For Your Ka

It's an interesting and complicated thing, being non-Christian but from a Christian background, this time of year. Not just because of the prevalence of the pop-Christmas stuff, starting earlier and earlier every year, but because living in a family context means that the family markings of the holiday keep coming up. Not really the religious aspects (the in-laws no longer ask if we want to attend Mass with them), the cultural-social ones.

And some of those are important to me, as part of the continuation of my ka, my family soul; there are traditions that are resonant for me, meaningful for me. The keeping of the names, some recipes handed down from my grandparents to my parents to me; these things matter, are a part of the flavor of meaning, are places that are where I came from.

Which means I'm coming around to the feeling that Christmastime is something I mark as a major ka festival, and an ancestor festival; it's undeniable that my ancestors for quite some time were, after all, Christian. And this time of year is resonant with established traditions, and a time that my family marks with family gatherings as it is.

So in that sort of mode, I went into the season with a round of making the traditional family dishes, and making a traditional Polish dish, and some Scottish gingerbread, all the old family lines. Building up my own tradition of family traditions, bloodlines, heritages, where I came from.

In ancient Egypt, a gift was presented with the phrase: for your ka. For your family-soul, your heritage-soul, your lifeline.

Merry Christmas.

Constructing Consent

Background: a call for submissions for a book proposal apparently about date/acquaintance rape (hard to tell because of the poor writing of the proposal) went out, and has sparked controversy. This is not about the controversy; for people who want context on that, a few people have written critiques of the proposal and its issues for discussion; perusing them and their links and so on will likely be informative. (I haven't kept track of all the links I've read on it; I think most of them can be found through there.) The gist of the anthology as I currently understand it is that it wants to envision a world in which enthusiasm and enjoyment is the standard for consensual sexual activity.

The thing I want to poke at, though, is the construction of consent.

Okay, yes, a world in which my first boyfriend was waiting for "Oh please do this to me" would probably be one where I didn't have flashbacks and dissociation issues around sex. Granted.

The root of the assault, or part of it, goes back before that. Back before "yes means yes" or even "no means no" -- there were failures there, but those weren't the points of first failure.

The first failure was a point of "How do I know whether I want to say 'yes' or 'no'?" The lack of clearly articulate consent or nonconsent was in significant part because I had no idea how to construct the concept. I wrote some about this for Blogging For Sex Education Day here and here.

And the irony is, I started wrestling with those questions, realised I needed to do the work to construct an understanding of consent, because of the assault. Because I was woefully unprepared, don't think well under pressure, uneducated, unprotected, and unwilling to be that vulnerable again.

Building consent was hard, in the culture I was surrounded with at the time, the Just Say No culture -- always refuse, refuse, even if you want to, even if you desperately want to, or are just curious, or think it might be nice: no is the answer. Especially if you're female; here are the consequences that you're risking: pregnancy, disease, death. Say no! You are the gatekeeper, the preserver of virtue, young woman: say no, and keep the world true on its course.

And the negation of consent was also present on the male side: men were presented as indiscriminate, hypersexual, defective if they turned down an opportunity to fuck. Their consent was invisible because it was assumed that they would be interested in sex now, with this person, at this time, under these conditions, no matter what; the concept of male consent was flatly laughable.

(For things I now know that I was utterly unaware of when younger: women of color are frequently framed in terms typically associated with (white?) men in these matters of consent construction: consent is irrelevant, due to insatiability.)

None of this is a context in which people are likely to easily be able to be secure in what their own boundaries are; the enorced nroms and expectations are a riptide of social expectation. In my teen years, sexual activity may have been status in some ways, an initiatory experience into the mysteries of adulthood, but that status was dangerous, a whispered one. Slut-shaming was a real factor, and the rumoured-promiscuous boys were read as much as potential predators as successful at the rites of manhood.

I had a friend have a hysterical fit at me, a complete meltdown, conviction that I was going to get myself killed or ruin my life, when she learned that I was sexually active (with the fellow I wound up marrying, I would note). Slut-shaming has some perverse manifestations.

The story of the guy I know who was raped is one full of myths: he's male, so of course he wants it, and besides, he's a nerd who wouldn't get laid otherwise, so I'm doing him a favor. The construction of his consent never seemed to come up in his rapist's mind.

But that comes after the problem of consent.

"What do I want?" is a critical question for consent: without answering it, neither 'yes' nor 'no' comes out with conviction. The steps to assault for me started with wanting love and attention, wanting to explore and understand my own sexuality; perfectly damned rational things for someone in mid-adolescence to be wrestling with.

