H is for Handholding and Headpatting

Every so often, some little kerfluffle goes around, about how the poor fragile newbies really need to be coddled and condescended to so that they will not flee from the big scary pagan world, and how people who are more established in their religion have some kind of obligation to provide education to others solely because they are more established.

Back to being the dancing monkey and listening to people sound like they got their social cues out of Derailing for Dummies.

When I am in various pagan communities, I am there to hang out with other people with religious perspective kind of like mine.  That doesn't make me a resource you can mooch off of, your own personal pagan-oriented search engine.  You cannot plug search terms into me and get the secrets of the universe.  I have other things to do with my life, even when I'm talking to other pagans.

I am not in the mollycoddling business.  And, too often, I hear people talk about how newbies need to be mollycoddled, wrapped up in cotton wool and never, ever questioned, jostled, bumped, or unsettled, lest they flee for more welcoming environments that will not correct their errors, contain substantial conversations about significant matters, or treat them like adults.

Apparently we are supposed to hearken back to when we were new and terrified of all this ookyspooky religion stuff, much like in order to do other basic tasks in our lives we are supposed to hearken back to when we were hot pink badgers with an unfortunate skin condition and a desire to sing Gilbert and Sullivan.  (Remember: learning things is horribly, horribly dangerous and should totally provoke an adrenaline reaction at all times.  That is why they shoot off cannon at irregular intervals on school grounds.)  We are supposed to remember all those kind and patient elders who took us under their wings, guided us to our true destiny, and informed us about everything we wanted to know, until they vanished in a cloud of rainbows and butterflies and released us into the world with the fading cry, "Now, pay it forward!  It doesn't matter if they do the work!"

Be nice, they say.  Because being mousy and inoffensive is a virtue, after all.  None of us have moral codes that value courage and discipline, or truth, or pride in oneself. Nothing should ever be questioned, fact-checked, confronted, or discarded.  It is all about who has the nicest little china tea sets with petits fours.  (I do not knock petits fours.  I love petits fours.  But I am looking for more than children's tea parties in my religion.)


So a few things to straighten matters out.

I was not put on this planet to make your life easier.

If you are seeking out religious services in particular, it would be contrary to my duties and obligations to make your life easier.  In the short term, at least.  If you want my services as a priest, then expect to have your ass kicked, because that is the service that I offer in that role.  I do not do confession and absolution.  I do not offer warm blanket snuggles and affirmations as to your special place in the universe.

I am also not going to pat you on the head and feed you babyfood because you have decided that you're not up for interacting as a functional adult.  I have kids.  You are not one of them.  If you cannot actually interact from a framework of basic competence, if you insist that you aren't worthy of my time and attention, I am going to give you the basic respect of agreeing with you and not investing in you before you are worthy.

I was not spoonfed.  I did the same damn thing you did - I got books, I read them, I tried things, I played around with what did and didn't work, I stumbled across people who had some stuff in common with me, I did things with them, sometimes I hit something that really resonated, I worked from there.  You want your next step?  Here are mine:  I found organisations that did instruction at some point, and I did their coursework - and critiqued it.  I started to do independent research.  I broadened my field of study.  I read poetry.  I started to cross-reference things I knew with other things.  I thought about what I needed in order to get what I had to have.  I found individuals who were offering training, and I made agreements with them because I met their standards as a student, and I did their work.  Go, and do likewise.

I am not doing universalist religion.  I do not care whether or not you put your name on the dotted line. I am not a pimp for the Divine, nor am I a door-to-door theology salesman.  It is up to you to decide whether or not you buy, and what terms you're willing to put in that contract.  I really, genuinely, completely do not give a flying fuck at a rolling donut whether or not you think that I am too mean for you to join one of my religions.

I am not your teacher.  I am not anyone's teacher right now.  That isn't to say that you can't learn anything from talking with me, given that I know a bunch of Stuff, but I do not have any obligation to give you any of that Stuff.  I certainly don't have an obligation to give you the particular thing you're asking for - and being your teacher wouldn't give me that obligation either, given that if you're asking for something that I know to be useless or counterproductive I'm not going to bloody well encourage you.

In the event that I do, in the future, become your teacher, you do not set the lesson plan.  I will know what I am attempting to convey, and what you get from me will be angled toward conveying that, not whatever shiny shit you are chasing around because you think that the right goddamn crystal will solve your personal problems.  If you don't like what I teach, in that case, you are 100% welcome to find a compatible teacher, because I am not going to change the instruction just to satisfy your neuroses.  If you don't want the lessons I'm actually offering, you don't want me to be teaching you.

I am not going to express contempt for you by assuming that you're incapable of participating in a conversation among equals as an equal.  I don't care if you're new; I probably don't notice if you're new, being not privy to your life story and unlikely to read your engaging and detailed personal introduction (and if I do, I'm quite unlikely to remember that engaging and detailed personal introduction was you, specifically, as opposed to 'some random person on the internet somewhere').  If you want someone to treat you as a little child who isn't capable of knowing any better or hearing the truth, you want someone else.

Presumption of Innocence

A while back, two people named Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks decided to try to paint my blogworld acquaintance maymay as a pedophile for not barring minors from the KinkForAll unconference set he started and released into the world. I've been meaning to try writing about this for a while, but between Little Foot and everything else I have not been able to get the spoons together; better, more coherent writing can be found at Alas, A Blog, among many other places. One of maymay's posts on the subject is here.

So rather than roll over those subjects again:



In an ideal world I'd have to hand the statistics about some European approaches to sex education, which starts well before puberty and has, as its end result, lower teen pregnancy rates, later age of first sexual contact, and so on, and I'd be able to lay them out in that cool-headed rational way that is how one's supposed to act in order to be Convincing in this culture.

