The Casual Stupid

So someone I know on LJ posted about the whole Polish officials investigating whether Teletubbies have teh ghey thing. And homophobia is a big problem in Poland at the moment, getting all tangled up (back to intersections) with some of the difficulties eastern Europe is having with the whole post-Soviet identity thing. Nationwide strike a possibility, fears of energy dependency on Russia, constitutional issues with the EU, ... and that's just the first page of hits on news.google.com.

The person who linked the article added a comment about how, y'know, he thought about making a Polack joke, but it's not worth it.

And gee ... how nice that it's not worth the effort to make that sort of display. Because responding to one bit of bigotry with another is so chic and enlightened.

Not just speaking, you know, as someone whose grandmother's surname was Jeranonek.

Navigating the Labyrinth: Left-Hand Rule

Over on Little Light's place in the discussion of intersectionality issues, magniloquence said in response to me:

"I think, along with the privilege, there's ... hrm, assumption of purity there? Like the yelliest feminists - the ones that put oppression as a woman before everything else, and who are most likely to cast everything in terms of their feminist viewpoint - tend to be the upper/middle class, relatively well-educated white ones. Not just because they're privileged and think they should dominate (though yes, that's huge ... and annoying), but also because for them, that's all that's happening. That's the only thing 'holding [them] back.' There's no intersection to be had there."

As I have mentioned now and again, I have, historically, serious issues with the values of the upper-middle class relatively well-educated white feminism I was exposed to when young -- largely because, well, it doesn't like my kind. Though I fit its nominal demographic.

And I'm now wondering if that's because sexism was never the primary issue holding me back in my life.

My primary issue? Education access. Trying to get a good education was the dominant issue of my childhood -- and I had parents who were doing the best they could for me, bringing that upper-middle-class privilege to bear on the school system, fighting for access to programs that could address my needs, able to pay for things outside the school's limitations. And I was fighting there as the precocious intellectual brat, which is a privileged position of a kind, but I still have this gut-kick reaction that damnit, if the education system worked better, if there were adequate funding, if there were more options available, if some of the craziness were removed, if people had the skillsets to do various things, that would Save Teh Wurld Tee-Em.

The horrible, horrible sexual harassment that made my junior high school days a living hell? Is subsidiary to the education access issue in my head -- because that was tied up in matters of school choice and familiarity, wound up dictating what schools I was willing to go to come high school (and I recognise that I had the privilege of an option to choose to escape the abuse, which is not something that other people, especially people with certain other intersections, have available) -- because I was a target because I was an asocial nerd, and thus I was rendered perpetually, constantly aware that my sexuality was being treated as a public chew toy because of being The Smart Girl, and nothing we could do could render my schooling free of that. It dominated my choice to do after-school activities (so I didn't have to take the bus home with the mangy hounds), it plagued me during the school day, and sexism only superceded the way that it ruined my access to education when I was told that nobody would do a damn thing about it because "boys will be boys". (That was my first exposure to institutional sexism.)

Secondary issue and first intersection? Mental health. Not just my own depression issues or my probably-PTSD, though that's a big chunk of it. But stuff like my cousin, whose intersections between learning disability/ADHD/race meant that he dropped out of high school and never went back (and look, there's the education access again, funny that). Not just my experiences with a parent who is probably mentally ill with more than depression, with the generational effects of alcoholism, with all that stuff. But things like -- I went to one of the Seven Sisters schools, right? Bastions of professional-class white feminism. One of the folks in my social group had been hospitalised because she was suicidal, and others of my friends tried to organise a trip to visit her there. And were told, more or less, "Don't you worry about the likes of her, she's shown that she's not good enough to be one of us. Go worry about your homework."

I wasn't terribly surprised that when my own mental illness issues led to me dropping out, I was bullied and browbeaten by the administration, and then abandoned by officialdom. (And look, there's education access again. Fancy.) At least I wasn't suicidal, eh?

