Back to Being Pinocchio

Odd juxtapositions of thoughts today. First I write this Stealth Kink piece over at SM-Feminists, and then I get ranty at Amber's place.

Wanted to keep the ranty, though.

The thing that gets me is that one’s sex life is only really permitted to be a private matter if it’s normative.

I was in the Village in Montreal this past weekend (the gay quarter, in other words) and looking around, and saw a couple walking down the street, hand in hand: a young man and a heavily pregnant woman. I was chatting with the fellow I’d come down to hang out with a bit after that and commented that they’d been “flaunting their heterosexuality”, which is one of those jokes that isn’t a joke.

I got interrogated vigorously on a newsgroup a few months ago because I commented something to the effect of, “My boyfriend said this”. And some guy — who happened to know I’m married — figured there had to be some profound reason that I specified my boyfriend had said something, rather than just identifying him as a friend or some random person. He asked me if there was some philosophical dispute with my husband involved. Tried to get at the deeper reason for me identifying my boyfriend as my boyfriend other than, “I think there’s only one or two people on the newsgroup who would know who I was talking about if I’d used his name.” If I said my husband had said something, slip, slide, right under the radar, in normal-people world people identify their spouses as spouses or partners as partners without there being some Deeper Reason.

I live my life painfully aware that normal-people world is barred from me unless I choose to betray my family by lying about them — and even then, I only get there so long as I’m willing to call a lifepartner a “friend” or a “roommate” or whatever else is required to conform. If I just treat my family like a family, I’m flaunting, I’m pushy, I’m asking too much of people, I’m pushing an agenda … by saying my boyfriend is my boyfriend. Not even talking about the kinky stuff, just by calling. him. a. partner. Just like a real human being would.

Back to this sense that blatancy is required for being real and different simultaneously ...

Facing the Devouring Mother

A few years ago, my husband and I were having lunch with my aunt. The conversation was sort of light and scattered, and then she said, without preamble, "So I hear your mother told you you were an unwanted child. You were quite wanted. Up until she figured out that it was work."

This is the sort of thing that's kicking around in my head in response to some of the latest kerfluffle some places I read. I commented in one of them about the Savage Garden song, "Affirmation", which has a line that goes, "I believe your parents did the best job they knew how to do." And it makes me want to cry, sometimes, because they did. They did, and ...

I don't know much about my mother's childhood, just scattered stories, enough to actually have a great deal of empathy for her in a sort of abstract sense. I remember, when I was eight or so, her drawing up little Bradshaw and ACOA charts of family relationships, with an orange jagged line looping around the little circles that were her and my grandmother, indicating a broken, tense, hostile relationship, and her comments that that tended to perpetuate through generations. Her comments without, apparently, any sort of self-awareness. I know whole bunches of things, bits of anecdotes, things she clearly didn't recognise were inappropriate to share, and can piece together enough to know that she did the best job she knew how to do.

On a good day, I can rail at a universe which can do that sort of thing to a person. On a good day I can point out all of the things that need to be damn well fixed so that never happens again.

On a bad day I sit back and go, "Where does someone like me get off considering having children?"

And go, "With a model like that, how good can the best job you know how to do be?"

And go, "Is someone like you capable of raising a child who isn't grievously wounded by your own carried damage?"

And about then I realise that I'm going into one of those self-abusive loops about how I can never be good enough for anything, certainly not good enough for my mother, and I back away for a while. And one of these days I'm going to have to find a way through that, learn how much of it is illusion that needs to be stripped away (with a nod to The Devouring Mother, there) and come out the other side.

One of these days.

(In the end you will submit; it's got to hurt a little bit.)

Whoa.

Little Light is guestblogging at Feministe. And has written this spectacular piece about street medicking. Which is ... full of philosophy.

She has also written about food, family, and the continuity of human experience, which has a bunch of stuff that I know down in the bone too.

Shoo, shoo. There's good reading to be had.

Stripping Down

Daisy has a conversation at her place about people's experience with getting appearance-based comments as differentiated by sex.

And it occurred to me that I really don't have much experience with the sort of appearance policing that a lot of people do. And part of that is a thread of protected status -- specifically, that I am fairly thin, my skeletal asymmetries are not obvious enough to render me obviously body-nonconforming and are rarely disabling, I fall within the societal-standard range for 'passably attractive' without ever approaching 'popular crowd gorgeous'. Part of that is that I'm geek-gendered and hang out with geek-gendered people, who tend to be, for better or for worse, somewhat oblivious to matters of appearance. Part of it is that that same obliviousness almost certainly means that some fraction of such comments either never got noticed or, if they did, didn't register as something worth remembering. Part of it is that, as one of the nerd crowd, most people who wanted to try to cut me down went for that as a vulnerable spot rather than appearance, which was not so much.

