Resuming Normal Broadcast

Thanks to folks for their supportive comments on my little meltdown.

In an attempt to get back into the swing of things, I'm going to write about my hair.

I have joked in the past that my hair is a more critical identity trait for me than my sex. Which is an interesting thing; it's certainly far more consciously chosen.

I have very dim memories of one of the first times I had my hair trimmed, in my grandparents' bedroom in Stoughton. I screamed the entire time. I have gotten a little better about having my splits removed since then. A little.

I've kept it cut the way I do it now since I was fourteen, when I came to the conclusion that I was done looking like Wednesday Addams. This was partially influenced by the abuse I took in junior high school, which was partially centered on my hair (and one of the cases of unwelcome touch was hair-related). I have permed it twice, maybe three times, at about the age of seventeen, and came to the conclusion that I appear to be allergic to the chemicals, don't like smelling of plastic, and don't have particular interest in the effect. (Besides, as my dear college roommate says, if I want it curly I can braid it and wash it.)

I have a lot of hair. In its natural state it is fine, prone to splits, on the oily side, straight, and dark brown with a tendency to brassy highlights when I get a whole lot more sun than I have in years, and these days reaches my ass. And there is, well, a lot of it.

I'm thinking about my hair today because I just finished dyeing it, which I do every three months (though I was about a month late on this one due to life being crazy and disrupted, and me being a lazy bastard).

Dyeing my hair is a two-day process; I wash it the night before so it's clean and dry come the day of, and then mix up and apply the stuff, let it sit for a few hours, and wash it some more. It's a fair amount of effort to go to, and this time when I was washing it out I wound up thinking about cultural beauty rituals and assumptions.

The assumption I often see is that the stuff one does that's appearance-based is effortful, done to please others, requires extensive maintenance, and so on. The whole sparkle-pony shit that gets sneered at around elsewhere.

I have a hell of a lot of hair. I have a hell of a lot of oily, fine, split-prone hair. I have spent probably cumulative months of my life arguing with my hair, with its tangles and tendency to snarl, extracting tennis-ball sized accumulations of frayed mess that did not noticeably affect its density, several times giving up on tangles and cutting them off with a knife. (I have a blade, rather duller now than when I got it, that I refer to as 'my hair-cutting knife'.) I have a hell of a lot of ornery hair, and I won't cut it short.

Now that it's freshly hennaed, I can't stop running my fingers through it; the smoothness of it, the way it feels, the way it flows. It doesn't tangle; I will probably need to worry about combing it again sometime in October. That two-day process (mostly planning and scheduling, and then sitting for a few hours with mud on my head) wins me wash-and-wear hair, hair that behaves, hair that is willing to grow a hand longer now that it doesn't get so fragile and so caught up in snarls. The hair that I always thought I should have had.

I was washing the cocoa butter out of my hair this afternoon and just running my hands through it, feeling the sleekness of the length of it, the way the water flows through and around it rather than fighting with it constantly. Like it's not there, in the way it flows and swirls (and now I laugh at the person at the Flea this weekend who asked me if I was a mermaid, for a completely different reason than my bafflement at the time; my liege's fiancee did suggest that I have mermaid hair, floaty on the water...).

It turns my hair from dark brown with those bronze highlights to dark red-brown, nearly invisible in artificial light, striking in the sun. And yeah, I've gotten a compliment or two on that from relevant folks.

But what it wins for me is the hair that's my self-image, my identity, and reduces its maintenance to the occasional need to deoil it. It gives me hair I can run my fingers through without catching them on a sudden snarl that wasn't there a moment ago, induced by the disruption of a breath or a touch. It gives me my hair.

It gives me hair that I maintain this way in significant part as religious devotional. And it gives me hair that has been known to get my liege to bury his face in the back of my neck and rumble, "Mmm, henna", as well. But mostly ... it gives me my hair.

Oh my fucking god.

Okay, so I was semi-idly getting resources for dealing with Borderline Personality Disorder for a friend, and started reading this compilation of posts.

And I'm reading along and reading along and find this, specifically this sentence:

The client said that she had heard from a friend of her mother that she had explained her estrangement from her children and grandhchildren saying that her children had been the product of marital rape.

Hit me like a bucket of ice water, first a "Do I know this therapist, did someone I talk to talk to ... no, there's no way, the relationship-to-person isn't right ... holy shit, someone else did that?"

Only she said it to my face.

Oh my fucking god.

I'm not alone.

