Okay, I normally avoid jumping on the feminist blogosphere drama bandwagon, but seriously. It’s so “nice” to know that no matter what kind of work you’ve done, how intelligent you are, or how well-respected, if you are female, you are not allowed to be taken seriously or treated with any amount of dignity:

You know, I was psyched to be invited to this lunch and was feeling pretty honored. But then things like this remind me that no matter what I do or accomplish, because I’m a young woman all I’m good for is fodder for tacky intern jokes and comments that I don’t “represent feminist values” because of the way I posed in a picture.

Pretty much. Unfortunately, it’s worse than that. If you’re an attractive young feminist you can’t be taken seriously because you’re attractive and young. But if you aren’t attractive you also can’t be taken seriously since you’re an ugly man-hating feminist, and you must only care about women’s rights because you’re not pretty and assumed to be insecure. If you’re not pretty enough you’ll get flack for not being good eyecandy no matter how thought-provoking your ideas, and if you’re too pretty you must not have anything valuable to say since we all know intelligent women are never attractive. And so on and so on.

I think someone must really have to hate women in order to think like that. I do.

PS: Since it’s my area of concern at the moment, I think I’ll post some stuff about feminism and fiction writing soon, okay?

Yeah, I’m still alive. Bitch | Lab left me a comment yesterday and I thought maybe I ought to update and let you all know how I’m doing. What’s amazing to me is I still get new comments on old posts…well, constantly. Several a week. Cool.

First off, I adopted a new ferret from the Denver Dumb Friends League because my remaining one was so lonely after Susie died, to the point of getting sick from stress. They get along well and Heidi seems to be doing much better. So. That’s Kuma. Yeah, he’s pretty cute. He plays fetch and climbs up tall things which he then cannot get down from (also, I think he’s afraid of heights, which begs the question…WHY?), and also he is extremely snuggly. So. Yay.

I’ve been writing a lot, honestly. I finished a magical realism/fantasy/weird novella (although it still needs revision. a lot of it.), and sent off a short science fiction story to a major magazine in hopes of publication the other day. I helped teach a writing workshop for young authors. I’ve been spending a lot of my free time here, posting thought-provoking discussions of body hair on fantasy worlds. So, you know, the same topics as here, really. I’m co-co-editing (two co-editors, so…yeah, nevermind) a book of fantasy and science fiction writing by young authors, which is pretty much taking up most of my time, but I’ll be done soon. I wrote some articles on SF writing/worldbuilding and basic proofreading for Creative Writing Solutions, which might get posted eventually someday if Tony ever gets around to it. *cough* Considering that the RPG module I created to add on to their creative writing cirriculum still isn’t available after over a year, that might be awhile.
If you want to keep up with what I’ve been doing, there’s always the LiveJournal. (If I know you and you want to read my fiction rough drafts there, let me know and I’ll friend you. Feminist SF!) I’ve posted some of my poetry and such at Perpetually Untitled, having come to the conclusion once again (as I do sometimes before deciding I want to try submitting to literary journals again) that my poetry is unpublishable in the current writing market, which is a shame because I think some of it is fairly decent. I blame editors’ bad taste and the fact that most published writing has been declining in intelligence for awhile now for no damn good reason. SF is possibly, but maybe not, an exception. Anyway, I’m gonna be posting my writing articles there, too.

Oh, and, hey, if y’all want to help me out, mind enlightening me as to what you think would make a good, feminist fantasy novel aimed at teen girls? Are there certain things you notice in YA fiction that you like/hate? Something you’d like to see in more YA writing? Is there some random object/character/plot point you’d like me to somehow incoporate into my plot, just for fun?

I want to live in a world where abortion is just another medical procedure, about as morally-charged as treating a cold or getting your wisdom teeth removed.

Does a tumor have a right to life? It’s the same thing. It’s a clump of cells that siphons off your body’s resources so it can grow. Sure, sometimes a fetus is a wanted parasite, welcomed, even, and I have no issue with that. That’s great. But even when it’s wanted it can take a toll. The body sees a baby as a foreign invader and does everything it can to try to kill it off. Plenty of fertilized eggs don’t even implant. (If we take conception as the moment life begins it means lots of sexually active women have a miscarriage without even realizing it.) A tumor is alive. It has human DNA, even.

