In which I still ain’t right

Luther M. Siler

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If you ever needed proof that I make foolish decisions: I decided to release a book during what I think may literally have been the stupidest and most rage-inducing week of my entire life.  I mean, there was probably a week during the Bush administration that at least came close somewhere.  Hell, there was probably more than one.  But right now hell if I can remember when that week might have been, and perhaps more importantly I didn’t have a wife and kid near me to remind me of my need to keep my shit together, and it has been fucking hard to come home from work each night and force myself into editing and creating mode instead of staring dully at Twitter and thinking thoughts that I ought not to be thinking.

I have never hated Republicans more than I do this week.  I have never been more exhausted and sick of white men than I have been this week.  I have never been more embarrassed by men in general than I have this week.

I cannot imagine how any of my women friends feel, and I can’t believe my wife is even still standing after all this shit.  The rage has nearly incapacitated me and I haven’t been putting up with entitled assholes like Brett Kavanaugh my entire life, like virtually every woman I know has.

Oh, and today at work involved transcribing a bunch of witness statements and having to find a way to get a four and a half minute, 500mb video of a kid in one of the scariest meltdowns I’ve ever seen in a school off of an ancient Android phone with a broken screen and to the cops.  I will say this: I have never been shy about criticizing cops when I feel like they’re doing a shitty job.  Our SRO took what could have been (what already was) a very, very bad situation today and, while it did ultimately lead to the student being taken out of the building in handcuffs (and still fighting the cops the whole way) it could have been much, much worse with a different police officer.  He was an absolute model of using minimum force required and attempting de-escalation the entire time (and it was the police officer who asked our security guard to start recording the incident) and the decision wasn’t finally made to take the student to the police station until the parent of the student, who, it should be pointed out, started the shit in the first place, refused to come and collect their child and actually told the SRO to take the student to jail.

Which … Okay.  But then I’mma come get you, and you’re going to jail too, you fucking asshole.  Ain’t no goddamn universe in existence where somebody calls me and says they need me to come get my baby and the words “Just take him to jail” come out of my mouth.

It’s been a very, very, very fucking rough week.

But I’m going to get this book done, and it’s going to be available this weekend, so go check me out on Patreon so you can have it once it’s ready.

On Al Franken

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

Al_Franken,_official_portrait,_114th_CongressI’m not at work today– I woke up with my head swimming like crazy, a condition that, seven hours later, hasn’t really gotten any better– and I probably ought to be doing something, anything other than sitting in front of a screen.  But seeing as how things like walking around or moving in general aren’t exactly easy at the moment (the decision to call in was made moments after realizing I needed to sit down for my morning piss, and then needing to take a second to not pass out after I did) I’ll just write a shorter version of the post I had in my head anyway because staring off into space until bedtime doesn’t sound super exciting.

So, yeah: screw Al Franken.

I really could make that the entire post, and be done with it, honestly.  There’s been a lot of yammering in Democratic circles over the last couple of weeks– I am paying no attention to what the other side thinks, because fuck them– about whether Franken resigning after multiple credible accusations of sexual harassment, at least some of which Franken admitted to, was going to be a Good Thing for the party or not.  Franken, if nothing else, is at least a reliable vote in the Senate for Our Stuff, and has managed for the most part to buck the trend of former-entertainers-turned-politicians being useless buffoons.  I myself tossed the idea of him running for President around a couple of times,  an idea that I’ve mostly shot down because I’m really dead tired of voting for white men for President and don’t want to do it anymore.

And I dunno.  Maybe I’d feel different– I suspect not, but maybe– if Franken was from a state that didn’t have a Democratic Governor, and maybe I’d feel different if the current lead candidate to replace him wasn’t a woman.  But the idea of keeping a predator in the Senate because he’s currently useful to us is not a look I’m especially happy with.  Oh, you don’t like the word “predator”?  Too fucking bad.  Dude shoulda kept his goddamn hands to himself.  It is actually not hard to not grope people.  In fact, not groping people is easier than groping people!  There’s less to do!

