The Physical Possibility of Gender In The Mind of Someone Watching

Last week my liege and I took the kids and went to visit his grandmother.

This is always an exercise in barely-contained chaos, really, and at one point the three adults were sitting in the kitchen while the kids chased each other around the loop of the house, shrieking and bellowing with glee.

"They're so girly at this age," commented his grandmother, perhaps because Little Foot - upon hearing a comment on her shock of hair - paused in her orbits and brushed her curls forward into her face to show them off, before of course whooping and charging off again like a very perky hound of hell.

At least, that's our only possible guess as to what might have been meant.

It's stuff like that that makes me feel like an alien anthropologist.  "Tell me about the customs of your quaint little planet...."

The Illusion of Able-Bodiedness

Right now, I really want to be able to pretend to be able-bodied again.

I have spent much of my life getting good at pretending.  It meant that my incapacities were moral failings rather than concerns of health, sure, but somehow it's easier to be a failure than to wrestle with actual embodiment, and living in a body that in subtle, quiet ways fails to serve what I want to do with it.

(But in the spiritual process that comes of needing to sharply start shedding those comfortable lies, the comfort goes along with the lies....)

What brings this to a head, of course, is the way treatment brings health into a sharp relief.  If I can take a pill and be more energetic, more functional, stronger, more competent... then all the structural incompetence is something that can't stand, and I have to replace it with something else.

If I manage to put trust in numbers when I could not put trust in myself, and the numbers not only reveal my autoimmune problem but other deficiencies in my chemistry, then I cannot ... not honestly ... say that one set of numbers validates me and the other does not.

Even if it would be nice, when the treatment for the other set of numbers makes me frail and helpless and trembling and unable to stabilise my emotional state, to say "I don't believe in this" and throw it aside.  Because I looked up the problem, and it had things like risks of permanent neurological damage, and even if I don't believe in the dualism and even if I don't know how to comfortably be in my body my mind, I was using that thing, okay?

Being angry is getting me through it.  It gives me enough strength to keep from collapse.  Maybe not the best of solutions but for the lack of anything else that works I will just keep at that.  I can be angry at the loss of my illusions, here, even if many of them were illusions that I was worthless, that I was just as free to act and be and do what I dreamed in the world as anyone else.

I spent time working on, wrestling with, fighting my way to a place where I could work on embodiment, on not drifting up into the realms of the theoretical and the mind.  This is a thing that's part of my training in my Craft work, something that I need to do to be effective in reality, and as I get deep into this work, deep deep in, my body's frailty catches me and I am caught in this deep, penetrating weakness.  And because I can't just stop what I'm doing, pop up into the realm of the mind, for so many reasons, I have to face my way through what it is to be embodied in a body that ... is like this one.

A is for Apotheosis

Your purification is the purification of Heru

Your purification is the purification of Set
Your purification is the purification of Djehwty
Your purification is the purification of Dwn-Anwy
Your purification is the purification of your ka
Your purification is the purification of your purification
and this purification of yours also
Is among your brethren, the gods.
- Pyramid Text 36

Your brethren, the gods.

What kinship is there between the human and the divine?

Well, there's the ka, of course, as explicitly mentioned - which is fundamentally the many-divided and multiply-intertwined ka of the Creator, differentiated unto millions.  But the ka is a different sort of identity than is addressed with "you", most times, so that is at best only an incomplete suggestion of an answer.

The word for 'god' in Egyptian can be translated with, I feel, more nuance, as 'divine power'.  And I would suggest from that that there is a gradation there: one can have divine power, and one can also be a divine power.  Certainly, there are cases in Egyptian lore of a human accumulating sufficient netjer to become netjer - Imhotep being a primary example of such a person (who was not previously a bearer of the Kingly Ka, which complicates the whole divinity question a touch).

Heka - the most commonly discussed power of magic - was a gift granted to humans in order to "ward off events", or something rather like that.  It is a divine power.  (It also means 'activation of the ka', and thus resonates with that deep divinity.)  Akhu, another magical word, is also the word for "ancestors", and indeed the ancestors are commonly thought of as closer to the gods in some ways than the living.

But there is the inner truth, the personal netjer, that ideal and aspirational being, the personal power within.  That which you are the only one who can achieve it is bound up with that personal divinity, that personal place.  The intimate and most individual of powers, the purification of which is also the purification of your brethren, the gods.

Who is this flower above me

And what is the work of this god?
I would know myself in all my parts.
- "The Flower Prayer"

X is for X______________

Okay, yeah, whatever, that's excessively meta.

But that's where you sign your name on the dotted line.  Put down your mark, all of that stuff.

It's worth thinking about what you put your name to, where you put your commitments.  And this isn't just a "which god do you swear to" (or by, or at) sort of thing.

Because your commitments are a part of how you build your worth, your personal authority: the point of pride that is your personal law.  Your discipline, the spine of your practice.

This is the root of magic, among other things: being able to stick to your intention.  Whether your magic is based in word or will or some other thing, you need to bloody well follow through.

It seems like a simple thing, but it really rather isn't.  Everything slips, everything loosens up at times.  Meaning to do it isn't doing it.  (And that's what Yoda was on about, right?  Don't intend, act.)  This is one of those Witch's Pyramid points, to will, to put creation in motion in the forms you demand of it.

This point of pride, of action, these things make up how your identity is defined: what you follow through on, what you affiliate with, what you allow to shine.


(I meant what I said and I said what I meant, an elephant's faithful one hundred percent.)

V is for Vino Veritas

Hetharu is the Lady of Intoxication.

There's a lot to be said around that, and a lot of it is actually kind of difficult to express.  I mean, there's the obvious point that the use of alcohol is not something problematic, but it's hard to avoid that on a culture that is heavily constructed around beer in any case.

But here is a thing: one of the effects of alcohol is what gets called "lowered inhibitions".  It brings forward all of those desires that one wouldn't admit to ordinarily, and takes the brakes off, meaning they're more likely to happen.

There is a peculiar honesty to alcohol.

I suspect that's where "in vino veritas" comes from, that sense that people who have been loosened with that particular drug will show something less constrained, something that is in some way more real.  (It will reveal people whose secret desires are foul and antisocial as well, which is knowledge worth having at times even when dealing with someone who is a "good person" when sober....)

Not all the things people feel constrained from are awful.  Some of them are small things.

It's worth knowing where the narrow spots are, sometimes.

(Tipsy, I stop fixing my typos.

I make broader, more expansive gestures with my hands.

I poke people in the nose.  Generally people I'm close to who won't mind.  Much.

I pun.)

