Knocked Off Center

To think like a member of a privileged class means to place yourself at the center of the world. Your experience is the empirical experience, and all others are deviant in some way. The deviance is the fault of the individual, and you see the world as relationships of individuals without any reference to systems of power that define relationships between group. White people need to be knocked off center to see how our privlege was created and at whose expense.

To be knocked off center is frightening because you have to question everything that you held to be the absolute truth. You have to examine your own beliefs and behavior, your own actions and thoughts. To be knocked off center means to be honest with yourself; and doing so requires you to admit to yourself that you might be racist, or sexist, or prejudiced in some way. You have to look hard at it, and figuring out how you came to be that way does not excuse you from the work. The problem with this is that it is painful and difficult, and requires you to be quiet and listen to other voices that make you uncomfortable and that might even hate you. You have to work at being quiet. You have to work at understanding the anger that might be hurled at you. That is compassion; and you can never stop.

Compassion is mistaken as soft and touchy-feely; but soft and touchy-feely is really quite hard.

On a Happier Note

Big D is recovering from his surgery and doing well enough to call and share a bitch about department politics. Only his back hurts from being tied to a board for twelve hours.

Sexandviolence, part 2

In my last post I discussed a bit about how I was once nearly raped. That incident still shames me after fifteen years. I feel the eyes of the world judging me for having gotten myself into that situation in the first place, and I some dark little insecure corner of my mind still partly agrees with them. I am also ashamed for continuing the relationship with this person afterwards, and for the person that I became for a while because of that relationship.* I became everything I had before and since despised. This is all personal shame.

I have found myself ashamed to mention the incident, too, because, to many other people, it calls into question the legitimacy of both my political and intellectual feminism. “Oh,” they can say, “she just has issues with men.” Anything I have to say after that has no weight. If I try to explain to a boyfriend what I need from him emotionally or sexually, and if this inconveniences him in any way, then my desires can be dismissed because I “have issues with sex” from the rape incident and should "just get over it" or "deal with it on" on my "own time." If I am sexually harassed at work, my complaints can be discounted because, “well, you know, there was that alleged attempted rape,” the implication being that anything that happened was really a misunderstanding that I blew out of proportion.

To other people, it seems, when they learn of this incident, they see me as a crazy woman whose experience is questionable because I “have issues with men.” As I try to examine the way the world teaches girls to be girls and boys to be boys, anything critical that I say becomes trivial because of this. The same brother who was at the firing range tried to “explain” my feminism to our dittohead cousin by saying, “well, she had some bad experiences with a bad boyfriend.” His pity, while a welcome change from overt judgement against me, undercut anything that I had to say on the matter of gender. Any public knowledge of the rape attempt has been used as a way to silence me, and the silence compounds the personal shame that I already feel.

I will be the first to admit that I have some very very big "issues" with men; but my brother had it very wrong. The issues began long before even he was born, and the issue is not with individuals so much as the systems that teach and permit harmful and sexist behavior. You see, to me, the rape attempt, along with about a thousand other violations both small and large, including the silencing reactions and the personal shame, actually helped to open my eyes to gender analysis. Girls are brought up differently and taught how to behave in ways that are contrary to their interests and place them in danger. Boys are brought up to behave in ways that are dangerous to women. I’m not saying that this is the whole story of either myself or of gender socialization, nor am I saying that women are inherently “victims” and men inherently “predators.” I am saying that, there is this place where sex and violence come very close together and intersect in which girls are trained to behave in ways that will get them hurt, and boys are trained in ways that make hurting women acceptable.

