Tag: ranting and politics

Russell Means on orality and literacy

Russell Means braids his son's hair, by Ilka Hartmann

In the quiet before the Pow Wow, Russell Means braids his son’s hair. Omaha Annual Pow Wow, Macy, Nebraska, 1992 by Ilka Hartmann

I like the way Russell Means began his 1980 speech, For America To Live, Europe Must Die.

The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

So what you read here is not what I’ve written. It’s what I’ve said and someone else has written down. I will allow this because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead, dry leaves of a book. I don’t really care whether my words reach whites or not.

I read a lot of media theory, where orality and literacy is a giant topic. (I can see a book called Orality and Literacy from my desk.) And I think this is the first time I’ve encountered a first person, pro-orality perspective from someone with an oral culture. I feel shocked to realize this. But of course books about media have a bias towards text. And of course online articles have a bias towards text and mass media. Somehow I had the two topics in my mind, media theory and resisting white supremacy, but hadn’t made many connections between them.

There’s a rule of thumb which can be applied here. You cannot judge the real nature of a European revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposes to make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effects it will have on non-European peoples. This is because every revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europe’s tendencies and abilities to export destruction to other peoples, other cultures and the environment itself. I defy anyone to point out an example where this is not true.

Means was talking about Marxism, but now I am thinking about printing presses and the internet.

Lierre Keith on gender

I enjoyed this interview with Lierre Keith about destroying civilization, especially these definitions of genders.

Sexual domination and subordination are institutionalized into the very concepts of masculine and feminine. Masculinity is simply a conglomeration of the personality traits necessary for the patriarchal soldier-rapist: physically strong, emotionally cauterized, rational, domineering, cruel. All of this is supposed to add up to “handsome” as well. Likewise femininity is ultimately a description of the personality that results from trauma and powerlessness: weak, passive, yielding, emotional, hyper-vigilant to the needs of the dominators and desperate for the dominator’s attention.

On scarcity.


Capitalism works on the same principle as a glass company whose employees spend their nights breaking people’s windows and their days boasting of the public service they provide.

— Alfie Kohn in No Contest: The Case Against Competition

Soneteer


A sonnet is built on a fourteen-line frame, of five-foot lines. Hence, the soneteer knows exactly where he is headed, although he may not know how to get there.

I finished reading The Elements of Style. The famed, much recommended Elements of Style. It’s alright. You need to bring your own race and class analysis goggles. An example.

Style rule #2. Write in a way that comes naturally.

Style rule #15. Do not use dialect unless your ear is good.

Style rule #20. Avoid foreign languages.

Where this leaves a person whose natural dialect doesn’t sound good to an English professor is a matter for the analysis goggles.

I would at least pair the book with this old, also somewhat famed, David Foster Wallace essay about English usage wars.

That essay is a delight but I feel sad when I read it. I feel sad reading anything by DFW since his suicide, but there’s more this time. He gets all the way to seeing that language has class signifiers and that Standard Written English is an elitist, white, academic dialect, and then he gives in. His best suggestion for surviving in this classist, white supremacist (capitalist colonial heteropatriarchal… might as well get it all in there) system is to learn to pass. That is soul crushing advice.

I’ve gotten this vibe from a lot of David Foster Wallace’s writing. There’s a part that is generous and open and loving and grounded (he calls it a Democratic Spirit in that essay), and then a part with… I want to say with no faith in the power of consciousness. I don’t know if that’s exactly it. But something. Resignation? I count him as one of my favourite authors, but usually when I read something by him I have to debrief afterward. I just looked at my little list of “books read in 2006” and saw that my note for Infinite Jest was “not sure yet.” (Since then I’ve given it as a gift at least three times.)

I am really wishing that Dark Daughta’s archives were still public so I could link to something about passing and anxiety, or about changing the power dynamics of a situation by speaking and acting with a grounded analysis. DD, since you went members only, I sure notice how much I was depending on your output and not pitching in, so thanks for that wake up. If I find alternate links I will come back and stick them in.

Down with praise, emotional dentistry, granfallooning.

I continue to publish drafts that have been lingering in the archives. This one lingered because it was veering towards criticising my friends and I was too scared and distracted to get it to a place that was honest and compassionate instead of either judgmental or passive. Check out how non-intense it is. This is the type of stuff that has been terrifying me for years. It’s kind of funny.

