Category Archives: Trauma and Recovery

Monsters and Madwomen (Just Another Day at Reiter’s Block)

We’re crazy for links this month at Reiter’s Block!

At the multi-author blog Feminism and Religion, Laura Shannon, an expert on traditional women’s ritual dances, recovers intriguing background information on two fearsome females of Greek mythology in “Medusa and Athena: Ancient Allies in Healing Women’s Trauma”. The story we know best, from the 1st century CE poet Ovid, pits them against each other. Beautiful Medusa is raped in Athena’s temple; the goddess is offended and turns her into a monster, then helps the male hero Perseus behead her.

Shannon contends that this patriarchal reinterpretation covers up an earlier tradition in which Athena, her mother Metis, and Medusa were three faces of the same goddess of wisdom and healing, “aspects of an ancient triple Goddess corresponding respectively to the new, full, and dark phases of the moon…Their many common elements include snakes, wings, a formidable appearance, fierce eyes and powerful gaze.” Male-dominated traditions emphasized Athena’s warlike qualities, but she was also a figure “of healing, of wisdom, of protection and self-defense, of craft and culture, of the olive tree–which can have great significance for all those healing from trauma.” This tantalizingly brief essay is excerpted from Shannon’s piece in the anthology Revisioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom (Gladys Livingstone, Trista Hendren and Pat Daley, eds.), forthcoming from The Girl God, a publisher of feminist spirituality books for children and adults.

Over at the blog of sci-fi publisher Tor Books, author Theodora Goss surveys literature for “Five Monsters That Explore Gender, Sexuality, and Race”, from Victorian lesbian vampire Carmilla to Octavia Butler’s human-alien hybrid Lilith.

What is a monster, anyway? We tend to associate the monstrous with the ugly, evil, or frightening, but there’s a more sophisticated way of thinking about these creatures. In On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, Stephen T. Asma argues that monsters are examples of “categorical mismatch.” We like to organize reality into easily understandable categories: you are either male or female, human or animal, living or dead. When something or someone crosses those boundaries, it makes us uncomfortable: that’s when we label it as monstrous. That kind of labeling can be dangerous, because it can allow us to deny someone’s humanity. But the idea of the monstrous can also be powerful. If you’re a woman, it can be a subversive act to think of yourself as Medusa, with snakes for hair, turning men to stone.

Asma points out that the word “monster” comes from the Latin root “monere,” meaning to warn. In other words, monsters always have some sort of message for us.

Goss’s latest book is The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, a Victorian-era paranormal murder mystery featuring the daughters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and other female victims of mad scientists’ experiments, including my personal obsession, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s lovely and poisonous Beatrice Rappaccini. My 1,000-book wishlist just got a little longer.

With the ascension of the Orange Chucklefuck to our nation’s highest office, we can’t expect much relief from the mental illness “diagnosis” rhetoric that progressives deployed during the 2016 campaign. At Eidolon, an online journal of scholarly writing about Classics for a popular audience, Jessica Wright explains in “Crazy Talk” that calling our ideological opponents mad has a long and coercive history. Wright is a historian at the University of Southern California studying theories of the brain and mental illness in antiquity.

What is the effect of the “crazy” talk that permeates our public forums and our political discourse? We have a very long history of using words such as “crazy” and “mad” in casual polemic. The Greek orator Demosthenes used the word mania sixteen times in his extant speeches, and never to offer a “medical” diagnosis. Some two-and-a-half centuries later, Cicero employed the Latin word insania and its related verb insanire on over seventy occasions.

Authors such as these were the models of polite speech and rhetoric throughout the Roman Empire, and were enormously influential in literary culture and education in modern Europe and its imperial reach. As Caroline Winterer has shown, Greek and Latin models were fundamental to political oratory in antebellum America. Frederick Douglass, as David W. Blight has described, studied rhetoric from a book called The Columbian Orator, which included extracts (translated and imagined) from Greco-Roman oratory…

…Our penchant for casual diagnosis does not stem from political oratory alone. The discourse of crazy was fundamental to early Christian texts, especially heresiological catalogues, polemical pamphlets, and sermons, all of which were arguably more influential even than Cicero during late antiquity and the medieval period. Terms for mental disorders were commonly used to undermine one’s opponent and to situate oneself as an authority on others’ moral health…

…Phrenitis was an illness popular in early Christian polemic, especially in the writings of the bishop Augustine of Hippo, who diagnosed phrenitis over forty times in his religious opponents, including pagans, Jews, and Manichaeans. In Augustine’s work, as in the writings of contemporary preachers such as John Chrysostom, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Peter Chrysologus — phrenitis served as a metaphor or a model for illness of the soul. That is, in early Christian terms, the failure to be saved. Phrenitis stood in for the delusion, the loss of self-control, and the threat of death that Christian authors associated with alternative religious paradigms. With salvation understood as the only form of health, rejection of salvation could not but be understood as symptomatic of disease…

…Phrenitis provided a model for a spiritual illness that presented among its symptoms the experience of spiritual strength. As such, it was integral to Augustine’s anti-Jewish polemic, since it explained why the Jewish people might believe themselves to enjoy a positive relationship with God.

The no-win logic of spiritual/political madness is an authoritarian trap. The more you protest, the more your strengths will be twisted into symptoms–cool logic as sociopathy, emotional pleas as hysteria, self-preservation as noncompliance. A modern comedy or horror film scene in an asylum would be incomplete without the stock figure of the paranoid patient desperately asserting that he’s not really crazy, his distress contrasted with the calm of the men in white coats. We’re so easily fooled into mistaking privilege for sanity.

Preachers such as Augustine commonly represented themselves as physicians of the soul —a conceit borrowed from ancient philosophy — but phrenitis enabled them to leverage a new kind of authority. To borrow an example from Plutarch, a preacher might compare sin to gout in order to persuade his congregants of the importance of spiritual care. When a preacher diagnosed sin as phrenitis, however, it meant that he thought his patient was beyond persuasion, and needed rather to be coerced. More than once, Augustine explains punitive actions against religious opponents as a form of treatment or restraint commonly applied to those suffering from mental illness.

Augustine justifies intervention in the religious and political lives of his opponents on the grounds that he is a physician of the soul, and that their religious difference is symptomatic of an organic mental disorder, an illness of the brain. This rhetorical move diminished his opponents’ authority to speak for themselves: phrenitis offered a model for therapeutic intervention in a context where the patient refused treatment. Psychiatric invective became a powerful tool for establishing the authority of one religious perspective and practice over another. Even though Augustine’s diagnosis was “merely” metaphorical, he intended it to have real-world effects.

Wright cites contemporary examples of psychiatric diagnoses being mis-applied against marginalized groups. For example, during the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, the psychiatric establishment redefined schizophrenia to discredit and criminalize black men:

Jonathan Metzl in his book The Protest Psychosis…shows how schizophrenia transformed, during the Civil Rights era, from an illness characterized by weakness and depression and associated primarily with white patients (especially isolated housewives) to a diagnosis of aggression and paranoia, disproportionately applied to African-American men. Within the frame of Civil Rights protests, Metzl argues, violent actions (including self-defence) could be interpreted as the unpredictable outburst of the schizophrenic, while the identification of structural inequality was interpreted as paranoia, and the denial of one’s own sickness as delusion. Asylums for the “criminally insane” saw a steep rise in the population of African-American men, who were contained through sedatives in doses now considered extraordinarily high. Fifty years later, African-American men continue to be disproportionately diagnosed with the disease, which continues to be associated with violence and aggression. With the merciless irony characteristic of structures of injustice, the system of mass incarceration that has evolved over the intervening decades in fact minimizes the mental health resources available to incarcerated populations, criminalizing mental illnesses, even as it medicalizes “deviant” behaviours.

Thus, when we use “crazy talk” to oppose our resident fascist demagogue, we’re not just being politically incorrect. We’re actually reinforcing the authoritarianism that we fear.

One-Year Anniversary of the Orlando Pulse Massacre

Today, June 12, is the one-year anniversary of the hate crime at the Orlando Pulse nightclub in Florida, when a gunman slaughtered 49 people during the LGBTQ club’s Latin Night. It was the deadliest attack on queer people in U.S. history as well as the highest body count by a single shooter.

At QSpirit, Kittredge Cherry’s site for LGBTQ art and spirituality, she profiles Tony O’Connell’s commemorative artwork “Triptych for the 49”. The gay Liverpool artist’s mixed-media piece is a shrine shaped like a traditional church altarpiece, with photos of the Orlando martyrs surrounded by haloes. Saints Sebastian and Joan of Arc flank them as protector spirits. Visit his Facebook page for pictures of the work in progress and updates on a forthcoming public exhibition.

Over at the Huffington Post, Queer Voices columnist James Michael Nichols surveys the continuing political impact of the massacre on queer and Latinx communities in his piece “For Those We Lost and Those Who Survived”. Among the issues raised by the tragedy and its aftermath are the demand for effective gun control, the need for safe spaces for queer people of color, and the lack of culturally competent mental health services for trauma victims belonging to multiple marginalized groups.

Kevin Garcia is a great educator/advocate about all things gay and Christian via his blog, podcast (A Tiny Revolution), and new YouTube channel. He shares what the incident meant for him in his video “Remembering Pulse and My First Pride Month”. Dance clubs have historically been sanctuaries for queer people, he says, far more than many churches. When he came out of the closet, he felt so much stronger and freer than when he was living a lie, until the shooting took away his sense of safety as a gay man in the world. This is what hate crimes are meant to do–to make marginalized people erase themselves. While many affirming churches did the right thing and gave people an opportunity to mourn, Kevin was angry that other megachurches and conservative religious leaders either ignored the event or co-opted it to make it about something other than an attack on queer people of color.

