A rough patch

Y’know…when I first moved in with The Dandy and Dandette (and more specifically after the two of them resumed their relationship, which effectively killed a bunch of stress that was building in the household), I loved it there. She and I became close really quickly and even developed a snuggly kind of relationship. We weren’t outright sexual with each other but in a way it felt like we were dating, too, and so instead of her being just The Dandy’s other girlfriend who I had to figure out how to live with, there was love flowing in all directions.

But now it’s different and I don’t entirely know why but I hate it.

The first major setback is that Dandette ran out of anti-anxiety meds and wasn’t able to get more right away. I thought what she was on was supposed to take a while to leave the system, so maybe it was just placebo effect in reverse or something but Dandette almost immediately started having panic attacks and other manifestations of her anxiety, like, a lot.

When she’s having a panic attack, she shakes with adrenaline and doesn’t want to be touched at all. She’ll stumble backward away from you all terrified if you even look like you might approach. And she becomes convinced that her panic attack is inconveniencing everyone, which makes her panic more. So you can’t try to help her in any way; she will perceive it as her issues inconveniencing you and she’ll freak out. But you also can’t let her know that her panic attack is, oh I dunno, scaring the shit out of you and twigging your own anxiety really hard, because that’ll convince her, too, that she’s a terrible person who ruins everyone else’s lives.

For the most part, her thing of not wanting her attacks acknowledged or helped works for me just fine. I’d come out of my room in the morning, see her in the living room shaking and hyperventilating with her eyes all dilated and weird, say “‘morning” in a cheery voice, walk past her to get some cereal and go back into my room again to eat it. She doesn’t consider this rude. She doesn’t change her mind once the attack is over, either; I mean it’s not like she says “leave me alone” during but then after she’s like “WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME ALONE WHEN I WAS PANICKING YOU ASSHOLE” so cool.

But one time she had an attack while we were out running errands together and I was kind of stuck with her and it was the most awful thing. She was clearly all fight-or-flighty and vulnerable and I didn’t want her walking home alone like that, so I had to pretend that I just happened to feel like walking home anyway and then walking back to complete the errands. It was such a lovely day out, after all. I definitely felt like taking a nice long walk. And of course the walk home was a grim deathmarch during which I contrived to act casual and comfortable and make light conversation that didn’t require any replies while making sure I stayed beyond accidental touching distance and trying not to let it show that my heart was hammering. At one point she was stressing out about how much work she still had to do at home (her whole housewife thing) but when I tried to comfort her by saying “I can help with anything you need” she barked my name all angry-like, meaning “stop making it worse by trying to help me” so fine, I guess I was supposed to let her sit there and stew in a cage entirely of her own making, then. And then partway home – cutting through the parking lot of the grocery store I’d been aiming to circle back to when Dandette started panicking – she insisted I leave her and do my grocery run but then a car started backing out of a spot and almost backed into us and I yelled “HEY” and my yelling triggered some kind of fugue state in Dandette. I could see her go even more wild-eyed and freaked out than before. But I knew if I insisted on walking her home, she’d scream at me not to, so I just kind of walked away. Dandette did end up finding her way home, but when she got there she wasn’t wearing shoes and she didn’t know why. She couldn’t remember anything after my yell. She was standing in the parking lot and then she was home, with nothing in between.

And any random thought could trigger one of her attacks at any time, which made me not exactly want to spend a lot of time around her. Plus I became afraid of ever touching her in case she’d begun having an attack and I just hadn’t noticed. Before then, I would touch her affectionately in passing all the time (and vice-versa). I didn’t even think about it. Suddenly though it seemed like there was a chance she’d be horrified and recoil and I didn’t want to be rejected so I kind of kept my distance and waited for her to initiate, which she…kinda didn’t. Maybe it was a vicious cycle; maybe she stopped being touchy and snuggly because I did. But for whatever it’s worth our whole ambiguous snuggling thing came about in the first place because she started it, so she sure didn’t mind making the first move before…

The second setback for us was that Dandette had a sudden second health problem. She had a cyst a year or two ago – I forget the name of the kind of cyst it is, but basically it’s a zit that gets so huge and impacted (like, the size of a golf ball) that a doctor needs to slice it open with a scalpel to drain it. It’s right under her tailbone, where it presses on her sciatic nerve, so in addition to being all under pressure and hurting to sit on, it’s fucking with her actual nerves and causing pain that way. And a week or two ago, it started to come back.

I knew she was in pain and I assumed (correctly) that she’d be in no shape to fix us the amazing dinners she usually made. The Dandy and I fended for ourselves/ordered food in for a week or so until Dandette’s cyst was big enough to get drained. Please believe me that I was not on any level feeling bitter about this or thinking “humph. She should suck it up and cook for us anyway.” No no no. She was not doing well at all and clearly needed rest. Buttttt the nature of my psyche seems to be that I have certain things that make me feel loved, which in turn will make me love the person back. And if I’m not getting those things from someone, my feelings for them can switch off amazingly quickly. The main things that make me feel loved are affectionate touches (which she’d already withdrawn) and being fed. And so my feelings of love for Dandette…winked out. Just like that.

The third setback is that – overlapping with Dandette’s whole cyst thing – I had a fairly terrible week. I am a nocturnal person; at this point in my life, if I have to wake up in the morning more than two days in a row, I start to feel seriously depressed and fucked up. That’s even if I’ve gotten adequate sleep. Well, I had six days in a row of working 10am-1pm and I didn’t sleep well during any of that time. My bladder was doing this hilarious thing it sometimes does where it forgets how to empty entirely so within half an hour of taking a piss I’d desperately have to go again; I was getting up ten times a night to pee. And I was having issues with insomnia. And The Dandy was snoring. And my stupid asshole cats were being restless for some reason and would randomly jump on me at night and stuff. So I had six nights in a row where I didn’t, at all, even once, get into the deep dark black part of sleep that is actually restful.

Y’know how clinical depression is caused by low levels of a brain chemical called seratonin? The thing that restores a person’s seratonin levels is sleep. By the end of my week of hell, my anxiety and depression were off the charts. I was full-on crazy, like “nobody in my life really loves me, they’re all just pretending, they probably talk about me behind my back” crazy. Everyfuckingthing The Dandy or Dandette did seemed like a plot to fuck with me or a secret code spelling out that they didn’t like me or want me there. Oh and in fairness I also wasn’t cleaning the kitchen (my one official household job) to my usual standard, so maybe Dandette wasn’t feeling loved, either.

