Counter-Terrorism

A couple of editorials I only just saw:

Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot

Refuse to be Terrorised

Sex Pixies

Because I couldn't resist the impulse.

(If you don't have the referent for the joke, just nod and smile, folks.)



(Sorry, fellow sex pixies, I just couldn't begin to bring to present myself with butterfly wings .... I tried! Couldn't make it look like me! I did go through all the shirts though, picking the sexpixiest thing I could find that I might actually wear. I kept the sparklies!)

(Sex Pixie Dw3t-Hthr doll created at Elouai.)

Claiming Iron

I am watching (and only very slightly participating in) a discussion hosted by a Feri witch I respect greatly on the subject of the differences between the Anderson Feri tradition and the Reclaiming tradition. (For a little background: the Anderson Feri tradition is an until-recently-fairly-obscure form of American-origin religious witchcraft -- superficially similar to the far-better known Wicca. The Reclaiming tradition, which is far better known in significant part due to the writings of its luminary, Starhawk, is a partial descendant of Feri, blending some of its techniques and liturgy with Z Budapest's goddess worship and a related branch of politically-activist second-wave feminism, and probably some other threads as well. I have seen people raise the theory that people mistaking Starhawk for a Wiccan author is part of why current-day pop paganism is such a confounding mess.)

The discussion of the differences between Feri and Reclaiming is one of those standing-wave arguments that one gets in fairly closely-related subcultures. It's an interesting one to me, as I have minimal resonance with Reclaiming as a tradition (though I have, over the past several years, gotten less knee-jerky about it and more able to deal with Reclaiming-influenced ritual in groups due to spending a great deal of time with a number of Reclaiming witches), but am interested in pursuing further studies of Feri (when I get my head straightened out a little).

One of the tools that Feri and Reclaiming share is something called the Iron Pentacle, a tool for contemplation, energy work, personal development, what have you: a five-pointed star with each point associated with a concept, a virtue, a manifestation of the center. The points of the star are often traced onto the body -- Sex at the head, drawn down to Pride at the right foot, Self in the left hand, Power in the right hand, Passion in the left foot, and then back up to Sex.

One of the things that Feri and Reclaiming do not share is an attitude towards power. Reclaiming's second-wave background includes the particular threads of egalitarian feminism that are deeply concerned about the concept of power-over, and thus the tradition as a whole strives for a non-heirarchical and communitarian perspective. Feri, traditionally taught as an oral tradition, with its essence being handed down from specific teachers to specific students, has an inescapable thread of heirarchy to it, along with its vehemence about developing one's own personal power and strength and freedom.

As I work with Iron, I explore the ways in which creative energy, living energy, sexual energy -- conceptualised in Feri as Sex -- are tightly intertwined with Power and Self, the adjacent points on the Pentacle. I cannot sever the connections between Sex and Power in myself any more than I am willing to tolerate having the connections between Sex and Self severed (been there, done that, trying to heal the damage). And one of the things that I've come to realise is that my understanding of the flow of power depends on difference; power is thermodynamic. Two identical forms of power just sit up against each other; if one supports the other, or if they have different goals or aptitudes or natures or flavors or any of the other peacock-fanning spreads of possible difference, there's a flow, an engagement, energy moves. From hot to cold, from black to red, from light to dark, from and around and through.

Which leads me around to understanding at a deep level why certain forms of feminist egalitarianism leave me cold. Or possibly tepid, in that kind of thermodynamically evened way. The emphasis on avoidance of the thing called 'power-over' frequently leads to a smoothing-over of the sort of differences in the sort of power people are expressing that drive my sense of power, and with it my energy investment, my enthusiasm, my sexuality, my life-force, whatever you want to call it; I feel sterilised in that kind of space, soaked in antibacterials and mummified in plastic.

Against Empowerment

Sometimes being a giant word nerd gets me in trouble.

Have a look at the dictionary definitions of 'empower', would you? Here's an indicative one, right up at the top.

1. to give power or authority to; authorize, esp. by legal or official means: I empowered my agent to make the deal for me. The local ordinance empowers the board of health to close unsanitary restaurants.
2. to enable or permit: Wealth empowered him to live a comfortable life.

There's a wee usage note a little bit down about usage of the word 'empower' in movements and as a political buzzword.

Every so often I see something going around -- how dare someone say such-and-such a thing is empowering. Do you really think you're empowered by that? This empowers me. Etc.

I don't get the appeal of empowerment.

The thing is, if you look at the word, 'empowerment' is all something that's granted by someone else. Delegated power, existing only on the whim of the authority figure that grants it. It's not genuine freedom, because it's entirely contingent on the powers that grant it choosing to continue to do so. It's a form of self-determination that depends entirely on buying into a particular power structure, accepting a particular authority, doing whatever it is that one does to win the 'empowering'.

Where's the finding genuine actual power that doesn't depend on someone or something else's stamp of approval? I want to see more people talking about real power, real decision-aking, the things that people do for themselves, the manifestation of their hearts, not the things that are granted to them by the mainstream world, or their political subcultures, or their social organisations and disorganisations, for the sake of their allegiance to those structures, for their conformity.

