Jessica Dickinson Goodman

Guest Post – Got it Master Chief? (An open letter)

Webmonarch — Sun, 20 May 2012 04:06:46 +0000

I’m reposting this from a good and wise friend’s blog; it’s a guest post from a wicked smart and kind friend of ours. It’s graduation tomorrow and I’ll be posting all kinds of euphoric and bubbly stuff in the morning. But this matters. Trigger warning for: sexual assault.

A dear lady-friend of mine has been feeling very frustrated at a very close guy friend of hers who forced himself on a girl at a party recently. I think she needs to read her words aloud to him but then again, what do I know?

Without further ado, an open letter from Ophelia Cumberbatch.

Dear Beautiful, Powerful, Well-Meaning Best Man Friend:

Listen up, because I’m only going to say this once: If you think for just an inkling of a moment that you raped her, you probably did. If she said that you raped her, you probably did. If you find your self making excuses about how she said “no” but kept going you raped her. You definitely did.

I say her because the anecdotal person here is a she but that she could be he or zie or ne or ve or xe, whatever that person’s chosen pronoun may be. (If you grumble about the pronouns we will have to have another conversation like this, about your position with kyriarchy and how sometimes I want to choke you because you don’t. Fucking. Understand.)

I am sick of having conversations with you about how things “weren’t clear,” and that she said no but her voice said yes and that she had been flirting with you all night. I want to be your understanding cool lady friend who watches baseball with you, who ties your tie, kicks your ass at Halo, and loves you like a brother, but I can’t do that after you tell me that “she said no but then I tried again and she said yes.” I love you, man, but really? You think it wasn’t rape because you’d been making out? Because you knew each other? Because you’d hooked up once before? Because you crossed the “she’s into me, she’s into it” threshold and now there’s no going back? Ever?

The hierarchy of rape (“forcible” or stranger rape vs. the much more common “date rape” or “acquaintance rape,” i.e. being raped by someone you know, or even love) is a completely unfair standard that cheapens the experience of one set of victims over another, favoring the black and white scenarios that allow for a ghostly masked rapist to absorb the ire of a community while keeping us from thinking about the attitudes of our friends, our family, and (most terrifyingly) our lovers.

It’s true that many cases of date and acquaintance rape and similar “confused consent” incidents are cases of misunderstanding, but they are also issues of disrespect and a failure to communicate, not in terms of talking but in terms of listening. Being a good sexual partner means noticing your partner’s physical cues. Being a good person means noticing their emotional state. That means knowing the person well enough to know when she’s scared or hiding something. If you don’t know them very well (which happens), you have to be even more vigilant.

Dearest bro friend, dearest unbelievably gorgeous bro friend, this is your girl talking to you, you intellectual fuck buddy, your mama and your little sister all rolled into one. I am asking, begging, no, demanding that you fetishize consent, dear. Fetishize it. It’s easy if you try. “Yes” is the most beautiful word in the world. “Yes” is what you want your partner to say all the time every time. “Yes” is the only thing that revs your engine. When you know the person, when you’ve talked about it beforehand, you can go through rape role play. You can go hardcore with the toys and the ropes and strange wrestling moves you learned in middle school. Have fun. (You big slut good for you!) but please, please, please, make “YES” in big huge, sunny yellow letters your big goal. “Do you want to _____ ?” “YES” “Are you sure?” “YES!”

“Yes.”

“Yes!”

“YES.”

“YES!!!!”

“No” is not a turn-on. “No” is a huge boner-kill. It is not a negotiation. It is a huge red flag. Other things that are no include “Not right now,” “I’m not feeling well” and the physical moving of hands away from her or an area of her body. Your partner doesn’t have to “be clear” with you. If you’re making out and you try to move to another phase of lovemaking and s/he says no, that’s off the menu for tonight. End of story. The kitchen is closed. Don’t try again in twenty minutes. Don’t try again in three hours. Talk about it with your clothes on, after you’ve finished your meal. If you do your job right, you’ll be invited in again. (See what I did there?)

Yeah, I know. Sex is complicated. Love is complicated. You had to chase her for a while before she agreed to a date. Somewhere along the line, someone told you that you had to fight for your girl, that jealousy can be sexy, that protectiveness can be sexy, that control can be sexy. You were just giving her what she said she wanted. She said yes before. She was a little tipsy. More importantly, you were too. You can’t be held responsible for what happened. You had chemistry, there’s no denying that. Misunderstandings happen all the time.

