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.

Relational Tinkertoys

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

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

So. Relationships. Structures.

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

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

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

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

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

So that's all backdrop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the Aftermath of Prop 8: Please Correct Your Fucking Ignorance

Dear the internet:

Marriage is not a religious ritual.

It may be a ritual in your religion. It may be treated as a ritual in common implementations of your religion in order to 'pass' under the hegemonial status of Christianity. You may be sufficiently swamped in the hegemonial status of Christianity that you can't imagine a religion that doesn't treat it as a matter of theology.

Your ignorance is not the same thing as historical fact.

You know when the Christian religion held sole sway over marriage in England (the law of which supplies the backstory for the legal systems of many and probably most of the people who might have a chance of reading this rant)? Between 1753 and 1837. There's your historical basis for the exclusive ownership of marriage by the Church (with exceptions for Jews and Quakers, IIRC).

Before that, in England, people could, if they so desired, get married by claiming they were married and fulfilling certain social parameters (common law marriage). Afterwards, there was established a public registry of marriages (civil marriage). In England's colonies, things varied widely - my Puritan ancestors were totally squicked out by marriage as a religious thing, as I've noted before, not that anybody damn well noticed. Various other cultures have treated marriage as falling under forms of trade, of contract law, of sundry other things.

I don't want to hear anymore about how this upholding Prop 8 separates church and state. I don't want to hear anymore about how this religious thing should never have gotten legal status in the first place. I don't want to hear anymore about how the government - enforcer of contract law - should be out of the business of enforcing the contract of marriage because somehow marriage is magically different because the right-wing asshats think they own it.

Marriage is a human universal. Anthropologically, it is the formation of a family under the witness of the community, with the creation of the responsibilities and benefits that that community considers a part of that process.

You may think it weird that I don't consider marriage a religious thing.

That's fine, I think it weird that the loud religions in my vicinity don't consider childbirth a religious thing.

Examination Burnout

I was reminded of something by this post, and it's stuff I've mostly found too raw to post about, but I feel like writing a bit now while it's in my head.

I've written before about "Just Say No" culture and sexuality. What I haven't talked about was the way denial-and-examination culture intersected with my inner kinks.

When I was an elementary school child, I started building an understanding of my sexuality as it was at the time. I had very separated experiences of physical sexual pleasure and romantic attraction - it had not occurred to me that these were related - but I explored both as best I could. I was aware that my experience of romantic attraction was somehow related to "grownup things" like marriage and families, but I recognised (consciously, even) that that was something I would figure out when I was older; for now, there was the boy, and I could beat him at wrestling.

Once my fantasy life had developed into fiction rather than fascination with the boy, and once I had grown enough of it for my sense of physical pleasure to get tied into my sense of attraction, they took on a structure of extreme power differential, often with bondage aspects. I was never ashamed of these fantasies, or, as I thought of them, the stories I told myself when going to sleep; however, I knew, bone-deep, that I could never talk about them.

I never have.

(Think about that for a moment. I have never talked about those fantasies in more than generalised referents, themes and content.)

I knew that if I told anyone about them, they would try to figure out what was wrong with me. I didn't know words like "misogyny", but I knew that I'd have the concept thrown at me. I knew that I'd be treated as sick and wrong, because Good People don't have thoughts like that. I knew that I would never, ever be able to express these things; at least on that last I was wrong.

And as I became aware that these things were things I should not express, I became aware of the idea of examination. I had an obligation, I knew, to figure out where these things had come from, that they could be excised. I was a sleeper agent of the oppressor, my sexuality out to subvert everything that women could achieve, and I had to cure myself. There was no support for this - it was still unspeakable horror - but it was clear that the wrongness was something that I would be expected to purge before I was an adult.

Guilt started to creep in around the edges. The fantasies became even more secret, because there was this edge of belief that I should not be that way, that I should be someone else, someone more loyal, more diligent, more compatible with the universal goals that I had been assigned on the basis of my sex, class, and race. I squelched the impulses in my more conscious mind, leaving them only the release of the nighttime stories, giving me dreams of the taboo-breaking man who might love and own and honor me despite the shackles of surrounding culture.

I was an emotionally isolated young adolescent, full of need and loneliness and hunger and wanting to explore the concepts of sex and not knowing how. Nothing in the world around me had ever given me any understanding for figuring out what I wanted or how to implement that safely; I was still half-consciously aware that what I wanted was Bad anyway, so figuring out how to get it was unthinkable.

It didn't go away, of course. And sometimes these things come out in badly sublimated ways. Hook a loop of fear-paralysation into a mind frantically denying its need to surrender, bait a touch-starved, curious adolescent with affection from a pretty older boy, and watch a psyche fragment into a perfect rape victim and a panicked, impotent observer. Respectful and loving submission was unavailable, unthinkable, unallowable, so all I had was deer-in-the-headlights capitulation, where my sexual drives and my terror and his unceasing pressure conspired to shove me into a closet in my head.

And maybe, with a little more examination, I might guess that this is one of the real reasons that I have never really been able to forgive myself. Because, after all, if I didn't have those wicked, shameful desires, then maybe the combination of mental lockup and pressure wouldn't have been enough to get my psyche fridged. It can't really be his damn fault, right? He just happened to luck into that siren song of unacceptable woman-hating sexuality. And I can't hold it against him, because he stopped short of rape in the end, when he saw that I was broken. (I can't even write 'that he'd broken me' and feel honest, right now.)

