Carol Hanisch said "the personal is political" and feminism embraced that. Radical feminism looked not only at the big structural elements of oppression and the institutionalized unfairnesses that were ensconced in laws and policies, but at individual personality characteristics and the behaviors that go with them. The value systems and priorities that come directly out of a person's way of being in the world, a person's most fundamental personality attributes. And they said that masculinity was a political problem, the political problem, that being a man at the local individual level meant supporting patriarchy inside of every interpersonal interaction.
There are, of course, readers who are wanting to fling their hands in the air and protest, "No, you mean toxic masculinity. Not all masculinity is toxic!"
And they're right. We need to avoid oversimplification. There are many butch women whose trajectory in life has been a "yeah, so?" response whenever accused of acting masculine, butch women who found identify and validation there. There are transgender men as well who embrace masculinity as the best mirror of who they legitimately are. There are cis men who accept the mantle of what's expected of them but spend their lives contemplating how to be a good man in the modern world. So yes, there are people aligned with masculinity who value courage and willingness to risk, and the willingness to not be defined by the pack even if it means being a socially cut-off isolated individual, and a cut-to-the-chase raw honesty.
But whether toxic masculinity is just the extreme "turn it up to 11" overdose of masculinity or if it is a specific emphasis on the most antagonistic elements, toxic masculinity exists.
We live in the interesting times of long-wave culture wars coming to a decisive turning point: these are the last gasps of patriarchal hegemony, with patriarchal value systems's claims to legitimacy pushed back against the social ropes. And at the moment, the patriarchy's values are personally embodied to the hilt in one Donald Trump. This election, like the one before it in 2016, is all about patriarchy versus its opponents, and it is raw and undisguised, and we've had four years of seeing that on display.
It is because patriarchy is on the ropes that the masks are off. It is because they are on the losing side of history that they have given up on the middle and along with it the pretentions to debonair chivalry, the gestures of "we will take care of you, we are compassionate in our authority and power".
The Specifics
• Belligerence — masculinity values fighting, being aggressive, the notion that you get your way with other people by intimidating them with the threat of attacking them, and backing that up with actual violence when need be. Our nation has tried to cast itself on the world stage as a "good citizen" country that doesn't invade and conquer, but we've barged into several countries with tanks bombs and soldiers, and have more secretively toppled the duly elected leaders of others, and so we've exhibited plenty of belligerence. Donald Trump's entire way of interacting with everyone, domestic and foreign, official politics or unofficial interpersonal interaction, is belligerent; he is the personification of the notion that you get things done by intimidating ohters
• Defensive Fragility I: making mistakes or ever being wrong -- masculinity values absolute certainty and decisiveness, the attitude that there is something weak and ineffectual about considering alternative possibilities or remaining aware of your own fallibility. Our nation has a long tradition of believing itself to be anointed by God, American exceptionalism, that our way of doing things is guaranteed to to correct. We've made legitimate overtures to the rest of the world to come together respectfully and work out our differences peacefully -- the US is most directly responsible for the existence of the UN -- but a lot of our nation's behavior has had a wide streak of "we are giving the rest of you the opportunity to follow our lead and do things just like us". And we don't take kindly to criticism. Donald Trump is the quintessential stereotype of a person who can't ever consider the possibility that he is, or was, wrong. He will never apologize and will stick to his guns no matter how often he's shot his own foot off with them.
• Defensive Fragility II: needing others or ever being dependent on others -- masculinity is all about "going your own way" and "attending to my needs myself", and if the non-toxic form of that is about stepping up and doing what needs doing instead of waiting for someone else to do so, the toxic form exhibits utter contempt for anyone who ever needs anyone else for anything. As a nation we've become increasingly toxic in our insistence that we don't need the blessing or agreement of any other nation or people, we're going to do whatever we want and the rest of the world can go fuck themselves. We had the sympathies and compassionate regard of the overwhelming majority of the world after the 9/11 World Trade attacks, but squandered it as casually as tossing a piece of trash into the waste bin, attacking Iraq with no provocation and no coherent explanation. Donald Trump is very vocal about not needing anybody and not caring if his actions do not need with their approval. The Republicans in Congress and in his own administration found that out, often to their dismay: he doesn't need them, or believes that he doesn't and behaves as if he doesn't.
• All Differences are Superior/Inferior -- masculinity has a tendency to see every distinction as one in which one possible kind is better than the other, that there's always a "right way to be" or a "right kind to buy" or "best form of it to use". This is an outgrowth of the belligerence and the tendency to see everything in terms of the potential for competition and conflict. Feminists highlight this as "othering" and show how this tendency spreads oppression by encouraging people to see folks different from them as inferior and then use that to justify taking advantage of them whenever the possibility exists. Our nation began with a lot of lofty lip service about equality, and as a nation we've valued equality in principle, but parallel to that has been the long history of ways in which we've treated categories of people as less worthy, less human, as subordinate or substandard, or pathological and evil and in need of being eliminated by whatever means necessary. Donald Trump has made a career of disparaging the different, and tailoring his appeal to those who view themselves as "normal" and who also resent anyone who isn't "like us" who dare to demand their rights as fully human beings.
• Coercion and Control -- masculinity, again as an outgrowth of the belligerent anticipaton of conflict, tends to value winning more than any other goal, to the point of losing track of what goal made winning in this or that case important in the first place. This also goes hand-in-hand with the defensive fragility about ever considering the possibility of having made a mistake. The US became the poster child for this kind of masculine manifestion in the Vietnam War, where there was less and less clarity on what we were there for or what our goals were, but where nevertheless our leaders pursued winning the war as the first and most important consideration. Donald Trump epitomizes the spirit of "winning isn't the best thing, it's the only thing", and it means there is nothing he considers off-limits if it facilitates him winning.
• Polarization -- masculinity tends to carry the attitude into any confrontational argument or dissent that "you're either with me or you're against me". This, too, is an attitude that carries over from imagining being in a fight. In direct physical conflict, nuances of perspective and opinion aren't relevant, it's all about whether you're someone else representing a risk that I should attack lest I be attacked or I can count on you to fight on my side. Our nation has often played the polarization game outside of wartime, doing its best to force nations to take sides and divide the world-map into US and THEM factions. It was our behavior all throughout the cold war. We've never been very open to a multifaceted way of viewing international economic or political configurations, preferring the either/or and pressuring everyone else into buying into that. Donald Trump is the polarizer-in-chief, doing more to divide us internally than anyone else who has ever occupied the office. There is to be no forgiveness, no consideration of understandable reasons why someone would do something we would not ourselves do, nor any willingness to think of alliances as complex and shifting things. Everything becomes "us versus them".
• Oversimplification -- masculinity, with a military focus on quick decision and operating in fear and opportunistic aggression, tends not to trust complex thought in general. This feeds the notion that everything is actually quite simple and that anyone who claims to see complexity is weak and indecisive and wrong by definition. As a nation we've shifted from a faith in science (although one that automatically rejected any critical questions of how the science was put to use) to a sort of pride in not thinking too much. We still have good universities and educated people, but culturally we value them less, and have shifted to a shorter attention span that doesn't easily get immersed in complex explanations. Donald Trump has made denseness a virtue and continually exhibits the utmost contempt for actual thinking, insisting that everything worth thinking about has immediate and obvious answers.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Sunday, November 1, 2020
Monday, August 24, 2020
Social Justice and Defunding the Police
One of the changes that some people have been advocating for since the police killing of George Floyd is to "defund the police". In some quarters, it's certainly a less than popular idea--nervously worried people glance at each other and try to visualize what our world would look like if the police all just packed up and went home. Most of these worried citizens haven't required a rescue from the predations of dangerous people in the last year, but still they think of the police as necessary protectors, a force without which there would be violent crime threatening us around every corner.
Me, I think there's something out of whack when our official organized response whenever there's a conflict between people is to go in with the attitude that somebody is the bad person, that somebody is the perpetrator, the evildoer. As if no two people could ever end up frustrated and feeling mutually thwarted and angry unless one of them was a bad person and the conflict was their fault. I think if you're a parent and your children are fighting, or you're a teacher and your students are furious and yelling and making threats, or you're a supervisor on the job and your employees are arguing and screaming and shoving each other, that you go in with the expectation that you need to listen to both sides, and the anticipation that there's going to be some way that everyone can get what they need out of the situation or at least enough of what they need that there's a solution everyone can live with. I'm not saying it's always going to work out that way, mind you, but you go in with that attitude. Not with the attitude that someone's in the wrong and needs to be stopped and then punished. And frankly if that's not your approach, if you don't go in looking to see how to make peace between these squabbling people, you're not a very good parent, a very good teacher, a very good supervisor. That over time you're going to contribute to the problems and make the fighting worse.
