Confessions of a Recovering D-Bag

8388756753_96e97955f4_zTeenage me, probably around 1992, wrote and publicized the following Valentine’s Day poem, and I will bear that shame for all my days:

Roses are red, violets are blue.
Women are evil, and nice guys get screwed.
I wrote you this poem because I wanted to say
I’m not bitter at all on this Valentine’s Day.

It goes on for several more whiny quatrains, but I think you get the idea. I share this now not in service of the belief that “nice guys get screwed,” but in atonement for ever actually thinking that way. I have been out of the dating pool for a few years now, and it has given me the time and perspective I needed to see just what a d-bag I used to be. If I can use this realization to help even just one person live a more fulfilling life, it will be worth it.

I used to fall victim to the notion that there ought to be a standardized set of procedures for dating. The world of the typical American man has changed from what we imagine was a time when men could meet certain standards and expectations in order to qualify for a mate. Most of these standards involved income or social status, with looks thrown in as (at best) a secondary concern. Factors like charm, personality, and compatibility were near the bottom of the list in this mostly-imagined previous era of courtship. Women, as the idea seems to go, picked a suitor from a panel of applicants based on these attributes. The upshot of this is that men had a uniform set of goals and attributes for which they should strive in order to “succeed” at finding a bride (or hookup, or whatever.)

Very, very few of us have debutante balls like in Downton Abbey, where a young woman can announce her availability to the world. Also, most of this imagined past of following dating instructions set forth in a cultural manual is just that: imagined. Life has always been complicated, I believe, and while the specific norms of relations between the genders (all of them) is in flux, they have always been complicated too.

I could write an entire book or more on everything that I have gotten wrong over the course of my life, but (a) I have stuff to do, and (b) it is an ongoing process of realization. I am not saying this in search of forgiveness, or even just to get a cookie. Rather, I have discovered a wondrous world in which people can coexist and interact without undue concern over gender or identity roles, where a relationship with a woman that culminates in friendship rather than sex is not somehow a failure, where a guy can meet a woman and develop a friendship without feeling pressure to at least try to have sex with her, and where one’s ability to share fully in others’ lives potentially extends to everyone, not just their own gender.

It can be a beautiful place, and I want to share it with others who think the way I once thought.

Whether others want to join in this world is up to them, but this world exists, and it is all around us.

Photo credit: emmstitch [CC BY 2.0], on Flickr.

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Getting right to the point with social media (or, It all comes down to smut in the end)

'Pinterest User Pie Chart' [Fair use], via G4I don’t get Pinterest. I think I have made that pretty abudantly clear in recent months. I have a few “boards,” to which I will “pin” things from time to time (my board entitled “Food porn“) is far more popular than it probably deserves to be, considering the level of inattention give to it. I never, however, browse through other people’s pins the way I might scroll through my Facebook news feed or my Tumblr dashboard. It’s just not my thing.

Don’t get me wrong; I think Pinterest is a brilliant idea, and it has been wildly successful. It just doesn’t necessarily appeal to my particular sensibilities. Maybe it’s because I’m a dude, although I doubt it is as sociologically significant as that (for me, anyway.) Whether or not by design, Pinterest primarily appeals to women, possibly a first for the internet. Of course, this being the world in which we live, someone has to ask how to make a service like Pinterest more appealing to the sausage-bearing crowd. And because it is the internet, it eventually comes back to the question of how many X’s we can post. Perhaps not surprisingly, these two questions overlap.

To review the state of what I will artfully call Smut in Social Media:

  • Facebook won’t allow anything over an “R” rating.
  • Twitter might let you get away with a little “X” now and then.
  • LinkedIn has no idea what you are talking about right now.
  • Tumblr saw your three X’s and raised them to a level of perversity heretofore unimagined. Seriously, you are never more than 2-3 mouse clicks away from an animated GIF of activities that Porn Valley might not even know exist.

(Please note that I use the word “smut” in a purely descriptive sense.) Continue reading

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