Sophianotloren

Ok, then.  Enough being sick.  I have a pile of laundry two weeks deep.  I have admitted publicly and privately that I will NEVER get caught up on yard work.

The garden SHOULD be planted and it is not even prepared.  Ah well, it is a year in constant change, the culmination of almost three years of difficulty on several levels; I guess we can let the veggie garden slide.

What did I learn by being in-bed-sick for over a week?  Well, I remembered, albeit belatedly, that the codeine in the cough syrup (to which I have a sort of intolerance — as I don’t metabolize it well) used to be the patent remedy for dysentery and the like.  My gut after a mere teaspoon of syrup once a night for eight days was locked tighter than Ft. Knox. Even the antibiotics destroying gut-flora were insufficient to counteract that effect. Luckily, I also remembered that rhubarb pie is the patent remedy for THAT!  Luckily, rhubarb is a perennial and was sprouted tall, red, and ready in the neglected garden!

The swallows are back in the yard, though I don’t know if they are nesting in the soffit or not.  But watching them dive and swoop is a lot of fun, and die, you little mosquito bitches, die!  Mosquitos are not the only busy bugs: various wild bees are at work, in addition to the occasional domesticated honey bees, in the apple tree, clematis, and the wisteria blossoms.  In addition — there is a tiny white crab spider in that photograph — it is all reared back and contemplating whether it can “take” that little bee!

As I said, I got a gratifying pair of sandals yesterday.  I spent about ten minutes trying to take a photograph of the single sandal I’ve succeeded in lacing into wearable form.  It took most of the last 24 hours to lace the sandal.  This is not because it is especially difficult.  This is because gray Gracie-lace-killing-kitty is especially adept at grabbing laces and running off with them.  The photograph failed because I am still too shaky to hold my smart phone dead steady.  Oh, well.

Obviously, I’m not very “with it” this morning.  Here…have a neglected front flower bed!

 

But then…it is Monday, so I have a few questions:

Why when this statistic exists people are freaking the fuck out over legalized grass or e-cigarettes?

Why after eons of mothers raising sons, it is suddenly something that apparently denies them their “masculinity” somehow? I mean, really, could we like Left-Back-Hand of Darkness this bullshit already?

Why anyone goes on reporting on this guy’s sorry assed excuses for racist claptrap? OR on what his “estranged wife” says she may or may not eventually do.

Tagged: gardening, nature, summer

Some headlines:

• Chase Bank Is Shutting Down Porn Actors' Bank Accounts
• Porn stars battle stigma with sex awareness amid bank account closures
• Amazon is deleting sex workers' wish lists without warning
• The Soapbox: How PayPal & WePay Discriminate Against The Adult Industry

Although Chase Bank is dominating the news in this area lately, it’s clear that other major brick-and-mortar banks, including City Bank and Wells Fargo, also discriminate against sex workers.

This is wrong and unfair to sex workers. But it should also terrify the rest of us, because major corporations in effect form a second government in the USA, a government that can lock people out of access to essential services without any appeal or accountability. It’s hard to live if no bank will do business with you or cash your checks. And if private banks have the right to act this way, why not other private corporations – utilities, say, or internet service providers? If sex workers, why not other unpopular groups – say, polyamorists, or trans people, or socialists?

The more free corporations are to arbitrarily make decisions that constrain our lives, the less free ordinary people become. Gigantic corporations that in effect rule major aspects of our society should not be legally allowed to engage in this sort of behavior. Viewpoint neutrality should be legally required of any bank or utility serving the general public.

PJ Rey writes:

Particularly, it’s interesting that this outright discrimination against legal sex work is coming from Wall Street and Silicon Valley—both recognized hubs of libertarian ideology. Typically, leaders from both sectors staunchly defend unfettered economic activity as fundamental to an open society. In fact, they often go so far as to equate economic activity with expressions of free speech, deserving of maximum protection and minimal interference.[...]

But what libertarians too often fail to acknowledge is that discrimination is frequently expressed through and encoded into markets themselves (housing being perhaps the most notoriously discriminatory market). When one’s commitment to markets takes precedence over one’s commitment to challenging discrimination, it’s almost inevitable that fair treatment for marginalized groups falls by the wayside. It seems that sex workers have found themselves victims of a contradiction within libertarian ideology: markets, though themselves supposedly conditional on freedom and fairness, create conditions of unfreedom and unfairness.

In PJ’s comments, Iamcuriousblue (who has occasionally commented on “Alas,” although not lately, alas) pushes back a little, writing:

I think you ignore the governmental role that factors into this as well. It’s been noted that Operation Choke Point, a behind-the-scene DOJ policing initiative toward the financial industry, has guidelines that specifically list things like “escort agencies” and “pornography” business activity on the part of account holders as things that should raise red flags. (I’ll note that Mother Jones is very dismissive of concerns about OCP – I’m not so convinced of its wholly benign nature.) Combine this with the recent history of overzealous “antitrafficking” initiatives coming straight from the federal government, and you’ve really got state/private sector partnership fueling this kind of discrimination. Which would hardly be the first time we’ve seen something like this – one need only look at unjust drug laws and drug testing in the workplace for a well established example.

It is:

Writing has officially begun (by me, to be clear) on book six of the Old Man’s War series, tentatively scheduled for release sometime (probably) in the first half of 2015 (note: tentatively). I won’t tell you the (again tentative) title yet, but I will reveal that the title has five words in it. No, If you start guessing I will not tell you if you get it right. Just chill, more information will come in time.

How’s the writing going, you ask? So far, so good. Thanks for asking!

Aaaaaaaaand that’s all you get about it for a while. I’ll pop up every once in a while with an update. Until then, just assume that in the absence of new information, everything is going along perfectly. I thank you in advance for agreeing to this comfortable delusion.

S.E. Hinton, a woman, arguably pioneered the young adult genre of literature. So why is it that women are seen as secondary in this genre, and as less valuable as their male counterparts? Book Riot explores this question, and the powerful effects that narratives written for young women can have.

Within the pages of these books, we have girl stories. That is, stories about what happens to girls, not books for girls. There’s physical violence, romance of all shades (between a girl and a boy, a girl and more than one boy, a girl and a girl), sexual violence, self-harm, tough but real language, and sex/sexuality. And sure, many of the books written by women that are challenged have male main characters, but the problem goes back to what S. E. Hinton was told when she launched this ship in the first place: you can’t be a woman and be taken seriously.

Related Posts:

• Blume on Censorship
• The Whiteness of BookCon
• Ernest Hemingway Was…
• Queer Characters of Color in YA Novels
• Lisa’s Book Round-Up

"I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do."

-- HAL 9000

...a machine that, given a semblance of human consciousness, develops some of the less admirable, more primitive human emotions: jealousy, fear, anger, and the urge to defend itself all costs.

...

All those years ago, when "2001: A Space Odyssey" was first released, I began my review with a few lines from a poem by e.e. cummings:

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

That was my response to the people who said they couldn't understand "2001," that it made no sense and that it was one long exercise in self-indulgence by Stanley Kubrick, who had sent a man to the stars, only to abandon him inside some sort of extraterrestrial hotel room. I felt that the poetry of "2001" was precisely in its mystery, and that to explain everything was to ruin everything -- like the little boy who cut open his drum to see what made it bang.

...

[2010: The Year We Make Contact] is, in short, a movie that tries to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance. There were times when I almost wanted to cover my ears. Did I really want to know (a) why HAL 9000 disobeyed Dave's orders? or (b) the real reason for the Discovery's original mission? or (c) what the monoliths were trying to tell us?...

...was told to lie - by people who find it easy to lie. HAL doesn't know how.

Brad DeLong is excellent on the consequences of the Supreme Court arbitrarily re-writing the ACA:

This is the piece of the article that leaves me most annoyed because of the absence of context. Why have 20 states refused to take part in Medicaid expansion? It’s not because of how the Affordable Care Act was written. All states currently participate in Medicaid–it is a good deal for a state to do so. The ACA changed Medicaid. But John Roberts rewrote the law from his post on the Supreme Court to give states the option of (a) simply continuing with Medicaid-as-it-exists-in-2013 in addition to the options of (b) participating in Medicaid-as-it-exists-in-2014 and (c) dropping Medicaid entirely.

