The bear and I were watching a show that was discussing racial stereotypes briefly. The “Asians can’t drive” stereotype came up, and I had to profess ignorance. That was one I had never heard. The bear told me he’d heard that one plenty of times before, and since it was a stereotype that made it onto national television, I had to assume plenty of other people were aware of that one.

After thinking about it some, I went to google up some statistics, and got a better picture of what I think was going on. I grew up in an area with a surprisingly large immigrant population (albeit unsurprisingly segregated). There is a distinctly large Asian population here, but it’s comprised overwhelmingly of a very few ethnicities, generally not Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. I only bring that up because I know that in my mind, when I think “Asian” and don’t investigate the thought further, I generally think of some undifferentiated compendium of “ChineseJapaneseKorean.” I don’t think of Laotion or Hmong. If you were to ask me, “Are Hmongs Asian?” I’d say yes, but if you were to ask me, “What is Asian?” I’d probably say Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and might not remember the rest of the Asian world unless prompted. Admittedly, maybe that is just my brain. But it made me wonder if the “Asian people can’t drive” stereotype didn’t really take root here because the most identifiably Asian population in my hometown isn’t necessarily considered “Asian” at first glance.

There is also a very large Somali population here. In my hometown, it’s the Somalis who can’t drive. It’s also the Somalis who are “taking all the jobs” and “can’t take care of their kids” and “run down the neighborhoods” and “talk way too loud.” The first, second, and third of those assumptions never really took root in me for some reason, possibly because I grew up in a neighborhood with a very diverse mix of immigrants, and got to actually see immigrants working extremely hard (usually in jobs white people would never take), caring lovingly for their children, and tending their homes and lawns way better than my father ever did. In fact, the city was called on my house several times, and the police a few times, due to our general slovenliness and perceived threat of violence to the neighbors, so I’m pretty sure we were the ones bringing the neighborhood down, and not the Laotion guys who lived down the street.

The talk too loud stereotype and the bad driving stereotype did take root, though. I know they did, because whenever somebody is talking very loudly near me, or is speeding recklessly, in the split-second before I turn my head to look at them, this chime goes off in my head that says, “I bet they’re going to be black.” Anybody in my town with dark skin shares the same stereotypical space in my brain — if they’re speeding and talking loud, they’ve got to be African or African-American.

I didn’t used to notice this when I was a kid. In fact, I didn’t notice it until I went to a different town for college. That town had a very different demographic make-up, with a very small immigrant population, and an absolutely dismal proportion of African-Americans, who were nonetheless even more segregated. This escaped my notice entirely for about a year of college, until one day I was on the bus and I saw a Nigerian man. And I stared. I stared before I caught myself staring, and, horrified, forced myself to stare at my shoes the rest of the ride, asking myself what the fuck was wrong with me. It finally occurred to me — you haven’t seen somebody who isn’t white for almost an entire year. I stopped wondering what was wrong with me, and started wondering what was wrong with this town, and this college. And then I went back to wondering what was wrong with me, that I had never noticed this in all the college materials.

In that town, African-Americans couldn’t drive, and African-Americans spoke too loud. There wasn’t really any other ethnicity available to share that stereotypical space.

Now that I’m back in my hometown, I take note of it every time my brain clicks and whirs and spits out, “That shitty driver is going to be black.” I take note of the fact that, if they are black, my brain wants to file that away in a box called “Told you so, blacks are shitty drivers,” whereas if they turn out to be white or any other ethnicity, my brain wants to file that away in a box called, “What a shitty driver, moving along.” I really force myself to notice that I’m doing this, and sometimes I force myself to say it out loud — “I assumed that woman was going to be Somali because she was loud, and then when she was Somali, I felt smug.” (I do not say this out loud in front of the person I am pigeon-holing — I say it out loud just for myself, or sometimes in front of my bear.)

