O My Head

My therapist and I talked a little at the end of our session about getting me a referral to a psychiatrist.

Because I'm tired of being crazy, and the week or so of persistent pain has given me ... a certain lack of emotional stability, because I just don't have the resources. And where I'm trying to be in life, I can't afford the luxury of running anymore.

Trying to articulate how I feel about this mostly drives me to fits of ellipses.


I have made fudge with cinnamon, though. If you all are really nice to me I may post the recipe. Hah.

What's In A Name?

I breathe a theology of words.

Language is a holy thing, a thing of power, threaded through with the power of raw creation, the power to speak the name of a thing and bring it into being, evoke it, make it more real.

This is the power that humankind shares with the gods: we have words. By our words, by our ability to draw concept into reality, we make and break the world.

We make and break both large worlds and small.

Sometimes the word is "Mine".

Sometimes my response is, "Your what?"

Because there is the underlying theology of it, the spiritual drive: name me, claim me, speak this real, take up the power of the gods and name, what am I? Which of my kaleidoscopic shapes is forefront in your mind at this moment?

"My lover", sometimes, close and sexual and partnered. "My blanket", a laughing snuggling claim demanding warmth and comfort. My friend, my partner, a pattering of nouns each blowing a little reality into one piece or another of the complicated shape that is what is a relationship.

I breathe words of heirarchy, of mastery, into his ear, just to hear them said. To speak them real. To invite him to speak back, at times; other times to plead for it, to ask to hear myself recognised. Sometimes just to say it, to have it said, breathed out again like the sun breathes out dawn, not changed, but asserted in the real as Re-Horakhty asserts morning.

And here is the deep magic, one of the secret powers: when a thing that is seen, recognised, and named true is a thing that, in another world, cannot be shown, cannot be seen, will be taken as shameful, defective, broken - when that thing can be heard and celebrated and named aloud - that is power.

It is the power to be the thing from the dark.

It is the power of being seen, recognised, named, heard, known.

It is the power of the ringing words that have the power of the gods, the naming of a thing as real.

To recognise power, to name it, to have someone see it and be aware of it and move in the space of the named thing.

There are words that come out of the primal dark places, the places where things are unspeakable - or at least treated as unspeakable, and thus live in the space between denial and absence. There is, sometimes, "my sacred whore", whispered or growled or spoken with dark red undertones of emotion, and with the rich velvet intensity of reality.

There are words spoken then that some people would call degrading.

And I don't understand how that could be.

These are god-words, full of spirit, going bump in the night, speaking of the power of the shadow-things with teeth. It is not degrading to be.

Name me.

How I Learned

I was a weird shy kid in high school, a little on the young side, a little inexperienced. I wound up, freshman year, hanging out with a few other mostly weird shy kids, a group that eventually formed into a dynamic social group consisting, largely, of the sort of weird shy kid who had never had a dynamic social group before.

It was the last day of school senior year; the exam for the last class of the day. There were a few of us who were in that class, students in that year, who might never see each other again. It's an odd feeling, the triumphant escape and the mellow bittersweetness of knowing that each of us is going their separate ways.

The exam finished; the bell rang.

One of those first friends, back from freshman year, came up to me as I was gathering my things. "Hey," he said. "I want to tell you something?"

"Oh?" I had my things together; I looked at him. He looked nervous, perhaps shyer than normal, full of light anxiousness that might, if played a little more dramatically, go to fidgeting or handwringing.

"I'm gay." There was a long silent pause, and then he said, "... is that okay?"

Is that okay?

I put my arms around him and hugged him tightly. I had no words, because he had broken my heart.

The Quality of Language is Strained

I just watched a bunch of writers seriously arguing that the usage of the word "gay" to mean, more or less, "something I don't like", is not homophobic.

Because, you know, that usage indicating sub-par quality has gotten so general in the culture that it's unremarkable, it clearly doesn't refer to actual gay people, and its spread and usage has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of underlying flow of homophobia in the culture such that the shape of things might be predisposed to using a word aimed in the generally queer direction as a generalised slur.

I'm ... boggled.

This is a bunch of people supposedly sensitive to word nuance - many of them professionally published - and several of them are seriously arguing that it has no homophobic connotations. "Oh, no, my kids aren't homophobic, they're using a word they don't know what means."

The usage is homophobic. Whoever uses it. Whether or not it's being chosen consciously as a slur. It buys into and supports a cultural universe in which "gay" is equated with subpar, low-quality, obnoxious, broken, defective. It hooks into the same cognitive space as and partially replaces the equivalent usage from my generation - "lame" - which I never noticed as problematic before I saw someone point out how ablist it was. Which is, again, tapping into the extensive cultural characterisation of people with disabilities as being subpar, low-quality, broken, defective.

