buffer-overrun

[In response to a thread about how outside the US, it is normal for adults to live with their parents, and that the US obsession with indivuality and the self-made-man normalizes young adults moving out of the house.]

I would be interested to hear, from young people who are living with their parents, how this effects sex and relationships.

So many of my relationships in my teens and early 20s were things that my mother was frankly not able to deal with – an open relationship with a cis woman which evolved into a polyamorous triad with a nonbinary person, a relationship with a trans woman, a relationship with a bisexual drug user, a relationship with a black man These were (and for the people who are still alive) still are very important people in my life, and my mother was pretty openly disapproving of all of them. I was so lucky to be able to leave for college at 17 and to not have to run away.

On the other hand, in my 30s, I lived with my now husband and his mother in a section 8 apartment in New York. Tobias needed to be living there to help his mother keep the apartment she had been living in for 25 years (when we moved to Boston, she had to move into a studio). And she was totally cool with us having sex in the bedroom next to hers, and it was never an issue (maybe because she’s Western European?). But, when we went to visit my grandmother, we had to sleep in separate rooms (until we got engaged).

And of course, when my mother and my mother-in-law get older, at least one of them will probably end up living with us. Though, again, I worry about how my mother will deal with my daughters when they are teenagers, since she already cries all the time because my older daughter is a tom boy.

I’m actually distantly related to Tasha Tudor, and my childhood was haunted and oppressed by the proto-Martha Stewart perfect New England country life of her books. When my mother gave me a copy of Take Joy!, I suddenly realized where all my mother’s crazy Christmas traditions come from.  They’re all super cute, and I really liked some of them as a child, but for my mother, they carried a certain obsessive, perfectionist quality that makes every family holiday an emotional minefield.

For me, Tudor’s books also carry a lot of elitist Boston Brahmin baggage. The Wasp fantasy of retreating to the summer house in hard times and living your pastoral fantasy. (She used her mother’s maiden name to emphasize her Boston old money connections.)

So, I’ve been thinking about campus sexual assault, and all the victim-blaming advice, and how the counter-advice is to teach boys not to rape.  But I have two daughters, so that advice is not super useful for me.

One of the big problems with the advice that girls are given is that it is not only victim-blaming, but also either incorrect or unusable.  If your advice to young women is basically, “don’t date boys,” (which is what a lot of the “don’t drink” advice boils down to) it’s pretty much unimplementable.

I guess the first piece of advice would be, you don’t owe anybody anything sexually.  If someone tries to badger you into anything, that’s a real warning sign.  (And the whole idea of “game for anything – within reason” just seems like a repackaging of “don’t be a prude” and seems to assume that women don’t have their own sex drive.) Maybe with role plays to learn how to spot creepy guys.  Don’t really know how that would work.  My daughters are going to hate me.

Then, if you feel trapped in some situation, call me.  We’ll figure out a way to get you out of it.  Me and every girl I know has some story about being pushed to go further than they wanted because they didn’t feel like they had a way to leave.

If you are sexually assaulted, do not trust the university.  We will get you a lawyer. (Though, this advice would not be particularly useful in the military.)

In a situation where serial rapists don’t get caught, you have to rely on reputation and rumor.  Creepy until proven otherwise. Which is pretty depressing advice to give, but I’m not sure what else to say.

And this is where I get into “don’t date boys” territory.  I was really against fraternities when I was in college, and I think it saved me a lot of grief.  The finals club parties had an open door policy for girls, no questions asked.  And they bused in girls from the local women’s colleges on Saturday nights specifically so they could go to the parties.  It was the place I was least likely to find a person I would be interested in. But is telling them to be careful about fraternities useless advice?  If that’s where the social life is.  And, that’s assuming they go to college.  But I think there’s still a question about how to deal with going into spaces that are controlled by men.

Is this situation going to be as bad as my gut feeling is telling me?

Can I find a way to tell the person how miserable they are making me?

If I cannot find a way to talk to the person, what can I do to make myself feel better in the moment?

Sometimes other people really are acting like jerks

Pay attention to when I am trying to pretend that things aren’t upsetting me.  Do not let my temper surprise me.

I am not responsible for other people’s drama

It is not my responsibility to make people like someone I care about (husband, brother, friend) unless that person asks for my help

Do not get emotionally invested in arguments with people who enjoy arguing for its own sake.

OK, so back in 1987, when I was 13, I read Valley of the Horses and that first sex scene between Jondalar and Ayla basically was my idea of How To Make Love.  It was so earnestly and cheesily graphic, but I’m pretty sure the first time I had sex with a girl, I tried that thing Jondalar does where he licks in a spiral on one nipple while mirroring the motion with his finger on the other nipple. (It’s probably a good thing she hadn’t read the books.)

For a whole variety of reasons that I only came to understand later, my mother never really told me anything useful about sex.  Like, it feels good.  Or it’s a good idea to figure out how to masturbate before you start fooling around with boys.  So, yeah, graphic pre-historic romance novels.

My girlfriend in college had read Delta of Venus when she was 9, and it inspired her to start masturbating (and move out of the bedroom she shared with her sister).  Also she had a weird fixation with sweetened condensed milk (I don’t know who Anais Nin was sucking off that she thought semen tasted like sweetened condensed milk, but whatever).

But I guess as a mother, I need to figure out what the boundaries of appropriateness are.   Like, what’s informative and what’s damaging.  My older daughter’s 5, so I have a while, but, like, at some point, the guideline of “browse the internet with your child” is just not going to work anymore.

A couple of years ago, I was making a big push to do something with my old photos (taken with Brigit’s old Asahi, all T-Max 3200, like some kind of epically self-involved photo journalism).  I had had the best of them printed into a book by a vanity press in LA, and I was, for some reason, showing them to my mother.  She stopped on a picture of Ian, because he was beautiful, and it’s a great photo of him, with a warm open smile (I’m sure he was high) instead of the wattage turned to 11.  I told my mother that I thought his beauty was part of what Kate wanted out of him.  (She was charismatic as fuck, but not really beautiful.  Like me, her face was just too weird, though she did have that boyish model build.  But showing up with an actual model on your shoulder must be a real ego boost.)  But that, in the end, Ian was probably the one person I’ve met who I think is actually a sociopath.

And my mother’s response was that that’s what she’d finally realized about my father, after the charm had worn off.  And, I mean, there’s a difference between being a sociopath and being a charming alcoholic asshole (a difference of degree, if nothing else). [Reminds me of someone’s quip about Dick Cheney and how people should stop calling him a sociopath, since sociopath’s need to be at least superficially charming.]  But also, who thinks that’s an OK thing to say to someone about their father.  I didn’t choose him as my parent, she did.  And she knows how much effort I’ve put into being on good terms with him.