Periodic Tales

In my continuing series about all the books people recommended to me I finished reading Periodic Tales.  This book is far less controversial than the last one I wrote about, and is a meandering tale winding its way through history.  It has the periodic table of the elements as its theme, so the author devotes each chapter to an element or group of elements and talks about their discovery, uses, and notable events.

The book is a good read for anyone whether or not you have any scientific training.  All the science in the book is pitched at a broad audience and is easily accessible.  The great majority of it is just a series of short history lessons which are generally interesting and amusing.  The author does a great job of blending humour and learning to make the stories fun as well as educational.  It isn't a long read so you can't expect to get a complete education on any one topic but if you want a series of history highlights with a focus on discovery then you will be happy with the book.

You will find pieces about gold rushes, aluminum (or aluminium, depending on where you live) utensils that were the height of fancy living for Napoleon III, and chlorine's use as a weapon in WWI.  The variety is huge.

One thing that stood out to me though was the way the author talked about gold, silver, and iron.  He spoke about them as though gold and iron were obviously male associated and silver obviously female.  Those associations exist in several cultures, but the idea that this is inevitable or inherent to the elements is quite absurd.  From a western historical perspective his point is supported, but he talks about it as if this is an inherent property of the elements themselves instead of a historical accident and that is wrong.

The reason this stood out to me is that gender essentialism is a real issue in society and it irritates me to see it.  It wasn't a huge part of the book, but I do like to point out these things when I see them.  It was a negative mark on an otherwise enjoyable read.

I recommend this book.  A few 'Silver is obviously a female element' comments aside, it was quick, informative, and fun.

Withdrawing from society

Almost a month ago I watched the Netflix show entitled The Social Dilemma.  It was about social networks and the algorithms they use to decide what to show users.  I knew that social networks used these algorithms and that these algorithms were there to increase ad revenue and engagement, not to promote truth, but this show outlined clearly just how bad things are.

As as example, FB was instrumental in the widespread influence of pizzagate.  Its algorithms noticed that people were extremely engaged with the nonsense story of a child sex ring operating out of a pizza joint, organized by high level Democrats in the US.  Obvious foolishness, but it got clicks, so FB showed it to as many people as possible, and plenty of them bought it.

In response I decided to unfollow everyone on Facebook.  I still use FB for messaging, and I can still be part of organizing events or conversations, but I no longer see anything on my feed except ads... which makes it quite easy to ignore my feed entirely.  I could have just refused to look at my feed of course, but I know myself - resisting the urge to look would take precious willpower, and I didn't wan to have to resist temptation.  Unfollowing everyone means that it would take a lot of time to actually make my feed exist again, and I was pretty sure I wouldn't do that.

This trick worked.  I unfollowed mostly everyone and I have ignored my feed for four weeks now.  I do feel better overall, but it isn't entirely rosy.  There are certainly bits of news I will miss, and events in the lives of my friends that I will not see.  Still, while most of those feel like a real thing at the time, they have no long term impact.  Nearly all of those things that social networks convince us are crucial actually don't matter at all a week later.  That said, if there was a good way to get those moments without having to scroll endlessly through a FB feed, I would get them.  Unfortunately, there isn't.

I am happy about the time I have retrieved from FB.  I don't scroll, wondering if there are new things.  I don't read stuff I have no interest in simply because it was there in my feed.  I also don't get misdirected and subtly influenced by FB's algorithm anymore.

Doing this has made me more aware of the other networks that I touch and how they react.  For example, a Youtuber I watch occasionally made a video about her dating life - in the past, she identified as straight, and thought the stories that her straight male friends told about dating were exaggerated or not important.  Then she came out as bi, went on some dates with women, and experienced the exact same frustrating behaviours that her straight male friends had complained about.  I think her politics and beliefs are similar to mine; this wasn't some right wing 'women are the worst' kind of garbage, just an acknowledgement that a new environment brings new perspective.

Youtube immediately begane shoving 'Feminist gets owned by LOGIC' and 'Watch Jordan Peterson demolish liberal snowflakes' videos at me.  A single video was enough to give it the clue that I might be receptive to the MRA / PUA / antifeminist outrage machine.

It doesn't matter that the Youtuber in question doesn't believe in any of that garbage, nor that I don't.  Youtube wants clicks, outrage gets clicks, so it is endlessly searching for something that will outrage me so I will click and click and click.

Algorithms have figured out that I like Hearthstone videos.  It knows I play World of Warcraft and will check out news stories about it.  These things are useful!  But they also desperately try to get me hooked on bigotry and tribalism because that is how you make money.  I don't know the best way for society to cope with this.  I am sure that the increasing polarization of society is in large part attributable to social media and algorithms, and I think long term that is going to cause some serious damage.  

Unfortunately just knowing that something is a problem doesn't automatically lead you to solutions.  I don't know how we all tackle this.  I just know that I am going to remove myself from the mess as much as possible.  I don't want it anymore, both because I think it is bad for my personal life, and also because I think it is bad for humans as a whole.

Welcoming to some

I have been following and commenting more on the World Boardgaming Championships Facebook page.  There is a large and contested set of posts there surrounding women feeling safe and included in WBC.

One thing I have seen in several posts is the idea that WBC is completely welcoming to everyone regardless of gender, race, culture, appearance, or anything else.  In fact it has been pitched as the most welcoming place in the entire world.  (Naturally it was pitched this way by men who think that we don't need to do anything to change women's experiences at the con.)

Of course we also, in the same thread, see women talking about all the challenges, insults, and rude or abusive behaviour they have witnessed on many occasions.  How do we square these two points of view?

I have a story that may help illustrate.

Years ago I was invited to an puzzle solving event.  After the event, all the attendees went to a nice bar to get dinner and drinks.  At the time I was living well below the poverty line, and I was regularly skipping events solely because of the cost of bus fare.  Everyone else at the party was ordering whatever they liked off the menu and chatting about their homes, their cars, and the vacations they had planned.

I didn't have a house, or a car, and vacations were a dream.  If I had ordered dinner at the bar I would have burned through 3 months of entertainment budget in a single meal.

Many people in that group might well have felt uncomfortable in many areas of their lives.  After all, they are a group of puzzle nerds.  I am sure to all of them, this was an incredibly welcoming environment.  I am also confident they thought they were being welcoming to me.

But it is fucking hard to sit and listen to people talk about their financial misfortunes when they are bemoaning how they have to put off buying a cottage, and you have to feel guilty about not tipping the waitress because you can't afford a single drink.

I can tell you without any doubt, people can be extremely comfortable, *think* they are being entirely welcoming, and make someone feel desperately out of place.  I left the bar eventually, and didn't get back together with that group.  I don't blame them, or think they did anything wrong.  They didn't know how it made me feel.  I didn't complain.  But I wasn't going to go back.

