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Filed under activism
WRONG
A 14 year old girl in Ventura, CA who has obviously been groomed by conservative parents is making a statement: boycott girl scout cookies because the Girl Scouts Of America are welcoming to transgender children who want to be scouts. Although she has another list of complaints surrounding the increasingly progressive nature of the Girl Scouts with their belief in a woman’s right to own her own body, learn about it, access health services, and make independent decisions regarding when to be a parents it’s the issue of trans inclusion that has her (and presumably her family, as she repeatedly mentions) riled up. In her video, she calls the girl scouts “dishonest and unfair” for including a 7 year old transgender girl into a troop and claims that this would disrupt the, “true all girl experience.”
Yeah, that’s some tired-ass transmisogynistic bullshit right there.
It’s not the first time that the Girl Scouts have come under fire from conservatives. Hans Zeiger, a young man who started to develop himself as an emerging conservative pundit when he was still a teenager, came under fire in his 2010 campaign for a 25th Legislative District of Washington seat for statements he made about the Girl Scouts in his adolescent years such as, “the Girl Scouts allow homosexuals and atheists to join their ranks, and they have become a pro-abortion, feminist training corps.” He pulled down his old work, made a formal statement that he did not stand by his old position any longer, and went on to win his campaign.
The 14 year old “founder” of the website Honest Girl Scouts calls up all those old ghosts but her video and campaign are exceptionally focused on transmisogyny. Although the website criticizes partnerships with Planned Parenthood and other more progressive policies, the project is dedicated primarily to maliciously excluding transgender children. More or less, the video is a teenage conservative’s rehashing of the “womyn born womyn” bullshit that comes out of the Michigan Women’s Music Festival. The 14 year old speaker in the video criticizes the girl scouts for not “confirming” the gender of a potential scout.
What the hell does it mean to “confirm the gender” of a 7 year old child? Where the fuck does that line of logic go? Does it require a note from your personal physician indicating the presence of a prepubescent pussy? A quick check by the scout leader before a camping trip? From where I stand, a child’s genitals are NOT THE BUSINESS OF A SCOUTING TROOP. Period. That comment alone is horrifying to me because of what implementing such a policy would even begin to entail.
The video goes on to equate a 7 year old transgender child with an 18 year old high school senior donning a dress and saying he wants to be girl scout in a deliberate attempt to sexualize the space as a man “pretending” to be a woman. It’s outright hateful and wholly irrational to equate a 7 year old child with an 18 year old high school senior wearing drag to violate women and it’s a straw man to boot. It’s a phantom, a fictional construction designed to inspire fear. First off, a 7 year old child is not “manipulating” the system as a way to get all kinds of “womyn born womyn” pussy. Secondly, even if the applicant were a high school senior trying to join the scouts, the risk of rape, assault, murder, harassment, and other violence that comes with being a transwoman in today’s society is already a pretty strong filter.
A policy of inclusion via identity is not a slippery slope for cisgender, heterosexual males to put on a dress and “use” the policy sneak in and violate women at will. That’s nonsense talk. That is what we call a logical fallacy and a bad faith tactic for debate. It’s just a way to derail a conversation and it wouldn’t be worth acknowledging at all save for the fact that this 100% contrived bullshit is so goddamn popular in the political arena right now. Grown-ass adults who cannot see past bigoted fiction should not be in charge of running our country. Marriage is NOT the most important issue facing sexual minorities but when Rick Santorum equated same-sex marriage to bestiality he exposed himself as someone who cannot be depended on for clear, rational, and intelligent thinking. Positing the notion that if a policy of inclusion based on gender identity rather than genital morphology will lead to quarterbacks donning drag and raping girl scouts with impunity is just as fucked up if not more so.
The you tube video created by the young woman calling for a total boycott of girl scout cookies until her hate issues are addressed is essentially a playbook of transmisogynistic commentary. The girl scouts have one simple policy for who gets to be a girl scout: being a girl between who is in kindergarten-12th grade. There’s also the huge class bias revealed in calling for a cookie boycott: those cookie sales make it possible to reduce the cost of GSA hosted camps and excursions for lower income scouts. In other words, not only is this a big FUCK YOU to trans folk it is also a big FUCK YOU to people of a lower income who rely on the GSA for the education, support, and opportunity to go explore the world it provides to their young daughters.
And frankly, even if the applicant were a teenage trans girl it still wouldn’t matter and that individual is still entitled to support. Our culture treats transwomen as lower than trash and the real world risk of unending bodily harm for coming out as trans is a pretty fucking strong goddamn filter. It’s totally disingenuous to state that accepting someone’s preferred gender identity means that “just anyone could claim they ‘want’ to be a girl.” The GSA has stated that they are responding to an increasing number of requests from transgender children with a warm welcome and what I would really like to see as a part of that response is strong support for transwomen who step up to be girl scout leaders, as well. It’s not about “allowing” transgender children into the scouts, it’s also about transgender women leading them.