This was not ... the only time I fell into that pattern, though it was the only time it was assault. I had an abusive vanilla relationship that hit my submission buttons around music until I hit a wall and threw him out of my life. I had a relationship with someone who was deeply uncomfortable with my submission, and so like a good little subbie and a good little woman I stifled it again to make him happy. I had other issues. And I worked on it until I came to a place where I could return to childhood and refuse to be ashamed.

Where does it come from? I don't give a damn. And not giving a damn is not just a political position about the unworthiness of the question, but me fighting back against the investigation of myself for which fruit of Original Sin was why I deserved to be nearly raped before menarche.

If the message had been that I needed to figure out how to deal with these desires in a sane, reasonable, and balanced manner, if it had included discussion of consent and how to set boundaries, if it had been anything other than "WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?! WHY ARE YOU A FREAK?!", maybe things would have been different.

Why am I like this? If my established answer isn't good enough, fuck off. Why am I a freak? Welcome to the edge of the map. The Antipodes, where men walk upside down.

Watch your step. I bite.

Getting Into My Head

I hate the way she does it. The way she's able to do it.

I can get a note and have it roll off me and think how great I'm doing, how easy it is to look at that and say, "Oh look, she's pulling this trick, that trick, the other; the subtext here and here is all about how great she is, the subtext there and there is all about how horrible I am. It reads surface-level as supportive, and is completely full of undermining. Ha ha ha, how remarkable. Good thing I'm able to draw that boundary, huh?"

And then ...

... then there's the way a decision I had more or less made winds up getting ripped out from under me and turned on its head because of a totally reasonable conversation, just letting you know, and of course she would do this responsible thing rather than the thing that I was intending, and it wasn't like I told her what I was doing anyway for her to undermine, I think she just guessed, or maybe it doesn't matter and she'll do what she does without knowing anything and ....

Yeah, around and around in a giant damn loop of self-doubt and uncertainty and needing to balance what is real and what isn't, and I don't know anymore.

I'm full of hormones and full of fear and my mother is in my head again and I don't know how to get her out.

In my head in my head in my head ....

The Marrying Kind

I went on one of my "Well, I'm behind again" runs through the blogs and livejournal and came across a couple of posts about relationships and marriage, which of course is one of the umpty things on my mind at the moment. (I'm more preoccupied with depression, celiac diet, and wrestling with work, but marriage is at least mostly more cheerful.)

One of the things that I've been chewing on is the space between the private and the community; marriage is a liminal thing, really. And where the boundaries on community are.

And it's hard to write about the stuff in my head. It's odd, the way marriage is much more a publically stated thing than, say, my d/s, but the d/s is mostly easier to write about. But there's the thing where a marriage -- at least an unmarked case thereof -- doesn't require much in the way of explanation. I can say "my husband" and it just floats off on discourse, and maybe something gets misapprehended because some people have dippy notions about what that means, but for the most part that doesn't even hit undertow.

A bit of my brain wants to make wedding plans right now. Work out the format, the structure of asking people to witness, the contract. It's been kicked into my mind because of poking at the question of rings and their design, and it's not shaking loose easily. And it's maybe early (though some people do much more long-term planning on such things), and it's certainly busy, and yet ...

... I fret about things. Like trying to navigate the nightmare of parents, who might well have been happy about our respective first marriages, but have varying opinions on the validity of the second. I want to talk to my brother about the nightmare of trying to figure out the lowest-drama solution for dealing with my mother. (My brother, dear sane fellow that he is, took my announcement of my engagement with a, "Congratulations. I guess I should meet this person sometime, huh?")

And maybe it'd be easier to do the private little oathgiving and ring exchange with a few loving hecklers as witnesses, but I'm too much of a liturgist and ritualist to have that feel like it works for me. Easier to just skip the whole question of what to tell the parents, if anything, and have it come up when it comes up, if ever, easier for someone whose mind doesn't have the same shape as mine.

And an acquaintance just came out poly to his parents, someone who's been poly for long enough that his children, half a generation or so younger than me, were raised in a household in which that was normal. He'd gotten worn down by it all, I gather from his writing about it. And there's meaning there, and recognition, though I don't know what sorts of relationships he has.

What does a marriage mean? This shape of placing that relationship in a context that I cannot right now articulate. And my context is complicated and full of family and friends and the eloquent tangles of the past, and for all that I've had this ring half a year it's only started to feel real in the last half-month, the thing that I never thought would work out for me, the thing that leads me to snuggling up in a discussion about plans and parents and marriage and saying, wonderingly, "How did we get here?" to get the answer, "We really failed at casual sex."

What does it mean to do this, to stand up and say it, even though the society as defined by that which holds the laws cannot and will not hear it said? What does it mean, to do it damn well anyway, without religious imperative, just because it matters?

I think that's what I'm wrestling with, under all the flailing at other things, that deeper grappling with why. Superficially, the ability to answer the drama if drama comes with an understanding of why is provoking it.

But the thing about doing it is knowing what I'm doing.

Time Better Spent

So I've been sort of half-assedly observing some of the blogs I read having a small explodiation about something about burlesque and the fallout from same, with the usual suspects having a "Why aren't you people concerned about raunch culture and teh pr0n, this is the most important feminist thing evar!" around the edges.

This is one of those things that boggles the everliving fuck out of me. And I haven't written in a while, so I'll pretend that my bogglement is substantial.

