metaphortunate son

WHEW.

Looks like it got called while we were brushing the baby's teeth and putting him to bed. Well, you know how it is. Before election: feed baby, do laundry. After election: feed baby, do laundry.

And it looks like all the pro-rape guys lost, which makes me very happy.

It did start me wondering, though. That fact that you can't say the pro-rape Republican candidate lost, you have to specify which one. Now, as you know, the GOP ran a female candidate in the last presidential election, and they got their asses handed to them. I wonder if the party made a policy decision that trying to attract the female vote, or claim to be aligned with women's interests, or whatever the fuck they were trying to do with Sarah Palin, was a fool's game, and that this year, they were going to deliberately say the hell with women's concerns, we are going to demonize women and court only the male vote.

We'll know soon if anything like that happened, because if so, there's probably a lot of frustrated Republican strategists vowing tonight to never let any candidate mention another "women's issue" again. "Fuck it! You can't be for them! You can't be against them! From now on we're just going to pretend women don't even goddamn exist!"

Things the baby has ostensibly done recently to cause people to say "Wow, you've really got a boy there, haven't you?"

1) Opened kitchen drawer, flung out piece of tupperware
2) Climbed up slide at playground

Things I believe the baby has ACTUALLY done recently to cause people to say "Wow, you've really got a boy there, haven't you?"

Received a short haircut.

Reason for hypothesis

Previous to the haircut, the most common question upon meeting him was "Boy or girl?"

Alternate hypothesis

Perhaps the haircut has caused him to behave in a more masculine fashion?

Evidence supporting alternate hypothesis

None. Baby behavior has not noticeably changed.

Evidence supporting initial hypothesis

People are extremely good at finding patterns and then noticing evidence to support those patterns and discarding evidence that does not.

Conclusion

GRRARGH PEOPLE WHY YOU GOTTA BE LIKE THAT.

I remember one time when I was a teenager I destroyed everything in my room. I had a shitload of posters on my walls when I was a teenager, art prints I loved and heavy metal bands, which I had collected over years, and in many cases cut up and reshaped into collages, and one day I ripped them all physically down and destroyed them and tore up a bunch of my drawings and broke a bunch of shit because I was beyond furious and there was nothing else I could do about it. I remember thinking at the time, even as I did it, that I was doing it because I had finally learned that whenever I got angry and I tried to do something about my anger to the source of my anger, everything just got worse for me. And if I could not keep my anger unexpressed, finally it was best to just turn it at myself and destroy my own things. It was all I could do.

Cat Marnell is the acceptable face of female anger. She's cute and skinny and white, but most of all she's self-destructive. She's very open about hating herself. We're comfortable with that. Requires Hate is extremely not comfortable. She does not let us know whether or not she's cute, whether or not she's skinny, she's definitely not white, and she very definitely hates you, not herself. Very much not the acceptable kind of female anger. I don't like Ms. Hate, and I do like Ms. Marnell* - hey, I'm as much a part of this culture as anyone. But if I had a daughter, I'd rather she grow up to be like Ms. Hate than Ms. Marnell. Keep those crotch kicks aimed outwards, love. There will be plenty of people to beat you down without you joining them.


*In talking about these women I'm talking about their public personas as inferred from their writing. I don't know anything about what either of them are actually like as people.

I know I tweeted this already, but these are the best thoughts yet on Brave.

On another note, though, ( spoilers )

Also, that was totally Ancient Scottish Burning Man she fucked off to, right? I wonder if all the [spoilers] in Ancient Scotland who didn't go celebrated the annual Festival of Parking And Being Able To Get Into Restaurants like we do around here.

I find it fascinating how much time and energy people have put into discussing, on freece's blog and at f_fa and elsewhere, whether Laurent is the one who takes it up the butt or not. (Question answered now, obviously.) I think there's a reason for it.

It starts with Laurent's literary pedigree: his father is Lord Peter Wimsey; his brother is Vampire Hunter D; his mother is Francis Crawford of Lymond. You see the issue, here: he had to be an assbaby. Female characters get beat with the Mary Sue stick but there ain't no Sue like a boy named Sue. The only female character I can think of in English literature who shares the family traits of infuriating rightness and superhuman versatility and so on to the same over-the-top degree is Mary Poppins. And she had no children. Bert is a nearly offstage character; the central characters who stand in the same inferior yet fascinated relationship to her as their various lovers and admirers do to Wimsey and Lymond and so on are the Banks children. Which says something about that type of relationship.

