More on science fiction, from one of many possible thoughts on Frankenstein

One of the many fascinating things about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein is that it is (among other things) a woman's rejection, not of Romanticism in its entirety, but of the male-based subjectivity that is so central to the Romanticism of her contemporaries. By attacking the whole notion of the individual (assumed male) genius while leaving intact the awe of nature, the skepticism about science and rationalism, the intensity of emotion, Shelley creates something remarkably different from--and to me, both more interesting and more what you might call morally sound than--what we normally expect of a Romantic work.*

*Analysis of Frankenstein in and of itself isn't what I'm primarily interested in here, so I'm not going into the ways in which she does this, but treating it as a given. If you want further analysis of this, I would imagine that there are plenty of published works as well as high school and college term papers about it.

It's especially interesting (to me) to think about what this means in terms of Frankenstein's place as one of the founding texts of science fiction (and some would, not without justification, leave off "one of" and italicize "the").

While it would take almost 150 years for any significant number of SF writers to catch up to Shelley's distrust of the nobility of science, not to mention her woman's perspective (though on both terms there were always exceptions), the rejection of heroic subjectivity is, to my mind, central to SF, despite any appearance to the contrary created by the plethora of individual heroes in the history of the genre. These heroes are, almost without exception,* not so much characters--individuals--as stand-ins for what many (including me in my last SF post) call "the idea as hero." Indeed, it would be very difficult to have a literature where the idea is itself the hero without the rejection of Romantic subjectivity.

*At least in SF of the "classic," pre-1960s era; after about the mid-60s the story of SF gets way more complicated, sometimes for the good, sometimes not.

It doesn't stop there--the SFnal concept of "the sense of wonder," for one, though it is superficially very similar to the traditional Romantic awe in the face of nature, is in fact almost completely different in both content and impact, in a way that is difficult to explain if we don't take Shelley's rejection as foundational. There is much more that could be said about this, and about other aspects of SF that are hugely informed by her rejection, but this post is getting way longer than I meant it to be and I'm not finished yet.

One of the most interesting (again, to me) aspects of this is that Shelley's rejection comes largely out of her perspective as a woman--a perspective that is noticeably absent from almost--but not quite--all pre-1960s SF, and still absent from a majority of the mainstream of the SF of the 1960s and later. The genre is notoriously masculine--even, all too frequently, macho. But the fact that a woman's perspective is so foundational to the genre carries through strongly.

Towards the end of Joanna Russ's frustratingly short essay, "On the Fascination of Horror Stories, Including Lovecraft's" (as collected in the indispensable To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction), Russ describes a fan party she attended, where the conversation turned to favorite horror stories, and then to the implications of the appeal of horror and SF:

[O]ne very bright young woman described her adolescent reading of SF as a genuinely subversive force in her life, a real alternative to the fundamentalist community into which she had been born. This alternative had nothing to do with the cardboard heroes and heroines or the imperial American/engineering values which she had skipped right over. What got to her were the alien landscapes and the alien creatures. We scholars perhaps tend to forget how much subversive potential both SF and fantasy have, even at their crudest.

Unfortunately, as with so many of the countless fascinating points she raises in this uncharacteristically skimpy essay, she leaves it there. But the point is made, and taken--and recognized. I have seen numerous accounts of women saying similar things--and though I am not a woman, nor did I grow up in an environment that was at all oppressive (thanks, mom and dad!) beyond the general background radiation of our culture, I am queer and a general discontent who grew up in a heterosexist, conformist society, and what this unnamed woman and Russ have to say strikes a strong chord with me. On reading Frankenstein, I can't help but think that we all have Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to thank for this intrinsic subversivity,* indestructible despite the occasional best efforts of macho writers who wished it would go away. It didn't.

*Yes, I know, Firefox's spelling check knows, the dictionary knows that it should be subversiveness, but that word is wicked ugly to me.

Training starts early

We've been watching a lot of new-millennium Doctor Who recently. Hey, this stuff is pretty frequently brilliant, you know? The Baronette, for reasons of a) employment and b) general good sense has been sticking to just Who proper, while out-of-work, no-sense me has been indulging additionally in the spinoffs--the self-consciously "adult" Torchwood and the for-kids Sarah Jane Adventures (RIP). At this point I've only made it through the first seasons of each, though we're on the third season of for-adults-really-but-kids-have-always-loved-it Who.

