With all the talk last month about Sucker Punch, and negative and offensive portrayals of sex workers in general, I wanted to write an ode to a different action movie from 15 years ago.  I realize I've been doing less "weighty" blogging in the last couple of months, but this post isn't as shallow as it might sound.  How sex workers are represented in both the press and popular fiction is a subject that interests me, as these are the representations that influence the public - for better or worse.

Action and horror movies do tend to have a greater representation of sex workers as non-victim characters, but none of them have really resonated with me.  For example: I remember how excited I was when I read that George Romero's Land of the Dead would have a zombie-killing hooker as a main character.  But, of course, it is revealed that she was only a sex worker because the dictator of her post-apocalyptic society forced her to take that job, and she actually wanted to be in the militia protecting the city.  Thus, the character is redeemed to the audience for her whore-y sins, since they were not her choice.

I recently tweeted about how I'm not aware of a mainstream movie with a more positive and non-sensationalistic portral of a sex worker as the 1996 action hit Independence Day, and I wanted to expand on that.  Its director, Rolland Emmerich, is known for over-the-top absurdist visual spectacles of destruction with overbearing musical scores, such as in The Day After Tomorrow or 2012.  Yet, in Independence Day, he created the most normal sex worker character I've ever seen in a Hollywood film: Jasmine, played by Vivica A Fox.

Jasmine is a stripper who lives with her boyfriend Steve, a pilot in the US Marines who dreams of working for NASA.  She has a young son, and they live in a house in the suburbs of Los Angeles.  Her job as a stripper is treated as pretty much like any other job, and there's no dramatic scene where she's gang-raped and then made fun of, and her story is not one of being rescued from her work by a man.  She expresses zero desire to "escape" the sex industry, nor does her partner ever ask that of her.

Jasmine's job doesn't even really come into the plot, aside from a couple of of key moments: Steve's friend making a disparaging comment about the respectability of marrying a stripper, and Jasmine telling the First Lady (whose life she tries to save) that she's an exotic dancer, not a ballet dancer.  (These scenes can be found at 4:29 and 11:05, respectively, in my clip video posted below.)  The fact that this is not a "sex worker movie" makes it all the more cheer-worthy to me.  It's an action movie with a heroic character who just happens to also be a stripper.  It's very normalizing, despite being set in a movie about an alien invasion, filled to the brim with explosions and aerial fight sequences.  Independence Day was one of the highest-grossing films of all time when it came out, so it's not some art house flick with progressive themes that no one would ever see.

I went through and clipped all the Jasmine scenes from the movie, boiling it down to an 18-minute look at her and her relationship with Steve, the main hero of the film, played by Will Smith.  (I think it's fair to say that this is the primary romantic relationship of the movie.  The audience is meant to be rooting for them.)

Click the screenshot or click here to view or download my re-edit in Quicktime (.mov) format, which is 25 mb.  (I recommend watching the entirety of Independence Day on a regular basis anyhow.)

What this movie tells the audience about Jasmine and her life:

* Sex workers can be loving parents.
* Sex workers can live in normal houses in normal neighborhoods.
* Sex workers can have loving relationships with a partner who is not a pimp, sleazebag/loser, or a customer trying to rescue them.  (I think this one is especially awesome and important to note.)
* Sex workers' partners can catch flak about their jobs.  There is stigma to loving a sex worker, but if you're a good person, you won't let that stop you.
* Sex workers can care about each other.
* Sex workers can outrun explosions.
* Sex workers can be tough survivors.
* Sex workers can be capable leaders who take initiative.
* Sex workers can be discreet when dealing with famous people.
* Sex workers can be compassionate.
* Sex workers can be unashamed of their jobs and and tell people what they do for a living without making apologies.
* Sex workers can be on the hero team, rather than being caricatures, victims, and villains.

I was feeling angsty and sad one night over the weekend, ranting to New Boy about my issues with Old Boys.  Poor sweet New Boy, he listens so patiently, even though he's no doubt sick of hearing me bitch about this topic.

