While out of town this weekend, between two plane trips and a couple late evenings up reading, I started and polished off  Elliott Currie’s The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence in very short order.  I didn’t do this because it was a fluffy or easy read — it’s actually very in-depth and painful at times, though highly readable — but because it was such a well-done piece of work, so engaging, and from my point of view, so dead-to-rights.  It was incredibly refreshing to read Currie’s approach: I was thirsty for it, and it delivered a long, tall and much-needed drink. I found buried treasure.

It was timely, my reading this book, because for a while I’ve taken issue with how at-risk youth are even defined.  For the most part, they are defined by race and class, as necessarily of-color, and/or in poverty.  By all means, I agree that being a member of any oppressed class — which every adolescent is, simply by virtue of age — will always bump risk factors up, and I want care given to of-color youth and low-income youth in a way which does it’s best to compensate for those youth having less resources than others.  (As well, I’m also concerned with the not-so-well-meaning and racist or classist implications of identifying at-risk youth that way, as if, by virtue of color or income, rather than the institutions which discriminate by that criteria, a given person is somehow innately destined to have bigger problems, and it is that person in need of “fixing,” not those institutions.) But I do often worry, particularly since so often we see middle-class youth of all colors at Scarleteen having such a tough time of things, about assuring that our focus is broad enough when it comes to who we decide needs care and attention.  I have frequent concerns that the way we identify who is and who isn’t at risk, who may and may not be likely to be at-risk, is too narrow.

How much money the family of a young adult has is no guarantee at all of happiness or well-being, something I learned all too well when I taught upper class children for a year in the early 90’s: there was an isolation, a loneliness and a stressed-out perfectionism many of those students — particularly those approaching puberty — that took me very much by surprise at the time.  On more than one occasion, I heard a parent respond to a valid concern we voiced for their child with little more than an immediate concern for and defense of their needs (such as the “need” to pull a child in and out of school incessantly because a parent didn’t like the cold and liked to switch over to a summer home on their whim, for themselves), not those of their child.

The new middle-class world in which many American adolescents grow up is one that combined harshness and heedlessness in equal measure.  It is a world that is quick to punish and slow to help, a world paradoxically both deeply moralistic and profoundly neglectful.  Hence, it is hardly surprising that so many mainstream teenagers are in trouble, for that world makes it very hard to grow up.  It makes it all too difficult to achieve a strong and abiding sense of worth and all too easy to feel like a failure and a loser.  It makes it all too easy to feel like an outsider, all too difficult to feel appreciated or respected for being who you are.  It is a world in which it is treacherously easy for adolescents to trip up and break the rules but in which no one can be bothered to help them avoid tripping up in the first place. (p.254, bolding mine)

I admit, I had a lot of déjà vu when reading Currie’s accounts of the teens he worked with.  While I grew up primarily low-income, a few of my adolescent years were spent in the middle-class, and those were the years when things got as bad as they could possibly get.  Accounts in the book of Tough Love were all-too familiar to me, and the reminder harrowing.  In my case, Tough Love was used in conjunction with, and sometimes as justification for, an abuse dynamic, which was particularly chilling, and you see that in some of these accounts as well.  I remember, too, that when we moved into (rather, married into) the middle class, there was less notice of the effects of my household on me.  In lower-class communities and schools, neighbors and teachers seemed to have a keener eye: in middle-class life, there seemed a universal propensity to turn the other cheek, to put on blinders, to say “None of my business,” which felt very different — cold, isolated, the kind of disturbingly quiet things are when no one wants to talk about what’s wrong — than our lower-income community had.  Perhaps it was partly due to the timing, due to that switch happening at the onset of my adolescence, but I remember it very distinctly feeling like suddenly we youth were the enemy, always at fault, and parents and other adults ever-good, even when they were being anything but.

I noticed some changes and some similarities.  On the north side of Chicago, back when I was a teen, there were a rare few of us identified as “trouble” who had not either spent some time put in mental institutions by parents — not by the state — or who were frequently threatened with same.  It became a way to find something quickly in common: “Oh, you were in the ward at Northwestern?  When?  Were you there with Susie?”  That still seems to be occurring, but more often the institution is pharmaceutical: at the first sign of trouble, mood changes (which are part and parcel of the chemical effects of puberty, not a disorder) or rebellion, teens are put on SSRIs, anti-anxiety or ADHD medications.  We also see many youth now wind up in criminal institutions, “boot camps,” — whose listings I have to remove from our GoogleAds constantly — get shuttled more from one home to another, and with GLBT youth, in camps which aim to “rehabilitate” them.

Young adults seem also to be suspended or kicked out of school with more frequency and ease in this era, taking away yet one more resource that is needed; setting youth more adrift than before, rather than helping them to use places like school as a much-needed tether. His accounts of the world of modern-day suburban high schools and rigorous academic achievement will probably also sound very familiar to teens today: as cold, uncaring (particularly for students who do not prove their worth with high grades or test scores), punitive and, all too frequently, more parent and teacher-centered than student-centered.  Of course, there is also a heavy and judgmental religious morality, one which in the U.S. has found it’s way into schools and policies through our current administration, which also often judge, youth, and do so with the ultimate authority figure: one which claims to come directly from God.  The actuality or threats of kicking a teen out of the house also do not appear to have decreased, despite the fact that it still remains unlawful for a parent to abandon a minor in that way.

I appreciated that he brought up that one common reason teens wind up in trouble, or in situations or social circles which endanger them isn’t because teens are stupid or foolhardy, but because those places or groups are more accepting of them, have less stringent or rigid standards for approval than teens are finding elsewhere. There’s a reason, after all, that so many teens are so stressed out right now: it’s not random.

If we wonder why we see very young teenage women dating older partners who clearly or likely are exploiting them or putting them at risk, rather than just looking to that teen or that adult, we should also look at what they get from that situation which they are not finding elsewhere.  If the only person stating or recognizing a developing maturity (whether or not that is earnest or manipulative) is the 25-year-old guy who lives with Mom and picks up teen girls at the mall, it’s no wonder a young person moving into adulthood is very drawn to that person, despite their flaws or manipulations which may even be known to teens pairing up with them.  If we feel like youth are spending too much time in online communities and too little in real-life, we might look at the differences through this lens, considering what kind of acceptance they are or are not getting here or there.  If we’re wondering things like why we’re seeing an increase in abusive YA relationships we might also look to where they are learning those patterns in the first place, why those relationships seem to be so easy for teens to fall into and why they seem so normal and familiar.  If it seems completely incomprehensible that young people wind up with addictions to hard drugs (self-injury is also pertinent here), we might look at the differences in how a person feels on a drug and off of it: if a drug seems the only way to feel comfortable socially, to care less about feelings of hatred for oneself, or to find something to shake a person out of feeling numb, why look to the drugs or the addiction first, and to what’s being escaped from second, if at all?

The stories he recounts are so important: as usual, I can’t say enough how important I feel it is that we listen — really listen — to young people.  They are painful and poignant, but often inspirational: many of the young people he interviewed managed — though they shouldn’t have had to — to create and discover selves and lives of meaning and value despite so frequently being denied help and care from the sources where they should have most easily found both.

But what I found most important, and most meaningful, were the conclusions he draws from those stoires and what he knows as an expert on many of the institutions and institutional systems youth can wind up in, from what their experiences illustrated so clearly and consistently. It’s all very simple, really.  The idea many people seem to have that the reason middle-class adolescents find themselves in crisis is because they have too much of everything — too much esteem, too much care, too much attention — and thus, the answer is to take those things away — work to decrease esteem, withdraw or deny care and attention — is not only profoundly cruel but profoundly flawed.  When the young adults he talked to were able to turn their lives around was, of no surprise to those thinking and feeling clearly, when they finally got some practical help, some support and attention; when they were cared for and treated compassionately, when who they are was respected and assured to be of worth — without being proven through achievement — when they were no longer just tossed to the wolves to see if they’d make it or not.

These should be obvious conclusions, but we all know that however obvious they may seem, they are often not the conclusions drawn or the approach taken.

What makes this institutional failure so troubling is that many of these teenagers really needed help at some point in their adolescence.  They were at best overwhelmed and adrift, and often in peril.  Some had been genuinely damaged by their treatment at the hands of abusive, neglectful or dysfunctional adults. Over and over again, the teens I spoke with said that what they most needed during their periods of crisis was basic: they needed someone to listen to them, pay attention, take them seriously and not put them down or humiliate them.  They needed people who were sufficiently engaged to help them figure out what to do next and strong enough to be flexible and understanding rather than reflexively judgmental — people who could help them understand their mistakes while acknowledging their good qualities and who could help them build on their strengths and potential.  When they got that kind of response, they appreciated it and usually responded in kind.  But they rarely got it.  What they got too often was an ideologically grounded regime of punishment and blame that seemed designed to break their “oppositional” nature… (p.168, bolding mine)

More flashback for me.  I remember — and by all means, we still hear this from teens today daily - that whatever mistakes I made, or perceived failings of flaws I had always seemed to take more precedence than the good things I did or  my unique personality and talents.  I could get the great grades I did all I wanted, and yet, what I heard more about was how the way I dressed and presented was ugly and unacceptable.  I could be an intensely creative person, always writing, making a piece of art, singing and playing piano,  I could be as kind to other people as possible, I could try and do some things with social change movements, but because I clearly wasn’t straight and was (and actually was perceived as being well before I *actually* was) sexually active, what I boiled down to was just a loose slut.  The fact that I had largely raised myself, taken care of myself from a very young age without much help was never recognized, but when I made any error or oversight with that self-rearing, it was all my fault.

Like most of the youth in Currie’s work, when things turned around for me was exactly when these kinds of things happened for me.  I was able to switch from a very unwelcoming public school — even for an excellent student, which I very much was — to a specialized and highly inclusive arts school where my gifts and talents were recognized and my uniqueness was celebrated by both faculty and peers.  I had a counselor who didn’t put blame on me, but acknowledged things that were not my fault clearly (like that it was my family who was crazy and dysfunctional, not me; like that I had been trying to live though serious trauma without any real help or acknowledgment of that trauma so it was no surprise I was having a very hard time). I was able to get connected with a parent who was supportive of me and willing to work through the problems I was having with me with love and acceptance, fully engaged with me in doing so.  All of these kinds of things were my turning points. The fact that I had to actually fight to get those things — that anyone does — that I was ignored or denied when asking for them so much I just stopped asking, rather than to be neglected (or, at other times, face highly severe “punishments”), abandoned, institutionalized, tossed to the wolves all “for my own good,” will hopefully, at some other point in history, be recognized as the harmful lunacy that it was and for many teens, still is.

