"While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats." - Mark Twain

what is being implied about how she got to this state?

Gypsies Tramps & Thieves

firstly i want to emphasize that i feel a great passion for the expression of ideas and the exposure of truth; this passion comes across sometimes i think, but the passion stems from my own convictions and not from a desire to influence yours. i do not claim to know one goddamn thing for any kind of certain. these are not even firm opinions, just contemporaneous musings, so i am not proselytizing and please for the love of god disagree and let me know what you think.

this started as a stream of consciousness on mating: does anyone else wonder why the process of getting to know and fuck someone can be so fraught with anxiety and ugh-ness? i think one could make a cosmological argument that the split of universal consciousness that precedes our occupying these mortal bodies leads to a feeling of physical isolation that becomes psychological. i'm interested in these approaches for sure, but lately i've been looking at how it is in the trenches, noticing the trends in the material world as we collectively and individually perceive it.

i'm an observer, and although i malign the tv as a conduit for evil, i believe it is, i do consume whatever shows i can tolerate, primarily because i like to know what the general population is consuming. i do recognize the pleasurably addictive powers of these shows, and i've said that i enjoy one reality show or another, and the truth is that i do enjoy them, not always but often, and i think that's another thing for me to question and examine. in sum, what the fuck is going on on the tv, i dont know, but i personally pay some critical attention to it, as i think some major underlying causes for relationship dysfunction are right there on the tube,.. the glass teat (a term i lifted from stephen king)

i think our increasingly repressive and isolationist society contributes to our inability to make connections, then encourages us to do x,y or z to mitigate the subsequent depressive feelings.
ads and tv and katy perry etc all glorify alcohol abuse, sexism and selfishness, then add to that the currently projected uncoolness of caring about anything outside of the self. i suggest that this cocktail is what leads to generations of dysfunctional relationships that misfire absurdly from beginning to end. so much of work in relationships stems from the need to mitigate insecurities, our own and those of our partners. when i really break down a lot of the interactions that i see and have engaged in myself, jealousy of time or attention is at the root of a lot of sexual and relationship dysfunction. for my own view, i think of jealousy as an umbrella term that indicates feelings to be further evaluated and named. in other words, i might be jealous because i am angry at you for paying your attention elsewhere when i feel needy, or i might be jealous because i am fearful that you will leave, or i might be jealous because i am mad at myself for treating you like shit so i am defending myself by turning it around mistrusting you, on and on. so when you really break it down, you might notice that base or negative emotions like fear, anger, envy etc are the basis for so many conventional relationship models. so then we have to fabricate the rules of mating, having game or playing hard to get or being a pickup artist or whatever, to get around these psychological land mines. really we could just let all this shit go and be calm and honest and courageous and COMMUNICATE, i believe we'd be better off.

personally i have lots of trouble finding people i might even consider being interested in pursuing. this is particular to me in a way, because i'm totally totally loony and weird to most people, but also i don't think i'm the only person who feels they 'can't find anyone;' i've heard other peopler say that, albeit often following a long list of impossible criteria they seek to fill in one partner. anyway, if i do happen to chance upon a potential magic one life partner rescue prince/ss, if i find that mythical savior person and i am reading the cultural messages correctly, i'm supposed to navigate a series of definite steps, waiting x number of days to call, saying this winking that, pretending i feel one way to secretly convey something else or to test my partner, etc... none of this shit even alludes to direct communication or honest expression of feelings, and i consider those to be fundamental aspects of loving relationships, so you can imagine how i find myself frustrated. (i'm not saying that waiting a day or two to call is inherently a bad thing, i'm in support of any action that arises organically and is motivated by your intuitive higher self)

by the time i expend the energy it takes to play the game as its dictated by present culture, i've convinced myself that the object of pursuit is not worth the effort. this is my own personal experience and i cannot speak for anyone else, bear in mind that i am the single biggest personality freak stalking the planet. some people are happily dating and don't feel like mini-pariahs every time they think about sex and love. some people are totally sick of their partners and have bad sex or abusive conversations but being in a long-term monogamous relationship is the goal we're force-fed since the little mermaid so they feel they can't leave. i'm just attempting to highlight that depression and anxiety and dissatisfaction are not emotions we naturally feel around love, rather they are emotions we are made to feel through the various mass media.

i want to point out here that my opinions are informed by an analysis of the slice of pop culture i have grown up with, and i feel i might evolve in my thinking if i could also evaluate and discuss the messaging that was happening in pre-internet america. i've seen some racist ads from the 50s-70s, for instance, but i'm not sure what kinds of relationship messages people were receiving. i'm just putting forth my experience because i believe testimonial is inherently political, without the attempt to postulate that i have landed upon the one true way to interpret the culture. or whatever the fuck, i digress

anyway all i'm saying really is that lots of people are lonely and unhappy in these constructs, and we somehow gloss over this as a culture and continue to promote the same shitty paradigms as glorious and ideal. for what it's worth, i think the awkwardness and falsity and hollowness that pervade modern coupling are a product of larger forces, because i don't think it's a coincidence that such similar messaging is conveyed through so many supposedly disparate elements of the mass media. i think it's especially not a coincidence because most outlets of modern media are owned by one or two companies ultimately. but i digress again

