Goodbye Bunny!

The Game is over. I no longer care about posting, and haven’t for a while, so if you wanted to comment, that might be why it didn’t get approved. So yeah. Go write stuff on your own blog.

Good luck and be brave!

Am I Human?

I’m not a species essentialist. That is to say, I do not believe that the sum of a species is held in its genetics; a genetic code that makes you look “lion” enough to be visibly recognized as lion does not necessarily make you so. A lot of humans make this mistake—assuming that looks mean everything—because we have a pretty sub-par sense of smell compared to actual omnivores and carnivores and, Western culturally, we don’t really encourage developing it. To someone who doesn’t view animals as important, as real people, the idea of paying serious attention to scent as a primary non-human language is pretty ludicrous. Which is actually pretty sad.

Scent is fucking important, though, even for humans: it affects sexual attraction, love, often friendship, and your basic feeling of connectedness with other humans, not to mention food and its taste. People who lose their sense of smell generally fall into a deep, unremitting depression, regardless of their species—the same behavioral cues for severe depression appear in rats who’ve had their olfactory bulbs removed (by humans) and, as you should well know, body language will out; to put it more succinctly (and honestly), they developed severe depression. I am still surprised that we haven’t really gotten beyond food smells as a signal of scents’ importance to us.

But perhaps it’s because we don’t do it so well as many other animals, and you’re not really allowed to point out something humans aren’t as good or better at without rationalizing it away; perhaps it’s because we’d have to realize that all land-predators use scent to track prey, and we can’t because we’re not predators; perhaps it’s because we’d have to realize that scent has more importance for some species than, well, ours, and as such we can’t judge their capacilities on a sight-sound-dexterity human-animal template. Perhaps it’s because we’d learn more about non-human animals than we’d really be willing to know.

Did you know that when a cat is upset, the scruff on their neck will emit a very particular acrid odor? That the scent varies by mood—anxious, depressed, frightened? Did you know that when cats are happy, the scent changes—that a consistently ebullient cat will have this sweet musky smell? It’s cat musk, the same scent they use in perfumes, except when it’s actual animal musk (civet, for example) they just cage them and then treat the unhappy-scent with chemicals to make it into the happy-scent.

Did you know that this is why cats generally do not respond to mirrors, except at a distance or to play—because cats identify other cats only by scent? That’s why your other cats will freak out at one who’s just been taken to the vet for more than a small amount of time: they smell weird, they must be a stranger.

Consider that for a minute. Consider the idea that, for whatever reason, cats do not and cannot recognize other cats on sight, but on scent-profile. Consider that not as a bigot who believes anything different than what they do is inferior, but as someone trying to understand a foreign culture, from one equal to another. It makes sense; it’s just weird to think of as a human. I posit that it’s because cats’ eyesight is based mostly on movement; humans have a sense of sight that recognizes a wide range of color (which also can’t be movement-sensitive—look up completely colorblind people; their eyesight is literally like a hawk’s and, if they get any color-sight capabilities, they stop being able to really focus on anything). Dogs are partially colorblind compared to us, too; their social groups are also scent-based, though they’re still less sight-oriented than cats.

And, speaking of dogs, they don’t naturally stink; in an actual pack structure (which most humans are not capable of providing, given our cultural misconceptions), they actually smell floral.

I’ve had firsthand experience with that; I knew a dog who was basically ignored constantly by her family (all of which, of course, had the balls to say that she “lived a good life”) and when they expressed interest in having someone else take care of her, I jumped at it. I am very social, as is my best friend, and the primary characteristic of an alpha is that zie is very social; we groomed this little lab mix out, took her for walks to help relieve her arthritis, fed her food we would eat in addition to her kibble (raw potatoes, bell peppers, mandarin oranges—yes, she ate them!—strawberries and cooked legumes), and basically kept her with us almost constantly—the way a real pack would. She started off smelling like “dog,” that very earthy, not-sweet-musky, B.O. scent; her fur was oily and matted, so if you petted her for very long she’d leave that particular animal-product greasy residue on your hands. Yet after three weeks—of making her cuddle when she didn’t ask for it, come and sit when she didn’t want to, and basically making her a pack member—she started smelling sweet and floral, as if she’d just been bathed and shampooed (she hadn’t). Scent was not the only indicator of her mental health, but it was a damn important one. Her previous family had been wrong to assume that dogs just smelled bad—like it was natural, automatic.

If we considered scent important, we’d no longer be able to dismiss and diminish the non-human animals who rely on them as “silly” for not percieving the world the same way we do.

Scent is just an example, but it is a really good one, and that’s why I keep pushing it. There are other senses we do not understand, the biggest of which is probably sight, basically because humans like to assume they’ve got the best at it. But we don’t know the half of it. Birds, reptiles, insects and fish can often see ultraviolet light, electric, water and air currents, heat; these are extra frigging colors that we can’t see. The usual failing of humans is to be too busy believing they’re so damn awesome to actually be awesome.

But all the senses are just an indicator of the essential species-ness of a species is, what and who they are. Not being a species essentialist, I believe that a species isn’t merely defined in terms of genetics, but in behavior: ecological, group, individual, in order of importance, because the greater terms define the latter. That is to say, an animal (a species, not necessarily non-human) outside of its ecological place will not be able to “be species.” Their species-ness becomes harder and harder to maintain in unnatural circumstances, and having lived in a fucking tent without anyone fucking preventing me from getting enough food, I now realize that while naturalness is not really all love-and-light, it is certainly a requirement for actual happiness and fulfillment. (Of course, it doesn’t help that the status quo forever gets nature wrong, so you should probably just dismiss every idea you have about it right now and start over.)

Body language will out; behavior will out. Behavior is the window to the soul, not the eyes (even human eyes, on their own, are hilariously incapable of imparting anything more than “frightened,” “happy,” and “neutral”), but when you conceive of behavior in the limited sense of the individual, you lose one of your greatest tools to understand a species.

It’s too simplistic to try to understand human behavior in terms of the individual, because humans are also social, cultural, and ecological (or right now, anti-ecological—i.e. civilized). You can’t see a human or zeir emotions and behavior as merely an individual thing; it doesn’t make sense. You can’t cure someone’s anxiety by seeing it as an individual thing; you can’t cure anything by seeing it as an individual thing. When osteoporosis rates have an absolute correlation with high-dairy-consumption countries, you face intellectual dishonesty and a disgusting bigotry when you try to frame osteoporosis as an individual lack of dairy.

And the inverse, because you can’t have one without the other: real, optimum health cannot be achieved without covering all levels. Health is not merely physical, and it is not merely mental, emotional, not merely social and cultural; they’re inextricable. It’s a fucking web.

Now if you’re very bright you can clearly see that I’m using humans as the example, not the rule, and if you’re even brighter then you’ll be able to understand that only human-supremecist bigotry stops anyone from groking how to apply these assessments to other species, too.

I don’t believe that species-ness is an absolute—you can have varying levels of species-ness without actually “being species.” But one of the essential parts of species-ness is how you are social, in part because it determines how you think. (No, you don’t really have any agency within culture and civilization; cut yourself off and you’ll grow some, though.) The way animals relate to each other weighs heavily on their species-ness and also their ability to be happy; I’ll reference again the story about Sith, the dog I took care of, and point out that basically everyone is wrong about cats. They naturally group in colonies, even if they don’t hunt together, but even then they enjoy seeing another cat hunt; and their primary pleasure centers—cheeks, above eyes, ears, neck—are all easily accessible to another cat if they like each other. Hell, most cats enjoy living with other cats, and even become anxious, bored and lonely without them.

Which is all a fancy way of saying that you’re supposed to socialize with your own species; not that I’m precluding other species (after all, there are fucking thousands of cases of inter-species friendship outside of the influence of humans), but just that your own species is default. While I roll my eyes at the human supremecism behind the statement that it’s not healthy for a human to associate only with non-humans, I essentially agree with the concept.

Especially because humans who are not around other humans for long periods of time become—well… strange. They stop really knowing how to socialize, but even more than that, their mind goes weird and unhealthy; they get depressed, space out for long periods of time, and develop erratic moodswings. They become “touchy”—excessively needy for routine, feel uncomfortably and painfully vulnerable from contact with other humans, unable to read or react appropriately*, have exaggerated or suppressed behavioral/emotional affect, often develop repetitive compulsive behaviors, so on and so forth. In essence, they develop many of the traits of autism—which is one reason I’ve always been so wary of any claims of both the “natural variation” of the autism spectrum and the idea that what many anti-ableists call “neurotypicality” is somehow innate and unchangeable.

There’s not such a distinct line, and it’s not so innate or unchangeable. If you can develop the fucking behaviors, then clearly those behaviors we label “autism” are an inherent concept within the animal experience.

There are two groups most likely to get these things: the first is documented, the second is not. That first group is those who’ve been put into solitary confinement for even as “little” as three months; they develop all these behaviors, and like with eating disorders, they’re hard as hell to get rid of. I am, of course, obligated to note the remarkable similarities in these developments between human-animals who have been solitary-caged and non-human animals who have, like many puppy mill breeder dogs—and if you don’t like that comparison, then you can just get the fuck over your hoity-toity simian self.

The second group is a particular kind of homeless man—the solitary ones. Having come into contact with them, I can honestly see why street kids (who tend to be very social, or at least they were) would hate and disrespect them, but I am also a primitivist who accepts that nature isn’t very love-and-light—I think it’s actually natural to reject and shun the socially incapable so that they die, and that it’s become that way because of the necessity and the overwhelming dominance of nurture over nature. I also know that makes me kind of an asshole—which is fine, if I had my way almost every single person who might read this would never have been born. But for the record, I don’t think that this applies only to a certain kind of social… failure?; I count myself in the group. If I’d been born, in nature, with some kind of innate anxiety disorder, I’d be fucked as far as continued life went; and if all of civilization were to fall apart right now and it was still traumatizing enough that my anxiety disorder didn’t disappear the way it did in the tent, I’d be incapable of surviving then, too—not that I’d want to. Anyone who thinks that a life with anxiety can be good or acceptable is a total fucking tool, especially if they live with it. Anxiety and happiness/fulfillment are mutually exclusive.

