Every year, my anxiety increases as the days lengthen, yet every year I seem to forget that until it has gone on for a while; I start feeling all weird and restless and agitated, but somehow it never dawns on me why I feel that way until late May or early June. It probably doesn’t help that my brain is sneaky, so as soon as I figure out why I’m feeling a certain way, it starts manifesting in a new way. For example, I used to carry a lot of stress in my muscles, and as soon as I’d figure out that a mystery ache was stress-related it would clear up and move someplace else in my body. Last year I got lucky; I believe the anxiety mostly manifested in the obsessive home-improvement project I’ve been telling y’all about for over a year. But this year, the rain delayed our getting started as early in the season, so the anxiety seems to have manifested in an unusual degree of procrastination, disinterest in doing things I really need to get done, and just plain forgetting. Maybe now that I’ve figured it out I’ll be able to fight it a little better, and in another week the days will begin to slowly grow shorter anyway. But that probably means next year it will choose some entirely new and strange way to make my life more difficult, and I’ll have to figure it out from scratch again.
Posts Tagged ‘psychology’
Diary #572
Posted in Diary, tagged psychology on June 15, 2021| 1 Comment »
Legal Fiction
Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged adolescence, agency denial, consensual crime, cult of the child, psychology, Shazam!, Still a Child, The Shape of the Spoon, Too Young To Know on June 10, 2021| 5 Comments »
I disagree that legal minors “cannot” consent to sex. Our society doesn’t allow them to consent due to the possible consequences. It does, however, allow them to consent to some other things due to the potential consequences being (correctly or incorrectly) perceived as acceptable. When we pretend that legal minors are incapable of consent, we infantilize them and open the door to bad-faith arguments like this one. There is no magical moment of “Shazam!” at which teens are mystically imbued with the ability to consent, but there are various arbitrary legal lines at which society recognizes their consent to various things as valid. Some may have been making valid choices for YEARS by the time the State recognizes those choices as valid; some may not ever be capable of making valid choices, even though legally allowed. That is, unfortunately, the only way large societies have yet figured out to recognize rights without somehow testing ever single person for decision-making ability every year from 13 to 30 (a process which would itself be ripe for abuse and political manipulation). The only real solution to all the conflicting ages of responsibility is to stop letting the State micromanage so many different areas of our lives, and to stop letting it criminalize so very many decisions people of any age make over their own lives and bodies.
Unsanitized
Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged activism, censorship, dirty, holidays, LGBT rights, neo-Victorianism, psychology on June 2, 2021| 5 Comments »
Today is International Whores’ Day. It is not “Sex Worker Day”; that is March 3rd. Today is a day to shamelessly celebrate our shameless history, not a day to cater to the precious fee-fees of amateurs by neutering our terminology so as not to offend their delicate sensibilities with a raw, unsanitized word like “whore”. But for the past several years, I’ve seen a number of sex worker organizations and social media accounts doing just that, and in doing so participating in the same process of sexual sanitization which inspires modern picket-fence gays to absurdly claim that huge fascist corporations and gangs of uniformed thugs employed by the state to inflict violence on sexual minorities are more welcome at an event commemorating an anti-cop riot than kinky queers are. While the neo-Victorians who dominate 21st-century public discourse…
…reject the belief that sex is innately bad, they also believe against all reason and evidence that it’s something like a radioactive material which must be handled with special and elaborate precautions or else it becomes the single most destructive force on Earth. They imagine that engaging in sex for the “wrong” reasons, or without the benediction of elaborate rituals of consent, or with people separated from one another by more than a very few years of age, is terribly harmful…the desire to describe…sex…as “good” or “bad” is a very strong one, and for the neo-Victorian mind to accept sex into the “good” category it must be ritually purified by amputating all of its darker aspects, branding even the discussion of them as “violence”, and even pretending that they aren’t even sex at all. This belief flies in the face of reality; sex, fear, dominance and violence are inextricably bound together, and only by living in a state of complete denial can someone pretend that the only valid, “healthy” and legal sex is that which is so sanitized and neutered that it resembles the real thing about as closely as a hamburger does a heifer…
Today is not a day for sanitized words or concepts; it is, in fact, exactly the opposite: a day to fight society’s attempts (via law and police violence) to sanitize the wilder, unrulier, more chthonic aspects of sex. This is a day for sexual outlaws, not well-behaved “workers”; it is a day to celebrate the triumphs of criminalized human beings against a society that would rather we didn’t exist. It is a day to oppose censorship, not to engage in self-censorship; a day to honor a means of survival that predates laws and governments by eons; and a day to celebrate a power which will always defeat even the most pernicious attempts to domesticate it.