. . .

9 Feb 2008

I just went to the dentist for the first time in about seven or eight years. This particular dentist is explicitly “an emotional guy” who gives a lot of compliments about teeth, and expresses a lot of care and encouragement about your dental health. Full on, “I know I just met you, but I really care about your teeth and gums, because I know that dental health can really impact a person.” Totally sincere, enthusiastic. OK. Awesome. It also ran right into this discomfort I have with receiving compliments and praise, which I thought about a lot on the walk home from my appointment.

So I’ve been wanting to write out my ideas about praise and compliments, but I’ve determined that first I need to deal with this other dentist-related thing, being that a lot of my friends go to the same dentist and I’m a bit afraid of sparking some “we’re all in the Dr. Bjornson club!” celebrations. (This is a real “everything good is actually bad!” kind of post. I dislike compliments, and furthermore I dislike belonging! No fun allowed!) I’ve been belatedly discovering Kurt Vonnegut’s books, and in the last one I read (Cat’s Cradle), he uses this invented word, granfalloon, to describe an allegiance based on a shallow or pointless shared trait, like being from Iowa or going to the same dentist. I am happy to have this word, even just to clarify for myself that I don’t want to avoid all kinds of belonging. Only granfallooning gets the diss, because it is meaningless and distracting, and is, I think, a kind of vanity.

. . .

So, then, over a year later, I’ve thought a lot about my problem with compliments. I think there are two parts; one where I’m crazy and one where some compliments are crazy. I have book quotes to go with both of these.

The part about living in a crazy world is like this. From Nonviolent Communication.

Conventional compliments often take the form of judgements, however positive, and are sometimes offered to manipulate the behavior of others.

And the part about my own craziness goes like this. From Women Who Run With The Wolves, in a chapter about procrastination and creative blocks.

Troublesome contaminants in the river [of soul/creativity] are obvious when a woman turns away sincere compliments about her creative life. There may be only a little pollution, as in the offhanded “Oh, how nice you are to give such a compliment,” or there may be massive trouble on the river: “Oh, this old thing” or “You must be out of your mind.” … These are all signs of an injured animus. Good things flow into the woman but are immediately poisoned.

Not that my teeth are my creative life, but being a person who was both terrible at accepting compliments and struggling with intense procrastination at the same time, I figure it translates.

An anti-war horror movie I’d like to see, old random drafts.

In the spirit of spitting things out rather than polishing them forever and driving myself crazy, I’m going through my archives and publishing drafts.

A couple of years ago I was reading a lot about horror and monsters. At some point I saved quotations from The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.

p.186, regarding WWI vets.

The Frankenstein pictures continued to be a cultural dumping ground for the processed images of men blown to pieces, and the shell-shocked fantasy of fitting them back together again.

That was the first idea I ever heard about horror as a mirror of culture, from a Chuck Palahniuk interview. It doesn’t make me want to watch horror movies, particularly. But this next movie is something I would like to see.

p.205-6

For his unnerving final sequence— completely irrational, but nonetheless a devastating moral statement— [Abel] Gance recruited actual members of the Union des Gueules Cassées, and created a nightmarish montage of all the ruined faces that had been haunting the world’s cinemas for the past fifteen years in the guise of “horror entertainment.” The actual men are nameless, but they could easily be the living models for the masks worn by Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, Lionel Atwill, and others. As a conscious antiwar statement, J’Accuse is superior; as an unintentional revelation of horror’s major subtext in the twenties and thirties, it is breathtaking.

Re-entry, being Scottish, the other end of cultural appropriation, not yet being able to write short sentences but maybe one day.

I’ve been sitting here for three weeks attempting to write my grand re-debut in blogging, where I would declare my intention to overshare again like I haven’t since about 2002, note that a lot of anxiety that I was blaming on work deadlines actually seems to stem from not writing enough about things I care about, and delve into the limitations I’ve been accidentally sticking to regarding not scaring my family or offending my friends or embarrassing my partner, but how about I skip that for now since it has become a bit of an albatross, and just post something already?

Yes!

So I’ve been thinking about European ethnicities, whiteness, colonialism, and cultural appropriation, and what I need to do to make sense of being, apparently, of 100% Scottish ancestry.

