Politics or Pussy?

For me there is always this period in a relationship where I try to suss out what kind of politics a person might have. I don't know that I necessarily think that everyone I date must be on the exact same page as me in terms of our political views but I do know that I'd likely have a hard time finding anything sexy or long-term about a fundie Christian, for instance. However, I try to remain open minded when I find myself having a connection with someone who doesn't sing the praises of composting, or see the need to be on every activist listserv in the city.

Like many people, I often find the potential dates (or more casual encounters) via activities centred around our shared views. I am not the first--nor the last--dyke who's tried to pick up on the bus to a rally. It just kind of happens like that. But I also recognize that those kinds of things take serious time commitments, and that there's a whole legion of lesbians who don't necessarily show up to every community potluck or forum. Plus I think it might be healthy to look outside these frequently incestuous dating pools. I suppose that's how I ended up in the situation I'm currently in.

I connected with this beautiful gal rather unexpectedly, particularly considering the debacle that was my last romantic escapade. We met through some mutual friends some months ago and made plans to connect in a business sense (she makes music videos, and I am a musician). However, contacts were lost and we did not cross paths again until this past weekend, via the same mutual friends. She is unbelievably cute. And very flirtatious. And an excellent dancer. She's also smart, and has her own (successful and growing, I might add) company at a remarkably young age. She is motivated and responsible, and good. So when she asked me out, I obviously said yes. I figured that with mutual friends as great as ours, she had to be a safe bet. But I've recently found out that I am now facing down a "politics or pussy?" kind of scenario; she's the kind of hipster-y girl who uses words (acronyms?) like "AZNs" in reference to any people of Asian descent. This is not in everyday conversation, mind you, but more in the envelope-pushing "ironic" hipster way that seems to be so trendy right now*.

I don't get this. This otherwise smart and cute and interesting and funny and sweet girl thinks this is funny. But to me (and countless others, I'm sure) using racial slurs casually or ironically isn't cool. It just fucking isn't. And what is so bizarre about this fad (at least, I hope it's a fad, which would imply that it's going to go away soon) is the kind of gradient attached to the Ironic Hipster Racial Slur. That is, it seems that the more shocking the epithet, the more it establishes a Hipster cred, like there's some sort of competition going on amongst moneyed suburban kids living in the city doing important Art Things or Music Things as to who can drop an n-bomb with the least trace of a smile.

I mean, I kind of understand the idea of it. I think the underlying notion is, "if I can use this awful word in all seriousness then I am calling attention to how incredibly offensive it is and that's funny", but the exclamation that seems to follow, whether spoken or implied, is "I'm not actually racist guys, I have all kinds of black friends!". These (almost exclusively white) kids don't seem to get that there is a huge amount of power in what they're saying that really, really overthrows any kind of irony they may be getting at.

I'm sincerely hoping that this girl is not one of those hipsters I am referring to, and that she is on the lower end of the Ironic Racial Slur Hipster ladder, which to me indicates that there is hope for her yet. Truly, I think she's kind of young, in the sense that she maybe hasn't had exposure to the kinds of politics my friends and I live (out of necessity, not aesthetic, which I think also explains my distaste for ironic hipsterdom). Yet writing that makes me feel like I'm being condescending, not to mention making the fatal early relationship mistake of thinking "Oh, that will change with time" (which can actually be interpreted as "I will change them" and as far as I'm concerned, is relationship suicide).

Still, as much as I hate to admit it, I often wonder about the accessibility of anti-oppressive politics. To some extent I believe it is every individual's responsibility to educate hirself about what kinds of privilege zie holds. But I also think that there's a part to this about having access to that kind of self-reflection and self-criticism as a form of privilege. I'm not sure I know how that fits in to the overall idea of being anti-oppressive, but I know that I want to give this girl the benefit of the doubt. Truthfully, I (and everyone else) had to go through a process of awakening, and I'm certainly hoping it's not far off for my ladyfriend.

