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TheModestBloggist

~ The opposite of a regret, is a story.

TheModestBloggist

Category Archives: Uncategorized

New Patreon Account To Help Me Activist

20 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by shieldingc in Confessions of a Buried Survivor, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=9380599

#ImasurvivorAnd I want representation on TV. Show me male survivors who do better things than serial-killing. Show me female survivors whose function is not martyrdom.

#ImasurvivorAnd I want to know for sure that when I try to have my adoption records unsealed the judge will consider just wanting to know who raped me is a valid health concern.

#ImasurvivorAnd I’d like to throw a party for survivors, because why shouldn’t we get to meet each other under happy circumstances?

Survivors of rape and sexual assault need and deserve our own political movement.  The only time people talk in public about sex-crime, the discussion revolves around rapists and how we ought to treat them.  But we survivors are a huge and diverse community, with needs that non-survivors have never considered. I present #ImasurvivorAnd to help us find each other, and our collective political voice.  Join me in leading the conversation around the issues that affect us.  I want to know what your political priorities are as a survivor, and how we can work in solidarity to accomplish every last one.

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=9380599

Donate $1 to my new Patreon account, and every month I’ll tweet a 280-character story about you (in the genre of you choice).  Donate $5, and I’ll sneak your name or chosen code-phrase into the first piece I publish every month.  When I have $100 of monthly donations total, I’ll throw a party for survivors to celebrate our community!

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=9380599

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Black Mirror Hates Rape Survivors

05 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by shieldingc in Confessions of a Buried Survivor, Uncategorized

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#ImasurvivorAnd, #metoo, Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker, Daily Telegraph, feminism, Help me, Intersectional feminism, Micahel Hogan, Michael Callow, movement, National Anthem, Pig, Rape, rape culture, Rory Kinnear, Sexual assault, Survivor, Survivors

That Black Mirror continues to be a popular program after the first horrendous episode is proof that survivors of sexual violence need more than the general aegis of feminism for our protection.  We need and we deserve a movement specially geared toward our interests as a community.  Non-survivors don’t know how to recognize threats against us and are not prepared in any way to address those threats.  We do, and we are, if we had a platform to preach it.

Charlie Brooker’s science fiction anthology show is supposed to examine dystopian manifestations of current trends in technology and culture.  It’s also, according to Wikipedia, “inspired by older anthology shows like The Twilight Zone, which were able to deal with controversial, contemporary topics without fear of censorship.”

So says anonymous on the internet, who, like Michael Hogan of the Daily Telegraph, comfortably hails the first episode as “a shocking but ballsy, blackly comic study of the modern media.”  But really, shut up, because I saw that first episode, too, and what I saw was a giddy self-congratulation on Brooker’s infinite power as expressed by his ability to make you watch a man’s sexual violation.

It features a fictitious British Prime Minister (Michael Callow, played by Rory Kinnear), who is tricked into believing a beloved princess will be killed by a terrorist unless he has sex with a pig live on national television.  He goes through with it, and everyone tunes in, their delirious giggles at local pubs slowly turning into mutters of “poor bastard” as he sobs his way to tortured orgasm.

It turns out the princess was never in danger of being killed.  She’d been kidnapped by an oh-so-edgy, oh-so-brilliant artist who quietly released her right before the pig-fucking, and who gracefully killed himself to avoid any discussion of just what crimes, by name, occurred.

A news analyst in the show recapped the incident one year later, tacking the following moral onto the story: the incident was definitely art.  The artist had successfully engaged a bigger audience than any artist before him.  And everyone engaged in what was clearly a public performance, whether they wanted to or not.

But did you see what Charlie Brooker did there, friends?  He got meta.  It’s not a fictitious audience fictitiously engaged in a character’s coerced sex-act.  It’s you and it’s me who were tricked into watching the full episode.  We thought there would be a point.  It’s implied when you begin a story that you’re going to get to a point eventually, and we trusted that there had to be a point, and we watched and kept watching even when we were made to feel uncomfortable, and it turns out that there was no point – just art.

Some of us, though, watched with more than vague discomfort.  Some of us, where others saw weird, bold, artistry, could see the plain old rape.  And where you were hearing white-noise, we were hearing dog-whistles.  Brooker’s boast is old as time: look what I can do.  But when you are a survivor, it doesn’t matter that Michael Callow is male and white and rich and even a world-leader; he is who you are.  The message for us was look what I can do – to YOU.

When we were sick to our stomachs and shrugged it off (because dammit what’s the point of this?  we have to figure it out), Brooker’s gloried Statement – that he did it because he could, because no one could stop him – came as a reminder, not as a revelation.  We already knew that we are powerless in the face of rape.  We already knew that you could make us watch, over and over, for no reason if you wanted to.  We might not have known (but thanks for the memo) that people like you can dream of power in terms of raping prime ministers live on TV, and all of society will say that it’s fine and good work on keeping things wonky.

We need a survivor movement: #ImasurvivorAnd I need you to see what I see.

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I’m Pro-Choice and So is the Virgin Mary

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Catholic Edition, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

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Abortion, abstinence, angel, angels can't read minds, annulment, Annunciation, authority, Be it done unto me according to your word, Behold, bible, biological material, Birth Control, blaspheme, bodily autnomy, Bodily Autonomy, bodily integrity, body, born, Catechism, Catholic, Catholic Church, cesarean, chastity, Childbirth, Christ, compromise, conceive, conceived, Conception, consent, consent to pregnancy, corpses, crime, criminal, cycle, dead body, deadly, death, death penalty, deceased, desecration, dignity, disabling mutilation, disposable, donor body, double effect, dying, ecclesiastical, ectopic, Embryo, erroneous Catholic teaching, euthanasia, evil, exception, excommunication, experimentation, explicit consent, exploitation, exploited, fallopian tube, fallopian tubes, feminism, fertility, fetus, fifth commandment, flesh, force, Gabriel, gestation, giving birth, God saves, God's will, Gospel, health, hierarchy, Holy Spirit, hormonal, humility, I am the handmaid of the Lord, illness, impact, implantation, indulgence, infallible, intellect, intent, Jesus, John, just war, late-term, legitimate defense, lethal force, life, life begins, Life-at-conception, life-threatening, love, Luke, Luke 1:26-38, Maria Goretti, Marriage, Mary, medical, medical rights, medicine, misogyny, moderate, most high, Mother of God, natural, natural order, nine months, No word from God will ever fail, openness to life, Organ Donation, ovulation, personhood, precious, Pregnancy, Pregnant, pregnant people, Prejudice, priest, Privacy, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Procreation, proportionate, proportionate force, Rape, rapist, Religion, reproduction, respect for the person, risk, sacred, science, scientific research, secular, self-defense, servant, sexism, Sexual assault, sexual predator, sexuality, Silence, sin, soldier, speak for God, Suicide, termination, the Church is in error, The Kingdom, theology, unborn, uterus, vestments, viability, Violent, virgin, virgin girl, Virgin Mary, virtue, warlord, woman, word made flesh, word of God, Zechariah, Zechariah's silence, Zygote, zygotes

Regarding the issue of abortion, the Catholic Church is in error.

It is no blaspheme to say so.  Theological standards require that infallible doctrine apply to the entire Church, and never target an individual or a particular group of people.  The Church’s pronouncements against abortion, however, remove rights deemed universal exclusively from the pregnant.

The error applies specifically to abortion conducted before the point of viability, or the point at which a fetus is developed enough to live unattached to another human being.  This error, in other words, applies to the vast majority of intentional termination.

Post-viability abortion is intrinsically different, in terms of both impact and intent.

In terms of intent, the person who has voluntarily endured six months or more of pregnancy is demonstrably planning to give birth.  Personally (and legally, in almost every location) it would take nothing short of a calamitous prognosis at this point to convince doctors and parents that death is the best course of action.  Most commonly, it is a fetal health anomaly guaranteeing the unborn a short life of struggle and pain, or a life like perpetual coma, without hope of interaction.  In these cases, the end of pregnancy is incidental to the situation, not the ultimate goal.

Late-term abortion, in other words, is not abortion.  It is euthanasia.

Though comprising a very small proportion of intentional termination, post-viability abortion is predominantly singled out by pro-life literature.  Images of women with pronounced pregnant bellies, terms like “fetus,” and references to dismemberment are common indicators that the protester believes all abortions occur late-term.  To make the case against it, some present graphic descriptions of the removal of the deceased’s body out-of-context, as though the unborn was killed in a manner without parallel.  However, the method of death is, as prescribed with every act of euthanasia, lethal injection.  The remains are collected in the manner least dangerous to the pregnant person (as is also the case with late-term miscarriage).

In terms of impact, there may be few circumstances where post-viability abortion occurs in defense of life, as gestation can usually be ended by an induced, non-lethal early labor involving the same degree of risk for the pregnant person as a late-stage termination.

Abortion pre-viability, however, constitutes the lowest threshold of force for the removal of risk from one person at the expense of another. It therefore constitutes legitimate self-defense and cannot be infallibly condemned.