The fact is, especially early-on, it’s something that happens all the time, purposely or no. And the baby’s not really a living, thinking thing in anything other than the strictest sense — a glob of cells the size of a pencil eraser. Can you tell me removing an unwanted embryo at that stage is comparable to murder? (As an aside, I think that comparison really minimizes the gravity of murder. A person who has lived years of life is different from something that’s existed for a few weeks or months and hasn’t even experienced anything yet.) It’s not a big deal at this stage. I really believe this.

This is not a “callous” attitude and it’s not disrespect for life. I have an immense respect for all life, which is why I’m anti-war and against the death penalty and try to buy cruelty-free meat and won’t kill a freaking mosquito if I don’t have to, for god’s sake. I have respect for the life of the woman carrying the fetus. I have respect for that woman’s autonomy. And that is why I say it’s not a big deal. People kill bugs all the time and I wish they wouldn’t and it’s something I don’t do, but it’s not a big deal so I don’t try to pass legislation telling them that killing living things just because they’re “pests” is wrong and they can’t do it. Because if you don’t swat that fly, a spider will eat it or something anyway. Everything dies. Small lives are not worth more than large lives, and the converse, respectively. All life is worth immeasurably much. But it’s also not the end of the world when something dies, either, though it can feel like it.

Death is not the worst thing that can happen. Our fear of our own mortality is what makes us feel it is. If we accept that all things die, that we will die, one more death upon the billions this world is built on doesn’t seem so awful. Torture concerns me. Disregard for human rights concerns me. Destruction of the environment concerns me. Injustice concerns me. Rape concerns me. Abuse concerns me. Oppression concerns me. Genocide and murder concern me.

Against those things? A woman deciding she doesn’t want to dedicate the rest of her life to caring for another creature doesn’t really phase me. Some people can’t or don’t want to take care of pets. I respect that decision and encourage them not to purchase one. Having a child is a much heavier and deeper responsibility with lasting repercussions that impact generations of lives. I strongly encourage some people not to have kids, ever.

Mind you, I know it’s a slippery slope, and that’s why I’m not placing conditions. I don’t think one can be pro-choice with conditions or caveats. As long as the thing is still in a woman’s body, I support her right to do whatever the hell she wants with it. I don’t care how far along she is. There are circumstances that sometimes prevent a woman from getting an abortion until it’s too late, until after the point when it’s no longer legal, when their intention was never to carry it to term. I think these women should not be punished due to factors which prevented them from aborting sooner. Some people will cut off at a certain date, when they think abortion is no longer permissible, and I think this is usually arbitrary. It’s often based on exactly when that particular person thinks an embryo is human enough for its death to qualify as murder.

I think an embryo’s always human. (Now, when it becomes a person, that’s debatable.) To deny that would be silly. And abortion is always killing a living thing, but I don’t see why that’s a huge issue given the undeniable realities of physical existence — living things always die. (We cannot live without killing. Even vegans eat plants. Even if we could invent a machine to synthesize food that’s never been alive, chances are it would have an environmental impact. There’s no way around this. As far as I’m concerned, there doesn’t need to be. Curing any disease is killing something, usually millions of microscopic somethings.) Life isn’t perfect and it’s not lasting and it’s really not as huge a deal as people make it out to be. Life at all costs is a short-sighted philosophy that ignores, I think, the impact of what’s really important: quality of life.

Living life by a rigid standard of ethics, denying relativism and pragmatism entirely…it may survive some philosopher’s purely logical standard of what is absolutely morally acceptable, but what is right is not always what is Absolutely Good. Nothing can ever be perfect. Utilitarianism isn’t any better a standard than this, either, and neither is hedonism, so I’m not endorsing either. I just think what is right depends. It depends on the situation, the circumstance, the people.

All we can do is what causes the least suffering, if in fact such a thing is feasible or practical. If not, we’re not perfect and we’re not all-powerful. We just are. We’re animals with an inflated sense of self-worth and our impact on the universe around us. If a God existed, would ze care, really, what we do and do not do? Does ze care about morals and ethics, if ze is really all-knowing, unconditionally loving, all-powerful? I doubt it. Everything can be forgiven. Better yet, mistakes in an absolute moral sense don’t need to be forgiven. There’s nothing, in a great cosmic sense, wrong with them.