*for evidence of this, please see sites such as You Tube and Hipster Runoff

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Valentine's Day

Last year, for the first time in my life, I had a Valentine. We had begun dating just a few weeks before the Holy Day of Love, and I was excited to section off a piece of my calendar to spend that day with him—really, with anyone at all. So after a long day at work and an evening of rehearsals for a community theater production, I went to his house at 10pm, still garbed in my dress shirt and tie, and we celebrated in the most romantic way possible: by grabbing food at the Jack in the Box drive-thru window, popping in a DVD, and then going to bed. For sleep. To get up early for work. No candles, no roses, no mind-blowing love-making. And it was still something to be remembered.

I took this as a sign that my idea of courtship had evolved; I used to saturate my thoughts of love and dating in unrealistic romantic notions. In my junior year of high school, for example, I had a huge crush on a girl named Anna. She was spunky, smart, had an “in” with the popular crowd, and—the clincher—had great taste in music. That, and she came from the same ethnic background as I did; my parents immediately claimed her as my bride to be, the Filipina who liked Filipino food and had more of a Tagalog vocabulary than I did. She would keep me grounded in my culture, they thought, bring me back to my Asian roots after “straying,” as they might’ve put it, to the Latino and Black friends that largely made up my social circle.

I grew to like Anna. A lot. I had bought into the necessity of dating someone in high school after watching too many TNBC sitcoms and WB dramas. I perceived that that was what it meant to really live your high school experience. Thus, in the most innocent ways that I could have expressed, I pined for her: in my AOL Instant Messenger profile, I inserted lyrics hinting at my interest in an unnamed someone; in my journal, I wrote cheesy entries about how I’d treat her right if she were my girl; and for Christmas, I gave her the most expensive and thought-out gift I had distributed among my friends. At the time, I didn’t see the act of pining even remotely as the needy, embarrassing, and sometimes creepy signal it might represent to adults; it seemed like the appropriate response when you were enamored with someone for whom your fondness hadn’t been reciprocated. It was the physical and emotional manifestation of the butterflies you felt for someone. It was my naïve and superficial proof of being alive inside.

The culmination of my media-fed so-corny-I-want-to-barf enactments of romance: I decided that, after eight months of dropping too-subtle hints, I wanted to tell her how I felt. In my head, I aimed for the perfect moment: we would hang out afterschool, and as we walked out our classroom buildings (at sunset, of course), she’d find petals leading to a grassy hill just off-campus. And there we’d have a talk. (In retrospect, this idea of having that DTR-like situation without actually having a relationship to define seems exceedingly preposterous.)

As delusional as that sounds, that was the plan, and fortunately, I didn’t actually execute it. That vision was much too overwhelming, even for my immature adolescent self. I saw past it. Instead, I went completely in the opposite direction: cowardly, I hid behind a computer screen and screen name and told her everything online. She didn’t believe me at first, but eventually, she realized I was serious. And she broke it to me straight: an “us” wasn’t what she was looking for in our friendship. As she typed the words that broke my inexperienced heart, I did what Dawson or Slater or Topanga would do—I locked my bedroom door, fell onto my bed, boomed O-town’s “All or Nothing at all” (you’re excused if you need to vomit), and bawled.

Thank fucking goodness that I have grown up since then. My first relationships and sexual experiences have helped to de-mystify and de-romanticize the hype surrounding love. I came to understand the differences between a honeymoon period and the lazy motions of the day-to-day routine of seeing a significant other. Maturing past my stereotypes of what liking someone looked like helped me to ground and re-envision love not as fuzzy feelings stickered with hearts and arrows, but as simple and unquestionable comfort—a situation where a pairing only seems right and normal. I think this is different from being cynical about romance; indeed, I still appreciate roses and slow dances, flickering flames lighting a fancy dinner for two. The difference is that I now don’t see those signifiers as proof of chemistry; they’re more like its accessories—unnecessary but nice.

So this year, I’m making myself believe that having a Valentine on February 14^th, a day that supposedly celebrates the idea of love, is sort of like that: unnecessary, but nice. I’ve heard it said before that everyday should be Valentine’s Day. Wouldn’t it be nice, people have asked, if everyone demonstrated his or her love as expressively as he or she does on Valentine’s Day? But now I want to understand that suggestion a little bit differently: maybe we shouldn’t take that to mean that everyday should be fluffy and commercial and conventional; instead, maybe everyday—the normal, the routine, and perhaps even the boring—maybe that should be the type of love we find worthy of celebration and value. Maybe everyday already is Valentine’s Day.

