Not Even The Mommy Trap

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 ...

And Now The Angry Post

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."

The Eternal Subject Again

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

laughingrat:

"domination and submission--the brutalization of one person or group of persons".

So we start out by equating power to brutalisation, and this doesn't even get noticed or questioned -- it's just taken as a given, a default. And I think of Trin's regular comments about parents, about teachers, and I think of coming off my spectacular training weekend where we talked explicitly about the heirarchy between master and pupil. No, this is 'brutalisation'.

"fetishizing torture of the body or spirit in the bedroom".

This post is tagged 'BDSM', by the way. I don't expect you to get it. I don't expect you to understand it. If you don't find it comprehensible, that's okay, it's not for you.

If you don't fucking admit that it exists, if you don't acknowledge me, if you don't give a damn about my power, you have no business trying to talk about what I do.

I don't consider an argument predicated on erasing me 'feminist'; hell, I don't consider an argument predicated on erasing me anything other than my enemy. If you are hostile to my existence, you don't get me playing nice.

"do not tell fairy tales about it".

Ah yes, the ever popular Appeal To Delusion.

My reality is just a fantasy, you know. Not anything that has anything to do with the world that I actually live in; I'm delusional. In fact, I'm posting this from the psych ward in a straitjacket! I'm typing with my nose!

Just ... get real, okay? When you're willing to actually listen to my life rather than your pretty little fantasies about my life - because that's all they are, fantasies - and stop vanishing me away into theoryland, I'll still be here, writing away.

"Without patriarchy, the so-called "submissive side" of our personality, taken for granted as being natural because we can't currently imagine the possibility of life without domination and submission, would simply go away."

What's this one, Appeal To Utopia?

I love it following the 'fairy tale' snark. "In my fantasy world where everything conforms to what I want, people like you just won't happen! Because my imaginator makes it true! Take that, fictional people!"

becstar:

"Given the influence of the patriarchy it is not all surprising that the majority of submissives of female because we are brought up to believe that that is our proper role."

As I have written about more than once, I was brought up to believe that my proper role was to be one of the movers and shakers of the world, challenging the glass ceiling, curing cancer, running for President, and so on, and anything less than that was a betrayal of women in general.

What you mean, we?

danielle:

"Yet no one is saying that-we're try to have a discussion, not tell people what they're doing is wrong and shameful."

Well, that'd be a first.

Given some of the other comments, I'm back to 'What you mean, we?', though.

becstar:

"It amazes me that people who consider themselves feminists don't question where these submissive fantasies are coming from."

Setting aside the whole 'question' thing ("challenge the accuracy, probity, or propriety of", but that's not meant to indicate wrongness or shame, remember that, calling into doubt one's truthfulness, integrity, or correctness doesn't mean anything negative), it amazes me that people keep saying this.

danielle:

"When people respond emotionally and defensively and cut off arguments? That's when I can't stand feminists."

Oh, you women, you're so emotional. Come back when you can have a rational conversation. Not that you can, of course, that's what's wrong with women.

Nerdisms:

"(I capitalized the S to make it more empowering, you guyz!!!)"

I think capitalisation games are childish. When I talk about d/s, I talk about d/s. Well, sometimes I talk about D/S, but that's more effort to type, so mostly I don't. I do say "D/s" at the beginning of sentences, because I was oppressed by a culture that capitalises the initial letters of sentences and have not thrown off my conditioning yet.

EGhead:

"laughingrat's original dissenting post was in no was disrespectful".

... the post that called people brutal, torturing, suggested that people were delusional, and in magic feminist utopia they wouldn't exist was in no way disrespectful?

... or did I miss one?

EGhead:

"I think it would be beneficial for people to stop their BDSM practices; not necessarily beneficial for them, but beneficial for society as a whole. I think refusing to engage in any kind of abusive interactions-- even if they're consensual or 'role-play'-- can positively affect society."

"Equating BDSM categorically with abuse ... BINGO! I have BINGO!"

Oh look, and I should stop doing things that are good for me for the sake of society. I guess that's because that's women's job, to sacrifice their selfhood for the ungrateful.

SarahMC:

"Yeah, yeah, go on with your bad selves, choosing your choices and telling other feminists to STFU. You're all very empowerful and stuff."

Oooooh, empowerful. I loves the empowerblizing!

(Actually, I thought that it was a common response to the overprivileged to say, "Just shut up and listen for once, okay?")

"This thread is just a bunch of defensive rationalizations."

Hm. People who have been called brutal, torturing, delusional, that they should stop being themselves for the good of others, overemotional, and so on and so forth should ... just let themselves be hit rather than responding with refutations.

They like to be hit, after all, don't they? Why are they objecting?

Nerdisms:

"In fact, the majority of the world thinks you should submit, so it's not like that person questioning you has some ridiculous amount of social power over you. It's just someone thinking."

