A running thread

 I started this post to talk about grooming and didn't even get there.

Because when I found out that my friend had died, it came up in conversation about it with another person that someone I had cut out of my life rather earlier had also passed away (of skin cancer of all things). I realized I'd cut out a large part of my formative social scene because of the hurt (and let's face it, harm) they'd done me over the years. I said something to the effect of "Lot of people who won't hear 'no' in that group". And it hit me; this is where it started. 

I loved the place I went on Tuesday nights to dance to a local band and talk about nerdy things. I felt seen for who I was, I felt supported, I felt attractive, I felt safe; all things that I did not feel at home nor at school. I finally found a place I could take some more tentative steps towards my own erotic fulfilment, and it was mostly with people my own age. But I also endured the advances of some much older men who I did not find attractive, while considering the advances of some men who I did.

We were all subject in myriad ways to the Five Geek Social Fallacies, spread over a community of a hundred or more people. These dynamics are toxic and harmful enough in small groups, but at that size the problem is exponentially worse.

There goes my brain, trying really hard not to think about this again. 

It starts simply enough with affectionate words from a man of the group. These are missing at home and so welcomed, and so is the chaste affectionate touch that follows. With some of them, it becomes less-chaste, but never outside the bounds of some group-understood propriety. You are underage, and you are safe. And because you're safe, you let them do things that maybe you wouldn't let other people do if you didn't know they were safe. A touch that lingers. Some inappropriate comment. You don't notice it slowly ramping up. You are exploring with other young people your age, and you interleave the humiliating and awkward things you do with people your age with the interactions with the older crowd. You're praised for being so "mature" and so in control of yourself. If you stand up for yourself, this approval is rescinded.

I gave up seeking my mom's approval in 2016. It is only now, some five years later, that I realize that the gap where I was trying so hard and not getting it, was a time that left me vulnerable.

I was not sexually assaulted as a teenager. But the simmering anxiety that was bent to someone's (or someones') selfish purpose led to the inability to say no that marked so much of the last twenty years of my life. I said yes to a lot of the things I wanted, and I said yes to things I didn't want, over and over and over again, because I thought it would make me a good person. That gap in the armor made me hyperaware and a people pleaser, which left me open to emotional abuse. I was not sexually assaulted as a teenager, but I was sexually assaulted, regularly, by an intimate partner for several years as a grown-ass adult. It's taken me so long to admit that that's what happened that it's a whole new form of embarrassment to have it out there in the open.

It made me popular (for a time) in a way that I'd never been popular among my peers in school. But more and more as I look back, that time was extremely bounded: between 18 and 23. The five years in which I could still be mistaken for underage; the years in which modeling requests came with a frequency that was annoying, but also rather flattering. The years when I was frequently asked to dance, winked at, pushed, prodded, hugged, fondled and groped.

I am thinking about this because I was thinking about the person I'd cut out of my life who'd died of skin cancer, and how in our shared high school theater classes (he was an upperclassman), he insisted on hugging me. Insisted. To the point that even when I didn't want to hug (when he started getting handsy and I started saying no), he made a joke of it with another guy in the department, and they made me their "hugging post". They hugged me while I stood defiantly stiff and glaring. They hugged me when I said no, laughing and high fiving each other. And then that guy who died of skin cancer wondered why I never wanted to speak to him, once it was made abundantly clear (a few years later when I was of age) what he wanted from me. 

Older men, this behavior is on you. It's not enough to say "sorry, you're jailbait". It is not enough to say "let's not date until you turn 18".  It is not okay to cultivate friendships with underage women on the chance that they might fuck you once they're legal. It's not okay to only withdraw, or threaten to withdraw, emotional support and friendship when they don't want to fuck you. This needs to be taught, along with the curriculum in consent that's now coming to the fore, to every man on reaching the age of 18.

I am now, twenty years later, still crippled with fear in the face of making new connections, because am afraid that I am valued only for sex, and I cannot believe that my desires would be accommodated. Let me say this again. I am nearly 40 and I am afraid to date because I am afraid that the people I form intimate connections with only care about fucking me and will not stop when I say no.

I am unpicking this thread from the weaving, bit by bit.

