Guerrero Words: Monsters in Love

Guerrero Words: Monsters in Love: It scratched its way out the chambers of my heart, whispering, “Close your eyes, my sweet, this night is my gift.” I didn’t always know it, ...

This is fantastic.

In my life, I found that I confused lust and abuse with love more often than not. At this point in my life, I prefer to be without what passes for "love" and wouldn't know what to do with the romantic type of love even if it was real. I prefer platonic friendships and those are difficult enough to maintain.

OctPoWriMo 2019: Day 8: The Scent

Image by Artie_Navarre from Pixabay

he breathes the scent of me as he moves in

going for the kill, he can smell the sin

he thinks he knows I want what's on his mind

kills every little hope one at a time

he hates the wildness I hide inside 

he thinks it's a game when I try to hide

he gets a thrill watching my dying dreams

he loves listening to my helpless screams

he wants me to be his porcelain doll

to be his servant at his beck and call

I'd sooner live my days in poverty

than ever grant him ownership of me

~Cie~

Song Inspiration:

Rest in peace Scott Weiland

To every bastard who mentally, physically, or sexually abused and took advantage of my younger self with her low self-esteem who was so desperate to be loved, burn in hell.

These sorts of assholes seek vulnerable women to prey on. They are low-life predatory sadists. 

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~

The Cheese Grates It: The Effects of Bullying Last a Lifetime

A response to a post on "The Mighty."

I'm now almost 54 years old, but the bullying that I endured all through school still affects me to this day.  I have always felt that I was hideously ugly. If I'm completely analytical about my appearance, I'm actually fairly ordinary-looking, but when one lives in a society which has a very narrow view of beauty and constant bullying is added to that, one learns to loathe one's physical appearance. I honestly don't like it when people compliment me on anything because my initial thought is that they are just trying to get something out of me.

When I was in the third grade, I was sexually assaulted by two of my female classmates. I was too ashamed to say anything.  Later, a boy in that same class pinned me up against the wall and told me that he was going to kill me with his pocket knife. I wet my pants, and when I went to the school nurse, she laughed at me and told me that I was being silly. This boy was very popular, and he was never punished.

Throughout school, the bullying that I endured often had sexual overtones. There were horrible rumors that I would have sex with any boy who wanted it. In fact, I was so naive that I thought a "bl*w j*b" was blowing in someone's ear, and I wondered why anyone found that sexy.  Boys would often grab my breasts or buttocks. The adults never did anything about it. In one math class, the teacher was sitting right there while my classmates said things like "she plays with herself" and "she'd play with her t*ts if she had any." Up until I turned 18 and realized that my breasts tended to get in the way when I was doing things, I hated my "flat chest." I actually have rather average-sized breasts, not that anyone should be bullying someone with smaller than average breasts.

I have never enjoyed sex, but once I got into high school, I allowed my boyfriend to take my virginity. He dumped me after that, and I ended up in the mental hospital over the weekend with a slew of unkind doctors and nurses looking down their noses at me. One nurse even told me that I was a freak and I would never be normal. To this day, I'm proud of my sixteen-year-old self who told her: "better a freak than a b*tch like you." I don't know how I found the strength in me, but I stood up to those jerks, and I tried to be helpful to the other patients who were in there with me. My roommate was a woman in her 50's who was so severely anorexic that all her bones were showing. She had trouble voicing her needs, so I tried to be her voice.

Remembering these things makes tears of anger come to my eyes, but they won't last long because the message that crying is weak was so deeply internalized. I have a lot of trouble crying. I didn't cry after the deaths of some of my close relatives. I didn't cry when I had to have my beloved rescue cat put to sleep on his sixth birthday due to kidney failure. It's not that it didn't matter. I've never recovered from it. There's a gaping wound in my heart that will never be filled. I get accused of being cold and uncaring because I don't cry, but I simply can't. Crying was a weakness that my bullies would exploit, so I never let them see me cry.

I have major mental illnesses (type 2 bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder which manifests as hoarding objects, not animals.) Any coping skills I have with these diseases have been developed on my own. "Mental health professionals" have only tried to medicate me into normalcy even though I do not respond well to psych meds. They make me manic and psychotic. Family members offer wisdom like "just stop being like that," "just stop thinking like that," "just stop looking for attention," and "just act normal."

I have been completely unsuccessful in life, and, if it weren't for my son, the honest truth is that I would have been long gone. My life has been a series of loss and disappointments. With the psych conditions I have, it would have been an uphill battle anyway, but with the self-loathing I learned from being bullied all through school, the battle became impossible.  

When my diabetes worsened, I became unable to work the difficult jobs and long hours that I had always prided myself on being able to work. I am now living in poverty. If it weren't for my son, I'd be homeless. I do not have hope for things getting better.

Bullying destroys lives, but all I ever heard is that it was my fault that I was bullied, and if I would just "act normal" and "ignore it," I wouldn't "bring it on" myself.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

NaHaiWriMo 2018 #6: House of Cards

Notes:

Text by The Real Cie. House of Cards and its characters are the creation and property of Netflix.

I was inspired to create this Haiga while binge-watching House of Cards instead of sleeping. I noticed the parallel between the over-the-top drama involving House of Cards' main character, Frank Underwood, and Kevin Spacey, the actor who plays the part. Frank Underwood describes his father as having been a violent alcoholic. Spacey has stated that his father was both physically and sexually abusive as well as a racist.

While I feel that the inner turmoil from his childhood abuse combined with shame over his sexual orientation may have prompted Kevin Spacey to behave in inappropriate and ill-advised ways with young men, and while I feel compassion for his struggles, I do not think that his behavior is acceptable. It is a shame that it resulted in his being terminated from House of Cards because he is a superlative actor. Of course, it is also unfortunate that the young men subjected to his behavior suffered psychological repercussions.

This piece falls into the categories of fan art, art imitating life, human failings, tragedy, and irony.