Rapists are not all born. Quite a few of them are made. Those men who planned and executed the rape of that 14 year old girl in Iraq, then murdered her family, I don’t think that they were born rapists. I also don’t think that the many other rapes that are probably taking place at this moment in Iraq and Afghanistan and being committed by the good guys, are being committed by men who were born to rape. I think something in not only their upbringing, but also in their training, taught them that these rapes are acceptable. Take the boys at Duke who were accused of raping a dancer at a party. Whether or not they are guilty, their attitudes and the attitudes that cropped up around them were such that any rape of her was permissible. Something in the way those boys and the people around them were taught told them that. Even the first time that I had ever heard of acquaintance rape (although it was not called that), the girl in question was portrayed as a tease who had changed her mind. Raping her was considered perfectly fine. My parents, incidently, told me about this case because one of their friends was sitting on the jury. All of these messages, the training either in the military or in life, make rape become something acceptable or, at the very least, excusable due to the circumstances. This interests me because I think most rapists are made; and even if someone's upbringing does not lead them directly to rape, it makes rape permissible, and it makes a whole spectrum of indignities, disrespect, and intimidation commonplace along the way.**

I’m damn sure that something about the way that I was taught allowed me to put myself in that particular situation where I nearly became a rape victim. That very same teaching, along with the shame, put me in stupidly vulnerable positions for the next two years. Yes, I was the “victim” in those years mostly because I had absolutely no psychological tools for understanding how I got into those positions, how to get out of them without causing more harm to myself, and how to avoid them all in the first place. I had no tools because I had never been taught them. At most, I was taught that by using whatever tools that I might have for defense, I was myself somehow at fault or that I could only use those tools only the once or be like “boy who cried wolf.”

Finally, I got pissed off enough to realize that patterns of vicitimization, like my own, might be due to something other than my own weakness. Something was seriously wrong. I was being nice, caring, understanding, accomodating, and all of the other things that a woman is supposed to be; but that put me in danger and kept me in danger. That's when I went looking for a way to understand the patterns and to defend myself.

When I went looking for a way to understand these patterns of acceptable behavior for men, regardless of its violence and disrespect, and acceptable behavior for women, regardless of how much it put her in danger, I found feminism. I admit a bias in my feminism; but bias is all but impossible not to have in anything. Certainly people who oppose feminism, or subscribe to certain shades of feminism and not others, are all biased as well. My bias was that I had been hurt and left unable to defend myself because I was a woman. Feminism gave me a tool to analyze what I saw and experienced, and a way to understand broad patterns of behavior. Feminism is not the final or only tool, because there is more to a person than their gender; but it is a useful one because a person cannot escape their gender or the ways that they were taught to behave and the ways the world reacts to them because of their gender.

To me, the attempted rape, and all that preceded and followed from it, does not negate my point of view on any matter relating to gender. It has not left me with "issues." It has not made me something that needs to be "fixed" or pitied or explained. It was an incident that demonstrated to me something very viceral and important for my own safety, survival and sanity, and made me a bit more empathetic with others in similar or worse situations. The attempted rape allowed me to see the core ideas that go into feminism and gender analysis. It does not cloud my judgment of male and female interactions so much as enhance it.


* Incidentally, before anyone jumps to conclusions, I knew the person in question for about 2 very fucked-up years, at the end of which I decided that he was, in fact, just an asshole that I didn't need to know. I haven't seen nor heard of him in a good, long decade. I haven't allowed anyone like him to enter my life since then, either.

**To reiterate, again and again, this is not to say that ALL men as individuals are intimidators, etc., inherently and irredeemably. I'm looking at the general social message, not charging you or someone you know. I you are reading this and becoming upset, ask yourself why.

Sexandviolence, part 1

I went to the gun range with my brother and two of our friends. This was about fifteen years ago. They romanticized law enforcement, one even became a cop, so they were going out to "practice." I didn't particularly like guns, my policy being to stay away from them as much as possible; but I was partly curious and partly still in a phase trying to prove that I could be as butch as they were, so I went along. I shot a glock, and some other sort of pistol, and a shotgun. The glock was loaded with a Black Talon at one point, and the shotgun with regular small-guage shot first, then a slug. I wasn't good, but I could do some damage to someone if they held still like the target and gave me time to aim. I tended to shoot low, so when aiming for the heart, I tended to hit the cock.

