Help a feminist blogger get her business off the ground!

Quick links if you wanna skip the whole reading-the-post part:

• My Indiegogo campaign page
• My Etsy shop
• My business' Facebook page

That said, here's the story:

I realize I haven't posted much at all here for awhile, and that's for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to:

• Seriously stressful home life stuff
• Jumping around between shitty temp jobs
• A repetitive-strain injury to my right hand that makes typing for long periods of time difficult and painful
• Battling moar depression stuff (bleh)

But most relevant to this post, I've also been working on trying to get my jewelry business off the ground.  

I make chainmaille jewelry (link goes to the maille tag on my tumblr blog where I post photos of completed pieces as well as works in progress [and, ahem, rants and crankiness about the making process when shit gets fucked up]) to sell on Etsy, to family/friends/coworkers, and by word of mouth.  And the instability of temp work I've been dealing with lately (along with the raves and encouragement from people who've seen my work helping me to gain confidence in my skills) has made me think - what if I could fill in the gaps in income with this work?  Maybe even be able to jump off the treadmill of the 9-to-5?  So I've been working on trying to make the shift from hobby to business.  I don't expect to make millions, but I'd like to be able to be at least partially self-sufficient from this.  The thing is, being a business requires looking like a business and acting like a business, and that requires some stuff I don't have and can't afford what with being between jobs and struggling to get by - more/a greater variety of raw materials, better tools, business cards, displays and packaging, table fees for local craft fairs, a small light tent for professional-looking product photography, etc.

Which is why I've created an Indiegogo fundraiser campaign to help me out with this.  The perks I'm offering include discount codes for my Etsy shop and pieces of custom jewelry.  Every donation is appreciated, no matter how small, and if you can't donate, signal-boosting is equally appreciated!  Toss the link up on FB, reblog my donations post on tumblr, retweet the new-post tweet for this post, any and all getting-the-word-out is awesome.  

Or just buy something from my shop.  That would work too.  ;-)

Thanks!

My Father's Name

[originally written as a rant on my tumblr]

I swear to dog the next time I hear someone talk about a woman taking her husband's name as a contrast between "her husband's name" and "her father's name" I AM GOING TO BITE YOU. VERY VERY HARD. NOT IN THE SEXY WAY. 

 

Because this name that I have right now, the one that’s been on all my paperwork for twenty fucking seven years, THAT IS MY NAME.  Mine.  MY name.

My father shares it, yes.  As does much of his extended family.  This is true.  And it is also true that I share a last name with his family, rather than with my mother’s family.

But that
does not
make it
any
less
MY NAME.

I have not been going around in the world for twenty-seven years answering to a borrowed name.

Every time I wrote it on a piece of paper for school,
every time I answered to it in roll call,
every time I responded to it at rugby practice,
every time I have entered it on DMV forms
and medical forms
and tax forms,
I have claimed it as MINE.

If (when, gods willing) Ozz and I get married someday, if I choose to change my last name*, it will be me choosing to exchange my name for his.  Not me giving up my father’s name in order to take on my husband’s name.

I guess what I’m saying is, don’t you fucking dare act like my name doesn’t really belong to me, just because it belonged to a man before me.  He doesn’t keep ownership of the name we share because I bear it, any more than he keeps ownership of my body or life because I bear his genetics.  When you act like it’s still *his* name, you’re also acting like I’m still *his* in some way.  And I may be slightly touchier than most about this because my father and I have some truly epic Issues, but you imply that I’m somehow *his* in any way beyond what allegiance I freely choose to give him as an independent adult in my own right, and I will fucking cut you.

We clear?

*Spoiler alert: I won't.  Or at least, it won't be a straight mine-gone-take-his-instead.  I don't even like his last name and it sounds terrible with my first name.   We'd been considering hyphenating, which would probably be my preferred choice.

PSA: On "Fluffy"

Do not EVER

EVER

EVER

FUCKING EVER

refer to fat people as "fluffy".

Fluffy is a thing that small poofly dogs and kittens and ducklings are.  

It is sometimes a thing that a person's hair might be, depending on the humidity.

It is NOT

a fucking descriptor

for my goddamn body.

It makes it sound like you think my fat is made of whipped cream or something equally stupid.

And maybe it's just me?

But it's the sort of descriptor that inherently casts fat as negative

by awkwardly being "cutesy" dancing around it

And also it implies

(and again this could just be me)

that my fat is just the "fluff" surrounding my actual body.

Like it's pillow stuffing filling up my skin

and if you took it out I would be skinny.  Like it's that easy.

Newsflash: my body is fucking fat.  Fat is the state of my physical being.  Fat is not this separate thing that rides around with me.  It is part of me.  There is no skinny girl inside me trying to get out.  There is just me.  And I will fucking end you if you imply otherwise.  I have no patience for that shit.

So just be aware that violating the terms of this PSA in my presence will result in immediate evisceration.

Verbal if you're out of reach.

But if you're within reach, I make no promises.

Have a nice day.

Dear Self: You know better. DON'T. READ. THE FUCKING COMMENTS.

I've been spending some spare time lately fucking around on Experience Project, a social networking site designed around connecting people not by geographical location, or demographics, but by shared experiences.  You join groups that are all titled "I have [$EXPERIENCE]" - "gotten divorced" or "gone skydiving" or something like that - and you always know that within the group you're talking about something you all know.  It's interesting.

Well, EP has a "questions" section, where people post random questions and other people answer them, vote for their favorite answers, reply to other answers, etc.  It's slightly above the level of YouTube comments.  Most of the time.  I'm developing a reputation as a feminist killjoy* because I slap down bullshit with glee and don't let people get away with shit when they're arguing with me.  This pleases me greatly.  ^_^

Today, I was browsing around, and came across the question "How do you define a 'real lady'?"

