I don't have the stomach to write much about this

I see via antiwar that horrible Wired has finally released the full Bradley Manning/Adrian Lamo chat logs, and my (and a bunch of other people's) feeling, based on the bits that had leaked out already, that Manning has been misgendered this whole time seems to have been correct (assuming, that is, that the log is reliable).

I have no doubt that the guards who forced hir to stand naked with legs spread and hands behind hir back, and whoever gave them their orders, know that.

Incarceration is not something that improves when you do it while trans.

PS I only read the top, like, twenty lines, and my god is Adrian Lamo even more disgusting than I thought.

Masculine military, feminine art: or, Ethan thinks out loud, talks out of ass

(I've been poking at this essay, off and on, for the past five days now. If it's a mess, it's because I'm just kind of aggregating it as ideas come to me. If it's really misguided, it's because I'm just thinking out loud, and not very carefully at that. Please, let me know! I want to refine these ideas and get a better understanding of things, and since I realized that wasn't happening with me just writing to myself, I decided to post this one raw.)

UPDATE: Here's Justin's response.
UPDATE II: See bottom of post.

This feminism 101 post by Melissa McEwan is (genuinely) interesting, and I imagine for many people it could actually be quite useful. Given that it's by McEwan, and thus written from her usual mainstream liberal feminist perspective, I have many disagreements with it, but regardless: interesting, useful.

I would like to, more respectfully than my usual, disagree with this aspect of its analysis in particular:

All of which happens inside an environment which is coded masculine to begin with—which is why corporate work is considered serious and important, while the arts, which are coded feminine, are considered unserious and superfluous.

Which, in turn, is why the National Endowment for the Arts (feminine) is constantly in threat of being defunded, but solemn discussion about reducing the budget for the Defense Department (masculine) is considered a hilarious suggestion

McEwan then goes off of a tangent about Democrats and Republicans, my objection to which I'm sure I don't need to state. But regarding the quoted section: I agree that "the arts" are generally coded feminine, while the military is coded masculine. But the straightforward cause and effect McEwan imputes (i.e., the gender coding is the reason for the difference in funding/support) is, at best, oversimplified.

My immediate reaction on reading it was to say to myself, "No, that's exactly backwards," but it's not. If I were to say that McEwan had it backwards, I'd be saying that the military is coded masculine so that it could be funded better, etc. Which is not the case. Rather, it's an example of the evolution of social norms under the pressures of power, as I've written about before*. McEwan's pairing of the military with the arts is a wonderful opportunity to point this out.

*Re-reading that post, hah, I certainly know more about Naomi Wolf now than I did then, yugh.

There are many ways to determine or define or describe the lineage of our current society, but however you do it, military activities have been coded masculine at pretty much every point in that lineage. The same cannot be said of the feminine coding of the arts; in fact, that coding is extremely recent (think of warrior poets, the machoism of the Romantics, etc.), and even at this point I would suggest that it is not nearly so pervasive as the masculine coding of the military--drumming or electric guitar playing, say, is coded extremely masculine, and think about how many of the last 100 movies you saw were directed by women.

What is the reason for this difference in the vintage and strength of the gender coding of these two pursuits?

Military pursuits are perhaps the most important function of civilization; if not, they are certainly the main mechanism by which civilization maintains itself. For a detailed explanation of this, pick up anything with the name "Derrick Jensen" on it, but briefly: civilization, being the organization of people into cities, means that large numbers of people live on land that cannot itself provide the resources that those people need to live; therefore, civilization must import resources from outside, which requires a constant process of expansion, which inevitably leads to violent conflict. So, for as long as there has been civilization, military activities have been essential for that civilization's survival. As long as there has been civilization, the masculine has been privileged (the reasons for this are hazy, as far as I know, and I'm sure it's not so linear as I'm making it sound, but for now let's accept it as a first principle), and so we see why the masculine coding of the military has been so long-lived and pervasive. And, considering that all of this stuff continues to be true for contemporary society and in addition we've now got the immensely profitable military-industrial complex goin' on, it's easy to see that the selective pressures on the society will keep its evolution proceeding along those lines for the foreseeable future.

