Who is the God who affirms queers?  Who loves the people society hates?  What have I seen about him?  What do I know about her?

This God is not a God who is invested in control.  This God does not need to shape creation to please himself, break it open, contort your truth, your individuality, consume you and leave you obedient.

Instead, this God is a God who is invested in freedom, committed to free will despite the cost, who is invested in consent.  That God created from a place of taking joy in creativity, who wanted the joy of watching what was initiated take on a life of its own, go places and learn a self separate and divine.

This God is not going to hurt you.  Even if, sad to say, you hurt someone else.  Instead of control, instead of intervening in our free will by stopping us or punishing us until we are controlled by fear and made “good” she gave us the resilience of the human spirit, the presence of conscience, empathy, the will to change, the brilliance and potential of humanity to unbury the wisdom the Creative Spirit put into their own bodies and the living world and find it still there after suffering so much violence, and see new ways of being, nonviolent and creative and loving ones.

This God is not in the angry voice, the machine gun, armies made uniform and obedient and ready to be deployed, the nuclear bomb, the voice of shame, the electric rake of fear going up our spine and threatening what will happen if you do not obey.  This God is not in the machine, the suppression of the self, the murder of the soul.

This God is in your own body, in the opening of your chest when witnessing something beautiful, in the energy of new truth running up your spine, in the pleasurable ache of desire in your belly, in the exhaustion of content.  This God is in the resistance of the spirit against its own oppression, the courage of the commonplace person to refuse to harm another despite the threat of punishment, this God is in the vision of the radical, the humility and strength of the civilly disobedient, in each connection between human beings, in each moment of truly seeing the world, in the humanity and vulnerability of knowing ones own or another’s suffering without blindness or a need to move away.  This God is in the natural world, in the reverence for one’s own true loves, the expansion and liberation of the soul.

When I say this God is real, it is because I know her.  I know that other God, too, the one who hates us queers.  And I say, from the spirit, don’t follow that one.  That one is real.  But that ain’t God.

Provide processing time ~ As an extremely social introvert, this is perhaps the most important one on the list for me.  Time between inputs, like spending time with friends and lovers, experiencing art like films and books, and other extraverted activities are important for an introvert to process and store information and sort out their perceptions and opinions.  I honestly think I can’t remember well without enough processing time.  I feel as if I lose experiences when I overcrowd them.

Learn to be a gentle handler ~ You can’t charm a fox with a brash approach or scare a rabbit into heightened performance.  If you want to get yourself to take action, gentle nudging and internal coaxing will work while pushing yourself forward, brandishing the knife towards yourself and making threats will only lead to paralysis or resistance.  A lot of introverts had pressure applied to them by adults as children in order to get them to become bold and have internalized this tactic which disrespect their true nature and also tends to backfire, as it’s counterintuitive for managing introversion.  Improve your gentle self-talk and reduce your inner harsh, critical voice.  It may seem like a motivator but is actually an inhibitor and a block.

Practice use of body language ~ For introverts, it is often difficult to talk, and if not to talk, then to take the risk of speaking authentically.  Learning to use nonverbal expression can help give approval or positive attention to people you’re interested in, help you show annoyance or anger when you’re boundaries are being overstepped, and help you show your feelings when you want to but feel shy or inarticulate.  I feel like I learned a lot by interacting with dogs, who wear their feelings on their sleeve by nature.

Notice your love of other introverts ~ One of the greatest struggles practically everyone faces is self-negativity and judgment.  Many introverts gravitate towards other introverts and find shared traits understandable and even likable in others they judge in themselves.  Remember to compare your consideration and respect for others to how you feel about yourself and try to make them equal.

But germs would still exist.  And everyone would still be subject to them.  They’d still play out their causes and effects.  Lack of public agreement wouldn’t stop them, or change what they were doing one bit.

I’ve talked before about “awakening to feminism,” and with it to an ethic of consent.  It’s one of those amazing experiences that also freaks you out and costs a lot of energy and emotion, a lot of regret and anger and horror and anxiety.  A lot of mainstream media and everyday interactions begin to freak you out.  You can never casually waltz into a rom-com again.

Because in our culture, unacknowledged violence is commonplace.  If you start seeing and naming all the coercion that goes on, recognizing this authoritarian, hierarchical rape culture we live in, you will probably have to either gravitate towards likeminded people you can be safe with, or be very tactful in how you present your worldview.  Because people are going to be kind of freaked out by it.

In our culture, we aren’t educated about violence, about coercion, about rape.  They play out their affects nonetheless, causing pandemic suffering and harm.  But collectively, we deny it or just don’t recognize it.  Rape and abuse are supposedly rare.  Freedom is the alleged status quo, because over time more and more of the most overt forms of oppression have been named and combated.

Sometimes I feel depressed because I believe in an ethic of consent.  It seems like there is so much violence and so much denial, so many tiers of abuse in common people’s lives, such complex webs of power and violence.  Using the germ analogy helps me, because I can see then how seeing something harmful that’s pandemic and seems extreme and crazy can turn overtime to common knowledge, something we’d never refute because the effects, not just the science, are such realities in our own lives.  And I can imagine that violence might be like that one day.  Something we learn about and combat in more and more complex ways.

The crux of why this kind of teaching distresses me is that it does not have affirm at its heart an ethic of consent.  It instead attempts to add a layer of coercion to what people do sexually.

I see this as problematic along two major lines.

One is that by alienating people from consent, it makes it more likely that they will experience rape.  Anything which normalizes coercion and the absence of consent in life and in sex contributes to a rape culture –a culture which supports, hides, and fails to name or resist rape.  It also makes it less likely that people will recognize what they have experienced as rape, as the world around them will reflect back false messages of their culpability.  Many people feel guilt or shame after nonconsensual sexual experiences, yet do not think of them as rape, imagining their experience makes them less good or whole or holy.  This is a terrible thing to do to people.