So why do we have police, when what we generally mean by "police" is a professional force that goes in to intervene specifically looking for lawbreakers to arrest? There are, in fact, some police forces in some locales where the officers are more inclined to go in and get people settled down and listen to all sides and remind the people in the community that we need to stick together and work together. That does exist. But you know, and I know, that that's the exception, not the general rule. People who aspire to become police officers don't imagine themselves doing inpromptu counseling sessions on the sidewalk. The people who wince at "defund the police" aren't worried about not having mediators in blue uniforms to get both sides listening to each other and working towards a mutually acceptable solution either. Instead, we've all been brought up to think of the police as the ones who get the bad guys. They have fast cars and radios; they have sticks, guns, and handcuffs on their belt. They will stop the criminals and put them in jail. Yeah, that model.
I'd like to see the police as we know them replaced with people who have been trained in defusing and mediating. And if the existing people wearing police badges feel like they didn't sign up for that, replace them with people who took social sciences and humanities courses in college.
I'm reading a book, mainstream entertainment fiction. Michael Connelly, The Closers. Like the overwhelming majority of police procedurals and mysteries, it's about murder. Because our steady diet of laudatory praise and respect for the police is centered around murder. It's not so easy to see why the enforcement of the rule that you shouldn't go around killing other people is somehow reinforcing our existing social inequalities--I mean, yeah, sure, you can no doubt come up with a scenario or two where somebody is in a situation where they have a moral right to kill someone (their rapist, the slaveowner who stands in the way of their freedom, etc), but it's a reach. We think it's a rare situation where killing someone isn't just plain inexcusable.
But most of the situations that police officers intervene in aren't murders. They investigate property crimes and occurrences of people shouting and shoving, and respond to situations where one person feels threatened by another; they look for violations of drug laws and they watch for people misbehaving in their vehicles; and they show up to investigate when there is vandalism or theft.
We didn't always have them around, you know. Yeah. We haven't always had a professional police force in the modern sense. Furthermore, the history of their existence is pretty tangled up with maintaining and enforcing an "us versus them" division or two in our society. The kind where one group is defined as "them". The bad people, the criminal elements that the other group needs to be protected from. And in the United States, the number one "them" group has been black folks. The entire notion of "criminals", the widely shared belief in a "them" who would otherwise threaten our safety and security here in our own homes and on our downtown sidewalks, is heavily interwoven with our notions about race. It's not always painted as overtly so, but we're made to fear the anger and hate of black people. (Why, because maybe we think they've been mistreated and deprived and just might have an understandable reason to be angry and hate us, ya think? Little bit of white guilt turned inside out to become a fear of a righteous wrath, perhaps?) Several white people have pointed out that it's an act of white privilege to call the cops any time there's a possible conflict, especially when the people with whom we're having a conflict are nonwhite people. They point out that for a nonwhite person to make a similar call, there's a legitimate worry that the police, upon arrival, will not help but will instead treat them as the cause of the problem. I watched a video earlier this week where a group of black teenagers called the police when they'd been physically attacked by someone else, only to have the police pull out guns on them when they showed up.
Meanwhile, we have the calls for social justice. I've never liked that phrase. "Justice", as in Department of Justice, as in dispensing justice from the judge's bench in the courtroom, is part and parcel of the police model. The notion that somebody is a culprit, an evildoer who is at fault and deserves for bad things to happen to them for the evil that they've done.
You can't really have it both ways. If it's a better approach to get everyone talking and listening instead of barging in designating somebody as the bad person, I don't think that changes when the alteraction is not about a cluster of teenagers arguing in a parking lot but instead is about different broad social factions arguing about oppression.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Me, I think there's something out of whack when our official organized response whenever there's a conflict between people is to go in with the attitude that somebody is the bad person, that somebody is the perpetrator, the evildoer. As if no two people could ever end up frustrated and feeling mutually thwarted and angry unless one of them was a bad person and the conflict was their fault. I think if you're a parent and your children are fighting, or you're a teacher and your students are furious and yelling and making threats, or you're a supervisor on the job and your employees are arguing and screaming and shoving each other, that you go in with the expectation that you need to listen to both sides, and the anticipation that there's going to be some way that everyone can get what they need out of the situation or at least enough of what they need that there's a solution everyone can live with. I'm not saying it's always going to work out that way, mind you, but you go in with that attitude. Not with the attitude that someone's in the wrong and needs to be stopped and then punished. And frankly if that's not your approach, if you don't go in looking to see how to make peace between these squabbling people, you're not a very good parent, a very good teacher, a very good supervisor. That over time you're going to contribute to the problems and make the fighting worse.
So why do we have police, when what we generally mean by "police" is a professional force that goes in to intervene specifically looking for lawbreakers to arrest? There are, in fact, some police forces in some locales where the officers are more inclined to go in and get people settled down and listen to all sides and remind the people in the community that we need to stick together and work together. That does exist. But you know, and I know, that that's the exception, not the general rule. People who aspire to become police officers don't imagine themselves doing inpromptu counseling sessions on the sidewalk. The people who wince at "defund the police" aren't worried about not having mediators in blue uniforms to get both sides listening to each other and working towards a mutually acceptable solution either. Instead, we've all been brought up to think of the police as the ones who get the bad guys. They have fast cars and radios; they have sticks, guns, and handcuffs on their belt. They will stop the criminals and put them in jail. Yeah, that model.
I'd like to see the police as we know them replaced with people who have been trained in defusing and mediating. And if the existing people wearing police badges feel like they didn't sign up for that, replace them with people who took social sciences and humanities courses in college.
I'm reading a book, mainstream entertainment fiction. Michael Connelly, The Closers. Like the overwhelming majority of police procedurals and mysteries, it's about murder. Because our steady diet of laudatory praise and respect for the police is centered around murder. It's not so easy to see why the enforcement of the rule that you shouldn't go around killing other people is somehow reinforcing our existing social inequalities--I mean, yeah, sure, you can no doubt come up with a scenario or two where somebody is in a situation where they have a moral right to kill someone (their rapist, the slaveowner who stands in the way of their freedom, etc), but it's a reach. We think it's a rare situation where killing someone isn't just plain inexcusable.
But most of the situations that police officers intervene in aren't murders. They investigate property crimes and occurrences of people shouting and shoving, and respond to situations where one person feels threatened by another; they look for violations of drug laws and they watch for people misbehaving in their vehicles; and they show up to investigate when there is vandalism or theft.
We didn't always have them around, you know. Yeah. We haven't always had a professional police force in the modern sense. Furthermore, the history of their existence is pretty tangled up with maintaining and enforcing an "us versus them" division or two in our society. The kind where one group is defined as "them". The bad people, the criminal elements that the other group needs to be protected from. And in the United States, the number one "them" group has been black folks. The entire notion of "criminals", the widely shared belief in a "them" who would otherwise threaten our safety and security here in our own homes and on our downtown sidewalks, is heavily interwoven with our notions about race. It's not always painted as overtly so, but we're made to fear the anger and hate of black people. (Why, because maybe we think they've been mistreated and deprived and just might have an understandable reason to be angry and hate us, ya think? Little bit of white guilt turned inside out to become a fear of a righteous wrath, perhaps?) Several white people have pointed out that it's an act of white privilege to call the cops any time there's a possible conflict, especially when the people with whom we're having a conflict are nonwhite people. They point out that for a nonwhite person to make a similar call, there's a legitimate worry that the police, upon arrival, will not help but will instead treat them as the cause of the problem. I watched a video earlier this week where a group of black teenagers called the police when they'd been physically attacked by someone else, only to have the police pull out guns on them when they showed up.
Meanwhile, we have the calls for social justice. I've never liked that phrase. "Justice", as in Department of Justice, as in dispensing justice from the judge's bench in the courtroom, is part and parcel of the police model. The notion that somebody is a culprit, an evildoer who is at fault and deserves for bad things to happen to them for the evil that they've done.
You can't really have it both ways. If it's a better approach to get everyone talking and listening instead of barging in designating somebody as the bad person, I don't think that changes when the alteraction is not about a cluster of teenagers arguing in a parking lot but instead is about different broad social factions arguing about oppression.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, July 24, 2020
Kitten Robe
I was unsure about whether I'd end up blog-posting about my robe project. Wondering if it wasn't more than a bit off-topic, you know? But then I got into a conversation with someone who'd attended the same schools as me, initially discussing shop class but that got me to thinking about how home ec was required for girls only when I was in junior high.
So yeah, learning how to sew from a pattern on a sewing machine is gendered. Sure, there are tailors and other male-bodied folks who sew, but you could make that case for any activity, including vamping in sexy lingerie. And people in my gender-atypical FB groups often post selfies showing themselves modeling or posing. So why not?
Also, there's a scene in my book where my mom teaches me how to make a shirt from a pattern when I'm 18, and I make this brilliant red-and-gold paisley shirt, and then about a year later I'm wearing that shirt at a party and get beaten up, with a lot of references to me being sissy and probably queer and therefore that I'd had it coming. And I hadn't really ever gone back to sew from a pattern since then, not until now.
