sweet angel

from my heart to yours

[angfdz]

pay artists in cold hard cash

[gatheringbones]

[“A mother cannot articulate anger as a mother,” Marianne Hirsch observes. “To do so she must step out of a culturally circumscribed role which commands mothers to be caring and nurturing to others, even at the expense of themselves.” Too bad for me, because my own anger became unshakable after the election. The scope of male power in America felt salient; the path forward hazy. I wanted to resist, to collectivize my rage, even move beyond a politics of resentment, but I was exhausted. “Two jobs have only meant for women even less time and energy to struggle against both,” Federici writes. The design is flawless. Dejected, using my government-subsidized healthcare, I went to talk therapy for the first time since I was a teenage girl living in my mother’s home. I hinted that I thought I might—still, almost two years after giving birth—have postpartum depression. My concerns didn’t gain any traction. Instead my therapist told me it was “scary” how much my internal dialogue sounded like an argument I was having with my mother. I felt so frustrated with this trope of trotting my mother out, reproaching her for everything, when I was so clearly being bullied by other forces: by men, by the world in which we lived, by all the voices that told me how a mother should be.

Women who are full of rage—or just sad and falling apart—are rarely seen as responding with reason to America’s uniquely isolating, intensive parenthood models, or to the historical depreciation of their round-the-clock work in the home, much less to the misogynistic culture in which they grew up, only to find their bodies used and abused further in work that goes unrecognized as work, with little free time to agitate for better working conditions without risking being called unfit or in need of psychotropic drugs. “We are seen as nagging bitches,” Federici writes, “not workers in a struggle.” Bad mothers, frigid wives, hysterics—all are more cultural images that police women’s latent rebellions and their burgeoning desires for rejecting what’s piled on them all their lives. Rarely are such women understood to be intelligently tapping into a wise internal voice, an intuition, and a clamoring inside their bodies for change.

I grew up with hardly any language with which to assert my own autonomy, only to find myself absorbing the widespread cultural belief that women should martyr themselves for motherhood. But I knew somewhere inside, even in the early years, that it didn’t have to be this way—that it wasn’t supposed to be this way. That there was some other set of terms—beyond dominance versus “gentleness,” powerlessness versus power, passivity versus anger, self-erasure versus running, normalcy versus madness—another, altogether different approach to the way we were doing this work of raising children, which in its current state felt like such a ruse.”]

amanda montei, from touched out: motherhood, misogyny, consent, and control, 2023

[gatheringbones]

[“When I learned that my second baby would be designated “boy,” I googled the term “gender disappointment,” but my search didn’t turn up anything that tracked with how I was feeling. My love already felt endangered by the breadth of its demand: now there would be two kids to care for, and now I understood the comprehensive nature of that work. And in any case, hadn’t I always been disappointed by gender? Once he was born, I even felt for a time less pressure. He would be endowed with many layers of privilege; the kind I had as a white person and also the kind his father had, as a man. Jon and I joked uneasily that our jobs would be easier this time around. This baby would be fine. He would grow up to be a white man in a white man’s world.

In other words, at first I saw my second baby not as a victim of power, but more as an inevitable foe. As if here, in front of me, was someone who would benefit from all the power structures I hated, from everything that had troubled me and the women in my life. At the very least, I saw my new baby as someone who did not need my emotional protection in the same way my daughter would, and my rage took a different form with him in the first two years of his life, as it always had with rowdy little boys who seemed to take up all the space. As he brought his baby wrath to bear on my body every night at the witching hour, mouthing my breasts and tearing into me with his impossible-to-trim nails, I projected masculine violence onto his healthy infantile aggression. When he began to walk, I was harder on him when he bumped into other kids carelessly, just as I had always been with the boys at the daycare. I knew his right to take up space would always be greater than my daughter’s, and when he acted out in frustration, threw his body into it, I scolded him harder, trying to block off some path on which I felt he was already walking a little too firmly.

Parenting a son with patriarchy in mind meant I had to be extra attentive to the ways in which my best efforts at making him a good person would be thwarted by a culture of masculinity that would teach him to take take take. But by the time he turned two, I felt like I had been conned into reproducing the exact gender roles I was trying to avoid. I had positioned my daughter as a victim of the patriarchy, my son as an aggressor. I had left no room for anything in between. I had, despite my best efforts, developed a pattern of reinforcing the gender binary, even if the way I was doing it wasn’t quite in line with how I saw others projecting gender on to my children.