Back to the subject—humans are inherently social with other humans; a lot of species-ness is tied up in how you are able to be social with others of your species (and often others of different species). To a point, I believe that sexuality is inherent, too—mostly in the way that emotional and sexual intimacy often overlap, while they’re not necessarily the same thing. It’s difficult to explain in English, because things are so divided in English—I don’t know if it’s possible to write “(1) for humans, intra-human emotional intimacy is absolutely necessary and natural for happiness and species-ness, (2) that emotional intimacy is often completely indistinguishable from the desire for sexual intimacy from one specific human to one specific other, (3) but emotional intimacy may not necessarily be at all related to sexual intimacy between two humans” without sounding like you’re condemning a lack of sexual intimacy, or a desire for sexual intimacy.

Which is not what I’m trying to imply; it’s a lot more complicated than that, as is everything. Between two (usually two, sometimes more) humans, a relationship may be entirely emotionally intimate and be just as fulfilling as another relationship that feels empty or incomplete without sexual intimacy. The two things overlap, but they are not lesser or greater; you cannot add emotions together and come out with something greater, like it’s fucking math or something. When you add one note to another, the music does not automatically become louder; but it is changed. Whether it becomes better, worse, or has no effect is entirely dependent on the piece. And even though it may be nice at one point or another, you can’t just add all these notes together throughout the entire thing hoping for the same effect—the piece will become, basically, noisy mush. And sexual intimacy is one octave; emotional intimacy is another. There’s more than one note, more than one nuance, and sometimes a piece sounds best when it’s kept simple, a la Canon in D.

And a piece cannot be judged against another piece except by the one hearing it; if you’re asexual, then maybe you just won’t have any interest in the sexual-intimacy octave compositions at all, but even those who are ?sexual can feel that the non-sexual pieces are the ones that sound sweetest when they play them with their non-sexual friend, and not want to play anything else.

But in order to be happy and fulfilled, you have to play the pieces with someone else; otherwise your ear grows dull and you stop being able to really distinguish the notes. That’s not so much like music, except that the longer you are isolated from others the more experimental and less relatable your music tends to get, but it is the way of the brain: pathways fade and grow with time and repetition and you are changed by what you experience in a real way, even if you can’t see it.

The mental is physical; the physical is emotional; the emotional is mental. The lines between these things are organic and indefinable, because they change so often and require such a nuanced view of life and love to take the fullest amount of joy in them.

A cat hunts, a cat plays, a cat chases, a cat grooms, a cat brings prey, a cat takes naps in the sun, a cat does these things with other cats. If a cat does not do these things, then they are a cat only in name and appearance: they have none of their birthright, their essential cat-ness, to make them happy, and it’s a wretched, cursed existence.

A dog plays, a dog chases, a dog wrestles, a dog rubs, a dog brings prey, a dog whines, a dog follows, a dog alerts, a dog is a dog’s pack; there’s no way you can distinguish between an individual dog and zeir pack without losing some sense of who and what that individual dog is. A dog’s pack is their birthright and still, it’s a wretched, cursed existence without it.

A horse races, a horse nuzzles, a horse whinnies, a horse nibbles, a horse is a horse’s herd. A horse who is alone is a horse as good as dead; if they are alone they will shortly be dead, and if they’re alone then death will be better than more of the same.

Evolution cannot be understand as purely or even mostly ruled by physical/ecological requirements, because the greatest threat to an animal’s survival is unhappiness. So make happiness come from what it takes to fully experience a healthy life; make healthiness, happiness and security indistinguishable and you have a successful evolutionary tactic. Also let the suffering ones die, because empathy is the only universal instinct amongst animals, and seeing someone who is suffering will make you empathize, and suffer yourself, and then everyone will suffer and die. Happiness is not an afterthought of nature; it is an evolutionary imperative.

A human laughs, a human kisses, a human shares: a human shares fruit, orgasms (if they want), laughs, kisses. A human explores, a human touches, a human admires bright colors, a human plays. Maybe some of them with other animals; but a human definitely does these things with another human.

It’s definitely pretty ableist of me to say this, but I don’t think you can be human without these things; I originally came to this line of thought because I realized that psychopaths—narcissists and borderlines, not just the antisocials—didn’t have any kind of mental or emotional process that would make me think of them as a person, so I wondered just what it was that made you human.

And I also wondered what made the survival of a species so fucking important, what it was that made Lierre Keith and every other carnist drool over the idea that a species would survive. And I decided they were wrong, and that the idea of a species as a genetic code, as an individual state, is a particularly individualist, intellectualist, pro-civilization, anti-nature evil, above and beyond being merely carnist.

A species is not a genetic code or an appearance. That is not how they function; that’s not reality. Behavior will out; function will out. I can’t even pretend otherwise anymore. It’s just too simplistic, it’s what you mean when you say “childish” and “immature.”

*”Appropriately” here should not be considered in the sense of the status quo cultural context, but in the way that, between two humans, both of them can continue to interact without feeling threatened-uncomfortable. Note two things: first that, as with all mental-emotional-behavioral Things, its level of “problematic” is defined by its consistency and regularity; second that it should also be noted that many, if not most, male-socialized behaviors (and quite a few female-socialized behaviors) cannot be considered “appropriate” in any way, shape or form. Gendered behavior is inappropriate—abolish it!

The Lessons of Porn, Expanded

Referring back to this post on the effects porn had on my sexuality and particularly how I perceived “sex” and the narrowing of what was pleasurable for me, I wanted to write another post about stimulus and conditioning. Especially since people seem to believe that this is some isolated phenomenon, and it’s just not.

One of the things I noted about pornography was that it actually limited the pleasure I could find in sex or masturbation when it wasn’t “aided” by porn, and that it warped my definition of sex so that it consisted almost entirely of penetration, performed pretty mechanically by two or more partners—it could have been anyone, not just me; all that mattered was that penetration happened. It was really about as sexy as a hammer striking a block repeatedly: if you have a healthy sexuality, not at all.

Carnism warped my perception of what “filling” food was. Some months after going vegan, I remember looking at the cover of The Complete Vegan Cookbook and thinking that even eating all that couldn’t fill me up—and it was a depiction of probably more than two thousand calories and four pounds of roasted vegetables! Corn, potatoes, peppers, garlic—that was just the beginning; I can’t even remember all the varieties of food pictured.

Needless to say, I was being pretty ridiculous; it was purely a problem of distorted perception. After several years of being vegan—almost entirely without omnisubs or “meaty” products like tempeh and tofu—the same picture would seem to me an inordinate amount of food, a veritable feast.

Other carnists do this too; one of my friends, who works at Subway, is vegan too and regularly has to deal with comments from customers and coworkers about how the Veggie Delite (sans cheese, nonvegan condiments and patty, natch) just wouldn’t fill them up. The hilarious thing is the maximum amount of meat you’ll get for a six inch is four ounces; mostly you get two to three ounces—the bread is literally the most filling part of the entire sandwich. On top of that, people who say that it isn’t filling have usually never actually tried it—or they only got one or two vegetables at best.

Carnism makes you feel that the only real sustenance is contained in animal products; it warps your perception.

But one of the most interesting experiences for me, taste-wise, was fruitarianism—i.e. 2,000 calories a day specifically from fresh semitropical or tropical fruit, a large salad usually consisting of two heads of lettuce, and every other day or so some avocado, coconut or nuts. I’ve heard rather pretentious vegans remark that you have to like, go to culinary school to have “good enough” tastebuds. (I had no idea that you could be a classist Marxist; thanks, Vincent!) Now, one of the most interesting thing was just how my tastebuds changed.

Without letting myself go hungry, the flavors of fresh food became exponentially more vibrant when they’d already been delicious to begin with; I could taste the sweetness and saltiness of romaine, chard, spinach and the peculiar sweetness of sour limes. But even then, the taste of food became really impossible to explain in terms of sweetness, sourness, saltiness and bitterness—much the same way that the joy of sex is impossible to explain with a sexual terminology tainted by porn, or to someone currently limited by pornthink.

Anoretics generally suffer from a lack of flavor—food becomes bland: you have to add salt or mustard, chew gum constantly, something to get a constant rush of flavor. It’s the same for people who are suffering from mineral or vitamin or protein deficiency—food loses its luster; you become depressed and listless and lose any interest in eating. This was a diametrically opposed experience.

What was also interesting was that when I began eating cooked foods again—for a multitude of reasons, but mostly because of capitalism, which is unfortunate because tropical fruit makes humans feel good—it was incredibly… bland.

I also couldn’t stand nearly as much salt anymore; it overpowered the food and ruined the flavor. Salt has its own flavor too, you know; a lot of the time I find this is actually the biggest reason why carnists find vegan food “bland.” There’s just not enough salt in it, and they’re used to salt.

This leads to my point: when you regularly condition yourself to a certain substance, you lose your ability to enjoy the same activities without that substance—usually to a greater rather than lesser degree. When I was younger and tried food without salt, it wasn’t that it had no taste; it had taste, I just couldn’t enjoy or appreciate it.

I literally built up a tolerance to a substance that was supposedly non-habit forming. My taste buds—my brain—got conditioned to only recognize flavor in the presence of salt; similarly, when you consume porn, your brain becomes conditioned to recognize sexiness and arousal only in the context of pornified sex (which basically isn’t very much like sex).

But my primary reason for writing this post was this: technology screws up your ability to enjoy life.

That could sound silly, coming from somebody who’s clearly writing this on a computer. But since I’ve realized just how badly technology impairs my ability to enjoy life, and to be fascinated and fulfilled by nature, I’ve actually been restricting my use of it.