I'm crying.

You're Mine Now, But You're Not My Slave

(Title pulled from this song, which is entirely in keeping with the sense of perverse humor that my music collection frequently exhibits.)

I was chatting with Annwyd the other day about, among other things, kink stuff, and she asked me about the words I use in public discussion of my relationship with my liege. Such as whether terms such as 'my liege' were common in the community, or whether that was our personal thing.

We actually have spent a lot of time talking about language and connotations of language. Trying to talk about what we're doing with reasonable accuracy matters to me a great deal.

I don't use 'my liege' in private space with him, generally, but I imagine I might well when I feel like playing high protocol in a whimsy; I have other language for the personal. But after a lot of discussion, we came to the conclusion that this was a useful model for what our dynamic was: an exchange of service for protection and territory. (Love? Wikipedia reminds me that one of the services a vassal owes is "counsel". Scolding reinforced.)

The territory is an interesting thing -- in an early conversation I said something like, "So, if you're my liege, what's my fief?" But there's this whole scope of space and resources available to me in order to provide service, difficult to articulate; a discussion on a BDSM community on livejournal suggested that the relationship itself was the relevant form of territory, which is close enough for government work. The whole thing is an abstraction -- I mean, an original-framework vassal's primary service is military rather than sexual -- but it works for the shape of things.

It works for the notion that I am valuable, that my strength supports his; a weak vassal is less valuable to the liege, after all. It makes my power something worth developing, turns being strong of itself into a form of service. (And I can get antsy around 'power exchange' language, because, as I've written before, my experience of a stable d/s relationship is not 'power exchange' but 'power unleashing' or maybe 'power revelation'. And this is not unrelated.) Which gets around to my incomprehension at the notion that a dominant must be better or more skilled than the submissive in order for the relationship to be successful, when that's so orthogonal to the lines of power, the creation of the space of the fiefdom in the dynamic and the choice to grant it in exchange for service.

And it's an abstracted and idealised sort of version of flow of power, but that's not exactly uncommon in the kink community for framing structures. Witness language like master/slave, after all ...

Part of our discussion about terminology came down to connotations on words. For example, while I refer to him as my master in some discussions (mostly where the kink aspect to our relationship is relevant and I don't want to get bogged down in "what was that word?" discussions), I do so with permission. "Master", unadorned, suggests to him rather a lot of breadth of scope; a term for, say, Lugh Samildánach. Similarly, 'slave' carries a heavy connotation of nonconsensuality rather than chosen service, and he values greatly that I choose to offer these things to him.

Which isn't to say that we don't wander off in the occasional sex slave direction as part of occasional interaction, but more often I am called 'hetaera'. To play with a completely different historical practice abstracted outwards.

I'll close off with something from Annwyd, 'cause I asked her for permission to quote her and then didn't actually cite anything from our conversation the whole post: "I find that sort of...not exactly roleplaying, but *use* of these very dramatic, elegant roles...to be kind of hot. ;) Don't know if I have the discipline to keep it up in a relationship, but man."

*grin*

You're missing the whole point-- you're not my little pet
Don't throw away your life-- the game's not over yet
I do not own your soul--don't want you in a cage
I only want your heart to find a special place

You're mine now but you're not my sister
You're mine now but you're not my slave
You're mine but you're not my child
You're mine now but you're not my slave
You're mine now but you're not my slave

On Livejournal I have a usericon of Jon Stewart of the Daily Show collapsing to bang his head on his desk

Traditionally dressed Nobel laureate nearly thrown out of hotel before resort guests who recognised her intervened.

The Fiction Mirror

It's actually an interesting question, what one can tell about a person from the stories they tell and the way they tell them. And I think a lot of the things that certain types of literary analysis go into miss much of the point.

There are a couple of things that can with reasonable reliability be derived from a text about the author:

1) The author cannot write something that does not fit within their imagination. If the author cannot conceive of something as a possibility, it will not appear in the text.

1a) These limitations of conception are sometimes cultural. I forget which of the discussions of Athena I've seen kicking around the blogs in the past few days this came up in, but there's a bit in the Odyssey where She takes the form of a young man to provide someone advice, and apparently there was a discussion about how horribly sexist it was that She needed to take male form -- and the pointing out that in that culture and in that time period a female form would not have been listened to didn't make a difference. People are aware of that bit of cultural blindness now, more or less.

