... Whoa

I've been off reading the comments to this thread at Making Light, which have been a fascinating and frustrating discussion of all kinds of things related to sexism and gender identity (and kept me up far too fucking late because there are umpty-hundred of them and I didn't even finish). (It got linked by someone saying, 'Wow, the discussion starting at comment 602 is fascinating'. I read the previous 601 comments, too, as I had last read the thread when it was around 20 ....)

I just got to this chunk of comment by the inimitable Teresa Nielsen Hayden. (This is comment #730, by the way; it has a wee bit of context.)

I once heard Annie Sprinkle say that until prostitution is legalized, no woman will be free. This struck me as true at the time, but it took a long time for me to tease out the implications. One of them is that as long as there are women who are outside the protection of the social contract, all women are threatened with reassignment to that category.

Well, hit me with a fucking brick. I'm just sort of, ... what an illuminating angle to sit at and peer.

The Clothes Make The Er Um What

I've been thinking a good bit about clothes lately. (Not just because I'm helping my liege work out what he's going to wear for his wedding, but not not because of that, either.)

I've been exploring, mentally, what it means to dress like me.

This doesn't have, necessarily, that good an intersection with the clothes that I have. But, y'know, not having won the lottery recently or anything, I don't have the resources to go out and transmogrify my wardrobe, so I mostly pick things up slowly over time that feel more like me than what I've got.

Or rather ... more like the rest of me. The part of me that doesn't have anything in particular to say with clothing other than 'I am not exposing my nipples and genitalia' is well-supplied with t-shirts. And really, being too damn lazy to bother thinking about clothing and thus putting on a t-shirt and some pants as necessary is a part of me that is legitimately expressible.

As I was reminded recently, one of the early manifestations of the 'I want to dress more like me' thought was picking up a couple of pairs of slacks. It used to be jeans-and-t-shirt, but I got to a point where it mattered to me to be able to move more freely -- coincidentally, opening myself to the possibility of an office job by expanding my office-appropriate apparel options -- but mostly just not liking the feel of the weight of the jeans.

The house we moved into last fall has a gifuckinggantic closet. So I've been unpacking and hanging things, like my collection of vests, and thinking about how to coordinate that into what I wear on a regular basis. Shirt, pants (or long skirt), vest is dressing more like me than just the shirt-and-pants does, but it also requires more conscious effort (the only skirt I have clean and put away at the moment is a broomstick skirt with paisley patterning; this does not go with more than one of my vests).

I look at this, and I have no idea what's being communicated there. I mean, I'm aware that there are signalling cultures which convey all sorts of information with their clothing, and those which don't, but I can't say I speak any of the codes. I just wind up feeling that falling back on the unmarked clothing is a habit I got into as part of my depression coping mechanism, something I didn't have to think about at all, and thus thinking about how and whether I want to differ from the default there is something that I want to do. I don't know what I'm saying, beyond "I like these clothes" or whatever, but it's ... an interesting bit of thing to think about.

And when I start trying to synthesise things and work out what the whole shape of the message is -- okay, I'm pretty sure I can work out the slinky blue dress, I can get somewhere with the velvet bellydance-style shirt with the fantastic lace sleeves, and I'm also pretty sure I can work out the burgundy swallowtail coat and the snazzy grey top hat, too. Living in the space that encompasses these (and the other things that living in my head encompasses) is interesting to imagine, as if from the outside.

(On a note of petulant acquisitiveness, he's been looking at a lot of nice waistcoats ....)

A Funny Thing, Perspective

So when I was in my early twenties, and still quite callow when dealing with politics, I came across, in a newsgroup I read, a particular cluster of people. They were my first reasonably direct exposure to people who self-identified as feminists in a vocal way, as opposed to the subtexts of feminist thought that I had been raised with or encountered, distantly, on news reports or editorials pages.

I don't remember what order the cascade of revelations of position was, entirely, so this is all a bit jumbled and haphazard in my memory.

Early on was the argument about whether men could be feminists. Which, even in my anxiousness about the word at the time, seemed to me to be the stupidest damn thing I had ever heard; I don't hold opinions with my genitalia, and I don't see why my genitalia would qualify me to be identified as someone with a particular set of opinions. This caused some in-depth friction, including with a transman friend of mine who had been raised to be a good feminist girl by a mother who was of the "only women can be feminists" flavor, and who thus took his trans-ness as a particularly vicious betrayal. Again if I'm remembering right, he was told, by this crowd, that he could be a feminist if he wanted, because he had the relevant experience as someone with girly bits to qualify; he said, more or less, "Fuck that noise."

