For Pops.

Because today would have been my father’s 84th birthday, some Louis, who he loved.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

It is sometimes reassuring to think of all the people who knew him – and he knew a lot of people, some for a second, some for decades – and to know he probably got to tell them a dumb joke, or complimented them in some old-fashioned way, or even just smiled at them as they went by. It’s the jauntiness, the joy of him, that I miss the most now; there are very, very few men who can tell me a dumb joke that will actually make me laugh, & who think it is important enough to try, & he was the first and the last. You getta you papers.

Pops, I miss you. I wish I could pick up the phone so you could tell me every last detail of your most recent conversation with the guy about the extra charge on the cable bill right now.

He found joy in almost everything: in the photos taken around the same time as this one, there’s one of my mother worried about her electric scooter; my nieces are splitting a cotton candy; my sister was probably counting tickets or finding  a map or some something for my mother, and my nephew was waiting to see what ride next. Rachel volunteered to go on any ride the kids would go on, even the ones that made everyone else sick and dizzy, and I took pictures. But my dad just watched and smiled: at a toddler taking a step, at his beautiful wife, at the ice cream stand, at this small part of his assembled family. He’d tell a story about a guy he knew growing up in Brooklyn, or about the guy he knew in the service, and the funny thing is, not all of his stories ended happily. A lot of them didn’t. But he just told them, because they were relevant or because something had reminded him of the person or that particular story. They rarely had  an ending, or a moral; he wasn’t that kind of guy who is always trying to impart wisdom or experience. In almost the same breath, he could finish a story about not having his number called during the Korean War, and then wonder out loud where to get ice cream.

Stories and ice cream. I thought I’d get to share a lot more of both with him, but I’m glad, at least I managed to snap this photo: you may not be able to see his eyes, but you can’t not see the twinkle in them, too.

High Heels for Men

High heels for men? But of course! Their rules? ” No adult content and men wear heels as men.” Sometimes I wish I could just read things without deconstructing them. “Adult content” means “not a of a sexual nature” I’m sure, but “as men”? No idea what that’s supposed to mean.

Exactly Why Slutwalk

You don’t really have to wait even a minute for an example of the kind of victim-blaming that Slutwalk is all about, but this one is particularly horrific, as the young woman died in a fire on Saturday and the coverage of her death appeared in The New York Times. The journalist quotes someone who calls her a “he”, comments on the men she invited to her apartment, and describes her curvaceous body.

As if any of these things had anything to do with her dying in this fire. Pathetic reporting, pathetic culture we live in.

From Feministing:

Other folks, including GLAADJanet Mock, and Autumn Sandeen are calling out this incredibly offensive and dangerous article as well. You can let the New York Times know you’re sick and tired of their victim blaming and transphobia by writing to them here or tweeting @NYTimes. Update: GLAAD also recommends tweeting @NYTMetro, the paper’s Metro Desk, which might get to the reporters more directly.

Please speak up.

Me: Slutwalk: Appleton

It wasn’t the most formal talk I’ve ever given, but I didn’t know it was being filmed at all, so I’m glad to see it.

And let me tell you “slut” + “faculty member” + “”43” is not the easiest sartorial equation to solve, and on Mother’s Day, no less!

Slutwalk: Appleton

Today, for my 43rd birthday, and on Mother’s Day to boot, I’ll be speaking at Appleton’s first Slutwalk. Here’s a preview of what I’m planning on saying:

Thank you so much, VDAY, for having the ovarios to put on this event here in Appleton.

For those of you who don’t know, Slutwalk began only last year in April, in Toronto, when a police officer  admitted that he was told he wasn’t supposed to say that women shouldn’t dress like sluts so as not to be victimized. And by that, he meant they should dress in ways that hid their bodies in ways our misogynist, sex-obsessed culture would find acceptable. Aside from the impossibility of being able to decide what “dressing like a slut” means in any culture, he put together the idea that somehow women’s bodies are at fault for the violence and slut shaming perpetrated against them.

They are not.

Women’s bodies are beautiful and should be seen, and in a culture that had its act together – on both violence and sexuality – police officers wouldn’t say such stupid things. Mind you: he wasn’t trying to be hateful. His words, no doubt, came out of something like compassion for the women who he had seen victimized while doing his job. He wanted – like so many of us do – to keep women safe from sexual assault, from trauma, from fear.

But what many men don’t know is that it’s not what kind of clothing a woman’s body wears that has anything to do with it. It’s what a woman’s body IS that causes us all these troubles: bodies full of desire, desiring, desired; bodies of curves and straight lines and freckles and hair. Bodies of skin and fat and muscle and bone; bodies of organs, of hearts and brains and cervixes.

What I love is that every day of my life I can wake up & say that I was born with the one body part whose only use is pleasure. But if you think about it, which parts of us aren’t? Brains, hair, hands, hearts, breasts, legs, feet and elbows – the skin itself is about pleasure. Freud had this theory that we were all polymorphously perverse – meaning that when we’re born, we’re so awash in the pleasure of having a body that every touch, ever breeze, brings us rolling waves of pleasure and that the process of getting older is learning to move some of that sensitivity to a few precious locations – mostly so, as he figured it, we were going to get anything done at all. And so our nerves, so adept at finding pleasure, became located in our nipples and tongues, our fingers and toes, the backs of knees and the backs of our necks, our lips – both sets of lips –  and of course in our genitals too. And somehow we managed to stop touching our selves long enough to write books and build buildings.

But women are a kind of warm, breathing repository of all of that pleasure, and it’s hard not to see, especially not in spring. Our sexual selves come out of hiding in the spring, and so our clothes come off – even here in Wisconsin, where “spring” and “warm” are not always the same thing – because we feel the joy of having bodies, of desiring and being desired. Continue reading “Slutwalk: Appleton”

Argentina Raises the Bar

Argentina set the new standard for changes in gender markers on identity documents for trans people:

“The fact that there are no medical requirements at all — no surgery, no hormone treatment and no diagnosis — is a real game changer and completely unique in the world. It is light years ahead of the vast majority of countries, including the U.S., and significantly ahead of even the most advanced countries,” said Eisfeld, who researched the laws of the 47 countries for the Council of Europe’s human rights commission.

In the US, you can get your passport changed with a letter from a doctor but no genital surgery is required, at least. The problems arise in the different ruling of the different states, so in Texas, for insance, a trans woman is always legally male, but she can legally marry her (cis) girlfriend there. Not quite how they expected the law against transness and against same sex marriage to play out, but there you go.

NC

North Carolina looks to pass a law that will make it impossible for same sex couples to have anything that even resembles marriage – a law that’s referred to as a super DOMA. Wisconsin has one in place, too, and I understand, for some, they are meant to uphold a traditional Christian marriage of one man + one woman.

What they do, sadly, is make LGBTQ feel less welcome, cause an increase in bigotry and violence against queer people, and put many children of LGBTQ people further into legal limbo when their parents separate, amongst other things.

I do not understand why civil recognition of my partnership offends people so deeply that they would pass this kind of law.

I don’t understand why people hate gay people so much.