I wore out my old summer bathrobe (it was hanging in tatters) and what with me being at home due to Covid / unemployment, it made sense to do a creative project, so my partner (who is quite adept on the sewing machine) proposed that I make my own. So I picked out a fabric and she helped me select a sewing pattern and I was soon ensconced in chair, pinning and cutting and turning that pile of cloth into a garment.
The fabric arrives:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2617_sm.jpg
Separating the pattern pieces:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2620_sm.jpg
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2618_sm.jpg
Our dining room table repurposed as a working surface:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2625_sm.jpg
Cutting the fabric as per the pattern pieces:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2629_sm.jpg
Stacking the cut pieces on the back of the couch until needed:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2630_sm.jpg
Pockets: the goal here is to have the print pattern on the pockets merge exactly with the underlying print on the robe front:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2633_sm.jpg
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2634_sm.jpg
Pinning in preparation for sewing the pocket down:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2648_sm.jpg
Belt Loops:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2652_sm.jpg
The sewing machine: not fancy but portable and functional:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2653_sm.jpg
Now just lay down a stitch in a straight line...
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2657_sm.jpg
Not too bad!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2664_sm.jpg
Finished seams:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2661_sm.jpg
It's starting to be a robe!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2662_sm.jpg
Close to the edge...
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2669_sm.jpg
Sleeve!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2677_sm.jpg
Finished product!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2678_sm.jpg
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2680_sm.jpg
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
So yeah, learning how to sew from a pattern on a sewing machine is gendered. Sure, there are tailors and other male-bodied folks who sew, but you could make that case for any activity, including vamping in sexy lingerie. And people in my gender-atypical FB groups often post selfies showing themselves modeling or posing. So why not?
Also, there's a scene in my book where my mom teaches me how to make a shirt from a pattern when I'm 18, and I make this brilliant red-and-gold paisley shirt, and then about a year later I'm wearing that shirt at a party and get beaten up, with a lot of references to me being sissy and probably queer and therefore that I'd had it coming. And I hadn't really ever gone back to sew from a pattern since then, not until now.
I wore out my old summer bathrobe (it was hanging in tatters) and what with me being at home due to Covid / unemployment, it made sense to do a creative project, so my partner (who is quite adept on the sewing machine) proposed that I make my own. So I picked out a fabric and she helped me select a sewing pattern and I was soon ensconced in chair, pinning and cutting and turning that pile of cloth into a garment.
The fabric arrives:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2617_sm.jpg
Separating the pattern pieces:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2620_sm.jpg
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2618_sm.jpg
Our dining room table repurposed as a working surface:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2625_sm.jpg
Cutting the fabric as per the pattern pieces:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2629_sm.jpg
Stacking the cut pieces on the back of the couch until needed:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2630_sm.jpg
Pockets: the goal here is to have the print pattern on the pockets merge exactly with the underlying print on the robe front:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2633_sm.jpg
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2634_sm.jpg
Pinning in preparation for sewing the pocket down:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2648_sm.jpg
Belt Loops:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2652_sm.jpg
The sewing machine: not fancy but portable and functional:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2653_sm.jpg
Now just lay down a stitch in a straight line...
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2657_sm.jpg
Not too bad!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2664_sm.jpg
Finished seams:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2661_sm.jpg
It's starting to be a robe!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2662_sm.jpg
Close to the edge...
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2669_sm.jpg
Sleeve!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2677_sm.jpg
Finished product!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2678_sm.jpg
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2680_sm.jpg
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, October 11, 2019
False Dichotomy
There’s a false dichotomy between “born this way” and “choice”. We encounter it in the MOGII communities, where there’s a rapid embrace of the notion of inherent genetic and brain differences, first for gay and lesbian people and, more recently, for trans folks.
That’s not the only place you find it, though. That same ongoing discussion can be found in the perpetual arguments about free will versus determinism. You ever dropped in on those? The backdrop for those discussions – often hinted at but not always explicitly identified – is the criminal justice system and whether or not it is morally defensible to punish criminals for their illegal deeds or if, instead, we should recognize that they are products of their environment and did not choose their behaviors. If you want to delve back further, this argument dates back to whether God shall punish evildoers for the evil that they have done or if they were preordained by God to have done those things in which case it isn’t their fault.
In other words, the notion that they didn’t choose is used to excuse behaviors that are labeled criminal or immoral.
So if we slide back over to the arguments about whether gay and trans people have choice, the argument that they don’t starts to look a lot like gay and trans people’s identities are being excused and forgiven, as if they needed to be excused or forgiven. As if being gay or being trans was akin to being a thief or a murderer or something. Uh huh.
Are you in a big hurry to buy into the notion that who you are needs to be excused or forgiven, on the grounds that “you can’t help it” ???
Why are our identities on trial? In all these discussions, there’s an unquestioned taken-for-granted assumption about what needs excusing or forgiving in the first place. If you want to discuss criminal justice and punishment, for example, how about we discuss Officer Daniel Paneleo, he whose chokehold on Eric Garner resulted in “I can’t breathe”, and, behind him, the entire police-enforced structure of racist social control. Do you want to start off from the position that Officer Panteleo can’t help it, that he’s a product of his environment and should not be held accountable? That we can’t expect him to change? That he was not a maker of choices? That he is not responsible?
It’s a false dichotomy. When a person makes choices, the kind of person that they are dictates what kind of choices they will make, and yet those are still choices. There isn’t one “self” there who is a decision-maker but who is “affected by” or “determined by” their own biology or their socialization and upbringing, as if those are external to the “self”. They aren’t. A person’s identity consists of all of their environment, their personal history, their built-in nuances from genetics and biology to the structure of prior beliefs and values – that’s all a part of who the person is. If you take all that away there’s no “self” left to do any deciding. But if we consider all that stuff as part of who the person is, the expression of that self takes the form of choices that the person makes. It’s how we experience ourself, as choice-makers.
I certainly do. In second grade, I looked around; I saw girls behaving one way and boys behaving a different way, generally speaking. I was in situations where I chose my behaviors, and the behaviors that I chose were the ones more typical of girls than of boys. I was proud of it, and rejected the notion that I should be ashamed of it. Could I have made a different set of decisions and still been true to who I was? No! But they were still choices. I was affirming who I was.
Last month I was assaulted by an angry individual on 14th Street in New York. I was wearing an orange skirt at the time. He was coming my direction in heavily congested foot traffic and collided with me as we passed; I thought it was an accident but a split-second later he came up from behind me and began pounding my back and head, all the while yelling, “I didn’t hit you! I never hit you!”. Now, sure, social forces and his personal history and widely shared beliefs about gender-appropriate behavior no doubt shaped his worldview, but he also made choices. His choices are a part of who he is, and I hold him responsible for all of that. I could make the same point about the people who shot up the Pulse nightclub in Florida awhile back. I’m not out to pin the blame on the culprit, nor am I a true believer in the moral sanctity of retributional punishment, but we are activists here; we are active. We act. So let’s get one thing established: if I am allocated choice at all to any degree whatsoever in my life, I choose to be as I am, a gender variant individual, and if you think to hold me morally accountable, bring it on, baby. I wouldn’t want to be any different and I make no apologies for who and how I am.
Quit acting like choice is a dirty word.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
That’s not the only place you find it, though. That same ongoing discussion can be found in the perpetual arguments about free will versus determinism. You ever dropped in on those? The backdrop for those discussions – often hinted at but not always explicitly identified – is the criminal justice system and whether or not it is morally defensible to punish criminals for their illegal deeds or if, instead, we should recognize that they are products of their environment and did not choose their behaviors. If you want to delve back further, this argument dates back to whether God shall punish evildoers for the evil that they have done or if they were preordained by God to have done those things in which case it isn’t their fault.
In other words, the notion that they didn’t choose is used to excuse behaviors that are labeled criminal or immoral.
So if we slide back over to the arguments about whether gay and trans people have choice, the argument that they don’t starts to look a lot like gay and trans people’s identities are being excused and forgiven, as if they needed to be excused or forgiven. As if being gay or being trans was akin to being a thief or a murderer or something. Uh huh.
Are you in a big hurry to buy into the notion that who you are needs to be excused or forgiven, on the grounds that “you can’t help it” ???
Why are our identities on trial? In all these discussions, there’s an unquestioned taken-for-granted assumption about what needs excusing or forgiving in the first place. If you want to discuss criminal justice and punishment, for example, how about we discuss Officer Daniel Paneleo, he whose chokehold on Eric Garner resulted in “I can’t breathe”, and, behind him, the entire police-enforced structure of racist social control. Do you want to start off from the position that Officer Panteleo can’t help it, that he’s a product of his environment and should not be held accountable? That we can’t expect him to change? That he was not a maker of choices? That he is not responsible?
It’s a false dichotomy. When a person makes choices, the kind of person that they are dictates what kind of choices they will make, and yet those are still choices. There isn’t one “self” there who is a decision-maker but who is “affected by” or “determined by” their own biology or their socialization and upbringing, as if those are external to the “self”. They aren’t. A person’s identity consists of all of their environment, their personal history, their built-in nuances from genetics and biology to the structure of prior beliefs and values – that’s all a part of who the person is. If you take all that away there’s no “self” left to do any deciding. But if we consider all that stuff as part of who the person is, the expression of that self takes the form of choices that the person makes. It’s how we experience ourself, as choice-makers.
