T: I don’t believe you.

Me: No, seriously! I just had my tongue out and then you leaned back on it.

T: You’re a lousy liar.

Me: I mean, I might have had my tongue out with the intent to lick your back, eventually, but I hadn’t gotten around to it when your back jumped it.

(I suspect this is more of a problem in Swedish circles, where people actually literally tell women “grattis“, than internationally, but I think it’s equally weird to say “happy IWD”.)

It was pointed out to me that being a woman is not comparable to having a deadly disease caused by a virus. “I don’t consider myself a ‘victim’ of being female,” a woman said. This got me thinking about one of those things that I often think about but never, for some reason, wrote down, even though I think it’s really important. About one part of all of the fucked up shit that society teaches us: That being a victim is something bad.

So. “I don’t consider myself a ‘victim’ of being female.” Well, I’m sorry, but you are a victim. Not of being female, of course, but of structural oppression. Women are the primary victims of patriarchal norms – and yes, men got it bad too, but today is fucking International WOMEN’S Day and can we PLEASE just have ONE FUCKING DAY to dicuss our problems without some dude going on about their own?!! Fuck’s sake. Okay, onwards – and this is something we have to deal with, whether we want to or not. We can deal with it by pretending it’s not true, which a lot of people do (I know I used to!), or we can give up and just take the path of least resistance, or we can fight it. But we can’t make ourselves not-victims.

Here’s Dictionary.com’s definition of the word:

vic·tim [vik-tim]
noun

1. a person who suffers from a destructive or injurious action or agency: a victim of an automobileaccident.
2. a person who is deceived or cheated, as by his or her own emotions or ignorance, by the dishonestyof others, or by some impersonal agency: a victim of misplaced confidence; the victim of a swindler; avictim of an optical illusion.
3. a person or animal sacrificed or regarded as sacrificed: war victims.
4. a living creature sacrificed in religious rites.

So. There it is. You don’t get to decide if you’re a victim. That’s the whole point of the concept of victimhood. It’s something that is done to you or that happens to you that you didn’t ask for. And what’s more important is that that’s all it means. Being a victim of an accident, of discrimination, of rape, of deception or whatever doesn’t say anything about your character. At all.

And yet we have this pervasive idea in our society that being a victim is equal to being passive. A victim is unable to change their circumstances or deal with the situation. A victim is pathetic. Why?

It’s like we’ve all secretly fallen for The Secret. The idea that we might not be able to do anything about certain things, that they are out of our control, is so terrifying that we often prefer to blame the victim than the perpetrator. If a woman got raped because she was wearing slutty clothing and got drunk at a party, that means if I just avoid doing those things, maybe I won’t get raped. We cling desperately to the illusion that we are in control and lash out at those who end up the victims of circumstance. Because if they couldn’t prevent what happened to them, then that means it could happen to us too, no matter how many preventative measures we take. No, much better to think that they are simply to weak and stupid to protect themselves. Or maybe they are simply indulging in self-harming behaviour?

Whichever way you look at it, there is a connotation in the word “victim” that implies helplessness and passivity. And these things are bad. No one is more pathetic than s/he who just lies down and takes it, right?

I want to reclaim the word. I want to be able to be a victim and be strong. I was the victim of bullying for six years, but I held my head high and survived. I was the victim of a boyfriend who treated me like a dishrag and left me emotionally scarred, but I’m getting over it.

And: As a woman, I’m a victim of oppression, but I’m fighting it. I am not letting it get me down. And that’s what International Women’s Day should be about. Acknowledging that although we have come far (at least in some parts of the world), there is still much to be done. We are still victims, and the fight rages on.

Because you can be a victim and a fighter.

And, conversely, it’s okay to not fight, too. Sometimes you don’t have the resources, be they financial, emotional or something else. Sometimes all you can do is weather the storm, and that’s okay. That’s when your friends and loved ones, your sisters in battle, feminists all over the world rally around you.

That’s what International Women’s Day is for.

I keep my hand on my phone in my pocket, so that in case I feel chased, I can call someone quickly. If I feel especially worried that night and have a hand to spare, I keep my other hand on my keys, just to have some extra edge if I need to fight.

