Ok, I know it's late, but there's only three this year:

Get on a medication that works for my bipolar depression and keep taking it. (This is already started; just have to discuss my med choice w/therapist and start taking it).

Eat fewer processed grains. "Less white flour, more wheat flour." See what that does.

Secret resolution: try new sex thing.

This is required reading for pretty much anyone who's having sex and/or voting in America.

From an article about a presidental straw poll at the recent Values Voters Summit:

Abortion was the leading determinant, followed by government spending, repeal of healthcare reform, protection of religious liberty and national security.

In a speech earlier Saturday, Gingrich outlined what he described as the two greatest threats to the nation: a "social secular machine" and radical Islamic extremism.

I find these these events, and the articles about them, interesting not so much for tracking what values they people who attend these events espouse, but because the people at these events are often in a position to use terms describing said values. You see a lot of newer coinages--words known in back rooms and in the halls of congress, but not on the street--brought into the public sphere for the first time during events like this.

Look at "social secular machine." That's going to take off on CNN soon, if it hasn't already. The GOP has talked a lot in the past few decades about what constitutes a social unit, what should constitute a social unit, the decay in the social unit, etc. But here, the idea of being "social" is becoming tainted through association with that bad-boy adjective, "secular," and the vaguely uncomfortable connotations of "machine." (Not to mention "socialism." It wasn't explicitly mentioned in Gingrich's threat-list, but the echoes are contained in the roots of the word themselves, and if people weren't talking about socialism as evil at the Values Voters Summit I'll eat my hat). There's no recognition that people are the ones who possess the quality of secular-ness; there's just this idea that groups of secular people are a machine. The word "machine" conjures up a lot of images--ants, production lines, shiny metal rivets--but none of the connotations of the word "machine" are particularly human, or particularly friendly. After all, humans create machines to do the work that they, as humans, don't want to do. So, as far as I can tell, the first danger is "groups of people who don't have a religion."

The second group of people, radical Islamic extremists, seems more forthright, but since this country can't decide what, exactly, constitutes radical Islamic extremism as opposed to normal Muslim belief or practice, in the meantime there's a panic about everybody who's Muslim. Nobody is paying much attention to the people who say, "I'm not a radical Muslim," except for the the people whose job it is to discuss the idea that those moderates may not be telling the truth. So, as far as I can tell, the second danger is "pretty much all Muslims, at least until we can figure out what our definition of radical is, which hasn't happened in the last decade."

Where does this leave us? We have "Christians," "Jews," and "other religions that are too small to matter to us in terms of votes and/or that have not yet committed acts of terrorism against America and hence come to our attention."

I don't understand how this same Values Voters Summit made "protecting religious liberty" a priority...

...Oh, wait. That's totally code for "we can't say 'oppose the homosexual agenda' anymore, because we have a few gay friends now, so we've started saying that our religion is attacked whenever those gay friends want to do something our religion tells us it's wrong for them to do."

That's what's been happening in the news and in the point/counterpoint columns we've been seeing for the past few years: once the cultural window shifted from "doing this is objectively gross" to "doing this is subjectively gross," the people who subscribe to that particular brand of subjectivity as part of their cultural identities gradually shifted to arguing for that cultural identity's right to retain that subjective assessment of grossness.

Here's the thing: I agree that people who subscribe to that particular brand of subjectivity as part of their cultural identities should have the right to retain that cultural identity's subjective assessment of grossness, even if I vehemently disagree with their particular cultural identity's assessment of grossness.

However, I do not think that the assumption of a cultural identity should shield the people who assume that identity from criticism of that identity's subjective assessment of grossness, or from criticism of that identity as a whole in terms of the policies and ideas it spreads as a group.

I also think that one religious cultural identity's subjective assessment of grossness should not take precedent over:
- all other religious or secular cultural identities' subjective assessments of grossness
- any other religion's cultural identity's subjective assessments of grossness
- any other secular cultural identity's subjective assessments of grossness

In America, separation of civil and religious law should ensure that:
- there are a multiplicity of secular cultural identities and their subjective assessments of grossness
- there are a multiplicity of religious cultural identities and their subjective assessments of grossness

However, this is not currently happening. Instead, we are being told that one (or maybe two?) historically and emotionally important and widespread religious cultural identities' subjective assessments of grossness (the Christian right's assessment, or possibly the "Judeochristian" right's assessment) should take precedent over all and any other secular and religious cultural identities' subjective assessments of grossness--because that one religious cultural identity is historically and emotionally important and widespread.