Incivility in unrest

Last week, someone I was once close with died of cancer. 

I say "once close" instead of "a friend" because we'd drifted apart over years - they were part of a group that was formative to my youth and to my young adulthood, but which turned quite toxic and eventually I quietly left. (At least I thought it was quietly.) The last thing she asked me was advice for making skirts out of the elastic-smocked-top crushed velvet yardage from Joann's, and that was more than a decade ago. She was medically obese, and was working hard to be seen as a woman. The skirts were an easy way to get an infusion of femme without trying to also tackle the toxic women's diet industry at the same time. I can only vaguely recall her deadname at this point, because her nickname was what we all called her. I hadn't really spoken to her since before her transition. I had cut off that entire part of my life like one cuts off a decaying branch.

I realized that I stopped doing Faire in 2006 (or 2009), and Dickens in 2013; it's been fifteen (or twelve) and eight years I've been outside those groups, respectively. While I miss the camaraderie and I miss the absolute joy of the places and experiences we created, I do not miss the toxicity of the people involved.

Dickens Fair is having its #metoo moment, simultaneously as it's facing criticism for it's casting policies, business practices around the volunteer staff, and acknowledging the hurt and harm that cast members receive at the hands of both patrons and other members of the cast and crew. There needs to be a change, that much has been acknowledged - even by the people who run the event. They've promised many things before and been caught short, so the performers are right to hold their feet to the fire. However, I do not think that the timeline set out in the demands are reasonable, and I believe one of the demands in particular is unreasonable. Others agree, but several of the leaders of this movement cannot abide others who don't agree wholeheartedly and are actively sealioning and dogpiling other folks who raise the slightest objection. I'm seeing signs of a cortisol/dopamine cycle addiction that I find really troubling. To quote something extremely relevant:

Self harm that is rewarded by society looks like: 

5. Social media ‘outrage’: social media outrage occurs when we (without breaks) consume content that puts us on a cycle of emotional addiction. These platforms are designed to use our dopamine + cortisol hits to keep us using the product. They can lead us to feeling helpless + have a narrative of the world that doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.

I've been trying to write this for an hour and I keep looking away. 

My brain does not want to talk about how traumatized I have been by people who I thought were my friends, who enjoy beating others down on the internet, and who have done it to me with a shockingly casual and final cruelty. Before it was Facebook, it was LiveJournal and Tribe, before that it was forums, and before that usenet groups and mailing lists. I have had these righteous types who I thought were my friends do real and lasting harm to my self-esteem and mental health, to say nothing of my social life and emotional connections. These are people who see themselves as good people, and who are blind to the harms they do, be it in the name of The Cause or on a personal whim. I will not abide this treatment, and I leave. For better or worse, when I disappear from their sphere of influence it doesn't even register.

I have been fortunate enough to not need Fair or Faire in the economic sense, and so cutting them out has impacted my social life but not prevented me from thriving. We talk about "drama is as drama does", but the reality seems to be that people who cannot control their external lives spend much of their time enforcing their views on the internet instead. I am all for moving the Overton Window in the direction of Social Justice, but I am not for magical thinking when it comes to social organizing. I get that people have been pushing these objectives for months and years, but it has been (slowly) getting better. I get that the time for BLM organizing is now, but I also think that timelines for demands should take into account that we're only just now starting to emerge from a global pandemic in which the things which shut down first, and most-thoroughly, were special events. 

There seems to be a thread of "we can rebuild this on our own if the Powers That Be deny our demands" and to that I just have to purse my lips grimly. If your main method of building consensus is to shout down people who hold other opinions, you are only going to have people join who already agree with you lock, stock, and barrel. And I doubt that will be as many people as you think. Facebook is the wrong place to organize, because it enables and normalizes building and maintaining the type of filter bubbles that enable other magical thinking movements, like Q-Anon. 

I want change for the better. But I also want to stop people from spending their entire days writing thousand-word rebuttals to people who say they disagree with any part of a plan. It turns out, arguing these things at this length, in person or especially on the internet, does not have the persuasive effect you intend. But keep chasing that dopamine.

I want change, but I also want people to stop being assholes.

I guess they're people, so maybe that's not entirely possible.