Caveat Lector

I’ll get by.

My husband dug this out of his work email when I thought I had lost it forever. I wrote it two jobs ago, in response to an acute attack of bitterness and frustration.

Lawyer alert: This is a parody. PAR-O-DEE. Such things are legally protected. Really. No foolin’. Look it up.

After some time at Cheese Station N, Snort noticed that the cheese supply once again began to diminish. He told Scuttle and Mumble what he had discovered, and they agreed to go searching for New Cheese together. They tied on their running shoes and blithely set off.

Their first day of search was rather discouraging, as first days often are, so they turned back toward Cheese Station N to fortify themselves for another sally. On their way back, they came upon something strange: the floor of the maze stopped, and a giant wheel, built of bars whose ends were welded to two great circles, towered above them.

Scuttle, smallest and most nimble of the three, squeezed past one of the circles into the wheel, and began to run toward the other side. As he ran the wheel began to turn. He looked down through the bars of the wheel, and saw a great many gears and other sorts of machinery underneath, which the wheel’s motion also set in motion.

“Why, look!” called Mumble suddenly, pointing down a side passage on their side of the wheel. “Cheese!”

And so it was. A small portal in the maze wall opened, and bits of Cheese came out of it and landed on the floor, all ready for eating. Scuttle stopped on the wheel to see the sight—and the Cheese stopped appearing.

“Scuttle, keep moving the wheel!” cried Snort excitedly. And Scuttle did so. As the wheel turned, more Cheese appeared from the portal in the wall. Snort and Mumble ate their fill, and encouraged Scuttle to keep running, occasionally passing him in bits of Cheese.

Scuttle grew tired after a while, but Snort and Mumble told him how grateful they were for his help, and how wonderful it was that his efforts produced so much Cheese, and being a good-natured soul as mice go, Scuttle kept running.

Eventually, ahead of him, beyond the wheel, Scuttle dimly began to perceive a hint of orange in the darkness of the maze. He peered and peered as he ran and ran, until at last the dim shape came clear: a new Cheese Station, greater and more glorious than even Cheese Station N! Between gasps for breath—for he was running very swiftly now—Scuttle told Snort and Mumble what he could see, since they were in the side passage collecting Cheese from the portal and could not see it for themselves.

“Well, that’s very fine, Scuttle,” said Mumble, “and it’s terrific that you found it, and we’re very proud of you, but before we all go to the new station, we need you to run faster so that we have enough Cheese from this portal to be strong enough to get there.”

In vain did poor Scuttle protest that the new station was only a short way away, and if they would only let him stop running, he could lead them to it in a trice. In vain did poor Scuttle plead and beg to be allowed to recommence the search. At last, poor Scuttle felt his heart breaking within him, and in agony he cried out to Snort and Mumble, “Please! I must stop running, or I will die! Just let me stop running, and I will take you to the New Cheese!”

Snort felt sorry for his friend, and turned to Mumble to plead on his behalf. But Mumble was inexorable. “We must have the Cheese. Scuttle, keep running!”

But Scuttle could run no more, for exhaustion and lack of Cheese. His little paws ceased their wild bursts of motion. The momentum of the great wheel dashed him backwards against the bars, and before the horrified eyes of Snort and Mumble, Scuttle slid insensible between the bars of the wheel and was torn to pieces in the machinery below, which ground to a halt.

“Oh, dear,” said Mumble. “What a shame. How sorry I am to see Scuttle go. But Scuttle’s contributions were very valuable, and will long be remembered and appreciated. Let us go on and make more Cheese, in Scuttle’s memory.” So he stepped onto the wheel. Unfortunately, the mangled remains of poor Scuttle had clogged the wheel’s machinery such that no matter how hard he tried, Mumble could not make the wheel turn.

Snort watched in deep sorrow for his lost friend. With tears in his eyes, he turned to the wall above the now-empty portal, lifted his mouse paw, and began to scratch on the wall with it:

No One Can Find Cheese
without Opportunity, Energy, and Authority
to Search For It.

Mumble left the motionless wheel, and read Snort’s mouse-track letters in silence. He stepped forward and wrote:

Depending on One Person
to Find Cheese
is Extremely Dangerous.

I stupidly left my Kinesis at home today, after toting it home last night as I often do so that I can get a little work or play done.