It feels really icky to say that shit out loud, to hear what I’m saying. I do it that way because my ex-friend Polar once went off on a racist rant, and hearing that shit said out loud made me realize how few places you have to hide racism anymore, once you’ve taken it outside your head and put it in public. Once I say, out loud, “I felt smug because a black person was loud, the way I expect them to be,” there is no way for me to chock that up to anything else. With Polar, she went on a rant with me about a solicitor who came to her house on an obvious pyramid scheme about flipping properties. Solicitors suck, and pyramid schemes suck, so I understood her fuming about how shitty it was and how angry it made her, thinking about how that solicitor was probably just going to go next door and scam some old person. I got that. But she just wouldn’t stop talking about it, and seemed to get angrier and angrier the more she talked. I don’t know what clicked it for me, something in the tone of her voice, but I finally asked, “What race was the guy?” And thus opened up a new wing of the conversation, called “Fucking Somalis.” I wasn’t yet at the point in my life where I was willing to shut somebody down cold, and end a friendship with them over a major breach in goddamn ethics. So I tried having a “rational” conversation with her about how maybe, just throwing this out there, maybe that situation wasn’t any worse just because he was Somali. Maybe it sucks to have a solicitor try to scam you, no matter what race they are. And maybe we should stop talking about how he’s a fucking Somali who you can’t even understand the way he talks hurfle burfle racist puke, and just move on to talking about something else, okay?

I finally accidentally shut down the conversation when Polar, getting increasingly backed into a corner, tried this one: “It’s not even what he was doing that bothered me! It’s just that he came to this country and took somebody else’s job!” Without thinking about it, I burst into laughter. “Oh, the coveted ’scam old people all day’ job? That’s a tight fucking market, how dare he take that job away from some sad white dude who has to work in an office with benefits now that the pyramid scheme is all sewn up.” I was being really generous at the time, all “oh, she’s just venting, I should help educate her” instead of “racism makes white people believe completely insane things and I am not going to entertain this conversation as if it is sane or reasonable.”

I’m getting really off track here. What I meant to say about all of this: there are a collection of racist stereotypes that I know intimately, but where I have grown up, they’ve been applied to completely different groups of people. If I hadn’t heard that “Asians can’t drive” thing on TV, I never would have even considered the fact that perhaps in other parts of the country, Somalis aren’t the bad drivers. Perhaps in other parts of the country, all the same stereotypes just get applied to the local demographic whipping boy. And I got curious about that. I started to wonder what other hometowns look like, how this process works everywhere — take a stereotype and stick it to whoever your town values the least. If anybody is comfortable sharing, I’d like to know who is the loud bad driver in your town. What ethnicity fills the slot of (any given stereotype)? I’m less interested in the ethnicities than I am in the stereotypes, since I suspect we’ll end up with a static list of stereotypes, and a rotating cast of characters to fill them. I’m interested in this because it’s like a Mad Libs of goddamn horrible oppression: pick some characteristic that white people, as a society, have decided is an accurate indicator of a person’s unfitness for citizenship (which is its own insane judgment to start with), and then just fill in the blank with whoever your most visible local non-white ethnicity is. Like, if I put out there: The worst drivers in my town are (ethnicity), and ask a local white person to fill in the blank, I probably now have a fairly accurate judgment of the demographics of their town.

It’s now 100% official. I will start my new job on the 9th. I’ll be working to support and maintain the office infrastructure of a county guardian ad litem program (avoiding using my exact job title for anonymity’s sake). Though it’s a county program, it’s officially under the jurisdiction of the court, which means I am a state employee. Which means MAD BENEFITS. Oh, and also? 5k+ pay hike.

I have never in my life seen a less surprised face than the way my supervisor looked when I told her. I feel kinda bad for her, but I also, um, don’t.

I will be busy, possibly too busy to blog, in these final days, since I am trying to download all the information in my brain into bite-sized documents, so whoever they replace me with isn’t at the utter and complete loss I found myself at when I started here. However, I may also be asked to take additional vacation hours so they don’t have to pay them out, so I might be unbusy. Who knows? It is a sweet, sweet mystery.

It is not for sure yet. It is one hair’s breadth away from “for sure”, and I have no reason to expect that hair’s breadth won’t go through. And I probably shouldn’t be posting until it is for sure for sure for sure.

But I think I may have a new job.

I think I may have a new job.

