Chapter 3: Talking

<< The adventures continue. Sorry to announce, there’s no direct sex in this one. A lot of talking around sex and relationships, but no thrusting cocks and pools of cum. The story structure just worked out that way. Not to worry, we’ll get back to that in the next chapter. Enjoy! -=Norm. >>

The next morning, after the girls had left, Tony came by. We greeted each other with a hungry, tongue-tangling kiss.

After a nice little make-out session, I stopped him from pulling off his shirt. He looked disappointed and confused. “Don’t you wanna...” he began.

“Yes, I do. And we will get to that. But there’s more we need to talk about first, and if we take our clothes off, we’ll never get around to talking about the important stuff.” I said.

“Talk about...? I thought we got all that out of the way yesterday,” he asked, confused.

“Not even close,” I said. I led him over to the living room couch and sat down next to him. I gently took his hand.

“Before we get Hot-and-Heavy, There are some things that you need to know, and some things we still need to work out between us,” I began.

“You’ve just discovered a whole new world. A world of quick and easy exciting sexuality. Sex that, to your own surprise, you really enjoy. At least the parts that you’ve sampled so far. That’s awesome. But, like any discovery, careful exploration is required. There are hidden dangers and monsters that you haven’t seen yet, and won’t know about until you’re warned. I’m still a kid, too, and don’t pretend to know it all, but there are some guideposts that I can provide. Here’s just one example: Why did we fight yesterday?”

“Um, I called you a Faggot?” he said, querulously.

“Okay. When you say the word ‘faggot,’ what does it mean to you? When you think of the term, what image does it bring up in your mind?”

“Um. You know!” He said, in some confusion.

“No, I really don’t.” I said. “besides, I’m asking what YOU meant when you said it. You need to really think about that. It’s important.”

He thought for a moment, I waited patiently. Finally he said, “Weak. Girly. Stupid. Huh ... You’re not any of that.” he finally said.

“Okay,” I said, “now we’re getting somewhere. There are a number of concepts I’m trying to get you to understand. The first, and maybe most important is what words really are. related is the concept of ‘assignment.’”

He looked confused. “Wait, I’m not stupid, I know what words are...”

“No, I don’t think you’re stupid,” I told him with a squeeze of my hand on his. “You’ve just been told a lot of things. Many of those things aren’t true. A lot of them are almost true, but some important parts have been left out. Sometimes deliberately. We need to go way back here. What are Words?” I asked rhetorically.

He looked at me in confusion.

“Words are labels,” I continued. “We have a concept of something in our minds. A dog. A tree. Truth. Beauty. We want to communicate that image to someone else, so we apply the label of the word that we’ve agreed stands for that concept. So that when we talk about a dog, or a tree, or a dog pissing on a tree, we can be reasonably sure that the recipient sees the same thing in their head that we have in ours. With me so far?”

He bit his lip cutely in thought, and nodded slowly. I wanted to kiss him again, but held off.

“This is a pretty good system, and overall it works pretty well,” I continued. “There’s a problem with it, though. It relies on the image in my head being the same one in yours. Take that ‘dog’ concept. One person might think of their beloved Labrador Retriever, sitting on their feet, snoring by a fire. Somebody else might think of their aunt’s ugly, corpulent, bad-tempered Chihuahua, Another person might think of the police dogs that were set on them and bit them so badly. Three different people, three Very different images of ‘dog.’ And that’s a simple one. It gets really bad when we start to talk about something that isn’t a physical thing or is out of the communicating parties experience. Think of ‘truth’ or ‘beauty,’ or ‘faggot.’ We can’t be sure that the concepts we’re passing around have any relation to the concept received, or if they have any factual basis in reality at all, and that’s totally aside from the point that we may not have a complete understanding ourselves.”

Tony was nodding along with my points, slowly. It was plain that he really was trying to understand.

I continued. “In trying to understand what a word really is, I like to use the concept of a ‘Conceptual Egg.’ The word is just the shell, the part that makes it so you can handle it easily, store it neatly or pass it around. At the center of the egg, you have the yolk. The thing itself. Around that you have the egg white. All the things you think about the concept, all you’ve been taught, impressions and feelings. The shell wraps all that in a neat package. With me so far?”

He nodded his understanding.

“Okay. Hang on, this is where it gets bumpy,” I said. “If I hand you an egg, a word, do you know what’s inside? It might be a farm-fresh hen’s egg. It might be a duck egg, still tasty and useful in many of the same ways, but different. It might be hard-boiled. It might be rotten, It might be wooden with nothing inside. It could be plastic with damn near anything inside. The point is that while you might think you know what I’ve handed you, until you open it up, you can’t be sure. When we accept the egg, though, we accept all of it. The good and the bad.

“That brings us to the second point: Assignment. I need you to answer my question again, in light of what I’ve said. I need you to really think about your answer, and to be as clear and detailed as you can. When you used the term ‘faggot,’ what concept were you trying to convey?”

He really was trying to please me. I could see him thinking about his answer. Finally, he slowly answered. “Somebody small, weak. Acts wrong. Dresses wrong.”

“So, what I’m hearing you say,” I replied, “is that when you use the ‘faggot’ term, the concept you’re using is the mincing, lisping, cross-dressing, effeminate stereotype. Right?” I asked.

“Yeah...” he said.

“Does that apply to me? Does that apply to you?” I asked.

He frowned and shook his head.

“There’s another problem here, too. The problem is that there is that there’s a bunch of other stuff that goes along with that concept. You hinted at it in your definition when you used the word ‘wrong.’ The concept is ‘Different,’”

“‘Different’ leads to some pretty dark places. Specifically ‘different-bad’ or ‘Alien.’ From there it goes into ‘Acceptable Victim’ with a pretty short step. By using the term, you are informing me that you consider me to be your victim, that anything you do to me is acceptable, and that there is no help coming because everyone approves of any punishment that you may inflict because of my differences. You were assigning that role to me. That’s what I could not let stand yesterday. My choices were to either let that assignment stand and accept your punishment, and assume that role from then on, or to prove to you and everyone else why it wasn’t accurate.

“If you’d asked yesterday if I was a faggot, and by that you meant ‘Do you like to have sex with other males?’ I’d have said ‘Sure! It’s a lot of fun! Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it!’ Of course, most of that would have been to mess with your mind, but still...

“Instead, you assigned me the role of ‘acceptable victim.’ At that point, I had to make that fight. You do understand that yesterday’s fight was entirely my choice, don’t you? I could have stopped it at any point before I goaded you into throwing that first punch. I could have walked away with a dismissive wave, I could have blocked that first punch and denied that you’d thrown it. I could have stepped in and kissed you full on the lips. Any of that would have stopped it. I’ve stopped others in just those ways before. Instead I proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to everyone in that room, and by extension everyone in the school, why I wasn’t, and never would be, anyone’s acceptable victim.”