Followup on Venting a Bit and Invisibility

I actually went and read through all the thread comments after the comment I linked on the other blog post I mentioned yesterday, and one of the subthreads of discussion bugged me enough to make another post.

Okay so: two positions were put forth by people, which were "women are barraged by unwanted attention so maybe don't contribute to the firehose" and "women want to be hit on but only by the ones we want" and...

I don't exist in the middle of this.  I'm sort of at both/neither.

One of the reasons I feel invisibled by a lot of the discussion I've seen around this is that my actual preference in attraction is the nerdguys (see also the "Where are all the geeky boys with nice shoulders?" complaint).

And that that doesn't mean that I am universally and undiscriminately interested in such.

Another one of the reasons is that basically all the positive relationships I've had with men were ones where I was the pursuer.  (There may be exceptions but I can't think of one right now.)  Partly because I am in fact interested in the geek type and the geek subtypes I tend to find appealing are less likely to approach.)

So all of these conversations that just assume that women can wait and be approached by someone they want fail in several directions, and all of these conversations that assume that women do get relationships, somehow, magically happening, without asking, those assume that people like me don't exist.

(Which makes me entirely unsympathetic to the "I have to approach people!"  Yes, it's hard, and if you want to have a relationship with that person over there the only sure shot you get is going and seeing if that's possible somehow.  At least that's the reality I've got to work with, and when I see people complaining about it it feels a bit like seeing people complain that if they try to put things in midair they fall down.)

But I'm not the timid sort who never got approached.  Not entirely.  I would rather have been that than what I got, I think.

What I got was approached by bullies using sexuality as a weapon, by people who felt entitled to my attention, by people who thought that social association of any sort was consent to a romantic relationship, and by people who don't respect boundaries, understand no, or figure out that maybe pinning someone down on a couch and trying to pry their clothes off might be crossing the line before trying it.

So my emotional response is not so much "Don't approach me if I don't find you hot" but "The ones who I find hot don't approach me; the ones who do approach me want to abuse me".

(Plus, of course, that strangers aren't hot to me, and I can't imagine how they would be, so there are whole chunks of cultural somethingorother that are wholly beyond my comprehension.)

Just Venting A Bit

The problem with coming across things through link roundups is that it's often too late to join the conversation.  Which leaves me wanting to reply to this comment and not sure how to do it and so I'm taking it off here.  (Initial post worth reading, but I'm sort of wanting to poke the comment, which is #35 by someone whose handle is trazan.)

I had no meaningful connections with anyone. The problem wasn’t feminism, but toxic masculinity growing up. The culture (of boys) in my school was not democratic. I’d say values were fascist. You cannot tell someone their comment really hurt. Hurting is the point. It is dangerous to show weakness or be vulnerable. At the time I thought pupils in school were like inmates in prison. I wasn’t insane and I still had enormous trouble in contact with girls.

Reminds me of my experiences, yeah.  Though I wouldn't say "enormous trouble in contact with girls" regarding myself - I had enormous trouble in contact with people my age.  I was the sort of nerdy kid who could talk to adults and was hopeless at my own age.  I didn't listen to the right music, I didn't know the right jokes, I didn't wear the right clothes, and on top of that I was socially anxious, withdrawn, depressed.

I learned dissociation as a skill in junior high school.  Because the alternative was being bullied to tears and seeing the victory on their faces.  I also stayed late - for Math Team, or with manufactured reasons - and worked in the school store so that I wouldn't have to get on the school bus.  I would rather wait for the activity bus or just walk the two miles home (a mile of that along a state highway with no sidewalks, by the way) than deal with humans.  Particularly those humans.

They only got physical once.  I put the perp on the floor of the bus, and afterwards my sharp elbows became Our Little Joke, right?  We're all in this together, ha ha ha, we'll stay a foot or two away from you because bitches are crazy amirite, and nothing else changed.  Did I mention?  That bullying was sexual.  The 'got physical' was copping a feel.

On the other side of the gender line, I was invited to a party once.  A slumber party.  Packed up my things, delighted that there was someone who was being kind to me for once.

The address didn't exist.  I wonder which of the neighboring houses belonged to that person, whether they and their friends watched out the window to see if they could spot a forlorn figure with a pillow clutched close, wandering up and down the sidewalk checking to see if there was that house number, somewhere, in the world.  Eventually we gave up and my parents took me home.

The next school day... I figured that she would ask me where the fuck I was.  And I was planning to apologise, to say that I couldn't find the house.  Because it was probably my fault I missed the party, right?

I had one friend at that age, a boy.  We hung out together primarily because neither of us had anyone else, and because as geeky kids we had enough in common to, for example, go play Tetris.  And it was nice to have someone to sit and eat lunch with.  (Always at the same spots at the same table, me with my back to the wall, because for all that we were the lowest kids on the local totem pole he wasn't paranoid enough to put his back to a wall.)

Then I figured out that he thought I was romantically interested in him.  Which I wasn't.  And I didn't know how to correct his notion that 'we hang out and play Tetris' and 'we go do things sometimes' meant 'we are an item'.  He didn't touch me.  He never asked.  We had a whole additional relationship that existed solely in his head that he never, ever, ever explicitly told me about, and it turns out that that was as bad as the active bullies, because I'd thought we were at least some level of friends.

And I was desperately lonely.  I hadn't felt socially comfortable in my old school - this was not long after moving - but I did have friends there, and I missed them.  I missed the boy I fancied all through elementary school particularly, because he wasn't, at least in my head, anything like that.  (And the couple of times we managed contact after that, he didn't show any signs of being like that.)  But that was nothing to the gaping isolation and the outright hostility and the bafflement about why it was like that.

I never did figure out what was wrong with me.

There were shy girls. Maybe for some of them, school was a living nightmare.

Maybe!

---

This is one of the things that's gotten me about a lot of the "I had a terrible time in [junior] high school posts".  Obviously.  Discussions set off by the infamous comment 171 have had a lot of "[junior] high school is hell for shy nerdy guys" stuff going on where I'm going, "... yes?"

And then these guys describe stuff that's about 80% my exact experience - down to the emotional-sexual frustration and the fear of being caught at it. (And here's a thing: when I was fourteen, fifteen? I was creepy.  I stared at people I fancied and I was so sure I was being subtle and I really, really wasn't.  But I knew they'd never want me - they were otherwise involved, I was too much younger than they were - being an accelerated student works a real hash on stuff related to sexual development at times - and anyway there was that nebulous Something Wrong With Me that I could never pin down and meant I couldn't approach anyone.)

But I look at the stories and I say "That's basically me".  With less physical violence, in the cases where the stories have physical violence.  With more sexual assault to make up for it.  (And I'm not sure about the deliberate emotional abuse angle, both because that's harder to evaluate fairly and because it's the sort of thing people don't talk about.)

Only it's not me.  Because it's a Male Story, and it's so very much tangled up in being a Male Story, with that particularly apparently Male desire for sex/relationship snarling things up as if nobody female has that sort of thing going on.  (As if nobody female was ever asked "Please stop staring at me."  Um.  Guess I'm not, again.  I'm often not.)

But these narratives often come out as "This is a super-specially male narrative" - trazan doesn't do this, actually, even with the 'you know, maybe things were awful for girls in a similar position to mine when I was a boy', because he's being personal, not universalising, and is at least considering the possibility that there might, out there, be stories like mine.

But I wish for a bit that the experience could be degendered a bit in the social narrative.  "I was lonely and pining and had no friends and was afraid of terrible social consequences if I tried to change that" doesn't depend on gender presentation.  At all.

