Once again…
…tonight, I’m having that thought, of what would happen if I really truly stopped apologizing for who I am, for taking up space, for having feelings, for having quirks, for being me? If I stopped cloaking my vulnerability in sarcastic self-deprecating asides about “navel-gazing” and being “emo?”
What would that be like?
Every few months/years/whatever I have this moment of, good lord, that would be REALLY different, maybe I should try it! And I’ve been steadily moving toward it for years, but let me tell you, it’s REALLY fucking hard. This isn’t just psychobabble, people.
What would happen if I really did enact that personal revolution?
Fragments: Fear
Last night I was thinking about the fact that fear has been a theme throughout my life. It kept me in a state of inertia during my teen years when I was still living at home; I was being harmed but trying to take any sort of action was too risky because if the outcome wasn’t perfectly in my favor then I would be in trouble; I’d be harmed further. The same thing was repeated in my marriage (though ultimately I broke the pattern, in that case; yay for personal growth!). It’s also what stopped me from ever taking the step over the line and actually going into sex work. There are other examples. Is it what stops me from calling my health issues what they are?
Tonight, on the way home from Manuel’s, I was thinking again about all the considerations about whether depression should be called a disability. (I even have a hard time calling it a mental illness – hey, I grew up in the same society as everyone else, and we’ve all internalized the stigma to an extent.) I was having the usual back and forth in my head. I wondered what other people think of people who have mental health issues and identify as disabled. I wondered what my closest friends really think about my struggle with depression and my questions about whether or not it is a disability. I wondered how much it really matters what it’s called and why I’m so preoccupied with that question lately. I wondered if Rusty feels burdened or irritated or manipulated or limited or frustrated or exasperated or thinks I blow shit out of proportion or thinks I make shit up or thinks I do things just to get attention or rolls his eyes at all my ponderings on identity. But maybe that’s just because I roll my eyes at myself, a little (or a lot) and maybe I should stop that. I wondered how much of this comes from internalizing of the societal stigmas and how much is me being a responsible person who thinks of others instead of being too self-absorbed.
I wondered what it would be like if I could wipe the slate clean and not have all that baggage and all those wonderings.
Do other people think about this stuff, in the way I do? I often think about how we can never really know if the way we experience the world is “the norm” or if it’s an exception. We can never really know what it feels like to be someone else. But because I’m fascinated with people and interactions, and because it comes perhaps too easily to me to think of how I would feel/act if I were in a certain situation that someone else is in, I always wonder.
We hear a lot of messages in the media and pop culture about being an over-medicated society; people talk about kids getting ADHD diagnoses and roll their eyes because that’s just a scapegoat, that’s not a real condition; we get angry at people who can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps and shake things off. I admit I feel that way sometimes, when I hear about someone filing for disability, and then their disability turns out to be… PTSD. Anxiety. Depression. ADD. Etc. C’mon if I can force myself through the day certainly other people can too! Plus Americans love to focus on individualism (which, let me be clear, I do not think is a bad thing at all) – why should I subsidize someone else just because they have depression, right? Not on the tax payer’s dime, etc.; all the Libertarian/Republican talking points. And even as I push back and say, that’s spoken as someone who has never dealt with mental illness, sometimes those thoughts go through my head too.
LiveJournal, maybe?
Once again, and more and more, I am considering starting a friends-locked LiveJournal. Yes, LiveJournal! Why not continue to do password-protected blog posts on here, you might ask? Well, I have to send out the password each time and that feels dramatic. People who don’t have the password can see that the post is there and that has led to stupid drama in the past. And somehow I feel like it would be comforting to steal away somewhere that’s on a completely different system, totally third-party managed, not a domain I own and a platform I manage myself. Might not make much sense but for some reason it appeals to me in a way that doing password-protected posts here doesn’t, at the moment.
