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Acquiring

Jul. 29th, 2024 02:01 am
ahunter3: (Default)
As a child I thought it a good thing that there should be a system. Like patriotism but nonspecific, just the general notion that there was an ideal way to do things and we were those who had sought it and acquired it. Or were in the process of acquiring it.

Always in the process. Always there in the process, acquiring it. Not a state of being there having acquired it. The act of becoming.
ahunter3: (Default)
[warning: multiples forms of hostile & derogatory language]


There's a form of knuckle-dragging stubborn refusal to consider other folks' social situations that pretends to be common-sensical and harmless. And tries to portray anyone making a complaint about common widespread behaviors as rigid and rule-oriented, judgmental and humorless.

The problem with intolerance is not limited to the proud jerks who brag about how intolerant they are and who say deliberabely confrontational things to rile people up and make us angry.

But let's start with them anyway. One problem with folks like that nowadays is that such statements are so freaking outrageous that you feel stupid taking them seriously. Someone starts a discussion about how people like their coffee and one of these loud cheerful folks says "Just like my women: black, hot, chained to my bed, and whipped twice a day". Or "Strong and manly, don't pour me none of that faggy fairy flavored stuff, it was probably Evian water before it transitioned and I don't want none of that tranny stuff". They count on you feeling awkward about getting indignant in front of everyone present and saying "THAT WASN'T FUNNY, you asshole". They count on people accepting that it was to be taken as a joke. If confronted, he's going to spread his arms wide, shrug, and say "Yeesh, you don't think I'm being serious, lighten up willya?"

That's a problem if what is being "joked" about is just an extreme form of things said in all seriousness right there in the same social context.

I've been at a dinner table where some people who did beat their kids would say funny things like "I brung you into this world and if you don't watch it I can take you right the hell back out" or "Yeah of course I'm taking him with me when we go out swamp fishin' this Sattiddy... just the right size for trolling for alligators". See, it sets a tone where it sounds huffy and indignant and self-important if you later object to "I'm gonna raise a knot on your head if you interrupt me once more" or the obviously dead-serious affirmation that "A kid DOES need a good lickin' now and then. That's just good parenting. Nobody ever got anything but properly straightened out by a close familiarity with their Daddy's belt".


The bigger problem, though, is the weather people.

Do you know and understand about the weather people? Those are the ones who accept some forms of people-behavior as being Just How Things Are, just like the weather. Complaining about the weather never did make it change, now did it? What you do with the weather is, you adjust, you accept, and you COPE. Anyone who seriously snivels and whines about it is not being an ADULT.

But people are not storm clouds. Storm clouds are not going to listen to your complaints. It would be irrational to expect the storm cloud to ever change its behaviors in response to you. But people have a personal responsibility for their behaviors. So when a behavior is truly egregious and is something you should not have to tolerate, it does not MATTER that the behavior is long established and not likely to go away the first time you complain. It does not MATTER that people will defend such tradition-honored asshole behaviors and argue against you and get annoyed with you for attacking them. If you're pretty solidly sure of your ground and feel strongly enough about it, this is how it's done. They don't have to like it. But they have the capacity to change, and whether by patient explanation or angry call-downs or any other tactic of communication, it is appropriate to make those challenges to those ensconced behavioral patterns.

But here come the weather people, acting all reasonable, saying "OH well it's not that you're WRONG, but c'mon, they always do that, and you're making too big a fuss, and they do not MEAN ANYTHING BAD by it, the most outrageous ones are just being ridiculous and funny and the serious ones aren't saying anything that's all that horrid. I tell you what, let's just lighten up. You can have your opinion and it is OK that you said it out loud, but since no one was intending you any hurt you need to do something about that angry TONE of yours"

Weather people at beer bashes and parties twenty years ago were saying "Yeah so people shouldn't drive home all drunk and stuff, but they're going to do it anyway and you should not be bringing everyone down being all dead serious, and they're grownups and most of them aren't all that drunk so give it a rest, willya?"

And thus it becomes rare and difficult to actually SAY anything about our social issues. No one wants to be tagged as the wet blanket, the ponderously-serious social misfit who doesn't get how inappropriate it is to lecture folks and so on.

