I am trying, and it is desperately hard, not to argue with the readers who’ve been kind enough to send me critiques of “Lily’s Friend/With Her Own Eyes
( Read more... )
When it comes to reader responses, Terri, you're a class act.
(Now *I* have to reread Emma too! Oh, the horror!)
I'll be leaving soon to visit family, and I won't be back till the 2nd, so I'll have less online time for a while, but I'll keep checking back.
Aaaaand now I'm going to rant at you. Sorry; sensitive subject.
that child had the absolute, unmitigated gall to whistle at a white woman.
This really bothers me. No one deserves to be beaten to death. Emmett Till's murderers should have been put away forever. But wolf whistling is sexual harassment. Don't imply it's nothing.
A wolf whistle is a *threat*. It's about "I can hurt you because I'm a man and you're a woman." It's *not* about "I think you're cute." It's a sexually-charged threat.
Emmett Till's murder was horrible, but it isn't an endpoint.
You might be thinking that Emmett's behavior was "just teenage bravado" -- but that's what teen male bravado *is*: showing off the power of your newly-acquired manhood. If Emmett chose to show off his male power over a white woman, he chose to pit male privilege against white privilege. Neither privilege should exist.
Please don't minimize the harm done by either of them.
This really bothers me. No one deserves to be beaten to death. Emmett Till's murderers should have been put away forever. But wolf whistling is sexual harassment. Don't imply it's nothing.
Nice of you to just accept the whitewashed version of events.
God, just shut up. Every time you talk about Emmett Till to justify your own butthurt Nice Guy projecting-onto-Snape bullshit reasons for not getting past high school the more disgusting you and everyone who puts up with you becomes.
You are a straight white man. You have no room to talk about racism or sexism. And it is fucking galling to watch you get on your pedestal just because someone dared to insult your favorite fictional characters. The Death Eaters were a Nazi/KKK stand-in and Severus Snape was only to happy to join them. Fucking deal with it.
My very favorite feminist dyke poetterri_testingJanuary 9 2011, 05:36:24 UTC
Judy Grahn, quoted from memory, about the tangled, twisted, intersections between racism and misogyny "A Woman is Talking to Death":
We do each other in, that's a fact.
Maybe he once drove taxi and raped a lover of mine, how to tell thes things....
(About the black man the white dyke left to be railroaded for a crime he hadn't committed)
Now I think: maybe he was Josie's baby.
All of our chickens come home to roost.
All of them.
(About the hispanic straight man, twenty-years younger than the narrator, who'd just assaulted a middle-aged white woman--with impunity because she was also a dyke.... and Josie, that dyke's first-ever crush, had been a Hispanic straight girl who'd been forced to drop out of school because of her [shocking!] pregnancy).
I'm perverse, myself; I like the acknowledgment of complexity. More in fact than any facile resolution.
Thanks for posting, and for caring enough to spend thought on this issue.
No one deserves to be beaten to deathterri_testingJanuary 13 2011, 07:06:10 UTC
I am, technically, a woman of color, or of mixed races. Or even white, if history is erased enough.
Grins.
It all depends on what you count. And on who's counting. I got called squaw, as a kid, and I cried when I was teased for my "Indian eyes". I am registered as a member of the Anishinabe nation. But some European-immigrant-ancestry Americans see me as "white", because I don't trigger their particular racial markers. I'm visibly not "black," and that's what they count. Black or white.
I did trigger racial-minority markers among those with whom I grew up; I don't [usually] those among whom I'm now living. So what am I?
Sometimes I've been the victim of white racism, sometimes the recipient of white prejudice.
Which matters more?
But when I was twelve, I was raped (sexually assaulted) by my white (by any definition) mother.
When I was fourteen, I was threatened with rape by a white male older teen.
when I was nineteen, I was threatened wirh rape by another white male stranger.
When I was twenty-two, I was threatened with rape by three male strangers of assorted races.
*
The only rape that was actually accomplished on me was by my mother; those other threats I managed to thwart.
*
And I wanted to punish that actual sexual assault by beating her to death.
*
No, not by beating.
That was far too removed.
When I was ten, my cat had left a partly-disemboweled mouse at the foot of my bed, and I'd stepped on it.
That was what I imagined as punishment for my sexual assailant (my mother) when I was twelve/thirteen.
Not injuring her with a weapon, that was too distant; not touching her with my hand, that would mean touching her, and polluting me with her evil.
*
So stomping on the assaailant's (my mother's) body barefoot. Feeling her different organs squish and pop under my feet. Feeling her desruction as intimataly as possible, but not contaminated by touching her with my hands.
Sick, huh? That's what I wanted for my rapist.
For my mom.
* No one deserves to be beaten to death?
*
How easy that is easy to say.
*
I envy you your lack of imagination. I do, really.
I imagined stomping my mother to death. Barefoot. Literally.
I imagined this repeatedly.
I didn't do it.
But I imagined it.
So now tell me she didn't deserve it.
Do tell.
This really bothers me.
Yes, it does me too.
* I think this is the ultimate difference, and the magic of all "ism's"--that the other, the wrong one, can be declared to be someone, something else.