It’s not the job I wanted mostest in the whole world that I interviewed for a while ago. I would have loved that job, but those guys acted really weirdly after the interview, and I found out I didn’t get that job through their Facebook — they still haven’t contacted me to tell me I didn’t make the cut. If it wasn’t the job I wanted mostest in the world, that would be enough to make me not to work there, because, seriously, come on.

The job I wanted mostest in the world was going to be in an abortion clinic. This job is not in an abortion clinic, BUT at the end of my interview they sprang on me that one of my job duties would be to assist pregnant minors in acquiring a judicial bypass so they don’t have to inform their parents of their decision to acquire an abortion. They asked me if I was okay with this, asking me in such a way that they were obviously prepared for a very horrified response. I was  like, “Are you fate? Have you come knocking at my door to say, no, not this, but something very similar for you instead?” That is not what I said. What I said was, “Ha! I just applied at an abortion clinic. I am so okay with that. I am downright giddy.”

I am waiting on a criminal background check to go through (the new job would be with the state government, so it’s a bit of a screening process). I have zero reason to think it won’t come back all clean and nice, but because it’s the very last thing I need before I get this job, I am obsessing over it just a bit.

In the meantime, I have purchased myself A) comic books, B) trashy teen vampire novels, C) a shiny new necklace, because I AM PRETTY SURE I HAVE A NEW JOB, GUYS, and so I get to BUY MYSELF THINGS I DON’T NEED.

WHOOOOOOOOO

On my way to sign the background check, I got calls from two other places wanting to interview me. Seriously? GUYS. WHERE WERE YOU A MONTH AGO WHEN I WAS ALL BLOO BLOO BLOO.

As soon as this is all for sure, I am going to make a donation to the National Network of Abortion Funds. To get a job in this economy, and a job that is better pay and better benefits to boot, to have gotten so many more callbacks and interviews than I ever expected, that is beyond luck. That is a blessing. Knowing how many people are hurting right now, knowing how close I was to just quitting and dealing with having no insurance, knowing the anxiety that caused me because of all the things that might happen to my uterus if I couldn’t have it insured, and knowing about the goddamn fucking shitmonkey Stupak amendment, I feel like I ought to give something back to the women who are getting hammered and don’t have any other options. I want to put a little “thank you” out there to the universe, for doing me a goddamn solid.

Dear Harriet.

What happens when the state one used to reside in during the shadiest period of one’s life has an online database wherein one can (if inclined) look up the criminal offenses committed by ex-friends?

Love,

Harriet

Dear Harriet,

An excellent question! In said situation, one will likely discover details of ex-friend’s lives that one did not wish to know and are yet unsurprising in any given way. One then spends the rest of the night feeling all gross in one’s tummy.

Love, Harriet

Dear Harriet,

Why didn’t you tell me this before?

Love, Harriet

Dear Harriet,

Because you NEVER ASK ME IN ADVANCE, DO YOU? You and your GOOGLING.

Love, Harriet

So, back in college, Flint and I were friends with a pack of boys. Each of these boys were HORRIBLY FLAWED in one way or another, which was presumably why we were friends with them. A side note: if you ever look around at your friends and think, “Good lord, how did I get involved with such a pack of losers?” it is likely because you are kind of a loser yourself, dude. At the time, we all pretended we had created a friendship based on fate, a shared love of dinner parties, and the practical need to develop contacts with weed dealers. In retrospect, it’s incredibly obvious that the real glue that held us together involved several serious drug problems, misogyny (I gave as good as I got), and a fierce denial of crippling and dangerous personal problems of a looming nature. Oh, we were such friends.

We met this group of boys through Nero. Flint and Nero were on the same Greyhound one day, both of them fiending for a joint and awash in the brutal unfairness of a world that does not allow you to smoke a joint on a Greyhound, and only allows you like one five minute stop, seriously, you can’t smoke that quick and like enjoy it, which is a crime against fucking nature. Nero introduced us to his dealer, and also to the pack of rancid boys who hung around his dealer’s apartment CONSTANTLY, and this is how I made friends in college. This is also, by the way, why I think kids smoking pot is a bad thing: LOOK AT WHO YOU MAKE FRIENDS WITH, JUST LOOK AT THEIR FERRET FACES AND STINKFEET.

