I was asked about those people who came into my life outside of the groups and communities I loudly claim.  Oh, I wasn’t directly asked.  But it was mentioned.

I have been through a lot of different phases.  I know people from different times in my life.  In almost every time in my life I have acquired a close male friend.  How that relationship goes depends on which man from a community takes an interest in me.  It’s really interesting how that goes.  Mostly I am only picked up by guys who are socially extremely aggressive.  Once in a while I find an honest to god nice guy.  Amusingly enough, I have found them nearly exclusively in English departments.

There are two in particular, J and P.  I worked with J when I was a teacher.  He had the classroom next to mine.  He was my buddy.  I met P in my first semester of graduate school in a writing class.  He gave me writing feedback on my porn with a straight face.  He’s a keeper.

I haven’t seen J much since I stopped teaching.  I miss him.  He and I traded stories of way back when and reminded one another that even though we felt boring right now, we really aren’t boring people.  He was able to talk shop with me about my job and yet I told him really private things.  He was the only coworker I let myself get close to.  He was the only one emotionally available in the way I needed.  I’m hoping that some day we will get to go out to dinner and hang out for multiple hours.  It would be nice.

P has stayed.  That’s been interesting.  He is the only one of “my boys” that isn’t an asshole.  No, that’s not true.  But he is the only one who has stayed and been a really consistent part of my life who isn’t an asshole.  Most of the other nice guys fall away.  I get the impression I intimidate them.  I don’t mean to.  But I don’t intimidate P.  Or at least not enough so that he minds.  Do you know why I got P in my life?  Because he had no choice to talk about the things I wanted to write about and he was positive towards me.  That doesn’t happen very often.  Very few people talk to me seriously about what I write.

Let me give you a tip.  If you want to give me a metaphorical woody, talk about my writing.  It means you are seeing all the secret hidden backways in my brain.  Knowing that people care enough to look at that is very uhh rewarding.  I don’t understand neutralish but positive feedback.  It bewilders me.  How can you read what I write and feel neutrally towards me!?  It’s a challenge.  It makes me want to win you over.

Do you know why I have so much more sex with assholes than nice guys?  Because the assholes ask.  The nice guys aggressively stand still near me.  It makes for really good friends and not helpful lovers.  I need my lovers to ask.

I think I am undesirable.  I think I constantly need to work harder because whatever I am, it’s not desirable enough.  It’s interesting to me to look at the outliers because it shows me different things about what I am interested in.  Near as I can tell the fail mode of my interactions with P is for him to get frustrated and shake his head.  He is very gentle with me.  There is a part of me that has wondered for eight years what he is like undone with passion.  I’m not even sure I can do it.  I’m not sure if I would be able to get the rhythms right.

I don’t sleep with nice guys because I don’t have the courage to ask (rejection sucks) and I’m afraid I wouldn’t know how to be a good lover anyway.  I hunt for the kind of men I hunt for because I know what to do.  Whether men like to admit it or not there really are categories of sexual interest.  I’m good at a couple of categories, but certainly not everything.

You see, the outliers help me understand that having sex is a physical activity.  Physical activities take practice and can become skills.  I more or less got a PhD in sex, but I had a very narrow concentration.  I feel like sleeping with a nice guy is taking someone with a Marine Biology PhD and asking them to write a 1,000 page book on the history of China from 375AD-450AD.  They will probably say, “Uhhhh not so much.”  They aren’t stupid though, right?  They just don’t know this subject.

I don’t know nice guys.  Do you know why sex with Noah is so consistently good?  Because he’s a pushy asshole who bodily shoves me around so that the sex feels as good as possible for him.  Yeah, that’s going to get me off.  No really.  One of the very hottest feelings is when he manages to make it feel like he is using my cunt to masturbate his cock.  I’m not even going to bother with the whole “I don’t know why I do that” thing.  He’s objectifying me.  Noah is happy to objectify me for sex a couple of times a week for the rest of my life.  While handing me ridiculous amounts of time and money and telling me to go be whatever kind of person I want to be.  I already won the lottery.

Where do the outliers fit into this?  I sit around and think about them.  I think about what it would be like to be in a relationship with someone who was simply not comfortable ever objectifying me.  Would I be ok with it?  What would sex actually be like with someone who was so… passive.  Would we ever actually get to intercourse?  How in the hell do people manage to have sex anyway?!  This is all very confusing.  I don’t think I would have been able to do nice girl dating.  Either I want to have sex with you or I don’t.  And if I do, right now is as good of a time as three weeks from now.  This isn’t entirely true, of course.  I’m moody.  But anytime I’m in the mood is a good time.

The outliers are safe fantasy material.  I can beat my head against that wall for years and years and they tolerate me.  They (both P and J) often looked kind of bewildered by things I say, but I get the impression they like the titillation.  I never know what to do with being liked by people who don’t want to fuck me.  I feel this constant tension of… I have nothing to offer you.  How in the world could you like me.  But they do.  And eight years in I have consistent fantasy material about P and he’s a close friend and some day when Calli is older I may have to risk rejection and find out what it’s like to have sex with a nice guy.

But the outliers aren’t casual.  Once someone is in my inner monkey sphere… it’s different.  It can’t be casual.  Sex becomes dangerous because I don’t want to emotionally damage my people.  I worry about the structural integrity of nice guys whereas I don’t worry about assholes.  I find it interesting that all of the assholes deny that they are assholes.  (Except for Noah!)  I worry too much about whether or not I am responsible if the nice guys feel emotional pain.  Honestly, I expect the assholes to handle themselves.  I get codependent and wishy washy with people who appear “nice”.  I need to know that someone can handle the full intensity of my tactless communication.  I don’t know very many nice people who want to sign on for that.

J, my coworker, was different.  He is an intensely quiet man, which I find kind of hilarious from a high school teacher.  I have kind of this weird thing with him.  I think he is the only guy I know that I would describe as, “I think he has thought about me really intensely for a long time without ever picturing sex with me.”  I very rarely feel like that happens.  If people are going to think about me intensely, they add in the sex.  If they aren’t interested in sex with me, I feel like that means people won’t bother to think about me.

Sex is a way of increasing the likelihood that someone will think of me, even when I’m not there.  I feel more alive.  I feel like part of my spirit stays with the people I sleep with and then, forever, I have the promise of immortality.  I have touched them and something of me changed them.

Without the sex that feels impossible.  But then there are the outliers.  I guarantee you that P has thought about sex with me (yay!).  I have no actual idea about J.  I’m not going to be tacky enough to ask any year soon but maybe some day.  And yet, they both think about me a lot.  Without me having to fuck them.

That’s why the outliers matter.  Because maybe it’s all a big lie.  Maybe I don’t have to fuck people in order to be important.  Only it’s not a big lie.  Sex is important and it does change things.  But it’s not the be-all, end-all.  I need the random people from random groups who decide to pay attention to me because it gives lie to “I only appeal to ‘x’ kind of people in ‘y’ small subgroup.  Obviously I am a mutant who should be rejected by ‘normal’ people”.  BS.  I’m not because if anyone is not kinky, it’s J.  And he likes me a lot.  He thinks I am inspirational.  I don’t know whether or not P is interested in anything “kinky” but he’s interested in me.  He’s interested enough to read a torrent of words year after year.  Even though I’ve never gotten him off.

Interesting.