What Makes a Poly Person... Poly?

What makes a poly person poly?

This is something that came up recently after some great conversations about the nature of non-monogamy vs monogamy that came up after the Midwest Freethought Conference in August. It’s been bubbling around in my brain for a while, particularly after a couple of great (if all too brief) conversations with a fellow blogger on Storms of Atheos and another dear friend. (Yes, sometimes we bloggers actually physically get together and sit [or stand] around and bullshit about important things instead of sitting stumped and caffeinated in front of our laptops at home [or a coffee shop, or some other not-home location, as I cannot seem to get jack shit outside of episodes of whatever-the-most-recent-NetFlix-obsession done at home] to bullshit about important things.) So, I’m going to try to address that here. We’ll see how that goes.

Being polyamorous has fuck-all to do with one’s marital status, or who one is dating, or how many (if any) partners one is with.

I am currently single, and plan on staying that way for a while, for my own sanity. And not even really because I want to be single. (I don’t. I definitely don’t.) But I need to, because I’ve got some other things that I need to try to work on about myself, and I need to stabilize some other things in life before I can let such a potentially volatile and wonderful destabilizing force as a relationship or relationships come and shake shit up.[1] However, regardless of my current relationship status, I still self-identify as polyamorous. Because that’s the model of relationship that (for the moment at any rate [and that ‘at the moment’ sort of a thing is part of the meat of what I’ll get to below, I hope]) best describes me.

I have a friend who is married, and is currently actively in a relationship only with a spouse,[2] who has absolutely zero interest in pursuing any other relationships, either now or for the foreseeable future, despite repeated and periodic assurances that it’s perfectly acceptable to do so. Spouse (we’re using ‘Spouse’ as a substitute formal name/pronoun for now[3]) is just not interested. Which is not to say that, at some point, Spouse may not be. My friend waffles back and forth. There's the need to reassure Spouse that if there ever did occur a desire to date, flirt with, kiss, whatever someone else, that’s really alright; there's also a not wanting there to be any pressure to do the above (possibly simply to provide a salve for a guilt that things aren’t [on the surface] equitable in the dating/desire to date area - and there's a whole separate discussion available here about self-sacrifice and selfishness in there, I think).

At this point, there’s a little back-story I want to throw in. At the Midwest Freethought Conference, Amanda Brown gave what I thought was a fantastic talk on nonmonogamy. She was, especially when pushed a bit, pretty abrasive and dismissive of the entire idea of monogamy. This rubbed people the wrong way, even (?) in an atheist audience. (Even among those that have left religion and gods and that behind, there is still the remnant of those unexamined stones of ideas that, though they may not realize it, are the antiquated vestiges of faith. Which I think was part of the point of what she was saying.) My friend felt shamed by this for being married and in what she identified as a currently monogamous relationship. But here’s the thing: I don’t think that she should have felt shamed. Because I don’t think that the way that she approaches relationships is monogamous. Definitely not in the puritanical sense meant by most societies whose norms are defined by antiquated religious expectations of virginity until marriage and then after that only ever only only that partner ever ever ever. Ever.[4]  And probably not even in the much looser sense in which most people mean monogamy. And somewhere buried in that is the rub.

Assuming I’ve got a decent read on what most people have as a mental referent when they use the word “monogamy,” I think that they mean fidelity to one person and one person only, with a willfully blind eye to the future. They believe, even though they know full well that it’s not fucking likely, that they will stay together forever. The relationship’s functional day-to-day existence is guided by the cute belief that the two of them will stay sexually and socially monogamous; that because of marriage the relationship has been concretized in some magical way that precludes the possibility of change, the possibility of expansion to include others, the possibility of narrowing, the possibility of having a terminal point.

And I don’t think that poly people do that. They recognize, accept, and go with the fluidity of relationships. They are perfectly willing to address the need for those changes and evaluate relationships on an ongoing basis, revisiting the status and nature of relationships as needed or desired. And I don’t think that monogamous (as commonly practiced) couplehood, and especially monogamous marriage, does that. It assumes a perpetual status of couplehood, and as such, makes those involved in that relationship blind to the morphing that any given relationship status can undergo.

And, of course, as with all things poly, communication is key. My friend is more than willing to address and readdress Spouse’s desire or lack thereof for further or additional relationships. But the reason that the communication part even comes into play here is the recognition of the transient properties of time and relationships. It’s that thing, that openness, that willingness to talk about desire, dating, relationships with one’s partner or partners. It’s an open-endedness, a recognition that the terminal point of relationships has not already been defined and cemented by marriage, or by whatever. A recognition that the whole idea of terminal point may, in fact, be moot.

And that’s not the last word. That may change, too. Which is part of the point.[5]

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[1] What exactly those things are, I won’t really get into at the moment, but the totality of the reasons can be put into maybe a couple of short phrases. I need to become a better person; I fucked some shit up that I need to fix; both of those aforementioned things are going to take time.

[2] It was in one of a couple of conversations with this person, and another conversation with another poly friend that most of this got worked out in my head.

[3] Which brings up another interesting point/similarity with the atheist and LGBTQA communities, that of feeling the need to keep identities secret. To which I say, FUUUUUUUUCK that’s frustrating. I intend to write about the similiarities and differences at some point, and how I think things are going on the OUT fronts in those areas, and what geography and demographics has to do with that, and just exactly what OUT even means. Somebody remind me to do this. (sigh)

[4] Not that this can’t be done successfully and fulfillingly (ß can that be a word? My spellcheck says no. Of course my spellcheck also says that spellcheck is not a fucking word). It can. About 1% of the time (being, I think, generous, and if I’m doing the numbers right, which I grant that I may not be, which is why I need to actually study those statistics books that someone gave me since I can’t really afford to take the statistics courses). Sources for numbers: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20061219_95_of_americans_have_had_premarital_sex/; http://www.catalogs.com/info/relationships/percentage-of-married-couples-who-cheat-on-each-ot.html;

http://www.divorcerate.org/

[5] Sorry for the rather abrupt ending there, dear fives of readers. But this is one of those bits of writing that I fear I might not put out there at all, but keep going back to and adding a sentence or two here and there, tweaking a bit here or there, deleting this or that definite article, if I don’t just say “Fuck it,” at some point and click the clicky thing on the computer. At some point, I'm going to start doing some actual real writing that requires more careful structure and editing. Just not right at this very moment.