This Scottishness is new-ish information because my dad was adopted. Until my dad (or my mum?) saw his adoption paperwork a couple of years ago I thought of myself as half Scottish, half mystery, and really, mostly as a generic white settler person. Lately it has occurred to me that if I can get more rooted in being a specifically Scottish-descended settler person, I might be able to use that to subvert whiteness a bit. I’m thinking that since whiteness works as a generic, supposedly neutral, supposedly non-racial racial quality, then knowing my ethnicity better might help me to be more aware of whiteness instead of taking it for granted, and also might help start conversations about race and privilege in everyday life. This is very early stages here. I get the impression a lot of people have thought about this, and I have a lot of reading and thinking to do. I don’t know what “understanding my Scottishness” would look like yet. I’m hesitant to suddenly care about kilts and druids partly because maybe they aren’t relevant to me, and partly because I associate, e.g., Celtic knotwork jewellery with New Agers and metal bands. More on that in a minute.

This is part of a bigger, backwards personal growth quest. Years ago I started reading about death and dying, and got interested in denial. There’s a lot of writing about denial in radical politics and anti-oppression work. Privilege and denial, collusion and denial, performance and pretending. Darkdaughta writes (or did write, when she was public) especially clear analyses of how personal denial perpetuates political oppression.

Trying to be thoroughly anti-oppressive, then, merges right up with trying to be an honest person, and both missions lead to sorting through my family dynamics, my parents’ families, and back and back. It’s useful to apply some historical context and political analysis to all of that. So again, I have a lot more reading and thinking and talking to do.

For starters, I’ve been hunting for general history about Scotland and colonialism. It is very easy to find writing about the oppression of Scotland by England, but, predictably, harder to find anti-colonial perspectives on Scottish settlers.

This caption was the first promising thing I found: Professor Geoff Palmer of Heriot-Watt University believes Scotland is still in denial over its role in British slavery. A signal! Involving the codeword, denial! I found some leads and put some books on hold at the library about Scotland and colonialism.

Towards the end of that article though, they are talking about other aspects of the Scottish diaspora, and the subject turns to cultural appropriation.

David Hesse, an “urban intellectual from Zurich”, who gave up a journalism career to study in Edinburgh, says: “You could call my field the imagined diaspora. I investigate highland games in Germany and Scottish clubs in eastern Europe. I look at people dressing up as Scots. Those people have no “real” Scottish ancestry but feel aesthetic connections. I think international fascinations with Scotland and Scottish-looking things are a phenomenon.”

Hesse sees imaginary Scottishness as an identity that is becoming increasingly popular in northern Europe. “It is a folk identity, but it is quite macho. It involves military music and martial games. It is also a generally white phenomenon.”

I laughed when I read that. Cultural appropriation has never inconvenienced me before, but I think this is what’s going on with my cautiousness towards anything celtic. It’s been taken over by metal bands and the scented candle crowd. I’m used to thinking about cultural appropriation from the other end, choosing not to wear dreadlocks or sari silks, not to get tattoos of asian calligraphy, not to use imaginary ancient aboriginal terms for my menstrual period. I think Operation: WTF Scottish Roots is working already. Things that made intellectual sense make a little more experiential sense.

So, hi again internet. It’s been years since I wrote regularly and I think I must still write like a twenty two year old, but I’m ok with just spitting things out until I get the hang of it.

Alternatives to mastery.

'Adept' by Jason Engle

‘Adept’ by Jason Engle.

I’ve been thinking about the word master for a few months, off and on. Mastery, masterpiece, master crafter, masterwork. It’s a problem because I’m really interested in work, practice, and skills, but master is not a positive word to me. It’s like expert, or authority. Knowledge as domination or exclusivity. I’m into DIY and cooperative visions of skill and work, so I’ve been keeping an eye out for more accurate vocabulary.

Today I am promoting adept to regular rotation. It’s from the Latin “to attain,” and definitely +2 against social hierarchies.

I am very excited!

Look good naked, bring your own analysis, a lot of video links.

A bloggy friend of Erin’s posted about a TV show called How To Look Good Naked. I don’t have cable, and I didn’t know anything about this show. This blogger, Sarah, said the show basically relied on body image coaching to help women like their nude bodies, with no weight loss or surgery suggestions at all. I found this improbably thrilling news regarding a reality makeover show, so I looked it up on YouTube. This is from the American version (the original is British).