Oh, boy, do I miss that thing. How do you people with mass-produced keyboards manage? My hands feel twisted inside-out already, and I’ve only been here fifteen minutes.

In the interests of full disclosure, I will admit that ordinary keyboards have one advantage over my Kinesis: you don’t have to keep your fingernails quite so short. The Kinesis angles your fingers on the keys such that if you have long fingernails, you strike keys with them instead of your finger-pads, which is a nasty jolt after a while.

That’s it, though. Other than that, the Kinesis is immeasurably superior. Cost me a bundle, but some of the best money I’ve spent this year. I know I sound like a PR flack, but I’m only speaking as I find, and I find that I am now a Kinesis fanatic.

My latest check to the mortgage company just cleared, so I hopped over to the mortgage company’s website to check that my amortization chart and their records are roughly in synch.

They are. We’ve paid off over half our mortgage, speaking in dollars, in the not-quite four years we’ve owned our house. (Speaking in time, we’ve paid off better than two-thirds.)

Though it isn’t a big mortgage as mortgages go, I think this is still deserving of a hearty w00t!

In hopes of salvaging something useful out of yesterday’s fiasco, I’m going to talk about the cloud over “sexy.”

Should define my terms first. I am talking about the social construction of female sexual attractiveness and femininity here. I am not talking about individual women’s public expression of sexuality. That understood (it is understood, right?), let me tell a story or two about “sexy.”

Funny thing about the outfit that sicked the two street-corner bozos onto me. A few years earlier, back at Indiana, I was wearing it, walking through the parking lot of the main campus library with a group of—classmates, I think it was. Yes, we were coming from a research-methods-and-resources session. Anyway, I was talking with another young woman about Irish monastic penitentials or something like that when a couple of guys in a big ol’ car started the wolf-whistle-leer-and-comment-suggestively bit, with particular reference to my breasts.

There it was—the sickening grunch as I landed involuntarily back in my body—and not my entire body, either, but specific parts of it. The conversation was ruined. I felt uncomfortable for being targeted. My conversation partner felt uncomfortable on my behalf, and I think a little devalued as well; being targeted is no fun, but being ignored is no fun too, in its way. Sensing that devaluation, I said something about how it was only because of my clothes; if I had dressed the way my conversation partner had (sweatshirt and jeans), I would have passed unnoticed.

Which was probably true. It didn’t make either of us feel any better, I don’t think. Nor did it help us repair our shattered conversation. We weren’t two students any longer; we weren’t two minds looking for common thoughts. We were two bodies. Bodies don’t talk about Irish penitentials.

Note carefully, by the way, that I wasn’t the only woman in that incident to feel the sickening grunch. The woman I was talking with did, too. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if other women walking near us did as well, to a somewhat lesser extent; I have certainly felt grunched when women near me were the overt grunchees. Judging one woman that way turns every woman in earshot into a body.

(In passing, let me mourn the loss of what had been my favorite outfit. It’s a nice one. I was, and am, very fond of it. I’m sad that I don’t feel comfortable in it any more, that it’s languished unworn in my closet for years now. It’s just a white tank top and a handmade openwork lace blouse from Mitla, Mexico over a broomstick skirt whose dominant colors are white, purple, and the same sky-blue as the lace.)

About the same time, my role-playing group switched from a Robotech campaign to a heavily-munchkinified Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I rolled up a gnome illusionist named Fechan. I intended her to be short, squat, frumpy, grumpy—but boy howdy, could she ever sling magic.

It is said, usually by people who want an excuse to laugh at gamers, that gamers use games to try to inhabit the ideals that they themselves fall pitifully short of. Said ideals are usually thought to be shallow, Muscleboy or Superbabe. Well, there’s a grain of truth there—not a few gamers are hunting ideals. I was. I wanted Fechan to earn regard with intelligence and skill. I wanted her to be so secure in her abilities that her ugliness wasn’t even a question, never mind a problem. She was meant to be so good at what she did that sheer ability outshone everything else about her.

And then the (male, natch) GM insisted that Fechan have god-level charisma (only he didn’t like the Charisma stat, so he went ahead and called it “comeliness”).

Grunch.

Not even in a game, an explicitly unreal world, could I get away from the ironclad expectation that women have a place on the sexiness continuum.