Q is for Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

(Yeah, I know.  But 'queer' and 'questions' were too predictable-feeling, and anyway I write about that sort of thing all the time and doing it over just didn't give me any warmfuzzies.)

It's always an interesting question, the one of "Who is one answerable to?"

One of the reasons that a lot of pagans have anarchic tendencies is that, having grown up observing Organised Religion Tee-Em, well, a lot of us see that Organising tends to encourage people to get themselves into positions where nobody will feel able to call them on their shit.

One of the other reasons that a lot of pagans have anarchic tendencies is that they don't want to get into a position where someone will have the authority to call them on their shit.

Both of these approaches have their problems.  (She said blandly.)

Here's a fact of life: we're all of us going to be full of nonsense at some point along the line.  Sometimes it'll be a lot of nonsense, sometimes it'll be a little nonsense, but there will be nonsense.  With a little luck, we'll usually be able to notice that we're talking bollocks and stop doing so without making damned fools of ourselves - or doing harm to others.

I tell you something: there's stuff I dealt with when I was younger, where I genuinely don't know even with adult perspective how much of it was "real" and how much of it was some sort of contagious delusion.  (I can only be grateful that it was perhaps less grand than The War On The Astral and was less publically proclaimed.)  But one of the things that I think good about that time in my life is that - while a bunch of folks got quite wound up about it - we then went and dealt with it, and as far as I know nobody did a whole bunch of talking it up as a grand mystical experience or proof that this particular bunch of young folks had an especial type of experience unfamiliar to anyone else.  Or what have you.  We kept a decent watch on ourselves.

And that's part of the process, isn't it?  Run checks.  Try a couple perspectives on to see how what I'm doing looks if I don't assume that it's "real".  Whatever.

I wrote a bit of a checklist a while back which I will now cannibalise:

• Is this thought/experience/role/claim something that serves primarily to inflate my ego or serve as self-aggrandisement?  Is it a claim of specialness or separation from others?  (Is it heavily distinguished from the types of experiences that other people have claimed to have within my knowledge, for that matter?)

If the information from this process is about me, is it something personal to me ("I need to pursue this work/clean my room/quit my job/etc.") or is it something that I think other people should know about me?  Do I make it all about me even when it oughtn't be?

What fraction of stuff-about-me is "That's awesome!" or "I'm so cool!" and what fraction is "Fuck, I have to deal with that?" or "You want me to do what?"  (Work doesn't mean it's genuine, but actual effort required is more plausible than the universe handing out free cookies.)

What are the actual risks - to myself or others - from listening to the little voices and doing what they suggest?

Is the danger of listening to the little voices commensurate with the value of what is being pursued by that action (to both me and the entities thus proposed)?

IS MY SHIT SORTED RIGHT NOW?  Because if my shit is unsorted, then it's much more likely that I'm hearing my own emotional damage than something external, or my own insecurities, or simply my own potential for an epic stress meltdown.

Do I currently have the capacity to express good judgement in my ordinary life?  Am I expecting myself to have better ability to make significant choices than evidence suggests is a good idea (perhaps because I think dealing with esoteric/spiritual/whatever stuff will have fewer consequences than staying up so late that I get late to work in the morning and can't do my job or something)?

Am I working with spiritual/magical/religious tools that are supposed to produce this kind of experience, or is this totally random crap that I'm trying to organise?

If I am dealing with a known entity, is the sort of stuff I get from that entity consistent with other experiences of that entity?  With the lore, with the experiences of other practitioners, with mythology, with recorded ritual practice, etc.?  Do I get confirmation of unexpected details when I do further reading or talk with others?  (I had a fascinating confuence of similar experience when talking to other dedicants of Neb.y about our hair color ... which was also consistent with the lore.)

If I am in fact making up this experience, how would my behaviour patterns change, and are those other behaviours notably improved?  If I clean my room as part of a spiritual devotion that's one thing - but if I do spiritual devotions instead of cleaning my room, that's rather another.

It's worth having a checklist to keep a watch on oneself.  It's also worth having a community who can help run this and other checklists for each other.

But the problem in greater pagandom is a lot of people run into groups that don't run any sort of checklist.  It doesn't matter what crap they make up - they'll run into someone who'll believe it.

This does not serve us well.

J is for Juxtaposition

It's not unrelated to syncretism, actually, the setting of things against each other to form a contrast, the way contrasts and shifts produce enlightenment.

But it matters, really.

It matters to see that the crown is placed - the plants of south and north bound together - by both Heru and Set, that order and chaos combine to produce this whole.  It is not something achieved by one overwhelming the other, but a tandem function, strength as an individual and the collective heart of the community.

When a symbolism works with contrasts - the bird and the snake, red and black, male and female, whatever other things are framed as dynamic balance with each other - there are always those stark places where one meets the other face to face.  And those places matter, fundamentally.

One of the things that bothers me about my surrounding culture is the mutually annihilatory contrasts.  Good and evil, say, that whole Manichaean god-and-devil dance in which each is attempting to destroy the other, or whatever the fuck that's on about, and the world doesn't actually work that way at all so it all comes across as trying to turn reality into a big game of chess to me.  There Are Two Sides, They Are White And Black, And There Is Nothing But War.  Doesn't look a whit like the real world to me, so whenever I run into this kind of cosmology I'm at a loss.  It's like talking to people who are seriously waiting for their Hogwarts admission letter, really.

The real world is predator and prey, and there is no mutual annihilation there.  If the prey 'loses', vanishes away, obviously the predators die off.  If the predators vanish, the prey die too - starving in the winter because there are too many of them to survive on the forage, if nothing happens because their weaker members are no longer culled.  You put those together and you don't get Good Vs. Evil World-Annihilating Cagematch, you get a self-balancing ecosystem.  You get synergies and transformations and all kinds of interesting and flashy stuff.

That's what real juxapositions produce, this flash of something larger, more complex, in the give and take available.  These create edges, liminal spaces, in which one can find transformational magic.  This and that has its realm of thisandthat, even when it is an interplay of opposites.

S is for Syncretism

A lot of pagans are pretty down on eclectic pagans.  With good reason, of course, because a lot of eclecticism is done really crappily, with a lot of shallow cherry-picking of shiny objects out of their context and not a whole lot of thinking through systems and their implications.

One of the nice things about syncretic practice is that it requires at least one reasonably whole system.  One coherent worldview resonates with another set of practices, or even a few singular things, and eventually they can glom together tidily.