When I lived in a tent with my best friend, I… experienced life, and joy, for the first time ever. Nothing in civilization can ever compare to the enjoyment of life I had then; you can’t experience true joy or fulfillment as long as you are bound to civilization. The reason I chose—and still long for—fruitarianism is that it is the only time that I can get any kind of approximation of that wholeness… 811rv allows you to experience the closest approximation of real life, of nature, that you can get in civilization.

And I had all these beliefs about nature and who I was and what I was capable of just utterly destroyed.

You know how teens and college-aged kids get bored when they’re sitting outside in nature? How older people can sit, and sit, and sit, and be entertained—by looking around or playing solitaire or just thinking? I was one of those kids too. I swore that I’d just die of boredom if I was ever caught without technology—my laptop, my GBA, my iPod… something to take me away from the slowness of nature.

Except that the opposite happened. I had my iPod, and I didn’t use it because I was just endlessly entertained, by talking, by thinking and by watching; I found an almost Buddhist sense of spirituality. There is this certain kind of… sense that is reinforced in you by even a temporary detox from technology, of the inferiority of civilization and human “ingenuity” in the face of nature. I completely lost any appreciation for architecture I once had, because architecture has no real visual texture; the intricacies of a tree—of a living organism—are endless. It redefines beauty. I like to say that of the entirety of what Yeshuah said, “Sell all your things and give them to the poor; and come, follow me,” was the most literal. You can’t have any understanding of love, life, and joy, of the inherent goodness and truth of nature, unless you are a wanderer… unless you reject civilization absolutely. Everything you think you know about the ruthlessness and callous violence of nature, and about the “benefits” of civilization, is a laughable lie. Nature may not necessarily be kind but it certainly isn’t cruel—it won’t hurt you simply because it doesn’t have a reason not to.

When I was forced back into “shelter,” it was awful—you don’t have any idea how it is to feel joy, to feel freedom, to finally understand what it means to say that nature is good, and to just… have that ripped away from you.

The worst part, I think, is that it’s never very long before you forget what it was like Before. Maybe it’s just too much for your mind to really comprehend—nature is not, after all, cruel or malicious; you reach a point where “pain” and “sadness” don’t really exist because there’s not much to compare it to anymore, it’s just normal. Just because it would be so much more painful to remember what it was like to be free, to be safe. The idea that you have to know sadness to know happiness is total bullshit: it only works one way. You can be happy all the time, because happiness is something default, happiness is necessary if you’re going to survive in nature. But you cannot be sad all the time without becoming numb, without forgetting what happiness ever was.

Eventually you’re just left with this uneasy wistfulness for an indistinct memory: you knew. You knew it was better… but you can’t remember anymore.

Technology still does this to me—to everyone; it conditions your brain to a faster but less detailed speed, to a speed where you actually can’t process many details. It conditions your brain to a lower textural quality while ramping up simplistic intensity to compensate.

You can look at movies from different eras to see my point; movies have gotten faster and faster as time has gone on, as advertising has had to continuously compete for effect and audience. I remember a point where I watched Star Wars in my early teens and actually thought it was kind of slow-paced. The same has happened with music, but I’m not glorifying the Beatles; their music also encouraged the loss of musical texture and complexity. Jonsi and Sigur Ros and 65daysofstatic are actually some of my favorite music because their music is so complex and filled with texture.

One of the most damaging things technology does, though, is make you impatient. Car drivers, gamers, television watchers, and even casual internet users become incredibly impatient; I don’t think you really hear or see yourselves. I also become incredibly impatient; I’m more likely to snap at my best friend if I’ve been using the computer at all, I’m more jittery and needy of stimulus. It makes you impatient.

And tired. Incredibly tired. Video games have the same effect on me, even for a small time, but if I keep playing I become overstimulated and can’t get to sleep, the same way as when I try to stay up when I’m tired.

Speaking of which, I’m very tired, so I’m going to end this post now.

I Ain’t Dumb IV: Thoughts on Words

From FCM:

and apparently, if you wake up one day having a stroke, having lost your language skills and therefore the ability to verbally conceptualize “its morning and the sun is shining” and instead just experience it without verbalizing it in your mind-chatter, you feel absolute, unmitigated joy. interesting!

Yes.

I’ve come to the conclusion that, ultimately, language is a poison and humans never should have developed it, for the same reason that it’s unnatural to spend your time thinking about death—or even considering the concept of death at all. “Death” is not a relevant concept to someone who is living their life; thinking about death is mutually exclusive with living a full life. If you are living joyously, you don’t need to ponder death. I have experienced this.

At the same time, thinking about your experiences is often mutually exclusive with actually fully experiencing them. I am so over the academented practice of intellectualizing experience and emotion, because the more you intellectualize these things, the farther you take yourself from them. I believe that’s actually why we came up with the practice of intellectualizing: because it separates you from having to feel and deal with your experiences. That’s got to be a pretty compelling coping method for a group of people who have just been convinced by the “Enlightenment” that the thing that makes them better than animals is their separateness from emotion and the supposed connection to logic and rationality.

Oh, the irony of humans telling themselves that their unique specialness in nature—which is the basis of the language that allows them to feel like special goddamn snowflakes (which do not occur in native human habitat)—is partially because they are able to feel “more complex” emotions. When this very “uniqueness” prevents them from feeling truly complex emotions.

One of the reasons that I easily grasped the fact that we are wrong about non-human animals is that I was always forced to identify with them.

You see, thinking in language isn’t a trait common to humans. I can absolutely confirm this, because I am human, and I don’t think in language. I think in meanings—pure, absolute, and incredibly complex—and this often makes it pretty hard for me to get my point across.

The only point where I think in language is when I am thinking of how to communicate, to another human, my argument or experience or whatever. And then it goes pretty much straight from meaning to language, with all the axed meanings falling to the side like fabric scraps. That annoys me about language—like, what, you couldn’t at least be special enough to make an adequate language, you douchenuts? But whatever.

When you talk about the supposed inferiority of animals because of XYZ, I know very well you’re talking about me, too. According to you, all humans are supposed to think in language; this is the defining characteristic of humans, that our thoughts are better and make sense because they’re in language. (Though, again, given the ridiculous limits of any language, I’m not entirely sure how this makes us smarter instead of stupider.) So, very clearly, I’m not human.

Which is fine by me. You creatures are just beyond fucked up sometimes, you know that? Define me out of existence all you want; it just proves you’re wrong about any distinction between “human” and “animal.”

You can take your justifications for carnism and shove ’em where the sun don’t shine.

What Men Aren’t Taught About Rape

If you are triggered by graphic descriptions of rape, self-injury and body horror, you may want to skip this post.

To put it bluntly, men are raised to be incredibly ignorant of rape. Male socialization systematically devalues the trauma and pain of rape and leaves those raised to be men painfully and insultingly misinformed on the subject. That’s not to say that men can’t learn—just that an understanding of rape, with all its irrational anti-patriarchy implications like empathy for the survivors, is not included in the syllabus.

What’s interesting, and infuriating—and will doubtless get me called a transphobe, again, because I’m not self-interested enough to selectively ignore the realities of a gendered society—is that male-socialized blindness to rape is only limited by firsthand experience. Which is to say, the ignorance and misunderstanding of rape is universal among people who have been socialized as male, unless they have directly experienced rape or empathy for a rape survivor, as a person—not as property or them-by-proxy. An adequate understanding of rape is not created by considering the theory of rape or by rejecting either stereotypical manliness or by identifying as a different gender; you can only grow one by either being a survivor yourself or by deeply caring for a survivor.

It’s been bothering me lately how flippantly men speak about rape, and how lightly they use it to refer to something without the concrete characteristics of rape; that’s why I’m writing this post. Rape 101, right here, folks.

I. Concreteness of Rape

The concrete reality of rape is this: first, that rape is committed by a specific person; second, that rape is committed against a specific person.

Any other definition of rape deliberately obscures what actually happens in rape. It does not “simply happen,” you aren’t walking down the street and trip over a rock and get raped. Someone does the raping. A rapist isn’t epheremal; there aren’t rapist particles floating around in the air, lurking around particularly sharp dips in the sidewalk.

When rape happens, it happens because a specific person is a rapist, or because several specific persons are rapists. This is part of assigning accountability—when several boys get together and gang-rape an eleven-year-old, they are rapists. They weren’t “drawn into” anything—they are rapists; without an actual, real, concrete rapist, rape does not exist.

The second part of that definition is the counterpart to assigning accountability: it’s assigning harm. Rape is experienced by a person; it doesn’t happen to no one for no reason. A person—someone who can feel and think and experience what is or was done to them—suffers rape, because that’s the meaning of the fucking word, and because the widespread misunderstanding of the experience of rape is what makes men so comfortable with using rape outside of an injustice, against a person, perpetrated by another person.

This is part of what I’d like to submit as a basic guideline for radical feminist questioning of atrocities:

1. Who is targeted? Who is suffering from it?
2. Who is committing the atrocity?
3. Who benefits from the atrocity—i.e., why is the atrocity happening? What use does it have to the Kyriarchy?

Too often, rape is spoken about—by men, but also by people being excessively gentle with men’s feelings—as if it’s this mystical woo-woo magical thingy that just kind of like, happens. “Rape is an epidemic in the Congo…” By who? Against who?

Because the concrete reality of rape, right now, in this universe—not the universe of The Spearhead or Larry Flynt or whatever—is that men rape, and it’s largely women, children, animals, transfolk, and disenfranchised men who are raped on the basis of not being male enough—which also means not being human enough, which also means not being worthy enough. It is an ongoing tactic of rape culture and rape apologists to obscure these realities of rape: who suffers from it, who is perpetrating it.

II. Men Speak Casually About Rape

K’naan, in the song My Old Home: Justice has been raped in my old home…

Emmanual Jal, on his album Warchild, has a song entitled Vagina. It speaks of how Africa is exploited and sabotaged by the Western, white world, but it appropriates sexual violence against women to fight racism… on the same album, Jal talks in Skirt Too Short about how the way women are or are not dressed magically makes him incapable of respecting them.