On the Thursday of my hellweek, Dandette got her cyst drained*. Presumably the stitches etc hurt after that but the draining process would have relieved all the pressure and nerve pain and stuff so that she was a lot more functional. And indeed, on Friday morning she set her alarm specifically to get up and make coffee for The Dandy, as she does every workday (except while the cyst was hurting her). She brought his coffee in to him and left it by the bed, like every workday. And then she went back to bed without fixing me breakfast.

(For contrast: when I had a solid week of work just a few weeks before, she woke up and made me breakfast every day, and packed it up so I could sleep in later and eat it on the bus. She packed me a lunch, too, when I had a two-gig day. And these were good meals, man. Fresh-squeezed orange juice. French toast. The lunch included dessert. Dandette made it clear that a) she loved being a housewife and considered feeding me like this to be her job b) she expresses love through cooking c) she receives love through appreciation of her cooking. And boy, did I ever appreciate it. I gushed to her so much I was afraid it might come off as fake. And she glowed and kissed me goodbye on the cheek and wished me a good day at work every single morning.)

The living room was in disarray and Dandette decided it needed a major reorganization so she pulled an all-nighter Friday night to do that. She was still awake when I got up Saturday morning and started getting ready for my sixth consecutive morning shift, but she didn’t make me breakfast. What she did do was hold up my old mug with the QWERTY keyboard printed on it and ask “do you use this?”

“I keep pens in it,” I said (or rather, I did at my old place and then I moved and didn’t know where it or the pens had gone).

“Do you want it still? Because if not I’m taking it to the garbage room.”

“If you hate it that much, I guess you can toss it,” I said.

“It’s not that I hate it, it’s that we have too much stuff,” Dandette said, and she left with the mug and some other things of hers. Then I immediately changed my mind and flung open the door and got it back from her. I like that mug and it feels like I’ve given up entirely too much lately: a shit-ton of my belongings so I wouldn’t have to pack them to move; my big dresser which got destroyed in the move by accident; exclusive use of The Dandy’s cock; having my own room… It’s too much. I wanted my fucking mug. So I told her I changed my mind, and she handed it back saying “Well, just don’t let me ever see it again.” Which I’m pretty sure was, objectively, a really fucking rude thing to say to me, but also remember I was suuuuper crazy from lack of sleep so it really hit me badly at that moment.

I said nothing and just stomped off and put my mug in the bedroom. The Dandy was in there putting clothes on because I’d begged him to drive me to work. I bitched to him furiously about what had just happened. I mean, Dandette regularly finds major pieces of (admittedly pretty cool, usually) furniture in the garbage room and puts them in the apartment. SHE BROUGHT IN A GRANDFATHER CLOCK a few months ago. All that fucking thing does is take up space doing the same thing a five dollar watch would do. Just a few weeks ago she brought in a huuuuuuge hutch and transferred all our dishes and silverware into it (four full sets of dishes, two sets of silverware, and maybe five sets of glassware, by the way, not including mine), and when I was like “Hey, now we can get rid of the previous hutch, which is sort of ugly and most of the handles are broken, anyway…” The Dandy and Dandette completely ignored me and decided to put the stupid thing in the front hall and keep shoes/umbrellas/etc in it, instead. The shelving unit that had previously been used for shoes/etc got crammed into the storage closet. The Dandy, meanwhile, has a bunch of assembled sets of Star Wars Lego on display. Ewok cities and X-wing fighters and a bunch of other shit whose only function is to be looked at and that’s been sitting there so long that I doubt anyone in the house even consciously notices it anymore. Neither of these people get rid of anything fucking ever (and I have been delicately sort of sniffing around the idea of them purging some things for a while, because the apartment is big but in serious danger of being totally subsumed by furniture etc and having no more usable space than my old tiny apartment). I’d been tactful and gentle in my urgings and both of them had seemed kind of hostile so I dropped it. They have a different aesthetic and different priorities than I do, and part of living with other people is accepting differences like that, so I worked on doing so. And now Dandette has a wild hair about clearing out the living room and my one little mug is too much but the Lego and grandfather clock stay? Fuck off.

The Dandy didn’t say anything during this rant of mine. He often goes silent when I’m angry. This time his expression wasn’t that frozen-up/scared thing he does when I’m mad at him, though. It was aggrieved, like “Ugh, why do I need to be listening to this right now?” When I saw that I reined in my ranting. But boy was I pissed.

A little while later when The Dandy and I were by the door putting our shoes on for the drive to my work, Dandette was like “Can you take this to the garbage room on your way out?” and gestured at a piece of furniture. It was facing away from me and lots of dressers etc have a cheap particle-board back on them so it took me a minute to realize what it was, but then suddenly I did. The Dandy said there wasn’t time or the dolly was in the car or something so we couldn’t. I walked straight out to the elevator without saying anything and just glowered pointedly at The Dandy while I waited for him to catch up.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, once he was finally next to me at the elevators.

“What’s wrong is Dandette and I never discussed throwing my bookcase out. This is the first I’m hearing about this.”

“…Oh.”

I held it together until we got in the car and then basically broke down and sobbed the entire way to work about how Dandette seemed to have abruptly decided she didn’t want me there and was taking pains to let me know. The Dandy said he’d talk to her (and, thank god, said he wouldn’t mention some of the not-very-nice side-points I’d made in my ranting** and just focus on “hey, you appear to be getting rid of Cowgirl’s stuff without permission; what’s up with that?”

The verdict (reported by The Dandy when I got home) ended up being that Dandette had thought I did say I would get rid of the bookcase – and in fairness I probably did say at one point that I was thinking about it but hadn’t decided yet. So that was a misunderstanding. And the mug thing was just cranky, underslept, ass-stitches-hurting, up-all-night-organizing Dandette phrasing things in a really unfortunate way. And all of this was of course magnified by me being jussssst fuckin’ batshit crazy from lack of sleep. And Dandette apologized to me later and said she never meant to make me feel unwanted at all, she really did think I’d said I wanted to get rid of the bookcase.

I believe both of them (although I couldn’t manage to stop feeling persecuted and suspicious until I’d had a massive cry and an even more massive sleep and set my brain mostly back on kilter). But I still feel like something’s up, dammit. Maybe Dandette wasn’t actually trying to squeeze me out of the apartment but I increasingly feel like she’s not that happy to have me there, either. Not the way she initially was. And I don’t know if I did something or the NRE just died really fast or her initial enthusiasm was all an act to suck up to The Dandy or what.