They just pointed out that plastic surgery doesn’t work? On TV? And they used their feelings to decide how to solve their personal distress? Yay hooray! The clips I found raise a ton problems for me, but wow, I am really happy to see this conversation happening on a mainstream makeover show.

Problems/boring parts:

And yet, I am still definitely pleased to see a rounded woman’s butt cellulite on screen in a positive context, hear someone make the basic point that clothes need to fit your body and not vice versa, and even see men touching each other fairly comfortably.

This is a very narrow discussion of body image, but it is at least in a direction that I value: unpacking all the crap that people said you should do and deciding for yourself. (My body and I are totally bff almost all the time anyway, so I’m not disappointed about the lack of new ground.)

It’s quite the comment on the state of TV that eliminating weight loss and surgery without discussing anything else is cause for celebration, but maybe these baby steps will make some room for a similar show that adds a couple of elements, and then a couple more. No weight loss, no surgery, and no dissing fat. Or getting to know your body without looking at it. Queer eye for the straight girl, finally, or a show where women come up with ways to enjoy their bodies without a host/star/authority at all. I dream.

Ernst Haeckel, categorization, sets of sets, primary colours, dog tv

Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur

One of Ernst Haeckel’s naturalist illustrations, 1899-1904.

I fell into a bit of a well of naturalism and anatomy links, and ended up wanting to read Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums, although I’m pretty sure it isn’t as critical or curious as I want it to be. One review quotes this tedious oversimplification as a “philosophical insight into the scientific and human impulse to categorize.”

“To have a concept… is to have its negation already in tow…. There is a class of things called ‘dog,’ and there is a class of things (quite substantial, in fact) that are ‘not-dog.’… Language and thought cannot really function without this most basic tool for carving up reality.”

Never heard of fuzzy continuums and the rewards of using them, I guess? Odd, since natural history museums are full of ambiguous specimens (two headed mutant dog, alleged dog-cow hybrid, newly discovered tentative dog, etc) that illustrate quite nicely the space between dog and not-dog. Sort of dog. Possible dog. Both dog and yet not dog. Natural history museums are pretty much ground zero for failed categorization schemes and fuzzy margins, sets that are more complicated than somebody was hoping they would be. Maybe the quote is just out of context. There are a lot of ellipses in there.

To balance out the sad saga of binary categories in science, I like to think about primary colours. These seem like a life-affirming, pro-ambiguity, scientific success. Primary colours are sets of colours that are chosen to maximize the usefulness of the spectrum between them. A noble, everybody-wins way to think about categorization, and also an easily visualized example of information organized into multiple overlapping continua. Wikipedia points out that “Any choice of primary colors is essentially arbitrary; for example, an early color photographic process, autochrome, typically used orange, green, and violet primaries.” Concrete! Maybe this is because colour science is so bluntly tied up in perception and perspective. It has to be aware of observer bias and intention, because it is about observing. My favourite bit of that Wikipedia page:

If a human and an animal both look at a natural color, they see it as natural; however, if both look at a color reproduced via primary colors, for example on a color television screen, the human may see it as matching the natural color, while the animal does not; in this sense, reproduction of color via primaries must be “tuned” to the color vision system of the observer.

I wonder how long it will be before someone makes a TV for dogs, with two kinds of pixels instead of RGB. Or TV for bees, with four kinds.

Crap emails, man angst, better living through feminism…


I try to be calm and cool…… but my body language always gives me away & creeps women out some how. I start conversations easily, but I find myself saying too much or confusing women by saying things that they cannot understand or are too deep, for the amount of Vodka-Red Bulls that they have consumed.

This post at Letters From Johns reminds me of this (much longer and funnier) Crap Email From A Dude. They both remind me of crap emails I’ve received in the past from various acquaintances and from strangers who read about my vagina.

It’s weird to recognize a whole collection of traits— the insistence that they like women even though they are unable to avoid venting their anger at/about women, the over-analysis often constructed from one chapter of [dead guy of your choice], the obsession with yet lack of self-awareness (“I’m very direct, here’s 3000 words about nothing.”), the refusal of independent responsibility (“I hate it when people hang out with me even though they obviously think they’re too good for me.”), the fucked up gender stereotypes, the obsession with yet discomfort over sex… It’s a whole syndrome. In high school, my friends and I called these characters Deep Teen Smurf, or Bad Teenaged Poet.

