Fuck (H)

I remember the thrill of saying it as a kid–the word held a kind of power kids weren’t allowed to have, and saying it felt strong. It wasn’t about rebellion; it was about being a real person, being taken seriously, that whole horrible struggle to be seen and heard.

I bristled at it later used to refer to sex, but then came to like it around the same time I began to pursue (and enjoy) casual sex. It was a way to talk about sex that meant that it was casual, my coolness and flippancy denoting what I felt as power in the form of invulnerability. It was also about not letting a word scare me, using it so I wouldn’t be sensitive to it (and thus risking being hurt).

But this summer I read a passage by John Stoltenberg that keeps arresting me. I think of Audre writing about how learning can be incited, and it is starting to feel like this: ideas enter my mind, grow, compel and disturb me, and cannot be unrooted. It is hard to un-see. I don’t have the Stoltenberg passage–I’ll amend this when I’m back in California–but he points out how troublesome fuck is. That the same word is used to mean sex as is used to mean messed up (fucked up), ruined (it’s totally fucked), beat up (they fucked him/her up), as a usually negative exclamation (fuck!), an expression of giving up/in (aww, fuck it), taken advantage of (fucked over, get fucked by), as an order to go away (fuck off), and as one of our culture’s ultimate verbal expressions of contempt and disrespect (fuck you). If you’re tempted to call it a fluke, he reminds the reader of the similar ways screw is used.

HELLO. You can’t really get more rape culture than equating sex with violence and/or domination.

This post on tumblr brought the issue to mind again this morning:

How often do you use “fuck you” or hear someone else say “fuck you”? I’m guilty of it, I do it quite often. I’m always spewing out “fuck that!” or “fuck hate!” or “fuck (insert unpleasant concept/thing/person here)” But only lately have I begun to analyze my use of that language. “Fuck” represents the act or acts of having sex, intercourse, oral, WHATEVER. Sex. When we apply that to things like “fuck you,” and especially when we say “fuck you” because we don’t like something/someone, we are implying that through fucking someone we can ruin it/get rid of it. We are implying that we are going to do something that will be unpleasant, undesirable, and harmful to someone else in the hopes that it will make them upset or make them disappear. If my nose is working correctly, I think I smell a pot of rape culture brewing up. This is what rape culture is: perpetuating and implementing violence through sex. We are going to hurt people through sex, whether it being physically, mentally, or emotionally. And you can say, “hey it’s just a word” but it’s not. We must treat this like we’d treat any other racist, sexist, heterosexist, anti-trans, xenophobic, etc slur out there. By saying things like “fuck prop 8” or “fuck racism” we are using a tool that rape culture apologists use; we are negatively sexualizing unpleasant things with the mentality that we are combating inequality, hatred, and overall bad things. But we are simply using violence. We are implying that it is okay to apply violence through sex to get rid of something or someone. It is not okay. Saying “fuck you” is not okay.

This has been incubated in my brain  a few months now, and I keep bringing up this question with Max–is it best to claim the word for one meaning (violence) or the other (sex)? If so, which one? Do we drop it all together? Thoughts?

Addendum: The Warrior (H)

I’ve been reading a great blog written by a friend-of-a-friend, and generally I appreciate her insight but was a little taken a back by a couple entries about “warriors“. The warrior is one of the male archetypes that our culture most glorifies and celebrates, which is by (a quarter of an inch of) extension celebrating the will to power and the will to do violence. But the idea that you can condone or celebrate that out there and not bring it back here just doesn’t make sense–not that it’s okay to do violence out there, either.

This is from Shepherd Bliss’s essay, “My War Story“:

The warrior image has damaged us. As we move into the twenty-first century we need to mature beyond wars and warriors. I disagree with those men’s movement writers and activists who speak so highly of the warrior. I appreciate some of his traits–like courage, teamwork, loyalty–but the archetype itself is bankrupt at this point in history. We surely need guardians, boundary-setters, husbandmen, and citizens. If we are to survive on this planet, so threatened by war and warriors, we must get beyond the obsolete archetype of the warrior and value images such as the peacemaker, the partner, and the husbandman who cares for the earth and animals.

Letting go of a rape culture, hierarchy, violence, means celebrating men who fill roles other than “the warrior”. The process of self-re-creation and the revolutions in self-imaging are greatly supported by alternate images and archetypes that aver our new aspirations. After all, the brain doesn’t get rid of neural pathways, but it can create new ones.