I've gotten a few comments that mostly parsed as crudely sexist comments, most of them of the harassing kind, a couple of the 'you don't have adequate attributes and are thus a sub-woman' kind. (The pair of guys who commented on the size of my arse when I was walking to the takeout for a roast beef sandwich inclined me to walk home on the other side of the street. They probably weren't genuinely threatening. Probably. Just, as a pair, three times my mass, nothing better to do than stand around on the sidewalk, and making sure I was aware they filed me as a lesser being.) Aside from the need to do threat-evaluation processes, these don't register much to me, and I actually don't consider them so much 'comment on appearance' as "Inane spoutings because of course that female-appearing person is obligated to give a damn what I think, and I just babble anything that crosses my tiny mind."

(A belated edit: I tend to file that stuff in the same category as the very occasional "I hate you" gotten from a friend in a discussion about weight issues; the frequency difference is balanced out by the fact that I find getting even a claimed-whimsical declaration of hatred from people I care about over my fucked-up metabolism ... a fair bit more traumatic than being wolf-whistled.)

I wrote at Daisy's place (after a less-well-formulated and less complete paragraph that was basically the above):

The stuff that's actually gotten through my skin has been mostly more abstract discussions. "Women like that are only attractive to closeted homosexuals" was one of the ones that stuck with me. A fair fraction of them have struck me as "Men attempting to support the women they find particularly attractive by expressing contempt for people who have different preferences", which I find disproportionately hurtful, in that whole, "What the hell did I do to you that you need to take a dig at me and those people who have the temerity to be attracted to me at random?" kind of way. The rest have been pretty much equal-gendered interactions, dissecting the unpleasantness of the existence of people like me as if I were some kind of unhuman bug on the medical table.

And it occurred to me that this is one of the reasons I find the politically-based appearance policing that I see kicking around profoundly creepy. It unites the animating spirit of these two wrongnesses so neatly and completely.

There's the thread that suggests that the way to support people whose appearances do not fit a particular model is to run down those people who do -- that strength and worthiness is conserved, and thus someone must be degraded to make anything better. Sometimes it's the appearance itself that's degraded; at other times the intelligence, independence, or competence of someone who would choose such an appearance (as I've frequently seen in anti-femme rhetoric). That dismissal is tied to some level of contempt for those people who enjoy that appearance or demeanor, as well, which is at least something that gets me more defensive than nastiness merely directed at myself. Some appearances are simply Not Permissible and people who like them are Bad People. And it goes around and around about which ones are the unacceptable ones, and maybe sometimes people miss the slams that aren't directed at them, but I'm reminded of my friend who describes herself as having an Austrian peasant build who said once that she's seen me get more and nastier commentary based on my weight than she's gotten. (And I believe she reads this, so she can tell me if I'm remembering wrong.)

And tied into that zero-sum economics of beauty is this impersonality, this cold dismissal. And I see it in the blogs a lot, the whole, "We're not going to take away your lipstick, sweetie" or whatever else. Take apart the whole concept, strip it away and pare it down, flay the flesh off it so we can hold it up to the light and see what sorts of markings are on the underside, but it shouldn't matter, it's not personal. 'We don't mean to direct it at you when we say that women who ...' (Who is it supposed to be directed at, then? Or, to paraphrase a wise woman of my acquaintance, it maybe wasn't aimed, but it got waved around a bit and it went off.) A particular trait is flayed out of the people who have it, treated as if it has independent existence from the people it was stripped from, a political agenda, a deeper revelation about the personalities of the people who engage with it. The trait is reduced to a paperdoll, a strawman, a caricature of beauty: we all know what people with that hair colour are like, that nobody has that figure without engaging in socially deviant eating habits, that that outfit has a party affiliation and votes for those kinds of people, after all.

That abstract, impersonal concept being vivisected on the table was stripped out of the bodies of real live people, whose pound of flesh does nothing to fill the ripped-open wounds of people who have suffered from the same contempt directed at different traits. All those divinatory entrails on the examining room floor just wind up producing a bunch of hamburger and wounded people bleeding out their personhood.

Name Games

So I am now back from my vacation, and had one of those little thoughts-to-travel by.

We handed over our passports/miscellaneous information at the border crossing, and one of the things they tend to do is read off the names to make sure that people respond properly to the name (it's a really shaky way of checking for fake ID, but it's something, I guess).

I have never responded consistently to my legal name, even when I used it regularly. I haven't used it socially for on the order of magnitude of two-plus years.

It's just a weird, weird place to be in, expected to react to a name that was never really mine, which I don't even pretend to use in my real life anymore.

Which of course left me pondering the complexities of people who change their names for whatever reasons, and the transfolks I know, and ... yeah.

Names. They matter.

Okay, this amused me.

History Repeats Itself: How The RIAA Is Like 17th Century French Button-Makers.

I'm going to have to go through and read the linked related articles at some point when I'm not supposed to be packing for a trip -- abundance in economic theory is oddly topical for me. (For some context, I wrote an article for an anthology about wealth magic, and the piece was basically about accepting abundance.)

It would appear

That I'm now on the staff over at SM-Feminist, and wouldn't you know I went and started shooting my mouth off over there immediately just to let everyone know I was there.

So there's this thing over there, if my seven and a half readers fancy chasing me around the internet. It's about fear and subspace and the way they mesh through emotional vulnerability, more or less.