The second is that by alienating people from consent, it makes it less likely they will seek and have the profound and sacred experience of consensual sex, particularly while being free from outside punishment and fear.  This in and of itself is causing harm, working to subtract from people’s lives a source of self-discovery, intimacy, pleasure, and excitement strong enough to be transformative in lasting and dramatic ways.  Consensual sex is holy, and it can reaffirm in one’s body and spirit the reality that there is the potential for good in this world and pleasure and joy is possible for them.  It reaffirms the will to live and to love, which I see as the hallmark influence of the Divine.

Sex negativity and any discussion of sexual ethics that does not have at its heart an ethic of consent can only serve to make people more vulnerable to abuse and take away from experiences of joy.  Evidence of this is all around us, being explained with incongruous and detached rhetoric or just outright ignored.  And it is in each of our lives.

I think it is time to rebel.

The belief  that to be good is to obey is the beating, perverted heart of authoritarianism.  It functions on many levels in our society but none so stark and formative as the relationship of children to parents.  Children are often explicitly taught to think, “I am good when I obey,” often to obey without questioning, resisting, or responding negatively by showing signs of pain, unhappiness, sadness, anger and other “troublesome” emotions while complying.  At other times the message is implicit in the withholding of affection or attention or resources or other unacknowledged punishment, which theorists like Alice Miller and John Bradshaw point to as the cause of the construction of a false self, an inauthentic self adapted to the demands of a parental figure in order to survive.

Perhaps the next most stark and evocative example of this dynamic is in religious teaching and hierarchies.  First it stands out in the manner in which we relate to our religious “authorities.”  I’ve talked before about the idea of the Bible as “the ultimate authority” and pointed to the reality that there is no such thing as a direct Biblical ethic since everything from the translation, to the application, to the picking and choosing of what would otherwise be contradictory in its content, to oftentimes the simple reading of the Bible is in fact through this argument being left to the “authorities” which often means the clergy and significantly to celebrity or widely publicized members of the clergy.  The implied message is not to think or engage with ethics and spirituality yourself, but to obey the mandates of others.  This is appealing because it allows us to be lazy (our inherent, original sin) and hard to escape because it threatens us with fear of rejection and damnation should our own consciences and beliefs contradict with those messages.

But more heartbreaking and what seems more personal and pivotal to me, it shapes the way we think of God, of the Divine.  We see God as an authority figure – self-centered and temperamental, ready to dish out rewards for our obedience and punishment for our disobedience.  We imagine God wants to police and restrict us, to water-down our thoughts, correct and censor our feelings, to constrain and reduce our desires.  God wants us to conform to what God wants.

For some of us, this isn’t even as explicitly “religious” as all that.  I think in our own minds most of all we find ourselves engaged in a disturbed dynamic in which obedience is equated with good.  When our shame, guilt, self-consciousness or ungrounded “selflessness” guides our actions, we imagine some external authority approving of us.  When we begin to listen to our own feelings, bodies, minds, and conscience we often find ourselves fearing retribution, feeling arrogant, uncomfortable and fearful that we are stepping out of line.  Self-violence is the watermark left on the conscience of those raised in authoritarian contexts.

I seriously doubt that many of us would believe in authoritarianism if it were presented as such and the alternative well represented.  But we are taught and imbedded in that teaching is deference.

I often suggest that those people consider calling themselves “queer” if they feel comfortable with it.  And they ask, “What does that mean?”  I say, I don’t know.  Generally, when placing words on people, mistakes are made.  But this is what I think.  This is for those who would like to have a word to describe themselves, but feel that it may not be okay for them to use queer.

The way I see it, if I am uncomfortable enough with how society defines gender, sexuality, and relationships to feel resistant to accepting a label, if I feel a simultaneous urge and resistance to voicing my discomfort with how people do sexuality, I can claim the identity of queer.  Queer means, not mainstream.  Not comfortable.

Sometimes, it’s because we don’t want a single relationship to take primacy in our lives.  Because we don’t believe in the romantic myth.  Because we don’t get what’s up with wanting marriage.

Sometimes it’s because we love people who aren’t our “opposite” gender.  Because we don’t get gender.  Because we just love who we love, and want who we want, how we want them.  Because we aren’t going to let some concept of gender get in the way of how we make our love bonds.

Sometimes it’s because we don’t want the sex society says is okay.  Because we want to be tied up or knocked around.  Because we want crazy, dirty things we would not say out loud in most settings.

Because if and when our true sexuality is made public, we will get pathologized, we will get abused, we will get prosecuted.  Because we squirm in our skin whenever people are defined, whenever mainstream relationship talk hits our ears, whenever we someone hate themselves for wanting “the wrong things.”

Because we don’t want to get on the conveyor belt of relationships in this society, carried along, passive and half-hearted, when we know there’s something more.  We’ve felt it in our friendships, and we want it to grow, not die out with time.

I am sure there are tons of reasons we’re made “queer” in this society.  It seems it’s getting harder and harder to be what we’re supposed to be, to comply with contradictory norms and bizarre, inhuman standards of appearance, desire, and behavior.

No one in the world should have to “be queer” if they don’t want to.  But I just wanted to say something for people who think they might like to, but maybe they can’t or shouldn’t.  Because it seems to come up a lot.

Throughout their relationship, this guy showed incredible respect for Emily’s physical boundaries.  He made sure she wanted to hold hands, kiss, have some spontaneous moves put on her.  If and when she said no, he wasn’t reactionary.  He even made sure she knew he wasn’t secretly freaking out or angry, that it was okay not to consent.  In short, he considered her claiming autonomy of her own body to be her right and no harm to himself regardless of his desires and feelings.  He had good physical boundaries.  Their hookups were, as a result, great.

Simultaneously, he showed a complete lack of comprehension of mental and emotional boundaries.  He called her a lot.  He wanted to hang out everyday from the first day they met. He texted her at all hours, and when she asked for a week of space, he sent a text that started by saying she didn’t have to respond because he was giving her space. At one point, when she said how she would feel about a certain situation, he said that no, that was not how she would feel.  When she said she needed emotional and mental space – more time between interactions and less emotional intensity – he freaked out.  He said he tried to give people space in past relationships when they asked for it, but that giving them space conflicted with his need to interact.  The boundary of having someone available to him at all times was his concept of boundaries.

