You know, as someone with bipolar disorder, it suddenly occurs to me that I intensely dislike the use of “manic” in this trope. Mania, and its ugly step-sibling depression, are never dreamy.
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I feel like people think mania is Robin Williams going sixty jokes a minute or, yes, Natalie Portman relentlessly smiling and showing you how awesome life is when in fact it’s stuff like banging pots and pans together in the kitchen at 6am singing o-lay-o-ay at the top of one’s lungs and then taking an early morning jog in the neighborhood park wearing only running shoes.
Not the sort of thing that makes for a stable relationship.
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Boy howdy, it most certainly does not. It does, however, make my score much, much lower on that “purity” test (I finally took it) due to time period(s) before/when I was properly medicated and/or off meds.
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Completely agree. Taking it I felt like the Beave was sitting next to me snickering at all the naughty words.[quote=“M_M, post:62, topic:81709”]
It’s not that bad. I’ve had a really dull life, scored 21.4% and thought of a good few questions they were missing.
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When will they please update so I can take my score a little lower?
As a librarian, people, please, stop this. If you simply must then… actually no, just stop.
The sexual identity binary of sexy librarian/old lady shoosher pushed on us actually has a third component, the emasculated male. I’m not a little guy, and often wear a full beard, but I could not count how many times I’ve helped someone and received a “thanks, ma’am” in return.
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Oh, absolutely! The concept of gendered pricing structures is something I’ve seen discussed a lot. There’s a bit of a movement to not attend any event with such a structure. The attempts to justify them … yeah, that’s not really making it any better.
Both I and the partner with which I usually attend events are both non-binary. We’re lucky – not just that we haven’t run into that ourselves, but we’ve also got other events and venues if we do find one that does this. I can’t recall either of us getting a bad reaction for not being cis, although I’ll admit that we’re always a bit cautious when going to a new event.
This actually ties into another post …
I’ve run into all of this, and some of the same gender norms that @popobawa4u mention, in the SF/F convention scene. The two scenes are amazingly similar, and not just because of the population overlap. Many in the kink community call themselves “sex geeks,” with quite a lot of justification.
I understand very well the feeling of “My People!” Especially when you go around feeling restricted most of the time simply because most people don’t bother to try to understand your point of view. (Quick: am I talking about SFF geeks or kinksters here? Answer: either group applies.) That aside, I try to not use ‘vanilla’ or mundane in a derogatory way, although it can be useful to have a term that means “people that aren’t part of our group.” (Just please include, if only in meaning, “… and that doesn’t mean they’re lesser in some way.”
I have seen groups in both the kink community and the SFF community fall apart when some respected leader raped someone. In each community, the discussions about what happened followed more or less the same pattern, including the part where many members simply shrug and say “Well, we don’t know everything and $victim was probably drunk” or similar excuse. I think in many ways, both groups were afraid of losing their respective place to go. (Sure, once in a while someone gets taken as a sacrifice, but this is a pretty good island, isn’t it?)
In the end, in either community, it seems that if you find a good event that fits your needs, it can be a good experience. Just don’t let that good cloud your judgement – about like any relationship, really.
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No, not at all. I love my glass dildos! They’re comfortable, feel great, and yes, pretty. (They’re also really easy to sterilize in the dishwasher, just be aware of who is emptying the dishwasher. We don’t have kids, and they really aren’t buying that story about the new juicer.)
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Cue my standard rant of irritation at the use of “crazy” to mean “zany”.
Manic isn’t cute.
I do kinda miss it, though; it beats the alternative.
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Oh dear god, yes and yes. The things I have seen as a librarian … no need to watch porn, I’ll just go to work.
And more yes. As with any so-called “pink collar” profession, the men are emasculated. Librarianship hovers around 80-85% female, according to the Statistical Abstract (just for you @critter, had to cite my sources, you know).
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I must admit I do take some pleasure when the willly flashers think they’re going to get a young aide and then I come around the corner.
Not enough to make it a kink, but you do what you can at work.
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No judgement here. When one happens upon a literal pile of shit in the stacks – more than once – it changes one’s worldview.