Not too long after that, Nero fucked off to a farm somewhere to live in a tent and get over his high school girlfriend (Nero was always and forever getting over his high school girlfriend, and it was, by the way, his sophomore year in college). But Flint and I had already made friends with the other dudes, so we spent that summer getting really high, watching shitty pirated movies, and talking about what a loser Nero was, seriously guys look at his hair does he think he’s a hippie, which is how I learned that boys are way more of gossipy shits than girls have ever been.

When Nero came back, I ran into him, as I always did, on our dealer’s couch, stoned out of his mind. I asked him how his trip was, and he blathered on for a while about how CLEANSING it was to be out their in the woods, not HIGH AND STUPID AND WASTING HIS LIFE like all of us had done all summer. Then he picked a fight with Flint about how Flint was bogarting the bong, and it’s not about weed, man, it’s about RESPECT and FRIENDSHIP.

Ugh. Those days.

I hadn’t known Nero very long, but one day I looked at him and just had this overwhelming feeling, the kind of thought that hits you fully formed and without doubt. Nero has a serious drug problem, I thought, and someday he’s going to need help badly. Then I looked around at all the other boys, including Gregory, who was Nero’s best friend. And nobody here will help him, I thought with that same calm sense, because everybody here has a drug problem, too.

Way to sober up the party, Harriet! I didn’t mention my little Premonition of Obviousness to anybody, because I also (psychically) had forseen really bad reactions to this little bit of information. But I made a silent note of it, then spent the next several months quietly reading books about drug addiction and interventions on the side. I wasn’t going to be caught unawares like all these other assholes (it’s okay, you can laugh).

Predictably, Nero got worse. He used a copious amount of drugs in social settings – all the boys did — but I had the feeling he was using far more in private, because his behavior was becoming more and more erratic. If he had a fight with one of the boys, he would get on his bike and ride circles around the house in the rain, sobbing and shouting gibberish until he fell face down in the mud, where he stayed for a while burbling. He pretty much stopped wearing clothes when he could get away with it, even though he lived with roommates. I don’t mean he went around naked, but I do mean that he went around – unwashed – in the same ratty half-closed bathrobe with nothing on underneath. He arranged all his classes for Tuesdays and Thursdays so he could plow through the crates of Wild Turkey he had on standby for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Sometimes, when he spoke, he didn’t make sense. Not “I don’t understand the concept you’re trying to explain” sense, but he wasn’t actually using real words anymore. You could see him plaintively trying to communicate, and it was like he was speaking in tongues. I pointed this out to him once, told him that he wasn’t using real words, and he got so upset he started hysterically sobbing. All the boys rolled their eyes and started riding him, because it wasn’t the first time he had tried to 1) monopolize the only woman in the house with obscene prattling, 2) failed to actually use words, and 3) broken down into hysterical sobs.

Without consulting any of the other roommates, Nero purchased a snake. Oh, god, everybody confided to each other. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Nero won’t be able to take care of the snake, because he’s GONE FUCKING INSANE, the snake will die, and then it will be one more thing for Nero to lose his mind about. And that’s almost exactly what happened. The snake refused to eat frozen mice, but would eat live mice. Nero couldn’t bring himself to feed the snake live mice, so several frozen mice carcasses just built up in the cage while the snake wasted away. Nero lost the snake in the house for an exciting period of time. And, eventually, the snake just died. And Nero went off the deep end.

Later we learned that the snake hadn’t “just” died, but one of the roommates – the roommate nobody liked and nobody could recall how he ended up living there – had purposefully killed the snake by spraying chemical cleaners on it every day. This was a bad house for anybody, much less a drug addict, to be living in. These were bad men.

After the snake died, what I suspected was Nero’s more hidden drug use started to make its way onto the public social scene; he just couldn’t hide it anymore. One day, I arrived at the house to see Gregory, and Nero handed me a pipe. This was pretty normal – we were all potheads. Just before I smoked it, one of the other roommates stopped me and told me it was full of opium. “Jesus, Nero,” I said, “You know I don’t do hard stuff. What the fuck, man?” Nero just shrugged, not an “I don’t care what you think” shrug, but an “I didn’t even hear you because I am on another planet because I have been smoking opium all fucking day” shrug. Gregory told me that Nero was plowing his way through coke (Gregory with him, because Gregory had a crippling drug problem, too), and had started talking about how cool it would be to go live in Thailand.