For one that people aren't so much aware of, try this one: How many movies are there where "Which person will get chosen in this love triangle" is an essential part of the plot? Especially where both potential parties are loved and loving, distinguished primarily by 'socially acceptable' and 'socially marginal'? (Where I come from, we call this YAFMA: Yet Another Monogamy Accident.)

1b) These limitations of conception are sometimes personal.

Sometimes this is a simple lack of experience, and something that can be corrected with research or even 'consciousness-raising' -- for an example of this, I'd point at John Scalzi's piece "Being Poor". Someone who simply does not think to consider the effect of, say, ethnicity or sex or orientation on their characters is probably dealing with some level of cultural blindness on a personal level, and as they become more aware of these issues may well start doing this differently. (I commented recently that I have been deliberately working on illuminating different ethnicities in my own fiction, because that's a place that I'm less well examined than I would prefer.)

Sometimes this is a more complicated to articulate "I don't think that way; I can't figure out how to understand that." There are plenty of people whose cognitive processes are opaque to me; I can make models of how they work that may in fact be reasonably accurate, but which I do not put a great deal of trust in, because they're sketchy things based in, "Okay, if I posit that this is the case, what would make sense?" I keep the people who are this level of alien to me as minor characters, people who are sufficiently unexamined in the course of the story that the flaws in my modelling how they work are unlikely to come up. I know that such people exist, but I can't explore them in any depth, because I know I'd hit the limit of my understanding mightily quickly.

I know people who can't read C. J. Cherryh -- who is one of my favorite authors -- because they simply cannot penetrate her prose. They don't think that way. I do think that way; I don't always express that way because constant exposure to other language frames shifts my default sentence processing a bit more towards 'comprehensible' than she writes. I read enough of her, though, and I wind up with glorious tangles of verbiage with peculiar punctuation, like I think. I don't hold it against people that they can't read Cherryh because her mind is too alien; one of my current criteria for killfiling people on usenet is "I could not render this person plausibly in fiction."

2) It may be possible to get some understanding of issues that an author is wrestling with by looking for generalities in a broad body of work. A single work will have a number of themes and images to explore (and I think very few authors consciously work to a theme; I know one multiply-published woman who has said that she learns what the themes of her works are when someone tells her in an interview); when one considers a variety of pieces, it is possible to tell which of these are persistent across works and thus likely to be specifically illuminating of the author. This may be a political position, an issue the person wants to explore, something about their background that makes an indelible mark on their view of the world, whatever else, but it is really only discernible from study of a variety of works, especially in multiple genres if those are available.

To any literary critics reading this in the future in which I'm published: the underlying universal theme in my fiction is the experience of the outsider looking in. Please acknowledge this in your thesis. Also, The Devil's Dance is about the madness of grief. That's all I know about themes.

3) Writing will reflect the author's unexamined axioms and perspectives. Taken to an extreme, this will generate cliches -- how many movies have the black sidekick killed off at their climax again? (How many cliches are there in the phrase 'black sidekick killed off at the climax', for that matter?) This is not unrelated to questions of blindness, but is not the same thing. Someone who, for example, is aware at one level that issues of racism are important to consider in the world may nonetheless write a story in which all the characters are white, because that's what they know. Someone whose sole experience with religion is conservative Christianity is unlikely to write a plausible polytheism. And so on. And people will argue about what that means, too -- Scalzi (again) notes that he puts very few ethnic markers in his books, so while he knows how much of the population is of a variety of ethnicities, the cues in the text itself are very thin. Other people note that this opens the text to interpretation as 'all these characters are white'. (He also has a character who is completely sex-unspecified, I believe.) So that doesn't resolve the question of whether these are adequately examined axioms interpreted in a particular way or not.

4) In the ideal sense, writing will not betray the author. Fiction is a mirror we hold up to the world, and it reflects ourselves as we wish to be or as we fear we are. It illuminates us, expresses our beliefs, and is part of the iterative process of culture propagating into the next generation. What stories we tell about ourselves, our world, the people we imagine, contain some level of truth.

Truth is a complicated, slippery thing, and it exists in the nexus between the text and the reader as much as it does in the author's creation of the text, which is why this gets even more fiddly than unexamined axioms. What a person may pull out of a text can vary so greatly vary from what was put in (even taking into account the unexamined and invisible) that it is unrecognisable. And the, "Oh, this is an excellent allusion to a myth the author had never actually heard of" sort of thing is a richness to a work as it wends its fractal way in the world, not a betrayal.