 

*After the draining, The Dandy drove her home. They came in and I paused my Netflix show, thinking Dandette might want hugs or to talk about the ordeal or whatever. She just gave me a hostile look (or was my underslept brain just seeing it like that?) and went straight to her bedroom. Later, when The Dandy and I had gone to bed, she kept having things to say to The Dandy and calling out to him to come over for sec. Like five times in a row she did this, and he’d clamber out of bed and go into her room where she’d talk super-animatedly at him for a few minutes. And then he’d come back to bed and it would repeat again and this was at ONE THIRTY IN THE MORNING BTW but anyway a few days later Dandette referred back to the cyst-draining aftermath and said sorry if she was a bit withdrawn that night but she just couldn’t deal with people. Why am I “people” and The Dandy isn’t? When I first moved in Dandette said we were family, we were all in this together, we’d help each other through things. She supported me through some things and I wanted the chance to do it back but she just doesn’t seem inclined to lean on me. At all.

**I may have yelled a bunch more about the grandfather clock and the four sets of dishes and gone on a whole huge tangent that maybe Dandette is so used to finding all her furniture in the garbage that she’s kind of “easy come, easy go” about these things and doesn’t get that I had to work and save up and buy my shit. I didn’t even mean this as a jab at her not working; I really meant it at face value, and still believe it even though I’m less mad now. None of my furniture was a spontaneous “Oh cool, someone tossed this out, I think I’ll take it” affair; I had an idea in my head of a specific item that needed to fit in a specific spot and I went to stores armed with a tape measure and wrote down stats and prices until I found exactly the right thing, which I bought with money earned at a job I didn’t necessarily like, and possibly paid for delivery too, and in many cases assembled myself. I feel like that’s gonna make a person more attached to a piece of furniture than if they hadn’t even actively wanted a particular item but it just showed up for free and it was like “Meh, what the hell.”

Power play

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before but I asked The Dandy, once, why he identifies as dominant. By which I mean: he didn’t ever mention BDSM at all (beyond that one mention that he’s a dom) or seem to crave it or have any kinks or get excited by D/s type scenarios and I didn’t wanna assume he was just calling himself dominant out of a misplaced urge to blend in with other people in our largely goth/kinky/edgy social circle, butttttt…

He said that he just has a knack for getting people to do his bidding. First off (and I said this to him) being dominant, in the kinky D/s type sense, isn’t being able to get people to obey you. That could be charisma or being physically intimidating or seeming knowledgeable or any number of other things. Being dominant is liking to be in charge/be obeyed.

Also, though? (And I didn’t say this out loud…) I have seen no particular evidence of this alleged ability. I mean okay, I’ve seen him ask Dandette for things – even things that inconvenienced her – and she said yes. But Dandette…kind of has issues with saying no, I think. Especially to The Dandy, since HE PAYS ALL HER LIVING EXPENSES. Of course she’s not going to want to piss him off. Ooooh, big tough domly-dom Dandy shooting fish in a fucking barrel. So power. Much dom. Wow!

I wonder if he mistakes basic courtesy in people for obedience? Like is he asking someone “Hey could you pass me that pen?” and when they go “Sure” and toss it over he’s thinking “Awwwwww yeah. Everyone does what I want!”? I just don’t get it.

Since our “so…you’re…’dominant’?” conversation, it’s come out that The Dandy has a big kink for needle play, so fair enough, perhaps he’s conflating dominance and sadism. Or perhaps he wants to be dominant over someone but is conflicted about it (he’s conflicted about the sadism for sure).

But I’ve noticed that he has a really hard time saying no to things, which – for me – really undercuts his alleged superpower of making people obey him. Like, he’s a terrible snorer and (as a very light sleeper who shares his bed…) this has been driving me mad. I’ve told him several times that I think he should get assessed to make sure he doesn’t have sleep apnea. And each time, he does this awkward giggle but doesn’t actually answer me. So it seems Mr. People-Just-Seem-To-Obey-Me can’t bring himself to use his mouth-hole and tell me “I’m not comfortable doing that because I’d probably have to do a sleep study, which sounds hella inconvenient, and also I’m afraid of confronting possible health issues; stop asking” (which I’m pretty sure is what he’s thinking).

And when he doesn’t wuss out and entirely avoid addressing a thing I want, he’s doing what I want. I see this as him simply being an attentive boyfriend, not submitting to me, but it’s interesting because he defined his dominance around people doing what he wants and yet he asks me for very little and gives me foot massages on demand.

Oh that’s the other thing: when he does want something (well, an emotional/personal need fulfilled; he has no problem saying “could you take this suitcase down to the car?”), he doesn’t usually ask me using words. If he wants sex he hints at it by taking out his penis and flapping it around until I notice. If he wants a hug he’ll sidle up to me and put his arms out, or just kind of hover around me with a hopeful expression. I actually can’t even remember a single other time he’s asked me for something emotional-like except once, before I moved in with him: he was at my place cooking dinner and I was watching tv in the next room and eventually he said, kind of irritably, “It would be nice to have some company in here.” This was probably the fifth time he’d cooked dinner for me at my place, and I’d always puttered around in the living room while he cooked; I’d been puttering for at least an hour so far that night. Seems like he can’t bring himself to say what he needs until he’s starting to resent me for not reading his mind, which is…not great. And also, to my mind, not particularly dominant. Or at least, maybe he’s dominant (in the sense that it’s an orientation; he wants to take control) but he’s not great at it yet.

But yeah, back to him doing what I want…mostly, I am very careful to ask for things in a neutral way. I mean there’s a sort of energy I can switch on when I’m asking for a thing as a dominant and I don’t do that with The Dandy. He is not my submissive; he is simply a wonderfully attentive boyfriend, and that is where I keep my brain when I request things of him.

Every now and then, though, I have gotten a bit feisty and used my dom-voice on him a bit…and from the look on his face, he seems to know exactly what I’m doing. And he still does what I ask. And he doesn’t seem annoyed; he seems kind of…intrigued, or something. It causes some sort of frisson when I get toppy with him. I think probably it’s a challenge thing; my being toppy makes him want to, like, conquer me with his superior domliness or whatever. Except, like I said…he usually does end up doing the thing I imperiously demanded of him.

Earlier today, The Dandy was at one end of this big L-shaped couch. I was sitting in the crux of the L. The tv remote was at the empty end of the L. And (being quite possibly more audacious than I’ve ever dared before, with him…) I was like “could you be a lamb and fetch me the remote?” with full-on dom energy. He pointed out that I was closer to it than he was. I said “but it’s still so farrrrr” and batted my eyelashes at him facetiously. A moment passed in silence and just as I was about to relent and reach for the thing myself, The Dandy set his book aside, got up, walked to the other end of the couch to retrieve the remote (which I could have reached myself without even getting up, probably, just stretching real hard), and handed it to me.

