Category: Sexuality & Gender

Incremental progress

Good news first, I have been asked to come in and talk to a recruiter this afternoon.  This is the closest I’ve gotten to genuine job hunting activity in months so I am obviously thrilled.

Bad news. I’ve lowered the price and still can’t get anybody interested in the cafe; I will have to break the lease.  HEAVY HEAVY SIGH.

Tarot for Atheists, a couple of hundred words’ worth of progress.

Turkey soup is on the stove – I will adjust seasoning shortly and then start freezing it in containers. Jeff can’t stand the smell of the bones, and has no idea how this sentence would have ended if I hadn’t backspaced over it.

Replaced cpap machine with one that smells a little less disgusting.  I must make a purchase decision within 2 weeks.

Completed writing down a song, converted it to midi and fired it off to mOm.  I only have another hundred songs to write out.  It really IS the Song That Never Ends.

Herewith today’s linkorama:

Crowdsourcing Tolstoy. 

This guy and guys like him are why I make no further efforts to date.

Fighting sexism… using MATH.

My cat wants an escape pod.

If you rape a girl and leave her naked outside in freezing weather, and you work for your family’s restaurant, and your local prosecutor despite eyewitnesses and video refuses to prosecute, and then the whole town turns on the rape victim and burns her house down, well, the internet just might give bad reviews to your restaurant.

Little yawning kitties.

 

 

No, I am not a misandrist

If I see another frakking opinion piece that starts out “Real Men Don’t…” I’m gonna lose it. If you have a preference about what the men in *your* life do or how they treat their lives or you, please don’t preface it with that ill thought out attention grabber. Otherwise it’s just you wishing that the men you deal with had been brought up better or alternatively cared about you at all. (Gosh, isn’t it amazing that all those opinion pieces about men’s behaviour bind them to what’s currently FASHIONABLE? GAH.) And by a cruel trick of rhetoric, that will lead directly to me writing an opinion piece that starts out “Real men wear dresses and put baby animals on their heads, BECAUSE I SAID SO.”

Gendered slurs

Crikey, it’s not like I needed another project.  So here is what you might call a ‘substantially complete’ list of gendered slurs.  I don’t want these words coming out of my mouth, so I’m trying to find replacements.

Ballbreaker – woman

Ballbuster – woman

Bimbo – starlet

Bint – woman

Bitch – crank, meanie

Bitchy – cranky, spiteful, malicious, mean, nasty, cruel, unkind, snide

Bleeder – woman

Boob – jerk

Breeder – woman

Broad  – woman

Chica – woman

Chick – young woman

Cocktease – sexually unavailable woman

Cow – crank, jerk

Crow – crone

Cunt – cloaca

Dick – jerk

Dickwad – jerk

Dickweed – cloaca

Dog – not to my taste

Douche – jerk

Douchebag – cloaca

Dyke – lesbian

Feminazi – woman

Fish – woman

Frail – woman

Gigolo – sex worker

Girl – This one is troublesome.  If for a female under 14, yes.  For a female between 14 and 18 I prefer young woman or teen.  Over 18 – woman.

Himbo – attractive young man

Ho – sex worker

Honey – woman

Kitten – woman

Mangina – feminist

Minger – woman

Munter – woman

Pussy – schlemiel (in the sense of being ineffectual) coward (in the sense of being easily frightened or timid)

Putz – jerk

Real girl – as opposed to what, but prefer woman

Rentboy – sex worker

Scrote – timewaster

Scrotey – trivial

Sexkitten – woman

Shemale – trans woman

Skanky – unhygienic, dirty, unpleasant

Skirt – woman

Slag – not to my taste

Slut – enthusiast

Streetwalker – sex worker

Sweetie – woman

Teaser – woman

Tit – woman

Tosser – idler

Tranny – trans woman

Twat – jerk

Wanker – incompetent

Weiner – jerk

Whore – sex worker

Witch – woman

 

I left homo, queer and faggot off the list as those words appear to be in a state of flux regarding usage.  I do use queerfolk as an inclusive term.

 

what?

Dear Mr. Kenney, and by copy to Mr. Julian,

Look, it’s really very simple.  If you don’t want an abortion, don’t have one.  If you don’t have the equipment to ever need to make that decision, stay out of it.