This one just exhausts me. I mean, setting aside the fact that the majority of the world that I have encountered thinks that submission is utterly contemptible, and demonstrates this (among other things) by paying support roles a fraction of what they're worth and figuring people who take them are just not as good as Type-A people and deserve the shit they get, I ...

... live in an environment full of "just people thinking" out loud about things. And a lot of those people are thinking that I'm scum, and want to make sure I know it. It's hard to climb out of the slime, and making one person stop thinking these things won't make that much of a difference, but maybe if enough one people stop thinking these things dealing with society will start stinking less.

danielle:

"Yea, that radical feminist viewpoint damages so much. That would be the viewpoint that demanded equal pay for equal work, women's right to be able to even work, and birth control."

"I think we who work full-time in the movement tend to become very narrow. What is happening now is that when non-movement women disagree with us, we assume it's because they are "apolitical," not because there might be something wrong with our thinking."
- Carol Hanisch, "The Personal is Political"

Nerdisms:

"You see, this kind of reflection is personal. While we'd maybe have different opinions on, on a larger scale of where these things get influenced from, I really can't tell you about yourself or whether or not this examination on your own childhood/experiences/arousal patterns is accurate."

And what else am I supposed to talk about? I'm only qualified to examine my own shit, I don't even have access to anyone else's.

joyfuldinosaur:

"I'm going to put BDSM into the "ethically bad" category along with pornography and always trying to be ethically good."

Okay, so this one figures that I'm doing The Wrong Thing, but eh, everyone does Bad Things anyway, so who cares? I'm just supposed to accept that I'm bad and let go of the judgementalism of it because it doesn't matter.

It matters. And what I do is not ethically bad.

I'm pretty sure someone in there was on about egalitarian and inegalitarian relationships, but I didn't find the quote. I'll just link this anyway, because I find the whole 'egalitarianism' thing a red herring.

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

The Shareef Don't Like It

There is a giant dwama ongoing in the blogworld again, mostly talking about BDSM. I've been dithering about whether I want to comment on it, whether I have anything new to say; I've chased down links, I've pulled up a stash of old posts to point people at, and so on.

And there's all kinds of stuff out there. About "women who allege to enjoy BDSM", say. Or how consent is bad, there's a brainbender for you. Women are responsible for the actions of patriarchal men, and don't you forget it, and eat your lima beans, there are children starving in far-away places. And people who disagree are 'little girls' who need to be chastised by the wiser among us, of course. Oh yes, charming calls for tops to kill themselves: "If exploring your “dark side” entails wanking to women being tortured, it might be best to leave it unexplored. Or kill yourself." Godwin's Law is, of course, satisfied. Or some other joyous things that Ren has catalogued for the world. But don't forget, none of this speaking out about those horrible people has any power to harm anyone anyway, so why are you upset in the first place? It's not paternalistic or anything to be Concerned about submissive women, you know.

Now, I don't expect to get any more response than I did the first time I responded to this nonsense, as one of the major players has explicitly stated that she's only "getting into it" with men who reply to her, and while she claims to be reading and considering, well, the level of response to me, to antiprincess, Cara, hexy, Subversive Submissive, all in threads where she was a participant until one of the above showed up, well, I guess we're not worthy of response. No, the problem is teh mens, not us poor deluded women, especially the submissive ones. So we don't actually get anything even resembling an acknowledgement. We're just defending our doms, after all. Or something. No, only the ones In Autoritah should be responding.

(Thanks to Ren and Trin for linking to most of these so I don't have to trawl through the cesspit myself. I find it interesting that Nine Deuce considers them worthy of responding to. Maybe it's that "You must be a man" thing striking again.)

... I could generate more links. But really, that's plenty depressing enough, and if you go read them you're in for some masochism. I'm linking to them primarily because I find holding these kinds of 'discussions' with gaps in the communication threads tends to lead to insidious results. Nobody can claim I'm taking them out of context or responding in bad faith; the context is all there in its hideous glory. And I'm not feeling like playing scared of trolls and assholes descending upon me because I had the temerity to speak up, no matter how out of place it might be for a woman and a submissive to say something.

What I find depressing about this - I mean, aside from the virulent hostility and Wrong Womaning and stuff like that - is the notion that all of this stuff is unexamined, that people don't write about it, think about it, that it's all just happy fluffy "Well it makes me happy!" There's the snarky, "How can you feel derided for being a submissive woman? in the middle of those threads deriding submissive women, and I think back to writing about the forms of power that someone of my sex, class, and background was socially obligated to and the persistent social degradation of support roles, which cannot but carry over into sexual support roles. About my experiences in an 'egalitarian' relationship that denied my kink, for that matter, and how much more oppressive that turned out to be than a relationship where I can be an equal partner, just as whole and present as myself as my liege.

ND claims to understand where "submissive women" are coming from with some fascinating strawmen about what that might be, to be "charitable" about the zoo exhibit's motivations. And uses terms like "M/f", one of those peculiar gender fetishes that kind of creeps me the hell out, suggesting that it's so hard to be accepted as sexual in this society so being in a situation where one can be "out of control" might be appealing, how submission is intrinsically derived from shame and all, and other suggestions that BDSM is just plain disordered, a coping mechanism that's only semi-functional at best.