The members of that one historically and emotionally important and widespread cultural identity feel free to tell the members of all other religious and secular cultural identities that:
- their religious or secular cultural identities' subjective assessments of grossness are wrong
- their religious or secular cultural identities have no or harmful values in terms of the policies and ideas they spread as a group
- that particular religious cultural identity's subjective assessments of grossness should be given primacy over all other religious and secular cultural identities.

And the members of all those other religious and secular cultural identities would feel free to refute those ideas.

If that was what was actually happening, we would be having a debate on somewhat more equal footing. The historically and emotionally important and widespread cultural identity of Christianity would still have more of a foothold because of its historical roots and its widespread adoption, but that problem is at least a known bug.

But that's not all that's happening.

What is actually happening? If members of any other religious and/or secular cultural identities object to the cultural primacy of one religious cultural identity, they are told that because the people in question also have a right to their religious cultural identity and its subjective assessment of grossness (which is true). But they are also told that people with any other cultural identities, religious and/or secular, have no right to question:
- that religious cultural identity's subjective assessment of grossness
- the religious cultural identity's value as a whole in terms of the policies and ideas it spreads as a group
- the primacy of that particular religious cultural identity's subjective assessments of grossness over all other religious and secular cultural identity's subjective assessments of grossness.

That is untrue.

And that one religious cultural identity? It's already got power, enshrined in politics, law and culture, and is doing its best to ignore or defame all other religious or secular cultural identities in those arenas in order to retain its primacy and keep the other cultural identities from not only obtaining primacy, but from obtaining much power at all.

So we have Unitarians (for instance, among other religious cultural identity groups) unable to religiously marry (a religious cultural action) religious queer people (a religious cultural identity group), due to the political power of the primary religious cultural identity group.

We have judges (a secular cultural identity group) unable to civilly marry (a secular cultural action) atheist queer people (a secular cultural identity group), due to the political power of the primary religious cultural identity group.

We have Christians (the primary religious cultural identity group in the US) using their political power and cultural primacy to ~successfully argue that it is unfair that queer people are able to question their religious cultural identity's subjective assessment of grossness, their religious cultural identity's value as a whole in terms of the policies and ideas it spreads as a group, and the primacy of their particular religious cultural identity's subjective assessments of grossness over all others.

Yet what does the Christian right do when arguing for the retention of their cultural primacy and political power in secular American law? They question queer people's subjective assessment of grossness, queer people's secular cultural identity as a whole in terms of the policies and ideas they spread as a group, and try to argue that queer folks' particular secular cultural identity's subjective assessment of grossness has primacy over their own understanding (at the same time, they use language that implies that their own subjective assessment of grossness is still, and still should be, the most powerful).

Do I think that people in America have freedom of speech, such that the people with the culturally dominant religious subjective assessment of grossness may insinuate that I am a danger to children, and religion, and a menace to society, in their TV ads? Yes, but I should also have freedom of speech, such that I can shout about their lies.
I have this right as a queer person in this day and age and location, but I am consistently told, in words and in actions, that it is unsafe to shout too loudly, and I am constantly reminded that I just got the ability to speak.

Do I think that people in America have freedom of religion, such that the people with the culturally dominant religious subjective assessment of grossness may refuse to marry me to the person I love in a particular place of worship with a particular policy of believing that I am a sinner? Yes, but if I am religious, I should also have the freedom of religion such that I can go to another place of worship with a particular policy of believing that I am not a sinner, and they should be able to marry me to the person I love.
I do not have this right as a queer person, in this day and age and location, because the people with the culturally dominant religious subjective assessment of grossness have successfully used their power to defend their position that I should not be able to marry the person I love in a religious ceremony.

Do I think that people in America have freedom of religion, such that the people with the culturally dominant religious subjective assessment of grossness may refuse to marry me to the person I love in a particular place of worship with a particular policy of believing that I am a sinner? Yes, but if I am not religious, I should also have freedom of religion such that I can go to a place where civil marriages are performed, and they should be able to marry me to the person I love.
I do not have this right as a queer person, in this day and age and location, because the people with the culturally dominant religious subjective assessment of grossness have successfully used their power to defend their position that I should not be able to marry the person I love in a non-religious ceremony.

This is the most ridiculous, and dangerous, definition of "protection of religious liberty" I've ever seen.

And it's already becoming a buzzword, a shorthand.

