MOOP!

I don't often feel it necessary to make posts with subjects like this, but I've had two weird/unpleasant encounters with strange dudes in the last 24 hours, and I wanna document them for various reasons, not the least of which is "dear dude friends, don't do this".

The more benign of the two was just a few minutes ago. I was standing outside of a locksmith, with my cell phone to my ear so I could call him and ask when he would be returning to his shop¹. An older (mid 40s?) white man walks out of the building, stares at me, and then tells me "he'll be returning at three".

Possibly I would not have felt so utterly, textbook, mansplained to had it not been for two factors. One, that the only reason this stranger knew the locksmith would be back at three was because there was a sign on the door that clearly said so --I am not so oblivious as to be able to determine the hours of the shop, and the number to call, but clearly miss the sign on the door.

And two, at the time I received this information, it was already 3:36. If that's not the definition of mansplaining, I don't know what is --an older dude giving a younger woman information that she already knew or could figure out, and was easily proven incorrect. I roll my eyes mightily.

((I would perhaps be rolling my eyes less if his tone of voice had been a lot less "jeeze, can't she see the sign" or if he had asked "are you trying to find the locksmith" or had actually come across as helpful rather than authoritarian. For all the information he had, I needed to make a call and just happened to be standing in front of this business.))

The less benign of the interactions was last night, and I'm gonna toss in a very light ( Read more... )

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Normally I am not so bold, I made the call on the (asked for, wanted, very good) advice of the guy who ran the appliance repair shop next door.

2: Because more often than not, it's coming from a car, and the guy driving it wants to let me know I'm a cunt, in case I had somehow forgotten this fact.

3: And woman-appearing/woman-presenting people. I am not a girl, but I've been heavily socialized like one.

4: Like, enough so that I'm not even annoyed at him for making a left turn at Powderhouse.

POST SCRIPT: Tonight is birthday ice cream night! Haul your arses down to JP Licks between, I dunno, 7:00 and 9:00 PM or so, and get ice cream and sing Happy Birthday to me or variations or whatever. I will make another post when I actually head out.

I don't seem to have ever actually written this story down before, although I tell abridged versions of it relatively often. So here, have the explanation of how I started Scottish Country Dance.

My first semester of college (fall 2007) was a pretty great time. I was making new friends, reconnecting with old ones, and spending a lot of time just wandering around and exploring the world. You don't know what freedom is until you've moved six hundred miles away from home.

One of the people I was spending a fair amount of time with was my friend MagusMarc. He and I had met about three years prior, at Origins, chatted online for a while, lost track of each other, and remet at Balticon '06. From there, we were talking regularly and became pretty good online friends. When I moved to Boston, it turned out that he lived just about a mile away from Lesley. He was my only local geeky friend, and one of my only adult friends, and in general a nice alternative for when the college kids got too immature or mainstream for me.

As it got towards Thanksgiving, my computer was starting to act up a little bit. I assumed nothing too bad was going on, and when Mr Belm picked me up (I stayed the night after Thanksgiving at his place) he offered to run some computerwizardy on Seren¹ for me. The computer proved to be more a challenge than he could endure, and so I left it with him on Sunday --he let me borrow his clamshell² so I'd have a computer for school, and agreed to take Seren off to the mac store.

On Monday, I was out and about with some college friends, when I received the phone call from Dave. Seren's hard drive had self-destructed There was no chance of getting _anything_ off it, and the drive would just have to be replaced.

I was devastated.

I had gotten the laptop at the end of August. I'd been using it exclusively for three straight months, and everything, everything, was gone. All my photos, all my bookmarks, all my college work, all my writing, and most importantly, Behind the Walls version 2.0. My diary.

Since we were in the area, I politely excused myself from Dominik and the twins. I walked to Marc's house, and knocked on the door. "Distract me?" I whimpered, recalling other times when he'd been good enough to give me comfort.

"Well, I'm going dancing soon." he replied, and that made perfect sense to me. I went along with him, to Scottish Country Dance, and had a good enough time of things (despite having the worst possible shoes). And that might have been it. Except.

On Wednesday or so, I got my computer back with a shiny new hard drive, and a surprise external drive (early Christmas gift). I named her Vera Serenfreude, based on Dan and Tho's suggestions. She is a wonderful wonderful beast, and even if she's getting old and cranky, thank god she's managed to get old.