An hour or so ago I got up to get a piece of cheese to snack on and bumped into The Dandy, who was exiting the kitchen with pieces of something white-ish in his hand. “Is that cheese?” I asked. It was. “Ha! I was just going to go get some of that, myself.” The Dandy asked me if I was going to try to take some of his from him now, instead. “No,” I said, “I was going to ask nicely if I could have some of yours.” (Actually I wasn’t even going to do that until he brought it up. Seeing if he’d relinquish some of the food he’d gotten for himself had occurred to me, but I didn’t wanna overdo these little D/s experiments. He does seem incapable of expressing dislike of my behaviour until shit gets critical, after all.) He gave me some of his cheese. (When I later decided I wanted more I asked if I could get him some too, just to balance things out.)

On a somewhat related note, The Dandy has a habit of turning off the shower without actually depressing the little button that diverts the water back to the tap. Which means that if I decide to take a bath later and go to fill a cup with water to rinse the tub out, I get cold water gooshed onto the back of my head, instead. The last time this happened I stomped into the bedroom where The Dandy was, half jokey-mad and half actually-mad, and demanded to know what sort of cretin turns off the faucets in the shower but doesn’t press the button.

“I just assume the button will fall down on its own when the water turns off, like it does in most showers,” The Dandy said.

“And you’ve been living in this particular apartment for how long now?” (it’s been five years and I knew it and he knew I knew it).

“…A while,” The Dandy said, sheepishly.

“The next time my head gets unexpectedly doused in water I’m making you lick it off,” I said, slipping into dom-voice kind of accidentally and looking him right in the eye. I so totally expected him to snarkily remind me that he’s stronger so I can’t make him do anything that I pre-emptively responded with “…Or, I’ll just get something of yours that’s made of fine leather and dry myself on that.” Only when I’d turned and was striding out of the room did I realize that he hadn’t actually snarked at me and that in fact he’d been looking at me with a mixture of, I think, arousal and unease.

Or maybe his expression was one of “I’d snark, but I did do a stupid thing sooooo…” who the hell knows.

At any rate, as much as I do want a submissive man in my life (and will continue to look for one), I think The Dandy’s toppiness sparks with mine in a sexy way. He keeps me on my toes a bit. He presents an appearance of challenge while in fact giving me foot rubs every time I ask and petting my head til I fall asleep without me even having to ask. Probably a submissive could challenge me and inflame my lust in some similar way, but I’m not sure yet exactly what that would look like. I’m not sure I would tolerate a sub acting exactly like The Dandy does, with me. Or at least I never thought that sort of behaviour would be tolerable or desirable to me in a sub. Maybe I’m wrong.

Math fail?

The Dandy and I were talking about penis size the other night for whatever reason and he said that the last time he measured himself, he was seven inches or seven-and-a-half or something like that.

I almost blurted out “Pffffffffft! Where were you measuring from?!?” but I managed to restrain myself. I did give off palpable vibes of surprise, though, because The Dandy’s size looks dead average to me at most (average is 4″-6″ and is my favourite. I’ve been very vocal about that preference and very vocal about The Dandy being the perfect size for me). Then a thought occurred: “Were you thinner than now at the time that you measured?” The Dandy said that he was. “Ah, then some of that length may be taken up by this, now” I said, affectionately touching his lower belly. I’ve heard that a guy’s weight can make a difference to how long his dick is. Or how long it looks or how much of it is on the outside or whatever.

But that still doesn’t really make sense to me. If some of his dick-length was just subsumed in fat, any time he thrust into me hard, the fat around the base would compress and that extra, hidden dick-length would end up inside me and he’d probably nail me in the cervix. He’s never hit bottom on me and though I’ve never made a concerted effort to mash down his lower-abdomen fat with my hand, I’ve given him plenty of hand jobs and played with his dick a million times and I am not sensing a bunch of hidden shaft.

Our conversation segued into me giving him a hand job and I surreptitiously measured his erection against my index finger. My index finger is about three inches long. The Dandy’s cock was only a fraction longer than my finger. Budgeting in some extra room if you tamp down his fat, I’d guess him to be maybe four inches.

So how on Earth did he ever arrive at the idea that he’s 7.5″? Did he measure from his asshole? Did he lie to me in a very weird attempt to impress me (me, the one who loves average-size dicks almost to the point of fetishism and who has seen his erect penis hundreds of times)? Was he looking at the centimetres instead of the inches by accident? I just don’t get it. He seems to know that his penis isn’t huge (and is fine with that). So…maybe he just doesn’t know how big average is, and he believes he’s 7.5″ and that this is kinda small?

It’s all very strange. And I didn’t feel like I could ask him about the discrepancy without sounding as if I were shaming him or trying to humiliate him. You could ask a guy how he managed to mis-measure a shelf he was hanging but you can’t ask him how he managed to mis-measure his dick (by like almost fifty percent!!!) without there being a bunch of cultural baggage attached.

Becoming everything I didn’t want.

I like living here. The apartment is HUGE and pretty and I pay very little rent. It’s actually kinda nice having people around, especially these particular people. Dandette planning and cooking most of the meals is a total game-changer for me and lets me put so much energy into other things (instead of figuring out how the hell to feed myself) that it’s just amazing. There’s a sweet doggo to hang out with, and an additional cat who is also sweet when he’s not using my stomach as a trampoline like a fucking bastard.

But there are a lot of adjustments. Like…a lot. There are a lot of things about this arrangement that twig my anxiety or even threaten my sense of self.

Like…from the end of my marriage twelve years ago up to now, I prided myself on being independent. Even like two months ago when I was desperate to get away from the Harpy downstairs, I was looking for an apartment that was just mine, even if it was the size of a closet and cost a thousand dollars a month and I had to ramp up my sex work activities in order to afford it. It was that important to me to live alone and depend on nobody else for my well-being*. My ex husband was in charge of all our money back in the day (and sometimes I didn’t work and he supported me) and this made me feel dependent and infantilized and I never wanted to be beholden to anyone like that ever again. And The Dandy has even made a few creepy comments before about how Dandette feels obligated to be extra nice to him because he pays her way, and he likes that. And now I’m living with him and letting him subsidize my living expenses. O.o

I’ve also always been kind of possessive and inflexible when it comes to my stuff, and now I’ve merged all my things with Dandette and Dandy’s – to a point, even, where I’ve given Dandette carte blanche to use my dildos (well, I did earmark two of them as just mine) as long as she puts a condom on them and runs them through the dishwasher after. And needless to say I can’t be as calculating and possessive about food as I was when I lived alone. “Okay, there are nine eggs left, that means I’ve got breakfast for the next three days” is simply not a thing that can happen in an apartment where there are three people and one of them bakes. I’ve told everyone that the drinkable yogurts are mine (I use them as work snacks and buy exactly enough to last me), but aside from that the fridge is kind of a free-for-all. On the up side, there are always delicious leftovers around. And I don’t seem to be getting the killer food cravings I got before (I assume because my diet is far more varied thanks to Dandette’s cooking so I’m not deficient in anything now) so it hasn’t been to hard letting go of control of the fridge. I mean I’m not having that thing where my body suddenly tells me EAT SOME FUCKING TUNA EAT IT NOW and then it turns out I’d mis-estimated and there is no tuna and I feel like I have a hole in the centre of my world (as has happened in the past). I seem, so far, to be able to be like “I’m hungry. Let’s see what’s in the fridge” and there are a few appealing things and I pick one, the way I’d imagine normal people do.

