Dis/Ability

Little white pills.
(One and a half of them -
I cut them with a kitchen knife every other day.)

Little white pills
Treating to the numbers
(I never knew to notice but
Maybe when you're fifteen you don't pay the right sort of attention
Or maybe
The kid with the dissociation problem
And PTSD
Is not the best at body awareness.
Ya think?)
They checked my throat,
Little pen marks and a tape measure,
And told me
"Little white pills, one and a half of them."

Eventually
I stopped taking them
It didn't seem to matter.

When I had doctors
I would tell them
"I took little white pills,
One and a half of them.
I want you to find the numbers."
They found the numbers,
And sent me on my way.

I argued with one,
"These are the wrong numbers.
Here are my printouts.
This is what the new standards are,"
And she told me
My numbers were fine.
The one time they weren't,
She checked again,
And they'd changed.

Sometime in my late twenties
I found a bentwood cane
In an antique shop.
"Necessary tools should be beautiful," I said.
It was about the right height,
Red and knobbly and wonderful.
I didn't usually need it
But it was nice to have.

I took little white pills
For a while
They made me feel stoned
When I changed my dose
But the world didn't hurt so much
In my mind
And that was nice.
I had to stop
When I was pregnant
Though.

My knees never recovered
From the pregnancy
And stairs were hard.

I got a new doctor
And I said to him
"I had little white pills
One and a half of them
And I want you to check my numbers."
And he did.

And he said, "I don't treat numbers,
But your numbers
(The lab would say they're fine
Like your other doctor did)
They aren't good.
I would give you little white pills
Just for this
But look --
This other number --
Those are antibodies
And they shouldn't be there."

And he gave me little white pills.
Half of one a day, to start,
And I went home with a scrip
And told everyone I knew
"I have an autoimmune disease!"
And some of them understood
Why I was so happy.

One day
There was a truckful of rocks to unload
And I took the kids outside
And I helped
Because I had little white pills.

The little white pills
Don't change my body
Into a body that isn't nonconsensually suicidal
But they start to take away its weapons
And I didn't notice
All the ways I felt better
Until the little white pills
Went away.

And then I noticed
That my knees hurt again.
That I was so tired
Too tired to think.
I noticed
All the things I knew before.
(Fatigue, depression,
Constipation,
My appetite is gone because
My metabolism is fucked
It didn't go long enough
For my fingernails to shatter
But I bet when they grow a little more
They will.)

I noticed I needed that
Bentwood cane
And I hadn't remembered
The last time
I needed it to make it through a day.

"I need new little white pills,"
I said
While trying not to want to die
In a body that was trying to kill me
Because somehow
Having it all come back
The chills
The acne down my jaw
The way the pain kept me awake
And my ankles felt like tennis balls
Of flaking, brittle skin
With the fatigue
And all
(At least my heart didn't go flipping out
Like it was doing before I got
Little white pills
This time
That scared the fuck out of me
And I couldn't say
"I think I'm going to die"
I have kids
I can't leave them like this
I couldn't even tell the doctor
Which was stupid
But it was all the same damn thing
My life a ruin for a lack
Of little white pills
I suppose
But I digress)
It broke me
Hard
And I could barely get out of bed
The day I was going to see the doctor
Who could give me
Little white pills.

(My grandmother took the pills
I don't know if they were little and white
I wonder sometimes
If that was why--
Or part of why--
But no matter.)

He gave me little white pills
I gave him blood
To check my numbers
He said "I'll call if they're really bad"
And I took my scrip
And yelled at the pharmacist
Until they gave me
Little white pills
Just one at a time
To replace
The ones that didn't work.

Today I had to have a beer
To make the pain stop.
I will take my little white pill
And hope
To be more than a little better than I was
Tomorrow.

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...."

O is for Ordinary

Yeah yeah yeah I am so amazingly behind I know I know.  But I just made a list!

I'm sure I've touched on this before - certainly on the post on Goals - but it's worth coming back to.

Sometimes people will sneer about Beltaine-and-Samhain pagans (like people sneer at Christmas-and-Easter Christians), or possibly in my case Wep-Renpet-and-Opet pagans or something, I don't know what would be appropriately iconic really.

It's all kind of backwards isn't it?  As if religion orbits primarily - or even solely - about whether or not one properly celebrates a Special Day.

Here's a thing I'm coming to as a reconstructionist, though.  The Special Days are at least 200-level religion.  They're not the fundamentals, they're shiny things.  And sometimes they can distract from the fundamentals.

I write about ka theology a lot.  Ka theology talking about family and food and sex and magic.  This is not special day stuff.  This is today, tomorrow, next week, next month.  This is Little Foot asking me for a glass of milk just now.  There is no "I'm going to put off eating until the next holiday", even in a holiday-packed ritual calendar.

I think a lot of people get caught up in What To Do For The Holiday, to the extent that everything gets kind of dropped when there isn't an impending holiday or other obligation.  I do it too, hell; there are times that noticing an upcoming festival on my calendar is what kickstarts my arse into getting back to regular daily practices, breathing exercises, that kind of thing.

But that's the thing:  I have the ordinary stuff too.  I have the putting away the shopping carts and the theology of lunch, I have ordinary things to deal with, to get back to.  I have foundation.  I can say "I'm losing track of my sense of time" and fall back into the time liturgies that I learned and wrote to attempt to recenter myself, like I did recently.

The ordinary stuff is the basics, the where we are in the fundamental beginning.  When the ordinary is stable, then we can move on to advanced stuff like what to do for this holiday or that holiday.

Tools

I was given two tools: a wine carafe and a knife.

The first lesson was the knife.  I hated it, I hated the task: being held to a standard of challenge, of knowing the standard and being unyielding when the standard was unmet.  Of being, not cruel, but hard; of offering the support of critique and voicing an awareness of failure.

It was Ordeal work - both in supporting the Ordeal I was serving as challenge-master for, and in finding in myself a place where I could do this thing, rather than do what I wanted to - rather than be softer, gentler, more cuddly, more gracious, a haven rather than a fight.  And I did the work.  And it was hard. And I became stronger.

And I was glad of the resting time afterwards, the space to recover.  Holding to the knifework is hard.  The surgeon's mind - knowing when is the time to cut and when is the time to put the knife away - is a sharp and dangerous place, and it is not easy work.  I had longed for the place I thought of as more of the carafe - the healer, the sustainer, the refuge - and having to cleave to something sharper was exhausting.

There is a common false dichotomy in the gendering of tools - the knife as active, the cup as passive - the phallic nature of the thing that penetrates taking that masculine, dominating, urgent energy in symbolism, while the thing that contains and holds is that vulvar feminine, submitting to its contents, patient.  This is all through a lot of ceremonial magic and other things, and cultural things, and perhaps it infects the brain even when one doesn't symbolise the hieros gamos by stabbing something in the wine as a matter of standard protocol.

The idea is that the knife is work, and the cup just kind of sits there.

This idea, of course, is bullshit.

Even at its most simplistic, the vessel to hold power must be as strong as that which it holds or it will fracture.  That strength must be a held strength, something that sustains, not the sort of burst strength of a single action.  To cut takes strength in a moment; to hold takes strength over time.

Hold the power.  Hold it available.  Be the well, the place from which strength can be drawn.

Hold the image of the possible so that it can be found as a reflection.

Wait.

Try not to run dry.

E is for Exclusivity

Touchy, touchy subject, especially in the wake of things like the PantheaCon Trans Inclusion Debacle (Mark 2). But I'm not just thinking about that, I'm thinking about huge chunks of things.

Most people reading this likely grew up in a culture that was dominated by Christianity. And the thing about that is that there's a whole bunch of subtle stuff that comes with it, a lot of assumptions that don't actually get questioned and checked - even among people who have actively chosen to reject Christianity, often with the "my awful ex sucks" attitude that a lot of pagans have.