Anyway, the Whoniverse as a whole has always been pretty gentle. Torchwood pushes at that quite a bit (and often tries way too hard while it's at it), but there are far worse shows to grow up on than these. It's often violent and kid-scary (and, occasionally, verges on adult-scary), but the Doctor makes a point of never carrying weapons, and he respects life unless it unacceptably threatens other life, and occasionally drops some nice slogans.* And the whole thing has been pretty remarkably good in terms of women (regularly creating strong female characters who can think, frequently passing the Bechdel test without cheating, etc.), and race (though there are some slightly troubling patterns with its black characters, overall it's not too shabby--and it has a lot of them, relatively), and sexuality. In general, it is very seldom that I cringe while watching it, and when I do it's usually fairly minor things. Much better than you might expect from state TV**, in other words.

*Dalek Emperor: "What are you, Doctor? Killer or coward?"
The Doctor: "Coward. Every time."
That episode also contains the amazing line "You are tiny. I can see the whole of time and space, every single atom of your existence, and I divide them." Delivered brilliantly by the brilliant Billie Piper as the brilliant Rose Tyler.
**And there's a pair of words to chill the blood, am I right?

All of which makes it all the more...weird, when something goes icky. Like in the Torchwood episode where some startlingly vehement, and yet disturbingly casual, transphobia was put into the mouth of, of all characters, Captain Jack, the pansexual anything-goes-including-aliens open-minded man of the 51st century (though apparently I was the only person in the world bothered by that line--and no, I'm not linking to that After Elton post because I like it, but only because it starts with the quote I'm talking about).

Or like in the Sarah Jane Adventures episode I watched this morning that suddenly spewed out a prison rape joke:



It's the kind of thing that should be unbelievable. Sarah Jane is one of the gentlest characters in the entire gentle world of Doctor Who. It's in the middle of an episode with a decent, if a bit ham-handed, message about how awful it is to train young children for violence. And yet right here in the middle of this show for children, the threat of imprisonment and violence is treated lightly, as if it were funny. Unfortunately, it's not unbelievable. Because, you see, we all have to be trained from a very young age to lack all empathy, to separate humanity into good and bad, and to think that punishing the bad part is not only acceptable, but good, and not only good, but funny. What better way than by casually sticking this kind of thing into a show purportedly against violence?

I'm not saying that the episode's writer, Phil Gladwin, plotted and schemed his way to to sticking this line in. But as far as I can tell there's only two kinds of minds that could think a line like that is appropriate in any context, or, for the love of god, necessary in a fucking children's show*. The first is the kind that does have a deliberate interest in training empathy out of children so as to maintain the status quo. The second is the kind that has been so socialized that it does this unconsciously. In some ways it's almost worse that Gladwin is far more likely to be the second kind. It's in this way that this murderous culture of ours maintains itself.

*And I am most emphatically not one to be all "but think of the children." I think children can be trusted to handle far more than we usually let them. And I don't think they should be protected from information and knowledge about either sex or violence, since those are both integral parts of the reality they live in (one a much much better part than the other, of course). But it's exactly these kinds of messages that slip past the conscious level and become a sort of background radiation of what-we-think-is-acceptable, until it gets to the point where we have a whole society of what used to be human beings who can't be bothered to stop laughing uproariously at goddamn prison rape, let alone do anything to stop it.

A year and a half before that episode originally aired, there had apparently been a minor controversy about a Who episode that had a brief, throwaway, fairly subtle joke about oral sex between consenting adults. To my knowledge (and to google's, as far as I can tell), there was no such outcry about this.

To anyone who doesn't understand, or doesn't believe in, the concept of the rape culture: voilà.

With apologies to What The Tee Vee Taught...

...I don't want to encroach on your territory, but I figured Australia was out of your jurisdiction.



AS IF the full array of standard gay stereotypes weren't ridiculous enough (the "normal guy," the leather daddy, the bear, and the prissy twink, from left to right*), you're really going to shove disability, non-whiteness, slight fatness**, and femaleness onto one token character? This is hilarious. I wonder how many board meetings and focus groups went into constructing that set of characters.

(It is, by the way, a promo from an upcoming Australian sitcom about gay sci-fi nerds. As seen on io9.)

*Because it's certainly been my experience that every group of gay men includes one representative of each of these types.
**The bear doesn't count.

A Wonder Unlike Any Other...

All considered, I'm not sure you could call the 50 second mark a "punchline", but it is a delightful bonus to this Malaysian treasure.

Mehlman on man

When we say that something has "long [been] an open secret," what do we mean? Within a family, I guess it's the kind of thing people hint at, all the adults understand, the kids ask embarrassing questions about, no one actually talks about it, grandma might not know although she probably actually does; the drug addict uncle or whatever.