Art, though. What's the deal with that? I'm not going to pretend like I know a lot about the history of art's social role, because my understanding is much more of a vague outlines thing than any kind of expert knowledge. So, frankly, I'm going to gloss over the long-view historic thing a bit by saying that, in various ways, for most of civilization's history art has played at best a neutral role as regards the interests of power, but more often and in general has served those interests more than not. Court patronage, nation-building culture, that sort of thing. To a large extent the same is true today.

But things have been changing, and, keeping in mind the admitted vagueness of my knowledge on this subject, I would tentatively place the beginning of the change with (what else?) the industrial revolution, gradual at first but with, as with everything associated with the industrial revolution, a kind of bewildering acceleration in the past hundred years or so. Art, to a certain extent, resists the commodification, the mass-production that comes along with industrial capitalism. Of course, to a much greater extent, it is subsumed within it, I'm not naïve enough to not see that, but at least in concept, the idea of the artist is the idea of the individual, the idea of the art-object is the idea of the idiosyncratic.

Or maybe it's not the difference between concept (artist as individual) versus common reality (artist as producer, or content provider) so much as the idea that art contains within it the possibility of resisting industrial capitalism. As the Situationists would not put it but to use their terms, art, stripped of its official structures, has in it the possibility of détournement--subversion--and of the dérive--spontaneity of a type unusable by power.

So, as capitalism advances, increasingly colonizing all areas of life and the world, art increasingly has to either rebel against it, in which case it is opposed to the interests of power, or serve it, which does not require a recalibration of priorities but does require a huge recalibration of methods (serving the power of a king's court is very different from serving the power of CEOs and part owners). In particular, art that serves the phase of capitalism we currently find ourselves in has to be amenable either to mass production, to marketing, to fashion, to being chintzy, planned-obsolescent, and interchangeable, or to being a trophy for rich people, reflecting back to them their best conception of themselves (in which case it is basically serving the old-fashioned purpose of art, but this is a niche in an expanding market).

At this point I think we can see why a feminine coding of art has been becoming more and more prevalent. On the one hand, art that actually is opposed to power's interests can be dismissed as irrational and meaningless, or even dangerously hysterical. On the other hand, art that serves the needs of production can be treated as subservient and submissive.

To be continued....? You decide.

UPDATE II: Picador says in comments what I think I was trying to say all along, and is hilarious to boot:

...Power can redefine activities and groups as masculine/feminine, thereby modulating their social status, depending on whether they serve or oppose the interests of Power.

E.g.: if the Pentagon were to determine that US military supremacy could only be assured by deploying legions of pregnant women dressed in pink leotards quoting Andrea Dworkin and blowing soap bubbles, 1) the Pentagon would deploy such forces, and 2) our culture would immediately redefine pregnant women in pink leotards quoting Andrea Dworkin and blowing soap bubbles as supremely masculine and kick-ass.

[Hilarious case-in-point examples elided; see comments.]

...it can be done deliberately, and selectively, by those who control the media discourse regardless of any inherent "masculine" or "feminine" traits of the target... It's not that Group A is demeaned because they are feminine; they are demeaned because they are a threat to power, and power demeans them by deliberately classifying them as feminine.

José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies page 292

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

...they call it peace to live in so many and so terrible evils, such as sacrificing their own children or making other hidden sacrifices, or staying awake all night doing mad things; and so they neither maintain cleanliness in their lives or in their marriages, but one man takes the life of another out of envy, another takes a man's wife and he has no objection, and everything is confused: blood, deaths, thefts, deceits, corruption, unfaithfulness, riots, wrongs, mutinies, forgetfulness of God, contamination of souls, changing sexes and birth, changing of marriage partners, and disorder of adulteries and filthiness, for idolatry is an abyss of all the evils.

It's a gender weekend!

Mel of Broadsnark just linked on twitter to this essay by Asher Bauer. It's probably the best introduction to radical thinking about gender you could hope for right now. Highly recommended for everyone, even if you think you're already knowledgeable on the subject (it's even made me a bit embarrassed about some of my phrasing in the last post), and especially if you think you're not interested, because you damn well should be.