Oh, shit.  So I waded right in.

My initial reply: "Do you identify as a woman?" "Yes" "Are you okay with being called a lady?" "Yes" - there you go, that's how you define a real lady.  I'm not a lady, because I fcking HATE that term (considering its history of being used to judge and restrict "appropriate" standards of female behavior) and will vehemently correct anyone who tries to call me a lady, real or otherwise.  Tautology it may be, but a "real lady" is simply a person who identifies as a lady. 

Another reply: "A female with self-control, who is quick to hold her tongue.  She delights in everything lovely and feminine and she isn't afraid to speak her mind when needed.  Compassion and passion are two of her best qualities, along with nurturing, serving others, unselfishness and poise.  She is passionate about her beliefs and she accomplishes anything she puts her mind to.  Her peers respect her for being truly female." with my next comment nested underneath as a response: "...ew.  Thank you for reinforcing that I am NOT, and do not EVER want to be, a "lady".  Notice how it basically requires you to STFU, put yourself last, and treat yourself as if you matter less than other people?  Yeah no.  If it means hewing to ancient, restrictive, patriarchal stereotypes of "appropriate" womanhood...all aboard the Nope Train to Fuck-that-ville."  and another response saying "Well said", although since EP only nests to a single level, it's unclear whether they're commending the OP or my response to it.

There is not enough EW in the world for that OP.  I notice that "speak her mind" is qualified with "when needed", which is in the passive voice, raising the question, who decides when it's needed?  (Hint: it's never the woman doing the speaking.)  We then get three different synonyms for "Put other people's needs ahead of your own at all times, you come last," and end with gender policing.  I think I need a shower.

Another comment: "Treats others and expects to be treated with respect, compassion, has strength and dignity, humor."

See, this is not a bad definition.  I'm still never going to back it myself, because it still involves an arbitrary definition against which a person can be measured and "disqualified", but it's at least closer to just a measure of a good person than archaic gender roles.

Another comment: "Feminine, charming, romantic, sentimental, motherly, refrains from gossip, independent when the need arises, smart and willing to please her man in bed."

Oh, gross, another one.  "Feminine" - how are we defining that?  It's one of those arbitrary things that, like "when needed", is never judged by the person performing the action, but always judged by the male opinions around her.  "Motherly" - oh goody, here we go with the biological essentialism and reducing women to their uteruses (whether they have them or not, etc).  "Refrains from gossip" - so uh, men get to gossip without restriction or something?  Ooh look, "when needed" rears its head again!  And then the kicker, "willing to please her man in bed."  Heteronormative, assumes active sexuality and dating, places female sexuality subordinated in service to male sexual desires, and I notice there's nothing about eager to receive reciprocal pleasure...Guess men don't need to please their ladies in bed.  Gods, I'm glad I not a lady!  More orgasms for me!

Like I said - slightly above the level of YouTube comments sections.  Between this one and the "ZOMG OBESITYZZZ" and "TEH GAYZZ IN MILITARY" questions I've also been playing whack-a-dumbfuck with, I'm about tapped out for the day.

Feminist killjoy, out.

*I actually just ordered this necklace today.  I'm so excited for it!  I also ordered a literal flying fuck.

Microaggressive Naming

[This is dredged up from the drafts folder, so context-dependent time references are no longer correct, but I'm too lazy to fix it.  Sorry for the lack of posting, some personal life shit has been going on and it has fucked me up but good.  Even with meds, I'm only just managing to be mostly functional; blogging is often beyond me, cause it takes too much focus, concentration, interest, and energy.  Well-wishes, good vibes, prayers, etc are welcome for Ozz's and my relationship, and for me personally if you want.  Sorry again and thanks.]

It's bid day today!  I work for a general contractor, and we have not one, but TWO jobs bidding today.  Which means that, since a major part of my job includes handling the incoming faxes and making sure everything gets to the right people, I'm pretty busy today with the dozens and dozens of bids subcontractors are faxing in.  (Not too busy to write irritated posts, though!)  Because in the last batch of faxes, there was this lovely little gem of a company:

The header of an incoming fax from a company named "Shutter-Up Window Coverings", whose logo seems to be two stylistically-drawn people, one in a skirt with hands on hips, the other in pants casually leaning against the skirted figure with an arm draped around her neck.

Now the name itself was irritating enough when I saw it that I intended to post about it already, considering that it basically boils down to a creaky old "joke" about lol women talking amirite?

But the fun part was when, after I'd printed this fax off and given it to John, our lead estimator, I heard him laugh a few minutes later and poke his head into our general manager's office.

"Hey Tracy, did you see this sub bid?  I love the name!"

And Tracy looks at the copy I left on his desk and cracks up, and I overhear them reminiscing about another misogynistically entertainingly-named subcontractor from a few bids ago, "Gutter-Done" (a play on git-r-done).

Yeah, because play-on-word names that reference silencing women and fucking them are soooo hilarious, amirite?  Not like there are any women in your office - or working for those companies, for that matter - who might end up feeling excluded and demeaned by it, by the reminder that when it's convenient, y'all are quite pleased to assert your male privilege and participate in sexism, and even find it funny.  I know I totes feel like a valued and equal person to my coworkers while they're laughing over shutting women up.

(And this is not even mentioning the latest fuckery from yesterday, which I ranted about on tumblr here.)

A Pro-Choice Poem for Mother's Day

This Mother's Day, as the antis try to use it for propaganda
(as they always do)
I want to thank my mother.

I want to thank my mother, not for simply having me -
But for waiting until she was ready to have me.
For having me when she wanted to have a child.
For bringing me into a home and a situation where I was planned,
wanted,
loved.

