Letters from Gehenna: The World on a Slant

Political PTSD

2012-01-29T22:51:00.003-05:00

A while back I was talking with my lion about politics and reactivity, and I realised something.

US politics has PTSD.

And some people like it that way, because as long as the body politic can be reliably triggered, then it can be controlled. Atavisms may be abrupt, violent, and at least somewhat unpredictable, but they can be channelled, and really when that good old fight or flight kicks in, what happens is either a "fight" or a "flight".

But seriously. Look at the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, and think about how much of speechifying is all about bringing up the intrusive recollections. Waving that bloody shirt, keeping a good low level of panic, because actually healing from these triggers would mean that people would be able to think more clearly, and wouldn't react in predictable ways when the predictable buttons are predictably pushed.

And yes, the whole "OMGTerrorists" thing is a pretty dramatic example of it, but honestly, I think as a culture the US was pretty vulnerable to this kind of collective traumatisation. (Not entirely tangentially, sometimes Little Foot wants us to read Dr. Seuss's The Butter Battle Book to her, and it strikes me very profoundly how very Cold War it is, and how likely it is that she will not actually understand its deeper message because "mutually assured destruction" is no longer the big red button of the collective consciousness of the polity.) I mean, "socialists! socialists!" is still a code word for setting off "run in circles, scream and shout!" responses. Boogety boo.

But.

Sound like any nation you know?

Breathing

2012-01-26T21:31:00.005-05:00

I have posts I want to make, and I have gotten out of the habit of making them. So I'm going to see if I can use this Pagan Blog Project thing as an excuse to try to rebuild my habits. What the hell, hey? And maybe in and among that I'll get around to other things that I was meaning to stick in the blog.

One of the things that I have as my standard advice to people who are undergoing stressy situations (good or bad) is "Breathe."

And it's actually way more useful than it sounds. The reminder to breathe often catches people in a twisted-up bodystate, one in which it's impossible to take a deep breath, in which there's a choking back of the capacity to inhale. And that place is one that keeps the physicality of stress in place, when taking a moment to uncoil, to take a breath, can release that tension.

The first person I trained with was a hardass about posture, which was really being a hardass about breathing. She wanted her students to be able to take a full, deep breath at any time, and to this day if I hear her voice my shoulders go back from their usual techno-hunch. But she would point out - not just that a body unable to efficiently process oxygen was not going to support spiritual or magical practices - but that breathing is a part of how people draw in life-energy. That magical work is made of power drawn in on the breath, transformed within, and then - again - spoken, using the breath. Breath is a part of the continuity that situates people in the world.

When I was early on in my Egyptian studies, I noticed that the word 'heka' - the word for magic - was written with an H hieroglyph and the symbol for the ka. Where the ka is the vital soul, the soul most bound to the body, the soul that passes from the ancestors on to the children (the soul that I refer to when I say "Hug your children so they have souls"), the soul whose name has ties to food, to sex, and to magic. And I folk-etymologied that H-ka to say, "Ah. Magic is the breath of the soul." It turns out that by actual Egyptology standards I'm closer to right than not - the standard literalistic rendition is something like 'activation of the ka', and given how tightly words are bound to magic in Kemetic procedure the notion that activating the soul is linked to speech, to breath, is not precisely farfetched. (And pun and soundplay is a theological obligation anyway, so even if it's not true, it makes sense as a folk etymology, which makes it religiously valid!)

The creator in some of the more popular Egyptian cosmogonies, Amun, is associated primarily with air. His is an invisible power, without which there is no life. To breathe is to receive life from the hands of Amun. For this and various other reasons, it was easy for Him to be seen as a universal god, personally interested in and aware of even the most ordinary peasant. The power of breath was an intimate connection with the animating power of the progenitor of all things.

I was reading a book recently that addresses, among many other things, some mystical symbolism regarding birth and rebirth (My Heart, My Mother, by Alison Roberts). There is a lot of discussion of the mingling of fire elements (represented by solar discs, crucibles, and so on) and water elements (boats, streams of semen) in the process of engendering life - but there is also a critical phase in which the wind moves the process along, in which this life-giving breath, this vital energy, the power to be and enact, joins the process of fire and moisture and converts it into breathing, moving life. I wrote, as part of my current training, addressing an unborn deity, and making reference to the texts Robert quotes:

Keeping the Sabbat Holey

2011-09-21T22:10:00.004-05:00

I just had another run-in with another one of those neo-Wiccans who has a serious burr up their arse about the fact that not all pagans celebrate their festivals. Which was one of those tedious things that crops up every so often when one doesn't bow to the Llewellynist hegemony, but whatever.

It has me thinking about calendars.

Actually, a lot has me thinking about calendars because I've been up to my armpits in calendar research trying to make things go for my life, my work, my theology, and so on, but that's gotten me a much clearer sense of what works for me in a calendar and what doesn't.

I startled someone a while back by commenting that the Wheel of the Year thing never really worked for me, I never connected with that system of eight festivals. And that's despite growing up in a climate where it actually was something that suited the seasons, more or less, so if it was going to be intuitive it is not like I was living in Texas or another not-four-temperate-season climate.

Somewhere in this I realised one of the big deal things for me, though.

Equinoxes are way too fucking abstract.

I mean, the breath of the year, the lengthening and shortening of the days, that I can understand; I can understand marking the long and the short of it, even though that's not part of my personal practice. But the moment in the middle? Tracking that makes as much sense to me as taking note of the moment when my lungs are half-full. When I'm doing breath exercises, it's in, fullness, out, emptiness, and 'in' and 'out' are continuous functions, not things with notable break points at three places along the road ('halfway' and the points between). It's a neat trick to calculate, but it doesn't have any particular immediacy for me.

I'm a little obsessed with getting the lunistellar version of my festival calendar calculated out somehow, rather than just settling for the thing I have which pins things to the civil calendar like moths on a lepidopterist's display, because of the thing about breath. If the breath of the month is the breath of the moon, that's immediate, that's there: it's something I can see, or could if I ever left the house but that's kind of tangential. Breathe, and the moon breathes with you.

The mechanical life support structure of the civil year is something that can do for now, keeping my little Frankenstein's monster going while I actually build the heart properly and get it to breathe, breathe in a way that doesn't depend on these machines of calculation. It's something real, though: I see the star. The moon flows through its mythic rending and mending and all things are made whole thereby.

Abstractions like a balance of seconds on either hand elude me; a day is a breath in and a breath out, however long each is held. I cannot celebrate a teetering pile of seconds or register it as spiritually meaningful - it does not connect to my world in that way. It's a curiosity, a piece of abstract knowledge, a process of understanding the world that does not speak to my souls. I studied astronomy and loved it, and understand the wheels of this process, but that does not make them liturgy to me.

I am probably more annoyed than I should be by that conversation, more annoyed than it deserves, but I am tired of being pinned to seconds and to declarations that this cycle matters and that does not, because the hegemonic forces of pop paganism have so declared it. Talk to me of what stars are rising and how many fractions the moon has, and leave the measured paces of the sunlight in peace.

Tomorrow begins Opet, at least in my lepidopterist's calendar. Perhaps by the end of it I will have the slightest clue what to do about that.

Best Anonymous Comment Ever

2011-01-10T13:19:00.002-05:00

Followed a link from a friend on livejournal and read the comments, and for once it was worth it because I found this, from a point where the discussion was commenting on how 'food policing' was often 'woman policing':

If you read the Bible, it turns out that apparently all the sins of the world were caused by one woman making an inappropriate food choice.

Via Making Light

2010-12-02T18:49:00.001-05:00

Close the Washington monument.

So tired of 'War on Terror' bullshit.

By the way, I'm a "domestic extremist"

2010-11-25T20:14:00.004-05:00

Signal boosting this: apparently there are rumors that the TSA's sense of listening to people being upset about the new, ineffective, and invasive 'security' techniques is to put 'em on a ... you got it! ... list.

Maybe someday I'll have time and brains to post again, but 'til then, let this bit of fucking outrageousness tide ya over.

This gives me a little moment of optimism

2010-08-13T11:19:00.002-05:00

So I have a tag on this blog, if you haven't noticed, of "sixteen tons". Which I use, of course, for ranting about American corporatism and the nature of employment and related subjects like "What do you mean you have a life and can't do overtime?", etc.

Sometimes I see little glimmerings of things that might make me hope that in some future time, I wouldn't need it.

(Class-limited, that is, but it's something for someone, and that's a little better than nothing for nobody.)

No comment beyond that, just a little quickie note.

Paradigm Lost

2010-08-11T18:28:00.004-05:00

Normal kinky people confuse me so much sometimes.

In the last week I've come across a "we must totally structure our relationships in a particular way lest Disaster Follow", a "well, I could understand how she might feel a conflict between feminism and kink if she were submissive", and a "How can you do d/s and be poly without the master having control over the submissive's other relationships? Where's the power exchange in that? Surely if the sub gets told 'no' it's her obligation to deal, and if the master wants something he gets it!" (Gendering from original quote; I don't know if it's the usual conflation fail or because it's a response to a thread in which a female submissive was seeking advice about a situation with her male master.)

I just.

No, really, it's entirely possible to let relationships work out and see what properties they emerge to rather than either strictly segregating them or doing the Anapol-bullshit "you all must have a shared cause![tm] in order to succeed!" thing.

No, really ... oh, for fuck's sake, shoot me now. The whole tacit, "Oh, of course a female submissive would be uncomfortable with feminism"/"Oh, of course a feminist would be uncomfortable with female submission" is, ... I can't even work up a good head of rant about this right now. I've said it all already, so many fucking times.

The third one kinda blew my mind, though. The idea that d/s means that some obvious package of agreements is in play - "obvious" meaning "unnegotiated and tacitly present" because we totally all do the same thing right and we don't have to think about what we do even if we're rooting around in the spooky parts of the psyche - and thus it's just flat incomprehensible to not include the package.

Of course the dom wants to control the sub's sexuality, because, you know, sex! It's about sex! And power! So putting tight restraints, restrictions, and obligations on the sex is what it's all about, even if that isn't actually fulfilling to anyone! Because! Sexsexsexsexsex! And power!

Gah.

It makes me miss the carpentry.

Re-Birthed

2010-08-02T16:03:00.003-05:00

I'm still reading those threads on Feministe. And one of these sentiments keeps coming up, people dismissing concerns about the segregation of mothers and children with things like "[this is] about parents who want to continue living the same life they had before they had children". (Gee, where have I heard that one before?)

I tell you a secret: I have the same life I had before Little Foot was born.

Indeed! I have not died and been resurrected by a divine avatar! I have not been carried up into heaven or dragged down into hell to begin a new existence on a new plane! I have not been spontaneously reincarnated as a very clever emu! I have not been uploaded onto the internet to live in the tubes! I have not been resuscitated after a medical emergency! I have not been in a chrysalis and emerged with delicate wings! I am also not a zombie or other undead entity.

I have the same life as before. My life is, in fact, a continuous flow in time, without notable discontinuities. I know, it's shocking, but it's nonetheless true.

La Lubu made a response to one of those posts over there which is damn good.

But I just want to pull that out a bit more.

The two narratives about women, life, and children that I see are either "Living through her children" or "Gave up her life for her children". This is what's seen as culturally normal: the parent-read-woman ceasing to exist as an independent, self-willed entity for at least the duration of childhood, and either vanishing in a puff of logic or desperately attempting to vicariously devour her child's living soul to replace what she has lost. (And then when the children "leave the nest", she has no idea who she is anymore.)

Why does anyone think this is a good idea? For mothers or children?

Why is this normal?

Here's what I see on this front, at least from the culture where I grew up: I see young women being told that they can do or be whatever they have the aptitude for, so long as they do not have children. A woman can, in theory*, have a life, so long as she is childfree; a woman who is not childfree has clearly "chosen" to discard 'the life she had before she had children'.

Child or life, pick one.

So women who want lives don't have children, or turn into terrifying vampires feeding off their children's vivacity. Some form the "compromise" position of having children and navigating the complex world of daycare and babysitting in order to "have it all", which takes time, energy, and expense, much like any other attempt to pull off living a double life does. Otherwise, it's the women who are content to be 1950s Stepford clones are the ones who have children in this world, right? (Someone in one of those threads suggested that having children indicates not only a political position, but a necessarily socially conservative political position. I don't have the heart to go digging for that now to sort out my memories of it.)

But life is still continuous.

Two years ago I was a struggling novelist and beginning theologian, wrestling with concepts of gender and with recovery from being sexually assaulted at the age of fourteen, primary homemaker in one house of a two-household family, working on and off on plans for my second wedding, dealing with stress and insecurity in one relationship, about to embark on what turned out to be a period of about three months of persistent illness, and trying to get pregnant.

A year ago I was in a hospital bedroom with a nearly nine-pound baby and a husband who'd barely had any more sleep than I had, trying to make sense of the hospital room service.

Today I wrote about 1600 words on a new novel that wasn't what I meant to be doing, am nearly through a first draft of a major work of theological analysis (written in poetry and bad jokes) that will need major revisions to make it to submittable draft (but hey, first draft is nonetheless a fine thing to be nearly done with), working on joining a Unitarian church, still feeling complicated about gender and considering how to make it possible to go back into therapy at least a little bit of the time, married to two fantastic men, navigating the complexities of an only partially split-location household, wishing to address some issues in the relationship with one of them and wishing to have time to celebrate the feeling of connection that my child's birth restored to my relationship with the other, mostly healthy, mostly sane, working on plans for when I might be able to go back to college and dithering about whether I want to start part time sooner rather than later, contemplating my driver's license test and the practice I need to get for that, and I have a baby asleep on my foot.

You might almost think that I kept living my life as best I could even while huge amounts of my time, energy, and effort are consumed by being primary caregiver and food source for the kidlet, wouldn't you?

I mean, I don't get out to social gatherings as much as I used to, which is as much "I'm too tired to move" as it is the complexities of child portability.

But I want to do more, live more, be more, now, in part because my child deserves to see and live life beyond my living room. And that, dear readers, is wicked hard.

And among the things that make it hard are things like wondering, if I manage to get out to dinner, who might try to pull me aside and scold me for having a baby in a restaurant to make a 7:30 reservation. Because, you know, you're a parent now, you need to make sacrifices and accept that you don't get to do that sort of thing.

Babies go to bed at eight, and that's that, even if yours never actually has, you know. That's the rule.

(You don't get to have your old life. You gave that up when you had children.)

(The one where going out to dinner landed at 6:30, which would require interrupting her nap.)

* So long as she is not a POC, is not or does not become disabled, is only queer in "tolerant" areas and maybe not even then, is not trans, makes enough money, and otherwise conforms to standards for life-having as defined by pernicious external forces.

Bleeding Mama

2010-07-30T18:49:00.002-05:00

I got linked to these posts by guest blogger Maia on Feministe. These links came up in comments, and I am reminded of my commentary on privilege feminism a while back. And this post got linked along the way.

All of which is kind of context for where this bit is bleeding out.

Antiprincess got me between the eyes with this comment, by the way:

the idea of “child-friendly” space vs. “child-free” space is not really about comfort or convenience or “appropriate” behavior or environment. it’s piggybacking (over generations) on the “separate spheres” thing – the idea that men do things in public space and, well, women and children do whatever it is they do wherever it is they do it, at any rate in a space separate from men (private space).

And Faith followed it up with this:

Actually, no one seems to really want to address the problem of women being isolated from certain parts of society if they have children. At best folks have simply stated that parents have to accept a certain amount of isolation when we become parents (and they do use the word parent while ignoring that women are the primary caretakers the majority of the time…), yet no one who espouses this has really given any reasonable explanation for exactly why women just have to accept this isolation.

Since Little Foot was born, I've felt very political.

It's a hard and complicated thing, and I don't know where to go with it, or even where to go with talking about it. I don't know how to tackle it, because it's so large, and because there's nowhere immediate and obvious to get a grip on it. It puts a strange, sharp edge on things, things that matter to me, and I have no fucking words, here.

I've also felt overwhelmingly hopeless about it.

I mean, even if I set aside all the bits where it's farcial to imagine that a freak like me - a polyamorous pagan kinky woman who dropped out of school for mental health reasons - might manage to do a damn thing in the political machine. Even if I imagine that there's some alternate route to organisation and action that hits what I need to do that I can do, which ... I see people do, across a gulf of unshared experience, and I don't know how to pick up those pieces which aren't mine. Even if I set aside all that.

I don't know how to do it. I didn't grow up in a world where mami did the union negotiations with a baby on her hip, as BFP wrote about in one of those threads - I grew up in the world where, for all that it was more integrated then than it is now, there was the children's universe and the rest of the world and it was cute when I listened to All Things Considered and came away wanting to make the budget numbers add up because I could do algebra. Cute, not meaningful. I grew up in a world where any memory of being listened to as a human being is tainted with the sneering, raging, "Your father treats you like an adult." I grew up in a world where I wondered when I would be old enough that someone would consider my opinions on the public sphere worthwhile (answer: sometime in my twenties).

And in that world, there are no public mothers. Because of the separation of the spheres, that white privileged woman's fucking paradise, angel of the household, that thing that was the big feminist victory to escape, to let women into the public sphere. People in public aren't parents; parents - read, mothers - are demi-human, shadows on the public sphere, people who are ghosts in the economy, when the economy is what really matters to be human. Now that I am a mother, it matters to me to touch the public sphere, and now that I am a mother, I am bereft of any understanding of how to do it. (Even if the issues that lost me my schooling would let me, which is another kettle of fish entire.)

Somewhere in one of those threads is a set of people saying that centering children is buying into that Little Precious Can Do No Wrong notion that my child is somehow the most important and perfect entity ever spawned. The idea that radical love by whatever means are necessary - as the guest blogger put it - that centers children is really about the solipistic individualism of the sick society built on capitalism rather than actually being the way a movement goes.

It has to be the way a movement goes, from where I sit.

Because it's too late for me.

It's not too late for my little girl. She hasn't been sexually assaulted. She hasn't been bullied. She hasn't been broken by administrative bullshit. She hasn't had her mental health shatter in a way that destroyed her for years. All of these things that happened to me, they haven't happened to her.

I can't build a world where the stuff that happened to me didn't happen. Those words are already written into the fabric of time. I can't center me, build a political effort around making things okay for me, because even though they're okay now there are worlds and worlds of ways in which the way I got here was not okay. I can't center me and rehash the things that happened to me and make it all about me and ignore all the things that happened to other people whose different courses through the wide wild world of not okay didn't coincide with mine.

I have to center the children. Not just my baby, all the children, because it's only when the children are safe from brutality that nobody will live brutalised.

And I don't even know if this is hope or despair. It bleeds, that's all I know.

A Theology of Lunch

2010-07-19T11:47:00.000-05:00

So, while I was writing "Ka", I was also catching up on blogs, and Raising My Boychick had a link to this post at the Fat Nutritionist.

I think a lot about motherlove and connection and the ka, and about sex and the ka, and all that stuff, but the thing is: food too. And this is a part that's actually kind of subversive. For the reasons noted in that post.

When you break it down to fundamentals, the ka is a repository of life energy, creative power, all that stuff. Where does our energy come, in a deterministic biological sense? From what we eat. "May your ka be fed", that offering liturgy, applies to us here largely in the material world, consuming material things. While my ka is fed by gifts of love and caring, my ka is also fed by lunch, and denying that goes into weird, unpleasant places.

Especially since much of the attempting to bind food up with virtue gets entirely entangled with an aescetic attitude in which there is Good Food and Bad Food - which Food is Good and which Bad changed depending on the latest fad science, of course - and the appropriate way of managing the concept of Soul Food is to only eat the Good or at least feel appropriately contrite when partaking of the Bad. And people get bound up in the lure of the forbidden, and detached from their own body's signals about what food they want to eat, when to start, when to stop. And people cast it in moral terms, referring to their food decisions as "I've been good" or "I've been bad", and even find it harder to make those decisions in the way they would prefer if they have recently been 'bad'.

What we feed ourselves, how we feed ourselves, is a spiritual process; as we offer ma'at to the gods that their ka be fed, when we feed our kau we ought feed them in keeping with ma'at. But what this means in practice is a fiddly sort of thing.

We eat according to our natures: each person has a palate with its quirks, somewhat different nutritional needs, different digestive capacities. We add to this filters for what we feel we can ethically consume, what we can afford, what those in our lives are comfortable with eating. I am not so much a believer in what gets called "intuitive eating" as I am a disbeliever in pretty much anything else I have heard of, honestly, but there's the thing, isn't it? Eat food, it's a good idea.

And there's a lot invested in control mechanisms around food, even if people were free to choose - which we aren't, really. Not by a long shot. I certainly can't afford, y'know, artisinally farmed pastured organic non-GMO pesticide-free antibiotic-free free-range hand-raised grass-fed dry-aged locally-grown ethically butchered non-pasteurised heirloom cruelty-free cageless durians. Certainly not all the damn time.

But that doesn't actually answer the question of how to recognise connective justice at lunchtime.

There are layers and layers.

As a rule, I like my food reasonably unprocessed. And I have the privilege of having the knowledge, time, and facilities to prepare such food rather than having to depend on pre-packaged stuff that contains a fair amount of filler. (Which is one of my little "If I could fix the world" social justice things. Feeding people is one thing. But making sure people have access to ingredients, facilities, and the basic training in order to cook? That's a whole other thing. And getting there, too, that requires making it possible for people to live without having to take several ill-paying jobs - making sure that they have the time and resources to acquire, develop, and actually use those skills. That part would take an overthrow of the current economic system.)

(I still think it's probably a good idea.)

The whole "eat real food! Also organic, locally grown, etc.!" thing is ... okay, it's a nice idea, and I'm not going to knock it. But it needs to be done in a way that isn't catastrophically tone deaf on issues of class. Exhorting people to eat in a particular way has been a growth industry my entire life; making the parts of that that are actually reasonable possible, on the other hand, is evidence of creeping communism and narsty narsty subversiveness. We can't be having with that.

And - like the Fat Nutritionist blogger says - a Twinkie is not the end of the world. (I drink a fair amount of soda. I try to get the kosher for Passover stuff in quantity each year when I can find it, because it's made with sugar rather than liquefied corn subsidies and also tastes better. But even HFCS soda is not a moral failing; I still like it, so I still drink it.)

And yeah. There are ethical questions in where food comes from and how it's prepared, and that's part of eating ma'at. Those questions do not start at the condition of the animals, and they do not stop there either. Those questions include concern about the status of farm workers. (And if you look at that carefully you will notice that that set of questions makes a beeline for immigration without regard for whether or not you wanted to go there.) Those questions include concern about environmental monocultures created by large farms, too. Animal death as a result of farming. Sustainability. Creeping corporatism. Small farmers losing seed crops because of cross-pollination from deliberately sterilised genetically modified corporate grain breeds. Genetic diversity in our food sources. Environmental costs of shipping. Feeding animals inappropriately rather than according to their natures (if you want to eat corn, eat some fucking corn; cows-that-ate-corn is both not as healthy and abusive to the cattle). There's a lot more of that stuff.

Here's a thing, beyond all of that:

Food is one of our social bonds. Exchange of food is considered sacred in a lot of cultures; it's a standard peace offering even in some of our near primate ancestors. This is probably instinctual.

Yet, there is a thread of Western culture that wants to make food divisive. Are you eating too much. Are you sufficiently grateful (there are starving children in Fill-In-The-Blankia, you know). Are you eating the right things. Are the things you're eating of sufficient ethical purity. Have you performed sufficient abasements to apologise to the world for eating that cookie.

These things are all ways of keeping us from feeding our souls. And, perhaps more importantly, from feeding each other. Because offering food to each other is one of the ways that we can connect, ka to ka, recognising this fundamental bond that we share as members of the cosmos, and as long as there is the reflexive response of "I can't eat the food you offer, it would make me a bad person", we have this fundamental hostility that sabotages our interactivity.

I mean. I'm not saying "Don't be an ethical vegetarian", if that's the way you roll; roll that way. I'm not saying "Totally ignore food preferences and intolerance because what I make for you is totally an expression of soul connection!" I consider it my obligation, when I'm feeding people, to offer them food that will sustain their souls - which means having vegetarian or vegan options as necessary, which means making sure that I manage to offer things that won't risk killing my guests or causing them health distress, which means making sure there is food that I, also, can eat. But it's my obligation as the recipient of food to accept or decline with grace, because I recognise that this is a medium of feeding my ka. This is one way that we can express caring for each other.

When we can feed each other, we can have peace in our halls and sustain each other in community.

Unsaid Things

2010-07-18T11:47:00.004-05:00

In the comments on this post on Figleaf's, Clarisse Thorn posted a link to this post, in the comments to which there was a fair amount of discussion of, basically, the whole "well, kink comes from abuse", that's in part fed by stories in which people link their kink with their childhood abuse experiences.

And of course there was the usual, "No, actually, I wasn't raped/molested/abused, so my kink doesn't come from rape/molestation/abuse" stuff in there, but here's a thing that I don't think people talk about.

I was the victim of attempted rape.

My emotional response to that left me reluctant to trust people in sexual situations, extremely cautious, unlikely to seek out new partners, and basically extremely sexually conservative, a trait that, believe it or not, has persisted for the following eighteen years.

So there exists, in at least one case (and you know by Ugol's Law there are more, even if you don't know that some of that "more" have been in my comments in the past) a link between highly risk-averse non-promiscuous sexual behaviour and sexual assault.

But, you know, you don't see a lot of "Sexual assault causes sexual conservatism" stories. Because my sort of low partner count and wariness to get involved with people is a desired outcome, after all, so the default social response to it is more likely to go in the "Well, uh, good for you" then than to consider my preferences the sort of problematic that makes a crashing good tale. (Though I have run into a couple of assholes who were of the opinion that I should try some sort of desensitisation therapy - read, have a lot of casual sex - in order to burn out my sensitivity to sex so that I might consider fucking them. There's a whole lot of wrong there, to say the least.)

And as I think about this, I think about one of my little political bits of Discordian ju-jutsu around orientation. A while back I was regularly running into people who would say something to the effect of, "I never hear straight people saying they knew about their attractions before puberty, so gay people who say that must have had inappropriate sexualisation as children." I have, at times, taken some glee in pointing out to these people that I had my first crush at the age of seven or eight, and was quite aware of it as linked to "grown-up stuff" that I would figure out later, and that I am painfully straight. Somehow, they had managed to fail to register my perfectly ordinary and very common story - the elementary school crush, for crying out loud, have they never heard of Judy Blume? - as being relevant to the question of whether ordinary and very common children have any connection to the concept of attraction.

(I so much marvelled at these people for their ignorance of the constant threads of heterosexuality that is imposed on children - when a mixed-sex pair of children starts rough-housing, the declarations of puppy love, for example. Or the creation of gender-segregated classrooms where associating with the Other Side is fraught and charged with inexplicable but oddly adult tension - I can recall my crush standing on the far side of the fifth-grade classroom, talking with another boy, on the far side of the uncrossable gender line, where it would take a braver girlchild than I was to venture.)

How many perfectly ordinary stories do we forget to hear? Because the perfectly ordinary flows so seamlessly into the world that we want to know that it vanishes, invisible, like so many lines in the game of cognitive Tetris, racking up the points for what we think we know but disappearing into the imaginary as soon as we register them. How many perfectly ordinary stories don't register in our mental statistics because their mundanity - the puppy love, the losing adventurousness due to a trauma, the marriage that doesn't end, the kid who never causes trouble in school, the high school athlete who doesn't join the big leagues and make millions of dollars, the brilliant mind who doesn't cure cancer after all - makes no impression?

How many stories do we just not hear?

(ETA: Here's another relevant link to a story we don't hear, explicitly talking about the stories we expect instead, even!)

I'ma Thump You With My Cane

2010-07-11T17:26:00.004-05:00

For various reasons, I have ventured outside my nice little enclosed area of pagan religious discussion where the majority of people present are actually functional adults (I include in this many of the teenaged posters) and have been reading a bit of More General Pagan Discussion.

Which reminds me why I don't do public pagan-flavored religion as a thing.

Because seriously, people.

Grow up a little.

You are not a mighty warrior called to serve in the Great War on the Astral. Your deeper spiritual nature as a wolf does not inform you about the coming storm. No, I don't "feel the change coming" or believe that Mother Earth is about fit to shrug her shoulders and throw the human race into the abyss over Deepwater Horizon. Earthquakes actually are not that exotic. When the apocalypse comes your "abilitys" will not feed and protect you and keep you in a better conditioned than unenlightened people who have cars. You are not destined to be the foundation of a new species. Your special gift is not to protect the masses from other people's special gifts.

I don't need a guide to your holidays. No, really. Even if I were a sabbat-celebrator, which I'm not, because it's not actually a part of my structural assumptions about religion, I would either know what the fuck I was doing enough to not need your three-paragraph summaries of how you do it or want to get my information from someone who uses an apostrophe to mean something other than "OH SHIT HERE COMES AN S."

If you don't know what you're dedicating yourself to, I can't help you write a fucking ritual. I don't even know what religion you're talking about, though I can guess it's probably some form of neo-Wicca because because you clearly assume everyone shares it. Ranting bad history in all caps doesn't make your ignorance less obvious. Your weird hard-on for ranting about monotheism isn't actually an interesting philosophical position.

No, really, you don't need to add runes to the set to get finer-grained nuance. (Unless, of course, you've sacrificed an eye for the wisdom to know what the fuck you're doing, and if you've done that why don't you know better than to ask the internet?) If you don't know how to read your Tarot spread how much useful information do you think you're going to get out of it, anyway?

You seriously just recommended Silver Ravenwolf. I ...

... feel old.

Ka

2010-07-09T15:36:00.007-05:00

The irony in the manuscript that I'm currently working on - a treatment of the texts colloquially known as "The Egyptian Book of the Dead" - is that funerary theology is perhaps the least interesting part of my religion to me.

Of course, it's the thing that everyone thinks about when they think Egypt, and it's also where we have a boatload of actual resources, so as a place to work from it's not a bad idea.

The thing with systematic theology is, though, that it doesn't matter where you start; you tug at the bits and they wiggle the rest of it and suddenly you're exploring the whole system. A lot of Egyptian funerary literature is about fixing "what went wrong" that someone is dead, which means that when one teases out how it works and what's being done, one actually comes away with a really vibrant picture of the understanding of life. (Because that's actually what it's really about. It's not even subtle.)

There is a lot to be said about the construction of identity and the nature of being in this system, but honestly I keep orbiting around a bit of the Pyramid Texts that I wrote about before.

A bit of the Pyramid Texts that I keep wanting to express as "Hug your children so they have souls."

"You put your arms around them like the arms of a ka, that your ka might be in them."

The ka - the vessel of life-energy, twin to our bodies, a sustaining and generating force etymologically and thus magically linked to food, reproduction, genitalia, that portion of the gods which receives offerings and that portion of our friends which receives gifts - that essential part of a person is bestowed through parental care and affection.

Further, that soul of ours is the same as the souls of our parents, their parents, all our kin, the whole of humanity, the whole of animal-kind, all living things, all things animated by internal spirits, by the essential kinship of coming forth from the Creator, which passed that soul, that ka, into the twinned First Children, and from there into all the created universe through that process of ongoing differentiation. When I offer to the gods with "May your ka be fed" I am allowing this energetic connection to be awakened and to flow, divine to me, me to divine, because it cannot be allowed to stagnate: I give, They give, the cycles of life depend on the ka feeding the ka feeding the ka, all through all things. When I open my arms to my friends, present them with gifts ("For your ka"), likewise our bonds as citizens of the cosmos are affirmed.

It is a little tiny line, that "put your arms about them like the arms of a ka, that your ka might be in them", buried in a set of texts that hardly any people actually read. But tug at it a little, tug and see what wiggles.

Hug your children so they have souls. So they have their unique and glorious portion of the soul, the creative essence, the live spirit of what some might call God Herself.

