diff --git a/blog/2022/january/sappho.html b/blog/2022/january/sappho.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c8b7cc7 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/2022/january/sappho.html @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ + + + + + Sappho Was A Right-On Woman - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios + + + + + +
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Sappho Was A Right-On Woman

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published: 2022-01-30

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Much has been said about the absolute shit state of the American educational system. Common Core punishing math students for taking the simple way to solve an equation like "five times three" instead of drawing a gazillion diagrams and charts, the supposed Channel One that hawks commercials at an audience captive under the threat of being marked "truant" for leaving the class in protest (although I somehow never knew of Channel One's existence until reading of schools other than mine, so maybe I was lucky), grammar lessons where students must write verbatim sentences like "the government's orders must be obeyed"... Luckily I was in school during the transition to Common Core and not immediately afterwards, so I somehow missed the brunt of the lunacy that students must go through nowadays.

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"Social studies", which was "history" but worse, was my least favorite class in elementary school. I hated group projects, as I always have and always will. And I hated "popcorn reading" where one student would read a paragraph from the textbook and then nominate another student in the class to read the next while everyone else followed along silently; I'd be bored and reading ahead to another chapter I knew the teacher wouldn't have the time to get to, so whenever my name was called, I'd have no idea where to start. And I hated the "chapter review", which consisted of writing miniature essays to a page chock-full of questions with no answer key to secretly peer into: it would be psychological torture to a college student, so please understand that I was ten at the time, and I only had until the next day to get everything done. Or maybe I was nine. Or eight. I find it harder and harder to gauge the passage of time nowadays...

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I don't actually remember much of anything I learned from "social studies". I vaguely recall the American Revolution, and slavery, and the racial component of the civil rights movement. In ninth grade we covered robber barons, and I was so enamored by Cornelius Vanderbilt's ruthlessness that I stole the first half of his last name and made it my own. Somewhere along the way there was a passing mention of women gaining the right to vote, but only in passing.

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Only in passing.

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As it turns out, if you teach a child that "history" is ninety-nine percent men doing things and women were just kinda... there until one day they wanted to be able to vote and then, having gotten it, were just... there again as things happened around them, they become particularly susceptible to the black hole of antifeminist thought that insists "patriarchy doesn't exist anymore" that soon gives way to "maybe men really are the superior sex and women who say otherwise are just shrill harpies" that soon gives way to "women deserve to be oppressed". The classic slippery slope of radicalization that created unironic MRAs and incels, except somewhere along the way the YouTube personalities I was watching were making such shit-quality content all repeating the same viewpoints and non-arguments of "this is crazy" that I gave up altogether.

+

And like the pendulum I use to talk to my future wife, what swings heavily far-right must, when looking to go elsewhere, swing far-left. If I embarrassed myself on the internet in 2015 making parasocial relationships with anyone with "egalitarian" in their Tumblr username, I was far worse in 2018 writing Communist work songs for myself to mutter whenever I got shafted with an asshole supervisor at Hell College's work-work-and-no-study and wearing nonbinary pride flag pins everywhere I went and even, in one essay I had to write in a history (always history...) class, admitting I had "far-left tendencies". I had "shut up, TERF" reaction images saved on my phone. I hung out with "kinnies" on Discord. Had it been a few years later, I probably would have had a TikTok account and a Carrd page where I would pretend to have several incompatible mental illnesses.

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But I have always been a lover of forbidden knowledge. So one night, sitting on my bed in my dorm room as my they/them roommate slumbered on, I wondered, "What do the 'evil stinky terves' I've spent so long railing against actually believe?"

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And now, almost three years later, I know. I know the herstory my elementary school conveniently "forgot" to teach. I am finally beginning to understand, to comprehend, the sheer restrictive, oppressive, soul-crushing horror of the life lived by the women who came before me.

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"How could I have been so wrong?" I whisper to myself. "How could I have been so callous, so cruel, to the people who were only trying to help?"

