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Sexual Perversity in Australia

August 20, 2006 / / 5 comments

Back in 1998 I visited Australia for a month (Queensland to be precise). We visited a zoo, and this particular zoo had all the pervy animals in the country all gathered together.

I still don’t like to talk about the sexual assault by the emu. I mean, I know it’s just a big bird, but it was a big bird that made inappropriate advances upon my person.

Then there was the horny kangaroo, who did not assault me, but chased the rooey ladies about the enclosure, as a result of which “horse” is no longer the word I think of to complete the phrase “hung like a…” Golly.

But I know my audience. You all want to hear about the lesbian peahen.
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Makeup, the Male Gaze, and So What?

July 29, 2006 / / 14 comments

Arthur and I got into a conversation about makeup. Specifically, “should” women wear makeup. And that morphed into a conversation about the male gaze.

Understanding the male gaze is probably the most abstract and hard to grasp part of feminism. Equal rights, equal wages; everyone gets that. Double standards about sexuality and sexual freedom, about social freedom, outspokenness and aggression; not hard to define and explore. But how we look at things, how we display or do not display ourselves, how we use our eyes and images to create subject and object; these are pretty highfalutin.

I am not opposed to the idea that the male gaze is hard-wired. We certainly know other species in which one gender draws the gaze of the other; peacocks are prettier than peahens. On the other hand, male and female gorillas and chimps look more or less alike, and I’d wager I’m more a chimp than a peahen. (Remind me to tell the story about the lesbian peahen someday.)
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I Don’t Remember My Vacation

July 25, 2006 / / 2 comments

Not “don’t remember” because it wasn’t memorable, or “don’t remember” because of mind-altering substances, but “don’t remember” because I was at peace.

I floated through my vacation. I allowed days to pass into nights and then into days. I left my expectations home. I was One with the experience of festival.

Vacations built on expectations are no fun. Maybe more memorable, but no fun. They are driven by an inner pressure instead of an inner peace. You absolutely wouldn’t guess, knowing me, that I have a clue about inner peace. I get angry, I get snide, I get worked up. But I know about expectation and I know about attachment, and I know how to let go of both.

So I have moments. Hot sun. Parties. Drinking with Kate. Cuddling with Larry. Hugs. Lots of hugs. Cooking the best meal I ever cooked; maybe not the tastiest meal, but the most praiseworthy one. Because I have never cooked for a dozen people before, and they all loved it, even with the restrictions of camp cooking, and I have never felt so delighted.

Since I’m always up first anyway, I had camp coffee ready every morning. By the time the other three coffee drinkers staggered out into the light, My teeth were brushed, my hair was de-scarified, and I was handing them their full cups of fresh hot java. Teh yum. And it felt so good to do that, to be the morning nurturer. Felt balanced, what with Charlie being the evening nurturer.

In the end I came home feeling like I had a wonderful time, but lacking the means to describe that time.

Dating Normativity

July 12, 2006 / / 6 comments

Over at Alas (A Blog), Rachael linked to a bunch of blogging about interracial relationships. I was struck by this very sharp observation:

One thing that really gets me frustrated when I read about interracial relationships [is] the whole normativity of same race relationships. When people marry or date people of the same race, their racial views are not interrogated; the racial nature of their relationship is not questioned or noticed largely because it is considered normal.

This struck me very strongly. In part, because one argument in favor of interracial relationships is that they should be normal; there should not be a special term for them. Mostly, though, because I think you get into a place in life where you want to feel normative. You want to get home, and kick off your shoes, and not be Other. Not be Interesting.

In a blog entry that lists reasons that black people should date each other, Racial Realist includes:

Shared Experiences/ Shared Worldview – For anyone who wants a life partner/ soulmate (as opposed to a fling/ relationship driven by enhancing one’s status), it’s natural to seek out an individual who has been through/ is going through what one has been through/is going through

I get that. It’s comforting.
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Story of P.

June 30, 2006 / / 6 comments

While in Sao Paulo, I did a bunch of Tarot readings. I did five in a row that hit on all cylinders, just dead-on stuff: “You’re in a legal conflict with a man who has disappointed you, and you’re involved in athletics” were my first words to a woman who then revealed she was a gym teacher in the midst of a divorce.

Then P. comes in and I read the first cards.

“No” she says.

I read the next cards.

“Not at all, I just don’t relate to that.”

Next cards.

“In fact,” she says, “It’s the opposite.”

You get that fear in the pit of your stomach. Every reader knows that fear. » Read more..

When did we become so harsh?

June 8, 2006 / / 12 comments

As a culture, America has become an astonishingly unforgiving place. The trend towards mandatory minimum sentences was perhaps when I first noticed it. But nowhere are we less forgiving than in regard to sexuality. In Tom’s post about Plan B, a commenter said:

Suck it up. Either have the kid, or have the abortion. Either way, George Bush was not in the bedroom…

Suck it up?

Would she who is without an impulsive moment please cast the first stone?

Plan B offers women a non-invasive, non-surgical means of preventing pregnancy. Our cultural answer seems to be, well fuck that. Can’t have it be easy.