When John Roberts rewrote the ACA from the bench, he did so very badly. The expansion of Medicaid meant that a great many people who used to show up at safety-net hospitals without any insurance at all will now be covered by Medicaid, so the rationale for the Disproportionate Share Payments to safety-net hospitals that treat the uninsured will go away, hence the ACA eliminates the no longer-needed DSP. But in states in which Medicaid isn’t expanded, the need for the DSP remains. When Roberts rewrote the law, did he rewrite the law so that the DSP remains for states that do not accept Medicaid expansion? No. Will safety-net hospitals in non-expanding states close as a result? Some of them, probably, without some other emergency fix. Did Roberts know what he was doing? Almost surely not. If you rewrite a law from the bench, shouldn’t you and your clerks first familiarize yourself with the law enough so that you know what you are doing? Next question!

When John Roberts rewrote the ACA from the bench, he did so very badly. The expansion of Medicaid meant that people with incomes less than 133% of the poverty line will now be covered by Medicaid, so they will not need to be eligible for subsidies to make the policies offered on the exchange affordable to them. But in states in which Medicaid isn’t expanded, people with incomes less than 133% of the poverty level will need to purchase heath insurance on the exchanges if they are to have any form of coverage at all. When Roberts rewrote the law, did he rewrite the law so that people not covered by Medicaid with incomes less than 133% of the poverty line become eligible for exchange subsidies? No. Will there thus be millions of people left out in the cold? Yes. Did Roberts know what he was doing? Almost surely not. If you rewrite a law from the bench, shouldn’t you and your clerks first familiarize yourself with the law enough so that you know what you are doing? Next question!

An additional wrinkle–a wrinkle that may have pushed Arizona into the Medicaid expansion camp–is that non-U.S. citizen legal residents of the United States with less than five years of residency and incomes less than 133% of the poverty line are eligible for exchange subsidies. Thus the ACA, as rewritten by John Roberts, treats working-poor non-citizen immigrants with less than five years of residency much more favorably than it treats working-poor citizens. Did Roberts know what he was doing? Almost surely not. If you rewrite a law from the bench, shouldn’t you and your clerks first familiarize yourself with the law enough so that you know what you are doing? Next question!

Now, you could blame Congress rather than the Supreme Court for this if they had any reason to believe that the Supreme Court would strike down the mechanism for expanding Medicaid, but of course they had no reason whatsoever to expect such an unprecedented intervention. (If Congress can use highway spending to enforce a tenuously related national drinking age, why should the umpteenth expansion of Medicaid have even been in question?) The lack of precedent might not be an issue if the Supreme Court was enforcing a specific constitutional provision, but it was doing no such thing. The argument has a Shelby County problem — not only is there no specific prohibition the Medicaid expansion violated, Congress is explicitly authorized to tax and spend for the general welfare. The Constitution does structurally establish a federal system, and I suppose I could come up with a hypothetical where the federal spending power was so coercive that it threatened the very structure of federalism itself (“not a penny of federal money if you don’t modify your divorce laws!”), although trying to come up with any such law that could actually be enacted by Congress I get nothing but a loud buzzing noise.

If the Court is going to freelance and invent prohibitions that swim against the text of the Constitution, it faces a particularly high burden of proof — there had better be a crucial liberty interest at stake and the logic needs to be airtight. We’ve been through most of this before, but the Medicaid expansion part of Sebelius fails spectacularly on this score:

• If Congress had just created the ACA’s version of Medicaid from scratch, it would be unquestionably constitutional.
• If Congress had just repealed Medicaid outright this would unquestionably be constitutional.  Roberts’s logic seems to imply some sort of permanent state entitlement to receive federal money once it’s been given, but he can’t possibly believe that.
• If Congress expanded Medicaid by just making it a Medicare-style federal program, this would unquestionably be constitutional even though it would give less autonomy to the states than the ACA’s Medicaid expansion did.
• And the fact that the decision is based on this transparently results-oriented, farcically incoherent formalist hair-splitting  means that by definition there’s no meaningful liberty interest being protected by the Court, even you believe that that extratextual “rights” of states should be privileged over the statutory rights of actual citizens.   The ACA’s Medicaid expansion did not threaten to deprive state governments of anything they’re constitutionally entitled to, and Congress remains free to pursue identical goals in ways that are actually more “coercive” towards state legislatures.  The decision is also a disaster on a pragmatic policy level for the reasons cited above.
• The fact that the decision is based on this transparently results-oriented, farcically incoherent formalist hair-splitting also means that Congress is given little guidance going forward.
• And, please, save the “but it was 7-2, just like the permanently unassailable Dred Scott v. Sandford!!!!!” argument.  Even in the enormously unlikely event that Breyer and Kagan weren’t voting strategically, all this would prove is that Breyer and Kagan joined a terrible opinion and were probably extremely naive about the consequences of doing so.  In Breyer’s case, at least, this would have been far from the first time.

Whether 5-4 or 9-0, what the Supreme Court did to the Medicaid expansion was terrible constitutional law and worse policy.

Last week, Will Self declared the novel dead. But so have a lot of people over the last century. Video may have killed the radio star, but who killed the novel? Rebecca Makkai asks that question over at Ploughshares:

Who is to blame for this sad decline? We could look to our digitized lifestyle. Are we less likely to engage with a Death of the Novel essay on a deep level if that essay appears on a screen? What if that screen has lingerie ads down the side of it? What if those lingerie models are wiggling back and forth? See what I mean?

Makkai poses a few more rhetorical tongue-in-cheek questions, but she raises a valid point: we’ve been talking about the death of the novel since the form was first printed, but more novels are written every year.

Related Posts:

• The Literary Novel is Dead! Long Live the Literary Novel!
• Life Lessons from Children’s Literature
• White People Everywhere
• One Chance to Make a First Impression
• How to Love a Writer

I’ve just come home from visiting my family to an empty apartment and the sharp musk of old air that fills it. The apartment had been sitting too long. The air had been too still. I sweep the floors even though they don’t need to be swept and sit quietly in the light that’s left of dusk. There is nothing for me to do. There is no one I want to see. I turn on the computer, or what I call the TV. I decide to watch The Shield because an ad for it has popped on to the screen. It’s a show about corrupt policemen that ended several years ago. I watch three episodes before going to bed.

 

The Shield’s main character is a detective named Vic Mackey. Vic is a short, white bald man, who dresses casually: mostly in jeans and sweatshirts, and always in a hoodie that stays unzipped— blowing in the wind of his determination. He runs a specialty team of men he has hand-selected. They are a team, but mostly they act like brothers, playing a game of cops and robbers. Sometimes they are the cops.

 

In the fall of 2010 I watched the entire series, Lost. It took me four weeks to watch every episode. I would watch the show after work, during my lunch break, and on the weekends. I didn’t do anything else. I didn’t leave the apartment other than to go to the grocery store or work. When at home I would move from one room to another, dragging Lost with me. I would eat like I believed the character Hurley was eating—secretly, quickly, while standing in the kitchen or lying in bed.

 

After a night of heavy drinking I wake up to the roll of vomit in my throat. The vomit is a half digested sandwich, mostly bread eaten before passing out to prevent the vomiting from happening. Head in the toilet, I remember throwing up on my floor before eating the bread. I look to see if anything is there, on the floor, but see nothing. The wood either soaks or hides.

 

It is so much easier to be wrapped in the lives of characters instead of your own. Sometimes I need moments of stillness, a lack of movement. I started watching Lost the day after my apartment was entered into, an ex boyfriend pushing entry and slamming me on the floor, telling me how I should really start answering the phone. He had stolen my spare key several weeks before. It was like a movie on Lifetime TV. We sat in that apartment for hours, pretending, but watching a television show alone would have been better.

 

Television can be better than most things, always.

I am curled up in a comforter at 9:23 in the evening when Vic Mackey kicks in the door of a drug dealer. He wears black tennis shoes, the kind that are non-descript. He doesn’t care about labels. He is a man of action and his action is holding a young black man’s face down by the neck. His partners stand around him. They watch as information pours out of the now disable man’s lips. Action works. The man sort-of cries. Vic Mackey doesn’t care. Vic Mackey makes his own justice.