Trying to keep up with his big busy sister, Elliott became quite the bruiser. Whatever I did, however I hovered, I could not keep him from injuring himself. Those around us often linked his gaucheness with his perceived gender identity, which frustrated me, because I saw in him the confusion I felt as the younger sibling, carrying around a body so full of energy, without any clear understanding of where to direct that vitality, or how to get anyone in the family to pay attention to me. But Elliott also grew to be so tender, thoughtful in a way I never expected. Like all children, he became a multifaceted little creature.”]

amanda montei, from touched out: motherhood, misogyny, consent, and control, 2023

[reading-writing-revolution]

[fangorn-forest]

summer sufferers poll: would you rather have…

the ability to repel all bugs so they can’t touch/bite/sting you

the ability to always be at a comfortable temperature while outside

no chafing ever again

Remaining time: 5 days 8 hours

[lastoneout]

The bugs one bcs I'm immune compromised and bugs carry diseases 👍

[assporn]

I live in the 5th hottest city in the Americas and I work outside. GUESS.

[angfdz]

prev is so funny bc i know art conservators now & the way they are so passionate about wearing gloves & caring for the work & also they're all super young lmfaoo

[wizardarchetypes]

absolutely looosssinggg it. i'm so obsessed with movies which portray the woman MC in a highly specific job because the writers clearly think it's like "off-beat" and "quirky" but have no idea how the field works whatsoever.

i decided to try a romcom i somehow missed i the 2000s 'head over heels' and i got 3 and a half minutes in and we're introduced to the lonely MC with bad taste in men as evidenced by her extremely short list of ex boyfriends, including her first boyfriend when she was 11 or something because i guess that's still relevant in her adult life.

so she's resigned herself to never finding love and prefers to ignore men to focus all her energy into her career.

this job is immediately presented as though it's for spinsters with no hope of ever finding a man.

the mc's lesbian bestie (whose first line involves her being scolded for being too sexual in the workplace, but moving on) points out their colleagues as evidence that they're doomed to a romance-less, sexless life if they don't switch up their shared career path. the colleagues are three old women, so-dubbed "the menopause triplets":

these women are presented as if they have no idea what's going on at any given moment. this is 2001, and presumably this is an entry level job requiring low effort and no experience.

then their boss bursts into the room, unceremoniously bumping a large painting into the door jam and walls, announcing that it's a new project for our MC.

our MC is thrilled to see the painting. apparently it's a light in the daily slog at her dreary job for loser women with nothing going on in their lives.

And that job is? Conservator of paintings (specializing in Renaissance) at the New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The painting being handled like an old couch on its way to the curb?

The Bacchanal of the Andrians by Titian.

Her lesbian colleague who is presumably also a a highly trained & skilled curator finds it depressing that the MC is so excited about the painting.

it's a quirk unique to this MC that she cares so much about paintings, in her department at the metropolitan museum of art, where her colleagues find all that art business rather dreary. because we all know that's what conservators in extremely competitive museum positions are like.

[wizardarchetypes]

I'm not saying there can't be lifelong love in here somewhere but I also just feel like the monogamous heterosexual marriage you're fantasizing about isn't necessarily best represented by the bacchanal. and that's okay. but i do stand by that.

[gatheringbones]

[“… attachment theories like the kind that undergird parenting advice still categorize people who did not receive attentive, loving parenting into a range of attachment styles, including “avoidant” and “anxious.” Such theories, though, are a bit like a personality test: these categorizations mirror our internal realities back at us and give us a comforting set of classifications through which we might understand tendencies that previously felt confusing or deviant. They provide recognition, a way of making sense. But that doesn’t mean they provide us with the original image of what they reflect. Theories of how human relationships evolve and take shape may give us language to describe our experiences, but they can also trap us in cultural attitudes that are neither fixed nor liberatory. What may be more valuable is recognizing how we turn to certain disciplines—for instance, psychology—to confirm the status quo rather than to offer us tools to challenge what we consider to be “normal.”

In an essay for Gawker on how Americans grew so attached to attachment theory, Danielle Carr, a scholar who studies capitalism and neuroscience, writes that “attachment theory offers the consolations of the heuristic, a kind of rough-draft outline for a larger essay on our internal life. This is true of almost any Grand Theory of Everything that explains the unknowable—in this case, the interiority of the other—using a few rough-hewn concepts.” Attachment theory is nevertheless used to explain both parenting (usually relying on the mother-child dyad) and romance (usually relying on the man-woman dyad), which furthers the theory’s hetero-patriarchal feel and allows us to blame even our sexual and romantic relationship problems on our mothers.

