theatreofsin

Call me Richard; it fits me better than Ishmael. It's not my real name, or it is depending on your definition of "real", but it's what I'll be using right here.

What you've stumbled on, been linked to, or awoken from a fugue to find yourself confronting, is a slow and mostly haphazard sifting through all the gunk at the bottom of my brain. It will be disorganized, probably redundant, certainly self-contradictory, and often uninteresting to people who aren't me.

A lot of it will be fiction, or fictionalized accounts of real events. Some of it will be farfetched enough reality that a certain segment of the population will want to think it's fiction. Some of if will be quite normal and even common experience. Some won't fall into any of these categories.

It will contain the mental equivalent of unidentifiable sludge pulled from the back of the fridge. It will contain words coughed onto the electronic page which will seem banal, pretentious, or laughable in a calmer mood. It will contain things downright radioactive in their sensibilities.

If you're reading the journal, you've signed on for it. You can leave at any time. I welcome discussion. But I make no apologies.

An obligatory disclaimer: Fantasies and the like acknowledged, I still know where my brain ends and the rest of the world begins. Fiction is fiction and fantasies are fantasies, and I do not now and have not ever planned actual nonconsensual violence on anyone. Besides, this journal exists to keep things from festering. People who are open about their lives tend to be healthier, better-adjusted. This is my outlet. You needn't be afraid.

I'm not convinced by the popular image of children as innocent. Partially because my own childhood, even growing up in a safe, accepting home with no major traumas to think of, was anything but. I devoured stories with blood and betrayal and trickery and death. I made my friends play war. I was fascinated by martyrdom and playacted torture and control.

Humans, human emotion, the human body – they're all still animal. Or perhaps it'd be better put that there is an element of the animal in the active realization of the human or human-form being: an indelible element, which some people spend their entire lives trying to tame. More power to them, if that's how they're best fulfilled; I can respect that. What I can't respect is the urge to deny that element entirely, to insist that "human" somehow means wise and cerebral and untouched by that primal part, the part that scares people. I find it a misleading ideal, dishonest and harmful.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a warrior when I grew up. I wanted to carry a sword and wear armor and exert myself through the moving and countering of blades. I wanted a true induction, a rite of passage, a stature. I craved the asceticism of the march. I didn't want a pony, I wanted a warhorse, and I wanted to sleep against its side under a rough pelt on the plains under the stars. And through that qualic landscape I navigated much of my noninnocence.

Even before I hit puberty, I had issues with sex and gender. I used to have daydreams of cutting off breasts with my sword. All the women of the world would line up and I would induct them into some unexpressable something with a glorious sweep of sharp steel. I understood it as a liberating act; it never crossed my mind that breasts might be something people would find desireable to, themselves, have. My picture of womanhood was of people stoically dealing with a body that wasn't pleasurable to be in, that leaked blood and grew children like parasites or tumors and was awkwardly shaped and hung wrong in all the wrong places. Going through highschool and college was something of a revelation to me in that people actually did want this.

(Before anyone asks, I now regard womanhood as something a bit like sexuality: something I don't find desirable, but fine enough for other people and not inherently better or worse than most options. Different aesthetics suit different people. Or, as George Elliot wrote, "souls have complexions too; what will suit one will not suit another.")

I didn't have a complete understanding of these things, but I had some understanding. I certainly had enough to know what I did and didn't want. I didn't want to be a woman. I didn't want to be a man either, but that non-want was less than my non-want for womanhood. I would rather have been a king than a queen, but what I most wanted was to be a warrior, which, for me, wasn't a gendered term.

I never understood the practice of compliments or congratulations at menarche. Who would want their body to ache and leek unseemly blood? Blood from a wound, to my mind, was cleaner, better. I understood bras to be items used to keep breasts out of the way and as out of mind as possible. To this day I can understand the social reasoning behind things like breast implants, but I can't grok it – I can't reconcile with it, on an emotional level.

