The Revolution of Nonmonogamy

There's been a lot of talk about nonmonogamy recently, what with Laurie Penny's piece in the Guardian and this somewhat horrifying bit of commodification at Jezebel. As earnest and elegantly stated and nuanced as Penny's piece is, it still presents nonmonogamy in light of the heteronormative standard: "Just another way of organizing life, love, and who does the dishes" which replaces old relationship problems with new ones, of terminology and how to "make sure you're spending enough time with each of your partners."

Penny herself acknowledges that this isn't the point of nonmonogamous relationships: "The truth is that there is no magic set of rules for love, sex and home economics that works for everyone – and that's why it's so important that there are other options out there." Presenting nonmonogamy as just another set of rules to follow is severely limiting in its possibilities. "Polyamorists and monogamists alike," she notes, "fall prey to the delusion that their rules are the only proper way to organize relationships[.]"

The revolutionary nature of nonmonogamy comes not from being a new and exotic, esoteric set of rules to follow (because, let's face it, that's vaguely racist) but in the idea of creating your own rules. Creating your own rules *in concert with other people.* Creating rules that work mutually for both of you, so that everyone gets what they need. It's not about doing "whatever you want" because no one wants to hurt people that they care about. But it's never assuming the emotional state of someone else; it's always letting them tell you whether they're ok or whether they're hurt, and then listening to the answer. It's respecting the answer. It's working towards a better way of doing things if hurt happens. Between the two of you, to the benefit of both of you so that no one gets hurt and no one unintentionally hurts anyone else.

All of this sounds like some pretty standard, run-of-the-mill couples therapy stuff. Because I keep saying "the two of you" as if it is a couple, two people, and that's not nonmonogamy, right? As if relationships between just two people didn't exist in nonmonogamy. But that's not true. I say between the two of you because no matter how many people are in your relationship, or in a relationship with you, you have to think of them as just themselves, each one person, an individual being with thoughts and feelings and features unlike any other that are completely irreplaceable because this person is a person, a whole person, a single person.

(sidebar: You should view everyone this way, not just people you're sleeping with. Being sexually attracted to someone shouldn't be the deciding factory in whether that someone is a complete human being, because everyone is, regardless of whether you want to sleep with them.)
(secondary sidebar: You have to view yourself this way, too. You, also, are a unique and complete human being that deserves a complete life like any other, in ways that make you happy.)

If you start to falter in this unassailable belief that each of your partners is a whole person, a complete person, an individual human being with feelings and thoughts and dreams unlike any other, what happens is that you gradually cease to weigh their own feelings and pains equally with yours and then you end up "doing whatever you want" which (inevitably) causes pain and suffering for someone, usually not yourself the worst. You cease to care about your partner, because they're not a whole person, just a thing you use. And maybe you're sorry about that thing becoming worn because you're using it because it's not a person anymore, it's an it.

The thing about pre-made rules for interacting with people is they create whole systems that revolve around people not being people, not being individual and complete human beings.They replace individuals with characters, with scripts to follow. You're supposed to wait three days before calling. You're not supposed to talk about your dreams. Or your period. Be thin, white, symmetrical, of normal neuro-functionality, secure in your gender and seeking an opposite gender as if gender were binary. Find one mate to raise children with according to those nonexistent gender binaries. Make lots of money.

These are the rules, right? Those are the people that are held up as beacons of success, of stability, of doing-it-right-ness. This is the script. There are so many people that don't even *get to be in the play* because they're not thin or white or symmetrical or neurotypical or cis or hetero or rich. So, like, hey, even if you're thinking about nonmonogamy as a way to be all those things because you think it's possible to play out the script, that's cool. I guess. I'd sort of like to meet you, because it must be nice to never feel as if there are parts of yourself that just don't fit and that's got to be a weird experience because I don't think I know anyone that wouldn't cop to feeling like a square peg in a round hole sometimes no matter how wedged into their round holes they are.

But inevitably, some people don't follow the script. And rules mean that even when the script doesn't work for you, you're supposed to follow it instead of change it. Rules mean that when you're not in the script at all, you're not supposed to trod the stage of life, complete life, fully human life.

How terrible. Terrorizing.

So throw out the rules. Throw out the roles. Work out your own rules. Be nonmonogamous.

And then, when you've tried that for awhile, you can start to blow apart all your relationships. Monogamy and nonmonogamy are for sexual partners, specifically. But what are the other things we're supposed to be doing with sexual partners? Or not doing with them? Raising children, living together, working. Why should those be tied to who you sleep with? Why should you have to live with someone you're fucking? Why should you have to live with someone you're raising kids with? Why should you have to raise kids with the person you're fucking? Why shouldn't you work with a sexual partner? Does the kind of work matter? What about the rules for relationships between work and parenting? 

Pick all of your relationships apart and put them back together in the ways that work best for you. And demand a system that lets everyone do that. Pretty revolutionary, that.

Leave Angelina Alone

On Tuesday, the New York Times published an op-ed written by Angelina Jolie on the subject of her recent pre-emptive double masectomy. And then everyone went nuts. In at least three different ways.

Some of the crazy was entirely predictable and almost too cliche to even mention, except that objectification of women is still a very serious problem, so I'll mention it. Over at Public Shaming, you can get a round up of all the awful people offering condolences to Brad Pitt on the loss of Angelina Jolie's boobs. Do I need to break down why this is wrong? One, it's Jolie's body, not Pitt's. He doesn't actually own her. They're not his boobs. If you're going to offer condolences, offer them to *her.* But (and this is two), maybe think twice about offering condolences at all. Because, you see, Angelina Jolie is not merely a pair of breasts. Honest. There's a whole body attached to those breasts, and a head and a brain and AN ENTIRE PERSON with complex thoughts and feelings and the ability to make choices. She made a choice. She exercised her agency, and lamenting the pieces she lost to retain that life and that agency is pretty despicable.

Just a brief tangent, because I find people that feel like they have the right to hold forth on other women's bodies to be hilarious in their rationalizations for why they get to opine at all: I do wonder what the "Natural Beauty!" criers will have to say. Jolie did elect to have reconstructive surgery after her masectomy. But, like, is that wrong, Natural Beauty Aficionados? She's now got not-natural breasts. Should she not have done that? Or is it ok because she just went back to the way she was? But isn't natural supposed to be totally natural? Oh, right, except for all the false eyelashes cleverly and permanently glued on your eyes and the impossible skin care routine for the dewy-fresh look and 6 hours a day at the gym to tame whatever your natural body shape is into a perfect temple of "Natural" Beauty Male Gaze Aesthetics.

Wait, but now I really do want to know what the Natural Beauty Aficionados have to say. Please, define "natural" for me. Because I'm pretty sure you don't actually mean "However a woman finds herself." Pretty sure without that reconstructive surgery, none of you'd find Jolie attractive anymore. BUT WAIT. Those aren't real, so she's not attractive anymore anyway. CATCH-22. Getting sick means you're a worthless person, right? Yeah, maybe you should just not talk about "what's beautiful." It always backfires, no matter how nice you think you're being because guess what? Beauty isn't everything. So quit making it everything. Just. Shut. Up. Women do not need your validation.

But, there were other kinds of crazy. There was the ubiquitous, seemingly endless stream of commenters that wanted to talk about the fact that most women don't have access to and can't afford even the test for the gene mutation that Jolie found she had, much less the treatment option she chose.

"Can we talk about how most women can't afford to make the same choices she did now?" I feel like I heard 100 times in about an hour. "The choices SHE made." Maybe I'm just projecting, but there seemed to be a petulant quality to the question, a grudge held. But what I don't understand about this is that Jolie up-front and matter-of-factly acknowledged that most women don't have access to the gene test. And she said we have to do better.

So, yes, guys: We can talk about this. LET'S TALK ABOUT THAT. Jolie kick-started that conversation for us! Someone pat that woman on the back! I get that she's pretty and rich and a celebrity and so that makes it really hard to give her credit for anything because everything is just so easy for rich, pretty celebrities, but the woman has spent three month having her breasts removed and reconstructed because there was an 87% chance she would develop breast cancer (which she watched her mother die from) and maybe, JUST MAYBE, we could cut her a little slack and give her credit for proactively managing her health, being open about her decisions and what they mean to her, AND ALSO advocating for every woman to have the same access to healthcare she does as a result of being rich (and pretty and a celebrity)?

It can't be that hard. I know everyone wants to hate rich, pretty people. But even rich, pretty people are just people. So maybe try to contain your jealousy and treat her like a person? Just a thought. Maybe you could try it.

But maybe my favorite bit of insidious, awful misogyny that got flayed out there in the world for everyone to see were the "This is such a distraction!" people.

A conversation about the things that we value women for, the inequities of the healthcare system in the US, and a discussion of the fact that human genes inside of human bodies are patented is a "distraction?" Fucking really? Private corporations are patenting our genetic material and barring us from access to life-saving information, and now there's a floodlight on that, and still this is a "distraction?" Look, I get that maybe none of these issues are your pet issues. We all have the things we care about more than other things, even broad-spectrum activists. I, for example, rarely blog about things that aren't related to feminism or compassion. But I still pay attention to other things, even ones I have only a tenuous grasp on. I still think they're important. I don't call them "distraction" when they push my pet issues to the background for a day or two. I lend my tiny voice to support them and the people that know about them.