The clear direct response to this was made by someone I happen to know is queer. Who got nothing in response but "How horrible of you to say that about someone's children", "some gay people have that usage, how dare you!", "you're being an asshole", "the word means happy!", and the like. Someone seriously brought up "When I was a kid, we were taught to say 'jewed down', and I'm not an anti-Semite".

The assumptions of the culture are homophobic, are ablist, are anti-Semitic; to the extent that one takes those in and breathes them out, one will be homophobic, ablist, anti-Semitic. (Racist, sexist, ...) Because that's the baseline for normal: a steady, grinding, degrading wearing-down of groups with less power with a constant grit of low-level disgust.

I left a response saying that the usage was so blatantly homophobic that I was shocked that anyone was arguing otherwise.

Because I am that shocked.

And because nobody should have to stand alone.

For Want of Community Or A Bowl of Rice

BFP has written an extensive, heartfelt, and powerful piece about why she is leaving the blogworld.

Belledame has commented upon it. And reading Belle's post, I had one of those oh-shit realisation moments, and now I'm writing.

Quoting BFP here:

I wrote what I wrote in response to all those feminists who, during the Full Frontal Feminism blow up, kept insisting over and over again that if “WOC” want book deals, they should “go get it them themselves.” That publishers weren’t skimming through the blogosphere looking for just anybody who’s a good writer. That you had to work for a book deal—you had to fight for it, show a little initiative, stop complaining, just do it. JUST. DO. IT.

And she talks about the nastiness of the whole JUST. DO. IT. as it gets directed in racist ways. Go read it. Please. I can wait.

Now Belledame:

Because, see, I look at this post by bfp, and what leaps out at me is not the business about "feminism" but the emphasis on community. Specifically, 1) she's got her own, she doesn't NEED a little corner office in the big bland white edifice, no matter how generous it thinks it's being, 2) the overwhelming evidence that as much as certain people might give lip service to the idea, in fact, they were never about community at all. They were about self-aggrandizement, and that's pretty much it. And the only reason they care about, for instance, "feminism," (or gay rights--hi, Andrew Sullivan! hi! or what you will) is because they see whatever-it-is as getting in the way of their rightful ascendancy to the top. Gimme my piece of the pie, OUR piece, OUR pie, excuse me, and make it a big one. What else matters?

JUST DO IT.

Here's the illusion: that you can do it.

That's the illusion I was brought up in. You, yourself, you are one of the ones who will change the world. You have the power: you're smart enough, coming from a position of enough privilege, mighty enough in and of yourself, this weight can rest upon your shoulders.

This isn't "We are the ones we are waiting for"; this is a personal, individual burden laid upon people, often when they're very young, this sense that the thing we must be is special, world-transforming, earthshattering, Important.

I don't know how much this spreads into other cultural communities, but it's fairly common as a thing mentioned by people I know, a community mostly white, mostly educated, mostly left-of-center: "But I was supposed to save the world."

JUST DO IT JUST DO IT JUST DO IT.

You can't do it.

"Never doubt that a small group of commited citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead

JUST DO IT.

But ... 'a small group of committed citizens'.

That's not you.

That's -- maybe -- you and some other people.

You can't do it on your own.

JUST D--

Wait, what?

You can't do it on your own.

Changing the world, saving the world, whatever you want to call it, is intrinsically a matter of community. It's not something that you do. It's something that y'all do.

"If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." --Sir Isaac Newton

Anything we can build, anything we can do, is built over foundations laid by those who came before us. The materials we use are drawn from other people, other strengths, collaborators or contractors at the best, but also often victims of theft. The labor for assembling each new floor may be shared and joyous or compelled from the enslaved or a wide range between. But it's not something done on its own, isolated, without the support of others.

And the most fertile things, the most productive and inclined to make progress, the rich wealth of cross-pollination, comes of actual living, thriving communities, people sharing their own things, enriching their work with the relections and support of others, sharing the burdens of caretaking and the efforts of labor and the costs and trials.

The best families do this. The best neighborhoods do this. The best communities do this. People pool their strengths, divide up their weaknesses, synergise, grow.

There is no JUST DO IT, which denies the necessity of support, of roots set in fertile ground, of the ecosystem of the mind.

There is WE'LL DO IT.

And a large part of my own falling-out with feminism was in the difference between the illusion and a community, because the illusion that JUST DO IT is real breaks so easily when what's needed is the two little hands, or when what's needed is the ability to bend a little and not hold out for the lonely impossible solitudes of the illusory notion that one is fundamentally alone.

Same As It Ever Was

So, Renegade Evolution is a cranky, controversial-in-some-circles porn actress and stripper.