After that it starts getting to be a complicated, tangled mass. Religious issues have mostly been my increasing sensitivity to language of religion that presumes beliefs that are not mine, such as some sort of monotheism (which I see both from majority-culture theism and the atheistic reaction to same). Sexuality issues have been largely an ongoing, underlying thread of anxiousness about my kink, partially induced by anti-BDSM feminism. I have ongoing concerns about the safety and security of my nontraditionally-structured family, which have been a major focus of activism for me for ten years now, because I want to get the world to be as safe as possible for my children before I have them rather than have to fear once they exist; that starts to blend into some other civil liberties stuff in a complicated way that I don't know qualifies under any adjective-related issues. I started developing body-image issues somewhere in my late teens or early twenties that I mostly don't talk about (they're currently under control, in any case).

I pass well enough as cisgendered under most circumstances that it doesn't much come up as an issue; I suspect that this has shielded me from a lot of issues over time, as it strongly shapes my experience of sex polarisation. My physical capability issues are both sporadic and comparatively minor. Race issues and queer issues and trans issues mostly come up because of supporting others, and I try to be aware of them though I suspect that I often don't do as well as I might.

If I had to boil the tangled mass down into a single thing it would be a constant, snarling wrestling match with categorisation -- the whole monstering problem, being the other in an inescapable around the edges way. There's this whole intricate morass of images that people get measured against, whole bunches of default-human assumptions, and they all rankle at some level. ( I used to measure myself against the standards of that white upper-middle-class educated feminism, and when I did I would break down in tears and feel like a worthless piece of shit.) But all the cardboard people rankle -- the this-or-thatness, or the assumptions of limitations, or the institutional biases against those people who don't happen to fit the cutouts the institutions favor. Freedom isn't fitting into the shape the institutions favor -- and some of us will still be unable to fit that shape, for whatever reason. Some of us will remain in the maze.

To not get lost in the labyrinth, keep one hand on the wall. Turn the same way at every intersection.

Here be monsters.

It is of course well known that careless talk ...

I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with "lifestyle".

It's one of those words that pops up in a couple of the subcultures I drift through and gives me howling "That word, I do not think it means what you think it means" fits. The word means "manner of living", with strict denotation; with connotation, it's heavy on the economic activity and public show -- one of the quotes in one of the dictionaries I've checked on this word is something like "living a millionaire's lifestyle on a middle-class paycheck". Lifestyle is what you do, where you're seen, how often you go out to dinner. It's stuff like whether or not you have credit cards -- and whether they're paid off. That's lifestyle.

You know why the anti-gay crowd are big on the word "lifestyle"? Two things. One of them is that they're trying to create the belief that there is a common manner of living that can be equated with queerness. The thing that's never spoken but is always there in the subtext is "indiscriminate, disease-transmitting anonymous bathhouse promiscuity"; that's what they're trying to slather into all the discussions of gay rights issues, that's what the codeword is for. The other one is encoded in the subtext of the word "lifestyle" itself -- that this is all trivial, superficial shit, something that people do for shits and giggles, not orientational, just ... the current fashion. The trappings that someone might adopt, something easy to change, not a matter of substance. A lifestyle choice, y'know? Like deciding where to go out to dinner or whether or not one can afford to buy a new car, maybe something like a hobby, not anything important to one's soul or inner nature.

So I get kind of irritated when people in one or another of my subcultures refers to something as a 'lifestyle'. Partly because, hell, I don't know anyone with a manner of living that can be meaningfully pointed at with one of their adjectives. I tend to suspect that those people who can be said to be living a fill-in-the-blank lifestyle are, honestly, pretty boring. (I'm reminded of a gay acquaintance who spoke in great frustration about the sort of guys who just wouldn't have a personality at all if they weren't gay.) If the whole of one's life revolves around one thing -- one person, one adjective, one whatever -- that's an awfully limited sort of concept.

You can get all kinds of people wanting to construct a lifestyle around their stuff, but the thing is, none of it is inherent. Not the guy who was absolutely certain that poly people just 'cause they were poly would be interested in being recruited to his particular brand of leftist activism or Deborah Anapol's crazed "Polyamory is less a recreational activity than an alternative way of life which often encompasses economic, nutritional, and political alternatives" from The New Love Without Limits; not the people who are for-damn-certain that anyone who claims to be pagan has to be a vegetarian because that means they wuv momma Earth; not the people who think that Trinity should be wearing a corset 'cause of being a top and all; none of these people are defining what it means to be whatever.

