Is the film Cuties (Migonnes) the reason why so many people are canceling their Netflix subscriptions? Why don't they just remove the film?

 

I finally watched Cuties! I say that with a level of pride because I don’t watch TV—-I generally see about 1–2 hours of TV a week, generally on Mondays—-Love It or List It; I also watch My Dream Lottery House; AND this week I went crazy and actually watched an episode of Love After Lockup (which was literally a pro-incarceration TV ad. All of the ex-cons——immediately got out and acted physically or emotionally like ex-cons. lol It explained why my cousin Eric has been in the recidivism cycle of prison for 30+ years.)

I’d heard some hullabaloo about Cuties so I actually looked it up on Netflix because the algorithm and My List, that I provide to them (you do know that’s how the recommendations work, right? Also you’re pushed “like-minded fare” on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. based upon your past history—-literally your own mentality because text and video are essentially broken down into their descriptive components—-words, ideas, political ideologies, etc..)

My cookie (the codename for the digital attachment in your computer that creates the connections) based algorithm is a little wacky because my choices are heavily foreign language, documentaries and one or two odd TV show picks but I tend to watch chunks then turn to reality projects (it took me years upon years to actually watch Breaking Bad. And by the end I thought it was meh, you know. But again not just algorithms but also TV shows and movies reflect aspects of the viewers psychology.

I’m getting to my Cuties point. I promise.

I was doing some work late one night and in my double screen—-laptop and giant screen TV converted to a monitor ala below………

…much as I sit typing this up now, I put it on the big screen.

I will first say that most of the reviews and ad hoc opinions of the film miss huge chunks of points and exposition and storyline.

• One, the immigrant experience.
• Two, the culture clash experience.
• Three, generational expectations from the grandmother to the mother to the daughter based upon largely invisible men and religion.
• Fours, the deep desire to be accepted by Amy the little Senegalese girl.
• Five, childish immaturity even shown when the young girls try to attract the attention of older teenagers and are shunned as too immature.
• Six, the point of group/peer pressure and mentality and points of maturity or self-censorship within the fictitious group of girls. Which I think is deeply illustrated in Amy’s immediate obsession with social media and garnering Likes. In order to garner them she has to do more and more outrageous things that eventually cross social and even sexually appropriate lines..
• Seven, the consciousness and self-consciousness that the character comes to understand.
• Eight, the statement on the things and ways that women are expected to tolerate male—-her father’s decisions—- because of sex-gender, and not equality.
• Nine, the intense role modeling from an older male who tries to correct the girls’ behavior.
• Ten, the shift, the trajectory of maturity levels that Amy, the 11 year old Senegalese girl, goes through.

I thought going in, that one, it was American, it’s not it’s French-”Migonnes “ the title really—-made and that two, it was solely about the young girls being hypersexualized.

There’s actually a deep, substantive film here about many issues—-but a lot of them have to do with the least valuable, equality bearing folk on Earth—-women/girls and an African (read: Black) to Americanized perceptions.

It’s a very, very good film.

To the point of the sexualization of the girls and their dance routines—-that’s what your girl children are exposed to as a suggestive reality.

But, I’ve worked in schools for quite a few years and seen and counseled about what children, girls are experiencing and reflecting back.

Jane, The Non-Virgin

At one school, a girl, we’ll call her Jane to save all involved—-Jane was brought to the office for some mess in class and I was alone in the office. I tell Jane to sit down in the corner at a table, the Principal is in a meeting and will talk to her in a minute. I’m sitting there typing away and Jane comes over to my desk, leans suggestively over the short wall and starts trying to chat ,me up. No, not as a child being friendly—-but as a young woman trying to get a man’s attention with her mid-sized bosom, long hair and blinking eyes.

Now to contextualize this further, a few weeks prior Jane’s mother had come to school searching for her one Monday morning. Jane at 13, had been gone the whole weekend. Her mother thought she might be at the school and when questioned about a level of control over her daughter disappearing for weekends at a time with older guys, over 30, her mother demurred that she didn’t want to anger Jane and risk getting her ass kicked.

Jane at 13, held back a grade, so she was still in Middle school was very pretty yes, with long luxurious hair and a faraway look in her eyes. As I told Jane to pull her little fast self together and immediately took her into the female principals office—I recognized a child/teen who was literally bored with the retinue of girl’s who paid attention to her because she’d been sexualized earlier than normal and therefore had a pseudo-maturity and older boyfriends. But I also didn’t feel safe, professionally, alone with Jane as a hypersexualized girl.

Don't’ LGBTSGL despair, there was a young boy there too, gay as a $3 bill, who too had older boyfriends and eventually married an older man when he came of age.

But before you think they were isolated fast kids I’ll tell you how the City got involved. Turns out several of the kids are latchkey kids—-going home by themselves or with siblings until their parents got home. The middle school kids devise who has free apartments and dozens of them at a time would take over a house and have full fledged sex parties in the home.

Reality Check, everyone: your kids are fucking.

When confronted with this, the parents refused to believe it and further refused the school’s advice on teaching about safe sex. In an effort to insure some level of knowledge and safety, the school invited in the Department of Health for Science Week. And the entire week the kids were taught about HIV (Read: Safe Sex and STIs.)

Later that year I got the overall pleasure of teaching advanced test taking strategies and sitting at a table of middle schoolers asking them if they had any questions, a little boy, 11, puts a condom in the middle of the table and innocently asks me what it is. Some at the table knew, some didn’t. I had to generally explain it.

I offer those fun slices of reality at the same time that I’ll point out that Cuties is fiction.

You know this—-dancing, gyrating, twerking, is a level of trickle down from Adult World? It’s not like kids are sitting around with bananas and debating sex techniques. No, it is twofold—-exposure to information on the internet—-which I don’t think is bad BUT what makes it problematic are adults assuming that children aren’t curious, confused, knowledgeable or little mimics.

Indoctrination, Misogyny and Sexualization of Girls/Women

Cuties is really about the indoctrination girls get as they move towards womanhood in not just the society of the past 25 (internet) years but also in older traditions and religions like Christianity and Islam represented in the film by Amy’s family—-and the expectation of women to be submissive and pleasing towards men no matter their feeling. The mother is forced into a multiple wife marriage by her husband and that woman moves in and is shrouded, therefore without identity. And Amy watches all of this, questions it but is rejected from a sensible explanation because the grandmother and mother have none, and are dependent upon the father.

Therefore independent, questioning thinking about men, sex, sexuality is shunned and shamed by her female role models. And her father considers her behavior more of faulty parenting and childhood insanity and disobedience than female rebellion to such intense structures.

Even her odd neighbor friend and classmate is physically and emotionally manhandled by the girl’s older brother. Not in a directly harmful way but in a way that clearly shows male dominance is occurring in her household too. There are reasons both childish and emotionally starved and misogynistically warped as to why the girls are acting out like this. It’s only at the end of the film that Amy’s mother sees the effects and corrects it which allows Amy to then correct herself. Her mother realizes she’s spent so much time disciplining Amy, as the grandmother does both of them, to conform to this male control system, and that’s why she’s acting out so extremely.

Girls to women are taught to do all of this for the Male Gaze, for reward of attention to their self esteem (how one feels about one’s self internally) and self worth (how one feels about how the world feels about one’s self), whether they are aware of it or not.

The Female Gaze As Creator

The film was directed by a woman Maïmouna Doucouré and as a film isn’t just made in someone’s den—-there’s producers, writers, studio executives involved—-I trust that it was made thoughtfully. And in watching it, I could see how it was made thoughtfully and with restraint about Jane level realities that some young girls are crossing the lines in emulation of.

Also, and this might come as a big shock, it’s fiction.

Now it depicts yes, a reality I can testify does exist but there has to come a point where adults can discern and not be triggered by fiction——because it’s—-wait for it…wait for it——fiction.

Reality Check, everyone: you watch people being killed.

You know what would be fantastic?

If there were as much protest about say the Fast & the Furious or Avengers Endgame depicting mass genocide (by a non-White skinned dude. Yeah, Disney, subtle racism, hmm? Was I triggered by that? lol) Or maybe Wolverine? How about any film Liam Neeson is in? How about all the dead women in Law & Order and SVU?

TV/films are literally a graduate school on how to kill women and how to stay desensitized to it as an audience. It is no coincidence that during the emergence of a BLM movement about the lives of people of color there is a co-movement about #MeToo and women as valuable, existing, still being grossly marginalized and abused in spite of the progress of you know in the past century getting the right to vote. And own property. And not need a man’s written permission to travel.

Therefore to be upset at Cuties is hypocritical. How about all of the cops killed in—-every action film, the security guards, etc.? Sometimes when I see an action film and the hero is shooting folk, I think about how we edit that those are victims and “bad guys” or simple flesh barriers in the way of the goal and not as people begin simulated murdered. I’ll take it farther and deeper—-how many people have watched Arnold Schwarzenegger simulate killing? And then elected him to be a Governor?

Oh, that you can separate as fiction vs. reality?

And what about Kids? Remember this diddy of a film?

Again a fictional account of the sexualization or hypersexualized activities of young children and teens.

