Shoeboy’s Law of science fiction series

Any sufficiently lengthy science fiction series will degenerate into sexual wish fulfillment for the book’s author.

The canonical examples of Shoeboy’s Law are the Dune series, which includes such things as Amazons from space enslaving the human race with Tantric sex and the Ringworld series, which pretty much degenerates into the hero having sex with bearded alien women (aka “rishathra“). Other examples include the Foundation series (in which the Asimov stand-in upsets one of the other main characters by having Too Much Sex with the sexually insatiable telepath character) and the Rama series, where the anal beads come out around the third book and one is left wondering how exactly they got into space with the rest of the cast.

Here are some links to wiki entries for the first book or so of each series.

Dune
Ringworld
Foundation
Rama

I will update this with other sci-fi series that suit if it comes up.

Vitamin D, black American women, and fibroids

It has been a mystery to the American medical establishment why black American women got fibroids at rates far higher than white American women– some estimates run as high as 70%. It’s also been a mystery why black American men get higher rates of prostate cancer.

It’s the Vitamin D (or lack thereof). Unsurprisingly, the amount of Vitamin D one gets in a multivitamin is formulated for white people, who have far more ability to generate vitamin D in parts of America outside the South, where there’s less sunlight per day. And while many black Americans live in the South, there are plenty not living in the South, some so far north that they can’t make their own vitamin D (and the multivitamins don’t contain enough). Additionally, black Americans are concentrated in urban areas where pollution also affects how much sunlight can get to them to absorb and make vitamin D from.

Vitamin D is the precursor to hormones women and men need to avoid fibroids and some cancers.

There’s a mythos among fibroid sufferers (esp. black American fibroid sufferers) that the reason African women and men don’t get fibroids and prostate cancer at the crazy rates of American blackfolk is because of ‘traditional diets’. No, it’s primarily that African immigrants come from countries where they lived at a latitude to generate enough Vitamin D. Secondarily, it may be that their preferred ethnic diet is heavy in Vitamin D– but there are a lot of African ethnicities that immigrate over, and there is a fair variety in all the different diets.

There is finally starting to be a bit of research done (will update this post with the link as soon as I can find it) grudgingly suggesting that yeah, getting little black American girls vitamin D might help them not have fibroids, which is one way to avoid the disproportionate hysterectomies the medical establishment loves to inflict on black women. Plus, black men might not be dying at 55 from ’stress’, but from not having enough vitamin D as little boys, putting them at higher risk for various cancers and even high blood pressure– possibly more so than ‘bad diet’ or ’stress’.

I do think black Americans have more stress exposure in their lives and that it affects the health negatively, but it is quite appalling how ’stress’ is used as a catchall to avoid investigating root causes (like this vitamin D issue, which involves some very cheap solutions to help people be healthier) when it comes to blackfolk.

Just an increase from 500 IUs of vitamin D per day to 2500-5000 IUs per day could be the key to saving a lot of black American women from unnecessary surgery and outright saving a lot of black American men. It would be bitterly excellent if millions could be helped by something so cheap as a bottle of vitamin D tablets.

the ladies of mammon

I have love for sexworkers– strippers and whores and phone sex ops, and porn girls and cam ladies– all the permutations and variations of the ladies who sell love itself at reasonable market rates.

I have love for the uniquely and particularly female manner of selling intimacy, affection and longing in such myriad and tailored ways. I have this love because I shared the skin, I thought the work a valuable service, a series of gifts showered on men in need. Like all those girls, in my corrupted confusion I thought I was doing kindness, giving away a sacred thing in a way that could benefit the giver and the taker/receiver.

And in so many ways what they do, what they offer and give is a beautiful thing, so curiously wrought one cannot help but be fascinated. From just the right angle, it looks so much like ministry to the needy. It looks like the work of Christ’s handmaidens– if you tilt your head a certain way.

But sexworkers bow before a different altar and are doing the work of a different god– Mammon. Being Mammon’s handmaiden is an altogether different situation. The least bit of good intent in sexwork just gets completely twisted to serve a dangerous end. No matter your degree of love for them as creatures of need, in the end they are only customers, after all. If the girl likes you so much she will not take your money, she has pretty well spit on her own god and pays accordingly in terms of your disbelief and lack of trust. Or you do trust her, and ’support her work’, so she treats you as a pet, the way she is ever treated by the decent regs. And this is also sin against Mammon, to play the buyer when you are fated to be the seller.

It is a cruel effect that even worship of Mammon gets corrupted in sexwork, leaving the work itself a mystery, though not a holy one. Just an endlessly fascinating and tempting one. Because the allure of being kind to weak men is not the strongest pull, only the thing that is corrupted in both Mammon’s and God’s philosophies. The real pull is not even Mammon itself, not the crispness of the bills for each dance or bj, nor the feeling of satisfied smugness when your paypal account has money in it from an adoring money-slave, nor the edged pleasure taken from having a sugar daddy you didn’t have to fuck for rent and Benz money.

The real pull is the thing they’ll constantly deny, swear up and down and sideways is either non-existent or beside the point. It’s the idea that love itself can be commoditised and packaged up in highly constrained forms and shapes, and that the girl, SHE is the mistress and the craftswoman responsible for it all. She controls love itself, moulds it to form the core of her appeal to various types of customers. She is the thing, and controls the thing, and OWNS the thing, and you’re just getting the sliver she’s CHOSEN to carve for you to hold a little while. This is true even among the degraded and/or trafficked girls, the ones whose suffering is the sell. Even among the lowest girls who had the least choice in it all, there are those who feel this.

But you cannot tell a sexworker that she wishes to be God– not a holy-whore vessel of some mythologised temple cult, not an empowered uberbitch, but plain old G-O-D in the most elementally Christian sense of that word.

Every sexworker is playing Eve’s part, seeking after Godhood, believing the misdirection of the serpent that knowledge is itself Godhood. Some think they only want the money, only want Mammon. It is just the excuse, not the motive. The fact that worship of Mammon naturally corrupts itself as a function of sexwork illustrates this.

As for the men, the customers, they are playing Adam’s part, wanting to do anything to please Woman. Some will say that this means Adam’s sin is the lesser, but all sin is the same to God and Adam’s sin is merely different, but no less dangerous. Adam’s sin has led us to the resentment of women that characterises all too many sexworker-customer interactions. Wanting to please, but cursed to battle against that desire that brought sin into human existence.

Eve, being more than her sin, has left a legacy in which some daughters particularly choose to re-enact her sin in a manner that looks and feels and wants (sometimes) to be something more Godly. And it is in that fumbling, mutilated version of charity where temptation remains strongest for me, why I still sometimes wish to return to that work. But if a lady would offer kindness to Adam’s sons, she must offer it as sister to brothers, rather than to customers as a falsely holy whore.

Jesus and the sinful woman

I recently went to a church event on redeeming female sexuality. One of the speakers mentioned a verse in which Jesus talks to a man while looking directly at a woman (who is nameless). The verse is Luke 7:44 and it’s from the passage often subtitled ‘A Sinful Woman Forgiven’.

If one is not given to clicking, the passage follows below in English Standard Version with verse 44 highlighted:
A Sinful Woman Forgiven36 One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table. 37 And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, 38 and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment. 39 Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.” 40 And Jesus answering said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he answered, “Say it, Teacher.”