Do not attempt to legislate the recriminalization of abortion in Canada.  Although there is a substantial minority of Canadians who would applaud the recriminalization of sodomy, gay marriage and abortion, we live in a modern pluralistic liberal democracy and the majority of Canadians don’t support those stances.

Recriminalizing abortion is regressive, mean-spirited and an assault on women’s rights.  It’s bad medicine, bad politics, and bad social policy.

I say this as a woman, a tax-payer, a church-goer and a voting Canadian.

Kill M-312 as soon as possible.

 

Yours truly,

 

Allegra Sloman

phone and address redacted

thank you mOm

You know, my mOm raised me to not really give a shit about cosmetics.  She quit wearing her one concession to patriarchal culture, lipstick, the instant she retired.  Over the course of my life I’ve probably saved fifty grand not buying them. I have powder, probably time-expired, and one jar of nail polish, in my bathroom.  I think Katie cleaned out anything else I had lying around.  I do concede that my face looks better if I prevent my eyebrows from meeting in the middle, and I do pluck the darker hairs off my chin and chest because even though I’ll never get mistaken for a man I would prefer to present as a woman.

I don’t care who consumes cosmetics, but I am upset and disgusted by people smearing fishscales and metal oxides on their faces without understanding the long term health consequences.  Makeup, unless it’s part of what you do for a living (rock star, sex trade worker, actor, television personality, model, emo kid) is a waste of money.  It doesn’t get wonderful just because a group of men decide to spend money on it.

Sundry and various

DJD, whose poetry mentions the thousand sided dice emailed me back amid the last minute flurry of edits for a manuscript, saying ksided was ‘quite nice’.  Chipper picked a couple of very interesting words out and said ‘weehaw’, and there were many other congratulatory emails, some from people who only found out about it this weekend and some who’ve known about it from the outset.  Robof9 wants to be able to choose .ca websites.

Linked from Making Light, a poem for Neil Armstrong.  I wouldn’t have the courage to try to write a poem about that so I am glad someone else did.

A horrifying subject with a book cover to match.  Yeesh.

Neil Gaiman won another Hugo.

A poly advocacy site talks about who we are.  I’m very much following along these lines in terms of definition and emphasis.

This week is shaping up to be very busy in a lot of challenging ways.  Hopefully it will be full of work and win and not whining and whimpering.

 

 

Part of what I’ve been doing with my time off

My Moleskine comes with stickers. There are romance stickers. One suited nominally male and skirted nominally female, two more that are same sex. My first thought, “But what about transpersons, genderqueers, fellagirlies and the polyamorous?” Is it possible I’ve been hitting the self-paced gender studies a little too hard during my time off? bwa ha ha. Oh, and props to Moleskine.

A mad wor(l)d my masters

Snoop Dogg went to JaMAIca and came back a Rasta.  He now goes by Snoop Lion and his next album will be entirely reggae.  Tis fabulous news!  Hope he covers at least one Sublime tune…

OMG  I just spent two hours reading RADFem and Transfem blogs and the hate and bigotry are so tiresome and frightening that I went to a Men’s Rights blog for a while to help me get my bearings.

Unclear on the concept – private company tries to trademark Anonymous.

Paul’s back from Ontario, brown as a walnut and sporting a rather luxurious multicolored beard.  He poked his head in briefly last night and it was good to see him in such good spirits!  Then he had to go to work….

Eddie haz a sad.  He hates it when Jeff is gone for any length of time.

Had brekky with the lovely and everblooming Sue, and how good it was to spend some time with her.

Now, back to work.  I have learned that when you’re writing trombone lines, you need lots of places for players to take breaths, as they need more air than any other brass instrument.

 

 

Letter to the Globe and Mail published January 5 1991.

John Allemang’s recent comments on the subject notwithstanding, women who choose to breastfeed do so from the conviction that they are doing what is best for the child.  I was pregnant and/or nursing for almost five years, and I certainly got bored with it, but I never felt trapped, because it was something I chose to do, voluntarily, despite the witlessness and smug, value-laden commentaries of people like Mr. Allemang.

I never flashed my breasts in public because I failed to see how I could advance the cause of nursing by so doing.  Take a poll of real live women who nurse their children, and ask them how they feel, rather than telling us how you think they should feel.  We already know that a lot of men like looking at women’s breasts.  Please tell me something new – that we are perhaps now living in a world where a woman can discharge her responsibilities as a caring parent without getting flak for it.