Contrary to what has been claimed by some who are pro-life, pregnancy and childbirth always include a very real risk of dying.  This is why people tend to give birth under the direct supervision of medical professionals who keep sterilized surgical equipment at the ready, and it is why, throughout gestation, doctors carefully monitor the pregnant person’s health.  Pregnancy can cause spiking and plummeting blood pressure, deadly clots, strokes, and heart-attacks.  Hormone-related psychosis, depression, and other disorders which (because of pregnancy) are not treated with prescription pills have even taken their share of lives via suicide.  Everyone who died giving birth or under the cesarean knife would have lived had they instead chosen a safe, legal abortion during the typical first trimester.

Nor is there any knowing in advance who will die.  Every pregnant one is risking death.  Hence, every pregnant person is entitled to defend her own life in this manner.

Contrary to what some may argue specifically in this context, we are not obliged to shrug off risk to our own lives as unimportant when demise is not guaranteed.  Nor are we expected to defend ourselves in a haphazard fashion; a less-than-certain hazard of death does not require a defense that is less-than-certain to kill.  A moderate use of force requires rather that we are to employ in our own defense nothing in excess of the force required to remove the risk of death.  Up until viability, lethal force is the minimum amount necessary to ending the pregnancy; hence, abortion is the moderate use of force.

Some do not like the categorization of abortion as self-defense for the reason that they would rather not place the unborn in the same category as any violent criminal.  This, however, is bias – and it undermines one of the Catholic Church’s foundational teachings.  That is, all people are equally, incalculably, precious.  When removed from battle, a child-soldier, blameless and vulnerable, is to be shown the same mercy as the commanding warlord.  The rights of others dictate, however, that while posing an active threat, either might be killed in self-protection.

Legitimate defense is not a proclamation of guilt, nor a dismissal of human value.  No crime makes a person unworthy of living.  It is simply the Church’s position that when two lives are in conflict, neither is obligated to forfeit for the good of the other.  As the Catechism states, “one is bound to take more care of one’s own life than of another’s.”

The fact that the Church classifies abortion as a special kind of sin, resulting in instant excommunication for the pregnant person and doctors involved, emphasizes the targeted and discriminatory nature of this teaching.  Unlike the soldier joining, in good faith, what seems to be a Just War, or the sovereign who orders the death of a citizen in pursuit of societal safety, the woman who is pregnant and chooses abortion (along with those who serve her) are presumed to be acting with mal intent and operating without the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.  The demonstrable good of her continued existence on this planet is not considered, or else is worth nothing, such that abortion is purported evil by nature.

In cases where the error of this assumption are glaring, Catholic thinkers have exercised mental acrobatics to deny it the medical context proclaimed by secular feminism.

In an ectopic pregnancy, where the embryo is found developing without a uterus, it is clear that termination will save the life of the pregnant person, and that the unborn will otherwise not have long to live.  Still, the preservation of one of those lives can only be accomplished by such pretended accident as might require, for instance, the removal of a woman’s fallopian tube.

In impact and action, this is abortion.  A willing deed ends one life early and saves another.  But, by a discriminating twist of logic, it is reasoned that intending the action that will certainly cause death is not the exact same thing as intending the death itself.  So this is not abortion.

But it would be, if the embryo were removed through a tubal incision small enough to heal.

We see by this example that a condemnation of abortion requires that sanctity of heart and mind not meant to be trespassed, even by angels, to be plastered over with assigned purpose.  Neither the woman seeking an abortion nor the doctors helping her are granted the privacy of their own intentions.  For them, and only for them, benign intent must be externally demonstrated in order to exist.  What satisfies the Church that they mean well, furthermore, is singularly the removal of a piece of her body.  This is nothing but abortion pre-absolved – by the sacrifice of one’s fertility and the physical assurance of her lifelong suffering.  It is an ordered corruption of indulgence.

Denying pregnant people their medical rights in order to maintain that abortion is wrong does nothing to disprove the medical nature of abortion.  If sin cannot be justified by the avoidance of harm, then sin cannot be required as a condition for the avoidance of sin.  Non-therapeutic amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations are explicitly-listed sins against bodily integrity.  In this context, the removal of an entire fallopian tube is all of the above.

Consideration for respect of the person and scientific research led the Church to rule concretely that it is “not morally admissible to bring about the disabling mutilation or death of a human being, even in order to delay the death of other persons.”  As the best possible outcome of tubal removal for an ectopic embryo is the delay of death, such mutilation serves no ethical purpose.  In removing a pregnant person’s risk of death entirely,  however, direct abortion is an application of legitimate defense – in keeping with the fifth commandment and the spirit of defending life.

Nor is respect for the person to be undermined in the interests of saving life.  The donation of one’s bodily organs is hailed by the Church as an act of love and compassion, but is “not morally acceptable” if the donor has not issued explicit consent.

Even when the donor body is no longer alive, and sharing of its parts endangers no one, it must be unambiguously established that the deceased had intended donation.  In condemning abortion, the Church has established that the dead possess more rights than the living pregnant person.  For, as has been pointed out, every act of pregnancy requires the donation of one’s organs and the accompanying compromise of one’s health.

Symptoms of a typical pregnancy would certainly be termed illness – and often severe illness – if experienced by any category other than the pregnant.  Nine months is a long time to be so incapacitated, but many of these symptoms, such as tooth decay, have permanent effects.  Childbirth and the major abdominal surgery known as cesarean sections are, of course, objectively damaging in the best of circumstances and require many weeks and months of medical recovery.  Very often the person bringing life into the world sustains serious injuries rarely acknowledged.  Tissue damage may result in enduring painful intercourse, lost libido, or incontinence.  Irreparable pelvic fractures are also very common.

Explicitly, the Church holds as the organizing principle for the regulation of human bodies, the fifth commandment.  The value of life.  But where it is not argued that the individual is the appointed guardian of her own life, and it has not been established that the insides of our bodies are as private or as sacred as the insides of our minds, it is taken for granted that violations of body are wrong for the reason that they go against a certain order established by the Church.

Consent does not justify medical experimentation enacted voyeuristically.  Consent is not the baseline for determining what constitutes a desecration of the dead.  The Church establishes the order, and in so doing, places the human body firmly under its own jurisdiction.  Ecclesiastical authority can say that pregnancy does not violate its integrity – even when bones break, muscles tear, and hearts stop.  Even when the person who is pregnant does not will it, and is screaming for it to end.  There can be no violation because, as regards the pregnant, it has established that this is what their bodies are for and this is what their lives are for.

The fact that sexual assault appears in the section of the Catechism listing sins against chastity, rather than those entailing sins against health, freedom, bodily integrity, or respect for the person, speaks further to this troubling assumption: it is the business of the Church to regulate, not the pure morality of how people treat one another, but the material usage of bodies.  With relation to all things sexual, it is human reproduction the establishment seeks to command.

This is why, though it was never acceptable to kill an attempting rapist, it was once taught as valiant to kill yourself in the event that you were a virgin girl who otherwise would be raped.  Saint Maria Goretti, who died fighting off a sexual predator, is still commemorated at the pulpit for “defending her virtue unto death.”

What sole, unspoken virtue could there be in a young woman’s death – except the prevention of a baby, whose very existence outside the bounds of sacrament would sully institution?

It is not by reasoning, but by the default prejudice known to feminists as “sexism” that we have always determined something in a woman more precious than her life.  And by that same determination, we have reduced what life may be within her to exploited, “disposable biological material,” however hard we preach to the contrary.

When we include those zygotes who fail to implant, three-quarters of all persons conceived are never born.  That the Church nevertheless will demand unprotected sex between married persons is a valuation unexamined.  It states that an infant is worth the sacrifice of every life lost in utero.  In the Church’s eyes, the born child is worth more – by far – than the zygote or the embryo.

The Church’s teachings against birth control further are a statement that allegiance to natural order as defined by institution are of greater import than human life or dignity.  Science informs us, in fact, there are many more zygotes lost in the course of natural ovulation cycles than could be in the storied event of breakthrough ovulation, as it may occur within wombs too thinned by hormonal birth control to sustain life.  Assuming hormonal birth control even does thin the uterine lining and hinder implantation.  The jury is still out.

So, too, the teachings on marriage requiring openness to life, while maintaining that perpetual abstinence is sin.  A discovery that one partner entered the union with no willingness to have children qualifies a union for annulment – a disavowal that true love ever existed.  In pursuit of procreation, the Church makes the statement – never mind the fact that Jesus’ parents followed quite a different model – that this is what your marriage is for. This is what your love is for.

This is the context by which abortion is without conceivable merit.  The great evil is not death – for all lives are equal and every child born requires the risk of another.  What rankles so is the insubordination; the fact – the known fact – that a pregnant person made a choice about it.

Let it rankle and be known, however – the Virgin Mary is pro-choice.

It says so in the bible.

In Luke’s gospel, the angel Gabriel does not frame it as question, but fact – that Mary the virgin will be overshadowed by the power of the Most High, will become pregnant and will give birth to a baby, whose job it will be to save all the people of God. (Luke 1:26-38).  The Annunciation ends with Gabriel’s insistence that no word from God will ever fail.