(And I'm tired of the myth that this stuff doesn't happen to girls.  That sex is just easy and simple for girls and women to navigate and be satisfied with.  Every time I see - and there's one or two of these dirtbags in the comment thread above the comment that pinged me here - "women have total freedom and get all the satisfying sex they want, so male insecurities are wholly justified" - I just.  I just.

I need a respite from this noise
The distant roar of static oceans
Give me a haven from this bedlam
And let my senses rust away

Let the wind erase me
Like the memory of a kiss
Let these waters take me
Away from all of this...

- Assemblage 23, "Let the wind erase me"

I just.)

Readercon: On "Socially Awkward"

I don't know how many people who are currently reading me have any feelers in the SF fandom community, something which I have been on the fringes of in the past and may again, someday, if I ever get back to working with fiction routinely.

But in any case: there was a recent convention called Readercon, which happens to be located about five or ten minutes from where I lived until last fall.  I never managed to attend; I had always been Meaning To Do So Sometime (one of the founders was enthusiastic about my potential enjoyment of the con; eventually, I also had a friend running programming), but honestly my social resources are sharply limited so I don't get out much in general.

Genevieve Valentine, an author attending the convention, was sexually harassed by a Big Name Fan, Rene Walling.  Readercon had a policy of lifetime bans for harassers, which had been implemented previously; Walling got a two-year suspension.  The internet exploded.  You can find a collection of posts on the subject here.

Among the many things that has been said is, roughly, "But but but but what if this man is an Aspie!", a matter which has been responded to by others.  And people have even noticed that, y'know, maybe this particular "sexual harassment is done by socially awkward people, so we have to be forgiving of their disability" strawman is perhaps the prime way that geeky/nerdy subcultures forgive assault and rape.

And a couple of people said something that i'm frankly embarrassed to have not come up with on my own:  if we're going to make spaces that are extra-forgiving of people who are socially awkward, how about the socially awkward women that are getting hit on, huh?

You know why this is embarrassing?

Because the fact that I'm a socially awkward woman is kind of a big chunk of why I have GODS-BE-FEATHERED FLASHBACKS.

(And is not unrelated to why I haven't had the spoons to go to Readercon in the first place.)

I actually saw a conversation that raised "Well, what about socially awkward women?" as a question that was promptly derailed into "Well, they shouldn't be touching people without consent either!"

As if.

As fucking if.

There's this goddamn myth that women are all fucking supergeniuses about body language, about indirect and oblique communication, about communicating in fucking smoke signals.  That, for example, "autistic" is something that only happens to people marked "male", and that the rare woman who is socially inept is the Creepy Stalker Ex type.

And apparently the fannish communication system doesn't have space for the wallflowers, the lurkers, the people who spent too much time reading to actually know how to talk to people easily.  At least ... if those people are women.

Don't know how to communicate - either subtextually or verbally - that attention is unwanted?  Get very flustered by social contact that is outside of a reasonably small comfort zone?  Tend towards that often-ignored 'freeze' response instead of fight-or-flight in social situations that go over a very low stress threshhold?  Only able to communicate with anything resembling fluidity with people one knows well and has had time to build a cognitive model for?  Get completely overwhelmed with anxiety when a situation might lead to any form of negative response?  Highly dependent on sidelong watching of other people to figure out whether or not behaviour is inappropriate?

You might be "socially awkward"!

And you might be all of that and appear female.  'Cos that there?  That's me at the age I was nearly raped.  It's still me, in a lot of ways, I just have much more sophisticated coping mechanisms than I did twenty years ago.

Now let's imagine someone like that.  (For some of us this will be easier than for others.)  They don't have to be "on the spectrum" or anything; as far as I know I'm allistic.  Let's imagine that she's participated in fandom online, gotten to know a few folks, and been convinced that a convention is a social gathering for people basically like her: sharing enthusiasms, probably a little socially awkward in some ways but we understand that and it's okay, we make allowances.  She checks her budget and decides to try a con.  Maybe she travels for it; maybe there's something local to her.  Doesn't matter.

She makes it to the con.  She makes it to registration, picks up her badge, gets a program, looks at interesting panels.  She finds a few names she recognises, makes note of them, wonders anxiously if they will remember her, if they'll actually think she's worth spending any time with in the vastly more energy-investing meatspace.  She lurks at the back of panels, completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of people present - and even a small con is gigantic.

(Back when I went to cons, I don't think I ever did more than two a year.  They completely wrecked me, in that 'that was fun while it was happening but now I have a hangover that will last at least two weeks from just the amount of social management it required to get through that without dying of mortification'.  I actually had an easier time with larger cons, energy-management-wise, due to the sense of anonymity they provided me.  Get to a certain size and the standard billing of fandom as being a place for people-like-me who should be treated as extended family becomes the giant laugh that it actually is, and I stop trying to figure out if I'm going to offend Distant Cousins Francis and Alex with something about my posture, my lack of conversational segues, my incorrect jargon terms (like saying "sci-fi", gasp), my tendency to fall totally silent, or my interruptions.  Or, you know, any of the other weird things that I tend to do and don't know about and thus have inchoate anxiety about whether or not I'm causing distress by.)

So.  She's at the con.  It is completely overwhelming, beyond what she entirely anticipated, but she is at least more or less enjoying herself, in a stressy kind of way.  Eventually she ventures out of the more regulated spaces of the panels or the anonymous free-for-all of the dealers' room into the consuite, or a room party where some of her online friends said they might be hanging out, or something.  Yes: she is brave enough to venture ...

... socialising.

Maybe someone notices the unfamiliar face and strikes up a conversation.  Maybe there's a Moxie-drinking station set up in the corner (for those not in the know: Moxie tastes like flat root beer with a Listerine chaser, and I would not know this if it weren't for a con).  Maybe she gets some cheese and crackers and sits down to amiably listen to the conversations, because that's comfortable and reasonably safe.

Now: someone approaches.  He's a little too close, a little too familiar, maybe a little handsy.

And she freezes.  Maybe she looks around to see how other people react: whether they're standing too close to each other, touching each other, or indeed whether they notice how this guy is behaving and find it notable.  She doesn't know if she feels unsafe because he's violating social norms or because she's socially fragile, and she knows that she's socially fragile, so hey - that's probably the way to bet unless there's countervailing evidence, right?  Because that's definitely true.  And nobody's finding the guy out of line, so....

This isn't me.

But I damn well know it could have been.  Fuck, I had a six month relationship that started basically that way and ended in attempted rape; all I would need for this to be actually me would be to have done that a little older and in a different venue.

And I damn well know that if it had been - and by some miracle I had managed to try to report it or even talk about what happened in coherent terms - someone would have come out with "You know, there are a lot of socially awkward people in fandom.  It could just be that."

Because, I guess, being the person trampling someone's boundaries is more awkward than being the person who can't figure out thing one about defending those boundaries?

(It couldn't possibly be that those people are more 'people' or more 'in fandom' than their targets.)

N is for Nice

You're so nice.
You're not good,
You're not bad,
You're just nice.
I'm not good,
I'm not nice,
I'm just right.
I'm the Witch.
You're the world.

"Last Midnight," from Into the Woods


I am not sure if Graydon would mind me quoting something he said years ago in another internet universe, so I will paraphrase instead:

"Nice" is behaviour which is socially unobjectionable.  It does not have to intersect with truth, and thus it cannot be a virtue.

I commented earlier in the PBP about one form of expectation of 'niceness', but that's far from the only form that ever puts in an appearance.  It's not even the first one I've talked about in this project thing.

