Just Venting A Bit

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

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

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right music, I didn't know the right jokes, I didn't wear the right clothes, and on top of that I was socially anxious, withdrawn, depressed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never did figure out what was wrong with me.

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

Maybe!

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Assemblage 23, "Let the wind erase me"

I just.)

A Personal History Of Games

(Apparently I'm down to 'I make a post once a year or so'. I should work on that... this last year has been really shit for my being able to keep up with my posting anywhere.)

I was, in my wanderings around the internets, linked to this article on the history of the video game industry. About which I have a lot of odd thoughts.


Scene: the early to mid 80s. I am at a friend's house, and I am playing Pac-Man. I love Pac-Man. I suspect, secretly, that I bore her, because I want to play Pac-Man, or Jumpman Junior, or other games, rather than the sorts of things she wants to do. Sometimes I deliberately suggest other things, even if I'd rather turn on the computer, because I don't want to make it sound like the only reason I come to play is because of the games.


Scene: mid to late 80s. We have Brickles - a Mac version of Breakout - and I am extremely good at it. A single game can last over an hour.

My father knew the people who did Space War! and we have a copy of that. He has stories about playing it with one of the members of the Grateful Dead. At that time, I didn't know who he was talking about well enough to find it impressive.

We get the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game. And the clue book. I get scolded for revealing all the clues with the highlighter pen, but the book was as interesting to read as the game was fun to play.


Scene: maybe the late 80s? I am at my aunt's house, and my (male) cousin has an Atari. He is playing Pitfall. I am rapt; the idea of computer games is immensely compelling to me. My brother has a turn. I do not. Quietly, whenever we plan a visit to that part of the family, I hope that I might have a chance to get a go at the Atari. Sometimes, I get a turn at Spy Hunter, but never enough to get good at it; we don't visit often, and clearly, the Atari is for the boys.

Eventually, my cousin gets a Nintendo, and the Atari - and its crate of games - comes to us. I discover Joust.


Scene: early 90s. I have a friend with some of the King's Quest games and Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, who doesn't mind that sometimes I want to play.

My brother has a friend with a Nintendo and one of the Super Mario Brothers games. Sometimes I wheedle my way into playing with them.

The one friend I have at school after my neighbour friends move away is just as painfully nerdy as I am. Unfortunately, he thinks that being interested in playing Tetris together means we're dating.


Scene: 1993. The whole family is trying to figure out Myst. We never really manage it.


Scene: mid-nineties. My brother wins a colour-screen Game Gear and Sonic the Hedgehog in a raffle, because my brother is the sort of person who wins raffles. He gives me his old Game Boy for Christmas. I promptly learn how to beat Super Mario World all the way through and then get the option to beat it on hard. Then I do the same thing for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game.

When my brother gets a Nintendo and is playing Mortal Kombat I sometimes lurk in the background and watch him play with his friends.

It never occurs to me to ask my parents to get me a game that I would like to play.

Girls don't play video games, you know.

Readercon: On "Socially Awkward"

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

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

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

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

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

You know why this is embarrassing?

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

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

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

As if.

As fucking if.

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

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

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

You might be "socially awkward"!

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

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

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

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

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

... socialising.

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

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

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

This isn't me.

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

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

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

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

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.

Weighty Contemplations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ignorance and Bliss

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

Angles of Approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

Cannot think past end of penis, apparently.

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

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

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

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.

The Standardised Woman

Back when I was evaluating possibilities for a care provider for my pregnancy, I called the office of a highly recommended (and thus highly in-demand) gynecologist to see if she had any space available.

"And when was the date of your last menstrual period?"

I had been asked that question so often that I could just rattle it off without thinking, so I did.

"Let me check The Wheel.... Okay, your due date is ...."

Let me take a moment to explain my understanding of "The Wheel". The idea is that since the standard-issue woman has a standard-issue menstrual cycle of 28 days, therefore one can use 'date of last menstrual period' to determine 'date of ovulation' and thus 'due date' on a standard-issue pregnancy. All standard-issue medicine and standard-issue bureaucratic paperwork.

