A Strange Day on Planet Earth

There is no greater indication of our total colonization as women than our acceptance, even celebration, of “consent.” In the words of Sheila Jeffreys:

A model of sexuality based upon the idea of consent is a male supremacist one. In this model one person, generally male, uses the body of another who is not necessarily sexually interested and possibly generally reluctant or distressed, as a sex aid. It is a dominant/submissive and active/passive model. It is not mutual. It is not about the sexual involvement of both parties. It bespeaks not equality, but the absence of it.

Consent is a tool for negotiating inequality in heterosexual relations. Women are expected to have their bodies used but the idea of consent manages to make this use and abuse seem fair and justified. In certain situations where this might seem particularly and obviously unwelcome, such as street rape, women are given a limited right to object, but in general the idea of consent allows the sexual use and abuse of women to remain invisible as harm or a contravention of human rights.

In this liberal approach to sex it is vulgar to ask political questions such as how the consent and choice are constructed. Women’s consent, the kind that can cause them to undergo furiously resented sexual intercourse in marriage, or just to accept that they should be used as a masturbation aid, is constructed by the pressures exerted upon women throughout their lives. Such pressures include economic dependency, sexual abuse, battering, and a cultural barrage of propaganda about what women are good for.

But we are now going to “teach men” about consent, did you know? Turns out the establishment of coerced sex as invented, practiced, and perfected by malekind is one big misunderstanding. They just need a nice big sister and maybe a pamphlet.

Nevermind that they always win the consent game. Forget that extracting sex from women they know don’t want it is something all — or, nod to the Nigels, nearly all — men engage in. “Which they don’t call rape” (Dworkin). Which they enact skillfully, deliberately, and routinely.

The implications of that are terrifying to confront, so go back to sleep. Back to la la land with Prince Charming and White Jesus and the hypnotic tempo of gently falling, eerily stale snow in a Christmas movie. Back to the anesthetized mental state we are meant to live and breed and undergo involuntary pelvic exams in. Through that nebulous haze it’s almost believable: They just don’t know!

New action plan, all: We’re going to explain it to them again. Parachute into every college across the land with this urgent transmission to the species: Women don’t want that thing you already know they don’t want and so are forcing them into. Write it in your diaries, boys.

We’re adding a new clause to the rules of your game: Consent is to be enthusiastic (pretty, pretty please).

What if it’s not? Well, most unseemly and not very sportsmanlike, but you were probably confused so here’s a pamphlet and pretty, pretty please don’t do it again.

You may now pass Go, collect $200, and proceed into the illustrious future promised you, while your ex-girlfriend spends the next decades collapsing under a series of increasingly complex and debilitating illnesses.

Those are the rules.

Did women ever “consent” to play the consent game? Is it perhaps a bit rigged? Is the word “consent,” with its connotation of acquiescence, not just a little groomy? Might a consent frame be wildly inappropriate to the context of human sexuality?

No time for those pesky questions, ladies.

Next player, step right up!

Did you have the freeze response he was angling for?

Consent, he wins!

Did you need $50 for your kids’ shoes or next hit?

Taking money = consent, he wins again!

Did he take you by surprise, wear you down, punish you, intimidate you, manipulate you, sleep deprive you, lie to you, trap you, guilt you, confuse you, silence you?

He didn’t hit you, he wins again!

Or well, maybe he did hit you, maybe he strangled you to death. He tells the judge you liked that kinky stuff. What’s that, consent?!

He wins again!

Did you know it wasn’t a waitressing job awaiting you?

Consent on technicality, he wins again!

Are men so committed to keeping women down ( = consent) that they would take their own exploitation in capitalism over losing that advantage? Is society carefully structured so as to warp that space women’s choices ought occupy? Is that not the very deliberate design of this game?

Best not think about that.

Let’s communicate better.

Let’s improve ourselves and redecorate our homes.

Let’s raise better sons (hasn’t worked for the past 6,000 years but hey, maybe this time!)

This is the way to safety, or at least forgetting to feel unsafe. The way to sleep. We will teach men about consent. We will learn more about their fake ass addictions. We will follow The Rules. We will follow the guidebook. We will buy a whistle.

