Patriarchy and Homosexuality

Patriarchy hates homosexuality and punishes it severely. But have you ever wondered why it hates it so much? Why it feels that homosexuality must be given the biggest disincentives possible? What are they so afraid of? What fuels their persistent and clearly unsupported belief that homosexuality is spreading and that any exposure to it will lead people down the wrong path?

Why are they so afraid that something they say is the most disgusting and awful thing ever will start catching on?

Because patriarchy breeds homosexuality. And deep down, it knows this. In fact, in a sense, patriarchy itself is very gay, and I think that male homosexuality has played a part in the history of patriarchy.

The most obvious way that patriarchy breeds homosexuality is via sexual segregation. Anyone who has heard about what goes on in prisons knows that sexual segregation leads to opportunistic homosexuality.

Now imagine that, but pervasive throughout the lives of young males. From birth till college, they are kept apart from women by the established patriarchs who don’t want better-looking youthful men full of hormones poaching “their” women.

So all that is around when they are going through puberty, and more importantly sexual imprinting, is other males. Young, old, equal, superior, fulfilling every role in a functioning society (including “women’s work”), nothing but XY chromosomes as far as the eye can see.

In this world, females are alien, exotic creatures, rarely see up close and clad in unassailable virtue and protected (and enslaved) by a system that treats them as priceless possessions. In such a system, women seem not just unattainable but mysterious and thus powerful. The patriarchal system proclaims the rightness of hetrosexuality, but removes the opportunity.

In such a system, a high percentage of males are not just going to have sex with one another (that’s virtually guaranteed), they are going to sexually imprint on one another, and hence homosexuality is inculcated.

This happens because one of the most important components of our sexual imperative is the seeking of the most stimulating available target for one’s sexual attraction. Emphasis on availability. That’s why your dog humps your leg, and why you hear of the occasional bull moose “wooing” some farmer’s cow. It might not be the ideal sexual target, but it is the best of what is available, and lust can always overcome reluctance if it is left to build for long enough.

And when the most stimulating object around is another male….

In addition, patriarchal culture constantly reinforces the value of men and the unimportance of women, and treats manly virtues paramount and female virtues to be strictly for girls. It should then come as no surprise, then, that when it comes time to choose a partner, some of these males (especially the ones of low status) seek a partner with those same male virtues.

Once patriarchy goes past a certain point of no return, when the sexual segregation is nearly total and women are forbidden to show any female characteristics in public at all (again, because of the jealousy of old established patriarchs), the homosexuality of the culture becomes literal and things will inevitably slide towards male homosexuality.

That is what they are so afraid of and why they have to make a show of punishing homosexuality as harshly as they can in order to show to others and themselves that no matter how tempting it might be, homosexuality is not worth it.

Otherwise, why bother punishing it? We don’t dole out harsh punishments for doing things nobody actually wants to do. Nobody ever got burned at the stake or stoned to death for pounding a nail into their eyeball or setting their hair on fire. To harshly condemn and punish something, and talk about how easily it could spread, you have to believe that this thing is something everyone wants to do really badly and only the threat of the severest punishment and a culture where every man must continually assert and defend their heterosexuality can keep everybody from doing it.

Another way in which patriarchal culture breeds homosexuality is by encouraging men to stay at a prepubescent level of sexual development. The idea that all that women are good for is cooking, cleaning, and babies matches completely with how a little boy sees the opposite sex. A little boy literally cannot imagine what else women are for. And neither can patriarchy.

This sexual infantilization turns all women into “mommies”, and under that paradigm women can only be good mommies or bad mommies. Good mommies treat their men like spoiled babies, giving them whatever they want whenever they want, including sex. Bad mommies fail this very narrow and powerless role.

This is how the Greek version of patriarchy, which progressed to the point of women not even being allowed to leave the house, quickly became the era of “women for babies, men for fun”. Heterosexuality was nonexistent and you only had sex with women because you wanted to have lots of children (that she had to raise, of course) in order to impress other men.

Also, because patriarchy separates the sexes so thoroughly, it breeds gynephobia. What is mysterious is often frightening, and so men in a patriarchal society often fear women. And how do they express that fear?

Why, by punishing them and controlling them, of course. Misogyny is always an expression of the fear of women. Only someone who sees women as dangerous as an enraged bear will think that women have to be kept in chains.

And who is going to lead this fight against the power of women? The ones who fear women the most, the ones who don’t just see them as a threat but as competition for the attention of other males. Ones who understand that, from their point of view, women ruin everything because most men are primarily heterosexual and therefore no man can be a superior sexual target to any women as the women will always be more stimulating.

I am talking, of course, about gay men.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

TARDY REVIEW : Seven Psychopaths

Just gonna dash off a few thoughts while I try to get this extremely irritatingly timed allergy attack under control.

Damn you, generic Claritin, you’ve failed me again.

Let’s see… it’s a very smart, stylish, and dextrous movie, and I did enjoy watching it, but I can’t recommend it because it all seems very forced, contrived, and way too pleased with itself.

And I mean, the whole thing of having the main character being the screenwriter of the movie you are watching and ending it with him finishing the script is so verydone

I mean, Disney’s done it, for fuck’s sake.