Netter's Anatomy Book
Human beings have roughly 20-25,000 known genes. These are the ingredients for making a human and with 20-25,000 different ingredients, there are a metric fuck ton (that’s a scientific term, of course) of recipes to make a human being and they are all legitimate. It is often said we all “start” as female but this is not accurate. We don’t all start out with a pussy, we start out with a genital tubercle that develops as the genetic, chromosomal, and hormonal sequences unfold themselves. To put morphology (what you physically see on the outside) before gender is to literally put the cart in front of the horse. In fact, hormone washes and changes have the ability to reshape the morphology of the flesh between our legs even after puberty.
No, we do not all start as ‘female’ but we are all made out of the same “star stuff” and we’re just beginning to understand what that means.
And since there was a comment that admitting transgender children into the GSA “almost dangerous situation for children,” I would like to spend a moment talking about other venues that create an “almost dangerous” situation for children: school, church, playgrounds, day care, museums, camps, sports teams, locker rooms, and any place where a child is with someone that they know. When gender and sexuality are framed as something that belong to grownups like parents, teachers, clergy, or sexual partners it becomes much harder to internalize the notion that you make the final call about who does or does not touch you and that you have a right to fuck shit up for anyone who thinks they are entitled to it.
The GSA programming includes having conversations where questions are answered in age-appropriate but honest ways. Children have a right to know how their bodies work and teaching them that their body is their own is not what is confusing. Telling children that their body belongs to anyone with the means to take it (especially sky daddies) is what’s exceptionally confusing because it’s insane. Yes, the GSA programming teaches young women that they are the sole owners of their bodies. It helps provide information on how it works by partnering with recognized and accredited medical institutions, it teaches them that no matter what someone says it’s their call what they do or don’t do with their bodies.
This video and it’s accompanying webpage demonstrate transmisogyny very well: teaching bodily autonomy to women is bad but it’s worse to teach bodily autonomy to a trans woman or girl.
The GSA has been moving towards a more progressive stance on gender at a pace faster than any other self-identified feminist space. Although they aren’t perfect, I respect the Girl Scouts for listening to the people they serve more than they listen to the mainstream feminist establishment especially since they’ve had branches of their national organization that first began recognizing that gender is more than male/female since the early and mid-90s before the blogsophere was an established anti-oppression tool.
And this is the place where I start making people uncomfortable:
To the adults behind this campaign and especially to the parents of Taylor, the 14 year old girl behind this video, you better fucking hope that the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts and the schools and the average American household starts accepting non-gender normative kids. Some bigots will not let go of their male/female fiction until it is pulled out of their cold dead fingers and there are revolutionaries who are prepared to accept those conditions and they are supported by a growing number of allies who are willing to follow direction and aid the process because they recognize that their own liberation is tied up in the struggle as well.
The Girl Scouts are not a radical organization. I would say that they are progressive but they are not, in fact, creating an anti-oppression militia. They’re pretty passive but it’s not uncommon to see self-defense anti-abuse classes taught to even the littlest girl scout. At best, they’re starting to create a space where young queer, gender queer, and transgender kids can go and not be brutalized. There are radicals out there, though. Some might be in your community already and they have these new fangled tools that allow them to network, support, and cross-educate one another. When people do find their support network and have the opportunity to develop the confidence and self-esteem to defend themselves, they will.
So allow me to repeat myself: you better fucking hope that it’s the Girl Scouts who welcome marginalized children and actively implement policies and leaders who can fully support them because the Girl Scouts won’t teach you how to make a Molotov cocktail.
When you teach hate, what you’re teaching children is how to ignore, deny, and invisibilize the reality of our world and and the people who live in it. When you teach your children that they can act as the owner of someone else’s body, you have taught them a dangerous delusion. There is a human survival instinct and when you tell your children it’s OK to run around and start fucking with that they run the risk of touching the wrong button someday and those odds are going up with each passing moment. Although we convey a message of non-humanity to transgender/gender queer/intersex/non-gender normative humans, the truth is getting out there one tweet and blog post at a time.
When you go out of your way to fuck with people, systemically dehumanize them, rip out their support networks, and threaten their lives at a time when they can quickly and effectively organize, you’re creating something of a problem, especially if you make the police and criminal justice system wholly inaccessible to them as anything but a defendant. In that context, you have left those you’ve fucked with no other option.
If you raise a child to think that they can do whatever the fuck they want to do to someone so long as their victim looks less like Barbie or Ken than they do, you are setting them up to have their entitled ass handed right fucking back to them. If you raise a child to make it clear that no amount of logic, reason, or words will ever change their minds that marginalized people are worth less than they are and your child acts on those delusions, you are raising a future target for justified violence in the form of self-defense.
Something to think about.
Photo By Whole Sex Life
I was nervous the first time I was invited to fuck someone with a strap-on cock of my very own. The leather harness looked complicated to put together, there were straps and buckles everywhere. It actually took me several tries to figure out how to wrangle it all and stick a hard and bouncy appendage between my own legs and eventually I learned that a novice strap-on fucker’s best friend for the learning curve is a blindfold over the bottom’s eyes so they can’t see you struggle with the straps or resort to improvisation and overhand knots when it all becomes too complicated to handle.