At best, however, attachment theory is merely a tool for explaining how growing up in a hetero-patriarchal culture tends to create certain personality types, outcomes that are loosely linked to how our caregivers behaved when we were kids, or how we perceive them to have behaved years later, when we grow into adults and consult the attachment playbooks. At worst, attachment theory can be used to reify bad behavior that emerges from living in a sexist society, tracing it all back to Mom and Dad—but usually Mom. “What are the odds that the vast majority of heterosexuals would sort so neatly into what look like gender-coded slots—the women frantic for explanations for their romantic woes self-identifying as ‘anxious’ and slapping the ‘avoidant’ label on guys who seem to be just not that into them? Does this remind you of anything?” Carr asks. “The whole thing smacks of gender.”

Not surprising, given that the theories we have available on how human development, psychology, and relationships both form and function are all inherited from white men. “I think a lot of that science is bad science,” Kate Manne has said about the sexism that continues to plague contemporary studies on how men and women supposedly perceive the world differently because of biological difference. “There’s no control group in a patriarchal culture,” Manne points out. “There’s no group of women raised such as not to have sexist theories and misogynistic enforcement mechanisms operating on them. Of course some differences will show up. But it doesn’t lead to an enhanced kind of epistemic state, where we know something interesting and new about two different groups.” The same is true for how we interpret the science that says secure attachments with our mothers makes us well-adjusted later in life. Who is to say this is not the result of growing up living in a family that felt “normal,” judged by standards that relegate women to positions of inferiority in motherhood?”]

amanda montei, from touched out: motherhood, misogyny, consent, and control, 2023

[angfdz]

women want men to be more sensitive but then they meet a sensitive guy & think he's a pussy like make it make sense

[gatheringbones]

[“As Hannah grew, breastfeeding became less idyllic. She took me in, guzzled and cooed one moment, hated me the next. When my breast slipped from her mouth, or the milk didn’t pour down her throat fast enough, she beat my chest, mauled me. I thought of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theory, which I had first read while pregnant, in which she argues that the mother-child relationship forms every person’s early sense of self. Klein in some sense blames the mother for all the troubled contours of the human psyche—an American tradition, especially in the field of psychology—but she also introduces a sense of power into the psychoanalytic saga of the mother’s purportedly passive body. For Klein, the mother’s breasts are the first objects the infant encounters with passion. They are also the first tools of power, and they begin, in the child’s mind, as two confusing, fragmented objects: a “good” breast that gratifies and a “bad” breast that deprives and tortures.

I had found this all confusingly abstract before I breastfed. Was one breast fuller? The other with a low milk supply? I had interpreted the theory literally, finding it hard to understand an infant’s perspective, which is that the good and bad breast are, bewilderingly, one and the same. Watching Hannah nurse, I could see now how the mother’s body teaches the infant about nourishment and the threat of its denial, about giving and taking, and soon, I would learn to identify the potential there—the possibility of teaching my child about consent. Klein called the early phase of infant development the “paranoid-schizoid” phase—a time when the child understands the mother as two beings, a giver and a withholder of pleasure. As the child grows, however, it learns that the mother’s breasts are two aspects of the same presence, and that the mother is a being unto herself.

When I was still reeling from childbirth, I didn’t yet see this period as an opportunity to provide my child with her first lessons on autonomy. Instead, our breastfeeding relationship became increasingly one-sided. I lost any strength to resist her demands, to say no, to refuse her, not only because she was needy and helpless and it was my job to care for her, but because the advice I consumed in the early years of motherhood—in books, online—told me our relationship should be this way. Learning to see the mother as a whole person, one with the power to teach the child a range of human emotions, I found, takes a very long time—but even longer in a culture that tells women that they no longer belong to themselves after they have children and that their time for freedom is over, if it ever had a chance to begin.

Even so, years later, when I think back on that time of giving myself over to my baby completely, I do not feel remorseful. I yearn for the short-lived decadence of the first months, for the license I gave myself to fade from public life, to devote myself to my baby, to the creative work of caring for her, and for myself. I sometimes long for those days—before I began to see how my love and my labor as a mother were deeply entwined with my own disempowerment, and with a world built on one-sided wants. Before I began to fight, but also before my baby began to move away, as all babies do. I don’t wish that I had never woken up to the culture of motherhood that was thrust on me, but I do sometimes long for that brief time when everything felt like a choice, even if, perhaps, it wasn’t.]

amanda montei, from touched out: motherhood, misogyny, consent, and control, 2023

[carlosmarcosapproved]

[xphaiea]

Peruvian textile fragment

[angfdz]

one thing u gotta realize about men if you want to date them is that they are people too.

