Prey About It - Again and Again and Again ...

Most of the men I know who read my blog, or at least these posts about what it is like to be a woman, have asked me what exactly triggered what essentially appears to them to be an outburst.  Triggered is an interesting word choice, given its increasing association with the post traumatic stimuli of violative assault (I repudiate the term "sexual" assault, as rape is not and never has been about SEX - which is a sacred and blessed part of our humanity), and - yes - there was an incident recently that got me thinking about just how little most men understand the experience of womanhood - and, sadly, of girlhood.

The trigger, for me, was not something to get upset about.

And, the more I have let it sit and the more I have thought about it, THAT is precisely what upsets me so much and has got me talking.  The fact that an incident of personal violation, because it's "just" verbal, is not "worth" getting upset about in our world.

If it were a man, or a boy, people would smack foreheads and freak out.  But the thought of a woman's being inappropriately approached, in public, is quite literally "nothing" to us.  To men, *and* to women.

Which is simply an outrage.

There are a lot of other things going on in the world, too, which are worthy - indeed, demand - upset.  The boys club of the Texas legislature.  The depravity and intimate brutality to which a woman must be subjected by strangers because she has the temerity to create a professional career in sex education (this link is the story of a woman first verbally assaulted with vulgarity and insuperable presumption by a stranger with sexual advice for her to take with her own husband, and it is perhaps the finest written piece of meticulously reasoned, and REASONABLE, outrage I've read in months).  And it's not all sensational stories about ass-grabbing, either.  Sometimes it's disguised in terms like "gravitas" as we dismiss the (imaginary - and faultily reasoned) specter of the "gender backed" "female dollar."

We live in an excessively screwed-up (terminology and entendres quite entirely intentional, yes) world, society, and culture, and the rapidly increasing control exerted by every aspect of it upon women is frightening and angering an awful lot of us.

But, yeah - I began talking, began my personal version of "activism" by airing out the things I have to say and participating, well, actively in this "conversation" because of those things - and because of the recent thing - which have happened to me.  These things MUST be exposed to the light of day.  The intrusive consequences of simply being a woman are immoral, and these things must be said.  Again and again and again.

I regret, to an extremely small and not particularly uncomfortable degree, minimizing what has triggered me most recently - and yet, I also feel that, as Jill McDevitt points out, there's an awful lot about the experience of my gender and my body which are flat-out nobody's business but my own.  I may privately backtrack somewhat and explain what I am discussing here, for those extremely few men whose concern I actually give a rat's behind about managing - because I care about them and The Unknown, particularly when so archly published on the internet (after discussions dismissively saying "nothing happened") is sort of a wench move.  It may lead to clinical and substantive conversations which aren't all about me, and for those men I care about who have daughters, it could be worthwhile to take the instructive posts I've already written and contextualize them in the current events of a woman they care for in return.

As for the rest of you - given the disturbing and intimate personal information I've already shared, I don't feel it's appropriate nor necessary to go on about more.  This doesn't bear further actual explanation, no matter how strongly I feel that "these things" need to be said again and again and again.  Please understand that no new sexual (again there's that inappropriate terminology) harassment at work has occurred.  That physically I am intact and untouched.  That, depressing as it is, "It's really no big deal" is all it deserves, in terms of public discourse.

That my privacy is as much my own as my body.



Sometimes, I look at the extent to which my parents emphasized for me my bodily and spiritual autonomy, beginning way back in the wee hours of the 1970s, is almost miraculous.  That is the people who raised me - human beings of such dignity.  Who put a premium on their children.  Whose ultimate goal, whether it was religion or politics or personal experience of violation, was to protect and preserve and always to VALUE their daughter.

My sense of self wasn't something they taught me with tedious explicitness, by rote, even by words.  It was their inimitable example.

I am incalculably grateful for their lesson.

X Post Facto

My strange existence online, being one of those weird old people who still believes in privacy - and wants it, or at least believes in controlling my electronic identity pretty strictly, is something I share in common with X. There's probably an extent to which I learned it from him, as much as growing more crotchety and indulging the privileged pomposity that comes with age.

And ... the more and more I read, the more and more I am glad I *am* as old as I am, and have been able, at least somewhat, to manage this for myself.

I was very slow to come to Facebook, and when I did, I was very quick to leave again. For the life of me, the entertainment value of flinging a few colored pixels at a "friend" I neither see, speak to, nor even recall the existence of outside my Wall is utterly lost on me. I find the byzantine connectivity of Facebook intensely intrusive, and bafflingly unappealing. The content, such as it is (and there is not much) is stutifyingly drab and uninteresting, the sort of "look at my vacation pictures" self-indulgence once considered to be the height of boring/boorish behavior when sociability involved interaction in the first person, verbal conversation often extending to actual *minutes* in duration (!) with just one other person, and possibly interesting (sometimes good) food.

The point, finally, was impenetrable to me. With those people I was interested in, and friended, I felt no actual interplay on FB. I *have* lost some of them, losing my profile, but some of those had my email, and we don't seem to talk - so priorities prioritize, and decisions sort of don't get made. The little actual writing people do on FB seemed to me rarely to approximate anything I would or could call communication, mostly just unilateral comments. Of the automation of interests, turning activity or fascination into insubstantial algorithms: the less said the better.

Finally, the touchy-feely-ness involved neither touching nor feeling, nor even the most basic reaching out between people. I enjoy quite enough inability to touch or interact with some of the people I love most. It's been an endless source of joy for me and X, the cause of a veritable font of difficulty for us, loving, but being denied ... I really don't need to synthesize more of that.


So. When the wrong person tried to friend me - rather than go through the process of ignoring or rejecting them - I shut down my account. I've never missed it, and wasn't interested in my profile even when I had it. It seems to me there's been zero net loss in this decision. And I am acutely apt at identifying my losses.

Of course, some say an author needs to be on FB, and Twitter, and I can't deny the possibility EVER again amen. Yet I do find myself seduced by the hope that the nature of my genre, historical fiction, doesn't lend itself to 140-character bursts of chatter in the ether, nor can it be much served by flung girdles (... "what the ... ?"), livestock whose invisible cookie poops will feed my personal data to advertisers and political campaigns, or "dude such a rotten day" scrawled on an electronic wall. I like to think fans of WRITING prefer actual reading to snippets and miniature animations, detachedly judging the hotness of my friends and family, or wondering why I wore that particular sweater.

I'm not much a traditionalist, but I'm ungraciously old-fashioned, in my way.


So today when I read YET another article about the way the act of opening an internet browser (and - for the record - the link you are about to see actually is *not* all about Facebook, to be fair ... though FB beats at the heart of any and every approach to the subject of contemporary privacy - and will be hollered about sooner or later in any dscussion thereof) is an act of public exposure on hundreds of invisible levels, I gawped; I gaped at people's stupidity, and marketers' duplicitous avarice; I shook my head at Kids Today; and I thought about how blessed I feel to have grown up in a world where I was invisible.

And then I took a link, and opted out of one of the most heinously exploitive data-collection initiatives, perhaps, in the history of the world. I felt dirty just going to the site. Apparently, however, the opt-out is legitimate and effective (I found it at another of those sites prone to hollering about FB, at which it had been used and subsequently determined kosher). So please follow that last link. If you followed the "invisible" one, I'd hope you're eager to do so. And X, this one is on me, for you. Heh.