A few issues that this person who doesn't file herself as a feminist has personal some-might-say-feminist interest in, either from personal experience or concern over personal friends, in no particular order:

1) Social support for victims and survivors of sexual assault and rape. The notion that "real" rape is perpetrated by a stranger, and thus being assaulted by a partner, a friend or acquaintance, a medical professional, an officer of the law, or in some other scenario that isn't "leap out of the bushes in the park at night" is not legitimate trauma. The treatment of people who have been assaulted or raped as perpetually damaged and marked by their victim status, and thus unable to have a real life afterwards. Treatment of certain categories of people as unrapeable because of their believed status as subhuman or so-voracious-consent-is-irrelevant, including but not limited to: sex workers, people of color, trans people, disabled people. Addressing the frequency of sexual assault of queer people as a form of orientation and gender policing.

2) Social treatment of nurturing and support - and thus commonly assigned to female - tasks as not really work and not worthy of time, attention, or remuneration. Parenting is a big one of these. Domestic tasks, unless of course one is poor, typically brown, and cleaning someone else's house. Nursing. Elderly care.

3) Health care access in the United States sucks. Especially for the poor, the under- and unemployed, the chronically ill, and the people who fall disproportionately into those categories due to systemic prejudice: people of color, women, the elderly, people with disabilities, etc.

4) Anti-family culture in the United States is really damn pervasive. (It's also in other countries; the example that comes to mind is an Irish friend.) The default social expectation is that career will overwhelm all other things, meaning that time to spend time with partners, children, and actually having one's life is eaten away by "actually, we expect this overtime". The Price of Motherhood's introduction includes the author noting that she had to write the book when someone asked her, "Didn't you used to be Ann Crittenden?", rendering her entire identity dependent on the job-worshipping culture, and her status as a parent negating even her name.

5) Sex education. If I had gotten better sex ed, stuff that covered how to think about my sexuality and what I wanted to do with it, then I would probably not have been sexually assaulted. Period. Not just "Here are the horrible things that could happen to you if you fuck", but actual awareness of the thing, yes, disease and pregnancy prevention but also, y'know, someone once mentioning the word "consent", say. Good sex ed will reduce pregnancy rates and disease rates, and I bet they'd make a lot of people a whole lot less traumatised by sex due to situations of dubious consent like the one I went through, too.

6) Sexualisation of children. We do not need toddler-sized thongs in the universe. (We could do with girl-gendered clothes for young children being built to the durability standards of boy-gendered clothes, too.) I count "purity balls" as the sexualisation of children, by the way.

7) The whole madonna/whore undercurrent of culture. There's a reason I have a "good woman" tag on this blog. The cultural assumption that there is a good way to be a woman and a bad way to be a woman, and the bad women will be raped, shamed, abused, and discarded is broadly a Bad Thing. And I don't give a damn whether the "good woman" is a fine, upstanding feminist citizen or the pretty virgin-whore (but only available for her lawful owner) or whatever other standard exists: all these standards hurt people. The proliferation of standards upholds the existence of the dichotomy, because it's even more impossible to be a "good woman".

8) The undermining and discarding of women's agency as sexual beings. Which is pervasive and everywhere, whether it's the "sex is something men get from women by tricks or coercion" thing, or the thing I wrote about a while back where discussions of polygamy essentially disregarded the notion that women might have preferences, or the good woman standard of sexual purity, or slut-shaming which is its flipside, or the double-standards of male and female sexuality, or the assumption that a woman who is sexual is generally sexually available, or .... Women's abilities to choose relationships, express their sexuality, or otherwise exercise free will are constantly questioned, and women are pop-culturally treated as the prizes of men with agency.

9) Differential treatment of women's and men's health. Cheap Viagra vs. umpty-lump a month for contraceptive hormones (if they're covered at all). Better coverage for prostate care than endometriosis. Female sexual dysfunction treated as mythological or the fault of the woman's partner(s) rather than a possible legitimate health problem. Women's knowledge of their own medical concerns not being taken seriously. Doctors not listening to women's concerns. Hypermedicalisation of pregnancy and childbirth (sometimes in connection with #4).

10) Appearance policing and shaming. The one I've seen the most of is around weight and diet issues, and it's gone both in the standard-cultural hatred for heavier people direction and some really vicious backlash the other way. A sideline into eating disorders, constant dieting and discussion of dieting, and food obsession (which I'm extremely cranky about at the moment as I'm supposed to go on a celiac diet, and neurotic attentiveness to ingredients makes me miserable and crazy, and wheat is fucking everywhere). But also sidelines into such idiocies as whether or not one shaves and what one shaves, makeup habits, clothing conformity, and that sort of thing. Treatment of visible aging as neutering.

11) Creeping Dominionism. I mean, speaking as a crazed mystic polytheist, I can't say that I'm big on the whole rewrite the universe in the structures prescribed by a particular lunatic-conservative reading of the Bible just to start with, speaking as a woman I don't like what that means for the status of women. Let alone the speaking as a sexual deviant and all. Or someone who isn't interested in religiously justified war.