I want to thank my mother, not for simply having me -
But for all the twenty-six
(and counting)
years that have followed.
For making Halloween costumes and prom dresses,
lunches and dinners and Christmas cookies,
and in the process, teaching me.

I want to thank my mother, not for simply having me -
But for all the times she went to bat against an unfair world,
stood up to bullies,
taught me I deserved better.
For instilling in me a love of reading that has made me into the writer I am today.
For quietly, subtly - just by being the person she is -
instilling in me a budding proto-feminist sensibility,
So that when, in college, I made my first fumbling steps into formal feminism
it was less like learning
than simply coming home.
(And that, too, has made me who and what I am today.)

And with these more usual gratitudes,
I want to thank my mother for something else.
Something the antis would see as directly antithetical to the spirit of the day.
But which, I feel,
is exactly right.

I want to thank my mother,
For helping me to not be a mother.
For taking me to her doctor to get on birth control when I started having sex at 15,
for making it so that I wasn't one of the teens who had to sneak around and buy condoms under cover of shame and darkness.
For taking me at my word when I said for the first time, at about age 12,
"I don't ever want to have kids."
For never pressuring me to produce grandchildren,
and for waving off family members who might have.
(It helps that I have lots of cousins who have had lots of babies already, I suppose.)

And, six years ago this past week,
For driving two hours down at 5 in the morning to my college apartment,
so we could get breakfast before my appointment.
Sitting with me in the awkward hush of the waiting room.
Then, six years ago this very weekend,
Laying in supplies of favorite foods and movies and lots of very thick pads,
shooing my brother out of the house to go hang out with friends,
so that I could bleed out the baby I wasn't ready to have -
will never be ready to have -
in privacy, and safety, and comfort, and support.

That year, we celebrated Mother's Day by keeping me from being a mother.
And I have been grateful, every single year since.
So the next time the antis throw out that tired line,
"Aren't you glad your mother was pro-life?!?!?!"
I will laugh,
as I always do,
because they don't know my mother.
I do.
And she has shown herself, in a thousand thousand ways, a wonderful mother,
and part of that has been in her respect for my body,
my choices,
my life.
That's her pro-life stance.
She's pro-my-life.  Pro-her-daughter's-life.
Pro-the-life-of-every-person-who-could-face-this-decision.
So I think, when I laugh in the face of the next anti to assign a political stance to a woman they have never met,
based purely on the fact that she has given birth,
I will also say,
"Yes, she is.  But not in the way you think."

Happy Mother's Day, mamana.  I love you.

Caturday!

My apologies for not posting all week - I have been in the grips of a very dense "grey fog" type of depression, wherein everything is boring and nothing is interesting, even the things I intellectually know and remember loving to do, like blogging, writing, gaming, etc, and I have no energy and no willpower to get shit done with.  And it's been compounded by a constant barrage of fucking horrible news that I just have not had the energy to write about.

So as an apology, kitteh!

[video description: Mara, a small calico tabby shorthaired cat, lays across my laptop's keyboard, biting at a large bag of Cheetos laying beside the computer, which rustles pleasingly.  I laugh and ask "Are you having fun with that, sweetie?"  She pauses to lick her paw, then returns to chewing on the bag.  "Yeah?  You're enjoying trying to destroy my snack?"  She ignores me.  "Rawr."  More nomming, holding the bag down with one paw, as I pan out a little so you can see all of her.  "So we've taken over my entire computer, and we're trying to destroy the bag I'm trying to eat out of.  She's very - " Mara suddenly gets a good grip on the bag and starts to stand up and back away across my keyboard with it.  "Oh!  Oh.  Where are you going with that?  Hey, hey, hey.  No.  You can't go anywhere with that, give it back."  I pull it out of her mouth and set it back down, where she promptly returns to chewing on it.  "Yeah, no.  That's not for you, kitty-cat."]

She loves to sit on my keyboard whenever I will let her.  I've stood up to go do other stuff for awhile, and come back to find her snoozing on my computer, with the screen showing a dialog box asking if I want to allow some program to make changes to my computer!  She's also helpfully tried to write blog posts for me. Thankfully I've always caught it before she hits "publish", but if a nonsensical post of random text strings pops up one of these days, it's entirely her fault.  I let her keep hanging out on there anyway, both because it's so cute, and because she gets cranky with me when I try to stop her...

[video description: my hand, hovering over my keyboard, with Mara leaning on it with both front legs wrapped around my wrist as she bites my hand.  "Ow, ow, ow!"  She stops and untangles herself to sit next to my keyboard; I leave my hand hanging there to stop her in case she tries again.  "This is what happens when I try to stop her from stepping on my keyboard.  She tries to step over my arm, and then when I don't let her do it, she starts biting."  I pan the camera over to focus on Mara, who is now busy grooming her chest and belly.  "Of course, you would just completely fail to provide a demonstration of this, now that I have the thing going."  I nudge her side a little bit with my knuckles, and she immediately whips around to face my hand and clamps right back on, biting.  "Ack!  Oh god.  Ow.  Apparently poking it was all that was necessary!"  She chews on my fingers a few more times.  "You're so cute."  She decides she's done eating my hand and re-untangles herself, giving my fingers a last couple of licks before turning away.  "Yes, I'm sure I has a flavor."]

Maybe next weekend I'll see if I can get the video of her chasing her tail on the bed posted for y'all.  Until then, have a good weekend, keep fighting the good fight, and hopefully I'll have some more substantive content for y'all this week.

