Obama just got over 1 million donors.

That number is nearly one percent of all voters who voted in the 2004 general election. Think about that– Barack Obama has successfully persuaded nearly 1 in 100 voters to give him money. Those same donors have disproportionately gone out and volunteered to get out the vote, not just for Obama, but for the Democratic Party more generally.

Obama has managed to get people embracing democracy through the mechanism of the, er, Democratic Party. He’s presented people with the option to make the Democratic Party the party of actual democracy. And boy howdy are they taking it.

Unlike Clinton, Obama is eager to support other candidates, to create a political infrastructure that can benefit anyone running for office, not just a single guy running for President. That expansiveness and graciousness is extraordinary politically.

This entire election cycle and the shocking contrast in the various campaigns is historic. All the Presidential candidates are making history. Impressive stuff.

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?

Why don’t POC get to write what they know?

This comes up a lot. POC with life experiences outside the stereotyped narrative suite (most specially black POC, but certainly all other POC get their share of this in) get treated extremely ill by the (white) world at large.

A particular instance personal to me is rural upbringing. Black and Asian people who grew up on farms or ranches just leave most whitefolks outside of Texas and a couple other places completely baffled and sometimes angry. In light of the historic expulsion of such folks by whites (black people did in fact live everydamnwhere in America, until white people saw them living happily and had to Do Something about that), the idea that we’re all ‘just American’ or whatever is particularly galling.

Colorblind whites are the worst about this kind of thing. They have a narrative of ‘racist rednecks’ or whatever, and so POC growing up rural and not living in Jasper, TX just wreck that shiny story they comfort themselves with.

Also, alternawhites (who overlap strongly with the colorblind ones, of course). Your Burningman types– ugh, they will not let us be alterna, unless we’re female and Asian (and generally only Chinese or Japanese Asian at that, but sometimes Filipina, in my experience of alternafolk). Burningman itself is full of white people who, like, totally aren’t racist because they have this hot young tattooed Asian chick in their camp, dude!

But all that is not specifically to do with writing, and to clarify, I’ll have to bring up sexwork, since it is the most recent instance of white people doing this crap.

Re: sexwork, writing about it is fraught with peril as a WOC, because if your experience does not match an extremely specific narrative, you get told your experiences are invalid. I’ve been told my experiences are fictional and overblown and incorrect and misinformed, all because I fail at the ‘poor black (almost certainly single mother)’ sexworker role assigned to me. Saying and writing what I know gets me told I must be wrong or lying, basically.

So it’s difficult to write of my experiences, of the ways in which sexwork has marked me because what I know isn’t the standard narrative. And for us POC, this is kinda what leaves so many of us with near-permanent writer’s block. The constant and chronic invalidation, and pressure to stick only to the narrowest and most stereotyped of personas. We can’t be human and have our multitudes, each with unique and interesting and different experiences. We have to fit some small set of templates and if we crush the templates, whitefolks try to slap us down as mad upstarts.

It is so rude. And, of course, patronising and racist. But whatevs.

There’s no willingness to let us have our duelling/competing anecdotal evidences. We don’t get to be rural, or book-crazy and NOT self-hating, or computer-nerdy and not self-hating. Or you know, whatever.

Even in sci-fi and fantasy, it’s difficult to write what you know as a POC, because white poachers will come along and swear to you that you don’t know the first thing about your own mother’s cooking. But they do, since they lived in your country for six months and used the cuisine for their latest novel as delicacies of an alien race.

This is primarily about how much white people irritate me with their rudeness and denial of true humanity to, well, anyone else. But this is reflected in white whining about how POC writing can be ‘inauthentic’ (fail the stupid batch scripted narratives– argh!) at all. Their grubby selfish envy bugs me.

Curiously, all this is less bad in Texas. They’ll let black and asian rural folks be rural all the livelong day, except up north in the outlands nearish to Dallas.

I may rewrite all this later. Or leave it as an extended note.

Where Obama really is in the Democratic presidential race.

Obama is ahead in pledged delegates alone.

Obama is ahead in pledged delegates plus superdelegates currently declared.

Obama is ahead in total delegates even without receiving a single Michigan delegate and only receiving a proportionate share of Florida delegates. He can actually afford to have them split that way and still be ahead.

Obama is also ahead in the popular vote.

Obama is even ahead in the popular vote including Florida, with a smidge under 10 million total votes.   

Lastly and leastly, Obama is ahead in the polls.

Hillary Clinton lacks both charm and confidence.

In a nutshell, this is why Bill Clinton and Shrub won twice. Clinton could get by on personal charisma, plus he was not afraid to have advisors and staff who disagreed with him publically.