When you're talking about people in the public eye, though, it means something related but different in significant ways. There, it means that everyone in that person's peer group knows the "secret," and, whether explicitly or tacitly, accepts it, and they all collaborate in keeping knowledge of it from the public in whose eye they are*: Isherwood and Auden didn't run around outing each other, for example. And that's all just fine and dandy, though of course it takes on a somewhat different cast, as all things do, when you place it in a context of power--as with Mehlman.

My point in all this is to say, the only thing Ken Mehlman cares about less than Melissa McEwan's "pity" is the lives of gay people in general. Gay people in his own class have it set, so why should he care? It's good that McEwan "can't imagine the self-loathing, the discomfort in one's own skin, the profound disassociation of self that happens with the subjugation of authenticity behind thin façade, that exists within someone who had the professional life he did," because I can pretty much guarantee you that none of that did, in fact, exist for Mehlman. Neither he nor most of his fellow members of the ruling classes have a problem with his being gay, and for those who do, these problems are overridden by the more important commonalities they share as a result of being members of that class. If only we at the bottom could realize that they feel that way, we could stop telling fairy (ha!) stories about these people, and stop feeling "pity" for them, and start maybe feeling some of that class solidarity ourselves, down here.

Mehlman may be lying when he says that "over the past few months, I've told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they've been wonderful and supportive," but the lie is contained only before the first comma.

In other Mehlman news, Zen Comix made me laugh for like an hour.

*Normally I don't give a shit about dangling prepositions, but that structure popped into my head and cracked me up, so allow me this small pleasure if you will.

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.

Marry me

So, whatever, until just now I would have said that Dark Knight cosplay is silly and was well overdone by May of 2009, but that was before I learned that this wonderful man dressed up like The Joker on the tenth of that month* and burned down his high school "because it is run by hypocrites and [he] didn't like the way they treated [his] friends."

My god, I think I'm in love. OK, there's an age difference of about a decade, and an ocean in between us, and I hear he's in some legal trouble, and I'll be wanting to talk the costume-thing out of him (or vice versa), and I'm guessing he's probably a bit more lady-oriented than I would prefer, but I think we can make it work.

A million euros of damage. "I am glad I did it because the people will realise they can't treat students as sub-human." I'm swooning here.

In all seriousness, if they take away his life (in terms of imprisonment, that is) because of this, which it looks like they might not thank god, it will be such an immense waste of such immense promise.

*He missed my birthday by three days, but I'm sure he had a good reason for that.

via io9

NSFW if sexy lactation isn't welcome in your place of employment

Halfway through Pride Month

I guess once July starts I have to go back to being ashamed?

I guess there are many things you shouldn't ask, shouldn't tell

"This legislation" = repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell; "he" = Obama:

“This legislation will help make our armed forces even stronger and more inclusive by allowing gay and lesbian soldiers to serve honestly and with integrity,” he said.

OK, two things. First, it will make our military even more inclusive? Even more inclusive than what? Second, how the fuck strong does our military have to be???

Further quickies

I have plenty of things I want to write about but no inclination to do so right now. So for now here's another quick thing:

The spectacle (not The Spectacle) of people chaining themselves to the White House fence to fight for the right to serve the State in the most devoted way possible is, uh, troubling.

As of now

My landlord is, like, god's gift to landlords. Or, I don't know, rephrase that sentence in a way that makes sense. He convinced his sister (who he delightfully faggily described as "Looks just like me, drives a minivan, total Desperate Housewife"*) to drive two hours out of her way today with her sons who had to go to karate to bring us two sump pumps, because she, unlike every hardware store in the tri-state area, had them. After only a few hours, pretty much all of the accumulated water in our basement has been pumped out. Naturally there's still a whole shitload of stuff to do in the way of cleanup and drying and de-moldification, but I can't even tell you what a relief it is, and how satisfying it is, to see that water getting sucked up and pumped away.

Credit where it is due to the Baronette, who did all of the wading around in the basement. I just ran around fiddling with hoses and extension cords. She did all the hard work.

The rain stopped, the clouds broke. Right now the skies are beautifully clear. As my father and I keep discussing, there is every possibility that spring/summer monsoons are the new New England climate. If so, there will have to be major adjustments in every facet of our lives. But for right now, things are looking up.

*He also, after telling me he was dealing with flooding at my house and his own house, called himself "The Water Removal Queen" and said "It's a title I never wanted." I love him.

The funniest thing I've seen in weeks

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.

