Depression, or simply being awake?

Warning: This entry has no real theme or focus or conclusion but does make excellent time going nowhere in resplendent self-pity.

As far as types of feminists go, I’m definitely not one who believes that everything is socialized.  “Nature loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger” makes sense to me. I think about this a lot. Why are some people so ambitious? Why are some people bouncy and good-natured and see things through bubbly colored glasses? Why can some people paint beautiful pictures and others can’t? Why can some people sing and others can’t?

Maybe it’s more like “Life’s not fair,” or “Nature loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger, and life’s not fair.”

Like, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t depressed. Even when I was happy, I was sad. Yes, I grew up in a “dysfunctional” household (whatever with that shit), and my parents were both negative and miserable, but there are people who grow up in similar circumstances who aren’t depressed. And there are those who grow up in more well-adjusted homes who are depressed, or who kill people. Of course it’s much more likely to be males killing people, so that’s one argument for socialization to be sure. But a lot of men kill only themselves, without going out of their way to shoot up a field of country music fans before they do it.

They say that depression is anger turned inwards. Maybe. Probably. I don’t know. I was the “nice” child in my family. I didn’t mouth off or rebel like my younger sister. I was trained to please and it seemed my “nature” to not be confrontational. And I’m still that way to some extent. I don’t want to please anybody but I really don’t enjoy the feeling of displeasing anybody. Why? Why is this still the case?

My dad was and is a domineering, sexist asshat. An angry one, too. He thought and still thinks that because he is/was a good-looking tall and intelligent white man that he’s the one who really knows what’s going on and that somehow his perception of reality is accurate. (Well, we all think that to some extent, don’t we?) He’s angry because he didn’t get what he thought he was entitled to out of life, being so special and all.

When I started becoming an extra super beautiful patriarchy-approved fuckhole when I was about 12 it became a source of pride for both my parents. And I took the bait, hook line and sinker. It’s really almost impossible not to. It was pleasing to them. The way I looked reflected well on them I guess? When my dad’s creepy hick boss would come over for summer barbeques and stare at me the entire time and comment about how beautiful I was like a broken record, my dad would respond with “Yeah, yeah, gonna have to get the shotgun out pretty soon.” (I actually think it made my parents uncomfortable, but what were they going to do? He was my dad’s boss. WHAT A FUCKING ASSHOLE, huh?)

And it was the first thing out of everyone’s mouth when they met me or saw me, with my sister standing right there. And when I try/tried to talk about this to anybody, the typical responses are/were either A) “Everyone should have such problems! Do you know how many girls would love to be beautiful?” (this is usually from men), or B) a look of irritation that floods the person’s pupils like black food dye squirt into clear water, and there might as well be ticker tape running across their foreheads — “…What a conceited bitch…..What a conceited bitch…..What a conceited bitch..” Why? Why is this the reaction?

Well, the two or three people who may read this know why, but it’s so buried and so normalized and I have internalized it so much: that’s my worth. That’s your sacred duty and YOU LUCKED OUT, BITCH! And besides, you’re not that pretty!

So who are you when age makes mincemeat of it? What sustains you? Who have you become? What have you given? What bonds have you forged with other human beings?
Who will bury you? Who will mourn you? In what landfill will your baby pictures go to disintegrate?

This is what I’m struggling with, and it’s shallow and yet it’s not. It’s on a continuum of misogyny. It’s on the continuum of how men keep women subordinate. Because all my life, what I looked like is what people treated me as. And people assumed I was stupid, or knew I wasn’t stupid at all but said that I was anyway because I needed to be kept in line. My talents, my intelligence… I don’t think those things really ever mattered to very many people, least of all me. Add this to my “nature” (loaded gun and environmental triggers) and I’m not sure how it could all have gone any other way than it did. And it makes me rage.

So now I’m standing here in my late 40s, having gone through the meat grinder of men and been celibate for a number of years now, and I don’t have children, and I don’t really have friends, and I can’t even go to a fucking AA women’s meeting without a trans identified male asshole taking up the entire meeting talking about himself. Tell me this isn’t real.

