Where ignorant armies clash

Content note: misogyny, violent misogyny, and state-sponsored, violent misogyny. This is rough, y'all.

I feel my body vanishing.

The following exchange took place between Republican Senate candidate Tom Smith and Associated Press reporter Mark Scolforo:

SCOLFORO: Well, how would you tell a daughter or a granddaughter who, God forbid, would be the victim of a rape, to keep the child against her own will? Is that something that you would–do you have a way to explain that?

SMITH: I lived something similar to that with my own family. She chose life, and I commend her for that. She knew my views. But, fortunately for me, I didn’t have to… She chose they way I thought. Now don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t rape.

SCOLFORO: Similar how?

SMITH: Uh, having a baby out of wedlock. You know.

SCOLFORO: That’s similar to rape?

SMITH: No, no, no, but… Put yourself in a father’s position, yes. I mean, it is similar. This was a–But, come back to the original–I’m pro-life, period.

The whole conversation was recorded and you can hear it here.

Smith is saying that for a father, the devastation of discovering that your daughter has chosen to participate in premarital sex and has become pregnant is similar to the devastation of discovering that your daughter has been intimidated, overpowered, subdued, assaulted, tortured, and traumatized (either by force or coercion) and that now she has to make a critical decision about the pregnancy that has resulted, all the while dealing with the stigmas and pressures of a culture that chooses to erase her pain. Similarly to how Smith just erased her pain himself.

Smith is also saying that because his daughter chose to carry to term the pregnancy she conceived when she happily and freely engaged in consensual sex with a partner of her choice, society should expect a woman who was intimidated, overpowered, subdued, assaulted, tortured and traumatized (either by force or coercion) to carry to term the pregnancy she conceived by the man who intimidated, overpowered, subdued, assaulted, tortured and traumatized her (either by force or coercion).

It's no longer one or two right-wing extremists saying this. The whole party recently approved a new party platform that would deny the choice to have an abortion from all rape victims, as well as all other women, including women whose lives are endangered by pregnancy. (Note that "pregnant rape victims" and "women whose lives are endangered by pregnancy" can and do include girls 10 years old or younger.)

Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, as you've probably heard, co-sponsored with Todd Akin the legislation that introduced the concept of "forcible rape." The bill proposed that victims of rape would not be granted abortions unless they were victims of "forcible rape." This, of course, puts the burden on the woman/girl to prove that she isn't just a lying slut trying to escape responsibility. And further, the message it really conveys is that any woman/girl who wants an abortion must be able to prove that she is as innocent herself as her innocent blastocyst, and therefore equal to the blastocyst in value.

Then is it any wonder that I feel my body vanishing?

Because when a Republican state legislator here in my home state says that a woman should be denied the choice to terminate a pregnancy even when the fetus is known to be dead, citing that animals have done it on his farm, that woman is me, that is my body.

When legislators of my national government say that some ideologue in an office somewhere should be free to decide that a woman should die rather than receive a life-saving abortion, that woman is me, that is my body.

When women in my country are charged with murder because of their miscarriages, that is me, that is my body.

When Republicans in Virginia try to pass laws that a woman should be vaginally penetrated for no medical reason, but only because the State wants to shame her out of her decision, that is me, that is my body.

When acts of terrorism are committed against women's health professionals, that is me, that is my body.

When a communications director for a Republican representative goes on Facebook and says, "Let's hurl some acid at those female democratic Senators," that female is me, that is my body.

When the most pro-life state in the nation also has the highest rate of sexual assault against teenage girls at 17.3% (all evidence of a culture hostile to female autonomy and consent), that girl is me, that is my body.

When a woman nearly dies because the ER doctor on call refuses to abort a non-viable fetus, that woman is me, that is my body.

When pro-lifers propose "personhood" amendments giving full human rights to zygotes and making it murder to terminate ectopic pregnancies that result in maternal death, that is my body.

When a Republican state legislator in Kansas says that women should "plan ahead" for their eventual rape by purchasing separate abortion coverage plans, that woman is me, that is my body.

When the Arizona Senate passes a bill to allow doctors to withhold information from a pregnant woman about fetal abnormalities or genetic disorders, that woman is me, that is my body.

When a regular contributor to Fox News says that women who report sexual assault in the military "want to be warriors and victims at the same time" and asks "what did they expect?" that is me, that is my body.