Or I could just dig out my Blogging for Sex Education Day post and emotive appendix and wave them around again like a bloody shirt. Possibly with an "As a mother of a baby girl..." attached to start hitting those buttons as hard as I can.

But, y'know, as a mother of a baby girl, the Hughes-and-Brookses of the world terrify me. They terrify me because they wish to make equipping Little Foot with what she will need to navigate the world in reasonable safety a crime, if not literally, at least socially: they want the concept of frank discussion about sexuality to be, if it exists at all, constrained to those above legal majority, keeping the youth vulnerable, exploitable, ignorant.

I mean, I'm familiar with this sort of thing, this idea that children are 'innocent', which is a code word for 'unsexual', and that they will be tainted by knowledge.

I've run into it in homophobic discourse - because straight people never realise they're attracted to MOTOS before puberty, so gay people who figure that sort of thing out must be inappropriately sexualised. I have a hobby of popping into those discussions to note that I had my first crush when I was seven or so, and recognised it at the time as "something that has to do with grownup things like getting married", and it manifested as - among other ways - wanting to touch the target of my affections which, being in elementary school, involved defeating him in a wrestling match at a friend's birthday party. These people remain wilfully ignorant of the way that hairpulling and teasing get labelled as "puppy love" when the children involved are of different apparent sexes, making it redundant for people for whom that sort of thing is actually the early and inchoate manifestations of sexuality to realise that hey, they're straight!

... those were some very long and complicated sentences. Anyway!

Once, when I was pointing out that I was aware of parts of my sexuality when I was pre-pubescent - that I was formulating my taste in boys from the age of seven, say, I don't think I'd even gotten into the definite awareness of some level of kink by the age of twelve - I got told that I was providing justifications for pedophiles. That self-awareness as someone who was formulating an understanding about "grownup relationship things" and how I felt about having them someday was some kind of mitigating factor that could excuse sexual abuse. That even acknowledging child-appropriate sexuality in a prepubescent was carte blanche for people to fuck children.

I can tell from the way I repeat that and rephrase it over and over that I go all fugue-y and kind of triggery about it.

Children are keen observers of the world, perhaps especially the world of adult social dynamics, because they have to relate themselves to that world in order to survive. A keen state of vulnerability means that understanding the systems of social interaction is a vital skill. (This, tangentially, strikes me as one of the reasons ASD can be so disabling.) Expecting that children will not be piecing together understandings of sexuality from what they observe is flatly ludicrous: even the ones who are not growing up in a household with adults who are in a romantic/sexual relationship of some sort will have friends with married parents, or single parents who are dating, or whatever else. They will see people with relationships on television, or watch a Disney movie and observe how this year's Princess gets her Prince. And they will find themselves drawn to explore things themselves: whether it's "if I touch this I like how it feels" or "That person there makes me feel happy and I want to be near them" or something else altogether in that complex of things.

We cannot cannot cannot dissociate children from an awareness of how what's in their heads relates to the adult world. And sexuality does not suddenly spring into existence from nothing at puberty, at age of consent, at legal majority, at an age where one is old enough to drink, no matter how much the rhetoric would like it to.

And I'm writing about children, because I have a child and I have to work through how to equip her with knowledge from age-appropriate ground up - which doesn't even touch on the vileness of equating teenagers who might be attending one of maymay's unconferences with my nine-month-old child in terms of what sort of sexuality discussion might be appropriate for them.

But this is a culture in which carrying condoms in order to be a responsible driver for one's sexuality frequently gets taken as being oversexed, slutty, indiscriminate, bad, and thus unrapeable, because sex isn't a topic for discussion; sex is something magical that happens from beyond and carries you away. Being frank, real, knowledgeable, aware, making deliberate choices: these are all the sorts of things that destroy 'innocence' and thus make a person guilty.

Nose to the Grindstone

A friend recently linked to this article, titled 'Why Self-Discipline is Overrated'. Which ... I recognise me in it, despite the fact that I have kind of terrible self-discipline.

Though I certainly internalised the notion that moral rectitude is in part measured by how good one is at knuckling down and doing What Must Be Done.

But one of the things that it reminds me of is the style of "schooling" intended to shape children into good, obedient workers, rather than critical thinkers, innovators, or even well-informed and knowledgeable citizens. Under some bits of the history of school development, none of those things are actual desired goals - which explains why the system stinks at producing them. No, the system is supposed to produce "self-discipline", pretty much.

But the stuff about going to college? Portrait of the blogger as a teenager. And a few other people I know, besides:

Dutiful students may be suffering from what the psychoanalyst Karen Horney famously called the “tyranny of the should” -- to the point that they no longer know what they really want, or who they really are. So it is for teenagers who have mortgaged their present lives to the future: noses to the grindstone, perseverant to a fault, stressed to the max. High school is just preparation for college, and college consists of collecting credentials for whatever comes next. Nothing has any value, or provides any gratification, in itself. These students may be skilled test-takers and grade grubbers and gratification delayers, but they remind us just how mixed the blessing of self-discipline can be.

I was a nerdy kid. I'm still an autodidact, pursuing levels of in-depth knowledge on subjects of interest to me - but of course those subjects fit remarkably poorly into any instructional pattern. I was bad at most of my homework, because - as the article notes - so much of it is utterly pointless, and that much was evident to me from the age of, y'know, seven or so.

But in college? I had no idea what I was doing. I had nebulous goals for the future, none of which were dependent on a degree, but getting a degree was What One Did and An Important Experience, so I tried it. (It didn't work out, but that's neither here nor there; I both know people who, like me, went from "stressed to the max" to "broken" and people who scraped through with a degree they found meaningless aiming them at a life that didn't feel like it went anywhere.) The whole value in college was the "discipline" of it, and the "won't it feel so good when you've accomplished". I had no space for finding the place to learn - and do - what I loved.