This is not a Netflix issue—-they are simply a platform that shows materials created by artists. Some of this yes, has to do with society and big butts (hey, JLO!) and Brittany Spears and Madonna and Janet Jackson and Beyoncé and all of the artistic things they do for adults to garner attention and at the same time young girls see and emulate.

Perhaps a better way to construct what so much entertainment that is sex and violence focused does is to perhaps look at concepts of excessive images and ides of violence and dominations leads to actions of hypermasculinity or toxic masculinity being fed and replayed-exampled by and to boys resulting in school violence, bullying, etc... The parallel of feminine destruction/violence and oversexualization becomes hypersexuality manifestation from girls?

This is the cost, in reality of 500+ channels, streaming everywhere, YouTube, Justin Bieber, K Pop—-those acts being sexually suggestive—-and deeper magazines like Vogue and Elle and the fashion business being designed for pre and pubescent bodies. To be alluring (in Allure magazine) and seductive but not fully, obviously adults. I’m not even going to touch on the body sizes and dimensions forced upon women to be i entertainment, when the average normal woman size is 16. Not a Callista Flockhart ). Which isn’t her fault but the system, fashion and entertainment gravitates towards her as an ideal and sends that message out with millions of dollars of advertising and more detrimentally—-repeats it with a dozen more TV shows of size 2s. Do any action heroes like normal sized or plus sized women? Is Rebel Wilson anything but the comedy girl and not the serious romantic lead—-because of her weight. gain, female reduction in equality.

What A Guy Wants

There's a controversial idea that such films and magazines and TV and music videos being targeted to present pre/pubescent girls is because male biological sexuality is geared to seek out females (if you’re not LGBTSGL, don’t get triggered gays!) who are within that age range as sexually available. More importantly, the theory proves out because of the heavy male control of these visual/presentational forms, which have made it the norm for decades upon decades.

So then, Kyle, is Cuties a form of propaganda manipulation?

I think it’s spotlighting the propaganda/manipulation and how it seeps into the minds of young girls and how some, for a variety of home and social reasons, buy into it wholesale and get out of control. Losing self control to forms of exploitation like the real Jane I knew or like Amy in the film. But Amy realizes the connection of her self-exploitation and her mother and grandmother’s oppression and as maturity warrants, changes her mind about herself and her interests and actions.

It wasn’t hard to watch for several reasons for me—-young girls nor boys don’t fall into my sexuality spectrum (perhaps some upset men and women are unconsciously upset because when they look at the film and see all the dipping and gyrating and pumping—-they can’t help but sexualize the children's doing it.) I don’t sexualize children or even teens because I know and understand them even if they’re being sexually flagrant.

Bugs Bunny nd Daffy Duck and Their Fetishitic Sexual Relationship

Yes, children can be sexual towards me and it will fall flat because I completely don’t see sex there, male or female. But I think the upset folks watching Cuties SEE sex in the movements, the gyrations because one it’s sexually provocative in its context. But those same viewers miss the overarching reality.

It’s fiction.

I can see Bugs Bunny kick Daffy Duck in the butt, a hundred times. It takes my internal mentality to sexualize that Bugs has a violent ass fetish or that Daffy’s getting off from it. Because I recognize the action AND the overarching context, make the action a representation of perhaps sexualization, but NOT actual sexualization.

There’s an internal differentiation that the VIEWER must do, the art form cannot be resposnible for yoru internalized projections upon it.

Did I just explain how the human brain and fiction works? lol

Back To Jane the Non-Virgin

An interesting side point about us discussing Jane in the school—-one teacher, with a 12 year old daughter said that he was talking to his male friends about Jane and they agreed that if a 12 year old girl came onto them and was physically developed as Jane was, they might hit it. Because Jane had proposed it. Jane’s actions and disappearing with older men was acceptable because she was complicit.

The women in the office suggested that even if Jane proposed sex with an older man, she’s not mature enough to be consensual in such an affair. The male teacher shrugged.

I then pointed out that his friends were also telling him that if his 12 year old daughter flirted, purposefully or accidentally, that they would hit it. It was bit like a rape gang telling a friend that his daughter was on the menu too. Creepy. But male honest.

Adults and Sex and Children's and Sex and Adults Sexualizing's Children

I think not only do adults find the pressure to think about what children are doing and emulating uncomfortable but I think adults, as proven by our news cycle, also have sexual thoughts and actins about children, that the vast majority aren’t discussing because it’s a social taboo.. So when it comes through Netflix into one’s home, it’s like being caught in a form of cognitive dissonance.

Yet, you watch things where women are killed and mutilated thousands of times a year (I dare you to sit with a pad for the next month and simply mark off a check when a woman is abused or killed in your regular entertainment fare); or simulated romance and sex is often depicted as some sort of passionate “struggle” or angry emotions before consummation—-or someone you vote for makes movie after movie, simulating killing people.

No, hold that thought.

Video of FDR or JFK or MLK shooting a variety of people in the head, in the chest, blowing them up. And then on the news asking for your vote/allegiance.

We literally masturbate as a society to fiction that is so close to the line of reality that it triggers some people as if it is reality but then they watch other far more horrible stuff and that they’re desensitized to.

Which makes me question who and why it set them off?

What are THOSE people going through in their heads that immediately kids, children, little girls fully clothed, ridiculously acting out—-becomes both sexualized in the fiction AND then in the external reality, to the point of objection?

I found the scenes slightly ridiculous and almost humorous at children acting so unself--consciously in ludicrous ways.

Because I view them first as children, outside of an aware adult performance to be sexually enticing, not as adult sexual objects.

The Earth Orgy

We're all complicit in this orgy circle jerk of sex-violence. I’m not even going to go near videogames where you’re video armed and directly shoot simulated people. That’s just low hanging fruit.

Netflix is just the GrubHub delivery system. You and I are the willing, never satiated gang, we just have to defend our barbarity by occasionally pointing at something as “too far”. Like hypocrites. We can’t delineate fiction and reality and then be upset that the non-reality art is problematic. If it’s unreal, it’s unreal.

But maybe that’s the bigger underlying psychological problem?

People are starting to not have a filter internally between what is fiction/unreal and what isn’t? I have written fiction for 30+ years——all manner of stuff and I’m very, very clear on what is real and what isn’t. I even go so far as to not engage fiction (TV) on a deeper basis because of how it bypasses the prefrontal cortex (your filter machine) and goes directly into the amygdala—-your core center.

Maybe Cuties is so upsetting because your filter has been ripped so thoroughly that your core reacts to it as if it were reality?

Huh.

Don’t hate the player, hate the Game.

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Kyle Phoenix is a teacher, certified adult educator, sexologist, sex coach and sexuality educator with over two decades of intensive experience. He studied at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, New York University, and Columbia University. He has worked, consulted and taught individuals and focused professional developments for the CDC, Department of Education, Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York City Department of Health, non-profits, Fortune 500 companies and unions. He began his career facilitating on-campus workshops addressing a wide range of sexuality and sexual health issues and then moved on to teaching at universities, non-profits, private groups and clients, hosting The Kyle Phoenix Show on television and multiple online webinars, including YouTube and Sclipo and writing extensively through his blog, Special Reports, articles and other print and E books in the Kyle Phoenix Series on relationships, finance, education, spirituality and culture. He lives in New York with his family.

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Can you describe a time that your company only discovered that you were irreplaceable after they fired you? How did you feel? What did they do?

This was over a decade ago……and you’ll see why Sage is my favorite X-Man…….
The Set-Up
I was working for a temp-long term consulting agency and they placed me at one of the NY offices of Williams Communications, a multinational telecommunication company. I often don’t talk extensively about my corporate history/experience because of what I was doing, what I was good at.
I was a corporate spy.
But I was a corporate spy FOR the corporations I was consulting for.
So I’m placed in the Marketing and Engineering Dept., answering to two VPs—-Jack and Arthur. I was excited, they were both Black men who had worked their way up and worked for a Senior VP, Craig, another Black man. I was excited to learn and progress in all manner of corporate goodness, I thought they would be excellent business mentors.
I would sit at my cubicle outside of Arthur and Jack’s offices and occasionally answer the phone and transfer calls a few times a day. I started bringing magazines (I used to always carry a Vanity Fair to temp assignments—-a good solid 8 hours of reading.) and then I start editing and revising manuscripts I was working on. Suit and tie, backpack, magazine, USB drive, attentively ready.
Jack promises work is coming. Arthur is anxious and always bouncing around, talking too fast, too much. But okay….
Finally, I go to Jack and explain I’ve been there 6 weeks and while I’m grateful for the non-stressed cash, but there’s got to be something I can do?
Jack tells me to close his office door. He gives me an assignment that I can’t talk about with anyone in specifics.

Now I Know The Skinny-Two Assignments

• I go back to my desk and the next day boxes of invoices of engineers, technicians, and work done by them come to my desk. Sift through them and prep them for payment. This means that I then have to engage their in-house financial/billing system——that no one is an expert on.
• Another assignment comes to me: educate the tri-state office entirety of employees. Hundreds. They are then to take a test for their job title/position to be comparable to their skill level in let’s say Level 1, Level 2 or Level 3. (Someone had read about my TAing experience on my resume and thought teaching! But it became a corporate teaching gig…sort of.)