“But the Republicans aren’t about to ask the shitgibbon to resign!  And they’re voting for a pedophile for the Senate right now!”

So?  Fuck them.  They’re assholes, every last one of them, and I don’t want to be like them.  I want every single one of these sex-assaulting shits removed from whatever public role they hold, and I want each and every single fucking one of them replaced in whatever positions they held by women.  And honestly, I’ve seen a few prominent feminists on Twitter posit that they aren’t especially chafed by the idea that a few genuinely innocent men might get caught up in this, and I’m starting to come around to their side of things.  Blow the whole shit up and start over.  I don’t care if Franken gets tossed to the wayside in the process.  Motherfucker shoulda kept his hands to hisgoddamnself.  He didn’t.  Bye, Felicia.

And now my head’s swimming again, so I’m going to go back to lying around and not doing anything.  If anybody else gets busted for sex assault while I’m gone, assume I want them done and dusted and don’t bother telling me about it, OK?  Cool.

#metoo and me

Luther M. Siler

So a friend of mine, a friend who will likely see this, so it’s not as if it’s behind her back, posted this on Facebook the other day.  Forgive all the blurriness:

allofus

And here’s the thing: yeah.  It does.  It makes me uncomfortable.  The notion– a notion I believe without the remotest qualification, by the way– that literally every woman I know has experienced sexual harassment makes me profoundly uncomfortable.  Hell, uncomfortable’s not even the word, although it’s part of it.  There’s a fair degree of fucking rage in there too, for example.

And no, I didn’t “like” the post.  In fact if I have hit Like (I don’t use any of the other options, ever; don’t ask me why) on any posts associated with the #metoo hashtag, I don’t remember doing it– and I’m pretty certain there aren’t any.

I hit Like on her post and then deleted it.  Wrote a comment, and then deleted that too, and then spent the next couple of days fighting off this post.  The reason I haven’t interacted with any of these posts online isn’t because of some feeling of discomfort or shame, is the thing.  I haven’t because none of this is about me, and I feel like it’s pointless at best and empty virtue-signaling at worst for me to interact with a thing that isn’t supposed to be about me in specific or men in general.

So, yeah.  All of them.  #allofthem, if you prefer.

I’ve spent the last few days– longer than that, really, but it’s come to a head in the last few days– thinking a lot about my own actions as a cishet guy throughout my life.  And in a lot of ways I’ve been resisting the temptation to paint myself as one of the good guys.  I’ve never raped anyone, obviously.  (Is it obvious?  Probably flattering myself.)

But there was that one time, with that one woman, where she indicated her lack of consent to a certain action at the literal last possible moment, and it’s haunted me ever since.  When I say last possible moment, I’m not exaggerating, not by a millisecond or a fraction of an inch.  I didn’t go any further– of course I didn’t– but my first immediate visceral reaction was wait what the fuck are you kidding and I don’t know how much of that reaction got through to her.

I’ve never catcalled anyone, not once.  Never hassled a woman in a bar, never got angry with anyone because they wouldn’t give me a phone number or something like that.

(I have what I’m pretty sure is a funny story about accidentally approaching the wrong woman in a bar who I thought was one of my friends; maybe I’ll tell it sometime.  It’s not for this post.)

But I had years– years— where I bought into the idea of the friendzone, and where the idea of just telling a woman that I was interested in her and thought we should go out/make out/fuck each other senseless was pure anathema.  No, she (whichever she was at the time) was gonna figure it out sooner or later and fall into my arms.  I was a Nice Guy.  Sooner or later she’ll figure out that all the guys she dates are assholes and I’m right here, all not being an asshole and shit.

I can think of some moments, some interactions that make me cringe right now, honestly.  I’m pretty sure there were times when I was being creepy as fuck and didn’t even realize it.  There are others where I know I was being creepy as fuck and I regret the hell out of them.  Some of them probably involved the woman who originally triggered this post, honestly; we have a bit of history together, not all of which I’m proud of.

