Hey, baby, what's your sign . . . CLOSED FOR REPAIRS, dear

Oh, goodness, what a blast from the past. Those creepy people used to periodically erupt onto alt.polyamory, where they would be roundly mocked, smothered in sensible philosophy, mocked some more, and then mostly ignored. Talk about worlds colliding.

P.

Aaarghh...

Yes, this group tried to co-opt the very term "polyamory" and make out like it just means "scoring with tons of people," sigh. WHich is irritating in itself. But the thing that rankled me about the crazy site was the assumption that (1) women are manipulation fodder, and since if we love them we'll get hurt and ignored, let's use them instead and laugh, and (2) anyone's going to sit still and fall for the lines they use. If anybody took my hand, stared soulfully into my eyes, and started that spiel about "Remember a time when you felt good," I would burst out laughing in his face. Really, are some people so naive or plain clueless that they take these nuts seriously? Surely not that many, in the po-mo society where even the evening news has a sardonic tone and plays cynic. A lot of the stuff they talk about is based on neurolinguistic programming, which may or may not "work" in the sense they think it does, anyway. What those lines sound like is something out of a cult initiation, which is what's kind of unnerving.

YECH!!!

Ain't it, though. Do you suppose people actually fall for their "patterns" ("Remember a time when you felt good. . . .")? They sound like motivational speakers who tell you to go to your safe place.

I can't tell you how many arguments I had with female friends in college, insisting that some guy they were dating was "different," when I knew for a fact that he wasn't (cause I'd heard him bragging!). But it's nice to have the internet to PROVE to women how (some!) guys talk about them....

Not all men are jerks, honestly. But most of the non-jerks are the kind of guy that women don't flock to. What a weird catch-22...

And then many of the women who were mostly interested in jerks in college wonder why, in their 30s and 40s and 50s, all the nice boys they once wanted nothing to do with seem to be taken. Bit of irony, there.

Bit of tragedy, too.

Too many people not realizing that the things that make for a good friendship are a large part of what makes for a good relationship, too, imho.

Yeah...sad, tragic, ironic, all those things. And once you have kids with a jerk, you're kinda stuck with him, in one way or another, the rest of your life.

*sigh*

Why won't the whole world listen to the wisdom of ME, ME, ME!!! ;-)

Why don't they listen. . . .

I don't know why people will not listen to us. We are perfectly reasonable. My mom has made the same complaint all her life--if they'd listened to her over the past 70-odd years, the world would not be in this mess right now.

What kind of disturbed me was the thought that anyone would take those "lines" of patter seriously. As I said in reply to an earlier comment, if anybody took my hand, stared soulfully into my eyes, and started that spiel about "Remember a time when you felt good," I would burst out laughing in his face. I'd know that he had some snake oil to sell! It sounds like a cult come-on. Which it is, in a way, I suppose.

But it did make me think of an idea. (Whoa!!) I think I have been bamboozled like this with NLP before (neurolinguistic programming, which you are *supposed* to use on *yourself*, if you ever read the original materials) at writers' workshops. You know the ones, probably; the leader of the group says we're going to do a visualization and then a freewriting, and they "take" you into a light hypnotic trance (or so it is theorized) where you imagine your safe place where you have been happy, and you then anchor it by saying that whenever you start to freewrite you will have these feelings, etc. And then they guide you to freewrite and "share" as they find out your trance words, etc. It would be an interesting experiment to do this next time we go out to talk to a group about being a writer--we could program them to have those good feelings when they heard our names or saw the titles of our books. Yow! We'd find out quickly enough whether the concepts worked in practice.

I dunno. Maybe it would be too obvious, even to the usual crowd who shows up at one of my "lectures." (GRIN) ESPECIALLY to them!