But hey, are all these same people going to sit down in a circle tomorrow afternoon and be part of an honest talking and listening space, and we should bring it up with them then instead?

No?

So if it's going to be said at all, it has to be said in the spaces where the offenses occur.


—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts
ahunter3: (Default)
I am pro-choice for moral reasons. You get one kind of social reality when women can control their reproductive situation, and hence their sexual one as well. You get a vastly different one when they can’t, and I consider the latter to be morally abhorrent.

Many of my female colleagues would prefer the entire matter be left up to them. There's no reason people without ovaries need to know about any of this, and it concerns a situation we don't face and have no experience of. But like many other self-important people with a high opinion of my opinions, I'm going to add a few more lines anyhow.

When I've made the point about the immorality of interfering with female control of female reproductive functionalities, I've obtained the response "The argument that you are making is that it is greater evil to force someone to carry a child to term against their will, than to allow them to kill that child. In other words, that this is a case of justifiable homicide?"

Not quite. It is greater evil to force a whole lot of somebodies – to the point of defining what it means to be that particular kind of somebody – to carry a child against their wills, hence categoricallly oppressing that entire category of somebody – than to allow them, collectively, to decide whether or not to abort. Those who are appalled usually aren't generally opposed to all cases in which humans intentionally end a human life. They'll reconcile themselves to the necessity of war and the military, even though the enemy soldier isn't often out there by choice. They'll say it's okay for people to kill in self-defense or in defense of others. Many have no problem with capital punishment. But they apparently have problems with moms doing what a mom's got to do on occasion. Doesn't mesh with their idea of motherhood and femininity, I guess.

Some folks tend to think of abortion as modern and technological and hence a departure from what's natural. But 12,000 years ago when Gina the hunter-gatherer reached puberty, she may not have had access to abortion but she also wasn’t going to be expected to raise any babies all on her own (it was the entire tribe’s responsiblity) nor was she a minor dependent on the largesse of adults but instead a regular contributor like any other adult. So pregnancy had vastly different consequences. It certainly wasn't shameful and didn't constitute a threat to social viability or a barrier to subsequent choices.

Some rank and file right-to-lifers actually do find abortion itself an upsetting idea, but their leadership is transparently motivated by a desire to return sexuality to the adversarial polarized patriarchal format, and that's the be-all and end-all of their purpose.

—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts
ahunter3: (Default)
Excerpt from page 22 --




He never wears skirts or dresses to school because he says they aren't comfortable for dodgeball, which is another thing Birdie likes. Even still, most people do notice that Birdie doesn't dress like most boys. But his pink and purple shirts, rainbow shoes, and leggings covered in pink donuts, and everything else, have never really been a problem.


Birdie is a nine year old child. He is assigned by everyone as a boy, at which point it is often remarked upon that he wears "girl clothes", or at least clothes that other boys won't and don't, purple scarves and items with spangles, not to mention fixing his hair in pigtails and painting his nails with nail polish. And learning to sew, in order to be able to make his own versions of what he sees in fashion magazines.

Jack is Birdie's older sister and the narrator of the story; we see the events, and Birdie, through Jack's eyes. Jack's friend Janet, who aspires to a job in a hairdressing salon and doesn't wish to wait until adulthood, describes Jack's sense of style and presentation as "a disaster". But aside from Janet, very few people comment as much about Jack's own variance from gender expectations the way they remark on Birdie's.



There is a lot that I like about J. M. M. Nuanez's Birdie and Me (New York: Kathy Dawson Books: 2020). You know how lots of people have said they want to see more books featuring gay and lesbian and trans characters that don't make the fact that the character is LGBT the focus of the novel? Well, here's one like that for the rest of us. The book has characters who are gender-atypical in some unspecified, undisclosed type, and yet the book isn't about that.

I try to read several new books featuring folks who are at least somewhat like me every year. A lot of them are sort of polemical and didactic, if you know what I mean: "See, folks, here is a little trans girl; see, some people accept her but other people misgender her and they act all hostile and belligerent. See how the mean ones are evil and horrible and wrong? See why everybody ought to accept people like her?" and so on.