For example: Christianity is a universalist religion. It claims to be there for everyone, available to everyone, and in fact it wants everyone. Different bits of it manage different quantities of genuine welcome, but even the parts that are least friendly to us deviant types will say "We want you to join us, give up your deviancy and get our divine cookie when you die!" (Why that's appealing is still unclear to me, but that's neither here nor there.) In the two most common (in my experience) framings of Christian universalism, people are either divided up into Good People (heaven-bound) and Sub-Human Scum (hell-bound) or categorised in some flavor of "You can just get to heaven if you do it right, let me show you what I know about how to do it right." (I know plenty of Christians who do not proselytise at me or consider me hell-bound, mind, but I suspect that their basic approach is something like that from C. S. Lewis's Narnia, in which 'doing it right' is by axiom recognised by the Power(s) that would appreciate such action.)

The assumptions of universality are much more persistent than the actual belief in Christian religion, though. (If you need an example of this, go into any atheist vs. theist flamewar and see how often "religion" is equated with a coercive force intended to convert or compel those people who are not adherents to it. I have stalled out several ranting atheists by pointing out that I really could not give less of a fuck whether or not they "believe" in any of my gods. They generally paused briefly, and then went back to arguing as if I did not exist.) The fact that it was an innovation, and that most religions historically have not been down with that kind of nonsense, is completely lost in the hegemonial status of A Religion Is For Everyone (Except Maybe The Sub-Human Hellbound Scum).

Ancient peoples, for example, were not generally universalists (though some philosophical branches within them might have been: vide Atenism). Oh, each tribe and culture likely thought that their gods were the best gods - and one act in war was stealing icons from the enemy to deprive the enemy of their power - but it was an axiomatic given that those people over there had different gods. After all, they were different people, a different culture, with different customs. If they had the same gods and practices, why, they'd be us, not them.

Obviously, this attitude has its ups and downs - Christianity has had an effect in making it more plausible to see widely varied people as part of "us", after all - but it does mean that the whole "impose on you the one true religion" thing is kind of a no-starter. I think the closest we get are things like the Romans, who tended to do things like conquer places, study the local Powers, and say, "Oh, your gods? Those are other names for our gods. Update your statues accordingly and pay your taxes and we won't smite you a second time." (Some times their accuracy in parallelism was better than others.) And even with the equation of "proper attention to the Roman cultus" with "decent citizen not in need of smiting", there were periods when Jewish people were given exceptions from those laws, despite being, in Roman terms, atheists (without statues to update).

But modern paganism has a largely-unrecognised tension between universalist tendencies and exclusive ones. I have - more than once, probably more than a hundred times - seen the basic argument between the person who expects religion to be universal, and thus to be coddled, persuaded, and handed membership for the asking, and a person who expects religion to be something affiliated with a specific community or even family, who therefore asks the universalists why they should get special treatment as a total stranger.

And of course this always blows up, because, at some level, the would-be pagan coming from a universalist standpoint takes that as "you are Sub-Human Hellbound Scum". Because if they weren't Sub-Human Hellbound Scum, obviously they'd be welcomed as a member! There is no other reason to say no! Religion is for everyone! And information wants to be free! (Has the information climbed into your personal ear yet? No? That's why you're asking for it? Clearly it doesn't want to be as free as all that.)

There's also the thread that the universalist probably thinks 'pagan' is a religion, rather than the none-of-the-above category box for leftover religions, and thus expects a well, more universalist approach to things. Sure, anyone can be pagan by saying so. That doesn't mean jack shit about anything specific....

The critical thing about modern paganism as a mishmash is that while some of the founding influences were fairly open (for example, most reconstructions being fairly open to those who are willing to do the work and adopt the appropriate attitudes), others - including the best-known things - are organised around mysteries. And mysteries, by their nature, are not general-access things.

A mystery is, at root, an experience that can only be understood by going through it. One can learn all kinds of theory about many mysteries, but that doesn't actually provide functional knowledge. (Much like reading and learning about sex is not the same thing as having sex: sex is a mystery.) A mystery may be an experiential aspect to a comparatively open religion (technically speaking, Communion in Christianity is such a thing, not that this is commonly presented) or it may be more limited - only those people who make the correct sacrifices may enter, only those people who have the correct devotions, the correct background, or whatever else.

If the entire religion is structured around a mystery, then it is the responsibility of those people who are in possession of the mystery to only bring it to appropriate dedicants. Simply wanting the mystery does not make it happen, any more than wanting a pony pays the rent of a stall at the stable.

The tricky parts come in with trying to talk about how and why these communities are limited-access.

A while back I had a few go-arounds in a conversation about a particular religious witchcraft tradition. Unlike Wicca, it has not yet spawned a more universalist derivative (using the same name or otherwise), and the teachers are still heavily localised. And, for one reason or another, the conversation degenerated to, "Well, if your tradition is so great, why aren't you sharing it more? Don't you want to share your shiny thing?" And a lot of the responses got read as "Well, I sacrificed to get to a place where I could get training, so if you don't do that, you just don't want it bad enough" or "Something will magically happen to make it possible if it is your destiny, otherwise fuck off" or "Only the special people get in."

And, y'know, some people think that way. It's not a useful way to think, especially, but it's out there.

I'm suspecting people wanted to convey was something more like, "Look. Training in a mystery religion is hard work. It's very rewarding for the people who pursue it, yes, but it will also quite likely turn your life upside down, force you through all kinds of complicated and painful situations, and honestly, if you're not a person who really, genuinely, truly needs to do this particular thing, you will not succeed, because it's not worth it unless you need it." (Doing outer-court training in a mystery tradition led directly to the end of a five-year relationship for me, by the way.) I'm also suspecting that there was something to be said along the lines of, "Look, just because you think something is shiny doesn't obligate someone to invest their personal time to give it to you; if you really, truly want it - if you think you're one of the people for whom it's worth that level of effort - you have to evaluate what you're willing to do to get it."

And also, I don't think that this was actually a part of that conversation, but it needed to be said anyway: mysteries are a dime a dozen. You can trip over one walking out your door. Your life is full of them. If the access to this specific mystery isn't compatible with your life, find another. The thing that makes this mystery all that for me is that it's the one that I choose and the one that I need and the one that blends with my experience.

Mysteries are by definition hard to talk about, but I think people need to start being clear about them. "This is the mystery for the people who need this specific mystery" is something that only makes sense when one has a little knowledge, after all.

"This ritual is for those people who wish to celebrate their menstruation experiences" is a much better phrasing than "this is for women's mysteries" (which suggests that it's for women in general, including those who have never menstruated for whatever reason or those like me who find that 'menstrual spirituality' is much of a muchness with stuff like 'tasty, tasty shit pancakes in delicious oil-spill sauce') or "this is for blood mysteries" (which gives me a vastly kinkier impression than I think was intended).

"This ritual is for those people who are seeking to develop an intimate devotional relationship with this specific Power" is a pretty specific way of dividing the wheat from the chaff of potential attendees, though obviously traditions where the nature of the Power in question is among the information held privately it is harder to judge whether or not one wants to seek to develop such intimate relationship.

It's even possible to put things in the negative, though I think it's harder to do so without potentially creating issues. "This ritual is for survivors of sexual violence", for example, would include male survivors and trans survivors of all sorts, while a ritual structured in a way where there is concern that someone might be triggered by an encounter with a penis perhaps due to a lack of trousers, and where avoiding those triggers is important to the organisers, would not in fact be open to all people dealing with an experience of rape, and should not bill itself as such.

"This ritual is for adult Greek-speakers who have never committed murder, who make the appropriate piglet sacrifice, and who perform the appropriate ritual bath in the river Illisos", meanwhile, is all that and a bag of pomegranates.

C is for Calendars

One of the things I have been, as a going thing, kind of obsessed with is building a religious calendar. I mean, I have put together a satisfactory draft, even though I am not happy with it, and I haven't done the work to work out what to do for most of these dates. (I had a notion that this year I would work out what to do for each festival by the end of the festival. This resolution lasted for one festival.)

Part of my problem is that everyone around me is fixed on the solar year. Even if I get out of realms where "holiday" is assumed to be "Christian or maybe Jewish unless hey we've heard of Muslims, they celebrate stuff too, right?" and am dealing with general pagan circles, it's all "What are you doing for this sabbat?" and frankly, some pagans are even nastier about the idea that someone might not celebrate their festivals than I have ever encountered from a mainstream monotheist.