So Laurent as a character has no female parent, nor is he himself female, but I put it to you that in Captive Prince he is doing the closest thing possible to playing a female version of that type of character. It isn't quite a female role. If Laurent were a girl the story would be quite different, and I'd love to read that goddamn story. I'm waiting to read that story. I'd love to know what it would be like, because I can't imagine it. Well, I've been trained not to since birth, obviously. Every part of my culture down to the most casual teaches me that a strong and romantically successful woman is not the one who beats everybody - that paper bag princess goes alone into the sunset - she's the one who achieves her natural place two paces to to the rear of her just slightly more awesome man.

(And this takes me back to hradzka and others complaining that women are using gay men to tell their stories, and how that makes me want to laugh until I fall off the sofa. Why yes, we've been trained since birth that all the stories worth telling are about men, and now we tell our stories using men, and you complain? Give it up. Like this commenter complaining to yuki_onna that people are appropriating! British-Celtic! culture! As if it somehow just happened that in America I grew up never hearing any Olmec or Aztec myths but I sure did learn Scottish and Welsh and Irish and English fairy tales and fantasy stories? As if it were accidental that all the fantasy I grew up reading was set in Vaguely Europe, that I was taught to dream of dragons? Ha! No. Europe imposed its culture on everybody: now it's ours too. If you shove something down people's throats, it's too late to demand it back when they chew and swallow.)

In the meantime, Laurent sounds like a transitional object (another thing I learned about from Are You My Mother?:) it's not you, but it's not not-you, either. Like Toni Morrison's famous characterization of Bill Clinton as the first black president. Clinton wasn't black. But, in retrospect, he was a step on the way to Obama.

So the question of whether Laurent tops or bottoms is at least a little bit the question of to what degree he is a female character, and furthermore, the question of how female a female version of his role gets to be. Because Laurent is definitely cool. He's a badass; he's openly the most capable person in four countries. And the question is: to be a cool, capable badass, do you have to top? Do you have to take the male role in bed? Does it lessen the character if he likes to get fucked? Bitchy Jones addressed this in her complaint about how het female doms, if they are ever even acknowledged, are always supposed to be all about pegging their male subs. That's an activity in which the woman's pleasure is mostly symbolic. There's nothing wrong with it; but why is it the sine qua non of female sexual dominance? It would be as if male doms were overwhelmingly known to most favor keeping their pants on and going down on their female subs, eschewing any activity that actually involved their penis. To understate the obvious: that's not the way male sexuality is constructed. So it was a very interesting question whether Laurent in his hermaphroditic role would perpetuate his dominance by being the fucker rather than the fuckee, or whether he would somehow try to reconcile a very male type of dominance with a female type of sexuality.

It occurs to me that one of the annoying things about the GOP's war on women is that I miss feeling like Sheri Tepper was over the top.

Peanut butter chicken: the period after you have bought the all-natural peanut butter, but before you can actually eat the all-natural peanut butter, because the all-natural peanut butter is sitting in the kitchen waiting to see who is going to give in and stir it.

I feel for you guys who live alone, I surely do. Life must be so empty without this kind of gamesmanship lending it quotidian color and interest.

Actually it occurs to me that this is a pretty good example of the appeal of traditional gender roles. If it were my job to stir the peanut butter, on account of how I am a woman and it is a kitchen thing, well I would be annoyed at always having to be the one to get peanut butter all over myself and everything and clean it up. BUT it would mean that I could eat the peanut butter right away. Plus I would not have to devote any mental cycles to deciding whether I wanted to be the one to give in and stir the peanut butter. It would just be an automatic thing. So there would be something in it for me. And of course it would be great for Mr. E, automatic pre-stirred peanut butter. >XP

And then of course the mindful alternative would be that we sit down and discuss our peanut butter roles, should we take turns, how would we keep track, should it be the person who bought it, would that just encourage us to never buy any peanut butter, who eats more peanut butter, maybe we should trade it off with another chore so that one person would be the peanut butter stirrer and that person would never have to return the deposit bottles, honestly even thinking about this level of negotiation makes me want to eat my own head.

So peanut butter chicken it is. Maybe I should call it satay.

I own a purse, two skirts, and a dress! And I have been wearing them! I have leveled up in Girl.

I got my skirts from Effie's Heart. They only go up to size XL (about a 14-16?) but if you can fit into that, they have some nice stuff. And sales. I got this skirt for a total of $18 with discount!

A-line skirts are nice because if they're at least knee-length then no one is seeing your underwear no matter how you sit. Unfortunately they are just not as warm as pants. On the other hand, if you have tights that fit, then my GOD they are comfy.