Here at Scarleteen, and at other services which are expressly for teens and young adults, one way we often see that lack of care is just in how tough it often is for us to find volunteers or get donations: to far too many people, teens and young adults are seen as a population who is too young to be considered and treated as adult, but too old to be cared for. Services which are about control or containment — which are, let’s face it, more about providing creature comforts for parents then for teens — often are more stable and supported than those which are about providing the kind of bonafide support or help the youth themselves are asking for, and that’s a serious problem.  Teens are often put in a sort of purgatory, even in what services are provided for them: little children are important, adults are important, but anyone in between…well, they’ll sink or they’ll swim, right?  What Currie makes clear, and I agree, is that what that approach inclines them to do is to tread water or drown.

I do wish some attention had been given to the additional challenges gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth often face; that some address had been made of how additionally isolated GLBT youth often are, and how “tough love” or… approaches compound their crises.  But that’s a minor quibble — and really, my only quibble — while most of the youth he talked with seemed to be heterosexual, Currie didn’t explicitly identify the orientation of any of them, and it may simply have been outside the scope of his study.  I also would have loved a foreword from one of the youth he interviewed: maybe for the next printing?

None of this is rocket science, but it does stand pretty counter to some very common approached to youth in trouble and.or in need of help. We should know by now that the “Bad kid! No biscuit” (or no love, no roof, no school, no social outlets, no dating, whichever it is) approach not only doesn’t work, but is potentially quite damaging, and certainly not in accord with helping young people transition into healthy, happy adults. For lack of a better term — though I personally, am really fond of rebellious and think there’s a lot of great power in the term — being “oppositional” is part of the nature of adolescence.  While it may inconvenience, challenge or scare parents or other adults, and while it certainly can wear a person out, in so many ways, adolescence is another sort of birth.  During the teen years, young people are giving birth to the adults they are becoming, and like any birth, it is frequently painful, in some way inconsiderate of its environment, raucous, unpredictable, chaotic, anarchist. To a large degree, it is not something others can control, which certainly poses a conflict to a culture seeking more and more control of everything and everyone.   I’m of the mind — and my impression was that Currie is, as well — that young adult separation and rebellion needn’t be or be viewed as destructive.  In fact, I’ve long thought and expressed that I think it’s something we need in our culture: one incredible thing teens do for us is sort of jar us awake, pull us forward unto their future, give us, as a culture, a sort of high-powered jolt I think we’re often in need of.

So many huge cultural and social changes in our culture — like them or not — are changes we have generations of youth to thank for: the Great Awakening, the Industrial Revolution, public schooling, the Civil Rights Movement, the Beat era, feminism, the hippies, yippies and diggers of my parents years, the punk movement of my era, the riot-grrls of the one right after that, tech development, and…. well, we’re going to see what we really have right now, if we give our youth a chance to show us, anyway.  For a lot of our national and global history, young people have been at the forefront of social justice movements and other social change, and for just as long of a time, adults have frequently been resistant, and sometimes that resistance results in attempts to (and successes at) control and contain rather than engagement, cooperation and participation.  Often enough, and certainly now, adults have been sure that teens cannot harness and manage their own energy despite history showing us that more often, in fact, young people know exactly how to channel their rebellion and their unique spirits powerfully and positively, perhaps better than adults do.

I think if we seek to quiet, subdue or control young people, we all — and most particularly the teens themselves — lose something immensely valuable and seriously important. We also don’t help teens at all by either abandoning them or by punishing them for their nature: it’s one of the ways we do them real harm.  The title to the book speaks of a typical answer Currie got when asking teens about why they fell into destructive or damaging habits, addictions or behaviors, or how they felt about themselves and their lives at the time: “Whatever,” was a typical response.  I think — I hope - one place all of us can agree upon, no matter our divergent and diverse politics, values or aims — is that no one earnestly benefits from a population who feels that their lives and actions are just “whatever.”  The youth themselves most certainly don’t, but neither do adults, even if that “whatever” gives some adults more room to have lives uninterrupted or without the inconvenience of a more invested and higher-esteemed teen.

It seems like stating the obvious, but if we want a healthy, vibrant and caring world, we just can’t very well expect to have that if when our youth are looking towards adulthood, we’ve made them feel that they’ll have nothing of value to contribute if and when they get there (unless, apparently, they become only who we want them to be to serve our own needs and aims, rather than being and becoming who they actually are and serving what needs and aims are their own).

Suffice it to say, I strongly recommend this book: to parents, teachers, other YA helpers, as well as to young people (I know my inner-teen got some healing and acknowledgment through this, so your actual-teen might well, too).  In a similar vein, I also would suggest two other books, Generation on Hold: Coming of Age in the Late Twentieth Century, (James E. Cote & Anton L. Allahar) and The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager by Thomas Hine.

It perhaps goes without saying that I also strongly recommend that we look at where, exactly, teens are learning to look at themselves and their lives as “Whatever.”  A mirror may prove useful.(Cross-posted from the Scarleteen blog.)

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, activism, heart work | permalink | comments (3) »

Phew! It took me months, and a whole weekend spent doing nothing (save one book promo event down the street) but this including pulling most of my hair out to edit it down to something resembling a manageable length, but sparing a graphic for it and maybe a few more final adjustments, it is finally freaking done. Writing that piece was harder for me in many ways than writing my whole book: it’s just such a broad topic, and it is so, so hard to approach men with it and walk the fine line between accountability and nonproductive blaming. I also went back and forth a thousand times about detailing my own rapes, but it just felt like disclosing them was important (even if it means, as it usually does when I disclose without being a weepy mess, that I’m likely to get at least a few emails telling me I deserved to be assaulted) when it comes to making readers who might feel vulnerable know that I’m vulnerable, too.

We do have substantial male traffic, so I’m hoping it does some good, and to boot, I can at the very least know plenty of female readers will see it and will get to have the rare experience of reading rape prevention materials that are about someone besides rape victims.

(FYI, I had a sidebar in there originally explaining that some couples like and both consent to dominance and submission play and that doesn’t mean we’re talking about rape since that activity is wanted and negotiated, and then gave a little airtime to talking about that it needs to be negotiated like anything else, not assumed, etc. I took it out just because it seemed obvious given the talk about consent before it, but for any peeking over at it who do D/S, can you let me know if you think it really needs be mentioned? Thanks!)

Hell, even if it does no good whatsoever, I am pleased as punch to have that stinker OFF of my to-do list at long last. Know how it is when any given thing just goes on and on, never finished, and how it becomes the most important thing to do in the whole world — even if it really isn’t — just because it’s so hard to finish or get started on anything else with whatever albatross it is putting it’s butt in the way of your brain fully focusing on anything else? That’s what I’m talking about. Now, would that it were the ONLY thing on my to-do, or rather to-finish list like that, but it was certainly the biggest and least pleasant, so that’s something.

Tomorrow — hooray! — I start two days of training and orientation for my new second (third? I have so many jobs, I don’t know which it is) job, which will likely also include a new Hep B vaccination, redoing/updating my very antiquated first aid/CPR and HIPAA schtuff, and, given what it’s like here right now, being very wet and cold coming and going. I also need to not make my workwear my pajamas, which means I must, as ever, face the terrifying laundry piles which I’ve become convinced must somehow be viral. I did give myself a splurge last week as a reward for getting this gig, and grabbed a new kata as well as this awesomely wonderful, toasty sweater (in black) here which just came today, so that at least covers the top of me. It’s the “no jeans” bit that’s going to be a tough order, as that’d be 95% of the pants I own and live in which are not pajamas. I’ll work it out, but the spoiled work-at-homer in me is a wee pissy at the moment, especially since there’s laundry involved.

I also had the first day with my new, fantastic weekly in-house volunteer last week, who got started on a Facebook page for Scarleteen (I can live with Facebook: I cannot and will not have anything to do with myspace) as well as a new call for writers. It’s so nice to have someone to help a little bit sometimes right here in the home office, who I can talk things out with rather than just typing them out, and cooler still, she was a once-upon-a-time Scarleteen user when she was younger, so she gets all of the import of what we do, which is a very happymaking thing.

Oh, and my editor wrote last week to let me know that the book is going into it’s second printing. Yay! But… she only got told after the fact, which means that it’s going into that second printing with the two very irksome art department typos. Boo.

Maybe I’ll name my next pet “Urethea” in honor of those typos, and with the wishful thinking that someday I won’t have to see them anymore save on met vet bills.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, apropos of nothing, workworkwork | permalink | comments (4) »

Just two quickies:

1) I had gotten a little behind with shipping out books to folks who ordered them through me, got a book via making a donation, or asked for a review copy over the last two months. But I just shipped out more than twenty books and took all morning going through all my email and records as meticulously as possible, so everyone waiting should have their copy/copies within the week. If you have been waiting, are in the U.S. (Canada folks will likely have a few extra days wait), and do NOT have a copy by the middle of next week, please do email me so we can be sure you didn’t get lost in the shuffle. Thanks!

2) I got the job! I do my orientation and all my HIPPA/HIV/First Aid re-certifications next week, and then start on my two-day-a-week regular schedule. Now I must go Snoopydance about it some more.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, workworkwork | permalink | comments (10) »

…and nearly just as soon as I’m back, I’m off again.

Thanks to the National Sexuality Resource Center and SFSU, I’m heading to San Francisco tomorrow for a few days to accept my Champions of Sexual Literacy award, do a couple events including telling my (beyond undramatic) coming out story on stage and giving a talk at the Center for Sex and Culture on YA sexuality and sex education issues. As an extra bonus, I’ll be fitting in two photo sessions, one with a longtime reader and another with Melissa, catching up with Carol and Robert, who are two of my favorite people in the entire universe, and hopefully also getting a chance to see Anne and Cathy, because it’s been too long, dining at the Millennium, which is basically where vegans go to die when we have been VERY good, and my editor and I will finally get to have all those glasses of wine together that we wanted so badly throughout the process of producing the book.

