In Praise of "Dress Like a Whore" Day

It's almost Halloween again, which at least in the United States means it's time for the annual panic shared equally by the right and the left: Girls' Halloween costumes are too slutty.

Now, I'll quickly agree that most pre-packaged "sexy" Halloween costumes for women are just ridiculous. (Take for example Sexy Finding Nemo, Sexy Taxi, or Sexy Policewoman with the word "Busted" across her chest.) They're also expensive and poorly made: Despite the ubiquity of the Leg Avenue brand, I've never worn any of their clothing twice without ripping it, and yet they charge over $50 for a costume. I confess that I drooled a little over their wood nymph costume hanging in a store window this year, but I'm an average size 10, and I could barely get the size-large over my head without ripping. When I gave it back to the salesgirl and told her it was too small, the salesgirl (who was visibly shorter and skinnier than I am) nodded and confessed that she didn't know who's supposed to fit in these. Regardless of what you want to be or how much skin you want to display or conceal, making or thrifting your own costume is more creative and usually more fun.

But the media and blogosphere don't seem especially concerned about pricing, quality, or size-ism of pre-packaged costumes. The politically correct concern for Halloween costumes is to protect our impressionable daughters from the dangers of sexuality. And yes, of course, children should be strongly protected from sexual coercion of any kind. But I think the concerned conservatives and the concerned feminists both underestimate how early puberty naturally sparks lust. I started masturbating and writing long obsessive diary-entries about "cute boys" when I was eleven. I could barely look the "cute boys" in the eye when I was eleven, but that's when the hormones set off my private imagination.

So I wholeheartedly agree that the little girl in this short-skirted ragdoll costume is too young for sex. But I don't believe that her short skirt necessarily means that she is having sex, or even that she will in the next few years. I would like to think that she'll have a fulfilling, self-aware, consensual sex life in ten or fifteen years - and puberty is when most people start the long process of self-discovery and experimental fantasy that makes that possible. If a teen or "tween" girl wants to play-act in a shorter skirt than she would usually wear, I think it's less empowering to shame her than to make sure that her sexual beliefs are medically accurate; that she understands that her own pleasure is as important as any hypothetical partner's; that she has the support of trustworthy adults and friends; and that she has enough self-confidence to say no and walk away from anything that makes her uncomfortable. What scares me is the confusion and low self-esteem that follow the juxtaposition of pre-packaged, consumer "sexiness" and abstinence-only "education" teaching our daughters to shame "sluts."

Halloween is one night a year to celebrate fantasy. Really KJ Dell'Antonia said it best:

"I distinctly remember the annual struggle to come up with a Halloween costume that conveyed my hidden assets and yet didn't look like I was trying too hard, and certainly anything that involved fishnet tights invariably fit the bill. When everything fell together, the feeling I remember best was one of power—of flaunting what felt like a rebellious choice in front of peers and adults alike, risk free. Were men and boys looking at me in inappropriate ways? I guarantee that I hoped so. I also guarantee that I knew—as do the vast majority of people—that I was not inviting my drama teacher to go all Roman Polanski on me."

So I will laugh at the inanity of dressing up as a "Sexy Martini Glass," and I will delight in my once-a-year opportunity to wear my fetish clothes down the street. To the people cringing at teen girls' thighs, I have to say: Pick your battles.

Pro-Polyamory-Rights, Pro-Disability-Rights Lesbian appointed to EEOC

Is there any way that I can sufficiently thank Chai Feldblum?

Last week Barack Obama appointed Chai Feldblum as the first open lesbian to the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Her Georgetown Law professor biography page lists some of her outstanding and diverse credentials in the realm of fighting discrimination:

"J.D. Harvard... A former law clerk for First Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Frank M. Coffin, and Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, Professor Feldblum has been a leading advocate and scholar in the areas of disability rights, health and welfare rights, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, and workplace issues. She played a leading role in the drafting and negotiating of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008. She has also helped draft and negotiate the Employment Nondiscrimination Act and various medical privacy bills and regulations."