But I digress. I started out talking about nature and nurture and personality and it’s because I’m a depressive, and I don’t know how to change it. I’m an isolator and I don’t like most people. And I see life as a big hopeless cesspool, and I don’t get much joy out of it. I know I felt the beauty in life at one time—it may not have been happy beauty, but it was beauty—but now, meh. The male of our species is so colossally stupid it defies belief.

And all this is just whining, and the MRAs would love it and say, “See what feminism did for you? Now you’re alone and hardy ha ha ha aren’t you sad and serves you right!” They would also say I rode the cock carousel, which I find amusing despite how ugly the sentiment is.

And now it’s over! How did I fall off the cock carousel and is there a way to get back on?*

But if you asked me now if I could do it differently, I’m not sure I would. I saw the writing on the wall with men at a very young age. I saw what so so so so so so many of them are truly like. (I think all young girls are treated like shit, whether conventionally attractive or not.) How do so many women forget? How do they reconcile what they see and experience with this expectation that they’ll marry one of the assholes? Why do many people become uncomfortable when they’ve realized I’ve never married or had children? “But you’re so beautiful!” (This is common—normal—for people to say.) How could a beautiful female person not be married? Something must be really wrong with her. Or else she’s a serious bitch. What did Ben Stiller’s character say in Something about Mary in reference to Mary possibly being single years later? Oh yeah, he said, “Girls like Mary don’t say single.” Totally normalized.

My dad is totally disgusted by what I’ve done. Resigned, but angry I think. At me. My sister and I will probably never have a non-hostile relationship. Maybe I’m not normal. That’s what I think as I’m out and about in the world, running errands, watching people at the grocery store, at Target. I’m the lonely shopper you see in T.J. Maxx, filling her cart with shitty candles she throws away, later stopping to observe girls through the window of Sephora, the groups of them putting on makeup together, high on shimmer and possibility.  (That’s when I feel that all hope is lost for female liberation the most, seriously. The beauty business is almost as bad as porn, in my opinion, for the messages it gives girls, and I’m fucking involved in it, and I come home and wash the slime off and cry.)

How do I change now? How do I pay my bills? And so on and so forth, but there are 14-year-old girls doing youtube videos about how to apply $50 foundation with a brush! Why does anybody need a fucking brush? And why are14-year-old girls wearing foundation and making videos about it? And why do they have hundreds of thousands of followers and views? Just watch some of these videos some time, if you want to see how bad it is. Childhood for them is a but a summer before the self objectification becomes everyday living. It makes me want to rage vomit with empowerment. Maybe I’m the normal one.

I once went to a radical cocktail hour here in NYC and there were overweight lesbians with body odor there. Literally. I didn’t give a shit, but I was not imagining things when I felt a couple of them looking at me with…what? Contempt? Resentment? Bewilderment?

It’s just so easy to see how liberal feminism won. If you don’t embrace the choose your choice narrative as to why you’re wearing makeup then you’re simply a hypocrite. (But let’s all talk about how we live in a rape culture and yet still get very upset when anybody dares see and speak the connection between that and the beauty business and porn.) Meanwhile, NARS has names for blush like “Orgasm” and “Deep Throat.” Smashbox has names for lipstick like “Safe Word” and IGK hair care has a product named “Hot Girls.” And on and on. I’d say half the product and shade names are named after some aspect of sex and/or work to sell porn culture. It’s not that “sex sells;” it’s that sex is forced on us and there is no alternative, no other channel to watch, not really.

God am I rambling.

Wanna hear something stupid I did? I quit my job three weeks ago without having another one. I had a male boss who was making me crazy and I was exhausted and I just resigned. I’ve never done anything quite that irrational in regard to employment. I think I may be losing my mind. I advise against doing this because not only does one need money to live, but because it’s extremely depressing and disorienting. I’m a loner as it is but this, this not working, is really outer limits. Why do you think I’m actually writing in this thing, and about my personal feelings no less? I have too much time for brain spinning.

What I am going to do about it? What am I going to do about it? I can’t change the world; what am I going to do about it? Bleh. Tomorrow is another day.