And while perhaps this particular commenter isn’t a Puritan, doesn’t this attitude come from the idea that if we make mistakes we should suffer? If we have a sexually impulsive moment, it’s only right that we should “suck up” the most painful, expensive, and long-term consequences possible? Surely there should be no Get Out of Pregnancy Free cards!

Because none of us nice women have had sex on impulse. Without birth control. Just for fun. (And remember, the woman in this article had sex with her husband. I’m told even Puritans approve of that.)

What if we lived in a world where people sometimes behaved foolishly, smiled ruefully, and moved on? Without losing friends, respect, or having to undergo surgery? What if, when we hear of someone making a mistake, we all paused to reflect on our own mistakes?

I think I’d like that world.

Men Aren’t Really From Mars

March 8, 2006 / / 5 comments

Today is International Women’s Day, as well as Blog Against Sexism Day. I had something else vaguely planned for today, but these thoughts started running through my mind late last night.

When I was a teenager, I knew a couple of girls, my own age, who were lesbian separatists. When I first met them, I thought this meant they just wanted to live apart from men. But no! They believed that the human race was originally female. They believed that men were invaders from outer space, who had stolen women’s natural partheogenic abilities to control us. They believed if we could kill off or drive away all men, partheogenesis would reemerge on its own.

Even when I was fourteen, this made my brain hurt. Besides being, y’know, whacky, I thought it was pretty high risk. I mean, what if you did get rid of all the men, and the partheogenesis thing didn’t happen?

But what I want to say here is: That isn’t feminism.

Isn’t.

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Why are some people so clueless?

February 28, 2006 / / 13 comments

Particularly, clueless about Teh Gay. I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, but misty at Shakespeare’s Sister alerted me to this completely insane story.

I’ll give you the short version: Nine women are suing Clay Aiken’s record label for leading them to believe he was straight.

They allege that employees of RCA, Sony/BMG, and Aiken himself “engaged in collusion to prevent public disclosures they believed might be harmful to their product”.

The angry ladies go on to state, “This is tantamount to a manufacturer concealing information about a defective product. Therefore these actions were both unfair and deceptive to consumers.”

A spokeswoman for the group says, “As consumers, we feel ripped off. It is obvious now that the private Clay is very different from the manufactured packaged public Clay that was marketed to us.”

Okay, there’s just lots and lots that’s dumb about this, and frankly, my brain cells are popping like bubble wrap just trying to think it through.

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House, M.D.

February 26, 2006 / / 8 comments

Why is the character of Gregory House so popular? He’s acerbic, insulting, crude, and self-absorbed. By every conventional scale, he’s unlikable. Yet the show is enormously popular, and has won Emmy awards for writing and performance.

The extras on the DVD for season 1 include some speculation, that rests in the notion that House is popular because he speaks his mind, and doesn’t care what anyone thinks, and we all wish we could be like that.

Nah. Homeless people living on street corners don’t appear to care and many speak their minds quite freely indeed. We don’t all envy them.

Here’s the deal. House is the best damn doctor ever. So good that he can get away with rotten behavior, bad manners, constant insubordination, and even ethics violations. Hell, even breaking and entering, if it’s for the good of the patient.

It’s the so-damn-good part that is so enormously appealing. The guy is so good at what he does that he’s given a pass. And that’s what we all long for. The fantasy is, I’m the best at what I do, therefore you have to put up with me. The fantasy is, I don’t have to suppress who I am, I don’t have to kiss ass and swallow shit, I don’t have to obey, because my wonderfulness is enough. It’s a compelling fantasy; it’s the same one that fueled the show M*A*S*H, where Hawkeye Pierce was both invaluable and insubordinate. It’s the fantasy that fueled the dot com boom, where brash young techies could wear sneakers and no socks to work, as long as they got the job done.

At the bottom of the whizkid fantasy is a more universal wish. We all want to be loved, appreciated, and admired for exactly who we are. We all suspect that, if the facade we wear were stripped away, we would no longer be loved. In life, we fear, we are one bit of misplaced honesty away from rejection at every moment. House’s goodness outweighs his inner evil; something proven each week as he miraculously saves yet another life. Since we all have that inner evil, we long to be reassured that in us, too, our goodness outweighs it.

AND it’s a damn good show.

Why is there exactly one answer?

February 24, 2006 / / 7 comments

In the abortion debate, sooner or later someone will bring up the “when life begins” canard. Now, on one level it’s bullshit, because the whole idea that “pro-life” is “preserving the life of the unborn” is not pro-life. It’s not. If it was pro-life then the lives of adult women would be important. If it was pro-life then unmarried women who had babies would be celebrated rather than shamed. But I’ve posted about that before. Here, I am posting about something different.

When does life begin? We cannot talk about it without dancing on the edge of the soul or spirit, and that’s pretty religious, even for non-religious people. I do think this whole “pro-life” (insert eye-roll here) discussion comes perilously close to establishment, because it takes some religions’ views over others’. But moreover, we’re working from a rigidly monotheistic paradigm.

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