All of the above issues are good fights worth fighting, and all will inspire the usual name-calling and fear-mongering from the radical right. But in an especially rare move for someone entering the public spotlight, Chai Feldblum also signed the statement "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision For All Our Families and Relationships" - along with her esteemed company of Gloria Steinum, Judith Butler, Betty Dodson, and Barbara Ehrenreich. The Catholic News Agency's headline calls it a "'Manifesto' that Praised Polygamy", but then, the Catholic News Agency hasn't done enough research to realize that we usually now prefer the term "polyamory" over "polygamy." What the statement actually says, in part, is:

Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship, and it should not be legally and economically privileged above all others. A majority of people – whatever their sexual and gender identities – do not live in traditional nuclear families. They stand to gain from alternative forms of household recognition beyond one-size-fits-all marriage. For example:

· Single parent households

· Senior citizens living together and serving as each other’s caregivers (think Golden Girls)

· Blended and extended families

· Children being raised in multiple households or by unmarried parents

· Adult children living with and caring for their parents

· Senior citizens who are the primary caregivers to their grandchildren or other relatives

· Close friends or siblings living in non-conjugal relationships and serving as each other’s primary support and caregivers

· Households in which there is more than one conjugal partner

· Care-giving relationships that provide support to those living with extended illness such as HIV/AIDS.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

There is the usual, predictable right-wing backlash, which I don't feel like gracing with much attention, except that it maintains its entirely ignorant assumption that "households in which there is more than one conjugal partner" characterize only patriarchal Mormons, Muslims, and "cultists." I laughed aloud at Rev. James Heisner's statement through the John Birch Society:

"Technically, the Beyond Marriage defense of 'loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner' would include not only polygamy but also polyandry, but it’s not hard to imagine that “loving households” that include more than one husband sitting on the sofa and telling the wife to get them another beer isn’t really all that high on the agenda of folks like Professor Feldblum."

In part because my last three years of polyandrous polyamory have been some of the happiest of my life, and in part because it's rare to see a male conservative paint such an offensive stereotype of men. Another poly woman had already commented teaching Rev. Heisner the word "polyamory"; my response is on the John Birch Society's Comments section and also below:

Speaking as a legally married woman who has also had a boyfriend for the last three years, and who has always been entirely honest with my husband and has his support: I assure you that polyandry is actually just as real as polygamy, and we are are grateful for Ms. Feldblum's support. I am not "normally associated with Moslems and cultists," and I do call myself a feminist. And yes, most of the modern people who honestly maintain multiple romantic relationships at the same time prefer the term "polyamory." The most respected books about polyamory - The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, and Opening Up by Tristan Taormino - were both written by women.

Reconciling feminism and multiple loving partners isn't difficult at all: Feminism is all about the freedom of choice. What strikes me as both offensive and simply ignorant is your assertion that polyandry can only mean "more than one husband sitting on the sofa and telling the wife to get them another beer." Do you actually believe that a man's only role in a romantic relationship is to sit on the sofa and demand beer?

....Thank you Chai Feldblum. You are a beacon of hope, and may you have many productive years on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The Bureaucracy of "Holy Matrimony"

About six weeks after my wedding, I'm finally getting around to legally changing my name. Which is a highly personal and arguably an eccentric choice for me to make as a polyamorous feminist. I've heard all the arguments for keeping one's maiden name, and I confess that I have no rational argument against them. My husband and I are still separate individuals. ...But for a few weeks after the wedding, every time I said, heard, or signed my name with my husband's last name, I did get a kick of girlish glee. It's a cool name. And now that the novelty is wearing off of it, my maiden name has started sounding increasingly strange to me.

