Like a lot of people in the US of A, I am taking a long weekend. Posting may be a little light for a bit. So here’s an open thread for everyone else taking a long weekend. Or not. Use this thread for anything that’s not personal. Like misogyny, politics, kitties, you know the drill. (Though kitties are welcome in all threads, of course.)
I am hoping my long weekend turns out a bit better than that of the people in the Australian movie of that name from 1978, which I keep meaning to see. Apparently their little beach vacation doesn’t go so well, and they are attacked by … nature? At one point, I believe, they face off against an enraged dugong. (No, really.) The movie was recently remade, but apparently the remake wasn’t as good.
Stay tuned for more reviews of movies I haven’t seen and that I’m just giving vague impressions of based on things I’ve heard somewhere.
Yeah, I don’t plan on wearing falsies or anything like that because I’m much more focused on actual bodily changes. Like, in addition to hormones, I want to try to get breast augmentation surgery done some time in my life. I’m hoping I can get breasts that aren’t bigger than a B (although I’m not even sure if it’s possible to have C+ breasts as a result of surgery in the first place) so I can avoid wearing bras.
Lol, you know the rope scene in Boondock Saints? Wtf do you need the rope for? Among other potentional things, hoisting food out of the reach of larger animals.
I’d also spent a bit researching edible plants in the areas you’ll be in. I know up here we have wild blueberries and they are AMAZING. That’s half “because it might save your ass” and half “because they can be so much better than store bought food”.
LBT, I go to college in the Fargo/Moorhead area, so right on the border between North Dakota and Minnesota. I won’t be there until late August when school starts up again, though.
And bras – I’ve only had trouble with bras when there was a sizing issue or when they had wire or padding. I bought a new t-shirt bra that’s downright comfortable. Then again, I have a small cup size, so YMMV.
Ally — you should be fine then. And yeah, you can get HUGE implants, but for average female sized breasts, why bother?
My mother has silly large breasts (like, I talked her into letting me measure, she’d be like a J cup or something) — she refuses to deal with bras and wears undershirts to keep them sorta in place. Her sisters are both B~ cups and neither seems to mind bras any. So YMMV is totally true.
Regarding mosquitoes… I picked up some Benadryl anti-itch cream earlier and am loving it. First stuff I’ve ever used that actually helped any!
Totally going in my emergency kit (which contains things for such “emergencies” as needing a computer speaker! [hey! It was useful yesterday! One of the techs where my mother works took an online certification test and needed speakers for it, the office doesn’t, have any, I did. Emergency speaker justified!])
RE: Ally S
Agreed on enthusiastic consent bit. My rapist was a rules laywer type; once I said yes, it didn’t matter how or what got it out of me–I had Officially Agreed To One (1) Instance of Sex, and it couldn’t be undone. It didn’t matter if I just laid there and cried the entire time, it satisfied his ideas of consent. (And mine for a long time too–I didn’t know there was anything else.)
RE: Argenti
You are godsauce. Am reading up on those right now! And yes, I DEFINITELY want to know more about edible plants. The more I can forage, the better. And I did know about the rope bit–though the joke was, “Bears? Fuck bears, this is to keep KIDS out of your shit.” At the time, I thought she was joking, but sure enough, some pubescent twits tried to dig into my food and I had to shout at them.
Sooner, rather than later, I hope.
Of course, in my deepest of dreams lately I have been thinking of getting an old school bus and doing this to it
and then roaming about the country wherever the weather takes me.
I think that a large component of happiness is deciding to be. It doesn’t get you all the way there, and plenty of stuff will put you behind go, but it is a big piece. I’m just learning how to internalize this for myself now.
Random, and I’m not an outdoorsy person, but friends who are swear by peanut butter as a good thing to carry in terms of emergency food. It’s high in calories, fairly nutritious, and stable in a variety of conditions. There’s a reason that at least one org is now using it as the basis of their famine-relief efforts.
@Dvar:
“Coming back to this thread again and Obsidian Files tells me, in response to my post saying that my experience of one-night-stands have been two people enthusiastically and reciprocally engaging in sex, thus no difficulty in knowing whether the other person consent or not, that this kind of sex isn’t for all men.”
O: Yes, I was hoping we’d revisit that topic…
“Um, okay. So apparently I’ve only had sex with men who are hot enough (?) for me to get enthusiastic over. But men who aren’t that hot must settle for women who… idk… mostly just lie there? Which makes it very difficult to know if the woman consents or not?”
