Scribbles and Bits

This was the winner of the fan poll for this month! Images behind cut.

( Sneak just wants to pet zer headmate. Why won't Rawlin let zer??? )

Mori: that weeklong headache, the worst part of it was, it tended to hit (or get worse) at night. Nothing worked, not ibuprofen, not ice packs, nothing. It was the PITS.

( My girlfriend took pity on me and helped fix it with touch! )

Mori: Me and sinistmer are having a book club, reading Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, by Lillian Faderman. One of the things I wanted to keep an eye out for was whether any spirit marriage came up, and wouldn'tcha know it, sinistmer texted me letting me know INDEED THERE IS!

( LADIES! )

Mori: man, what a crummy brain day.

Brain: x_x what will you do to nourish me?

Mori: organize magazines at the sci-fi library, of course! What could be more soul-nurturing than that?!

Brain: you’re right, absolutely nothing!

Mori: man, I can’t help but notice how racy these chainmail bikini babes are and how they’re all over the place, even in nonporny things, while the actual porn we buy these days is way, way tamer in their cover art. These old geeks get to have jiggling nipples everywhere while Rogan can barely buy gay porn comics with a shirtless guy on the cover.

Brain: Hmm... could we make a soul-nurturing activity out of this??? @_@

Mori: I want to go through our entire bookshelf for all the nudity and horny covers and then arrange them into real-life bar graphs charting them by year, content, and couplings.

Brain: HUZZAH! That’s the way to use me! I feel better already!

(And then we made photo graphs and photographs.)

Mori: we have a rule here: when something terrible happens, we must resist the urge to go numb and paralyzed, and instead reinforce our bonds to others and do SOMETHING to build morale and fight back, if only in our own minds.

So when that Big Buttfucking Bill passed and I found out early because Social Security sent me an ass-licking email lying about how Trump was personally benefitting ME, I was pissed, and I ranted to my roommates: “I AM GOING TO EAT THIS MAN IN EFFIGY.”

And they said, “sounds good, can we join?”

( WHY YES YOU CAN. )

Mori: as a reward for getting through some crummy medical shit, I trawled a used book store for lady speculative fiction! (We’ve realized that it’s a lot easier to let ourself buy it with the glee that even if WE don’t enjoy it, the sci-fi library insures OTHERS will! And while the sci-fi library is well-stocked with “traditional” sci-fi publishers, it is really lacking in speculative work for queer and women’s presses and such.) I have taken on three of the four now...

1. “Sultana’s Dream”, by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. 1905 Bengali Muslim biting satire about a carless future society where women rule and all the men have to stay indoors and never be perceived by humans outside their servants and immediate family. The edition I had shared the short story and then all the historical, cultural, and personal context as to WHY the story got made, who the author was (a feminist who fought hard for women’s rights in now-Bangladesh) and why it matters. Very historically interesting and edifying! (Also, for real, I do love the fantasy of Garden Future where all roads look like gorgeous garden paths because cars don’t exist and everyone moves by walking or floating helicopter/zeppelin thingies! In 1905, a carless future was imaginable! When the narrator regrets treading on such pretty flowers, another character tells her not to worry, these are special street flowers that can’t be harmed by feet!)


2. Return to Isis, by Jean Stewart. 1992 lesbian separatist post-apocalyptic matriarchy story. Didn’t finish; everyone was just kind of unpleasant to each other, and if you’re going to write evil rapist men, I damn well require you understand how misogynist rape works. (I am probably the equivalent of the lawyer going “ugh” whenever they have to watch a courtroom drama, when it comes to the study of human sexual douchebaggery, though.) First book of five book series; maybe she got better as she went on, but I have other books to read!


3. Madame Aurora, by Sarah Aldridge. 1983 historical novel about two girlfriends in their seventies at the turn of the last century who, struggling with money and disability, decides to set one of them up as a spiritual advisor, and the events that follow. I really enjoyed this one! Old ladies who still bang! Sordid history! Is it psychic or is she just really intuitive? What’s the deal with that scabby old Colonel? Aldridge does a good job, I think, of writing even unpleasant characters with an understanding of why they are how they are. Refreshing!
   

All that remains now is Katherine V. Forrest’s Daughters of a Coral Dawn. Forrest is apparently a better mystery writer than sci-fi (and I read one and liked it!) but I am willing to give it a shot and declare it library-worthy if I can’t stand it.

A successful booking!

Original posts by Phosphor of Hungry Ghosts here, used with permission: https://nightfeather.cafe/notice/AuOng8NknA7IRvgusi

Rawlin: This morning, I woke up to rain against the window pane, my symbiont in my arms, and her claim in oil stained on my skin. We were warm and safe, dry and content, and I was happy.

