M is for Monsters

(Okay, not doing a catchup post. Doing an on-time-ish post.)

Let's take a moment and crack out the OED.

"Monster. [OF. monstre, ad. L. monstrum, monster, something marvellous; orig. a divine portent or warning, f. root of monere, to warn.]"

A marvel. A portent. A warning.

A revelation.

There is monstrousness threaded through myths, and sometimes it is even spoken explicitly: the minotaur, born as a result of cheating Poseidon of His due, perhaps; Fenrir, chained; Balor and his oddly-placed and evil eyes. Warnings. Consequences. Dire circumstances.

Sometimes, people make much of dealing with inner demons, facing the beast within, skirting the edges of the monstrous. Sometimes, they even do the work.

There are deities and powers of the borderlands, and some of us love them. How many tender, tasty witchlings will call upon Lilith as the strong woman who walked away from Adam, a feminist icon rejecting a patriarchy of Abrahamic monotheism well before Abraham, and "forget that the next part after your co-opted icon parts ways with Adam and goes her own way is and she begat monsters, and she becomes terrifying", for example?  Perhaps they are young enough, some of them, to be human children, in Her eyes.  Perhaps they are delicious.

How many happy dancers wish to spin a round with the fairies and never imagine that someone will have to pay a tithe to Hell?  Oh, but we don't believe in the Devil, so obviously those nasty rumors are false and the fey-kind are perfectly safe.  (I have some watching me, these days.  It makes me nervous.) And anyway, they're pretty, right, and monsters have, as they say, a fearsome countenance.

It's like summoning a bannik into your bathroom.  Hope that the people who find that in someone's crap 101 book are, for the most part, not skilled enough to pull it off.

Here is a thing: there is a monstrousness about being pagan.  This is a thing about the present that cannot be dismissed or discarded, and it is not trivial.  Sure, in ancient days, some people had beliefs as a matter of ordinariness that were a lot like these, but then is not now - and calling upon then as a talisman against now is about as effective as sacrificing the wrong bull to Poseidon.  There is a thing about being off the edge of the map, the bogeyman summoned to keep someone else's children in line.  Of worshipping idols and other things forbidden to the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve.  Stepping outside those boundaries makes people something else, and sometimes, in fits and starts, people notice, and get anxious, when one responds to "But of course we want God to bless America!" with "Which one?"  (And thinking of my country, and thinking of my God, I am left with the horrible suspicion that, recently, He has.  He is not one to let people leave their monsters uncontemplated, shall we say.)

(And of course some people revel in the trivialities of their something elseness, lording their super-special distinction in having a goddess and a god, OMG wow, over those "mundanes" or gods-help-us "muggles".  In this, the monstrousness of pagan belief and practice is overwhelmed almost entirely by the different monstrousness of being an asshole.  This is not one of the interesting monsters.)

We are none of us safe.  And you can take that as a statement about personal security, or you can take that as a statement about being mad, bad, and dangerous to know, or you can take it any of a number of other ways: these are all true.  And yet we have the capacity to walk in beauty like the night - at least if we can deal with the unsafeness.  Not by pretending it away; not by conjuring up our Mr. Hyde to get away with the things that Dr. Jekyll would never do, oh gracious no.  By becoming whole.

This is a truth of the world:  the wolf will have his portion.  And if he doesn't get it any other way he will take it off at the wrist.

B is for Black

"The blacker the body, the whiter the light – the incandescent, active virgin heart from which all comes." - Victor Anderson

I first encountered that line in a training group run by Thorn Coyle (and in fact when I pasted it into a search engine just now the top hit was her book, Kissing the Limitless). I responded with some pretty crazed mysticism about astrophysics, which is neither here nor there.

One thing that modern pagans have to deal with is our common origins in a culture that valorises whiteness. This is not just a racial thing, but yes, racism is threaded through it. (And the question of why so much of pagandom is pale is perhaps not as unrelated as some might want to think.) Anyone who has done more than a little time in a pagan discussion board will probably have come across someone asking about the coloration of their magical work: Is this black magic? When might it be okay to do black magic? Is black magic being worked on me?

And here we come across is: Black is bad. Black is malevolent. Black is scary.

"Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget's Thesaurus there are 120 synonyms for blackness and at least sixty of them are offensive, as for example, blot, soot, grim, devil and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is a "black sheep." Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child sixty ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Whenever someone asks me about "black magic", I reply with another Victor Anderson quote:

"White magic is poetry. Black magic is anything that actually works."

Reframe your paradigm.

What is whiteness, what is light?

Some people talk about white as a symbol of purity - talk about that.

And talk about the cruelty of concepts of purity, too.

Talk about the treatment of children with multiple ethnicities, and consider how many of them live in exile from the worlds of all their ancestors due to being insufficiently pure. Talk about the madness of ideological purity that makes those who will listen to other positions anathema and only the wildest, most outrageous, most pure positions put forth. Talk about the spectre of the Holocaust, talk about the murders of trans women who died because some man thought he would catch a contagion of gayness from them, talk about menstrual blood taboos, talk about the madonna/whore complex, and talk about which people never have a chance at being shoved into the tiny box labelled 'madonna' because they're already socially impure. Talk about the whole concept, not just the - here's that color again - whitewashed versions thereof.

Symbols are complicated. Using them is a precise and delicate art, and sometimes they say other things than one thought they meant, too.

"Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number--Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysos, every now and then." - Ursula K. Le Guin

When I tell you I am Kemetic, I am aligning myself with blackness. This is what the word means, if you chase it back - an English noun form, from "Kemet", one of the Egyptian words for their nation: The Black Land. Black for night and black for death and black for the flesh of a mummy prepared for wrapping and black for resurrection and black for hands deep in the wealth of rich soil that comes like a miracle when the floodwaters part. Black for life. Black, also sometimes written in green.

And the Black Land is not opposed to Whiteness; its counterpart is the Red Land. Red for the desert, the barrenness of that space untouched by the sort of earth that can become rich with greenness, the earth which cannot be substituted one for one with green. Red for fire and blood, but blood is what unifies a body into a living thing, the pulse in every limb proof of wholeness. Red for the fire serpent that is the essence and protection of the sun.

Red for danger, anger, destruction, death, but black also for death and the night is not without its dangers. [*]

When I tell you I am Kemetic, I am telling you that I am black and red, and black means death and black means life, and red means death and red means life. I am telling you that it is not as simple as black and white thinking.

And when I tell you I am Feri, I am telling you to look to the night sky.


([*] Reference for these few paragraphs can be found in Wilkinson, Symbol & Magic in Egyptian Art, by the way, if you want to check my notes.)

His Mind is Engaged in the Rapt Contemplation

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.