Not a part of one's one belly, or mother, or blood.
How lovely to be able to repudiate something absolutely.
Re: No one deserves to be beaten to deathtotalreadrJanuary 28 2011, 12:24:38 UTC
This is under someone's reply to me, but it appears to be directed at me so...
I've imagined such things about people who have hurt me as well.
Would your mother have deserved to have your imaginings come true?
Would my father have deserved mine?
Would my brother have, when he passed on what he learned from my father to someone else? My brother who always protected me as much as he could, who saved my life when I was six?
I still love my brother. I even still love my father.
But I wouldn't tell those my brother hurt that they didn't have a right to imagine killing him slowly. (Nor do I deny he did it. I know he did. When I tried to tell my mother about my father, she didn't believe me so...)
Nor can I quite bring myself to say my father wouldn't have deserved it.
But then that's the point, isn't it? When focused on one's own pain, one can't bring oneself to say that. Not about the specific cause of the pain. (And often, not even about something someone else is insisting "is worse." Saying something else is worse feels like a denial if from yourself or a betrayal if from a friend -- it feels like saying your own pain is not so bad, if something else is worse.)
I can say -- and believe -- that no one deserves to be beaten to death.
I can say:
My brother wouldn't have deserved to be beaten to death. (I wouldn't expect those he hurt to say that, though.)
And I can say:
Mussolini (or Stalin, or even Hitler) did not deserve to be beaten to death.
I cannot say my father...
Maybe some people think that makes me a monster. I think it makes me normal.
...
But no. No one deserves to be beaten to death. It may strike you as easy to say but I don't just say it, I mean it. Even when I can't say it. And we both know it's not so easy to mean.
Re: No one deserves to be beaten to deathterri_testingJanuary 29 2011, 07:12:20 UTC
Affirming that, even where we can't actually believe it--even where o ur own pain shrieks otherwise--yeah.
I cannot fault the child that I once was who felt that the desired, appropriate reaction to my abuser was to use my bare feet to bludgeon her to death. To trample her internal organz, savouring how she bled beneath my feet. Not some random victim: Her. That pervert who'd so casually destroyed my trust, my innocence and my sexual response.
And I am glad now that I restrained myself from doing it, from meting out that form of vengeance. I don't argue that she didn't deserve it, but I've glad I never tried so to punish her.
I didn't deserve that.
To become the person who had done that.
And nor, clearly, do you.
That's what the Harry-cruciating-Amycus Carrow apologists miss. The question was never really whether Amycus deserved torture. It was whether Harry deserved to become a torturer.
It's not what they did--your father, my mother, your torn brother, whoever--but what we do, that sculpts us most deeply.
We may never again be innocent; we had that option cruelly torn from us.
But we can still choose to be the good. To be among those who choose what is right over what is easy. Or, even, over justice, in the narrowest and more horrible definition.
Not to inflict undue pain, however our own hurt insists punishment is deserved.
As you said, with such difficulty: no one deserves to be beaten to death. No one.
That's quite an ideal to live up to, take it at its full worth.
(Now *I* have to reread Emma too! Oh, the horror!)
I'll be leaving soon to visit family, and I won't be back till the 2nd, so I'll have less online time for a while, but I'll keep checking back.
Aaaaand now I'm going to rant at you. Sorry; sensitive subject.
that child had the absolute, unmitigated gall to whistle at a white woman.
This really bothers me. No one deserves to be beaten to death. Emmett Till's murderers should have been put away forever. But wolf whistling is sexual harassment. Don't imply it's nothing.
A wolf whistle is a *threat*. It's about "I can hurt you because I'm a man and you're a woman." It's *not* about "I think you're cute." It's a sexually-charged threat.
Emmett Till's murder was horrible, but it isn't an endpoint.
You might be thinking that Emmett's behavior was "just teenage bravado" -- but that's what teen male bravado *is*: showing off the power of your newly-acquired manhood. If Emmett chose to show off his male power over a white woman, he chose to pit male privilege against white privilege. Neither privilege should exist.
Please don't minimize the harm done by either of them.
Reply
Nice of you to just accept the whitewashed version of events.
God, just shut up. Every time you talk about Emmett Till to justify your own butthurt Nice Guy projecting-onto-Snape bullshit reasons for not getting past high school the more disgusting you and everyone who puts up with you becomes.
You are a straight white man. You have no room to talk about racism or sexism. And it is fucking galling to watch you get on your pedestal just because someone dared to insult your favorite fictional characters. The Death Eaters were a Nazi/KKK stand-in and Severus Snape was only to happy to join them. Fucking deal with it.
Reply
We do each other in, that's a fact.
Maybe he once drove taxi and raped a lover of mine, how to tell thes things....
(About the black man the white dyke left to be railroaded for a crime he hadn't committed)
Now I think: maybe he was Josie's baby.
All of our chickens come home to roost.
All of them.
(About the hispanic straight man, twenty-years younger than the narrator, who'd just assaulted a middle-aged white woman--with impunity because she was also a dyke.... and Josie, that dyke's first-ever crush, had been a Hispanic straight girl who'd been forced to drop out of school because of her [shocking!] pregnancy).