Off and on, I’ve wished for a book to recommend to these guys, to help them snap out of it and get past being so angry and hurt about their entitlement not working out for them. I would call this book “Put On Your Big Boy Pants, OK Thanks.” I’ve seen The Gender Knot recommended as a book that explains how patriarchy even causes problems for men (while distinguishing those problems from the problems of being oppressed). So maybe that would work. It’s on my excessively long personal reading list for 2008, to find out.

Curling, graininess suitably expressing surreality.

Uh, me curling.

I went curling after hours at a rink owned by some friends of my cousin, out near Sidney.

  • It was surprisingly fun, in the way that bocci, billiards and croquet are fun. Minimally-confrontational exercises in physics.
  • So far I’ve never once been a fan of flattening large areas of land (parking lots, malls, golf courses…), especially land where I understand something about it having been colonized and occupied. It’s extra absurd when the flattening is done for sports. Non-cooperation overload.
  • If I were actually into playing sports, I would set up a beautiful place to play for once. Rinks, fields, courses and courts are all so ugly! Wow. I wonder if spending time in artificially lit, flattened out, weirdly-proportioned, echo-y, energy sinkhole type spaces might be damaging on its own, even without the formalized competition and violence and the addiction to contrived adrenaline rushes. (Hi, I have fun ideas about sports!) Certainly people say that about office cubicles, that the ugliness is demoralizing, even without the bureaucratic hierarchy crap.
  • And, curling was really fun. Pushing heavy things across ice with measurement marks is basically sensory play. Balance, momentum, angles, stretching, muscles. I bet curling kink parties would be fun.

Excessive red and blue in my kitchen, being impressive, calendar trivia…

Red and blue kitchen.

For a moment I was feeling disappointed that I hadn’t come up with any simple theme for the photos I’ve been posting this week. (I don’t know if anyone even noticed them, but the matching sets of red and blue and crafty ideas and so on were making me more comfortable.) I got to thinking about the ways I use gimmicks like that whenever I make things, as a way to add automatic value to whatever I produce. Obvious extra effort. If nothing else, the project will look like a lot of work, which is impressive in certain ways, by default. I’m trying to stop doing that automatically and cut to the chase more. Be more honest instead of more impressive. Probably every adult thinks about this at least a little bit, in some context. I thought I was doing alright with this personal growth project, but then at a festive feast with my extended family, a cousin’s friend commented that I seemed well read. That’s probably my number one trying-to-impress-you habit, being smart. It’s complicated, because I do like to learn things and I do like to share what I find out and not hoard it, but if I want to be your friend I will almost surely start telling you a lot of fanciful trivia related by a larger theme instead of, for example, asking you to tell me about things you seem to know that I don’t. Reading about DIY education is helping me work on this. It makes nonconsensual teaching really, really embarrassing.

So. As my early morning mind-map hopefully explains, I was all set to embrace the non-patterned nature of my really low-effort holiday posts. Then I got to thinking about how much I love the way the last week of the calendar year can get divorced from daily reality and kind of out of time. Students and lots of workers are on holiday from their regular schedules, you never know when shops are going to be open, many households have visitors or go visiting, a lot of people eat really strangely… Regular patterns don’t hold. It reminds me of an ancient Roman intercalary festival that I can’t remember the name of. So now of course, that’s my theme for this week’s little photos. Intercalary disorder. I think this sort of doubly violates my goal of not acting so impressive.

Old men knitting, a gap, then young men knitting

Flickr photo

‘CA002791’ by birgittaclark

I posted a few photos of knitting ideas this week, and when I was thinking about what to post to round on the week’s set, I got to thinking about men knitting.

Several times, I’ve had old white men come up to me while I’m knitting (or especially the few times Galen has been knitting in public), and they’ve talked about how they used to knit, or about how all their sailor or fisherman coworkers used to knit their own socks, hats and sweaters. People in my grandparents’ generation. Pretty much the exact dudes in that photo. The middle one is knitting. Can you tell? That’s my usual move, knitting while everybody else drinks beer.

