How come there's no commandment that says "Thou shalt not rape"?
Did God ask Mary for consent before he put a baby in her? Or was God Christianity's first rapist?
If abortion is murder, then blowjobs are cannibalism.
Social media is to socializing what masturbating is to sex.
If Fifty Shades is your idea of a good book, you have no idea what a good book is.
Every time a dog humps your leg, you're being raped.
#metoo
We made each other laugh with the most outrageous statements, that were technically true, but too taboo to say out loud in front of other people.
At least in America.
In Europe these are normal every-day jokes. They have a much darker, uncensored, boundary-pushing sense of humor.
In Europe you're allowed to have a dark, morbid, or peculiar sense of humor. It's perfectly ok, and even expected of you, to make jokes that are in bad taste because they make fun of sacred cows. Because those are the kinds of jokes that make people think about why they find the joke so offensive. It makes you see your own sacred cow for what it really is: just a cow.
A sacred cow, unexamined, feeds itself and produces a whole lot of bullshit. And nobody wants that, except the people who profit by selling you bullshit. Those are the people who try to tell you that examining or criticizing the sacred cow is taboo.
Over there you don't get stoned to death by an angry, torch-wielding Twitter mob, eager to censor and punish you for having your own thoughts. Even if your thoughts differ from mainstream orthodoxy.
In Germany they use the English word "shitstorm" to describe what happens, when a celebrity in America expresses an unpopular opinion on social media. A bunch of self-righteous trolls from the politically correct thought-police descend on the celebrity who dared to express a dissenting opinion, like a bunch of piranhas. And then they unleash a shitstorm. It's like a feeding frenzy, when piranhas smell blood.
German newscasters literally use the English word shitstorm on the air when they report the latest American celebrity scandal. The word implies that the social media outrage is fake, and the whole scandal is just bullshit. Shitstorm just sounds catchier than Bullshitstorm.
Anyway, Shelly and I had the same odd sense of humor. We shared funny memes, and weird news articles about bizarre inventions or strange sex toy accidents.
Shelly's parents were Chinese immigrants from Taiwan. They had moved to Hawaii when she was three. She grew up in Honolulu. Then she went to college in San Francisco and got a business degree. She worked in Shanghai for a while, and now she had been living in Los Angeles for the past few years. She worked in the accounting department of a big hotel chain.
She had been bouncing around the world almost as much as I had. And even though she grew up in Hawaii, she was still an immigrant in a sense, because her parents still spoke Chinese at home and followed Taiwanese traditions. Shelly and I had the same outsider's perspective of American culture that all immigrants share.
I snooped around on her Facebook page and found some pictures of her. She was in her early thirties and very petite, as most Asian women are. She had long, black hair. She was beautiful.
And yet Shelly was just as lonely as I was. She didn't have much luck with men. She had been in three relationships over the years, but none of them worked out. She tried dating for a while, but she was painfully shy and going on dates was pure horror for her. She hated pointless small talk as much as I did.
I could imagine how she felt. I wouldn't want to be a woman in the age of Tinder and have to date men. 99% of men are douchebags who just want sex. And casual sex is a big no no in Taiwanese culture. Her parents had raised her to be a proper lady.
Eventually she gave up on dating. She had too much self-respect to put herself out there, on the meat market. She preferred to spend her evenings cuddled up on the couch with a good book, like millions of other girls who would rather be single than be used as a sex doll by some douchy neanderthal.
SHELLY
"The most introspective of souls are often those that have been hurt the most."
Shannon L. Alder
"An exciting and inspiring future awaits you beyond the noise in your mind, beyond the guilt, doubt, fear, shame, insecurity and heaviness of the past you carry around."
Debbie Ford
The following Monday, Carmen texted me that she and Eric got married at City Hall. Like she expected me to congratulate her. I didn't respond.
Over the next few days she kept trying to call me, but I didn't answer. She sent me more texts. With a bunch of frowny face emojis. She wrote that she missed me and I shouldn't be upset that she married someone else. She still wanted to be friends.
Finally I texted back: "U don't even get it. I'm not upset because u married Eric. He can have u. I'm pissed bc u lied to me for weeks. U were trying to manipulate me by pretending u love me. After everything I've been thru. U just saw me as an easy target."
"No, I do love u," she texted back with another row of frowny faces, one after the other.
I didn't reply.
Good luck with that hot mess, Eric.
I spent more and more time emailing back and forth with Shelly. At some point emailing just wasn't enough anymore. I wanted to talk to her and hear her voice.
"Let's talk on the phone. Less work than typing," I wrote.
She wrote back: "I hate talking on the phone. I prefer texting and emailing. I'm not a good talker. I never know what to say. And I hate awkward silences."
"Don't worry about awkward silences. I'm a master at ignoring them," I joked.