On Atheism Plus (Finally)

After much delay, I guess it’s about time to actually throw my inconsiderable opinion into the interesting stew pot of Atheism Plus. (The actual decision to go ahead and throw this out there was a combination of Tanya over at Daisies and Shit kicking my ass just a tiny bit for not writing… well, anything, lately, and a thought process that looked about like this in my head: OH MY SHIT I AM SO BEHIND ON ALL OF MY READING AND AM NOW GOING TO SAY FUCK IT TO ACTUALLY GETTING CAUGHT UP AND JUST HIT THE GODDAMN RESET BUTTON IN 1… 2… 3… and done).[1]

Before I actually start talking about it in any detail, I’ll just start by saying that I heart the Atheism Plus idea. And I’m also going to attempt to focus on what I think is so great about it, and not so much on the hullabaloo (read: shitstorm) that’s been flying around the interwebs about it. Although that’s probably going to be unavoidable to a certain extent. (Also, this is part of the reading and research that I’m so woefully behind on. But I have semi-successfully gotten semi-caught up on at least that one little slice of reading. I’m also just about equally behind on podcasts. And, with the exception of a few of my very favorites, probably HITTING THE GODDAMN RESET BUTTON on those, too.) Onward.

Secularity has been dragging the world forward on all kinds of social justice issues for just about as long as social issues have had any forward progress. And religion has been retroactively taking the credit for it for just about as long[2]. And secularists, atheists, haven’t had any choice but to just shut the fuck up about it, because our position, for all its merits, has simply not been creditable. That’s up until relatively recently. Lately, atheists have been more vocal. More present. More cohesive. More of a lot of things. More of a lot of really great things. The atheist movement, the atheist population, the atheist whatever-you-want-to-call-it has been growing quickly, and with all of the growing pains that come with that in any given collective movement.

Atheism Plus is, I think, is the Atheist Visibility movement, next step. I may be jumbling labels a bit here (and this is not altogether unintentional), but one of the graphics that I’ve seen that I really liked that pithily described the difference between atheists of the old order and New Atheists (not to be confused with Atheism Plus… the new new atheist movement… :-P) as being that New Atheists, when told to shut up, say, “No.” Which is awesome. We should be saying no. We should be as visible as it is feasible for us to be, given individual circumstances. And we should be visible and active AS ATHEISTS. That’s part of the point, right? To get atheists and atheism out there in the public eye, to make us an every day, ordinary, accepted part of American society. Except that so often we are not doing that.

We've segmented our atheist activism apart from all of our other forms of activism. We've said to ourselves, “Over here, I am a feminist and I will be active for feminist causes. Over here, I believe in gay rights and I will fight for marriage equality over here. But those things are not my atheist causes. My atheist causes have only to do with my atheism. And I will partition the inside of my head that way.” Which some people can do, I guess. Actually, I probably do that a little too well. Which is part of my own all consuming personal issues. I don’t actually want to be that partitioned in my life. That’s one of the reasons that I actually started this little clusterfuck of a blog; so that I could be all (or most) of the things that I self-identify as in one place, in one piece, and integrate all of the different parts of myself into one organic, healthy (or, at least, getting healthier, which is part of the point, right?) whole.

I’ve written before about how I am, in fact, a feminist specifically because of my atheism. Regardless of what the dictionary definition of atheism is or is not, there is a deep causal connection between my lack of belief, the kind of integrated thinking that allowed me to overcome some equally deep cognitive dissonances, and so many of the other aspects of my life and the way that I think about the world. Becoming an atheist, and openly adopting that self-identification, was not an isolated thing, nor could it be held in isolation. It was a revolutionary overthrow of a complete worldview that forced me to reevaluate every other little thing about the way that I looked at the world. And every other big thing.[3]

So there’s that part.

Atheism+ vs Secular Humanism: Well, okay, but what about Secular Humanists? Aren't they doing all of that great activism stuff already? Yes. But they're not doing it AS ATHEISTS. They're not raising the awareness that atheists are an integral part of the broader activist community; they're not raising the awareness that atheists care. That as atheists, caring is an integral part of our self identification as atheists. Using the label of Secular Humanism allows those (both ourselves and others) that are uncomfortable with the label of atheists to dodge that particular issue, rather than branding the scarlet A on our chests and walking around naked with it until the discomfort for ourselves and everyone around us finally wears off, and nobody minds that we’re naked sluts . That’s how we get accepted. (Note: I am absolutely not saying that everyone should walk around naked at work. That probably won’t fly. Maybe that can be something for down the road a bit.)

Why so angry? Some of the anger in the negative reactions to this whole thing strikes me as very similar to anger surrounding the geek label and fringe culture in general that I wrote about before (inspired by Ashley Miller’s much better [and more polished] piece on the subject [but fuck being polished… right?]). It’s the, ”Hey, we were here first! We were doing this before doing this was cool! Quit trying to reinvent the wheel!” sort of thing. That argument is fucking stupid and pretty juvenile. Let it go, grow up, blah blah blah. Instead, get excited! Join the movement.

