Category: personal

xx is not a disease

Do you menstruate?

Have you been diagnosed with anemia and been told it’s because of your sex and not an underlying medical issue?

If so, print this out and hand it to your doctor as you say these magic words: “86% of women in this study were found to be anemic due to previously undiagnosed internal bleeding. My biological sex is not a disease; and it is likely I have an undiagnosed gastrointestinal illness. Are you willing to work with me to get this solved?”

My celiac disease went undiagnosed for over 30 years because it was easier for doctors to call me weak, fragile, picky, sensitive and female than it was for them to realize I had a genetic disease (and you don’t want to know the various irresponsible, sexist and racist (long story) things medical professionals said to me when I finally got so ill I had to have a diagnosis). This medicalizing of my sex as opposed to actual attention to my health has done permanent, irreversible damage to my body.

Being female is not a disease, and anemia is generally a sign of one. If your doctor says it’s because you menstruate without further and significant investigation: get a new doctor.

reporting for an audience of one

I was 17-years-old when the Berlin Wall fell. It was my senior year of high school, a year, during which, I had hoped to study abroad, largely to escape the bullying and awkwardness I felt at school and the secrets I was beginning to understand the need to keep at home. But, when I had broached the subject with my parents the year before, it was a subject that had gotten squashed quickly.

My mother, who is Jewish, was uncomfortable with my desire to study in Germany or Austria, places that fascinated me because of her own love of their art — I grew up looking at women painted by Gustav Klimpt and Egon Shiele, women who looked like me and seemed like home.

In truth, looking back on it all, it may just have been the first thing that it sprung to her mind to say; my parents’ objections were probably more likely about money or my being off somewhere far away from their rules. But with my mother’s reaction being what it was, I didn’t ask a second time. Like all things I longed for, I merely stared at it from afar, lingering on travel ads in the newspapers I was raised to read daily as civic duty, hoping my desire would be obvious and, somehow, magical.

So I didn’t study abroad, and a month after my seventeenth birthday I wasn’t in Germany. I watched the Berlin Wall fall from our dining room table during that surprising week where I was allowed to have the television on during dinner. And each night, as I watched those events, I thought of two things: David Bowie’s “Heroes” (a song which kept me going in high school and that is deeply and complicatedly enmeshed with Berlin Wall mythology) and how I could just get up at 4am, take the can of cash I was hoarding out of the bottom of my closet, steal my mother’s credit card, grab my passport out of the second drawer on the left of her roll-top desk, take a cab to the airport, and run away, to Berlin, so I could be there as the Wall kept coming down.

But I had no nerve. And while I don’t know if it would have worked, I have always regretted that I never tried. 21 years later, I have still never been to Berlin.

Patty is too young to have particularly strong feelings or recollections about the fall of the Berlin Wall. She did not grow up afraid of nuclear war. In terms of scale, her Berlin Wall moment was, probably, sadly, 9/11. And here is this moment in Egypt, and she’s in India, doing what she loves, living without television and without radio she can understand. The news she gets comes on her mobile phone, from me, from friends, from the calls the other people on the dig get.

My academic degree is in journalism, a profession I selected for a host of foolish reasons: needing a respectable job-possible major to get parental assistance (and permission, I was 17) to go to college and wanting to be a war reporter because of fictions (V, the original version) I had loved as a young teen.

I was never a war reporter, but I did work for the AP for a few years in their Computer Assisted Reporting unit back in the mid-90s. When I write non-fiction now it’s scholarship, criticism, analysis, personal essays, or, in the hey-it’s-a-paycheck category, light lifestyle pieces for various online media.

But when I call Patty tomorrow, it’s my job to be a reporter, even if I’m just reporting all the news I watch both because it is my nature and because it is a requirement of my analysis work. I’ve been doing it since the beginning, starting with the Giffords shooting and then since the time I paged her in the middle of the night about Tunisia and Yemen and the beginnings of Egypt. The page didn’t go through right, and she, puzzled as to why I was frantically texting her about Yemen, called me on her lunch break, and I ran everything out as fast as I could.

Since then, it’s been hard to keep up the excitement and intensity and confusion and fear and hope of what’s been going on in Egypt. I’m just one person, without video or images to show her, without direct information, and with a great deal of fatigue from how much these events have upended my own working life. But it’s so important to me that I do a good job, that when she plays Where Were You When games she’ll have more for this than “I was in India, so I sort of missed it.”