41 “A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?” 43 Simon answered, “The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.” And he said to him, “You have judged rightly.” 44 Then turning toward the woman he said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. 46 You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. 47 Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven–for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.” 48 And he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” 49 Then those who were at table with him began to say among themselves, “Who is this, who even forgives sins?” 50 And he said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

What I want to talk about is some of my off-the-cuff interpretations of that passage based on reading it in about twenty available English versions (yay www.biblegateway.com). There are three different lights in which one could interpret the woman’s actions that I would focus on.

A) She was a whore.
B) She was falsely accused of being a whore.
C) She was a supporter of Jesus, spoke too boldly and through rumor/dislike came to be considered/known as ‘a sinful woman’.

In case A, one can see that if she were a whore, then there is a really fascinating reclamation of her sexuality in her actions towards Jesus. In coming to Christ for redemption and using a physical, sensual intimacy to show her love, the holy tenderness of Christ for even that corrupted love is revealed. Jesus says bluntly, ‘She loved much’, and through holy grace He reveals her show of physical intimacy to be in fact a display of spiritual intimacy and connection with Christ. She is down at his feet, anointing and wiping up her tears with her uncovered hair– her gestures are deeply, deeply intimate and distinctly non-sexual. But they so easily *could* be sexual, and yet grace pulls this nameless woman from such an abyss into healing. The woman came to give her love to whom could truly accept it, and her– Christ only.

In fact, her namelessness in this scenario can be seen as a way of showing that Christ is there, waiting with complete forgiveness and love for all the whores who are dismissed as nameless ’sinful women’ by society, not fit to acknowledge as fellow humans, only considered merchandise and meat. This scenario serves to reveal the hypocritical rudeness of the Pharisee Simon through contrast. Simon is named, and has a position. But in naming this hypocrite and pointing out his self-righteousness sin problem, Jesus illustrates the depth of his love. He will name you as sinner and call out your hypocrisy if you take too much pride in your ‘good name’. But if you have no ‘good name’ and come to Him unadorned, vulnerable and nameless, as so many must come, he is waiting to save you from the pain of sin.

Christ turned away from the big shot with the fancy name and title to instead look at the woman, to show that no matter who you are in the secular world, you get his full gaze and love when you come seeking full repentance.

Now those are just some thoughts about case A. Case B offers a different interpretation of the woman and the Pharisee’s actions.

In case B, if the woman is falsely accused, her actions get more interesting. Now you have a woman who can be seen as an active agent in redeeming whore-like sensuality. It then becomes a situation of a woman coming to Christ as a show of faith. Faith that Jesus will provide her with strength to weather the falsehood levied against her, faith that she will admit to and repent before Jesus of her non-sexual sins out of love for Christ. Faith that she will repent in what would be her own sin of self-righteousness. In this interpretation, ‘She loved much’ becomes an expression of risk. She loves so much she will risk her justified anger at false accusation, risk her own desire to be judgemental, risk her temptation to play the whore since she was accused of such. There is so much risk for her, and yet she falls down before Christ and puts it all before Him, literally at His feet. And He turns it all into intimate, holy love and forgiveness.

Her repenting of hypocrisy and self-righteousness can then be seen as a arrow directed right at Simon the Pharisee’s inability to admit his own sins. Additionally, in this scenario, her namelessness could represent all the Christians who are humble enough to shed their good names and any soiling those names took to come before God meekly begging forgiveness. And for Jesus to turn to those who are rendered nameless, robbed of their own good names serves as its own subtle rebuke to those who did the robbing with their deceitful betrayals.

Considering how easy it is to rob a woman of her name (as currency and power) by even hinting she is sexually immoral, Christ’s willingness to turn to her with full force of gaze is even more powerful and striking. And on that high note, on to the third scenario, option C.

Admittedly, the third scenario is a bit left-field, but not entirely implausible. When Jesus was walking the earth, views on Him ranged from ‘crackpot troublemaker!’ to ‘Son of God!’. And even that early in Luke, people are coming to worship Him as Lord. So it is at least conceivable that a woman could come to be filled with the Holy Spirit and run around praising Jesus in some bold fashion for that era. And if she did such, she could easily be labelled sinful or devoted to sin.

More on that third possibility later today. It’s time for bed now.

Jesus and the sinful woman, part deux

This will serve mostly as an appending to the post from yesterday.

So the last interpretation of Luke 7:36-50 that I want to analyse is this one:
She was a supporter of Jesus, spoke too boldly and through rumor/dislike came to be considered/known as ‘a sinful woman’.

Now in this interpretation of that passage, we have some very interesting feminist notions that I will not discourse on presently. But I will toss out the idea that Jesus consistently used women with no names as examples and rebukes to men who deemed themselves righteous. And I will put forth a question to the reader as to why he might use women for this purpose in an era when they could not even be spoken to in public by individual men alone without being considered prostitutes. That is as far as I will go with feminist critique of this passage for now.

As for the elements I want to focus on, if this woman was saved and had been labelled whore by men of law as punishment, her arrival and actions are themselves a rebuke of self-righteousness. To shower Jesus with her affection and love in such an intimate way, with full faith– she is walking proof of redemption in a very specific and yet subtle way not possible if she were actually whore. Instead, this nameless woman, in her very namelessness and simultaneous devotion reveals herself to be a demonstration of how to respond to false doctrine. She responds to the falseness laid upon her with total faith and devotion and sacrifice of her very name. Because her faith is already with her, and she is there firstly to worship her Lord. Christ can be seen as seizing this opportunity to lambast false doctrine, as Paul does much later in the book of Titus.

Simon the Pharisee, the man of Law, inviting the Christos to his home as amusement or intrigue, is lain quite low by Christ revealing the gifts given to those of deep and true faith. To those who love despite all efforts to defame them and render the Word untenable. Ultimately, Jesus looks right at her, and not at the self-righteous man he is rebuking.

Christ’s love is not given lightly, and in bestowing such forgiveness on a sinner with faith in such a case, it is shown to be all the more potent and wonderful.

It is a beautiful thing, Christ’s love, and instructive.

I could go on, but that is enough frilly interpretation for now. I hope to delve further with even more Bible study in coming months.

The government does not exist to rubberstamp your ideology.

One might class this as a core belief of mine. I think there should be (federal and state/provincial) governments, but I don’t think they exist solely to sign off on a given agenda.

I don’t believe abortion is a federal issue.

I don’t believe teaching creationism vs. evolution is a federal issue.

I will use those two above examples to illustrate my discontent with accepted party lines on these matters. Regarding abortion, I think that instead of lobbying the government to cut checks for women who want abortions or attempting to enforce a federal law that states can and will weaken at their own whims, women should collectively organise to raise funds for abortion and/or contraceptive support. If abortion were a state issue, I would expect and frankly contribute towards women pooling money and time and other resources towards helping other girls and women get those abortions or contraceptives they needed if they lived in a state where these things were outlawed.

Yet, when I suggest this kind of thing, people get very irate with me and insist that the government should serve their goals. They start talking about ‘privilege to have a car to drive across a border with’ and other such things. The entire issue is reduced to a perverse binary in which either there is a check cut from on high (federally) or individual women exercise privilege and go travel as needed to get abortions and/or contraceptives.

There are middle grounds, but they require individuals working privately towards collective goals, without expecting the government to approve their ideology.

Regarding school teachings, I feel much the same way. You want all the theories of evolution taught (dirty little secret: there’s more than one)– pool resources and build you a school. Likewise for creationism in all its forms.