I'm finding it hard to articulate what I mean by 'betray the author'. I can say ... I want to say, "Go read 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' and think about what it means, what it illustrates -- what meaning Le Guin would shudder and deny if someone thanked her for presenting it." But Omelas is illustrative, explicitly sketching an idea and inviting a response, and fiction doesn't have to be didactic to do this. But maybe going to Omelas for a while and looking in the wretched basement room would reveal something. I don't know.

It goes into responsibility -- to write the dystopic aspects of reality in a manner that makes it possible to recognise them as dystopic, to make the principles I believe in seem plausible even if I'm not writing something set where they are implemented. To not undercut myself as I shape the world by writing the reality I want to see out of existence with implausibility and the ability to twist it into something corrupt. I may not be writing to express a truth, but I still need to write such that I do not deny it.

Sex and God

Your hope in my heart is the rarest treasure
Your Name on my tongue is the sweetest word
My choicest hours
Are the hours I spend with You --

O God, I can't live in this world
Without remembering You--
How can I endure the next world
Without seeing Your face?

I am a stranger in Your country
And lonely among Your worshippers:
This is the substance of my complaint.

-- Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya, trans. Charles Upton

Sure, there's loving God. And then there's, y'know, loving God, wink wink, nudge nudge, saynomore, saynomore.

Which falls in a weird sideways place somewhere rubbing up against madness. There are all kinds of frameworks for divine ecstasy, but along with ecstasy being sort of marginalised and out of fashion, expressing it in that whole sexual/romantic/kinked vague direction is a good way to get weird looks. At best.

This kind of direct sexuality does not seem to mix well with a lot of people's image of religion. (And I think about Tantric practice, which seems to me in the West to have first been limited to its sexual aspects and then separated from the whole embodying-the-Divine bits.) When people refer to a nun as a "Bride of Christ", they're probably not thinking in terms of Jesus's cosmic polygynous harem (except if they're easily amused warped literalists like me). (But somehow I bet there are a few nuns out there somewhere who have some level of mystical consummation of their marriages.)

WordK wrote "Since YHWH's interaction with humans is often of an erotic character (and I dare anyone who has read the prophets or Song of Songs to try and tell me it isn't)..." Hmmm:

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth--for thy love is better than wine.

Thine ointments have a goodly fragrance; thy name is as ointment poured forth; therefore do the maidens love thee.

Draw me, we will run after thee; the king hath brought me into his chambers; we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will find thy love more fragrant than wine! sincerely do they love thee.

-- Song of Songs, Chapter 1

Well, I'm not going there.

There's this whole section of the clawing towards the experience of oneness with the divine that just doesn't get talked about, doesn't get seen. And that doesn't make it go away -- there are still the quiet voices of the people whose dreams are filled with their gods, who aspire to some sort of partnership with something in the Unseen world. As well as the noisier voices of the ones who are less circumspect.

And it scares some people. I know of people who simply cannot deal with the concept of a god as a lover -- perhaps because it's hubristic, perhaps because the material and mortal is thought of as something immiscible with the transcendent and divine, perhaps because 'god as parent' is so strong in that mind that 'god as lover' becomes abuse, creepiness, some sort of warped perversion of family. (I've seen all of these.) And this doesn't stop there being stories of the heroes who came from crossbreedings between lines (though their mortal parents often had a really bad time of it), or mortals raised to godhood, or that so-political office in ancient Egypt, God's Wife, intended to keep the daughters of a rival line chaste and without mortal offspring -- but did the God appreciate His Wife? In a culture with seductions between the god and the mother of the king painted on its walls?

And it's the edge of madness, this concept of reaching for the divine in this way, and it's hard to talk about without being mad. Impossible to respond to a sneering, "Why would anyone worship such a god?" when the answer has at least two tendrils rooted in this emotion. And there's the whole question of whether the madness is the madness of ecstasy, or just being in need of a straitjacket.

And none of that means that I'm not hoping to find a ritual scourge at the Fetish Flea. Not because my liege asked it of me; because Neb.y asked it of me.

I want to fuck you like an animal
My whole existence is flawed
You get me closer to god

- "Closer", Nine Inch Nails

Bulletins From Planet Gender

I've been trying to figure out how to talk about my sense of how gender works for me. It's come up in a couple of conversations around the blogs recently, and it's one of those things that I chew on occasionally anyway. A friend commented to me the other day that she figures that in a lot of ways she has some more "masculine" traits than I do but has never had issues with the concept of being female; another friend, years ago, told me I was butch because that was the way I am.

