Buried Alive

I ended a partnership of over 4 years about 3 months ago. Cheating.
Fucker.
(And don’t even get me started)

Here is what I know so far: as a female, I calculate emotional pain in unimaginable doses, re-allotting in idiotic patterns and measures to see if this time, just this time, it will work.
So what the hell does that mean.
I don’t even know, really.
The unimaginable doses are the vat-sized wells I visualize inside of me. I can fill and dump and fill and dump-fast like a damn tube-I am capable of enduring waves that leave me beached bones. It hardly occurs to me, until too late, if ever I should have had to endure such emotional anguish. And because I have been taught (though rightly) that love is emotion-based, I misplace BIG emotions in a relationship with LOVE. How men use physical pain to mean worth, I use emotional pain in a relationship.
Love,
Masochism

The re-allotment of idiotic patterns and measure is how I expect the repayment of my emotions to be met. If they can put up with and, even meet, some of my pain-based demands, my heart steals a glance. Do this a lot? “What’s your number?”
In a break-up, these are the ties that bind: how much do I hurt them before they start to mean something again? How much did they hurt in this relationship and does the pain I caused them outweigh the pain they caused me?
Love,
Sadism

Never fear. I am done with this fucker.
But.

I never want to love like this again.

By Lucia Valeska

“What I have to say about women and childraising is harsh. I know of no other way to get the message across, so mucked up we are in fear, myth, romance and historical ignorance of the world’s oldest and most significant female vocation–motherhood. The harshness comes from a sense of urgency. Unless we untangle the real features of childraising, the feminist movement will fail to jump its most difficult hurdle.
Three years ago in the midst of the contemporary lesbian rebellion, as a mother I turned to my lesbian sisters and said: ‘Mothers will be next and lesbians will look like silly putty in comparison.’ Mothers outweigh us in numbers, rage and immobility. When they strike we will come up with them or they will take us down. That is how I felt. Two years later in an impatient surge toward individual liberation I gave up custody of my three children. As a result, I am a mother and then again I am not. Non-mothers or the childfree measure their words in my presence, and since I’ve felt the fold, most mothers find me fundamentally suspect. But the view from renegade bridge is enlightening.
I see three distinct but occasionally overlapping political campaigns: 1) The childraisers, 2) The children, and 3)The childless or the childfree. These camps share a common oppression but they are also in direct conflict with one another. Each situation carries a series of contradictions and concomitant ambivalencies, complicated by the separate realities of sex, race and traditional class divisions. The job of untangling the conflicts, of forging a common struggle is nearly beyond comprehension, but we must start digging somewhere.

Mothers
Mothers are not the only childraisers. Included in this group are lovers, housekeepers, babysitters, nursery, elementary and secondary school teachers, communal mothers, relatives, friends, feminist aids, and an occasional father. There are what can be broadly defined as primary and secondary childraisers with much variety and several degrees in between. A primary childraiser is the primary source of emotional and economic support for her children. The secondary childraiser is only one of a group of people who is economically and emotionally responsible for the children.
Whether you are a primary or secondary childraiser and what else you do with your time makes a big difference. The myth tells us simply that you are a mother or you are not. But the facts cast the deciding vote, especially regarding the strength or poverty of the self image you derive from childraising. Ethel Kennedy affords a ready illustration. Tennis, horseback riding, golf, a huge houseful or surrogates and the Washington cocktail circuit can uniquely influence the self concept of your basic mother of eleven. The single mother who works a nine hour shift in order to support her four children will have a different self image. What we do well tends to create a solid self concept. What we do poorly results in the opposite. How well we do anything directly depends on the economic and social environment in which we do it. The crunch in childraising comes when you realize that poor mothering and faulty childcare are currently built-in givens in the North American social and economic system.
Specific signs of decay are readily apparent. Te beging with, we are all familiar with the dreaded question: “And what do you do?” (a) “I’m a mother” (b) “I’m a lawyer” or (c) “I’m a pig farmer.” As a mother I was always tempted to answer with ‘c’ because there are some interesting historical parallels. The primary difference boils down to the fact that pig farming went out a little earlier than motherhood and so you pick up an extra point or two on its antique value. Not even the middle class American supermom with the greatest resources at her private command can beat the inevitable failure. As the feminist movement legitimizes rebellion, supermom after supermom throws in the towel of her discontent and as often as not returns to school.
If being with children is a joy why aren’t we fighting harder for the privilege? Why it is when you ask for childcare volunteers everybody in the room contemplates their boot laces? Why is it the mothers and a handful of political stalwarts are inevitably left with the job of consciousness raising (children are human beings too) and organizing childcare for meetings, jobs, community, wherever.
The signs are real. The message is clear. If you’re looking for a solid self, don’t be a mother, or an elementary school teacher, or a childcare center aid at all. Since failure is built into childraising in our society, there is no such thing as a good mother and no such thing as a good self concept emerging from this work. The situation goes beyond the sole dictates of male supremacy. It has nothing whatever to do with any individual childraiser’s advanced skill at maneuvering. There are a number of ingenuous, if partial, escape routes that the more privileged work out for themselves. But there you go; it is an escape–something to get away from. That something transcends good or bad mothering. What is it?

