Sparkly got a bunch of bug bites recently, so I’ve been reminded that her strategy for dealing with itchy things is: scratch them until they hurt instead of itch, i.e. usually until they bleed.
Yes, this is the same person who worries something must be wrong when I pick at dry, already-peeling-off skin in a totally harmless and painless way.
I initially assumed that both Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear) and Lundy Bancroft (Why Does He Do That?) were women. (They’re both men.)
I’m used to the majority of the people talking about these things being women who are abuse survivors. So I’m kind of wondering why the big famous books are by men. There have to be women out there who have both personal experience and Respectable Work Credentials on this topic, right? Why haven’t I heard of them?
Horror is having to take in/absorb/contain, without putting up any defense, things you don’t want.
Joy is taking in, without any defense or hesitation, wonderful things that you want to get that close to.
Yes, they share a component.
No, you can definitely tell the difference.
(I mean, you can take in things that you feel neutral about, things that you aren’t sure whether you like, but. To the extent that you can tell what you like and what you don’t (i.e. by definition, if it matters to you, you know how it matters) you can tell whether you’re being defenseless in a good way or not.)
(The thought that goes around in your my head afterwards is, it was so awful and I let it happen. I’m not sure if I said this before? The “I let it happen” part is its own trauma, on top of whatever it was. No, Sparkly, there isn’t any Awful Thing that you don’t know about, don’t worry.)
You’re absolutely right. You do. And I have exactly zero problem with your yelling! I’ve never had a problem with it. I would not in a million years classify you as part of the problem we were talking about.
The post you cited as “almost anyone would say I was totally unreasonable and too yelly”– I have zero problem with it. I feel like it’s rude to dissect what you said, like I’m sort of putting words in your mouth, but I don’t know how else to explain. So here goes.
The first like 3/4 of that post is 100% quality expressing emotions and boundaries as far as I’m concerned. You say “I am triggered” in so many words, you say “that was condescending” which it absolutely was, and it would be a shitty thing to say even if it weren’t a trigger for you, and you say “I’m not going to listen to things like this anymore”. Seriously, with this post you are meeting the standard that I aspire to and struggle to meet in talking about things like this. Those first couple of paragraphs could be a script from Captain Awkward. I have written yellier things than that first part while definitely not triggered and not even really angry.
Further down you do get into just yelling about how bad you feel. But with the rest of what you said, I don’t think it’s a problem.
The kind of thing that would bother me would start with yelling about how shitty they feel, and then progress to “And it was YOU, YOU made me feel so shitty, you are the worst person ever in the world and you should die in a graphically unpleasant way.” And possibly go on to insult everything they know about the other person, or demand that they grovel and admit to being a bad person.
—–
Yeah, part of this is about people’s personal limits for how much anger and yelling they can listen to. And yeah, nobody should turn that into an absolute standard that everyone should meet. But I do think that there’s something else.
I don’t want to put words in the mouths of the other people who’ve been talking about this, and I can’t find that big post that got mentioned to refresh my memory. So here is my possibly very flawed explanation of what I was trying to say is a problem.
It seems to me, from the outside, that sometimes people use their hurt and anger as a weapon. They talk about how they feel not because they need to vent, or get advice, or because they want to explain why something needs to change– not because they want to feel better– but because they want to hurt and tear down the person who hurt them. It doesn’t end in “Phew, I feel a little better now” or in “All right, you understand, maybe this can be okay” but in “HA HA I WIN.” (And sometimes it doesn’t end for a long time.)
That’s what I have a problem with. People who want to win the Pain Olympics and think they should get a prize of power and validation and walking-on-eggshells from everybody around them. People whose goal isn’t “stop saying the thing” but “admit you are dirt”.
There are lots of things we should be able to get from people who hurt us. We get to have them stop and go away. If the harm they did is something straightforward that they can fix, we get to expect that. But I don’t think we get to demand they feel guilty and pathetic enough to satisfy us. I don’t think we get to demand they sit still and let us have revenge. That’s what I’m against.
And you’re hurt and upset about this and the conversation keeps going off in different directions and I don’t want to come in at a bad time and start a fight, so I’m not actually telling you this.
It was about a teenager with Asperger’s (known to me only as Max. Mock trial characters generally don’t have a gender given, so that teams have flexibility in who plays what character. In this case, though, Max isn’t allowed to appear in person.) who, along with a close friend, took the friend’s grandmother’s car without permission. They were supposed to be repairing and washing it, as they had done multiple times before; Max hotwired it. They drove a short distance and stopped at a pizza parlor. The grandmother noticed the car was gone and called the police immediately, so they were found eating lunch and admitted to taking the car. No harm done to anything. Apparently someone thought Max having a special interest in cars was relevant to the case.
One of Sparkly’s friends said he couldn’t do the prosecution’s side on this case, because something about him caring about autistic people. And oh, I really hope he doesn’t think something shitty behind that. There are sensitive ways to handle this defense, I think, and maybe even to bring up autism in it, but there are also really bad ways.