I didn't even figure out what I wanted to be doing for something like ten years after I dropped out. Because I didn't have the tools; I just had the discipline thing (and the knowledge that I kind of fail at it).

I think of this now, for two reasons - one, that I'm having a major shitfit about the conservative/discipline approach to living and the way it devalues more spontaneous and intuitive attitudes right now, entirely unrelatedly, and two, because I'm seriously considering how I might want to actually go back to school. And ... what I want is a particular Master's degree. And to get that, I ... need a BA. So I've been trying to find something that I can do, that fits in with my life, that is also work that I love, because if I have to hit this particular hoop, I want to do it for more than the discipline.



(In a fit of irony I'm trying to make sure I get at least a post a month up here despite being profoundly occupied with Little Foot. Discipline! Perseverance!)

Not Exactly the Wrong Questions

Then there are the times the answers are wrong. Or something like that. Not sure how to riff this bit right.

I was recently in a discussion of safewords elsewhere that got me into a contemplation of bits of kink culture and my somewhat complicated relationship with it. It's a hard subject to try to articulate about, because a lot of this is in the superficial impression level of things, and I'm well aware that I have not explored things with much depth - in part because of that impression.

The thing with me and safewords is that if I'm in a position where I might want to use one, I'm almost certainly not in a position where I'm capable of using one. (The other thing with me and safewords is that if I'm verbality-enabled, I'm quite competent to say, "You don't want to be doing that" or something similar about a boundary-crossing behaviour, and I'm not generally engaged in stuff that would require something other than plain language to communicate.) I alter state so significantly that the safety latch option doesn't come up on possible options - often, possible options to think about, and that's without getting into the implementation problems.

A community discourse that focuses on the usefulness (and indeed necessity) of safewords is a community discourse in which I cannot be a full participant. I need to be able to build what relative safety I can by other means, and the construction of those other means is something that I've pretty much had to do on my own, through trial and error. Fortunately, none of those errors have been traumatising for me - even the 'now that I'm back in my ordinary mind I would rather not have done that' stuff has been educational rather than upsetting.

For someone like me, for whom nonverbal trust state is one of the fundamental components - indeed one of the desired goals - of submission, trying to frame that all through the safeword lens breaks it. Between that and the SM focus of a lot of kink discussion, I wound up wondering if what I was hooked into was something different that was not kink, if the BDSM community had anything in common with me. I could get some use out of bondage discussions, but SM and the importance of safewords were bulletins from an alien planet.

A lot of things were bulletins from an alien planet. "The scene", clubs, play parties, all that stuff that's normative within a lot of kink-contexted discussion? About as emotionally comprehensible as approaching a relative stranger and asking them if they're interested in siring a child in the next half hour or so. And that's because this central thing, the whole reason for being there, is this my-mind-is-blown-open-my-god-it's-full-of-stars-and-kittens experience, and looking for that kind of trip off someone with whom I'm not already intimate is not merely unappealing, it's bizarre. I'm not someone who can get an endorphin high off a casual flogging and be happy with that - the only value a flogging might have to me is in whether or not it can get my mindscape somewhere interesting, and all of those 'somewhere interesting' places orbit around that ego-death thing and are more likely to go there the more satisfying the interaction is.

My kink gets more intimate than sex; sex can be a real trip, but it's something where the skin is still a barrier, a boundary, something that holds the difference between me and a lover as a tangible thing even through the inversions and entanglements of being twined through each other. My kink gets more intimate than sex, and I'm a thirty-one year old woman who has never really had a monogamous relationship and has had six lovers in her lifetime. My kink gets more intimate than sex, and it's not as easy to find a partner who can hold that stuff as it is to find a lover, even if I really want to, even if I try, even if I'm frustrated by my inability to make ... that ... work with someone I love.

And this is a giant lump of dangerous mental juju to propose to drop on someone, asking them to hold that safe space, to create that dissolved and fluid state and to keep it from being ripped apart. This is not easy, and this is not a small magic. But where does one learn this shit? Talking about safewords, one experienced top suggested that people like me are not for novices because this is high-proof stuff - but how does one become not-a-novice at this in the first place? Not with safewords, because safewords belong to a different reality than the altered state.

I don't know these things. I know that the first time I slid into a submissive state while nestled into the arms of the one who is now my liege, before we talked about kink and wiring and responses and fantasies much at all (it was at the end of the Initial Sexual History Conversation, actually), the first time he saw me on the edge of that state, he knew I could not give meaningful consent to what he wanted to do, and he brought me back up out of it so that he would not hurt me, so that he could ask and get a meaningful answer. It didn't matter that he had no prior experience with d/s there; what mattered was that he recognised where I was and made the right choice. (And left me with a horrible case of thwarted desire, but as a consequence to risk that's hardly a bad outcome.)

That same care guided me through a reenactment of my sexual assault, a transformative experience that still blows my mind. That same care has only majorly messed things up once, and it was rough, and we got through it eventually. it is not a simple thing, and I don't know how I mustered the luck to have it work, but it is what it is. I don't know how to make for a world where people can learn how to find this if that's what they want, how they can get there with fewer blunders than I had to go through. I think it matters, and I don't know how to do it. At all.

I sometimes think I'm at least two kinds of submissive; the service, the devotion, all of that seems a different reality than this blown-open space so full of stars. And yet it's the same thing, somehow, in a way I have yet to be able to articulate, the way the risk-strewn madness at the core snuggles into protocol and ritual and support and making tea on the other side. "Safe" and "sane" only exist in the penumbra of the sorcery, but maybe that's the secret. I've seen people whose kink has SM in it talk about knowing their 'dark side' and letting it have its place; maybe this is letting the mad side have a home.

