Wow, that's harsh, but... not inaccurate, at all. A lot of us (Anselmus being an exception) haven't wanted to talk much in public about the gap between the image and the reality of Pavilion, because we were afraid we would look vindictive or spiteful, like we were "out to get people" after all these years. But when other people confirm that it didn't look very good, we have to admit that it really wasn't a good activism group, and it was also a very negative experience for us. I know we've used the "Potemkin activism" analogy ourselves, and Sophie also came up with the analogy that they were roleplaying activism, considering that the three groups who had the most power in Pavilion did a lot of roleplaying and had all met each other through it. (Not that there's anything wrong with roleplaying. It just seems in retrospect like they had trouble distinguishing between roleplaying and reality, which is obviously a very bad foundation for an activism group.)
And the thing is, we were really enthusiastic and fired up to work on it, at first! It was just that-- again, being totally honest here-- it got hijacked early on by the Blackbirds' obsessions with categories and ranks, and suddenly we were told that Lucas of the Blackbirds was in charge of the project and no one was to question this, when we had envisioned it as more of an egalitarian thing. They didn't seem to know HOW to run anything except as a top-down chain of command. Then we were being told that the first and most important goal for us was to propose a "new model" to replace the DID model, and that was what "fires" was supposed to be. Somehow. We felt even at the time that this couldn't possibly get us anywhere, but the Blackbirds would get angry at anyone who questioned it-- slightly angry to their face, but they would rage at and insult them behind their backs. We saw how they talked in private about the people who questioned the "fires model," and at the time, we were afraid of being ripped apart behind the scenes the same way. (We would be, eventually, but we didn't find out about it until two years after it happened.) So we were like "okay, fine, let them have their fires, hopefully they'll see in time that it's not as all-encompassingly important as they think," which... didn't happen.
For instance, they upheld the idea of "healthy multiplicity" mostly by kicking out anybody who didn't look "healthy" enough. While Pavilion members "can come from anywhere," (2003, April 23) Lancers refused to take plurals who didn't maintain a certain standard of functionality and normalcy.
The "functionality" thing often made us feel like we didn't deserve to be there, and we often felt it was the reason for why we weren't allowed to do more and why our ideas weren't taken more seriously. We were in our first year of university at the time, without adequate disability accomodations, and were struggling to keep up with our courses. We were also still running on "well, we're autistic, but we're not THAT autistic, we're VERY high-functioning, we can be completely normal with a little bit of effort." And no, actually, our sensory dysfunction was very disabling for us at the time, but we had nothing to compare it against, so we had no idea how far from "normal" it was. We were starting to realize that we were lying to ourselves about the "we can be completely normal with a little work" thing, but we didn't want to admit it. So in the middle of that, the Blackbirds and Hondas were presenting themselves as paradigms of Successful Plurals, and they did have excellent grades and jobs and lived independently and everything we had never been able to hold onto for more than a short time, at that point.
So.... yeah, it hit us, years later, after actually getting to know other disabled people, how ableist the vague criteria for "functionality" and "working together in daily life" were. I remember it being handwaved a few times with "It means you won't be irresponsible and say 'but my alters did it, not me'", but at other times, they were really pushing "we want to show people that we can have degrees and jobs and cars and apartments just like anyone." And, like, for one... those are very culture-bound measures of "success," and for another, we never got the impression that most of the people on groups like alt.support.dissociation DIDN'T have degrees, cars, and jobs. The stereotypical MPD/DID patient in a lot of places, at the time, was still considered to be someone who had gone through all the "standard" rites of adulthood and then began to melt down in their 30s or 40s.
Probably the biggest reason for the lack of concrete action, during the active period, was the massive organizational gridlock that mainly seemed to exist because of the Blackbirds' obsession with hierarchal order. I mean, there were five systems really involved with it, five bodies, so not a lot of work reasonably COULD be assigned. But Lucas really seemed to like "delegating work" and giving "assignments" after the weekly meetings. We would have meetings, then he or Gina would come up with a weekly essay topic and say we needed to write an essay on that for next week, and then rag on us for "not doing your work" if we said we didn't feel this was as important as other things we could be doing. I mean, ffs, this isn't school! Why are you giving "assignments" to the people who have ALREADY signed on board with your project and agree with your goals? Every time we tried to propose something we thought would be more useful as activism, they would shoot it down with rationales like "We can't do that until we're more organized and can prove to anyone who doubts us that we're all functional and capable of holding our own in day-to-day life."
Though Amorpha says their roster was padded by sock puppets (2017, September 22).
Yeah, there were two of them-- "Jessamy," the Blackbirds' median system, and another median journal I can't remember the name of, run by Astraea. I don't mean these were subsystems of their groups listing themselves separately. I mean that, as far as I know, they were people who didn't actually exist. They were characters that the Blackbirds and Astraea were playing out on LJ to "show singlets coming to understand that they were medians," to promote the concept and the use of the word. In other words, more roleplaying. And as far as we know, it didn't really influence anyone that much.
Also, in practice, the Lancers side was the only group who ever actually did much of anything. A lot of people were signed up for Pavilion, but almost none of them participated in any of the proposed projects. It really seemed like the Blackbirds and Hondas wanted as small and closed a group as possible because it was easier for them to micromanage every aspect of people's public presentations and actions that way. There were maybe 3 or 4 essays by people outside of that closed group.
