• April: 59650 (Goals: 30/50)
• March: 104525 (Goals: 30/50/100)
• February: 31373 (Goals: 30)
• January: 50018 (Goals:30/50)

May is off to a terrible start.  I think I’ve written 900 words.  I’m going to have to work my ass off just to pull myself back up to a 30k month.  Wish me luck.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

the soft twist of your inhalations
draws me into you

the fragile spindle of your heart
winds me tighter

—

This outing of young men by an over-controlling principal is just horribly painful to me.  It makes me sad and angry and I hope they’ll be okay.  I also feel for all the hetero couples  who were also outed.  These things can be dangerous also for young women, and even men, depending on their family situation.  One of the young men was also dropped from a rebuilding trip to New Orleans because some faculty were afraid he might “embarrass the school” or engage in “inappropriate behavior.”  What the fuck, people.  Seriously.  Grow up.

—

Read me clearly: there is no point to feminism if it does not actively address its racism with its agenda. There is no point to feminism if it does not address its racist history, racist matriarchy, racist icons, racist literature, racist imagery, racist publications, racist presence. To claim we’re all female and unite under one cause of gender does. not. work. History never lies. This model has left more marginalized women in the road than we can count. Why the dichotomous split between gender and race, as if we live separately from the strands of our hair to the color of skin to the anatomy of genitalia.

  …from myecdysis

This above is something I’m thinking about a lot in the last few days.  Someone in another blog said that anti-racism doesn’t really go anywhere if you don’t have close friends who are people of colour, if it’s not real to you.  I can see how that statement might be true in a general sense, maybe, but I don’t find it true for me.  Maybe it’s because I don’t have many friends in general.  Maybe it’s because many of my daughter’s friends are people of colour.  Maybe it’s the neighborhood I live in.  Or maybe it’s just me and my flailing hypersensitive idealism.  But the success of feminism, to me, is meaningless if racism is not also conquered.

I don’t want to live in a world where people are discriminated against because of their skin colour.  It’s anathema to me.  I cannot feel passionately about feminism anymore without also being passionate about anti-racism.  I know that I am as immersed in racism as I am in patriarchy, and that I am awash in privilege.  Like a fish in water.

I may not have close contact with people of colour on a daily basis, but I have to live with myself.  And until I am doing the right thing, and I am convinced that this is the right thing, I can’t do that comfortably.  Call it the Princess and the Pea, if you will, but I can’t sleep with that lump in my feather bed.  I don’t want to give up my nice feather bed, but I will if I have to, or I will make room for others, because what good is it to have comfort if people all around me have so little?  Haven’t you ever nearly stopped breathing from the flash-moments when you realize how hard the world is for others, how much terribleness is going on, how much unfairness and wrongness there is?

This idea of untangling oppression into threads and solving one and not another at any given time is counterproductive, I think.  A lesson is a lesson.  The recognition of privilege, the paths of activism,  the making of apologies, the calls for change, all of these things are universally applicable processes.  Yes, we can do it all at once.  It may feel like a slower process, and people mouth about ‘diluted resources’ and such, but that’s really bullshit.

What is progress if it comes at the expense of others?   How can resources be ‘diluted’ if more people are bending to do the work.  It feels like feminists are building a house that’s missing two walls.  “We can’t work on those walls, we have to make these ones first, and if we stop working on these walls, we’ll fall behind!  The elements will undo all our work!”  How does one propose to put a roof on a house with only two walls?

I’d go so far as to say one wall.  The front of the house.  The facade.  And all the while middle/upper class white feminists are building the facade and landscaping the lawn, we return every night to our own homes, safe and sound in  our privileged beds, ignoring the fact that people all around us don’t have roofs over their heads at all.  But we still want them to come work on the new house.  The front of it.

It’s a shitty analogy but it’s all I have right now.  This isn’t some brilliant screed.  It’s me trying to say that as a middle-class academic disabled queer white girl I’m not content with how things are going — in my own head (until recently) as well as outside of it.  And even if all I can do is listen to others and paw through my own insides, then that’s what I’ll do.  I’ll make coffee, I’ll clean toilets, I’ll post links, I’ll confess my fuckups, I’ll try and change me as much as I can, I’ll keep my mouth shut, I’ll speak up, whatever I have to do to work it all out, because I don’t like it this way.