If you’re a Massachusetts voter, here are two things you can do for the Pulse victims to #HonorThemWithAction. First, call your legislators to ask them to support the Conversion Therapy Ban Bill (SB 62/HB 1190). According to the MassEquality newsletter:

This bill would prohibit state-licensed mental health providers from using dangerous and discredited conversion therapy techniques to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of a minor. These techniques are designed to instill shame and self-hatred in LGBTQ children, and are associated with depression, anxiety, homelessness and suicidal thoughts and actions.Suicide already takes a terrible toll on our community—LGBTQ youth attempt suicide at 4 times the rate of their non-LGBTQ peers. Passing this bill will reduce the incidence of suicide among our vulnerable young people and prevent them from being subjected to this harmful treatment.

Second, get updates from Freedom Massachusetts about the 2018 ballot question that could repeal our protections for transgender and gender-nonconforming people in places of public accommodation. I’m going to sign up for voter phone-banking.

Nationwide, see the 49 Days of Action page for more suggestions about how you can fight for queer rights.

June Links Roundup: Reclaiming Ugliness

I identify most with the Feminine when She is monstrous.

Forget those flirtatious princesses with little-girl bodies. Give me fat octopus drag queen Ursula the Sea Witch, rape survivor Medusa, skull-stomping goddess Kali with her ecstatic thirsty tongue and dozen limbs. I like romantic walks along the beach at sunset while Cthulhu rises from the ocean. (Preferably in the winter.) When people criticize Barbie for having an unrealistic female form, I laugh; you better believe it, she’s a seven-foot-tall babe who could put your eye out with her perfectly pointed foot.

Now, I do have many parts, with different ages and genders, so there is one who loves rosebuds and sparkly necklaces and kittens. But she is six years old, and this is not the kind of world where she can walk around outside alone.

I have a new mantra for living in a society that indoctrinates us with shame and judgment. Adapt as needed to your circumstances. Each day I look in the mirror and say, with as much glee as I can muster:

I’m fat, I’m queer, and I’m crazy!

Embracing queerness–that is, dropping the effort to be “female”–has opened up all sorts of interesting investigations about habitual patterns of movement in my body, as well as the interpretive filters I unconsciously put over the image in the mirror. It’s almost cliché by now to point out that fat-phobia connects with the sexist backlash against women taking up space. Yet so many otherwise liberal women keep fat-shaming themselves and others, because our gender markers have inequality built in. When we see a big person with expansive, relaxed body movements, we struggle to recognize her as feminine, and therefore attractive. But now that I have been trying to walk more “like a man”–longer, confident steps, with feet and knees turning out slightly to the sides–I’ve found that the foot balance problems identified by my Feldenkrais bodywork teacher have eased up. And I haven’t even worn high heels since the early 2000s!

“Crazy” means that I have PTSD, sensory processing disorder and some other Aspie traits, and an imaginative world that is more vivid and important to me than a lot of meatspace relationships. Feminists have reclaimed madness, like fatness, as feminine excess disapproved by society: a “hysterical” intensity of feelings. Mine is not so chaotic. For me, it’s about not fitting in, seeing what others don’t see, openly taking time for emotional self-care, and not hiding the fact that my priorities are unusual. My shame around craziness is the fear that I will be so absorbed in my inner experiences that I’ll lose social self-consciousness and do something conspicuously embarrassing. This takes us back to femininity and its concomitant demand for 24-7 awareness that you are being looked at, so you’d better be easy on the eyes.

Role Monsters, Jess Zimmerman’s new series at the online lit mag Catapult, says to hell with that. “Being a monster is harder than being a hero,” she writes pointedly in the first installment, about harpies as a symbol of men’s fear of female ambition. But it’s the second essay, “What If We Cultivated Our Ugliness? or: The Monstrous Beauty of Medusa”, that made me cry and cheer.

Before I shaved my head…I had never thumbed my nose quite so drastically at beauty. Fat women often rely on other markers of femininity to edge us into the visible spectrum: flowing hair, smooth skin, expansive cleavage. I’d been weird-looking and tough in my early twenties, but at some point I’d drifted into trying to please people with my presentation, to fit in, to hover around staring at the mark even though I’d never hit it. Hacking into my hair felt as transgressive as carelessly sporting a bad complexion, which I also had at the time. I was wrecking my tenuous connection to beauty, crumpling it up and throwing it away.

I looked great with my haircut, but “great” in the sense of “a vast and incalculable thing.” I definitely didn’t look pretty; I looked further than ever from “pretty,” more than ever like a weird hulking creature instead of a girl. But the haircut also made everything else that was wrong about me—my fat, my heavy bones, my combat boots—fall into place and finally make sense. I wasn’t missing the mark after all; the mark was irrelevant for me. I could make a new mark.

When she was younger, Zimmerman says, she went by the Internet username Medusa, a creature so ugly you literally couldn’t look at her. Now she appreciates the power in the symbol that once represented her low self-esteem.

I didn’t know there was a difference between “not beautiful” and “ugly.” I thought that my failure to meet basic standards of femininity and prettiness meant I was repulsive.
But ugliness is something greater and stronger and stranger than mere non-beauty. It’s not an absence, but a new force, unpredictable and unrestrained. Beauty has rules and symmetry; ugliness does not. Helen of Troy’s face might have launched a thousand ships, but one look from Medusa could have sent them all to the bottom, weighted down with a crew of stones.

According to the Greek myth, Medusa was actually once so beautiful that the sea-god Poseidon desired her. He raped her in Athena’s temple, and the goddess punished the mortal victim–not the god, naturally!– for this sacrilege by turning her into a monster. Zimmerman muses:

Medusa lost her beauty—or rather, it was taken from her. Beauty is always something you can lose. Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: We are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live.

Oh, but ugliness—ugliness is always yours. Almost everyone has some innate kernel of grotesquerie; even fashion models (I’ve heard) tend to look a bit strange and froggish in person, having been gifted with naturally level faces that pool light luminously instead of breaking it into shards. And everyone has the ability to mine their ugliness, to emphasize and magnify it, to distort even those parts of themselves that fall within acceptable bounds.

Where beauty is narrow and constrained, ugliness is an entire galaxy, a myriad of sparkling paths that lurch crazily away from the ideal. There are so few ways to look perfect, but there are thousands of ways to look monstrous, surprising, upsetting, outlandish, or odd. Thousands of stories to tell in dozens of languages: the languages of strong features or weak chins, the languages of garish makeup and weird haircuts and startling clothes, fat and bony and hairy languages, the languages of any kind of beauty that’s not white. Nose languages, eyebrow languages, piercing and tattoo languages, languages of blemish and birthmark and scar. When you give up trying to declare yourself acceptable, there are so many new things to say.

For another variation on the feminist theme of “Don’t play a rigged game”, consider this creative midrash on one of the Hebrew Bible’s disturbing tales of parental abuse and violence against women. Fred Clark is a progressive Christian ex-evangelical who blogs as Slacktivist. In this 2012 post, “Regarding Jephthah’s Daughter”, he considers different ways commentators have tried to make this story more palatable. In Judges 11, the Hebrew commander Jepthah vows that if God grants him victory over the Ammonites, he will sacrifice as a burnt-offering whoever first comes out of his house to meet him. Like the father in “Beauty and the Beast”, Jephthah was probably expecting that it would be an animal, not his own daughter. So he had to kill her.

Or did he? Clark contrasts the way the evangelical church taught the story, which assumed that the vow was binding, and the commentaries in the Jewish Encyclopedia, where the rabbis were pretty clear that Yahweh is not a Beast. According to Jewish tradition, Jephthah’s pride, his embarrassment at having made a rash and invalid vow, or (at best) his ignorance kept him from doing the right thing and asking the temple priest to annul his promise. It should have been obvious that God would not respect, let alone enforce, a vow to commit murder. Clark writes:

I don’t recall ever hearing a Sunday sermon on the story of Jephthah, but I probably heard a half-dozen Sunday school or Bible class lessons, and all of them pointed to this as the moral of this immoral story: Don’t make rash vows, because you will be bound by them just like Jephthah was.

And that’s monstrous — almost as horrifying as the original story. Those well-meaning Sunday school teachers all assumed, as Jephthah did, that he was absolutely bound by his vow, no matter what. And thus they all repeated Jephthah’s error — assuming that such vows and rules might somehow matter more than the life of Jephthah’s daughter.

That seems to me to be precisely the opposite of what this brutal little story actually illustrates. It shows us the lethal ignorance and sinful pride of remaining “inflexible.” The story of Jephthah is the story of everyone who decides that vows and codes and rules must be absolute. That way of thinking always ends in death.

