“What benefit is there to toasting bread instead of just eating it untoasted? If there is no benefit, how much electric energy is wasted on toasting in the U.S. of A., do you think?”

I think the most elegant spam is this kind. You find yourself reading it, and pondering the points raised, and you come this close to posting a comment in response… and then you remember that this has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the post.

For the folks playing along at home, you’ll notice I’ve added a few new links to my blogroll. I’m often slow at updating my links, so some of these are folks I’ve had in my RSS reader for a while.

I do want to highlight some of the folks I added who are doing fantastic work around disability issues. FWD/Forward is a new blog focusing on disability and feminism, and the writing there is simply fantastic. They’re also great about posting roundup of work elsewhere on the internets, which is how I discovered Broken Clay and Wheelie Catholic.

The concept of “safe spaces” is often the subject of debate in the blogosphere. Is it ever possible to create a completely safe space for everyone? Can we avoid triggers? Can we eliminate hate and ignorance?

I first became acquainted with the idea of safe spaces as physical spaces during my freshman year of college, when a letter published in our student paper endorsed a secret court from the 1920s that investigated and expelled several students suspected of homosexual behavior. (I can highly recommend William Wright’s Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals. It’s quite a read.)

Campus reaction to the letter was swift, and heated. The main queer organization on campus, then called the BGLTSA, responded by distributing Safe Space signs across campus, which are now a staple of materials distributed for occasions like National Coming Out Day.

But do they work?

Harvard didn’t invent safe space markers, of course, and proponents acknowledge that they’re mostly symbolic–it’s a way for allies and advocates to publicly display their commitment to queer issues, and their desire for public (and private) spaces where harassment and derision are unwelcome.

Although I call out homophobic language in the library and maintain a collection (fiction in particular) relevant to LGBTQ concerns, I don’t have visible safe space markers anywhere in the physical space.

And I’ll be honest: I have, at times, felt unsafe in my own library.

A major case in point would be last week, when several students were openly discussing the reasons they consider homosexuality immoral.

Did I feel physically threatened by the students? No. Were they ever directly addressing me? No, although the conversation took place mere feet from where I was sitting. Did I feel like my identity, indeed my very being, was being derided and disrespected? Absolutely.

And therein lies the rub. Can I keep my students safe from direct harassment or physical threats when they’re in my library? I’d like to think so, yes, and I think to some degree I’ve created a culture here where it’s clear that kind of behavior isn’t okay. But I can’t protect my students (or myself, apparently!) from the ignorance and disapproval of others–which is arguably a good thing.

After all, a good chunk of the world still believes we’re immoral, or inferior, or unqualified to teach and work and live our lives publicly. I’d like to think we can work on those beliefs, but they’re still out there. Pretending they don’t exist does our kids a disservice.

Last week our school was lucky enough to host Kathi Meyer, a local mother whose teenage daughter died last year after drinking with friends before and after homecoming. Because our own homecoming was last Friday, we wanted to use the assembly as a jumping off point for discussing responsible choices with our students, particularly freshman and sophomores in our advisory groups.

For once I was on my own with advisory Friday (I usually have a co-advisor, but she was out), and I did veer a little into some interesting topics–somehow a student came up with the misconception that light beer has less alcohol (which is apparently true in other countries, but not in the US, where “light” primarily refers to low-calorie)–but my kids mostly had great contributions to the discussion.

One contribution I wasn’t expecting? Blaming the mother.

More than once I had a student chime in wondering if (or outright declaring that) the mother might be partly responsible for her daughter’s death. Shouldn’t she have known that her daughter was drinking? Couldn’t she have done something to keep her home or stop her from partying?

I tried to steer the conversation away from this line of questioning by saying I didn’t want to speculate on blame or guilt–while one point of our discussion was certainly the idea that a single decision (or a series of decisions) can have very serious consequences, I said, I’m sure that all the involved parties, from Meyer to her daughters’ friends to teachers at the high school, already feel the horrible weight of responsibility.

While I can understand the impulse to find a “guilty party” in even tragic cases like this, I was a bit taken aback by what I perceived as a distinct lack of empathy among my students. I certainly saw kids later in the day who had been visibly moved by the presentation, but among my group I heard more blame and disapproval.

How do we inject compassion into these discussions if it’s not automatic for kids?