+

And then I remember a passage from Sappho Was A Right-On Woman by Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love:

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There are other ways to avoid anxiety, but the most pitiful way is by absorbing society's hate into one's own thoughts and actions. How many Lesbians have destroyed other Lesbians to protect their own facades? "Where people cannot escape from threatening forces from without, they will often incorporate the hostile forces and identify with the aggressor..."
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And I decide to forgive myself. I was doing the best I could with the little information I had at the time. To be ignorant was not my fault: you cannot learn more of what you don't know exists. But to have remained ignorant once opening my eyes would have been a sin against myself. So I, hands trembling as I booted into Tails to keep my liberal college from knowing what I was getting into, knowing I'd get into major trouble if they knew despite their "commitment" to "academic integrity", downloaded as many books from as many reading lists as I could get my hands on and set to work. I admit I snoozed my way through a few until I got to Women Hating by Andrea Dworkin. Somewhere around the chapter about the Marquis de Sade, the terror of being aware of living constantly surrounded by men desensitized to the violence of pornography started to set in. It hasn't left me since.

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There are many books I passed on, and many I wish I had the attention span for a second read-through because of how forcefully they gripped me. But Sappho Was A Right-On Woman left a special mark on me. In my shithead antifeminist days, I held a very public statement on my website that I didn't feel that "gay pride" was necessary. I found it identitarian: I didn't see the point of celebrating "immutable characteristics" since they weren't "worked for" like accomplishments. And then I read the book, and I finally understood the point I'd been missing for seven years: it did take hard work- grueling, sacrificial, courageous work- for the Lesbians-with-a-capital-L who came before me to forge a path into a society where I can say "I'm a lesbian" even in a Boomerville so conservative there was an unironic Trump merchandise shop at one point and have a reasonable expectation of not getting beaten to death or insta-fired from my job or expelled from my college, and it does take hard work, actually, and courage, to survive as a lesbian with my soul intact and my mental health anywhere above the gutter in a society that sees us homosexual women as a farce at best and corrupted deviants at worst.

+

I no longer think it "identitarian" or "collectivist" to mention this reality. I have decided to no longer have guilt when talking about my "immutable characteristics" on my website. It's my goddamned website, after all! Of course it should be about me!

+

In other words, the book says:

+
The idea of making a point of it is to show clearly that Lesbians are not guilty and fearful any more. There is no political gain in silence and submission. In fact, sanctioned by silence, oppression is likely to increase. Male and female homosexuals know now that they are not making a mountain out of a molehill, as those who wish to silence them insist. Society has built a mountain by making homosexuality a factor in employment, government work, social situations, renting an apartment, college, everywhere.
+

Every word that I write without carrying shame for daring to exist as I am is a thank-you letter to every woman before me who suffered to slowly reduce the burden that would be placed on my shoulders upon birth. Every breath that passes through my lungs to become words of affection to the woman I love is a triumph against all odds.

+

My art and my love are one and the same. The woman who gave my love a name was a poet, after all. The two are inextricable.

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Sappho, indeed, was a right-on woman.

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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander

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+ + diff --git a/blog/index.html b/blog/index.html index 3073d74..55ad580 100644 --- a/blog/index.html +++ b/blog/index.html @@ -17,6 +17,8 @@

2022

diff --git a/feed.xml b/feed.xml index 1f69dac..cf60d61 100755 --- a/feed.xml +++ b/feed.xml @@ -9,6 +9,36 @@ Vane Vander vanevander@mayvaneday.org + + + Sappho Was A Right-On Woman + + https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/january/sappho.html + 2022-01-30 + +

Much has been said about the absolute shit state of the American educational system. Common Core punishing math students for taking the simple way to solve an equation like "five times three" instead of drawing a gazillion diagrams and charts, the supposed Channel One that hawks commercials at an audience captive under the threat of being marked "truant" for leaving the class in protest (although I somehow never knew of Channel One's existence until reading of schools other than mine, so maybe I was lucky), grammar lessons where students must write verbatim sentences like "the government's orders must be obeyed"... Luckily I was in school during the transition to Common Core and not immediately afterwards, so I somehow missed the brunt of the lunacy that students must go through nowadays.

