Buried Alive

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.

(more…)

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.”