And have you heard Date Rape by Sublime? It’s a disgustingly upbeat song that describes a near-stranger rape, a rapist who admits he’s a rapist—”If it weren’t for rape I’d never get laid,” sez he (since, obviously, it’s so horrible and life-destroying to accuse a man of rape without his permission)—but never fear! The members of Sublime have no allegiance to such a silly thing as reality; his victim takes him to court and wins and gets him put in prison! And, as a final fuck-you to feminism, the end of the song has the (male, need I point out) singer gloating about how her rapist gets raped in prison, lolololol! Rape is so funny when it happens to people who deserve it! HOORAY EQUALITY.

Nine Inch Nails, too, joins into the fray when Trent Reznor sings in Animal, “you let me violate you/you let me desecrate you.” Of course, it’s really about pain and agony and obsessively needing someone—so sexual violence is really your only answer when you are trying to expressed your tortured manly maliness!

There are more, of course, from AC/DC to Led Zepplin, not to mention the entire genre of gore metal and the “romantic misogyny” of emo, but I’ll leave off the musical references with a shout-out to a classic: Rape Me by Nirvana. Sure, Kurt Cobain was never actually raped, but that doesn’t mean he can’t co-opt the soul-destroying violation for his self-important angst!

Literature is a goldmine of men speaking casually about rape, too.

In this one book I got a few years ago—I am honestly sorry I don’t have the name, but it was so forgettable that the few details I can recall aren’t nearly enough to find the title with—by some Eric Whatshisface manages to write a rape into the first few chapters of one of the few female characters he introduces, and the first native woman on a planet invaded by a species whose language is completely nonsensical when Eric translates it into English (for some reason he thinks having three letters in a row—like “tiiirn”—can work, ever). She gets pregnant from it, and is chastised for even considering abortion by one of the Great White Masters ultra-superior demigods of the invading race—I’m not even exaggerating—because he knows her better than she does.

This Ubermensch, who is masculine, tells her, “but bleeding was never enough, was it?” Implying that she should be thankful for being raped and impregnated, or that being raped and impregnated occured because of her mystical woo-woo womanliness. Because it made her “whole.” This is near the end of the book; strewn throughout are patronising lectures about why animals are not people—Eric has apparently never noticed that animals do change in personality over their lifetimes, which neatly ties off his justification of women not being people either. After that, he has another female character gang-raped and stabbed to death, by the man who raped the native woman earlier (main character’s love interest, naturally). Which is like, fine, because you never develop any emotion for her; she’s evil but she’s in love with one of her rapists, so it’s just another random act of violence against women. Just more to develop male characters as evil (rapist) or as good (rapist-by-proxy by forcing you to carry a fetus to term).

And who could forget good ol’ Chuck? Bukowski, the sainted fucking classic-writer, thinks of women literally as props: they reflect on men, are there for men, to tell the reader things about men, to be used to move men’s stories along. Sexual violence and sexual exploitation is merely a way to progress the story—barely even a fucking plot point.

And Julia Serano, whose Whipping Girl definitely qualifies as fiction, albeit of the likes of Ayn Rand, and who was raised and socialized to be a man, writes this:

When I was a child, I was sexually assaulted, but not by any particular person. It was my culture that had his way with me.

And one of my best friends, who survived several rapes throughout zeir life, shivered and snorted when zie read that. “That’s not how rape happens. That’s not what rape is,” zie said, pissed off that someone who’d never been raped could ever fucking be allowed to say that kind of shit.

Then there’s this: “Trans women are raped by our own bodies.”

You can only say things like this when you don’t understand what rape is… or when you want to trivialize the suffering of those most likely to be rape victims: women who were forced to be women. Which also includes FTMs. Because by the same standard—that no FAAB person “chose” to be a woman, they had that gender role forced on them—women are raped by their bodies, too. Or, if you’re going by the standard of severe body dysmorphia (which not all transfolk have!), fat people who don’t accept themselves are raped by their bodies; people with eating disorders are raped by their bodies.

No. Rape does not occur without a perpetrator. It does not merely happen.

And how many of you have not heard this from men (or have thought this about rape)? Shere Hite, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, published accounts of men who said they wanted to be raped on pages 794-5. Here is one example:

I have not been raped by a woman yet, unfortunately. But I am patiently waiting for such a moment because it would make me feel sexual if I caused a woman to attack me out of lustful desire. Female motorcycle gangs seem to fascinate me. If I were in a large city where female gangs existed I would like to flaunt myself in hope of being raped. I have not sexually attacked a woman and never plan to.

I chose to display that one specifically because it’s so difficult to justify it as “just a fantasy.” He clearly believes that rape would be a sexual action, and far beyond the idea that men can’t be raped because they “want it” all the time, it’s actually very telling in terms of what men believe about rape victims. That rape is sexually pleasurable; that you are “begging” for rape if you “flaunt” yourself (as defined by what could possibly turn men on—which, as far as I can tell, is basically anything); and that rape is caused by sexual desire for someone, instead of an inability or unwillingness to understand that no one owes anyone the use of their body, whether for gestation or experimentation or orgasm.

George Carlin, whose death I am not particularly saddened by, thought that anything was funny—even rape. Rape just needed the right target to be funny, like an old man. Of course, George Carlin wasn’t raped; it could be funny to him because he never had any reason to know what rape actually was.

Then, of course, there’s the fucked-up shit that went on with PennyArcade. Recap: two white men made a rape joke. Rape survivors thought this was inappropriate and callous and said so. The two white men complained about censorship—which is quite an interesting claim when you are actively behaving in a way that will silence already oppressed people—and along with more white boys, but not only white boys, commenced the twisting of the knife to show how badass they were. Also cue one hundred bazillion dudebros and dudebro-identified women mansplaining why the joke wasn’t about rape, it just used rape as a way to make the joke funny. Yadda yadda, the survivors got death threats and rape threats—but threats and silencing only started mattering once the two white men got ’em. Then it was all like “hey yo, truce man, back off” and everyone forgot about it except for the survivors who now irrevocably knew they were not safe or supported within their community.

And Palaverer believes that rape does not matter when it happens to women when zie says:

[T]he abuse transgender individuals suffer…is, statistically, far, far higher than what women collectively suffer.

Because those who identify themselves as transgender make up, at best, 10% of the population; those raised to be women make up 51%, of which every one out of three will be raped, sometimes more than once. Not even if every single transgender individual was raped would that statistic hold any kind of water. The only way you can claim that is if you do not believe rape—a violation overwhelmingly directed at female-bodied people, and even more overwhelmingly young female-bodied people, and even more overwhelmingly young lesbians—is as bad when it happens to women.

When Julian Assange was arrested for rape—several months after the reports were filed, just in case Swedish women didn’t understand that their country hates them—Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann deliberately and intentionally lied to discredit the women accusing him and the validity of their charges. Assange’s own lawyer lied and said that he was being charged with having sex without a condom, which is a crime in Sweden (except, not); that he was charged with “sex by surprise”—which is, you know, rape, because if someone doesn’t consent then you’re raping them.

Assange’s lawyer made fucking rape jokes on TV; Assange claimed that he was being personally persecuted and oppressed by “the Saudi Arabia of feminism.” And yet I am still expected to be “reasonable,” to not necessarily believe that he is a rapist, when he has shown every indicator—masculine outrage, a fondness for rape culture, a putrid contempt for women’s concerns and wishes, and hatred of feminism—of being a rapist.

Men fictionalize rape in ways that do not even begin to grasp at women’s experience, or in ways that specifically reject women’s experience as ridiculous in favor of what a man thinks rape should be. Men speak casually about rape because they don’t understand it: they may use it to refer to something horrible, but the vast majority of the time they trivialize the experience of rape by stereotyping why it is horrible for women. And honestly, it’s almost worse.

Oh yeah, rape is horrible ’cause, like, you can get pregnant. ‘Cause you’re not a virgin anymore—you’re dirty and used up and since women are objects, not people, nobody will want to buy you from the store and you’ll end up getting put on the discount rack to be bought by some cheapass uncle for his nephew that he doesn’t really care about. ‘Cause you feel like you cheated on your owner husband/boyfriend/predestined Mormon Vampire Soulmate. ‘Cause you can get a VD. ‘Cause you can have, like, physical discomfort (getting torn up).

Look at those reasons. Look for the pattern within those reasons. They’re shallow, sure; they’re fucking awful. But there are two common threads within male socialization of rape culture on Why Rape Is Kinda Sucky For Girls. Do you see ’em yet? Secret fucking eye, c’mon now.

All those reasons revolve around one of two things:

1. Men.
2. Physical pain or inconvenience.

And that doesn’t even begin to cover it.

III. Rape as an Experience

I speak as a survivor of rape.

When I was raped at the age of eighteen, by a man in his thirties who had informally expressed interest in hiring me, I barely registered what was happening. Sometimes I think that the realization of what was going on would have been so intensely painful that my mind refused to acknowledge it; I dissociated automatically, instinctively. I can still barely remember it, the same way I can barely remember my worst panic attacks—I get the gist of what happened, I remember a few details in an indistinct way, but I can’t dredge up anything more. I don’t want to dredge up anything more.

I remember that he had a green wall hanging and that he offered me one of those disgusting Sunkist sodas before he took my pants off. Why do I remember that? I can’t fucking remember how my body felt when he raped me, for Pele’s sake; I just went completely numb, like I wasn’t really there.

I got dressed and went home and he contacted me again for a second interview, which I went to, of course. He told me he didn’t think I’d be a good fit and gave me his private cell number and told me to call him if I “ever wanted to meet up again.” I don’t even know what I thought about it at the time or what I did with it, but two years later I found it in my closet and gave myself a thick scar on my right wrist; I lit it on fire with a lighter and set it on the back of my wrist and kept relighting it, letting it smolder out against my skin.