I started out what I thought of as dual path a number of years ago.  And the thing I found was that the more work I put into each path, the more it resembled the other.  While the trappings - the structure of ritual, say - were very different, a lot of the values, core goals, and even symbolism were very similar, so I find myself now reaching from one system into the other when I perceive a gap or something more directly addressed by one system.

It's all one thing.

It's hard to talk about what it is, though.  I talk a lot about my reconstructionist stuff, in part because I think it is an obligation as a reconstructionist to talk about my practices, my sources, and so on, in order to make the entire structure more accessible to others who can then build upon it and elaborate to meet their own needs.  I don't talk about my Craft stuff as much, because it's more personal and harder to talk about, and because other people don't need to know.  But actually as I do the work with these things, they're the same, and it's not straightforward to draw a line and say 'this is reconstruction' and 'that is Craft'.

I'm pretty sure I'm Not A Real Recon by a lot of people's standards, because I have this other stuff that threads through, and I patch my gaps with something other than whistling and vigorously flapping academic books over the holes in the hope that nobody will notice the vacancy.  And the 'other stuff' isn't academic - patching with different cultures' academic works would probably be more okay, if it's all "Okay instead of Egyptian I'm going to do Graeco-Egyptian and extrapolate back a bit" - which I also do.  But talking about a line with a nameable founder, that's way too woo and recent for a lot of reconstruction.

(To which I say "Unscrew you, at least I put footnotes in my work so you can fucking well go check my references yourself.  I may not be recon enough, but that's more than most of the 'legitimate' recons can be bothered with doing.")

It's nice to have the resonance box that can be built between multiple systems, especially when they're the same instrument in the end.

L is for Lord

It amazes me sometimes how touchy a lot of pagans are about the concept of entities with power.  For all that there are folks styling themselves Lord Thissythat and Lady Suchandso, the concept of lordship, of actual power and authority, that's a thing.  I mean, there are branches of pagandom who react to any overt acquisition of power as "power-over" which is defined, for some reason, as a bad thing in and of itself.

Hierarchical structures are anathema to a lot of pagans, I've noticed.  Knee-jerk reactions abound, whether it's to bowing to the restrictions placed by a teacher, having a person make a decision rather than coming to some form of consensus, valuing the input of people with greater experience commensurate with their knowledge, or to respecting the gods.  Obedience is frequently equated with abasement, and "... is whatever you want it to be!" is a fucking battle-cry.

And I come into this and refer to one of my gods as Neb.y - which means "my lord".  I come into this as someone who has heavy power-oriented Stuff in my sexuality which I am not ashamed of or willing to repress.  My skills are in realms of support rather than governance, and are best used in support of a competent governor.  None of this is stuff I'm willing to set aside in order to pay lip service to a community that treats distinctions of status as illegitimate - because in that community I am unable to do my job.

And that's what some of this stuff is about, the job.  I Am My Own Authority only gets me so far - because while I may be my own sovereign, I do not command the resources to do everything I want to do.  I have to deal with other entities, each of themselves sovereign, to get what I want, rather than declare by fiat.  I may make long-term agreements about relationships with those other governors, mortal and divine both.  (I may have my name on the deed, but the bank still holds a mortgage, okay?)

The appearance of power is pretty commonly appealing - Lardy Whoosisface is proof enough of that - but the entire shape of actual power, which comes with both responsibilities and the ability to change the world - that's a touchier thing, now, isn't it?  People don't want a god that gets called Lord, that's too Christian after all, isn't it?  And it suggests that there might be a rank difference, that someone might be able to make a decision that other people are expected to care about.  And we can't have that, oh no.


Back in the dark ages, I took a summer course in etymology.  One of our assignments was to go into the Oxford English Dictionary - an epic exploration involving the full-sized volumes in the college library - and investigate the origins of a common word.

The word I was assigned was "lord".

It derives from hlaf-weard (I may be spelling that wrong).

Which means "bread-guardian".  The governor of basic sustenance for the community.

W is for White Elephants

(Yeah, I am totally bouncing around in this thing and not getting a damn thing done on time.  Life exploded in the summer and I'm still putting together the pieces.  Here's one I'm gonna pretend is on time, ish, rather than spur-of-the-moment topical!)

A number of years ago, my aunt gave me a pair of porcelain elephants for Christmas.  I was never entirely certain what to make of this, to be honest - my family is certainly down with the snarky jokes - but I've moved the white elephants around with me because that is, of course, what one does with white elephants.  Never quite sure what to do with them.

Take that as a little frame story.  I'll get back to the elephants in a little bit.

A couple of weekends ago, I was at a religious retreat.  I'm not going to go into a whole hell of a lot of detail about this, but suffice it to say that I had a major life-transforming experience and have been spending the last few weeks figuring out how to put the pieces back together.

And one of the things that I've been working on is figuring out how to better actually deal with the whole self-respect dealie, which (between various things well-chronicled in the archives) is not one of my better skills.  And it's an important thing to do, and to actually make space for, and it's something that will reliably slip out of my grasp as soon as I have any stress in my life at all, at least going by my track record.

Now, one of the topics we discussed at retreat was time, and having a healthy relationship with time.  And the idea was raised: build an altar or shrine to time, make offerings, make prayers, deal with this Power as any other god or godling and see if being polite to it helps.

And while I have issues with time, they are nothing at all compared to my issues with self.

So I - while putting my room back together after the various crises that made me have to take it apart - decided to put up a me shrine.  Partly recognising what I have, in fact, done, partly aspirational.  I'm riffing on some chaos magic that my liege and I talked about years ago, the idea of writing up a character sheet for now and figuring out where to spend the points and how to get to the skillset that one wants to have on one's character sheet, and so on.  Make a space for it.

So I dedicated a shelf on the bookcase I was shelving tonight to this little project.  I unrolled a scroll of Ma'at that I'd never had a home for (indicative of something, for sure) and set it up so the shelves themselves hold Her in place.  Some tools I use for magical self-maintenance can go up there, sure; all the books I contributed to (or wrote) on one side of the shelf to remind me of real accomplishment; the weird black heart a friend gave me; my Lilith icon, since She's certainly one for demanding a bit of fucking self-respect ... and I propped the corners of it all with those two white elephants.

You see, white elephants, they have a bit of a troubled reputation, because they're those things you can't get rid of.  That's the idiom - nobody wants them, they kick around as tchotchkes forever, what have you.

But back it up a little.  The white elephant is particularly sacred and holy.  Being given a white elephant is an extreme honor, being given the caretaking of something so precious and rare.

Yes, it's high-maintenance taking care of a me.  But it's nonetheless a sacred trust.