Supporting people in need can be done by individuals being willing to pool their resources. The false narrative that the government has to pay for it or else it cannot happen stifles grassroots efforts.

For me it is obvious that you ask many individuals privately to work towards a common goal by sharing resources– it is fundamentally (fundamentalistically?) Christian. Christ ever asked that people share what they could for a common goal.

I think the privilege remarks in these instances are just derailing tactics, to avoid the issues of having to work with and share resources with those of other colors and backgrounds– to put money where your ideology is. It’s easy to talk about a right to abortion when your goal is to have ‘the government’ pay for it– other people still, but faceless enough that they don’t count.

Kinda different when you have to canvass neighborhoods full of people not like you to get the money together for women in need. It’s harder, and it takes more time to set up useful and flexible infrastructures. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be done. Again, likewise with school-teachings. It is harder to advocate for creationism or evolution if you aren’t expecting the government to rubberstamp your views on the matter and fund it anonymously.

Some would say, but is not a government a collection of individuals? Is not this suggestion to organise in groups a simulacrum of government? And I would say– it is altogether a different thing when you have to learn all the names of the people you’re asking for money from. And government-reliance means never having to go that far. It is always ever about distancing yourself from the source of support, be it in cash or time or other things. Always making sure that it’s impersonal, that you never have to look anyone in the face and state your case and beliefs.

I say embrace the difficulty, and the challenge. Find out what you love and are willing to sacrifice for, and do that. Don’t wait on a wilfully impersonalised third party. And if you will not truly offer yourself for others, then maybe you should lay off the vehement advocacy that relies on quasi-anonymous government cash to succeed.

The Curious Invisibility of Fertility Awareness among pro-life and pro-choice folk

I have a really massive amount to say about what is called Fertility Awareness, Natural Family Planning, Natural Birth Control, and a number of other names.

But what I am interested in right now is its invisibility. Basically there are three main methods– daily temperature only (thermal method), cervical mucus/fluid/discharge only (Billings method is the most popularised name for this one), and daily temperature plus cervical fluid (sympto-thermal, aka Fertility Awareness Method [FAM], popularised by Toni Wechsler in the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility).

All of these methods take a maximum of five minutes and a minimum of 20-30 seconds per day, and are cheap or free. Their reliability in preventing pregnancy rivals Depo-Provera’s effectiveness. These methods (particularly the cervical-only and sympto-thermal) can even be used to increase odds of pregnancy to around 80 percent, if one wants children.

There are no chemicals or synthetic hormones required or involved. There are no side effects from use of these methods, and again– cheap, quick, reliable.

The sympto-thermal and cervical-only methods can even be used successfully for birth control when women have irregular cycles (such as from coming off the Pill, or breastfeeding, or stress, or PCOS, etc).

These methods allow women past optimal babymaking age (i.e., over 35) to undergo fertility testing and treatments at the most accurate and viable times for their individual bodies.

So why is this not the primary discussion topic among pro-life and pro-choice activists? Why does the discussion revolve around surgical and chemical abortion, which is basically something that occurs because women have been told their bodies are unpredictable morasses of hormones and OMG YOU COULD CATCH PREGNANT AT ANY TIME WATCH OUT.

Most women don’t know that sperm only live for days on end for a few days per month in any woman’s cycle. They don’t know that you can’t get pregnant for about 3/4 of your cycle (if you have a 28 day cycle, you have a maximum of about seven days fertility– the rest of the time, all the sex in the world won’t knock you up.)

They don’t know why some women ‘just walk by a dude and get pregnant’ (shorter cycles and/or maximum amount of sperm-friendly fertile cervical fluid).

In this society women are so totally disconnected from the reality of their femaleness that menstruation (which is the BEGINNING of your cycle, not the start and end of it) is reduced to a nuisance to be covered up with drugs so that you can be– what? Not a man, but not really a woman in the physical senses, either.

Birth control pills work by cruelly telling your body it is pregnant. The ‘period’ is a withdrawal from drugs, not an ovulation. That is basically appalling.

I know that some pro-life types hate fertility awareness methods because they think noticing fertility signs is somehow ‘going against God’s will’, nevermind that God gave women these signs for, you know, a reason. Maybe so they wouldn’t constantly worry at any minute they could CATCH PREGNANT? So that maybe they would be able to know their bodies intimately enough to take charge of when and how they wanted children, if they wanted them?

On the pro-choice tip, there’s a lot of talk about how it’s hard to swipe your vaginal lips and glance briefly at some goo (you can even do it with a tissue, if you’re squeamish). Clearly going to a doctor and paying monthly for pills or shots or patches that have obvious and at the least irritating side effects is somehow ‘more independent’. Not sure how relying on the medical establishment that brought us DES daughters and thalidomide babies and tested those quasi-holy Pills on brown women before daring to advertise them to whitegirls is a sign of independence and bodily integrity.

My views on abortion have changed somewhat upon finding out about fertility awareness. I guess I will bust out with some of this here. I am angry that in other cultures, cultures I will have to track down and identify by name, the cervical fluid method has existed and been in successful use for a long, long time. I am angry that some ‘Christians’ are against these methods because they were made popular in America among Catholics first (as a more accurate response to the almost unusable Rhythm Method). I am angry that these same ‘Christians’ think that telling women how their bodies truly work and showing that even a woman with irregular cycles can still find patterns and healthy things going on with her body is dirty and weird and bad. God gave us this world to study and in studying it, appreciate and love all the more the glory of His creation, the wonders of it all.

I am amazed that fertility awareness has shown that even with a giant fibroid, I have actually been ovulating and having normal cycles during all those months I thought the fibroid was bleeding my fertility away. It wasn’t. I just didn’t know what was healthy and what wasn’t. And so many other women are the same– no idea what kinds of bleeding are normal and sometimes a sign of excess fertility.

I am angry at pro-choice women who have diverted bodily integrity arguments away from the starting point– the ovulatory (usually) cycle. Some of them don’t like fertility awareness methods because of the Catholic popularising (as far as American understanding of them goes). Others don’t think they work because since they don’t understand or know how our cycles work, they just assume it’s a BS method to ‘keep women barefoot and pregnant’.

I think abortion is still important, because even if every young girl was taught some of these methods first and every consensual-sex pregnancy was a wanted one, you would still have women getting pregnant due to rape, incest, or having a life-risking pregnancy. And you would still have women who claimed they didn’t want to be pregnant and did it anyway (these are the women who skip their pills and then blame the Pill for ‘not working’– a small set of all women using birth control, but still, an important one to keep in mind).

For so many women, abortion comes up because pregnancy itself is considered an ailment that you catch unexpectedly, and is just not preventable without the god Science and Its magic Pills. The idea that we can take control of our bodies before the sperm ever get to them is just not in play.

And this is just amazing and upsetting to me. I want pro-lifers and pro-choicers to answer for this. Why are both camps united against starting with the cycle of fertility and infertility itself and THEN having a discussion about what bodily integrities need to be considered after that point?

Fertility Awareness methods=cheap or free, easy to explain, adaptable to women working two or three jobs. A case of thermometers is way cheaper than a case of birth control pills. And the easiest to do method (cervical-only) is totally free and takes ten or twenty seconds per day, completely competitive with the argument that ‘popping a pill is easier’.

I know also that fertility awareness is associated with over-35 professional, upper-middle class white women, but the current biases of FAM training and books are really an entire other post. The information itself is reducible to a postcard or so of data that all women can immediately put to use. It’s not ‘too complex’ to learn at least the cervical-only method. Eggwhite or lotiony cervical fluid–fertile. Gummy or just vaginal moisture–not fertile. That’s the minimum.