I ran with it. I really did. I turned Fechan from a fairy-tale witch into a little china doll. I subverted the living daylights out of the situation, and Fechan became one of my all-time best characters. But from the day I first played her to the day I wrote my last bit of fluff about her (long after the campaign ended), the hallmark of her personality was her utter disregard for her own beauty. It was as close as that GM allowed me to get to my ideal.

This same GM was driving me and two other participants (one male, one female; the female participant was the GM’s girlfriend) somewhere early in the school year when the talk veered to new acquaintances. The other guy in the car mentioned a young Asian woman he’d just met.

“Fuckable?” asked the GM, utterly out of the blue.

“Yeah, I would say so. Not, like, gorgeous or anything, but fuckable,” said the other guy.

GRUNCH.

Multiple experiences of the sickening grunch—not just once, not just twice, but over and over again, as grunchee and as witness—is what makes it so damned hard to take when “sexy” and similar social constructions of femininity haul my body unceremoniously into the conversation when it is utterly irrelevant to what’s going on. And whether I want it to be or not. I don’t control the conversation about my body. I can’t, except perhaps by throwing temper tantrums on the scale of yesterday’s.

Not even on the Internet, where nobody’s supposed to know or care that I’m a dog. All the folks waxing rhapsodic about escaping their bodies on the ’net are men. Without exception (that I’ve found, anyway), women who write on the topic are less rhapsodic, more troubled. They know they can be grunched, driven involuntarily back into the sexual parts of their bodies from what is supposed to be a realm of the mind and spirit. What woman on the ’net hasn’t been?

Much is made of women’s hatred of their bodies, and rightly so. My own track record in this regard is not sterling, Mung knows. I don’t know that I’ve often heard it said, though, that the damage is not just due to impossible standards of attractiveness—it’s due to not being able to escape one’s body, attractive or no. Not being able to escape being judged by one’s body. Not being able to escape being aware of one’s body and how other people react to it.

Yet for me, that inability to escape my body is far more troubling than the actual judgments of others regarding it. Yeah, I’m nobody’s pinup, so what? If that fact could remain unregarded, firmly in the background of my conversations, of my blog, of my work, of my walks down the street, I’d be happy. But it can’t, because the world around me refuses to let it.

As I told Mike in email this morning, I have a couple of Peruvian coworkers who are justifiably wog-boggled by race checkoff boxes on American employment forms and whathaveyou. They just don’t think of race in those terms, and find it borderline insulting to be forced to check off a box when they feel (correctly, IMO) that the whole basis for judgment is ludicrous.

That’s where I am on “sexy,” sometimes even on “female.” I don’t like the checkboxes available; I don’t really want to be judged on that axis at all. Yet I can’t get away from it, any more than my coworkers can escape American concepts of race (since they don’t want to leave).

Makes it hard for men, I know it does. Hard for women trying to reclaim “sexy” for their own purposes, too. What is, say, Gretchen Pirillo supposed to think of me? That I’m jealous? That I hate her because she’s beautiful? I’m not, and I don’t. It’s just that how she constructs herself involuntarily (involuntarily; I want to stress that) makes me vulnerable to judgment on a standard I don’t want any part of.

I don’t have an answer to all this, and after yesterday it would be highly presumptuous of me to get all prescriptivist on folks anyway. All I’m trying to do is offer some data points to explain why I and a lot of other women have a hair trigger when it comes to the word “sexy.”

What I get for posting in anger.

I owe Frank an apology, and I try to pay my debts. Frank didn’t play the “sexy” card with Gretchen Pirillo any more than she let him. He didn’t deserve to get dragged into my rant, and I’m sorry I did it. Gretchen didn’t deserve it either, and I apologize to her as well.

Moreover, while it is frustrating (and, I think, justly so) to see sexy used in exclusion of almost all else to sell woman-authored blogs, I shouldn’t have even implied that I was tarring Doc with that brush. Again, I’m sorry.

I won’t pull the post—not because I’m particularly proud of it, or because I stand unequivocally behind what I said, but because I believe in warts-and-all self-presentation. And that was a wart.

The worst thing about the preceding post was that it distracted me from Cory Doctorow’s highly nifty story on Salon.

Copyright, l33t talk, depression, total ownership of one’s bodily processes—good stuff. Check it out. I’m still finishing it.

