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• Emotional Hand Jobs

  

  I have a lot of social anxiety around people. Wait, let me rephrase that – I have a lot of social anxiety around people that don’t know me and I have to prove my worth through some sort of pithy conversational cue that indicates my humanity and suggests there’s more to me than a woman who has dirt under her fingernails from some unknown source. Considering my personal preference to eliminate all superficial banter that Homo Sapiens are seemingly comforted by, I usually start off with such talking points as, “tell me your primal wound,” when meeting a stranger. My interest is in wanting desperately to know who someone truly is, and not hiding behind the conventions that masquerade us as the happy, perfect, success we all want to be perceived as. I want to know your darkest parts, your deepest shame, your emotional-self, the piece of you that scares you the most – and wouldn’t you know it, not everybody is down for that journey?

  Living in the woods for the past 9 years has insulated me from the societal pressures of impressing humanoids. In my community of cuntree living I’m mostly accepted as my authentic self. The chipmunks understand my crude nature, the trees don’t judge my incessant yammering about capitalism fueling the psychological raping of the patriarchy, and the grass is accustomed to my endless well of genitalia infused humor. Yet when I leave my population of moss-covered rocks and venture into the big world of urban existence where I’m exposed to a plethora of people to connect with, I tend to constantly question who the hell I’m supposed to be in order to be liked.

  Of course there the simple answer is, “yourself”- be yourself Toni!

  Or another answer is, “who cares what people think?”

  Both of these I agree with and try and implement, yet who is “myself” around those I don’t know? How can I not be aware of how others perceive me when I can’t help but notice as their brow furrows at my comment about “butt-fucking corporate greed” and how soon we will be a population of genetically modified humans where only the wealthy will be able to afford designer, Nietzschean, Uber-babies while the poor will lack the resources of genetic perfection thus igniting a cultural war between the immortal demi-god elite and the deformed, polluted, regular humans? I see how their eyes glaze over as they slowly excuse themselves from talking to me, and move stealthily away to have more comfortable conversations with someone else – avoiding eye contact should I return with more polemic antidotes.

  I’m a lot like cilantro in that way. To some, I taste very soapy.

  I struggle with accepting the fact that I turn a lot of people off because I realize I’m making a choice to approach people in the way that I do. I know I could be more likable if I was socially lubricated enough to give out emotional hand jobs. Deep down I know I am capable of deep throating their desire to stay on the surface and discuss things that aren’t as emotionally loaded as, “does your dad actually love you?” Yet instead I feel this need to avoid jerking someone off even if I know they’d enjoy my company more and instead end up furiously metaphorically masturbating while staring them in the face hoping they eventually drop their trousers and do the same.

  I feel torn about wanting to be liked and wanting to be real because those things don’t always go together.

  When I was a young kid I didn’t have any friends. SURPRISE! I had my older brother and he was the only playmate I needed. When I started the 1st grade I made one friend named Trudy who didn’t wear underwear, so I knew she understood a lot more about life than I did. She was also great at cartwheels despite the provocative consequences of the afore mentioned fashion choice. Trudy moved away for the 2nd grade, so I made one more friend to replace her. She was a very shy girl with ringlets named Ashley and we spent most of our time not talking and jumping rope. In the 3rd grade I was separated from Ashley so I became friends with a girl Lizzie, who had an exceptionally impressive blond ponytail that swung when she walked. Lizzie was popular because she was the new pretty girl with the hot hair and the popular boy had a crush on her – and as we all know – a women’s value is often defined by the caliber of boy that likes her because… the patriarchy. Yet sadly Lizzie and her luscious mane moved away after one year, leaving a black hole of the “popular girl” vacuum to be filled. I figured I would go back to my life of obscurity and singing songs about frogs and pigs with Ashley, yet because I had been Lizzie’s best friend, I inadvertently inherited her crown.

  I found being popular to be very stressful. Having many friends is theoretically nice, but when you’re a co-dependent, people-pleasing, 9- year old that feels responsible for the emotional happiness of others and has been socialized by Catholic guilt to prioritize everyone but yourself because love is conditional and only given when behaving in the manner adults want – it can be a bit overwhelming. I always wanted my friends to be happy and this created a dynamic where I was more concerned about being who THEY wanted me to be rather than who I actually was. I was intuitive enough to understand the parts of me each friend preferred, but then my personality became a performance art of negotiating the traits each audience member was most likely to enjoy.