Of course, I had the best of intentions in the days between coming back from Victoria and leaving for SF when it came to getting a ton of things done. Very, very few of those things are done. My primary interest while back home was staring at the wall, eating, and taking several hot baths.

But this is it, for the most part: after the San Fran trip, I won’t have to do any traveling for a while. The weekend after next, my sweetie was a total peach and arranged for a weekend away for us — and with the dog, no less! — in Port Townsend for us here.

The Victoria trip was fantastic. Sarah is the absolute best, even though I think we both needed ice for our jaws after yapping for three days solid. The events were both very packed and very awesome. And on the ferry home, as it turns out, I found myself seated next to an older couple, and in no time at all, we discovered that we had quite the thing in common: she was a member of the Planned Parenthood board in Long Island, and I do what I do. So, pencil in three more hours of breakneck gabbery.

I’ve made it no secret here that I’m not a fan of public speaking. Really, a big part of the reason why after many juvenile and adolescent years of hardcore musical training, I pretty much ditched it as something I was going to do as work, full-time, was because while I loved (and still do) making music, I never liked performing. It was never awful, but it wasn’t something I enjoyed, either. For a long time that was the same story with the public speaking, until a handful of years ago I became downright phobic about it, for no real rhyme or reason. The mere thought of it would make me nauseated and clammy, and in the actual doing, my voice would never stop shaking, my knees would feel like they were going to fall out from under me, and I was having to keep myself from puking or wetting my pants the whole time. The only thing I looked forward to with it was the talk being over.

It got so bad that a few years ago, I was invited to be featured in this amazingly high-profile feminist conference, and while I was so honored, and so badly wanted to do it, I ended up declining because I was relatively certain I’d just never come out of my hotel room to give the talk. Mind, it didn’t help that I was told half the university and organization REALLY wanted me to talk there and half REALLY did not, but still, my issue, and a really serious case of disappointment-in-self.

However tired I am, and however much I just want to sit in front of my fireplace for several months without leaving, one huge benefit of doing all these book events over the last six months has been that I feel okay about public speaking again. I mean, I’d still rather NOT be doing it, but once the first few minutes are over, I’m okay, and it’s no longer terrifying. That’s a pretty serious boon.

I am still nervous enough that I get babbly.

REALLY babbly.

I’ve come to the conclusion that since everyone listening always looks mighty entertained and very alert, that must be okay, but I still feel like a bit of a dolt about my mouth running five feet ahead of the rest of me most of the time, and seeming to have limited control of what comes out of my big yap. Am I an educator and an activist, or am I a clown? Dunno, but at least no one ever looks bored.

While I was in Victoria, Sarah and I filmed a segment for a documentary that is centered around a male photographer who does vulva photographs in the interest of improving female body image. While I’m not exactly the most excited ever about most projects that are male-led in order to help save us women from our own crappy self-image, the guy’s heart certainly seems to be in the right place, and the photo work is pretty decent.

We watched the current edit of the documentary before going to film, and both were commenting — in good spirits, but still — on some of the level of batty of some of the female experts on there. Betty (Dodson) is always batty, and in such a lovely way, but still, yanno… batty. There was some other woman whose batty was far less charming, and just plain kooky and counterproductive in my view, going on about how you could tell what the inside of a woman’s vagina was like by the appearance of her external vulva.

(Umm, yeah. She didn’t suggest that she made a habit or even an occasional practice of actually putting her hands into women’s vaginas for these theories, personally or professionally, but I was so wishing I had met her in person so I could drop my pants, ask her to take a look and make her prediction, then ask her to lube up, go on in there and find out if there was any truth in her vagina…psychicry? Psychicness? I don’t know what the term is for the act of being a psychic: whatever it is, that word. I also had a moment of feeling incredibly glad I wasn’t dating women at the moment, because I would SO have wanted to make a game out of this and see if I might become a vulva psychic myself. For all I know, that gig just might not leave me broke like this one does. Imagine how many parties you could book! It’s totally better than some guy pulling rabbits out of hats.)

So, we go to film, and one void we noticed in the edit we saw was that there was a lot of talk about poor body image coming from porn. That’s valid, and I certainly think it can be an issue, but if you start and stop there, I think you miss a LOT of other important issues and a big part of the picture. Women suffered with poor body image, and especially poor genital body image, well before mass-produced porn — and with the wide availability of amateur porn, and self-made porn, while I think porn can play a big hand in problems with sexual self-image, sexual gender roles, and with overall body image, I’m not so sure that it’s the right place to pin poor genital image for women on, since if they’re looking at more of the DIY or amateur stuff, most of those performers have not had labiaplasties. Many with breast implants, to be sure, nearly all very femme, and the endless lack of body hair, but to my understanding, labiaplasties? Not so much.

Anyway, we’re gabbing about this, together on screen, and discussing the fact that because the male genitals are so externally visible, that men have the benefit of being able to just walk into a group shower or locker room and see a wide array of penises. Without having a same-sex lover, or other opportunities to see real genitalia that require a lot more intimacy and another person’s permission, men often get to see a pretty wide range of penises and testicles. Because most of the female genitals are hidden, women don’t have that opportunity. Very few women who don’t have same-sex partners or become gynecologists and obstetricians will ever have ANY opportunity to see what a vulva besides theirs looks like in-person, and that lack of genital visibility (and scent, and taste, the works) is one very practical, and really, unfixable, reason why so many women have no idea if their vulvas are “normal,” and what the range of female genital appearance really is.

I’m a talker-with-hands. If my hands aren’t flying wildly everywhere, my mouth is probably shut. So, in discussing this, we both — unaware the other was about to do this — pantomimed what one must do to get a good look at a vulva by making a movement with our hands and fingers in front of our faces, as if we were doing the world’s smallest inverted breaststroke.

It was at that moment that it became quite undeniable that we, too, are those batty ladies.

That’s okay. I mean, I know I am already destined for extreme batty-old-ladyhood. I’m looking forward to it, and I may as well practice now and get good at it so that I can be an Olympic bat later. And when the subject is sex, if you can make people laugh, you can help people feel a lot more comfortable about everything, so it tends to be a help to be weird and goofy. It also makes me feel much better about my spaztastic mouth and my flying hands when I do public talks: if everyone else who does this kind of work for a while eventually becomes pretty loony, it therefore may well just be a job requirement.

See how that amazing logic works? I have just turned my lack of cool eloquence and controlled, professional speaking into a marker of acheivement! Go rationalizing, go!

And with that, I’m off to pack and prepare to go be batty for a few days, with the hope that at the very least, I can pony up and not be a complete loon while accepting my award. Doubtful, sure, but a girl can dream.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, women, sexuality, events, travel exhuasts me | permalink | comments (3) »

Since my day began with yet another vet visit and yet another staggering vet bill, there’s really no sense in not going ahead and writing about one of the not-so-great parts of my Chicago trip, since I’m in a pissy mood already.

(Just so no one worries overmuch, Sofia isn’t on her deathbed or anything. The current diagnosis is that due to being exposed to fleas and now-verified mange, she had to both deal with the parasites — and now my cat has to be treated, too — AND the allergic reaction she had to them, and now also, apparently, that allergic reaction has stirred up her food allergies, so she has to have a food switch as well. At the moment, rather than itching herself into a frenzy as she has been, she’s sacked out on the sofa looking very comforted by a huge dose of antihistimines, which I really hope keep working, because the vet says if not, it’s on to cortisone injections. All this with the dog who has never had a single health issue. When it rains…)

I want to open this up by noting that both the book events I had in Chicago, even though one had some serious badness, were easily the best book events I have had so far. Both were apparently record-attendance events for both shops, which made me feel tremendously good. Both had incredible people at both of them who were a joy to meet, and who I felt very lucky to count as supporters and readers of mine.

At the Women and Children First event, we had a wonderful event coordinator and a very nicely diverse turnout. They’d told me that they never did so well with teen-specific events, and so we’d jointly decided to bill the event as a sort of remedial Sex Ed 101 for people of all ages, as well as a signing. In opening the event, I briefly explained what I do when it comes to Scarleteen, what S.E.X. covers, and also gave a relatively short list of what sorts of topics I could answer questions on. My list was essentially this: puberty, all-gender anatomy, sexual orientation, gender identity, birth control, safer sex, sexual response and function, masturbation, partnered sex, general relationships, body image, sexually transmitted diseases, all aspects of human reproduction, reproductive options and other related topics. Overall, I feel like I gave a very clear impression that I was addressing practical, tangible issues rather than theoretical or academic issues.

Most of the audience seemed to grasp that easily, including the handful of young adults that were there, the wonderful older male gay sexual health advisor, my parents and my mother’s girlfriend, the couple friends I had in the audience, a couple grad students and…well, almost everyone.

The only two people who either could NOT grasp that or who perhaps simply did not WANT to grasp that were two middle-aged, white, hetero men in attendance.

Now. For all I know, one or both of these men read me here. If you are one of these men and are reading, and feel I am somehow misrepresenting you…well, that’s kind of too bad, since what I’m about to say here was the impression everyone else there seemed to be left with, too, especially since I could see all of their faces throughout. If I hurt your feelings in any way, know that is not my intent, even though I do intended to be rather direct, and don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be.

I also want to say that one of these men announced publicly about 2/3rds of the way through the event that he had a social disorder. While I still think it was possible for him to behave differently than he did in many respects — or if he absolutely could not, to exempt himself from situations where he cannot control his behaviour — you have to give someone credit for not only being aware of that sort of disability, but for being somewhat accountable for it. Especially since the other man in the audience clearly ALSO had a social disorder — one profoundly worse than Man One did — but I don’t imagine that for a minute he would have even considered that he did, nor that if he knew he did, he would have chosen to behave any differently if behaving differently was an option for him.

Both men seemed to show up with an agenda, to the degree that one even came with prepared notes. Both men didn’t seem to care, at all, that a) they were in a women’s space, and b) there were younger people and younger women in attendance for whom the way each spoke most of the time was seriously disrespectful, purposefully intimidating and big-time inappropriate. And you know, when someone who thinks it is appropriate to sit in a group and talk easily and shamelessly about lubing up for anal sex, fisting or get in-depth about what an HPV wart looks like thinks you’re talking inappropriately, you know you’ve pushed one hell of an envelope.

