In which some jerks act like jerks.

I had an encounter awhile ago. A few months ago. I didn’t post about it at the time, because I was somewhat tired, a little upset and I was about to make dinner.

I was walking to the shops in the evening, going to pick up some food for dinner since we had nothing in the house and I was hungry. I get a little anxious sometimes walking around at night. Our area is not the greatest one around. Apparently for where we live this is the slums of our area, but I tell you they’re much nicer slums then when we lived in a capital city. Much nicer. Our area strikes me as strange. There’s a potential for dangerous things but usually people are just drunk/on various drugs and they just sort of shout at you - or have really odd conversations. The odd conversations are often kind of funny actually - like all the times random people have asked me if I’m german, and would I like to have some pot with them. I guess I give off german vibes.
The odd happenings might just be a me thing - since it doesn’t happen to my housemate or boyfriend. How much of that is me and how much of that is because I’m the only female in the house I can’t be sure. A bunch of the weird encounters have been akward guys with romantic thoughts. There have only been one or two times when the people talking to me have stricken me as actually dangerous.
Anyway - I was walking to the shops. This was fine and dandy. It was walking home from the shops where something happened.

Not too far away from my house there are these five or so drunk guys standing by the side of the road outside some apartments.
They yell something like hello, and I say hello back. We start talking. They confirm part of my self-consciousness, by being convinced that I’m on drugs even though I’m not. I… I don’t know. Apparently I’m a little strange in the way I speak, like the timing. N’I have an accent for some reason even though I’ve lived in Australia all my life around Australians. N’I guess I’m a little eccentric. So they thought I was high?
One of them even gets out his camera phone and holds it up to my eyes to check how they’re dilating and stuff and reports back to his friends “No, she doesn’t seem to be on drugs.”
Weird. But okay. We talk for a bit. I mean to continue on to my house, but they keep talking and it seems rude to just walk on by.
They’re tourists come in from New Zealand, I ask them how they’re liking Australia. They like it. They seem nice and conversational, but I’m weary. See. Another girl walks down the street, and one of them rushes off to talk to her and pull her in the way they pulled me in, but she just walked on by, and the guy who was trying to talk to her got all annoyed.
At one point one of the guys says to me something like “Why dont you two hook up, you’re single, he’s single”
I put on a little perplexed frown and tell them that I never said I was single, and that I’m not single. I have a boyfriend at home. He’s all like “Well, he doesn’t need to know” and my frown becomes a little more pronounced.
We move away from that topic onto something else. They invite me upstairs to join their party and I say that I really must decline.
They ask why, and I say I’m going home with my dinner-food to cook myself some tea. I’m hungry and I was just watching the television. I’m up for a boring night.
They say not to worry about dinner, one of them is a chef in training and has some great food upstairs. I say sorry, but I’d rather not.
They keep pressing me to go in, and I tell them that I can’t really. It’s not safe for a lone woman to go into the apartment of five random drunk guys she’s never met. They might be nice people, but I’m not willing to take that risk.
They get mad, especially the one I’ve been talking to for the longest. Like “why would you think that?” and I’m like. “I on’t know. Lots of girls get sexually assaulted, I don’t know you. You seem nice, but surely you can understand why I just want to go home.”
Him: “Did you hear that guys! She said I was going to sexually assault her!”
Me: “No. I didn’t. It’s just I don’t know you, there’s lots of you, and you’re all drunk. Can you see why that would be worrying?”
He storms off, and one of the dudes asks me if he can walk me home. I say no. and think to myself that I don’t need these creepy fellows knowing where I live. He keeps insisting he walk me home, and I keep telling him I’m fine. (If I were to censor my movements by walking with the protection of a male, it would be so I could be protected from _this_ type of crowd.)
As we discuss this - the guy who got mad at me and stormed off, along with some of his friends spray me with their hose while they’re on the balcony.
At which point I pretty much give them all the finger and seethe off.

Grr.