I just am baffled, hurt and angry at how mainstream and feminist views of femaleness try to dissociate women from the workings of their bodies. This even extends to the shaving and douching stuff– we’re not supposed to be women, we’re supposed to be sex-positive female dolls. Dolls don’t bleed, so you take a pill to stop the bleeding. Dolls don’t have icky goo spill out of them, so you douche it away. And dolls don’t have cycles– so if you catch pregnancy, you go have a doctor-man clean it out.

I still prefer herbal abortifacient knowledge and advocacy because so many abortion doctors are male and will continue to be male and this goes completely unquestioned among pro-choice feminists. Why is ‘bodily integrity and sexual freedom’ so tied to getting pills and procedures from a fundamentally masculine establishment that already tells us we’re ‘broken men’? Why is feminism structured to reinforce that patriarchal belief by rejecting any least sign of femalehood that cannot be sexualised, or cultifying it without understanding (the menstrual-blood painter feminists come to mind here)?

I’m a woman of color. The medical establishment is not really my friend– they think of me as test-meat for white women. The vitamin D deficiences that have led to 75 percent or so of black American women having fibroids–only just recently (the last year or so) getting mentioned. And the medical establishment STILL wants to rip out OUR female organs when they would never dream of recommending castrations for male tumors at the same rates.

But I’m digressing just a bit. I hope fertility awareness becomes more common among Christian women and non-Christian women alike– it would be great if abortion could be reduced simply by honestly knowing when you were and were not fertile. Not a behavior change or slut-shaming, not a pill or surgical procedure, but just teaching women to understand why their bodies do what they do for them.

That’s all for now. And no, I don’t think we shouldn’t have medical science, for pity’s sake– but if we can start with non-invasive, 99 percent effective birth control FIRST, why not go the route of least harm?

How much money do strippers actually make?

This is a question I will certainly return to in one form or another. For now, I will simply throw some statistics at the problem.

Since stripping pays a salary for all effectual purposes, it runs into the same issue as other salary data– it is right-skewed. That is a fancy way of stating that most strippers make relatively little and a handful make a whole bunch.

Thus, the answer to the question of what strippers actually make can be answered with an application of the Empirical Rule. Under the Empirical Rule, about 68% of all strippers’ earnings fall within one standard deviation of the mean. About 95% of all strippers’ earnings fall within two standard deviations of this mean. And most fun of all, 99.73% of all stripper earnings can be said to fall within three standard deviations of the mean.

Ah, but what is the mean?

Truthfully, the mean stripper earnings is approximately 100$ per shift worked, or the equivalent of a good night for a diner waitress.

However, the mean is ALL stripper earnings, even negative amounts (owing the back house fees, or VIP room fees, which sometimes come out of the stripper’s cut). That is why data has a standard deviation. The standard deviation for stripper earnings is about 175$.

In practical terms, this means that 68% of all strippers make between -75$ and 275$ on any given shift. It means 95% of all strippers make between -250 and 450$ (but subtracting the 68% means that you really have only 27% of all strippers making less than -75$ or more than 275$ at this point).

Lastly, it means 99.73% of all strippers make between -425$ and 625$ on any given shift. And again, with subtractions, you can work out how tiny the percentages are for a stripper to make more than 500$ on any given shift.

Some would say that these numbers contradict accepted wisdom about how much strippers make, but these numbers are about as close as one is going to get off-the-cuff for accounting for the strippers who work for free drinks/drugs (even if it is only, say, 20% of all strippers, that’s a lotta 0$ or negative earnings numbers), for accounting for the strippers who think 50-100$ is ‘enough’, and so forth.

In a nutshell, an average stripper can hope to make between 100-300 on any given night, and a top-end hustler can expect to occasionally pull outlier money of above 600$, with regular earnings on the edge of the 2nd and 3rd standard deviation.

This all pretty much only applies to strippers in clubs, though, not those who work for party agencies or do parties independently.

But wait! There is hope that strippers really make more than a lousy 100$ a shift average!

It is Chebyshev’s Theorem. It is a more…flexible way of looking at a data distribution, and may in fact be better for processing the right-skewed data that is stripper income.

According to this theorem, about 75% of all measurements lie within two standard deviations of the mean. About 90% of all measurements lie within three standard deviations of the mean. To borrow the mean and standard deviation from above, this would suggest that 75% of all strippers make between -250$ and 450$ on any given shift, and that 90% (or an additional 15%) make between -425$ and 625$. This opens up the possibility that as much as 10% of strippers earn way more than the mean, perhaps 4, 5, 6, 8 standard deviations more.

However, even under Chebyshev, the core assumption doesn’t really change. Averagely, if someone wants to be a stripper, they are looking at making less than 500$ average and are not unlikely to end up owing money. Alas.

Still what fun to learn what strippers really make, statistically.

The numbers are about as accurate as you can get when your data gathering methods must include copying out the lists of dance/vip tallies at clubs, direct interviews and other not easily nailed-down methods of assessment.

A John I Know

there is a man i know who is charming, easy on the eyes, and fun to hang out with. by most people’s standards and accounts, A Cool Guy.

he loves to visit strip clubs and book escorts, and he specially likes strip clubs where many dancers are happy to provide escort services in-club or out.

he prefers ‘brasileiras’ and ‘asian girls’, and his notion of what those categories constitute is exactly what you think it is.

he has made friends with many escorts, a slight majority of whom are/were in the business to earn enough to never have to go back to the men that beat/cut/raped them.

he often says he is aware of the game and its rules, and expects nothing more than a lady will provide for his cash money.

he is married, Catholic and can count intimacy with his wife in biannual increments. she will not except under duress, and then never without being almost fully dressed.

he never questions this situation, never tries to talk to his wife about how they could have a healthy, more fully Christ-modelling marriage. they never talk about Catholic views on marriage and sex within marriage. perhaps his wife is unfair, but he never asks her about the situation.

he started visiting clubs and escorts after a year of refusals.

is a year too much to honor your wife and love her as Christ loved the Church? is a year without sexual contact enough to break the marital covenant with suffering woman after suffering woman?

i know the girls he visits too. not all of them, but some of them. they have other customers like him. not demanding in some ways, but yet– always looking for the next girl to book, even if he books you ongoing every few months.

and he is the one who brings up the frigid and so Catholic wife, as if her religion is the problem. he never attends Mass or confesses, never speaks with his wife about her faith. but somehow she is the reason he has to book his latest brasileira or Asian girl.

somehow she is the only one in the marriage who has done wrong. the only one who can be blamed for the brokenness, the lack of conversation, the lack of sex, the minimal remnants of marital connection.

somehow he is innocent and sexwork must be wonderful, because without women selling themselves to him, he would be in a sexless, unhappy marriage, not having sex regularly. but the girls give him the sex and/or the sensual dancing, so he doesn’t have to concern himself about the girl he married and has broken faith with.

i don’t know the wife. i don’t know if she hates sex, or was taught poorly about sex, or if she is waiting for him to love her. i don’t know anything about her side of it.

i just know the john. i just know the girls he hires and what they say about him. and i know what he’s said to me in a subtle attempt to get me to sell myself as an escort outside of the club because he’s such a cool, undemanding guy. who hopes a little that i’m just doing this because my man beat me once too often and i had to cross the waters to come to america and earn enough to retire in my home country, since american dollars go so far in brazil, thailand, laos, china…

or did. things are changing now. from what i understand from girls who still see this john, he comes around less, and books less. as do many of their johns. american dollars are not so golden anymore.

i hope he is trying to reconcile with his wife, but i know better.

he is trying the cheaper girls, who say a lot of things in many accents for fifty bucks, or thirty, or twenty, and it all goes so fast, he’s had his fun and she’s got her money.

and i wonder if he’ll have a new set of beliefs about those girls, to justify never considering his wife for intimate moments.

probably not. he will probably consider himself wonderful because he gives sixty on a fifty dollar bj and anyway, she is just doing it to get away from her man who cut her, and that’s why she has the scar and is working this corner to save up money to get away.

he is just one of many johns i know.