[angfdz]

me, a "straight" woman dating a man: this ain't my first rodeo

[gatheringbones]

[“Emotional labour is an invisible background condition that enables more visible forms of labour and production to take place. It is an ‘unseen effort, which, like housework, does not quite count as labor but is nevertheless crucial to getting other things done’. This effort is a precondition for emotional reproduction, as well as for the continued reproduction of gender.

The invisibility of emotional labour is premised on a differential valuation of emotion based on gender. If women’s emotional expression is visible as emotion, it is because men’s emotional expressions tend to be interpreted as a statement of fact. Hochschild writes that when men express anger, ‘it is deemed “rational” or understandable anger, anger that indicates not weakness of character but deeply held conviction’. In contrast, ‘women’s feelings are not seen as a response to real events but as reflections of themselves as “emotional” women’. While women perform more of the invisible work of attending to the feelings of others, they are nonetheless deemed to be excessively emotional themselves. There is a circular association of femininity and emotion in which femininity is devalued because of its connection with emotionality while emotion becomes devalued when coded as feminine. This serves to empower those expressing the right kind of feelings while marginalising those who are thought to express improper, excessive, and feminised emotions. As men’s expressions of feeling are coded as rational rather than emotional, they have a greater claim to constructing a generally accepted view of the world. While women work harder to maintain social relations, men have greater control over the content of the world view created in those interactions. Women thus often work to affirm a construction of the world that persistently subordinates them. This serves the reproduction of gender hierarchy and women’s subordinate position, especially within heterosexual relationships.

Hochschild points out that the fact that women tend to form intimate connections with men differentiates gendered oppression from hierarchies based on race or class. This intimacy explains the primacy of emotional labour within gendered oppression, as this labour creates the social relations that perpetuate gendered hierarchy. While racialised and classed oppression and exploitation primarily play out at work or in public, gender is continually reproduced through intimate family relations. Emotional labour has been increasingly commodified since women started to enter waged work in greater numbers, but gendered oppression at work is distinctly shaped by relations formed in the private sphere. This gives heterosexual gender relations a distinct character, as the subordinated are tasked with forming intimate bonds of love with their oppressors and adapt their seemingly authentic emotional lives to the needs of those who subordinate them. Hochschild writes that since ‘men and women do try to love one another … the very closeness of the bond they accept calls for some disguise of subordination’. Emotional labour, then, not only reproduces more general forms of gendered exploitation and oppression but also presents oppression as love.

Men tend to feel more entitled to their partner’s nurturance than women do. This runs contrary to the received knowledge that women are more emotionally demanding in intimate relationships. According to this understanding of heterosexual love, men express their love differently, and it is unfair of women to demand full reciprocity. This idea mobilises the trope of men as emotionally inexpressive – what Stephanie Shields calls the paradigm of masculinity as self-control.66 Men can reinforce their power by withholding emotional expression. This also means that women often have to rely on other women for emotional support. According to Tamsin Wilton, heterosexual women’s friendships tend to function as support systems that serve to uphold male dominance by naturalising men’s lack of emotional reciprocity. Such support systems aim to minimise the emotional harms of heterosexual relationships without challenging the source of that harm. Friendship can therefore function as a source of emotional reproduction, which serves to shore up the very relationships that continually marginalise those friendships and posits them as less important than romantic love and family bonds.”]

alva gotby, from they call it love: the politics of emotional life, 2023

[gatheringbones]

patrick califa, from public sex: the culture of radical sex, 1994

[in-mutual-weirdness]

[Sex radicals have often avoided or glazed over damage done by child sexual abuse. Stacie Haines, the author of a recovery manual for women who were sexually abused as children, has this to say about her experience trying to bridge the gap between the sex-radical agenda and the survivors' movement.

As a manager at Good Vibrations…I found myself caught repeatedly between two worlds: the world of survivors, hurt and at times paranoid about sex, and the world of sex-positive educators, many of whom did not want to hear about the negative uses of sex or the effects of sexual abuse. Many in the survivors' community were afraid of sex and thought the best they could hope for would be something slightly better than just tolerating it. Survivors who liked sex and who spoke openly about it were met with mistrust and even, at times, disdain. It was assumed that they were "acting out" their sexual abuse. Pleasure was suspect. To me, it seemed to boil down to no trust in sex. Understandable, but not the recovery I hoped for. Among sex educators, there was little talk of sexual violence or the sexual contradictions experienced by women who had been sexually violated. … I found myself educating the educators about the effects of childhood sexual abuse on adult sexuality. One colleague went so far as to suggest that incest itself wasn't the problem, that it was the cultural taboo surrounding incest that was harmful. No, no, no!