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The Complete Package

Is romance a lie if you have to get past physical attraction first?

On Friday night, I avoided a mounting bout of holiday loneliness by going out. (Okay, so I went out alone—again—but in the company of great music and eye candy, I had fun.) The next day, my friend asked me if I had met anyone new, as if having done so would have had anything to do with my having had fun.

“Of course not,” I answered. Of course: my two-word explanation for stubbornly sticking with the expectation that other men should come to me instead of me going to them.

With that, my friend revisited last week’s homily about my lack of aggression when it comes to meeting men. If I don’t approach anyone, then how do I expect to meet anyone new? she would argue.

This week, I retorted.

“But you don’t always enjoy it when other guys come to you at straight clubs. I mean—you all ask to be saved all the time.”

“But I still dance with assholes if they’re hot.”

“And if they’re not? Then you ask to be saved.” I introduced to them my hypothesis: that everything in the world of pick-up comes back to physical attraction. If you don’t have that, then you don’t stand a chance, even in a dimly-lit bar filled with horny, incoherent people.

“That’s not true,” another friend chimed. “I’ll dance with an ugly guy if he can start good, genuine conversation.”

I disagreed. “If an ugly guy came to you, he might be able to start a ‘genuine conversation,’ but as soon as he gets your attention and you take one look at him, you would make a split second decision as to whether or not you wanted anything to do with this character, regardless of what he said.”

“Not,” my first friend said, “if they had an incredible sense of humor.”

“So basically,” I continued, “they have to make up—in some sort of large way—for their lack of physical attraction?”

She hesitated and then nodded, accepting the implications of what that meant as far as physical attraction: an end all-be all wall that must be hurdled before personality, character, values—before anything else can be evaluated about a person.

I hate this conclusion, for both ethical and personal reasons. It means that if you have a look that may not be largely perceived to be attractive, then your chances for any sort of success in a club, bar, or any setting where first impressions are key are slim. It means that you have to work twice, thrice, or even more times as hard if you want any success with flirting—or maybe you can have enough trust in pure luck to bring someone who defies the judgmental norm to you.

For me, it means that I’m screwed if I perceive personality or intellectual traits to be my strong suit. It means that my achievements in the work world will mean nothing to my personal life if my appearance isn’t what’s date-ably marketable. It means that I can be on top of the world with success—but always falter in the department of romance. Because if I can’t get past the first hurdle without running into any issues or having to “make up” for something that I don’t have perfect and can’t quite change without reversing the impenetrable decisions of genetics, then I’ve got to somehow adapt my endearing (but perhaps naïve) idea of love for someone else into a notion of love for someone else on the initial basis for how they look. How shallow it sounds, but how real it is!

If I’m going to undo my seemingly perpetual pattern of singleness, then what actions can I take to off-set the role of physical attraction in how others will receive me? And even then, if flirtation and dating are two-way streets, how rare will it be for me to find someone receptive to that different mode of attraction, to the idea that physical attraction can be “made up for” or even overcome? Or maybe, with my ridiculously youthful belief in fairy tale true romance, there’s someone out there who might actually like me for I am—the complete package, the inner highlighting the outer, the outside providing the perfect complimentary shell foreshadowing the gifts within, but remember over and over again that it’s the thought that counts—not the object itself.

This holiday season, I don’t think I’m going to discover that rare find at a club or bar. Heck, to be perfectly honest, heading home to spend time with a family that knows nothing about my love life isn’t really going to help my cause either. I suppose, though, that in a season founded upon faith, hope, and magic, anything is possible. Scientists have recently discovered that it’s mathematically possible for Santa Claus to make it around the world (as long as he’s based in Kyrgyzstan); if they can find a plausible home for a crazy international trespasser, then I can certainly find at least one person who believes that physical attraction isn’t the primary ingredient for chemistry.

And if I can't, well then... at least I can add it to my wish list for Santa.

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