Not One Of Your Holiday Games

One of Ren's prompts for this next round of the Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy was on the importance of women naming their own sexuality. And I've been thinking about that one for a while.

And after a lot of contemplation, I'm left with the feeling that it boils down to "If I don't do it, someone else will." If I want to leave it inchoate, unnamed, mysterious, I have to keep it entirely secret, because any sign that I have a hint of sexuality somewhere will be dragged out and assigned meaning by someone else. Even the category of being unsexed can be sexualised in some cases.

I have to make my own meanings, hold to them, define myself, or someone else will try to override me.

I am a cissexual woman. If I don't work on what, if anything, that means then I can get swept away in all of the cultural meanings of 'woman' and buffeted between them. Trapped between madonna and whore, career woman and brainwashed housewife, all the dichotamous piles of what 'woman' means. Whether it means I'm perceived as a set of penetratable holes and some boobs, or a little child in need of paternalistic protection, or both simultaneously, or one of the other godawful forms of womanness that floats around and tries to latch onto people like a facehugger out of Aliens and infest them with parasitic larvae doesn't matter: if I don't have a strong enough narrative of myself to refute these things, I can get infected and corrupted by these things. I am someone with these body parts and no dysphoria about them; it has no ontology, no deeper truth.

I am heterosexual. I am not in denial of my true and intrinsic bisexuality; I am not compelled into unsatisfying relationships by a heteronormative culture; I do not experience my orientation as fluid and malleable because I am a woman; I do not project my sexuality into images of women in the media; I do not consider my attractions to be oppression. I like looking at certain men, because I find them attractive, and I am just fine with that, thanks.

I am a sexual assault survivor. I am not a victim for revictimising, an object of pity, someone whose entire life and reality orbits around a golden afternoon in 1992 that left its marks in my mind. I will not be truncated and boxed into no more than helplessness and damage. I will not accept the myths, that I have a perpetually defective sexuality because of my experiences, that I just need to loosen up and get laid more to get over my trauma, that my kink or my polyamory or my anything else is a result of being warped, that my flashbacks or fears are a sign that I am a defective. All of which I have heard. I am a person who had a horrible experience; I have suffered, and I have worked to heal.

I am polyamorous. I am not looking for a quick lay, I am not available to just anyone, I am not too damaged to commit, I am not incapable of real love, I am not any of these other stereotypes or condemnations. I was not abandoned by my father, nor was I sexually abused. I am a person with two wonderful, committed, loving partners to spend my life with and another person of whom I am quite fond indeed.

I am kinky. My kink was not created by assault, manufactured by patriarchy, adapted from a need to seek abuse and disparagement, born of a sense of inferiority, a sign that I am a pathetic doormat, an invitation to treat me like a victim, or a signpost to deeper psychological defects. It is what it is, and I have invited commentary on neither the legitimacy of how I choose to conduct my relationships nor the progress of my spiritual development.

I am pregnant. This is not a validation of traditional barefoot-in-the-kitchen mores, a sign that I am more interested in baybees than my own autonomy, ownership by a man, a betrayal of women's freedom, a perpetuation of patriarchy, a sign that I am the right kind of woman with correct values, an embodiment of The Goddess [tm], or whatever other crazed myths that come up about motherhood. It is a part of the process of mammalian reproduction, which is not unrelated to sexuality.

Also: I am an emotional abuse survivor. I have my stories. If you want to define my reality for me, to override who I am and where I came from, to erase my stories, you are just like the one who abused me. I will exist in defiance of you and your fantasies about who I am, and I will not be quiet because you find me inconvenient. I don't care what your agenda is, whether it is important to you as a feminist or a traditionalist or a whatever else that people like me not exist and not be heard: you are the enemy of my personhood and my souls, and I deny you the power to name me.

I am many, many things, multitudinous beyond listing, and I. Am. Not. Yours.

I don't want other people's stories about me. I have my own.

If you want to have stories about me, listen - or, as a friend put it once, refrain from copulation and discorporate.

Foolish Inconsistency: Also a Hobgoblin Of Small Minds

So here's the thing.

People get to define their own lives. People get to define their own narratives. This is one of the perks of being people: this whole own mind, own life, own decision, own responsibility thing.

This is one of the reasons that I have been railing about how reprehensible it is that the anti-BDSM crowd keeps making up little just-so stories and lies about motivations and false images of what the life of a female submissive is really like and not listening to the actual narratives of actual real people who don't agree with them. The fantasy is not more important than reality.

It is no less reprehensible for a kinkster to do this to one of them. If you want your own narrative, give everyone - even your ideological enemies - the space to define themselves.

And stop being a smug, condescending asshole. There are too many of them in the world as it is, and we're over quota on our side.

To The Two-Year-Old of the Blogosphere

You know the one, who's harassing people trying to get shit done with the perpetual "Why? Why? Why?" After pondering some discussions over at Let Them Eat Pro-SM Feminist Safe Spaces, and Trin's examination of her own kink stuff, I present:

Why Dw3t-Hthr is submissive. (Insert little sparkly bits around this, or a nice scrolling banner, or whatever floats your pervy little boat.)

1. My perfectionistic, protocol-happy, rigid, and unforgiving-of-error personality makes a sucktastic leader, and a spectacular enforcer/majordomo/chief minion.
   
   
2. My wacked-out executive functions deal poorly with surprise, unanticipated situations, or anything for which I cannot bring to mind a previously evaluated protocol. In other words: I think very poorly under pressure.
   
   
3. I am sensitive to social dynamics involving subtle power flows (largely for reasons of self-protection) and thus far more comfortable in a defined heirarchy (especially when compared to one of those groups that claims to have "consensus-based" decision-making and refuses to acknowledge the power differentials within the group because it's ideologically unacceptable to notice them).
   
   
4. I reject on a gut level the social expectation that I am obliged to be compliant to other people's desires and ideologies, and operate in a system where my level of obligation is under my own control.
   
   
5. Even if I have been partially socialised into an expectation of vulnerability and malleability (which has a fuck of a lot more to do with my mother's insanity than any particular patriarchy construct), my earliest fantasies that acknowledged that focused on connecting with a person who would find me and cherish me in defiance of that cultural expectation rather than treating me like a faceless automaton just like all the others.
   
   
6. I take strongly after my father in base personality; I am sentimental, deeply emotional, a caretaker and nurturer, and drawn to being a support figure. (See also the umpty-leven posts I've written in the past bitching about the cultural degradation of support roles.)
   
   
7. I am profoundly fascinated by the exploration of altered states of consciousness, ranging from meditative trance through to careful studies of the effects of alcohol on my cognition. Part of this is a control-freak awareness that the more cognizant I am of the various functionalities of my brain the more likely I am to be able to navigate situations safely; part of this is simply mental-sensation junkieness.
   