War is peace.

Marriage is security.

Rape is misunderstanding.

Sex work is work.

Sex work is work.

Sex work is work.

Next player, step right up!

We really need to bring an end to the paternalistic state dictating what people can do with their own god damn bodies. I mean, why does this even need to be said to the swerf ‘n’ terf ($29.99 at Red Lobster this week only, btw) contingent when they claim to be any kind of feminist?

That’s why I started the hashtag #SellingOrgansIsWork and have been interviewing organ vendors on my podcast, The Oldest Surgical Procedure.

Why do organ vendors make this deeply personal choice? Their stories are more complex and inspiring than you could imagine. Last week we even featured an organ vendor manager, who recruits organ vendors and then coordinates their autonomous choices to harvest as many as three organs at a time. Next week we explore the contentious topic of minor organ vendors, a discussion you don’t want to miss!

Globally, this surgical work has opened new economic opportunities to those outside the formal economy. The swerfs ‘n’ terfs will tell you the industry overwhelmingly harvests organs from poor black and brown bodies, exploiting desperation, and leaves many vendors disabled for life, if not dead. You may have heard the phrase “modern-day slave trade.”

I wonder why they hate organ vendors so much. It’s true that many of these women are former organ vendors, in which case they were simply in the wrong line of work. It’s not for everyone. As to the race of organ vendors, we need to ask why this choice may be more desirable to certain demographics: a sensitive topic that warrants further study. But would you rather people have no food than the option to work in organ vending? How can anyone support that kind of state interference in historically stigmatized procedures?

Does being poor mean a person can no longer make autonomous choices about selling body parts on a market? That is a deeply patronizing and patriarchal mindset. In fact, these transactions liberate us from a puritanical relationship with our corporeality and the constraints of five-sense-normativity. Anyone who argues otherwise probably just hates bodies.

While the organ trade has attracted certain unsavory criminal elements globally, to conflate organ vending and trafficking is hysterical disinformation. And the risk of death is greatly exaggerated, though no we don’t have quality data on that just yet. There are occupational hazards, just like with any work. But consider that unlike soldiers, organ vendors make an informed choice about their body modifications.

Once organ vending and buying are decriminalized everywhere, organ vendors will come out of the shadows and healthy local organ vending economies will flourish. No more black market — promise! That is what happened in New Zealand, according to organ vendor managers in that country. And that is why I demand an immediate end to all state regulation of organ harvesting.

As I support fully decriminalizing the sex trade, this is called being logically consistent.

BuzzFeed reported on prostitution in Tijuana with surprising honesty (excluding some predictable language and, uh, interesting photographic choices) circa 2018:

For more than a century, the US–Mexico border has been associated with the search for cheap, easy vice by Americans, so much so that in 1920, Mexican Consulate official Alfonso Pesqueira lamented that whole towns along the border had begun “to look like red-light districts.” …

“These areas are associated with doing whatever you want, and getting away with it,” UCSD’s Vera said, which plays into the sense of entitlement that many US customers coming to Mexico already have and expect. While sex work may be legal in Tijuana, sex workers are still treated as second-class citizens.

There are dozens of websites, subreddits, and forums dedicated to the subject of paying for sex in Tijuana, and they read more like guides to big-game hunting than meeting women. Women become “targets” to be observed, stalked, and bagged, with an eye toward quality and getting a good price — down to using coupons and VIP cards for discounts.

I take great personal comfort in knowing the male left has the consistency to break the bonds of brotherhood over such blatant manifestations of capitalism and imperialism. Really, they speak of nothing else, between burning Playboys in the streets. I did recently hear a rumor about a male leftist watching porn somewhere in France, but don’t believe it.

Just as a funny little exercise, though, I will now entertain the nightmare of a world in which most “anti-capitalist” males are vacuous self-interested misogynists. What might a creature of this sort say in response to the written testament of sex slavery?

“They have the money and the power,” Monica, who is Laura’s 20-year-old niece, said with a shrug. “They tell us that’s what we’re here for, that we’re whores, that they’ll treat us as badly as they want to. … They have all the money. You can’t really fight that.”