12) Rape apology. I'm really kind of bothered by rape apology from all sides, she said, with mild understatement. And I've seen whole bunches of really creepy ways of getting rapists and assaulters out of responsibility for their actions. To name a few off the top of my head: "What'd she expect, going home with him?" "If you get assaulted, well, you encouraged it by being a stripper." "She was wearing that short skirt." "You can't rape a man, they always want it." "Of course, the porn indoctrinated him into that behaviour." "Men are all rapists." "It's impossible for a woman to consent under patriarchy." "We have to give this severely disabled woman a hysterectomy so she doesn't get pregnant." "She had more than one partner, she had to expect that people would think she was available." "Flaunting her sexuality." "Trying to pass as a...." All of these get people who commit sexual assault out of responsibility free. They remove distinctions, generate rhetorical chaff, and/or dismiss and denigrate the actual experiences of assault survivors.

13) All women are one woman thinking. I made a few giggle-waves in the blogworld a while back talking about the "woman as arcade game" mode in some cultural thought -- this notion that there's a cheat code that will make women behave appropriately, perhaps like that which can be found in self-help books, and women who don't jump in accordance with the latest programming are defective somehow. But there's also the appropriation of women's experiences by other women, or by men looking for victim stories. I ranted about the pagan equivalent of this thing a little bit ago, like last month, the essentialising of female experience into a genero-goddess. The bullying of women whose experiences don't fit the party line for what women are supposed to be like in whatever subcommunity is looking.

14) The creepy interest some people have in knowing about my genitalia for such things as determining whether or not I should be able to be recognised as married.

15) Underemployment of women in general. Which is partly a consequence of disproportionate amounts of caretaking (and thus not listable as work experience) work falling on women, subtle discrimination, and driving women out of the workplace because dealing with the sexism is exhausting, but also of this massive intersectional mess where, say, older men may be respectable, but older women can't get work.

There. Fifteen things I think more worth spending angst-time on than porn and high heels.

Measure of a Medication

Fear is how we measure ourselves.

(I know it because a god told me. I know it because I feel it in my bones, blood and bone, breath and blood and bone. I know it.)

Fear is how we measure ourselves and that's how I got out, got out, got out of the laughing crying hysteria of terror the slip-slide of the inside of my brain. I said it, said it in the car when we were driving, driving because my husband was willing to go and get me the only food I could imagine myself eating, was willing to listen to me giggling through the tears with, "I'm crazy!"

I said it, and got a handle on the sideways-slipping weirdness of the brain, the sense of Things Moved Around in ways that I don't understand and don't have a grip on, not feeling less of the madness but maybe better able to float rather than flail.

Fear is how we measure ourselves.

And I'm about 90% sure that it was hormonal, is hormonal, with a side leavening of physical illness, and that does not help as much as I think it ought anyway. And half the things on my mind I can't formulate the words to talk about right now, anyway, half the fears, because of the overbearing weirdness of my brain.

I measure myself anyway, measure against the unfamiliarity of the inside of my mind, test it, try to figure out what is bearable, where the fractures are, pray for the hormone break that will restore something familiar if not sane. I measure myself, with only the occasional gibber of, "Moved the furniture! Inside my head!" like an affronted cat who has to sniff everything twice to make sure.

One of the things I said while I was laughing mad, crying mad, shaking mad, was that this was one of the things that I had been afraid of, that my reactions would change, that the unfamiliar would become overwhelming. And no amount of knowing that I'm still falling within the range of potentially normal responses makes this feel normal for me, makes it anything other than a mental intrusion about which I circle, stifflegged and slightly fluffed.

And at the same time I think about the line I came across for work, the thing about it being okay to be depressed now and again, to not be 'medicated until normal', and I don't know how to respond. For work, I corrected the punctuation and let it be, never mind that I wanted to scream at the smug ignorance that can let someone who clearly hasn't been curled up in bed until the sheets were stained black with body oil mutter about how it's okay to be depressed every once in a while, that's normal, that's acceptable.

You think you know something about the world, I wanted to say, you think you know, try it in here sometime, try being in a mind so broken it curls up the body and isolates itself from loved ones while desperately lonely and in need of touch. Take the sheets stained rigid with the effluvia of mental illness and wrap yourself in them for your next toga party. Try out knowing for half a week that you need to do some laundry and have that knowledge crush you rather than inspire you to produce clean underwear. Try on the desperate ground-in habits of depression, the hopelessness, the anxious hyperawareness of failure.

Circle my mental processes with wary caution I may be, but I at least know what I'm talking about when I say that I feel crazy.

Fear is how we measure ourselves.

In Which She Links Her Previous Posts And Breaks The Labels Feature

Someone at "The F-Word" asks:

While I’m here, can I ask: why are there next to no “sexy” images of men on sex positive* sites, or sites focusing on porn for women etc?

A post to which I reponded:

Well, my 'sex-positive for lack of a better term' blog doesn't have photos of hot men on it because I respect my partners' privacy and anonymity in that forum.

And anyway, it's not their blog.

Belledame of Fetch Me My Axe has written about being a sex-positive lesbian and a short sidebar on slash writing; Caroline at Uncool talks about her use of imagery. When I think about people who are posting images of men (and sometimes women) they find sexy just on my blogroll, I immediately think of E for Eclectic (whose second post from the top as of this writing is titled 'The Beauty of Men'), Natalia Antonova, Aishwarya at Kaleidoglide. There are others, too; that's just a quick sample.

But that's neither here nor there.

I just went and looked at my "beauty" tag. And in there among the anti-poly sizeism post or the one about the gorgeousness of correct taxonomy and recognising the beautiful humanity of a stranger and the politicality of hair and beauty vs. brains and body image stuff I find things like me writing about male beauty and my problems with the mainstream conceptualisations thereof or my recent post about beauty and power dynamic and lust and some theology using male beauty as the central image.