I see people writing that kink is about humiliation and degradation and pain, nothing other than rape and abuse, snidely dismissing things as silly frivolous people who think they're 'empowered' by their sexual escapades, participating in the intrinsic treatment of women as inferior, just about being wild and other and transgressive. Some of them treat kink culture as a monolithic edifice in which if one specific act can be condemned the rest will fall apart. They talk about fantasy worlds, recapitulating experiences of abuse, the poor unenlightened and benighted submissives who need to be liberated, and similar things.

None of them have asked about pride. Or sensuality. There have been no investigations of the nature of power and gendered assumptions about it that I have seen. None have touched on anything that might reach the potential inspirational power of submission.

Nobody has really reached for actual power and taken it to bed with them.

In all this examining and exploration and demanding understanding of why submissives are the way we are, is there ...

... anything I can say that I haven't already said?

Welcome to the Mommy Wars

The other night I went chasing links around on 'Heartless Bitches International' due to a link posted at Figleaf's. ... until I got sickly depressed and had to stop. It's not enough dealing with crazy shit like GreenConsciousness, as documented at Bastante Already, but one of those sites that I find darkly and crankily amusing went at it too.

The context: mail from a rather skeevy-sounding fellow who had a quote-unquote traditional relationship with a stay-at-home-wife-and-mother type whose responsibilities were childcare and "looking good", for which end he invested a pretty penny in miscellaneous beauty products and what have you and yet expected other people to police their websites for him rather than supervising the kid.

Quite the prize, eh?

So I read this. And the editorial comments start out all right. Stuff like, "Equality would be if she CHOSE this."

And then there's ...

"I'll bet your wife is on an antidepressant, and you convince yourself that all "happy, well-adjusted" women are."

And the mental-health-ablism-thing hits me like a punch in the nose. Oh yeah, right, real women aren't on Prozac. I forgot that. That's all part of housewife ennui, which we've been medicating for for a while to keep those Donna Reeds mellow and in their places, not something that might actually have a history, an etiology, a deeper meaning.

Carry on a little further and we get:

"[Being a stay-at-home mother]'s really a shelter for a woman who is afraid to fail or try."

... where was that 'choice' thing again that I thought we were talking about?

And then we go on. And on. And on.

"She's set herself up to be a parasite her whole life, and you are more than happy to have her this way. You couldn't be more prehistoric if you hobbled her. Frankly, I'm glad the two of you found each other."

"I have known some women that have turned their backs on the life of the "kept woman" simply because their values were more than skin deep."

"You might not have worked so hard, however, if you had motherhood, sexual favors and the ability to have someone ELSE bring home the bacon, to fall back on."

Um.

"Oh... that's right -because in YOUR opinion, it's more valuable for a WOMAN to raise a child than contribute things like a cure for cancer, or ensure justice is served, or design buildings to withstand earthquakes..."

And now we get this -- not only must one be out there doing the career thing, but really, the ones who count and matter, the ones everyone is measured against, are the elites.

And since I was never going to cure cancer anyway ....

...

I just, just. Fuck it all, y'know?

Hi. Mentally ill housewife here. 'Scuse me for breathing, feminist movement.

Slipping Down the Slope

I've been thinking, for a couple of reasons, about classism and how it interacted with the feminism of my childhood.

(This is riffing on my "Spoiling Feminism" post on last year, in part.)

I had a damn weird upbringing in some ways, class-wise, but one of the things that was a big part of it was that I would go to college. On the one side of the family, it was "Of course you will go to college; we are Yankee bluebloods and our kind has gone to college since Colonial days." On the other side of the family it was, "Going to college is how we can have a better lot in life than our parents and lift ourselves out of the working class. Your grandfather gave up a scholarship that would have made him the first in the family to attend college because his family needed his income, and you need to honor that sacrifice."

And threaded in through all that childhood is this very class-conscious feminism, one that barely touches on issues of violence and genuine misogyny for a very professional-class set of concerns that mostly were relevant to the women who were college-educated. Glass ceilings. Access to the boardroom and the White House. Economics without any sense that people bleed, except in the past, where that bleeding was done so that you, meaning me, could go out and accomplish the great things that Our Feminist Foremothers could only dream of seeing their daughters do. Just Do It feminism at its worst. I had to prove myself for womanhood, and because as a woman I couldn't afford to depend on anyone else for care and support, especially not a man.

I tell you a secret: I had no damn clue what I might want to do in college. This was my secret shame, that I didn't have A Goal, some sort of appropriately middle-class college-educated thing I would do to prove my merit (and, incidentally, Further The Cause Of Women). I wanted to write, and I couldn't think of a thing to study in college that would help me with that. (Literature classes were, in my experience, entirely painful, and not useful for actual writing in any case.) It was acceptable to take classes in Random Interesting Shit, but only in and around the edges of what was required to manage establishing that Proper Career. I had no Career dreams, and I knew that this was a great failure for me as a human being (for classist reasons) and as a woman (for feminist reasons).