While we’re on the subject of critiquing conservative Christianity, ex-evangelical writer Chris Stroop’s blog Not Your Mission Field features incisive articles and interviews about spiritual abuse, right-wing politics, and how they overlap. In a post from May 3, he warns us progressives about the no-true-Scotsman fallacy: “About Those Trump Voters for God? Stop Calling Them ‘Fake Christians'”. Both liberals and anti-Trump religious conservatives have been arguing that the president’s evangelical supporters are Christian in name only. While it’s understandable that believers don’t want to give Tan Dumplord power to define their faith, Stroop says that the battle to define “true” Christianity according to our political or theological preferences is unwinnable:

A modest proposition: while defining Trumpist Christians as “fake Christians” might feel good to the people who understand Trump support as a violation of their Christian values, this categorization is inaccurate from any empirical perspective. In other words, what represents “true” or “pure” Christianity (or Islam or Judaism, etc.) can only be debated within the discourse of the religion in question, that discourse being inevitably multivalent, tension-ridden, and subject to reinterpretation and internal contestation. Arguing over interpretation is part and parcel of text-based monotheisms. Put more simply, theologians and believers get to debate what the “pure” form of a given religion is; no one else does. However, there are no universally accepted grounds they can appeal to on which their contradictory metaphysical claims can be adjudicated, which means that, empirically, there is no such thing as a singular, timeless “pure” form of any religion.

Untenable, too, is the very American, but not especially Biblical, drive to separate pure religious motivations from self-serving political ones.

…[G]iven that these conservative Christians understand their drive to take dominion as a theological imperative, why should we understand their religious worldview and goals as only “ideology,” at the expense of “real” religion?… [For many commentators] the evident answer is that “ideology” is religion they don’t like, and “religion” is religion they do. This is intellectually sloppy…

The temptation to believe these things is powerful. Many of us want religion to be inherently good, and it can make for feel-good politics to reject fundamentalism as “fake” religion. But it is not. Religion is not anymore inherently good than it is inherently bad.

As a survivor of oppressive Christianity, I feel erased by claims that the Christianity I grew up with was not “real.” Let me tell you, I experienced myself as intensely religious well into my 20s, and I do not appreciate it when the Balmers and Goldbergs of the world tell me I was not “really religious” after all. Also as a result of my religious PTSD, I am naturally inclined to the position that organized religion, on the upshot, does more harm than good. I admit this may be my confirmation bias, and this claim would be very difficult if not impossible to demonstrate for the whole course of human history (although it is worth noting that the Abrahamic faiths have served as powerful vehicles for the propagation of patriarchy). The more salient point to my argument here is that harmful practices carried out in a religious context, as religious imperatives, do not stop being “really religious” just because they are harmful. This belief is nothing but wishful thinking and/or political expediency, even if many intelligent people cling to it, having failed to check their own confirmation bias on this point.

Moreover, whether we agree with it or not, Trump-ism is rooted in a worldview that many devout and religiously well-educated Christians have found support for in the Bible. It’s not the only worldview you can get out of Scripture, but it’s firmly rooted there.

The latest Pew data have revealed that it is precisely the most frequently churchgoing white Evangelicals who are currently most supportive of #SoCalledPresident, so you can give up what was literally a #FakeNews narrative concocted by a mainstream media that simply refuses to face the extent of white Evangelical illiberalism. The Evangelicals who voted for Trump are the kind who in many cases send their children to Christian schools or homeschool them, who memorize Bible verses, and who practice daily “quiet time,” that is, a period they spend praying and reading a devotional gloss on scripture or the Bible itself. We must face facts: this group is a Christian community.

When these Christians read the Bible, what do they get out of it? For starters, they appeal to the narrative of the fall and the doctrine of original sin to support an extremely dark view of human nature, the kind of paranoid view that imagines any number of “inherently lustful” men might put on dresses and claim to be transgender in order to spy on women in bathrooms, even though there is zero evidence that this ever occurs (while the medical community’s consensus on the validity of transgenderism is unequivocal). This extremely dark view of human nature leads to a sense that fallible human beings must be subjected to strict discipline or moral and social chaos will result, which in turn serves as “justification” for these Christians’ willingness to use coercive law in order to enforce on all moral norms that are not shared by all and that have no secular justification…This reading of the Bible leads to a sense that only Christians can be expected to behave morally at all, and comes with a concomitant rejection of pluralism (on which see this Twitter thread)…

…These conservative Christians, with their dark view of human nature, also find in scripture typologies through which to understand the world in terms of Providence and apocalyptic prophecy. This leads to what I call a “politics of Providentialism,” which entails reading the will of God into history and current events. Often it involves “recognizing” divine “blessings” and “punishments,” which believers of this sort insist can be applied not only to individuals, but also collectively to nations. One of the walls in my Christian elementary school was emblazoned with the phrase, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD,” the first part of Psalm 33:12.

While the psalmist was referring to the covenant between God and ancient Israel, many contemporary American Christians believe the same type of relationship to exist between God and the United States of America. Thus they argue that if the U.S. “sins” by, say, removing officially sanctioned prayer from public schools, legalizing abortion, and/or legalizing same-sex marriage or passing transgender non-discrimination protections, God may punish the nation with some sort of catastrophe, or at least allow catastrophe to befall the nation by removing the “hedge of protection” with which God supposedly surrounds us when our nation is “obedient” to him (this version of God is always a him).

“But,” you will object, “How can such people claim to follow Christ and at the same time seek to deprive fellow Americans of healthcare and social support?”Many such conservative Christians would argue this is not what they are doing. Believing, as they do, in the inherent and indeed extreme corruption of human nature, and having a deep suspicion that such corruption will be expressed in a high degree in the secular state, which we can make into an idol if we’re not careful, they will argue that individual Christians and churches, and not the government, should provide for the needy. (Yes, this is utopian.)  Some go further, either taking the road of the prosperity Gospel, in which health and material success are signs of God’s favor, or arguing, through an extreme interpretation of the Calvinist concepts of “total depravity” and “limited atonement,” that Christians are only to take care of other Christians. I don’t find any of this to be in the spirit of the Gospel as I read it, but nevertheless it is “real” Christianity.

As I’ve shared in recent months on this blog (e.g. here and here), continuing to call myself “Christian” would drag me back into the rigged game of trying to please or convince others about my identity. Perhaps orthodoxy goes so well with patriarchy because they both fear the internally self-referenced person, as explained in this Psychology Today article by relationship counselors Linda and Charlie Bloom:

They listen and take influence, but they know who they are, what they want, and are guided in their choices by that clarity. While they are respectful of conventional wisdom, and open to personal input provided by their partner, friends and colleagues, ultimately they tend to make their life choices on the basis of their own experience and judgments, rather than defer to the opinions of others. This trust in the validity of one’s instincts or intuitive knowledge is distinct from the notion of “shooting from the hip” or just “going with your gut feeling.” It is the closeness of the partnership that has promoted such self-trust, and that self-trust enhances the partnership.

Self-trust is less not simply “doing what I want to do” but rather is a matter of accumulating the wisdom that is cultivated through the practices of self-awareness, self reflection, and the intention to learn from the results of our life choices. It also doesn’t mean rejecting all outside opinions. Self-trust combines the openness and receptivity of a child’s mind with the understanding of an adult whose wisdom has been deepened through a lifetime of learning and the integration of life’s lessons.

A life that is self-referential is one that is flexible, fluid, and creative. Our sense of security comes from a sense of trust in our capacity to deepen it rather than rely exclusively upon the input of other people and institutions. Self-referentiality allows us to choose from a broader range of options in making our life choices without having to adhere to a particular tradition authority, or belief system. In so doing we are able to meet our needs and address our unique concerns with resourcefulness and creativity.

A system that wants to cut people off from their inner power, and replace it with social control, will start by making them ashamed of their needs for nourishment, pleasure, and authenticity, after which it becomes easier to convince them that God also doesn’t value them unconditionally. I’m much happier being fat, queer, and crazy. And I might be able to turn you to stone.

Is Feminism the Right Movement for Nonbinary People?

This is not a post about “do trans women belong in women’s spaces”. Feminism is for women. How you became a woman is nobody’s business.

This is not a post about “do nonbinary people belong in feminism”. That framing begs the question that we are, or should be, asking to be allowed in.

Rather, I’m pondering two complex questions: Should enbies always push for gender-neutral or gender-inclusive language in feminist activities? When feminists who identify as women decide to continue centering women in their group’s language and mission, what alternative services exist for enbies to address issues that have traditionally been the purview of feminist organizing: sexual assault, reproductive rights, discrimination, and the like?

The answers, I believe, are interconnected. Before women can declare that a space is not for us or a movement is not about us, have they considered whether we have anywhere else to go for this kind of support? Are those options equally local, accessible, and effective for the enby in question? What are these women doing to supply feminist resources and theoretical insights to enby-focused organizations?

Before we enbies go #AllLivesMatter on anything gender-specific, have we empathized with women’s silencing by patriarchal society, and appreciated the historical struggle to carve out spaces where women’s voices and experiences had prime importance?

The topic is on my mind because I’ve signed up for a “Women’s Sacred Rage” workshop. It was a fantastic experience last year, the organizers are reliably trans-friendly cis women, and I expect the participants will be supportive of gender diversity. But I’m more definite about my queerness than I was then. Do I need to come out to everybody or will that be derailing? I was socialized as a woman, I’m perceived to be a woman, I participate in a sexist culture, but one source of my rage is that I was forcibly brought up as a girl/woman when I don’t think I was one.