Makeover.

I am not sure where or when, but I am revamping the content of this blog and starting fresh somehow. This is more of a note to myself, but also just a notice to any readers that it’ll be different sooner rather than later. And have no archives (though frequently linked posts will still remain available and the links will still work).

Sexwork and sorrow

When I first thought of this post, I was going to say that it pained me too much to write about the anthology Sex Work, but I have gotten over the days of suffering.

It was painful to read all those stories (I’ve so far read only the section of personal stories about sexwork, not the political and nonfiction portions) and not really see what I had heard tell was there– joy in the work. There were really three strands of experience– sorrow/anomie, smugness, and brittle shrillness. Most of the women were sad or just kind of wearied by the work and the idea of it. The sorrowful tone was palpable. There were a couple who were disgustingly smug about the work, all white women of highly desirable demographics. And then there were a few loudly proclaiming the happy hooker partylines, but they really did not seem to have their hearts in it, so to speak. Their stories were told in a shrill, brittle manner that was uncomfortable to get through.

Nobody really deriving joy or pleasure from the work. I had read a little about this book various spots, and I thought it would be different. It was depressing, frustrating and upsetting.

The racial/class aspects and total, utter, complete lack of actual female solidarity also didn’t help matters. It was swimming through a sea of sorrow, and no comforting beach of sacred whoredom to wash up on.

Kathryn Cramer is a whiny blonde thing.

http://www.kathryncramer.com/kathryn_cramer/2009/01/aliases-are-for-people-on-wanted-posters-preaching-the-evils-of-using-pseudonyms-on-the-internet.html

I suppose I could call the Cramer thing a lady, but that would be disrespecting ladies. I could call the Cramer thing white, but, like omigaw, race doesn’t exist on the internets!

Apparently Kaycee was harrassed by anonymous people claiming to be affiliated with Blackwater. This is held up as an example of how tuff Kaycee (or perhaps KatCram?) is to use what passes for a ‘real name’ and whatnot, like this creature personally shot mercs as they parachuted into the bedroom or something. But Blackwater isn’t all mercs and trying to spin the whole thing as an example of how badass you are to keep using your real name online is just ridiculous and foolish.

The link up there is about how it’s evil to ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever use a pseudonym. Like, ever. Also there is racism– the scary blatant kind that is just shy of saying ‘The niggers are out to get little blonde me!’ It’s not stated *quite* that bluntly, but it’s about the same deal.

Considering that Kaycee edited an anthology featuring pseudonymous writers in it, the drooling, whiny spooge about the evils of pseudonyms is all the more baffling and strange. So if white people whose work you admire use pseuds, then it’s ok? Appears to be that sorta double standard. Completely unsurprising to see inconsistency, incoherence and hypocrisy from a whiny blonde thing– it’s one of their core competencies. And yes, there is a reason I am using a specific pseud to refer to Kaycee.

Kaycee really is some dumb blonde, likely hired for her trim figure and bubbly head. It happens, even in sci-fi land. Maybe she didn’t edit the anthology I’m thinking of– maybe she was just in the room when the actual work was happening and rushed to take her share of the credit. You know how those people are about not working, but wanting to get paid the same. And you know they never would have hired one of those people without affirmative action.

Whitefolks sure are funny when they rant about evil cullud hordes coming to get their porcelain flesh and allathat.

And so I fill my quota of sark for the season…

ETA March 2009: So far as I know, the link no longer works, but it serves well enough as an archival sort of thing. Clicking through is risky, as KayCee has been mucking about with redirects and such to hide/obscure/disappear what she once proclaimed publically instead of displaying her words in a historical public sense. One might hope a redirect leads here, cos that would show an intriguing sense of humor. Perhaps we may be so gifted. Time will tell.

Rick’s Overstates their Goodwill Wildly

Don’t worry, it’s an accounting/finance term. I am going to blog a financial analysis of Rick’s Cabaret, about the only stripclub-focused publically traded company left. There’s another, but its volume is nothing and it’s pretty much an obvious shell.

I feel invigorated and hope the journey into Rick’s sketchy financials (just the bits off yahoo and google finance are scary as all getout) will be an amusing and profitable one.

I think I will go into it later, but stating upfront that a significant fraction of your revenue stream is from dancer tipout is not really a good approach. Even mentioning that is immensely questionable, particularly in light of the ridiculous goodwill assessment. Even a behemoth of goodwill, CocaCola is not so absurd in its ‘goodwill’ crediting.

But these are bagatelles for now and I don’t want to jump guns, so I will pause for now.

I haven’t got the spoons to deal with blogging.

I can’t write anymore because I’m just too full of rage and frustration. As soon as I start, I am stymied into stasis by more adventures of Stupid Whiteness. Whether it’s some white chick talking about how she is more considerate of pwecious mother gaia because she has ten cats instead of any human children, or some whiny white person who is upset they got called out for writing stereotypes instead of 3-d POC characters, or whatthefrickever.

I could fill thousands of words with examples of white stupidity in all its grasping incoherent uselessness. And yet they claim themselves so superior. But of course.

I tried vainly to write about overpopulation and how that entire discussion engenders sexism and racism, but I just got too angry to finish. I was literally sputtering with rage at some of the key elements of this myth in attempting to respond to them in writing.

I don’t know where to go, or what to do. My words could potentially upset some damn white lady somewhere, and we can’t freaking have that!

I just haven’t got the spoons to handle their grasping horribleness. Some others do, and wow do I admire them. But I just don’t. I can barely proclaim my love of Christ without getting battened down for that as well by white Christians who feel bad because -isms are sins and that makes them ‘feel weird’.

Yes white people are often gross and horrible and creepy and, well, spiritually unclean. And normally I would not be so blunt on my blog, which was intended to be both more focused and more dispassionate, but I hurt and here I am showing the bruises in public, hoping someone will see them and understand that I never brought this pain on myself through my actions, but only through my misfortunate existence.

I look at all these places on the web where white people scream for sympathy and handholding and so many other things as they crush souls like anthills under a kid’s feet. You knew they were there, don’t lie and say otherwise, and especially don’t say the ants should be happy you stepped on them, since that is technically a form of acknowledgement.

Screw you. At minimum we are persons, people, human, not ants despite my metaphor choice and yes– I think more human than you who can never be honest and true with us.

I don’t have the spoons to spend on white hate, especially not the slick quasi-academic kind that masks itself as fake dispassionate analysis.

So I don’t know when I will blog again, or whether I’ll ever be able to blog regularly. The souleaters are always lurking and I will not stick around to be nipped and torn at if I can avoid it.

Embossed.

I am embossed with the scar of your love,

longing,

Plated in desire.

Hold me as your vessel,

waiting.