I am in a bad mood today. Partly because my coworkers can’t seem to stop nattering about their clothes closets. Partly because Terje’s article is getting enough exposure that I really feel I need to write a rebuttal, and I don’t especially want to. Partly because the Doc S thing really needs to die, and it won’t, and I want to hold up a great big sign in front of Mike Golby that says “DUDE, YOU ARE SO NOT HELPING.” Partly because the burns on the inside of my elbow from last weekend are starting to hurt like the blazes.

Ergo I will do what bad-mood bloggers do—inflict my bad mood on the world at large. I want to be rid of it by the time I go to my husband’s work farewell party this afternoon.

So I’ll pick on Mike Golby. He’s a big man, right? He can handle it the way a man ought to.

I hope those last two sentences bugged you folks. I intended them to. I just folded Mike inside a big nasty stereotype, will-he-nill-he. Which is exactly what he did to me when he called me “sexy.”

(I originally wrote more than two sentences. The additional ones addressed stereotypes of alcoholics, and were blatantly offensive. So I got rid of them, though they would have made my point better.)

For the record, I am not sexy. I am a scarred, size-16, 30-year-old, makeupless, shapeless, mousy-haired, plainly-clothed peasant drudge, all right? I do not think of myself as sexy, nor do people looking at me who categorize other people in that way.

I am sexual, though that fact does not loom particularly large in my life—and that is all you are going to hear on that subject from me. The difference between “sexual” and “sexy” to my mind is that the former comes from within and the latter is imposed (or withheld) from without.

Sometimes the imposition is not done with intent to harm. Golby didn’t mean to piss me off; he was trying to be funny. Sometimes it is, though. Sometimes it’s meant to shove me into a corner so that I can be dealt with as a “sexy thing” (you should forgive the expression) and not a fellow human being. Sometimes it shoves me into a corner so that I don’t have to be dealt with at all (which is part of what Burningbird was getting at—if the only alternatives are “man” and “sexy woman,” what are non-sexy women supposed to think and to do?). Sometimes it’s just plain predatory.

Withholding of “sexy” is nearly always done with intent to harm. Funny, that. No, not funny. Enormously terrible.

I haven’t always had the physique I now do. I used to get the same drooling sex-obsessed crap that women in the “sexy” cage get. The one time I saw my gentle, cerebral husband ready himself for threatening physical action was over a pair of bozos on a street corner who thought they had a perfect right to comment loudly on and reach for my breasts.

This happens to women a lot. Ain’t unusual at all. Not being sexy means I don’t have to deal with it any more. Unfortunately, it also often seems to mean I’m not worth regard. Great choice I’ve got there.

Consider, Mike, that you are putting yourself in the company of those two bozos, whether you know it or not (and perhaps you don’t), when you call women “sexy.” And, Jonathon, if it is doctrinaire, reductionist, and Pharisaical to point this out, then I will happily plead no contest. I think it’s important to (kindly, gently, and with humor and forgiveness—all the ways I’m not doing it in this post) show the good guys when they’re off-track, particularly when they don’t know they are. They’re decent chaps; they don’t want to hurt anyone, and if they know they’re doing it, they’ll stop.

Anyway. What has me almost trembling with suppressed rage right now (yeah, I am bloody well overreacting, and you can bloody well sue me for it) is the mere fact of the “sexy” cage. That the best way Doc and Mike and Frank (see his remarks about Gretchen Pirillo) can find to attract people to read the writing of women is to put them in that cage. (See apology, please.) That the only way women bloggers can attract readers, seems as if sometimes, is to live in that cage. That the best way Mike can find to talk me down from my “unsexy” posture (see comments to post linked above) is to say that hey, he was talkin’ about my mind. That Mike thinks he needs to talk me down from this posture at all.

Damn it to hell, I did not choose to be sexy! I do not want to be sexy! Let me out of this ridiculous damned cage you have built around me before I tear it apart with my bare hands, and you with it! Find some other way of relating to me, and do it now, please!

Oo. That felt good. It shouldn’t have, but it did.

Right. I am calmer now. Mike, Frank, Jonathon, Doc, I’m not mad at you, and I ask you to forgive me for using you in the rant I just ranted. I’m mad at the prevailing discourse structure in which we are all entwined whether we like it or not. It’s that, and certain unsavory practices reflected by it, that make being called “sexy” unwelcome. And—I might as well be completely honest—I’m still mad at those two bozos, years later; I can’t make myself wear the handsome and well-loved outfit they saw me in any more, because the incident involving them was so frightening and so ugly.