Two articles I read recently frame this dilemma. Rain and Thunder is a local magazine of radical feminist thought and activism. When I call their feminism transgender-exclusive, I mean that as a description, not a slur. Their branch of the movement is concerned about erasure of the specific history and needs of women, particularly lesbians, by the rising popularity of umbrella terms like “queer”. The articles are not available online, so I’m going to quote some passages below from Debbie Cameron’s essay “The Amazing Disappearing ‘Women'”, in Issue #67 (Spring 2017). She is upset that reproductive health organizations have started using gender-neutral language to acknowledge that some people who get pregnant and menstruate don’t identify as women, and that a similar change is taking place in political discourse about hate crimes:

…the term ‘gender-based violence’…is widely used by government bodies and NGOs to refer to what feminists would call ‘violence against women’ and/or ‘male violence’. In this case what prompted the adoption of the inclusive term wasn’t a concern about anti-male bias. Rather, humanitarian organizations in the 1990s felt the need for a more abstract umbrella term to encompass the full range of issues they were working on. The choice of ‘gender-based violence’ did not, initially, change their understanding of the issue. Most early definitions of ‘gender-based violence’ explicitly say that it means ‘violence against women’…

…But to me, at least, it’s unclear why calling violence ‘gender-based’ should do more to highlight power and inequality than calling it ‘violence against women’. The most obvious characteristic of the inclusive term is its vagueness: it says only that some acts or types of violence are ‘based’ on ‘gender’, while leaving the nature of the connection unspecified. (Is it to do with the motive? The perpetrator’s gender? The victim’s gender? Both?) Far from highlighting ‘power inequalities between men and women’, the non-specificity of ‘gender-based violence’ leaves room for an interpretation of it as something any gendered being might do to any other gendered being…

…From a feminist perspective the problem with inclusive terms is not statistical, it’s conceptual. Feminists conceptualize male violence against women as a form of social control which helps to maintain men’s collective position of dominance. It’s not just a question of some individual men using violence to dominate some individual women. All women–including those who will never experience an actual assault–have to live with the fear of being assaulted by men, and with the restrictions that fear imposes on their freedom of movement, action and speech. Violence perpetrated by women against men, however heinous and individually deserving of punishment it may be, does not have the same political function. All men’s lives are not circumscribed by their fear of being attacked by women. This understanding is what motivates the feminist preference for gender-specific terms. Replacing those terms with non-specific, ‘inclusive’ alternatives is not just a superficial change in wording, it’s a rejection of the logic of the feminist analysis…

…When feminist organizations adopt inclusive terms…they aren’t trying to make the problem of structural sexual inequality disappear. But the result is still a loss of analytic and political clarity. Planned Parenthood’s reference to ‘people being criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes’ is a case in point. Like feminist campaigns against male violence, feminist campaigns for reproductive rights are underpinned by a political analysis which sees the legal and religious policing of reproduction as a tool of patriarchal social control–and the point isn’t to control ‘pregnancy outcomes’, it’s to control the behavior of women. (pgs. 12-13)

So much to unpack here. Let me start by problematizing the rhetorical move of speaking for “feminism” as a monolith, akin to evangelicals’ self-descriptive use of “Christianity” or “orthodoxy” to give false universality to one sectarian perspective. To be fair, Cameron is right that male violence against women is supported by and reinforces structural inequality, while the reverse is not true. Men–or should I say, those who are perceived as men–don’t regularly circumscribe their behavior to reduce the risk of date rape or sexual assault, and in situations where they do have to worry about this (e.g. in prisons), they’re generally afraid of other men. And yes, attacks on reproductive rights aim to subordinate “women”, but that’s because conservative men don’t recognize trans and enby identities. Why should we defer to their misgendering of pregnant people?

But is this all there is to feminism? Are all other instances of gendered violence outside its purview? I would argue that “gender-based violence” includes:

*The widespread violence against transgender women, typically by cisgender men, which has its roots in misogyny and toxic patriarchal gender roles. According to the National LGBTQ Task Force’s StopTransMurders campaign: “In 2013, where there were also 12 reported murders of trans women of color, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence programs reported that 72% of hate crimes against LGBTQ people were against trans women, 90% of whom were transgender women of color.”

*Domestic violence in lesbian relationships, when the straight-acting or femme partner exploits her butch girlfriend’s gender-nonconformity to shame her or threaten to “out” her. (Ask me how I know about this.)

*Both mothers and fathers forcing female genital mutilation and male circumcision on children who are incapable of consent.

*Both mothers and fathers coercing children into the wrong gender identity or expression, including “corrective” surgery on intersex infants.

It’s patriarchy, not the existence of trans and nonbinary folks, that starves feminism for resources, so that radical feminists fear competition from issues other than the traditional one of male violence against women. I believe there should be spaces for the specific needs and solidarity of cis women who’ve been oppressed by men, just as there are (or should be) spaces foregrounding people of color, lesbians, trans and gender-nonconforming people, etc., but there should also be ultra-inclusive spaces where everyone affected by patriarchy and gender-based violence can share insights and support each other’s rights. Planned Parenthood, NGOs, and governments should be as inclusive as possible because they serve large populations and there are few alternatives for people who are turned away from these organizations. At the personal level, like workshops and support groups, I don’t have a hard-and-fast rule to discern when it is time to be inclusive versus specific, though I think the presence or absence of alternative resources is key.

For the contrary position to Rain and Thunder, I appreciated Kim Kaletsky’s piece “The Dangerous Exclusivity of Spaces for ‘Women’ Sexual Assault Survivors”, an October 2016 post on the social justice blog The Establishment.

…when author Kelly Oxford encouraged “women” to “tweet their first assaults” in reaction to Trump’s recently released remarks about his right to grab women…I hesitated to join the millions of people responding and sharing their stories.

…[I have]a very particular kind of nonbinary identity, the sort that doesn’t come with body dysphoria. I often pass as a cis woman, whether I want to or not, because I have breasts and don’t wear a chest binder. Sometimes I benefit from that — when I’m able to use women’s restrooms without putting myself in danger, for instance — but mostly it feels like having a sign with false information about me tattooed on my back, one I didn’t ask for and can’t easily remove. At no time does the dissonance between who I know I am and who others tell me I am feel more apparent, however, than when public conversations about gender-based sexual assault arise…

…The more I read others’ stories, the more I wanted to share my own subway story, in solidarity with others. But the stronger my desire to speak up, the more hesitant I became. What would it mean for me to take up space in a conversation explicitly designated for “women”? Would my voice be welcome as a nonbinary voice, or would I have to forfeit that aspect of my identity in order to earn the right to share my experiences?

I chose not to share my story. It’s a decision I’ve made numerous times — when considering submitting essays to magazines dedicated to sexual assault survivors, and when looking into support groups and listening in on social media conversations. I respect that spaces designated for women are for women, and will never deny their importance. Women need that space, and they need to feel safe there. And if my presence as someone who doesn’t wear the “woman” label is going to make anyone feel less comfortable sharing their experiences, then I fully relinquish my right to be there.

But if most spaces for survivors of gender-based sexual violence are for cis women, where does that leave the trans or nonbinary people who may or may not identify with femininity or womanhood, but whose bodies cis men have felt entitled to because they “looked like a woman”? Welcome or not, I often avoid spaces designated for “women” for the sake of my own mental health. Because participating means agreeing you wear the “women” label, entering “women’s” spaces, to me, feels like misgendering myself. And though many “women’s” spaces are unlikely to turn me down even if I do speak up about being nonbinary, I don’t want to subject myself to a space that’s so ambivalently supportive of nonbinary identity that its organizers can’t even commit to using nonbinary-friendly language. I’m already feeling vulnerable whenever I talk about sexual assault and rape culture — I can’t feel liberated from the weight of misogyny if I’m simultaneously dealing with language that invalidates my gender identity.

While I have enormous respect and appreciation for “women-only” spaces, their existence feels counterproductive. Many of them strive to combat or heal the damage from patriarchal norms. But I don’t think it’s possible to deconstruct misogyny or promote bodily autonomy without also deconstructing binary gender and the complicated binary gender divisions and expectations that keep patriarchal culture in place and deny trans and nonbinary folks their own bodily autonomy.

In my workshop later this month, I’ll probably come out, and it’ll probably be fine. People in our ultra-progressive town have responded with a wonderful indifference to my past declarations. The question remains whether I’ll go further, and start some conversations about creating trans- and enby-led forums for survivors of abuse and patriarchy. The burden of organizing those opportunities shouldn’t be entirely on us not-quite-women. I encourage cis-feminist groups to help us build on their work. And by encourage, I mean, “will annoy you until you do what I want.” Sacred Rage power!

The Gospel According to Alice Miller: The Truth Will Set You Free

Alice Miller (1923-2010) was a groundbreaking psychoanalyst and author of many books on childhood trauma as the root of personal and societal problems. Some of her work crosses over into theology, as she critiques how certain religious texts reflect and perpetuate toxic family dynamics through the generations. Concepts of original sin, forbidden knowledge, and child sacrifice take on new interpretations when we decide to stand on the side of the child, against parental violence. This hermeneutic has led me to part ways with Biblical Christianity as I once understood it. It was a surprise and consolation to find that Miller rescues the person of Jesus from this deconstruction, giving me a way to keep relating to him without going back into denial.

Miller’s The Truth Will Set You Free (Basic Books, 2001) is a popularization of her theories for a general audience, focusing on the case against corporal punishment of children, rather than the taboo topic of sexual abuse in the family. Even the title is a quote from Jesus (John 8:32), though this may be the choice of the English translator. (The original German title was Evas Erwachen, which I think means “Eve Awaken” and refers to Eve eating the forbidden fruit.) This passage from the last chapter describes a Jesus I can believe in:

The figure of Jesus confounds all those principles of poisonous pedagogy still upheld by the christian churches, notably the use of punishment to make children obedient and the emotional blindness such treatment inevitably brings. Long before his birth Jesus received the greatest reverence, love, and protection from his parents, and it was in this initial and all-important experience that his rich emotional life, his thinking, and his ethics were rooted. His earthly parents saw themselves as his servants, and it would never have occurred to them to lay a finger on him. Did that make him selfish, arrogant, covetous, high-handed, or conceited? Quite the contrary.