Birdie and Me has some hostility and identity-acceptance elements woven into the plot, don't get me wrong, but it's less a conflict between being phobic versus affirmative than it is a conflict between what is socially safe and what is important for expressing one's true self, and how adult protectiveness and authority gets stirred into that issue. People who are responsible for others are often torn between wanting their children or their charges to keep their head down, to stay out of trouble, or supporting their self-expresson.

This is a tale where any initial tendency (whether on the part of the reader or on the part of the characters themselves) to sort the world into good people and bad people runs into complexities and inconsistencies.

Nuanez has a skill for gradual character development, blocking out whole people from their behaviors and observable nuances as seen from the outside. The pacing is a brisk strolling speed, languid enough to keep questions floating but fast enough to keep you immersed in what's happening. This book is appropriate for middle grades but I'd recommend it for adults, who should find it both thought-stimulating and entertaining.



If you are a person who doesn't easily find your own identity type emblazoned on the title of any message board or Facebook group, if you've hovered around support groups for transgender and nonbinary and genderqueer and genderfluid and gender nonconformist groups and asked yourself and other people "Do you think this label describes me? I was thinking I was more *this label* but lately I've been thinking this *other label* fits me better?", well, here's a book that features one of us.


"So, Birdie," Janet says, breaking the silence. "Do you think you're gay?" I'm too shocked to say anything.

"I don't know," says Birdie in a small voice.

"Do you want to be boyfriends with girls or boys?"

"I don't want to be boyfriends with anybody."

"Janet," I say, "this has nothing to do with being boyfriends with anyone. And I"ve already talked to him about that."

"Okay, okay," she says, waving her hands at me. She turns back to Birdie. "So, do you feel like youre a girl, then? Have you ever heard of the word transgender?" ...

"I don't know," says Birdie, shrugging. "Everyone says I'm a boy."

"But what about on the inside? Do you feel like you're a girl on the inside?"

Birdie shrugs for the millionth time. "I don't know. Sometimes I wish I was a girl because then it would make everything easier. But I don't know what my mind is." He looks down at this shoes again. "Is it bad that I don't know?"


-- pp 185-186


This book, by never handing Birdie or us an identity-conclusion, tells us in a quiet but proud voice that our identity is valid without a label to put on it. That it is valid even if it seems to fall between the cracks and not fit into transgender or genderqueer or anything else we've heard about.

———————

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 and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts
ahunter3: (Default)
I'm often oblivious to how other people perceive me. People can be nudging their companions and inviting them to check me out with a nod in my direction. I don't notice.

I don't internalize any observations about how a way of dressing or a way of behaving has generated reactions when other people do them.

I don't mean I don't notice patterns at all. I do. By the time I was in second grade, I had observed that there were differences in how girls and boys behaved. The girls were doing it right. The place where being oblivious kicked in had to do with anticipating or predicting how other people would react or how they'd think about something.

I didn't anticipate that anyone would have a problem with me deciding that the girls were doing it right, or with me choosing to copy the girls' behaviors and adopt their priorities and values and stuff.

I was also amazingly unaware of how folks actually did feel and react. It could be going on right there around me and I wouldn't notice anything except the most overt hostile behavior, and when I did, I didn't connect it up to any widely shared social attitudes. It was just Billy or Ronnie being a jerk.

I did, eventually, make the observation that I was lonely and didn't have many friends, and that I had the poor misfortune of getting stuck in classrooms with an astonishingly high number of crude stupid hateful people.

I kept expecting it to be different. New year, new classroom. There was no reason people wouldn't like me, after all.

You could say I wasn't getting it.



* * *


A couple years ago, I was on a message board where several people were debating whether or not it is sexist and horribly limited to think differently of a person's behavior depending on their perceived sex. One person said this: "If I were thinking about dating a woman, and it turns out she was violating all the expectations about a woman's sexual behavior, I'd have some concerns, yeah. Not because the same behavior is wrong or worse when it's a female person doing it, but because the expectations exists, and she's not giving them any consideration. So I'd wonder why she would leave herself open to the resultant judgment and hostility. That seems immature, not taking care of yourself and your own reputation. So I'd be concerned about what other kinds of common sense she doesn't have".

That is a conservative philosphy: for anyone who embraces it, it preaches conformity to expectations, not because the expectations are inherently good but because it's "for your own good" that you don't stick out and draw hostile attention.