I won’t abandon this blog (and hell, I might not even start that LJ at all, I might just talk about it forever and never do it) and I actually hate blog posts where the blogger talks about how they don’t feel comfortable posting anymore because of what people might think. But that’s my situation and it’s not as simple as “what people might think” in the reductive sense of, OMG I base my entire self-worth on the approval and validation of strangers. No, it’s just, like Mary J. Blige, I too do not want drama in my life. And I’m sick of feeling eyes on me, of people who have their own expectations of what I should write or should do. Or people who have just decided I’m The Enemy and no matter what I say, they’re going to pounce on it and tell me how wrong I am. Or my mom will read my posts and call me up and say she doesn’t want me to get mad but am I okay, really, am I, can I please take care of HER needs by NOT working shit out in a way that’s helpful for me? For some people, I’m not enough of an activist w/ my blogging – it’s too personal, everyone hates navel-gazing, I mean no one CARES, get over yourself, geez. For others I am not personal enough, they want to know more, they feel entitled to every detail. And for still others I’m just doin’ it wrong, no matter what.
Some things I’ve had on my mind and wanted to write about are:
- My experiences w/ depression – past, present, possibly future. Musings of all manner along those lines. In particular I keep thinking about something mentioned on BADD – like Melissa at Shakesville, I wonder, should I call myself a person w/ a disability? Whenever I try that on for size, it feels wrong, like I’m appropriating, or trying to give myself a label to get attention, or making a mountain out of a mole hill, I mean I’m not REALLY disabled, and wouldn’t the REAL disabled people get pissed off if every person who just has DEPRESSION starts calling themselves “disabled?” -But that’s the problem, right, the “just” – JUST depression.
Is the whole identity thing getting out of hand, anyway? Sometimes I see people with so many comma-delimited self-descriptors that it makes me roll my eyes. But I think it’s important for people to self-identify and name who and what they are. But I’ve also seen people abuse it, as a way to manipulate. They had ISSUES but they cloaked it in identity. I don’t want to look like one of those people. And the eye-rolling, too, well maybe that’s just knee-jerk from growing up in a culture saturated w/ Fox News type media, where “political correctness” is a big joke… look at those silly people making up terminology! Woman of color? Person of size? Sex worker? Haw haw haw, come on now, we’re the WASPy upper-middle-class straight dudes and we set the terms, not you, silly Others!
And on and on along those lines.
- How sick I am of people misusing the word privilege. Hint: If you put the word “unearned” in front of it, you are talking about something totally different.
- More about my history of wanting to go into sex work but never doing it.
- Sex 2.0 anxiety and how I am really worried that once again I’ll end up doing everything even though it’s supposed to be a committee, but I can’t write about that because I have to be all diplomatic because I’m the founder and there are certain things I can’t say because I’m a figurehead, or something. And, more generally, how people drop the ball and let me down a lot and have done so throughout my life, and it’s a pattern, and I hate it.
- Kind of along the same lines as the disability thing, calling myself an abuse survivor. I know that’s what I am but since I didn’t have physical bruises it’s not REALLY abuse, and it would be disrespectful to REAL abuse survivors to try to appropriate that, wouldn’t it? Etc.
- Posting old written journal entries for reflection. Sometimes it helps to see things typed out on the screen in a nice CMS interface, don’t ask. It just does, for me.
- How I don’t trust people who don’t share certain beliefs, because it’s not just theoretical nebulous “beliefs,” it’s the knowledge that if given the chance they would take control of my life away from me, and indeed they work every day to do so. Basically the same thing Apostate’s commenter says here.
- I mentioned this on Twitter the other day, but I am SO sick of whenever you bring up some instance of sexism, some dude is so quick to point out that that doesn’t happen JUST along gender lines! Some dude who is TOTALLY NOT SEXIST, btw. And don’t you forget it. He’s so not sexist, that he gets squeamish if you even mention sexism, and goes out of his way to show that it’s not “just” discrimination based on gender. Because that’s how we know it’s important, see? If it were JUST affecting women, JUST along gender lines, then it’s not a big deal, but once it affects men, well that’s a whole other story!
But don’t mention this to him, because he is NOT SEXIST, and you’re a feminist who looks for reasons to get offended and sees things that aren’t there and you probably don’t shave your legs, either. Smile!
