healthymultiplicity.com update
Feb. 25th, 2023 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeWe have massively updated our section of healthymultiplicity.com's Free Read page by adding the following short comics and zines (most of which were also posted here or on Deviantart at some point):
We've also reuploaded our very old comics Questions from 2010 and This is Mac, This is Rogan from 2008. At this point, they're so old they now may prove useful for historical citations of certain subcultures and language use at the time.
Rogan: I have waffled a lot over what I'm okay with being public on the Internet. Things've changed a lot since 2008, when we were a rando who nobody had heard of. Now we're mildly well-known in some circles. We've watched "plurality" go from shiny new expansive umbrella term to having the exact same problems people had with the term "multiplicity," which plurality replaced. The thrice-damned endogenic/traumagenic slapfight didn't exist, and now people ask me about my trauma history at comic cons, to my disgust.
As I've aged, I've had an increasingly difficult time staying on what Julia Serano calls the activist language merry-go-round. Too many labels, too little energy, tired of people who grab my lexical hand and smack me with it, all the while saying, "quit oppressing yourself." At the same time, the consequences of failing the performance seemed to get ever higher.
I found myself trying more and more to squeeze myself into an acceptable box--I originally removed Questions and This is Mac, This is Rogan because they straightforwardly expressed that yes, I bang my husband, and people said it made them feel weird, and I went, "oh no, I have to be a good multi." But there is no such thing as a good, acceptable multi, because where I am, multis aren't accepted. No amount of word weaseling, self-policing, or attempts at respectability can escape that. A whole lot of plural slapfights, in my opinion, boil down to people refusing to give up that illusion. They think if they can just throw out the lolcows, society will embrace them, not realizing that to be plural, all by itself, is to be a lolcow. Doesn't matter what paperwork you have, how good you look, how big you smile, you are intrinsically laughable to mainstream American society. Throw out all the lolcows, my friend, and you will get thrown out too. Similarly, throw out all the bad dysfunctional plurals, and you too will get thrown out, because to be plural in American society is to be considered intrinsically crazy and disabled. (Also, you'll still be stuck with assholes, because being "functional" and "respectable" has nothing to do with whether you're a decent person or not.)
The more I tried to play this game, the worse I felt. As I stripped away more and more public mentions of the things that brought me fulfillment--my husband, my boyfriend, my sexuality, my kink, my inner family, my "weird shit," my inner mythos, my fiction, even media I enjoyed--all that was left to discuss in public was my trauma and plural citations. Then I got sick of discussing my trauma because there's really only so long you can suffer before even pain becomes boring, and all that was left was citations.
Today, I was listening to a song by Romanovsky & Phillips called "Straightening Up The House." The song's lyrics depict a gay couple who, after a phone call announcing a surprise visit from one of their mothers, the son in question goes on a tear of trying to sanitize all the obvious queerness from their house... including his relationship with his lover. As the song goes:
If other plurals online look to me as some sort of role model, what do I teach them when I try to contort myself into an impossible respectable box? Especially since, ain't no winning this one. My marriage makes people uncomfortable, never mind the nonmonogamous queer kinky shit. And even at my worst, I refused to pretend I wasn't married.
Making Multi Orgasmic was the most fun I had in 2022, personally. Reading various forms of historical, cross-cultural, and spiritual plurality (and I AM using plural here as an umbrella term for any sort of body/mind/soulsharing) watered my soulflowers like nothing doing, because it proved that being plural is so much more than the constipated cliquery people try to make it out to be. It proved that there really are no rules! People just make them the fuck up!
For years, I've wondered what the fuck I'm doing still doing plural shit. Most of the people I know doing this kind of work have long since buggered off to elsewhere: queer activism, disability liberation, otherkin work. I felt like a crazy mountain man living in a shack in a junkyard who refuses to leave on principle: "I live here! It's on fire and full of rats, but I LIVE HERE!"
And now I think I know what I'm still doing here. Because yes, citations matter, and more than that, the weird imperfect shit matters. The bullshit religion brains make out of cultural detritus, and the queer kinky relationships that aren't hidden under a basket, and people existing imperfectly in public. I live here, goddammit, and I lived here before the wankers came to play No True Scotsman, and I don't want to abdicate and leave the playing field to them. Multi Orgasmic sold by far more than anything else we made last year, and I think it's because even though a bunch of multis are secretly terrified that banging their headmates makes them shameful lulcows, they also really want to talk about it and share tricks. Similarly, Mori was worried nobody would be interested in Madgic, but a lot of people have talked about it in really cool ways! And you know something people have brought up in both cases? This feeling that they COULDN'T discuss such topics, because "proper" multis or whatever didn't do that!