Love me again

love me again

Sarah Palin reminds me of 35 year old newbie strippers.

She’s on the last end of her looks, flirting and winking her way to political gain, and not sure how long it will last.  In this she is similar to strippers over 30 who are working the remnants of their milf-ness in an environment where it pays off in more than an occasional compliment or whispered remark from guys around town. 

And much like many strippers over 30, she has the vibe of someone who’s figured out she can hustle her looks just this way a bit too late and is rushing to grab whatever access those looks can get her before they disappear completely. 

And yes, I am being a bit extravagant, but the high number of mostly male conservative Christian types who ‘just like’ her inspires this kind of post.  Of course such men think ’she could be sitting in the pew right next to me!’  Same kind of guys who dismiss their own sexual sins while loudly proclaiming teh gay is the worst sexual sin evar. 

And like an alarming proportion of strippers, she is cunning, grifter-fashion, rather than intelligent.  I leave the extrapolations to any readers that turn up.

Sarah Palin is a Tribal Fertility Totem

I am writing this on what is technically Election Day, partly because I am not sure Palin will hold national interest beyond that point.  But I think it’s a point that’s gone unrecognised consciously among many, including many conservatives who ‘just like her, darn it’. 

One of the tragedies of American Christianity is that the strains best known to the larger public tend to be focused on something akin to a cultural idea of Christianity, rather than sound Biblical doctrine.  It revolves around going to church with people who look like you and think the correct things, vote the correct way, and so forth.  There isn’t much Bible in this sort of culturally-derived pseudo-Christianity. 

Sarah Palin represents one of these tribes of cultural Christians– the (mostly) white Pentecostal tribe.   Her relative youth and remarkably extended fertility are beacons to members of this tribe.  McCain selected an enchanted symbol with layers of meaning to one modestly sized tribe. 

In some ways, pointing out her incompetence at governing or her greed for power or her flirting with powerful men and then turning on them is missing the point of her as an exercise in throwing bread to the masses.  If she were competent, adept at interviews and all that, she wouldn’t be serving out the entirety of her role as a totem of fertility– a white woman who can pump out the future white race while still looking good without surgical enhancements.

When your primary role is to be a marker and comfort, actually being able to do the job doesn’t matter.  She was fruitful and multiplied, while being married.  That makes her the right sort of white Christian lady.  Plus she bore a Down’s kid and didn’t abort, which grants her additional ‘authentic’ symbolism.  The men who like her feel that way because she’s the ‘right kind’ of Christian wife, fecund and still with a decent figure.  And since she looks good, she must be a good person at heart. 

Her presence on the ticket makes this white Pentecostal tribe of American Christians feel like their version of Christian culture is fertile, ripe, waiting to burst forth and shower the world with its awesome.  But it’s just a symbolic gesture.  The totem is hollow, and once again, the cultural (rather than Biblical) focus of their Christianity means that they fall before her as to an idol and will be shocked and hurt when the fertility totem can’t bring the crops…or win the election.

Justice Walks removed her perspective from the internets.

It’ll be sorely missed.  I hope she feels comfortable doing a public blog again, but if not, I was glad to have the chance to read it and in some ways rejoice in what it offered.   

It’s hard to control the sense of frustration and irritated anger.  I’m not going to delve further into rage and supposition, and just deleted all my frothing.  It doesn’t benefit her, and the relevant parties are already busy rejoicing in their sin against her, and would just look on any commentary as further fodder for their senses of self-import. 

Anyway, I think I’ll be posting more often than monthly just to take the edge off the sorrows racism has lately been dropping into my life, this one among many, sadly. 

I wish the lady well, and if the random good wish of an internet stranger is anything, there it is.

Process Nerding Your Way to Victory, or The Obama Ground Game

I will probably not do proper justice to it, but the title covers the basic premise.

McCain is not a process nerd. Hillary was not a process nerd. Obama is the *ultimate* process nerd. This is in fact why he is doing so well in a national presidential campaign. Usually guys like him just run campaigns brilliantly for other folks, but this time the process nerd *is* the nominee. That in some ways is more unprecendented than his being black, or about as young as Clinton.

There is a lot of talk about Obama’s ‘ground game’, but that obscures what drives it. It’s not just enthusiasm– there’s a herd of enthusiastic Palinites out there getting nothing done for that ticket. It’s not just ‘a background in community organising’– the Deaniacs did very well field organising. It’s process nerdery– the trainspotting ability to manipulate enthusiasm and direct organising in specific and precisely tailored ways. A process nerd studies processes, even down to the process of making sure your volunteers are *useful* self-starters, as an example. Or studying the process of proportional nomination for your party so well that you can actually convert your success into useful ground campaigns for the national winner-take-all process.

It’s nerdy, it’s geeky, and it’s never really been done by the guy standing in front of the cameras saying ‘I’m running for President’. It suggests some interesting things about what an Obama presidency would look like in practical terms.

The scary-wonderful thing about being a process nerd is that you build in your own vote protections. It doesn’t matter that Republicans will intimidate some percentage of voters– through process nerding, Obama’s got unprecedented levels of turnout that will completely obliterate any attempts to commit partisan-useful vote fraud. There may still be some in this election, but it will be rendered toothless and not able to alter the final tallies.

Plus the focus on process allows for a broad reach in terms of connecting to voters– even people who won’t vote for Obama increasingly might just stay home since he doesn’t sound like a bad guy, they just can’t *vote* for him is all– and that kind of ambivalent support stifles the Republican base turnout and can create a nice little margin of victory.

Ah, Obama, the ultimate political process nerd. One wonders only if anyone will ever be able to top it. I’m just amazed to live in an election year where this stuff is actually, finally a winning electoral strategy and group of tactics.

I am Sarah Palin and that is why I don’t like her.

I can see myself wielding my fecundity against other conservative women as a sort of morality trump card (I am clearly more Christian/more moral/more family-oriented/etc COS I GOTZ FIVE KIDS BIATCH!). I can see myself finding out the hard way that while I was pretty good looking (enough to win or place well in beauty pageants), I wasn’t hot enough for television– but I would always be the hottest gal in the room if I went into politics. I can see myself telling lies and being rude because ‘it’s just politics’ and still feeling smug and secure in my Christian-culture (though perhaps not necessarily Christian) faith.

I can see myself being offered the bargain Satan offered Jesus, that rule of earthly kingdoms could be assured if I would but bow down to Satan. I can see myself getting so distracted by how I’d delegate authority, and what projects I’d have my kingdom working on, and how I’d make others do what I said that I ended up accepting the bargain without any deeper thought.

We often dislike most people who reflect temptations we aren’t conscious of being susceptible to. And so I dislike her because I think she took the devil’s deal and in taking it revealed to me that I might as easily have done too, in her position and situation.

Her deceit has forced me to be more honest about my motivations when taking on leadership positions and roles and confront my temptation to be power-seeking and vainglorious. God’s work is mysterious, indeed.

Sometimes a picture is worth 100000 words.

This image, from the Field posting about Ms. Palin, is worth a hundred times the usual thousand words, especially in light of the way evangelicals rushed to view a white lady and her kid as image-bearers of God when they could not do the same for others of less pale and middle class persuasion.

I’m a Christian. By some standards my views place me in right-wing evangelical territory. It is a source of chronic and deep pain that these right-wing evangelicals do worse than look at me and mine as animals– they literally will not even acknowledge us as part of God’s creation. This is a far crueller consequence of racism, because it places us completely beyond any hope of redemption or acknowledgement.

