Queen of Swords

[Error: unknown template qotd]

More than anything else, what makes me feel sexy is being looked at with desire and/or feeling another person's sexual energy focused on me.

It's been difficult to feel particularly sexy on my own for quite some time now.

The sassiest, funniest, smartest, most empowering condom commercial I've seen.

I have always considered Dr. Juliette Burber a soul sister....

Wicked, wicked interplay. . . !


Sex columnist Dan Savage joins Stephen Colbert to discuss the passage of Prop. 8.

I get the feeling that not many people can leave Colbert speechless.

[Error: unknown template qotd]

My parents, despite their tendency to conservativism, never censored my reading as I was growing up. I suspect they may have been a bit concerned if they realized the sexual education I was getting via romance novels and even some of my science fiction, but I was careful never to mention those parts if/when I talked about something I was reading.

In recent years, my mother's comment was We trusted you -- suggesting to me that they would have expected me to avoid "inappropriate" material. There were certain things that I avoided because of personal taste (horror or hardcore porn for example), but I never avoided a book just because I knew my parents would not approve. I can't remember ever hiding a book.

The funny exception to this was the two or three times I bought Tiger Beat magazine. My father had a flat rule that we could not buy teen fan magazines because he didn't want us "worshipping movie stars." It wasn't actually a ban coming from a spiritual bias, but his general dislike of the thought of his daughters swooning over tv and movie stars. Twice during my junior high years I took the long way to walk home, bought Tiger Beat at the grocery stores, smuggled it home in my purse, and hid it in the bottom of a drawer.


The consequences of my experience as a teen are two-fold. First, I have a general policy of not wanting to censor Wolfling's reading any more than my own was censored. On the other hand, unlike my own parents I have a very good idea of what she could be getting into -- especially given her tendency to read fanfiction online. However, I realize that I can't control her reading without putting her under pretty severe supervision, and that's not going to be good for either of us. So I've told her that I'm not going to make rules I can't enforce, or that she will eventually break in this area, but that I would prefer she kept her online reading limited to stories with age-appropriate ratings.

I've also told her not to ever worry about freaking me out with something she's read because odds are that I've already read it, or something like it. I may even have done it. Not something my own parents could have said.

We'll see how it goes. . .

Someone asked

How does the poem at the sidebar of your journal inform your approach to ANY of the six topics about which you invited inquiry? Please pick at least two.


I grew up being taught that it was very important to show myself in public as being a respectable, "normal" person. My father was a person of influence in our community, and my mother's constant message to my sister and me was that everything we did reflected on him. My parents had a very low tolerance for anything that could be considered counter-cultural. What wasn't judged potentially dangerous was dismissed as "weird." I grew up being very good at being the very model of a Good Student, Good Christian Girl, Good Citizen, Good Daughter, and etc. And I created a secret code so I could write all my not-Good secrets, fantasies, and desires without fear of being exposed for not being quite as Good as everyone thought.

To this day, I struggle with the thought that what I believe and do will be dismissed as "weird" by those whose respect I desire. It takes me a while to get around to asking myself why I want the respect of anyone who would pass such a judgement on me or something important to me.

One of the wonderful things LiveJournal has done for me -- which I failed to address in the previous questions about LJ -- was that I was able to, in a mostly anonymous venue, start to be open about those parts of me I'd always kept hidden. And instead of finding myself dismissed, ridiculed, or judged harshly, I found affirmation and a community of like-minded people.

[ETA: There are also more than a few folks who have friended me here and remain my friends despite significant differences in our beliefs.]

The last few years of my life have been a struggle for authenticity in my public self, to find the happy medium between being open and honest about the truth of my life and beliefs -- and sexuality -- and reasonable/polite discretion in places where such discussions and revelations are not always appropriate.

I have to believe in my own "unacceptable self" if I'm going to plumb the depths of my own spirituality, serve my spiritual community, and make my wider community safer for people who share my beliefs.

I've had to come to terms with my "unacceptable self" sexually to find the deepest of intimacy and greatest of joys with partners who are similarly "unacceptable."

In being bold about my "unacceptable self" here on LJ and in the wider community I've found more and better friends, since we meet from a place of authenticity rather than pretense.