I certainly do. In second grade, I looked around; I saw girls behaving one way and boys behaving a different way, generally speaking. I was in situations where I chose my behaviors, and the behaviors that I chose were the ones more typical of girls than of boys. I was proud of it, and rejected the notion that I should be ashamed of it. Could I have made a different set of decisions and still been true to who I was? No! But they were still choices. I was affirming who I was.
Last month I was assaulted by an angry individual on 14th Street in New York. I was wearing an orange skirt at the time. He was coming my direction in heavily congested foot traffic and collided with me as we passed; I thought it was an accident but a split-second later he came up from behind me and began pounding my back and head, all the while yelling, “I didn’t hit you! I never hit you!”. Now, sure, social forces and his personal history and widely shared beliefs about gender-appropriate behavior no doubt shaped his worldview, but he also made choices. His choices are a part of who he is, and I hold him responsible for all of that. I could make the same point about the people who shot up the Pulse nightclub in Florida awhile back. I’m not out to pin the blame on the culprit, nor am I a true believer in the moral sanctity of retributional punishment, but we are activists here; we are active. We act. So let’s get one thing established: if I am allocated choice at all to any degree whatsoever in my life, I choose to be as I am, a gender variant individual, and if you think to hold me morally accountable, bring it on, baby. I wouldn’t want to be any different and I make no apologies for who and how I am.
Quit acting like choice is a dirty word.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, March 2, 2019
REVIEW: Boy Erased
I finally got to see Boy Erased after having missed it when it was playing in a few regional theatres.
Jared Eamons (Lucas Hedges) has one of the stormiest coming-of-age and coming-out experiences: he's in college and [CONTENT WARNING / spoiler alert] gets raped by another religiously inclined boy, Henry (Joe Alwyn), who, like so many rapists, doesn't appear to see rape itself as a fundamental moral failure; instead, Henry is focused on the wickedness of same sex erotic behavior and whimpers to Jared afterwards about his remorse for the bad things he's done. When Jared, to Henry's apparent surprise, isn't particularly warm and friendly to him subsequently, Henry becomes worries that Jared will inform on him, so he preempts that by outing Jared to his parents and to people on campus.
You can be excused for wondering why being outed as a rape victim would cause anyone to reach any meaningful conclusion about the victim's sexual orientation, but Henry doesn't allude to his own involvement or factor in the violence involved; he simply tells everyone that Jared has been engaging in homosexual activities.
As it turns out, Jared has indeed been aware of sexual feelings towards males, and when confronted and accused decides to be honest about that.
That sets the stage for Jared's father Marshall (Russell Crowe), a socially conservative clergyman in a southern Alabama church, to arrange for Jared to attend a gay-to-straight conversion program, "Love in Action", a Christian-centric day facility operated by Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton).
"Love in Action" is a total institution in the classic Erving Goffman sense; Sykes and his staff evaluate the program participants not only on their own behaviors and attitudes but on what opinions and feedback they provide to the others attending. That means they control all of the approval and disapproval that anyone can receive within the program. Denying that you have any problem, any worrisome attitude or unhealthy compensation mechanism, is itself always a symptom, proof that you aren't dealing with your issues, so no one can disagree or differ from anything that they are accused of. And of course this way of treating you is defined as therapeutic, as something you're being subjected to for your own good. It is, after all, love in action.
There is a considerable amount of internalized self-hatred and self-rejection in Boy Erased, and it is convincingly portrayed. Michael (David Joseph Craig) is a rule-worshipping martinet, bristling with disgust and contempt for Jared and the other sinful wicked people brought to the program; Henry the rapist is clearly tied up in revulsion for his own attractions and urges; Jared himself spends much of the movie accepting that he belongs here, worrying that God will condemn him to hell for being this way. There is a scene where Brandon (a camp counselor brought in to give masculinity lessons, played by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers) first berates Jared for going into the toilet unaccompanied and accuses him of going in there to masturbate, and then stands behind him commenting lasciviously on how Jared pees. And from the top, Victor Sykes, an "ex-gay" convert himself, gets a discernable amount of prurient delight from hearing the confessions of his fallen guilty charges; he doesn't believe Jared when Jared details his homosexual sins as consisting in their entirety of laying down next to another guy (Xavier, by Theodore Pellerin) for a spate of platonic hugging. Sykes wants to hear more juicy morsels to pass judgment on.
The scenes where Brandon gives lessons in how to be manly men, instructing the boys on how to stand and what positions to hold their wrists in, etc, are campy and silly and reminiscent of Kevin Kline's sendup in In and Out. But given how silly it actually is to aspire to this thing called masculinity by mindlessly emulation, that's probably not easily avoided.
Boy Erased subtly underscores a fundamentally Christian problem with a homophobic agenda: having already gone on record as disapproving of heterosexual sexual activity except when restricted to marriage, the conservative Christian churches have painted themselves into a bit of a corner; they can't simply run camps like "Love in Action" as boot camps for enthusiastically heterosexual activities without contradicting a lot of what they stand for. As a consequence, throughout this movie we see a somewhat anachronistic approach to the condemnation of gay sexual activity, treating it as an unpicky, polymorphously perverse way of being entirely too interested in sex in general, rather than a failure to lust sufficiently for the opposite sex.
Nicole Kidman plays the mom, Nancy, who is largely ignored and bypassed by her husband in his rush to handle the crisis of his son having gay sexual feelings. She never joins in the judgmental condemnation and later comes to Jared's rescue and stands up to husband Marshall in the process. This is consistent with conservative men being more hostile to gay males than women from the same culture are.
The most important point, though, is that "Love in Action" does not function as a straightening clinic. It's a recloseting clinic. The clients who attend are not reshaped into heterosexual people and there's very little pretense that this is happening. Instead they are told to "fake it until you make it", to go through the motions, to study what passes as normative heterosexual and gender-appropriate and exhibit those characteristics. The camp's pressure on the participants is to go along with the program, to appear to agree more than to understand and be truly motivated by it. Appearances are all. Other boys in the program advise Jared to say what will give the counselors the impression that he is making progress. It's how you get out of here.
Boy Erased is based on Garrard Conley's book Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith and Family
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Jared Eamons (Lucas Hedges) has one of the stormiest coming-of-age and coming-out experiences: he's in college and [CONTENT WARNING / spoiler alert] gets raped by another religiously inclined boy, Henry (Joe Alwyn), who, like so many rapists, doesn't appear to see rape itself as a fundamental moral failure; instead, Henry is focused on the wickedness of same sex erotic behavior and whimpers to Jared afterwards about his remorse for the bad things he's done. When Jared, to Henry's apparent surprise, isn't particularly warm and friendly to him subsequently, Henry becomes worries that Jared will inform on him, so he preempts that by outing Jared to his parents and to people on campus.
You can be excused for wondering why being outed as a rape victim would cause anyone to reach any meaningful conclusion about the victim's sexual orientation, but Henry doesn't allude to his own involvement or factor in the violence involved; he simply tells everyone that Jared has been engaging in homosexual activities.
As it turns out, Jared has indeed been aware of sexual feelings towards males, and when confronted and accused decides to be honest about that.
That sets the stage for Jared's father Marshall (Russell Crowe), a socially conservative clergyman in a southern Alabama church, to arrange for Jared to attend a gay-to-straight conversion program, "Love in Action", a Christian-centric day facility operated by Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton).
"Love in Action" is a total institution in the classic Erving Goffman sense; Sykes and his staff evaluate the program participants not only on their own behaviors and attitudes but on what opinions and feedback they provide to the others attending. That means they control all of the approval and disapproval that anyone can receive within the program. Denying that you have any problem, any worrisome attitude or unhealthy compensation mechanism, is itself always a symptom, proof that you aren't dealing with your issues, so no one can disagree or differ from anything that they are accused of. And of course this way of treating you is defined as therapeutic, as something you're being subjected to for your own good. It is, after all, love in action.
There is a considerable amount of internalized self-hatred and self-rejection in Boy Erased, and it is convincingly portrayed. Michael (David Joseph Craig) is a rule-worshipping martinet, bristling with disgust and contempt for Jared and the other sinful wicked people brought to the program; Henry the rapist is clearly tied up in revulsion for his own attractions and urges; Jared himself spends much of the movie accepting that he belongs here, worrying that God will condemn him to hell for being this way. There is a scene where Brandon (a camp counselor brought in to give masculinity lessons, played by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers) first berates Jared for going into the toilet unaccompanied and accuses him of going in there to masturbate, and then stands behind him commenting lasciviously on how Jared pees. And from the top, Victor Sykes, an "ex-gay" convert himself, gets a discernable amount of prurient delight from hearing the confessions of his fallen guilty charges; he doesn't believe Jared when Jared details his homosexual sins as consisting in their entirety of laying down next to another guy (Xavier, by Theodore Pellerin) for a spate of platonic hugging. Sykes wants to hear more juicy morsels to pass judgment on.
