So, the Barbie thing.

Googling "Quiet dignity" "Barbie" does not in fact turn up a new toy line, but rather references to the latest tempest in a teapot among organised science fiction writing/fandom/thing, such as this one, which quotes a rather interesting bit, a part of which is:

She has always been a role model for young girls, and has remained popular with millions of them throughout their entire lives, because she maintained her quiet dignity the way a woman should.

("Role model" is kind of an interesting phrase, isn't it?)

But anyway, the thing that came to my mind when I saw that going around (with its associated "She's a nice girl, she doesn't dress slutty, she doesn't complain to Ken about having things tough, and so on" rhetoric) was that Barbie is quiet because she is made of plastic.

This isn't a far-fetched thing to read when a science fiction writer talks about this kind of thing, it's not like robot housewives aren't a staple in genre and even in the surrounding culture.

A woman should be quiet.

Like an inanimate thing.

A toy, to be specific.

Made out of a manufactured substance.

"The way a woman should."

Dear Unfortunate Implications Fairy: do you think C. J. Henderson noticed your visit at all?  That was a very generous gift you provided.

T is for the Tree Goddess

One of the things about gods is that they have theophanies, particular appearances and mysteries tied to that appearance.  (I know several people for whom the question "Which Brighid do you get?" is a sensical question.)

And life can get interesting when multiple gods have the same theophany.

So consider the Tree Goddess.  She appears in a number of mortuary texts as a shelter for the dead and source of food for the spirit.  Sometimes she turns up in vignettes as a tree with a woman's head and breasts (and the sycamore fig, the relevant tree, produced sap referred to as milk, so those breasts are rather more literal a figurative than many).  She was a manifestation of the only large tree that grew in pharaonic Egypt, a source of food and shelter and timber.  The gate of dawn was a pair of sycamore figs made of precious turquoise, and the sun passed out between them in the morning.

The Lady of the Sycamore, Hetheru, can be assumed to have the fig as one of her theophanies.  And she brings herself to sweep through that filter: the lady of joy and wealth, perhaps her intoxication coming in the form of a fig wine, the stately lady who is Queen of Heaven.  She comes as the healer of Heru's wounded eyes, and she comes as the Lady of the West who shelters and welcomes the spirits of those who go forth upon their mooring day.  The Tree Goddess is therefore filled with regenerating life, the magnetic draw towards joy that characterises being and creation.

Nut also appears as the Tree Goddess, as lady of the coffin and womb of the dreaming dead, extending her shelter and protection to those beneath her branches as well as those she conceals within her body.  She comes as starry heaven, mother of all things manifest including her grandfather the sun, and perhaps those twin sycamores from which he emerges at dawn are her thighs as she births him.  The Tree Goddess is therefore filled with the power of manifestation and eternity, the light of the unwearying stars, and the birth of reality.

And also, the Tree Goddess is Aset, whose shapeshifting might shall not be limited to merely animal forms.  She comes as the lady of the throne, the one who establishes and nurtures power, whose standards are high and whose glory is great.  She comes great of magic, whose words are underlaid with the ultimate power of the name of the Creator.  She comes as the mourner of the dead, who throws open the coffin and pleads with eternity for the return of temporality.  The Tree Goddess is therefore filled with power and dedication, with yearning and with continuity, the power that takes what is ancestral and makes it live in the now.

Here she is, the great tree: her roots sink deep into the earth, twining with her (Nut's) husband Geb in eternal aching, separated save for this touch at the horizon.  Here she is, the great tree: branches embracing heaven, reaching to mingle with her (Hetharu's) husband Heru in eternal celebration, a house great enough to hold him.  Here she is, the great tree, cradling each star as she cradles her (Aset's) husband Wesir in his eternal reign in the lands of twilight and dawn, standing at the boundary between worlds.  Here she is, the great tree, offering food and drink, offering shelter and healing, her strength an eternity and her trunk reaching across even the horizons between all worlds.

Bleeding Mama

I got linked to these posts by guest blogger Maia on Feministe. These links came up in comments, and I am reminded of my commentary on privilege feminism a while back. And this post got linked along the way.

All of which is kind of context for where this bit is bleeding out.

Antiprincess got me between the eyes with this comment, by the way:

the idea of “child-friendly” space vs. “child-free” space is not really about comfort or convenience or “appropriate” behavior or environment. it’s piggybacking (over generations) on the “separate spheres” thing – the idea that men do things in public space and, well, women and children do whatever it is they do wherever it is they do it, at any rate in a space separate from men (private space).

And Faith followed it up with this:

Actually, no one seems to really want to address the problem of women being isolated from certain parts of society if they have children. At best folks have simply stated that parents have to accept a certain amount of isolation when we become parents (and they do use the word parent while ignoring that women are the primary caretakers the majority of the time…), yet no one who espouses this has really given any reasonable explanation for exactly why women just have to accept this isolation.

Since Little Foot was born, I've felt very political.

It's a hard and complicated thing, and I don't know where to go with it, or even where to go with talking about it. I don't know how to tackle it, because it's so large, and because there's nowhere immediate and obvious to get a grip on it. It puts a strange, sharp edge on things, things that matter to me, and I have no fucking words, here.

I've also felt overwhelmingly hopeless about it.

I mean, even if I set aside all the bits where it's farcial to imagine that a freak like me - a polyamorous pagan kinky woman who dropped out of school for mental health reasons - might manage to do a damn thing in the political machine. Even if I imagine that there's some alternate route to organisation and action that hits what I need to do that I can do, which ... I see people do, across a gulf of unshared experience, and I don't know how to pick up those pieces which aren't mine. Even if I set aside all that.

I don't know how to do it. I didn't grow up in a world where mami did the union negotiations with a baby on her hip, as BFP wrote about in one of those threads - I grew up in the world where, for all that it was more integrated then than it is now, there was the children's universe and the rest of the world and it was cute when I listened to All Things Considered and came away wanting to make the budget numbers add up because I could do algebra. Cute, not meaningful. I grew up in a world where any memory of being listened to as a human being is tainted with the sneering, raging, "Your father treats you like an adult." I grew up in a world where I wondered when I would be old enough that someone would consider my opinions on the public sphere worthwhile (answer: sometime in my twenties).

And in that world, there are no public mothers. Because of the separation of the spheres, that white privileged woman's fucking paradise, angel of the household, that thing that was the big feminist victory to escape, to let women into the public sphere. People in public aren't parents; parents - read, mothers - are demi-human, shadows on the public sphere, people who are ghosts in the economy, when the economy is what really matters to be human. Now that I am a mother, it matters to me to touch the public sphere, and now that I am a mother, I am bereft of any understanding of how to do it. (Even if the issues that lost me my schooling would let me, which is another kettle of fish entire.)

Somewhere in one of those threads is a set of people saying that centering children is buying into that Little Precious Can Do No Wrong notion that my child is somehow the most important and perfect entity ever spawned. The idea that radical love by whatever means are necessary - as the guest blogger put it - that centers children is really about the solipistic individualism of the sick society built on capitalism rather than actually being the way a movement goes.

It has to be the way a movement goes, from where I sit.

Because it's too late for me.

It's not too late for my little girl. She hasn't been sexually assaulted. She hasn't been bullied. She hasn't been broken by administrative bullshit. She hasn't had her mental health shatter in a way that destroyed her for years. All of these things that happened to me, they haven't happened to her.