For the record, when Minx moved in with me we realized we collectively owned doubles of several different movies. She said we ought to sell the redundant copies (the “redundant” ones being whichever version looked more beat up). I agreed to this but kept “forgetting” to do so because I didn’t want to have to re-buy anything if we broke up. Which was prudent because we did break up in the end. With The Dandy and Dandette I’ve gotten rid of most of my cookware and cleaning supplies and my hair dryer and I forget what-all else, because they have those things already. I think I have a bit more faith in this relationship lasting. Mind you, the plan is for us to move to a bigger place where I have my own bedroom and The Dandy has an established history of continuing to support an ex and be on good terms after breaking up with them, so there’s that. 😛

There’s the thing where I’m part of a harem, which is quite frankly going fine so far but it irritates me on principle because it often feels like half the world (the kink world, anyway) expects women to be in some guy’s harem. And that it must mean the women are bi and submissive. I know that what people outside our polycule think doesn’t have any actual bearing on my life for the most part but still.

There’s the thing where the thought of having my life all entwined with someone else’s scares the shit out of me.. For the past bunch of years I’ve basically been solo poly and that suited me fine; I kept my partners at arms’ length enough that they never expected me to hang out with their parents or friends. When I broke up with someone I’d lose only them, not a whole ersatz family. And now I’ve let myself get all enmeshed with two people. Truth be told, I’ve been kind of secretly wanting a family and commitment and shit for a while. But it’s still scary as fuck.

And last but not least, there’s how much like a (weird, two-wived) 50s household we are, here. Not in the sense that Dandette actively wants to be a housewife to us. I mean: The Dandy is just chock-full of entitlement. He’s a middle-aged white dude and he comes from a pretty rich family (private school, multiple university degrees that his parents fully paid for so he has no student loan debt) and he’s just…really out of touch. Dandette says that when she’s talked about what it’s like to be poor, he was like “Oh, I know, at my first job out of college I was only making 30k!” (*Headdesk*) He seems to think of Dandette and I as his underlings, or perhaps he just has no idea what we do to keep things going and thinks the house cleans itself.** The way Dandette summons us to dinner and he swans in beaming with a kind of smug benevolence and eats the awesome meal she’s prepared without comment and then doesn’t bus his dishes just irritates the shit out of me. He’s sort of opaque…he’s deceptively cheerful-seeming pretty much all the time (including when his dad died a few years ago, apparently) and he has a solid track record of not communicating well so that the rest of us have to guess what’s going on with him. Dandette often talks about him to me as though he’s weather – this inescapable circumstance whose vagaries she’s at the mercy of. It makes me sick but I find myself commiserating and acting like he’s weather a bit, too. Neither of us has a lot of leverage with him since we don’t have the means to live on our own right now, so yeah, we have to try to figure out his thought processes and head off potential issues at the pass even though he won’t actually tell us there’s a problem. We need to ensure our continued security and livelihood.

I never wanted to be the kind of woman who talks about her partner like he’s some alien species and then rolls her eyes like “Oh well, what’re you gonna do?” and goes back to loading the dishwasher. But now that’s who I am. That’s the part I hate the most.

I mean, he’s also really good to us, and he’s pretty together on the feminist front. He doesn’t (or doesn’t consciously) believe that women are lesser or anything. He’s an okay guy. But god, that poor-little-rich-boy obtuseness. It kills me. One time a few months ago when I was apartment-hunting, I got turned down for a place because they didn’t feel I made enough money to afford it***. And the place demanded a money order for first and last month’s rent to even apply, and stipulated that if I got accepted I had to take the place – or at least that they wouldn’t give me my money back if I got in somewhere else. So the application process stalled my apartment-hunt for several days right at the beginning of the month. My current living situation had gotten so bad that it was giving me PTSD, but the housing market is so dire that it pretty much seemed like every half-decent place was taken within the first week of the month (I would call every half-decent ad on viewit.ca on the first of the month – sometimes twenty phone calls to twenty places – and I’d get maybe one viewing out of it if I was lucky! And this happened several months in a row!). Because I work freelance and am behind on my taxes, my only way to prove my income was to show printouts of my bank statements – and I was just starting to enter my slow season at work. I realized that I’d have to either get approved for an apartment somehow that very month, or start taking cash out of my line of credit and depositing it into my chequing account on a regular basis to make my income look more steady than it was. I was horrifically, crushingly stressed out with no end in sight, is what I’m saying. I had gotten to a point where I wanted not to be alive anymore (not suicidal ideation, mind you. Just…I couldn’t keep living where I was, every place in the city was seemingly either unaffordable or unavailable, and I didn’t have the resources to move to another city. The dilemma was breaking my brain and I wanted to wink out of existence so I wouldn’t have to struggle with the issue anymore).

So anyway, the day I got rejected for that apartment, I had plans with The Dandy. I took the bus to our appointed meeting spot, crammed between two strangers, trying not to cry or have a panic attack. I got to the spot and The Dandy he came striding over from where he parked his car, beaming benevolently as he does, wearing $300 shoes and a vintage designer wool overcoat and, I dunno, solid gold pants and a diamond shirt or some shit. And I knew that although he would understand in theory that I was stressed out, he’d never, ever really get it. He makes $93,000/year at an office that gives him paystubs and would write him a letter of employment. He’s been there a few years and his credit is fine. As long as there’s nobody ahead of him in the queue, he can apply for an apartment and get it. Even if it costs three times as much as the place I applied to he’ll get it. The most stress he’s ever felt about apartment-hunting is probably “Boy, I hope the place with the marble countertops and dishwasher gets back to me first. I liked that one marginally better than the one with the sunken tub and fireplace.”

And tbh I really, really wanted to punch him in the face.