In the News (#1141)
Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged cops, disease, Do As I Say, domestic violence, drugs, fascism, Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish, Guinea Pigs, hysteria, I Spy, illegal aliens, Michigan, New Jersey, Oklahoma, psychology, rape, surveillance, teachers, Texas, To Molest and Rape, Torture Chamber, Unsafe for Human Consumption on May 29, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Instead of…a chicken in every pot, Biden…promises an auditor at every kitchen table. – Chuck Grassley
Give aggressive thugs power over teen girls; what could possibly go wrong?
A [cop assigned to terrorize students]…in the Chouteau Public School District…[was arrested by other] Oklahoma [cops for molesting a student]…Dale Tillotson…faces a lewd molestation charge [for sexual assault while wearing his magic clown costume]…
Looks like we’re going to have to rethink the safety of the mail:
The [US] post office’s law enforcement arm has faced intense congressional scrutiny in recent weeks over its Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP), which tracks social media posts of Americans and shares that information with [cop shops and spook houses]…the program…includes analysts who assume fake identities online, use sophisticated intelligence tools and employ facial recognition software…in[cluding]…Clearview AI…Other tools…include Zignal Labs’ software, which…run[s] keyword searches on social media event pages…[and] Nfusion…to create and maintain anonymous, untraceable email and social media accounts…
Unsafe for Human Consumption (#1071)
Now that the pandemic is fading, cops are back to their usual panics:
A Michigan [cop] collapsed during a traffic stop after he [had a panic attack due] to [hysteria over] fentanyl…[he] was [root]ing [in] a vehicle [that was none of his business] and adjusted his face mask…[then got the vapors] and f[ainted. Imagining]…he could be overdosing, his partner administered Narcan and the [placebo effect stopped the attack]…Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is [not an aerosol and is so difficult to absorb through the skin that fentanyl patches for pain treatment rely on patented technology that took years to develop]…according to [actual pharmacologists]…
Civil rights violations often start with whores, but never stop with us:
…In the name of catching tax dodgers, the Biden administration is seeking serious snooping rights to oversee all American bank accounts and payment apps…87,000 new IRS employees would be hired and everyone could expect more scrutiny of the flow of money to and from their financial accounts…inc[luding]…Paypal and Venmo…It’s how the administration proposes paying for the massive new spending measures in Biden’s American Families Plan…The administration [claim]s…this…would only affect extremely wealthy tax scofflaws. But the extremely wealthy know they get extra IRS scrutiny and already have all sorts of tricks for shielding income…from regulators’ view. Rather, it’s the folks who sometimes get paid “under the table” for informal gig work…who [would be targeted]…After all, those 87,000 new employees can’t all be catching wily millionaires and billionaires…the IRS would have an unprecedented ability to…target even the tiniest bits of unreported income…
Biden adores surveillance, and dreams of dramatically increasing every variety whether the Constitution allows it or not.