I don't know these things. And they're hard to talk about.

No Dark Sarcasm In the Classroom

The children of the literate classes in Egypt were taught reading and writing by rote repetition. Many of the texts that they copied over and over again were instructions on proper behaviour, and thus literacy came with pedantic instruction in local values. So, for this Pagan Values Month post, I will explore one of these texts with an eye to general overview. I have chosen The Wisdom of Amenopet for this purpose, rather than selecting from multiple texts; link provided for those who want to see a translation. (For those who want to know what specific translation I'm working with, I'm using Ancient Egyptian Literature: An Anthology with translations by John L. Foster because it happens to be my book of Egyptian writings near the computer at the moment.) Traditionally speaking, these wisdom texts were supposed to have been written by ancient sages for the proper instruction of their sons.

(A value of reconstruction: citing sources.)

One can see in Amenopet's writing that he lived in, and valued, a society that was ordered, heirarchical, polite, and prudent. He treats the gods as a given, declaring that truth is a matter of the God's love (the offering most commonly presented to the gods in wall decoration is a figurine of Ma'at, representing truth and justice, among other things), and expects his son to appreciate each day as the gift of the gods, as such is far wiser than sinking into mundane expectation that one day is just like another.

He has a great deal of advice on how to deal with people in a civil manner. He disapproves of snarky messages (either sending them or appreciating them), which probably has me in trouble. He suggests the generally prudent values of not arguing with hotheads, leaving the quarrelsome's generalised bitchiness in the hands of the gods, being generally polite with opponents, and not giving enemies an excuse to go overt with hostilities. He disapproves of negative gossip and suggests that his son should speak the good he knows of others, not the ill; in fact, he suggests avoiding abrasiveness in conversation altogether (there's another rough one). He disapproves of eavesdropping on judges and government officials.

Simple politeness expands to a certain generosity of spirit in Amenopet's eyes. He suggests taking time out of a workday to speak to widows, lending an arm to drunken old men and giving them the support that their children might provide if they were present, and forgiving two-thirds of the debts held by the poor. If there is beer in his son's jug, he ought not turn away a thirsty stranger. His son is encouraged not merely to not cheat the laborers of their fair day's wages (Egyptian laborers were paid in food) but to measure out their meals as if he were laying out food for a friend. Care and charity for the poor ought to be greater than debt to the mighty, and judging the poor should be done without harshness. If life is a ferry ride, he is not to leave people behind at the dock, should not worry too much about collecting fares, and should take his fair turn at the oar without demanding special treatment. It is unjust to use power to oppress those who do not have it, and Amenopet specifically mentions widows and the elderly in that category; he also objects to mocking the disabled.

He has a lot to say about living in a just society. He lists off a dozen different forms of fraud in order to say "don't do any of these": moving boundary-stones, falsifying weights, crafting false weights, falsifying writings, altering scales and balances, changing proportions of measures. On top of this he notes that messing with the planting of another man's land produces no benefit, but cultivating that man's good will does. He disapproves of associating with swindlers and thieves. He disapproves of threats and bribes, though he will allow as how it may be wise to speak what praise one can for someone who offers a bribe ... in case they come back. He goes so far as to suggest that one should not accuse others of criminal behaviour, for one does not know what motivated their actions; I imagine one 24601 would have appreciated that one. He suggests neither accepting favors from the powerful nor harassing the weak in their name.

There is a delicate balance of status to be navigated here, as well. It is important to know one's place; it is also possible that, by doing good, a god will chose to elevate one's station. This is not to be counted upon or begged for, because pleading for such things proves an unworthiness. One should not hang out in bars looking for someone important to latch on to and toady to, nor should one hold back dues to the temple in the hope of accumulating more. One should not covet the goods of the poor, for they have enough damn problems; instead, look after them. Nor should one covet the goods of the rich, for if the rich man asks one to administer his property, how could one do that honorably if one wants it for one's own? Both seeking wealth and seeking poverty are inappropriate in Amenopet's view of the world: a properly balanced personality will be provided with the gods with sufficiency, and wealth aside from that is a matter of luck or fate.

There is a great deal, as well, about putting on a correct social face. Some of this reflects the heirarchical nature of Egyptian society: to not criticise the conversations of the great, to not eat before a nobleman, to not backtalk superiors, to remember that a servant will serve a master's interests. At the same time, he advocates a certain set of attitudes so that his son's reputation will be a protection to him: his integrity should be so publically known that it is a comfort to his neighbors. He should be a good friend; if a friend is troubled, he should neither silence nor provoke into greater agitation, but rather let the friend speak, hear the issues with an understanding of where that friend is coming from, and attempt to bring about peace through listening. Amenopet holds the good will and good speech of others to be more valuable than the contents of storehouses. Another line I will simply quote from the translation, for it is too fantastic to paraphrase: "A strong arm is not weakened by discretion, nor is one's back made safe by bowing."

The Egyptian focus on truthfulness is clear throughout the writing. Not merely falsehood is denigrated, but the specifics of speaking false praise, of keeping quiet about one's goals so that others will be unable to interfere with them, and passing false laws get their own mentions. He is against not merely perjury, but babbling on in court. Goals achieved by lies are rotten in the heart, he says - the heart, the shrine of right action - and will come to no good in the end.

There is, further, a thread of prudence throughout the work. Take care of your health, Amenopet tells his son. Sleep on it before you speak. Pursue self-sufficiency in your fields, for work well-done brings the most satisfaction, and it is better to stand on your own feet than be dependent or deceive for sustenance. Do not overeat and indulge to excess, and do not associate with those who do. (Amenopet would not have approved of certain aspects of Roman high society.) You cannot know what tomorrow will bring, and you are of this time, not any other; live accordingly.