Talkin’ ’bout the pay gap and antifeminism

I keep hearing that there is no pay gap. That the “pay gap” exists because studies don’t take into account women leaving work after having babies, or that a large amount of women work in part time low paying jobs. (Out of pure choice no less.)

So to that I just want to say bullshit is all. To quote the article:
“So let’s just get this straight right now, says Murphy: That 23-cent differential is not because some women take time off to give birth or raise children. The pay-gap figure measures only women and men who work full time, for a full year. It does not include women who took time off during the year or worked part time.”

I hear that women have low pay because they’re typically not aggressive negotiators, so they end up short changing themselves by on average negotiating for lower starting wages then men generally do. (Where how much they get payed for the next job gets based on how much they were paid for the last job etc.)
I’m down with that. it makes sense. Hearing someone make this argument, and also make the argument that the wage gap doesn’t exist. Well… it’s startling is all. If women generally have lower pay because they’re not good negotiators, then… I mean the start of that sentence was “women generally have lower pay” right?
The thing that gets me about that is that if women are less likely to be aggressive in negotiating, isn’t that a reflection of the fact that women are trained in society to be passive while men are trained to be active and aggressive? I mean, that seems like a symptom of the way women in society are trained to be feminine. In short, it seems rather patriarchal.

The people who point out the pay gap doesn’t exist due to patriarchy, it exists due to womens own lack of being aggressive are often the same people who will say that domestic violence doesn’t affect women more then men, and that women are equally aggressive.
Either women are less aggressive (due to sexist societal training, in my opinion) and that accounts for the pay gap - or men and women in this society are equally aggressive. It doesn’t seem to me like it can go both ways.

I reckon’ I might as well post this on the antiantifeminist blog. So I will. I made it for this one, but really it might be more appropriate there. I’ll just post it to both. (antiantifeminist is still on blogspot. I might change that soon.)

*Remembering that I define patriarchy as systems that benefit men at the expense of women, and not women being deliberately exploited by men, all men. Patriarchy is a society thing that benefits men. Saying “women perpetuate it” doesn’t stop it from being patriarchal.

I have the privilege not to care.

I missed the international day of action against the NT invasion. I’d meant to write about it. I thought about it. But I forgot the date and let it slip by. If it affected me more I bet I would have never forgotten. My privilege. It be showin.’
Might as well write about it now ey?
I don’t know to well what to write. I wrote something vaguely about policies in the NT here. (A “why aren’t they doing this to white communities” thing) but that doesn’t really say much…

It’s hard for me to know what to say. The policies they’re implementing are clearly racist and fucked up. What gets me is how… self righteous so many Australians are about these things. Like. There was this thing where Howard was saying something like ‘Many Australians would be offended at the idea that they should say sorry to the Aboriginal people’
and then I was watching something like Today Tonight. Some politician from New Zealand called Howard a racist bastard because of the policies he’s implementing. Shit went down and he apologized to Howard and people from New Zealand. The presenter of the show I was watching was asking angrily why he hadn’t apologized to the Australian people, since they were the ones he insulted.

Offended. Insulted.

There are a bunch of Australians that get offended and insulted when you start piping up about racism. In the last week I’ve had two angry exchanges with real life friends this week. One of them was talking about how the settlers brought great things to this country and that there was only a supposed genocide anyway.
Supposed.
Supposed?

The other one was talking about how he earned everything he’s done in life. That university degree. All earned. I asked him how he earned the privilege of being in a decent neighborhood and going to a good primary school when he was younger. Just because “your primary school” is surely an example of unearned privilege that he’d understand, which he apparently seemed to get.
So passionate about things being right the way there are. “‘Supposed’ genocide.” “I earned everything I have”

Meanwhile ‘Ccording to that information sheet floating around the internet about the international day of solidarity against the NT invasion the government can take lands without compensation. Aboriginals who are doing alright under the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) will be pushed onto welfare. Aboriginal communities will be monitored by outside folks put into positions of authority over who stays and who goes.
That and a whole slew of human rights abuses.
S’fucked.

Ima copy that thing here. The day might be over, but the information is still good.