 

 

 

*Platonic roommates are not exempt from this. If a platonic roommate was struggling financially and couldn’t always pay their share of rent on time; if they were passive-aggressive; if they were a loud partier; if they were often palpably sullen or cranky; all of these things would add to my stress levels exponentially. Do not want.

**I’ve agreed to be the official kitchen cleaner and I’m fine with that but The Dandy doesn’t even bring his dishes to the kitchen when he’s done. He’ll leave his half-finished plate of spaghetti to congeal on the table and just wander off, and a lot of the time I don’t notice until well after the food is dried on. If he’d scraped the food refuse off his plate and stuck it under running water for a sec, it would be an extra five seconds of effort for him; the fact that he doesn’t means I have to soak it and try to chisel all that shit off later on instead of just tossing it in the dishwasher. He’s making exponentially more work for me. Yesterday I mentioned this, just casual-like, and asked if he could just put his plate in the sink and run a bit of water on it from now on. We’ll see if he remembers.

***NB: I’d given them six months of banking records along with my application and in all of those months but one I made over a thousand dollars more than the rent of the place cost (enough excess money to cover that one shortfall and then some). So I don’t know wtf they wanted from me. Maybe they had a weirdly high idea of how much the average person spends on food and bills…

Money

So I’m still struggling to get on disability for my anxiety issues. I’ve been fighting for this for a year or maybe two, now (appealing two rejections) and got to the tribunal stage (the final showdown where they either reject you forever or they accept you and can’t take it back) and the lady at the tribunal approved me(!).

Unfortunately, now they’re saying they can’t actually give me money until I prove to them that I qualify financially (they never asked me my income in all this time. WHY DID THEY LET ME JUMP THROUGH ALL THESE HOOPS WHEN FOR ALL THEY KNOW I MAKE TOO MUCH MONEY TO EVEN GET HELP). I just got a letter with a huge-ass list of shit I have to provide to prove my income etc.

The real kicker is, after my tribunal in December of 2016 where the lady said “congratulations! You’re in!”, the disability office literally forgot about me for five months. I had to call twice to remind them I was alive. Then sometime after the second call (where they were like “Oh shit, okay, we’ll try to find your paperwork and put it through”) they apparently assigned me a worker but never told me that – I only found out another month or so down the road when I still hadn’t heard anything so I called yet again. They gave me my worker’s name and extension. I left a message on her voicemail basically going “so…I got approved…um…when can I expect cheques in the mail…?” And she left me a voicemail a week later saying she’s behind on her paperwork so just wait (and that my welfare cheques won’t be discontinued until I start getting disability cheques. Well, cool story but I’M NOT ON WELFARE. I’ve been treading water and hoping desperately for disability to bail me out of poverty).

And now – seven months after the tribunal where they told me I was approved for funds – I get this letter with a huge list of documents I need to provide the disability people in order to get any money…AND THERE’S A DEADLINE ON IT. Of less than a month.

Oh and I’m sure it goes without saying but the letter says that if I can’t get all that shit in by the deadline I have to call them and give them reasons why. Ummmm BECAUSE I HAVE ANXIETY THAT INTERFERES WITH MY EXECUTIVE FUNCTION. IT IS THE MAJOR REASON I’VE APPLIED FOR DISABILITY. Oh also their list of documents that they want includes tax info and I haven’t done my taxes in like five years. BECAUSE. I. HAVE. ANXIETY. AND. I. AM. NOT. GOOD. AT. GETTING. THINGS. DONE. OR. DEALING. WITH. BUREAUCRACY.

TBH, now that I’ve moved in with The Dandy and Dandette and am paying half the rent I used to, I probably won’t qualify for disability. It’s my slow season but between the lowered rent and The Dandy paying for the lion’s share of groceries and toiletries, I think I can mostly make it through the summer okay; in winter I typically make much more so I’ll do just fine. But my understanding is that once one gets approved for disability, they give you a retroactive lump sum dating back to when you first applied. Which I believe in my case would be well over ten thousand dollars. And I’m hoping that even if they don’t think I should get anything going forward, they’ll see from my history that I did qualify back then, and give me that lump sum to make up for the hardship of the previous year or two. You guys, I’m a terribly anal retentive person and compulsive worrier/planner. It’s been killing me to have to live month-to-month for the past five years or so. If disability gives me that lump of cash I’d finally have an emergency savings fund again. I wouldn’t have a repeat of last summer where I estimated my finances wrong (and was too afraid to check my account and know for sure) and ended up in the negative and paying off like two hundred bucks in NSF fees. Or at least, I wouldn’t have a repeat of last summer for probably a pretty long time, if this living situation holds out.

It’s so hard, though. I hate that they’re making me produce so. Many. Documents. And in fact I probably can’t produce all of what they want, so maybe I’ll go through all this work for nothing. And if I’m actually able to get on disability and get a cheque each month, that’s more bureaucracy to deal with – I’ll have to send them proof of my income every month, and they’ll make deductions from my next cheque depending on what I made in the current month (I think that’s how it works) so my income still won’t be steady, and doing my taxes will be even more of a clusterfuck because I’d be getting income from yet another source…it’s tempting to give up.

I realized that The Dandy is a big factor in this, for me. He’s been partially supporting me, and he hasn’t complained about it but I don’t know that he’s thrilled about it, either. And he knows I have a shot at getting a regular income, all year long, for the next three years; enough income that I could pay my own way entirely, year ’round. If I don’t take that shot, how will he feel? Will it look like I’m taking him for granted? Like I’m assuming, without ever having asked, that he’ll pick up my slack financially?

So over the weekend, while angsting about this stupid list of documents, I asked The Dandy point blank, “If I just totally give up on this [process of getting on disability], am I an asshole?”

“No, not at all,” he said. “I mean, look, you do work. It’s just seasonal. You may have to contribute less during the summer, whatever, that’s fine. My income is steady. I can cover us. As long as you’re contributing what you can.”

OMG OMG OMG. This is such a relief. Because, here’s the thing: I decided from the getgo that I will pay my fair share here no matter what. If I don’t do that, I’m afraid The Dandy will see me as a child/invalid or start thinking he owns me or some other nefarious shit. So when he and I first spoke about me moving in here, I negotiated a rent of $450/month – one-quarter of the full rent here. My reasoning there is that Dandette has her own room but I’m sharing with The Dandy so I’ll pay half of his half of the rent.

But. With how little I make in the summer months, it was looking like that $450 would tap me out completely – I’d be able to pay my rent and maybe bills but then have nothing left over at all.* And it strikes me that there are different kinds of “fair” – paying an amount of rent that matches the amount of apartment I use is fair, but I’d say that paying an amount that’s commensurate with my income (so that The Dandy pays a bigger proportion of rent but we each end up with enough discretionary cash to feel like we have basic human dignity) would also be fair, in its way.