Mary tells him, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.  Be it done unto me according to your word.”

This is not a yielding, simple, sweet agreement.  Mary’s first word is the literal demand – look at me.  And, contrary to what most think, that line about being the handmaid of the Lord is anything but self-dismissal.  For context, we need to look at the story immediately before the Annunciation – the one where Gabriel appears to Mary’s cousin, Zechariah.

Line by line, this conversation (Luke 1:5-20) reads as a foil for the second.  Both visits begin with Gabriel suddenly appearing, telling the human not to be afraid, and proclaiming a boy will be born to change the fate of the world.  In both cases, the human wants to know how it is even possible to expect a baby, given how old he is on the one hand and how unmarried she is on the other.

It is in answer to Zechariah’s skepticism that the angel self-identifies as a servant of God, whose words reflect God’s will.  Then Gabriel tells the old man that, because he failed to believe the angel’s words, he will be silent until the prophecy comes true.  (Accordingly, Zechariah can not speak again until he supports his wife in naming their baby John.)

When they come from an angel or a man in gleaming vestments, claims of serving God are hailed as proof of a special proximity to heaven.  He uses this claim to imply that he, better than others, is able to decipher the Lord’s will.  And if no word from God will fail, speaking for God makes one infallible.

But enter the maiden – poor and young.  Never having commanded angelic legions in heaven’s defense, and making no claims to any standing in divine presence.  She is bold for no reason – except faith.  Where Zechariah was shut up by Gabriel’s humble-brags of higher service, Mary makes the angel look her in the eyes.  Mary speaks of her own service to God.  And Mary tells the angel famously, “Be it done unto me according to your word.”

So active and forceful is her consent – practically a command – the annunciation is painted as a sort of proposal in most biblical interpretations.  But she answered a question that was never asked.  By her yes, Mary asserts, against the angel’s presumption, that she has the right to say no.

This is a stand that flies in the face of erroneous Catholic teaching.  The girl is not consenting to sexual activity that may or may not lead to pregnancy.  She is consenting to her pregnancy in the moment after learning there is a person – with a name, a gender, and a destiny – whose life depends on her.

Mary’s faith in God was not the type of faith that could be blinded.  She could not be silenced, like Zechariah, because she believed no word from God would ever fail – and if the word of God was in the angel who served her , she knew the word of God was in her own voice, too.

Mary’s love for God was not the type of love that would let her forget the dignity of her own person.  So she told the angel yes, even though she wasn’t asked.

It was in that very act of choosing that Christ was made, before the angel’s eyes, from a perfect foretold prophecy to a person of flesh, who might be denied.  Without that yes in honor of his mother’s personhood, there could be no honor given to the personhood of Christ.

Let Mary teach us, in a spirit of humility, to halt our quest for The Kingdom where it causes us to tramp beyond the veil of a breathing human’s flesh.  We do not honor children by removing from their parents such rights as we still give to corpses.

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Allegations ARE Coming Out Now Because of Politics

13 Monday Nov 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Confessions of a Buried Survivor, Uncategorized

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Bill Clinton, Blue, Child-Molester, consent, feminism, Hollywood, Inter-sectional Feminism, Molester, Moore, No Moore, Politics, Rape, Resist, Roy Moore, Sexual assault, Trump, Weinstein

I get pissed when I read threads on twitter patiently explaining why survivors take decades to tell our stories.  I get pissed because, as true as it is may be that fear and trauma and societal pressure can keep survivors from speaking, there is a greater pressure no one wants to mention.  It’s the pressure that keeps you from listening.

The first time a survivor’s tale goes viral is never the first time it was told.  It’s only the first time someone who couldn’t be dismissed heard the story and decided to do something with it.

It’s a one-in-a-million story that everybody cares about; a lottery of supply-and-demand.  Politics are currents, happening everywhere, always.  They are at work when a 14-year-old girl gets molested and her friends tell her she’s making a big deal out of nothing.  There are politics in the small town mothers and fathers and pastors who gaslight and downplay, and in the journalist who, in the right place at the right time, will hear that resonating rumor and decide to follow up.

If it takes tens years for a political tide to swell in the right direction and make the stories finally go somewhere, it can’t fall on survivors to explain why.  It falls on us, on all of us, to ask why, suddenly, we heard.

It is true that Roy Moore’s child-molestation only matters to most of you because of this election.  I know that for a fact because most of you aren’t calling for criminal charges.  “If Moore is guilty, Moore should step aside as Senate candidate,” is the faux-heroic stance of admired liberal after liberal politician.  Thanks so much, farmer-with-a-shotgun, for suggesting the fox kick himself out of the henhouse, but it ain’t gonna happen.  When the best you can do with your power is to suggest a child-molester remove himself from your line of vision, you’re not protecting or supporting survivors.  You’re using the waves created under them to forward your career.

Trump is a rapist and he should be in jail.  So the fuck is Bill Clinton.  And I refuse to believe that saying this will work against the movements seeking to expand healthcare or put a halt to Nazism.  The political tides that brought Hollywood-hating republicans and feminism-studying liberals together as two ears, hearing buried stories, have given me reason to hope.  That, in this perfect storm, we have made room for reckoning.

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The Virgin Mary is Pro-Choice

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Abortion, angel, Birth Control, Catholic, chimera, Christ, Conception, Elizabeth, Embryo, Feminist, fertility, Gender, God, Grabriel, heresy, inter-sectional feminist, Jesus, Jesus Christ, John the Baptist, Life-at-conception, misogyny, Privacy, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Rape, rape culture, Religion, sexism, Twins, Virgin Mary, Women, Zechariah, Zygote

The gospel of Luke begins with two announcements.  First in a conversation with an old priest named Zechariah, and then in a meeting with Zechariah’s cousin, Mary, the angel Gabriel declares that there will be another baby born, to change the fate of the world.

The first annunciation (Luke 1:5-20) is set up as a foil for the second (1:26-38).  Zechariah and Mary each ask the angel how could they, given their strange circumstances, parent a child?  But whereas Zechariah is struck voiceless because of his doubts, Mary’s voice only grows stronger.

“Behold,” she tells the angel, when it has been explained to her that no word from God will ever fail.  “Behold,” meaning, look at me.  Then she says: “I am the handmaid of the Lord.”

Taken out of context, this might be read as a declaration of passivity.  However, just a few verses before, Gabriel responds to Zechariah’s skepticism with a similar introduction:  “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you.”

Serving God was given, not as reason for dismissal, but as the source of the angel’s authority.  Anyone who disbelieved God’s servant was kindly invited to shut his mouth for the next nine months or so.

After Mary speaks, it is the angel, and not the woman, who has no more to say.  He stays just long enough to hear her final answer: “Be it done unto me according to your word.”

So active and forceful is her consent – practically a command – the annunciation is painted as a sort of proposal in most biblical interpretations.  But Mary assumes a question that was never asked.  By her yes, she still asserts that she has the right to say no.

Most traditions on the matter hold that without her permission, God would never have made her pregnant.  The narrative has been used in theological circles as a parallel for sexual consent.  However, Mary wasn’t consenting to sex.  She was consenting to pregnancy.  And Jesus, though not incarnate, was fully-formed.  Gabriel knew his name and gender and what his destiny would be.  Mary accepted, regardless, in a way that made it clear – she didn’t have to do this.

Jesus was a choice that she was making.

Though no story was recorded, it is evident that Zechariah’s wife, Elizabeth, experienced some form of annunciation as well.  She knew her son’s name was John, though her husband couldn’t tell her so, and shouted as soon as she saw her cousin again that Mary was the mother of her Lord.  We aren’t privy to the way that Elizabeth spoke with God.  Elizabeth ensconced herself in solitude for the first five months of her pregnancy, so perhaps this missing story speaks to how highly she valued her privacy.  But she issued a statement during this time that rings loud and strong across the ages: the Lord had done as she requested.  John was a choice made, too.

Neither lady seems to have been particularly phased by the knowledge that whole nations and peoples would be shaped by their decisions. Of course, as they were women, this knowledge was nothing new.

Women are socially prepared, in great and subtle ways, to foster the life of the species.  Identified females at every age are discouraged from partaking in activities, diets, and habits considered unhealthy in any given culture.  Women must be clean and cautious, discriminating in our mating and producing the right number of offspring.

Conversations concerning family planning invariably fall under the umbrella of women’s issues – from secular spheres where chemical birth control has never been developed with men in mind, to the natural family planning promoted by most Christian groups, wherein the prescribed ingredient is a wife’s unerring knowledge of her own menstrual cycle.

Worldwide, fertility rates have always been determined according to the number of children per woman born.  We are reminded again and again that our bodies represent the greater public good.  Those like Elizabeth, who can’t or won’t have children, have long borne the shame of society’s disappointment.  So, too, the teenaged mothers, poor and unmarried, like Mary.

Popes and presidents, scientists and prophets all have voiced their strong, conflicting opinions on the way that female bodies should further human aims.  The fate of the world’s population is given as ours to decide.  John Paul II preached that, as the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live.  This follows his appeal for married couples to see children as “God’s special gift to them and to society.”  He suggests, but doesn’t say it: As goes a woman, so goes her family.