Hug your children. Eat. Love. Give.

Honor what comes to you by opening your arms and letting it move.

For your ka.

And mine.

For the kau of all the little children.

All the elders.

All the world.

Tips for Atheists

2010-06-11T23:48:00.006-05:00

In the last few days I have had the misfortune to come across a half-handful or so of largely unrelated discussions in which various atheists demonstrated to me once again why theism/atheism "discussions" on the internet are a waste of time in general, and a waste of time for a polytheist like me in particular.

I mean, sometimes I comment in them anyway, but for the most part it's like I didn't say anything, because I'm not engaging According To The Rules, which rules are apparently defined by conservative Protestantism. I am not feeling as sarcastic about this as I was when I first ran across it a few days ago, but I would like to muster a few points about cultural awareness.

I know a number of completely personable atheists, including a few who are happy to have serious and in-depth conversations about not only theological theory but my actual religious experiences. Not a single one of them participates in theism/atheism discussions on the internet; most groan and don't want to know when I mention stumbling across one.

So, my angry and offensive opinions:

1) You may very well want to express contempt for "so-called holy books", but do not mistake revealed scripture for religion. Not all religions have scripture at all. The ones that do interpret in different ways than you are obviously used to; the Tanakh is read rather differently than the Old Testament, and those are, technically, mostly the same words. Try to apply the same standards to the Principia Discordia and you might understand why that scripture includes the line "A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads." Your mission, if you choose to accept it: The Oresteia.

2) Similarly, condemning "belief" as a category does not get you anywhere useful. Not only does it slam things like "I believe that my husbands love me", but you are presuming that belief is a fundamental and important factor in religion. Orthodoxic religion is familiar, yes, because Christianity is more orthodoxic than most religions, and Christianity is, well, pretty popular in the English-speaking world. But that whole "more orthodoxic than most religions" thing means we cannot actually have a meaningful conversation. This feeds into the ridiculous and pernicious cultural angst about whether or not Judaism is a religion, a culture, or an ethnicity; contemplation of this may be enlightening. (Condemning "faith" is sufficiently similarly problematic that I will not make another bulletpoint for it.)

2b, though) Also, you're ignoring theistic or religious agnostics when you dismiss religious people as "believers".

2c) Not to mention nontheistic religion.

3) And on the subject of that religion, culture, ethnicity thing: when you talk about your utopian future in which there is no religion, you are expressing a position that is, at best, colonialist. It is rooted in a culture that grew up descended from the Roman notion of "religion" as a category that could be pointed to as something disinct from or other than "the way we live as a people", a notion that Christianity inherited. When you say you want to wipe out "religion", what you communicate to many people is that you believe that their culture and heritage should be destroyed. The people you may hit hardest with this particular colonialist club are likely, of course, the members of surviving indigenous colonised tribes who have been on the butt end of Christianisation used specifically as a tool for destroying them as people with an independent identity. Be careful of the company you keep.

3b) Also, if you are basing your anti-religion-X argument on the way that religion-X treats its women, children, sexual minorities, etc., fucking listen to the religion-X people who are women, children, queer, whatever else rather than stomping all over them with your I-know-better-than-you-poor-deluded-people-who-haven't-escaped-the-trappings-of-your-oppressive-religion boots, okay?

4) Yep, "supernatural" is a big fancy word for stuff that doesn't exist. The relevance of this point to religion is questionable and both 100% dependent on a privileged definition of "god" and a complete avoidance of the concept of orthopraxy. For a trivially obvious couple of examples, an animistically inclined religious person can entirely agree with you that there is no supernatural and still have boatloads of gods kicking around; a religion that is primarily defined on the social practices and behaviours of a community does not go away even if gods do.

5) On that "disproven" thing, yes, gods are not scientific axioms. People who try to use them as such are idiots. Most religious people do not think their religion is science, and trying to tell them that their religion is not a substitute for science will mostly get you an, "Why are you telling me this rather than join me in doing something about the idiots who want to get 'intelligent design' into my kids' textbooks?"

5b) Science is not the full range of reality, either. I like art and music and other subjective experiences! I bet you do too! I'll bet that sometimes you do something daring like eat some chocolate or have sex or listen to Bach sometimes without engaging in a peer-reviewed study of the process by which your neurons fire! I like blue things, and I do it without deriving my enjoyment from the principles of the electromagnetic spectrum!

5c) And regarding that whole "but religion suffuses everything" thing that's part of the arguing with people who want to get intelligent design into the textbooks. Trust me, I hate "God Bless America" played at baseball games at least as much as you do, possibly a little more because it is in my muscle memory as the accompaniment to a tae kwon do kata and I prefer not to accidentally kick people in the head in the seventh inning stretch. (Ceremonial deism is a crock.)

6) By the way, if you start arguing against "omniscience" or "omnipotence" as divine traits, you're basically talking about at best one hypothesised godform, and the rest of us may as well bugger off and have tea. Don't mistake that for a definition of what a god is. (And if you, like one atheist did once to me, respond to someone attempting to point out that that argument is completely incoherent from a non-monotheistic perspective with "What's the point in worshipping a god that isn't omnipotent?", you lose at cultural awareness and probably capability to understand basic polite conversation outside your microscopic frame of reference.)

7) So on that "What's the point" thing, by the way, when you assume that religious people are religious out of fear (fear of death is a popular more-specific version of this), wanting a cookie from some all-powerful parent figure in the sky, or similar infantilising trivialisations, you are probably not going to get a response from the adults in your vicinity. Not because there aren't any, but because the work to disabuse you of your notions just doesn't look worth it, and being a responsible adult bears a remarkable resemblance to being too tired.

8) When you make your arguments about religion, it really helps if you don't use catchwords that indicate you only know about one or two of them. (Hint: "salvation" is a tip-off. "Original sin" too.) Also, saying something like "Your god will eventually vanish into prehistory and superstition, just like nobody worships Thor, Zeus, or Osiris anymore!" will make the polytheists in the vicinity very tired; most of them, however, know that pointing out that they worship Thor or Zeus or Wesir will just get them called childish and primitive or something in the unlikely event that anyone acknowledges their existence at all, and thus don't bother to correct your ignorance.

9) Most religious organisations suck, and institutionalised power leads to abuses. WELCOME TO PROGRESSIVE SOCIAL ACTIVISM AWARENESS, HERE IS YOUR INFORMATIONAL BROCHURE ABOUT WAYS THE HUMAN CAPACITY TO GANG TOGETHER GOES HORRIBLY WRONG. Seriously, are you expecting religious structures to differ from corporate structures? Nations? High school cliques? People form social structures to make levers; people apply levers to get what they want. Some things people want are bloody awful. If you want to end holy wars you'll have more success with it by fixing water rights, health care access, economic security, and all that hope-for-the-future stuff than by trying to abolish gods.

9b) Seriously this is an argument for anarchism not against religion.

10) If you start out your comment or your shiny blogpost by saying "Religion does X thing and I don't want to hear from anyone pointing out religions that don't", posting a comment later on going, "Gee, just about everyone who reads my blog agrees with me on this!" is just - fucking - ridiculous. When you state up front that you're uninterested in hearing counterarguments, only the most bullheaded ideologues will ever bother to make any. (I'm not making this one up, though I will admit it's more of a general Internets Argumenting point than something specific to this particular standing-wave flamewar. I just saw it a day or two ago when catching up on the last few weeks of blogs I read and the resulting explosion led to this post.)

So yeah. There's my inflammatory bullshit. Let it join all of the other inflammatory bullshit about this subject that's kicking around the internets lately.

Running through to drop a link

2010-06-07T13:03:00.001-05:00

Ebert's blog: "How do they get to be that way?"

On the painting over the murals of students in that Arizona school.

Presumption of Innocence

2010-05-09T12:53:00.005-05:00

A while back, two people named Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks decided to try to paint my blogworld acquaintance maymay as a pedophile for not barring minors from the KinkForAll unconference set he started and released into the world. I've been meaning to try writing about this for a while, but between Little Foot and everything else I have not been able to get the spoons together; better, more coherent writing can be found at Alas, A Blog, among many other places. One of maymay's posts on the subject is here.

So rather than roll over those subjects again:

In an ideal world I'd have to hand the statistics about some European approaches to sex education, which starts well before puberty and has, as its end result, lower teen pregnancy rates, later age of first sexual contact, and so on, and I'd be able to lay them out in that cool-headed rational way that is how one's supposed to act in order to be Convincing in this culture.

Or I could just dig out my Blogging for Sex Education Day post and emotive appendix and wave them around again like a bloody shirt. Possibly with an "As a mother of a baby girl..." attached to start hitting those buttons as hard as I can.

But, y'know, as a mother of a baby girl, the Hughes-and-Brookses of the world terrify me. They terrify me because they wish to make equipping Little Foot with what she will need to navigate the world in reasonable safety a crime, if not literally, at least socially: they want the concept of frank discussion about sexuality to be, if it exists at all, constrained to those above legal majority, keeping the youth vulnerable, exploitable, ignorant.

I mean, I'm familiar with this sort of thing, this idea that children are 'innocent', which is a code word for 'unsexual', and that they will be tainted by knowledge.

I've run into it in homophobic discourse - because straight people never realise they're attracted to MOTOS before puberty, so gay people who figure that sort of thing out must be inappropriately sexualised. I have a hobby of popping into those discussions to note that I had my first crush when I was seven or so, and recognised it at the time as "something that has to do with grownup things like getting married", and it manifested as - among other ways - wanting to touch the target of my affections which, being in elementary school, involved defeating him in a wrestling match at a friend's birthday party. These people remain wilfully ignorant of the way that hairpulling and teasing get labelled as "puppy love" when the children involved are of different apparent sexes, making it redundant for people for whom that sort of thing is actually the early and inchoate manifestations of sexuality to realise that hey, they're straight!

... those were some very long and complicated sentences. Anyway!

Once, when I was pointing out that I was aware of parts of my sexuality when I was pre-pubescent - that I was formulating my taste in boys from the age of seven, say, I don't think I'd even gotten into the definite awareness of some level of kink by the age of twelve - I got told that I was providing justifications for pedophiles. That self-awareness as someone who was formulating an understanding about "grownup relationship things" and how I felt about having them someday was some kind of mitigating factor that could excuse sexual abuse. That even acknowledging child-appropriate sexuality in a prepubescent was carte blanche for people to fuck children.

I can tell from the way I repeat that and rephrase it over and over that I go all fugue-y and kind of triggery about it.

Children are keen observers of the world, perhaps especially the world of adult social dynamics, because they have to relate themselves to that world in order to survive. A keen state of vulnerability means that understanding the systems of social interaction is a vital skill. (This, tangentially, strikes me as one of the reasons ASD can be so disabling.) Expecting that children will not be piecing together understandings of sexuality from what they observe is flatly ludicrous: even the ones who are not growing up in a household with adults who are in a romantic/sexual relationship of some sort will have friends with married parents, or single parents who are dating, or whatever else. They will see people with relationships on television, or watch a Disney movie and observe how this year's Princess gets her Prince. And they will find themselves drawn to explore things themselves: whether it's "if I touch this I like how it feels" or "That person there makes me feel happy and I want to be near them" or something else altogether in that complex of things.

We cannot cannot cannot dissociate children from an awareness of how what's in their heads relates to the adult world. And sexuality does not suddenly spring into existence from nothing at puberty, at age of consent, at legal majority, at an age where one is old enough to drink, no matter how much the rhetoric would like it to.

And I'm writing about children, because I have a child and I have to work through how to equip her with knowledge from age-appropriate ground up - which doesn't even touch on the vileness of equating teenagers who might be attending one of maymay's unconferences with my nine-month-old child in terms of what sort of sexuality discussion might be appropriate for them.

But this is a culture in which carrying condoms in order to be a responsible driver for one's sexuality frequently gets taken as being oversexed, slutty, indiscriminate, bad, and thus unrapeable, because sex isn't a topic for discussion; sex is something magical that happens from beyond and carries you away. Being frank, real, knowledgeable, aware, making deliberate choices: these are all the sorts of things that destroy 'innocence' and thus make a person guilty.

Imaginary

2010-05-02T18:10:00.005-05:00

Holly of the Pervocracy is taking apart some internet weirdo named Roissy, who has put forward "tests" to evaluate female attractiveness and male attractiveness according to some wacked out fetish pick-up artist subculture paradigm.

It is ... very strange.

Especially since the usual suspect is in there arguing that the Conventionally Attractive Woman totally benefits from this detestible set of social upfuckery and thus if one wants to have a Conventionally Attractive Woman one must learn these rules.

Now, as I mentioned over there, to the extent that that's an accurate description of "club culture", it's a brilliant argument for never going to a club, but there's more than that going on. As Holly notes in one of the previous posts she's written about this nonsense, the nonsense ignores the huge number of ordinary guys with partners. All of the Conventionally Attractive Women are off clubbing, right!

Er, no?

Unless, of course, one defines Conventionally Attractive Woman - and Roissy might - as someone who goes to trendy clubs. (I am pretty sure that people who go to goth and punk clubs don't count.)

I mean, I know more than a few women who pretty much meet the basic standards for Conventionally Attractive Women as I understand them - fairly thin, non-invisible bust, dress in an attractive manner that is compatible with their figure, and ... I don't think I know anyone who goes to trendy clubs. Or if I do they consider it the sort of shameful secret that doesn't get mentioned in polite company. Closest I'd get is people who go to see favorite bands in clubs on occasion, in which case the trendiness of the club is completely irrelevant. Hell, I've done that, to see a goth rock group. I have no idea if the place I went for that is fashionable, though the bartender didn't know how to mix a lime rickey and I had to tell her.

But it comes around to that thing that got said there - to get a patriarchy-approved woman apparently one has to become a patriarch. Okay, that's as sensical a thing as any.

What I don't understand is why this is an appealing relationship goal to have, at least as anything other than "Look at me I have a hot chick hur de hur hur". I mean, I know that humans are profoundly status-driven in ways that often fly under the radar, but that particular status jockeying just eludes me entirely in its appeal.

Somewhere recently I read a chunk of a post that went something like, "Nerdy types are rarely popular because they don't want to go to the effort of popularity" or something like it. Which, well, makes sense. The goalstates are different. And setting aside the fact that I was cast as the smart one, not the pretty one, even if I had had the option of being the pretty one type, I didn't want to pay the cost.

And there is a cost. Maybe it's a more obvious cost to me as someone who had that weird outsider fringe status but maybe could have paid that pound of flesh if I had had the social acumen to do it - but the cost is immense.

I don't even mean the time and money investment required to manage the beauty ritual, make sure all of the shaving-required bits are shaved, mastering the skills of makeup and coiffure, and so on, though that's certainly a cost - if nothing else an opportunity cost on acquiring other skills or spending that money.

I mean the social cost.

Let's say I go to the effort to convert my more-or-less Conventionally Attractive Woman presentation into something that hits the PUA crowd's buttons, something I could probably do because I have the privilege of having a base template that is fashionable. Let's even say that I would enjoy presenting myself that way, so that we can neglect the mental stress of investing myself in something that is at best neutral to me on the appeal front. Let's even go into the wild hypothetical mode and suggest that this hypothetical me is unpartnered.

This hypothetical me would have to deal with more creepy approaches. Real-world me is sufficiently nondescript in clothing and presentation that she can fade into the background and read a book on the bus rather than having to regularly fend off the inappropriate and unwelcome strangers who will occasionally glom onto a woman and try to demand her attention.

This hypothetical me would be attractive to pick-up artist types. Real-world me has not been subjected to that sort of attention since the regularity of sexual harassment in junior high school.

These costs are magnified by my experience of sexual assault, which makes unwelcome male attention extremely stressful. My particular (major) sexual assault has its roots in my being a wallflower, in part, so perhaps if I had achieved Conventionally Attractive Fourteen-Year-Old it would not have happened. But that sort of breaks the boundaries on this speculation, because if that were the case I would not be the person writing this blog at all, even in hypothetical.

This hypothetical me would be perceived as not unattractive but unlikely to be suitable as a partner by the sort of men I do find attractive - because the assumption runs very strong in certain subcultures that a woman who is not only conventionally attractive but who puts significant effort into the elective portions of conventional attractiveness will only interact with those men either to demand service or for purposes of mockery. I might well have to go to extra effort to integrate myself with these communities - which can be doable, I know and have known several women who cared about fashion and similar matters who have done so - but it would still be a cost.

So, yeah, I could theoretically remake myself to gain certain forms of status in certain subcultures, because I'm thin, could probably pad out a bra a bit if I wanted to, and know a bit about what flatters me physically. But I don't see that I'd derive much benefit from the "patriarchy-approved woman" template, so I can afford to be lazy on that front and pursue other forms of status.

It just always bemuses me to be invisible.

Though it often beats the hell out of being seen by some people.

Ghost in the Dwelling

2010-04-26T23:21:00.007-05:00

My lion asked me yesterday how I was doing, and after a lot of circling around the subject and trying to figure out how to say things, I finally hit the revelation:

"I'm angry with my mother."

(No shit. I live in a universe of angry with my mother. But, he quite reasonably asked:)

"Why? She hasn't been all that much in contact, has she? I mean, what's she done?"

I tried to explain. Explain that every time I talk to her, if I mention that something is hard with taking care of Little Foot, that I'm feeling in some way hemmed in or tired or stressed or any of the normal things that motherhood brings, her voice takes on this knowing cast, and she says something like, "Yep, that's what it's like. That's what it'll be for the next twenty years! You gave up your life."

This parenting gig, it's hard work. It is one of the most wonderful, rewarding, bloody difficult things I have ever done in my life, because it's a thing that I have wanted to do, that my heart has yearned for.

And every time she says something like this, it gets just a little bit harder. Or maybe a lot harder.

Because I am still a person, no matter how much she wants to turn me into the negative phrasing of the Angel of the Household, the madonna of self-sacrificing motherhood. I still have things that I want to do with my life - that I am doing with my life - even if I have to wedge them around the crevices. And I have to wedge them around the crevices because there's still that legacy of Victoriana, the two spheres, the "real world" and the domestic area that I, as a nursing mother, preside over with my apron and wooden spoon, only I haven't got an apron anyway and Little Foot wants to play with the spoon.

I resent the way the culture surrounding me sets me up to be an unperson now. I resent it, and I wish to change it, and I do things like thinking about joining a church to expand the base of my support structure, to maybe find a community with like-aged children so that Little Foot can grow up with friends, to do all the things that might shore up the slumping walls of my Fortress of Unsolitude that I inhabit as the not all that super mom. I am, since Little Foot arrived, more driven to be political, to find community to be active in, to do all of these things that people do, as well as my own work (terribly neglected in the perpetual onslaught of the nine-month-old), and that politicality comes with a keener awareness of the way that I am marginalised.

Oh, I am doing So Many Things Right, with the breastfeeding and all, and isn't it nice that I'm dedicating myself to being a good mother, and now I can be completely glossed over as a person because I will be off doing BABYBABYBABY, right, that's not something that real people have to bother their pretty little heads about, they can go do real people things. Like work, and have relationships, and achieve things that matter in the world, and 'things that matter' don't include 'raising a loving and loved child to be a healthy human being'.

And that's what my mother tells me, over and over again. That I've given up any chance I had to be real for a good long time. This velveteen rabbit will not breathe and bleed and hop on its own, no matter how much it's loved. Because all my real gets drained away, magically, into childrearing.

What you see here is a clever fake.

So that's why I'm angry at my mother right now.

But I Try, I Try

2010-04-18T12:52:00.004-05:00

(I've had fragments of "Modern Love" stuck in my head all day, yes.)

Today Little Foot and I went to church.

It was our second time attending this particular church - the first was their family Easter service, where she got to pet a rabbit - and I think we will be going back somewhat regularly. I'm thinking of joining the choir; I miss doing music with people, regularly. (It'll have to wait until I can leave Little Foot with other folks of an evening so I can attend rehearsals, but...)

I miss a lot of things.

I'm lonely.

It's a weird sort of loneliness, not one that can be fixed with family, or close friends, the people who have sustained me for so long; it's the sort of loneliness that can only be healed by a broader community, a different layer of system. If it takes a family to make a healthy person, maybe it takes a community to make a healthy family. Maybe. Maybe now that I have Little Foot, that's what I need.

And I'm lonely.

I'm lonely for fellowship, for shared religious feeling. I have my own work, I have the people I share small group with, and I'm alone. And my work is as much soul-devouring as it is soul-feeding, it consumes all of me in order to meet what I need, and there is nothing left to cradle me and give me rest. There is nothing left for me, no temple that holds my first time anymore, and the shells claiming the names of temples all have Top's Disease and I. Will not. Rest. With tyrants.

We went to church, and watched from the balcony (where there is space for littles to run around without disrupting the service), and when the sermon turned to youth participation she said, "AAAAAAH!" and was audible downstairs.

I searched for local Unitarian Welcoming congregations, and this one has music up front, music and other pagan members and a stray poly-activist, and it is friendly. And maybe I'll be able to be at home here, shy me, awkward me who is afraid of joining things out of the surety that I will not be wanted. But yet it feels friendly, even to me.

Today I filled out a card to get the church bulletin.

The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future....

2010-03-31T23:05:00.003-05:00

I was unaware that a particular bullying and cyberbullying case had led to a bunch of local action before it was drawn to my attention recently.

I am incapable of commenting on the particulars of the case; I haven't looked into it. I honestly find the whole subject more than a bit triggery, so I cringe and hide when it comes up, a lot, rather than put too much thought into it, to trying to figure it out, trying to empathise.

You see.

I spent about ten years almost entirely unable to cry.

It's still hard for me, and I'm more likely to get a piercing headache that feels like my eyes are being crushed out of my head instead of tears, along with the driving need to shed tears and no capacity.

Tears would prove that they had won.

And that was even more unbearable than what they put me through.

So I held my tears until I was safely off the bus and away, out of sight, out of earshot, held them until I got home, held them, held them back, probably fooling nobody but that didn't mean I didn't need to try, until I could do nothing but hold them, frozen into veins of ice in my heart that have never fully melted.

Somewhere in there my parents tried to talk to the school administrators, who said "Boys will be boys" and shrugged; sexual harassment and at least borderline assault were nonevents. (And I look at the person who commented on the article I linked who wants to know what caused the "recent uprising in bullying" and wonder what fucking planet they're from. Nobody has ever cared to fucking stop it. I mean, the closest I've seen to any general awareness or giving a damn about it was post-Columbine? And maybe they're doing something about it in Massachusetts because of this poor girl.) Things like getting invited to a slumber party at an address that didn't exist ... well, the gash left by that hope that someone was interacting with me in a manner other than mockery didn't even register as something that needed a bandage, in amongst everything else.

I've said before that nobody escapes childhood unscathed, but some of us had a rougher time than others.

And I sit here thinking, "I have a child. I have a child. My gods, I have a child."

She is eight months old and I am terrified of school for her. I flail helplessly at all kinds of ways of doing schooling for all kinds of reasons, but a lot of them come down to this:

I'm still bleeding.

Somewhere deep in me is that kid who cannot cry, who views every human interaction with distrust because they all turn to ash and mockery sooner or later. That touchy agitation jumps too far, too hard, at any slight, any dismissal, waiting for the signs that it will turn into the knife twisting in the gut.

I'm still bleeding.

Even those people I trust most completely, most utterly, can make me jump. A bad day, a moment of distance, and I'm braced for the snap. Sometimes that bracing is worn smooth and old, a bare lump of awareness, something where I can ask my lion "Are you okay?" rather than half-hiding, half-cowering in the far corner of the room because I assume something's going to shatter and leave me bereft and laughed at, catching the sudden horrific backlash of a joke half my life in the making. I don't believe it will happen - but there's that sliver of horribly twisted, broken person in me that knows it has to be prepared.

I'm still bleeding.

My baby is so innocent.

I'm so scared.

Right-Wing Irony Oops

2010-03-26T15:09:00.002-05:00

This in from The Moderate Voice:

Conservative thinktanker David Frum was fired soon after his criticism of Republican obstructionism over health care reform, with his boss claiming, well, y'know, times are hard.

Turns out a lot of these policy wonks have think tank jobs ... for the health coverage.

Nose to the Grindstone

2010-03-22T15:30:00.005-05:00

A friend recently linked to this article, titled 'Why Self-Discipline is Overrated'. Which ... I recognise me in it, despite the fact that I have kind of terrible self-discipline.

Though I certainly internalised the notion that moral rectitude is in part measured by how good one is at knuckling down and doing What Must Be Done.

But one of the things that it reminds me of is the style of "schooling" intended to shape children into good, obedient workers, rather than critical thinkers, innovators, or even well-informed and knowledgeable citizens. Under some bits of the history of school development, none of those things are actual desired goals - which explains why the system stinks at producing them. No, the system is supposed to produce "self-discipline", pretty much.

But the stuff about going to college? Portrait of the blogger as a teenager. And a few other people I know, besides:

Dutiful students may be suffering from what the psychoanalyst Karen Horney famously called the “tyranny of the should” -- to the point that they no longer know what they really want, or who they really are. So it is for teenagers who have mortgaged their present lives to the future: noses to the grindstone, perseverant to a fault, stressed to the max. High school is just preparation for college, and college consists of collecting credentials for whatever comes next. Nothing has any value, or provides any gratification, in itself. These students may be skilled test-takers and grade grubbers and gratification delayers, but they remind us just how mixed the blessing of self-discipline can be.

I was a nerdy kid. I'm still an autodidact, pursuing levels of in-depth knowledge on subjects of interest to me - but of course those subjects fit remarkably poorly into any instructional pattern. I was bad at most of my homework, because - as the article notes - so much of it is utterly pointless, and that much was evident to me from the age of, y'know, seven or so.

But in college? I had no idea what I was doing. I had nebulous goals for the future, none of which were dependent on a degree, but getting a degree was What One Did and An Important Experience, so I tried it. (It didn't work out, but that's neither here nor there; I both know people who, like me, went from "stressed to the max" to "broken" and people who scraped through with a degree they found meaningless aiming them at a life that didn't feel like it went anywhere.) The whole value in college was the "discipline" of it, and the "won't it feel so good when you've accomplished". I had no space for finding the place to learn - and do - what I loved.

I didn't even figure out what I wanted to be doing for something like ten years after I dropped out. Because I didn't have the tools; I just had the discipline thing (and the knowledge that I kind of fail at it).

I think of this now, for two reasons - one, that I'm having a major shitfit about the conservative/discipline approach to living and the way it devalues more spontaneous and intuitive attitudes right now, entirely unrelatedly, and two, because I'm seriously considering how I might want to actually go back to school. And ... what I want is a particular Master's degree. And to get that, I ... need a BA. So I've been trying to find something that I can do, that fits in with my life, that is also work that I love, because if I have to hit this particular hoop, I want to do it for more than the discipline.

(In a fit of irony I'm trying to make sure I get at least a post a month up here despite being profoundly occupied with Little Foot. Discipline! Perseverance!)

Weighty Contemplations

2010-02-14T18:04:00.004-05:00

So, I recently joined FetLife just kind of for the hell of it, and discovered that it's full of all the same stupid arguments I see on the blogs, only with maybe a little more kink acceptance. (Sometimes that maybe is a little thin. It's depressing.)

Today I decided to poke around the Submissive Women community to see if there were interesting discussions there. I found "interesting", though not the sort I think that one might be hoping for.

There were two threads in particular that caught my attention. One was "Would you let a dom give you a buzz haircut?" and the other was "Would you let a dom put you on a diet?"

Guess which one got the more vehemently hostile reactions from the community?

Guess which one had, in the first comments to the discussion, something along the lines of, "I bet this one will go over better because it's serving vanity!"

Oh no, I thought, people will be just as harsh if not harsher on the weight-loss thread, because it's so much more invasive, because health concerns are involved, because ...

Wait, what. "They're about equivalent in invasiveness"? The vast choruses of, if not enthusiastic support, "Yeah, that'd be okay, I think, so long as she's not at a healthy weight already". A few lone voices in the wilderness suggesting things about that sort of thing being bad for self-esteem were scattered among the generalised quiet murmurs of assent and one or two "If you're going to do that sort of thing be sure you have your medical shit together, you know."

I'm left kind of half-speechless. Even knowing that there is so much derangement around weight and the possibility of losing it, a community of people who spit fire at cutting their hair but would acquiesce without complaint to being ordered to lose weight? Who consider these things roughly equivalent, but only the latter acceptable?

I wish I had clever commentary. I'm just too stunned.

Keeping Abreast of the Subject

2010-01-23T15:57:00.002-05:00

I'm not sure I have anything to say on this Shapely Prose guest post about experiences with fluctuating breast size that isn't kind of tangential of the subject, so I'm pulling my ruminations back here.

When I was thirteen or fourteen, I started to enter puberty.

This was, as you might be aware, a touch on the late side. (Further, I was in high school, due to getting skipped up a grade, and thus that much further out of synch with people whose physical development had started, typically, two or three years earlier.) And, as longer-term readers may recall, I was not well-positioned for good social skills development especially around sexuality, nor particularly ept at it.

I had been sexualised and objectified prior to that point; one of the driving forces behind my schooling decisions for high school was wanting to avoid any further exposure to the boys who had made an avocation of attempting to grope my undeveloped breasts or taunt me with sexually charged commentary. But the actual physical stuff didn't really start to kick in significantly until I was actually in high school.

The androgyny of childhood gave way to an androgyny of early adolescence, one too lean and light-boned to show any of the broad paintstrokes of womanhood, with bare hints of the swelling of breasts. I learned how to change shirts in the gym locker room without ever quite seeming to be topless in the selfconsciousness of knowing that I was braless, puerile, exposed. My mother harassed me to wear a bra despite the fact that I had the barest suggestions of curves, and I humored her for two or three days before discarding the thing as an uncomfortable mass of useless fabric.

Despite all this, I was bemused by notions that I should want larger breasts; the pectoral workout scenes in Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret left me laughing at the strange implausibility of adolescent females rather than reassured that I was not alone. I did not think larger breasts would make me attractive; attractiveness was such an unreachable goal that such physical transformations did not occur to me. I hardly thought about breasts at all, beyond a near-subliminal discomfort with a sense of sexualisation and exposure that came of admitting to having them - a discomfort that was eased by the fact that, compared to most female people I knew, I didn't have them.

It was strange to me to hear discussions of breasts (and bras, and similar), because I was ... not precisely dissociated from mine, but had them as tightly associated with my identity as my kneecaps. And so I missed out a lot of importance and had a rather funhouse-mirror perspective on a lot of things, a perspective that perhaps matched the lopsidedness of my actual breasts. (One of which, I have joked for years, never made it out of Tanner stage 4.) Perhaps this was rooted in or a root of my later understanding of myself as genderqueer; gods know.

I picked up a few sports bras from a friend a few years ago, not because I needed sports-bra support of the breasts, but because there were times that going shirtless for exercise was too cold and a shirt led to overheating, so half a shirt was the right scale. They ached some at certain points of my menstrual cycle. My partners found my nipples notably more interesting than I did, overall (experiments with things to do with them mostly led to me wondering when something worthwhile was going to begin). And so on.

All of which made pregnancy ... interesting.

There are stretchmarks on my breasts to go with the stretchmarks on my belly and thighs. I wear a nursing bra most days as much for support as for the protection on my nipples when they've been moderately abraded. The larger one actually folds over, which is frustrating for finding positions to lie down. There is an actual curve between them where there used to be a breastbone; it's possible to imagine corsetry giving me cleavage without me having to put one hand on the side of each boob and shove them together (which was the prior methodology for achieving 'cleavage').

It's honestly a bit confusing. My lion commented that some of the photography of me with the baby suggested a curve, and I was very much, "Yes, it's so weird." Not weird enough to be dysphoric, at least, just perplexing and faintly off-kilter.