Jesus grew into a strong, aware, empathic, and wise person able to experience and sustain strong emotions without being engulfed by them. He could see through insincerity and mendacity and he had the courage to expose them for what they were. Yet to my knowledge no representative of the church has ever admitted the patent connection between the character of Jesus and the way he was brought up. Would it not make eminent sense to encourage believers to follow the example of Mary and Joseph and regard their children as the children of God (which in a sense they are) rather than treating them as their own personal property? The image of God entertained by children who have received love is a mirror of their very first experiences. Their God will understand, encourage, explain, pass on knowledge, and be tolerant of mistakes. He will never punish them for their curiosity, suffocate their creativity, seduce them, give them incomprehensible commands, or strike fear into their hearts. Jesus, who in Joseph had just such a father, preached precisely those virtues. (pgs.190-91)

Working Title/Artist: The Holy Family with Saints Anne and Catherine of AlexandriaDepartment: European PaintingsCulture/Period/Location: HB/TOA Date Code: 09Working Date: 1648
Digital Photo File Name: DT16.tif
Online Publications Edited By Steven Paneccasio for TOAH 1/2/2014

Holy Family of Choice! (source)

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Killing You In My Mind: My Early Notebooks

A few years ago, a writer friend and I were briefly obsessed with the reality show Storage Wars, where a colorful cast of junk-shop dealers competed to bid on abandoned storage units. Since they could only glance at the mystery pile of crap before committing to a price, it was anyone’s guess whether they’d find a cache of rare coins, or a locked safe containing a fake severed hand.

To avoid disappointing future rag-pickers on national TV, this month I am purging my off-site storage room, which contains all the papers, books, and knickknacks I’ve hoarded since the 1980s. (At least that’s what I think is in there…I opened up an envelope marked “stock certificates” yesterday to find photos of my dolls’ wedding.)

In the manner of the Great Book Purge of 2014, chronicled on this blog, the storage excavation gives me an opportunity to discover how my beliefs and attitudes have changed, or not, in 30 years. My trajectory is hopefully of interest to someone other than myself, because understanding the psychology of our political or religious opponents is necessary for any bridge-building in these angry times.

Moreover, as an adult with a child of my own, I can look back at my teenage journal entries and see the ways that my elite schools failed me emotionally, even as (or in part because) they held me up as an academic and artistic success story. My junior high and high school for “gifted children” was wonderful at encouraging multiple kinds of academic and artistic intelligence, but also tended to track kids into the one thing they were superior at and keep them there, and make them too responsible for caretaking other students’ jealousy. We received the weird mixed message, “Be the best you can be, but if you’re bullied, it’s your fault for showing off.” (Not unlike my home life with a narcissistic mother, actually, who swung constantly between demanding that I look thin and pretty as a reflection on her class status, and enviously hiding me in ugly clothes like Cinderella.) I reached a point where I simply wouldn’t try anything I wasn’t already good at, even something as small as switching from sanguine chalk to rough black charcoal in figure-drawing class. Harvard provided superlative opportunities for meeting smart and creative people, but the grading and teaching ethos was predominantly about sorting students into winners and losers, rather than teaching everyone at the level they were on. Maybe I can offer future educators some clues for spotting and supporting traumatized overachievers.

Or simply a good laugh at these gems of misanthropy from my early notebooks. Take, for example, the opening of the mid-90s sestina “The Seven Deadly Virtues”:

Patience first, that pale child dressed in rueful
red, in the brute fears of some banal game
struck down, unable to go against the grain
of her virtuous feebleness, to repel
the force of the frustration that forms
the first thing we learn. Those who can prevent

torture never recognize it, nor prevent
us from giving the name Forgiveness to the rueful
realization we’ve missed our chance at revenge…

(That’s not half bad, though the rest of the sestina becomes awfully long-winded as I attempt to hit those end-words.)

Along the same lines, this list from January 1992 may sound detached and philosophical, but I well remember the anguish of wondering why my “good” self diverged so much from the traits that actually helped me stay alive. List #1 is redacted because its length embarrasses me now.

List #1: My Moral Virtues

Loyalty
Compassion
Willingness to be a nonconformist for a good cause
Concern for ethics
Sense of my own and others’ dignity
Maturity/responsibility (no drugs, no casual sex, no self-destructive pleasures except too much snacking)
Artistic integrity

List #2: The Qualities I Like Best About Myself

Intelligence
Deviousness/effective rhetoric
Assertiveness
Ability to resist oppression through manipulation of the oppressor
Self-preservation instinct
Ambition (without betraying or stepping on others)
Sense of personal style

One can almost glimpse Julian peeking out of the closet in that second list, waiting for me to love him more than those deadly virtues. Instead, these notebooks contain the long-lost original drafts of several quirky but over-intellectualized and gloomy short stories, mostly about humiliated fat women or cruel parents. (Autobiographical much??) From the 1993 tale “Pinocchio Died for Your Sins”, I see that I hated Disney’s film then as much as I do now, for the same reason: it punishes children for not avoiding the temptations and deceptions that adults deliberately put in their path.

This thought experiment from March 1993 reminds me of child abuse expert Alice Miller’s radical midrash on Genesis in Thou Shalt Not Be Aware:

Anthropologists like to say that God and religion are just projections of things we don’t want to admit are really human creations (e.g. norms and taboos that are merely man-made are called God-made). But what if the reverse is true? What could the reverse of that be? …perhaps that we and the rest of the created cosmos are merely projections of things God doesn’t want to face about Himself.

It’s like Beatrice in [Nathaniel Hawthorne’s] “Rappaccini’s Daughter”–her poison is made to bear sole responsibility for an evil we all share. Did God cause original sin so He could blame us for it? In other words, evil came from God’s character flaws but He made us so we’d bear the blame. I don’t actually believe all this but it’s an interesting concept.

What strikes me about this juvenilia is how fiercely I was attempting to be loyal to myself, in the face of social pressure or ideologies that promised an end to loneliness and guilt…for a price. Equally striking is the consistency of my difficulties with Christian virtue and belief, side by side with my attraction to the tradition. Really, nothing has changed, though at the time I framed my dissent as rational individualism rather than trauma activism or queer theory. My long goodbye to Christian identity in the past 3-5 years has been shaking my confidence in any fixed sense of myself or my perceptions, but it shouldn’t. I was always trying different routes to the same goal.

Such as, for instance, November 1990’s “The Instantaneous Reiter Method for Determining the Direction of One’s Existence,” my fancy-ass name for a list of pros and cons about my possible call to Christian ministry. (Little did I suspect the two most important reasons: “vestments are too hot” and “you will become a pagan in 2014”.) In case you want to try this at home, Step 1 was “Write down all the thoughts and feelings you have about the proposed course of action,” and Step 2, “Analyze the philosophical implications of each part of Step 1.” The upshot was, I was aesthetically drawn to Christianity and comforted by a community where I didn’t have to compete or excel (“It would also be nice to love God,” I confessed), but I couldn’t honestly say that a desire to serve God or other people was paramount.

What I feel in church–am I being religious, or is it just an escape from my problems (psalms that say God will protect the righteous)?…I always loved church before I had any problems [Ed. Note: What, as a zygote??] or before church helped. But is religion the last refuge of a scoundrel, or is what you discover in hardship equally (or more) valid as what you discover by peaceful thought?…It would seem that even if now you know how nice it would be to be looked after, that doesn’t make it any more moral or plausible to accept or expect it.

Guys, this is kind of sad, huh? I was truthful enough to realize that it was codependent caretaking to become a minister in order to get love and protection, but no one in my family, church, or education had taught me that I was entitled to love and protection just because I’m human. Nothing immoral or implausible about that.

It’s strange, in retrospect, that my sense of victimization by greedy and arbitrary educational gatekeepers coexisted with my bootstrapping libertarian philosophy, which led me to write some cringe-worthy student newspaper articles about infantilized, needy, “victim culture” (think of your standard editorial against trigger warnings today). I think I was feeling that I shouldn’t have to abase myself, or reveal my private wounds, in order to receive basic kindness and a fair assessment from others. Not that this makes my arguments less wrong, but it suggests that those most vocally against “safe spaces” may be secretly the ones most in need of them, and in despair of finding them.

I leave you with this politically clairvoyant satire of a college entrance exam, from November 1990. Just think, if I’d remained my creed-wielding, Federalist Society dues-paying self, I could’ve been Betsy DeVos.

Existence Aptitude Test (EAT)
“the test to end tests”

There is a penalty for wrong answers. The Educational Testing Service thinks the difference between right and wrong is important. There is also a penalty for right answers. The Educational Testing Service does not want to foster antisocial elements whose intellectual superiority threatens the self-esteem of others and weakens the social fabric.

Therefore, only work out the problem when you have tried to guess and failed. Remember that the least imaginative guess is most likely to be right.

Good luck.