————–

Call for Solidarity with Aboriginal People in the Northern Territory
Stop the Invasion!

International Day of Action, November 17th

In June this year, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, announced that there would be a ‘National Emergency Response’ to combat child abuse in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. The measures announced included the quarantining of half of all welfare payments, the abolition of the Community Development Employment Program, the appointment of managers for 73 prescribed communities, compulsory sexual health examinations of children, and the abolition of the permit system, amongst other things.

These measures are a violation of human rights, and is obviously racist and authoritarian. The passage of the Emergency Response legislation is dependent on the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, and the Northern Territory Native Title Act. Federal police and the military have been sent into the NT to enforce these measures.

Aboriginal people that work through the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) manage their own wages and money. Abolishing CDEP will push people onto welfare and the welfare income management system that allows for quarantining and tight control of how people’s money is spent. Many people running businesses on CDEP in remote outstations are already being forced to move into larger regional towns. The extraordinary measures give the Federal Government power to seize lands and property without compensation. The owners of those lands and properties have no right of appeal. Lands will be leased for five years, but the government has plans to extend these measures for 99 years. It is entirely up to ministerial discretion whether rent is paid on those lands or not.

The Federal Government has appointed non-Indigenous business managers to the ‘prescribed’ communities. These managers have the power to decide who lives in a community and who must leave; they can observe any meeting of an organisation working at the community, they can change any local programme. Many Aboriginal communities consider these measures, often being administered by under-prepared military personnel, as an invasion rather than an intervention.

These measures return Aboriginal people to the days of mission stations, where life was tightly controlled by authoritarian managers. It is a return to times of colonial control on Aboriginal life, and the complete absence of any autonomy or self-determination. The removal of basic property rights as enjoyed by all other Australians, with the abolition of the permit system, is a gross violation of human rights. Even the Northern Territory police oppose this measure, for the likely adverse effect it will have on crime.

Some $570 million is being spent on these measures. Half of that money will be spent on the salaries of 700 new bureaucratic positions created to regulate this intervention. $88 million will be spent on measures to control the incomes of Aboriginal people on any government payment (including aged pensions and veterans payments).

This is an insult to the hard work of Aboriginal people who have been campaigning for basic services in remote communities. Roads, schools, health care, housing and social services are desperately needed by these communities. It is estimated that the housing backlog alone for Northern Territory Aboriginal communities is half a billion dollars. Moreover, with the publication of the Closing the Gap report by Oxfam earlier this year, it has been shown that Indigenous life expectancy is 17 years below that of non-Indigenous life expectancy.

A week and a half ago, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, announced the Federal election for November 24th.

This came shortly after Australia voted against the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples (along with Canada, New Zealand and the USA).

It is time to stand up for justice for Indigenous peoples everywhere, to demand either a change of policy, or a change of government!

One week before the Australian Federal election, on November 17th, various groups across Australia will be taking action to show opposition to the Federal government’s intervention into the Northern Territory. We hope that those outside Australia will join us in calling for an end to this government, an end to racist, colonialist policies towards Indigenous people, and support for the strong self-determination that Indigenous people demonstrate every day.

With allegations that the Australian Federal government is manipulating international media about the intervention, it is vitally important that information about the intervention and views of Indigenous people in the Northern Territory are widely disseminated through social justice networks. Please use your community and activist media to promote the interests of Indigenous Australians, and Indigenous people worldwide!

Learn more:

National Aboriginal Alliance: nationalaboriginalalliance.org/

Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the Northern Territory - alternative to the government’s Emergency Response:
snaicc.asn.au/news/documents/CAOreport8july.pdf
Women for Wik: womenforwik.org/
Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation: antar.org.au/
Oxfam: oxfam.org.au/world/pacific/australia/
Koori Mail: koorimail.com/

Things you can do:

1. Organise a protest outside the Australian Consulate in your nearest city. Make it clear that the Howard government’s shameful opportunism on human rights is gathering international criticism.

