oh.

Have we all seen Married to the Sea today?

Warning for: 9/11, politics, war. NOT FUNNY.

I haven't been so weirdly gutted by something since the "I'm Falling for You" Valentine's Day Twin Towers card which will probably enrage a bunch of you, but makes me cry and cry and cry.

further public transportation sundries

The M106 and M96 share stops on the West Side and people often get confused between the two.

Boarding the bus today the driver said, "This goes to 106th," as if I were a likely party to get confused.

"I know," I said."

"Oh you just didn't look --"

"racist?" I cut him off, swiped my card and found a damn seat.

*

On 100th and Madison I saw a man in white tie walking a daschund. It was lovely.

The Open-Source Boob Project

When I was 15-years-old I spent a sumer taking classes at Yale and dyed my hair black.

When my father found out we got into an argument in which I eventually said, "it's my hair!"

"No, it's not," he replied and gave me inadvertant confirmation of what I had always known: that as a woman my body is not my own.

I exist in fandom both personally and professionally because it has loved me as much as I have loved it. I have found joy there, but perhaps more importantly, healing, repentence and absolution. In my defense of fandom, I have had to learn a lack of shame.

Which is why I have a certain amount of sympathy for theferrett and his argument for the Open Source Boob Project despite how woefully misguided and steeped in unnoticed privilege it is. But to explain why I so strenuously object, I first have to tell you why I don't.

In my heart I truly believe one of the worst sins that can be committed against another person emotionally is to have contempt for their desire, their affection, their longing. You can denigrate what moves a person, but to denigrate the fact that they are moved - it seems foolish and unnecessary and distracts from the place the intellectual and ethical debate should be occuring. It belittles and implies all hearts share shape and size and nature.

So I get what theferrett is saying when he talks about a scenario in which people could casually express desire towards one another and acknowledge it affirmatively or negatively, but without judgement. Wouldn't it be nice if people could make passes at people without expectations? Or if people could decline such offers without being appalled at their source? And wouldn't it, finally, be nice if people took no for an answer, graciously and with cheer?

Unfortunately, the world doesn't work like that. And we can't make it work like that. And the first clue to those facts is that theferrett made it about men asking things of women.

One key problem with the Open Source Boob Project (and that is the stupidest thing I have had to type in a long time -- couldn't you have come up with a better name?) is its structure somehow makes it incumbent upon women to salve the ego wounds of men, as if we created desire and therefore must assuage it.

If that weren't offensive enough, the problem is also that this does not acknowledge the ego wounds on the fields of sexuality and desire that women also bear. And it certainly doesn't even begin to acknowledge violence -- and not just the violence of abuse and rape (which has also affected men, of course), but the casual violence that comes of a life lived as a woman: people who grope, being viewed as the crazy one when you confront an attacker in public, a push or a shove when you take up too much space, the constant demands that you fill a shape you were not made for.

The Open Source Boob Project has another problem that irks me as well, and that is the increasing dissolution of the idea of personal space both in America in general and in the fannish community in particular. I will never forget a woman I knew choosing to tell people I was mentally ill because I do not kiss and hug people hello in greeting and adieu. This is something I do with a few people I am very close to now, but that has been an earned intimacy.

My reasons for this are many.

For one thing, I like the formal world because the formal world makes more small things beautiful, startling and intimate: the brush of fingers, an accidentally revealed crescent of skin, the sound of breath, the fall of hair. I think the loss of certain formalities robs us of the ability to easily see small beauty.

For another, I am, despite being a very public and performative person, an introvert. Human contact exhausts me and this extends to physical contact with those I do not consider my good friends. I am profoundly tactilely sensitive, and, if I am worn down, touch can be upsetting. This is not the legacy of any terrible experience, but the legacy of the way I'm wired: some of it surely related to the nerve pain, tingling and misfiring that comes with my celiac disease.

But the reasons ultimately don't matter. I don't like strangers touching me, and I shouldn't be obligated to even address physical contact with people not my intimates beyond a handshake: not because of my gender, not because of how I'm dressed, not because I'm speaking on a panel, not because of who I know, not because of what I do for a living, not because of how many people I've had sex with, and not because of something you read on the Internet (and yes, every single one of these things has been used as an excuse to me about why I should let someone touch me and/or hug me and/or kiss me and/or have sex with me).

I've learnt to be gracious about it: it's in everybody's best interests, and it conforms to my own ethical code mentioned at the beginning of this. Sometimes, I even push through it and do the hug thing, because in some circumstances the cost is smaller to me on a given day than another.

I love my body, and I am lucky to. It has tried to betray me often. I have been the most beautiful girl in the world and the least. I've made a poor man and a dashing boy. And I have trained this flesh brutally to heed my commands against all odds and at times poor skill.

I dress to serve my flesh so that my flesh may serve me. When I fence every inch of me is covered except for my right hand and the back of my head, but I have also walked naked through a major motion picture.

I have no interest in wearing a sign giving or forbidding you permission to desire me. I am offended by the idea that succumbing to some random social pressure to do so will make the world a better place. I think I have finally learned enough in life to take well-meant desire kindly and to refuse politely (and all the gods know I've been a huge clod about such matters in the past); if you trust me with a question, I will trust you with an answer.

But fuck you and the horse you rode in on if you ever try to tell me that I or anyone else is obligated to heal you (medical and counselling professionals, clergy and even some gods, however, are appropriately obligated to try in logical contexts). The hardest, most brutal, grief-filled lesson I have ever had to learn is that only I could make myself finer with fire, only I could salve my wounds, only I could grant myself peace.

For me, fandom was a big part of the right place for me to do those things, because there was (all my complaints about personal space aside) space there for me to do what I needed to do how I needed to do it. That people were kind and gracious to me and saw beauty in my layers of clothes and sadness and loss was a gift. But it was not one they were obligated to give or even address the possibility of.

So while I get where theferrett is coming from, I think he's misguided; I think his ideas were put forward in an inherently misogynistic way; and I think he is sadly missing both the beauty of the worlds around him and the potential of his own power.

I was 15-years-old when my dad flipped out about my dyed hair. And you know what? He had a right to do that, because he's my dad and that's what parents do. But this flesh was never his, and I'm grateful that he taught me that through such a stupid, nasty accident of a remark. With any luck some good will also come out of the Open Source Boob Project, if only in the form of private lessons in self-possession.