kiya

Honestly, what I really mean is Hegemon Is A Vector (and Gender is a component thereof, necessary but not sufficient).

(Also I am well aware that I need to actually read de Beauvoir. I have not.)

The thing is - okay this is straight-up de Beauvoir as I understand her but keep in mind that I have not actually fucking read her - that people go on about two genders but culturally speaking there's basically one and nobody has it.

The One Legitimate Gender is Hegemon/Man, and because everyone falls short of that there is a constant opportunity to leverage insecurity due to Insufficient Masculinity on the part of man-categoried people for fun, profit, and disruption, and the categories of people who are Non-Men (de Beauvoir again) are variously sorted depending on what is most convenient for the people who are currently pulling the levers on the Insufficient Masculinity Insecurity Machine.

So there are sort of three broad semi-permeable categories, because certain types of Non-Men can aspire to merely be Insufficiently Masculine if they get their hands on the levers of the Insecurity Machine; any individual trait can be disqualifying on Man but if the power flows shift just so then it might not matter. (Consider the number of mainstream cis gay men who, having attained Man status despite being Insufficiently Masculine (like everyone else), proceed to give the ladder a good yank so none of the effeminate queer men, the divas, the trans people, the kinky queers, etc. can make it into the Insufficiently Masculine Man box.)

The whole damn thing is a hob's game that keeps the people who think they can climb the glass pyramid of masculinity by using Non-Men as stepping stones, including by declaring certain forms of Insufficient Masculinity as qualifying for Non-Men status, busy eating each other and also the rest of us.

Hegemon/Man is an arrow that goes in one direction, a greased pole that nobody can actually climb to the top of. It's built that way. And security is framed in terms of whether or not one can climb the pole, with some people not allowed to even try.

(World made of levers, said Tyl.)

I have so much stuff to write.

* Monstrous theology poem
* Auto-invocatory poetry
* Whatever other poetry I need for my homework
* Opening post for Patheos gig
* Possibly contribution to magic-and-disability antho Alas, book announcement, not CFS, but that's off my list at least.
* Elizabeth's piety survey
* Polytheistic ethnography survey
* Stuff
* Things

What have I successfully written? Fanfic for jenett.

Two things, to reprise recent demonstrations of my own personal damage.


Over in a thread on the Yes Means Yes blog there's someone ranting about the evils of homeschooling because, among other things, "how can a relationship be realio trulio equal if only one person is bringing in significant income".

(Good to know that the measure of respect and importance and meaning in a relationship is made out of cash. Thank you so much for that kick in the face.)


In the couple weeks since I signed up on FetLife, I have seen, not just on FetLife itself, that stupid 'Polyamory is Wrong!' t-shirt linked four or five fucking times. Ha ha universe. Fuck you too.


In other news, I'm wondering if I'm getting PPD. It doesn't feel like depression-depression, but I'm constantly overwhelmed, want to cry for no particular reason, and various other things. It's ... very complicated in my head, which isn't helped by the low-level sense of illness (that is probably 'I haven't slept properly in a month, or well for eight or nine'). I need to sit and kala and probably do my regular Kemetic rituals and see if it helps, but mostly I just want to sob and be left alone.

Various states of family tension do not help, and have a bad habit of dragging up guilt and shame complexes (kala kala kala). And when my mind is working I want to parse calendars - I may post on that later - not, y'know, all the other shit that needs to be done for the household.

I am increasingly dreading most human interaction. Everyone wants 105% of what I can give, from the baby on up, except - maybe - my cat, who appears to be of the opinion that when I'm available for snuggles he'll take them but is otherwise self-managing.


Also, while I'm whingeing, my arms hurt, because I just helped teinedreugan put a very heavy box up somewhere high and was supporting it for too long because we needed to get whispercricket to snag a footstool for me to stand on so I (second tallest person in the household) could get high enough to finish the job, which would collapse horribly if I relaxed.

... this is an excellent metaphor for my entire life right now.

I think under many circumstances I might write this for the blog, but I really explicitly firmly am not wanting to treat it as something fucking political right now, because getting political in my personal is part of what fucks me over, and I don't want to do that processing level right now.

I have a defective relationship between money and self-worth. Like pretty much everyone else in our fucking culture.

I'm writing about this because I was talking with teinedreugan about it yesterday? Friday? something because this is one of the issues in our sex life, but it's also, I've got too much crap in my head, so I need to excrete it somewhere and that's what livejournal is for!