And that’s part of it, too, really. Galvanization. This kind of thing gets people excited, gets them moving, gets them to want to be involved. Which is a GOOD THING. Because atheists, as atheists and openly in the name of atheists, need to be in ALL THE THINGS. Then, rather than being blocked off into a corner or fringe of society that can be easily ignored, ridiculed, reviled, feared, shunted off as some academic, irrelevant concern to society, rather than that, we will come to be considered a necessary part of forward progress in the world. In order to be an accepted segment of modern society, we really need to be completely pervasive in all levels and quadrants of society. (And, really, we already are, we’re just not open and vocal about that bit. Which, again, is part of the point.) You want to be relevant? This is how. Be an atheist feminist, not an atheist and a feminist. Be an atheist egalitarian, not an atheist and an egalitarian. That kind of thing. All of these social justice causes get people’s blood moving, because it’s real to them, often on a very visceral level. It affects them and the people that they care about every day (and this is true no matter which way you roll on any given one of these issues).  This shit is relevant. This is shit that people care about. This is shit that we can work together on, that we can have a legitimate and hefty voice on. That we can make a difference in. And we can!

Liberal church analogue. The closest analogue that I can think of for what we ought to be doing here is that of the liberal religionists reaching out the GLBTQA communities, and what a difference it’s making. Not just that subculture, of course, but so many. That’s just the most recent one. Does it frustrate you that churches are appealing to the very same people, populations, cultures and subcultures that they were doing their damndest to suppress just a few fucking minutes ago? Yeah? Well, how did they do that? By getting out there in the name of their churches, their faith, and reaching out to those people. Making a place for them. And I know that the idea of taking a lesson from them may sting a little, but we need to do the same thing. We need to reach out to them, take their side, acting as atheists. Taking the secularity that has for so long dragged the religious world forward while they dug in their heals;  take that secularity and say, “Hey, you know what that is that helped you win your place in the world? That’s atheism. I’m an atheist, too. Let’s go be atheists, and make a fucking difference in this world, shall we?” It is, in fact, secularism that has made the world a better place. About time we shed a little light onto that secularism, instead of it hiding in the shadows while the world’s religions vie for the credit, for the spotlight; because when you shed the light on it… secularity? It’s atheism. It really is.

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[1] Also, if you don’t like asides and footnotes and things like that with no particular rhyme or reason other than where they feel like they should go at any given moment, you should probably go ahead and stop reading now. I’m taking a page from Robin McKinley’s blogs and will probably be doing more of this sort of thing. I think it is a pretty fair representation of what the inside of my head looks like. And, far from being polished and pretty writing, that’s what this blog is supposed to be. If you want my polished and pretty writing, it does exist… just not here so much.

[2] Despite the fact that religion was more often than not the motivating force behind many of the injustices, and in the aggregate, fought the progress every bloody inch of the way.

[3] There is a forest/trees subtext going on here that I am not going to try to tease out at the moment. But it’s there, just so that you and I know that.

Here's A People List: Atheists

A good friend and fellow blogger over at Storms started putting together a list of Atheists (he makes lists for everything… EVERYthing… it’s what he does), and was asking for some names (in case he forgot anyone). I realized that his list and my list are likely to be somewhat different, so I thought I’d make my own list, too. Atheists that helped me in the process of deconverting, that inspired me to be more active, and ones that just plain inspired me.

In no particular order, then, here are some people that I love.

Greta Christina, JT Eberhard, Matt Dillahunty, Beth Presswood (and Jen Peeples & Tracie Harris – The Godless Bitches), Dan Fincke (Camels With Hammers), Jenn McCreight, Stephanie Zvan, Ashley Miller, Maryam Namazie, Phil Zuckerman, Sikivu Hutchinson, Natalie Reed, Ophelia Benson, Zinnia Jones, Hemant Mehta, Jessica Ahlquist, Ed Brayton, Hector Avalos, David Silverman, Jamila Bey, Brianne Bilyeu, Emily Dietle, Christina Stephens, Tanya Higgins, AJ Johnson, Sarah Morehead, Darrel Ray, Jerry DeWitt, … The list will only continue. Feel free to add some.

And I think this whole idea goes back to something that I am finding to be more and more the case as time goes on. There is, in fact, a new generation of atheists coming into our own, finding our own way in the world, expanding the voice and the visibility of atheism in the world. And this, I think, is what Atheism+ is really all about. (And, yes, of course, I have quite a bit more to say about this, but I’ve fallen SO FAR BEHIND on my reading, etc. So before I say much else about that, and thereby reveal the depth of my ignorance, I’ll just get caught up a bit over here, and then say more.)

Good, Bad, Ugly (But... I Want Beauty): Brief Personal Notes

I'm not actually writing about anything today. This was something that actually started as a fb update a couple of days ago, got too long & introspective, and so got copied into a note on my phone. I am now spewing it here for lack of a thought in my pretty little head.

Extremely busy the past few days at work. I'm learning. It doesn't feel like it's fast enough, but I am learning.

In other areas of life, it feels as though... well, that it's a rough, gravel fucking road & I'm ill equipped for the travel. Or maybe it's more that there's good, there's bad, and there's ugly right now, and all I want is the beautiful.

And yet on another hand, I look back at this weekend and think of how awesome it was. Did I mention that I got to actually meet and talk to at least three of my absolute favorite bloggers? That I sat and talked to one of them for a good hour before I realized that I was talking to her and husbandish?

And then I also think about what I missed last weekend, too; there is a palpable ache there. So many things all held in tension in moments in time, from one moment to the next. I try to capture them, hold them, release them, let them be what they may be.

And a very happy birthday to one of my beautiful, amazing daughters. I wish that I could have been there.

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Post script. As I went to get the link for Daisies and Shit above before posting this, I saw my name there... and I was confused for a moment. Then I read. Then I squeeeeeeee'd. OH. MY. SHIT. One of my favorite blogs just mentioned me. I may be a little excited by that. A bit.

Also, rest assured, she did not forget anything; I did not mention that I blogged during that conversation, which in retrospect, may have been because I'm too goddamn shy about that stuff, I was thrilled that I was talking to her and husbandish, I was tired, and blah blah blah.

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Fringe Culture, Anger, and Maturity: Or, It's Okay To Be Cool Now. No, really. You just need to get the fuck over it.