The following weekend, I went home to Maryland. There were several goals for this visit --surprise mom, surprise Veronica, go see Rocky Horror and the LRHS play³. There was also one major thing that happened that hadn't been planned --I broke up with kSatyr, who I had been dating for about ten months at the time.

From noon Sautrday to noon Sunday I spent equal numbers of hours crying and sleeping.

I believe the actual number is something like "three"

BtW 2.1, 2December2007

So Monday I was back in town⁴. and I again show up at Marc's. I tell him what had happened, and I ask. "Distract me?"

From then, it was a tradition. I danced three weeks of December, went home on break, and came back and danced every week after. I kept dancing even after Marc stopped being able to make it, even after he moved away. I've dragged as many friends as I could (and Tricia and Jesse both _stayed_, at least for a little while!) and don't intend to stop. Due to Scottish, I've found two partners, gone to one con, and eaten slices from *way* too many cakes.

It's been four years now. It's one of the things I enjoy most in the world. And while I hate that the impetus had to be a tragedy, because those tragedies led me to dancing, they were absolutely worth it, every bit⁵.

Cheers.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: "Don't you mean Vera?" Keep reading.

2: one of these. I still want one _so bad_. Such a comfortable laptop!

3: Unfortunately the only one I made after I had graduated LRHS. I feel bad about that.

4: And my arrival back in Boston is a different strong memory --the first time my heart ever sang out that I was Home.

5: There are parts of the story that I never tell, but that you might know anyways. SCD, and everything and everyone I've gotten from it? Yeah. Yeah, they're worth that too. Every. Single. Fucking. Bit.

(Apologies to anyone who saw this twice --it didn't want to crosspost)

So let's talk about it a little bit. Ain't gonna leave an elephant that big lying around without giving some explanation. I'm cryptic, not cruel.

Trigger warning, sexual and emotional abuse.

And...that's what it is, really. I consider myself to have been abused. The partner in question is kinda damaged, much more than I am. I don't think they consider themself to be an abuser, and that's fair, I guess. But I look back at what was going on, and my skin crawls, because I have so fucking few happy memories from that relationship, and that's not good.

I call the sex stuff rape, but I don't always believe it was "that bad". They never actually had intercourse with me, for instance, despite how badly they wanted to. And, you know...rape is bad. I don't want to be "that girl who was raped". So instead I'm just "that girl whose partner went too far and didn't really listen when she asked them to step back." Which isn't exactly better.

There are things that still make me nervous sexually, long after, because they happen and I Remember. But I'm working on it --no one but me gets to decide what I can enjoy-- and my current partners are both supportive and helpful. (Sparr especially seems to find it a challenge to...not fix me, I'm not _broken_... but help me scar over the damaged parts. I'm grateful for this.)

The emotional stuff was probably worse, but I don't talk about it as much --partly because it's a lot more insidious, and makes me look a lot more pathetic. There were some pretty thorough incompatibilities in our relationship, and they caused my partner to lash out at me, due to insecurity. I wound up having to give them a lot more support than I was ready for or able to.

I don't have very good journaling for a lot of the relationship, so I wonder sometimes if I'm just being crazy, and exaggerating what happened. But then I look over old chatlogs, and find the one where they're yelling at me for spending more time talking to Veronica than them, or the one where they decide to blackmail me, and I'm...reassured, unfortunately. That's not everything they did, or even the worst of it, but it's enough to know that I was absolutely the more sane partner in the relationship (and that simply should not happen with me.)

I've been writing heavily filtered posts about it for a while now --if you want to be on that filter and go read them, feel free to contact me and ask, though I absolutely reserve the right to not let you on and never explain why. Mostly, I've been working on just trying to figure shit out, and learn how to heal. That's a big part of why I went back to therapy a year ago, to try talking to someone for a while. It did help, I think. The other thing that's helped a lot is learning more about rape culture and activism and coming to terms with the fact that there are some shitty toxic narratives that get forced into our throats from day one. I've been doing what little I can to avoid those, when I can.