Just to focus on what I know, which is what I've written.

And I think there's something actually insidious about the notion that a sex-positive blog is necessarily a sex blog is necessarily a porn or erotica blog, at all. That the whole thing about being sex-pos is about working to titillate, arouse, or engage sexually with one's audience. Perhaps, that it's all about the 'hawtt titjobbe bisexee suckfuckers', that sex-positive asexuals do not exist.

The sex blog I've been reading longest is Sexeteria, which currently features a herbaceous porn header: the unclothed genitalia of a tulip. (Actually, looking at it again, it's not a tulip, but I don't know what it is, and I can sidetrack myself for hours trying to figure it out to properly improve my one-liner. Thus, moving right along ....)

This is a sex-positive blog.

Note the lack of sexy images of men or women. Not because of any political impulse, but because I'm not interested in sexy images of either, for the most part, and I respect the privacy of the people I do fancy ogling at length.

Note, also, the lack of explicit writing, scene reports, tales of sexual prowess, and similar things. Not because of any political impulse, but because my private sex life is none of your damn business, my assorted readership and stray explorers who got here by Googling "pixie sex" or "nine letter relationship word status" (good luck with your crossword puzzle, whoever you are!). This is not a sex blog.

It is a sex-positive blog. It's here because I'm writing about my personal sexuality, BDSM, the difficulties and damages and risks inflicted by a surrounding culture that is frankly defective about matters sexual. Because I want to write about learning about sexuality and how to have healthily constructed sexual experience. Because I'm concerned about the marginalisation of various people's sexualities, including my own. Because I write about divine ecstasy.

And, you know, I've occasionally considered writing a post about porn, because it's one of those going subjects in the sex-pos blogworld, but I'm not up for writing a post about something I've never seen, participated in, or had any particular interest in. I might write something someday about written stuff I've found hot, or visual stuff I've found hot -- I may have mentioned my reactions to Tigana in passing -- but that's not a particularly compelling subject to me either.

Asserting my claim on my own sexuality is a compelling subject for me, because it's something that I have been wrestling with for twenty years or so, because there are forces that make it very necessary work to do, people who think I should avoid things I find sexually satisfying for political reasons, moral reasons, social reasons. Doing the work to make the world safe for me as a polyamorous kinkster, and as part of that same work to try to make the world safe for all the other people with their varying sexualities and lacks thereof because we are all people, is what makes this a sex-positive blog.

If one is mistaking "sex-positive" for "providing wanking material", one will miss a lot of the work that a lot of people are doing. The internet may be for porn, but this blog isn't.



On a related note, I appear to have missed the fourth carnival of sexual freedom and autonomy just like I missed the third, but just because I don't have anything in it doesn't mean that I don't think people shouldn't go read it if they're so inclined.

Ay Oh Way Oh

I'm sitting here after a godawful day (the high point was shovelling the half-foot of snow off the deck steps) and the music pops up "Walk like an Egyptian".

Which gets me thinking about E.

E was my best friend in elementary school, about a year older than I was. We were both in the 'awkward smart kids the school system can't afford to do anything meaningful with' group that were allowed into the chorus in fourth grade. She was a dancer and ice skater -- I never could manage to get through the third level of the intro classes (there were four) and she was learning how to do routines, maybe angling towards competition. She gave me a guppy once. About five generations of guppy; it was pregnant. She had a magic tricks set that I coveted, a sweet calico cat with a purr like a Mack truck, and an obnoxious older brother.

She was the only one who comforted me when I was crying my heart out the day after my grandfather's funeral. The teacher saw her in the corner, nearly scolded her for being out of class, and then saw me there and let us be.

I have this clear memory of her in my parents' living room, singing 'Walk Like an Egyptian' and dancing. I didn't know the song -- it was big at the time, but I was culturally illiterate -- and it was silly and real and very E.

I moved away when I was ten, and was not good at keeping track of my old friends.

She called me six, seven years later. She'd dropped out to take care of her baby. Talked about maybe getting married to the kid's father. And I felt like I'd fallen into a different universe, one where I didn't know the rules anymore. I was tangled up in awkwardness, with not knowing her world. I wished her well, wherever she was, wherever she wound up.

The past is sometimes as hard as the future.

Heartbroken

So last night I called all my immediate family members -- both parents and my brother -- to wish them a happy Thanksgiving.

Talking with my brother is ... complicated, sometimes. It's like we grew up in slightly different worlds. He was never close to Dad, particularly, for reasons I understand, and maintains a closer relationship with Mom than I can imagine ever wanting. He asked me why I was finally in therapy, and I told him I'd hit rock bottom, and after a moment he said, "I'm happy for you", and ... it's a funny thing to say, though I know what he meant.

He apparently went to a Thanksgiving gathering with Mom and about a dozen (according to him) or twenty (according to her) other people. She had a great time. He felt alienated by all the strangers having their family togetherness holiday, pretty much.

And he said, "I hate holidays like this."

I asked him why.

"I don't have a family," he said.

The divorce and all its chaos happened while he was still living at home -- I was off to college, and then I went mad, and I stayed here rather than come back. Which I needed to do, and at the same time I wasn't there for him. I'm pretty sure he was upset by that, by not having my support, but I could barely keep myself together at the time.