Part I: General Knowledge

(1) Time
(a) past and time present
Are both perhaps contained in time future.
(b) and tide wait for no man.
(c) is money.
(d)

(2) Space
(a) is curved.
(b) and time are one.
(c) is limited, so act now!
(d) ____________

(3) Death
(a) shall have no dominion.
(b) be not proud.
(c) and taxes are inevitable.
(d) to the Educational Testing Service!

(4) The world
(a) is too much with us, late and soon.
(b) is charged with the grandeur of God.
(c)
(d)

(5) Beauty
(a) is truth, truth beauty. That is all we know, and all we need to know. Stop. Do not complete the rest of this exam. Hand in your paper to the proctor.
(b) and the Beast lived happily ever after.
(c) is in the eye of the beholder.
(d)

(6) God
(a) is dead.
(b) is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
(c) bless [insert country’s name here]
(d) knows.

(7) Energy
(a) =mc squared
(b) can neither be created nor destroyed.
(c)
(d) is eternal delight.

(8) Life
(a) is a bitch and then you die.
(b) is a beach and then you dry.
(c) is a bitch and then you marry one.
(d)

Part II: Literature

(1) Lord of the Flies is about
(a) an entomologist.
(b) the devil.
(c) sadistic teenagers.
(d) Harvard.

(2) The title of Gone With the Wind refers to
(a) Scarlett’s dress when Rhett carries her upstairs.
(b) the gracious and infinitely superior Southern way of life.
(c) Atlanta burning.
(d) Margaret Mitchell’s notes for the lost final chapter of the book, in which Scarlett sues Rhett for alimony and Ashley fulfills his latent homosexuality.

(3) In Moby-Dick, the whale represents
(a) the Holy Grail.
(b) the forces of nature that overpower humanity.
(c) a society dominated by the white male power structure which the disabled and disadvantaged seek to infiltrate or destroy.
(d) Harvard.

(4) Coleridge’s lines “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/a stately pleasure dome decree” suggest
(a) a drug experience.
(b) a world of poetic fantasy.
(c) the Taj Mahal.
(d) Donald Trump.

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November Links Roundup: Queer Connections

Conservatives, and liberals still in the denial stage of grief, have been calling for “unity” after this week’s presidential election. I think we need to talk about solidarity instead. Not making nice with people who are ideologically committed to hurting us, but taking a hard look at the ways that our different marginalized groups have not cared enough about each other’s concerns. Feminists need to wake up to racism in our ranks. (53% of white women voted for Trump. Embarrassing.) The gay rights movement needs to address class and poverty, along the lines of Harvey Milk’s support for labor unions. While we celebrate access to  institutions like marriage and the military, we risk forgetting about youth homelessness, employment discrimination, and healthcare and basic public safety for transgender people. All groups should pay more attention to disability issues.

On that note, Reiter’s Block reader Alex Diaz-Granados invited me to spread the word about his online resources for LGBT children and teens with cerebral palsy. Alex wrote to me:

Children with disabilities are sometimes more likely to be bullied than their non disabled peers. This includes children that are also part of the LGBT community. Obviously, this is not a good thing.

Having cerebral palsy, I understand how critical it is for parents of a child with CP to have access to reliable information, especially when it comes to delicate topics like these. Equally as important, I represent CerebralPalsyGuidance.com because I believe in their mission of providing quality cerebral palsy information and assistance to families in need.

He pointed me to the article “Cerebral Palsy and LGBT”, which discusses dual discrimination against youth who are both LGBT and disabled, and provides links to anti-bullying information for teachers and parents. One of the inspiring stories in this article features Australian playwright Thomas Banks:

25-year-old Thomas Banks, from Australia, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a toddler, but knew he was gay by the time he was 12. Throughout childhood, he was called names and teased mercilessly. Even today, he hears numerous myths that unaware people think about disabled people.

“Some of the misconceptions about people with disabilities are that some people think [cerebral palsy] is an intellectual disability but it’s not, said Banks. “ Some other people think I’m stupid, but I’m not. And people think people with disabilities are asexual.”

Instead of dwelling on the issue, Banks became a writer and advocate for being gay with a disability. He even created his own theatrical play, Someone like Thomas Banks, which explores how he uses the Internet to date and find love. He also raises community awareness through workshops, where he talks about communication difficulties that many people with cerebral palsy go through.

Visit his Facebook page to learn more.

Regular readers know I am a big fan of British feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed, who writes about the paradoxes and projections of diversity work: essentially, how the person who calls attention to a problem is silenced by being labeled the source of the problem. On the website Brainlina, you can find a Sara Ahmed Reader with 40+ pages of excerpts from her books The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Strange Encounters. In the chapter “Queer Feelings” from the former book, Ahmed asks us to question:

…how the defence of the war against terrorism has evoked “the family” as the origin of love, community and support… What needs closer examination is how heterosexuality becomes a script that binds the familial with the global: the coupling of man and woman becomes a kind of “birthing”, a giving birth not only to new life, but to ways of living that are already recognisable as forms of civilisation. It is this narrative of coupling as a condition for the reproduction of life, culture and value that explains the slide in racist narratives between the fear of strangers and immigrants (xenophobia), the fear of queers (homophobia) and the fear of miscegenation (as well as other illegitimate couplings)… Hence, the failure to orient oneself “towards” the ideal sexual object affects how we live in the world, an affect that is readable as the failure to reproduce, and as a threat to the social ordering of life itself.

Heteronormativity, Ahmed writes, is one way that a national culture creates a sentimental bond of sameness that is exhausting to challenge. Being comfortable within your world’s unconscious assumptions can blur your awareness of where you end and the world begins. This feeling is easy for leaders to co-opt for patriotic or in-group identity purposes. It dulls critical thinking about your culture as a culture, one of many possible social arrangements.

One of Ahmed’s objectives in this chapter is to “reflect on the role of pleasure in queer lifestyles or countercultures, and…how the enjoyment of social and sexual relations that are designated as ‘non-(re)productive’ can function as forms of political disturbance in an affective economy organised around the principle that pleasure is only ethical as an incentive or reward for good conduct.” Read more here.

Ahmed’s analysis feels timely, because there is a temptation for progressives to question whether personal issues like sexual orientation and intimate relationships are a bourgeois distraction from “real” movement work. To the contrary, a culture that forcibly shapes or suppresses our personal lives works hand in hand with a state that seeks to co-opt our loyalties.

In this post from October, “Trump, Sexual Assault, and Incest: When Forgiveness Is Failure”, progressive Christian blogger Rebecca Todd Peters draws a connection between Trump supporters who gave him a free pass for predatory behavior, and Christians who wrongly pressure survivors to forgive instead of seeking justice. Certainly, it made me cringe to see evangelical leaders distorting the language of grace and repentance to defend Trump as a changed man. Peters writes:

While it is true that Christianity is a religion that is rooted in forgiveness, it is also rooted in justice. While Christianity teaches that God’s grace is so profound that anyone can be forgiven for anything – no matter how awful; God’s grace is not a substitute for meaningful justice in human community.

Sexual assault is traumatic for anyone. To have it happen to a pubescent child who is only just beginning to mature threatens to provide life-long damage to this woman-child. But to have it perpetrated by her father and tacitly condoned by her mother is to have the most sacred and profound parental obligations of care, protection, and safety severed and shattered forever.

I am a huge fan of the idea of restorative justice, which promotes alternative sentencing and community-based solutions that seek to help and heal communities in situations where healing and restoration are possible. These models are based on the notion that many crimes are offenses against individuals or communities and that perpetrators are better rehabilitated when they confront their very real harm and damage that their crime has caused in the lives of very real people.

In cases of sexual assault, restorative justice is neither a healthy or viable option. Asking the victims of these crimes to play any role in the rehabilitation of their perpetrators threatens to revictimize survivors. More importantly, it implies that the healing of the perpetrator is not only as important as the healing of the survivor but that survivors “owe” something to their perpetrators in the form of forgiveness.

Christianity does not require or promote the idea that victims have any obligation or moral responsibility to forgive the people who have violated and harmed them. While people may choose to do this as a part of their healing process, that is very different from teaching or implying that Christianity requires us to forgive or to “turn the other cheek” when we are harmed.

As you all know, I agree with this psychologically 100%, but really wonder how it’s supported by the text of the Gospels…? Commenter Iain Lovejoy raised the same objection, and suggested an alternative framing:

Forgiveness for abusers doesn’t mean abandoning the protection given to victims under the criminal law, only ceasing to hold anger against them and wishing only to see genuine repentance and their freedom from the sin inside them that caused them to act as they did, and recognising criminal penalties as an unfortunate necessity rather than a desired revenge…A truly repentant person would welcome paying for his crimes, not seek ways of avoiding doing so.

By either of these standards, I think we can still be mad at Trump! More tricky is how we respond to our neighbors who voted for him. When is it skillful to be honest about our anger and pain, when is a kinder approach called for, and when should we simply take care of ourselves by not engaging with bullies? This is my current discernment challenge. I’m starting with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s online guide “Speak Up: Responding to Everyday Bigotry”. (Hat tip to Captain Awkward for the link.)

Coming Out Witchy, and Other Links on Spirituality and Trauma

“My gender is witch,” proclaimed poet Charlie Bondhus, concluding a masterful set of published and new works he read at the LGBT Center in NYC last month. (Witch? Which? Switch!) In four words he summed up the elusive quality of our overlapping identities: queer, magician, writer. All involve a commitment to phenomena that may be immeasurable by outsiders and therefore vulnerable to challenge. Am I making this up? And who decided that creativity was a slur, anyway?