So. A set of values put forth by an Egyptian sage, and inculcated in generations of schoolboys.

Slipping Down the Slope

I've been thinking, for a couple of reasons, about classism and how it interacted with the feminism of my childhood.

(This is riffing on my "Spoiling Feminism" post on last year, in part.)

I had a damn weird upbringing in some ways, class-wise, but one of the things that was a big part of it was that I would go to college. On the one side of the family, it was "Of course you will go to college; we are Yankee bluebloods and our kind has gone to college since Colonial days." On the other side of the family it was, "Going to college is how we can have a better lot in life than our parents and lift ourselves out of the working class. Your grandfather gave up a scholarship that would have made him the first in the family to attend college because his family needed his income, and you need to honor that sacrifice."

And threaded in through all that childhood is this very class-conscious feminism, one that barely touches on issues of violence and genuine misogyny for a very professional-class set of concerns that mostly were relevant to the women who were college-educated. Glass ceilings. Access to the boardroom and the White House. Economics without any sense that people bleed, except in the past, where that bleeding was done so that you, meaning me, could go out and accomplish the great things that Our Feminist Foremothers could only dream of seeing their daughters do. Just Do It feminism at its worst. I had to prove myself for womanhood, and because as a woman I couldn't afford to depend on anyone else for care and support, especially not a man.

I tell you a secret: I had no damn clue what I might want to do in college. This was my secret shame, that I didn't have A Goal, some sort of appropriately middle-class college-educated thing I would do to prove my merit (and, incidentally, Further The Cause Of Women). I wanted to write, and I couldn't think of a thing to study in college that would help me with that. (Literature classes were, in my experience, entirely painful, and not useful for actual writing in any case.) It was acceptable to take classes in Random Interesting Shit, but only in and around the edges of what was required to manage establishing that Proper Career. I had no Career dreams, and I knew that this was a great failure for me as a human being (for classist reasons) and as a woman (for feminist reasons).

So what happens when I went to college?

I went mad.

Load that wacky classist baggage with mental health ablism, now. Depression isn't a legitimate disability, you know, it's just the excuse of the lazy for their failures. It's certainly not a reason to drop out of college, because college is what I was supposed to do, and none of this fluffy insanity shit gets me out of my obligations to family, to class, to women as a whole, right?

I worked junior tech support and pink-collar for a while to make rent and food. My happiness at my state of freedom collided messily with, again, the whole class thing, the downward mobility of not being college-educated and the sense of hamartia that came of that -- not merely falling short, but sinfully so.

And, in time, freedom faded too, as the stress of the work started to be too much for me to handle. My migraines returned, my health degraded, and I could feel the edges of sanity sliding again, especially when I had to choose between being a good person by my own lights and making the rent. Eventually, I quit, and slid, more quietly this time, into madness and self-negation, truly knowing myself worthless and not worthy of living because of the shame of dependence -- dependence on a man, to boot.

I've had to come to terms with it. All of it. The classism, the ablism, the giant morass in my head. I've never gone back to college -- something that shocks people from backgrounds like mine, where the "of course you're college-educated, you're intelligent" assumptions run deep. I've had to accept that the odds are good that I can't work enough to support myself on my earnings and keep my sanity; I have to pick one or the other. I've had to deal with people who talk about how it's irresponsible for a woman to not be able to support herself on her own earnings, because other people are unreliable, untrustworthy, can't be counted on to not betray me and leave me on the street.

Which leaves me an autodidact with a freelancing job, working at home, writing between contracts because that leaves me saner than not, doing the laundry and all despite still occasionally facing failure-as-a-person and failure-as-a-woman for "settling for" a life where I have a chance at being happy and reasonably successful on my own terms, rather than miserably a good example of womankind.

The Only Thing That We Done Right Was The Day We Begun To Fight

I was just reading this article about being multi-ethnic and thinking of the shape of things. Not just the overt play of racial politics in this election, though that's a part of it. Thinking of the people I know who get called "biracial" (some of whom object to the term because they are more than bi), my cousins who straddle the Yankee blueblood heritage I know with black kin who still bathed in a tin tub in the kitchen with water boiled in a kettle when I was a kid, my friend who taught me how to take care of her hair so that I could write about it, the intersections of intersections. The fact that had I been born to parents like mine a hundred years ago, I would be "multiracial": white and Irish and Slav.

My family watched the movie Across the Universe last night, which was full of many things, and I find myself thinking of the sequence that began with the 12th Street Riot, with a black boy singing, softly, "Let It Be", as he huddled behind a car. And the flow of it, the song taken up by a gospel choir for the twinned funerals of that boy and that of a soldier killed in Vietnam.

And I'm too young to know that turmoil personally, but I knew enough to tear up. Knew enough in my soul steeped as thoroughly as it is in Keep On Walking And We Shall Be Free, in Long Time Passing, in How Many Ears Must One Man Have Before He Can Hear People Cry. I know the music, at least, well enough to have a passing familiarity, and the movie's cosntant backdrop of violence was the more real for it.

And it's with that in my mind that I read the speech Barack Obama made, addressing the issues of race, of black church, of so many other things. And I think of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writing "Michelle Obama: Those Who Say: "I Ain’t Voting For No Nigger"", and of Orcinus's refutation of the Obama campain as a "cult" as the insidious drivel that it is.

And I get to the part of the speech, after all the pain and broken lives and the memories and legacy thereof that's in my head to think about today are cited, this:

Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

And more like it, but education was first listed and so utterly dear to my heart, my pet issue.