Honey, baby, bear, kindly shut the fuck up. Unlike many misunderstandings, these mistakes have catastrophic costs to everyone touched by the incident. The person you raped or sexually assaulted is sitting at home feeling like they suddenly don’t know what they want. She’s trying to decide whether the helplessness, the emotional and physical pain she just went through was her fault. After a lot of self torture (probably days, usually weeks or even years), she might get up the courage to tell someone what happened: a friend, a parent, or a mentor. That person is going to feel just as helpless as your lover did. They’re going to feel angry and hurt and unbelievably frustrated because they don’t know how to fix it. They don’t know how to make it better. They’re going to wish they had been at the party. If they know both of you, they’re going to wish they had explained to you what it’s like to be a confused, scared rape victim, to try to make “no” sound like a nice, nonthreatening, nonjudgemental statement because nice girls don’t shut men down, because girls who say no don’t get asked back. They’re going to wish they had told you about how they were raped, and how it changed them.

That’s if that first witness believed her, but only if. That person might ask, “Well, what were you wearing? Had you been drinking? Did you flirt? Hadn’t you said you like him?” And so she disappears into herself, shackled in a subjectivity that society forced on her. She has no right to be mad or hurt. She should have said something other than “come hither.”

You may genuinely feel bad. Because I know and love you, I’m pretty sure you will. You’ll wonder how you could have let this happen. You’ll think of all the ways that she could have been more clear about saying no, trying to distract yourself from the multiplying ways in which you decided that she said yes.

You may feel so bad that you’re suicidal. I’m sorry, but I don’t care. This isn’t about you. This is about her. This is about us. You and me. Me and you. This wonderful sexual tension filled tornado of awesome that we’ve had going on since we were both scared and lonely so very long ago. Because you’ve scared me to my core. Maybe scarred as well. This word fills my head whenever I see you. When you hug me (RAPE), when you tease me (RAPE), when you put your hands over my eyes and make me guess (RAPE. YOU’RE A RAPIST DON’T TOUCH ME.) Because if you hurt her you could hurt me. And here’s our little secret: There was a time when I wanted you to hurt me. Just not like that.

You make me question every instinct I have, every deep dark turn on I’ve had, every man I’ve ever felt safe with. You make me afraid of the night. I used to be that girl who loved empty streets and broken street lamps, the girl who sought out adventure because I was immortal and safe and strong. I trusted my instincts, I kept my keys sticking out between my fingers. I thought that I knew how to say no, but it catches in my throat when you look at me, my eyes screaming it but my tongue saying nothing.

You’ve damaged somebody. Hopefully not permanently, but you may have. You drove drunk and you hit someone. That person didn’t have to say “Don’t hit me with a car.” You hit them. You have to live with that.

You don’t get to dismiss that guilt, that reality, so you can sleep through the night. Guilt makes you a better person. It keeps you from being a sociopath and a psychopath and all the other paths that I don’t want to walk down. I was pretty sure I wasn’t friends with a sociopath but hey, I’m a lady and I don’t know what I want, so who knows?

The sooner you admit that what you did was wrong the sooner everyone will heal, and the easier it will be for me to be your lady friend again, if at all. But if you ever say “She should have said no more clearly,” to me ever again, I will strangle you with your own tie. Got it, Master Chief?

Inspirational Quote:

“A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves – a special kind of double.”–Toni Morrison

Last day volunteer escorting for Planned Parenthood in Pittsburgh

Webmonarch — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:20:33 +0000

Today was my last day escorting for Planned Parenthood of Western PA. This week’s been a lot of “lasts”: my last final for college (“Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict: 1880 – 1948″), last grading (“How to Get a Job”), last time walking into the College of Fine Arts, dropping a form off at the Dean’s office, buying a bagel in the library. Every time I log into the Andrew system for CMU I wonder if this is the last time I’ll need to remember the bit of poetry I use for my password.

It’s been like two weeks of ripping off bandaids–it feels good because I’m advancing and growing, but stings a little. My last morning of escorting was nearly perfect: I was tired, and grumpy on the bus, and on my way out of my morning bagel run a group of jock-y protesters tried to get on my case. Then I got to meet some new escorts and hang out on my favorite corner: the one with the most patient traffic and most poor protester behavior.