Comments section is long and good.

Do you have a Y chromosome?

I swear I don't regularly read the xkcd blog, particularly not on Saturday mornings, but I ended up there due to a complicated series of links that I couldn't even begin to retrace, and while there I stumbled across this.

I guess he was conducting some sort of a survey about colors and how people name them, or something, and part of the data he was interested in collecting was respondents' chromosomal sex--because it relates to colorblindness.

I'm by-and-large cisgender, but I'm still always pissed off whenever a form or survey or anything asks a sex-or-gender related question and gives only the options M and F (not only, but definitely not least, because one of the people I care most about in the world is somewhere-or-other on the trans spectrum). It's a small thing, but, you know, small things suck, right?

So, from that perspective, I'm always interested in people who set it up differently, and in discussions about setting it up. So xkcd's discussion here is interesting to me.

The way he set up the question was this: he asked "Do you have a Y chromosome?" and allowed answers of "don't know," "yes," and "no." Underneath, a brief description says "If unsure, select 'Yes' if you are physically male and 'No' if you are physically female. If you have had SRS, please respond for your sex at birth. This question is relevant to the genetics of colorblindness."

It's not perfect (for example, if I were some form of intersex, I would probably answer "Don't know" but would feel a bit iffy about it), but it seems like a good start for how to phrase things when chromosomal (and therefore some aspects of phsyical) sex is what matters--which, frankly, is not that often, but does occur sometimes. I like especially that the note explains why the question is being asked; leaving the reason unstated, as most do, assumes and implies that the importance and reality of our binary gender distinction is unquestionable and far more broadly applicable than it actually is.

(The comments section is huge and honestly I didn't read any of it, assuming it would be all big nerds, you know? Nerdy webcomic fans? HATE THEM.)

UPDATE Commenter Melinda has made me aware of some additional information, in light of which I would like to point out that none of this means that Randall (the writer of xkcd) isn't kind of a douche on the issue at times. See comments.

Oh come on

Hey, Duncan. I like you, but this

Personally, I don't seem to have a "gender identity": I know that I'm male, but subjectively, inside myself, I don't feel that I'm either male or female

just means that you're not trans. Also: don't assume your experience is universal, because when people do that, they become tiresome.

And a blurg note: non-bad family stuff has been distracting me recently. Regular posting should resume shortly.

Choose your own adventure

One thing that my friend Melissa McEwan is actually pretty good about is the fluidity of sexuality. She frames her essay as a critique of an episode of The View, which is kind of annoying (though I guess it's not much different from the way I frequently frame my own essays as critiques of McEwan, so I shouldn't complain), and her critique is myopic in the way it tends to be, but she gets at some good things here:

I don't particularly love the idea that women who come out as lesbians late in life were necessarily closeted all along. I'm sure that's true for many women, but why is it so hard to conceive of a woman (or a man, for that matter) whose attractions, or choices, change over hir lifetime?

We're always so desperate to talk about sexuality as if it isn't a choice, ever, for anyone, lest we create a crack into which homobigots can insert their argument that it's an American-wrecking lifestyle choice that makes the Baby Jesus cry buttplug-shaped tears or whatever, but, you know, maybe we should be talking about sexuality in a way that says even if it is a choice, people who love and fuck and live with and parent with and grow old with or have one-night stands with people of the same sex are deserving of equal rights because it's no one else's goddamned business and MREWYB.

(MREWYB is an acronym for my rights end where yours begin; it's a nice enough thought if we must remain within the conceptual framework of "rights," which I wish we wouldn't. Jack has a nice essay on some of the problems with this framework.)

The whole "it's not a choice" concept is muddled on a number of levels. There's what McEwan mentions, which at a more fundamental level is that this rigid interpretation of sexuality devalues choice in favor of genetic (or whatever) destiny. It sets up a context of unavoidable circumstances and says we're all helpless victims to them--while simultaneously insisting that being thus victimized ain't half bad! Sounds a lot like capitalism when you put it that way, actually.