I can't build a world where the stuff that happened to me didn't happen. Those words are already written into the fabric of time. I can't center me, build a political effort around making things okay for me, because even though they're okay now there are worlds and worlds of ways in which the way I got here was not okay. I can't center me and rehash the things that happened to me and make it all about me and ignore all the things that happened to other people whose different courses through the wide wild world of not okay didn't coincide with mine.

I have to center the children. Not just my baby, all the children, because it's only when the children are safe from brutality that nobody will live brutalised.

And I don't even know if this is hope or despair. It bleeds, that's all I know.

Or A Serious Expression In The Middle Of July

The Mother's for Women's Lib carnival linked me to this post, which contains this paragraph:

Not only are traditionally female fan objects and fan engagements devalued, the very gender identity of the fan thus becomes problematic: reading done in private by women is a selfish and time-wasting activity, and fannish investment is a selfish and time-wasting squandering of emotion. Mothers, however, are meant to focus their activities and emotions on one target only: their family. Capitalist culture has long been undergirded by domestic ideology: the man’s primary domain is the capitalist world, where selfishness and aggressivity are rewarded, while the woman’s primary domain is home, where she creates social awareness by selflessly volunteering and providing moral guidance for the next generation. I’m taking this directly from my domestic/bourgeois ideology lecture for the British nineteenth century, but frankly, living in a white middle class suburban area with two kids in private school, the ideological structure of my community doesn’t really look all that different.

And that's an interesting thing.

I have gotten, since Little Foot was born, profoundly jealous of what time I get to spend on myself. And it's hard, on a lot of levels - I mean, starting with the comment "being selfish is one of the worst crimes a woman can commit without breaking the law" but also all the ways in which my time is circumscribed - whether because I actively need to be minding Little Foot or, like now: she finally went down for a nap, after a fussy day in which she largely refused to sleep. I should go, for example, grab the towels out of the bathroom and wash them, but if I put her down she might wake up. (She has been very, very easy to wake of late, alas.) Which necessity - the dirty towels or the unrested infant - rules?

I have always struggled with taking time for myself, seesawing between complete self-sacrifice and a tendency towards indulgence without ever quite knowing where the range of legitimate behaviour fell. It is not something - growing up in a context where any time spent on myself was proof of my selfishness - that I learned well. Nor a culture designed to help rational thought on the subject, even if I were not kept from learning it at home.

And there are the half-spoken assumptions: that of course the lion and I would stop playing games when we have children, for example. That our recreations will become proper, whatever that means. I already watch baseball games, maybe we'd have to take up more television sports? Or - to really buy into the mythologies of adulthood, that his world would be consumed with Job and my world would be consumed with Baby and neither of us would ever have scope for our own pursuits again, except maybe a movie every year or two when the stars align and someone else could mind the babe.

I find myself strung up by the self-doubt, neither counting off tasks - fold the laundry, clean the bedroom, catalogue the crate of books, whatever else - nor taking time to relax, poised between the two because I have no space to give myself for either.

I think maybe this is why I'm tired.

The Cult of Mommon

Trinity posted a link to this article thing. And, man.

But let's talk about the greatest gift a woman can receive: being a mommy.

This pisses me the fuck off even more now that I have a Little Foot to look after. I mean, the gender-essentialist 'women are all about the baybeez' thing has always annoyed me, especially since I know plenty of women who aren't so much and a few men who are, and the amount of 'No, really, you should have kids (unless you're some kind of my-standard-of-defective, in which case you should never come within a half mile of one)' bullshit in this culture makes me crazy.

I'm not touching the rest of this stupid article, just that one sentence.

No, "being a mommy" is not a fucking gift. The magic stork did not drop by my place with a giftwrapped angelbaby who never requires anything inconvenient, okay?

You know where my baby came from? My innards. And I built her over forty-one weeks of nausea, increasing mobility impairment, heartburn, significant gender dysphoria, emotional fragility, and, admittedly, reprieve from my depression. Her arrival was two days of fucking back labor, frustration, blood loss, and twelve goddamn stitches done despite the fact that apparently my body will only consider believing in lidocaine for brief moments.

Gifts do not require twelve stitches upon receipt, people.

And that's not touching on people who had C-sections, who went through long-term adoption processes, who otherwise, y'know, worked and sacrificed and bled and paid for their shot at 'being a mommy'. Or a daddy. Or. That's not touching on people who have been locked out of parenthood because the adoption agency won't place with a gay parent. That's not touching on a whole lot of things.

Being a mommy is not something that was bestowed upon me like the halo on a medieval madonna painting, unlike what this sentence would like you to believe. This sentence, like all of the mommy-worship culture, wants to paint a beatific portrait of motherhood, the angel of the household proven with the babe-in-arms.

Being a parent is something that one does. And it's something that one has to do every single day, a constant choice, a deliberate act.

Deliberate consciously chosen perpetual commitments: also not gifts.

What makes me a mother is not mystical processes bestowed upon me by a benevolent universe because I have a worthy uterus. It is not some external thing that fluttered down and spread its wings over my family.

What makes me a mother is sitting here typing this blog post with Little Foot cradled in one elbow because she needs to nurse. What makes me a mother is bouncing her when she has bellyache, changing her diapers, giving her a bath. What makes me a mother is doing this even when I feel like crud because of my current state of illness. And, y'know, these same things - barring the breastfeeding - are the things that make the other members of my family parents.

I have always had a vocation towards motherhood, and always been aware of what that would require of me. I spent ages fearful about this, worried that my depression would mean that I was doomed to be a failure as a mother, someone who would not be able to properly care for my child. And frankly I resent the idea that the years of work and therapy and personal development I spent preparing, the nine months of gestation, and the weeks of recovery and childcare are a gift as opposed to a goddamn accomplishment.

And there is a trap in this "gift" language - if a mother has a bad day, needs someone else to look after the kid because ohmygodsI'mgoinginsaneIwillneverhavepersonalspaceagain or thescreamingthescreaming or ifIdon'tgettwohoursofuninterruptedsleepnowsohelpmeIwillexplode or whatever else - well, that's being an ungrateful bitch. Because motherhood is a "gift", you know, this magic thing bestowed upon the worthy and enuterused, and that means that one is obligated to bow one's head and cradle the baby and look holy so that the motherworship can commence, because how can we properly revere someone who has mud and blood in the sacred motherhood and who acknowledges that there are times that it is fucking hard to do and my gods, I'm pulling my hair out here need some time away, etc.?

The "gift" of motherhood is a trap, simultaneously erasing investment and effort and commitment and choice and dedication and making it unconscionable to express displeasure, talk about issues, have postpartum depression, express a realistic picture of what it is to have a baby. It erases the experience in order to replace it with something clean and pristine that can be adored without contemplation of consequences or actual respect for the real efforts of mothers.

I am not your fucking madonna-and-child icon, proving my worth for worship by placid acceptance of this bounty.

Motherhood is not a fucking present.

A baby is not lagniappe.

Little Foot is tucked up against my breast, one arm wrapped around it with her cheek pillowed on the nipple. When I look at her, she smiles in her sleep; if she were awake, she would meet my eyes and beam with a toothless grin, pure delight at being with me.

That is a gift.

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!

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.

