Who Owns It?

[kiya]

This is a political post. Keep in mind that I don't like feeling political, I find feeling political to be a visceral response to a wrongness in the universe, feeling political is "Every Hetheru has an inner Sekhmet", it's not a mode I find natural or comfortable, so this may be incoherent and ranty in bits.

Since I'm being incoherent and ranty on the subject of sexuality, who knows, it may be incoherent, ranty, and not entirely safe for work. Probably won't be, but I haven't written it yet, so I'm making warning noises about the possibility.

Also, the random music selection is amusing me in a dark bitter chocolate sort of way.

Okay, enough disclaimer.


I wrote, at the end of last year in a locked post, something about the relationship I had with the concept of sex. Specifically, I traced some of the ways sex was taken away from me, from being my personal secret thing, my own private property, into something I could not, somehow, believe was mine, and how I've fought to reclaim it.

I had a long slow slide through depersonalisation starting in about junior high. I was a favored target of boys who wanted a sexual object to direct their frustrated and incoherent hostility at -- I am not at all sure that they knew what they wanted, other than something that a girl had, and the prestige and status that came of owning that girl's something. Their commentary was full of insinuations clearly meant to be overheard, commentary, stares and leers; only one grope, but that grope was followed immediately by me knocking the brat in question onto his ass, so they learned there were, at least, a few lines. They wore away, with their use of me as their object, at my ability to have my sexuality be my own; they were much clearer on what use they wanted to put it to than I was, and I could not readily hold on to it (especially in my state of insecurity in those years).

"Boys will be boys", I was told, then. I was a prize student, the school administration adored me for my precocious intelligence, but my sexuality was not to be protected. I was to expect that the boys would use it and use me however they fancied, so long as they kept outside of certain narrow lines -- I was never punished for hitting the one of them, at least, for defending those narrow borders.

I also learned that I risked, if I spent time with boys I actually got along with, the presumption that I was partnered with those boys -- with consequences if I made actual partnerships elsewhere. Association was sufficient to render me some sort of property, convey some sort of expectation of consent. Bits of this pattern, in the long run, led to the assault, which I'm only going to mention as part of the pattern: my sexuality was not mine, someone else had rights to it, and my consent was sidelined.

And back to boys will be boys, the baffling horror of my mother's response when I asked her if she knew why I wasn't speaking to the fellow who assaulted me, the shrugging, "I figured he forced himself on you", from which I fled in incomprehension, scrambling up the stairs and into my room in the knowledge that even my mother was uninterested in helping me protect my sexuality from outside claims. I had to do it myself, and I had no idea how.

At the same time as all this, I wound up more aware of surrounding culture that reinforced the notion that my sex could not be my own, in a huge variety of ways:

Women's sexuality and sexual attractiveness winds up portrayed as the default in saleable traits, the ultimate commodity, as one of the defaults of advertising: this will get you women! This is sexy like a woman! Women women women pretty shiny own one today.

A "real woman" is generally the sort of woman that is sexually attractive to the speaker, unlike all those other women, who are cheap plastic fakes or something. (Except when a "real woman" is the sort of woman who is politically attractive ... but the similarity in the treatment leaves me wondering about things like the fetishisation of political conformity.)

The clothing typically available to women is set to a certain set of approved body shapes, presumably the 'acceptable' ones, and women who don't suit have to work hard to find things that match their shape. (I'm aware that I suit a lot of 'conventionally attractive' standards, and I can't find pants that fit because my legs are too long. Meanwhile, I hear rumours that a number of manufacturers are going to phase out 'petite' sizings.)

There's been recent foofaraw here and there about the 'purity balls', those things where fathers make a public flaunting of their claims of ownership over their minor daughters' sexuality, their intent to protect that virginity until it gets handed over to a suitable other man. (I swear, if I ever run into someone in the real world who is in favor of these things, I'll probably recoil with a, "You approve of the public display of children's sexuality?!" Ahem. Anyway.)

Treatment of women's worth as being contingent on attractiveness in certain forms -- not just the whole finding pants that fit thing, but the acceptability of "trophy wives", the heavy pushing of cosmetic and minor medical treatment to "correct" minor defects, skin blemishes, or whatever. I get this general impression of a sense that I'm supposed to be insecure about my body, about my physical attractiveness, with that insecurity bolstered by the bizarre arbitrariness of clothing sizes, the difficulty of finding things that fit, the concern about minor blemishes or whether or not I shave my legs properly.

So anyway. Huge number of ways that women's sexuality and physicality (not entirely related, but not entirely unrelated either) gets treated as a public commodity to be traded and molded into the "correct" form, with proper obeisances to the popular wisdom about what women are like. With some fascinating physical cues and triggers (and don't ask me if I'm growing out my bangs, because setting aside the fact that I like them this way, they're armour against some stuff I went through with the boys when I was twelve, and I'm not prepared to expose myself to them again for all that they're most of a lifetime ago and probably hundreds of miles away -- that's the sort of weird shit in my head).