So–Yes! Guardians, boundary-setters, husbandmen. I especially like the last, the farmer (in my mind, vegetable farmer) who tends the land, nurtures growth, knows the balance of active and receptive, work and rest, shows patience, persistence. This concept of tending is key–caring for, supporting, rather than controlling or forcing. And what about the dancer who has an exquisite ability to respond to circumstance, bending when the moment calls for it, and staying firm when that is what is needed? The dancer works with energy, resilience, and grace; grace being, as Pablo puts it, “… the balancing opposite of power. It means rolling away and landing on your feet instead of bruised ribs, and small hand movements letting a stronger person tie themselves up when they try to hit you.” In other words, resilience, self-protection and disarmament that are firm and assertive, but not aggressive. And there is the healer, touching, mending, with the courage to open to great suffering. Again this theme of working with, supporting, rather than controlling, or being even a “benevolent patriarch”. And there is the poet whose work is the honoring of the inner life and creation of language; the teacher who is a guide to and within new knowledge; the bread-maker who creates and then relinquishes his creation, day after day, to nourish self and others. These are just a few in a plethora of alternative roles we can imagine self-actualized people of any gender filling–the seeker, the student, the scientist, the lover, to name a few more. Showcasing and celebrating these roles, creating them in our conceptual, social, and visual imaginations, is one important way that art and social media can work as a forces for positive social change.

intro: Kate Bornstein (H)

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.

The Indefensible Apathy (I)

I’ve oftentimes heard the argument that someone eats meat because whatever the argument against it, they don’t care. I get this argument a lot because somehow people, once they know I’m a vegan, think that I’m being vegan at them. That my diet is an affront to theirs. That I’m politically vegan.

And I am, I guess, but not more than I’m a pacifist  at them. I tend to use Hope’s stance, “I’m not going to start the debate about meat, but if you start it, I will win it.”

People have used the argument many times in defense of vegetarianism, “if slaughterhouses had glass walls we’d all be vegetarians.” Which is ludicrous; there are people employed in slaughterhouses aren’t there? The places aren’t run by Judas cows. The idea is that the world is populated entirely by bleedings hearts, but most of them don’t know they’re bleeding hearts.

First off, I do not defend vegetarianism. Vegetarianism and veganism are each an inaction; it is a food you choose to not consume. If a chicken would peck on my door and lop its head off, it might be rude of me not to eat it. And it is true that avoiding meat and meat products is a pain in the ass. But I see no sense in having to defend an inaction where there is no real reason to take that action in the first place. I put the onus on the meat eater: an animal is killed so that it may end up on your plate. Defend yourself.

There are a series of arguments here. One is that vegetables are also alive, something has to die unless you photosynthesize, what’s the difference between an animal and a plant? This takes the stance, I assume, of the divine spark that is in all living things, and as an atheist I exempt myself from that. A plant possesses no central nervous system, and if we believe that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, I can’t find any evidence of consciousness in a brainless form. I see no evidence that they feel pain or fear. I read a book that said they’d found a way to measure the consciousness of plants, and proved that plants feel pain, but it contained no documentation, and when it started namedropping leaders in the Church Of Scientology I stopped reading. Plants are alive by the classification that we call something alive, but I see no argument for sentience.

Someone once argued to me that no one can know anything about the world; everyone’s perspective is different, which means there is no objective reality, which means there is no objective morality, so fuck off with morality completely. We can’t even be sure anything really exists. These conversations usually happen on the beach around a bonfire and involve brandy and/or spliffs. To this I say: then why do anything? If we say the world is possibly an illusion, then there are only two ways to interpret that: assume the world exists as we see it, acknowledging it might not, or assume that it does not exist as we see it. Option One means live the same way we did before. Option Two means curling up in a room and assuming absolutely nothing exists. You don’t get to say the beef patty exists because it makes you happy and choose to assume the suffering that it came from does not.

Some people claim that fish don’t have feelings. Aside from the idiocy there (who the fuck proved that? what did that test look like? who the fuck funded that research?), does the inability to feel pain mean you have no right to life? There are occasionally humans with no pain centers in the brain, who can’t leave a controlled environment because their body won’t feel discomfort in a warmer environment and consequentially won’t sweat. Obviously these humans deserve to live. And accepting the unlikely argument that a fish feels no pain, if you attempt to kill a fish in a way where it is aware its life is threatened, it will rapidly swim away. It can very clearly show a desire to go on living, and exhibit that, if not pain, it can feel fear. Do we only preserve life to avoid pain?

And once my father argued that he knew in his heart that a human has a soul and an animal does not. And as soon as he can give me any substantive way to define what a soul is and who has one, I’ll give credence to the argument.

