Tilting at Windmills

Happy Birthday agt_spooky!

For your birthday (belated), I wish for you that you see everything you want in the upcoming miniseries of X-Files.  :)

Many happy returns!

Blessed Solstice!  Grateful for the return of the light!

I got asked out on a date.  By I guy whose conversation I enjoy, and he's not bad to look at either.  Sounds great, right?

And yes, on one level, I'm very excited.  Flattered.  Tickled even.

But.

After the initial excitement, I think about the likelihood that if he is interested in me romantically enough to ask me on a date, he is probably interested in me sexually as well.  He presents as a cis-het male, and the world being what it is, if he wasn't interested in me at all sexually, he probably wouldn't have asked me out.

And it's not that I don't like sex!  I'm quite fond of it, in fact.  I masturbate regularly, and I love the sexual responses of my body.  I love the experience of achieveing orgasm, and that mellow feeling afterward that all is right with the world.  So why does the idea that a man might want to help me reach that great place, and go there with me, why does that frighten me?

Well, I am a woman of size. I'm not obese, by either the old or the newly revamped and much more broad definition of that term.  (Heh, "broad," get it?)  I am probably around a size 16.  Maybe even a 14, in the more deliberately flattering design labels.  But I'm not "slender." I'm not "athletic" or any of the other buzz words we use to hide that we are specifying someone who is skinnier than me.

(And isn't it telling that I felt I had to qualify that? That I felt I had to make the distinction that I am a little fat, but not a lot fat?)

I'm also an activist for body acceptance.  I read, recommend, and link on social media articles from blogs like The Body is Not an Apology, Dances With Fat, Fat Body Politics, This Is Thin Privilege, etc, etc.  Hell, I co-hosted a 12 month live-stream discussion series on Women, Food and Body Politics that examined every aspect of women's relationship to food and our bodies!  So intellectually I know that my body is just as rad as anyone else's, and that I should be proud of all that it is, not punish myself for what it is not.

But.

Those messages are everywhere, aren't they?  Those messages that tell you that you should be skinnier, younger, more fit, eating less, eating better (I eat very well, btw); that you should just be better?  That romance is really only the purview of the physically fit?  Tell me, when have you last seen, in television, movies or print, hell, even in a work of literary fiction, a woman of size having a physically satsifying and healthy sexual relationship?  I mean, I can barely remember the last time I saw a woman of size at all in the media, much less having a satisfying sexual life.

So I think about the possibility of this new man putting his hands on my body, seeing parts of my body unclothed, and I shudder.  Not out of excitement, not out of anticipation, but out of horror. Out of shame.  Despite the fact that I know that's bullshit.  That I know I shouldn't feel that way.  That insidious, pervasive message has snuck in behind my logical defenses and lodged itself firmly in my insecurities, in my nervousness, in my fear of the new and unknown.

Men and women of the world, know this.  There are scores and scores of women out there with whom you could be having healthy, wonderful, enthusiastic sex.  Whose bodies you could be enjoying as much as they enjoy them.  With whom you could be having the very, very best kind of sex:  joyful, mutually satisfying, skillful, generous, sex without shame. But standing in the way of that is all those messages that Hollywood, the media, advertisers and religious zealots are sending over and over to women that sharing their bodies, sharing their orgasms, is only reserved for the worthy few.  For the young, for the skinny, for the males who selfishly take what they want.

For everyone else, for women like me, the only thing I am expected to feel about my body is shame.  And that, my friends, does not lead to good sex.  At least not easily, not joyously, not effortlessly.

And That. Just. Sucks.

It is Shrew, Shrew, all the time Shrew right now.  We are swinging into the meat of rehearsals, I'm trying to get off-book, and our fundraising campaign has 10 days left in it, and we are just under half way there.  So here's where I start begging.

Could you be so kind as to post this link on your social media stuff?  Facebook, LJ, Twitter if you do it, Instaface, Imguram, whatever else is out there?  The more eyes see these, the more likely we are to succeed, so would appreciate any publicity you can give us!

Thank you thank you!!!

http://www.hatchfund.org/project/fifty_shades_of_shrew

Throw Yourself Like Seed
by Miguel de Unamuno

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
Sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
That brushes your heel as it turns going by,
The man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
Which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
But to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
Is the work; start there, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
Don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
And do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
For life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
From your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

I know I post a lot of these, but I apparently continue to be surprised and dismayed how formulaic they are.  Here is a pretty typical example of the Bad Mom role:

MARTHA HARDIN / Other / Principal / Female / Caucasian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern / 45-65
Martha Harden (45-65) mid 60’s, Stacy’s nagging mother. Martha is an overly dramatic lower middle class woman who loves flashy things and acts younger than she is. Martha wants to be in charge of Stacy’s life.
Rate: NO PAY - COPY CREDIT AND MEALS

Overbearing? Check. Vain? Check. Controlling? Check. Nagging? Check. Materialistic? Check. Dares to make herself the center of her own Universe? Check.