- I hate when men describe me as “angry.” Go fuck yourself. I need to be able to say my piece and not get pigeonholed in that oh so typically sexist way. And hey here’s a thought: if I do happen to be angry about something (different from ANGRY as my ENTIRE BEING) – maybe there’s a REASON for it, have you thought of that??
- I hate when people make jokes that are so old and have been said a million times and weren’t funny the first million times anyway. I should put “jokes” in snark quotes, to be more accurate. Do they really think they’re the first person to think of that? Do they really think they’re a laff riot?
- Can I tell you how little I care about social media marketing, personal branding, and all that other crap? Can I tell you how absolutely bored I am of conversations about strategies for viral marketing and being transparent?
- Work stuff that might get me dooced, but I probably wouldn’t even mention that on a friends-locked LiveJournal. That’s always been beyond the pale. -Well, except for that secret sex and job hunting Blogspot blog I used to have. But that’s another story.
There’s more but I’m forgetting it.
And to be fair part of why I haven’t written as much is time, but that’s also a cop-out as a full excuse, because if I didn’t feel so inhibited I would find the time. I would write this stuff instead of clicking around on Twitter and Tumblr and shit.
Thoughts on Sex 2.0 thoughts
I’ve been a jumble of emotions ever since I put up my post about my concerns about this year’s Sex 2.0 event.
I do not regret posting it, nor do I feel it was the wrong thing to do. I struggled w/ whether or not to post anything – I’ve been going back and forth for months – but what finally made me decide to do it were two things: 1) multiple people had contacted me privately to express concerns that were similar to my own; and 2) I resolved that, dammit, Sex 2.0 would not replicate dysfunctional family dynamics if I had anything to say about it. And of course, all I can control is me, so that meant I decided that the risk of being seen as a Debbie Downer or any other “negative” perception was worth it; I wasn’t willing to keep my concerns (which were also others’ concerns!) bottled up for the sake of keeping up appearances or pretending everything is just peachy keen. I lived my life that way for too long and nothing but heartache comes from it. Sure there is heartache that goes along w/ speaking your feelings and putting yourself out there, but it is ultimately far less self-harmful than to not say anything for the sake of some bizarre “party unity” or something.
What’s difficult is that much of the foundation for my concerns cannot be blogged. I know this seems like a cop-out; people are probably thinking, well isn’t that convenient, she writes a screed that totally harshes everyone’s mellow and then says, hey, I can’t tell you why! If people perceive it that way, then I have to be okay with that, because I can’t control it. The fact is, there is backstory and behind-the-scenes stuff that can’t be blogged because it would potentially compromise people’s privacy, and that is also not something I’m willing to do for the sake of making a point. So, understandably, many people who do not know all the details can draw their conclusions based only on the information they have. That’s what we all do every day when we draw conclusions about anything, so I am not faulting anyone for doing that! I’m just saying that it’s a tough spot; people don’t have all the information, they don’t know that they don’t have all the information, but for the most part I can’t share all the information for a variety of reasons.
So why didn’t I just shut up, if it was going to be half-assed, you might ask. Well, as I said above: I felt compelled to speak, and I felt the costs of not speaking would be worse that the costs of speaking and opening myself up to negative reactions.
Also, I had hoped that maybe if I wrote a post, some of the people who had approached me privately would feel safer coming forward and sharing their concerns. I don’t think we do ourselves any favors as a community by not communicating about the stuff that’s difficult and not so fun. At the same time I understand people’s reluctance, and sometimes, given the unique nature of the online community around sex, that reluctance is based in more than just a fear of criticism, but the potential for very real, damaging repercussions.
Still I hoped that maybe if I opened up a thread, asked for input and thoughts from anyone involved in Sex 2.0 in any way, that some of those who voiced their reservations to me might share there. In my post I did not mention that others had approached me, because I did not want anyone to feel (even without me naming names) that they had been put on the spot and were now expected to account for private conversation. I realized this would make it look like just me griping, but I hoped that that would be assuaged when others spoke up. But, most of those others have not spoken up, and so the picture of what’s going on is skewed to observers. I later clarified in a comment on that thread that people had contacted me, even though I felt a bit uncomfortable doing so. But I was also not happy about letting the inaccurate and unfair perception that this is all just me stand. I cannot force people to comment if they don’t want to do so, but I also do not want to be misperceived as just a complainer or someone who can’t bear to see her precious conference change.