Is the resistance to an equal devotion to anti-racism — hell, the redefinition of feminism to include anti-racism by default — because white feminists have to stop being right and go stand over by the white men they’re struggling against when it comes to addressing racism?  Is it because being called on ‘fraternizing with the enemy’ is that painful?   Is  it threatening?  Is there a sense of losing the moral high ground?

I don’t know.  I can only speak for me.  I’m not good at group activities.  I’m probably a lousy feminist.  I like a lot of things I ’shouldn’t’ like.  I’m a carnivore.  I like violent video games.  I like a lot of music videos.  I write un-brilliant queer porn.  I’m pretty clueless.  But I don’t like this anymore.  It has to change.  At least *I* have to change.  I promise to do about half a million things wrong along the way, so don’t hold your breath waiting for epiphanies over here.

Why do we feel the need to make Jesus cute, or our pal? I have a hunch about why. The things He had to say were radical, often offensive, to the people to which He was speaking. The things He asked us to do are just about impossibly difficult. Love your enemies.

&e recommends just going ahead and reading this blog…
http://myecdysis.blogspot.com/2008/04/accepting-kyriarchy-not-apologies.html

Let me break this down for you. When people talk about patriarchy and then it divulges into a complex conversation about the shifting circles of privilege, power, and domination — they’re talking about kyriarchy. When you talk about power assertion of a White woman over a Brown man, that’s kyriarchy. When you talk about a Black man dominating a Brown womyn, that’s kyriarchy. It’s about the human tendency for everyone trying to take the role of lord/master within a pyramid.

http://myecdysis.blogspot.com/2008/04/apparently-feminists-need-acting.html

One of my favorite students ran into my office today and dramatically collapsed on my couch. Before I even asked what was on her mind, she sat up and shared her wisdom, “Do you know what my acting coach told me today? She said, ‘Listening means having your life changed.’”

http://fetchmemyaxe.blogspot.com/2008/04/yes-and.html

This is just sort of a general rumination on what some people call “constructive discourse/action.”

In improv theatre, or certain acting exercises in regular theatre, we used to have this trope called “Yes, and.”

some days I hate my country as much as the next one…
http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2008/04/28/fetuslove-canadian-style/

Anyway, what’s got LEAFer Bonnie Gembey’s oysters in a pot is a bill working its way through Parliament, Bill C-484. This bill would grant legal personhood to — say it with me — fetuses. The sentimentally-titled “Unborn Victims of Crime Act” would allow authorities to press additional, more bad-ass charges if a fetus (the “unborn child”) is aborted concurrent with a violent crime perpetrated against a woman (the “mother”).

I figure I might as well follow my tracks around the blogosphere. I haven’t got the nerve to comment places; I don’t know why. I’m really vocal on LJ. Ah, well. If I can’t speak, I can link. Right?

I would star them but I don’t remember liking them, honestly.  My memory is damaged by being ill. 

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
<b>Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22</b>
One Hundred Years of Solitude
<b>Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick</b>
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
<b>The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov</b>
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
<b>War and Peace
Vanity Fair</b>
The Time Traveler’s Wife
<b>The Iliad
Emma</b>
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
<b>Great Expectations
American Gods</b>
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
<b>The Canterbury Tales</b>
The Historian : a novel
<b>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath</b>
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
<b>1984</b>
Angels & Demons
<b>The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)</b>
The Satanic Verses
<b>Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest</b>
To the Lighthouse
<b>Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels</b>
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
<b>Dune
The Prince</b>
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
<b>Cryptonomicon</b>
Neverwhere
<b>A Confederacy of Dunces</b>
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
<b>The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter</b>
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
<b>The Mists of Avalon</b>
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
<b>Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame</b>
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
<b>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit</b>
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
<b>Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers</b>

April was supposed to be a bit of a break after a 100k month that included starting-and-finishing a novel.  It’s been a break.  I’ve done very little except write some with B (and I’m only getting anything done because of her).  I’ve hated every minute of it.  This is one reason I don’t want to go to Homewood for two months.