When I first attended WBC I felt wonderful.  It was incredibly welcoming to me, and I felt right at home.  But I am not every person.  My experience is not universal.  Just because WBC is extremely welcoming to straight white guys who are good at games does *not* mean it is welcoming to all.  Some people at WBC, notably women, have the same experience I had at the bar, but at the con instead.

If you are a white guy who loves to dress in nerdy Tshirts, cargo shorts, and a backpack of board games, WBC is fantastic place.  The rest of the world may give you looks and shut you out, but this place is perfect.  It is easy for you to fit in, and you are completely accepted.  I can easily see how you remember all the places in the world where you weren't accepted, and conclude that WBC is simply accepting of everyone!

But that isn't reality.  WBC is super accepting of you, for sure.  But that experience is not universal, much as you presumably want it to be.

So if your experience of WBC is one of comfort and acceptance, great.  I am happy for you!  But when you conclude that everyone else must have had the same experience, you are insisting that your experience is the only valid one, and you will accept nothing else.  You are refusing to be the accepting person in turn.

If you remember other places in your life where you got side eyed looks, and people talked as though you weren't there, or assumed you were clueless without knowing anything about you, you know that isn't fun.  It doesn't make you want to go back there.  Women are telling us all that this is how they often feel at WBC.  The men at WBC have a responsibility to try to give them the accepting, easy, comfortable experience we have.  The first step is listening to what they say, and *believing* it, even if it strikes us as quite different than our own experience.

I am not saying WBC is the worst.  I love it!  I think the people running it have good policies in place, and work hard to make it great for everyone.  I think a lot of the people attending do the same.  But we have room to improve, and the stories women are telling us make that crystal clear.

Warm welcomes

This is the time of year that I travel to the US to play in the World Boardgaming Championships.  It is one of the best things in my year and it is a great disappointment to have to miss it this year.  Unfortunately playing board games in a convention hall is only slightly below orgies in the covid 19 risk list, so WBC stood no chance.

Much as I love WBC it has some issues.  The official policies regarding inclusion of women, minorities, people with disabilities, and such always struck me as good ones, and my experience has been that the con officials do a solid job trying to make it welcoming to everyone.  However, we can't deny that board games are a white male dominated hobby, and the people that come to WBC trend very white, and very male.

Yesterday there was a thread in the WBC Facebook page about how extreme the white male dominance in board game design is.  It pointed to this article about the issue, which comes from a woman who designed one of my most played games of the past few years - Wingspan.  So far so good.

One of my friends replied to this post talking about her experiences at WBC, and how there have been many incidents that made her feel unwelcome.  The problems she had weren't ones that are easy for officials to do something about - it wasn't people saying obviously awful things like "Girls can't play this game!  Go away!"  Her struggles were more subtle, like people making comments that suggested that she was only there because she had a husband / boyfriend who was at the con, or assuming that she has no idea how to play, with the clear implication that this is because she is female.  She likes WBC, and a lot of the people there, but these experiences taint that.

This sort of post is hard to make.  I know it was difficult for her because she was struggling to explain the problem while avoiding coming off as whiny.  Women are often dismissed when they try to walk this line - they often find there is literally no ground between downplaying the problems they have and being ignored because they are 'too emotional' or 'too pushy'.

A couple of guys wandered in to make excuses.  The men just don't know how to talk to women, you see, and they want more women involved in the hobby!  I decided I couldn't just let this stand, so I explained that if you want more women involved in the hobby, you don't try to shout down women when they explain the problems - you fix the problems.  Claiming that you don't know how to talk to women is just misogynistic nonsense, because you can just talk to them the same way you talk to men.  Talk about the con, or the game, or whatever else.  Women aren't some foriegn species with inscrutable motives.  Just assume they are humans who like games and talk to them on that basis.

Of course there was some tension, as there always is when you ask people to behave better, but the conversation was entirely civil.

And then the WBC official in charge of social media walked in, deleted all the comments, and told us we weren't allowed to talk about this anymore.  This was the comment she left

"There are many things we can do to ensure our hobby is welcoming to all people. Arguing divisively is not one of them. Commenting is closed. Read or do not read the article. Talk to your gaming friends. Invite someone new to WBC. Have a nice weekend!"

This absolutely enrages me.  This pretends to be about making WBC welcoming, but instead makes it clear that women with negative experiences are not allowed to express those, and anyone asking for change will be summarily ignored or officially silenced.

I assume the goal in this was to preserve WBC's image, but instead what it accomplished is to make it clear that WBC has a real problem and that management's current response is to try to pretend it doesn't exist. 

Did MeToo teach us NOTHING?

When a woman says that men having been treating her badly, the solution is not to try to hide her story and pretend nothing is wrong.  The correct course of action is to listen and learn.  I don't think the WBC officials can actually fix this directly, with rules.  I don't expect every paternalistic comment of 'so, is your boyfriend playing this game too?' to suddenly stop just because management says so.  (Also heteronormative, as well as sexist, for the record.)  But even if you can't directly fix it, you can let women talk about those experiences, and let other people listen.

I am going to contact the board and make it clear that this is totally unacceptable behaviour.  If the thread had been full of people calling each other assholes or otherwise making personal attacks, shutting it down would have been a reasonable course of action.  It wasn't, at all.  The thing that caused the ruckus is that somebody had the temerity to suggest that there might be a problem that needs fixing.

If you go to WBC, I would ask you to join me.  Writing to anyone on the board and asking for action is useful.  Sharing this to your other gamer friends would also be appreciated.  I am not calling for anybody's head here.  I don't think that 'silence women' is actually a policy.  I think this was a serious error, one that needs fixing, and I am going to ask them to do just that.  I would encourage you to be specific and make it clear that talking about the challenges women face in the con should be supported by the administration.

We want our hobby to be welcoming to all.  We will never accomplish this if our approach is to pretend is already is, and no work needs to be done.  We have to publicly talk about the issues we have, and take steps towards change.

Angry at the library

Toronto's public library system recently was in the middle of a conflict surrounding trans rights and freedom of speech.

People who read my stuff regularly can probably already imagine what I will be yelling, considering that freedom of speech came up, but I can't resist doing it all over again.

The basic situation is this:  Meghan Murphy is a feminist activist who has a lot of anti-trans opinions.  She has testified in front of multiple governments in this way, pushing to prevent trans rights.  She takes the view that trans women aren't real women, so they don't deserve any rights that women get, and they ought to be kept out of women's washrooms and other places that are reserved for women.

Murphy is a classic anti trans bigot.

Murphy was giving a speech about gender at a Toronto library, and a lot of people got pissed about this and demonstrated, demanding that the library refuse to host her.  The library said no, citing the fact that they have a policy to prevent people using the library who are going to promote hate speech, but saying that Murphy doesn't count as having done that.

Murphy did get to give her speech, and there was a lot of blowback and controversy about it.  But freedom of speech! was a commonly used rallying cry, as it so often is in these cases.

