Hillary Clinton’s speech in Beijing at the UN Women’s Conference in 1995. It gives me that righteous quiver.
I’ve been reading bell hooks‘s Killing Rage: Ending Racism. It’s a slow read for me because it’s a topic about which I’m almost completely ignorant, and her writing is dense. Each essay requires at least a couple readings. In “Whiteness in the Black Imagination”, she writes:
Some white people may even imagine there is no representation of whiteness in the black imagination, especially one based on concrete observation or mythic conjecture. They think they are seen by black folks only as they want to appear. Ideologically, the rhetoric of white supremacy supplies a fantasy of whiteness. Described in Richard Dyer’s essay, “White,” this fantasy makes whiteness synonymous with goodness:
“Power in contemporary society habitually passes itself off as embodied in the normal as opposed to the superior. This is common to all forms of power, but it works in a peculiarly seductive way with whiteness, because of the way it seems rooted in common sense thought, in things other than ethnic difference… Thus it is said (even in liberal textbooks) that there are inevitable associations of white with light and therefore safety, and black with dark and therefore danger, and that this explains racism (whereas one might well argue about the safety of the cover of darkness, and the danger of the exposure to the light); again, and with more justice, people point to the Jewish and Christian use of white and black to symbolize good and evil, as carried still in such expressions as ‘a black mark,’ ‘white magic,’ ‘to blacken the character’ and so on. Socialized to believe the fantasy, that whiteness represents goodness and all that is benign and non-threatening, many white people assume this is the way black people conceptualize whiteness. They do not imagine that the way whiteness makes its presence felt in black life, most ofte
n as terrorizing imposition, as power that wounds, hurts, tortures, is a reality that disrupts the fantasy of whiteness representing goodness.“
Collectively black people remain rather silent about representations of whiteness in the black imagination. As in the old days of racial segregation where black folks learned to “wear the mask,” many of us pretend to be comfortable in the face of whiteness only to turn our backs and give expression to deep levels of discomfort. Especially talked about is the representation of whiteness as terrorizing… I want to focus on that representation of whiteness that is not formed in reaction to stereotypes but emerges as a response to the traumatic pain and anguish that remains a consequence of white racist domination, a psychic state that informs and shapes the way black folks “see” whiteness.
bell hooks, in The Will to Change, p. 113-115:
Many of the New Age models created by men reconfigure old sexist paradigms while making it seem as thought they are offering a different script of gender relations. Often the men’s movement resisted macho patriarchal models while upholding a vision of benevolent patriarchy, one in which the father is the ruler who rules with tenderness and kindness, but he is still in control…
Clearly men need new models of self-assertion that do not require construction of the enemy “other”, be it a woman or the symbolic feminine, for them to define themselves against…
Undoubtedly, one of the first revolutionary acts of visionary feminism must be to restore maleness and masculinity as an ethical biological category divorced from the dominator model… we must define maleness as a state of being rather than as performance. Male being, maleness, masculinity must stand for the essential core goodness of self, of the human body that has a penis. Many of the critics who have written about masculinity suggest that we need to do away with the term, that we need “an end to manhood.” Yet such a stance furthers the notion that there is something inherently evil, bad, or unworthy about maleness.
It is a stance that seems more a reaction to patriarchal masculinity than a creative loving response that can separate maleness and manhood from all the identifying traits patriarchy has imposed on the self who has a penis. Our work of love should be to reclaim masculinity and not allow it to be held hostage to patriarchal domination… those of us who committing to ending patriarchy can touch real men where they live, not by demanding that they give up manhood of maleness, but by asking that they allow its meaning to be transformed, that they become disloyal to patriarchal masculinity in order to find a place for the masculine that does not make it synonymous with domination or the will to do violence.
J. once wrote to me, “So if Kate is an S/M Gender Outlaw, who was once a transgendered lesbian woman born into a body with a penis, and I think she’s hot, what does that make me?“
Kate’s book Gender Outlaw was my introduction to queer/feminist thought, and it changed everything. From chapter 11:
It’s time to call the persistent clash of genders what it really is: a class conflict within a dangerously invisible and pervasive cult-like class system. Gender is indeed a group, a club, a church–but it operates as a class system, pervasively, throughout culture.
The continued oppression of women proves only that in any binary there’s going to be one up and one down. The struggle for equal rights must include the struggle to dismantle the binary.
