Not Anonymous

My week was long and felt rather endless.

I let myself sleep in this morning, I still snuggled under the duvet for about two hours before I felt the need to extract myself from covers.

I feel like my life consists of work, brain melting, and sleeping.

I miss the days where I could write long meandering posts about whatever came to mind, but there seems to be a real effort involved in doing this now. The effort it worth it, and I wonder if it really is because I have less time during the week, or because I'm more careful with my words these days.

Yeah, I also sniggered when I re-read the line above.

I'm almost positive my picture is next to the phrase "puts foot-in-mouth" on more than one occasion. Although work has somewhat restrained me, the casual atmosphere does not help much.

Yes, work is pretty much all I do. I went to one roller derby training and haven't been back since because work fucking eats my life. I know it's about getting my priorities straight and managing my time better, but suddenly the job has become a career.

I still don't know how to deal with that mindset when I'm laziest person alive. I've been doing this for nearly a year, and I don't want my life to just be about work.

I suspect it's the fact that my commute there and back to my room in my parents house has something to do with it.

I'm anxious about moving out, especially to the city (we are suburbia), not because I don't like the city. I love the city and would love to live there. It's just that I'm very seriously considering emigrating at some point over the next five years (and yeah, I need to start getting my shit together for that to actually happen) and living on my own (and roommates, the studio apartment dream died long ago) will eat up my finances.

At this point I have no expenditures and I very rarely spend my money on frivolous shit, which is a funny thing to write when I'm in the market for a new laptop and am planning a holiday in June.

Context is everything.

The cuteness!

( Spoils within! )

Crossposts: http://eumelia.livejournal.com/608457.html

Went to see "Skyfall" last night.

( ALL THE Spoilers )

I enjoyed it, but I have many many misgivings. I'll go see it again, because I'm addicted to the franchise and love the character too much.

I missed Jeffry Wright as Felix Lieter though. No CIA in this movie, alas.

I'm sure a lot of you heard of this American fellow, Timothy Kurek, the guy who pretended to be gay for a year and then wrote a book about it.

In the article linked above it is stated that he was a devout Christian who grew up "hating homosexuality" and that when a friend of his told him how badly her family treated her when she came out as a lesbian he got the bright idea of "pretending to be gay" and essentially living as a gay man for a year.

Basically, to see what it was "actually like".

I find myself angry at this man.

I've been sitting on this story since yesterday and I'm angry, so fucking pissed, that the underlying assumption of the various articles that I've read about this guy in the mainstream media is that is guy is brave. That the fact that he had to deal with being called the other-fucking-f-word is this big huge hurdle that he had to overcome in order to view gay people as human.

Well, cry me a river.

I mean, this guy had a choice. He made the choice and the consequences he had to live with were temporary.

I'm supposed to be amazed that this guy discovered other Christians in the gay community in the South of the United States? Is this a joke? Gay Christians, gay Southerners, men and women who are not straight have been shunned for decades and have made their home there for decades, by creating a community this guy infiltrated because he couldn't conceive that these men and women were actually human just by the virtue of their existence.

No, he had to "walk among them", because in the end, for this guy, it was an anthropological experiment, one he's now cashing in on by publishing a book (all earnings go to an LGBT charity, of course, of course) about his experience as a straight man in living a gay life.

How exotic.

How special.

How appropriative.

We've been telling our stories for decades, for centuries, not all these stories are mine because I'm a woman (and not American), not all these stories are theirs because they are men (and American), but it is certainly not his story!

Pretender was never a better title.

Trigger warnings are not for naught.

We are vulnerable people, we live in a world that is structured around power and that breeds a broad culture of violence, that (more often than not) men perpetuate and (more often than not) women are victimised by.

The culture of violence is something we live and breathe, we cannot avoid it, not really. We can, however, do our best to live gentler, more compassionate lives. We can do our best to empathise with those who have suffered under the tyranny of power disparity. Those of us who have been traumatised by events out of our control, whatever they may be, deserve to be treated with respect and kindness, not with indignation and ever so slightly veiled scorn.

When I read The Illusion of Safety/The Safety of Illusion by Roxane Gay earlier tonight, that's exactly what I felt.

Scorn.