Try returning the favor. I don't know why you would be so dismissive of a woman's lived experience, and the actual life-or-death choices that is healthcare in our country. I don't know why you'd be so dismissive of a spotlight on the reality of corporate power, patent law, and blocking the free-flow of information. I suspect it's because you don't like Angelina Jolie, or you don't like celebrity culture, and that's fine. But *this* is still not a distraction. It's a serious conversation that Jolie graciously started for us by sharing a series of experiences that she took great pains to hide from prying eyes while they were happening because they were PAINFUL, both physically and emotionally. That's an act of generosity that you could try to respect. At least a little. At least enough to keep your mouth shut if you have nothing nice to say.

Check your biases, world. And think about why you're heaping so much hate on a woman that's doing her best to navigate between her privilege and her life. Maybe you don't agree with all her choices, but they're still hers to make, and she's not doing a horrible job of it.

Misogyny at the Oscars

So, I'm real late to this party by internet standards, but I got involved in a facebook argument about this, and this morning I wrote this as a salvo in that argument (don't judge me for getting into facebook arguments, ok? Thanks.) and I decided I might as well just put it up here no matter how late to the party I am. 

Seth MacFarlane at the Oscars did not, as Victoria Brownworth and a lot of other people claim, “rip the status quo a new one.” And if you think he did, you probably grossly misunderstand both the status quo and the concept of satire. Ironic hipster racism is still racist, and ironic juvenile misogyny is still misogynist. Let’s start with the boob song, since that’s pretty simple to understand as it’s really just straight-up misogyny, as opposed to discussing dear Miss Wallis, which is a horrific intersection of racism and misogyny.

So, like, Seth MacFarlane sang a song about seeing women’s boobs, and you want me to believe that his point was that we strip female nudity of context and simply gawk at it. How did he do this? He did this by… stripping female nudity of context and simply gawking at it. Oh, wow, that’s some real clever satire there. I mean, the edginess of taking the status quo and just… regurgitating it. God, someone please explain to me how edgy and awesome it is to use the status quo on a billion-person platform, and how it’s so subversive to the status quo. My poor, feeble female brain must just be not getting it.

No, really, I’m waiting. Explain to me how vomiting up the status quo of a misogynist culture that objectifies women’s breasts regardless of context is subverted by replaying the trope of objectifying women’s breasts regardless of context.

See, the thing about satire is that it’s supposed to do that: subvert the status quo. So, whatever MacFarlane did, it wasn’t satire.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the boob song, for two very distinct reasons. One was the inclusion of Jennifer Lawrence.  Setting up a dichotomy, a competition, if you will, between those whorish actresses that have done nudity and those awesome pure ones that haven’t is part of misogyny 101: divide and conquer. Get women to police their own behavior, and each other’s behavior. Get them to think they are each other’s enemies. Then they’re a lot easier to exploit.

BUT THE REALLY BIG PROBLEM WAS SCARLETT JOHANSSON. The inclusion of Ms. Johansson in that  song basically wipes out any attempt at saying MacFarlane had any sort of point about double standards for women in film. Wanna know why? Scarlett Johansson has NEVER (I repeat, never!!) bared her breasts on film. She’s never done it. MacFarlane’s seen her breasts because someone hacked into her phone and stole and then published private pictures she took of herself.

Please, go ahead and tell me that she shouldn’t have taken the pictures. That the existence of the pictures means she’s a slut that deserves whatever happens to her. I will laugh and then I will put you on my private mental list of probable rapists, because if you can honestly say with a straight face that anyone deserves such an invasion, you probably think women that wear mini skirts deserve whatever happens to them, too.

But let’s talk about Quvenzhane Wallis now. MacFarlane turned a nine-year-old black girl into a sexualized object to make a joke about George Clooney’s dating habits. I don’t give a fuck what you think about her, or Clooney, or his dating habits. HE TURNED A NINE YEAR OLD GIRL INTO A SEXUALIZED OBJECT TO MAKE A JOKE ABOUT A VERY POWERFUL MAN. Worse than that. He turned a nine-year-old black girl into a sexualized object to make a joke about a white man.

Is there a better way to telegraph to someone that they don’t matter? Again, honestly asking. We’re going to just completely ignore the fact that you’re a person and reduce you to a thing so we can make a joke about this other guy, who is immensely powerful and is the one we actually care about. You, you mean nothing. You’re less than nothing. You, nine-year-old black girl, can be ridiculed globally for all we care. That white man over there is the one that matters.

The thing about comedy is, if you’re going to claim it’s socially conscious and progressive and edgy and groundbreaking, is that it has to reverse power relationships. MacFarlane objectified the person who was probably the most powerless in that entire theater to make a “joke” (and I use that term loosely) about one of the most powerful. Miss Wallis is going to spend her entire life being turned into an object and being sexualized so that *someone else* can do something to her, both in real life and on film. MacFarlane does not get “props” for kicking off that process way ahead of schedule and on such a big stage.

You can claim all you want that everything MacFarlane has done has been done before by other people. What you don’t get to do is follow that up with, “So why be mad at him?” Because that IS, in and of itself, why people that don’t like to see other people objectified are mad at him. We’re mad at him in EXACTLY the same way we’re mad at ALL THOSE OTHER PEOPLE that do it. Because whether you’re the first person to do it or the last, doing it at all is still wrong.  It’s not funny. It’s not cute. And the fact that he was using jokes that have all been made before by other people in other ways proves that MacFarlane is not edgy or original or even a good comedian.

He’s not satirical. He’s not subverting the status quo. He’s supporting it. As evidenced by the fact that all those tired, clichéd, trite jokes resulted in a big boost in the target demographic: 18-45 year old white men. The ones with the power. The ones that "really matter."

Female Privilege: The GOP, the War on Women, and Class

Let's talk about privilege.

priv - i - lege (n): a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most.

There's the now-ubiquitous take down of white male privilege explained in gamer terms (that I love, for the record, and I don't even play video games). And honestly, public discussions of privilege generally center on white male privilege, and for reasons well and good, but there are other types of privilege.

Female privilege, for example. Now, you must understand before you decide to crucify me that "female privilege" and "white male privilege" are not exact correlations. The kind of privilege I am going to talk about with regard to women is not the all-encompassing power of cultural superiority that white men hold. But still, there have traditionally been some privileges afforded one by being (white and/or wealthy) female. These privileges fall generally under the condition of "immunity" rather than "right," but that doesn't preclude them from being privileges, as you can see, from the above-quoted definition.

It's a political truism that there are two kinds of freedom: freedom from and freedom to. Generally, people don't specify which they mean because (in my extremely humble opinion) the people that yell the loudest about "freedom" usually mean "freedom from" and that's a rather inferior sort of freedom, don't you think? I think so. I mean, I'd much rather have the freedom TO go where I please than have the freedom FROM men yelling at me on the street. It is more important to me that I be able to set my own goals and accomplish them, which requires a more or less absolute freedom of movement, than it is to never encounter something unpleasant. That's how I parse the difference between freedom to and freedom from.

(N.B. - Ideally I'd have both, but I am, despite my unflappable optimism, a realist, and getting both is a little greedy so I'll take the freedom to, thankyouverymuch. And do whatever I can do ensure that maybe my great-great-great-great-great-granddaughters will have both.)

However, that's how I value-weight things. I am not the only person, nay, nor even the only woman in the world. And women have, since time immemorial, enjoyed a particularly privileged position when it comes to "freedom from." There are concrete examples, like street harassment: only going out with a male chaperone is a pretty effective way to not have dudes cat-calling and/or trying to grab parts of your body.

But the female privilege of freedom from extends much farther than such concrete examples, as privilege is wont to do. The privilege of freedom from is the freedom from all sorts of unpleasantness. Let's face it, everyone, the world is a pretty awful place. Navigating it is hard work. Making decisions, weighing options, walking the tightrope between self-care and caring for others: these are difficult, draining things. They are difficult and draining things for everyone, regardless of gender. But women have had the privilege of avoiding these things, by letting men make such decisions for them. The privilege of women has long been the freedom from having to chart a course through the universally-determined awfulness of the material world.

Sexism is, at its core, a belief that women are not capable of doing this. Women are not capable of making decisions, weighing choices, wielding power, and navigating the world. Because they are not capable, they must be protected, given freedom from having to do these things. That explains men that want to limit women's choices.

But what about women? They must realize that they're capable of choosing things for themselves, they must realize that they are capable of navigating the world. They must. Particularly high-power, high profile women, women like Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin and Nikki Haley, they must realize that the perception that women can't do the things they have done is wrong. So why do they (and hundreds of thousands of other women) align themselves with a political party that is dedicated to legally limiting women's choices? This is the question of the hour! Everyone is asking it!