It bothers me a good bit when people try to nice up paganism.  (This came up in a discussion, mostly in referring to dealing with deities.)

Let's get real.

One of my patron deities is best known for fratricidal murder.  This is not nice.

One of my religious paths is unabashedly and unashamedly sexual.  This is not nice.  (The fact that there is social objection to eroticism is a whole other barrel of rant, but it's still undeniably true.)

I have a religious obligation to the development of personal power.  This is not nice.  (The fact that there is social objection to genuine power, also.)

I don't even have a clue whether or not I'm technically a fucking Satanist, but regardless this is not commonly considered nice either.

(And that's not getting into the fact that polytheism itself is a matter of the socially objectionable, because that's a level of social objection that I don't generally grant the legitimacy of addressing.  But nonetheless, this is a genuine factor: being pagan, itself, in some environments, will be taken as being not-nice.  This is why people hang out in the broom closet.)

You know?  I could go on.

It does no good to not acknowledge these things.  Deities, for the most part, are not nice, though some may be more often than not pleasant, at least so long as you don't call upon them in one of their epithets that specifically isn't.  The natural world is certainly not nice; that charging bull will not respond to a citation from Miss Manners about how goring people is indecent behaviour, and aconite will stop your heart even if you ask nicely if you can pick its flowers.  A spirit doesn't have your best interests in mind just because it's not got a body.  Being socially unobjectionable can be useful - in certain social situations, so long as you can achieve your goals that way.  In non-social situations, or social situations in which it's impossible to get what you need by being nice?  Nice and five bucks will get you a latte.



There's a bit in Terry Pratchett's Maskerade where Granny Weatherwax draws a hatpin from her witch's hat, grins the sort of ferally savage grin that rather suggests that she is enjoying herself profoundly, and declares, "Let's do some good."

Granny: not nice.

Damn good witch, though.

Something other than a PBP post

As some of you know, I was recently diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. (Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Basically, my body is trying to kill my thyroid gland.)

This whole process has been a very interesting one for me on multiple levels.

You see, this happened because I changed doctors. I hadn't been to the doctor since before Little Foot was born, and I was beginning to get all agitated about it (as my family was very good about the preventative medicine things, so there's a certain amount of 'but I haven't had my appointment' deep-seated in my psyche).

And we did a little interview thing as my first appointment, rather than the checkup, and he asked me about my health concerns. And one of the things I said was "I want you to run my thyroid numbers. I was treated for hypothyroidism as a teenager, and I like to monitor my condition."

So, in among the other blood tests he ordered, he ran the thyroid numbers.

Not only did he run the standard three thyroid numbers, he ran the antibodies numbers, and bam. There it was.

But the great thing was that before he mentioned the antibodies, he said, "I don't like your TSH number. It is too high."

My previous doctor - at the same practice - would, I felt grudgingly, run those numbers for me every year. And I would get numbers like that - one time, that TSH was notably higher, even - and she would say "It's within the lab parameters. You're fine." Somewhere along the line I learned that some regulatory agency's recommendations wanted to see lower numbers, so I mentioned that to her, and "It's within the lab parameters. You're fine."

Now, consider what Wikipedia says about Hashimoto's: "Given the relatively non-specific symptoms of initial hypothyroidism, Hashimoto's thyroiditis is often misdiagnosed as depression, cyclothymia, PMS, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and, less frequently, as ED or an anxiety disorder."

I've been in and out of treatment for depression with anxiety features for years. I have chronic fatigue issues (which are not entirely related to my Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder, also treated by this shiny new doctor).

It also has relationships with celiac disorder - which runs in my family, and for which my brother has been in treatment (I have a mild gluten sensitivity). And cardiac stuff - and just around when I went to the new doctor, I was having intermittent tachycardia / heart flutters, which have magically completely cleared up now that I'm on a minimal dose of levo.

It is nice, for a change, to have a respectable invisible disability condition. There isn't a blood test for depression to prove that there's a real problem involved. DSPS, well, you just have to go to bed earlier, kid, stop making excuses. PTSD? Drama queen. But no, I have magic numbers to prove that there is something that this is treating. It's oddly comforting, to be dealing with something that most everyone believes is actually real. There are actual antibodies. They actually do damage to the endocrine system. Science shows it!

Yeah, this is cynical of me. But at the same time as this I've been watching a friend deal with the sort of utter contempt that mental health stuff can bring out in others, and for all this culture's valorisation of the life of the mind and the desire to escape the body, we really do put a lot of stock in those little numbers, don't we?

B is for Black

"The blacker the body, the whiter the light – the incandescent, active virgin heart from which all comes." - Victor Anderson

I first encountered that line in a training group run by Thorn Coyle (and in fact when I pasted it into a search engine just now the top hit was her book, Kissing the Limitless). I responded with some pretty crazed mysticism about astrophysics, which is neither here nor there.

One thing that modern pagans have to deal with is our common origins in a culture that valorises whiteness. This is not just a racial thing, but yes, racism is threaded through it. (And the question of why so much of pagandom is pale is perhaps not as unrelated as some might want to think.) Anyone who has done more than a little time in a pagan discussion board will probably have come across someone asking about the coloration of their magical work: Is this black magic? When might it be okay to do black magic? Is black magic being worked on me?

And here we come across is: Black is bad. Black is malevolent. Black is scary.

"Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget's Thesaurus there are 120 synonyms for blackness and at least sixty of them are offensive, as for example, blot, soot, grim, devil and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is a "black sheep." Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child sixty ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Whenever someone asks me about "black magic", I reply with another Victor Anderson quote:

"White magic is poetry. Black magic is anything that actually works."

Reframe your paradigm.

What is whiteness, what is light?

Some people talk about white as a symbol of purity - talk about that.

And talk about the cruelty of concepts of purity, too.

Talk about the treatment of children with multiple ethnicities, and consider how many of them live in exile from the worlds of all their ancestors due to being insufficiently pure. Talk about the madness of ideological purity that makes those who will listen to other positions anathema and only the wildest, most outrageous, most pure positions put forth. Talk about the spectre of the Holocaust, talk about the murders of trans women who died because some man thought he would catch a contagion of gayness from them, talk about menstrual blood taboos, talk about the madonna/whore complex, and talk about which people never have a chance at being shoved into the tiny box labelled 'madonna' because they're already socially impure. Talk about the whole concept, not just the - here's that color again - whitewashed versions thereof.

Symbols are complicated. Using them is a precise and delicate art, and sometimes they say other things than one thought they meant, too.

"Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number--Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysos, every now and then." - Ursula K. Le Guin

When I tell you I am Kemetic, I am aligning myself with blackness. This is what the word means, if you chase it back - an English noun form, from "Kemet", one of the Egyptian words for their nation: The Black Land. Black for night and black for death and black for the flesh of a mummy prepared for wrapping and black for resurrection and black for hands deep in the wealth of rich soil that comes like a miracle when the floodwaters part. Black for life. Black, also sometimes written in green.

And the Black Land is not opposed to Whiteness; its counterpart is the Red Land. Red for the desert, the barrenness of that space untouched by the sort of earth that can become rich with greenness, the earth which cannot be substituted one for one with green. Red for fire and blood, but blood is what unifies a body into a living thing, the pulse in every limb proof of wholeness. Red for the fire serpent that is the essence and protection of the sun.

Red for danger, anger, destruction, death, but black also for death and the night is not without its dangers. [*]

When I tell you I am Kemetic, I am telling you that I am black and red, and black means death and black means life, and red means death and red means life. I am telling you that it is not as simple as black and white thinking.