Both men clearly didn’t want to talk about ANY of the subjects listed, nor let anyone else talk about them, myself included. Both men repeatedly and relentlessly spoke over any and every other audience member.

Man One, with the social disorder, basically was entirely focused on pornography and seemingly on having sex with every woman in the room that evening. I knew it was bad as it was, having watched almost every young woman in there try to get away from him, and having moved away from him as he followed me around the store before the event myself, but only in seeing that a young woman who attended the event who had briefly blogged on it note that she was asked for a lock of her armpit hair by this guy did I realize how bad it really was with him in that respect.

My father is one of those guys who, when introduced as my Dad to who anyone who meets and likes me, people seem to imprint on as surrogate Pop almost immediately. I was pretty well-adjusted about this in my youth, but I confess that there was more than one time in high school when I’d get all happy that a friend stopped by, then feel resentful when they made clear they had come because they needed to talk to my Dad. Harumph. Anyway, at some point, one of the staff there had apparently given my Dad a big bear hug and a kiss on the cheek, after which Man One came up to him, pointed at the woman, and asked my Dad how he could get “one of those,” for himself. I’m not sure what exactly my Dad said to him in response, but the look of disgust on his face was pretty palpable.

Man One would not stop talking about porn throughout the event: in fact, that is all he talked about, ad nauseum, both before the event to me, and during the event, to everyone. At one point, he sat listing all of his favorite porn sites (stating the .com at the end of each very oddly) to a totally unreceptive audience, and when I made clear after a few that I was sure we all got the picture, he kept racing to try and get to the end of the whole list, which he had written down on notecards. I was this close to asking if he got some sort of commission. It was my mother, this time, who asked him to please, for the love of gawd, freaking stop already. I watched a row of teenage girls in the front get more and more uncomfortable the more he went on: it was agonizing, and I did all I could to give them an “I’m terribly sorry” look.

Later on, he also asked if it wasn’t simply inaccurate to say that women didn’t like spending loads of time looking at naked men in print and online porn to the exact same degree men do at women. I informed him that first of all, there were plenty of men who didn’t like looking at women sexually at ALL, plenty of women for whom the inverse also was without appeal (and have I mentioned lately how tired I am of feeling like in nearly every conversation to be had about sex, I must step up and be the Heterosexism police?) as well as people of all stripes who aren’t regular porn users, period. I also let him know that most of the information and statistics we have on this — he seemed to imply that it was some sort of women’s conspiracy that stats always show the primary users of porn as being male — come from the porn industry itself, who tend to be pretty exacting with their statistics, since they’re in the business of making money, so knowing who their primary clientele is is no small matter, nor are they likely to misrepresent the marketing stats, since there’d be no benefit to them in doing so. Unfortunately, letting that question — I should have known better — in started the list of porn sites again, as well as him telling us he was going to share a personal anecdote. Seeing the faces of every single person in there still green from the existing oversharing, I tried to move on to someone else. Very, very quickly.

But alas. Up steps Man Two.

Actually, he was already standing. The event had several long rows of chairs, which everyone there had been sitting in from the start. I too, was sitting rather than standing (something I prefer at events, period, especially events about sex where I’m billed as an expert: I feel like someone in that position standing makes it feel intimidating and power-lordy). But not Man Two. He had been standing in the aisle between all the rows from the minute one, moving closer and closer to me the whole time with a silent scowl on his face while I answered some anatomy of the clitoris stuff, some basic safer sex procedure stuff, some developmental puberty stuff, some how-to-address-how-virginity-makes-some-people-feel-lousy stuff and some issues about HPV and age-matters with the vaccine. I’d asked him twice to please sit down, as had the staff. No dice.

Once he began talking, he kept moving closer, getting louder, and as time went on, I watched spittle form in the corners of his mouth, and his fists clench and unclench. He first started talking by cutting off a male college student, no less — who was a hero of the revolution for bringing his two younger sisters to the event, knowing they had zero sex ed in their family — who just wasn’t clear on what STIs he may or may not have been immunized for, and who also was interested in the status of HPV vaccination for men. I can’t say whether it was ironic, blind and careless, or just plain mean-spirited, but he interrupted that guy, who was visibly Asian, by barking out at me:

“Why does everyone blame the white man for racism?!?”

Umm, okay. We weren’t talking about racism. At all. All night. And, I’m thinking that at that moment, it was a pretty obvious answer since he’d just silenced a person of color right there in that room with his own white, male mouth. Of course, I almost wanted to ask whose fault exactly he thought racism WAS if not the fault of white people, and the whites with the most power, because I was really dying to know this fascinating theory he had, but suffice it to say, I was not about the humour this guy in any way. So, instead, I just calmly said that that wasn’t a topic we were discussing, nor one I felt was relevant to the book and the event.

My response didn’t result in much. He kept moving forward, spittly-mouthed, forehead-sweaty and clenchy-fisted, going on about this. Then there was some intermediary diatribe about how — and put in exactly this language, knowing he had teen girls sitting right in front of him — everyone just wanted to fuck 15-year-old girls and his 15-year-old daughter, but not him. I actually didn’t hear the bit about a daughter in there, my family only mentioned that later. I’m glad, because I don’t think I would have been able to not look beyond horrified at the notion of this poor kid who got stuck with this jerk as a father.

Again, the louder he got, the more I continued to ask him to sit down. And still, he’s not sitting, and still, he’s spitting. Then he starts in on why does everyone blame the white man for everything bad.

I was thisclose to telling him that if right now, anyone WERE blaming the white man for the badness, and the white man they were blaming was him, that would be BECAUSE IT WAS HIS FAULT. I considered telling him that while he couldn’t change his race, nor his sex (well, he could, but I don’t see this guy even remotely wishing he were female), what he COULD change, and what was most likely his biggest problem, was the fact that he was a giant horse’s ass. And that people who may have blamed him for being said ass were likely putting the blame where it belonged, and if he did not like it, not only could he choose NOT to be a giant horse’s ass, we’d all give him a freaking medal for making a different choice at that point.

But you know, there you are, in a public group. You watch the public group get more and more uncomfortable, half of them earnestly looking like they just don’t even feel safe anymore, and you watch them look to you to fix it, knowing that a lot of them want you to say exactly what you’re all thinking because this jerk has effectively terrorized the whole room. But you know, too, that telling someone any of those things publicly, if you did, would primarily be for you, not them, since calling them out that way is likely only going to make them both feel even worse about themselves and everyone else and behave even more badly.

So, if you’re me, the best you feel you can do is to tell him that again, this is outside the scope of the book, that this is a sexuality education book that addresses bigotry a bit, but doesn’t get into any sort of blaming, and that no one in the room is blaming anyone for anything right now (even though they’d have every right to). And then you tell him, more strongly than calmly this time to SIT DOWN. He keeps talking, so you say it AGAIN. This still doesn’t get through, so you then try being a little more direct and say it’s clear he is making every single person in the room grossly uncomfortable, but before you can get that out of your mouth, both of your parents, from opposite sides of the room, take flank positions and ALSO tell him to sit down. Then the staff try and tell him to sit down.

It is at this point that I finally just cracked up laughing, watching the bizarre circus that is sometimes my life, and did a little “Ladies and Gentleman, meet my parents…” which everyone in the room thought was just me being funny, and that the two people in the room I gestured to were just acting like parents, but were not actually my parents for real.

(My mother’s girlfriend later remarked that that was likely in part because when you look at both of my parents, while I may physically resemble them both in part, one wouldn’t assume I’d come from some soft-spoken, but very professional-looking now-blonde, or from some gangly, skinny old Italian. I’m not sure why not, but there you go. She also observed that she thought that some of why these guys went so batty was that they were expecting something from me that wasn’t there — that I was supposed to be, in their minds, some sort of femme fatale, or ball-busting dominator, rather than the short, funny and damn-patient chick in ratty jeans who talks about sex like she was talking about the weather. Who knows.)

Believe it or not, he did finally sit down, but in near-perfect unison, both Man One and Man Two piped up to say they EACH had “anecdotes” they wanted to share with the group. I think at that moment the collective imagination of everyone in that room about said anecdotes made us all wish there was some sort of soap we could use inside our heads.

Thank CHRIST that a half-second later someone else raised their hand so I had someone to call on. For the rest of the evening, the best I could do was look at both men with their perpetually raised-hands, letting them know that I saw that, unsurprisingly, they were not anything close to done, but that as far as I and everyone else was concerned, they’d said MORE than their fair share.

* * *

Honestly, the thing that grated my cheese the most about all of this was that, from everyone’s observations as well as my own, both these guys came into the event with an agenda. Both came in seeming to feel that they needed to tell all of us how it was, and that we were some sort of threat to them. Into an event at a women’s bookstore which has been hanging on financially by a thread, where most of the audience was some sort of minority, be it by age, sex, race or sexual orientation, all talking about sexuality for another marginalized population. In other words, how on earth we could have been any sort of threat to either of these guys, even if we’d have wanted to be, is completely beyond me: I’m not sure there was a single person in there with that power, nor that desire.

I’ll tell you, two, that having survived a couple assaults and stalkers, as well as being someone who has taught self-defense, that my radar is exceptionally good for predatory people. I was exceptionally glad that I was not taking the bus or the el home alone as I would have if I’d still lived there, because I can nearly guarantee that without a doubt Man Two — and possibly, though less likely, Man One — would have been the sort to follow me home.

Some of why behaviour like that pisses me off so freaking bad — beyond the fact that it also resulted in me losing my voice for the rest of the weekend, and feeling like I’d been run over by a Mack truck — is that for fuck’s sake, they were both validating the exact things that both seemed to be saying they did NOT want people to think about men. There were some awesome men in the audience, but those awesome guys are NOT the men anyone was going to leave that event remembering, because the other two made that completely impossible.