In my previous entry I shared how both Wolfling and I expressed a desire to "grow up to be Michelle Yeoh."

athenian_abroad's response included the following:

My first reaction: "You don't have to be a girl to want to be Michelle Yeoh (or a Michelle Yeoh character)!"

Which brings up a question. How common -- or uncommon -- is it to "identify" with characters, etc., across gender lines? How does that relate to intuitions about whether gender is an essential or incidental quality? How does it relate to the fluidity or solidity of one's own gender identity?

I thought this was a great question. It's also one I'm having a hard time grappling with effectively, because this isn't an area which I think about all that much.

Personally, while I certainly enjoy the exploits of heroic male characters, I tend to only identify with -- or want to explicitly emulate -- female characters. I think Chow Yun-Fat can bring to the screen many of the same qualities as Yeoh: physically beautiful, a sense of wisdom, a regal air, a believable warrior. (I'm thinking of him in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Anna and the King.) But I don't ever want to be him or his characters. I want to bed them, not be them.

When I play RPG's, I never even consider playing a male character unless I'm a GM running male NPC's. As a writer, my primary characters have all been female, even though my most significant creative work has a large number of male supporting characters. When I explore archetypes, I avoid the small number of them which I perceive as being explicitly male. For example: I am always the Queen, never the King.

I've written and deleted at least four different paragraphs here, trying to sort out the way and the degree to which I experience myself as feminine and masculine. . . and I just can't find the words. Maybe all I can say right now is this: I identify as utterly female on a basic biological level, but enjoy having (traditionally) masculine qualities. Indeed, the Queen of Swords symbol is an expression of a mature woman with strong masculine attributes.

Perhaps it's a bit paradoxical. I embrace my masculine attributes while being absolutely comfortable with my physical femaleness. Or maybe I just don't think in those terms very often because I've never had trouble with my gender experience or identity on an internal or social level. I've played with a lot of different aspects of identity, but gender has never been one of them. I've never felt that being physically female has limited my ability to express who I am, whether that expression is considered masculine or feminine. At the same time, on some level I evidently perceive some kind of essential difference between Male and Female that goes beyond biology because I can't/don't identify with male individuals.

Disclaimer: these are all my subjective experiences as an individual. I have no interest in judging the experiences of others, which I know can be radically different from mine.


Please chime in. I'd be very interested in the expreriences and insights of others. I know that some of you have a very strong interest in gender issues, and there are those here whose own gender experiences are very different from mine.

Powered By TheirToys



And here I've been fretting about my day job. . . !

I'm reading more now that I'm in this house. The light is much better, for one thing. And my daughter has her own room that she likes to be in, so the noise of her games doesn't interfere. I watched a lot of DVD's over the past few years, but for some reason that has less appeal these days. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's as simple as the TV no longer being the focal point of the living room.

Last night I started reading A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. It's not going to be one of my top-rated books, but it's engrossing enough. The main quibble I have is that the Nordic-flavored names have so many similar-sounding syllables in them that I have a hard time keeping track of which character is a man, which a wolf, and which pairs are bonded.

It wasn't until this morning that I realized the debt these authors owe to Anne McCaffrey's Pern stories. In both mythos there are a group of community halls set apart for those who live with powerful animals. Young humans are taken from the ordinary halls (maybe not in Pern?) to bond with the young beasts at the animal halls, with some being chosen and some rejected. Those who do bond live at the hall and spend much of their time training to battle the danger that threatens their society. In Pern, dragonriders defend against the mysterious thread, which the dragons burn from the sky before it can fall and burn the people and crops below. In the wolf-halls the men and the giant wolves battle trolls and wyvern. And in each society, when the female animals come into season, their bonded partners share the experience of both arousal and battle-passion as the males compete for the right to breed.

( Mating Rituals )

Given the mood I'm in today (and have been for several days, truth to tell) I'm very amused at this hypothesis about what those exchanges of looks really signify at the end of Episode IV.


http://noahbrand.blogspot.com/2007/01/unutterable-geekery-new-hope.html

(Yes, it's about sex.)