Fat Acceptance Is Not A "Passive" Act

Last week, Jen of Fat And Not Afraid linked to a post by a friend of hers, The Rogue Priest, about Fat Acceptance (FA), in which he voiced a couple of "concerns" about the merits of FA:

There are two concerns I have with the idea of fat acceptance:

• There are health problems associated with obesity. Some are exaggerated or imagined and advertisers definitely hit the button too hard, but I question whether people should be told to accept a higher-risk health condition.
• I tend to favor self-development. There is a type of happiness to be found in accepting circumstance, but also a type of happiness in overcoming adversity or personal obstacles and achieving something hard.

The first is the usual "fat is unhealthy therefore you're encouraging people to be unhealthy" BS, which commenters pretty thoroughly debunked, along with the notion that FA is "telling people to accept" anything, rather than presenting fat people with the novel idea that there is another choice outside of self-hate and celery sticks.  The second concern he voiced is less usual, and actually bothered me more, as a person who is deeply into self-development and who has also actually done the self-development work that FA requires of a person.  So I hopped over to leave a comment, basically summing up my own struggle with FA and how I count my increased self-acceptance and self-love and the stronger mental state that followed from that to be a big accomplishment from a personal development point of view.

To which he replied:

 [...] 

To me, having lived both of them, I do consider the proactive, demand-a-change, self development approach to be a very different kind of thing than the acceptance, self-love, take-me-as-I-am approach.

...way to completely sidestep addressing the point I just made, in favor of reiterating the point I was just debunking, but okay.  Let's take this point-by-point.

Look, here's the thing.  People don't just fall into FA, you know.  It is very much "proactive".  It requires dedicated work on rummaging through your preconceptions and your self-talk scripts and all kinds of internalized bullshit, to find it all and slowly, gently, without damaging yourself through further self-hate (OMG how could you have thought this for so long, STOP IT RIGHT NOW is not exactly the most productive way when the goal is long-term improvement of one's self-esteem), root it all out and replace it with healthier, more evidence- and reality-based conceptions of body size, weight, health, worth, and the relationship between those things.  (The short answer is, body size and weight are *sort of* connected, although not directly - some people pack a higher poundage into smaller space, simply by virtue of their build, and some people weigh less but take up more space, because of how they're built.  Health and worth?  Not even remotely connected, neither to each other nor to body size and weight.  Healthy fat people exist, as do unhealthy thin people, and all of us are worthy of dignity and respect because we are all people, the end.) Not to mention that because the anti-fat position is so vastly overrepresented in the media and culture, most people have never really been exposed to FA, so you have to search out blogs and books and people to talk to - again, very much a proactive thing.

So that takes care of the "proactive" assertion.  Next: you want to talk about demanding a change?  What do you think FA is and does?  As several other people pointed out in the comments there, FA as a movement is half self-acceptance and self-love, and half political/social activism to make it so that fat people don't NEED to undertake epic journeys of deprogramming and reprogramming their brains in order to stop the shame and self-hate!  We got Disney World to close its fat-shaming "exhibit" aimed at kids.  We raised over twenty thousand dollars to buy billboards countering the fat-shaming of children in Georgia.  Just because we're not demanding an unreasonable and unlikely physical change out of our bodies, and are instead demanding a change in how the world treats our bodies at the size they are, doesn't make it any less "demand-a-change".  

Lastly, given that my comment was explicitly describing how my journey from self-hate and disordered eating through to a fairly stable self-acceptance and HAES approach has been a massive accomplishment for my self-development, I find the contrasting of weight loss as a "self development approach" versus FA as a "take-me-as-I-am" approach to be deeply fucking insulting.  Look, bro, unfucking one's deeply dysfunctional culturally-ingrained mental patterns of internalized bigotry IS FUCKING SELF DEVELOPMENT, OKAY?  I consciously and deliberately sought out my mental patterns and slowly, painstakingly rewrote them to help me be a better person - stronger, happier, more fully myself in the world.  If that's not self development, I don't know what is.  Maybe you're working from a definition of self-development that reads "changing your external presentation to the world to increase public perception of your worth", but that is definitely not in the same realm as my definition, which reads roughly "consciously interacting with one's whole Self, mind/spirit/body/etc, in order to make deliberate changes that will make you happier, stronger, and healthier in every sense of the word"*, and I'm not inclined to grant that other definition any legitimacy as a valid meaning of "self development".

I cannot say enough how not-okay I am with this implicit framing of weight-loss as "active" self-development, versus FA as a "passive" approach.  It may have "acceptance" in the title, which is usually conceived as a fairly passive thing to do - accepting what you can't change, and all that.  But when what you're working on "accepting" is a trait inherent to your body, which is vehemently and violently reviled by the entire culture in which you live, "acceptance" is no passive, easy thing.  It requires work - a lot of it, and over a long period of time.  It requires struggle, as you chip away at internalized negativity you didn't even know was there - only to have the same issue pop up in slightly different clothing again a few weeks later, leaving you frustrated and angry because oh my god didn't I already work through this part how am I here again?  It requires strength - the kind of quiet, subtle strength that our culture never really talks about, because it's much more fun and dramatic to talk about and depict displays of overt, aggressive strength, but strength nonetheless.  It requires determination and persistence and consistency, especially during the awful, long slog through "well it's fine for other people to be fat but I still need to lose X lbs" territory - I'm pretty sure we all get stuck there for awhile, and the cognitive dissonance is nasty and yet still so hard to shake!  And above all, it requires courage, so much courage.  Because what you are doing, when you make the switch from a diet-and-thinness mentality to a FA mentality, is nothing less than flipping the finger to several very large, very loud, very well-funded and well-supported industries, which have conspired to build around you an entire culture which bombards you with repeated, painful, dangerous messages about your body and your worth as a human being.  You are explicitly rejecting the dominant narrative, openly refusing to participate in a game that 99% of the people around you are throwing themselves into playing.  Hell, in some ways, continuing to diet or attempt weight loss in some other way might actually be easier: less challenging, less personally-developing, because it allows you to go with the flow and it pretty much guarantees that everyone around you will support and encourage you in your efforts, while FA requires you to buck the trend and risk social backlash for it.