More importantly, one of the many reasons that I choose to struggle to keep serving the populace that I do is that shit like this is very real and very common in terms of this populace — teens and women. Interpersonally, politically and educationally, publicly and privately, in everything from their sexual healthcare to trying to negotiate sexual activity they are shouted down and yelled over just like this. We can talk about exceptions to the rule all we want — and by all means, should note that there nearly always ARE exceptions — but this still IS the rule. It’s also a fine example that someone doesn’t have to be the numeric majority to do that: there were but two of these guys, and at least 25 of the rest of us (and I say “rest of us,” because the only other people in the room who were male were — and it was made clear to me by them that they were — either gay or bisexual, of color or homeless), and yet they still found the way to dominate when no one else was fighting them FOR dominance, nor was that anything resembling the vibe of the room. They still attacked, still walked in on the offense, when there was absolutely no cause or reason to: when they were in no danger whatsoever, when there was less than zero threat to them of any sort, save the threat of someone else getting to take their turn speaking about their own issues or questions.

And for crissakes, you’d think, you’d hope, that one could at least be given a vacation from this sort of shite when you’re doing a mellow event, at a mellow women’s space that’s making room for everyone. But you can’t, and perhaps can’t all the more, because I think sometimes that that in and of itself is perceived as a threat: that women could have a space that IS ours, and have the “power” to invite anyone into that space with the understanding that they are expected to behave like guests and expected to make the same allowances.

And I know, we’re so often not supposed to say things like this, but the trouble is that the reality of these situations bears itself out time and time and time again. To pretend that it doesn’t, or to not speak about it (or feel we’d better not, or to be kind must not) is to deny that reality and to choose to be silenced. Like it or not, if you don’t get it, a scenario like this is a big part of why women want exclusive women’s space sometimes (however you define what women’s space is and who it includes): because every now and then, we’d like to be able to speak and talk without being shouted down as most of us so often are, especially if what we want to say either is — or is simply deemed to be — less important than or in conflict with what the men in the room determine so.

(It feels stupid I even have to say this, but just ’cause: does that mean that ANY white, middle-class hetero male is like this? No. Nor does it mean that had another shown up, he would have behaved this way. But this was the actual situation at hand, and these actual situations happen a’plenty.)

Interestingly, I think it’s the first time my mother has actually understood what parts of my job are like, how much of it flat-out stinks, and how small the payoff is so often for me. As we were driving home, she seemed to first be operating under the assumption that something like this never happens, and I let her in on the fact that this sort of thing happens all the time with what I do, in a lot of different contexts. It happens on the message boards, it happens in my email box, it happens with events and talks I give. In talking to straight, white male colleagues of mine who do similar work about these sorts of things, I have yet to have a single one express that this sort of thing EVER happens to them (not saying it doesn’t, just saying that of yet, no one has reported it to me), while other women I know in the field have stories like this in spades. In fact, much as I hate to say it, of the handful of hetero male sexologists I have met face-to-face all but one or two have not hit on me, made salacious comments to me (or about me, to a partner when I stepped away), or seemed to have even the smallest iota of real respect for me and my work beyond how it or I might benefit them personally. Last year, I had to tell a male colleague in the field to stop asking me to do his work for him (for his profit, and for free on my part) at least five times before he stopped, and even then, he literally sent ANOTHER man to harass me to do something for him. Only in saying to said other man that this was at the point of harassment which I was about to take action with did it finally cease.

But I digress.

My mother was pretty mortified, and since that event, has asked how things are going with the book and Scarleteen in every conversation, whereas she used to ask me about it maybe once a year, tops. Oddly enough, one of the lone positives from the whole fracas was that I actually got to see my mother seriously stand up for me in public — which has not happened in my recollection since 1976 — and not because she felt she was supposed to, but because she wanted to. I also think she grew some respect for me that she didn’t have before.

Perhaps most noteworthy, however, is that my parents cooperated with something. MY parents, who I don’t think have cooperated with anything since 1969, when I was conceived.

My father, of course, was not that shocked: he knows the deal. And my father, of course, made new friends that night, and is now paying attention to the event listings for WCF and asking me about them in terms of if I think he should go to make sure there aren’t any jerks in the audience harassing the two staffers who adopted him. I’m sure there could be all sorts of analysis, gender-based and otherwise, on what my parents each took from the event, but I’m fresh out of analysis today.

The event did sell out of all their cartons of books, though, to the point that they ended up buying the three copies I had with me from me, and sending a few sad folks away bookless. And, of course, we all got to leave with whatever our own oh-so-entertaining versions of the story were, though I think the girl who got asked to give over armpit hair got the shortest end of the stick.

This wasn’t the book event that broke the camel’s back or anything: like I said earlier and in another post, there were actually some other very positive experiences there, and it really was fantastic to be able to have an event in a shop I hold so dear. But I’d already decided that week that after the couple workshops I’d committed to in Victoria for October, and the San Fran trip that same month, that I’d be taking time away from promotion. Not only am I out of funds for it, I’m out of “on” for it, especially since big social events drain the hell out of me to begin with.

And to be honest, those two guys did make me want to take a break all the more. I loathe that result, as it makes me feel like a wuss, but it is what it is. It’s one thing to deal with this stuff online, but it’s entirely another to deal with it up in my face, and that filled my limited quota of it for a while.

I’m also done with it right now, because the far more attractive prospect of friend + bottle of wine just showed up on my door, which beats out pretty much anything, but most certainly kvetching further about this crap.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, s.e.x., rantapalooza, events | permalink | comments (7) »

1.) I realized I forgot a couple of good things from the trip. (Yep, still putting off talking about the bad stuff. I reserve the right not to be bitter today.) Like being able to take Mark to Wrigley Field for his first time EVAH with my Dad. After the chamoole finally stopped calling it a stadium, he confessed to having profound penis envy over my hometown ball park. Unfortunately, it appears that for the same reason that Mark’s family asks him not to attend Bengals games because they lose when he’s present, it seems Mark’s visit to our fair Cubbies, beginning with the game we took him to in which Soriano injured himself, had similar results.

Of course, this is the Cubs. Love them as I always will, the only people who need to be in attendance to assure they lose is…the Cubs.

(For the record, it looks as if Mark and I can finally stop saying we’ll do X if he comes home, and go back to when. They were doing the final checks on the car repairs today, so chances are very good that he can get on the road in the next two days so that he can be home by the end of next weekend. Jeez. I told him today that it was getting to the point where I felt this idea we had that the fates wanted us to be together was perhaps backwards: given we started long distance, and by the time he gets home now, will have gone a whole month without being together in the place where we live, it’s possible the fates instead wanted us to be together apart.)

I got to go to the library branch where I spent many a childhood afternoon and hand-deliver my book. Whether they’ll shelve it or not remains to be seen, however, not only did I get a rockin’ Library Journal review which in a couple weeks alone seemed to land it in three times as many libraries as before, my editor today said it looked like we even had backorders for libraries. This makes this girl from the wrong side of the stacks very happy indeed.

2.) For the last two days, I have inexplicably been unable to get the word dirigibles out of my head. Or my mouth: I just had to say it out loud when I typed it, and was glad for the excuse. Thankfully, I remain home alone with my dog, who, while perplexed by my shouting it out at her every few hours, is at least without the power to institutionalize me for it.

While in Cincy, I found Pez Dispensers of both Sully and Mike from Monsters, Inc., which resulted in me pulling out the Mikedispenser and shouting “Mike Wazowski!” Dirigibles seem to have wiped me clean of that, but I’m uncertain it’s an improvement. Can you develop Tourette’s with corprolalia later in life? I know, it doesn’t seem like this is Tourette’s, given that I am not shouting out obscenities, but bearing in mind what exactly I do for my living, and all I hear in a given day, I think we can agree that even determining what obscenities would even BE for me proves a challenge.

3.) I was looking over some photos of friends from Shambala today, and I found myself feeling monstrously old. By this, I don’t mean feeling old in a way that I have changed due to age, but feeling old in a way where I missed a boat that friends not that much younger than me didn’t seem to, which is a big part of why I have zero desire to ever go to Burning Man.

To whit: while I appreciate and dig how glorious those folks look out in the great outdoors with kooky fur and shiny duds and crazy shoes, for the life of me, I can’t dig up even the slightest desire to go camping and have to give half a thought to what I’d wear, what it looks like, or even if I smell, sparing smelling so much I’d be chased by wild animals. Camping to me has always been a wonderful escape from presentation and appearance — even the kind that’s not oppressive in the least, but creative and fun. My joy of camping is really meditative, more about paring life down to the absolute minimum and delighting in simple tasks. I can do it socially and enjoy that, but I often enjoy it even more when it’s largely antisocial: when I’m either alone, or with someone or someones where a minimum of noise and conversation or even interaction is the order of the day. If camping felt like a fashion show — not saying it does for my pals, just that it would for me if everyone wasn’t wearing cut-offs and flannel shirts — I’d feel robbed of camping.

So, yeah: I don’t get it, and not getting it makes me feel crusty. And not in the good, I’ve-been-camping-in-this-gross-but-cozy-salt-stained-t-shirt-for-a-week way.

(Edit: I feel like this may have been/might be read as a jab or a judgment, but that’s not at all what I intended it to be. In fact, I’m envious, and sort of wondering if this isn’t yet one more way I just can’t have a good time where others so clearly can, which has been a bit of a running theme with me lately I’m less than thrilled about. I’d also hope folks — especially my friends — would know me well enough by now to know I’m not one for hidden strikes, but just in case, there ya go.)

4.) When I go to San Francisco for the sexual literacy awards ceremony, I not only get to finally meet my wonderful editor, and not only get to go to the ceremony with her, but we’re also taking a road trip up north a couple days later to spend some time in my favorite area of this whole country with Anne. Renee and I are strongly considering picking up a different bottle of wine for glugging when we get there every winery or so.

We may need to rent a larger car than usual.

5.) As it turns out, Toni Weschler is practically my neighbor, living just a couple of miles away. We had the most wonderful long morning coffee yesterday, and it was just what the doctor ordered; we talked everything from how we feel about giving the youngest women information on charting to book-writing trials and tribulations to birth control to how so many people don’t seem to get that Judaism is often more about heritage and race than it is about religion. It’s just so freaking swell to spend time with other dedicated people in my arena who not only get it, but who got it before I did, and who are also just great to gab with. After all, I learned how to chart with Toni’s first book when it first came out (and as it turns out, at the same age she learned herself: very odd). Suffice it to say, I’m seriously elated we connected and greatly looking forward to doing it again.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (7) »

There’s little better for an author then having an event at not only your favorite bookstore, but at the bookstore that you truly came of age in, where you’d sit for hours reading, and was your best home away from home. It’s amazing for a feminist to have an event in a place where you started doing your cornerstone reading in feminist theory, and which has provided a haven for feminist women, activists and authors for nearly the whole of your life. Same goes for coming of age queer and confused and having a haven where you knew you could sit with your hairy pits and your stompy boots and read your Adrienne Rich, your Rita Mae Brown or your Curious Wine, all while crushing on the gorgeous woman who always saved you the books she knew you’d like, without anyone looking at you funny.