So now I have these two massive projects, just me, but what the projects do is they give me, and only me—-insight into EVERYONE. Their work, their skill levels, their billing, their vacation time (people had to sync into my Outlook for me to sync their training classes.) I’m also responsible for setting up remote online training for everyone to be able to access AND send them either the EBook training manual for their appropriate level OR a printed manuscript of the training materials.
Ok, as the year of this is unraveling, Arthur quits and goes to the competition and then a year later quits there and comes back. This is important.

My Cover
My two on the surface assignments were:

• Invoice/Work Reconciliation
• Training of Tri-State Staff (hundreds of people)

I was given Arthur’s corporate credit card often—-I eventually signed his name better than him—-to purchase IT equipment to set up a neighboring conference room for in-house Training of individuals and as my launch/storage space as my work was too much for my cubicle area. Sort of like an office. Sort of.
I was also given perks like team dinners (I often would get an entire department certified and technically passed on the Training in a tight window of time) at Morton’s, a swanky steakhouse, when milestones were met AND near-unlimited billing as a Consultant because——wait for it….Arthur signed my billing invoice from the agency every week——and eventually it was a perfunctory matter that I put down my times.
I routinely billed 100 hours a week.
Arthur thought this was impossible and tried to surprise me by coming into the empty office building on a Saturday—-I was sitting there working.
In a few months, I was an expert on their in-house system and clicking through it so well that when the coastal VP came out to scare Craig, Arthur, and Jack, she asked to meet me. Susan. Susan then tasks me with directly working with her, answering only to her and sending my invoices ready to pay only to her—-in California— through the system. We agree that I can get about $40k done a week though there are $2 million dollars or more of invoices to be paid after my forensic accounting.

The Shady Truth of the Company
Okay—-now the back door dish on this whole Invoice BS.
There was embezzling going on. It seems that several of the Engineers and Technicians were in league with several Project Managers. The PMs would say send 4 Techs to the Acme Company Construction skyscraper on Broadway to build out a telecom system for the top 10 floors. The PM would invoice that it had taken 200 hours per Tech—-800 hours. However, it had taken only 500 hours. The PM would then kick back 50 hours to each Tech and keep 100 for himself.
What I was tasked with doing was syncing up money to time to Tech. Bob couldn’t have been at Acme that week because he was in New Jersey at Orange Inc. And then backtrack that embezzlement to the original assigning, signing off PM. But it was complicated by the fact that Acme had had some work done. So I had to disentangle those 500 actual work hours from 800 padded ones.
What the invoices actually were, was my correcting them and the companies being reimbursed what they’d paid for ghost time because there had been rumblings about a mass lawsuit if they weren’t rectified. Susan would then approve say 300 hours at $40,000 in total back to a check cut to Acme for Job # 15 in July 2XXX. They had originally paid maybe $60k in July. The further complication was Acme might have 8 offices throughout the tri-state area so each office’s working techs and PMs had to be scrutinized for overage against work history elsewhere.
It gets uglier.
It seems that a VP’s husband had made agreements with national Acme Construction for $5 million and they’d only gotten $2 million worth of work. But the VPs husband had used his private shell company. Essentially Acme Inc was getting royally ripped off from the bottom and the top.
Susan knew all the details but didn’t have the forensic proof. Jack was her man on the inside. I was the spy given access to everything to proof, step by step, each hourly, daily, monthly rip off and directly tie it to names. I was also a non-Williams consultant. I held allegiance to the task and was “clean” of any wrongdoing or relationships to wrongdoers.
When Jack first told me my assignment and my corporate accounting experience, finance experience, and computer experience was the real reason why I was hired and stuck in a corner to become invisible—-I told him from observation of the PMs, Techs, and Dispatchers (the Dispatchers had to be in on it to “fake” send someone somewhere but Dispatcher # 1 might bump John’s hours at Acme Site 3 to 60 hours in Week 19, however, Dispatcher #7 would have recorded his hours as 65 at Orange Inc Site 2 Week 19. The Dispatchers essentially data dumped into a person’s file but couldn’t alter it because the dump itself would create the payout. Within the embezzlers' network, not enough of them knew or had the clearance to alter multiple areas of the system to align time, accounting and presence to payment from the purchasing companies to avoid leaving a trail.)
But just visually in the office, I’d spotted at least 4 people who were sporting more bling and expensive clothing than their salaries should’ve allowed.
One guy I jokingly said, because he was bald, walked by and had the theme from Shaft played behind him—-I’d seen that cashmere jacket on Quincy Jones on Oprah, I went to Saks, gasped at the price —-there was no way in fuck a PM like Lance could afford it—he was the kingpin of embezzlement.

Training? Not Exactly
My second overlapping undercover assignment was this mass Training. This though was a roundabout thing that I knew held another nut. To do the training, for me to pull all of your information and assign a Level to you and then track you down throughout the tri-state, get you a digital or physical manual, set you up online for a test, broadcast tutorials from the conference room, receive your score and then data store and correlate it—-from my micro/macro beginning-deep insight-to-end perspective—— looked like something else the other side of my screens.
I was profiling each and every employee. And using the data to create a measurement profile of them by an objective assessment.

Hundreds of People Had to Be Trained Though….
Here’s what I did—-On a Saturday and Sunday, I networked into every printer, on desks, and copiers in the entire 4 floors of offices and then queued up Level 1, 2 and 3 manuals and pressed print.
40 printers would begin printing.
I’d go to the movies. To Saks. To Barnes and Noble.
Back in a few hours to change paper and toner, go have lunch on them at a nice restaurant. Return, replenish, go to dinner. Return, move everything to the conference room, fill out that 100-hour invoice and take a car service home. Monday morning I had dozens of manuals going out by office mail and Fed Ex to the tri-state employees.
Depending on how well they knew their position/studied the manual the online Training could take 2–8 hours so it was a chore to get hundreds of people within a year to complete.

A Stock Market Scandal and Employee Shakedown
Here’s what happened:
Arthur and the others start mocking me one day because Williams has made an offer to all the full-time employees—-focus your 401k cash into buying Williams Stock and when it hits $50, you could line up at HR for a brand new $50 bill. The current stock price was then maybe in the $20-$30 dollar range.
I’m like this feels suspicious but my finance education was new then so I ask a coworker friend who’s BF owns a brokerage house—-I lay out the pieces to him on a conference call and I tell him what I think I’m seeing. He’s amazed that I’m a VPs assistant and asks if I want to work for him?
I demure because I can’t explain to them why I’m so highly finance educated for seemingly such a low position. His GF was a Tech but not on the graft. In fact, she came in one Saturday and saw me pushing one of the giant, thousand-pound photocopiers from one side of the building to the other through the elevator lobby. (If I’d had the MSCE training I would’ve known easier how to reroute IP addresses…you’ll see what this digression is about.)
The stock price hits $50.
HR hands out 50s.
Grown adults run through the building screeching like children.
I tell them, something’s wrong here.

Tony
A new VP comes in-—Tony. Very cool, nice, charismatic in a low key way….but his job duties are vague. However, he’s close to Susan. He, Susan and I have closed-door conference calls about my Invoice AND Training process. $40k a week—-confirmed, emails and setups into the training computer system, results being tallied, checking off hundreds of employees with receipt of materials, instructional email, time to test, test results. They’re very interested in not my process but in the end, resulting data.
I suggest to Arthur that what I’m doing, which he has a sense of but doesn’t understand, though he’s my supervisor, is the Okey-Doke. He’s a reasonably nice idiot so I’m trying to warn him.
Tony fires a dozen Techs, half a dozen PMs and several Dispatchers on a random Monday.
Craig the Senior VP, the King Henry of the office and NY offices/tri-state, is upset and promises to swiftly rectify Tony’s insanity. Big Boy (he was a large man) is summarily told to mind his business, Tony’s power comes from the Top—-Susan.
Oh, snap.
Tony tells me good work.
I realize my Invoice work are the bullets.