I never thought I could be happy like this, after everything we've been through, after everything I've done. I had resigned myself to a life of loneliness and lovelessness, given up hope for anything better... and now, without my having done anything to earn it, here I am, with everything I have ever wanted, fallen into my lap. Truly, life is beyond prediction.

We are no longer in danger, no longer being hurt. Yes, we are dealing with the scars and shrapnel of the past... but we are dealing with them, and I am coming to believe butch when she says that nothing is ever going to come between us ever again. Each time a memory she had lost came up, I was so sure that she would realize what she had gotten into and leave, and every time, it instead becomes something we can talk about, grieve, and move through. It becomes speakable, bearable, healable. As impossible as it sounds, we become closer through it, and the more times this happens, the less frightened I become of the next one.

We cannot pretend that there is an Eden to return to, a time before scarring, for we were forged in the molten heart of violence, and if it hadn't existed, then neither would we. We can also never become the people we were before the god devoured me. There is no undoing that history. But... as impossible as it seems to believe, I'm starting to think that maybe this here-and-now is better, for all the weight and scars of the past, for all the uncertainties and tyrannies of the future. Because there is rain against the windowpane, and a butch who loves me, and I am joyous.

Mori: I’m reading a lesbian history book, Faderman’s Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, and this bit on utopian lesbian-feminism gone wrong in the 1970s feels so relatable fifty years later:

The uncompromising stance and rhetoric of rage in the movement was bound to bring about bitter feelings and factionalism. Perhaps rage was an inextricable part of lesbian-feminism, because once these women analyzed the female’s role in society they realized they had much to be furious about. But their anger sometimes manifested as a horizontal hostility in which members of the community were constantly attacking other members, either because they had strayed from some politically correct behavior or because the diversity within the growing groups was not sufficiently recognized to appease everyone. As the decade progressed, the core groups tended to get smaller as factions multiplied and splintered and became more and more insistent in their demand to be heard or in their conviction that they alone were the true lesbian-feminists. Attacks were often brutal, combining what one victim described as “the language of the revolution [with] the procedure of the inquisition.”

Like the Left, lesbian-feminists believed that the revolution meant change—women changing themselves as well as changing the world. Criticism and self-criticism were thus crucial in order to perfect themselves in their quest for utopia. It was to the credit of lesbian-feminists that they wanted to provide a platform for criticism in the name of improvement, but criticism often became vituperation. This was particularly true when the community opened itself to criticism from minority voices. [...]

Women felt freer to complain within the lesbian-feminist community than in the more oppressive heterosexual world, where their mistreatment was far worse. Not only did community doctrine mandate listening to criticism by all members, but also they felt the community was or should be family and they were claiming their rightful place in the family. But the word “oppression” was then tossed around so loosely as an accusation that it came to be devalued. Criticism too often became crippling. It seemed that every move one made was sure to be found politically incorrect by a dozen others. (Pg. 235-236)

Mori: Was digging around and refound the zines of August Eckhardt, AKA Rocko Bulldagger, Bleached Blonde Bimbos #1 and #2 in the Queer Zine Archive Project (sadly not screenreadable). They're still winners, but this quote in particular, from June 2005, especially jumped out at me:

"What is with this more-radical-than-thou attitude? If no one has a hope of understanding you, who are you even talking to? [...] Between being tragically misunderstood, perpetually on the cutting edge and more radical [than] everyone else, when do you have time to connect with others? [...] So many strict rules about how to be what you are, what to call it, and how you can expect others to relate to it. All this rigidity seems to be isolating, resulting in a cycle of pain, loneliness and bitterness, trying to find people exactly like yourself because they will understand but no one else will, consequently being disappointed, becoming more rigid, more hurt, stricter and more precise about your language and identity... and on and on..." (Bleached Blonde Bimbos II, "The End of Genderqueer," pg. 10)

Rocko was talking specifically about the genderqueer identity, and how it morphed and changed out from under them over the course of 1999-2005, but I feel like a lot still holds true about other things, twenty years later. Also both zines are just still really good! Might have to print out a copy of #1 for my shelf. Also they got me to check out Amber Hollibaugh from the library, which is cool!

Guess I'm gonna be adding them to the Self-Hate and Social Justice Bibliography! (Maybe I'll just make the "edward cullen haunts my soul" tag about noble liberatory causes being twisted into poison and self/other-hate, not like we use it for its original purpose much anymore...)