I also do not want to give the inaccurate impression that I am not excited about Sex 2.0. If that were the case I would not be going! As I said in my previous post, I am looking forward to seeing old friends again and meeting new ones, and participating in some really interesting sessions. As an unconference, it is the responsibility of each of us to make Sex 2.0 what we want it to be, so I also do not want my previous post to be interpreted as passive complaining. But it would be disingenuous and naïve to suggest that “make it what you want it to be” is never influenced by external factors, because hello, if it’s up to all of us to do that, and some of us have conflicting ideas, then yes, there’s potential for some tension there. That’s not necessarily a bad thing except when the potential for true harm exists – but this comes back to what I said above about the stuff that can’t be blogged.
I know this post is even more circular and confusing to the casual reader than the last one. I have a knee-jerk temptation to apologize, but I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. I am not apologetic about speaking my feelings; but I am sorry that circumstances are such that I cannot give the whole story to everyone and make sure everyone understands 100% where I am coming from. And I am sorry that writing this will probably come off negatively even though my overall intent is resoundingly positive.
Let’s make Sex 2.0 what we want it to be!
Thoughts on Sex 2.0 past, present, and future
I can hardly believe that Sex 2.0 is less than two weeks away. I’m looking forward to plotting and scheming – I mean, catching up – with farflung friends, some of whom I’ve known for years and some of whom I met for the first time IRL at last year’s Sex 2.0. I’m also excited to finally meet some of my other internet nerd-crushes; Monica Shores, Nikol Hasler, Sarah Dopp, Maria Diaz, just to name a few.
At the same time, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a few reservations. There’s a little ball of anxiety and worry that’s been hanging out in my chest for the past several weeks, and I’ve been doing my best to try to push it away and tell myself everything will work out just fine. But as the founder of Sex 2.0, and in the spirit of transparency with which it was created, I feel it’s important for me to share my concerns honestly and get feedback from the community.
(more…)
Computers
I have too much old computer detritus (or “collectibles,” depending on how you see it) that for some reason I just can’t bring myself to get rid of. I’ve never been a pack rat. I like the occasional purge. I do hold onto things that have personal, sentimental value for me – the stuff that doesn’t necessarily have monetary value, but can’t be replaced if lost. Why do I hold onto these last remains of my former pretty-big computer collection? I haven’t *used* them in any way in years. I simply tote the boxes around w/ me whenever I move, and shove them in another closet. But do I really need an entire box of Localtalk connectors? This stuff is taking up space, and while we have more of it at the house than at the apartment, we don’t have a ton of it to waste.
I guess part of me thinks maybe one day this stuff will be even rarer than it is now, and… then what? I don’t know. Old stuff is cool. Scarcity makes for interestingness. Plus, I believe it’s important not to erase all traces of where we’ve been – and esp. w/ technology, since it changes so fast.
And yet the fact remains, I *don’t* have space for this stuff.
[Originally posted on my Tumblr, and then I realized, hey, I ended up writing enough to constitute a real blog post! So I'm cross-posting it here - and shortly the RSS feed will be imported to my Tumblr, to complete the infinite loop.]
“Welfare”
When I was reading The Way We Never Were, I had the realization that my grandmother has basically been on welfare for the past ~35 years. In the book, Stephanie Coontz talks about how the term “welfare” has been manipulated by politicians so that it represents a poor black urban population living off the government; there is a stigma attached to the term because surely no one would want to be that (racism, classism, etc. all nicely wrapped up in one package). Ronald Reagan was instrumental in embedding this understanding in the political discourse with his use of the term “welfare queen.”