  I lived like this for ummmm… 30 years? There was this hyper concern about the needs of others that made it impossible to prioritize the needs of myself or truly settle into the relationships that made the most sense for me. I was so desperate for love that I’d take it from anyone, even if it meant folding myself into an origami shape of their liking – “oh you’re not into me, well how about you try Toni as crane.” It wasn’t until I birthed a human that I started to address shedding this strategy of manipulating others by manipulating myself into the manipulated figure they most fancied. Not only because of my child’s all-consuming unconditional love that accepted all, didn’t judge, and whose only expectation was my utter devotion – but also because taking care of a kid is very time sucking and forced me to prioritize what was actually important.

  I think we all change, mold, and develop as we grow, but for me personally becoming someone’s mother shook me out of a coma of my own making. I started to genuinely feel like, “who gives a shit what anyone thinks but her?” My kid’s opinion of me is truly the only one that matters and she thinks I’m the fucking shit. The Munch loves my videos, she thinks I have a beautiful voice (I don’t), and she’s convinced I’m an accomplished artist purely because my hearts aren’t crooked and I can draw a descent star shape. Not that I’m basing my sense of self purely on my daughter’s perception of me because I’m aware there will come a time when she’s resentful, rebellious, or questions why she can’t smoke pot in the house when mommy does – but what I have learned from raising The Munch is that I will never be able to be who someone wants me to be because they will ALWAYS want more. They will endlessly suck from my teat, ingesting the milk of my efforts to please them and then digest my excretions while expecting me to change the diarrhea in their diapers.

  So I’ve gone the other direction. I’ve come to terms with the fact that not everyone is going to like me, and maybe I even speed that process along by being so unapologetically myself right out the gate. If you’re not interested in discussing the future of A.I. and how maybe hating yourself is what you love about yourself most, then we probably aren’t going to have a lot in common anyway. I’m not perfect at this practice of course. I can get intimated by strong personalities that think they’re better than me because hey – you probably are better than me. I can allow myself to feel bullied in conversations if the person I’m engaging with resists my efforts because they are stuck in their own ideology and too closed-minded to be willing to explore. I can find myself back in old patterns of wanting to please and allowing comments I think are dumb, offensive, annoyingly sexual towards me, or purely shallow. When I’m at my strongest I challenge, and when I’m at my weakest I acquiesce and let things slide I later wish I didn’t. Yet life is a work in progress and I guess the best I can do is keep forcing myself on people and hoping I run into those that are interested in investigating their darkness with me.

  

  April 18, 2018 • Change, Children, Emotions, Mommyhood, Musings, Parenting, Political Banter • Views: 4207

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• Men are Not The Enemy

  

  Ugh!! These #meetoo stories of sexual assault are fucking me up! Every single woman I know has experienced some sort of sexual violation in her life – EVERY SINGLE ONE!

  With how many stories are being shared you’d think that all men are committing these acts of violence. Yet I feel like I know plenty of dudes that not perpetrators? Right guys? Maybe there are just some really prolific creepy dudes out there dispersing their rapey ways to a lot of victims? Perhaps for every ten stories women tell of some heinous behavior they all stem back to one inexhaustible dude. I want to believe the ratio isn’t as bad as it seems, and it’s more that shitty dudes are shitty to many women rather than most dudes are shitty.

  I wonder what it feels like to be a man right now? How a man that has sexually assaulted a woman- but is regretful- feels when he sees these posts. Do they ignite his empathy? Or inspire him to reach out to the woman he’s hurt and acknowledge his actions? How does a man react that has abused women, but lives in denial about it? Is he becoming more indignant and hateful? Do these women revealing their stories of pain open his eyes to the hurt he’s caused, or just make them seem like whiney bitches? Or what about the man that has never been creepy but is dealing with the burden of gender responsibility? Is he feeling defensive of his male counterparts, or horrified by their actions? I guess I understand that last guy the most because I do live with the guilt of being a white devil. But still, it can’t be easy to have a dick right now.

  I keep hearing arguments of people wanting to excuse the behavior of sexually deviant men through the lens of biology. This pervasive sentiment of, “Yeah it sucks, but that’s the way men are so what can we do about it?” attitude. This type of thinking is predicated on the assumption that because men have exterior genitals, bouncing around on their thighs all day begging to be burrowed in some hole, that they are going to act out sexually as a consequence. Because of this anatomical condition of “dick needing to be satisfied,” these men can’t control their sexual urges. So of course when your face looks like a shoe and you finally have some power to exploit, you’re going to try and fuck Gwyneth Paltrow. These things happen.