I’ve done my share of dating, which means I’ve also had my share of breakups. For the vast majority of these, I’ve been the dumped party. Over and over again. I’ve then had to see those women go on with their lives, go to classes, go to work, walk around and live and breathe–and I’ve always wondered, how do you do it? Because when you’re the dumped party, it is sometimes unfathomable that the world should go on in the wake of your pain. How do you do it? How do you laugh, and smile, and go on with your life when you’ve done this to me?

And now that I’ve done the breaking, I finally know the answer.

I do it by sobbing to my therapist every week.

I do it by throwing myself into work.

I do it by buying a twelve pack every week and supplementing it with whiskey shots on Saturdays.

I do it by yelling at my cats for being cats and then worrying I’m turning into someone I don’t like.

I do it by avoiding eye contact.

I do it by never saying your name.

I do it by always saying your name.

I do it by forgetting nothing.

I do it by remembering against my will.

I do it by slowing down as I drive on the streets some corner of my heart associates with you.

I do it by replaying all the conversations even though I can’t change the way any of them ended.

I do it by throwing out things you gave me.

I do it by keeping things you drew for me.

I do it by staring at every greyhound I see.

I do it by laughing, and crying, and feeling guilty, and getting mad, and wishing, and hoping, and regretting, and wanting.

I do it every day and then I go to sleep and wake up and do it again.

At school yesterday, I was waiting for a colleague to finish talking to another teacher. She turned to me and said, “Yes, sir.”

And then died a little.

It was clearly one of those it’s-Friday-and-I’m-fried things, a simple slip of the tongue. She was mortified. She even mentioned it to the next person who walked by–”I just called her ’sir!’”

And I laughed along, and was greatly amused by the whole thing.

But then suddenly it struck me: I’m not out at work.

I have this tendency to assume that I’m out by default–I present as a big butch dyke, and I don’t pussyfoot around that at all. So I generally figure everyone just knows I’m a lesbian. But my gender identity is another matter entirely.

I applied for this job with my full name, which is distinctly female. I do this as a default for professional settings–it’s my legal name, after all, and I like to make it clear that I’m a woman. Even though I quickly transitioned to my preferred name (my initials), the faculty and students are very clear that there’s a Ms. attached to my name. (Or a Mrs. in some cases, though it’s inaccurate. Have other people in education noticed that some kids seem to have difficulty with the whole Ms. concept? But I digress…)

So no one here knows that many public restrooms strike fear in my heart. No one knows that I used to get misgendered on a daily basis. No one knows how near and dear trans issues are to me.

What does it mean to work in an environment that is blind to my gender journey? Will I grow close enough to anyone here to even bring any of these issues up in conversation? I’m actually worried enough about being (so it seems) the only visible queer in a small-town faculty. I feel guilty about not outing myself more explicitly. I feel uncomfortable with what I’m already assessing as very heterosexual work norms, the way men and women flirt and tease subtly in the course of the day.

Who am I here?

Earlier today, M clued me in to a new(ish) doll in the American Girl line. If you were to just browse through the online store, Gwen seems like any other doll–she comes with a book, she has a few accessories. Unlike most of the other dolls, though, there aren’t other outfits you can purchase for Gwen. Why not? Because she’s homeless, silly!

It’s incredibly difficult to verify any of this without dipping into editorials and news reports on Gwen. On the American Girl site, she’s just a friend of Chrissa, the girl of the year who stands up to bullies. Even in samples of Chrissa’s book, the casual visitor never finds out why everyone’s making fun of Gwen–she’s just the “loser girl” that some of the popular girls tease.

A quick trip to the Palm Beach Post or (ugh) the New York Post, however, reveals that in Chrissa’s book, Gwen’s backstory is homelessness:

In the history books that come with every American Girl doll [...] you learn that Gwen’s father walked out on the family. Her mother lost her job.

[...]  as fall turned into winter, Gwen’s mom lost her grip.

Mother and daughter started bedding down in a car.

Now, there’s not necessarily anything inherently wrong about marketing this doll. There are a lot of conversations to be had about the ways that American Girl markets all its dolls, particularly the way that the “just like you” dolls allow little girls of a wide range of ethnicities to finally have a doll that kinda sorta looks like them (except, you know, with white features, because heaven forbid we make those look realistic!) while ignoring things like body type and ability. (Oh, wait, I forgot–you can get a wheelchair for your Just Like You doll, so that totally covers it.)

