Start Your Week Off Right: A Round-Up

[newdance]

I just LOVED this post from Walking the Hedge, entitled “Z”:

You speak of freedom of religion. You say “this is their Tradition and they have a right to it.” And this is true.

You speak in generalized platitudes about religious tolerance, of freedom. You say nothing of the pain caused to the individual. My “beef” with Z. Budapest and Dianic Wicca is not one of generalized platitudes. It is personal.

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This apple=shaped Forbidden Fruit vibrator is cute. I wonder how difficult t would be to take off the lettering and re-write it….

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So, there was the Anthesteria festival recently, and Dver put up this great post and Sannion did an Anthesteria round-up.

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So, by now, you’ve probably heard about CAYA Coven Amazon tribe succeeding from Zuszsanna Budapest’s line and basically re-naming themselves and re-aligning with the “Pan-Dianic” movement that recognises the rights of trans women (and presumably other unwombed women, which Ms Budapest seems curiously silent about) as well as men of all sorts to worship their Goddess, even though the primary interest of that group is menstrual mysteries. P. Sufenas Virius Lupus has did a great write-up here, and also a book review of Gender & Transgender in Modern Paganism, which presents some truly diverse views, for better and for worse.

And, to be honest, I think this move comes at a very opportune time. The transphobic remarks of Z. Budapest caused enough harm and upset in the community, but recently she’s written something which I don’t think has had as much attention but that nonetheless has me a little worried that she’s also moved into good old-fashioned homophobia as well: rapists are really just gay men. (Let’s ignore for the moment that it’s not only males that perpetrate rape, sexual assault, and other forms of sexual abuse…) Despite the provisional acceptance of gay men that Z. had expressed in certain situations in the past, this is doing something entirely different. I’ve written about the fallacy that ‘homophobia = homoeroticism’ previously, but this kind of twists it into an even further strange territory. Yes, rapists are horrible people, I think we can all agree on that. But, to make this tautological claim that (male) rapists are really just gay, because that means they’re not “real men” and are kind of even scummier than just “regular men” as a result, is pretty over-the-top in a ton of ways. Unlike some of the commenters on Z.’s blog post, I’m not inclined to see this as anti-men so much (although it is) as much as it’s anti-gay men. Given that this blog post came at a time not long after Hyperion and others refused to “defend” Z. at PantheaCon, I can’t help but wonder if that might be a contributing factor to the overall tenor of her remarks there…

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ALSO:
I made some updates to “A No-Nonsense TS/TG 101 for Pagans”. Read, enjoy. It’s spreading like plague.

Oh, and I’m getting really tired of Pantheacon debaters being all “it’s a public event so everybody has to be able to attend every ritual!” Seriously, people, DIVVERSITY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!

Just In Case You Were Curious:
…about the music, six weeks ago or something, someone on the goth.net forum, who clearly doesn’t know music as well as they think they do, once (apparently seriously) described Ska as “punk mixed with jazz”. Er, no honey, “punk + jazz” equals No Wave. And whatever you’d call Rig Rig + Panic (some purists believe that “No Wave” is strictly whatever was coming out of New York between 1979 and 1985 that fit that punk-jazz-avantgarde-minimalist sort of schtick, while RR+P were British, but personally, I think if you’re going to call No Wave a genre and not a scene, then RR+P fits, even if they’re considerably less noisy than some, and more complex than others in the No Wave genre). Ska is the evolutionary link between Mento and Reggae. Sure, some punks discovered Ska around ’78 and thus the Ska Punk fusion was born, but talking to a Ska purist about Ska Punk is like talking to a Metal purist about Glam Metal, and not even the watered-down, “can you really call it ‘metal’ of any sort any-more” crap, like Poison -a comparable band to a Ska aficionado would be No Doubt.

Shit You’ve Probably Read Already:
* P. Sufenas Virius Lupus’ “Burn Rome”
* and lastly, COMEEKS!
…SMBC: Socrates

Your New Old Word For the Week:
IDIOPATHIC: adjective, from Greek idiopatheia (idios-, one’s own, personal; -patheia, from paschein, to experience, suffer): 1. peculiar to an indicidual; 2. (of diseases) arising from an obscure or unknown cause.
His idiopathic associations with that particular song by The Supremes led him to cry whenever it came on.

Mirrored from Of Thespiae.