Reading her post, it's clear she's been through a lot in her life, that she knows suffering and trauma.

She writes a long and relatively literary account about why trigger warnings do not work. Moreover, that they are, as the title suggests, an illusion in the face of reality and the way reality is conveyed via the media.

I hope you read the whole thing, but I want to focus on this one paragraph, as it had me bristling:

There is also this: maybe trigger warnings allow people to avoid learning how to deal with triggers, getting help. I say this with the understanding that having access to professional resources for getting help is a privilege. I say this with the understanding that sometimes there is not enough help in the world. That said, there is value in learning, where possible, how to deal with and respond to the triggers that cut you open, the triggers that put you back in terrible places, that remind you of painful history.

Where is the understanding that we are, in fact, different from each other? Okay, so trigger warnings don't suit you, who are you to judge if they are suitable for anyone else! That is what I want to know, because you know something? I need trigger warnings.

Not because I have a painful history that rips me open when I have textual reminders of something traumatising.

Trigger warnings tell me that this person is respectful of the subject. That they know what it is they are writing. It tells me that they understand the ramifications of writing subjects that are to do with the violence in our lives.

The quote above is a very condescending way of saying: "You who need trigger warnings are over sensitive, I don't need them and I've been through shit, so why should you."

Telling her audience that "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces" are illusions, empties out precisely why those concepts are necessary to begin with; they are reprieves from the brutality that is reality.

I do not expect to be accommodated by the culture of violence at large. My triggers are so specific sometimes, that I generally know what I can and can't watch at any given time (because my triggers are visual and aural), but you're side-swiped and it doesn't matter if you thought you were prepared for what was coming, sometimes your brain signals things to your body you know aren't true, but it feels that way any way.

However, when you are an artist and your medium is your message, what you want to convey isn't removed from the culture at large. When we write, when we create, we are part of a greater picture from which we take and return with not quite equal measure.

Feminist art used to be (at times still is) specific challenges to masculine supremacy and a type of in-your-face radical femininity. Now, for me at least, a big part of feminist art is approach to subject, and approach to audience.

Feminism, as a political standpoint, should be rooted in compassion, in the knowledge and awareness that we navigate and negotiate an environment that is hostile. Trigger warnings are a way to navigate through art. Does everyone need them? No. Should they be required? No. Should we begrudge those who use them? No. Should we question why people don't use them? Yes.

Roxane Gay also wrote:

Trigger warnings also, when used in excess, start to feel like censorship. They suggest that there are experiences or perspectives too inappropriate, too explicit, too bare to be voiced publicly. As a writer, I bristle when people say, “This should have had a trigger warning.” I think, “For what?”

I understand the defensive stance. I don't, however, believe there is such a thing as an "excess" use of trigger warnings, considering the discourse that even bothers to even talk about them is fucking tiny.

If you feel censored by the request of trigger warnings, I would suggest you ask yourself why? Do you want to add your voice to the culture of unaccountability when it comes to violence? Ask yourself if the mere thought of thinking of the effect your art has, as opposed to affect makes you rear and cry "censorship" in the face of criticism, what exactly your aim was.

We do not write, create, react, interact in a vacuum.

Those of us who have triggers, who have been traumatised, who walk this world hyper-aware and "over sensitive" don't need to be condescended to about being reminded of our painful history. We carry it with us, always.

It never goes away.

Asking and knowing that others know this, respect this and honour this, is a tiny and temporary reprieve.

Telling me that that reprieve is a childish illusion, is to me a show of extraordinary lack of compassion, a defeatist attitude when it comes to pushing back and being critical of the culture that enabled and enacted our trauma in the first place.

Talking about The Dark Knight Rises on Twitter, has enabled me to flesh out my thoughts regarding the movie.

( Here they are along with spoilers )

When I was in high school I was slut shamed. A lot.

Whether I was sexually active or not is beside the point, because the boys and girls who bullied me, they weren't the ones who knew my business. I was called "bitch", I was called "whore", I was called "dyke".

I was also called "slut", but that has a different context.

When I was in high school I used to go to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A lot.

The word "slut" was bandied around in a positive way, no one was saying it to offend or to shame. No one was saying it in order to see me blush and avert my eyes, just so they would leave me alone.