I’m a news junkie. Maddeningly so. It’s not just work. It’s a compulsion. Sometimes, she has to tell me to change the damn channel because I’m about to watch the same episode of Rachel Maddow twice in the same evening. She puts up with this with a great deal of amusement, and she’s certainly into current events herself, just in a way that’s a bit less odd. So I hope I’m doing okay. That I’ll do well tomorrow. That she’ll be able to say in response to this entry in the Where Were You When game, “I was in India, and my girlfriend had to tell me about it on this crappy mobile I bought, and we kept getting disconnected and it was like two tin cans on a string and it seemed so strange.”

To me, who has the news on all the time, often on multiple screens and channels, it doesn’t seem like enough. But it sure does seem like something, like paying a debt for the way I once did, and still do, dream of Berlin.

Cthulhu-esque trash day

It is now less than a week until I leave for Gallifrey One. While the weather looks grim (rain, rain, rain, rain), temperatures in the mid-60s sound pretty great to me. That and In-and-Out Burger. I’m half considering going vegetarian from now until I get there just to counteract the extremely unhealthy habits I tend to have there (the LAX Marriott isn’t really a prime zone for gluten-free food, so I wind up eating a lot of burgers without the bun and potato skins).

I’ve mentioned this on LJ, but on the odd chance anyone is here and not there — you’ll be able to pick up Whedonistas in the dealers room, but if you like to purchase a copy of The Book of Harry Potter Trifles, Trivias and Particularities ($15) or Horror Between the Sheets (the Cthulhu Sex anthology) ($12) let me know and I’ll bring copies with me. I’m not bringing spare copies, because it’s too onerous in the luggage.

Meanwhile, in the realm of people advocating for their own professional creative projects, my buddy John Snead is a designer of role-playing games and is currently running a Kickstarter project to fund the development of Eldritch Skies which is in the genre of Lovecraftian SF. Want to know what John could possibly mean by this or how to get the game yourself? Check out the project.

Back in the tentacle-free world, I was struck by this article regarding a discussion at an exclusive private club in New York that devolved into what sounds like Internet debate at its (articulate) worst over a reciprocal agreement with a British club that only allows women to enter when in the company of a man.

Finally, this CFP for Interfictions 0 regarding interstitial work may be of interest to many of you. I’ve been told by involved parties that work from folks who have interstitial relationships with the Academy (i.e., independent and non-traditional scholars) are most welcome to submit.

And now some follow ups on some previous stories:

Remember A Billion Wicked Thoughts? Well, now there are 50 tags, some of which, like mansplaining, that have been selected over 150 times. Proof fandom has a long, angry memory with a bucketload of social science expertise on the side. People should hire us to righteously fuck shit up; we’re really good at it.

Meanwhile, I was interested to note that Fat, Ugly or Slutty has received more click-thrus, by far, than any other item I’ve ever linked to in this blog. Part of that is that issues of how women get treated online is probably more exciting to most readers than the edible cups (no, I will never, ever stop talking about that). But I think part of it is also the provocative name, and, possibly, that rubbernecking impulse we often have on the Internet. If you clicked, why did you?

I’ve also noticed an interesting trend in the spam comments I get (and trash) here. Mostly they are generic things that are like “wow, this website has special content” but with worse grammar and even less specificity. The whole point is to sound flattering enough to get through and then hope someone will click on the URL of the commenter. But the ones I got on my most recent post about bullying? They were of the same level of grammar and specificity (so generic and clearly not about me) and in a shift, largely of the “wow, you are so stupid and whiny about something you could easily fix” variety. Their URL destination? Crappy on-line b-rate war video games. I guess it pays to know your audience; it pays more to have a good spam filter.

I’ll be speaking with Patty in the morning. I’ll let you all know if there are any more cobra status updates.

the vicious middle

When I was five I was invited to a birthday party for Sandra, a girl in my kindergarten class.

At it, I recall her giving out these brightly colored, chewy, things with a sugar shell. I have no idea what they were, but they were the most satisfying things in the world to sink my teeth into. Each girl got one candy, and when she got to me, she cut one in half and gave me half.