Little Red Tarot columnist Andi Grace explores the real obstacles to public witchiness in her latest post, “Coming out of the woo closet: Facing shame, stigma and historical trauma”. They write:

[T]he woo closet is the forces that keep us from being open about the way that magical, energetic, psychic, extra-sensory or spiritual forces nourish and guide us. To my mind, the woo closet is very old and is one of the most powerful spells (or cluster of spells) that keeps us from stepping into our truth and power.

I see the woo closet as being composed of several parts: historical trauma that has roots in the witch burnings, the stigmatization of neuro atypical mental states, and also the legacy and present day impacts of colonization–specifically as it relates to spirituality and conceptions of knowledge and knowing…

…If we accept that our bodies carry trauma from previous generations then we must also accept that unless we find ways to heal that trauma, we will carry it with us in our bodies and spirits. What this means is that, in a very real and tangible way, my body fears for its life in coming out as a witch and this manifests as anxiety, defensive self-judgement and deeply woven feelings of shame. The feeling of fear that I have when being honest that I can see and feel spirits, isn’t one that is just in my head. It’s in my bones and my spirit and it’s literally been burnt and drowned into my memory. And no, it won’t just go away with positive thinking, though that is one small piece of the magic needed to turn the tide of this spell…

…A fundamental mechanism of colonization is devaluing ways of knowing that don’t fit into empirical knowledge systems. This devaluation is used to undermine the sovereignty of indigenous people and ultimately to steal land, resources and labour. It has also been used to justify cultural, spiritual and physical genocide. Much of western science and higher education models are based on the assumption that empirical, measurable “truth” and linear understandings of time are more valid than understandings that do not fit into this box…

…The legacy of colonization and witch hunts has lead many people to believe that things like energy, visions, dream work, astrology, herbalism, tarot and magic are bogus and manipulative pseudosciences that should be disregarded with righteous fervor. Sure, we should be discerning (particularly with regards to oppression and appropriation) and yes some people are lying manipulators, but that doesn’t mean we should just dismiss whole systems of knowledge that have long and rich histories with tremendous learning and guidance to offer us.

Andi Grace’s piece includes useful guidelines and resources for folks with European ancestry to recover pre-Enlightenment ways of knowing, without being appropriative and colonialist in a different way toward nonwhite indigenous cultures. Here, for me, is where trauma and my political ideals get their wires crossed.

I agree completely with the critique of appropriation. But I feel this gut-level resistance to claiming a bond with my ancestors (bad-ass Polish witches, no doubt) because abuse and abandonment have largely severed my ties to my biological family. My mother is the product of multi-generational child abuse and mental illness. I blame my ancestors for our destroyed relationship; I don’t want to summon their spirits! My father is a nice guy but was absent from my life until I was 30. We’re becoming friends, but time will tell whether we ever have that sense of relying on one another like a true family. Perhaps this is where the writer magic comes in: I may have to invent a trustworthy ancestor who can be my guide through Eastern European hexery.

baba_yaga_and_the_skulls_of_her_enemies_by_secondlina-d63rkgr

[Baba Yaga and the skulls of her enemies. Source]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turning to what’s new in the Christian blogosphere, I was struck by this article at the Feminist Newswire, “‘The Least of These’: Black Children, Sexual Abuse, and Theological Malpractice”. Author Ahmad Greene-Hayes, a Ph.D student of religion at Princeton, is the founder of Children of Combahee, a new initiative to end child sexual abuse in black churches. He argues that “respectability politics” combined with homophobic and patriarchal theology in the black church create an environment where secret predators can thrive. Churches’ model of sexual morality/deviance should shift away from upholding rigid gender roles, and toward prioritizing consent and safety–a paradigm that admittedly the Bible does not always support, but here is a case where we must talk back to the Bible.

Black church people have used silence as a means of protection from white racial-sexual terrorists. To mitigate the effects of white supremacist violence, many African Americans do not address intracommunal violence, and in some instances extracommunal violence, because they do not want to portray the race in a negative light or they want to be race loyal, or even race first, everything later. These patterns are deadly and send a loud message that racial justice takes precedence over the justice that every individual deserves in regards to their bodies and psyches—regardless of age, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, religion, or any other marginalized identity.

The inability (or unwillingness) to address sexual violence as an evil that pervades home, church and community is steeped in larger cultural “norms,” though abnormal, of cogitatively dissociating one’s lived experience—in Black flesh—from one’s embodied and experienced sexuality. In other words, the inability to address violence and trauma as it relates to Black sexuality can be traced back to the plantation where rape and torture were codified by law and the theologies of the master class. In some ways, the contemporary Black church—which grew out of enslavement—mirrors the plantation of times past, and survivors are pushing the church to consider its reinscription of master tactics—that is , attempts to abuse, silence, marginalize, shame, victimize, and dehumanize marginal subjects, or as Jesus said, “the least of these.”

For white people reading this analysis, the takeaway message (in my opinion) should be that we can’t fight child abuse without fighting racism. The black church’s code of silence and internalization of toxic mainstream gender roles are an understandable survival strategy for an embattled minority. We have to do our part to end that battle.

Finally, here’s a comprehensive article from the progressive blog Religion Dispatches about campus Christian organization InterVarsity’s recent decision to oust all LGBTQ and affirming staff members. “Inside InterVarsity’s Purge: Trauma and Termination at the Premier Evangelical Student Org” is written by journalist Deborah Jian Lee, author of the well-reviewed book Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women & Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism (Beacon, 2015).

InterVarsity has rolled out a policy that calls for staff who disagree with its theological position to come forward and quit by November 11. If staff members disagree, the national campus ministry stated in a letter to staff, “we trust that they will alert their supervisors and conclude their work [within two weeks].” (The policy does not apply to students, though students who disagree cannot be leaders, and it includes dictates against divorce, pornography and pre-marital sex.)

Supporters of InterVarsity’s decision see the policy as a commitment to “orthodox” theology, while critics call it a “purge.” The news, first reported by TIME on October 6, has unleashed protests from droves of InterVarsity students, alumni, influential InterVarsity Press authors and Christian leaders, many of whom have released petitions calling for the organization to revoke the policy. Within InterVarsity, a number of LGBTQ and ally staff, including Vasquez, have formed “the Queer Collective,” which for months has been pressing executive leaders for unity amid theological differences. They have elevated stories of LGBTQ-affirming people in the organization and documented the mental health impact of LGBTQ exclusion.

Despite their advocacy, InterVarsity announced its policy in a manner that Queer Collective leaders see as severe and punitive. For example, InterVarsity created a “helpline” for staff who felt unsure about the organization’s theological position, but the “helpline” only offered “limited confidentiality,” according to a July email sent to staff workers by then-interim president Jim Lundgren and president-elect Tom Lin. If a staff worker announced their disagreement with InterVarsity’s position and did not declare this to their supervisor, “[the helpline] resource person [would] inform the supervisor.” This, and reports by other staff workers who say they have been questioned about their beliefs, seems to contradict InterVarsity’s claim that it is relying solely on the self-declaration of LGBTQ-affirming staff.

Despite the ministry’s disclosure of the helpline process, “to call something a ‘helpline’ as a place of support and also make it a place of whistleblowing—that’s not just harmful, but also unethical,” said Teresa Pasquale Mateus, LCSW, author of Sacred Wounds: A Path to Healing from Spiritual Trauma. Mateus sees patterns of spiritual abuse in some of InterVarsity’s treatment of LGBTQ-affirming staff and students and warns of serious emotional “collateral damage” in the aftermath of “the purge.” Already, members of the Queer Collective and other InterVarsity insiders say that every day raises new concerns about emotional trauma, unemployment, resignations, disaffiliations, and the future of InterVarsity.

This fracture reflects the larger rupture over sexuality taking place across the evangelical movement…

Lee goes on to describe InterVarsity’s inconsistent treatment of LGBTQ students and staff, their refusal to repudiate the discredited practice of “ex-gay therapy”, and despite all this, the difficulty of turning one’s back on the diverse and passionate Christian community that IV represents for many people.

Leaving isn’t so simple. To many like Vasquez, evangelicals are their people. As Alexis Garretson, a George Mason University senior who identifies as queer and LGBTQ-affirming explained, InterVarsity is actually the friendliest of the campus fellowship options. If students left InterVarsity for greener pastures, they’d have to leave Christian community altogether. “LGBTQ Christians fiercely believe in the faith we have,” explained Garretson. “Asking us to leave goes against our identity.”

To staff workers who have worked for InterVarsity for years and sometimes decades, leaving the ministry means losing both their livelihood and the entire community they’ve built for themselves over the years, sometimes since their own college days. After all, InterVarsity isn’t just a student club, it’s a family. “People here just loved me from the first moment I got here,” Scripps College junior and LGBTQ-affirming InterVarsity member Rachel Geller told me. InterVarsity goes the extra mile to welcome new students, surrounding freshmen with an immediate posse of friends at the start of college, following up with relentless evangelical zeal.

It’s also a lifestyle. Much like the Greek system, the activities are all-consuming: Bible studies, fellowship, dance parties, retreats, prayer meetings, dorm gatherings, group lunches, study dates and so much more. To feel this sense of love and belonging so fiercely every day is intoxicating, students and staff say. It’s what leads so many students to graduate college, join the 1,300 member staff, and build their lives around the organization’s mission. For Vasquez, “InterVarsity was the air I breathed.”