Exclusionary exploitation

Those who have been reading this blog regularly might have noticed that the liberal bloggers I pick on most frequently, aside from the obligatory digby, are PZ Myers and Melissa McEwan. I do it partly because their particular brand of liberalism happens to be the kind that irritates me in a way that amuses me, but it's also because they each post genuinely interesting things often enough to make them worth reading. With Myers it's the occasional fascinating science post in amongst all the smug atheist time-wasting and liberal vapidity, and with McEwan it's the occasional genuinely worthwhile feminist post in amongst all the crap.

The communication habits of white men, treated by corporate America as the natural and best and only way to communicate, leaves people from backgrounds who didn't grow up speaking that language (literally and/or figuratively) feeling frustrated and excluded. White male colleagues who aren't aware that "the rules" of corporate America have been designed to suit them regard their not-whitemale colleagues as unqualified, as not understanding "how to play the game." Not-whitemales have a more difficult time getting their ideas heard, their concerns addressed. Not-whitemales who figure out how to speak the right language are promoted, thus reinforcing the cycle of non-diversity, even as diversity is hailed a hero.

These are the problems of half-assed diversity programs. And the result is that, 10 years after everyone was kissing Silicon Valley's ass for its embrace of diversity, the companies' inclusion is sliding backwards, especially at the top.

Diversity without multiculturalism is just hiring people who look different and expecting them to act the same. If these companies want to get serious about diversity, then they need to reflect that in their culture, not just their hiring records.

I have some serious objections to this, obviously, but the general outlines are very familiar to me--and as a white non-stereotypically gay male (I want to write more about that detail soon) I don't fall far outside of the whitestraightmale realm. Hell, even white straight males who fall outside of mainstream consumer culture can feel this exclusion, as JR from ladypoverty discusses towards the end of one of the most astonishingly brilliant blog posts I've ever read. (And JR, if you're not a white straight male and this reads as implying that you are, I apologize; I mean to say only that the interaction between coworkers you describe there could apply equally to a white straight male as to anyone else.)

What McEwan doesn't mention, and may not be conscious of, is that "hiring people...and expecting them to act the same" is exactly what the companies do, deliberately. They expect everyone to sacrifice themselves to the company's profits. Currently white straight male culture is the best suited to this; if that changes, companies will embrace whatever culture rises to replace it.

UPDATE: Rachel points out in comments that what I said was actually pretty severely untrue (though she's kinder than that in her phrasing). And this is because I said it all wrong. What I meant to say is that enforcing white straight male culture is a good bludgeon for company purposes, which I think makes more sense than what I said originally.

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.

Irony

I just overheard a very gay man using his church affiliation as justification for his anti-abortion stance.

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.

I really don't give a shit about gay marriage

Or at least not as much of a shit as I seem to be supposed to. Equal rights and all, sure, but I can't help feeling that the fact that people get all incensed on one side or another of the issue (which, of course, like all issues, has more than the two sides allowed to be discussed in the mass culture), but not about the systematic incarceration of American human beings, particularly American Black human beings, or the enormous wage gap between workers and their owners, or the mass murder of foreigners for profit, or whatever, is just extremely misplaced passion and helpful to the ruling class. Not to mention that gay marriage is not the be-all and end-all (or however that's supposed to go, typographically) of gay rights, the way many people seem to think it is. Same thing goes for abortion.

Anyway, I'll read anything that criticizes Governor Carcieri, so I read this article about him speaking at an anti-gay organization in Massachusetts. No surprise from Carcieri, really. I tend to think of him as being a comic book super villain, evil for no other reason than that he enjoys it. His wife's the same way; after her husband fired all of the state's translators, she called Asian kids who were upset at their parents' now extremely limited access to already minimal state services "terrorists". For writing a letter. Um, anyway, that's beside the point. I just like to bring it up.

So I'm reading this article, standard, standard, blah blah, fags, and then I come across this passage:

A Brown University poll from May showed that 60 percent of registered voters would support a law allowing gay couples to marry, but obstacles remain for those pushing the idea: The state is heavily Catholic, and same-sex marriage is opposed by both Carcieri and Democratic legislative leaders.

Now, come on, what? Yes, that second listed obstacle is real. Our elected officials in Rhode Island are largely opposed to gay marriage, including the leadership on "both" "sides". But the second one? How can you go directly from saying that 60% of the voters are in favor to saying that the heavily Catholic population is an obstacle? Obviously that Catholicism isn't stopping a large majority from being in favor. Christ. I mean, hell, you might as well say "Spain is heavily Catholic, so there's an obstacle to legalizing gay marriage".

This is exactly the same kind of reasoning that gets support for single-payer health care or withdrawing troops from Afghanistan being branded as "far left" rather than "blandly centrist". I understand why it happens, but my god, it's so obvious.