From a young age, though I didn't have the word for it, I had a neutrois identity. It's been a constant, in my life. Before being told that this did or didn't exist, I grasped it as the thing which best suited me. I knew what I was.

I've just recently discovered the word which describes it.

:)

I'm not big on the idea of "safe, sane, and consensual" as a litmus test. I manage to take issue to two out of the three, in fact. The safe and sane things, specifically.

Safe because while it's a good general guideline for many people, I don't see that it's something which needs to be enforced. Plenty of things aren't safe. BASE jumping isn't safe. Climbing a mountain isn't safe. Even football isn't safe. Yes, there are safeguards one can put in place, but these activities have never been fully sanitized, and may never be. Transgressing the boundaries of safety is one's prerogative.

Sane offends me on principle, because it's such a squoogy word. One person's sanity is another person's insanity. One person's reviled madness is another person's religion. Any legislation, no matter how informal, which uses sanity as a benchmark is bound to fail, especially on something ass subjective as interpersonal intimacy.

If I had to put forth a standard of my own, it would be Comprehended and consensual. Those are the principles I see as most respectful of the persons in question.

But that's me speaking, from my own value set. And value sets, like sanity, change from person to person.

I've been thinking about dysphoria lately.

Gender dysphoria, species dysphoria. I have friends who experience – sometimes quite keenly – each of these. As do I, to a certain extent, but I feel that it's... different.

Questioning Transphobia fielded a biting essay on how dysphoria can be:

[What it is like for me is pain. It is the pain of having your skin wrapped badly around your body, fitting awkwardly at best. Reminding you that everything is wrong whenever you move, whenever you go to the toilet, whenever you undress, whenever you shower, whenever you wake up, whenever you go to bed, whenever you see a mirror. It is a constant pain. Everything reminds you of it – the pronouns others use for you, the name others use for you. The clothes you wear.

It’s like living in a world where everything is made of sandpaper and it’s always grinding into your skin – your skin that does not fit your body.]

My dysphoria is a quiet mismatch. An often-bemusing thing which is a source of annoyance when I run up against social modes, or when, from time to time, by body does something it shouldn't, or is incapable of something I need. My dysphoria is disappointment. It's aggravation, it's confusion, it's distraction. But it's rarely pain. And there are things I can do – I want to do – in order to eliminate some of this, but there is no identifiable end goal. I don't feel like I'd be bringing my body into line with an ideal-form me. I'd just be making a few tweaks to its operation, here and there.

.

I've been thinking about otherkin-ness, and how I've drifted through the fringes of the movement. I find much of it compelling, but little of it personally true. I was thinking recently that it seems taken as a given that "human" is undesirable. It's the nature of the beast, I know; we're all assigned human at birth, and dysphoria is manifest in the struggle to get away from what one was assigned. An otherkin who desired humanity wouldn't be an otherkin. They'd be cis-species, and this'll be the case until we start assigning people as other-than-human. But still, when I look too long at only that narrative (and there must always be a balance of narratives), I feel that humanity is being done a disservice. Just as it isn't an innately superior identification, it's not an innately inferior one, either.

That's what led me down to this revelation.

Because the thing is, I don't identify as human. I don't much identify as anything. So when I asked myself, "Why are you getting your hackles up? Are you feeling your identity slighted?" and had to look at myself and honestly answer "No, I don't think that's it," one of the questions that branched off was something I've come back to and back to: "What do you identify as?"

I haven't resolved the question coming from the gender side. I haven't found a name. Agender is something I consider, but also third gender, other-gender. Sometimes I say Effete middle-aged male humanities professor is my gender. Complete with sweatervest. But none of them ring right, have that snap Yes. This is true that I discovered when I found the term asexual, for example – and no species has the name I'm looking for, either. Human is a default. It doesn't quite fit me. But it doesn't cause me pain, either.

.