And the way they throw around the word psychopath annoyed me. It was too much of a catchphrase, plus I think the screenwriter thought “psychopath” meant “crazy violent person who kills people”, and it’s far more than that.

But it has its good parts. Tom Waits has a small but memorable role and turns in a solid performance, which pleases me. Some of his performances in movies were… not so good. Which is fine… he’s a musician, not an actor.

But I am happier when not faced with the cognitive dissonance that inevitable ends with me feeling cringe-inducingly ashamed on his sake. Like I am watching a friend butcher a song on American Idol.

Fun fact : he was also good in Wristcutters : A Love Story.

And Christopher Walken is, of course, awesome in it.

Well, time to go, pills are kicking in. (That never stops being fun to say. )

I’ll talk to you nice people later today.

I am here to destroy them

Therapy today was… amazing. So many things revealing, so many new avenues of understanding revealed, so much good, solid therapeutic ground covered.

These are the days that justify all the sessions where nothing of note happens. I won’t claim I had some kind of life altering breakthrough and now everything will be different now, because that would be setting myself up for failure.

But we did good work. Such good work that it is four hours later and I am still processing it all.

One thing we figured out is why I can be calm, rational, and strategic when some offends against me, but when it’s someone I know and care about (me and mine, I like to say). I fucking lose my mind.

What we figured out is that I have a massive amount of latent anger from all that I have suffered in life. All the neglect and abuse and powerlessness and helplessness that I couldn’t even acknowledge as wrong because it was against my programming is still in there, ready to explode.

But I grew up without a model of how to express anger in a healthy way. My father expressed it a lot, but purely out of his need to vent his anger on us helpless victims. My mother rarely expressed it at all. Us kids didn’t do much better.

So in my world, there was only two possibilities : expressing anger at whoever can’t fight back, or never express it at all.

As you know, I swore to myself that I would never take my anger out on others like my father did. Which meant that for a long time, I couldn’t speak up for myself. But all that anger was still there, waiting for release.

Put someone else into the equation, though, and suddenly a very strong protective urge opens the anger valves and then I lose my motherfucking mind. I am ready to kill crush and destroy in order to protect my loved ones, and to a lesser but still very potent extend anyone who I see as being a victim of a bully and/or injustice.

Which brings me to a scenario that worries me.

My therapist has asked me what I would do if I had a real asshole for a professor. No problem, I replied. I can be calm and strategic. I can smile in the guy’s face and take the abuse if it gets me closer to what I want, namely a good grade.

I might also be plotting their downfall. But mostly the other thing.

But what has me worried is what would happen if this professor was an asshole to everyone, not just me. And there I was, sitting there while he abused people far, far less able to defend themselves than me. Making them cry, even.

There is no fucking way I would be able to let that slide. None.

Like I have said before in this space, I simply cannot sit by when bad shit is going down. I simply have to throw myself into the middle and protect the innocent from the badness. I have to thrust myself betwixt the weak and the strong, and betwixt fragile humanity and the cruel and unfeeling hand of fat.

I have to do something. The alternative is practically unthinkable to me. I GOTTA DO SOMETHING.

Which could very well put me in conflict with an asshole professor. If I saw someone verbally abusing some hapless nineteen year old freshman and making them break down in tears, there is no way I could just sit idly by and let it happen. I would draw that professor’s attention to myself and let them try that shit on me, and see how far that gets them.

It would be my mission to destroy them. But odds are, they would have real power over me, and might even be able to get me expelled. And I don’t see any real solution to that.

Granted, I am perfectly capable of calling their bluff if they threaten me with consequences they can’t actually follow through on. And I am also perfectly capable of learning everything there is to know about what they (and/or their colleague/cronies can and can not do) and nailing them to the wall if they make a single mistake.

But the real political power structure in any organization is based on things like favors owed, influence, and power of personality, and it might be that whatever the rules say, they can squash me like a bug and there would be nothing I could do about it. And then I would be SSOL.

So here is hoping that doesn’t happen. And if it does happen, let’s hope I can retain the wit to be a sniper and not a juggernaut, and gather all the information, support, and arguments I need before taking my one clean perfect shot to take this person out for good.

Because seriously. I am here to destroy them.

Of course, it could very well be that today’s professors are very well behaved because, and this is just a guess on my part, when they look at their students they see a sea of devices recording their every move. The last thing any professor wants is for a video of them being a total tool to some teary eyed freshman to become a viral outrage hit the next day on YouTube.

I hope that’s true. I really don’t know how I feel about recording the lecture. It seems eminently sensible, and yet I don’t feel good about it. It seems rude and disrespectful.

Especially if you fall asleep.

So I have worked out a compromise : I will do without until I really feel the need or desire for it.

After all, I never recorded anything the last time I was in college, and I did fine.

Hmmm. I guess this turned out to be about a lot more than therapy.

I never end up where I was planning to go.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

TARDY REVIEW : The Goonies

Another night, another review written in the wee hours of the morning. This could become a thing.

Nah. I hate things.

So, yup, just now finished watching the Goonies for the first time in my life. It feels good to finally tick off that box. It’s a seminal movie of the 80’s, it came out when I was just the right age for it, and went to movies a lot, and yet somehow I never saw it.