My take on it is simple:  Freedom of speech requires that you be able to speak without the government threatening or imprisoning you.  You have to be able to say a broad variety of things without fear of retribution.  Murphy has that.  In fact, she has had a drastically greater platform, at the government's expense, than the great majority of the population.  Telling her she can't spew her anti trans bigotry at the library isn't crushing her freedom of speech.  She can speak outside the library, she can write blog posts, or she can rent a hall.  Her freedom of speech wouldn't be threatened by being banned from the library.

The crux of the issue is the hate speech policy.  If Murphy was going to give a presentation on how Jews shouldn't be allowed in bathrooms, there is no doubt whatsoever that it would run afoul of hate speech laws and she would be banned.  But many people still don't see trans people as being fully entitled to rights, and they still think that debating their existence is a reasonable thing to do.  It is clear to me that her statements are hate speech, and her opinions on policy are reprehensible.  But much of society isn't on board with that yet, which is why so many people still think this is a debate we can have.

Those same people generally think that 'Do black people deserve to be enslaved?' is a question that cannot be debated publicly.  They haven't yet got around to seeing trans people's issues as so clearly decided.  I think over the next few decades we will make that transition, and I eagerly await it.  But until we do get there, we need to push back against Murphy and her ilk, and keep pushing their bigotry down until the masses of humanity start to do it reflexively.

A dragon or three

This post has all the spoilers for Game of Thrones season 8.

In the closing episodes of season 8, Daenerys murdered thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people.  Not because they were a threat, but just because she was pissed off.  There are all kinds of blog posts and articles and petitions that are angry about this because people wanted Dany to be good and pure!  She could be the saviour of Westeros!

Dany was never good or pure.  She was just white, as white as white can be.  The story of Dany as the great saviour is a pile of racism as far as I am concerned.  Dany is very much the embodiment of privilege, a person who wants the feeling of having helped people, the belief in herself as a benevolent person, but who has no interest whatsoever in considering what sort of help other people actually want.  She wants to *feel* good, not *do* good.

Throughout Game of Thrones Dany has been merciless, cruel, and hopelessly self centered.  She refuses to see anyone else's suffering as relevant, and regularly makes it clear that while she lays claim to titles like "The Breaker of Chains" she actually isn't interested in offering freedom.  She wants to be seen as a liberator, but she demands perfect subservience from everyone around her and total personal loyalty.  People should be free, she thinks, but what freedom means is simply "Have no other master other than Daenerys."

Dany 'saves' people occasionally, no doubt.  But she saves them without any idea of the consequences of her actions, and her expectation afterwards is perfect obedience and adulation.  Simply put, Dany sees herself as the natural and righteous ruler of the world.  When any power structure is destroyed she is happy because it means that more of the world is falling under her sway, and she is closer to the absolute power she thinks she deserves.  When she saves someone she thinks she is doing them a favour - the favour of being ruled by Dany instead of someone else.  Most people think of being saved as being given more freedom, more security, or a otherwise better life.  Dany doesn't think that, because they only thing that makes the world better, in her mind, is her controlling more of it.

Just look at how the whole thing with her rescuing Mirri Maz Duur from a rape goes down: Dany assumes that because she rescued Mirri Maz Duur that she is owed eternal loyalty and love.  Mirri Maz Duur, of course, remembers that the army that Dany showed up with raped and murdered her entire family, destroyed their homes, and enslaved them.  And then she was 'rescued' by being taken forcefully by her oppressors as a servant.  No wonder she strikes back when given the chance!

Daenerys is a delusional, murderous, megalomaniacal tyrant.  The fact that Varys and Tyrion, among others, could not see this is mostly a function of their own racism, and the fact that they really didn't see the suffering in foreign nations as important compared to the suffering of people in Westeros.  They saw her being a force for destruction and evil but hoped that she would suddenly stop when she arrived amongst white people... and she did not.  I wasn't surprised in the slightest, and they shouldn't have been either.

It was honestly funny to me that people complained about this turn of events as though it was impossible to predict.  Dany has been written and acted in such a way as to foreshadow this throughout the show.  Just watch how often Tyrion tries to convince her that she shouldn't use her dragons to burn King's Landing, and how she consistently ignores that line of reasoning.  She doesn't say "Of course burning a city with dragons is a heinous crime!  I would never do such a thing!"  She stares icily, and makes it clear that she would *love* to burn the city with her dragons, but just maybe if people beg and grovel enough she might forgo that pleasure.

Because she is the rightful ruler, and if she wants to burn a city, well, that is her perogative.  People only live because she allows it.

While Daenerys had a terrible time of it in many respects, she has always been a villain.  Many people were hoping that she was the one truly good person in a world of moral ambiguity, (again, way too strongly influenced by her whiteness) but that has never been borne out by her words or actions. 

Face it.  Daenerys is one of the great villains of Game of Thrones.  Just because she occasionally struck back at men for their sexist behaviour or ruthlessly murdered evil people doesn't change that.  Just because she is pretty and white doesn't make her pure.  Her suffering, appearance, and gender do not qualify her for Team Good status.

When Dany burned King's Landing I nodded to myself and thought "Yep, that sure was always going to happen."  You don't have to like it, but this was coming right from the beginning.

Sparkly and Pink

I got my nails done.  Are they not pretty?

It was a couple weeks ago.  They are chipping away and not nearly as pretty as they were.  Still, shiny.

This wasn't a professional job.  I was at a birthday party and part of the thing was a nail polish station, primarily intended for the small girls at the party.  Naturally an older man at the party made jokes about how the boys are going next, clearly thinking that no boy would do such a thing.  Because girl stuff, ewww!

I went next.

Apparently there were more comments during the event disparaging men or boys getting their nails done, but none of them made in my presence.  I guess none of the people there felt up to challenging my masculinity on the basis of a couple mL of sparkles - which is unfortunate, because I had some savage replies all locked and loaded.

The small boy at the party also decided to get his nails done.  I hope he didn't have to put up with a lot of flak for that choice, but this family runs pretty conventional, so I expect there was pushback.

I have gotten plenty of weird reactions in the weeks since.  Lots of people notice it and are surprised - it isn't normal for me, and it doesn't fit with the rest of my aesthetic. 

It does make me a bit sad though when people totally lose their minds about it.  I have had medical professionals demand that I parade myself in front of secretaries to show off my nails because a man with nail polish is JUST SO WILD and WOW.  It isn't the same as criticism, certainly, but I don't want a gigantic fuss made about me at all - I just want people to shrug and ignore it.  I like the idea that if I do something outside the normal gender rules people will be cool with it, not put it on me to be part of the show.

There are people that dress differently to get a reaction, certainly.  But most just want to do their thing and be left alone, and usually I get left alone because I look quite expected.  For the next few weeks though I will be hoping to just sneak under the radar and not have everyone make a fuss, aggressive or not, about a couple mL of pink goo that happens to be coded 'woman'.

I wish it was good

The new Doctor Who got some people excited because the Doctor is now a woman. I liked the idea, and I think it was about damn time they tried that.  Of course many misogynists yelled on the internet that maleness is a key, necessary part of being the Doctor, but they are just spewing sexism everywhere and making a mess on the carpets.