There's been a lot of waffling about whether or not I was ever going to make a post like this. It's...not a secret that I was raped, abused, whatever word you want to use. Indeed, it's kindof become a thing I make sure new friends know about me, in part because this happens _all the time_. It's horrifying, and I don't want anyone I know to be able to say "I don't know anyone who's been raped" because I expect I am not the only friend you have who has. Closets have always made me grit my teeth, in part because I am charismatic and popular and I want to prove to the world that you can be a functional human being and still be [gay/poly/kinky/queer/survivor/etc]

I don't want anything bad to happen to that partner. We've split, and it's cool, they're out of my life now. They weren't intentionally abusing me, they just...had a shitty life, and it hadn't taught them how to deal with people in a functional manner. I have sympathy for that. Which is all a fancy way of saying, if you know or have suspicions, don't. Don't out them, don't accuse them, just don't. Part of my reluctance to talk about this is that I don't want to drag their name through the mud (which is why there are as few personal details as I can write) and I don't want to fuck up their life any farther --I just want to be completely out of it.

At any rate, a lot of the nerve to actually make this post --which I wanted to make for LAST Coming Out Day, but couldn't find the nerve to speak up-- is due to a recent post by Holly Pervocracy, Survivor. There've been a ton of essays and blog entries that have made it seem a little easier, made it seem like I was less alone. But that one hit me like a ton of bricks, especially the intro. I don't want to say I was raped, it seems so fucking *dramatic*. But it's true. Sometimes dramatic things happen to non-dramatic people.

Anyway, I won't say I'm fixed, but I will say I'm a hell of a lot better then I was. I have written literally thousands of words on this, private and public, since before the relationship ended even. Writing...helps is such an insufficient word. And being loved by people who aren't assholes helps, and knowing people who are from the "yes means yes" school of consent theory helps, and let's face it, time helps. It still hurts, but every year it hurts me a little bit less. Someday maybe it won't hurt at all.

Happy Coming Out Day. Sorry it's such a downer this year.

~just Kat, this time
MOOP!

Trigger warnings go both ways, abuse: sexual and emotional.

I am the survivor of an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship.

Fuck closets. It's not a thing to be ashamed of. It is a thing that, for as awful as it was, made me stronger and made me a better person.

Happy National Coming Out Day. In case you've forgotten, the other closets are that I'm bi/awesomesexual, polyamorous, kinky, and genderqueer.

Please be gentle.

So, badmagic has posted a thing about advice you would give to your 15-year-old-self. This is especially interesting to me, as the difference between 15!me and 16!me is...vast, it seems. Not just the change from heartbreak and an interest in sex, but in terms of anger, of introspection, of impulsive actions, of not just being asexual but antisexual.

It's the difference between being a child and being an adult.

So I started to write advice to my 15!self. This is going by memory --I have the ability to cheat, because I have this livejournal to look at for most of that year, and the BtW file for the three month gap-- and I tried very hard to restrict it to advice that would actively be useful to 15!self --it's all well and good to tell her to meet Sparr earlier and see what happens¹, but not when the opportunity won't even arise for more than two years.

So. Here's what I would have to say if me from six years ago and me from now had a nice sit-down and a chat.

1) Don't worry about not being sexual, but do be gentle to those who are. You don't have to be sexual to be sex positive, and I really do think you'll feel better about things if you stop calling people you care about tramps. Let them enjoy their sins.

2) The relationship you just started will be convoluted and confusing. Do not put as much energy into it as you do. It feels like your heart is breaking, and it probably is, but I promise it gets better. You'll be friends for a while, GOOD friends, and that's important. Even after it disappears, it was important. And I promise, eventually he dumps her, and the words he say will be the sweetest revenge you can imagine.

3) Remember that guy you met at Origins last year? Heh. Everything you dreamed and more, if I didn't change the timestream too badly by telling you all of this. And if I did...pursue his friendship. Keep his friendship, and take care of him. He'll repay you in kind, and that'll be more important than sleeping with him. Sex, as you're well aware, is not everything.

4) You have ADHD. You also have a mild auditory learning disability. This isn't why you're bad at school --you're just an unmotivated dumbass like that-- but this _is_ why you have so much trouble in Ms. H's class. See if she can give you help or advice.

5) In eight or nine months, you're going to realize you're wired to love more than one person at once. It will change things so much to tell you this -dangerously much, in terms of setting you back from being an adult- but never let yourself be forced into monoamory. Ever. Ever. It will only make everyone involved miserable. You will be younger for the experience, but you also won't cry as much.