We spent the entire morning entertaining each other: one of the escorts is a nuclear engineer and she told jokes about how people don’t understand the exponential decrease in reactor energy at Fukushima. The protesters yelled about Mother’s Day. A client’s companion needed a smoke and she hung out with us and gossiped. Several bystanders thanked us for out work; one glared at us and said, as she walked quickly away, that she “doesn’t believe in killing babies.” (Gracefully handling drive-by snark is just a perk of the gig.)

I’m signed up to escort in Boston, where the clinic requires a year-long commitment from volunteers but said that with 5 years of experience they might let me slip in for a summer. Escorting with Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania during undergrad let me pray with my feet: it was uncomfortable and awkward and scary and probably did more to cement my commitment to women’s rights than any class or relationship.

Inspirational Quote:

“During my second year of nursing school our professor gave us a quiz. I breezed through the questions until I read the last one: “What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?” Surely this was a joke. I had seen the cleaning woman several times, but how would I know her name? I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank. Before the class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our grade. “Absolutely,” the professor said. “In your careers, you will meet many people. All are significant. They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say hello.” I’ve never forgotten that lesson. I also learned her name was Dorothy.”–Joann C. Jones

Finding the words for graduating

Webmonarch — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:57:50 +0000

I like words. I find them friendly, comforting. They are the first place I turn to when I need to think a problem through and whether alone on a page or performed by actors, they give me a sense of the world as it is and as it could be.

I collect them. I’ve posted about a favorite category of words–heteronyms–which I collect. But I also just collect words which feel good inside my head and in my mouth: you may have noticed lambent making several appearances in the past week. It means:

I know this because I’ve kept this definition open in a tab on my browser for the past few weeks. This word makes me feel like:

And this:

It’s hopeful and a little sad and big. It’s the kind of light I imagine lit Emily Dickinson when she wrote:

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

This poem’s also been sitting open in my browser, because I like the acknowledgment it gives of the sadness and hopefulness of parting. This poem makes me think of being away from Matt, of leaving Pittsburgh, of losing the Fulbright. I’m tempted to feel saudade, the loneliness for something which never existed. I’m tempted to idealize college and sentimentalize away all of the things I’ve found so hard about being a student who doesn’t like being taught at. I’d like to feel something simple, like pride in my school and myself for graduating, like excitement about my future, even mourning for losing a place in the place I’ve grown accustomed to.

But I feel all of those, the hopefulness and the sadness, the pride and the bitterness, and the only way I can exist with this swirly of the soul is to read, and write, and talk, and think, and try to find new words.

So today I feel lambent and saudade, and truly believe that “Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell.”

Inspirational Quote:

“If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”–Toni Morrison

The Geeky Way to Choose an Apartment

Webmonarch — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:10:40 +0000

I’m a fan of quantitative decision-making. When I chose Carnegie Mellon for undergrad, my Mom and I used a Pugh Matrix. When my partner and I were deciding between several apartments in Seattle this weekend, we wrote-out this chart:

We ended up choosing option 3, a small apartment in the new, eco-friendly, Citizen of the Pike Pine apartments. It was the second smallest and the most expensive, but as you can see from the chart, those weren’t the only factors in our decision. I loved the Capitol Hill neighborhood: on one block there was a cupcake shop, a yarn store, and a used bookstore and another had the Chatterbox Cafe and a pie shop. The space, though small, was exceedingly well-designed (thus the “Yes!” in the usability column) and the apartment management got 10/10 for professionalism in our book for being honest, knowledgeable, and flexible. The space has good bike storage and the route to Matt’s work is thoroughly bikable. Basically, I am thrilled with our new apartment.

Though I still love PadMapper, we found our new space entirely by accident–we were wandering between viewing appointments and decided to try and get a tour during office hours. Serendipity at its finest.

Inspirational Quote:

“Home is a shelter from storms – all sorts of storms.”–William J. Bennett

AO3 Is the Classy FanFiction Archive

Webmonarch — Tue, 01 May 2012 00:15:20 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of getting invited to make an account on AO3, An Archive of Our Own from the estimable Organization for Transformative Works. Ok, I begged for an invite from an In Real Life friend who I met because I liked reading her fanfiction, followed her on Twitter, then had coffee with when we realized we were in the same department at Carnegie Mellon.

I’ve been slowly falling in love with AO3. I’ve been reading fanfiction.net since I was a preteen, though I boycotted it for most of junior high and high school for deleting accurately rated works in a general purge which harmed some of my favorite authors. There are many fandom-specific sites but I’ve been keeping my eye out for a host with chutzpah, a willingness to stand behind their content creators, which AO3 seems to have.