There's another story in there somewhere.

The targets would come back shredded. The targets were the standard sort that have a man's sillouette on them, so that the shooter can practice hitting the torso. The one that had been the victim of the Black Talons was in several pieces, as was the one that had received the shotgun slug. Those two bothered me the most. A human body would be torn up just like the paper, but much worse. I felt very sad for the rest of the day. The human body suddenly seemed very fragile and too easily destroyed; and the human mind that could come up with something like the Black Talon seemed outside of my comprehension. When we left the shooting range, I didn't feel too butch or curious anymore.

The guys all hopped about like puppies as we left. They high-fived one another and said "fuck yeah" a lot. "Man, did you see that shit!" they said to one another, pointing at a particularly good hit, or a particularly piecemeal target. "That shit rocked!" They turned to me. "See?" they said, "isn't it cool? You feel so powerful."

"Uh-huh," I replied, then looked out the window.

"Man, I'm really horny now," one of them said. "What about you guys? Does shooting make you horny?" "Hell yeah," the other two agreed. "I could really fuck a chick right now."

Now, I personally did not feel in any danger from any of these guys at the time. I wasn't even offended by the subject. I didn't think any of them were going to pull over and start a gang-bang. At this point, especially considering that one was my brother, I figured only one of them really thought that was a come-on. Mostly, I figured that they were posturing for each other, all but pulling out their dicks to measure them. I had pretty much ceased to exist by not jumping in on the post-firing range euphoria. Boys were being boys, I thought. Plus, I was getting a glimpse into this male world, even if some of it was showing off for the chick in the car.

That glimpse unsettled me. These were guys that I knew, liked, was related to. Yet, I felt as if I was getting some idea of how rape happens. In every war, there is rape. Rape is part of the business. You can't even soften the statement by saying "more so in the old days when we were less enlightened" or "more so in 'uncivilized parts of the world amongst less civilized people like in Bosnia or Africa." Rape happens always in war, and by the good guys as much as the bad guys. By Americans as much as anyone else. Rape happens in peace, as well, and in the same way. All sizes and shapes of women are raped by men who could be defined both as good guys and bad guys in the rest of their lives. You probably know both, and don't even know that you do.

A man I knew tried to rape me on a date not too long before this firing range incident. (I only just now saw that maybe there was some connection, but save that for later.) He insisted later that he really did not intend to rape me. He thought I was playing a "game." Other women had played such a "game" with him before. They acted like they didn't want to have sex with him, he explained; but really, they wanted him to take them forcibly. "What kind of a sick shit game is that?" I thought. "And what in my terrified shrieking and clawing and kicking and crying made him think that I was playing it?" I thought, "fuck those other women for playing such stupid shit games and leaving me with this fallout of expectation."

What I said was, "how did you know that's what they wanted?" "Because they were fine the next morning," he said. "They acted like nothing had happened." I began to have a little more sympathy for the women. "Besides," he said, "I'm not a rapist, so I can't rape women." I almost laughed in his face at the sheer -- I don't know what, ignorance? idiocy? -- that being a rapist were like some profession, as if some men become doctors, and some become lawyers, and some become rapists. I felt very sick realizing that he was, in fact, a rapist. I had narrowly escaped, and I still don't know why.

I go back to that day at the firing range. Those guys there, when I had told them parts of the story, had thought that what the would-be rapist did was wrong, although they admonished me for getting into the situation in the first place; but they would not see any connection between their own sexual arousal at the firing range and his in trying to overcome me. They would say that I was making too much of nothing. Ironically, they would probably think like my would-be rapist. "I'm not a rapist, therefore I don't rape," much the way people think, "I'm not a racist, therefore I don't do racist things," or "I'm a feminist, therefore I don't so sexist things." Ipso facto.