Here's my take: privilege. It's not that these women are stupid, or self-loathing, which are the two explanations I see advanced most often. No, they are neither. What they are is deeply, deeply aware of their female privilege. We're at, you might say, a tipping point. Feminism has advanced to the point where women can indeed become Ann Coulter and Nikki Haley and even Hilary Clinton. But it has not advanced so far that actual equality is achieved, and thus, female privilege is preserved.

The option of retreating from the world, of ceasing to navigate it's awfulness and messiness, still exists for women of a certain class. The option of being protected and deferred to still exists. Women like Coulter and Haley and all the others are scared of losing that privilege.

At the Republican National Convention this year, there is something called the Women's Pavilion, organized and presided over by GOP women, where salon services and feminine hygiene products are available, and where women can meet to talk to other women "in ways women can relate to." The whole thing strikes me as redolent of a harem, minus the sexual overtones. Women winking over what the men say and speaking to each other in a coded, female-specific language; women occupying a place where men are forbidden; women assigned a specific sphere of influence. Even the name, "pavilion," calls up images of ladies sitting on comfortable chairs and shaded from the sun that might damage their complexions whilst they chat idly over lemonade. This is the privilege of women: a space "just for them," a language all their own. But, of course, by virtue of gender-exclusionary practices, nothing will get done in this women's pavilion. There will be lots of talk and no action. No decisions will be made, only communication, only translation.

Because the privilege of women is the freedom from decision-making. In an interview with Mary Anne Carter, organizer of this women's pavilion, a telling quote turns up:

I would think that the current healthcare bill that may or may not be repealed — I don’t want to call it ‘Obamacare’ but I can’t remember the name of it — is potentially a serious war on women, allowing women to make their own healthcare choices.

Allowing women to make their own healthcare choices, instead of having them dictated by a husband or a father or a doctor or even (in a pinch?) the government that is run by men is the real war on women, for those that are terrified of losing their female privilege. Having to take responsibility for those kinds of things, those things that happen in the real and awful and terrifying and messy world is a pretty scary thought. It's much easier to rest on female privilege, on the perception of the fairer and weaker sex, on the idea that women need a space and a language all their own, on the construction of the general world as male and therefore outside your purview.

Women have historically been great enforcers of gender roles. We shame and punish each other for being sluts, for breaking the rules, for doing what women aren't supposed to do. Why? Because we all know that we're capable of managing our own lives, but some of us really don't want to have to. The world is awful and living is hard.

The problem is, of course, that not all women have the option, the luxury of relying on the female privilege that is largely the demesne of the wealthy. And setting public policy for the comfort of the wealthy has never worked out indefinitely for any culture. But still, that doesn't stop people from clinging to their privileges with terror-hardened fingers.

"I Don't Want To Go Out Alone Anymore."

I find myself increasingly unable to handle "creepy" men.

Several weeks back (a few months, even? I'm so bad with time.) I was at a favorite bar for a show. Three bands on the ticket, two I knew sandwiching one I'd never heard before. A lovely acquaintance is in the band that was to play last. In between sets, I stepped outside to have a smoke. I do that. When I re-entered the bar between the second and third sets, I stepped up to order another beer. There were two men who had clearly been drinking for some time slumped into their bar stools next to me.

The man immediately to my left gave me a sidelong glance, as people do, and then started up a conversation, as people do. I go places alone often; I often get in conversations with strangers. It's one of my favorite things about going places alone, actually. Anyway, this guy started up with he'd never been to this particular establishment before, I told him it was one of my favorites because of its excellence as a live-music venue.

And from there, the conversation degenerated rapidly. He started asking me what "kind" of music.

"All kinds!" I said "Everything from folk-pop to hip hop to the noisiest noise rock you can imagine. Tonight there are three bands, all with heavy folksy vibes."

"Would I like it?" he asked me.

I hesitated. I had no idea. "Well, do you like folksy or bluesy music?" I asked him.

"Would I like the band?" he badgered me.

I tried to explain to him that there was no way I could answer that, given that I had no idea what kind of music he liked, but I was really into all three bands on the ticket and I definitely recommended checking it out.

He then proceeded to call me a "dumb bitch," say I was "stuck up," and mutter loudly about how women were all awful to the buddy sitting on his other side, while glancing at me every five seconds to make sure I knew he was talking about me.

I was so freaked out I left. I never saw the last band, the one my lovely acquaintance is in.

Last night, I was a bit blue: out-of-sorts, restless, unable to bring the snarls of my various thoughts into anything like a smooth-flowing order or even a neatly knotted braid. No, everything was willy-nilly. It's Summerfest in Milwaukee, so after the toddler was passed out cold, I kissed my mother and hopped on my bike and pedalled down. Death Cab for Cutie live? That will totally make me feel better, I told myself.

So there I was, hanging around the very edge of the back of the crowd, half-watching for a friend who was on his way down, half watching the screen, when a hand grabbed my ass. I jumped. A very large, very sweaty, very drunk man was behind me.

I scowled at him, moved to the other side of the table I was standing next to, and tried to forget it.

The next time I looked around, the man was planted on a table across from me, staring.

I was so freaked out, I left. The friend I had been waiting for turned up about ten minutes later and couldn't find me. I only saw about 40 minutes of Death Cab's set.

That's twice this year that I've been driven from something I really wanted to be at by creepy, inappropriate men. Ten years ago, even five years ago, I think I wouldn't have left either circumstance. I'm not sure if this is progress, or regress.

On the one hand, it's possible that ten years ago (or five years ago) I wouldn't have been aware just how creepy and inappropriate and downright awful these kinds of things were. I might have just brushed it off as drunkenness or a bad night. If I'm more aware now, that's progress. On the other hand, this "increased awareness" might be just increased fear. I'm allowing fear of worst-case to rule my own behavior in ways that I would have been utterly defiant of ten or five years ago. If I'm reverting to fear-based reactions, that's regress.

I've been thinking about this since I left the festival grounds last night. And I come, inexorably, to the conclusion that I'm reacting to increased fear. Five or ten years ago, I was at least somewhat secure in the belief that even *if* the worst case scenario happened, things would be done about it. Perpetrators would be brought to justice, courtroom drama would ensue, I would cry prettily. (I can't actually cry prettily, for the record: my face turns the color of boiled tomatoes and my eyes swell shut and my nose runs.)

I have spent too much time reading true horror stories, and seeing the non-cosequences of violence against women and rape to be secure in that belief anymore. Today, I believe that if the worst case scenario happened in any given circumstance, I would be blamed for it. It would be my fault for being out alone/having some drinks/wearing a dress/smiling at people/take your pick.

This is the reality of rape culture: I don't want to go out alone anymore. I would rather remain cooped in my house if I don't have the protection of another person with me. I don't want, or have the strength of mind, to fight through all the fear that is building up around being out, in public, alone. And why is it incumbent on me to have to fight through all that just to enjoy the world? Because I'm a woman? Bullshit.

Men, quit acting like this. I don't care how drunk you are. I don't care how long it's been since you got laid, or how badly your last relationship ended. Just knock it the hell off. There's no excuse for it.

I don't want to go out alone. If you know me even a little, you must understand how momentous a statement that is. I don't want to go out alone anymore.

Doubt

I have been struck by a terrifying thought: How much of my morality is simply gender-socialization?

I can talk quite prettily about how love will save the world, about the need to build communities that care about each other by building individual connections between people who care about each other, about learning to care for your neighbor and your neighbor's neighbor and on and on and on. And all of that is without a doubt the basis of my moral understanding. Everyone is a human being, and simply by virtue of being a human being they are deserving of dignity and respect.

But the real world is messy, and real human beings are complicated, and you can't love someone punitively. Therefore the other underlying tenet of my moral understanding is a well of infinite forgiveness, side-by-side and co-mingled with that bottomless well of compassion I try to cultivate. Without question this is influenced by my Catholic upbrining; people make jokes about "Catholic guilt" because of confession and a whole host of other things, but what is missing from those pithy understandings of Catholicism is that the guilt is not the point. The point is forgiveness. God is infinitely forgiving if we are sincerely contrite, and He will go on forgiving no matter how many times we screw something up.

The process of institutionalization took this incredibly noble ideal and turned it into the doctrine of dispensation, which was the straw that broke Martin Luther's back. And we all know where that went. On the whole, the Lutherans and the Calvinists and their doctrinal brethren are far, far more into guilt than Catholics ever were, but that's neither here nor there.

The point is: Forgiveness. You cannot love punitively. You cannot love and fail to forgive. If you want to teach someone that they matter as a human being, love and forgiveness, not guilt and shame, is the way to go. Jesus was down with this. He spent most of his time wallowing in the gutter with all those poor people that broke all kinds of social and even legal conventions, because: forgiveness.

But the practical effects of my understanding of these moral imperatives have the interesting, terrifying side effect of making me sometimes indistinguishable from that most perfect feminine form, the doormat.

I can rant and rave and rail against instutionalized misogyny (and I do) but when it comes to individuals, I have a hard time condemning. Because, forgiveness.