Please get comfortable while I prepare to effuse on the topic of unionizing for an undisclosed period of time. Who will you unionize against? I don’t believe that’s relevant. No, I don’t condone pimps. I was at G20.

All the sex workers who spoke with BuzzFeed News said they are routinely beaten, choked, and spit on by clients. … “[The john] always says, ‘You stupid Mexican, you Mexican bitch,'” said Patricia, 49, adding that if she refuses to give him some of her meager earnings, he chokes and beats her. … Laura said he also beats up her 8-year-old brother, who has a neurological disorder that affects his speech.

After the revolution, ladies, places of safety will rise from the sea to envelop you and sexism will vanish like a fickle haze. Wait until you hear about restorative justice; you won’t believe it.

You will be freed of your concerns at last — no, I’m not really sure what they are, stop interrupting — and the corrosive temptations of bourgeois feminism, along with all your hypocrisies, and finally be liberated unto bearing the next generation of revolutionaries while producing ethical porn for my personal stash. But as I was saying about unions …

The sex industry in Tijuana is a multimillion-dollar enterprise that employs thousands. It’s become such a major driver of the city’s economy that in 2015, city officials considered basing an advertising campaign around the sex industry. Called the Tijuana Coqueta, or Flirty Tijuana, the short-lived proposal would have used “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”-style ads to lure back US tourists who’d begun avoiding Tijuana because of the drug war.

At least we didn’t let those carceral feminists nag us into affiliating with the state. My conscience is clear. Keep sex work free.

Virtually all of the nearly two dozen sex workers interviewed for this story said they deal exclusively with US clients or that US clients make up 60–80% of their business.

At least they aren’t raping real wo— nevermind. I mean to say, borders will soon be a thing of the past. And racism.

And we’ll give you free abooortions. Proooomise.

Very soon. Meanwhile, you really shouldn’t do shit that divides the working class. No, I don’t mean like watching porn and visiting brothels!

Between payments to the bars and clubs, security guards, and hotels, a significant portion of sex workers’ income is gone before they make it into a room. Add on the cost of transportation, health care, and perhaps maintaining a drug habit, and most sex workers are barely surviving. … Most of Tijuana’s sex workers grew up in Zona Norte or one of the city’s other poor neighborhoods. Some are brought to Tijuana by pimps from Tlaxcala, a small state in central Mexico notorious for sex traffickers.

McDonald’s. McDonald’s. McDonald’s. McDonald’s. McDonald’s. McDonald’s. MCDONALD’S. MCDONALD’S. MCDONALD’S. MCDONALD’S. MCDONALD’S. MCDONALD’S! MCDONALD’S! MCDONALD’S! MCDONALD’S! MCDONALD’S! MCDONALD’S! MCDONALD’S! I AM NOT SHOUTING!

Do I revere McDonald’s? No, that’s not what I’m saying. Obviously. Just that after the revolution we will kill off the capitalist pigs of McDonald’s and unionize sex work.

Also have you considered that there are other professions where workers must encounter bodily fluids such as doctors and nurses? Didja? Didja consider that?

I’m sorry I don’t see the DIFFERENCE between double anal and LOGGING.

But I am not sexually repressed like some people. I get it, though, because I was raised Christian. Porn really helped me heal my attitude toward sex and I let go of all that shame.

Do I want to do it? WHAT? I have body image issues.

Sit at the corner of Coahuila and Avenida Niños Héroes on any given night, and you can witness the parade of US men on the hunt, from the gangs of rowdy college-age teens and twentysomethings pushing through the crowds to men at the upper boundaries of middle age, who walk with the confidence of experience as they clutch the hands of bored-looking young women.

A clear sign of capitalism and its discontents. You should listen to these guys; you might learn something. They’re actually upset about wages.

Hookerfucker1 said he is “absolutely certain” the gender dynamics north of the border are causing more guys to visit Tijuana for sex, even though there’s no way to count them. “We are frustrated with the system that paints everything a man does as harassment,” he said.