Scenes from a Life, Trauma Ward Edition

The fingers of my left hand grip the edge of the sink because my balance rocks back and forth with the sobs; I am trying to brush my teeth, a process rendered notably more complicated by the way the crying keeps bringing up washes of bile for me to strangle on.

I hear his voice in the hall, asking me what's wrong, asking me if I'm all right, and I don't have enough leftover breath after the tears to make any voluntary sounds. I spit into the sink, still clutching it for stability. There is a tap at the door; eventually it opens and he winds an arm around me, holding me as I sniffle into his shoulder.

Another round of bile comes up; I turn and spit it into the sink. "Is that blood?" he asks, concerned. I cough. "Yes. I'm pregnant. My gums bleed." The bleeding doesn't have anything to do with the trigger, it's just normal, unremarkable. The tears are something else. He holds the hair back from my face in case I have something else to spit up.

I cling to him a little longer, and then lurch out of the bathroom. "Since I'm awake..." he gestures into the bathroom, and I nod and crawl into bed, slowly strip off my clothes and fling them into the closet where I'll need to sort them into the laundry later, and take a sip of water from one of the mugs there. Then the nausea comes again in earnest, bringing with it panic: the bathroom is still shut. I grab the other mug, the empty one that needs to go down to be washed, and throw up in that.

When he gets out of the loo, I lurch back, dump the contents of the mug into the toilet, rinse it out. "We need to remember that," I mumble as I slump back into the bed. He holds me a while, I forget how long, whether there was any talking, any explaining of the ripped-open space in me, the way I was thrown back to old thoughts, old patterns, back to fighting for the mental space to actually blame the one who tried to rape me for the assault rather than letting the responsibility dissolve in a wind of excuses.

"Do you want me to take the mug downstairs?" I shrug. "It's on the bathroom, uh. Thing." "I'll rinse it out." "I did that, it just needs to go down." He takes it down and, I presume, puts it in the dishwasher; I curl up in a kind of null space and snivel.

He settles back next to me, strokes my skin gently. We talk, curled up together; the cat climbs up on the bed, walks up the length of my body, wanders off again. His questions bring me out of shaking trauma reaction and into analysis, taking apart my responses, working through where it came from; making me realise what, precisely, triggered my meltdown, what bit of damage needs washing clean and sewing up so it can mend a little. I track it back, thinking of all the ways I have blamed myself for the assault, the ways I made excuses for my attacker, the ways I let him off the hook, cut the slack: remembered that every time I've told a part of that story, every single person has been harsher about him than I have ever been willing to be. I remember that I have never been able to forgive myself for being fourteen, for not knowing how to take up the responsibility to police some dumb boy's penis and thus being - in that defective image - entirely to blame for the consequences of his erection.

I remember identifying the colonists in my mind, and the way that lanced the rotten wound, oozing out pus and blood, and I can feel its ragged edges and know that it has still not healed. It is an old wound, old and familiar and unscarred and suddenly torn deeper and sharper and bleeding fresh.

I am shaking, spent, wracked with pain and memory; even my own room, my own space, does not manage to give me shelter.

"Could you take me down a little and hold me?"

He strokes my neck, gently. "I'm surprised you're not down a little already, after--"

After earlier, when he had told me that he was going to bed, fingers laced into my hair and sending me into half-dreamspace with a perfect touch, earlier when I had looked up into his eyes and told him, wonderingly, how gorgeous he is. Earlier, when he said he was too tired for anything now, but a few hours of sleep and he'd probably be happy with whatever inclinations I had.

Earlier, when I had anticipated crawling into bed for the love and comfort that I got, but without the raked-open heart needing emergency sutures, when I might have been able to bury my face in his chest and feel his hand on the back of my neck and just feel the joy of it. When it might have been possible to make love in the gentle warmth of the dark, rather than just cling and claw to presence, too fragile, too brittle, to be able to accept the comfort of anything other than the burying my face against his skin and shaking.

"There's been a bit of an emotional interruption," I say, trying to say it lightly, with that lilt of understatement, and failing.

Another future speared through with reality. Too much lost opportunity, too much lost time, with one thing and another; my distraction or his, my medical needs, his schoolwork, now this quaking betrayal of savage memories and old wounds. By this point, the birds are starting to greet the sun, a fact which I greet with bitter sarcasm that makes him smile gently and cradle me close. I will need to be awake in a few hours, at this point, and I cannot imagine sleeping well.

He held me, and I felt the tickling, teasing tears roll down my cheeks.

Not One Of Your Holiday Games

One of Ren's prompts for this next round of the Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy was on the importance of women naming their own sexuality. And I've been thinking about that one for a while.

And after a lot of contemplation, I'm left with the feeling that it boils down to "If I don't do it, someone else will." If I want to leave it inchoate, unnamed, mysterious, I have to keep it entirely secret, because any sign that I have a hint of sexuality somewhere will be dragged out and assigned meaning by someone else. Even the category of being unsexed can be sexualised in some cases.

I have to make my own meanings, hold to them, define myself, or someone else will try to override me.

I am a cissexual woman. If I don't work on what, if anything, that means then I can get swept away in all of the cultural meanings of 'woman' and buffeted between them. Trapped between madonna and whore, career woman and brainwashed housewife, all the dichotamous piles of what 'woman' means. Whether it means I'm perceived as a set of penetratable holes and some boobs, or a little child in need of paternalistic protection, or both simultaneously, or one of the other godawful forms of womanness that floats around and tries to latch onto people like a facehugger out of Aliens and infest them with parasitic larvae doesn't matter: if I don't have a strong enough narrative of myself to refute these things, I can get infected and corrupted by these things. I am someone with these body parts and no dysphoria about them; it has no ontology, no deeper truth.

I am heterosexual. I am not in denial of my true and intrinsic bisexuality; I am not compelled into unsatisfying relationships by a heteronormative culture; I do not experience my orientation as fluid and malleable because I am a woman; I do not project my sexuality into images of women in the media; I do not consider my attractions to be oppression. I like looking at certain men, because I find them attractive, and I am just fine with that, thanks.

I am a sexual assault survivor. I am not a victim for revictimising, an object of pity, someone whose entire life and reality orbits around a golden afternoon in 1992 that left its marks in my mind. I will not be truncated and boxed into no more than helplessness and damage. I will not accept the myths, that I have a perpetually defective sexuality because of my experiences, that I just need to loosen up and get laid more to get over my trauma, that my kink or my polyamory or my anything else is a result of being warped, that my flashbacks or fears are a sign that I am a defective. All of which I have heard. I am a person who had a horrible experience; I have suffered, and I have worked to heal.

I am polyamorous. I am not looking for a quick lay, I am not available to just anyone, I am not too damaged to commit, I am not incapable of real love, I am not any of these other stereotypes or condemnations. I was not abandoned by my father, nor was I sexually abused. I am a person with two wonderful, committed, loving partners to spend my life with and another person of whom I am quite fond indeed.

I am kinky. My kink was not created by assault, manufactured by patriarchy, adapted from a need to seek abuse and disparagement, born of a sense of inferiority, a sign that I am a pathetic doormat, an invitation to treat me like a victim, or a signpost to deeper psychological defects. It is what it is, and I have invited commentary on neither the legitimacy of how I choose to conduct my relationships nor the progress of my spiritual development.