I feel lost without my deadlines and lists.   I don’t like it a bit.  I love being productive.  The problem is that when I’m not, I forget that I can be.  Being productive and pro-active isn’t such a part of my paradigm yet, after years of illness, that I can drop any vigilance.  Today, I read over the calls from a publisher I like, made a list of the ones I wanted to do, and started putting them into my calendar.  I feel better already.

I am so tired of being inert.  It’s horrible.  I’ve been inert so long without having any choice.  I’m going to go for a walk later, maybe with Tirehead the Unwalkable (aka Princess Shira of WHAT IS A LEASH FOR AGAIN?!).  Someone’s got to clue her in on the idea that she is NOT a 75lb yo-yo with a tail.

So, yes.  I hate April.  I am so confused and I don’t even have anything to show for the month except for what I’ve done with B (and yes, it’s not bad and I should be happy, and I love doing things with her and she is fabulous) and a head full of bad TLC/Slice shows.  Maybe I’ll write What Not To Wear BDSM porn and call it all research.  You know.  Because I can.

————-

I’m an aggregator.   Lately, my mind has been awash with feminism, anti-racism, pro-porn/anti-porn, writing, and other thoughts.  I’ve been reading tons of new blogs.  I’m regretting the loss of a blog I was just starting to read, but I understand why it’s gone and I can put on my big white girl panties and go out and learn without it, especially given the reasons it’s gone.  The more I’m learning, the less I post, usually, unless something sets me off monstrously.  I’m still mulling things over around the abortion art project at Yale and I need to follow up on it.

Damn blogosphere with so much going on.  I don’t want to say anything singular yet,  because there’s all these new connections growing in my head and I want to just let them thrive in the dark.  At this point, it’s not that I don’t want to be told I’m wrong as I don’t want the subconscious underpinnings to be displaced.  I’m more than capable of altering my thinking, it’s just that when it comes to home truths, I think I need time to let it all get strong.  These are home truths.  Not just about other people, but about me relating to the world, and about my brain and my illness (can’t forget the research on neuroplasticity).

Then something will come along and I will shock myself with what I really think and how strongly I think it.  Sometimes, I wonder if me and I are two separate women living in the same space, one going out and surviving in the world and the other sitting in the safety of her room and learning and changing and developing opinions.  Suddenly, the latter speaks up, out loud and into the world, and the former says, “what the fuck are you doing, rocking the boat so hard?  I have to go out there tomorrow, and look what you did!”

————–

Some of you may have caught from my Twitter (the name is so appropriate) posts that I have been in a bit of a rumble with Mystic’s school.  The lead in is as follows:

• last Thursday, the school announces that they are ‘cracking down’ on inappropriate dress, due to the warm weather bringing out the belly shirts and short shorts
•  last Friday, Mys stays home and I take her out to buy clothing that specifically in no way contravenes the school board’s dress code.  Here I quote the relevant portion:
  • Clothing that is revealing and show an excessive amount of skin such as: muscle shirts, low cut necklines, inappropriate tops with spaghetti straps, bare midriffs, and open back are unacceptable. Shirst must be ‘tuckable’ and not excessively tight. Shorts and skirts must be a reasonable length. Low-rise jeans, short shorts, lycra and biking shorts are unacceptable. Undergarments should not be visible.