"I'm sorry, she doesn't have any space open for July. And we're not booking for August yet."

"I'm almost certainly not going to have this baby before August."

"The Wheel says ..."

"I have a long cycle. I ovulated on this date, not the Wheel-assumed date, which means August, not July."

"We go by The Wheel."

"Even though I know when I ovulated because I was tracking my temperature?"

"We go by The Wheel."

Well, okay then.

I have my doubts I could get decent medical care from an office that expects me to gestate on the clock, anyway. Punch in, punch out, I'm not gonna get paid for this overtime, am I?

My defective long menstrual cycle and I hauled our ass to a midwife.

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.

Time Better Spent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Goddesses and Bellies

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

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

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

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

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

And then I noticed ...

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

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

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

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

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

Where am I?

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

A Social Disease

So I spent my therapy appointment talking about "Baby Madonna" and related.

She doesn't think I need to forgive myself. She thinks I need to ... externalise the victim-blaming, the disgust at self, the sense of failure, into a framework in which what I have is a piece of shared experience of a cultural failing -- not just the assault itself, but the framework by which the people who have had such experiences are further beaten down and abused by the response and expectations, by the thump of falling off the madonna pedestal and the crush of having it land on us afterwards.

That this internalised self-hatred is a taught thing, a cultural thing, a social disease. And I don't need to forgive myself for suffering its symptoms; I need to recognise that it's an illness. And then move to treating that illness.

I ... am scared of collective experience. Not just because the I'm Every Woman feminists make me sick, not just because of the horrible essentialising I've seen of that sort of thing, but because the meaning of it gets out of my hands. It feels like opening it up for someone else to tell me what having been assaulted meant to me, did to me, broke in me, because it's a more generalised thing than just me.

And I wouldn't talk about it, not for years, because I was afraid of being just another faceless victim whose experience was a statistic, who was taken and ruined and discarded into the "broken" heap. In the hope of avoiding the social disease that I seem to have caught anyway.

So I find myself asking: What does it mean, to be a part of collective experience? To be suffering the symptoms of a cultural cancer? It can't mean the universalising bullshit, or that I can be used as someone else's political blow-up doll, the victim, boo-hoo, let's all have a good cry about our collective victimisation, not if it means anything beyond reiterating suffering

It has to mean something about sorting out the boundaries between self and other-than-self, distinguishing shame from what others want me to be ashamed of, if it means anything worth trying. Finding a way of sorting out what pain is my own thing, and what pain is because this ... construct ... has hooks under my flesh.

At that level I can't consistently tell the difference between me and my mother, let alone me and this huge crazy scary planet.

Baby Madonna

I need to write this, and I suspect it will make me cry.

I'm not sure I've ever really forgiven myself for being fourteen.

And if anyone asks what sort of sins being fourteen might be: I let myself get assaulted. I let someone inflict lasting psychological damage on me, warp my sexuality around fear, take away the possibility of it ever being easy.

And while I have worked a great deal on forgiveness, on self-acceptance, I have never fully forgiven myself for this.

Never forgiven myself for being the sort of fourteen-year-old who could only find a partner three years older and thus well past the explorations of boundaries that are tied up with the experience of being fourteen and learning adult sexuality.

Never forgiven myself for not knowing yet where my boundaries were, none save the last, that kept it to assault from rape.

Never forgiven myself for not knowing how to go back to ground that was secure.

Never forgiven myself for ignoring his protestations of love that I knew were anglings to set up sex in the hope that my lack of responsiveness would make it go away.

Never forgiven myself for not knowing how to say "No", even when I was pinned down with his huge weight and curled into a knot of refusal. Never forgiven the lack of words, lack of articulation, from someone who was only starting to learn how not to be a child. Never forgiven the inability to speak understandings some of which I only achieved years later.