Watch for it, and defend against it wherever you see it.

Sometimes you just read an article that makes you go, "Holy shit, really, universe?"
Such an article is this column where a woman writes in complaining that her 7-year-old daughter's unibrow makes her uncomfortable.

The professional advice columnist gives the following advice:

When I first held my darling in my arms and gazed on her mass of black hair, I whispered to her, "you're beautiful and amazing, baby."

If your child has an easily fixed cosmetic problem, it's best to avoid her wanting to take a razor to her face, and she's more likely to do something stupid to get rid of unwanted hair if she thinks she's ugly.

I suggest for now that you stop counting hairs and relax. As the brow fills in, or she starts complaining that other kids comment on it, you can say that she has eyebrows just like Daddy, and that's ok.

Oh, wait, that was the sensible advice I wish she'd given. She actually said:
when I first held my darling in my arms and gazed on her mass of black hair, I whispered to her, "Don't worry, baby girl, I will take care of you when the time comes to get some of your hair removed."

If your child has an easily fixed cosmetic problem, it's best to avoid her wanting to take a razor to her face. Fortunately, today a little girl with a brow like Bert the Muppet can have it transformed almost instantly into something more like Brooke Shields.

I suggest for now that you stop counting hairs and relax. As the brow fills in, or she starts complaining that other kids comment on it, you can say that she has eyebrows just like Daddy. Explain that he takes some of his out with a tweezer, but you're going to do something better for her that will mean the extra hair is gone for a long time or maybe forever. It's OK, Mom, that you want a clear path for your daughter's inner beauty to shine.

Did I...miss something about where hair grows, inner-beauty wise? Are there removal creams for the hairy soul, or razors for the heart? Because, well, otherwise that sounds like a totally *outer-body* procedure.

If you're really hairy, and you feel uncomfortable with it for whatever reason, and you're 15 or 25 or 65, and you want to get rid of your own hair, ok, sure. I'm all for getting rid of hair you don't want--I shave my arms and my legs and my feet, and have a short haircut, because I don't like having hair on my body for spiritual reasons. But that's you, dealing with your own hair.

Don't subject your kid to lasers and hot wax because you think that her seven-year-old unibrow isn't ok, and you can't bring yourself to show her Frida Kahlo's self-portrait and talk about inner beauty without thinking, "God, that woman would have been regarded as even more brilliant if she hadn't been so damn hirsute."

I sort of went to town in the comments, and emailed the columnist, and wanted to talk about why: it feels like my mom wrote into that columnist 10 years ago, and took her advice, and it fucked me up. Maybe this is a case of people being Wrong on the Internet, but I don't think so--I think it's a much, much larger problem about who is allowed to police whose body image, and who is allowed to have and develop a body image of their own, and how casually we cut others down for being different, without even realizing it, and what it does to the people who think it's ok, and what it does to the people who've been cut down.

I used to self-harm. Sometimes I still do. These last few weeks have been really, really hard, and I'm proud that today--as of ten minutes ago, even--I can look in the mirror, and see only one tiny scab from the past few weeks, and think that my skin looks ok, and realize that what I need for it to look better is not a half-hour long session staring into the mirror and digging at my nose with a nail file, but more sleep and a walk outside and the realization that I just had my period, so of course I'm going to have a flare-up.

It is really hard for me to believe, with all the hand-wringing that advice columnists do about teens self-harming and the double standards and beauty standards that women face, that they cannot see letters like these as what those problems stem from, and I think more problematically, what problems like rape, eating disorders, and the perception that women do not know their own minds come from. (Not that self-harm isn't problem enough). I feel like there's a huge emphasis on it being culturally ok for women, especially, to not know and own their own bodies--women's standards are expected to be someone else's standards, and women don't know or care what those standards are, or have their own standards for themselves, they are wrong. This happens most obviously in fashion/beauty and in the workplace and in the family, but it happens everywhere else, too: food, news, everywhere. I can't think of anywhere it doesn't apply. Think of the "we girls can do anything, right, Barbie?" slogan from the 80's. (I had that Barbie, and I hated it. Pink stole, yuck. She was always the one to get run over by the mini Ferrari). Sounds empowering at first, right? But it's not just "we girls can do anything"--"we girls" have to turn to Barbie, of all things, and ask her if she agrees with us, and wait for her approval. And then, then it's ok to do anything. (Not asking Barbie does not fall under the category of things we girls can do, apparently. Apparently Barbie never said "no," either.)