I don't have a problem with being signified human, which isn't the same as being human. I don't feel particularly human, but I don't feel particularly any species. It's something the same as gender: I don't mind being signified male. I don't feel particularly male, nor do I feel particularly female, but when the call comes out to say "What are you? Name yourself!", male is unobjectionable. What I am, if I'm anything, is something else. Not so much other as wu.

I can't say I have no attachment to this life or this body. I am, in a literal sense, attached to them both. But the I which identity reduces to does not take definition from them or share definition with them – except in the sense that, in daily life and existence, I is taken to indicate all of them. My I, my impetus, is like the electricity that powers a computer. The programs on the computer may have version numbers and configurations, the computer itself may have a make and a model, but the electricity has none. The electricity can flow into whatever machine it needs to, and power whatever function that machine has. Some machines make more or less efficient use of that energy, and some objects – a candle, a stone – are not suited for electricity at all, but there's a vast variety of suitable vessels, as well.

Much of my identity derives from the impetus rather than the impelled. It's a fascinating state to be in: I gain great flexibility in exchange for a loss of self-knowledge. I gain purity in exchange for complexity. Clarity in exchange for richness. Each of the values on these scales has value; none are superior or inferior. They simply inform how we are to go about interacting with ourselves and the world.

There are certain parts of my core-self that I can't identify as belonging to impetus (electricity, in our earlier metaphor), impellant (computer) or impelled (programs). I can, for example, say that my genderlessness comes from impetus, my gender from the impelled, and my sex from the impellant, but what about my fascinations? My sacred qualia? What about the modes in which I go about things, the analytical nature, the preference for certain kinds of interaction? Are they programmatical? Or are they innate, immutable, non-negotiable?

Here's a thing: when I think of what this core-self feels like, the closest thing to mind is the Flurry screensaver for Macs. But it's not a visual qualia, it's a qualia of dynamic. Something small, moving. Flowing from part to part. A quiet, yet-unceasing motion. Impetus. What species, what gender, is that?

Let's glance at a couple of controlling images.

In one, a wolf attacks a man who screams and tries to beat him back. The man is overcome and falls bleeding into submission as the wolf tears at his flesh. Then, in a moment, the wolf is seized by the man's own terror and pain and, horrified, runs from the crime and leaves him.

In the other, a wolf attacks a man who takes a deep breath and opens himself to the teeth and the violence. The man is overcome and falls bleeding into submission as the wolf tears at his flesh. Then, in a moment, the wolf is seized by the man's own acceptance and relents, licking the wounds clean.

It works only, of course, if the wolf and the man are in some way allied; if the wolf is not motivated by malice, if the man can accept the part of him which can be hurt and the part of the wolf which needs to hurt. And it's best to remember that wolves and men are not mutually exclusive. The scene could still play if they were both animal, tearing into each other, reacting with fear or acceptance, breaking apart or licking each other clean.

Let's get this out there: sex is to physical intimacy as buttercream frosting is to cake. Properly prepared and spread, buttercream frosting is a lovely accentuation to some cakes. Myself, I prefer cream cheese frosting or a nice bittersweet ganache. Part of the cake? Oh, it certainly can be. The be-all end-all finishing touch? Well, that's really a matter of personal preference.

I'll take a moment to out myself: I'm asexual. (Read more at the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, Wikipedia's article on asexuality, the About.com article "The Anatomy of Asexuality, or Salon.com's article "Asexual and proud!".) I experience low or no sexual attraction. And, while this is an orientation which is slowly gaining media and cultural legitimacy (and is largely unafflicted by the violence leveled at, say, homosexuals), it's an area on which little light has been shown.

After all, it's easy to look at someone expressing sexual attraction toward someone of their own gender and say, "Aha." It's more difficult to look at someone not expressing sexual attraction and have a moment of realization. Most people spend quite a lot of time not expressing sexual attraction. If all people did was express sexual attraction constantly, 24/7, this would be a very campy world to live in.