L is for Love

I touched on this briefly when I wrote O is for Obligation, but, y'know, advantages of writing things out of sequence or something?

There's this really common narrative in understanding of religion around here, the whole 'god is love' thing.  Now, again, I'm just going to note that this is one of those places where Christianity is leaking into other things and leave it; it's a thing that's out there.

Love and the divine is complicated.  Let's start there.

One of the reasons that I drifted out of Christianity was that divine love wasn't satisfying to me.  The love of that god was something that I could recognise, but it was far too generic and impersonal for me. "I love you because you exist" mostly left me wanting some sort of personal relationship, something that cared about me as something beyond a breathing entity.  Yes: the divine powers love existence.  The divine powers are working to uphold and support existence, that's what They do and what They are, which means that you - as a thing that exists - are precious.

But that doesn't mean all that much.  The mosquito that got swatted yesterday was equally precious, because it was equally in existence, and now its remains - which still exist, are just as precious.  As those remains decompose, become part of the humus, and support a new life that will feed on their nutrients, that will also be precious.

"The gods love us" as a generic is a very, very, very low standard.  And I think the people who say it mean something a whole lot more significant than "We exist in the matter/energy matrix that the gods preserve".

We're used to that sort of anthropocentric thinking.  We talk about being a danger to nature, as if - should we make the planet uninhabitable to ourselves - it will destroy the world, rather than simply ending ours.  Or how the world was made for us, as the special pinnacle of creation, even though our knees are laughable from a structural engineering standpoint and our retinas are all installed backwards.

The idea that gods might not always have humans as their prime concern - or indeed that there might be gods with no particular interest in humans at all - is an uncomfortable one.  "But the gods love us!" is a shield against the indifference of the rest of the world to our individual uniqueness.  But, like I said before, 'A storm god taking a fancy to ya is not going to give you electricity resistance 10; this isn't D&D. If you're lucky, it'll give you the sense to keep in out of the rain.'  The love of a storm god doesn't keep you from getting electrocuted; the love of a war god may very well get you killed.  Probably gloriously.  But even so, from your point of view, you're still dead.

This isn't to say that gods don't form personal bonds with individuals, because They obviously do.  But that's not something that comes from god-dom, it comes from individuality.  It is of necessity a personal thing, not a generalisable one.  And that's something that will come of individual resonances, attractions, dedications, needs: it's not an entitlement.  Treating it as an entitlement is a good way to discourage it from happening, for much the same reason that guys who whine about how all the bitches would rather go out with jerks don't attract a lot of women.  But it's better to look for love from people who live in your world - which means to expect to find it among people who live the life you do, not glamorous movie stars, and not gods.

A lot of myths talk about gods forming personal relationships with humans.  It tends to make that human's life harder, overall, whether because of being brought more intimately into divine conflicts, being expected to shoulder more of the weight of the universe, or simply having more stuff to deal with.  It's genuinely a whole lot safer, in a lot of ways, to only have the level of interest from a deity that's along the lines of "I am doing this profession, and thus the god who is particularly interested in that profession appreciates me".

Not that safety is high on the list of standard human motivations. ;)

I will conclude with a major flip on the concept of love and gods.

I was once asked by an atheist something like, "What's the point of worshipping a god that isn't omnipotent?"

Which I didn't know how to answer, on multiple levels, starting with, "Well, it's a lot more useful to deal with entities that actually exist than ones that don't"....

But really, the core of the question comes down to being asked "What's the point of love?"

And someone who would ask that question - or who doesn't know that's the question they're asking - I don't know how to begin to talk to.

C is for the Craft

Mostly when I write religion, I write reconstructionism. I write books and research and the joy of finding a little nugget of something somewhere and bringing it out and polishing it until it shines and fits into the whole of the system. I write ancient theologies and stories written in ruined stone buildings.

The thing with recon, even the kind of deeply mystically oriented and extrapolative stuff that I do, is that it's fundamentally all known things. You could, if you got a burr up your arse, go read the same things I do and do the same work, and you might even come to basically the same conclusions. It's all out there.

It's not all that I do, of course, but that's the nature of icebergs.

Sometimes I don't talk about the Craft because, as a student, I'm not fully qualified to do so. Sometimes I don't talk about the Craft because what I do there is not that interesting to people outside my head - or I *do* talk about it, but I don't explicitly label it as religious work. Sometimes I don't talk about the Craft because the Craft doesn't want me to talk about it.

Silence is a crocodile.

Someone asked a group I was in recently what the "goal" of the Craft studies was. They compared it to an idea that the "goal" of Christianity is salvation, is reaching heaven.

I don't trust goals. Too much gets lost along the way.

The Craft is about getting my ass moving, not getting my ass to a specific location and then being done. The Craft is about relationship - within myself, with others, with the Powers, with the cosmos. The Craft is about the edges of things, the twilight space at the edge of a knife.

It's not about where you're going. It's not even about where you are. It's about how you choose to proceed.

Since I'm all about the quotations lately, let's do a bit of poetry. This is one of my favorites, and I think its relevance is obvious.

pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness --- electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of made is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence. We doctors know a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go E. E. Cummings

I got the formatting from this site because my HTML skills are not up for attempting to convey Cummings properly.

Unsaid Things

In the comments on this post on Figleaf's, Clarisse Thorn posted a link to this post, in the comments to which there was a fair amount of discussion of, basically, the whole "well, kink comes from abuse", that's in part fed by stories in which people link their kink with their childhood abuse experiences.

And of course there was the usual, "No, actually, I wasn't raped/molested/abused, so my kink doesn't come from rape/molestation/abuse" stuff in there, but here's a thing that I don't think people talk about.

I was the victim of attempted rape.

My emotional response to that left me reluctant to trust people in sexual situations, extremely cautious, unlikely to seek out new partners, and basically extremely sexually conservative, a trait that, believe it or not, has persisted for the following eighteen years.

So there exists, in at least one case (and you know by Ugol's Law there are more, even if you don't know that some of that "more" have been in my comments in the past) a link between highly risk-averse non-promiscuous sexual behaviour and sexual assault.

But, you know, you don't see a lot of "Sexual assault causes sexual conservatism" stories. Because my sort of low partner count and wariness to get involved with people is a desired outcome, after all, so the default social response to it is more likely to go in the "Well, uh, good for you" then than to consider my preferences the sort of problematic that makes a crashing good tale. (Though I have run into a couple of assholes who were of the opinion that I should try some sort of desensitisation therapy - read, have a lot of casual sex - in order to burn out my sensitivity to sex so that I might consider fucking them. There's a whole lot of wrong there, to say the least.)