Like every other sex worker - whether they'll talk about it openly or not - some of the people I've dated/fucked have treated me un-awesomely, to one degree or another, due to my occupation.  Earlier this year, I was involved with two men who had argued that it could screw up their careers if it was found out that they were linked to the likes of me - as though I'm some kind of wanted Taliban operative who plays target practice with babies in my spare time.  I think both of these guys were just using the work excuse as a bullshit cover for not have to deal with the risk of personal embarrassment over sleeping with a girl who takes her clothes off for money.  (This sort of issue is not confined solely to sex workers; see Violet Blue blogging about her similar experiences as a sex writer here.)

I recently posted a half-serious ever-so-web-2.0 relationship/friendship definition on Twitter: "It only exists if it's on the internet and indexable."  This year, I've gotten increasingly stubborn about the idea that I am done hooking up with anyone who makes a show out of the importance keeping things off-the-grid.

Part of me wants to declare that we sex workers should all stand up for ourselves and our dignity and stage a big boycott of dating/fucking people for free who are too cowardly to associate with sex workers outside of the bedroom. But, I realize that's impractical for a lot of sex workers (such as the ones who are still in the closet themselves), and I'll probably break my boycott someday anyway, since I'm lousy at dogmatism.  But still - imagine if more sex workers did make that decision right now and stopped enabling people to reap the rewards of sleeping with sexually skilled partners, while refusing to "give back" by being our most intimate of allies.  A partner who exhibits behaviors to let you know they are ashamed of you is inflicting a form of emotional abuse, plain and simple.

I'm a fairly public person who lives on the internet and blogs and Twitter.  I am not saying I have no sense of privacy or discretion when it comes to my personal life and the wishes of my partners, but that's a whole different matter than being curtly confronted about how I am not allowed to tell people that we've slept together.

The guy I refer to as Mr Personal Assistant had his employee relate to me that "his career is just too important right now", and that "with the media all over him", he just couldn't be linked to a sex worker.  I wanted to scream at him - had he had the nerve to actually tell me this himself - "Who the hell do you think you are?  One article about you in Wired Magazine does not mean the media is 'all over you' like an insatiable swarm of tabloid paparazzi, eager to catch you in a headline-making sex scandal."  (For those of you know know who I'm talking about, you are no doubt laughing hysterically right now.)

While not a single photo ever existed of that asshole and I - whether on our iPhones or the cover of Us Weekly - it's a different story with the long-term ex.  He wasn't a legendary douchebag like the other guy, but his more subtle behaviors still chipped away at me.  We both love photography, and took plenty of photos of each other.  When we went on vacation, for example, there were many "us in front of this thing" touristy images, candid glimpses we'd catch of each other, or just photos of us making silly faces at each other when we were bored.  I knew, without needing reminding, that photos like these were not pieces of my life that I could upload to my Flickr account.

Being a sex worker has meant knowing exactly how many times I've appeared in publicly-viewable photos with a person I've dated/fucked. And that answer is often "zero".

With the long-term ex, the one with a camera ever-present around his neck, I know where all six of his photos of me are.  Two are at a conference, two are at a large party, and two are from our vacation.  All of these photos imply that I'm just some person who happened to be in the same place, perhaps a casual acquaintance, or the back of the head of a tourist who obtusely wandered into the frame of his perfect shot.  Never, ever, is there a photo of us together, and gods forbid, certainly not a photo that implies we were "involved".  If you're someone who knew us, and looked at his prolific photo-taking, I would think it actually stands out that he has oodles of photos of all of his friends, including other women he's been involved with, except for me.  That still stings.  (It reminds me of the scene in The Village where one character informs another that he knows a certain man is very attracted to her.  She asks him how he could be so certain of that.  The answer?  "Because he never touches you".)