Those two needs and attempts at boundary setting are not parallel.  Boundaries are each person’s inherent right to their body, mind, and spirit.  Emily owns herself.  If she sets a boundary around her time, attention, or availability, that is her right.  Setting a boundary that you need to have someone available to you is not a boundary.  You cannot set your boundary in someone else’s space.  He can feel anything and it will be appropriate.  He can make his decisions based on the reality of what he’s feeling.  But to push at that boundary as a violation of your rights is just not okay.  And this same guy would never do the same thing physically.  He’s a feminist in that regard.

It is certainly true that the need to be heard, respected, cared for, and supported is a genuine human need.  Like touch, affection, and sex are needs.  But needs that involve another person have to met consensually.  And like physical boundaries, there is no giving up one’s right to consent.  Each moment, each decision is a choice.  The other person always has the right to reclaim themselves, to not consent.  Most people, even if they do understand physical boundaries, do not understand emotional boundaries.  As an example, I’ve never understood the phenomenon of people who, when told they are being broken up with, try to negotiate.  That to me evidences the very issue at the heart of what’s wrong.

Emily’s failed love interest is not uncommon, and he is not a bad person.  He was a very cool person in a lot of regards.  But he was a pretty abusive guy.  And his behaviors were counterintuitive to getting his needs met (especially consensually, though I personally do not think you can actually get your inherent need for love met non-consensually).  When you try to set your boundaries in someone else’s space, your behavior is entitled, and you are trying to violate someone’s rights.  Most people who do this do not think they are doing anything wrong.  They think that are getting what is owing to them, sticking up for themselves, or at best, sly.  If they don’t get what they want, they usually think they are being harmed and tell the person they’re trying to invade that they are being abusive.  If that person is also confused about boundaries, this is a recipe for scary dysfunction.

Being called a “foodie” – which I more or less took to mean someone who is upper middle class, wants to avoid eating food that’s harmful and have only “the best,” and thus loves Wholefoods and lives on organic, fancy foods – really hit me the wrong way.  I think I felt like he had some idea of my place in the current system, his identifying me as a “foodie” implying that my political will was a privilege (which in some senses, it is) signifying a certain background, and assuming my political will had been nicely appropriated into the status quo.  Food was a hobby with an ethical twist.

I wouldn’t be so sensitive about the term now, but I might still be annoyed.  Because it points to something that really upsets me about our culture, a sort of pitfall people’s evolving ethics can fall into out of common, human laziness or simply get bogged down in for lack of knowing what else to do.  Some folks seem to be interested in wholesome, organically produced (or not chemically contaminated), local foods as a privilege offered only to them.  They see it as “the best,” what is owing to them, a signifier of class.  Other folks seem to be interested in wholesome, organically produced, local and ethically produced foods as a privilege that ought to be extended to everyone including themselves.  That is a marked difference.

Adding a niche of ethically produced food into a system where food self-sufficiency is not being rebuilt and most folks are not getting adequate resources to change their habits is merely a way to cash in on rising political consciousness while maintaining the status quo.  An unjust system selling or allowing the sale of ethics to a privileged few is not a gateway to change.  It’s a scary paradox of capitalist consumerism, the sale of ethics, the sale of safe food, as a niche market.  It won’t disrupt the status quo.  And it is scary to think that some of us privileged enough to know about our food system, grow leery and critical of it, and to have resources enough to spend more and have access to better foods should be so easily pacified as that – we get ours, comfortable in the assumption we will always be privileged enough to get it, and we’re all set.

Context is everything when it comes to food.  I will never forget the taste of spicy chicken sandwiches when I was only eating once a day, the crisp and oily outside and slight sting of the spice, or cold coke and French fries with dozens of packets of ketchup.  I will never be able to think of a box of brownie mix that takes only water without a fleeting sense of wonder, having found one in the back of our cupboard and not having money for oil and eggs.  Mac and cheese with tuna and generic doctor pepper were a steal, the generic brands costing only cents were the makers helping us out.  Franchise tacos left you feeling surprisingly good after and full longer than most things.

I wouldn’t touch that food with a ten foot pole now.  When I taste coke, it seems like a froth of sugared chemicals and literally hurts my tongue.  But I am not starving slightly each moment now.  There were glimpses of the food love I have now in childhood.  Tomatoes my grandmother and father grew, the red and yellow German “Candy” Stripe that I would walk outside with a salt shaker, pull off the vine, and eat until my stomach was full or bring in and cut up alongside cottage cheese.  Blueberries that grew on bushes on our property, and the magical tart and sweet, vibrant taste of pies that brought up the feel of bright sunlight and rainwater, that technically failed since they were runny, but made my chest ache, feeling how they rare they were and watching them disappear as they were eaten.  The clear, clean taste that seemed to cut straight at hunger and solve it for a time of white fish caught only hours before and cooked in a microwave under cellophane with bits of butter and lemon and seasoned salt or fried and eaten on cheap wheat bread with piles of ketchup.  The almost freakish, wild taste of morels the first time I went and found and ate them, bringing them to my mouth over and over and still not getting past the shock of the taste.

But always, always, these could not usurp hunger.  Access to food that was not nourishing or food that was but still would not be provided consistently never really solved my hunger.  Hunger is more than appetite in the moment.  I did not even recognize on a fully conscious level that I was hungry.  That was just how life was.  How it felt to me.  My bodily feelings of hunger weren’t distinct.  I dreamed about food every night, and I thought it was strange.  When I came to college, I gained ten pounds.  I thought I was getting “fat,” gaining the freshman ten or whatever, but couldn’t figure out where it was going on my body, since I seemed to look the same and my clothes still fit.  I decided it was because I was walking more and gaining muscle in my legs.  I did notice I was sleeping better and was more able to feel happy.  I thought it strange when I exercised I could do three times the repetitions I was used to, which I didn’t realize was increased energy and muscle mass distributed all over from simply being fed.  I hadn’t been at my natural body weight.