So, I am beyond elated that I have a book event at Women & Children First on Friday evening, August 3rd at 7:30 (5233 N. Clark St., In Andersonville, on the north side of the city). We’re doing this as a remedial sex ed Q&A for women of all ages, since I have so many adult readers who benefit from the kind of Sex 101 I give at Scarleteen, and since so much basic sex ed is really not about women, and in addition, certainly not often inclusive of women who sleep with women, and also not very informed by feminist approaches and a holistic viewpoint on sex. I imagine, given how events with me usually go, that it’ll turn into a pretty cool bit of CR and roundtable discussion on women’s sexuality. (I also expect to tear up the minute I walk in the door, so bring me some tissues, if you would, please.)

The extra on this is that my fave bookstore in the world has also been in a tough financial pickle — laregly due to the fact that they helped make the neighborhood they’re in so much more awesome that now they can barely afford the rents there — like most feminist bookstores have, so I’m happy to do anything at all that I can to keep them around, even if I live across the country and can’t enjoy their stacks myself anymore.

So, please come if you’re nearby, and please tell as many of your friends in Chicago as possible about the event. For anyone who comes themselves or is telling others, I encourage everyone who has some books they’ve been meaning to buy lately to wait until that event and please buy them at W&CF: they need your business, and we all need them. They’ve been supporting women’s work for close to 30 years now, and so long as they stay afloat, they’ll be doing it for many, many more.

(Also? I can’t eat them anymore myself, alas, but if you aren’t often in Andersonville, know that if you decide to make a day of it, or arrive very, very early — they close at 2:30 — and are hungry, that Svea, right across the street, has the best swedish pancakes you will ever eat in your life.)

Don’t forget, too, that if you’re in or near Chicago, that if this event doesn’t work for you, I’ll be at Early to Bed on Tuesday night, the 31st, doing an event for parents and allies of kids and teens.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Happy!, feminism, events | permalink | comments (0) »

There has been some continued suckitude lately, but also some good stuff.

I’m starting with the yuck so I can end with the yay: better for me, better for you.

For a while there (like, the two years kind of while) the Scarleteen email just was NOT working. Basically, you get a site with THAT much traffic, you get so much spam every day that even a great email server gets jammed up every day. Given the content of a lot of spam is just stuff that really messes me up to read, I had to mass delete a LOT. This wasn’t a big deal: after all, I still had many ways for people to contact me otherwise, and the boards are always open. And me missing a lot of hate-mail (especially since, as I was just telling someone today, the big haters aren’t the fundamentalists: more often they’re the pissed-off hetero college boys who feel that the information we provide is going to make their dating pool less pliable: would that I were kidding)? Not exactly a bummer.

One boon of that was that I got a lot less personal emails from users. I’m not talking about hate mail, I’m talking about advice stuff. I always make clear that I do not do advice via email (I used to, years and years back, but I stopped). There are a couple reasons why. The biggest one is that given I’m often serving minors, I want everything I do and say to be up front and center so that it’s all out in the open; I don’t wind up with anyone thinking I’m soliciting their child in any way, or having an inappropriate relationship, and I also just feel like this is often such delicate work that I really prefer a sort of public monitoring. People have insinuated about what goes on “behind the scenes” in some pretty crappy ways in the past, but since I know full well that there usually IS no behind-the-scenes at all, it’s pretty easy to shrug off and just let people be the idiots they wanna be.

Another biggie is that there just isn’t time in a day, and while in many respects, working Scarleteen is often working for free, it at least has the possibility of paying me and the org sometimes. Not so with email: while I’ve accepted a deal to do some interfamilial email or phone counseling/mediation before, for a reasonable fee, there’s no way to do emails from minors that way, and I’d feel really weird about it.

The other reason, though, is that it shelters me from some of the truly awful stuff: I have enough of that to deal with in a day, and one person really can only take so much. Often, people (for obvious reasons) do not want to publicly post the worst of the worst — or even what they think is normal, but you feel is nightmare — so even if you say you don’t do email, they’ll try, in the hope that you’ll be sympathetic, which, of course, I often am. But since the redesign where we now have contact forms up, I’ve started to get more and more of those again, despite setting clear limits where I ask people not to email me personally for advice.

Like the woman yesterday who asked me to give her “proof” to give to her boyfriend who left her because she had such terrible bleeding from rough vaginal and anal sex that he’d come to the bizarre conclusion she could only be bleeding like that because she’d been cheating on him. But that’s not it: she also made clear to me that he had masculinity issues which involved him needing to have rough sex to prove something, and to keep him, she needed me to explain all this blood was okay and he could still keep doing that. It didn’t matter to her that she might well be sustaining injuries and seriously opening herself up to infections: the concern was keeping the guy. Then there was the other one, on the boards, a new poster who posted to ask if her boyfriend continuing with anal sex (she was the receptive partner) until he reached orgasm, despite the fact that she told him at the start it was hurting her and asked him to stop throughout. I explained that yes, that was rape, and not only did she tell me she’d thought it was “just” an abuse, but she also was exceptionally confused because “he deserved to feel good,” and doing what he did was “just being a guy,” wasn’t it?

No, I don’t have thimngs like these every single day. But it’s awfully close. The night before last, when I couldn’t sleep, I was up half the night on the boards counseling a 14-year-old incest and physical abuse survivior (from her brother and father, respectively) whose main concern was that she HAD to be on the pill. Why? Because — she wouldn’t give me details, and I didn’t press because I could counsel her without them — the situation she was in (now at least out of that home with the incest, thank christ) was “complicated” and sex was “going to keep happening whether she liked it or not.” I talked to her as best I could, but you know, she hasn’t had any real support or counseling, and it can be mighty hard to get a big sexual abuse survivor to understand that she really does have a right to say no to whomever. And ultimately, you have to just tell her how to get the birth control, knowing that if there isn’t anything you can do to help her to be better cared for (and to better self-care) that’s at least one way you can mitigate the bad outcomes that she’s willing to pursue. But when you go to bed after that, you don’t sleep well.

Tangentially, I was trying to explain to Mark last night that counseling for abuse amoung teens that age can get really tricky — and serious props to those who do nothing BIUT that, full-time for that age group — because they’re not just abuse survivors, they’re also normal 14-year-olds who behave and talk like normal 14-year-olds. I had to ask that one to please stop saying “My mother will KILL me if…” because in context, it was making it nigh unto impossible for me to figure out what her mother would ACTUALLY do, and if there was any abuse there with Mom, too, or not.

I do get things like this almost everyday, and sometimes several times in a day. Every now and then, they’re some creep wanting to just get his rocks off by pretending to be a rape survivor asking for help (and in those cases, whereas most survivors don’t usually want to start a conversation with a straner by detailing every minute of their rapes, with those posts, it is always written in explicit detail, that I get to read, lucky me, from the start). But from what I can tell, that’s the rarity, not the norm. (And every now and then, I have a wonderful, blissful day where absolutely not a single post makes me want to cry at all: they are infrequent, especially during the summer months, but they are WONDERFUL days.)

Needless to say, this stuff is stressful as hell, and not something you can often just call up any old friend and recount: more times than not, on days like these, I’ve started to learn to just talk to no one at all about them. It’s so damn isolating to do this kind of work, and even more so when so much of the world around you is bound and determined to say these things never, ever happen, or only happen very rarely. This stuff isn’t rare: it is, literally, an everyday occurrence. And fuck, does it suck.

What else sucks?

Still no end in sight to my financial nightmares. But I don’t want to talk about that.

Speaking of nightmares, last night, likely as a result of the overwhelming yuck of the last day or so, I had a really awful dream, starring no less that four bloated, drowned corpses being pulled out of the water right in front of my face, and a Montessori classroom that was bigger and messier than I’d ever seen, and which I was responsible for cleaning up — a Sisyphysian task, in part because it was also full of people, and every time I’d go in a different corner, I’d find myself without my clothes. Also in this classroom I found my old bunny is his cage, which I had forgotten to ask anyone to care for over the summer. He should have just been dead, that given, but instead, he had turned into this yellowed, vile and shriveled mass with bright yellow eyes that was still barely alive. Those were the highlights.

Well, I was supposed to go over to Cheryl’s land Saturday, but alas, my dog got sick AGAIN. This is the second time in two months, from a dog who has never gotten sick before, and who is also the baby to both Mark and myself here (in fact, he gets way more freaked than I when she’s not right). He was still out of town, so I didn’t feel okay leaving her scratching herself silly and vomiting and having all kinds of big bowel yuck, so I had to reschedule, even though we both really, really needed that day.

(As of right now, the vet opinion is that the fleas of last time had their revenge: apparently my dog is also massively allergic to fleas — or that’s their best guess now — and apparently when that’s the case, your dog can be not-right for even a month or two after you treat the damn things. Ain’t nothin’ like being a pet owner when you’re broke, as you may know: it never fails that just when you’re scrambling for cash to pay the usual bills, they have to get sick and you have to get stuck with vet bills on top of everything else. Argh! The antihistimanes they gave me for her were supposed to do the trick, but alas, they don’t seem to have, so I’ll likely be back at the vet AGAIN today or tomorrow.)

Know how women who are pregnant get baby weight? I have book-weight. You have to spend nearly a year with insanely long days strapped to your chair writing, under a fierce deadline…well, some things are fairly inevitable. I don’t really care all that much from a body image perspective, but I don’t dig it from the perspective of my body feeling out of whack — I’ve noticed over the years that I seem to be really sensitive about my own equilibrium — and the bigger issue is that I have to go do book promo back home in a couple of weeks and my favorite stuff to do things in and travel in isn’t feeling very comfortable right now, and I’m hardly in a spot to go buy new stuff to tide me over until moving around a lot again sets me back right.

