Straight men, I mean. It’s different for us fags. Kinda.

Anyhow, the thing women should know about men is that when it seems like all they want is sex, a lot of the time what they really want is intimacy. They want the act, sure, but their real goal, without them knowing it, is the quiet and the cuddles after.

And above all, what they want is a woman’s approval. They want a woman to say “Yes, you ARE good enough for me” and this need is so strong that the fact that they might be paying that woman for sex does not in any way dilute it.

Prostitutes will tell you that a lot of their clients make like what they want is sex, but end up just talking to the sex worker instead. That’s because it’s the intimacy they crave, and the approval. Simply talking to a sympathetic and willing woman can do wonders for a man’s emotional well-being, and that is far more important than sexual release. ^[1]

Men can get sexual release by themselves. It’s all the rest of it that they really crave.

And why are things like this? Because men aren’t supposed to crave intimacy and approval. It’s just plain not allowed. Among acceptable male emotions to express, lust is the most acceptable. So all their other needs are funneled into lust.

In the male culture of North America, even the desire to settle down and get married is penalized. Can you imagine a bunch of bro type males talking about how much they love to cuddle. Or how they need a woman’s approval in order to feel like they are a man. Or about how sad and lonely they get sometimes.

So it all gets tied into lust. That guy bragging about what he did in bed with some woman might really be saying “A woman said yes to me, and that makes me a valid male!”. The guy who cracks sexist jokes all the time might be expressing his deep frustration with lack of female approval the only way he knows how. The man who “suddenly turn into a monster” during a date might just be so desperately lonely that it overrides their higher faculties leaving their id in charge.

And they probably hate themselves afterward.

This all stems from the fact that these deep emotional needs often operates well below the conscious level. Men are not encouraged to introspect, and that means men are often a mystery to themselves. They do things without knowing why, and often conclude that there must be something wrong and evil about themselves because they misbehave with women.

This includes the things men do to try to control women. Like I have said before, men who feel the need to dominate, punish, and control women are men who are terrified of women’s power to do emotional harm to them, and therefore feel like they only can be “safe” around a woman if she is violently and visibly suppressed.

Therefore I think that one of the best, if not THE best, weapon against violence against women is the emotional empowerment of men. If male culture becomes more open and accepting of nonsexual desires for women, men will no longer have to try to get all their emotional needs satisfied via sex, and therefore would not become tortured souls who can’t understand why they aren’t happy.

Too many of them conclude it must be something wrong with women.

This conflict between men’s emotions and what it is acceptable for them to express helps explain why the “friend zone” is so hated by men. To a man, pursuing a woman all the way to the point of sex and then being told the woman only wants to be friends seems like a cruel trick, something like a bully holding out something you really want then pulling away at the last second saying “Psych!”.

As though women were saying “You’re good enough…. good enough… good enough… LOL NOPE.”

Obviously, this is crazy, and not what the woman is thinking at all. But the current setup produces men for whom sex with a woman is the only form of approval they are allowed to seek. So saying “but hey, you still get a friend! Isn’t that almost as good?” is meaningless. It’s like telling someone that sure, they lost the million dollar first prize, but the second prize of a coupon from the Keg is almost as good!

No it isn’t. It really, really isn’t.

And I think women are better off learning to accept this. Sure, when you are a teenage girl trying to figure out this exciting and dangerous new territory of desire for boys, you can be forgiven if you keep “making friends” with guys who seem really nice then suddenly “get weird and gross” by expressing sexual interest in them, but by the time you are out of college, you should be wise enough to realize that men are going to pursue them with sex on their minds and that’s fine. That’s normal. Imagine how you would feel if they stopped wanting you that way entirely.

And if a man makes a pass at you and you tell him that you just want to be friends, and he says he’s cool with that, that man definitely still wants to have sex with you. All you have done is put him in a holding pattern. He agreed to the friends thing because he didn’t want to lose access to you. But deep down, no matter what he says, he still wants to fuck you.

Well I guess that’s my wisdom bomb for today.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Nope, this isn’t fiction. Sounds like one of my short story titles, though, doesn’t it?

Been rolling in the grey lately. Hanging around naked, sleeping a lot, letting the days go by.