I am glad that the actress playing the Doctor now really nailed the part.  She has just the right enthusiasm and quizzical positiveness that makes it work.  Unfortunately I am a little bit skeptical about the writing, particularly for the third episode.  The episode focused around the characters visiting Rosa Parks, of US civil rights movement fame.  They had to stop a very racist man from the future from preventing her story unfolding.

I like shows that push back against patriarchal norms.  I also like shows that showcase racism in a serious, wrenching light, and this show did that.  It had the main characters talking about their negative experiences with racism, and dug into the topic.  Great!

But the show was terrible. The writing failed all kinds of basic rules, and left everyone watching with a bad taste in their mouths.  It made little sense, felt shoddy, and was a real let down.  Politically it was good.  The story and scenes though... they were rubbish.

It reminds me of the Ghostbusters reboot a few years back with a female cast.  I wanted it to be good, the sexist trolls on the internet hated it before even seeing it, and it ended up being a bad movie.  There is something extra disappointing when a piece of media aligns with your politics and you want so much for it to be good, if nothing else because that might help more things like it to be made.  There is a guilt that manifests if you say you hate it because it sucks, because you don't want to be one of those people hating it just because it features a woman, or a black person, or a gay person, or whatever.  But you do dislike it, not because of those things, but because it just isn't any good.

So far I have only seen three episodes of the new Doctor Who.  I like the way the show is going, and if you liked the older versions of the Doctor you will probably like this one.  Doctor Who isn't exactly my thing, but this show, and the lead actress in particular, do the thing that Doctor Who does really well.

But the third episode... not so much.  Hopefully it rebounds from here.

Damage that never quite healed

I have had a lot of struggles and drama in the past few weeks.  It all surrounds my uncle Gary and my relationship to him.  I have a long history with him, much of it bad, and after my visit to my parents this January I finally snapped and had to do something.  People I have talked to about this have remarked on how this has big similarities with a lot of the #MeToo stories that have come to light over the past year or so.  I am a man, so it isn't going to be the same because the gendered element is important, but there really are a lot of parallels.

My uncle Gary has been an abusive bully to me as far back as I can remember.  Some really early memories I have of family celebrations involve him grabbing me, pinning me down, and jabbing at my stomach and chest hard enough to make me scream.  I am extremely ticklish so I was laughing and begging to be let go and wailing all together.  It was horrific to me, but he was always laughing, smiling, and seeming to have a wonderful time of it.  He seemed to particularly enjoy letting me go, pretending it was over, and then when I ran he would jump up to catch me just before I could escape and then pin me down and start it all over again.  I feared him then, because I never knew when it would start.  Like all long term abusers he figured out how far he could push it - if he did it constantly every time he saw me people would have stopped him, so he only did it occasionally.  You can't just go around punching strangers, because society prevents it.  But if you are generally likeable and friendly you can get away with regularly punching people you know because otherwise you are such a fun fellow - could it really be that bad?

But it was always there.  I was always frightened of going near him because sometimes he would lash out, grab me, and pin me down and make me scream.  The half of the room he was in was always dangerous, and he made it worse by regularly lunging at me but not actually grabbing me.  He thought it was hilarious that I flinched and jumped away, and made out like it was a game.

A little kid who is hurt by someone like that does not see it as a game.  It is terrifying, and the fact that he played it up just made sure that when he was around I was constantly worried, constantly on edge.  He had fun with the fact that he could make me jump and freak out any time he wanted.  He could just ignore it and focus on something else if he felt like it, but I couldn't.  If I ever stopped looking I would end up on the ground begging to be let go.

Things changed as I got older, of course.  He would sneak up behind me and pinch me or jab his hands into my sides or back. Sometimes when he came in from the cold he would grab my sides with his freezing hands, just to watch me jump and yelp.  He was quite strong so he took great pleasure in hurting me by crushing my hand when I had to shake hands with him, and body checking me into things.  I won't forget his face, and the feeling I got.  He sent the message that was stronger than me, that he was going to use it to cause me pain, and there was fuck all I could do about it.  It always felt to me like half of the reason he did it was to keep me constantly worried and paranoid so I could never quite relax.

Gary is a joke teller and a goof.  He loves to play the clown and entertain people with ribald humour, often poking fun at them directly.  If you are the sort of person who wants to insult people and is okay with being insulted back I can deal with that - my relationship with Naked Man is a lot like this.  But Gary, while he loved to insult others, has a very thin skin.  The few times in my life I tried to play back at him when he mocked me or belittled me he got angry and violent, making everything worse.  I learned not to do that, and that the only way to get by was to take whatever he was dishing out.

Once I tried to talk to him about it, to explain how upsetting it was, hoping that it would help, that he would see my point of view.  I don't recall the response precisely, but the gist of it was crystal clear:  The world is harsh, the things he was doing were just a game and not serious, and I need to get tough and deal with it because it wasn't going to ever be any different.

What do you do when faced with that?  When you tell someone things they are doing are hurting you, and they tell you that it is your fault for being hurt, and you know that you cannot win a fight against them, should it come to that?

You just put up with it, is what you do.  I couldn't get away, and I couldn't fight, so I gave in.  I learned to dissociate, so have that distant, grey, unreal feeling that allows people to cope when they are being hurt and they can't deal with the hurt.  Of course it isn't at all reasonable to lay it entirely at Gary's feet - the great majority of my pain and struggles in my early life were the horror that is other children.  But this sure didn't help.

As an adult the way he interacted with me changed, but the fundamental feelings did not.  I always felt a distinct unease, knowing that he would push boundaries, do things that I did not like, and that when he did my only option was to simply put up with it.  Over the years there were a couple specific incidents that enraged me but which I could do nothing about.

As an example, after Pinkie Pie was born we were visiting my parents and things were really terrible.  We were barely sleeping and were not functional.  Wendy had finally gotten Pinkie Pie down to sleep with me in the bedroom and she was crashing on the couch, desperate for sleep.  Gary came over to visit, was asked to be quiet because she was sleeping, and yelled and shouted to wake her up.  Gary has kids, he knows what that awful exhaustion feels like, but her suffering was irrelevant.  It was funny to him to refuse to let her sleep, and to stay around to visit, making sure she stayed awake.  What do you do with that, when you can't even tell someone "Hey, that hurt me" because they obviously only did it *because* it hurt you?

This past week Wendy, Pinkie Pie and I were visiting my parents.  Gary showed up unexpectedly.  I was not impressed, but I decided to try to just get through the visit and hope nothing bad happened.

But that was not to be.  Wendy was starting to go sledding down a steep hill and Gary rushed over to push her down faster.  She told him not to.  He did it anyway.  I just stood there, shocked that he would do that.  I shouldn't have been, of course, as this is the way he always is, but somehow I didn't react.  I knew that Wendy had brakes and could slow herself down so she wasn't in danger, but the raw disregard for her wishes made me angry.  Then when we went inside I was showing Gary my chest tattoo, trying to find some common ground to have a civil visit, and he called his girlfriend over and reached out and grabbed my nipple and twisted, hard.  I just stared at him and didn't flinch, feeling that familiar dissociation sealing me off from the pain, just like in years past.