The next step was getting on a slope too steep for my skill level. I was still in the bunny-slopes part of sex, trying to figure out how to turn without tumbling into a snowbank and how not to crash into trees, and wound up with the only available potential source of love-and-attention being seventeen, presumably well past the shallow hills and looking for someone to hit the black diamond with. So I got run down the bunny slope, didn't crash into anything, and that was taken as good enough reason to swing me around to the next grade. And the next, and the next, with no breathing space.

And most of the time I do believe that the guy was of good will, not trying to coerce, was genuinely horrified when he realised he had nearly raped me the bright afternoon he gave me the little tape loop of terror. Most of the time; I don't believe he was completely unconcerned with consent, entirely focused on getting what he wanted, just ... a dumb kid doing dumb kid things to a kid with even less experience and understanding and ability to articulate. Most of the time, I do believe this.

But I never got to really master the green circle slopes, whether he was a dumb kid or a predator with just enough human respect for his prey to not blatantly continue in the face of obvious nonconsent. I had no opportunity to explore, to get the feel of things, to learn what I liked about the terrain, to get the joy of the basics.

And the bunny slopes are part of healthily developing consent -- the exploration, the comparatively low-stress figuring things out, the, yes, occasionally tipping into a drift or hitting a rock or losing a ski halfway up the hill. Learning boundaries requires testing the boundaries, exploring within them and trying a little bit outside them every so often. Firming up the edges, or expanding the possible.

And going outside the boundaries is impossible to do with perfect consent. The problem with initiations -- and sex is one of them -- is that the result on the other side may not be knowable, which means it's hard to face up to the consequences and accept them in advance. But a good grounding in the possibilities, an intellectual understanding of what may happen, and all of those, those are part of making up consent. Going through the bunny slopes, learning the way it all goes together, makes it most possible to go through those transitions with the least likelihood of long-term harm. One can learn about the whole process, one's own reactions, without having to deal with the tricky hills right at the outset. Take a fall on a gentle hill a few times, so as to be able to survive one on a steep slope. That sort of thing.

Focusing on pleasure won't fix constructing consent. I got dragged down a lot of slopes without my consent, and a lot of them were pleasurable. (Others were kind of baffling.) In some ways, pleasure betrayed me, passing for consent, passing for acceptance, confusing me about whether or not I wanted a yes there, or a more, or anything else -- because it felt good, and how did that weigh against the sick twisting feeling of the growing dissociation, anyway? I didn't know how to find answers to these questions at the time.

I started to learn how to think about it when in traction from the consequences of being a green circle sexuality on a black diamond slope.

There are better ways to learn how to give consent.

Link Festivus

I'm running off for a frenetic couple of days with miscellaneous relatives and in-laws, and currently have the Seasonal Doom Cold, so a few links in lieu of anything of substance:

What do you get the socially-anxious Jewish lesbian in your life?

If Stairway to Heaven was done by the 1964-ish Beatles

And, special for the "OMG, wait, what, we have a religion to scream about?" season, Your God Is Too Small.

I'm Too Nerdy For My Love

maymay writes here about the strange dichotomy between sexiness and smarts.

And my comment over there (still in moderation as of this writing) is:

"I was too smart to ever be pretty. It shapes a lot of things."

It wasn't allowed, you know, for the likes of me to be attractive. I could be either attractive or smart, and smart was something I clearly was before the dichotomous choice came up as a visible fork in the road, so I was off down one branch before I realised I was well past the place I could maybe have decided about it.

Because it was forbidden for me to be pretty, it was forbidden for boys to like me (unless they were social rejects beyond the bounds of The Rules). It wasn't forbidden for them to treat me as some kind of sex toy, but kind attraction was forbidden. Crude comments, breast-grabbing and other unwelcome touch, and mockery were acceptable; those didn't depend on me being pretty, just on being female. Perhaps some of that was an outlet for taboo attraction. Perhaps they were just assholes who knew they could play with me with impunity. There's no way to know.

Because it was forbidden for me to be pretty, I spent a long time utterly unfocused and unable to focus on things relating to my own appearance. I had no idea how to attract the attention I wanted, how to construct myself in an appealing manner; I spent years with earnest intensty being the only thing I could offer to a potential partner with any intention. (Fortunately, my husband could handle it.) I had no sense of style, personal or otherwise. It would make no difference, after all, as I was not allowed to be pretty anyway, so why waste effort?