Claiming that someone did something wrong because they are incapable of knowing better is not necessarily doing them a favor– not unless they really are completely incapable.
Normally, when someone does something wrong and we think they’re responsible, we expect one of two things to happen. Either being punished will teach them to stop and they won’t do it again of their own free will, or we’ll figure out that they are determined not to stop and we’ll forcibly prevent them from doing it again.
Claiming that someone isn’t responsible sort of bridges this divide. If someone doesn’t and can’t know better, we don’t think they deserve to be harshly punished, but we do want them to be forcibly prevented from doing it again– because what other choice is there? They aren’t going to learn to stop. For their own good and everyone else’s, someone has to make them.
Obviously this isn’t a case where we’d expect that to happen officially. Not if this is the first time Max has done anything like this. But.
The attitude that people like Max need to be controlled for their own good is plenty widespread already. They are put into institutions, put into special schools that are essentially institutions, kept under their parents’ legal guardianship even as adults. Caregivers who ought to think of themselves as friends or relatives or employees think they have the right to make decisions for them, to control what they do and who they see, to help them do things but only things the carer approves of. Even when they nominally have control, they are taught by people around them that they aren’t competent and shouldn’t trust themselves. In these big ways and also in innumerable small ways, they are prevented from making their own choices even when they are capable of doing so.
If you claim that Max couldn’t know better because Max has Asperger’s… you’re trying to get Max out of this charge, yeah, but you’re also saying that Max shouldn’t really be free.
—–
And on the other side of it, you’re contributing to a narrative that often helps people who really could change get away with doing harm. The idea that someone who “can’t help” doing something harmful should just be excused and tolerated by the people around them is bad all around.
—–
I don’t think Max should be punished more than minimally. But I think that because Max is young. I think this is a case of “teenager assumes they can get away with anything and somehow it’ll be fine”, and no harm was done, and I think Max will learn better, as well as any teenager will, from being caught and given minor consequences and a good talking to. This is the kind of exception we regularly make for teens. Autism doesn’t need to come into it.
Otherwise delicious food that’s too spicy for me to eat.
Let me tell you a thing (that I learned because of a research project): What makes chili peppers spicy is a chemical called capsaicin. It interacts with some types of nerve cells in your tongue (or other parts of your body) that normally sense heat and pain, and convinces them they’re being burned. Wikipedia doesn’t say this, but according to one of the papers I read, too much exposure to capsaicin actually kills off the cells that react to it.
My point is it’s something you can build up a tolerance to (by not having as many cells that react to it.)
Occasionally I see people talking about how ridiculously bland [British/Nordic/European in general] food is, and I just feel sad and tired. I’m not being a wimp, nor is not liking chiles a weird inexplicable white-person thing. People who don’t eat them on a regular basis are more sensitive to them. I would like to be able to eat spicier food. But I’d also like to be able to eat without feeling like my mouth has been scrubbed out with steel wool.
I keep seeing “Sex positivity would be helpful if“– I’m not actually going to argue about the existence of people doing it wrong, even though I don’t ever seem to encounter them, but it’s not a would if. It is doing all those good things. Just, apparently, not where you are. So I’m going to compile it and then, hopefully, resist the urge to reblog every “sex positivity is bad” post with a link to it.
There’s a kinky couple. (And they are SO cute.)
Now, my recollection is that the way that the authors fade-to-vagueness for their sex scene is kind of awkward, and kind of shows that they don’t really know what the specifics of their kinkiness should actually be, but– still!
How many other published-by-a-major-publishing-house books have I read that had any kind of kink in them, much less a happy, functional relationship? As far as I can remember, one of the Burke books by Andrew Vachss. (There are some kinky things in other books by him, but they’re pretty dysfunctional. Poor Shella.)
I guess this isn’t something I think about a lot, because I get so much representation out of fanfic, and online original works. So the Burke series basically occupies the same space in my mind as Tales of MU, in terms of representation. But in retrospect– what a thing that series is! A trans woman, a Deaf man, a kinky lesbian couple, assorted former and current sex workers, lots of people of color, of various races including “Jesus, can’t people just stop trying to guess my race from my apperance?” mixed… all of them with these things a legitimate part of who they are, with an actual effect on them, but not the only thing about them. It’s pretty fucking glorious. And the plot and the message are so compelling and so forceful that these books have been a part of my life for most of a decade but it never occurred to me until yesterday that the author was probably deliberately trying to write a diverse cast.
And this, especially. I promptly went and bought the thing and it was five dollars well spent. (I’m about halfway through reading it now.)
I’d been thinking that it would be nice to read more about sex and penises from someone that actually has a penis. And I meant that for purposes of writing about cis men having sex, but (a) some of it is still relevant, like “what sexy things can you do with a soft penis?” and (b) whether or not I ever get the opportunity to use the rest of it as a how-to guide, it’s still just really cool to learn about different perspectives on sex.
Some Open Space 