Later on a few people were in the hot tub and Gary decided the thing to do was to throw snowballs at everyone.  Of course we couldn't throw back as we were in the tub, so he took great joy in pelting the kids right in their faces.  They were upset and didn't like it... but he thought it was absolutely grand. 

That is what prompted me to write this.  I can take all the nipple grabs in the world now, if I have to.  That primal fear is gone, because I am big enough and strong enough to fight him if required.  But what I can't take is the look of fear on my wife's face when someone lays his hands on her after being told not to.  I can't ignore the upset and worry on my daughter's face when she realizes that a man feels entitled to hurt her and she knows that if she objects he will just do it more.

Worse than that, she knows that her father didn't do anything to protect her.  That makes my gut twist, and that feeling is one I cannot allow to continue.  It isn't like the things that Gary did these few weeks ago were so hideous.  It isn't like Wendy or Pinkie Pie asked me to do this.  But the combination of my history and these actions is beyond what I can or will endure.

I am fucking DONE.  I can take Gary's childish abuse when only I have to endure it.  But I will never again stand by and allow him to hurt people close to me in the name of family unity.  I am cutting him out of my life for good, because the alternative is watching him go after my wife and child again, and having to choose between just watching them get hurt, or starting a fistfight.  Gary has made it clear that asking him to stop doing something is utterly pointless and a brawl will only make things worse, so this is the only option left to me.

You might ask why I bother to write this if I am going to cut him out.  What is the point?  The point is that when someone is like this, they usually hurt lots of other people too, whoever they can get away with.  I want them to know that they aren't the only ones, that it is Gary's fault, not theirs, and that they will have people on their team if they choose to do something about it.  Our society spends way too much time worried about the reputations of abusive men, and not nearly enough time confronting them with consequences for their actions, and this is part of my step to finally start fixing that shit in my own life.

Writing all this was gut wrenching and hard.  It wasn't hard to talk about the bad stuff that happened to me.  The hard part was figuring out what not to say.  I don't want to give a shit about Gary's reputation, but I don't want to exaggerate or give impressions that aren't true.  When the subject of men abusing kids comes up, everyone immediately jumps to 'pedophile!' but that isn't at all applicable in this case, and I don't want to suggest that it is.  On the other hand, why the fuck, after all these years and all this garbage that happened to me, am I the one twisting myself up trying to protect this guy from inaccurate accusations?  Why isn't that *his* problem?

There are always excuses.  Gary grew up in a rough and tumble household, with a father (my grandfather) who loved to sneak up behind people, grab them, and yell loudly to make them jump and scream.  He did that to me any number of times, so I know that this is how Gary lived at home.  But you can learn any number of things from this sort of upbringing.  Gary learned to tear down people who couldn't stop him from doing so.  The shit that happened to me taught me that you only touch people when they confirm that they want you to, because I know what it is like when you are on the other end of unwanted, violent touch.

I have no interest in excuses, apologies, or reasons.  At some point my question becomes "Can I live with this?" and for a long time I could.  I didn't like it, but I could live with it.  Now I cannot.  I am the sort of person who works hard to make things smooth, who puts enormous effort into finding ways around strife, but when I am finally pushed so hard that I simply cannot, I fucking burn those bridges.  I am done begging for mercy, I am done asking for kindness, and I am done enduring.  The pain and struggle of coping with a family member I am refusing to be around is less than the distress and upset of living with him, so that is what I am going to do.

There will be casualties of war, in this.  I know that family relationships will be pushed and strained.  I don't like that.  But I know that despite those challenges, I am looking forward to finally hitting submit on this beast of a post and having that decision be done, out there.  There will be a real sense of relief in finally having done what I have wanted to do for literally as long as I can remember.

Falseness

The messages our culture sends about female sexuality are a mess.  In large part they are completely wrong, and they almost universally assume that our cultural norms are universal instead of arbitrary.  For example, the idea that straight women just want a man who is a good provider, steady, and reliable while straight men want a woman who is young and attractive is wildly off base.  Women aren't really in it for the sex, we often hear, they just put up with the sex in order to get the other benefits of relationships like security and support.

I bought into these stereotypes when I was young.  They came cloaked in 'science' and a Darwinian understanding of nature.

But then I had sex with a bunch of women, and talked with a bunch of women, and noted that these stereotypes did not well explain the women who were desperately horny, the women who had male partners who weren't interested in sex, and the women who wanted all kinds of wild, kinky sexy stuff that had nothing to do with safety or sustenance.

Plenty of women want sex, (though obviously some do not, which is true of any and all genders) and the myth that women are mostly asexual is just another consequence of patriarchy.

I read Untrue recently and it ably covered the reasons to think that women's sexuality is wildly misunderstood, and happily smashed most of the standard stereotypes to bits.

Wednesday Martin attacks the issue from multiple angles.  She includes lots of science and interviews with experts to bolster her credentials but also talks about her personal experiences with infidelity and desire.  She goes to polyamory conferences to discuss open relationships, attends sex parties for mostly straight women who want to try out sex with women, and otherwise pushes her own boundaries surrounding her monogamous commitment to her husband.

One of the core theories in the book is the idea that the plough and how its development and use affected women's sexual liberation and general autonomy.  It turns out that societies that used ploughs relegated women to a much lower status that societies that did not, probably because of the high upper body strength requirements and issues with child rearing that came along with use of the plough.  The issue is probably more complicated than Martin makes it out to be, but I completely buy into the general thesis that specific styles of agriculture changed society in ways that were bad for women and the problems that those styles of agriculture created remain tenacious to this day.

If you are interested in understanding the history of women's sexuality and examining what science tells us about it, I highly recommend this book.  It is accessible and easy to read while be well researched and informative.  I like the line it walks between trying to be fun and provocative while being strict about the truth.

There is one thing that bothered me though, and it isn't specific to Untrue.  So often in conversations about relationships and sexuality people seem desperate to bring primate behaviour into the mix.  We seem to need to talk about bonobos and their orgies, bisexuality, and promiscuity to justify such behaviours in humans.  A large part of Untrue is dedicated to studies of primate behaviour that strongly support the idea that female sexuality in other species is NOT passive, straight, monogamous, or secondary to male sexuality.  However, this whole thing about primates is just a diversion from the key facts:

1.  Humans having relationship structures that aren't straight, monogamous, or vanilla isn't a problem for other people.

2.  People doing stuff that isn't a problem for other people should be left to do their stuff without interference or harassment.

We don't need to justify our relationships or sexuality by proving it is 'natural' because other primates do it.  We don't need to prove that we aren't the only species that wants to do all these things, because even if we were the only species that had orgies or queer sexualities it would still be fine for us to do it.