I Figure Out the $50s
I suggest that the company is doing something, inflating the stock price by such an infusion of capital——from the employees 401ks; Susan is pushing me to reconcile Invoices to even out the books AND the training are to measure the entire population……for an extinction-level event.
I can only tell my friend and her BF, who confirms that’s how you inflate a company for sale, as the buyer’s due diligence is going on: ”Hey, we’re worth $5 billion look at our stock price souring….” AND scoop back all of the employee's money that you’d have to payout.
How I Got Fired
Arthur though jumps the shark——he’s afraid that I’m working too close with Tony. So to stab Tony—-he fires me at 9 am on a Friday——explaining that Williams, valued at well over $4–5 billion…. simply doesn’t have the cash anymore to justify an $80k+ a year consultant like me. I’m the only one on staff. Yes, yes, there are are other “temps”, dozens in fact, but MY check is sinking the company.
This is several weeks after I figure out the Extinction Level Massacre about to happen.
I say okay. Bye.
(Never fire me. I don’t return. Okay, I returned once years later but I’d already been made another offer by a different side of a company for more money to go into effect when my crazy boss fired me…for the third time. She used to fire me on weekends for shits and giggles. Then I flew the coop. She started a corporate nuclear war over me, to get me permanently fired. And lost. Then she got fired a year later. They were so scared of what I would say at her going away party that they told me the wrong time so when I got upstairs it was over. I still got some cake though. :P My friends call me Olivia Pope! lol)
I stroll out of Williams in jeans and Timberlands walk several blocks in Midtown to the consulting office and explain that I see every invoice, hell, I might even have signed several for Dispatchers and others (and myself). I am earning them back $250k a year I do so much time at Williams—-I want a new Monday assignment—-I’m not leaving the chair until I get it at a comparable price. I’m that valuable. They have one for me downtown in an hour. I go back to clean out my cubicle.
It’s now noonish.
Arthur, having received Susan’s invoice check-up call, says they’ve “found some money” and can keep me on.
I tell him no thanks, I’ve already accepted another assignment. It would be unprofessional to have accepted and quit now. Sorry. (Not sorry.)
I go to my desk and pack for 5 hours. (I FedExed home more office supplies than could fit…on a FedEx truck lol…..)
Arthur’s in a panic, he goes back and forth with me. Finally, he calls the agency and they say: “You fired him. If he wants to move on, he can move on.”
Tony calls me into his office and asks if I’m really going to go? I say yes. You can’t trust a married man who’s ready to slit your throat AND is having an affair with a married Dispatcher. (They used to make out in Grand Central Station. Eeeeeeww.) Plus, I tell Tony, I’ve assembled all the pieces (weapons)—- I can see what is about to happen. He grins.
Susan calls me. I innocently tell her Arthur fired me BUT here are her week’s invoices, teed up, online.
Tony prints out a thing for me, like an old-time transcript and picture of a “Rowan”, which is an old form of an Assistant who goes above and beyond, does and is more than his position. He tells me to frame it and he’s my reference, recommendation anywhere I want to go. And he winks, he’ll take care of Arthur.
I leave. There are banker’s boxes of $1 million in Invoices left unresolved. Susan hits the roof…in California.
Arthur calls me for weeks on end at my new job but I tell him I’m very happy there, can’t leave, it would be unprofessional. He then tricks-transfers me to the Dispatcher he’s wrangled into trying to reconcile the Invoices. I hang up. That was December.
It seems that aside from their direct function no one else had developed the synergistic understanding that I had of their in-house computer system to weave my way through its byzantine networks and pull, link, check, verify and tee up from authorization data from Employee, Time, HR, Paychecks, Vendors, and Invoices, essentially like 6 “buildings” within the tri-state structure.
I’d spent 18 months really just focused on this one system and then my learning was reinforced setting up the Training using some of the same data.
The Invoices aren’t reconciled.
January: Susan has to write a check for $2 million because no one knows the system well enough to bang out $1 million in Invoices to figure out the exact amount Acme was over-billed.
Hell, I was the best in the country and I was doing only $40k and it took me a week for that.
Real Truth (Like the part of the movie where they show you what really happened during the heist.)

• Actually, it took me about 30 minutes to bang out $40k. I used to do it on the morning of Fridays before Susan’s call. I knew to stretch it out for job security—-and I took the following year off to finish writing a book. I’d been planning on the sabbatical for over a year—-having to kick out a roommate October threw off my plan to exit directly in December/January.
• The $50 stock price was a sales shill. Williams sells off part of that company using the inflated stock price—-the stock price then drops to under $5. All of the bragging, screeching 401k/pensions are wiped out. Some people like Arthur, Craig, hundreds of others had been there 10–30 years. In many ways, Williams recouped all of that paid out employee invested cash that normally a company has on its books as a form of liability-debt. Williams tricked its employees into investing millions back into the company for $50 each.
• The Training I was doing was to assemble a Hit List. If you got below a certain number, say 70, on the test that was about your positions knowledge of the computer system, you were terminated.
• Tony terminated 200 people in that building by April. He kept 8. It was a desert, a cubicle desert when I visited a year later.

I saw Arthur a couple of years later, ironically with his wife in Grand Central and he told me about the massacre—-I already knew from my friend who was one of the 8 Tony saved (and I had warned).
Arthur had crawled back to another company and taken essentially a PM position at a quarter of his salary. Jack was kept. Craig was fired.
Arthur asked what I was doing. I explained I was Senior VP of a telecom company, gave him the name and a business card told him to send me his resume.
He plotzed.
The Behind The Scenes of My Thinking
This was not the first time my investigative, forensic, IT, financial and teaching skills have been harnessed to such a melee weapon. While it wasn’t my fault, and no, I don’t feel responsible for weeding out thieves and ill-trained, fake skilled folk—-I do feel like mythic Cassandra sometimes…..
But no one EVER listens, which I find hilarious. And sobering. I generally look at my corporate work along those lines as not a warning bell but as an effort to see clearly.
The Gallups Talents surveying assessment has Strategic, Ideation and Futuristic as three of my 5 Talents. I use all three—-I used them there (I didn’t discover Gallup for another decade when I went back to teaching and was working with adult students to help them find their Strengths.)

• Ideation allowed me to understand EVERYTHING as I was slowly sitting there just absorbing, playing with the in-house system, watching people. Most importantly their in-house system—-I could literally see it’s byzantine, massive warrens in my head and like a boy with a pet octopus, talk to it to perform multiple unified functions.
• Strategic helped me navigate on a micro-level through all the work itself and getting it effectively done and then on a macro level see the ramifications of my work as well as what one thing—-$50 bills, 401k investments, and Tony’s arrival could “mean”. It took me a while to understand that a tsunami was coming but all of the tide washing back, animals fleeing, air pressure changes allowed me to pack myself (and warn a friend) and make a plan to leave by the end of the year because I suspected there wouldn’t be much thereafter that. To that end, I was in my 20s, it was one of the first times I’ve had that Strength pressed from so many directions and levels.
• Futuristic allowed me to backward design and plot out outcomes and see pattern-based possibilities and what to do, not do, plot alongside, pocket resources and know when to leave. I was emotionally disappointed when I understood how all of these moving pieces, my work the generative engine would end because I did want to become a permanent employee—-a Tech, a PM maybe. Which is why Arthur’s limiting me and then firing me hurt so much. I would’ve stayed, Tony and Susan asked me too but I knew that it would mean Arthur, and a few others, got what they richly deserved if I left. I got out of the way realizing I was also Arthur’s shield as long as he was the supervisor , technically of me and my projects. I walked out of the factory but didn’t put the lead shield back down over the radioactive core.

Why I Got Fired
While Arthur was a fool, he wasn’t a complete villain ( but he was a jerk/asshole with malicious intentions), which is why I tried to “warn” him of my prescient pattern seeing. But an aspect I hadn’t considered that my friend who worked there brought up was that when she would come over to his office I’d be there, sometimes sitting at his desk while he talked to me—-and I’d be directing operational stuff through the computer, outlining plans, etc.
She said there were times, with his credit card going around town to Best Buy and other places buying computer equipment for my conference room office/training studio, training programs (I had to learn and bring Techs in to set up essentially an online video training system that could be accessed 24/7—-this was in the early days of things like YouTube)—— that I was taking his place, directing him as the subordinate. He might have felt a certain way about that secretly—-been threatened, felt I was setting him up to take his job, so he tried to cut me first not knowing how thick my relationship/value with Tony and Susan was.
Now from my perspective, I always think of my skills and abilities being to who I, a Rowan, am working for—-Arthur first. Then Jack. Then Tony. Then Susan. Jack stayed invisible, in the cut—-he eventually got Arthur’s job. But I had no designs on Arthur’s job.
I’ll tell you when Arthur lost this Rowan’s fealty.