Apparently it’s very important to have a cock between your legs if you want to get ahead in the world. Well I have something like 20 goddamn dicks in all kinds of sizes, colors, textures, and relative hardness. I have flaccid packers that I wear just because there’s something about the weight of a dick between your legs that makes you want to get into mischief.
RodeoH is a new San Francisco company that is attempting to take the complications out of cock harnessing. They built a harness out of a machine washable set of boy briefs that you can pull on and get going. It’s easy to wear under clothing even when it’s super tight and stylish and there are no complicated buckles to got lost with when you’re hot, bothered, and ready to go. I love it for being able to wear a flaccid cock while getting coffee because of the ease it creates in loading, unloading, or switching out a cock.
Versatility is key for me. I have a growing collection of strap-on harnesses and I’m no slouch when it comes to grabbing a piece of a rope to make one on the go. I’ve transformed button fly jeans and even saran wrap into harnesses. It’s a lot of fun to be inventive in bed but there’s something to be said for having something easy to carry around in a purse that makes it possible to get going in a few quick moves. There aren’t any rings to lose (or break), the cotton is super breathable, and it’s really simple to use if you’re looking to break out into the world of strap-on sex.
Advanced strap-on tops might be dismayed by the fact that the RodeoH won’t hold some of the bigger and wider cocks out there on the market. The website states that the optimal toy dimensions are about 5″-6″ length by and 1 1/2″-2″ width. This is true. Although it is possible to squeeze in something larger with the flexible ring, this is not a harness for giant dicks. The things that make this harness so quick and easy are it’s lack of straps and buckles. Still, the idea of wearing a harness comfortably all day long as a pair of underwear is the major draw of this harness.
Not to mention the fact that even I sometimes get obsessed with the size of the dick I’m wearing. It’s not the size of what’s between your legs that matters, it’s the pleasure of the people involved that really counts. In the event that I’m cruising for a quickie session in, say the bathroom of a bar or gas station, I’m not going to have the time to do all of the foreplay necessary to warm someone up for some of my monster cocks especially when something right off the bell curve of average cock size will do just fine.
RodeoH is an awesome company that is local to me in the Bay Area and I would very much like to thank them for sending this fun new toy to me. I’m happy to say that my RodeoH has a spot in backpack next to my lipstick, chewing gum, and other vital essentials. I would also like to thank the photographer, Whole Sex Life, for capturing these images.
As I strolled through my neighborhood, I couldn’t help but notice that the political postings calling for a recall of Mayor Jean Quan had been updated. Now I’m a fan of social progress and activism. I support the global Occupy/Decolonize movement. I don’t believe passivity will save us. I believe those being attacked have a right to physically defend themselves. I am also mad as hell about the fact that the physical brutality that Mayor Jean Quan is responsible for is considered an appropriate reason to plaster this bullshit all over the neighborhood that I have to walk through.
I don’t live in the part of Oakland where Mayor Quan lives. My neighborhood is a little more sketchy than that. It doesn’t have any easy access to the BART line, it’s a bit of a walk to get to any real commercial districts, and when I walk my streets I’m going to face no small amount of street harassment. Cat calling is not about compliments or beauty; it’s about harassment and the entitlement to say whatever you want to someone minding their own business just trying to get to the corner store. Whoever placed those signs did not take into the account that there are women who walk these streets with the knowledge that stalking them is not only socially appropriate, it’s heralded as damn near romantic in the mainstream media and cinema.
What do we know about stalking? According to a 2010 CDC report we know:
California was actually the first state in the country to criminalize stalking in 1990. The penal code states:
When someone is stalked, they are encouraged by anyone they report the behavior to get a restraining order. A restraining order is great if the individual receiving it is A) confused as to the nature of your relationship and B) reasonable. If someone wants to scare you, hurt you, rape you, or kill you a piece of paper is not going to stop them. A restraining order may reduce your stress and anxiety level but if you are genuinely concerned for your life it’s not going to be a restraining order that saves it. It’s just a piece of documentation for court if your perpetrator is arrested and if your district attorney pursues the case.
Stalking victims are re-victimized by people who either don’t give a shit and even by people with the best intentions. All in all, stalking and repeated malicious harassment are not taken seriously regardless of how many people are impacted each year. The number of women annually reporting stalking? It’s now well over 1,000,000 reports a year in the US. In Oakland, it took me 30 minutes to get a police response to an active burglary in my home when I was alone. A stalking victim in Oakland cannot maintain any faith whatsoever that the police will be able to uphold their restraining or protective orders.
These stalking signs are numerous in my neighborhood. I understand that they were written as a call to action against a mayor who DID take horrible life harming action against protesters but I’m the one who has to walk the streets of my neighborhood everyday.
I don’t want any part of your revolution if a “tactical political tool” is placing a reminder every 50 fucking feet by my house that stalking is a totally acceptable thing to do to a woman. The signs calling for a recall against Ed Lee in San Francisco, matching the recall signs for Jean Quan, have not been altered to reflect the pro-stalking stance so this isn’t being universally applied to any and all politicians pulling the string on the response to Occupy encampments. This was an articulation of the thoughtless misogyny that happens everyday.
