Subscribers have had it in their hands for a week, but my story is now available free for everyone on Daily Science Fiction. A Study in Flesh and Mind.
The feedback has been really nice thus far and that has warmed all the cockles in my heart. I may have to revisit the Albury-Wodonga Academy of Fine Arts and Neuroscience sometime.
Daily Science Fiction doesn’t have bio photos as part of its formatting, but if it did here’s a link to my earlier blog post with a very rare life model photo. How safe it is for work will depend on your workplace (it is lifemodel-ly but not pink bits-y. Photo taken while the Canberra Times were interviewing me for an article about the Parisian Life Model strike.)
John Scalzi’s reading last night was lovely on multiple levels. Great to hang out with friends, great special surprises, lovely reading and Mr Scalzi is of course adorable, thoughtful, funny and engaging. I particularly enjoyed how he smiled and eyes got all soft and dreamy when mention of his wife crossed his lips. Folks speaking of the ones they love is always a delight to see.
Speaking of marriage Scalzi stated his support for same sex marriage and said (to paraphrase and semi-make up from memory) “What do I lose from same sex marriage? Nothing? I enjoy being married *cue soft smiley face* my gay friends should be able to enjoy that too. I don’t lose a thing.”
I would go a step further and encourage folks in general to shift language to the positive (no criticism of Mr Scalzi here, indeed thanks for inspiring this post and being an all round good guy). “What do I lose” is a place to start when people are processing their fear around sexualities, but we can move through that to something that isn’t reacting against perceived badness as part of its structure.
As a happily married contextually heterosexual gal I feel like it’s not about “what do I lose” when I have everything to gain from same sex marriage. Making marriage equally and equitably accessible is a positive gain for everybody (though some might need to move past fear to get there). When the consensual love between two people is made lesser because of some chromosomal bigotry I feel it diminishes all consensual love.
I have even more to gain from universal gay rights because it frees me from an additional burden of privilege guilt that I carry around. There’s a lot of heterosexual privilege that exists in the world (there are many articles and checklists if you’re not sure what this means, here’s one) and as someone who was brought up with a sense of fairness it rankles that things like privilege exist. It’s just not fair and it makes me grumpy. On a basic pleasure principal and because smiles breed smiles when my friends suffer less, when folks I don’t know suffer less, I benefit.
When smart people of amazing capacity do not have their capacity limited because of bullshit prejudice I get to enjoy so much more of what they have to bring to the world. When a woman who looses her wife is given the cultural space to grieve and be supported I benefit. When a man who loses his husband does not also lose his home and pension I benefit.
Often heterosexual priviledge is invisible, but the fact that I get to live at all in the USA is grounded in heterosexual privilege and I have to look at it every day. If I had fallen in love with a woman instead of a man I would not be able to live in this country. There are friends I never would have met, conventions I never would have gone to, publishing opportunities I never would have had and rawking writers workshops I never would have done. The idea that the gender of the person I love could have rendered all that impossible chills me to the bone, it makes me feel sick and sad and guilty that so much of what I have now is built on heterosexual privilege when it doesn’t have to be.
Privilege, to my mind, diminishes accomplishments. It adds a sour note to every victory no matter how much struggle it took to get there (ah yes, I got that, but did I get it on my own merits is that just because I’m ‘pretty’? because I’m white? because my situation is monogamous hetero? because of my intellectual middle class upbringing?). There’s always a part of me looking for some way to undercut praise, and that’s not always healthy, but privilege is real, inequality is real.
Where inequality exists it makes us less than what we could be. When a voice is silenced the choir loses complexity and volume or the music festival looses a stage.
So on purely selfish terms I don’t lose a damn thing with same sex marriage in the world. I gain, my life becomes richer and healthier because of it.
I found this looking for a nice "This is what a feminist looks like" image. Comes from a really funky looking virtual mosque. I think my favorite t-shirt is "Halal for me means sweatshop free". I didn't know Halal could extend to manufactured goods, but given Halal means consuming things that have not been generated out of cruelty that makes sense.
Wiscon is not very far away at all at all! – Wiscon being a mighty feminist science fiction convention held every year in Wisconsin.
This will be my first Wiscon and I am quite excited. I will be doing a reading and two panels.
11up – Writer Readings. Cycles of Life. Salacious, sacrificial, silly, sentimental and severe.
Sat, 2:30–3:45 pm Michelangelos
Liz Argall, Keffy R.M. Kehrli, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Margaret Ronald and Monica Valentinelli
With about 10 minutes a piece we aim to entertain. I am planning to read from an unpublished story of mine that I am very fond of. It’s called “Love is a component of this story”. It’s my love letter to Kurt Vonnegurt, though I do have a few love letters to Oscar Wilde I’m tempted by as well.