I think it was at about the same time that some members of that crew put forward the proposition that agreement with the statement "Men are pigs" was a significant criterion in evaluating whether someone was a worthwhile person. Something to the effect of, "The only appropriate response from a man is, 'I know we are, I've met us'" was stated, while simultaneously the usage of the phrase as a litmus test was denied. This position was agreed with, to my incredulity, by one of the male posters to the group.

Whenever these discussions came up, the same half-dozen voices would club together and compete to be the first to smack down the dissent. People who objected to the positions they expressed were typically accused of blindness, insensitivity, and abuse of privilege; they were told they needed to shut up so they did not silence alternate positions. They were occasionally called on American-centric positions by posters to the group who were not American; this position of privilege in discourse was not acknowledged. They also did not acknowledge 'being able to speak without being descended upon by silencing harpies' as a position of privilege; they were the ones in opposition to privilege in all its forms, after all. When they had successfully silenced their opposition by rendering people unwilling to speak up because it was just too much effort to deal with the junior-high-school nastiness, they congratulated each other publically on how good they were, and how successful at enlightening others, to the point that actual on-topic discussion on the group suffered for me -- I was afraid to post anything that might rouse the wrath of the cabal.

They ebb and flow in the newsgroup, but continue to be a reason that I am not particularly open there anymore.

And now they're taking it over again, with vicious attacks on those who do not agree with their ideologies on certain issues. Their particular target of the moment is a woman I know from several areas, who I have always found helpful, informative, and engaging. They are accusing her of a variety of things, among them attempting to silence opposing positions.

Even if I did not know this woman, I could not look at this argument without laughing my fucking arse off. The head of the clique that descends upon someone who does not adhere to a particular ideology and starts just sniping, sniping, sniping is not a credible witness when it comes to "silencing opposing positions". The woman they're attacking starts a sentence with something like, "My personal objection to this is" and the chief buzzard replies, cutting off all other substance, with, "as usual, wrong."

When someone pointed out that this is what privilege looks like when it tries to silence dissent, another one of that crowd responded with, "Thanks for the demonstration."

The thing is, I don't want to write about these people -- I'm just trying to generate enough context for the short thought that I had sudden perspective on.

I'm watching the circling mess, and watching the way it all plays out, set-piece responses, entire long sequences of posts utterly predictable, with the handwringing, "I feel silenced and shut down!" from the bullies when they're called on their behaviour ...

... and I wonder how much it looks like the same thing from the other side.

I don't wonder it enough to want to go there, to pull the worst of them out of my killfiles, to pretend that that space can ever be a place that I can present myself as genuine and whole. But I wonder if they genuinely think that the people they are bludgeoning out of that space are threatening them.

Today, that makes me sad, and angry. But not sad enough to forgive.

Thinking About Libidos

This is in response to the discussions that Trinity started at her place and at Let Them Eat Pro-Feminist Safe Spaces about what women's libidos are actually like.

Not to generalise from a small sample (but everyone does that!), I want to ramble about things that I note have an effect on my libido and have seen other people dealing with. Just anecdotal data, of course, but maundering in directions that I find reasonably illuminating.

Relationship age shifts

My experience of my sexuality with a partner is that I tend to be very intensely sexual for the first six months or so of the relationship (more if there are distance issues); I also experience emotional spikes that often translate sexually when seeing someone after a long time apart. However, this intensity does not last; at about a year or a year and a half into the relationship, it has drifted down to a significantly lower and stable level.

Definitional issues

A lot of people seem to equate "libido" with "how often one wants to initiate or seek out sex". The thing is, for me, that's almost never (outside of the early phases of a relationship); it's not something that I tend to seek out. The thing is, my libido almost entirely runs on responsiveness to stimuli. (Early in relationships, I think the major stimulus it's running on is 'Partner nearby! Woo!') If I get the right things to respond to, I can respond very strongly -- and some of those things are difficult to articulate or isolate as stimuli.

I see people talking about masturbation frequency or use of porn as something keyed into libido, and that tends to leave me baffled. My sexuality is intensely partner-focused, and by 'partner-focused' I mean 'specific people', which means that neither of those things satisfy the focus of my sexuality. Masturbation can take the edge off a "the partner I want is not available to me at the moment", but aside from that has no particular appeal. Porn is, well, to paraphrase a guy on usenet, "Sex happening to someone else. Why should I care?" It doesn't involve me or my partners, and I am moderately squicked by voyeurism, so I just don't get it. Relating either of these to my libido just feels like trying to relate golfing to my libido -- has nothing to do with the subject.