2. Donate to the National Aboriginal Alliance.

3. Spread the news of this horrendous violation of human rights to as many people as possible. Write an article about it, post to your blog about it, send the news to your friends via email. Encourage your friends to speak out about it as well.

4. If you are part of a political organisation, collective, or group, please send your words of solidarity and support to the National Aboriginal Alliance. Send messages of solidarity to: secretariat at nationalaboriginalalliance dot org.

5. Write letters to Mal Brough, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, or John Howard. You can find guidelines here: http://www.antar.org.au/action/current_actions/

" "I support homosexuality" :D "

“Why on earth do people come out with trite crap like that?
It may have good intentions behind it, but really if you think about it it’s patronizing as hell and completely pointless.
Do gay or bi people walk up to straight people and say “I’m not straight myself, but I support straight people!”
No.
Because it’s a sexuality. It doesn’t need your support.
It just is.
It’s pretty much someone saying “I approve of your sexuality”
I don’t need your approval! Fuck off!

It’s almost as pointless as people saying
“Aww, you’re gay! I love gay people!” or “Gay boys are cute”
Bollocks.
You can’t love “gay people”, there are too many of them and not enough time.
Gay boys are just boys who are gay. They are not cute. They are individuals. Some are quite hideous and make small babies cry.
Just because they like the cock doesn’t automatically make them cute!
…unless you’re also gay very drunk and very horny and the lights are quite dim.

Anyhow. I was going somewhere with this.
Yes.

If I walked up to a group of black people and said
“Aww! You’re black! I support black people”
I’d probably get a free ride in an ambulance.

If you honestly don’t have a problem with people who have different sexualities to your own, then treat them ‘normally’.
Don’t patronize them or make them feel like they should be grateful that you accept or approve of them. They don’t need your approval.
It’s a sexuality, not a show dog.”

A gay man on a forum I regularly visit wrote the above as a response to seeing a topic somewhere else with the title “I support homosexuality”
Inside the topic, everyone was praising the original poster for their views.
There are bits I wouldn’t say myself. I wouldn’t make the comparison between the treatment of heterosexuality and the treatment of homosexuality because one of them is a privileged group and the other isn’t, but the point still stands. People in oppressed groups don’t need strange useless seeming people making them feel awkward.
They’re still people, so treat them like you would anyone else.
I would have left out the analogy between being gay, and being black. For one thing, comparing oppressions isn’t cool and for another it suggests to me that black = violent.

I thought I’d post it here anyway in an unaltered form, to get it a bit of a larger readership. Only like 10 people go to the forum it was posted in. The username of the guy who write it is ‘Ebil” N’he gave me permission to reproduce it.

ITT: Cellycel admits to being a terrible person, and yammers on too much about D&D.

There was a guy at my old work who used to complain about his ex-wife and ex-girlfriend a lot. In doing so, he made quite a number of jokes about women. Now, I put up with this the first few times, and called him out on it later.
He told me that he was a misogynist, and replied that I was a feminist. He told me that feministsw ere what made him a misogynist. If I were wittier I would have said that misogynists were what made me a feminist, but instead I had to get back to doing my work.
When we got a chance to speak again I was all “So… you actually hate women? And you’ll like, admit it?”

He told me he didn’t hate women really, he was just very angry with his ex-wife, and I raised an eyebrow and got on with my work.

Well - I just saw him again tonight at a big old games day being held by the universities roleplaying society. One event was a giant oneshot D&D game (In which I did not take part.) there was two teams of player characters. One team was evil, and the other team was good. The evil team were powergamers, the good team were not.
So, they play. Each team has to recover one item. (The good team are getting a breastplate, the evil team are getting a crown.)
As they go through, the good team learns that the two items put together will cause a great evil to arise, so they destroy the crown. Then they tell the (very powerful) evil guy they were fetching the crown for, that the other team destroyed it.
Then someone from the good team tells someone from the evil team about this whole “blaming it on you” situation.

So the evil team get pissed. They’re like “Well, if you’re screwed us, we’ll screw you!” and the good and evil teams fight. The evil team beats the fucking pants off the good team.