Yeah, it's nice to get the recognition that comes with someone else granting one power. Gods know it's a trip and a half to play that game; I can't say that I don't get a lot of kinky fun out of playing with it. But it's the deeper thing that isn't a game that matters there, the acting from the center and the heart; all the gameplaying empowerment toys that come of d/s wouldn't mean a damn thing if it weren't for the way I get my feet settled on something solid, a place to stand, to use this here lever from.

I'm not going to settle for empowerment when I can have the real power that comes of acting truly as myself, doing the things that matter to me, choosing what I think is best for me and mine, and working to make a world where those choices are easier to do. The Power Fairy can come and bestow on me all the empowering they fancy, but there's the real world to live in that suffers from an excess of getting along with an authority because keeping my head down provides bennies.

So long as I'm merely 'empowered', whoever or whatever gave me that can take it away again.

Sexes and Genders and Bears, Oh My

So I was reading some of the discussion on the Trans 101 thread on Feministe, and one of the things that came up in a number of comments there is about the intersections between transsexuality and genderqueerness. And I've written about related stuff before, most particularly in the Lamia piece, but not so much directly on that subject.

And so I want to poke a bit at that.

I'm cissexual. I'm also genderqueer. I'm not transgendered -- there is no 'over there' for me to go to, so I rattle around in the amorphous space between 'gender congruent' and 'gender incongruent', a sort of gender dilettante.

When I say "I'm cissexual" I don't mean that I am 100% down with the whole having a female body thing. I've slept on my side all my life; I still haven't adjusted well to what that does to my spine now that I'm not flat. I am so not in the "I love the profound spiritual experience of my moon time" camp. If there were a magic way to swap sexes freely, I would certainly try out being a man for a while to see what it's like -- I might even like it, who knows? -- but I'm pretty damn sure I'd want to swap back after I'd given that body a test drive for a while. (And some of the reasons for that swapping back, to note one of the standard hostile commentary directed at trans people, include particular sexual kinks that hook into this body configuration.) I don't mean that I don't have little dysphorias about my body, though none of the significant ones are sex trait linked.

But all of these are little minor things, comparatively tiny. I didn't used to wear glasses; I remember when I had really spectacular vision. The state of my eyes doesn't leave me with a feeling of wrongness, just mild annoyance at times. My body isn't wrong. It's out of warranty, sure, my skeleton could have done with a bit better engineering, an upgraded gastrointestinal system would be appreciated (but I'd give one to my brother first), but it's still my body. I greet menstruation with "Oh, this nonsense again", not, "This is wrong. It can't be happening to me. My body is making it clear that I don't belong." (Every trans man I know well enough to discuss this with has referred to menstruation as 'cognitive dissonance week'.) There isn't a sense of profound wrongness attached to these things, just aggravation. Inconvenience, perhaps. I'm not thrown out of my head by any of it.

I get thrown out of my head by gender stuff.

A couple of years ago I commissioned a custom NancyButton with the text: "Deborah Tannen thinks that I'm a man." (To be less pithy and more accurate about it, reading through the gendered-communication stuff she wrote about in her pop linguistics stuff, I probably come out to about 2/3 male conversational pattern, 1/3 female conversational pattern.)

There was one of those "What sex are you?" internet quizzies that went around a while back, with result options 'male', 'female', 'either', and 'neither', and I came out male on top ... and then neither. Female clocked in at 39% match.

I got told by a Radical Faerie (I think) once that I had 'a lot of male energy', and commented something in response about my self-perception of androgyny, the experience of an astral penis, though not mentioning that in most of my very few explicit sex dreams I'm male with a female partner.

On the one hand, there's the whole "Of course a woman can do this; I'm a woman, and I do this" thread of things. But at the same time there's this whole thing where I've always felt like a poser, a faker, someone with passing privilege who has to be sure to not be caught doing it wrong, or watching the other people surreptitiously for cues. The body things I don't have a problem with, but I don't seem to have a woman's mind. Or at least not what gets portrayed as one in any of the gender presentations and behaviours standardly allowed for women.

Or something. I've written about being much more comfortable with the trappings of femininity once I gave up on the whole female-gender thing as describing me, because then I could go at them with the same attitudes I did at the trappings of masculinity -- I can get out of this what I want, I don't have to fit a pattern.

I've noted that the only gender I've ever been comfortable with is "geek", but that's not right, it's merely not wrong. I once gave my gender as "music elemental" in response to a casual poll. I have a perfume that I wear when I want to keep myself mentally off-balance for some reason, because it makes me smell like a girl. I commented to Little Light a while back that my sort of ur-formalwear includes a frock coat and elbow-length opera gloves. The idea of having a single gender expression -- picking, say, the pseudo-Victorian look and attitude and priorities over the long-skirted long-haired hippie or the sleek, spiked goth or any of the other things that I pick up and put down depending on the tides and the weather -- or even a dominant one with little lapses into the others for special occasions -- is weird and uncomfortable and pinning me down somewhere I don't belong.