Never forgiven myself, above all, for suspecting "Do you want to come over to my place and watch a movie?" a ruse, suspecting it near enough to be a belief I might even have spoken at the time had anyone asked me, and for packing up my videotape and going in the trust that I would be asked, that time, despite a long, long history of not being asked, of being presumed. For knowing, and hiding in a cloud of denial, of expectation of the civility of directness, of presumed protocol.

For not cutting him off, for not drawing the lines I didn't know, for ...

It never occurred to me before today that I never forgave myself for not being a more competent policing actor on that guy's penis. So of course I couldn't accept the damage that came of falling off the madonna pedestal.

Half a life ago and more, and I never thought of that.

Threat Displays

It's interesting the way arguing with people can sometimes illuminate things I already knew, but from a different, more compact angle.

This fellow turned up in a discussion forum and asked some questions, and despite the fact that he rubbed me kind of wrong, I did some responding. Up until someone posted to note that what appeared to be a name was in fact a pseudonym -- he was posting under the name of the main male character from the "Big Love" television show, about Mormon patriarchal polygynists. Which sort of left me with a thought of, "... oh, well then. That explains why he sounds like a sexist asshole."

But one of the things that I got quite clear on was this underlying notion in his conversation that women are passive in relationships, which seemed to be threaded through a lot of his basic perspective. He was baffled by the fact that I consider a guy who is threatened by the fact that I have other (male) partners (female partners are hot, you know, so that's maybe okay, especially if he can join in ... sigh) to be threatened by me.

But no, he said, from a guy's perspective it's that other guy who's the threat.

Now, the way I see it, that's treating me as someone with no agency. There's no recognition that I have chosen to be with someone, but a skipping off to 'that someone is a threat to me'. And the fact that if it wasn't that someone, it would, at some point, be someone different doesn't matter -- there's no recognition of my capacity for choice, for the fact that I am an active participant and factor in my own relationships. The woman is the passive possession of the man, and there is an ownership conflict here.

Those other people aren't "threats" because of themselves, because of who they are or what they do, but only because they exist and are chosen and desired. There is this illusion that if that object of desire is destroyed, the desire will cease to be; this guy suggested that one couldn't consider the woman a threat, because threats were to be obliterated. So her choice has to remain inconsequential, inevitable, without motive; all of the 'threat' has to be passed on to someone uninvolved, someone one does not have to deal with as an intimate. Someone one isn't risking losing something by hating.

And it's a horrible depersonalising thing to do to someone, an utter objectification: to hate them not for themselves, for who they are or what they do or any of that, but solely because someone else interacts with them in a particular way. It erases their humanness and casts them into a role, and because that role is deemed unacceptable, the person is unacceptable. The person who wishes to have that someone in that place, the supposed partner, is exempt from consideration in this; it's that other person's fault, the other person who is vile, the other person who is the threat to the way things should be. It doesn't even get to "If only you were someone who didn't want to be with them, you'd be perfect", more often than not, because that requires acknowledging that that person is genuinely someone other than the blow-up doll version of want-you-like-this.

I've run into people on occasion who thought I would be a great partner if only I were someone else -- more monogamous, more busty, more ambitious, curvier, more sweet-tempered, more compliant, less religious. If only I didn't have these other people in my life, if only I wasn't short-tempered, if only someone else was in my skin, I'd be so good for them. If only my agency could be subsumed into someone else's, if only I were more posable, more agreeable, more like their fantasies of me.

And I figure there are thousands of people out there who are more monogamous, bustier, mellower, athier than I am, so someone who wants one of those should go finding them rather than try to make me into someone I'm not. And if that someone goes beyond that to being actively threatened by who I am, well, ... I'm catankerous, difficult, and not interested in changing. Thousands of other people. Shoo, shoo. There's probably nothing wrong with what you want, but I'm not going to give it to you. Who I am is not what you want, not even with judicious editing.