Do As I Say, Not As I Do (#1088)
It’s so nice to see them feeding on their own for a change:
A [typical and representative] New Jersey [cop named Christopher Walls] is facing a list of serious charges after [other cops] discovered a methamphetamine lab inside of his home…[when his girlfriend] called t[hem because he beat her up]…Walls had everything…he needed to manufacture meth, along with…books related to “making methamphetamine, explosives, and poison…
Clearly, this is all Trump’s doing:
More than 4,500 immigrant children and teens are being held in enormous, filthy tents on a military base in Texas without access to basic necessities, including underwear…The [camp], which is largely populated by teenage boys, is housed at Fort Bliss, an Army base near El Paso…In [government propaganda], these [camps are] shelters…for kids who are waiting to be reunited with relatives…in the United States. In fact…the Biden administration
is holding “tens of thousands of asylum-seeking children in an opaque network of some 200 facilities”…[that even] Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra [admits are]…not fit for…them…lice…are…[spread]ing…and [a whistleblower reported that]…”We have already caught staff [molesting] minors”…
A Texas [cop] killed himself…just after admitting he had sexually abused children…Robert Johnson…had a six-hour standoff with other [cops] before he died by suicide on [May 19th]. He admitted to being involved in several child sexual assaults…[and] implicated two other [cops, Christina McKay and Chonda Shalett Williams] in the crimes…
The Sparkle of a Star
Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged drugs, imaginative fiction, LGBT rights, marriage, nostalgia, psychology, racism, witchcraft on May 24, 2021| 1 Comment »
We are quicksilver, a fleeting shadow, a distant sound…our home has no boundaries beyond which we cannot pass. We live in music, in a flash of color…we live on the wind and in the sparkle of a star!
– Endora (Agnes Moorehead)
A couple of years ago I rewatched Bewitched, a show I always enjoyed in my youth but hadn’t seen since the early ’80s. I’ve always thought Elizabeth Montgomery was an excellent actress, but this time the magic of cannabis (which slows down my hyperactive nervous system so that I can really watch these shows in a way I’ve never been able to before) opened my eyes to just how talented she really was; she could convey so much with just her facial expressions and vocal manner, and her comedic timing was brilliant. But beyond that, I saw aspects of the show itself that were previously opaque to me. I’ve always recognized that many of the episodes are veiled commentaries on racism and other forms of bigotry; that was typical of the 1960s, when fantasy and science fiction shows could sneak controversial issues past uptight sponsors and network censors by disguising them as the stuff of alien worlds or magical happenings. When Samantha angrily denounced ugly witch stereotypes or mortals’ fear of those who are different, the perceptive viewer understood what the show was really saying. As I grew older, I realized that there was also a more-deeply-buried queer subtext which was too radical even for most contemporary viewers who thought of themselves as liberal: beside the fact that several of the principals were played by gay men, Samantha had to hide her true nature in order to exist in the judgmental mortal world, and only in the company of other witches could she really be herself. Furthermore, those mortals were willing to hunt, persecute and even burn those like her merely because they were different. But queer people weren’t the only sexual minority violently persecuted and actively hunted by 20th-century puritans; while I’m sure it was unintentional, sex workers can also see ourselves reflected in this magic mirror.
When I last watched the show, in my late teens or very early twenties, I naturally identified most with Samantha. But on this rewatch, I found myself identifying with her mother, Endora, due in part to her age, in part to her unique personal style, and in part to her attitude toward her daughter’s marriage. I’m old enough to have a daughter in her twenties or early thirties, and I can certainly understand how I’d feel if she married a man I thought wasn’t good enough for her. But it goes beyond that: the association between sex work and witchcraft is a very old one, and even today many sex workers metaphorically describe our work as “magic” (not to mention the many sex workers who actually do specifically practice witchcraft, though obviously not the fantasy TV variety). Endora’s chief gripe with her son-in-law isn’t really that he’s mortal; it’s that he wants to rob her beloved daughter of her birthright by forcing her to eschew magic and submit to mortal drudgery. And every time I heard her say this to Samantha (in quite a few episodes), I imagined how I would feel if my beautiful daughter gave up a successful career in sex work to marry a “dumbo” who demanded she renounce her heritage, shun her whore friends, and work a shitty square job when she could make far more with far less effort by doing what she’s good at instead of letting herself be limited to behavior that doesn’t make dreary, unimaginative authoritarians uncomfortable.