And I'm again reminded of the person over at Renegade Evolution's who was horrified by people not wearing bras because People Can See Your Nipples, which left me in a bewildered, "Don't you wear clothes where you come from?" sort of state. Which has to be linked with my mother's insistence that there was some moral necessity to clothe my barely-adolescent chest in additional totally unnecessary layers, somewhere, in the department of socially normal things that make no sense to me.

It's a horribly fraught subject and one where my investment is minute, which is a fascinating experience.

None of this is anything I know how to talk about in a way that's relevant for Shapely Prose, honestly; I'm pretty sure I didn't quite talk about what I meant to when I started here, either. Just ... all the investment people have in breasts, I guess, and I'm limited to faint aggravation at unnecessary clothing and preferring it when I don't get kicked in them.

Or A Serious Expression In The Middle Of July

2010-01-19T17:45:00.003-05:00

The Mother's for Women's Lib carnival linked me to this post, which contains this paragraph:

Not only are traditionally female fan objects and fan engagements devalued, the very gender identity of the fan thus becomes problematic: reading done in private by women is a selfish and time-wasting activity, and fannish investment is a selfish and time-wasting squandering of emotion. Mothers, however, are meant to focus their activities and emotions on one target only: their family. Capitalist culture has long been undergirded by domestic ideology: the man’s primary domain is the capitalist world, where selfishness and aggressivity are rewarded, while the woman’s primary domain is home, where she creates social awareness by selflessly volunteering and providing moral guidance for the next generation. I’m taking this directly from my domestic/bourgeois ideology lecture for the British nineteenth century, but frankly, living in a white middle class suburban area with two kids in private school, the ideological structure of my community doesn’t really look all that different.

And that's an interesting thing.

I have gotten, since Little Foot was born, profoundly jealous of what time I get to spend on myself. And it's hard, on a lot of levels - I mean, starting with the comment "being selfish is one of the worst crimes a woman can commit without breaking the law" but also all the ways in which my time is circumscribed - whether because I actively need to be minding Little Foot or, like now: she finally went down for a nap, after a fussy day in which she largely refused to sleep. I should go, for example, grab the towels out of the bathroom and wash them, but if I put her down she might wake up. (She has been very, very easy to wake of late, alas.) Which necessity - the dirty towels or the unrested infant - rules?

I have always struggled with taking time for myself, seesawing between complete self-sacrifice and a tendency towards indulgence without ever quite knowing where the range of legitimate behaviour fell. It is not something - growing up in a context where any time spent on myself was proof of my selfishness - that I learned well. Nor a culture designed to help rational thought on the subject, even if I were not kept from learning it at home.

And there are the half-spoken assumptions: that of course the lion and I would stop playing games when we have children, for example. That our recreations will become proper, whatever that means. I already watch baseball games, maybe we'd have to take up more television sports? Or - to really buy into the mythologies of adulthood, that his world would be consumed with Job and my world would be consumed with Baby and neither of us would ever have scope for our own pursuits again, except maybe a movie every year or two when the stars align and someone else could mind the babe.

I find myself strung up by the self-doubt, neither counting off tasks - fold the laundry, clean the bedroom, catalogue the crate of books, whatever else - nor taking time to relax, poised between the two because I have no space to give myself for either.

I think maybe this is why I'm tired.

Ignorance and Bliss

2010-01-14T21:30:00.006-05:00

I was, for various reasons, having That Conversation the other day. The interminable one, with someone who almost certainly means well, but hasn't quite managed to claw up to spitting distance of social awareness. You know how it goes; you ask, "Look, do you worry about whether you'll be raped if you go out?" and get a response like, "I totally worry about being mugged, I live in a bad part of town." (Because we all know that women totally don't ever have to worry about being mugged; it's one crime or the other.)

Anyway.

One of the other people in That Conversation commented that her moment of revelation was a Savage Love column in which someone had written in asking for advice for how to deal with anal tears, because she'd been mucking about with bondage with her partner and he took advantage of her helplessness to do something she'd previously refused. It hadn't occurred to the writer that she'd been raped.

And, well, it hadn't occurred to the person relating the story that that was rape either. Because she had internalised the "sexuality is like this: resist resist resist resist resist lie-back-and-think-of-England-in-the-end". So: revelation! That is rape!

My first thought on this was relief that I had never been that naive.

My second thought, following immediately after, was that actually, I had been.

Because the cascade that led into my assault was, as I've ruminated before, a long chain of violations, minor building up to major, where I hadn't figured out if I wanted any of them - and by the time I realised I had wanted to say no long ago, it seemed so pointless, so cruel; he expected to be able to do that stuff now, it would be so nasty to suggest that I didn't like it, right? It wasn't nice to lead people on like that. All of the minor transgressions were written off as the price of my failures of promptness, and anything built upon them likewise, not because of resist-and-submit per se, but the same complex of expectation. The things already lost cannot be a crime against person, because they are lost already. And that is what sex is about: resist-and-submit, and if I wasn't able to articulate the 'resist' right on, well, that left me the resolution to do.

Tied for third thought, cascading out of this moment of someone else's enlightenment:

That I didn't know what happened to me was almost rape, and denied that word for many years because I didn't want to appropriate the experiences of "real" victims of assault, but I knew it was wrong, and that's why I wouldn't have been surprised by the opportunistic rape from the letter-writer being named as it was;

That there is a bonus complex narrative about the consequences of being female and kinky (reminded as I was of a friend who was raped under similar circumstances), too;

That for all that I missed out on a lot of the social expectations of femaleness (all the things women are supposed to do 'by default' when they go out because of the risk of rape are things that don't occur to me most of the time - perhaps because I'm a shut-in by preference, perhaps because I was assaulted by a supposed romantic partner and not a stranger and none of them would have protected me) I ... have no idea ... how to show this world ... to someone who does not already see the space in which it inhabits.

I often feel that I don't live in the same world as other women who are talking about the world women have to move through; that was not the case yesterday.

I'm looking at my daughter, now, and it matters that she is female-bodied whatever comes after, because I look at her and think about this world she has no idea exists, snugged as she is now in the arms of her loving family. I have the tears welling up, knowing that she will have to learn to navigate that godawful world, however it looks when she gets older, my happy, sweet child who has never known cruelty, whose sense of betrayal is keyed to a diaper left unchanged a little too long, not ... all the world can wreak.

And I wish for all the world that she could remain as sweetly unaware of the awful things that humanity will do to women as that annoying guy who wanted to know better. That her education could be as gentle as a heated conversation with a handful of frustrated women on the internet, women armed only with domestic violence stats and a fistful of personal experience.

(And I am worlds further away from understanding my mother than I have ever been.)

Offline Memory

2009-12-31T14:19:00.002-05:00

I store my memory outside my head.

I don't know how to explain this to people, to people with undamaged memories. The only people who have understood me have had more overtly abusive relationships with one or another of their parents than I did, but they understand.

They understand growing up in 'that didn't happen', a world where any given event might disappear into an oubliette of denial and revisionist history. Where there is this constant meshwork of things never said, things said and forgotten, things said and denied a day later, where a child could not begin to navigate, caught between child's memories and the need to have faith in a caregiver.

(I think of a beloved friend's little icon, a scan of words written by a parent who never said them, a proof of something ambiguous and complicated and now, just ... unable to fit into language.)

I learned to store my memory outside my head.

Email archives, now that I'm an adult: great huge piles of email archives. Even when having conversations in text leads to vast emotional blowups, which it can do - my liege and I communicate shockingly poorly in text, for example - at least I can verify, if to nobody other than myself, that it actually happened.

Notes, mementoes, small objects that are part of an experience. I still hold a faint woundedness in my heart from when my father lost the baseball bat my grandfather gave me. I, very vaguely, wish that the scars on my forearm from when I self-injured had not faded, because scars are memory, and I know I was there, and I have no proof but what is written in my mind.

Small objects that were simply present at an experience, all part of the defining context of childhood, a thing that hooks into a complex of knowing where I came from, knowing where I was, an entire sense of security built around the familiar and the known.

"Do you need this?"

"It's a candy dish."

It's mints set out for some adult party, lights and nice clothes, something to do with artwork. It's Christmas candies by the tree in the house where I was a child, me tucked around the back of things putting ornaments on the side of the tree that faces the wall, voices singing "Haul out the Holly" from Mame. It's an assortment of pretzel sticks, once, and I cannot for the life of me remember why.

It's a little piece of memory.

"I mean, does it matter? Is it an important, like, family thing?"

I don't know how to answer the question, but since it is just a little piece of memory, not bound to a person, a single important event, something seminal, just part of where-I-came-from like so many other small things and really I don't need all of these little pieces of memory do I, there's enough else that can serve, enough that I don't just ... have my childhood dissolve away into doubt, since it is a trivial piece of memory, I say "We don't need it."

I store my memory outside my head.

Infinite Space Bounded in a Glass Ball

2009-12-29T21:25:00.002-05:00

This evening I started to inscribe Little Foot's name in glitter and glue on a glass ball. She has a lot of letters, so I merely did the first four, and will wait until it is safe to turn the ornament without smudging to write the rest.

Her name will join the names thus written on other glass balls in past years: the other three adults in my family, the cats' names, and the snake. Come this weekend, my father and his wife will also get to write their names in glue and pick a colour to sparkle in. This way is in its fourth generation at least, now: my grandmother, my father, myself, my child. As generations of humans before me have done, I take the trappings of my old religion with me when I convert. This is the meaning of my Christmastide.

Meaning is a delicate thing, and one does not always take away what was intended.

Perhaps my northern European bloodline appreciates the placement of an abundance festival in the dark of the year - before the worst of the cold, yes, but in the hints of the return of the sun. Perhaps this is so.

Perhaps I am so marinated in Christianity that I cannot give it all up. I would not be the only one.

But: I come back to the ornament, carefully written upon in glue.

If you spend the dark of the winter with my family, you get a name ball. Your name inscribed in glitter, on a glass or satin-coated ball. This is how it has always been, it was so before I was born, I hope it will be so after I go West. A catalogue of names, a litany of memory.

If you will be back in the dark of the next year, your ornament is set aside, awaiting you: none will put it up but you, for it is yours, the token of our collective memory, the sigil of your welcome. If you do not return - if the travel is too much, if the circumstances do not align, if you will come no longer - then we will put it up for you, and remember the times you were present.

I will make cookies and cake for the season, the one a matter of holiday duty, the other a thing of more general celebration, for when my father comes, because it is hard to be properly festive when it is just us and the constant onslaught of baby requirements, but for my father who raised me to these traditions I can go to the effort. Perhaps I will make a roast, I believe we have one kicking around somewhere. And these will be my offerings of abundance for the season more than anything else, the barest essentials, more important than wrapped-up objects to be presented as offerings to the other: I offer food and the promise of the memory of a name.

To be with my family at Christmastime is to be always remembered, to always belong. To always have a place. When I strip away everything else, I am left with this offered universe, written upon in glitter and glue, held always in company and community. That is the holiness that is written upon my heart in the chill dark of the year, when it might be easy to trip into solitude and isolation. This is the community that I build over time, out of fragile glass balls and glue and memory.

For your ka.

Space To Be A Family

2009-12-13T18:28:00.001-05:00

Raising My Boychick put up a post about what changes we would look for to make the culture safe for families. More or less. Noodling ensues, and I said I'd write it here because gods know I do ramble on.

This isn't a simple damn problem. The anti-family shit is deeply ingrained in the culture. (A Salon article about just some of the more overtly misogynistic bits.) I can look to Europe and see things that are better, though not all of them are what I would want.

After Little Foot was born, I had what is probably one of the best of all possible situations in this culture, because I'm a weirdo with a fantastic family. I could spent the first month of recuperation time almost solely recuperating - because I had three other people who were taking care of Little Foot while I could heal. Which meant that people could take basically an eight-hour shift of babycare and not be too shorted on sleep. And I could pull that off because of my family structure, because I had the luck to give birth near the beginning of the break between summer session and the fall semester, and because people took staggered leave so I wasn't alone with Little Foot until sometime in September. In among that we had a constant stream of visiting relatives who did some assisting in varying levels.

But note all the caveats in there. Most women giving birth do not have two husbands and their wife to help out. We had to stagger leaves from work, and if I'd given birth a week earlier ("on time") there would have been finals to contest with; later gets into the rolling beginning of the semester, and one of us is in grad school and another on staff at a university. And I think that having the four of us there was pretty much a bare minimum to maintain reasonable levels of sanity through my recovery.

I literally have no idea how smaller families do this without losing their shit.

On the other hand, I have no idea how I manage to be sole caretaker for Little Foot during the daytime during the week without losing my shit, so presumably people with smaller families are tapping the same wellspring that gets me through the day until I get relief as people drift home from work, from school, from classes, from errands.

The isolation of taking care of small children is inhuman. Much as I hate all those biological-essentialist notions that go along with How We Are Meant To Be, this is not how we are meant to be. I worked at home prior to Little Foot's arrival, and was more than content, as an introvert, to do so; now, I find myself feeling isolated and sunk into a morass from which it is difficult to escape. I walk down to the gas station to buy snack food solely to leave the house - with Little Foot tucked into a wrap if I'm entirely alone, leaving her in the care of one of her other parents for ten minutes if I have the help. Perhaps it would be easier if we had a second car and I my driving license, but I have no freedom to just go somewhere; even with help getting her into the car is a small project (check diaper bag, get jacket on baby, get wrap for carrying her at destination, get baby out of house, into carseat, buckles all done up). Perhaps it would be easier if we still lived in the city, and I could climb down the two flights of stairs, hop on the trolley, and go somewhere. But even so, my abdominal muscles have still not recovered from pregnancy, and carrying her for too long, I learned yesterday, means that when we extract her from the wrap I fold in half as soon as her weight isn't countering my muscle strain.

But how do we fix this? We can't put the culture back to a place where all the huge extended families are all settled in roughly the same place - even for those of us on good terms with our bloodkin have had reasons to move. Local crunchyparent gatherings have largely been scheduled during daytime hours in places I would have to travel to by car, as if all crunchyparents have one stay-at-home, and that stay-at-home can drive half an hour because they have a dedicated mommycar and no issues that interfere with its use. (I kind of fear noncrunchyparent gatherings, and haven't looked into them at all.) Subdivisions aren't communities, really, though part of that is my lack of any knowledge of how to really get to know my neighbors in any useful way. Childcare services are a bandage, whether it's an in-house nanny or dropping the kids off somewhere, and has its own intrinsic and complicated class issues.

But we don't see mothers (or other caregivers, but like so many things, this falls on the mothers) going about their daily business with a kidlet in a babypouch. Hell, we don't see those mothers going about their daily business - not shopping, not going to the park, I mean going to the office or sitting behind the cash register or whatever else - with baby shoved in a bucket carseat under the counter either. Employers who have in-house childcare are still a minority. The childcare work is invisible and unintegrated. It's done by magic invisible people. We expect the fairies to raise the children, and then we wonder why the children are fey, elf-touched, and unintegratable with the ordinary world.

It needs to be okay to bring the kids in to work, to have that part of life integrated with everything else. But that's not enough. Parents like me have to be able to not be alone all the time. Which means community building, and fucked if I know how to do that. It means stuff like commercially-zoned spaces within walking distance, parks, and spaces that aren't parent-and-child hostile: places to sit and nurse other than bathrooms, sidewalks that are broad enough to accomodate strollers without driving other pedestrians into the street, having public social gathering places that are open to children.

It also needs to be okay to have work have delineated edges. Every so often I hear people complaining about how parents get to take time to take the kids to the doctor, to their lessons, whatever, that parents aren't expected, necessarily, to do more than their nine-to-five, that there's this tidy cultural excuse that means that parents are only expected to do the work they're contracted for and can't reasonably be expected to do more. This is the sort of broken that's why I have a tag 'sixteen tons' on this blog. (And that's just dealing with exempt employees - hourly employees have a whole different set of problems to deal with, and one I'm actually less equipped to speak to despite having all of my life employment being on an hourly wage basis. Class is complicated.) It would be to everyone's benefit - not just parents - if work was not presumed to trump life unless one has a signed permission slip from overculture excusing our absences. (In a culture where only paranoia about swine flu makes taking time off for illness currently acceptable - despite the fact that infecting the office with that cold will cost a lot more than two days off - what the hell do we expect?)

And that's not getting into the whole needing to scrimp and save up vacation time to do parental leave. My lion had the flexibility to take time off and then do a week working from home; most people don't. We had more people than most to do staggered assistance for me. And, even with all that, I was still bleeding out lochia when I settled in to being her primary, and usually sole, daytime caregiver. And see above about the isolation thing, where I have it pretty good since every so often my liege is about when he doesn't have classes and can provide the amazing relief of "Could you pick her up so I can rearrange" or "Could you handle this diaper change" or "Could you mind her for five minutes so I can go buy a donut" - not even, usually, doing primary caretaker (though sometimes he takes her for the morning and lets me get some more sleep), more "a momentary hand with this makes my life an order of magnitude easier".

Most industrialised countries have longer maternity leave times. Some have parental leave that is available to presumed-both parents (adoptive or biological, even). (And even for families like mine where more parental leave might be wanted, those countries also have more than two weeks of vacation time available at all, which goes back to the whole work-trumps-life rant about being expected to work more than one's hours by default.) I don't know where other countries are on flex-time working and telecommuting; getting those widespread would be a help to more parents than me. (When my lion does a telecommuting day, again, my resilience goes up a lot.)

(And, of course, my health and Little Foot's depend on my lion maintaining that pretty nice job that lets him telecommute sometimes including for a week after he took vacation post-birth. Because of the way employment links to health care, and the way that one's quality of job therefore links to one's quality of life. And if there were an NHS here, how much of a difference would that make to people who have to work shitty jobs for the health care, or who needed prenatal care, or post-partum treatment? Who wouldn't have the money to hire the homebirth midwife we had or handle the not technically last-minute transfer to the hospital?)

And I think long-term, too, like the friend who was enraging me a while back (who apologised, by the way), and think, y'know, the time that people spend raising kids should count towards Social Security or something. I don't know if I'm as optimistic as one of the commenters on Raising My Boychick about some kind of parenting wage, but hey. That'd be cool. (Did you know that Norway counts breastmilk production in its GDP?)

Let's see if I can summarise this into something reasonably tidy:

* enabling community support, whether larger families, extended families, chosen families, I don't care, more people available to help with kids for more time
* walkable communities with basic stores and public spaces near residential areas
* death to the Company Store - shorter hours, more vacation, no expectation of overtime as default, flexible scheduling, telecommuting, available to everyone, not just to parents
* universal health care access (here, this'll make up some of the pain to the companies that are being required to treat employees better)
* recognition of parenting as ... I don't want to say 'economically productive' because I dislike the whole 'it has to be qualified as Real Work and quantified monetarily for anyone to take it seriously' shit, but somewhere in the direction of, y'know, noting this happens, we don't get new taxpayers from the aforementioned childrearing fairies
* parental leave available for all legally recognised parents (acknowledging that families like mine are unlikely to be accomodated here but), whether biological or adoptive
* integrating caregivers with the community, not separating off and isolating paid caregivers (more in-house childcare in companies, etc.)

How's that for a start?

Dreamlife

2009-12-11T02:23:00.003-05:00

When I was a child and trying to get to sleep, I would tell myself little fantasy stories all about the boy I fancied and how in a fantasy world he needed to be rescued and afterwards we would live happily ever after.

When I got a little older, I got uncomfortable with that because what if he didn't want me, so I would tell myself little fantasy stories that were only mostly about the boy I fancied and how ... etc.

When I got a little older, I built raw fantasy out of my kinks to soothe myself to sleep, with intricate gearwork constructions of bondage, domination, and service.

Once I had a sexual partner, I would assemble bits and pieces of fantasies out of things we'd done and extrapolations thereof.

Often, these would be kinked, playing with ideas, coming up with scenarios and notions.

... now, when I am trying to get to sleep, my mind is full of baby smiles. And holding her close, cradling her in my arms, and actually having the strength to not have to let go, back away, get a little space, and breathe so that I do not lose my mind. Actually having the infinite patience that is back behind the archetype, being able to pour all the love into her that she can hold.

I honestly find it more than a bit confusing.

And I would miss the sex dreams, if I had space left in my mind to have them.

Grumble

2009-12-06T14:45:00.001-05:00

I've turned on the feature that adds a captcha thing to the blog because I'm starting to get stupid quantities of comment spam. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Listening

2009-12-01T01:33:00.003-05:00

And here is my response to The Adult Privilege Checklist, now.

When my mother was up visiting, she had a lot of commentary, as she will do, and one of the things she said was something scornful about Inappropriate Parent-Child Relationships, specifically that my father wanted to "give me a vote" in how family things were conducted.

I have no idea if he did this. I have no idea if she is correct that this fell into the weird dynamic he had with his mother. I have no memory of any such thing, but I don't believe I necessarily would have.

What I remember, though, is that I always felt that my father took my opinions seriously, even when he disagreed or thought that I was uninformed or not able to think things through. And I know that she thought that this was inappropriate, was "treating me like an adult", as opposed to treating me like, as I thought at the time, a person.

It frustrated me no end as a child to not be treated as a person. To know that my input was dismissable solely because of my age. I carried that resentment into my teen years, and it got sharper and more bitter when I saw adults doing things that I had never been idiot enough to do and still figuring that they knew better than me.

(I came to some sort of political consciousness during the Reagan Administration. One afternoon I drew Federal budget pie charts with made-up numbers, trying to figure out where I thought the money could go, because I was sure that I could make the budget work right. I never knew where to find the figures; if I had had the internet back then, I would probably have gone looking so I could make it work. This was naive - but it also came with this intense need to be taken seriously in my contributions, and a need to think deeply about those things that entered my awareness. Also, I was a weird, weird kid.)

I've settled into being a sort of attachment-parenty mum, and I think that's settled into the whole 'listening' thing that was what I wanted as a child. It's hard, when Little Foot wants to be held all the time, or when she's fussy and I can't figure out what's wrong, or whatever else, but I can't bear for her to feel unheard. I recognise that she didn't ask to be here, or to have a wet diaper, or to be maybe-probably-teething, or any of the other indignities of infancy, and that she has definite opinions about the world. (One of the latest appears to be "Cats are fascinating!")

And we talk a lot of theory about what's best for Little Foot. She's four months old and we talk about schooling already, and I wonder if I could bear homeschooling/unschooling/whatever her without going mad from the sheer pressure of parenthood (and look at my spiritual teacher/mentor, who likewise was not sure she could do this, but took up homeschooling her special-needs child because the school system could not serve him well). There's a maternity-and-childhood consignment store, and the gelfling (my husbands' wife) has commented we can bring kids there and say, "You get to pick one piece of clothing" or whatever, and everything is under ten bucks, and that addresses parts of the whole nonconsensuality of clothing thing. I plot out how best to raise her without my twitchinesses around food, whether it's possible to raise a child more socially ept than I am granted that I don't have skills to convey to her, and similar. I think about how to feed her, how to nurture her, how to make sure she's aware of her own self-possession. I remember the story of the little girl who snapped "SAFEWORD!" when people wouldn't stop tickling her, and think about how to teach that.

I cuddle her when she cries, which is not often, as we try to be attentive to her needs and she spends much time curled up with one parent or another. My lion currently has her downstairs bouncing on the exercise ball because she wouldn't go down to sleep and I took her last night; earlier I heard her laughing and burbling as my liege read his flash cards for school out loud to her (and apparently she was grabbing them out of his hands and putting them down in the 'done' pile, having figured out that the cards go from the pile on the left to the pile on the right in the game that Da was playing). As she grows older, she will grow broader opinions, she will think about politics and the world, she will be frustrated by, among other things, department stores and counters that are too tall to see over and shopkeepers who look past her when she has a question (to remember particularly persistent things from my own childhood).

There's a lot I can't plan for, because I don't know what she will have to say once she gets words to say it in. (Or signs. I've been doing intermittent bits of babysigns at her, though she's still too young to get it, just so there's context for her to get it from when she hits the right cognitive stage.) And I have to accept that, and remember that my first job as mama is to listen, not to force her into the space that is convenient for me to allocate.

She tells me what she needs, when I pay attention. The trick will be not breaking that.

Non-Ranty Mamablogging

2009-11-29T18:49:00.011-05:00

It's hard for me to figure out how to write about this whole motherhood gig, because I'm pretty much convinced that the stuff I can't turn into some kind of political rant or interesting bit of introspection about the nature of my personal reality will be boring to the entire rest of the universe so why write it? Which tends to bias me towards only writing about stressors, because stressors are for blogging.

I don't think that's entirely well-balanced, so I want to fix it.

Here's Little Foot, vigorously waving a toy lion made for her by Vieva, who appears occasionally in the comments here. (Little Foot's a Leo. This was pretty much the logic under which the animal was chosen.)

She really loves her lion. It is one of her two favorite current toys (the other being a small fish with a jinglebell in it gotten off Etsy). If she's lying on on the floor and presented with the lion, her face will light up, she will grab it by two limbs, and then (usually) roll onto her side as if she's attempting to bodyslam it and gurgle happily. Up until she flings it up over her shoulder and then fusses because oh noes the lion it has ceased to exist.

The rest of the time she manages to drop the lion on her face and then flips out because it's eating my face it's eating my face get it off get it off get it off!

She also grabs the corners of blankets and often winds up pulling them over her face, which leads to what I call an Object Permanence Crisis: "The cosmos has ceased to be, for I cannot see it! Alert! Alert!" I am perhaps not as sympathetic to this as I ought to be, I merely free her from the predations of the reality-annihilating spit rag.

I am reasonably confident that we have done horrible things to her sleep cycles, as they have settled in at this point to semi-conform to mine, and I keep really weird hours. She does, however, willingly sleep something like five hours at a go almost every night, which is pretty good for not quite four months old. She's a little fussy lately, we think because she's contemplating the possibility of teething part time when she remembers to, but not terribly so, and she rarely cries all that much - though the last few days she's frequently woken up from a sound sleep going from zero to howling, and I suspect babynightmares.

Much like the family has one night a week for dinner prep obligations, we've divided things up so one of each weeknight one of the parents is on primary baby duty, which means they handle diapers and so on as much as is possible. This is a great system, and I highly recommend that anyone thinking of having a baby accumulate as many allomothers as they can handle, because the level of sanity this enables is amazing.

Today, the other half of the family returned from Thanksgiving away from home, due to complexities of compromise and family obligation; Little Foot went down for a nap after nursing at about 11:30, giving me two hours in which I could put together a perfect little family dinner to welcome them home with. This worked out brilliantly, and she didn't wake up until they got back, which meant other people got to deal with the next diaper.

I'll not deny that doing the full-time daytime parent thing is very hard for me. I'm a pretty extreme introvert, and an infant is, of course, demanding and in my personal space a huge chunk of the time. The help I can get from the rest of the family is critical to my ongoing stability and competence as a mum.

But I'm becoming increasingly convinced that post-partum depression rates have a lot to do with support structures. I'm aware that my long-term history with clinical depression makes me really high risk, and there have been times that I've felt the stresses pushing on the edges of toppling over into a depressive state. But I haven't been there yet. (I suspect, if it happens, it'll be when the other half of the family moves back into their house after they finish their renovations, because having the people around both for company and babyassistance is a big deal.) And part of not having been there is being able to say "Hey, could someone get me out from under the baby for a bit?" before I hit some kind of internal meltdown crisis point. It's leaving me feeling increasingly militant about the need for real social support structures for mothers, and that if the sort of feminism I'd been exposed to had been, say, the stuff from Mothers for Women's Lib and blogs I've found from there I might have a much less bitter relationship with the word "feminist" these days, as opposed to the reflexive comparisons between being a stay-at-home parent and the 1950s with their subtextual suggestion that there's a necessary equivalence. (I saw an instance of this yesterday. But this is supposed to be a non-ranty post, not another "Oh look, I get to be a brainwashed pawn of the patriarchy, Donna Reed style!" post.)

Anyway, out of the politicalised bits. I love watching Little Foot work on figuring out the world. We got her a bouncy seat to set her down in at times, and then we got a toybar for it. At first, she flailed her hands vaguely and was stunned when things moved. And then, slowly, over time, she moved to deliberate manipulations: that bead will slide from side to side, that flower spins. (A bit after that, she got bored with it, so I took it off the seat for a while and now she's willing to play with it again.) The process of cognitive development is amazing.

For example - this was something my liege noticed - I have one of those hawk silhouette decal things intended to keep birds from flying into windows stuck to my bathroom mirror, because I'm a weirdo. For a while, when we brought Sad Baby in there to dampen a wipe to change her diaper, she would stare at the decal and Fall Silent, because of the primitive mammal reflex that goes SHIT DEATH FROM ABOVE at raptor silhouettes. Now she looks at the baby in the mirror (or the parent in the mirror) instead.

When she sees me for the first time in a while - and some values of 'a while' are 'five minutes' - her face lights up with joy and she kicks enthusiastically two or three times with the sheer exuberance of it all. And I wonder, sometimes, if I have ever before had in my life someone so unreservedly happy to see me. There are times it makes me think of the stereotypical imaginary teenaged girl who has a baby 'so someone will love her unconditionally', and, weirdly, being a mother has given me more sympathy for that half-myth than I ever thought possible, even while it gives me an ironclad, hardcore, "Oh no no no no, hon, you don't have any idea what you're getting into."

I look at the world and I try to find ways to protect my child from parts of it, to introduce it to her so she can navigate it without taking grievous harm, to show her how to be strong and secure. I know that nobody escapes childhood unscathed, but I pray every day that she escapes it unmaimed.

More politically flavored post later, riffing some on these links assembled by Elf of Dreamwidth. I've been reading more and more of what gets called "mommyblogs" lately, for obvious reasons. (Psst, Mamacrow, you have a parenting blog somewhere, right?)

I leave you on this note:

The Cult of Mommon

2009-11-15T17:53:00.003-05:00

Trinity posted a link to this article thing. And, man.

But let's talk about the greatest gift a woman can receive: being a mommy.

This pisses me the fuck off even more now that I have a Little Foot to look after. I mean, the gender-essentialist 'women are all about the baybeez' thing has always annoyed me, especially since I know plenty of women who aren't so much and a few men who are, and the amount of 'No, really, you should have kids (unless you're some kind of my-standard-of-defective, in which case you should never come within a half mile of one)' bullshit in this culture makes me crazy.

I'm not touching the rest of this stupid article, just that one sentence.

No, "being a mommy" is not a fucking gift. The magic stork did not drop by my place with a giftwrapped angelbaby who never requires anything inconvenient, okay?

You know where my baby came from? My innards. And I built her over forty-one weeks of nausea, increasing mobility impairment, heartburn, significant gender dysphoria, emotional fragility, and, admittedly, reprieve from my depression. Her arrival was two days of fucking back labor, frustration, blood loss, and twelve goddamn stitches done despite the fact that apparently my body will only consider believing in lidocaine for brief moments.

Gifts do not require twelve stitches upon receipt, people.

And that's not touching on people who had C-sections, who went through long-term adoption processes, who otherwise, y'know, worked and sacrificed and bled and paid for their shot at 'being a mommy'. Or a daddy. Or. That's not touching on people who have been locked out of parenthood because the adoption agency won't place with a gay parent. That's not touching on a whole lot of things.

Being a mommy is not something that was bestowed upon me like the halo on a medieval madonna painting, unlike what this sentence would like you to believe. This sentence, like all of the mommy-worship culture, wants to paint a beatific portrait of motherhood, the angel of the household proven with the babe-in-arms.

Being a parent is something that one does. And it's something that one has to do every single day, a constant choice, a deliberate act.

Deliberate consciously chosen perpetual commitments: also not gifts.

What makes me a mother is not mystical processes bestowed upon me by a benevolent universe because I have a worthy uterus. It is not some external thing that fluttered down and spread its wings over my family.