I keep sorting through the class conflict in my head.  I’m working on the part of me right now that sees things I’m longing to do like making my own pasta or grinding my own grain as a bourgeoisie activity.  What a shock it would be to my great-grandparents that producing one’s own food would feel to me like a sign of high class.  It’s complicated.  When I ask myself:  How much should I ethically spend on food?  The answer is more than many people have and more than I will have at times of financial insecurity.  Then I’m perplexed, asking myself:  Is my class status allowing me to be ethical?  How can this be?

I suppose it’s being mixed class that has me feeling that if my food ethics and food security are dependent upon my maintaining a certain class status and our society continuing to provide the same degree of opportunity to people of my demographic then I do not feel secure.  That’s the privilege that I want, food security.  I know in my bones what perhaps many of us don’t know – that class can shift.  It is not a sign of personal character whether we are allowed access to adequate, ethically produced food.  It is a sign of our society being well, ethical and just.  I’m trying to sort out how to invest in greater food self-sufficiency, find places where I can live and work that help me feel more food secure.  But I know it will be a niche, a privilege, if I do find it.  And I don’t want the broader culture, the common experience to remain unchanged.

Valerie recently discovered the term “mixed class” someone online was using to apply to their life experiences.  She mentioned it to me, because she knew I would relate to it.  I recently spent time with a friends family, the sort of upper middle class people who do not think they are rich but talk casually about the various properties they own.  I could not get over the fact that they thought and talked about money constantly.

I had only experienced that degrees of having everything seen through the lens of money in times of extreme poverty.  When money is a problem you cannot solve to get your basic needs met, you think about it all the time.  Every single decision, each food you buy, each item you purchase, means scarcity later.  And there are times, when you have to spend anyways, because there is no flow of money and the scarcity is guaranteed.  Money dominates your life.  It oppresses you.

When I have been relieved from those times, like when my father finally won his disability suit, and when I finally got a job after months of underemployment that had me down to my last $50 outside of rent and utilities that I could spend on food for the foreseeable future, my constant thoughts of money cleared up like the foggy mind-state of a fever passing away.  It’s hard even to remember accurately afterwards.

I think I am forever marked by my experiences of poverty.  In the back of my mind and often in the forefront, I am not convinced that I will not face poverty again and not convinced that next time there will be a reprieve.  I have probably five times more food stocked than anyone I know, because it gives me a tangible sense of food security.

Food insecurity causes a hunger than cannot be satiated.  Even with a belly so full it is uncomfortable, there is still a gnawing ache, from a body that has not had a sufficient supply of what it needs to feel whole and well and a mind that is searching to solve a problem it cannot and trying to cope with that reality.  The only people I have ever known who lived with empty fridges and shelves without an underlying anxiety that wrecked their mood and sense of safety in the world had enough money to buy prepared food anytime they wanted.

I’m fortunate that I have not faced the same degree of housing insecurity.  And I am lucky that I always knew I could use my high school grade record and discipline, which in a way is taught and a privilege itself, to get myself into college, away from home, and through school.

Now I’m trying to sort out what to do with my mixed class self.  There is literally a dual  perspective, often conflicting in my own mind.  My sense of what I can accomplish is paradoxical.  My faith in the system in which I live is deeply jaded, which I am actually quite grateful for, but certainly is deeply uncomfortable.

Right now, I’m just starting to form the questions.  How do I articulate and comprehend the economic system I live in, how it affects me, how I should live in it?  How do I ethically engage with money?  What efforts should I or should I not put in to gaining access to it?  When do I have an excess?  Where should it go?  What are basic human rights, the privileges everyone should have?  What is unjust privilege, which everyone should divest of?

I wanted to take the time to write out what is bothering me in a lingering way about his comments after the flare of rage I always feel about misogyny and rape apology has worn down, a more haunting and creepy feel.  I can’t help but asking myself, if this man is a human being and human beings do have some commonality, how can he make such a statement, think such a thing, and still maintain the sense of being a good person?

I might be humanizing the perpetrator, or focusing too much on the abuser and not the victims, but I feel there have been enough responses that there is room for mine to focus here.  I have to wonder how in God’s name someone can make such statements, and this wondering vexes me.  Perhaps the greatest threat I’ve faced to my hope and joy as a human being is experiencing absolute confidence in human evil and doubt in human goodness.

What’s wrong with this man?  My answer is, he is lazy.  What’s so haunting about his recent words and the twist of logic and ethics they evidence is the commonplace, familiar, contagious, and incredibly dangerous feel to them.  Obviously, other people believe this.  Obviously, such a simple and stupid false truth can be eloquently and succinctly unraveled by hundreds of thousands of voices.  But I think we all feel a haunting fear that his simple, false words are still strong, that they’ll travel faster and farther than our own.  Because they offer people a legitimized way to avoid the pain of reality and make decisions they feel good about without taking any responsibility or doing any work.

It’s plain old original sin – laziness – at its finest.  And by finest I mean most harmful, detached, and dehumanizing.  This gentleman just tipped a global crisis of human rights violations into the trash on a whim.  Why?  Because he can.  Because it’s easy.  And because he’s found a way to avoid the reality that would be neither pleasant nor convenient that we live in a rape culture and violence against women is the number one human rights abuse and that sex, pregnancy, and abortion are complicated issues affecting people’s lives and tangled up in systems of oppression and interpersonal violence choking the nevertheless resilient presence of human goodness, desire, passion, and love.

The violence this man enacted so casually, so flippantly obviously did not register for him as a violent act.  He did not feel that he had harmed anyone.  And, of course, that is ludicrous for as many including the blogger linked earlier in this post have pointed out, he is not just a random someone, he is a person of high influence in making political decisions and shaping the stance of authority in upholding or undermining the human rights of women.  And he is not taking that responsibility.