I'm perverse, myself; I like the acknowledgment of complexity. More in fact than any facile resolution.
Thanks for posting, and for caring enough to spend thought on this issue.
Reply
Grins.
It all depends on what you count. And on who's counting. I got called squaw, as a kid, and I cried when I was teased for my "Indian eyes". I am registered as a member of the Anishinabe nation. But some European-immigrant-ancestry Americans see me as "white", because I don't trigger their particular racial markers. I'm visibly not "black," and that's what they count. Black or white.
I did trigger racial-minority markers among those with whom I grew up; I don't [usually] those among whom I'm now living. So what am I?
Sometimes I've been the victim of white racism, sometimes the recipient of white prejudice.
Which matters more?
But when I was twelve, I was raped (sexually assaulted) by my white (by any definition) mother.
When I was fourteen, I was threatened with rape by a white male older teen.
when I was nineteen, I was threatened wirh rape by another white male stranger.
When I was twenty-two, I was threatened with rape by three male strangers of assorted races.
*
The only rape that was actually accomplished on me was by my mother; those other threats I managed to thwart.
*
And I wanted to punish that actual sexual assault by beating her to death.
*
No, not by beating.
That was far too removed.
When I was ten, my cat had left a partly-disemboweled mouse at the foot of my bed, and I'd stepped on it.
That was what I imagined as punishment for my sexual assailant (my mother) when I was twelve/thirteen.
Not injuring her with a weapon, that was too distant; not touching her with my hand, that would mean touching her, and polluting me with her evil.
*
So stomping on the assaailant's (my mother's) body barefoot. Feeling her different organs squish and pop under my feet. Feeling her desruction as intimataly as possible, but not contaminated by touching her with my hands.
Sick, huh? That's what I wanted for my rapist.
For my mom.
*
No one deserves to be beaten to death?
*
How easy that is easy to say.
*
I envy you your lack of imagination. I do, really.
I imagined stomping my mother to death. Barefoot. Literally.
I imagined this repeatedly.
I didn't do it.
But I imagined it.
So now tell me she didn't deserve it.
Do tell.
This really bothers me.
Yes, it does me too.
*
I think this is the ultimate difference, and the magic of all "ism's"--that the other, the wrong one, can be declared to be someone, something else.
Not a part of one's one belly, or mother, or blood.
How lovely to be able to repudiate something absolutely.
To declare it entirely outside oneself.
*
Nothing human is alien to me.
*
Reply
I've imagined such things about people who have hurt me as well.
Would your mother have deserved to have your imaginings come true?
Would my father have deserved mine?
Would my brother have, when he passed on what he learned from my father to someone else? My brother who always protected me as much as he could, who saved my life when I was six?
I still love my brother. I even still love my father.
But I wouldn't tell those my brother hurt that they didn't have a right to imagine killing him slowly. (Nor do I deny he did it. I know he did. When I tried to tell my mother about my father, she didn't believe me so...)
Nor can I quite bring myself to say my father wouldn't have deserved it.
But then that's the point, isn't it? When focused on one's own pain, one can't bring oneself to say that. Not about the specific cause of the pain. (And often, not even about something someone else is insisting "is worse." Saying something else is worse feels like a denial if from yourself or a betrayal if from a friend -- it feels like saying your own pain is not so bad, if something else is worse.)
I can say -- and believe -- that no one deserves to be beaten to death.
I can say:
My brother wouldn't have deserved to be beaten to death. (I wouldn't expect those he hurt to say that, though.)
And I can say:
Mussolini (or Stalin, or even Hitler) did not deserve to be beaten to death.
I cannot say my father...
Maybe some people think that makes me a monster. I think it makes me normal.
...
But no. No one deserves to be beaten to death. It may strike you as easy to say but I don't just say it, I mean it. Even when I can't say it. And we both know it's not so easy to mean.
Reply
ur own pain shrieks otherwise--yeah.
I cannot fault the child that I once was who felt that the desired, appropriate reaction to my abuser was to use my bare feet to bludgeon her to death. To trample her internal organz, savouring how she bled beneath my feet. Not some random victim: Her. That pervert who'd so casually destroyed my trust, my innocence and my sexual response.
And I am glad now that I restrained myself from doing it, from meting out that form of vengeance. I don't argue that she didn't deserve it, but I've glad I never tried so to punish her.
I didn't deserve that.
To become the person who had done that.
And nor, clearly, do you.
That's what the Harry-cruciating-Amycus Carrow apologists miss. The question was never really whether Amycus deserved torture. It was whether Harry deserved to become a torturer.
It's not what they did--your father, my mother, your torn brother, whoever--but what we do, that sculpts us most deeply.
We may never again be innocent; we had that option cruelly torn from us.
But we can still choose to be the good. To be among those who choose what is right over what is easy. Or, even, over justice, in the narrowest and more horrible definition.
Not to inflict undue pain, however our own hurt insists punishment is deserved.
As you said, with such difficulty: no one deserves to be beaten to death. No one.
That's quite an ideal to live up to, take it at its full worth.
Reply
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