Haines is right to call on sex radicals to take a strong position against incest. An adult cannot adequately parent a child if there is also an erotic involvement, even if that activity appears to be consensual or seems to be welcomed by the child. The emotional expectations and ethical obligations of these two types of relationships, parent and lover, cannot be reconciled. You can't encourage your child to develop his or her own values around sexuality or intimate relationships if you have an agenda about justifying the incest. How could an incestuous parent respect the natural process of development, which takes a child out of the parent's world into his or her own future? Depending on what age the adult perpetrator of incest found the most attractive, there would be a tendency to either retard adolescence or anticipate it prematurely. A young person who is being incested has very little chance of receiving adequate parental support for developing good relationships with peers, dating, or exploring questions of gender and sexual identity.

This may be obvious to most readers, but it needs to be spelled out because there are still a small number of people who consider themselves to have progressive sexual politics who also believe that incest is damaging only because it is criminalized and stigmatized. There are also a handful of people who will say that they had sex with a sibling, parent, or other family member, and were not damaged by that contact. Sometimes I think the person telling me this kind of story is just in denial because their personality and relationships with others are so clearly dysfunctional. Sometimes, to be absolutely honest, I can't see any symptoms of pathology. Most of these anecdotes concern meetings between adult siblings who never knew one another as children. But this tiny minority of exceptional people is not enough, I believe, to counterbalance the enormous amount of evidence we have that incest is, the overwhelming majority of the time, injurious to its object. Similar ethical problems are raised by sexual relationships between children or teenagers and teachers, counselors, religious leaders, coaches, and other adult caretakers.

When I wrote "The Age of Consent: The Great Kiddy-Porn Panic of '77" and "The Aftermath of the Great Kiddy-Porn Panic of '77," I was naive about the developmental issues that make sex between adults and prepubescent children unacceptable, and the nature of the power dynamic between minors and their adult caretakers which make informed consent to sex problematic. Yes, prepubescent children are sensual and sexual beings who sometimes display that eroticism to adults in a way that may appear to be flirtatious and inviting. The appropriate realm for expression of that sexuality is, I now believe, via masturbation or age-appropriate exploration with peers. A child displaying his or her body or playfully soliciting adult attention for erotic behavior is not stating readiness or willingness to engage in cross-generational sex. One of the prerequisites for giving informed consent is possession of knowledge about what one is consenting to and the potential consequences or outcome of that behavior. Prepubescent children and many young teenagers are not developmentally equipped to have that knowledge; it isn't physically possible. The preening and posing that kids do is a test: "Is this part of me really okay?" and "Can I trust you to keep me safe as I grow up?" Adults who engage in sex with prepubescent children flunk that test. It is the adult's responsibility to provide the child or teenager with reassurance and unconditional positive regard, and make sure any erotic activity with self or peers is benign.

In the twenty years since these articles were published, I've become much more cynical about the ability of adults to listen to children. We are so busy, so set on having our own way, and we've forgotten what the world looks like to a person who is not as tall as the seat of our chairs. When a fetish for sex with children is added to this adult proclivity to be self-centered, you wind up with a person who sees consent where it cannot reasonably exist. "If she didn't want to have sex with me, she shouldn't have come into the living room while I was watching television," a perpetrator might say. Or, "He just has that look in his eye that says, 'Come and get me.' I can recognize it. He doesn't have to say anything."

Perhaps because I am a parent now, I am less idealistic about the possibilities for an equal adult/child relationship. When I try to describe the difference between a good or bad parent/child connection, I think more in terms of making the child's welfare a priority than of consent. Raising a child involves making all kinds of decisions that the child resents and opposes. Most children do not want to sleep in their own beds, take medicine, nap, get a shot, give up the baby bottle, get a bath, eat vegetables, learn their multiplication tables, etc. In order to avoid having every interaction turn into a pitched battle, adults condition their offspring to obey and please them. While this meets with varying degrees of success, there's never a time when the playing field is level. The parent/child paradigm is so powerful that it colors all interactions between adults and young people.

End transcript.]

[hometoursandotherstuff]