So clearly we need to prove that multis do indeed do that.
What I'm saying is, we're gonna be making some imperfect weird shit this year, and I hope you like it.
- Too F'ed to Live Too Punk to Die
- Flex
- It Runs in the Family
- How Are You?
- Agony 2022
- Cloudhair
- Bubble Monster
We've also reuploaded our very old comics Questions from 2010 and This is Mac, This is Rogan from 2008. At this point, they're so old they now may prove useful for historical citations of certain subcultures and language use at the time.
Rogan: I have waffled a lot over what I'm okay with being public on the Internet. Things've changed a lot since 2008, when we were a rando who nobody had heard of. Now we're mildly well-known in some circles. We've watched "plurality" go from shiny new expansive umbrella term to having the exact same problems people had with the term "multiplicity," which plurality replaced. The thrice-damned endogenic/traumagenic slapfight didn't exist, and now people ask me about my trauma history at comic cons, to my disgust.
As I've aged, I've had an increasingly difficult time staying on what Julia Serano calls the activist language merry-go-round. Too many labels, too little energy, tired of people who grab my lexical hand and smack me with it, all the while saying, "quit oppressing yourself." At the same time, the consequences of failing the performance seemed to get ever higher.
I found myself trying more and more to squeeze myself into an acceptable box--I originally removed Questions and This is Mac, This is Rogan because they straightforwardly expressed that yes, I bang my husband, and people said it made them feel weird, and I went, "oh no, I have to be a good multi." But there is no such thing as a good, acceptable multi, because where I am, multis aren't accepted. No amount of word weaseling, self-policing, or attempts at respectability can escape that. A whole lot of plural slapfights, in my opinion, boil down to people refusing to give up that illusion. They think if they can just throw out the lolcows, society will embrace them, not realizing that to be plural, all by itself, is to be a lolcow. Doesn't matter what paperwork you have, how good you look, how big you smile, you are intrinsically laughable to mainstream American society. Throw out all the lolcows, my friend, and you will get thrown out too. Similarly, throw out all the bad dysfunctional plurals, and you too will get thrown out, because to be plural in American society is to be considered intrinsically crazy and disabled. (Also, you'll still be stuck with assholes, because being "functional" and "respectable" has nothing to do with whether you're a decent person or not.)
The more I tried to play this game, the worse I felt. As I stripped away more and more public mentions of the things that brought me fulfillment--my husband, my boyfriend, my sexuality, my kink, my inner family, my "weird shit," my inner mythos, my fiction, even media I enjoyed--all that was left to discuss in public was my trauma and plural citations. Then I got sick of discussing my trauma because there's really only so long you can suffer before even pain becomes boring, and all that was left was citations.
Today, I was listening to a song by Romanovsky & Phillips called "Straightening Up The House." The song's lyrics depict a gay couple who, after a phone call announcing a surprise visit from one of their mothers, the son in question goes on a tear of trying to sanitize all the obvious queerness from their house... including his relationship with his lover. As the song goes:
I never should've promised I'd continue with this lie
But Dad was so certain if she found out she would die
But if it's killing anyone, I think it's killing me
Because it hurts me deep inside to hide my true identity
And asking you to help me makes me feel like such a louse
Straightening up the house...
If other plurals online look to me as some sort of role model, what do I teach them when I try to contort myself into an impossible respectable box? Especially since, ain't no winning this one. My marriage makes people uncomfortable, never mind the nonmonogamous queer kinky shit. And even at my worst, I refused to pretend I wasn't married.
Making Multi Orgasmic was the most fun I had in 2022, personally. Reading various forms of historical, cross-cultural, and spiritual plurality (and I AM using plural here as an umbrella term for any sort of body/mind/soulsharing) watered my soulflowers like nothing doing, because it proved that being plural is so much more than the constipated cliquery people try to make it out to be. It proved that there really are no rules! People just make them the fuck up!