MSCE Training—-Give a Nerd His Candy
The Techs had evening trainings where they trained each other or other staff. One Tech, who was also funny and cute, who was Microsoft System Engineer Certified, offered it as an in-house evening training. For any and everyone who signed up.
I wanted it so badly, I’d already bought the books a year before. I’d been doing MS Office software certifications and gotten 7 of them. But MSCE was like $4000…and then it was FREE downstairs with the Techs in the later evenings. I had attended 3 of the sessions when Arthur kiboshed it to be ONLY Techs saying that it would overtax me to getting my Invoice & Training projects done. That was BS. That’s when I realized he was frightened of my getting too much training and wanted to reserve me to only service his light.
See, if he’d let me get what I wanted, the option of maybe being a Tech or just having the knowledge, I would’ve protected him as a loyal Rowan should. I could have then gone into the company as Tech or a PM. Even if I remained under him, his department, I would have had the requisite experience and certifications to command a greater salary as a FT employee of the company. It was a heavy skill based tier system, of pay. I’d stayed away from taking a permanent position with them because I was making more as a consultant—-but I did want into this big company where I had skill/value. I just needed higher certifications. That was very expensive and close to my desk and work schedule.
When he kiboshed me, I cut all loyalty strings. So when he fired me, I’d “left” months before——which is why I was drawing out the Invoices. My plan was to quit at the end of the year. He knew I’d had to kick out my roommate in October, pay $5000 in back rent, so I was suddenly in apparent need of the job and he fired me the first week of November.
Which is why I left $1 million in Invoices in his lap.
And Susan eviscerated him for it, through Tony—-who I immediately sensed was the guidance system to the “missiles” I was “building”.
Tony was clearly the Hatchet Man but Arthur, Craig, and others didn’t sense that until he started cutting…….
I saw them lining them up, fleecing them of their 401k cash—-quite a few of the FT employees were nasty to me—-treating me like ”the temp”, couple of sexuality digs, etc., etc.
Even Arthur did me some to my face dirt, he had given me his Dispatcher girlfriend's paperwork in a FedEx packet to express to Texas—where HR processed hirings. No one ever knew that he hesitated to hand it to me, she was sitting there smirking in his office but I sealed it in front of them and went to mail it. I actually went to the men’s room on another floor and opened it to confirm where her position would be. If they’d been setting her up to come into his department—-I was his “department”—-I was going to trash the paperwork and quit, leaving the Invoices and Training high and dry.
Luckily, he was simply making her permanent in the Dispatcher Dept. But as an FT company employee she had their Dispatcher certification would have made more than me if I became an Employee without certifications. He was setting her up lovely for her loyalty but not mine, while his wife and funny looking daughter sat at home and her husband sat in Iraq.
Yeah, it was that kind of 48 Laws of Power (which I’d read) kind of place.
That comeback dharma is a bitch. And I put the itch into bitch.
What Arthur Should’ve Done
He thought he was maintaining an In with Tony and Susan through me. He was. He should have never tried to weaponize me against them out of fear nor minimize me to neutralize me. He should have built me up, let me go to the classes and then brought in a couple of people to “help” me as he had done before to small Tech teams to get the video/training links set up and coordinated (which is when I would force him to come up off the corporate Visa and take us all out to dinner at Morton’s steakhouse.).
He should have had me train others on what I was doing to minimize my value and/or breed more fealty into me by getting me into the company fold itself where he would’ve had more leverage over me. By still being with the agency I had that 1-Hour Option to take my hefty skill set and walk out the door and be employed an hour later.
Technically speaking, I was the agency’s Rowan. Not Williams’, nor Arthur’s. I was bringing them $250k a year and getting less than half of that. He should’ve bumped me up slightly above my take-home from them with cash and benefits, but made me a Williams employee, under him. And surrounded me with lesser pawns of his design. He didn’t take advantage of time and my inability to say no to training others in what exactly I was doing so that he could control the process of the Invoices. He tried to control me instead of the ball itself—-the Invoices—-which would have given him leverage over Tony and Susan. The leverage move would then have been to take Craig’s place—-where he was aiming, Craig was talking retirement—-by consolidating his power, building his own X-Men.
But Arthur was limited in several ways:

• He was charismatic, a natural salesman, which is how he’d been a Tech then, a PM but he wasn’t much of a VP strategist.
• He let his personal business become office scuttlebutt. As a married man schtupping a married Dispatcher (an office manager said I should talk to him about how indiscreet he was. I was like now I’m Betty Curry too?) It was too volatile of an office—-gossiping, backstabbing, embezzling—-to have a scarlet letter on your backs. Also, a man loses trust and a woman loses 50% of professional respect when an affair is office knowledge. Tony was (and still is) a seriously committed family man. He didn’t care about my sexuality, he cared about integrity. Arthur failed Tony’s personal assessment of him as well as professional.
• The Dispatcher goomah should’ve been his secret weapon to sidle up to me as my assistant. Get the skinny on the work process. He used her for temporary gain/she used him for temporary gain.
• It was wartime in the USA, she didn’t look “good” cheating on her soldier husband. It made people, particularly the women in the office (always the office moral backbone) feel a certain way about her. She was dismissed as a whore essentially. And unAmerican. Didn’t help she was Haitian with an accent. (No, she wasn’t that pretty.)
• When he’d quit and come back part of that was to tee him up to secede Craig. It was his job to lose, which he did. He should have just stayed in the cut, recognizing that Tony and Susan were using his resources (me) as their objective weapon. He was already in, which is what I was trying to tell him.
• Jack stayed in the cut after teeing me up to what my skillset had been hired for. He was often giving me behind the scenes skinny. I became his conduit and shield. He took a demotion to PM, stayed in the company and after a while filled the massive vacuum as a VP. He saw the coming culling/war and entrenched himself in good work and simply huddled out the bombings. He was one of the 8 left by an act of humility to allow himself to be demoted.
• Arthur was nervous, anxious, all the time, paranoid. I’ve noticed that the VPs I’ve worked for who don’t play to create value, every boat rising around them and long game, tend to burn out. They tend to believe that their position, title and mystique (there is none) of the VP title means they are a stone’s toss from the seat of power. When in fact, the title of VP, is often an ego bone tossed to managers.
• Tony’s title? Director of Special Projects.
• My title? Administrative/Executive Assistant.
• Power never lies in titles nor the most highly compensated.

I waited and watched and then as a lynch-pin, accepted being fired and refused to return. Eventually, the agency threatened Arthur if he kept trying to contact me.
As a Final, Final addendum: What I Learned
It was after Williams that I started doing a Work Journal where I keep track of

• what I did,
• what I learned,
• what I liked
• and what I didn’t like about particular jobs/assignments/projects.

What I also learned to do and evaluate myself against was:
Here’s what controls how much you earn:

1. How good you are at what you do? (I am good at Working because of my Work Ethic. I can outwork you and damn near anyone else. You won’t hear me grumble until 100+ hours of work in a week. (And by then most people are gone anyway.))
2. How high is the demand for what you can do?
3. How valuable your work is to the marketplace?
4. How easy it is to replace you (People with a Strong Work Ethic are taking over—-they’re called immigrants, why do you think there’s such foreigner fear?)

How you get good/ahead:

1. Be better at what you do (than those around you—-I purposefully go out of my way to get certifications, degrees and take skill builders that others can’t/won't. What I’d been doing before, during and after Williams was taking short evening computer classes so I was Advanced/Certification level (ironically a few years later I’d be tapped to train hundreds in the official certifications) for MS Office, web design, graphic design, programming. That continuous immersion in computers, programming, design etc is what made it so easy to understand William's byzantine system—-it was essentially several different kinds of software applications—-Dispatchers, PMs and Techs, tended to specialize in their “form” of software in the system. I was able to overview master it as an entirety because I was studying similar components. Which is what I found intellectually stimulating about the job. And why I was so interested in the MCSE training as a natural evolution of what I’d been doing but couldn’t immediately afford.))
2. Be in an industry that is growing.
3. Increase the value you are able to deliver.
4. Be hard to replace

I try to teach my students these ideas/methodologies now. Often I find it’s knowledge most people who work at any level don’t know because they are unaware of how they are evaluated by the systems they’re in, by supervisors, and by what their overall thinking should be about the position/work. Most people go to work like a donkey to carrot and don’t think about the road or where all of the carrots are coming from or why they can’t reach the carrot.
As a horrible hammer to point—-the employees who voluntarily shifted their 401k/life savings to Williams’ stock for a $50 bill—-donkeys to carrots who were tricked to trade their millions of stored, compound interest increasing carrots for 1 $50 dollar bill.
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Kyle Phoenix is a teacher, certified adult educator, sexologist, sex coach and sexuality educator with over two decades of intensive experience. He studied at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, New York University, and Columbia University. He has worked, consulted and taught individuals and focused professional developments for the CDC, Department of Education, Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York City Department of Health, non-profits, Fortune 500 companies and unions. He began his career facilitating on-campus workshops addressing a wide range of sexuality and sexual health issues and then moved on to teaching at universities, non-profits, private groups and clients, hosting The Kyle Phoenix Show on television and multiple online webinars, including YouTube and Sclipo and writing extensively through his blog, Special Reports, articles and other print and E books in the Kyle Phoenix Series on relationships, finance, education, spirituality and culture. He lives in New York with his family.

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Do you have healthy boundaries? Why or why not?

It was/is something I had to be taught and re-evaluate to get right. It’s not a one step internal process as much as it’s an ongoing process like working out, or eating a healthy diet or even writing and publishing.
Unfortunately I grew up with parents who experienced a lot of trauma in their lives. Fortunately though they were not only highly educated, having met in college but my mother majored in psychology. This meant that the idea of mental health, seeking mental health counseling and being conscious of feelings were all within the realm of possibility, very unusual for African Americans. I think what also helped was that my parents became adults, in college, post 1960s. There was still enough of “free thought” being pressed and Black Consciousness but it also meant that they were away from some more repressive parts of the larger society.
The negative side to “freedom” was that they got involved in drugs and alcohol in distracting and addictive ways. Both of them had strong addictive issues but again luckily, due to education, I was well provided for so we never lived in poverty. This also meant that my mother was more aware of getting out of control and voluntarily went to rehab then shifted our lives away from father and addictive stepfathers. She was able to become self reflective enough to see herself, if not clearly, then as the architect of her own misery and rectify much of it.
What this meant growing up was that on one hand I experienced a lot of freedom, not from necessarily neglect but as an only child there were less boundaries between myself and the adult world. Everything was honestly and graphically explained to me which then artificially advanced past other children my own age. In order though to be a child in an adult world, it was easier to take me along sometimes than find a babysitter,I became not a direct people pleaser but something similar, helpful, gracious, giving—-it took me years to learn appropriate giving in the sense that I gave as I wanted and not simply to make others happy, which creates an indirect shine back onto me. I now give because I genuinely want to. The good part about this is that I’ve ever been attached to an outcome from the giving, which means I’m not predatory about it. I’ve found though in balancing myself how non-giving so many people are and therefore how being giving made me stand out or has given me opportunities. In many ways those dysfunction of Swiss cheese boundaries forced me to establish a higher ideal about being generous and helpful. In corporate word this wasn’t such a big problem but becoming a teacher/educator it was and in personal relationships.