(True fact: the first time I kissed the woman who eventually married me, we were sitting at a table in a diner and I literally said “Let’s go make out in the parking lot,” and it worked.  Sooner or later I broke past the idea that doing nothing would get me somewhere.  That said, if that line doesn’t work?  Possible eew.)

I remember one time in high school when a bunch of us– too many to fit in the car– were all going somewhere, and one of the girls decided she was going to sit in my lap.  I put both my hands in my lap, palms-up.  She shrugged and did it anyway, probably knowing that having both hands on her ass would make me twice as uncomfortable as it was making her and that it wouldn’t last more than a moment, which it didn’t.

I still remember that.  I wonder if she does.

(I was gonna say “I’ve never groped anyone who didn’t want me to,” which is what reminded me of that story.)

I remember a week– one very, very weird week in middle school– where for some reason everyone, boys and girls, were all going around trying to yank each others’ shorts off.  By the end of the week everyone had their belts on so tight or their pants laced so tight that I suspect some of us were cutting off our circulation.  I was on both sides of that little game.  But I can’t say I’ve never tried to take anyone’s clothes off who didn’t want me to, either.  I still remember the two girls I targeted; I know one of them took a swipe at me at one point too, although I don’t know who was first.  I don’t remember what the other one thought about it.

(God, I’m glad my middle schoolers never had that bug hit.  I can’t imagine what the teachers were thinking.)

I don’t know that I have a single, overarching point to all this.  Okay, yeah, there’s obviously an element of the confessional here but that’s not the entire point.  I have contributed to this culture of rape and harassment, or at least participated in it, and the fact that I’ve learned (tried to learn) to be better in recent years doesn’t affect the facts of who I was and what I did, even if I can point to any number of men who were maybe worse.

You don’t stop rape, or sexual harassment, by controlling women.  You stop rape and sexual harassment by insisting that men learn to be better.  One of my most important jobs right now is to raise my son to be better than me.

Maybe men need a #metoo hashtag.  Or an #allofus hashtag, because right now, it is all of us.  We’ve all contributed to this.

Or maybe we could just stop, and fucking listen, which was what the point of the hashtag was in the first place, and try to learn to get better.

Maybe.

On my feminist agenda

Luther M. Siler6 Comments

detail.jpgOn the plane on the way to Denver it became obvious very quickly that the young woman one row ahead of me and across the aisle was going to the same event I was.  She was in her early 20s, blonde, pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way and, as it turned out, really chatty.  She spent the entire trip talking with everyone around her, a circle that grew bigger as it became clear just how many of us were on the plane for the same reason.  The guy she was seated next to, who was in his late forties or perhaps even his early fifties, wasn’t with us.  I overheard her mention her boyfriend at least two or three times during the flight, and it’s not as if I heard their entire conversation.  Later on, she told me that he’d spent some time talking about his daughters, one of whom is a recent high school graduate– meaning that she and the eldest daughter were no more than three or four years apart.

I’m betting that if I stopped talking right now, you’d all be able to predict how this ended.  Because of course he either magically ended up in the same car rental shuttle pickup as her or he actually followed us, and of course he asked her out, despite her making it clear that she had a boyfriend and despite her being less than five years older than one of his own daughters.

Because, y’know, she talked to him, which is exactly the fucking same as wanting a date.

I heard a lot of presentations from furniture company reps and various executives in my own company over the last week.  What got to me was the repeated and constant gender essentialism of goddamn near every single presenter we heard from.  The funny thing?  None of them agreed.  Some of the reps refused to use any word other than she to refer to the buyer, because why would men be interested in something like furniture?  Obviously only the women would make decisions like that.  Others went on and on about how these features of the furniture would appeal to the girls and these more practical features would clearly appeal to the men— and it was always the more practical features– construction, say– that were for the penis-people and style or color concerns that were appropriate for the more vaginal among us.

It was constant.