I can talk a big game about the need for personal responsibility in relationships, but I have a hard time implementing it because my moral understanding always, always leads me to undervalue my own needs and desires and over-emphasize someone else's. Like any good helpmeet, I'm quite willing to submerse myself in someone else's goals. The Quiverfull people could probably brainwash me in about two days flat.

There's no answer. Now that I've come face-to-face with the realization, I am always going to be living in the tension between my desire to be recognized as a full human being despite my gender and my belief that it is my duty to recognize everyone else as such. As long as there are people willing to take advantage of others, I will be a ripe target. And worse than the gullible fool with the wool pulled over their eyes, I know what I'm walking into, at least some of the time. But if I don't walk into it, the guilt of having failed torments me. Rock, meet hard place. Let someone else hurt me, or inflict an equally painful wound on myself.

I wonder if men that have similar conceptions of moral good feel emmasculated? Or effeminate.

Worst of all, the tension makes me question my beliefs. It makes me wonder if I'm not just creating an elaborate rationalization for behaving in exactly those ways that society expects me to behave. Maybe I should just shut up and sit down and look pretty, too. I do that pretty often, anyway, because you can't change anyone's minds by yelling at them or forcing them to confront things they're not ready to confront. So why, exactly, am I bothering with anything, again?

I've been unable to abandon either my moral principles or my belief that I can make a difference, so I guess living in the tension is working out. But it's stressful, and I am full to bursting with doubt that's spilling out over every decision I make. I doubt everything these days, myself most of all.

The Saddest, Most Infuriating Troll This Month: Newsweek and Katie Roiphe

Like much of the internet, particularly the lady-oriented bits of it, I found myself reading Katie Roiphe's Newsweek cover story this morning. It was sort of like watching a train wreck, really: I couldn't STOP reading it. Now I can't stop reading reaction to it, which is also like watching a train wreck.

I know a lot of people don't like Roiphe. She's not my favorite person in the world, either, but she wrote a piece for Slate once titled "Does Everyone Think Single Mothers Are Actually Crazy?" that really resonated with me, so I am more apt to defend her (despite her history of dismissing date-rape as a thing that doesn't happen) than most people. That's a round-a-bout way of saying that I don't diss everything she writes out of hand the way some people do.

And this piece is no exception. Roiphe is really a pretty smart lady. There are more than a few good points made: Sexual desire is not beholden to political correctness; fantasies are generally about leaving behind the world you're living in. And, snob that I am, her jabs at the awful prose that is Fifty Shades of Grey make me snicker to myself. Because, honestly, it is awful writing. If you want literary female-submission porn, there are far, far better-written stories than Fifty Shades of Grey. REALLY. This shit is like Twilight all over again, and it offends me most as a writer, or someone who considers herself an aspiring writer. Or something. Bad prose is offensive, ok?

The basic problem with all of Roiphe's assertions can be summed up thusly: she's talking about modern women and their sexuality when she ought to be looking at modern life in general, and pressures on and fantasies of both sexes.

Fifty Shades of Grey is enormously popular! No one can deny it. It's become a bonafide sensation. There's a pretty good piece on Jezebel explaining why this particular piece of words strung together is perhaps not as culturally revealing as we would all like to think it is, because the rules of supply and demand and also the unspoken power of cache apply.

But ok, that would be boring, so let's run with the idea that this particular story, with its themes of submission and losing one's self, IS popular because it stirs up some latent need or desire in the collective unconscious. I'll bite that hook. I happen to think that the allure of sexual submission does, in fact, come from pretty much that exact set of desires: the desire to let go, to not be in control, and ultimately to not be responsible for whatever happens. Roiphe backs up this reading of our culture at large by referencing a scene from HBO's new comedy Girls in which one of the characters, waiting for an OB/GYN appointment, briefly fantasizes about having AIDS because such a diagnosis would free her from the responsibility of ambition and making something of herself.

I think we can all identify with that urge.

And that's where Roiphe goes wrong. We ALL can identify with that urge. Men, too. The urge to leave behind responsibility and just float for awhile is not uniquely female. And the fantasies that we engage in that run along this theme are not uniquely sexual: for all that it occurs in a gynecologist's office, the scene in Girls is not at heart a sexual fantasy. The desire to shed responsibility for a while comes up in even the most mundane daydream about going on vacation. Hell, I get excited about the prospect of my dad taking my kid to my sister's house for the day because it means that my walk home from work is conducted without the specter of responsibilities to be shouldered immediately upon returning home. It's an hour of time that is normally scheduled and deadlined which is suddenly, utterly, blissfully free, and that is SUCH a great feeling. But not in the least a sexual one.

By pegging this completely natural desire to leave it all behind as (one) only for women, (two) sexual in nature, (three) universal and (four) irrevocable, Roiphe has done a serious disservice to all of us. Men, in Roiphe's world, exist only to cater to the fantasies of women. They don't get to have any of their own. They don't get to want to indulge in the fantasy of giving it over and giving up control for a while. I would love to hear Roiphe explain the prevalence of the FemmeDomme in popular culture, if men don't even want to give up control. Women, in Roiphe's estimation, are all exactly the same, with exactly the same fantasies. The popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey translates to an absolute universal: since a lot of women seem to enjoy reading this, all women want to experience this. And, like Freud before her, Roiphe assumes that everything can be reduced to sexuality, when the truth of human behavior is actually far more complex. And while I myself indulge in some pretty hefty abnegation-of-responsiblity fantasies, at the end of the day, I do enjoy my autonomy and personal-decision-making capacity, and I'd really like it a whole lot if the culture I lived in would acknowledge that I am both capable of and have the right to make all personal decisions for myself. This is why I am a feminist. Just because I, like everyone else, sometimes would like to not make any decisions, doesn't mean I never want to make any decisions. Submission fantasies do not mean that feminism, with it's basic demand that women be viewed at all levels as complete human beings, is wrong.

This is where some of the feminist criticism of Roiphe, and of BDSM in general, breaks down, for the record. They take the opposite position, and they're equally wrong: feminism does not mean that submission fantasies are bad. If feminism is the struggle to gain credence to that women are people, then the ultimate feminist goal is a completely humanistic view of all people. And that means that women, as much as men, have the right to daydream about being free from pressure now and again, and even to achieve that feeling through whatever means they deem fit.

Of course, the larger context of this piece of Roiphe's matters. It's a Newsweek cover story. The headline reads "The Fantasy Lives of Working Women" and the accompanying image is of a naked, blindfolded women with suggestively parted, perfectly painted red lips and perfectly sculpted coiffure. She is slender to the point of emaciation through her neck and arms, but with hints of a generous, voluptuous bust. The image is titillating, and rife with the kind of impossible beauty standards we as a culture hold women to. The title plays on the language of "working girls" and delights in wallowing in the idea that women that own their sexual desires are sluts and prostitutes. Given Roiphe's own fascination with spanking, the association that women need to be punished for owning their sexuality is unavoidable.

The content of the article is sadly narrow. The context is utterly infuriating.

There Is Nothing Wrong With Sex

Social networks make political commentary ubiquitous, so when I see things my friends say, sometimes I laugh and sometimes I cringe and sometimes I do both. A comment like, "This from a climate-change denier who thinks the world is 6,000 years old and that making contraception available encourages sex" will elicit both a giggle and a cringe. I mean, it's funny because it's so ridiculous, but that last line makes my head hurt.  The lover in me immediately read that last bit, "making contraception available encourages sex" and went "WHOA, there, buddy! It doesn't matter if making contraception available does or does not encourage sex, because there's nothing wrong with sex."

And when I put that out there into the public sphere of the internet, I got this reply: "Might want to include 'consensual' and 'between adults.' " And my first reaction was something like, "Well, duh. Obviously." And I was just about to make some polite reply about a 140 character limit and all that noise, when I stopped. Because you know what?

Duh. Obviously.

"Non-consensual sex" is not a thing that exists, world. Non-consensual sex is RAPE. And rape is not sex. When did sex, as a word or an idea or an act, become so tainted that it has to be minutely distinguished from rape in public discourse? Is sex so dirty, so awful, and so much of a violation that it is inherently indistinguishable from rape? No. And it is both disturbing and deeply saddening to come to the realization that a lot of people might feel it so.

Sex is not bad. Sex is beautiful. There is nothing wrong with sex.

While I do think that at least some fear of sex stems from a deep-seated misogyny (you should read some of the things that Bukowski and Warhol had to say about sex and women, golly geez) I don't think it's a universal explanation. The woman that told me I ought to add "consensual and between adults" to my exhortation that there is nothing wrong with sex, for example: I don't think she hates women.

Rather, I think there's a strange modern conflation of love and sex, and also love and marriage, that ends up creating a bizarre triangle in which the points are love, sex, and marriage and everything becomes a tangled mess.

