Sex and Sexuality

I have, as mentioned, a rather personally fraught relationship with online dating. Catching too many of my supposedly monogamous partners using personal ads to cheat on me left me pretty thoroughly unable to commit to the process. And, when it comes down to it, you have to commit to the process: you are saying, in effect, that you wish to meet potential partners through a service we've all paid for in order to meet other potential partners. You have to accept that it's a perfectly acceptable way to meet someone, and to set down and just let go of your hang-ups about it.

There are many reasons not to get involved with someone who is otherwise monogamously committed to another person. It's not because you're a slut destined to ever be unhappy, or because you're betraying some sisterhoodly duty to prevent someone else's man-child from betraying her. It is, however, because, regardless of what your relationship or dating goals are, you're likely setting yourself up for failure (and a whole raft of shit, which you know if you've been reading comment thread).

Sadly, $pread, the all volunteer-run quarterly written by and for sex workers, posted yesterday that they can no longer sustain their magazine:

We regret to inform you that...$pread will close its glittery doors soon after the dawn of the New Year...We apologize for those of you who have only recently come to know us, and to all our longtime supporters. After all these years, five all-volunteer years to be exact, we have come to the conclusion that an all-volunteer magazine is simply unsustainable in the current publishing climate. Short of a donation of $30,000, we will be unable to sustain the magazine past January.

Why the pretense of "virginity" to my parents made so many things much more difficult. (Warning: the following involves sluthood, sexual assault and talking about either with one's parents.)

The person with whom you have decided to have a monogamous relationship owes you fidelity, as you owe that person the fidelity you also promised. If that person breaks that promise, I can guarantee one thing: he or she made the choice to do so.

If you haven't heard, there's only one possible result when you're a "slut"—particularly if you have the audacity to do it without shame and—clutch your pearl, ladies—talk about it in a public forum.

NO RING FOR YOU!

Who would want the cow when he can have the milk for free, we're told (because, like cows, we women apparently have no intrinsic value—we're just about what we can provide for others).

There is no such thing as The One.

There, I said it. No fairy godmother is going to come down and give you fancy One-seeking slippers, there's not some other higher-power-created other half of you waiting equally wistfully for you to walk into his or her life, and there's no ultimate, perfect person out there that, if you make one mistake or break one undefined rule, you'll fuck it up with and thereby end up alone.

Some music for your weekend: I was thrilled to recently learn about Jhameel, a pop-orchestra musician who covers T Pain songs and whose lyrics (according to his bio) "revolve around such topics as Middle Eastern womanhood, homosexuality, and urban prostitution, giving voice to the silent margins of society."

The "three-date rule" is stupid. So's the five-date rule, the six-month rule and any other rule that someone's told you should govern the time in your relationship that you choose to engage in physical intimacy. The problem is that, in sorting through all the messages of when you should or should not submit to what the other person apparently wants from the get-go, not enough people get around to considering what feels right to them.

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is next week. Having not grown up in North America and having taken a fairly circuitous route to feminism, the first time I ever heard of Michfest was about seven years ago in the Inga Muscio book Cunt, where Muscio talks about what a transformative experience it was to be completely surrounded by only women for a week. Then, a few years later, while I was attending a writing retreat for women of colour at the Leaven Centre in Michigan, one of the women began to talk about Michfest, and their womyn-born-womyn policy (WBW), i.e. the fact that only cisgendered women could attend Michfest. I was stunned.