Tom Hardy crying

Did I really not share this when it was first out? I imagine this was only out in the UK, so US people, you’re in for a treat: 19 glorious seconds of Tom Hardy crying.

(I don’t know how well known he is outside the UK, so to explain briefly, he’s best known for playing tough, wild, brutal characters – Bill Sykes, Heathcliff, and similar – so the juxtaposition was especially delicious.)

Good lord

Warning: straight off my head onto the page – I reserve the right to feel totally differently about this tomorrow.

I’ve just run into* the concept of asexuality. Why am I only hearing about this now? All this time I’ve been trying to figure out why I don’t have sexual feeling the way other people do, and it never occurred to me that that might be a thing in and of itself, rather than some kind of broken.

I’m not saying, ‘Yes! This is me!’ I don’t know. I need to think about it. Clearly, I do have sexual feelings, and I do find people attractive. But a) it’s something I’ve kind of learnt over the years, and b) it’s a largely intellectual attraction. The more I think about it, the more I feel that everything that interests me sexually is basically intellectual, emotional, psychological – it’s all about story. Drama. Narrative. The idea of sexual passion gives me the electricity; actual sexual activity does very little for me.

Asexual is a label that would describe my younger self very well. Very well. I had crushes even as a young child (5-7), and I still get crushes, but they have always been mostly intellectual crushes, emotional crushes, not physical at all. When all my friends were starting to get interested in boys, around 11-12, I had nothing. It felt very alienating. The only vaguely crushy feelings I had at that time were a brief infatuation with Christine Cagney. And again, non-physical.

And when I started actually having sex, I felt nothing. Nothing. How freeing it would have been then to be told that that can be a ‘real’ thing, not a disorder of some kind.

As I say, I’ve kind of learnt, in a Pavlovian association kind of way, to feel sexual feelings in a sexual situation, and for bodies, and physical sensation. Even so, my response is very muted, like the volume’s been turned way down. My friends find this very hard to get their head around. I’ve assumed so far that there must be something fundamentally wrong – some fear, perhaps, that intervenes and prevents me feeling my own sexual response, even when the physiological response is present.

But perhaps it’s the other way round. Perhaps by nature I’m just not a sexual being. Perhaps I’m an asexual being who has developed some limited sexual feeling.

This concept opens up so many new ways of looking at things that it’s slightly blowing my mind right now. I’ve always felt a great psychological desire for sex. But perhaps what I’m craving there is not actually sexual fulfilment at all. Perhaps it’s other kinds of fulfilment. I’ve simply assumed all these years that a fabulous sex life was the goal. Because, you know, that’s what all of our culture throughout all of history tells us. Perhaps there are other things I want, and other ways to find those things.

Perhaps it’s even possible to find people who are like me to some extent. Who might be interested in the way narrative makes things hot, and not remotely interested in a storyless grinding of bodyparts together. Who might want something from sex that isn’t sex. Perhaps we might be able to find other ways of being intimate and excited about each other.

Is it possible to be both dominant and asexual? If it’s possible to be straight and asexual, or gay and asexual, I don’t see why not. Am I dominant? Or do I just love drama? Am I dominant? Or is that feeling just a desire to never again do anything I didn’t actively want to do, resulting from years of doing stuff that other people were more excited about than I was, and the feelings of alienation that result? Am I asexual? Partly asexual?

And all those intense psycho-emotional crushes I’ve had on people I knew I had absolutely no desire to sleep with at all. There have been many of them. Many. People I admired and adored, and would have loved to be allowed to interact with with the kind of intimacy and passion you have in a relationship, but in a non-sexual way. (These passions have caused people to consider me a flirt, over the years.) Imagine, if those people identified as asexual, or even simply knew of the concept, how things could be different. I might be able to express my passion for people without having to worry that they would feel I was ‘leading them on’, promising something I wasn’t going to deliver (the cardinal sin for a woman, far worse than promiscuity).

I have no idea if this label really fits me. I may be way off base. But just knowing that it exists makes it possible for me to think in all kinds of new directions. And there are certainly parts of me that it fits, and making room for those parts makes me feel much less broken, and much less hopeless.

Sometimes I’ve got so angry about the sex thing. It’s felt as though it’s something that every other person on the planet gets but me. And like a complete barrier to the possibility of a loving relationship. Apparently neither of those things are true. Hurrah.

*Via Male Submission Art, to MayMay‘s, which led me to Dev‘s (post love – I *hate* kissing from the bottom – I get pretty bored kissing from the top, but then noone would ever let me bite them) and asexy beast‘s, and thence to AVEN.