He is sidestepping it completely with a vague theory based on magical thinking that God or science or whatever force in charge is creating a world of justice, we just haven’t noticed.  It seems we humans have been waiting forever for God to control events to create justice for us, some of us so in denial we fabricate realities in which this has occurred.  And it seems God will wait forever for us to get over our lazy pain-avoidance and face truth and take responsibility to create justice for ourselves.

Anyways, I thought I’d write out something of the way I engage with my own consent.  I broke it into Yes, No, Maybe, If, and Triggered or Interference.  I tried to give either common and specific or personal and specific examples of each.  Hope this helps someone!

Yes:  You know you want something.  You are able to express first desire and then enjoyment.  Enthusiasm is the general, trustworthy indicator of genuine consent.  There is no permanent or irrevocable yes. 

• I want to have a sexual relationship with someone, and I express this as tactfully as I can so they can understand it.

• You make a sound, expression, or assertion of pleasure during sex to give your lover the green light to keep going.

• You move your body a certain way to get your partner to touch you how you want.

• You have a dialogue of what will and won’t happen, chose a safe word, and continue into an experience where your partner will continue on past what would normally read as non-consent.

No:  You do not want something.  You are able to articulate this.  If someone pushes the boundary, you trust yourself to assert to the degree you have to in order to have your boundary respected. 

• This is when you feel emo or tired or just not into sex, and your partner puts the moves on you, and you give a non-defensive, non-apologetic clear indication you do not want to be seduced, at present.  Then hopefully you guys are skilled enough to figure out something to do that doesn’t disappoint you both.

• When you’re in a sexual encounter and you redirect someone and despite taking the cue, they keep coming back to try again to get you to consent, and you escalate your no enough to get them to stop and also reassess your trust in them.

• Someone starts to corner or coerce you, gets pushy or threatening, and you get out, get loud, get help, get intimidating, make it clear there will be serious consequences and you will do what you need to do to be respected.

• It is possible to be unskilled enough to say no.  This is where most of us start out.  We worry too much about other people’s feelings and unwanted consequences, we want to preserve the attachment so we either do not indicate or when pressured do not re-assert our honest non-consent.

• It is possible to be unable to say no due to circumstances, like when you are a child or the risk of bodily harm is beyond what you can contend with.

Maybe:  You are uncertain and so unable to give an enthusiastic yes but do know that you can give a no without apology and be prepared to assert.  This is where most things start out when trying them for the first time.  Maybe is not being caught in relational pressure to do something and struggling with wishing to want that thing as a solution to “the problem” of your non-consent, that’s being coerced. 

• I feel attracted to someone, but I don’t know them well enough yet to know whether I would want to have sex with them as they are in real life, not just in my mind.  But I don’t have any indications that they would not respect my saying no or backing out at any time, so I get some more information.

• I know I enjoy fantasizing about something, and I am not sure whether I will enjoy it in real life.  I start out either on my own or clarify this with a partner I can trust and move forward with some checking in for both to ensure that consent is happening.

• I don’t have strong feelings of yes or no about something.  I feel I would try it out with a partner who was interested and would respect my consent.

If:  This is when certain circumstance determine whether you consent to something.  

• For most of us, safer sex practices probably stand out.  I consent to sex if barriers and trustworthy birth control are used.

• I’ve been with someone who wanted nipple play but only after becoming highly turned on and always just before orgasm.  That’s a clear, consistent if.

• A lot of young people would like to have sex, but they are in environments where the risk is too great.  They don’t have access to birth control or barriers, or their parents would become abusive.  That’s a situation where societal coercion turns consent to non-consent.  Partners who override this lack of consent are still abusing their partners, despite the presence of desire.

• I am have a highly vanilla sexuality on my own, and so I would not bring certain kink elements into sex with a partner just like me.  But when I have a kinky partner, there are things like role playing and storytelling that I consent to because I can enjoy them in a context where my partner is very excited.

Consent is not doing something because someone else likes it.  You can enjoy something only in the context of witnessing someone else’s enjoyment.  My best friend loves bad media, and I love watching it with her.  And my lover enjoys if I tell her a sexy story when I’m on top, and I enjoy it because it makes her more responsive.  But if I can’t enjoy it for myself and do it anyway “for” another person, that’s not consent.

Situations where the presence of drugs or alcohol determine an if should be highly suspect.  Those things might enable or interfere with consent.  If something helps you overcome an inhibition you don’t want, it is perhaps an assist at overcoming something you might try to gain the skills to consent to without it.  If something helps you overcome an inhibition you do want, it is destructive.

Triggered / Interference:  Past trauma disrupts your experience of the present and interferes with your awareness of or articulation of consent. 

• Someone flirts with me, and I feel too spooked by a past filled with sex negativity and abusive authority figures to know whether I’m interested or not or to communicate yes or no.  Either they read mixed messages and respect me with some distance, or they read mixed messages and move in, which is an indicator I should get away from them.  Someone looking for consent and getting mixed messages will be wary.  Someone looking to coerce you will take mixed messages as openings and move forward and is not trustworthy.

• I am having sex with my partner but keep checking out.  They’re getting confused about consent and checking in with me.  I can’t give an enthusiastic yes, so I have to decide whether I want to stop or try to move into or away from a trigger and give my partner some information.  Regardless of what I’m experiencing, I need to respect their right to stop.

• When I first got with Valerie, she asked me if I wanted to go take a shower.  I really wanted to, but I was too overwhelmed with fear and paranoia about roommates, which had actually to do with my family of origin, and communicated a rather panicked no.  She seemed surprised and made it clear that there was no pressure.  I clarified that I wanted to but felt spooked, and she said, okay and she would ask me again sometime.  The next time I wasn’t spooked, I said yes, we did, and it was great.

When triggered, it can be not only hard to express consent but also hard to say no or assert if coerced.  This is one reason I think learning the skills to track respect for consent or coercion in relationships before having sex with someone is so important.