Coontz talks about how the 1950s was a uniquely prosperous decade because of so-called “entitlement programs” on a scale unseen before and since, not because of mythical up-by-the-bootstraps individual action. People arguably pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, sure – thanks to government programs that enabled them to pursue opportunities. But no one thinks of the government investments in white middle-class families as welfare – even though technically that’s exactly what it is. (See also Coontz’s 1989 essay, “In Search Of A Golden Age.”) Funny, that. My grandmother receiving benefit payments from the Army every month following my grandfather’s death in 1978 is not social welfare, but making certain others jump through hoops to receive a paltry amount of food stamps, for a limited period of time until they get a job, dammit, is.
Perspective and definitions are interesting, aren’t they?
Class and Oppression Olympics
Sometimes I wonder if there’s a kind of Oppression Olympics with class-related stuff. For one thing, when you start talking about class, this is what most people associate with the word “privilege.” And I feel like discussions involving class sometimes descend into a kind of oneupsmanship.”Our lights were always getting turned off because we could only afford rent or bills, not both!” “Oh yeah? We lived off of food stamps when I was growing up!” And so on and so forth.
I get annoyed by class discussions for reasons at both ends of the spectrum. This bit from a recent comment at Anji’s blog really rubbed me the wrong way:
However, your own photo you posted to this entry (and the other flickr photos) shows the pro-sex work protesters to be white, and visually middle class.
“Visually middle class?” What the hell does that mean? That’s just supporting the idea that you can tell what a person’s current financial/economic situation is, as well as their background and personal history, just by looking at them. And frankly I find that extremely condescending. There isn’t one way to be middle class, working class, poor, whatever. Thinking you can clock someone based on a set of external markers is reductive at best and downright offensive at worst.
I’ve mentioned before that for all the talk of the definition of privilege as not referring simply to economic advantage and/or being a personal fault, it seems like an awful lot of bloggers who should know better fall into this trap. This was particularly evident to me with that “class privilege” meme that was going around a while ago. Talk about annoying. No, class is not something you can determine by ticking a few boxes on a form. An empirical fact such as “when you were growing up you had a lot of books in the house” carries, by itself, not much information. It’s all the backstory, the complex stuff that can’t be represented by a tick-mark, that contains the real information.
I also keep coming back to what Queer Dewd said: “Class is not a sweater that you take on and off.” I hate the way some bloggers have been guilty of pointing to a person’s current perceived (because let’s be honest, for the most part they don’t know much about anyone else’s personal situation) economic status as if it exists in a vacuum. There is also a conflation of income and wealth which I find very frustrating and, again, reductive. (We’ve discussed this at some length at Octogalore’s blog, but I can’t find the thread now.)
On the other hand I’m also annoyed from the other side, when people try to act like economic privilege doesn’t exist, or minimize its importance. Sometimes I wonder if I’m slipping into the Oppression Olympics game, but I really do feel it’s worthwhile to talk about the differences in perspective from people who have never really known what it felt like to not “have enough” as opposed to people who have felt the very real effects of the lack of a safety net. To pretend these differences don’t matter, or to minimize their effect, is foolish.
Hugo wrote a post yesterday about college graduates who end up having an existential crisis after graduation and I just can’t get too worked up about feeling sorry for them. Yes, I know I went to college; but these are the kinds of people who annoyed me in college. They didn’t seem to have any sense of perspective. They never had to worry about paying the rent or paying their tuition or anything like that, because mom and dad were taking care of it. Or like on the Suze Orman show the other night, this couple was asking whether they should focus on saving for retirement or saving for their child’s college education. To me the idea of saving for a kid’s education is so foreign. I wonder what it would feel like to be someone who had a college fund or whose parents paid their tuition. Personally I think college students should pay for their own education, take out loans, get jobs, figure out how to make ends meet, because otherwise you get this protracted adolescence and a lack of understanding of the real world. Or maybe I just think that because I’ve always been so independent, by nature. I wouldn’t have wanted to be supported by my parents even if it had been financially possible. I was an adult and I wanted to live accordingly – which is why I used to get so annoyed by people talking about college students as if they weren’t adults. I probably even wrote about it on this blog back in 2002.