  I feel like there are a lot of holes in this logic. Now, I’m not a historian or anything, but I think men have a much greater predisposition to kill not rape. We didn’t evolve from a “raping and gathering” society… but a “HUNTING and gathering” one. Hunting is much more engrained in the male DNA then raping. For thousands of years men killed the shit out not only giant animals like Wooly Mammoths, but also that dude Zog from the neighboring tribe that looked at you funny from behind that rock and because you can’t speak to each other besides grunting – fuck that guy. You don’t know him. You’d spear the shit out of Zog and then continue with you day. There were no lawyers or murder trials in the early days of human history. Accountability for homicide didn’t happen until the ancient Greeks 2,500 years ago. Before that, you could kill anyone you wanted or deemed a threat, and then go home to your cave and eat supper.

  Yet I don’t here people saying in murder cases, “Well, men did evolve to kill, so they just got that blood thirst. Let him have a few sips.”

  NO!

  We have a pretty clear expectation that men should not kill people (unless of course you’re fighting some government provoked war to expand our Empire, or if you’re a police officer killing an unarmed black man. But let’s not get lost in semantics). There is a pretty obvious expectation to not kill each other; even though biologically killing is how we advanced into the species we are today.

  The other problem with justifying rape culture with the rational, “this is the way men are,” is the very wrong assumption that men like sex more than women. Nope. Not true at all. Just because my genitals are tucked in like a suitcase and not flopping around in front of me, doesn’t mean I enjoy or want sex any less than a man. In fact there were plenty of nights that I went out of my house with the sole purpose to find sex. Yet not one of those evenings consisted of me trying to cup a dude’s balls without his consent, or batting his dick around while he was trying to order a drink.

  Men aren’t rapey because they have testes, or because they like sex more. Men are rapey towards women because they view women as objects. They see women as pussies, not people. The patriarchy has insisted women are property to be taken care of by men for thousands of years. Just because we started working and voting a few decades ago unfortunately doesn’t take away that branding. When men treat women like sexual playthings invented purely for their own pleasure, (and care nothing of the pleasure or interest of the woman), it stems from a dehumanizing process that has been in place for millennia. But we can’t confuse social systems with biological imperatives. Just because it’s been this way, doesn’t mean it has to be. This conditioning is a consequence of learned behaviors, not inevitable ways of being. Just like men learned not to enslave people, they can also learn not to rape them. It’s a matter of shifting the consciousness.

  But men are also rapey towards other men and kids. Now what’s that all about?

  Now since I’ve never sexually assaulted a person, so I admit, there is a lot I don’t know about the impetus. But is seems to me that the other person NOT wanting your advances is part of the turn on. The fact that you’re doing something they don’t want, but you do want and you’re getting away with it, is part of the rush. That power you have over them fuels the desire, and is only enflamed by knowing you’re taking advantage of someone weaker.

  Again I think this has to do with socialization. Men have been in power for all of written human history. Power is a part of the masculine identity. Wanting power over another person is the foundation of most of the systems that rule us. Governments and capitalism are built on power over others. This is the social structure we’ve developed, so of course it’s going to get played out sexually. Sexuality is a reflection of culture, and in case you haven’t watched the news in your life, the world is a pretty ferocious place full of people seeking power over other people.

  The concept of wanting power over others is rooted in the structures that we’ve come to accept of how society functions. Until we develop a more cooperative system that is not top down, but rather a collective community of equal and shared responsibility, chances are there are going to be plenty of individuals mimicking the energy at play. If we live in a patriarchy run by a few wealthy men who suck up the majority of the earth’s resources for the benefit of the elite, we’re going have some rapers out there raping people. Yet when we open our minds to a new social structure that isn’t run by the tyrannically forces of the oligarchy and instead honors the need for global collaboration, then we’ll most likely have a hell of a lot less rapers.

  One of the most functional societies in the animal kingdom are ants – and they don’t have a boss bossing them around all day. There is no king, just a queen farting out babies. Ants don’t have a top down colony; they work together as equals and are the most efficient creatures on the planet because of it. When you have a “leader” as an organizational structure, that leader has to constantly re-enforce his power. The “alpha male” of the monkey species doesn’t just chill all day eating bananas. Nope. He has to remind everyone he is the fucking king all day by beating up scrawnier monkeys and trying to fuck all the ladies. That sounds exhausting. Most of the time spent being a leader is reminding everyone that you’re the fucking leader because the second anyone has a moment to think about it, they’re like, “hey this sucks, what the fuck?” Then the leader tries to kill or fuck someone and they’re like “fine whatever.” But the last time I checked, we’ve evolved quite a bit from the monkeys we came from, so maybe we could re-think this way of organizing ourselves. Just like we can change our minds and decide that we actually do like goat cheese, we have the power to change the way we think. So even the rapey dudes out there could become less rapey, if even not rapey at all.