And there's a dangerous, nervewracking thing -- the fact that sometimes people hit the lifestyle stuff, with all of its attendant nonsense, and wind up believing that they have to have all the crap additional stuff to be whatever they are -- all the trappings and dancing around and all the other stuff that they'd only be interested in because it legimates their identity. I saw a discussion recently about Goreans, and a number of people who got into that whole subculture with all of its sexist baggage and mediocre prose because it gives them a structure under which it's okay to be kinky. If the only way one thinks it's okay to, say, be a female submissive is to go do Gor, then by all that is good and holy they will do Gor, and even the weird shit will be critical to defending it, because it's the only way that's acceptable to embrace that identity.

This is where cults come from, in their way -- tying all kinds of other crap to being The Way It's Okay To Be This Way. I've seen some folks damaged in some bigtime ways with the other crap associated with The Way It's Okay To Worship These Gods, let alone anything more complicated. The power of justification is a big deal, and it gets all tied up with the sense that I think is out there that if there's a coherent system, an entire lifestyle, in which whatever thing is embedded then that is somehow more acceptable to adopt than doing the thing on its own.

I saw someone recently make a comment along the lines of, "I'm wondering sometimes if this lifestyle is being taken as a fad", and I could not resist pointing out that that's one of the things that's tied to the concept of lifestyle. Having a family or being oneself isn't a fad; it's not a lifestyle either.

I think there's something to be said for building systems that let people identify what it is that they want to do or be or perform or whatever else and do that, without having to hang all this other rubbish off it. But then again, even if one is avoiding festooning one's life with the dirty laundry of assumption, that won't stop other people from pelting one with stinky socks. (Yeah, I've read the edges of the pole dancing foofaraw.)

Blood from a Stone

Okay, setting aside my whole set of issues with the whole gender identity thing, you know, of all the things that would never, ever occur to me as precipitating the need to engage in serious thought about what it means to be a woman, taking a version of the pill that stops menstruation should probably go near the top of the list. Really, my first thought on cramping up at the end of my medication cycle is not, "Oh, thank the gods, I'm still a woman." I don't consider the whole oozing blood thing to be a reassuring reminder of my gender identity as a woman, and I can't imagine that I would if I had a gender identity as a woman.


More pointing and laughing at Pandagon. Don't miss the video of the crazy woman at the end, holy shit.

I Can See In Myself Wings As I Feel Them

I had one of those moments of hilarity when I came across someone arguing a position that can be expressed, "Come the revolution, we will no longer be Fallen."

(The word "Fallen" was used, with the capitalisation.)

Encoded paradigms are funny, funny things. The notion of the Fall is one of those bits that rattles around, culturally, without getting questioned at all -- this notion that there is something fundamentally wrong with people, something intrinsic and uncorrectable without salvation (which may come in the form of some sort of divine presence, or The Revolution, or some other thing).

And, y'know, when I got sophisticated enough cognitively to explain why I couldn't manage to be Christian, the essential problem was: I can't bring myself to believe in the Fall.

And it's not the misogyny of most interpretations of that myth -- the whole "women are the mechanism by which humankind was flung out of paradise" fragment of the Eden thing made the whole notion of a radical-feminist sympathiser appealing to salvation from the Fall the funniest damn thing I've read all week, though -- it's just ... I can't believe in it.

Glass half full, glass half empty. It really comes down to a certain sort of optimism vs. pessimism, as far as I can tell.

It would be very, very easy for me to just go off into the "there's something just fucking wrong with people, look at the way they behave" cognitive pattern, and justify it from my experiences. And there is certainly enough wrong with the world to justify misanthropy on a grand scale, to suggest that this world of flesh is no more than a vale of tears, and all of that weight of past theologies. And I still can't believe in it.

I can't believe in it. I believe that humans are drawn to groups, to preserving the well-being of the groups they perceive themselves to be in; I believe that humans are prone to drawing lines and saying 'these humans are not in my group', and have wildly varying treatments of those outside. I believe that work to expand the groups that people are willing to affiliate with leads to an expansion of the basic goodness that drives that urge to protect and develop one's social group.