Here’s what bothers  me, and M: the doll retails for $95, the same as all the other dolls, and none of the money goes anywhere but straight into the American Girl coffers.

Couldn’t this be a marvelous opportunity to pair with an organization that actually strives to make a difference in the lives of homeless youth, like Horizons for Homeless Children? Or what about combating poverty, or aid to families who may be struggling with unemployment or debt?

Nahhh, better to make a happy doll with a pink headband that doubles as a belt.

(And in case you’re wondering about the title of this post: not a direct quotation, but one of the product reviewers who bought Gwen just luuuurves her. “I was rather disappointed by the lack of items for Gwen though.”)

Hey, remember when I used to blog? Yeah, me neither.

My life imploded in the past couple of months. I don’t want to go into detail, but the end results include a new apartment, a new therapist, and a new car. I’m like a grab bag of emotional extremes. It’s a riot.

And now, for the first time in my life–adult or otherwise–I live alone.

Okay, so I live with my cats. But no matter how much I end up talking to them, they don’t really count.

It’s bizarre and lovely by turns. If I don’t feel like washing the dishes, I don’t feel like washing the dishes. If I feel like being Really Particular about where my utensils go, I can be Really Particular.

I’m extremely lucky in so many ways–that I have a job, that my job allows me to afford a place of my own, that I still have some income on top of that to take myself out to dinner if I need some human interaction…

But it’s fucking lonesome.

I like to think I’ve always been a pretty independent person. From the seven year old making up Behind the Music-type narratives for fictional bands to the college freshman who used to pick a particular table in the dining hall precisely because I knew no one else would want to sit there, I’ve spent much of my life reveling in time to myself.

I come by this fairly naturally, as I am my father’s daughter. I grew up hearing him tell us about how he’d have a Daddy Film Festival when the rest of us went on a trip, or telling me as I got older that he was looking forward to having “a good letting-alone.”

But now that I have all this time to myself by design, I find myself watching a lot of crappy TV just so I can avoid hearing my own thoughts reverberating against these wide open spaces. (I don’t own much furniture, and I’ve yet to put anything up on the walls besides a dart board.)

One of my favorite movies is a very underappreciated Disney film from 1944 called The Three Caballeros. One of its segments, The Cold-Blooded Penguin, follows a very determined penguin named Pablo who always dreamed of warmer weather. Ultimately [spoiler!] he manages to sail all the way past the equator to sunny beaches… and then does nothing but dream of the South Pole.

In some ways, I’m a bit like Pablo. I’ve spent much of my life as a loner, dreaming of what it might be like to find someone to spend time with, to just be around and live with and have a happy little domesticity. And when I finally had that, I found myself longing for alone time.

And here we are back at the beginning again, alone and lonesome.

This morning I went to therapy for the first time in about six years.

I’m a person who is very hesitant and wary about therapy and therapists. Some of this is my family background–I have people close to me who are inwardly and outwardly skeptical about the entire profession, and I’ve clearly internalized that attitude. Some of this is my baggage from past experiences with counselors. I saw a child psychologist when I was eighteen, and all I can remember about him is that he consistently mispronounced my girlfriend’s name, and that he seemed hopelessly new-agey to me at the time. I saw someone much more helpful when I was nineteen, but she was still more or less a stranger, and one I didn’t want to be seeing.

This time around I went out on a limb and asked for help from a friend. I happen to play basketball once a week with a psychologist, and I called more or less in tears on Saturday and asked if maybe she could recommend someone. At the very least, it’s a whole lot more comforting to have someone you’ve had a beer with recommend a therapist than to more or less get blindly handed one when you’re just a poor college student having anxiety attacks.

My new therapist described her job in a way no one has ever talked about therapy with me before, and I liked it. She said her job is to create a relationship with me that only exists in her office. She wants to get to know me, to hear me talk about my life both so that I can hear the things I have to say–as these thoughts sound differently out loud than they do bouncing around in my head–and so that she can get to understand my point of view. This way two of us can start seeing things the way I see them.