* s/

by Categories: Buy this shit and be empowered, General blah blah, Patriarchy, Uncategorized 5 Comments

I’m a shitty blogger in that I don’t post but every two months, but here’s a little story for my three readers

As some of you may or may not have guessed, I live in a big metropolis. Trump has been a figure here for many, many years, and New Yorkers mostly despise him. So tonight I got off at the Union Square station because I had to return something to a clothing store right there. Union Square is “downtown” and kind of central and crawling with NYU students and all kinds of other people in general. It’s where demonstrations take place and makeshift memorials spring up (9/11, replete with the entire city being plastered with “missing” posters) and the Farmer’s Market is there and there’s a huge Whole Paycheck and a Trader Joe’s and people skateboard and smoke pot and the like. It’s not quite as much that scene as say, Washington Square Park is, but it has a heavily young vibe and it’s a real cluster fuck as far as congestion goes, but I digress.

As I was walking through the station I came upon the scene in the image: hundreds and hundreds of Post-it notes hating on Trump.

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Who knows who started the project, but there were Post-its and Sharpies for all. I took a few pictures and then I thought “What the heck? Why not leave my own note?” But my Post-it is not the point of my story. The point of my story is that as I was standing there writing “WAKE UP, WOMEN!! MEN HATE US!” the young man who was unbeknownst to me standing right behind me, said, “Um, Miss, excuse me. I don’t hate women.” He was about 23, white-ish of some kind, with dark scraggly hair. He looked like he was just hanging out.

This was me: Ignore Ignore Ignore Ignore
Him: “Miss, I don’t hate women. I don’t hate women.”
Ignore Ignore Ignore Ignore.

Him louder and getting annoyed: “I don’t hate women.”

There are so many things I could have said at that moment, but all that I could muster was an angry “Don’t talk to me!” Then I went back to writing my Post-it, pissed off now.

“REALLY?!” he said. “REALLY? Holy shit. Who’s the hater?”

This probably could have been an educational moment, right? I could have turned to him and said, “YOU ARE DOING EXACTLY WHAT SHOWS THAT YOU HATE US. YOU ARE MAKING THIS ABOUT YOU. YOU ARE #NOTALLMENNING ME IN REAL LIFE AND GETTING MAD AT ME THAT I’M NOT RESPONDING TO YOU. YOU ARE DEMANDING THAT I STOP WHAT I’M DOING AND DO WHAT, EXACTLY? SAY, “OKAY, YOU DON’T HATE WOMEN, SO EVERYTHING’S OKAY NOW.  DON’T YOU SEE WHAT YOU ARE DOING??!!!!”

But I didn’t do that. I walked away and finished my Post-it elsewhere, and hung it up next to the “all you need is a love wall” Post-it.

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And now I’m going back and forth in waves of feeling pissed off and feeling bad that I snapped at a whippersnapper. Was it because I look so young and stylish and hip for my age 😉 ?? (I mean, I was wearing metallic gold shoes and a leopard coat.) Or is it just because I was female and he was male and he had to SET ME STRAIGHT, flexing his entitlement and privilege to open his pie hole to me in a way that he wouldn’t have to another male, or I’d guess even a black man (but maybe a black woman???) writing a Post-it that said “WAKE UP BLACK PEOPLE. WHITE PEOPLE HATE YOU!” (And of the Post-i ts I read, the vast, vast majority of them were about racism and “bigotry” and white supremacy. Very few of them mentioned women. It’s so fucking depressing.)

And that’s my story for tonight. Burn it all down.

Oh, and P.S. A woman in an AA meeting I went to in a chi chi part of town tonight said, “I’m just thrilled that he won! He’s going to turn this country around. And I’m part of the 1% and I’m proud of it!!”
YES, SHE SAID THAT. I don’t care that I’m not supposed to repeat things I hear in meetings. I’m sick of this shit.

by Categories: Patriarchy, Sexism, WE'RE FUCKED 4 Comments

Open letter to the National Post: resistance to gender identity laws is about much more than political correctness

When it comes to preferred pronouns and gender identity, there’s more at stake than just transgender rights and freedom of expression. For the feminists critiquing this ideology, resistance isnR…

Source: Open letter to the National Post: resistance to gender identity laws is about much more than political correctness

by Categories: Identity Politics Leave a comment

Gender-ful sobriety

Well, shit. It’s been weeks since I’ve written anything, here at least. I’ve been squatting in the comments section of a Feminist Current article, wherein the pole dancing community has spent a great deal of energy defending pole dancing as a super empowering enterprise. Curse third wave feminism all to hell.

