boxofdelights

I hope to talk about some of the rants I delivered out loud in front of other people, but this one only happened in my shower:

Here's the description of the Choice Feminism panel:

Many people say that feminism is about providing more choices for people. There are people who, faced with this variety of choices, choose the same thing that the kyriarchy would have chosen for them. Is this problematic, or is this variety a strength of feminism?

I commented, "I'm a stay-at-home mom.[*] I have a lot of shame about that. The shaming doesn't come from feminism, and it doesn't come from women with jobs. It comes from people with jobs. It's how people with jobs feel about unemployed people. I want to ask you whether there is any admixture of contempt in how you feel about women who choose that."

Two of the panelists are my friends, and I trusted the other three not to be unkind. They weren't. An audience member, talking about her choices as a single mom, made eye contact with me to say, "I wish I had your choices." With a tiny chin-toss on the "wish".

Here's the rant:

That is one of the things that I meant when I said "contempt". You had it easy. Money for nothing. I wish I had your choices.

Which is true as far as it goes. But. I gave up things in exchange for getting a man's support during my childrearing years, things that Single Mom chose not to give up, and I'm not just talking about my sexual autonomy or my freedom to live where things would work out best for me. Our degrees of freedom of choice were different, but you don't get to say that mine were greater unless you're willing to look at the whole picture.


So, yeah, rantiest Wiscon ever. But I hope to change that.


[*]Not my preferred term but the one that the panel was using.

So I cried at three panels this Wiscon. Personal record. Fortunately none of them were panels I was on.

The first was Pan Morigan's voice workshop. (Which anyone might cry at. Though I think I was the only one who did.) The second I already told you about. The third was "Living with Invisible Disabilities".

On the topic of deciding when/whether/how/to whom to come out about your disability, a panelist mentioned skepticism. (Yes, really, when you disclose your disability, some people will decide that you must be making it up. Sometimes they'll say so to your face. No, I don't know either, why anyone would presume that having a disability is less likely than pretending to have a disability.)

I wanted to point out that the skepticism increases exponentially when you admit to two unrelated disabilities, and ask for advice on how to deal with it. Unfortunately, thinking about framing the question made me think about unpleasant coming-out experiences made me feel anxious and embarrassed to begin with. And then, in order to improve access for people with hearing impairments, we were going to the front of the room and taking a mike instead of speaking from our seats. So I stood up in front of everybody and took the mike and suddenly couldn't speak because I was crying! Gah! But eventually I burroed through and got the question out and got good advice, namely: network. Advocate for the accommodations other people need and ask them to advocate for you. Disclose to individuals who (you trust) want not to be assholes, and point out their opportunities to be allies.

ETA: I was telling this story to wild_irises and she was going to give me some advice about reframing it when I got snatched away by my moderator responsibilities! Debbie, do you remember what you were going to say?

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In a *Rolling Stone* interview, musician John
Mayer suggested that Tiger Woods could have avoided his terrible
troubles if he had just chosen to masturbate more. Rather than literally
acting out his obsessive sexual urges with a jillion women who weren't his
wife, why not contain them in the fantasy realm? I suggest you consider
applying this principle as you make your decisions in the coming weeks,
Scorpio -- not just in regards to your sexual life, but in other areas as well.
There may be times when you could prevent an influx of unnecessary
chaos simply by conducting a conversation in your imagination rather
than by having it with the actual person who seems to be agitating or
enthralling you.


See, almost all of my interaction with other people is already confined only to my own imagination. Except for sex: there, you can drop the "almost".

Last time I saw my husband it occurred to me that our sex life has been missing for seven years. I thought about pointing that out to him, suggesting that we have it declared dead; but then I was afraid that he would say-- he wouldn't literally say, "well, duh," but I was afraid that he would say something emotionally equivalent to "well, duh," which would enrage me, because every time I asked him about our missing sex life, every single time over the past seven years, he insisted it was pining for the fjords.

So, we didn't have that conversation.

That's my life, mostly: not having that conversation.


At Wiscon, though, I was shockingly non-self-effacing. You know what I did? Well, lots of things, of course, but the one that most purely self-satisfies me was at a Monday 10 a.m. panel where the panelists kept leaving their hands in front of their mouths while they talked. I had to think about this for a long time before I did it, but once I decided, I stuck my hand all the way up in the air and left it there. I think maybe my visible discomfort made the moderator uncomfortable also, because he sighed and looked at everyone else in the room before he called on me. But then he did call on me, and I did say, "Could I ask you all to please take your hands away from your mouths while you are talking," in a voice that was unfortunately pretty goddam shaky from feeling conspicuous plus correcting other people.


I know I don't have good judgment on the question, to speak or not to speak? I haven't had enough practice to be very good at it yet. But I would like to be more like me-at-Wiscon.