Maybe it never came to sleepy little Summerside. I must admit, it’s a tad spicy for a kid’s movie. The kids swear and like five minutes into the movie the kids are dealing with a stone penis. I was shocked but not in a bad way.

I actually found it refreshing, because, if we are being honest with ourselves, that’s how kids actually talk when there are no adults around to hear it.

And speaking of hearing, one of my favorite things about the move (spoiler : I loved it) is how rambunctiously enthusiastic the whole thing is. Sure, it’s noisy, and if simultaneous dialogue is a Bad Thing For Your To Be Around (BTFYTBA), steer clear of this movie because there’s tons of it.

It’s part of the movie’s charm for me. They clearly let the kids improvise their reactions to various things. Everything is done at a gloriously high level of energy that perfectly suits the kind of movie Spielberg was trying to make.

Basically, one that was exciting and fun all the way through, packed with all kinds of things kids love like pirates, treasure, really nasty bad guys (who also got to improv some), skeletons, secret doors, puzzle-based booby traps like in Indiana Jones, scares, thrills, and a super feel good ending.

Man, I loved that Super Happy Ending. All the kids and parents seemed genuinely overjoyed to see one another after all the kids had been through. I teared up, it was so beautiful! Made me want to hug my Mom.

Some day, I will come home again, Mom!

The whole movie is one long crazy ride, beginning to end. The only other thing I can think of with that kind of breathless non-stop pacing is A Stitch In Time by Madeline l’Engle. It’s awesome. I wish more stuff was like that!

What can I say, I was raised by television, I need a dense stimulation stream.

This is the kind of movie that I think of when people are annoying me by using “Spielbergian” as a pejorative. In his prime, Spielberg was magic. He made extraordinary entertainment that went way beyond the call of duty and that left a deep and powerful impression not only in the memory but in the imagination.

And in the culture, come to think of it. When everything that comes after your work uses things you invented in your work, you can call yourself a true auteur.

You didn’t change to fit the industry. You made the industry change to fit you instead.

I get all tingly in my creative parts just thinking about it.

Well, I have avoided it so far, but I guess this is as good a time as any to talk about Chunk.

Chunk is the fat kid. He’s obsessed with food (all comedy fat people are, more’s the pity), he’s quite high strung, and he is very clumsy and tends to break things.

All of this was true of me when this movie came out. If I had seen it in the theatre, my response to it might have been… complicated. And troubling.

Now, Chunk doesn’t get an entirely raw deal. He gets to save the day by showing up with Sloth near the end. And the fact that he gets to befriend Sloth in the first place is a win from my point of view, because I am all about befriending the friendless and looking past people’s issues to see the real person inside.

They never did explain why he’s such a mutant, though. I was not surprised, just a little disappointed. The movie made it clear that he’s the third Fratelli brother, and the other two aren’t lopsided Quasimodo looking motherfuckers.

What the hell was Ma Fratelli doing when she was pregnant with him? Work with fumes?

Oh, and Chunk gets to keep Sloth at the end, so to speak. That might not seem like a big win, but do you seriously think anyone is going to mess with the high strung little fat kid with Sloth around?

Not often, and never twice.

There’s little things that don’t quite make sense. But who cares? That would be a ridiculous thing to worry about in a movie like this. It’s nothing really major and the movie’s energy leaves little time for nitpicking anyhow.

This is the point where I should be able to give examples. But I can’t think of any. So they can’t have been that big a deal.

Honestly, I wonder if I was better off not seeing it until now. If I had seen it when it was in the theatres and I was a timid little kid, I might not have been able to appreciate it because it was too loud and chaotic for me.

Then again, I loved the hell out of Indian Jones, and that wasn’t exactly a naptime lullaby. So I dunno. Maybe I would have loved it twice as much then as I do now, and I love it a lot.

So yeah, you could say I recommend it. In fact, do it now. I’ll wait.

Very good! You have a lovely voice.

As long as you go into it expecting nothing more than a fun kid-sized ride, you will enjoy it as much as I did. Let you inner kid out to watch this and I guarantee he or she will have the time of their life.

Oh. And this is Spielberg World. Park your cynicism at the door. You won’t need it here.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s the little things

Today’s tiny adventure went quite well, so I feel compelled to tell you about it.

First, you have to know that I was out of insulin. Honestly, I ran out Thursday night. I totally could have gone to get it on Friday, but I was too distracted and lazy. And I could have got it on Saturday, but my little pharmacy is only open between 10 am and 2 pm on Saturdays, and by the time I remembered, it was past 2 pm. Too late.

They’re not open at all on Sundays. And they have my insulin prescription on file, so I couldn’t go one block further to Shoppers and get it.

So Monday it had to be. It’s a tale as old as time.

As it turns out, I had another errand to run : stick that signature form in the mail. Joe was nice enough to give me a stamp and a manila envelope, being the icon of awesomeness he is, so this morning, after lunch (look, we don’t all have the same definition of “morning”, okay?) I signed the form, and very carefully hand lettered the envelope, and stuck the form inside, and sealed it.