 

Some of my earliest memories are of watching TV. I remember watching the opening credits of China Beach while my mom was in the kitchen. There was something dramatic and beautiful about the sunset in the credits at the beginning of the show that was hard not to recognize as a four-year-old. Diana Ross’ Reflections playing as the background music had nothing to do with it. It was all Dana Delany and that sun, that golden sun. I wanted to be hard and beautiful like she was, like that sun was. Like Delany, I wanted to be taken seriously like a man. I also wanted to end my nights in a shitty bar with a glass of whiskey. I thought I saw strength there. I didn’t realize how flawed that glass of whiskey was, and I never looked back to see the woman in my kitchen working. That wasn’t interesting to me; she had a domestic softness I wasn’t interested in.

I found myself in a similar admiration toward Glenn Close when she joined the cast The Shield to play Captain Monica Rawling. She was like Delany: hard and strong. She had the look of a woman who refused to be hurt.

 

The night my ex broke into my apartment he asked me to make him dinner. The only things I had in the fridge were a tilapia filet and some limes. I made the piece of fish with the lime and threw a cup of rice on the stove. When it was done, I apologized for the lack of color on the plate. I apologized for the blandness of the meal and he commented on how we should go to the store tomorrow while placing a hand on the sallow green colored skin of my bruised leg.

 

I don’t remember when he left that night, but I do remember his threat of taking me to the grocery store, of him coming back. He never did, though. It was all for show, to stick.

 

Vic Mackey is one of those family men who protect when there needs to be protecting (rarely ever) and provides when there needs to be money provided (some of the time) but he doesn’t do more than that. He isn’t about emotional support; he is a man of blanketing support, the kind that covers everything up, presses everything down, to a controllable understandable state. But this is the kind of support that rarely helps, and when you suffocate under the pressure of it, he blames you for not being good enough to accept it.

 

Sometimes I will spend months sleeping in my living room, watching television. There is a type of punishment in it, as though I don’t deserve to sleep in a bed. It is good to wake up feeling the soreness from an uncomfortable position. It is good to work my day while in that soreness: a cramp in my back, or a tightness in my neck. After sleeping on my sofa for a couple of days, my bedroom becomes foreign, a place that works against me, a place that speaks a different language: one of comfort or normalness that I cannot allow.

 

I chat sporadically online with a man I met at a bar only a few months before. His name is Ben. At the time we met, he was visiting his family while on leave from the service and I enjoyed the temporary nature of his stay. I thought he looked safe. I thought, I can do this for a few days. When he left the weekend after we met, he asked to stay in touch and I agreed. Now this man is the only human contact I enjoy on most days, and I am not sure it even matters who he is.

 

I think, by law, Los Angeles is only allowed to hold someone for 12 hours for questioning. Some of the actors in The Shield’s holding cells have been there for eight years. I’ve been alone in my apartment for three days.

 

It doesn’t take long before I get tired of the opening credits. The music is made for men, men who want to watch other men who do things their own way, just like how Vic Mackey does things his own way. But he looks like a fool, and the screaming men and guitars in the opening sequence sound like fools, I don’t even have to see them.

 

Between finding a new apartment, changing my phone number, and beginning my tenure with Lost, I spent several days at my mother’s. When she asked me what was wrong, I told her I couldn’t sleep. I told her that I was working on getting the right sleep medication down. I said, these things are complicated, you know? In the evening she would serve me a glass of melatonin after dinner and then I would take a Xanax followed by two Ambien. I would sometimes be able to sleep after that, but mostly I would lay half-awake in some other state.

 

One of the uniformed officers is sleeping with Mackey. I don’t understand her attraction to him physically, but I understand how she sees him as a protector. She doesn’t see his corruption. She only sees him as a man of courage, of strength. She sees his compassion toward some of the prostitutes and his need to provide for his wife. But I don’t understand why she lets him into her home. I understand why she doesn’t want anyone to see. I understand that he has something, something like anger that he has fashioned into something to respect. I understand that she thinks he is a good man but good can be as thin as a blanket.

 

I start to think that I am attracted to Detective Wagenbach. This is mostly because he is the least threatening character on the show. He is smart and romantically pursues people who do not like him. He also makes one slack-jawed face he that I, frankly, would like to hit. I think detective Wagenbach would let me take a lot hits before he said no. He looks safe like this. I think about punching him in the face several times and squeeze my legs together before forcing myself out of bed.

 

When my ex began taking art classes at the school where I worked, I had to finally tell my boss what was going on. When she tells me there is nothing she can do, when she says we cannot deny students for any reason, I begin to think that she is not on my side. I go back to my desk angry that she never put the pieces together: how I recently changed my phone number and address, how I would come into work with my arms and legs covered in bruises. I suspect and know she doesn’t respect me. Then I suspect that she never cared enough to pay attention in the first place, as she is very busy and mostly cares about getting home to her two kids. I force myself into feeling a little better. When I go home that evening I bolt my doors and drink a glass of wine before taking my pills to go to bed.

 

When Ben comes to visit again, I am surprised at how well our time together goes. We meet for drinks the first night he is in town and go to my place after. By the second day I am eating dinner with his parents but I am ready for him to leave. My apartment feels louder with someone else in it. On the third morning, I draw a bath and soak in it while he is still asleep. I set my laptop on the toilet and watch The Shield with the volume set to low.

 

I am in the bathtub when Mackey’s first captain, Aceveda, is forced to take another man’s penis in his mouth. Aceveda is not so much a good man, but a man who we can see weakness in. He is weak in the shadow of Mackey, and now he is on his knees, crying, with his mouth full. I turn to the side of the tub, my back to the wall, my shoulder exposed to the cold air. Ben is sleeping in my room. He stirs and comes into the bathroom just as the perpetrator on the screen takes a photo of his cock in another man’s mouth.

 

To accept Ben’s touch I have to fight instinct. I have to force my neck not to pull; I have to stay still, cold, marble, and waiting. I cannot trust my reflex, whether I should lean in to his touch, or accept his kindness for genuine. I tell myself this will change, eventually, but until then I have to lie when he asks what is wrong. Until then, I sort through my feelings through the characters on my TV.

 

There is a reason why a man like Aceveda is mouth raped but not Mackey; it is because Mackey is pure masculinity. He is unwavering in his control, and the show’s plot cannot handle the weight of its main character being hurt, violated, broken. The show isn’t ready for this, yet. So the man who is just ok in his character, the man who tries to do good but falls victim to the easiness of Mackey’s strategies is used instead, and we watch because we too are in that place: that place somewhere in the middle of complacent and self-righteousness. We watch, sitting in our homes waiting for something to move us in one direction or the other.

 

My insomnia in 2010 wasn’t caused by fear. I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t turn my mind off. Every evening I would sit in front of my television trying to be dull and failing that, I would try to escape into more dramatic story telling/problem solving. The problems of Lost were much richer than my own. Lost contained mysteries that I knew would soon be uncovered. The story telling of Lost was biblical in its moral. My own thoughts had no solution. I could not solve why I had not left my ex sooner. I could not correct when I should have said no. I could not go into the past and pull away from a man who would eventually force his way into my home to take away my normal. I could find no moral in what had happened in real life.

 

On Sundays a group of women join me in my apartment to watch a television show called Girls. We watch the program, while eating snacks I’ve made. Sometimes we talk about our work, but mostly we just watch or talk about the lead character’s always-exposed puffy nipples. We talk about this with our own nipples firmly protected by various forms of clothing. When the program is over, the women leave and I move to my bed to watch The Shield.

 

I’ve been alone in my home for 47 hours, wearing leggings and a deep v-neck that when askew causes me to fall out, exposed to nothing, to no one. There is a book on the bed next to me. I tell myself I should be reading it. Instead, my computer is open and season six of The Shield plays. I don’t even know when season five ended. I look at Mackey’s baldhead. The camera changes and another character, Claudette, looks back at me. She looks like a friend of mine. I haven’t moved from the bed since the last time I had to pee. I don’t remember when that was.