And I say, from the depths of my heart: Hold on. Hold on.

I think, also, that I'm here because of Ashley.

Intersection in the Bookstore

So I decided to make an attempt to redeem a really godawful day by wandering in a used bookstore for a bit. And while I was wandering, I decided that I wanted to see if I could find something by bell hooks, because a number of people I respect speak so highly of her work.

Intersectionality in action, there.

bell hooks has nothing in the feminist theory section, nor in the women in history section, nor, for that matter, in the race issues section; the three titles in the used bookstore were filed under 'African-Americans'.

And I found myself thinking about the discussion brownfemipower was hosting, about the work of women of color being sidelined, pushed to the back end of the semester as an if-we-have-time. And I'm wandering this bookstore going, "Wow. If I were just puttering about in the women's studies section, I'd never know bell hooks existed." Though there were a couple of titles in there about critiques of mainstream feminism from a POC perspective.

Intersectionality means that nobody knows where to shelve your damn books. It means that only people who are looking at whatever subissue the linear one-person-one-categorisation has lumped you into will see what you have to say, and the fact that you have more to say than fits neatly into the box is irrelevant. Procrustean shelving practices prevail, because there's no damn way of shelving the book in the five different places it goes.

I don't even know how to fix it. Looking at the world in a tangled mess of Venn diagrams doesn't help anyone find something in the damn bookstore. Not until we get VR bookstore interfaces and can shelve everything in all the places that it goes, so people can look in their boxes and find everything that belongs in the box.

Check your local bookstores. Where can you find bell hooks?

(But I now have a copy of Ain't I A Woman: black women and feminism.)

A Personal Note

Provoked somewhat by discussions on Bastante Already and in reference to Carol Hanisch's 'The Personal is Political', a personal note to the internet.

Those pesky personal problems that I drag into the public arena when I have the time and energy:

Mental health concerns being treated as strongly distinct from other health concerns. Shaming of people with depression and other mental health issues, treating those concerns as being moral failings rather than health matters. Frequent lack of coverage for extended therapy and other mental health concerns in American health care coverage. The dependence of adequate health care coverage on adequate employment in the United States. Attention to diagnosis depending on the sex, ethnicity, class, and other privilege status of the sufferer, such that a suburban kid may actually get the care they need while an inner-city kid may get kicked out of school for being 'disruptive' or something similar. Socially deranged attitudes towards body shape and health that encourage eating disorders, among other consequences.

Privilege-fraught access to education in general. Failure to put forward advancement of actual learning in the schools rather than constant grinding over the same topics repeatedly. Lack of care for students with special needs, whether those are remedial, medical, advancement, or something else. High costs of education. Lack of learning actual essential skills for living. Failure to teach how to evaluate and weigh evidence. The promulgation of misinformation about socially denigrated activities in the hope that fear will keep people from having sex, smoking pot, or whatever else is being discouraged by propaganda. Lack of informed status on such things as the basic beliefs of Islam, the principles of supply and demand, the mechanics of disease transmission, and any of a number of other matters that have worldwide import.

The equation in the United States of form of employment with selfhood. The shortest span of paid vacation in the supposedly civilised world. The expectation that employees, especially but not limited to men, will work overtime rather than have time to spend having their actual lives. The lack of childcare facilities available in most workplaces. The cultural prioritisation of financial gain as measure of success.

The shaming and fetishisation of rape and assault victims as Damaged People. The lack of adequate awareness of social coercion and date rape. Slut-shaming and other tools of oppressive normative sexuality. Seeking to diagnose and pathologise whatever is wrong with people who do not have normative sexuality on the assumption that nobody could be like that without having been abused. Treatment of people who do not constantly adhere to normative sexualities as being intrinsically dangerous, antisocial, abusing, or otherwise disruptive. The unpersoning of sex workers. Treatment of sexuality as something intrinsically unable to be approached with rational thought, commitment-keeping, or human respect. Treating personal sexuality as a political statement.

Lack of awareness and consideration for verbal and emotional abuse. Boys will be boys. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you.

Lack of social and legal support for alternate family structures. The inability of same-sex partners to legally marry in most of the United States. The presumption that any non-monogamous family unit is polygynous.

The social presumption of Christianity. The fact that questioning the hegemonial status of someone else's holiday leads to accusations of hostility to Christianity, "War on Christmas", anti-religion sentiments, secularism, or whatever other deranged slanders crop up especially around this time of year. Generalised religion-bashing sentiments that only make sense if one assumes the axioms of a particular flavor of Abrahamic monotheism. Anti-Christian sentiments expressed in the assumption that nobody present could possibly object.

Sexism. Including anti-male sexism. Gender essentialism. Mystical frou-frou womb worship. Sexual reductionism. Transphobia. Ableism. Calling things "lame". Calling things "retarded". Calling things "gay". Homophobia. Anti-bisexual bigotry. Racism. Presumption that the customs of one's people are laws of the universe. Ethnic supremacy. Male supremacy. Female supremacy. Kink supremacy. Polyamorous supremacy. Reconstructionist supremacy. Imperialist treatment of non-Western nations and ethnicities.

And quite likely rather a few other things I can't think of right now.

They could sometimes admit that women were oppressed (but only by "the system") and said that we should have equal pay for equal work, and some other "rights." But they belittled us no end for trying to bring our so-called "personal problems" into the public arena - especially "all those body issues" like sex, appearance, and abortion. Our demands that men share the housework and childcare were likewise deemed a personal problem between a woman and her individual man.

From the new intro to "The Personal is Political", linked above.

Back to School

The other day, when my husband and I were in the checkout line at the grocery store, I spotted in the magazine rack a headline something like:

The Best Schools

It's never too soon to start stressing about your children's education!