That’s probably more detail than needed. Oh well.

Honestly, the whole process seems so archaic now that it almost seems like magic. Like I am a wizard inscribing a scroll with words according to an ancient ritual that will make it teleport to a far distant land.

Well, not that far distant. It’s just going to Victoria, after all. I could get there for like, ten bucks.

So the stupid signature form was ready to go. And I was thinking I would have to go the extra block to use to mailbox in front of Shopper’s drug mart, and then would probably get pulled in to the gravity well of White Spot. And that would put me over budget for this week, which would make me feel sad and insecure.

But no! Turns out there is mailbox right across the street from the pharmacy. And by a stroke of luck, I had chosen to travel on that side of the street, so I didn’t have to go out of my way in the slightest.

I love it when things work out that way. Makes me feel better about the world that I normally can’t help but feel is a harsh and unfeeling place filled with rakes waiting to pop up and hit me in the face.

I know that isn’t true. But it’s what my chemicals tell me, and so it’s what I can’t help but feel, even if I don’t technically believe it on a conscious level.

Consciousness is, after all, just the interface for a very sophisticated computer.

I’m working on it. I am utterly committed to the process of therapy, and honestly, I don’t think I could stop it if I wanted to. My mind has developed a very strong taste for this purification process, where wrong thoughts are not just suppressed but crushed and swept out of the way. I feel like I get stronger every day.

When I think of the timid, confused, terrified creature I was when I first went into Doctor Costin’s office, all I can do is shake my head and wish I could give that poor guy a hug, and tell him it does get better. You can free yourself. Doctor Costin will help you a lot with that.

Every step along the path of recovery has been that way. From the very first day I took St. John’s Wort, it has been a slow process of waking up. At least, that’s how it seems like when I look back. Like I was trapped in a terrible nightmare, and my entire life since then has been a process of waking up from it and become more awake, alive, and whole.

Hopefully, Kwantlen will further accelerate the pace. Having more to do with my mind always helped my mood, as does moving around more and being more active. Plus I will be getting social exposure in an environment (school) where I feel relatively comfortable and secure. That has got to be therapeutic.

Plus, I have enough self-confidence and maturity to fear no verbal bully. Go ahead, make fun of me, see how that works out for you. Not only am I likely to have way better verbal kung fu than any random idiot, I am perfectly willing to use it to smack down a bitch who is trying to front with me. Fuck YOU. Let this be a lesson to you all!

Plus, I seriously, genuinely, give absolute zero fucks what people like that think of me. So even if they had my kind of skills and managed to get in a good shot, it wouldn’t harm me. In fact, honestly, it would make me respect them.

I might even get a little turned on. Yeah that’s weird, so what?

Last night, during conversation with the fabulous Miss Felicity, I realized something that had been in the back of my mind for a while : I truly feel like, as a white night verbal kung fu master, I will, of course, never use my powers to punch downwards, pick on the weak, bully anyone, or otherwise go to the dark side.

But I am nevertheless a warrior who seeks worthy and/or deserving adversaries. So if I ever come across someone who is getting away with being a verbal bully, I am deadly serious when I say it will be my mission to destroy them.

Not physically, of course. That’s called murder. But verbally and possibly even psychologically, hell yeah. It is the duty of the strong to protect the weak, and when it comes to words, I am definitely on the strong side.

When it comes to literally anything else…. not so much.

But this is the digital age. Being brilliant with words has never been more powerful. The venues have changed but the Internet is still ruled by text. Listicles, blog posts, Facebook statuses, even images people share around : all text.

So fuck the “real world”.

I got Internet power!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

TARDY REVIEW : Pacific Rim

(Yes, I am going this at a weird time. I just finished watching the thing so I figured, might as well. Oh, and SPOILERS. Duh. )

That movie was way better than it had to be.

I’m serious. Hollywood could have totally gotten away with crapping out another fat culture turd with absolutely no soul, no spirit, and an eye-watering amount of contempt for the audience, but instead, they made something significantly better.

I guess it’s good to be Guillermo Del Toro. He has a lot of clout in The Biz these days, and this movie seems like a labour of love to me. Someone wanted to not just make this movie but to do it right.

And I have a lot of love and respect for people like that.

Now I am not saying this is the next Casablanca. It’s nobody’s idea of high cinema and nobody is going to be studying this movie in snooty movie courses. But only an idiot would expect it to be.

It’s your typical American corny action movie. You have your all American hero of the salt-of-the-earth New Yorker variety. You have the traumatic event early in the movie (monster kills his brother while they were psychically linked…. harsh!) that puts him into a funk for a long time (five years). This is where the hardassed boss of the anti-monster program finds him when the world needs his monster killing abilities again. There’s a female love interest/co-pilot, a hotheaded brash rival whose respect he eventually gains, characters you meet once and then again when it’s time for them to get killed, and of course, lots of cool giant robot versus monster fights.

I am serious. They are kickass.

But the older I get, the less I give a shit about originality, and I never gave many shits about it in the first place. I suppose that’s for the best. The older I get, the more things I have seen, and hence the harder it is for anything to strike me as entirely original. I try not to be jaded about it, but it’s not easy.