The above, about paying for college, might sound draconian. You might ask, why shouldn’t someone’s parents pay for their college, if they can afford it? And, yeah, I get that. It’s not like I’m advocating making a law or something. :P I’m just saying I think being able to fend for yourself is an important skill that should come sooner rather than later. And it’s a skill many people don’t have the luxury of foregoing.
So is it Oppression Olympics, to say that? Or just fact?
Just a thought
I came across yet another random blog thread this morning where it devolved into radfem hand-wringing and sticking-out-of-tongues at the so-called (by them) “YAY PR0N!!1!” crowd. (And no, I am not going to provide a link. I am sick of people going, “OMG WHY WON’T SHE PROVIDE A LINK???” My blog, my call.) As if on cue, a commenter chimed in with, “Well, Biting Beaver used to be a sex worker, and she’s anti-porn and anti-prostitution!”
This strikes me a bit like, “Well, I have a black friend, and she says it’s okay for me to use the N-word!!”
Which is, of course, one of the most fundamental trappings of unrecognized privilege – viewing one person who is a member of a group as a representative of the entire group. (So, for example, a woman who wrecks her car proves that women are shitty drivers; an unemployed Latino man proves that Mexicans are lazy; and so on.)
One sex worker’s bad experience does not negate another sex worker’s good experience; and vice versa. A fundamental concept that we’re all supposed to be keeping in mind here is that people are individuals who experience the world in unique ways, and my experience will never be like yours, or hers, or his… etc.
I don’t want to harp on this anymore, though. I don’t like to fall into the trap of just doing blog posts about, “Oh look at this shitty thing another radfem blogger said!!” because even though I blog for myself first and foremost, sometimes I do worry a bit about what people might think of feminism as a whole if they see posts like this one. -And, yes, I know that if someone draws generalizations about all of feminism based on my complaints with one miniscule segment of the feminist blogosphere, ultimately that’s their problem for not using their brain; but still, I don’t like to be negative more often than positive. However, I do feel compelled to comment on stuff like this from time to time, because it upsets me to see such sentiments expressed under the guise of feminism.
And, now, I’m off to photograph dilapidated old buildings.
Individualism – it’s not necessarily a bad word
I haven’t felt inspired to blog for the past few days, but today, at least, Octogalore has a great post that I’ll quote from at length, to break up the monotony of nothing but Twitter and del.icio.us auto-posts. Also, I do have an idea for a post, thanks to Kochanie, co-blogger at Real Adult Sex; I should have time to write it this weekend.
Bigotry relies on classification. People who are sexist, racist, ablist, homophobic, transphobic, what have you, have convinced themselves that women, people of color, etc. are X or are not Y. That they are able to feel a particular way about an entire group because the group is homogeneous in some way.
Whereas, these people feel that their own group is composed of individuals. Let’s take a white male who doesn’t think highly of blacks or women. He’s decided that blacks are a certain way, and women are a certain way. However, he doesn’t like all white men either. But the reasons he may not like someone in this group allow for more diversity within the group.
That’s why recent statements in bloglandia about individualism are puzzling to me.
There was a discussion which many of you may recall about sex workers, in which some of us who piped up and said we did or do feel good about being able to lend a bit more credibility to the profession by virtue of being educated and not addicted to drugs. Others felt this was not feminist and was exclusionary.
More recently, in another thread, I was referred to as promoting individualism and therefore antifeminist. The context was my suggesting that various women who claimed they were educated and middle to upper class could stand up to patriarchal behavior on the part of their husbands. I was told that I did not understand the capitulation that ALL women need to make as the underclass, and that in suggesting that particular women break out of this trap, I was classist, individualist, etc. It was also stated, to plentiful agreement, that any step women are able to take is purely based on privilege, rather than initiative, guts, creativity, or anything else INDIVIDUAL.
So let’s think about this. By insisting that women are homogeneous, aren’t we playing right into the hands of the bigots?
Read the whole thing. It’s good food for thought.