I am pregnant. This is not a validation of traditional barefoot-in-the-kitchen mores, a sign that I am more interested in baybees than my own autonomy, ownership by a man, a betrayal of women's freedom, a perpetuation of patriarchy, a sign that I am the right kind of woman with correct values, an embodiment of The Goddess [tm], or whatever other crazed myths that come up about motherhood. It is a part of the process of mammalian reproduction, which is not unrelated to sexuality.

Also: I am an emotional abuse survivor. I have my stories. If you want to define my reality for me, to override who I am and where I came from, to erase my stories, you are just like the one who abused me. I will exist in defiance of you and your fantasies about who I am, and I will not be quiet because you find me inconvenient. I don't care what your agenda is, whether it is important to you as a feminist or a traditionalist or a whatever else that people like me not exist and not be heard: you are the enemy of my personhood and my souls, and I deny you the power to name me.

I am many, many things, multitudinous beyond listing, and I. Am. Not. Yours.

I don't want other people's stories about me. I have my own.

If you want to have stories about me, listen - or, as a friend put it once, refrain from copulation and discorporate.

Examination Burnout

I was reminded of something by this post, and it's stuff I've mostly found too raw to post about, but I feel like writing a bit now while it's in my head.

I've written before about "Just Say No" culture and sexuality. What I haven't talked about was the way denial-and-examination culture intersected with my inner kinks.

When I was an elementary school child, I started building an understanding of my sexuality as it was at the time. I had very separated experiences of physical sexual pleasure and romantic attraction - it had not occurred to me that these were related - but I explored both as best I could. I was aware that my experience of romantic attraction was somehow related to "grownup things" like marriage and families, but I recognised (consciously, even) that that was something I would figure out when I was older; for now, there was the boy, and I could beat him at wrestling.

Once my fantasy life had developed into fiction rather than fascination with the boy, and once I had grown enough of it for my sense of physical pleasure to get tied into my sense of attraction, they took on a structure of extreme power differential, often with bondage aspects. I was never ashamed of these fantasies, or, as I thought of them, the stories I told myself when going to sleep; however, I knew, bone-deep, that I could never talk about them.

I never have.

(Think about that for a moment. I have never talked about those fantasies in more than generalised referents, themes and content.)

I knew that if I told anyone about them, they would try to figure out what was wrong with me. I didn't know words like "misogyny", but I knew that I'd have the concept thrown at me. I knew that I'd be treated as sick and wrong, because Good People don't have thoughts like that. I knew that I would never, ever be able to express these things; at least on that last I was wrong.

And as I became aware that these things were things I should not express, I became aware of the idea of examination. I had an obligation, I knew, to figure out where these things had come from, that they could be excised. I was a sleeper agent of the oppressor, my sexuality out to subvert everything that women could achieve, and I had to cure myself. There was no support for this - it was still unspeakable horror - but it was clear that the wrongness was something that I would be expected to purge before I was an adult.

Guilt started to creep in around the edges. The fantasies became even more secret, because there was this edge of belief that I should not be that way, that I should be someone else, someone more loyal, more diligent, more compatible with the universal goals that I had been assigned on the basis of my sex, class, and race. I squelched the impulses in my more conscious mind, leaving them only the release of the nighttime stories, giving me dreams of the taboo-breaking man who might love and own and honor me despite the shackles of surrounding culture.

I was an emotionally isolated young adolescent, full of need and loneliness and hunger and wanting to explore the concepts of sex and not knowing how. Nothing in the world around me had ever given me any understanding for figuring out what I wanted or how to implement that safely; I was still half-consciously aware that what I wanted was Bad anyway, so figuring out how to get it was unthinkable.

It didn't go away, of course. And sometimes these things come out in badly sublimated ways. Hook a loop of fear-paralysation into a mind frantically denying its need to surrender, bait a touch-starved, curious adolescent with affection from a pretty older boy, and watch a psyche fragment into a perfect rape victim and a panicked, impotent observer. Respectful and loving submission was unavailable, unthinkable, unallowable, so all I had was deer-in-the-headlights capitulation, where my sexual drives and my terror and his unceasing pressure conspired to shove me into a closet in my head.

And maybe, with a little more examination, I might guess that this is one of the real reasons that I have never really been able to forgive myself. Because, after all, if I didn't have those wicked, shameful desires, then maybe the combination of mental lockup and pressure wouldn't have been enough to get my psyche fridged. It can't really be his damn fault, right? He just happened to luck into that siren song of unacceptable woman-hating sexuality. And I can't hold it against him, because he stopped short of rape in the end, when he saw that I was broken. (I can't even write 'that he'd broken me' and feel honest, right now.)

This was not ... the only time I fell into that pattern, though it was the only time it was assault. I had an abusive vanilla relationship that hit my submission buttons around music until I hit a wall and threw him out of my life. I had a relationship with someone who was deeply uncomfortable with my submission, and so like a good little subbie and a good little woman I stifled it again to make him happy. I had other issues. And I worked on it until I came to a place where I could return to childhood and refuse to be ashamed.

Where does it come from? I don't give a damn. And not giving a damn is not just a political position about the unworthiness of the question, but me fighting back against the investigation of myself for which fruit of Original Sin was why I deserved to be nearly raped before menarche.

If the message had been that I needed to figure out how to deal with these desires in a sane, reasonable, and balanced manner, if it had included discussion of consent and how to set boundaries, if it had been anything other than "WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?! WHY ARE YOU A FREAK?!", maybe things would have been different.

Why am I like this? If my established answer isn't good enough, fuck off. Why am I a freak? Welcome to the edge of the map. The Antipodes, where men walk upside down.

Watch your step. I bite.

The Shareef Don't Like It

There is a giant dwama ongoing in the blogworld again, mostly talking about BDSM. I've been dithering about whether I want to comment on it, whether I have anything new to say; I've chased down links, I've pulled up a stash of old posts to point people at, and so on.

And there's all kinds of stuff out there. About "women who allege to enjoy BDSM", say. Or how consent is bad, there's a brainbender for you. Women are responsible for the actions of patriarchal men, and don't you forget it, and eat your lima beans, there are children starving in far-away places. And people who disagree are 'little girls' who need to be chastised by the wiser among us, of course. Oh yes, charming calls for tops to kill themselves: "If exploring your “dark side” entails wanking to women being tortured, it might be best to leave it unexplored. Or kill yourself." Godwin's Law is, of course, satisfied. Or some other joyous things that Ren has catalogued for the world. But don't forget, none of this speaking out about those horrible people has any power to harm anyone anyway, so why are you upset in the first place? It's not paternalistic or anything to be Concerned about submissive women, you know.

Now, I don't expect to get any more response than I did the first time I responded to this nonsense, as one of the major players has explicitly stated that she's only "getting into it" with men who reply to her, and while she claims to be reading and considering, well, the level of response to me, to antiprincess, Cara, hexy, Subversive Submissive, all in threads where she was a participant until one of the above showed up, well, I guess we're not worthy of response. No, the problem is teh mens, not us poor deluded women, especially the submissive ones. So we don't actually get anything even resembling an acknowledgement. We're just defending our doms, after all. Or something. No, only the ones In Autoritah should be responding.

(Thanks to Ren and Trin for linking to most of these so I don't have to trawl through the cesspit myself. I find it interesting that Nine Deuce considers them worthy of responding to. Maybe it's that "You must be a man" thing striking again.)