The Changing Economy of Motherhood
Early one morning everybody in the world woke up and decided in unison to hate children. Hence the cure: we all wake up tomorrow morning and decide to love children. Stripped of its rational facade this is the kind of solution which too often prevails. Many contemporary writers (Jill Johnston, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, Jane Alpert) talk of returning to the good old days when children were ‘integrated’ into adult society, when they were treated as ‘small adults’ and were a constant presence in the daily life of the community. It’s not a bad idea. We could gather up all the children and go marching through the factories, business offices, medical schools, cocktail lounges, libraries, college administrations, board meetings, nuclear laboratories, saying: “Here’s three for you and three for you and three four you; keep them safe, happy and intelligent; we’ll be back for them in 25 years.”
The description of an integrated society these writers present resembles an historical truth, which in many parts of the world still prevails.But is it the entire social, technological and economic fabric of these period and places that makes the integration of children a viable reality. Many of these integrated children vitally contribute to the economic life of the community: they work from sun-up to sun-down. But most significantly, their relationship to their mothers is relatively casual.
In any economic setting with an extended family, the mother’s relationship to her children is automatically secondary. That is, the children will be raised and economically supported by a group of people which the biological mother is simply one member. This is generally true for all classes, races and cultures.
The economic settings which maintain a secondary relationship between the mothers and children cover an enormous range and variety in life style. They include nomadic communal gathering and hunting people, agrarian societies, feudal societies and early industrial societies. Since these economic forms have prevailed for most of human history, many of the contemporary expressions of motherhood are outgrowths of an economic existence which is now obsolete in most parts of the U.S.A and generally in any advanced industrial setting.
Here’s the ideal: the nuclear family is the result of an economic system which has come to depend upon small, tight, economically autonomous, mobile units. It is essential to capitalism because it not only meets the peculiar production needs of our economy but also fits the requirement of capitalistic consumption. Thus the ideal nuclear family boasts one producer and several *but not too many lest the labor force explode) consumers. It is a middle class ideal and the norm held out for all classes. Even though the working class family rarely achieves the ideal, it too believes this s the way life is supposed to be. In the “good” family, the man “works,” the woman is wife, mother and homemaker.
The nuclear family provided stable units for the advanced industrial state for a number of years. Now, the very mobility it arose to feed is turning around and killing it. The means of stabilizing and sustaining the old family have progressively disintegrated: neighborhoods, churches, ministers, relatives, etc. New institutional buffers have taken their place: T.V., psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, family counselors, school counselors, and a huge educational system.
By keeping the nuclear family limping along, these adjustments have eased the new primary relationship between mothers and children. But short of total fascistic control (no divorce, no abortion, no children) the attempt is economically doomed. The U.S. government has failed to salvage an institution which served it well. The top-gap adjustments have not been sufficient. Psychiatrists no longer even attempt to “save” marriages: they help people through “transitions.” The divorce rate soars, giving the nation a new choice and women and children a new deal. Either the old nuclear provider supports two, three, r four families, which most men can’t or won’t afford, or middle class women join the labor force with unmatched vengeance. All this at a time when the number of jobs is rapidly shrinking.
Meanwhile back at the homestead, the children are waiting to go to school to make this new deal possible. For a mother of three that’s a minimal wait of nine years on diaper duty before she is free to look for “work.” Upon finding that job, she also finds she must be away from home for at least eight hours a day not including travel time. Mist children’s school days run two to four hours short of this requirement. Talk about credibility gaps, here we have a possibility gap. Welcome, ladies, to the working class.
But long ago, they moved middle class women out of the extended family, Mexican, Irish, Italian, Jewish neighborhood. Mother still lives in Pocatello, Aunt Jean is in an institution up in Rhode Island; so who will watch the kids? Arise the new childcare center: haphazard, unfunded, disorganized, and expensive. A college educated woman earns less than a male with two years of high school training. If you even find a job, do you grasp the size of the pay check coming in, minus the babysitting, childcare, groceries, moving, housing and medical costs? This is a framework for built-in failure.
Take a good look at the rhetoric surrounding the issue of motherhood. The term “childless” represent out society’s traditional perception of the situation. Since motherhood was the primary and often only route to social and economic well-being for women, having children was a material asset, and to be “childless” was historically negative. Indeed the term was often directly equated with “barrenness.” Few women were autonomous; survival depended on marrying and bearing children. No man wanted a barren woman. So under these circumstances no ‘sane’ woman chose not to have children. To be childless still carries a negative stigma even though the social and economic reality has drastically changed. Consequently the question, must we be childless, is loaded.
The tern “childfree” represents a new perception of reality in the U.S.A. Not only is motherhood no longer the only route to social and economic well-being, it has become a real detriment–a detriment which is clearly visible when a mother looks for a job, a place to live, babysitters or childcare, when ever she tries to take her children any place she goes.
Women must for the first time in herstory leave the nest in order to gain an identity and a living wage. Yet a mother cannot leave the nest because she is the children’s sole remaining legal, economic, and emotional representative. When children are barred from any productive role until they are 25 years old, it makes the job of representative ten fold what it was in the past. To be a good representative you must be economically solvent, have a solid self concept (gained elsewhere), and have a great deal of time on your hands.
On another level, the debate between “childless” and “childfree” is purely rhetorical. Clearly, with or without children, women are not free in our society. Even more important, as long as children exist it is a delusion to speak of being free of them. They are still all out there, impatiently clamoring for recognition and support.
Meanwhile the government takes its own stand. It has already paid farmers not to grow food and workers not to work past a certain magical age. It pays students not to join the labor force and fathers to stay away from home. Now the government is implicitly paying women not to have children. Ford will follow Nixon in refusing the necessary funds for childcare. Like Nixon he will call it “economizing and preserving the American family.” The new deal for children and mothers amounts to no deal at all. They are being forced into an economic and social transition which is doomed to failure from the start.