So now that I'm succumbing to this "traditional" marriage custom, I've had a lot of time of sitting in fluorescent-lit government lobbies to ponder the difference between the personal/cultural recognition of marriage and the government's recognition of marriage. Because the inescapable part of any government institution is that it involves a rather a lot of very dull paperwork and standing in line. Which I am willing to do for all of the pragmatic legal advantages of a public record that my husband and I will be sharing our taxes, property, and financial decisions, and in order to have the name that I now prefer to be called listed on my legal identification and credit accounts. But after spending an absurd amount of money on a "search fee" to get our marriage-certification papers from the county (which didn't even guarantee that the county was going to find them), and filling out dozens of forms with my social security number, my parents' social security numbers, and my husband's social security number, I am freshly baffled how politicians and pundits argue that "traditional" marriage laws have any relationship whatsoever to any religious values.

My husband and I did have a religious officiant, in accordance with our families' cultures. But our chosen religious officiant also performs same-sex ceremonies, and proclaimed during our ceremony that marriage is not something that the government or even he could confer onto us. Marriage is a relationship that we had already built. Then, for our association with a liberal humanist congregation, we get the exact same legal treatment as married strict-Evangelicals or married atheists.

So now that I'm getting familiar with those legal aspects, I would be entirely fascinated to meet someone who actually believes that spending the first two hours waiting to be called at the Social Security Administration only to be told that I didn't have the proper paperwork from the county (and that the Social Security agent had no idea how I should go about getting the county's paperwork) is part of a religious, holy sacrament. (And I haven't even gotten around to the Department of Motor Vehicles or the State Department.)

Some liberals - and even Forbes Magazine - have argued convincingly that the government should stop recognizing marriages altogether. But legal marriage is a convenient shortcut for so many legal issues that would otherwise end up in lawsuits or without the weaker party's ability to enforce their rights: who owns property, who gets property if someone dies without a will, who is allowed to or legally obligated to take care of children, who's allowed to make decisions if we're medically incapacitated, etc. etc. The laws are objectionable in many ways, including the explicitly heterosexist and monogamist bias, and the fact that so many people are in bad marriages. But as we seek to liberalize the institution, I'm not convinced that we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Once again, I recommend lesbian E.J. Graff's book What Is Marriage For? for charting how Western marriage laws have already changed significantly over the past century - with a trend toward liberalization. (And for all the conservative politicians' and pundits' shrieking about the Death of the Family, the similarly apocolyptic cries of their 19th-century counterparts against letting married women own bank accounts or vote have yet to be substantiated.)

So I will limit my ranting about government bureaucracy, fill out my paperwork, and continue to argue that the marriage laws should be re-written to apply to any two or more people that want to get married. Pragmatically, legal marriage is an amalgamation of a large number of civil and financial rights, and it's well worth fighting for. But let's be honest about the role the government plays in heterosexual marriage now: which is to manufacture and maintain copies of bureaucratic paperwork.

Any time now that I hear a politician or pundit confer holy, religious sanctimony onto the government's recognition of marriage, I wonder what part of waiting in the lobby of the county clerk's office was supposed to offer spiritual revelation.

Report from the Folsom Street Fair

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Gay Marriage and Pickles

I was at a party recently and stumbled into a conversation where someone was stating their opposition to gay marriage rights. I have to admit, this doesn't happen to me often; I live in a big city, and the overwhelming majority of people with whom I personally associate take the desirability of gay rights for granted. So I pulled out all the arguments that I usually save for the proverbial choir, and asked this fellow why he opposes gay marriage. To be fair, neither of us were sober for this debate, but he didn't claim to have any rational arguments, and he didn't cite religion.

All of his arguments came down to re-wording, "Being gay is wrong because anal sex is gross. Ewww."

Which he said with taken-for-granted conviction, like he assumed that just because I'm a straight woman I've never fucked a man's ass before. Actually, I highly recommend it. I've also watched every episode of Queer as Folk, which I mostly find melodramatic, except that its man-on-man sex scenes are some of the hottest soft-core porn scenes ever to air on television. And I'm not the first straight woman to say so. So I can answer that particular homophobia with enthusiastic conviction: "You don't know what you're missing." To which he gaped incredulously and repeated, "Ewww." Which is hard to debate, really, because what makes people horny is always individualistic and irrational. And then I realized: This fellow's opinions on anal sex may be a lot like my opinions on eating pickles.