Teaching/Educator
I worked as a TA for a university then corporate world for about a decade than slipped back into education at a charter school then several non-profits and eventually a university again. This meant that my students, 80% over 18, were closer to my age or older than not. I also spent years teaching workshops/counseling around sex and sexuality so this meant that I was intimately acquainted with personal and private issues from a lot of my students. What this meant was that worked for several organizations that had bad boundaries so I had to first notice this then adjust myself then understand I wasn’t being stand offish or rude by keeping myself, my personal life private but that it was the internalized corruption of agencies that had bad boundaries.
Several agencies like GMAD, Gay Men of African Descent or Black Men’s Xchange normalized predatory sexual behaviors, unsafe sexual behaviors while being funded to be the opposite and fraudulent financial behaviors. It wasn’t until I worked for GMHC, Gay Men’s Health Crisis and Phoenix House, that I found healthy boundaries that aligned to my own internal ethics and morals. But this meant that I had to slowly weed out friends, clients, former students, former coworkers—-including directors and social workers—-from my life because of their drug/alcohol habits, predatory sexual habits towards younger people and their dissonance around safe sex and caring for the health of others.

How I Changed
I had a friend from middle school, who started out male—-let’s call him K. It was pretty apparent that whatever K was going to be, a total geeky nerd that he wasn’t going to be conventionally heterosexual. He was just very light melanin wise and fey-—-so he stood out even among Black people. Eventually when we were about 20, K had gone to school in Buffalo and I was working at home, helping to pay off the mortgage while figuring out how to get to college myself, we had a discussion on the phone. I calmly said that I’d joined a gay dating service. I’d been in counseling with a high school counselor for years—-she started a group and had a relationship beyond friendship with my best friend—-come out to my family at 18, so K steadily more of a distant/visiting friend was the last to know. I was very nonchalant about it and that’s when K revealed he was trans. I was very nonchalant about that too. K peppered me with interruptions and questions until he—-transitioning to a she understood that I understood.
By then my mother and I had done intensive therapy with meditation techniques, I still use today; I’d been in an Incest Anonymous group for over a year; I’d been to years of AA and NA meetings with my sober mother and I had the high school counseling. This is important because the conglomeration of those things forged a healthier sense of self within myself. K and I had diverged after high school, him getting the chance to move to absolute suburbia with his father and stepmother and then onto to college. We talked about his being sexually abused at 6 onward and how he thought and related to it as the best sexual experiences of his lifetime—-though the perpetrator was 10+ years older. My own sexual abuse experiences I was purposefully working to contextualize as separate from my sexuality and then identify my sexuality clearly and enact it healthily.
I eventually went to the same university as K, who flunked out after 7 years and though I was trying to work downstate and the deal was K would keep my stuff in her apartment basement, I’d return, and we’d find a big place, in NYC, in December, K surprised moved in September. As sort of a passive revenge thing because I’d gone to PA, my mother’s house, then left there and was in Philadelphia working. In retrospect, I lost lots of stuff from Buffalo because I wasn’t taking care of K, I was taking care of myself. But I had accustomed myself to being the brother/caretaker role and with my high paying job helped K learn and get well paid too in NYC, using my credit to get us a big apartment.
K though was out of control—-dressing female, purposefully taking illegal hormone pills and silicone injections under the muscles to create a female appearance but not eating so there was no fat to “shape”. K was literally working at an antithesis with herself. She was also constantly on a dick hunt, inviting vagrants into the apartment, to draw them naked or married men. It wasn't like one’s wild 20s where you’re dating and learning yeses and noes, K was like a bad remake of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, with increasingly more dangerous acts for both attention and self destruction.
Finally 2 years into this roommate hell, we’re having a blow up over K leaving the front door open in the mad dash to get a married train conductor from the 7 train back to her bedroom, to blow, the previous night. Within the argument K explodes that for those 3 months I was working in Philadelphia, while I stayed in contact with her and family to let them know I was safe, I’d detached, not told anyone where I was.
I realized that having taken time away from K and my money demanding parents/family—-a boundary—-had been seen as betrayal by K.
I was also regularly listening to and reading Marianne Williamson and one of the things she’d said in a lecture was that if you find yourself in an argument and you think it’s insanity, that the other person is insane that is the intervention of God, in a holy instance, and that you too are insane.
But that the most insane person must step back and the very next day get a therapist.
The very next day I went and got a therapist. Elizabeth.

Elizabeth, The Therapist. A Romulan.
In our discussions we talked about my friend and family—-bad boundaries and more importantly how I was enraged—-no, like murderously enraged internally for the past few years. How I perhaps loved dysfunctional friends, family, relationships but deeply disliked them yet never got to call them out on their stuff.
Elizabeth and I worked on basic boundaries—-like self worth care of my being on time—-that it was my self worth care to tell my idiot V boss that one day a week, I was working 100 hour weeks, I need a 90 minute lunch so that I would have time to get across town for our 60 minute appointment. Every minute I was late was cheating myself, did I think I was worth 1 hour in my own healing?

