This post is a response to Gail Dines' excellent essay about the patriarchy's fear of women's empowerment and the rise of pornography and suppression of courses such as women's studies in response to that fear.
The fear of truly liberated and empowered women does indeed terrorize those who are caught up in patriarchal beliefs. When I was bound for college in the early 1980's, I was signing up for courses, and one of the courses I signed up for was women's studies. My parents threw a huge fit and demanded that I withdraw from the course. They said that if people heard that I was taking "courses like that" they'd think I was "a dyke" and that I'd be ostracized and have no friends.I said that if someone thought that I was a lesbian simply because of a class I was taking, or that they would refuse to be friends with someone who was a lesbian, that was not someone I wanted to be friends with.They then stated that they would refuse to pay for college if I took this course.Because I didn't have the financial means or the knowledge to pay for college myself, I backed down.I lasted one semester. I was sexually assaulted early on in the semester, and I knew that because I was drunk at the time my concerns would be dismissed, so I never reported it. When I tried to tell my father what had happened, he asked why I had put myself in a position where I would be vulnerable to such an assault.I had a nervous breakdown and ended up getting married too young to the one person who treated me with any compassion.There is some positive outcome to this tale. I am still friends with my ex-husband. We divorced in 1994 but were able to repair our friendship. We had a son together who is now 27, and we are a family. Sadly but understandably, my son cannot stand my mother.
My father passed away near the end of 2010. In spite of his awful reaction to my assault, I hope that no-one will say it's good that he's dead or good that he suffered for many years before dying. He was a good man who had some stupid beliefs and I did love him in spite of these unfortunate ideas.
The poem references the lies told by the beauty, fashion, and diet industries, selling us on an image of perfection which doesn't exist in reality and causing many of us to hate who we are unnecessarily.
It is a battle I've fought all my life, on one hand desiring to be accepting of others regardless of their physical appearance and on the other hand despising myself for my unforgivable ugliness in a world which craves impossible beauty.
I really liked this prompt.
I am now caught up with OctPoWriMo's prompts (for the moment.) I still have ten more to go to get through 30 Days of Haiga--which wrapped on September 30.
I'm also considering participating in Inktober, and then in November I will be doing NaNoWriMo creating the story line for the VILE Awards on the Rattling Bones Undead Musician Magazine, as I do every year.
At the end of November, those nice young folk in their clean white coats will come to take me away to the Funny Farm.
Today's prompt for OctPoWriMo asks us to tell why we write.
I write because I'd commit suicide if I didn't, and then I'd have to haunt the bullies who love killing dreams and torturing misfits. It's so much easier to just stick around and keep pissing them off by remaining alive.
I'm old, I'm tired, and I'm blunt. I don't take others down, but I tell my truth with no apologies. I have had a difficult year, and there was a period of time when I didn't know if I could write anymore.
I continue to do so because I don't want the assholes who said I couldn't do it to win.
Even if I'm the only one who reads my words, I've written them. So the bastards haven't won yet.
I share this Haiga with you because many of Pepper's experiences are fictionalized mirrors of my own. Eventually, the Team will get back to writing the tale, and you will see.
The shooter was an old white dude. In before crazy online history is exposed with all that white nationalism bullshit or whatever this type gets into. They’re already actively framing him as being mentally ill, which is the treatment white terrorists always get. Pay close attention to how this man’s act of mass murder and terrorism gets framed by the media and pundits.
Next: those of us who live with mental illness will have to put up with the bullcrap of people talking about mental illness as if the only form of it that exists is dangerous psychosis.
Most people with mental illness are not dangerous.
People with mental illness are more likely to be victims than perpetrators.
Most people with mental illness do not present with obvious signs of psychiatric issues to the general public. The most common type of mental illness is mood disorders with unipolar depression being the most common mood disorder. Regarding bipolar disorder, people who have type 2 do not present with psychotic features. People with type 1 may or may not present with psychotic features. In other words, most people with bipolar disorder do not stand out significantly either.
Most people with disorders with psychosis, such as schizophrenia, are not dangerous either.
It is highly unlikely that this individual was psychotic.
I am extremely tired of evil behavior being excused as “mental illness.” All this does is hurt people who actually live with mental illness, most of whom are not dangerous and are already having a hard enough time as it is in a world which has little compassion for imperfect specimens.
~The Cheese Hath Grated It~
Notes:
Wincestshippingtrash.tumblr.com is my Supernatural fandom/fanfiction blog on Tumblr. It is often NSFW and generally isn't political. I reblogged this piece there and commented on it because it is my Tumblr (and, in fact, my blog across all platforms) with the biggest audience.
With the addition of prose, the Haiga becomes a Haibun.
This is today's Haibun. As it happens, the prompt for 30 Days of Haiga and the prompt for OctPoWriMo both work well for today's post, so I'm going to use this Haibun for both.
This is not a happy little tale of colorful flowers and chirping birds, unicorns farting rainbows, or boy meets girl and they live happily ever after in a glorious palace in twoo wuv forever.
This is my story, it's sad but true, about a crazy old curmudgeon that some of you knew.
Let's go back to my childhood now, boys and girls, so maybe you and I can understand some of the things that make me the way that I am.
Even today, when I am approaching 53 and my mother will be 79 in the middle of next year, my relationship with her is still complicated. But I won't convolute things by talking about the current dynamic between us. For now, we will stay with the incident that happened long ago which prompted the creation of this Haibun.
When I was a young child, no more than five or six years old, my mother took to singing The Hearse Song to me.