 

When the week begins, I spend my time at work wishing I were home watching TV, or chatting on the computer with people that live in cities far from my own. I sit at my desk, moving from work to conversations with people in digital windows. A coworker walks down the hall past my office and says, hello. I raise my head and smile, distracted by the blinking on the screen.

 

There is a scene late one afternoon where Vic is having sex with a woman who has a boyfriend. They are on a bed in a hotel room. He is on his knees sitting upright and she is on top of his lap. Vic looks extremely short but we are supposed to see past this. He is a ladies man. He is a protector. We are supposed to see him as a man who women are undeniably drawn to, but he looks like a character from Dragon Ball Z: short, bald, and muscular. The camera moves from his thighs to her thighs and then her back to his back and then it ends at his stocky neck. He is red from exertion. He is always red from exertion. He looks like violence.

 

I wake up in the middle of the night and check the Internet to see if Ben is online. He is not. He is ten hours away in a place that I keep forgetting the name of. It’s probably cold there. I switch windows on the screen to watch The Shield. I watch for thirty minutes before getting up to go to the bathroom. The floor there is cold and because of the cold I can feel a hunk of grit under my foot more clearly than if the apartment was warm. I finish peeing, go back to the bedroom, and listen to The Shield as I stare at the ceiling.

 

I started watching The Shield after visiting my family during the holidays. I had not seen them after moving away for a new job six months before. I could not stay in the town I was in, mostly because of the incident but also because I needed to find some other space that was normal, one that I could manipulate my own kind of safety/power in.

 

It’s 4:37 am when Captain Monica Rawling walks on to the screen and into my heart. Rawling is the new captain of the police station. She says she is going to make changes. She is going to stop all of Mackey’s violence and corruption. She looks serious. I want to believe her. She wears the type of pantsuit a woman wears when she knows she can be feminine in some other way, which is to say, her suits were styled in the way of a man’s but more flattering to a woman’s figure. I am amazed her balance of power and softness.

 

Ben comes to visit once more and again we play house. He tells me how excited he is that we met. He says hat he wishes he were not in the service. He says, If only I didn’t have two more years. I agree with him but secretly enjoy that he has that time left. I know that if I have a little more time I can feel normal.

 

When Detective Wagenbach kills a stray cat that keeps him up at night, I find it difficult to watch. He kills the cat to see if it ignites some kind of feeling within him: a feeling he learns about through the interrogation of a serial killer. The killer tells him about power and about the feeling when you see fear, then life leave a person’s eyes. I watch Wagenbach kill the cat. The animal’s body is a stiff prop made of fur like fabric, glass eyes, and whiskers. Wagenbach drops the prop on to the driveway when he is done; when he discovers that the feeling isn’t there, that he couldn’t find power like that. Watching him try to obtain this power and failing doesn’t make me like him, but it makes me see myself in him.

 

I begin to chat everyday with Ben after he is deployed to another country. When I am at work, it is nighttime where he is. At work I filter through my emails prioritizing which ones to get to first before signing on to tell him hello. I think I miss him, but I know I only miss the idea of him. He is safer at this distance and I consider that it’s the safe feeling of that distance that I like the most.

 

When Vic Mackey kills a man, he does so in a method so swift that there is no time to doubt himself. The writers on the show may attempt to lead us to believe that this is a man who plans what he does, but he doesn’t. Everything is reaction, reaction, and reaction. He reacts and takes, and then builds schemas to justify what he has done.

 

During her short stay as Mackey’s commander, Rawling keeps referring to the short leash she has him on. He looks at her smiling whenever they are in her office and makes promises that she doesn’t give a shit about. She is smarter than him but she will not win against him. Rawling will not be able to stop his perverted method of chivalry and justice. But as she tries, she treats him like a dog and he stands there, panting with a dumb look on his face. It gives me pleasure to see Mackey look so stupid but I know it cannot last for long. A man like that can chew through a leash like it’s the flesh of his own leg.

 

I begin to wonder if I am keeping Ben on a leash. I wonder how long it will be until he chews through it, or if he is even that type.

 

When I get dressed in the morning I push through a large section of dresses and choose from a series of slacks and blouses. The dresses hang there like forgotten desires—things purchased with the hopes that I’d someday feel comfortable wearing them. Some of the skirts look like ones my mother would wear, others are more bohemian, none of them are a consistent style, because you have to wear something before it is yours, before it is a style.

 

Eventually one member of Mackey’s special team begins to internalize Vic’s violence. He internalizes each narrative escalation like I internalize my own stress—in the stomach. He hides his vomiting from his partners but can’t manage to hide it from Internal Affairs. Internal Affairs is that good. This character vomits blood, he vomits it everywhere but the team just can’t see. When I was sixteen I also would vomit blood. I had four ulcers the size of quarters. They lasted eight months before becoming something less physical. This character doesn’t last that long.

 

It’s 1:42 pm when Mackey starts to look like a human sized walking penis. His face is red and he just kicked in a door to a drug den. Someone yells, “WHO ARE THE SHOT-CALLERS?” and a man on the floor gives up all of the shot-callers. Mackey’s remaining team members stand over the perp as he drools and spits information. I turn to the cat that is resting next to me, ignoring the light of my laptop with half-closed eyes, and ask him where the shot-callers are. He doesn’t say anything. I am alone.

 

Captain Rawling never had a chance. When she leaves, when she is left sitting in her new home, we are not surprised. This is not a show that can allow anyone but Mackey to have anything. This is a show about how futile it is to control anything, to grasp for power. Rawling is a woman who is unwavering to fault and masculine in her demeanor but only the passive women in this show end up in a position of favor. Everyone else: Aceveda, Claudette, and Detective Wagenbach have to settle with a quiet dissatisfaction.

 

I wake up and turn my alarm off. I wake up and reach outside of the blankets. Everything is cold. I can hear the cat in the litter box taking a shit in the other room. I don’t want to get up because I never want to get up. I squirm in the bed, I feel my calves pressed together, I squeeze everything tighter. I put my hand between my legs and hold it there, not moving. I close my eyes and pretend to sleep.

 

When I wake up in the mornings I do not leave the bed for a while. Days are best entered subtly, which is why I do not close my curtains at night. It is best when the daylight filters through the mini-blinds: the day creeping in politely. Mini-blinds are good for this. You can adjust them in a way that the light filters in without anyone being able to see you’re home. Sometimes when I wake up, it’s to the sound of the trash collector. Other times I wake to the sound of my alarm, but this isn’t as pleasurable.

 

It’s 3:47 in the morning when The Shield ends. Everyone on the show has died or is dying. Vic is confined to a cubicle (the ultimate punishment) and his wife is given a home, a home away from him. She wins, or something. I dream about the ending for days after. In my dreams, Wagenbach swaggers into the police station with a posse of his own special team. He wears a do-rag, a wife beater, and white basketball shorts. I have no idea why he looks like this but I am more repulsed by him than ever. I watch him from my dream space, trying to manage his power, trying to manipulate it into something other people fear, something others don’t want to challenge but it doesn’t work. Some people just cant handle what they take and others have to retreat without taking at all.

 

 

 

 

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dirtydarwin:

A few weeks ago I posted a link to this article, and since then it has received thousands of reblogs: Report: Many Girls View Sexual Assault as Normal Behavior. 

I noticed that many of the reblogs included personal stories of sexual assault and harassment. A dialogue had been started, and I wanted to share it all, in one place. I’ve compiled a lot of the stories and input here together, with the op’s consent. These stories give names and faces to “rape culture”. These stories show that the original report is more than just a study, but an epidemic that our girls and women have to live with everyday. We need to change this. Every girl should not have a sexual assault story. 

I think that one big step towards changing the prevalence and acceptability of rape, sexual assault, and harassment in our societies is to speak up and speak out. Some of these stories are heartbreaking and personal (trigger warning!)

The order of these stories is largely random. Some are just a short piece of input, and others are long personal accounts. Many of these women are being incredibly brave in sharing their personal stories, and I applaud them for it. I encourage you to read all of these stories. 

Let them begin: 

grrrls-to-the-front:

I was sexually assaulted in high school by someone I thought was a friend and it didn’t even occur to me to report it to anyone because I thought it was just typical boy behavior.