It adds up to a political reality wherein no choice regarding pregnancy is ever isolated from societal concern.  This has always been the reality.  Those who become pregnant are required, rather than called, to serve the highest good – independent of which choice is made – by the very act of choosing.

Mary certainly knew her pregnancy had a political context.  The Jewish people were an oppressed minority within the Roman Empire, and the long-discussed Messiah was expected to flip that paradigm.  On her visit to Elizabeth after speaking with the angel, Mary sings that the Lord has “brought down rulers from their thrones but lifted up the humble.”  God was doing a great thing for her in making her a part of his revolution.  Her choice is a power that she is proud to wield – not in a general pro-life way, but specifically for the advancement of Israel’s people.  Mary demanded, before Gabriel knew her answer, that the angel recognize her as someone God trusted to make such great decisions.

To call abortion selfish is to ignore the sociological landscape that demands women choose, in every moment of living, the highest manifest good of our communities.  Fleeing abusers, hunger, political unrest, unemployment, or the violence of neighborhoods guarded with suspicion by established authorities – the choice of abortion has very often been a choice in pursuit of conditions that are safer and more conducive to life.  We have it on biblical authority that pregnancy is not always a blessing.  Cursed be the breasts that suck and the wombs that bear in days of tribulation.  Luke said so a few times, and Matthew said so once.

Those who have small children, and who plan to have children in future, acutely know that a risk to their own lives is a risk to others’, too.  You may argue that there are very few circumstances where abortion can be seen as a defense of a pregnant person’s life.  You would be wrong.  Pregnancy and childbirth always include the risk of death.  Hence people hurry to hospitals at the first signs of labor, preferring that medical professionals with surgical equipment actively supervise delivery.  Throughout a pregnancy, medical check-ins are normal and encouraged.  Rising and falling blood pressure throughout gestation can cause deadly clots, strokes, and heart-attacks.  Hormone-related psychosis and depression, and other conditions which during pregnancy could not be treated with prescription pills, have even taken their share of lives via suicide.  Everyone who ever died giving birth or under the cesarean knife would have lived had they instead chosen a safe, legal abortion during the typical first trimester.  There is no knowing in advance who will die; the risk is there for every pregnant person.

Life is not a miracle, in the word’s most common sense.  It’s not something that just happens, as though by magic – nor is it, as children may be told, born by stork through open windows.  The creation of a human being requires the physical suffering of another person.  Symptoms of a typical pregnancy would certainly be termed illness – and often severe illness – if experienced by any category other than the pregnant.  Nine months is a long time to be so incapacitated, but many of these symptoms, such as tooth decay, have permanent effects.  Childbirth and the major abdominal surgery known as cesarean sections are, of course, objectively damaging in the best of circumstances and require many weeks and months of medical recovery.  Very often the person bringing life into the world sustains serious injuries rarely acknowledged, affecting areas of the body considered unfit for public discussion.  Tissue damage may result in enduring painful intercourse, or incontinence.  Permanent pelvic fractures are all too common.

It is sensible to presume that, even if no laws enforced it, the vast majority of abortions would continue to occur within the first trimester.  A person who endures five or six months of pregnancy clearly intends to have a baby.  Late-term abortions are overwhelmingly the result of dire health concerns, and not what any compassionate person would call “elective.”

The Catholic Church, easily the most prolific and influential pro-life organization globally, enshrines a much more stringent definition of non-elective abortion.  Even when the termination of pregnancy will most certainly save the life of the person who is pregnant, and when the life of the unborn otherwise will certainly not be long, no abortion is moral that intends the death it causes.  For example, in the case of ectopic pregnancies, an embryo found developing in a place other than a uterus may only be terminated indirectly, by, say, the removal of a lady’s fallopian tube.

Following what is characteristically Catholic logic, it can be argued that the intent of an action is as important as the impact of the action.  But following what is characteristically Catholic prejudice, intent is treated as more important than impact when the subject is abortion.  Further, and uniquely here, intent is treated as external, rather than private – visible to the Church and open to public evaluation.

As a Catholic, you are taught in other contexts that a person’s heart and mind are private spheres, and that this privacy is sacred.  Not even angels can read minds.  It can’t be assumed that the intention of abortion is to kill a zygote or embryo anymore than it can be assumed that the intention of a fallopian tube’s removal is not to kill a zygote or an embryo.  Excepting such specific, individual cases where, say, a pregnant woman appeals for advice to her parish priest, then – the logic that is being used to tell us that it’s wrong to have an abortion, can’t be used to tell us that it’s wrong to have an abortion.

By a similar prejudice, the Church’s reasoning regarding self-defense is never applied to pregnancy.  However, abortion removes the risk of death from one person at the expense of another.  Because pregnancy cannot be ended with less than lethal force, lethal force is proportionate to threat.  On these grounds, abortion should be considered valid self-defense.

You may balk at categorizing a helpless embryo the same as a willful assailant.  This, too, is bias.  According to the Church, we have no right to distinguish the value of lives based on guilt or innocence.  Regardless of what crimes a person has committed, Catholic teaching holds that human being as incalculably precious and worthy of life.  A child-soldier, blameless and vulnerable, is to be shown the same mercy as the commanding warlord when either are removed from battle and posing no active threat.

While in battle, the Church’s longstanding support for the concept of Just War argues that (arbitrarily contrary to what we’d argue with abortion) it is permissible to organize and intend the use of lethal force.  A pregnant woman is different from a soldier only in that she is neither following orders, nor recognized, by the Church, as an authority over the territory of her body.

Interestingly, though the Church does specifically proclaim bodily integrity to be a value worth the outlaw of slavery, torture, and medical experimentation enacted voyeuristically, we have never been clear that a violation of bodily autonomy, even including rape, justifies defensive homicide.  It was, however, once considered acceptable to kill yourself in the event that you were a virgin girl on the verge of being raped.  And if you died while “defending your virtue”, you might just earn your sainthood.

There is something to the Church more precious than a life.

Abortion is a special crime not because of death – for all life is to be equally valued, and every child born requires the risk of another.  What rankles so throughout the Church is the fact, the known fact, that a pregnant person made a choice about it.

If it were known to all that the Virgin Mary was pro-choice, would we take her experience into consideration?  Or would we dismiss her?  Would we hate her?  Would we call her an enemy of life?  Would we, solemn and troubled, ponder the idea, that mother though she was, and Mother though we call her, she was able to hold her head high and consider, just a minute, a world where we didn’t belong?

Does that thought bring us too near for comfort to the brink of non-existence?  Can we feel the power slipping from us if we place it in her hands?  Does it make us feel better to imagine that she had no choice, that she was God’s servant in the sense that she couldn’t say no?

Or maybe we’ll just compartmentalize, again, to save ourselves from considering abortion in one vein with the rest of our theology.  The Annunciation will have nothing to do with questions of life or death.  The main difference, we’ll conclude, is that – regardless of whether God was obliged to respect her wishes – a hypothetical no from Mary wouldn’t have physically killed Jesus.

According to the Vatican, life begins, case-closed, at the exact point where a sperm and egg cell meet.  The angel says, you will conceive – Jesus wasn’t there, yet. Of course, conception as the starting point makes it theologically difficult to determine when Christ’s life did begin.  There was no sperm involved.  Unless it was God-sperm spontaneously generated.  Maybe zygote-Jesus was entirely concocted from divine genesis, or one of Mary’s egg-cells divinely mutated.  The point is, we have no canon idea when or of what Christ was made.

So life-at-conception isn’t inclusive of Jesus.

Nor is he the only one left out.  Identical twins, springing from a single zygote, would have to be considered half-people if personhood could not begin after conception.  Chimeras, splicing from multiple zygotes into one, contain multiple living strands of DNA.  Such people can sometimes be identified by two differently-colored eyes.  If both zygotes are people, and neither one dies, a chimera is a couple.

Great though it would be to watch the Vatican back-dooring acceptance of “them/they’re” pronouns and polygamia, the prospect of forcing a several-soul identity onto a child born chimera should remove from us such arrogance as would assert we know no mystery regarding life’s beginning.

What we have learned through science is that, including those zygotes who fail to implant, three-quarters of all conceived are lost naturally before they are ever born. That the Church does not condemn unprotected sex as reckless endangerment, but rather endorses it between married persons, is a valuation unexamined.  It states that an infant is worth the sacrifice of every life lost in utero.  In the Church’s eyes, the born child is worth more – by far – than any developing embryo.

Humility could spare us heresy and bless us with compassion, when, without it, our quest for righteousness entitles us to tramp beyond the veil of a breathing human’s flesh.  Is there no reason, after all, that God saw fit to bury the sphere of life within us?  Are the insides of our bodies not private, and sacred, just like the insides of our minds?

Mystery has its job to do.  It stands as shield between us and a knowledge too profound.  Protecting us from heartbreak in the wake of zygotes gone.  Blowing away our labels before we stick them to each other, and lifting from our backs the weight of explanation.  Some things don’t fit neatly into boxes.  The straightest path has always been to accept that we’ve been confounded.