• Monday, Mys wears to school a short-sleeved, hip-length T-shirt that does not reveal her cleavage or the tops of her breasts, a pair of capri-style sweat pants, socks, and skate shoes
• Monday, Mys is removed from a class event because her shirt is ‘questionable’, sent out into the hall with other girls, and made to bend over so that the female guidance counsellor can check whether or not it is possible to see down her shirt
• Monday afternoon, I make a furious call first to the vice-principal in which I tell him in no uncertain terms how inappropriate shaming, harassing behaviour is no matter what a student is wearing.  He informs me that this is school policy.  I tell him I will be discussing this with the school board.  He gives me a ‘fine, go ahead and do that if you need to‘.  (You bet I need to, buddy, and thanks for the permission I didn’t need.)  He then apologizes if Mys has ‘felt badly’ about it, going on about how great a volunteer she is in the office, what a great athlete and student.  She is, thanks.  I knew that.  He also reiterates that it was a female employee who did it and that Mys wasn’t the only one.  Shockingly, I tell you, I am NOT mollified.
• Monday afternoon, I make an even more angry but civil call to the junior superintendent in which I tell her I feel my child has been harassed, outline the situation, and ask her to consider how she would feel if this happened to her at her job.  I tell her that the minimum standard of protection I expect my child to receive in school is the same protection afforded to her in her work situation.  She tells me the senior superintendent will be following up.
• Wednesday afternoon, I receive a message from the superintendent, but am out of the house.
• Thursday morning, I call back.  She is in a meeting but leaves it promptly to take my call.  The first thing out of her mouth was, “That won’t be happening anymore.”  You bet your damn ass it won’t.  I’m just glad it got worked out at this level.  When her email inquiry was not fruitful, she made phone inquiries to the principal and vice-principal and by the time she actually got to speak to them — SHOCKINGLY — they had already decided between them that this was a bad idea.  No shit, Sherlock.  I am not going to let you hide abuse my my daughter behind ‘but a woman did it!’  (Please link this point, and the whole incident, back to some of my fury at the excuses around the OSBP.)
• Tomorrow, I will be calling the school to arrange for the vice-principal and the counselor who assaulted my child to apologize to her — by her request.  She is also requesting that the counselor apologize in general to all the grade 7&8 girls because by her count ‘at least twenty’ girls were subjected to the same thing.  She does not have to return to school without an apology.  Hell, she doesn’t have to return at all, but I am not recommending that she return without knowing that she is respected.
  
• General point of pride — Mystic questioned the entire process when it happened to her and, on noting that the clothing check was more severe than the posted rules, asked the counselor what she planned to do with students who were unable to afford to buy new clothes to fit her agenda.  This was one of the things that made her most angry.  Not everyone can afford new clothes and they shouldn’t have to suffer for it.
  

So, now you’re a little bit caught up.  Enjoy!

Don’t panic. It’s only art.

Art major Aliza Shvarts ‘08 wants to make a statement.

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

No. Wait. Panic. Not because of the art, not because it might be real, not because of the idea of someone having multiple ‘forced miscarriages’. Panic because of comments from theoretically pro-choice feminists that amount to: it’s evil to KILL SOMETHING for fun/art, there’s a limit to how many abortions a woman should have, having that many abortions suggests mental illness, immoral, and HOAX. (Try here and here for a start.)

Who knew there was a threshold past which pro-choice feminists start to sound like fundamentalists? I didn’t think it would be that bad. I didn’t think the responses would make me THIS nauseous or furious or this close to tears. Because, dear feminist friends, fuck you for your vile responses.

‘It’s not art. It’s a HOAX.’ First, let’s look at this one, and I will put a FUCK YOU right by this one. It’s not a hoax. It’s art. CONGRATULATIONS, EVERYONE, FOR TAKING PART. Would you be so fast to call it a hoax if it were something else? What about liposuction? What if she said she ate only McDonalds and had liposuction every month. Would you be talking about it as performance art or deriding it as an immoral hoax? It’s not a hoax. It’s brilliant. Because many pro-choice feminists have just been outed for the fertility cultists and uterus polizia (thanks for the term, ~eyelid) that they really are under the surface. The hoax is every single ‘pro-choicer’ who responded to this with “I’m pro-choice, but…”

Let’s move on to this shit about “she’s stupid because she’s put herself in danger if it is real”. Step. The. Fuck. BACK. Let’s trade being a woman in an alley at night or a black man in a sundown town after dark with ‘artist simulating or having multiple abortions’.