So what happens when I went to college?

I went mad.

Load that wacky classist baggage with mental health ablism, now. Depression isn't a legitimate disability, you know, it's just the excuse of the lazy for their failures. It's certainly not a reason to drop out of college, because college is what I was supposed to do, and none of this fluffy insanity shit gets me out of my obligations to family, to class, to women as a whole, right?

I worked junior tech support and pink-collar for a while to make rent and food. My happiness at my state of freedom collided messily with, again, the whole class thing, the downward mobility of not being college-educated and the sense of hamartia that came of that -- not merely falling short, but sinfully so.

And, in time, freedom faded too, as the stress of the work started to be too much for me to handle. My migraines returned, my health degraded, and I could feel the edges of sanity sliding again, especially when I had to choose between being a good person by my own lights and making the rent. Eventually, I quit, and slid, more quietly this time, into madness and self-negation, truly knowing myself worthless and not worthy of living because of the shame of dependence -- dependence on a man, to boot.

I've had to come to terms with it. All of it. The classism, the ablism, the giant morass in my head. I've never gone back to college -- something that shocks people from backgrounds like mine, where the "of course you're college-educated, you're intelligent" assumptions run deep. I've had to accept that the odds are good that I can't work enough to support myself on my earnings and keep my sanity; I have to pick one or the other. I've had to deal with people who talk about how it's irresponsible for a woman to not be able to support herself on her own earnings, because other people are unreliable, untrustworthy, can't be counted on to not betray me and leave me on the street.

Which leaves me an autodidact with a freelancing job, working at home, writing between contracts because that leaves me saner than not, doing the laundry and all despite still occasionally facing failure-as-a-person and failure-as-a-woman for "settling for" a life where I have a chance at being happy and reasonably successful on my own terms, rather than miserably a good example of womankind.

My Little Demon

I wasn't going to write about this. I thought I'd said everything that needed to be said at the Corvid Diaries, but it's been chewing on me, and when I saw that Trinity had posted about it at her place and at SM-F and Lina at Uncool also said a piece, I started formulating my thoughts.

I've written about wrestling with responsibility for my assault; it's a question that has been a major part of my psyche for over half a lifetime now. It's so easy to wipe it away into self-blaming, should have known better, all the things that I could have done differently if I'd been a year, a month, a few days wiser, with the wisdom that I bought with a shattered mind.

It's so easy to fall back in the place where, well, it wasn't really a rape because he stopped just shy of that, so my pain is not legitimate, my flashbacks are appropriating "real" sexual assaults. It wasn't so bad because it wasn't a stranger. It wasn't so bad because ...

It wasn't so bad because my own goddamn mother thought it was a nonevent, just something to take for granted: of course he assaulted me, he's a man and all, that's what men do. I shouldn't expect anything different; it was a nonevent.

I had to fight the demons of guilt and shame to accept it as an event.

I had to fight the world for my right to have been hurt.

I had to fight myself, the world, everything, for recognition of the fact that my sexuality was folded around nonconsent like a car wrapped around a tree by a drunk before I was old enough to know, fully, what it was.

I had to fight to be able to say: this thing happened to me. This was real. I was hurt by it. It was not my fault. In fact, it was his fault, his choice, his decision to never ask, never realise he was pushing, that he was doing harm. And I am far more forgiving of what he did than anyone I've told the story to, still, and even I know that it was his damn fault that he assaulted me, pinning me down under his naked bodyweight while I tried to curl into a ball of adolescent neutronium.

I fought. And I won that fight. I won that fight primarily with the help of a woman I traded stories with, sitting on the floor in her house in Wales one summer night talking about where we had been and what we had seen. I won that fight with the support of my husband. I won that fight with the guidance of the outraged responses to the story that so many people have given me, letting me know that my event was a real event, something that I was allowed to be affected by.

And now I run across someone saying "All men are rapists." (I'm not inclined to chase down the link enough to link that thing there, because I don't feel like retraumatising myself. If you want to read it, the posts I linked above linked it.)

And that throws me back to fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, unable to talk about it, because my experience wasn't actually real, it was "just" an assault, and anyway it was my boyfriend, not some stranger. It throws me back to knowing that, anyway, it was my fault, I should have known that he'd try something, I shouldn't have gone over to watch a movie if I didn't expect that. It's back to being all my fault, not his responsibility, because that's just how men are, that's just the default setting, he shouldn't be expected to be a decent human being.

All my fault.

All my goddamn fault.

It throws me back there, in the whirling mess of adolescence and trauma, back when I was still flashbacking regularly, back when I couldn't face the pain because being in pain was degrading to people who'd had a "real" assault.

All my fault.

And I sit back and bare my teeth at that maelstrom and say, "No."

