moominmuppet | May. 19th, 2015

May. 19th, 2015

Certain things make me twitchy. One of the fastest ways to get my hackles up (although I try to be polite about it) is when someone goes white knighting on me. White knighting is one of those bad old internalized misogyny tendencies of mine, one I do my damndest to control. Part of why I get twitchy is the reminder of that, but the other part is that I rather instinctively take it as a power challenge. My automatic internal reaction is basically "Back the fuck off. Don't you know _I_ do the rescuing around here?!" It forces me into the role in that dynamic with which I emphatically do not identify (Which is also how I really learned just what an ass I was being when I did it to others).

(Honestly not related to any recent interactions, fyi)

(catching up on cross-posting from FL; there will be a spate here for a bit)

I like the opportunity for exchange of sexual energy with seemingly incompatible people sometimes even more than compatible. There's the intriguing possibility of being surprised, but as a rule things generally stays less serious (flirting or mutual appreciation, or maybe casual play), when less serious is what I need. When I'm out of emotional spoons it's fun without being overwhelming in its potentialness. And it's pleasantly thinky for times when I'm more in the mood for mental masturbation than physical. (I crave new thoughts about dynamics and interactions and sexuality like I crave touch and orgasms) I like stretching to understand (if not always participate in) new kinks, and I love when people give me insight into their experience in some way. So I don't want a community full of people whose kinks and fetishes and personalities all mesh with mine. I'd get laid more often, but I'd get so much less out of the experience as a whole. Thankfully, there's no risk of that happening anytime soon. ;)

So, I talked a lot about archetypes the other day, in a relatively general way. I'm thinking now about real and fictional characters that were role models for me in various ways. There are plenty of characters I dearly love, but don't personally identify with. Here, I'm trying to keep it to characters where I felt a strong sense of "I want to grow up to be like them!" (this feeling hasn't changed much as I've gotten older, my definition of "grown up" just keeps shifting)

Female characters that in some way defy gender expectations have always had a heavy presence on this list, especially those where physical power is an element of their persona. Iconoclasts and outsiders in general are a big touchstone for me.

This is off the top of my head; I'm sure I've missed a million that'll seem blatantly obvious in retrospect.

(the first three are especially central, and the characters I'll bring up over and over in these kinds of conversations):
[Maude - Harold and Maude][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_and_Maude]
[Aughra - The Dark Crystal][http://darkcrystal.wikia.com/wiki/Aughra]
[Pippi Longstocking][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippi_Longstocking]

[Ronia][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronia_the_Robber%27s_Daughter] Same awesome (read her bio) author as Pippi Longstocking, and I only wish I'd discovered this book when I was a kid. SO highly recommended!
[Nausicaa][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausica%C3%A4_of_the_Valley_of_the_Wind_%28film%29] I only had access to the bastardized american version when I was a kid, but I didn't know any better. My joy at finding the full version as an adult? Oh happy day!
[Tatterhood][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatterhood] One of my favorite fairy tales, and one of few I can tell entirely from memory. This and "Three Strong Women" are from a collection of feminist fairy tales my grandmother gave me when I was little, and which I still treasure.
[Xena][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xena] I use old Xena eps to talk to Kidlet about violence and ethics, actually, and to talk about different kinds of bravery (Xena and Gabrielle being two very different models of that)
[Zhaan][http://farscape.wikia.com/wiki/Zotoh_Zhaan] - Loved Farscape in so many ways, but Zhaan is the character who really spoke to me, especially her light-hearted and matter-of-fact approach to sexuality.
[Three Strong Women][https://soundcloud.com/sarah-young-24/3-strong-women] Another favorite fairy tale. If you have 20 minutes to spare, the link is me reading it.
[Beast (X-men)][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beast_%28comics%29] - If I could be any X-men character. Oh yes.
[Encyclopedia Brown][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Brown] Actually, about equally with Encyclopedia and his tomboy best friend Sally. I've been introducing Kidlet to this series, and remembering just how much I loved it.
[Valka][http://howtotrainyourdragon.wikia.com/wiki/Valka] Oh, if I'd had this movie when I was 9! She is everything I wanted to be.