Triggers can get you where you can’t make choices and need your partner to safeguard your consent.  But if you have skills choices like switching what’s happening to something that’s easier for you, tracking a trigger by focusing on where you feel pain or dissonance in your body and letting those feelings take over, or moving away from a trigger and getting back into your experience by finding where things are still feeling good in your body and bringing your attention there can all be good ones.

I don’t think writers like Clarisse Thorn mean “mainstream sex” when they say vanilla sex.  They mean “not kinky.”  But what is that?

What does it mean to try and figure out if there is a distinction in people’s sexuality while we live in a culture that undermines any and all sexuality?  According to the mainstream, it seems kinky people are perverts, sluts, creeps, and get pathologized, often considered to likely be victims of past sex abuse (an accusation meant to undermine and shame them).  Vanilla people are inhibited, sad, frozen, not self-actualized, shitty partners, pathologized, and likely victims of past sex abuse…  It seems like all roads lead to everyone being made to feel like their sexuality is terrible.   And that no matter what their sexuality is like it’s not theirs in that remarkable trick of postmodern culture that shames you for not being self-derived in order to take control of you.

I’ve personal experiences that lead me to feel like there is something being described with vanilla and kink that are important in order for people to understand each other’s sexuality and sexual compatibility.  I’ve only had two experiences of reading about sexuality and having an epiphany of who I am.  One was hearing the term polyamorous described in the book The Ethical Slut.  I was like the boy in Velvet Goldmine yelling That’s me!  That’s me!  And the other was reading a kinky blogger’s description of sex and feeling like I got the gist of what was being described in some intuitive way and thought, “That’s a real thing.  I’ve felt that in other people.  And I don’t have it.”

By my friends’ definition of vanilla, I’m not vanilla at all.  And I think by that definition it’s because I have broken away from having my sexuality restricted and defined by a sex negative and crazy society.  But I think I am vanilla, and that I’ve been with kinky partners and slowly started to figure out how our personal experiences were differing even during the same encounters.  I’m pretty sure I had a frustrated kinky friend who more or less was pushing role playing into her everyday life with confused partners, one of them being me.  And Valerie and I have tried to talk through what we feel is different about each other lots of times.

Here is one attempt to define the difference between kink and vanilla sexuality: 

It seems to me that kinky people focus more on the eroticism of sex.  It’s the mood, the feel, the atmosphere that develops a charge and an edge and makes sex exciting, and this charge is often created by use of a cultural situation that often involves some form of taboo or power dynamic.  That mood, that feeling, that charge, that’s sex, or rather the center of what sex is and what’s most exciting to them.

Vanilla people focus more on the sensual, what’s happening physically and as a result emotionally right then and there with the people present as they are, and on what they can read of what their partner feels physically and emotionally.

I first tried to name this with Valerie after we were talking about what we meant when we even said the word “sex.”  I tried to put it into words by saying she’s focused more on what’s happening externally during sex, and I was more focused on what was happening internally during sex.

I think maybe it’s like Meyers-Briggs types:  Everyone has both; like right- and left-handedness most people have a natural dominant function they use more and more easily; like ambidexterity some people have more ambidexterity than others; society can push you away from your natural inclination; and you can shift over your lifetime, though many people don’t.  And perhaps like ambidexterity, the culture allows for vanilla sexuality more than kink sexuality, so people who are kinky have typically learned to adapt to vanilla sex out of practice and necessity, while people who are vanilla typically find it harder to comprehend and swing towards kink because they are never really expected to.

Like the functions in Meyers-Briggs, I don’t think kink and vanilla are a dichotomy in a separated sense and would be confusing and alienating to understand that way.  I think they’re a duality somewhat in the way that introvert and extrovert and thinking and feeling functions are.  I don’t think that people who are predominantly kinky and people who are predominantly vanilla can’t have sex with each other or satisfying sex with each other.  And I do think that figuring out how to articulate the difference and know that it exists can help people have more awareness of themselves and others and better relationships.

[Added 8/8/12]

One thing I did not write about in this post that is sorely absent is the reality of vanilla privilege – for lack of a clearer term.   While I attempted to show that everyone is hung up on judgments external and internal about their sexuality and this convolutes the situation of us understanding ourselves and one another, I did not point out that you can be as “extreme” into vanilla sex as you want and not be legally abused.  No one is going to take your children away because they find out you can orgasm only from nipple play.  No one is going to put you on trail for having tantric orgasms and enjoying five hours of penetration.  In a sex positive environment, these things are even goals or envied.  However, equal “extremes” on the kink side can elicit violence.  That is to say, we all experience sex negativity, but there is a degree of privilege, of safety in having one’s basic human rights upheld, in being vanilla.  No one should be punished socially or systemically for consensual sex, and kinky people, among others, are.  I think it was an error to leave this out.

This article in particular seemed like an accessible anti-racist argument grounded in everyday specifics.  I particularly like the way the Administrator responded to Proud American in the comments section.

I’m going to try to post more articles and things on here that I think are really loving.  This seems like a good kick off.

I watched an episode of 60 Minutes when I was probably 12 or 13 that was about an alternative therapy for young people dying from anorexia.  The part I remember best was when they interviewed the woman who had created the clinic in order to try to save her daughter, who doctors said was incurable and would die.  She said every single person she had worked with had a voice in their head that was real and told them they were fat, ugly, worthless, and was constantly stopping them from eating.  She said you have to teach them to fight the voice, and that’s what’s missing from hospital help, and that even getting them to talk about the voice was hard.

That made an enormous impression on me.  I think that everyone has a voice in their head, a part of their psyche that is destructive, fear-mongering, and violent.  Part of me feels that our wellness has at least in part to do with how well this voice is distinguished from the rest of the psyche and how many skills and habits are applied to keeping it from running the show.  I have a lot of names for this voice in my own mind – the Critic, the Judge, the Censor, and it’s about the only thing that I think of these days as being the Devil, the force that wants to un-create the world.