I am the director's goddamn cut with the special features and the actor interviews. I make no apologies.

Living in Theory

(This has been kicking around in my head since the beginning of the month, so is not directly related to the current dwama that some fraction of my eleven and a half readers are aware of. Nonetheless ... same old, same old.)

There's a one-liner that drifts around talking about the Land of Theory. "I'd like to live in Theory. Everything works there."

There's also "The difference between theory and practice is that in Theory, there is no difference."

A while back, on one of those link-chasing festivals, I wound up reading the recent posts of one of the Big Feminist Blogs, and the comment threads on them. And aside from folks I knew, what I read mostly ... was something I could link to and say, "This conversation is pretty much distilled essence of why I don't call myself a feminist". If I wanted to invite the sort of response that I'm still pretty sure I'd risk even after waiting the two, two and a half weeks after it went off the front page of a busy blog.

This is hard to write about, trying to pull out the assumptions and the things I react badly to. Because, yeah, I can go through and pull out bits -- in one of the drafts of this I did -- like 'Men who fail to hate you are rare' -- but the more of them I pull out the more likely it is that the ravening hordes will come in and how-dare-you at me. And one of the reasons I dropped the word from my identity was that I hated the internalised warfare it brought to me. The occasional bickering about why-don't-you-call-yourself-a is still warfare, even if it's outside my head, even if it's someone else attempting to impose on me an obligation to adopt a label that doesn't like my kind. And if I'd gone into that thread to post, I'm pretty damn sure that I'd have been assumed to be a man, because apparently penis-possession leads to the sort of blindness that's a part of where my head is at. According to what I read, at least.

It just ... I'm honestly afraid to write about this. I've seen the way the harpies come in onto people. It reminds me of some of the first feminists I 'met', who were big believers in the 'men can't be feminists, and any man who disagreed is blinded by his privilege', who so graciously insulted a transman I know by saying that he wasn't a real enough man to be thrown out of their club. (He pointed out that he'd been raised to be a good little feminist daughter by a mother who was in their club, and her reaction to his transition told him all he needed to know.) And at the same time, I rail about it, I resent this sense that this supposed community that's supposed to be supporting me because I happen to have been born with a woman's body is both so shockingly alien to me and is willing to express such venom to people whose experiences are much more like mine. I'm reminded of how someone who spoke up about one of that crowd got a sneering, "Well, I feel silenced" from one of them, never mind that he (and, for that matter, she in response) had the guts to actually speak up against her bullshit and I run off to my little semi-anonymous space on Blogger and angst about whether I dare speak up.

I saw a later thread on the blog that was actually within one of my realms of reasonable expertise, another link-chasing experience, and I considered offering some of my thoughts ... and didn't. Because ... I know that that space isn't my community, and is unlikely to ever be so. Inviting being noticed that way is ... not ... safe.

My ex read the thread and said (quoted with permission), "You know, it occurs to me that I _don't_ want to live in theory. Sure, everything actually works there, but the men are all really pretty horrible people."

Delusions of Inadequacy

E for Eclectic writes about Why Female Gender Supremacy is Ignorant Crap, and is linked from SM-Feminists with commentary and also responded to at A Place To Draw Blood Laughing, which I found by chasing links around.

And I'm not going to get into the weirdness of parsing sex- or gender-based supremacy stuff to me, as I'm sure folks can figure out how baffling that is to someone genderqueer. I mean, it needs to be noted as one of those, "Wow, your universe has no space for certain types of deviants to exist, let alone have anything to do" things, but ....

The weird thing about this stuff for me is how oddly restrictive it gets. Not just in the gender-assumption bits, or in the obvious 'men are like this, women are like that' stuff (whether it's male-superior or female-superior, it still has something of that sort), but in the whole rest of it.