Last October, I had a lot of people screaming imprecations at me and telling me how horrible and intolerant I was. Why? Because I (rather gently, perhaps especially for me) pointed out that Samhain was not "the pagan new year", but "the new year for those pagans who celebrate Samhain and consider it a new year". Wep Renpet falls in August. I think my liege - who does also mark Samhain, given that he's largely Celtic-oriented - probably considers Imbolc, yesterday, to be his liturgical new year. (Or at least one of them; I think he might argue he has three.) But simply nothing that Samhain-new-year-celebrator was not an equivalent set to "pagan" got me marked as scum of the earth, the sort of person who was trying to Oppress Everyone Different by ordering them to not talk about their Samhain/new year celebrations.

Calendars are complicated. I have a solar-year calendar which I'm currently using as a basic approximation for what I need to be doing, but as I noted before I'm not done with that yet. It's a beginning. I don't expect to be done with it for a good while. (For one thing I really wish I could find some sort of calendar calculation software that lets me put calculations in that depend on moon phases rather than civil calendar dates.)

But.

I wish I didn't feel I had to fight with other pagans all the damn time for the space to have my own holidays.

I should get back on the horse and figure out what can be done for the Festival of the Lights of Nit....

Intersecting Works of Fiction

I had commented to a friend of mine a while back that the Star Trek: Rebooted movie had reawakened my long-lapsed Trekkieness. (I went to Star Trek conventions when I was in high school, level of Trekkie. Wrote some fanfic, too, though mostly because the people I was hanging out with did. I didn't like the right characters, though, heh.)

She gave me this link yesterday, and that is fucking fantastic. One of those things that suddenly cleans up the goggles, as was said in the comments - talking about the importance of the romance subplot in Rebooted. And I'd been already outraged by the people who talked about Uhura as a token girlfriend, as if she hadn't been the linchpin of the entire possibility of resolving the movie plotline in a manner of appropriate heroism, as if she hadn't been clearly the pursuer and not the pursuee or woman-who-melts-suddenly-when-confronted-with-the-asshole-turned-hero. But that post reveals a big, big piece of something I missed, and I loves it forever for making me a little tiny bit wiser.


That being said, racist fail in another SF media project:

The Avatar live-action is an inexcusable debacle.

And here's a really sharp visual representation of why.

Seriously, when Heroes does a better job on race issues (Heroes of the "Have we gone an episode without killing off a woman or a POC?" fame, in which it rather takes after its pulp superhero comics origin perhaps a bit too well) than you, well, that's ... unspeakably ... I'm out of words here, someone hand me a cue card.

Especially when starting with a show that had a rich Asian cultural background, stuff like "We want you to dress in traditional cultural ethnic attire. If you're Korean, wear a kimono. If you're from Belgium, wear lederhosen" from the casting director? Casting calls for "Caucasian or other" on POC characters?


And, so Rebooted doesn't feel entirely left out of the scolding, an open letter to Winona Kirk on the subject of sexism in the Reboot portrayal.

Relational Tinkertoys

One of the previous posts got into discussing fiddly bits of constructing relationship systems and how one looks at them and so on, and so I've been chewing on that. Which I've also been chewing on in terms of this CFS for kinked relationships in a polyamorous context, which I'd like to write something for if I only had a brain. (Or a diploma.)

And there are bazillions of things talking about terminology out there, and some of them even get it mostly not wrong for how it works in the wild (the number of sites that talk about "primary/secondary" or "heirarchical polyamory" under the notion that people only ever have one primary-typed relationship is gargantuan), and none of them are actually all that useful, as far as I can tell. (And this is getting all crossed-up in my head with an old post I just read from someone who left me a comment on 'what's the difference between "bedroom kink" and "24/7", anyway?' so that may wind up in this ramble.)

So. Relationships. Structures.

One of the things that I think drives a lot of people's responses is the way that the model of what a relationship is like is sort of presented as monolithic. He and she become they and we know it's right and true because they get married and live happily ever after gazing into each other's eyes. And there are variations along the way, but this is the thing that I saw presented as the Correct Model - heterosexuality, marriage, starry-eyed monogamy, fairy tale ending. All the ingredients.

And of course there were little cracks in that obvious from the beginning: in my youngest years it was the knowledge that divorce happened. Then an awareness of homosexuality. By the time I was fourteen or so I could comment that I figured there were people who were monogamous and people who weren't, and the ones who weren't should let people know so that people wouldn't get hurt. (At fourteen, all this obvious shit is simple ...)

But a lot of what I saw was ... still tending back towards the Correct Model. He and she become they transforms into he and he become they. The divorced woman finds the one who's actually the right one, and we know it's right and true because they get married and live happily ever after, etc. All sort of edging towards not being different, even if there were a couple of cosmetic things not in accord with the Model; trying to minimise the ways in which people varied, relationships varied, and so on.

And I think this makes it hard for people who venture into non-normative relationships, because the shape of the Correct Model casts a long, long shadow. Some people luck into areas or subcultures that give them models that work better - or get stuck with a choice between the normative models and the subcultural normative models, neither of which works for them. And some people have to rattle around a lot and figure out which bits work for them and which don't, and sometimes, well, this hurts. So people have scars.

That looks tangential to the question of relationship structures and how people go about things, but it isn't, really. Because all of this is part of the cultural stew that people are steeping in when they go about their relationships, and even being consciously aware of some of it and what it does doesn't mean that one's got it all down and sorted. And some of it is something specific people like, and some isn't.

So that's all backdrop.

If you frame some of the wrong questions in terms of the backdrop, you can see some of how they get asked. Only one relationship fully exists in reality; that relationship is arranged with cohabitation, mutual sexual interest, long-term commitment, and all that stuff that's part of the Serious Package; other relationships (if they exist) are more trivial, flighty things, maybe focused on addressing desires that the real relationship cannot satisfy, like kink, sex with a same-sex partner, the nebulous thing called 'variety', the 'I don't think it's healthy to expect my needs to be met by one person', etc.

And this is what the default model of A Polyamorous Relationship is.

Me, I say that I don't have any polyamorous relationships. Because for the relationship to be such by my standards, there would have to be more than two people in it. And I can't figure out how to make that work, so I don't try to do it; all my relationships are dyadic. (I'm not attracted to groups of people; I'm attracted to specific individual ones. So that's how I conduct things.) So I don't add people to relationships or have to balance things in a relationship or whatever; all of that stuff is system-level, which a lot of people don't recognise as an important distinction in the first place! (World on a slant strikes again.)

And only doing dyadic relationships simplifies some things. Some people like and prefer the one big relationship model, and more power to 'em. They're doing something I can't, for sure, and I don't know how they manage it. I note that they exist, but decline to comment further on grounds that I'm incompetent to do so.

But what goes into a dyadic relationship in a poly system? Obviously, one scraps the "And if I ever find myself attracted to anyone other than you, clearly our relationship has failed and is defective in some way" part that crops up in some implementations of the normative model, if one's having other relationships at all. Though some people have agreements and preferences that can look like that from funny angles, that include things like "Don't love anyone else", "Don't have sex with anyone else" ('sex' being variously defined), "Don't have a serious relationship with anyone else"... all of which I've seen work for some people, provided adequate term-defining.

But there are other nuances. I know people for whom the critical part of polyamory is that they be able to have another relationship if they decide they want to. And in a fair few of those cases, when they have that option, they don't actually have any desire to start another relationship. In other cases, the critical thing is the ability to have and have acknowledged attractions without any necessary follow-through (or maybe no more than a cuddle or what have you), and that satisfies all emotional requirements the poly person might have. And on the other end of things, I know people who don't want to miss out on an opportunity or turn down a potential, and a few kind of messed-up people who seem to think that saying "No" or not being interested in a new relationship now is proof that one isn't really polyamorous at all.

I know of relationships in poly systems that are pretty much vehicles for sexual release, relationships in poly systems that have no sexual activity or desire for same, and pretty much anything in between the two. When my liege and I started our relationship, as I believe I've mentioned, we were shooting for something like friends-with-benefits or a probably long-term fling - turning our established friendship into a friendship that happened to include fucking on occasion, more or less. (That notion didn't last terribly long.) Some people have agreements for looser rules on business trips, conventions, and other prime sources of fling time, too; not all relationships are long-term.