I fought that fight already, and I won, and no fleabitten RAPE APOLOGIST claiming to be a feminist will EVER take that away from me.

Is that fucking radical enough for you?

Spoiling Feminism

Over at Daisy's place, there appears to have been some noisy discussion while I was off getting my head shrunk. And one of the comments there included the sentence "I think too many women not being feminists spoils feminism."

And I say to that, oh look, I'm the enemy of womankind again. Which I've been told, on and off, for long enough that I just shrug at it, slide it off, want to quote that last paragraph of "The Personal is Political" back at them, wondering if they ever actually read it -- that last paragraph that says, "Look, women are leaving this movement in droves, and we can't blow that off -- have we ever asked them why? Are we expressing something wrong? Are we missing something important, here, that these supposedly non-political women could tell us?"

Here's my why.

I was raised in a culture of privilege feminism. By which I mean that the majority of the concerns I heard described as feminist were all the preoccupations of the professional classes: good, high-paying white-collar jobs. Wage gap. How do we get our girlchildren into the maths and sciences, into the boardrooms, into the White House.

Basically, I grew up in a culture in which people were presumed more or less immune from violence and poverty, in which higher education was presumed as a given, in which it was taken as automatic that girls would grow into ambitious women who would go forth and change the world, not by activism, but by proving that the glass ceiling was a lie.

And I grew up wondering what was wrong with me, because I had no such ambitions. My earliest fantasy about what I wanted to do, from when I was a kid? I wanted to have a private zoo, a rambling pile of land full of interesting and exotic animals, some place I could spend my time exploring and just being in. I don't remember why I gave up that notion; I suspect it was because I started to contemplate the shit involved. After that, I think I settled on being a writer, which is where, more or less, I have stayed; writing is a strange ambition, and one that I can't fit in my head at the same time as the politics of what it was to be a good, ambitious woman that I was steeped in as a child.

It was still a given that I would go to college, of course. It was pitched to me in terms of, "Well, the breadth of experience will be good for your writing", and I agreed, and planned a physics major because of the tendencies to occasional science fiction. But it was also just ... a given, that this was the world I lived in.

My givens fell apart a bit when I went mad. The first of my friends to have a major break of that sort was hospitalised; when others wanted to go visit her in the hospital and asked the college for help in doing so, the college administration said, "You shouldn't be concerned about that kind of people, you should pay more attention to your studies." That kind of people. The kind of people that couldn't hack it at Wellesley, that Mecca for training the ambitious professional-class women who are going to change the world in politics and by simply proving the glass ceiling is a lie. The kind of people like me. My madness was not something to heal me from, something to nurture me through, something that the great tradition of strong Wellesley women was strong enough to handle; it was proof that I was Not Their Kind, not the strong, independent, good woman ideal of my upbringing.

I dropped out, I temped for a while, spent a few months unemployed, got a secretarial job. My parents wanted me to come home where it was safe; aside from the emotional traumas of their place at that time, I knew that if I slithered back with my snakey tail between my legs, I would have accepted that I was a failure. An irrevocable failure. I fed myself, housed myself, with the largesse of several forgiving people, with the support of others for a bit, but eventually I proved that I was not a failure: victory was simple survival, and I survived. I proved I could. Privilege feminism didn't want me.

Threaded in and behind this was my own wrestling with my sexual assault, something that I could for years not talk to anyone about. Perhaps I was sheltered as a child, but the discussion I had seen about sexual assault was focused on things like, "Some women claim to have been raped by their boyfriends. Is this a real problem? Are these real rapes?" I saw no genuine feminist work on this, no discussions of what it means to consent. And I had been assaulted, by a boyfriend, who stopped with the assault before he reached penetration -- not a rape by any standards, it took me years to acknowledge it as a sexual assault at all, out of this misguided belief that I was somehow diluting the experience of genuine rape, stranger rape, violent rape, by daring to have flashbacks to what was not stranger, not terribly violent (though there was some physical coercion attempted), and not rape. And out of the conviction -- which I still, to some extent, have -- that if I spoke up and claimed my past, my experience, there would be people who would ever thereafter dismiss me as damaged goods, no longer human, merely 'the assault victim'.

Maybe it's better now. But I hear stories, sometimes, and I don't think it is.

Around when I was thrown out of the holy halls of privilege feminism for being too fucking crazy, I met my first people who were vehement about being feminists online. This was a singularly unpleasant experience. They were of the "Men can't be feminists" school, as well as of the sort who flock together and back each other up with constant bullying of people who disagreed with them. Many of the people who disagreed with them were men, primarily for the reason that they were raving sexists who insisted that their vehement anti-egalitarianism and misandry couldn't possibly be sexism because their genitalia excluded them from being sexists. No, men were just pigs, and you could tell which men were worthwile by whether or not they agreed with that statement. If a woman argued with that statement as sexist and expressed an unwillingness to put up with this sort of bigotry -- this was me, once -- that would get a "How nice for you" response, with the 'little girl' unspoken. They had no problem with bullying men into silence, of course, because men should know what it feels like to be shut down and repressed. They fangirled each other utterly unabashedly. They disagreed with a transman who said he had no shared understanding of what it means to be discriminated against as a woman. They said men couldn't be feminists, but said the transman could be one if he wanted. (He declined; he said, more or less, "My mother was one of you, and raised me to be a good little feminist of the men-can't-be-feminists school. She's not forgiven me yet for being a man.")