I consider what I’ll do if someone jumps me. How much do I fight? How much do I cry for help? I figure a few attempts at violence initially, in case I might be able to tear lose and run away, but then I should stop, or I might get seriously hurt. But what if I don’t fight enough? Perhaps it’s good if he clocks me once or twice so that I don’t seem like a liar when I claim I’ve been raped?

When he’s finished, how long do I wait before I call for help? In what order do I call people? I need to get to a hospital as soon as possible, obviously — do I call 112 (that’s swedish for 911) or a cab? Or do I call my boyfriend first? Should my parents be alerted immediately or would they be too worried?

This is stuff I think about. For real. Regularly. There is very little reason I should do. I’m fully aware rapists jumping out of bushes and molesting strangers are extremely rare. During that short walk there is really no place for a rape to happen without someone else noticing, and especially on weekend nights there are frequently volunteers around to keep the peace.

Still, I think about it. Because it has been so ingrained in me that it is dangerous to be a woman, and because I know that I wouldn’t stand a chance if someone wanted to rape me. I don’t think all men are rapists. But any given man could be one. And society tells me I have to be prepared, in case something happens. It tells me I’m to blame if I’m not careful enough. It tells me it’s up to me to take precautions, to protect myself.

So I do.

How fucked up is this?

ETA: This post was not meant to start discussion. It’s not a debate piece. It’s merely meant to give people, primarily those who don’t find themselves in my position very often (a position that involves things such as being fairly small and weak, occasionally wearing heels, etc), a glimpse of what it’s like in my mind in a specific circumstance. If you want to discuss the topic, go ahead, but please tread carefully. I am far from the only woman who has these thoughts, and suggesting they are no different from what it might be like for a man to worry about robbery is not very respectful of our unique experiences.

I self-identify as one, neither happily nor grudgingly but merely because it is a fairly self-evident category to place myself in, given that I have lady parts and have little desire for anything else. If nothing else, identifying as female is convenient and avoids a lot of confusion. But it’s not a category I have been very happy in.

It’s not that I have ever felt uncomfortable in my own skin (apart from once a month during my late teens/early twenties, before I got on the pill). I’m as happy with my body as a girl could be expected to be, having grown up in this screwed-up world with its screwed-up pressures. Apart from an intense curiousity what it would feel like to have your sex organs dangling on the outside, I’ve never harboured any particular wish to be a man in a man’s body.

My problem with the “woman” category is that I don’t like what expectations society has on me, other than what ought to be between my legs.

***

Although I haven’t actually realised this until the last few years, this has been a problem my entire life. Always, I have been told that there is something wrong with my personality. I am outspoken, opinionated, smart and not afraid to show it. Had I been a boy, I’m sure I would have been seen as a go-getter. A bit arrogant, perhaps, but who cares? Arrogance can be sexy.

If you’re a man.

As a girl, however, I am merely a stuck-up, know-it-all bitch, who needs to be put down the way she puts other people down.

Now, I know my personality clashes with some people. I know I’m not going to make friends with everyone, even though I’ve worked so hard at becoming less of a bitch. I’ve reconciled with reality, accepted it and moved on. But I’ve had classmates at university, the same age as me, tell me off for being the way I am. Because they don’t like it. Because presumably, in their world, girls just shouldn’t be like that. It offends them and they don’t mind telling me.

Throughout my youth and even into adulthood, too many people have thought it perfectly acceptable to tell me I’m somehow … faulty. That there is a factory error I should be compensating for. Even my parents, the most loving, doting, supportive couple you could ever imagine, would tell me this — presumably to protect me from other people’s disdain. Even so, the net effect is that on some level, I have internalised the belief that there is something wrong with me.

***

Years ago I went to the theatre and watched one of my country’s most famous actresses portray Shakespeare’s Hamlet. She was brilliant, and unbelievably attractive. I had never particularly enjoyed her acting in any of the few films I had seen with her, and her looks as a woman were uninteresting to me. But in a man’s clothes? With a man’s bearing? Self-assured and cocky, in a suit, with her blond hair combed back from her face but constantly threatening to explode into an angsty teenager’s mess, she was so striking that I had to come back and see the play again.

(Even before then, I had been inventing cross-dressing women for the stories I never wrote, but after that rendition of Hamlet, they were always blond.)