I thought I was fine. When I figured out that I’d been raped, I felt almost relieved—like, I was one of the strong ones; I didn’t want to curl up bawling in the shower, the way men write rape victims on Law & Order SVU. But at the same time that fucked me up—the idea of rape victims, I mean—’cause I never really recognized on any kind of deeper level that it was rape, and that it fucked me up really bad. I just thought that because I wasn’t one of those victims, that it didn’t really mean anything for me—sure, it was technically rape, but it clearly wasn’t real rape because I didn’t completely fall apart, you know?

It took me four years to figure out that the little terrors—my inability to cope with being watched while eating or drinking, my incessant urge to start stripping off layers of my skin, my need to purify something from my body (hair, lip skin, fingernails, toenails, dandruff, hangnails, skin tabs, pimples)—were actually symptoms of PTSD. The ways my mother had abused me had been so thorough and desensitizing that I had trouble noticing that I was upset, panicky, anxious, triggered, that a lump was forming in my throat, that the urges I felt weren’t just urges. I’d long before dissociated emotionally; by that point I was almost completely incapable of recognizing that I felt anything except “fine” and “bouncy” and “angry,” let alone being able to name or explain the sensations. I thought I was strong; I was just fucked up.

Even now I can’t even go around one of those stores without getting the nerves; I all of a sudden just get antsy. I bite my nails until they bleed; I pull out hair by the roots and pick out dandruff until my scalp bleeds; I run my hands over my upper arms and neck, looking for something to grab at, scrape out or off. If you saw me doing it you’d think I was just jumpy; I act the same way abused dogs do when they get anxious or triggered. A lot of erratic movements and watchfulness, a lot of wary edginess.

But even that doesn’t provide any kind of glimpse into what my life became. I became a raw nerve: seemingly random shit triggered me and after I got triggered once, it would last for days or more and then everything would trigger me.

And now I need to stop and explain something.

When rape survivors speak of being “triggered,” we aren’t talking about being upset or angry or depressed or anxious or offended. To even begin to grasp what being triggered means, you need to understand what rape does to you: it destroys your protection, the line between “you” and other people, the silhouette that distinguishes within from without.

You can picture it more vividly by using one of Aslan’s metaphors: take a human being and peel it like a banana.

Skin is symbolic to a human, in a lot the same way that claws are to a cat: protection, security, safety, identity. It holds you together—makes you distinct from the rest of the world. Andrea Dworkin wrote specifically of the preoccupation of male writers with skinning as a part of sex in Intercourse. They thought it made you more intimate, unable to hide, completely open to your lover; they’d also never been raped.

Being triggered is the sudden overwhelming recognition that you have no skin. It’s not that you’re naked. You have no skin. You have no protection from anything; you are not you; you are not anything except horrible fucking roiling pain and terror and horror. Cut yourself with a knife and pour lemon juice and pat garlic on the wound and that sensation is your entire body and soul.

You become suddenly and unavoidably aware of how shamefully vulnerable—at risk, in danger, threatened—your body is, and you could almost feel pity for the pathetic, defenseless thing except that it’s the thing allowing the rest of you to be threatened, too. You want to scratch your skin off, you want to destroy your body—you want to get the fuck away from this trap that’s so transparent and weak. Your body is a trap that forces your mind into a constant, stinging contact with the world, and there are times when you feel like you’re literally going out of your mind; you’re breaking out of your skin and you contemplate suicide just to free yourself from your body, because through the interface of your raped body the entire world is just one overwhelming violation.

It’s not romantic. Men have a tendency to believe that vulnerability is romantic, sexy, intimate. People who’ve been trained to get off with BDSM tend to do the same thing—to glorify danger, being at risk, being helpless. But this is something entirely different from the vulnerability they adore: in sex, there’s no risk involved because you are sharing, not having something taken from you. Feeling as though everyone can see inside you—that you’re transparent—and knowing that they see something ugly and painful and horrific because that’s what it feels like inside you—is not sexy, not romantic, not hot, not intimate.

And at first I was oblivious—barely, in the way that you kind-of sort-of know but not really—that I felt this way. I’d go through entire weeks feeling vaguely on-edge in a way I couldn’t place, uneasy—not wanting to be bothered but not wanting to be left alone—and I’d stay inside all the time because it felt like everyone was watching me. Not that they were; I just had the unshakable conviction that there was something horribly fucking wrong about me and that everyone else in the world could see it. And I wanted to deal with my pain on my own—I was never comfortable with sharing my feelings with my parents; my father traveled and my mother always managed to make me end up feeling humiliated and inferior for ever feeling anything except “fine.” I’d learned by the time I was six or seven never to confide in her. So feeling skinless—see-through, unprotected, unsafe, insecure—reinforced the idea that sharing any negative feelings with other people would inevitably end up making me feel worse than I’d started out.

I never admitted it to anyone, except my best friend and roommate, Aslan, and then it took so long because zie’d been so horrifically fucking abused that I thought claiming rape would be pretentious—I clearly didn’t suffer like zie did. This is the first time I’ve written about it in detail, ever. It hasn’t gotten better with time; I’ve just learned better tricks, ones where I can ignore a minor trigger in a way that makes it not bother me.

The physical sensations are often the most minor part of rape, especially in the face of emotional turmoil so intense that it actually manifests as physical agony; more than once I’ve woken up in the middle of the night because my entire body was cramping from the tension. It is a peculiar sensation, feeling like it hurts just to be inside your head. It is even more peculiar to be waiting for the crosswalk to turn and suddenly you find yourself seriously considering stepping out in front of a passing car, automatically making calculations on which car will be able to best kill you based on its speed and size. Looking around to make sure no one’s watching you, because you feel like everyone is constantly looking at you, consuming you because you haven’t got any kind of distinguishing line between you and the rest of the world. Punching the wall to make yourself feel the pain because it gives you something to center on and ignore the way your nerves jangle in warning and alarm.

But that’s not what men are taught about rape.

It’s a lot harder to say the things that men are allowed to if you know what rape is: after all, you’re a target.

A Ranty Post About Dairy

The pro-forced birth ideology is one of the reasons I’ve come to the conclusion that men learned to rape from farming animals. Because the basic concept of “forced breeding” is one of machinery and alienation; fundamentally, it doesn’t matter what your property thinks or feels about it, because the goal is merely to produce more property to be owned and also exploited—unless they are in the owner class, which women, children and animals are (naturally) automatically excluded from.

Remember that if you say, “it’s wrong to treat women like animals,” you’re missing the point. It was wrong to treat animals like that in the first place; ignoring that fundamental wrongness allowed it to be done to women, too. It’s pretty easy to expand a category of inferiors, after all—the trick is to make sure there is no category of inferiors to expand.

I used to believe that being pro-forced birth was merely believing in rape by proxy—raping a woman, taking over a female person’s body against her will, by way of a fetus. At the time I wasn’t yet vegan, and couldn’t understand the nuances of what I was saying; now I can. In a sense, it’s still basically true: you’re reducing a female person to a machine, to property, by affirming that using her body to produce more property—children, whether of owner/property-manager or property class—is more important than anything else she could do with her life, like, for example, actually living it without being subjugated as an incubator.

In short, rape objectifies you by reducing you to a thing to be used (property); forced birth reduces you to a thing to be used (property). Who is doing the using doesn’t really matter; the fetus is still going to be property if/when it actually becomes a sentient being—a baby—and a fetus isn’t exactly forcing itself on anyone. It has no thoughts or feelings—the entire point of gestation is getting a fetus to a point where it is developed enough to have thoughts and feelings—and thus it can’t really force itself on anything. It’s still the people around you, stewing in the putrid sewage of a misogynistic society, who are forcing a fetus on a woman, and don’t you ever forget it.

Without having the inferior property status of her body enforced upon her, she’d have her uterus contracting firmly in a jiffy, and the fetus wouldn’t be much more than menstruation. It would happen, because that is what women have always done.

Always.

The concept of someone’s body being property should horrify anyone; I still can’t quite figure out why it doesn’t. The life of a dairy cow bears an unhappy resemblance to the life forced upon women, by socialization, by culture, by capitalism and men: you are impregnated as soon as possible, for money; you are used to produce more children (caged and slaughtered for veal or caged and impregnated), for money; you are used up, for money. And when you aren’t “good” at producing things for your owner anymore, you are dealt with. For as much money as he can milk from your corpse.

That was a mild description. Do you really need to hear that dairy farmers are basically entirely men to realize what’s wrong with it? Do you really need to know that the dairy farmers themselves gave a nickname to the artificial insemination stands where the cows are restrained, calling them “the rape racks”? Do you really need to hear a dairy cow yowl herself hoarse after they take away her calf a few hours after birth—the best to collect the colostrum, now a new “health supplement” product—to understand how that’s fucked up?

And do you really need to have the lines drawn to understand that property is property, and that exploitation doesn’t become acceptable when it’s directed towards a different target?

Carnism has more implications for women, not merely on the stage of justification—because, as you should know, women’s exploitation has always been rationalized on the basis that they were “like animals”; I am still surprised that feminists have not yet cottoned to the fact that, since men were so wrong about the women they wanted to use, they are also quite likely wrong about the animals they used as a comparison.

There’s more nuance than that; over and over, women end up being destroyed by their participation in capitalism, civilization, racism, ageism and carnism, because all oppressions reinforce each other. It’s just that the link from dairy to women’s bodily autonomy is more direct and distinct because of several things:

1. Dairy contains the more potent animal estrogens (as opposed to phytoestrogens, which are much weaker); the age of menarche and puberty has dropped in tandem with the rise in dairy consumption. FAABs of color are more likely to begin puberty earlier; they are also vastly more likely to have been enrolled in WIC, which is heavily reliant on shoveling subsidized dairy products out of the market (and which only in the past five years included soy formula, thanks).