  All men are not the enemy. There are lots of men that want the same changes in society that women do, because they too feel the insanity. There are even men that have fallen into the traps but are beginning to see the error of their ways, and are trying to get out. We got to pull those dudes up! If their arms are extended, grab one! We have to be flexible to the possibility that a lot of this horrible behavior they wish they hadn’t done too. If we are open to forgiving them, maybe they will be more open to apologizing and changing?

  But of course there are going to be some guys that burrow deeper into the cave of darkness trying desperately to hold onto a past paradigm. They will dig their heels in and believe that women deserved whatever tragedy had befallen them. They will continue to commit acts of misogyny and violence again and feel totally justified. They will champion men, and further denounce the rights of women – hence the every growing men’s right’s movement. And to those guys… ummm… hmmm… wow…. Lemme think… Jeeze… Good luck to you, and may the best man win.

  October 18, 2017 • Change, Current Events, Musings, Political Banter, Problems, Vagina Stuff, Women's Business • Views: 5679

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• Can You Sprinkle Some GMO’s in my DNA?

  

  Now that it is winter, and I basically live in the open Tundra, I have had a lot more time to stare off into the distance and think about the future. Not my future silly… that just feels like a bleak road of endless mediocrity and stalled dreams – the future of humanity! Wait… that also feels pretty dreary. FUCK!

  I wonder what the evolution of our species is going to look like. Technology has so drastically impacted our environment and society that it seems impossible our DNA won’t be affected. Don’t you feel like extreme shifts in culture would force our biology to adjust just as much as shifting natural ecosystems did? If simply walking north was the catalyst for all racial differentiation, how is our iWorld going to influence our brains? What is the exposure of hundreds and thousands of chemicals going to do to our bodies? How are our psychological selves going to adapt to a world where social media takes precedence over human contact?

  At least this is the crap I think about during those moments when I am sitting with my kid spending “quality time” with her. You see… as long as you look like you are paying attention, it is totally okay to daydream about our transhumanist future!

  The other night I was playing in The Munch’s room watching her practice handstands. I observed how she endlessly kicked her legs in the air, awaiting a moment of balance to feel the lightness of suspension. Part of me was impressed by her tenacity, but I was also thinking how I have seen 4-year olds on Youtube dance the Salsa like their feet were on fire. I know talent is relative, but I also can’t help but compare The Munch to the countless of amazing children I have seen on the Internet! Some of who are infinitely better than me at everything I do!

  It is hard to be blown away by anything any more because we have infinite exposure to everything great humans do all over the world. Someone in Uzbekistan can fart so forcefully that they propel themselves into the air, land on a tree branch with their pinkies, and then somersault off while contorting their body so much that they land inside an Evian bottle – and I will see it on Facebook! Then all my farts would seem subpar, and average, as they just blandly soak into the couch. I SUCK!

  When you see someone do something you can’t, the normal human reaction is to feel awestruck, but also inadequate. The prevailing internal monologue is usually “wow, that is cool, but I can’t do that ☹” We don’t all have the natural ability, or commitment to be exceptional at everything, yet we still have the urge for excellence. But don’t worry everyone! I think science will soon change all that!!!

  Because we live in a genetically modified world, I think we are approaching the point were we are going to start genetically modifying humans. Science is on the precipice of making this a reality, and as soon as rich people can get access to this technology, they are going to use it. They will not only manipulate genes for beauty and physical prowess, but also manufacture immunities to best deal with the impending environmental catastrophes before us. This super race will not only be aesthetically perfect and intellectually advanced, but they will also have the biology to withstand the breakdown of nature. Yet of course there will also be a race of humans who can’t afford to purchase these targeted mutations, and they will sadly be at the mercy of natural selection. Maybe the super race will then use the blood of the pathetic unmodified people for fuel… or inject it into their bodies to stay immortal.

  OMG what is wrong with me!? Why can’t I just play “Go Fish” with my kid like a normal person??

  But maybe I need to start saving up $$$ so I can shoot GMO’s into The Much so she can stick that handstand?

  

  November 19, 2014 • Current Events, Environmental Impact, Musings, Playing • Views: 3997

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