And as I think about this, I think about one of my little political bits of Discordian ju-jutsu around orientation. A while back I was regularly running into people who would say something to the effect of, "I never hear straight people saying they knew about their attractions before puberty, so gay people who say that must have had inappropriate sexualisation as children." I have, at times, taken some glee in pointing out to these people that I had my first crush at the age of seven or eight, and was quite aware of it as linked to "grown-up stuff" that I would figure out later, and that I am painfully straight. Somehow, they had managed to fail to register my perfectly ordinary and very common story - the elementary school crush, for crying out loud, have they never heard of Judy Blume? - as being relevant to the question of whether ordinary and very common children have any connection to the concept of attraction.

(I so much marvelled at these people for their ignorance of the constant threads of heterosexuality that is imposed on children - when a mixed-sex pair of children starts rough-housing, the declarations of puppy love, for example. Or the creation of gender-segregated classrooms where associating with the Other Side is fraught and charged with inexplicable but oddly adult tension - I can recall my crush standing on the far side of the fifth-grade classroom, talking with another boy, on the far side of the uncrossable gender line, where it would take a braver girlchild than I was to venture.)

How many perfectly ordinary stories do we forget to hear? Because the perfectly ordinary flows so seamlessly into the world that we want to know that it vanishes, invisible, like so many lines in the game of cognitive Tetris, racking up the points for what we think we know but disappearing into the imaginary as soon as we register them. How many perfectly ordinary stories don't register in our mental statistics because their mundanity - the puppy love, the losing adventurousness due to a trauma, the marriage that doesn't end, the kid who never causes trouble in school, the high school athlete who doesn't join the big leagues and make millions of dollars, the brilliant mind who doesn't cure cancer after all - makes no impression?

How many stories do we just not hear?

(ETA: Here's another relevant link to a story we don't hear, explicitly talking about the stories we expect instead, even!)

Imaginary

Holly of the Pervocracy is taking apart some internet weirdo named Roissy, who has put forward "tests" to evaluate female attractiveness and male attractiveness according to some wacked out fetish pick-up artist subculture paradigm.

It is ... very strange.

Especially since the usual suspect is in there arguing that the Conventionally Attractive Woman totally benefits from this detestible set of social upfuckery and thus if one wants to have a Conventionally Attractive Woman one must learn these rules.

Now, as I mentioned over there, to the extent that that's an accurate description of "club culture", it's a brilliant argument for never going to a club, but there's more than that going on. As Holly notes in one of the previous posts she's written about this nonsense, the nonsense ignores the huge number of ordinary guys with partners. All of the Conventionally Attractive Women are off clubbing, right!

Er, no?

Unless, of course, one defines Conventionally Attractive Woman - and Roissy might - as someone who goes to trendy clubs. (I am pretty sure that people who go to goth and punk clubs don't count.)

I mean, I know more than a few women who pretty much meet the basic standards for Conventionally Attractive Women as I understand them - fairly thin, non-invisible bust, dress in an attractive manner that is compatible with their figure, and ... I don't think I know anyone who goes to trendy clubs. Or if I do they consider it the sort of shameful secret that doesn't get mentioned in polite company. Closest I'd get is people who go to see favorite bands in clubs on occasion, in which case the trendiness of the club is completely irrelevant. Hell, I've done that, to see a goth rock group. I have no idea if the place I went for that is fashionable, though the bartender didn't know how to mix a lime rickey and I had to tell her.

But it comes around to that thing that got said there - to get a patriarchy-approved woman apparently one has to become a patriarch. Okay, that's as sensical a thing as any.

What I don't understand is why this is an appealing relationship goal to have, at least as anything other than "Look at me I have a hot chick hur de hur hur". I mean, I know that humans are profoundly status-driven in ways that often fly under the radar, but that particular status jockeying just eludes me entirely in its appeal.

Somewhere recently I read a chunk of a post that went something like, "Nerdy types are rarely popular because they don't want to go to the effort of popularity" or something like it. Which, well, makes sense. The goalstates are different. And setting aside the fact that I was cast as the smart one, not the pretty one, even if I had had the option of being the pretty one type, I didn't want to pay the cost.

And there is a cost. Maybe it's a more obvious cost to me as someone who had that weird outsider fringe status but maybe could have paid that pound of flesh if I had had the social acumen to do it - but the cost is immense.

I don't even mean the time and money investment required to manage the beauty ritual, make sure all of the shaving-required bits are shaved, mastering the skills of makeup and coiffure, and so on, though that's certainly a cost - if nothing else an opportunity cost on acquiring other skills or spending that money.

I mean the social cost.

Let's say I go to the effort to convert my more-or-less Conventionally Attractive Woman presentation into something that hits the PUA crowd's buttons, something I could probably do because I have the privilege of having a base template that is fashionable. Let's even say that I would enjoy presenting myself that way, so that we can neglect the mental stress of investing myself in something that is at best neutral to me on the appeal front. Let's even go into the wild hypothetical mode and suggest that this hypothetical me is unpartnered.

This hypothetical me would have to deal with more creepy approaches. Real-world me is sufficiently nondescript in clothing and presentation that she can fade into the background and read a book on the bus rather than having to regularly fend off the inappropriate and unwelcome strangers who will occasionally glom onto a woman and try to demand her attention.

This hypothetical me would be attractive to pick-up artist types. Real-world me has not been subjected to that sort of attention since the regularity of sexual harassment in junior high school.

These costs are magnified by my experience of sexual assault, which makes unwelcome male attention extremely stressful. My particular (major) sexual assault has its roots in my being a wallflower, in part, so perhaps if I had achieved Conventionally Attractive Fourteen-Year-Old it would not have happened. But that sort of breaks the boundaries on this speculation, because if that were the case I would not be the person writing this blog at all, even in hypothetical.

This hypothetical me would be perceived as not unattractive but unlikely to be suitable as a partner by the sort of men I do find attractive - because the assumption runs very strong in certain subcultures that a woman who is not only conventionally attractive but who puts significant effort into the elective portions of conventional attractiveness will only interact with those men either to demand service or for purposes of mockery. I might well have to go to extra effort to integrate myself with these communities - which can be doable, I know and have known several women who cared about fashion and similar matters who have done so - but it would still be a cost.

So, yeah, I could theoretically remake myself to gain certain forms of status in certain subcultures, because I'm thin, could probably pad out a bra a bit if I wanted to, and know a bit about what flatters me physically. But I don't see that I'd derive much benefit from the "patriarchy-approved woman" template, so I can afford to be lazy on that front and pursue other forms of status.