And that is why for me, the treatment of Sarah Palin’s daughter and her daughter’s bastard remains important, and why I use the word that only gets pulled out by white evangelicals when referring to brown and black and poor babies of unwed mothers. I am glad that so many evangelicals are rushing to shower them with lovingkindness. Now I want to see them do that for the WOC in similar straits, or the poor white women who aren’t comfortably middle-class.

As Field’s picture illustrates, I’m being smacked in the face by some of the same people I go to church with regarding sin and its consequences. Jesus got pretty irritated with Pharisees, and in this regard, I am as well. I am so tired of Christian-culture being used to further white supremacist messages when Christ was not even a white man at all by modern American standards.

I hope things work out for the family, but I also hope that these uber-religious folk open their hearts for people who don’t look just like them as well. Which may be a vain hope– I hope otherwise of course.

Christianity and same sex desire

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to experience homosexual love, as opposed to just the desire. I don’t tend to write about that side of my sexuality because I just don’t have affinity with bisexual or lesbian women who love other women. It is a circumstance where I sympathise and wish I could empathise.

I have never been able to love women romantically. It is easy for me as a Christian woman to say ‘Well, certainly I have desire for women, but God has quelled much of it in me, and it’s really no big deal to not have that desire as a large part of my life anymore’. It is easy because my desire for women is sexual, and when you have never loved someone of the same sex and hoped to spend your life with someone of the same sex, all that stuff in the Bible about how it’s not allowed is not really a problem for you. It’s just lust, and lust is sinful, whether it’s heterosexual or homosexual. In other words, because I’m only tempted sexually, I can throw my desire for women into the ‘lust’ pot along with my desire for men and resist the whole, uh, stew of sexual temptation. And honestly, in my life, God has taken much of my sexual desire away, save the chaste desire I have for my spouse.

So I struggle with my inability to truly understand what it would mean to be Christian and desire to marry someone of the same sex, to be Christian and love others of the same sex romantically. In a way, my bisexuality creates an entirely different kind of temptation, as I have to resist the belief that everyone *could* be happy with a partner of the opposite sex simply because I still like boobs, but I get along without them just fine. That kind of privilege-laden belief can close one’s heart to another’s sufferings. Being Christian and desiring what the Word says is not allowed is a complicated enough struggle without someone smugly trying to tell you that since their desire is easily quelled, yours could be too.

Granted, I haven’t been that person. But feeling that ‘everyone’s a little bit heterosexual’ is bad enough. And I’m writing even this because I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t presume that my experience of same-sex desire should or could apply to all Christians who love or lust for same-sex partners. But I have, and did, and that was also sin.

Well, there you are. I’m a Christian who experiences same sex desire from time to time, but in general is not tempted by it, and though I can’t understand same sex loving (rather than desiring), I at least have come to accept that my experience cannot be extrapolated to all Christians with similar desires.

This post was inspired by a blogger who was wrong about something, but got belligerent instead of admitting to it. I just decided to admit to my wrong thing, so here we are.

Mormons are not Christians.

The only reason they are considered fully Christian and not a ‘cult’ like Santeria often is considered would be because it’s a bunch of blond, blue-eyed white people practicing heresy. Mormonism is very much a religion that borrowed a fair bit from Christianity, but it is not itself Christian. It really would be like saying Islam was a denomination of Christianity, or vice versa. Islam and Christianity have some common elements acknowledged, but they are clearly two distinct religions. The differences are at least as large between Mormonism and Christianity.

I just get tired of something like Cao Dai (a very fascinating Vietnamese religion with some Catholic elements, such as having a pope) being considered not Christian in any way, but Mormonism gets a pass and all the privilege being considered white-Christian entails in American society even though they are not Christian.

Not going to get into the fact that Mormonism is both a culture and a religion, because that is something many people don’t understand precisely because Mormons look so ‘normal’ (white). And the idea that Mormonism has a cultural face would mess with the myth that white Americans ‘don’t really have their own culture’. Perhaps another day I’ll tackle Mormon cultural practices, but not this one.

Movie Review– X-Files: I want to believe

I have been away from blogland for long enough. Here’s a spoiler-free movie review of sorts. But first some background:

Being an X-files fan from back in the day, I was obliged to see the new movie that was randomly sprung on summer crowds. It was quite the stealth attack advertising campaign. Just mixed in amongst the usual smash-bang-boom stuff is a rather promising trailer…for a show that ended nearly a decade ago. But the trailer was spooky and just evocative enough of the things one likes about X-files– paranormal weirdness, shadowed conspiracy and The ‘Ship between Mulder and Scully.

The movie itself was a curious object, different from its trailer in ways I did not expect. It was like a two parter from season 4, when it was still fun, but there was now non-awkward character development mixed in with monster-of-the-week.

Now, normally ‘It was like an episode of the show’ is a criticism, but in this instance, it was a strength for the film. There was evocation without excessive explanation, and that’s just what X-files did best. And in this film, the actors did all their work very well. The loathing between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson that generated so much wonderful tension is mellowed and weary here, creating a different kind of tension for the viewer (who is probably an X-files fan and thus expecting something very specific). They are done hating each other off-set, and so you have an interplay of curious rapport that was just not possible back in the day. Mulder and Scully transcend The ‘Ship in this film, and totally not in a way you’re expecting.

As well, the plot is a side-swiper. It presents a morally complex set of situations and then leaves the viewer turning them over as the film progresses. You keep checking and checking to see if they’re going to do anything with that moral complexity, and then the movie ends and you realise they just don’t know how. The reason is that it’s a movie about faith, and Catholic Christian faith very specifically– but the writers don’t actually know what they’ve written. And that’s because they aren’t Catholics, or even versed in the extensive range of Catholic responses to doubt and uncertainity in God.

But if you have even a passing acquaintance with those responses (any of them), then the movie is quite interesting to watch, even if they get it (Christianity) wrong. The dilemmas are that rich in possibility.

I liked it. As a fan, there were disappointments that were pretty much expected, but I wasn’t expecting a film full of completely unwitting theology. It was amazing to see it play out in all its flawed strangeness.

Apparently some people feel it’s anti-Catholic. I’d have to say it’s more uninformed about the complexity of Catholic Christian faith (and Christian faith in general). I can’t recommend anyone other than die-hard fans see it, or perhaps someone interested in watching the movie for theological analysis purposes. It lingers, yet not unpleasantly.

Like the show, it had some purely charming and/or intense moments. Also like the show, there were some clunky moments. It kinda summed up all I’ve liked and disliked about the X-files when I was watching it regular.

Lastly, since I am going on because the memory lingers so, the spooky bits are just the right kind of weird-spooky. Greatness eluded it, but it did not fail to fascinate. If I were rating, I’d say a solid seven of ten, or three of five.

I used to write fiction.

I have been blogging in a very intermittent and unsteady fashion for the last yearish now. Additionally, I have a few other spots on the internets where I post comments and such more than a bit. However, for the time of official blogging, I have pretty much stopped writing fiction. Every couple of months I look at my archives and see how long it’s been since I even edited a story or a poem, and it has been a very long while for me.

I used to write a lot of fiction. Even when I thought I wasn’t writing terribly much, I was still knocking out a bit of fiction here and there. But since I have become attached to writing nonfiction, I’ve found I cannot get back to the place that spawned my fiction.