So what does "having a libido mean"? I tend to parse it in terms of sexual reactivity and responsiveness, because that's the way my sexuality functions. Other people seem to refer to it in terms of sexual initiation, aggression, or loose sexual energy. Are we even talking about the same stuff?

Depression issues

My experience with depression is that my libido is the canary in the coal mine; if my emotional system is going down, one of the first things that goes is my responsiveness to sexuality. Often, the way the sailing that part of the neurochemical sea goes, it's not something I miss or even note as absent unless it is brought to my attention in some way; I have had several multi-year periods of asexuality.

I recognise this as something that does damage to certain parts of my relationships; this does not help the mood problem.

Damage issues

I've written extensively about my experiences with sexual harassment and assault, even just in this space.

I haven't written about what effects that has had on my sexuality as much.

My first period of asexuality occupied most of the dissociative period after the assault, and it was clearly self-protective. It may also be a chunk of the origin of the depression/asexuality link; after all, if the correct thing to do to be safe at one point was to cease being a sexual entity, then that's a pattern that worked once. Why not try it again when under similar stresses (isolation, anxiety, trauma)? I honestly have no clear sense of continuous memory with the person on the other side of that; I can pull up facts, but they're not entirely contiguous with my sense of self.

At my best guess, the person who would grown out of a version of me who was not assaulted would have been a good bit more sexually open. Probably would not have been one for casual sex, but might have been more comfortable and fluid with friends-with-benefits sorts of relationships. Would have had a clearer sense of sexual exploration rather than sexual danger; would probably have been less reckless in initiating sexual relationships. Might not have as strong a distinction between physical and emotional arousal. She might have masturbated occasionally, or might have come to the conclusion, after some more experimentation, that the sensation was not satisfying.

Physical arousal and mental arousal are only loosely linked for me. Most often, this manifests as physical responsiveness (getting wet, etc.) without associated mental/emotional "I'm turned on/horny/interested in sex", though it has occasionally manifested the other way around. This has meant, among other things, that the studies that show physical responses and purport that to have to do with arousal have always left me cold; my sense of arousal is much more mental than physical, and I can have one without the other. I wonder how much of this is because of having a history of dissociation around sex, and how much of this is that physical arousal is somewhat less overt for me than for a man -- lubrication doesn't always register to me as something to be aware of, so I don't have to work out questions like, "If I have a physical response to this, does it mean sex is warranted?" I know of people who assume that "erection" = "sexual arousal", despite the fact that the physical response is fickle and responds to a variety of things; I wonder, also, whether that confuses things any.

I used to get flashbacks. (They are, at this point, very rare, and mostly controllable.) The trigger for those flashbacks was the sight of an aroused and erect naked man, especially of a particular body type. As flashback triggers go, this one is rather inconvenient if one is a heterosexual woman. Wrestling with the flashbacks, especially at times when I was just not feeling emotionally strong enough to explain what was wrong or even mention that something was wrong, is utterly exhausting in demoralising ways.

For a variety of reasons, I get easily messed up by a sense of sexual pressure, with any sort of expectation that I should be more sexual or more readily sexual than I am. Some of this is self-inflicted trauma from personal esteem issues interacting poorly with other things -- I, basically, wind up with tremendous complexes about my value as a partner if I'm not sexually available, which, once they exist, wind up setting off depression issues very easily, and, of course, make me unable to sexually respond smoothly or without extensive effort, because I need to have the complexes soothed as well as the responses evoked. This is a self-perpetuating bloody mess, as I get into a mental state where any sexual approach that doesn't synch up within a very narrow band of response triggers completely tenses me up. And I don't know how to fix this, which depresses me, which ....

Kink compatibilities

I've learned from experimentation that I cannot sustain a relationship well that doesn't have a certain level of kink compatibility. What I actually need is the ability to have my own kinks be expressable and not remarkable when they tend to show up; on the flip side of that, I can't handle dealing with too much stuff that just doesn't turn me on in my sex life.

A bunch of my kink stuff is very strong sexual responsiveness trigger, too; a good mesh can lead to a bunch of things raising energy very easily. This doesn't mean I don't have responsiveness to non-kinked stuff, but it does mean that the more I can synergise with someone on this front, the easier it is to be sexual.

Cultural stuff

There's a whole hell of a lot of weird pressure out there on sexuality. Not just in the whole cultural assumption that women must regulate male lust in some way rather than having desires of their own, or the notion that even if one does have sexual desires one should not express them for fear of being inappropriate, too forward, too pushy.

