OMG drama

I’m gonna try to keep this saga short because the guy in question really doesn’t deserve a ton of my brainspace. But we’ll see.

So, a guy I’ve been friends with on FetLife for a few years contacted me recently saying he was gonna be in my city (he lives in another city a couple hours away) and asking if I wanted to meet up while he was in town. I was flattered by this (and, I mean, I do enjoy his FetLife presence and we’ve had some entertaining online conversations). So I said yes.

We ended up going for gelato, and we talked for so long that we got hungry again so we went and grabbed sushi.

This guy is a sadist, like me; also, I thought he was straight (but the day before we met up I checked his profile and he’d changed it at some point to say pansexual. Hmmm.). So I had no reason to assume he was meeting me in hopes of us hooking up. Buuuuut I’ve been feeling really, really nostalgic for dick for a while so I’m not gonna lie, “hmmm, I wonder if…?” was in the back of my mind.

And when we met, I found him attractive pretty much immediately. This may have simply been because he’s new and shiny and I miss banging dudes. But then again I seem to have developed a fairly distinctive “type” after I broke up with Minx back in the day: cis men who look hypermasculine but give off a level and softspoken vibe, are feminist-leaning or I guess fake it well, and don’t really feel feelings the way other people do. The Pedant and The Dandy are both examples. So is this guy. I should name him. We’ll call him The Praying Mantis, because he compared himself to one once. Mantis for short.

The whole time Mantis and I were hanging out, I felt this nagging physical attraction. Like, I found myself wanting to touch him – just let my arm brush his as we walked from the gelato place to the sushi place, things like that. A constant pull. I didn’t touch him, because as I said I had no reason to think he’d be into me like that and I didn’t wanna make him uncomfortable. I wouldn’t necessarily have been against doing my usual super-suave “we could make out if you want” thing at the end of this meet-up, but he was going straight over to see another friend and I didn’t want things to feel rushed, or to have a first kiss with someone right out in public at a bus stop or whatever as we parted ways. So I didn’t make any moves. Uggggh his goodbye hug was great, though; firm and strong enough that I really wanted to know what else those arms and hands could do. Which in turn made me feel really emotionally off-kilter and vulnerable and it’s just as well I went home right after that. I don’t think I was thinking straight.

I want to mention, though, that although there was a vibe about Mantis that immediately put me at ease, I had reservations about him, if only because he’s a middle aged toppy cis guy and they are often predatory.

And then I remembered that he once made a post on FetLife saying he’d treated some FetLifers badly in the past (he didn’t say how), and not just online, but he was turning over a new leaf; he asked people to please tell him if he’d ever made them uncomfortable so he could fix his behaviour. Also, when he and I were hanging out he mentioned an ex-relationship and when I asked why that had ended, he said, ruefully, that it was because he’d emotionally abused his ex.

And, like…maybe he was genuinely contrite about whatever his past actions were, and has reformed himself since. Or maybe he was an abuser playing the part of a humble, contrite, self-aware guy in order to gain access to new victims. I’ve seen serial predators express sadness over mysterious Things They Did without specifying what. I’ve seen serial predators ask people to please, please just let tell them if they’d made some sort of misstep so they could fix it (knowing, I’m sure, that it’s fucking scary to confront a predator directly, so probably nobody would, so then the predator would be able to say “well how could I possibly have known that I upset these people when none of them told me?”). I’ve seen serial predators try to gain people’s trust and sympathy by outright admitting to having abused people before but claiming to be a different person now.

Also, I know it’s A Thing for some cishet guys to list themselves as something other than straight in their online profiles, pretty much just to get access to afab enbies, whom they secretly just think of as chicks they need to jump through some extra hoops to acquire. Mantis claims he used to list as straight on FL only because pansexual wasn’t an option when he first joined, but could that possibly be true? It’s a pretty basic and well known orientation. Also I remember a convo we had years ago where I jokingly said he should do sadistic play with a guy sometime For Science (we’d been speculating that estrogen-based bodies possibly bruise more easily than testosterone-based ones due to differing amounts of subcutaneous fat, but neither of us actually had any basis for comparison; he’d only played with cis women, I’d only played with cis men) and he was like “Um, no. I will not be doing that.” All snarky like I’d asked him to do something absolutely ridiculous and unthinkable. Which seems like total straight dude behaviour but who knows? Maybe he’s pan but only likes to be a sadist with non-men. I dunno. Pansexual folks aren’t required to do all the same things with every gender.

Anyway, I was on the fence about whether I was being paranoid about Mantis or not. People say to listen to your gut, but my gut and my anxiety have almost identical-sounding voices. 😛

But after he went back home, we exchanged some messages on FetLife that made me a lot more sure that dude is at least problematic, if not an actual predator. I’ll probably want to dissect that convo pretty thoroughly, and this entry is already getting a bit long, so I’ll end this off here and continue in a new post.