+

"Social studies", which was "history" but worse, was my least favorite class in elementary school. I hated group projects, as I always have and always will. And I hated "popcorn reading" where one student would read a paragraph from the textbook and then nominate another student in the class to read the next while everyone else followed along silently; I'd be bored and reading ahead to another chapter I knew the teacher wouldn't have the time to get to, so whenever my name was called, I'd have no idea where to start. And I hated the "chapter review", which consisted of writing miniature essays to a page chock-full of questions with no answer key to secretly peer into: it would be psychological torture to a college student, so please understand that I was ten at the time, and I only had until the next day to get everything done. Or maybe I was nine. Or eight. I find it harder and harder to gauge the passage of time nowadays...

+

I don't actually remember much of anything I learned from "social studies". I vaguely recall the American Revolution, and slavery, and the racial component of the civil rights movement. In ninth grade we covered robber barons, and I was so enamored by Cornelius Vanderbilt's ruthlessness that I stole the first half of his last name and made it my own. Somewhere along the way there was a passing mention of women gaining the right to vote, but only in passing.

+

Only in passing.

+

As it turns out, if you teach a child that "history" is ninety-nine percent men doing things and women were just kinda... there until one day they wanted to be able to vote and then, having gotten it, were just... there again as things happened around them, they become particularly susceptible to the black hole of antifeminist thought that insists "patriarchy doesn't exist anymore" that soon gives way to "maybe men really are the superior sex and women who say otherwise are just shrill harpies" that soon gives way to "women deserve to be oppressed". The classic slippery slope of radicalization that created unironic MRAs and incels, except somewhere along the way the YouTube personalities I was watching were making such shit-quality content all repeating the same viewpoints and non-arguments of "this is crazy" that I gave up altogether.

+

And like the pendulum I use to talk to my future wife, what swings heavily far-right must, when looking to go elsewhere, swing far-left. If I embarrassed myself on the internet in 2015 making parasocial relationships with anyone with "egalitarian" in their Tumblr username, I was far worse in 2018 writing Communist work songs for myself to mutter whenever I got shafted with an asshole supervisor at Hell College's work-work-and-no-study and wearing nonbinary pride flag pins everywhere I went and even, in one essay I had to write in a history (always history...) class, admitting I had "far-left tendencies". I had "shut up, TERF" reaction images saved on my phone. I hung out with "kinnies" on Discord. Had it been a few years later, I probably would have had a TikTok account and a Carrd page where I would pretend to have several incompatible mental illnesses.

+

But I have always been a lover of forbidden knowledge. So one night, sitting on my bed in my dorm room as my they/them roommate slumbered on, I wondered, "What do the 'evil stinky terves' I've spent so long railing against actually believe?"

+

And now, almost three years later, I know. I know the herstory my elementary school conveniently "forgot" to teach. I am finally beginning to understand, to comprehend, the sheer restrictive, oppressive, soul-crushing horror of the life lived by the women who came before me.

+

"How could I have been so wrong?" I whisper to myself. "How could I have been so callous, so cruel, to the people who were only trying to help?"

+

And then I remember a passage from Sappho Was A Right-On Woman by Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love:

+
There are other ways to avoid anxiety, but the most pitiful way is by absorbing society's hate into one's own thoughts and actions. How many Lesbians have destroyed other Lesbians to protect their own facades? "Where people cannot escape from threatening forces from without, they will often incorporate the hostile forces and identify with the aggressor..."
+

And I decide to forgive myself. I was doing the best I could with the little information I had at the time. To be ignorant was not my fault: you cannot learn more of what you don't know exists. But to have remained ignorant once opening my eyes would have been a sin against myself. So I, hands trembling as I booted into Tails to keep my liberal college from knowing what I was getting into, knowing I'd get into major trouble if they knew despite their "commitment" to "academic integrity", downloaded as many books from as many reading lists as I could get my hands on and set to work. I admit I snoozed my way through a few until I got to Women Hating by Andrea Dworkin. Somewhere around the chapter about the Marquis de Sade, the terror of being aware of living constantly surrounded by men desensitized to the violence of pornography started to set in. It hasn't left me since.