So don't ever, ever tell me that FA is some kind of passive deal, less of a worthy challenge than weight loss.

Maybe I should cut the guy some slack - after all, in other parts of the thread and with reference to the whole fat=unhealthy thing, he actually did seem interested in learning more about what FA actually is, as opposed to clinging to his preconceptions.  But at the same time, even ascribing the best of intent to his comments, the most charitable conclusion I can draw is that he has no fucking idea what the hell he's talking about when it comes to this shit, and should really, really, really just step back and listen and read and learn before trying to pass judgment on us again.

*I've never really tried to define my approach to personal development before; that was both harder and easier than I thought it'd be.

Caturday!

Happy Birthday, and also happy one-month-of-new-home day, to SWHNYBN, who has in fact been named:

Lady Mara McNibbon, Duchess of the Laundry Pile, is not amused.

Here, have a video of her playing one of her favorite games, "Tear up Daddy's arms while suspended in midair", with Ozz.

Video description: Ozz, a tall, heavyset white man with long brown hair and a goatee, holding Mara, a petite white-calico-tabby cat with one arm.  She is busily chewing on his fingers as he holds her suspended over his arm. You can hear me behind the camera laughing at the two of them.  Suddenly Mara stops and lifts her head to look in my direction with a surprised "Who me?" expression.  I giggle and say "Oh hai, sweetie", then "Oh, no, back to chewing on Daddy's hand." as she decides nomming his hand is more interesting.  He extends his arm to me, Mara still dangling and chewing on him, like he's going to hand her to me.  "Ack, no, do not hand that to me.  It's all teeth."  He pulls her back to his chest; "Yeah, she can keep chewing on you, that's fine."  He turns and tries to set his little bundle of teeth on the couch, but as soon as she hits the cushion she whips around onto her back and grabs his arm with all four legs, pulling him down to keep nomming.  "Well, apparently putting it down doesn't work."  She starts trying to climb her way up his arm with front paws and teeth; he shakes her off.  Undeterred, she pounces at his hand again.  They wrestle a little bit more, until he gets a hand under her and scoops her up off the couch so she's dangling in midair again, which fazes her not even a little.  I laugh again, and she looks up startled right at the camera, then abruptly calms down and lets herself be tucked under Ozz's arm like a furry little football as I say "I guess we're done then."  Fin.

Hope everyone's having an awesome weekend!

Apologies for my absence, but LOOK IT'S AN ADORABLE KITTY!

Sorry I've been away, dearloves!  It's a bit of a long story, but the short version is, I enlisted my mom's help to do some massive decluttering and housecleaning, which took a full week of working every day at least half the day, starting the day after Thanksgiving and going through the next weekend (I swear, I think we hauled at least two dozen black trash bags of stuff out of this place, between trash and Goodwill donations!).  The reason?  Ozz and I decided to get a kitty, talked to our landlord about altering our no-pets lease, and the end result of all this work (the house needed to be made safe for a kitteh; there was far too much clutter and junk in corners that a cat could get into trouble with and which could've hid spiders or other nasties) came home with us Wednesday night:

She-Who-Has-Not-Yet-Been-Named, a mostly-white calico cat w/orange-brown and grey tabby patches, curled up on the bed with her front paws over her tiny little face

She's almost a year old but still quite petite, with a purr like a good-sized motor that starts up as soon as you touch her or sometimes even talk to her.  She's a snuggler, too:

SWHNYBN laying on her back across my lap, sleeping with her head pillowed on my arm and a paw resting on my laptop while I tried to work around her

My fiance Ozz, laying down and smiling at the camera with SWHNYBN draped across his chest looking half-asleep

So!  There's my excuse for being gone the past couple weeks.  And a very cute little excuse she is, too.  As she settles in and my routine re-stabilizes, expect to start hearing from me again - I have Things To Say about Obama's Plan B fuckery, the bullying of a Pagan child by his teachers, and a potential "atheist license plate tax" in Georgia, among other things.  Hope everyone's holiday season (if you are celebrating anything this time of year, anyway) is going well thus far! 

PS: I am perfectly open to doing regular or semi-regular Doses of Cute, now that I have a subject, but I don't want to spam y'all with cat pictures if you're not interested.  Would you be interested?  Let me know in comments!

Postsecret Strikes Again: Gendering the Desire for Marriage

I read PostSecret, as I believe I've mentioned before here.  Sometimes they're banal, sometimes they're annoyingly common - this week included "I don't shave my legs in the wintertime"; who the hell does if you don't absolutely have to, honestly? - many are less "secrets" and more just statements, and there are usually...hopefully...a few that touch a subtle nerve in you, striking up the feelings of poignancy and human connection for which this project became famous.

Of course, reading PostSecret - consuming any kind of media, really - becomes a lot more complicated and interesting once you've "taken the red pill", so to speak.  Things your average person would find funny or scroll past without pausing catch the eye and poke at you.  Like the "I always bring fat customers extra helpings of breadsticks" secret from a few weeks ago, or the few over the years that have admitted to covert feelings of racism, or the cissexist assumptions made about whether or not lesbian couples could ever become pregnant without outside assistance from a couple months back (here is a good roundup of several of the worst offenders).  This week's Sunday Secrets included the following postcard:

A postcard depicting a black-and-white image of a man and woman in traditional Western wedding dress/tux holding each other and smiling in front of a church.  Red text overlaying the image reads "This is what I fantasize about...I'm a guy."