Control and emotion

Posts, eh? None for six months, and then three come along at once.

Since I was posting, I couldn’t not also post about the Spock stuff from the new Star Trek movie. It pushes sooooo many of my buttons. Few things do it for me like a guy trying and failing to control overwhelming emotion. Sadness/pain is best, but I love anger, too. There’s just so much tangled up here, thousands of years of cultural stereotyping and archetyping. The fact that whenever I write about this I always want to use the word ‘manfully’ to describe this attempt at stoicism shows just how ingrained this stuff is.

Of course, the more stoic the guy, the more delicious it is when he’s overwhelmed. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. And who is the ultimate in stoic self-control? Why, Spock, of course. So what could possibly be more delicious than Spock succumbing to grief and pain? And anger?

And we’ve got the H/C thing here, too. The ultimate H/C, when it comes to emotional H, surely. I mean, the guy’s just lost not only his mother but his entire planet, and become a member of an endangered species. Awesome. Women all over the world must have wanted to grab Zoe Saldana by her perky ponytail and yank her out of the way.

Plus, you know, Zachary Quinto, om nom nom.

I really wanted to post the clips for posterity, but sadly all the actual clips appear to have been removed from YouTube, leaving only the crappy crappy fan vids. Please, fans, stop posting crappy crappy fan vids. It makes it really hard to search for actual clips. And seriously, noone wants to watch your montage, no matter what soppy song you set it to.

Heroes

So, I fell off the face of the planet. Can’t promise not to do it again. I’m still struggling with this stuff, and still can’t face going out to try and actually interact with it. It’s not even the thing itself that worries me at this point, it’s the thought of The Scene. I actually now feel like I want to move towards this, to explore, but I just have no clue how to do it.

So instead, I’ll just keep trawling the mainstream media in the safety of my own home, getting far too excited about everything which looks even a little bit like something which might be my thing.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to post about Heroes for a while. Flawed as it is, here’s a lot to like in it, and I heartily approve of their equal opportunity approach to lechery. Season 2 was pretty much the season of half-naked Milo Ventimiglia, and Season 3 the season of half-naked Zachary Quinto. Thanks, Heroes producers.

In fact, though, Ventimiglia’s character, Peter, didn’t do for me at all in season 1. I might have loved him when I was 12, but as an adult, he was just a bit twee for my taste.

But then season 2 opened…

It’s the contrast as much as anything, so I’ll give you the back story. Peter was a sweet, soft, decent, floppy-haired pretty boy in a family of manipulative political near-mobsters. He was caring, gentle, emotional and perhaps a little fragile, and worked as a palliative care nurse. Then he turned out to have the ability to absorb other people’s superhero powers by empathising with them, making him potentially the most powerful ‘hero’ of the lot. He tried so hard to use his powers for good, but eventually he picked up some radioactive power that he couldn’t control at all, and at the end of season 1 his brother had to fly (like Superman, not like aeroplane) him out of New York in the nick of time to stop him accidentally blowing up the whole city.

So season 2 opens four months later, and Peter’s still missing. Noone really knows what happened when he, um, exploded. Through the whole first episode everyone’s wondering what happened to him. And then, far away, in Cork, some petty criminals with incredibly unconvincing Irish accents (really, rarely have I heard worse) go to a dockyard looking for some stolen merchandise, and open the crate to find not the ipods they were after, but a very confused, shirtless Peter, handcuffed to the wall. All cropped hair, dirt, and muscles. And with no idea who he is or how he got there.

I think my friends were a little confused by how excited I was about it. But I’m sure you can see it. Gentle Peter, suddenly turning up all dirty and muscular and bewildered, like someone picked up that soft, delicate creature, shaved his head, and brutalised him for four months. And then chained him up in a crate, and left him there. What did they have him doing all that time? Was he digging holes? Being forced to use his powers for evil? On a chain gang? Being experimented on? So many fun places the mind goes to.

And then, the not-Irish guys tie him to a chair and work him over. Still half-naked, so you can see all the muscles and sinews stretching. Splendid.

Video of Peter all dirty and bewildered and being beaten up in Cork (YouTube continues to be too smart for me, so you’ll have to watch it on Vimeo instead.)