Ashley F. Miller has a great post that on one level is about “geek culture,” but is really about any fringe culture going through a process of growth into mainstream culture. It is truly insightful and you should go read it. What I want to touch on here, though, is something that she doesn’t quite come out and say in her post. She quotes at length a commenter on her blog, who basically says that if a person has not earned the right to be called a geek, has not had to fight through the high school experience of being bullied and shunned, then they should not be allowed in the ranks of geekdom. And he is bitter about that, and angry. The hurt he went through is palpable in his screed comment. This is understandable, since the self-identification as geek was and still is, for many people, a sort of psychological defense mechanism, the badge of honor, that one wears in a community of only a very few. Military Vets can be that way, too. Even among ourselves, there can be other subdivision. Like, if you didn’t serve in combat, then you aren’t really a vet. Alcoholics can be that way, too, in some weird way. “Look, son, I drank more in a week than you have in your entire life.” (I even have to wonder if, perhaps, all communities have something like this. Even the “popular” peoples. “Look, you don’t know what hard is until you’ve done two-a-days in 100 degree heat all fucking summer to be on the football team.”) So I think that this line of thought is perfectly natural and allows people to make it through some very difficult things and in that way forge a place for themselves, a belonging to a community.

Geek Culture can be very... thorough

But you can’t stay there in that mind set. It will implode in a messy cloud of dust and noise, and you will be left with a complete lack of identity; just a hole where the structure of identity that you struggled to build once stood. There’s another line of thought among alcoholics that I think may be applicable here. They say that during your drinking/using time, you basically stop developing, emotionally and mentally. I don’t necessarily buy that wholesale, but nonetheless, I do think that there is some truth to it. I also think that the sort of anger grasped onto by the commenter and so many other bullied and fringe social groups is just as poisonous and stunting as any drug or alcohol. When nurtured like that, it excludes and inhibits all other possibilities for growth and development.

This is not to say that anger is not a healthy emotion. The whole idea of “healthy” vs. “unhealthy” emotions is completely overrated, to begin with. Emotions just are. They happen for perfectly valid reasons. Anger is just anger. It is useful. It serves a purpose. It can even, on occasion, be intensely satisfying. But when clutched to the breast and petted and fed and nurtured, it turns into something vile. It turns into hate, and turns from something that you clutch for survival into something that seemingly takes on its own vile life and claws through your ribcage to take possession of you.

Ashley Miller closes her blog with some truly good advice:

Being a geek shouldn’t be about a persecution complex.  It shouldn’t be about being better than other people.  It shouldn’t be about bullying people who want to be your friend now because of what you think they may have been like in high school.  It should be about embracing people for being themselves and being grateful that they can be themselves when they are with you.

In order to do that, one has to mature as a person. The immature anger that allowed for survival in high school or whatever other environment, must be released; if it is not released, it takes over. And then that poor demon-possessed person is stuck there, in high school, never progressing beyond those juvenile emotions, that juvenile intellect. No matter how many other bits of knowledge they collect and cobble together, they will be stuck in that tar pit of misery.

So, in order to truly open up and enjoy the community of Others, we have to let go of all of the anger and hatred from all of the bullying in our past or present. That anger has served its purpose, it has outlived its usefulness, and it’s okay to let it go. And, really, if you can’t find shit to get angry about in a much more positive and useful way these days, then you just aren’t paying attention.

I want to grow. It is never too late to grow. I think I’ve been stuck long enough in a lot of my own tar pits and sand traps. I’ll do whatever it takes to get out of those, and scour all of that poison off till my skin glows and breathes the fresh air. And then I’ll keep walking out into the world. Let that world be wide, not narrow, and let it be populated by whoever is there, and let me, for once, dance with them instead of holding myself back and just watching. (More on that in some other post down the line. I know, I say that a lot. I mean it every time.)

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Ranting to Myself: Self-Hate is Great

This is a great (and very self-conscious/aware) entry. I'm including this because the whole problem of self-esteem and being hyper-aware of what others think of me is something that I struggle with on a continual basis, and the author addresses some of this in a way that I found to be helpful and enlightening. As I have very often found conversations with this author to be.

Ranting to Myself: Self-Hate is Great: I was listening to the "WTF" Podcast by Marc Maron today, a common source of inspiration for me. Marc chose to repeat the 100th episode in ...

Hate, Choice, and Identity. Or, Bigotry Makes My Head Explodey

That right there is a fucking fact. People CHOOSE to be bigots, to do violence to another person, to hate. And it does not actually much matter where one comes down on the nature/nurture debate as it relates to being gay, hating someone and carving that hatred into another human being’s skin is FAR MORE OF A CHOICE.

Think about it, though. Why would someone choose to be a person who can be hated to such an extreme, so much so that they know that there are people out there who want nothing more than to carve “dyke” into her skin with a knife? No one chooses that! It just doesn’t happen. But the hatred does happen. And it is chosen. It is latched onto. Just at this very moment, I have no desire to try to delve into that mind and understand it. I will, eventually, in my private thoughts, try to understand what could possibly have brought someone to that level of hatred, and to empathize to some extent. But right now, I need the anger. (And oh my, yes, I see the dangerous line of potential hypocrisy looming up ahead as I stride that fine line bordering towards cognitive dissonance.)

Yesterday, very, very early in the morning, three men broke into the home of an openly lesbian woman in Lincoln, NE. Read the story here. Now imagine that you are her. Find something about yourself that is not part of your privilege, something about you that places you as a part of some sort of a minority population (nearly everyone has something about themselves that is like that).[1] Now imagine that three masked men, screaming obscenities and waving weapons around, shock you into consciousness; you’re confused, not quite aware yet of what is going on. You suddenly find that in the midst of their guttural slurs and threats, your hands and feet have been bound. It hurts. They cut your clothes off. You can’t tell, but the knives in their hands look dull and rusty to you. Their breath reeks, the rot in their brains apparently making its way down to their lungs and out of their open and panting mouths. They begin to carve the slurs of your minority status onto your face, your arms, your chest, your belly. The pain begins to take on an unreal, distant sort of quality, but full on shock won’t set in, yet, you won’t let it, because you know you have to escape. Maybe after that. Maybe not.