I just remembered this happened on what a facebook group popularly called “Inappropriately Touching Your Friends Day”, and the motherfucker used that as an excuse.

I told this to my (male) best friend and he said “He didn’t even take you on a date first?” and I remember timidly responding “It wasn’t like that…”. I didn’t have a name for what happened to me.

But no, what is this rape culture you speak of?

ischemgeek:

… this is news to them? It was story of my life when I was a kid. Folks who haven’t dealt with sexual assault or harassment should go look up #Ididnotreport for more info: Not being believed/having reported before and been accused of over-reacting and/or exaggerating is a big reason why a lot of victims don’t report.

It’s why I didn’t.

femalebattlecry:

I was assaulted and harassed as a teen and both times I blamed myself AND put it away in my mind as “not as bad as it could’ve been”.  I tried to shrug it off even though it changed the way I trusted guys for years.  It wasn’t until I found myself frozen in yet another situation I didn’t want to be in that I put my foot down, did research and found out that what happened to me was most definitely sexual harassment and assault.

nostalgica:

My dad was so concerned with this he made sure I was clear of what sexual harassment was before I even began school, he told me “If someone touches you, you kick their ass” I took this to heart and fraught these unwanted approachesrather violently, every time I was told I was wrong and my dad had to come around and bark and bite for me not to get kicked off the school because I had punched a boy after he put his hand up my skirt…

xelo-tath:

I can say that I was totally a kid that thought that this shit was just “part of being female” growing up and it took until at least college for me to realize that that’s bullshit.

[read dozens more valuable, heartbreaking, and important voices after the break]

Read More

This is an expansion of a post I reblogged (and added my own stuff to it) a few days ago.  The author has taken responses and stories that were added on reblogs and created a larger discussion on the issue with our voices and experiences.  This was done with permission, and my post is in there too. o:

I wanted to share it because I think having all these women share our stories and the discussion of how normalized sexual harassment and assault is in our lives growing up is important.

Rolling through stop signs when it’s clear there are no other vehicles or pedestrians around is pretty much my only regularly practiced deviation from following the rules of the road I’m guilty of on my bike, and I’ve had some vague guilt about this, but not enough to stop when it’s clearly safe. Jason Stromberg makes a strong case for it:

There are even a few reasons why the Idaho stop might even make the roads safer than the status quo. In many cities, the low-traffic routes that are safer for bikes are the kinds of roads with many stop signs. Currently, some cyclists avoid these routes and take faster, higher-traffic streets. If the Idaho stop were legalized, it’d get cyclists off these faster streets and funnel the bikes on to safer, slower roads.

The Idaho stop, if legalized and widely adopted, would also make bikes more predictable. Currently, when a bike and a car both pull up to a four-way stop, an awkward dance often ensues. Even when cars get there first, drivers often try to give bikers the right-of-way, perhaps because they think the cyclist is going to ride through anyway.

If the cyclist logically waits, both parties end up sitting there, urging the other to go on. In the opposite (and rarer) scenario, both people assume the other will wait, leading to a totally unnecessary accident.

An Idaho stop would put an end to this madness: the first vehicle to come to the intersection always has the right of way, giving bikers a rule they’d actually follow, making them more predictable for drivers.

If all this sounds far-fetched to you, look at the data. Public health researcher Jason Meggs found that after Idaho started allowing bikers to do this in 1982, injuries resulting from bicycle accidents dropped.When he compared recent census data from Boise to Bakersfield and Sacramento, California — relatively similar-sized cities with comparable percentages of bikers, topographies, precipitation patterns, and street layouts — he found that Boise had 30.5 percent fewer accidents per bike commuter than Sacramento and 150 percent fewer than Bakersfield.

I’m still trying to process the possibility that there may be a public policy question that 49 states get wrong, and the one state that doesn’t is Idaho.

I don’t like my mother.  I have good reasons.  Yes, as an adult, I made every effort to justify and understand her behaviors, invited her to a “Now we are both adults and free of each other, can we have a relationship” mode of  being.  That was a huge mistake, she heard “I’m your idiot oldest child, the one that remembers all the shit you like to forget and/or deny; and now I invite you to fuck with me some MORE.”

Water under the bridge.  For a good while, from the ’80′s till about 2009, I told myself it didn’t matter — I had a step-mother bequeathed to me by my father’s suicide, and she seemed the mother I’d always wanted and never had.  Here and there, something was a bit strange and off with her, but I rode past it.  Until about 2009 — then the long phone chats between here and Mexico devolved somewhat.  Her speech was slurred, I worried — was she still on pain pills from the breast cancer surgery?

And then little nasty barbed comments, snide and hurtful before she got off the phone abruptly.  And of course, in 2011, she broke her hip and I went into debt running to the rescue over the worst-ever Christmas holiday break.  She was not happy to see me, barely spoke to me.  It all fell apart.  She had been a secret alcoholic for all the years I knew her.  The “cooking wine” Gallo gallon in the fridge was not for cooking.  A whole secret life full of horrors was revealed.  We went home, leaving her a clean house and all the accouterments of recovery; she would not comply with physical therapists sent to her home, finally denying them entry.  She would never walk again and denied all help.

By 2012, her last friend in the States was calling to say she was sure N. was dead or dying. I sent people, friends, to find her — she was vanished, her former rental home full of shifty eyed sorts who seemed like the type to be dealing drugs.  I’m sure she IS dead – someone in Mexico collects her Social Security and has her Wells Fargo bank account pin number.  Nobody at the bank cared — I wasn’t a blood relative, so I had no right to question.  And since her Social Security check is under a name I don’t know, I can’t really report THAT either.

So, yeah, call me ill-mothered.  Silly bit to whine over by my age — 60 — isn’t it.  But the point is all that made me unhappy to BE a mother, too.  I was competent, but not playful.  I was ever-vigilant, but no fun.  I was not abusive physically, but I yelled one helluva lot.

So, my husband bought me a pricy pretty delicate fountain pen that scares the hell out of me – with my big rough hands.  My son and his Beloved bought me sandals that send African girls to school; I must learn how to lace them.  I felt overwhelmed by both gifts, and undeserving of either.  Motherhood, the only job I ever did with the same intensity of focus and dread of failure as I approached ‘wife-hood’.

I’m not Eleanor of Aquitaine, she who reputedly claimed to be both bad wife and bad mother.  But I know how she felt.  I was clearly given to understand, back in 1977 when I wed…that doing so made me a “bad feminist”.  And my own daughter began as early as age five telling me what a bad mother I was, my mother-in-law laid out my failings as wife (laughably — it was that I didn’t not tell her son to obey HER!), so yeah — bad feminist, bad wife, bad mother.

And I get presents.  No wonder people like pets better than people — the cat thinks I am awesome for changing the catbox and filling the food bowl!  The demands of motherhood are inexplicable as they are unending…

**Oh, and extra bitterness points for other allegedly “feminist” bloggers criticizing mothers who didn’t want to be mothers, saying their kids “feel the rejection” and that those mothers should just ….what DID she say, not “ovary up” but that was the sense of it, and “do it right.”  Helluva presumption there, don’t you think?  That just because motherhood was NOT on the list of “what I’m dying to do” that you can’t do it well, and that you don’t love your children.  And when I commented as to same?  I got more condescending bullshit.

Well, fuck you, too sweetheart.  You are one more reason so many young women do NOT want to identify as feminists.  Just another critical enemy to face off with….same song, different gender.

Tagged: abuse, alcoholism, denial, families, lies, mothers' day, parenthood

So the Supreme Court says sectarian prayer before legislative meetings is AOK, cause, hey, “Pull up your big boy/girl pants and be ADULT, damn it.”  Well, alright then, SCOTUS.  That should therefore mean that the dominant paradigm religions get to put on their Depends big kid pants, too, right?  And not have melt-downs if someone offers a prayer from an alternative religion, right?

So, why does NPR label someone wanting to offer a sectarian, but very much not mainstream, religious prayer as a “rabblerouser.”  I rather agree with the “rabblerouser” in question — this ruling was about protecting prerogatives of the Christian majority.