The scenes where Brandon gives lessons in how to be manly men, instructing the boys on how to stand and what positions to hold their wrists in, etc, are campy and silly and reminiscent of Kevin Kline's sendup in In and Out. But given how silly it actually is to aspire to this thing called masculinity by mindlessly emulation, that's probably not easily avoided.
Boy Erased subtly underscores a fundamentally Christian problem with a homophobic agenda: having already gone on record as disapproving of heterosexual sexual activity except when restricted to marriage, the conservative Christian churches have painted themselves into a bit of a corner; they can't simply run camps like "Love in Action" as boot camps for enthusiastically heterosexual activities without contradicting a lot of what they stand for. As a consequence, throughout this movie we see a somewhat anachronistic approach to the condemnation of gay sexual activity, treating it as an unpicky, polymorphously perverse way of being entirely too interested in sex in general, rather than a failure to lust sufficiently for the opposite sex.
Nicole Kidman plays the mom, Nancy, who is largely ignored and bypassed by her husband in his rush to handle the crisis of his son having gay sexual feelings. She never joins in the judgmental condemnation and later comes to Jared's rescue and stands up to husband Marshall in the process. This is consistent with conservative men being more hostile to gay males than women from the same culture are.
The most important point, though, is that "Love in Action" does not function as a straightening clinic. It's a recloseting clinic. The clients who attend are not reshaped into heterosexual people and there's very little pretense that this is happening. Instead they are told to "fake it until you make it", to go through the motions, to study what passes as normative heterosexual and gender-appropriate and exhibit those characteristics. The camp's pressure on the participants is to go along with the program, to appear to agree more than to understand and be truly motivated by it. Appearances are all. Other boys in the program advise Jared to say what will give the counselors the impression that he is making progress. It's how you get out of here.
Boy Erased is based on Garrard Conley's book Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith and Family
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Skirt
I purchased and wore my first skirt not for transgender reasons but for feminist reasons. It's sexist to designate a garment as only for one sex when there's nothing about it's physical design that makes it accommodate one body structure and not the other. I liked skirts, they looked more comfortable than pants in the summer, and they looked fun to wear. And there was no reason I shouldn't wear a skirt if I wanted to, so I did. I wanted to flaunt my attitude towards sexist expectations.
There also were what could be called transgender reasons as well, though. The entire reason I had such a vested interest in challenging sexist expectations was that I'd been one of the girls as a child, growing up, and had retained that history and sense of self up through junior high and never fully stepped away from it.
Being a girl didn't mean wanting to wear skirts or needing to do so in order to feel fulfilled or appropriate. It meant being the way I was; what I wore and what my body was like had nothing to do with it. Girls were more mature than boys as children, more social, less antagonistic and violent, more patient, far more self-disciplined and able to hold themselves up to an internal standard, smarter, better at classwork, more sensitive, and more elegant overall. And I was competing with them, keeping up, proudly their equal. And the boys were an embarrassment, pathetic disgusting creatures for the most part, and I didn't want to be thought of as one of them.
I never sought to be perceived as female. I was proud of being a girl as good as any other girl despite being male. So I didn't crave a purse of my own to take to school or yearn for my own pair of oxford patent leather shoes.
Years later, the skirt thing was a way for me to be back-in-your-face to a world that had gradually managed to make me feel like maybe something was badly wrong with me.
None of this is entirely alien to a 2018 transgender community's view of being transgender. But it was pretty foreign to the 1980-vintage understanding of what it meant to be transsexual. And unlike a person in similar circumstances who did want to present as female, to be thought of as female, to transition to female, my experience mapped pretty comfortably to 1980-vintage feminism. I saw it as a feminist issue and framed it accordingly.
These days I frame my issues as those of a genderqueer activist doing identity politics, so I've had feet in both camps.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * *
There is political tension between some feminists and some transgender activists. I want to look at that in more detail today.
If you are transgender or are more familiar with a transgender perspective, come along with me for a view from a different window. The way transgender people talk about sexual polarization and the assignment of traits and roles to the two binary sexes is worrisome and problematic to many feminists, because it erases gender inequality (as if men and women were equal, just different) and instead stresses the inequality between cis and trans people (as if cisgender female and cisgender male people were equally privileged, whereas transgender people are at a social disadvantage compared to them, with less power).
Feminists also tend to be uncomfortable with what they see as a certain type of gender essentialism from transgender people. Feminism argues against the notion that there are all these built-in, inherent differences between men and women, whether it be a built-in appropriateness for the wearing of a skirt or a set of behavioral characteristics like being accommodating or flirty or whatever. Transgender spokespersons often embrace the notion that men and women are quite different, that they are different types of people with different ways of being in the world--it's just that some people's physical configuration got them misclassified as one of those two identities when in reality they belonged in the other category. Or, to put it another way, feminists see themselves as trying to tear down the political fence between the sexes, and they perceive the transgender phenomenon as consisting of people who consider the grass to be greener on the other side of the fence, and tunnel under it to get to the other side, leaving the fence fully intact. Transgender paints the world pink and blue. Transgender people appear to celebrate the liberation of the skirt not because guys as well as gals should be able to wear them but because it's trans-affirmative for AMAB people to wear one.
Now let's switch. If you are a feminist, or are more familiar with a feminist perspective on gender issues, let's examine how feminist political behavior often looks to transgender people.
First off, for a person who (like I myself) considers that who they is one of the girls or women despite being male (or being in a body classified by other people as male at any rate), the presenting edge of feminism is the declaration that the female experience is less desirable, although for social-political reasons, not because being female is itself a less desirable condition. Still, that paints transgender women as a political "man bites dog" (or a "cat chases dog") phenomenon: if women are oppressed by men, and the situation female (in all its social aspects) therefore a less desirable situation, why are there people who clearly qualify to be considered as and treated as male doing their best to opt out of it and seeking to be accepted and regarded as women? Well, there are answers to that within feminist perspectives and feminist thought, answers that don't disparage the males (or "people assigned male at birth" if you prefer) who do not wish to continue to be subjected to the situation male; but those aren't the answers that many transgender people encounter when they hear feminists speak about transgender women. Instead, they hear feminists get defensive about this very question, as if transgender people had said to them that there is no women's oppression--see, here are people who could have lived their lives as men but they opt to be women instead. Transgender men, meanwhile, embody what so many people think lots of women would want--not out of penis envy but male-privilege envy. Transgender men, in fact, are often welcome in feminist circles, where they are viewed as female-born people who have chosen a transgender pathway as a coping mechanism for escaping the femininity cage imposed on women. But transgender people don't see this acceptance as a counter to feminist's suspicion and dubiety towards transgender women, perhaps because it is a quiet and low-key acceptance.
Feminists appear to many transgender activists as rigidly committed to binary ideas of power: that the only relevant unfair distinction within the polarization of men versus women is that of power, that it and only it is desirable, that men have it over women, period, end of story, and that therefore no male person or person perceived as and categorized as male can have any legitimate complaint about gender and how gender is set up in our society.
I'll confess that I have found it difficult to enunciate within a feminist context why I have a personal stake in this, why masculinity is toxic to me as a male and why and how it is in my personal political best interests to resist it, as opposed to doing so for chivalrous pro-women reasons. I will tell you that I have found within radical feminism a strong strand of thought that overturns the desirability of power over other people, itself, as a patriarchal notion, but I will also tell you that ordinary everyday feminism as one may encounter it is more likely to come from the more binary "who benefits / who suffers?" kind of analysis, the "culprit theory of oppression", and it does indeed leave no point of entry from which to be a sissy femme male activist against patriarchy.
I don't know if the conflict and friction between feminists and transgender activists is merely receiving more press coverage or if it is indeed worsening. It certainly seems to me to be intensifying. Transgender activists have more social power now than they did decades go when Jan Raymond flug down the gauntlet with The Transsexual Empire; they have labeled feminists who do not regard transgender women as real women TERFS (trans-exclusive radical feminists) and with considerable success have painted them as hateful bigots who need to be shut down, as people who have nothing positive to contribute to the dialog, as people against whom physical violence is deemed appropriate.
I'm not much disposed towards physical violence myself but I find this sufficiently frustrating that I will admit to fantasies of grabbing transgender activists in one hand and feminists in the other and smacking their heads together. Stop it!! We should be listening to each other, all of us. The stakes are high, and this is counterproductive infighting that benefits the status quo. Quit trying to trump each other's victim card. If social liberation is only an acceptable goal for whoever happens to be the most oppressed, we're never going to make any progress. Read each other's material. (And mine, dammit. You can learn from perspectives that differ from your own, and I come to you explicitly as an ally of both but member of neither of your two camps, with my own vantage point).