If some fool tries to tell people that women shouldn't be promiscuous because females don't do that in nature you can be all scientific and tell them 'LOL wrong!' or you can just circumvent that argument entirely and say 'so the fuck what?'  It is false, but even if it were true it wouldn't be relevant.

It is all well and good to study primates, but let us not think that we need primate behaviour to tell us how we ought to treat one another, or what the range of acceptable human behaviour should be.

The luckiest man alive

At a wedding this past weekend I had some interesting times trying to explain my relationships to people.  You see, I took my girlfriend to my wife's exhusband's wedding.  Like a lot of my current relationship status it makes perfect sense when you look at how it came about, but the one sentence summary boggles people's minds.

I ended up talking about that with a couple of different people at the wedding and I got the usual sorts of reactions.  Some assumed they had misheard and couldn't believe what was going on.  Some pretended to be okay with it but had no idea what to say.  Others leapt to conclusions that just aren't true.  The last one decided I must be some kind of superhero with magical powers of seduction.

The reactions to my polyamorous relationship web are massively charged with gendered assumptions.  People don't suddenly think "Wow, Sky's wife and girlfriend and other lovers are super lucky!"  They always leap to "Wow, Sky is the luckiest bastard alive!"  I can only assume a lot of them are assuming I have done something nefarious to manage to be in this situation.  What they don't do is assume that the other people I am involved with have much in the way of agency, or that they get anything out of it.

It just always seems to revolve around the expectation that the men involved in open relationships finally get to bang whoever they like, and the women put up with it for some inexplicable reason.  Obviously this stuff comes from common social assumptions about men and women, it isn't a mystery, but every time it smacks me in the face I get grumpy and try to push back against it.  I know lots of women who are in relationships where they want all the sex and their partners do not, and they struggle mightily with their desires to have more partners or more variety.  The baseline cultural assumption that they *don't* want those things also makes it extra hard.

The reaction that an open relationship is a windfall for me but a burden to the women I am involved with at the moment makes me angry.  It takes away agency from them and makes me out to be someone who is just taking advantage.  It puts me at the centre of it all, and my partners on the periphery.

I want my relationships, no matter the structure, to be something that works for everyone and makes all the participants happy.  It is important to me that the way I structure how I live is desired for everyone, not a burden to be borne because of the inevitability of my wandering eye.

I don't want to be seen as that lucky bastard who sold a bunch of women into grudging acceptance of his unending lust.  I want to be seen as a guy who works hard to make his relationships bring happiness to everyone involved, no matter if that means being conventional or not.

Just one more reason to storm the barricades yelling "Down with the patriarchy!" as if I needed more reasons for that.

A red wedding

This weekend I was at Full Throttle's wedding.  It was an odd thing, because he got married ten years ago, but only now decided to actually do the whole ceremony and party bit.  I struggled some with it because it was in a church and I had lots of internal issues with the religious and gender based stuff in a wedding I went to during the summer, and I did not want to run the God gauntlet again.

It is a tricky beast.  I don't want to tell other people how to live, or what sorts of ceremonies they should have to mark their important moments.  I also don't want to sit in a religious service silently seething at the ways it cements and supports entrenched sexist norms.

I ended up just skipping the ceremony and going to the reception.  I could have easily made up any number of lies to get out of going to the ceremony but I felt like I had to pick one thing or the other:  Either Full Throttle is someone I am close to, or he is not.  If he is someone I am close to, I should tell the truth about having problems with the venue and composition of the ceremony.  What possible good is being close to a person if you have to lie to them about things that are important to you? 

On the other hand if he isn't important to me and thus lying becomes more palatable, then why go to the wedding at all?  It makes no sense, to me at least, to go to a wedding if you don't care about the people getting married.

The wedding was Game of Thrones themed.  There were lots of swords for decoration and the music constantly had me imagining tiny cogs and wheels.  Part of that theme was the 'get the couple to kiss' rules, which were that you had to fight and win a duel with a plastic sword, and each victor of a duel had to take the couple's cause in the next duel.

A chance to make an ass of myself in public *and* fight with a sword at the same time?  Sign me up!

Iolo and I decided that we, as the groom's gamer nerd buddies, needed to break the system.  Iolo fought the first duel against the head table, so he ended up becoming the next champion.  I challenged him, and he simply held his blades aside so I could whack him gently and defeat him, forcing the couple to kiss.  This made me the new champion, and while Iolo could simply have challenged me and had me concede we decided that we had already broken the system this way once - no need to do it again.

The next way to break the system was for me to go up and challenge again, while I was still the champion.  I would have to fight myself, and I could just whack myself with the sword, and both win and lose at the same time!  I would both have to retire as champion and be the next champion, so I can only assume this would have spawned a singularity and swallowed up the earth had I done it, but before I put this plan into action I was challenged by somebody else.

Unfortunately this challenge did not go well for me and I lost, getting stabbed savagely in the stomach.  It turns out that plastic swords can do little damage with a slash, but a stab in a vulnerable region is quite another thing entirely.  I was in a lot of pain immediately, and even three days later my stomach is still hurting.  I don't think I have any permanent damage, but it is not comfortable.

This strikes me as quite appropriate.  Much of my relationship with Full Throttle was about playing football in university, and we played full tackle without any protective gear.  I spent many a day limping about, barely able to move after savage hits in our games.  That I would be injured at a Game of Thrones wedding, with Full Throttle as the groom, feels entirely appropriate.

Women in their place, unfortunately

This weekend I went to a wedding.  It was a perfectly normal wedding in most ways, and most people wouldn't think anything of it.  I couldn't help but be frustrated by so much of it though because of the unrelenting sexism.

Giving the bride away is a tradition that needs to die in a fire.  I just don't know how people today can sit there and watch a woman handed off from one man to another like a hunk of meat and not twitch at the injustice of it all.  If you want to be handed off by your parents, fine, there are ways to do that.  I have seen weddings where both people being married were walked in on the arms of both of their parents and this is fine!  Not my style, but it does not bother me at all.

But the thing where much ceremony is made of which man is going to hand over the bride to the groom?  YUCK.

Lots of little things got to me too.  I don't like the pageantry and expense of weddings in general, but that is an aesthetic thing rather than a real moral objection.  But the bridesmaids and groomsmen all being gender coded, and the explicit gender rules for everyone involved in the party really bother me.  I also struggle with the expectation that the women in the wedding party must spend extensive time doing hair and makeup while the men put in a far lesser amount of effort.  The women have to pay for new dresses to match the colour of the wedding, while the men just wear their normal suit.  The men are clearly just fine on their own, but women have to show themselves off to get full value.

Marriage is fine and all, once you strip away all the sexist garbage.  I just can't be comfortable with the way marriage happens to most people though, particularly the way it so ruthlessly polices gender roles and comformity to gender norms.

And this is all to ignore all the objections I have to all the religious stuff associated with weddings, which is another whole rant entirely.