My old workmate is on the good team. He got pissed off. Like really pissed off. He was the only person to be angry with the situation. He called one of the guys on the evil team a dickhead, and said he didn’t want to play with people who acted that stupid.
My first thought was “Well don’t play, no loss to us.” but what I said was “You’re the only person who seems to think that was stupid.”

He said “Yeah, well I’m allowed to think that, and I’m allowed to express my opinions.”

What I thought was: “Yes, and we’re allowed to think you’re a dickhead for it and we could express it if we wanted”
What I said was: “Yes, but that doesn’t make you right.”

At which point his eyes bulged, and I was told not to fuel the fire by another dude. He says “Yes, but it doesn’t make you guys right either!” with venom. Oh it was venomous.

So, this time I said the first thing that came into my head: “No, it doesn’t, but you called him a dickhead first…”

So he apologized to the other guy for calling him a dickhead. The other guy brings up the fact that the good team acted dishonorably first, in a way that would get the evil tam killed, and responding with anger was only in character. My old workmate admitted that setting up the bad guys wasn’t nice, and apologized but still thought that killing their characters in return was stupid.
He left the room angrily.

I know he’s still angry right now and for some reason that pleases me. I don’t like that guy, and the fact that he’s angry, and I’m happy… Well. That’s pretty damned neat. He got _sooooo_ angry. N’he was the only person who really cared.
I’ve had shitty things happen to me by other team mates. Once our characters had been wandering through a swamp for like a week. My character decided “screw this, I’m leaving the swamp” so all the other characters killed me, and sacrificed me to their dark gods using my characters horse as a sacrificial altar, and then immediately left the swamp.
Considering they killed me because I wanted to leave the swamp. I thought this was shitty. I thought it was way more then shitty.
But what could I do? I could start a huge fight with all the other players, or I could make a new character, and get on with it to have more fun. I chose the latter.
I’m inclined to think most people choosing the former are being dickheadly. (Though it does depend on the situation.)

In this case, I totally think Mr. Misogynist was acting dickheadly.

Strangely, he invited me to play in a game he runs. He’s selective about who gets to play in his games, because he doesn’t like or want powergamers, or basher types, and he screens the games so people he doesn’t like can’t play. It’s interesting that he invited me to play. I don’t know if I’ll do it or not. I talked to my boyfriend about it, and he was all:

“It’s Vampire the masquerade, which means there will be sex themes. You’re you, and he’s him. That’s like a recipe for arguments right there.”

So I imagine I shouldn’t play in his game.

I might do it anyway though.

>.>
<.<

*is a terrible person*

I was watching the news tonight, and I saw coverage of the civil rights protesters rallying about the Jenna Six. I saw the dude man talking, and the icon about the news item to be talked about came up, and there was a picture of a noose with the word ‘Jenna’ or something like that.
I saw the icon and was like ‘WTF they’re covering this on real live television! That’s awesome’ so I sat down to watch it.

The news report was _not_ awesome.

They basically said that six black students had been accused of assaulting a white student, and that black protesters were upset about racism. It used phrases like “Jena was filled with a sea of black faces” noting that one the day “all businesses in the small town had been closed.”
It felt to me like fear mongering. Be afraid of these black protesters, or at the very least, mock them.

The whole thing about white students hanging nooses from trees that the black students decided to sit under one day? Not mentioned. The fact that a white guy drew a gun on a bunch of men of colour? Not mentioned. The fact that black students had been harassed and intimidated? You guessed it. This news article didn’t mention any of that.

All it said was that 6 black students had been accused of assaulting a white student, and that a sea of black faces had come to protest racism.

THEN: They talked to some white peeps who lived in Jena. One white guy said something like it was just humans sweating, or something, and that the black people in Jena don’t even care about this trial.
Some other white lady was also most displeased.

Why did they get a _white guy_ to talk about how the _not white guys_who live there think? They couldn’t ask people of colour what they think themselves? We have to get these things filtered by white guys who seem to know all?
Grr.

ARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH.

*stupidracistmediaI’mgladIhavetheinternetorI’dbealotmoreignotantthenIalreadyamand
jesuschristthat’ssayingsomethingfuuuuck*

Women in D&D - a short linklist.

Alright. There was this thread on the wizards of the coast board called “Astrids Parlour - a haven for women in gaming”

It was full of whiny young men talking about how women don’t need spaces to talk about gaming, because aren’t they just like everyone else? This is sexist! RARHRARGHRAGH!!!

The thread got pulled down and replaced with a lss controversial “How to support women in gaming”

See how the first title was a place for women to talk, and the second title seems to imply to me a place where men can talk about women? I’m not sure I like that.

Here’s some links anyway.

http://www.additiverich.com/morgue/archives/002101.html
http://peaseblossom.livejournal.com/448610.html

Argh! You know how ages ago I was annoyed because I got in this big old fight with a friend who told me that the image from 300 of the white guy kicking the black guy down the well with the phrase “go back to Africa” on it wasn’t racist, because it was just taking the sentiment from the movie, and wasn’t intended to be a racist phrase?

Well, today he told me the term “bitch” isn’t sexist, because you can call men and women bitch.

Geez…

*Stupids*

I visited my boyfriend’s parents yesterday, and got into something of a large argument with the beau’s mother.
See, the last time we went up, we watched this documentary thing on graffiti and street art in Melbourne. A lot of the artists had their own political agendas, mostly liberal white boyz saying their piece. There was this funny one where someone drew a picture of bush on the sidewalk saying “piss on me” which made me giggle. Imagine walking on that sidewalk ey?
Anyway, since what they do is illegal a lot of them were wearing masks for the documentary. Cute ones and silly ones. One apparently had some mask from warhammer, only with their own decorations on it, one had an internet cartoon on it, and one in particular had a Ned Kelly mask on.

Mr. Ned Kelly talked about the media, and corporations and what not. Most of them did to some extent. He was a liberal white boy himself. He also put up pictures of Ned Kelly all over the place, said something about reviving the romance of our history or something like that.
So’s I was thinking, and said out loud that there wasn’t anything romantic about the days of Ned Kelly. That was colonialism in its peak, and how can someone who is against systems of oppression start glorifying colonial times.
I said I thought that maybe since Mr. Ned Kelly was a rebellious figure that maybe it was rebelling against colonialism, but I doubted it. So then my boyfriends mother started talking to me, and the racism of colonialism was brought up, and how the effects of it linger on to today, and all this. She seemed to get annoyed because I was saying that aboriginals deserve this country and we took it away from ‘em, and she tells me about how white people are here now, and what are we expected to do? All leave the country? And I was like “Jesus, I don’t know”

So when I went to see her yesterday, she asked me if I was part of any aboriginal rights groups. When I told her no, she said that’s not the impression she’d got from our last visit.
Basically she brought up the subject so she could pick a fight. My boyfriend told me that she really enjoys arguing.
She asked me what I thought of the new restrictions at the aboriginal communities, and I told her I thought banning porn and alcohol for aboriginal people and not white people is fucking racist, and she agreed.
I told her I’d be cool with a nationwide ban on porn, because really I think it causes harm, and she agreed.
But she went on about how white people are disadvantaged, and how as a white person she had less scholarship opportunities, and all sorts of things, where I was like “JESUS CHRIST YOU HAVE MORE OPPORTUNITIES BECAUSE YOU’RE WHITE”
At one point she’s talking about strategies to help make black communities better, and she says “Well obviously giving them things doesn’t work.” and I got a bit mad at her.

The most ridiculous thing though is that we were having this big old argument, and we’re both ignorant white women. I kept feeling like I had to speak up because what she was saying was so wrong and ignorant, and what I was saying was very likely so wrong and ignorant as well.
Two ignorant white women arguing in a room about aboriginal rights. I read a book on aboriginal Australia, and I read some WOC blogs now and then, fuck. What the hell do I know about aboriginal rights? Nothing. Because they don’t matter to me in the scheme of things.