Anyhow, I did not go into this movie thinking it would be a beacon of originality.

Hell, I liked Avatar, and it was constructed entirely out of tvtropes.org entries.

One thing that bothered me was that, for a while, it was looking like the movie was going to be super goddamned sexist. It looked like there was exactly one female pilot (Ms. Love Interest) and the first time she tries to pilot a mech, she fails spectacularly because she can’t control her emotions.

Fut the WUCK? I was getting pretty pissed off. But apparently they anticipated that, because shortly after, there is a (very brief) scene that reveals another female pilot, and then later in the movie, our hero says the first time is always harsh.

And I am nearly positive he was talking about mech piloting.

So I canceled the male feminist red alert and calmed the fuck down. This was almost a very different kind of review. That shit pisses me off severely.

Instead, it was a highly fun movie with way better acting and production values than necessary. Like I said above, there is a real feeling of something very corny being made with love, care, and attention, and that is a rare thing indeed.

One little nitpick : quite annoyingly, all the mech versus monster battles take place underwater, in the rain, or in the fog. I am positive that this is a way to conceal the crappiness of your graphics (plus it gives you an excuse to skip the background on closeups). It’s the CGI equivalent of concealing Elizabeth Taylor’s weight gain by putting gauze over the lens.

It’s better than having desperately inadequate graphics, but it’s frustrating to always be straining to see what is going on. Makes me resent the movie for making me work so hard.

That aside, the fight scenes are awesome. Tightly paced but expertly staged and edited so it doesn’t become a nonsensical series of rapid cuts seemingly made just to have rapid cuts.

The human eye can only resolve the image it sees so fast, people. After that, it’s a visual seizure.

I love how the main character fights. There’s elements of American style boxing, professional wrestling, and good old fashioned brawling in the mix, but the main thing is that it is just fucking brutal.

And after being shown that these monsters have killed millions via attacking cities, that’s what I want to see. This isn’t the martial arts, honorable combat, or war. There’s no humanitarian concerns and no Geneva Convention.

This is monster killing, and there’s only one rule : kill the fucking thing.

I mean, at one point, he rips a monster’s acid-spitting tongue out. And I was like FUCK YEAH. The movie sets up the monsters as essentially pure fucking evil, and that clears the way for total carnage.

But my fave thing about the fights is the main mech’s weapons, and I am not talking about the lame shit like missiles or plasma beams. I don’t give a shit about those, they are boring. I want to see hand to hand combat, not special effects shots.

No, the one I am talking about are two things I absolutely love : rocket punch, where there’s a rocket in the elbow of the mech and you can fire it to punch REALLY HARD, and my favorite (fictional, I assume) weapon of all time : the CHAINSWORD.

It’s the weapon Female George Washington is using in this clip :

It’s a whip. It’s a sword. It’s an entanglement weapon. And it is so freaking boss.

And when a corny action movie delivers on the fight scenes, making even someone like me who has been watching the damned things since the 80’s want to stand up and shout, someone has done something very, very tight.

So I recommend this movie. It’s tons of fun and better than you’d think, and while you will recognize most of the elements in it, they are better made than usual, and workmanship counts.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Am I submissive?

This is a trickier question than one would think.

The easy answer would be no, hell no, not even the slightest. After all, I am notoriously protective of my right to my own identity and my autonomy. The very thought of something thinking they control me fills me with deadly rage. Much to my own detriment, I have proven to various parties that I simply cannot be controlled, and you’re a fool to think I can.

Hence my rebellious streak. Largely unexpressed, as life hasn’t seen fit to give me a whole lot to rebel against. But I know in my heart that I am capable of damned near anything if my autonomy is threatened.

Nobody controls me. Nobody owns me. Not even me.

But that’s a subject for another blog entry.

All that rebellious potential would seem to preclude my being submissive. And it mostly does. But only mostly. I certainly will never be forced into anything. Not a chance. I’ve certainly proved THAT many times as well.

But there are softer forms of being submissive than the crudely physical. There are forms of force far more subtle than any ball gag or leather paddle. There are way to dominate a person without ever touching them.

And I might… might… be open to that.

The thing is, while I vehemently reject anything that suggests someone else controls me and I absolutely cannot be forced into anything, I have no problem with being… secondary. The junior partner. The right hand man. The beta to someone’s alpha.

Because as stubborn as willful as I am, I have no inherent desire to be in charge, be the center of attention all the time, or be The One On Top. I can quite happily leave the decisions to someone else and play the supportive role to their ego power.

I consider this a strength. I am free to take whatever role I see fit, and I am a big believer in being flexible enough to adapt to situations. It’s so much better than being forced to make situations fit you. Like I have said before, I pity those people.

So I could easily see myself taking the secondary role in a relationship. All I would need is regular assurance that I am respected and appreciated and that my other half hasn’t started to believe his ego surge when it tells him that anyone like me is contemptible and weak and surely a big important man like him doesn’t need someone like me around.

As long as my conditions are met, I would be quite comfortable in that secondary role. I’d make an excellent househusband. I would love to cook and clean for a man I love, and rub his tired shoulders after a hard day at work, and be there for whatever he needs in order to help him wind down.