I don't mean to take the metaphor very far, because I realize that it's a flippant one, and I don't mean to make light of the struggle for gay equality. Of course I understand that a taste for pickles is not vital to a person's identity the way that sexual orientation is. But personally, I can't stand pickles, and I never have. Every once in a while, I bite one by mistake, not realizing that they've been snuck onto a sandwich, and I immediately spit it out and start gagging. They just taste rancid to me. It's a bizarre and unfortunate thing to do to a perfectly good cucumber. Whenever I get a pickle spear on a plate with a sandwich, I offer it to anyone sitting near me, and often they'll take it happily and say something like, "Awesome! I love pickles!" and tell me all about their favorite variety of pickle. Pickles still repulse me. They probably always will.

However, it would be pretty absurd and reprehensible of me to sign petitions or vote on referendums to block other people from eating pickles. And it's socially unacceptable in most circumstances for me to even tell anyone just how much I hate pickles, not because the First Amendment doesn't protect my right to disparage pickles, but because it would be obnoxious and negative and pointless. My visceral nausea does not make eating pickles wrong. I accept that people will occasionally eat pickles right in front of me. I can still walk through Jewish delis and grocery stores with whole shelves of pickles in glass jars. I still periodically get free pickles on my plate with sandwiches. I ignore all of this and go on with my life. What I do about my disgust is: I don't eat the pickles. I promise, it really is that easy.

And even then, it saddens me that I will never feel the joy that someone who likes pickles feels when they bite into a good pickle. Other people genuinely enjoy pickles, and my own loathing for them is ultimately my own loss.

So I pulled out that argument too, and I still don't think that I got anywhere with that particular drunk homophobe. You can't really argue with a reaction as irrational and visceral as, "Eww." What still infuriates and baffles me is how anyone makes the illogical leap from "Eww" to a grandiose political posture.

Demystifying Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder

I have premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD for short. It's what doctors call the more popular "premenstrual syndrome" when the psychiatric symptoms are so severe that they prevent you from basically functioning.

From a feminist political standpoint, it's a deeply troubling diagnosis. Women have had to fight hard over the last century to combat the sexist stereotype that we're somehow inherently more emotional and less rational than men are; and that stereotype has kept women out of leadership positions for centuries. In Victorian times, the medical concept of "hysteria" made femaleness virtually synonymous with insanity. So I definitely understand why, as John F. Kihlstrom writes: "Some feminist professionals, including the APA’s Committee on Women and the National Coalition for Women’s Mental Health, objected to the inclusion of such a syndrome under any label. From their point of view, menstruation is a normal bodily function, and any psychological changes associated with this function should be seen as normal as well. Classifying PMS or PMDD as a mental disorder stigmatizes women..."

But for all my rage against disempowering stereotypes, my actual experience of PMDD resembles bipolar disorder a lot more closely than it resembles vaginal bleeding. I've been keeping a paper diary since I turned twelve, and I keep it mostly in narrative format. Then, throughout the diaries of my early teen years, there are sporadic entries of suicidal rants with no "story" whatsoever, just repeating over and over that I hated myself and wanted to die. Generally, the entry before or after would be something cheerful and mundane, like "I did well on today's English test," or "Today I went with my friends to the mall" - offering no clue toward why I might have felt suicidal the day adjacent. Only years later do I recognize: That's the record of my early menstrual cycle. One of the more impressively oblivious rants from age thirteen claimed, "My mom says I only feel this way because of my hormones. Which proves that my mom doesn't understand anything. I hate her!"