Speaking of third wave feminism, I once again experienced first hand the encroaching culture of the gender queer world, and once again it was in an AA meeting. But before I get to that, here are two good things that happened today that made me smile/laugh in regard to the reality of the material world:

  1. As I was heading into the women’s locker room at the Y (where a sign on the door still gloriously says, “Children of the opposite gender [sic] over the age of five are not allowed in the women’s locker room,”—or something to that effect—I can’t remember the exact phrasing), a man/father was outside the locker room with a little boy, clearly waiting for the mother to emerge. Just as I was entering, the man said to the little boy, “No, you can’t go in there. There are rules about seeing naked people.” Who knew that such a thing would ever make me smile? I wanted to high five him.
  1. Before my dance class started, an instructor came in to get his iPod, which was hooked up to the speakers and blasting Motown hits. (He’d taught the class before ours or something, and must have stepped out of the room to attend to something else.) So he comes in and says, “Hope you guys have enjoyed it.” And then he said, “I mean ‘gals’.” And then, “Oh, but there’s one guy in here. In Spanish the presence of one male (!) turns it automatically to ‘ellos’ instead of ‘ellas’.” And then one woman said something like, “Of course it does,” quite sarcastically, and a few of us laughed. Yay!

So back to the AA meeting. I walked in to a supposed women’s meeting, and there was a guy, distributing copies of the Big Book around the tables. Yes, a male. He was just gay. Just a gay male. He was dressed in “male” clothing and while he did have a little makeup on and had some hair dye uniqueness going on, he was clearly a gay male going by an ultra-femme name, as trans are wont to do (and which I’m dying to reveal, but can’t). I’m not supposed to be talking about this at all but I have to have somewhere to vent. Obviously I am perfectly okay with males wearing makeup but it doesn’t make him a woman. I won’t elaborate much more, but WHAT THE FUCK? Is there anything women are allowed to have to themselves anymore? How did this happen to AA?

So many women have sexual trauma/baggage, and for alcoholic women, it’s very frequently a big part of their stories. It’s NOT RIGHT to have a male in the room at women’s meetings. Women want to talk and share their experiences and the entire vibe is different when there’s a male present. Of course he shared and used the term “cis.” That narcissistic asshole was taking up time that another woman could have used to talk, and women do not speak with the same freedom when there’s a male in the room. And it’s not like there aren’t many meetings in this city that are specifically labeled “gay and lesbian.” How long until they’re called “exclusive?” I have half a mind to go to a lesbian meeting instead next time, if only to see if there even is such a thing anymore. Will there be males there who identify as lesbians? I’m serious.

And oh, before we read out of the Big Book round-robin style, the woman running the meeting said, “We encourage you to use gender neutral language as you read.” Okay, fine, I guess. Everything has always been “he” in everything, and the Big Book was published in 1939. But really? Do you know what’s it’s like to listen to people stumbling over words trying to remember to say “they” (or in the case of the trans, “she”)? What’s the point in an AA meeting? AA is not supposed to be affiliated with any religion or political party, and yet this ideology has crept in and imposed itself at the expense of female human beings and their fucking sobriety.

I’ve concluded that it’s useless to go to women’s meetings unless I start making a special trip to the less “cool” parts of town. Maybe they’ll be free of lesbians saying they’re men and men saying they’re women. Obviously the lesbian saying she was a trans man at the last meeting I tried bothered me in a much different way than the male being there today. I couldn’t help but wonder if there were any other women in the room who were as annoyed as I was.

IS ANYTHING SACRED? Fuckers!

by Categories: Identity Politics, Postmodern Misogyny 8 Comments

Gosh feminism is tiring

I spend a lot of time in the comments section of Feminist Current. Sometimes I do it because it’s funny, and other times I do it because you never know what budding radfem may be reading and sees something at that moment, on that day, that sways her in the correct direction. I think I’ve shared this before, but when I first looked into feminism a few years ago, after having mostly forgotten about it as a “thing” but was prompted by something (I may share that something someday but I may lose any and all radfem credibility) to Google it, well, I was completely and utterly confused, and it took me almost three years to get to the bottom of it. I weep for this fact because most women (much less men) will not be determined or critical enough to take that kind of time to really think it through. It was obviously important to me and I like to understand things I purport to care about.