I didn’t want to fuck her. I wanted to be that woman. The one who gets to act the way I felt I actually was; one who doesn’t show off her tits or ass because her brain is so fucking sexy she doesn’t need to. Whose walk and talk tells you she owns the world. Who doesn’t apologise for taking up space.

***

Throughout my life, I’ve had a vague feeling of constantly being on the outside. It has been compounded by a distinct lack of an active social life. It was like there was a window between me and the world; I’d press my hands against the cold glass and watch others interact in ways I couldn’t relate to.

As depressing as that may sound, don’t pity me. I clung to my fierce individualism and held it in front of me as a shield. I was lonely, sure, but it was a choice, born out of the same instincts that made me shun everything that struck me as excessively feminine according to our cultural norms. Ever since I was a child I rarely wore skirts, and wouldn’t be caught dead in one that ended above the ankle. I shunned the colour pink. I never learned to wear make-up or do my hair in anything more advanced than a ponytail or simple braid. Because I would not, could not do something that I felt was imposed on me by standards I hadn’t signed up for.

This was of course wholly irrational. I still liked to wear clothes that showed off my feminine shape. I liked to feel beautiful, cute, sexy — and feminine. But certain symbols were simply too strong for me. Probably because I felt those pressures so strongly as a kid that it became a gut reaction to hate everything pink and frilly.

Then I realised that as long as I shunned skirts and the colour pink merely because society said I should like them, the norms were still winning. I was still adapting to them, albeit in a reactionary fashion.

***

For a long time, I felt increasingly frustrated with my lot in society. I had no words to put on what it was I felt. I have no qualms with categories, being scientifically minded I in fact love them; categorising the world is what scientists do. Making connections, lumping things together, then separating them as new data appear. But we need more categories, and people need to understand the ones that exist. And to stop making assumptions. Categorising myself as a woman was never problematic for me, merely what others assume that category entails.

These days, I wear short skirts and knee socks and a fairly large portion of my wardrobe is pink (it works well with my skin tone). I also have a very active social life with plenty of friends who accept me for who I am. My frustration is gone, and I worry that it’s because I have conformed. Alright, so I still don’t wear make-up, but that’s mostly because I’m too lazy. But have I crossed some sort of threshold of conformity where I’m now so ordinary that my individualism has been compromised? Do I need to feel like an outsider to know that my principles hold?

I’m not done figuring any of this out yet. I don’t think I ever will be. I started writing this long ramble of mine over a year ago and its content has changed considerably since. In a year, I would probably write something entirely different. And because of this, there is no way to wrap this up. There are no conclusions and no point to this text.

Other than this: Being a person is tricky business.

It’s not that I didn’t already know I was a pervert, back then. I did. On some level I’ve always known. But I didn’t know to what extent or how important it was to me. In some ways I suspect these latter questions will never have a true and final answer, as my personality and interests shift with time — but I have a far better idea of this particular aspect now than I did then. Either way, this post is not about my journey, it’s not even about my particular orientation or interests.

It’s about stepping out of the closet and onto the barricades.

Entering the kink community made me think a lot about sexual politics, and about how society treats those with sexual interests that differ from the norm. It has been suggested that BDSM is now seen and treated as LGBT was a hundred years ago. BDSM, fetischism and other paraphilias and the people who practise or wish they could practise them are often pathologised, pitied, exotified or otherwise treated as other.

We are caught in a catch 22, much like gay people used to be, and still are in most places. For BDSM and other paraphilias to become accepted, we need to come out of the closet en masse – but until this has happened, individuals are punished for stepping out. In the ideal world, kinksters could be as open about how their relationships and sex lives work as the next person. That is, some still wouldn’t want to talk about those things at all, and others finally wouldn’t have to censor themselves.

Right now, we do, because we know that we will often be judged. And not everyone is in a position where they can ignore judgment.

Personally, I am an immensely privileged individual. I was born and live in one of the safest and most progressive societies in the world, where I belong to the ethnic, lingual and cultural majority. I’m cis-gendered, straight (more or less), healthy, naturally skinny, reasonably attractive, intelligent, and my highly educated parents made sure I received a decent education despite the current state of our school system. I have never starved, never had to take or keep a job I really didn’t like, and I get to choose my friends and partners without anyone so much as whispering a complaint. In fact, I think pretty much the only privilege I will never have is that of being male.