+

There are many books I passed on, and many I wish I had the attention span for a second read-through because of how forcefully they gripped me. But Sappho Was A Right-On Woman left a special mark on me. In my shithead antifeminist days, I held a very public statement on my website that I didn't feel that "gay pride" was necessary. I found it identitarian: I didn't see the point of celebrating "immutable characteristics" since they weren't "worked for" like accomplishments. And then I read the book, and I finally understood the point I'd been missing for seven years: it did take hard work- grueling, sacrificial, courageous work- for the Lesbians-with-a-capital-L who came before me to forge a path into a society where I can say "I'm a lesbian" even in a Boomerville so conservative there was an unironic Trump merchandise shop at one point and have a reasonable expectation of not getting beaten to death or insta-fired from my job or expelled from my college, and it does take hard work, actually, and courage, to survive as a lesbian with my soul intact and my mental health anywhere above the gutter in a society that sees us homosexual women as a farce at best and corrupted deviants at worst.

+

I no longer think it "identitarian" or "collectivist" to mention this reality. I have decided to no longer have guilt when talking about my "immutable characteristics" on my website. It's my goddamned website, after all! Of course it should be about me!

+

In other words, the book says:

+
The idea of making a point of it is to show clearly that Lesbians are not guilty and fearful any more. There is no political gain in silence and submission. In fact, sanctioned by silence, oppression is likely to increase. Male and female homosexuals know now that they are not making a mountain out of a molehill, as those who wish to silence them insist. Society has built a mountain by making homosexuality a factor in employment, government work, social situations, renting an apartment, college, everywhere.
+

Every word that I write without carrying shame for daring to exist as I am is a thank-you letter to every woman before me who suffered to slowly reduce the burden that would be placed on my shoulders upon birth. Every breath that passes through my lungs to become words of affection to the woman I love is a triumph against all odds.

+

My art and my love are one and the same. The woman who gave my love a name was a poet, after all. The two are inextricable.

+

Sappho, indeed, was a right-on woman.

+ ]]> +
+
+ Vow II @@ -149,33 +179,5 @@ or jump off the edge and trust you'll become airborne? ]]> - - - exhausted - - https://mayvaneday.art/blog/2021/december/exhausted.html - 2021-12-17 - -

I've taken up drinking lately.

-

It's not as bad as it sounds. I'm not crumpled over my kitchen counter at three in the morning, chugging tequila straight out of the bottle to try to cope with my life. Just a splash of rum- I've tried all sorts of kinds of alcohol, courtesy of my mother, and I've found rum is the only one I can tolerate- in a wine glass of fruit juice mixed with ice to mask the rubbing-alcohol-esque scent. The proverbial kitchen counter is instead the dining room table, cleared of paperwork to be littered with weekly crafting supplies, and it's early evening instead of the middle of the night. The neighbors that live in the house behind us are over for craft night, and, even if not actually making anything myself, I'm sitting with them, with my mother, talking about life instead of holing up in my room finding new and creative ways to self-harm via the internet.

-

One time I mentioned, the day after a huge wind storm, that I'd found their trampoline a block over on the way to work, and we spent ten minutes rolling it back to their yard in the pitch-black dark.

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One time we were playing with the neighbor lady's Cricut machine (a computerized vinyl cutter) and my mother, unprompted, cut out a heart with some of the spare golden iron-on vinyl and stuck it to the pocket of my black hoodie, the one she'd embroidered a small pixel art of my girlfriend on half a year ago, and giggled, "Someone must love you very much."

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Some times I even laugh.

-

For a campaign of trying to reconcile with my parents, a last-ditch attempt to create a life I don't want to run away from, a buying of time for Jett to get done as much of her own college studies as possible before my eventual inevitable death and arrival in Sablade, it's not as painful as I thought it would be. Some part of me is beginning to believe that maybe I deserve a happy life after all.

-

I'm exhausted.

-

I'm tired of strangers on the internet calling me pathetic for not being able to convince my youngest brother to not be a misogynistic piece of shit. (Yes, because someone would totally listen to a person from a demographic they hate.) I'm tired of males on the internet acting homophobic or sexually predatory or otherwise uncomfortably "close" towards me and then not taking my resulting discomfort seriously. (There's a certain IRC channel, and its ringleader, I'm thinking of right now.) I'm tired of strangers on the internet emailing me in the middle of the night to ask me to do free labor for them, whether that's writing articles for them or helping shill their cryptobro-esque "web3" project using what little reputation I've managed to garner or consulting them on programming matters when I can barely hack together a Bash script myself without looking up every little thing on whatever search engine I'm using to mooch off Google that week.