Another problem with "it's not a choice" is that even if we say that sexual preference or orientation or whatever isn't a choice, sexual behavior always is. The capital-L Lesbians of second wave feminism, for example, could tell you that. It may or may not be personally healthy for any given individual to choose one sexual behavior over another, but it is still possible to choose. Acknowledging this does not lead logically only to the "choose monogamous heterosexuality within marriage!" argument, though if you have a case for it, by all means make it. Accepting that sexual behavior is a choice can lead equally to any number of other arguments, from "do whatever you feel like but try not to hurt anyone" (my favorite) to others just as specific (and potentially harmful) as the fundamentalist line, like "have sex only with people matrilineally related to you" or "never get consent" or "stick with nonhumans." Out of the whole range of options opened up by admitting that there is a choice here, it shouldn't be difficult to argue in favor of doing whatever we feel like short of hurting people, and yet we still seem to be terrified of making this argument.

Another problem I have with the "it's not a choice" crowd, and this is more anecdotal, is that at least among people I personally have known, there is a high correlation between promoting the choiceless concept and promoting the static, often binary (on/off, straight/gay) model of sexuality that McEwan critiques in her original post, the model that doesn't seem to be questioned by anyone on The View for instance.

I tend to identify my sexuality, when called upon to do so, as "gay," for a bunch of reasons. It's a simple shorthand. It is the single word that most accurately reflects my actual sexual behavior as it has occurred in the real world (though "infrequent" also comes close on that front). It has the force of habit behind it, as it's the identification I came to back when I first realized there was something to identify, more than half my lifetime ago now, back when my still-developing brain and still-strong (despite my parents' best efforts!) cultural indoctrination led me to simple answers rather than accurate ones. Because, yes--"gay" is a simple answer, and a decent approximation, but it's not accurate, in a multitude of ways that I'm not going to go into here (partly because some of them are entirely private, partly because it's complex enough that it would extend the length of this essay a thousandfold, and partly because a huge chunk of it is things I haven't even figured out how to articulate externally). I don't know what a more accurate description would be--I guess "queer" would do it, though I have an aversion both to the sound of the word and to the specific people who used it most frequently when I first became aware of it as a legitimate descriptor, and anyway I'm not sure how I feel about using such an enormous blanket term that nevertheless separates all of humanity into the distinct categories of "queer" and "straight," which I reject as invalid.

I think the problem is that the whole notion of "sexual identity" is a crock. It's a function entirely of our socialization in this insane, fucked up, unlivable society we have. It is, in fact, a form of the choiceless victimization I described early on in this essay. Don't get me wrong; there are clearly people who tend towards the behaviors we bundle under the "straight identity" and those who tend towards the behaviors we bundle under the "gay identity" and those who tend towards the behaviors we bundle under the "bisexual identity" and so on, but tendencies do not an identity make.

For a long time, the concept of fluid sexuality confused me; surely, I thought, if you're attracted only to members of the opposite sex, you're just straight, and if you're attracted only to members of the same sex, you're just gay, and if you're attracted to both, you're just bi. Why make it more complicated, more mysterious I thought, than that? Doesn't that cover everything? I eventually realized that the whole concept of "same" and "opposite" sexes is, at best, incomplete and inaccurate, that the "attraction" model isn't much better, and that there is a great deal more to sexuality than just which side of the artificial gender binary you most enjoy mingling genitals with.

Earlier, when I said "sounds a lot like capitalism!" it was more than a jokey throwaway. The late-period capitalism that we live in requires of us that we feel like we have options--but only the options provided to us by the system itself. Thus, with sexuality, we do have, in many ways, a greater openness than the generations that preceded us. It's OK to be gay, pretty much! But this openness has been channeled into tiny little boxes, easy to control, easy to market to. Gay? Buy the gay identity! Straight? Buy the straight one! Look at all these options we have for you. Anything you could possibly want to reflect and display your identity, we can sell you. And if you want to choose some other option--sorry, it's not a choice.

