Thorns

EDIT: The more I think about this the more I worry it's derailing :( I shall leave it unlocked, of only so I can link to it the next time I am annoyed by a boundary policing straight person. But still, apologies.

So, I think homophobia and heterosexism are bad. I'm against any sort of oppression on principle, but I've also seen the terrible hurt these prejudices can cause, both in the wider world and to my LGBTQ friends in particular.

But without meaning to minimise or distract from that (because it is definitely more important), I was recently struck by the way in which a particular form of heterosexism hurts me as a straight woman as well.

Namely, the way that the impossible bind bisexual women are put into (any interest in the same sex-> lesbian! Any interest in the opposite sex-> straight!) also, in a less extreme way, erases the sexuality of those of us who have some same sex attraction but still identify as straight.

Thus, my rambling somewhat self-centered thoughts. This is definitely not a complete analysis of bi erasure! And the primary target of my ire here is boundary policing from straight people (including the little boundary policing straight person in my head), since I feel skeevy lecturing LGBT people about how they should be more inclusive of me. Only talking about women since that's where I've seen it play out, but a lot of this applies to men too¹.

PLEASE let me know if I'm being a straightsplaining jerk, and I apologise in advance if I am. I really hope not, but it's a complicated topic.

EDIT: And I am! Am in the process of editing based on people's criticisms, see the comments.

This is the conversation which inspired this post (and expresses pretty much everything I want to say much more succinctly :)), but is definitely not the first time I've encountered these ideas.
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I am so unbelievably low on spoons right now I cannot express it (on the plus side this is as a result of building myself to have a Serious Conversation About My Future at work, which is now done. More on that when things are more settled)

But something on Foxtel just now I wanted to note: a documentary about possible terraforming of Mars explicitely comparing it to "other frontiers through history", with images from the American West and talk about how "Colonists would do the same thing all colonists have done, packing light and preparing the land as they go..".

Some context: For those not aware of it, there is a Big Conversation happening right now about A fantasy novel with an American frontier..minus the American Indians(*). And one of the major points which has been brought up is that without indiginous peoples to exploit (not to mention indentured workers and slaves) the american colonists would have died, or at least not expanded so fast or so easily. In lots of ways the whole myth of the Frontier is a horrible racist lie.

And it's a lie with a lot of attraction to nerds, and this documentary illustrates that pretty well.

As to comments: I probably am not up to answering them, not for a while. And no playing BINGO.

(*)In case you can't find a synopsis in there, I shall arbitrarily pick one by someone I know :) And yes, that is my favourite author in the whole world making a racist ass of herself :(

Wow. I feel terrible. I think I'm going to have to judge the "working three days a week" experiment a failure, especially since one of those days was spent restfully watching other people speak during a four hour(!) meeting.

I'm currently watching "Meeting People is Easy", a Radiohead doco I recorded off ABC (Unexpected side effect of Foxtel: recording all that cool stuff off ABC and SBS have I forget to watch) It's so utterly them, a bunch of diconnected half scenes and songs with no explanation or context, often cut off mid sentence. And yet somehow it ALL MAKES SENSE. Back in about 1997 their official webpage consisted almost entirely of mostly white pages with disconnected images and snatches of lyrics, with random words being links to other pages, and clicking in far enough led to strange things, and their merchandise page and "As a reward for clicking this far, have a free t-shirt design saying "Property of the Radiohead Corporation"". I thought it was the coolest thing ever, in my defense I was 17 :D It had an unforunate effect on my homepage which I first constructed around that time, the only real remaining vestige being the scenic route.

I love their music, but I get the feeling I'd find them unbearably intimidating and up themselves in person :) (Well, that and I turn into a gibbering 12 year old girl when I meet famous people, it's terrible) I've never cared much about the musicians who make the music I like much anyway, I get more personally attached to writers. (Although, in the very unlikley event Radiohead reads this but you never know..I LOVE YOU GUYS NO OFFENSE SQUEE FLAIL)

Does anyone else think Thom Yorke looks kind of like John Simm? No? Ok, just me then.

You know sometimes I feel like trying to work isn't worth how miserable I feel when I have to call in sick for two weeks straight, but then I remember how miserable I felt when I wasn't working. *is reminded why "depression" is mentioned prominently in the "follow on symptoms" of any description of cfs*

On the plus side, I was inspired to write a new disclaimer (see 5a).