( Necessary background: )

So that's the needful background about my breakdown; skippable for people who either know about the breakdown or might find it upsetting to read a summary of someone else's screaming descent into gibbering failure and the consequences thereof.

( So that was the circumstance under which I Entered The Workforce. )

It's not actually as bad as I've written it, the money thing, it's just. I need to write about this problem, so I've cut out the bits that aren't the problem. You know how it goes. But this is always there.

From A Natural Guide to Pregnancy and Postpartum Health by some people claiming to be medical professionals:

"Type 2 diabetes can often be fully resolved by returning to the appropriate weight for your height - often what you weighed in high school, assuming you were a relatively thin teenager."

This is not the first, "And yay, you can lose weight with this advice too!" bit of commentary in the book, but it's the one that finally has driven me to fuming rage.

Someone with 'MD' after his name (I don't know what the letterspew after the first-listed author means, and I can't be bothered looking it up) who's giving advice to postpartum women should perhaps keep in mind that skeletal development in things like the pelvis can continue until well into the twenties, and perhaps evaluating health on the basis of what an underdeveloped bone structure weighs is bone stupid.

And that's without getting into 'the appropriate weight for your height' as if there were only one, and it were totally independent of other health factors, heritage, bone structure, and so on. Or ....

.... damnit, I want to bite something.

Amazon.com is attempting to coerce small press publishers that use print-on-demand technology into using their POD service rather than whatever else they were doing ... at least if they want an active listing on Amazon.

Various people are not happy. lupabitch is also not happy.

I am also one of the not happy people.

There is much not happy to go around.

Please, write to Amazon, so that they can be not happy too.

Today, it occurs to me that someone who can seriously maintain mind/body dualism such that treatments of the two are in separate moral categories probably has the luck to have not had much experience with mental illness, chronic illness, or disability.

Given, that, y'know, I treat depression mostly with nutritional considerations and by trying to keep an eye on my activity level. And am familiar with the consequences on the psyche of the limitations of my body, though not as much so as some folks reading this.

Also given that my brother was at least at one point on a serotonin-related medication so that he didn't starve to death. Which is not unrelated to why I treat the depression nutritionally.

I will probably rant about this in the blog later, but damnit.

(zeborahnz and green_knight, yes, this is related to the obvious context. I cannot participate more directly in the conversation there and remain within standards of civility that I would prefer to maintain, and unlike this bit of idiocy with the same party I am not required to be engaged directly.)

I need to thrash at this concept until I get it into an essay, I think, but I'm making a note of the seeds of it so I don't lose it entire.

oneironaut and I were talking about power exchange relationships and related stuff, and responses to the possession of power, power and ma'at. Or what arawen sometimes refers to as "If I don't take good care of my toys, I don't get to play with them anymore."

There's something heady about having someone else in a position of vulnerability, by whatever means. It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things whether it's kink, whether it's economic power, whether it's social power, physical capacity, spiritual knowledge, anything else: the mere fact of the capacity to do is a drug. And it's not a drug everyone has the skill to handle well. (And the toxicity of the drug depends, I think, somewhat, on whether or not the vulnerability is more chosen than coerced.)

Is the response to an exposed vulnerability to raise up, to work it synergistically, to hold that position to keep access to the drug? Any exposed vulnerability is an intimacy -- this is heavy currency in d/s, but it's also one of those flows of political stress that comes of being an oppressed minority, forced to be constantly more exposed, more intimate, to more people, with less consent, less freedom to say "I don't want to be naked here." Is that intimacy cherished, loved, protected, or is it played for personal advantage? Is it an intimacy that people can refuse to have if they don't want to be exposed, or don't want to be a party to someone else's exposure? (And that goes off into questions of [fitb] privilege rather handily -- not only the confidence of being able to lay a hand on a shirt, but the ability to not notice when other people are stripped, to step away from the whole question.)

My experience of d/s situations is that they make these reactions, the responses to power and exposure, all very immediate and present. oneironaut and I exchanged "You know who you really are when" comments about it -- the whole question of whether or not the jump when granted intense, extensive power over another person is towards ma'at or away. It's always, always, always going to be a drug, but there are good trips and bad trips, and good ways of dealing with the chemistry and bad ones.

I come around to my tendency towards fealty models, exchange of powers, interdependent obligations.

And I come around to, sometimes, choosing to be naked beneath everything, because I show myself who I really am.

(Words aren't coming out quite right. Oh well.)

(ETA: This is partly related to discussion linked from takingsteps, too.)

Decided I wanted to save it.

( Society/gay marriage )