I finally brought up my premonition. “Nero is a drug addict,” I said. “He can’t stop using. He is destroying his life. And when he goes to Thailand, he’s not coming back. He’s going to start with heroin and then he’s going to die. We have to confront him.” At first, everybody was super excited. Yeah! Let’s do it! There were some really good conversations as everybody related things they had seen Nero done and never discussed, and how it made them feel. I started contacting interventionists in the area. All the boys worked at the same place, and Nero’s problems had become apparent to management, so Flint discussed with the manager the possibility of his sitting in on an intervention, to add some consequences to the weight of the confrontation. The manager was very good-natured and agreeable, and worried about Nero.

One day, I was getting ready for class when our dealer came over to smoke with Flint. He mentioned casually, “Oh, that intervention? Yeah, we totally had it already. We just had a talk with Nero last night about how maybe he uses too many drugs and should cut back a little. He cried. It was really good.”

“Did you tell him any of the things we all talked about? The different things he’s been doing that scare you guys?” I asked, trying to contain my anger.

“Nah, nah, we didn’t need to. I mean, he’s hurting enough. Why bring that stuff up? Anyway, it totally worked, so…” Shrug.

I tried to collect myself and speak as calmly as I could. After all, this was our dealer, and if I pissed him off, Flint would be all over me – and yes, I understand how creepy and ridiculous it is to try and have an intervention with the dealer present. But our dealer was the social hub of the entire wheel – he paid the most rent, he organized the social events, he dispensed advice like a kingly lord. Nobody would get together without him, and Nero probably wouldn’t have respected anybody’s opinion as much as his. ‘Cause, you know, he was the gatekeeper. “I understand why you did what you did,” I said, “But I think it was the wrong decision. If Nero is an addict – and I think it’s obvious he is – a nice chat won’t make him better. He said whatever you wanted to get you off his back, and now he’ll self-destruct even faster.”

“Nah. He won’t. He’s better now,” our dealer persisted.

“I have to go to class, so I can’t argue,” I said, “but I think Nero will prove my point for me soon enough.”

I didn’t realize quite how soon it would be. When I came home from class, Flint was curled up crying. Nero had come over and beat him up. Apparently, during the fake intervention, the boys had let slip that Flint had spoken to their manager – I’m guessing this was a detail that made the intervention too real for them, and part of what made them sabotage it. Despite the fact that the manager really didn’t care (he had a drug problem, too, did I mention?) Nero considered this an unpardonable offense. He knew Flint had recently had his wisdom teeth out, so he came over, threw Flint up against a wall, and smacked him around his jaw. There wasn’t any serious damage – I don’t think he even bruised – but obviously that wasn’t the issue.

There were a few huge red flags that I wish I’d recognized at the time, as they could have saved me a few more years of grief. When I saw Flint curled up crying, I didn’t care. I honest to god felt nothing. I can’t imagine feeling nothing if somebody hurt my bear, and I acted the way I knew I should – outraged, angry, comforting – but deep within me, I felt nothing at all, no sympathy, no protectiveness, nothing. Hey, Harriet, maybe YOUR MARRIAGE SUCKS, did you think of that?

After making sure Flint was all right, and hearing what happened, I had only one thought. “We have to get to an Al-Anon meeting,” I said. “Our lives are crazy. We can’t do this.” Flint, who had been a whimpering sad sack a moment before, suddenly became aggressive and overbearing. “ABSOLUTELY NOT,” he said. “That’s not the answer.” We argued back and forth. Finally, I told him, “Fine, but I’m going to an Al-Anon meeting.” “JUST LEAVE IT ALONE, HARRIET!” I was shocked to discover he wasn’t just against going to a meeting himself, but seemed poised to actively restrain me from attending one. I laid off the argument for a while, then told him I was going out for groceries. At the grocery store, I used the pay phone to call the local chapter. It was a voice recording. As I listened to the recording, I realized two things: I had really needed somebody to pick up, and this was something abused women do. They call for help from pay phones after escaping on the pretext of domestic chores.