And speaking of long-term, one of those questions that comes up is "How often do relationships like this fail?" Which amused me for a while, because there was a string of people asking me this question in a time frame where I'd recently had a successful relationship come to a conclusion (it was done, and we didn't drag it out too badly) and another relationship that was in a state of continual slow failure not quite energetic enough to cease. But the model for 'failure' was about 'ending' - and often any change in a relationship system was called "ending", so the fact that, say, I'd been with one partner for a decade didn't matter if I broke up with someone else in the interim. Success in a relationship depends on the relationship, not the duration - and not whether the relationship is ongoing, either.

I think one of the things that I'm finding as I burble along semicoherently is that, well, a lot of things are up for negotiation and discussion. In a lot of ways, this is a really scary part: instead of there being a simple, straightforward, and above all known pattern for what a relationship is like (insert digression here), all this other stuff is in question, like what it means for a relationship to succeed, the meaning of fidelity (literally keeping your promises and commitments), who is involved, to what extent, how many ....

Digression: The single thing I've seen cause the most drama in poly relationship setups is the quesiton of who owns the time. There are people who figure that being in a relationship means that all their unspecified time is spent With Partner; there are people who specify time With Partner and figure that their unspecified time is theirs, though it will often also be spent With Partner. When these two types of people get into relationships, there's often a lot of low-grade sense that there's something off here. When these two types of people start up in a poly situation, the drama explodes all over the place and the shrapnel is killer. Those 'of course we know what the rules are for relationships' assumptions bite and the wounds bleed - and they still bite in a monogamous situation, but the damage often feels less acute because people are generally perceived as more threatening to relationships than ... well, all the other stuff that a partner might be doing. (End digression.)

One of the big standing-wave flamewars in poly groups is the concept of heirarchy and, more importantly, what heirarchy means. If anything. (Some people just let it be, if it is, and I appreciate that, being inclined that way myself aside from an obvious tendency towards overanalysis.)

Some people don't do heirarchy. They have their partners, those relationships are what they are, and that's that.

Some people don't do heirarchy. They have their partners, those relationships are what they are, and that's that. They also have the other people they're in some way involved with, who may be romantic friendships, or sex buddies, or whatever else.

Some people do heirarchy. They have their primary partner, and everyone else is required to be of less importance. Often, there is some sort of control that the primary partner has over other relationships, such as the ability to veto. Sometimes called 'prescriptive heirarchy' (as opposed to 'descriptive heirarchy').

Some people do heirarchy. They have their primary partner, and don't have any particular interest in having that sort of relationship with anyone else, but they also have other relationships, romantic, sexual, and both, of lesser centrality to their lives.

Some people do heirarchy. They have their primary partners and other partners by whatever standards and particulars suit the people involved.

Some people do heirarchy, with a tidy sequence of succession such that if one relationship goes away, everything lower than it moves up a rank. Or something. I've never been able to parse this one, and it pretty much never happens in the real world so much as in people's fantasies about how this all works, so it doesn't matter much.

A primary relationship may or may not be a close match to a mainstream-normal real relationship. Various factors that some people have insisted are essential to primary partner-ness have been marriage or other commitment ceremony, cohabitation, sex, shared finances, shared responsibilities, power to control other relationships, the ability to trump commitments to others with desired time (even in non-emergency situations), there can be only one Highlander-ness, um, probably some other stuff. The rules that any given primary relationship run under are probably only known to the participants, though they may well think that it's obvious and all clear-thinking folks will agree.

A secondary (or tertiary, as we carry on down the line) relationship is one that does not contain all the traits that someone thinks of as necessary for a primary relationship. What that actually means in practice is fuck-all with a side order of 'this is a distinction we think necessary to make'. Some people treat this category of relationships as disposable fun-toys. I think those people need to be smacked with a haddock.

Some people get all tangled up in sex and romance and which is more important or if they're all the same thing. And my feeling on sex and romance is that they're different things, and some people can have one without the other, and some people have the two tangled together, and that's life and among the zillions of things that people can be varietable about. Same thing with kink and sex and romance, for that matter. I can have romantic love without sexual attraction but not sex without romantic entanglement; some people can do sex without love/romance/whatever. Life is complicated. That's fine.

Digression two, since I don't think it'll ever be sequitur. 24/7 kink vs. bedroom kink? For me, in my fulltime kinked relationship, it's always there. I'm 24/7 d/s like I'm 24/7 married, y'know? It's always a factor in my life and my calculations and my interactions with people, especially, y'know, the relevant person. My bedroom kink with my other primary partner is ... he's kinky, I'm kinky, sometimes we're kinky in similar directions, it's not a part of our relationship per se (I think we'd both like it if it were a little more so, but it doesn't work out that way), it's just a thing that we do sometimes. And it's not like we stop being kinky people when we're not in-scene or whatever, it's just that it's not a defining trait of our interactions - it may be a defining trait of our selves, but that's a different locus. End digression.

Some people make up abominable unwords like "sexualove" and "compersion", meanwhile, and expect other people to appreciate the brilliance of their ugly jargon. At least one of those has a functional etymology and merely sounds stupid, rather than like a disease symptom.

Some people think their whatever makes them far superior to all of those peons who are still monogamous or who are doing their poly thing differently. These people also need to be smacked with a haddock.

Ugh, I'm sure I had more to say when I started but since this has now been written over something like a half-week full of gaps and staring into space I've lost a fair fraction of it.

But I think that should illustrate, more or less, why I get frustrated when I'm doing my wee activist thing (over a decade of answering questions about polyamory and counting, but not very precisely) and, after explaining what my life is like, get the response, "So the people I met before who [hurt|upset|confused] me are doing it wrong?" (This has happened more than once.)

No. They're just doing it not like me.

More Heat Than Light

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

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

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

But seriously.

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

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

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

It's the middle stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

People? People are harder.

Progress, Regress, Transgress, Egress

Trin writes about transgression at sm-f. I've written about it too, in the past. So I'ma write about it a bit again.

Transgress, etymologically 'trans-' (across, beyond, through) + 'gress' (step, walk).

To step beyond, across, through; there is an implied line, and a space beyond it.

I think the most transgressive thing I've done in the last week is get married.

Not in that hipster-ironic no-Birkenstocks way that somehow requires a DJ and in which not doing a name change is worth blogging on, just ... stepping through.

And it wasn't done to be transgressive, to be the cool thing that shows the mainstream world up, it was done like most marriages are done these days: as a matter of formal commitment, because of love. There was no flashy smugness about how different it all was, because it was what it was, and we did what worked for us.

It was not one of those exclusive monogamous structures, of course, and rather than being 'given away' by any subset of parents, we walked to the center with our legal spouses. And even for those who might acknowledge the possibility of multiple relationships, I transgress expectations with my two partners, and they transgress expectations by not throwing some kind of hissy about how their possession object might possibly fuck someone else.

We had no officiant; we had a friend serve as a herald to announce what we were doing and declare that it was time to have a party. Similarly, what religion was present was in the poetry of our vows, touching on symbolism shared and not shared, expressing concepts and feelings. No gods were invited, as we don't really have gods that care about that sort of thing.

Our ceremony and vows were written as explicitly d/s, though I suspect that fact was not especially obvious to others because we are reasonably subtle and not terribly in-your-face about it. And not the sort of fetishistic kink stuff one can find googling up slave contracts, but threads of the actual nature of our partnership, and gestures that reflect that.

The wedding reception was a potluck cookout, conveniently for us landing on the first gorgeous weekend day of the spring and thus the correct time to throw a grill party. We served mead that we had bottled the previous day with my father's assistance, though it was too hot to drink much of anything that sweet and alcoholic even for the people present who weren't pregnant.

And maybe this isn't all that far on the other side of the line of the expected - I certainly doubt we startled anyone who actually knew us, but we know people who know where we live - but when I look at the world outside the little pocket of people who think we make sense, I can see the shape of the alien, not playing by the rules.

Taking the rules and bending them a little until they're something that fits.

Sometimes they only take a little bending. Sometimes they take ... a little more.

Do I transgress?
Very well, then, I transgress;
(I am large--I contain myself.)

Just Another Talking Cunt

Belledame's post about language and dehumanisation and ... stuff has finally shaken me loose of the dithering about whether or not I wanted to post this here.