When all this goes on, and then Republicans say that the war on women is "fiction," it's not fiction to my body.

I don't believe that an embryo, or a blastocyst, or a zygote has more value than I do. I don't believe that the rights of an embryo, or a blastocyst, or a zygote trump my rights. If you do believe those things, get your beliefs off of my body.

If you're not comfortable acknowledging just how heinous any kind of rape truly is, or what an omnipresent terror it is to all women every day, or if you think it can be compared in any way to a consensual act, or if you are intent on legislating the behavior of rape victims who are trying to reclaim their lives while the judicial system remains so inept at prosecuting rapists that 54% of rapes continue to go unreported, keep your illusions the hell away from my body.

I never asked for all this violence, but it is being waged across the landscape of my body.

Does that sound dramatic? It is dramatic. This misogyny is extreme and terrorizing. Surely this revelation cannot be shocking to you: that I can never be at peace while my body remains the darkling plain.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
           -from "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold

Product Review

She's basically pretty. She sort of looks like me. Which is good because a doll ought to be relatable. She can sit and stand without falling over. It'd be nice if her hair were longer, since it's long enough for a ponytail but not long enough to braid.

She speaks a few phrases, which is satisfactory, but her voice is too squeaky to be appealing, so I mostly don't use that function.

I'll just mention that a doll ought to be able to wear a hat or glasses if the occasion calls for it, but these things fall right off her.

Of course, the main trouble is she just doesn't do very well in her playtime roles. She tolerates her wicked stepsisters well enough, which is fine when we play Cinderella, but when we play Runaway, the plot just falls apart because she can't ride a horse. She dances okay, but she can't sigh convincingly, so the romances never work. I can tell the prince is frustrated by the lack of chemistry in their performance.

I've tried playing Schoolteacher with her, but she has no compassion for her students. Panda is failing and will have to be held back a year if this continues. I thought a more exciting plot might please her, so I tried Joan of Arc. But when we got to the end, I'd swear she was relieved to be burned at the stake.

She just doesn't want to be the ingenue in my stories, which I don't understand. I let her play the villain for a while, but she was terrible at that as well. She refuses to abuse the other toys, even for the sake of thematic climax. And all this is extremely aggravating for me, because I spent entirely too much of my allowance on this doll to end up having to drop her down to a bit part.

I'm not a difficult girl. There is only one quality I require in a doll, and that is flexibility. She needs to have a steady hand when she operates on Snuggles. She needs to faint gracefully when she's kidnapped by the Evil Witch. She needs to pull the other doll's hair if I tell her to.

And this should go without saying: if she can't be punctual for teatime, what good is she? Plus it's entirely too hard to get her clothes off. If you tug the back of the dress, the snaps just break. I've got half a mind to leave her naked.

She has no appreciation for the opportunities she's been given. If she would put forth a little effort, she would see that I'm a very loving person.

But when I look into her little eyes, I can almost hear her saying, "For the love of God, put me back on the shelf. I'd rather sit alone with my empty, plastic head than be loved by you."

Migraine

Only a sliver of light slices into the bedroom from the hall, but I have shielded myself against even that, with the bedsheets pulled over my face. Underneath them the air is hot and still and noiseless.

Only the faintest sounds reach me. They are hardly more than the sound of my own blood in my ears. Behind my dark eyelids I am underwater.

My husband's laughter bubbles up, breaks my surface, clear but distant. Then his voice, joyful and adoring, entreating the little black dog we both love to find a toy he is hiding for her. I hear her playful whines and the jingle of her collar. In my mind I see her prancing and my husband's arms reaching for her.

I don't wish, not even for a second, to stand up, walk into the other room, smile, speak or touch them in that bright, bright world that is no longer my world. I lie still and love them - skills, I realize, I will one day be grateful to have practiced.

Something, like a cyborg

Since the wires for the pacemaker are threaded through the vein, it kinda makes the vein stand out. It's totally weird. Wanna see?

Definitely. But maybe not while I'm driving.

Yeah, okay. Also I can feel where the pacemaker is with my fingers. I saw an x-ray of my chest the other day and it was crazy! It showed the inside of the pacemaker and all its wires, plus my sternum is now wired back together, so it's like wires everywhere in there. Like a robot.

That's awesome. You're basically a cyborg.

Ha!

Well, we'll all be cyborgs before long.