“Because you’re half,” she said.

It’s not the first time I can recall being bullied. But it’s the first time I can recall having no recourse. (When it happened in nursery school my friend Eric and I hatched a plan that led to us slamming the perpetrating kid’s arm in a toy refrigerator and doing a lot more damage than we had intended). That lack of recourse came from three main things:

1. I had no allies.
2. I had no one below me in the hierarchy through which to define a status for myself.
3. Sandra wasn’t wrong. Or, at least, she didn’t feel wrong to me. I was younger than everyone else. And smaller. And poorer. And less pretty. And more awkward. And I could never remember my vowels in the right order.

I think of this story from time to time. It’s definitely my go-to story for the “look, I’ve never really been sure I’m okay for the world” thing that I, like most people, walk around with.

But today I thought of it because of CNN’s mention of a new study that shows the more popular a kid is the more likely they are to bully unless they are are the very top of the popularity ladder. Sounds dead-on to me. How are hierarchies determined but through enforcement? The only people who wind up not playing are those who have nothing to enforce (those at the absolute bottom) or no need to enforce (those at the absolute top).

It occurs to me that this idea of the vicious middle can be extrapolated to a lot of things outside of the classroom. I’m sure it can be extrapolated to fandom, although I’m disinclined to try to map that out because I’m pretty sure those of us who play in those sandboxes can imagine the sort of reception that would get. But I’m also sure we can extrapolate to lots of other interactions where things transpire that are, or at least involve (in a larger context and agenda) elements of, bullying.

Sexism on the Internet is one, and the stuff documented at Fat, Slutty or Ugly (a website dedicated to showing the hateful crap female gamers are dealt pretty much constantly) is a great example. Here were have a place where a dudes who feel like they’re not at the top of the social hierarchy (because nerds and gamers are just two of many subcultures that, let’s face it, still get treated like crap for some pretty arbitrary and uncool reasons) and so when women (uncommon in the community by popular belief if not actual fact) show up, those men enforce what social position they believe they do have by being abusive to the theoretical interloper women, lest the tables get turned and the nerd dudes wind up one more peg down the board.

The current congressional Republican crusade against abortion rights (sure, they dropped the whole appalling thing about what’s “real” rape, but now we have the bill that says it’s legal to let a woman die rather than provide her with emergency care if that care would harm the pregnancy should that outcome be more personally comfortable for the medical personnel involved) also feels like this to me. This is true in the structural sense of the CNN-reported study — think about these congresspeople: big fish who aren’t big enough fish, who are striving, striving, striving, to stand out enough to be somebody with a name school children are obligated to remember and study; there is so much of the worst types of ambitious in politics, and it might hurt less if I were less sympathetic to that sort of pothos.

But this type of political behavior, conducted in this way on this issue, is also like bullying in the raw emotional content output and its subsequent reception, as when Sandra told me I was half.

Because I am half.

I am half to those people in Congress, half to those gamer boys I complained about in a Sassy article in 1991, half to girls who were mean to me because if they were better than me maybe boys would be better to them.

It’s all heartbreaking.

It’s also all terrifying.

Because all of us, sometimes (most times), are in that vicious middle. And hierarchy enforcement through bullying is second nature to most of us by the time we’re five or six or seven. And for a lot of us, it’s not just about unlearning a bad and unnecessary behavior, but unlearning behaviors that often have been necessary, because they kept us alive when we didn’t, and often, couldn’t fit in.

One of the theories that has come about in reaction to the findings of CNN-reported study is that the way to end bullying isn’t by addressing bullying with those who do it or those who are targeted, but with the bystanders and witnesses, the kids who aren’t in it today, but could be on either side of that equation tomorrow.

This is the part at the end of the blog post where I tell you not to be an asshole and better yet, to speak up if you see some crap going down, but I know that 9 times out of 10 you can’t. I can’t. We can’t. It’s so hard. We don’t even know what to say. We’re scared — at work, on the Internet, at school, at home — of making ourselves a target, or rushing to the defense of someone whose company we don’t actually enjoy, or losing what little bits of status we think we’ve managed to scrape together.