A friend of mine in high school completely flipped out when she learned I was sexually active. Completely, totally lost it. Because she had seriously bought into the whole Sex Is Dangerous propaganda of the upswing of the AIDS panic -- someone who was sexually active was going to come down with a horrible disease or die. Or become pregnant and ruin their lives. Or something like that. Crazed panic. The whole mythology that it's impossible to be responsible about sex was one of those things I had to think about a lot, especially given my reckless tendencies as a result of the trauma.

There's no teaching about how to think and communicate about desires, which makes it harder to articulate and present them. Which makes it harder, at least for me, to be able to express what I want, talk about the hidden desires, and so on.

And the difficulty of talking about things ramps up harder and more vicious around kink stuff. The stuff that I fantasised about when I was telling myself stories to go to sleep by is all stuff that a lot of people tell me I Shouldn't Get Off On, and that makes it harder to go there, harder to admit to it, all the complex tangles of the need to, basically, come out to oneself.

(I managed to avoid the "good girls aren't sexual" stuff, but I know people who didn't. I also know people who caught a bad case of "Only assholes have and express sexual desires".)

Inhibition and Expression

I am far more interested, sexually, in a communicative lover than an unexpressive one. Sounds, facial shifts, physical response, it's all good; if I don't get something like that, my own responses tend not to kick in, or not terribly strongly. It is far easier for me to express myself sexually with someone who is sexually expressive and does not manifest hangups and glitches about sex (whether culturally induced, history induced, or whatever else); I have enough sexual glitches for two.



So that's a few things that I know play into how my libido responds. I used to have a joke that I had the libido of a philodendron -- I bloom profusely once a year -- though that's less accurate these days. It's still not a bad joke, in a lot of ways, because the entire process is fraught and complicated and sensitive, and I can't help but wonder how much of the play of all of these factors might be a part of the whole mythology of women wanting less sex.

Some stuff to think on.

Selling My Soul

How fascinating that a thread discussing Faust should go this direction.

The claim was made that "messing with brain chemistry is a bad thing", in a context of the discussion of antidepressants. (Also comparing Prozac to heroin and ecstasy, and making an analogy to defacing written texts.) And was baffled and hurt that this offended people.

There are all kinds of places I can go with this, but I want to go into the mythology of depression. Many of which struck me as being in play in that discussion.

Like:

- Mental illness is fundamentally different from physical illness, and should be treated with different rules. Never mind, of course, that most "mental illness" is organic in some way, whether it's my depression as rooted in digestive and thyroid disorders as much as a propensity to the specific chemical glitch-set, which is just as much a part of my fucked-up body as my other weirdly functioning bits anyway; never mind, similarly, that some physical illnesses are in fact psychosomatic, something that any child who has induced a fever by failing to finish their math homework is well aware of. Never mind that the brain is another body part.

- Mental illness is intrinsic to a person and a personality. Sometimes this takes the form of "What an excellent example to others you are!", which is a sort of patronisation that I've seen directed at physically disabled people as well. Sometimes this takes the form of the romanticisation of the tortured artist; how many artistic heroes committed suicide or died young, and we hear, "Yes, so tragic, but would the art have been as good without it?" Sometimes this is in the form of, "If you treat the illness, you are changing who that person is!" whether it's calling Prozac Ecstasy or suggesting that Ritalin treatments for ADHD children are producing 'zombies'.

- Mental illness is not a real concern worthy of treatment; the moral question of whether it is acceptable to alter brain chemistry is significant enough to call medication into question. That medication is the equivalent of illegal drugs or puritanically disapproved euphorics, not the equivalent of insulin treatment for diabetics.

And then the fascinating:

- Mental illness is a special case because brain chemistry is more bound to "self" than other body parts. Modifying other body parts will not change sense of self; modifying brain chemistry will axiomatically change sense of self.


The argument against antidepressants and other treatments seemed to boil down to (I say "seemed to" because the person making the argument seemed to me to be increasingly incoherent; the unawareness that the position was mind-body dualism was a fascinating bit of "Aren't you paying attention to what you're saying?"):

Axiom 1: The personality ought to be immutable and sacrosanct.

Which is bloody nonsense, honestly, in denial of the functions of the real world: personalities shift over time and circumstance all the time. I note, for a dramatic example, that I never used to swear before the assault; it wasn't an inhibition, it just didn't occur to me to do so. Other changes, those Trousers of Time moments where one knows that one's life has forked (but perhaps not what the different ways might have led to, other than "Something different"), the gradual accumulation of experience -- like the post over on SM-feminist Trinity made about gender supremacism and being embarassed by old thoughts while still understanding how the person she had been had had them -- all of these change who we are, how we respond.