When I wrote fiction, it was much the same. I struggled with nonfiction, rarely getting further than note-taking, much less actual intros or drafts. I should love to find a balance, and write fiction– there are so many tales I haven’t finished the telling of, people and worlds and places I long to return to and stand on the soil of, tasting the texture of another reality than the one I dwell in.

But I feel overwhelmed by nonfiction. There’s so many research studies to analyse and critique, so many laws to deconstruct and list the flaws of, so many opinions and views to put out where others can see and think on them as they will. So much religious analysis and apologetics to write. There’s a lifetime of nonfiction, dozens of books worth of material. I have gotten so grounded in the wonders of this world I can’t get back to the ones inside my head to write about fictional people and things.

Certainly, I hope I can return to other worlds than this one, but in the meantime I will stay here and get back to posting nonfiction on various topics of interest.

Since this is my 100th post, I will post a meme. I got tagged by the evocative Natalia, and so here that goes.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

REM- Losing My Religion
Front242- Headhunter
Elvis Costello- I Dreamed of My Old Lover Last Night
Cabaret Voltaire- 24-24
Sade- Hang On To Your Love
Bush- Mouth
Elvis Costello- Distorted Angel (Tricky remix)

This is current to the fortnight, which is about all I can attest to when it comes to songs I like.

I will tag Shannon, the Field, Joan Kelly, WOC Phd, Sudy, Problem Chylde, and Aaminah.

The Authenticity Cult in sexwork sucks.

Title says it all. There are plenty of other authenticity cults, such as the one that says you have to have been a drug addict or regular user to write about it. Or the one that says you have to have given birth to write about it. And so on.

It’s particularly frustrating with sexwork because all those authenticity police spend a lot of time invalidating the experiences of anyone who doesn’t share their opinions. This is true on both the pro and anti sides of the matter. Journalists interview their subjects, and that’s good enough to call news. Why can’t that be good enough when talking about the vagaries of sexwork? Why are the only ones allowed to speak ones with experience WHO ALSO AGREE WITH YOU?

It’s such a bizarrely modern notion that ‘ya gotta live it to talk about it’. These same authenticity cops are happy enough to pontificate on many other things they haven’t directly experienced. And that’s the whole problem with authenticity policing, or with first-person-only (who agrees enough with mememe) as the sole arbiter of validity.

I thought I was going to say more about this, but that covers it.

What is reproductive freedom?

Sometimes I question the right to abortion. I don’t question it out of jealousy or resentment or a desire to keep women ‘in their place’. I question it because I question a societal circumstance that leads women to believe that an instance of pregnancy is a disaster that must be dealt with by obliteration. It bothers me that in a supposedly “civilised” cultural environment, women can still feel that something is wrong with giving birth in itself, that there’s a problem if they happen to be fertile enough to provide some continuation for the human race.

I can’t chalk it all up to the nihilism of middle class+ white women. This is something deeper and more constricting in American and Western European society. This isn’t a thing that can be blamed on women alone, the feeling that their fertility is a fault to be papered over with abortion.

This strange and latently nihilistic undercurrent in those social fabrics makes the question of reproductive freedom a particularly complicated one, because so often in the MSM it is defined as the right to obliterate life and not much else. But there is more to reproduction than restricting one’s reproductive abilities and calling that freedom. There’s also the freedom to bring life into being regardless of circumstance, to not be told you should have been sterilised. There’s the freedom to learn how to prevent conception, and contemplate an approach to sex that isn’t based around male-specific fertility (that is, the idea of continuous fertility).

Most especially, there’s reconfiguring the social structures so that it isn’t a ‘disaster’ when a woman does get pregnant (or when she gets pregnant with certain kinds of fetuses). To me, the idea of reproductive freedom involves eradicating this fear of pregnancy, of embracing the true nature of female fertility (which is yeah, different than male fertility), and mostly of creating a situation where women can start with avoiding conception first so that surgical, hospital-based abortion is the last resort.

Abortion isn’t comfortable or fun, and I believe it can be reduced while still allowing women to choose how they’ll plan their families (or plan not to have them, in those instances). This brings us back to fertility awareness and the desperate need for it to be a primary element of reproductive freedom, not an unspoken, misinformed rumor.

Reproductive freedom to me should be about informing women so totally about their bodies that they don’t have to have abortions most of the time but can instead simply not conceive. I don’t care if some doctors lose money over that. I just hope I and others can find a way to get more accurate information out to the vast array of women who just have almost no information about their bodies. I guess I feel knowledge is freedom, then access.

Stop calling Prostitution the World’s Oldest Profession

Prostitution (and for that matter, all the rest of sexwork) isn’t the world’s oldest profession. In fact, the winknudge aspect of that whole association is remarkably non-respectful of womens’ ability to get along in the world using something other than sexual service. In the history of the world, women have been valued for far more than how much sex they can provide for cash in hand. The idea that in tiny twenty family villages there was a village hooker is just appalling. In such a tiny economy it doesn’t even make sense to have what is generally considered prostitution.

Prostitution fundamentally requires an at least minimally urban, specialised culture to sustain the idea of a woman having to support herself by having sex with the town’s men. In a foraging group, it’s not worth the trouble. The woman will get fed or get thrown out without having to have sex for the food. The fact that a society has to get pretty advanced to even have a village large enough to support a ‘town whore’ means prostitution is not the oldest profession, not even in jest.

I just get tired of hearing that transactional sexuality is the ‘real’ norm for sexuality– which is the primary underlying subtext in this ever-favored narrative. Women were engaged in plenty of other professions aside from prostitution historically. Which isn’t to say women’s lot has been perfect in the past or anything, just that it’s incredibly misleading to pretend that prostitution is what all women *would* do even if they all do not.

That’s another little implication. Of course, I still hold the oldest profession is murder for hire, and there’s less to dispute there comparatively. Anyway, it’s one of my little triggers, one might say.

A Reminder from Ecclesiastes

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%2011:5;&version=47

“As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.”

This is the kind of Bible verse cherrypicked by science-worshipping atheists to demonstrate that Christians are inherently opposed to science. Because in that worldview, humanity has magically come to a complete understanding of all bodily processes. Actual science reporting shows otherwise, but that is generally not the thrust of such discussions.

I look at a verse like that and I realise that science is a perfectly fine complement to Christian faith– it illuminates aspects of God’s glory and creation, without usurping His role as Creator. While we as humans can know the processes of fertilisation and pregnancy, we don’t know why some eggs get fertilised and why some don’t. We don’t know why some women can easily get with child, while others cannot even in their late teens and early twenties. We don’t know why most zygotes and embryos never make it to fetal stage.

We can describe what happens when things go well, but science is no help as to why things do not. And I appreciate this little note that we can never truly know, understand, comprehend all that God has made of us and for us and around us. It reminds me that pride is foolish, especially pride in science, which only tells you how little you know the more you study it in any specialised aspect.

Sexwork is not transgressive, but socially normative.

In agreeing to participate in any form of sexwork, one is agreeing to rules and roles that are demarcated by society. They are rules that can be bent a little here and there, but it’s deceptive to claim sexworking is a transgression or flouting of social conventions. Sexwork is part of the social fabric in most post-agricultural societies, and as part of the fabric has rules and mores one is supposed to follow.

I won’t say they are comfortable or pleasant rules, but they are there. The work is many things, but it’s not subversion.

I’ll come back to this detail intermittently. It’s important to remember that true transgression generally doesn’t involve slotting oneself into predefined roles hundreds and thousands of years old.