Also:
Every girl who dressed as a boy and ran off ever
Lots of characters that ran away to live in the wood self-sufficiently
Many adventurous hero princesses (especially if those that made friends with dragons)
Awkward geeky outcasts and misunderstood monsters of all kinds

Perhaps oddly, despite my username there are few muppets or moomins I strongly identify with (except Aughra). Many I love, few where I feel a direct reflection of me all in one character. In those worlds, I find bits of myself scattered amongst many of the characters instead, and it's actually the _world_ I identify with, not the characters, and that's fine, but not so useful for this post.

Something that seems worth noting; although I don't identify strongly with either tricksters and priests (by which I mean the broadest sense of religious vocation regardless of tradition), I have a deep affinity for both, and they're over-represented in my social group almost as heavily as the artistic/creative-types who balance my rational/linear thinking. Many of my favorite characters at least arguably fall into these categories.

Who do you identify with/aspire to? Who do you want to be when you grow up?

Another cross-post from Fetlife, this one gets more graphic than some folks may prefer to read. Adding a cut-tag, since I'm not using filters on LJ anymore (because I'm using it to cross-post to FB -- *sigh* the trials of multiple social media platforms) I've added some contextual notes throughout to clarify, and anonymized any FL usernames that were in the original. I've also expanded a bit to describe the actual class, for folks who weren't there.
( Read more... )

I'm not writing this to start a debate about the larger question of call outs, just to state unequivocally where I stand on receiving them.

I don't like being an ass, either carelessly or cluelessly. If you call me out on bad behavior, I may be hurt and embarrassed in the short term, but I will also be grateful. If we are friends, it will likely lead to me trusting the friendship more, not less. Just want y'all to know that, so you don't have to wonder/worry about consequences if I say something that bothers you and you feel a need to respond to it.

Brought to mind not by an actual call-out, but by some slips I made last night that would have been worthy of one. There's a language disconnect for me between common language around sexual and reproductive health and issues of trans inclusion. Several times I fell into old bad habits in that regard ("women's health", for example). Because these are both important issues for me, I expect better of myself.

With all the talk about identity recently, somehow I missed one of the very central categories for me, although plenty of the characters I discussed fall into it in some way or another.

Scandalous Women. Oh, hell yes.

This is my sense of familial history, why I don't feel like a black sheep.

Great-Grandma was the first woman in DC with a driver's license, and an active suffragist.
One of my great-great-whatever-aunts was one of the first botanists to collect wildflowers in Yellowstone, and her collection used to be in the Smithsonian, from what I understand. She was apparently known for riding (in pants and astride) up into the Park at first thaw, and not coming back 'til autumn (she had an assistant who brought her flower presses down and got supplies, from how the family stories tell it).
Grandma hung with Georgia O'Keefe, ran from the FBI, and taught me how to deal with tear gas.
Mom has been cheerfully scandalizing small-town america as a minister's wife for 40 years.

And since scandalous queers and scandalous women gotta stick together, I'm counting Uncle Walt, too. Walt Whitman is a great-great-something-uncle, and although I can't currently find the old post about how my middle name being "Whitman" changed my life, it most certainly did.

I definitely, and proudly, define myself as a scandalous woman. Not a "use my feminine wiles to get my way" sort of scandalous (not my thing), but in all the ways autonomous women who don't play by the rules still to the day get tagged with that label. I'll take it.

I have become more and more certain and comfortable in my genderqueerness over the years. I don't think I've gotten commensurately easier to read as such, though. If anything, the opposite. I tell people, and expect them to respect it, but without that it'd be under the radar or incorrectly identified by many, much of the time. Many more than would've read me semi-accurately at times in my past.

I mostly credit feminism for fixing the rift between my masculine and feminine sides, in as much as it's fixed. That's where I learned the skills to analyze the stuff I was reacting to anyway, found the context and space and people for conversation, gained the tools to start consciously fixing some of the more thoroughly fuckered parts of my brain. I was saying earlier today that my Mom says I've been intensely sensitive to power dynamics and imbalances since I was a toddler.