Elizabeth actually looked like a Romulan—-she was as tall as Helen Hunt and cut her hair with a soup bowl. But she was sharp, incisive and called me out on the things I let pass or hurt me. She told me that within 6 months time, following her guidelines, I would change and K would notice, my family would notice. They would then be super nice to me to try and woo me back to my old ways, that would be when I had to choose—-old or new.
Six months later my birthday came up and I decided to throw myself a huge birthday party at a favorite restaurant—-I invited 30 people with invites and notes about books, candles or incense being a great gift. I came home with sacks of gifts that I dumped in the living room and then promptly went on a fun brunch the next day as a first date.
K noticed and tried to give me a gift but I told her no, thank, you , I actually already had it. I saw then how furnishing my bedroom, feeling guilty I then cajoled my mother into helping furnish K’s room as she gave me furniture from the big house in PA. That I should’ve left K sleeping on an air mattress with no furniture but I felt guilty about finding/buying a king sized bed, tables, chairs, a desk—-living like an adult.
K was content, as she’d been in a room in Buffalo, to sleep on the floor, have a closet full of slutty clothes and skads of make-up and comic books. After 6 months with Elizabeth I was able to SEE who and what K really was and that I was an enabler/caretaker to this person.
A few months later, I discovered K was purposefully not paying her half of the rent, cable, electric to tank the apartment, which would force the last 6 months of the lease to break. She of course had her parents house to go to, I had no family in NY so I would’ve effectively been homeless if I hadn’t noticed what was going on. I realized we’d played this game of bills, catch up, housing court because I was expected to act as the administrator/adult and attend to details and that privately, I never trusted K.
I never trusted, after 15+ years of friendship, K because K never went to a psychologist as a trans person is suppose to, was doing all of these illegal drugs (even her stepmother confronted her with how are unregulated drugs changing her mentally plus the illegal silicone deposits in her body)—-I was in many ways managing my family’s addictions through K. Once I got that, I pulled my money together, kicked K out and lived in a gorgeous apartment with a fireplace until I was ready to move.
Coincidentally the month after kicking K out I allowed my mother to visit—-to set her up with a job interview with my idiot boss, the VP as she was considering leaving my stepfather in Charlotte. She had moved in her boyfriend and began graphically describing on the LIRR their “exercise routine”. Yes, she moved in her boyfriend with her husband,. Then her last night as I’m counting my nickels and pennies so that I had the $5000 to get the apartment out of arrears (no, she brought no money)—-I was able to single out $75 on a tight budget to take her to dinner. I go into the living room and she, who had arrived with one bag, had several and boxes—-she’d gone shopping through my apartment for things she liked. First I peaceably tried to offer, I’ll buy/forward you stuff-books from Amazon then I finally said no. Took her one bag and her and kicked her out. It was 7pm, her train (which I’d paid for left at 7am—-I told her she’d have to sit at Amtrak and think about what she’d done.
I was on a roll.
When I told Elizabeth, the Romulan, calmly asked, knowing my mother’s dysfunction, why I invited her, paid for her to come at such an upheaval time? I groused at the little Romulan. But I understood her point.
Carlene Hatcher Polite, the Pulitzer nominated writer and professor I’d worked for in Buffalo, had met K once at a concert. Later, after TA work/class she took me to lunch and gently, in her inimically, metaphor laden, word dancing, way asked if she could tell me something, offer me something? I was flummoxed because she was being so careful. I said yes.
She said that she was surprised K and I were friends. She’d moved through many lives, over many continents, so she knew all kinds of people, all kinds of sexualities and such, but that being older she had looked deep into K in that short meeting. And knowing me, my character, wanted to know why I had such a “fragile” person as a friend.
I was gobsmacked and silent. Blown away by her estimation of K.
Three or four years, later when I’d thrown K (and my mother) out and was on the phone with Carlene describing how I’d been cleaning this 2000 square foot apartment from top to bottom, not my normal cleaning, but actually on the floor scrubbing the extra bedroom, opening windows all night, setting off all kinds of incense—-Carlene gently suggested to me: had I ever considered that what I was in actuality, unconsciously, spiritually doing was trying to get rid of the remnants of an unclean spirit?
I was gobsmacked and silent. Blown away by her estimation of K. Again.
I had gotten K work (at a salary level , $40k+ a year that she didn’t deserve or had earned), a home, furniture, food, emotional support and got very little of that back, instead I’d been undermining myself. Much the same with my family. During that time I’d sailed ahead in a good financial analyst career, had several healthy boyfriends and recognized my own dysfunctions.
I saw Elizabeth for a total of a year then moved on, eventually to working in education and then took up anther therapist Allison, when I thought from my small business endeavor of earning so much money on the side, that I need counseling. It turned out I meant a life coach, which I got a few months later, and he helped me with moving on and away from the corrupted non-profit agencies that I worked for, that I didn’t want to leave because I, as a youth coordinator and teacher, didn’t want to leave my charges to the wolves.
I helped those leave the program—-insanely recruiting up from zero to 80- then slowly pushing them out and away until there was only 1 left. He skipped out on his pick up to rehab and I left a few weeks later.
I learned though that though I was hawkeyed on not getting in a dysfunctional romantic relationship, having set good boundaries with my friends and family—-that one’s job world could be a dysfunctional relationship.
I left the job for GMHC, who’d been courting me for a year, confronted myself about what I was truly worth, took care of myself, refused contact or to allow certain people into my home, really thought about the dysfunctions some presented—-and like I did during the K times—-got a fucking life away from those work peers. What made it trickier though was that my work and personal social life—-parties, groups, etc. overlapped and I lived in the neighborhood of the agency. I had to learn to socialize elsewhere, make new friends, separate and compartmentalize a lot. My boss at GMAD, who eventually went on a sex spree infecting people with HIV while embezzling company money on crystal meth was actually mad at me when he laid me off ad I accepted teh GMHC offer the next day and was working there when he came begging for agency money a week later. he was mad at me for being okay. No, really, that’s how crazy the agency heads were.
One friend, work peer, I called up and having pulled him along to several jobs, was asking how he was.
No literally I said “Hi, how are you?
And he said: “Well, I’m still depressed because I can’t find a man. No one wants me at my age so I’m not having sex which makes me feel awful about myself. I’m so lonely, I will never be happy.”
I actually looked at the receiver—-all I said was Hi, how are you?
I realized how mired in his own pain and drama he was but I also realized how he vomited it at everyone (which is why he’s single) before you got past general pleasantries. I saw the swamp he immediately threw up at you. Which precluded you or ME existing in his view. We were targets for his depression not real people that he could be supportive of or happy for. Which ironically is one of the reasons why he was unattractive.
Another coworker, this one a social worker, saw me on the train years later and asked about my mother passing, did I get the house, did I get money? how much money?
I was so shocked at such casual personal questions on a crowded train, that I asked about the guy half his age that he’d been a “therapist” for that he’d tried to seduce—-have you heard from him? I had. I’ gotten him teaching jobs. Then I asked about the social worker’s HIV+ status and how I’d seen/heard he’d been in the hospital for a brain infection and how he was constantly in and out of the hospital. How was that heath decline going?
He was actually gobsmacked that I came back at him, his shit, so viciously. He said I hadn’t changed and got up and left, telling me to contact him.
Before my mother died, in Charlotte, I called him because of his profession to ask him (and others) about elder programs in NYC. He left me a voicemail laughing, no elder info, and asking could I tell him how to do an Access Query?—-maybe a shot at my leaving GMAD and nearly doubling my salary at GMHC teaching computer certifications. I never forgot that. I think he was high too.)
I realized with people, jobs, even family that I had made space for their insanity, allowed them to trounce across boundaries.
Now I will hit you with a gentle but firm No—-I practice at stores, with vagrants—-I believe in looking people directly in the eye, no matter their station in life and saying No, thank you—-to their requests. Here in NYC it’s pushier vagrants so sometimes you have to say No a lot harder but it’s good boundary exercise.
I’ve learned to give as I will and consider how the person received it, what I meant, what I didn’t mean. Some people have never been freely given to so when you give them a book they think it means you want a blowjob.
No, I was just giving you a book.
When I’ve won money sometimes I treat coworkers one or two at a time to lunch or tell them I’m headed to pick up my dinner, how many are in their family and bring a dinner for them.
I can give. It’s cool and fun. Most people are gracious and accept and the giving comes back 10 fold from other sources—-like winning money occasionally! lol
I learned to maintain boundaries with my mother so that I could loyally and lovingly be there for her and take care of her the 2 years it took for her to die. And I could admit relief that it was over.
I’ve learned to separate abuse from my sexuality and curiosity——and I have had a fun, fun, fun fun time of loving with about 95% good men and women and occasionally small groups over the years. I’ve always practiced safe sex and never used drugs, no matter the emotional calamity I was in, and minimally engage alcohol.
I could have been a hot mess so many things happened to me before 21 but even in her 80% sanity my mother and father dealing with his addiction and mentors like Carlene and others nudged me to be free, to explore myself and at the same time take care of myself.
After 20s, My 30s
I’ve been able to rededicate myself to writing for the past decade and publishing even greater than I had in the decade before, around the world. That's been slow, personal, slightly profitable and wholly my own. A funny thing is my family and dysfunctional friends and such have never bought, read or supported my writing. I’ve had big presentations, TV and radio interviews, countless emails of gratitude and such but my closest (supposedly) circle for years acted like I birthed dead babies and buried them in the yard, sometimes acknowledging I had written books but never saying I read it or I bought one.
When I noticed this it dd hurt—-my mother saying that it was about sexuality—-why?—-she meant it in a shaming way and I pointed out she sold lingerie for years and then eventually put on fashion shows of men and women in underwear in nightclubs—-and my books on safe, healthy sex were scandalous?
I realized this was another way to minimize me.
Another friend coworker said my work was soft porn—-I summarily got rid of her for that comment and her simmering rage at her own life. I learned to value my work, good or bad, my creations as I would children, as worthy of praise and not just viciously critical stabs. Those people, like internet trolls, in person, must go.

I realized too that the friends from GMAD and GMHC and BMX who all knew and loved me while I was a facilitator, ear to their problems, vanished when I needed help or perhaps some of their venom on trains had to do with the fact that I turned the work in those rooms into millions of dollars in books and TV shows. (Which ironically I’d suggested to all of the workshops they do, they blanched/laughed so I went and did it.)
I’d first joined then stayed, then worked for those organizations, seeking male, Black, non-hetero mentors, and found plenty of anti-mentors and plenty of confused people. One of the big lessons I took was to in the terminal time, be with your dysfunctional parents as much as possible to facilitate closure. So many of the men in those rooms—-I’m talking hundreds—-have fucked up relationships with their parents, people, friends, bad lovers, practice unsafe self destructive sex because of not working out their shit. I got mentored by the experience not by the men, which was also disappointing in many ways.
What I can tell you is that:

• I’ve spent 1 year for every decade of my life in therapy—-reviewing, working on that life stages’ issues.
• That I’ve done 2 years of Incest Anonymous to clarify and contextualize abuse, sex, sexuality, pleasure, coercive pleasure, and a liberated/libertine sexuality.
• I’ve done several group therapies and then went on to write magazine cover stories about them—-integrating what I learned and then reproducing it to help others.
• I’ve facilitated thousands of hours of workshops about…everything. Throw an apple at a library of subjects and I’ve taught a group./class about it. In many ways that dynamic challenge is why I’ve been able to write so many long and short non-fiction books and interesting fiction ones. My work, I eventually have transmuted into creativity and back again.