   
8. I benefit strongly from situations in which my adequacy, success, and general worthiness as a human being not only are acknowledged, but extensively supported.
   
   
9. I believe that people are best off operating from their strengths and core drives rather than displacing their selves into what sorts of power others think they ought to be pursuing.
   
   
10. I am not dissociative enough to have a sexuality constructed separately from the entire rest of my being.
    

I don't expect that this will be good enough for some people, but that's not my fucking problem. I've answered your question.

Mother's going to make all of your nightmares come true

When I was a child, I knew that I had no privacy.

Not in the sense of constant surveillance or diary-reading (had I kept a diary). But I had nowhere to retreat to. My bedroom would be charged into, sometimes without knocking, to check on me, to see if I was behaving, to inspect me; once we moved to a house where my room had a lock, if I actually used the lock I would get screamed at. So I locked my door regularly, but ... only when nobody was around to notice, or when I could listen to hear if someone was coming. Sometimes I toggled the lock but did not close the door. My space was in regular danger of disruption. Even the insides of my head were subject to rearrangement at her whim.

One of my deepest expectations about interactions with others is that I do not have a safe retreat space. This deeply tainted my adolescent sexuality, though at least I had pre-pubescent sexuality that nobody interfered with because it's a cultural taboo to imagine that kids that age have sexualities.

(As I've developed a sense of boundaries, I've gotten touchier and touchier about people who want to co-opt my experiences and ignore my self in order to feed their own desires and narratives, which is one of the reasons Nine Deuce and her crowd's monstrous behaviour towards kinksters annoyed me so spectacularly.)

But I only ... just ... realised that I was set up.

That the positioning I have as pawn, as tool, as palimpsest for an agenda, that I fight against so damn hard, the stuff that feeds into my massive damage around privilege feminism, the stuff that leads to me thinking a lot about mechanisms of social control and how they show up, my generalised outrage at being rewritten ... was all carefully taught to me.

That maybe treating rape as normal came about because that was the lesson I was supposed to have learned.

Interventions

When I was a very young child, probably around when my brother was a baby, I started accumulating dribs and drabs of information about pregnancy. Very little of it made sense, and very little of it stuck with me, but there's one thing I remember: the concept of amniocentesis terrified me.

It just seemed like a thing of horrors - sucking out someone's insides through a giant needle, what's not to be scared of here? - and somehow I picked up the notion that it was mandatory, that every pregnant woman had to do this. It never occurred to me that people had been having babies for a long, long time before this procedure was even invented, it was just presented as utterly normal, default, part of the medical procedure that goes with this thing.

It wasn't a shock when I realised that nobody was going to force me into this, sort of a gradual dawning of relief. And it gave me this edge of jadedness about the presentation of the pregnancy-as-pathology-requiring-treatment thing in common culture. And I read Suzette Elgin (author, among other things, of The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense) talking about concerns of women and the elderly as constantly medicalised, pathologised, turned into Graeco-Latin terminology, and took that away to chew on.

I am, for various reasons, prone to hypochondria; every pulled muscle in my abdomen at the moment is good for a moment or five of panic before I can kick the analytical self into recognising the sensation. But one of the things that being pregnant has done for me at a gut-deep certainty is make clear that this is a normal thing, not a pathology, not a medical crisis; I may be impaired in some ways from my ordinary functioning, but the process I am going through is a natural one, and not something that I need to panic over, get tested every-which-way, micromanage. I'm achieving a state of calm that has been implausible to me in the past, naming my little freakouts as little freakouts, looking up a few things to check on them, and then letting go and being in this straightforward process of development.

I'm asked at least once every three or four days if we know the baby's sex yet, and I don't know how to explain from inside my head to the world outside that we're not going to any special effort to find out in the first place. This child is my child, whatever the gonads are, and I don't need to build up expectations now to care for the life tucked away under my heart. I don't need to rummage and inspect to find these things out right now. If we find out along the way, we find out along the way, but there's no need to go to special effort.

I've cleared my medical history and concerns so that we have a baseline to know what may be cause for concern, I've got blood tests to do to make sure everything is in order. But I have not been stabbed in the guts with a giant needle, to suck out my insides.

I have a guppy occasionally bouncing off my innards, and last night my husband and I heard the heartbeat for the first time. There is nothing to fear here.

Something Appealing, Something Appalling

Questioning Transphobia raised the issue of excluding trans women from areas because a penis -- or a former penis-possessor -- might be "triggering" to abuse survivors. Lisa Harney wrote a followup discussing her own triggers.

So here's the thing.

I am, in fact, triggered by penises; that's the most consistent thing that sets off my flashbacks to the assault. (Other known triggers include the movie A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which I didn't successfully watch again until a few months ago as a part of a really intense scene, certain phrases, and, apparently, attempting to discuss the events in any detail with the shrink.)

Being triggered by penises is really annoying if one is pretty much exclusively interested in male sex partners. For the first ten years or so I was sexually active, I kept the lights off if at all possible, and rarely looked south of the ribcage.

Being triggered by penises is really one of those things that almost never comes up in the ordinary world. I'm more likely to have my unrelated mostly-mild phobia of mirrors pop up than random unexpected penises -- people put mirrors every-damn-where, but it's not often that one encounters a random penis. (Warning: link to random penis includes random penis. Art by the delightfully wacky Ursula Vernon.)

And the reason it doesn't have much relevance boils down to, mostly: trousers.

I live in a part of the world where people, for the most part, wear clothes. The penises the people around me have, if they have them, are irrelevant to pretty much all interactions I have with them, whether they were born with them, had them generated via modern medicine, got cybernetic implants a la Star Wreck's encounter with the Bored, or have a sparkly purple one that lives in the drawer next to the bed. The penises just don't come up, or if they do, they don't come up thoroughly enough to escape the trousers (or occasional kilts).

Hypothetical penises that may or may not be there are not triggering for me. I am not speculating about what is in your trousers right now, whether you are male, female, or not, whether you are cis or trans, whether you are wearing a thong or boxers or nothing or whatever. So long as your clothes are on, your hypothetical penis is hypothetical. With your clothes on, you are as sculpted and nippleless as Barbie to me, though presumably better-proportioned and able to flex your feet.

But ah, you say, what about those circumstances where people may not be clothed, what about those penises?

What about them, I say.

The thing is, my trigger is my problem. Which is not to say I don't appreciate people who are willing to make accomodations for it, as I do, but I can't find it reasonable to demand that other people go to exceptional effort to pad the corners for me.

Let me walk away if there's a penis and I'm upset by it. Don't make me stare at your naked dude spread. Give me space if I flip out. These are levels of consideration I expect from you as a decent human.