Someday I am going to finally swear off all of this.  I feel stuck when I get invited to weddings that I know are going to be a barrage of religion and sexist crap.  I don't want to alienate friends, but sitting through more of these ceremonies that fly in the face of deeply held values of mine is becoming more and more unpalatable as the years go by.

The future of the red pill

Orson Scott Card is not a good person.  I don't like him, not one little bit.  However, he did write one of my favourite books, Ender's Game.  I find it hard to reconcile these facts; generally I decide to just make sure that I never do anything that gives Card money but still read the books I love.

This weekend I started reading Ender in Exile, a book following Ender after the events of Ender's Game.  I figured I would enjoy the book and it would be a guilty pleasure.  Instead the book pissed me off and I don't even plan on finishing it.

Ender In Exile in many ways a predictable followup to Ender's Game, but it goes off the rails with Card pushing his crappy sexist bullshit.  Much like many other highly successful authors before him, Card pushes out sequels to make cash but inserts bigoted views because he is big enough that he can get away with it.

This time it is all about relationships.  Card makes it clear that the only way that human society can function is monogamy, and that it has to be enforced monogamy.  This is silly and flies in the face of all of the evidence, but initially I was merely irritated.  I am all about non monogamy, but fine, the characters in the book are ignorant, I can cope.  The thing that really got me was a scene where on a planet where monogamy has been arranged and is seriously policed.  In the scene, a top male scientist had a subordinate female scientist desperately try to convince him to have sex with her to give her smart babies.  She desperately wanted to lie to her husband explicitly because she wanted better genes for her children.

I am disappointed that Card has added 'red pill' sexist bullshit to his repertoire of evil.  He wants to portray women as requiring enforced monogamy, because otherwise they will just cuckold their husbands for higher status / better genetics / prettier men.  Card's sexism was evident in previous books but this particular one really slapped me in the face with it, and because it also pushed my buttons I couldn't just ignore it.

I just don't know how to cope with straight men who so obviously hate women.  It is such a mess to have that combination of desire and bitterness, attraction and repulsion.  It is wretched and awful, and I am glad I have no part of it.

Don't read Ender in Exile.  Further, if you must read anything Card wrote, try not to give him money for it.  That message is an important one to send.

Keeping score

Recently I found a fantastic Youtube channel called ContraPoints.  It is, as the star says, a scholarly study of online bigotry.  It is also funny as hell, and mixes educational material about racism, sexism, and all the other isms along with dark and dirty humour.  It is definitely not safe for work, and it is not safe for work in ways that I quite enjoy.  The video I watched today is this one about pickup artists who call style themselves 'alpha males'.


The thing I found most interesting in the video was a description of the end goal of pickup artist seduction techniques.  I always found pickup artists loathsome but this gave me some insight into how you get from where I am to where they are.  I like sex, I am a straight man, I am fine with casual sex, and in the periods in my life where I wasn't having sex I was unhappy about that fact.  This might suggest that I would be the sort of person who might employ their tactics.

But no, never.  The reason is that pickup artists aren't actually in it for the sex.  They are in it to try to soothe their intense feelings of inadequacy and self hatred by having as big a score as possible.  If they were just looking for good sex they would figure out how to be in a relationship and find some woman with a massive sex drive and call it a day.  But that doesn't inflate the number of people you have slept with much at all, and that number is the way in which they keep score.

For me sex is the point, score isn't.  The interplay of mutual desire, the ratcheting up of excitement, these are the things I want.  Having sex with new people is fun in general but the really important thing is that the sex be *good*.

Whereas for pickup artists no time is wasted on how to enjoy sex, or how to bring your partner enjoyment.  Once you get your penis inside a vagina your score has ticked up, so the remainder of the encounter is not particularly relevant.

Now I get it.  It wasn't just that pickup artists were gross before, it was that they made no sense at all.  They were clearly evil, but it was an evil without a point, which confused me.  Now that I realize that their goals were entirely different from mine it all falls into place.  Pickup artists aren't pleasure seeking hedonists like me, because wasting time in bars trying to get reluctant people to have shitty sex with you isn't pleasureable.  They just want to win the game, and they are willing to win it in a way that is sad for all people involved.  The game of keeping score in life by the number of one night stands you have had is sad and destructive and I want no part of it.  I am going to keep score by trying to be the person who generates the most fun for me and the people around me instead.

Everything sucks for everyone!

Patriarchy sucks.  There is an awful lot of information there about how it sucks for women, and few people are willing to debate that at this point.  (Obviously there are some, and they are terrible people.)

But patriarchy sucks for men too.  I read a great article today interviewing a number of trans men who had lived experience with being treated as a man and as a woman and they had lots to say about the negatives of being treated as a man.  They talked about people refusing to speak to them, about their emotions being dismissed, and about the lack of support and empathy they got from others.

Of course they acknowledged that being treated as a man came with the benefits of being listened to and being promoted, among others, but it was clear that both sides had their penalties and benefits.

Overall I would take the 'treated as a man' package, as would most people I expect.  It generally is better, which is kind of the point of feminism.  But we would be remiss if we ignored the bad stuff that happens to men as a result of toxic masculinity.  Repression of emotions, lack of non erotic physical touch, and vulnerability being seen as a failure make men feel shitty, and then it cascades onto the people they interact with.

I think this is a critical part of feminism that a lot of people ignore.  Feminism isn't just about helping women - it helps make a better world for everyone, whether they be man, woman, nonbinary, or literally any gender at all.

Ending it all, done right

Usually when I click on obvious clickbait on the internet I feel bad about my choices.  It never brings fulfillment, only endless marching hordes of exclamation points, hoping to divert my attention from something that actually matters.

But sometimes I find a gem.

I just wandered across the alternate ending to Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and it fixed so many things.  One of the things about Scott Pilgrim was that while most of the movie was an absolute joy to watch I found Scott's obsession with Ramona unpalatable at times.  At points their dynamic was good, but there was simply too much of entitled dude chasing a woman he has imbued with all his dreams and fantasies without much thinking about who she really is.

I wanted the film to end with Scott not being involved with Ramona.  I wanted him to realize that his desperate pursuit of an unknown was not true love, but simply infatuation.  I wanted him to grow, dammit.

And in this alternate ending, Ramona just walks away, and Scott ends up happily gaming with Knives, finally seeming to appreciate what she brings to him.


And Ramona should walk away.  Sure, there was a crazy thing between her and Scott, but this is the right ending to the story.  I like it both because I feel like this is the right story to tell, but also because I want to put the right lesson out into the world.  "Chase the woman you become infatuated with until she is yours." is not the thing I want the world to see.  I would have been happy with Scott alone at the end, Ramona having left because they didn't actually have anything, and Knives having left because Scott was an asshole to her.  That would have been good too.

But Ramona leaving and Scott and Knives finding a good place for the two of them to be - that is an ending I am so much happier with.

(Here is where I insert my usual snark, noting that polyamory as an option blows up the scripts of at least half of the movies ever.  Why not date both of them?  At least consider it!)