Pop culture in this country makes endless jokes about a presumed male reluctance to commit in relationships with women, and with marriage being the biggest commitment to a relationship one can make, of course men are skittish, amirite?  We understand - and teach young girls - that women long for marriage, that marriage is the pinnacle achievement of Relationship Rewards Points; we're expected to dream about The Big Day when we get to be the princess in the white dress with the church and the wedding cake, to have notebooks filled with pictures of the dream dress, etc.  But we refer to a man's wife as a "ball and chain", bachelor parties are a last-gasp-of-freedom usually involving alcohol and nude women before you lose your freedom forever to your marriage, etc.  Marriage, and weddings in particular, are constructed as a thing women desperately desire and men equally-desperately run from. 

And that's what makes this secret a powerful enough thing to have shown up on PostSecret.  A man is keeping his longing for a wedding (or marriage; it's hard to tell if it's the wedding part or the marriage part he's talking about from the image) a secret because fantasizing about weddings is a girly thing.  And of course, in a culture where masculinity is defined and constructed as not-femininity, the worst thing a man can do to damage his masculinity, and thus his identity as A Man, is admit to being feminine in any way.  For a man to have this girly desire for his wedding day is shameful, emasculating, and thus best kept secret.

I found this fascinating on a personal level, as well as a sociological level, because after being engaged my senior year of high school (and coming to my senses shortly thereafter, thank the gods), then coming to my "feminist awakening" in college, I decided I wasn't all that interested in marriage.  I maintained that position for years, and probably would have been quite satisfied to remain unwed the rest of my life, whether partnered or not - yet I'm engaged now, and looking forward to the day when we can make it legal (we haven't yet, because I refuse to take advantage of a privilege of access gained purely by chance because we happen to have different gender markers on our driver's licenses, and he agrees and supports that choice).  Yet when we got together, and our relationship turned deeply serious, he was the one who asked me to consider marrying him.  Not just in the "he proposed, of course, because the man always does the asking (but it's for show and form, the decision is usually all but made ahead of time)" sense, no.  He knew my feelings on marriage.  And we had a serious discussion wherein he made it clear he would respect that if I said no, but he also explained that he strongly did want to get married.  As in, it was a long-held wish of his, in the way that we teach women they should wish for marriage.  So he was the driving force behind our engagement, out of genuine desire for marriage.  (I've since warmed to the idea quite a bit, although the complexities of the vast war machine that is the wedding-industrial complex still make me want to run screaming into the night.)  So to me, this secret provokes a "So what?  I wouldn't even be engaged if not for the fact that my fiance feels similarly to this guy.  This is a *secret*?"

But I understand why.  It's our gendered expectations of what is an "acceptable" desire re: marriage and weddings that make this statement "I'm a guy who fantasizes about his wedding day" so taboo as to be a Secret one can only tell to an anonymous secret-gathering art project.  I wonder if I could send in a complementary secret, confessing my disinterest in weddings and outright hate for "traditional" wedding gowns, and have it been seen as equally confessional-ish because I'm a woman...?

Dear Personal Development/Life Coaching Community: We Need To Talk.

[TRIGGER WARNING: ableism]

Look, I like y'all, I really generally do.  I've found many awesome people, I've learned a lot, I've developed the tools to manage a lot of my depression and anxiety through tweaking stuff I picked up from personal development blogs and coaches.  I firmly believe that everyone deserves to live their best life, filled with passion and energy and self-actualization and creativity and everything else you teach.

But then, I run across something like this. [TW on linked article for ableism; comments actually are fairly safe to read, plenty of people calling it out]


To an extent, I understand.  Not everyone has the resources, physically, emotionally, or financially, to take on the extra struggles of raising a child with a disability - even if the only issue is trying to wrangle the system into giving your child the proper consideration, care, and accommodations they need.  It's rough.  It's different than raising a non-disabled child.  And not everyone can do that.  I do understand that, and I respect a person's knowing their limits and making decisions based on that knowledge.

However.

If your reasoning for not wanting to keep your baby if it turns out to have a disability is "I don't want to raise a child who will probably never be independent or contribute to the world/my vision of my future is of strong, healthy children, not limited in what they can do" (that's an almost-direct quote from the linked article, btw), YOU HAVE A SERIOUS ABLEISM PROBLEM TO CONFRONT.

You are making a choice about your potential future child based on a STEREOTYPE.  A nasty, ableist stereotype of disabled people as non-contributing burdens to society, forever living with their parents, needing constant caretaking.  Some people with disabilities are like that.  Many more are not.  Someone's diagnosis at birth does not tell you where on the normative-functionality spectrum they will fall.  If you want to talk about how you're "being honest with yourself" and "honestly assessing your capabilities", how about you try also being honest about what the potential challenges and difficulties might be.  Y'know.  Do some research and make a decision based on facts instead of "icky disabled people I don't want one of those in my family". 

Between guilt-based "pay what you can (oh but there's a minimum and I'm going to shame you for not being able to pay more than that)" sales, abuse of the word "gypsy" to mean "adventuresome bohemian hipster" (I'm looking at you, Gypsy Love Warrior), and now this, well...like I said, I love y'all, but I'm not sure I can keep this up.  I would like to think that a group of people ostensibly dedicated to self-improvement and self-reflection would be self-aware enough to not fuck shit up like this, but y'all are not giving me a lot of hope.

Meditations on a Word: Flattering

Wherein I ruminate and ramble and share a brief moment of "ding!"...

I had this thought the other night.  I've gained weight, you see, from my high school size of a 10/12ish (US) up to around a 16/18 these days.  And I'll be honest, I'm kind of struggling with my self-image and how to feel beautiful in a body my culture emphatically and repeatedly tells me is UGLY and DISGUSTING and THE SOURCE OF ALL EVIL IN THE VERSE. (The irony, of course, is that were it not for such messages that made me feel unacceptably big even at my smallest adult size, I wouldn't have dieted my metabolism into the ground and gained 100lbs over the past 7 years.  Diet culture is what *made* me fat.)