Ask me to tell you if I'm being triggered so you can determine if you feel you need to make accomodation to my issue? Sure, that's something I don't expect, but do appreciate, and I consider it a gesture from a friend.

Ban penises in my vicinity, just in case one of them might set me off? Presume to tell people "You can't bring that penis in here, she might have a flashback"? Free clue: my neuroses don't have a right to run my life, let alone the lives of innocents. I have the right to live like a normal person, and let other people likewise live their lives.

It sucks to have to manage triggers. But it's something that I have to do. It's something I've worked on, actively, gentle exposure to the occasional penis, going so far as to look at a few (though rarely for long, because it makes my brain itch in unpleasant ways due to, y'know, triggeryness). But I have to do it, because that's the price of living in my head. Like sometimes walking with a cane is the price of living in my body. I don't get to opt out. If I were crippled by the possibility of encountering someone with a penis unexpectedly, I couldn't go get the mail, let alone have a satisfying life including my partners.

I don't want to be oh-poor-babied and have my fragile spots coddled until I'm made of nothing but twitchy shards of overprotective mess. I'm not going to tell you to leave your penis at home any more than I'm going to forbid you to hum "Everybody Ought To Have A Maid", but I may remove myself from your presence at times if I can't handle it right then.

Examining Desire

Oh look, it's another discussion of how to examine one's sexual desires. To which one party has responded with raising the question of what the problem is with examining and analysing this stuff, anyway.

So here's the thing:

No amount of "examination" will make any form of sexuality ideologically correct.

Sexuality does not have an ideology.

As people said in various places in this blowup, a penis in a vagina is a penis in a vagina; it's sex, it's normal/natural/biologically common/whatever, it doesn't have an ideology. The meaning is something that people create, attach, ascribe.

I've been chewing for a while about the occasional "just because a woman chooses that does not mean it's a feminist choice" thing that crops up, and have come to the conclusion that the concept of 'a feminist choice' is meaningless. And, in fact, that the notion that there are 'feminist choices' and 'non-feminist choices' is one of the major factors that drove me the fuck out of feminism.

It is possible to tune one's level of analysis to make every possible choice wrong, when "examining one's choices". It's easy. It is certainly, given my socialisation and upbringing, the level of analysis that I will automatically gravitate towards: it is so easy to slide to whatever level of analysis will frame me as defective.

I mean, I've written a couple of times before about the white knight who was sure that I needed to be rescued from the horrible fate of having the love and support of some wonderful men. There's a level of analysis there, that looks at the socially known patterns of multiple relationships and finds a lot of abusiveness there, that knows about problems with women with low self-esteem being likely to get into bad situations, and so on; there's not enough "examination" to notice the paternalism or listen to the actual perspective of the other people involved, but that's par for the course. And saying, "Examine more!" won't make a difference; it's all fully examined, even if the analysis is obviously defective when viewed by people outside the system.

But what's the system?

Take this one, for something that isn't obviously some man telling a woman "UR DOIN IT RONG":

I'm a housewife.

This is one of those things that gets a lot of handwringing "examine that!" responses. Lack of financial independence, check. Short resume in the event that Horrible Things Happen and I need to be supporting myself, check. In this situation in part because of being a dropout and thus in the ranks of the undereducated-for-modern-employment, check. Buying into patriarchal norms of appropriate womanhood, che--

Well then. I've written before about how the norms of "appropriate womanhood" where I grew up had a lot more to do with getting into the boardroom, the tenured faculty, and the White House than housewifery. And how attempting to conform to that standard despite my poor suitability for those roles was, shall we say, rough on me. So there's a little more examining to throw into the pot. And when I examine that far, I wonder if maybe Doing What The Pat Says Not To Do Reflexively is maybe another Controlled By The Pat thing, like a teenaged rebel who hasn't thought this through.

And then the little self-analysis mode goes into maybe being lazy and too entitled to go work outside the house, which I can stew in for months at a time if I'm not careful. Never mind that my time supporting myself left me feeling used and abused and actively unclean at times, not to mention the number it did on my mental health. And I examine a little more and find the bit where the work done at home is not socially marked as actual work (unless one does it in someone else's home, in which it's work only fit for poor women), and for that matter the creative work that I do is not socially respected as real work (see also, "But what's your real job?" directed, at some point, at just about every writer in the universe). And examining down another layer, well, that's all just an excuse, isn't it?

And if I keep examining, I wind up at "That's all just an excuse to justify doing what you want. Doing what you want is being a selfish bitch by definition, you selfish bitch." No matter what I examine, I wind up there. Protestant work ethic, a thread in there, and examining that one which runs so deep goes straight back at "selfish bitch", even when I am ideologically committed to an abundant universe.

There are no "win" choices. I choose this place to give myself time to pursue my callings -- my religious work, my creative work, eventually my mothering work -- and support my family in non-financial ways, not only because I have the option to choose it but because I am ill-suited to many other choices. Someone else may choose the same thing because of ideology of some sort, which I may or may not personally approve of or consider adequately enlightened or whatever.

But the choice has no opinion on the matter. It's not representative of an ideology; it is, at most, an emerging result of the interaction with ideology and reality. And the same ideology will lead to different choices when running into different bits of reality, and different ideologies will produce indistinguishable choices in various circumstances.

So back to sex.

Where the things that produce arousal come from is one of those deep mysteries. There's evidence that sometimes, they come from traumas, imprinting, juxtapositions that made an impression of the mind, sometimes they have biochemical origin points in part, and that sometimes they just come from somewhere and fucked if we know. Thinking about where they came from can be an interesting thought exercise, but I've found that the only intellectually honest answer I can present for some of them is agnoticism: I don't know, and I don't believe it's knowable.

"Why don't I just lie here anyway? Why don't I climb out? Why don't I just go zootlewurdle. Does it matter? Even if it does matter, does it matter that it matters?

(Pause)

Zootlewurdle, zootlewurdle, zootlewurdle...."

-- Marvin the Paranoid Android, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio broadcast, episode eleven, by Douglas N. Adams

Examining sexuality in the light of ideology seems to me to consistently come up with pernicious results. Mostly because it's generally framed not as "What sex do I want to have?" but "What sex should I want to have?"

When asking the question "What sex do I want to have?" all this stuff reasonably goes into the pot -- what is actually desired, what is acceptable to one's sensibilities to act upon, and so on. And this is quiet, personal stuff that has to do with one's own consent and desire to consent, one's recognition of the differences between fantasy and reality, and is only the business of anyone else if they're expected to participate. At which point they get to decide if that particular thing is sex they want to have for whatever reason they choose to do -- which may or may not include ideology at all, and they don't have to say why.