I think it is this voice that stops us from creating.  While I have some mixed feelings about The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, I her love exercises and her advice to do the ones you feel excited about and the ones you feel an intense resistance to and just pass over the rest, which seems to me like a good policy for life.  One thing I like best is how the exercises try to get you to name what it is your Inner Censor says – what that destructive voices tells you to keep you in control.  The hardest thing I did as part of that workbook was writing out the harsh criticism my Inner Censor had of my work and myself and then writing a rebuttal.   I think it really helped me, sort of equipping me with what language to use when twisted logic starting taking over my self-worth and the erasing the worth of my work.

One thing I believe makes the Inner Critic so hard to overcome is that it often represents the damage our parents have done to our psyche.  It seems like it is very difficult for human beings to recognize fault in the people who raised them, and easier for the mind to twist itself all out of shape to avoid that awareness.  And branching out from that are all the other ways our society batters the creativity out of folks through further mystification of the creative process, equating of creativity with posturing some inappropriate status, and the vicious way we belittle anyone who is not a celebrity and hate anyone who is in a remarkably thinly veiled way, and how we fail to support artists in general, making it feel like stepping off a cliff to try and commit a substantial part of your life energy to creating something.

I think its very important to be humane and interfere for those who are suffering under abusive authority figures.  And I feel that one of the most simple and complex radical acts of justice we each find ourselves unavoidably responsible for is gaining back our own inner worlds from the Censor.

The house has gray shingles and a big wrap around porch, a little property and a barn, and an unusual magnolia tree (the mystical Gorey magnolia) but otherwise is very commonplace.

Inside is filled with the stuff of his life – mostly odd assortments of junk he collected from yard sales, antique stores and what-not and often displayed in arrangements around his house.  There was a collection of dark, metal jewelry he loved to wear, teapots, carved animals in wood and stone, tiny ceramic figures from tea boxes, a bottle of lye, a bottle of gin, small creatures he hand sewed and stuffed with rice, a giant pile of tickets to operas, plays, and concerts he attended.

Then there were many original artworks on envelopes he sent off in the mail, books he illustrated and some he wrote and illustrated, information and items from his work on Dracula for Broadway, and a pile of slightly unnerving puppets from little shows he put on later in life for small and excited audiences.

I got the sense as I was looking around that what caught his interest in life was anything that perked the ears of his imagination, that hit the right cord to amuse or inspire him.  He obviously didn’t care about money or status, which was alluded to when he gave away his Tony award to a friend, never really mentioned it, and never did any other Broadway after the highly renowned set and costume design he did for Dracula.

And I think that’s because his authentic sensibilities occupied that space — an idiosyncratic mix of childlike, playful, morbid, gothic, detailed, lush, sparse, and a little bit of everything it seems.  I felt like his work was so unique and brilliant simply because he stayed in his creative mind and worked with intense, obsessive passion not for status but to make the thing, the exact thing his imagination wanted.

Even the information they passed on about the end of his life seemed sad, but not tragic – not empty in any way.  It felt mystical and meaningful.  The museum said the Gorey magnolia produced a bloom out of the usual season in time to ornament the wreath on which his friends sent his ashes out to sea.  There were pictures and dates… but regardless, I believe them.

I felt like I got a little snapshot into someone who lived a truly creative life.  And I left feeling happy for him and excited for myself and my close people.

It seems the hallmark of the postmodern world is despair – a nagging sense that we are in the process of destroying ourselves without the certainty that we are worth saving.  I remember in a class on Czech literature how I felt stunned by the transition in tone of novels written before and after the First World War.  It was as if a harm had been done to the collective psyche, humans took on a profound sense of our own capacity for evil that overwhelmed us.  I’ve heard it described that the injustices rampant in places other than the first world came home, inevitably, as systems of dominance reached their apparent conclusion (much as they are now in the US).

In the end, our society only has use for us except as consumers.  We work, and we buy.  That is our purpose.  There is very little meaning in that.  During college, like a lot of people I focused an incredibly amount of time and energy on reducing my consumption.  I started to decompartmentalize and question where things I consumed came from and where they went.  It was, of course, horrible.  But it pulled me away from despair.  It gave me meaning and generated enough political will to massively reshape my lifestyle.  It was very energizing, and as my life got simpler, it was happier, as well.

Eventually it seemed my efforts were reaching about as far as they could.  I found myself putting a date on my box of Q-tips, anxious to determine whether they were a luxury item and trying to track how many I used in a year (I realized I use less than a box every year and so decided to keep buying them for those of you who hate cliffhangers).  The question that had been fueling me – How can I consume less? – was generating fewer and fewer answers.  And I seemed to meet again with despair.

The end result of my individual struggle not to consume felt much like trying to erase myself. But I was working away from that meaning, and I needed something else.  Otherwise, I’d be left with nothing.

I read this beautiful little book recently called If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland, which rather than being the usual (decidedly unhelpful) self-help writing advice, was essentially one woman’s philosophy of creativity.  Her argument is that the Muse or creative energy, the Holy Spirit, and our own true soul’s voice are the same thing, and that human beings are essentially meant to create.  We are taken away from it by society, and when we restore it we find our purpose and joy again.

In my mind these days the opposite of consuming is not “not consuming”, it is creating.  And recovering our ability to create, to overcome our internalized shame which leads us to self-censor and seek out safe places where we can be creative without being done the sort of knee-jerk harm common in this culture, seems to me one of the strongest needs we have as a society nagged by despair.

I am a huge sci-fi and fantasy nerd.  If there is anything that’s painful to witness its something you love done poorly.  If there’s anything worse than that, it’s seeing something you love done poorly then massively rewarded for it.

So I don’t much like movies these days.