Alright, I think that’s enough of that exercise. The point is to empathize with the terror, the panic, the horror, the fucked-up-edness. And realize that someone is doing that to you because of WHO YOU ARE. And because you are willing and able to say aloud to the whoever is listening, whether they agree with you or not, This is who I am. I am who I am. Someone out there is apparently so uncomfortable with the fact that you are who you are, that they CHOSE to take a knife and carve the fact of who you are, the fact of their hatred of who you are, into your very body. It doesn’t matter what it is, at that point in the game; whatever it is, it should not be hard to see that they chose their hate far more than you ever chose whatever-it-is.

Hate is far more of a choice than ANY IDENTITY ever was or will be.

What has been beautiful to see is the response from the communities in both Lincoln and Omaha. That gives me hope that all of these beautiful people will rally to give this woman the strength to bear what she has born, to bear what she will have to bear. So that in the midst of hate that pushes back, pushes down, shoves, and tears, she will have the strength of beautiful people to take the next step forward for all of us. So that the children that see us doing this don’t have to suffer the same things. So that she can heal. This community will link arms and push back against the hate to ensure that she and so many others have a safe space to heal in. They will also push out, push up, push forward against hate.

Hate is far more of a choice than ANY IDENTITY ever was or will be. I do not, even from within the chaotic heat of my anger, choose hate. I choose love. I choose beauty.

I will choose beauty, along with a whole mess of other beautiful people, here. Join if you can, in your thoughts if nothing else, because that does make a difference.[2]


EDIT: I should also add that there is a fund set up to help out the woman, who has no insurance. http://starcitypride.org/victim-recovery-fund/

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[1] I know, right? It’s no fun, and requires that you recognize and acknowledge those parts of yourself that *are* part of your privilege.

[2] Not in some woo-woo pseudo-spiritual way, either. I think it is consciousness-raising, something that you take back out into the world later, and it affects not only the way that you think and behave, but also, through that, the way that other people behave around you.



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Grief in Aurora: or Being Useless Over Here In My Little Corner of Headspace

Whenever something happens that is as stupid, as senseless, as horrifying, as crushing, as violent as someone walking calmly into a theatre in Aurora, CO and murdering as many other fellow human beings as he possibly can, it seems perfectly natural to me to cycle, both personally and as a collective sort of public conscious, through the various stages of grief. Right now I'm vacillating between anger and a melancholic sadness.

I’m even allowing myself to wonder occasionally at the differences between the public reaction and attention to something like this and the deaths of military members in the sandboxes overseas. Or the rate of suicide in the military, which comes at me by way of getting angry over some stupid Texan senator’s statements about the Moviehouse Slaughters. And, of course, anxiety over whether anyone that I have a connection to was there, was hurt, knows the murderer, knows the victims, etc., no matter that the chances of that are slim. The chances of anyone going to see a movie at midnight last night walking into the stuff of decades of nightmares was pretty slim, too. Slim chances mean next to nothing taken in context.

And then I return to that deep, energy draining sadness. I feel a hopelessness. But the odd thing (and I think that I may be about to make myself look like a shit, here) is that it is a very personal sort of hopelessness, rather than the empathetic grief for others’ anguish. It’s possible that I just feel useless? Once upon a time, I’d have gladly clutched onto the idea that I can pray for them, that praying would help these aching people through their grief. But prayer is a useless homeopathic salve for a railing conscience, a water pill against a raging cancer in my head. To a certain extent, I can only accept this discomfort for what it is, hold it and name it.

This learning how to simply let emotions lay down and take up space inside my head does not come easily. It’s far too easy for me to say, “I don’t like the way that I feel, I am going to change it. I don’t know how to change it other than with booze, so I’m going to do that.” Calm down, I’m not going to. But I know that I could. Instead, I am going to accept the discomfort for what it is. It is part of the grieving process that we all go through, and I am thankful that there are internet spaces like this one that can help me learn the tools to grieve for myself and for others without the salve of prayer or of an afterlife to make even the worst of things alright, because they are not alright, they are the opposite of alright. And it’s okay to acknowledge that and allow space for that, both in my own consciousness and the public consciousness.



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Midwest Freethought Conference - coming up all too quickly

The Midwest Freethought Conference is coming up (all too quickly) on August 3-5 in Omaha, NE. We have a GREAT lineup of speakers, and, due to the OmahaCoR’s billboard invitation to non-believers (the first atheistic billboard in Nebraska), a huge amount of publicity. The speakers are, in (more or less) order of appearance: Brian Dunning, Adam Brown, Dave Muscato, Amanda Knief, PZ Myers, Amanda Brown, Hemant Mehta, Jerry deWitt, Sarah Morehead, AJ Johnson, Dan Barker, and Fred Edwords.

It promises to be a fantastic weekend full of great presentations, great conversations, and great fun! These sorts of gatherings are perhaps particularly important in the traditionally staid and conservative religious Midwest area, where being religious is more or less assumed, and the opportunity to gather and build community among nontheists is rare. The billboard and its reactions have proved this to us, with everything from people telling us to read Lee Strobel to notes from closet atheists thanking us for putting up the billboard, for letting them know that there is a community out there for non-believers.

A quote from someone who walked out of the restaurant that the billboard is located near: “Thank you so much for the billboard! My fiance and I have always wanted to be a part of an organization that supports our beliefs. We walked out of HuHot, I looked up and almost started crying. It really was a 'beacon of hope' for us. We're really excited to become a part of this community!! THANK YOU!!!!”

