Peace in America is inevitable

One of the things I liked most about working on the phones at call centres in the customer service dept, was the feeling I'd get at a certain stage of a call with a caller on the other end going ballistic. A feeling that a happy ending to the call was inevitable. 

You build up a thick skin working in call centres, but the solidarity and comradery with fellow workers enables you to endure the daily lughole batterings and keeps you feeling like a human being and not some cog or tool or device being utilised by a system.

Many times my first call of the day would be the customer running on peak anger who needed to inject it directly into the intended target while it was still fresh. 

But that kind of pure anger is a rare and special vintage that doesn't last very long if it has to fuel itself. So I'd just listen to the customer and shut the hell up until I was certain they'd said everything that needed saying before responding. 

Most calls felt like small counselling sessions which had a distinctive shape with similar themes. Customers would often wish to inflict their anguish and frustrations for the company on me personally. Instead of the company I was working on behalf of being inept and completely incompetent, I was the one personally responsible for their workmen soiling their shagpile rug after mending the boiler. It was my fault the double glazed windows fitted the week before had started leaking this morning. 

Then, when they'd finally ran out of ammo, and could see that my initial intention to try and help them with their issue hadn't changed, the apologies would come because they had made things personal.

"Sorry. I know it's not your fault...".

The conservation is reset, and you both start again but with the same shared goal this time. The volume of both voices remaining the same, as neither wishes to speak over the other. A natural rhythm to the exchange develops as you both climb aboard the same train of thought, setting off to see how far you can get to your destination. The journey becoming more valuable than the need to arrive.

But it all started with relinquishing control of the narrative and just listening. Not trying to assert control from the get-go out of fear of things escalating:

"Right, before you tell me anything, this is how things are going to go..."

There's a sense of bad inevitability about what is happening now in America. Trump's pride and pathological necessity to assert cliched depictions of inflexible strength lifted from the bygone eras his idols live in, is a trait I fear is so hardwired in him, that there will be the to-ing and fro-ing of sides constantly upping the ante, until everyone involved goes all in and a new peace comes only because the will to fight on has been totally spent.

The Desperation of Commercial Porn in 2019

Something I've noticed for a long time in porn which has become more obvious recently is how in classic porn there was less of the user/used dynamic. If a man or a woman was giving head, there was less inclination for the pleasuree to hold the pleasurer's head in place and apply more forceful guidance. The pleasurer had a freer role and was less constrained in what they ought to do. They possessed greater ownership over their performance as well as the aesthetics of their body while enjoying sex. Ideally, both parties should simultaneously be pleasurer and pleasuree. There ought to be no distinction at all. But this growing divide in porn, in a way now reflects the world at large right now, and reflects the deeply unfair and unequal divide. I think good feminist porn aims to reaffirm and demonstrate in a way that is self-evidently true, the fact that equality of power for both parties during the act of sex is the most desirable configuration.

Some of the more aggressive commercial porn hetero porn I've watched recently has taken a disturbing twist I think. Going beyond the woman's function of simply being an obedient fucking or sucking device, she now has the additional challenge placed upon her of having to perform her duties with a balletic grace, making aesthetically pleasing for the viewer, the male porn stars sudden whims and changes in his carnal urges. From fucking her mouth while perched uncomfortably upside down to being spun around resuming her duties sucking on her knees while jacking off two other cavemen who were waiting patiently on the sidelines but now want in on the action. This new additional pressure placed upon the woman to make these immediate and violent transitions more natural looking or at the very least, less clunky I feel is very unhealthy as it is the woman's responsibility to ameliorate the impression that violence is taking place. Hetero men have never had it so good, if that's the kind of scenario that gets you. Interestingly there are women, who it seems, absolutely love being degraded and treated as sexual objects, their humanity during their ordeal becoming a faint memory from a former life.

I don't know enough about sex, but I have been making notes on how the symbolic acts in porn have been gradually morphing over the years. For guys who see women through a reductionist lens i.e. see woman in terms of the part of them they will end up coming in (mouth, ass, pussy, tits etc), I feel like aspects of foreplay and arousal that don't directly involve pleasure will either seem pointless or unnecessary to them. Acts through the language of touch that symbolise what is to come or what might be possible with their lover, what their partner might be willing to do with them, are all too subtle for these brutes to pick up on. They need concrete, unequivocal signals of what will be taking place soon. I think it's possible that this new age of men feeling the pressures of obtaining clear consent may feed into this absolutist stance to some degree, but I'm not sure. Part of me feels like the tireless sex performing neanderthals from our current porn world are incapable of romance, because for me, romance is based on wanting something we don't yet have and we maximise the sensitivity to our desires and wishes being reciprocated whenever potentially reaffirming signals are detected. This can also work the other way round and involve us investing inordinate levels of vain hope and optimism into the chances of our transmitted signs and cues projected into the ether of our beloved being gladly received.

I think it's a lovely phenomenon the way a sex starved individual will declare they would drink the dirty bath water of their beloved, or masturbate with a deep carnal yearning over an empty can of coke their beloved's lips had once been sipping from. When there is a profound lack of what one truly desires then the brain/heart amplifies any incoming signals that indicates our wishes may soon be fulfilled. So it's interesting when I watch 80's pornstars like the slightly built but egregiously well hung John Holmes come, allowing lustful feelings swell up inside of him and take over his person before being engulfed by a powerful tide of erotic pleasure, opening his floodgates and letting his cum gush wherever he happens he is. Compared to the uber-hench pornstars of today who are devoid of any narrative in the story of how they fuck. They start at the end and turn the act of sex into an endurance challenge for themselves as well as for the woman they subject. Sex for hetero women in commercial porn more and more resembles a test of their inner strength and will power, an arduous trial they are determined not to succumb to. So it comes as no surprise that invariably these men end up having to jack themselves off at the end of the shoot in order to finally jizz, their own hand proving only thing they are unable to resist the orgasmic persuasions of. The narcissistic homos!! Hahaha!!