Cages, cages everywhere. I could try to escape this cage by joining Kalilily in Cronedom. Unfortunately, I see the whole “maiden, mother, crone” thing as just one more cage, albeit one constructed primarily by women themselves. It fits me and my life no better than does the “sexy” construct.

I’d rather escape the cages altogether, of course. The thing is, I can’t do that by myself, no matter how I scream or claw at the bars. I didn’t put myself in this cage; I was put there. I can’t stay free of it alone; I need people to refrain from locking me up.

Please. Help me be free. Please?

Okay, the DNS is doing its bit… and stupidly, I forgot to download the old CavLec archives and move them to the new textartisan. So archive links to textartisan probably broke for you sometime yesterday.

They’re back now. Sorry for the breakage.

Email was indeed squirrelly yesterday, but it seems to be sorting itself out. I’m pretty sure I didn’t lose anything.

I think I’m going to be lazy about the wedding pictures; who needs to see them after four years anyway? I’ll put the summary, ceremony, and articles back up, but I don’t have the energy to tussle with our old scanner.

Found a nifty bit of art for the Baladro pages. Still need one for the wedding pages. Once all that is up… Yarinareth will be in good shape, and it’ll be time to turn my attention back to textartisan, where a good many bits are half-finished.

The design is working out astonishingly well. It took me two or three hours to clean up the markup on my grad school story. (Yeah, it was pretty sad stuff.) Once I found and digitized the photo I wanted for the background, the rest only took me twenty minutes, and it doesn’t look bad at all (though I may darken up the red a bit if inspiration strikes). I am at heart a lazy bum. Instant design appeals.

Writing teacher Jeff has been kvetching about the stress on the “creative” and expressionist in writing classes, as opposed to the practical and structured.

I had to grin, especially at the (free-?)association of this style of writing with personal heroes. I have a silly old story about that…

I was the unquestioned star of my eighth-grade English class. I mean, unquestioned—and the competition was pretty good. Come the end of the school year, it’s time for the usual pointless certificate handouts. Hated those when I was a kid; I couldn’t have expressed it then, but I knew perfectly well how false and empty it all was.

Our English teacher decreed that the award this year would go by contest, rather than by aggregate performance over the year. I have no idea why. It’s not as if the essays we were to write were blind, and it’s not as if everybody didn’t already know I was teacher’s pet.

She handed out a mimeo with the essay topic. It boiled down to Talk about your hero. Live hero, mind you; literary heroes were right out.

Er. I don’t think she was quite prepared for the amount of anomie that can reside in a thirteen-year-old soul. To be fair to myself, I had earned a little anomie—I had spent half the school year marooned in Mexico (I did not then speak Spanish), made it through the big ’85 earthquake, and returned to have an immediate family member go into inpatient alcoholism treatment, and to be accused (falsely, and fortunately not formally) of drug abuse by that family member’s counselor. Bad year. Very bad year.

I didn’t have any heroes just then. I couldn’t even manage to pretend I did, despite already being an advanced practitioner of the fine craft of BSing. I stared at the paper, started to write, erased it all, stared some more with tears pricking at my eyelids. I finally turned it in blank, with only my name and the date at the top. Teacher was a stickler for dates on essays.

A classmate accosted me in the halls later that day. He was one of those who veered between tormentor (the usual case) and comrade (when no one else was egging him on toward cruelty). “Gonna win the English award?” he asked with a jocular grin.

“No,” I said glumly.

He stared. “You wrote the essay, didn’t you?”

I can’t remember exactly what I said. I think I lied outright.

“Then you’re going to win. Everybody knows that.”

The teacher accosted me a bit later, and demanded an explanation for my blank essay. I was tall enough then to look her straight in the eye—she was in her 60s and a bit hunched. It didn’t matter. I had no explanation to give, nor enough strength to straighten up and stare her down. I remember wanting to step backward as she peered right up into my face.

The English award went to my jocular acquaintance. I stared straight ahead of me while the inevitable certificate was awarded, pretending not to hear the surprised whispers or feel the curious eyes trained on me.