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
There also were what could be called transgender reasons as well, though. The entire reason I had such a vested interest in challenging sexist expectations was that I'd been one of the girls as a child, growing up, and had retained that history and sense of self up through junior high and never fully stepped away from it.
Being a girl didn't mean wanting to wear skirts or needing to do so in order to feel fulfilled or appropriate. It meant being the way I was; what I wore and what my body was like had nothing to do with it. Girls were more mature than boys as children, more social, less antagonistic and violent, more patient, far more self-disciplined and able to hold themselves up to an internal standard, smarter, better at classwork, more sensitive, and more elegant overall. And I was competing with them, keeping up, proudly their equal. And the boys were an embarrassment, pathetic disgusting creatures for the most part, and I didn't want to be thought of as one of them.
I never sought to be perceived as female. I was proud of being a girl as good as any other girl despite being male. So I didn't crave a purse of my own to take to school or yearn for my own pair of oxford patent leather shoes.
Years later, the skirt thing was a way for me to be back-in-your-face to a world that had gradually managed to make me feel like maybe something was badly wrong with me.
None of this is entirely alien to a 2018 transgender community's view of being transgender. But it was pretty foreign to the 1980-vintage understanding of what it meant to be transsexual. And unlike a person in similar circumstances who did want to present as female, to be thought of as female, to transition to female, my experience mapped pretty comfortably to 1980-vintage feminism. I saw it as a feminist issue and framed it accordingly.
These days I frame my issues as those of a genderqueer activist doing identity politics, so I've had feet in both camps.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * *
There is political tension between some feminists and some transgender activists. I want to look at that in more detail today.
If you are transgender or are more familiar with a transgender perspective, come along with me for a view from a different window. The way transgender people talk about sexual polarization and the assignment of traits and roles to the two binary sexes is worrisome and problematic to many feminists, because it erases gender inequality (as if men and women were equal, just different) and instead stresses the inequality between cis and trans people (as if cisgender female and cisgender male people were equally privileged, whereas transgender people are at a social disadvantage compared to them, with less power).
Feminists also tend to be uncomfortable with what they see as a certain type of gender essentialism from transgender people. Feminism argues against the notion that there are all these built-in, inherent differences between men and women, whether it be a built-in appropriateness for the wearing of a skirt or a set of behavioral characteristics like being accommodating or flirty or whatever. Transgender spokespersons often embrace the notion that men and women are quite different, that they are different types of people with different ways of being in the world--it's just that some people's physical configuration got them misclassified as one of those two identities when in reality they belonged in the other category. Or, to put it another way, feminists see themselves as trying to tear down the political fence between the sexes, and they perceive the transgender phenomenon as consisting of people who consider the grass to be greener on the other side of the fence, and tunnel under it to get to the other side, leaving the fence fully intact. Transgender paints the world pink and blue. Transgender people appear to celebrate the liberation of the skirt not because guys as well as gals should be able to wear them but because it's trans-affirmative for AMAB people to wear one.
Now let's switch. If you are a feminist, or are more familiar with a feminist perspective on gender issues, let's examine how feminist political behavior often looks to transgender people.
First off, for a person who (like I myself) considers that who they is one of the girls or women despite being male (or being in a body classified by other people as male at any rate), the presenting edge of feminism is the declaration that the female experience is less desirable, although for social-political reasons, not because being female is itself a less desirable condition. Still, that paints transgender women as a political "man bites dog" (or a "cat chases dog") phenomenon: if women are oppressed by men, and the situation female (in all its social aspects) therefore a less desirable situation, why are there people who clearly qualify to be considered as and treated as male doing their best to opt out of it and seeking to be accepted and regarded as women? Well, there are answers to that within feminist perspectives and feminist thought, answers that don't disparage the males (or "people assigned male at birth" if you prefer) who do not wish to continue to be subjected to the situation male; but those aren't the answers that many transgender people encounter when they hear feminists speak about transgender women. Instead, they hear feminists get defensive about this very question, as if transgender people had said to them that there is no women's oppression--see, here are people who could have lived their lives as men but they opt to be women instead. Transgender men, meanwhile, embody what so many people think lots of women would want--not out of penis envy but male-privilege envy. Transgender men, in fact, are often welcome in feminist circles, where they are viewed as female-born people who have chosen a transgender pathway as a coping mechanism for escaping the femininity cage imposed on women. But transgender people don't see this acceptance as a counter to feminist's suspicion and dubiety towards transgender women, perhaps because it is a quiet and low-key acceptance.
Feminists appear to many transgender activists as rigidly committed to binary ideas of power: that the only relevant unfair distinction within the polarization of men versus women is that of power, that it and only it is desirable, that men have it over women, period, end of story, and that therefore no male person or person perceived as and categorized as male can have any legitimate complaint about gender and how gender is set up in our society.
I'll confess that I have found it difficult to enunciate within a feminist context why I have a personal stake in this, why masculinity is toxic to me as a male and why and how it is in my personal political best interests to resist it, as opposed to doing so for chivalrous pro-women reasons. I will tell you that I have found within radical feminism a strong strand of thought that overturns the desirability of power over other people, itself, as a patriarchal notion, but I will also tell you that ordinary everyday feminism as one may encounter it is more likely to come from the more binary "who benefits / who suffers?" kind of analysis, the "culprit theory of oppression", and it does indeed leave no point of entry from which to be a sissy femme male activist against patriarchy.
I don't know if the conflict and friction between feminists and transgender activists is merely receiving more press coverage or if it is indeed worsening. It certainly seems to me to be intensifying. Transgender activists have more social power now than they did decades go when Jan Raymond flug down the gauntlet with The Transsexual Empire; they have labeled feminists who do not regard transgender women as real women TERFS (trans-exclusive radical feminists) and with considerable success have painted them as hateful bigots who need to be shut down, as people who have nothing positive to contribute to the dialog, as people against whom physical violence is deemed appropriate.
I'm not much disposed towards physical violence myself but I find this sufficiently frustrating that I will admit to fantasies of grabbing transgender activists in one hand and feminists in the other and smacking their heads together. Stop it!! We should be listening to each other, all of us. The stakes are high, and this is counterproductive infighting that benefits the status quo. Quit trying to trump each other's victim card. If social liberation is only an acceptable goal for whoever happens to be the most oppressed, we're never going to make any progress. Read each other's material. (And mine, dammit. You can learn from perspectives that differ from your own, and I come to you explicitly as an ally of both but member of neither of your two camps, with my own vantage point).
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Tuesday, December 4, 2018
REVIEW: DePression Pink by Alice Klugherz
Pink-garbed people under pink lights. It's a female experience. Depression and anger. (And guilt). Klugherz and her entourage of dancers and performers express women's frustration with this emotional content and the ways in which women who express it are then blamed for their own condition.
Then the terrain changes. The troup speaks of being trained to comply, specifically being trained as females to accommodate. And bad things happen, a combination of ratcheting up the ickiness of the things you're expected to comply with and sudden exposure to things you weren't expecting or ready for, but for which a lifetime training in being amenable and cooperative didn't prepare you to cope with or avoid.
And then you get the message that either you're being ridiculous to complain about it or that it didn't happen at all.
Through personal vignettes and opportune echoes of phrases we've all heard on the news-channels, we're reminded again of Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, and the primordial clash of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. There are viscerally personal stories told, stories of violations and betrayals. Mothers, boyfriends, doctors, teachers, acquaintances and strangers, and how they've contributed, either by committing gross invasions or by participating in the denial and erasure. The whole of the piece is far greater than the mere sum of its parts because it's a cumulative experience.
Diane Roo Carroll, Anna Zekan and Irene Morawski join Alice Klugherz in the leadoff performance, using dance to highlight the emotional substance of what Klugherz narrates about being depressed and angry.
The voice of Marlene Nichols introduces the #metoo element with Klugherz and Cynthia Xavier using movement and posture to illustrate her story. Lenny Langley weilds a mean utility-light and Anna Zekan walks us a transfixed deer caught in it as the women explain the general phenomenon of being caught and paralyzed by the situation, setting the stage for the narratives that follow.
Susan O'Doherty, Shari Rosenblatt, Irene Siegal, and Klugherz herself relate their specific stories of encountering these sexual intrusions; they peel themselves to the raw reactive cores, exposing their uncertainties and the self-doubts and self-recriminations as well as the fury at what's been dealt to them.
Themes emerge: we see how people cope by so often treating the occurrence as a dream or bottling it up as a vague half-remembered thing; there is little opportunity to name things, to speak them out loud, when they are so seldom spoken of and when there is no one to whom one can speak them; and the social pressure is to push down on one's feelings, to deny and erase; and there is once again the "weather thing", learning to regard these behaviors of men as if they were as natural and as inevitable as rainstorms. Marlene Nichols rhetorically asks, "What kind of New Yorker would I be if somebody copping a feel on the subway left me devastated, you know?"
And finally, of course, internalizing it, Blaming one's self for what happened, and experiencing it as unanchored random despondency and misery and fury.