Anyway. I’m not even any kind of real activist other than donating to Planned Parenthood and talking shit on blogs, but sometimes it just gets so tiring, you know? Just seeing the same old bullshit over and over and over again. The relentless WHATABOUTTHEMENZ and NOTALLMENZ from the general dipshits of the world—often women—never mind the MRA’s. And don’t even get me started on the queer theory gender fuckers. And it’s like I lead this double life because I work in an industry that’s really not good for women. I was a femme sexy heterosexual alcoholic lost person for so many years. I let the world of men chew me up and spit me out, but I’m not sure I even had much of a choice in the matter, and now that I’m middle-aged and I know the score it makes me so angry. There’s no way you really can know the score until you go through it. Men will say, “Only older women say these things” when we talk about the things men did to us when we were young. Well of course it’s only older women who say these things. No shit Sherlock. This culture grooms young girls to be victimized by males and then blames the victim and says “She knew what she was doing!” NO, no you don’t know what you’re doing when you’re young. Our brains don’t finish developing their judgment centers until we’re 25. But the natural rebelliousness of youth makes you think you know everything, and there’s no way you’ll ever listen. There’s no way to make “Hey, kiddo, that guy is an asshole and you haven’t lived long enough to understand” not sound condescending. It makes me despair.

But on a brighter note at least I’m sitting in the air conditioning. It’s hotter than hell in this sweatbox of a metropolis. And I’m also coming to realize that I’ve slowly started to chuck a lot of femininity out the window. I can tell that my boss doesn’t like it, and that makes me happy. I still have long hair and I still wear makeup, but I’m not as thin as I used to be and I don’t wear skirts or heels or show my boobs. Not that I ever did much of that, but I’m embracing the fact that I don’t give much of a shit. I have two closets full of beautiful clothes but I wear the same thing pretty much every day.  A uniform of sorts, one that makes me look stylish, but not dressed for the male gaze. Not sure anybody cares about this, but it I think it’s the little things that count sometimes. And it makes me so sad to see how many girls dress for the male gaze as opposed to style. There is a big difference. I wonder if they even know it.

But that’s enough of my meandering thoughts for one sitting. Not a particularly political or insightful post but there it is.

by Categories: General blah blah 7 Comments

Bargaining patriarchal style

Did you know that when the economy is down, sales of lipstick go up? The beauty industry realized this at one point and now you have lipsticks priced at $90. You may not be able to afford any of Louboutin’s torturous shoes, but you can have his brand of horseshit spackled to your lips! (And here’s where I wave my hypocrisy flag, because I am an avid lipstick wearer. Still haven’t spent $90 though.)

Ah, lipstick. Behold the Empowerment:

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I came across this on Avon’s website the other day. Avon makes Skin So Soft, which is an excellent mosquito repellent (the original blue-ish packaging items) and I need some, so that’s what I was doing on Avon’s site. It annoyed me, to say the least. But then I got to thinking about it and it got me all in a twist as this subject usually does, the subject being women making a living in a capitalist patriarchy.

Wasn’t Avon one of the first companies that “empowered” women to make a little coin? I think the Avon lady model as we know it is pretty much dead. I don’t think women go from door-to-door anymore. As far as I can tell you can choose (!) to find an Avon sales associate in your hood and give her the sale and/or have her come to you or whatever, but you don’t have to. You can just order your stuff online, as I almost exclusively do with pretty much everything because I hate stores/people/loud bad music/lines. I think Avon has had a hard time adjusting to the online landscape and evolving their business model, and any excursions they’ve made into retail have never gone particularly well. They have an entrenched equity/image that is probably past transformation. (Their Anew line of skin care is actually quite excellent, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Anyway. So we all know the beauty and fashion industries are oppressive, and that’s putting it nicely. The people at the top of these businesses are still men for the most part, and even if the figurehead is female, there are always boards of directors to consider, who are again, usually majority male. But the henchmen, middle managers and other assorted people on the org chart are mostly women; that’s who keeps the great beauty industry wheel turning from the companies themselves to the ad agencies to the retail locations. Women can often find very good employment and money in these businesses and completely avoid men and marriage and childrearing and/or escape abuse and opt out of the private side of patriarchal oppression.

