Diamond in the Rough

(Editorial note: One of a pile of posts I've been chewing on (I'll try to get the others done soon; at the moment they include some sexual assault processing, meditations on my pregnant body, possibly some crazed mysticism, maybe something about the financial mess, maybe some bisexuality and homosociality, and a couple of other things). I'm writing this now in part because becstar - a poster from Feministing quoted in two previous posts - has dropped by, and I'd like to give her someplace less cranky to comment if she's so inclined.)


One of the things that comes up a lot in some flavors of discussion is about the "influence of patriarchy" or similar things. Basically, cultural environment and such. I wrote about this a while back in terms primarily of homophobia and ablism as promoted in language, but I'm writing a bit more broadly for the nonce, though I'll drag it back to sexuality again somewhere.

I don't think I can honestly describe the cultural flavor I grew up in as "patriarchal". I would call it, instead, "corporatist". Which is interesting, as neither of my parents had 'mainstream' jobs - my mother a freelancer and fine artist, my father a professor, then working at a startup, and eventually a consultant-type - so I didn't get the Company Man indoctrination at home. It was almost all surrounding culture.

In that surrounding culture, the central question of identity was "What do you do?" What is your form of employment? How do you obtain money? This was a fundamentally depersonalised question: the individuality did not matter, all that was significant was this sense of what position one was holding in the mechanism of production. The answer had significant class effects - from the answer, one could extrapolate a rough expectation of income and associations, and from there determine who was 'appropriate' to associate with.

As I observed the adult world surrounding me, I saw a lot of reinforcement of this essential framing of identity. Long working hours were the rule rather than an exception in most cases - the job was more a part of many people's lives than anything else. I became dimly aware that things like medical care depended on employment, as well as the ability to maintain food and shelter. I heard on the news about people who had less good employment than my parents, and consequently poorer health, and the message I got was quite clear: job is quality of life, and worthiness of person.

At the same time, I watched the way certain forms of work were treated. One category of these was the "women's work" category - housework, childcare, other domestic labor. Often times this didn't count as "doing" at all (in response to "What do you do?"), and thus meant that women doing these tasks had no access to a legitimate identity. ("Didn't you used to be Ann Crittenden?") The other category was work in the arts - whether as a fine artist like my mother, or a writer, or a poet, or a musician, or a sculptor, or whatever else, giving that sort of answer to "What do you do?" got "No, I mean your real job." Art was a frivolity, a triviality, perhaps allowed to be considered a "real job" if one was very successful, but (vide the Dire Straits): "That ain't working, that's the way you do it, you play the guitar on the MTV. That ain't working, that's the way you do it, you get your money for nothing and the chicks are for free." (And for the concept of 'free chicks', I'm left with referencing Figleaf's "worthiness trap" posts, like this one.)

The short version is that it was a cultural setup where, broadly speaking, there were sets of roles, and one's value as a person depended on fitting into those roles properly and suppressing anything untidy (keep your head and hands inside the vehicle) into those few bits and time that were not the property of the Job.

And I have always been ... quirky. In my childhood, I was much more comfortable with younger children (I was the oldest child on my block by three or four years, so spent a lot of time in the company of children my brother's age) or adults, and very uncertain about fitting into the roles and groups that were part of the social system for children. And because I went about unprotected by a pubescent monkey troop, I was a prime target for sexual harassment; it was very much shaped by my experience as The One Who Does Not Conform, who is therefore sexually available or exploitable or at the very least can be abused without repercussions from any of the other local primates. If I had been able to pick a role and stick with it, if I'd had a "job" in the junior high school world, a legitimate identity, I would have been a less appealing target.

Overlaid upon this depersonalisation, a Momo-reminiscent obession with conformity and fitting in and keeping up with the Joneses and similar things was the world of "Just Do It" philosophy. Just about everyone I know from something roughly comparable to my background has talked about the secret sense of obligation they had from very young: to be the one who Fixed The World. And that intense, isolating sole pressure to be saviour to a world much larger and much more impersonal became a dominant feature of the zeitgeist I grew up with; not for nothing did I have a conversational exchange that went, "My goal: have children who need less therapy than I do," "I think that's the goal of our entire generation."

So: harshly enforced conformity to a world defined explicitly defined as defective and in need of saving; isolation even in a community context due to unrealistic imposed expectations; enforcement of these conditions managed with compulsion, shaming, and occasional violence. In the world of my childhood and in these terms, it was primarily the case that the girls were the enforcers and the shamers and the primary inflictors of severe harm, while the boys' threats were for the most part simpler, less abstract, more physical, and of lesser significance. (It's easier to talk about the menace perpetrated by the boys because there's more often a specific thing to poke at. The whole experience was full of hostility, though, with many of the exceptions nonetheless including accidental harm.)

On the one hand, I was recognised as Exceptional by parts of the adult world. I advanced ahead of my age group academically and was promoted accordingly. I had opportunities that others did not as people tried to figure out how to manage me and using the advantages of my class background.

But.

All of that difference fed both the "Just Do It" illusion that I was capable of changing the world, not-so-secretly special, and the sense that I was recognised as significant not because of anything about the core of me, but because I was particularly suited to the facelessness of my current Job: student. I was lavished with privileges and academic attention and so rarely felt that I was recognised as a person. I was an Early Reader, a Mathematically Gifted, The Logical One, Science Girl, whatever.

Out of that morass of culture and personal history and everything else came a deep, intense, and powerful drive: to be recognised as whole and complete. To be something other than an animated role-fulfiller, something personal and real.

I wrote before about how the first boy who told me I was beautiful broke open my walls and what that meant, and that was all responding to that need, that hunger, to be complete, to be seen: and that was what laid me open for the assault. To be treated as something other than an instrument to the Job; how could I find the will to turn that down when I was screaming for it inside? I suspect sometimes that that, more than anything, is why the assault broke me like it did.

I don't talk about the details of my young fantasies, but I can speak in generalities.

And the generalities of the kink that I built for myself were: that in a world of depersonalisation, reduced to soulless bodies and skills kept in lines, owned and exploited by faceless organisations, there was someone with a face, a soul, a devotion, who would defy all custom and tradition to treat me as an individual, precious, cherished, important, who would see and value all of me, no matter what the risk, no matter what the cost.

Ask me what effect patriarchy had on my kink?

It made me want to be found: the diamond in the rough.