In contrast, the Good Mom role is of course that she loves her family more than her life, dotes on her husband and kids, stays at home and in the kitchen where she belongs, would do anything for her family, and has no goals/life of her own.  Oh, and is a former beauty queen.

There are only two kinds of Mom, folks.  Just so's ya know.  ;)

Suffrajitsu: Mrs. Pankhurst's Amazons, by Tony Wolf, art by João Vieira.
Content warning: depictions of misogyny, drug use, violence

Full disclosure - I am not a fan of graphic novels.  I struggled through The Watchmen, immensely grateful when the panels and floating bubbles of dialogue gave way to interludes of plain, ordinary text on which I could rest my eyes and simply read the story.  So I was a bit trepidatious when I was asked to review Suffrajitsu, despite the fact that I knew I would love the content.

Full disclosure #2 - I'm a feminist.

Suffrajitsu tells an alternative history to that of the Suffragettes of 1914 in England and the UK.  It is part of the Foreworld Saga, and will initially be published electronicly via the Kindle app, and later as a print collector's edition by Jet City Comics. There is a very helpful companion website at www.suffrajitsu.com if you want to either brush up on your history before reading, or learn more about the historical figures after reading.  The website also relates the actual events that inspired the graphic novel's storyline.

Persephone Wright quickly engaged me as an admirable heroine, and I was easily drawn into her struggles.  The supporting characters were distinct and came to life in just a few brush strokes.  (I personally loved the nod to Judith Lee, who has her own collection of adventures as a lip-reading Sherlock Holmes.)  The art is vibrant, energetic and cinematic, perfectly suited to the action/adventure nature of the story.  The hostility of those on the wrong side of history, the men who attack the suffragettes and who make the Amazon bodyguard necessary, is dealt with most satisfactorily.  The victories are hard won, however, which made me root for the Amazons even more.

Twists and turns lead us to a doozy of a cliffhanger ending, when the story diverges dramatically from the actual history of the Suffragette movement.  There are some breadcrumbs scattered throughout that may lead to where I think the story is going to go, but nothing is given away.

I had to go back and read it several times to fully absorb it because I so rarely read graphic novels (see above), and I have difficulty following the format.  But with Suffrajitsu, multiple readings were a pleasure!  If you are a fan, I strongly recommend you pick this one up when it is released at the end of January 2015.

Here's the cover art:

How fun is that!?!

Oh mighty F-list!

So Amy the Dog and I are $65 away from our first milestone goal, when I can enroll the little stinker in her first level of classes.  Hopes are that that is all she will need, and frankly, judging from how damn hard it was to get to this point, I doubt there is any way we could afford the next level of classes even if this set doesn't work.

Could you all send around one more time to your circles the appeal and the website?  If I can even get down to $25 out, I'll cover the rest and make the damn appointment.  I just want to get her help.  We had another bad walk yesterday, where we ran into a bunch of dogs and we were both jittery messes by the time we got home.  She and I both need this training so badly!

Here is the website:
http://www.youcaring.com/pet-expenses/amy-the-dog-s-training-and-rehabilitation/249199#.VECheHmoTII.facebook

The more eyes see it the better.

Thanks for your support!

I don't know how it happened but I'm over my head again.  I just can't seem to help biting off more than I can chew.

Well, I guess the big change is I got cast in a show, and that will officially begin rehearsals on Nov 16th, and go 5 days/wk until we perform on the second weekend in December.  It's actually a short process:  less than a month of rehearsal and then only two performances and we are done.  But that will mean that not much else is going to get done during that time!

I do keep crossing things off my to-do list, but I've got such a backlog right now, it doesn't seem to matter much.  I have to remind myself that I can only do what I can do, and that as long as I am moving forward, I'm making progress.  It just when I have stacks of paper on my desk that need attending to, and I can't keep my email inbox under 50 outstanding emails that need attention, I get pretty stressed out.

I did finally get one big thing accomplished however.  I finally was able to upload the finished version of Things I Should Have Said to YouTube.  I had to do it at a lower resolution than I wanted, but my connection is just not good enough to upload the higher resolution - after trying over ten times and having it fail every time, I just gave up.  Anyway, here it is.  Would love it if you could watch and give some feedback - I'm curious how it plays.  Thanks!

I've been kind of down for the last day or two, just feeling physically beat, and it's wearing on my mental strength as well.  But tonight we taped another For Fork's Sake and I feel pretty good now.  Exhausted, but good.  The episode was on Body Autonomy & Body Policing, and despite our usual technical difficulty (there's one every time, but it's never the same...) it was a spirited and intelligent discussion.  We talked about doing a Part II because this was such a broad topic that we barely scratched the surface.

Anyway, the next time you grab something to eat, instead of sitting in front of the t.v., load this up on your computer and watch it instead.  We could use the views!