This summer, I've been trying to up my game on my "scare 'em away plan" of sorting new potential mates.  This weekend, I disclosed to New Boy that I had been testing him a bit.  When we met, I liked him right away, so I immediately set about trying to seduce him - and, of course, see if he was going to be scared away.

On the first night we were getting to know each other, a friend took a photo of us together at a club, which I found in her Flickr stream.  Throughout the coming weeks, I kept at it.  I not only stood next to him in photos, I put my arm around him!  I exhibited body language that suggested sexual attraction!  And, New Boy passed this simple-but-vital test of mine with flying colors.  He uploaded these photos alongside all his other photos, like there was something totally unremarkable and non-shameful that his friends, family, and coworkers would be able to see us together.  This sounds trivial to civilians, but after my last year of problematic mating, it makes me feel stupidly warm and fuzzy.  No one knows if or where things will progress with New Boy, but he's certainly set the bar high for everyone who comes next, just by being sane and normal towards me, rather than acting like he's an evangelical preacher cheating on his wife and I'm an underage gay hustler.

After the end of the conversation wherein I revealed my photo test to New Boy, I was curling up in bed, and texted him my closing thoughts for the night: "Thank you for treating me the way I think I deserve to be treated."

And thanks to all the other slut-lovers and ho-lovers out there for simply acting like we are regular human beings, not plague-infected, career-ruining embarrassments.  You all rule.

[Edited to add: I worry this post comes across like I'm throwing a major pity party for myself and that my love life is completely shitty.  It's not at all, and I also recognize that I have had much, much better luck with the dating scene than many other sex workers.  It's just that this last year contained some notable unpleasantness in my personal life for me, and two guys who represent different ends of the spectrum of how partners of sex workers can react poorly to our work.  One, overtly, one, more subtly.  While I still really want to punch Mr Personal Assistant in the face, I only harbor minor resentment towards my longer-term ex, who was, in most ways, a really awesome partner.]

"My lovely friend — I’ll call her Ophelia.  We both realized that we'd been through bad breakups simultaneously, and clinked glasses.  I told her about what ended the relationship with toxic boy; about him seducing another woman in front of me and walking in on them in bed together.  That I dated him for two months but no one knew; he told me not to blog him, he kept out of public photos with me, didn't want his photo on my blog.  That he'd give me little presents related to my life/work but I couldn’t blog that he gave them to me — even once told me to lie and say they were from someone else.  I told Ophelia about all of this, and she understood.  She especially understood why I let this happen to me; her situation was identical, having dated someone who wanted to be with her, but then wanted everything that made her *her* to change.

Ophelia is an icon in her realm; while I’m a sex blogger, a sex writer, sex educator, and a very public one at that.  And we both *get* boundaries.  But I write about my life *and* my life's work — which is to normalize sex and change the cultural conversation about sex, at least in my generation.  And I’m not ashamed of what I do.

I told Ophelia, it's as if these boys — they're attracted to the persona, the passion for sex culture, the attention, the notoriety, the outspoken and frank nature of the way her and I relate sex to the world, the openness — that's the spark.  I live and breathe sex and blogging and everything that goes with it.  It's oxygen.  Ophelia and I are both public sex personas, which is what attracts people, but then they want to get rid of that.  A killing jar is designed to preserve the insect's appearance."

-- Violet Blue, in kiss me to the ground on tinynibbles.com

(This one is probably my favorite post on Violet's blog.)

[The title for this post is a quote from Lee Harrington, from the amazing relationship roundtable titled "Your Girlfriend SUCKS!... for Money!"  The context of his quote was among commentary on those of us with the overlapping traits of being sex workers, kinksters, and polyamorous/non-monogamous.]

It's no secret that my spring was really shitty.  I had two bad splits from people I was involved with, and wasn't feeling motivated to do much of anything besides sleep.  My summer, however has been amazing: filled with travel, good friends, excellent food, partying, sex, and seeing inspiring people fighting for various issues.  If I was a low-IQ midwesterner, I'd label the season "chicken soup for the soul", but since I'm a city-dwelling vegan rationalist, I prefer "come shots for the sapient."