But…but…they’re contributing to female oppression, to their own oppression. They’re shoveling female empowerfulness manure and maybe many of them actually believe it because they’re brainwashed and living on planet False Consciousness, but I know for a fact that there are those who don’t and aren’t living on that planet.

Per a comment I made on another post on PSF’s most excellent blog, this is where one could talk about White Feminism in the sense of what was originally meant by it before it was appropriated as a catch-all phrase used to shut women up. The people in the corporate beauty industry jobs are for the most part not WOC. They’re white, college-educated people, mostly women. Now, are the people who were the Avon ladies and not the executives, the ones who perhaps at one time were able to make a living or put themselves through college or escape an abusive boyfriend by selling Avon WOC? It would not surprise me if it skewed that way. Social hierarchy is a thing.

A big part of why feminism has stalled is that college-educated white women who mostly toe the party line (dress femininely, play the game, spread the horseshit) have been able to opt out of private oppression if they so choose. A lot of white, college-educated women I know, myself included, have pretty nice lives, free of some jackass living with us, cheating on us, sticking us with the toilet cleaning and diaper changing and still pestering us for sex. And if women like me do have children, they hire somebody else to clean the toilet and change the diapers. I’m pretty sure this isn’t progress for the vast majority of women living in the US or any other wealthy country. Let’s not even mention the conditions under which the majority of the world’s female population still suffers.

So the people with the most resources and power to be heard aren’t rocking the boat because why would they? If you work in the beauty industry (this includes not only cosmetics but anything to do with plastic surgery, such as the medical professionals, drug companies, medical supplies, the hospitals that provide a venue for it, etc.) or the fashion industry or the wedding industry and you start openly criticizing any of it, well, really, who’s going to pay your bills then, Independent Lady?

How should a woman get out from under and pay her own bills without contributing to the system? How many jobs aren’t directly or indirectly linked to female oppression? Hell, even if you work for a bank you’re tied to it; maybe even more so, because credit cards enable the consumption of pornography.

I once saw an interview with Germaine Greer, in which they were talking about women in corporate positions. She said “They’ll change you before you change them.”

Yup. Capitalism has got to go.

by Categories: Beauty Products, Buy this shit and be empowered, Patriarchy, Postmodern Misogyny, Sexism 1 Comment

I’m thinking about writing an essay about Milo Yiannopoulos because I find him so disturbing.

Part of me thinks this is a stupid idea; to give him even one minute of my time and energy. But really, he’s gay, and I find the misogyny of gay men an interesting subject. It has come up in my life on several occasions and I’ve never really figured it out 100%. I find the fact that he is essentially pandering to hyper heterosexual males who seem to have no issue with the fact that he’s gay kind of fascinating. I’m not sure this is a noble pursuit on my part, but still… it’s really whacky if you stop and think about it. I’ll see how I feel tomorrow.

by Categories: Regular Misogyny 2 Comments

Good heavens I haven’t posted for 16 days

Amazing how time flies. I thought I didn’t have anything in particular to say this evening, but maybe I do.

A couple of months ago I spoke to a lawyer about a situation that’s going on in my place of employment. He was a man. (For what it’s worth I later spoke to a female lawyer, who unsurprisingly had a slightly different take on it.) The reality is there’s not much I can do about this situation. It’s not affecting me directly in a way that I could take any legal action, and we all know what happens to women who say anything about anything when it comes to male behavior.

But back to the male lawyer. He was pretty dismissive. He literally sounded like an anti-feminist troll in the comments section of a piece about workplace sexism. Every cliché you can imagine came rolling out of his mouth. “Work is a pain in the ass.” “Get a thicker skin.” “Don’t let it bother you.” “If you look for things you’re going to find them.” And blah blah blah.

What got me to thinking about this tonight is that I’ve become hyper aware of male domination tactics in public places. You know, body language. Manspreading and the like. It’s not like I didn’t notice it in the past, but I wouldn’t have called it that. I would have just called the guy an asshole. I would have made myself smaller and moved. Just the other night a guy in his gym duds got on the train. He was carrying a wardrobe bag. The train was not crowded and there was plenty of room. But noooooooo, he had to stand right next to me and his dumb wardrobe bag with his probably dumb suit inside of it was touching my handbag. Why? Why did he do that?