Then there was their design: clean, easy to navigate, the search semantics takes a bit of work to learn but so far I haven’t had any of the usability issues which have plagued ff.net for a decade and more.

But their Terms of Service hooked me for good:

[...]

The OTW does not claim any ownership or copyright in your Content. Repeat: we do not own your content. Nothing in this agreement changes that in any way. Running the Archive, however, requires us to make copies, and backup copies, on servers that may be located anywhere around the world.

[...]

They believe most fanfiction is fair use, which is what I wrote my thesis on.

In other lovely news, Neil Gaiman posted on his tumblr about how he understands slash (here is his own sum-up of all of his find-able quotes on his opinion of fanfiction):

That [quote about Good Omens slash fiction being "mindboggling"] was written on my journal in 2002, when the idea that people on the web had taken a book Terry and I had written and together created several hundred times as many words as we had written, mostly detailing the erotic adventures of two characters who are described in the text as sexless, seemed very peculiar indeed.

These days, ten years later, I do not think of it as mindboggling. Compared to many things on the web it seems relatively normal. I don’t have any interest in reading it, though, and learned my lesson about bumping into it accidentally the time I searched Tumblr with a Crowley or Aziraphale tag to find a picture to illustrate a post here, and found myself looking at things I hadn’t expected to be looking at.

This quote successfully places Gaiman, a favorite author, to the Dragon camp of authors who are supportive of fanfiction.

Inspirational Quote:

“Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total.” —Forsyth and Rada, Machine Learning

I’m in Seattle!

Webmonarch — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 05:53:40 +0000

I’m spending the weekend in Seattle, visiting with Matthew and searching for an apartment. I don’t even know how I found housing without Padmapper–it is a life-saver. Seattle will be home base, which means its where my heart and books are, while I’ll be flitting around Boston.

Though my brain is travel-blocked, I’ve found 3 things to love about Seattle:

I can smell the ocean,
There are real mountains (where reality is defined by the likelihood they will kill you)
I saw more Vietnamese, Ethiopian, and Thai places on the light rail ride downtown than I’ve seen in Pittsburgh in 5 years.

Inspirational Quote:

“When you look at your life, the greatest happinesses are family happinesses.”–Joyce Brothers

State Censorship, Woman At Point Zero, and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison

Webmonarch — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 05:40:41 +0000

Today I gave a presentation in my “Modern Arabic Literature” class on state-censorship. Well, first I put on a play, using some scenes from the frame narrative of Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero (slides 8 and 9 include the relevant text), then used the slides below to dig deeper into the text. In the scenes, a psychiatrist tries to get access to a death row inmate (the woman who will be the narrator once we’ve completed the frame) and gets into the kind of veiled discussion of the corrupt authorities.

When I lived in Qatar, one of the most important lessons I learned was how to speak tactfully. I learned how to turn on the censor in my head, tuned for the kinds of speech which are illegal in Qatar as well as how to make friends in a slightly more formal society. As someone who thinks the best product of my country is a commitment to civil rights, it was vital for me to learn a little of what it means to grow up in a state where speech is not free.

In my presentation, I tied together 3 pieces of Arabic writing with passages from Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture. I first read it when my favorite English teacher in high school, Dr C, handed it out. I’ve re-read it several times a year ever since. It has probably done more to shape my conception of the moral responsibilities of writers and speakers than anything else, and the imagery is compelling. Woman at Point Zero was an example of the chilling effects state censorship has on normal human expression. A speech from a current leading Egyptian Presidential Candidate, Amr Moussa, was a non-fiction example of:

Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

The final, grotesque, example came from Sun’allah Ibrahim’s The Committee, on the self-violence which self-censorship can bring. I won’t spoil the ending, but involves what the Leviathans would call, “bibbing”:

It was only after the Arab Spring that I learned to distinguish from the tact of my friends in the Middle East who had grown up as or with the children of diplomats and the fearful vagaries which smart and critical people are forced into in a state of censorship. I am hoping that the other students in my class won’t have to learn that difference alone. Here’s the full presentation, under Creative Commons 3.0, like everything else here:

PS: For an extra bonus, and as an object lesson as to how subtle and insidious censorship can be, as you go through the presentation keep an eye on the black bar on the right. Most of the class didn’t notice until it took up 2/3 of the page and I’d turned all the black text white to fit.