And it isn't that standard gender roles are oppressive -- which they are -- or that the alternate conceptions of gender strike me as similarly, if not as severely limiting -- which they do -- it's just that the whole damn thing is a mask-dance anyway. It's all drag, man. None of these are me -- or at least not all of me.

Bodies 4: The Footnote

Acting Surgeon General thinks Santa should lose weight.

Because even your mythologies need to bodyconform!

Bodies 4: Seeing Clearly (Is the Rain Gone?)

I've been thinking a lot about self-image, body image, stuff like that lately. The state of relationships to food and health and similar stuff.

I'm in a funny state about a lot of this stuff; I missed the adolescent indoctrination period into proper body image, partly by having the luck to mostly fall within the norms of the socially acceptable and thus not getting policed on it, partly by being a completely fucking oblivious nerd. When I was about twenty, I was introduced to the real world, and it stung.

What I first ran into was backlash. People who felt that the best way to support the heavier/curvier women they preferred was to proclaim them the only real women, capable of handling the affection of a real man without breaking. Women in particular who directed insults, hostility, and hatred at people with different body types, snide comments about what they were or were not eating, generalised cattiness. People who blew off people with my narrow build and slight breasts as only likely to be attractive to closeted gay men.

(The fact that I have a crazy ex who was, as far as I can tell, a closeted gay man, who was notably more attracted to me than his other partner at the time, who has a much more earth-mothery and thus overtly feminine build, and treated her even worse than he treated me, complete with, as I understand it, some level of insults to her attractiveness? Not helpful on that last one's front.)

I spent a little while -- when I wasn't busy cringeing -- familiarising myself with the size acceptance movement, sensitising myself to the issues around weight, developing a nice little head of annoyance about the way weight and health issues are treated. Expanding my awareness a little. Starting to actually pay attention to the cultural chaff that I had sort of ducked much of my life.

Large parts of it are still Bulletins From Outer Space for me, observing the way utterly ordinary-sized people go through the little ritual dance of the "mustn't have cookie, it's shameful" thing before eating, or who feel the need to reduce their weight. And so rarely talk about it in terms of body performance or needs -- not even a "When I weighed ten pounds less I felt better/more energetic/etc." The ritual declarations of hatred for people who aren't engaging in this process. I wind up uncomfortable in these discussions, the rattling off of Weight Watchers stuff, the obligatory offerings of shame, the ... sheer alienation of it all to me, this standard-feminine social ritual that I can't comprehend.

Mostly can't comprehend.

One of those times I was sort of torn and bleeding from being on the edges of one of these things, I had a terrifying moment, looking in the mirror, and going, "I see someone perfectly ordinary in size. And all these ordinary-sized people I know are desperately needing to diet, are concerned about their calorie intake, are doing all these things. What am I not seeing? Do I need to fix something? Do I need to change?" All of that social shame-programming and neuroticism that I missed suddenly manifesting, kicking in, chasing some illusory ideal that goes straight down the road to completely delusional body-image.

My hips finally finished broadening out in my mid-twenties, ish. And occasionally I'm struck with this sense that my body isn't the shape I expect it -- not the wrong shape, but broader, not the narrower sexless form that I had for so long. And I remember my parents telling me that they hit a point where they could gain weight at around thirty, and my breadth of hip is comparable, I think, to my mother's, a sensible place for it to be. It's all bone structure -- with it came a shifting about of flesh that means I'm inadequately padded in a couple of places, especially if I drop a pound or two -- and I recognise that with the rational mind.

The irrational mind looks at me in sweats and tee in the mirrors at the studio where I study tai chi and goes off on this railing panic about my goddamn size. Even when I know -- rationally -- that I could do with gaining a few pounds, at least if I could gain it in my ass. The shame machine is there, trying to make me crazy, hooking into the whole cultural edifice I missed out on having as an active part of my psyche and trying to connect it up to the driving horribleness of personal inadequacy. The irrational mind is convinced that this late-developing hips thing is some sort of crisis. The irrational mind cups a hand over the curve of my belly and says, "This thing didn't used to be round like this, right?"

And I sit here with the delusionality trying to take hold, trying to make me obsess, trying to get more focus than the fleeting and rationally dismissable bits of, "But! But!" that I can blow off by pointing out the pointy bits of discernable bone and other reasonable countermeasures, and I don't damn well know what to do about it. On the one hand, because I haven't been wrestling with this shit all my life, I'm fresh and have a much more developed rational facility for shooting the crazy little voices down and such; on the other hand, I spend a lot of time going "Where the hell did this come from? Makes no sense!" And getting even more uncomfortable around the ritual declarations of bad cookie or the discussions of diets or the evaluation of the caloric counts of various dishes, because rather than simply being outside my comprehension, it hits all those insidious buttons that in my head are the heads of that well-larded slope into complete fucking delusionality.

I can't say there's nothing wrong with my body, but what's wrong with my body has not a damn thing to do with my weight. And I can generally take the rational mind and point that out to myself, firm-like, and not get on the train to crazy about it.

But at the same time ... please don't talk to me about your diet.



Associated recommended reading: The Fantasy of Being Thin.