"What sex should I want?" goes into all kinds of ugly directions pretty much immediately -- slut-shaming kicks in on any female desire for sex at all, internalised homophobia chews up anyone with queer attractions and spits them out, anyone remotely pervy winds up wrestling with the possibility that they're some kind of monster, huge swaths of fantasy sexuality get shrinkwrapped and sanitised for your protection in the name of Practice Safer Wanking, and shame and guilt over sexuality are the rule, not the exception. It engages the prurient parts of ideologies, the invasive attention that expects someone's political to be everyone's personal, the creepy social stalker that wants to grope inside people's underwear before letting them get married.

Swapping from the default sex-negative culture's ideological perspective on acceptable sex to a different ideological perspective on acceptable sex doesn't fix the problem. It doesn't even change the problem. It just comes up with a new way of examining sexuality in order to determine who's having the wrong sex. To which the answer is, unsurprisingly: usually women, usually the people who aren't having mainstream sex for reasons of number, gender, or activity, usually the people whose sexuality is unacceptable to the dominant paradigm already. And the fact that these new ideologies pretty much paint the same people as unacceptable as the things they're supposedly critiquing ... goes unexamined.

But the examination, the taking apart of desire in the name of ideology, it mostly just makes people ashamed. It doesn't go anywhere rewarding; it ponders the unknowable until people get disgusted with themselves or their desires, or blow it off as useless, and if they blow it off as useless they get told that they're shallow, not thinking things through, saying "Whatever gets me off is okay."

I got asked the other day whether 'my feminist beliefs' had problems with me being submissive.

I just ... was too tired to get into how angry I get at that question.

(Added: A link to another instance of a post I linked up there somewhere, because there's conversation happening there.)

Silence is Complicity

It's hard, at times, sitting on the edge of known space, not involved enough in things to have anything useful to say, not far enough away to claim ignorance, to not know.

And I wasn't going to say anything, because I have no words of my own, and so much is about letting those who do have words speak them. And at the same time, ... whose side are you on?

So.

Other people have words. I will let them speak for themselves. I'm not asking for a fight, as the wounded party has asked to be let go without a fight. I'm asking for a witness. These things are happening. They have been happening for a long time, in many fields, in many forms. Pay attention.

[Added] Get some perspective.

My own words now: stop. Think. Listen.

Know were you came from.

Maybe then you'll know where the fuck you're going.

Dear Amazon.Com: Fuck You Too

Newsflash for the day: Big corporations suck, and the bigger they are, the more enthusiastic they are about sucking.

Now that we've brought up the tactile properties of water, the religious habits of the Pope, and the common defecation locations of bears, more specifics.

You've probably heard of Amazon.com. Hell, I link 'em occasionally when I'm posting about books here and have a searchbox on my page until I post this and start revamping my layout to remove it. Turns out, they've taken the notion that their position in the forefront of the online book market means they can strongarm presses that use print-on-demand technology. Specifically, they want all of those presses to print using Amazon's POD service rather than whatever they are using now, at least if they want to be listed on Amazon.com.

This is going over about as well as one would expect, especially since the POD publisher that Amazon acquired is deemed not as good (more expensive, fewer features) than the alternates that various small publishers are actually under contract with.

I work for Immanion Press, a small press that uses print-on-demand technology for its publication runs as a freelance editor; I have also been published in one of their anthologies, and intend to pitch at least one project to them in the future. They use Lightning Source, mentioned in the Angela Hoy article. I've bought books from Asphodel Press, which uses Lulu.com as a printer. I don't know what printer The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a small pagan press devoted to the Graeco-Egyptian pantheon, uses, but they'll be affected by this nonsense too. (I'm listing specific pagan presses because I actually have more direct contact with them than others. This has made The Wild Hunt, a pagan blog; I haven't seen it in the fiction-writing world yet, though if it makes Making Light I'll edit in a link from here.) I also know a variety of writers working in small-run science fiction, fantasy, and romance lines, at least some of which use print-on-demand.

I want people to be able to buy my books. I want people to be able to buy my friends' books. I want people to be able to buy the books of worthy others, too.

Please join me, one of my employer's senior editors, Lupa, Celtic recon author Erynn Laurie, and a variety of other people in bitching out Amazon for being monopolistic bastards. As soon as I get this posted, I will be removing all the Amazon affiliate stuff from my blog design and possibly drafting them a nasty handwritten letter about what assholes they are and sending it to

Amazon.com, Inc.
P.O. Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226

Jerks.

Crazy For You

There's an interesting and largely unfortunate consequece to being up-front about damage, and it's why I rarely am.

It's the way it exposes things. Generally, the exposure is in the form of, "You're reacting that way because you're broken in this way." And if one's disclosed having been hurt in the relevant this way, well, there's glory for ya, catch-22 style.

Back when I was dealing with the jerk who was pulling the "What horrible thing happened to her that she doesn't believe she deserves monogamy" schtick, when he was prying and going at 'did you have an abused childhood? were you molested?' and all the things that were looking for someone to blame, I didn't talk about things. Not just because I know that talking about, say, my mother in any other circumstances would get the usual borderline-description-response "Oh, that's perfectly normal, you're the crazy one", but this time would be siezed upon as some reason to justify my responses. Not just because talking about the assault is hard, and I don't want to hand over little bits of the rough stuff in my head to someone who just wants ammunition to hurt me with.

But because sometimes, the reactions aren't a pathology. I don't need horrible-things-happened to explain being poly or kinky, as I don't consider them broken states in need of correction.

With real people worth talking to, it gets harder, though.

Especially when getting aftereffects of The Crazy One.

"You're reacting that way because ..." and wham, off to the races.

Any response can be characterised as belonging to The Crazy One, if one's dissected one's past enough. Especially if there is any genuine damage in there to deal with. And if it belongs to The Crazy One, it's my responsibility to deal with; it doesn't necessarily bear on reality.

Only sometimes I really am just that upset.

And after getting a "You're reacting that way because ..."

... I spend hours taking myself apart, trying to figure out if I'm delusional, if I'm The Crazy One and didn't notice it, because maybe someone else actually knows why I'm reacting better than I do from inside my head ...

... because ...

... what if I am The Crazy One?

... what if ...

... if ...

Without The Balls To Post This In Context

One of these days I'll see a discussion about how horrible it is that young women today don't identify as feminists that I don't want to quote the last paragraph of Hanisch's "The Personal is Political" at.

That day is not today.

Centres of Power

I was talking with a visiting friend the other day about the "Spoiling Feminism" post, and, after a bit of reflection, commented that if I could inject one bit of comprehension into the brains of people I argue with sometime, it's that people are most powerful when synched up with who they are. Then I read Trinity's frustration at the blogs over BDSM, and decided to write about this.