I couldn't comfortably deal with certain feminine gender markers until I started actively considering myself genderqueer. Too much stress about making those proper obeisances and conforming to the Real Woman Standard. Which gets back to the owning eye makeup and using it to paint patterns on my cheeks. (And now I want to get some cheap eye stuff and see about painting the tattoos I want on my skin with it because that sounds like it might produce some neat results that differ from the ones I get with sharpies.)

Subcultures aren't really much better about it. Different sets of triggers, different sets of behaviours, but the sense that one's personal stuff is the property of surrounding people remains. And I wind up feeling like a target, a lot of the time.

So I'm a nonmonogamous woman, which freaks out certain circles. My sexuality isn't owned by a single man, OMGWTFBBQ, from one side, and then the weird-ass "a woman who doesn't think she deserves monogamy has to have something wrong with her" from another (that from someone who appears to me to be so 'feminist' he berates and abuses women who don't want the sort of liberation he's working for). As if "deserves" was a useful approach to things.

(And we get into the questions of dealing with how to deal with someone whose reason for wanting something or being a certain way is because of damage they've suffered, which gets bloody complicated and painful. I see this come up in plurality communities a fair amount, in addition to the whole "But if someone only wants this because of the patriarchy/the abuse/the this, that, and the other, does that mean that 'this' is bad? If that person gets better, should that mean they stop doing 'this'?")

Pro-sex/anti-sex. I get called anti-sex for not lying about the motivations behind my relationships (because saying that I don't form partnerships primarily motivated by fucking is "anti-sex", apparently, or people don't know what "is about" actually means and throw it around like it's a trivial declaration). Or for not being interested in casual sex (especially casual sex with, oh, people like the person who thinks I should be interested in casual sex, because 'pro-sex' means 'no standards' or otherwise another manifestation as 'if you're not going to be called "repressed" you have to be willing to let your sexuality be my property'). As far as I can tell, 'anti-sex' is mostly 'you don't agree with my political fetishes' is mostly 'you won't fuck me, you frigid bitch, I thought you weren't monogamous'.

I don't even begin to know how to think about the BDSM weirdness I've seen, largely because I mostly live on the fringes there. The shock that people have at being decked by a submissive for being too forward, people thinking 'sub' means 'public property' or something. The confounding of 'submissive' with 'no personality or desires of their own', in response to which non_doormat_sub was founded. The assumption that one kink comes with a complex of others, and offense given when someone is a sub who isn't a masochist, or into humiliation, or any of the other things that I've seen people go all irrational about.

I caught bits of the whole feminist blowjob frothing from discussions here and there, links in riba_rambles, talking on sexeteria recently, commentary from pantryslut, and reading through the comments I find myself thinking that they're grounded in this essential belief that women's sexuality is owned by external forces again -- here it's been 'liberated' from the ownership of a specific man in order to be claimed as the property of the political action committee.

And yes, there's thought that's worth putting into the question of whether certain things in one's private space are influenced by broken stuff in the outside world. But even if things are, there's going back to the whole "But what do we do about it?" and I can't believe that subordinating women's sexuality to a political agenda is an improvement.

I'm not even a big fan of oral sex, and what I got out of following some of that was that it was a point at which people believed it was appropriate for me to be subordinate -- not to A Man, but to The Correct Ideology Of Interpersonal Relationships.

It comes back to my snarky "Majority opinion isn't my dom either" comment to rmjwell a while back.

I've had to fight hard to get to a point where I had any confidence that my sexuality, my physicality, were mine in any meaningful way -- not just wrestling with damage from people, the weirdness of my culture, but the medical complications that took it away from me at times. I've had to deal with parts of my responses being rough on people around me, and finding the balance point between what I consider my intrinsic reactions and the comfort of others. I've had to work out what I like, what I don't like, what I'm willing to deal with for the sake of a relationship or in particular contexts, and how much of each of those things is good for me.

I've had to do the damn work. I'm still doing the damn work, though it's getting better as I've worked to decouple sex and fear and opening up and terror, as I've built based on who I am, damage and all, and kept building as I resolved parts of the damage.

Which leaves me in a slightly precarious place where this stuff is mine, I feel strongly about that, I mantle over it protectively and will defend it with my claws as need be, and I'm hyperaware of things that threaten it.

I've found the quiet sacred space where what I can do is share and act from the depths of my being, at least some of the time, the place where I can at least hear the beating of my own Black Heart. And that sacred space is not a place where people are welcome without invitation, without negotiation, without trust, no matter how political they feel about whether or not I'm behaving according to their ideologies about What Women Should Be Doing.

It's mine. And it's mine in a way that I feel the need to defend actively, because it's not secure enough for me to relax about it.

Mine, mine, mine.

Damnit.