Luckily for me, my mother knew what she was talking about. She put me on birth control pills when I was sixteen, despite the fact that I really was a virgin. The birth control pills suddenly gave me a predictable 28-day cycle. There's no way of knowing how much the relative alleviation of my breakdowns can be attributed to hormone regulation and how much was just getting older and thus further from the universal hellhole of puberty. But once I had a 28-day cycle, it was much easier to notice the correlation between my worst mood swings and the reminder to stash pads in my backpack. By the time I got to college, I had built enough self-awareness to mark my calendar, not plan anything strenuous or important on premenstrual days, and warn my roommate and boyfriend, "Next Wednesday I'll probably be crazy, so don't worry about me then. I'll feel better on Thursday." Given the quantity of sporadic suicidal thoughts I had between ages twelve and fifteen, the medical intervention of birth control pills may have saved my life.

Each month, the PMDD usually starts with an overreaction to some minor catalyst, and then it takes me at least a minute to connect that I am overreacting. In this state I have cried at TV life insurance commercials (the ones with people ruminating on what would happen to their loved ones if they died), and I have literally shaken with rage at simple requests from my boss. And every time I catch myself is surreal: What I'm feeling strongly is not my feelings. That's just dysphoria. But the faster I catch it, the better I can usually calm myself down. Heightened self-awareness doesn't make it go away exactly, but it does allow me to assure myself: You don't actually believe that. You're stronger than this. You'll definitely feel better tomorrow. At which point it's easier to laugh at my own absurdity. If I was unhappy a few days earlier, too, I find myself dwelling more energetically on my problems, but I still know better than to confront anyone the day before my period. And when everything else in my life is going well, then I find myself dwelling on the frustration of PMDD itself and the burden of my "defective brain."

And then, not every month but sometimes, then there is no catalyst, and there are no thoughts in my head but pain. I just curl up in the fetal position and writhe and sob. (This is when it's especially important to have warned the people I live with in advance.)

I did get a prescription for anti-depressants at one point, but they came with a severe side effect of insomnia. So I had the choice of being crazy from PMDD or crazy from not sleeping for a week at a time, so I quit taking the pills. The one great miracle cure is marijuana. Pot's "side effects" still prevent me from any kind of productivity, but if I know that I'm going to spend several hours useless on my couch, spending them high is a lot more pleasant than spending them crying.

I am infuriated by the stigma, but not because doctors recognize PMDD as a medical disorder. Claiming a medical disorder is how I rationalize myself through it, and treat the symptoms with marijuana while I wait to feel better. What degrades me are the general taboos against discussing menstruation, or "craziness." I've gotten more comfortable discussing PMDD over time with my friends, which is a godsend when it starts to come on and I'm free to be honest about why I suddenly start acting strange and need to go home. But there's little worse than needing a good cry while I'm at my day job or a large family event, and feeling that it's "not okay" to talk about my menstrual cycle or my mental illness - let alone both at once. But if PMDD must be kept private, then what am I supposed to do when I can't stop myself from crying and it's that awkward to tell anyone why? Usually I hide in bathrooms, or comb my hair over my eyes and try to be very still and very quiet and hope nobody tries to talk to me. But boy would it be easier to just choke out between sobs, "I have PMDD and I'm going to go be alone for a while," without the rational fear of losing respect. In my ideal society, PMDD would have the same social implications as migraines: an unpleasant medical issue that makes people need to lay down quietly for a while, but also goes away, and doesn't imply an inherent character flaw.

From a feminist ideological standpoint, it's still frustrating to admit that my female hormones do sometimes make me uselessly hyper-emotional. But feminism has to reflect the actual experience of living women if anyone can be expected to live by it. I have PMDD, but PMDD doesn't describe what I am any more than a migraine would. When my vagina starts bleeding and my emotions level out, there's a great joy in re-disovering my intellect, my humor, and my "real" self again.

Sometimes Any Publicity Is Good Publicity

Thank you to Pendard at the Geeky Sex blog for alerting me: Pat Fagan of the Family Research Council just gave a speech to his right-wing base all about polyamory. Of course, very predictably, Christian Evangelical Pat Fagan does not like polyamory; one of his claims is: "In a polemical vein, one could say they 'snatch' children away from their parents and from the culture of monogamy in ways analogous to the Ottoman Turks of the 14th century who raided boys from Christian nations to train them as their own elite warriors, the Janissaries."