If you need or would like more information, please contact me at josiah.mannion5@gmail.com , or Sheila Cole at Sheila@OmahaAtheists.org, or William ‘Danger’ Newman at omahacor@gmail.com.

Also, here's a link to a short blog post from a friend that summarizes and provides most of the relevant links for all of the media response (both positive and negative) up to the date that it was written.

http://aparticularblogbyaparticularatheist.blogspot.com/2012/07/uncontroversial-billboard-is.html

And also, the link for conference:

http://midwestfreethought.org/index.html



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Watch My Fucking Language

This is a post about a teeny little thing. No, I am truly not being sarcastic, it really is a minor thing, but it was something that came up recently, and it’s something about which I have, as it turns out, turned over in the shadowy coils of my brain late at night, the sort of thing to which my brain turns when trying, for instance, to avoid pondering things of greater importance for fear that the things-of-greater-importance will send my heart scampering off in a pounding fit of anxiety.

I do. I love it. Very diverse word.

It’s about blasphemous language of various sorts. For instance, why do atheists persist in saying things like, “Oh my God?” Shouldn’t they say, “Oh your God?” (This is also perhaps linked to the musings on what an atheist utters mid-coitus.) But really it’s about blasphemous language in general and some things that sort of came up in conjunction; that was just the question that kicked it off and reminded me of all of the thoughts on the subject that I was barely even aware that I had been thinking, much less translating from thought to practice. And so I thought to myself, this is a thing about which I will have ALL THE THOUGHTS. 

Now, let’s be clear, here. I fucking love expletives. Dearly. They have an emotional oomph that normal language simply does not and cannot have, a fact that has some scientific weight behind it. For some explorations of the value of profanity, follow the links. But those rational explanations of the value of taboo language are only part of the reason that I relish them so much.  And I’m not so much interested here in those explanations, valuable as they are and genuinely interesting and cool as they are; I have other additional reasons, and that’s more what I’m interesting in exploring a bit here. Because this is my blog, and I get to do some self-exploration here (get your mind out of the gutter, you) that often I don’t otherwise take the time to make explicit (again, mind, gutter, you, out).

See? Very Diverse.

If I am to be perfectly honest with myself, it’s because I thoroughly enjoy the freedom to say these delicious words without guilt; it’s because for the majority of my life, I felt intense guilt about “taking the Lord’s name in vain” and all other forms of blasphemy and swearing. So when it comes right down to it, it was all about the fear of damnation. Because I said a word that had been imbued with a taboo meaning, there was the potential that I could be damned to hell. So, now there is a thrilling freedom in being able to utter the utterly damnable without the damnation bit. I don’t have to be scared any more. This, in turn, is really quite intimately connected with the much more serious idea that, if the carrot and the stick are imaginary, then I then carry the full weight and responsibility for the consequences of everything that I do. There’s no getting out of things by praying for forgiveness. So, breaking out of the guilt cycle imposed by religion[1] also means that I cannot get the reprieve, the temporary release from the tension of real guilt when I do actually do something remarkably stupid, which I am wont to do from time to time.

It really is sort of an odd thing, though, if you take the idea literally, of saying something like “Goddammit!” and not expecting any results. Whether one is a believer or not, though, the culture that we Westerners soak in through the societal water is without a doubt thoroughly steeped in Judeo-Christianity and theistically-tainted psychology. The result of which is that when I say, “Fucking Hell,” Or “Goddammit!” the biochemical reactions that fire off in my brain are somehow hooked like Velcro to that framework and it seems probably that no amount of work is going to completely clear my innards of all of that. So, I will bow to that, and hijack it for my own expressive purposes. 

This becomes relevant(-ish) in a moment. For now, just let it sink in.

And besides which, the vast majority of Christians and other believer aren’t taking it as literally as their institutions would have them do, either. With very few exceptions, I have yet to meet many persons of any faith who aren’t perfectly capable of cursing up a storm of epic, Rainbow-Brite-vomit level proportions. Here's a recent personal example. Last Friday, there was a local counter-protest for the Anti-Choice and blatantly religious bigotry motivated “Stand Up For Religious Freedom” protests taking place in scattered spots throughout the States. I was there. After the majority of the protestors had begun to retire, having prayed their useless prayers, sung their useless songs and in general felt very good about themselves, I think, a few of them inevitably wandered over to argue with us. Which was fun, since I do love to argue. (This particular format of arguing is still quite new to me, and I’m afraid I didn’t do it very well, but it was a learning experience.) Of course, I spiced up the arguments with the occasional, “fucking” this, and “fucking” that. One upper-middle-aged, clean cut gentleman who looked as though he may have recently retired, took umbrage with my use of the word, “fuck.” I asked him what the fuck that had to do with anything, and he responded with something, I don’t remember precisely what, that included the word “shit.” Me: “Wait, what? So, shit’s alright but fuck crosses the line? How does that make any sense?”[2]

And lastly, for those that argue that cursing is simply a sign of a poor vocabulary, a lack of intelligence, a lack of creativity, an inability to otherwise express oneself, I will offer the wise retort of Mr. Stephen Fry:

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[1] Which is not, like, a one-time thing that happens and then I’m magically free of all the jagged little shards of my brain’s glass prison; a lot of those jagged little shards stay embedded for a long time and have to be picked out one by one as I repeat, over and over as necessary, the process of breaking the glass.

[2] He then devolved into some incredibly hurtful ad hominem attacks. More importantly and what was really much worse (but less pertinent to the topic at hand, thus the footnote), was that it worked. His attack was intensely painful to me for reasons that he could not have been aware of, and it shamed me and stunned me into silence for a minute.