Doing the Industrial Revolution Right
Sun, 12:00–1:15 am Senate A
Philip Kaveny, Liz Argall, Richard F. Dutcher, Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey and ANONYMOUS.
Is there a way to develop a modern industrial society without devastating environmental and cultural destruction, and without creating enormous social inequality?
Communication Technologies as Tools of Revolution
Mon, 10:00–11:15 am Conference 3
Christopher Davis, Liz Argall, Jim Leinweber, Rowan Littell and Sunny Moraine
First, let’s discuss the various communication technologies and the tools to use them: the Internet, satellite, cell and broadcast; email, instant messaging, social media, and ham radio. Then let’s talk about how they advance social change and how can we make them more effective in social change work. Some possibilities: routing around failure, preserving anonymity, collating assistance and organizing efforts, and auto-translating.
To all my friends and loved ones who have children in their lives. So many amazing women I know have chosen to have children in the last few years and it is wonderful and amazing. In the buildup to mothers day I have been thinking about how much I am grateful for.
Smart, active, brilliant women have chosen to have children and:
They are all alive. I am most grateful for this. They are all alive to live and rock on and change the world and I am in a better position to live in this world because I am not grieving for sisters I lost along the way. They are all alive and none of them are horribly maimed by giving birth either. This is wonderful and amazing when you look at statistics throughout the world and history. There may be complications, but I am so grateful not to fear for my friends lives whenever I hear that they are pregnant – fear born from this kind of tragedy is not part of my lived reality.
Wonderful children are engaging to the world who 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago simply would not be alive. That’s an amazing kind of diversity to now have in the world. Premature babies are living and living stronger and better with human contact much sooner than in past times. I have never had to loose a child, but I know of women of older generations who carried the guilt and pain of loosing a child, still-born or “failed to thrive” or brain damaged by birth or early fever or fracking measels. I love that friends that I love do not have to carry this kind of loss. I love that if a child has problems it’s less blame invisible forces and the eve-like mother and more “hmmm this child has a hole in their heart” or kids are delicate and SIDS happens sometimes, this is how to reduce the chances. I am so glad many burdens of sadness have been reduced or at least made comprehensible.
I think of the psychic impact of these two things alone. The impact of reduced mother and child mortality is clearly shown in numbers in developing countries especially, and I think we often think of physical impact. Communities and women especially have so much more potential when there isn’t as much grieving business to do.
And beyond death:
All of the women I know chose to have children. Some by luck and making a choice in the moment, some by planning, some by years of determination, medical intervention and more grit than I have. Some have had abortions in the past to allow them to make this choice now. Some have had miscarriages along the way (I’m sure many/most have, though it’s not something spoken of that much, though more than it used to be)… because that is the way of things and building a child is a fricken complicated thing – most of us take a few practice runs to do something that complicated. Some women I know have chosen not to, not now not ever and they have not been forced to bear children.
All of them chose to have children and many had help. And no one I know has been forcibly sterilized because they were a lesbian or an angry feminist or suffered from depression or were teen mothers or rebels or were of the wrong caste/class/ethnicity. Women’s reproductive rights are still forcibly taken away in some places (not too far from where I am in fact), but not as much as it used to be and it’s slightly less of a dirty little secret.
And now to happier stuff of community
I love the diversity of communities of support my wonderful friends are getting. In meatspace, on-line, through the fracking postal service and telephone wires. Communities of choice, of blood, of association, of need. I love my friends who are not silenced by their pregnancies and children. They write of the joys and complexities and sleep deprivation. There’s a lot of blogging about the freaking weirdness of breastfeeding and lactation consultants and getting the little bugger to feed isn’t always as easy as the stories say. This depth of knowledge hasn’t always been there, or gets lost or was only passed down in certain ways. I think of some of the terrifying isolation and fear that existed for some women only a few decades ago who had broken away from traditional spheres of womanhood and didn’t have support there – and before support for women who chose professional lives had started in any form. While support for women to have children and professional lives is still developing at least it is in development and at least there are more women who have dealt with the challenges of profession and children.
I love that men are doing more in the domestic sphere. I think this is good for mothers, for culture, for children, for the men themselves and for their relationship with their partner. Different people are good at different things and a burden shared is more than a burden halved… making more space and energy for the joys that are in parenting.
This week I have been thinking a lot about the wonderful women I know who are having children who are being raised in all sorts of different globules of community.
So many are far away, I wish I could be part of their village in a more physical way. It is good to be part of a small person’s village. I am thinking of you my dear friends, as individuals with so much to you as well as rearers of small interesting people who will live and do in this world when I am gone. I don’t know if having kids will ever be a choice Mike and I make, but I never want my village to be without those small and marvelous people that mothers bring into the world.
To the women and tribes I know and don’t know who do their darndest to raise children of marvelous capacity – I salute you and think of you and am proud of you.