The Tyranny of Orgasm
Posted in Biography, Perception, tagged drugs, masturbation, oral sex, orgasm, psychology, scams, sex toys, sex work is work on May 20, 2021| 3 Comments »
I have often expressed how disappointed I am that the cultural reaction of Americans to The Hite Report and other ’70s studies & surveys of female sexuality was for most women to become (sexually) more like men, in other words for their sexuality to become less about the experience and more about the relentless pursuit of orgasm. And it’s only become worse since the ’80s; virtually nobody (and yes, women are often just as bad as men) is willing to accept any more that some of us simply aren’t very orgasmic, and that whatever new “technique” or “toy” or “process” they want to try isn’t going to make any difference. My anorgasmia is only partly due to a recessed clitoris; the rest is due to my neuroatypicality in general and my cognitive hyperactivity in particular. And though most people recognize that I’m really quite intelligent and have had many, many thousands of hours of practice over the last 40 years, they still refuse to grok that I already figured out long, long ago (by the mid-’80s) what will produce orgasm on a semi-regular basis, “but will probably never act on [those things] again because they either come with too much baggage or it’s much too difficult to find the right person or persons to do them with.” Though this is considered heresy in “sex-positive” circles, I simply don’t think it’s important enough to invest my time, effort, and money in toys, books, classes, Gwyneth Paltrow gimmicks, or silly cults in a fruitless effort to pursue an experience my body and nervous system seem disinclined to undergo.
If you’ve never seen a woman write about this before, it’s probably because most women who feel as I do are afraid to admit it. They’re afraid of being considered defective, freakish, or simply not good enough, and not only by entities who reside outside of their own skulls. But most anorgasmic women don’t write about sex; most women writing about sex haven’t been sex workers for their entire adult lives; and most of the sex workers who both feel as I do and write about sex (probably already a rather small group) are too concerned with commercial viability to admit that no, they really can’t orgasm 17 times from some dude’s fumbling around with their genitalia, and they’re really not thinking about sex as often as their clients do. But for me, the best thing about paid sex is, I get the reward I want regardless of whether my wiring decides to respond in a way that will feed my partner’s ego. And sex work gave me the confidence not to be ashamed to say that I don’t give a shit if I don’t orgasm. But I understand that I’m unusual in many respects, so I was very pleasantly surprised to see this stunningly-honest article in The Atlantic:
I am a 39-year-old woman, and I have never, to my knowledge, had an orgasm…I love sex, and I’m probably on the kinky side—there’s very little that I haven’t tried. But no matter how much I am enjoying myself, there inevitably comes a time, both on my own and with a partner, when the physical pleasure, having built and built, either fades to nothing or becomes a sensation too uncomfortable to bear, and provides neither the rapture nor release I have imagined…In the early days of [my] relationship [with my future ex-husband], I made…an appointment with a sex therapist, therein getting a glimpse of the growing and highly lucrative female-orgasm industry. A plump, elderly woman…advised me to eat more dark chocolate, stop taking birth control, and sign up for what she called “orgasm camp,” an immersive experience …that would have me masturbating all day long. She also sent me home with some female-centric 1980s porn, a list of recommended herbs and vitamins, and a prescription for Viagra that the pharmacist, alarmed by my gender, initially refused to fill. For months I dutifully followed her advice…but…eventually, exhausted and even a little bit bored by the effort, I once again resigned myself to my anorgasmic fate…
…In her 2018 book, Faking It, the sex educator Lux Alptraum denounces a culture in which, for many men, the female orgasm has become “the primary, if not entire, purpose for pursuing sex—a sentiment that suggests that anyone who isn’t able, or doesn’t want, to achieve orgasm is some kind of freak or failure.” Alptraum lays no small amount of blame for this on She Comes First, a wildly popular cunnilingus manual by the sex therapist Ian Kerner, which…established a new paradigm in which the female orgasm, once seen as mythic, was recast as compulsory…
…I finally embraced the obvious solution: I started faking it…sex therapists…think that faking it breeds guilt and resentment…but the truth is that, for me, faking it was instantly empowering, even revelatory. Overnight, the emphasis shifted from what I lacked to what I offered…faking it threw into relief my sexuality; for the first time since my divorce, maybe for the first time ever, men began to see me as I saw myself, and as I knew myself to be, which is to say, no less carnal than the next person, and perhaps even more so…
There’s a great deal more, and I think it’s especially worth reading if you’re anorgasmic yourself, or if you would like to understand why some women aren’t interested in catering to your emotional need to give them orgasms. I myself have written in defense of faking orgasms on several occasions, and I’m in agreement with author Katharine Smyth about faking being a legitimate strategy to reclaim one’s sexuality from the tyranny of others’ selfishness disguised as generosity. There’s quite a bit more after the part I’ve quoted, in which Smyth tries all sorts of other things for which I lack the patience, the credulity and the dedication; I must also point out that when I was her age, I had already been doing sex work on and off for 21 years and full-time escorting for 6. But even so, I hope that by the time she’s my age she either finds what she’s looking for, or learns to stop caring about it.