There are men who are stalked but it’s positively fascinating that when it came to a female mayor, the reacting call to violence for her action was, perhaps “appropriately,” altered to reflect a form of violence against women that is systemically ignored and often fatal in the country. It’s a reminder that most anarchist spaces are not safe for marginalized people. The rhetoric matters.
I’m not proposing passivity. I’m asking to consider why some words are chosen for some people and not for others. Why not words like mace, tear gas, restrain, take down, rise against, incarcerate, kettle, or any other immediately related activities that would clearly demonstrate the utter lack of ethics she actually displayed in the way that Occupy Oakland has been handled without bring acute misogyny into it? Why was “stalk” chosen other than the fact that it is one of the scarier things you can imagine if you’re a woman? Why is it justified to throw the women in my neighborhood completely under the bus in regards to the very real world experiences we are having because someone wants to show just how angry they are at the mayor?
Knock that shit off and think for just 5 fucking seconds about whether or not you’re using the words that fit your intention. My neighborhood in Oakland does not have money or resources. We have bars on our windows and corner stores in the middle of the street. Every single night you can hear gun shots and after a few months you’ll never mistake the sound of gun fire with a car back fire ever again. It’s a load of fucking bullshit to put those signs on my streets in some fucked up way to reach people and get them to join the movement because Jean Quan does not fucking live here. It wasn’t a message for her, it was a message for the residents of my low income neighborhood. Fuck you very much for that, by the way. Our streets don’t get regular cleanup here and there’s a lot of us who already have more than our fair share of worry about stalking.
It took not only misogyny and a total lack of compassion for victims to infect my neighborhood with tons of those signs, it also took a lot of classism. These were signs made my someone who felt entitled to make those of us affected most by that kind of violence deal with the heavy weight of that message.
The town where I grew up was indeed a strange anomaly for Los Angeles County and with all of its quirks and unending anachronisms give it a Stephen King that was palpable to me even as a kid. The town had a weird mix; originally founded as a Victorian getaway for the Tuberculosis crowd, it used to have train access to Los Angeles and the Mt. Wilson peak was a popular getaway spot.
In many ways, some form of exhibitionism for being a bit peculiar was drilled into my brain. The eccentricity of Sierra Madre, 3 square miles with no electric spot lights in city limits has been documented in many “Bizarre Los Angeles” guides. If you consume American media, you have seen the streets where I live and undoubtedly the property where I went to high school. The classrooms were off to the side of the “Villa Del Sol Oro” which was a scaled model of a favored Italian villa that the original owner, a Tuberculosis doctor, had commissioned to be his office and his home. The basement was constructed to house medical equipment and state of the art refrigerators for medicines. It has one of the first electric elevators in the county. It went on forever in darkness; I got to go through it often as a child during Halloween when the whole villa was turned into a haunted mansion as a fundraiser and it was a doozy.
My freshmen year I got to be the source of the theatrics. The school had all of the classes, freshmen through senior, each take one of the main hallways on the 4 floors of the estate. The seniors got the basement. Clubs were offered the side rooms to transform into their own niche theme. I went with SADD because they got the medical grade kitchen and I was able to sway the vote to recreate a Bedlam clinic as a way to unnerve the patrons. We had teenage girls in hallow makeup, frizzed out hair, wandering in gowns. A sheet was hung up to show a silhouette of someone performing hydrotherapy the way the Victorians did best. We had straight jackets. We had other girls welcoming people in with a clipboard as doctors to welcome them for a tour of the facilities.
And people wonder why I’m kinky.
I grew up at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in a small and terribly archaic anomaly in Los Angeles County: a city only 3 square miles in size with no electric stop lights within the boundaries of the town, a life-size nativity prominently displayed on city property in the middle of the city square, a city wide dedication to the little league team, an all volunteer fire department, and one of the smallest and still 100% volunteer powered float contributors to the world-renowned Tournament of Roses Parade.
There is something so distinctly American about the Tournament of Roses Parade. On New Years Day (unless it’s a Sunday in which the festivities proper are held until the 2nd) there is the Rose Bowl football game which is preceded by an egregious display of wealth, prominence, and privilege in the form of a parade in which the floats must be 100% covered in organic matter presided over by the Rose Queen and her attending Rose Princesses.
The Rose Court ladies must be students in the Pasadena school district as high school seniors or in the first year at Pasadena City College. It used to be that many young women from other cities would actually enroll at P.C.C. just for the chance to try out for the Rose Court and the chance to reign for the period of one year of American Aristocracy. It is quite an honor; the young ladies are more or less passed from their classes due to the hectic schedule of being a reigning queen or princess. There are endless charity events to attend and the ladies spend a great deal of time at the gorgeous ivory-white Victorian mansion headquarters for the Tournament Of Roses. They are given a wardrobe, etiquette classes, makeup teams, lessons in elocution, and every other element of training to articulate fine breeding.
They are given constant gifts and shuttled around by a staff of knights in white minivans with the rose emblem prominently displayed. Young children bask in their presence and they all have a perfect smile. Now, it used to be that the rose court matched the paint on the mansion and the minivans but there have been great efforts to include women of color. Taking a cue from Mattel, the court is the very definition of mainstream beauty and strikingly similar physiques and flashy white smiles under rhinestone tiaras.