Consequences and Strategies
The situation portrayed presents distinct consequences and strategical possibilities for the three political camps: mothers, children, and the childfree. We must recognize the contemporary condition of women and children as a complex product of economic history. The problem is far more complicated than just the result of bad men in places of power. The grim fact that women in feminist collectives refuse to deal with the dilemma unless mothers literally put them up against the wall, is one indication that our situation is not a simple by-product of the ideology of male supremacy.
Think, In general the feminist movement has benefited its members. It has given them a collective identity which in turn has made them stronger as individuals. Women have given of themselves freely and deeply, in order to develop this new strength. OF course we’ve had our casualties, but in general the prize has been worth the cost. In the case of childraising the prize does not yet equal the cost. We reflect society’s perception that mothers, children, and childcare are expendable. The “expendability” is often expressed in statements such as: “Childcare is a reformist issue.” But this expendability of mothers and children is built on the economic system which controls all of us. ”

From Quest a feminist quarterly
“The SELFHOOD of WOMEN” vol. 1 no.3 Winter 1975

I call this particular issue the “YUCK!/YAY!” feminist phenomenon.

Here’s how it looks:

Feminist A: “I think it’s feminist when I wear____/behave like _____/ my significant others do _____ to me”

Feminist B ” What you think is feminist really SQUICKS ME THE FUCK OUT but you like it so jolly good times.”

(Just look at those feminist Alphabet people tolerating each other)

Why doesn’t Feminist B like Feminist A’s “feminist” acts?  If they are discussing acts for their feminist value, isn’t Feminist B saying she, likely, doesn’t find Feminist A’s interests very feminist?  Oh no pisaquari, it’s just not her cup of tea. BUT WHY!