In contrast to that, my way of being oblivious to people's expectatons is not just a cutely absent-minded cluelessness, it's a protective mechanism, an insulating blanket that keeps me from being too aware of what other people think and how they're likely to react.

It's a survival mechanism that I bet lots of marginalized people have employed in various forms. Learning to doublethink around the threats of social reaction. Learning how to take enough of those patterns into account that you are able to deal with the hostility when you have to, but without being any more aware of it than you need to be.


———————

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 and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts
ahunter3: (Default)
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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ahunter3: (Default)
I have a temporary job working at a Montessori School. Not in the classroom but in the office, where interaction with the children isn't really an expected part of my job. But we're understaffed. The other day, the teacher in the classroom for 3 to 6 year olds needed a bathroom break and there was no teacher's assistant to cover, so I was asked to step in. Except not quite exactly step in. "Just stand at the entrance to the classroom until she gets back", the administrator told me. "I don't want to send a man in with the children, some of the parents won't like that".

I fumed while I waited there, not liking this. (The children know me from the front office; they're alert and bright and know all the adults by name from early September on. They called to me from within the classroom and asked why I didn't come on in). So I stood there doing a slow burn, and rehearsed telling my boss I was unwilling to work there any more because of this.

This, by the way, is what dysphoria is for me. For other gender-variant people, misgendering may occur when people use the wrong pronoun, or when they are referred to as "male" when they identify as "female" or vice versa. In my case, I consider myself to have both a sex and a gender, and don't have a preferred pronoun; I don't mind being referred to as male because I am male, and most of the time being referred to as a man doesn't provoke my ire, either, because in most cases the person speaking isn't using it offensively, just ignorantly. But when I get lumped in with other men, with my attributes extrapolated from what is known or thought of men in general, and distinguished from women, that's misgendering and I hate it personally and viscerally and with shocking pain, personally affronted by it.

When the teacher returned, I stalked down to the administrator's office. "You told me to wait outside the classroom because the parents would not like a man being in the classroom with their children. So you would not have said the same thing to a female office worker if she was asked to cover?" I crossed my arms, already preparing my I-quit sentence within my head.

"I am not willing to expose any of the men who work for me to the horrible attitudes of some of these parents", she replied. "Let me tell you about Brian. He was a student here, honor student, really nice boy. I had him working in my office for awhile when he was a young adult. One day the police showed up and demanded to know if I had Brian Jones working here, because they needed to arrest him on suspicion of child molestation. He would never do such a thing, everyone who knew him agreed with that. What had happened was the children were playing flag football during gym class and one of the girls lost her flag from where they tuck it in, in the back of their shorts at the waistband, you know, and she had trouble reaching back there to get it back in, so he helped her. But her mother heard that there was a man working with the children and she asked the girl if he had ever touched her and she had no idea what her mother meant by that. Anyway, I'm not willing to put you or any other man in that kind of situation".

Hmmph.

That does put a different spin on things. If she had said "I am not willing to expose my children to any risk of sexual misconduct" or "I am not willing to expose my school to the risk of such accusations", I would have been so out of there. Because my maleness doesn't make me a threat to children and I'll be damned if I'll tolerate that kind of insinuation. But she'd couched it in terms of the risk to me of being targeted by that kind of bigotry.

Oh, it's still the wrong answer. There exists what I call "The Weather Approach" to social problems. Someone addresses all the incoming women students on campus and warns them not to dress revealingly or to be out unaccompanied by themselves, because there's a risk of rape, and in doing that they are treating the behavior of the men on campus as if they were the weather--no responsibility for their own behavior, so those who might get exposed to it have all the responsibility of dressing for it and carrying an umbrella. We don't expect the weather to develop a consciousness of how it treats the people it rains on, so it makes rational sense to tell people to take the weather into account and plan accordingly. But men are not the weather. Neither are bigoted parents with sexist attitudes. So it's the wrong answer. Ideally she should have spoken to me about what I might be exposing myself to, risk-wise, but not acted so as to protect me without my having chosen to be protected.

The "Weather Approach" always tends to be complicated and convoluted. Does a parent of an oppressed and vilified raise his children to be free and untrammeled and unimpeded by societal labels, or to be savvy and wary of racists and haters?


I listened and went back to my desk, still employed there at least for now.


———————

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.

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