... I could generate more links. But really, that's plenty depressing enough, and if you go read them you're in for some masochism. I'm linking to them primarily because I find holding these kinds of 'discussions' with gaps in the communication threads tends to lead to insidious results. Nobody can claim I'm taking them out of context or responding in bad faith; the context is all there in its hideous glory. And I'm not feeling like playing scared of trolls and assholes descending upon me because I had the temerity to speak up, no matter how out of place it might be for a woman and a submissive to say something.

What I find depressing about this - I mean, aside from the virulent hostility and Wrong Womaning and stuff like that - is the notion that all of this stuff is unexamined, that people don't write about it, think about it, that it's all just happy fluffy "Well it makes me happy!" There's the snarky, "How can you feel derided for being a submissive woman? in the middle of those threads deriding submissive women, and I think back to writing about the forms of power that someone of my sex, class, and background was socially obligated to and the persistent social degradation of support roles, which cannot but carry over into sexual support roles. About my experiences in an 'egalitarian' relationship that denied my kink, for that matter, and how much more oppressive that turned out to be than a relationship where I can be an equal partner, just as whole and present as myself as my liege.

ND claims to understand where "submissive women" are coming from with some fascinating strawmen about what that might be, to be "charitable" about the zoo exhibit's motivations. And uses terms like "M/f", one of those peculiar gender fetishes that kind of creeps me the hell out, suggesting that it's so hard to be accepted as sexual in this society so being in a situation where one can be "out of control" might be appealing, how submission is intrinsically derived from shame and all, and other suggestions that BDSM is just plain disordered, a coping mechanism that's only semi-functional at best.

I see people writing that kink is about humiliation and degradation and pain, nothing other than rape and abuse, snidely dismissing things as silly frivolous people who think they're 'empowered' by their sexual escapades, participating in the intrinsic treatment of women as inferior, just about being wild and other and transgressive. Some of them treat kink culture as a monolithic edifice in which if one specific act can be condemned the rest will fall apart. They talk about fantasy worlds, recapitulating experiences of abuse, the poor unenlightened and benighted submissives who need to be liberated, and similar things.

None of them have asked about pride. Or sensuality. There have been no investigations of the nature of power and gendered assumptions about it that I have seen. None have touched on anything that might reach the potential inspirational power of submission.

Nobody has really reached for actual power and taken it to bed with them.

In all this examining and exploration and demanding understanding of why submissives are the way we are, is there ...

... anything I can say that I haven't already said?

Welcome to the Mommy Wars

The other night I went chasing links around on 'Heartless Bitches International' due to a link posted at Figleaf's. ... until I got sickly depressed and had to stop. It's not enough dealing with crazy shit like GreenConsciousness, as documented at Bastante Already, but one of those sites that I find darkly and crankily amusing went at it too.

The context: mail from a rather skeevy-sounding fellow who had a quote-unquote traditional relationship with a stay-at-home-wife-and-mother type whose responsibilities were childcare and "looking good", for which end he invested a pretty penny in miscellaneous beauty products and what have you and yet expected other people to police their websites for him rather than supervising the kid.

Quite the prize, eh?

So I read this. And the editorial comments start out all right. Stuff like, "Equality would be if she CHOSE this."

And then there's ...

"I'll bet your wife is on an antidepressant, and you convince yourself that all "happy, well-adjusted" women are."

And the mental-health-ablism-thing hits me like a punch in the nose. Oh yeah, right, real women aren't on Prozac. I forgot that. That's all part of housewife ennui, which we've been medicating for for a while to keep those Donna Reeds mellow and in their places, not something that might actually have a history, an etiology, a deeper meaning.

Carry on a little further and we get:

"[Being a stay-at-home mother]'s really a shelter for a woman who is afraid to fail or try."

... where was that 'choice' thing again that I thought we were talking about?

And then we go on. And on. And on.

"She's set herself up to be a parasite her whole life, and you are more than happy to have her this way. You couldn't be more prehistoric if you hobbled her. Frankly, I'm glad the two of you found each other."

"I have known some women that have turned their backs on the life of the "kept woman" simply because their values were more than skin deep."

"You might not have worked so hard, however, if you had motherhood, sexual favors and the ability to have someone ELSE bring home the bacon, to fall back on."

Um.

"Oh... that's right -because in YOUR opinion, it's more valuable for a WOMAN to raise a child than contribute things like a cure for cancer, or ensure justice is served, or design buildings to withstand earthquakes..."

And now we get this -- not only must one be out there doing the career thing, but really, the ones who count and matter, the ones everyone is measured against, are the elites.

And since I was never going to cure cancer anyway ....

...

I just, just. Fuck it all, y'know?

Hi. Mentally ill housewife here. 'Scuse me for breathing, feminist movement.

Getting Real

Trin at SM-F linked to this post with a comment about "What is this equation of BDSM stuff and roleplaying, and where is the renfaire notion coming from again?"

I can't even say I wish I knew, because combining "roleplaying" and "sex" creeps me out so much that I don't even like reading discussions of it. It's probably not the biggest squick I have, but it's the biggest one I can see right at the moment (and I desperately need a nap, so I'm more myopic than usual, but hey).

If it's not real, it's not sexy to me.

And I think part of the reason that this distaste is so deep, visceral, and intense has to do with my experience of sexual harassment and my assault -- this constant barrage of people who wanted not-me sexually. Who had this pinup notion of me in their head, regardless of consent or reality, and made constant reference to it in their interactions with me, never letting me be unaware of this me-shaped blowup doll they were imagining me into.

That sort of thing, the creation of the role, reminds me too much of living in space where my sexuality wasn't mine, was regularly appropriated for other people's entertainment, where I didn't exist as anything other than the vessel for the game.

It burned me out on any notion of pretending to something I'm not where sexuality is involved.

And I'm a hell of a gamer. And in fact I've met probably a majority of the partners I've had in my life in gaming circles of one sort or another - let's see, flirting over Magic: the Gathering, met at a game store, playing Shadowrun (our characters wound up married, too), online roleplaying game, AD&D game, online RPG, at a weekly gaming gathering .... You're not going to get an "OMG the horrible gamers, the weirdos" out of me.

But I don't play games with sex.

I want my sex raw and real and present and accepting of the wholeness of me, without censoring away bits or tidying it all up into some kind of fantasy world that detracts from the genuineness of where and who I am.

It's not a place where I want anything other than reality.

And this is one of the reasons that my liege and I are intermittently working on a more or less formal contract that covers the full scope of our relationship and my service, because the whole of me is not willing to just pretend that I'm only his in the bedroom. The whole of me puts the kettle on when it knows to expect him dropping by; that's not in the bedroom. And it's not a game.

It produces real tea, not a fantasy. I'm not pretending to boil water, the water is actually, realio trulio little pet dragon hot. I'm not roleplaying a waitress or a maid or whatever other little game some people might want to give a thrill to their tea-making; I just make the goddamn tea.

O The Embarrassment

I can't respond to this in a way that makes sense on the threads, because where I'm coming from is utterly tangential; the origin of the discussion is here and here.

One of those places that I'm ludicrously short-fused is when I run into stuff that equates submission with humiliation. I sort of touched on it obliquely when writing about language and terminology and 'name-calling' before.