At the end of July, I spent 10 days in Las Vegas - which is the most loathesome place in the entire world - and ended up loving pretty much every moment of it.  I was there primarily for the Desiree Alliance conference, but as coincidence would have it, the 2010 whorecon overlapped precisely with a couple of nerd conventions that I've attended in the past.  I don't think I'll ever have more people I love occupying the same city at the same time.

Thank you so much to the Desiree Alliance conference organizers, volunteers, speakers, and attendees for carving out a wonderful place to be in Las Vegas for a week.  I liked that an over-arching theme in so many presentations (I was mainly interested in the business tract, mind you) was the importance of working independently, and how empowering it is to be calling your own shots.  I couldn't agree more.

One of the things I want to praise is the conference's expectations form, which all presenters and attendees were required to read and sign at registration.  This policy was apparently based on an agreement from Dark Odyssey, at the suggestion of Sarah Sloane.  It's a kick-ass statement on the rights and responsibilities of participants at a sex-positive event, so I'm quoting it in full.  (Same list of expectations for attendees as for presenters/volunteers, just different titles for each form.)  Readers know that I've long had a huge bee in my bonnet about people/conferences not being real allies to sex workers.  Consider this a starting point for making your events safe spaces for sex workers.

Our Expectations of Presenters and Volunteers:

Our presenters and volunteers are the public face of Desiree Alliance, and we ask that all presenters and volunteers agree to support the following ideals during their time at the conference:

A) As a presenter or volunteer, you are in a position of trust regarding attendees' identities & levels of privacy. In order to protect all attendees, we ask that you:

-Respect that some attendees have separate identities for separate parts of their lives; do not disclose personal information about them without their express permission.

-Do not share with people outside of the Desiree Alliance conference any information about who is and is not in attendance.

-Identify them at the conference with the name that is on their badge, even if you know them by another name.

B) You understand and agree to practice the principles of Desiree Alliance including diversity, respect, tolerance, acceptance, openness, and non-judgmental support. You understand and agree to not make any assumptions as to the sexual orientation, partner choice, physical ability, race, spiritual affiliation or belief, class, kink or sex work interests of any attendee.

C)  You understand and agree to practice a gender neutral policy. Desiree Alliance is committed to being a safe, inclusive, welcoming, and positive space for people of all genders. We ask that you do not make any assumptions about someone's gender identity, genital configuration, or the pronouns they prefer. Please respect everyone's self-identification. If you are unsure about how someone would like to be referred to, please just ask them.

D) You will take your role as presenter or volunteer seriously and professionally. Know that you are a representative of Desiree Alliance. You will not use your position to practice or promote classist, sexist, racist, homophobic, or other kinds of bigoted behavior. You will abide by the rules of the conference which include local laws and hotel policies.

I was involved in a couple of presentations, both of which seemed to be quite well-received.

The first was one I did was titled "Solo girl: An introduction to operating your own porn site".  I was nervous about being able to condense all the material I wanted to cover into a 40-minute time slot, but amazingly, I did so, with 4 minutes to spare.  I skipped out on all the personal storytelling, and went at things point-by-point, hitting the most useful and practical advice I could think of for aspiring indie pornographers.  I will not be posting my slides or notes for this presentation online.  It remains my opinion that if you're serious about starting a business, you can be serious enough to travel to an industry conference for your new chosen profession.

The second was a panel I did with Amanda Brooks, Dr Brooke Magnanti (Belle de Jour), and Alex Sotirov, titled "Safety for Sex Workers Through Personal Privacy: Digital and Real-World Techniques For Safeguarding Your Identity and Your Life".  I believe that a recording of this panel will be made available soon, and I'll post that once it appears.  Brooke and Alex are also planning to expand a bit on the material they covered at the conference, and I'll post their notes here.  (Not sure if Amanda plans on posting her materials on her own blog, but she highly recommended the book "How To Be Invisible" by JJ Luna.)  I'll also post a separate entry covering my portion of the panel.  This topic could have easily been a half-day workshop, but I think the four of us did a kick-ass job of narrowing things down to the most important basics that every sex worker needs to know.