I know he walked out somewhere in there, lived with friends for a few weeks, just didn't deal with them, because of something Mom said to him, trying to pull the coercion tricks on him because he wasn't bending to her will, because he was trying not to take sides.

I know he was a lot more scarred by the dissolution than I was. I don't know how to soothe that at all.

I just ....

"I don't have a family."

Tired Of My Mother

I am so tired of my mother.

Which is, of course, why I'm stuck writing about it, because my entire universe keeps collapsingto "Goddamn, am I tired of my mother."

Every glitch, every petty irrationality, everything I snap at or over, somewhere along the way I come across this moment of revelation: oh, right, I go completely nonlinear here because of a pattern from my mother. I am tired of this. I want to be a crazy freak for a different reason for a bit.

I was going to print out "Have you ever gone mad?" from this blog and my detailed writeup of the assault from my LJ to hand to the shrink tomorrow, to have something to talk about other than my mother, but that was before a dispute and revelation led to me sobbing in my husband's arms about how tired I am of my mother. Sobbing and wailing to the point of nausea (how I hate that emotional upset makes me want to vomit) about how everywhere I turn, she's there, the echoing voice in my head, the patterns, the irrationalities, every damn problem I try to tackle, every issue I want to resolve, oh look, there are mommy issues. So maybe I should talk about how tired I am of my mother.

There's no escape. She lives in my head and I don't know how to evict her. I live five hundred miles away from her for a goddamn reason, and I still have these small signs that light up saying "Please do not push this button again".

And who am I kidding, anyway? So much of the madness is tangled up in having no refuge, no way of recovering, becoming sane, her obsession with the condition of the filthy sheets over showing any concern over my pain-wracked mind, fighting to stay where I was rather than go back anywhere near her where I would have to face the buffeting of her towering contempt. I don't know how to chase down the origins of that break, either, though she's not uninvolved. So much of the aftermath of the assault is tied up in not having anywhere safe to turn to, because my mother was untrustworthy and my father was emotionally shut-in and ... there's no escaping her there either, just a diversion of other reasons to be quite crazy that are at least slightly separate from the all-consuming howling madness that she taught me.

And my liege just asked me, "Do you want some tea or something?"

I said, "I want an exorcism."

He said he'd look for his manual for Catholic priests.

Heh.

I am so tired of my mother.

Therapy is hard. I don't see any way of getting free.

Wine and Ice Cream

Two sessions with the therapist and I'm already fighting with myself about going.

Not because I dislike her; she's reasonably easy to talk to, laughs at most of my actually funny jokes, asks reasonable questions, doesn't flip her shit about my having a husband and a boyfriend (though required a little correction about what that means), holds sessions in the first therapist-held room I've been in that was actually a comfortable place to be in (and I've been in and out of therapy rather a lot in my life). The problem is not the therapist.

The problem is not the effort to get to the therapist, though it took a fucking hour and a half to get there today from the point I was dropped at the train station. I can read on the subway; I may actually start reading fiction again (especially since I have Farthing to get through, and after the fourth person asked me "Hey, have you read Kushiel's Dart?" like, this month, I snagged it). It arguably does me good to get me out and about a little, and I can run city errands in the space there; I'm intending to take up tai chi next week because I need that sort of physical training at the moment.

No, the problem is the actual being in therapy.

We're still doing the introductory 'Okay, this person is trying to figure out context for me and get enough background on my situation to start being able to do anything' stuff; today we talked about my name (I don't use my legal name), religious affiliations, my liege, and attempted to explain the giant snarl that is my anxiousness in my dealing with my husband, where it came from, and why I sit here and stare at it and degenerate into hopeless blubbering. I'm sure at some point we'll talk about my mother, and that will be a trip and a half.

And I just ... don't want to deal. I have so much crap I'm dealing with right now, relationship stress, life stress, health stress, my mother sent me a 'Gee, what's up with you?' email a week and a half ago and it's sitting unresponded to because I tend to stare at stuff from her for about two weeks before replying, not actually recovered from the wedding stress, that the prospect of going to therapy leads me to wanting to make sardonic declarations like, "And because I don't have enough shit to deal with, I'm going to go unearth more of my fucking issues!"

Like the flashbacks. I talked about flashbacks today, and the stuff the flashbacks did to me. Like fucked up my relationship with my husband. Why? He has the same basic body type as the guy who assaulted me. Which means when I get flashback triggers off him, I get them hard. I haven't had the flashbacks badly for a while -- I can summon up the scene at will with this almost surreal vividness, but it doesn't come up and try to take me over like it used to -- but there's still this sort of lingering anxiousness about it.

Of all the things that enrage me about that damn assault, the fact that it fucks me up in my partnership with someone I hadn't even met at the time, who has almost never been anything other than completely supportive of me (and the exceptions I can think of all have to do with my mother lying to him), that's the thing that hits my 'cannot forgive' buttons. And it would do me some good, somehow, to get myself unstuck from something that happened now over half a lifetime ago, because I recognise that that black hatred I have for the guy is something that keeps me connected to him and keeps that loop of my brain still wrapped around those moments that are seared into my memory like a goddamn cattlebrand. I'm fine with hating him, but I'd kinda rather do it in a casual way that doesn't invest me in his existence like this.

I haven't spent this much time thinking about the flashbacks for years, and I'm now fuming about the damned things. Just ... of all the things. Of all the things. I just ... resent it. There are much better things to have stuck in my damn head. Like, say, the tune to 'It's a small world after all'.