I actually had a long conversation with my husband a while back trying to get an explanation of mere erotic embarassment that made any sense to me. After going back and forth for over an hour, I still didn't really see how it could work. So the best I can do is figure that other people are wired up differently from me and not think about it too hard because it makes me queasy.

Which it really does.

And I think it comes down to a place where the contrarian iron is in my spine. The short enough to be catchy but a little too short to be perfectly accurate way of putting it would be:

If I got off on being a lesser being, I'd have run back to mommy when they threw me out of school.

And it's not just the mommy issues or the failure at college thing; it's that my life has made me into someone who wants to defy shame. (And one of the things that I find powerfully attractive about my liege is his lack of shame, and lack of interest in it.)

And experience with bullies and experience with abuse means that my reaction to someone trying to twist a perceived weak spot, to humiliate, or degrade ... is cold fury. Sometimes controlled; sometimes not. I protect my vulnerable spots, and someone who wants to get me alone to twist a knife into them will run into my defenses, not get happy pervy goodness out of it.

I spent my childhood as scrawny, bookish, socially inept; my early adolescence in a maze of social abuse and sexual harassment and appropriation; my adolescence shaken by the aftermath of assault and a growing awareness of myself as Unacceptable due to my sexuality, my religion, my politics, my lack of class-appropriate ambition, my failure at higher education, my domestic focus, my mental illness. I have had enough of being treated as a defective or lesser being, well past enough.

And when she tried to coerce me back to the explosive shelter of my disintegrating parental home where I could be further humiliated and degraded, I refused. That's the key thing: I refused. I drew the line, I extracted myself from that.

I'm not going back, not to anything like that.

My happy pervy goodness comes out of being in an interaction where I am able to be whole. Not crushed into something lesser, but where my entire self, including the darker and more fragile pieces, including the parts that the outside world wants to break me of (like an impulse to service) are honored, are valuable, are precious, are holy.

Someone who thinks that my desire to be possessed and of service is a matter of humiliating me is not treating that desire with any respect, and thus becomes someone from whom that desire must be protected. Not someone who can share it.

Time Better Spent

So I've been sort of half-assedly observing some of the blogs I read having a small explodiation about something about burlesque and the fallout from same, with the usual suspects having a "Why aren't you people concerned about raunch culture and teh pr0n, this is the most important feminist thing evar!" around the edges.

This is one of those things that boggles the everliving fuck out of me. And I haven't written in a while, so I'll pretend that my bogglement is substantial.

A few issues that this person who doesn't file herself as a feminist has personal some-might-say-feminist interest in, either from personal experience or concern over personal friends, in no particular order:

1) Social support for victims and survivors of sexual assault and rape. The notion that "real" rape is perpetrated by a stranger, and thus being assaulted by a partner, a friend or acquaintance, a medical professional, an officer of the law, or in some other scenario that isn't "leap out of the bushes in the park at night" is not legitimate trauma. The treatment of people who have been assaulted or raped as perpetually damaged and marked by their victim status, and thus unable to have a real life afterwards. Treatment of certain categories of people as unrapeable because of their believed status as subhuman or so-voracious-consent-is-irrelevant, including but not limited to: sex workers, people of color, trans people, disabled people. Addressing the frequency of sexual assault of queer people as a form of orientation and gender policing.

2) Social treatment of nurturing and support - and thus commonly assigned to female - tasks as not really work and not worthy of time, attention, or remuneration. Parenting is a big one of these. Domestic tasks, unless of course one is poor, typically brown, and cleaning someone else's house. Nursing. Elderly care.

3) Health care access in the United States sucks. Especially for the poor, the under- and unemployed, the chronically ill, and the people who fall disproportionately into those categories due to systemic prejudice: people of color, women, the elderly, people with disabilities, etc.

4) Anti-family culture in the United States is really damn pervasive. (It's also in other countries; the example that comes to mind is an Irish friend.) The default social expectation is that career will overwhelm all other things, meaning that time to spend time with partners, children, and actually having one's life is eaten away by "actually, we expect this overtime". The Price of Motherhood's introduction includes the author noting that she had to write the book when someone asked her, "Didn't you used to be Ann Crittenden?", rendering her entire identity dependent on the job-worshipping culture, and her status as a parent negating even her name.

5) Sex education. If I had gotten better sex ed, stuff that covered how to think about my sexuality and what I wanted to do with it, then I would probably not have been sexually assaulted. Period. Not just "Here are the horrible things that could happen to you if you fuck", but actual awareness of the thing, yes, disease and pregnancy prevention but also, y'know, someone once mentioning the word "consent", say. Good sex ed will reduce pregnancy rates and disease rates, and I bet they'd make a lot of people a whole lot less traumatised by sex due to situations of dubious consent like the one I went through, too.

6) Sexualisation of children. We do not need toddler-sized thongs in the universe. (We could do with girl-gendered clothes for young children being built to the durability standards of boy-gendered clothes, too.) I count "purity balls" as the sexualisation of children, by the way.

7) The whole madonna/whore undercurrent of culture. There's a reason I have a "good woman" tag on this blog. The cultural assumption that there is a good way to be a woman and a bad way to be a woman, and the bad women will be raped, shamed, abused, and discarded is broadly a Bad Thing. And I don't give a damn whether the "good woman" is a fine, upstanding feminist citizen or the pretty virgin-whore (but only available for her lawful owner) or whatever other standard exists: all these standards hurt people. The proliferation of standards upholds the existence of the dichotomy, because it's even more impossible to be a "good woman".

8) The undermining and discarding of women's agency as sexual beings. Which is pervasive and everywhere, whether it's the "sex is something men get from women by tricks or coercion" thing, or the thing I wrote about a while back where discussions of polygamy essentially disregarded the notion that women might have preferences, or the good woman standard of sexual purity, or slut-shaming which is its flipside, or the double-standards of male and female sexuality, or the assumption that a woman who is sexual is generally sexually available, or .... Women's abilities to choose relationships, express their sexuality, or otherwise exercise free will are constantly questioned, and women are pop-culturally treated as the prizes of men with agency.

9) Differential treatment of women's and men's health. Cheap Viagra vs. umpty-lump a month for contraceptive hormones (if they're covered at all). Better coverage for prostate care than endometriosis. Female sexual dysfunction treated as mythological or the fault of the woman's partner(s) rather than a possible legitimate health problem. Women's knowledge of their own medical concerns not being taken seriously. Doctors not listening to women's concerns. Hypermedicalisation of pregnancy and childbirth (sometimes in connection with #4).

10) Appearance policing and shaming. The one I've seen the most of is around weight and diet issues, and it's gone both in the standard-cultural hatred for heavier people direction and some really vicious backlash the other way. A sideline into eating disorders, constant dieting and discussion of dieting, and food obsession (which I'm extremely cranky about at the moment as I'm supposed to go on a celiac diet, and neurotic attentiveness to ingredients makes me miserable and crazy, and wheat is fucking everywhere). But also sidelines into such idiocies as whether or not one shaves and what one shaves, makeup habits, clothing conformity, and that sort of thing. Treatment of visible aging as neutering.

11) Creeping Dominionism. I mean, speaking as a crazed mystic polytheist, I can't say that I'm big on the whole rewrite the universe in the structures prescribed by a particular lunatic-conservative reading of the Bible just to start with, speaking as a woman I don't like what that means for the status of women. Let alone the speaking as a sexual deviant and all. Or someone who isn't interested in religiously justified war.