We’re on a waiting list to move into a three-bedroom unit where I’d have my own room, and I’m not sure exactly how much those units are but based on what the rent is in our current 2-bedroom, my guess is that a third of the rent for a three-bedroom in the building would be at least $700 if not a bit more. I’d been working up my nerve to talk to The Dandy about him subsidizing me a bit, at least in summer. Like maybe an even third of the rent during my busier months but $300 in the slow season. Now it appears I don’t need to have that talk. 🙂

 

*As it happens, I got a few lucky breaks recently that have made my summer look a lot less tight. But that’s not really the point.

Big drama.

I don’t usually do trigger warnings here but this whole post is centred really really hard around r*pe and you wouldn’t specifically know it from the title so beware.

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Context to this post: I have recently learned that The Dandy and Dandette broke up the first time not (probably) because of fundamental personality differences, but because a guy raped Dandette at some kind of nerdy-thing convention – and incidentally this happened pretty soon after The Dandy had his heart bypass surgery – and the general stress of these big life events happening in a short span pretty much broke the relationship. I mean, Dandette literally woke up with this guy’s dick inside her so she developed trust issues and PTSD and stuff. Maybe it made her hate men for a while? I don’t know but she’s actually the one who broke things off.

So anyway. Dandette ran out of anxiety meds and isn’t able to get more for a little while, so she’s been having panic attacks. The other day she had one while we were out running errands, so we immediately started walking home again. Eventually, in addition to the panicky breathing and stuff, she started whimpering with every step and she told me that she hadn’t expected to be walking so much so she’d just thrown on her sandals – but her ankles are shitty and generally need more support than that so now walking was agony.

Later, when The Dandy and I were alone, I told him about this and asked if Dandette had a pattern of being self-defeating (it was a suspicion I had). I mean, the mall we were going to was a couple of blocks away, and Dandette herself suggested we make some unplanned detours while we were out. If she knew that the sandals would quickly make walking painful, why would she wear them for errands where we would probably be walking a bunch? Does she do things like that a lot?

The Dandy said that she does. I asked for an example and he said “Like getting drunk at a con and not wanting to leave when I left, so she stayed and ended up crashing in a room with a guy she didn’t really know.”

WHAT. “…Is that when she got raped?” I asked, carefully. The Dandy confirmed that it was. “Wow. That’s some victim-blaming bullshit.”

The Dandy objected and said he didn’t blame her for the rape.

“But dude,” I said, “I was asking about situations where a person does a thing with a predictable end result and then seems blindsided by that result. Do you see how ‘she wore shoes that hurt her feet and then was shocked that her feet hurt’ is different from ‘she stayed overnight somewhere and a guy decided to rape her’?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you, though? Do you get that Dandette didn’t get raped because she got drunk or because she stayed out or because she slept in the same room as a guy she didn’t know well, but because a guy was around who decided to rape her? Like, if there hadn’t been a rapist around, she wouldn’t have gotten raped. She could have passed out drunk in a room with a thousand guys and if none of them was the kind of guy who thought it was okay to stick his dick in a sleeping person, no rape would have occurred. Her rapist is responsible for that happening to her. Nobody else.”

The Dandy kept claiming he understood, and maybe he did now that I called him out, but judging by how the topic even came up, I’m gonna guess The Dandy’s been blaming her for her own rape all these years. And I can’t help wondering if he didn’t hide that very well and that’s why they broke up.

And I felt a wave of dread wash over me because I live with this man now – I’ve thrown my lot in with his, and in fact it’s doubtful I could find or afford a place of my own again right now even if I wanted to. The Dandy plays a key part in my survival at this point so I want the relationship to work out…and he’s just revealed himself to be a victim blamer. Is that what I have to look forward to? Him saying “Welllllll in fairness you did do X and Y” if (god forbid) I get raped or sexually assaulted again?

So that put me in a funk for the rest of the evening. It also brought my mind back to the various sketchy shit that’s happened to me in the past, and I told The Dandy a bunch of those stories, not in any kind of hectoring “So how you gonna blame that one on me, huh? Huh?” way – not to make a point at all – but just riffing. He listened and seemed supportive – no playing “Devil’s advocate” or any of that shit – so that’s something.

Unrelated: the next day, Minx texted me that the hot 22yo poly boy I’ve been so enamoured with raped a friend of hers multiple times, and some other people, too. And yeah, at first I did the typical mental gymnastics of “No, that guy is awesome, he can’t have done this” but ultimately I know that it’s exactly those instinctive mental gymnastics that make it really unlikely that a person is lying about that sort of thing – that particular accusation is way more likely to make people disbelieve and ostracize the one saying it than to actually get anyone to think badly of the accused, and every adult woman knows this. So basically I figure he did do these things. And I was slated to hang out with him that night.

Now, people do have facets. Maybe this boy really was awesome – toward me. Maybe he’d never break my boundaries, just like how serial killers sometimes have wives and families even as they kill other people. But I don’t want to take the risk and frankly I don’t want to give my time and attention to someone who’d abuse anyone. I can’t bear to think that a guy I’m wooing is someone else’s I-can’t-even-see-a-photo-of-him-without-being-triggered person.

I called The Dandy (this whole revelation about the boy happened at my art gallery job) and told him how the boy I liked has apparently raped people and I’d better probably cancel my outing with him that night.

And The Dandy replied “Well, you haven’t heard his side of it yet.”

I called him out on his hypocrisy immediately. “Wait, okay, so if Dandette sleeps in the same room as a guy she’s never heard any sketchy stories about but he rapes her, that’s her fault for trusting him, but if I hear that a guy I know has actually raped people and I decide I’d maybe better not hang out with him, I’m not giving him a fair shot? What the fuck!?!? And you do realize most people don’t lie about these things because they know everyone’s gonna say exactly what you just did, right? If someone tells me that a guy is rapey, I’m inclined to believe them.”

I can’t remember what The Dandy said. Probably nothing much; he freezes when I’m angry. I had to get back to work anyway so I ended the call.

I did cancel my outing with the boy, citing tiredness. I wasn’t ready to confront him about what I’d heard. He kept texting me hellos and whatnot that I ignored, though, and finally the next day he texted me like “Sorry, I don’t wanna be ‘that guy,’ but longer-than-average radio silence makes me antsy. Is everything okay?” Well fine then. I told him that a trusted source says he raped a friend of hers, repeatedly, and I kinda need to back off and process this info. I did not ask for “his side” – what’s the point? Ask a rapist and a non-rapist if they ever raped anyone and they’re both gonna say no. Although Minx did say that this boy takes a different tack; he admits to it, but says he’s reformed. He also, oddly, tries to play the victim card by claiming he has PTSD from being called out on his actions back then. WTF.