You know what it was about? You know what it was fucking about?

Preschools.

PRESCHOOLS.

He commented on, y'know, the whole encouragement of stress thing being not exactly a good idea.

I, on the other hand, did the hopping up and down thing about this insanity. Must be sure to get into the best preschools, or little Whoosie won't make it into Harvard! For goodness sakes. (When I went to preschool, all I remember is duck duck goose in the church playground and maybe hazy recollections of play-doh and celery.)

The article goes, "Mind you, we’re not endorsing this trend. That said, it seems to us that when it comes to your kid’s education, the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em mindset is the only real option." Oh, yeah, they don't endorse the trend, of course, but it's never too early to stress about it all, and really, can you be sure you won't be horribly crippling your child's academic chances if you don't worry about it Right Now?

It's only about $10K a year on average, flipping through the listings. You can afford $10K for Your Child's Future, right?

And it's all of a piece with stuff I see elsewhere, not all of which I can chase down. I can find this 2000 article about the way homework can mess with kids' time to have family life; this article from Stanford in 2006 that indicates that homework in elementary school has no academic benefits linked from this blog post. Not to mention all the stuff people write about "No Child Left Behind"'s unintended consequences. This 2003 article suggests that this sort of education madness is not limited to the US. And the whole 'Gotta get into the right school' shows its effects in an apparently rather flawed book called The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, which I note in part because damn, that was one of the schools we competed against in It's Academic, but mostly because this delusion of OMGMustBeDramaticallyAccomplished makes for madness.

I just ... bang my head on the desk. I'm not even terribly coherent about it. I mostly just get to jumping up and down about the damn stress injection into school. I remember the stress injection of school from back when I was going, back when I was being diligently taught the same horrible lessons that are now more important than ever, stuff like 'people will give you useless busywork, but if you're sharp enough you can coast around it (and you won't hit the wall until you're well past when you were supposed to pick up the skills for it)'; 'your value as a person is your accomplishment on a nice, mainstream educational track', 'doing well on the test matters more than understanding, enjoying, or valuing the knowledge' ....

Now with bonus madness! Because preschool isn't too soon for the parents to stress! And no parental stress ever communicates to the kids!

Augh. I wish this didn't infuriate me so much so I could write about it coherently. I'm just with the jumping up and down.

Happy freakin' September.

Sex Education, Andromeda Appendix

I've actually been thinking a lot about the whole sex ed thing, through reading everyone's collective contributions and discussions I'm having elsewhere. And it gets me wound up like I don't really get wound up on teh intarwebs anymore, this whole thing about sex education.

I take it so damn personally.

Because sex education is a place where The System completely and utterly betrayed me. Not just fucked me over bureaucratically (the story of much of it) or didn't manage to transfer necessary skills (much of which was at least as much my fault as The System's). Beyond that.

The sex ed I got from the school system (all six and a half fucking hours of it, total, in twelve years in the public schools) was all about How To Be Safe, with a bit of biology on the side so I knew what to expect from puberty and a little bit of the process of pregnancy. And if I wanted to be Safe I needed to avoid these diseases, not stash sperm near my ovaries, and then I would be okay.

And I didn't even run into a real predator, for whom How To Be Safe is a much more complicated proposition. I ran into another badly instructed kid, and I don't think either of us came across the word "consent" in the information we'd gotten from The System (I should find my copy of the book my parents gave me and see if "consent" is in there, but I don't actually think so), and we certainly didn't know how to negotiate it or think about it.

And yeah, it'd have been good if that kid had had the guts to say, "Hey, are you interested in this touch?" rather than trying it out on me and seeing if I punched him in the nose. And it would have been good if I'd known where my boundaries were ahead of time, rather than having to try to figure it all out on the fly and feeling over my head and too late to speak up. But deriving that shit from first principles with no support, no errors, and no clear implementation isn't exactly something that a fourteen-year-old in the middle of hormone stew is going to be skilled at. (He was seventeen. I don't know that seventeen is much better, or, for that matter, less stew-y.)

Everything I needed to know to be Safe was that if I didn't say Yes it was rape. Oh, and blood contact transmits AIDS.

That's what they taught me.

There's this little screaming voice somewhere in the back of my heart who sees an earnest person who does not mean harm saying, "Look, but we don't know if they're teaching good information in those classes, that's reasonable concern" and ... this is the person who The System was trying to appease when it lied to me, symbolically speaking.

It's hard to respond to that rationally.

I mean, a rational voice might point out that you know exactly as much about what your school's sex ed classes are teaching the kids as you do about what they're teaching about geography or science: you have the same level of access to the handouts and research materials, the same ability to look at the school curricula, the same ability to write cranky letters to the administration about it and get it adjusted. That's a rational thing to say, a rational thing to point at.

But of course learning where Madagascar is isn't as fucking terrifying as learning where the clitoris is, and the existence of electrons doesn't hold a candle to the danger of the existence of gay people.

And I can't be rational about this. There's this little chunk of my psyche that responds to the Dutiful Parent With Concerns as if it were the great oceanic beast come lurching up to devour the virgin sacrifice where The System left her bound and vulnerable to pay for its hubris. I can't be rational, with my heart tasting of sea spray and terror.

Blogging For Sex Education Day

Blogging For Sex Education, hosted by Renegade Evolution, who is keeping this link roundup.