I believe that some people are willing to be utterly, utterly vicious to the other, the outside-the-group, and that these people should not be allowed to dominate the definitionals of the groups they are in. I also believe that this requires care and maintenance, because there's an easy false support one can give one's group by dragging the not-group down and treading them under, not improving one's own status in real terms, just making everyone outside the group worse off, and because this is so easy, it's easy to slide there by being lazy. And once there, it's so easy to see how dangerous it is to challenge that state, so risky to possibly lose the group's support and become one of the ones in the mud.

I believe in laziness far more readily than I believe in innate evil. I believe in fear far more readily than I believe in innate evil.

I believe that a well-ordered and healthy reality requires maintenance, requires vigilance, requires work. I do not believe that it is outside human scope to get there; I do not believe in the necessity of salvation.

I think back to some of the most miserable times in my life, when I was the favored target as an outside-the-group person, that long pattern of sexual harassment and degrading behaviour. I think back to how they would taunt me, and I would sing to myself to close them out, and then they would challenge me to sing for them as if that was a taunt, too.

I sang.

And there was the one in the back who was quiet and thoughtful when I sang. I always remember him, and the way he so clearly knew that I was human too, even though he wasn't strong enough to admit that he could see.

"I did not put it in their hearts to do evil", said Ra, in one of those bits of mythology.

I believe in the essential possibility of purity of heart.

I believe that sometimes it is very, very hard to be strong enough to let that shine.

The Marked Case of Equal

So I've been reading The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality, by Sandra Lipsitz Bem lately. And chasing down links off let them eat pro-sm feminist safe spaces.

This produces interesting intersections.

The chapter I just finished in The Lenses of Gender was about androcentrism: the basic notion that the unmarked case of human being is male. (I will probably have more to say about this later, but for now I'm just giving context.) Which shows up in all kinds of ways; one of the ones that stuck in my head from the book was an insurance company unwilling to cover pregnancy-related disability issues because that was gurl stuff, not human stuff -- while still covering issues like prostate cancer -- and this being upheld as not being sex discrimination because hey, it doesn't affect not-pregnant women or men, so it's not discriminating on the basis of sex! The woman-specific issues were outside of the scope of human care.

This crops up a lot -- this notion of what normal is, what the shape of a default human being might be. Marked and unmarked cases. At one point it was expected to say "woman doctor" -- having a woman with a medical degree was so remarkable that she needed to be distinguished from her colleagues, set apart as something subtly different. These days, a similar language tic can be seen in "gay marriage". There's the normal thing, the thing that just gets the noun, and then there's the special case shit which isn't covered by normal, which probably doesn't get covered at all -- those marked case people, so long as they're doing the marked stuff, they gotta fend for themselves; they're outside of what Normal Humans Do, so Normal Human Coverage doesn't handle it. That's what they get for being weird.

So, with that framing context in mind, I was reading this old post of Trinity's, where concerns were raised about equality in relationships as regards certain BDSM practices. That a practice of egalitarianism -- of treating people equally regardless of various traits -- precludes doing the sort of stuff that kinky people do. At least so long as adequate demonstration of "self-examination" is not presented.

So we have the Normal Human Thing again.

And here's the thing with certain models of egalitarianism: the argument that people should be treated the same regardless of their preferences on the matter mostly looks like the nightmare-bogeyman that was hacked together to explain why we shouldn't be commies to me. The argument that I shouldn't go my kinky-submissive way because it promotes inequality mostly looks like I am held to be unequal: that because my stuff is outside the Normal Human Thing, it doesn't deserve the consideration that other people do.

And I should be pleased with the way the disability insurance will pay out for my prostate problems, too.

This is the thing: equal treatment has to take into account individual differences, individual experience, context, background. No amount of modelling the default human as male will take away my uterus; no amount of modelling the default human as vanilla will take away my kinkiness.