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No Gods, No Heroes

The phenomenon of idol- or hero-worship is fascinating to me. For many reasons. Personal and not so much. Emotionally and intellectually. It’s something that I want to study more and in some detail at some point and I hope that I’m afforded, despite everything, the opportunity to do so at some point. But for now, there’s this:

Far too many of the people I have looked up to throughout my entire life have failed to live up to the pedestal I put them on, and in many ways that is extremely frustrating. Both religious and secular heroes have fucking failed miserably. On the other hand, that was not, in the end, what drove my deconversion process and it will not drive me away from the secular movement either. In fact, in some ways, it is an incredibly important lesson, perhaps especially important for one who, like me, is still in the relatively nascent phases of being openly secular and atheist and trying my hand at what secular activism is available to me.

This has nothing to do with anything. It's just a neat picture and I like it.

There is no single figure that remains so important to me that when I find out that, like everyone else, they have failures, faults, or possibly even are people that I don’t even really like personally, it will (hopefully) disturb me not one whit. It has not, so far. Ever since Professor Richard Dawkins’ spectacular display of privileged white maleness and dismal logical fallacy #FAIL last year, I recognized that I can still love and respect and learn fantastic and wonderful things from his books and at the same time recognize that he still has things to learn. He does not need to be perfect in every respect any more than I am perfect in every respect. Holy shit, when I consider the perspective of myself being judged and dismissed in the same way as it is tempting to judge and summarily dismiss these “leaders” and “heroes” in their totality because of their imperfections, I have to humbly offer silent thanks to those around me that they do not reject me outright. (ß Tangled sentence, I know. Deal with it. It stays, because it says what I want it to say and it makes sense in my head.)

It has been freeing, too. I now feel free (or freer, anyway, I’m still hyper-self-conscious and hyper-sensitive to my desire for acceptance and shit like that) to be critical of what others think and inspect what they say a bit more carefully. Rather than trying to mold my opinions and thoughts and everything else about me so that I fit in the niche. Like, please please please, can I be cool, too? Granted, I still have to beware of my own tendency to do this. It doesn’t go away in the snap of a finger, and I still find in myself that unconscious desire to have an idol to worship, a hero to look up to, an example to which I can point and say, “That is the right. Good. Whew! I don’t need to think about it anymore, I can just copy them.”

See? That last bit is just the thing, I think. The reason that many of us so desperately WANT those heroes is because thinking about ALL THE THINGS is HARD. Well, so be it.

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Shame Shame Shame and Sexism

So a thing has come up lately in the atheist blogosphere; an ugly thing, sort of, and an inspiring thing, sort of. LOTS AND LOTS of people have been posting, commenting, saying things. (I suspect that this post will largely consist in a shit-ton of hyperlinky thingies.) I count myself as a feminist, if an inexperienced and bumbling one that may say the wrong thing at any given instant, and I thought that it was about the coolest thing ever that there was a Women in Secularism conference that took place last weekend, and I so wish that I could have been there. I am also extremely grateful to Ashley F. Miller for providing a good summary of the whole thing and also for live-blogging the entire thing so that I could at least get a flavor of the conference in my head and a fair amount of the detail. I’m sympathetic to her fingers doing all that typing, and would just like her to know that the results did not go unappreciated. I can’t say that I felt like I was there, exactly, but still, it’s as close as I was going to be able to get. (I also just discovered that Ophelia Benson also has a whole slew of live-bloggy posts about the conference as well, but you’ll have to dig a bit to get at them all.)

I absolutely intend to write something about some of the other wonderful and inspiring things that were said at the conference, but just at the moment, I am now going to address the sort of ugly thing, maybe just so that I can get that shit out of my system a bit more and onto paper (however digital it may be – yes, I do keep an actual journal on actual paper as well – no, you will never see it – well, bits of it do bleed onto over here, which gets a bit messy sometimes, but that’s okay) and then move on to parts that make we want to fly.

So, the ugly thing: Sexism is very fucking real. And it happens all the time. Even among those of us that like to self-identify as freethinkers and humanists and skeptics and atheists and the like. For me, all of those things are a completely natural byproduct of and direct consequence of my atheism, which I’ve talked a bit about before so I won’t go on and on about that here. There was a mention of the fact that some not-so-small-fry men-speakers at conferences were behaving in some very sexist ways and that women-speakers, for a myriad of reasons, had formed a sort of underground warning system in order to cope with what in the end amounts to harassment, plain and simple. For more about the details, see Stephanie Zvan’s original post about the topic, and her follow up post. As an example of why women do not very often drag this shit out into the open, the example of the explosion of horrible that happened around “elevatorgate” was pointed to; it is an excellent example of what happens, and boils down to a form of “slut-shaming.” I hate shaming. HATE IT. Violently. Which I’ll come back around to in a minute, I think.

I posted the original article in my local atheist group and got an immediate and surprising amount of push-back on the issue, which largely swirled around the specifics of elevatorgate, rather than addressing the sexism-at-conferences and sexism in the movement issue as a whole. To be fair, that was addressed as well, but the whole underground network system of warning women about skeezy speakers was labeled as something akin to high school girls posting about ex-boyfriends on the internet and gossipy things. All of the push-back took me a bit by surprise, and I felt what I always feel when confronted with confrontation, especially from people that I genuinely like, want acceptance and approval from (which, I know, is a whole other, if related, issue); I felt shamed. I was sorely tempted to just drop it and delete the post. But, I hate shame. And this is important. So I asked for help, which is also difficult for me, so that I wouldn’t feel quite so backed into a corner by myself. With that help, I then stood up and stuck to my fucking guns. I did not back down.

This not backing down is an important part of me dealing with my own sense of shame, and that’s incredibly important to me and for me, so I didn’t want to leave that entirely out. However, that’s not really the point that I’m trying to make in this post, so I’ll leave that for the moment, but it can be expected to return periodically as it is something with which I do and will continue to struggle and work through.