This is the text of a post I did not make to usenet earlier today, because I knew that whatever response it got would be entirely too depressing, and I'd rather be working on my wedding liturgy than flail at people who refuse to wrap their heads around things.

The context is whether insulting people with the word "twat" is misogynistic, by the way. And whether pointing out such use of language, even if accurate, is something worth concerning oneself about. It is perhaps unsurprising that it's the same usenet group as this one. I suspect, after nine and a half years there, it's coming up on time for me to give up and find some other writers' kibbutzing group.



Actually, this is one of those things that's fairly fundamental, from the right perspective.

I grew up in a culture in which words with a female gendering association were used as significant insults to imply that people were subhuman. (Likewise, I grew up in a culture in which words referring to disabilities were used to imply that people were subhuman, and I live *now* in a culture in which words referring to sexual orientation are used to imply that people are subhuman.)

The flavor of the discourse is such that I am *constantly* reminded of my second-class status in many contexts. One newsgroup I read is only manageable because I killfile for such sexist comments on the first offense. The insult discourse is, to me, *the same thing* as the treatment of traditionally female-gendered labor as less important and less worthy of remuneration than traditionally male-gendered labor, to pick a for-example. Womanness is less worthy than maleness; thus, womanness is an insult and woman-work doesn't pay well.

All of these are rooted in the notion that femaleness is less valuable than maleness, intrinsically a marked case, something of low status and low worth. And in a "you've got to be carefully taught" kind of way, people who can inanely parrot language without thinking that reinforces that notion create, reinforce, and support a systematic setup in which not only is femaleness something shameful - and thus something that women are obligated to feel bad about - but one in which I could, say, get excellent general medical coverage to address my prostate problems but coverage of my pregnancy is a special interest costing more.

I don't have the luxury of being able to treat it as a separate, minor issue; it may be tiny, but if it is tiny it is only so because in this context we are looking at something that's only three iterations of the fractal pattern. It's not a different fractal from the same pattern at a thousand iterations, and, being a fractal, it looks *exactly the same*.


I live in a world where my fundamental worthlessness is taken as a given, and where that message constantly reinforced by sexist-rooted invective among many, many other things.

Building a world where I am a valuable human being requires challenging the subtext of an entire culture. Sometimes I'm too tired to fight the same damn battles again and again, because it never ends; there's always someone who thinks that having my _existence_ treated as sufficient background to formulate an insult is not a real problem worth being concerned about.

I don't know; I kind of value my existence. Having it framed as degrading by default gets wearing.

No, womanness being used as an insult is not the biggest problem in the universe, but a world in which womanness was not immediately siezed upon as one of those high-calibre heavy hitters would necessarily be a profoundly different one than this one.

Writing the Real

My mind has been full of wanting to comment on the RaceFail thing in more substance for a while, and I haven't been able to articulate much of anything. So I will start out by pointing at things that were part of what I wanted to try to respond to, because they're worth noting at least, and then get on to what I have capacity to articulate.

For context on RaceFail, rydra_wong is collecting a complete set of links.

Wordweaverlynn writes Shame and Racefail. Queenofhell writes I am not the moderator. Miriam_Heddy writes Some thoughts on the impossibility of opting out of the economy of privilege. Inalasahl writes Because there aren't enough spoons on the planet.

Then the stuff that congeals some of the things in my head right now into something semi-comprehensible:
Let Me Tell You A Story
Mary Anne Mohanraj Gets You Up to Speed, Part I
Mary Anne Mohanraj Gets You Up to Speed, Part II
Taking One for the Team

A few years ago I realised that the characters in my stories defaulted to white. In some cases there was reason for this - such as the books set in a largely European-ish climate in which there was very little long-distance travel and no colonial history. But even so, I recognised it as a flaw in writing, and started thinking about how to address that.

In that European-like world, I thought about what I knew about it. I knew that one group of people in the area I was writing about travelled, and that they were more ethnically mixed than the rest of the population as a result; that had been in the bits I'd already written. I thought about people in the places they might have travelled to, and whether, say, a group of people displaced from their home might buy passage to another area and try to build a new way of life there.

That group of people happened to be black. They took up residence in one of the poor areas of the city the story was set in, as that was where they could afford the space, and settled in. They get their food the way the locals do; their family customs are not that different from the customs of the poor of the city, so the blend there is smooth; they trade like the locals do, too, and do reasonably well for themselves because they know techniques that the locals do not. There is some level of intermarriage. And, because this is genre fiction, they maintain their traditions of how to teach and work with psionics, which are very different than the local ways.

Which gives rise to the most story-significant character from that culture: half-immigrant, half-local in heritage, trained in her enclave's techniques in psionics, and adopted, as per local tradition, by one of the local psionic families and trained their way. She is sixteen, twists her hair into dredlocks, and quite certain that she's not old enough or knowledgeable enough to be a bridge between worlds.

Not that she really has a choice in the matter: her mixed heritage means that she will always be needing to navigate the question of where she came from. I wrote a little from her perspective on that state of dubiousness, of uncertainty, of not knowing how to make the synthesis between her heritage and her home, because that is the nature of her story. (I shared it with Little Light the other day, who simply said, "Yes.")

When I was working on constructing this character, as I wrote before, I had lunch with a friend who had written extensively about the spiritual nature of her hair and how she takes care of her dreds. Even though my character was not from an Earthly culture, I knew that she was going to be seen and read by people who were, and so I wanted to be sure that I was treating her well. She lives in a city where people with psionic power mark their affiliations with coloured hair ribbons; she comes from a culture where people with psionic power have dreds. She takes care of her hair carefully, quietly, in a place where nobody knows what it means, where the only person who comments is a child she saved from predators who has developed a juvenile crush.

She gets asked by a little girl - of similar mixed heritage - to teach her the things that go with having "the hair". And despite her self-doubt, she starts to do so - coming into mild conflict with a young man of the dominant culture who is well-steeped in young adult arrogance and certainty of complete knowledge (who spends most of the book being taken down a peg every so often). Her story is not a major part of the book (if I write a third book in that universe, her story will be central, and the bereaved gay man I mentioned in the discussion at Scalzi's will find love again too), but it's a part of the themes that I'm constantly exploring: stuck between worlds, the outsider looking in, the alien trying to make sense of the world.

Another story I had been thinking about on and off for a while was an expansion of a short story I wrote in college. And I thought about it, and figured that what I had was a fine short story, but for an expanded thing, it needed more depth and exploration of what was really a trio of generoteenagers, two boys and a girl.

I spent a while exploring the ethnic origins of the spirits that the boys wound up associated with, thinking about what backgrounds would lead to their affiliations, and so on. (The boys are shapechanged, she is not, so what sort of thing they were was pretty well set in the story.)

I wound up getting a multicultural dictionary of fairy creatures and reading it straight through, taking notes on things to look into, trying to find a humanoid supernatural creature to affiliate her with. When I found something promising - from Peru - I decided her name, Jule, was short for Julianna.

Dealing with a Latina main character gave me a whole lot more resarch to do. I bought a book of Quechua folktales; I listened to my collection of Andean music; I bought a Spanish slang dictionary to supplement my somewhat faded school-based knowledge of the language. I wrote to a Californian educator of my acquaintance asking her for tips, not only about the Latina character, but the white boy who lived in the barrio, and wound up with some understanding of things that I would need to rewrite for depth.

And because this was set in something resembling the Real World, I wound up dealing with Real World racism. An accidental friend's WASP mother was blatant about it; the friend herself had a more incidental flavor and immediately noticed that she'd made a misstep. Julianna, more overtly than either of the other two main characters, has to navigate between the worlds - not only the mundane world and the faery world that they have been caught in, but between her Hispanic heritage and her American desires. Her friends wrestle with poverty and dreams, with middle-class white "culturelessness" and deeply closeted bisexuality.

The themes of the book - finding oneself and coming to an understanding of identity, and as always the between-worlds and outsider-looking-in, were profoundly enriched by the introduction of Julianna's "new" (I hadn't thought about it before, so she was generically whiteish) ethnicity.

And it caused me to add a snide cat-shaped storm demon of Peruvian origin, who rapidly became one of my favorite minor characters ever.