We won’t ever know because the conversation never gets that far. We are okay at stopping at tolerance.  That’s our endpoint or goal.  Tolerance.  Apparently, telling everyone everything they do is fine and dandy or vaguely suggesting one just has “different preferences” suffices. Feminist B would never divulge her reasons because that would likely cause a riff or something equally terrible like a debate.  There is no greater Cardinal-Rule-To-Break than:

thou shalt tolerate thy sister

But the missed truth in these passing’s of conversation is an unspoken difference of opinion on feminist values and definitions.  Pretty important stuff!  Likely kind of compelling and eye-opening, as well.  But we care more about not rocking the boat than digging in, than getting a little messy (this is all so AMERICAN the more I type it).  And by ignoring these signifiers of root-level mutual exclusions, we are creating a dishonest movement.  A false sense of sisterhood (and perhaps one of the reasons when shit hits the fan it REALLY HITS–we don’t have the means to fully express our disagreements b/c they go far too long unspoken and, so, we try to fit too much in in one breath).

What’s more, by valuing tolerance over dis-closure and upfront-ness, we further isolate ourselves.  By never feeling our feminist values can shake up the ooey-gooey feelings of tolerance, we alienate ourselves at a very psychic level.  This is a remarkably alone place to be in a movement that once promised so much more (I know, I’m sooo DoomsDay about this).

Were Feminist A and Feminist B talking, for instance, about the best ways to get their respective homes, the “YUCK!/YAY!” phenomenon might work.  You live at different houses so you take different streets.  But what happens when feminists stop showing up at the same house?  If we scatter ourselves at an ideologically molecular level, what do we do then?  Don’t we lose strength and purpose?  Don’t we lose revolution?

This is intended to be as short as it’s about to be.

Doing or thinking in a manner of opposites is not necessarily (and I would argue, hardly ever) a means of subversion.  To reciprocate is to use the same original ingredients in perhaps a new way but the same ole junk pile nevertheless.

Oftentimes, people believe their particular mix is something revolutionary.  If you dice instead of leave in large chunks, sprinkle this at this time instead of the other, convection bake instead of microwave (WHY the cooking metaphor you ask? I don’t know really).

And this action, of dwelling in the many versions of the same ingredients, is often a silencing tactic used by liberals, men and “great thinkers” alike. What they call “nuance” or “caveat” or “the spectrum” is merely a game of traipsing along a preset line or binary and seeing how many different ways they can land on the line.  One never thinks, in this line of work known as flipping coins, to simply do away with the currency.

One of the BIG reasons I no longer believe in, or support the idea of,  sexual orientation has to do with our relationships to others’ body parts.  In most cases, to have a sexual orientation, is to have fetishized genitalia (or preference, one prefers [part]).

That’s ew.  Not because bodies are ew but because that creepy creepy preoccupation with others’ parts is (bodies are neither hawt nor ew, geddit?). Though I understand the reasoning behind using genitalia as a marker for certain kinds of socialization–hence not dating males because the chances they are sexist assholes is simply too HIGH– using genitalia as a visual marker for arousal or appeal is a fetishizing act and does not differ you in any way from another amateur pornographer:

Why must these vulgar specimens insist on its unique “beauty” when, in fact, a vulva is precisely as “beautiful” as an elbow or a nostril?

Precisely-ism.

Note: the comeback tour is on indefinite hiatus.

Watching people’s physical person get destroyed or damaged.  It makes me physically sick.  I just had to stop watching one because I was having visceral reactions.  Awful stuff.

Not to mention you sit there and become emotionally invested people and then have to watch them tortured or slain.  Masochism to watch it.  Scary movies included (who wants to be scared? )

I watch documentaries most of the time nowadays.  The film I just put on pause I could probably have watched a few years ago.  The move away from violent films has increased my sensitivity(/empathy?) to scenes of violence.  And I can’t complain.

I feel like bundling up in a thick, velveteen blanket in a Queen-sized bed (bigger than the king–this is my dream world), in a cozy dark room with the TV glowing, just down a warmly-lit corridor which zig-zags from the living room, in a forest-hidden cottage and just staying put.

But radical feminists, of all kinds and every last one of you, the path to the cottage through the door and the living room down the corridor to the bedroom to the bed through the blanket to the arms inside is open.