I'm quite certain that someone else is out there pointing out that starting sex education at the point at which people's brains are starting to be scrambled up by puberty is bone stupid, or perhaps boner stupid. I'm quite certain that someone else is out there pointing out that the statistics from Europe indicate that extensive sex education covering all of the physical mechanics and such seems to lead to lower teen pregnancy rates, lower teen sex rates, a later age of first sexual activity, and all that stuff. And even if someone doesn't have it covered, I'll presume that all seven of my readers are capable of googling for those factoids now that I've mentioned them, so I don't have to go do it. These are things that matter to me, but they're not the big, personal rant I have to make. So now that I've at least gestured at this other stuff, the thing.

Knowing the mechanics is nowhere near good enough. It's not good enough to have an encyclopedic knowledge of STDs, how to use birth control of a dozen different varieties. It's not good enough to have access to this stuff either.

The hardest part of sex education is not the facts. Facts are easy, if you can get someone to teach them: they just are, they sit there in little rows and are factual.

The hardest part is knowing what to do about them.

Adolescence is a confusing, complicated time to start out with, full of all kinds of emotional shifts, and into that mix is the development of more active sexuality from its inchoate roots. I think in general the culture I grew up in is not very good at navigating this time, and it is terrible at doing so with matters involving sexuality.

And part of this is the emphasis on giving out facts. Which are, again, important, but not the whole shape of things.

When I was maybe twelvish, I got given one of those "Okay, you're entering puberty, this is what you can expect" books. And it was useful, and full of facts, and I read it several times. And I still say that my left breast is stuck in Tanner Stage Four -- in fact, I said it to my new doctor last week. And then when I went back to reread, mostly what I pored over was the single chapter on emotions. Over and over again, trying to get something that would help me sort out how I felt about sex and sexuality, how to actually relate this to what I was experiencing. I saw the author had another book on the subject, and asked my parents for it -- I'd been told to ask them if I had any questions, and that was the one I asked -- and when I got it, I read through it, hoping for something that would help, and it didn't have anything that would help me evaluate the stuff in my head or do anything useful with it.

The stuff I wanted to know was stuff like:

How do I relate the stuff in my head that hooks into my sexuality (much of which was entirely incompatible with the real world levels of fantasy world construction) to dealing with real people? (And here, I think, a lot of stuff that would really help young folk who are wrestling with issues of their kink would fall, even without necessarily going into kink explicitly.)

How do I evaluate what I want to do in general? How do I do sexual scouting missions safely so I can learn what I'm comfortable with? How do I define my boundaries? How do I defend those boundaries from people who are not actively malicious? How do I defend those boundaries from people who are actively malicious?

How do I negotiate with people about sexuality and romance and all of this new stuff? How do I approach people? How do I respond to people who want to approach me? How do I get enough space to think about all of this usefully?

How do I say no in ways that will be clear and likely to be respected?

How do I know when I want to say yes?


And I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I didn't know how to think about this stuff when I was fourteen. I didn't know how to evaluate it, how to determine whether or not I wanted something, how to say no clearly when I'd decided that I didn't, how to say "This is going too fast", how to say, "I don't like that", I didn't know how to say any of that -- and I had to build the ability to even think about it up from scratch, because I didn't have any tools to apply to these questions at all, and I didn't know how to ask for them or do anything other than build them myself, which is a slow, difficult process and could not keep up with the progress of a relationship with someone notably older who had presumably worked a lot of this shit out for himself already.

And that's where sex education failed me: I do believe that had I been clearer, more able to communicate, more able to understand what I was going through and what I wanted, I would not have been sexually assaulted. The guy who assaulted me was also a reasonably inexperienced kid, but not a Bad Person, and he could've used a little training on "How do I ask if she wants something?" to balance my needing a little training on "How do I figure out what I want?", and I really do think if I had known when I wanted to start saying 'no' he would have been able to listen to me.

But neither of us had the damn skills to navigate that social situation, because learning about how to implement sexuality is done by throwing a bunch of adolescents into a school system and seeing who survives. There's no knowing how to think about it, or evaluate it, and these days the abstinence-only shit pre-assumes the correct answer to "What do I want?" and doesn't give any tools for actually getting there.

I want more people to survive adolescence whole -- and that means I want people to figure out how to think about sex, how to make reasonable judgements on it, evaluate the risks -- not only physical and temporal but social and emotional -- and make and hold to decisions they make on it. I was never given those tools, or a way of getting to those tools, and because of that, I didn't make it out in one piece.

Navigating the Labyrinth: Left-Hand Rule

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here be monsters.

Reflections on Schooling, Effort, and Praise

So I went to a magnet school for high school. (For those unfamiliar with the terminology: a 'magnet school' draws some fraction of its population from a larger region than a normal school for a special program. So, for example, it might draw its students from an entire county rather than a single district. These programs can be arts programs, sciences programs, other academic programs; it varies a good bit. The general notion is for students deemed "gifted" in some way; the schools for problem students are not typically referred to as "magnets".)

A reasonable fraction of the people who went through my high school's program broke down in some way when they hit college. Some needed to take a leave of absence for a year or change schools, or had seriously shaky academic time there, or did what I did and broke down entirely, dropped out, and never returned. To the point that my mother dropped me an email a while back saying, more or less, "Is it just me, or do a lot of people who went through that program wind up breaking down?"

It's something I've seen a reasonable amount in other people, too, who didn't go through that program. Hit a certain point, flame out. And live with the sort of weird, awkward guilt about never living up to that potential that people always talked about, way back when, before the nervous breakdown, or before the really terrible sophomore year grades, or before settling for getting a degree somewhere else just to escape and go seek a quiet, less spotlighted place to hide.

So I see a link to this article about praise, smart kids, and the trend towards mediocrity and mostly spend a lot of time nodding.

And thinking that yeah, I do crave praise at times -- but mostly I want specific things, solid things, not the 'you did that well' or the 'you looked good'. I want to know what and why and how and have something tangible to hold on to, because the generalities just ... aren't ... real.