A shorter note on the space opera I'm not working on at the moment - in a fit of aggravation at the stereotypical post-ethnic space opera, I spent a while pondering colonisation efforts and wound up having a large chunk of novel set on a planet settled primarily by Caribbean-origin Francophones. Which gives my Catholic narrator a sense of almost, but not quite, having a sense of the religious rhythms of the place.

I don't expect that my writing will be perfect, or anything near it. But I know that I have gotten more wealth of exploration and more depth in the themes that I was already working with, as well as just more interesting stories, from trying.

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.

Resting Ye Merry

My husband and I were listening to the radio while out driving somewhere the other day. This being December, the usual "Hrm, don't want to listen to this commercial, change the station" was supplemented with "Don't want to listen to this shitty Christmas pop, change the station."

Somewhere along the line, it started playing "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" and I insisted on leaving it there.

Here's the thing that drives me nuts about Christmas music: in the name of being "accepting" or "inclusive" or what have you, the only stuff that gets much airtime is crap. Frosty the Snowman. Here comes Santa Claus. Winter Wonderland. Bibble-bobble fluffstuff.

I'm not Christian. That doesn't mean that I don't like Christmas music -- real Christmas music. The stuff with soul, religion, faith, the stuff with actual musical merit. (Not to say that all modern Christmas music is universally crap, but it's so much the way to bet.)

It's one of those things that puts me in some sympathy with the "Jesus is the reason for the season" folks, even if I'm more of an "Axial tilt is the reason for the season" kinda gal -- because in the name of tolerance and diversity, we don't get meaningful music for everyone. We just get pap. Grind it down to the point that all of us have been run over by a fucking reindeer.

I learned a few years ago that getting me drunk in December was a good way of getting me to belt out proper carols -- the kind that mean something -- at the top of my lungs. (And I can sing loud.)

Generally, what it produced was:

Adeste fideles
Laeti triumphantes
Venite, venite in Bethlehem.
Natum videte
Regem angelorum

Venite adoremus
Venite adoremus
Venite adoremus
Domine!

A good Solstice to all, happy Channukah tomorrow, merry Christmas next week, a good secular/Christian new year upcoming, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth.

(Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice justice and freedom demand....)

Rolling Home to a President Like Me

Truth with all its far-out schemes....

I was raised on a diet of Pogo and Doonesbury, sixties protest rock and NPR. One of my standard jokes is that Album 1700 is my deeptape; I would sometimes listen to one side of the tape copy I had with the tape recorder under my pillow as I was going to sleep at night. (Other times it was one of the Charlie Brown musicals. Never say I'm not a bit eclectic.)

Lets time decide what it should mean....

I came to the first beginnings of real political awareness in 1986, listening to the Iran-Contra hearings and people stressing about the epic deficits of the Reagan era. I was a serious, earnest child, and I scowled while listening to the news and drew lopsided pie charts trying to figure out where the money should be going. I was sure that if I could just go through it, I could straighten it all out, and I wasn't sure why the people in the government couldn't.

It's not the time, but just the dreams that die.

The following decades kind of burned out that little spark of, "Oh, if I could only get at the stuff here I could make it all add up."

And sometimes, when the room is still...

I'm registered as unenrolled, which means that I can vote in whichever major party primary I feel more strongly about. Which means that if I hadn't been stuck in a morass of bad nerves in 2000, I would have voted in the Republican primary for John McCain.

Time, with so much truth to kill ....

I wouldn't have voted for him in the general, but I felt that his dedication to talking about issues rather than playing the mudslinging game was something worth supporting. Given the choice among a Democratic field that didn't excite me terribly, and the possibility to make a difference to the flavor of the Republican Party for the next while, I knew which way I wanted to gamble.

Of course, it turned out I was too busy being mad to vote, but that's how it would have gone if I had.

Leaves you by the windowsill so tied.

In November 2000 I was up until some ludicrous hour of the morning talking with my ex (we weren't exes at the time) and watching election results go wildly everywhere, and I commented that when I'd been walking down to the polls I'd seen a man on a unicycle bouncing a basketball as he crossed a minor highway (sometimes catching the ball in front of him, sometimes behind his head), and said, "This is gonna be a weird election."

Without a wing to take you high.

I watched the people I knew online start to slowly melt down, my newsgroups become less and less readable and more and more hostile, an atmosphere that only got worse after 9/11.

Without a clue to tell you why.

I went, a year or so later, to a local hearing on same-sex marriage access, intending to speak in favor as a heterosexual married in Massachusetts. I put my name in the hat to speak to the legislature, and I waited, and I waited, and I listened for hours, and I have stories about this, but the long and short of it is that I wound up having to go home without speaking, in part because my husband had another obligation, in part because I started gushing blood from my nose for no particular reason other than, I suppose, it being cold and dry.

Now, I just want to keep my name ....

Time crawled onwards. I watched my country slowly slide into a perdition that I felt I could do nothing about. My personal activisms started to burn out quietly, between my perceptions of the risk and my lack of hope for effectiveness. In the 2004 election, I voted in the Democratic primary, for someone unelectable whose voice I wanted at least heard a little, and I watched a lackluster Kerry campaign fail while wondering what happened to the war hero who had been elected.

Not bother anybody's game....

Time continued crawling. I grew increasingly insular, increasingly weary, increasingly disgusted, and increasingly helpless. I needed to protect my own people, a wide and varied group of various sorts, and had no energy to spare for anything outside of that. I cut what I did down to the bone, preserving sanity and energy for what slowly started to seem like the inevitable need to defend. I couldn't see the world changing to suit what I wanted it to be unless I went up and did it, and I could not afford to do it - not the mental cost, not the risks to my family, none of it. So I knew it wouldn't happen.

Without ideas of gold or fame or...

When the election season rolled around again, I could not bring myself to be terribly interested. There was nothing that would stop the slide downwards, after all; "politics as usual" would be the same established interests, the same voices, the same faces, the same donation sources, the same sorts of policies. I had reasonable confidence that whatever Democratic nominee made it through would have the ability to win, given the overall status of the Bush administration, and that was all I could bring myself to care about, all I was able to invest in.

Insane heights.

I have friends who are political junkies; I absorbed things they said quietly, without really engaging with any of it. I poked around and did "Which candidate matches your views" quizzy things occasionally, on a lark. I mostly ignored the process for a long time, finding myself unable to care terribly much which of the sets of talking heads got the nomination. I mostly watched the Republican side, because they made me anxious, and I knew whichever one of them came out on top of the slugfest would be setting a tone - and I wanted to know where my enemies were going to be coming from. I needed to defend, after all. That was all I could believe in.

I don't want a lot of money, I don't want a Playboy Bunny....

I don't remember when that started to change. But I remember listening. I remember Jon Stewart on the Daily Show saying, "... gave a speech about race that treated the American people like adults." I know that was after I started listening, started paying attention, started thinking about possibility.

Started waking up.

Just a love to call me honey late at night...

And I still didn't want to talk about politics, talk about the races, talk about the vast dramas played out on the national soap opera stage. But there was something different out there - not the same old figured with their various policies, but all basically a part of the flow of The Way Things Were. There was a possibility of something being different, and someone doing it other than me - that thing I'd had no hope of.

In my arms, by my side, in my arms, late at night.

Quietly, in my own space, I started reading party platforms. When it was down to Clinton and Obama I laid their websites out side by side and compared the issues. When McCain looked likely to take the Republican nomination I remembered 2000, and had hope for a shift back to what he had been then and there. There was ... something there, a possibility, the sort of world that I would like to see, where the people who had their differences could address them themselves.

But I don't know, I ain't been told...

There was a little spark there, that the era of hostile campaigning might come to an end, that people might have a vision and work towards it, something might change - and it wasn't policies that I wanted that change in so much as zeitgeist.

Everybody wants a hand to hold....

I thought a lot about the civil rights movements that this country has had, working for racial equality, for women, for gay rights, for so many things. It flowed in and out of my mind, the old tunes, the ways of being. I watched Across the Universe and read that speech, and I felt myself in tears.

They're so afraid of being old....

I was quiet, and focused, and almost reluctant to make comments supporting one candidate over another, because of the weariness of those years. But there were the songs in my heart again, and I remembered them, and hummed them quietly to myself.