It just always bemuses me to be invisible.

Though it often beats the hell out of being seen by some people.

Ghost in the Dwelling

My lion asked me yesterday how I was doing, and after a lot of circling around the subject and trying to figure out how to say things, I finally hit the revelation:

"I'm angry with my mother."

(No shit. I live in a universe of angry with my mother. But, he quite reasonably asked:)

"Why? She hasn't been all that much in contact, has she? I mean, what's she done?"

I tried to explain. Explain that every time I talk to her, if I mention that something is hard with taking care of Little Foot, that I'm feeling in some way hemmed in or tired or stressed or any of the normal things that motherhood brings, her voice takes on this knowing cast, and she says something like, "Yep, that's what it's like. That's what it'll be for the next twenty years! You gave up your life."

This parenting gig, it's hard work. It is one of the most wonderful, rewarding, bloody difficult things I have ever done in my life, because it's a thing that I have wanted to do, that my heart has yearned for.

And every time she says something like this, it gets just a little bit harder. Or maybe a lot harder.

Because I am still a person, no matter how much she wants to turn me into the negative phrasing of the Angel of the Household, the madonna of self-sacrificing motherhood. I still have things that I want to do with my life - that I am doing with my life - even if I have to wedge them around the crevices. And I have to wedge them around the crevices because there's still that legacy of Victoriana, the two spheres, the "real world" and the domestic area that I, as a nursing mother, preside over with my apron and wooden spoon, only I haven't got an apron anyway and Little Foot wants to play with the spoon.

I resent the way the culture surrounding me sets me up to be an unperson now. I resent it, and I wish to change it, and I do things like thinking about joining a church to expand the base of my support structure, to maybe find a community with like-aged children so that Little Foot can grow up with friends, to do all the things that might shore up the slumping walls of my Fortress of Unsolitude that I inhabit as the not all that super mom. I am, since Little Foot arrived, more driven to be political, to find community to be active in, to do all of these things that people do, as well as my own work (terribly neglected in the perpetual onslaught of the nine-month-old), and that politicality comes with a keener awareness of the way that I am marginalised.

Oh, I am doing So Many Things Right, with the breastfeeding and all, and isn't it nice that I'm dedicating myself to being a good mother, and now I can be completely glossed over as a person because I will be off doing BABYBABYBABY, right, that's not something that real people have to bother their pretty little heads about, they can go do real people things. Like work, and have relationships, and achieve things that matter in the world, and 'things that matter' don't include 'raising a loving and loved child to be a healthy human being'.

And that's what my mother tells me, over and over again. That I've given up any chance I had to be real for a good long time. This velveteen rabbit will not breathe and bleed and hop on its own, no matter how much it's loved. Because all my real gets drained away, magically, into childrearing.

What you see here is a clever fake.

So that's why I'm angry at my mother right now.

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.

Figuring Gender

I'm eight months pregnant and I finally figured out why it's so weird to me.

I commented the other day to a friend that my gender identity fluxes between 'none of the above' and 'yes'. It also biases to some flavor of 'female', I suspect because I'm cissexual. But under normal circumstances that bias is ... a bias, something that tints a bunch of presentations and adoptions that I think of and experience as some form of neutral, androgynous, epicene, or fey and reflects them out as female, which really doesn't bother me particularly, because it's just a tint, not a major shift.

Under normal circumstances, my body is my ally in this. It is thin, small-breasted, perhaps on the tall side, and I can specifically tell when it is moving in a manner that genders strongly female. The fact that my hair is ass-length does not mean that I have not been sirred from behind. The sort of neutral fluidity of my normal feelings about my gender can be smoothly expressed with my normal body.

One of the things with gender expression is the way that a part of it exists in the liminal space between my experience and others' perceptions. And it's there that the weirdness comes in.

Because no matter how I feel right now, my body screams female. (Even in a post-Thomas Beattie world. His moustache is rather more noticeable than mine.) I don't have the option of fluidity and flux, the normal slight shifts in how I present and feel that reflect my inner understandings of the lability of gender.

Because even if my pelvis were't tilted to shove my ass out as if I were wearing heels, even if one of my breasts weren't a Breast of Unusual (For Me) Size, even if I could walk without rolling of hips induced by the pregnancy waddle and favoring the pains in unmentionable places, I am twice as thick as I used to be, and it's all belly. That normally-approaching-neutral body of mine has no subtleties to mask the obviousness of my cis-woman status; I have no thickness to reduce the impact of the pregnancy.

That space between my feelings about how I am and the rest of the world is swamped with this figure that pins me down to a particular external perception of my gender that no longer can be affected by what's in my head right now. There's too much blatant baby there, and it's not just because I'm starting to feel it in my knees that I'm locked in. Whether or not I like it, whether or not I feel this way right now, I'm Presenting As A Woman - and further, a specific kind of woman.

And there have been times that it's been okay. Times that I've rattled around looking for a nice shirt that fits over the epic curve of that unsubtleness and declared that I was tired of feeling frumpy (as I've spent much of the last while in pyjamas and t-shirts, because they fit and don't require effort); but those times don't last long, and then I drift out of them again, into a spacce where the options are even more limited because all of the stuff in my head fits in a body without a baby in it.

And it's something I chose to do, and it's something I will almost certainly choose to do again, but when I do it again I'll at least know that I. Will. Feel. So. Weird. Weird and thrown a little out of myself, because my body won't do what I am properly anymore.

Somehow I don't think this is what most people are talking about when they stress about their figures during pregnancy.

Living the Mystery

Another Pagan Values Month post, now, which may be a wee bit more coherent than the last one.

I'm going to talk about mystery religion.

This is a matter of particular relevance to initiatory religions such as traditional Craft lines, but it's not unimportant to the reconstructionist lines either. A value most often explored in mystery work is the experiential exposure to the ineffable, and this is something that a lot of modern pagans value highly - as I mentioned yesterday, the whole concept of no intercessor is one of the things that a lot of pagans feel strongly about at some level.

First, a little terminology definition.

A mystery is, at its most straightforward, something which cannot be explained accurately; it can only be experienced, and afterwards offered explanations can actually make sense. Mysteries are not limited to the mystical or spiritual, though the ones that aren't are rarely described as mysteries, and the ones that are common human experience (sex, say) are often spiritualised by at least some people. The Greeks - who coined the term and set the stage for how we think of it - recognised two classes of mystery, the greater and the lesser. Lesser mysteries can be fucked up with spoilers, like a movie with a twist ending. Greater mysteries are immune to that sort of thing, because whatever experience is being evoked cannot be broken with partial preknowledge.