Axiom 2: Any modification of brain chemistry is morally questionable.

Setting aside, for the moment, that in practical terms this means that one should not eat, sleep, have sex, fall in love, experience any other emotion, record memories ....

The notion here was that changing the brain chemistry changes who one is, and because of the axiom encoded in (1), that's bad. Of course, for at least some depressives and other people familiar with similar issues, the concept of identifying with the disease is about as appealing as binding one's identity to a pus-filled abcess: that is not the self, that is a lesion on the self.

This notion is one that I have a hard time understanding at all, really. But, mind, I have at times made studies of my mental reactions to various substances so that I know what cognitive shifts they induce -- so that I feel better able to handle the workings of my mind in a variety of states, so that I am familiar with what tools I might want to use in order to get my cognition into functional order. Some of these I maintain long-term (such as B vitamins and various fatty oils, which induce the cognitive shift of 'not suffering from persistent severe depression with anxiety attacks'); others are more situational (such as, say, my awareness of my responses to various forms of alcohol). This does not leave me with much sympathy for the "OMGitchangesthebrainchem" position; I am systemically inclined to want to know how to captain my brain through a variety of waters, not least because I can't count on it remaining smooth sailing on the biochemical sea in the first place.

Axiom 3: A person taking antidepressants or other medications is not the same person as the same body not taking them.

Given my sense of piloting through the Straits of Serotonin I ... don't get this one. Not how it meaningfully differs from any of the other changes in the self over time or circumstance, especially.

Even if I believed that this particular use of medication crossed a line into being a qualitatively different way of readjusting oneself than any of the other ways that people change, consent to activities, or otherwise deliberately do things that have a risk of rearranging their perspectives, I'm not sure I'm capable of seeing the problem. When the meds work, this philosophically-defined suicide and transformation into a new person produces a happier, more productive, more capable individual in the body of someone who was suffering. Considering this morally questionable strikes me as the old suffering-is-virtue trope, which I've never much cared for.



Mostly I'm left with a weird impression of what-gets-called-privilege -- that this level of lack of understanding can only be maintained by someone who has no intimate personal experience of what it's like living in a mind that doesn't work right. Probably someone who has no intimate personal experience of what it's like living in a body that doesn't work right, either.

I'll just continue selling my soul to those demon vitamins.

Fractal Liturgy

I love liturgy.

I was having a lengthy pontification about liturgy this evening, which is tied up with a poem I'm working on at the moment, though that's sort of incidental to it. And I came to the realisation that liturgy, good liturgy, has a fractal nature.

Look at it this way: someone who's first encountering a religious ceremony isn't going to know what's going on. The liturgy provides action guidelines and a set of imagery that should be able to convey the basics of what's going on and serve as a pointer to the basics of the action for someone who doesn't know a thing about it.

It also, for someone who does know the basics, goes deeper, pointing out and evoking points of the Mysteries of that particular faith.

If it fails at the former, then new people will be unable to smoothly begin to assimilate the religious material; if it fails at the latter, it will be ineffably shallow.

I got here because I'm trying to write about a Mystery, and because of my study in the relevant religion, I don't have much liturgical knowledge. This is, in part, because people are supposed to be constructing their own religious material -- which is, in fact, why I'm trying to write about it -- to serve as pointers to and illumination of their understandings of the Mystery.

The problem is, I only have one strong verbal pointer to this one. I can wave that around a bit, but it's not enough to get me parallax that includes language. And Mysteries are hard to talk about; all we can really do is exchange pointers. And I caught a new layer of fractal, I've gone deeper than the surface, than the basics, and I want to articulate an image of where I've been, leave it as a signpost saying, "I am here". And I don't have enough to interpolate from to do it easily or smoothly.

Liturgy is a form of dialogue, engaging the people, the experiences, the ways of relating to the faith, moving these things around so they can be grasped and grappled. New liturgies develop in part because of this exchange, this way of talking about faith, the generating the images of meaning.

I've got a single line. In iambic pentameter.

And an old pointer to where I want to go.

And the stars my compass.

Can't Use Sex To Sell Condoms

So apparently, out there in the world where people use televisions for something other than watching recorded material and playing video games, the Trojan condom company has put out an ad with the basic concept, "Men who push for sex without condoms are pigs; don't be a pig."

Fox won't play it, because it's talking about pregnancy risk rather than disease prevention. CBS won't say why they won't play it.

Oy.

(At some point I'll generate content of my own again. Honest.)

(Also at Pandagon.)