And that’s…. sort of submissive. Isn’t it? Certainly the women of the second wave of feminism thought so. They, quite rightly, wanted the option to be so much more than submissive housewives.

I don’t. But good for them.

Another piece of the puzzle is the fact that, as I think I have mentioned on these pages before (too lazy to search!), two of my favorite people from my childhood was Betty, my babysitter, and Mrs. Rogers, my fifth grade teachers.

These people had one very important factor in common : they had strong personalities and wills. They also were not intimidated or offput by my precocious intelligence. As a result, they could handle me, and that made me a much happier kid. Children need someone more powerful than them around in order to feel safe and secure. Those two people fulfilled that role.

But they were the exceptions. For the most part, I didn’t get that feeling of security at home or at school. I was a reasonable kid, so I didn’t butt heads with authority just for the sake of it, but when I did, I made it abundantly clear that authority did not bind me and that whatever I did, I did out of my own free will. Because I had decided to do it.

Looking back, that seems almost like a cry for help. Like I was crying out for someone to stop me. Someone to prove to me that I was not alone in a world of danger and pain by showing me that someone was looking out for me and didn’t want me to make mistakes and get hurt.

But of course, the world could not provide me with that. And I think that, on a deep level, I still crave it. Deep within my machinery is a desire for someone who can control me and guide me.

Or at least, someone who stands a chance of doing it. I can meet them part way… probably.

It would take someone very strong of mind and will who was willing to deal with me when I was feeling unloved, insecure, and underappreciated. Or when I was being stubborn about something I really should do. Someone who could dig me out of my potholes and get me to try new things and stretch my abilities.

If I found a man like that, I would be so incredibly devoted to him that it might frighten him. I am geared for gratitude and effusive if left unchecked, so it might be a little overwhelming at first.

But once I settled down, I would do whatever it took to keep that man happy. I have a strong urge to nurture, and if I had my way that man would feel like a king, not to just feed his ego, but because that is exactly what he would be to me.

I suppose I am one of those weak spirits who needs stronger personalities around in order to feel whole and complete, as opposed to broken and vulnerable.

And that sounds a lot like being submissive to me, at least by traditional gender/power rules.

And yet… on the other hand….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Review of Moribito : Guardian Of The Spirit

Minutes ago, I finished watching the anime series Moribito : Guardian of the Spirit, and so I thought I would capture my impressions of the series while they are fresh in my mind and have not been occluded by the passage of time and oh so many thoughts.

Wait, what was I talking about? Oh right… the show.

The basic thought is that the young prince of an Edo style kingdom has been chosen to bear the egg of a mighty water spirit within his soul. The boy’s mother, the queen, hires bodyguard Balsa (yes, just like the wood) to spirit the boy away from the royal palace so that he will be safe from his father (the Mikado), whom it is feared will be forced to kill his own sun in order to prevent the water spirit from being in line for the throne.

Seeing as, at the beginning of the series, the spirit is thought to be a demon, this is not entirely unreasonable.

So off they go, the ten year old prince and his tough as nails female bodyguard, Balsa, mistress of the spear. Off to flee the Mikado’s assassins.

At this point, I thought the show would be like Lone Wolf and Cub, a warrior and an innocent child versus hordes of bloodthirsty enemies, and the first five episodes bore this out. But then, out of the blue, they find a city and settle down, and it becomes an entirely different kind of show. One with very little violence, and a lot more character development, especially concerning the young prince.

This took me by surprise, and it took me a few episodes to get my bearings and realize that this was it, they were not going to start fighting again. This was now a show about Balsa raising the little prince incognito and teaching him how to survive in the real world.

That made me suspect something that I later found out to be true : the author is female. Had to be. Not because of the female lead, but because the style and pacing were so unlike the typical impatient male aggression based drama.

The show is hardly pacifist. There are some killer action scene wherenbsp; Balsa wields her spear in totally badass ways. She is definitely She With Whom Thou Shalt Not Fuck. But they are few and far between.

Once I made the adjustment to the unusual pacing and style, I quite enjoyed the show. The story is fascinsting and rich, it has good characters, the animation is quite good, and I really cared about Balsa and Prince Chagum and what befell them.

As I implied above, the spirit turned out not to be a demon after all, but a very important water spirit who was responsuble for all the rain in the kingdom. That raises a lot of questions, but this is fantasy, so we’ll just roll with it. This water spirit must die and be reborn every hundred years, and obviously if it failed to be reborn, it would cause a terrible drought, and millions would die.

So the secong half of the show’s 26 episodes are dedicated to learning about this, and how to make sure the young prince survives it.

One thing I liked was that the fearsome warrior Balsa has taken a vow to never use her skills to kill. She will not take a life. This is another thing that you will likely only get from a female writer. We men are far too easily caught up in our testosterone madness that demands our literary avatars dominate their adversaries in the fullest way possible by killing them.

But why kill when it can be avoided?

Another thing I really liked was the character Shuga. He is a palace scholar who discovers that the spirit is not a demon and that killing it would be Very Bad, and he ends up rebelling against the other scholars to get the truth out. He is gentle, intelligent, passionate, and very pretty, and I totally had a crush on him for the whole show.