And when I tell you I am Feri, I am telling you to look to the night sky.


([*] Reference for these few paragraphs can be found in Wilkinson, Symbol & Magic in Egyptian Art, by the way, if you want to check my notes.)

Political PTSD

A while back I was talking with my lion about politics and reactivity, and I realised something.

US politics has PTSD.

And some people like it that way, because as long as the body politic can be reliably triggered, then it can be controlled. Atavisms may be abrupt, violent, and at least somewhat unpredictable, but they can be channelled, and really when that good old fight or flight kicks in, what happens is either a "fight" or a "flight".

But seriously. Look at the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, and think about how much of speechifying is all about bringing up the intrusive recollections. Waving that bloody shirt, keeping a good low level of panic, because actually healing from these triggers would mean that people would be able to think more clearly, and wouldn't react in predictable ways when the predictable buttons are predictably pushed.

And yes, the whole "OMGTerrorists" thing is a pretty dramatic example of it, but honestly, I think as a culture the US was pretty vulnerable to this kind of collective traumatisation. (Not entirely tangentially, sometimes Little Foot wants us to read Dr. Seuss's The Butter Battle Book to her, and it strikes me very profoundly how very Cold War it is, and how likely it is that she will not actually understand its deeper message because "mutually assured destruction" is no longer the big red button of the collective consciousness of the polity.) I mean, "socialists! socialists!" is still a code word for setting off "run in circles, scream and shout!" responses. Boogety boo.

But.

Criterion D: hyper-arousal
Persistent symptoms of increasing arousal (not present before the trauma), indicated by at least two of the following:

Difficulty falling or staying asleep
Irritability or outbursts of anger
Difficulty concentrating
Hyper-vigilance
Exaggerated startle response

Sound like any nation you know?

By the way, I'm a "domestic extremist"

Signal boosting this: apparently there are rumors that the TSA's sense of listening to people being upset about the new, ineffective, and invasive 'security' techniques is to put 'em on a ... you got it! ... list.

Maybe someday I'll have time and brains to post again, but 'til then, let this bit of fucking outrageousness tide ya over.

I'ma Thump You With My Cane

For various reasons, I have ventured outside my nice little enclosed area of pagan religious discussion where the majority of people present are actually functional adults (I include in this many of the teenaged posters) and have been reading a bit of More General Pagan Discussion.

Which reminds me why I don't do public pagan-flavored religion as a thing.

Because seriously, people.

Grow up a little.


You are not a mighty warrior called to serve in the Great War on the Astral. Your deeper spiritual nature as a wolf does not inform you about the coming storm. No, I don't "feel the change coming" or believe that Mother Earth is about fit to shrug her shoulders and throw the human race into the abyss over Deepwater Horizon. Earthquakes actually are not that exotic. When the apocalypse comes your "abilitys" will not feed and protect you and keep you in a better conditioned than unenlightened people who have cars. You are not destined to be the foundation of a new species. Your special gift is not to protect the masses from other people's special gifts.

I don't need a guide to your holidays. No, really. Even if I were a sabbat-celebrator, which I'm not, because it's not actually a part of my structural assumptions about religion, I would either know what the fuck I was doing enough to not need your three-paragraph summaries of how you do it or want to get my information from someone who uses an apostrophe to mean something other than "OH SHIT HERE COMES AN S."

If you don't know what you're dedicating yourself to, I can't help you write a fucking ritual. I don't even know what religion you're talking about, though I can guess it's probably some form of neo-Wicca because because you clearly assume everyone shares it. Ranting bad history in all caps doesn't make your ignorance less obvious. Your weird hard-on for ranting about monotheism isn't actually an interesting philosophical position.

No, really, you don't need to add runes to the set to get finer-grained nuance. (Unless, of course, you've sacrificed an eye for the wisdom to know what the fuck you're doing, and if you've done that why don't you know better than to ask the internet?) If you don't know how to read your Tarot spread how much useful information do you think you're going to get out of it, anyway?

You seriously just recommended Silver Ravenwolf. I ...


... feel old.

Tips for Atheists

In the last few days I have had the misfortune to come across a half-handful or so of largely unrelated discussions in which various atheists demonstrated to me once again why theism/atheism "discussions" on the internet are a waste of time in general, and a waste of time for a polytheist like me in particular.

I mean, sometimes I comment in them anyway, but for the most part it's like I didn't say anything, because I'm not engaging According To The Rules, which rules are apparently defined by conservative Protestantism. I am not feeling as sarcastic about this as I was when I first ran across it a few days ago, but I would like to muster a few points about cultural awareness.

I know a number of completely personable atheists, including a few who are happy to have serious and in-depth conversations about not only theological theory but my actual religious experiences. Not a single one of them participates in theism/atheism discussions on the internet; most groan and don't want to know when I mention stumbling across one.


So, my angry and offensive opinions:

1) You may very well want to express contempt for "so-called holy books", but do not mistake revealed scripture for religion. Not all religions have scripture at all. The ones that do interpret in different ways than you are obviously used to; the Tanakh is read rather differently than the Old Testament, and those are, technically, mostly the same words. Try to apply the same standards to the Principia Discordia and you might understand why that scripture includes the line "A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads." Your mission, if you choose to accept it: The Oresteia.

2) Similarly, condemning "belief" as a category does not get you anywhere useful. Not only does it slam things like "I believe that my husbands love me", but you are presuming that belief is a fundamental and important factor in religion. Orthodoxic religion is familiar, yes, because Christianity is more orthodoxic than most religions, and Christianity is, well, pretty popular in the English-speaking world. But that whole "more orthodoxic than most religions" thing means we cannot actually have a meaningful conversation. This feeds into the ridiculous and pernicious cultural angst about whether or not Judaism is a religion, a culture, or an ethnicity; contemplation of this may be enlightening. (Condemning "faith" is sufficiently similarly problematic that I will not make another bulletpoint for it.)

2b, though) Also, you're ignoring theistic or religious agnostics when you dismiss religious people as "believers".

2c) Not to mention nontheistic religion.

3) And on the subject of that religion, culture, ethnicity thing: when you talk about your utopian future in which there is no religion, you are expressing a position that is, at best, colonialist. It is rooted in a culture that grew up descended from the Roman notion of "religion" as a category that could be pointed to as something disinct from or other than "the way we live as a people", a notion that Christianity inherited. When you say you want to wipe out "religion", what you communicate to many people is that you believe that their culture and heritage should be destroyed. The people you may hit hardest with this particular colonialist club are likely, of course, the members of surviving indigenous colonised tribes who have been on the butt end of Christianisation used specifically as a tool for destroying them as people with an independent identity. Be careful of the company you keep.

3b) Also, if you are basing your anti-religion-X argument on the way that religion-X treats its women, children, sexual minorities, etc., fucking listen to the religion-X people who are women, children, queer, whatever else rather than stomping all over them with your I-know-better-than-you-poor-deluded-people-who-haven't-escaped-the-trappings-of-your-oppressive-religion boots, okay?

4) Yep, "supernatural" is a big fancy word for stuff that doesn't exist. The relevance of this point to religion is questionable and both 100% dependent on a privileged definition of "god" and a complete avoidance of the concept of orthopraxy. For a trivially obvious couple of examples, an animistically inclined religious person can entirely agree with you that there is no supernatural and still have boatloads of gods kicking around; a religion that is primarily defined on the social practices and behaviours of a community does not go away even if gods do.