At Wild Hunt, comments had to be closed on this topic; one commentor who rather snidely told me if I really believed prayer was enforced and made those who didn’t want to participate feel threatened for job security or promotions,, that those people should just file a lawsuit.  She obviously was not reading MY comment well.  I was speaking of the coercive atmosphere about prayer in MILITARY settings.  Servicemen and women do not have the legal right to sue their superiors OR the federal government, so that is scarcely a viable solution.  (Not that every person being impelled to silently endure prayer has that option either!) The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been fighting these battles for some time now.  Mike Weinstein lives with security issues because he gets death threats for defending American military members’ rights to freedom FROM religion.

I’m just very disenchanted by NPR’s headline.  Gee, got a biased axe to grind, NPR?  You surely didn’t describe a bunch of monotheists wanting public prayer in government as ‘rabblerousers’, did you?

Tagged: freedom-from-religion, hypocrisy, moron media, NPR, religion, wall 'twixt church and state

It’s annoying enough when non-kinky people try to pretend power dynamics don’t exist (sticking your fingers in your ears and hollering ‘I don’t see colour’ does not stop Black people from getting arrested/beaten up/murdered, and acting like it will just makes you look like an idiot), but it’s so much more aggravating when kinky people, who are supposedly all about power dynamics try to pretend there is no difference between an older, male, famous photographer and a very young, female, unknown model.

For those who don’t do Fetlife, the gist of that link is that a 19 female model arranged a photo shoot with a very well known fetish photographer (who of course she can’t name publicly thanks to Fetlife’s terms of service and (I’m assuming) a rational interest in avoiding being accused of trying to stir up drama), who then flipped his shit when she tried to bring a friend to keep an eye on her.

The really irritating part for me is that Mr Big Shot photographer and a number of the commentors on that writing all acted like the photographer was at just as much risk as the model and therefore it was completely unreasonable for her to have a spotter but not him (she decided to bring a spotter at the last minute and he didn’t have time to arrange one of his own). Honestly, it’s like they’ve spent their entire lives in a cave on Mars.

First of all, we live in a misogynistic society. This should not be any sort of news if you have ever read a book, watched a tv show, browsed the internet, or gone outside. Thanks to the misogyny we’re all steeped in it would be terrifyingly easy for even an unknown male photographer to dismiss a female model’s claims of inappropriate behaviour by saying it was a misunderstanding, she’s just overreacting/too sensitive/not cut out to be a model/unprofessional/has some mysterious grudge. On the other hand, if he were to accuse her or her spotter of stealing his equipment, he would most likely be believed without question.

We also live in a rape culture. If a male photographer sexually assaulted a female model, many people would fall all over themselves to blame her for her own assault. She certainly wouldn’t be able to go to the police if she were the kind of dirty slut who would would let a stranger tie her up and take pictures of her. If she doesn’t bring three bodyguards, perform an in-depth background check, and interview every model who has ever worked with that photographer, it must be her own fault if he decides to assault her. But if she wants to bring a friend she’s overreacting and as good as taking out full page ads accusing the photographer of being a rapist.

We’re also bad at dealing with the idea that people are not simply all good, or all bad. A brilliant photographer who creates beautiful art can also be an asshole who ignores his model’s boundaries any time he thinks he can get away with it. An activist trying to hold governments accountable for their actions can commit sexual assault. Once someone has done something good, we don’t want to believe they’ve also done anything awful. We don’t want to believe we were such bad judges of character, we don’t want to stop enjoying their art, we don’t want our view of the world to be upended, so we just quietly sweep it under the rug when someone we think is good does something terrible.

Finally, let’s not pretend age doesn’t matter. We all spend our whole childhoods being told to listen to people who are older than we are, but we’re supposed to magically throw all that conditioning off when we hit 19/21/whatever the age of majority is in your country? No, that’s not how people work. It’s hard to tell an authority figure to back the fuck up. That’s exactly why so many predators go after people who are much younger than they are – people their own age won’t take their shit.

So with all those power dynamics in play, where the fuck do you get off saying that both photographer and model are at equal risk? We of all people should understand that power dynamics do exist, that they do put some people at much greater risk than others, and that we need to pay attention to them if we’re going to treat people fairly. Come on everyone, this isn’t fucking rocket science.

An eating disorder is a mental illness.  Just because it’s a mental illness that latches onto societal ideas of thinness, beauty, womanhood, etc, doesn’t make it less of one. Telling somebody with an ED to not care about their body is like telling somebody with depression to cheer up.

A lot of people with EDs are very aware of body image issues, fatphobia, feminism, etc, and can apply it to others, but not themselves, and more feminism won’t fix it.  They need support, and sometimes that means reassuring them about their bodies during recovery, because recovering is more important than turning a single individual’s struggle with a serious illness into the hill to die on about beauty standards and society.

t-high-la420:

t-high-la420:

i…………FOUND IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ITS CONTEXT? 

KIRK WORRYING THAT HE OBJECTIFIES WOMEN. PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT AND REALLY SOAK THIS IN. 

This is actually a fairly good and simple way of explaining objectification of women.

malindalo:

xxxshakespearexxx:

• Legendary amazons (movie 2011)
• Richie Jen as Yang Zongbao
• Cecilia Cheung as Mu Guiying
• Cheng Pei-pei as She Saihua
• Liu Xiaoqing as Chai Qingyun
• Ge Chunyan as Zhou Yunjing
• Oshima Yukari as Zou Lanxiu
• Li Jing as Geng Jinhua
• Jin Qiaoqiao as Dong Yue’e
• Yang Zitong as Meng Jinbang
• Kathy Chow as Ma Saiying
• Yu Na as Huyan Chijin
• Chen Zihan as Yang Yanqi
• Liu Dong as Yang Yanying
• Xiao Mingyu as Yang Wenguang
• Zhou Xiaofei as Yang Paifeng
• Wang Ti as Yang Jinhua
• Zhao Qianyu as Little Bean
• Tang Yaolin as Little Sparrow
• Shi Fanxi as Yin Qi
• Wu Ma as Pang Ji….

This is super cool.

Based on the stories about the Generals of the Yang Family.

Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs perfumed oils. I have quite an assortment, too — tho’ I am absolutely minor league compared to a couple of friends.

BUT, the last BPAL party, last year? There was this little vial called “Baba Yaga” after the slightly malevolent Russian crone of legend. It smelled like pineapple. I shit you not, PINEAPPLE!

Good grief, did anyone at BPAL even READ any of the stories? This old broad flies through the air in a giant mortar, using her broom as oar/pestle! She has a house on chicken legs and skulls decorate her fenceposts. So that totally stupid scent was a thorn in my obsessive side.

I am soothed like any other savage beast now, however; and not by music. This is because my online buddy PJ made me a custom oil as a prize in a small contest. She made me a proper “Baba Yaga” oil! It smells of black tea and tobacco, with a hint of cherry and leather. The first whiff and I could practically SEE the old woman hunched in a chair by the fire, pipe clenched in mouth and samovar steaming beside her.

So yeah, BPAL…kiss it!

Tagged: BPAL, mythology, perfume, reading

A. Suppose there's a standard recipe for people who want to make coffee: harvest and prepare (or simply buy) some coffee beans, grind them up, boil them for a few minutes, and serve.

B. Suppose a company — let's call it Feurig — declares a patterned approach toward following this recipe:

• Provide penetrable cups of a certain size containing prepared, ground beans.
• Provide a ring sized to hold the cup, a mounted pin to puncture the bottom of the cup, a mounted injection nozzle to penetrate the top of the cup, and a hinged apparatus to automate these penetrations when a cup is inserted into the ring and covered by depressing a handle.
• Provide an encompassing container capable of heating water, detecting its temperature, and injecting that water into the cup at a rate suitable for cooking the bean dust.

C. Suppose Feurig then implements this patterned approach toward following the recipe by making cups and a device to accommodate and process them.

D. Suppose further that a competing company with an interest in making coffee notes Feurig's success in the marketplace and creates a different machine — made from different materials, employing a different heating, monitoring, and injection facility, and penetrating the cup differently.

