To Romeo's Planet and Back Again

It's been what, almost a year since I last traversed Planet Romeo. It started out at G4M -- I was playing DOTA in the internet shop a few blocks away from home when I noticed some dude browsing guys4men. After a few games trying to master Leviathan Tidehunter, I went straight home to check out the website. I was 3 years celibate at that time. My abstention ended a couple of days later.

Good enough for not just a weekend lay, but I'm not complaining if that's all I get.

-- status message from ye ol' profile from the olden times, circa 2009

Cursive's Old Profile
(and it had to be cocky as fuck, of course)

I prefer being serious with someone I really, really like. And since I do not have that right now, I am all about having fun in the interim by absence of choice. I found that it's fairly easy for me to get laid (If you're impeccably straight-acting, and if you've got a brain, a fit body, a nice face and an ample cock, you wouldn't find getting laid very difficult). With the right person I could easily fall back to my serial monogamous default. But I won't settle for anything less than what I deserve even if it takes me a long time. Nobody ever should =)


Now I do hope to meet smart guys who take good care of themselves in a non-obvious kind of way. I am a straight-living guy so I am cautious not to date guys who are out and aren't discreet.


If I had a choice, I wouldn't be gay. But we can choose what kind of gay guy we'd be and I choose to live as a secretly homosexual masculine guy. I enjoy most of what my straight buddies enjoy, and I also don't understand women very much either. I think like a straight guy minus the appetite for cunt. Respetuhan nalang mga chong.


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Unnecessary facts (boring or otherwise)
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Appearance:
Semikal Moreno, square jaw, masculine, good set of teeth, relatively fit and occasionally wears glasses to take a break from contact lenses.


Sporty Side:
Trained in martial arts for a few years (Jeet Kune Do, Capoeira, Tae Kwon Do) and generally athletic. I miss fighting though. I am now working out to hopefully one day look really really good naked. HAHA. I obsessed with NBA in the 90’s. I had a collection of hundreds of David Robinson cards. He was my idol because he led the Spurs whilst being ridiculously good in math, which I suck at. Up to now I’m still keeping my Grant Hill co-rookie of the year card although I felt bad that he beat Jason Kidd to the title. Anfernee + Shaq, Pippen + Jordan. Malone + Stockton. Sigh. Those were the days.


Geeky Side:
Collected Marvel Cards and X-men comic books as a kid. Reads grown-up fantasy books. Overcame an addiction to Diablo (I dread the arrival of Diablo 3) and DOTA (Kael the invoker FTW!), traded and played Magic: The Gathering. I definitely have a healthy geeky side.


Artistic Side:
Draws and paints really well with a few awards under my belt as an adolescent, had a short but successful graphic design gig, some background in music (played in a band), some dance training (classical and hip-hop).


Miscellaneous superfluous information:
I was fortunate enough to have been able to study in some of the best schools from Kinder until College. I had a traditional and conservative Catholic upbringing. I could carry myself well either in a finer cosmopolitan setting or on the sidewalk, crouching and humbly drinking beer sa kanto hanggang sa mapagsabihan na ng tanod pag masyado nang maingay. LOL.

G4M is where I met my good friend K. We are now each other's fag hags. He showed me what Malate was like, and I would't go inside the bars unless I was wearing some sort of baseball cap or a jacket's hood. I felt like Aragorn the rogue -- surveying, calculating and observing a foreign land that's also supposedly my natural habitat.

The G4M forums are where I leaned about Wensha. Then I'd go there to get a massage, eat buffet, read a book and occassionally meet boys. I met an Enkanto there--through a steamroom dance that involved glancing and looking away, catching each other's glances, a smile, and a beer offer. He introduced me to his other enkanto friends a few weeks later. I didn't know they were bloggers. Wensha Enkanto eventually introduced me to a cool guy who's now my sidekick:

I prefer being serious with someone I really, really like...With the right person I could easily fall back to my serial monogamous default. But I won't settle for anything less than what I deserve even if it takes me a long time. Nobody ever should.

PlanetRomeo is first and foremost a hook-up site. But so much good can come out of it and such as it was for me, although I never use it anymore and I don't ever want a renewed need to do so. I don't need to hook up and I now have a healthy number of faerie friends who keep me sane and grounded. I now look back with nothing but fond memories and a genuine appreciation that I belong to the internet generation.

Homme Fatale: The Gay Emosogynist (Part 2)

The past couple of years, I had a pattern of dating boys for several weeks without having sex with them. My friend K thinks it is an abomination. Faeries have sex for sustenance and it’s a known fact. However, I may have unconsciouly found that hearts may have been more appetizing than schubligs.

One night stands are healthier by comparison (so long as you only do safe, of course). If nobody hears from anyone after the debauchery, the message is clear. The game of the efficiently raptorial womanizer (and its parallel--the average horny faerie) ends after the one nighter. However, the emosogynist, straight or otherwise, has a completely different set of rules. Compared to regular predators, emosogynists have evolved advanced culinary tastes and learned how to marinate, season their prey in cinammon and cook them over slow fire.