My gramma, who has been my main knitting tutor other than books, is totally unphased about men knitting. She seems to find it normal and expected, which strikes me as odd since knitting is now cast as such a gendered activity, as a feminine art to be reclaimed and valued, as something our grandmothers did. When guys knit now, it’s celebrated as a happy transgression similar to chicks fixing cars. I should ask my grandparents about this, see if they remember a break when western or North American men stopped knitting.

(My brief googling for pictures of men knitting turned up lots of men knitting within apparently conventional knitting roles in Peru — Andean male knitting traditions are well-known— as well as Turkey, plus net-makers all over the place. Only the young urban male knitters in North America had any kind of “breaking tradition” vibe happening. E.g., a drummer, a subway rider.)

I wonder if it has anything to do with different modes of transmitting knowledge. I’ve never seen any written knitting instructions or patterns geared to guys before the last few years (Knitting with Balls and the like). All the heaps of vintage commercial patterns I’ve seen are for the ladies. I would assume the knitting sailors and knitting workmen maybe learned it right from another person. I could also see job changes, mass production, world wars, and gendered income differences being involved in there.

I haven’t even tried to google this. It’s just going in a pile with other vague research topics that I casually keep an eye out for. Knitting grandfathers. Maybe I’ve got some.

Fertility awareness, old feelings, heart connection

Galen is taking charge of his fertility'

Galen is reading Taking Charge of Your Fertility. Partway through a chapter, he popped in to do a dance of excitement about how interesting he is finding fertility awareness. Ovaries! Mucus! Feedback cycles! DIY science! He asked whether it would have been cool to learn about cycle charting when I was thirteen or so, so I could have had a lifetime archive of data about my reproductive health. Wow, that caused a lot of feelings at once.

First, go team! It is useful and friendly for bio-guys to learn about female physiology, reproductive health, menstrual cycles and all that. I still tell people gleefully about the time last year that (male) Galen and our (male) friend Nathan were discussing their favourite features of the diva cup. (“Well it has marks so you can measure your blood.”) Doing their part to make the world safe for menstruators.

But also, awww, yes I do wish I’d known interesting ways to chart when I was starting out, or had any decent period information. It is amazing to me that after a solid eight or nine years of purposely investigating menstruation and cultivating positive attitudes and general insatiable curiosity, I still get ambushed by leftover sad feelings around menstrual cycles.

I don’t seem to have had an especially negative or ignorant upbringing compared to other people I know, but I managed to accumulate a fair amount of emotional trauma about periods just through a general lack of self-determination as a teenager. Dumb everyday stuff, like I was neither in charge of buying my own underwear nor in charge of how the laundry got done when I lived with my parents, so I was constantly frustrated and embarrassed (and often getting yelled at) about dealing with period laundry. It seems like surely I could have been responsible for either or both of those things if it had occurred to me— I don’t think my parents were that authoritarian— but strangely I remember arguing about wanting to do my own laundry my own way and being unable to work out any arrangement. Even now, I often find simple plans impossible to coordinate with my parents, for reasons I can rarely even remember. It’s deeply confusing. I think part of my lingering upset about menstrual cycles is actually due to the fact that I can’t recall any coherent explanations for past conflicts on the subject. Hmm.

Galen knows all this, at least superficially. I talk about vagina-related feelings with pretty much anyone who’s up for it. The most recent neighbourhood rock club was on the theme of songs to change your past and I picked a song that might have prevented me from going on the pill if I’d heard it while I was resigning myself to modern living through pharmacology. (In The Evening by Nina Nastasia and Jim White, because it makes me feel stubborn and that’s what I needed to be.)

I am sad that I ate all those chemicals, and that it seems to have done some damage to my cervical crypts (where the infamous eggwhite fertile mucus is produced). Sad sad sad. Angry too, to feel so misinformed. Disappointed that I didn’t listen to my own better judgment, and betrayed on behalf of the part of me with better judgment. I said most of that at rock club, but I’m not sure that is something people can relate to without a fair amount of relevant experience or other knowledge. Erin afterwards said she had a grieving process about the pill. Me too, going on it and again going off.

So Galen’s latest round of excitement about menstrual cycles is complicated. I was immediately glad to have company, and also immediately lonely, realizing I’m cut off from the possibility of feeling simple, impersonal excitement about uteruses and their ways. It was good to realize that he’s in the rather privileged position of not having personal emotional baggage about menstrual cycles. Once I managed to make him all sad about my damaged cervical crypts and assorted teen angst, we had a better connection there. It’s good to be on the same team.