The auditions are held annually at the mansion early on in the fall. Hundreds of anxious young ladies line up around the block in their prettiest outfits practicing their best smiles and rehearsing what they’ll say in the allotted 20 seconds they would stand before the panel of judges who would smile the whole time and thank them kindly for coming out that day.
In the fall of 2002, I was standing in that line. My motives were slightly different and although it is true that it was my mother who encouraged me to attend and stood at my side, it really doesn’t play out the way most people imagine it would go. We both had the same derision for the beauty standards and neither I nor she had any illusion I was going to picked to be part of the court. We were there together purely to enter ground zero of this bizarre ritual. We wanted to peer inside the mansion, we wanted to see these people behind this wholly contrived affair and the incredible amount of money poured into it.
Seriously: this parade has a fucking budget and a prestige that I will never understand. As a small child, I had my city pride in the fact that unlike everyone else in this stupid fucking parade we never hired designers, contractors, engineers, floral specialists, or anything. Children submitted designs, people voted, and then whoever stepped up to lend a hand to build thing showed up at the big warehouse behind the little league fields to work. At 9 years old, I loved the lack of rules governing the operation especially around the issue of child safety in a workplace involving serious risk to life and limb.
I mentioned that everything had to be covered in organic matter. Unless it’s a moving part, you have to stick down flowers, seeds, leaves, rice, or something that grows from the ground onto the exterior. It’s a huge waste of resources and a lot of what is used is wholly edible. In a city where there are people who are homeless, it’s really a cruel joke that millions of dollars are spent cultivating food that will be applied to the side of a 50 foot tall moving nutcracker that sings and has people dressed as elves and bears dancing at the bottom.
At 9 years old, the fact that the foreman on the project told me I could glue corn husks onto the bottom of our larger than life train car with moving wheels by sliding underneath the engine of it all and its amateur construction while it was actively being tested for safety and functionality was a total delight to me. Even at that age I knew I was embarking on a task that was totally and utterly unsafe and situation that no sane adult should ever recommend. The foreman saw only thing: the whole fucking float had to be covered in organic matter and someone had forgotten to get the part underneath the engine that was technically considered in the judging and only a 9 year old would be small enough to get in there now. So I was handed a tray of some seriously fun glue, a bunch of corn husks that I myself had been ironing for hours, and scrunched underneath the hulking, moving, and dangerous iron beast with a smile on my face.
Those are the moments I remember fondly about the tournament of roses. Then again, there was a certain magical bewilderment I always had when thousands of people camped out on the streets of the parade route on New Year’s Eve just to get a good spot to see the parade. Really, it wouldn’t have been too terribly hard for me to have biked out to see this prestigious event and I could not wrap my head around the fact that it was prestigious purely because so many people watched it.
But back to the day of the day of the audition.
My mother and I stood in line with a distinct feeling of otherness and a serious unfamiliarity of how to play this situation as mother daughter. The behavior of the fray did not match our own and I could see that my Mom was struggling for the right way to be supportive despite the fact this whole thing was so clearly stupid and overtly in opposition to the notion that a woman could be a valuable for a brain and not just a mile long white flashy smile and ability to wear a tiara well. I had no idea how to dress for the occasion. “Femininity” was a concept that also baffled me. I had attended my first high school in drag because I literally had no idea where to begin when it came to dressing like a girl. It was obvious that this was an assessment of how well we did by age in balancing girlhood and womanhood.
I hadn’t come into with any intention or desire to win but as I got closer to the front it just made me feel sick to actually go through the process of certain rejection. It didn’t matter why I was there, those assholes with the minivans–no matter how fucking polite–were the ones who made the decisions about which young lady was princess material and who wasn’t. I could be smarmy, I could be witty, I could bitchy, I could be smart as a whip. I could say whatever the fuck I wanted but when it was my turn it wouldn’t amount to anything more than humiliation because they had everything. When it was my turn, I mumbled something along the lines of being there “because it was Pasadena,” and then walking off to the side room for my complimentary portrait holding a massive bouquet or crisp beautiful roses.
I felt like I was in a daze. Until the flashes from the portraits being taken of the cattle line with our numbers pinned onto our shoulders so the judges could remember what we looked like, I just floated through the space locked entirely into my head. I was wearing an orange skirt with even brighter orange polka dots and a vermilion blouse on top with small black heels on my feet from Payless. I looked like the surface and it matched my perspective on everything.
Probably 85% percent of the line is there gunning for the gold. Then you have the other 15% split along more unique motives. One young woman showed up in a Marlene Dietrich tuxedo ensemble, flipped the judges the bird, yelled, “Fuck the patriarchy!” and then strolled off into the portrait room. The judges didn’t even flinch; just smiled their polite smile, thanked her for coming out, and waved her goodbye.