So scared of dying so unknown, and all alone....

Something in me started to live again.

Rolling home.

I watched the hardening of the discourse, the negativity, and folded in on myself. The insulting terms that were thrown every which way about the candidates and their supporters depressed me almost catastrophically.

But at the same time, I saw people inspired. Creative. I saw LOLcats. I saw an entire blog of photos of Obama with kids, his own and others, and just this sense of comfort and ease with small people. I saw occasional images of his relationships with his family, laughing with his daughters, heard about the puppy so that when he spoke about it in his acceptance speech I said, "A puppy!" before he mentioned it and drew funny looks from my men. I saw pumpkins. I saw all these different upswellings of feeling, and creation, and, yes, being talked to like an adult.

And there was new music, too. New music, my gods, new music.

There was a story, sometime in there, where a bunch of reporters found Obama in a diner and wanted to get his opinion on the Crisis Of The Moment, and he looked at them, and was reported to say, "Why can't I just eat my waffle?"

Why can't I just eat my waffle?

That was a clinching moment for me, oddly enough; this eminently human reponse, this realness, this sense that here was someone who wasn't going to just spew talking points or declaim on positions at the drop of a hat, but who was a real human being who occasionally has breakfast.

A friend made me a livejournal icon of it.

And I watched the first campaign that actually started to speak my language. Not just in terms of what I called the first political campaign of the 21st century in terms of its grassroots and internet work. But in the sense that somehow, somewhere, someone knew about that little girl who drew little pie charts about the budget, putting huge slices of it towards education, because damnit, if we only had the numbers we could do something to put it right. Someone wasn't ashamed of having been the little kid who said, "Hey, I'm smart enough to figure this out, just let me at the problem," in a country where politics has had a strong anti-intellectual current for my entire lifetime.

And I saw, just before Halloween, a photo of Obama on some tarmac somewhere, talking with an aide, with a pumpkin tucked under one arm, as if that were a perfectly normal thing to do.

I had never seen a politician preparing to carve pumpkins before.

You want the real America? Goddamn, a politician with a fucking pumpkin.

A friend posted this image today and I laughed at the sticker on the computer, but, again, this is a real human thing, something familiar and real and I laugh not just because it's silly but because it's human and known and damnit I wish I'd thought of that, you know?

And it's a trivial thing, a silly thing, not enough to put a vote on ...


... but it's enough to make the vote I cast mean so much more.


Because I voted for a President who's actually like me, and I never thought that would happen.

I never thought it would be okay to be the little girl who hoped her government could be fixed again.

Something Appealing, Something Appalling

Questioning Transphobia raised the issue of excluding trans women from areas because a penis -- or a former penis-possessor -- might be "triggering" to abuse survivors. Lisa Harney wrote a followup discussing her own triggers.

So here's the thing.

I am, in fact, triggered by penises; that's the most consistent thing that sets off my flashbacks to the assault. (Other known triggers include the movie A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which I didn't successfully watch again until a few months ago as a part of a really intense scene, certain phrases, and, apparently, attempting to discuss the events in any detail with the shrink.)

Being triggered by penises is really annoying if one is pretty much exclusively interested in male sex partners. For the first ten years or so I was sexually active, I kept the lights off if at all possible, and rarely looked south of the ribcage.

Being triggered by penises is really one of those things that almost never comes up in the ordinary world. I'm more likely to have my unrelated mostly-mild phobia of mirrors pop up than random unexpected penises -- people put mirrors every-damn-where, but it's not often that one encounters a random penis. (Warning: link to random penis includes random penis. Art by the delightfully wacky Ursula Vernon.)

And the reason it doesn't have much relevance boils down to, mostly: trousers.

I live in a part of the world where people, for the most part, wear clothes. The penises the people around me have, if they have them, are irrelevant to pretty much all interactions I have with them, whether they were born with them, had them generated via modern medicine, got cybernetic implants a la Star Wreck's encounter with the Bored, or have a sparkly purple one that lives in the drawer next to the bed. The penises just don't come up, or if they do, they don't come up thoroughly enough to escape the trousers (or occasional kilts).

Hypothetical penises that may or may not be there are not triggering for me. I am not speculating about what is in your trousers right now, whether you are male, female, or not, whether you are cis or trans, whether you are wearing a thong or boxers or nothing or whatever. So long as your clothes are on, your hypothetical penis is hypothetical. With your clothes on, you are as sculpted and nippleless as Barbie to me, though presumably better-proportioned and able to flex your feet.

But ah, you say, what about those circumstances where people may not be clothed, what about those penises?

What about them, I say.

The thing is, my trigger is my problem. Which is not to say I don't appreciate people who are willing to make accomodations for it, as I do, but I can't find it reasonable to demand that other people go to exceptional effort to pad the corners for me.

Let me walk away if there's a penis and I'm upset by it. Don't make me stare at your naked dude spread. Give me space if I flip out. These are levels of consideration I expect from you as a decent human.

Ask me to tell you if I'm being triggered so you can determine if you feel you need to make accomodation to my issue? Sure, that's something I don't expect, but do appreciate, and I consider it a gesture from a friend.

Ban penises in my vicinity, just in case one of them might set me off? Presume to tell people "You can't bring that penis in here, she might have a flashback"? Free clue: my neuroses don't have a right to run my life, let alone the lives of innocents. I have the right to live like a normal person, and let other people likewise live their lives.

It sucks to have to manage triggers. But it's something that I have to do. It's something I've worked on, actively, gentle exposure to the occasional penis, going so far as to look at a few (though rarely for long, because it makes my brain itch in unpleasant ways due to, y'know, triggeryness). But I have to do it, because that's the price of living in my head. Like sometimes walking with a cane is the price of living in my body. I don't get to opt out. If I were crippled by the possibility of encountering someone with a penis unexpectedly, I couldn't go get the mail, let alone have a satisfying life including my partners.

I don't want to be oh-poor-babied and have my fragile spots coddled until I'm made of nothing but twitchy shards of overprotective mess. I'm not going to tell you to leave your penis at home any more than I'm going to forbid you to hum "Everybody Ought To Have A Maid", but I may remove myself from your presence at times if I can't handle it right then.

The Dangerous Woman Shortage

Noli Irritare Leones writes about monogamy, marriage, and the lack of the impending decline and fall of civilisation. (The basic point of which I am greatly in agreement with, that people keeping commitments is a good thing, and that not making them or running out on them is much more a threat to the universe as we know it than people not promising sexual exclusivity ....) It's a good post; go have a look at it.

It reminded me, though, of one of those things that I see crop up consistently.

Whenever I see acceptance of multiple relationships come up, especially the concept of legalising polygamy, someone pops up with "If that's possible, then all the wealthy and powerful men will have all the women and there will be none for ordinary guys like me."

This argument blows my mind, and I want to take it apart a little.

First of all, there's the thread of Figleaf's "no-sex class" analysis in there -- that women will trade their sex for money/power access, rather than desiring their own sexual relationships. If "all the women" are being collected by those elites, "all the women" are going to be spending a lot of time cuddled up with their vibrators.

(I actually have a vibrator ... somewhere. I prefer real penises.)

And that comes with the presumption that the only form of polygamy that's likely to exist is polygyny, that women like me don't exist. (I obviously find this problematic. And at least for a while I knew more women who considered themselves orientationally nonmonogamous than I knew men.) That these women who have one zillionth of their movie star or bazillionaire will be satisfied with that and not have any other relationships of their own -- that such women will automatically be unavailable to other men, because women are the Monogamous Class.

And, also, the failure to actually follow through on the assumption that women are the Monogamous Class, and might therefore insist on having relationships with men who are willing to be monogamous. Which will raise a bunch of those ordinary guys a bit higher on the list than the gazillionaire movie star playboys who already have a woman for each day of the week and two for Sundays. Apparently the lure of having a fraction of Mr. Uberpowerful is more important than the Monogamous Class values that might require exclusivity.

And then there's the idea that these wealthy, powerful guys actually want to collect women. I hear this from people who claim to be monogamously oriented, not interested in more than one relationship -- but apparently that trait corresponds with "ordinary joe" status, and the elites by whatever standard will claim enough of these plentiful monogamous-but-doesn't-care-if-you-are women to cause a shortage. A girlfriend to match each car, perhaps. Quantity over quality. Pokemon partnership, gotta catch 'em all.