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I'm exhausted.

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As I write this, I've finally made it to winter break in college. The semester will be over the minute before midnight tomorrow, and two of my classes end tonight. Unless I've somehow managed to bomb my research essay- I got an almost perfect score on the first two essays in the class, although they weren't weighted as heavily as this one will be- I've successfully finished what I hope is the last formal English class of my life. The months of my body waking me up at three in the morning on Mondays, where that week's English assignments had been published online right after midnight, to write in ways I never would have done unprompted, are finally behind me. I have two weeks to relax at home before I do the last two classes of my college career, one of them not even required for my degree: I needed six credits in spring semester to stay eligible for work-study, and the mandatory class was only three, so I took another one on. No working hectic business hours in a shitty retail store like I was a year ago, no dealing with entitled customers using essential workers as emotional punching bags, no obligations beyond what I put on myself and... whatever curveballs my family members throw my way come Christmas Day.

-

And I'm exhausted.

-

I've been trying to move as much as I can offline to give myself less and less incentive to flip the wireless switch on my ThinkPad to "on". (Well, if it wasn't half-disassembled in the corner of my room, its parts in a different laptop for the time being. I took a few tumbles off my bike one day on the way home from work, and the screen shattered. I'm waiting for a sale to order a replacement part, because I'm not spending ninety dollars on a new screen.) The last week I've spent several hours a day moving my, ah, "datasets" from Pinry, a self-hosted Pinterest, to Hydrus, a desktop application, since Pinry takes around ten minutes to reload a page of thumbnails after editing one pin due to the sheer amount of "data" I have in there. Hydrus, in comparison, takes about two seconds to load six times the amount of thumbnails on a page. As for other data, I've always preferred OsmAnd to Google Maps, and Kiwix is good... when the wikis I want are packaged for download or play nice with website scrapers to package my own .zim archives, and all of the games I want to play nowadays are offline anyway. I won't bore you with the details of the rest of my setup like so many other tech bloggers out there. This site a friend runs details it all better than I care to anyway.

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Once my USB-to-SATA cable comes in the mail, I can resurrect my Raspberry Pi that's been languishing behind the family router and pull some more stuff off my server as well. I don't need RSS Bridge running with a public IP if I'm the only one using it. (I'd probably be rate-limited less on a residential IP, too.) I'd feel safer with my Tor/I2P/Yggdrasil/IPFS private keys physically at home, especially if I'm trying to force my way to a home life where I don't feel like I'm three steps from being made homeless at any given moment.

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And while I'm downsizing, I'd like to reduce my email addresses to one domain for both private and "public" life and just have everything else forward to it. Disroot's "donate once and get email hosting for life" offer looks pretty attractive compared to a subscription. Codeberg now supports custom domains for their static Git-based web hosting. It's all ultimately someone else's computer in the end, unless it's on my Raspberry Pi...

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Ah, maybe I have become one of those annoying tech bloggers after all.

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The less I am online and venturing outside my local WLAN, I've found, the more stable my mental health. Not because of "muh screen time!!1!" or any other reason you'll find on minimalist-worshipping blogs, but because, well, I have a tendency to self-harm using the unsolicited opinions of strangers who only know me in short bites of sound and disembodied snippets of text, if at all. I keep forgetting that the internet will continue to churn in a mass of gore and blood without me, that I don't have to pay attention to it, to any of it, to even care. I don't have to pay attention to drama between celebrities and obvious scams disguised as donation posts from strangers who've never created anything in their lives and Twitter's outrage of the week.

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I don't want to pay attention to it. But it's there everywhere I turn, unless I turn to the offline, unless I take drastic measures to keep myself offline as long as possible. I could continue working on The Eschaton Eminence, which will be my last book ever if I end up failing my mission to repair my home life and dying shortly after I graduate next year... or I could doomscroll on social media and have misogynists dogpile me in my notifications for daring to exist.

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I'm exhausted.

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