5) On that "disproven" thing, yes, gods are not scientific axioms. People who try to use them as such are idiots. Most religious people do not think their religion is science, and trying to tell them that their religion is not a substitute for science will mostly get you an, "Why are you telling me this rather than join me in doing something about the idiots who want to get 'intelligent design' into my kids' textbooks?"

5b) Science is not the full range of reality, either. I like art and music and other subjective experiences! I bet you do too! I'll bet that sometimes you do something daring like eat some chocolate or have sex or listen to Bach sometimes without engaging in a peer-reviewed study of the process by which your neurons fire! I like blue things, and I do it without deriving my enjoyment from the principles of the electromagnetic spectrum!

5c) And regarding that whole "but religion suffuses everything" thing that's part of the arguing with people who want to get intelligent design into the textbooks. Trust me, I hate "God Bless America" played at baseball games at least as much as you do, possibly a little more because it is in my muscle memory as the accompaniment to a tae kwon do kata and I prefer not to accidentally kick people in the head in the seventh inning stretch. (Ceremonial deism is a crock.)

6) By the way, if you start arguing against "omniscience" or "omnipotence" as divine traits, you're basically talking about at best one hypothesised godform, and the rest of us may as well bugger off and have tea. Don't mistake that for a definition of what a god is. (And if you, like one atheist did once to me, respond to someone attempting to point out that that argument is completely incoherent from a non-monotheistic perspective with "What's the point in worshipping a god that isn't omnipotent?", you lose at cultural awareness and probably capability to understand basic polite conversation outside your microscopic frame of reference.)

7) So on that "What's the point" thing, by the way, when you assume that religious people are religious out of fear (fear of death is a popular more-specific version of this), wanting a cookie from some all-powerful parent figure in the sky, or similar infantilising trivialisations, you are probably not going to get a response from the adults in your vicinity. Not because there aren't any, but because the work to disabuse you of your notions just doesn't look worth it, and being a responsible adult bears a remarkable resemblance to being too tired.

8) When you make your arguments about religion, it really helps if you don't use catchwords that indicate you only know about one or two of them. (Hint: "salvation" is a tip-off. "Original sin" too.) Also, saying something like "Your god will eventually vanish into prehistory and superstition, just like nobody worships Thor, Zeus, or Osiris anymore!" will make the polytheists in the vicinity very tired; most of them, however, know that pointing out that they worship Thor or Zeus or Wesir will just get them called childish and primitive or something in the unlikely event that anyone acknowledges their existence at all, and thus don't bother to correct your ignorance.

9) Most religious organisations suck, and institutionalised power leads to abuses. WELCOME TO PROGRESSIVE SOCIAL ACTIVISM AWARENESS, HERE IS YOUR INFORMATIONAL BROCHURE ABOUT WAYS THE HUMAN CAPACITY TO GANG TOGETHER GOES HORRIBLY WRONG. Seriously, are you expecting religious structures to differ from corporate structures? Nations? High school cliques? People form social structures to make levers; people apply levers to get what they want. Some things people want are bloody awful. If you want to end holy wars you'll have more success with it by fixing water rights, health care access, economic security, and all that hope-for-the-future stuff than by trying to abolish gods.

9b) Seriously this is an argument for anarchism not against religion.

10) If you start out your comment or your shiny blogpost by saying "Religion does X thing and I don't want to hear from anyone pointing out religions that don't", posting a comment later on going, "Gee, just about everyone who reads my blog agrees with me on this!" is just - fucking - ridiculous. When you state up front that you're uninterested in hearing counterarguments, only the most bullheaded ideologues will ever bother to make any. (I'm not making this one up, though I will admit it's more of a general Internets Argumenting point than something specific to this particular standing-wave flamewar. I just saw it a day or two ago when catching up on the last few weeks of blogs I read and the resulting explosion led to this post.)


So yeah. There's my inflammatory bullshit. Let it join all of the other inflammatory bullshit about this subject that's kicking around the internets lately.

The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future....

I was unaware that a particular bullying and cyberbullying case had led to a bunch of local action before it was drawn to my attention recently.

I am incapable of commenting on the particulars of the case; I haven't looked into it. I honestly find the whole subject more than a bit triggery, so I cringe and hide when it comes up, a lot, rather than put too much thought into it, to trying to figure it out, trying to empathise.

You see.

I spent about ten years almost entirely unable to cry.

It's still hard for me, and I'm more likely to get a piercing headache that feels like my eyes are being crushed out of my head instead of tears, along with the driving need to shed tears and no capacity.

Tears would prove that they had won.

And that was even more unbearable than what they put me through.

So I held my tears until I was safely off the bus and away, out of sight, out of earshot, held them until I got home, held them, held them back, probably fooling nobody but that didn't mean I didn't need to try, until I could do nothing but hold them, frozen into veins of ice in my heart that have never fully melted.

Somewhere in there my parents tried to talk to the school administrators, who said "Boys will be boys" and shrugged; sexual harassment and at least borderline assault were nonevents. (And I look at the person who commented on the article I linked who wants to know what caused the "recent uprising in bullying" and wonder what fucking planet they're from. Nobody has ever cared to fucking stop it. I mean, the closest I've seen to any general awareness or giving a damn about it was post-Columbine? And maybe they're doing something about it in Massachusetts because of this poor girl.) Things like getting invited to a slumber party at an address that didn't exist ... well, the gash left by that hope that someone was interacting with me in a manner other than mockery didn't even register as something that needed a bandage, in amongst everything else.

I've said before that nobody escapes childhood unscathed, but some of us had a rougher time than others.

And I sit here thinking, "I have a child. I have a child. My gods, I have a child."

She is eight months old and I am terrified of school for her. I flail helplessly at all kinds of ways of doing schooling for all kinds of reasons, but a lot of them come down to this:

I'm still bleeding.

Somewhere deep in me is that kid who cannot cry, who views every human interaction with distrust because they all turn to ash and mockery sooner or later. That touchy agitation jumps too far, too hard, at any slight, any dismissal, waiting for the signs that it will turn into the knife twisting in the gut.

I'm still bleeding.

Even those people I trust most completely, most utterly, can make me jump. A bad day, a moment of distance, and I'm braced for the snap. Sometimes that bracing is worn smooth and old, a bare lump of awareness, something where I can ask my lion "Are you okay?" rather than half-hiding, half-cowering in the far corner of the room because I assume something's going to shatter and leave me bereft and laughed at, catching the sudden horrific backlash of a joke half my life in the making. I don't believe it will happen - but there's that sliver of horribly twisted, broken person in me that knows it has to be prepared.

I'm still bleeding.

My baby is so innocent.

I'm so scared.

Weighty Contemplations

So, I recently joined FetLife just kind of for the hell of it, and discovered that it's full of all the same stupid arguments I see on the blogs, only with maybe a little more kink acceptance. (Sometimes that maybe is a little thin. It's depressing.)

Today I decided to poke around the Submissive Women community to see if there were interesting discussions there. I found "interesting", though not the sort I think that one might be hoping for.

There were two threads in particular that caught my attention. One was "Would you let a dom give you a buzz haircut?" and the other was "Would you let a dom put you on a diet?"

Guess which one got the more vehemently hostile reactions from the community?

Guess which one had, in the first comments to the discussion, something along the lines of, "I bet this one will go over better because it's serving vanity!"

Oh no, I thought, people will be just as harsh if not harsher on the weight-loss thread, because it's so much more invasive, because health concerns are involved, because ...