But all these arguments can be dispelled much more succinctly, because they’re all the same argument. They’re an attempt to poke a hole in the defense of vegetarianism, the same way fundies try to disprove evolution. None of these is an argument in favor of meat consumption. The question goes unanswered: an animal is dying so that you can eat it. Why?

And there is only one answer, which is “I like the taste.” There’s no longer any reasonable argument for the health value of meat. A vegan has a 4% chance of dying of heart disease, while a meat-eater has a 50% chance. There is no vital nutrient gotten from meat that can’t be gotten from a plant, and if gotten from a plant there is less fat, less cholesterol, lower acidity, and so on. “I like the taste” ultimately comes down to a euphemistic way of saying “I do not care about the suffering of animals.” This is the only real argument in defense of eating animals. An animal dies unnecessarily for a human’s pleasure in eating it because the human does not care about the animal’s suffering.

If a murderer says on the stand that they killed 15 people because they simply felt no empathy for those people, we still send them to jail. This is not K-Pax (“every living thing in the universe knows the difference between right and wrong”). If we felt we could trust everyone’s heart to be their guide, we wouldn’t write laws.

Now: I’m making an argument against meat-consumption, but that’s only because it’s most often on my mind. But my real stance is this: morality cannot be a question of emotions. We can’t say that something is ethical because it “feels” right or unethical because it “feels” wrong. The fact that I’ve never met anyone in Iran and therefore feel no empathy for Iranians does not justify bombing Iran. I may spend days or weeks or months not giving a shit about animals, but I won’t eat meat at those times, because emotions aside I can’t defend it.

I am saying that apathy is never a defense. I am saying this: we must always and at all times be rational beings, and base our code of ethics on that. That’s why every homophobe in the world should support gay marriage, because the marriage ban is indefensible by any rational argument. And it sure as hell is why we should stop fucking bombing people, please and thank you.

Dead, with Possessive Pronouns (H)

Jack writes:

There’s no denying that in some sense I ‘feel better,’ and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one’s unhappiness. I’ve read about that in books, but I never dreamed I should feel it myself. I am sure H. wouldn’t approve of it. She’d tell me not to be a fool. So I’m pretty certain, would God. What is behind it?

Partly, no doubt, vanity. We want to prove to ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job. But that’s not the whole of the explanation.

I think there is also a confusion. We don’t really want grief, in its first agonies, to be prolonged: nobody could. But we want something else of which grief is a frequent symptom, and then we confuse the symptom with the thing itself. I wrote the other night that bereavement is not the truncation of married love but one of its regular phases–like the honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through that phase too. If it hurts (and it certainly will) we accept the pains as a necessary part of this phase. We don’t want to escape them at the price of desertion or divorce. Killing the dead a second time. We were one flesh. Now that it has been cut in two, we don’t want to pretend that it is whole and complete. We will be still married, still in love. Therefore we shall still ache. But we are not at all–if we understand ourselves–seeking the aches for their own sake. The less of them the better, so long as the marriage is preserved. And the more joy there can be in the marriage between dead and living, the better. The better in every way. For, as I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow–getting into my morning bath is usually one of them–that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic.

The dead have no preferences, so what could we possibly owe them? But the dead and my, your, our dead are two very different things.

Vampires & Transformation (H)

Halloween night. Her face and hands are grayed with make-up and we’ve been talking much of the evening. I tell her I like her necklace, and she takes it off, puts it around my neck, a gift. And then, hours later, I’m curled up in a chair, trying to stay awake, half-listening to the conversation in the room, and I am surprised to hear her say, “Some people are just fucking vampires. I let my friends know that, you know, when I’m with them, I’m with them, but if I’m not there, not to count on anything. But people just want things from you like vampires.”

In my mind, the rememberance of it is closely followed by the rebuttal of the Sufi saying: “Do not become bitter because you are not equal to the magnitude of suffering with which you have been entrusted…” I find my mind throwing this saying at me again and again when my own stinginess and irritation arise; a call to remember that the source of tension is not so much in the person asking for something, but my lack of inclination or capacity to give.

When someone asks us for something or reveals a wound, they are offering us their vulnerability, giving us a gift of trust and giving us a chance to be worthy of it. The other’s implied belief in our goodness gives us more confidence in our goodness, or opens up for us the possibility of our goodness, and those things can bridge the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Sharon Salzberg writes about “reteaching a thing its loveliness”. When people come to us with their wounds or a request for compassion, the interaction can serve as mirror where we can see our stinginess or aversion, or where we can act with generosity and see our own loveliness.