And my bed-seeking urge is off the charts. It was really hard for me to get out of bed today. My bed has turned into a gravity well again, and it takes a lot of emotional thrust to escape it.

And I have been looking at the clock when I wake up from a nap and if it’s close to a meal time, I feel like I have won something.

The signs are clear. I am depressed.

But I am not going to beat myself up over it. This is a diagnosis, not a judgment. Getting depressed over being depressed is extremely counterproductive. What matters is the solution.

First, though, one must define the problem precisely. The more clearly one defines a problem, the better the quality of the cure.

The thing is, my mood is not terrible. I haven’t had deep feelings of hopelessness, or that there was no point to anything. Anhedonia is low. So the physical depression is not, as of yet, resulted in emotional depression on a large scale.

I think that’s because the coming of Xmas is providing a little structure to my life that I desperately need when school is not doing the job. Having something to look forward to has a very strong effect on my mood, as does a feeling of financial security. I have both right now.

Admittedly, if I had realized this was a five week month, I might not have ordered the KFC^[1] I ordered last Saturday night. But meh. As it stands now, I have no more planned spending before next Wednesday, so the $350 or so I have left will have to cover 4 weeks at $87.50 a week.

No prob. I get get by on that no problem. And January is a GST cheque month, so that will supplement things.

My planned Xmas Eve at Riverport will be a little expensive…. probably something like $50, unless the restaurant I go to has a “dinner and a movie” deal or something. But that won’t matter too much. I will be able to work around it. Some things are worth investing in, and not feeling dangerously lonely on Xmas eve is one of them.

It’s weird that I will be going to therapy on Xmas Eve. My psychiatrist is Jewish, so it’s just another day for him and his people, but it’s a little strange for me. I will be going to therapy, coming home, then something like three or four hours later, heading off to Riverport by bus.

Riverport is not that far from my therapist’s office, come to think of it. Maybe I will do the movie first.

At any rate, I got plans. See the Star Wars movie, have a nice dinner, come home by bus, go to bed, get up, wait for Joe to come pick me up for Xmas dinner with his family.

Not bad for a single dude with no family nearby.

Looks like I will be eating at the Old Spaghetti Factory out there at Riverport. Other times I have eaten out there, I ate at this decent little brew pup called something like Old River Brew Pub or something. But when I went to look up restaurants at Riverport I came across some very negative reviews of the place and so I am thinking Old Spaghetti Factory sounds like a safer bet.

Their food isn’t impressive, but it’s good.

Anyhow, back to my twilit world. I have decided that the best way to address the problem is to simply remove expectations from the equation. Maybe I had ideas of what I “should” do over the Winter Break and I am not really doing any of them, but the worm has turned on those expectations and they have become poisonous. They have become something to beat myself up over and thus become something that drives me to hide from the world with bed and naps and distractions.

So, whatever. My only obligations are to do my words for you people every day and to finally get around to doing a LOC for Felicity. Next semester will start no matter what, I don’t have to invest any more energy in that to keep it going. It is perfectly fine if all I do is nap and blog and play video games for the whole two weeks. If I am to do more, it will have to be because of a naturally and organically occurring desire, not some artificial pressure from “above” about what I “should” be doing.

Having trouble focusing. My interior mental processes must be trying to usurp more mental resources than I can spare while consciously focusing on what I am doing. I just spaced out for thirty seconds in the middle of writing about how much trouble I was having focusing.

That’s some of that irony stuff I have heard so much about.

Oh well, my brain will get its way when I am done blogging. Then I will just unplug and let my conscious mind go slack so those busy interior processes can have the place to themselves for a while.

In other words, I will “zero out”, as I like to call it. It’s not sleep, but it’s a state of being totally unaware of your environment and time passing subjectively fast and sometimes I dream, so it is a lot like sleep. But when I return to reality, I don’t feel like I have slept.

More like I was lost in thought for a while. Which I was, in a sense.

So anyhow, whatever happens between now and Thursday is cool. May I will get back to compiling my portfolio, and maybe I won’t. Maybe I will send stuff out to markets, and maybe I won’t.

It’s all cool.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.