We participate in and condone killing every day and it’s not in the sense of cold-blooded murder, it just is. Why is this any different? There is no reason it should be different that doesn’t buy into the idea that humans are inherently superior to animals, plants, bacteria. And I honestly don’t think we are. This attitude of mine is only a disregard for life if you accept that smaller lives don’t matter. As I don’t…what’s the problem? Where is the moral dilemma?

As for my unconditional support of choice, don’t give me that I-support-abortion-but-not-as-birth-control bullshit. What else is it? It’s a form of birth control. Did you mean to say “in place of contraception”? And if so, why? What about women who can’t take hormonal birth control (my sisters, my mother, me)? What about women who can’t afford it (again, were I in a position to be having penis-in-vagina sex, probably me)? What’s the litmus test here to see if a woman is deserving? If she used multiple forms of birth control perfectly and they all failed? It’s okay then? Is it only okay once? If birth control fails twice in ten years is that okay?

You can’t know another’s circumstances. Don’t judge. It’s not up to you to decide. The choice, in all likelihood, has absolutely nothing to do with you. Keep your nose out of it.

And if it is because a woman just didn’t take precautions…just because she doesn’t want a child, even if she could afford to care for it… So? Why is a woman obligated to become a mother? Why is anybody who does not want a child for any reason obligated to have one? Aren’t there enough people in the world? Do we need more? Why is this an issue, other than as a form of control over women’s bodies, women’s lives?

I want to live in a world where a woman’s decision to have an abortion is nobody’s business. I want to live in a world where anti-choice attitudes are not the accepted norm and are instead a radical fringe philosophy that normal people find horrifying. I want to live in a world where abortion is cheap, easy to access, and available whenever a woman needs one.

That is not the world we live in now, no matter what the anti-choice propaganda says.

I’m not in a good mood, and I’m just musing and venting. I do not want to debate this, and this post is not an invitation to debate. Thank you.

So just an update: a week ago, I had to make the decision to have Susie put to sleep. She was getting really, really sick, and the medicine didn’t seem to be effectively treating her symptoms (and treating her symptoms, trying to keep her blood sugar under control, was the only thing we could do — she was too sick to have the tumor/s removed). This has been really difficult for me and I don’t really feel like working on this site much right now. (Which is not to say I haven’t been working on anything — I’ve been painting a lot.)

I know some people think that the death of a pet isn’t a huge deal, and would find it strange that for me it’s so devastating. I think those people are stupid. But anyway, I think you can all at least somewhat understand where I’m coming from here.

Not only am I still pretty sad about this (doing better than I was), I also have to find a way to earn some money to pay my dad back for vet bills because of all this. (In addition to website costs which I already needed to earn some money for.) I’m not terribly motivated but the motivation I can muster is definitely going towards potentially paying work. It’s not too bad; I’ve gotten a few leads and I think I can get some artwork in a couple of galleries, I think at least some of it will sell, although if I didn’t really need some money, I probably would never pursue the idea of selling art professionally. I might be house-sitting for a little extra cash and I’ve got a huge editing job that should help a little. But that’s my focus for now and all I have energy for.

It’s not that if I really felt inspired I couldn’t find the time for this blog, but…I just really can’t do it right now. I haven’t been able to for weeks now but it’s just been getting worse and worse and circumstances haven’t improved. I can’t keep up with other blogs either, so I’ve got no idea what’s been going down in most of feminist blog-land for the past month. It’s not just burnout — but that’s big part of it.

Anyway, there you have it. Keep me on your RSS feeds or whatever; I know I’ll be back around eventually. I get too pissed off about the world and too worked up over theory for it to be any other way. Keep an eye out: even if I’m not writing here I’ll post information about any other projects I work on.

So, if you don’t know, my ferret who’s been ill for the last month (causing me not to post much for my guest period on Alas–sorry, Amp!) was just diagnosed with insulinoma, which is basically a form of pancreatic cancer that affects insulin production. She’s been put on medication which seems to be helping a lot, though I’m not sure how long she’ll live. Sometimes ferrets can live for years with cancer and be perfectly happy and sometimes it can get really bad or invade other parts of the body and kill them pretty fast. It all depends. For now, she seems to be doing better and seems to be happy. I know it will probably get worse and eventually her condition will probably deteriorate, but for the moment, it’s under control.

