Women who write about sex.

Two links;

Ponderosa (she of banned-from-Livejournal fame) on shame/harm/sex writing.

Abby Lee (she of one-track-mind fame) on surviving being outed as a sex writer.

I'd want to add some commentary, but it's really not necessary, is it?

small outbreaks of sanity

[I am sleep-deprived and waffling]

Related to the whole Livejournal malarkey; The New Witch Hunt. My sister and I wound up talking about this while watching the news earlier; we suspected the negative tone of said news was fuelled by pure DailyMaleitis. (Oh, and this is months old, but god, PA, +PA news). I can't help but wonder who benefits from the witch-hunt, and who suffers. It seems like another of those attempts to divide the entire world into 'trusted friends' and 'monstrous strangers'. Most child molesters are in the former group, so why pretend that crazy freaks on Livejournal are that scary? (There's no line there, just many overlapping waves; I first heard about the whole Strikethrough mess from a friend who's both an abuse survivor and a cheerful shipper of incest, twincest and jailbait-slash.)

On women-only spaces; I blogged about this on Deadjournal in relation to Ladyfest. My personal inclination is generally that there are good ethoses of communication and bad ethoses of communication, rather than good or bad gendered spaces. I loved this line and may come back to it later; "Important point to note, that one - feeling aggravated, annoyed, pissed off etc is not the same as feeling physically threatened."

Whole other questions about family structures. This is a family issue I have verry little experience of, as my relatives have this habit of dying young, but I think I feel its currents; vicious cycles of noncommunication, generations sitting in separate rooms, unsure how to interact. (I'm sure it's just me who's altogether confused about what blood ties mean anyway, so I'll avoid projecting that onto the world at large.)

Reading this was a great saving in time and effort, because if I hadn't, I would have had to write it myself. Like anorexia, it's a subject that warrants consideration in a way that doesn't assume all the victims are female.

In which I conflate two unrelated issues, yay!

I've spent a lot of today reading about the 'LJ Strikethrough', with rapidly-rising disgust. The short version of the wank is thus; Livejournal has, seemingly due to complaints made by a (perhaps dubious) pressure group, been deleting journals that have unsavoury activities listed under 'interests' - regardless of whether the journal in question was a paedophile ring, an abuse survivor's journal, a literary discussion group, a fanfiction archive or even an RP villain's blog that expressed the foul personality of someone who does not even exist. This explanation was given as part of one support request on the topic - it happened to pertain to a blogger who'd been running an RP that had lost two journals pertaining to the latter group, fictional villains;

Material which can be interpreted as expressing interest in, soliciting, or encouraging illegal activity places LiveJournal at considerable legal risk. When journals that contain such material are reported to us, we must suspend them. Because LiveJournal's interests list serves as a search function, and because listing an interest enables other people also interested in a similar topic to gather and/or congregate, we have been advised that listing an interest in an illegal activity must be viewed as using LiveJournal to solicit that illegal activity.

In particular, the interests that you had listed on your two journals' profiles that qualify as expressing interest in, soliciting, or encouraging illegal activity were: child abuse, human sacrifice, kidnapping, killing, murder, paedophiles, paedophilia, rape, and beating people up.

Now, better bloggers than I have already torn this statement into itty bitty pieces, and also noted that it's both ripped holes in fandom and left real abusers underground and unscathed. What I'd like to add to the collective ranting is an observation; it reminds me quite a lot of the discussion that first sucked me into this part of the blogosphere, a discussion that began over here (but which soon migrated elsewhere because it's hard to discuss stuff when people are refusing to publish comments that don't support their side of the story. The tenth comment on that thread has to be one of my favourite internets evar.) The message being put out strikes me as being mighty similar; we've decided already, talking about it would be an incitement to abuse, you can't have this discussion in our conversation-space, it's not safe to say that here because you might hurt someone/get into trouble, so shut up about the difficult stuff, you can't form a group about that, anyone who wants to talk about it in this space must be wrong and evil, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.

I'm making a mental list of books I love that couldn't be hosted on Livejournal right now. But that's by the by. A few days ago I read Trinity's post questioning the wisdom of alliances between feminists fighting against abuse and the far-right. She asked; 'What does that do for us?' Well, here's a presently exploding example of what well-meaning right-leaning men have to say to women who speak out about abuse, whether real or imaginary; shut up. Don't discuss books, or your own past, put walls up in your imagination and your memory, don't go there, stay home at night, good girls can't go to that part of town, shut up.