Not to mention that mostly movie stars date other movie stars, to the perpetual delight of the tabloids. The Beautiful People mostly hang with other Beautiful People; even if I'd accept an offer from Golden-Boy Heartthrob if I got one, he's never going to make me an offer, because I'm some random housewife living in a swamp in Massachusetts, I don't have a fairy godmother to Calgon-take-me-away to a place where I'd meet the guy, and I have no illusions about this sort of thing. I hang out with nerds. That means that the people I might hook up with are probably going to be ... nerds. Fortunately, I'm pretty much exclusively attracted to geeky boys with nice shoulders, which means that "nerds" is a better stalking ground than "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" for my actual preferences (which also don't come into this scenario, notice that?).

And really, we're already in a world where the elites can have all the women they want, and in fact do ... to the perpetual delight of the tabloids.

And sure, there are people -- of all sexes -- who like a lot of reasonably casual liasons. But one of the traits of that is that one isn't marrying them, and thus they're not "off the market", if one wants to go all transactional like that. Once one gets into more serious relationships, one starts hitting limited resources -- even if one has infinite money, infinite desirability, and infinite sexual stamina, one has limited time. Women are people; if a person is settling into some sort of serious relationship, that will include some level of support. I'm sure there are a few women who'll trade a quick poke once a month for a nice allowance and the opportunity to go to the ball and meet Prince, but I can't imagine that is a major grouping. Even a ridiculously low-maintenance wife will need a certain amount of time, and if she doesn't get it and the gold-diggy stereotype is being played, she's not gonna stay married -- she's gonna play for the severance package and see what she can get in a divorce.

I know people who have sustainable relationships with a day a month where they might see their partners -- and the thing is, those people aren't considering those relationships marriages, primary-level, or whatever your word is. They're secondary relationships, dating, satellite, more peripheral, fun on the side, whatever you want. The majority of the actual poly people I know aren't terribly interested in marrying more than one person; a fair few aren't big on marriage at all. Which also cuts into the odds of monopolisation; if a huge number of the people doing multiple relationships are doing so at the "something mostly on the side" level, then even if the whole population suddenly goes polyish overnight because multiple marriage is available, the majority of people seem likely to be only having one marriage in the first place.

All these women are presumed to be really after the wealth and power and willing to trade sex to get it. And this isn't just the "I can't get a date" crowd -- I've heard this from people who are apparently happily married, and I can't help but wonder if they really apply this to their wives and presume that they'd be abandoned if "something better" came along, if only it were possible for more than one person to be the wife of Superstar.

Strangers on the Subway

Four boys, probably high school aged, with a black sketchbook just like the ones that I had for my art class in high school. They passed it around, drawing graffiti-style lettering in the book.

One took the book, slid down the side of the car to sit on the floor, bumping my foot. "Sorry," he said, and "No worries," I replied.

He took the fuschia marker and started to sketch out letters with perfect grace, each line with ease and fluidity, fading from thick to sparse with each stroke. He worked quickly and deliberately, swapping from pink to black, and I could not figure out what he was saying.

"Aw," he said, "that looks like shit. Whose black is this?"

It belonged to the one sitting across from me.

"Do yourself a favor, man, get a new one." He took the pen, stepped on the end, shook it a few times, and then scribbled on a scrap of paper. Satisfied, he handed it back to its owner. "Smooth."

He had perfect sketching hands.

We got off at the same stop, before I could figure out how to say it.


He was sitting on the trolley across from me, talking with his wife, his bare smooth-muscled arms clearly visible, as he was wearing a sleeveless shirt.

He had amazingly beautiful skin. It looked perfectly smooth, unblemished, shading through all kinds of dark rich colour along the contours of his arms and into the knobblier darkness of his wrinkled knuckles.

And I couldn't think of a way to tell him. Not that wouldn't come off as some creepy race-fetish thing, even aside from the horrible awkwardness of trying to compliment a perfect stranger, especially on something so socially strange.

He got off the stop before mine, leaning heavily on his cane.


What a world it might be, if people knew how beautiful they were. If it were possible to tell them about beauties easily, without awkwardness, without sounding like a freak.

In Which She Links Her Previous Posts And Breaks The Labels Feature

Someone at "The F-Word" asks:

While I’m here, can I ask: why are there next to no “sexy” images of men on sex positive* sites, or sites focusing on porn for women etc?

A post to which I reponded:

Well, my 'sex-positive for lack of a better term' blog doesn't have photos of hot men on it because I respect my partners' privacy and anonymity in that forum.

And anyway, it's not their blog.

Belledame of Fetch Me My Axe has written about being a sex-positive lesbian and a short sidebar on slash writing; Caroline at Uncool talks about her use of imagery. When I think about people who are posting images of men (and sometimes women) they find sexy just on my blogroll, I immediately think of E for Eclectic (whose second post from the top as of this writing is titled 'The Beauty of Men'), Natalia Antonova, Aishwarya at Kaleidoglide. There are others, too; that's just a quick sample.

But that's neither here nor there.

I just went and looked at my "beauty" tag. And in there among the anti-poly sizeism post or the one about the gorgeousness of correct taxonomy and recognising the beautiful humanity of a stranger and the politicality of hair and beauty vs. brains and body image stuff I find things like me writing about male beauty and my problems with the mainstream conceptualisations thereof or my recent post about beauty and power dynamic and lust and some theology using male beauty as the central image.

Just to focus on what I know, which is what I've written.

And I think there's something actually insidious about the notion that a sex-positive blog is necessarily a sex blog is necessarily a porn or erotica blog, at all. That the whole thing about being sex-pos is about working to titillate, arouse, or engage sexually with one's audience. Perhaps, that it's all about the 'hawtt titjobbe bisexee suckfuckers', that sex-positive asexuals do not exist.

The sex blog I've been reading longest is Sexeteria, which currently features a herbaceous porn header: the unclothed genitalia of a tulip. (Actually, looking at it again, it's not a tulip, but I don't know what it is, and I can sidetrack myself for hours trying to figure it out to properly improve my one-liner. Thus, moving right along ....)

This is a sex-positive blog.

Note the lack of sexy images of men or women. Not because of any political impulse, but because I'm not interested in sexy images of either, for the most part, and I respect the privacy of the people I do fancy ogling at length.

Note, also, the lack of explicit writing, scene reports, tales of sexual prowess, and similar things. Not because of any political impulse, but because my private sex life is none of your damn business, my assorted readership and stray explorers who got here by Googling "pixie sex" or "nine letter relationship word status" (good luck with your crossword puzzle, whoever you are!). This is not a sex blog.

It is a sex-positive blog. It's here because I'm writing about my personal sexuality, BDSM, the difficulties and damages and risks inflicted by a surrounding culture that is frankly defective about matters sexual. Because I want to write about learning about sexuality and how to have healthily constructed sexual experience. Because I'm concerned about the marginalisation of various people's sexualities, including my own. Because I write about divine ecstasy.

And, you know, I've occasionally considered writing a post about porn, because it's one of those going subjects in the sex-pos blogworld, but I'm not up for writing a post about something I've never seen, participated in, or had any particular interest in. I might write something someday about written stuff I've found hot, or visual stuff I've found hot -- I may have mentioned my reactions to Tigana in passing -- but that's not a particularly compelling subject to me either.

Asserting my claim on my own sexuality is a compelling subject for me, because it's something that I have been wrestling with for twenty years or so, because there are forces that make it very necessary work to do, people who think I should avoid things I find sexually satisfying for political reasons, moral reasons, social reasons. Doing the work to make the world safe for me as a polyamorous kinkster, and as part of that same work to try to make the world safe for all the other people with their varying sexualities and lacks thereof because we are all people, is what makes this a sex-positive blog.

If one is mistaking "sex-positive" for "providing wanking material", one will miss a lot of the work that a lot of people are doing. The internet may be for porn, but this blog isn't.



On a related note, I appear to have missed the fourth carnival of sexual freedom and autonomy just like I missed the third, but just because I don't have anything in it doesn't mean that I don't think people shouldn't go read it if they're so inclined.