Avoid Sarcasm. Altogether.

The above mantra in this artcile (which is actually interestng and important) is making me howl with inappropriate laughter. Like in a bad crack!fic sort of way. I think the dust from this moving thing is getting to me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/magazine/30feminism.html

Also the girl? Truly fancies the sarcasm. But perhaps that's why she's not a boy.

In truth, I have long and artful things to say about this piece, but that's for another time. I'm a bit exhausted right now and the reliaities it's presenting are pissing me off.

(no subject)

the NIDA catalog came for this year's summer courses. I am trying t be zen about not having money. I can go next year.

Four words, two hyphens: 4-week, competative-application, directing course.

Also, shouldn't my little TSI experience have knocked away my urge to to direct? Oh no. Now I want to get it right, and have the team I need to do so. I'm so bad. Remind me I said this on the off chance Dogboy & Justine gets accepted t the Strawberry One-Act Festival and my life utterly ceases to exist for it.

Bad, bad Rach.

Ah, I make me giggle. I fucking _miss_ Sydney though.

ants

I attempting to respond to the Maureen Dowd piece I linked to last night, there are many possible directions. One is to divide this post up into segments like her piece and address my own experiences there in. Or I could just write about what it meant to go to Hewitt, then and apparently now. Or talk about my father's complaints to me (when I was a very young child) that the feminists didn't want his help. For that matter, I would write about my own lack (and later found) of understanding of those women who were choosing to opt out -- not of the woking-woman culture, but of the whole man/marriage/baby-as-status thing.

But perhaps the most efective thing I can do is tell you about what I was like in my early 20s. It can be summed up in only one dread way.

I wanted to keep up with the boys.

A sentence which, if you're paying attention, already implies we were racing the 50-yard-dash and my starting line was twenty feet (at least) back from theirs. Oooops. I didn't see it.

In my early 20s I figured if I drank enough, swore enough, and made sure to have technical enough jobs, I'd be in the club, I'd have access to men my competitors (other women) didn't have, and I'd get them and keep them because I was able to move in their world and enjoy the things they enjoy.

This is actually crap, or was for me. I got laid a lot (I hate that phrase, or at least, as a woman saying it, I hate it. Rephrase: I had a lot of sex). and I had some relationships that were both interesting and meaningful.

But it was still crap. I mean, what the hell was I trying to keep up with exactly? Their intellect? their achievement? their fucking je ne said quois? I mean, really. I was a stupid bint.

I was flattered by men who told me they wanted me to have their children, and hurt by those who loved me and loved to fuck me, but couldn't stand the thought of me as the mother of their children and felt they could not justify their desire for me to their friends.

There is a certain type of woman for all things, I learned, but no woman is all of those women. And I was a jack of all trades, and was left useless and lonely, and the sort of girl men got uptight about being attracted to.

In time, I've come to view this as a peculiar cousin of homophobia. Not because I'm a queer woman who also has relationships with women. And not because I play with gender at times in my physical appearance. This homophobia we all know to varying degrees, yes? What I mean here is that I came to learn that most heterosexual men lived in terror, not as I had always suspected, of their manhood being literally, physically compromised by homosexual acts (or less literally, the thought there of), but of their manhood being compromised by any overt sexuality within their male sociality. Which meant that any chick that was playing the man's game in the way she drank, or fucked, or worked, was met not just with disdain, with sexism, but with homophobia, as our petty ambitions seemed to metaphorically compromise the integrity of male flesh.

How utterly strange it was to realize men were afraid of me not because I might want to trap them into babies and marriage (as they said -- it was an easy and insidious weapon to force a woman into being reminded she was a woman while also encouraing her to give up the readily available and meagre common tools of social status), but because when the war came instead of carrying me to safety they'd have to worry about me dying next to them. They hated me for that They hate us for that. How peculiar to realize they were afraid I might be better at it than them. How peculiar it was to realize they had lived their lives in one form and for all my attempts I could not be static. I could invade anywhere, at any time. I was zombies. I was posion gas.

When I realized this, I started opting out of a lot of things. It's not that there aren't many men who are the exception to the rule. Nor is there any lack of a spectrum of queer (for so many values) men that happily recognize me as also of their nature. But it felt like climbing to be shattered.

I am interested in status games more than most people. I'm a menace (and very funny) in acting class scenarios of this nature. But I am not interested in deriving my status from a privledged group (men) to lord it over an unprivledged group (women without men), because let's face it, even the ant on top of the pile of ants is still a fucking ant.