But bullying isn’t a habit and a mechanism and a tool that can be overcome just by deciding not to bully and doing our best to stick with it, if we’re then silent when we witness bullying. Bullying is a social action, one that doesn’t involve two or three people, but actively includes the surrounding social community (even when the bullying transpires in secret) in order for the hierarchy enforcement to have efficacy and thus enable more bullying.

Stopping bullying effectively requires herd immunity, which I’m pretty sure means we have to keep talking about it, all the time, until all of us who were ever told we were half, have one voice.

queer rage and the grocery toll

I shop at Whole Foods not infrequently, and while I shouldn’t have to justify this to you, I suspect I’ll be asked to, so let’s get it out of the way: I have celiac disease, and, for better or worse, I eat some packaged products; this means that there are limited places where I can acquire many of those products, and some are only available at Whole Foods. It’s also convenient one of my work spaces.

Unfortunately, getting in to the Whole Foods generally means my passing a gauntlet of people asking if I have a moment for gay rights. They’re raising money for HRC (the Human Rights Campaign), and I find the whole thing extremely angry-making.

First things first: My gay dollars don’t go to HRC anymore. Why? Because HRC can’t even stand to put its cause in its name. Because HRC has repeatedly backed off on defending the rights of trans people for the sake of expediency. Because HRC represents assimilation that is neither relevant to nor possible for me. Because HRC seems to be actively uninterested, not just in the issues trans people face, but also in the issues that women and people of color in the queer community face. There are better places for my gay dollars (and we’ll talk about what they are later).

Next: I resent a social interaction in which I am effectively framed as uncaring and bigoted to a group of which I am actually a member because I don’t feel like engaging with street solicitation. For me, this is just an irritation that I may well be blowing out of proportion. For a queer person in the closet (and yes, they exist, even in New York), it’s particularly and uniquely cruel.

Additionally: I dislike the implication that because I’m shopping somewhere like Whole Foods (and, again, in my case for medically necessary reasons that I shouldn’t have to justify to you), I’m obligated to have a discretionary funds for whatever cause has camped out in front of their door.

Obviously, I want people to give dollars to queer-rights (and other) causes. And, I have a significant amount of empathy for people that do that street solicitation job, having once worked for NYPRG for a couple of miserable weeks when I was 17. But between my feelings about HRC, my dislike of the guilt thing, and my genuine concern for people not prepared to be out as queer or queer rights supporters, the whole thing just ticks me off. And that’s before we get to some of the tactics the solicitors use to get attention (don’t tell me to smile, don’t flirt with me, don’t block my path — how dare you? — it’s predatory and nasty and it’s targeted at women far more than men).

Mostly though, I’m just really sick of doing the “I gave at the office,” dance (normally I give from home, but I have remembered to do various donations at work, so hey).

Queer rights organizations I support and who don’t put me in an awkward, crappy position when I’m trying to buy food I can eat? Lambda Legal and The Trevor Project are at the top of the list. I’ve also given money to DADT-repeal groups and equal marriage rights groups in multiple states, as well as local, NYC LGBTQ community organizations.

Which brings me to another part of why I’m angry that has nothing to do with Whole Foods and HRC: I spend a lot of money fighting for my rights. I shouldn’t have to do that.

There are a lot of basic fiscal costs to being gay that have been well-documented including those of taxes, inheritance and benefit costs due to a lack of federal marriage equality; the financial stresses related to employment and housing discrimination (which is perfectly legal in most states); medical costs related to medical professionals who are unhelpful or unfamiliar with dealing with LGBT clients (and let’s not even talk about the costs of medical transition for those seeking that — it’s a fortune and almost never insurance covered). And, in case it’s not obvious, these financial stresses impact the different subgroups within the LGBT community differently, making these issues even more complex and complex and critical. So are we clear now that no matter how much people talk about affluent queer people because of the DINK theory (dual-income no kids), that the fact remains being gay costs money and actually leaves many queer people (and particularly trans people) struggling with poverty?

And if we’re going to talk about costs, let’s not forget these damn activism dollars! I’m glad to have the extra income to put money into these causes. But I hate it. I hate having to do it. I hate how often I find myself tossing another 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 dollars at something or else there will be no counter-voice to more commercials on TV about how I’m a terrible person or actively working to destroy a world I don’t even understand (I grew up in NYC, among artists, I don’t even understand the things I’m supposedly dangerous to). When I give money it shouldn’t have to be about survival and with this sense that it’s never enough (and don’t get me started on having to give money to politicians who don’t actively support or admit to supporting my equal rights because the alternatives are just so awful).