What makes me a mother is sitting here typing this blog post with Little Foot cradled in one elbow because she needs to nurse. What makes me a mother is bouncing her when she has bellyache, changing her diapers, giving her a bath. What makes me a mother is doing this even when I feel like crud because of my current state of illness. And, y'know, these same things - barring the breastfeeding - are the things that make the other members of my family parents.

I have always had a vocation towards motherhood, and always been aware of what that would require of me. I spent ages fearful about this, worried that my depression would mean that I was doomed to be a failure as a mother, someone who would not be able to properly care for my child. And frankly I resent the idea that the years of work and therapy and personal development I spent preparing, the nine months of gestation, and the weeks of recovery and childcare are a gift as opposed to a goddamn accomplishment.

And there is a trap in this "gift" language - if a mother has a bad day, needs someone else to look after the kid because ohmygodsI'mgoinginsaneIwillneverhavepersonalspaceagain or thescreamingthescreaming or ifIdon'tgettwohoursofuninterruptedsleepnowsohelpmeIwillexplode or whatever else - well, that's being an ungrateful bitch. Because motherhood is a "gift", you know, this magic thing bestowed upon the worthy and enuterused, and that means that one is obligated to bow one's head and cradle the baby and look holy so that the motherworship can commence, because how can we properly revere someone who has mud and blood in the sacred motherhood and who acknowledges that there are times that it is fucking hard to do and my gods, I'm pulling my hair out here need some time away, etc.?

The "gift" of motherhood is a trap, simultaneously erasing investment and effort and commitment and choice and dedication and making it unconscionable to express displeasure, talk about issues, have postpartum depression, express a realistic picture of what it is to have a baby. It erases the experience in order to replace it with something clean and pristine that can be adored without contemplation of consequences or actual respect for the real efforts of mothers.

I am not your fucking madonna-and-child icon, proving my worth for worship by placid acceptance of this bounty.

Motherhood is not a fucking present.

A baby is not lagniappe.

Little Foot is tucked up against my breast, one arm wrapped around it with her cheek pillowed on the nipple. When I look at her, she smiles in her sleep; if she were awake, she would meet my eyes and beam with a toothless grin, pure delight at being with me.

That is a gift.

His Mind is Engaged in the Rapt Contemplation

2009-11-08T20:31:00.002-05:00

Lissy at Thinking About My Kink wrote a post linking to a Feministe post about the changing of names, and now that Feministe is back up from whatever it was doing before, I'm reading the comments over there.

And the person in there who annoyed Lissy is almost making me annoyed enough to post a comment on Feministe explicitly denying that my nonexistent feminism was 'why' I didn't change my name when I was legally married. (That feminism made this possible for me to do readily is a given historical fact; it doesn't have so much to do with my decisions on the matter.) It's not about your goddamn movement, okay? (And I'm even setting aside here the rant in which I note my opinion that talking about whether something is a "feminist choice" is pernicious, not least because it always degenerates into the sort of "you're calling me a bad person", "no I'm not I'm just saying your choices are bad" froth that's going down over there.)

My lion and I talked briefly about whether or not I was gonna change my name. He was profoundly touched that I had even, for a moment, considered it, as he had assumed that I wouldn't. And that contemplation made clear to me that my surname was the only part of my legal name that I had any sense of strong identification with - annoying though it is to have because nobody can spell it and nobody can pronounce it, it is my goddamn name. If I were going to "change my name" it would be mucking about with the forename portions, and certainly at that time I had no idea what I would change my first name to if I changed it.

(I do know how I would legally change my name if I did so at this point. I have not done so, not because I'm 'waiting to get married' or any of the other things that have been raised in that thread, but because I am undecided about the hassle, kind of tickled in a pseudo-anarchist way by the idea that the government knows me by a name that isn't 'mine', and, fundamentally, haven't gotten up my arse to wrestle with the paperwork. It's apparently not that hard to do around here - a friend of mine changed her name, both fore and aft, a few years ago - I just haven't gotten my shit together. And that's for a forename change where I know what I'd change it to. I make notes on legal paperwork sometimes with an aka in case I ever do make a legal change?)

So, yeah. I have this surname thing. It's attached to an ethnic heritage; it is in fact attached to the ethnic heritage that is the smallest part of my genetic makeup, but a greater point of personal identification than many, and from a beautiful part of the world with a landscape that feels right to me. (Perhaps not as right as my more recently ancestral stones and streams of New England, which is more recent bloodline, but still comfortably correct.) It is also attached to the side of my family I have more cultural kinship with. In some ways, all the hassle that came of having the surname made me more attached to it, as opposed to the rather generic-for-my-generation forename and distinguished-but-only-used-attached-to-the-forename middle name I got.

Further, though I was not involved with my liege when my lion and I got married, it was pretty well established that my ideal situation would involve me having two marital relationships. In a multi-spousal poly situation, the whole name-change-upon-marriage thing turns into a level of relational calculus that is frankly beyond me. My liege comments that this is what clan names are for, but unfortunately we don't have any way of establishing a legal-socially meaningful tribe. It's just easier this way, even if it means that the four adults have four different surnames.

(Oh gods. Someone's using 'the personal is political' to mean 'your private choices are reflections on my movement's effectiveness and thus mine to harsh on you for' again. The same someone who irked me enough to write this post. Gods be. What is it they say, never read the comments? And, I mean, yes, the social convention of name-changing irks me, though it doesn't piss me off like getting letters addressed to Mrs. Lion Hislastname, like I don't even have a fucking forename of my own.)

I also find it useful to be able to respond truthfully to telemarketers asking for Mrs. Hislastname that there is nobody here by that name, but hey.

So we get into the iterative decisions about names. Like kids.

Honestly, my expectation was that my first kid would have his surname, next one mine, to do equal time for everyone. But in the larger family discussions, we talked about it, and there was general argument that it was probably for the best to have siblings with the same surname to make social things easier. And that for children I bear, that surname would be mine - because I feel strongly about my family name and want it to persist, because my brother does not intend to have children, and because it cuts off the implied answer to "But which one is her real father" at the fucking knees and requires that people who want to be that unconscionably rude actually verbalise rather than assume they know the answer based on differing surnames.

(When I announced Little Foot's name to my relatives, my father asked me if she had my surname because of his notion that female children should take their mother's name and male children their father's. By the way.)

And maybe that choice "makes it easier for others" to choose to keep their name, or change it, or whatever else. But the thing is, I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about that. There's just, y'know, time better spent. And for matters like surnaming, that time's probably best spent trying to get the legal stuff changed to what it apparently is in Quebec, where a name change requires getting a name change, not getting married. Rather than talking about how Those Women are doing it wrong - not even about the apparent half the population who thinks that women changing their name should be legally mandated, nope, Those Women.

Always doing it wrong, Those Women. Pretty sure I did it wrong by not Striking A Blow For Feminism there. (Alternately, that feminist motives will be projected upon me by people who are inclined to do so, whether for or against. Which is further evidence that "feminist choice" is nonsense phrasing.) Oh well then.

Unwritten Letters

2009-10-20T23:29:00.000-05:00

Dear ____________,

You don't know me. We met in passing at your son's first wedding; you asked something about the logistics while I was setting up the centrepieces on the reception tables, I answered you, and when I was done with my task I fled to the bride's room to hide from you. I'm sure you figured out that I was his lover when they insisted on taking photographs that included me (as well as my husband) over your objections. I'm sure that it was not lost on you that we helped clean up the place as if we were part of the basic logistics, not merely guests, and were the ones who said the last goodbyes as all the wedding guests drifted away.

There was a time you liked the idea of me, wanted to meet me - back when you thought of me as a human being. A fellow potter, perhaps, or someone who could provide useful advice. Someone who was important to your son, yes, and I suppose that was a part of why you said you were looking forward to the opportunity.

I have this thing, though, that I won't meet people under false pretences if I can possibly avoid it. I most particularly will not step under their roof with the expectation that I will be lying to them, and pretending to be anything other than his partner would be a deception. I have a particular sense of hallpeace that I will not be so easily brought to violate; it would be an insult and a dishonor to my host were I to do so.

I know that I stopped being a person to you as soon as you knew. I was no longer someone with a set of shared interests, someone who was a major presence in your son's life; I was a symbol of so many things gone wrong, and that symbol overwhelmed any human fellowship we might have had.

I know and understand that you were hurt badly and betrayed by a partner who was unfaithful to you. I wish I could tell you that I will not betray your son and be heard, or that his devotion to me was not a betrayal of his legal spouse. I do not know how to mend this at all, or even if it is mendable; it is certainly not anything I can touch, because you have made me your enemy whether I will it or not.

There is nobody in the world beyond my immediate family whose recognition matters more to me than yours; nobody I want more to acknowledge me as his wife. I think that you are one of the people who has mattered to him most in the world, which means your regard matters to me. It might be better for me if I could dismiss it as a matter of insignificance, but that is not within my power. I am vulnerable to you; I cannot say I like it, but I acknowledge it and accept it. My dedication to your son means that you have that gut shot available to you, and that is okay.

When he and I got married, we had long, long talks about who to invite. We brought in our community as witnesses, because marriage is a thing about community. I invited my father and my brother. He wound up inviting no relatives, because he could not expect you to understand. I know how much it meant to me to have my father there, especially recognising that he is not perfectly comfortable with the structure of my family. I wish we could have opened our ceremony to include you.

I wish I could spare him the pain of all this. Or at least that I could set my own pain and anxiousness aside and just hold him rather than be plagued with tearing weakness that means that he must comfort me instead of the other way around. Every time you and he talk, I see his pain and frustration, not just at your refusal to see me or your refusal to see him, but at losing you. I wish things were different, that he did not feel forced into a choice between his mother and his wife, that ... I just wish things were different.

I wish I could talk to you and put it right, never mind that what is wrong is in a place I could not touch if I tried. There is a part of me that fervently believes that if you could see us, spend a little time with us, get to know us and our family, that you might come to forgive us for not being the white picket fence family you wanted your son to have. I know this is a fantasy, a little dream world that I spin to make it seem like this could possibly be under my control and thus something I could fix, something that could fall into a realm I could affect. Something that I could change, make better. Something that I could heal.

I know that I cannot, and it may never be better, never be different. Which is why, while I may write you letters in my mind, I cannot send them.

Angles of Approach

2009-10-14T13:53:00.002-05:00

Shapely Prose recently hosted a discussion of how to approach women in public, the comments on which had me thinking about a lot of things.

The comment that particularly got me was this one, which included the question: "But, if this is the case, then why don’t more women approach men?"

I wish I knew what good that was supposed to do.

Now, I don't get hassled on the subway or whatever terribly often these days. I don't know if it's the area I live in or that of the people in the vicinity I have sufficient armouring to make me not look like a good mark (between the wedding rings, the leather jacket, the frequent headphones and/or book, and the tendency to pull my hat down over my eyes and nap). But I cannot for the life of me see how more women approaching men will change what hassles I do get.

I mean, I've been over 50% of the initiation effort for every relationship I've been in other than the one that ended in attempted rape. (And that does not make me any the more comfortable with random approaches. It, in fact, makes me more aggressive about pursuing actual interests because I don't want them approaching me lest I go all woobly-minded.)

If I were doing this in the hope of fixing street harassment it would be, you know, a total, dismal failure. Because not only do nitwits on the street not know whether or not I'd tell them if I was interested in them, they do not care. They are expressing less articulate versions of this guy's argument (when they're not just trying to get a response out of a woman):

I think a lot of men will think along this line – “what’s the point of her thinking I’m a trustworthy person if we don’t have that conversation and there’s still at least the possibility of Penis tourism and, possibly, 100 pretty babies.”

If you’re interested in talking to her, but you don’t talk to her because of her assumed boundaries, and you don’t risk to be rejected, you may feel good about yourself, being the trustworthy person that you are, but you don’t get anything else for it.

[...]

And that’s where the problem is. In a very real way, I think, for him, the more rational approach would be to politely say hello and see if he’s interested, always being alert about her reactions, and withdrawing if she shows any kind of disinterest. That way, while having been interrupted, she may even get the impression that the guy was able to understand her saying no – to him. A no that was not assumed, but real.

The comments were closed at Shapely Prose before I could reply to this, and it's a hard time to formulate it. But I'm left with ... what a modern-capitalism notion of transactional analysis. Immediate profit potential over long-term gain.

I mean, there's this thousand-comment long thread about how this sort of thing means that women out in public are more likely to be closed down and unwilling to engage with people, which, as a long-term system, doesn't do well for what this guy claims to be wanting to get. But the miniscule chance of that one-in-a-lot shot at getting laid means continuing to degrade the environment such that women feel the need to be on guard in public, thereby keeping those odds nice and low.

Cannot think past end of penis, apparently.

I commented recently on not liking being approached in part because the relationship started that way ended in attempted rape? Got this response, quoted verbatim:

"It's not fair to deprive men of the ability to approach you because one raped you."

Kinda oozes sex appeal, doesn't it? Look at what I'm missing!

The Invisible Woman

2009-10-01T15:02:00.002-05:00

A few weeks back, I think it was, now, there were a number of people blogging about invisible disabilities and the sorts of effects they have. And I considered rattling around and doing the questionnaire, a bit, but decided against it for a variety of reasons.

I did want to highlight Erynn Laurie's post about things people say, though.

One of the things about these ... things (okay, must stop being word-clever or I'll sound like gibberish to myself) is the way so many of them wind up wedging themselves into the mind. Invisible disability can become even invisible to the person who has it.

And there's an entire fucking industry of cultural crap designed to keep it that way.

Have a look at this article, which a friend linked recently.

Do you see what I see?

In case you missed it, what I see is this paragraph:

In the past, researchers have raised allegations of ghostwriting in articles about quality-of-life drugs like antidepressants, painkillers and diet pills. But the situation has become more serious this year after a few editors said they had discovered ghostwriting in manuscripts about life-and-death products like cancer and hematology drugs.

Yeah, those antidepressants and painkillers. Not life-and-death at all. It's not like people commit suicide for their lack or anything like that. It's not like they can make a difference between soul-sucking misery and a life worth living, or even the possibility to live it in anything resembling a half-functional way.

And you know why people can write paragraphs like that?

Because people who need antidepressants or painkillers are socially constructed as weak. Our disabilities are personal failures, quirks of neurology that any proper person would have been able to handle already, really, honestly, would you shut up and stop whining?

I know someone who begins every comment on their struggle to get their invisible illnesses treated with a comment about how they're such a whiner and it's all in their head and they need to pull up those bootstraps and stop being so pathetic - and I don't know how much of that is serious belief and how much is voicing those gremlins so they can function. And for all that I wish that that little voice would stop plaguing that person so loudly, I ...

... can't say that I don't have it too.

I mean, I can claim that I'm too disabled to be able to stably hold down an office job. But I know I did it for a while, right? Enough to pay the rent, even though I slowly whittled myself down into someone who couldn't engage with anything she actually valued because every last bit of me was spent on keeping that job and doing it reasonably well. That's not an inability to function. "You know, deep down, you're just a lazy ass, not someone who genuinely can't handle that."

Right?

Half of what I do sometimes is justifying. It's okay that I don't chase Corporate America, because I have written so many words today. It's okay that I don't put on my pink-collar drag and go answer phones until I want to scream because I took some time to teach someone or help them out of a bad spot. Lately, it's okay that I don't do that because it's not like I could bring in enough income to pay for childcare anyway, right?

Right?

Because it's invisible, and not even the sort of invisible that other people would believe is real if they knew. I don't have a heart condition like my brother; that's a real disability. I'm just ... touched in the head. A little blue. And I should get over the stuff that I haven't gotten over, I'm such a useless whiny bitch sometimes.

Gah.

Monster of Mothers

2009-09-23T14:09:00.004-05:00

I am the monster under the bed.

(Apparently under the big bed, the one that holds 'all of you'.)

I am off the edge of your map, and I am prowling. You make noise and flash lights as if I might be driven into the imaginary by your denial, you pretend I am not there, and by that pretending you cast my shadow large and misshapen, huge and slavering and consuming things you thought you knew.

I come in the night and seduce away what you thought was yours, what would live by the rules of civilised climes, the way you thought things should be. I am nothing but a shadow, not a creature of substance; what you know of me matters not against what I mean. Perhaps I am the shadow of a real evil, nothing but the hound of a cult trailing along in the footsteps of other unreality. Perhaps I am the demoness herself, spiked and sorcerous.

But - I tell you this - never forget that in the shadow that you made there is a child.

Because there is where you will meet the real beast.

Do not forget my daughter, treat her as an irrelevance, dismiss her. Do not attempt to use her as a leverage point to peel away one or another of her parents. Do not attempt to wail and claw at the horror of a child cradled in such darkness as mine, because I will want to introduce you to darkness then, I will want to and I will hold back because her innocence will not be stained with blood so unworthy.

I will hold back a while. I will wait you out, I may try to laugh because the fairy tales are so comically twisted and unreal. I will let you tell your stories if they help you sleep at night. I will swallow up my own pain at being driven away and warped into shadows, my reality ignored because you must have your stories and hold them up over what is real. I will bleed for you, you who live in the light and order of civilised lands and must have tidiness and hold the borders of your world strong, and believe me, I bleed every moment my humanity is less important to you than your fictions and your "It's just wrong, I can't tell you why." I will let you fucking flay me alive with your weapons of annihilation, without denying that that is what you are doing to me.

I will do this for you.

So long as you leave my child alone, cradled within the arms of her family.

I am the monster of mothers, and you who live in Heorot should leave us be.

Where Everybody Knows Your Alias

2009-09-17T18:39:00.004-05:00

Dianne Sylvan wrote recently at her Dancing Down the Moon about feeling alienated, isolated, or separated from the overall pagan community, and I sort of want to write about that (to the best of my current somewhat frazzled ability).

I feel, more often than not, very complicated about 'pagan community'. In ways that often remind me of my nasty breakup with science fiction fandom, more than anything else: the sense of "This is a space built for people like you, so long as 'people like you' is appropriately edited for content", the sense of "Let's bond over all this stuff we have in common (without noticing when we don't actually have any of this stuff in common)."

Like the person who commented recently that sexual domination has no place in paganism, because that shit is evil, yo. (And the people who followed up on that with, more or less, 'How can you be so nasty to people who are into BDSM? It's not like it's rape fantasies!' didn't exactly help with that, even though that's not one of my things.) Or, more benignly, all of the people talking about the autumn equinox, what are you doing, tell me about your plans, introduce me to this festival, and it's not my fucking festival and even though I accept the genero-pagan wheelyear as really damn popular and that people aren't asking me specifically what I'm doing for Someone Else's Bloody Holiday, I am, for one reason or another, just tired and touchy about it. Or a recent "How can we update the triple goddess concept to suit more people?" Or whatever.

So when I look at public-sphere paganism I see, well, I see:

Mother goddess and Her horned heterocentric consort, in a circle, on the sabbats or by moonphases, spellcasting, Greek-derived ceremonial magic elements, eco-religion as dogma, sexuality is sacred but not any of that pain blood domination stuff, an it harm none, not a Satanist you know, everyone is a priest, and so on. Let us meditate on nothing whatever substantial and then do a spiral dance.

None of this connects to me, seeing as I'm a full-up polytheist who hasn't gotten the work done to sort out her goddamn liturgical calendar aside from the 'hey, someone's got a holiday, I can handle an excuse for a party' level, not much for the magical foo as commonly done and overall over my attempt to categorise everything by classical element, too genderqueer and kinky for a nice sex ritual, not overly hung up on being nice, possibly technically a Satanist in some interestingly askew ways, cranky about being shoved into a priestly role inappropriately by idiots, and so on.

Which means that, in the overwhelming majority of public pagan spaces, I feel like an idiot.

Feeling like an idiot is not conducive to meaningful religious experience.

I'm entirely capable of going to Someone Else's Religious Ritual and having a meaningful experience, mind. I did it all through my going-to-church childhood; I have decent odds of pulling it off when I attend PantheaCon; in a lot of ways, my own religious practice group is built around making meaningful Someone Else's Religious Ritual for all parties present, not pushing anyone notably further out of their comfort zone than anyone else. But this sense of specifically-for-someone-else-that-they-assume-is-me feeling is a bloody mess. PCon is deliberately a kind of religious smorgasboard anyway, and I approach it as such.

I'm left with this sense of "What the hell do I do here?", mostly, in it all. Because the public stuff is so unsatisfying - and it was unsatisfying even before I settled into my current religious orientations. But there's no space for people like me to do our thing (even if people-like-me, by which I mean me, as I'm the only one doing my particular thing really, had our shit together to be able to pull off a public thang if we wanted to), because the cast-your-circle, invite-your-pair-of-sex-differentiated-deities, do-your-spell, be-happy-and-have-cake stuff is so fucking normative that one can get screamed at for a, "Sorry, I can't help you, it's not my holiday" let alone actually showing some reality.

So people like me stop showing up.

And apparently people like Dianne Sylvan, who's actually published books about Wicca and thus presumably had some greater personal stake in Wicca-like religion than I do, stop showing up too.

Who the hell shows up anymore?

It's a real problem.

On Demand

2009-09-15T01:04:00.002-05:00

This is going to be damned hard to write, okay, so I'm going to start out asking you to bear with me here. I've been trying to write it on and off for a couple of weeks, and have made not so much with the headway, so ... yeah. (Some of the wanting to write is wanting to try to untangle what's in my head so maybe it can get better, too, which makes the frustrated inability to articulate even more aggravating.)

I think I'm gonna try being blunt rather than getting the nuance right to start out with, because hitting the precise spot is more energy than I've got. Again, bear with me, I'm navigating the shoals here.

Motherhood has completely fucked up my d/s.

Not in the way one might expect from the cultural pressure stuff, the whole "Now that I am a Real Adult, I must put aside these Foolish Things Of My Youth" bullshit.

Here's the thing.

Okay, here are the multiple things.

The first one is a general new-parent thing, I think. It's amazing how much of my life just drops into Little Foot's adorable orbit. Even aside from the time I invest in caring for her, holding her is one of these simple joys that persists. (And I'm constantly torn between wanting to hold her when I'm good and happy with it and knowing that I'm fully capable of burning myself out emotionally on overcontact, and trying to balance the "I must hold my kid" with the "If I don't have someone else hold her right now I'm going to go totally fucking batshit.") I have amazing levels of help - not just that Little Foot has a four-parent family, but also miscellaneous parents and friends coming by - my dad's been here most recently and taking a lot of Sitting Down Under The Baby duty, for example. I know I would not be functioning terribly well without that help.

And at the same time, I feel horrifyingly alone. Because all this energy goes to helping-me-with-the-baby, not helping-me, and ... I've been articulating to the husbands a bit that I have a snuggle shortage. It's helping a little, to sit with my lion and lean on him for a while, or my liege coming up and just ... talking with me for a bit before he heads off to class. That's getting me back trending at least not away from sane. But there's this increasing level of awful neediness in me, and I don't know what to do about it, and I have to balance it with the fact that Little Foot is much more fragile than I am and less capable of taking care of her own needs, to understate a smidge.

And there's another thing. It doesn't matter how hard I kink for service stuff, I am 24/7 on call for a master who is nothing but demanding and has essential claims on use of portions of my body. This is exhausting. And it doesn't leave me much flexibility for more negotiated service, either; it's hard not to meet a request with snappishness, not because I resent the request, but because, say, an afternoon of Grunty McFusspot and her pants-related events or her habit of shaking my nipple like a terrier who's finally gotten a grip on a long-pursued rat does not leave me feeling generous and full of warm, giving spirit. Which is not a get-out-of-commitments free situation by any means, but it does add a layer of stress to the whole experience.

So while I'm needing care and support - and would truly love to have some of the protective restorative energy that some of the d/s we do affords me - I wind up feeling like I have nothing to offer right now. Enthusiastic service is a bit rough. I can fetch tea, so long as I'm not Sitting Down Under The Baby, and that's about what I'm up for. And I have a hard time asking for things, even as I recognise that I have standing orders to do so, especially when I don't feel I have anything to balance the scales with.

It of course does not help that I had twelve stitches put in my chassis, and while that appears to have healed up, I have a ridge of scar tissue running up one side of certain rather sensitive bits of anatomy (a direction I rather prefer than down the perineum proper, but nonetheless it has its inconveniences) and my lochia is only now appearing to resolve itself. Sexual frustration has surfaced occasionally, and often gone in really awfully messy dissociative direction, because - again - for all that I enjoy sexual service, being cut off from any form of the possibility of physical reciprocation meant that it was intensely onesided and mostly underscored the sense of body-failure without offering satisfaction to me. Touch was treacherous, unsafe, with its risks of going places that ached too much to bear. Normal sexual reactions in a partner that I would ordinarily enjoy felt like being cornered, pressured, trapped; my incapacity exposed and still demanded upon. This has not been pleasant.

And, on top of it all, I'm intensely emotionally vulnerable, not in ways that promote intimacy; rather, they promote a sort of isolating self-protection. My liege is busy with a major renovation project, with being in school, and with helping take care of Little Foot; my ability to read his current emotional state is heavily dependent on a lot of factors, primary among them how well my ability to connect to people is going (not well, of late) and how relaxed he is (not very, of late). Which means I go all paranoid about questions like whether my inability to do little service things without emotional drama or the fact that Little Foot needs care or whatever else are upsetting him, and am unable to judge reactions sanely. And really, going around asking "Are you mad at me?" every time that particular anxiety demon pops up is a good way to make people mad at me ...

Okay. That's out of my head, more or less. All stuff I've said in bits, so it better not shock any relevant party. And I really should have gone to sleep when Little Foot did, alas, as I was up with her last night, but ... mrgh. Stuff in head. Gah.

Feeling a little crazy today.

Not Even The Mommy Trap

2009-09-10T12:12:00.001-05:00

An acquaintance linked to a post about 'rescuing' a woman from the workplace in order to have her fulfil her godly-appointed role as a housewife. Or something like that. Bonus fun woman-is-a-subset-of-her-man bullshit, the whole nine yards.

The acquaintance replied to this by saying, well, if you stay home - with or without kids - I don't agree with your choice. I won't hassle you about it, but I don't agree with it.

I'm not replying. Er. I'm not replying directly, I'm passive-aggressively going and fuming about this where said acquaintance probably won't ever know it got mentioned, because I am not fucking up to dealing with this.

Because my first reaction to this has nothing to do with the housewifery, has nothing to do with the fact that I have a month-old child who needs constant care and attention, who I think is better cared for by one of her parents than by other people who we would have to pay for it (and of course that counts as real work because it's caring for other people's children, right?), has nothing to do with all that angel of the household bullshit even in vague theory.

My first reaction to this is, "Well, it's a fucking good thing I don't need your consent for my disability management, now, isn't it?"

Haven't I fumed about this sort of thing before? Why, yes, I have.

And the fact that my health management means that I'm working from home and thus available to give Little Foot the care she needs (even though I know in some cases a professional might be able to do a better job, because a professional doesn't have my mental health disability to manage in the first place) is a bonus, a somewhat precarious bonus on a rough day when I need to hand her off so I don't fracture myself, but a bonus nonetheless.

But the being here? This is me trying to keep my mind more or less in one goddamn piece.

And you know, I feel I can't talk about this shit without including a tagline about how awful it is that some people think that women need to be dragged out of work because it's Inappropriate To Womanhood to be there, and isn't that monstrous? Because I have to make the appropriately pious kowtowing to the outrage in order to point out that something is fucking ablist or ask who the hell is going to take care of Little Foot then?

I ... just ...

... the fucking fuck.

(Pardon. Profanity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker.)

If I don't say anything I won't get Tone Argumented about it.

A couple of links, meanwhile:

How American Health Care Killed My Father - I'm not in agreement with all of it, but a lot of it is right up my alley, and some of the rest is stuff I hadn't thought of and might need to reevaluate on.

Lactate on your own time. Oh, for ...

The Whole Story

2009-08-19T20:21:00.002-05:00

I have been talking, with various people, about how to deal with the subject of rape, for the last day and a half or so. (And not talking, at times, because I'm not the sort of person who's really good at untangling exactly why some arguments sound like survivor-blaming and rape apologia because I find them too upsetting to disassemble coolly.)

And one of the things that came up for me and had me wickedly shaky last night is the way that no matter how many times, how many different ways, how carefully I tell my story, I cannot tell the whole story, not in one go.

I've written about the assault here not infrequently. And each post about it has a different piece of the story - like the issues around the social construction of consent and the failures of sex education to assist in rape prevention, the effects of women's sexuality being treated socially as a form of public property, my trauma around failure at the 'gatekeeper' social role, contributions from my repressed kinkiness, normalisation of rape and lack of support, the way uncertainty and the slow erosion of boundary defenses contributed, the induced vulnerability created by the social dichotomy between attractiveness and academics, trying to come to terms with shame and internalised self-hatred around the subject, comparison of superficially similar experiences, how I had to fight for the space in which I could actually lay the responsibility for the assault at the feet of the person who did it. In other places I've laid out the facts of the events, I've written about the major kink scene my liege and I did to try to do some mental reprogramming, I've written about other things. I've probably missed a few posts about it from here, too.

None of these are the whole story. The fact that there are so many renditions, so many ways of trying to talk about the experience, so many posts, that should probably be a tip-off as to the incompleteness, the giant fucking layer cake of the experience that can only be written about one pink-icinged stripe at a time.

I can't even think about it all at once, see all the layers. At least not yet; I wonder some if that's why I keep writing about it, trying to get all the angles clear so that I can grasp it as a whole.

There are so many stories in that one event.

There are all the stories about the social, societal, familial contexts that fed into what happened, that made the space in which it could happen possible, easy. And all the stories about the social, societal, familial contexts that shaped how I responded, where the damage ran, how I scarred, where, and how deeply. A few of those, I've written.

There are the stories about the events, the way things happened, and which stories those are depend on which events one wants to include.

There are the stories about the people, too.

And there are the secondary stories. Because, for example, one of the consequences of having a version of the story about him in my head - because I, unlike everyone I've told these stories to, almost knew him - is that it feeds my self-hatred and self-blame, because I can see a little bit through his eyes. And I know this, and this is why I don't often tell any of my version of his story - because it's very easy for me to slide into victim-blaming with it if I go into any depth, even though the victim is me. And even though I don't tell the story, I refer to it, I get frustrated with people who respond to my story as if he were a monster rather than an idiot kid, I gnaw at the incompleteness of things.

Someone wrote a post, talking about how there's a vision of what a rapist looks like, and it doesn't look like anyone we know, and that this isn't true.

And, for the first time I think, I wrote about who he was in response, not a name, not a referent, not treating him as an event, but the person I maybe almost knew a little. And part of that was to make that person's point a bit, to make it clear that this was ordinary, ordinary, ordinary, that my bog-standard assault narrative has a bog-standard person as the aggressor. And it's put me more in touch, mentally, with him as a person than I have been in a while, which leaves me shaky and uncertain.

He was a perfectly ordinary geeky, arty high school kid. A little on the tall side, with what gets called an athletic build; light brown hair, long enough to ruffle without actually being long and not that I ever ruffled it (that being a contact more intimate and affectionate than I was comfortable with), jeans-and-t-shirt-wearing type, like any other ordinary high school kid. I met him through one of my classmates, and he may never have known that I was technically not old enough for high school, let alone not a junior like that friend.

He did drama club at his high school, and I went to see him perform. He listened to Peter Gabriel. He lent me the Wild Cards books one at a time. He had a computer in his room at his parents' house, an old clunky thing with a green screen, and played Ultima on it. He quoted Monty Python, at length, on a frozen day outside the Smithsonian museums on the Mall, a day when it was windy enough to make the seagulls fly backwards. ("Albatross!") I remember nothing about what we talked about on the phone, and only one movie we went to (The Cutting Edge).

He was the sort of person that people I know would know, would spend time with, would never wonder about.