High levels of estrogen—especially from dairy, which, again, is from pregnant and nursing mothers—are also linked to a longer period of fertility, as many as seven extra years from menarche to menopause. More time to get pregnant and fucked over.

Did I mention that dairy can also increase your chances of having twins which, aside from being incredibly dangerous to the mother, is also fraught with peril for the children and somehow more than twice as tiring for any mother? This has been in the news several times in the past few years; it’s not exactly hidden knowledge.

2. Dairy sabotages herbal abortion methods.

I’ve worked with herbalists over the past several years of my life and, aside from being incredible people, they are also very willing to change the way they think based on how their patients do with different treatments. Three of them assisted abortion regularly, especially for low-income youth; all of them affirmed that herbal abortions were more likely to be successful the fewer animal products were consumed, with no reduction in benefit as consumption went lower; all of them said that a mixture of herbs and activities were best; and two of them were so alarmed by what dairy did to their patients that they refused to assist anyone who wouldn’t give it up for at least six weeks so the abortion could work properly.

And this is why: most abortive herbs, combined with dairy, will wreck your kidneys.

Angelica root (1/2 tsp. as a tea twice a day with 2 tsp. tansy or 1 tsp. black cohosh as teas every two and a half hours) turns into an incredible poison when mixed with dairy. It produces, at best, violent nausea; without dairy it works well.

Pennyroyal (1 tsp. as a tea three times a day with black or blue cohosh 1/2 tsp. as teas three times a day) also produces the nausea, but sometimes causes tingling in the extremities as well. It doesn’t do this with dairy.

Ginger, a well-known, mild abortifacient and contraceptive in large, consistent quantities (as a raw juice mixed with orange or papaya juice, chopped raw taken like pills, freshly powdered, in food, constantly, about 1.5 tablespoons three to six times a day.) loses its effectiveness when combined with dairy. It doesn’t become poisonous; it just becomes useless.

Slippery elm, too (1 tsp. as a tea twice a day with any of the above, with cedarwood essential oil rubbed firmly in a specifically downward motion just below the bellybutton to the mons) becomes completely ineffective.*

All the time, every time, even the most minor intake of dairy will fuck up the chances an herbal abortion will work. I like to say this is because dairy is evil and the cow is cursing you for perpetuating her pain, but only to people who really piss me off.

Carnism fucks up women; it fucks up your ability to control your own body and you can only be carnist by fucking up someone else’s ability to control theirs. Abortion is a necessity for women, and always has been; women have always had abortions and basically always will, unless or until we can make it so that no one ever has PIV unless they really really want to get pregnant. Abortion is a necessity not because it is a special thing needed to make sure women are equal to men, but because it is a basic right not to have your body used against your will—not a human right.

*I’ll make a more lengthy post about nonmedical abortion methods later.

Vanilla is Really Tasty (especially when you haven’t got that nasty porn taste in your mouth)

Here’s the list of “vanilla privilege.” What can I say, I got bored and irritated.

* A vanilla person does not have to fear that discovery of their being vanilla will have an effect on their work life.

Wait. What do you mean by “discovery”? It’s generally a good idea to keep your sex life out of work, especially because your coworkers do not appreciate it, but you can be “vanilla” and in a same-sex relationship—or does that magically count as “non-vanilla”?

* A vanilla person usually does not have to worry about the potential legal implications of sex in the manner they prefer with a consenting adult partner.
* A vanilla person does not have to worry about their being vanilla as having bearing on whether they are considered fit to be parents.

I’m fairly sure there aren’t any legal implications other than losing your children when you’re “non-vanilla,” at least in the U.S. But it’s pretty hard to argue that Peacock Angel is speaking to non-Western countries, since the idea of “kink oppression homigosh” is basically a non-issue when you’re not a privileged brat. Also notice the erasure of intimate same-sex or polyamorous relationships that do not include power dynamics, porn, or kink.

* A vanilla person doesn’t have to worry about their being vanilla being thought of as diseased or pathological.

Oh, yeah—you know, I never get thought of as repressed or uptight or a religious zealot or that I’m somehow just hiding some terrible fetish and pretending to be egalitarian. And I never get told this to my face, either, the same way lesbians never get told that there’s something wrong with them for not wanting to fuck men.

* A vanilla person will have an easier time finding depictions of people with sex lives similar to their own in the media.

Wheeeee no.

Anyone who takes this seriously is disconnected from reality; just for a start, “vanilla” sex is predicated upon a power dynamic of a passive partner and an aggressive one—a “man” and a “woman.” The “traditional” idea of sex—as a heterosexual, monogamously married relationship consisting mostly of missionary PIV and maybe you can talk her into licking your stick—is rife with power dynamics, and inherently not “vanilla” at all. It’s simply beyond me how anyone with an introduction to privilege-dynamics can refer to “vanilla” sex as somehow fundamentally different from what’s defined as “kinky.” Porn makes you incapable of thinking, I guess.

But even more than that, nooot really. Gather together 100 depictions of a sexual relationship from recent television shows and 100% of it will be power dynamics. If you go for references to sex from recent television shows (between adults, not children), you’re likely to find that about 75% of them can refer to “kinky” sex.

And again, because “vanilla” sex isn’t by any means egalitarian or non-pornified, I can’t find any depictions of people with sex lives similar to my own. I’m more fucking oppressed than you!

* A vanilla person will not have their sexual orientation called into question due to their sexual practices.

That’s pretty funny, because the fact is that Peacock Angel doesn’t seem to allow for “vanilla” gays and lesbians or triads. Zie doesn’t seem to be aware that zie is, therefore, questioning the sexuality of “vanilla” gays and lesbians because of their sexual practices.

* A vanilla person will have comparably easy access to reliable dealing with safety surrounding their sexual practices.

Oh, right. Because, you know, there’s so much correct information on the proper use of condoms and dental dams out there, as well as how to use them how to have sex e.g. proper stretching practices, not to mention the plethora of materials surrounding consent that are taught to you from a very young age. And not to mention access to STD protection, contraceptives, and abortion!

I live in a motherfucking utopia. Thank you for showing me the fucking light.

* A vanilla person seeking medical attention due to an accident that occurred during sex will not face scrutiny or be treated unsympathetically because of the nature of the vanilla nature of their sexual activity.

You know it! Women of any age never face scrutiny and unsympathetic medical staff when they have to resolve problems from their “vanilla” sex life.

* Vanilla is not used as a pejorative.

Okay, this one is absolutely true. The mainstream culture, which is in love with “vanilla” misogynistic power dynamics, never uses “vanilla” to mean that you have some kind of mental or personal flaw. No one is ever pressured into having sex they don’t want to have by being told they’re too “vanilla” as if it implies those same mental and personal flaws.

Heck, vanilla is so not used as a pejorative that Peacock Angel is actually using it to refer to real vanilla! All you folks who thought zie was defining you out of existence were simply imagining things.

VANILLA BEANS! HOORAY!

* A vanilla person will not be assumed to be a sexual predator because of their vanilla sexual practices, nor will language used to refer to vanilla people as a group be used to describe rapists and perpetrators.

… ? Besides the language that the kinksters adopted for themselves (sadist, slave, etc.), there’s not much that you can say is used against kinksters that’s also used against rapists. And perpetrators of what, exactly? Power dynamics?

Anyway, I can’t imagine why anyone would attribute sexual predatoriness to someone who finds domination and power erotic. After all, rape isn’t about power and domination at all; they’ve got nothing to do with each other.

* A vanilla person will have an easy time finding media that portrays people with their sexual preferences sympathetically and accurately.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHA

HA

ARGH.

(P.S. The Department of Redundancy Department called; they said they’d like to see if you could come in for a job interview so that they can see about giving you a job to work at for your career.)

* Vanilla people will never have their sexual practices used for shock value.

???

“Vanilla” power dynamics, including groping, sexual harassment, and boys-will-be-boys exploitativeness: not used for shock value.
Egalitarian lesbian, het and gay sex (poly optional): not used for shock value.

… Um, alright. How do I get a ticket to the dimension Peacock Angel is living in?

* A vanilla person does not have to worry about outsiders perceiving their relationship as abusive or pathological.

Hahahaha. Yeah. Having egalitarian sex isn’t weird at all.

Obviously, to correct this we need to acknowledge the truth: that “vanilla” sex is abusive and pathological, too. Then we can have actual, interesting, non-pornified sex where our fantasies aren’t fed to us from a male- and white-privileged hegemony.

* Safe spaces for vanilla courtship and socializing are not privilege to legal harassment in the way BDSM clubs are.

Exactly! Those safe spaces for “vanilla” courtship and socializing have to be kept free for sexual harassment.

* A vanilla person will not have their being vanilla brought up during a rape investigation (either as accuser or accused)

OH SHIT I THINK I JUST PEED MYSELF LAUGHING.

C’mon, Peacock Angel. Cough it up. How do I travel to the world you’re living in? Because seriously, I want to live there instead. I have social-ideology incongruity and I need to transition but hard.

* Vanilla people can assume their relationship partners will not find their sexual arousal pattern disgusting.

Someone’s never read The Hite Report or The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, I see. Or seen or heard the thousands of casual or joking jabs about how women are just so hard to bring to orgasm, or how it’s disgusting to go down on someone’s vulva, etc. etc. etc.

For a kinkster, Peacock Angel sure is awful sheltered.

* A vanilla person will not fear their sexual practices counting against them in a divorce.

Again, sheltered. When you speak in absolutes, you better be damn sure of them. Either people who are “vanilla” are not mainstream—they actually constitute a small minority—and Peacock Angel has just decided that they’re not kinky enough, or Peacock Angel doesn’t know jack shit about the world, or the definition of “vanilla” is absolutely incoherent.

If you checked D) All of the above, here’s an internet cookie. Nibble on it with joy.

* A vanilla person will not be asked about the origins of their sexual arousal pattern, or have it assumed their sexual arousal pattern stems from trauma or disease.