12) Rape apology. I'm really kind of bothered by rape apology from all sides, she said, with mild understatement. And I've seen whole bunches of really creepy ways of getting rapists and assaulters out of responsibility for their actions. To name a few off the top of my head: "What'd she expect, going home with him?" "If you get assaulted, well, you encouraged it by being a stripper." "She was wearing that short skirt." "You can't rape a man, they always want it." "Of course, the porn indoctrinated him into that behaviour." "Men are all rapists." "It's impossible for a woman to consent under patriarchy." "We have to give this severely disabled woman a hysterectomy so she doesn't get pregnant." "She had more than one partner, she had to expect that people would think she was available." "Flaunting her sexuality." "Trying to pass as a...." All of these get people who commit sexual assault out of responsibility free. They remove distinctions, generate rhetorical chaff, and/or dismiss and denigrate the actual experiences of assault survivors.

13) All women are one woman thinking. I made a few giggle-waves in the blogworld a while back talking about the "woman as arcade game" mode in some cultural thought -- this notion that there's a cheat code that will make women behave appropriately, perhaps like that which can be found in self-help books, and women who don't jump in accordance with the latest programming are defective somehow. But there's also the appropriation of women's experiences by other women, or by men looking for victim stories. I ranted about the pagan equivalent of this thing a little bit ago, like last month, the essentialising of female experience into a genero-goddess. The bullying of women whose experiences don't fit the party line for what women are supposed to be like in whatever subcommunity is looking.

14) The creepy interest some people have in knowing about my genitalia for such things as determining whether or not I should be able to be recognised as married.

15) Underemployment of women in general. Which is partly a consequence of disproportionate amounts of caretaking (and thus not listable as work experience) work falling on women, subtle discrimination, and driving women out of the workplace because dealing with the sexism is exhausting, but also of this massive intersectional mess where, say, older men may be respectable, but older women can't get work.

There. Fifteen things I think more worth spending angst-time on than porn and high heels.

Examining Desire

Oh look, it's another discussion of how to examine one's sexual desires. To which one party has responded with raising the question of what the problem is with examining and analysing this stuff, anyway.

So here's the thing:

No amount of "examination" will make any form of sexuality ideologically correct.

Sexuality does not have an ideology.

As people said in various places in this blowup, a penis in a vagina is a penis in a vagina; it's sex, it's normal/natural/biologically common/whatever, it doesn't have an ideology. The meaning is something that people create, attach, ascribe.

I've been chewing for a while about the occasional "just because a woman chooses that does not mean it's a feminist choice" thing that crops up, and have come to the conclusion that the concept of 'a feminist choice' is meaningless. And, in fact, that the notion that there are 'feminist choices' and 'non-feminist choices' is one of the major factors that drove me the fuck out of feminism.

It is possible to tune one's level of analysis to make every possible choice wrong, when "examining one's choices". It's easy. It is certainly, given my socialisation and upbringing, the level of analysis that I will automatically gravitate towards: it is so easy to slide to whatever level of analysis will frame me as defective.

I mean, I've written a couple of times before about the white knight who was sure that I needed to be rescued from the horrible fate of having the love and support of some wonderful men. There's a level of analysis there, that looks at the socially known patterns of multiple relationships and finds a lot of abusiveness there, that knows about problems with women with low self-esteem being likely to get into bad situations, and so on; there's not enough "examination" to notice the paternalism or listen to the actual perspective of the other people involved, but that's par for the course. And saying, "Examine more!" won't make a difference; it's all fully examined, even if the analysis is obviously defective when viewed by people outside the system.

But what's the system?

Take this one, for something that isn't obviously some man telling a woman "UR DOIN IT RONG":

I'm a housewife.

This is one of those things that gets a lot of handwringing "examine that!" responses. Lack of financial independence, check. Short resume in the event that Horrible Things Happen and I need to be supporting myself, check. In this situation in part because of being a dropout and thus in the ranks of the undereducated-for-modern-employment, check. Buying into patriarchal norms of appropriate womanhood, che--

Well then. I've written before about how the norms of "appropriate womanhood" where I grew up had a lot more to do with getting into the boardroom, the tenured faculty, and the White House than housewifery. And how attempting to conform to that standard despite my poor suitability for those roles was, shall we say, rough on me. So there's a little more examining to throw into the pot. And when I examine that far, I wonder if maybe Doing What The Pat Says Not To Do Reflexively is maybe another Controlled By The Pat thing, like a teenaged rebel who hasn't thought this through.

And then the little self-analysis mode goes into maybe being lazy and too entitled to go work outside the house, which I can stew in for months at a time if I'm not careful. Never mind that my time supporting myself left me feeling used and abused and actively unclean at times, not to mention the number it did on my mental health. And I examine a little more and find the bit where the work done at home is not socially marked as actual work (unless one does it in someone else's home, in which it's work only fit for poor women), and for that matter the creative work that I do is not socially respected as real work (see also, "But what's your real job?" directed, at some point, at just about every writer in the universe). And examining down another layer, well, that's all just an excuse, isn't it?

And if I keep examining, I wind up at "That's all just an excuse to justify doing what you want. Doing what you want is being a selfish bitch by definition, you selfish bitch." No matter what I examine, I wind up there. Protestant work ethic, a thread in there, and examining that one which runs so deep goes straight back at "selfish bitch", even when I am ideologically committed to an abundant universe.

There are no "win" choices. I choose this place to give myself time to pursue my callings -- my religious work, my creative work, eventually my mothering work -- and support my family in non-financial ways, not only because I have the option to choose it but because I am ill-suited to many other choices. Someone else may choose the same thing because of ideology of some sort, which I may or may not personally approve of or consider adequately enlightened or whatever.

But the choice has no opinion on the matter. It's not representative of an ideology; it is, at most, an emerging result of the interaction with ideology and reality. And the same ideology will lead to different choices when running into different bits of reality, and different ideologies will produce indistinguishable choices in various circumstances.

So back to sex.

Where the things that produce arousal come from is one of those deep mysteries. There's evidence that sometimes, they come from traumas, imprinting, juxtapositions that made an impression of the mind, sometimes they have biochemical origin points in part, and that sometimes they just come from somewhere and fucked if we know. Thinking about where they came from can be an interesting thought exercise, but I've found that the only intellectually honest answer I can present for some of them is agnoticism: I don't know, and I don't believe it's knowable.

"Why don't I just lie here anyway? Why don't I climb out? Why don't I just go zootlewurdle. Does it matter? Even if it does matter, does it matter that it matters?

(Pause)

Zootlewurdle, zootlewurdle, zootlewurdle...."

-- Marvin the Paranoid Android, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio broadcast, episode eleven, by Douglas N. Adams

Examining sexuality in the light of ideology seems to me to consistently come up with pernicious results. Mostly because it's generally framed not as "What sex do I want to have?" but "What sex should I want to have?"

When asking the question "What sex do I want to have?" all this stuff reasonably goes into the pot -- what is actually desired, what is acceptable to one's sensibilities to act upon, and so on. And this is quiet, personal stuff that has to do with one's own consent and desire to consent, one's recognition of the differences between fantasy and reality, and is only the business of anyone else if they're expected to participate. At which point they get to decide if that particular thing is sex they want to have for whatever reason they choose to do -- which may or may not include ideology at all, and they don't have to say why.