I met a model a couple of years back. After downing some buckets of beer, we strolled along baywalk, stole a few kisses and talked until morning. The next time we saw each other, he brought me siomai. Then packed lunch. Then a pink teddy. Then he brought me to his school to meet his teachers. It only took another couple of weeks before he introduced me to his family as one of his "best friends". We went out, watched movies, the whole nine yards. Well, call it 8 yards because I never slept with the dude. One day I decided he wasn’t for me. Clearly it felt good to be liked but it got confusing when I couldn't like the person back no matter how hard I tried or how everyone else seems to like the person but me.

I met a sweet fresh grad a few weeks after. The boy chose to accept a job offer an hour and a half away from his work so we could see each other more often. But I was gone after a month. A very similar story happened with an IT guy. I just stopped answering his texts and phone calls. Obviously he ended up bewildered. Honestly, I may have been just as baffled. Similar story with… you get the point. Repetition was necessary before I could recognize any pattern.

I wasn’t always just dating boys without sex. A boy has got to eat. Hot skinhead boy who picked me up twice (from an earlier blog entry) observed loudly that I was the dating kind. His first sentence was, “tara sa Eurotel” to which I promptly replied, “wag muna.” I could be an obnoxious kaltok-deserving Maria Clara if I wanted to. So we dated for an hour and headed out to Eurotel anyway. I was the dating kind, not deliberately sleazy, but not deliberately insipid either. A little more fatal.

Irina Aleksander writes about the L’Homme Fatale in an article in The New York Observer and describes the emosogynist as:

…Often the creative type, he projects a deceptive vulnerability, while maintaining an appealing confidence. He’s usually not the best-looking guy in the room, but he is the smartest; he turns these traits to his advantage, playing up the contrast with the typical hot guy or womanizer (physical inferiority, emotional evolvement). His courtship begins with a rushed sense of intimacy and, yet, a disarming lack of forward physical advances; a first date might involve a game of Scrabble or perhaps a cup of tea; his target usually leaves wondering if in fact it was a date at all. And yet the story always has the same ending—he grows distant, stops calling and eventually disappears with little explanation, if any.

The emosogynist is not necessarily aware of the emotional havoc he can wreak. It is this lack of awareness of his effect highlights the damage even more. And this lack of awareness extends to the emosogynist's incognizance of what he wants. In my case, I was not sure what I wanted; getting someone to fall for me was one way I could find out if I could reciprocate it to that person. It was more convenient, less painful and utterly selfish. The common adage is “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” That ditz Celine Lopez quips that you can hate the player and not the game. What is all this hating going to accomplish, anyhoo hullabahoo? The L’Homme Fatale is not even necessarily aware of his part in the game; or if he’s aware of any game at all, for that matter.

 Irina’s article goes full circle and takes us to a more sympathetic view of the emosogynist:

“The Homme Fatale is a different, possibly more modern condition than a sociopath—he is not as aware of his actions. My understanding is that sociopaths are more clever and conniving. Maybe this is my personal bias, but I think the Homme Fatale is a slightly more sympathetic character,” said James. “The empathy is there, but people who do the most harm are people who don’t know what they want, and Hommes Fatales don’t know what they want.”

And unlike a sociopath, James described feeling a genuine sense of remorse. He’s been trying to change.

“I don’t think you can ever really shed it completely, but as with any sort of psychological problem, it can be made better,” said James. “The first step to reforming one’s actions is to become aware of the pattern you’ve laid out.”

There is the possibility that there are many closeted gay guys that go emosogynist on women because they cannot truly conquer the cunt. Frankly, emosogyny may simply be about men giving women a taste of their own medicine and faeries got into the mix somehow. Whether the emosogynist is straight or gay has become highly immaterial; the affliction touches beyond the sexual and dangerously pokes at the fundamentals of infatuation, emotional connection and love.

Homme Fatale: The Gay Emosogynist (Part 1)

The faerie’s conquest is inverted. Sex is easier; emotional connection is the elusive bitch. Promiscuous fae are common, highly insecure good-looking faeries are the species' most profligate, but the gay emosogynist deals the most amount of damage.

What is an emosogynist? Celine Lopez (I am a big non-fan of her btw) once had a one-sided commentary thankfully saved by the topic's novelty. The emosogynist is an advanced womanizer, finding his validation of manhood not just through successful sexual conquests but by getting a girl to fall in love with him. In a nutshell, emosogynists are straight men who have found a new way of seduction: a metrosexual flare with a non-threatening sensitivity that can switch off a woman’s guard very easily, leaving open her heart—the latest plaything. Dude acts faggy, gets girl to fall in love, then dumps her. Tits have become rather antiquated. Women have evolved a keener sense of identifying predators, and predators would naturally need to adapt to the new feminist habitat. Charles Darwin is smiling somewhere in heaven saying “I told you so.”

Emosogynists are a new breed of straight men but gay men are just as capable, if not more, of fitting into the profile. It has now become easier for more faeries to find sexual partners through a plethora of social networking sites, chat rooms and watering holes all around the Metro and this convenience dwarfs the actual chances of finding romantic connections. Because sex is easier, getting someone to fall in love with you has become the real challenge. It ups the ante. Games are more exciting when the stakes are higher.

And some have become experts.

There is a new game in town and it’s not Diablo III. However, just like Diablo III, it has sprung from a wealth of technology and connectivity, and just as devious. Some of us may be in it right now but we don’t know it. Emosogyny is a game that a lot of us have played at some point. I’ve had my ride the last couple of years.

To be continued.