Anyway, that’s what’s up and that’s what’s keeping me stressed out and busy right now.

Have a picture:

That’s it, baby. Tell that smiley face who’s boss!

Still dealing with a sick animal who suddenly seems to be getting sicker. Occasionally sick siblings. Avoiding water gun fights (okay, that was the highlight of last week, actually :). Store moving, leaving my job. The best laid plans of mice and men and other various mammals gone awry. Trying to find a vet that’s open on a Sunday. In other words: stressed out, worried, occasionally breaking down.

It’s not really all bad, though. I’m okay, really. I’m alive, I’ll be fine. I just really don’t feel like posting anything lately, even when I have ideas for what to write about. When I do feel like writing it’s my fiction, which is really my top priority anyway. Just dropping a line so you all know I’m still around and I plan to keep posting, I just don’t know when.

I need to upload a bunch of art onto the main site; maybe I’ll just do a post about that for lack of better content. Besides, my pictures are pretty.

On AlterNet: Hating the Hate Mail. It’s all good, so you should just go read it now. But if you want to know what it’s about, an excerpt:

The psychic impact of hate mail is something female writers don’t often talk about in fear of appearing vulnerable in the male world of opinion writing. I believe women can take the heat of opinion journalism as well as any man; the problem is that the heat we take and the reasons why are very different.

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times discussed reactions to female opinion in her column last year. “While a man writing a column taking on the powerful may be seen as authoritative, a woman doing the same thing may be seen as castrating.” She went on to say she called Alan Dundes, a renowned folklorist, to ask about it. “Women are supposed to take it, not dish it out,” Dundes told her.

Any woman who writes or blogs on political (not even necessarily feminist!) issues can tell you all about this. I doubt men are as often targeted with threats of violence just for being men. Hate mail I’ve gotten when presumed to be male has been bad too, but not nearly on the same level as I get when I make my sex clear.

I think this relates to the article on women being disproportionately harassed online. It’s the same attitude, coming from the same place. Just being a woman is enough to make you an appropriate victim (after all, how many female rape victims are presumed to be “asking for it” simply for wearing certain clothes or being friendly, things which are simultaneously promoted as somehow intrinsically”feminine”?), but if you’re a woman and you dare to have an opinion… WELL.

I’ve been told by a couple of people that my last post was attacking strawmen because I engaged the weakest arguments to my point and ignored the better ones.

Well…maybe.

But a decent argument can stand up for itself. Is it really a strawman if people have actually tried to argue the point at length with me, and expected me to take them seriously? Does it bother anyone else that, even though the argument seems weak to you, that someone out there thought it was brilliant and can’t see the glaring problems? That someone (lots of someones!) don’t see why judging someone based on their appearance or resorting to insults rather than discussing the actual matter at hand is…well, irrelevant? Rude? Especially when people who should know better participate in it? (Because there are feminists who attack other women as “sluts” or “bimbos” and don’t see the hypocrisy when they ask not to be judged by that same standard.)

Maybe it’s the weakest argument. I think sometimes attacking weak arguments is a good thing, because obviously someone actually made it and it didn’t occur to them on its own that there were problems. If people can’t understand why the argument is weak…

Whenever the topic of using non-offensive language comes up, someone invariably objects on one of two grounds:

1. I’m somehow impinging upon their freedom of speech.

This one is ridiculous since making suggestions about how to more politely communicate their points, especially to people who claim to care about anti-oppression work (which is really who my writing is targeted at — if I realize someone doesn’t care I’m not really going to bother explaining why racism, etc. is bad), is very different from me somehow forcing them not to use those words, which I clearly don’t have the ability to do. And I’m not threatening violence on someone who disagrees with me, which is more than I can say for some of the anti-feminists who’ve left comments on my blog. I’m also not going to go and actively harass other people online with whom I disagree until they change their opinions/language, which is also more than can be said for some people. They can say things if they really want to. I just don’t necessarily respect that choice of words. Just because I think everyone should be allowed to express an opinion doesn’t mean I have to agree.