The Hearse Song dates back to the time of the Crimean War. Here are the lyrics.
"Don't you ever laugh as the hearse goes by, For you may be the next one to die. They wrap you up in big white sheets and cover you from head to feet. They put you in a big black box And cover you with dirt and rocks. All goes well for about a week, Until your coffin begins to leak. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, The worms play pinochle on your snout, They eat your eyes, they eat your nose, They eat the jelly between your toes. A big green worm with rolling eyes Crawls in your stomach and out your sides. Your stomach turns a slimy green, And pus pours out like whipping cream. You'll spread it on a slice of bread, And that's what you eat when you are dead."
When she reached the line of "that's what you eat when you are dead," she would poke me in the belly and laugh. I would run to my room screaming. My parents found this quite amusing.
A little background on my mother. On her mother's side, she came from a very strict religious family, the kind which believed in End Times prophecies. One such relative believed that even the legs of tables needed to be covered and that animals such as cats were Satan's creatures because they are prone to lifting their tails in the air and showing off their privates. Pretty much everyone was thought to be going to hell because there were so many rules that it was nearly impossible not to break them.
This family did not produce a lot of happy people.
I don't know much about my great-grandmother on this side of the family as she died before I was born. I do know that she had a lot of children, the last one of which was born when my mother and aunt were already in their teens. This child fell off a piano stool and injured her back when she was two years old. She subsequently developed meningitis and died. I saw the picture of her in her casket. I initially thought she was lying in a bassinet. When I was younger I thought this picture was "gruesome." Now I just find it sad, and, in its way, beautiful. These were people who came from a time when there were not a lot of pictures taken. Sometimes a "memento mori" was the only image they had of a loved one.
My great-grandmother was a stout, sturdy woman. She was only five feet tall and weighed around 300 pounds. I am not pointing this out to shame or berate her, and I do hope others who may choose to comment will have the maturity and courtesy not to do so as well. From learning more about her and the other members of the family, it's clear to me that she had endocrine problems, which I share. I'm taller than she was, courtesy of my father's side of the family, but I have a large body type, which my father's slender relatives would find shameful and something that "needs to be dealt with."
My great-grandmother died from acute myelogenous leukemia at the age of 79. Within the space of a year, she went from 300 pounds to 95 before passing away.
My great-grandmother held beliefs such as a red moon being a sign of a coming war. She was also extremely religious, and, inadvertently, religiously abusive. The superstitious beliefs she clung to came from her predecessors and were passed down to her descendants.
When I entered puberty, my bipolar disorder onset, but being type 2, which is harder to diagnose, the true nature of my psychiatric condition was misdiagnosed until I was nearly 40. Looking back, it was easy to see the ways in which the religious paranoia and the bipolar disorder fed each other. I used to study my Bible, particularly the Book of Revelation, for hours on end, looking for prophetic signs. I was devoutly religious until I got into my late teens when encountering far too many judgmental and hateful people calling themselves "Christian" caused me to start questioning my faith.
I went through a New Age phase which lasted nearly 30 years and also ended in disappointment as New Age ideals share more than a little of the judgmental, victim-blaming attitudes of Christianity.
At this point in my life, I'm an agnostic. I dislike organized religion and feel it spreads a lot of harm, but I acknowledge having met people of faith who are genuinely Christian in their attitudes. I find full-on Atheism far too depressing, and, while most Atheists I know are good people who simply don't have any religious or metaphysical beliefs, I can't tolerate the acerbic sort who love to sneer at anyone who does. Thus, I fall in the middle and garner criticism from both sides.
I no longer fear the worms, but I still can't sleep in total darkness. It feels too much like being trapped in a coffin. Also, I've left instructions with my son that when this old carcass goes belly up, he is to arrange for it to be cremated. Although I'll no longer be in it, I can't abide the idea of it being stuffed into a coffin and buried in the ground.
My attitude about my corpse is similar to my attitude about the zombie pancreas which currently resides in it. When I inject the insulin necessary to maintain my life in a body with a non-functional pancreas, I gleefully think: "take that, you stupid zombie pancreas! I don't need you after all."
With my vacated body, my thought is "fuck you, Worms. You ain't getting none of this!"
However, I still wish I could reach back in time and tell the frightened and overly sensitive child that I was that it's okay, that the worms aren't going to get me, that it was wrong of my mother to sing the Hearse Song to me.
My mother wonders what I did to cause myself to have all my endocrine and psychological problems. I've never said it out loud because it wouldn't be worth the trouble, but my thought is always "I'm related to you."
And now you know what you're all dealing with. So you can avoid it like the plague, which most people do. Or you can stick around because there's lots more to come.
~Cie~
Here's the Hearse Song as performed by Harley Poe for your listening pleasure.
The mind, when all thoughts are silent, Become's aware of the present moment.
It communes with the eternal so that the two are one. The undefinable, the unknowable, the unnameable and the now. Life and existence cohabiting within and without you.
To the many meditation means - contemplation, thought, thinking, musing, pondering, reflection, prayer, deliberation, reverie. But to those who practise an art older than the English language and older than those whose general understanding is based on the English word, it means something else entirely. It involves focusing on the breath and remaining in the present moment. Ninety-eight percent of humankind talk to themselves. By that I mean they allow their mind to control their thoughts which race constantly through their brains. To be aware or awake to reality, to the world of the present, of the now, meditation is the preeminent method of controlling unwanted thought. It also connects you to what the Chinese refer to as Tao which means the path or the way or, if a monotheist, to God. Meditation is available to all and any faith. As Jesus said, "the Kingdom of God is within you."