Yet, the close connection of violence and sexual arousal scared me very much. These were not anonymous thugs with long records, hiding in the bushes waiting for a good-looking woman in a short skirt to walk past. These were not invading soldiers of a heathen race. These were not psychopaths. In other words, these were not stereotypes of rapists. These were guys that I knew fairly well. One was the father of a little girl. One all but worshipped his mother. One was a middle school teacher. One was interviewing to be a cop. Yet, these guys had guns, they knew how to use them, and they were horny. My would-be rapist had a gun in his house, I later learned, "for protection." Still, without the gun, he seemed perfectly willing to bludgeon me into submission.

For these men, violence led to the desire for sex. There is a step in between there; but only one step. My shooting-range companions had not taken that step. In rape, the violence and the sex are the same thing. My would-be rapist seemed capable of taking that step. What removes that step? What makes the violence of rape the gratification? While I believe that some rapists are just born that way, already wanting to rape; I also think that otherwise regular guys can step over into that category. That worries me because it could happen at any time for any reason, and I want to know when and how and why.

That is what I was seeing that day at the firing range, the potential for these friends of mine to become rapists. Not that they would, but that they could. That haunts me.

Ever Known Someone Who Made You Want To Do This?

“I wish that I could snatch his eyeballs out of his head and shove them up his butt so he could see just how big an asshole he really is.”
– Wanda Sykes, Sick and Tired , 2006.

SiteMeter Secrets

Beware the word combinations of your posts and their titles. Who knew that “gay,” “men,” and “fucking” would attract people looking for “gay men,” “fucking,” “gay fuck,” and “husbands who want sex”? You would think that a blog title like “Clio Bluestocking Tales” might indicate that probably won’t find what they are looking for here. Then, again, they might think this is a knock off of “The Red Shoe Diaries.” Plus, they probably don’t look at the title, just the fact that they got a hit.

I've become a bit of a SiteMeter addict, especially since my blog seems to get hits from time to time. Some of my new fascination comes from the fact that it is a new toy; but I also think that this initial lonely period in adjusting to my new life makes me look for some human contact, no matter how vague. Loneliness makes you a bit erratic in relation to other people. All of your needs and insecurities are a little too close to the surface.

On the SiteMeter, you wonder why people visit your blog. Why were they looking up that particular combination of words?. What was it that I said in the comments of that other blog that made someone want to see what else I had to say? Did they hate me or love me or find themselves entirely indifferent to me? Which would I prefer? If I comment on a blog that is somewhat different in tone from mine, will those readers come to mine and think I'm a total wimp? Where do these people go to after me, and why?

ISPs that indicate a geographical location where I have lived or where someone I know lives make me wonder if I know that person, or at least have met them somewhere along the line. "Oooh, a Texan! Do we know some of the same people?" I think, as if Texas were a tiny little place like Cicely, Alaska, or Mayberry, N.C. Is that person from Michigan trying to figure out if this is really that person that she met at that conference? And why is the referring link to a site that has no reference to this site? Are these good things? You can sit and ponder for hours.

At least, I can.

Checking the SiteMeter and surfing other blogs reminds me of the voyeurism that I saw one summer when I stayed in New York. I had the fortune to be rooming on the top story of a tall building that bordered on Chinatown, Soho, and the Financial District. A tall apartment building was on the opposite corner of the same block. I loved to sit in the window of my apartment, and read and write and watch the city. New York does not fail to entertain. In the other apartment building, the residents kept their curtains open, so I found myself watching these people's lives. Nothing exciting happened, like in the movies. No man murdered his wife and cut up the body. No one had wild illicit sex. They just put away the groceries, and read the newspaper, and played with the kids.

And watched the people in my building.