Wait, what. "They're about equivalent in invasiveness"? The vast choruses of, if not enthusiastic support, "Yeah, that'd be okay, I think, so long as she's not at a healthy weight already". A few lone voices in the wilderness suggesting things about that sort of thing being bad for self-esteem were scattered among the generalised quiet murmurs of assent and one or two "If you're going to do that sort of thing be sure you have your medical shit together, you know."

I'm left kind of half-speechless. Even knowing that there is so much derangement around weight and the possibility of losing it, a community of people who spit fire at cutting their hair but would acquiesce without complaint to being ordered to lose weight? Who consider these things roughly equivalent, but only the latter acceptable?

I wish I had clever commentary. I'm just too stunned.

Ignorance and Bliss

I was, for various reasons, having That Conversation the other day. The interminable one, with someone who almost certainly means well, but hasn't quite managed to claw up to spitting distance of social awareness. You know how it goes; you ask, "Look, do you worry about whether you'll be raped if you go out?" and get a response like, "I totally worry about being mugged, I live in a bad part of town." (Because we all know that women totally don't ever have to worry about being mugged; it's one crime or the other.)

Anyway.

One of the other people in That Conversation commented that her moment of revelation was a Savage Love column in which someone had written in asking for advice for how to deal with anal tears, because she'd been mucking about with bondage with her partner and he took advantage of her helplessness to do something she'd previously refused. It hadn't occurred to the writer that she'd been raped.

And, well, it hadn't occurred to the person relating the story that that was rape either. Because she had internalised the "sexuality is like this: resist resist resist resist resist lie-back-and-think-of-England-in-the-end". So: revelation! That is rape!

My first thought on this was relief that I had never been that naive.

My second thought, following immediately after, was that actually, I had been.

Because the cascade that led into my assault was, as I've ruminated before, a long chain of violations, minor building up to major, where I hadn't figured out if I wanted any of them - and by the time I realised I had wanted to say no long ago, it seemed so pointless, so cruel; he expected to be able to do that stuff now, it would be so nasty to suggest that I didn't like it, right? It wasn't nice to lead people on like that. All of the minor transgressions were written off as the price of my failures of promptness, and anything built upon them likewise, not because of resist-and-submit per se, but the same complex of expectation. The things already lost cannot be a crime against person, because they are lost already. And that is what sex is about: resist-and-submit, and if I wasn't able to articulate the 'resist' right on, well, that left me the resolution to do.

Tied for third thought, cascading out of this moment of someone else's enlightenment:

That I didn't know what happened to me was almost rape, and denied that word for many years because I didn't want to appropriate the experiences of "real" victims of assault, but I knew it was wrong, and that's why I wouldn't have been surprised by the opportunistic rape from the letter-writer being named as it was;

That there is a bonus complex narrative about the consequences of being female and kinky (reminded as I was of a friend who was raped under similar circumstances), too;

That for all that I missed out on a lot of the social expectations of femaleness (all the things women are supposed to do 'by default' when they go out because of the risk of rape are things that don't occur to me most of the time - perhaps because I'm a shut-in by preference, perhaps because I was assaulted by a supposed romantic partner and not a stranger and none of them would have protected me) I ... have no idea ... how to show this world ... to someone who does not already see the space in which it inhabits.

I often feel that I don't live in the same world as other women who are talking about the world women have to move through; that was not the case yesterday.




I'm looking at my daughter, now, and it matters that she is female-bodied whatever comes after, because I look at her and think about this world she has no idea exists, snugged as she is now in the arms of her loving family. I have the tears welling up, knowing that she will have to learn to navigate that godawful world, however it looks when she gets older, my happy, sweet child who has never known cruelty, whose sense of betrayal is keyed to a diaper left unchanged a little too long, not ... all the world can wreak.

And I wish for all the world that she could remain as sweetly unaware of the awful things that humanity will do to women as that annoying guy who wanted to know better. That her education could be as gentle as a heated conversation with a handful of frustrated women on the internet, women armed only with domestic violence stats and a fistful of personal experience.

(And I am worlds further away from understanding my mother than I have ever been.)

His Mind is Engaged in the Rapt Contemplation

Lissy at Thinking About My Kink wrote a post linking to a Feministe post about the changing of names, and now that Feministe is back up from whatever it was doing before, I'm reading the comments over there.

And the person in there who annoyed Lissy is almost making me annoyed enough to post a comment on Feministe explicitly denying that my nonexistent feminism was 'why' I didn't change my name when I was legally married. (That feminism made this possible for me to do readily is a given historical fact; it doesn't have so much to do with my decisions on the matter.) It's not about your goddamn movement, okay? (And I'm even setting aside here the rant in which I note my opinion that talking about whether something is a "feminist choice" is pernicious, not least because it always degenerates into the sort of "you're calling me a bad person", "no I'm not I'm just saying your choices are bad" froth that's going down over there.)

My lion and I talked briefly about whether or not I was gonna change my name. He was profoundly touched that I had even, for a moment, considered it, as he had assumed that I wouldn't. And that contemplation made clear to me that my surname was the only part of my legal name that I had any sense of strong identification with - annoying though it is to have because nobody can spell it and nobody can pronounce it, it is my goddamn name. If I were going to "change my name" it would be mucking about with the forename portions, and certainly at that time I had no idea what I would change my first name to if I changed it.

(I do know how I would legally change my name if I did so at this point. I have not done so, not because I'm 'waiting to get married' or any of the other things that have been raised in that thread, but because I am undecided about the hassle, kind of tickled in a pseudo-anarchist way by the idea that the government knows me by a name that isn't 'mine', and, fundamentally, haven't gotten up my arse to wrestle with the paperwork. It's apparently not that hard to do around here - a friend of mine changed her name, both fore and aft, a few years ago - I just haven't gotten my shit together. And that's for a forename change where I know what I'd change it to. I make notes on legal paperwork sometimes with an aka in case I ever do make a legal change?)

So, yeah. I have this surname thing. It's attached to an ethnic heritage; it is in fact attached to the ethnic heritage that is the smallest part of my genetic makeup, but a greater point of personal identification than many, and from a beautiful part of the world with a landscape that feels right to me. (Perhaps not as right as my more recently ancestral stones and streams of New England, which is more recent bloodline, but still comfortably correct.) It is also attached to the side of my family I have more cultural kinship with. In some ways, all the hassle that came of having the surname made me more attached to it, as opposed to the rather generic-for-my-generation forename and distinguished-but-only-used-attached-to-the-forename middle name I got.

Further, though I was not involved with my liege when my lion and I got married, it was pretty well established that my ideal situation would involve me having two marital relationships. In a multi-spousal poly situation, the whole name-change-upon-marriage thing turns into a level of relational calculus that is frankly beyond me. My liege comments that this is what clan names are for, but unfortunately we don't have any way of establishing a legal-socially meaningful tribe. It's just easier this way, even if it means that the four adults have four different surnames.

(Oh gods. Someone's using 'the personal is political' to mean 'your private choices are reflections on my movement's effectiveness and thus mine to harsh on you for' again. The same someone who irked me enough to write this post. Gods be. What is it they say, never read the comments? And, I mean, yes, the social convention of name-changing irks me, though it doesn't piss me off like getting letters addressed to Mrs. Lion Hislastname, like I don't even have a fucking forename of my own.)

I also find it useful to be able to respond truthfully to telemarketers asking for Mrs. Hislastname that there is nobody here by that name, but hey.

So we get into the iterative decisions about names. Like kids.