"Greater" and "lesser" may be misleading; I consider learning to turn while skiing a greater mystery. It's also my standard explanation for what a mystery is, so I will tell the story in brief: the one time I went downhill skiing, my parents sat me down and talked about their ski experiences, and explained to me how to turn. The explanation they gave was, "You go down, then up, then down." And they told me I would not understand this until I did it. I thanked them for their useless advice, went skiing, fell over a few times, and then I went down, and then up, and then down. And, as the koan ends, hearing this, the man was enlightened.

And those of you who have done downhill skiing will probably nod and understand this story entirely, because you have partaken of the Mystery; those of you who haven't will nod and smile and, perhaps, thank me for my useless advice.

We, obviously, know very little about ancient mysteries, because we haven't been down that hill. Some mysteries, such as the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, had huge populations of initiates, all of whom were earnestly sworn to utter secrecy about the content of the ritual. In other cases, though, we know a great deal about what was going on at the point that the mystery happened - but not necessarily enough to be sure we can reconstruct the mystery and have it happen again. We can try, but we can't be sure it will work.

(This actually came up in a conversation with a Canaanite reconstructionist a few years ago, who had done one portion of a well-recorded ancient ritual, and had a fellow practitioner say, "That was great, let's do the whole mystery next year!" In the end, my advice, which she wound up agreeing with, was to try adding factors from the historical record into what they actually did, and if the mystery happened, well, now they'd know the secret and could honestly say the time after that that this was a mystery initiation. If it didn't happen, they'd know they were missing something.)

Again, historically speaking, the mysteries were often presented as gifts from the gods, sacred treasures to enlighten, instruct, or transform the initiates - who might be the local citizenry, who might be devotees of the god who gave the mystery to the people, who might fit some other, more complicated criteria of citizenship, heritage, affiliation, role within the community. Initiates might be aware of each other as a sort of semi-secret society, or might have no further connection to each other than the shared experiential knowledge.

Now let us transfer to the modern day.

Many modern pagans are interested in experiential knowledge in various forms. I submit that this is one of the reasons for the popularity of modern Craft religion, as many of the principles thereof are rooted in the manifest world rather than the commonly interpreted as transcendent values of Christianity. (It is, of course, not this simple, and the treatment of Christianity as purely transcendent is erroneous. But that's off to the side, a bit.) I wrote, elsewhere, at one point, about Neb.y, that while He is not the storm, if one cannot encounter Him within the storm, He's not likely to be terribly findable, because the storm is an expression and manifestation of what Neb.y is. This is experiential knowledge; most pagan gods have similar manifestations that can be touched, felt, or known (and what Egyptian woman is not honoring Hetharu when she does her makeup?).

An interest in experiential knowledge almost inevitably leads to the Mysteries.

In many reconstructionist circles, people who claim to be performing the Mysteries are considered pretty fringe. The studious religion-with-homework attitudes of reconstruction tends to be very logic-brained, unlike the intuitive experience of the Mystery -- and, of course, we don't know how the Mysteries were conducted, for the most part. Someone who claims to be able to initiate you into the Eleusinian Mysteries is probably talking through their hat or their nether regions, because we have no data.

This doesn't stop the interest, it just treats some forms of it with contempt, causing unfortunate fractures within the community. There have always been and likely always will be people with a mystical bent, who will be interested in some form of mystery work; if that pursuit is made incompatible with reconstruction, these people will be driven out of reconstructionist work. And I think that's a major loss, because the sorts of stuff people can pull out of mystery work is the stuff that keeps a religion alive and engaged with the experiential world. Those people who take a reconstructionist-leaning attitude towards the Mysteries - that the gods will reveal whatever mysteries they think appropriate when the time is right - barely manage to stay within the fold, at times. Coloring within the lines becomes almost de rigeur for reconstructionists, unless they have sufficient clout within a community that people will take their inventions and revelations as just as good as historical information. Needless to say, I think that's unfortunate.

Of course, the initiatory mystery religions have the opposite problem. Instead of losing people who are trying to find an authentic mystery experience, they are accumulating people who don't think their mysteries are important. The historical and sociological reasons for this are fiddly to track down, but a lot of it comes down to the difficulty of articulating what a mystery is. In a culture where things written down are highly significant, this experiential process is denigrated. Further, in a culture where people think they should have access to anything they want (heard anyone say "Information wants to be free!" recently?), there are a lot of people who are deeply hurt when they're not accepted as candidates to experience a particular mystery. Religion is for everyone, right? It's universal! Only ... not so much.

Mystery paths, historically speaking, were mostly offshoots and side paths, away from the mainstream religion, something that the particularly interested would seek out. For those who didn't want the mystery investment, there was the mainline stuff they could do. For Craft religions, well, there was no mainline for a good long time. And now the Craft community is bewildered by all of the people out there claiming to be a part of their traditions who haven't actually encountered the mysteries - because they're inventing the mainline stuff, partially out of dribs and drabs of what people have let slip, partly out of whole cloth. When one's rooted in the assumption that the mystery is fundamental, this winds up looking tremendously messy - as well as unrooted in not only the actual meaning of the traditions thus transformed, but, potentially, reality. (And some of the more fascinating neo-Wiccan groups have some fascinating notions about reality ....)

I would not be surprised, in the long run, if the pagan world winds up with more people like me, with one foot in the reconstructionist camp, and one foot somewhere in mystery religion of some sort (whether Craft or not) -- looking to bring the possibility of repeatable ecstatic experience back into that book-crusted treatment of religion on the one hand, and matching modern religious expressions with ancient roots on the other. I'm not thinking in terms of the sort of "[Culture in the blank] Wicca" or whatever else might come to mind here, where a loosely Wiccish structure is meshed with a selection of gods from a particular culture (though I consider Ellen Cannon Reed's Circle of Isis an excellent book, even if alien - in part because she passes the god sniff test in her descriptions, rather than doing the common bastardisations of myths to fit an alien structure) but an actual syncretistic form that is really neither reconstruction nor straight-up mystery based religion.

And now I am up far too late, and Neb.y is storming gloriously at last, so I am posting and appreciating my experiential world.

Embracing the Shadow

This was not the post I was expecting to write next for the Pagan Values Month blogging thing, but the post I will be linking to is just too beautiful to let slip away.

Both of the religions that I follow have, in places, an aesthetic of duality. There are repeated myths of the siblings or pairs, exact opposites, exact equals; their conflicts, their parallelisms, the fundamental creative tension between the self and the shadow, however one defines the self, however one defines the shadow. The thing that comes closest to expressing this in common consciousness is the yin-yang symbol: the two shapes curling around each other, each having a spot of the other at its core, the essentiality of both of them.