There were many other people that have weighed in on the issue from a variety of different perspectives. Stephanie Zvan had a follow up post addressing some practical aspects of what to do, Jen McCreight (whose off-hand comments at the conference spurred the whole blogosphere discussion) had a great post on it, JT Eberhard (from whom I shamelessly stole the word “skeeve”) asked what he and other men who self-identify as feminists could do to ensure that consent and boundaries are respected while recognizing that sexual people will be sexual people, Greta Christina has a few posts on the topic, Beth Presswood, Matt Dillahunty (who threatened to and, I believe, did block people from his FB wall who were using that same trivializing and slut-shaming technique [“The point of bringing this up at the convention was to note that this should NOT be back-channel communication and that the individuals should be called out on it. Those of you who are STUPIDLY just ranting that this is all just unsupported allegations - that's part of the fucking point. …  It's fucking disgraceful that even the meta-discussion about what to do in the future is being reacted to in a way that virtually ensures that mouths will stay closed.” – Oh my shit, I love that quote]), Ed Brayton, Skatje Myers (who was guest posting at Pharyngula) has a brief discussion of it at the end of her also excellent summary of the event, etc. I know I missed some that I’d read. Feel free to post links in the comments if you know of anymore.

Alright, in closing, and I think this addresses a couple of different things I might be trying to say, I’d like to bring up this thing called the Johari window. It’s a bit Psych101, I know, but I find it a useful model for a lot of things.

In this case, it’s really the “blind spot” window that I’d like to talk about just briefly. These are things that other people can see about us, but of which we are, for whatever reason, unaware. The reall challenge is how we react when other people point out some things about ourselves of which we are, perhaps almost willfully unaware. It can be an incredibly uncomfortable thing to have that shit pointed out to us. It has certainly been uncomfortable for me in the past, and I imagine for most people. But it levels the playing field, so to speak. When we get uncomfortable, we often get defensive. Things get said. Words are used. People get hurt.

On the other hand, if we take a step back and look at ourselves, and recognize that perhaps there really was something there (and, of course, it’s not always going to be the case that the person was right, but how will we know if we don’t at least look?), then we can shift those things that were hidden from ourselves into the realm that is not hidden from us, but is rather known to both us and those around us. That is how we become more ourselves, more whole, more self-aware; that is how we change, grow, affect change around us, become better people, become a better community.

That all feels incredibly incomplete and very poorly stated, so don’t be surprised if I come back and edit the shit out of this later, but at least it’s out of me and onto this, and that’s a starting place.

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I Said the Word, or Being "Spiritual" In the Rooms

A few weeks ago, The Skeptical Novice had a post about saying, “I’m an Atheist,” in a context where one might not normally say that and how it felt to say that. I had a very similar (in some ways) experience right around then (in fact, I’m not sure whether I read this before or after, just that when I did, I may have actually said, “FUCK YES!!” out loud and then looked around innocently).  Except I said it at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. At my “home group” meeting. It’s a big meeting. There are a lot of people at that meeting. I love that meeting. I really really like a lot of the people at that meeting. Aaand a lot of them believe in the classical AA Higher Power, i.e. Jesus Christ. (No, I am absolutely not going to get into my very complicated and not un-conflicted relationship with AA – that’s a whole separate post – probably many whole separate posts.) The reading had been on spirituality. The topic was spirituality. People were saying a lot of things about God and prayer and what not.

I have not, in some ways, been terribly shy about being an atheist. I think it comes with the actor in me. On the other hand, that actor bit of me has always also been about being horrendously insecure, and being an out atheist is certainly no different there. One of the parts that I identified strongly with in TSN’s post was this statement, “First off, I did this without thinking too much about it. This is a huge step for me.  Looking back two years, there is no way in hell I would have said to a large group of mostly strangers that I identified as an atheist.” Now, I did think about it. But not too hard. It was unnatural for me to speak, but natural. I owed it to the other people that I knew goddamn well were in that room trying to stay sober without a god to say something, to let them know that they are not alone, that it’s okay to be an atheist. And a fucking drunk. At the same time. Especially then.

When the topic of conversation at AA meetings turns to spirituality, atheists often feel pushed out to the perimeter, and, yes, absolutely pressured to at least try to believe in a deity HP, however vague. We often feel as if it is absolutely taken for granted that we, because we are Atheists, have no spirituality. Which is complete horseshit[1]. It’s just that my spirituality doesn’t have any, you know, actual spirits in it.

My spirituality is other people. My spirituality is aloneness. My spirituality is trees. My spirituality is galaxies.

My spirituality is...

I love others, and I am loved; I care about them, they care about me, and I even care about myself (well, I try to anyway). That is spirituality. Being able to be comfortable alone with myself in a room, alone with myself in the forest, alone with myself in my head, in its dark-and-twistiness and its light-and-airiness, too. That is spirituality. The world around me, from the grass and leaves still before the rain to the universe and the universes beyond the universes flinging nothingness behind them. That is spirituality. Being able to live in the gray, in the tension and uncertainty between blacks and whites that don’t exist; slowly learning to carry my own emotions. That is spirituality. What need for a god in all that?

I didn’t say all of that, but I’ve had more time to think about it now. I didn’t think about it as much then. What I did say was enough, though, enough for them to get the gist that I really do have my own "spirituality" and some of what it means to me. And that I am so deeply grateful that AA (or at least, this AA, this meeting, this group, these warm people) has room for me, too, an Atheist.

(Afterword: It did make a difference. Right afterwards, the guy next to me, an artist that I have a HUGE amount of respect for and who came and picked me up and took me to meetings after I had relapsed once and was still detoxing too acutely to fathom driving, leaned over and said, “Well, you fucked me up!” and laughed. Maybe you had to be there, but that was a good thing. Several other people approached me afterwards to thank me for speaking up and said that they were Atheists, too.  One of them was the chair of the meeting.)

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[1] This is leaving aside for the moment my very real misgivings about language and words. Like, for instance, the whole God thing. So many times I question why, once one understands the concept of the God people are actually trying to defend, they insist on continuing to use that word when it so clearly does not correspond to the meaning that it implies when one actually says the word. (ç VERY EASILY DISTRACTED BY SHINY MIND-OBJECTS, THIS ONE.)