Well, that wasn’t me, I thought. Flint is right. I’m overdramatizing. I’m not one of those women. And I hung up before noting any meeting locations.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that Flint was an avid, obsessive, frighteningly addicted role-player. Like, D&D style. The weekend after I left him, his game was still on. The day I told him I was in love with another man, his game was still on. Nothing stopped his game. There was a game scheduled that day, and when I came home, it had already started. So it was another five hours before I could even talk about what had happened.

After the game ended, Flint mentioned what had happened to the boys. I remember having this palpable sense of relief, thinking, “They can’t possibly pretend Nero is okay, with what he’s done. He’s obviously out of control. Out of his mind. He needs help. They can’t possibly deny help now.” Everybody agreed, grumblingly, eyes downcast, that yes he sure needed some help. I told them I’d put together some information on addiction for them to read, so they understood it more, and I’d call the interventionist I’d found.

And then we didn’t see or hear from our friends for a month.

During that month, Flint decided to quit smoking pot. The whole thing had shaken him up pretty bad. I was ecstatic. I had quit smoking pot as soon as I’d started talking intervention, because I knew it was a goddamn laugh to try and tell somebody they had a drug problem while you were high. And I’d discovered that when I quit smoking, I lost all my friends. Nobody wanted to hang out if I didn’t want to smoke, even though that didn’t stop them from smoking. So I was overjoyed to have Flint quit and join me, so I wouldn’t be so alone.

The first time he quit, he asked if I could buy him some comic books and role-playing books to distract himself with. He worked min wage, and always spent all his money on pot and books and movies, so he had to ask me (or steal my credit card) if he wanted anything extra. That was always a source of stress with us, so we were both happy this time to have me go out and voluntarily, excitedly, buy him everything he wanted.

A week later he swiped my credit card to withdraw money and buy from a different dealer, one who didn’t care who we were interventioning.

Then he quit AGAIN. In celebration, and to show him I had no hard feelings, I took him out for the fanciest dinner. I remember how proud and preening he was, having the waiter give him the wine for approval, look to him for orders, and hand him the bill (though he handed it back to me when the waiter was out of sight).

A week later, Nero had left for Thailand, and the imposed ban on our company had apparently been lifted. I came home one night to find the boys at our house, having a memorial smoke about what a good guy Nero had been. Flint had joined in whole-heartedly. This was the point in my life where I started cutting myself again.

Not long after Nero had gone, I heard a story from a girlfriend of mine who had also worked with those boys. If slut was a word with good connotations – meaning a sexually fulfilled and well-adjusted woman who knew her own desires and didn’t accept the status quo of relationships on face value – that’s what I’d call her. But since it’s a word with nasty connotations, I’ll call her free-spirited. All the boys wanted to get in her pants, but she had pretty specific standards about the kind of sex she wanted, and with whom.

One night, after their shift was over, Nero started badgering her to go back to his place and have a smoke. She said no, nicely, in a thousand different ways, but he kept on badgering, and eventually she went. Once there, he badgered her into a drink. Then he badgered her into a backrub. Then he badgered her about taking off her shirt, ‘cause that would make the backrub easier. She drew the line there, stopped saying no politely, said no firmly and unequivocally, and threatened to leave. He backed down, only a few minutes later to suggest that she take off her pants. She got up and left, and ever after, he treated her like shit in public, bad-mouthing her as a stuck-up skank and trying to convince the other boys to hate her (they hadn’t taken a chance and gotten shut down yet, so they didn’t take him up on the hatefest, still hoping for a piece). She was pretty glad Nero was gone, ‘cause she was sick of being treated like shit, and she was sick of hearing his endless diatribe about how no woman can ever be truly satisfied without dick, thus lesbians are broken human beings. Directly after turning him down, she had started sleeping with a woman, so I’m pretty sure that’s where that came from.