I've said it before--just as economic interests seek to control our movements, a control that can be fought with the Situationist concept of psychogeography, the same interests seek to control our sexualities. We need, again and always, to be sexual flâneurs--in, and this is important, whatever way best suits us.

exclusion

just came across this in The Transgender Studies Reader and thought it good to revisit some past talkin's:

"'Woman' typically has been mobilized in ways that advance the specific class, racial, national, religious and ideological agendas of some feminists at the expense of other women; the fight over transgender inclusion within feminism is not significantly different, in many respects, from other fights involving working-class women, women of color, lesbian women, disabled women, women who produce or consume pornography, and women who practice consensual sadomasochism..."

- Susan Stryker, (De)Subjugated Knowledges

Glen AND Glenda

From Science News: Chicken cells have strong sense of sexual identity.

Basically, a study of a rare but naturally occurring developmental oddity in chickens that results in animals bilaterally divided into male and female (seriously, look at the picture) has found that male and female cells are scattered throughout the body, male dominating one side and female dominating the other, regardless of the hormonal signals that previously were thought to override this cellular sex.

Subsequent experiments supported the idea of strong, cell-by-cell sex identity. When the researchers transplanted tissues from genetically female embryos into what would become the gonads of genetically male ones and vice versa, the transplanted cells didn’t start expressing opposite-sex characteristics.

In combination with other recent papers, says UCLA geneticist Art Arnold, the new study calls for fresh thinking about sex determination, and not just in birds. “The old hormone-only theory is no longer viable, for birds or mammals,” he says.

In some ways this seems like it could be a bit disheartening for humans using hormone therapy as part of a transition process*, but to me, taken together with a lot of other research (like the experiment I pointed out a while back in which female mice were turned into male mice by switching one gene), I find this fantastic. It's yet another scientific finding chipping away at the notion we have that sex is a simple binary, and yet another encouraging sign that we may eventually have far greater control over how our bodies reflect gender than we do now.

*Though of course hormones do have a huge, demonstrable effect that no amount of scientific findings about cellular sex can take away, and knowing more about this stuff can only help the hormones to be more effective.

So weird

Following some links around from articles at the Punkass Blog, I stumbled, as I occasionally do, onto a feminist* blog that holds a vicious, psychotic hatred of transgender people. As usual when this happens, I'm filled with a strong urge to post a comment saying "You're absurdly hate-filled and have no idea what you're talking about," but I never do, because really what's the point?

My only reason for posting this right now is to say: huh?!?

I completely understand, though I disagree (somewhat selfishly, somewhat not), when some feminists' rage against men is indiscriminate and vehement. It is hard to be understanding when the entire class of human beings you belong to is oppressed by an entire other class. But what the hell did transgender people do to these feminists?

And it's a really bizarre kind of hatred, too. Or, rather, a bizarre kind of hatred for people calling themselves feminists to engage in. In the post and in the comments, all kinds of attitudes come out that I bet the people writing would immediately recognize as absurd if other people made them about any other group. In the original post, the writer says that transwomen should "try addressing the problem of rape and the men they are afraid will rape them, if they use the mensroom. but they never do," as though it was the responsibility of the victim to fix the victimizer. Or this from one of the comments (which gets an approving response from the original poster): "This would be funny if you weren’t right about trans women being MRAs. One of them even admitted it." One of them??? Hey, once I met a woman who lured men in with her looks and then crushed them! All women do that! Once I met a Black person who stole! All Black people do that! Are you fucking kidding me?

*I'm tempted to say "feminist" in quotation marks, but I don't want to be one of those people who defines "feminist" as "someone who agrees with me on everything."
**Another of those times when the possessive is insultingly inaccurate.

WOW: This post is awkwardly written. I might copyedit later. The content won't change, but the wording might a bit. Just, you know, a warning.

Acknowledged

April 1 saw two long, interesting essays appear in the blogs I read. I have not yet been able to formulate responses to them, but I'm feeling a need to acknowledge them. So:

Jack Crow against "right and wrong." Awesome intro about eternal uncertainty, too.

Lisa Kansas on "fun feminism." I hadn't heard the term before but I'm definitely familiar with the concept and yeah, yuck. Replacing a system of oppression from without with a system of oppression from within, all the while retaining the same ol' subservience to consumerism, is not a positive step.