I could have loved her but there was no way for me to get past the crowd to chat with her and then I lost her entirely in the fray. Still I watched and the way that even with the courage she had that I lacked I could still see the lonely hollow in her eyes that crawled back into her own mind just as mine had when I was standing back at her end of the line. My eyes also perked up when I saw a young man with the physique of a quarterback enter the room in deliberately horrible drag; an ill-fitting sequin dress and cheap blonde wig hanging haphazardly from his head.
I watched him and felt instantly the same way that I felt the first time I saw Victor/Victoria. It was sudden and deep envy of men in feminine attire. It’s where my mind always goes when I see pictures of Weimar Berlin. Now this young fellow was obviously putting on a satire but his body posture was otherwise quiet and unassuming. He was very polite and kept mostly to himself never once obviously lingering on the bodies of the women in cocktail dresses and heels standing everywhere around him. I didn’t lose him in the crowd and felt compelled to make his acquaintance when we were spit out into the exit parlor with information about the “Rose Ball” danced hosted for anyone and everyone who tried out for the Tournament Of Roses. It was well-known as the “loser’s ball” and represented a major portion of everyone’s purpose in being at the mansion that day.
It was just like prom but infinitely more elegant and moreover it was 100% free for anyone who came out to the audition and one guest of their choosing. Unlike a high school, they had a public relations board and a lot of market research into anything and everything they did. This is a profitable enterprise. There were no demands on gender or heterosexual conformity. They were 100% hands off. Additionally, they didn’t put us through the horrific rigamorale of drug dogs and metal detectors outside of the dances we were used to attending. They didn’t search our bags, they didn’t police our outfits, they had lots of security to handle any problems but otherwise kept their hands off and let us celebrate our loserdom in decadence.
When I caught up to the young man in drag, I asked him with a smile why he came out. He told me that he and his girlfriend were both pretty broke and wouldn’t be able to afford the $100 tickets to their prom but that this dance would be an even better substitution. She had been looking forward to dressing up and having a night on the town just like the movies had always depicted and she was going to be auditioning herself just for the dance tickets. As fate would have it, she had come down with food poisoning and was at home vomiting. “I figured that if it was important to her, she shouldn’t have to lose out because of that. I guess you’re supposed to wear a dress for the audition so I grabbed one from my mom’s closet.”
I don’t remember the name of this individual and but a decade later, here from this blog, I really wish the best for this guy wherever he is. I got a sense that he was a class act when I was 17 but here I am at 27 and his participation in my memory of that event gives me hope that even at ground zero of some fucked up gender problems there were still teenagers out there playing with gender and questioning the event.
Looking at the blogs, twitter accounts, and tumblrs of young queer and trans activists I get the sense that those auditions for the Tournament of Roses are going to get pretty fucking interesting in the coming years. This is an institution that needs to be challenged and taken down by the youth it caters and markets itself to and I have hopes that this will happen. There’s more and more information and resources available to those asking questions. I was there at the dawn of it but I smile at what there is now and I delight when high schoolers get rowdy and uppity about gender bullshit.
How much longer are people going to keep smiling at the beauty of this meaningless, wasteful, and humiliating tradition? The “Doo-Dah Parade” has been a time honored counter-culture response to the Rose Parade. It’s very dada-esque in many regards and famous for the fact that the crowd was once encouraged to throw tortillas at the people in the parade as a commentary on wasting food. This has fallen out of popularity because of waste and because there was something of a serious tortilla injury at some point. Now you’re more likely to see people in the Hibachi Grill Marching Band preparing hotdogs, wrapping them in tin foil, and launching them from constructed “hot dog bazookas” and firing them for safe consumption into the crowd.
Build a hot dog bazooka, feed the people, and rather than a rose court have a contingent of the “dead rose queens” in zombie makeup and sashes from yesteryear. Make fun of the institutions, have a few laughs. Everyone loves a parade and the Doo-Dah is an open call to anyone with an idea. You show up in the morning with your bizarre performance art and get in the line. The “Invisible Man Marching Band” led by one man with a bandaged body below a suit and sunglasses waving a baton, blowing a whistle, and standing in front of a 30 foot gap leading his brigade. A group of people under the banner, “The Bastard Sons Of Lee Marvin” smoke cigars and get surly walking together as a group. You could see anything, really, and I think it’s much more fun than the Rose Parade any day.
Filed under About me
Photo by WholeSexLife.Com
I hope that everyone out there in internet land is getting through the bleakness of winter in the company of loved ones. I am a secular slut but I’ll never be opposed to hanging lights when there is so little sun in the day. All of my very best wishes to everyone and I hope that you have a spectacular New Year. I will be making some changes to my website here early on in the new year and I hope you’ll come back to check out the new look.
It is also my pleasure to announce that I may be coming to your city in 2012! I have been getting booking requests at different universities and venues to help promote sex worker rights, consent culture, and more! It’s an honor to be invited but as a broke ass ‘ho it’s hard to get anywhere when you don’t have a plane ticket. As a low budget backpacker, it will be thrilling to sleep on couches and meet new folks. I’m not a fancy traveler but hitchhiking isn’t quite going to work out this time around.