Honestly, my expectation was that my first kid would have his surname, next one mine, to do equal time for everyone. But in the larger family discussions, we talked about it, and there was general argument that it was probably for the best to have siblings with the same surname to make social things easier. And that for children I bear, that surname would be mine - because I feel strongly about my family name and want it to persist, because my brother does not intend to have children, and because it cuts off the implied answer to "But which one is her real father" at the fucking knees and requires that people who want to be that unconscionably rude actually verbalise rather than assume they know the answer based on differing surnames.

(When I announced Little Foot's name to my relatives, my father asked me if she had my surname because of his notion that female children should take their mother's name and male children their father's. By the way.)

And maybe that choice "makes it easier for others" to choose to keep their name, or change it, or whatever else. But the thing is, I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about that. There's just, y'know, time better spent. And for matters like surnaming, that time's probably best spent trying to get the legal stuff changed to what it apparently is in Quebec, where a name change requires getting a name change, not getting married. Rather than talking about how Those Women are doing it wrong - not even about the apparent half the population who thinks that women changing their name should be legally mandated, nope, Those Women.

Always doing it wrong, Those Women. Pretty sure I did it wrong by not Striking A Blow For Feminism there. (Alternately, that feminist motives will be projected upon me by people who are inclined to do so, whether for or against. Which is further evidence that "feminist choice" is nonsense phrasing.) Oh well then.

Angles of Approach

Shapely Prose recently hosted a discussion of how to approach women in public, the comments on which had me thinking about a lot of things.

The comment that particularly got me was this one, which included the question: "But, if this is the case, then why don’t more women approach men?"

I wish I knew what good that was supposed to do.

Now, I don't get hassled on the subway or whatever terribly often these days. I don't know if it's the area I live in or that of the people in the vicinity I have sufficient armouring to make me not look like a good mark (between the wedding rings, the leather jacket, the frequent headphones and/or book, and the tendency to pull my hat down over my eyes and nap). But I cannot for the life of me see how more women approaching men will change what hassles I do get.

I mean, I've been over 50% of the initiation effort for every relationship I've been in other than the one that ended in attempted rape. (And that does not make me any the more comfortable with random approaches. It, in fact, makes me more aggressive about pursuing actual interests because I don't want them approaching me lest I go all woobly-minded.)

If I were doing this in the hope of fixing street harassment it would be, you know, a total, dismal failure. Because not only do nitwits on the street not know whether or not I'd tell them if I was interested in them, they do not care. They are expressing less articulate versions of this guy's argument (when they're not just trying to get a response out of a woman):

I think a lot of men will think along this line – “what’s the point of her thinking I’m a trustworthy person if we don’t have that conversation and there’s still at least the possibility of Penis tourism and, possibly, 100 pretty babies.”

If you’re interested in talking to her, but you don’t talk to her because of her assumed boundaries, and you don’t risk to be rejected, you may feel good about yourself, being the trustworthy person that you are, but you don’t get anything else for it.

[...]

And that’s where the problem is. In a very real way, I think, for him, the more rational approach would be to politely say hello and see if he’s interested, always being alert about her reactions, and withdrawing if she shows any kind of disinterest. That way, while having been interrupted, she may even get the impression that the guy was able to understand her saying no – to him. A no that was not assumed, but real.

The comments were closed at Shapely Prose before I could reply to this, and it's a hard time to formulate it. But I'm left with ... what a modern-capitalism notion of transactional analysis. Immediate profit potential over long-term gain.

I mean, there's this thousand-comment long thread about how this sort of thing means that women out in public are more likely to be closed down and unwilling to engage with people, which, as a long-term system, doesn't do well for what this guy claims to be wanting to get. But the miniscule chance of that one-in-a-lot shot at getting laid means continuing to degrade the environment such that women feel the need to be on guard in public, thereby keeping those odds nice and low.

Cannot think past end of penis, apparently.

I commented recently on not liking being approached in part because the relationship started that way ended in attempted rape? Got this response, quoted verbatim:

"It's not fair to deprive men of the ability to approach you because one raped you."

Kinda oozes sex appeal, doesn't it? Look at what I'm missing!

The Invisible Woman

A few weeks back, I think it was, now, there were a number of people blogging about invisible disabilities and the sorts of effects they have. And I considered rattling around and doing the questionnaire, a bit, but decided against it for a variety of reasons.

I did want to highlight Erynn Laurie's post about things people say, though.

One of the things about these ... things (okay, must stop being word-clever or I'll sound like gibberish to myself) is the way so many of them wind up wedging themselves into the mind. Invisible disability can become even invisible to the person who has it.

And there's an entire fucking industry of cultural crap designed to keep it that way.

Have a look at this article, which a friend linked recently.

Do you see what I see?

In case you missed it, what I see is this paragraph:

In the past, researchers have raised allegations of ghostwriting in articles about quality-of-life drugs like antidepressants, painkillers and diet pills. But the situation has become more serious this year after a few editors said they had discovered ghostwriting in manuscripts about life-and-death products like cancer and hematology drugs.

Yeah, those antidepressants and painkillers. Not life-and-death at all. It's not like people commit suicide for their lack or anything like that. It's not like they can make a difference between soul-sucking misery and a life worth living, or even the possibility to live it in anything resembling a half-functional way.

And you know why people can write paragraphs like that?

Because people who need antidepressants or painkillers are socially constructed as weak. Our disabilities are personal failures, quirks of neurology that any proper person would have been able to handle already, really, honestly, would you shut up and stop whining?

I know someone who begins every comment on their struggle to get their invisible illnesses treated with a comment about how they're such a whiner and it's all in their head and they need to pull up those bootstraps and stop being so pathetic - and I don't know how much of that is serious belief and how much is voicing those gremlins so they can function. And for all that I wish that that little voice would stop plaguing that person so loudly, I ...

... can't say that I don't have it too.

I mean, I can claim that I'm too disabled to be able to stably hold down an office job. But I know I did it for a while, right? Enough to pay the rent, even though I slowly whittled myself down into someone who couldn't engage with anything she actually valued because every last bit of me was spent on keeping that job and doing it reasonably well. That's not an inability to function. "You know, deep down, you're just a lazy ass, not someone who genuinely can't handle that."

Right?

Half of what I do sometimes is justifying. It's okay that I don't chase Corporate America, because I have written so many words today. It's okay that I don't put on my pink-collar drag and go answer phones until I want to scream because I took some time to teach someone or help them out of a bad spot. Lately, it's okay that I don't do that because it's not like I could bring in enough income to pay for childcare anyway, right?

Right?

Because it's invisible, and not even the sort of invisible that other people would believe is real if they knew. I don't have a heart condition like my brother; that's a real disability. I'm just ... touched in the head. A little blue. And I should get over the stuff that I haven't gotten over, I'm such a useless whiny bitch sometimes.

Gah.

Monster of Mothers

I am the monster under the bed.

(Apparently under the big bed, the one that holds 'all of you'.)

I am off the edge of your map, and I am prowling. You make noise and flash lights as if I might be driven into the imaginary by your denial, you pretend I am not there, and by that pretending you cast my shadow large and misshapen, huge and slavering and consuming things you thought you knew.

I come in the night and seduce away what you thought was yours, what would live by the rules of civilised climes, the way you thought things should be. I am nothing but a shadow, not a creature of substance; what you know of me matters not against what I mean. Perhaps I am the shadow of a real evil, nothing but the hound of a cult trailing along in the footsteps of other unreality. Perhaps I am the demoness herself, spiked and sorcerous.

But - I tell you this - never forget that in the shadow that you made there is a child.

Because there is where you will meet the real beast.

