Real weather still cold, emotional weather warming

[flexagon]

A week of improving emotional weather, led by two or three major good things:

• My Zillian stock sale went through, enabling a small and pre-planned shopping spree. In particular, I was waiting for this before purchasing a new sewing machine (a refurbished Janome Sewist 740dc) and DDR pads. Both of these should provide many hours (hopefully years) of use. I also ordered a new battery for my laptop, which is from late 2022 and which I don't feel like replacing yet.


• Spent an evening helping apfelsingail move into her new apartment, and the squirrel helped too. So satisfying on multiple levels! We got all the moving company's boxes unpacked.


• Circus training went well, overall. I've been confused at some of it going well and some of it going badly, but I had a really good talk with Tiny Person in which we figured out the pattern. What's happening isn't great -- I'm holding tension, and it's messing up my movements, so that anything requiring speed and momentum is a struggle while the things I can creep into slowly are going just fine. But it's good to have figured it out. I'm working on more flowing, swinging, circular motions and trying to let the tension go. In the meantime, on the slow side of things, I did my best-ever backbend press into forearm stand. So there was that.

There's been some nice crossword puzzle progress. I met with my collaborator Z and finalized clues for a puzzle (thus finalizing it entirely) and we sent that in to the NYT, and at the same time we're most of the way to a final next grid, so we're going to have another soon. In the meantime, one that I was working on by myself suddenly filled really nicely. I'm still going to iterate on it, but now I'm absolutely certain it's worth submitting once it's done. Feels good to be generating puzzles again after a lull.

I went to Anime Con for a while (again, with squirrel) and it was a lot more sexualized than the science fiction cons tend to be. So many cartoon boobs. SO MANY. We had a good talk about how many women there seem surprisingly okay with the asymmetrical hypersexualized stuff, and it led me to think back about the arc of my own experience with The Male Gaze. There's a while when being able to pull that gaze around is new and fun and exciting. Then a while where one realizes that attracting people that way too much, too quickly, can kind of warp how they relate to the rest of you. Then a decade or two in the workforce, often trying quite hard to keep sexuality out of the picture while learning more than you wanted to about patriarchy, sexism and microaggressions. All in all... sure, I saw a lot of young women and enbies at Anime Con. But the 50-year-olds I saw there were almost entirely men.

The house is still leaking. I talked the bug into removing a square of drywall from our unit's wall in order to better see what's going on in the ledge technically outside our unit, and that paid off in that we were able to see some water running down a board. But at some point we'll have to fix a big hole in our wall.

Artemis II news is giving me life, in the context of the rest of the news. Lunar flyby tomorrow, bring it!

And hmm, it turns out that Walkabout Mini Golf on the VR headset is more fun than I would have expected? I have introduced the bug to this too.

Comments

[randysmith]

Thank you for the personal Male Gaze arc summary. It didn't have individual pieces I wasn't familiar with, but putting it together like that is really useful for understanding some of the dynamics of societal het sexuality. Yuck, but still interesting.

[flexagon]

No problem. I feel like I could have done a better job... in particular, that (of course) I was telling my story, even where I generalized. And how there was a particularly chilling step, that happened late for me, where I realized that sexual attraction sometimes makes men get mean instead of nice. Call it the Pamela Anderson effect. :-( Most of what I personally experienced was more on the positive but unhelpful side, more like "insistent daydreaming", e.g. "you look like a girl who likes to party" when I was 20 or so.

Finally, that every perception has just layered on to the other ones. Like, at 48 I still find it fun to purposely play with the Male Gaze on occasion, but now I prefer it to be low-stakes: so mostly with existing partners, known friends or definitely-gonna-stay-strangers. Probably that itself is some of the evolution -- realizing that while it's all low-stakes most of the time, sometimes the stakes get crazy high, and so maybe one ought to be careful. Like with any power tool.

The young'uns who are still at the "whee!" stage looked like they were having lots of fun this weekend, and I hope they were.

[randysmith]

WRT men getting mean instead of nice in response to sexual attraction: I read a blog post by Ta Nehisi Coates a while back talking about early twentieth century masculinity. His framing was that it didn't allow for any vulnerability, which is a problem in the context of sexual attraction, because, of course, that's a vulnerability. The reaction he was tracing out in the literature was a demeaning and objectification of women in response to that not-supposed-to-be-there vulnerability to try and remove it by controlling the women. I wonder if a similar pattern is part of the mean-rather-than-nice reaction.