Look, I’m not a big fan of the “born this way” theory, possibly because I’m so queer in terms of my attractions and gender that it’s hard to know what “this way” means; and I sure as hell shouldn’t have to be medicalized (and “born this way” is medicalizing. We never talk about how straight people are “born like that” — they’re normal, I come with celiac disease and gayness. Not cool!) to have my rights. But I gotta tell you, run the numbers, and then tell me why anyone would say, “Hey, I’ll be gay! I can live a carefree life of expensive vacations and fabulous houses!”

Yeah, they wouldn’t, and that’s despite the shiny happy picture of affluent normative queerness that HRC wants me to sponsor when I’m trying to buy groceries.

The Duchess and being mercenary by the year

I have just watched, in the name of research, both Gosford Park and The Duchess. Even as they bracket the time periods which Kali and I are smushing together for the novel, they both speak to it in that they are stories where no one is happy and everyone is constrained by matters of class and gender.

While Gosford Park is, by far, the better film (and I will readily admit I could watch Clive Owen read the phone book), it was The Duchess, which is deeply flawed in its structure (is it about the illicit romance between Georgiana and Gray or is it about the home situation between the Duke, Georgiana and Bess? — the film chooses one, and then when that seems unlikely to be as marketable or as easily a subject for a PG-13 rating, it chooses the other and becomes a bodice ripper before reverting back to its original trajectory), that is sticking with me in a way that is, actually, quite a bit miserable.

This sense of misery is, of course, ludicrous. A film about a vastly confining, misogynistic world I’m perfectly familiar with? Why should I find that troubling, when I not only know a bazillion versions of that story, but am, in fact, often engaged in creating similar stories.

But I suppose this is what is successful about The Duchess and, I suspect, why it was so poorly reviewed — not because of its structural flaws, but because it renders more successfully than many other films the confinement of the women of its story. For the tragedy is not that Georgiana is treated terribly by a man she loves, but merely by a man she is giddy to be chosen by as a child.

It’s the film’s rendering of her feeling of it being some sort of coup that she’s chosen, based essentially on no specificity of her own, to be a Duchess that makes it so effective. Even when I didn’t care about the affair with Gray or lost interest in the not-as-well-rendered-as-it-could-have-been friendship with Bess, I remembered that — those first 15 minutes of the film, that made me so shamefully curious, as I often am, of what it would be like to live in a world where one has but a single, clear, and universally accepted purpose regardless of what you get up to instead.

And yes, yes, I know it would be dreadful. Please don’t give me that obvious lecture. Obviously, it would be stifling. Obviously, I also wouldn’t even be of that class. But I just can’t help but wonder what it would like to have goals simple, clearly-articulated, and pre-chosen for me.

To be honest, I think a lot of women wonder about this; I think we’re often subjected to the suggestion that it’s reasonable for us to doubt the goodness of choice in our lives. And while that suggestion is almost always malicious in its intents, I don’t think the questions the suggestion leads us to ask are inherently bad. I mean, women in Switzerland didn’t even have the national right to vote until the 1970s; the world for my sex can, I think, always be different, in really terrifying ways, in a heartbeat. If it couldn’t, we wouldn’t have all these end of the world films in which women are some sort of chattel within a week and a half of civilization’s breakdowns.

Look, I’m just so fucking scared of medical stuff, you know? And surely there were young women terrified of the idea of childbirth in 1795 and did they just think, they would endure whatever physical miseries were involved with the process so they could have an heir, get a nice check or the house or the piece of jewelry and then be left to their own devices?

I just wonder what it’s like to be so mercenary with one’s body, not one hour or evening at a time (a mode not difficult for modern people to understand, I don’t think), but one year at a time — I mean, a year is an eternity in our digitalness, isn’t it? I have a very good imagination, but that one (marital relations and childbirth out of duty and for the paycheck gift) is truly beyond me, which may be, in fact, why I generally find it easier to write men, at least when working out of the here and now; it is easier for me to pretend that their choices and joys might be things I’m more likely to understand.

send mongeese immediately

I am not, in general, afraid of snakes. An old roommate of mine had a ball python that an ex of hers had left her and I used to have to feed it because the whole mouse thing freaked her out. Snakes are cool.