To wit, physical intimacy and emotional intimacy do go hand-in-hand. And it's not a purely female thing, as so many want to claim. Yes, women form attachments when they sleep with someone. So do men. Men are, in fact, capable of rich emotional lives. Sex is better, for both parties, when there's love involved, and trust, and respect. Anais Nin said, "Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy." And she was right.

Sex is often seen as proof of love, which is where things begin to become murky. "Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from." (Margaret Atwood) Feeling unloved really does feel an awful lot like dying, and because the connection between love and sex is so deeply instilled, the urge to go out and have a lot of sex to stave off that death, that desperation, that utter loneliness can be strong. Nothing in modern culture has captured the absolute soullessness of using sex as a bandaid like Steve McQueen's Shame. I was horrified to read reviews of that film talking about "normal human sexuality" and "unsexiness." The thing that makes Shame such a powerful film is that it is not about normal human sexuality, or sexiness, and yet its protaganist is still a sympathetic and poignant character. McQueen and Michael Fassbender together have created a space in which behavior that be would be considered depravity and degeneration in less capable hands is instead merely tragic. The moral judgment against sex itself is removed, and the obvious distress of the character is the moral grounding of the narrative.

Like everything else in the emotional landscape of a human being, there are greys and gradations in sex. If sex within love is ecstasy, and sex by self-destructive compulsion is tragedy, there are a million things in between those two extremes. All sex that occurs without the merging of hearts and bodies is not the desperate self-destructive behavior of Shame.

"Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good." - Woody Allen

That grey world is where most of us live. We neither find "true love" nor do we descend into addiction. And in that grey world, there is nothing wrong with sex. Sex without love might be meaningless, as Mr. Allen says, but not everything in life must be pregnant with meaning. Not every conversation must be weighted, not every book must be serious, not every film must be exposing social thought constructs, not every sexual experience must be Capital-E-Ecstasy. There is nothing so inherently wrong about sex that it cannot be lighthearted and fun.

“It would be perfect if everyone who makes love, is in love, but this is simply an unrealistic expectation. I'd say 75 percent of the population of people who make love, are not in love, this is simply the reality of the human race, and to be idealistic about this is to wait for the stars to aline and Jupiter to change color; for the Heavens to etch your names together in the sky before you make love to someone. But idealism is immaturity, and as a matter of fact, the stars may never aline, Jupiter may never change color, and the Heavens may never ever etch your names together in the sky for you to have the never-ending permission to make endless love to one another. And so the bottom line is, there really is no difference between doing something today, and doing something tomorrow, because today is what you have, and tomorrow may not turn out the way you expect it to. At the end of the day, sex is an animalistic, humanistic, passionate desire.”

― C. JoyBell C.

Which brings us to the other point of this triad, the other intersection tangled up in all this mess: the conflation of love and marriage. Let me be clear: I believe in love. I absolutely believe in love. And I believe in marriage. But they are not the same thing.

Love is a personal, emotional good. It is the thing that creates empathy in us, it is the thing that causes us to act against survival instincts and for a better world, it is the thing that allows us to see beyond the borders of our bodies and create meaningful connections in the external world. Marriage, on the other hand, is a purely social good. The benefit of marriage is the social stability it represents. But love is not marriage and marriage is not love. You do not have to get married if you love someone. And if you do get married, you do not necessarily love the person you marry.

I think that a significant portion of the "sex in marriage" movement could really be more aptly defined as "sex in love" if we could all just recognize that love and marriage are not the same thing. Way back when marriages were arranged, it was clear to everyone involved that a marriage was a social contract and that love had nothing to do with it. I don't advocate returning to such a system, mostly because of the way it treated women as chattel. But that doesn't mean that we need to dismiss the idea of marriage as a social good. Rather, in a world like today when marriage is not the only basis of social stability, it is even more important that we remember that marriage is merely a social good. One singular one. It is not a magic bullet that will solve any and all problems, either personal or political. Getting married will not make your life suddenly better; if you weren't happy before, you won't be happy long-term after the novelty wears off. And falling marriage rates are not to blame for the plethora of social problems we face (ahem, Grothman/Santorum/et al.). There are other causes, because while marriage is a social good, it is not the social good.

There is nothing inherently wrong with sex, whether meaningful or meaningless. Sexual identity and appetite, in all their varied forms, are not evidence of some other problem. We all need love, yes. And sex is not love. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have sex. And we all want love. But that doesn't mean we should all get married right now.

Personhood

Two of fifty states have now codified government-mandated sexual assault. Texas and Oklahoma, I'm looking at you while my skin crawls and my internal organs quiver in fear. Virginia is on its way to becoming the third member of this misogynistic, utterly abhorrent club.

Because it is incredibly unhealthy to be a rageball all the time, I am working assiduously at setting aside my anger at the very idea that the government is mandating vaginal penetration with a foreign object for women seeking a legal medical procedure. But let me just say that one more time, so that it sinks in for all of you following along at home:

The government is mandating vaginal penetration with a foreign object for women seeking a legal medical procedure.

Why is this ok? I'm seriously asking. I want to know why this is ok.

I find some of the quotes from people defending these laws to be instructive as to the kind of mindset that makes things like this ok. For example, "They already chose to be vaginally penetrated." Again, setting aside the initial rush of rage, I can start to unpack that statement. Choosing to have sexual intercourse once makes anything that happens afterwards consensual. It's something like a chaste/virgin doctrine: once intercourse occurs (once the hymen is broken?) there is no protection for your ladybits. By breaking the seal (so to speak), you lose claim to any protections. Consent to sex is something that can only happen once, and it can never be revoked. Once you've lost virginity, you are ever-after "open for business" to anyone, including the government! It's the fallen-woman doctrine, gussied up for modern times.

Another came after a Virginia legislator was asked about exceptions for rape and incest. His response? "Sometimes incest is voluntary. The woman becomes a sin-bearer of the crime, because the right of a child predominates over the embarrassment of the woman."

First of all, I am not kidding.

Second, can someone please find me a breakdown of "voluntary" incestual relationships versus molestation and rape by a family member? I would like to know more about this voluntary incest.

Really, I don't think this guy defines "voluntary" in the way that you and I do. Voluntary sex is any sex that happens because you don't kill yourself rather than be defiled. And sex, itself, is always a defiling act. Sex is dirty.

And that's really what all this is about, isn't it? The deeply-seated belief of many people that there is something inherently, irrevocably wrong with sex. The body is dirty, because it is corporeal and not spiritual, and acts of pleasure for the body are naught but devilish distractions from the work of cleansing the soul.

It's a sad, tragic outlook. My well of compassion is almost emptied, thinking about all these people that think the pleasures of touch and give are evil. Women are by necessity nothing but uteruses, because to acknowledge the entirety of a woman would be to acknowledge desire.

Sex is not shameful. Corporeal joys are not lesser than spiritual ones.

And the government has absolutely no right to be enforcing such arcane and deeply personal beliefs. You may wish to hold onto your notion of sex as something that is capital-W WRONG, but you do not get to codify your beliefs. Mandating sexual assault and making birth control inaccessible are inexcusable abuses of power. Women are more then uteruses, and our uteruses are not yours to make decisions about. I get to decide who and what enters my vagina, not a legislature. I get to decide whether I have sex, and whether I want the possibility of progeny to come from that sex, not a legislature. Those are my decisions to make because I am a complete person, with the ability to reason and choose.

You want to talk about personhood? Let's start with the personhood of women.

I am tired of constantly having to defend the existence of my brain, my character, and my capacity for moral decision-making. Women are complete beings. Accept it. And stop treating us as if we are not.

Pinterest and Techie Gender Bias

The hip new kid on the social media block is Pinterest. Ubiquity, thy name is Pinterest. Suddenly, the site and discussions about the site are everywhere. Someone in my twitter feed joked a few days back about how grateful they were that tweetdeck allows you to censor your feed by keyword, so they'd removed anything with the word "Pinterest" in it.

(Whoever you are, you're probably not reading this blog. Because I'm talking about Pinterest. GET IT? IT'S FUNNY.)

So. What is Pinterest? It's a virtual corkboard. You have one (or several) boards that you can theme any which way you'd like, and what you do is pin images of things you stumble upon on the Internet to this virtual corkboard. The pin includes a link taking you back to the original site. It's an image-based link-cataloging service. It's del.icio.us with pictures. There is absolutely nothing gender-specific in its concept or its design, which is oft-noted in pieces about the site with titles implying it's just for women.

Why is everyone talking about it? Well, it's proven itself in a very short time to be a phenomenal traffic-generator. But I don't really understand the techie-stuff. I get that it's a big name player because it is capable of driving traffic to sites, and that means those sites pay attention to it and its users because it wants that traffic, because I understand basically how the internet works and how to make money off of it.

(There's a reason I don't try an "monetize" this blog. I mean, I love you guys, and I love you guys for reading it, but I just don't get enough traffic. See? I totally understand the internet.)

So, I'm not real tech-oriented and that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about gender and Pinterest. Because, OH MAN.

Props to The Atlantic for writing the only gender-neutral piece on the explosive popularity of Pinterest that I can find. Credit where it's due.

And now we can get into the bizarro male-oriented world of tech blogs. 