To get a feel for what else went on at the conference, see the schedule here.  Personally, my favorites were Dr Joycelyn Elders' keynote, Kimberlee Cline and Mariko Passion's talk on coming out to friends and family, Kirk Read's keynote (watch video), Serpent Libertine and Bebe's ethical sex worker discussion, Nina Hartley's keynote (watch video), and the roundtable on sex workers and relationships.

I especially liked the relationship discussion because it's a subject that's been extra-present in my life this year, and it's good to be amongst other people who've experienced similar issues at some point or another.  I had been with a primary partner/dominant I was in love with, but no matter how happy I was at any given moment, there was always an unspoken expiration date on our relationship.  What he was really looking for for a girl who restrains her kink to the bedroom, her weirdness to an annual trip to Burning Man, and was, overall, a person with a non-embarrassing occupation with whom he could have a litter of children in the suburbs and share a mostly heteronormative life.  That is not now, or ever will be me.

The transgressions I've made against traditional society (as a sterilized, clamorous, out-and-proud sex working pervert) aren't things that most people can deal with.  They're not piercings you can remove, tattoos you can cover, funny-colored hair you can dye back to normal, or the occasional tab of acid you can plausibly deny ever having taken.  They're not surface-level personality quirks purchased from Hot Topic - they're the things that define the core of who I am as a human being.  Through the experiences with my main ex, along with having another guy ditch me solely on the grounds of my being a sex worker, I've been coming to realize how deeply and permanently totally fucking aberrant I am in the eyes of society, and that I need to work even more diligently at repelling mates who aren't okay with who I am.  (I already knew I was weird, and tried my best to warn people of that, but I'm apparently not working fervently enough at this task.)

My contribution to the relationship discussion was pointing out that those of us who are sexually different in some way or another are basically in two camps when it comes to finding mates.  You can try to gently ease people in - such as another person's suggestion that one start out by telling a partner that they used to be a dancer and see how the they react, and then consider telling them the whole truth from there.  This has never been my strategy, because it means hiding who I am by default, and the whole dynamic seems designed to put sex workers on the defensive about the lies and omitted truths upon which they founded their relationships.  It's too sneaky and dishonest for me.  My strategy is one I flatly referred to as the scare 'em away plan.  I am upfront with anyone I consider dating or hooking up with- I want them to run away, as soon as humanly possible, if they know they aren't going to be okay with me making a living taking my clothes off for strangers.  I don't want to build a sexual and romantic relationship with someone - pulling a bait and switch, essentially - and tell them the truth only after they've gotten attached to me.  Such a dynamic seems doomed to fail and hurt all parties, although it does work out for some sex workers.

And anyway, why would I want to fuck someone who might be anti-sex worker?  A few years ago I had a brief tryst with a guy whom I later learned to be a homophobe, and I felt so icky that someone like that got to have his dick in my mouth.  I can't imagine wanting to set myself up for such potentially disgusting and hurtful discoveries every single time I got involved with anyone.  I don't want to fuck or love people who might despise me if they actually knew the truth about me.  So yes, please- let them run screaming, because I'd be running away screaming, too.

Dating/mating as a sex worker isn't easy.  I wish we could have a weekend retreat or unconference on this subject, open to sex workers and their partners.  I wonder if there would be many takers for such a thing if I tried to cat-herd people into doing that at some time in the future?

"My generation saw in The Graduate that there is one romantic strategy to use above all others: persistence.  This same strategy is at the core of every stalking case.  Men pursuing unlikely or inappropriate relationships with women and getting them in a common theme promoted in our culture.  Just recall Flashdance, Tootsie, The Heartbreak Kid, 10, Blame it on Rio, Honeymoon in Vegas, Indecent Proposal.