Anyway, I was talking to myself about fashion, and clothes, and fit, and how to look good and more importantly, feel like I look good in my clothes at this size.  And I tried on for size (pun fully intended) the cop-out line of "it doesn't have to make me look skinny, so long as it's flattering."

But then it occurred to me: what else is "flattering" code for, in this context, but "skinny"?  We say clothes flatter us when they smooth our lumps and rolls, when they create visual illusions of height and a curve from waist-to-hip and fuller, higher, rounder breasts.  Hmm.  Smooth lines, height, hourglass figure.  What does that sound like? 

Why, our culture's oppressively narrow standard for female beauty, of course!  What we really mean when we say clothing "flatters" us, is "it helps us to inch closer to The Beautiful Body by camouflaging the body that is actually ours, veiling our real flesh in illusion."

Wow.  That's...not an improvement at all, is it?  "It doesn't have to make me look skinny, so long as it flatters me hides my body and makes me seem closer to the idealized standard."

As they say, it's hard to fight the enemy when the enemy has outposts in your own head.

I still don't know, after years of jeans-and-tshirts, what I want my fashion and style to look like.  But I do know, now, that flattering is not a concept I want anywhere near it.

"Just"...Stop.

"Just have it and give it up for adoption."  Because pregnancy and childbirth are totally safe and easy and free of cost, and don't totally change your body and life forever no matter what happens to the child after you give birth, right?

"Just stop taking everything so personally/expecting perfection from yourself/thinking about things so much."  I wish I could, but see, I have this brain that kinda doesn't let me stop doing those things.  What, you think I *like* being obsessively miserable and hating myself for every tiny failure in my entire lifetime?  Does that sound like fun to you or something?

"Just eat healthier and exercise more."  I've never thought of that before!  How incredibly simple!  Except that I can't afford much produce, don't like or know how to cook more than the couple meals I eat all the time, can't force myself to enjoy vegetables despite trying and trying, and dislike the taste of water.  Oh, also I have chronic back problems and low energy and am cripplingly self-conscious about exercising in front of other people, so any exercise I have to do has to be low-to-no-impact, easy, and something I can do in my house while my partner is at work, without boring the crap out of me.

JUST: (adv.) merely, simply.

I hate this word.  It minimizes.  It trivializes.  "Just" do this, or that.  It tells me the person speaking thinks the action should be easy.  It ignores circumstances and individual capabilities in favor of a normative narrative of what "everyone" should be able to do.  It also implies a moral judgment - the speaker obviously believes the course of action is not only easy, by their own arbitrary standards (usually heavily influenced by society's standards, of course), but the *right* thing to do.  It erases conflicting emotions and tells you the choice should be easy, and therefore being conflicted about it is wrong.  It invalidates peoples' feelings and experiences. 

From a stranger or ideological opponent, it's sneering, condescending.  From a loved one, it's even more damaging, a slap in the face.  It is the worst word, a metric fuckton of condescension, patronization, minimization, trivialization, all wrapped up in four innocent letters.

So please.  If you are ever tempted to 'splain someone's situation and the course of action you think they should take by saying "just do X", DON'T.  No matter how obvious the solution seems to you.  Just don't.  Step back, think about why they might not have done that yet, and find a way to offer advice - IF they asked for it in the first place, which in my experience the object of this unfortunate phrase usually didn't - that doesn't imply that the person is stupid for how they've handled themselves and their situation so far.  Respect their decisionmaking process.  Try giving them the benefit of the doubt - try assuming that they *do* know what they're doing, and that they *do* have reasons for handling things the way they have. 

But for the love of all that was, is, and ever will be..."Just" stop.

Feel free to add and vent about other "just" experiences you've had to deal with in comments.

Hiatus

Alright, loves.  I've been trying to avoid doing this, but I think it's gotten to that point anyway.  Life has been kind of kicking my ass; depression's been a sneaky bastard who chose, this round, to just sap away my motivation and ability to do things, but without the usual accompanying mood shifts so I didn't recognize it right away.  (Well played, you destructive fucker, you.)  And though my usual impulse is to force myself to keep up "normal" output and soldier through, I'm learning that it's seriously detrimental to my *actual* recovery for me to do so. 

So for the time being, Witch.Words will be on official semi-hiatus.  I'll probably throw together a post about Dan Savage's epic bi-fail this week, and I plan on participating in the Shakesville/What Tami Said Planned Parenthood Blog Carnival, and I'm toying with the idea of setting up a reader survey to get clarity on some questions I've had about my readers and my blog's direction, but other than that, posting will be light-to-nonexistent for at least a week or two, maybe longer.  I'll post if I feel the urge, but I'm not going to be forcing myself to anything. 

It's time for me to rest and heal.  I apologize for the interruption but, honestly, it's what needs to happen for me right now.  I hope to be back to "normal" (where normal = my baseline condition, not some normative idea of mental health and productivity) in a few weeks, maybe a month at most.  If you need me before then, my email is in my bio on the sidebar.  

Love and light,
Jade

PS:  To those readers who are so inclined, healing energy/prayers/thoughts/vibes/spells/whatever you do would be most welcome.  Thank you.

Suspiciously "Convenient"

You hear a lot of shit about how women who get abortions* are getting them "for convenience".  (Most recently brought to mind for me by this thread on tumblr.  Yes, tumblr rules my life now.)

I've been pretty open around here about how I am childfree by choice and have no interest in ever having children.  But here's the thing: even if I did want children someday, when I got pregnant five years ago, I would still have gotten an abortion.  Because...