DePression Pink is not set in chronological order. It starts with the depression and anger and then sifts through what precedes it, what causes it. And yet that's the cognitive order, sure enough. It's the order in which a person coming to grips with all this is most likely to process, recognizing the incapacitating emotional states and recovering the awareness and memories of the violations later.
Towards the end of the piece, the performers offer a sentiment I have to dissent with: "If they wanted something mutual", they declare, after indicting the perpetrators of these intrusions, "they would have it". Those of you who follow my blog will already recognize that I have said all along that there are problems for the male person who does indeed want something mutual. It isn't set up that way. This is not, however, any discredit of the message rendered by DePression Pink; if anything it is a concurring statement about how things are structured. It's the same phenomenon, this polarization. One audience member commented on the combination of the sensual/sexual women in some of the dance pieces, dancing in celebration and freedom, and these awful stories, and the significance of juxtaposing them, that they are both part of women's reality. This dynamic, in which sex is pursued in a predatory way by males, in which female people are treated as prey... this is woven into our cultural understanding of what the genders mean, of what it means to be a woman or a man. If there are women who do not readily see any corresponding validity to a male complaint that we're situated to behave in a sexually invasive way or else be relegated to the sexual sidelines, they might more quickly recognize it in the social condemnation of women who are so brazen as to pursue their own sexual interests instead of waiting passively to comply with some male's initiative. They might recognize it in the litany of names that get applied to women who act with sexual autonomy.
Alice Klugherz says, near the end of the piece, "I am going to cross out what I've written, and write it again and again, until it says what I want to say". She seems to have honed her voice to a very effective edge in DePression Pink.
DePression Pink was performed November 29 and 30, and Dec 1, at University Settlement in the Lower East Side of New York. Video footage of the performance is pending and when it becomes available I will edit this blog post to include it.
———————
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Then the terrain changes. The troup speaks of being trained to comply, specifically being trained as females to accommodate. And bad things happen, a combination of ratcheting up the ickiness of the things you're expected to comply with and sudden exposure to things you weren't expecting or ready for, but for which a lifetime training in being amenable and cooperative didn't prepare you to cope with or avoid.
And then you get the message that either you're being ridiculous to complain about it or that it didn't happen at all.
Through personal vignettes and opportune echoes of phrases we've all heard on the news-channels, we're reminded again of Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, and the primordial clash of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. There are viscerally personal stories told, stories of violations and betrayals. Mothers, boyfriends, doctors, teachers, acquaintances and strangers, and how they've contributed, either by committing gross invasions or by participating in the denial and erasure. The whole of the piece is far greater than the mere sum of its parts because it's a cumulative experience.
Diane Roo Carroll, Anna Zekan and Irene Morawski join Alice Klugherz in the leadoff performance, using dance to highlight the emotional substance of what Klugherz narrates about being depressed and angry.
The voice of Marlene Nichols introduces the #metoo element with Klugherz and Cynthia Xavier using movement and posture to illustrate her story. Lenny Langley weilds a mean utility-light and Anna Zekan walks us a transfixed deer caught in it as the women explain the general phenomenon of being caught and paralyzed by the situation, setting the stage for the narratives that follow.
Susan O'Doherty, Shari Rosenblatt, Irene Siegal, and Klugherz herself relate their specific stories of encountering these sexual intrusions; they peel themselves to the raw reactive cores, exposing their uncertainties and the self-doubts and self-recriminations as well as the fury at what's been dealt to them.
Themes emerge: we see how people cope by so often treating the occurrence as a dream or bottling it up as a vague half-remembered thing; there is little opportunity to name things, to speak them out loud, when they are so seldom spoken of and when there is no one to whom one can speak them; and the social pressure is to push down on one's feelings, to deny and erase; and there is once again the "weather thing", learning to regard these behaviors of men as if they were as natural and as inevitable as rainstorms. Marlene Nichols rhetorically asks, "What kind of New Yorker would I be if somebody copping a feel on the subway left me devastated, you know?"
And finally, of course, internalizing it, Blaming one's self for what happened, and experiencing it as unanchored random despondency and misery and fury.
DePression Pink is not set in chronological order. It starts with the depression and anger and then sifts through what precedes it, what causes it. And yet that's the cognitive order, sure enough. It's the order in which a person coming to grips with all this is most likely to process, recognizing the incapacitating emotional states and recovering the awareness and memories of the violations later.
Towards the end of the piece, the performers offer a sentiment I have to dissent with: "If they wanted something mutual", they declare, after indicting the perpetrators of these intrusions, "they would have it". Those of you who follow my blog will already recognize that I have said all along that there are problems for the male person who does indeed want something mutual. It isn't set up that way. This is not, however, any discredit of the message rendered by DePression Pink; if anything it is a concurring statement about how things are structured. It's the same phenomenon, this polarization. One audience member commented on the combination of the sensual/sexual women in some of the dance pieces, dancing in celebration and freedom, and these awful stories, and the significance of juxtaposing them, that they are both part of women's reality. This dynamic, in which sex is pursued in a predatory way by males, in which female people are treated as prey... this is woven into our cultural understanding of what the genders mean, of what it means to be a woman or a man. If there are women who do not readily see any corresponding validity to a male complaint that we're situated to behave in a sexually invasive way or else be relegated to the sexual sidelines, they might more quickly recognize it in the social condemnation of women who are so brazen as to pursue their own sexual interests instead of waiting passively to comply with some male's initiative. They might recognize it in the litany of names that get applied to women who act with sexual autonomy.
Alice Klugherz says, near the end of the piece, "I am going to cross out what I've written, and write it again and again, until it says what I want to say". She seems to have honed her voice to a very effective edge in DePression Pink.
DePression Pink was performed November 29 and 30, and Dec 1, at University Settlement in the Lower East Side of New York. Video footage of the performance is pending and when it becomes available I will edit this blog post to include it.
———————
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————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Sixth Grade
It kind of started with third grade, along with the rest of it. That's when I first remember feeling different and being proud of it. I was good, like the girls. Not like the boys. Boys were bad. Of course I was proud of it. Boys were mean and stupid, an embarrassment. Embarrassing to me, because I was a boy myself, so people would see me as one and treat me as one and expect me to be like them, and I wasn't. So naturally I did things to distinguish myself from them and get people to think of me the way they thought of the girls, in other words as who I really was, what I was actually like.
Last September, I blogged about being a genderqueer third grader, but one of the things I didn't specifically write about was the fighting. Boys fought. Girls didn't. On the playgrounds, in the neighborhood, with their friends or against their enemies, boys got into fights. Shoving and trash-talking would escalate to hitting and wrestling, usually culminating in one boy straddling the other boy's chest and pounding his face and shoulders while his arms were pinned until he said he gave up.
So it was logical for me to drop out of fighting. It would go a long way towards distinguishing myself from the boys and being viewed more like one of the girls. Up until then, yeah I could dish it out, I knew how and I was reasonably adept at it. But grownups didn't want us to. It was against the rules at school and you could get into trouble for it. Most importantly, they talked about boys and how immature we were, and how we were discipline problems and couldn't be trusted, like if the teacher had to leave the room for a moment. A teacher would often ask a girl to take names of anyone acting up in her absence.
So I did that. Yeah, little Mahatma Gandhi, no kidding, I went totally nonviolent as a nine year old as part of showing I was different from the other boys, as good as the girls. It was easier than you might think. Little boys aren't all that efficient at inflicting pain; their punches insult more than they bruise. Also, they're surprisingly formal and stylized in how they escalate from taunting and shoving and daring and when I simply refused to lift fists they'd get frustrated and insult me harder, then get contemptuous and accuse me of being a sissy, which was sort of like trying to insult a witch by implying she's a witch if you see what I mean, and then they'd stalk off in disgust.
So anyway, since this is titled "Sixth Grade", you probably see where this is headed. The three years between being a nine year old and being a twelve year old are some pretty long years. I'd been the target of some really intense bullying and harassment, mocked and giving the most insulting pet names people could come up with, and the physical confrontations had gotten scarier. They'd circle me, several of them, egging on the principal assailant and adding additional threats. The adrenaline made my stomach churn and my voice shake and they could see how they were making me feel and they liked it, they got off on it, they found me quite entertaining. Meanwhile, they'd gotten a lot more efficient at hitting and hurting, and I was out of practice and hadn't learned what they'd learned in those intervening years. Somewhere along the line I had ceased to feel like I had a choice: I couldn't fight.
Mark Fiveash was one of those boys, the ones who thought it was funny and clever to make fart sounds with their armpits and clown around ridiculing and tormenting people for the entertainment of his amused followers. Sixth grade teacher Mrs. Mason had asked him to put the film camera up on the shelf and he held it between his legs with the lens barrel facing out and mugged for the classroom. I scowled my opinion. Then he made as if to insert the lens under Cindy Salter's skirt.
"That's rude", pronounced Betsy Johnson in the desk to my right.
I nodded. "Act your age".
Joey Joiner's seat was behind Betsy's. He leaned over and commented, "You never laugh at anything Mark does. Why not?" I said he wasn't funny, simple as that.