When I decided to get a purse I started looking around at people's bags and it's one of those things that I never noticed before but when I started thinking about it, wow, people carry a lot of bags. Well, probably a lot of it is also that I walk around and use public transport. Drivers probably just haul shit around in their cars. But people walking around need all kinds of bags. You know what's amazing to me? Women who carry around purses so big that they could have a purse dog in there and no one would ever know except that their purse dog could be a German Shepherd. If I were carrying around one of those purses I would be all leaning to the side and huffing and puffing. But they're just casually swinging it along with the other bag they're probably carrying. They clearly carry that purse every single day, they're so used to it. What do they have in there? What 3 cubic meters of stuff do you need with you every single day?

So I've been thinking more about makeup, on account of stuff like this. And I go back to, if you dress butch then not wearing makeup is a no-brainer; makeup isn't very butch. But if you dress femme and don't wear makeup, then do you look like you're too hippie to or not organized enough to? Of course, Corporette is a blog for lawyers; my workplace is much more casual. But on the third hand, I got called "young lady" the other day. In a joking manner, but still - I'm about to be 37. That ain't right. Anyway, I haven't started wearing makeup, but I thought I'd do some research in case I decided I wanted to. So I googled "minimal makeup". What I found was articles on how the no makeup look is the hot look right now and how to achieve it for which you will apparently need three separate types of concealer. THE POINT, YOU HAVE MISSED IT.

Good things about wearing a purse: you don't have to keep transferring shit between your pockets; much less chance of accidentally running chapstick through the wash with your clothes; when going through security such as at the airport or, just to pick a random example, when spending the day with your tiny son at the emergency passport center (long story), it is much easier to just throw a purse on the conveyor belt than it is to dig every last random penny and scrap of lint out of your various pockets.

Bad things about wearing a purse: you don't. That is, you wear it when you're out, but you don't wear it around the house or the office. This is really awkward! I keep my lip gloss in my purse now, but now that means I don't have it with me every time I go to the bathroom, which means my lips are all chapped because I don't have the opportunity to reapply it when I go to the bathroom! And what about having your phone around? Do you just not answer your cell phone when you're at home cause you can't hear it cause it's in the other room in your purse? When you're stuck in the bathroom, do you just read shampoo bottles like it's 1998? Skirt-wearing people who are used to not having pockets: how do you deal with this? You have to wear a watch still, right?

I've been feeling surprisingly interested in being more femme lately!

I mean, I guess in a way it's not surprising, and that way is that I get bored very easily. My hairdresser mentioned last time I saw him that I've probably had eight different hairstyles in the time he's been cutting my hair where most of his other clients have had one or two. Other stuff that might be going on:

1) I pooped out a baby! And now I am feeding him from my boobs! I am pretty sure that somewhere in my brain biological determinism is going "huh, now we are a mama...I guess we should step up our female game?"

2) I have been reading sparkymonster and her cronies geek out about fabulous eyeshadow and such over Twitter and, you know, it sounds like fun! I mean, I have always liked costume and elaborate clothes. I wear a lot of hats!. See above re: inconstancy, I have had more butch periods and more femme periods in my life, but if I had to pick my favorite overall gender presentation or the one that has appealed to me most throughout my life, I would have to say: foppish. If I could choose what I would look like it would probably be Adam Ant. Oh, sorry, under-35s: like Captain Jack Sparrow, but with fewer bodily parasites.

3) I've been feeling ugly, and lord knows that the fastest way for me to get some strokes for my appearance is to conform more to gender rules. And it would be so much easier to be more femmey. (In some ways. In other ways, it's so nice to have stuff that I just handwave and say "that does not apply to me because of my gender presentation, thank you." Things like leg depilation. I would have to deal with that again, and damn is that not appealing.)

4) It might be as simple as the fact that I am growing out my hair, actually.

But see, there's just one of the many problems with this idea: the whole reason I am growing out my hair is that short hair only looks good if you get it cut regularly, and it's much harder to get the time to do that right now, so I thought I'd try to get a haircut that would be more forgiving! I have no time! It's not a good point in my life to get curious about makeup! If I have ten minutes that I could spend zerberting the baby, or sleeping, or fucking around on the internet, or reading, or drawing on my eyelids: YOU LOSE, EYELIDS.

I don't know. I have a wedding to go to this month, and then there are holiday parties, and I need something to wear, because none of my pre-pregnancy tops fit right anymore...maybe I will buy a dress and see how it goes? Igigi is a good place to buy dresses, right? Fatshionistas, help me out - where should I be looking? Also, shit, if I wear a dress, I'll need a purse, right? They don't have pockets? Where's a good place to get a purse from?

Sady Doyle tweeted about feminists being killjoys, and... and...



I HAVE NO EXCUSE OKAY