I think the youngest person to whom I'm even out as poly is twenty-one, and I don't remember having kidnapped any children lately, but whatever. What thrills me about this speech is: The Family Research Council is helping us with visibility. Because most people have never even imagined the concept that anyone could carry on multiple sexual relationships at the same time honestly.

As I've written here before, more people can wrap their heads around the phrase "open relationship" - but then they make false assumptions about how seriously committed we can be in "open relationships." A massive, massive quantity of Western literature and film has been devoted to the "tragedy" of falling in love with two people and having to decide between them. A massive, massive quantity of Western literature and film depicts people cheating dishonestly, and the "confession" is always a moment of great trauma.

Some popular TV characters like Sex in the City's Samantha went a long way toward popularizing the concept that a woman could have lots of sex partners without yearning to "settle down" - but even then, after Samantha falls in love, the writers dramatically force her to choose either (a) the man she loves, or (b) freedom to have sex with whomever she wants. Points for making "b" a valid option, but did it never occur to the writers of Sex in the City that the two choices aren't inherently mutually exclusive?

It's hard to fight for acceptance and understanding if you have to spend most of the conversation explaining that your lifestyle does, in fact, exist at all. And we have been getting more publicity lately, and thank you to Alan of the Poly in the Media blog for tracking it. We even got an impressively fair article in Newsweek But the Newsweek article still claims, "It's enough to make any monogamist's head spin."

So back to Pat Fagan's speech. I don't know where he picked up the word "polyamory" - because it's pretty clear that he's never researched as far as the Amazon summary of The Ethical Slut to find out what people who identify as polyamorous actually believe. I could pick through his bullet points and refute every one of them, but they're all such absurd oversimplications that it's hardly worth bothering past the first two examples:

"The culture of monogamy is infused from top to bottom with the sacred, in personal, family, community and national life. Worship of God is frequent and assumed. The culture of polyamory tends much more to hide religion, even to suppress it in all things public. It worships God less and demands religion be private."

Some counter-examples include every monogamous couple in which at least one person identifies as atheist, agnostic, or non-observant. Counter-examples on the other side include everyone who has ever agreed with the book Radical Ecstasy, and all the poly Unitarian Universalists and Pagans out there, of which I promise there are many. Also poly Christians, poly Jews, and poly Buddhists.

"The culture of monogamy views freedom as the freedom to be good while for the culture of polyamory freedom views freedom as having no constraints imposed on you."

Actually I think both monogamous and polyamorous people make up their own minds what freedom means to them. But polyamory has lots of constraints: Our bibles like The Ethical Slut and Opening Up have substantial sections on figuring out what kinds of constraints make your relationship feel more secure. Instead of the undiscussed assumption that our partner just won't touch another person, we have to specifically discuss what acts are okay with what people, in what circumstances, and with what safer-sex practices - and whether we need to be consulted first, or if we need our partner to come home to us afterward, or if a particular toy is not to be used with anyone else, or whatever makes people feel safer. I have constrained my husband not to call anyone else by my term-of-endearment. We're not totally anti-constraint; we just like them customized.

Fagan also somehow reached the conclusion that, "State controlled programs today in developed countries, almost universally, are polyamorous-friendly and monogamy-hostile." Which particularly baffles me, because all Western marriage laws are written for couples. Even same-sex legal marriages, civil unions, and domestic partnerships are limited to two people. What government programs are hostile to monogamy?! And if there are any protecting polyamory, I'd love to hear about them. It was only 2003 that the Supreme Court decided by a 6-3 split that police are no longer allowed to break into people's homes and arrest them for consensual, adult anal sex.

So Pat Fagan doesn't know what he's talking about when he mentions polyamory or monogamy, and maybe he's never used Google. He has separated the entire world into exactly two amazingly narrow lifestyles, tossed out everyone who doesn't conform exactly to one or the other, and fantasized some arbitrary delusions to round it out. But! However vague and absurd his understanding of loving multiple people may be, he is spreading the message that such a thing is possible. And for that, I thank him.