He was the first attractive, potentially compatible person who had ever shown interest in me; my experience of romance was all of the junior high variety, full of blatant abusiveness and harassment, and I was an awkward, nerdy kid unfamiliar with the vagaries of proper social interaction. He said I was beautiful, not that I really believed him; he said that he loved me, after a while. I had no idea how to deal with him, because in among all of this unexpected, unfamiliar, loneliness-curing kindness was the persistent ignoring of consent, pushing at boundaries whose precise location I did not, at that point, know, up until he hit the boundaries around sex, where I at least knew that I didn't want to go there.

When he let me escape after the assault, I fled to the bathroom to try to put my mind in order. When I came back out, he was fully clothed, sitting on the couch that he had tried to pin me to, and even in my pained dissociation I thought he had realised what he had nearly done, realised and was now ashamed. Maybe even wondering how he had read me wrong, maybe - and this would be good - wondering how long he had been misreading me, whether it went back to the beginning. There was sadness and silence there, and I did not ask what it was; he had never asked me what was in my head, and asking what was in his was too intimate even if I had not been shaking and shattered inside. He walked me back to the subway so I could go home.

It was probably the next weekend or the one after that he went to the second day of a Star Trek convention with me, which I left early, claiming headache, not saying that it was terrifying to be near him and I was bleeding inside. We never spoke again after that day.

I saw him, or someone who looked like him, in a bookstore a few years later. I had a panic attack and fled to the company of my mother at a cafe, sitting by the escalator he might have come down if he were leaving that way, and I watched the stairs moved in a panic.

When my lion and I went to see the Stargate movie in the theater a few years later, I was so triggered by the looks of James Spader that I could not really bear to watch any of it. I buried myself in other-things, and we laughed about the things we had done in movie theaters in the dark, without ever shedding light into that particular bit of darkness.

You Pays Your Money, You Takes Your Chance

2009-08-16T15:51:00.002-05:00

I hate health insurance.

See, here's the thing. The idea behind insurance, right? Normal insurance? "We pay in in case something awful happens to someone who paid in, and what we've got here will cover helping out the unfortunate." It's gambling, paying in in case of theft, of fire, of flood, of whatever, but we don't expect to have these things happen, precisely, we just know they might.

And that's why I hate health insurance.

Before you start, you lose the bet.

You're gonna get sick.

Putting in money in case you get sick? Is, straight up, lost money. Because there is no "Maybe I won't get sick" like "Maybe I won't get robbed" or "Maybe my house won't burn down". That's resources lost, pfft. You'll get sick, or injured, or whatever else. Eventually. Unless you're hit by a truck tomorrow and die instantly, of course, in which case the insurance company will be really happy with you for being their ideal customer.

And because you will inevitably have need of health care, the thing where everyone's putting a little bit in as a bet against the chance that they're robbed/burned down/flooded out so the few who actually do wind up in need have enough resources to recover doesn't work so well. Everyone will be pulling something out sometime, so there's no chance for the pot to build up enough to take care of everyone's needs (unless, of course, we're spending exorbitant amounts).

And so the game goes like this: we pay money in, sunk cost, and when we need the money out, it's in the best interest of the insurance people to not pay that out (less money for them and, for that matter, for everyone else), so we get surcharges, pre-existing conditions, caps on how much medication we can take or how much care we can get even when we need it, all designed to keep the money drained out of us. So now we're down the money and we don't get the care.

So people try to 'economise'. Some go without insurance and pray that the major illness doesn't happen to them just yet. Some skip preventative healthcare (that would increase the odds of catching those major illnesses early) to keep the resources for catastrophic situations. Some have to decide which of their conditions will get treatment.

And people get stuck in awful places, because the whole system is set up to feed this goddamn protection racket. Trapped in a bad job but can't afford to quit because that would lead to 'losing health insurance'. Unable to get insurance and stuck managing serious illnesses out of pocket. Making major life decisions based on whether or not health care access will be possible, because we can't afford the risk - or have people depending on us who aren't 'risks' but 'actualities'.

And I hear rhetoric about how we don't want bureaucrats between us and our health care as a reason to ... make sure we have insurance companies available to kneecap us, rather than some sort of system that makes sure that basic care is available to people in general.

Pony up your blind. Shuffle up and deal!

Oh look, I got a two-seven unsuited. Again.

Grab Bag

2009-08-14T15:09:00.002-05:00

I don't have the time or the brain to write up anything particularly brilliant, so I'm just going to throw out miscellaneous notes in no particular order.

Giving birth has corrected my pregnancy-induced gender dysphoria, which is a tremendous relief. Even the fact that Little Foot is, thus far, exclusively breastfed off my personal boobs does not ping me as being Axiomatically Wrong the way late pregnancy did - I might even go so far to say it doesn't ping at all, but given how awful I was feeling towards the end there I don't know if I have valid space for comparison. I'm not back to previous levels of mostly-able-bodiedness by a long shot -- a four-block round trip walk in the heat (weather.com says 84F!/87 with heat index - that's 30 for you centigrade folks) completely flattened me earlier, my bad hip seizes up in horrifying ways every so often, and I still have stitches in my chassis -- but my body feels more or less like my body again, not this alien lumpy thing that I'm only existing in because I'm stuck there.

Labor and afterwards generalised childcare have convinced me that I need to buy a box of bendy straws to stash under my shrine to Neb.y Set (which is where I keep the rope and other such things stashed), for circumstances in which I might not be able to use my hands when drinking or am stuck in a position in which easy drinking is more complicated. Things one does not expect to learn from newborn care!

I love having the whole family in the same house, even if it's a little crowded and stressy-because-of-people-being-displaced. It's just ... yeah. A good thing. I know it's only temporary, while we're adjusting to Little Foot being no longer wodged into my innards and all, but it's a fantastic thing while it lasts, and I'm enjoying it greatly.

Little Foot herself is doing well. She's regained her birth weight, the pediatrician thinks she's doing great, she's sleeping well, eating well (ow), and generally being professionally adorable. The lion's parents are visiting us now, and they are appropriately smitten. All things are good. At least at the moment, 'cos she's asleep. ;)

A few links:

"How I Lost My Health Insurance at the Hairstylist's" is one of those punch-in-gut stories, and makes me even more enraged by the fact that the public debate has become "How do we get people health insurance" rather than "How do we get people health care". I wrote a ranty, impassioned letter to the White House about it. Gods know if it'll make any difference. But damnit.

"The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck" is not an expression of my own experience, but it's an expression that needs to be heard. And, as pointed out over and over in the comments, it is an expression of my experience -- just in different adjective combinatorics. The rules are the same.

"An Open Letter to John C. Wright", meanwhile, is a lovely bit of response to a truly obnoxious homophobe. It is cheering, and also funny, and I think I need to buy one of this man's books because he deserves to have money aimed in his direction, so I have added that to my to-do list for books.

Enter Little Foot

2009-08-05T15:46:00.002-05:00

WARNING: The following post contains descriptions of a reasonably difficult labor and delivery. If this is liable to distress you, just scroll down to the photo. ;)

The contractions started at midnight on 31 July, but were spaced out at an hour and a half or two apart, fairly dull. In fact, early labor is pretty much entirely boring, as far as I can tell; just this sort of anticipatory waiting punctuated with the occasional contraction. I called my parents to chat, thereby weirding out my father. ("I don't think I've ever had a phone conversation with someone in labor before. I'm sure they happen, like, in the movies, but generally with the father, not the grandfather..." "Star Trek!" "RIGHT! Star Trek! ...still the father.")

Midwife arrived at about 1am on the first of August, after a day I'd spent feeling kind of at loose ends, really. I believe I was in the birth pool when she got there, I seem to remember floating there and hearing her voice say, "Yep, looks like labor." Various things happened over time. Mostly I tried to rest between contractions, though I got increasingly irritable by little things. (Like, "Do you want some [insert foodstuff here]?" "No." A little later. "Do you want some [different foodstuff]." "No." A little later. "Do you want some [food of some sort]?" "I WANT PEOPLE TO STOP ASKING ME!")

I didn't feel like labor was actually going anywhere. The midwife said I was doing fine, that things were progressing well. I was getting tired, mostly, and aggravated, and frustrated, and finally we did an inspection to see how dilated I was, and the water broke. Which was a fascinating sensation....

Contractions got worse. Working theory is this thing called "back labor", generally caused by the baby position being unideal in a way that approximates agonising. This was not helped by the fact that, like my mother, I do not have normal-duration contractions (something like two minutes); mine ran to 4-5 minutes straight. And there was Stuff (subtype: green) in the waters. We first decided that the Stuff was not a risk to the baby, and then, a while later, found fresh meconium - perhaps caused by the stress of the long contractions.

After some discussion, discretion was declared the better part of valor, and we packed up and went to the hospital. There was ... mild drama, that I fortunately found out later; the hospital didn't want us. They spent a while trying to convince us that another hospital was closer than they were, but eventually relented before the information that our chosen pediatrician was on their staff.

How much of this has to do with an idiot midwife who only transports to hospital when things have already gone to hell in a handbasket and has afflicted that particular hospital twice (as opposed to what we did, which was say, "Hm, that looks like a handbasket; let's avoid it with caution") and how much has to do with local politics regarding midwifery I do not know; I suspect a fascinating combination of things.

Anyway, it was for the best that I was unaware that my condition and my child's health had been treated like some kind of hot potato as I limped up to Labor and Delivery; I might have killed something during a surge.

There was initial friction with the OB - he was hostile to our midwife coming in (see above paragraph) up until he sorted out that we had transferred as a precaution, not because I was about to detonate or something, and got a look at my prenatal medical records and saw that they were, in fact, competent. And that we weren't going to refuse all interventions like the filthy hippies we were, or something. I curled up on my side and listened to him talk with my lion (formerly referred to as legalhusband). Paperwork was wrangled. Every so often someone wanted me to lie on my back, which I find uncomfortable at the best of times, and which at that particular time was roughly like being drawn and quartered.

They put monitors on me, which I disliked, but wasn't really up for arguing about, and it didn't matter, I wasn't going anywhere. They put an IV in me, which I also disliked - I hate the damn things, though it was less bad than the one when I got my CAT scan, it just left my hand feeling bruised all to hell - but that enabled me to get some fucking painkillers, which at least removed me from the state of "Kill me now and extract the baby from my steaming corpse."

Forty hours of back labor are disrecommended, by the way. Which is about where I was by that time. Exhausting, unproductive, discouraging, and it fucking hurts.

After that, I floated on some narcotics, half-listening to paperwork wrangles and family support, waking up for only the most intense contractions and snarling for assistance getting through them, for about two and a half hours, at which point I was nearly fully dilated. They wanted me to hold back on pushing for a bit, and taught me some breath techniques for that, which were hard to focus on but manageable, more or less. Somewhere in there I got a second dose of the painkiller, and vehemently refused an epidural. (I was not allowed to sign a health care proxy giving medical decision-making power to the whole family because I was stoned, but I could consent to an epidural while stoned. I don't know, man, I didn't do it. I can sort of see the sense in it, but at the same time, if I'm not competent to consent, I'm not competent to fucking consent.)

After a bit, I stopped having the capacity to restrain my reactions to the surges, and we worked out a position for the actual labory bit, with the advice of the nurse on duty.

And my liege held me cradled against his shoulder, and my lion supported my leg so that I could work and helped me when my hip siezed every so often. And going through the experience between my husbands, held, supported, ... now, okay, I've hit the moodswingy bit of post-partum here, but it makes me all weepy, okay?

The doctor had mellowed out a bit and at one point said, "I see green hair!" Apparently the rest of the family chorused "It's a Muppet!" whereas I, on the floaty strange space of the labor, just driftingly thought, "Probably just more stained mucus" and carried right along with what I was doing.

Tearing during labor is like lines of fire. And nowhere near as horrifyingly squicky as being cut would have been.

I had to hold for an infinite while while they cleared air passages, and then there was a little more, and then the release, and another rush of fluid, and there was the other side. It was a strange, spent, empty space on the other side.

People were talking, bustle, I was following half-threads of conversation, bits and pieces. Eight pounds, fifteen ounces. I had two tears, a small one and a moderate one (I presume it wasn't huge, there was no drama about it, just a "... not so small..." sort of flavor). I needed to lie on my back, could I do that? It didn't hurt horribly. I could do it.

My liege was on my left. He had knelt for most of the seriously active part of labor, to hold me, and his knees were wrecked. My lion was on my right, stroking me when he could, when he wasn't needed to answer questions, or taking a few photos. The OB sprayed something almost hot on me, and started to stitch me up.

(Turns out lidocaine isn't effective on me for more than a couple of minutes. They sprayed me with it three times.)

They put pitocin in the drip to make me pass the placenta faster so they could do the stitches properly without the cord in the way. I barely noticed, still in the dreamspace of post-labor, still there. I had wanted to let the placenta empty its blood supply into the baby, and there was a part of me that was angry and frustrated at that failure, a distant, shouting, too-tired-to-speak part.

I wanted to hold her.

Eventually I could, hold her, hold her with all the agitated medical mess done with, feeling the flow of everything around me. Feeling in love with the universe, with my daughter, with my mates. Her skin was soft against my skin.

Do not offend the baby. She can kill you with her mind. See?

Intersecting Works of Fiction

2009-07-30T11:50:00.005-05:00

I had commented to a friend of mine a while back that the Star Trek: Rebooted movie had reawakened my long-lapsed Trekkieness. (I went to Star Trek conventions when I was in high school, level of Trekkie. Wrote some fanfic, too, though mostly because the people I was hanging out with did. I didn't like the right characters, though, heh.)

She gave me this link yesterday, and that is fucking fantastic. One of those things that suddenly cleans up the goggles, as was said in the comments - talking about the importance of the romance subplot in Rebooted. And I'd been already outraged by the people who talked about Uhura as a token girlfriend, as if she hadn't been the linchpin of the entire possibility of resolving the movie plotline in a manner of appropriate heroism, as if she hadn't been clearly the pursuer and not the pursuee or woman-who-melts-suddenly-when-confronted-with-the-asshole-turned-hero. But that post reveals a big, big piece of something I missed, and I loves it forever for making me a little tiny bit wiser.

That being said, racist fail in another SF media project:

The Avatar live-action is an inexcusable debacle.

And here's a really sharp visual representation of why.

Seriously, when Heroes does a better job on race issues (Heroes of the "Have we gone an episode without killing off a woman or a POC?" fame, in which it rather takes after its pulp superhero comics origin perhaps a bit too well) than you, well, that's ... unspeakably ... I'm out of words here, someone hand me a cue card.

Especially when starting with a show that had a rich Asian cultural background, stuff like "We want you to dress in traditional cultural ethnic attire. If you're Korean, wear a kimono. If you're from Belgium, wear lederhosen" from the casting director? Casting calls for "Caucasian or other" on POC characters?

And, so Rebooted doesn't feel entirely left out of the scolding, an open letter to Winona Kirk on the subject of sexism in the Reboot portrayal.

Some Things They Don't Mention About Pregnancy

2009-07-29T18:26:00.002-05:00

In honor of me now being officially past my official due date and also past my personally calculated because dammit I know when I ovulated due date, my long-pondered "Things they don't tell you about pregnancy" post.

May not apply to all pregnancies. Some assembly required. Contents may settle during shipping.

(Next time I do this, I totally want a t-shirt that says 'Contents may settle during shipping.')

* I seem to have swallowed my spare change.

First-trimester symptom: everything tastes like metal. Everything. Breathing tastes like metal. Faded out a bit after a while, but still has reappearances, like right at the moment as I'm typing this.

* Where did my seasonal allergies go?

This, this is wonderful. The horrible head cold I had during the worst of the morning sickness was the most miserably sick I've been in my life, but an entire better part of a year in which the tree sex didn't make me feel like crap is amazing.

* My joint pain went away too.

For someone who lives with chronic low-level ache and what my midwife elegantly referred to as "loose hips", the six or so months free of that was really nice. Of course my bad hip started popping again at the end of month eight, as if to make sure I didn't get my hopes up too high, but one can't have everything.

* Pregnancy update websites are probably not written with me in mind.

I first realised this when every single one of them I read one week saw fit to inform me that really, the major body change I was likely to notice around here was my breasts getting bigger, and that this was the best and most thrilling part of being pregnant.

The one that said something about my pregnancy now having lasted longer than any of my high school relationships was a nice garnish. (Gods, I hope not. Legalhusband and I have been together since I was sixteen.)

On the other hand, the Vegetable of the Week game was an excellent way to pass time. How to play Vegetable of the Week: Google "pregnancy week #" and see what article of produce the fetus is the same size as now.

* It turns out that 95% of the weird shit that happens and freaks me out is a normal pregnancy symptom.

Increased rate of heart flutters, say.

Skin tags, too.

* Your hair and nails will grow like whoa.

The nails thing is the part that throws me - as someone who had low thyroxin most of her life and is barely used to fingernails growing at a particularly noticeable rate, having to cut my nails all the time is almost upsetting in its "this is not normal" way. And it's even more fun now that I can't reach my feet.

Also, "Hair grows like whoa"? Includes pubic.

* Pregnancy is weirdly and subtly racialised.

Being someone who's in lefty-natural childrearing circumstances, I'm occasionally struck by how white things are.

By going to baby supply stores and having, on the wall, images of lots of babies and toddlers - all white, most blue-eyed.

By having people seriously suggest that the nipple-darkening during pregnancy is so babies can visually track the food source better, never mind that sight doesn't develop that clearly for a bit, mammals track by scent, and dude, where are you getting this bonus contrast concept from if you can't think of anyone other than a white person as human?

I just wow.

* Trying to get a ballpark figure for an appropriate amount of weight gain during pregnancy from the internet is not a good idea.

Take all of the crazy, interfering, I-know-better-than-you stuff that gets directed at pregnant women.

Take all of the crazy, interfering, I-know-better-than-you stuff that gets thrown around about weight and health issues.

Combine.

Or hit yourself in the head with a brick a few times. It's faster, and just as informative.

* Moods are not unstable. Moods are turned up to eleven.

Instead of "cranky" I was achieving "kill it and devour its heart that its lifeblood might sustain my offspring."

Instead of "I don't want to deal with this" I was achieving "I need to go live in a cave and contemplate the hopelessness of human interaction."

* Childbirth classes with any sort of natural bent will spend at least a quarter of the time in class talking about how to protect yourself from hospitals.

This is epically fucked up. Completely, totally, epically fucked up. Legalhusband and I would leave our childbirth class every time, exchange glances, and then he'd say, "I'm so glad we're not planning on a hospital birth. I'm so glad we don't have to go through that."

And this ranges from stuff like the friend of mine who went in for a post-term ultrasound to doublecheck that everything was okay and had the administering nurse lie to her in an attempt to panic her into admitting herself to be induced immediately to horrifying shit like a woman having her baby taken away because she refused a C-section.

They will lie. They will not talk about the risks of epidurals. They will insist on putting an IV shunt into your vein "just in case" and not mention that it's possible to refuse. They will pressure. This is why people hire doulas - when they can afford them - to help protect their families from the crushing stress and pressure. This is insane.

* Hospitals are insane. Did I mention?

If you had to go to a hospital to get a special blood test done to confirm that you were healthy enough to not have to go to a hospital for your delivery - consider the stressiness in the context of previous point please - what would you like to be hearing in the lab waiting room?

There was a television there, turned up too loud, of course, because this culture is sucktastic.

But what was playing on the television?

Medical programming, of course, it was the hospital.

What medical programming?

What would you put on?

What would you put on if you were a complete idiot?

How about a special on medical mysteries in which a family could not get treatment for their newborn's skeletal abnormality because the medical community wouldn't believe that it existed?

(Present in the waiting room: receptionist, three third-trimester women, and my liege, who had brought me there, looked at the television, and put in earplugs so he could study.)

* Heartburn can be bad enough to make you throw up.

'Nuff said.

* You will become a D&D dwarf.

The ability to detect the slightest of grades will suddenly appear. "This is an upslope." "Is it?" "Yes."

* Water is the best thing in the universe.

Go swimming. Take a bath. Get an inflatable tub that's deep enough to float the belly. It doesn't matter. Bathliness is next to godliness. I am totally composing this post in the tub.

I get in the water and all the pain and strain go away. And when I get out, I don't hurt for a while, because my muscles have had a chance to relax and unwind and rest a little, because water is totally supportive.

I am completely and totally convinced of the water ape period theory of human evolution. I found it convincing because of the whole, dude, where did our fur go thing, but experiencing pregnancy, and then experiencing pregnancy and water? Completely conclusive.

* How debilitating pregnancy is depends not merely on who you are, but random unknown factors that for all I know include the phase of the moon.

I went around and around on "Why can I climb the stairs without a problem today when I couldn't yesterday?" Damned if I know.

Pregnancy is hard physical labor, and the hard physical labor of it is completely invisible, so it's like an invisible disability only of course there's the giant belly so it's not invisible-invisible, it's just that it's implausible to people who haven't been there.

* No matter how crazy the experience makes you, everyone around you is crazier.

I've been in and out of tears. I've muttered about needing to be off my depression meds because of complications on SSRIs in the third trimester. I've wrestled with the fact that gestation takes all of my energy except enough to run the braingremlin that thinks I should be getting more done.

This is nothing compared to people around me.

In the birth class, the teacher told us that we should think about delegating someone to field all the "Is the baby there yet?" phone calls. To which one of my classmates said something to the effect of, "Who would do that?" I said, "Pregnancy makes people crazy. Not you. The people around you."

I went to a baseball game last Friday, minor league game 20 minutes from my house and probably 10 at the outside from the backup hospital. Was chatting with a woman with a toddler-in-stroller in the elevator back to the car.

"So when are you due?" she asked me.

"Monday."

My deadpan made her laugh nervously, and she said, "... cutting it a little close there, eh?"

Cutting it close? Is the baby going to erupt from me in a splash of drama during the seventh inning stretch? What?

* Relaxin feels so weird.

My pelvis is in, I think, four pieces, and every so often when I move it feels like it nearly falls apart. The muscles that are, of course, completely unused to holding my hips on are exhausted from the effort.

On the one hand, I'm glad it's all loose because it'll make it easier to expel the fishie. On the other hand, having my pubic bone pop near-audibly weirds me the fuck out.

* The belly is gyroscopic.

It does not like to change orientation. Rolling over in bed while nine months pregnant is a feat of athleticism worthy of a medal. The belly objects. If the process involves rolling over onto the back, there will be the moment of hazy, dizzy fatigue in which the vena cava is compressed which leaves one feeling like an upended box turtle. Begging for assistance at rolling over is embarassing but sometimes necessary.

* Sharp tearing pain in the foot is something that happens to a certain fraction of women in the third trimester.

It's caused by the normal pregnancy edema, and trying to talk to medical professionals about it appears to lead to flailing panic and lack of any clue of what to do. Also, it hurts like fucking hell.

* There will come a point at which the belly gets in the way of everything.

By everything, I mean everything.

I mean I can't pee without the belly getting in the way, it wants to exist in the same space as my thighs unless I take my clothes off so I can move the thighs out of the way. (Lately I've been taking my clothes off a lot.) And trying to pee on the diagnostic stick at my regular medical checkups? HAH. It took me a couple of sessions to be able to consistently find the piss.

For a while getting places by crawling worked better (especially steep staircases, like the one at my liege's house). Now ... the belly is in the way.

I'm sure I'm missing a few things, but that will do for a nice overview.

Relational Tinkertoys

2009-07-22T17:47:00.003-05:00

One of the previous posts got into discussing fiddly bits of constructing relationship systems and how one looks at them and so on, and so I've been chewing on that. Which I've also been chewing on in terms of this CFS for kinked relationships in a polyamorous context, which I'd like to write something for if I only had a brain. (Or a diploma.)

And there are bazillions of things talking about terminology out there, and some of them even get it mostly not wrong for how it works in the wild (the number of sites that talk about "primary/secondary" or "heirarchical polyamory" under the notion that people only ever have one primary-typed relationship is gargantuan), and none of them are actually all that useful, as far as I can tell. (And this is getting all crossed-up in my head with an old post I just read from someone who left me a comment on 'what's the difference between "bedroom kink" and "24/7", anyway?' so that may wind up in this ramble.)

So. Relationships. Structures.

One of the things that I think drives a lot of people's responses is the way that the model of what a relationship is like is sort of presented as monolithic. He and she become they and we know it's right and true because they get married and live happily ever after gazing into each other's eyes. And there are variations along the way, but this is the thing that I saw presented as the Correct Model - heterosexuality, marriage, starry-eyed monogamy, fairy tale ending. All the ingredients.

And of course there were little cracks in that obvious from the beginning: in my youngest years it was the knowledge that divorce happened. Then an awareness of homosexuality. By the time I was fourteen or so I could comment that I figured there were people who were monogamous and people who weren't, and the ones who weren't should let people know so that people wouldn't get hurt. (At fourteen, all this obvious shit is simple ...)

But a lot of what I saw was ... still tending back towards the Correct Model. He and she become they transforms into he and he become they. The divorced woman finds the one who's actually the right one, and we know it's right and true because they get married and live happily ever after, etc. All sort of edging towards not being different, even if there were a couple of cosmetic things not in accord with the Model; trying to minimise the ways in which people varied, relationships varied, and so on.

And I think this makes it hard for people who venture into non-normative relationships, because the shape of the Correct Model casts a long, long shadow. Some people luck into areas or subcultures that give them models that work better - or get stuck with a choice between the normative models and the subcultural normative models, neither of which works for them. And some people have to rattle around a lot and figure out which bits work for them and which don't, and sometimes, well, this hurts. So people have scars.

That looks tangential to the question of relationship structures and how people go about things, but it isn't, really. Because all of this is part of the cultural stew that people are steeping in when they go about their relationships, and even being consciously aware of some of it and what it does doesn't mean that one's got it all down and sorted. And some of it is something specific people like, and some isn't.

So that's all backdrop.

If you frame some of the wrong questions in terms of the backdrop, you can see some of how they get asked. Only one relationship fully exists in reality; that relationship is arranged with cohabitation, mutual sexual interest, long-term commitment, and all that stuff that's part of the Serious Package; other relationships (if they exist) are more trivial, flighty things, maybe focused on addressing desires that the real relationship cannot satisfy, like kink, sex with a same-sex partner, the nebulous thing called 'variety', the 'I don't think it's healthy to expect my needs to be met by one person', etc.

And this is what the default model of A Polyamorous Relationship is.

Me, I say that I don't have any polyamorous relationships. Because for the relationship to be such by my standards, there would have to be more than two people in it. And I can't figure out how to make that work, so I don't try to do it; all my relationships are dyadic. (I'm not attracted to groups of people; I'm attracted to specific individual ones. So that's how I conduct things.) So I don't add people to relationships or have to balance things in a relationship or whatever; all of that stuff is system-level, which a lot of people don't recognise as an important distinction in the first place! (World on a slant strikes again.)

And only doing dyadic relationships simplifies some things. Some people like and prefer the one big relationship model, and more power to 'em. They're doing something I can't, for sure, and I don't know how they manage it. I note that they exist, but decline to comment further on grounds that I'm incompetent to do so.

But what goes into a dyadic relationship in a poly system? Obviously, one scraps the "And if I ever find myself attracted to anyone other than you, clearly our relationship has failed and is defective in some way" part that crops up in some implementations of the normative model, if one's having other relationships at all. Though some people have agreements and preferences that can look like that from funny angles, that include things like "Don't love anyone else", "Don't have sex with anyone else" ('sex' being variously defined), "Don't have a serious relationship with anyone else"... all of which I've seen work for some people, provided adequate term-defining.

But there are other nuances. I know people for whom the critical part of polyamory is that they be able to have another relationship if they decide they want to. And in a fair few of those cases, when they have that option, they don't actually have any desire to start another relationship. In other cases, the critical thing is the ability to have and have acknowledged attractions without any necessary follow-through (or maybe no more than a cuddle or what have you), and that satisfies all emotional requirements the poly person might have. And on the other end of things, I know people who don't want to miss out on an opportunity or turn down a potential, and a few kind of messed-up people who seem to think that saying "No" or not being interested in a new relationship now is proof that one isn't really polyamorous at all.

I know of relationships in poly systems that are pretty much vehicles for sexual release, relationships in poly systems that have no sexual activity or desire for same, and pretty much anything in between the two. When my liege and I started our relationship, as I believe I've mentioned, we were shooting for something like friends-with-benefits or a probably long-term fling - turning our established friendship into a friendship that happened to include fucking on occasion, more or less. (That notion didn't last terribly long.) Some people have agreements for looser rules on business trips, conventions, and other prime sources of fling time, too; not all relationships are long-term.

And speaking of long-term, one of those questions that comes up is "How often do relationships like this fail?" Which amused me for a while, because there was a string of people asking me this question in a time frame where I'd recently had a successful relationship come to a conclusion (it was done, and we didn't drag it out too badly) and another relationship that was in a state of continual slow failure not quite energetic enough to cease. But the model for 'failure' was about 'ending' - and often any change in a relationship system was called "ending", so the fact that, say, I'd been with one partner for a decade didn't matter if I broke up with someone else in the interim. Success in a relationship depends on the relationship, not the duration - and not whether the relationship is ongoing, either.

I think one of the things that I'm finding as I burble along semicoherently is that, well, a lot of things are up for negotiation and discussion. In a lot of ways, this is a really scary part: instead of there being a simple, straightforward, and above all known pattern for what a relationship is like (insert digression here), all this other stuff is in question, like what it means for a relationship to succeed, the meaning of fidelity (literally keeping your promises and commitments), who is involved, to what extent, how many ....

Digression: The single thing I've seen cause the most drama in poly relationship setups is the quesiton of who owns the time. There are people who figure that being in a relationship means that all their unspecified time is spent With Partner; there are people who specify time With Partner and figure that their unspecified time is theirs, though it will often also be spent With Partner. When these two types of people get into relationships, there's often a lot of low-grade sense that there's something off here. When these two types of people start up in a poly situation, the drama explodes all over the place and the shrapnel is killer. Those 'of course we know what the rules are for relationships' assumptions bite and the wounds bleed - and they still bite in a monogamous situation, but the damage often feels less acute because people are generally perceived as more threatening to relationships than ... well, all the other stuff that a partner might be doing. (End digression.)

One of the big standing-wave flamewars in poly groups is the concept of heirarchy and, more importantly, what heirarchy means. If anything. (Some people just let it be, if it is, and I appreciate that, being inclined that way myself aside from an obvious tendency towards overanalysis.)

Some people don't do heirarchy. They have their partners, those relationships are what they are, and that's that.

Some people don't do heirarchy. They have their partners, those relationships are what they are, and that's that. They also have the other people they're in some way involved with, who may be romantic friendships, or sex buddies, or whatever else.

Some people do heirarchy. They have their primary partner, and everyone else is required to be of less importance. Often, there is some sort of control that the primary partner has over other relationships, such as the ability to veto. Sometimes called 'prescriptive heirarchy' (as opposed to 'descriptive heirarchy').

Some people do heirarchy. They have their primary partner, and don't have any particular interest in having that sort of relationship with anyone else, but they also have other relationships, romantic, sexual, and both, of lesser centrality to their lives.

Some people do heirarchy. They have their primary partners and other partners by whatever standards and particulars suit the people involved.

Some people do heirarchy, with a tidy sequence of succession such that if one relationship goes away, everything lower than it moves up a rank. Or something. I've never been able to parse this one, and it pretty much never happens in the real world so much as in people's fantasies about how this all works, so it doesn't matter much.

A primary relationship may or may not be a close match to a mainstream-normal real relationship. Various factors that some people have insisted are essential to primary partner-ness have been marriage or other commitment ceremony, cohabitation, sex, shared finances, shared responsibilities, power to control other relationships, the ability to trump commitments to others with desired time (even in non-emergency situations), there can be only one Highlander-ness, um, probably some other stuff. The rules that any given primary relationship run under are probably only known to the participants, though they may well think that it's obvious and all clear-thinking folks will agree.