Because my boyfriends mother did this just because she likes to argue, the next time she sees me, it’ll be the same as always, we’ll chat about books or whatever, she might make lunch, well be friends again.
Because we’ve got the privilege not to have to really worry about what’s going on. We can afford to have an argument about something that “doesn’t matter”

Eck, Eck, Eck.

Nothing right about it.

I’m feeling drained right now. Perhaps too drained to really write, we’ll see how that goes.

At 5:00am I woke to a sudden start, I don’t know why. I remember I was dreaming, but that I didn’t die in the dream or anything like that. I was just suddenly, and startlingly awake.
My boyfriend was on the computer, with me sleeping beside him. Sort of how I’m on the computer, and he’s sleeping beside me right now.
After my sudden awakening, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I don’t know, I felt somewhat startled like there was adreneline running through me or something, but I don’t think that’s really what happened.

So I gave up, and crawled over to my boyfriend. I gave him a little hug and looked at the computer screen, where I saw him reading some manga scan. There were two girls talking to each other in a classroom.
He closed the window down, right away, and started to look at a website we both go on. I started to get worried. I shut down windows when he looks over my shoulder all the time, it pretty much doesn’t matter what I’m doing in the window, it just feels really uncomfortable if he looks over my shouler when I type things. (I had an ex who used to do that a lot. I don’t like it.) but he usually doesn’t care if I see what’s on his computer screen.

“What were you reading?” I asked him, and he brushed me off. I don’t know what he said… it would have been something to do with that website we go on, what something someone has done was. I was feeling suspicious. Fuck, more then suspicious. I had this feeling in my gut. He hadn’t been reading hentai, really, had he? I look down at the minimized folder, and it looks something like C:/Programs/Nvidia…
That didn’t feel good. Hiding things in random subfolders, not good at all.

I asked him what he was reading again, and he gave me a list of website names. So, I start to feel worse. He was hiding things from me. (And like normal, I wasn’t naming the things. I knew it was porn, but didn’t name it in my head.) I turn away for a minute, and look back, and that Nvidia folder was closed. I told him I had meant the manga, what manga was he reading.
He said “Oh that!” and started telling me about how he found this one meg scan, and wasn’t that amazing? Only one meg, the compression on that shit is great!” (Well, he didn’t swear, that’s my own thing there, I added that.)

So, I go to use the computer, check out some websites. I really want to check his most recent documents, because… I just had to know. He knew that was why I wanted to use the computer, and he looked over my shoulder, I think as a way to stop me from doing it. It stopped me for a minute or so, but then I looked. Yep. Hentai.

We had something like a four hour argument/discussion/thing, and I still don’t know the result of it.
I… he said he’d stop looking at it if it hurt me, but that rang hollow. I felt cheated, I felt lied to. He knows my stance on porn, he never seemed to argue it. I asked him what he thought of porn, and he told me that he didn’t like it, because no-one ever seemed happy. There was a subtext of exploitation I thought he was getting at there, and perhaps he was. Perhaps he doesn’t see hentai in the same light.
I don’t know. I didn’t expect to have this argument. Umm…

So, he nearly became not my boyfriend anymore a number of times throughout the argument. I’d say I didn’t want to date him anymore, and he told me he’d not download it anymore. I told him that the fact he downloaded it in the first place when he knew my feelings on the matter was hurtful, he said he tried to hide it so I wouldn’t feel bad and he’d “done his duty” (I got furious at that one. After hours of trying to explain each others points of view, my mind still boggles at that. Fuck.)

I felt trapped, he’s so damned reasonable and so damned rational.

I asked him at some point under what circumstances could I break up with him, without him being so damned logical. When is it reasonable for me to break up with him? He said “When you actually do it.” It reminds me of what Biting Beaver wrote about coersion, and I don’t like it.

So anyways. I don’t know how I feel right now. I’m writing this without any passion, but there have been tears for sure.

I…

There’s no second chances if I find he does this again.