Flutterby™! : Geeky Valentine

Nancy's comments in the Touchy Feely Mumbo Jumbo thread made me think that, in honor of the Hallmark marketing moment, we should get some musings on geeks in love going here. Might help the partners of geeks understand the geeks better, and might help the geeks understand themselves better.

One of the reasons I linked to that The 25 Most Inappropriate Things An Objectivist Can Say During Sex is that all of those things, to me, read as true. And the incongruence of those truths coming up against the cultural meanings we have for sex was funny. If you have to say "..., hence my wet panties", you're either about to get turned down as weird, or you're talking to someone who gets it, in which case the foregoing explanation is superfluous.

But it's also incongruous because it pits rationality against something that many people would rather stay unknowable. The local free weeklies out here have competing covers in light of today: The North Bay Bohemian has a Sex: 2005 issue, in which it looks at Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, and pits Best American Erotica 2005 against the Mammoth Book of Best new Erotica Vol.4, while the Pacific Sun tackles "The Mystery of Love".

But the teaser for the latter is "A-Lea Silas thinks we should embrace the mystery of love rather than see it as a riddle that needs to be solved". This being Flutterby, I'm fairly sure that a good number of you think that there's nothing that isn't a riddle that needs to be solved, and most of us probably have the string of disassembled household appliances, automobiles and relationships to prove it.

So of those two papers facing off for readership, we're far more likely to choose the option that doesn't discount the possibility of understanding. Because we have a long experience of people telling us "I just don't understand [computers | how to set the clock on my VCR | ...]", and we know we understand the world at a deeper level than that.

And we're not willing to accept other cultural myths on the same level. We find it hard to accept that it's a good idea to pay two or three times the going rate for a good dinner because our mates want it to happen on one particular day of the year. We see no reason that we should profess our love via the Beanie Babies of the gemstone world, so we'll eschew diamonds: Someone we love wouldn't ask us to support colonialism, civil strife and genocide for a chunk of rock which has artificially high sales costs and no resale value because of tacky marketing.

(And, frankly, if you want clarity and aesthetics, cubic zirconium looks better with or without a loupe. And I've mentioned befoere the irony in diamond advertising, and many of us "sensitive new age guys" like to keep our coercive sex in the realm of "carefully negotiated with safewords".)

Further, at least in my relationship, it drives Charlene nuts when she expresses an emotional need, especially in terms of how she's relating to someone else, and I say "I realize you want emotional closure, but what action would provoke the reaction you're looking for?". Because, once again she knows that my intellectual approach is the right long term tack, but it doesn't feel right.

So, here's our chance for some Q&A (we'll leave the T&A for another thread): Nancy et al, lay those "I don't understand you guys" questions on us and we'll try to explain.