Xe Part 2

Not Blackwater.

In the first part I mentioned that the awkwardness of the xe/hir construction was a major impediment to its ability to become unmarked. This brings me to my second feeling about the word, which is that I'm not sure how I feel about efforts, like this one, to normalize "deviance."

People who fall outside of our society's norms don't have many advantages as a result of their deviations, but a major one--one that, speaking as someone with a minority sexual orientation, I fucking love--is that it gives us a leg up in recognizing those norms for what they are (i.e., societal choices rather than natural law; often, impositions by and for the benefit of power) and rejecting them. To put it simply, we're already weird--we don't have to try. And given the absolutely untenable nature of the world as it is, we have to be weird--we have to reject it. All of us.

I'm a cisgendered man, so I understand that I'm coming at this issue from a position of considerable privilege. And I certainly think that these normalizing efforts are in many ways quite noble. Transgendered people are, obviously, people. People who, like everyone else, should have the right to not be exotic if they don't want to be. Just because I feel, strongly, that the world and all of its works need to be rejected fundamentally, does not mean that I have the right to demand it of other people just because they have non-standard bodies (or whatever else non-standard someone might have). And it must be really frustrating to go through daily life not even having a pronoun that comfortably refers to you. And I am well aware that frustration is the least of transgendered people's problems as they move through this crappy society of ours.

But I know that I'm extremely grateful* for my sexuality, because that aspect of my nature has been of great help in forming my view of the world. And for much the same reason that I'm ambivalent about gay marriage (it is of course ridiculous to have legal advantages available to some of the population but not all, but I'm not eager to hitch my sexual wagon to old-timey heterosexual patriarchal property transference procedures, you know?), I'm ambivalent about xe.

*Insofar as I can be grateful of something that no one gave me.

Xe

Not Blackwater.

 

Xe is, as far as I can tell, currently the most popular constructed genderless third person human pronoun in English (constructed to serve a purpose not adequately covered by it, which only applies to humans in a pejorative sense, and the singular they, which is a natural development of the language of ancient vintage, but which is pretty much only usable when the individual person being referred to is non-specific, rather than in cases of a specific person whose gender is not being specified). The pronoun is used primarily in cases where a person's gender is unknown (to replace the sexist practice of defaulting to "he") or when the person's gender falls outside of the traditional binary.

 

I have two kind of opposing, kind of complementary, feelings about the word.

 

The first is that as a construction it's incredibly awkward. "Xe" does not look like an English word, and there is no obvious way to pronounce it (I imagine that most people on seeing it for the first time would eventually come to the correct pronunciation, "zee," but only after some puzzling, and there's still a bunch of room for error). The object form of the word, "hir," isn't much better, particularly since on analogy from "sir" and "fir" most people would likely come to a pronunciation identical to to "her," which of course entirely defeats the purpose. If the intention is to eventually create an unmarked pronoun, so that people of indeterminate or non-traditional gender can be referred to as casually as people of specified, standard gender, then these are huge obstacles. It is true that familiarity can render anything unmarked; no one stumbles over Xerox, for example, though it shares many of the same problems. The difference, of course, is that a brand name has millions of dollars behind it working to shove it into our faces at all times; transgender people and default-he-avoiding linguistic feminists don't have this enforced familiarity working for them. In fact, both uses of the word are efforts to familiarize and normalize simultaneously (I think it's safe to say that most people don't have everyday experience with genderqueer people--to their knowledge, at any rate--or with considering the impacts of gendered language on thought). This is a difficult enough task without using such strange words. I haven't even gotten into how the particularly combination of phonemes in xe and hir make them both slightly more difficult (time and effort consuming) to pronounce than the already existent third-person pronouns, which I suspect might be an even larger obstacle.

And no, I don't have a suggestion for a better pronoun. Of what I've seen suggested, the Spivak system seems the most natural, although even it looks awfully weird written down, and no one seems to use it anyway. The naturally occurring yo found in some Baltimore schools seems promising, though I haven't heard any news about it since 2007.