Another redditor, who calls himself Tapcofucked and shares Tijuana advice with fellow “red pilled” men online, agreed. “I think it is a large motivating factor for guys … I’ve heard more and more from guy friends who basically say, ‘Fuck this shit. Take me to TJ!'”

I mean, identity politics will do that to you.

The sex workers in this story asked to be identified by first name and age only to protect their identities and the identities of their children.

Once moralizing has ended in the great After, land of generous seas, dried hazes, and ethical porn, society will no longer be hung up about sex. Like me. No more prudishness, no more stigma, no more arbitrary social constraints. Unless we decide to divide up women like on a timeshare basis among us. Because that’s totally a valid option I haven’t ruled out yet.

“It’s not an easy life, being a prostitute.”

Uh pretty sure you mean sex worker. Do you have some internalized whorephobia? Have I been talking to a SWERF this whole time? Because I didn’t consent to that.

How has this unmannered, anti-hygienic contingent of the population known as DOG LOVERS managed to do such a number on everyone? I want to know. Sidewalks dripping with urine, trails terrorized by sprinting hunks of teeth and fur, apartment buildings torture chambers of constant. fucking. barking., stores littered with warm feces — and still, even those permanently disabled by dog attack tremble to whisper the words: I don’t like dogs.

This whole phenomenon should be studiously examined as it is really a fucking master class in psychological manipulation. Dog owners have made walking terrifying. They have made sleeping unlikely. They have turned public walkways into private utilities. They have rendered entire streets untraversable. Public parks miserable. Beaches execrable.

While they roam obliviously through the world, ten feet behind their unhinged “companion animal,” having decided certain discomfort and potential trauma for all a totally reasonable tradeoff for Freddy’s extra bit of freedom. Daring to be angry if you voice the slightest discomfort. Always with the sing-songy, vaguely threatening tone of passive aggressiveness come to life. Oh no! Molly is being friendly! Oh no! Brody is in training! Oh no! Ollie just looooves playing! Oh no! Teddy only bites when he’s nervous! Why did you make Teddy nervous? Oh no! Bentley never beheaded a chipmunk before!

The solipsistic, sadistic intonations of a people who seem always half asleep and half ready to shit on your shoes themselves. Are they human? Are they real? Are they part dog? How else do you live in a constant panorama of chewing, slobbering, sniffing, reeking, retching, defecating, jumping, nipping, pulling, whining, scraping, shaking, begging undulations? Do they have no survival instincts left? No life-saving, evolutionarily-selected-for, most holy “ew” factor?

And yet they have so fully displaced any stigma onto those who merely try to stay out of their way — unfeeling scrooges that we are, apparently having woken up one day with an irrational grudge against life (which is synonymous with barking). Surely a pathological lack of floofy chonky pupperino do a cuddle feelings — and oh you’re a very bad, most untrustworthy person, just like Bailey tried to warn me! Yes, this thing currently humping my leg is a deep reader of souls.

And no, you are not an extra special totally unobtrusive #not-like-the-others-dog-owner. No apartment building in the world comfortably accommodates dogs. You are annoying someone. Constantly. No one save the similarly demented wants to walk over urine-saturated or poop-crumbed ground. No one wants to hear your dog’s nails hammering overhead. No one cares if it barked for a justified or unjustified reason. It is all fucking barking and we hate you. Also, your dog is fucking miserable and it shows.

No one for miles? Good for you! Feel great that while we live through an ecological catastrophe of epic proportions, you have prioritized maintaining a wholly unnecessary and enormously consumptive species for decorative purposes. Still affects the rest of us in the end. Your dog assuredly disrupts the natural cycles of all wildlife in your environs. Of course you don’t see it: that’s the fucking point. Its feces still end up in waterways. And you are still a living link in the verminous chains of dog culture, whatever you claim.

And unless you are one of the like five remaining small farmers in the world, don’t even think of bringing up food production to rationalize the existence of your pet.  Fuck you.

We, the still sane people of the world, are done.

Being only still marginally sane, I may be mistaken, but this exponential growth in the cult of the dog seems bound to topple. At some point humanity will rise from its slumber, assess its surroundings, and start screaming THIS IS FUCKING DISGUSTING, just as I’ve been saying.