This can be better, she said, than going to someone who already knows everything about you, because then all kinds of things can get in the way–their opinions, love, fear. It feels fantastic to have someone on my team who just wants to see things the way I see them.

A few things about this morning’s session:

I have goals for therapy. That feels sort of wonderful. I like goals, and having them for therapy is comforting because it gives me the impression that I won’t have to be in therapy forever. (That’s one of the things that scares me–the notion that I’ll forever have to have outside help to live my life. I think this is the same thing that makes me dislike medication so much.)

One of my goals is to get myself a little more stable. Lately I’ve been feeling really emotionally volatile, like I’m constantly in crisis mode. And apparently when I’m in crisis mode, I cry a lot. I question whether this would be particularly helpful in a crisis like a burning building.

On the one hand, this kind of emotional state is a little bit comforting to me, because it tells me I might not actually be getting depressed again. Because for me, depression has been numb. I do have some of my depressive symptoms–mainly fatigue and some issues with my appetite–but the fact that I can feel, even if what I’m feeling is usually really unpleasant, is pretty heartening to me.

My other goal is to try to stop making my decisions based on what I think will or won’t hurt others, and move toward thinking more about what I actually want for myself. This one is going to be pretty hard.

I’ve been walking around with a sort of personal first do no harm ethic, and I don’t think it’s working. Expecting to never hurt anyone would be like expecting my cat to never step on anything. And yet here we are, me paralyzed by the knowledge that I have the capacity to hurt people I love, and hurt them deeply.

Anyway. I went to therapy. I’ll go again next week.

You know, despite my yen to have a bigger readership, there are definitely some advantages to running a small-time blog. Case in point: bigger blogs probably have to deal with comments like this all the time:

So what, people can’t have sexual attractions to specific people? Oh, I know, I should stop going after people I find attractive, suppress my desires and live a ‘normal’ life. OH WAIT WHERE HAVE I HEARD THAT ONE BEFORE? Jesus Christ, you have such a double standard.

Thanks, random commenter!The comment appears on my post about a comic that a whooooooole lotta people find offensive, dismissive, triggering… I’m sorry, do I need to add more adjectives, or can we leave it at those?

My response, in case anyone is curious:

Loki, have you read any of the linked folks in this post? (You could even try An Open Letter, helpfully tracked back in three different places in this very comment thread.) Unless you’ve done that and would like to, oh, I don’t know, actually engage with the crux of these arguments–or demonstrate that you understand the distinction between fetishization/objectification and simple attraction–I’m gonna have to ask you to refrain from commenting again.

I think that was remarkably civil of me, given how frequently this bullshit “But people just like what we like! We can’t help it!” argument comes up whenever someone dares speak up about objectification and fetishization. Loki’s comment is particularly amusing (or infuriating, depending on what kind of mood you’re in) because of that part about my “double standard.” Because clearly being queer and wanting to not get the shit kicked out of me for loving another woman is exactly the same as othering trans guys as “ridiculously hot transformations of gender perception.”

Because I think so highly of myself, allow me to quote myself:

Here’s my argument: I can’t say that “honestly preferring” men’s sports is necessarily sexist, just as I can’t say that “honestly preferring” blondes is. But just as I think it’s important to see that our attractions don’t exist in a vacuum–they’re colored by cultural factors, in this case a society that routinely objectifies women and fetishizes their physical and psychological parts–it’s important to see that our preferences for entertainment don’t, either.

(I want to make it clear that this was in a post about women’s athletics. I don’t think trans guys are women, and I don’t want anyone to think that by quoting this particular passage I’m drawing a direct parallel between the objectification of women and the objectification of trans men. But I do think there are plenty of people who do fetishize the physical and psychological parts of trans men, as the infamous comic so helpfully illustrates.)

Really, it’s just making my ears steam a little that anyone would read my opinion that people should at the very least examine their own attractions as somehow equal to the societal oppression I experience as a queer woman. Aside from the fact that I don’t have the power to stop anyone from being attracted to anyone else, I’m not saying “Bad dog! Stop being attracted to trans guys!”

What I am saying–and I don’t think I’m alone here–is that when lots and lots of people have said, “Actually, I’m not flattered–I feel othered, and objectified, and like you’re exploiting my identity and my life,” maybe it’s time to take a second look at those “sexual attractions to specific people.”