My second feeling about xe is more of an emotional reaction than a procedural one. I'll be writing about it soon, hopefully tomorrow.

Incidentally, my Firefox spellchecker doesn't know the words xe, hir, genderqueer, or even transgender. Long way to go. Then again, it doesn't know how to spell Rhode Island, either, so I guess that really doesn't mean much.

Weird

I find Johnny Weir pretty aesthetically unappealing, and I think the Olympics are a really enormous atrocity, but IOZ has a really good point and I hereby resolve that, going forward, I will admire the ridiculous little twink.

Oh

Huh, so apparently Tristero really does hate transgender people, and that weird comment the other day wasn't just a fluke. I mean, I already thought he was reprehensible and a moron, but I guess this is just another way he fulfills those roles. Good to know.

Belated, as usual

So I knew that Martha Coakley was not someone I particularly cared to see in office (who is?), but I didn't realize until today that she's the nasty piece of work who made her name by first winning a conviction in the Louise Woodward au pair case and then hounding a bunch of almost-definitely-innocent people into jail, where many of them still are, on trumped up child molestation charges. More cases of "protect the children" being used to utterly destroy lives, all for Coakley's personal gain and the American public's sick entertainment.

Knowing this, all the liberal panic* over her loss is even more hilarious. This election, we're being told, is going to usher in fascism in America! As if, a, we didn't have it already, and, b, Coakley herself weren't at least as much a fascist as Brown! Are you kidding me?

In other news, the Supreme Court said corporations can buy elections now. This is apparently new.

*Note also the weirdly unnecessary casual transphobia. Tristero, always a winner.

Update to previous post

I can't access blogspot from work, where I am right now, so I can't leave comments or update posts. But I do have email posting set up so I can post. And I'm feeling enough of a need to say this that I'm going to do that rather than waiting to respond in comments or update the last post ("Be a sexual flâneur") this evening.

 

In comments (which I have reading access to through email), d. mantis said this: "Would you agree that, in a simplistic way, most of our problems stem from the fact that we couldn't give two shits about anyone other than ourselves or immediate surroundings? Would you then also agree that this post could be less geared to the individual and more to the community?"

 

(Normally I'd do blockquotes, but, you know, email is weird and I'm not sure it'll work right.) So: yes, I absolutely would agree. In fact, I'd put it more strongly. I think that the one root problem that is the cause of pretty much every single bad thing that people do to one another is exactly what d. states. It comes in different forms, but the root is always this lack of empathy or compassion or whatever you want to call it. Sociopathy isn't far off.

 

I tend to forget that a lot of the time a point that seems obvious to me in what I'm writing is only obvious because I know what I'm trying to say. What I intended, and failed, to imply in the previous post is that the psychogeographical/sexual revolution I ask for should be both individual and community oriented. In fact, I have a (completely unsupported) suspicion that one major reason that "we couldn't give two shits" about others is that our psyches and our physical environments have been so thorougly colonized by economic oppressors (who want us to be sociopaths, because it is profitable to them), and that an honest attempt to free ourselves of this colonization will change that or, as d. put it, "A 'revolution' as you state, of passion and desire could lead to a more emotional existence including greater compassion." This is exactly my point, though I failed to make it adequately.

 

One reason why I have the complicated subclauses and hyphens and parentheses and footnotes in everything I write is that I'm always terrified that I'm going to forget to mention something vitally important. I need to calm down, because as this and other recent events have shown (like my neglecting to even mention race in my post about media narratives of poverty), I'm always going to leave something vital out. Even reading over the flaneur post again I realize another thing I did was treat gender identity, as distinct from sexual identity, as a bit of an afterthought, which was certainly not my intent.

 

I'm always going to leave something out. One benefit of the small readership I've gained recently (thanks, ladypoverty!) is that now there are a few people who can point out to me when I've done this. And I'm certainly lucky to have the specific perceptive people commenting that I do.

 

(PS I apologize for any lapses of editing there may be in this post. Once I submit it it's unalterable until six this evening at the earliest, and as I tend to edit posts for several hours after posting them, it's a bit nervewracking for me to be doing this.)