I have commented before that getting into a stable d/s relationship as a submissive has been the single strongest contribution to my development and maintenance of a sense of personal power and capacity. And I'm not going to use the "empowering" buzzword, because that's nonsense; I did not get this power as a gift from outside, handed to me by my liege, or from thumbing my nose at some orthodoxy or other -- I got it from being able to put my integrated self in motion. If, gods forbid, something were to happen to him and our relationship, it would not go away, because I know what it's like to have that power now.

And I know that this concept will get a bunch of little twitterbirds with the, "But DH, you're a submissive, and further you're in a relationship with a man, which means this is all about perpetrating the hegemonial status of patriarchy somewhere in your subconscious and Come The Revolution people like you will be heeeeeeeealed" like is suggested in some of the comments to the post that Trin gave up on, but, y'know, unfuck the twitterbirds. (I'm not gonna fuck 'em, for sure.) If you're one of those little birdies, shut up for a minute and actually listen to what I'm saying, okay?

One of the big ways that systems keep themselves in power is to keep people who might challenge them off-balance. I wrote a while back a piece about how crazy Western culture is about the core biological impulses colloquially referred to as "the four Fs" -- food, fighting, fleeing, and reproduction, as it was taught to me long ago in class. Everyone is kept offbalance by this shit. And people who are of their own selves outside of the parameters of the normal in whatever way get it worst of all, because there's this constant modelling of the boundaries of what is a real human that stops somewhere short of us freaks out in the desert.

And I read stuff like the comment thread at Amptoons and watch people scurrying around drawing their little personal lines of who's the monster off the edge of the map, and who needs to be corrected and cured. And I see sequences that go like this, in paraphrase:

"Sheyeah, right, like a couple with a male dominant and a female submissive is counter to social norms."
"What makes you assume that I'm a submissive? Huh? Isn't that kind of fucked up, that a feminist dealing with a kinky woman assumes that?"
"Well, okay, no, I didn't mean you specifically, but there are people like that out there, and their stuff is clearly just asking for the Evil to come in."

Maybe, grudgingly, Trin's allowed in the sandbox, but I'm presumed to be a concussed idiot led down the garden path by the patriarchy or some other such blitheringly offensive nonsense. If I were a top or a domme or something else, well, maybe I'd be allowed a model of power, but as it is, my stuff needs to be questioned more, examined more, evaluated in terms of well, really, is this what I really want, truly, even after I've had my goddamn consciousness raised?

I had this big revelation a while back, working with one of the tools of Feri witchcraft, the Iron Pentacle. If one traces the points of the star around in the standard 'drawing a star freehand' way, the Iron Pentacle starts with Sex, goes down to Pride, back up to Self, across to Power, and down to Passion, before returning to Sex. Tracing the pentacle that way, each point is the previous one in motion, the ripple of that point.

I learned how Pride emerges from Sex from watching a lover's orgasm, and then expanding the metaphor.

The big reveal for me, though, was how Power is Self in motion. The more centered in myself I am, the more whole and complete, the more manifest, the stronger I am, the more able to act, because each act is backed in the fact that I am real and whole and putting my whole self behind those actions. When I am dissolute, when I am off my center, when I am acting from a place where there is self-doubt, I have no power, I have no capacity to move, because I constantly question whether the action is legitimate, the choice meaningful, the motion well-chosen.

I used to have those moments of doubt, back before I had my relationship with my liege, about whether it was okay for me to be a submissive, if this part of my Self was something that I should accept or question, correct, and get heeeeeealed from. I held myself as incomplete, refusing to give that portion of me any legitimacy, and thereby sabotaging my capacity for self-worth, acceptance, and effective action. Even when I shook most of the conscious stuff, gave up on the question of whether or not it was okay to 'give up my power', I had this lingering offcentredness about whether or not it was okay. I had relationships where my kink didn't mesh well with a partner or caused issues of one sort or another. I wound up in doubt that the sort of interaction I wanted was possible, or whether, if possible, it was going to be welcome or acceptable to anyone.

Having a partner who not only connected extensively with that part of myself, not only loves and accepts it, but who gives me the support that those fragile and ill-assimilated portions of myself need to have to integrate and bring myself together -- this is something that has meant that it's been possible for me to get into therapy after years of mumbling that I need to do so, has gotten me to wrestling with personal demons and strong enough to face them, has not only revealed to me what power I have when I'm actually in possession of both a lever and a place to stand but gotten me able to start working on becoming more Self-possessed, so that I have even more real, genuine, making a difference to the world Power.

Because I'm in a place where it's okay for me to be who I am, to be my Self, I'm actually able to do the damn work of figuring out how to be a gods-be grownup, and learn how to bring to bear adult Power. And because I recognise the huge wellspring of strength that that centeredness is, that rooting myself in my Self has granted me, I find myself caught in a sort of strange baffled wonderment at the people who want to try to convince me that I should be something else, should conform to their political fetishes, should lobotomise my understanding of power to 'being bossed around' because they told me to. Do these people not realise they want me to be a child, and further to be consciously constrained to weakness? Do they think that this is appealing to someone who strives to live in a place of I-Am-In-Motion-Making-Ripples-Of-Power? Be someone else, be still, be frail?

I am many things, and there is not a place where one stops and another starts; I strive towards actual wholeness. Someone may come in and say, "Well, being a submissive may be one thing, but that creates a vulnerability to these kinds of abuses", but being a submissive in motion does not create different Power than not being willing to put up with bullshit in motion does -- both are me, both are the ripples of Power that come from Self. Being a submissive is not about allowing my Self to be diminished, as the handwringing twitterbirds would like to suggest: it is allowing my Self to move.

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.

Having the Wrong Sex

Thinking about what Trinity wrote here and here, and Renegade Evolution's response here, and adding my own bit to the pot.

The problem with doing all this sex regulation stuff is that, well, there's no way it's going to make everyone happy. No matter what one does or does not do with one's sex life, there will be someone out there who doesn't approve -- maybe just that wacko over there who clearly only approves of said sexuality if it involves them, but someone is going to disapprove.

Given that there's no way to get universal approval for one's sexual practices, I figure it makes more sense to start with what makes me happy, and go from there to what makes the people who are actually involved with my sexual practices happy. If there's space for making anyone else happy after I've done the responsible thing and taken care of the people who are relevant and involved with the question, maybe I'll think about it. But I probably won't think about it for all that long, because people who are creepy enough to be interested in being satisfied with my sexual practices don't deserve much thinking about.

And, y'know, I was thinking of writing something more profound here, but I'm having a hard time coming up with something to be profound about. What gets me off isn't tied to politics, brainwashing, or obedience (and if it were, I'd have a lot of fun orgasming on command); what I'm not interested in isn't made up of politics, it's just made up of uninteresting. Giving up happiness with sexuality to suit politics is a bad trade; at least when I lost happiness with sexuality because I was medically broken that wasn't choosing misery.