Sexuality, for me, from my statedly outsider perspective, is in pure form a matter of hormones, endorphins, expectations and excitements and physiological triggers that don't really do much for me. Not too flattering? Neither is a big bowl of buttercream frosting, for all that it can make a cake something divine. My point in singling out sex like this is to point out that my status as an asexual doesn't make me a monk or a frigid loner. There's still that cake sitting there on what people would assume is an empty plate.

Physical affection is its own beast. A mother embracing her grown child, a group hug, a kiss on the cheek between fond friends, leaning against each other on a crowded couch or playing ragdoll in a packed car, a friendly wrestling match – all of these are nonsexual variants of physical affection, and one can have an appetite for them without a sex drive. And it can go further – I've slept next to people I've loved, in small tents or large beds or stretched out on a narrow futon barely wide enough to accommodate us both, and craved every inch of that contact. I am, at heart, a physical creature.

My interest just doesn't extend to the sweating and moaning options on the table.

People seem to assume that physical intimacy builds and builds until it reaches the point of sex, as though sex represents or validates some otherwise unattainable level. I've never held to that theory, even when one points out the theory that sex offers otherwise-unusual levels of vulnerability – there are plenty of kinds of vulnerability. Injury or illness. Emotional. I know people who don't seem to take on any vulnerability during sex, except for nudity, and there's nonsexual nudity as well – it's the kind in art and at nude beaches and in skinny-dipping. No one is in a rush to label those the pinnacle of human intimacy.

Sex is hormonal. It's thrown into equations with intimacy and romance and it takes on different tinges according to its context, but it's what people make of it, not what it is, that elevates it. And that's the way with just about all of human action, really.

Once when I was a child several of my friends turned on me. Given that I was in middle school at the time, a time when all children are universally horrible to each other in one way or another, this was to be expected, but as I was not well-acquainted with this truism of child development and/or the American public school system, I developed an entire mythology around the injustice.

Here's the thing about children: they're not innocent. They have a natural curiosity about life and nature, and the more taboo a subject is, the more they might be interested in it. Sex, violence, death, sadism, children are in no way immune to any of this. As for myself, appetite whetted on classics (have you actually read Shakespeare? sex and violence all over) and fantasy, spent long hours envisioning how I'd kill them if I ever had the power of a despot at my hands. I can remember long, delicious ponderings devoted to how the tips of my fingers would first strain into, then break through, the skin of their throats. I wanted that sort of visceral, absolute victory, that shared moment of physical intimacy, that power over another living thing that had wronged me.

Naturally, I never acted on it. On the whole I'm a surprisingly nonviolent person. I've only been in one fight, and during it I sat down, put my arms up to shield my face, and didn't make a noise. I didn't regard that as weakness. It was another kind of strength and, on reflection, a different mode of control. But that moment, that element I craved, the malicious and unreasoning force against a vital spot, didn't disappear from my mind. They just came at me from a different direction or two.

Because at the one hand, that's what I perceived myself as suffering. And as much as it was a refuge then, it's endured as something I fear now.

People having power over me, or having power to hurt me when I have no means of fighting back, terrify me – not in any form of screaming dismay, but in a way that makes me feel as though my own stomach has turned against me. An element of my life or self becomes foreign territory, leaning toward the enemy, and I'm caught in its grip without a last recourse. It's the moment right before the fingers touch the throat, when you can see it coming and can't get out. It's the point at which you know any screams will choke before they make it to your mouth.

And it would be nice – really, it would – if I knew of a strategy to fix that. But I don't. So my reaction thus far is usually to curl up into a tight burnt weed of anger and snarling hate, imagining some fantastical vengeance, which even to my mind is another display of defeat. If sitting and taking blows without acknowledging weakness or pain is a mode of control, this is a mode of submission – and to those people I least want to submit to.

But I am a quiet person. An internalized person. And resorting to hate is easy. And so long as it is the quiet, internalized hatred, with no expression or evidence, at what point will I ever be compelled to change it?