Conceptual Ledge
Posted in Music, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged law, LGBT rights, Like Houses, propaganda, psychology, surveillance, video on May 13, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Statists are fond of pretending that the slippery slope is a “fallacy”, because they don’t want you to think about how either legal precedent or human psychology work; as I wrote years ago in “The Devil’s Toys“,
…In the common law tradition, laws are defended from those who would challenge them by arguing precedent: demonstrating that a new law or practice strongly resembles others already in existence which have never been challenged (or better yet, withstood such challenges) constitutes evidence that the new act is also permissible. But there’s another factor, a psychological and moral one: once people get used to an idea, they’re much more likely to support laws that reflect that attitude…Those who rejoice when a private corporation deletes a writer’s article, and would gloat if she were fired, are already receptive to the idea of censorship; enacting the practice into law and establishing censors to act “on behalf of the public” is only one step further…
In the past decade, we’ve seen so many tyrannies enabled by these mechanisms, there’s very little point in my rehashing them; however, useful idiots being first and foremost idiots, they just keep on cheerleading for face-eating leopards that they believe will never eat their faces, because they either believe or want everyone else to believe that the slippery slope is a “fallacy”. There is indeed such a thing as a “slippery slope fallacy”, but it’s different from the real principle of tyranny via incremental extension of legal precedent; what makes the difference between the two is what one might call a “conceptual ledge”, a break in the chain of logic that those employing a slippery slope fallacy intentionally gloss over. The difference is so clear and simple only a fanatic or other victim of dangerously-disordered thinking could miss it: an example of the real slippery slope is the way that surveillance powers approved for use against “terrorists” were in fact mostly used to persecute people for drugs, while an example of the slippery slope fallacy looks like this:
Any questions?
A Broader Focus
Posted in Biography, Perception, Philosophy, tagged activism, blogging, imaginative fiction, psychology on May 7, 2021| 5 Comments »
As I pointed out yesterday, there are now a lot more sex workers writing articles debunking prohibitionist propaganda, sharing the truths of our lives with those outside the demimonde, and making powerful arguments in favor of decriminalization. Eleven years ago, that wasn’t the case; while I certainly wasn’t the only one writing, there were few enough of us that I felt very driven, knowing that my words were helping a lot of people understand that which our enemies don’t want them to understand: that sex workers are as diverse as any other social group and have real lives rather than being the cartoon victims or villains of prohibitionists’ sick sexual fantasies. Since Day One of this blog my primary intended audience has always been the general public; I’ve always been more interested in humanizing and destigmatizing sex workers in the minds of that public instead of preaching to the choir, which is why I’ve never felt any compulsion to restrict my topics to those of interest to activists. And now that the heavy lifting is spread out among a far larger number of far younger shoulders than mine, I think it’s time to broaden my focus even more. Some of you may have noticed it already: I’m ignoring news stories that feel too repetitive, and there are now too many good sex worker articles for me to call attention to them all. And I’m using the time and energy I save to write about stuff that’s interesting to me, like philosophy, construction projects at Sunset, and science fiction shows. But that doesn’t mean I’m abandoning my mission; I’m just going about it a different way. Instead of merely telling outsiders that sex workers are regular folks, I’m showing them instead. And I don’t plan to stop doing that anytime soon.