By the way, it turns out that where he’s been is indeed a ‘research’ facility, where he’s spent four months being the plaything of the boss’s sadistic, lightning-wielding daughter. Awesome. And at first he’s all, ‘These people know best, I should be locked up because I’m a danger to myself and others,’ all docile and quietly taking the pills, but later (persuaded by the ‘English’ guy next door – another truly atrocious accent) he starts plotting to escape, and then he starts smooching up to her and letting her zap him, to distract her from the fact that he’s stopped taking the drugs. Which of course pleases my ‘men offering up their body when out of other options’ thing no end. And wow, I wish I could shoot electricity from my lips. How much fun?

Video of Peter being toyed with by sadistic daddy’s girl in a research facility

The following season, the lightning-wielding sadist, Elle, ends up in a facility herself, where she’s visited by series big bad, serial killer Sylar (Quinto), who killed her father to take his powers. He’s got a sudden case of the warm and fuzzies, having had a taste of unconditional love from his long lost (not really, but he thought so) ‘real’ mother. And so now his long lost (not really, but he thought so) ‘real’ father thinks he can change his ways, and learn empathy to take people’s powers without killing them, by learning empathy.

So Sylar lets Elle take her revenge on him. Which she does by lightninging him up (yes, I said lightninging) to the point where she’s literally flaying the flesh from his bones. I mean, sure, he regenerates, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt (hello, Wolverine, my old friend). And he just keeps getting up and letting her hurt him more, taking it all for her. And really, they could hardly have found a better body to rip the clothes off with lightning.

Video of lightning vengeance

And then, the next season, the government decided everyone with powers should be rounded up and killed/locked up/experimented on -so all the heroes had to go on the run. I love men on the run. The desperation, the fear, the loneliness, the physical hardship, the sheer unrelentingness of it. Yum yum yum.

So, yeah, a lot to love.

If only she’d kick him a little harder

After the fun of watching NSync being chased by dogs, pop served me up another little morsel this morning. I turned on the tv to find Britney shoving some hot guy around. Thank you, Britney.

Now sure, it starts slow* (I came in about 2.38, when things are moving a bit more**), and there’s an awful lot more pointy shoes than I’d like (if I was gonna kick someone, I’d be inclined to get out the combat boots), but still, hot guy being kicked in the stomach and thrown around by his tie, and he looks so pretty when he’s scared.

* Though there is a blink-and-you-miss-it backhand in the office scene

** Just in time to mistake the gloved finger for a gun and get all excited

All the mansubs in the land

Having just read this post by Axe, I’m now imagining a kind of fairy-tale scenario. You know, like when the handsome prince invites every eligible woman in the land to a big ball, in the hopes of finding one to marry? Like that, but with one femdom and every mansub on Craigslist.

Would save a lot of time.

Meaningless labour

The powers that be are tormenting me. Having declared my LaBeouf lust, I go to look up his other movies, and what do I find?

“Holes: LaBeouf is wrongfully convicted and sent to a brutal desert detention camp where he joins the job of digging holes for some mysterious reason.”

Which sounds like it ought to be the perfect movie. Escept that a) it’s Disney and b) he was just a kid at the time.

Gah!

One day I’m going to make a bdsm movie starring this guy. You guys will invest, right? Or perhaps you have more delicious ideas for casting…?

Your compliance is vital

I seriously doubt anyone’s going to be bothered, but just in case, I’m declaring spoilers for Eagle Eye.

I have a little Shia LaBeouf thing going at the moment. What a great manga-face. I looooove big eyes. To borrow a phrase from a young friend of mine, I would wreck that.

I mean, look at it.

Why am I boring you with my slightly sinister cradle-snatching lust? Because it represents a partial return to form for me.

You see, I haven’t been quiet just because I’ve been busy (though I have). Nope. I’ve been right off this whole bdsm&m thing. For a good month or so, my brain has been utterly refusing to engage with it at all. It hasn’t wanted to play. It’s been like, ‘You know, this thing is messed up. Let’s just not look at it. We can manage without sex. We can get by without intimacy. Wouldn’t that be easier? Move along now, nothing to see here.’

I’ve been feeling intellectually repulsed by it (I forget who called this ‘social nausea’, but it’s perfectly descriptive), and sexually detached from it.

And then I saw Eagle Eye, and found my… um, ears?… pricking up. And it quickly became apparent that of course it wasn’t the manga eyes that did it (though that helps), but that good old pain/shame/powerlessness/self-sacrifice thing again.

Shia’s character, Jerry, is a drop-out who is weighed down by feelings of inadequacy, having being consistently outshone by his twin brother Ethan and ignored by their parents. At the start of the movie, after being estranged from his family for some time, he hears that Ethan has been killed. Cue funeral scene, with some really top-notch crying.