I remember once I screamed in the middle of the hall way, a loud drawn out scream. I don't remember why I did it, I must have looked insane. People parted around my like the Red sea and I was Moses.

Our most powerful weapon is our voice - Ursula (of The Little Mermaid infamy) obviously taught me well.

I didn't mine being called a slut when I was with my fellow Rocky peeps. Just like I don't mind being called a dyke or queer when I'm with fellow LGBT's.

Context is everything. No word can be reclaimed in full. I can the biggest bitch there ever was, but you don't get to call me one just because you don't like me. Yes, I am bisexual and lesbian, only I get to call myself queer. My sex life in my own and the people I actually have sex with and has no bearing on my morality and character - as such, slut is a word that I get to chose who says it and when and I decide whether I use it or not.

SLUTwalk has come to Israel and I will march.

Some people disagree with the politics of SLUTwalk, because the word is not reclaimable and the overt sexualisation of some of the marchers is counter productive.

I can't help but think back to what people say about the various Pride marches in my locale and all over the world. With regards to how provocative it is.

To that I can only say, Pride marches are necessary because of that sentiment my dear detractors.

And so long as sex and the having of it with whomever we chose is considered "provocative" and "slutty", and rape continues to be tied to the sex lives of the survivors and victims rather than to the actions of the rapist, these actions are necessary.

Because it doesn't matter what we wear, it doesn't matter what we don't wear. We could walk naked in the street with a neon sign flashing "Willing to Fuck Anyone!" in hot pink and that is still not "asking for it".

It happens to be International Woman's Day.

A friend said she considers this a day of mourning for the feminist struggle and I can't help but agree. IWD is a day in which we go "Yay Women!" and that's important, empowerment is not to underestimated, but who is empowered? And what are we empowering ourselves to be?

Feminism is not just about women, it is about the opening of minds and it is about resistance. Resistance of patriarchy, racism, homophobia, misogyny, modern-colonialism, war and economic terrorism, because they harm the majority of people on the planet.

SLUTwalk may be small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but rape is an instrument of war, it is an instrument of terror and so long as it is considered just something else we need to "deal with", resistance to the double standard of gender paradigms is paramount.

Make some noise.

Just because Israel doesn't automatically persecute gay men, lesbian women, bisexual people and trans people, mean that Israel is so bloody progressive when it comes to LGBT rights.

As regular readers know, I've been pretty vigilant about the way the LGBT community is being used as a way to cover up the disastrous human rights violations Israel commits on a daily basis, not only to the various ethnic minorities, but to LGBT people - a minority that crosses ethnic and religious "divides".

"Pinkwashing" isn't new, but it's getting a lot of news due to the fact that Israel's "re-branding" is, hah, failing.

Back in November, Sarah Schulman wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about this strategy that Israel uses, through its foreign ministry, its tourist industry - don't you know that Americans voted Tel Aviv as the best Gay city in the world! - and just plain flinging all those wonderful "rights" us queers have in the Holy land. Excuse me, I must go vomit.

Taking all that into account - the fact that there is this constant push and pull regarding Israel's image as a liberal oasis in a desert of religious conservatism - people seem to forget that all those "rights" lovingly bestowed onto the gay community (and yes, there is a big difference between the gay men and every other group put together in the alphabet soup of LGBT) are not presented accurately to the world, or more to the point to the United States.

A recent pinkwashing op-ed by a fellow by the name of Scott Piro wrote that:

Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where people are not persecuted because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

He then lays out the "facts" about Israeli LGBT life:
Israel has passed anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBTs.

Formal laws, do not rights make. Not to mention that women still receive 75% of the average salary as opposed to men. Consider a two women house-hold, when both women work in what is considered a "second-salary slot".
I can't even begin to tell you how fucked transgender people are when it comes to labour, because no one will fucking hire them - trans people are not protected under anti-discrimination laws with regards to the work place - putting that T in LGBT, launders the reality of trans people in Israel, who I can safely say are the most fucked over group under the queer umbrella.
Unless they also happen to be Palestinian. More on that, in a bit.
And sure, businesses are not allowed to discriminate against same-sex couples or people who have a gender non-conforming appearance, but hey, if you're a religious institution you most certainly can!
That's just the tip, of course.