So. For my future babies, I keep track of books like Cycle Savvy, in case they don’t want to talk with me about their personal strategies and feelings about periods.

Pets, sex, reading about tantra

During a mission to get a couple of books for holiday gifts (look out family, I have eliminated my filter on gifts related to self-help and patriarchy), I picked up a copy of Urban Tantra for myself. The author, Barbara Carrellas, seems like a fab and interesting person in the realm of Annie Sprinkle, Betty Dodson, Kate Bornstein, etc., so I decided to risk offending my atheist sensibilities.

So far, as long as I interpret all talk of Kundalini snakes and chakra colours metaphorically and keep an eye out for my personal standards of cultural appropriation, the ideas and practices in the book are useful and fun and kind of adorable. I laugh with delight at least twice per chapter. It helps that besides being “urban,” the book is super queer, feminist, safety-aware, BDSM-friendly and supportive of sex workers.

My top delighted giggle so far is this suggestion from the chapter called “How to Touch.” She’s talking about something she calls “the Resilient Edge of Resistance,” a balance between pressure and support, touch that isn’t too hard or too light but just at the edge where you can gradually go further. She suggests some exercises to practice finding this edge, including this one:

Practice by petting a cat or a dog. Pets give great feedback. If they stick around and beg for more, you’ve found their Resilient Edge of Resistance.

I don’t usually think of that as feedback, but of course it is! I’m happy to see somebody giving pets credit for being in touch with their bodies and uninhibited about communicating feedback. That seems genuinely body-positive, to not just acknowledge our animal natures but admire other animals’ skills.

Scars, gray hair, “real” beauty

A photo: where I’ve been, by dayzoid on Flickr. A self-portrait I think.

I like this scar— I like looking at most scars, and I work on looking at the rest. But the photo itself seems like the kind of thing that gets referred to as “real” beauty in skincare advertising. An older woman, but with flattering makeup and lighting. Gray hair, but stylish and even. Not a bone rack, but posed to look smooth and curvy, never lumpy or saggy or folded. Making some kind of cute and peaceful facial expression. Definitely feminine, but not sexual (not coincidentally, usually looking freshly washed and clean). It’s a very contrived and limited type of “real.” Looking again, this photo is not as extreme as all that, but the demure smile and the smooth white hair reminded me.

I don’t get why more people don’t rant about how patronizing it is to use “real” as a euphemism for old or fat. I can’t decide if it is better or worse than the older concepts of “imperfect beauty” or “inner beauty.” There are probably more phrases in body image activism that drive me bonkers. The whole focus seems off to me— I don’t think it helps anyone to offer these alternate, consolation prize types of beauty, more ways to win at being beautiful. That doesn’t do anything to get away from ranking people or competing. I really think the focus should be on learning to see more kinds of beauty, to be a better beholder.

Scar pride

{Flickr photo}

‘Scar pride!!’ by Karin Elgai

At first I was just looking for a few photos of people’s scars, having been reminded by Erin’s copy of the Learning to Love You More book. But, in typical internetto fashion, now I am intrigued by the patterns that show up when you look at a mass of public scar photos. There are some popular subjects— self-harm exhibitionism and processing, scars from pregnancy and cesarians (not so much finding episiotomy scar pics), voyeurism with optional processing (especially around major burn scars, and ritualized scarification by some African cultures), manifestos and statements about beauty and beautiful scars, and more general scar pride and storytelling. I find this last one the least complicated, the easiest to post photos without major accompanying comments. (In this one I’m only spotting basics, about how it’s easier to be proud of pretty much anything when you are cute and posing, but I still like how that calculator watch makes her look tough.)