And then you, dog owners of the world, will become a stigmatized minority, exactly as nature and reason intended. You should be trembling in your dog-shit-crusted shoes, because here’s what the non-dog sector has planned:

Peace, quiet, and long, uninterrupted walks for everyone. Yes, the evil dog haters of the world are growing in number and our reign will be long and fierce.

𝖠𝗇𝖽 𝗏𝖾𝗋𝗒, 𝗏𝖾𝗋𝗒 𝗊𝗎𝗂𝖾𝗍.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎ ‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎ ‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

I deleted my reddit account.  You may be wondering why a radical feminist retained a reddit account for so long, or at all — as I have often wondered, as well.  But then, I prefer to take my misogyny neat, without any obfuscation. And that 40,000-character limit, with actual text formatting options, proved just too irresistible.

Never mind that fewer and fewer people approached that character limit over the years or, indeed, extended more energy in posting than is consumed by regurgitation of a meme.  Never mind that comment sections devolved into the one-line truisms favored by gen Zers and bots: groups whose proliferating presence online — no offense — is indistinguishable.  The dumber it all became, the more motivated I was to set it right, quite bafflingly missing the point that this was expression of my own increasing dumbness in proximity to social media, too.

Never mind knowing that these are military platforms — as surely, with enough effort, we can turn the mechanisms of the machine back against itself.  Here I must conclude that, per usual, Audre Lorde was correct.  The master’s tools will always be the master’s tools.  He doesn’t share.  He doesn’t have to. 

So I have conceded the obvious: that the only thing to ever happen inside the ant computer is becoming irritated with the other ants.

And surely within these closed circuits of our conditioning we all grow not only exponentially dumber, but more irritating and irritated in kind.

This said, I will forever be grateful for the more thoughtful contributions to r/lockdownskepticism (before it devolved into a right-wing chamber of echoes; see prior points) and r/dogfree: spaces that did occasionally renew my sense of a humanity worth committing to.  And for my own part, I have deemed some of my writing there worth preservation.  Hence this post, as it will be archived here.  

If you notice a slight tone change in the forthcoming entries, that is why. Imagine you’re on reddit.  Or don’t: because, really, we all deserve better than that. 

Image from Nonsense Botany, and Nonsense Alphabets by Edward Lear, 1889, via The British Library

journal 7.4.24

I resent this perhaps more than any other shrink-wrapped Amerikan high holy day because I can’t simply close the door to the 99-cent polyester flags at Walgreens, can’t just silence my phone to images of nieces and nephews in star-spangled drag — when there is still the sound, the relentless BOOM BOOM BOOM penetrating walls and nerves. The sacred anthem of a war machine called a land.

And I woke thinking of my own rape, or not in need of thought at all, for it is always there, particularly in the sticky arms of the cursed month known as July for the dictator perpetuo. Always there like the feeling of wrongness of this place, of land owned and unknown. I wrote other dates on my calendar this year — Bear River Massacre, 1863, Sacramento River Massacre, 1846, Coshocton Massacre, 1781, Bloody Island Massacre, 1850 — all of which passed in a haze of stress, unmourned and unmarked. I still don’t know what happened there, what happened here, in the God-blessed, broad-striped, bright-starred New World, land of placelessness.

Yet I did remember to purchase a new cotton mattress protector with promo code JULY4 wielding an extra 20-percent off.

I moved again; I have a tiny yard; I adore this yard and it is the closest a person can get to placefulness when living on war bounty rented out by the month. I moved and it mattered not to the people whose walls I shared and names I never knew. It mattered to Monarch Properties, Inc. as opportunity to retain most of my deposit on fabricated grounds. Ordinary theft, daily violation. Just a corporation: it’s not supposed to hurt, not supposed to burrow deep into your cells and scour over the place that knows it will always be homeless in the truest sense of the word.

No part of me wanted to remember how easy I am to violate, what power means and how it’s traded inside placelessness. But I didn’t have to remember; that knowledge is always there, too.

Another day at the shrine of money inside the Temple of Man, and I resent the war sounds and char-broiled stench of it all.