5a) You're genderqueer by the way. Start working out how to be a boy now.

5b) Figure out a safer way to not be younger for the experience.

6) You will always have Veronica. Always. Keep her as well as you possibly can. Same with Pauli. Give both of them the attention and time they deserve.

7) If you have to wait for a boy, he will eventually be worth it. Every one of them. Even and especially the one who knows there are sparks, and makes you wait, for two and a half agonizing years. Even the one you've been waiting for ever since you made a terrible decision two years from now.

8) Go ahead and fail that class. It hurts, but it means you will get the teacher who changes your life. Let him. Tell him so. And try not to be quite so obvious when you flirt, it's just embarrassing all around.

8a) But seriously, stop being awful at school.

And as that last one doubles as advice to 21!Sor...yeah. We'll leave it at that. In all honesty...I liked myself at 15. I was young, but I've always been too clever by at least five eighths.

What would you tell your 15!self?

~Sor
MOOP!

1: *reads nametag* "Oh! Oh, you're the one my future self told me I should meet! Hello! I'm underage, would you like to be friends? I hear you'll introduce me to interesting things..."

Hello there! This is your nine AM report that yeah, opting out of the backscatter machines really is as unpleasant as you've been led to believe.

I had the time when I arrived at the airport, and the security lines were blesséd short, so yeah, why wouldn't I choose to opt out? Cause someone else a bit of hassle, and not have naked pictures of me leaked to the internet in a couple weeks. I am quite okay with this plan, and so, at the point where you are meant to be removing your shoes and putting everything on the little moving belt, I smiled oh so cynically at the woman directing things, and asked what procedures one must take to opt-out.

She didn't quite sigh, and directed me to put my things on the belt --make sure there was nothing in my pockets, no paper, no anything, no belt, and of course, no shoes. "We have a female opt-out" she said wearily into her walkie-talkie, which nearly broke me in two right there --I am not female, and I hate being called such, and I know that it is only a hundred times worse for so many more people.

I had to walk through the backscatter machine to get to the area in which they would scan me --directly on the other side of the backscatter machine, causing a slight bottleneck as more compliant people had to squeeze around me. And there I was and there was a young woman who was not the slightest bit comforting as she told me that she was going to have to touch me.

And proceeded to do just that. She, as the one account has been saying, stroked my hair, which felt far more violating than I ever would have expected. She ran her hands down my back, over my ass, down my legs, then came 'round to the front to stroke my chest, down between and under my breasts, my stomach. Waistband search is apparently mandatory --she slid a finger into my waistband, both front and back, and ran it back and forth to make sure I wasn't concealing contraband in the waist of my panties or some such.

Perhaps the part that made it worst for me was the way she kept emphasizing "I'm going to use the back of my hand" when she went to touch the so called "private" parts of my body. I'm sorry, if you are rubbing something against my butt, my breasts, it really does not matter whether it's the front of the hand, the back of the hand, or a six inch rubber dildo. I will still feel violated by the pressure and by the fact that you are stroking my body in a way I do not consent¹ to. Her reassurances that it was "only" the back of her hand felt rather like being told that it's okay, the stabbing you're about to receive is "only" going to be done with a blunt knife.

I waited patiently afterwards, to gather my bag --ohwait, I forgot that I have evil Massachusettsian water in my bag. This simply won't stand! So I had to wait for the agent to dump out my water and send my bag through again (she wanted me to go do it, which would have involved going through the line again...um, fuck no, much? One, it's not my fault you can't tell the difference between a bottle of water and a bottle of EVIl, two, I am so not fucking going through that unpleasantness again.).

Now I am about to go refill my water bottle with more evil Massachusettsian water (somehow MAGICALLY DISTILLED by being from an airport water fountain *after* security instead of an airport water fountain *before* security) and continue to try not to cry about the fact that I feel like I was just molested.

Banner fucking way to start the day, especially after how impossibly shitty last night was.

Fighting the good fight, and all that. Just wish it didn't feel so damn futile.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: I do not consent to being photographed naked by the TSA, and I sure as _hell_ do not consent to being molested by a TSA agent. However, apparently if I want to fly in this country, I have to let the people in power molest me, so I'd better just be a good girl and shut my mouth about it. Charming!