• I couldn't afford prenatal care or other health-care costs associated w/pregnancy;
• I was on antidepressants which are not compatible with pregnancy, which were keeping me alive and which I'd have had to discontinue taking for the fetus' safety, which would have had the effect of seriously destabilizing my already fragile hold on life and sanity, and which could have ended with suicide;
• I was in college and already struggling, and any further detriment to my school efforts could have been the final straw that got me kicked out;
• The man who donated the other half of the genetic material (he wasn't a "father" anymore than I was a "mother" simply by virtue of accidentally getting pregnant, so I refuse to use that terminology) lived across the country; it was a long-distance relationship and we had no plans to move closer together in the near future, so either A: I'd have been on my own without a partner, or B: we'd have had to have rearranged some very large life circumstances to be close enough together (and no, adoption wouldn't have been an option because of the above items and also I can't imagine giving a child of mine away, so no).

Do any of these sound like "convenience" to you?  Because my definition of convenience includes things like the grocery store being only a few blocks away from my house, or a parking space close to the doors of the mall when I'm not feeling like walking much, or my local Starbucks having a drive-thru for when I'm in a hurry.  Note that major financial concerns, life circumstances (the long-distance relationship), goals/plans (finishing college), and medical issues (depression) do not appear on the list of "conveniences".  Wanna know why?

BECAUSE THEY HAVE FUCK ALL TO DO WITH CONVENIENCE.

Prioritizing one's plans for life and one's ability to provide for one's self and possible or potential family over a biological "oops" moment is not about fucking CONVENIENCE.  Ask anyone who's had a child; having a baby, even if you don't parent, is a life-changing event.  Often also a body-changing event, in ways both permanent and impermanent.  It is a Big. Goddamn. Deal.


So if the fucknuggets who churn out anti-choice propaganda would please stop handwaving-away women's goals, dreams, plans, and life circumstances by dismissively referring to it as "convenience", I'd very much appreciate it and maybe not lose my shit so fucking often.  Kthx.

*Women are not the only people for whom abortions are sometimes needed medical care; all people with uteruses may fall into this category at some point.  However, the rhetoric of anti-choice groups centers on women, so I'm reflecting that in this response.

Nostalgia

Presented without comment, an entry from my old Livejournal, posted Dec. 17th, 2008:

mood: hopeful

"I feel like the government's working for me. I feel like it's accountable. I feel like it's transparent. I feel that I am well informed about what government actions are being taken. I feel that this is a President and an Administration that admits when it makes mistakes and adapts itself to new information, that believes in making decisions based on facts and on science as opposed to what is politically expedient." - President-Elect Obama on what he hopes the American people will be able to say about his administration in two years, in his interview with Time magazine.

Accountability? Transparency? Decisions based on science not politics? Somebody find me a fainting couch, I am about to swoon.

This is like waking up from a terrifying nightmare to a beautiful spring morning outside your window. Excuse me while I take a brief break from cynical reality to bask in the sweet light of hope.

Feed the Witch!

So, those who actually pay attention to blog sidebars (a minority, I know ;-) may have noticed that I've added a donate button to this little blog of mine.

Let me first say, I do not ever want to push, pressure, or guilt anyone into donating.  It's completely voluntary.  I understand how it is when money's tight (or just not there at all), trust me - that would be why I have a donate button up, in fact - and I don't ever want anyone to feel like they *have* to give when it wouldn't work out for them. 

That said, let me explain a little.  I spend a fair amount of time - averaging about an hour per post, more for ones that require a lot of sourcing or are longer/more in-depth - writing here.  I average between 3-5 posts per week depending on the week, and I'm working on upping my post frequency even further, because I love what I do here and I think it's important.  I don't want to go to an ad-supported model because ads annoy the fuck out of me, and they only work insofar as you have lots of pageviews, which is what often prompts bloggers to set their RSS feeds to snippet-only to force people to click through, and I fucking *hate* that.  So I won't ever do it.  But, as I'm trying to transition from unemployed to self-employed, I could use some support of the financial variety.

Understand this blog will always remain ad-free and free to access.  All I ask is, if you value what I'm doing here and your financial situation allows you to comfortably do so, toss a few bucks my way once in awhile. 

The donate button takes you to Paypal, where you can type in your donation amount, then use your paypal account or a credit card to send it along to me.  If anyone's interested in a subscription-type recurring donation, let me know and I can create a button for that, too. 

Whether you can donate or not, whether you choose to or not even if you can, thank you for being here, for your support in reading, pageviews, and comments.  I appreciate you, my readers.  From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Bleh.

Sorry, all.  Meant to be back posting on Tuesday, but it's been a shitty week.  It seems I take longer to recuperate after a socially-intense four-day trip than I thought?  Yeah anyway.  Giving myself through the weekend for genuine mental health time (as opposed to flogging myself for not posting OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING CHECKING TUMBLR FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME TODAY YOU HAVE POSTS TO WRITE - strangely enough, that doesn't actually help me recover faster) and will hopefully be back in full form come Monday. 

(Of course, now that I've said this, tomorrow will be awesome and I'll be posting left right and center and be able to queue posts for all through next week by Sunday night.  Because that's just how my life is right now.  >.< /self-pity)

Love and light, hope everyone has an awesome weekend.  See you Monday.

Don't burn the place down while I'm gone!

I'm headed down to SoCal this weekend for my cousin's wedding.  Sadly, there will be no open bar.  (It's a Mormon wedding.)  But it means I'll be gone from Thursday morning through to Monday night.  No new posts while I'm away, and apologies if I'm slow responding to comments, since I'm not taking my laptop, just my phone.

Enjoy the holiday weekend, darlings!  I'll see y'all next week.  Try not to burn the place down while I'm gone, ok kids? ;-)