It was Joey who was waiting for me when the end of day bell rang. And he didn't bring a crowd. It was just him. "Fight me", he urged. Like he was suggesting that we go ride bikes together or something. "C'mon, fight. Put your fists up". Joey was a fairly quiet student, put off a little bit of a tough attitude but wasn't among the people who typically harassed me at recess or lunchtime. He was also not particularly large. I was taller and skinny as I was I probably weighed about the same. So by himself he didn't seem especially scary.
I wasn't going to fight him. I didn't do that. He didn't get louder and make increasingly boastful threats but he was relentless, intractible. He wouldn't get out of my way. To get home I first had to cross the grassy school campus. The initial throng of students leaving the building had thinned away and we had the schoolyard to ourselves and still we stood there deadlocked. So I started walking slowly towards him, my hands at my side.
If he had continued to demand a fight but didn't physically interfere with me leaving, that would have worked, but he saw how that was going to play out and began peppering me with punches to the face, shoulder, and chest. "C'mon, just make a fist!"
I walked into the punches and reacted as little as possible and kept going at the same pace. Joey began taking more care with what he was doing and made each punch land hard in painful places. It hurt, it really hurt. I was also shocked that he was doing this: how can someone just keep on hitting a person who hasn't done anything to them and who won't fight back?
He kept hitting me on the eyebrows and cheek and I got more sore and each impact hurt worse until with maybe thirty yards of grass between me and the sidewalk he succeeded in making me cry. I was hurt and I was angry and outraged, and I couldn't keep going on, couldn't take any more, and that frustrated me too, broke me. I turned around and walked back and into the library, which was still open. He followed me, still whacking me when and where he could, until he saw that I was going inside.
The librarian had seen the end of it and now saw me coming in crying and furious. "I'm so sorry, that was horrible, that was so mean! Are you OK? Want a tissue? I don't understand how people can behave like that. There's a bathroom down there if you want to freshen up. Stay here until you feel a little better, stay as long as you want. You can call someone if you need to."
I appreciated the sympathy and the protection. She let me sit in a dark office sniffling until the shock wore off. Then I thanked her and carefully looked out the windows before deciding Joey wasn't lurking in wait for my reappearance, then I headed home.
A couple weeks later, Mrs. Mason made a statement about how important it was for boys to treat girls and women with respect because their greater delicacy entitled them to this important consideration, and I snapped, "It's supposed to be that we're equal". I wasn't on the road to becoming a men's rights activist, exactly, but I was starting to sense a fundamental unfairness to the whole setup, a sense that I was not just a bullying victim but was being badly treated on a systemic basis.
There were double standards afoot. Karen Welch, the girl who lived across the street from us, was in Mrs. Mason's class too. She had a boyfriend, Tommy. I had had a girlfriend in third grade but not since, and missed having that in my life, missed it very much. And now boys and girls were starting to be interested in each other more often, to be boyfriend and girlfriend. That part was good, but it should have been me. Not with Karen, I didn't particularly like Karen, but I liked a lot of the girls and if anyone was going to have a girlfriend it should be me, not loud rude typical boys like Tommy.
————————
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————————
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Last September, I blogged about being a genderqueer third grader, but one of the things I didn't specifically write about was the fighting. Boys fought. Girls didn't. On the playgrounds, in the neighborhood, with their friends or against their enemies, boys got into fights. Shoving and trash-talking would escalate to hitting and wrestling, usually culminating in one boy straddling the other boy's chest and pounding his face and shoulders while his arms were pinned until he said he gave up.
So it was logical for me to drop out of fighting. It would go a long way towards distinguishing myself from the boys and being viewed more like one of the girls. Up until then, yeah I could dish it out, I knew how and I was reasonably adept at it. But grownups didn't want us to. It was against the rules at school and you could get into trouble for it. Most importantly, they talked about boys and how immature we were, and how we were discipline problems and couldn't be trusted, like if the teacher had to leave the room for a moment. A teacher would often ask a girl to take names of anyone acting up in her absence.
So I did that. Yeah, little Mahatma Gandhi, no kidding, I went totally nonviolent as a nine year old as part of showing I was different from the other boys, as good as the girls. It was easier than you might think. Little boys aren't all that efficient at inflicting pain; their punches insult more than they bruise. Also, they're surprisingly formal and stylized in how they escalate from taunting and shoving and daring and when I simply refused to lift fists they'd get frustrated and insult me harder, then get contemptuous and accuse me of being a sissy, which was sort of like trying to insult a witch by implying she's a witch if you see what I mean, and then they'd stalk off in disgust.
So anyway, since this is titled "Sixth Grade", you probably see where this is headed. The three years between being a nine year old and being a twelve year old are some pretty long years. I'd been the target of some really intense bullying and harassment, mocked and giving the most insulting pet names people could come up with, and the physical confrontations had gotten scarier. They'd circle me, several of them, egging on the principal assailant and adding additional threats. The adrenaline made my stomach churn and my voice shake and they could see how they were making me feel and they liked it, they got off on it, they found me quite entertaining. Meanwhile, they'd gotten a lot more efficient at hitting and hurting, and I was out of practice and hadn't learned what they'd learned in those intervening years. Somewhere along the line I had ceased to feel like I had a choice: I couldn't fight.
Mark Fiveash was one of those boys, the ones who thought it was funny and clever to make fart sounds with their armpits and clown around ridiculing and tormenting people for the entertainment of his amused followers. Sixth grade teacher Mrs. Mason had asked him to put the film camera up on the shelf and he held it between his legs with the lens barrel facing out and mugged for the classroom. I scowled my opinion. Then he made as if to insert the lens under Cindy Salter's skirt.
"That's rude", pronounced Betsy Johnson in the desk to my right.
I nodded. "Act your age".
Joey Joiner's seat was behind Betsy's. He leaned over and commented, "You never laugh at anything Mark does. Why not?" I said he wasn't funny, simple as that.
It was Joey who was waiting for me when the end of day bell rang. And he didn't bring a crowd. It was just him. "Fight me", he urged. Like he was suggesting that we go ride bikes together or something. "C'mon, fight. Put your fists up". Joey was a fairly quiet student, put off a little bit of a tough attitude but wasn't among the people who typically harassed me at recess or lunchtime. He was also not particularly large. I was taller and skinny as I was I probably weighed about the same. So by himself he didn't seem especially scary.
I wasn't going to fight him. I didn't do that. He didn't get louder and make increasingly boastful threats but he was relentless, intractible. He wouldn't get out of my way. To get home I first had to cross the grassy school campus. The initial throng of students leaving the building had thinned away and we had the schoolyard to ourselves and still we stood there deadlocked. So I started walking slowly towards him, my hands at my side.
If he had continued to demand a fight but didn't physically interfere with me leaving, that would have worked, but he saw how that was going to play out and began peppering me with punches to the face, shoulder, and chest. "C'mon, just make a fist!"
I walked into the punches and reacted as little as possible and kept going at the same pace. Joey began taking more care with what he was doing and made each punch land hard in painful places. It hurt, it really hurt. I was also shocked that he was doing this: how can someone just keep on hitting a person who hasn't done anything to them and who won't fight back?
He kept hitting me on the eyebrows and cheek and I got more sore and each impact hurt worse until with maybe thirty yards of grass between me and the sidewalk he succeeded in making me cry. I was hurt and I was angry and outraged, and I couldn't keep going on, couldn't take any more, and that frustrated me too, broke me. I turned around and walked back and into the library, which was still open. He followed me, still whacking me when and where he could, until he saw that I was going inside.
The librarian had seen the end of it and now saw me coming in crying and furious. "I'm so sorry, that was horrible, that was so mean! Are you OK? Want a tissue? I don't understand how people can behave like that. There's a bathroom down there if you want to freshen up. Stay here until you feel a little better, stay as long as you want. You can call someone if you need to."
I appreciated the sympathy and the protection. She let me sit in a dark office sniffling until the shock wore off. Then I thanked her and carefully looked out the windows before deciding Joey wasn't lurking in wait for my reappearance, then I headed home.
A couple weeks later, Mrs. Mason made a statement about how important it was for boys to treat girls and women with respect because their greater delicacy entitled them to this important consideration, and I snapped, "It's supposed to be that we're equal". I wasn't on the road to becoming a men's rights activist, exactly, but I was starting to sense a fundamental unfairness to the whole setup, a sense that I was not just a bullying victim but was being badly treated on a systemic basis.
There were double standards afoot. Karen Welch, the girl who lived across the street from us, was in Mrs. Mason's class too. She had a boyfriend, Tommy. I had had a girlfriend in third grade but not since, and missed having that in my life, missed it very much. And now boys and girls were starting to be interested in each other more often, to be boyfriend and girlfriend. That part was good, but it should have been me. Not with Karen, I didn't particularly like Karen, but I liked a lot of the girls and if anyone was going to have a girlfriend it should be me, not loud rude typical boys like Tommy.
————————
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