This Hollywood formula could be called Boy Wants Girl, Girl Doesn't Want Boy, Boy Harasses Girl, Boy Gets Girl.  Many movies teach you that if you just stay with it, even if you offend her, even if she says she wants nothing to do with you, even if you've treated her like trash (and sometimes because you've treated her like trash), you'll get the girl.

[...]

Even if men and women in America spoke the same language, they would still live by much different standards.  For example, if a man in a movie researches a woman's schedule, finds out where she lives and works, even goes to her workplace uninvited, it shows his commitment, proves his love.  When Robert Redford does this to Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal, it's adorable.  But when she shows up at his work unannounced, interrupting a business lunch, it's alarming and disruptive.

If a man in the movies wants a sexual encounter or applies persistence, he's a regular, everyday guy, but if a woman does the same thing, she's a maniac or a killer.  Just recall Fatal Attraction, The King of Comedy, Single White Female, Play Misty For Me, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Basic Instinct.  When men pursue, they usually get the girl.  When women pursue, they usually get killed."

-- Gavin de Becker, in his book, The Gift of Fear.

"Wait - didn't he know what you did for a living before hooking up with you?"

That's the confused, am-I-missing-something-here question almost everyone has interrupted me to ask as I explained the first of my two nasty splits from the last two months.

The answer is that yes, he knew exactly what I do.  He knew before our first drunken makeout session at a party last summer, before our first date last fall, before he ever put his dick in me this spring.  In fact, he went on and on, profusely about how much he supported my decision to be a sex worker and how people ought to treat us with more respect.  He told me that my then-boyfriend was "classless" for having asked me to go with him to a work function as a "web designer" rather than a "pornographer".  He once even used the phrase "honored to help" when presented with a way to do something for the sex worker community.

You can tell where this is going, right?  It's like waiting for the punch line in the latest news story that begins with, "One of the nation's most prominent evangelical anti-gay activists was recently caught..."

This guy made himself officially my first split based on my job!  I can't believe it took me 8 years in porn to find - and copulate with - a guy to drop me like toxic waste for no other reason than fear of personal embarrassment about my work.  (I've seen other sex workers cycle through these assholes more regularly.)  I got the full bullshit parade.  "Look at me!  I adore and respect sex workers!  I'm such a good guy!  I can't lie to anyone!  I respect you and think you're wonderful!"  Until, that is, a couple of weeks after our long-distance half-year flirt-fest was sealed with several days holed up in my place fucking.  Ohhh... so that's what it feels to have a guy manipulate and lie his way into your vagina!

Here's the real punch line, though: the guy had his personal assistant do the dirty work rather than tell me himself.  Aspiring yuppie douchebags take note!  A girl will never forget that special first time when a man's personal assistant calls to lecture her about how his career is just too important right now for him to risk being publicly associated with a girl like her.  Kicking a girl in her most sensitive areas via text message is so lower middle class.  A true gentleman has an employee do it.

Or, if you like cruel jokes with two punch lines: he later did bother to tell me himself that he hoped we could still be "good friends" in spite of his decision.  Since we were never "together", I'm taking "good friends" to mean "I'd still like to put my penis in your holes when I'm in Seattle."  Honey, if you want to fuck sex workers, but don't want to be connected to them in broad daylight, that's not referred to as "close friendship".  It's calling being a paying customer.

Sigh.  And I was doing so well.  I'd only had one other asshole in the last three years, which feels closer to 30 in a sex worker dating years.

Split two was with the boyfriend, which was a more complex situation.  It was my longest relationship.  We'd been in this weird grey area for 6 months leading up to the final breakup in May, when I just couldn't handle dealing with his problems any more.  It called to mind an image of a dangerous attempt by a non-pro to rescue a wildly thrashing drowning person.