"You're gonna think I'm so boring if we talk on the phone," she replied.
I wrote back: "Don't worry. I know you're shy. To be honest, I am too. But you'd never know it by talking to me. I can talk your ear off. I can talk to anyone about anything for hours if I have to. I can hold a conversation about wheelchairs with someone in a nursing home. I can talk to a toddler about crayon colors for an hour, if I have to. So just leave the talking up to me. Don't worry about awkward silences. Just give me your number. Resistance is futile."
She finally caved and gave me her number. I wanted to call her right away, but I was nervous. What if it didn't go well and she didn't want to talk to me anymore after that? I had one chance to convince her that talking on the phone was gonna be ok, so I better not screw it up.
I waited a few hours and then tried to call her. She didn't answer.
I tried again a bit later. No answer.
"I'm still at work. Can't talk." she texted.
I called her after work. This time she picked up. We talked for about fifteen minutes. It didn't go all that smooth at first. She sounded timid and shy. Her answers were short and mostly monosyllabic. Typical for an introvert who hates to talk on the phone. But I just kept talking until she was more at ease. She responded more and more. Eventually we had a normal conversation. Well, normal for us anyway.
"See, that wasn't so bad." I texted her afterwards.
"I guess," she replied.
We still emailed all day long every day, but now we also talked on the phone at night, after she got home from work. She was still a little uneasy, but I pretended not to notice. After a few more phone calls, we had great conversations. We talked for over an hour, and she participated and shared stories and told me about work and whatever else popped into her head. She wasn't worried anymore that I would judge her harshly if she ran out of things to say.
We talked about meeting face to face some day. She told me she didn't like Florida, because of the climate. It was too hot and humid for her. I told her I'd come visit her in Los Angeles some time. But we never really made any firm plans.
We talked a lot about sex, too. Mostly in the abstract. She told me that she didn't have sex in a few years because she had been single for so long. We laughed about strange news stories about people who got arrested for having sex in public. And we tried to find the weirdest fetishes. Since she lik
ed Fifty Shades, we talked about BDSM as well.
I told her I thought it was funny that so many women in America suddenly claimed to be experts in BDSM. They were well-behaved housewives in Ohio or Utah, who used words like Gosh and Golly and Fudge and Darnit, because they thought the real words were too dirty to use. Then they read Fifty Shades, and now suddenly they plastered half naked erotic memes on their Facebook pages and tried to outdo each other with their stories about chains and whips and nipple clamps. It was fascinating to me, from a sociological standpoint.
"Did all that BDSM stuff in Fifty Shades turn you on?" I asked.
"Yeah, a little," Shelly admitted.
"You kinky little minx," I joked. "You better not ask me to whip you when we meet."
"You wish!" she laughed.
At some point she confided that she would like to know what it's like to be blindfolded and handcuffed to the bed while having sex, because she kept reading that it enhances the sensation of being touched.
"We'll have to try that out some time," I laughed. From that point on I always made our abstract conversations about sex personal. Instead of just talking about what other people were doing, I steered our conversations towards me doing those things to her.
Like a proper lady, she pretended that it was inappropriate, since we were just friends talking on the phone, nothing more. But I could tell that she enjoyed talking about having sex with me. Who doesn't love to talk about sex?! We talked about oral sex too, and she said she couldn't cum like that.
"Then the guys you've been with were doing it wrong," I teased. "I bet I can make you cum like that. I'm pretty good at it. It's like my superpower."
She was intrigued.
A few days later she told me that she had a couple of free days coming up. She was thinking about visiting me in Florida. She was looking at flights.
"Here it comes," I thought. "She's gonna start asking me to send her money, to pay for the flight."
But no, she was unlike any of the other girls I had met in the past few years. Not only could we have real, deep conversations. She also didn't need any money or anything else from me. Her parents were wealthy and she had a good job and made her own money. She didn't need me for anything. She simply enjoyed talking to me, and liked me for me. How refreshing!
We had met on Goodreads in June 2014, and in September 2014, she visited me in Florida.
"I'm about to board the plane. See u in a few hours!" she texted.
I was nervous. But she must have been so much more nervous! Think about how much courage it takes, especially for an introvert, to just go visit someone on the other side of the country. All by herself. I could have been an axe murderer!
I drove to the airport. She was waiting for me at the curb, in front of the main entrance. She wasn't hard to spot. Fort Myers Airport isn't that big. There weren't that many people outside. And she was the only Asian far and wide. That helped. She wore a pretty white summer dress. She looked gorgeous.
I was a little intimidated.
I pulled up next to her, got out of the car and said hello. We were both really shy. It was a little awkward. We hugged and then I put her suitcase in the trunk.
"Welcome to Florida," I joked. "Do you totally hate it so far?"