A secondary (or tertiary, as we carry on down the line) relationship is one that does not contain all the traits that someone thinks of as necessary for a primary relationship. What that actually means in practice is fuck-all with a side order of 'this is a distinction we think necessary to make'. Some people treat this category of relationships as disposable fun-toys. I think those people need to be smacked with a haddock.

Some people get all tangled up in sex and romance and which is more important or if they're all the same thing. And my feeling on sex and romance is that they're different things, and some people can have one without the other, and some people have the two tangled together, and that's life and among the zillions of things that people can be varietable about. Same thing with kink and sex and romance, for that matter. I can have romantic love without sexual attraction but not sex without romantic entanglement; some people can do sex without love/romance/whatever. Life is complicated. That's fine.

Digression two, since I don't think it'll ever be sequitur. 24/7 kink vs. bedroom kink? For me, in my fulltime kinked relationship, it's always there. I'm 24/7 d/s like I'm 24/7 married, y'know? It's always a factor in my life and my calculations and my interactions with people, especially, y'know, the relevant person. My bedroom kink with my other primary partner is ... he's kinky, I'm kinky, sometimes we're kinky in similar directions, it's not a part of our relationship per se (I think we'd both like it if it were a little more so, but it doesn't work out that way), it's just a thing that we do sometimes. And it's not like we stop being kinky people when we're not in-scene or whatever, it's just that it's not a defining trait of our interactions - it may be a defining trait of our selves, but that's a different locus. End digression.

Some people make up abominable unwords like "sexualove" and "compersion", meanwhile, and expect other people to appreciate the brilliance of their ugly jargon. At least one of those has a functional etymology and merely sounds stupid, rather than like a disease symptom.

Some people think their whatever makes them far superior to all of those peons who are still monogamous or who are doing their poly thing differently. These people also need to be smacked with a haddock.

Ugh, I'm sure I had more to say when I started but since this has now been written over something like a half-week full of gaps and staring into space I've lost a fair fraction of it.

But I think that should illustrate, more or less, why I get frustrated when I'm doing my wee activist thing (over a decade of answering questions about polyamory and counting, but not very precisely) and, after explaining what my life is like, get the response, "So the people I met before who [hurt|upset|confused] me are doing it wrong?" (This has happened more than once.)

No. They're just doing it not like me.

Not Exactly the Wrong Questions

2009-07-17T23:34:00.004-05:00

Then there are the times the answers are wrong. Or something like that. Not sure how to riff this bit right.

I was recently in a discussion of safewords elsewhere that got me into a contemplation of bits of kink culture and my somewhat complicated relationship with it. It's a hard subject to try to articulate about, because a lot of this is in the superficial impression level of things, and I'm well aware that I have not explored things with much depth - in part because of that impression.

The thing with me and safewords is that if I'm in a position where I might want to use one, I'm almost certainly not in a position where I'm capable of using one. (The other thing with me and safewords is that if I'm verbality-enabled, I'm quite competent to say, "You don't want to be doing that" or something similar about a boundary-crossing behaviour, and I'm not generally engaged in stuff that would require something other than plain language to communicate.) I alter state so significantly that the safety latch option doesn't come up on possible options - often, possible options to think about, and that's without getting into the implementation problems.

A community discourse that focuses on the usefulness (and indeed necessity) of safewords is a community discourse in which I cannot be a full participant. I need to be able to build what relative safety I can by other means, and the construction of those other means is something that I've pretty much had to do on my own, through trial and error. Fortunately, none of those errors have been traumatising for me - even the 'now that I'm back in my ordinary mind I would rather not have done that' stuff has been educational rather than upsetting.

For someone like me, for whom nonverbal trust state is one of the fundamental components - indeed one of the desired goals - of submission, trying to frame that all through the safeword lens breaks it. Between that and the SM focus of a lot of kink discussion, I wound up wondering if what I was hooked into was something different that was not kink, if the BDSM community had anything in common with me. I could get some use out of bondage discussions, but SM and the importance of safewords were bulletins from an alien planet.

A lot of things were bulletins from an alien planet. "The scene", clubs, play parties, all that stuff that's normative within a lot of kink-contexted discussion? About as emotionally comprehensible as approaching a relative stranger and asking them if they're interested in siring a child in the next half hour or so. And that's because this central thing, the whole reason for being there, is this my-mind-is-blown-open-my-god-it's-full-of-stars-and-kittens experience, and looking for that kind of trip off someone with whom I'm not already intimate is not merely unappealing, it's bizarre. I'm not someone who can get an endorphin high off a casual flogging and be happy with that - the only value a flogging might have to me is in whether or not it can get my mindscape somewhere interesting, and all of those 'somewhere interesting' places orbit around that ego-death thing and are more likely to go there the more satisfying the interaction is.

My kink gets more intimate than sex; sex can be a real trip, but it's something where the skin is still a barrier, a boundary, something that holds the difference between me and a lover as a tangible thing even through the inversions and entanglements of being twined through each other. My kink gets more intimate than sex, and I'm a thirty-one year old woman who has never really had a monogamous relationship and has had six lovers in her lifetime. My kink gets more intimate than sex, and it's not as easy to find a partner who can hold that stuff as it is to find a lover, even if I really want to, even if I try, even if I'm frustrated by my inability to make ... that ... work with someone I love.

And this is a giant lump of dangerous mental juju to propose to drop on someone, asking them to hold that safe space, to create that dissolved and fluid state and to keep it from being ripped apart. This is not easy, and this is not a small magic. But where does one learn this shit? Talking about safewords, one experienced top suggested that people like me are not for novices because this is high-proof stuff - but how does one become not-a-novice at this in the first place? Not with safewords, because safewords belong to a different reality than the altered state.

I don't know these things. I know that the first time I slid into a submissive state while nestled into the arms of the one who is now my liege, before we talked about kink and wiring and responses and fantasies much at all (it was at the end of the Initial Sexual History Conversation, actually), the first time he saw me on the edge of that state, he knew I could not give meaningful consent to what he wanted to do, and he brought me back up out of it so that he would not hurt me, so that he could ask and get a meaningful answer. It didn't matter that he had no prior experience with d/s there; what mattered was that he recognised where I was and made the right choice. (And left me with a horrible case of thwarted desire, but as a consequence to risk that's hardly a bad outcome.)

That same care guided me through a reenactment of my sexual assault, a transformative experience that still blows my mind. That same care has only majorly messed things up once, and it was rough, and we got through it eventually. it is not a simple thing, and I don't know how I mustered the luck to have it work, but it is what it is. I don't know how to make for a world where people can learn how to find this if that's what they want, how they can get there with fewer blunders than I had to go through. I think it matters, and I don't know how to do it. At all.

I sometimes think I'm at least two kinds of submissive; the service, the devotion, all of that seems a different reality than this blown-open space so full of stars. And yet it's the same thing, somehow, in a way I have yet to be able to articulate, the way the risk-strewn madness at the core snuggles into protocol and ritual and support and making tea on the other side. "Safe" and "sane" only exist in the penumbra of the sorcery, but maybe that's the secret. I've seen people whose kink has SM in it talk about knowing their 'dark side' and letting it have its place; maybe this is letting the mad side have a home.

I don't know these things. And they're hard to talk about.

Asking the Wrong Questions

2009-07-17T01:14:00.003-05:00

One of the things that I find most difficult to deal with are the wrong questions that people ask me (or ask in my vicinity). Things where ... in order to really answer that question, I have to dig back into the assumptions that make the question possible in order to point out that they're misapplied, inaccurate, or just plain wrong. And people are resistant to having their axioms argued with, a lot of the time, and reject, mock, dismiss, or otherwise just fail to adjust to actual encounters with reality.

One of the places this gets particularly egregious is around subject of polyamory. Everyone has their vision of what someone like me's life is like, and very few of these visions have even a passing relationship with reality. I mean, it's a running joke in some poly circles that the universal response to being tagged as someone polyamorous is, "Do you all sleep in the same bed?", which is, of course, a veiled enquiry about the target's sex life.

But try to take that apart, and you have not only the sex-centric nature of the question, the invasion of personal space required to immediately leap to asking a veiled question about sex, but more fundamental things like the assumption that 'you all' actually means something.

Taking apart 'you all'? There's the One Big Relationship notion, some sort of Stranger In a Strange Land collective mishmash. Probably with transitive relationships, in which my partners are presumed to be partnered to each other in some fashion, in order to form this magical 'you all'. And who's in and who's not? And ...

... and my husbands have another wife, and I'm not married to her or romantically involved with her, and is she a part of my 'you all' like we're in the same family unit? Is my long-distance partner, with whom I do not have a sexual relationship in any case, part of this entity known as 'you all', despite neither of my husbands having met him? How about my [legal] husband's long-distance partner and her husband - my ex (who has met my long-distance partner) - and their local poly family grouping, are they part of 'you all' despite being three thousand miles away and the posited bed being somewhat implausible by the laws of physics by this point? What is this 'you all', where are its boundaries, what does it mean?

I have three romantic relationships. Two of them are marriages. For the situations in which sharing a bed comes up as a relevant concept, all the people in the relationship share the bed. The value of 'you all' that actually has some bearing on reality is 'two', for which the scope for prurient investigation into the strange lives of other people rather fails on the 'strange' point.

I'm sure from that the astute reader can figure out some of where "How did you find someone to add to your marriage?" falls down, too. And I don't even have to go into the bit where I start jumping up and down and shouting about how people are not marriage accessories and why the fuck would I want to be munged onto someone else's relationship rather than having one of my own thankyouverymuch.

Though the rant would be a segue into "How do you share your partner?" where I either want to jump up and down and shout about how my partners are not my property to dole out or store in a trunk because I failed at kindergarten playtime or fume about how, no, actually, I'm not sharing a damn thing, my relationships are mine (and the relevant partner's) and someone who wants a piece of that can get their interloping arse kicked for 'em. They want a relationship with one of my partners, they can build their own rather than trying to cadge a piece of mine.

One of my favorites is "Why do you put up with that?" because I'm the one who refuses to consider monogamy. So I'm left with, "I'm ... putting up with ... being treated like someone who has input in her relationships? The problem is?" Of course, under this question is the sexist notion that women are intrinsically monogamous and men just want to fuck around and so any sort of open, poly, or nonmonogamous structure is for the benefit of teh menz and leaves teh wimminz suffering and alone and certainly never suggesting something like, "Why don't you go spend the day with your other wife because I can't stand having humans within about twenty feet of me right now?"

This is related to "What happened to you that you don't feel you deserve someone all to yourself?" Which I have been asked, in so many words, though it may have been a rhetorical question. And to which I could get nasty about the 'all to yourself' and the overwhelmingly broken social construct that one's romantic partner is the be-all and end-all of one's social interaction, but I don't generally bother, because I'm too busy wanting to snap people's heads off over their imaginary abuse wank fantasies.

"Why isn't one person able to meet your needs?" takes the nexus of presumed damage out of my past and plonks it in my current psyche, inventing some sort of greedy defective with a checklist of requirements, looking for other human beings to fill the niches created by projected deficiencies in each partner. There is one person able to meet my needs; me. Projecting that onto other people does not strike me as healthy. I'm not poly because I have 'needs' in excess of others'; I'm poly because my 'ooh, that person is shiny' meter shuts down at two serious relationships rather than one and I'm happier under those circumstances. (And I also learned - by painful experience - how to parse more subtle forms of shiny and fondness.) Related questions: "Why isn't your partner enough?", "What's wrong with your relationship?"

Or, "How can you think of bringing children into such an environment?", which mostly leaves me wondering what's wrong with a loving, stable family situation in which everyone is more or less supported in their sanity and emotional stability needs, work is well-distributed among the family members with reasonable flexibility, and people are happy with each other. I'm pretty sure that this is one of those really intensely veiled sex questions, predicated on parade-of-lovers and soap-opera drama, but I'm generally not interested in breaking my intrinsic boringness for long enough to dig that deep.

I seem to have gotten off on a run of the really annoying ones, rather than the just silly, which is unfortunate, but they do remind me of each other a lot so I suppose it's to be expected. Ah well. I think I've covered most of "What do you think this adds to your marriage?" before, aside from the whole, y'know, not having the single-relationship-plus-others model in the first place and not pursuing relationships for spicing.

And nobody comes right out and asks me how often I have sex, so I can't disabuse them of their notions of vast orgiastic parties every evening. I'm pretty sure my imaginary self gets laid a whole lot more than I do, and in much more exciting ways. I'm okay with that.

(Then there are the 'questions people don't ask but probably should instead of just running on the assumption that they know the answer', like, "Are you hitting on me?", "Are you into casual sex?", "Are you bisexual?", "Are you looking for someone new right now?", "Are you trying to convince me that I should open my marriage?" Sigh. I mean, some of the comments that come in on that are just plain intended to be nasty - the one I remember was full of how clearly emotionally unstable I had to be to be 'sleeping with all of these different people'.)

The whole illusory assumption thing is wearying, really. It's hard to be funny about it in the long run, just because of being imaginary all the time. It'd be nice to have a bottomless well of funny to throw at some of this stuff, but instead I have a bottomless pit of aggravation, occasionally leavened with funny.

More Heat Than Light

2009-07-13T01:01:00.009-05:00

Recently, a friend of mine posted to a local board looking for a roommate. Like people who do that sort of thing will do, she posted about what she was looking for in a roommate - which happened to include not having children.

And there was a resulting kerfluffle, in which one person replied suggesting (after some 'people who don't want to live with children are defective in some way' and 'why aren't you willing to modify your landlord's property to be more childsafe?' comments) that this was the sort of thing they expected of polyamorous people and their dubious state of priorities, that they'd rather have their orgies than have children around.

And I'm sitting here consulting with the belly, hey. Ha.

But seriously.

(Not even getting into the whole "... what the hell is wrong with not wanting to room with children?" thing here. I'm not capable of being surprised that a twenty-to-thirtysomething urban techie roomshare happens to have childfree people in it and, y'know, there's nothing wrong with reality here.)

This sort of thing just ... quietly exhausts me. In that 'nibbled to death by ducks' way. Because while it's not one of those Grand Oppression things, or even a major big deal, just the sort of wearing grinding everyday grit in the gears that means there's so much less available for dealing with the world. Emotional entropy, lost as heat.

I'm coming to think that this is one of the hardest things to convey about being one-down (or more-down) from normal in the social ranking thing. The way that ... it's not always someone's kids being taken away, or an eviction notice, or a punch in the face, or a death. And it's not always the major setups that say, no, you can't get married, or no, you have to decide what's safest to mark down on this form as your sex, or having to go the long and ugly way around for an accessible entrance, or all those other things that are the legacy of a system passively constructed in a manner hostile to people like you.

It's the middle stuff.

The stuff where it's clear that someone's basically hostile to people-like-you, may not have the power to do anything significant with it (though oftentimes, horribly, these people do) but just want to make sure you have an emotionally difficult day. A little more stress, a little more awareness of hostility, maybe even a little less safe.

But oh, it's just some person on a forum, or some overheard conversation, or something like that. It's not like it's hurting you, people will say; and it's not like it's the system keeping you down, the system isn't alive and argumentative like a person, so it's safe to rail against. It's just ... a little more friction, not anything worth paying attention to. Sticks and stones, you know, sticks and stones. This stuff isn't real, it's at worst a little friction.

But thermodynamics hits the emotions too. And the more the world wears away, the more people have to grind against these abrasive notions about who we are, for whatever values of who we are are being scraped at, the more just gets lost. The energy is gone, drifting away into nothingness, unrecoverable: the price of entropy. And that's energy that could have healed the world, maybe, or at least just been better able to deal with the real nasty shit out there, or the tedious grind of the impersonally cruel system.

I don't even know if I'm making any damn sense. It's not about being poly, or childfree, or anythign or everything else: it's about the hurt of being in a world where there's this constant exhausting pecking away, where any random person might just say something randomly hostile, where that's normal, unless one seeks communities specifically to protect oneself against that - and even there, there will be the moments that someone says something that grinds a little more grit into something the space wasn't defining as part of its protection.

Attacks I can deal with. Systems I can rail against and change.

People? People are harder.

Figuring Gender

2009-07-02T01:03:00.004-05:00

I'm eight months pregnant and I finally figured out why it's so weird to me.

I commented the other day to a friend that my gender identity fluxes between 'none of the above' and 'yes'. It also biases to some flavor of 'female', I suspect because I'm cissexual. But under normal circumstances that bias is ... a bias, something that tints a bunch of presentations and adoptions that I think of and experience as some form of neutral, androgynous, epicene, or fey and reflects them out as female, which really doesn't bother me particularly, because it's just a tint, not a major shift.

Under normal circumstances, my body is my ally in this. It is thin, small-breasted, perhaps on the tall side, and I can specifically tell when it is moving in a manner that genders strongly female. The fact that my hair is ass-length does not mean that I have not been sirred from behind. The sort of neutral fluidity of my normal feelings about my gender can be smoothly expressed with my normal body.

One of the things with gender expression is the way that a part of it exists in the liminal space between my experience and others' perceptions. And it's there that the weirdness comes in.

Because no matter how I feel right now, my body screams female. (Even in a post-Thomas Beattie world. His moustache is rather more noticeable than mine.) I don't have the option of fluidity and flux, the normal slight shifts in how I present and feel that reflect my inner understandings of the lability of gender.

Because even if my pelvis were't tilted to shove my ass out as if I were wearing heels, even if one of my breasts weren't a Breast of Unusual (For Me) Size, even if I could walk without rolling of hips induced by the pregnancy waddle and favoring the pains in unmentionable places, I am twice as thick as I used to be, and it's all belly. That normally-approaching-neutral body of mine has no subtleties to mask the obviousness of my cis-woman status; I have no thickness to reduce the impact of the pregnancy.

That space between my feelings about how I am and the rest of the world is swamped with this figure that pins me down to a particular external perception of my gender that no longer can be affected by what's in my head right now. There's too much blatant baby there, and it's not just because I'm starting to feel it in my knees that I'm locked in. Whether or not I like it, whether or not I feel this way right now, I'm Presenting As A Woman - and further, a specific kind of woman.

And there have been times that it's been okay. Times that I've rattled around looking for a nice shirt that fits over the epic curve of that unsubtleness and declared that I was tired of feeling frumpy (as I've spent much of the last while in pyjamas and t-shirts, because they fit and don't require effort); but those times don't last long, and then I drift out of them again, into a spacce where the options are even more limited because all of the stuff in my head fits in a body without a baby in it.

And it's something I chose to do, and it's something I will almost certainly choose to do again, but when I do it again I'll at least know that I. Will. Feel. So. Weird. Weird and thrown a little out of myself, because my body won't do what I am properly anymore.

Somehow I don't think this is what most people are talking about when they stress about their figures during pregnancy.

Reality is Messy

2009-06-28T01:37:00.003-05:00

Okay, crawling out of my horrible state of incoherent illness or whatever the hell is wrong with me for at least one more pagan values month blog post. This will wind it up for the month, hope you've enjoyed the trip.

I've done a whole bunch of these things, and I haven't talked much at all about gods. Which may be a bit odd for a sequence of posts about religious values. So here's a goddy post for all of you god fans.

I've found that a lot of people steeped in a monotheistic background of whatever flavor have a really hard time parsing their way through polytheism. Enough so that in a lot of discussions, when I point out that monotheistic assumptions don't apply to my religion, I just get ... ignored, passed over, as if someone turned on the Somebody Else's Problem field, and people keep going on arguing about religion as if they were actually talking about religion and not some subset thereof. And when people actually respond, it's often ... I pointed out the flaws in a monotheism-assuming argument to an angry atheist once, and got the fascinating response of, "Well, why would anyone want to worship a god who isn't omnipotent in the first place?"

What an alien world that is to me, though that's unsurprising with my little postcards-from-Gehenna schtick.

For context, I gotta tell you what I think about gods. Gods are elemental. I don't mean this in the sense of that earth-air-fire-water shit, I mean elemental, I mean like the periodic table, only with a lot more little boxes and squiggly abbreviations that require context and opaque numbers. Gods are exactly and precisely what they are, a coiled knot of consequences around a pure idea.

This doesn't mean that gods aren't complicated. You can't take a pure idea and fractal* it out to encompass all its consequences without getting complicated. The stories we tell about gods aren't the shard at the center of the god, they're all the stuff out on the edges that we can relate to and understand. Getting at that elemental core requires figuring out in what way all the stories are the same -- finding the part that iterates.

If I talk to you about Neb.y, sometimes I'll talk about transgression, sometimes I'll talk about sex and power, sometimes I'll talk about the initiator, sometimes I'll talk about the twinning of the desert and the fertile land, or the king and his twin the usurper, or deviancy and the foreign, or the strength borne of the individual, or the difference between destruction and annihilation, or the force of the storm, or the dread of the dark and the things that may go bump there. All these and more are part of His mythology, after all. But nestled into the centre of all of those is the Other. Edge of the map stuff, here be dragons - and will you be a dragonfriend, or will you be lunch?

Set as god as storms is the same thing as Set as god of redheads is the same thing as Set Who (in one set of myths) killed His brother is the same thing as Set in the prow of the solar boat as the one strong enough to break Apep's neck every night is the same thing as Set on the stolen throne waiting for Heru-sa-Aset to kick Him off is the same thing as sexually insatiable, pervy, queer Set with His foreign wives is the same thing as Set clasped hands with Heru and crowning the king. Dig into this and one can learn the mysteries of this god. It's all of a piece, the same thing, just requiring the right understanding to find the elemental equation that is the god.

Now, obviously, within this sort of system, this conceptualisation, one can't have just one god. If we got nothing but hydrogen, the universe looks a hella lot different than it does now.

Reality can be seen as being made up of this complicated tangle of all of these fractalised deities, twined through each other, rubbing up against each other, this glorious profusion of blended iterations. Just about everything we run into is composite, a sticky fornication of thousands of different raw principles: is the mask on my wall the Other? Is it Transformation? Is it Creation? And that's just a superficial getting into it being a mask, without considering what face it contains.

And this reality, this twined-together mass of composite being, answers things like the "Problem of Evil" quite simply - in a world where the millions of different pure fractal being-concepts are all tugging in their own particular directions, the composite is not in for an easy time, simply because there are too many flows. And that's without getting into the fact that being-concepts can include things like Strife For Glory or perhaps Appease The Abyss. And some systems want to suggest that all these arguing-combining-twining fractals, that entire fecund pile of conceptual DNA with its frantic combinations and recombinations, is sort of an intercessory layer between the composite and the ultimate, but even if true, that's a long way off into actual practical irrelevance.

Why worship a god that is not omnipotent?

Why not ask, have you ever fallen in love?

This is not a flip question, this is the core question. To be in love with the messy tangle of reality, to maybe find in the twisting apparently-contradictory convolutions something that speaks to what one loves in the manifest universe, something that makes up a little of one's own compositeness, or maybe something that answers a part of that, meets the valence number of some loose end and energises a system -- to be in love with this and to accept that that means all of the things which are not tidy, friendly, which are not matters of perfect benevolence.

And if the gods are flawed in their incompleteness, their lack of encompassing all of everything and thus having unquestioned power over it, then They are flawed, but They have the virtues of Their flaws.

And the virtues of our flaws is something that we, finite, composite humans can aspire to.

* Verbing weirds language.

Living the Mystery

2009-06-26T01:44:00.005-05:00

Another Pagan Values Month post, now, which may be a wee bit more coherent than the last one.

I'm going to talk about mystery religion.

This is a matter of particular relevance to initiatory religions such as traditional Craft lines, but it's not unimportant to the reconstructionist lines either. A value most often explored in mystery work is the experiential exposure to the ineffable, and this is something that a lot of modern pagans value highly - as I mentioned yesterday, the whole concept of no intercessor is one of the things that a lot of pagans feel strongly about at some level.

First, a little terminology definition.

A mystery is, at its most straightforward, something which cannot be explained accurately; it can only be experienced, and afterwards offered explanations can actually make sense. Mysteries are not limited to the mystical or spiritual, though the ones that aren't are rarely described as mysteries, and the ones that are common human experience (sex, say) are often spiritualised by at least some people. The Greeks - who coined the term and set the stage for how we think of it - recognised two classes of mystery, the greater and the lesser. Lesser mysteries can be fucked up with spoilers, like a movie with a twist ending. Greater mysteries are immune to that sort of thing, because whatever experience is being evoked cannot be broken with partial preknowledge.

"Greater" and "lesser" may be misleading; I consider learning to turn while skiing a greater mystery. It's also my standard explanation for what a mystery is, so I will tell the story in brief: the one time I went downhill skiing, my parents sat me down and talked about their ski experiences, and explained to me how to turn. The explanation they gave was, "You go down, then up, then down." And they told me I would not understand this until I did it. I thanked them for their useless advice, went skiing, fell over a few times, and then I went down, and then up, and then down. And, as the koan ends, hearing this, the man was enlightened.

And those of you who have done downhill skiing will probably nod and understand this story entirely, because you have partaken of the Mystery; those of you who haven't will nod and smile and, perhaps, thank me for my useless advice.

We, obviously, know very little about ancient mysteries, because we haven't been down that hill. Some mysteries, such as the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, had huge populations of initiates, all of whom were earnestly sworn to utter secrecy about the content of the ritual. In other cases, though, we know a great deal about what was going on at the point that the mystery happened - but not necessarily enough to be sure we can reconstruct the mystery and have it happen again. We can try, but we can't be sure it will work.

(This actually came up in a conversation with a Canaanite reconstructionist a few years ago, who had done one portion of a well-recorded ancient ritual, and had a fellow practitioner say, "That was great, let's do the whole mystery next year!" In the end, my advice, which she wound up agreeing with, was to try adding factors from the historical record into what they actually did, and if the mystery happened, well, now they'd know the secret and could honestly say the time after that that this was a mystery initiation. If it didn't happen, they'd know they were missing something.)

Again, historically speaking, the mysteries were often presented as gifts from the gods, sacred treasures to enlighten, instruct, or transform the initiates - who might be the local citizenry, who might be devotees of the god who gave the mystery to the people, who might fit some other, more complicated criteria of citizenship, heritage, affiliation, role within the community. Initiates might be aware of each other as a sort of semi-secret society, or might have no further connection to each other than the shared experiential knowledge.

Now let us transfer to the modern day.

Many modern pagans are interested in experiential knowledge in various forms. I submit that this is one of the reasons for the popularity of modern Craft religion, as many of the principles thereof are rooted in the manifest world rather than the commonly interpreted as transcendent values of Christianity. (It is, of course, not this simple, and the treatment of Christianity as purely transcendent is erroneous. But that's off to the side, a bit.) I wrote, elsewhere, at one point, about Neb.y, that while He is not the storm, if one cannot encounter Him within the storm, He's not likely to be terribly findable, because the storm is an expression and manifestation of what Neb.y is. This is experiential knowledge; most pagan gods have similar manifestations that can be touched, felt, or known (and what Egyptian woman is not honoring Hetharu when she does her makeup?).

An interest in experiential knowledge almost inevitably leads to the Mysteries.

In many reconstructionist circles, people who claim to be performing the Mysteries are considered pretty fringe. The studious religion-with-homework attitudes of reconstruction tends to be very logic-brained, unlike the intuitive experience of the Mystery -- and, of course, we don't know how the Mysteries were conducted, for the most part. Someone who claims to be able to initiate you into the Eleusinian Mysteries is probably talking through their hat or their nether regions, because we have no data.

This doesn't stop the interest, it just treats some forms of it with contempt, causing unfortunate fractures within the community. There have always been and likely always will be people with a mystical bent, who will be interested in some form of mystery work; if that pursuit is made incompatible with reconstruction, these people will be driven out of reconstructionist work. And I think that's a major loss, because the sorts of stuff people can pull out of mystery work is the stuff that keeps a religion alive and engaged with the experiential world. Those people who take a reconstructionist-leaning attitude towards the Mysteries - that the gods will reveal whatever mysteries they think appropriate when the time is right - barely manage to stay within the fold, at times. Coloring within the lines becomes almost de rigeur for reconstructionists, unless they have sufficient clout within a community that people will take their inventions and revelations as just as good as historical information. Needless to say, I think that's unfortunate.

Of course, the initiatory mystery religions have the opposite problem. Instead of losing people who are trying to find an authentic mystery experience, they are accumulating people who don't think their mysteries are important. The historical and sociological reasons for this are fiddly to track down, but a lot of it comes down to the difficulty of articulating what a mystery is. In a culture where things written down are highly significant, this experiential process is denigrated. Further, in a culture where people think they should have access to anything they want (heard anyone say "Information wants to be free!" recently?), there are a lot of people who are deeply hurt when they're not accepted as candidates to experience a particular mystery. Religion is for everyone, right? It's universal! Only ... not so much.

Mystery paths, historically speaking, were mostly offshoots and side paths, away from the mainstream religion, something that the particularly interested would seek out. For those who didn't want the mystery investment, there was the mainline stuff they could do. For Craft religions, well, there was no mainline for a good long time. And now the Craft community is bewildered by all of the people out there claiming to be a part of their traditions who haven't actually encountered the mysteries - because they're inventing the mainline stuff, partially out of dribs and drabs of what people have let slip, partly out of whole cloth. When one's rooted in the assumption that the mystery is fundamental, this winds up looking tremendously messy - as well as unrooted in not only the actual meaning of the traditions thus transformed, but, potentially, reality. (And some of the more fascinating neo-Wiccan groups have some fascinating notions about reality ....)

I would not be surprised, in the long run, if the pagan world winds up with more people like me, with one foot in the reconstructionist camp, and one foot somewhere in mystery religion of some sort (whether Craft or not) -- looking to bring the possibility of repeatable ecstatic experience back into that book-crusted treatment of religion on the one hand, and matching modern religious expressions with ancient roots on the other. I'm not thinking in terms of the sort of "[Culture in the blank] Wicca" or whatever else might come to mind here, where a loosely Wiccish structure is meshed with a selection of gods from a particular culture (though I consider Ellen Cannon Reed's Circle of Isis an excellent book, even if alien - in part because she passes the god sniff test in her descriptions, rather than doing the common bastardisations of myths to fit an alien structure) but an actual syncretistic form that is really neither reconstruction nor straight-up mystery based religion.

And now I am up far too late, and Neb.y is storming gloriously at last, so I am posting and appreciating my experiential world.

They Have A Word For It

2009-06-24T23:54:00.006-05:00

Okay, let's shift some gears a little; I've been doing ancient history for a wee bit, and that's not going to be relevant to all the pagan values month folks. (This is still Egyptian theology, just applied. Heh.)

I was discussing with someone the other day names and roles for "the woo" (for general reference, a lot of 'the woo' is tagged 'madness in motion' in here); at other times I've discussed things like the meanings of the words "priest" and "witch". I wrote a while back about reconstructionist sensibilities and clergy roles, which is one of the reasons I'm not redoing it right now; go read that one if you want it. And I'm a student (currently on maternity leave) of a teacher in an initiatory Craft tradition, too, whole different sets of meanings in there - but my teacher loves words in a nicely Egyptian-theology-compatible way.)

And among the things that we need to do is figure out what the roles are for these words, what they mean, what shape they have in the world. There are assumptions about what people with titles will be doing in religion, defined in reaction to the surrounding culture and its hegemonial Christianity - that a clergy type, whatever title they have, whatever role, will conduct public services, provide pastoral counselling, do marriages, and so on. Even in religions where the clergy-types don't have that role officially, they often do it just because it's easier than arguing for cultural space to do it properly (I believe many of things that rabbis can do can, strictly speaking, be done by any adult Jewish male, for example).

So take a word like "priest". A lot of modern pagans accuse Christianity of requiring some sort of intermediary between the devotee and the divine, and thus talk about everyone being their own priest -- where "priest" means "someone who's able to talk to the divine without requiring an intermediary". (Never mind that "priesthood of all believers" is, y'know, a Protestant term and many of these people are coming from a Protestant background.) Which means there are a fuckton of pagan priest/esses running around, many of whom don't know their asses from their elbows.