Continue reading →

I love you,
You love me,
We’re a happy family,
with a great big hug,
and a kiss from me to you,
Won’t you say you love,
me too

Photograph of the Girl

The girl sits on the hard ground,

the dry pan of Russia, in the drought

of 1921, stunned

eyes closed, mouth open,

raw hot wind blowing

sand in her face. Hunger and puberty are

taking her together. She leans on a sack,

layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,

the new radius of her arm curved.

She cannot be not beautiful, but she is

starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones

grow longer, porous. The caption says

she is going to starve to death that winter

with millions of others. Deep in her body

the ovaries let out her first eggs,

golden as drops of grain.

*Sharon Olds from The Dead and The Living

(Trigger Warning: Satire to the point of disturbance)

Yes, while on bloggular sabbatical I met and fell in love with a bearded liberal dude named Zed at a locals only Power Play Bar*, found coupled bliss in a pricey studio apartment cooking him organic lunch (but he cooks dinner—we egals know how to rock a feminist relationship), learned a second language while backpacking through Europe on my parent’s dollar and became an I Can’t Help it Feminist. Life is glorious. Weather is here. Wish you were beautiful.

Knowing full and well the confusion this recent conversion will cause, I should clarify a few points about my new found life as an I Can’t Help it Feminist.

Yes, I used to be one of those: a choice feminist. I used to believe women, upon examining their condition, could find it in themselves to make a different, less painful life.

Yes, I must come clean: I used to believe in choice and change.

I used to believe in autonomy, agency and freedom to move about in the spheres of feminist conscience whilst taking the most ingrained and damaging nuggets of patriarchal brainwashing and intellectually lobotomizing them.

Hell, I used to believe in feminist journeys.

I used to believe what we did in the bedroom, preferences for self-expression, the kind of people we are, were all part of a malleable feminist landscape—with bends, ebbs, flows, threads to be cut and re-sewn, again and again.

I used to believe in a feminism that could reject, resist, reform.

Oh how bigoted I was then!

(Granted, I was pallin’ around with those dogmatic radical feminists with all their talk of hope and words of encouragement and suggestions to get out of the hell hole.)

To all my new found allies: I’m SO SORRY I WILL NEVER SPOUT SUCH HATEFUL CRAP AGAIN!

Because, yes, now I know.

Whatever you do in the bedroom, you can’t help. No matter how many times you examine it, no matter how many times you think you might hate it so much you wanna go jump off a bridge while securing a chained noose to the perimeters of your neck and the scaffolding-whilst also aiming for the shark’s maw-no you can’t help it.

No matter how many times you’ve tried blocking thoughts about some older man insisting on you calling him Daddy while being orally serviced, it doesn’t matter. You can’t help it. You’ve had those thoughts for as long as you can remember!

If you feel you are a queer man trapped in a transgendered body with a hard-wired preference for paisley skirts and pin-striped business suits, then. you. are. It’s your biologically determined state!

If every time your mouth is without lipstick you find it neurologically impossible to emit serotonin then don’t fight your wiring! Your brain expects to find raspberry colored carcinogenic fecal matter lacquered to the outer extremities of your lips and when it doesn’t find it your brain gets VERY UPSET.

You are a feminist.

You.can’t.help.it!

I Can’t Help it Feminism is more than just a message of completely blind understanding, tolerance and acceptance. It’s the hopeful hopeless message that everything you are now is everything you have ever been and will always be.

And that, my friends, is a feminism ANYONE AND EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER HAD EVEN THE TINIEST INKLING WOMEN MIGHT BE GETTING SLIGHTED JUST A BIT can get behind.

*What, have you not been? Power Play Bars are about owning power. With play! Everyone gets a feather boa and black latex stick at admission. The rest of the evening is spent being randomly tickled by feathers and poked/slapped/prodded by The Stick. (Haught.) I was waiting in line at the restroom when I got three hard slaps to my ass. (Ouch!/Hot!) This was code for “Hey can me and my friend take turns c*nt torturing you with our steely pocket knives?” To which I responded by gently plucking two feathers from the boa and sticking one up each guy’s nostril (one was Zed’s!). This meant “Yeah but I’m a feminist so make sure you do it in a feminist kind of way.”