"Not yet, but I'm sure I will once my hair gets all frizzy from the humidity," she laughed.
We made some generic small talk on our drive to my place. I asked her about her flight and if she was hungry.
Once we got home, I showed her my lakefront condo. I was proud of the way it came out, after I had completely renovated it to suit my taste, when I first moved in.
"It looks really nice," she said. "All the dark wood trim and the colors you chose look very masculine."
I didn't even bother to show her the guest bedroom. I brought her suitcase straight into my bedroom. I was creating facts on the ground! We hadn't talked about the sleeping arrangements. Officially she was simply visiting a friend. Nobody had said anything about her sleeping in my bed.
I hoped that I wasn't too presumptuous and that she wouldn't be offended. Sometimes you just have to take a risk. He who dares, wins. I live my whole life by that motto.
I waited for her to object. I thought she might ask me to show her the guestroom. But she didn't. She was on board with sleeping in my bed. So far so good. Smooth, Oliver, smooth. Now don't fuck this up.
I showed her the swimming pool and we fed some geese by the lake. Then we went out to eat at a nice restaurant. She said she had a rule against eating at generic fast food joints when she traveled. You can eat McDonalds' anywhere. She liked to sample the local cuisine.
Interacting with her in person, after we had talked to each other on the phone for months, still felt a little weird. We knew each other so well by now, but it still felt like a first date with the typical shallow pleasantries. We weren't ourselves.
We both still struggled a little with that uneasy shyness introverts feel when we have to interact with new people. You know, when you don't show people the real you, but the public, polite, grown-up version of you. Your official persona. The fake avatar you hide behind in public, because you don't want anyone to know that you're really just a scared little kid who just pretends to be a grown-up, and you really have no clue what the fuck you're doing.
It was getting late. She was tired from the trip. It was time for bed. And here came my nervousness again. This was gonna be the moment of truth. Were we gonna have sex? Or would she be offended if I tried to have sex with her on the first date? Only one way to find out.
I showered. In the meantime she texted her best friend Susan in Hawaii to let her know that she was still alive and had not been savagely murdered in Florida yet.
I dimmed the lights, lay down in bed and waited for her. I was ready. For whatever was about to happen next. She took a shower and got into bed next to me. We both acted like it was totally normal. Like we had been sleeping in bed together for years. Even though we had never even kissed yet. We just hugged once at the airport.
She put her head on my shoulder and we watched some TV. Neither one of us said a peep about sex. Not a word about handcuffs or blindfolds or nipple clamps.
We were both tired. It had been a long day. We turned the TV off and got ready to go to sleep. Her head was still resting on my shoulder. I had my arm around her. We said good night. I kissed her forehead. I didn't really think about it. I just did it. Was that the right thing to do? Or too much too soon? Or not enough? She didn't say anything, so I figured it was ok.
We were lying in the dark. I was staring at the ceiling, watching the faint dancing lights reflecting off the lake outside the bedroom window.
Shelly stirred a little. She was restless. She exhaled rapidly. It sounded like an impatient sigh. Was she waiting for me to make the first move? Did she want me to grab her, kiss her passionately, rip her clothes off and pound away? Like a character in a smutty romance novel?
I knew how this stuff worked when I was in bed with a drug addict. They invited me to get on top of them in no uncertain terms. But Shelly was a normal girl. How do you have sex with a normal girl? It had been so long. Did I have to explicitly ask for her consent first? Would anything else be considered sexual assault these days? I had no idea.
She kept stirring restlessly. She was obviously waiting for something to happen. Should I tell her to rub my dick and get me hard? What if it didn't get hard because I was too nervous? That would be embarrassing. What if I read her body language wrong and she wasn't waiting for me to mount her like a stallion? What if she was simply a restless sleeper?
I decided the best course of action was to carefully rub my dick and get it hard myself, without her noticing what I was doing. Creating facts on the ground! And then I'd gently poke her with it. Almost by accident. Oops, sorry! Didn't mean to poke you with my massive stallion erection. Nothing to see here. Move along.
And then the ball would be in her court. Then she could either ignore the penis, freak out about the
penis, or make friends with the penis.
Yeah, that sounded like the perfect plan!
I gently rubbed my dick. I was careful not to move the sheets too much, so she wouldn't notice. I was a stealthy dick-rubbing ninja! It had to be nice and hard and ready to go before I was gonna accidentally let her find out there was a surprise waiting for her.
But my little buddy had other plans. He thought it would be hilarious to play dead. Fucking traitor. I felt like punching him in his stupid one-eyed face, but that wasn't gonna help.
I was simply too anxious to get hard. Fuck.
Time for plan B.
I touched her leg. She stirred again, in anticipation.
I gently pulled her panties down. She lifted her hips a little to make it easier.
Finding Happiness in Los Angeles Page 18