But as I said I didn’t ask for an explanation or justification. I simply said I needed silence so I could think. I figured it would be interesting to see if he respected that boundary or not. To my mind, in a situation like this where one person asks for space, the other person gets leeway for one more text message but then they’d better shut up. The boy sent me two messages rapid-fire but nothing since, so in that respect he’s okay.

In those two messages, though, he said exactly what Minx predicted. Here’s the second one, with commentary by yours truly (commentary from inside my head; I didn’t respond to the message at all).

I’ve worked really hard not to be that person. All of my partners know. I try to tell all of my friends and be hyper aware of myself and my privilege.

Minx said that this boy pretends to be a feminist in order to get in people’s pants. He certainly has the lingo down.

The person they were talking about was my first long-term sexual relation and I didn’t know how to act or how to be.

“Wait so I’m not supposed to slam my partner against the wall and choke them? God, how is anyone supposed to keep track of all these rules?”

Because yeah, that was in Minx’s report. The choking was in front of one of the victim’s friends, so not part of any of the rapes from what I can gather. The rapes I think were more coercion, and to be fair I think sometimes a person can be coercive or emotionally blackmailing without consciously realizing it, and rape culture makes it seem normal. So I can kinda see how a young person in their first relationship might be rapey because they don’t know any better (doesn’t make it okay, just makes it a thing that happens). But choking someone in front of their friend is pretty textbook abuse and I think it’s ludicrous for him to be like “Oh, I was new to relationships, I didn’t know how to act.” Of course, he probably doesn’t realize I know those details.

This doesn’t excuse what I did but I hope it gives some explanation.

I guess…

I hope you’ll believe me when I say that I tell people eventually. This person accusing me of this has given me PTSD and I’ve worked really hard to never do anything like it again.

This, right here, cements that this boy is an utter piece of shit. I’m sorry, Princess, did it hurt your feelings when someone called you out about rapes you did in fact commit? That must have been so difficult for you. Sadface.

And what does it mean to have PTSD from someone pointing out that he was an abusive rapist? Does he have flashbacks, go into a fugue state, and have to rock back and forth in the corner every time a perp gets arrested on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit? Like…no. NOPE. I call bullshit on this. Feeling uncomfortable at realizing you did something awful to someone isn’t PTSD, for fuck’s sake. But even if he did somehow legit have PTSD from being an abusive rapist, that’s entirely his own fault and not a thing he should ever try to leverage for sympathy. It’d be like telling people your knuckles always hurt when it’s about to rain because you busted your fist all up once while punching a puppy in the face, and expecting people to go “awwww, poor you!” Nope: fuck off.

Also, wtf is with him using the word “accused”? That doesn’t seem like a word you use for something you acknowledge that you did.

I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you and if I didn’t ever get to talk to you again I’d be really sad about that. Sorry if that was allot[sic]. I just wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t at least try and give my side.

Yeah no this is not about “feeling right,” it’s about trying to feel better about himself – and making himself look good (insofar as that’s possible) so I might still fuck him one day. I heard he’s a rapist and in fact that is correct. He admitted this.

So, I guess things with him are done now.

Good news, though – the last time I talked to The Dandy about any of this he’d apparently realized that yeah, everyone always says “butbutbut they’re so nice/let’s not be hasty/let’s hear their side/oh they can’t have done a horrible thing like that” when someone says a person raped or abused them, ergo most people don’t even bother mentioning it because they’ll just be ostracized for making crazy allegations against such a great person, ergo when someone does say it, it’s more than likely true. I think he gets it now, or at least he’s starting to.

There’s still another small piece of drama that came out of this, though. When Minx was texting me about the boy, she showed all this disdain for the idea that he called himself “reformed.” Not in the sense that she felt he must be lying. She seemed to think that if someone commits rape they must be an irredeemably terrible person, so there’s no such thing as being reformed.

And I’m thinking “does Minx not remember that she raped and sexually assaulted me when we were together, or…?”  I guess not, or else she doesn’t use those words for what happened (which in fairness I didn’t, either, for a long time; the words imply intent to harm to most people, even though the technical definitions don’t mention intent). At any rate, her holier-than-thou attitude and false-dichotomy type of thinking (like there are people who are nice and there are monsters who give unwanted sexual touching and they are two groups with no crossover) was bugging me so I texted her that while I don’t believe this particular boy is necessarily “reformed,” I do believe it’s possible for a person to do a bad thing and then realize it was bad and not want to do it again; after all, she raped and sexually assaulted me when we were together and I still choose to be friends with her. I know she’s not a terrible person.

Minx did not respond to this. At all. Although when I told her about my exchange with the boy the next day, she did engage with me about that, so I guess she’s not angry and freezing me out for calling the previous incidents with her what they were. She just doesn’t know what to say about it, I suppose.

Oh for pete’s sake.

Okay but hold on.

I Googled women taking Viagara and amazingly enough the first few articles confirm exactly what I thought: that Viagara can be beneficial to some women. I expected to only see articles saying “Oh, but when women have sexual problems it’s because they have hangups and just need to relax! Viagara can’t help with that!” but no, a couple of (female, btw) scientists did a study about this and Viagara helped when women had desire but couldn’t get it up.

But the issue the Viagara was treating isn’t given the straightforward descriptive name of “erectile dysfunction” – apparently it’s known as Female Sexual Arousal Disorder, because man things and lady-things always have to have special, different names even if they are the exact same motherfucking thing.*

Okay so now I’m Googling “FSAD,” the acronym for the super-special pinkwashed term for ladies to use about their lady-parts not getting erections, and there’s some information, finally. We’ll see if any of it is useful.

 

*I still remember referring to one of my dad’s button-down shirts as a “blouse” when I was a kid and my mom correcting me. His shirt was a shirt. Her shirt which looked just the same except the buttons were on the opposite side was a blouse. This was deeply confusing to me. And a few years back a guy I was seeing teased me for calling it a “hand job” when a guy used his hand to give me an orgasm. He said it’s weird to call it that unless it’s a guy on the receiving end. When it’s a woman it’s “fingering.” Um, okay. The word “fingering” has always seemed very vague to me. First off it sounds like a thing you just idly do for no real reason, not a deliberate way to give someone an orgasm. Secondly I’ve heard people use it to mean clitoral stuff or fingerbanging so what even is it?