Lastly, it sucks when you have this flood of brilliant ideas right as you’re falling asleep. I had this happen the other night, but as an insomniac, I know better than to get up and jot them down: I may be up a whole night if I do. If I go to bed at all tipsy or the like, I just accept they’re gone, but the other might I went to bed clean as a whistle, so fully expected to remember them all, and lo: not a single one remained in the morning, only the memory of brilliance long lost to me.

One forgets that as the years creep up, even though you’re totally supposed to be too young to be going senile, age itself is then only toxin required to blitz your memory.

* * *

Enough with the bad stuff.

Know what does NOT suck?

What does NOT suck is your partner coming home from a day-job biz trip to Lincoln, Nebraska (I keep telling him I feel like he’s a vacuum cleaner salesman or something, since he gets shipped to the oddest places) and having a perfecty-perfect stay at home date where you walk to the market to get what you want to cook, make a beautiful dinner together, mix up some experimental cocktails (more on that in a minute) and laze about utterly until the wee hours blabbing away. Well, mostly laze about except for the hour you get weird and have to hula-hoop in your dining room to bad 70’s pop just ’cause. But who doesn’t?

It also doesn’t suck to stretch out the anticipation with snuggles-only that night so you can have phenomenal welcome-back sex the next day.

So, here’s my fave cocktail of the evening, which currently remains nameless: icy-cold vodka (about a third of the glass) and a glass chilled after lining it and the rim with fresh orange and orange zest. Then fill with limeade and some lime pulp, and stick a big sprig of peppermint in there, and muddle it the TEENIEST bit. Yum. Free book to anyone who wants to give me the best name for it.

It also doesn’t suck to have a really good book-sales week, and last week was phenomenal. It’s pretty cool when you see your YA sex guide outsell the book that was your own YA sex guide way back when (yes, there was one day in that good last week where my numbers eclipsed Our Bodies, Ourselves: talk about an ego-boost). Rachel: I think I’ve got you to thank for that, gal.

It’s not at all sucky when one of your favoritest friends gets the hang of your “just drop by” mentality and does, and you get to head over to your neighborhood Sunday farmer’s market, and eat peaches so ripe there’s a flood of juice at your feet, and drink lemonade so tart and fresh it makes the sides of your mouth stick together. Actually, over the last couple of weeks nearly all of my fave buds up here have just dropped by, including two women who just dropped by from Tacoma — an hour away.

It’s really not sucky to have one of your favorite feminist orgs who you didn’t even know knew you existed not only interview you — and acknowledge the work you do as feminist work, because it’s about freaking time someone from something cornerstone did — but ask really amazing questions that bust your brain (an extended version — we got pretty deep into it — lives here). And Chris? We don’t even know each other — well, rather, I didn’t know you until now — but finding this this morning seriously made my day: that’s easily one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me, and you couldn’t have said it at a better time. I may need to steal that first sentence for my press package.

It doesn’t suck that when I go back home to Chicago, I’m definately going to be seeing one old friend I’ve missed, one old friend I have never even met offline, one of my best friends from elementary school who, oddly, found me because she’s gone into YA sex education and nursing herself (was there something in the water?), my two favorite aunts (one of whom is so close in age to me she’s more like a sister: my mother comes from big Irish family, another of whom I really need to tell stories about sometime), my Dad, my Mom, my favorite ex of all time (and his partner, whom I adore), one of my favorite living contemporary artists (who I’ll also get to take to my faveorite art museum anywhere: how cool is that?) and also very probably one of the teachers who saved my life, one of my best friends from high school and another from college. It also looks like (details forthcoming) despite my favorite feminist — really, just my fave bookstore, period — bookstore being in some crisis right now, likely get to do an event there. I even get to catch a Cubs game in bleacher seats, and take my sweetie to Wrigley for his first time.

(I also will likely be going on Fox News while I am there, but that’s more terrifying than it is not-sucking.)

I also pitched a book idea to my editor I really, really, really hope will fly. Not only do I just not want to pitch books to other pubs right now because I so badly want to work with my same editor again, I also really don’t want to do anything super-heavy or as provocative as what I’d usually do or be asked to do just this one time around. It’d be really nice to do work at least once in my life which half the populace or more soesn’t think is shameful and needs to be ferreted away somewhere. And I need a break from the heavy. I lit on something that is far lighter, but also still incredibly important — I don’t do fluff, just not my thing: don’t want to, and I suck at it, besides — and still young adult, which I’d like to stay in for a while. And not primarily about sex, thank freaking christ. Think good thoughts.

And today, I’m not doing any advice, I’m not reading any advice letters, I’m not even looking at the boards. Too. Much. I have other work I need to get caught up on, I have books I need to ship out, I need to do some boxing, some laundry and given last night’s nightmares and endless dog-scratching, I should even try to just take a freaking nap.

P.S. I’ve been noticing that in the last year, when I write here, I’ve been seriously overusing parentheses, and I have absolutely no idea what that is all about (really: none whatsoever).

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (2) »

All I’ve got for you today are some book-related quickies, in passing.

When Mark goes out of town for work, I never can get to sleep until dawn. Being so used to living in apartment buildings, houses feel unsafe to me, especially when I’m the only one in them. In apartments or rowhouses, you’ve got people on every side of you, who you know full well can hear even feet in your place, because they’re probably complained about it at least once. I’m a loud yeller, so if anything ever happened here, I’d probably get heard, but at the same time, this is Seattle, and the passivity of people here hardly inspires confidence.

I’m not afraid of the dark, but for whatever reason, when I’m here on my own I feel far more secure sleeping once the night sky starts flirting with dawn. However, since I’m also someone who naturally wakes when the light completely comes up, this means I get little to no sleep, and thus, am without proper brain function today.

Chicagoans: Still firming up some other dates and times, but on Tuesday, July 31st, at Early to Bed at 7:30 PM (North side: 5232 N. Sheridan Rd., right off Lake Shore Drive at Foster), I’ll be having an informal evening salon all about talking to kids and teens about sex and sexuality. Wine and munchies will be there, as well as the fantastic environ of a very fabulous women’s sex shop. (Thai, Sean and Erica: I’d better see you both there. Or else!) I’d also be up for an evening meet-and-greet somewhere that week if anyone wants to dish about it.

Two new press pieces on the book this week, one at Wiretap (Alternet’s Teen channel — it was also reprinted at The Nation and Alternet — whoohoo!), by the always-wonderful Rachel, and another at the Minnesota Women’s Press, by — which just rocked — a very cool high school intern.

I’m finishing an interview for the Center for New Words today, finally. It’s taken me an age because the questions they asked were so insightful and so huge, it’s earnestly broken my brain. But I was pleased as punch to be asked — it seriously made my month. For the most part, one of the toughest things I’ve dealt with in my writing and arts career is getting the perpetual cold shoulder from most feminist press: it’s taken a long time, for whatever reason, for a lot of feminist orgs to find the feminism in what I do, which has always flummoxed me utterly, since it’s not like you’ve got to dig for it. But, that’s looking up, which makes me very happy.

No joy yet on the financial front per all my work, I’m sorry to say. But I’m still over here trying to do everything I can to get that to turn around. Well, not yesterday. Yesterday the weather was so wonderful that I hooped in the back yard, played with the dog, viciously attacked the weeds that keep trying to take over my garden, made myself a fresh, simple dinner and whacked off before staying up all freaking night.

(I actually think I inadvertently did the equivalent of pissing on another dog’s territory in my masturbatory endeavors. Because I was feeling so ooky about being alone, I felt better masturbating in Mark’s office — which is HIS usual spot for that — than in the bedroom, which is my usual spot, and only occasionally his. I swear, I wasn’t trying to mark territory, but in hindsight I’m feeling a bit like a bad little puppy.)

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, s.e.x., apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (2) »

Sorry, more questions, still no answers!

(I’ll get back to actual entries any time now, really, I promise, including the magic carpet ride my dental hygenist in Minneapolis sent me on. But until then…)

• When I was in Minneapolis, doing my event for the GLBT youth center, I got a handful of questions about sexuality pertaining to infibulated women. This isn’t a shocker: Minneapolis has, for some time, had a substantial Somali and Ethiopian refugee program, resulting in a substantial Somali and Ethipian population there. I did know the basic answers to the questions, but I’d very much like to do an FAQ piece for Scarleteen answering questions not about the issue of FGM, but specifically address practical issues (orgasm and sexual response, healing from genital trauma, ways to respond to long-term health problems, etc.) for women and partners of women who have been genitally mutilated. However, I don’t feel right as a white woman who not only has not survived FGM, but who doesn’t live in/come from a culture or community in which FGM is prevalent. Might any of you know a woman who might be up to collaborating on this with me who does come from one of those perspectives?

• Over the last few years, I’ve noticed at Scarleteen that an awful lot of the worst (as if there were anything less than worst, but you get me) of our incest and friend-of-family rape cases arise from Austrailia and New Zealand. Are any of you better versed than I — and know decent sources I could look at — in terms of incest and friend-of-family rapes in those countries? More specifically, I’d like to have more than the basics I do on the justice system and incest, et al, on how social services generally responds (and what victim rights are), on basic cultural dynamics in terms of social and familial attitudes around incest and rape. (Stephen? Beppie? Kat?)

• Book events! I need to do them! Much to my dismay, I’ve started to discover that Seattleites are big, stuffy prudes, unless you’re approaching sex in a way that’s funny-ha-ha, all about the surfacey bullshit, or are a pro-domme. One big bookstore here even had the stones to tell my publicist that they “didn’t have an area private enough” to do an event with me. Did they think I was going to take my pants off and SHOW everyone sexual anatomy? I mean, I can see that Ann Rule has an event there (who, by the way, I’ve been known to read for a guilty pleasure; I’m a criminiology geek when I have three seconds of free time to read something besides work books, so I’m not dissing Ms. Rule). Is she going to be reading? Does she not need a more private arena to read about serial killing? Aren’t they worried she might give a demonstration? Ugh. So, save one event I got started cultivating yetsterday with a local book store (gods bless Ballard), I’m up empty. Suffice it to say, most of the rest of the world is pretty closed-mouthed, too. We knew full well from the start — it was glaringly obvious during the years of publisher-hunting — that a lot of people would be bloody terrified of this book, but it’s no fun to have it hammered home these days.

