The Cheese Grates It: Manosphere Morons and Other Idiots on the Internet vs. Reality

(via Why the "cock carousel" is bullshit, according to SCIENCE)I 

I wanted to share with you all my response to this post, first because David Futrelle is really cool and I love the way he takes apart the assholes who populate the so-called “manosphere.” 

Second, to rip a new one for all the assholes who love to claim stupid shit like “if you ship Wincest, it means you want to fuck your relatives” or for whom “pedophile” means “you ship something I don’t like.”

The following is part of my reality, and here are a few other delicious tasty morsels to chew on. Trigger warning for discussion of self-harm and sexual abuse.

I am celibate. I am not having sex with anybody. I don’t want to have sex with anybody. I don’t do relationships right, and casual sex is toxic to me. I don’t like it at all. Above all, I most assuredly don’t want to have sex with my relatives. When I was 19, my cousin hit on me. I handled it poorly. She was a broken person, and my running off to the other room rather than talking to her about what had happened destroyed our friendship. I regret that. But I most assuredly did not want to have sex with her. In all honesty, though, even though I am heterosexual, I would have been twice as upset if one of my male cousins had hit on me.

My cousin and I were both molested by her father. I was very young when it happened and I don’t really remember any details. I started having nightmares after my son was born and I eventually put the flashbacks together. My parents moved away from there when I was still pretty young. Obviously, my cousin would have memories of it happening to her because she was still with him. I was never alone with him after that.

So, the reality is, I don’t really like sex very much, and I certainly don’t like the idea of sex with my relatives.

This doesn’t mean I should get a pass to ship Wincest because I’m using it to work for trauma. I should be allowed to ship what I damn well want without being bullied and so should everyone else. If you think that people need to have been molested to earn the right to ship something, you can go fuck yourself.

I ship Wincest because I see a romantic dynamic between Sam and Dean. I love the idea of a relationship that triumphs despite impossible odds and societal taboos. I do not have an “incest kink.” Sam and Dean are the exception, not the rule. I never thought I’d ship an incest pairing, but they shipped themselves. I just write the stories.

Anyway, the following is my response to the blog post. I know I’m preaching to the choir, but maybe there’s a tiny chance that some ship shamer has a spark of humanity in them and will learn something from this revelation.

My 28-year-old son's high school friends who have married got married older than my high school friends, many of whom married right out of high school. Maybe better sex education and a generation of parents who were less reluctant to talk about topics like sex and drugs helped. 

Personally, I lost my virginity at 16 and I was definitely not emotionally ready for such a thing. Much though I joke about riding the cock carousel, I really never did. The guy I lost my virginity to was this gangly fellow about six foot six and he looked a lot more like Bob Denver than Brad Pitt. 

I was totally in love with him, was planning the wedding in my head and all, and he broke my heart. That colliding with a bunch of other fucked up stuff in my life earned me a trip to the mental hospital over the weekend with superficial cuts on my arms. I was treated like shit in that place which led to my pact with myself that I have kept for the past 37 years: I would die before I ever allow myself to be institutionalized again, even for a second.

What I didn't know at that point and what I wouldn't learn until I was 38 years old was that I had type 2 bipolar disorder, which is trickier to spot than type 1, and I had borderline personality disorder. 

Far from wanting to ride the cock carousel, I had a very romantic mind and a very low self-esteem, which led to my being taken advantage of by a number of less-than-honorable guys. After a horrific and extremely psychologically abusive relationship with a misogynist who would force me to watch really awful porn--we are talking bestiality and scat here--and who would force me to do things like kiss his feet under the threat that he would take his "love" from me, I ended up at his place one night with blood dripping from both wrists because, surprise surprise, after the initial thrill wore off he replaced my position as his "best girl" with someone who hadn't yet "hit the wall." She was in her early 20's. I was 34 at the time.

I wasn't done with ill-advised relationships yet, but even dense as I was I realized that I could not allow myself under the thrall of a creature like this ever again, if not for my sake than for my son's.

Admissibly, my situation was a bit extreme because of my undiagnosed mental illness. But make no mistake, guys like this prey on vulnerable women. They even say things like "the crazy ones are great in bed," and the line from Orange Is the New Black where Sophia tells her son about the philosophy of practicing on an insecure girl isn't a lie. These assholes don't think of women as people, they think of them as things to be used.

Maybe women of my son's generation are savvier about these creeps than women of my generation were. Women of my generation expected a certain level of misogyny. The younger generation may be less willing to put up with it. I certainly hope so.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It Hardcore~