I am reluctant to speak too much about the practices in religious witchcraft traditions, as I am not an initiate, and I am entirely too aware of the differences wrought by initiation and the understandings thereof. However, my understanding is that (in coven-based Craft traditions) the appropriate analogy is of a monastic order, in which a group of ordained people (and trainees) gather for the purpose of honoring and serving the divine in a shared context. (I am even more reluctant to speak about my own non-coven-based Craft tradition, because it is much more weirdly touchy to get that wrong. My teacher appreciates my quoting Terry Pratchett on witches, with comments such as "the natural size of a coven is one", though.) In any case, 'priest' here means someone who is dedicated to a particular mode of interaction with the divine, according to the strictures of the tradition.

"Priest" in Egyptian context means a servant of the god in the house of the god (the temple). The temple is the god's private estate, not open to generalised exploration. There are no services; there is no pastoral counselling. The rituals are for the benefit of the god and, more obliquely, the community, because the community is well-served when the god is pleased. It was, further, historically speaking a part-time job, and also often a sort of sinecure. I've done a godawful amount of religious work, and fought off the priest label because damnit, I am not the servant of any god in Their house. (The madness in motion sideways exception of that between myself and Neb.y is weirdly complicated, and I don't actually talk about it much even though there are times I'd kind of like to, but, y'know, a lot of people think that shit's crazy.)

Which means that I was left short of words for what it is that I do. Because what I do is in many ways more rabbinic than anything else: I'm a scholar, though self-taught, of the relevant texts, I make interpretations, and - perhaps most importantly - I expect people to argue with me, disagree with me, and go off and form their own fucking schools of thought because damnit, we need more thinking. One of these days I'll find a good Kemetic word for that, and then I'll have a title for my public work.

For now, I'm stuck with a sort of uncredentialed ministerial jobbie, which I whimsically refer to as being jackaled (this is like being hounded, only with more Anpu (Anubis)). (Though it's primarily Wepwawet (Ophois) that I deal with, people have at least heard of Anpu.) And a lot of that is what I'm doing here with my pagan values month series of posts: putting forth structure and underlying thought and giving people chewy things to take away and gnaw on, at least in theory, because that's what that particular job is all about. My pastoral counselling is interestingly nondenominational, not because I step out of my religious structure to do it, but because what gods - if any - the person who needs help deals with are completely irrelevant to the question. Wepwawet is the opener of the way; Anpu is the guide to the lost. If someone comes unstuck and finds their way, that's a win on the 'doing god's work' front for me.

Other things that people lose words for are devotional. One can see a lot of pagans looking for "their patron god/dess", without any sort of clarity on what that means to them. Some are seeking a personal relationship with some deity, which may or may not be in the offing. Others pull back to a more historically accurate sense that a patron is the god who looks over one's profession - and I will note that I consider Khnum mine, for all that I have not properly had my hands in clay for years. (Man, I want my studio set up.) Some would find Djehwty a more reasonable patron for a writer (inventor of writing, after all), but my writing is very much about creating worlds in many ways, and thus the maker of souls (Father of fathers, Mother of mothers) looks over my work.

I don't even have a word for how I'd characterise my devotion to Hetharu. In many ways, it's very much in keeping with the ancient structures of worship: the idea of attempting to embody the values of the deity in question. (A Greek travelling in Egypt commented that there was not a woman in Egypt who was not giving her due to Hethert by putting on her makeup, and wasn't that a remarkably devoted population! ... not that I'm femme enough to do makeup most of the time, but that's beside the point.) I do not fear service (obviously), and I can say I pledged myself to Her service some fifteen years ago at this point; I can point at the curve of my belly and talk about the goddess who governs motherhood right now, hell. But this is a subtle and personal thing, not clergy, not something that most people will ever meet clear and in the open, even. I do not fear the word "worship" as many pagans do, nor do I equate it with abasement and grovelling. I sort of hover around "devotee" a lot of the time, as "follower" is not strong enough.

I have no tidy segue for "witch", which is one of those words that rattles around and causes controversy. I was actually sort of peripherally discussing that with a friend recently, who commented that she doesn't care for the word because she thinks that it's used too much for historical shock value, that it's not a reclaimable concept. (I seem to recall that my liege feels similarly, though we haven't talked about it recently.) And it's a word I've been ambivalent about for a long time; for a while I would only self-describe with it using a modifier - specifically "kitchen witch", which describes my style pretty appropriately, as my magical remedies for burns include live aloe plants. (And similar such approaches.) I'm not actually sure what started to shift me on that front, away from the 'this is not me' thing, aside from my deeper Craft studies and perhaps reading too much Terry Pratchett. I don't use it often, and I still often use it modified -- but it's not an entirely alien space anymore.

As posts go, this is not a terribly coherent arc of one, but whatever. I'm allowed to blither on a bit every so often. I think I hit my high points, someone else can fix the transitions. Summary: words mean things. Think about what they damn well mean. Use nuance. Build the world true.

With All This Bathwater, There Has To Be A Baby In Here Somewhere

2009-06-22T02:52:00.002-05:00

For this round of pagan values month, I'm going to spend some time gnawing at the differences between ancient and modern worldviews and explore a bit about what that requires of the modern practitioner, on the thinky thoughts dimension. Obviously, I'll be drawing primarily on my own religious background here, but a lot of this is applicable to others, and thus a lot of it will be written generically.

First of all, and perhaps most subtle in its effects: we are, for the most part, not living in communities of co-religionists, let alone tribes or nations. Most pagans were raised in other religions, or none at all; many of us are at a loss for how - or if - to raise our children with our own traditions, if we even have formulated traditions that might be appropriate for children. We can have no city-wide festivals as were done in the ancient Mediterranean, let alone the sort of city festivals that drew celebrants from all over the country as was the case at times in Egypt.

We are not surrounded by people who believe and practice as we believe and practice; in fact, many of us feel the need to hide ourselves for fear of repercussions. Even when we can gather in groups of other pagans, that does not mean that we can gather with co-religionists, and public festivals frequently take on a neo-Wiccan or similarly flavored tone because that is one of the few things that most participants might be aware of. (In some cases, the only thing that some of the participants know.) Our families and communities are for the most part not of our religion - though in some cases, they may be different pagan religions - and in fact many of the places that put an emphasis on primarily having relationships with co-religionists have alarming, cult-like tendencies towards insularity and isolation.

The difference this wreaks on the practice of reconstructed religion is both huge and subtle. Much of the information we have, when we have information, is dependent on the large-scale, the cultural assumptions being in line, the public festival in which entire communities participate, and we do not have these things. We have to find and adapt these things to the scale on which we live - an individual, a family, maybe a small working group - often in the absence of any significant knowledge of how an individual might have thought of the gods, might have constructed religious duty, might have acted in their home. We can guess, we can extrapolate, but this is new construction inspired by the old, not the way they did it in the olden days.

Related to this: the philosophy of the individual is far more thoroughly developed than it was in the past. Most people likely to read this are not typically thinking in terms of where they fit into their tribe, or their heirarchy, or the complicated social dynamics that come of living in more or less the same place among more or less the same people for a lifetime. Yes, the ancients thought in terms of individual needs, individual prowess, and so on, but they were also members of coherent peoples with complex layers of family, clan, ethnic, social ties. When we read an ancient text that mentions deferring to superiors and being gracious to inferiors, we do not read it as they did; we have different ego-boundaries and senses of place. We do not necessarily live within a short walk of our closest kin, and thus do not think of one of our souls as the same as our family. Many decisions are based on individual need and desire, rather than social patterns - and while many people think there is a 'cult of the individual' that has gone too far, that is, again, an individual's opinion. The very nature of conversion would probably be utterly alien to most ancients, and most modern pagans are converts.

Ancestor veneration, reverence for that family soul? What does it mean to people who have limited family ties due to mobility, due to feeling that past generations were unethical or unworthy, due to simply not knowing where they came from? What does it mean to mongrelised people, with ethnic ties sweeping across huge swaths of continents? What does it mean to people whose more immediate ancestors would likely not approve of such veneration in the first place? What place do honored elders who are not of our kin and clan have, if any, on our western shrines?

If the worldviews we wish to touch are born of particular lands, climates, and situations, how can we properly know them in a completely different context? I do not live in Egypt; I don't even live in a landscape dominated by a river, nor one with the stark twinned dualism of its landscape. For all that I resonate spiritually with these ideas, I do not have them engraved onto my understanding of the world the way someone who lived in that land would do.

And, to conclude, because it's totally late and I should have been asleep hours ago: we have the wrong information. It doesn't even matter what information we have, whether drawn out of old texts, extrapolated from art, recorded by historians or monks or whatever; it's not the information we need. We don't know what the information we need is, because it's about how to bridge between the old and the new. We may know a lot about how a divine king can rule over a unified, heirarchical, and ritualised society geared towards a particular envisioning of how to honor and serve a particular set of gods; we don't know jack about how a diasporic scattering of converts in a society of entangled and separated loyalties can build a functional model that is true to that original world without recapitulating it, because attempting to recapitulate it as it was is dumb.

No Dark Sarcasm In the Classroom

2009-06-16T23:51:00.003-05:00

The children of the literate classes in Egypt were taught reading and writing by rote repetition. Many of the texts that they copied over and over again were instructions on proper behaviour, and thus literacy came with pedantic instruction in local values. So, for this Pagan Values Month post, I will explore one of these texts with an eye to general overview. I have chosen The Wisdom of Amenopet for this purpose, rather than selecting from multiple texts; link provided for those who want to see a translation. (For those who want to know what specific translation I'm working with, I'm using Ancient Egyptian Literature: An Anthology with translations by John L. Foster because it happens to be my book of Egyptian writings near the computer at the moment.) Traditionally speaking, these wisdom texts were supposed to have been written by ancient sages for the proper instruction of their sons.

(A value of reconstruction: citing sources.)

One can see in Amenopet's writing that he lived in, and valued, a society that was ordered, heirarchical, polite, and prudent. He treats the gods as a given, declaring that truth is a matter of the God's love (the offering most commonly presented to the gods in wall decoration is a figurine of Ma'at, representing truth and justice, among other things), and expects his son to appreciate each day as the gift of the gods, as such is far wiser than sinking into mundane expectation that one day is just like another.

He has a great deal of advice on how to deal with people in a civil manner. He disapproves of snarky messages (either sending them or appreciating them), which probably has me in trouble. He suggests the generally prudent values of not arguing with hotheads, leaving the quarrelsome's generalised bitchiness in the hands of the gods, being generally polite with opponents, and not giving enemies an excuse to go overt with hostilities. He disapproves of negative gossip and suggests that his son should speak the good he knows of others, not the ill; in fact, he suggests avoiding abrasiveness in conversation altogether (there's another rough one). He disapproves of eavesdropping on judges and government officials.

Simple politeness expands to a certain generosity of spirit in Amenopet's eyes. He suggests taking time out of a workday to speak to widows, lending an arm to drunken old men and giving them the support that their children might provide if they were present, and forgiving two-thirds of the debts held by the poor. If there is beer in his son's jug, he ought not turn away a thirsty stranger. His son is encouraged not merely to not cheat the laborers of their fair day's wages (Egyptian laborers were paid in food) but to measure out their meals as if he were laying out food for a friend. Care and charity for the poor ought to be greater than debt to the mighty, and judging the poor should be done without harshness. If life is a ferry ride, he is not to leave people behind at the dock, should not worry too much about collecting fares, and should take his fair turn at the oar without demanding special treatment. It is unjust to use power to oppress those who do not have it, and Amenopet specifically mentions widows and the elderly in that category; he also objects to mocking the disabled.

He has a lot to say about living in a just society. He lists off a dozen different forms of fraud in order to say "don't do any of these": moving boundary-stones, falsifying weights, crafting false weights, falsifying writings, altering scales and balances, changing proportions of measures. On top of this he notes that messing with the planting of another man's land produces no benefit, but cultivating that man's good will does. He disapproves of associating with swindlers and thieves. He disapproves of threats and bribes, though he will allow as how it may be wise to speak what praise one can for someone who offers a bribe ... in case they come back. He goes so far as to suggest that one should not accuse others of criminal behaviour, for one does not know what motivated their actions; I imagine one 24601 would have appreciated that one. He suggests neither accepting favors from the powerful nor harassing the weak in their name.

There is a delicate balance of status to be navigated here, as well. It is important to know one's place; it is also possible that, by doing good, a god will chose to elevate one's station. This is not to be counted upon or begged for, because pleading for such things proves an unworthiness. One should not hang out in bars looking for someone important to latch on to and toady to, nor should one hold back dues to the temple in the hope of accumulating more. One should not covet the goods of the poor, for they have enough damn problems; instead, look after them. Nor should one covet the goods of the rich, for if the rich man asks one to administer his property, how could one do that honorably if one wants it for one's own? Both seeking wealth and seeking poverty are inappropriate in Amenopet's view of the world: a properly balanced personality will be provided with the gods with sufficiency, and wealth aside from that is a matter of luck or fate.

There is a great deal, as well, about putting on a correct social face. Some of this reflects the heirarchical nature of Egyptian society: to not criticise the conversations of the great, to not eat before a nobleman, to not backtalk superiors, to remember that a servant will serve a master's interests. At the same time, he advocates a certain set of attitudes so that his son's reputation will be a protection to him: his integrity should be so publically known that it is a comfort to his neighbors. He should be a good friend; if a friend is troubled, he should neither silence nor provoke into greater agitation, but rather let the friend speak, hear the issues with an understanding of where that friend is coming from, and attempt to bring about peace through listening. Amenopet holds the good will and good speech of others to be more valuable than the contents of storehouses. Another line I will simply quote from the translation, for it is too fantastic to paraphrase: "A strong arm is not weakened by discretion, nor is one's back made safe by bowing."

The Egyptian focus on truthfulness is clear throughout the writing. Not merely falsehood is denigrated, but the specifics of speaking false praise, of keeping quiet about one's goals so that others will be unable to interfere with them, and passing false laws get their own mentions. He is against not merely perjury, but babbling on in court. Goals achieved by lies are rotten in the heart, he says - the heart, the shrine of right action - and will come to no good in the end.

There is, further, a thread of prudence throughout the work. Take care of your health, Amenopet tells his son. Sleep on it before you speak. Pursue self-sufficiency in your fields, for work well-done brings the most satisfaction, and it is better to stand on your own feet than be dependent or deceive for sustenance. Do not overeat and indulge to excess, and do not associate with those who do. (Amenopet would not have approved of certain aspects of Roman high society.) You cannot know what tomorrow will bring, and you are of this time, not any other; live accordingly.

So. A set of values put forth by an Egyptian sage, and inculcated in generations of schoolboys.

Price of Power

2009-06-15T20:45:00.003-05:00

Here's some more Pagan Values Blogging, specifically dealing with the concept of rulership/leadership. Here is a reconstructionist approach, for those who are less familiar with the process of reconstruction; I look at the texts and evidence of the ancients, what they thought was the right thing to do, in order to derive an understanding that can be applied to the now.

Obviously, in a system that was, effectively, a theocracy mediated through a half-divine king, the concepts of rule and leadership were tightly intertwined with religion. Many of the royal duties were to perform ceremonial functions bound up with the gods' obligation to maintain the balance and function of the universe; in fact, many of those duties could only be performed by the king or his special delegates in the temples.

In the oldest days of dynastic Egypt, much was done solely in the name of the king as the son of the sun, by fiat, divine right as it were. In the turmoil of the First Intermediate Period, though, "I am in charge because I am in charge" lost a lot of its lustre; the nomarchs (local rulers) started to write tomb biographies explaining why they were the rightful rulers. It was not enough that they ruled and thus had the blessings of the gods; they established that the proof of the blessings of the gods was in how they ruled. That they upheld order and ruled properly showed that the gods had chosen them; that they were successful as caretakers of the people was proof of their worthiness to rule.

(Keep in mind that tomb inscriptions are basically propaganda, so that the afterlife judges will think the best of the official buried there. However, it's worth seeing what the ancients thought worthy of putting forth as propaganda.)

So, for example...

Nomarch Ankhtifi:

Heru (presumably of Edfu) asked Akhtifi to reestablish the rulership of the nome of the House of Khuu, and the rightness of this divine order is proven through its accomplishment. And how is that deed accomplished?

- the previous administrator, characterised as "a rebel and a wretch", was deposed (and history is written by the victors)
- peace was made between the survivors of murder victims and those who had done them harm (if I'm reading that line right)
- the hungry were fed; the naked were clothed
- those without oil for protecting their skin from the sun were anointed
- the barefoot were given sandals
- the unwed "were given" wives
- not only were the people of this nome fed in time of famine, but travellers from other nomes could trade for food

So: a justice system is reestablished, the needy are taken care of, there is no starvation, families were founded. (One does wonder about the opinions of the wives thus given, though.) Basically, the justification for the claim that the god willed this rulership is that the ruler took care of the people of the nome.

Nomarch Henku:

- fed the hungry, obviously a popular concern, including provisions for cattle
- depopulated towns were reestablished, and their proper organisation reaffirmed
- property rights were protected
- and he says he was a pretty nice guy

A little more bourgeois, this list, but much in the same mode: people were able to live good lives under his rule, so clearly he did it right.

Nomarch Tefibi:

- people were safe on the roads from bandits, brigands, and other evildoers
- the king was defended from rebels (in this time period, there was a lot of dispute over who was a proper king anyway; many nomarchs had their personal preferences)
- the temples flourished and proper offerings were made to the gods

This fellow had a rather militaristic attitude, and most of his tomb inscription talks about his success as a warrior in support of the king, but the support of both the ordinary person who would rather not be robbed and the proper heirarchy is present.

We also get a mention of the temples, which were, in many ways, the centres of the Egyptian economy. Not only did they serve as local collection points for tax money and redistribution of wealth to the needy, the temples were sources of education, trained medical practitioners, and similar professional-class services, and supported communities of artisans. If Egypt was a place of great culture and luxury, the means for that was largely focused through the religious structure.

Nomarch Kheti:

- built monuments
- supplied water where there had not been water access
- made sure grain harvests were plentiful
- provided tariff rebates (presumably to people in economic distress)
- cattle, again, and apparently magic extra-special fertile cattle which can certainly be chalked up to tomb inscriptions being propaganda pieces
- military competence
- shipbuilding
- speaker of truth
- close to the king

So this one, in addition to the standard "keeping people fed" procedures, offered public works products, support for local industry, tax rebates, and the suggestion that he had an in with the royal family that could be played for local advantage. Thus, we have introduced political awareness into the qualifications for rulership.

So what can we say, conclusively, about the theology of power here? That a theologically correct ruler will demonstrate that correctness in action; that the most important (or at least most consistently mentioned) action is the feeding of the hungry; that justice and public safety are established and reliable; that the economy is stable. The good ruler, in this system, proves the worth of that rule by the well-being of his people: their health, safety, security, and wealth.

And there is the religious justification for power, the thing that the heirarchy is intended to produce in all of that talk about social order and the right way to do things.

Health, safety, security, and wealth. These are the fruits of power well-applied.

I will conclude by quoting Sheshi:

I have come from my town;
I have descended from my nome;
I have done justice for its lord;
I have satisfied him with what he loves.
I spoke truly; I did right;
I spoke fairly; I repeated fairly;
I seized the right moment,
so as to stand well with people.
I judged between two so as to content them;
I rescued the weak from one stronger than he
as much as was in my power.
I gave bread to the hungry, clothes ...
I brought the boatless to land.
I buried him who had no son;
I made a boat for him who lacked one.
I respected my father; I pleased my mother;
I raised their children.
So says he whose nickname is Sheshi.

(I think next I will write about Wisdom Literature. I'll note I'll probably not write about the Negative Confessions, because I expect that most Egyptian recon types will wind up wanting to write about the Negative Confessions and there's a whole big heap of other stuff out there for exploring the concepts of values.)

Ear to the Ground

2009-06-13T13:49:00.003-05:00

Okay, some serious theological musings now, without pop culture at all. Next in the Pagan Values Month blogging.

Value systems evolve in environments.

This is both more and less complicated than modern ecopaganism (the ancients, as I have noted many times, really stank at environmentalism); rather than a straightforward concern about preserving the health of systems with a modern understanding of how they work, those values are derived from those systems, grow up as a part of them.

I am going to paint a landscape for you now.

Start with the river, a pulsing, throbbing artery that cuts through the land. Everything here focuses around the river, not just in the way that its banks are bathed in seasonally refreshed fertile land, but the way it divides the world into halves: east and west, upstream and downstream. Imagine it clogged with boats, little reed things most of them, with the occasional hefty barge made mostly from imported wood. The current flows north; the wind blows south; the great highway of the river is made to connect the place its feet are sunk in cataracts with its mouth. It is full of fish and fowl, yes, and also dangerous animals, whether predator or simply huge by human scale. The banks are covered with flowers and useful plants. The river is a living, essential entity; its god is painted in blues and greens, with pendulous fertile breasts and a great well-fed belly, and His crown is made of reeds like those that the people pluck from His banks.

Expand out, now, from this view of the river, and look at the land, its stark divisions. The fertile strip runs along the fat blue god's sides, covered in fields, fruit trees, gardens, sliced through with canals, all feeding grain and flax and vegetables. The range of floral scents is amazing; travellers from foreign lands come here in search of perfumes. And beyond that rich wealth of fertility, there is the stark desert, punctuated with monuments and tombs and graves, reaching to the horizon under the cloudless sky. Out here there is wealth, for those who brave the starkness, of a different kind: wealth of metal and gemstone and quarried rock. The two lands, it is called, the red land of the hostile and protective desert; the black land of rich life.

Sky and earth are similarly starkly divided, for the horizon is painfully sharp in the desert, and for all the rich wet central heart around the river, this is a desert land. Day and night are sharp and clear.

Let time pass. Watch the red land swell and grow and swallow up the fields in its time, the river dwindle. Watch the river swell again, in a great surge that devours the encroaching desert, bringing with it not just the new year's rich earth but malaria and other plague, a dual-edged sword of life and death. Watch the river secede, now, and the people clear their fields and once again plant flax, wheat, barley, cabbages, onions.

This is the land of the Nile, in ancient days.

What are the values of this land?

Look at it, see how it is divided into pairs: east and west, north and south, riverland and desert, earth and sky, fertility and starkness, life and death, all in the same packages. See how these pairs dance with each other, sometimes one ascendant, sometimes the other, all in intense, dynamic balance. This is not a land that lends itself to easy absolutes, not in a place where the river's rising brings disease that may kill your children or might swallow the foundation of your house and wash it away, nor a place where the terrifying and dangerous desert both holds wealth and forms a barrier that foreign raiders so rarely dare to cross. It is a place where twinned forces, equal and opposite, dance with each other in perfect balance, and the greatest value is that balance. All cosmic energies have ambivalent natures, even the ones that seem most friendly, and are dangerous out of their proper place.

It is a precarious land, balanced entirely on the grace of that androgynous reed-crowned god, and yet its wealth is amazing. In a good year, and most years are good, it can produce more food than it needs to feed itself, even while supporting the presence of many craftsmen, priests, scholars, artisans. That precariousness is aligned so perfectly, though, that it reveals an obvious divine order; why else would the wind blow so consistently southward, letting travellers reach the inner cities of Egypt by raising sails, and return to the Great Green simply by letting the current carry them? And thus it is apparent that so long as that divine order is preserved, maintained, encouraged, there will be wealth almost beyond imagining, and people will lead happy lives. The price for falling out of balance is harsh and generally immediate; the bounty of right action is equally dramatic.

And so this is what their land taught that set of ancients: that the world was made of synergistically opposing forces, in the center of which is the perfect balance of utter abundance. That even the most benevolent power might have a bitter edge, and even the most dangerous have worthy and valuable secrets. That preserving the order laid forth in these monumental terms was a delicate line to walk, and that falling from order was ruinous. That all these powers were necessary, a part of the intricate design that made for the land of Egypt, Gift of the Nile.

And thus we find, when we dig further, that the concept of order, also of justice, rightness, right action, truth, is represented as a feather: a delicate thing, light and balanced. And we find that in the end, people's hearts are laid in the scales to see if they have lived in the center of balance, held all the interconnected forces with appropriate love and appropriate fear, and thus was abundant rather than scarce.

This is what that land taught.

I do not live in that land. I live in the land where the Three Sisters teach the lesson of balance and synergy, not where those lessons are writ to the scale of giants. My bones are New England granite, and my land teaches me endurance, stability, order, ritual, and pattern in its own language. My bones are New England granite, and my heart is full of the dance of loving brothers in constant opposition.

And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.

2009-06-12T23:50:00.006-05:00

I have no coherent response to this abomination presented by the current administration and its homophobic lackeys on the 42nd anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia, at least not one that does not require that I explore whole new realms of expletive. (This link, being from an actual lawyer, rather than AmericaBlog, may be more palatable to some; it points out that, among other things, the executive is obligated to defend extant laws if they are legally defensible, though it is not obligated to be an asshole doing it.) (Another link: Pam's House Blend. There are a lot of links around; I'm going to stop snagging them. There are difficulties with the arguments in some of them ('cousin marriage' is not the same as 'incest', for example) but that does not make the whole thing less disgusting.)

I have had a simple response, one that I intend to supplement by actual writing of a paper letter to the White House, but it is a simple and elegant enough response that I would like to suggest it to the broader world.

I went to the White House contact form and sent them this quotation, with my own supplemental commentary:

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about. --Mildred Loving

Shame on you.

On this day of all days.

I would like to suggest to all my thirty-three and a third readers who care about the administration's reprehensible defense of DOMA that they, at minimum, pop over to the White House contact form and quote Mildred Loving.

Embracing the Shadow

2009-06-11T00:35:00.003-05:00

This was not the post I was expecting to write next for the Pagan Values Month blogging thing, but the post I will be linking to is just too beautiful to let slip away.

Both of the religions that I follow have, in places, an aesthetic of duality. There are repeated myths of the siblings or pairs, exact opposites, exact equals; their conflicts, their parallelisms, the fundamental creative tension between the self and the shadow, however one defines the self, however one defines the shadow. The thing that comes closest to expressing this in common consciousness is the yin-yang symbol: the two shapes curling around each other, each having a spot of the other at its core, the essentiality of both of them.

What does it mean to be in a world in which one's opposite is one's beloved brother, in which love and conflict build the glorious?

Hold that thought.

I will now take a turn into the ridiculous and talk about this past season of American Idol. And in the end, when this thought embraces its shadow, it will achieve the sublime.

I'm not much of a reality TV person - I'm not much of a TV person at all, let alone specific manifestations thereof - but my family wound up watching much of the end of this season of American Idol. There is a whole cultural thing tangled up around this, but our household attachment to the drama orbited around the three figures who were the final three contestants left standing. We talked about musical skill, we talked about impressions, we talked about what we liked and did not like about the voices of the performers, and we talked about the nature of the contest, the way the judges attempted to skew results to get particular performers to pass to the next week or off the show.

And we were cheered every week one Kris Allen managed to beat expectations, beat the harsh criticisms of the judges, stay on the show despite having someone we felt had an inferior voice and a far inferior attitude consistently pimped as a superior singer. Adam Lambert's progress was almost a given, so his continued victories were simply a sign that the world was functioning as it ought, but Kris Allen's progress was another story, one with actual dramatic tension, pitting him primarily against Danny Gokey, the other 'Christian contestant' and obvious judge favorite.

And the narrative in some circles was not the music, it was the package the music came in. Here's the big story: the flamboyant, theatrical gothling who was, in a phrase I saw recently, born fabulous, but whose unmistakable vocal brilliance and skills overcame whatever reticence some might have about his outrageousness; the down-to-earth Christian performer with a traditional relationship background. But which one of the latter?

In the end, it was Kris Allen.

And now I direct you to An Unapproved Road and a post titled We Get To Carry Each Other, from which I will quote (found via The Moderate Voice):

I know next to nothing about Kris Allen’s non-musical life, except that he’s married, he calls himself Christian and he’s done missionary work across the world. I heard about the exchanges among the other contestants that made reference to what is supposedly “godly” and right in relationships, but Kris’s name wasn’t part of that. I don’t know what kind of Christianity he practises, or how he envisions his God. I do know this: he declares himself Christian to the television audience – i.e. to the world; and he freely, publicly, verbally, and especially non-verbally, loves Adam Lambert like a brother.

and

In an interview the day after the finale, Adam departed from the usual breezy soundbytes required of him to emphasize what he felt was most important about the competition -- that the friendship and respect between himself and Kris might be an example for others in transcending difference, for the reward of becoming enriched by it.

Now do you see why I started out talking theology and then started babbling about American Idol?

(Go read that post, by the way. I mean it. It's gorgeous. Read at least some of the comments, too. Like this one.)

Look at the glorious nature of the duality. Look at the one young man, pianist and guitarist and singer-songwriter sort of voice, skilled musician, dedicated Christian; look at the other young man, whose coming out as gay in Rolling Stone isn't so much a revelation as an incidental footnote that he throws out on his way to 'Let me talk about my music.' Look at some of the narratives about the heartland vs. the coasts, culture and counterculture, down home vs. the clubbing scene, modest and self-effacing vs. charisma that can smack ya like a club, all the ways these two young men were supposed to be at each other's throats. One could imagine introducing them, telling each, "This is your Shadow. This is the Other. This is Not Like You."

And we are so readily taught that when there is that division between the two, that they are enemies, that there is hostility: this is the story of heaven and hell. This is not that; that is not this; they are locked in an eternal combat, jaws locked on each other's throats. This is everywhere, in politics (an us-and-them display if ever there was one, these days), in social things, all over the place, this antagonism between Self and Shadow.

But Self and Shadow are reflections off the same divide; that which is other to me is my negative space, the shape of the world that embraces. It can conflict, yes, but it can also twine and reveal the most amazing things, things like the friendship of two young musicians who recognised across that line that their exact differences made them, in the end, exactly alike.

In the tension between Self and Shadow, the world sings.

Frameworks and Fireworks

2009-06-06T18:04:00.005-05:00

I want to start off by linking this post, which I think is overall excellent.

Unfortunately, I read all the comments, so I can't just enthuse about it. Damnit. I wanted to just point and say this is cool, go read it.

But there's an argument thread in there that wants to talk about things like "all men are potential rapists", which isn't what the post is about at all; and while that's not as bad as the more extreme form, it's still ... not a thing that is protective of me, not something that helps me come to terms with my experience as a survivor.

This isn't a warning about the universe. No; this is a scalpel sliding blame and responsibility under the flesh to make sure the scarification stays sharp. If "all men are potential rapists", then if I want to be safe from rape, perhaps I should consider not associating with any men. Need to be a good little penis policeman, after all.

Except, you know, all people are potential rapists. Gendering it creates a heirarchy of survivors, makes some victims more real than others. Rape is not just sexist. Rape is racist. Rape is transphobic. Rape is homophobic. Rape is anti-sex-worker. Rape is ablist. Rape is a thing that sprawls across all kinds of intersectional social differentials, including some I haven't mentioned here, including ones that don't have tidy words for them. (What's the ism for the socially awkward nerdy guy who was raped and expected to be grateful for it? Not a hypothetical; I know at least one.) And not all the enforcers who use rape are men.

And I can read comment threads where people talk about having their bisexuality slide closer and closer to lesbian the more they think about this, and I wind up alienated and tearful, because I know maleness doesn't cause this thing. It's a social defect that winds up in people, and while it may be overwhelmingly more common in men because of privilege and the nature of the crime, that doesn't make it not a people thing.