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In Support of Holyoke High School’s Outspoken Poet

10 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Thank you for raising your voice at your school’s Puerto Rican Day event.  We are outraged that the blogger and former teacher known as Turtle Boy, who avoided an investigation into lewd and intimidating behavior toward a young woman by quitting his teaching job, has decided to target you.

That Aidan Kearney, director of Turtle Boy’s blog, either took it upon himself or allowed others to post numerous pictures lifted from a high-school student’s personal Facebook page is beyond inappropriate.  His sexualizing comments are abhorrent.  We call on our communities in Holyoke, throughout Massachusetts, and as far as word will spread to condemn this predator’s actions in the strongest possible terms.  By exposing a young woman’s images to his virulent reactionary following, Aiden Kearney has compromised the safety and privacy that every child deserves.

We stand with you against the harassment and cruelty that Aiden Kearney is trying to foment.  We condemn the sources, whoever they may be, who asked him to write this hit-piece.  It is unforgivable that an adult in a position of authority over you, including teachers at your school, according to Aiden Kearney, would jeopardize your well-being by directing a known internet abuser to write about you.

You clearly are more academically gifted by far than Aiden Kearney, who despite being a teacher in the past, has no idea how to analyze poetry or history.  We recognize that your poem is about racism, a topic that is far too heavy for some grown adults to handle, despite the fact that children of color must live with the impact of it every day.

It escaped Aiden Kearney’s notice that in the very recent wake of a massive storm that has left the majority of Puerto Rico’s residents without electricity or cell service, while family members are struggling to locate each other and an imperialist piece of legislation known as the Jones act is hindering international aid from reaching people who need it, the President of the United States of America can still refer to disaster relief as “debt” without a shadow of remorse.

It escaped Aiden Kearney’s notice that white supremacists were able to openly rally in Charlottesville, again, just two months after the last white supremacist rally in the same location during which a protester was killed in cold blood.

Aiden Kearney did not notice that as football players are protesting – peacefully, silently, kneeling down, harming no one – the Vice President of the United States made it a point to get up and leave, because their message that there is something wrong with police brutality is the something wrong with the situation to a white man who has the privilege of not caring.

But we hear you, and we believe you.  You do not deserve the hatred of Aiden Kearney, nor anyone else.  You deserve to be heard.  The problems you address in your powerful poem are more important and more worth all of our time than the words of another privileged white man.  You have our support, our admiration, and our thanks for using your platform to speak your truth.

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I Want to Laugh At Traumatized Women

19 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Biography, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Comedy; Trope; Comically Traumatized;, Kimmy Schmidt; Ellie Kemper;, Lisa Kudrow;, Nadine Velazquez; My Name is Earl; Friends; The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Survivor; Rape; Sexual Assault; feminism; rape culture;

This post was re-written after my introduction to Silicon Valley and the comically traumatized Jared.

 

The updated version:

https://amodestbloggist.com/2017/07/28/i-want-to-laugh-at-traumatized-people/

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You Hate Kim Kardashian Because Sexism, The End.

26 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by shieldingc in Uncategorized

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Caitlyn Jenner, consent, feminism, Kardashians, Kim Kardashian, OJ Simpson, Paris Hilton, Prince, rape culture, Ray J, sex tape, sexism, transgender rights, voyeurism

*An updated version can be found: https://amodestbloggist.com/2017/09/19/you-hate-kim-kardashian-because-sexism-the-end-2/

 

As the internet took to mourning over the late, great legend once called Prince, it did its due diligence in remembering to pay tribute to just how much everyone else hates Kim Kardashian.

Of Prince’s illustrious career people were gleefully eager to speak of this moment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZLP38moqC8  when His Royal Rain kicked Kim offstage as among his very best.  So many memes were groaning, “Dear hypothetical God – quit killing musicians.  Take a Kardashian woman next.”  Not even love for our musical royalty would seem to glow as bright if not bolstered by that uniquely red-hot hate inspired by this particular breed of socialite.

The time had finally come to begin asking.

“What did Kim Kardashian ever do to you?”

My answers were swift, and vague.

 

“She reproduced.”

“She takes up space in newspapers and websites.”

“She’s famous for no reason.”

“Her consumer empire just keeps growing, making her inescapable.”

“She sets unrealistic beauty standards for other women.”

“Young girls might take her as a role model.”

“She’s everywhere!”

 

The first may have been a joke, but – heavy accusations, there, to wield against a woman.  Having reproductive freedom, taking up space.  Making money.  Exerting control over her own physical appearance.  Having influence.  Being seen.

The suggestions that Kim is “wealth without work” “famous for no reason” and “does nothing” are also frequent charges against her, which to me is the most confoundingly untruthful reason for all the dire hatred.  If she was doing nothing, how could you hate her?

She does quite a lot of stuff, in fact, which is why she has that growing inescapable empire everyone also complains about.  It’s called business savvy.  And if you don’t know what shit she does, but you still hate her, what you hate could be the fact itself that she does shit.

Put bluntly, sexism. She’s a woman who’s capitalizing on sexuality and infamy. If she’s “everywhere” it means she’s successful – dare I say, powerful. And people don’t quite get why – because people still think of female sexuality as inherently passive. If she’s famously sexual, she’s famous for “no reason”. If her business empire is founded on her sexual fame, it’s indelibly based on her “doing nothing.”

Look at her. Just at look at her. Smiling on magazine covers. You can tell she’s doing nothing, because look at all the pictures where she’s just doing nothing. She can’t possibly be doing things the rest of the time that she’s not posing for pictures, and she’s certainly not doing things while she’s posing for those pictures, because look at her. That face. That plastic surgery.  You don’t get famous for being looked at and still get credit for doing shit.

And Kim Kardashian is nothing if not seen.  She makes sure of it.  She tweets and instagrams all over the internet, she realities all over the TV, and now her name is on perfume and shoes and you have to see it when you walk through stores.  It’s no wonder people cheered when Prince gave Ms. Kardashian that push – lightly, but still –saying the words everyone must be dying to say.  “Get off the stage!”

Because that’s what you do when someone you don’t approve of existing keeps reminding of their existing by standing there in broad daylight, right?  You push them away.  Prince could do that, but you and me?  We’re stuck with her.  We know from her tweets that night, Prince invited her onstage, and she was too starstruck to dance.  So she stood, doing nothing, just like always.  Being visible with nothing to say.  As if being visible is doing something in itself.

Ok.

But what if it is?

What if her image, itself, is worth something?  And what if she knows it, and owns it, and sells it, and you buy it.  Aren’t you mad at Kim, after all, for subverting the societal expectation of a self-apologizing female sexuality?  This status quo that acknowledges sexy women make stuff sell, but denies that the woman’s sexiness has value on its own.  The sexy woman can’t sell her sexiness without also having to sell, like, beer.  Or deodorant.  Toothpaste.  Anything, really, that benefits some dude in a suit.  One might say, pimps up hoes down.

And you were afraid young girls would emulate Kim Kardashian.  That could be the worst.  To have our young women corrupted into recognizing their own sexuality and wanting to personally profit from it.  It’s terrifying to consider a world in which traditional gender norms are cast away.  We’re not ready for it.  We’re not ready for our young women to want to be sexual.  It’s better to put up with a system that incentivizes female sexuality as little as humanely possible.  Even when that means disincentivizing female sexuality.  Hello rape culture, were you here the whole time?

Kim Kardashian is proof that you can be a rebel in this world without fighting or rejecting any part of it.  Maybe she is a pawn in your media machine like you said, conforming to the standards set by The Man, neither free nor independent, nor liberated, nor self-loving.  Regardless, she’s calling the bluff of everybody using some pretense to sell themselves.  She’s fine with image itself being product.  That bothers us.

Case in point: Kim’s “break the internet” photo featuring her bare ass.  Wikipedia reports, “A Time magazine writer commented that, unlike previous celebrities’ nudes that represented the women’s rebellion against repressed society and “trying to tear down” barriers, Kardashian’s exhibition was “just provocation and bluster, repeated images that seem to offer us some sort of truth or insight but are really just self serving. We want there to be something more, some reason or context, some great explanation that tells us what it is like to live in this very day and age, but there is not. Kim Kardashian’s ass is nothing but an empty promise.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Kardashian#cite_note-38

Ok, Time, let’s chat.

When was it decided that with great ass should come great explanation?  Who made you this “promise” that women on display would not be self-serving, but be martyrs to the greater public good?  What entitles you to any form of profit when a female celebrity lets her butt gleam free?  I could call it sexism, and it is, but it’s become more than that.  It’s pimpism.  It’s rape culture.  It’s what’s for breakfast.

With a female celebrity we start with the presumption that her sexuality is public property, and every gain she makes thereby becomes, of course, our business.  Hence comes the ire when famous-for-sex Kim Kardashian isn’t doing with that fame and wealth and ass what’s better for us than for her.   It’s not true that when watching a male athlete get rich and famous by using his norms-defying body “we want there to be something more, some reason or context”.  It’s enough that he’s nice to watch.  When he’s rich, it’s enough that he’s rich – that money is his.  When he’s famous, it’s good that he’s famous.  He owes it to no one to use that fame as a springboard for other causes.  Nobody cares that the standard of athleticism he sets is unattainable to most of his viewers, nor that any number of young men will take him as a role model and harbor unrealistic career goals as a result.  His social contract is two clauses long: He will try to win.  We will cheer him on.