He was also the show’s silver/white haired dude. Those seem to be mandatory in the shows I watch. There is always a silver haired dude with delucate bishonen features, a somewhat effeminate voice, and the manner of a gay elf.

Doesn’t matter the setting, and they might as easily be a villain as a good guy. But they are always there.

I can only assume they are there as fan service to the females and fags in the audience. If so, thanks!

What else… I enjoyed the overall gentle tone of the show. Gentle, but not wimpy or saccharine. Balsa does not baby Prince Chagum. Instead, she nurtures the strength within him, and stimulates his development of character. That doesn’t mean she is cruel or unnecessarily harsh.

It just means that she is always encouraging him to take that next step up the staircase of life. That, to me, is the right way to parent. Not only because it results in a tougher and braver child, but because it teaches the skills necessary for self-actualization. It teaches the child to always be prepared to do the next thing.

And that’s the secret of life, really. Doing the next thing.

There was some tiny things about the series I didn’t like. Plot elements were introduced as important then, in a later episode, dismissed with some offhand dialogue. There were a bunch of small logical inconsistencies, but that’s par for the course, as is the fact that the ending was not very satisfying.

I am really picky about my endings. Comes from having such an overdeveloped sense of narrative, I suppose.

But all in all, it’s a great show as long as you are not expecting it to be filled with battles and violence and really clear villains. It is instead a story of childhood, nurturing, survival, magic, romance, and it is all written with a great deal fo wisdom, compassion, and heart.

I recommend it.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Myth and practical storytelling

We have been studying the myths and legends of world cultures (not our own, because of course, we don’t have myths, we have God’s own truth) for at least 200 years now. And much excellent work has been done by talented and insightful scholars who have put a great deal of time and effort into piercing the veil of illusion that all culture inevitably develop.

But one aspect, it seems to me, is always missing from the analysis : that myths and legends are, primarily, stories.

That’s all they are. Sure, they might be a lot of other things, and they certainly serve many other functions, but their fundamental nature is still that of an oft-told tale, and as such, is bound by the rules of narrative.

I am sure that nothing I have said is particularly shocking so far. Even if they don’t use the same terms, and the fact that Mythology and Literary Analysis are two entire different faculties with professors to support, I am sure that I could get grudging agreement from both that a myth is a story.

I mean, what else could it be? A tone poem?

They might even agree that the tools of literary analysis can be quite useful when applied to myths and legends.

But I am not here to talk about literary analysis. That’s theory. What I want to talk about tonight is the other end of the spectrum : practice. Namely, the effect of the nature of storytelling on the myths and legends of the world.

Human beings love to tell stories. There is no denying that. And when we tell our stories, we want them to be received by an attentive and interested audience. We want to entertain, amuse, touch, or otherwise move our audience, and we want to be praised and thanked for that story.

In the modern era, where the line between fiction and nonfiction is not only established but very important, what that means is that mass media tends to focus on the trinity of story appeal : sex, violence, and betrayal.

But if we travel further back to before the printing press and mass literacy, not to mention mass transit, most people didn’t go far from their home village, and storytelling was not concerned with fiction versus nonfiction. It didn’t really matter much of a stranger’s story about far off lands or great heroes were true or not. A good story was a good story, and people could believe it or not, as suited them. Either way, nothing in their life would change.

And this extends all the way back to the glory days of early civilization, and probably beyond. Whether you are a caveman recounting the day’s hunt and maybe embellishing a few details to make your story better or a high priest of Amin in ancient Egypt, when you told your stories, you were probably keenly aware of the effect on your audience.

And so, as this myths are retold, either by a religion or just that nice fellow at the end of the bar who will entertain you for hours if you buy his drinks for him, the stories change in order to gain mass appeal.

That’s why pre-Christian mythos is so full of that dark trinity : sex, violence, and betrayal. And often, the further back you go in the mythos, the more violent and primal it gets because it is mirroring the rise of civilization and retelling that story, of emergence from primal forces and growing into who you are today, in a way that was appealing to people.

Christianity broke that mold…. sort of. A casual perusal of the Old Testament will reveal that there is a ton of freaky sex and horrible violence in it. That is because its content predates Christianity. It is a compilation of old myths and legends from early Judaism, as well as any other faith that got conquered by pre-Christians, and as such it represents the kind of stories that got passed around during that period.

So what do you get? All the juicy parts of popular storytelling. Not just sex, violence, and betrayal, but revenge, ambition, the rise and fall of great men and women, and all the other things that tickle our reptile brain fancies.

Once you grasp that these stories came not from the heavens but from the need to influence (perhaps even control) an audience, you can begin to understand that the content of them as we know it passed through the mouths and ears of many a storyteller hungry for audience approval.

There can be no “original source”, of course. It’s not like the gods told one person and then it got mucked up in the retelling. All of these myths came from somewhere, and my guess is, they came from some storyteller who was looking to captivate an audience with a really, really good story.

One that didn’t just entertain, it explained. Like I have said, it can be a very small jump between “this thing that might have happened for all anyone knows” to “this thing I just told people probably happened”, and another even smaller jump to “everyone believes it happened now…. clearly I am divinely inspired, receiving direct truth!”.