2: (from the title) Is anyone else thinking that Eric Idle's song from 2004 could really use an update? It scans and *everything*

Okay, I'm at that point where I have sixty tabs open across seven browser windows, and that really means that I need to make a link post and get on with my life. So here, have some sundries!

*Boston folk, in last Saturday's flooding, Taza Chocolatier got hit hard. They are trying to convince people to buy their stock so they have money for repairs. Buy some chocolate for a worthy cause!!

*Also Boston Folk, today at seven PM there is going to be a recess in Davis Square. Bring your jump ropes and four square balls, and believe me, I would be there in a heartbeat if I was a few hundred miles north and east of here.

*Improv Everywhere's newest stunt: Recreating the beginning of "Star Wars: A New Hope" on the Subways!

*I'll be honest here: I really quite want this foldable bicycle. It's a neat design, and I emphatically want to have a bike to tool around with up in Boston, to the point where I'm gonna need to find a way to get mine up there *some*how. So yeah.

*"But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning." (A hilarious review of that terribly unrealistic show on the History Channel --"World War II" (I mean, could you *get* more melodramatic?). Read the comments. Sporfle warning.)

*I will unfortunately not be able to post this Girls With Slingshots guest strip by Erika Moen in my future classrooms, but I want to so badly!

*Locked posts, so no links, but I'd like to extend appreciation to chickenhat for "LESS COWBELL!" and to ncarraway for giving an earworm trigger warning when he mentioned GaGa's Bad Romance.

*ms_hecubus continues to keep a fairly funny blog (seriously, I should make the list of people who's journals are fun to read even if you don't know them¹), this time ranting about how "Every time I use a plastic bag, the terrorists win". (And hopefully she will not mind me linking her, as I was impolite and didn't ask permission this time)

*Oh, and her followup letter to Sears.

*Speaking of Racheline (You do read the footnotes when they come up, and not at the end, right?), she went to a conference recently, and made this post about secrets and exile that talks about coming out about various things. ( And then I babble about this a lot more, because I find it important )

*Oh look, another ms_hecubus post, this time Sensibly pointing out that boobies are both sexual and practical items, and to try and define them as one hundred percent one or the other is useless

*yagathai came up with a fantastic new portmanteau: Voluntarting. Please go use in a sentence.

*Look! It is A map of the creative process!!

*So, I follow the davis_square community because I like knowing what's going on in my world --signal to noise is high enough to keep me coming back. Most of the posts seem to get between zero and fifty comments or so. So when I see one that gets _253_, I pay some small attention.

It is, of course, a post on how to have good bicycle/car relations.

I love my hippie city and miss it dearly.

*Mel Gibson Rant Quotes Presented by Kittens. I don't even know how to react to this. Trigger warning: severely abusive misogynistic language.

*Animation showing all the nuclear bombs that have gone off from 1945 to 1998, including test sites and the like. Long, but neat.

*Want respect for bicycles as transport? Use them that way!

*ratatosk talks about a recent court decision saying that the FCC's current indecency policy is unconstitutionally vague. Go censorship fighting!

And that seems to be everything. Now I can go clear the two hundred or so items out of my RSS reader. WOO!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Also on that list is:

rm, who writes about dancing and fandom and gender and the whole racism-misogony-homophobia-god-society-sucks-thing and doesn't really take shit, and writes just *fantastic* stories about a life that seems very much to be a part of a different world and time sometimes.

kittikattie, who writes about video games and American Girl dolls and ponies and art and the whole society sucks thing and takes even less shit than Rach and has a constantly amusing slice of life journal thing going on with lots of pictures of interesting stuff and is the one who coined the phrase "black day"² which I use sometimes.

And ShadowCaptain would be if he hadn't left elljay for the evil that is Facebook, and Ms_Hecubus like I said, and there are almost certainly other people who have interesting and entertaining journals, in case you need more to read, which I doubt. Dan4th and Heptadecagram, when they post. Others. Whatever, maybe I'll make this into a post of sorts sometime.

2: Black Day: A day in which you put on your gothy best, because sometimes it is nice to be all black-clad and take-no-shit. She always has one on the fourteenth of February, as well as two or three others across the year, mine show up sporadically, but seem to be reoccurring on the fourth of July.

3: In watching Clueless the other day, I remarked that "only to a sixteen year old would "and you're a virgin who can't drive" be seen as such a slur".