Contrary to what some seem to believe, I highly value freedom of speech. Believe me, as someone who wants to pursue a professional career in writing, I appreciate the ideal probably more than most people will ever have a real reason to. (Being locked up or killed for publishing something the government doesn’t agree with? Yeah, that would be pretty bad and I’m glad that I’ll hopefully never have to deal with that. Being told by some random person on LiveJournal that you’ve offended them? Not so much.) But freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism, and freedom of speech is also responsibility for the words that one uses. I will call people on offensive language, language that hurts or demeans or perpetuates harmful attitudes and stereotypes — including my allies. People need to take responsibility for their actions, and that includes their words. Words are a powerful tool and people are sometimes entirely too careless with them. I “misinterpreted” you? That’s “not what you meant”? Say what you actually mean, then. Or try to, and if I still misinterpret you, clarify.

I have a firm belief that people need to actually say what they mean, rather than resorting to slang and curse words and hoping that people understand their intent and sympathize with it. It’s lazy at best, and that’s my non-judgmental assessment of the behavior.

2. There are no other words in the English language that will suffice except for those which are horribly offensive.

I’ve heard it all. Apparently “if we took out all the words in the English language that people find offensive we wouldn’t have any useful adjectives, adverbs, or nouns”. (Not an exactly word-for-word quote, but paraphrasing a sentiment I’ve seen more than once on various forums.) Besides being totally hyperbolic, I think that if people’s vocabulary is so limited that they can’t find any other words to describe a woman they don’t like besides “bitch”, that they either don’t have a very good grasp of language (which is unfortunate but not an excuse) or they aren’t particularly imaginative. Expressing this judgment has hurt some feelings, but I stand by it, because the English language has lots and lots of words in it. Use them.

You don’t need to call someone “crazy” and further stigmatize the mentally ill. There are already words which connote that someone is making an illogical argument, or a fallacious statement. You don’t need to call someone a “bimbo” or a “slut” since those are value judgments quite often based on someone’s appearance or dress and thus shouldn’t be relevant anyway. Et cetera. Lather, rinse, repeat. There are probably hundreds of different ways to express your ideas in equally powerful language that doesn’t have the side-effect of insulting others or expressing misogynistic, racist, etc., attitudes.

The other side of this argument is really what I want to get at: people argue that they simply have to insult people in order to adequately express themselves. You see, they have a need to assume that a woman is a “slut” or has an eating disorder just from looking at her. It’s absolutely integral to their argument against Ann Coulter that they make assumptions about her physical sex (namely, implying that she’s post-op MtF, because being trans is the worst thing in the world or something); it’s not enough that she’s a hypocrite who doesn’t bother to actually research anything she talks about. Similarly, one simply cannot discuss Hillary Clinton’s politics without bringing in unfounded assumptions about her sexual orientation. It’s totally central to the argument. It is, after all, impossible to actually discuss a person based on their ideas or actions. No one can do that. We need those words. We need to be able to make unfounded judgments and insult people rather than encourage critical thought.

Also, some people seem to argue that they need to be able to use “gay” or “retarded” as a synonym for “stupid”. Actually communicating why you disliked a movie, perhaps found it dull, is impossible. There’s this ephemeral quality to something that makes it “gay” that merely saying “this subject doesn’t interest me” doesn’t quite capture. Something transcending mere disinterest, dislike, or frustration.

People have an unalienable right to be insulting for no reason, with no actual relevance to the sentiment they’re expressing, just because they can, without being questioned about it. This, truly, is the American Dream. The ideal the founding fathers meant to capture when they penned the US constitution was obviously that people be able to make insulting and pejorative remarks at any time with no repercussions, because the only way to actually communicate is through direct and indirect ad hominem attacks. Freedom of speech isn’t about protecting those who disagree with the government or popular ideals. It’s just about people’s right to be insulting.

Uh huh. Okay. Forgive me my lack of sympathy for the fact that already put-upon people would like it if you stopped making their lives and identities synonymous with whatever negative concept you’re trying to express. Somehow I think you can survive.

Apparently, Ally Work is hosting a carnival to erase racism. I didn’t know about this until now, since I’m apparently really bad at keeping up with these things. But there you have it. Good idea, hosted by some awesome people.