Those feminists are my most profound experience with feeling oppressed as Class Woman. Their standards of femaleness, their standards of behaviour, their expectations, their high-handed bullying tactics with any woman who did not fall into line, not only destroyed my idealism with regard to the concept of feminism, but left me feeling like a complicit collaborator with evil on account of my genitalia. I was left desperately wanting to say, "I'm not with them!" and terrified of doing so because they would descend upon me like a flock of cannibal harpies and try to savage me into submission. Eventually, I was cowed into silence, because I didn't want to spend the resources it would take to respond to their social wave attack, the constant floods of hatred and contempt. Even if I had not been a sensitive and deep-feeling young twenty-something and thus far too inclined to take their ravings personally, I would probably have given up on fighting the good fight eventually.

After my husband (then my fiance) moved up to live with me, I considered quitting my job. I loved parts of the work, and the rest of it was destroying myself. I was no longer able to write. Some of what I needed to do left me with a case of deep horror and utter shame, things that I could not have not done and still gotten the paycheck that kept a roof over my head and food on my table. I got to the point that I would snarl "Shut the fuck up" at the phone under my breath before picking it up and saying, "Cheerful Mandatory Office Greeting!"; I was sure that if I stayed I would start to get them backwards.

I quit my job. And had a second major stress breakdown.

Because at that point, I was Letting A Man Support Me. Privilege feminism didn't want me, but I hadn't given up on wanting privilege feminism, all the values that placed having that professional-class job and an independent income as the greatest good, while letting myself be supported by someone else's finances -- especially if that someone else had a penis -- was the greatest sin. I really believed that, believed that while I was a failure as a woman because I had failed school and could only manage pink-collar employment, believed that quitting my job made me a traitor to feminism, an ungrateful wretch who didn't understand what my foremothers had sacrificed.

I mentioned this once where the harpies could see me, the ones who made me afraid of discussing my experience with feminism, and they told me there was no way anyone could really feel like that. That was a patriarchal lie. Give them the names of the feminists who said that I had such an obligation. Give, give, give, justify your deviance, you are obligated to conform. It was years later that I first encountered other women who would admit to having seen it, saw it discussed in a way that wasn't followed with a knee-jerk, "That never happened" from someone calling themselves a feminist.

I had to give up on trying to be a feminist somewhere around there, because it was the only way that I wasn't destroying myself with complete self-hatred. I was not ambitious enough, not engaged enough, not political enough, not financially independent enough, not driven enough. I started being concerned about different things -- about the social role of motherhood and its ongoing degraded status, about family and community, about the social status of the arts, about the general shit end of the stick that caregivers get -- that were outside the scope of privilege feminism.

I kept running into people who insisted that a woman was a fool or a traitor if she didn't call herself a feminist. I tried to argue with a few of them, tried to point out how poisonous the ism could be. "No, if you believe these things, you're a feminist, whether you want to be called that or not", I got, in response to that, a complete papering-over and annihilation of my personal experience. My individuality would be devoured by the ism; I had no independent self. This did not encourage me to reconcile.

A friend reported a conversation on a bus stop or something, when she was out with her daughter. "What do you do?" "I'm her mother." "No, what do you do?" "I'm her mother!" "But aren't you a feminist?" I wasn't alone. But nobody believed me when I said that this happened. It wasn't big-name enough. It wasn't politically prominent enough. Just ordinary people on the bus stop. Ordinary people only have the power to promote hegemonial ideology if that's patriarchy, you see.

I ran into a feminist guy whose feminism was ridiculously parochial, full of, "I need to protect these women from their bad choices." He saw no problem with being nasty to women who chose sex work, casual sex, kink, or multiple relationships; clearly those women were damaged and needed to be saved. He wanted to know what was wrong with me that I enjoyed and appreciated the love and partnership of two wonderful men; I wrote about this before.


A couple of years ago, I met Little Light. Who actually listened to me; for the first time, I felt heard about some of this stuff. For the first time.

And that's why I'm one of those ungrateful bitches who's spoiling feminism.

Living in Theory

(This has been kicking around in my head since the beginning of the month, so is not directly related to the current dwama that some fraction of my eleven and a half readers are aware of. Nonetheless ... same old, same old.)

There's a one-liner that drifts around talking about the Land of Theory. "I'd like to live in Theory. Everything works there."

There's also "The difference between theory and practice is that in Theory, there is no difference."