I never could be told what to do, says Mom, it was just faster to reason with me and enlist my voluntary cooperation. It's still true, and shows a lot in my work life, where I'm vehemently loyal to bosses who treat me and my coworkers with respect, but itching for a fight with those I perceive as unjust or abusive. I chewed out one boss in my first meeting with him for making my coworker cry. It's amazing I've never been fired, given how easily I hit raging righteous indignation (especially when manic; saved a union that way)

I'm highly cooperative, deeply loyal, and not even a little bit obedient by nature. Threaten my sense of autonomy and I react. Outside kink play, I'm hardcore egalitarian, near-anarchist philosophically. Defanging involuntary, unjust, nonconsensual, and abusive power dynamics is what I do. The consensual, negotiated, analyzed power dynamics of the kink community are a blessed haven from the vanilla world even if I personally rarely play with the D/s side of things because it's so potently charged for me.

Nothing will bring out the enraged bear in me like bullying, on any social scale, personal or institutional. It is my nature to physically defend (and that feels somehow related to my territoriality about space, and my need to be able to care for my people). I often gravitate toward activism and action that involves physically using my body to protect, support, or comfort others.)

And I know I've wandered far afield, but I always ramble, especially when high (another reason to be a stoner, not a drinker - trying to type drunk is monumentally frustrating), and I think I am somehow getting back to the gender question.

So, I'm sensitive to nonconsensual power dynamics. And in our world gender is at the core of such monumentally fucked and nonconsensual dynamics that it's pervasive almost the the point of invisibility on every scale. I was raised in a very feminist, egalitarian way at home (Dad deserves so much credit here, for always supporting and encouraging my freedom. I was never his little princess with fetishized innocence). As I've mentioned, My Parents=Awesome. And every time I left the home I ran smack into the mundane sexism of 80's rural Michigan, telling me how I was lesser, or should be limited by my sex. It was the contrast and conflict that made me who I am. That made me certain I didn't deserve that crap, and equally certain it existed in spades all around me.

Since I was a tomboy, I also had reason to be more sensitive to gendered expectations than a girl who fit more of the standard expectations. I was getting in my first feminist arguments with teachers in first grade (and I won, thank you). And it's the old story with tomboys; having to be tougher than the boys to keep my place, constantly on guard against any betraying indication of despised femininity that could be used to shove me back in the "girl" box. Having to double down on the hating of all things girly or risk being seen as one of the enemy. Kneejerk defensive misogyny. I am bone-deep certain of the problem of sexism because I've felt it from both sides, how it twisted both the masculine and feminine in me. It has taken many years and a lot of work to rebalance things inside me.

I did try out performative femininity some as a teen. Partly out of curiosity, and because it is a part of me, after all, but mostly because I didn't know how else to conceptualize romantic relationships with boys. Outside my groping and rough-housing with my guy friends, didn't I have to be a girl to attract guys? I hadn't seen much evidence otherwise.

In college, in really analyzing gender stuff, I decided I was done living in that kind of reaction to the world; it controlled me just as much. And feminism called me on a lot of my toxic crap, made me see how I was recreating many of the same toxic, defensive forms of masculinity I couldn't stand from cis-guys.

I've gotten about equal benefit, personally, from feminist critiques of masculinity and of femininity. I more often saw myself in the bad behavior more commonly attributed to men than to women, and I was ashamed. I have a lot of cultural privilege in my life in general, and in social situations I often behaved, especially toward women, with the equivalent of male privilege.

I started thinking about what I would actually want to be like, if I were a guy. About the men I respected, about my Dad and my friends and my lovers. What kind of guy would I be if I weren't constantly engaged in trying to yell my identity over the cues my body sends? What's actually true to me, and not just a reaction?

What kind of men do I love and respect? Men who respect women, men who don't denigrate femininity. Men who don't fear their own feminine side. Long-haired gentle hippie men, creative, thoughtful men. Men with the confidence not to be defensive. Those were the kind of men I wanted to be like. I wasn't.

I'm more that way these days, and since I've mostly stopped using toxic but clearly gendered signs to yell my identity at the world, I'm less clearly read as masculine-of-center unless I intentionally communicate that through costume. But many of the guys I love and respect have no fear of wearing dresses, and I've used their example to find my own comfort. I'm still touchy about gender stuff, still too easily feel threatened and defensive. Still working on that, still exploring how far into femininity is natural to me, too.

And I want to fix that. Partly for my internal wholeness, but also for my smutty, smutty fun. Although I desire many feminine and androgynous people, masculinity has special power for me sexually. And that's a whole other giant post. Maybe tomorrow.