Choosing misery isn't virtuous. Choosing to do something with sexuality because it's in keeping with the political orthodoxy one likes or disfavored by the political orthodoxy one dislikes is still letting someone else control one's sex. (Someone who's selling their sex to an ideology has no standing in my books to be pissy about prostitution.)

No matter how sexual or not-sexual we are in any moment, there's someone out there who's convinced we're doing it wrong. I see no reason to listen to them rather than me.

Spinach Politics

I was a-gonna write something else. I have this half-formulated discourse on ethnicity and religion thrashing around in my head after some discussion over at Bucking the Dominant Paradigm, but it's not letting me write it right now.

Instead, I've got something else that has been stewing around for a bit, which is finally demanding to be written partially in response to this nonsense.


This thing I've been trying to formulate goes something like this:

The first standard I use for evaluating the quality of an activist ideology is whether or not it actually hurts the people it claims to be helping.

The way I figure it, the worst an activism should be doing is not improve the situation of those in its target group. If it's only actually helping people in a certain situation, or with certain additional traits, or with a certain ideology, it could probably do with better labelling, but is not lying when it claims to be supporting people-of-that-trait.

I'm willing to cut slack for activisms that, while I consider them to be doing some harm to people they claim to want to be helping, are at least aware that there are perceptual differences that will cause people to oppose them on that basis legitimately. At least these people can be said to be operating in good faith, and may, in fact, be responsive to sensible critique about their methods being genuinely damaging -- and people can also decide whether or not the harm done is worth the benefits gained.

The "The only people worse off under our ideology are those who do not adopt the ideology" crowd, however, gets no slack from me. Even the least abusive of these, the "If you only agreed with me you'd understand why I'm right" crowd, are trying to get out of even basic critique of their position, which is an intellectual dishonesty that I have no patience for. When it gets into the "Whatever suffering my ideology inflicts upon you is a consequence of your shameful Incorrect Behaviour" lot ... I do not really have language to express my opinion of that sort of evil. The ones who are willing to treat innocents as acceptable collateral damage in their targetting of the Ideologically Incorrect -- who will, say, deprive the people taking refuge in a women's shelter of support staff because that staffer is a sex worker -- are among the vilest of the vile, not merely hostile to those who do not agree with them, but willing to betray the needs of the people they actually claim to be supporting in order to support that conflict.

If the activism is not capable of even imagining working for the good of those who do not share its ideology, it is not only incapable of producing positive results in the real world in which diversity is the rule, it is an ideologically oppressive system that will inevitably be opposed by those who are outside its scope. (And will almost certainly take that opposition as a perverse proof of rightness, as the immune system responds to it.)

I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it.

Owning It

A few of the places I read have been talking about women's sexuality of late. The way it gets warped, the way it gets used, the way it gets controlled or whatever.

When I was a kid -- I mean eight or nine, pre-pubescent -- I had an active fantasy life. It was a little fairy-taley, complete with questing to free beautiful princes who were trapped in towers sort of thing, with an entire sort of Disney-movie notion of how to woo and win the boy of my dreams, and I was too young to get that this was the early, inchoate processes of sex, but it was there. As I got older, I got to experimenting with my body, figuring things out, learning what I reacted to; my fantasy life got more explicit as I got to understand sex, and much more explicitly kinky, in ways that would probably really bother some people who're concerned about male/female dynamics patterning.

And that was back when I owned my sexuality. Not securely, because I didn't have a good handle on what any of it meant, but it was mine and nobody had messed with me yet.

I was a shy, weird kid, not so up on the social development thing, and significantly later than most of my peers on the physical development end of things. Which meant, in practical terms, that mostly I didn't know what junior high school slang-laden conversations about sexual things were about -- I was sharp enough to pick up that it was sex or sexually related, but I didn't speak the language.

And because I was a shy, weird, socially inept kid, I was a favorite target for the overbearing bullying type. And because my body type is within social expectations for 'attractive female' -- in other words, I'm too damn skinny -- that targetting was not physically violent, but rather intensely sexual. I spent my days in a perpetual haze of encounters with people who made constant oblique references to my sexuality in terms I did not understand, who enjoyed treating it as a toy for their amusement. They only got physical once, but the taunting was ever-present, the suggestiveness, the unpersoning of me into some sort of sex toy. When my parents tried to get the authorities at school to intercede, the response was, "Well, boys will be boys"; my only defense was to arrange my life to avoid them as much as possible and develop a shell that detached me further from my sexuality, as that was something they were working desperately to claim as public property and their avenue of attack on my self.

At the same time, I had one friend -- another shy, weird kid who happened to be male. We had very little in common other than loneliness and a few games; we spent a reasonable amount of time in each other's company, eating lunch together at the isolated end of a particular table, occasional afternoons spent playing Tetris on his Nintendo, that kind of thing. And -- innocently in his case -- he also laid claim on my sexuality with his assumption that this meant romantic connection rather than amiable companionship. He took my willingness to spend time with him as attraction and felt betrayed by my involvement with someone else, despite never having asked if I was interested in bestowing my sexuality upon him.

It wasn't mine to give, apparently, just some stray boy's to pick up.

This was a major factor in the assault -- this notion that asking for consent, asking if I wanted to share my sexuality, was beyond the possible. I was a curious fourteen-year-old, interested in grappling with this whole question of sex and sexuality, trying to figure out what I wanted; I was not, of itself, averse to exploring the concept, but it was all very new, it needed contemplation, and I was never asked. The mode of interaction seemed to be "gently try something and see if I get told 'No'". But without the time to think about it beforehand, I couldn't reasonably or honestly say "Yes", so there was this constant pressure on untested boundaries and transgressing across them clogging up my processing of consent, leaving me trying to catch up with it, and leaving me with the sense that, y'know, I wanted to say no to something a month or two ago, but now it's too late, I need to figure out the now ... and that progressed until I hit something where I was certain of the no and folded up into a little ball of panic pinned down by a much larger body that was trying to understand why after all that quiet compliance there was a wall there.

I had been taught that I had to say "Yes"; I wasn't taught a damn thing about people who would presume that lack of being slapped meant yes. And, again, my sexuality was something that was made his without me being able to figure out what to do to prevent it. I didn't have good boundaries on my sexuality -- I hadn't even really begun to figure out what my sexuality was, and the experiences that might have helped me define it and explore it in more practical terms mostly tugged it out of my grasp and turned it into someone else's plaything.

Among the things I lost then was my fantasy life; even that most private and intimate bit of my sexuality, the stuff that existed only in my own head, was lost to me. It wasn't safe anymore to even contemplate sex, to explore the intensity of power and eroticism, to construct the little narratives that I used to soothe myself to sleep with. Nothing of my sexuality was mine anymore; it belonged to other people and their visions of me.

