Hate Mail and Beauty

A reader in Portland, Oregon, had this to say on Tuesday:

You’re a selfish, slutty cunt. Put your focus on your children, where it belongs, not your deviant desires. All of you poly player people are idiots. You want the cake and the frosting, without any concern for how your actions might affect others. By the way, your saggy, baggy breasts are ugly, not sexy. You’re almost forty; it’s pathetic that you’re still behaving like a fifteen year old girl. Listen up, stupid bitch, isn’t it time to finally grow the fuck up?!

When I first read it, it felt like a hard, sharp slap…and then, once I let my head clear and my cheeks cool, I became a little sorry for anyone who feels so angry at me (a person they’ve presumably never met) that this sort of vitriol comes out.

However, I thought it could be educational to address each of the points brought up, one at a time.

1)  Re:  selfish, slutty cunt.

Wow.  Two accusations and a derogatory.

Selfish?  Possibly, although you only see what I write about here, so you have no idea what I do with the rest of my time.  I could point out that I volunteer extensively at school and with outside organizations and I have dedicated my working life to helping people achieve their own life goals, but I doubt you’d allow mere facts to disturb the picture you have of me in your head.  Do I engage in a bit of navel-gazing here?  Oh, hell yes.  This is a fucking blog, dear.  This is not my memoir…this is a narrowly focused discussion of my adventures with BDSM and polyamory.

Slutty?  Definitely.  I don’t see that this is the insult you think it is, though.  I enjoy sex and I enjoy sharing it with other people, and the joy we feel together is something that cannot be expressed, no matter how hard one tries.  I’ve written poetry and prose and I’ve read what others have written, and it all falls short, but we’ll keep trying, keep attempting to express the bliss that is deep connection with another human being.  Once you’ve felt it, it’s hard not to want to share it, write it, scream it out from the rooftops.

Cunt?  Hmmm….I know this one was intended to really hurt, but I gotta say – cunts are beautiful, warm, soft, loving, strong, sexy things, so I’m hard-pressed to take it as anything but praise.  In fact, I’m kinda tempted to make myself a tank top that says “Cunt” just to be associated with something so magnificent.

2)  Re:  my focus.

I’ve had to trust from the beginning that mature adults will understand that I’m sharing just a part of my life, not all of it.  I have a full, rich life, and I happen to write about just one little piece of it.  See above re: Selfish.

3)  Re:  being an idiot and eating cake

Wow, clearly you’re not bitter or anything…It makes me wonder, though, who was the jerk who screwed you over so terribly that you developed enough hate to spread over millions of people you’ve never met?  I kinda want to grab him or her by the neck and “educate” the hell out of them.

If you read my blog, you’ll see that a lot of it is concerned with exactly the question of cake and frosting – the personal desires of one held up against the happiness and well-being of others.  It is a constant struggle, forefront in my mind, and something that I fuck up on a regular basis.  In fact, you might have noticed that I write about my mistakes more often than I do about my successes, because I believe that there is more to be learned by doing something wrong, and I hope to pass on a little experience in the hopes that everyone doesn’t have to make the same mistakes over and over.

4)   Re:  Ugly ageism

Really?  Saggy, ugly breasts?  My dear, these breasts are SPECTACULAR.  They fed two children and have offered up pleasure to me and my lovers time and time again.  I admit that they’re bigger than I would have chosen for myself, and get in the middle of conversations too often when I’d really rather prefer a little eye contact, but I still love them.

Btw, you might prefer a blog featuring someone who’s had enhancement surgery.  Over time, silicone breasts really stand up nicely, despite the ravages of gravity.  In fact, there are a number of websites where I go to admire such breasts on a regular basis.  Email me and I can shoot out a smattering of possibilities to you.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret – believe it or not, some folks enjoy the charms of un-enhanced breasts, too.

Now, my own vanities aside, your rant comes dangerously close to maligning some of my favorite people.  Catherine is 53, Kyle is in his 40s.  They have beautiful, strong, loving bodies.  The idea that women should hide behind a curtain once they reach a certain age is the worst kind of self-abuse.  Women need to celebrate each other and recognize that our current cultural sensibilities have been carefully crafted by marketing machines whose only goal is to create endlessly needy consumers.

I refuse to disappear because I no longer look like a child.  I’m sexy, and the women around me are sexy, and I’ll let you in on another secret:  the older I’ve gotten, the more I realize how damn attractive everyone is.  It’s almost as if aging has snapped me out of my artificial constraints and allowed me to see the world with new eyes.  Every day there are new things to admire about the world, and I revel in the beauty around me.

I am very sad for you that it’s a vision you don’t share. I am delighted to live among so many beautiful creatures of all shapes and sizes, ages and hues.  I’m guessing that you are surrounded by ugliness, and that must be a terrible hell.

5)  Re:  Growing up

I did grow up.  I studied, I got the honors roll, the Phi Beta Kappa, the accolades.  I learned instruments and languages and I reluctantly gave up art and theater in favor of more serious subjects so I could prove my worth.  I married, I got a good job and I had the 2 kids and built the white picket fence and pureed the organic carrots and played the right games and got them into the right schools and, along the way, I lost most of myself in order to fit into the spot that had been left for me by society.  I was a sad, lonely, miserable mother to my kids and wife to my husband.  I was teaching my kids that a woman’s place is to destroy herself in service of a society that won’t even see her once she hits 40 (see point #4.)

It’s damn hard to reinvent a life in the middle, and most people just give up.  I might eventually give up, too, but right now I’m working as hard as I can to try to fit everything I want in with everything that is being asked of me.

Is that eating the cake and the frosting, too?  HELL NO, dear.  I’m fucking baking the cake, mixing the damn frosting, decorating the shit out of it, delivering it to class, serving it up with a big smile to everyone else first and then hoping that, when the day’s finally done, there might be a little piece left for me.

For years, I went hungry, like my mother, and her mother before her.  They were sad and lonely role models, and I followed in their footsteps too well.

Now, I plan to eat.  I’m gonna take great big bites and chew slowly with a big ol’, shit-eating grin on my face, and I don’t care who approves.  Cuz, damn, after all these years,

this cake tastes GOOD.