Be a sexual flâneur

This article is of course completely ridiculous (and written by some sort of a John G. Miller wannabe, judging from the style). But even as it buys into all sorts of ludicrous societal programming (you have to be straight to have children, if you're gay you have to sashay all the fucking time, even in writing, only straight people like "manly" pursuits, gay people have to be promiscuous, women exist solely to bear children, etc.), it does bring up something that, coincidentally, my pretty-much-gay self and my father were talking about just the other day, on the occasion of the public lesbianization of a cousin of mine.

[My friends] have seen little evidence of an interest in the opposite sex during my adult life, nor asked why. And that’s the clincher.

If there had been an interest, it became eclipsed by other more instant, carnal and deliciously taboo temptations, so it never gained light to grow. For 20 years, my life took a track that stifled the fragile stems...

etc, etc, etc, sexuality is like a jewel, made up of many facets, essentially.

Now, strip away all of the self-and-others-loathing here, and what you have left is this: without all of the programming that our society lays down on us from birth, our sexualities would most likely be quite a bit more fluid than they are now. Or, as my father put it the other night, "We'd be messing around with women, men, pumpkins, cows, everything." Now, I'm sure there's an extent to which this is not 100% true--devoid of programming, it seems likely that I'd still tend towards other men, while my father would still tend towards women, both of us tending towards humans--but to me there is a great deal of indisputable truth to it.

The Lettrists, and the Situationists after them, talk about how our physical environments, all of the geography through which we move every day, are shaped entirely out of economic factors. We go where we go in order to make or spend money, and those destinations, our homes, and every place we encounter between, look and interact with us in the way they do because they serve the specific economic purposes that they do. Trace out the path I take during any given day, and the shape you get will be entirely determined by my economic life, even if it's not a day I go to work. What Guy Debord called psychogeography was an attempt to combat this, to get us to redefine our own personal worlds as we, personally, want to define them. He wanted us to do as we desire in any given space, not to do as the space (and the powers behind the space) want; to move as we desire from space to space, not as demanded of us. It can be almost impossible to tell the difference, so a constant effort (both in intellectual reflection and in spontaneous action) is required. This is one of the most revolutionary acts available to us.

Just as much as we need psychogeography, we need...well, we need what I would call psychosexuality if the word weren't taken already by stupid Freud. We don't need Mr. Muirhead's version of it, though--in fact, we need pretty much the opposite. We need to be sexual flâneurs. Rather than basing our sexualities around a societal expectation of what those sexualities will be (which Muirhead is doing even as he scandalously "switches"), we need to stop making any assumptions whatsoever about our own gender and sexuality, and those of others. We need to constantly examine our thoughts about all forms of sexuality--including everything from the standard hetero-, homo- and bisexuality* to more controversial forms like incest, polyamory, pedophilia, bestiality, and so on, as well as various forms of non-sexuality, such as abstinence and asexuality**, not to mention the more fundamental question of the gender binary itself--and figure out why we think what we think about them, and whether or not that would be better off changing. I'm not suggesting any specific course of action here--to do so would be missing my own point. I only mean to say that we need to think about these things, and, more importantly, experiment, be spontaneous, and always, always, try to avoid doing things just because we feel a societal or economic pressure to do them. It's not always possible, but it should always be the goal.

*Despite Muirhead's apparent belief that bisexuality is The New Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
**And I should keep going, and expand that list to include forms that tend to be dismissed as ridiculous, like object sexuality or a predilection for yiff or yaoi. But goddamn, I'm already so fucking wordy and just this one hyphened-off sentence fragment already has several subclauses and now two footnotes. I gotta chill out.

to all you volks out there

through a series of closed-door sessions, i've been granted access to this fine blab-stand.

thanks ethan. i promise to push our vile agenda in any manner possible.

Female mice turned into male mice...

...by switching one gene.

"It's still very speculative, but it's possible that this approach could produce an alternative to surgery and the removal of gonads -- ovaries and testes," one of the scientists says.

Awesome. This is obviously years and years and years and years and lots of work and theory and research and speculation away from being applicable to humans, if it ever is, but my god, is it promising.