If only The Breakfast Club could put out a new ending to replace the final 5% of the movie... then I could die in peace.

The big sad

Many of my friends are sad these days.  The provincial election did not go as we had hoped and our new government will be a Conservative one.  The people of Ontario decided to elect a party that never published a complete platform, made promises that are completely impossible, and is led by a buffoon, Doug Ford.  I wouldn't vote Conservative in any case, but there was a whole list of other contenders for leader I would have been vastly less harsh on.

I am sure people have lots of reasons for voting Conservative.  Mostly they seem to be terror at what a left wing party would do; these are usually pitched as fiscal concerns.  Many people claim that their Conservative vote was to protect Ontario's finances from the NDP.

I don't buy that crap.

The NDP published a properly costed platform.  The Conservatives published a list of promises that didn't even come close to adding up.  Economists on all political sides agreed that the Conservative promises were ridiculous and would lead to enormous deficits, higher than the other parties'.  If the Conservatives had actually published their numbers then perhaps they could have refuted these criticisms, but since they did not, we can only go with our best guesses.

You could also look at the party's history and see that they have no track record of financial responsibility.  Across North America deficits and foolish spending are not attached to any particular political party or even a leaning, left or right.  I would love to say that left wing governments are better this way, but we all know that every party wastes money and has financial scandals, and the data supports this.

You *can* choose how parties throw your money around though.  Right wingers will tend to throw it at rich people and shareholders, while left wingers will throw it at poor people.

I know which way I would prefer it, and I don't stand to benefit from helping the poor, quite the opposite.

So why vote Conservative?  Well, there are three reasons, I think.  Bigotry first among them.  Ford in particular is terrible for promoting bigotry and I am sure the fact that the three party leaders were two women and one man did some extra heavy lifting to get the misogyny vote out.  Lots of people want to vote for bigotry but few will actually admit it; these people of course often defend their position with "But what about fiscal responsibility?" and ignore the fact that there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that the Conservatives are better that way in general, and in this particular election they are far worse.

Some people really do vote for fiscal responsibility, and it isn't just a shield for bigotry.  These people are just misinformed or ignorant of the facts of the case here; I am sure there are times when you would actually be voting in a more fiscally responsible government by voting for the right, but this certainly wasn't one of those times.

And then there are those that vote for the right simply because they always have.  It is a tribal thing, and has nothing to do with policy of any sort.  There are simply people that always vote one way, and these folks are found in all parties.  I think their way of deciding who to vote for is terrible, but I am not the sort of person who is particularly into tribalism as moral compass.

Hard to say how much of what elected the Conservatives is evil, how much is clueless, and how much is random tribalism.  No matter the case, it makes me sad.  It won't affect me much directly, except insofar as they wreck the finances of the province, but it makes me so mad that they clearly intend to go after those who are vulnerable to placate the part of the electorate who did vote for them on the basis of bigotry.

We will get through this - there have been plenty of Conservative governments before, with similar goals.  But still I wish that the people of my province were better than this.

Slutting it up

I just finished reading the book Slutever by Karley Sciortino.  The tagline is "dispatches from a sexually autonomous woman in a post shame world", and that mostly gives you a sense of what the author is trying to do.  The book is a combination of two things:  First, a rambling story of all kinds of weird and interesting sex stuff that Sciortino got up to over many years of promiscuity ranging from drug fuelled orgies to sex work to BDSM.  The other thing is a well informed discussion of sex and feminist related issues touching on all sorts of topics including sex work, slut shaming, and kink.

This mash of types works really well.  The author makes it clear that her stories are meant to be more like cautionary tales rather than examples of good behaviour, and then links all of the mistakes she made to things she wants to change in the world.  As Sciortino goes through all of her struggles and travails she slowly learns how the world works, how her own brain works, and how our society could better handle sex and sexuality especially when it comes to women's sexuality.

I really like Sciortino's take on the issues.  She communicates easily and clearly while making the process fun for the reader.  Her brand of sex positive feminism is one I like, and I appreciate someone who can talk about complex topics without gumming up her prose with excessive jargon or convoluted writing.

For someone like me who has read a lot on this topic there wasn't anything new to learn really.  The political stuff all was right up my alley but this book is more aimed at the mainstream audience in terms of the teaching portion.  I agreed with it, but I didn't come away any more informed about sexual politics or cultural sexual issues.  I enjoyed the stories and the read was fun, but it was aimed at people who know less than I do about the topic.

That isn't a criticism, just a note!  I think the book does a great job at what it is trying to do, which is to educate normal people about feminism and sex.  It isn't trying to be a scholarly piece, informing the elite about something entirely new, and it lands exactly where it is trying to.

So if you enjoy stories about wild and unexpected debauchery, or if you think reading a feminist take on sexual politics would be informative, then go for it.  The book is super easy to read, quick, and on point.

If everyone read Slutever I suspect it would help change attitudes in a positive way, and it manages that while being fun.  Two thumbs up.

One more reason to be 'rude'

A couple weeks ago I talked about the justifications for being confrontational when discussing racism, sexism, and other bigotry.  Most of that discussion (including a bunch in the comments) was surrounding the efficacy of calling people racist instead of simply having polite conversation where you describe the issues with people's actions without actually calling them out explicitly.

It remains unclear to me how well explicit call outs of bigotry work in terms of changing minds.  It gets people's attention for sure, and sometimes that has value.  On the other hand it makes people angry and defensive and that often leaves them completely unwilling to listen.  On the other other hand though, it means that people who see bigoted behaviour and the backlash against it may change their behaviour even if they don't change their minds, and that is a victory, albeit an incomplete one.

But the thing I most missed was the effect conversations have on the people being discriminated against.  If you are a trans person, for example, and you see an online conversation about bathroom bills that try to force trans people to use the bathroom associated with their assigned gender at birth, it is going to be a shitty experience.  There are two ways that conversation can go though, and one is better for them than the other.

One way is that their 'allies' talk nicely to the bigots and don't use confrontational language and pretend like bathroom bills are a thing we can have a pleasant debate about.  This is going to be a miserable experience for the trans reader, as that conversation will make it clear that those 'allies' are people who will happily pretend in public that bathroom bills are morally neutral, just a thing to discuss.

The other way is the allies can tell the bigots that they are bigots, that bathroom bills are oppressive bullshit, and that they can take their evil and shove it up their asses. 

The second way is the best way.  Neither way is likely to convince the bigot to change, but one accurately portrays the evil as evil, and shows support for those who are actually being affected by this.  It allows the trans person in the example to see that there are people who are on their side, people who are willing to go to bat for them, people who are willing to call the bigotry what it is and not hide behind polite talk.

Calling a bigot a bigot may not work well in convincing them, but honestly very little will.  Usually it takes the experience of someone close to them being in the affected group, or simply waiting for them to die.

The best and biggest reason to call this stuff out is to send a message.  That message will be heard by oppressors and oppressed alike, and it matters.