This is not what you may think it is

Some people like shitting all over the rules and all over other people and pretending they can't help it for some bullshit reason. That's not me.

I'm interested in figuring out why people do things the way they are currently done in the global heteronormative culture that is also trying to figure out women's lib, why that doesn't work well and what new rules might improve on things.

It's completely different from pissing on the current status quo merely because pissing on people is someone's idea of fun.

Growing up, I was not part of high society and only figured out in my forties how upper class my mother's expectations were.

I'm not someone who wants to indulge all her "privileges" without earning them, without respecting any of the rules that exist and without taking responsibility for the consequences of her actions.

Historically, MEN got to have a WIFE and a mistress IF they adequately provided for both so men had some hope of remaining functional in the event they married someone who looked good on their arm at high society events but didn't really want to cook, clean or put out.

And there were rules about it and social distinctions were made, such as an acknowledged bastard versus an unacknowledged bastard. An acknowledged bastard might eventually establish good social standing and even inherit his father's title if they ran out of legitimate heirs.

It was tolerated in part because power was passed along family lines and it worked in part because being RAISED by people in power was educational in a way no school can ever be. It worked in part because biology:

A man who can afford to support two households can produce children who know who both their parents are and who are raised with a decent standard of living. A woman with two lovers prior to modern paternity tests might have no idea which children each man fathered.

They protected noble women in war time because if all the men died, the noble women had the education the male peasants lacked. When things got ugly enough, noble women were your desperate back up plan leadership.

Sometimes people born into wealth feel entitled to have money and pursue debauchery as "wealthy privilege" while earning nothing, respecting nothing etc. Historically people like that routinely got assassinated.

People born into wealth who aim to remain kept in the style to which they are accustomed while feeling no obligation to in any way merit it are a net negative for everyone. When society tolerates people like that it eventually collapses because there's no upper limit to how many resources one person can piss away if everyone agrees that's fine because they were born to the right family.

The people in charge in Syria were recently thrown out because their greed and self indulgence was impoverishing the entire country and the country as a whole decided they had enough.

The point at which "born wealthy and has PRIVILEGES because of it" comes to mean "they are entitled to utterly ruin COUNTLESS lives and murder people at will" is the point at which ordinary people have zero reason to respect the system and let it live on.

Great wealth is always rooted in great numbers of OTHER people contributing something to your life. When leaders stop adding ANY value whatsoever and merely bleed the people for their benefit, the people eventually say "enough."

As happened in Syria not too long ago.

I know people read my writing and want to imagine I am advocating for a "free love" society or something like that. I'm really not.

I was molested by both my father and my brother. I really wanted to be a good woman and marry for love and be HAPPILY monogamous and that's not how my life went.

Instead I married a man who had randomly volunteered to me at age eighteen the promise that he was willing to meet my needs. All I had to do was ask.

And it was a LIE.

For seventeen years, anytime I asked, he not only turned me down, he added insult to injury and told me it was somehow my fault because I had terrible timing or didn't know how to ask. Until one night I called bullshit on the whole thing and informed him he was capable of meeting my needs, he just didn't want to.

Up until that point, he and I BOTH enthusiastically blamed me for ANY problems in the bedroom. I no longer buy it when a man wants to tell me he's perfect and everything wrong with the relationship or the sexual piece of things is somehow my fault.

If he's so perfect, what's the appeal of getting with someone who is such a shit show? Why stay if it's entirely my fault?

I stayed long enough to figure out what was his shit, what was my shit and what was some magical alchemical "our shit" where two relatively harmless ingredients on their own add up to something terrible when they come together.

I'm more sexually conservative than most openly conservative people, like Catholics. I never wanted to be unfaithful to my husband or get divorced etc.

I'm so conservative I'm radical.

I want prostitution decriminalized to REDUCE the incidence of prostitution and make it a job a woman can LEAVE.

You see more prostitution during uptight Victorian periods when good girls don't. You see less during free love hippie eras when there's no expectation of virginity on the wedding night.

Hypocritical Catholic assholes and similar are the most likely people to go to prostitutes. Dolores French, author of Working: My life as a prostitute, said the further north she went in Europe, the more uptight people were and the more weird shit they wanted in bed.

Some Italian guy was completely vanilla and enjoyed hearing her stories and said "cool" about her wild and wacky stories but he wasn't paying extra for weird shit. 

The fetishization of female virginity and virtue means women cannot talk about or even THINK about career vs marriage in financial terms because we are supposed to marry for love not money and then there's an awful lot of cultural bullshit where we can't insist women need retirement checks or whatever.

Refusing to think of homemaking like it's a job means women get shafted out of decent resumes, adequate retirement income and on and on and if a woman bitches about it, she's a gold digger.

I've been CELIBATE for medical reasons for roughly two decades. 

Not because I don't like sex. 

Not because I don't like men or can't attract a man. 

Not out of some abstract sense of morality or virtue.

Not because of unresolved baggage from my childhood.

It's a pragmatic choice because germs don't care what religion you are or about weirdo human concepts of virtue and morality largely rooted in outdated concepts from primitive people in the past more ignorant than we are about WHY things go wrong and how to fix them when they do.

I married the second guy I had consenting intercourse with. For a woman my age, I'm surprisingly low mileage and a lot of what I know comes from long distance "virtual" relationships, reading and talking with people, not from sleeping around in the flesh.

I imagine I will likely remain alone for the rest of my life because this kind of honesty and openness doesn't pair well with hiding the dirt under the rug and most people have dirt they expect me to hide. If I get involved with someone in the flesh, there's no clear bright line between MY sex life and theirs, no means to wear all my secrets on my sleeve while keeping theirs.

I don't write to advocate for open relationships or a life of debauchery. I write really in hopes of helping others figure out what I never did:

1. How a couple can find their way to a happily monogamous relationship which edicts about virginity and such fail to foster.

2. How to establish a world where women can have successful female pattern careers AND children without sacrificing the welfare of the children to the current pattern of having women pursue "serious careers" designed with a MAN in mind who is assumed to have a devoted wife at home doing the women's work.

I can tell you all the ways things go wrong and maybe you can learn from my mistakes and make fewer, smaller mistakes yourself.

If you can't be a good example, you can be a terrible warning.

I am not trying to be a role model that you should follow in the footsteps of. I'm trying to tell you what I think works or doesn't work and WHY and firsthand personal experience is part of that source of information and opinion.

I think I got some things right and some things wrong and I don't sweep my mistakes under the rug because the truth is the only antidote to insanity and I'm fed up with the insanity of the world and the lies we all collectively tell to try to survive the insanity individually when it's the lies themselves that keep the insanity alive.