Like one of the comments E got was from someone who claimed to agree with the female gender supremacy thing (I think; it's not entirely clear in context) and was full of supercilious contempt and dismissal of a woman. Which probably indicates that a woman who doesn't fit someone's model of Correct Womanhood doesn't count as a woman, and is thus beneath contempt according to The System.

And not only does one have to fit into a gender and do it the right way, one has to fit into a model of what it means to be dominant or submissive or whatever else. Which reminds me of all the posts I've seen recently about female doms/tops being expected to fulfil certain fantasies -- look a certain way, behave a certain way, be into certain things. Not be in to certain other things. (And I'm sitting here watching this one guy who comes across as obsessed with not-being-into-pain, and my thought process goes something like, "I'm not into pain, and I'm doing research about floggers on the side ...." Though that's sort of a complicated side tangent into different ways I'm a freak.)

I've run into a couple of Gorean types who think their fantasy is a model of reality -- both the masters and the kajira. (Which I want to pluralise 'kajirae'; clearly I've been reading too many Greek plays lately.) And they're very clear on what sort of behaviour a "real" woman/sub should have -- the whole demure, compliant, master-this master-that thing. It reminds me of the "How can you call yourself a sub when you're not into humiliation?" person I ran into a long time ago, the whole slender, tenuous thread one must walk in something dealing with power.

Power, for godssakes.

The whole men coming up to dominant women and casting their 'female superiority' stuff there is just ... why should those women give up their power of self-assertion about the nature of their desire for some random dude? Why should I, a switchy sub, give up my power of identity for someone whose sole reason for expecting me to have a certain set of interests and proclivities is the shape of my genitalia? (Even my master doesn't get that; if he wanted me to be something other than complete as myself, we wouldn't be terribly compatible.)

And one of the reasons I value my relationship with my liege is he doesn't play the superior/inferior game at all. We have a relationship in which certain broad forms of authority are his to claim; we also have a relationship in which each of us is good at distinctly different things, and put in a position where we can bring those strengths to our dynamic freely. (I commented, frequently, a while back that I suspect most people's expectations of a d/s relationship included less woodworking -- but I'm good at keeping track of patterns of things that need done, and thus a position in which I'm running the sequencing of repetetive tasks in his service is damn useful to him. I mean, yeah, there were times I'd have liked more kinky sex and less sanding, but that didn't change what mattered to him.) It's specialisation, not inadequacy or inferiority.

I like dealing with situations in which my power is respected enough that I'm not put in charge of things, myself. (And so does everyone else around me; I'm a holy terror when I don't have an authority I respect to defer to.)

I like models that let people find what works for them without having to wodge themselves sideways into someone else's fantasy. There are enough weirdos out there for there to be some people who have compatible stuff, and even if one never comes across one (I, personally, never expected to) other people will remain real and have their own sexualities, and will almost certainly find implementing them more important to them than implementing that of J. Random Perv.

Bodies 3: The Revelation

(Considered tagging this 'art', but 'beauty' is probably more honest.)

This is actually the most thought out of any of these 'bodies' posts, and was largely spawned by this post, titled Men Are Pretty, that someone linked to in the way that links slowly migrate through the internet via Brownian Motion. Earlier today I came across Figleaf's 'no-sex class' archive in a link that Amber dropped over at Ren's place, too, and that's in the stew too. (That's all quite long, but IMO the lot of it is worth reading through.)

I came across, the other day, someone commenting something like 'many women's sexuality is framed by how they think they are seen, rather than their own perceptions' or something like that. (I'm pretty sure I'm missing a nuance; I also think I saw it in a standard fem-theory phrasing.)

There's this huge thing, though, about how women are 'the pretty ones', the thing that P. Burke was writing in response to, and it goes beyond just the whole body thing. (At which point I start riffing on my post from last month about clothes, too.) My husband has been known to complain how difficult it is for him to get interesting and attractive clothing -- the options for strutting like a peacock within his taste are limited -- while I have the option of a stunning variety of just cuts of shirt, many of which are readily available to me without having to go to specialty stores. This is because men aren't supposed to be pretty; a man who cares about his appearance frequently gets snarled up in the homophobic dialogues of culture (or their countering responses; see also Queer Eye).