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For a few years now I’ve been dealing with (usually) low-level depression. Some of it could be seasonal, as it’s worse at some times of the year than others, but it never seems to go away completely for very long. I compare it to my arthritis – most of the time it’s just there in the background and I don’t really notice it unless I stop and think about it: “Oh yeah, that dark cloud is still there in the back of my mind, isn’t it?”)
I get my medical care, including metal health, through the VA system. The VA isn’t exactly what you’d call a hotbed of progressive thought, although I’ve generally been fairly lucky, even if I remain somewhat guarded until I know the care provider. So when I started seeing a therapist there, I was reluctant to just open up about my whole life, even while I knew I needed to do so. It came down to the fact that I needed to be able to talk with her, but I know I’m strong enough to reject someone who’s judgmental, even if they’re a professional. Now I didn’t do a huge data dump, some aspects of my life came out slower than others, although some of it came up right away, just to get it over. If the doctor is going to have a problem with poly and pansexual, I need to know that sooner, rather than later. Turns out I didn’t have to worry, although honestly there are times I’ve realized I’ve been as much of an education for her as she’s been a therapist for me – not a bad trade, really.
One of the things that came out a bit later is my involvement in the kink scene. She asked some questions about this, of course, at least a few obviously trying to find my mental state during our activities. What it came down to is that it’s something that I look forward to doing, something that seriously improves my mental state, and one of the times that the little dark cloud is really no where to be seen. In other words: “Yeah, keep doing that.”
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When I left my first position to raise child #1 I joked I was really looking forward to just dealing with feces from my own family.
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You’ve found a winner, then, or at least I hope so. I can’t tell you the number of therapists I’ve been through and how difficult it is EVERY TIME to try to and fill them in on my history. It’s a trust dance, always on the knife’s edge of “is this my illness” or “is this me?” It has to be both, or none at all, because I’m both. To harken back to @actionabe 's post in this thread, which I can’t stop thinking about and have drafted multiple replies, subsequently deleted (I’ll admit, his/her intellect intimidates me – very articulate stuff), but anyway:
Why are we so hostile to consent? What did my consent mean under such circumstances? Was I not me when I said yes?
I don’t know. But I sincerely like investigating – oh, yes, I looked up articles because I’m a librarian and that’s what I do – this issue.
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I have related issues with medics (both physicians and psychs) thanks to my ex-IVDU status.
As soon as they hear of my history, the prescription pad disappears and all they want to talk about is addiction. And to make it worse, they usually jump direct to 12-step quackery, which instantly destroys my trust in their medical competence (I’m also an ex-psychopharmacologist who specialised in researching addictive/recreational drug use; I’m usually more familiar with the research in the field than they are).
It’s getting to the point where it just isn’t worth being honest with my doctors. Which isn’t good for a bunch of reasons.
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Edit:
Post deleted as it was waaaay off topic. Ne’mind.This is a good convo. 
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Way to go making me imagine what you might say. But, I’ll live with this:
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Also: blatantly obvious and cheerful.
It’s hardly difficult and we all know what it is. The people who have confused the issue aren’t being honest about their motivations.
I’m vanilla but kink friendly (orgasm fetishes are kind of win-wins), and even in cases where I was with somebody who had a ‘loss of control’ kink it was really easy to use our big ol’ human brains to make sure nobody was risking making sexytimes lame.
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As you and other regulars have probably noticed, I identify with SF/F geekdom more than a little bit. But one reason that I’ve never taken the plunge of attending a convention is because the issues friends of mine relate to me echo much of what drove me to turn my back on kink and indie music scenes. So I’m not at all surprised some of the same problems plagued both realms. I just wish I knew a solution.
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Indeed. But there’s always a hope for the doctor who does understand and does not judge. I hold on to that.
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Although I don’t claim to grok the tortured cognitive dissonance of sexual predators, I think most of them are completely aware of what they’re doing, even if they lack the moral courage to face it consciously. For me, what has made me hang up my hat on the kink scene (easy), vampire scene (gawdaful easy), mod scene (little harder), and indie music scene (really difficult to give up)…is all the enablers who wouldn’t stand up to the predators, and often down right circled wagons on the scum by in effect telling me and others not to upset the apple cart when I got angry at them. One reason I have too many hobbies is that I like sharing my interests socially, but keep getting irreversibly dispossessed with the moral cowardice within them.
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