Do not forget my daughter, treat her as an irrelevance, dismiss her. Do not attempt to use her as a leverage point to peel away one or another of her parents. Do not attempt to wail and claw at the horror of a child cradled in such darkness as mine, because I will want to introduce you to darkness then, I will want to and I will hold back because her innocence will not be stained with blood so unworthy.

I will hold back a while. I will wait you out, I may try to laugh because the fairy tales are so comically twisted and unreal. I will let you tell your stories if they help you sleep at night. I will swallow up my own pain at being driven away and warped into shadows, my reality ignored because you must have your stories and hold them up over what is real. I will bleed for you, you who live in the light and order of civilised lands and must have tidiness and hold the borders of your world strong, and believe me, I bleed every moment my humanity is less important to you than your fictions and your "It's just wrong, I can't tell you why." I will let you fucking flay me alive with your weapons of annihilation, without denying that that is what you are doing to me.

I will do this for you.

So long as you leave my child alone, cradled within the arms of her family.


I am the monster of mothers, and you who live in Heorot should leave us be.

You Pays Your Money, You Takes Your Chance

I hate health insurance.

See, here's the thing. The idea behind insurance, right? Normal insurance? "We pay in in case something awful happens to someone who paid in, and what we've got here will cover helping out the unfortunate." It's gambling, paying in in case of theft, of fire, of flood, of whatever, but we don't expect to have these things happen, precisely, we just know they might.

And that's why I hate health insurance.

Before you start, you lose the bet.

You're gonna get sick.

Putting in money in case you get sick? Is, straight up, lost money. Because there is no "Maybe I won't get sick" like "Maybe I won't get robbed" or "Maybe my house won't burn down". That's resources lost, pfft. You'll get sick, or injured, or whatever else. Eventually. Unless you're hit by a truck tomorrow and die instantly, of course, in which case the insurance company will be really happy with you for being their ideal customer.

And because you will inevitably have need of health care, the thing where everyone's putting a little bit in as a bet against the chance that they're robbed/burned down/flooded out so the few who actually do wind up in need have enough resources to recover doesn't work so well. Everyone will be pulling something out sometime, so there's no chance for the pot to build up enough to take care of everyone's needs (unless, of course, we're spending exorbitant amounts).

And so the game goes like this: we pay money in, sunk cost, and when we need the money out, it's in the best interest of the insurance people to not pay that out (less money for them and, for that matter, for everyone else), so we get surcharges, pre-existing conditions, caps on how much medication we can take or how much care we can get even when we need it, all designed to keep the money drained out of us. So now we're down the money and we don't get the care.

So people try to 'economise'. Some go without insurance and pray that the major illness doesn't happen to them just yet. Some skip preventative healthcare (that would increase the odds of catching those major illnesses early) to keep the resources for catastrophic situations. Some have to decide which of their conditions will get treatment.

And people get stuck in awful places, because the whole system is set up to feed this goddamn protection racket. Trapped in a bad job but can't afford to quit because that would lead to 'losing health insurance'. Unable to get insurance and stuck managing serious illnesses out of pocket. Making major life decisions based on whether or not health care access will be possible, because we can't afford the risk - or have people depending on us who aren't 'risks' but 'actualities'.

And I hear rhetoric about how we don't want bureaucrats between us and our health care as a reason to ... make sure we have insurance companies available to kneecap us, rather than some sort of system that makes sure that basic care is available to people in general.

Pony up your blind. Shuffle up and deal!

Oh look, I got a two-seven unsuited. Again.

More Heat Than Light

Recently, a friend of mine posted to a local board looking for a roommate. Like people who do that sort of thing will do, she posted about what she was looking for in a roommate - which happened to include not having children.

And there was a resulting kerfluffle, in which one person replied suggesting (after some 'people who don't want to live with children are defective in some way' and 'why aren't you willing to modify your landlord's property to be more childsafe?' comments) that this was the sort of thing they expected of polyamorous people and their dubious state of priorities, that they'd rather have their orgies than have children around.

And I'm sitting here consulting with the belly, hey. Ha.

But seriously.

(Not even getting into the whole "... what the hell is wrong with not wanting to room with children?" thing here. I'm not capable of being surprised that a twenty-to-thirtysomething urban techie roomshare happens to have childfree people in it and, y'know, there's nothing wrong with reality here.)

This sort of thing just ... quietly exhausts me. In that 'nibbled to death by ducks' way. Because while it's not one of those Grand Oppression things, or even a major big deal, just the sort of wearing grinding everyday grit in the gears that means there's so much less available for dealing with the world. Emotional entropy, lost as heat.

I'm coming to think that this is one of the hardest things to convey about being one-down (or more-down) from normal in the social ranking thing. The way that ... it's not always someone's kids being taken away, or an eviction notice, or a punch in the face, or a death. And it's not always the major setups that say, no, you can't get married, or no, you have to decide what's safest to mark down on this form as your sex, or having to go the long and ugly way around for an accessible entrance, or all those other things that are the legacy of a system passively constructed in a manner hostile to people like you.

It's the middle stuff.

The stuff where it's clear that someone's basically hostile to people-like-you, may not have the power to do anything significant with it (though oftentimes, horribly, these people do) but just want to make sure you have an emotionally difficult day. A little more stress, a little more awareness of hostility, maybe even a little less safe.

But oh, it's just some person on a forum, or some overheard conversation, or something like that. It's not like it's hurting you, people will say; and it's not like it's the system keeping you down, the system isn't alive and argumentative like a person, so it's safe to rail against. It's just ... a little more friction, not anything worth paying attention to. Sticks and stones, you know, sticks and stones. This stuff isn't real, it's at worst a little friction.

But thermodynamics hits the emotions too. And the more the world wears away, the more people have to grind against these abrasive notions about who we are, for whatever values of who we are are being scraped at, the more just gets lost. The energy is gone, drifting away into nothingness, unrecoverable: the price of entropy. And that's energy that could have healed the world, maybe, or at least just been better able to deal with the real nasty shit out there, or the tedious grind of the impersonally cruel system.

I don't even know if I'm making any damn sense. It's not about being poly, or childfree, or anythign or everything else: it's about the hurt of being in a world where there's this constant exhausting pecking away, where any random person might just say something randomly hostile, where that's normal, unless one seeks communities specifically to protect oneself against that - and even there, there will be the moments that someone says something that grinds a little more grit into something the space wasn't defining as part of its protection.

Attacks I can deal with. Systems I can rail against and change.

People? People are harder.

And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.

I have no coherent response to this abomination presented by the current administration and its homophobic lackeys on the 42nd anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia, at least not one that does not require that I explore whole new realms of expletive. (This link, being from an actual lawyer, rather than AmericaBlog, may be more palatable to some; it points out that, among other things, the executive is obligated to defend extant laws if they are legally defensible, though it is not obligated to be an asshole doing it.) (Another link: Pam's House Blend. There are a lot of links around; I'm going to stop snagging them. There are difficulties with the arguments in some of them ('cousin marriage' is not the same as 'incest', for example) but that does not make the whole thing less disgusting.)

I have had a simple response, one that I intend to supplement by actual writing of a paper letter to the White House, but it is a simple and elegant enough response that I would like to suggest it to the broader world.

I went to the White House contact form and sent them this quotation, with my own supplemental commentary:

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about. --Mildred Loving

Shame on you.

On this day of all days.

I would like to suggest to all my thirty-three and a third readers who care about the administration's reprehensible defense of DOMA that they, at minimum, pop over to the White House contact form and quote Mildred Loving.