Pay No Attention To That Pervert Behind the Picket Fence
Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged activism, censorship, dirty, domestic violence, hysteria, law, Madonna/whore, propaganda, psychology, rape, statistics on May 6, 2021| Leave a Comment »
At one time, there weren’t a lot of sex workers writing solid, substantive analyses of prohibition; that is no longer true. Every year I see greater numbers of sex workers writing strong, convincing articles on why the War on Whores is horrible for everybody, and not just in blogs or “zines” or other small-audience venues, oh no; just last week saw two powerful, in-depth articles on how prohibitionism is nothing but camouflage for the reality that the sexual abuse of children is nearly always perpetrated by people the victim knows, often inside the nuclear family worshipped as a cultic totem by those who publicly fantasize the most vociferously about imaginary pimps with magical ninja powers pulling screaming children through the internet and confining them in dog crates to be raped by 100 men a day in truck stops. Both are well worth reading in their entirety, but here’s a sample to get you started. The first one is from Reese Piper:
…One study…found that 82% of abuse was organized by a direct family member…despite all the warnings about strange men lurking in vans, only 4% of the abuse occurred by strangers when the child was being victimized by one person; 2% when the child was abused by multiple people. The rest were biological fathers, stepfathers, acquaintances of the family, mothers, stepmothers, brothers, sisters, grandmas, aunts, uncles, and trusted members of the community such as clergy, police officers, teachers, counselors, and babysitters…Projecting [sexual abuse] outside the home relieves the pressure of the cognitive dissonance, allowing people to accept the darker shades of our world without disrupting their understanding of normal. To protect the pillars that surround the Family, we need a scapegoat. Women who work outside the home have always been considered a threat. Just as daycare workers encountered vitriol and baseless allegations of harm against children in the ’80s and ‘90s, sex workers are now the vessels society empties its anguish and anger into…Often when…bills like SISEA are introduced they seem altruistic. An average person not schooled in sex work politics won’t understand how much harm censorship can cause in a profession that survives on visibility. But other times politicians are blatant about their plans to push “fallen women” back into the shadows where they can remain the other…
The other is from my friend Cathy Reisenwitz:
…Though evangelicals tend to oppose any sexual norm they believe might threaten the stability and fecundity of the Christian nuclear family—including premarital sex, interracial dating, gay marriage, trans rights, immigration, and abortion—the purity culture [politician Matt] Gaetz and other evangelicals promote may actually exacerbate sexual abuse. A recent report from the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence found that certain norms embedded in religious teachings, in particular, are associated with high levels of sexual abuse; these include gender essentialism, limited autonomy for women, limited gender egalitarianism, a view of masculinity as dominant and aggressive, and male sexual entitlement. So while it might seem counterintuitive that sexual abuse allegations proliferate in a movement that emphasizes sexual restraint and propriety, evangelical purity culture shares troubling overlaps with other cultures in which sexual abuse is common…There’s no epidemic of sex trafficking that requires the federal government to censor online pornography or arrest, deport, or incarcerate Americans for buying or selling sex. Nevertheless, evangelicals have forged a vast network of organizations meant to “raise awareness” and lobby the U.S. government to use state violence to enforce sexual purity standards…Perhaps these organizations rely on anecdotes and flawed data year after year because it has always been vanishingly rare for a stranger to successfully kidnap someone in the United States and force them into sex slavery. The most cursory analysis reveals that nearly every case of “sex trafficking” turns out to be one of two things: It’s either actually adult, consensual sex work or it’s an instance of intimate-partner violence… The real sexual abuse epidemic isn’t men in vans holding women at gunpoint. It’s…men like Gaetz, and the ideologies of abuse that they promote.
Diary #566
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, psychology, Sunset on May 4, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Though autumn is my favorite season, spring is my second-favorite, and for some of the same reasons: it’s (mostly) neither too hot nor too cold, neither too rainy nor too dry (although the latter doesn’t really apply here in the vicinity of the rain forest), and best of all it’s colorful. I like seeing everything turn green again after the winter brown, and flowers burst forth from both trees and lawn. Hummingbirds and honeybees are everywhere, and while there are also a lot of flies that’s also true of summer (which lacks spring’s other beauties). It does mean the days are getting longer, which increases my free-floating anxiety; however, part of that is the fault of the daylight mismanagement regime rather than the fault of spring itself, so I try not to judge her too harshly for it. And besides, once it starts getting to be a problem I can simply start my cannabis a bit earlier in the evening so as to give it more time to soothe my central nervous system before bedtime.
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