Both splits hit me hard enough to knocking the proverbial air out of me, but in different ways.  Thinking of suitor number one makes feel me angry and used.  Thinking of suitor number two makes me feel exhausted and sad.  It's resulted in my neglecting work and focusing on tending to myself, which means in an already recession-plagued economy, the last two months have not been too profitable.

One of the things I've heard many sex workers say over the years, as another is going through a breakup, is "invoice him!"  It seems to be one of our fallback jokes.  I've had half a dozen people implore me of that lately.  But, it's not the sex I want to invoice them for.  I wish I could invoice them for the less tangibly quantifiable degrees of emotional distress and subsequent distraction from work they'd both put me though this spring.  I wish I had something to show for it all other than being wiser in mate-selection in the future.  You can't take that consolation-prize sentiment and spoon it at night, or pay your bills with it.

I needed to get some fresh air.

I headed off to Mexico for 8 nights - unfortunately, though, not at the expense of either of the boys.  (I believe that people who drive you to necessitating stress-related vacations should be responsible for at least half of the cost, like an abortion.)  I'm now settling back in at home, but I had a lovely time on the beach in a rural part of the Yucatan.

I still can't really take much comfort in chalking it all up to experience, but at least I got a tan and some time to disconnect.

"Straight people are encouraged by culture and society to believe that their sexual impulses are the norm, and therefore when their affairs of the heart and loins go wrong (as they certainly will), when they are flummoxed, distraught and defeated by love, they are forced to believe that it must be their fault. We gay people at least have the advantage of being brought up to expect the world of love to be imponderably and unmanageably difficult, for we are perverted freaks and sick aberrations of nature. They - poor normal lambs - naturally find it harder to understand why, in Lysander's words, 'the course of true love never did run smooth'."

-- Stephen Fry, in a beautifully-written letter to himself, Dearest absurd child, on guardian.co.uk

Feminism is the shitty relationship you had in your early 20s. The lover who was charismatic and creative and gave great handjobs, even though, in moments of clarity, you could see that the two of you had a very real potential for detesting one another some day.

She was dodging a couple creditors, yes, and you'd heard that many of her other relationships ended in dramatic failures. But, the two of you could stay up all night drinking Cooks by the beach and exchanging breathlessly clever observations about the world around you. He was theoretically down with the number of notches on your bedpost, but in practice, he could get all pouty, or even confrontational, about how your sexuality made him uncomfortable. She had a great record collection, could do neat tricks on her unicycle, and she always knew the days of the month when museum admissions were free. You were willing to put up with seemingly minor insults to your dignity, like doing his laundry and picking up the tab for dinner most of the time.

When something would go inevitably go wrong, you'd attempt to convince yourself that the problem wasn't really her fault, even to a point of ridiculousness that makes you cringe in retrospect. "He's stressed and afraid of losing his job right now since they caught him stealing company property and eBaying it, so it's not the time to pick at him about the fact that when it was his turn to get groceries, he bought only a 24 pack of cola and a can of blueberry pie filling."

You glossed over her problems and dismissed them as "that's not the real her" until the red flags just got too big to ignore any longer. You finally cut your losses and realized that even if he's only truly shitty some of the time, it's still too much.

After it ended, you resent them all the more not just because they still owe you two months of rent, but because you tried so hard to make it work. Years later, you can still get worked up about the relationship because you went out of your way to overlook their serious faults and only acknowledge their good traits. When she failed you and was clearly at fault, you blamed yourself for interpreting her incorrectly. You tried to fit yourself into his pre-existing framework, rather than finding someone who didn't require that you shuffle any part of yourself the first place. You're mad at yourself and a bit embarrassed for putting up with the whole thing for as long as you did. You despise the whole thing with an almost undue passion because you once cared about making it work so damn much.

In my mid-20s, I finally sat down and mentally wrote a dear john letter. "The thing is, feminism, it's not me, it's definitely you..."

And for what it's worth, feminism never even bought me a can of pie filling.