"HARD, MESSY, and RISKY?"  Your phrasing around those words comes across as somewhere between condescending and overtly mocking. 

So, the status hierarchy is based on the neo-Calvinist willingness to suffer and die?  Or possibly  the right to brag about one's perfect relationships and athletic talents? 

Abusive partners:  Two weeks ago a close friend of mine was in the hospital for a week, after having nearly died due to being stabbed in the back by his psycho girlfriend who is now in jail facing attempted murder charges.  Yeah that relationship sure was HARD, MESSY and RISKY: was that better than whacking off?

HIV & other deadly STDs:  People I knew died of AIDS: slow painful miserable deaths like radiation poisoning stretched out to make the agony worse.  My "young & cute" years were spent in the middle of a f---ing public health apocalypse where any given night could be a death sentence.  You really need to take a close look at your heterosexist assumptions.  Those heterosexist assumptions are HARD (for this gay guy to deal with, without breaking out into expletives), MESSY (expletive deleted), and RISKY (if the risk of being seen as aggressively prejudiced means anything to you), but hardly as much so as AIDS. 

And I take it you think revenge porn and other vicious tricks of the sexual marketplace are funny?

There are no extra "good karma points," or social status points anywhere this side of an infantry platoon, to be gained from doing what's HARD, MESSY, or RISKY, compared to doing something else that's less likely to get you killed.

And in my experience, people who insist on setting up invidious superiority/inferiority hierarchies, and insist on invalidating the quality of others' intimately personal experience, whether about f---ery, wankery, geekery, food, music, religion, or whatever, are usually overcompensating for being terribly insecure about themselves. 

And here I've been having conscience-bugs for weeks, about having told someone at SR who had worked on Asterisk PBXs, that I thought Asterisk "wasn't ready yet for prime-time" in office environments.  In retrospect I thought my comment, "not ready for prime-time," had been insufferably rude & arrogant.  Wow.  By comparison with the present instance, that item was as mild as refried pinto beans with no salsa.

I'm going to be AFK until later today or this evening.  Ta ta...

-G.


=====

On 13-05-06-Mon 9:51 AM, Sonja Trauss wrote:

You got it! Dealing with people is HARD. It's MESSY. It's RISKY.

Here I was thinking, 'sonja, you paranoid jerk, is porn really a "scab"'? But, yeah... there you go.

On May 6, 2013 3:19 AM, "GtwoG PublicOhOne" <g2g-public01@att.net> wrote:

Yo's-

So let's talk about the reasons we might prefer partners and the reasons
we might prefer hands:

Anyone who's grown up with popular music knows the ideal of Romantic
Love:  The perfect relationship, each person fully attuned to the
other.  Great sex all the time, and great conversation all the time,
though not necessarily both at the same time.  Hearts & flowers until
death do us part, whether or not the state or one's employers recognizes
the relationship.

But for the most part, reality doesn't work that way, as the divorce
rate demonstrates.

A hand is always preferable to an abusive partner.

A hand is often preferable to playing HIV roulette, and nowadays,
massively-drug-resistant gonorrhea roulette, not to mention hepatitis C
and other life-threatening diseases, some of which can even be caught
from a (slurpy) kiss.

A hand may be preferable to the competitive game-playing of the sexual
"marketplace," where commodification is often the rule, particularly in
a culture where "revenge porn" has become commonplace (posting nudes of
one's former partners and "conquests" online for all the world to see,
against their will) and cruel gossip spreads at the speed of recycled
electrons.

For that matter a hand or two might be preferable to a partner who's
sexually inept, or of the opposite political or philosophical persuasion
than oneself, or who isn't strong, smart, creative, empathic, or
otherwise capable in at least one way that matters to oneself.

After a particularly painful relationship breakup, a hand may be
retrospectively preferable to the wild ride that ended with the
going-insane feeling of being dumped or betrayed.

And it's probably arguable, as a generalization, that a hand that meets
a basic physical need, is far better all round, than letting the need go
unmet to the point where it builds relentlessly, thereby infecting one's
every glance at another person, and one's every conversation.  In other
words, masturbation is not only a personal good thing but a social good
thing when it enables one to keep his/her objectivity rather than
viewing others first and foremost as possible sexual outlets.

Let's hear it for using our hands and keeping our objectivity!

-G.









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