A while back, on one of those link-chasing festivals, I wound up reading the recent posts of one of the Big Feminist Blogs, and the comment threads on them. And aside from folks I knew, what I read mostly ... was something I could link to and say, "This conversation is pretty much distilled essence of why I don't call myself a feminist". If I wanted to invite the sort of response that I'm still pretty sure I'd risk even after waiting the two, two and a half weeks after it went off the front page of a busy blog.

This is hard to write about, trying to pull out the assumptions and the things I react badly to. Because, yeah, I can go through and pull out bits -- in one of the drafts of this I did -- like 'Men who fail to hate you are rare' -- but the more of them I pull out the more likely it is that the ravening hordes will come in and how-dare-you at me. And one of the reasons I dropped the word from my identity was that I hated the internalised warfare it brought to me. The occasional bickering about why-don't-you-call-yourself-a is still warfare, even if it's outside my head, even if it's someone else attempting to impose on me an obligation to adopt a label that doesn't like my kind. And if I'd gone into that thread to post, I'm pretty damn sure that I'd have been assumed to be a man, because apparently penis-possession leads to the sort of blindness that's a part of where my head is at. According to what I read, at least.

It just ... I'm honestly afraid to write about this. I've seen the way the harpies come in onto people. It reminds me of some of the first feminists I 'met', who were big believers in the 'men can't be feminists, and any man who disagreed is blinded by his privilege', who so graciously insulted a transman I know by saying that he wasn't a real enough man to be thrown out of their club. (He pointed out that he'd been raised to be a good little feminist daughter by a mother who was in their club, and her reaction to his transition told him all he needed to know.) And at the same time, I rail about it, I resent this sense that this supposed community that's supposed to be supporting me because I happen to have been born with a woman's body is both so shockingly alien to me and is willing to express such venom to people whose experiences are much more like mine. I'm reminded of how someone who spoke up about one of that crowd got a sneering, "Well, I feel silenced" from one of them, never mind that he (and, for that matter, she in response) had the guts to actually speak up against her bullshit and I run off to my little semi-anonymous space on Blogger and angst about whether I dare speak up.

I saw a later thread on the blog that was actually within one of my realms of reasonable expertise, another link-chasing experience, and I considered offering some of my thoughts ... and didn't. Because ... I know that that space isn't my community, and is unlikely to ever be so. Inviting being noticed that way is ... not ... safe.

My ex read the thread and said (quoted with permission), "You know, it occurs to me that I _don't_ want to live in theory. Sure, everything actually works there, but the men are all really pretty horrible people."

A Funny Thing, Perspective

So when I was in my early twenties, and still quite callow when dealing with politics, I came across, in a newsgroup I read, a particular cluster of people. They were my first reasonably direct exposure to people who self-identified as feminists in a vocal way, as opposed to the subtexts of feminist thought that I had been raised with or encountered, distantly, on news reports or editorials pages.

I don't remember what order the cascade of revelations of position was, entirely, so this is all a bit jumbled and haphazard in my memory.

Early on was the argument about whether men could be feminists. Which, even in my anxiousness about the word at the time, seemed to me to be the stupidest damn thing I had ever heard; I don't hold opinions with my genitalia, and I don't see why my genitalia would qualify me to be identified as someone with a particular set of opinions. This caused some in-depth friction, including with a transman friend of mine who had been raised to be a good feminist girl by a mother who was of the "only women can be feminists" flavor, and who thus took his trans-ness as a particularly vicious betrayal. Again if I'm remembering right, he was told, by this crowd, that he could be a feminist if he wanted, because he had the relevant experience as someone with girly bits to qualify; he said, more or less, "Fuck that noise."

I think it was at about the same time that some members of that crew put forward the proposition that agreement with the statement "Men are pigs" was a significant criterion in evaluating whether someone was a worthwhile person. Something to the effect of, "The only appropriate response from a man is, 'I know we are, I've met us'" was stated, while simultaneously the usage of the phrase as a litmus test was denied. This position was agreed with, to my incredulity, by one of the male posters to the group.

Whenever these discussions came up, the same half-dozen voices would club together and compete to be the first to smack down the dissent. People who objected to the positions they expressed were typically accused of blindness, insensitivity, and abuse of privilege; they were told they needed to shut up so they did not silence alternate positions. They were occasionally called on American-centric positions by posters to the group who were not American; this position of privilege in discourse was not acknowledged. They also did not acknowledge 'being able to speak without being descended upon by silencing harpies' as a position of privilege; they were the ones in opposition to privilege in all its forms, after all. When they had successfully silenced their opposition by rendering people unwilling to speak up because it was just too much effort to deal with the junior-high-school nastiness, they congratulated each other publically on how good they were, and how successful at enlightening others, to the point that actual on-topic discussion on the group suffered for me -- I was afraid to post anything that might rouse the wrath of the cabal.

They ebb and flow in the newsgroup, but continue to be a reason that I am not particularly open there anymore.