The one-liners in some of these pieces make my head spin:

"Well, there's a reason it's not called Dude-terest."

Really, readwriteweb? Really? Are you really trying to say that things must be named in gender-specific ways so that we all understand who is supposed to use them? One, that's pretty insulting to just about everyone, and two, it doesn't actually make sense, since I cannot for the life of me come up with a way that "pin" is female-centric somehow.

"Pinterest is Tumblr for Ladiez."

Really, gizmodo? Your writer is trying to mitigate the blow of all that misogyny by claiming some sort of special privilege by sort of being ironical, and also maybe having a lot of female friends. Sort of like "I have a lot of black friends?" I can't tell. But let me just get right to the point: Ladies use tumblr. In fact, tumblr has perhaps the most even-steven gender split of any social networking site, at 51% men and 49% women.

Essentially, what is going on here is that contrary to what is generally accepted to be the case for new technology, the early adopters of Pinterest are women. Young women. Whereas Facebook is at least partially grounded in the horribly anti-women idea of comparing female faces for hotness, and Twitter's early adopters were heavily skewed towards men and coasts, Pinterest is being embraced first and foremost by young women in fly-over country.

Perhaps it's really the "fly-over country" thing that these tech blogs object to, but you wouldn't know it from titles like "A Guy's Guide to Pinterest" or even "Gentlemint Offers a Manly Alternative to Pinterest." It would appear that what galls is that ladies like it.

So, while women were capable of taking Facebook, with its petty start, and make it their own (currently something like 58% of Facebook users are female), men are not capable of doing the same with Pinterest? Or, because Pinterest has been embraced by women, it is doomed to some sort of niche-internet? How disappointing. I was pretty sure men had more creativity than that. The casual marginalization of something popular among women is both offensive and deeply disappointing.

Pinterest is not tumblr for ladies. It is not for ladies, period. It's for anyone that wants visual link-organization. And you may not be looking to plan a wedding or construct an elaborate shopping list, but you can still use the site. And you may not want to use the site, because we all could probably do with one less social network rather than one more, but the reason you don't want to use is not that it is "for girls." Or, maybe it is, but if that's the case, I really don't think we should be friends anymore.

Morality Cannot Be Defined By Any One Thing: Planned Parenthood vs. Karen Handel

Can we just talk about Karen Handel for a second? Ok, maybe a couple of seconds. She doesn't merit much more than that, but as a case-study in a particular way of thinking that I cannot for the life of me make heads or tails of, she's interesting.

And then we'll talk about how she's batshit insane.

But first, the earnest and wide-eyed questioning ingenue portion of today's blog.

Handel ran for governor of Georgia some years back, and her campaign website has been archived on the internet, because the internet never forgets anything, and so we can look at her statement about Planned Parenthood while she was running for governor. The salient portion of the statement reads as follows:

First, let me be clear, since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood. During my time as Chairman of Fulton County, there were federal and state pass-through grants that were awarded to Planned Parenthood for breast and cervical cancer screening, as well as a “Healthy Babies Initiative.” The grant was authorized, regulated, administered and distributed through the State of Georgia. Because of the criteria, regulations and parameters of the grant, Planned Parenthood was the only eligible vendor approved to meet the state criteria. Additionally, none of the services in any way involved abortions or abortion-related services. In fact, state and federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer funds for abortions or abortion related services and I strongly support those laws. Since grants like these are from the state I’ll eliminate them as your next Governor.

The sentence that smacked me upside the head and made me want to cry for the state of humanity is the last one: "Since grants like these are from the state I'll eliminate them as your next Governor."

What the what? Not, "Since grants like this are from the state, I'll amend the criteria so Planned Parenthood is not the only eligible vendor as your next Governor." Or even, "Since grants like this are from the state, I'll take the grant money and let the state itself administer cancer screenings and baby check-ups."

No. None of that reasonableness. As the next Governor, she would have eliminated the grants.

She's so pro-life that she's going to eliminate state spending on diagnosing life-threatening disease early! She's so pro-life she's going to make sure that poor babies don't see a doctor!

Look, Planned Parenthood is fun for a lot of people to use as a punching bag because they stubbornly refuse to stop providing comprehensive reproductive care services for women, usually women that have no other, or very limited other, access to healthcare. In plain English, Planned Parenthood refuses to remove abortion from the plethora of services it provides. Because of this, "pro-lifers" are quick to pile on, screeching at the top of their lungs that Planned Parenthood ought to be defunded by everyone and hounded out of business.

So, you don't like abortion. That's fair. I know some very lovely people who are staunchly against the practice, would never have one, would be horrified to know their daughter had one. I also know some not-so-lovely people who are staunchly against the practice.

The thing that, in my mind, separates lovely anti-abortion people from horrifyingly misogynistic control-freaks is something I call the Planned Parenthood barometer. It goes like this: I understand and respect your belief that life begins at conception and that you would never abort a fetus; do you understand and respect my belief (backed up by ACTUAL FACTS) that Planned Parenthood does way, way more than performing abortions, and can you recognize the good that they do and be happy that they do it and that they save lives? If the anti-abortion person I am speaking to can, in fact, recognize the good that Planned Parenthood does every day, then I term them a lovely anti-abortion person. Maybe they still have some discomfort, morally, with that, but you know what? Nothing is black-and-white. No moral decision will ever be simple. Being a good, moral person is to be uncomfortable for most of your life, because choices are hard, whether you're talking about an unintended pregnancy or killing a man that breaks into your house with the intent of harming you. If someone cannot understand that moral choices are fraught with gray and cannot recognize and acknowledge all the good (and I do mean, straight-up good) things that Planned Parenthood does, I mentally write them off as a horrifyingly misogynistic control freak and remind myself to never, ever trust them. With anything.

I'm not exaggerating even a little bit.

If your sense of being "pro-life" is so centered on a fetus that you are blind to the lives saved and made easier and the comfort given by poor people having access to breast cancer screenings, cervical cancer screenings, STD testing, and a general environment of non-judgmental knowledge, you're not very pro-life. You don't have to like abortion. You don't have to have one. But if you'd like to simply cease funding programs that do, in fact, save lives simply because they are being administered by an organization that does perform the perfectly legal abortion procedure, you cannot call yourself pro-life.

PERIOD. FULL STOP. You cannot do it.

Apparently, Karen Handel is one of these people.

What I learned last week, as the Komen debacle unfolded, is that contrary to what I had begun to believe about American humanity, she's the minority. People who are so incapable of recognizing nuance and the gradations that are attendent in any moral decision-making process are a minority.

You may not like abortion. You may think it's a bad thing, and a bad choice to make, and you might choose not to have one should you ever find yourself in an unfortunate position. But you don't get to condemn millions upon millions of poor women to death by breast cancer, or cervical cancer, or to lives of pain and suffering because of constant pregnancy due to lack of contraceptive access or STDs, and call it the moral, good, pro-life choice. And I learned last week that far, far more people than I thought would be able to make that distinction, DO, in fact, make that distinction.

World, you did me proud. I love all of you right now.

Then I read Handel's resignation letter this morning. The woman is batshit insane. She thinks if she says the same untrue things often enough, people will start to believe her. She thinks this even after last week very demonstrably proved that her extreme and frightening ideology and narrow focus is not shared by the majority of the people that Komen tries to help, or is supported by. Isn't the definition of insanity "doing the same thing and expecting different results?"

I thought so. The woman is nuts.

"Girl Land:" This Is What Sexual Trauma Looks Like

Author's note: As you'll see in the comments, I was mistaken about the publicly acknowledged magnitude of whatever happened to Caitlin Flanagan as a teenager. I still think that the essence of her admonitions and fears seem to spring from a place of trauma, but do please take my analysis with several grains of salt.

Some masochistic, curious-as-a-cat-with-only-one-life-left part of me really wants to read Caitlin Flanagan's Girl Land. Now, I'm sort of broke (well, when am I not sort of broke?) so I don't really think I can shell out $30 for a hardcover I will probably want to burn after reading, so I probably won't read it, at least not until it hits paperback.

I feel like most of the coverage I've read about this book ignores a very crucial piece of information. The book has been excoriated as reactionary, and dangerously nostalgic. Flanagan herself has been called a "cranky, (prematurely) old  church lady." There's an entertaining hour with her and Irin Carmon, resident feminist of Salon, on NPR's "On Point" that's been the fodder for quite a few blogs in recent days. In particular, the bit where Flanagan goes after Carmon for not having had a boyfriend in high school is almost laughable in its ridiculousness.

Basically, the condensed version of Flanagan's ideas and thesis (if you can call it a thesis?) is that adolescent girls today are being rushed out of their girlhoods by the Internet and pornography, and parents need to protect their girls from these pernicious and worldly influences so that they don't end up having a lot of sex with men who treat them badly. There's also a lot of discussion of "princess" ideals and tropes, which Flanagan adores. There's a lot of discussion out there that Flanagan's argument amounts to: (1) men only want sex; (2) women only want to be treated like princesses; (3) sex is dirty; (4) women have to use dirty sex to get men to treat them like princesses. There's an awful lot wrong with all of that, as I'm sure most of you will recognize. It leaves out any variation among female wants. It paints a pernicious and dangerous picture of men. It precludes the idea that men and women can ever be friends. It relies on gender stereotypes that are damaging to both men and women. And it straight-up calls sex something dirty.