I read that post right after reading a post in which a friend commented that her mother keeps patting her ass whenever she bends over and giggling about the discomfort it causes. I don't know about how you conduct things back on Earth, but here on Gehenna that's a sexually-tinged assault at best, made all the more creepy and fucked up by being something a parent is inflicting on their child and deriving some sort of perverse gratification from. Tell me this isn't contributing to rape culture. I want to see you say it and keep a straight face.

And if you can say it to me -- go say it to the young autistic woman who is trying to figure out what "normal" behaviour is, who has only just realised that maybe being randomly groped might actually be beyond the pale.

And, y'know, the power - and responsibility - to say "What the hell is wrong with you?" for attempting sexual assault and rape is not something that rests solely on men. It's a people thing, because if there's a 'rape culture', it's not just guys who are stuck in it.

So with Cereta, I'm gonna call on us all to be That Guy. Because there aren't enough stories of people getting other people to can the rape-promoting bullshit, and to stop people who want to perpetuate rape culture before rapes happen.

Some Basic Historical Pagan Values From Various Places

2009-06-05T13:51:00.006-05:00

This is the first of a set of posts that I'm going to be making for International Pagan Values Blogging Month, because I think this is important stuff to be going at, for one, and also because I've been too much of a ranty bitch here and I'd rather talk religion and theology for a while.

I'm writing this from a generic perspective before digging into things from my own traditions; these aren't going to be true for all pagan religions, or anything, but they're sort of first-order true historically (requiring back of the envelope calculations to correct). As someone with a reconstructionist sensibility who is also kind of amorphous and blurry, I find this sort of thing a useful place to start out from.

I've started a 'pagan values month' tag in case some of these don't get hooked up into the blogfest correctly or something. The ancients were great believers in backups and all.

So. A few points of general historical interest, possibly a little whimsical in presentation.

Our ancestors knew what they were doing. They are also, due to being our ancestors, our closest allies in the spirit world, and, being in the spirit world, probably have a better handle on all this numinous shit than we do. Keeping on their good side is smart, as they're the best allies we've got when the weird goes down.

For a more modern perspective: Most reconstructionist paganisms include some level of ancestor veneration. Further, the entire concept of reconstructionism is based on a form of "our ancestors knew what they were doing", the idea that these old religions actually had some stuff sorted out and we can start working from that basis. Even non-reconstruction pagan religions often have forms of inherited lore and tradition, as well as some level of ancestor veneration. This is all, of course, rendered much more complicated by shifts in the nature of tribal identity in the West, having known specific ancestors who were real jackasses, or having people who feel like ancestral figures without any particular blood tie. People muddle through, in the end.

The gods don't care whether you believe in Them any more than the rocks care if you believe in them, the panther in the forest cares if you believe in it, or your cousin Sam cares for that matter. What they care about is whether or not you treat Them properly and do what They want, much like the rocks and your cousin Sam (the panther is well-aware that you're unlikely to do what it wants, especially if you have a spear on you, but remains hopeful that you won't). Your community cares, too, because they can see whether or not you do the right stuff, and the gods occasionally have a blast radius.

For a more modern perspective: Most pagan religions are orthopraxic. Some are militantly orthopraxic, knee-jerk responding to a culture that puts an unbalanced amount of weight on belief by refusing to consider systematisations of thought as relevant. Even in a community that has a healthier balance, it is entirely likely that there will be a number of different beliefs within that community, much as the ancient world had people who had philosophical perspectives on the nature of the gods living alongside people who had belief in the gods as entities and various other shades of meaning. For many of the religions with a strong basis in historical cultures, there is a sense of shared community practice; while people will have their own personal practices and devotions, religion is a matter of public ritual as well. This is one of the things that is actively different for a lot of modern pagans, due to the diasporic and convert-based nature of the religions in question.

It is blatantly obvious that different people deal with different gods. Why, if everyone had the same gods, it'd be much harder to tell our tribe from their tribe, and that Just Wouldn't Do. (Besides, these gods are our oldest ancestors/creators/etc., and they didn't beget/make/etc. them.) And there's no point in making other people worship our gods, really, because that would be like adopting them into the family, and we don't actually like them all that much and we don't want them over here thinking like they're as good as the rest of us. Let 'em have their second-rate gods, and let 'em have them over there.

For a more modern perspective: most pagans are not big fans of proselytisation. I suspect that in all honesty this has a lot more to do with feeling harassed by a dominant culture of pimped conversion than anything with historical basis; however, the closest thing we have to a conversion culture in the Western pagan world is the Romans, who tended to declare various local gods equivalent to various of their gods, say, "Do these rituals this way or we'll stomp you some more", and go away. At least in theory, pagans are not threatened by people with different gods, beliefs, and practices; in practice, well ... the difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference.

Sometimes those foreigners from the tribe over there actually have a cool god. (They probably stole it from us back before we remember.) Well, cool gods are cool; we can worship that too. We may even come up with a story of how that god relates to our gods if we feel like it.

For a more modern perspective: For all that many modern pagans rant and rail about god-borrowing and similar practices, they are ancient. Even without getting into the major things like the aforementioned Romans or Graeco-Egyptian syncretism or anything else, people nicked gods from their neighbors all the time. And with modern communication and the research of lost cultural traditions, just about everyone is everyone's neighbor these days. A historically-based practice will likely center on a particular cultural grouping of gods, yes, but a smattering of other gods is far from implausible.

Gods tend to live in particular areas. It's rude to not give the ones in the area one lives in proper respect when one travels.

For a more modern perspective: most modern pagans no longer consider major gods to be strictly bound to particular locations. (Gods of locations are a different story, of course. They tend not to move much.) Nonetheless, They have places They are strong in, whether the homes of individual people, houses of worship, etc. Unfortunately, the value of giving care and attention to local powerful gods is not one that has really carried over into modern paganism, perhaps because it would obviously, in many cases, require being polite to Christians.

Gods are embodied. Not simply, the way people are, but in a complex interlacing of forms and appearances. The sun is not the sun-god, but if you can't perceive the sun-god by observing the sun, that's not a terribly effective sun-god, is it? (But at the same time, that same sun-god may be embodied in an icon, a sacred animal, and so on; learning to see the gods in all their forms is an important mental thing.

For a more modern perspective: The word that gets thrown around a lot is "immanent", in opposition to "transcendent". God is in us, and in the environment, and all this. Now, the ancients kind of sucked at environmentalism in general, but their basic attitude was in many places that all kinds of things (animals, plants, and natural phenomena) might happen to be the current form of a god going about godly business, and thus worthy of respect and cautious treatment. Many also crafted icons to house gods when gods wanted to drop in in humanish ways; these were later degraded as "idols" by people who figured that a god in a body was limited.

Gods are not omniscient. Nor are They omnipotent. (Though They may approach these things within their particular domains of interest.) They are certainly not omnibenevolent. They have Their own agendas, and those agendas are Their primary concern. They may offer help to people if that forwards Their agendas, or if those people are perceived as useful; it's just as common for people to wind up caught between a major divine personality conflict, or just haphazardly hurt by an agenda. In short, gods are a lot like people. Just, y'know, really big ones.

For a more modern perspective: the gods aren't going to fix you, make everything all better, or otherwise cuddle you through your problems. Sometimes you have to deal with shit under your own power. This is a big deal for people who are raised in a culture in which the Problem of Evil is a major underlying philosophical concern: where is an all-powerful, all-good deity when you really need one? "Jesus with tits" paganism is ahistorical, in other words, and frequently abuses the names of gods Who aren't inclined to agree. Like other people, gods aren't perfectly reliable, and They don't have infinite patience either.

Worship is making a deal. God doesn't do what you want? Withhold the sacrifices. This is a contract, and there are rules and principles.

For a more modern perspective: honestly, a lot of modern pagans are really uncomfortable with the sorts of compulsions that the ancients would put on the gods. But one of the standard sorts of prayers we have recorded (on shards and other things) goes something like, "If you do this thing for me, I'll sacrifice this for you" or some similar service. And a lot of other things are, "If you don't return things to the way they should be, the rituals will stop." The god-impersonation intrinsic to Egyptian theurgy makes a lot of people kind of squeamish.

Ngh, that's what I got for now. I'm probably missing a few, but what the hell, if I keep digging at this until I unearth everything in my head that might fit I'll never get anywhere.

Who Does This?

2009-06-03T16:46:00.003-05:00

My mother invited herself up for a visit.

This isn't the funny part.

The information I had was "Sometime after Memorial Day" and "My roommate may need to be near there on June 1 if she takes that internship". To which my response was, okay then, I'll try to get my brain armorplated by that time.

So last Thursday I get an email from her saying, "Don't bother calling me, I'm heading out on Saturday to visit people!" Not a personal email, a mass mail to twenty or thirty people.

... okaaaay.

Time passes.

Monday afternoon, the phone rings, and my powerful psychic skills say, "That's my mother," and so I leave it to go to voicemail. And lo! It is my mother.

She wants to come up Wednesday and stay through Friday.

This isn't the funny part.

Wednesday: birth class. Thursday: preexisting commitment with friends.

I crack up. And explain this to my [legal] husband (I need a new title for him, this brackets thing is maddening, but I'm not going to just post treating him as my only husband dammit), and he says, "Well. That's piss-poor planning on her part."

He said that a lot Monday evening.

So I called her up Monday night. She is Very Enthusiastic and all. And then I point out the schedule issues, and she says, "... oh."

"Oh", like she's suddenly shocked into a realisation that, y'know, I have a life that exists outside the fringes of her peripheral vision.

Well, she's going to go up to Maine on the weekend to see her other brother, why not visit on the way back down?

Sure, Mom. But I'm out of the house all day Tuesday.

"Oh."

So she's driving down Sunday night, here for Monday, and going away Tuesday morning.

Oh.

Who does this?

Tiller in the Seventh Month

2009-06-02T16:12:00.004-05:00

I mentioned that I'd been affected by the Tiller assassination today to the shrink.

She said, "Yeah, I was wondering how you were reacting to that."

Just great. One of my therapist's thoughts about the news was how I was dealing with it, and on her own dime to boot.

It's obvious, of course, that it would. I'm seven months pregnant. I have anxiety issues. (Secondary effect of my depressive disorder.) My primary criterion for dealing with my pregnancy (both in terms of medical care and everything else) has been minimising stress and meddling, with a particular eye to things that I know I can degenerate into obsessive circles of increasingly frantic worry over; I know how to manage my brain when I'm off my meds, after all, I've been doing it that way for most of my life.

It is completely normal in the course of a pregnancy to have worries about the health of the baby, to have moments of 'what if', to fret about whether things are okay. The baby wants to hang out pretty much exclusively on my right side; does that mean the cord is tangled up and making my uterus into a trap? Etc. And my anxiety and I, we've got a little routine for this: I listen to the fretfulness, I acknowledge it, I point out that there's nothing we can do about it right now, I set it aside, and I go do something else.

Before Sunday.

On Sunday, as I'm sure you well know, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down in his church. A man who specialised in care and comfort for third-trimester women in tragic circumstances. Who conducted the abortions with sufficient skill and empathy to provide grieving parents with an intact body to mourn and bury. Who had followed in his father's footsteps in feeling that this care was essential for women in need (his father had had a patient die after refusing to perform an abortion, and thereafter changed his practice), who had been one of three people in the United States who did it at all. [Added:] Who was known to provide that care even to people who could not afford to pay for it.

There is often a foot wedged against my bottommost right rib, an uncomfortable pressure, sometimes accompanied by a sequence of thumps.

I think of the woman in my childbirth preparation class who has as her mantra, "If it's kicking, you know it's alive." She is pregnant after a miscarriage, after all.

After Sunday, I rock and pray that that is good enough. Kicking means alive, right?

I read, and see people talking about babies eaten up with terminal cancer, ancephaly, various other syndromes, deformities, failures to develop, and I try not to jump and startle with every kick, every vibration of the skin of my abdomen, try to stifle the exaggerated startles of my PTSD and just repeat, "If it's kicking, you know it's alive."

I have friends who have lost children to miscarriages; who learned that their desired baby was a blighted ovum and had to work through the whiplash from 'nurturing life' to 'harboring death'. One of my [legal] husband's coworkers had a baby recently, a baby who lived for two hours after birth.

I have been carrying this life for seven months. It's kicking, right?

But the fear is there, the overwhelming fear, from reading about, thinking about, the women who carried their lives for seven months, eight months, nearly nine, and then learned that no, what they had nurtured, invested in, prepared for, perhaps named, was going to die. Maybe killing them on the way too, bleeding out or rot or toxins poisoning the system or any of the other horrible malfunctions of flesh.

And people write about Tiller, write about the care he gave to these stricken families, and sometimes to do that, they have to write about why his job was necessary.

And I cradle my belly and want to howl with the terror of it.

I want to crawl into a hospital and demand tests, poking, prodding, knock me out and put a fucking closed circuit TV in my belly if you have to, let me know that it will be okay. Let me know that it's enough. Let me know that it will be all right. Even though I made all these careful, cautious, informed choices, avoiding the medicalisation of pregnancy, facing this natural process with calm and serenity and all that good stuff, I want to throw it all away and beg someone, anyone, somewhere, to give me reassurances.

Because a man who helped women face the worst when the worst had to be faced was murdered by a terrorist.

Who has certainly achieved a fine terrorist goal: one terrified woman. And with me, probably many others.

I talked about it so rationally, reasonably, with the shrink, noting in the abstract that it was setting off my anxiety, that I really ought to go to some effort to address that, remember my vitamins, all that good sane stuff.

I left her office, fractured, and my liege said that I looked completely exhausted. Yes.

And I had talked about it, which meant the walls around the roiling mass of terrified were breached, and the entire trip home I sniffled and fought back tears, trying to hold on a little longer without falling apart. Couldn't fall apart. Couldn't make a scene. Couldn't ... show ... fear.

I closed the kitchen door, a soft scrape into solitude, and when I was alone I howled like a terrified animal, howled and screamed and spat bile and let the tears roll down my cheeks. Only in solitude, because it was too much to show even my husbands.

And Now The Angry Post

2009-05-30T00:09:00.003-05:00

Now, I was thinking of writing a moderately cranky post about the way Susie Bright's otherwise neat post of June 2006 goes right off the fucking rails where she says that she's decided to no longer believe in the existence of women whose sexual reactions to pregnancy aren't basically rooted in the same experience as she had, but at this point I'm just going to sum it up with "Fuck off, I exist, neener neener neener so there" and take apart something that annoyed me.

If you want the reasonably rational and sane response to the annoyance, you will want to go over to SM-Feminists and read there, because this ain't gonna be it. Trin has a couple of followups over there too.

Now, it's not the post I linked to that's the annoyance. Nor even the first few comments. But eventually, the inevitable happens, and the creepiness starts to crawl out. Particularly enraging is the way the creepiness focuses around someone who claimed to be interested in listening to women's stories and understanding kinksters, who has since become rabid. Possibly because (before she triggered the everliving fuck out of me) I asked her to stop posting rape apologia to SM-F, and other people asked her to cite her statistics.

The actual post is an interesting exploration and comparison of roller coaster rides with BDSM, which is a functional and useful analogy that a lot of people seemed to find illuminating, at least in the first round of comments. Just another attempt by a kinkster to go to the work of translating the kink experience into terms that might be more accessible and understandable to people who aren't into that sort of thing.

I will link general subthreads, not individual posts, because otherwise this will take me four hours to write and cranky pregnant lady is cranky.

So. Someone posting under the name 'Brad', who I will therefore presume is probably male, says: "Your post does a fantastic job highlighting rape vs. consensual sex and voluntary vs. forced roles. I will remember this example for a long time."

The immediate response to that was deleted; however, one can extrapolate something about the followup from becstar's later "When someone admits to their desire to hurt women I am not going to sit by and say nothing. I am also not going to agree with the postmodern BS that "consent" makes everything okay." Setting aside what must be a fascinating definition of 'postmodern' (presuming, that is, it means something in this context other than "that bad thing I don't agree with", which is probably excessively generous), there is a level of projection here that approaches an artform.

(I am not going to compare this to surrealist art, even though, given the 'postmodern' comment, it's really tempting to point out that the random interjection of "violence!" "rape culture!" and "patriarchy!" into otherwise productive conversations bears some resemblance to the inspiration for "How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?*")

The conversation goes on with "If they were to seperate themselves from such sexualised violence on a daily basis though and worked on their self-esteem then consenting to such things wouldn't seem like such a great idea after all."

(I think here is where Belle would say, "I'm every woman! It's all in me!" Because we're dealing here with someone who has repeatedly claimed to have her primary experience with BDSM being in an abusive relationship that she continued with due to lack of self-esteem. Who, further, continues to suggest that she is being pressured into kink by her current partner and appears to have a fatalistic attitude towards his inevitable victory on the matter. So of course that's what everyone bloody else is dealing with.)

But, y'know, that whole 'try really hard not to be kinky because being kinky is bad'? Been there. Done that. Burned the T-shirt. Got the flashbacks, too. Dealt with the self-esteem issues that told me that I was the wrong kind of sexual, some kind of defective, someone who shouldn't ever be allowed out in public; unfortunately for Teh Theory, that's when I started defining myself rather strongly as a submissive, because it was due to crippled self-esteem that I wasn't able to be that self-determining.

Someone named Kate replies to this with "Stop it. You are not discussing theory, you are implying that anyone who enjoys BDSM has low self esteem and isn't thinking critically because that was true in your case. Pro tip: We're not all like you," to which bectar replies, "I'll stop when other people stop legitimising sexual violence, okay?"

Given that she triggered the hell out of me with rape apologia, I'm ... glad I didn't take my irony meter out of its sealed box for this trip down Aggravation Lane.

Next up, someone asks if consensual sex legitimises rape under Teh Theory here. And certainly, some people are of that opinion. No, BDSM is different and magical somehow, treating women more as sex objects than sex does, due to ... magic.

It's magic! It doesn't have to be explained!

Oh, and it legitimises the widespread view that women want violent sex that I've never encountered in my life, so probably I was living on another planet at the time. As opposed to, y'know, the flowers and chocolates tedium in most every damn romantic flick ever released, including the ones where the Spunky Independent Woman really just needs the right flowers and chocolates to fall in lurve with Our Hero, generally played by some version of the Tediously Not Actually Attractive Actor For This Decade. All of the cultural harping on how women like soft girly things and foreplay and cuddling so much more than actual sex, totally illusory. And there are no people out there arguing about how women need to be persuaded or tricked into being sexual like the pickup artist crowd, or that women are intrinsically asexual lesbians like certain radical separatists with their clear-eyed gazes, or anything like that. I made them up right now.

Next thread. One raq says, "Sexual fetishes are incredibly hard to ignore and change, and why should you engage in that type of self-loathing?"

becstar again: "Actually its not that hard at all. Remove yourself from as much of society's misogyny as you can and you'll find that your submissive tendencies will fade."

And once again! I'm every woman! It's all in me!

And over in my rational post on SM-F I commented that the thing that encourages what I understand as "rape culture" is the bit where people -- and women are hit with this harder than men in most cases -- aren't given the space to define their own sexuality. So here comes little miss I'm-so-wise, making sure that everyone knows she thinks that she understands their sexuality better than they do. My snake oil will work for you!

(Why on earth aren't there more people on the feminist clean up crew? Because damn, are there a lot of snake oil hawkers sometimes.)

I also get a kick, in the dark and sardonic way, out of someone saying, "Stop being submissive. Just do as I tell you." The misogyny there is subtle, and limited: directed at kinky women, rather than women in general, but the same sort of basic infantilising and attempts at humiliation that all forms of misogyny come up with. And it either contains the basic presumption that the submissive is simply there to take orders -- or a remarkable lack of grasp of ironic subtext.

The thread then degenerates into the standard dominant-women-aren't, submissive-men-are-freeloading-off-female-sexuality, and everyone-is-straight fails that I can't even begin to prod at humorously because they're so pathetic.

"A woman is in control when she isn't buying into the exact ideology which keeps her subjagated in the first place."

The snarky bit of me wants to respond to this with "Yep. That's why I left feminism. This would not be helpful. But really, nothing I could possibly say would ever be helpful to this sort of discussion. If I said "I'd rather get kicked in the head" I'd get mocked for being a self-abusing masochist rather than being sane enough to avoid both getting kicked in the head and avoiding places that are abusive. Not that I'm doing so well with the avoid at the moment, since I'm going through this comment thread in detail bitching about it. At least I'm doing it here.

"Where is your proof that hitting a woman with her consent is any different to hitting a woman without consent?"

Um, sweetie, you've defined two situations: "hitting a woman with her consent" and "hitting a woman without consent". They're explicitly stated as different situations. Therefore, that they are different is tautological.

(And aside from that, stop equating BDSM with "hitting a woman". I'm pretty damn sure one of these discussions we went around and around and you had the clueboat arrive on "submissive" and "masochist" not being synonymous. Though you're demonstrating yourself not capable of grasping that "submissive" and "female" aren't synonymous, so maybe I'm too optimistic about your capacities.)

"Well continue to consent to your own abuse then." Don't you love the personal attack victim-blaming of not-actual-victims? That's so feminist, you know. Especially directed at someone who has not commented on their sexual preferences that I'm aware of, so we've got a 'failed to medal in the polevault to conclusions' in here too.

"When people have low self-esteem they participate in their own abuse because they don't believe they deserve any better." Maybe that's why I'm still reading this thread. Clearly I need to develop enough self-esteem to not feel compelled to dissect the incompetent arguments of frothing assholes for purposes of public mockery.

I think this may be the same subthread, but I'm not sure, and I'm pulling it out because we have a New Contestant.

EGhead, come on down!

"What I'm concerned with is that it doesn't address the legitimate critiques of BDSM, those questioning the possible negative influence of power politics and gender roles on sexual practices."

... oh gods. A theory junkie. Theory theory verbiage theory theory critique theory theory.

"The ethical question, for me anyway, is how BDSM affects ourselves, our partners, and society at large."

Myself: Actual satisfaction of my personal sexual and spiritual needs, treatment of myself as a whole being rather than an emotional cripple, and a generalised improvement in my health, sanity, personal esteem, and generalised emotional balance.

My partners: Well, I seem to be vigorously driving my liege into fits of self-improvement in between other things, though some of that is complicated. My [legal] husband, it's a wee sticking point in our relationship sometimes because we kink in directions that don't actually have much chemistry for me and thus there's very little of that in our relationship. My dear competitor is amused by the stories.

Society at large: I didn't invite any creepy voyeurs into my bedroom; I'll thank EGhead not to do so either. In general, the major effect I've seen from the alt-sex communities of whatever sort I've had much observation on has been the introduction of concepts of overt negotiation into a culture in which "But women like lingerie, what's wrong with my girlfriend that she isn't thrilled by my gift?" is normal.

And I'm reminded of the story of the little girl who was not having much luck convincing the adults to stop tickling her until she snapped "SAFEWORD!" at them. (Many people have trouble respecting the boundaries of children. I remember this from when I was one, and I'm kind of concerned about it on behalf of my current inhabitant.) Tools for self-defense good.

And then dear becstar returns with: "But BDSM *is* real abuse and cruelty. If you admit that it has its basis in the patriarchy which uses it as way to legally hurt women, then how does it differ from any other form of abuse?"

Why should I or anyone else admit something that isn't true? I mean, there are all kinds of things out there that people believe that have no actual basis in reality, so this one isn't all that special, but I'm not responsible for other people's wacky nonsense and I'm not gonna cop to it.

I will take a brief interlude from this rant to declare that this comment completely and totally rocks and draw people's specific attention to it. It's too long to quote here, and I'm not gonna rant about it so it's off-topic anyway.

Back to the ranting, in a subthread about Dworkin or something:

becstar: "But you said it yourself, they are against sex that degrades women, not all sex, ever."

I've been told all kinds of things are degrading. I wrote about language and degradation once, in response to one of those things I've been told. I wrote about embarassment and humiliation, too, and about not being into that sort of thing, because I kink on being whole and becoming larger and more and powerful and just, well, not getting it. And because I don't get it, I don't do that sort of thing, like I don't do roleplay because I'm kind of scarred and battered about being treated as a sexual other and not myself.

And this sort of thing hits my buttons: the whole examine-and-elide-your-kink thing is being treated as a sexual other, not myself, an object to be corrected. This is the particular 'patriarchy'-trauma that most affected my sexuality, the idea that it was something that needed to conform to the desires of others, and I ... kind of twitch whenever I see people doing it in the name of feminism. I wrote about that, too, the humiliation-and-degradation-sexplay intrinsic to this nonconsensual white knight gig. Knock the gal down and be the one to pick her up again and take the credit for getting her off her knees.

It's creepy, okay? And it's creepy in a way that reminds me of being sexually harassed and assaulted, because I'm just the object that gets scored with. So many notches on the bedpost, so many souls redeemed for feminism, whatever. In many ways, I find the bedpost-notchers less creepy; they're easier to protect myself from than the ones who pretend to care about me as a human being (while not actually going to the effort to do so).

Becstar again:

"If pro-BDSM people cared so much about safety why encourage someone to participate in it when they obviously have problems with it? That isn't caring about the person, that's caring about your precious sex."

I don't know, becstar, why is that?

(From that link:)

becstar: I still think that I will never be able to participate in it as a sub because of this (although if my partner has his way I will). I definitely don't use it as a way to try to cover my desire for it up. Its more like a way to try and actually like it so I can just do it and get it over with without it destroying me.

Trinity: I really think you should leave your boyfriend if you can. He's trying to push you into something that really upsets and triggers you and doesn't seem to care about your boundaries. That's just not acceptable.

Me: This, right here: get out. Get out yesterday. That you keep having these moments of "But he keeps pushing for this even though I've said I don't want to, and I may give in"? Is making space for you to be raped again. Please, protect yourself. Please.

SnowdropExplodes: This guy has ALREADY crossed the line into coercive behaviour and that pressure is in my mind an element of an abusive relationship developing.

EthylBenzene: Fourthing Trin, Dw3t, and SD. Becstar, I hope you realize what your boyfriend seems to be coercing you to do is not what we on this site are advocating. Take care of yourself and let us know if you need anything.

SunflowerP: I'm jumping on the bandwagon, too, Becstar. This is the same-old same-old routine, with the idea being that you'll get tired of saying "no" and do what he wants just so you don't have to deal with the whining - that's coerced consent (and thus not really consent at all), whether the guy is someone you just met, or someone you're in a relationship with. DTMFA!!

Yep. We're all just encouraging people who have problems with BDSM to get involved. See all that encouragement? Why, it's positively overwhelming.

More from Feministing: "This entire thread and other places which debate it are about shaming people about not liking BDSM. People who don't like BDSM are always called "sex-negative", "ashamed", "repressed" and its all simply not true."

She tried to pull this one on SM-F too, by the way. I replied. I'm not saying I haven't seen people call certain positions "anti-sex", but, y'know, given that she mentioned this and had a couple of, "Er, no, actually, not," responses that she replied to, or at least had the opportunity to read before going for the Golden Flouncearama, a little intellectual honesty might be nice.

(And part of being the clean-up crew, as previously linked, is calling out people who pull that sort of unwarranted shit. But remember, that post never happened!)

"As long as you're okay with BDSM you're a wonderful person in their eyes." She doesn't actually pay much attention to BDSM discussions, does she? Man, the number of people I've seen categorised as "Yeah, s/he's kinky, but such a goddamn jackass. Don't deal with them if you can avoid it" is ... large.

"The minute anyone dares to critique it they are verbally abused and harrasses - not exactly proving how non-abusive and accepting they are." I think the 'verbal abuse' came in on SM-F when people asked her to provide citations for her statistics. Big meanie-pants.

Another subthread. Someone's a wee bit chatty, eh?

"You must have a strange view of what is safe if you think being hurt is safe." Dude, I have a tattoo. (Don't have any piercings. Piercings are for the most part over my line of acceptable perception of safety. By the way: when I've mentioned I don't have pierced ears, I've had people "jokingly" suggest that they can correct that, up to and including insinuating restraint and coercion. And yet somehow I don't go around railing about how people with pierced ears are victims of teh patriarchee who aren't capable of recognising violence due to their internalisation of defective values.)

"By encouraging BDSM in someone you are encouraging them towards accepting violence towards women. Exactly why would someone who respected women want to hurt them? The answer is, they wouldn't. Similarly, a woman who honestly believed she was worth something as a human being would not want to be hurt."

And we return not only to "BDSM is about hitting women", but some deeply wacked-out perspectives on worth and desire. I mean, one can bring up marathon runners, people in service jobs, or, hell, the original point about people who like roller coasters (in case anyone remembers the topic of the original post at this point), but it wouldn't make a bit of difference.

I continue to think that respecting a woman means listening to her preferences and desires and not overwriting them with one's own opinions, but I'm just kind of radical that way.

Gotta link this comment directly, it's just that special. It starts "Actually I have just returned from doing a lot of research about BDSM." Like this conversation she had with Hope. Or the several threads in which a huge number of people provided her with informational links, some of which are in previous entries in the blog.

No, what snapped her into "Then the longer I stayed there the more creepy their conversations got" appears to be that people wouldn't accept her statistics blindly and asked her to stop putting responsibility for rape on porn rather than rapists. Oh noes.

Skipping some other stuff that mostly just makes me go "buh" to get to a new thread with our star becstar.

"There is nothing sane about wanting to be beat up. It only shows how far the patriarchy has gone in making women internalise self-hatred simply for being born in a certain body." I've heard, though I haven't read, that she was in a different thread (that one on trans issues) on Feministing recently saying how any self-respecting woman would hate having breasts because they're just there for male ogleage and nobody would really want to be a woman if they had a choice. But enough with consistency.

ggg_girl pointed out quite reasonably that becstar would be better off not assuming that kinky people "want to be beat up", and got a response of "I know plenty about the people who practice it." But not enough to, y'know, actually know anything.

"(humiliation in this case meaning any relationship where you are not considered as an equal)"

So, for me, a strictly vanilla relationship, then. Good to know you're willing to support me in that, becstar.

(Ha. Ha ha ha.)

Oh hey, since I last scanned the comments this cool one went up, which is much the same as one of my old posts linked above. Neat.

Meanwhile, return of EGhead with:

"I try to make my critiques as impersonal and thoughtful as possible. In doing so, I don't see myself as shaming anyone, just having an important philosophical debate."

Have a nice philosophy.

Forgive me if I value my life more than your important philosophical debates.

And over here we have more EGhead, to wind the whole thing up:

"I agree that condemning fantasies is harfmful, but condemning actual sexual practices that may cause harm is ok. I suppose we disagree what what harm BDSM may cause. Either way, I don't want to shame individuals, but the sex practices themselves."

How very ... special.

"Love the sinner, hate the sin", eh?

And if the 'sin' is an intrinsic part of who the 'sinner' is, something that they consider important and value, something that's a part of their foundation on the world, well, they just shouldn't take it so fucking personally. It's not about them, it's just this thing they're doing.

I hate theorywonkage. Or theorywankage. Whatever. If the theory doesn't acknowledge me as real, it can bugger right off.

Oh, anyone who wanders over from that clusterfuck and wants to argue with me about why I'm kinky or tell me that I'm only pissed off because I'm improperly examined or whatever else is required to demonstrate that they have read this post before I can be arsed engaging with them, because I've already answered your fucking question and I am too busy having that life I value more than your philosophical dribblings to be your dancing monkey. Listen a little, use your brain, and don't treat me as your one-stop shopping resource for a submissive to shame or a sympathetic ear to take advantage of and maybe we can have a conversation.

If you'd rather not do that, of course, you remain free to write me off as a cranky bitch and one of those horrible anti-feminist harpies who's a sekrit pillar of the patriarchy if you find it easier than crawling out from under your rock. I will remain one of the more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Your irrelevance to me (and other kinky people) as anything other than a gadfly to swat occasionally will only grow the more you cradle your theories and prejudices close and love them more than you actually care about real women.

And I am just fucking fine with that, too.

* Answer: "A fish."