I got real curious about my position as former-man and not-quite-woman. Where did that place me in the gender/ class struggle that was daily spinning itself out in our culture?…
In the either/or gender class system we call male and female, the structure of one-up, one-down fulfills he requisite for a power imbalance… Without the structure of the bi-polar gender system, the power dynamic between men and women shatters. People would not have gender to use as a hierarchical framework, and nearly half the members of the bipolar gender system would probably be at quite a loss… What I’m talking about is what’s been called “male privilege.” And I think this is the crux of the gender issue; this is what’s holding gender in place: people who have and exert male privilege just don’t want to give it up. I think that male privilege is the glue that holds the system together.
People ask what it was like to have had the kind of privilege, what it was like to lose it, why in the world did I give it up. To have it was like taking drugs, to get rid of it was like kicking a habit. I gave it up because it was destroying me and the people I loved.
“Male privilege” is assuming one has the right to occupy any space or person by whatever means, with or without permission. It’s a sense of entitlement that’s unique to those who have been raised male in most cultures–it’s notably absent in most girls and women. Male privilege is not something that’s given to men in this culture; it’s something that men take… Combine male privilege with capitalism (which rewards greed and acquisition) and the mass media (which, owned by capitalists, highlights only the rewards of acquisition and makes invisible its penalties), and you have a juggernaut that needs stopping by any means…. Male privilege is, in a word, violence….
For me, I just wasn’t aware of any general impunity when I had it. I can understand men looking baffled when women accuse them of exercising male privilege…
I didn’t “lose” my male privilege so much as I made a conscious decision to get rid of it, and I didn’t get rid of it all at once; it’s an attitude that is insidiously pervasive. Right now the point where my vestigial privilege surfaces is when I’m driving: I can be quite a terror. Sigh.
It took my becoming a woman to discover my “male behavior”–that is, exhibiting male privilege. When I was first coming out, I used to hang out mostly with women. Any act of mine that was learned male behavior stuck out like a sore thumb. Things like leaping up and taking charge, even when it wasn’t called for; things like using a conversation like a sledge hammer; things like assuming everyone owed me special consideration for my journey through a gender change–I still shudder at my arrogance. Some might say none of that’s male. Well, I learned it when I was a guy, and I was the only one exhibiting that behavior when I was in the company of women, so if it’s not exclusively male, it’s real close…
I noticed I didn’t have much remaining male privilege by the slow dawning of peacefulness in my life. That may sound flaky, but the fact is I’m nowhere near as territorial and possessive as I used to be… I use force infrequently now. For me that’s a perk of having gotten rid of male privilege. The shortcomings are obvious: lower pay, less security, more fear on the streets, less opportunity in the job market. All those drawbacks made me look at the value of what I’d lost. Do I really want to take part in a culture that places a higher value on greed and acquisition than on peace and shared growth?
I’m not sure how much of her take on gender I agree with, though when I first read it (five years ago?) it really resonated. Now, though, I read it more critically, and it seems like she’s leaving the responsibility to changing/ fixing things up to men–but the rest of us can’t just sit around waiting for men to give up privilege! And in this chapter Kate ignores how much women are indoctrinated into deferring to men, discounting themselves, perpetuating patriarchy, the confusion between assertion and aggression, passivity and receptivity… The whole phenomenon of internalized misogyny which must be addressed.
***
Regardless of my criticisms now, when I heard her speak in college, she spoke with tremendous honesty and compassion. “Do whatever you need to do to make live worth living,” she told us. “Whether it is immoral, illegal, self-injurious. Just don’t be mean. I’ll do your time in hell for you.” And then she gave us these cards, as a promise. As a friend in the dark.
From David Lambkin’s The Hanging Tree:
In contrast, Tregallion enhanced my life. For the first time I knew a love that was at once profound and uncomplicated…
He set me free. Even Marion and her happy acceptance of homoerotic passion had not released me as Tregallion did. His love seemed entirely unconditional. He accepted me as I was, leg and all, and loved me heart-whole. I remember him saying once, quaintly: “I’m good at love. I love long and hard and solid. I can out-love anyone.”
He was the only man I’ve ever met who had freed himself from his past. His love was not driven by fashionable psychoses: early nipple deprivation, an unfair share of nourishing breasts or frustrated Oedipal longings. I was no mother figure burdened by his chaotic infantile needs. I carried for him no rag-tag baggage of psychological projections. He loved me: unreservedly and deeply. And I loved him back.