And now they're taking it over again, with vicious attacks on those who do not agree with their ideologies on certain issues. Their particular target of the moment is a woman I know from several areas, who I have always found helpful, informative, and engaging. They are accusing her of a variety of things, among them attempting to silence opposing positions.

Even if I did not know this woman, I could not look at this argument without laughing my fucking arse off. The head of the clique that descends upon someone who does not adhere to a particular ideology and starts just sniping, sniping, sniping is not a credible witness when it comes to "silencing opposing positions". The woman they're attacking starts a sentence with something like, "My personal objection to this is" and the chief buzzard replies, cutting off all other substance, with, "as usual, wrong."

When someone pointed out that this is what privilege looks like when it tries to silence dissent, another one of that crowd responded with, "Thanks for the demonstration."

The thing is, I don't want to write about these people -- I'm just trying to generate enough context for the short thought that I had sudden perspective on.

I'm watching the circling mess, and watching the way it all plays out, set-piece responses, entire long sequences of posts utterly predictable, with the handwringing, "I feel silenced and shut down!" from the bullies when they're called on their behaviour ...

... and I wonder how much it looks like the same thing from the other side.

I don't wonder it enough to want to go there, to pull the worst of them out of my killfiles, to pretend that that space can ever be a place that I can present myself as genuine and whole. But I wonder if they genuinely think that the people they are bludgeoning out of that space are threatening them.

Today, that makes me sad, and angry. But not sad enough to forgive.

One of Those Thoughts to Save

Comment posted in response to Renegade Evolution at the Feminist Critics blog:

My ex commented to me last night that he had figured out why I had never been comfortable with feminism. He noted that there are (at least) two ways of thinking about oppression of women -- one concerned with with women's access to areas from which they'd been restricted, and one concerned with the cultural devaluation of the stuff women were traditionally limited to.

Basically, the feminism I grew up with was supportive only of women who wished to adopt traditionally-limited-to-male or at best gender-neutral roles: pursuit of career, pursuit of higher education, financial and social independence. All of the stuff encoded in your #1 and #2. And frequently, that support came in a context of perpetuating the other oppression of women -- adding layers of "women who are home-focused are throwbacks and pawns of the patriarchy" to the already well-established "domestic work isn't real work, childcare is taking time away from its rightful owner, the employer".

A more balanced approach -- one that addressed the access to choice issues and the denigration of the choice-set that's historically flagged "female" -- would probably have left me in the camp of those folks who say, "Damnit, I'm not going to let those jerks steal the word that I've been fighting for all this time." Probably even after I ran into the neo-puritans who want me to examine how bad my sexuality is to have a little more. As it falls, though, the "let me guilt and shame you into stifling your sexuality" crowd were just the sound of the door shutting.

I'm just not brave enough

Okay, I'm having a hell of a day, so this isn't going to be as poised and well-written as the usual incoherent mumbling.

I wrote a bit ago, in my comments to a post a little bit down from here:

It was generally assumed that I would go forth and do something worthwhile and 'powerful' by my family; because my family's progressive attitudes framed that partially in terms of egalitarianism, and because of the professional-class feminist attitudes I encountered, I picked up -- again, from the way people expressed their assumptions -- that it was my obligation to do such things. The negative terms that people (largely outside my family) used to frame professional-class women who did not pursue powerful roles made it clear that these were not acceptable paths.

I just spent about half an hour trying to figure out how to reply to someone who was saying that the feminisms that lead some women to not considering themselves feminists weren't things he saw outside the blogs. And eventually I decided I couldn't -- especially not given that today is a different sort of flailing emotional hell without opening myself up to the sort of savageing that ever admitting to this stuff tends to do.

There's this little incoherent flailing voice in me that says look, the blogs weren't around when I was a kid. I grew up steeped in this form of feminism that means that if I embrace it I have to embrace the fact that from its perspective I'm at best a complete failure.

And by the time I got to be a teenager, I met more than the professional-class feminism that was concerned with women in the corporate boardroom and in the high-level science and engineering classes and pennies on the dollar -- I met the stuff that was hostile to the secret sexual expressions that I hadn't told anyone about and said that it was anti-woman and should never be allowed to happen.

Other sexual discussion? Where I grew up the generalised state of discussion of sexual violence was, "Is date rape a real concern? Is it really rape?"

...



Somewhere in The Price of Motherhood, Ann Crittenden mentioned that she knew she had to write the book when, after she'd taken some time from her professional-class job to have her children, someone greeted her with, "Oh, didn't you used to be Ann Crittenden?" Her motherhood rendered her a nonentity: only the professional-class job counted to make her a person with a name.

When I read that, I almost cried: someone, some Big Name Someone, knew what I was talking about. Knew where I had come from. Wouldn't call me a liar or deluded for having been from there, or demand that I pull up cites of the appropriate Big Names with tidy little quotes making flat-out statements that only professional women doing professional woman stuff qualified as enlightened human beings.

But I'm not brave enough to go say this to someone who questions it. Not anymore.

At least not today.