Ironically, one of them, The Concept of Normality Considered Harmful, is the one we relate to the most nowadays. Jinkies left Lancers near the beginning because they kept questioning the fires concept and the Blackbirds refused to take this as anything other than an attack, but... at least they left that essay behind, which everyone SHOULD have listened to at the time, but no one did. They had greener fields to move onto, I guess, places where they could do activism and not worry because their ideas didn't mesh with one person's or system's theory of everything. (And, 17 years later, we've absolutely seen the dynamics they talked about in the gay and trans communities, and some of us have personally experienced the "you purposely make yourself look like a freak to get attention" stigma.)
More on this later. There's a lot I want to give background detail about here.
no subject
And the thing is, we were really enthusiastic and fired up to work on it, at first! It was just that-- again, being totally honest here-- it got hijacked early on by the Blackbirds' obsessions with categories and ranks, and suddenly we were told that Lucas of the Blackbirds was in charge of the project and no one was to question this, when we had envisioned it as more of an egalitarian thing. They didn't seem to know HOW to run anything except as a top-down chain of command. Then we were being told that the first and most important goal for us was to propose a "new model" to replace the DID model, and that was what "fires" was supposed to be. Somehow. We felt even at the time that this couldn't possibly get us anywhere, but the Blackbirds would get angry at anyone who questioned it-- slightly angry to their face, but they would rage at and insult them behind their backs. We saw how they talked in private about the people who questioned the "fires model," and at the time, we were afraid of being ripped apart behind the scenes the same way. (We would be, eventually, but we didn't find out about it until two years after it happened.) So we were like "okay, fine, let them have their fires, hopefully they'll see in time that it's not as all-encompassingly important as they think," which... didn't happen.
For instance, they upheld the idea of "healthy multiplicity" mostly by kicking out anybody who didn't look "healthy" enough.
While Pavilion members "can come from anywhere," (2003, April 23) Lancers refused to take plurals who didn't maintain a certain standard of functionality and normalcy.
The "functionality" thing often made us feel like we didn't deserve to be there, and we often felt it was the reason for why we weren't allowed to do more and why our ideas weren't taken more seriously. We were in our first year of university at the time, without adequate disability accomodations, and were struggling to keep up with our courses. We were also still running on "well, we're autistic, but we're not THAT autistic, we're VERY high-functioning, we can be completely normal with a little bit of effort." And no, actually, our sensory dysfunction was very disabling for us at the time, but we had nothing to compare it against, so we had no idea how far from "normal" it was. We were starting to realize that we were lying to ourselves about the "we can be completely normal with a little work" thing, but we didn't want to admit it. So in the middle of that, the Blackbirds and Hondas were presenting themselves as paradigms of Successful Plurals, and they did have excellent grades and jobs and lived independently and everything we had never been able to hold onto for more than a short time, at that point.
So.... yeah, it hit us, years later, after actually getting to know other disabled people, how ableist the vague criteria for "functionality" and "working together in daily life" were. I remember it being handwaved a few times with "It means you won't be irresponsible and say 'but my alters did it, not me'", but at other times, they were really pushing "we want to show people that we can have degrees and jobs and cars and apartments just like anyone." And, like, for one... those are very culture-bound measures of "success," and for another, we never got the impression that most of the people on groups like alt.support.dissociation DIDN'T have degrees, cars, and jobs. The stereotypical MPD/DID patient in a lot of places, at the time, was still considered to be someone who had gone through all the "standard" rites of adulthood and then began to melt down in their 30s or 40s.
Probably the biggest reason for the lack of concrete action, during the active period, was the massive organizational gridlock that mainly seemed to exist because of the Blackbirds' obsession with hierarchal order. I mean, there were five systems really involved with it, five bodies, so not a lot of work reasonably COULD be assigned. But Lucas really seemed to like "delegating work" and giving "assignments" after the weekly meetings. We would have meetings, then he or Gina would come up with a weekly essay topic and say we needed to write an essay on that for next week, and then rag on us for "not doing your work" if we said we didn't feel this was as important as other things we could be doing. I mean, ffs, this isn't school! Why are you giving "assignments" to the people who have ALREADY signed on board with your project and agree with your goals? Every time we tried to propose something we thought would be more useful as activism, they would shoot it down with rationales like "We can't do that until we're more organized and can prove to anyone who doubts us that we're all functional and capable of holding our own in day-to-day life."
Though Amorpha says their roster was padded by sock puppets (2017, September 22).
Yeah, there were two of them-- "Jessamy," the Blackbirds' median system, and another median journal I can't remember the name of, run by Astraea. I don't mean these were subsystems of their groups listing themselves separately. I mean that, as far as I know, they were people who didn't actually exist. They were characters that the Blackbirds and Astraea were playing out on LJ to "show singlets coming to understand that they were medians," to promote the concept and the use of the word. In other words, more roleplaying. And as far as we know, it didn't really influence anyone that much.
Also, in practice, the Lancers side was the only group who ever actually did much of anything. A lot of people were signed up for Pavilion, but almost none of them participated in any of the proposed projects. It really seemed like the Blackbirds and Hondas wanted as small and closed a group as possible because it was easier for them to micromanage every aspect of people's public presentations and actions that way. There were maybe 3 or 4 essays by people outside of that closed group.
Ironically, one of them, The Concept of Normality Considered Harmful, is the one we relate to the most nowadays. Jinkies left Lancers near the beginning because they kept questioning the fires concept and the Blackbirds refused to take this as anything other than an attack, but... at least they left that essay behind, which everyone SHOULD have listened to at the time, but no one did. They had greener fields to move onto, I guess, places where they could do activism and not worry because their ideas didn't mesh with one person's or system's theory of everything. (And, 17 years later, we've absolutely seen the dynamics they talked about in the gay and trans communities, and some of us have personally experienced the "you purposely make yourself look like a freak to get attention" stigma.)
More on this later. There's a lot I want to give background detail about here.
-Riel