What we all have been watching in the saga of Kim Kardashian is a never-ending, mostly successful attempt to win.  When your dad defends OJ Simpson and everyone knows it: fuck prestige, me and Paris gettin famous bad.  When the singer you married at 19 becomes physically and verbally abusive: fuck you too, I’m still gonna win.  When you open a boutique with your sister three years later: It’s a start.  When you blow up reality TV and playboy and the internet: Winning harder, sell more shit, get more famous, keep on winning.

The fact that she does use her personal platform for the good of others is a moot one, because it’s not enough and no one cares and she isn’t even trying.  Need we rehash the flawless photogenic math by which we conclude that Kim Kardashian doesn’t do anything?  So what if one of her brands of lipbalm supports a fund for female entrepreneurs?  Who cares that she advocates for recognition of the Armenian Genocide, or if access to Kim’s generous spotlight allowed Caitlyn Jenner to spring from the transgender closet directly to the cover of Vanity Fair and the award of Woman of the Year that facebook officially has launched the new age of transgender rights?  What has Kim Kardashian ever done, for us?

And she had plastic surgery and lied about it after we all responsibly asked her what her body parts are made of, and her butt pictures are just like the butt pictures made to exoticize black women decades ago but she still gets her face posted places, and that’s not fair, and lots of people who deserve to be famous aren’t but we can’t stop looking at her pictures and we can’t stop saying her name and she’s never getting off our minds.  So she’s everything about the world we wish were done already –this woman who keeps us so mindlessly entertained and who turns our every drop of haterade to gold.

And maybe it’s fair to expect our celebrities to acknowledge and be accountable for privilege, particularly when the daring images they make bank on were already shot with black models when there was more to lose.  But the hatred – the million-meme-a-day,   universal-approbation-earned-by-each-barb-in-her-name, you-want-to-burn-this-article-to-the-ground-with-three-different-types-of-fuel, searing, insidious, personal hatred – that can’t be explained by proportionate appeal to meritocracy.  Searing, insidious, personal hatred doesn’t make unworthy celebrities less famous.  It’s the very base of Kim Kardashian’s business model; Kim Kardashian is fun to watch, and fun to hate.

So her name in your mouth is a product.  We consume it no matter the context of utterance.  These are the terms of her contract with us: We will watch.  She will let us.

It forces on the public no external morality; what we take and make of her image is entirely up to our own intrinsic values.  It is utterly to our shame, and ought to scare us, that what we’ve chosen societally is a gaze of unwavering contempt.

The comment surrounding her 2007 sex tape with Ray J typifies this relationship.  The comment has been, by and large – look how fake that is!  (In an angry voice).  The people who watched it will especially point out how the footage can’t have been shot without her knowing – how her hair and makeup is done so well and it looks like the scene was professionally filmed and lighted.  And this is offensive and archetypal of why Kim Kardashian is good to hate.  She couldn’t just get spied on and besmirched, like a normal slutty socialite, like her bestie Paris Hilton.  No.  She had to go and fucking consent about it.

There’s this thing about A Woman Who Lets You Watch we figured out a long time ago.  The thing is that you want to, even when it’s wrong.  And we’re all in agreement that when you just can’t stop yourself from watching, it’s her fault for being such a fucking dirty worthless slut that she doesn’t fight tooth and nail to make you look away.

It’s even worse when she doesn’t know how wrong it is – when her body is in your hands to do with what you will, and you go to test her boundaries and find that she has none.  She doesn’t judge if you call her names, or spit in her face, and it’s fucking terrifying when you realize maybe that’s exactly what you want to do.  Maybe you can talk yourself into thinking she deserves it, but the truth is you want to, just because you can.

Time demanded an explanation of Kim Kardashian’s ass exactly because we as a society lack the integrity to treat women as people without explicit instruction.  We know that it’s wrong to objectify and brutalize and demean but damnit, if those objects won’t make the effort to convince us they’re people what other option do we really have?

Oh, here’s one.  Fuck off.

Kim Kardashian does not deserve your malice, and if you don’t have it in you to be a decent person at least don’t brag about it.

Prince, it might uplift you to know, also seems to have thought so.  He invited her on his stage to dance, and after that iconic sassy farewell, his royal purpleness decided to pull her back up for another try.  Her concluding tweet that night is a fitting tribute to how much of an asshole Prince wasn’t, and to why if you hate Kim Kardashian you’re not in his good company:

“This time I redeemed myself!  We all danced while Prince played the piano!  Wow!  What a night!”

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/news/a57311/prince-kicks-kim-kardashian-off-stage/

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Glow – Chapter 11

22 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by shieldingc in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Free literature, Glow, Hedoniet, Ortiz, Science Fiction, Time-Travel

“That was close,” Hedoniet chuckled.

Enioreh squinted blearily around the thick cage of her flesh – she vaguely remembered her Invisiband flying off in the collision. She was inside a weird car, now, with two rows of seats facing each other; Hedoniet sat across from her, studying the gold-tinted psytron-tube between his forefinger and thumb.

“You prick,” Enioreh groaned. “Why’d you have to run me over?”

Hedoniet made a sympathetic sound with his tongue. “Had you been visible, I’m certain Bristol would have braked.”

The driver was glowering at her in the rear-view mirror – he was one of the suits who’d been to Faisal’s lab with the Prince.

“How did you know I’d be running through the parking-lot with psytrons, though?”

Hedoniet looked up into Enioreh’s eyes. “Because, I wanted you to.”

“Fuck you,” Enioreh growled. Her head was pounding out a rhythm she couldn’t ignore.

“Decorum, woman!” The Prince spoke sharply. “I am willing to overlook your many breaches in etiquette in light of services you have and will render the empire but don’t become too comfortable in your position. I am, after all, your Prince.”

“Seriously? You expect me to render more friggen services to some Empire I don’t even live in anymore? I’ve already been your psychic ferry across the starry galaxy and delivered the world’s first source of free, carbon-neutral, everlasting and non-toxic power to your antisocial clutches, albeit accidentally…what more do you want?”

“The physic-ferrying-through-starry-galaxies thing, once more, actually.”

Enioreh moaned. “Last time I did that it didn’t work out too well. You remember, with the whole, world-war, and all?”

“Is sense of duty so soon lost?” The Prince shook his head incredulously. “You still have a job to do.”

“Not until you pay my salary, I don’t!” Enioreh huffed. “Where are we going?”

“To the future!”

“No, seriously, where?”

They were pulling into a parking-lot, next to a tremendous, towering building.

“Liolaoc headquarters,” Hedoniet winked. “Resembles a castle already, does it not?”

“Uh-huh,” mumbled Enioreh. She waited for Bristol to get out of the car before she launched a kick at the Prince’s hand. He saw it coming and knocked her leg sideways with his elbow.

“Shit.” Enioreh gasped at the pain shooting up the inside of her leg. Now two parts of her were hurting. Bristol opened Enioreh’s door, and the girl hobbled angrily out.

“Try to be less alarmingly uncouth in front of my ancestors, please,” Hedoniet sighed, as Bristol forcefully escorted her into the building.

They rode an elevator to the first basement level, and Enioreh limped between Bristol and Hedoniet – the broken machine still clattering along behind her – through a set of double doors, around a corner, and through another set of double doors before stopping in an immaculately white room filled with shiny metal tables. The room was so big and sterile-looking, at first Enioreh thought it was empty – but as they kept walking she noticed a semi-circle of people standing towards the back. Three of them had on white lab coats, and one of them was wearing a suit, but all of them had hair that looked slightly bedraggled, as though they’d woken up just a few minutes ago.

The one with the suit stepped forward, smiling broadly. “Good morning,” he said, extending a warm hand to Enioreh. “Carlos Edwin Ortiz, at your service madam. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. My dear Hedoniet has already told me so much about you.”

“Thanks,” said Enioreh, gasping. “I’m actually here against my will, so if you can, like, correct that, or whatever…?”

“Oh,” said Mr. Ortiz. “Gee, um…that’s not really my area of expertise…”

“Here,” The Prince interrupted, putting the gold-colored tube in Ortiz’s hands.

“Thank God,” Ortiz sighed. “And is this…?”

“A tube full of psytrons – yup,” said Enioreh. “Not yours, so, you know – give ‘em back.”

“But…my dear!” Ortiz took Enioreh’s hand, his forehead full of wrinkles as he handed off the tube to one of the people wearing white laboratory coats. “Surely we can approach these discussions in a spirit of mutual cooperation?”

The scientists crowded around the tube, whispering excitedly as they made their way to one of the shiny metal machines located on a table close by.

“Nope,” Enioreh growled. “I realize I’m all fucked-up and outnumbered, here, but – seriously, those aren’t your psytrons. Give them back, or you’re a bad, bad guy.”

