Dirty

I grew up in the suburbs, in an upper middle class neighbourhood.  Where if a strange car parked on a public road in front of someone's house, the house owner would come out and give the driver shit for parking on "our street."  Where fully grown adults with professional jobs would get into fistfights about who cut which half-inch wide limb off which tree.  Where those who hired a lawn care company to look after their yard didn't "deserve" to own their house.  Where people going to a party at the top of the street would drive their cars rather than walk.

And where everyone knew who was ducking into whose back door to cheat on whose spouse, while tacitly looking the other way ... until the shit hit the fan, and then everyone would get out on their lawns and watch the show.  I mean, why would you hide behind your curtains?  Everybody knows you're watching.

As I grew older, each year the hypocrisy grew thicker as I came to understand the outside world.  That is, as I came to understand sex.  Sex emerged from our Dungeons & Dragons games spontaneously, obviously — we were the sons of doctors, lawyers, engineers, ministers, researchers, university professors.  We lived in a pristine, supra-scrubbed culture both indoors and out ... and so naturally we had a mall, which naturally had a smoke shop, which naturally sold porn mags to all the clean-cut, professional men who were intrinsically too clean to watch porn on film.  The way this joke came into my hands is an interesting story.  It comes from an issue of Penthouse, May 1974 ... when I was 10.  I bought it when I was 14 from a friend, who found the mag under his father's chest of drawers, after his parents got divorced.  And I still have it.  Strange games.

The joke works on multiple levels.  The little boy that knows, hitting the sister where she lives.  The woman admitting that the language isn't hurtful, but where it's coming from.  The way it's ... positive advertising.  After all, Rosalyn's paid to suck.

If we're going to call D&D "an adult game," then sooner or later we're going to have to be adults.  What I remember about the people I grew up around was their privileged, often ludicrous outrage at things they didn't understand.  Which is the same feeling I get when I read someone's list of D&D "don'ts" where no. 7 is "No Sex."  Because, with that familiar suburban taint of hypocrisy, it's "creepy" ... as opposed to, you know, the necessity to produce all the beautiful children in the world.

Oh, I'm sorry, I've gone and written about whores and children in the same post.  Gawd, what a monster I am.  I have no business being a grandfather.

We are living in strange times.  On the one hand, it's perfectly legitimate, and let me stress, a good thing, for an individual to legally and physically pursue the gender of their birth.  And if I can be more clear about what that involves, there are books at the medical library that explicitly details exactly what physical alterations are necessary ... trust me, the disturbing nature of the pic at the start of this post isn't on the same planet as these texts.  We can accept all this, support it, politically ... but as a DM I'm not supposed to mention "sex" in a running.  Oh no.  No.  That's a bridge too far.

Well, I'm not going to flog this.  I've ridiculed it.  That's enough.

Part of me says, don't publish this post.  Lot of people aren't going to read this far.  Hah.  They won't get past the comic.  The other part of me remembers that I'm not here to please.  Not interested in ranting an all, but ... I still want to push boundaries.  Force people to look at things that are uncomfortable.  Question the ad hoc principles that a bunch of moralists who don't play D&D think ought to be the boundaries.

But even I don't dare venture into another description of how sex in D&D could work.

Yep, strange times.