 

this woman is a member of the pamunkey indian tribe. my great-grandmother grew up on a pamunkey reservation; she was very regal even in advanced years, as is this woman.

shout out to fellow blogger sara david at http://wordsandturds.com for remarking often that desire does not occur in a vacuum. if our spending habits, our eating habits, where we think it's acceptable to live, with whom we believe it's appropriate to be friends, if all these basic judgments we make are informed by the media and advertising and other cultural outlets that we consume, then what makes us so convinced that our fucked up relationships are not also a product of the massive corporate construct? (sorry about that lame and vague terminology, still haven't figured out a catchy way to refer to that oligarchy of baddies who are controlling our lives, suggestions welcome)

in a society where cutting down your fellow human is a mark of success, and where sex negativity and stripping the people of our innate power are the norm, it only makes sense that we should be so lonely and so unable to sustain healthy relationships. again, i'm speaking in generalities, but the climbing divorce rate, for example, is objectively observable data that indicates some kind of negative social trend, right? i mean who knows, i could be thinking on too large a scale, and maybe the problem is just marriage as it is defined today. the confluence of the legal contract and the religious implications does confuse a lot of people i think. like, if i decide to get married so that i can have death bed rights, was i supposed to have been abstinent? i think the legal thing is separate from the religious thing in a lot of ways, but somehow it all gets lumped together. i hear a lot about the defense of marriage and traditional families, but at this point those terms are so theoretical and abstract as to be meaningless, like democracy and patriotism.

 

ask me why i don't think this is pretty 

disney movies continue to indoctrinate people almost from birth to scour the earth until they find the (only) one person whom they can possess or be possessed by, and without whom life is by definition unsatisfying. we end up with a culture of many times divorced over-shoppers who are lonely and miserable because the various modes of advertising have conditioned us to define contentment by completely perverse standards. does abusing alcohol in order to shop at the bar or on okcupid for a mate to own til death to us part, does this really seem like a good path to true love? but that's what gets promoted. yeah we took too many shots, think we kissed but i forgot, we're going to do it all again.

i know i have absorbed this messaging, until i started thinking critically about the way i view relationships, i thought my highest aim as a human was to seek out The One person who would be an unconditional vessel for all my insecurities and repressed emotions. truly forming a human connection is about love, and ostensibly this is what's promoted, but really listen to the pop songs and evaluate the romantic comedies. i'm going to stalk you until you realise that you belong to me, i cannot live without you, i realised that she's the one and i'm going to get her, the models for forming relationships that i can remember are all totally perverse and based on possessiveness, on jealousy, fear, all the baser emotions. i think the only reason people do not often make that connection between our sex-negative narcissistic solipsistic culture and the messages we receive through entertainment and advertising is that the truth is hiding in plain sight. as someone who has more than once scoured the room for an object that was sitting right at 12 o'clock, sometimes it's hardest to perceive what's directly in front of your face.

i don't know who or what is responsible for the rampant negativity, for the encouragement of all the base and reptilian and destructive emotions, but i do know that we can be responsible for ourselves. working against your own indoctrination is SO HARD, especially without a support network or language for talking openly about what we all know deep down that we are seeing, so i understand why most u.s. citizens prefer the comforts of delusion to the difficult work of gaining self awareness. have you ever noticed how academic scientists would rather discard or discredit information they cannot process, would rather ignore data than revise their systems? this too is a construct; we can practice using our intuition and common sense to evaluate what we see and hear. no system is immutable, no matter how old.

most of what we see and hear has been carefully cultivated for mass consumption, we can debate the whys of this, but i think if i were to take a poll i could reach some consensus on this point. at this point i can't imagine meeting even a dedicated jersey shore fan who did not acknowledge at least some degree of scripting or creative editing in the show. so if we know this, why can we not just take a step back and wonder? i think even a very basic level of questioning would be beneficial. watching a reality show i'll often think hm i wonder why she decided to respond with meanness to that situation because it really worked against her in the end, and i don't know exactly how to make that thought more productive, but i think even having it is a step. and i know that people watching the tv must have these thoughts buried in their intuitive selves, but watching the tube puts us in a trance-like state where we're inclined to just accept rather than to engage actively with what we are seeing. we do not have to accept that negativity is the default state for human interaction! it's not cool to be an asshole, being mean doesn't accomplish anything, taunting is not cool, violence is not cool, rape is not cool yet all these things are glorified in movies whether boldly or implicitly. think about the movies you've watched with rape scenes, and try to imagine a way that someone in the audience could be getting off from it. i can usually imagine that, rape scenes often involve a lot of breast heaving and clothes being ripped off one piece at a time, and i have to ask myself why? why does hollywood see fit to evoke our sexual desires when depicting rape, see fit to do so in so subliminal a fashion and so often?   if you start to filter what you're seeing basically as opposite, you might notice trends like this. why IS it that so much pop music centers around the abuse of alcohol, when we can point to countless destructive effects of the drug?

even small thoughts, small disruptions, small observations can reveal a beam of truth and i think we have a responsibility to question