Israel Recognizes same-sex marriages performed abroad.
No, Israel does not. It writes on the ID card "married" for couples who got married in a country where same-sex marriage is legal, because international law requires that there be equal status in all documents. The fact is, if you are same-sex couple and you got married in, say, Canada (like many of the wealthier gays and lesbians do), your status will be written, but not recognised and you have the same rights as a registered co-habitated or common-law married couple.

So, uh, you can scratch that off the list.

Israel has legalized LGBT adoption rights.
The supreme court allowed one lesbian couple to cross-adopt each other's biological children. It is a legal precedent, like most LGBT "rights" in Israel, as opposed to actual pro-active legislation.

Can this horse get any higher?

LGBT soldiers serve openly in all military branches, including special units; discrimination is prohibited.
Only Americans find this special. Seriously. Just because you had DADT for too fucking long (read, at all) doesn't mean that the fact that LGB (if you are a T and are out you will most likely be exempt from military service for reasons relating to mental health. Snack on that.) serve "openly" make the IDF in any way progressive. Considering the fact that the IDF is growing more religiously conservative as we speak and has rabbis telling soldiers to not hear a woman sing on pain of death, I can't see the fact that some boys and girls in certain units are out (you are not likely to be out in a cambat unit, as opposed to an intel unit, for instance) make the army liberal.

And in any event, why would we want to emulate a militaristic, hierarchical, masculine-supremacist, racist and patriarchal institution?

Same-sex couples have the same inheritance rights as heterosexual, married couples.
Wrong again. Inheritance rights for unmarried, common-law married or co-habitating couples relies on drawing up official papers and making your spouse your beneficiary, unlike heterosexual married couples, where it is automatic.

So you see folks. We may not be the worst, but really, when you compare us to actual Western countries (because we pretend to be one), we are not in the best shape. In other words, it's really easy to compare us to countries where things are really bad and come out looking quite good.

Also, of course, all this is related to Jewish LGB(T) people in Israel. The fact is, Israel uses the hard won fights the LGBT community has wrought throughout the years in order to cover up the fact that it violates international law and human rights in the West Bank, Gaza and in Israel proper - where is the help for Palestinian LGBT's in the West Bank and Gaza? There is a reason Israel based Palestinian queer groups like Aswat and Al-Qaws are critical of the mainstream and Jewish LGBT community for lapping up the fact that we are being used as a fig leaf for Israel's human rights violations.

Don't tell me Israel is a "queer oasis".

I recently acquired the new Florence + The Machine album Ceremonials. It is very good in my opinion.

But tell me friends, how do you know which if the contemporary artists and musicians you like are popular or not?

I don't watch MTV, my trawling through Youtube is sketchy at best and usually directed towards videos of cute cat or various political gatherings and suffice to say that Israel is so stuck in the 90's that the website selling tickets for the K's Choice tour crashed several times when it opened up for locals to buy (yes, I have a ticket, weehee!). Oh, and I don't follow the charts or the Grammy's unless it's research for something I'm writing that's set in a certain time frame (which means I'm more likely going to be looking at charts from the 60's or the 70's).

We are slightly dated, also the radio is an unreliable source of knowing which acts are popular or not in my opinion.

I'll be the first to admit that my taste in music is terribly banal and ordinary. I have a few bootlegs (that I digitised) of underground queer core songs, but I don't listen to those on a regular basis and I bought the bootlegs in order to support an anarchist collective as opposed to actually liking the music, so, yeah...

It's just that, I read this article about Florence + The Machine and the middle class apathy and I really couldn't figure out what this guy was talking about?

Am I utterly mixed in my genres? Since when is a remixed to death and multi voice track recording considered folk?

I'll admit that I'm slightly dated in my definitions (seeing as I'm an avid Joni Mitchell listener, as well as Joan Baez and Tracy Chapman), but um, am I missing something?

I mean, isn't Florence + The Machine more like Lady Gaga than, say, Suzanne Vega?

( Spoilers, Speculations and Pics from Episode 2.03 )

For people who read me and aren't in this fandom (or fandom in general), I know, I'm obsessing over this show, I hope you can wait a little longer for things of a different substance... Thanks in advance!