“That is not the way posterity shall remember it.” The Prince smiled grandly at his ancestor.

“I’m fucking posterity!” Enioreh yelled. “And I say it will make everyone hate you, if you don’t give them back to me, right now.”

“Well, now I’m confused,” Ortiz chuckled. “Did you discover psytrons?”

“No, but…they’re mine, ok? That’s not even the point, though! You guys are bad.”

“Hey!” Said a scientist in the back of the room indignantly – a pretty blonde.

“Well, you are,” Enioreh insisted.

“What’s the word?” The Prince demanded of the blonde. “Are they psytrons? Are they usable? Will we be able to reverse engineer the process, to capture our own?”

“We don’t need to.” She spoke in hushed tones. “The number has been growing in the short period we have been examining them. We’re not sure how, but it appears that psytrons are able to produce, or attract, more psytrons.”

“Extraordinary!” Ortiz said, delightedly. “Then have you successfully transferred…ahh! Here they are!” He rubbed his hands together, his eyes fixed on a petri-dish on the table filled with tiny, silver-looking pills.

Enioreh sidled closer, curious in spite of herself.  “What are they?”

“Time-capsules,” the Prince said, taking a pill and pressing it into Enioreh’s hand. “It takes a few minutes longer than the old syringe model, but its accuracy is great. All you need to do is swallow the pill while thinking of our own time, and when the outer shell dissolves the psytrons are released into your blood. As before, any person or object you are touching will travel safely with you.”

“Then this is really it,” said Mr. Ortiz – and he sounded sad. “You’re really leaving, now.”

The Prince turned to his ancestor and made a deep and courtly bow.   “For your hospitality, I thank you. For your kinship – I will remember you, always.”

Ortiz took Hedoniet’s hand, then pulled him into a hug.

Enioreh was staring at the capsule in her palm. It had a lot of weight, for such a little thing, and it responded to her touch, getting heavier on one side and then the other when she moved it. Like it was half-full of mercury, or iron filings.

“It makes me proud,” Ortiz was saying, “To know how far the strong work ethic and boldness of my family will carry on. And it makes my heart glad, to know there will always be young people working to make the world a better place.”

“Um,” said Enioreh. “Yeah…abducted girl, here, potentially facilitating the germination of global warfare, so…don’t go overboard, there, with the glad heart.”

“Touche!” Ortiz chuckled.

“Don’t do that!” a scientist said quickly, noticing the way Enioreh was jiggling the pill up and down.

“What. The. Fuck.”

All heads turned to the great room’s entrance. Jessie was standing there, fixing Ortiz with such a look of rage the rich man had to look away. Bristol made a move like to tackle him as he started stomping across the room – but Ortiz shook his head.

“Jessie Newman,” he said gently, “How are you? I haven’t had a chance to speak with you since you last were here.”

“Oh, I’m just peachy – and how are you, dad?”

The scientists gasped dramatically and Mr. Ortiz, after opening his mouth in surprise and shutting it, fell into a convenient coughing spasm, shaking his head and shrugging to show how politely apologetic he was that he couldn’t respond.

Jessie had marched as close to the group by the machines as Bristol would let him. “Seriously, pops, how’s it going? Ruin any good lives, lately?”

“Ooh,” said Enioreh raising her hand. “Me! I was kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped from where, kiddo?” Jessie laughed once, turning on Enioreh. “From Faisal’s lab, right, psytrons and all?   Cause I know you wouldn’t betray us the way your loser friend did.”

Enioreh had a weird urge to laugh and covered her mouth with her hand – then started choking on the time-capsule. She’d forgotten she was even holding it. The Prince slapped her on the back and it scraped a path down her throat with an aftertaste taste like lightning.

“Can’t you people synchronize your coughing fits?” Jessie demanded. “What did it take, Enioreh? Are you afraid of these people – did one of these pricks threaten you?”

“I heard that!”   The blonde scientist huffed.

“Come on, man,” Enioreh rasped. “That’s not what it is. It’s not personal, just…”

“Just what?” Jessie cut her off. “Professional? Is that what you’re trying to say? You think it’s objectively better for the world if an evil corporation has a patent on brain-power?”

“Just a minute, now!” Mr. Ortiz objected.

“There is nothing evil about efficiency!” the Prince argued.

“No one’s talking to you, monster-cock.” Jessie glared.

“I didn’t want anyone to have psytrons,” Enioreh protested. “They’re the cause of the war.”

“Liolaoc having psytrons is the cause of the war, according to your Prince. After all those times you told Faisal you believe in him – you didn’t even give him a chance to do things right.”

“Dude, look,” said Enioreh, angry now. “No future can be worse than the one that I remember. Where I’m from, the world is a fucking graveyard, and I hate to say it, but it’s kind of all your fault. You and Faisal are the ones who let the technology fall into the wrong hands to begin with.”

“That’s completely unfair – in that hypothetical Faisal was dead. You’re alive and you let the technology fall into the wrong hands.”

“Guys, we’re right here…” Mr. Ortiz waved his arms around emphatically.

“Yeah, but now they have time-travel,” argued Enioreh. “So maybe they’ll take over the whole world fast, like the Prince wanted, and there won’t be anything left to fight about.”

“Enioreh!” Jessie gasped. “Don’t tell me you’d support a global dictatorship?”

“Hey, if a little world domination will get us to a war-free zone, I say let ‘em have it!”

“Help!” One of the scientists yelled suddenly. “There’s someone over here!”

Everyone had been looking at Jessie, but they turned now at the yell. The scientists had moved a bit away from their machine, and Enioreh could see the gold-colored tube where it was set in a bigger glass tube, leading to a number of spiraly containers surrounded by thermometer-looking things. The whole machine was tilted now, was moving, and was halfway to being pushed off the table by forces invisible. The scientists responded quickly, holding the machine up, and Hedoniet snapped into action like the pretty good soldier he was – lunging at the area they were staring at. After a series of swift jabs he was grasping a banged-up Faisal in one hand and an Invisiband in the other.

Faisal twisted and made another dash at the machine, while Jessie rushed it from the other side. Hedoniet made a swift movement and tripped Faisal on his way to intercept Jessie, but Bristol-the-suit wasn’t waiting on the Prince. He’d pulled a black gun out of his shirt.

“One…more…move,” he hissed. The gun was pointing at Jessie.

Enioreh wanted to do something very sensible and noble now to make everyone happy and not fighting, but she found herself sitting down on the ground, instead. Her mind was going blank, and she was feeling mighty strange.

“Here we go.” Enioreh didn’t know whether her words were getting through the cyclone in her head. “If we did fuck up we’re the ones who’re going to suffer for it. You guys are only mad at us because you’re all, like, concerned for the future, or whatever – but it is our present, so, you know…our choice.”

“Enioreh!” The Prince’s arms were around her. “Think, and think of peace…” His voice was stretching in her ears, and she fought to hold it and talk back before her body sucked away through the vortex of her mind.

“Peace or no peace…we will make things right…” Break, smashing sea, hard as stone – throw as will be thrown, and ripples rise to push horizons fast away…Let go, let go the pain, oh pull away from what was done – let ripples grow to surf and coursing change. Ride, and ride the rivers through whatever daunting shift, as echoes turn to strangeness, mountains heaving breathe, and haunted loss resounds to see immortal love still kept. Bear on, waves and waves in starry daze, take hold in folding times – and rest you waves and all, bereaved, on shores of storied death…

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Chapter 10

29 Saturday Aug 2015

Posted by shieldingc in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Fantasy, Free Fiction, Free literature, Free Novel, Science Fiction, Time-Travel, urban fantasy

Faisal worked more diligently than ever after Hedoniet left. “We don’t need time-travel to give the world peace,” he insisted. “All we need is brain-power.”

Enioreh went with him a lot of the time; Faisal had an idea that era-foreign psytrons would behave differently, and he wanted to study hers. Sometimes he’d stick wires to her head with suction cups to try and see what was inside, but most of the time she was left with nothing to do but follow Faisal around, trying to look official in a white smock. She didn’t mind; she had an odd feeling someone was going to attack him if her back was turned, or that he would just disappear, like a ghost in the light.

Faisal was intensely quiet. When he had to speak, he was intensely heard, by all the underlings who used to be his peers. It was a race, Enioreh knew – Hedoniet’s team against Faisal’s. Liolaoc had the money, but Faisal had started working on psytrons first. Liolaoc had the formula for Chronojuice. But Faisal said that would only tell them how to keep psytrons in a person’s blood once they’d been harvested. And according to the Prince, Faisal was the one who’d figured out how to do that.

The days trickled by, pooling into one week, then another. Faisal wouldn’t let them get too far, too fast; he fought to wring each second for all that it was worth. The weight of monumental discovery was always in the air, making people jump. Enioreh found herself hanging on the minutes with baited breath.

Late one night, when there was no one in the lab but Enioreh and Faisal, she heard a scratching on the outside of the window.

“I think I’ll go check that out,” said Enioreh, after pacing and thinking about it for a minute.

Faisal nodded vaguely as she went.