What the fuck are you people fighting for if not the right of this woman and every woman to do EXACTLY what this woman pretends (apparently it was all artifice) to have done? Do you not trust your sisters? Are you only guaranteeing abortions to those who believe what you do? There really is a limit to the freedom you are willing to allow your sisters, isn’t there? It should not be dangerous beyond basic biological consequences for her to have as many abortions as she wants, for any reason. It is wrong for any of us to live in fear.

Doctors who PERFORM multiple abortions a DAY are heroes, doctors who have been shot, who have to be flown in by helicopter to clinics are not maligned as stupid, they are hailed as heroes. This woman therefore should be accorded the same status for placing herself in the public eye as a person who has (or has taken on the mantle of having) had multiple abortions and who is not sorry for it. She is a hero, to me.

To everyone mouthing words of concern about her health and future fertility, FUCK YOU as well. People have crucified themselves, immolated themselves, cut off their ears, their breasts, put out their own eyes, tattooed and disfigured themselves, and many of them call it art or heroism or martyrdom. ‘She shouldn’t have done it because she’s damaging herself,’ people are whining.

You know what’s damaging? Living under the sword of forced birth hanging over one’s head. That hurts every. damn. one. of us. Don’t dare lecture a woman for doing something that might interrupt her fertility. I’m sure that, immersed in the cult of fertility that we are, she’s thought of it. The same people who are outraged by a woman’s inability to get permanent sterilization at a young age are also… what? Mealy-mouthing over her choice to theoretically damage herself with multiple abortions for the sake of art.

What bullshit. Again, this is all about moralizing. It’s okay to have an abortion as long as you secretly are sorry for it? It’s okay if you only do it out of necessity? As soon as you say that, you throw us all into the furnace. I reject that utterly.

The argument that she is denigrating or using or making light of women’s real experiences with abortion is also pure crap. No, I’m not even starting to run out of steam on this subject. Fuck that as well. This from the same group that say an abortion should have the same social weight as a pap smear. Obviously if it doesn’t have that weight with YOU, why should the anti-choicers fall in line? You know this woman hasn’t really had an abortion? Why should she disclose her real status to you? She doesn’t have to earn a badge to talk about abortion, or to do art about abortion. She’s got a uterus, she did what she wanted with it. She hasn’t even looked sideways at yours. Step. Off. Get your eyes back where they belong, on your own hypocrisy.

To Yale, FUCK YOU, too. Fuck you for this: Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns. Basic ethical standards? What basic ethical standards are that? What mental and physical health concerns are we talking about? Are you rounding up the alcoholics, anorexics, cokeheads, insomniacs, plagiarists, overeaters, smokers, and nymphomaniacs in your program as well? These acts… you mean the ABORTIONS? The ‘forced miscarriages’? There are people doing worse things to themselves under your noses for the sake of art, people hurting other people as well, manipulating each other, driving each other mad, abusing each other, abusing themselves. Get your judgmental, authoritarian, hypocritical selves back in the ivory tower. Fuck you. This woman took legal actions, simulated or otherwise, on her own body and no other.

I wish this were true. I wish it were true because I wish it were that easy for women to control their fertility. I wish it weren’t all art. I’m glad it isn’t because I think that might keep Aliza safer, and I think she is brave to have done this. I don’t think it’s bad art. I’m sad that it worked so well and so many people danced the dance. I think the people who will be angriest about this are the ones who are going toe to toe with their own hypocrisy right now.

I support Aliza’s right to do this for real, because I will not throw my sisters into the furnace by applying my morality to OUR RIGHT to do what we will to our bodies. I support her right to do this as performance art, simulating the abortions/miscarriages she claims to have had, because it is her right (OUR RIGHT) to express herself in a way that harms no one. And I utterly reject any criticism of her beyond the unbiased, technical evaluation of her work as a whole. I hope she gets a fucking A.

But the truth is, we are grownups.  We feel like children because we feel worthless or scared or voiceless and that’s what children are.  We feel like children because we don’t have the mad, crazyass manipulative, violent power the grownups had when we were small.  But that’s just it.  We’re grownups.  We’re just not CRAZY growups.  And most grownups may be a little batshit, but they’re not CRAZY.  Not like we’re used to crazy.