I wonder if this is why so much porn, kinky or otherwise, places such an emphasis on consent or lack thereof;
the idea that women can consent alone of their own free will to wanting things that they are supposed to want is scandalous, and the idea that women can consent alone to wanting thing that they aren't supposed to want is more scandalous, and the idea that women can consent to forego consent is incredibly scandalous. All these stories put women in a place where they gave up consent, or get consent from others, but maybe consent or lack thereof isn't the scandalous thing--maybe the scandalous thing is how they're setting their own standards for themselves, and aren't allowed, by the plot or maybe the gag, to talk about it with anyone else. It's always all a big secret. (To be fair, I think that there are probably cases in which these conventions apply to porn with men in it, too, but I think there one of the big ideas about consent is that the men in porn often seem to be interested in the ways they can have their agency restricted like women. Asking for permission, being humiliated or physically bound due to clothing or social situations, responsibility for cleaning the mansion without having the ability to have sex whenever they want...man, someone needs to write a kinky Austen takeoff with the genders switched and everyone wearing pleather and PVC, just so this can all be seen a little bit clearer for what it is, because I bet it would come out like really generic kinky porn.

Anyway.

Through my whole life, I've been holding myself up to what I thought were my own standards, but I realized today--after spending much of last evening in an agony of fear that I would move ahead with my life only because I was afraid, because I was broke, because of all the wrong reasons, and make bad decisions--that they weren't always actually my standards. I think some of them have been. I think my academic performance was largely my standard. I think that many of my hopes and dreams for the future are largely my standard. I think that my coming out and much of my relationship with rax was largely my standard (and hers). But in the larger parts of my life that continue to dog me--my ability to be on time for things, to set long-term plans to achieve those long-term goals/dreams, to be able to trust other people to set standards for themselves that I and they can live with, to form a healthier relationship with myself and food that isn't based on denigrating my body, to form a healthier relationship with myself that isn't based on denigrating my accomplishments and very real progress thus far, to form a healthier relationship with my work that focuses on what I can do rather than what I can't, to form a healthier relationship with others that isn't based on putting myself down to build others up--I realize that I haven't been doing those things much because I was trained to look to others to tell me how to act, and punished emotionally if I didn't look to others to tell me how to act, and/or punished emotionally if I looked to others to tell me how to act and then decided that their advice wasn't for me. I think that's why I was so afraid to do things on my own--all the times I'd done that before, it hurt a lot because it necessitated me cutting myself off from the people who were around me, because I knew they would not approve of whatever it was I was doing, whether it was reading or not shaving my legs. If I'd just been able to go off and do more things on my own, without worrying about whether it was right for me to do so or not, without worrying whether my going and doing things on my own was destroying the relationship between me and rax, that would have saved me, I think, and I bet it would have saved our relationship, too. I think I was starting to get there. I understood that rax kept pushing me to do my own thing because she wanted/needed space and privacy, but I thought she kept pushing for that space and privacy because she thought that my being with her made me unhappy. So I just kept trying harder and harder to show her and tell her that being with her made me really happy, and gave her in the process, less and less space and privacy, and worked on my own things less than I liked or should have. Because I wasn't sure if working on my own things was really okay with me because I thought that setting my own standards for working on my own things would make me lose the relationship, I had constant relapses into worrying whether my doing things on my own was destroying the relationship, relapses that were just way, way too much for both of us, and way too intense. Relapses which of course destroyed the relationship I loved.

Well, no time like the present, I suppose. My decisions need to be made out of love for myself, rather than fear for myself.

( read my reply to the lady who wrote into the advice column )

I had started thinking about keeping a relationships and sex blog before rax 's and my recent breakup, and have now decided that it is more important than ever for me to start one.

I realize that to some of you the idea about blogging (rather than simply privately journaling) about relationships and sex may seem crass or too uncomfortably open, and I have to say that while I do not agree with your opinion--I think a blog, any blog, can be a tool for both private and public conversation and reflection in a way that a private journal cannot be--I don't want people who won't want to read about things that will make them uncomfortable to feel like the idea of my writing about this stuff was going to be sprung on them. So, I'm going to keep this post up top for several weeks, so people can really give consideration to whether they want to be on my new relationships and sex blog friends-list, or not.

I will probably start writing in said blog later today.

Please comment below if you would like to opt-ON to the friends list for the new blog. Otherwise, you will not be on it.

You can also ask questions, etc.

Thanks!