Friday 19 September 2014

Faked Out

These have been tumultuous times for your dear Brenda... I know, I know... when are things otherwise for your resident drama queen? But this time, it's different.

[singing: fooled around and fell in loooove…]

Fell in, fell out, and shook it all about... now, of course, you can never really fall out of love, but you can hurt the living shit out of each other like nobody else. I am not proud of my actions, but I am also not disdainful of those against me.

Anyway, that is not even my point. The fact that my girlfriend was really my boyfriend is only incidental, and certainly nothing to be ashamed of, right? The thing that upsets me the most is how this disrupts my entire philosophy.

I had come to the conclusion over recent months (years, even) that bimbo-ism is a gender neutral thing. Now it occurs to me that the women I met through my blogs, and elsewhere on the Internet, were all men: virtually every single one of them.

The most recent and prominent point in case is Summer, from Summer's Captions, a veeeeery popular Tumblr site. Part of its appeal was the (completely fabricated) backstory of its otherwise talented author. His writing would have stood on its own... why do people lie?

Easy answer: for attention. We all want dem chicks, but they simply aren't out there, not the ones who are into what we're into… in the way that we’re into it. So we create them, we fill the void with fraudulent personas… and oh, how sissies flock!

More difficult answer: the Internet allows us to live our desires. Yes, we crave the attention, but it is also about the personal expression of something deep and meaningful inside. What is gender, what is identity, in a cybernetic world? Please tell me.

I still haven't thought all of this fully through, not with the attention it deserves. Right now, I am still dealing with significant anger and resentment… partially at myself, for my own naiveté, and also at the flagrant disregard we seem to have for members of our own community.

In the prisoners dilemma, where the optimal outcome is based on trust, there will always be those who seek to gain by defection. Stop it. I need this world, and I refuse to see it ruined by liars and intellectual criminals. Accept your obscurity, your loneliness, and help us all build something better together.

I've said it before: all we have is ourselves. Nobody else cares for us, so let's start caring for ourselves, and treating each other with honesty and respect.

I can forgive all these people, and perhaps even love them (see top) but they have yet to account for the shattering of my worldview... or the breaking of my heart. Running and hiding is the cowardly approach. Stand up. Be a man. Better yet, be a woman: courageous, strong and accountable.

Am I perfect? Yes. Get over it!

Enjoy!


2 comments:

  1. Naive or not, I'm sorry you were hurt. Don't be too hard on yourself.

    Nobody likes us because our ironic ambivalence to our own "identity" and "sexuality" and "gender" shines a light on their dogmatic attachment to their own. Maybe.

    That's a good caption. It has a sprinkle of the old Brenda genius.

    PhiL

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  2. You're right! I see that now!

    ReplyDelete