I’ll be taking some time over the next week to get this stuff together in a more formalized way, but really, I can be creative about this. For instance, if you’re in WA, Portland, Victoria or Vancouver, it’s easy for me to get to: want to link up a group of parents informally for some gabbing on how to deal with parenting and approaching sexuality with kids and teens? Want to have a sex educator over for a group of teen girls in your community to have an accurate gab-session? Heck, have a table for sex Q&A at your next office party? I’ll do it, man, just give me a shout. Very little is too weird for this gal, as is likely obvious by now.

• I also know I asked this before around a year ago or so, but I only got a response from one person, who never connected with me via email. I really, really, REALLY need to get connected with at least a couple other people who have to rape or abuse counsel, and do the sort of highly emotionally difficult work every day I do — it’s not every single day that things are so loaded, thank christ, but it’s close. And it’s getting more so: Scarleteen and myself have been around solidly long enough, and have established a certain feeling of safety for users long enough, that over the last few years, I wind up dealing with rape and abuse more and more often. Certainly, I’ll do it — I always move first to get survivors to seek out good hotlines and in-person counseling, but they usually stick around for support with me and our volunteers — it’s needed, but it also certainly isn’t what I’d choose to do or what I was prepared to do so much of. Some days, it completely wrecks me emotionally: it’s always particularly tough with hotline or ‘net hotline work because there’s only so much you can do.

(Over the last two months, we’ve also had a couple of abusers post, looking for sympathy. Poor them, they didn’t KNOW their silent, prone, half-asleep girlfriend didn’t want sex or poor them, their girlfriend DESERVES to be hit in the face, so it isn’t really abuse, you see. Don’t even get me started on what it was like to be around me on those days, and how frustrating it is that an IP address and email isn’t enough to file a report on these assholes.)

So, readers: do you do any work like this? Do you know anyone else who does who could also use an extra person to sit and unload it with? I don’t need the connection to be one way, or all about MY stress, I just need some like-minded (or rather, like-worked, if that’s even a real phrase, and I suspect it is not) people to chat with about this stuff.

And those’d be my shout-outs for right now: my apologies for them being so all about me. Also in the all-about-me category, beyond really great reviews in Bust and Bitch, there have been some really nice blog mentions/reviews of the book this week. C.K. made my day, and then a day later, Laurie Toby Edison made it even better, especially since she and Debbie paired my review with a review of one of my best friend’s books — a real perk, since Hanne and I miss working together (though each of us had a lot of back-and-forth while we were each working on these books, and each star in our dedications and acknowledgments), so it’s uber-cool when our stuff gets put in the same pile so we can kinda feel like we are again.

(P.S. thanks to my eBay tutorial volunteers: I’ll be pinging you today.)

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, activism, surviving abuse, seattle, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (11) »

Just a one-note quick hit from the road, here.

For Chicagoans, today’s Red Eye (the Trib’s free daily) has a nice interview and piece on the book, so grab a copy if you see one lying around!

And yes, that is really it. Not enough time, too much to tell, must to be off with the me right now.

P.S. That’s not really it. I still love my dentist in Minneapolis. Even more than ever. More on that later, though.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, s.e.x., shameless self-promotion | permalink | comments (0) »

Greetings from sunny Minnesota!

(I’m not being ironic: it’s freaking gorgeous here right now. I heart midwestern summer more than more.)

Just a quick hello, as I’m between gigs, currently hanging out on Becca’s deck, enjoying a beer and a lot of sunshine. I’m off in a little bit to the middle-of-nowhere, to celebrate The Baby Liam’s first birthday party w/Briana’s family, in the land of zero wireless and lots of cheese product on hot dishes.

I saw Liam yesterday, and he isn’t a baby anymore, he’s a very little toddler boy. Full head of hair, moving around, making a ton of noise, and reveling in his own chaos, just as he should be. I confess, I often feel a bit like an alien when I’m around babies and kids, and when I feel giant surges of love for them, I never find myself thinking, “Oh, I wish I had one of my own,” but instead, simply, “I wish I could see that kid more often.” I’m not sure if that’s really unusual — given the former reaction seems to be more common — or just whether the culture of women presented as needing to be maternal (and thus, women learning to present themselves that way) is just so huge that everyone has internalized that message, and thus, can often react differently. Of course, too, I have spent more time in the muck and the mire with other people’s children than most. In any event, I wish I could see that kid more often. We had a fantastic time yesterdat evening, and I expect that we’ll have some more before I leave.

Speaking of kids, my red-eye flight was from hell. It’s not just about getting exactly no sleep, even after taking a sleeping pill. I was seated in one of the most claustropobic seats possible, and in my row and the row behind, was surrounded by Amish family, who I haven’t been that near since I was a kid. The window was to my right, and at left, a 12 or 13-year-old boy. Not only did he snore like a mother (and here I thought, not sleeping at home for once, where Mark and Sofia are a veritable symphony of snores, that I’d get a break from snoring), but anytime I almost fell asleep, or looked asleep, he’d touch me with his fingers on my arm or my face, my guess is, out of simple curiousity. If I shifted in my seat, he’d harumph loudly, despite the fact that because I’m small and he was 12, we had plenty of room between us. The lone time I went to go to the bathroom, he was so freaking beligerent, he wouldn’t even stand up so I could get out, so I nearly had to give the kid a lap dance in having to crawl over him.

Suffice it to say, given it was Amish family, I didn’t exactly fell able to say, “Hey, sod the hell off, kid! While you’re at it, quit with the freaking snoring, wouldya?” Becca’s husband suggested I should have given him a copy of my book to read, since he was clearly so bored. Pity I didn’t think of that myself.

That child made me neither wish to have any myself NOR to be able to see him more often. And I have no doubt that that reaction on my part is exceptionally normal.

So, yesterday, I managed to nab three whole hours of sleep during the day, after which I had to do a Chicago Tribune phone interview, hoping to christ I didn’t sound as incomprehensible as I felt, but did have a fine afternoon and evening with Becca, Briana and lil’ Mr. Liam. I got to see Heather today, and expect Bri and I to make a long hangout of it tomorrow night. Sunday is the book release party, the first of the three events I’m doing while I’m here.

I’ve gotten more and more acclamated to Seattle, but not enough that the first thing I did when I got here was to call my hairstylist and my dentist and make appointments. I intend on going by the eye doctors while I’m here, as well, despite the fact that my cash flow for these things is not exactly generous at the moment. Alas.

Did have another book benchmark for me today, which is finding some libraries that ordered and are carrying the book, which in many ways, is far more important to me and of more value than bookstores carrying it. I was one of those kids for whom the public library was a second home: iwas latchkey, so it was normal for me to spend a lot of time at the library after school. In addition, when the shit really started to get super-bad at my house, one benefit of still managing to be a dedicated student is that when you won’t be allowed out of the house for anything else, you are often still allowed to get out of the house if you’re at the library. I need to make a point while I’m here in Minneapolis of heading to a couple branches with books to donate. I know I sat with my first copies of more than one vital sex book in the stacks, and it pleases me to no ned to think I can be providing the same experience for other young adults.

P.S. Just because it seems it needs to be said lately in more venues than I can shake a stick at: the feminist blogosphere is not feminism. The feminist blogosphere is not the feminist community. The feminist blogosphere is just that: the feminist blogosphere, and supposing it to be, or presenting it as, a good representation of the whole of feminism, the whole of theory, the whole of feminist activism or community is foolish. To be honest, I don’t even involve myself much at all with the feminist blogosphere or all its dramas in large part because it is so incredibly discordant to my experiences with feminism and community amoung women otherwise.

I mean, certainly, still in our culture, women as a class are in very big trouble. And still as ever, feminism is in big trouble. But in my estimation, neither are in the kind of trouble we’d think they were if we presumed the virtual community to be represnentative of the whole. And that’s the case with the blogosphere, period. It has it’s value, for sure, but an accurate representation of life and community as a whole it is not.

So, if you’re a person who feels strongly about feminism, but the blogosphere is bumming you out, I’d really encourage you to turn off the computer and go find some real-life community. Join up with your local NOW chapter, volunteer at a women’s crisis line or shelter or with a more ad-hoc feminist or women’s community, or just make your own. Names that go with faces that go with voices that go with a more visceral connection really do make a world of difference.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, family, feminism, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (6) »

SCARLETEEN: EXPLICIT ADVICE FOR THE YOUNG

I gotta say, I’m not sure how often I give what I’d call explicit advice. If I did, I think I’d use a lot less words than I tend to and sum it all up by just answering every advice question with, “Things will always get better. And then they’ll always get worse. A good orgasm is good when they’re better and when they’re worse, and a shitty relationship is good for neither, so don’t ever promise to stick around for both.” But I digress, as I often do.

Despite how whoo-whoo the copywriter who does the front page for the P-I clearly felt the need to be, it was pretty darn cool to see that staring at me from the city paperboxes the other day. The reporter did a fantastic job and it’s a really excellent, positive piece (though I felt more than a twinge of discomfort at some of the more traumatic parts of my youth being mentioned sans context in a big paper, but then, I don’t keep it a big secret, and it is good for people to see that abuse survivors, like, DO things) — and featured on the front page, yo — which is a great energizer for me. And lord knows, I needed it. This old girl is TI-RED these days.

So often, press pieces about Scarleteen have had this sort of begrudinging acceptance. Like, “Yeah, I guess kids need this stuff but it sure sucks that they do, and yeah, I guess this woman does serve a lot of them and do a good job, but it’d sure be better is she was somebody’s nice, married, surburban Mom, and not this childless, queer, feminist skank who actually really likes having sex, and not the kind we’d prefer she liked. But I guess it’s still a good thing.”

This? Much better. And a fine how-do-ya-do, I’d say, from my new home city.

* * *

But none of that is half as cool as a phone conversation with my Dad today telling me, all choked up, that he just had the very best day of his life.

What happened?

He got to go into a bookstore and get a book solo-authored by his kid, who he has watched and mentored with her writing and work since he taught her to read, and without fail, ever since. My father may have his failings, but I cannot think of a single instance in my life when he was nonsupportive of my as