She has been butting heads for a long time with people who seem to want to characterise her as some sort of brainwashed minion who will only harm women everywhere by doing work that she enjoys a great deal. This tends to make her even more cranky.

One of the things that she's wished for for a long time is the opportunity to meet her detractors in an honest debate where they're actually forced to deal with sex workers in the flesh rather than as theoretical abstracts.

It appears that she had that opportunity at last.

Note, should you follow that link, in the comments a statement by one Anthony Kennerson, that begins:

Why do I get the feeling that Sam Berg will get seriously cold feet and attempt to pull out in the end, citing the usual stated policy against debating "pro-porn" activist lest they "legitimize abuse and murder"??

Which turns out to be sort of one of those prophetic things, now, doesn't it? Sam Berg is pulling a "I won't come to your panel if Ren is there", justifying it because Ren lost her temper pretty badly a while back.

The person who's trying to pull this together is trying to talk sense into the senseless.

Meanwhile, anyone who has any reasonable leverage with William and Mary College? Alumni, colleagues, people who can write a good letter? If you could lean on 'em a little, so that maybe one side of the debate won't be coerced into the silence of absence and talked about rather than talked with ....

Category Airing

I've got a fair amount of stuff rattling around in my head in response to Dev's post about female submission, and a lot of it is horrifyingly fraught and such, so I'm going to try to get what I said in the comments there coherent and see if I can deal with the rest of it later when I'm feeling less like bleeding on the carpet about it.

I am not a female submissive.

I am a woman. I am submissive.

Spotting the difference matters.

I'm on a couple of BDSM communities on livejournal, and every so often someone will pop up with "I read on male_dom" or "femdom" or "humbled_females" or something else linking sex or gender to power exchange. And while I'm pretty easy for communities, none of these have ever even remotely tempted me, not even as a place to lurk. They don't offer me anything I value, that I can value. I just ... not only is this not my kink, it's a kink that makes me uncomfortable.

And some of that discomfort is being genderqueer enough that any sort of sex-based essentialism tends to throw me out of the conversation entirely, because I'm either miscategorised or in that neither-fish-nor-fowl place where somehow, in the discussion being had, I don't exist. And not existing is a nasty, uncomfortable place to keep winding up being, so I prefer to stick to fields where my status as an extant being doesn't throw errors everywhere.

The thing is, these things aren't descriptive to me, stuff like "M/f" or "F/m"; they don't seem to describe systems where those just happen to be the relationships those people have, but rather something where it is important that The Person Of One Sex Is Dominant, and The Person Of The Other Sex Is Submissive. It's a particular gendering fetish, and it's not one that I share; it's not one I want to be involved with, either. ("Your kink may be okay, but I'll go over there now.")

If one isn't treating the sexes of the people involved as something that matters, then there isn't a need to specify. Those facts will come up as relevant, and if they're not relevant, they won't, and there's no sense bringing them up. There's no need to make a marked case of it. Someone reading for detail can probably pick out the facts of various interactions, to some level, and make guesses about others, especially as I do not go to any particular effort to conceal stray data (partially as a political act), but unless it matters, that's just data kicking around.

And every so often I get in my tracking someone doing a websearch for 'femsub' (and that's, I believe, the first time that appears in this blog; I just googled and got this for the search result, which doesn't contain it), and I sort of wince and want to shake the boxes a little, make space in which I can be a submissive without being a "femsub". Because I'm not one, and no amount of treating someone who fits two categories, who is 'female' and 'submissive', as thereby going into a category that links the two will make me stop existing for the convenience of the categorisers.

And all this leaves me awkwardly on the edge of discussions of differences in perspective on seeing a male submissive or a female submissive. For reasons that I think have a lot in common with people who have conceptual issues with the two -- that I'm deeply uncomfortable with stuff that looks like it's framing 'power' and 'sex|gender' as being intrinsically linked in a particular way -- but from my usual Klein perspective. Because I don't approach or perceive power as gendered, I can't meaningfully take part in a conversation in which the gendering of power is present as an axiom. It erases me from the discourse.

It most particularly erases my power. When my submission is gendered, it feels to me like it turns it into something that's about-womanness, rather than about-power. And I can't understand that as anything other than a caricature, because it's so alien to me, so it feels like treating me as a cardboard cutout, making my status as a woman the first and most important thing about me in a context where I feel the most important thing is my status as a submissive.

And yes, there's a fuckton of problematic stuff out there about power, especially in this context sexualised power, and sex|gender. I don't deny that, because I'm not a damned fool. But my submission is not about womanhood, it's not about femininity, it's not about genitalia; it's about loyalty, dedication, oathmaking and oathkeeping, being a pillar of support, service, strength, and trust.

These are not incompatible with being a woman, but they are not female. Focusing on my femaleness uncenters the perception from my power.

And it's all about the power.