O: Well, it seems to me that we’ve all agreed that under such “Rules of Engagement”, the guy is to simply NOT GO THERE – right? I mean, he’s not getting the “enthusiastic consent” you clearly gave to quite a few Men on your numerous one night stands – right? And I know, for one, that I certainly wouldn’t chance going there if I’m the “non-hot” guy. It’s just too risky, too much to lose. I’m just pulling the plug and calling it a night.
“This is so WTF that I don’t even… Look. Although people’s taste differ, obviously some men will be considered hot by lots of people because their looks confirm more to conventional attractiveness norms. So if someone were to point out that some men can easily get one night stands and for others it’s way more difficult, fine, I’m not gonna object to that. But OF seems to be saying, rather, that some men get enthusiastic sex and others non-enthusiastic…? Like WTF?”
O: Well – would what I’m saying along these lines be untrue? I mean, take the non-hot guy – clearly, he can’t make a hot one night stand of the variety you’ve talked about happen, because by definition, he’s not the kind of guy who can make such things happen. Right?
So, he has to go the “long” route…dating, courting and so on. If things go route, he might be able to “grow on her” enough for him to make something happen along those lines. However, and interestingly enough, I read an article about this on Captain Awkward, “The Art of No” I think it was called, the chances of him not getting another date is high. Especially if he’s going the online dating route, which is what CA was specifically talking about.
Mr. Not Hot Guy may have done everything right, and just came up short regardless. It happens A LOT. Much, much more than we’d like to admit. Which is why we don’t talk about it, on either “side” of the debate, because everyone knows it happens and no one has legitimate rejoinder to it. Dude is just stuck. Meanwhile, girlfriend has had a nice night out on the town and has saved her from the boredom of whatever was going on at home. This is what CA has actually said on her blog.
“He says he’s telling me what things are like “from the other side” – the other side of what? Some kind of dimensional barrier that separates OF:s universe from ours?”
O: What I mean by that is the respective “camps” – the Feminist one, which is NOT entirely made up of Women I might add, and the Manosphere one.
At any right Dvar, my point to you was that a key component in your having so many one night stands was that you had the good fortune to be with guys who were just hot enough for you, to go there. But that is not the norm, heck, YOU, as a Woman, are not the norm. Most Women don’t have tons of one night stands to begin with, to say nothing of hitting a lucky streak run of hot guys to have said ONS’ with. Just doesn’t happen that way.
Most guys aren’t hot enough to get a Woman to say “Yes!” to a one night stand with him, which means, if he wants to have any hope of having a romantic relationship at all, he’s gotta go the whole dating route…which is…not very efficient. And potentially expensive.
That’s all I’m saying.
I get what all of you are saying about the consent thing, and I’m on board with it for reasons I’ve made clear throughout the discussion. All I’m saying is that it sounds downright cruel to leave guys like the awkward and clueless, NOT the douches, out there twisting in the wind, on their own. True, it ain’t the responsibility of the Feminists to do it, and clearly you guys don’t like the PUA approach; and the Feminist-friendly guys, for whatever reason, don’t see fit to educate their brethren on how to get er done either. It’s almost like we’re telling them, either you got it or you don’t and if you don’t, too bad.
I mean…wow…
O.
RE: augochlorella
Well, I wouldn’t be in your neck of the woods until October at the earliest anyway. (And probably more like November.) I very well might drop by, though!
Poor men, totally unable to Google things or sign up for dating services without outside help.
Um, I’m pretty sure “treat women like human beings, have sex with women who want to have sex with you” has been said to every man at least once. Will saying it over and over again get the point across?
“how to get er done.” I’m pretty sure that high school Biology covers this pretty well.
@Cassandra:
“(Notes that the bra conversation seems to have done the trick. I guess talking about boobs in a non-sexualized way is like kryptonite for misogynists.)”
O: If you’re referring to me, I’m not a misogynist, one, and two, I don’t make it a habit of discussing body parts like that. Just not my way.
O.
Truly, the fact that the world doesn’t stop and make teaching guys who aren’t getting laid as much as they would like how to get laid more often is an epic tragedy and the most important issue of our times. Acknowledging the fact that some people just aren’t all that desirable to others and this means that there may be no ethical way for them to get laid as much as they’d like is a crime against humanity.