All pretty reactionary, throwback, damaging ideas.

But in pretty much every piece I've read about this book, the incredibly salient fact of Flanagan's rape when she was a teenager is mentioned, and then glossed over in the analysis of her ideas.

So let me be the one to say it, I guess.

This is what sexual trama looks like.

Being forced out of one's girlhood by a violent act would leave someone with a pretty negative view of sex, don't you think? And in the culture of victim-blaming and rape-apology we live in, it's not hard to see how someone would fail to heal from that. It's not at all difficult to see how all that blame could be internalized into self-loathing.

OF COURSE Flanagan wants to protect girls; she wishes, I am certain, that someone had protected her. That her recipe for protection involves giving girls no tools for dealing with men and the world and the whirlpool of emotions that is sex is no surprise. She doesn't want to deal with any of those things.

Rape is a serious and incredibly damaging act. With every word I read about this woman, and with every harsh word I read about her prescriptions, I wince a little bit inside. When Carmon admonished Flanagan on "On Point" not to make this about her, or herself, I wanted to grab my radio and shake it. This book would seem to be about Flanagan, and her intensely personal wounds that have never healed. Please, please: make this conversation about her, because that's what it needs to be. Flanagan may be a social critic, but when her criticism and prescription come from such a place as I imagine they do, it must be understood that she's not talking about the world as it is, but the world as she understands it. And while it's always true that we each of us see the world through the prism of our experiences and unique perceptions, it's also likely true that Flanagan's perspective is far more skewed than most people's.

Stop piling on this poor woman. Yes, this may be exactly the thing that misogynists and zealots and morality legislators will hold up when they try to push agendas that curtail women's freedoms. And certainly Flanagan bears responsibility for her words. But still: I can't help but be overwhelmed with compassion every time I read anything about her.

Rape is trauma. And it should surprise no one that in a culture where Ben Roethlisberger makes millions in the NFL and Dominique Strauss-Kahn goes free and women are constantly told how to dress and act so that they will not be raped that Flanagan has a nostalgic longing for a time before she ever had to think about sex or worry about danger, and that she wants to keep girls in that safe space forever.

The Gender Politics of Internet Trolling

I can be pretty obnoxiously political. As a general rule, I've kept most of it off this particular venue of expression of mine and focused here on my personal experiences of things, but really. I can be pretty obnoxiously bleeding-heart, far-left political.

Mostly this comes through on Twitter, where it was the protests against Governor Scott Walker and his union-busting that made me truly appreciate the medium. I was looking at a picture of the court order re-opening our state Capitol an hour and twenty minutes before it hit any local news site. (And yeah, I timed it.) I have made some really wonderful friends while tweeting about politics. And had some fascinating discussions.

So when I tell you that I've never been trolled, not seriously, you should understand that I do go through pretty long jags of political commentary. It's not that I've never been trolled because I stay away from that sort of thing. But, back in March when I starting getting the first inklings, I definitely did circle my wagons and clam up for a few days. And that's a strategy that's worked very well for me ever since. I am obnoxiously political for (at maximum) five days, and then I go back to tweeting about my love life or clothes or food or something safely domestic for a period of time that is at least three days longer than however long I spent tweeting exclusively about politics and current events.

This has had the interesting (and hilarious) effect of getting me on some really interesting public lists. Like "Almost Worth Following." I laughed pretty hard at that one. There was another one that was simply titled Liberal/Retard/Spam/Troll, which I thought was an interesting grouping of things to be. I didn't laugh so much at that as I did wince.

But my strategy of just never going for too long without backing off and becoming nonthreateningly girly again seemed to work. Aside from the most glancing, easy to identify, and non-personal trolling that exists, I've never had to deal with vitriol from strangers.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine (one of those wonderful Twitter pals I met through politics and #wiunion) dropped a comment along the lines of "Remember when I didn't have my real name here and people thought I was a guy? That was fun."

And it made me think: I'm pretty obviously female, even on a gender-neutral platform like Twitter. My handle is "TheGirlOne" for crying out loud, and for a long while I had a picture of my actual face up there as an avatar, and I'm clearly female. What if the reason I never get trolled is less to do with my careful curated strategy, and more to do with my gender? A woman in politics isn't "worth" trolling?

I don't think that's seriously the case; I think it might be some combination of gender roles and my strategy, but after having read this piece, and this one, and this one, I am pretty convinced that my being a woman hasn't been the driving force in not being trolled, either on Twitter or here. Because there are, apparently, a lot of men out there, and a lot of people out there in general, that are willing to aim a lot of pent-up rage at women on the Internet.

And I think that the quote at the end of the Time article is intensely relevant to anyone that's about to tell me that it's *just* the Internet:

"This is 2011. It’s not “just” the Internet. It’s our culture. At this moment in time, you can work, socialize, date, learn, communicate and debate online. There is no longer a divide. What is happening online is happening in real life. This type of abuse reflects real-life attitudes, real-life misogyny and it’s prolific. It’s about time we started discussing it."

The Internet is, for better or worse, a part of the way we live these days. It is our culture. It's no longer a subculture, or an underground culture, or any other negating adjective you want to throw on it. The Internet is pop culture. We inhabit these spaces as surely as we do our bedrooms, apartments, cubicles, cars. And what happens here is real.

I've been lucky. Startling, beautifully, terrifyingly lucky. I have blogged about gender relations, and gender bending, and patriarchal political pundits, and my own sexual history. I have been, at times, uncomfortably personal. I have been, always, lucky that all of you that read this or have stumbled upon it have been kind and supportive.

I worked for a political office in Milwaukee for a year when I was in college. When the then-governor of our state, Jim Doyle, vetoed concealed carry legislation, a lot of people were understandably upset. Several of them called into the Mayor's office to express their disapproval. (Don't ask me why people upset with the governor were calling the mayor of a city. I don't know. People are dumb.)

One of the interns answering phones during that period was a lovely young woman, a friend of mine, and she took a call in which the man on the other end of the phone told her, after she tried to explain to him that the Mayor had no control over what the governor did and it wasn't under our purview, that he "hoped she got raped on her way home tonight, so [she'd] understand that carrying a gun is a good thing."

I cried when it was directed at her, and I certainly looked over my shoulder the entire walk from City Hall to my busstop, the whole bus ride home, the whole walk from that busstop to my apartment.

I have been (for me, anyway) remarkably open here, and I have been lucky. And I have been consistently supported in that. I hope that never changes. But I would be lying if I didn't tell you that putting this piece out there is taking slightly more courage than I probably have.

We should all be more compassionate. Telling that to a mysogynistic, scared little man in his basement spewing hate at all the women he can find on the Internet is probably a bit like spitting in the storm's eye, but I'll do it anyway. We should all be more compassionate. We should all be working to understand the ways in which we're all vulnerable and scared, and we should all be working to change those conditions. Life doesn't have to be nasty, poor, solitary, brutish, and short. We can be better than that. So, let's be better than that.

And let's start by all being as civil to everyone as you've all been to me.

It just doesn't work. For me.

It's pretty much a cliche. A friend of mine even has a joke about it. A girl who tells you she got pregnant on birth control is a liar. Because she was never on birth control.

Only, sometimes, she's not. I'm not.

I got pregnant on birth control. Twice.

The birth control pill is not foolproof. For all the things written about how the sexual revolution would never have occurred without access to easy contraceptive methods, I think it's high time that it's acknowledged that the birth control pill is not a goddamn silver bullet.

For starters, you have to take the pill every day, at the same time, to get those 95% effective rates. I suspect that's probably the source of the joke: telling a guy you're on the pill but neglecting to mention that you've forgotten to take it for the last three days.

However, the other issue is exactly what the pill does. The pill is not a condom or a spermicide or a diaphragm or an IUD. It does not physically prevent sperm from entering your uterus and possibly meeting a nice egg that it would be nice to settle down with. The pill messes with a woman's hormones, tricking the body into thinking that the woman is already pregnant, thus preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus and becoming a pregnancy.

Sidenote: this is the reason for Catholic condemnation of birth control. Morally speaking, the Church holds that a fertilized egg is life, since it contains all the genetic material. Stopping the egg from implanting in the uterus, thus causing the "life" that is the fertilized egg to be discarded, is tantamount to murder. While I find this position untenable in terms of actual living, it is a morally principled and logically sound position.

But it's universally acknowledged that most biology is not exact. Particularly when it comes to biochemistry, there is massive and statistically significant variation across the population. So trying to artificially alter that biochemistry is going to be a hit-and-miss proposition. Think anti-depressants: they don't work the same for everyone. Not even close.

Birth control pills are not much different.