And then people say, hey, women aren't visually stimulated. Women are the ones who care about personal adornment. Women are the ones who are judged on their appearance in a professional and/or general social context. Women need to be Concerned about their bodies. Women are ...

And then people ask why women's sexuality is framed not by what they want to see, but how they are seen. In the context of this whole narrative that focuses consciousness on looking at women, suddenly, in the privacy of the bedroom, the heterosexual woman is supposed to start looking somewhere else. And I don't think that this is some sort of ingrained objectification thing, I think it's ... not having the story available, not being able to work on one's own personal dialogue and relationship with the whole concept of what it means to deal with the aesthetics of maleness. Because there really isn't a narrative for it.

Oh, there's a narrative of "Such-and-such movie star is so hawwwwwwt!", but that's all tangled up with celebrity-worship and fame and stuff that reminds me of reading those early books on pubescent development that talked about the "star crush" as a way of exploring feelings without having to act on them, due to how removed said celebrity is liable to be from one's reality. And maybe that's the start of trying to explore the aesthetics of maleness for some -- I wish it would go further, get a way of doing coherent narrative that people can respond to more usefully. (I don't think the extant narratives of female beauty are terribly good ones, either, mind.)

I mean, I can go and add to that "Men are Pretty" my own personal things -- there's this spot on the side right above the hip where there's this perfect curvature to snug a hand against. I get weirdly focused on the way the neck and shoulder and collarbone interact sometimes (which is why I find shirts with open necks or partially unbuttoned attractive on my fellows -- they draw the attention to that area), but I have a Thing for shoulders. I like longer hair than the 'traditional' male cuts (even on my ex who was best suited to a more mainstream-male style, I thought he looked best right about the point at which he started mumbling that it needed cutting). (*wave*, 'cause I'm all about waving at exes here lately, at least the ones that read this thing.) I really appreciate the way some people's bodies move -- I can recognise my husband well before he's close enough to parse features, clothes, or anything really, just from gross body movement, even in a crowd. (And what's with so many notions of 'beauty' being static, anyway? Motion is fantastic!) I like the fuzziness of my fellows' forearms, not for any particular reason, I just like it. It is fuzzy. I like remarkable noses. All that stuff.

And I can't connect that with the mainstream world at all. A while back in the passing-internet-quizzes-around part of the universe, one of them was a 'What men do you find attractive?' quiz involving picking between photographs -- and the overwhelming majority of those photographs were asking me to pick between men none of which I found particularly aesthetically appealing. Most of them were too thin, except for the overmuscled ones; most of them were diffident and unengaged in that sort of underwear-model way; when there was a model with nice hair I was supposed to be evaluating something else; etc. I just don't have the capacity to engage with this dialogue of beauty; it comes across to me as disconnected from the real world of actual aesthetics; nothing there was speaking my language of attraction or even my-that's-pretty. None of the people presented to me as choices were even close to as aesthetically pleasing as most of the guys in my normal social circle, leading me to comment in several people's journals where the quiz was posted, "Where are the geeky guys with nice shoulders?"

The narrative isn't there for me to engage with; if the question of 'attractiveness' is almost universally centered on men I don't find appealing, it gets hard to talk about at all. And that lack of narrative gets tangled up with the whole question of who gets to wear interesting clothes in bright colours, who gets to wear adornment, and who gets to be pretty. (And who is limited in some way by being evaluated primarily on prettiness, for that matter.)

I want better stories.

And pretty, pretty men.

People Are Weird About Words

(And I'm not just saying this because I'm once again being croggled by someone with a partially shared nominal religious affiliation having the little 'labels are bad' dance. Though that happening while I'm being weirded out by other people's language is at least one of those nice synchronisities of complete bafflement.)