The air was frosty and good when Enioreh stepped outside, and the moon hung low. Enioreh crept to the side of the building where Faisal’s lab windows were, searching the shadows for signs of something wrong.

“Enioreh.”

“What!!!” Enioreh spun reflexively, throwing useless punches and kicks in all directions.

“How have you been, friend?” It was Prince Hedoniet, leaning on a tree, shortened locks of burgundy swaying in the moonlight.

“Fan-fucking-tastic, asshole.” Enioreh folded her arms across her chest. “What’s with you sneaking up on me?”

“Permit me to be direct,” Hedoniet commanded. “I need help.”

“You’re damn right you do.”

“Tonight is the night, isn’t it, Enioreh?” His eyes glittered. “Tonight is the night that psytrons are discovered, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

Hedoniet studied her face. “You don’t know,” he agreed. “But you suspect. You know Faisal’s getting close. As do I. I’ve had it in my head for some time now, that Faisal would make his key discovery tonight. I don’t know whether this is a memory or an idea, but it sticks; I feel that this is it.”

“So, what? You’ve hit a wall at Liolaoc, or something? Realizing the value of Faisal’s mind, after all, and so you come crawling back for help?”

“I’m afraid so.” Hedoniet smiled. He did not look afraid. “It seems vision is just one of those things one cannot transfer unwillingly. We can’t see what Faisal sees without him wanting us to see it. Even with a good knowledge of psytron technology as it was always used in our time. And, Enioreh – I can’t see what you see without your help.”

“What?” Enioreh raised an eyebrow.

“You took us here, with your special brain. Maybe my mind had an influence on where we landed, but the picking up and going, was all you. And I need it, desperately, in order to get home to any kind of future.”

“Yeah,” said Enioreh. “Too bad you didn’t figure that out before you ditched us for Ortiz. I slept on a park bench. Do you have any idea what animals are like after dark? Fucking mean – bastards kept throwing trash at my legs.”

“You seemed not to care that I was leaving, until you had nowhere else to go. In any case, you are a resourceful woman with humanitarian friends – I had no fear for you.”

“Yeah,” said Enioreh. “Jesse and Faisal are humanitarians – good guys, and smart guys, too. Too bad you went and betrayed us – looks like you need all three of us now.”

“Betrayal?” Hedoniet shook his head. “My first allegiance is to the future, not the past. As is yours.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What is a personal slight compared with the development of global death-squads? I realize that Jesse and Faisal have both been kind to us – personally, I care for both of them a great deal. But what are my feelings in the scheme of things? We need to make history, Enioreh, whilst yet we know how. I asked Faisal to consider a partnership with Liolaoc, yet he remains unwilling. I fear this may be my fault – had I not shown him the Chronojuice formula, he may not have spurned such a materially beneficial arrangement. This is not what happened originally. Faisal Adlai partnered with Liolaoc, and once in possession of the particle, Liolaoc developed it – first as a source of alternative energy and then of weaponry, prior to becoming a state.”

“Wait,” said Enioreh. “You’re telling me, Lioloac became the Empire? Because of its weapons – because of psytrons?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, what the hell! We’ve been pushing Faisal to invent the thing that caused the war – and you’re ok with this, you fricken douche? You said you were in favor of world peace! I’m definitely not helping you now.”

“Enioreh.” Hedoniet sighed. “Understand that there has always been war – there have always been nations fighting. Liolaoc merely conglomerated those scattered conflicts into one. And if they had time-travel from the outset, they would have been able to solve that one, centralized conflict much sooner, and thus create a centralized and everlasting peace. It’s essentially the same as winning the battle of Theminus – giving the empire the power to triumph over all while they’ve still the will to win. By the time we return to our own time, we may find the world has even had time to grow used to peace. Think of all the people you have lost over the years of constant war, of all the people you thought never to see again. We can give all of them a second chance!”

“We?” Said Enioreh. “What exactly are we supposed to do, now?”

“When Faisal discovers the way to capture psytrons, the information needs to find its way to Liolaoc. It needs to, or we’ll never get anywhere.”

“So?” Said Enioreh. “I like it here.”

“The whole word isn’t like this,” The Prince laughed hollowly. “Any more than the entire world back home is like the Emperor’s summer palace. There is war, here, too. And there will be war, until someone has the courage to win.”

“You don’t know that,” said Enioreh.

“You don’t not know it.”

“You know I don’t know about knowing nothing like that!” Enioreh yelled. “Dude, look – I don’t have time for this. Talk to me when you’re feeling like less of a douche.”   She went inside, shaking her head. Her brain had taken her here – from a world of suffering to the one place she had the power to choose. There had to be some way of not fucking up.

*          *          *

“Everything outside was fine, Faisal. It was an owl, or something.” Enioreh coughed uncomfortably. What was the proper way to break it to someone that his work would lead to a war-torn dystopia, after all?

Faisal smiled faintly – looking at her, but not really. His eyes didn’t stick to anything. “Enioreh – come here.” He held out the wires bound to suction-cups, and Enioreh took halting steps forward, sinking into a chair in front of him. Music was pouring from one of his machines – soothing and scary at the same time.

“That’s cold,” she said, as he started attaching the suction-cups to her head.

“Yes,” said Faisal. “It’s an adhesive I’ve been toying with; a substance designed to channel stray particles. …Enioreh!” Faisal’s eyes were wild and whispering. He was watching squiggles dancing on a monitor behind her. “We’re close! We’re so much closer than we knew. …I can see them!”

“Oh, shit,” said Enioreh. “I guess that’s the end of your project, then? You can prove psytrons are real.”

“Yes,” Said Faisal, sounding hushed and far. “But they flee. And I – I know how to catch them!”

“Wait,” Enioreh gasped. “You’re talking about taking particles from my brain?”

“It won’t hurt,” Faisal murmured. “Psytrons aren’t contained by bone or tissue. They wander, they dissipate, like breath, and re-configure – you won’t even feel their harvest.”

Enioreh wiggled, looking at Faisal’s machines. The goop on her head had stopped feeling cold, but kept feeling heavy, with a growing stiffness. She followed the angled lines of wires with her eyes, from her body to where they hooked into an open box lined with delicate rods of glass and metal. It reminded her of a piano’s insides. Faisal’s face above it gave back the light of monitors, young and knowing. There was nothing but a tremble between him and discovery.

Enioreh steeled herself. She wouldn’t let the world get fucked up another time, right in front of her. “Faisal?”

He didn’t answer. The morning’s beginning was shining in over mountains through the window, making all things blue. “Here. Right here. Enioreh – we’ve done it!” Faisal spun wildly, his eyes meeting hers in soft wonder. He pried a gold-tinted metal tube from a slot in the machine. “We did it, Enioreh!”

“What?” Enioreh gasped. “What did we do? What is it?”

“Energy,” Faisal breathed. “Pure brainpower!”

Enioreh gasped again, touching her head all over. “But…that’s my brainpower?”

“I told you it wouldn’t hurt.” Faisal grinned affectionately, handing her the psytron-tube. “What kind of mad scientist did you take me for? We’ve always been the good guys.”

“Yeah, right? I know…” Enioreh muttered as Faisal pulled out his silly phone with shaking hands.

“Pizza is in order, wouldn’t you say? I just have to call Jesse first.” Faisal clasped his phone to his ear and turned away, maybe for just a second.

Enioreh stood as quietly as she could, then made a dash for the door – forgetting about the wires cemented to her head. There was a sharp feeling, like hair being pulled, a quick, chirping screech, then a pop, and the sound of clattering machine bits behind her.

Enioreh paused, hand on the door, and her eyes met Faisal’s where he stood across the room. The naked gizmos of the machine had spilled onto the floor, following the broken scraps clinging to her wires.

“Enioreh.”

Faisal’s words dragged out, too still and quiet not to make her hairs stand up. Then there was a burst of something behind Faisal’s eyes, and he was flying across the room at her. Enioreh scrambled around the door out into the hallway as fast as she knew how, her hands going into her hoody pocket as she ran. The Prince’s Invisiband was there – she’d made sure to always have it handy after the nights she’d slept in the park. Now she jammed it on her head, willing the wires and pieces of Faisal’s machine to also go invisible as the space and light in the hallway expanded and her hidden skull opened her vision too much.

“I can still hear you!” Faisal yelled, getting closer as Enioreh bashed her way through the emergency exit at the end of the hall.

She didn’t know if she could keep psytrons from being invented, but she could sure as hell try. Faisal’s feelings would be hurt, but he was a genius – he would come up with some other amazing project before long, and he’d get noticed for it right away this time. His supervisors knew how special he was, and he knew now that his own ideas were worth believing in.

Enioreh coughed on the crystals of cold morning air, dashing through the parking-lot. There were trees crowding its edges – she could just make out their silhouettes through pooling fog – and beyond them she knew where to find a brook. Enioreh had learned that most important things in the 21st century were programmed to self-destruct under water. She hoped Faisal’s psytron-cartridge was no different.

Headlights raked the edges of Enioreh’s vision; she turned her head in time to see the door of a black car fly open into the side of her face.

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