Thanks to having no extra monies and having Netflix’s view now, I have watched a few recent movies in the sci-fi / fantasy genre here lately.  I expected to be bored and annoyed and generally unimpressed.  I expected to have my eyeballs bombarded by a caustic, over-busy, aesthetically generic barrage of computer animation.  To have myths and stories I loved chopped up like cheap pepperoni and spattered across a mainstream romantic-myth-plus-bloodbath-equals-win movie (the parasitic virus that has pervaded all genres, sucking their life at an alarming rate).

But I have to confess – I did not think these movies would be so sexist.  Or generally terrible on a simple, thematic level.

Take Thor for instance.  If I had to summarize this movie in thematic form it would be:  Hyper-masculine privileged men and less-masculine privileged men both irresponsibly vie for power and cause remarkable harm.  But only the hyper-masculine win.

Honestly, it freaked me out.  FREAKED – me out.

I had been disappointed by Snow White and the Huntsmen.  And I had been literally astounded by the sheer awfulness – I will not attempt to even remotely pull punches even though I love you Orlando Bloom– of The Three Musketeers, which I honestly think might have been the worst movie I have ever seen.

But this film more than any of those really believed I would invest in the “journey” (pause to choke and hack and recover myself and beg the spirit of Tolkien to forgive my linguistic treachery) of a male character simply because he was macho, killed people, and had a generic, vague transformation to switching sides and fighting his brother for attempting the very same genocide of the film’s non-people-so-don’t worry! race, the Ice Giants, that he himself mindless attempted, and liking a pretty –and smart!  This is 21st century sexism here, please! – woman.

I think Hollywood underestimate us.  I think we want more.  But it seems they make enough money off names, pretty people, and computer graphics to make our sci-fi / fantasy films into little more than a 4th of July fireworks celebration in spirit – vague, sentimental, hypocritical, celebrating things that ought NOT to be celebrated, and a show that dazzles one tiny, animal part of our brains.

To anyone out there who has EVER wanted to write a fantasy or sci-fi story, please, please, please try.  Try for me and for your future self who will need a story.  Please!

We have to write the stories we want, the stories we ought to have.  The harder it is for you to overcome your inhibition, get your timid, frail little artist soul to peep out a story THE BETTER THAT STORY WILL BE.  I promise!  Obviously, the brash egotists are deafening us all with their pseudo-stories, or patriarchal favors as I like to call them.

So please, try.  Wage a just war of non-violent, brave protest against the violent voices in your mind and soul that try to tell you that you’re nothing and should not create anything and the world is too unsafe, hide away in safe places alone or with friends, and tell a story!

I NEED them.  And I think a lot of people do.

It seems that one primary thing our culture covertly wants to kill is creativity.  We have this idea that as adults if we dare to make something, be it a pot or a drawing or a story (anything but a child or an income really) we are claiming a superior status to others.  We are looked at with a hostile, piercing, critical lens.  And most of us have internalized that lens well enough to be “humble” and keep our creative foolishness to ourselves and never let it see the light of day and bring shame into our adult lives, and we block the joy and hope it could bring, as well.

A professor I had in college once told a story just as an aside in a course on religion that stuck with me.  He told us when he was traveling in Spain, he kept seeing guitars sitting in the corners of restaurants.  He said after a while, he saw that random people would just walk up and play a song or two then sit back down.  He could not believe they had the nerve to play publically, but they were well received.  And he remarked how in America, anyone who picks up an instrument had better prove something or else, and said he felt that in Spain music was understood as being more something that belonged to many people and was something that they’d want to share and other people would want to receive.  There wasn’t such absurd status or exclusive ownership attached to it, or consumer value either, which I also think was not a coincidence.

I finished writing a novel recently, and I’ve started the long process of submitting to literary agents.  I am already getting the stone wall, “Have you been published?” and then instantly discredited response when it comes up with people outside my close circle of friends.  I don’t bring it up myself with people who aren’t invested in me as an individual, not because I’m not proud or excited about it or because it’s not a major part of my life lately, but because it is not a safe thing to say.  I’m more likely to come out as queer in a group I know is homophobic than to talk about being an artist with people who don’t already know and like me.  And even then, I’m cautious.

I think we all have an internalized sense of a vicious, critical observer in our minds, something generously bequeathed to us in this culture to keep us in check.  It seems to me like a mechanism of control, perhaps one of the primary ones, and it has me wondering why.  Who benefits from this?  How do we fight it?  What would the result of breaking through be?

I have a feeling that consumerism itself is the opposite of creativity.  That autonomy and creativity, like autonomy and sexuality, are intrinsically linked if they’re separate at all, and that controlling them is key to any system of dominance.

Perhaps my very least favorite all of tropes, by which I mean the pseudo-feminism that gets a visceral, intense response from me, is the story of a woman being coerced by a man and then falling in love with him and having hot, consensual sex.  Witness, The Piano.  Or how about Game of Thrones.  There are more examples, I am sure, but these are perhaps the ones that made the strongest impression on me because people love them so much.

It’s like a slight of hand.  The calculation is:  rape is sex lacking female desire… so solve the issue by adding female desire!  It makes me shiver.  There is such a fine line between coercion and consent in the tangled up minds of those steeped in a rape culture a storyteller can suddenly have a woman’s feelings and experience “change” to become self-derived, positive, and hot.  And we’re supposed to believe that 1) this exists or is believable 2) the storyteller actually knows the difference between rape and sex 3) this character’s problem has been solved 4) it’s okay we were into the sexual tension being built by coercion and it is natural that we “knew” the female character would change her mind 5) the difference between men who have sex and ones who commit rape is the coincidental presence or absence of female desire, i.e. luck.

Three words for you:  Scary.  As.  Hell.

The idea that sex is hotter for men when women consent and get off too and therefore it is desirable as a general rule is quite simply not okay.  And it is something that exists in the real world.  How many women think they can solve “their issues with sex”, which really means the complex realities of oppression, by just wanting the sex they feel pressured to have?

Honestly, I cannot imagine anything worse for the cause of women’s equality than the coercion-turned-consent magical thinking of media representations of women “transcending” abusive relationships by conjuring desire for their abusers.