“I remember Alan Moore in the late 1980s telling me about a documentary he’d seen on TV about Jack the ripper. And then, over the course of the next few months, telling me about Jack the Ripper books he’d read. By the point where he was asking me to go and find rare and forgotten biographies of possible Ripper suspects at the British Museum, I though it quite possible that a Jack the Ripper comic would be in the offing. From Hell didn’t start with Alan going, “I wonder what I’ll write about today.” It started as an obsession.
Trust your obsessions. This is one I learned more or less accidentally. People sometimes ask whether the research or the idea for the story comes first for me. And I tell them, normally the first thing that turns up is the obsession: for example, all of a sudden I notice that I’m reading nothing but English 17th century metaphysical verse. And I know it’ll show up somewhere—whether I’ll name a character after one of those poets, or use that time period, or use the poetry, I have no idea. But I know one day it’ll be there waiting for me.
You don’t always use your obsessions. Sometimes you stick them onto the compost heap in the back of your head, where the rot down, and attach to other things, and get half-forgotten, and will, one day, turn into something completely usable.
Go where your obsessions take you. Write the things you must. Draw the things you must. Your obsessions may not always take you to commercial places, or apparently commercial places. But trust them.”
– From @neil-gaiman ’s speech given at the 1997 PRO/con in Oakland
So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.
So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.
So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.
This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner.
So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.
The only way to fix this is to teach boys it’s okay to love your friends. It’s okay to share your needs and your problems with your friends. It’s okay to lean on your friends, to hug your friends, to be weak with your friends. Only if this is okay for boys to do with their male friends can this problem be resolved… so men, this one’s on you. Women can’t fix this for you; you don’t listen to us about matters of what it means to be a man. Fix your own shit and teach your brothers and sons and friends that this is okay, or everyone suffers.
I have a client who
communicates exclusively via Microsoft Word.
If she has something
to tell me, I’ll receive an email with nothing in the body, but a Word doc attached. That’s where she writes her message.
Whenever she wants to
email me a photo, she does so via an empty Word doc with said photo set as its
background.
But my favorite thing
was the first time I witnessed her visiting a website. She had me spell the URL
(“W… W… W… dot…”) and with my own two eyes I watched her type it into Word,
made it a hyperlink, and Ctrl click it to go there.
I was so fascinated I
didn’t even say anything.
a different microsoft world
At first the marchers came one by one, then in droves. By 7 P.M., on April 24, 1993, Dupont Circle was filled to bursting, spilling over like a dyke Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Young ones, old ones. Suburban dykes in their khakis, city dykes in their boots, softball dykes with the little rat tails in the back of their short-cut hair, shaved Sinéad heads like mine, the big hair of die-hard femmes in dresses, butches dressed to the nines. People who knew about the march before they got to D.C. brought their own banners and signs. The rest dragged each other. I was supposed to be in charge, but how can you manage a hurricane? A tsunami of twenty thousand dykes? You don’t. You just try to get out in front. The Avengers gathered the fire-eaters and drummers together and with the banner pushed our way to the head of the crowd. When that huge entity started moving, what a roar.
[…] I bellowed the few words I had to say into a bullhorn. Probably no one understood, though it didn’t much matter because all those dykes knew where we were (in front of the White House), and how many we were (enough to fill the streets of the entire city), and that together we were Dyke America taking over the capital.
After I got done shouting, a dozen of us Avengers stood on the plastic crates we’d toted from New York. The crowd around us grew quiet. It was getting dark by then. You could hear voices shouting in the background, others yelling, “I can’t see. What are they doing?” We dipped our torches into lighter fluid, lit them, and raised the flames in the air. Then, silhouetted against the familiar glowing white form, we brought them slowly toward our faces, which were lit up, too. Exhaling, as the heat approached our lips, fire entered our mouths and disappeared. The crowds hollered and screamed. And we did it again, while Marlene Colburn tried to get a chant going, “The fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own.”
That moment, of dykes eating fire in front of the White House, endured as the image of the Avengers. Photographers sent out their photos. The Ministry of Propaganda shot off their press releases. Journalists from major venues beat down our doors for interviews, marveling at the turnout, at the drama and life compared to the same old, same old of the official March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Rights and Liberation with all the groups lined up and orderly. All the speeches predictably moving.
The message of the Dyke March was in our bodies. All twenty thousand of them there together in front of the White House, lit up with flame. We were disorderly, raucous, happy to be behind our own lesbian banner for a change. I can almost hear a couple of dyke readers murmuring as they turn the pages, “What’s the big deal? I don’t need anybody’s validation.” But if you don’t think it makes a difference, it’s because you don’t know. Maybe you’re dulled a little by seeing one or two lesbian faces on TV, in your local politics. One among thousands. Well, imagine what it’s like to suddenly be the majority. Not even the one in ten on the street or whatever it is. But the 100 percent. I suppose that would be my Lesbian Dream if I could describe it now. To be big enough to count. To take up space in the great brain of the country, for even ten minutes a day. To be free.
Kelly J. Cogswell describing the first national Dyke March in Washington, DC, in Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (2014), Ch. 1, Pt. 8 (via enoughtohold)
this creature is perfect. there is nothing wrong with it.
mother fucker unlimited …
Because traumatized people often have trouble sensing what is going on in their bodies, they lack a nuanced response to frustration. They either react to stress by becoming “spaced out” or with excessive anger. Whatever their response, they often can’t tell what is upsetting them. This failure to be in touch with their bodies contributes to their well-documented lack of self-protection and high rates of revictimization and also to their remarkable difficulties feeling pleasure, sensuality, and having a sense of meaning. People with alexithymia can get better only by learning to recognize the relationship between their physical sensations and their emotions, much as colorblind people can only enter the world of color by learning to distinguish and appreciate shades of gray.
Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (via yesdarlingido)
I read an article about how Millennials don’t carry cash on them and got annoyed and literally yesterday I was out with a group of friends and NONE of us had cash
I mean if you get robbed you can cancel the card and transactions. if you get robbed for cash that’s it man
just moving along like everyone else 