Various marriage- and baby-related plans

  • I think I want to get divorced sometime. Sorry marriage, I just don’t care about you. It would be much funnier to be divorced to my loverman, and introduce him as my ex-husband. The former Mr. Mundy. I think this would offer a much more accurate shorthand expression of our relationship. Right now I think the government approval is confusing.
  • So I am trying to figure out how to not have that look like we tricked people into giving us wedding presents. Because it wasn’t like that. (Except for the usual capitalist / consolidation-of-wealth aspects of the whole institution of marriage, but we actually work pretty hard to get around a lot of that.)
  • This would solve my main wedding-related regret, which was forfeiting the opportunity to birth a third-generation bastard. Both Galen and I were conceived out of wedlock, and so were his mum and my dad. I think this is a proud heritage, even if it makes my dad roll his eyes.
  • I would be willing to conceive a baby in wedlock (but not in a headlock) and then birth it outside of wedlock.
  • Also I am considering not disclosing the sex of any children I might squeeze out for at least a few days after they are born, to give them some space to be treated as ambiguous slugs. I don’t think that’s weird, but Galen thinks it might freak people out. So heads up, people who would be meeting these hypothetical spawn.
  • I guess that means they might not get named for a few days, also.

Boy terror

The rest of that horror essay I was quoting yesterday debates a super-Freudian interpretation of the “final girl” in slasher films— the one who doesn’t die— as a simultaneous castrator and phallus-envier. Cut something off that monster and wave your big knife in the air, ladies. The horror can’t end until the cocks are properly distributed according to your moral fortitude. Meh.

After all the feminist sexuality reading I usually do, it is bizarre to read an essay where somebody takes Freud seriously, even temporarily. Nobody seems to get away with discussing Freud’s take on sexuality without at least a disclaimer about the myth of vaginal orgasms, but in discussing horror apparently it is acceptable to dive into repressed womb envy and castration complexes with all sincerity. Maybe the academic tone of the essay disguised the author’s disdain, but it seemed like she was buying it.

I got a lot more interested when she started pondering why it has been so much easier to have women transition into monster-killing hero roles on film than to spend any screen time on men screaming in terror. Gender as theatre, this is more my speed. It actually made me sad for guys, to think of (mostly) guys in the ’80s making slasher movies for (mostly) other guys and having to kill all the men quickly in the distance while the women got butchered in close-ups. The audience’s only chance to identify with fear in most of those movies was through feminine characters. Men had a very limited range of possible emotions and options for expressing them. How were people supposed to learn about masculine fear? That’s terrible!

The author pointed out that the cliched lack of stereotypical femininity in the surviving girl (always the smart one, or the one wearing pants, or the one who doesn’t put out… also usually the one named Stevie or Georgie or something) might not just be about misogynistically killing all the feminine or sexually active women. She suggests it’s about giving guys a somewhat mannish hero to identify with, since an actual terrified man is off limits. The last girl is the character who realizes the full scope of the danger— she’s the most afraid, and spends the most time being afraid. Those are the interesting emotions, the ones that prompt the shivers and startles. I think it’s terrible that it’s still largely taboo for that to be a man’s role! Hopefully my kids will be able to activate their repressed fears with screaming victims of all genders.

If anybody knows some movies where men scream and cry in terror (preferably half naked?), do tell. I feel like I must know some, but all I can think of at the moment is Deliverance. Maybe some war movies would fit the bill.

“Babe of the day”

Flickr photo sharing

‘birdi speaking of her son while undressing on her (sorta)ex-lover’s father’s rented roof’ by tetheredto

Casey phoned the other day to ask about my top photos of undressed women, as a response to seeing one of those lame “babe of the day” widgets on somebody’s Facebook profile. (I think he wanted to build an arsenal, in case he had the opportunity to unleash it on somebody.) I am pleased that somebody thinks I am a potential resource for images of people who are sexy in the body hair and bellies kind of way, but I don’t have a stash of that stuff at all.

For a start, I thought of Rose and Olive, photographers I found awhile ago, I think on Warren Ellis’ blog. Their photos are often quite posed, and they seem caught up in starving artist glamour and that artier version of girls gone wild that hipsters like (wet shirts, polaroids, poetry…), and they have a blog at Nerve.com which is a creepy place to have a blog… and the photo above is one of only two black models in their entire archive as well as one of a very few models who look older than nineteen and aren’t showcasing skinny bony shoulders… but also, they seem to know that wide thighs and forehead wrinkles and messes are beautiful, and they seem sincere, so I pick and choose from their photos.

I appreciate the love of armpits, textures and complicated facial expressions going on in this photo, and the way the model is kinda subverting a classic pin-up pose. It makes me want to be on that roof, in that light, touching skin with somebody. So this might go in my babe of the day stash, if I had one.