So do I see it only because the term has become such a thing? There’s an entire subway campaign about manners, and manspreading is included in the things it chides, along with nail clipping and music-playing and leaning on poles. Thing is, I don’t think manspreading has gotten any better nor will it any time soon because “masculinity” is what it is and isn’t being addressed at the root.

Is it a case of “If you look for things you’re going to find them” or has male domination behavior actually gotten worse? Has general aggression gotten worse in crowded cities?

Thoughts?

 

 

by Categories: General blah blah, Patriarchy 12 Comments

Running into “gender” IRL

I went to a 12-step meeting for the first time in a loooong time tonight. I stopped drinking years ago but have managed to isolate myself into oblivion in the past couple of years, ergo my decision to perhaps look for some social bridges. I’ve never been very comfortable with 12-step programs, but right now I need to be a little more open minded, methinks.

Anyway. It was “Women’s” meeting. I bet you know where I might be going with this. I’m going to be somewhat vague in telling this story, however, as one is supposed to be discreet about recovery meeting goings-on.

First of all, they opened the meeting with the usual preambles/things they say before meetings, and this is what the woman said, “We welcome anyone who identifies as a woman.” Well. I don’t remember that being said in any women’s meetings I’ve ever been to. Even as few as five years ago. Okay, so that was the first thing.

Backtracking a bit, when I walked into the room of the meeting, I noticed a lesbian, a very gender defiant lesbian. I thought to myself “Hmm. That’s good to see.” The room was full of young-ish women, mostly very fem presenting, so for whatever reason it made me happy, like maybe it was a good, diverse group of women.

As the meeting progressed, a couple of women shared that they’d recently come out. One of them didn’t surprise me and one of them did. But that’s not the point of this story. The gender defiant lesbian shared. She was talking about how she’d come out years before and then said, “And now I’m moving into this identity as a trans man…”

It was at that point that I silently screamed inside my head, “Nooooooooooo!”

And she continued, “And dealing with that identity and identity politics.” She said this part quite ruefully, and in italics. 😉

The thing is, she wasn’t a kid. Now, I know shit from crabapples about lesbians identifying as trans men when all is said and done, but I just sat there thinking, “What a perfect storm, in a way, with addiction issues, too.” And she’s been sober for a while. How much of “gender identity” is driven by people looking for answers to pain? I mean, we all know that there’s probably a good chance that trans gender people have some other emotional health issues present, but then again, so do I. So do many people. But one of the terms in recovery vernacular is “pulling a geographic.” People move to other towns or even just other apartments, thinking that’s going to fix them. One could frame “pulling a geographic” in terms of gender identity, if you think about it. Kind of along the lines of “Wherever you go there you are.”

It made me sad. And this was after I’ve spent the last few days in the comments section of the Robert Jensen piece on Feminist Current. There’s just a part of me that wants to give up even thinking about any of this. I’ve become such a hermit that I forget that I live in one of the biggest hotbeds of identity politics in the world, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I ran into it almost immediately upon venturing out of my work-and-home-again bubble. It makes me sad that people are so steeped in this horseshit, that there are posters on the train featuring RuPaul II telling people to use whatever bathroom they want — “It’s the law.” How did we fall so far backwards?

But I will keep thinking about it, and commenting where I can if it makes even one person stop and think about what identity politics are doing to both female rights (in so many ways) and to lesbians. I’ve never been afraid of lesbians or dykes or of them being in my bathroom or any of that crap and it just makes me nuts when people say things like, “So are you okay with lesbians in your locker room??!?!?!!” like this is some sort of gotcha. And now we have this whole trans man phenomenon not helping that ignorant idea at all. It’s all so fucking absurd.

On that note, here’s my slightly tweaked version of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” (And imagine for the sake of this creative exercise that he wasn’t a misogynist asshole.)

Imagine there’s no gender
It’s easy if you try
No high heels below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today… Aha-ah…

Imagine there’s no gender
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to dress or identify for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace… You, ..

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no gender identities
I wonder if you can
No need for special snowflakes
A humanity of humans
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world… You…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

by Categories: Identity Politics 9 Comments