Yep.

---------

I did not expect my sister to agree so readily to that statement, but she is a Whovian, so I guess I underestimated her. It's getting harder to shock her lately. She's getting better at shocking me.

I'm serious about cyborgs, though. And not just in the sense that medical technology is getting better and better at performing the functions that our organs sometimes fail at, though that's part of it. It's also about technology becoming increasingly more intimate and more critical to our personal, daily lives. But that's just a part of it, too.

You know who else is serious about cyborgs? Lady Gaga. On the cover of the Born This Way album she appears as half motorcycle. In the You and I video, she appears as a cyborg again. She also appears as a mermaid. She also cross-dresses in order to play both the male and female lovers and (you know where this is going) she makes out with herself. In the Judas video she's both saint and sinner, leader and follower, prophet and heretic. In Born This Way she's both born-that-way and self-made. This is one of the critical pieces of Gaga's project: exploring, questioning and redefining the relationships between the things we consider opposites.

Humans and machines, living beings and our technical [life] support - are they opposites, or are they related? Distill the concepts down further: organic and inorganic, nature and invention - aren't they, in fact, fused? Not opposites, but opposite faces, like the faces of a coin. That's the beauty of the cyborg. And here's where the metaphor goes epic - everything has its opposite face.

Miracle/tragedy, horror/blessing, destiny/choice, wisdom/confusion, faith/doubt, success/failure, goodness/error - these things are not mutually exclusive. These things are inextricably bound. Not opposites but opposite faces. You can, perhaps, have neither, but you can never have just one - they are two aspects of a single phenomenon. Imagine if we had the words for "heads" and "tails" but no word for "coin." I think we live our lives that way.

I don't mean to say that these things are all the same - you could stretch the metaphor that far if you wanted, but why dissolve the paradox? Life is paradoxical.

I also don't mean this to say that there is an upside to every downside, some benefit arising from every hardship. Life is too senseless. I don't believe there is something good waiting to make every something-bad worth the heartache. But there is something. There's a kind of symmetry. It makes life - not happier or easier - but more beautiful.

We have miracles and tragedies, we have horrors and blessings, we have faith and doubt. There are some times it becomes hard to tell which side is which. Our lives are tossed like coins into the air. They never fall, they only spin, forever. After all, death must be just the opposite face.

So if you ask me my philosophy of life, don't be surprised if I tell you it's something like a cyborg.

I'm telling you this because I care

Do you think that I write this blog for myself? You couldn't be more wrong, reader. I write this for you. And it is for you that I have come back early from my blogging sabbatical to share with you an important public service announcement.

Oh, you didn't know I was on sabbatical? You thought I was being noncommittal, uncreative, lazy and a blogging equivalent of a tease? Well shame on you for thinking those things.

ANYWAY I am trying to tell you something important here.

Some time ago I shared with you all my serious concerns about flesh-eating bacteria, the likelihood that you will catch them from a toilet seat, and the general horror destined to ensue. Well, I have learned a lot since then and it is time to start Raising Awareness. I can tell you all are with me on this because of all the comments I sense you meant to leave on that post.

My friend's husband (who is a med student) says there is ONE WAY to contract a flesh-eating bacteria and that is through an open wound. So as for catching them from a toilet seat, I guess, you know, check yourself.

It is a real thing, however, that you can be an ordinary graduate student having fun at the lake and get into a zip-line accident leaving you with a massive gash in your leg and a REAL flesh-eating bacteria infection and a one-in-four chance of survival. In Georgia.

People, do not Google that story. I read it so you don't have to. Anyway that is everything you need to know, and the moral of the story is this: the world is scary as shit and you will die from it and so will all your friends.

I have been told there are people who don't think about these things - can you believe that? No, you can't.

That would mean thinking that living into the future isn't like sailing off the edge of the earth. That would mean no one would come if I invited you all to my place for some vodka or whiskey or some other drink with a name that implies you are serious about it, so we could toast one another saying, "It's okay if I die, you don't have to watch."

But I know you would come. Some of you would definitely come. At least one of you would come if I asked VERY nicely and promised hors d'oeuvres. We could play party games? I don't know, I'm not good at parties. But there would be absolutely no flesh-eating bacteria and you could sleep on the couch or the air mattress if you needed to.