I almost fell out of the window with laughter when, feeling a tinge of guilt for watching life in that other building, I saw someone over there watching life my building. He even pulled out binoculars. Had this been anywhere but New York, or any other time when I myself had not been observing from my perch for several weeks, I would have thought the guy was a total pervert (hell, for all I know, he might have been, and this may be the way true perverts are able to go about their perversion); but, I did not. In fact, not a few days later, I saw a guy in the apartment next to mine pull out his own pair of binoculars. He and his buddies passed them around as if they were a joint, each looking in a different direction, at a different sight. Again, nothing dirty or exciting or special was going on. We were all watching each other with the same fascination and, perhaps, titillation of simply seeing into someone else's life. I found it rather ironic that, in a city where everyone moves about with their heads down, keeping an invisible shell around themselves to create their own private space in public, so many people went home to open blinds and pull out binoculars, making private space become public. This seemed an accepted way of life.

That's what blogs are. People allowing some of their private space to be public. The blog is the opening of your blinds. The SiteMeter is watching who is watching you. Nothing special, nothing weird, nothing illicit; just simple curiosity.


Edited on Dec. 14, 2006 to add: I should duly credit Charley Carp for prompting me to finish and post this piece because he wrote about something similar on his own blog.

Dreadful Irony

I first heard of Big D almost fifteen years ago. He had won a grant from the city’s police department to write its history. I had never met or even seen him, and thought that this person who had won the grant was someone else with a similar name but with a much different physique and a much different approach to the history of policing. In the fall of that year, I saw Big D for the first time. He was pacing the halls before taking the comprehensive exam. Around and around he paced, passing by the t.a. office over and over, for nearly an hour. “That’s Big D,” one of the other t.a.s told me, with a tinge of awe and a touch of resentment. Big D later told me that most white people reacted to him that way.

I didn’t meet Big D until the spring. I was sitting out on the balcony, which was more of an outdoor hallway, and reading for my own comprehensive exams. Big D showed up and sat down to do some of his own reading for his next class. He told me later that he took one look at me in my Laura Ashley knock-off and thought “what’s this little china doll doing here.” He laughed, “you were all in that frilly dress and I thought ‘she must have a petticoat on up under there.’” Actually, I did. Chantal, another graduate student and the much-younger wife of one of the adjunct professors showed up. She and Big D knew each other and began to talk about graduate school and some of the problems in the department. I had my own issues and opinions on the subject, so I chimed in. Big D said my attitude did not match my looks.

Big D and I did not become friends until the following fall. That was the semester of the Groovy T.A.s., which included Babu, the Brown-Nosed Reindeer, the Pet Wolf, the Cave Boy, and Cheetos, among others. For the first time since I had entered graduate school, I felt a camaraderie with the other students. Big D was not a t.a., but he would stop by our office and hang out. I really don’t remember exactly at what point I went from being the “neurotic little white girl” to being his first white friend; but I did. I don’t know when he went from being Big D, our big brother, to Big D, the person who could talk me off of the ledge (and my first black friend); but he did. And very quickly.

Big D stayed away from departmental politics; but, being a large black man who studied Civil Rights at a southern university, the politics often found him. His intelligence and right to be in the department were questioned on sight. The old guard went out of their way to portray him as an affirmative action "welfare" case for the department, depsite the fact that he was seldom in their classes and never applied for any financial assistance or asked for any preferential treatment. He knew that this was bullshit, and tried to find ways to walk around it rather than confront it. Confrontation would cast him as the "angry black man."

He, in fact, is never confrontational. He believes in the power of persuasion, in defusing clashes. He believes in the importance of rational mediation. He also absolutely refuses to be treated as anything less than an intelligent human being.

So, he found the professors who had something to teach him about history, and who would teach him with respect; and he learned from them. Then, he turned around and helped any other student who asked, graduate or otherwise. "We are the only ones who are going to get ourselves through this process," he would say. "Our work will speak for us and silence our opponents."

