Date Machine: Rate My Ethics

amboabe — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:26:00 GMT

I didn't really know what I was getting myself into when I agreed to start writing here. I understood the concept of writing an on-going confessional about my love life. I tend to gush embarrassing truths about myself and wasn't worried about doing that in a public space. Trying to be honest about romance is definitely a squeamish endeavor. I've kind of felt like I was jumping blindly off a cliff with almost everything I've written here so far. That last second before hitting the "publish" button gives me a woozy vertigo every time, but I'm okay with it. As scary as it can be, it's equally thrilling to see myself through other people's eyes, to put my thoughts and experiences in a larger context of other people's thoughts and experiences. Writing about other people, though, and frequently without their consent or foreknowledge, is an even more compromising endeavor.

I was out a few nights ago with a woman who had discovered Date Machine before we had ever met in person. We were having a nice enough first date making small talk for an hour or so. Then she suddenly asked, "You're not going to write about this, are you?" (Hey M, this one's for you!) The thought hadn't crossed my mind during our time together, but I started to think about it after she brought it up. I had no idea. I told her I didn't think I would. We'd had some nice conversation, had a couple of drinks, she'd lost her shoe in a sidewalk grate on the walk to the bar, she had used the word "normative" in a sentence. Things were going well enough for a first date. Would describing the parameters of "well enough" really make for an interesting read (or an interesting write)?

My first post here was full of snark and derision (though most of that was aimed at myself), but I was paranoid that the woman I had written about would see it and have her feelings hurt. A few weeks later I wrote about a different woman and did hurt her feelings when she discovered the post after the fact. If there's a common thread beneath both those experiences, it seems like I wasn't as forthright as I could have been in either situation. In the first case, I wound up trapped for longer than I wanted on a boring date with someone I had no interest in. In the second case, I wound up slightly bruising an ego, even though I was much more interested in the latter than the former.

What are the ethics of writing about one's experience with other people in a public format? I have only one basic guideline so far, which is to limit my descriptions to my own experiences and perceptions. I know in advance that I'm a hypocrite and a petty bitch. When I sense those qualities buzzing somewhere beneath the surface, my imagination sticks and I wind up staring at myself in the figurative mirror for a few hundred words until I can match the form and the feeling. I reference other people in my writing, but it's never about them. My point of view is the vague, egotistical center at the heart of it all.

Which is why I always conclude that ethics are entirely irrelevant to my purposes here. The more empathetic I am in framing my time with other people in an inoffensive way, the less honest I become. What good is a confessional without honesty? What good is a confessional without some incrimination to atone for in the first place?

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Let's Just Be Friends

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Sex Machine: Why Women Are Great In Bed

Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed

Date Night: All By Myself on a Saturday Night

Sex Machine: Spank My Ass

Love Machine: Infidelity or How Long Can You Go Without Cheating?

Date Night: The 45-Minute Walkout

Date Night Redux: H's Version of Our Night Out

Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?

Sex Machine: My First Muff Dive

Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders

Sex Machine: Masturbating Upside Down

Date Night: Two Women in One Night

Nerve Confessions: Rate My Penis Size

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Crying in Public: My Cubicle

Celebrity Confessions: The Queen!

airheadgenius — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:21:00 GMT

Well, sort of the Queen, but more like Helen Mirren. An article in The Guardian a few days back explained why she gave up snorting coke. She was quoted as saying:

"And I read that in the paper, and all the cards fell into place and I saw how my little sniff of cocaine at a party had an absolute direct route to this fucking horrible man in South America. And from that day I never touched cocaine again. Until that moment I had never grasped the full horrifying structure of what brings coke to our parties in Britain."

How honorable!!! Giving up hedonistic enjoyment to spare those poor child drug runners and to stop making a horrible man even richer! What a woman. Did she simultaneously switch to fair trade coffee and start recycling? Maybe a percentage of her earnings goes to poor Indian children?

She was quoted in GQ too. There, she said that she was was locked in a room and forced to have sex "a couple of times" during her college days but did not report the incidents because "you couldn't do that in those days".

"It's such a tricky area, isn't it? Especially if there is no violence," "I mean, look at Mike Tyson. I don't think he was a rapist. I guess it is one of the many subtle parts of the men/women relationship that has to be negotiated and worked out between them."

She went on: "I was [date-raped], yes. A couple of times. "Not with excessive violence, or being hit, but rather being locked in a room and made to have sex against my will."

The actress also explained that she "loved coke" [cocaine] during her younger days but stopped after learning of the drug-dealing success of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie.

First of all, she was concerned about some nasty South American. Now she's got her knickers in a twist about Klaus Barbie. The two quotes were all but interchangeable though. Does she think the two are connected?? Was Klaus on his holidays or something and set up a drug cartel because he was bored of making sand castles?

(What is mind blowing is that if you google dear Klaus, the FIRST hit is Helen Mirren. Nothing to do with his Nazi war crimes, but all to do with some daft bint from England!)

But forget about the drug thing, what about the date rape thing?! Oh yes Hels, date rape is most certainly one of those little subtle nuances of behaviour between the male and the female. Oh yes indeedy. What a tool.

And let's not forget, way back when, that HM got her kit off in those Peter Greenaway movies. She claimed over and over again that she only embraced nudity in film if it was central to the theme and not in any way gratuitous.

I don't care about celebrity behaviour. It makes no difference to my life. It just irritates me when their baser instincts are elevated to celebrity status also. Like, I gave up doing drugs because it was affecting my work and I couldn't afford to get fired. She did it for the greater good.

Her ludicrous confessions are the latest in a long long line though. Remember these? "I tried marijuana once, I did not inhale." Well then, dear Bill, that was a bit of a waste of effort wasn't it?

or

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Again, barely worth the scandal if you're not even going to get your end away.

Why can't Mirren just fess up and say "I like getting stoned, I like getting laid and I like getting my tits out for the lads" and be done with it. And why couldn't Bill simply have said "I get stoned to cope with Hilary who happens to be a man and that's why I fucked Monica" and we would have all just said "of course you had to Bill, it would've been rude not to."

Here endeth my celebrity confession.

date machine : Bill Clinton

Date Machine: Rate My Ethics

Celebrity Confessions: The Queen!