Had a conversation at our table at one point about whether being married or unmarried was a detriment to being an effective salesperson.  One of the salespeople– another young, unmarried woman– said that she’s figured out that if she wears her Irish wedding band on her left hand when talking to couples she’s a lot more likely to close the sale.  This contention came as close as anything did during the week to actually causing an argument.  On my end, for whatever it’s worth, I’ve not noticed that any particular demographic or combination of customers is more or less likely to buy from me.

That one dude who won’t stop explaining basic simple concepts about sales or about furniture to every woman at the table, and won’t accept corrections from anyone except for the men, at which point he immediately starts pretending that’s what he was saying all along.  Had him too.

On the last day of the trip we’re allowed to wear streetclothes because we’re all headed to the planes after the final exam.  I wear my ASK ME ABOUT MY FEMINIST AGENDA shirt, which I have legitimately packed accidentally (I have a plain shirt of a similar color) but I’ve got it with me so fuck it.  The following things happen:

  • While helping a friend frantically search the pool and hot tub area for the glasses that she realizes she’s lost the night before, something I am very obviously participating in, a dude in the hot tub– meaning in a bathing suit– looks at me and, out of nowhere, says “I’ll bite!” at me.  It takes me a moment to even parse that the half-naked wet man is  talking to me, and another moment to realize that he’s not hitting on me, and about two more to tell him that I’m fucking busy at the moment, because obviously I’m busy right now for fuck’s sake, I know what the shirt says but I’m still not talking to you right now.
  • One TSA agent winks at me and tells me he likes my shirt.
  • A second TSA agent, waving me out of the microwave scanner or whatever the shit the thing is, noticeably growls at me and says “You’re done, whatever your… agenda is.”  I’m weirdly pleased at having annoyed him a bit.
  • We hang out in a bar at the airport while we’re waiting for our first flight to board.  A dude at the bar asks me to explain my agenda.  He seems friendly.  I smile and say “right now my only agenda is to get the fuck home, but if I can smash the patriarchy along the way I’ll take it as a win.”  He laughs.  I pat him on the shoulder and join my friends.
  • Eventually the co-worker who is on the trip with me asks about it.  I ask him how long of a conversation he wants to have and we agree to put it off for a bit since we’re both tired.
  • As I’m getting on the last plane, sweaty, fat, and gross, the motherfucker in the seat next to me has his backpack in between his legs and he is honest-to-god fucking manspreading in the plane seat.  As I’m putting my bag away and taking my hoodie off, nothing changes.  I weigh my general urge to not be rude to strangers and my general urge to not start shit on airplanes and my current mood and in the politest way I possibly fucking can tell him that I paid for the same size seat he did and to put the arm rest down before I sit.  He does, which surprises me, and I passively-aggressively shove his knee out of my legspace for half an hour before he either gives up or actually falls asleep.

For the record, and possibly for future reference via some sort of preprinted business card, this is a representative but not complete list of the items on my feminist agenda, such as it is:

  • As a man, my first and foremost priority is to force other men to see a man wearing a shirt that says FEMINIST.  Even if there’s not another word to be said.  Men need feminism as much as women do.  My son needs to know that I his daddy is a feminist as much as any (currently hypothetical) daughter I might ever have would.  Men need to be aware that men 1) can be and 2) are feminists.
  • I support equality between the sexes in all respects, but I am most concerned as a former teacher with equality of access to education.  I believe girls in particular need to be encouraged to move into STEM, and I believe that the culture of adult STEM environments needs to change to welcome those women when they get there.  Training little girls to do science experiments won’t do any good if the culture of programming classes in college is impossible.
  • I believe access to free, reliable and high-quality birth control should be an essential part of any ethical insurance program, and support Planned Parenthood completely.  I believe in the right to an abortion as well.
  • I believe intersectionality is critical to any successful feminism, and believe that women of color and trans women and gay or bisexual or asexual women face challenges that straight white women do not.  I also believe that white feminism frequently privileges the first word over the second.
  • I believe that feminism is about choice, and that a woman should be able to willingly choose to wear hijab or a bikini or anything in between if she wishes.   Her reasons for doing so are none of my business either way.  I do not believe that clothing in and of itself can be feminist or antifeminist, but the attitude of the law to clothing certainly can be.
  • I want rape culture ground into the dust and consigned to history.  I believe that “boys will be boys” is a cheap excuse and not a truism.  I believe the way that you stop rape is by teaching boys not to rape, not by teaching girls to avoid it.
  • I believe that publicly declaring myself as a feminist male does not mean that I deserve cookies, and do not expect to be offered any.  I am also aware that as a feminist male my position in any feminist movement, such as it is, is mostly to shut up and listen, with a side dish of doing what I’m told to help out. I believe that I can and will and probably frequently do get shit wrong, and I need to recognize that someone telling me that one of those things is happening probably deserves to be heard out.
  • The following is true despite the fact that I’ve literally just written 1500 words about what I think feminism is.
  • So deal.