These days, when students from our old graduate school meet him, they approach him with awe, but with no resentment. They think of him as a star, and are sometimes too intimidated to approach him. That amuses him. "These crazy little white kids," he says, "if they would just sit down and talk to me, they would realize I'm just regular people." When they do talk to him, he gives them whatever advice or help that they want or need.

Today, Big D went into the hospital for surgery. He has an atrial fibrillation, which will be treated with radiofrequency ablation. This is supposed to be a common and safe treatment, and will prevent him from having a stroke or more radical and invasive surgery later in his life. Whereas, earlier this year, I feared my mother's death in her double knee replacement surgery, I find that I cannot comprehend Big D's death. I love my mother, but something in me always sees her as soft and weak, although she has proven herself otherwise on many occasions. Big D, on the other hand, is tough and strong, both in body and in will. The thought that anything could happen to him seems incomprehensible. The most reality that I can muster is the recognition of the irony that someone with as big a heart as his could be felled by it.

The sense of irony is a cold observation; and it is the only buffer that I have between myself and the raw fear of the emptiness of a world without Big D.

Fucking and the Fucked

For some reason, this discussion is reminding me of an incident with my brother many years ago when he was 18. We were both working as ushers at the Symphony's New Year's Eve wingdingthingy. A gay couple approached him for directions to the bathroom. After my brother had pointed the way, one of the men thanked him and said, "You know, you're a rather attractive young man." My brother displayed offence, and the gay guys moved on.

Now, to hear my brother tell the story, and to see the reaction among the straight dudes who we worked with and who were his friends, you would have thought that the gay men had jumped my brother right there in the middle of Jones Hall. I told them, "Look, if you feel threatened by a gay man because he gives you unwanted attention, then you now know how we women feel when you guys hit on us." To a dude, they all disagreed vehemently. "Us hitting on you is NATURAL" they all insisted. "That was just UNNATURAL."

This always disturbed me. I'll cut my brother some slack because of incidents from his childhood (which I have yet to elaborate upon with full honesty and which make his reaction a bit more complicated), but the reactions from the dudes and from my father were consistently infuriating to me. "For crissake!" I used to say in complete exasperation to these dudes, "You don't want to fuck them, so how is their compliment any threat to you?"

Aside from being just cartoonishly homophobic, their interpretations of the exchange between the gay men and my brother seemed to reveal a lot about what these dudes were thinking when they approached women in the same way. Their assumption that the gay men somehow wanted to rape or coerce my brother into sex seemed to suggest that their own advances toward women were all sexual, and that the woman's desire (or lack thereof) for sex was of no real consequence. At most, her resistance was an inconvenience.

They as dudes felt that they had every right to approach a woman, but they did not extend that privledge to a gay man in approaching other men. If a gay man took the privledge of a straight man and approached another man, the gay man had assumed the masculine position. To a straight man, this was all fine and good, as long as the object of desire (and I use "object" intentionally here) were another gay man.* If the object were a straight man, then certain protocols had been disrupted, according to the straight dudes.

The approach position is the masculine position and the object position is the feminine position, according to this point of view. If both positions are filled by gay men, straight men don't mind because they themselves are not involved, and because they automatically assume that gay men are naturally feminine and therefore don't mind the feminized position. If a gay man approaches a straight man, then the straight man has been put into the feminine position and his assumptions about masculinity and femininity are upended.

Moreover, the feminine position, the object, the one being approached, the woman is implicitly available to the man simply by his desire for her. When a gay man approaches a straight man, then according to the straight man logic, he is now available to the gay man simply by the gay man's desire for him. If, when the straight man approaches the woman, her own will is not important; then when the gay many approaches the straight man, the straight man's will must not be important.

To use the incident with my brother as an opportunity for empathy with women (and even with gay men, although that would be another issue) meant that the dudes would have to admit the indefensible position that they do see women as something ("thing" used intentionall) that they can possess through sex. They would have to admit that women are their equals, which would mean relinquishing their own privlege to assume a right to have sex with women, whether or not the women wanted to have sex with them.