Remember, this is before we had any idea that there was such a thing as a subconscious mind. All mental activity was equally mysterious. So when you are waxing narrative over a spellbound audience, and you end up making up a whole extra chapter to the legends of Hercules in the process, well, where else could that have come from but the gods themselves?

And if the gods put it there, it must be true! It must have really happened. Suddenly the storytelling type person has a direct line to the gods.

If they keep that up, they can promote themselves to a new rank : the priest class, whose job it is to tell you what the god(s) want and do not want.

And then the storytellers gain real power.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My icebox mother

(TO MY SIBLINGS ANNE, CATHERINE, AND DAVE : Don’t read this. It’s stuff about Mom. You won’t like it. )

Today was a therapy day, and today’s session brought together two things I had never put together before, and that means I have to blog this business out.

This isn’t the first time I have complained about my mother. I have done it at least twice before. It’s never easy for me because I practically worship my mother.

Like I have said previous times, the household I grew up in had a basic duality : Dad bad, Mom good. My father was an angry raving tyrant, and my mother was the passive but loving saint. Polarization was the game of the day. My father had a deep need to take his frustrations out on whoever was around, and that was usually us kids.

So we all feared and I think at least somewhat hated him. Life was so much better when he wasn’t around. My sister Anne and my brother David got the lion’s share (and then some) of the abuse, but we were all tense when he was around.

That meant, at least to me, that I clung to my mother, the Good Parent. And that worked… for a while.

That’s what came up in therapy today and what I wanted to talk about tonight. First by going back to work and leaving me with a babysitter, then by simply sliding deeper and deeper into her own depression, my mother emotionally abandoned me.

I feel like a traitor just for saying that. But it’s true.

For a while when I was in elementary school, I at least had my mother as (as they used to say) a Boy’s Best Friend. I knew that no matter what, after supper I could talk to my mother for a while, and get hugs. It didn’t entirely make up for all the abuse I took at school, but it helped a lot, and so for that time, I felt okay.

But gradually, she just… left. Became more zombie-like and withdrawn. She was there but not there, not emotionally. I would hug her, but I might as well have been hugging a bundle of sticks. She was in no way and in no sense hugging back. She didn’t return my affection. She endured it. To her, it was just another thing to get through as she numbly went through the motions of life.

I have talked about this before. But it didn’t occur to me till today just how absolutely awful that was. The emotional damage caused by having my mother freeze up on me before my eyes (and arms) has to be absolutely massive. That’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t ever happen to a kid.

She was my one friend during a time when I had none. Then… she wasn’t. She wasn’t anyone. She was a zombie. Her withdrawal from me confirmed that I really was unworthy of anything in life and the last thing that might have kept me from withdrawing deeply into my own mind was gone.

So in that way, I ended up doing exactly what she was doing : withdrawing. Like mother, like son.

In fact, I think there is a very solid possibility that I learned depression from her. She modeled it for me. And I internalized it. Perhaps if she had not gone cold on me, I would have had a better time dealing with reality instead of withdrawing from it. I would have found something worth staying connected for. I would have found me way out of the badness.

Instead, I fell deeper and deeper and deeper into my internal abyss, which grew bigger and stronger as I abandoned more and more of myself to it.

And yes, I know mental illness wasn’t exactly her decision. It’s not mine, either. But that’s not important. Why it happened is irrelevant, as are issues of blame or responsibility. None of that matters at all.

What matters is what it did to me and how much of my current issues can be tied to it. I have spent a lot of time blaming bullying, my father, family neglect, a school system that could not handle me, and all the rest for all my emotional problems, and I have made attempts to blame my mother but until now, I didn’t really grasp the full scope of the trauma.

What does it do to a growing boy when his mother abandons him while still being right there in front of him? When I talk about my depression, I use a lot of cold related metaphors. Ice palaces, my frozen heart, my soul being nothing but trackless tundra… next to water, the most frequent source of my imagery is coldness.

And now, I think I know where all that coldness came from, and why I ended up as the passive cold kind of depressive who is in no sense mentally healthy but seems so on the surface because no matter what, they keep going through the motions.

That’s what my mother did. She had been so warm and loving when I was a child in the 1970s, before she went back to work. And even after she went back to work, she was very sweet to me and would play guitar and sing with me, and read to me before I went to sleep, and give me back rubs to help me get to sleep.

But as the years wore in, that went away. The backyard garden became the extension on the house. The family grew more and more distant from one another. And my mother stopped being a source of soul sustaining sunshine and instead became a source of the kind of cold black void that has been devouring me for as long as I can remember.

You did this to me, Mom. Not deliberately, but still. You took me into the darkness with you when you went away, and I still haven’t found my way out, and I am 42 years old.

After you left, there was nobody for me. Nobody. No-one looking after me, nobody looking out for me, nobody to discipline me, nobody to prod me to go outside my comfort zone, nobody to teach me how to be safe. Nobody to do anything for me at all.

So I grew up extremely timid, because a child’s solution to the issue of how to be safe is to do nothing even slightly scary.

And Mom…. I’m still scared. And you are further away than ever.

Please don’t leave without me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.