In “The Power and Meaning of Love,” Thomas Merton touches on the power of love to transform the one giving it (who perhaps learns that he is, indeed, capable of kindness ) as well as the one receiving it (who perhaps learns that he is not undeserving of love or unlovable):

“One of the themes that has constantly recurred throughout this article is that corrupt forms of love wait for the neighbor to ‘become a worthy object of love’ before actually loving him… Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love; and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbor worthy if anything can.”

Jean Vanier, too, touches on the idea that when we give someone an opportunity to act with greater love, or at least less harm, instead of assuming the worst, there is the potential for transformation:

“I have, on the other hand, some experience of nonviolence as a means of easing violence in people… If attention is paid in a positive way and welcoming way, responding to violence not with violence but with gentleness and understanding, then violence very often disappears… I am not saying that a man intent on killing will always cave in before nonviolence. There are so many different kinds of people with different forms of violence in them. All I know is that if a violent person is treated like a human being rather than a wild animal, there is a chance he will respond like a human being.”

As Bonhoeffer says:

“There is no way to peace along the way to safety. Peace is the great adventure.”

re: Dominion (H)

From everyone’s facebook favorite,  Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

“The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.

“The reason we take that right for granted is that we stand at the top of the hierarchy. But let a third party enter the game—a visitor from another planet, for example, someone to whom God says, Thou shalt have dominion over creatures of all other stars —and all at once taking Genesis for granted becomes problematical. Perhaps a man hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize (belatedly!) to the cow.” (p. 159)

“Even though Genesis says that God gave man dominion over all animals, we can also construe it to mean that He merely entrusted them to man’s care. Man was not the planet’s master, merely its administrator, and therefore eventually responsible for his administration.  Descartes took a decisive step forward: he made man maitre et proprietaire de la nature. And surely there  is a deep connection between that step and the fact that he was also the one who point-blank denied  animals a soul. Man is master and proprietor, says Descartes, whereas the beast is merely an automaton,  an animated machine, a machina animata. When an animal laments, it is not a lament; it is merely the  rasp of a poorly functioning mechanism. When a wagon wheel grates, the wagon is not in pain; it simply needs oiling. Thus, we have no reason to grieve for a dog being carved up alive in the laboratory.” (p. 160)

“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.” (p. 161)

And for good measure:

“For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.” – Pythagoras (re: karma)

“If [man] is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practise kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.” – Immanuel Kant

Being A Man, also: WASP (I)

I want to talk a bit about how and why being a 13-year-old boy is hard.

Yes, your hormones are raging. Yes, your social skills are lacking. But I think it’s hardest for boys today, harder than it was in previous generations, because there’s a more pressing need to find out who you’re supposed to be.

There was a time when everyone was supposed to be what I was born: white, straight, male, middle class, and Protestant. Speaking for me and my kind, I have the highest median income, I hold the most positions in government, I grow 90% of the country’s food… Louis CK maybe said it best:

If you’re white and you don’t admit that it’s great, you’re an asshole. It is great! And I’m a man! How many advantages can one person have? I’m a white man! You can’t even hurt my feelings! What can you really call a white man that really digs deep? “Hey cracker!” “Ugh, ruined my day, boy! Shouldn’t've called me a cracker. Bringing me back to owning land and people, what a drag.”

I never asked to be in a position of power, but am I really going to cry that it’s been thrust on me? For centuries there was “WASP” and “everything else,” and “everything else” didn’t matter.

Nowadays, being a white straight male is akin to being vanilla. (I used to work in a gelateria, and I hasten to remind people that vanilla is indeed a flavor; plain gelato is Fior di Late: it’s nothing but milk and sugar.) The world outside of us has gotten a lot more interesting, and a lot more specific. It used to matter to be straight when there was only “straight” and “deviant.” Now we’ve got gay, bi, lesbian, homo- and heteroflexible, trisexual, pansexual, sapiosexual, the dreaded pomosexual (which I won’t say out loud), asexual romantic, asexual nonromantic, and that all-encompassing “queer” which is basically a catch-all for “not straight.” “Not straight” is a hell of a lot more interesting than straight these days.

Across the board, too, with the gay rights and women’s rights and minority rights movements, there are fascinating developments in what it means to be gay, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be black or latino or asian in America. Not many people are writing about what it means to be a WASP. It’s not interesting.

My friend used to identify as “a dyke,” and she says she has trouble going to Pride some years because she felt abandoned by the scene. I don’t feel abandoned by the WASP scene; there is no such scene. What sense of community is there among white straight men other than the Klan? What can we take pride in? If we were the assholes we sometimes are and threw ourselves a parade, what would our floats represent? What did we do that it hasn’t been shown could have just as easily been done by gays, blacks, women? Could we omit centuries of slavery, the nations we destroyed, the people we denied rights to, the ones we still say can’t marry?

