Break It Down

I knew both Tom and Navarre online and by phone. I never met either of them in the flesh.

I was molested from age eleven to age thirteen and a half and told it was my fault because I was too beautiful to resist. I was treated as a sex OBJECT and didn't really understand what that meant until I had these long distance relationships where they never met me in the flesh and to this day I don't really know how to express what that all means.

I was only a body to use to the person accusing me of being too beautiful to resist. My feelings, my thoughts, the entire rest of the landscape of my life was all utterly irrelevant to them and I didn't understand what that cost me, what that stripped away from me, until one day it was being restored and I had no words for what I was experiencing and still don't.

That is somehow bound up in me thinking deeply for many years about sexual ethics and all the different pieces of an intimate relationship and why society and individuals make the distinctions they make.

For many people, a lot of things go together and go without saying. They have a lot of baked in assumptions that can go weird places when certain distinctions aren't made.

I had the opportunity to break it down and to conclude that in some sense no one really cares if you get sexually intimate with a particular person. They care about a zillion other things that typically get involved in that act which hurt other people in some way.

Money

Relationships in the flesh involve expenses. Dating typically involves buying a meal and entertainment. 

My relationships to these men involved expenses, such as long distance phone calls, but not to the same degree and not in the same way. 

I had a wonderful English teacher in tenth or possibly eleventh grade. I don't recall her name but she's relatively easy to identify because I named her my STAR teacher when I became STAR student by having the highest SAT score of my graduating class and managing to also be in the top ten percent GPA in spite of my undiagnosed health problems and being suicidal.

She assigned us a journal writing exercise and we could write about anything and it was private, between you and her.

She's most likely gay though she couldn't tell her students that. She kept her hair short, wore no makeup and I once met her "roommate" that she had nominally because housing is expensive but most likely that was her common law wife.

So she was something of an implicit example that being some man's chattel property was not the only option for a woman in life.

I went on a handful of dates that year and found them remarkably offensive because some guy would buy pizza for us to eat together and then feel entitled to paw me when I hadn't agreed to that. So I wrote about that experience and what I thought and felt about the whole thing as part of my journal, which was an unusually safe space for thinking about things that I valued a great deal.

This was the origin of my no dating policy that I've spent decades trying and failing to explain to people because it doesn't really mean I wouldn't have dinner with a man. It means I'm not going to let you buy me dinner and assume that purchases you sexual access because I think that becomes foundational for the pattern of the relationship and leads to far too many women marrying well as a polite form of prostitution.

I don't put out for money -- and if I did, I'm certain I would charge cash upfront, not play these twisted games where it's about money but we're pretending it's not.

I also don't use my sexuality to intentionally extract money from men as a kind of bait and switch tactic. I learned in my teens some women do that and I found it appalling.

I had a friend whose father was half Cherokee and her being part Native is likely why she didn't fit in socially at school and likely contributed to her dropping out. She was a little older than me though we had been in the same grade, so when I was seventeen she was already eighteen and legal drinking age for that time and place.

One day, she told me how she got free drinks by flirting with men at bars with no intent to go home with them. I was appalled because I understood she was committing a form of con artistry or fraud and I would never do that.

She was implying she would MIGHT sleep with them if they played their cards right knowing full well that absolutely was not true.

I also realized she was becoming an alcoholic and I couldn't stop it. As much as I wished I could help her, all I could do was protect myself from being dragged down with her and we kind of politely drifted apart after that because I just didn't want to be part of where her life was going and also didn't want drama from her. It was a diplomatic and unstated means to cut her out of my life.

I'm pretty sure the practice of Dutch Treat -- each person paying their own way -- is becoming more common in the US as women establish careers etc. because the practice of men paying for dates is deeply rooted in and entertwined with a mountain of social details that help make women chattel property and keep them chattel property.

I'm also pretty sure that it's no coincidence that this practice of paying your own way is so labeled and is associated with the Dutch culture which has a better track record than average on women's rights.

Tom was legally separated but still living with his wife. Navarre was sleeping at his office more than at home and contemplating divorce.

There were expenses involved in being intimate with me but they were a pittance compared to what is typical of seeing someone in the flesh and I think the financial stuff is part of what people object to with affairs. They weren't secretly bleeding their family of money to get to know me.

Disease and Pregnancy 

I never knew these men in the flesh. I couldn't make them sick because our intimate relationships didn't expose either of us to the other's germs and there was no risk of pregnancy.

It's made me take a jaundiced eye to some of the legal and social garbage going twisted places with regards to human sexuality and the Internet. I'm appalled that, for example, a teenaged girl sending a nude selfie to her boyfriend can be charged with making and distributing child porn.

Letting a man see your body via photos should be safer than getting naked with him in the flesh, not a means to ruin the life of an adolescence with a budding sexuality looking for safe ways to explore their OWN sexuality.

But, hey, if the asshole FORWARDS your nudes to the entire school because you dumped him, fry his ass with every charge you can legally hang on him. The definition of rape hinges on the detail of CONSENT and her sending you those photos was intended as a private act and you knew that.

Online sexual intimacy exists in an odd gray zone where some of the usual consequences of such acts are simply not applicable and I wish planet Earth would get over its hangups and recognize that fact explicitly instead of "grandfathering in" every bit of shame and judgement and objection to SEX we've ever had while failing to realize that our forebears did that largely to control disease and make sure kids had TWO parents to raise and provide for them and not because there is anything inherently evil in FEELING good for a little while and getting your rocks off.

Social Stuff 

I don't know what to call this and it needs a better title, but one of the big things about most sexual relationships is the impact it has on the social fabric.

People don't want you secretly sleeping with someone at work because that opens doors for work decisions to be corrupted by this personal relationship. Someone can get pressured to bend the rules to keep this dirty secret, for example.

If you are sexually intimate with someone, that's typically rather hard to hide and people infer impacts on a distribution of power and important decisions of various kinds because of the relationship. They SEE you together in public, know you are married or dating or whatever. 

They don't need to know what actually goes on in BED to know this impacts their life and how to interact with people on things like asking for x favor.

This also works different in different contexts. Online relationships can exist without anyone else knowing about it at all and it can mean that it's not going to have the same impact on the flow of power and decisions, though it can also mean there's worse dirty stuff going on where for example someone is being milked for money by a con artist.

My relationships trended towards the first outcome because see above: they mostly did not involve money.

No boyfriend ever sent me money. At worst, they initiated the phone calls so they covered the long distance bill instead of me.

But I'm quite clear that simply being SEEN together in a situation that even IMPLIES a sexual relationship is significant in the eyes of other people because it implies that power dynamics are changing and people with more money and power get subjected to high levels of scrutiny over whom they are attaching themselves to for that reason.

It's not mere lurid interest. It's intelligence gathering by people whose lives can be impacted by the fact that this relationship exists at all.

There's likely more to this but I've run out of things to say for the moment. Hitting publish.