E. Suppose even further that yet another company makes a cup different from Feurig's but consistent with the scale of the holding ring  on Feurig's machine and capable of being refilled with arbitrary contents (such as tea or sympathy).

What is the API?

The API is not the standard recipe (A) for making coffee: that's an obvious practice deeply embedded in the common culture and widely exercised in industry and among hobbyists.

The API is not the device that Feurig made as an implementation (C) of the patterned approach that Feurig had declared, and it is not the competing machine (D), and it is not the alternative cup (E).

The API is B: a patterned recipe-following approach capable of being realized in a concrete implementation.

F. Suppose now that a complex culture of innovation and competition has arisen around the API defined in B, and that a company — let's call it Deploracle — comes along and buys Feurig.

Deploracle argues that its newly acquired intellectual property extends not just to the physical brewing device its wholly owned subsidiary invented, but also to the abstract pattern to which that device and its successors (and many knock-off devices) conform to ensure interoperability, substitutability, and some other seven- or eight-syllable word.

That's sort of like claiming IP rights not only over the particular car you manufacture, but also over the general idea of exposing a latch to open a door, providing access to a seat, and presenting a wheel, some pedals, and a feedback display to enable intentional control of a driving machine– a contingent set of conventions that declare a patterned approach to the general recipe for driving a car. (Adherence to those declared conventions of capability and method ensure that many automobile manufacturers can make a car, that many people can learn to drive a car, and that people who learn to drive a car can thereby drive any car that conforms to the expectations implicit in that training.)

So Diabetes-Benz lays claim not only to its actual line of cars, but also to the very idea of doing a car in that way, simply because they declared that convention when implementing their car.

Does that seem right to you?

Who the what? © 2007-2014 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

The garden party was hosted by the Dutch Consulate, to celebrate Queen Maxima of the Netherland’s birthday. I didn’t know Holland still had a monarchy, and Beatrix? Really? Sure enough, the huge, lush garden was dotted around with kitschy plastic standees featuring a hefty woman in an orange dress doing that regal wave thing.  We were only there for the free booze.

It was getting dark, which promised to bring down the heat but also to ring the dinner bell for the evening mosquitoes, so I was thinking of leaving when I saw her come striding across the ridiculously manicured lawn. All I could think of was: how could I have been living in the humid hell-hole of Saigon and not have noticed this woman before? Not possible. Not possible.

She was at least six feet tall, lean and lithe as bamboo, with close-cropped hair bleached a dazzling white.  A cap of neat frost that gleamed against her dark, dark skin. Her face, her neck, her shoulders were carved from some secret, precious wood. The way her tendons stretched her skin, the way the lines formed at the corners of her wide mouth when she smiled. Her lips wet with plum lipstick the exact colour of her fluttering, oversized silk shirt. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

“Who is that?” I asked Nicolas. When he didn’t answer, I elbowed him. “Who the fuck is that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He clucked his tongue and dabbed at the beer I’d jostled onto his evening jacket.

“Bullshit. You know everyone.” And it was true. Nicolas knew everyone. He was the Spanish economic attache and the biggest slut in the tiny expat community in Saigon.  That was saying something because, as diplomatic backwaters go, Saigon was the back of beyond. There was literally nothing to do but drink, play golf and fuck.

“I can’t remember her name. She’s the girlfriend of that English lady lawyer.” That explained much; Nicolas would never remember the name of a woman he didn’t think he could bed. “Es lesbiana.”

“Pues, mejor. Introduce me,” I demanded, dragging him by the arm across the grounds, close to where she stood, holding court and a flute of something in her hand.

“I didn’t know you liked girls,” he said, quietly. “We could have a threesome. I know this French chick who’d be up for that.”

“I’m never going to fuck you. You know that, right?”  I whispered.

He sighed theatrically. “You’re a user and a tease.”

“Exactly. Now introduce me.”

“How can I make an introduction when I don’t know her name?”

I stopped, feeling my kitten heels sink into the sodden grass. “You’re a bloody diplomat. Think of something.”

I smoked a cigarette and waited in the evening gloom while he traipsed off to ask around. Someone switched the hanging lanterns on and I watched her talk and laugh and sip her drink and use her broad, long-fingered hands to envelope her listeners in whatever spell she was weaving. I couldn’t stop watching her. I wanted to be in that circle, within reach of those hands, and the perfume I was so sure she wore.

Nicolas returned with another glass of beer. “Jude. Her name is Jude.”

“Alright, come on then,” I said, tugging his arm.

“Fuck that. I’m bored. I’m leaving with the Columbians. Come with us. It’ll be fun.”

The ‘Columbians’ were not a drug cartel.  The Restrepo family, a brother and two identical twin sisters, owned a vast coffee estate up in the highlands above Daklak.  They were rumoured to be unnaturally close, to put it politely. Having sat across a table from them for a whole evening at some over-priced Australian gala, I was fairly certain the rumours were true.

“You prick. Introduce me first.”

“Introduce yourself.”  And he was off.

I stood there in the dark garden, with the winking lantern lights, having my ankles ravaged by mosquitoes, watching her, listening to her talk and laugh. She had a laugh like spun sugar. Pulling off into sweet threads and then breaking abruptly when it got too thin.

The crush was paralyzing. I couldn’t find the courage to enter circle of light she gave off.

Not then.

(continued here)

…and I realized I had an opportunity to present you with an “SEK scenario” before the inevitable inevitably happened.

Keep your eyes peeled on the evening news, friends, I have a feeling it’s going to be an interesting evening.

The documents were taken from at least 24 supersecret compartments that stored them on computers, each of which required a password that a perpetrator had to steal or borrow, or forge an encryption key to bypass.

Once Mr. Snowden breached security at the Hawaii facility, in mid-April of 2013, he planted robotic programs called "spiders" to "scrape" specifically targeted documents.

This excerpt from Edward Jay Epstein's WSJ article sounds awfully sinister and, well, advanced. Not just compartments, but supersecret, Houdini-defying compartments! Except that "supersecret" just means "above secret"– top secret — and "compartments" aren't physical devices but logical, taxonomic infosec categories.

But robotic programs, of all things… in fact, robotic spiders! Oh, wait. He's talking about mundane bulk copy utilities and scrapers. Nevermind.

However one feels about Snowden's ideological self-presentation and whatever case can be made that he was/is under the control of foreign intelligence entities and using whistleblowing as a cover, I don't think this sort of rhetorical obfuscation is appropriate. The strength of a case should depend on its substance and validity, not on frosting applied through orc mischief or ignorance.

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This is me about teaching trans-inclusion and being insistent that we do not and will not, never ever, throw other trans people (or other marginalized people) under the bus, play into heterosexist/cissexist norms, do the “sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears”, or any other kind of construction to soft sell trans positive education to cis people.  Those are the weapons of my oppressors.  I do not need their narratives.  I refuse to ever use them.

A cowboy poet/singer in the early 20th century talking about the glories of evaporated milk:

Carnation milk, best in the lan’
Comes to the table in a little red can.
No teats to pull, no hay to pitch
Just punch a hole in the sonofabitch.

Carnation was founded in 1899, so I assume this was relatively soon after it. It’s quoted in David Nye’s Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies, but without a date.

Canned food was central to the cowboy diet. For that matter, canned food dominates most food narratives of the 19th century American West. The idea of living off the land was mostly a myth. Living off the land is really hard. Opening canned food is very easy. Which would you choose.

It's official, Michael Sam is now the first openly gay player to be drafted by an NFL franchise, the St Louis Rams. After he was picked in the seventh round of the NFL draft, he did what any person would do, he kissed his significant other. In the aftermath of this completely normal human activity, the sound of heads exploding must have echoed throughout certain regions of the U.S.





With that kiss, Michael Sam has utterly ruined watching big, muscular guys in tight spandex getting physical with each other every Sunday after church! FOREVER!!!

Here's wishing a long, successful career to Mr Sam, and a happy life together for the couple.

Cross-posted at Rumproast.