Again with the LGBTAP erasure: apparently you’re just not allowed to define yourself as non-kinky if you’re not the 1% of the world that’s in a heterosexual monogamous marriage completely devoid of anything but missionary-style PIV and of whom both partners were virgins when they got married.

Just, I… this is really incoherent.

* A vanilla person will not have to worry much about their roommate discovering their vanilla-ness.

Yes; everyone knows that it’s a perfectly comfortable situation for your roommate to know details about your sex life as long as you’re “vanilla.”

For which you apparently do not have to be married, even, meaning that a good fourth of this list doesn’t even apply to any of the people Peacock Angel considers “vanilla.”

* A vanilla person’s actions will not be attributed to their being vanilla. (Many people link people’s bad actions to their kinkiness, “Well of course he’s a thief, he’s kinky”)

Yeah, that never happens to “vanilla” peeps… I’ve never heard of any case where a young woman’s actions were attributed to the fact that she wasn’t a virgin or anything. Or promiscuity being attributed to gay men and bisexuals. Or a hatred for men attributed to lesbians.

* Symbols of vanilla affection/romance will not be appropriated as “edgy” fashion statements (E.G. collars)

Exactly, they’ll just be appropriated as non-edgy fashion! Now everyone can “enjoy” patriarchal power dynamics! Because it’s not like we’re not forced into it anyway!

P.S.: Any community that tolerates a subset labeling itself as and eroticising/glorifying slavery has exactly 0.000% of the room in the world to talk about “appropriation.” Seriously, Peacock Angel even identifies zemself as a dominatrix—like that hasn’t been used as a tool of oppression.

* Discovery of equipment associated with vanilla sexual practices, provided they are otherwise privileged (condoms, lubricant, even a vibrator) although embarrassing will not result people’s drastically changing their opinion of the person in question.

Um, exactly what the fuck are you talki—oh, right. Sorry, for a minute there I forgot that Peacock Angel is actually living in an alternate dimension, where this is not complete bullshit and a painful mockery of reality, particularly in countries where the female-born sex class have little to no hope of being able to attain the kind of “oppression” Peacock Angel is talking about. Carry on.

* A vanilla person will not have their masculinity/femininity called into question because of their dominance/submission in bed (I.E. A woman who enjoys being sexually dominant may be called unfeminine, or a man who enjoys being sexually submissive may be called unmasculine)

Of course not. They’ll have their masculinity/femininity called into question because of their lack of dominance/submission in real life! No doy, you stupid radscum fauxminists.

(Extra credit: why is being “unfeminine” or “unmasculine” to someone without power over you a bad thing?)

* The discovery of a famous person having vanilla sex (provided it is within the other realms of privileged sex, monogamous, heterosexual, etc) will not be considered news worthy.

…

* A vanilla person’s sex related equipment (E.G. Condoms, lubricant, dental dams) will be regulated by government agencies and tested thoroughly for efficacy and safety.

Yeah, exactly! Everyone knows that condoms, lubricant and dental dams aren’t, like, actually necessary to have any kind of healthy and non-reproductive sexual activity, “vanilla” or not. It’s not like they could jeopardize anyone’s life or health if they’re defective, after all! Those things are “sex-related equipment” in exactly the same way that bondage gear and restraints are for the kinksters! It’s not like condoms, lubricant and dental dams are basic STD and contraceptive protection and kinky “sex-related equipment” is restricted to people with the class privilege to buy them! All types of sexual activity are equal, dammit! Peacock Angel and the other kinksters deserve floggers as a basic right on par with minimum safe-sex materials!

Oh man, this is so exciting. Peacock Angel is all over there like GET UP STAND UP STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS to perpetuate a patriarchal sexuality that eroticises power, pain and dominance. ROCK ON!

* Vanilla people can find numerous studies relating to their sexuality and sexual desire from the scientific community that do not treat them as marginal or pathological.

Hahahahaha. Okay. So what’s the punchline?

* A vanilla person can count on the media to usually get the symbols associated with their relationships generally right (Here’s an example of the media getting it wrong, dominants generally don’t wear collars)

Oh my gosh, someone somewhere depicted a dominant wearing a collar! THAT’S LIKE BLACKFACE, GUIZE.

* There is accurate medical research on the effects of vanilla sex upon the human body, kinky people are left with scraps here and there and anecdotal evidence. We still don’t know if it’s safe to flog breasts.

Yeah, you know, they even tested water on animals. Freakin’ water, I’m not even kidding, even though we already knew the effects of water on an animal body. I know, right? Hilarious, or something. Vivisectionists will use any excuse to torture animals to death for grant money.

Huh? What? Oh. Alright, define “safe.” Free of power dynamics? Free of patriarchal imagery? Free of discomfort and pain? Free of a culture that sees violence and force as erotic?

* A vanilla person will not worry about how their vanilla-ness reflect upon their gender, sex, sexuality, age group, etc etc etc.

Sheltered.

* A person’s political beliefs will not be called into question due to their being vanilla. (For example, a heterosexual man who identifies as a feminist and acts as a good feminist but is sexually dominant may be told he is a bad feminist for enjoying a dominant role during sex, same for a heterosexual female submissive, or a sexually dominant woman may be called an angry feminist due to her preference for a dominant role during sex)

What? Wow, sheltered. Apparently Peacock Angel has never encountered politics in regards to LGBTA before.

* A vanilla person will have an easy time finding a counsellor who understands and is sympathetic towards their vanilla sexual practices.

A… counselor? Like, a therapist? A psychologist? A grief counselor? A hypnotist? A school career counselor? Or just “a counselor”? Is this one of those things that exists only in Peacock Angel’s dimension?

* Vanilla-ness is not vilified or exotified by the media (For exotification/vilification of the kink community check out basically any CSI/Bones/Law and Order type show with an episode that deals with kink, or numerous episodes of shows like 1000 Ways To Die)

Well, yeah, that’s true. Heterosexist power dynamics within relationships, and especially within sexual relationships, are just treated like they’re a requirement for a normal sexual life. It’s actually really depressing. Zie’s finally gotten one right.

* A vanilla person can remain ignorant of terms involved in BDSM.

And apparently a kinkster can do an entire list on “vanilla” privilege without ever being able to define what “vanilla” is in a way that doesn’t erase LGBTAP people or contradict zeir own point—either by proving that the population of “vanilla” people is actually close to nonexistent. Or being so consistently incoherent that zie actually proves that the idea of “vanilla privilege” is actually just a dog-whistle phrase with moveable goalposts for kinksters to play around with and pretend they’re oppressed.

* A vanilla person will not be assumed to be sexually experienced because of their vanilla-ness.

Seriously, what does this even mean?

* Vanilla is not taken to mean sexually available.

That only makes sense if you actually define “vanilla” to mean things that specifically are not taken to mean sexually available. (Also, I guess you’re not “vanilla” if you’re single. Eh?)

* A vanilla person can go their entire life without being called vanilla.

Yeah, in countries where they don’t have the word “vanilla” and cult compounds. Just, what is this I don’t even—

* As always, most importantly, a vanilla person can ignore their vanilla privilege.

Translation: if you can clearly see that I am full of shit and that the world does not work the way I think it does, YOU’RE PRIVILEGED!

No “Yes” Means No

There are few problems with the phrase No Means No—particularly in comparison to the admirable, but inefficient and naively optimistic Yes Means Yes. But one of those problems is the resulting idea that anything but “no” does not mean “no.” On Elkballet, MRA beliefs about rape were collected and analyzed, which I find especially useful because MRA beliefs about rape tend not to be very different from the general population—they’re just unwilling to rethink rape culture and very angry that anyone would ever have asked them to, so it’s like having a glimpse into concentrated rape culture.

One of those beliefs was this: “So the problem is not that the girl consents, she never consents—she just somehow omits to say no.”

Consent is default; women’s bodies are there to be used sexually, so if a woman somehow doesn’t want to have sex (lying whore! tease!), she’s required to actually make an effort to say no. Which is… really bizarre. It’s basically just the equivalent of saying that women aren’t allowed to say they’ve been raped unless they’ve given the guy fair warning; it’s like, totally unfair that she’d just spring this on him when she didn’t even say no or anything. Doesn’t she know how sex works? It’s supposed to be this boring, unimaginative thing where a guy gets on top and whacks off in her vagina; everyone knows that gender roles are natural and PIV = sex. Gosh, girls are so silly.

I’ve been pissed off about this for a while, especially since I’ve had to live through the supposedly “empowered” women who actually believe that power dynamics are hot and PIV/penetration = sex, not just their be-penised counterparts. But every time I say that you need a yes for it to be consentual, some sex pox pro-porner comes up and does this:

“But *whine* my sex partner and I *whine* feel like actually checking for consent isn’t, like, sexy *whine* and that it makes it like, less spontaneous *whine* and our relationship is perfect ’cause we respect each other’s boundaries even though we don’t actually care to make sure of those boundaries *whine* so why can’t you like, just shut up and not say it for the benefit of women who might actually need it *whine* instead of making me act like the adult I say I am and self-select out?”

No, seriously. I consistently get this. And to that fuckhead who is waiting in the shadows of the internet, ready to pounce in for a whinefest of how you’re such a fucking special snowflake that no one should ever actually talk about or believe in consent because it makes you feel left out, go fuck yourself.

Because, seriously, if it’s such a terrible thing to be a rapist, then isn’t the onus on you to make sure you’re not raping anyone than on your potential victims to keep you from raping? What the hell kind of logic is that? “Well, he didn’t tell me not to murder him and use his wood-chippered corpse to grow tomatoes in Lierre Keith’s backyard.”

Come the fuck on, people; surely you have the sense of tiny unripe sweet potatoes.

Look at it this way: you are passing out cups of soda at your party. You know, because a psychic told you or because you saw your cousin spill bleach on them or there’s a recall in China or whatever, that one or more of the plastic cups could possibly poison the person who drinks out of them. But either way, there is a chance that this person will fall down, convulse, foam at the mouth, and die a horrible fucking death. And it will be your fault.