His last comment about bottles bringing happiness into the world was egregious.  Tell that to a Third World mother who has lost child after child to formula mixed with contaminated water, or the mother whose child has become kendy or brain damaged due to lead-contaminated formula.

Various thoughts.

Anarchism is now a thoughtcrime in England.  Have to wonder when that will happen here too.  The shellacking of free speech continues throughout the naughtily monikered ‘free world’.  I can just HEAR John on the subject.

I came back from Katie’s place last night after I took her shopping and took Government Rd, because that tunnel of trees reminds me of coming back from Jericho on a warm summer night on the back of John’s scooter.  Christ, I miss him.  I keep waiting for it to go away, but grief mocks timetables and stalwart resolutions with a cascade of neurotransmitters.

One of my longest term friends and noted poet Lucile Barker recently came up with these two gems: “Intermiliating…an experience that is simultaneously humiliating and interesting.
Entermiliating…when it happens to someone else.”

I’ve been worrying and fussing over Pride day, off and on the last little while, but I finally put all my errant thoughts together after posting this to facebook :

After participating in half a dozen Pride parades in Vancouver, I’m starting to feel very conflicted about it.  It’s not that I think that there isn’t more to be done to encourage love and understanding for the genderqueer, non-normative folks among us and inside us, or that we can’t do more to support young people coming out, it’s that I’m starting to feel less celebratory.

I’m having a hard time with how awkward the massive influx of sponsorship cash makes me feel when Ugandan gays are getting killed.  I’m dying a little inside about how transgendered people get treated as they get lumped in with the gay spectrum, and dumped on by “women born women” (I’m still recovering from that disgusting tshirt that was on sale at the michfest) while fending off queries as to whether they have a website nudge nudge wink wink….  I’m not saying that queer bashing in Vancouver is dead or that hosanna sexism stepped out for a beer, or that white and other interlocking  privileges have quit working their evil magic on everything. We all know that’s bs.  The millennium came and went and things have improved in quanta and fractions and lumpy little increments.  I see more freedom on the horizon, and I don’t want it sponsored by a fucking brewer, thanks.  I want to be part of a human movement powered by human love, human dreams, human actions, not a pasted on smile that gets cleaned up by the sanitation department later that day.

Of course we need to celebrate victories and agitate for better and fewer laws.  But I’m not feeling celebratory.  I am mourning for the person I used to be, believing that Pride was a sign of how advanced we are.  I’ve watched the banks and breweries opt in, and that’s the point at which I want to opt out.  It felt transgressive, asskickingly, gloriously transgressive and liberating, to participate in years past.  Now it feels like a chore, so that I, a nominally straight woman and Unitarian, can have some street cred.

This weekend I’ll try to unpack a little more of my invisible knapsack; I’ll try to engage straight people I know in that discussion; I’ll find a queer charity in town to support.  But I’m not going to Pride.  It feels like someone else’s party now, and I don’t want be the jerk that crashes it for the cachet of saying I was there.

And so since my irritation right now is directed towards oppression of transgender people, I’ve been wracking my brains for a charitable organization I can give money to that will express my values.  And all of a sudden it occurred to me that the answer has been staring me in the face.

Purpose.

Which school in the lower mainland supports TG kids the most?  Purpose!  How do I know?  Because I was at a graduation and heard it from the mouth of a TG kid (FTM) that he never would have made it without Purpose.  And because, without education, a TG kid can’t escape the employment ghetto and build himself a life of meaningful independence.  Because I know from my kids that they can be out and proud at school and their teachers, support staff and principal will raise hell if they are bullied or maltreated.  So I will support education, transgender rights and young people with one donation, and now I can feel like my Pride weekend has actually meant something.  I feel better!

We celebrated Jeff’s bday with takeout Schnitzel and the final episode of Season One from Breaking Bad.  What a hell of a show.

And he genuinely cares about women in Science

One of the many reasons I love PZ Myers.

Ps, I could only come up with one of my former coworkers’ wives, Carolyn Porco, Rita Levy Montalcini, Natalie Angier and Jane Goodall, and technically Natalie ain’t a scientist, oh, and Carolyn Herschel.

So I suck at the game too, and that gives me pause.