"What sex should I want?" goes into all kinds of ugly directions pretty much immediately -- slut-shaming kicks in on any female desire for sex at all, internalised homophobia chews up anyone with queer attractions and spits them out, anyone remotely pervy winds up wrestling with the possibility that they're some kind of monster, huge swaths of fantasy sexuality get shrinkwrapped and sanitised for your protection in the name of Practice Safer Wanking, and shame and guilt over sexuality are the rule, not the exception. It engages the prurient parts of ideologies, the invasive attention that expects someone's political to be everyone's personal, the creepy social stalker that wants to grope inside people's underwear before letting them get married.

Swapping from the default sex-negative culture's ideological perspective on acceptable sex to a different ideological perspective on acceptable sex doesn't fix the problem. It doesn't even change the problem. It just comes up with a new way of examining sexuality in order to determine who's having the wrong sex. To which the answer is, unsurprisingly: usually women, usually the people who aren't having mainstream sex for reasons of number, gender, or activity, usually the people whose sexuality is unacceptable to the dominant paradigm already. And the fact that these new ideologies pretty much paint the same people as unacceptable as the things they're supposedly critiquing ... goes unexamined.

But the examination, the taking apart of desire in the name of ideology, it mostly just makes people ashamed. It doesn't go anywhere rewarding; it ponders the unknowable until people get disgusted with themselves or their desires, or blow it off as useless, and if they blow it off as useless they get told that they're shallow, not thinking things through, saying "Whatever gets me off is okay."

I got asked the other day whether 'my feminist beliefs' had problems with me being submissive.

I just ... was too tired to get into how angry I get at that question.

(Added: A link to another instance of a post I linked up there somewhere, because there's conversation happening there.)

Goddesses and Bellies

I liked the neo-pagan triple goddess concept a lot better when I was younger.

And part of that was me still being in my concussed duotheism period, in which I kept trying to wodge the divine into gender-based boxes, never mind that I suck at fitting me into a gender-based box and why should the divine be any less wacky than a single embodied human? I may be large and contain multitudes, but there's only a countable infinity of ways I can be weird. A deity has curves.

(That's a really weird math joke. Just nod and smile.)

It seemed so real and physical and focused, this sort of down in the mud-and-blood notion of what a lifecycle looked like. It was lived reality, not a problem; of course things should reflect.

And then I noticed that that concept didn't have much in the way of similar cycles for men, and that was kind of weird.

And then I noticed ...

... so here's the thing ...

The whole structure depends on fertility patterns, right? And the status of a woman depends on the status of her uterus: unripe, in use, past use. This is ...

... limiting. Cramping, in all kinds of non-referential ways.

(And then I started to get to know actual goddesses, do my research, and started having my brain shattered by the notions some people have about what a crone is. Or what have you. Trying to impose a modern-Romantic system on figures much older and without that sort of fluff. So it only gets worse from there.)

And I was on the pill for a couple of years, off it for a couple of years, on it for seven more, and now that I'm off it again I like chocolate and my moustache-area hair is coming in darker, and I have no idea what to make of that at all, and I can't even pretend to fit myself into this phases-of-womanhood shit, even making allowances for motherhood not necessarily meaning bio-offspring, but all kinds of other things.

Where am I?

Bleeding like whoa, and philosophical about it, I suppose.

The Colour Of Your Argument

A while back, the webcomic XKCD posted this comic titled 'Jealousy'. Which, well, I wouldn't ordinarily blog about.

And, as is usual for XKCD, the livejournal RSS feed for the comic included a ridiculous number of comments. Which, again, I wouldn't ordinarily blog about.

Sometimes I skim at least the visible comments on the first page. And, of course, it's been long enough that the feed as expired that I can't pull up the comments word-for-word, which just goes to show I'm a flake who's behind on her blog queue, but hey.

And of course there were a few smug poly people who said something to the effect of, well, you know, if they were just poly this sort of shit wouldn't be a problem. Which I mostly roll my eyes at as predictable, though at the moment I'm sufficiently annoyed by one of the smug poly assholes of the universe that I want to amend that to, "Free clue, guys: being poly doesn't make it work out. Being poly doesn't mean that people don't have to make choices, sometimes hard ones, about who they want to be with. Being poly doesn't magically make it not hurt. Being poly doesn't mean that jealousy flies away on little gossamer wings to plague someone less enlightened than thou. Being poly may give you more perceived options for dealing with that sort of thing; it may also get you into more of that sort of situation. Grow the fuck up."

Ahem.

One of the comments there was really striking, though. And it went something like:

"Blah blah fat ugly poly slob women oh this wouldn't happen if you were just poly!"

I run into this occasionally, and it blows my mind. "The only people who are poly are ugly! The only people who are poly are fat!" The anti-poly bigotry comes extensively linked with sizeism and looksism, and with an occasional leavening of ablism (especially mental health ablism). It seems a strange thing to say to someone with multiple partners. "You only have more than one lover because you're so unattractive!" Generally aimed at women.

What?

And if I dig into this a little, I'm pretty sure I dig up some of the expectations of good and valuable women there. It reminds me of the runin with the giant fuckwit who was convinced that the only reason a woman could possibly want more than one partner was because she perceived herself as too damaged to "deserve" one all to herself. Such a woman must be willing to be used for sex by anyone who would have her, and didn't have the assertiveness or standing to demand exclusivity.

If the "high-value" women are presumed to have the standing to demand a monogamous relationship, then, logically, the ones who don't have a monogamous relationship must not be the valuable ones. And since "value" on a woman is marked in terms of desirability, they must all be the ones the poster thinks unfuckable.

And I've encountered people who say, more or less, "But really, whenever I see a poly gathering, all the women are gigantic, and ...."

And I've started going to a poly social gathering more or less regularly, because I have an hour to kill before a class I'm taking around the corner from the coffee shop where it's held, and I think about who shows up, appearance-wise, and the major trait that I can think that's most common to that crowd is:

Dyed hair.

Generally in cool colours like blue or purple.

There's the fellow with the white curly hair and the purple streak who was talking about his son's post-college-graduation plans this week. The woman with the blue-dyed hair who looks luminous when backlit. The punky-looking woman with the short-cropped pink-dyed hair. The woman with subtle purple streaks. The geeky-looking young woman with the end of her braid done in lovely green. (There are also the couple of big bald guys, an occasional polo-shirt-wearing guy who will speak quietly about being a submissive, a woman whose black hair is done in about a hundred tiny braids, an assortment of quietly professionally-dressed people who come by after work, and so on. Ordinary people. Many of whom have dye.)

Hell, I've been known to have a green streak, and I need to make another go at dyeing my tips blue. I got some advice at the poly social a few weeks ago, after all.

Does this mean anything about the demographics of polyamorous people? No. Most of the poly people I've met in other venues don't have dyed hair.

It means that the poly social is held in the coffee shop with the tattooed-and-pierced-and-dyed androgynous baristas, in a community full of geeky weirdos who cultivate the sorts of jobs where nobody throws a fit if they come in magenta.

The size demographics, attractiveness demographics, whatever? Look completely normal. Maybe a little older than the standard people who hang out in the coffee shop with the alty androgynous baristas, overall, less studenty around the edges. But ... just people.