The reason I don’t like this way of educating about trans people is that it’s very essentialist and also incorrect.  We’re assigned a sex by what’s between our legs at birth (and sometimes that’s ambiguous and doctors will want to change that to fit societal definitions of what’s “normal” -_-) but that doesn’t really mean anything about us, or even about our genetics (which is often where cissexist people will go to when they talk about “sex”), because surgery can change what’s between your legs, and intersex conditions can mean what’s between your legs may not “match” your chromosomal make up by society’s gender standards.

But more importantly is that we don’t make the distinction between sex and gender in every day life.  It’s conflated all the time, the two are used as synonyms, and to pretend they’re not is naive and unrealistic.  When you teach “sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears”, a lot of cis people will just go “oh okay, then I’m referring to your sex, not gender.”  Teaching it just encourages people to see trans people as “really” our assigned sex who just THINK we’re our gender.   Like “okay, you’re a woman, but you’re also a male, because that’s your sex, not gender.”  It leads to people just lumping trans women and cis men together as “males”, and just substituting “male” for when they’d call us “men”, and pretending they’re NOT being misgendering asshats. 

It’s a bad construction, and a horrible way to teach about trans people.  It introduces misconceptions and assumptions that you then have to UNDO later, so I think it’s best to not start down that road in the first place.  A much better & simpler way is to talk about how we’re all assigned a sex at birth by doctors who look between our legs, because that shows just how arbitrary and based on human judgement and constructions of gender norms it is.  And that some of us feel we match that assignment, and some of us don’t.

A lot of the way trans inclusion is traditionally taught is on the idea that trans people are not the sex/gender we say we are, but please be nice and say we are, and I don’t abide by that.

My recent ask/answer post got me thinking about how similar the misgendering I get for being trans is to how white people ask me where I’m “really” from.  In both cases, answering truthfully or even “officially” doesn’t satisfy them because they’re not really asking the question they’re claiming.  When people ask me where I’m from, they don’t mean where I live, or even where I was born, and when people ask me what gender I “really” am, or “so you were born a boy?”, they don’t mean my identity, my surgical status, or what’s on my birth certificate/ID (which is female).  They already KNOW more or less what the answer is (my ethnic background is from East Asia, my assigned sex is not what’s on my ID), and they want me to acknowledge this, not just to confirm their curiosity, but also to put me in my place that they don’t believe I “belong” in Canada, and that they don’t believe I am really my gender.  They believe I’m “really” from China, like they believe I’m “really” male, and ultimately it’s about how it doesn’t matter to them how I define myself, THEY are going to tell me what really matters about me and my identity.

This is a story that the Rude Pundit has told before, but, heck, that was probably years ago, so let's tell it again: It was the Rude Pundit's sophomore year of high school, an October day, possibly... probably... hard to remember. But this public school always started the day the same way: we were in homeroom, we got the announcements through the speakers, and then the announcer said, "Please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance." We took our oath to the fabric on a stick on the wall. Then the announcer said, "Please remain standing for a moment of silent prayer."

Now, south Louisiana being mainly Catholic, it would inevitably involve most of the students bowing their heads, muttering the Lord's Prayer or some such shit, and then crossing themselves. Most mornings, the Rude Pundit would stand there, wondering why the fuck he had to remain standing since he had no intention of praying. Sometimes, when he saw he was getting the stink eye from one person or another, he'd try to cross himself, although no one had ever taught him, so it looked like Jesus was more stoned to death than crucified.

But once, just once, he had a big biology test the next period, and he wanted to squeeze in just a little more studying. So he pledged his allegiance and then, thinking that he couldn't be compelled to pray, he sat down and got out his science notebook. A sharp voice came from the front of the classroom saying his full name. It was the homeroom teacher, who's probably dead now, but, hell, let's call her "Ms. Shithead" to protect her identity. She shout-whispered, "You stand up right now!" The Rude Pundit jumped up as everyone looked on at his heathen ass. (Note: The Rude Pundit hadn't fully committed to atheism at this point. If asked his religion, he'd say, "I'm guess I'm an agnostic because I don't care." When didn't feel like a discussion, he'd say, "Jewish." Either way, making the sign of the cross was not on his radar.)

After the prayer, Ms. Shithead asked the Rude Pundit to come to her desk. She explained that it was disrespectful for him to sit down while everyone was praying. "But I thought it was voluntary," he said. It is, she said, but even so, it's just good manners to stay on his feet. If he had thought that causing trouble was worth the effort, he might have responded, "So it's not voluntary." But, fuck it, he figured. He'd just fuckin' stand if it meant so goddamn much to everyone.

In other words, he was coerced into participating, whether he liked it or not.

The Supreme Court decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway certainly doesn't apply to morning prayers at public schools, but it's a step closer to making it possible, as Elena Kagan implies in her dissent. "Pray away at your town meetings, motherfuckers," said the majority. There's nothing wrong with it. In fact, according to Anthony Kennedy's opinion, it's as American as apple pie that you're forced to eat, even if you're allergic to apples.

Look at the wistful way Kennedy frames why a prayer at the top of a meeting of the town's legislative body is cool, even if those prayers are 99% Christian and often mention Jesus:

"In the town of Greece, the prayer is delivered during the ceremonial portion of the town's meeting. Board members are not engaged in policymaking at this time, but in more general functions, such as swearing in new police officers, inducting high school athletes into the town hall of fame, and presenting proclamations to volunteers, civic groups, and senior citizens. It is a moment for town leaders to recognize the achievements of their constituents and the aspects of community life that are worth celebrating." And, surely, you can't just honor someone without making sure they understand that Jesus is the reason for, well, Christ on a cracker, everything.

Kennedy goes on, "By inviting ministers to serve as chaplain for the month, and welcoming them to the front of the room alongside civic leaders, the town is acknowledging the central place that religion, and religious institutions, hold in the lives of those present. Indeed, some congregations are not simply spiritual homes for town residents but also the provider of social services for citizens regardless of their beliefs." No one doubts that everyone's gotta have their hoodoo to get 'em through this brutalizing world - some drink, some jack-off to midget porn, some worship Jesus - but Kennedy himself quotes several prayers spoken at the Greece, New York, town meetings that specifically reference God, Jr. or Christianity. Kennedy's solution: "Chill out, dudes. It's just a prayer." (That's not an exact quote.)

Justice Alito concurs that it's not an inconvenience to hear someone say a Christian prayer. What is an inconvenience is to tell chaplains and other prayer leaders to be non-denominational and inclusive in their praying: "[A]s our country has become more diverse, composing a prayer that is acceptable to all members of the community who hold religious beliefs has become harder and harder. It was one thing to compose a prayer that is acceptable to both Christians and Jews; it is much harder to compose a prayer that is also acceptable to followers of Eastern religions that are now well represented in this country. Many local clergy may find the project daunting, if not impossible, and some may feel that they cannot in good faith deliver such a vague prayer." Yeah, we wouldn't wanna put them out, now, would we?

Alito also cites the lack of non-Christians in Greece, which is a suburb, more or less, of Rochester, which is filthy with heathen Jews and Muslims, as a reason not to bother. So we can presume that Alito, a Catholic, would have no problem if an imam offered a prayer to Allah to start every town meeting in Lackawanna, New York.

Kennedy, Alito, and Clarence Thomas, writing his usual "You think that's crazy? Lemme show you crazy" concurrence, all seem to believe that because the Founders did it, it's cool. Do we need to break out the slavery argument here? The justices also believe that, as long as no one is forcing you to pray or trying to convert you directly, it's all good.

Public prayer is not a blithe, harmless, almost passive activity. It separates the believers from the non-believers, and it always implies that one should be behaving in a certain way. It forces you to conform or resist in settings where such pressures need not exist. Yeah, it's a fuck of a lot easier to say, "Kiss my ass. I'm sittin' out your prayer" in a large city. But in a small town, like Greece, or, perhaps, in the future, in a Southern classroom, it's an imposition on the freedom of others who want to go to secular things without having someone slap you in the face with their Christ butt plug.

The Rude Pundit has said it before and will say it again: "Freedom of religion" also means "freedom from religion."

Quick P.S. here: You know who offered an amicus brief in support of the praying rights of the Grecian people? The Obama administration. Yeah, the Solicitor General pretty much laid out everything Kennedy needed to say, so, you know, obviously the next State of the Union will start with an Islamic call to prayer.