I Come Home Wanting To Touch Everyone
The dogs greet me, I descend
into their world of fur and tongues
and then my wife and I embrace
as if we’d just closed the door
in a motel, our two girls slip in
between us and we’re all saying
each other’s names and the dogs
Buster and Sundown are on their hind legs,
people-style, seeking more love.
I’ve come home wanting to touch
everyone, everything; usually I turn
the key and they’re all lost
in food or homework, even the dogs
are preoccupied with themselves,
I desire only to ease
back in, the mail, a drink,
but tonight the body-hungers have sent out
their long-range signals
or love itself has risen
from its squalor of neglect.
Everytime the kids turn their backs
I touch my wife’s breasts
and when she checks the dinner
the unfriendly cat on the dishwasher
wants to rub heads, starts to speak
with his little motor and violin–
everything, everyone is intelligible
in the language of touch,
and we sit down to dinner inarticulate
as blood, all difficulties postponed
because the weather is so good.–Stephen Dunn
Tara Brach says that healing comes when we go back to a pain with a new resource, be it a new understanding, a new capacity to sit with what’s difficult, or the support of someone you trust. She’s also fond of quoting a friend of hers: “My mind is like a bad neighborhood: I don’t like going there alone.”
Buddhist teachers, as well as practitioners of and adherents to various other psychological theories, talk about the need to face what is difficult. This is summed up in slogans like, “The only way out is through,” or “The way out of the pain is the pain,” and “What you resist, persists.” And there is a lot of truth to this. For more minor mental aches and pains, simply turning towards the thing with a neutral or curious awareness and having the brief, unpleasant experience of it can be enough to dissolve or digest it.
But what about the bigger losses, shames, regrets, horrors, traumas, rages? A friend of mine thinks of it this way, using loss as the example: any loss comes with a finite amount of pain to be metabolized. And each time a wave of grief, panic, guilt arises around The Loss and comes into our awareness, if we can hold it well, let it come up and pass, we metabolize that piece of it. Audre Lorde writes about this so poignantly in The Cancer Journals:
“I must let this pain flow through me and move on. If I resist or try to stop it, it will detonate inside me, shatter me, splatter my pieces against ever wall and person I touch.”
Continuing on my friend’s theory, if we turn away from it, or can’t hold it well, it 
just goes back to the pile and will come up again until we can give it what it needs to be digested. In other words, it’s not useful to say: I’m just going to stay present with whatever comes up, no matter what. Opening to pain is of little or no use if you don’t know how to relax mentally and let the pain flow through as Audre describes, or how to help your body stay calm. Or if you can’t do it without injuring yourself with your own cruel judgment–the bigger pains require an explicitly gentle, kind presence. Pema Chodron writes in The Places That Scare You:
“The irony is that what we most want to avoid in our lives is crucial to awakening bodhicitta. These juicy emotional spots are where a warrior gains wisdom and compassion. Of course, we’ll want to get out of those spots far more often than we’ll want to stay. That’s why self-compassion and courage are vital. Staying with pain without loving-kindness is just warfare.”
—–
It comes back, again, to the wisdom of working at the edges. The example of the body is a useful metaphor: you want to do a split even though normally your hamstrings are so tight that you can’t touch your toes. If you force your body into the split, you just end up hurting yourself. Instead, you’ve got to work on the flexibility by going to the point where it starts to feel uncomfortable and hanging out there, gently reaching a little farther, listening to your internal feedback. And sometimes the best course is not try harder, but try softer.
From Norm Fischer:
“…Starting from Greek philosophy, there is a distinction between happiness and the good. Happiness is seen as less important than doing what is good or right. Happiness is self centered and goodness is connected to truth, to God, and so on. These things are usually in conflict, so we sacrifice our happiness to do the right or good thing. Again, this distinction is unknown in Buddhism. There is no distinction between the good and happiness. In fact, the only way to be happy is to be in tune with the good. For example, if you are having pleasure at the expense of another individual, this is not really happiness. What makes you happy is to be loving and giving towards others, and being attuned to others. Your interests cannot be teased apart from the interests of others. We come to see this through our practice. The basis of all this is awareness, of being sensitively present with your own experience…”
Jack puts it in Christian terms:
”…All your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.”