Anyway, back to the bra conversation! I really think a lot of it is about fit, like with any other kind of clothing. Bras that fit poorly are uncomfortable, bras that fit well less so. Bigger boobs make any discomfort more obvious because of both their weight and the fact that it’s harder to find bras to fit them.
CS: Holy crap he’s still doing it! This one really is as immune to mockery as he is to the idea that women are people.
CS: Everyone should type like this until he realizes how idiotic it looks.
CS.
“Why aren’t feminists doing more to help men have sex with women who don’t want to have sex with them?”
Because feminists don’t support rape or manipulation?
GRB: He’s more than a little oblivious, so that’s gonna take a while.
GRB.
RE: CassandraSays
Peanut butter is great stuff. I plan to carry it, potatoes, bread, carrots, hard-boiled eggs, dried-fruit, and nuts at all times. Decently balanced, lasts without fridge, can be eaten on their own or cooked together. (Plus lentils, just because I like lentils and they last forever.)
RE: ObsidianFiles
I’m a gay man, and even if I weren’t married and mono, there is literally not a person alive hot enough for me to risk a one-night stand on them. I don’t care if Gregory Kieth dropped out of the sky and threw himself at me.
At this point, I wish sex work would be legalized. On top of all the other reasons, maybe then these guys would stop acting like a sex shortage is so incredibly awful. Am I just MISSING some key component of my male brain or something? What the hell?
@LBT — if you’re going to forage, make sure you know your shit and you have good maps. Christopher McCandless walked out into the wilds of Alaska without good maps, started eating the wrong plant because he misidentified it, and starved to death because he got into a caloric tailspin. He got stranded in a flood and could have hiked out via an alternate route if he’d known about it.
Sorry if I’m lecturing y’all, and I’m hardly an authority on camping out (if Pecunium wanders past, maybe he can give you advice), but I got worried when you started talking about it.
(Incidentally, Google is a wonderful search engine, albeit a government stool pigeon. I didn’t remember McCandless’ name, but after a Google search for “this guy starved to death in alaska” ….)
@Ugh:
“Poor men, totally unable to Google things or sign up for dating services without outside help.”
O: As I indicated earlier, Jon Millward out of the UK has conducted an interesting study which shows that online dating isn’t very helpful for most guys; this corroborates in-house studies done by OKC itself:
http://jonmillward.com/blog/attraction-dating/cupid-on-trial-a-4-month-online-dating-experiment/
If I can find the OKTrends link I’ll post it. Interestingly enough, online dating doesn’t work for most guys for much the same reasons that I discussed with Dvar why most guys don’t get one night stands – because they’re in no way “hot” enough in the eyes of many (most?) Women.
““how to get er done.” I’m pretty sure that high school Biology covers this pretty well.”
O: The mechanics of reproduction? Definitely. But teaching Seduction? Attractiveness? Grooming? Body language? Last time I checked, no Biology class, high school or anywhere else, was teaching that…
O.
But you’re upbraiding them right this moment.
Literally.
@Cassandra:
“CS: Holy crap he’s still doing it! This one really is as immune to mockery as he is to the idea that women are people.”
O: Told ya…
“CS: Everyone should type like this until he realizes how idiotic it looks.
CS.”
O: I see it’s starting to catch on…
😉
O.
Actually, I need to go shopping for a new sports bra. I have a couple but they have a tendency to smoosh everything toward the center for the dreaded monoboob instead of pulling everything flat against the chest to keep things from moving. After the Marathon bombing, I decided that by next marathon day I was going to be able to run at least a 5K (hopefully in less time than the marathon itself takes!). Since one of the main side effects of prednisone is to make you eat ALL THE THINGS, I’ve got a bit more to try to keep in place than I did before I got sick and I need a bit of extra help. Wearing an underwire under my sports bra is not an ideal solution…
Shit, missed the part where you said you were going to be carrying a larder on your back. McCandless’ problem was he ran out of stuff like that.
Sorry.
CS: Dudebro thinks that you can teach attractiveness?
CS: This just in! The appropriate course of study can change your genes and reshape your facial features, as well as change your body type.
CS: That’ll be $2000 for the basic seminar, extra if you also want the supplementary course on how to change your penis size.
CS.
LBT, if you can afford to splurge a bit, go for the dehydrated peanut butter! It weighs less so you can carry more of it, and it rehydrates just fine.