Somewhere, everywhere, people are laying down picnic blankets and toasting with wine coolers and I am desperately relieved to be alone here, in the greatest chance of placefulness I can brush against, in a small yard owned by a man who of course did not complete the work this week as promised, listening to a weed wacker and the occasional deep growls of the dog on the other side of the fence, bracing for the next BOOM.

This is the greatest allowable degree of freedom a woman might enjoy inside this 248-year-old erection decked in red, white, and blue: no husband, one small yard. I do not celebrate today but I grasp that shard with everything in me.

Image: modified photograph by nakashi via Wikimedia Commons

Show me your wild edges. The place that broke and never mended, the craving that cannot be sated, the thoughts kept scrupulously out of sight.

Do not tell me your diagnoses, identities, or “what you do.” Please don’t bore me now, not when I need you so much.

Show me where you bleed. Show me where you make others bleed.

Tell me the part you can’t figure out. Speak what is definitely not safe to hear — and if you put a trigger warning on that, I will never forgive you.

Warm me with the truth when it is not uplifting. Feed me with your fears, the most irrational and twisted over. 

Don’t let me stand alone in my nakedness any longer.

I must have your hatred, unauthorized and untamed. I crave your unkempt places, unshowered and unknown. I need your steaming hot mess, lest I give up on it all.

Show me your poison and I’ll show you mine.

Don’t draw the curtains around the outer regions of your mind — the paranoid and grandiose, the ecstatic and deluded — where nothing fits back inside its box, however much you shove.

Don’t tell me how you got it at all together after 5,000 years of hot yoga, somatic processing, and diaphragmatic breathing.

I don’t believe you.

Don’t make it make sense: It doesn’t. It will never.

I don’t want it to.

I just need your greasy haired, crying on the sidewalk, I-put-it-all-on-a-credit-card self.

I can’t live without her any longer.

Image: Hanuman and Surasa circa the 17th century via Wikimedia Commons

I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.

journal 6.4.23

I started a full moon ritual in my dreams yesterday.  I remember looking down at my hands, smeared with honey, and saying, “The sweetness of life sticks to me.” The rest was lost to the spiritual trauma of waking up to thudding noises overhead.

But I smuggled this pearl out of dreamland and so the hour of 3 a.m. did find me with calendula-streaked honey on hands, face, and throat, closing one circle and slipping onto a fleetingly quiet balcony to sit in moonlight.

Today woke to an altar awash in dried flowers, a cauldron scattered with seeds, and bright red blood.  Feels auspicious to be bleeding on one’s (soon-to-be) fortieth birthday.  Here I believe the lady is meant to gasp and say, “Can it be? I feel so young inside!”  I am more inclined to ask: Has it only been forty?  I feel at least a hundred years old. In all the most splendid and awful ways.

The trees are so suddenly and so blindingly green it feels almost violent.  This is the Earth as I first saw her face, yet summer’s ascent always takes me aback, makes me want to retreat into darkness and just dip a toe in the searing golden pool.  Never quite certain of what might jump out.  Perhaps the imprint of being born under a long sun and waning crescent moon.

Depending who you ask, upon arrival that sun was in the sign of gemini and moon in aries, or it was taurus and pisces, or ecstasy and beauty, or the year of the water pig and hour of the earth snake.  All of which seem reasonable to me, making astrology as it’s commonly practiced seem rather unreasonable — but I have a fondness for the last story, the serpent and the pig, cosmic opposites that feel so familiar and inevitable.

It’s such an ordinary thing, to be born.  The most shocking things always are. Birth.  Death.  Flowers.  Moonlight.  Blood.  Ink.  The impossible ordinary.

As I write the sun has set on my last day as a 39-year-old.  There are blue clouds on the horizon but I know better than to say it looks like rain in this land, where clouds are notorious tricksters.  Even the fattest, wettest-looking ones, riding in on damp and restless air, may open their mouths to breathe fire instead of water.

I am sorry for all the moments in the past year that I missed.  I am sorry for the many moments in which I cursed the one of my birth.  I will try to meet you again, Sunna, guardian star, if I remain for another sojourn around your fiery heart.