I've had a relationship with someone who was so devoted to egalitarian treatment that he was deeply, painfully uncomfortable with my submissive tendencies and only faced them with such ambivalence that I wound up, more often than not, suppressing the reactions so as not to distress him.* I have a relationship now with my liege, who not only accepts but cherishes my submission even though he doesn't always remember to do anything with it (outside when it becomes quite obvious in the bedroom). And it's in the latter of these I feel far more treated as someone with equal standing in the relationship -- because even though I am explicitly in a support role rather than one of "equals", even though I have to deal with certain constraints and obligations, I am in a position to define what that interaction means and my satisfaction with the dynamic is of equal importance to his.

As soon as one starts to acknowledge the range of humanity, there has to come an acknowledgement that different people want and need different things as part of their support, satisfaction, and even happiness. And, as the old saw goes, if it were otherwise, think of the oatmeal shortage.

I am not a lesser being because of being submissive, nor is it a sign of weakness or ready compliance.

I'm just a marked case.



(Maybe I'll try The Trouble with Normal next.)

* I have run this sentence by my ex both for checking that it has reasonable accuracy and consent for posting it. (And to let him know that I was commenting on this in public, for that matter.) This particular incompatibility is not something I in any way blame him for; it was just one of those factors that didn't work out. C'est la vie, live and learn, and all that good stuff. He wishes to note that he has a better understanding of my kink in retrospect, but not any better idea of how he, specifically, would handle it. Which serves as further illustration of my point, funny enough.

Narrative Discourse

So I'm watching some discussion here and there about fanfic provoked by this piece by Cory Doctorow.

Fanfic is one of those contentious subjects in some circles, really. The whole interplay of ownership of worlds, of what of the presentation of story is a shared matter and what rights the original creator should have to define the way those worlds are viewed and defined. The writer as divine creator, bringing forth universes from the sweat of their brow, is a compelling mythology to some -- but what happens once other petty godlings start interacting with those universes?

The thing to keep in mind -- the fanfic impulse is old, old, old. One of the frequent topics of conversation in my life of late has been how much of the Arthurian mythos is fanfic. Lancelot and the whole love triangle plotline? French fanfic. And those bits of fanfic become a mythological canon later on, shaping White's The Once and Future King for a straightforward Arthurian, and Walton's The King's Peace for an Arthurian that isn't so straightforward.

Homer? Mythology fanfic. Criticised in his time for being insufficiently respectful, too. Our surviving version of the Isis and Osiris myth? Greek fanfic, Plutarch I think, which would probably have kinda bothered some of the original myth-constructors with its changes to authorial intent.

Story exists as a dialogue between the storyteller and the people around them, the people interpreting the story. The words on the page, or recited, or whatever, aren't the whole of the story; there's a whole other chunk of it that comes with what weight that people bring to what they're hearing, what interpretations they have, the shapes of things. (And someone I know objected to having a subtitle to a poem removed, because it changed the story of the poem -- unqueering it. Context, context, context.)

When I write, I am, for the most part, not operating in a world of someone else's conception -- but at the same time, I am functioning in the vast multiverse of worlds perceived and realised, real and fictional, engaging in this giant discourse with the nature of story, the sort of story that matters, the shape of what it means to make story happen. I may not be telling you an Arthurian, but if I speak of proper rulership or nobility I will be operating in the context of a discourse shaped by memories of Arthur, generations upon generations of people talking about the Round Table and elaborating upon rulership and right action.

And there are stories that depend on that matrix, for better or for worse. Lancelot could have been written in some other structure, perhaps, but would he have had persistent story to him if he had? "There was this great king, who organised the best warriors to exemplify certain virtues -- they went on a quest for ... oh, fuck it, let's just tell a story about King Arthur."

This impulse isn't different when it's telling a story about Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker -- these are story matrices just like the ones which have been around longer. And people will engage with that matrix, with that world or those characters. (And I will admit I am far more comfortable with the impulse directed at the world than the characters, save when the characters are already collaborative work, but that's my own quirk.) And when people engage with the matrix, sometimes the result is more story.

Sometimes the matrix is a metamatrix -- the structure of multiple stories, past and present, in response to more than one thread, and when that happens, we don't call it fanfic. We may recognise threads of inspiration here and there, recognise them as falling into a sequence of development or originating a notion that other people's work explores later, but because it isn't set in Camelot or Gotham City, we call it "original".