What does it mean to be in a world in which one's opposite is one's beloved brother, in which love and conflict build the glorious?

Hold that thought.

I will now take a turn into the ridiculous and talk about this past season of American Idol. And in the end, when this thought embraces its shadow, it will achieve the sublime.

I'm not much of a reality TV person - I'm not much of a TV person at all, let alone specific manifestations thereof - but my family wound up watching much of the end of this season of American Idol. There is a whole cultural thing tangled up around this, but our household attachment to the drama orbited around the three figures who were the final three contestants left standing. We talked about musical skill, we talked about impressions, we talked about what we liked and did not like about the voices of the performers, and we talked about the nature of the contest, the way the judges attempted to skew results to get particular performers to pass to the next week or off the show.

And we were cheered every week one Kris Allen managed to beat expectations, beat the harsh criticisms of the judges, stay on the show despite having someone we felt had an inferior voice and a far inferior attitude consistently pimped as a superior singer. Adam Lambert's progress was almost a given, so his continued victories were simply a sign that the world was functioning as it ought, but Kris Allen's progress was another story, one with actual dramatic tension, pitting him primarily against Danny Gokey, the other 'Christian contestant' and obvious judge favorite.

And the narrative in some circles was not the music, it was the package the music came in. Here's the big story: the flamboyant, theatrical gothling who was, in a phrase I saw recently, born fabulous, but whose unmistakable vocal brilliance and skills overcame whatever reticence some might have about his outrageousness; the down-to-earth Christian performer with a traditional relationship background. But which one of the latter?

In the end, it was Kris Allen.

And now I direct you to An Unapproved Road and a post titled We Get To Carry Each Other, from which I will quote (found via The Moderate Voice):

I know next to nothing about Kris Allen’s non-musical life, except that he’s married, he calls himself Christian and he’s done missionary work across the world. I heard about the exchanges among the other contestants that made reference to what is supposedly “godly” and right in relationships, but Kris’s name wasn’t part of that. I don’t know what kind of Christianity he practises, or how he envisions his God. I do know this: he declares himself Christian to the television audience – i.e. to the world; and he freely, publicly, verbally, and especially non-verbally, loves Adam Lambert like a brother.

and

In an interview the day after the finale, Adam departed from the usual breezy soundbytes required of him to emphasize what he felt was most important about the competition -- that the friendship and respect between himself and Kris might be an example for others in transcending difference, for the reward of becoming enriched by it.

Now do you see why I started out talking theology and then started babbling about American Idol?

(Go read that post, by the way. I mean it. It's gorgeous. Read at least some of the comments, too. Like this one.)

Look at the glorious nature of the duality. Look at the one young man, pianist and guitarist and singer-songwriter sort of voice, skilled musician, dedicated Christian; look at the other young man, whose coming out as gay in Rolling Stone isn't so much a revelation as an incidental footnote that he throws out on his way to 'Let me talk about my music.' Look at some of the narratives about the heartland vs. the coasts, culture and counterculture, down home vs. the clubbing scene, modest and self-effacing vs. charisma that can smack ya like a club, all the ways these two young men were supposed to be at each other's throats. One could imagine introducing them, telling each, "This is your Shadow. This is the Other. This is Not Like You."

And we are so readily taught that when there is that division between the two, that they are enemies, that there is hostility: this is the story of heaven and hell. This is not that; that is not this; they are locked in an eternal combat, jaws locked on each other's throats. This is everywhere, in politics (an us-and-them display if ever there was one, these days), in social things, all over the place, this antagonism between Self and Shadow.

But Self and Shadow are reflections off the same divide; that which is other to me is my negative space, the shape of the world that embraces. It can conflict, yes, but it can also twine and reveal the most amazing things, things like the friendship of two young musicians who recognised across that line that their exact differences made them, in the end, exactly alike.

In the tension between Self and Shadow, the world sings.

Frameworks and Fireworks

I want to start off by linking this post, which I think is overall excellent.

Unfortunately, I read all the comments, so I can't just enthuse about it. Damnit. I wanted to just point and say this is cool, go read it.


But there's an argument thread in there that wants to talk about things like "all men are potential rapists", which isn't what the post is about at all; and while that's not as bad as the more extreme form, it's still ... not a thing that is protective of me, not something that helps me come to terms with my experience as a survivor.

This isn't a warning about the universe. No; this is a scalpel sliding blame and responsibility under the flesh to make sure the scarification stays sharp. If "all men are potential rapists", then if I want to be safe from rape, perhaps I should consider not associating with any men. Need to be a good little penis policeman, after all.

Except, you know, all people are potential rapists. Gendering it creates a heirarchy of survivors, makes some victims more real than others. Rape is not just sexist. Rape is racist. Rape is transphobic. Rape is homophobic. Rape is anti-sex-worker. Rape is ablist. Rape is a thing that sprawls across all kinds of intersectional social differentials, including some I haven't mentioned here, including ones that don't have tidy words for them. (What's the ism for the socially awkward nerdy guy who was raped and expected to be grateful for it? Not a hypothetical; I know at least one.) And not all the enforcers who use rape are men.

And I can read comment threads where people talk about having their bisexuality slide closer and closer to lesbian the more they think about this, and I wind up alienated and tearful, because I know maleness doesn't cause this thing. It's a social defect that winds up in people, and while it may be overwhelmingly more common in men because of privilege and the nature of the crime, that doesn't make it not a people thing.

I read that post right after reading a post in which a friend commented that her mother keeps patting her ass whenever she bends over and giggling about the discomfort it causes. I don't know about how you conduct things back on Earth, but here on Gehenna that's a sexually-tinged assault at best, made all the more creepy and fucked up by being something a parent is inflicting on their child and deriving some sort of perverse gratification from. Tell me this isn't contributing to rape culture. I want to see you say it and keep a straight face.

And if you can say it to me -- go say it to the young autistic woman who is trying to figure out what "normal" behaviour is, who has only just realised that maybe being randomly groped might actually be beyond the pale.

And, y'know, the power - and responsibility - to say "What the hell is wrong with you?" for attempting sexual assault and rape is not something that rests solely on men. It's a people thing, because if there's a 'rape culture', it's not just guys who are stuck in it.

So with Cereta, I'm gonna call on us all to be That Guy. Because there aren't enough stories of people getting other people to can the rape-promoting bullshit, and to stop people who want to perpetuate rape culture before rapes happen.