I happen to be one of those people who's hormones fall waaaaay outside the norm. I should have known this, considering all the trouble I had getting through puberty and the ways in which my reproductive system still decides to punish me every month.

But I was a teenager and I bought into everything.

And I got pregnant at the ripe old age of 18. While I was on birth control. I had an abortion. And for those of you keeping score at home, my Catholic upbringing still asserts itself over that decision. I still sometimes cry for no particular reason and then realize I'm still processing a lifetime's worth of guilt and shame over having killed someone. But I do not doubt that it was the right decision, regardless. If I'd had that child, I'd still be married to an unmedicated, obsessive-compulsive control freak that liked to tell me I was worthless, didn't like me leaving the house, and had a penchant for trying to kill me. And there'd be a child in the household to worry about.

So, good decision. Even if it kills me now and again.

I put that experience out of my head. I told myself that I must not have been vigilant enough about taking my pill at exactly the same time every day. I set up a system with alarms and carrying extra packs of pills in all my purses and all manner of elaborate schema to ensure that it didn't happen again.

Well, I've got a two-and-a-half-year-old, so obviously that didn't work out as intended.

I love my daughter. I love her fiercely, dearly and unconditionally. But she was an accident, and I do wonder what my life would look like right now if I'd had the emotional wherewithal to go through a second abortion. Looking back, I think that her father wanted that, which may explain his current absence from our lives. No matter. No one should be forced to have a child they don't want, and men aren't an exception to that.

But these days, I put no stock in the pill. I don't even take it. I don't want to risk the temptation to fall back into the idea that I'm immune from pregnancy because I've got a silver bullet called Orthrotricyclen or Seasonique or what-have-you. Because obviously, it doesn't work for me.

Slut.

I was eleven the first time I was called a slut. Sixth grade. I rode a big yellow school bus to school, and it was a long ride, sometimes 45 minutes. There were a group of us that were attending this school that was on the other side of the city, and we were the first ones picked up and the last ones dropped off.

There was a boy on the bus, an eighth grader. Jesse. He was beautiful, and counter-culture, and really, really smart. I was pretty much in love with him from day one. Sometime during that year, he noticed me. And we started to sit together on the bus, bumping legs while we lurched over streets riddled with potholes and talking about everything that an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old can possibly think of to talk about.

One afternoon, we were sitting a bit farther back in the bus than usual; it must have been the first available open seat. About halfway through the ride, everyone left on the bus was sitting in front of us. This girl, I don't even remember her name, came and planted herself in the seat in front of us and started asking questions about our relationship. Were we going steady? Was he my boyfriend?

I had no idea what to say. I had barely even thought about kissing this boy. I just really liked the way he looked, and the way he smelled, and the things we talked about and the confidence with which he made his pronouncements. It was a very quiet confidence. I think he was taken aback, as well, because he also didn't know what to say. He deflected. She would not be deterred.

After five minutes of badgering or so, she reached into our seat, picked up his hand, and put it on my breast.

No, really. We both kind of looked at it there. Neither one of us felt much about it, so after a few seconds, he moved it away, back to his lap.

But this girl whose name I can't remember started screaming and hollering about how I'd let Jesse feel me up in the back of the bus.

By the time I got to school the next day, I was that girl. That girl that let boys feel her up in the back of the bus. I got called a slut a lot that year, and the next.

When I was fourteen, I went on a chaperoned trip to Australia and New Zealand with 40 other kids. The chaperones were four schoolteachers. The senior chaperone was a woman named Mrs. Sphar, and Mrs. Sphar had very definite ideas about how children should behave. I did not conform to her ideas, although by most any objective measure, I was a good kid. I got good grades, I hadn't yet tried any drugs nor had I even gotten drunk. I was a free-spirited little thing, and I had a sharp tongue and a distaste for authority, but I was a good kid.

I dyed my hair on that trip, something I'd done for the first time a year earlier with the blessing and help of my mother. (I have always felt it a travesty of genetics that my hair does not naturally have much red tint.)

Mrs. Sphar did not like the new hair color.

She told me I looked like a street walker, and demanded that I remain in my hotel room, washing my hair, until the dye washed out.

When I was eighteen, I met a man that I married less than a year later who liked to call me a whore when I smiled at grocery clerks and gas stations attendants. He never did forgive me for not being a virgin when we met, and was convinced that I was going to sleep with anything that moved because I was already spoiled, anyway.

Those are just the highlights.

I have difficult time, still, with having my sexual appetites and choices derided. "Whore" will as often as not reduce me to tears; "slut" makes me turn red and shaky with shame and rage.

I know that it's all the rage these days to reclaim these labels that have been placed on women that have taken their sexual lives into their own hands and make them positives. Women are supposed to wear these insults with pride, like precious pearl necklaces bedecking their throats, like pins of platinum pinioned on lapels.

I call bullshit.

The words are meant to be insults. You can tell me not to internalize them as often as you like, and maybe I should hear it, but don't tell me that I'm supposed to like being called a slut. It's meant to cut. It's meant to demean. It's meant to tell me that my worth lies between my legs and every time I let someone in there, I'm demeaning myself and lowering my worth.

So don't use those words. Don't play with them. They are not playful words; they are weapons. And most certainly, don't tell me that I'm supposed to like being bludgeoned with them.

Dumb Girl

I'm all up in my head, rethinking your feminism.

Everyone knows girls play dumb. It's a pretty fool-proof manipulation tactic: the hapless damsel requires assistance. I play dumb fairly frequently, or at least I take on a position of weakness in relation to whoever I'm interacting with.

But do I really do this because I'm female? I'm not so sure.

Certainly, it would be an easy out to point to pressure that girls come under to conform to standards of femininity that have been seriously influenced by Victorian mores of silent, subservient women. It would be easy to cop out with some pithy denunciation of society at large that told me for most of my childhood to sit down and shut up.

But it would be false.

Don't get me wrong: I was certainly told to sit down and shut up during my childhood. Repeatedly, in point of fact. In my very early youth, I was a talker, a mover, a smiler. I was a charming toddler, always asking ever-so-slightly intrusive questions of total strangers and winning them over with toothy grins and slightly-above average verbal skills. Not everyone was charmed, as you might imagine, particularly not in institutional settings. Daycare workers both loved and hated me; so did teachers.

So I was told to sit down and shut up. Repeatedly.

But I was also encouraged, with gentle prods. Every time someone answered a question of mine I was emboldened to ask another one. Every time I smiled at a stranger on the street and they smiled back, I was fortified to do it again.

Further, I doubt that the impatience I was up against had as much to do with my gender as it did with a general fatigue at dealing with a willful and noisy child. I'd have faced much the same reaction (I think) if I'd been male.

But then I ponder that sentence, and I'm not so sure. How would I know what would have happened if I'd been a boy? I don't. I certainly don't recall watching boys get treated differently than I for similar behavior, but I was a narcissistic little thing. I may not have noticed anyone else, boy or otherwise. And I certainly find that as I got older, there was a unique sort of pressure I faced as a a person with tits and a snatch.

Then again, people with cocks and balls faced pressures that I didn't have to deal with.

So how do we sort through all the various layers of pressure to determine whether gender has a significant impact on anything in our lives?

I will never go so far as to deny that being female has shaped my psyche, but I have no idea how my gender has affected my perception. Further, I'm uncomfortable apportioning any particular foible to gender, because there are so very many things that go into making someone crazy that it feels like a cop out to point to something so big, obvious, and unchangeable as the naughty bits one was born with.

I do play dumb. I do play weak. But I'm hesitant to say I do it because I'm female. It's effective because I'm female, and if it weren't effective, I would probably stop doing it, but I don't think my gender was the original impetus for trying weakness as a manipulation tactic. I think there are probably other, much more complicated and personal reasons for that particular development.

And, in all seriousness, what does a little weakness hurt? Who is hurt if I let the guy at the pizza place hold the door open for me? Who does it hurt if I let the guy walk me to my car because it's dark and I'm alone? No one. Everyone likes to feel useful, myself included. On an evolutionary level, we've segregated this usefulness in many ways, one of which is by gender: men are providers and women are caretakers. Since my natural inclinations are toward caretaking anyway, why shouldn't I play along with the role social pressure pushes me into?

And then, of course, I wonder if caretaking isn't my natural inclination at all, merely what I've taken on myself because of those pressures. Are the messages I receive really so insidious that they've steeped through my subconscious to my core without my even noticing?

I have no idea. I'd like to think not, and so I will operate as if such a thing has not occured.

But there is always a nagging feeling of doubt, a whisper I can't quite get rid of.

If I lived in a gender-neutral world, would I be the same person? I'm uncomfortable with the question because on the whole I like myself. I like who I am. But to ask this question posits that there may possibly be a better version of myelf out there, one I can't access because of the subtle conditioning I've been subjected to.

I hate this idea, and I'll deny that it has any real validity for a variety of reasons, including my extreme distaste for anything that smacks of predestination or fate.

But I'm intellectually honest enough (occasionally) to wonder in my heart of hearts: What if?

What if, indeed.