Perhaps the most consequential reason LGBTQ-affirming staff workers want to remain in the fold emerges from their concern that once they leave, LGBTQ newcomers will be isolated in a community that publicly welcomes them but privately misunderstands their most fundamental needs.

Is it just my love-avoidance that makes this description seem a little cultish? Be that as it may, it seems to me that similar reasons keep people connected to abusive partners: to protect the children, or to avoid what seems like the greater trauma of losing an entire family network. Building up new love relationships takes time and courage. Leaving is a leap into the void, at least in the beginning. Some of us decide we’re ready to make it, but woe be to those who pushed us off that cliff.

Sacred Wounds and Rescuing Jesus are going on my very long Amazon wishlist now.

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Sisters in Healing: Poetry from Margaret Gish Miller’s “Blood Moon Weather”

English Literature teacher Margaret Gish Miller may be retired, but she’s not resting on her laurels. At age 70, she has published her first poetry collection, Blood Moon Weather, through Dancing Moon Press. In it she lovingly depicts the bond between sisters healing from paternal incest, and looks back with wisdom and self-acceptance at the formative moments of her growth to womanhood.

The poems are written in a simple narrative mode, without stylistic tricks, yet a close reading reveals how nonlinear and complex the story really is. The gaps between facts are not visible on the page but in the mind. Small sensory details and isolated events are vividly remembered while the significance of their juxtaposition is left for the reader to ponder, like retrieving a traumatic memory in non-chronological fragments. At times the incompleteness left me unsatisfied, wanting to know the context for an anecdote, or to draw closer to characters who fascinate from a distance. But this is the kind of personal material that a writer often has to approach in stages, relieved, as here, with lighter and life-affirming poems about love and desire in her long marriage.

Margaret has kindly allowed me to reprint a sample poem below. Read Ed Bennett’s positive review in the July 2016 issue of Quill & Parchment.

Jellyfish

Like lingerie
suspended in
space inside
an aquarium

their pastels delicate,
soft as roses with thorns.
For they say jellyfish

have no heart and
sting in self-
preservation, a part

of their seductive
water dance.
I must have

had the heart
of a jellyfish
at twelve.

For that man, in his
fisherman’s fascination,
caught me. Kept me
as his own. And I
repeatedly stung
myself for this.

This debris
of my heart so sore
I soar into this space

and time
to gather the girl
that was you.

August Links Roundup: The Negative in Sex-Positive

This past March I attended the 5 College Queer Gender & Sexuality Conference at Hampshire College. One of the best workshops was “Sex-Negativity Never Happened”, led by Skramz Geist, a radical philosophy professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. We talked about how the “sex-positive” norm in queer communities can be exploited to push people’s sexual boundaries or create an uncomfortably sexualized environment. A theme that emerged was that no community rules are immune to subversion by a determined predator, whether they’re the consent and communication scripts of queer and kink spaces, or the rigid sexual boundaries in conservative churches, where I once sought protection from an emotionally numb and risky hookup culture. I read very little theology anymore, because it failed to perform what for me was its prime function: identifying safe people and creating safe spaces.

Very few hits come up when I Google “compulsory sexuality”, which is sad because this concept would have taught my 20-year-old self that feminism was about more than the right to get drunk at frat parties and have abortions. This 2010 review of Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women, from the feminist blog Fannie’s Room, provided a rare moment of validation for my motives in becoming a Young Republican:

Dworkin argues that, for good reason, Rightwing women fear the Left. The Left of the sixties was “a dream of sexual transcendence…. It was- for the girls- a dream of being less female in a world less male; an eroticization of sibling equality, not male domination” (91). What this meant in practice, however, was that it essentially freed men to fuck women “without bourgeois constraints” (91). What this meant for women was “an intensification of the experience of being sexually female- the precise opposite of what these girls had envisioned for themselves….freedom for women existed in being fucked more often by more men, a sort of lateral mobility in the same inferior sphere” (93). The Left, that is, continued to construct women as sex, while men continued to be constructed as the Doers Of Important Things.

Further, “sexual liberation” created an expectation that the sexually liberated were ready for sex at any time, effectively negating the concept of consent. Those who were not ready for sex were considered “repressed,” not liberated. For women, for whom pregnancy was sometimes an outcome of this sex free-for-all and for whom abortion was illegal, the consequences of sex were higher than for men. Rightwing women feared sexual liberation as it meant unfettered male sexual access to women, and possibly pregnancy, without the expectation of male support via traditional marriage.

This scenario was all too true for the many women who were mentored and sexually harassed by prominent theologian John Howard Yoder in the 1970s-90s, as history professor Rachel Waltner Goossen details in “Mennonite Bodies, Sexual Ethics”, a recent essay from the Journal of Mennonite Studies, reprinted at the sexual abuse survivor blog Our Stories Untold. Yoder is still widely cited and revered for his theology of pacifism, despite brave dissenters who point out that we should be skeptical of nonresistance preached by a sexual predator. Goossen observes:

For several decades, through the 1970s and 1980s, Yoder approached women with sexual invitations and intimidating behavior at the seminary, at academic and church conferences, and in homes, cars, and gathering places across the U.S., Canada, and a host of international settings. The women’s experiences varied widely. While each was acquainted with Yoder in some way, most of these women were not known to one another nor aware of Yoder’s sexual aggressiveness toward others. (One woman, married and much younger than Yoder, whom he surprised in the mid- 1970s with sexualized physical touching and who reacted with instant rebuke, later remembered the incident as deeply troubling: “It messes with the mind. I wondered, am I special to him? Is he lonely?”10)

Yoder justified his sexual approaches to women as theologically driven. He solicited help from female students and others, describing his entreaties as part of an “experiment” in sexual ethics in which he and a circle of “sisters” tested ideas about sexual intimacy outside marriage. For approximately eight years, over the objections of his supervisor at the seminary, president Marlin Miller, Yoder offered biblical justifications for his behavior based on Jesus’ ministry to women and what Yoder termed “the freedom of the Gospel.”11 Yoder argued that his ministrations to women were potentially therapeutic, and although he lacked formal training in psychological counseling, maintained that he wanted to help women overcome feelings of taboo. He intended to “defang” (or tame) “the beast,” he said, helping Christians to reject notions of sexuality as “a beast or a slippery slope which is … uncontrollable.”12

Yoder’s speculative project, arising as part of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, coincided with widening societal expectations about consensual sex. Although sexualized violence against women in the United States did not intensify markedly during the sexual revolution, one leading historian of the era notes that “In the new sexual order, the standard for consent had to be renegotiated. Why would a woman say no if sex presumably resulted in no harm? And who would believe that a woman had withheld consent, given new expectations of participation in the sexual revolution?”13 At a historical moment when lines were blurring about what constituted permissible sex, Yoder exploited notions that loosening sexual boundaries portended no harm.

The historian being cited in footnote 13 is Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). Hat tip to @GrumpyTheology for this article. Follow her for truth and cat pictures.

Consent and Altsex Culture is another recent gem of a post from Thing of Things, a funny and thought-provoking blog about philosophy, neurodivergence, gender, and nerdy special interests.

…[I]n our culture sex-positivity has a distressing tendency to collapse into compulsory sexuality.

What happens in a lot of cases is something like this: in conventional patriarchal culture, there are people women are supposed to fuck (their husbands) and people women are not supposed to fuck (everyone else). There is a socially legitimate reason for a woman to say ‘no’ to sex to anyone who isn’t her husband. And while there might not be much concept that women can say ‘no’ to sex with their husbands (remember that marital rape only became illegal in every US state in the nineties), most husbands are not rapists, genuinely love and care about their partners, and have no desire to have sex with their wife when she doesn’t want sex. While this is a terrible system in a lot of respects, it did reduce the harm of compulsory sexuality for many women.

Unfortunately, in this system, the natural way to do sex-positivity is to expand the set of people women are supposed to fuck. It is limiting to only have one person you’re supposed to fuck! Now you are supposed to fuck all your friends, or all the people in this intentional community, or everyone! Isn’t that great? We’re helping!

And, of course, if you’re supposed to have sex with a lot more people, then you’re much more likely to have sex with a rapist, or with someone who grew up in a culture that doesn’t give a shit about consent and who doesn’t have any reason to care about your emotional well-being. You’re a stranger, after all.

The worst excesses of the free love movement in the sixties birthed radical feminism, which instituted the rule that sex that one person involved did not want is rape. Most alternative sexuality communities seem to work under a similar rule today. This is a serious improvement, which I am not going to criticize.

However, I worry that a lot of alternative sexuality culture lends itself well to compulsory sexuality in more subtle ways…

…How can we fix this problem? I think part of the solution is just talking about it and trying to be aware of the pressures in our communities and the way that they make some people feel unwelcome. Another part is to explicitly work on including not just the sluts but the prudes in sex positivity– not just the people who want sex more or in different ways than society approves of, but the people who want sex less or don’t like some of the socially accepted kinds of sex. (Not, of course, that these are mutually exclusive.) And I do wonder if there are any simple changes we could make in communities dominated by kinky, poly, slutty, cuddle-prone etc. people to make them more welcoming to vanilla, asexual, monogamous, low-libido, not-in-favor-of-cuddling-strangers etc. people, without sacrificing our own needs and values.

Ozy’s blog is an unusual place: the comments are intelligent, and trolling is swiftly stopped. The ones below this post are worth a read. And of course feel free to share your own experiences and suggested solutions in my comments box too.