Often I stand on corners in Manhattan, on way with my roller bag full of books and papers, to a school, program, etc. and I stop. Sometimes for as long as thirty minutes. and I just stand and watch people, vehicles, nature. I watch it move and go by. I think about who is attractive, who looks funny, what people are wearing, what people are thinking—-I just admire life and observe it, revel in it.
About 98% of the time, I’m internally happy. Thinking about things, issues, solutions more than problems but happy. Content.
It took me a long time to see how exes and K and family and others could be jealous, envious, spiteful of me:
One, because I tried so hard to be good and supportive towards them—-I thought that negated spite.
Two because I thought we were special to one another.
And three, because I didn’t think I was worth those negative emotions, those attacks, such a reversal of esteem. I didn’t think I was good enough to be disliked. The ironic part is that was a perfect set up for a public-professional life of putting my work out there and getting everything from compliments to crank shots.
Recently I’ve written to—-I’m big on the handwritten letter or sent emails—— to exes telling them the truth. It’s not about please love me but it’s about—-you know I loved you but didn’t like you, or I didn’t give you a fair chance or this is how I messed up and why and what I was thinking. Something between tying up loose ends, apologizing, releasing, atonement and closure.
Yes, I used social media and acquaintanceship's and glimpsed K’s life now but didn’t make contact. She’s still in the same place—-a mover I’ve used for years moved her to a hovel in Harlem that he said he actually told her was bad, he didn’t want to leave her there—-still spartan, still no psychologist, still illegal hormones, still at the same job levels. Went back to school and I think realized how much time was wasted and dropped out again, creativity stunted against being trans—-something.
The reason for this piece on boundaries was that I actually am certified by THINY Trans Health Initiative of New York so I was giving a workshop, talking about boundaries and issues and such. A lot of my time dodging corruption and insanity at GMAD, BMX and a little bit at GMHC was that I regularly found workshops and certificates to get—-I have a ton of them. lol

What I found in finding boundaries and in writing about stuff—-hopefully it not only helps someone but all of my writing directly or indirectly goes into my teaching, thinking better and deeper about not just myself but issues to relate to, or publishing within books or on TV, is that I’m often singing a song in my head——la, la, la or now it’s Ole by John Coltrane—-I love it!——but that I’m not consumed as I was in undergrad or living with the highly dysfunctional K—which was dysfunctional and rocking myself to sleep every night with “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.”
I think it was a refrain against the insanity around me, childhood, etc. and not wanting to destroy myself but not knowing how to exorcise or re-contextualize my internal self to be happy.
And happiness is a recontexualization.
Later, after working on it, I was happy even with my family—-not because of them but happy within myself so that I could see them, deal with them, move on. I had to learn the hard lesson of distance from my family meant health. I used to think well, maybe if I jut did this or gave them more and more money or didn’t speak up and then each time, I got burnt or I felt like I was in a mental blender.
I had to learn to accept that though 80% better, that was as good as it was going to get and to make time, space and emotional boundaries to walk away if necessary. Even in the hospital I limited my visits with my mother eventually to 15 minutes at a time, 30 minutes in the cafeteria, then back for another 15 minutes. You don’t have to sit there for hours on end to be a good son. In fact you don’t have to be a good son. You can be a good person who takes care of themselves even when the other person is dying. And still be a good person.
I learned how to learn from the dysfunctional people around me. I learned that sometimes K was mad at me because I’d endeavored to go on 100 dates one year to learn how to date. And it was working, I was having fun, had a boyfriend. What I thought were clopping, awkward steps, K must’ve seen as freedom, bumbling unwitting freedom, and happiness.
The same for my family—-abusive cousins, parents, stepfather, etc.—-I got away from them all. I’ve traveled and never looked back, rarely go back to family reunions, funerals, dinners, etc. because abusers were there or the questions were too prying or because bluntly, I didn’t like some of those people. And I have a good life, living well, money, got a little fat because of it—-it’s clear I’m not missing folk.

• I was recently writing about an ex, who wanted to go to Columbia Law and I mentioned interest too and one day, a couple of years later, he is walking up the block and I come out of the law school in my CU sweater, all beaming, in law classes, just having an intellectual orgy.
• That reminded me of another ex who wanted to go to Dartmouth, and we were to tandem help each other—-me to Princeton. He then ghosted me (when his girlfriend came back to town) and gossiped about me and one day I arrived in my Princeton sweatshirt—-professors having gathered and recommended me there.
• Back farther to another ex in high school who was just languishing and I was making all this money and finally found out I’d be held back 6 months so I took the GED and left. He didn’t. I felt so guilty at leaving him on so many levels and then a couple of years later going to Buffalo for undergrad.

I have felt bad about my own successes—-that I have worked for on my own. Many times I minimized myself in relationships because of that. Now I’m all like—-whatever and sunbeams come out of my butt sometimes! lol
I came to understand that I was all gung ho for them in relationships to the expense of me.o r that I also did what I did with my dysfunctional family—-gung ho for them, secretly do it for myself and then it might look to them like competition or like I was being deceptive. So I could be good and bad at the same time. That I couldn’t be gung ho for someone AND myself publicly, honestly and call them out when they weren’t cheering me on.
That I deserved to be cheered on as much as I was cheering others on.
Sometimes we learn to pretzel ourselves to be both good and gently vindictive or secretive or passively angry, while being seemingly good.
Boundaries are also about learning how to withhold your own bullshit.

Boundaries Are a Circle
It’s like a big circle. And in the circle is your entire life. Even your spirituality and how I relate to religions and religious people. (Manage your own crotch, I got mine. You don’t need to judge, criticize or assist in a non-sexual, consensual way. Anything else—-fuck off. Yes, my mother was also a pastor and got the take a religious hike speech,)
But they keep coming up, new faces, new people. Less faces, less people. I don’t give off the Swiss cheese boundaries scent as much as I used to. I also don’t work or socialize in places where there’s a high concentration.
(Funny aside—-I was at a professional networker and this German guy is going on about how horrible Germany is compared to America and then how horrible America is to Germany. I’m trying to be all suit and tie, sipping a ginger ale professional polite and he’s just—-annoying. Finally I said to him—-”You know what, I’m too old to subject myself to this kind of bullshit anymore. You’re an asshole. German, America, Americans, Germany, it’s all a mixed bag but you’re an asshole. If you’ll excuse me.” And I froze him out then and at subsequent meetings and then he vanished—-I actually told an asshole directly, spontaneously, to go away! Normally or professionally, I would tolerate, passive aggressively sidle away, become his best friend, hate him, hate him, hate him and then avoid him and he’d think I was an asshole. But decades of work, I now shoot folks down who don’t suit me.)
That was a few months ago.
The boundary challengers and fools and button pushers come up often or not so often or less often but it’s full planet, they will come up.
I’m more direct in stores. I got followed by a security person in a store that I’ve been going to for 5 years and I told her, the manager and the overall store manager how ridiculous that was. How insulting that was. How it hurt my feelings and how humiliated I was to be treated so.
Because under my ire and my own racial knowledge of such bs, I was hurt.
Kyle’s feelings were hurt. and I can express that now. I can also say that I have a Manhattan based TV show that broadcasts to 500,000 people during a shutdown and I’m going to put your store on blast due to it and affect your bottom line. So many other stores I frequent, I’m an extremely polite large Black man of habit, treat me wonderfully, friendly, helpful, remember my orders and interests. I deserve to be treated well.
I can be honest, vulnerable and take no prisoners—-I can remove myself or demand change or better behavior.
Every day, you exercise the boundary work in new ways, small ways, big ways.
Money, Again
A coworker, yes, I won some money, before I can offer,tells me what kind of lunch to buy her. I said okay then realized I didn’t have to do it. When I saw her next, no lunch on her desk, she asked me and I told her I left, passing the restaurant because I was busy and maybe next time I won I would do it. Or not. You know what happened? She silently went away.
Tight boundaries with family as most of the ones I was closest to are dead. I don’t miss the others. At all. I stay in light contact with one, he’s in my will but the others. Pffft. I’m finally listening to my instincts about them and not overriding it with…but they’re my cousin, family,Stepfather, etc….
Each day even with bosses—-though I think as a man you learn to be professionally more self-respecting, maybe because money is involved—-I decide what I want and need.
Each day, each way, even managing a small business, deadlines and vendors and marketing (my bane!) and such I push myself a bit more, try a little harder, speak up more and more. It seems big to the casual observer now but it was a thousand single bricks put in place at a time. I also don’t shy way from saying, in a gracious way (I don’t like the term humble or feeling—-maybe because I spent so long being limbo dancer under a broom low, that I prefer now to politely stand) but I talk about my work.
I talk about my work.
It wasn’t a secret before but it was close. I’m proud of it, protective of it, I like it. I like me doing it, creating it. I like thinking up good, helpful, valuable things to teach and write about and wild fiction to create with. I like my talents that’ve worked for decades to develop. No, it’s no lightning bolt gifts from the heavens above—-it’s day after day after day slogging along, to write, to create, to start a business, to write a book, to design a blog, to produce a TV show. Work, hours, thousands of hours. Me. Work. .
I made this.
Boundaries are also about expanding your sense of self or self worth. We think of it like a wall but in truth it’s like one of those half and half back doors. Sometimes you open the top, sometimes the bottom, sometimes both. But it is under your choice and control, no matter who or what is knocking.
Hey, I like that metaphor! lol

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Kyle Phoenix is a teacher, certified adult educator, sexologist, sex coach and sexuality educator with over two decades of intensive experience. He studied at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, New York University, and Columbia University. He has worked, consulted and taught individuals and focused professional developments for the CDC, Department of Education, Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York City Department of Health, non-profits, Fortune 500 companies and unions. He began his career facilitating on-campus workshops addressing a wide range of sexuality and sexual health issues and then moved on to teaching at universities, non-profits, private groups and clients, hosting The Kyle Phoenix Show on television and multiple online webinars, including YouTube and Sclipo and writing extensively through his blog, Special Reports, articles and other print and E books in the Kyle Phoenix Series on relationships, finance, education, spirituality and culture. He lives in New York with his family.

www.kylephoenix.com

Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com

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