With this point of view, there is only the one acting and the one being acted upon. There is only the one fucking and the one being fucked. The masculine position, or simply the dudes, do the fucking. The feminine position, or simply women, is the one that gets fucked. That, according to these dudes is the natural order of things; and the natural order of things makes women an object.

That, according to me and according to the proprietor of the blog that inspired this post, is called patriarchy.


* Gaydar or not, you can't always tell just by looking, any more than you can tell if they are married, have a stunning I.Q., or anything else.

Disclaimer: If you take offense at this post, ask yourself why. If you still take offense at this post because "I don't do that" or "my boyfriend/husband/brother/father/etc. doesn't do that," then offer yourself consolation that this is not about you or them specifically (unless you know who I'm writing about, and it is). It is an examination of a moment in which I saw a particular way of thinking on the part of a rather large group of straight men.

Also, this is not a wholesale condemnation of approaching someone you find attractive in order to get to know them better. This is just asking that people consider some of the assumptions and implications of such interactions.

More Keys and Other Random Ideas

Keys added to keychain in past 24 hours:
1. Key to new apartment.
2. Key to new apartment's mailbox.

When I write "new apartment," I really do mean "new." (A mobile home ended up not being a viable option, and led to an epiphany that I am a terrible elitist). No one has lived in this apartment before me. The street on which it is located did not exist a year ago. This confuses utility departments, who don't recognize the address and aren't sure where the meters are on the property. This also means that, while the cable and high-speed internet providers of the town have agreed to put a line to the street, they won't put lines to the apartment units until more people live in them. I am the third occupant in a building of eight units. The cable/internet company assures me that I will be able to call them back and have this set up in "7-10 working days," by which time they will have run lines to the building.

So, no t.v. or internet at home for nearly two weeks. That is, perhaps fitting, since the movers won't be leaving New England for another week "either on the 13th or 14th," and won't arrive here until "a window between the 16th and the 22nd." That's kind of a picture window of the 1950s variety there. Meanwhile, I can break my re-acquired T.V. addiction and get more writing or reading done.

For the past two weeks, a cheap motel has been home. Motels are a sort of sensory deprivation chamber. The T.V. is the main source of immediate stimulation, so I channel surf a lot. Now, I loves me some bad t.v., don't get me wrong; but that has not prevented me from coming to some conclusions about the general offerings out there. The main conclusion about television is not that it rots minds, but that it perpetuates a lack of originality. The second conclusion is that most "documentaries," particularly if they involve anything related to the fields of medicine or surgery, are really just modern-day freak shows, which has some rather insidious implications. The third conclusion is that much comedy is actually not as subversive or as satirical as it seems.

In fact, I'm convinced that subversion and satire have become poses in many (but not all) cases, rather than real intellectual and artistic comedic choices. A comedian can hide some serious, regressive ideas behind the pretense of satire or subversion. That is a difficult position to argue against because any critique or criticism of satire and subversion can result in the most damning of all charges in comedy, "you don't get it" (which is often followed by the seldom merely implicit "dumbass," "moron," or "you humorless bitch.") It is an even more difficult position to argue against as you are laughing, even if you are horrified and wonder why the hell you could find this sexist, racist dude so hilarious.* Laughter is, after all, the only relevent test in comedy.

For the time being, I must end some of these observations without presenting my evidence. A migraine has launched an invasion in my head, cutting off the supply route of coherent thoughts from my brain.


*A radical, feminist, separatist, lesbian friend of mine considered "dude" to be the lowest of all insults. "Motherfucker," "asshole," even "cunt," could not match, no matter how virulently delivered, the disdain of her deep, nasal sneer, "dude."

Pessimism

Whenever I am happy, I wonder when it will crash. Not "end," but "crash," when everything goes entirely wrong and all hope for anything good or happy or simply "not going wrong" has been entirely destroyed by whatever disasters crescendo around me. I worry that this is, in fact, my glimpse into the true state of the world and not just a symptom of my faulty brain chemistry and bad attitude.