For years, I've wondered what the fuck I'm doing still doing plural shit. Most of the people I know doing this kind of work have long since buggered off to elsewhere: queer activism, disability liberation, otherkin work. I felt like a crazy mountain man living in a shack in a junkyard who refuses to leave on principle: "I live here! It's on fire and full of rats, but I LIVE HERE!"
And now I think I know what I'm still doing here. Because yes, citations matter, and more than that, the weird imperfect shit matters. The bullshit religion brains make out of cultural detritus, and the queer kinky relationships that aren't hidden under a basket, and people existing imperfectly in public. I live here, goddammit, and I lived here before the wankers came to play No True Scotsman, and I don't want to abdicate and leave the playing field to them. Multi Orgasmic sold by far more than anything else we made last year, and I think it's because even though a bunch of multis are secretly terrified that banging their headmates makes them shameful lulcows, they also really want to talk about it and share tricks. Similarly, Mori was worried nobody would be interested in Madgic, but a lot of people have talked about it in really cool ways! And you know something people have brought up in both cases? This feeling that they COULDN'T discuss such topics, because "proper" multis or whatever didn't do that!
So clearly we need to prove that multis do indeed do that.
What I'm saying is, we're gonna be making some imperfect weird shit this year, and I hope you like it.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 01:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 03:09 am (UTC)Make that weird stuff! We can't wait! -Kahlo (he/him)
no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 10:49 pm (UTC)Singlets usually haven't thought hard enough about it to come up with a proper putdown! They truly seem to think I haven't heard a "marrying Rosie Palms" joke before!
no subject
Date: 2023-02-27 06:08 am (UTC)--hikaru
no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 03:54 am (UTC)--Hikaru
no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 09:09 pm (UTC)That's what I get for thinking it all worked. Updating the post to correct my own typos. The correct links are: https://healthymultiplicity.com/loonybrain/Comics/SoL/Cloudhair01.html and https://healthymultiplicity.com/loonybrain/Comics/SoL/BubbleMonster01.html
no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 09:13 pm (UTC)--Hikaru
no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 08:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 09:44 am (UTC)And by existing and persevering and thriving together (for whatever level of thriving this hellscape permits), you're not just helping other multis, you're also helping other people who are weird and imperfect and unacceptable in other completely unrelated ways, yet whose weirdness and imperfections and unacceptability are often punished in very, very similar ways.
It takes tremendous courage to be yourself (nevermind be yourself publicly!) in this world. I am in awe and thankful and grateful that you all are. <3
no subject
Date: 2023-02-27 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-27 08:55 pm (UTC)Well put - I second this enthusiastically. I'm all too aware that my/our plural situation would be viewed as laughable and deserving of contempt by most singlets and probably most plurals, too, or at least a lot of them. Though I'm not in the least bit ashamed of my life, I'm too sensitive about it and not brave enough to discuss it much outside a trusted circle, and your willingness to be open to a wider audience is amazing and inspirational.
~Elle
no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 01:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-27 02:37 pm (UTC)SUCK EXUBERANTLY
MAKE MORE STUFF
no subject
Date: 2023-02-26 11:19 pm (UTC)Talking about it is hard, its scary because so many people are poised to ridicule and harass anyone who is weird in public, but its necessary to create a space where its ok to talk about those kind of things- common even.
We are considering posting our own essays on our relationship anarchy with each other, but we have such a backlog of projects to finish right now haha so that will be awhile.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-27 02:44 pm (UTC)And for all my anxiety about harassment... I've already been there, done that, and survived it, however imperfectly. So if need be, I will do it again.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-27 09:04 pm (UTC)Anyway, long and rambly and perhaps only semi-coherent way of saying, yeah, marginalized communities should not have to get as close to the mainstream as possible to be accepted. It's damaging and it's not even going to work.
~Elle
no subject
Date: 2023-03-01 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-03 12:54 pm (UTC)We are so looking forward to that! Thank you for carving out this space.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-03 06:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-03 11:10 pm (UTC)Now I remember why I update hm.com so rarely; I always screw it up. Fixed the links. Thank you for letting me know, it should work now!
no subject
Date: 2023-03-04 09:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-04 09:33 pm (UTC)God this is why we could never be a programmer or web developer, we are truly bad at this.
There. Now it should really truly work; I tested it and everything.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-04 11:38 pm (UTC)