Today I decided after therapy that it was a day for wine and ice cream.

I have wine and ice cream.

I still have to go back next week.

In Service

A little more than a week ago, my liege got married.

It was a small ceremony, close family and friends.

My husband and I were thanked in the program; him, for running the video camera, me, for brewing the mead that was blessed at the ritual and served to the guests, us both, for our respective emotional supports, which went unspecified.

I didn't sleep for a week or two before the wedding, not well; too much stuff that absolutely had to be done, too many minor tasks that I could help with or not. I twined ribbons around the little brooch he wore, I helped design centrepieces, I sat through endless discussion of liturgy and design and offered my opinion when it was asked of me; I didn't sleep well. The stress of the preparations was a matter of contagious burden, and I am not sure how much it was lessened by the sharing. There was no time that was not at least partially occupied with wedding preparation, wedding discussion, angst: his ring arrived in the mail the day before. There was too much to do. Could I do this thing?

We helped move the paraphernalia to the wedding site on the morning. I set up centrepieces, ran errands, did minor fetch and carry. His mother arrived, and I explained the guest books to her, finished my tasks, and retreated to the bride's room, where all of my spectacularly dressed female friends were helping her get ready. I was being politic, I told them; his mother does not approve of my existence, and this would be the first time we had actually met. I had not put the green streak back in my hair just to minimise the possibility of offense. I have no idea if she ever figured out who I am, though we were the last people to leave, the last people they said goodbye to. He took my collar off before they left; had put it on me in the morning as reassurance and reminder that our partnership endured in a code that I, at least, would understand.

Today, I think I finally hit physically recovered from the stress crash. I started sleeping again immediately, though I stopped being able to eat without nausea for a few days. But emotionally, I'm still stretched all out of shape, like an overinflated balloon. I have no reserves. I am ... okay, if one defines that by saying that in the current state of things I will tend to trend towards what might nominally be called normalcy. If 'okay' means 'not having a persistent impulse to break into tears', though, I'm not near there; I'm crying as I type, and I've spent much of the last two days or so feeling that strange salt-washed sensation around my eyes that is like wanting to cry without the horrible pressure in the forehead that comes with more intensity. Call it two fifths of the way to tears.

I was in service; I am in service; I will remain in service. I will do what must be done, even when I want to scream and flail and throw things and declare that someone else can be the goddamned grownup right now, I'm through with it.

I asked him to pull me down tonight, into a subspace where he could hold me, where I could regenerate some reserves, where he could take care of me for a while. Just to be close and held and ... not at work. And he held me with gentle, intense firmness, with laughter, with serious intent, with warmth. And eventually I will be okay, so long as I can be held there, in service but not being called upon to serve. So long as I can go deep down into that serene comfortable space, my head nestled against his chest, his fingers twined through my hair and resting on the back of my neck.

We came back downstairs because the rest of the family wanted to watch Heroes, and my fortune cookie said, "Inspiration within is waiting for you. It's time to go deep."

Echoes

Some fascinating discussion of interactions between women over at Daisy's Dead Air has me thinking about my mother. So a little solipsistic wander down memory lane ...


So I had finally cleaned my room, not my strong point as a child. Especially that room, which had this brilliant red and orange shag rug in it that ate small objects. But I had gotten everything off the floor, put on shelves or in the cabinets at the base of the shelves (I had a set of pressed-board bookcases with cabinets in the base, one of which had a fold-down desktop). It was tidy, it was in a state of what my father called "found the floor", things were put away.

But what had to happen was that it had to pass my mother's approval.

And she was in a rage that day, partly because I was not good at cleaning to her standards -- which was partly because her standards were superhuman, and thus no seven-year-old could reasonably be expected to master them.

Her response to my accomplishment was to sweep things off the shelves, empty the cabinets, heap them all up in the center of the floor heedless of what damage she might do, screaming about my inadequacies, wanting to know how dare I consider that clean while dumping objects onto the pile. And once she'd made the heap, she snarled that all that needed to be put away -- really away -- a distinction I did not comprehend, as it had been -- or she would bag it up and throw it out.

And she left me there to cry, all my work buried in wreckage.


I think somewhere in there was where I gave up, determined that I had no idea how to win her praise, and thus it wasn't worth trying at all.

I also can't throw a damn thing away. I think that's related too.

Who Do You Want To Be Today?

It's been one of those weeks for gnawing on questions of identity for me, which happens every so often, especially when I get moody. Being fed into by Annwyd writing about self-definition and identity and appropriation, some, and Ren's "Walking Away from Feminism" winds up oddly apropos to where I am at the moment, sort of cognitively, though not specifically.

I got a 'run along, little subbie, and get your dom to talk to me' comment recently. When I refused -- partly on the basis that why should I ask him to waste his time, partly on the basis that I'm the one with any relevant experience whatsoever -- I got completely blown off as a sub because I asked him to be my master. Because this wild communication shit is only for tops, or some such blithering nonsense. (And we get back to my embittered, "You can't expect people to do something as radical as communicate, honestly" snarkling comment elsewhere.)

But it comes around to the tangle that is the question of identity and meaning, and cycles around that a lot. There are all these adjectives and descriptive nouns kicking around, and people get all tangled up about what not only they denote, but the connotations thereof.