When I started to get it back, when I started to heal, it was a headlong thing, grabbing a hold of sex, seeing what it wanted, and going there maybe a little faster than I would prefer in an ideal world, because if I initiated, if I was the one to push my boundaries, at least I was the active force, the determining one. I was deciding where things would go. I was in control -- a rickety, headlong, no-brakes-down-the-mountain sort of control, but at least I was steering the wagon.

Which isn't really owning it either, but it was a step up from having it all under the control of others.

It was a long, rickety route with a lot of sliding and slipping to get to where I am now, more or less -- a few complexes and places where I can't hold on to my sexuality, a few broken bits that are outside my command, but an awareness that I can roll sex around in the curve of my hips and keep it as my secret, an awareness that my desire is my own, and something that I can share with who I want to, and can share how I want to. I read Renegade Evolution's post on power in sex work, and there's something there that is part of the owning it that I aspire to -- having it as a tool, something that I can apply to situations when I want to, having the power of command of my own sexuality, which, perhaps, has something compelling about it, to the right sort of people. To choose to present it in a manner under my control, rather than having it something that other people suck out of me.

I get really twitchy around people who talk about sexuality like it's public property. Or property of someone other than the person who has it and the person or people they have consensually agreed to share ownership with. That Purity Ball crap freaks me the hell out. The obligated-to-put-out-by-the-third-date crap freaks me the hell out. The "nice girls don't do that" crap freaks me the hell out. The "what you do with your sexuality has to be framed and considered in terms of what it says about genero-woman!" crap freaks me way the hell out. The Barbie-whore clothing for toddlers freaks me way the hell out, oh gods. There's a lot of stuff out there that freaks me the hell out with this regard.

But when I see people talking about sexuality, especially women's sexuality, I look for the code language to sort out who they think owns it. Because people who think that they have some level of entitled position to control someone else's sexuality without explicit consent ... are scary, scary fuckers.

Controlling The Four Fs

Back when I was a kid, I took a paleobiology course over the summer. One of the things that I've retained out of it was the teacher's declaration that the "Four Fs" were the fundamental responses of organisms: "Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and Reproduction." We all laughed.

But now I'm sort of looking at mechanisms of social control, and ...

... how much fucking weirdness is there about what people eat? About controlling what they eat? Getting beyond the nutritional stuff into the politically correct food, or the coming down on heavy people who dare touch a cookie, or whatever else. I had a juvie novel when I was in elementary school of which the basic plot bunny was "Mom's on a health food kick and I'm embarassed to eat my lunch in public", and part of the culmination was new research changing the diet again with new! improved! modified! what food is The Correct Stuff To Eat.

And then of course there are the assumptions about people's value that depends on what they eat or how they eat, or presumptions about what people eat by their appearance, that vast tangled morass. Worthiness evaluated in terms of fat. The "sinfulness" of certain types of food. The presumption that a vegetarian will be a pain in the arse to a meat eater because of course there's a moral crusade involved.

Or one can abstract it back a little: for lots of folks, whether or not they eat and how they eat is an economic question. And that gets into the whole tangle of jobs, the value of jobs, the value of a person depending on their jobs. And it also gets into things like people who are so poor that they can't get an apartment with a working kitchen, or who don't have time or the skills to prepare food from scratch, and thus are depending on microwave dinners and snack packs -- which are more expensive overall, as well as less nutritious per meal.

"An army runs on its stomach." Control the food, control the people.


Control the responses to threat, control the people. If people are passively compliant and unable to stand up for themselves, so much the easier. If they don't fight back when compelled, so much the easier.

"Boys will be boys" was one of the things that I was told in junior high school, in response to sexual harassment. It necer escalated quite to physical violence, but it was deemed acceptable for them to try to touch me. (I hit one or two of them, and they tended to circle like sharks after that, taunting but never crossing that social line again.) Boys do that sort of thing; there is no way to legitimately get them to stop, no way to fight back.

And we get into the whole deranged response some people who want to argue gun control had to Cho and the VT shootings -- this whole notion that either people need to have more guns so they can mow someone down who tries that sort of thing, or fewer guns so the psychos can't get the means. None of this is the answer -- there are the beginnings of right questions available, but they're off on the fringe and nobody hears them with all of the shouting about the damn bang-bangs. Too much instruments, not enough paying attention to what makes the fight thing go whack.

And so then there's the living in fear, the cultivation of this state of terror, of preparedness to snap at people, to break them for crossing some invisible line. The danger of putting out your recycling while brown. Or taking photographs. Live in fear, be ready to fight your demons as they are projected upon the people around you.


Control where people can retreat to, what spaces they find safe, where the boundaries of their ability to be private fall.

If you aren't doing anything wrong, citizen, there's nothing to worry about. The surveillance is for your own protection. We will only break in to houses where we have good evidence that there is dangerous crime. We're only checking your soap for drugs for your own good. Really, we have good reason to want to know what prescriptions you're taking. Maybeyou're not being allowed on the plane because of that rally you went to or conference you spoke at. We just need your tax identification number to deliver your package -- just fax us a copy of your Social Security card!

It's for national security.

It's for being able to serve you better as a consumer.

It's not like you're doing anything wrong, so why do you care? It's for your own good.


And then you get into sexuality. And it's not like most every dystopic science fiction novel doesn't have strictly regimented sexuality -- whether drugs to keep the sex drive down, or 1984's for-the-Party-comrade supervised fucking, or whatever else. Visceral, intense stuff that people feel strongly about, that's all tangled up with their sense of who they are.

You must be taught not to have sex before marriage, and marriage must be heterosexual monogamy. Heterosexual monogamy is the only acceptable manifestation of sexuality, but it is not about sex; anyone who wants something different is a sex-crazed freak. Love the sinner, hate the sin.

It doesn't matter that it's what they enjoy, that they are consenting adults who are aware of the risks, that stuff is just wrong, and nobody should be allowed to do it. Sex toys are like prostitution, after all. Those kinky people are freaks and abusers. Disease-ridden sex fiends! Broken people incapable of forming healthy committed relationships! Shame, shame, shame, never show your face!

And if you didn't consent to the sex, shame anyway. And we know that that means that you're ruined forever. Better Dead Than Raped. There goes The Victim (or The Lying Slut), never anything else. The nightmares are not enough punishment, or the jumping at any sound; only unpersoning is sufficient.

The only good sex is the ideologically correct sex -- and if you fuck in the wrong way, well, that shows that you're traitorous scum. You haven't considered the question enough. Who you are -- who you love -- how you express that -- is Wrong, and needs to be destroyed.


Four Fs.