*goes off to kill some monsters in FFVI*

EDIT: In this post I am using "white" as shorthand for "people who do not experience race based prejudice". The two are fairly correlated in Australian and American society, which is the two contexts I'm thinking of. But they haven't always been and aren't everywhere (certainly one can be very pale skinned and still experience racism) This post is about people who definitely don't experience racism and never have derailing conversations about people who have and do: the skin colour of the people involved is not the main issue.

Also there is nothing wrong with talking about the experiences of white people in general, either specifically white experiences (being anglo-irish, say) or issues which affect people of all ethnicities (class, gender etc).

One of the things that comes up in any discussion of cultural appropriation is scads of white people talking about how irish dancing has been appropriated etc and how this affects their feelings.

The Current Race Discussion and That Caught-in-the-Middle Feeling is a mixed race person who passes as white talking about how this complicates their reactions since it not the same as being white nor is it the same as being obviously not-white.

And again people bring up the experiences of white-but-have-a-family-history-of-oppression people. A jewish person talks about why she thinks we do this. And I must admit, this is a topic I've pondered myself, so since this is my lj and talking about it here is not derailing anyone's conversation, I will. I'm going to go into a bit of detail since I often get the feeling white people feel like sure, those other white people have (EDIT: ethnically, see caveat below) privileged lives but they have a unique understanding of (EDIT: ethnic) oppression (also I just feel like talking about it. Part of the point of this post is getting it off my chest so I'm not tempted to bring it up elsewhere).

But I think most of us have stories like this in our pasts (if you go back far enough there's always the romans), the point is that non-white people have this stuff in their present.

EDIT: Also stuff like class/gender/sexuality etc is even more irrelevant. It's not that those things don't cause huge important problems and injustices which deserve just as much attention in the right time and place, but they are not the same as race and so shouldn't be brought up as equivalent in a conversation which is about race. Same way as it would be inappropriate for a POC man to come into a conversation about sexism and say "But what about racism?" (this is different from "Let's consider the way sexism and racism interact").

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So I've been feeling quite headachey and dumb for the last few days, and to deal with this have
(a) been trying to avoid talking to anyone on the internet for fear of saying something monumentally tactless (unfortunately I'm not always smart enough to remember how dumb I am...)
(b) Been trying to avoid doing anything which strains my eyes, ie surfing the internet, watching anime, playing th DS etc. ie everything I feel like doing.

Yesterday I had a brain wave: didn't MacOs have a text reading utility? I could get it to read me fanfic!
( But of course life is never that simple... )

Femmeconne was awesome, but made me sick as a dog (I had to get Cam to pick me up early) I mean to write it up later, but anyone who was there and said "Can you email me/post about *blah*" etc please remind me or I'll forget by the time I am well. I blame Felix the adorable lurgy carrying baby.

Just watched the Bollywood film "Om Shanti Om". It's a comedy/romance/drama set in Bollywood (with lots of melodrama about past lives and such), I get the feeling I was missing the context for a lot of the references (even just minor things like the significance of names) but it was still a lot of fun. The trailer has an amusing scene: the main character is doing a tragic love story about a deaf blind amputee, and decides what it really needs is this dance number "The Pain of Disco"(*) (nb the rest of the film contains much less in the way of topless men and blondes in spandex) I also really liked the credits: as in a lot of movies about the film industry, the cast comes out on a red carpet as if attending the film within the film and has the actors real names come up underneath..and then the (afaict entire) crew does this as well. The choreographers in particular clearly enjoyed having chance to dance onscreen :)

( things I remember I said I would do )

I am sick. Literally, do not expect to hear from me for a few days, my throat is all swollen and I feel gross (and you do, don't be surprised if I am croaky and grumpy and nonsensical). I currently have a little paper pad next to me with half a conversation in it.

And now, back to the wonderful world of fanfic. Typically, I got two really thinky nonfiction books from the library on Friday...

EDIT: And of course I read an otherwise quite cheery House/wilson story where a patient starts with flu-like symptoms and a sore throat and then DIES A HORRIBLE DEATH

So, I've been thinking for quite a while about writing a "Why I'm an antiracist" post along the lines of my why I'm a feminist one. Partly to explain because people have asked, and also to get it straight in my head.

Some of the reasons are reasonably straight-forward and reasonable¹, but I had a rather unpleasant epiphany about it today. Namely, I think one of the reasons I focus on race in particular, instead of other "-isms" I'm not personally oppressed by like homophobia, is because in some ways it's easy.

( In which I poke at my brain and am dismayed at what I find )