In short, if anyone is in a position to step out of the closet and onto the barricades, it’s me. I’m not planning on going into a line of work where discussing these things openly should harm me. I don’t care about those who would judge me, as to my mind, it would be their loss. And currently, the only people I represent in any sort of official capacity other than myself are other kinksters (as a board member of a local BDSM association). So this is me: Hardly particularly secretive before, but now completely and unashamedly officially a kinkster.

What is it I want? I want the freedom to talk about whatever I want without people thinking I’m sick. And more importantly, I want that freedom for others, because as I said, I am already so privileged I really don’t have to care much. But the scope is really broader than this. I wish for these goals to be fulfilled regardless of one’s preferences when it comes to relationships and sex. I wish for a society where people can talk both rationally and emotionally about these things and be heard. I wish for public conversation and education and allowing for everyone to own their preferences, whatever they may be.

I think that sex being something secret and shameful and fraught with problems contributes majorly to rape culture, and I think a society where sex is no longer taboo is where rape culture ends.

And I’m finally going to be doing my part to make this utopia real. I am no longer going to be censoring myself. Which I have been, ever since I started blogging. I remember, early on in my blogging career, finding Greta Christina’s blog and thinking “Wow. That’s who I wish I were. I wish I could discuss sex and kink as freely as I discuss atheism.”

Well, I think I’m ready now!

As you may have noticed, this particular post doesn’t really contain much information about my personal proclivities. In all likelihood there will be such posts in the future, and these will be clearly marked as such, for the benefit of those who simply don’t want to know, such as family.

They met at a party. They met through a mutual friend. They met at work, in a coffee shop or in the grocery store going for the last packet of bacon. They met, somewhere, and he could smell it on her. She saw it in his eyes. Heard it in his silence, a muteness she had never experienced before.

It was a seed. A beach, a dock, a dream of distant shores. The beginning of a journey, the inspiration that sparked a new story.

“What are you thinking about?”

“I think I have met you before. I know your face.”

“It’s a face. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth. As faces go it’s pretty normal.”

“You asked what I was thinking about. So I guess my thoughts are normal.”

“Hah. I doubt it.”

“Good.”

At some point he called her beautiful. She deflected, out of habit. At some point she would stop deflecting. At some point, she would trust him. But first, the walking, the talking — the silence. The gentle probing of minds, exploring the surface while quietly daring each other to take a leap, to dive into the depths.

The ropes were like nothing she had ever felt before.

“Where did you come from?”

“Some little town, far from here.”

“No, I mean, where did you come from?”

She couldn’t explain what she meant. She thought he probably understood.

He said her name and suddenly she was no longer afloat, but anchored. Afterwards she could barely remember what he had said, if it had been encouragement or insult — only her name, whispered in her ear. A four-syllable spell.

And when her screams subsided, when there was nothing left of her but shivers and sweaty locks of hair covering her eyes, he held her. “It’s not over,” he said. “It’s never over.”

And she smiled.

And so I will.

People always say: ‘It’s inner beauty that matters, not outer beauty.’
Well, that’s not true.

No, it really isn’t. A lot of people are unabashedly superficial. I know more than one person who will admit that they only like to hang out with people who are at least as good-looking as themselves.

If it were, why would flowers put so much energy into attracting bees?

If the ability to attract bees is our new definition of “beauty”, I guess none of us are beautiful. Unless we wear flower prints or spill honey all over ourselves.

Flowers put energy into attracting pollinators because the flowers that don’t end up nudged out of the gene pool. That some flowers look beautiful to us is merely testament to the fact that our brains work in very strange ways.

And why would raindrops transform themselves into a rainbow when they encounter the sun?

This is even worse than the flower analogy. The flowers (the ones that are pollinated by animals, at any rate) actually do “try” to look attractive. Atmospheric drops of water are just floating there. The fact that rainbows occur and that we can see them is a happy coincidence, a result of physics and biology working the way they do.

Because nature longs for beauty, and is only satisfied when beauty can be exalted.

Which is why nature made it so that shit smells like flowers and looks like rainbows? Oh, and also it’s why nature made ebola viruses to sing people to sleep with gentle lullabies.

outer beauty is inner beauty made visible, and it manifests itself in the light that flows from our eyes.

There is no light flowing from our eyes. Eyes are for detecting light, if they emitted it they would rather be counteracting their own purpose. What’s that, you say? Metaphorical light? Okay, I’ll deal with that later on.