Hillary’s all about appearances of strength, both in her campaign literature and in her hiring. Hillary, like Kerry, wants to always believe she’s the smartest and/or toughest in any room. And both Hillary and Kerry surrounded themselves with yes-folk who didn’t tell them how bad their campaign strategy was until it was too late.

Shrub, on the other hand, being a child of total privilege, expected to rely on advisors and selected loyal people who would sometimes tell him no if needed. He also isn’t afraid to be considered the dumbest person in the room sometimes.

Obama has charisma so expansive he doesn’t have to worry about advisor quality, but part of his charisma is a natural delegative ability that ends up leaving him very likely to choose quality advisors and staff anyway. He has a genius for selecting people to run things who can be left alone to do so unsupervised. That is proper exercise of authority, and exceptionally useful in the long term politically.

Hillary is too much like the upstart bourgeoisie who treat their staff poorly because they don’t have the confidence born of privilege to conduct a more respectful master-servant relationship. And Hillary lacks the expansive charm (which lends its own confidence) needed to manage competent staff who might challenge her authority.

This really isn’t a ‘chick’ problem– it was Kerry’s burden as well. It’s getting framed as a female thing, but there are plenty of powerful women (usually they go into business, though) who have charm and/or confidence in the ways that are most useful when exercising authority.

Obama and Bill are natural politicians (although Bill is handicapped by a failure to admit that the Internet Age is rather different from his political era, which was still mostly pre-internet). Even Shrub is a natural politician in the way that aristocrats often must learn to be. Hillary simply is not. That handicaps her more in this political race than anything else.

Well, Obama can win after all.

He’s put together a pretty slamming little engine of change. His organisation has managed to steamroll over Mme Clinton’s tears and new co-opting of underdog status (not really new, just a return to the White Woman Syndrome well, but without the sobbing on camera).

Tomorrow (today?) are the Potomac Primaries. It should be very interesting times.

I admit, I originally thought anyone running against Clinton was going to lose. I am also shamed to admit that I thought Americans would eagerly lap up the Clintons’ racist baiting and insinuating once Obama started putting up impressive showings and beating the conventional wisdom bloody.

America, keep on proving me wrong by supporting this guy. Warm a cynical old lady’s heart. Even Latinos are voting for him, if they’ve been living in this country more than a generation. And there’s plenty of those folks in Texas. He’s a pretty strong candidate and only getting stronger by the day.

I held back any real opinion about him because I thought the Clintons were rich, powerful and well-connected. But they were a giant inflatable elephant, full of hopeful air, but ultimately lacking a solid core.

Republicans, Democrats, and us third party people (I have only ever voted third party in Presidential elections) are all getting on the Obama train for good reason.

He can win in November. And he pays as much attention to little three electoral vote states as he does to states with twenty three. That’s the kind of care and feeding America has been starved for from a President– someone who truly does care about the entire population, not just a select few in urban areas or ‘key states’.

We kinda need a President of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, not a President of ‘the eighteen key states needed to win by a very slim margin if all goes well’ of America.

This is my first proper poliblog. Should be a topsy-turvy few months.

Bling Culture is Human Culture

There’s a narrative going round that ‘bling culture’ is a child of hip-hop and therefore strictly the demesne of filthy negroes. The truth, as ever, is altogether different. Ostentation in wealth display is the human norm. It is an extraordinarily modern development that subtle displays of wealth are considered more upscale and chic. Being an educated lady, I use modern in the sense of ‘in the last two centuries’, as one might properly do.

It is a beautiful and dusky irony that this notion of subtle wealth-display, where it is known only by the cut or the tailoring, is the product of someone who was not rich or highborn and basically mooched off his rich friends. I present Beau Brummell.

While a part of me truly appreciates the idea that wealth-display is bound to appreciating subtly beautiful craft (and acquiring the knowledge to understand that it is beautiful, and subtle, and also craft), the rest of me is amused that so many denigrate blackfolk (and the whitefolk who emulate them) as upstarts with garish displays. How easily forgotten the displays of numerous perfectly pale kings and queens are when one can snark at duskier folk for not being ’subtle’, though ’subtle appreciation of tailoring’ was purely an invention of a commoner on the make.

The standard human norm is to be garish. Jewels dripping, furs pouring down all over, heavy rings on both hands. This is human, and crosses all racial and ethnic borders. Trying to claim it’s a recent, ‘black’ thing and that American whites were ever ‘more refined’ is both a lie historically and a lie currently. M’sieu Brummell fought against the standard human norm and hasn’t really overcome it, overall. Wealthy people may dress discreetly sometimes, but they don’t live in tiny houses or small apartments.

Bling is how all humans roll when they get mad paid, not just black rappers.