More concisely:
“Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.” – Elbert Hubbard
“When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad.” – Abe Lincoln
A dear friend wrote to me about feeling that vanilla sex was inadequate and though he’s not particularly oriented towards BDSM, he’s decided to start exploring it to expand his sexual repetoire. He writes:
I’m under the impression (perhaps misguided) that BDSM has a lot to do with power imbalances, anger, humiliation. I appreciate that it’s probably more complicated than that, but those drives aren’t really my deal… I’m also recently aware (via facebook) that some psychologists are considing recognizing five human experiences (interest, gratitude, confusion, elevation, pride) as emotional responses on par with the regular ones. So it seems that I could start looking into some kind of “topping” practice with a focus on aesthetic / emotional responses that are different from the ones I think of as being specific to BDSM.
I replied:
From my limited experience:Pain is different from harm. Whether the two coincide often has to do with intention or context–the pain felt during childbirth is processed and experienced differently (and usually not as psychic or emotional harm, even if the body is injured) whereas an equal amount of physical pain felt when being tortured in someone’s basement or in a POW camp I would guess is much more likely to be harmful.In less dramatic senses, I think there is more risk of harm when we are acting out of any sort of malice, retributive anger, hatred, resentment, defensiveness, aggression–anything that Yoda would put on the dark side of the force.This purtains to kink in that, when it is done in a “safe, sane, consensual” manner, one of the intentions may be to cause pain–physical or emotional–but not to harm. Anyone who wants to do you lasting damage isn’t someone that it would be healthy for most people to get kinky with. A good top, when you are not “playing” with power or other kink stuff but doing something more serious, is more like a spiritual guide, knowing when to push and when to slow down, open to feedback, offering support and encouragement when necessary, with steady love beneath whatever else is going on or whatever the expression of it is (you know I don’t necessarily mean romantic love). And in this context, the sub has the opportunity to experience and confront some of the things we struggle most with as humans– perhaps, physical pain, which she will learn is easiest when one surrendors to it or accepts it wholely; mentally, humiliation–which can be an joyful release from selfhood, an entry into intense trance states, a way of taking the ego and breaking it against a rock, failure or guilt–which, in going into fully in the safety of the setting she will learn to fear less in daily life, and to meet fully when it arises, her psychic and physical limitiations–which may help release her from some of the perfectionism conditioned into us by our culture, fear–which she will become intimate with and learn to and enjoy, create for herself the tool of imbuing the terrible with the erotic thus helping her to face it, to make it bearable.It is a grounds, perhaps most of all, for giving and recieving unconditional love. There is incredible risk on both sides to exposing “shadow” sides, in asking for obedience or giving it, in giving a command or following it. The scene can exist only when both parties conspire together, are in it together. And it is amazing, to humiliate oneself completely in front of someone, to for a period of time exist in a state of utter trust and let someone cause you pain without trying to escape, and instead of leaving, the person stays, appreciates, loves you all the more. And the top, I would guess, has a reciprocal experience–to demand, inflict, command, humiliate, and still be loved. It’s breath-taking, isn’t it?The difference between this and actual abuse has much to do with explicit consent and intention. Abuse often comes from intentions to harm, defend, protect, intimidate. Kink, in good situations, comes from intentions to expand and open emotionally and experientially, to achieve intimacy, to give and recieve love, and often includes inflicting pain in the service of these things.Of course some people use kink to channel hatred of various sorts, or to put themselves in harm’s (rather than pain’s) way, and in those scenarios, there is great potential to damage all involved. But in the best cases, sex can become a pretext, a means, a background, or simply a component of a deeply intimate, alchemical process.
To become a fully functioning adult, one moves developmentally from being dependent to being independent to being interdependent. Stephen Covey (1989) calls it the maturity continuum, and John Bradshaw (1988) refers to it as becoming whole. Regardless of the terminology, it basically means moving from being dependent on others to being able to work together with other adults, each independent of the other, but jointly, as equal partners.
Simply put, an individual operating in a dysfunctional setting is often forced to take an adult role early, and then as an adult, is literally caught between being dependent and being independent. So one will see this fierce independence coupled with a crippling dependence that weakens the person to the point that he/she has few emotional resources. This roller-coaster ride up and down between dependence and independence takes a heavy toll. Bradshaw and others refer to this constant fluctuation between dependence and independence as co-dependency.
Ruby K. Payne, A Framework For Understanding Poverty