Again, I’m not crying “oh it’s lonely at the top.” I saw an amateur comedian perform in San Francisco a while ago, and he said he was a Republican. And to the icy silence that followed he cracked “yeah, you want to know what it’s like to come out of the closet in Texas, admit you’re a Republican in San Francisco.” I wanted to smack him. When was the last time a Republican got dragged down Market Street from the back of a pickup?

Being a WASP today means slowly becoming aware that the identity handed to you is getting smaller every few years. We realized piece by piece “this is no longer yours for free,” and “this is yours for now but it will likely go soon.” Maybe it’s why we cling to marriage rights, abortion rights, flip out over affirmative action; we don’t want what power we still have taken from us. Whether or not we want to be WASPs, it’s the only identity we’ve been shown.

Most of us don’t understand what it’s like to be anything else. We think the anger we feel when we can’t get a job is comparable to the anger felt by the black community when entire neighborhoods of people can’t get hired because all the employers are white. Or that a woman’s drive to succeed in the workplace is no different from a man’s, ignoring how much harder it is for a woman. This has been illustrated plenty by Michael Douglas movies from the 1990′s.

So yes, it’s hard being white straight 13-year-old boy. You are nothing until you recognize how much harder it can be to be to be around one. Whatever identity we’re going to have, we’re going to have to forge it as individuals. Whatever we’re struggling with, it’s a personal struggle. We don’t know what it means to struggle as a mass of angry people. Like the world needs another white movement.

Rodger spells his name with an R-O-D-J,
receiving A’s only in ROTC,
front-row seat sociology class,
when the teacher was asking about affirmative action
he said, “why do black people get all the attention?
my grandpa never did no lynching, he’s a Frenchman.
it’s beyond my comprehension, you talk about the sting from the lash,
my own people call me poor white trash!
yeah I’ve got some peach fuzz on my upper lip,
eat my supper quick cuz there isn’t much of it
and now you’re making me furious.
who’s living worse? I’m curious.
Huxtable homes are lookin’ mighty luxurious.
yeah slavery was bad, selling folks by the tonnage,
but just because I’m white why should I get punished?”
I don’t even know how to answer that kid.
great-great grandaddy, look what you did.
you’ll never know the damage, you’ll never know the ruin,
you’ll never know the spectrum of the evil you were doing,
cuz you and all the rest were trapped inside your tiny minds,
that’s why I’m being more than just a product of my times
so I tell Rodger he’s still better off than poor blacks,
I try to put my fingers in the cracks, but damn,
I think we’ll be known as devils til we all act to the contrary,
passing off the radicals but honestly they want very
fundamental things, so use your reasoning,
fix the liberty bell and let freedom ring,
see, I’m angry about all the ways America has failed
but I’ll never be an angry white male.

-Jonny 5

Aggression (H)

What the fuck is it? Hopefully once I digest a bit of Lorenz’s book on it, I’ll have a better answer but here’s what I’m thinking on.

Sometimes when I’m training, I get angry. I like the people I train with, I’m even getting close with one of them–but I when I’m thinking of how best to hit their skulls so as to break bone, when I’m going for the knees, sometimes I get angry. There’s a purity to it, a simplicity, it is not anything to do with discursive  thought. And it hurts: anger is fucking painful. Not just the tension of it, but the rest of it too. I want to cry when I feel it in a simplest form rise up because, I presume, my body is doing what it connects with anger.

And the anger’s a focusing energy. And the times I’ve trained when I was angry to start with it, it throws me off, I feel all over the place, I can’t focus. It’s different from the anger that comes when I start out calm and it  builds up.

A friend says: aggression is like a laser beam. The other thing, the anger, is like a strobe light. He tells me, aggression comes up all the time. And I know this is true for him; it’s one of his biggest motors, or fuels. He says, aggression is everywhere. That when you feel competitive, that’s aggression. When you’re trying to seduce someone, that’s aggression. And that observation struck home: I refer to  it as hunting. Writing this, the term “going for the kill” came to mind too. Another friend, joking about seduction, used the term “I win you.” Which we agreed was hot–but there’s something else to it, too.

Is aggression all about getting? Or taking? Does it just mean: wanting power? Acting with power? And is it always acting in the power system of power over rather than power with?

Is it all about taking? Or am I just thinking that because the most aggressive person I know is also the most taking? What is the content of it when it’s not anger?

Addendum: Being a Woman (H)

Background: she’s recently discovered that he (her housemate of about six months) put hidden cameras all over the house.