*~Stars of Gold

WOW.

The desire to have you devote your life to keeping him happy with no outside interference

The desire to have sexual access

The desire to impress others by having you be his partner

The desire to possess and control you

These desires are important aspects of what romantic love means to him. He may well be capable of feeling genuine love for you, but first he will have to dramatically reorient his outlook in order to separate abusive and possessive desires from true caring, and become able to really see you.

The confusion of love with abuse is what allows abusers who kill their partners to make the absurd claim that they were driven by the depths of their loving feelings. The news media regrettably often accepts the aggressors’ view of these acts, describing them as “crimes of passion.” But what could more thoroughly prove that a man did not love his partner? If a mother were to kill one of her children, would we ever accept the claim that she did it because she was overwhelmed by how much she cared? Not for an instant. Nor should we.

Genuine love means respecting the humanity of the other person, wanting what is best for him or her, and supporting the other person’s self-esteem and independence. This kind of love is incompatible with abuse and coercion.”

- Lundy Bancroft, “Why Does He Do That? Inside the minds of angry and controlling men.”

You realise of course that we could never be friends.

Why not?

What I’m saying is - and this is not a come-on 

in any way, shape or form -

is that men and women can’t be friends 

because the sex part always gets in the way.

That’s not true. 

I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.

No you don’t.

Yes I do.

No you don’t.

Yes I do.

You only think you do.

You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?

No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with you.

They do not.

Do too.

They do not.

Do too.

How do you know?

Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. 

He always wants to have sex with her.

So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?

No. You pretty much want to nail ‘em too.

What if THEY don’t want to have sex with YOU?

Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out there 

so the friendship is ultimately doomed 

and that is the end of the story.

Well, I guess we’re not going to be friends then.

I guess not.

All this is to say that the fact that this octopus appears to be dreaming means one of two things. Either

a) dreaming is a very, very old thing indeed, going directly back to the Urbilaterian. This would mean that almost every animal, from insects to starfish to sea slugs to newts, is likely to have the ability to dream in some capacity or another (unless they have specifically lost it by evolutionary simplification).

or

b) dreaming evolved entirely independently in cephalopods when they developed greater intelligence. This would suggest, at least, that there’s something very fundamental about dreaming related to intelligence itself, which causes it to emerge independently when sufficient intelligence arises.

My skin. Watercolour.

Ready to start?