Oh, I was an intense kid, full of want, trying to figure out how to be human.

When I met someone who told me I was beautiful it broke me inside, a little. I didn't know how to deal with it, how to live with it, how to untangle the mess around this boy who broke the taboo for me. It rattled me, shook up my boundaries, left me even more uncertain than I might otherwise have been, and my terribly earnest self was utterly uncertain. Maybe that's part of why the assault ripped me up so much, why it took me completely to pieces, the fact that he was the first to break that rule. Broke a lot of other things with it, in the long run.

... there's more to this, but damned if I know how to write it. I've written in the past that it takes guts to be beautiful and whole and complete, and this is part of why: it breaks the rules. This is why it matters to know how to be beautiful to the people I want to see me as beautiful, why I want to hear it from them and nobody else. There's so much more, tangled up in the fallout from that one thing. I can gesture at it, but I can only trace the shapes with my hands, the curve of it, the way it flows.


I'm too nerdy for this post.

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.

Go Watch This

Sudy does investigative reporting: Say it Ain't So Feminism. Part one of a series, so I see.

Sudy can be found here.

Power Play

This is me trying to articulate some of what I was flailing at in my comment posted to Dev in this post titled 'Conversation with Friends'; if it's unclear due to context-lack, looking over there may be a help. Dunno.

Dev was talking with a non-d/sy friend about why she doesn't use her dominant position to enforce particular changes in Joscelin (her sub)'s life. And found most of the suggestions for things she could do notably non-sexy. maymay (of Maybe Maimed But Never Harmed) commented that he was surprised how often it is that people seem to dissociate d/s from sexuality.

(And I wonder, on a tangent, if that relates to the whole stereotype game of "Men think women are turned on by the dishes being clean, when it's more 'if the dishes are clean already I may have brainpower to think about sex'.")

And, y'know, back in the early stages of the formalising the d/s thing with my liege, I commented that I suspected a lot of the prurient kink-phobes would be disappointed at how much carpentry was in my d/s, compared to the levels of kinky sex. I do a lot of small service tasks, none of which are even remotely erotic, many of which don't even have the little touch of personal attention that comes of making him his tea when I know I'll be seeing him soon.

The only service I really get off on as it were is sexual. But I'm not a bedroom sub, where he's concern; we have an extensive ongoing power-charged relationship that extends out into all of the not terribly sexy service stuff I do like cleaning the wax off his ritual table (yesterday) or folding paper towels for cleaning up stain with (way back when). And all of that stuff matters to the kink, which is sexual, even if it's not in any way a matter of turning me on at the time -- not even in the transactional "If I do this task well I get laid" sense.

The thing is that the service in the mundane sense, all of the small things that I try to deal with, the responsiveness to suggestion and direction and all, all of it makes it clear that the interaction is whole. That it's not -- as he put it rather more bluntly than I was anticipating last night when we were trying to deal with a major issue in the structural stuff -- "just a game for when we fuck". The shapes of the thing are broader than the bedroom, and because of that the depth of the response from the d/s sexual play runs that much deeper, that much stronger, because it has all the weight of the engagement on that level in non-sexual circumstances. The whole of that energy of living can get behind it, not just the parts that are directed at sexplay.

Tangential to that central thought about why I do service stuff when I don't necessarily kink specifically for that sort of service, I had another response to that post that only came up while I was thinking about it and away from the computer. That being, using one's domly goodness to get someone to "get life together" may, well, be counterproductive.

And the thing I'm looking at is the thing that I was ranting about when I wrote Against Empowerment a few days ago -- if getting life together depends on the application of control, punishment, or whatever relevant bit of dominance is being applied, then in the absence of the active working, it's not gonna stay together. It's not power, it's just empowerment, bestowed by that outside force, contingent on its presence.

Which isn't to say that a dom can't be a positive force for the arrangement of someone's life. Trinity has written about that in various places, as a for example, how she enjoys being a positive shaping force. My liege consistently encourages me to face issues I'm avoiding, among many other things (that one's on my mind due to current events). But he doesn't take the burden of determine what has to be done onto himself, doesn't enforce discipline on it: there's the reminder of the issue, the support for dealing with it, and all that, but I have to develop and apply the power to do it myself. Otherwise, I'm not the one who's got my life in order -- he's got my life in order, and I'm dependent.

And it's not one-sided; I also am consistently prodding him to develop and apply capacity within himself, all kinds of things that don't depend on me though I helped them grow.