I do, however, have some particular primal fear of cobras from watching Rikki Tikki Tavi too many times as a little kid. Of course, being afraid of cobras is perfectly reasonable except for the part that there aren’t any in North America (other than zoos) so who really cares, even if I did have a lot of nightmares about them as a child.

So in short: snakes good; cobras bad. Not really something I think about that much.

Until I call Patty in Gujarat and she’s like “So hey, I was sitting by the trench talking to Judy and the older woman who works in my trench started screaming and I was like ‘what what?’ and then I turned around and there was a snake slithering behind me and she threw dirt on it and then it went over by some trees. But it’s the trees where people take their tea breaks so everyone was really freaked. But they found it and killed it later and hung it in the tree.”

So, I, of course, inquired as to the type of snake. Something poisonous, presumably.

Patty said it was either a cobra or not a cobra, but because she doesn’t speak the local language and her Hindi is pretty basic still and it’s hard to translate between snake types she wasn’t really sure. But she was, however, pretty sure cobra-status was discussed, she just wasn’t sure if it was or it wasn’t. So I asked her, based on my Rikki Tikki Tavi expertise, about various markings on it.

“Well, first it was behind me, and then it was dead, so I didn’t look that closely.”

By the time I next speak to Patty this will probably have ceased to be interesting to her. I, however, will be talking about it FOREVER.

SNAKE NEAR TRENCHES. COBRA STATUS UNKNOWN. DEAD AND DISPLAYED IN TREE.

Also, is it mongooses or mongeese?

true, but not for you

Since posting a blurb about A Billion Wicked Thoughts, the SurveyFail book, finally coming out, I’ve found myself circling back to the whole thing quite a bit. The most obvious reason for this is that I was definitely involved in that disaster.

While most of the Livejournal-based threads are locked now, I know there are screencaps around and there are certainly a number of posts that eloquently and summarize what happened in extensive detail (I’ve tried to link to some of the best throughout this post). I, personally, recall taking the authors to task on LJ for a number of things, including their use of the word tranny and, what seemed to me, their lack of even the most basic understanding of the sex industry — not as good or bad, but as something driven, like most everything else, by the engine of marketing.

All that, though, is ancient history. What isn’t ancient history is the book that has resulted from that mess and the blurb materials that have been floating around (you can see them on the product description at Amazon). If you have the inclination to read through them all you’ll note that, with the exception of the woman they got to write the book’s intro (a likely necessary marketing gesture in itself) all of the blurbs come from men. Sadly, in the realm of science, even (or particularly) science poorly engaged in, this is hardly surprising.

What jumps out at me the most, however, is one particular assertion in these promotional materials that, “Men form their sexual interests during adolescence and rarely change. Women’s sexual interests are plastic and change frequently.”

It’s hardly the only “Wait, WHAT????” moment in those promotional materials (“Though the male sexual brain is much more different from the female sexual brain than is commonly believed, the sexual brain of gay men is virtually identical to that of straight men” is another real winner that seems to suggest that people would or should think that gay men are more like women than men; it’s snuck in, in the sentence structure, and it’s misogynist and homophobic), but it’s the one I feel like focusing on today.

While this supposed finding regarding a perceived lack of fixedness in female desire is, in some ways, hardly new (consider, for example the common assertion that queer women on average come out later in life than queer men, indicating to some that there is a change or lack of solidity in female desire taking place there), I’m going to hazard a guess that in the text in question it remains just as unexamined as ever (is this something innate to women or a result of societal pressure that makes it harder for women to own their desire-based identities in a consistent manner?).

But, more than that, in the broader context of the book’s promotional materials and the experience I had and witnessed in the research the authors attempted to engage in on LJ, this quote seems to be saying that women in their desire are mutable not for their own sakes, but for the pleasure and convenience of men. Creepy, ne? Of course, I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect very few people who regularly read this blog or who had experience with the authors would be willing to take that bet.

Now, I’ll admit, that I probably do need to accept more intrinsically that these sorts of books — good or bad — are never, ever going to be about me. I’m not most people. Or most women. I fit into the boxes badly. And that’s before you even get to the queer sexuality and gender. I mean, I’m left handed! Do you know how many studies that disqualifies a person from? To be frank, sometimes it makes me feel more than a little bit unreal.