God, I love crying men.

He then gets ‘activated’ by a mysterious woman who turns out to be a near-omniscient and -onmipotent computer, and spends the next hour or so being a helpless pawn, making futile attempts at rebellion, but ultimately being outclassed and emotionally manipulated. If only the computer had gone in for a little sexual harrassment as well. Sadly, she is a computer and wastes the opportunity.

Learning that his brother worked with the computer as a super-secret Air Force secret agent type, Jerry decides to go along with it and finish the job for him. He then discovers that Ethan actually tried to foil the computer because it was trying to kill the president, and so he has to race to stop the planned assassination.

And this was the yummiest bit.

To do this, he runs into the State of the Union address, where a tiny crystal bomb in a necklace is about to be detonated by a trumpet (I know, mental), climbs on a table and starts firing into the ceiling, knowing full well that, while this is going to save the day, it’s also going to result in him getting shot by every secret service man in the room.

The look on his face as he does this is simply gorgeous. He knows what’s coming and he can’t bear to look. So beautiful.

So, as I’m sure you expected, here are some clips. Funeral (with tears) first and aftermath, then we jump forwards to see him confronted with childhood memories, and then, of course, the grand climax. (If all you want to see is the look on his face as he sacrifices himself for the greater good and his brother’s memory, skip forwards to about 6.45.)

(Edit: Gah! YouTube hate me. You can watch it here instead.)

So, I guess I’m back in the game, dipping my toes in the water once more. I’m still feeling pretty uncomfortable with a lot of stuff – which I’ll write about another day – but at least I seem to be coming out of lock down.

(Edit 2: It seems he’s likely to be playing the last man alive (after a ‘plague’ wiped out all the men but left the women alive) in an adaption of Y: The Last Man. I can see some potential with that concept – but probably the series is miles away from my fevered imaginings.

And the Patronising Cock of the Day award goes to Stephen King

It seems this blog has only three modes: lusty, whingy, and ranty. Well, it seems I pulled the ranty straw today.

As you know, I’m a tad geeky. I was over at the Leaky Cauldron geeking out on Potter, and found this quote from Stephen King:

Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people… The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good… it’s very clear that she’s writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It’s exciting and it’s thrilling and it’s not particularly threatening because they’re not overtly sexual. A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that’s a shorthand for all the feelings that they’re not ready to deal with yet.

Now, I’ve got no beef with what he said about Meyer. She does suck. And for now we’ll leave aside the question of whether he’s in any position to be criticising the state of other people’s writing.

What’s got me ranting is the second part of that quote, the bit about the young girls and the feelings. ‘Oh, the poor young girls, they have these feeelings, but they’re scared of them, and they’re so confuuuuuused.’ He’s wheeling out that old pernicious idea that adolescent girls are naive and vulnerable and clueless about their bodies, and need to be protected from real boys and real sex.

You patronising cock! It couldn’t be, could it, that young girls like hot guys, and vampires are hot?

When you think about 14 year old boys poring over Playboy, do you think the poor lambs are confused and afraid of their own feelings? No! You think they’re horny and they like looking at hot girls.

‘Oh, but girls are different.’ Fuck off are they. You just want them to be different so you don’t have to think about your daughter as a sexual being.

When I was 13/14 we were all passing round Jilly Cooper and Jackie Collins. Were we going, ‘I’m not ready to be a grow’d up yet, yet somehow I find these books oddly satisfying’? Were we bollocks! We were all, ‘Check this out, it’s hot!’ Partly we were devouring any information we could get about sex because we wanted to know what it was really like. But mostly those books were just plain hot. We were getting our jollies off them just as much as the boys with the Playboy.

But apparently that possibility hasn’t occurred to Mr King. Because god forbid teenage girls have actual sexual feelings. That would just be creepy and unnatural.

Busy

My god, I can’t believe I’ve only posted once so far in January. It’s just not good enough. I do apologise. Things have been a tad busy, but I hope to get back to it in February.

And I don’t have time to post now, even, so really I’m just popping in to apologise for not popping in, which is a bit rubbish, I know. Here, go and have a look at someone who does this shit much better than me – Ms Jones has a particularly fine rant up today. And pop over and vote for her on the Bloggies, too.

Of course, I realise you’ve probably all already done both of those things, but just in case.

Still feeling gypped? Here, here’s a beautiful man crying. Not very convincingly, I realise, but what can you do, this shit is hard to find.