It's very difficult. Partly because I'm not trans; I'm sex congruent, for all my sense of gender incongruency. I had a couple of long conversations with Little Light about that one a while back, about whether or not it was in some way an appropriation for me to start filing myself as genderqueer, because my body isn't a problem. (My mind, maybe. Or the surrounding world. I'm not sure.)

I think what I reach for is polyvalent gender, really. (Which makes sense, given how much polyvalency I have in the rest of my life.) Back to riffing on clothes again, and dressing like me -- I was talking with my husband about this in terms of clothing things the other day, because I was wearing clothes that filed for me as "just a little too ornate to be professional-class semi-formal", which is a particular sort of distinguished female presentation. And I pointed at the skirt and said, "If this were black, it would be perfect goth wear", and that goes off towards the goth aesthetic of certain types of androgyny (though the skirt won't go past 'goth femme'), and I swing that way too. Today I seem to be dressed nearly sex-irrelevant hippie: loose pants, loose shirt, in psychedelic blue. I flux to earth-momma hippie too, though. Then there's the "and t-shirt" set -- slacks and t-shirt, which is a slightly more formal "generalised twenty-to-thirtysomething" (I don't care for jeans); skirt-and-t-shirt, "female twenty-to-thirtysomething, sort of hippie"; slacks, t-shirt, flannel shirt, I don't know, maybe, "slightly chilly twenty-to-thirtysomething" or "slightly butch twenty-to-thirtysomething". And the bit of gender expression that owns a grey top hat and a burgundy velvet frock coat and lusts after Victorian men's waistcoats. There are a few others kicking around in here too.

I know people who have a very consistent gender presentation with regards to clothes. When I was in Montreal this past weekend with my family, I mentioned to the other woman that she tends to default to a notch or two more formal than the rest of us; I'm not sure how I'd file her style, but it comes off to me as both 'professional' and 'femme' most of the time. Another friend of mine comes off to me fairly consistently as "butch geek" -- jeans or cargo pants, t-shirt, often a flannel shirt, not infrequently belt with pager, tools, and so on. A couple of folks hit somewhere in the vicinity of "basic preppie" -- nice pants, polo shirt. I know a variety of people who land in various high geek and low geek styles.

I'm all over the place. And I think that's the important thing, the being all over the place.

So people elsewhere were talking about the fluidity of gender, and how some transfolks have a very clear gender identity and some don't, and this is the same for cisgendered folks, and that's where I think I come in: back to being the shapeshifter, the snake in woman's form. There's stuff I can do that fits some of the standard gender-stuff that I grew up familiar with, but it's not all in the same place, and trying to stick to one bit turns it into a mask-dance rather than anything that feels like identity.

And part of my problem with trying to pin my identity down to "female" has been this sense that calling this seething mass of gendered tentacles down to one shape was just asking for trouble. Performing gender is all well and good, but sticking to one style of performance isn't going to work for me in the long run. And the words for the consistent forms are words of inconsistency: shapeshifter. Fey, perhaps; fey I've done deliberately at times. "Gender-fluid" I've seen, or "genderfuck" -- that latter making it more deliberate, a choice to twist and rearrange and just mess with the concept of gender. I have this multiplicity of sense poured into a woman body, but even an approximate call-it-androgyny in a body with a female shape doesn't mean I don't get comments like, "Has anyone ever told you that you have a lot of male energy?" Whatever that means.

My first useful thread was when I ran into a bunch of folks who floated the notion of "geek" as a gender, which was the first gender that I could work with at all as me, rather than as a mirage that vanishes when the air shifts. I had an immediate apprehension of what that was pointing at -- the shape of the mind, the identity, the way it tends to manifest. And if I had to pick a gender, I'd pick that one, because it has in it this tendency to go sideways into weird little idiosyncratic corners sometimes. And there's space in there for me.

And a bit after that, I started spending a fair amount of time with interestingly gendered folks, some trans, some not, and started to wrap my head around the notion that I didn't need to pin myself down to one thing. I could be this huge slithery mass of contradictions, and it was okay. Born naked; the rest is drag.

And the thing is, I know people who have a lot of the same stuff in their heads that I do, and it hasn't left them feeling gender incongruent. They express not merely being comfortable in their bodies, but also in their minds, in the way things feel and shape inside. Sometimes I wonder what they have that I'm missing.