But the fact (fact: solid, precise, unchanging) also remains that I’m a malleable (malleable: inconsistent and therefore fact-free; haven’t you heard? women are mostly made of lies) person. I am pliable. I am shifting sands and a thousand faces. Mainly because it seems like a bit of a crap deal to me to be one person all the time. And I’ve never been that way for anyone’s pleasure but mine.

It’s one of those things I have to explain more than I’d like: just because I have sex, doesn’t mean I will have sex with you; just because I am water, doesn’t mean I am fluid for you. It’s so basic. I kind of can’t believe — whether I’m a boy or a girl or normal or not — that the world is still full of books (and people) that don’t get that one.

And while we’re on things that are just wildly untrue, can I just note that I have never been cautious like a detective agency? I’ve been reckless like one, though, once or twice. Sherlock fandom, would you care to weigh in on metaphors of detection and sexuality? I bet it would be awesome!

But anyway, what can you do? I, at least, can be entertained by the over forty people who tagged the book with mansplaining, among a couple of dozen (and counting) other unflattering tags.

creepy, icy trash day

It’s finally not snowing or icing in New York, but apparently there’s a storm covering most of the country. Meanwhile, the piles of snow here some of which are several feet high, keep melting and refreezing, making the city look like another world filled with strange flows of melted quartz.

Meanwhile, I had, hands down, the two most terrifying dreams I’ve ever had last night. I’m only starting to be not shaken now, about six hours after I woke up. This is a lesson for you writers: don’t develop magical systems right before bedtime (this is related to a lesson for actors: if you’re playing the Lady in the Scottish play, don’t work on your lines right before sleep or you will dream of murder) or you may have distressing encounters with the powerful, unseen and angry in your dreams. Wow. I can’t really overstate this one.

Speaking of other nightmare items: SurveyFail rides again. For those of you in fandom or who do fan studies, I assume the sentence, “Women enjoy writing and sharing erotic stories with other women. The fastest growing genre of erotic stories for women are stories about two heterosexual men having sex” from the book’s press materials strikes you as it does me: which is, “Yes, but no. In fact, really, really no. Aegjskgjsdfklsg;jgkslg!!!!” Have fun with that. And, fair warning, the part I’ve quoted is, horrifically, perhaps the least offensive of many of their “conclusions.”

I am deep, deep into my Sherlock analysis right now and am having scads of fun with it. You don’t get to have scads of fun with my data yet, but here, have a piece of fanfiction I really love: The Whore of Babylon was a Perfectly Nice Girl. Not recommended for those who don’t get the “Yes, but no” factor in the above paragraph or are purists about the platonic friendship between Sherlock and Watson.

For those of you who don’t generally watch MSNBC, which I know is viewed (mostly appropriately) as part of the newstaintment phenomenon, I just want to pause and recommend the work Rachel Maddow‘s been doing the last couple of days on the targeting of journalists in Egypt. She’s been doing a spectacular job on rounding up the details and explaining why it matters; it’s not just US journalists at risk, and it’s not just Western journalists at risk (no matter what CNN keeps saying). It’s ALL journalists. And bloggers. If you want to learn more about the risks journalists face around the world please visit the Committee to Protect Journalists. No matter what you may think of the current state of the art and science of reporting the news here in the US or elsewhere, the ability of journalists to do their work and survive doing their work, is critical to personal freedom and government accountability everywhere.

Changing gears to the department of crowdfunding: The Witches of Lublin is a radio drama created and performed by a lot of fantastic people, several of whom are friends. It’s currently raising funds to finish production and promotion. It’s a fantastic, feminist story with haunting music and is very much worth your attention. I had the pleasure of participating in one of the early readings of it and it’s been fun to watch it evolve. (If I make the the random Neil Gaiman noise at you, will that make you click? Seriously, Neil’s involved).

On a final, fairly random personal note, it seems like I may get to chop all my hair off for Gallifrey One after all. This is a long, somewhat complex, story, but I’m maddeningly shaggy right now. By Tuesday I find out if I get to hit the barber before I hit LA. We shall see. It’s a mixed thing, either way.