I could probably write more, but it’s 10:30 and I have to sleep sometime tonight.  This will pop tomorrow morning; be aware that I likely won’t be able to respond to any comments until I get home from work.

For the record: on Bill Clinton

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

44_bill_clinton_3x4-1We’re about to have another dumpster fire of a town-hall debate, in about an hour or so, and I’m going to attempt to liveblog the thing again, although I continue to make no promises that I’ll actually survive the thing.  I wanted to get one thing out of the way before the debate starts, however, in anticipation of a certain participant attempting to make hay of Bill Clinton’s record with women.

I had a conversation with my wife the other day about, were Clinton somehow younger than he is now and not so obviously addled (I really do think the man is seriously unhealthy) and if he ran for President– you can see how this hypothetical gets convoluted quickly– knowing what we know, or suspect, about him, would either of us vote for him?  Bill Clinton was the first Presidential candidate I ever cast a ballot for, in 1996.  I wasn’t old enough to vote for him in 1992, but I would have.

We ended up agreeing that, with his we’ll say shady reputation, it was highly unlikely that nowadays he’d even manage to get the nomination in the first place.  My wife brought up the example of John Edwards, who you may have heard of, but certainly not recently.  For the non-family-values party, the Dems certainly don’t seem too big on adulterers.

But: I voted for a guy in 1996 who has been accused of rape and multiple instances of sexual harassment, and would have voted for him again in 2000 had the Constitution not prevented it, and by that time he’d not only been accused of rape and sexual harassment but he’d been caught in an affair that was at best squicky about the power relationship between the two legally-consenting adults involved.(*)

I would not, in 2016, vote for a man with such a record.  I suspect in 1996 I simply brushed the entire thing off.  In 2016 the number of women involved and the skeevery of the affair we know he had are more than enough to prevent me from ever voting for him again, or anyone like him now.  I don’t know what the hell happened with Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, or any of the rest of them, but one of the big differences between me now and me in 1996 is my deliberately cultivated habit of believing women when they accuse people of this shit now.  I will still defend Clinton’s presidency.  I will not defend him as a person, and I wouldn’t vote for him again.  Those three things can all be true at the same time.

And it should go without saying that not a bit of this has any reflection on the job Hillary Clinton would do as president.  None of us are being asked to vote for Bill again, and Bill’s nature as a sexual harasser is not a relevant issue to Hillary’s suitability for the presidency.  Trump will try and confuse the issue; he should be scoffed at.  Hillary is no more responsible for Bill’s activities than any of Trump’s three wives (one of whom has sworn under oath that he raped her, by the way) are responsible for his.  Hillary has chosen to remain married to her husband; her reasons are hers, and are none of my business.

Still glad that I get to vote on Wednesday, by the way.

(*) I looked up the timeline: I coulda sworn this happened earlier, but apparently Broaddrick’s allegation that Clinton had raped her happened in 1999, after both of his elections, and she denied it happening while being questioned under oath during the Paula Jones case.  I’m not interested right now in digging further to see if I’m thinking of a different person, and I don’t think the timeline changes much, honestly.