I heard bits and pieces about Nero over the years, while I was still in contact with the boys. After the fallout of Gregory, I stopped talking to any of them, suddenly realizing that disclosing my rape to the same guys who hung out with fucking Nero was just a bad idea from beginning to end. After the bear moved in with me, we were cleaning up some of my old things and found a 20 page manifesto Nero had left for me and Flint, after beating Flint up. It was supposed to be an apology, but was really a grievance list of every wrong Flint had ever done him, and why Nero was the saddest, most sympathetic person in the world. I had never wanted to read it, because I knew the mind that had written it was diseased. When he’d sent it to us, I’d flipped through it to find any mentions of my name, and then written him an 11 page manifesto  about how I was not his secret goddamn girlfriend, for reals. I brought a knife with me when I dropped it off (he wasn’t home), and yet still lived in a fantasy world where my life hadn’t become unmanageable.

I’d never read the rest of it. The bear did, and told me all the good parts, the only one I remember being that Nero was sorry to have “completely emasculated [Flint] like that, making you impotent by using my commanding masculinity.” Wowzers.

All this leads up to the present day, wherein I stupidly put Nero’s name into the search database of criminal offenses in the state I used to live in. I’ve never mistrusted my perception that Nero was a drug addict with problems bordering on dangerous and violent. What I learned the other day was just how naïve those perceptions were. I had figured he was starting to go downhill, was getting near rock bottom. I hadn’t realized that he was in a mad spiral, already through bottom, and more dangerous than I had thought. Which is a good lesson to re-learn: whatever badness you sense seeping through a person, that’s only the badness they can no longer hide. There’s a whole pressurized vat of badness where that came from.

Nero has built up a series of charges over the years, getting more expensive and serious. Underage drinking, paraphernalia charges, speeding, reckless speeding. Assault. Intimidating a witness. Death threats over the phone. More assault. And finally, just before I left that town, sexual assault of a child. Then, a year later, a paternity suit.

Telling myself, “You know a rapist,” doesn’t have much of an impact, because, uh, yeah, I know my rapist. And hearing that Nero turned out to be a rapist isn’t much of a surprise, from the guy who tried his best to set up a rape of my friend, who thought no woman was complete without a dick, who harangued me for “flirting” with him and not being his bestest soulmate ever, who “apologized” for physical attacks by talking about his incredible manliness, who still obsessed for bitter long years over the woman who had left him. Who hung out with my rapist.

But I did stop to think about those bad, bad years that could have been much worse. I’ve sometimes wondered what stopped most of those boys from getting more pushy with me than they did, and I’ve always figured it’s because I was obviously somebody else’s property. That’s a really extreme way to say it, but I don’t think it’s inaccurate. Gregory didn’t care that I’d been raped, but when his girlfriend told him she’d been raped, suddenly rape was evil and rapists should be killed. I knew then, and I know now, that if I’d fucked Gregory a few times, my rape would be evil, too. It wouldn’t be a violation until some other dick was getting what only his dick should.

I’ve said this before, but I never really applied it to my own life. Sometimes, the reason women stay with abusive men is because they assume they will always be abused, and they’re choosing their abuser. I am certain, had I been single, Nero would’ve made a move on me. And without the omnipresent threat of stealing another man’s girl, he might’ve felt perfectly safe about raping me. I don’t have any doubt that the other boys would’ve told me it wasn’t rape, which would’ve been part of Nero’s sense of safety. Granted, the only reason I was in a social group like that was because of my association with Flint, but being surrounded by people of his choosing did exactly what he wanted it to: It made me choose him as the best alternative. For a few years, I was surrounded by completely amoral drug addicts and rapists/rape-apologists. And I assumed everybody was like that, once you got to know them enough; after all, I’d seen the boys act decent and human in front of new women. That’s a dangerous place to be, and since I wasn’t yet together enough to realize “I don’t have to hang out with these fuckwits,” the second best solution was to find some way to protect myself from all of them by choosing one of them. Letting Flint rape me was insurance against anybody else doing it.

Those boys are still hanging out with rapists. God, that gives me a gross feeling in my tummy.

New List, everybody!