Kitty and I posing for a quick shot at Pride 2011 with Folsom the dog
The amazing Kitty Stryker and I will be hosting a fundraising event on Jan 24th at the Center for Sex and Culture and we need YOUR help! We’re in need of financial donations to help us travel to the places that would like to learn more about consent and entitlement culture but we also need raffle prizes, performers, snacks, and anything else that can help us hit the road and change the world. If you’re in the bay area, mark your calendars and come out! It’s going to be sex positive fun with all kinds of toys, bur- and boilesque performances, and more!
If you aren’t able to come out but want to lend us a helping hand, send a donation via chip-in or email me: missmaggiemayhem@gmail.com with your ideas or contributions. Thanks for all of your help in advance and help us make our way across the continental landscape.
Filed under activism
Christians are such wonderful people. When they get together to celebrate the birth of Jesus, they’re filled with such delight and joy that the mere thought of someone celebrating any other birth, historical events, cultural practice, tilted axis and rotation of the earth, or blockbuster films gunning for an academy award just tears them up to pieces. Without Christians speaking up, how would we know that, “Happy Holidays” is actually a call for Christian genocide? It’s good to have such helpful Christians fighting the “War On Christmas.” Such brave soldiers. How truly oppressed Christians must feel during winter. There’s only hundreds upon hundreds of unconstitutional Christian nativity scenes displayed on state owned property rather than thousands upon thousands.
The best proof of just how brave the Catholic League can be is evidenced in their brand new, “Adopt An Atheist” program. Now there are a lot of atheist and skeptical blogs tearing this to pieces but don’t let that impact how you see this very giving and self-sacrificing program designed to fill those pews (and coffers) up with Christians who don’t know that they are in fact Christians and have gotten confused in this violent “War On Christmas” and are afraid to reveal their true Christ-like self amid all of the loathing and oppression heaped onto people in America who believe that Jesus is their savior.
Seriously, please adopt me. Adoption means that you’ll take care of my finances, right? I’m driving a 2011 bus pass, I live in a tiny apartment in a very exciting part of Oakland, CA, and I am something of a heathen. If ever there were an atheist in dire need of adoption it would be me. In order for me to understand your sincerity, you’ll peruse my wishlist and make sure I have some gifts to put underneath my Christmas Tree, right? That’s what normal people do. Help me be normal! I don’t usually have a tree and maybe the reason I hate Christmas so much is because I don’t get presents and a couple of years ago I was actually burglarized on Christmas. The best way for me to believe in Christmas Magic would be to see it in its full glory in a giant spread of goods I need and want.
It’s important to remember that if you don’t adopt me and give me a proper Christmas full of gifts and joy, I’m just going to go out and have sex on camera for that money. I know, just those words alone make all of the holy water in the bay area start to boil simultaneously. For every rent check, utility bill, and trip to Haiti I go on, I have to spend hours upon hours of my time having sex with my friends and my personal partner. Is there any other atheist more needy and starving of Jesus’ love? Sure, there are lots of hungry and homeless people in need of adoption in the cold of winter but they aren’t as needy as I am because I’m an atheist whore. I’m morally bankrupt. I have no Christmas tree. I don’t go to church. I read the bible as a piece of ancient global literature.
The Catholic League website makes it clear: if we hurry, these closeted Christians can celebrate Christmas like the rest of us. As an added bonus, they will no longer be looked upon as people who “believe in nothing, stand for nothing and are good for nothing.”
Good for nothing, wow. I thought that going to a place that was hit by a devastating earthquake and left in ruins to sledge, shovel, and clean up the mess was good for something. Now I realize that my work was helpless. The shelters that I built are “atheist shelters.” Oh you might think that they provide cover from the weather, safety from the outdoors, and a place to call home but the families that I worked with know that they live in an “atheist shelter” and it is chillier inside an “atheist shelter” than a real, genuine Christian shelter even in the tropics. It actually snows inside of the good for nothing “atheist shelters” I helped build.
I need someone from the Catholic League to adopt me, clearly. Just the other day my partner and I were talking about planning another volunteer expedition for the summer. Imagine what HORRIBLE things would happen if we showed up, jumped into some manual labor, and did so without any agenda other than clearing debris and constructing shelters. That’s just going to make more snow, isn’t it?
So please, Catholic League. Adopt me. Give it your best shot. Take me as a lascivious little lamb who needs to frolic back into the arms of my eternal shepherd zombie in the cloud castle.
Petri dish holiday tree, Image credit
Filed under atheism
I hate when there’s a sex panic about teenagers. Here’s one: ZOMG! THERE ARE SOME TEENS WHO HAVE HAD MULTI-PERSON SEX!
This study was shocked, shocked! to discover that 7.3% of girls aged 14-20 have had MPS- multi person sex. It’s a study that also utterly fails to forget that there are very few places where teens can go and they tend to travel in groups. Teens don’t have the luxury of saying, “Your place or mine?” to one another when the feeling is right.
That’s not to say that this doesn’t come with problems. You know how it’s illegal to drink alcohol until you’re 21 in the US and yet most college students enter at age 18? You know how that started to create a little problem known as 19 year olds drinking to their deaths during hazing rituals? So, we suspend teens who send sexy or lewd text messages even outside of school hours. We withhold information about sex. We also strongly limit where teens can get together and blow off some steam.