Anyway, to be on my intended topic.

So, one of the fora I read is a discussion group for science fiction and fantasy writers. A reasonable proportion of the population of the group is made up of people who have made professional sales, including people who make their living off their professional sales; probably about half are people who hope to make professional sales someday, or (like me) who intend to write no matter what and consider it appropriate to see if that can be parlayed into income; the remainder are interested hangers-on, writers with no particular interest in publication, former writers, people who hope to write, and so on. Strictly speaking, the newsgroup bans advertising in its charter, though exceptions are made for venues offering professional pay rates, which should mention this in their posting; this is noted explicitly very early in the newsgroup FAQ, which is posted regularly.

(I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.)

So someone came in to invite people to submit to the second issue of their small press magazine. And someone replied to say, "Okay -- your post doesn't say what you pay. Neither does your website. We're largely a professional group, here, we're not interested in being scammed or in giving away our work for free."

This gets a response from the original poster of, "Don't include that in a cover letter." And the claim that quoting rates isn't "classy", and that they do not pay for journal submissions -- those are for the fame and credential on a CV. (Er?)

Which was, well, rude enough; the other responder told her to drop dead.

Which was, well, rude enough, but at least he left after one or two posts; the next one, the original spammer's husband, informed the newsgroup that it was composed entirely of "fucking cunts", and whose next post was suggesting that all of the female posters in the newsgroup (a fair fraction of whom I've met face-to-face, incidentally) "are just male nerds who get off on using a female pseudonym" and masturbating over the responses they were getting. (I would note that I post somewhat gender-neutrally. My strongly gendered legal forename and middle name are not in my headers, and my usename is; while said usename is probably guessable as female, and is strongly gendered in its culture of origin, I doubt that many people are familiar with the names of any of Akhenaten's wives other than Nefertiti Neferneferuaten to be certain of that.)

I'm just croggled by the notion that someone thinks this is an appropriate way to enter into a group. (When I found out that the fellow was married, my response was, "And he's still got a mouth like a fourteen-year-old trying to shock great-aunt Sadie?" Kids these days, wandering the internet unsupervised ....)

I'm profoundly croggled by the whole coming in with slavering misogyny to defend one's wife. Okay, maybe the riding in on a white horse thing crosses into vaguely understandable somewhere, at some level, but I can't think I'm alone in thinking, "You know, I'm not going to be terribly impressed by, 'I defended you from those meanies, dear! I called them fucking cunts and fake women!' If he thinks 'fucking cunt' is a useful term of insult, he's not gonna be fucking mine any time soon."

I have similar thoughts about some of the trolls that hit in the alt.sports.* newsgroup I read, who seem to think that "cocksucker" is one of the nastiest things one can say about someone. I have to wonder what their girlfriends think about this. One of these days I'll have the story that that thought goes into.

It's not like it's all directed at women and bottoms either -- when I commented on this, someone responded to point out the number of synonyms for "penis" that are used to mean "obnoxious and somewhat stupid".

And then there's this PS2 ad campaign with the slogan "PS2: Because Your Girlfriend Bores You Shitless". This whole ... sense of what's appropriate, the playing to stereotype and contempt, and ... it's almost tangential, but it's the same damn noise, too.

Here is one of the demons of the culture this guy is writing from. Male genitalia are obnoxious and stupid; female genitalia (and bottoming) are venomously contemptible. This is what the encoding of the slang that gets grabbed carries with it, down in the subliminals of the use of language. These things are insults to be, these things are insults to have. Be ashamed; be especially ashamed if you are encoded 'done-to', because that makes you sickening, rather than 'doer', at which point you're merely some variety of jerk. By definition in the metamessage.

We build this world with our hands and our voices, and some people choose to build it with words that mould it out of sexual shame and contempt even for their own partners.

People are so weird.



(Hey, wait, didn't Little Light write about this back in May? Why yes, yes she did. More broadly, too.)