It doesn’t matter if a person is badly dressed or doesn’t conform to our idea of elegance, or isn’t even concerned about impressing other people.

Okay, this I actually agree with, mostly. A person can be perfectly delightful to be around regardless of how s/he dresses. And people who aren’t concerned with impressing others are usually quite a lot more fun to be around than those who are. I do tend to appreciate people who dress nicely, though. Being a poor dresser often goes hand in hand with being clueless in other ways as well.

The eyes are the mirror of the soul and reflect everything that seems to be hidden; and, like a mirror, they also reflect the person looking into them.
So if the person looking into someone’s eyes has a dark soul, he will see only his own ugliness.

So, meatphorical light emanating from the mirror of our soul, we meet again.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves of prose. Eyes are not mirrors of the soul. Eyes don’t shine with kindness or love. They don’t emanate hate. The eyes are mostly expressionless globes. The area around the eyes might tell you something about how the person you’re looking at is feeling, but unless you can also see her/his mouth, there’s no telling if your guess is correct.

I know. I’m ruining every romantic scene ever written. I don’t care. You can write about depth of emotion without resorting to tired clichés with no bearing on reality.

Beauty is present in all creation, but the danger lies in the fact that, because we human beings are often cut off from the Divine Energy, we allow ourselves to be influenced by what other people think.
We deny our own beauty because others can’t or won’t recognise it.

Instead of accepting ourselves as we are, we try to imitate what we see around us.

Divine Energy? I guess there’s more to this than I can be bothered looking into. These sentences presume you agree that Divine Energy exists, and I don’t even know what that means. Needless to say, I don’t think it does. And so being cut off from it certainly can’t be to blame for our tendency to worry about what other people think.

We are social creatures. We need to conform. We instinctively feel weird when we don’t. And it’s no one’s fault. If I enter a party where everyone’s dressed to the teeth and I’m wearing a onepiece, it’s not their judgment that makes me feel weird, it’s that I understand that I stick out. It takes a very special kind of person to not mind this at all.

I’m not saying it’s bad to worry about what other’s think, and I’m not saying it’s bad not to. Each person must find its own way to handle the various intricacies of human interation.

We try to be what other people think of as ‘pretty’ and, little by little, our soul fades, our will weakens, and all the potential we had to make the world a more beautiful place withers away.

Because anyone who is intrested in their appearance is necessarily a weak-willed, soulless shell of a human. Or maybe they just like looking pretty? I know I do. I don’t take this interest to such extremes as others do, but I do like to feel beautiful. I do like to be admired sometimes.

I used to look down on people who, in my mind, cared about their looks too much. Then I grew up. I realised that not everyone has to be the same, and that having a deep interest in painting your face or nails is not so different from having a deep interest in any other craft. Of course everything can be taken to extremes. Of course it’s bad to let insecurity and the drive to conform rule your life.

I get the feeling Coelho — and I admit I have yet to read a single work of his except this excerpt on his blog — is trying to say something profound, to help people accept themselves. But to not recognise that most of us do carry these feelings of needing to fit in somewhere, or to have our superficial traits appreciated, and accept this as something natural and profoundly human, is to do ourselves a disservice.

And as for what he says about nature: Can we not simply agree that it’s fortuitous that we happen to think a lot of the natural phenomena we see around us are beautiful? Do we have to ascribe agency to the universe? The world is as it is. It’s beautiful and terrifying and full of both pleasure and danger. (Frankly, for us, mostly danger.) To speak of it as if it strives for our entirely subjective concept of “beauty” is to make it out to be less than it is.

December 26, 2004. Click for larger version.

I’m nearing 30 and have been littering the web with various projects of mine since I was 13. I built more houses in the GeoCities than I can remember, I have blogs I can’t seem to remove from the net because I forgot the passwords, I’ve had accounts at most social networking sites that I never used. But I never really had my own website, that was just about me, with its own domain and everything. So I guess I felt like it’s time now.

If you’ve found your way here already I apologise about the mess. I haven’t quite decided how to decorate yet so we’re living out of boxes here. This isn’t the moving in party, it’s just a quiet acknowledgment that this is my place now.

Finally, huge thanks to my good friend CB for setting me up with the Binero account that hosts this.