Teenagers don’t have studio apartments. Maybe they have cars, all ages punk rock venues, hamburger stands, coffee shops, dances, parking lots, playgrounds, and their one friend who has parents vacationing in Europe. It’s not like teenagers invented the rule that you had to be 18 or sometimes even 21 to rent a hotel room.
We’re terrified of teens fucking. We’re terrified of teenagers in packs. In 2011 we’re terrified of teenagers fucking in packs. Who knows what next year will bring.
Multi person sex…sounds like the quintessential 1950s “lover’s lane” if you ask me. Maybe if I want to be a famous sociologist I can popularize the phrase, “episodes of vehicular exhibitionist indecency.” These spots were out of the way places where teens wouldn’t bother or be bothered by any meddlers while they engaged in their various mating rituals. Whether or not the researchers went to prom, I can only imagine that they’ve heard of this popular teen tradition of simulating the act of heterosexual marriage including consummation.
Isn’t there a scene in the original “Invasion Of The Body Snatchers” in which the alien invasion zapping the American-ness out of the city residents is evidenced by an entirely empty “lover’s lane?” The fact that there weren’t a bunch of cars full of young romantic couples in love out by the lake necking was a sign that shit was getting all kinds of fucked up.
Multi-person sex among teens is also known as, “DUDE! Steve’s parents are out of town and he has a heated swimming pool in his backyard! Party Friday night!” Are there hazards to this? Quite a few, most of which could be addressed by being realistic about the fact that teenagers are exploring themselves and adulthood. When we illegalize adolescence, we kill our youth. That’s what the statistics are showing us. Teens are doing something new. It’s the same old thing, the same old panic, and increased surveillance and criminal penalties.
The only way to survive being a teenager without getting yourself a record is to be rich or a child suddenly thrown into adulthood at 18 or 21 without any of the experience to handle what’s happening. It’s just frustrating to see muckraking masquerading as social science.
Filed under activism, sexuality, slut shaming
I am a last minute addition to the Bawdy Storytelling event happening TONIGHT, Thursday December 15 at the Uptown in Oakland, CA. The theme is WINNING! and the story lineup looks fantastic.
Thursday, December 15th (Special Holiday date)
Doors at 7, Stories at 8
$10 at the door
The Uptown NightClub
1928 Telegraph Avenue
Oakland, CA
Stories by:
Sarah Dopp is obsessed with the Internet, microphones, the overlapping edges of gender, and the kinds of adventures that make for a really good story. She accidentally lived in China, she drives to the Grand Canyon on a whim, and she recently learned how to make ice cream. Sarah likes to build communities, and she’s created thriving ones around genderqueerness, writing, and performance — both on the Internet and right here in San Francisco. She’s been published in Coming and Crying and Gender Outlaws: TNG, and has a history of co-hosting of San Francisco’s Queer Open Mic. But lately, she’s just been kinda normal.
Jonathan Moore-Northrop spent his first thirty years telling blue stories in a red state. In 2008, he relocated from Phoenix to San Francisco in search of like-minded leftist homosexual perverts. In collaboration with artist Chris Kelsey, Jonathan is the creator of the webcomic BDSMBadAdvice.com, which is relaunching in January.
If Kitty Stryker was a My Little Pony, her cutie mark would be a pen crossed with a sword. She is a sex worker who writes about filth and politics for Good Vibrations, Filament, and Artwank, among other publications. In her copious free time, she’s head of the queer Ladies High Tea and Pornography Society, founder of Kinky Salon London, and a devotee of enforced feminism. Kitty blogs about her professional and personal experiences at Purrversatility.blogspot.com.
Mandy Hixson is a San Francisco native who started attending Burning Man at 17. Most recently she has been traveling around the world and occasionally performing – burlesque in Istanbul, fire dancing in Bangalore and and inadvertently a sex show in New York. She is now very happy to be back at home in the city of queers and pervs.
Blythe Baldwin is a writer, poet, & visual artist. As an outspoken & unapologetic queer she spreads a sex positive outlook through the arts. She has featured at The San Francisco Queer Open Mic & performs regularly in the Bay Area. She spends her nights writing & drawing comics.
Maggie Mayhem is a writer, performer, and sex hacker who lives an underground Oakland lair that is a hub of sex positive technology, art, and activism she shares with her partner Ned Mayhem. You can find Maggie at her home on the web, MissMaggieMayhem.Com or on Twitter.
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Come out to my fabulous play party at Mission Control in San Francisco FRIDAY, Dec 16th from 9PM-3AM. We have tons of fungeon play space, a hot theme about uniforms and anti-uniforms, sexy decor to get you in the mood, great people to meet, and some sizzling entertainment. Come out and rock your socks and enjoy comedy by MORGAN at 9PM and the band BOBBY JOE EBOLA at midnight.
I can’t wait to see EVERYONE there! If shiny boots get you salivating and you think that uniforms were made to be fucked in, make it a point to come out to THRESHOLD.
Filed under events
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