I've been wrestling with religious obligations, like. Gods know my religious community (in the sense of 'co-religionists') is pretty fucked up; I've no patience for any of its organised manifestations at the moment. And yet I'm trying to build something sane that can last in the same framework, even knowing that by my standards nobody has done it. (Kemetic thought takes some work to apply to moderns, and I am not satisfied that any of the extant groups has done it successfully, let alone successfully and non-abusively.) And I'm doing it off on my own -- into the desert, be a heretic, claim your elbow-room. Which is perverse for something as communitarian as most any of the ancient religions was. And so there's the whole question of what's real, what qualifies as within the faith, and these things matter.

And even on the edges of the structure, the social obligation stuff, there's my personal things, which go off into weird dark places full of lightning, and I don't even begin to know how to talk about any of that. And I come across a line that might be helpful, a reference to something in an old document, and it's ... a sentence summary, something that doesn't illuminate a damn thing. I'm chasing ghosts. (And I idly contemplate whether there's a seidhkona on this side of the continent that I could talk to, outside the boundaries of the norm, but this is all about outside the boundaries of the norm.)

These big words take wrestling. What does it mean to be ... and here's where I actually do the examining, where I sit down and try to work out what it means, if I believe this, if I am that, how that actually fits in with the world, whether that's something I want to do, whether that's someone I want to be. And I look at how people use the words, and ask myself if I can use those words on me if I differ on this, that, and the other, and sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes it's no. And it's all part of defining how the world is working for me and around me.

I get chewing on it too hard, though, and I wind up feeling hollow; all these words making up a whole lot of nothing. It comes out feeling like it's all chasing ghosts, conjuring false meanings, what does it mean to be a woman, to be a submissive, to be a Kemetic, to be any of fifty thousand other things that are tangled up in that spooky verb 'to be'. Too much clawing at the mirror opens up the void, and then there's nothing, just the mirages of dancing photons. (And metaphysically, if 0=1, is one zero? Off to disappear up my own existence, too much looking back to figure out how I got to where I am, not enough of the actually being.)

I'm gonna go read a book. Maybe I'll find a little real in there, in memories of the lives of dead priests, servants of the gods.

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.

No Shoes

I have all this stuff I want to write about, and right now, I'm just angry with the world.

Angry with myself.

The depression is in one of those states where if I don't get one practical thing accomplished each day -- one bit of vacuuming, one load of laundry, one cycle of the dishwasher, whatever -- I will sink into this pit of utter conviction of my own worthlessness.

And getting the one thing done doesn't, as it does when the depression is breaking, start me towards a positive cycle of energetic progress -- the "I did this thing! I can now do that too!" cycle. It's just standing on the shore building levees out of sand castles to keep the tide from coming in. It works for a little while, but the only thing that keeps the tide from coming in further is the tide actually turning. Or serious construction. And I don't know how to build the sea wall.

And I'm sitting here going, "It's not like I'm trying to hold down a 9-5, I just need to keep this damn household running", and "It's not like anything I'd be doing is actually important" which is a good sign that I'm utterly fucked up, because 'what I'd be doing' is the creative work of my fiction, the religious work of my theology stuff, the small business that I'd start if I had the money to actually do it and do I want to do the research to see if I can get a small business loan or should I just scrimp and save up what I need for the equipment, the occasional trying to dig up a part-time job to bring in a little more money and mostly failing at that like I'm failing at everything else and ... well, there's the cycle, now, isn't it? I can't even say I'm genuinely good at this shit, either, I'm not one of those people who is a genuinely inspired homemaker.

I was talking with my husband the other day about depression, about sorting out where all this crap in my head came from, about wanting to lay it all out and find some way of fixing it. Medical treatment. And maybe, somewhere, getting a sound enough diagnosis that I can maybe try to find a reasonable level of expectation of what someone with my condition can be reasonably expected to be able to do.

It's popular to make comparisons to physical disabilities with depression -- someone on usenet pointed out that "can't we just compromise on what we used to do" with depression was like saying "I know we used to run marathons together, but now you've got a broken leg, can't we compromise and just run for ten minutes" -- but they're so much more nebulous and hard to pin down in some ways.

Okay, my brain is broken. Some level of depression, some level of probably-PTSD, some level of "Oh, by the way, my mother is almost certainly a Borderline and I worry that I may be too" that doesn't chart out nice and simple. But is my sense of my inability a coddling of my weakness, a cop-out and laziness, a way to duck out of my responsibility to be a Good Woman, a Responsible Adult, a Credit To The Family, to Not Waste My Intellect or whatever the fuck else I'm supposed to be doing with myself, or am I genuinely so fucking crazy that whatever I get accomplished is bonus? What is reasonable to expect of someone with my level of defective neurowhateverage?

It doesn't help that the stuff that I want to be doing isn't the stuff that gets the "Oh, you're gainfully employed" hits going. It's not like I'm going to be paid the big bucks or indeed much at all for theology research, writing novels, making pots, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. Culturally speaking, that's the frivolous stuff, stuff that should be set aside for the good of someone or other, who it is varies -- humankind or the company or the family or something else. It's easy to blow it off as not enough to make me not-a-failure, even if I were actually getting it done, especially on days like this.

There's that joke-saying thing, "I used to be upset about having no shoes, until I met a man with no feet." I have no idea what my mental leg condition is whatsoever -- I don't know how to tell -- I don't know whether I'm bitching myself for being unable to walk because I have no shoes, an achey knee, or because I have no goddamn feet.

I'll write something interesting and worthwhile some other time. For now I'm angry at the world, and not capable of contributing anything of any fucking value to it.