Are you seriously telling me that you wouldn’t go out of your way to make sure the people at this party are safe? Are you fucking shitting me? You would rather be a rapist/murderer than make very very sure that you are not responsible for destroying someone else’s life?

Because if you’d rather, then you shouldn’t be having sex or passing out cups at a party. You are too fucking dangerous; you are too self-absorbed, and are too absorbed in “getting yours” to think about what you might do to other people. Don’t have sex, ever. Oh, and you got “falsely” accused of rape by someone who you didn’t get a direct, verbal “yes” from? Cry me a river, build me a bridge… and jump off of it, you fucking rapist.

Because No “Yes” Means No, and Only Yes Means Yes.

Trans Misogyny

Only one kind of “trans misogyny” exists: misogyny encouraged and perpetrated by trans individuals and the trans community, of which many infuriating examples may be seen here.

Those who bother to understand gender theory, and who are not misogynistic gender essentialists who believe that a gender role is something inborn but something socialized, understand this. When an MTF is attacked for daring to break the rules of the gendered world, it is not an act of terrorism just against trans individuals; it’s an act of terrorism against all women, everywhere.

Trans individuals do not suffer some super-special form of trans oppression: they suffer from gendered oppression.

You know, as in being forced into a gender role from birth; as in being forced and expected to take on a fucking mass-produced personality that never allows you to express who you are, ever, because if you fail, if you trip and fall and show that you’re actually a real fucking person instead of a jendah—if women do not live up to those expectations, they face a very real threat of violence.

Physical violence. Emotional violence. Sexual violence. Economic violence.

Radical feminist women are not cis-anything, and if anyone trans actually bothered to read their real fucking words, they’d know why: radical feminists do not “feel” like women. They were forced to be women. They were forced to be a non-person, because of how their genitals looked when they were born. And radical feminists recognize this and explicitly reject the idea that a feminine mask—or a masculine one, for that matter—is natural and can, or should, be assigned based on your biological sex, no matter how long its hair or how pretty the dress.

There is nothing happy or privileged about being forced into a fake persona, a stereotype that confines you and prevents you from being who you really are: a person.

I would have liked to think that trans individuals and the trans community—given that the basis of trans rights is, after all, the idea that you shouldn’t be forced into a gender role you don’t fucking identify with!—but sadly, I’d be wrong to do so. The trans community seems hellbent on the idea that women somehow benefit by being forced into a gender role from birth, let alone the gender role that is on the oppressed side of the dichotomy.

Somehow, what’s oppressive to trans individuals actually ends up being a privilege when it comes to women who were forced to be women, who didn’t choose it, and who are fucking fighting the idea that any person should be gendered instead of merely being allowed to be a person.

Somehow, when trans women are attacked for not being gendered well enough, it’s a trans-specific crime. Because clearly, women are never attacked for being “too masculine;” they’re never raped or assaulted for being lesbians, or just for not slavishly devoting themselves to “empowering” themselves with the dick of every man who even thinks about fucking them. Because, clearly, when a trans woman is attacked, it’s not a gendered crime anymore, even though it’s all about gender—transition, passing, gender coaching, and internal identity—because it happens to a trans individual. Like women don’t know that would happen to them, too. Like women don’t fucking know that the wages of disobedience to the gender dichotomy and the sexual hierarchy are violence, rape, servitude and death.

Somehow—to use a veganized turn of phrase—what’s sauce for the parsnip isn’t sauce for the potato.

And somehow, when trans individuals claim that their oppression is a special kind of oppression that isn’t oppression if it’s forced on people born into a female body, I’m not supposed to make the connection between this argument and the ages-old misogynistic argument. I’m not supposed to be irresistably reminded of men arguing that rape isn’t as bad for women as men because the rapes women will endure are too much like everyday sex to really be rape-rape; arguing that it’s fine for women to be emasculated—to be disempowered and disenfranchised—because they’re, like, not men; arguing that it’s fine for women to be treated in ways that are atrocious for men to be treated—because men and women are different. I’m not supposed to think of Ili, one of my friends who’s an FTM, who was told that he was a feminist because he hadn’t started taking T yet and still had a “woman brain.”

I’m not supposed to see the connection from that to humans and animals, the way that an atrocity against humans is somehow no longer horrifying or atrocious when perpetrated against animals… or remember the words of white supremecists claiming that slavery was fine for Black people in a way it wasn’t for white people… or hear sizeists speak of how emotionally torturing and brutalizing people who happen to be fat is justified because there is something fundamentally inferior to having a body that is a different size…

Men, after all, are real people; women are not. And humans are real people; animals are not; whites are real people; nonwhites are not. I am not supposed to connect this; I’m not supposed to translate the vitriol directed at radical feminists and forced-to-be-and-raised-as-women as, “Trans individuals are real people; women are not.” Recognizing the patterns of oppression makes me transphobic; refusing to agree that transfolk suffer some special kind of oppression that doesn’t touch or frighten or reinforce the bonds’ of forced women and refusing to excuse transfolk when they employ victim blaming—women are just natural rape victims, didn’t you know?—I’m fucking transphobic.

Right.

This is the line. If you don’t believe that gendered oppression is worth fighting, not on the basis that there are some “real people” who want to be gendered at the opposite side, but understanding that the very assumption of gender at all in our society is the basis of your oppression, then I don’t want to be your ally. Because if you aren’t willing to fight gender—as something that boxes people regardless of how they feel and who they are—then you don’t have any interest in actually ending oppression; you just want to get yours.

So get out.

The Lessons of Pornography

So I wanted to point out the wondrous Elkballet again (I’m really digging that blog) on a particularly compelling post on the effects of porn. In large part because it’s all fucking true.

I watched porn regularly to masturbate for about two years beginning from when I was twelve. It took me more than six years after that point to really rid me of its effect enough to make an impact—of course, it didn’t help that I kept reinforcing the pornthink by repeatedly calling up the images and tropes when I was masturbating. I did this because, like Elkballet, masturbation wasn’t as fun or stimulating without it; it was years before I managed to masturbate to orgasm without using pornthink in some way.

When I first saw my boyfriend again, I found porn images would pop into my head during sex. I would have trouble being turned on, even orgasming without at least briefly calling up images I had seen. I would sometimes wish I could hop online and quickly look up images so things would go easier. Images would randomly pop into my head, without my meaning for them to. Without even realizing I had done it I developed a voyeuristic attitude towards sex. I wanted to watch him do things to himself, to me. I was even pressuring him into performing things, asking repeatedly despite him telling me it made him uncomfortable. I had stopped looking up porn, but my brain wouldn’t allow me to stop seeing it.

Check, check, check and check.

Looking back, one of the most bizarre and disturbing distortions that porn caused in my mental state was that I dissociated from my body during sex. I saw myself from outside—I saw myself having sex instead of actually being within my body, having sex. I became voyeuristic, too: sex developed into a series of actions. Me doing to my partner. My partner doing to me. As Catharine MacKinnon said—subject verb object.

There was none of the sense of sharing and being together that I now consider one of the best parts of sex; it was very mechanical and automated, though not in the way you’d typically think. Instead sex was segregated into roles—the top; the bottom; the sadist; the masochist; the dom and the sub. One was done to and one was doing to, except if the one usually done to was the one commanded to do. In case you can’t tell, I also became obsessed with BDSM; if you’re interested in it, it’s actually quite boring and you should stop and detox for a while. Forcing sex into a series of actions where one partner is passive/submissive and one partner is active/dominant stops you from ever getting to see how fucking awesome sex really is. It kept me from being able to see it for a fucking long time; I saw my partners as mechanical, too—like they were characters: they were just vehicles for the actions that were “hot,” as determined by porn—penetration, no doy.

Even when my partners persuaded me to stop being so intent on doing things and to simply relax, I couldn’t figure out what to do. Enjoying the sensation is alright, but it gets old fast. In porn, people don’t really, like, touch each other when they have sex—which is just beyond sterile; I can’t figure out why anyone would find it attractive anymore.

And you learn sex from porn; even if you don’t think you do, you do. Even if you think you already know about sex, the way you have sex will change if you start using porn. I had to go through a very painful growth period where I couldn’t figure out what to do with my hands if I wasn’t doing something to my partner.

Porn inhibited my ability to have sex with another person; I learned not to have sex with my partner, but to be preoccupied with porn. I’d say that porn was my sexuality for a good chunk of my life—that my sex life was haunted by the ideas of sexiness and hotness contained in porn, acting as a go-between for my partner and I, instead of merely allowing us to have sex.

Eventually I got over that. I’m still getting over it. But while I’ve recognized this for a while—recognized just how powerful pornography can be, and just how much it can absolutely cripple your ability to relate sexually to another human—there was another thing that made me decide to post this. I confided in one of my friends, as the post had caught her eye while she was visiting and she went ahead and read it, just how true it was and just how fucking hard ever having watched porn had made any kind of healthy sexuality for me. She replied—and has given permission to me to post about this—that she’s suffered from all of the same distortions in her own sexuality and mental state.

Except she’s never watched porn more than a handful of times, and for their comedic value at that. What caused that shit inside her head was the multiple rapes she endured as a child from grown men.

Rape taught her the same things that porn taught me: sex was penetration; one person was allowed to be active and the other person had to be passive; fear was inherently sexual; dominance was sexy; when having sex, people were really just things—objects using each other. She thought that large, painful penises or inserts were the only things that could be “sexy” and couldn’t stop herself from reducing the people around her into body parts—arms, legs, chest, stomach, butt.

Let me repeat that, more clearly: enduring repeated rapes as a child caused the same worldview changes as porn.

And now more succinctly: porn teaches the same things as rape.

For all the sex poxes may cry otherwise because they’re still having their sexualities warped and twisted by porn, I have to say, because I know better—porn is profoundly anti-sex, anti-sexuality, and just generally hateful shit. It’s much more fun over here.