Inspirational Quote:

“The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced,complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence;it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”–Toni Morrison

The Joys of Other People’s Cats

Webmonarch — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 05:30:33 +0000

I recently had lunch at my Arabic professor’s house, and spent most of the time playing with his cats. As a student, neither the rental contracts in my budget nor my moving schedule nor, tragically, my lifestyle permit me to have pets.

I do have two succulents, which hate the Pittsburgh cold with nearly the same bitter ferocity that I do. But spiky plants just aren’t the same as fuzzy people who need care and attention and can occasionally be entertaining:

My fixation on other people’s pets doesn’t just stop with patting: when I tell people how great a landlady I have, I nearly always mention Sophie, her adorable bear-like puppy. Sophie is tiny, not yippy, and firmly confused about how to run without turning into a rolling ball of fur.

I’m not in a place where I really want to live in the same city for 12 months non-stop. But on those few-and-far-between occasions when I flirt with the idea, the images which attract me are:

Being able to get a cat (or a puppy, since Matt loves dogs even more than I do and keeps talking about “training” cats, which is foolishness),
Buying a loom,
Finally figuring out where all of my things are (since some are in Seattle, some in Pittsburgh, a closet at Matt’s parents’ house, and a whole storage room in San Jose)
Having a truly permanent address to put on forms,
Getting the chance to do some renovations to make where I live fit me better–a big bathtub, silly wall-vinyls everywhere, tons of bookcases.

In the meantime, I’ll keep harassing my neighbors’ pets.

Inspirational Quote:

“The difference between friends and pets is that friends we allow into our company, pets we allow into our solitude.”–Robert Brault

Waterfalls Near Campus (A Lambent Light Fall on Schenley Park)

Webmonarch — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 03:59:52 +0000

As part of my exploration of the world of rocks in Pittsburgh, I spent some time climbing all over the creek alongside my daily bike-commute route which goes through a golf course. I found these tiny waterfalls:

It was a beautiful day out, and there were a bunch of people golfing. Though this may change as my joints get less compliant, but I would rather spend any day getting dirty and scampering around rocks and moss and water than slogging around clubs to put balls in holes:

Inspirational Quote:

“The number of shots taken by an opponent who is out of sight is equal to the square root of the sum of the number of curses heard plus the number of swishes.”–Michael Green, The Art of Coarse Golf, 1975

Blame It On The Fandom

Webmonarch — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 03:07:08 +0000

I read a great deal of fanfiction last week. I had most of last week off for Carnival and finished my 5th year project:

To celebrate finishing this anthology, which I have stressed about for longer than possibly anything but getting into college, I spent a few days diving into a fandom I haven’t spent much time in before.

And I love it.

I have all sorts of serious-sounding reasons why I like reading–squeeing over–the hurt-comfort fics which abound in this fandom: they let me process missing Matt; they dig into the place of God in a violent world; the main characters are pretty.

But really? I just love fanfiction. I love that there are communities of people who write for each other as favors, who take time to be silly and creative and critical and deep outside of school. They don’t just write fiction; some write music and others make videos for that music like this lambent example, “His Name is Castiel.”

Today I taught my “How to Get a Job” class on the perils and benefits of grad school. One of the biggest attractions to grad school for many of my students is it seems a way to stay in an intellectual community which is creative and critical and deep. Reading fanfiction lets me do all three of these things and won’t leave me with crushing debt and a lack of job prospects.

The trouble is: it is hard to explain the appeal of fanworks to people who aren’t fans. This video, which I found while reading with Matt tonight, might be a good way because it shows clips which are awesome all by themselves, without fandom context. It uses a mashup of hit pop songs from 2009 and clips from Firefly, Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Fifth Element, The Matrix, Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Merlin, and others I couldn’t identify:

If you got excited watching this video because you recognized the Doctor going into the Pandorica or Leia pointing her gun at that storm-trooper, if you gave a little “squee!” when Q snapped his fingers or Mal yelled naked at the departing spaceship, that’s the feeling I’m chasing when I’m reading good fanfiction. That recognition not just of awesomeness, but of awesomeness shared with friends (watching the Pandorica close with Anthea, Leia be a hero and Q be a creeper on my childhood carpet, Mal having a tizzy in the hallway in high school).

Fanfiction is essentially communal literature, creation for, by, and with friends. And reading it was a great way to spend a week.

Inspirational Quote:

“There’s a time and place for everything, and I believe it’s called ‘fan fiction’.”–Joss Whedon