What I'm saying is that being as happy and comfortable as possible for as much of the time as is possible is serious work, and I support you in it. And I know at least some of you know what I mean, about permission to refuse or retreat from despair, about not having to watch.

So *hugs* and take care and don't forget your Purell.

But if you catch something horrible from exposing your open wound to a toilet seat? Dude. I told you.

Love and Deconstruction

Don't you ever look at me and think, who are you? I think that sometimes, when I look at you.

It wasn't so much a fight as just a very painful conversation, one of those times when you both squint at each other's eyes and take turns saying, "I don't know what you're talking about." The moodiness of failure was settling in when I realized, like shaking the hair out of my eyes (and feeling stupid for having ever forgotten it for a minute), that this hopeless confusion was not the result of the matter but was the matter.

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

"That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all."

                                          - from TS Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 

Words are my life, and people like me are their life, too, so I am unafraid to speak plainly about them. They are pitiful, sad, nearly useless things. I love them and revile them because I know what they are. By catching hold of us at such an early age, they trick us into trusting them. Insidious things. We get comfortable with them, so that we never question even that which was never true - that they communicate, that we communicate through them, that if we only master them, we can connect.

A word is not a thing, but only a tenuous relationship between other non-things. The letters on the page, the sound of the word in your ear, these are the signifiers. But what is signified? How do you know a word's meaning except by other words? And so words are signs that point on toward other signs that point on and on toward something we think of as "meaning" but which can never know.

It's a hopeless endeavor when we set out to understand through words. Things like God, the meaning of one's life, the overwhelming questions, seem sometimes to be just ahead of us, on the tips of our tongues, but the more we try to call them out, the further they elude. Words settle in their wake like dust, and they are dust. Not even the Bible will lead you to arrive at God. The words can settle all around you, you can run your fingers through them, but they can never take you past themselves, to what is real.

You are real. Your realness is what makes you unknowable. You are an incomprehensible signified. Your signifiers will bring no one to you.

I cannot trust in words to explain me and teach me. I cannot call on words to bridge us together, two incomprehensible signifieds. When you hold out your hands to receive something real, all I can give you, all anyone can give you, is a few shimmering words.

Words are no more than bird songs. I do not strain to know the meaning of a bird song any more than a bird strains to define its birdness by singing. Singing is for honoring one's soul, not for arguing one's thesis. I hope I can remember that my words are songs. All our words are songs. In the absence of the real, you can still have a few shimmering songs.

I sit on the edge, kicking my feet in the water, calling out my words, hoping to catch some of yours. And if I do, I'll turn them over in my hands and memorize the feel of them, and sing them back to myself again and again. I will sense something, and perhaps it will be close to what you sensed. It will be impossible to understand, but it's okay, because the beauty isn't in understanding. The beauty is in striving.

My love, I cannot tell you what I mean, but perhaps it will mean something to you if I say my soul is a spinning coin. Perhaps you will sense something if I say you are a prism throwing colors on my face.

I am blessed
Just to be, more or less,
Standing in the afterglow of rapture
With the words the rapture left.

                    - from Emmy the Great's Paper Forest (Afterglow of Rapture)

Nonprofit Girl Shares the Elevator

Adventures of Nonprofit Girl, Episode 3

(Did you miss Episodes 1 and 2? They're here.)

The sun is just beginning its descent and the last of her colleagues have just left the office as Nonprofit Girl eats the last doughnut straightens up the kitchen and packs up her things. She heads down the hall and a young man from one of the other offices on her floor holds the elevator for her.

Nonprofit Girl knows you are opening yourself up to danger if you smile at people you don't know. A smile, after all, is all it takes to expose any harmless-looking passerby as that infamous imposter, Creepy Stranger Dude. But it was very nice of this stranger to wait and hold the door for her, and she is a superhero after all, so she decides to risk it.

Nonprofit Girl smiles at the stranger, in the face no less, and offers a clear-voiced "thank you."

But Nonprofit Girl is about to encounter something she never could have predicted.

The elevator door closes. The man (Nonprofit Girl is seriously not making this up) the man paces the elevator like a caged lion. It's only five floors, but he paces that four feet of space like death is closing in, and in doing so, chokes on his coffee. He is still sputtering when the door opens to the lobby. Nonprofit Girl considers asking him if he's okay but realizes the answer to that question would take far too long to answer.

She dashes out, thinking, Damn.