So, the whole street harassment blogathon of 2009 has got me thinking about a new list. (When I die, they will find me under a pile of lists, one of them being a list of improbable ways I might die).

On the one hand, goddamn I hate knowing that once I leave my house, I am fair game to have my space intruded upon. On the other hand, I can’t hold it against people for trying to fulfill the most basic human urge to connect with another human being. Straight men with good intentions looking to honestly fulfill that need have the deck stacked against them. No, I’m not saying “What about the men!!!!” I’m saying, sexism stacks the deck against everybody, and provides innumerable unnecessary obstacles between human beings trying to connect in intimate or basic ways. While I believe that women have disproportionately more obstacles (and less resources to overcome them with), and obstaclesthat are more likely to result in physical attack, that doesn’t mean that boys ain’t got their shit to deal with.

To wit: our current concepts of masculinity and manhood require a demonstratable ability to acquire the exclusive attention and sexual favors of women, and that requirement doesn’t get waived on the basis of context. That is, you don’t get points for trying; you get points for winning.”I don’t have a girlfriend because the girl I like the best right now just isn’t ready for a relationship and I respect that,” doesn’t make you a man, though “I wouldn’t leave this girl alone until she gave me her number and now I won’t leave her alone until we’re dating” does.

Our concepts of masculinity and manhood also require that concepts like masculinity and manhood exist. I know that sounds patently obvious. But the idea is, “man” can’t exist as a discrete concept unless “woman” exists as a discrete concept. “Masculine” can’t exist unless “feminine” exists. So the two concepts must necessarily be in opposition to each other; one is what the other is not, one is not what the other is.

So men are tasked with this impossible, crazy-making requirement: to be a man, you must acquire relationships with women, but you must not identify with them, or even like them all that much. You are not a man until you can get a woman to pay attention to you, but you can’t acquire that attention by being interested in anything that she is interested in. You must first treat women like aliens, to prove you are not one, and then you must find a way to make them enjoy that treatment.

There is no reasonable way to combine those two needs at the same time, while also fulfilling the very basic human need to have a companion. Which is how you end up with the wild shit women deal with every day when they get harassed on the street. A man is attempting to accomplish one or all three requirements:

1. establish that he is fundamentally nothing like her and never will be anything like her (which carries the implication that there is something wrong or undesirable about being like her)
2. attempt to get her to give him exclusive attention, deserved or not
3. attempt to acquire a positive human connection.

Does that sound confusing? Let me put it this way:

Man on street: Heeeeeey baby why don’t you come over here (Need #2)
Woman who is trying to walk to the laundromat: No.
Man on street: Well fuck you, bitch, you fat bitch, do you think you’re better than me? (Need #1)
Woman: What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t you have a mother who fucking raised you? If you talk that way to me again, I’m going to call the cops, you piece of shit.
Man on street: Oh, hey, no need to act like that. I just saw a pretty lady, I was trying to say hi to a pretty lady. I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just saying hi. (Need #3)
Woman: ????? (quiet determination to be aggressively and pre-emptively dismissive to all men who approach her in public in the future so as to avoid this bullshit)
Second Man: Is that a Firefly T-shirt? That’s awesome! (Need #3)
Woman: FUCK YOU GET AWAY FROM ME.
Second Man: Jesus! Women are psycho bitches! (Need #1)

The fact that men are raised to view women as completely separate and distinct creatures that cannot be understood by normal male brains doesn’t help boys any. The Second Man in that scenario probably viewed what he was doing as pure and innocent and nice, and his intentions probably were — he was trying to connect with another human being. But because that man has also spent a lifetime fulfilling Need #1 — the need to distinguish himself as separate and apart from women and their experiences — he entered into that interaction with no idea of how much street harassment women put up with, and how much they hate it. Because of Need #1, he has no idea how a woman wants to be approached, how a woman would be receptive to an approach, because if he were to learn these things, he would not be fulfilling the bargain of manhood.

So!

New list.

This is going to be the list of Street Luv. This is going to be a list of ways men can approach women that are not uncomfortable, dismissive, humiliating, condescending, privileged, ignorant, or generally sexist bad sauce.

Check it out.