round-up: 4/13
what i'm reading & listening to, and some quotations <3
Happy Sunday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
I had a poem come out in The Offing this week.
I also made a tiny zine:
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
Stuck in a rut? How to appreciate your life again, according to science
Back to Basics: A Butch-Femme Anthology
Quotations:
The reality is a lot more complicated. Many parents do not have their kids’ best interests at heart, or just don’t have the skills and knowledge to provide what their queer, disabled, or otherwise non-conforming kid needs. Some children know from a very young age that the religion being forced on them by their family is not right for them, or are obviously hurt by their parents’ attitudes about food, body size, physical punishment, or any number of personal values.
Most kids do need a ton of guidance in navigating the world, but they also have unique insight into what they need and what matters most to them that no adult’s judgement can replace.
And what about the role of life experience, which brings with it so much wisdom? My friend Arin’s sister is mentally two years-old according to her doctors, but she’s spent thirty years getting to know her family and has a profound understanding of what pushes their buttons. When she wants Arin to leave the room, she plays Mukbang videos on her tablet and smiles at him mischievously, because she has learned he hates the sound of chewing. She has strong preferences about how she wants to be treated, and is intentional and insightful in expressing that. Does this make her no longer a “child”? What does being a “child” intellectually mean?
Ability is fluid and a lot of what we can and can’t do is rooted in the resources we have available at the moment.
The number of years that a person has spent on the planet doesn’t tell you much at all about what they are capable of. Development just isn’t linear.
I am an abolitionist and anarchist at heart, which means I do not trust the state to decide what is right. I do not believe that our laws are inherently moral, or that states set policies with the intention of helping the most people. This forces me to confront the fact that 18 is not in fact a magic age at which a person suddenly becomes both deserving of freedom and no longer worthy of social protection.
As I have written before, abuse is caused by dramatic differences in power, not by the mere existence of taboo “adult” content involving violence or sex. The mere existence of sexual knowledge (or adult themes!) is not dangerous. It is, after all, children who lack knowledge about sex who have the hardest time recognizing abuse and seeking help. Child sexual abusers tend to target victims who are lonesome and do not have present and supportive caregivers or close friends, because they know that those children will not recognize the difference between safe and unsafe attention, and often have nowhere else to turn if they want to feel heard.
If I hadn’t gotten to know about alternate models of sex and relationships thanks to lots of weird, freaky adult content on the internet, I might have settled into an airless, unfulfilling straight partnership with some random boy in my class, whose pushiness and misogyny at least made me feel controlled in the ways I fantasized about at least some of the time. I would have sleepwalked through all the expected stages of a typical straight relationship, and found myself trapped within a marriage in a small town where nobody else was trans and kinky like me.
Or I might have just continued starving myself into an androgynous shape and a waking trance, as I was often trying to do in those days, because my body and reality felt like prisons.
When we segregate children from the rest of the world and censor all the information that they access, we suffocate the many people they could one day become — and show that we do not care at all for the fully-fledged, complex humans that they are right now.
In the current cultural and legal moment, including a “Minors DNI” warning in your bio is understandable even if it does nothing to prevent kids from browsing your page. There is a great deal of social pressure to avoid even the appearance of inappropriate boundaries with children and, for queer social media users in particular, often a genuinely felt need to protect oneself against bad-faith allegations of abuse.
We want to pretend there is a true story to be told. I mean, there are things that happened — I was raped. That is indisputable. Period. But I can tell that story in a lot of different ways. And being able to do something with form where I was imagining myself in the third person enabled me to articulate how dissociated I was at the time. That process also required me to establish distance in order to forgive that past version. There’s something about allowing a world in which a memoir can be fragmentary, and the subject within it can be kaleidoscopically imagined. Being able to imagine my subjectivity as discontinuous or fragmented did allow me to look back on my own shame and to feel less distaste for it, and to feel more generous towards myself. The other thing is just that a lot of these formal maneuvers allowed me to write about the worst possible things at a kind of remove that felt emotionally necessary.
Rebecca Solnit calls the pandemic of male violence against women ‘the longest war’; she talks about how it predates all other wars. That felt like an important revelation to me when I read about it because it was like, oh right, what happened to me is not anomalous — this is everywhere.
My response to my trauma was very discordant from what people demand of rape victims or survivors. I was violated repeatedly over multiple decades, and my response to that was to treat my body as if it was the exact amount of nothing that men had treated it as. I partied a lot, I drank a lot, I did a fuck-ton of drugs. I fucked so many guys — like so many guys. And that makes me truly the worst possible victim. Like if you watch an episode of SVU, that’s the bitch who’s gonna get decimated on the stand, and I always knew that.
I really thought that I deserved what happened. I had incorporated so much of the logic of rape culture; I had bought into it wholesale. And it’s funny because I never thought that about other people; it was a kind of hatred that I reserved solely for myself. Looking at that in the face in therapy and coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter if I was a mess — like, it doesn’t matter if I was treating myself poorly, I still didn’t deserve to be raped by those men.
I don’t think confessional literature or first-person women’s art is above critique, but I do think that an overarching dismissal of it felt very familiar to me from my work in grad school on confessional art, and the work of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and thinking about women’s art from life and the historical dismissals of that work.
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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