I am aware that mine are problems of an overly-educated, middle class, American white girl. Most of the world is just trying to survive. (Do people in places defined by war and abject poverty feel happiness? Am I mis-defining happiness?) That is why I also fear that my little version of pessimism is actually optimistic in comparison with the rest of the world.

In an Unexpected Turn of Events

I am now happily -- yes, I wrote "happily," and meant it! -- ensconced in my new job in the Middle of Nowhere. On my first day here, in the middle of the day, in the middle of researching, I had this unexpected spark of realization, "This is my job! I'm researching as my job! I'm researching something in which I am interested AS MY JOB!" I may be in the Middle of Nowhere, but I made the absolute right choice.

In an unexpected turn of events, however, I found out today that I may lose my contract on my local history book because I am no longer a citizen of the locale. This was not a stipulation of the contract, but apparently the publishers do have the right to revoke the contract at their discretion. I have written – or griped, as the case may be – about this sense of proprietorship over the history of the town. This new development seems to underscore this belief.

Is this a common phenomenon? Have other historians had contracts revoked or been met with hostility for daring to write about a place that they do not live? I’m trying to find some analogies. For instance, can white people write the history of non-white people? Can men write the history of women? Can straight people write the history of gay people? Can Americans write the history of places outside of the United States? Are historians limited to their own specific identity as defined by gender, race, sexuality, or geography?

When I was growing up in Texas, the last place that I wanted to write about was Texas. I turned to the history of other places because any place other than Texas was more exotic to my younger mind. Similarly, I turned to the history of Native Americans and African-Americans specifically because they were not me. Their history was like a secret side of what was supposed to be “my” history as a white person, and this fascinated me. Studying history had begun as a way of going outside of myself and my own limited experience.

On the other hand, I later embraced women’s history specifically because it was about me, or people like me. I would ask, “what would my life have been like, as a woman, a hundred years ago? How is that different from what my life is like now? What led to that difference? What does that difference mean?” My interest in women’s history came from my embrace of feminism, which was directly related to my awareness of my life in female shell as it differed from my friends’ and brothers’ lives in a male shell. At the same time, my knee-jerk hostility toward men who were attracted to women’s history helped me to understand the suspicion with which black people viewed me when I expressed interest in African-American history.

Then, I read a book that, in part, addressed this issue: Should history be written by “insiders” and “outsiders"? Gradually, designation of “insider” or “outsider” ceased to have any real meaning in regard to historians. The historian has a point of view, enhanced or hurt both by membership in a group and by lack of membership in a group. In fact, to classify someone as more or less able to write the history of someplace or some group or even some event due to their inclusion or exclusion from those categories became ludicrous. Otherwise, the only history anyone could write would be a personal memoir or, at the opposite extreme, the history of events, people, and places to which the historian has absolutely no connection. Even the personal memoir could be disputed since actors other than the author participate in the narrative.

This is all to say, while I understand the attitude of the people connected to the town, including the publisher, I find it incomprehensible that I should be summarily disqualified from writing this book because I was not a native of the town and because I had to leave the town. Understand that I had to leave the town because there was no future for me there outside of publishing this book (which, no matter how wonderful, was not going to get me on the New York Times bestseller list and allow me to retire in luxury). I would still gladly live there if the future were a bit brighter in regard to my employment prospects and if my income allowed me to survive.

If the contract is cancelled, I suppose that I could find another publisher; but, do I really want to do that? I have two other books outlined that would be much more important and would advance my career as a historian much more than this one would. And, of course, there is always that novel! In any case, at this moment, the contract is still mine and the book is still mine.

The book will always be mine.

Thank you

To Shakespeare's Sister for their bit of support. I'm not overtly political, but I do tilt to the far left. May visitors from that site enjoy my stories.