It's a weak little flame, it's all we got to our name

[sovay]

I am sicker than I was the day after Arisia. More coughing, more exhaustion, less brain. I resent it. I understand perfectly well what happened—I attended a convention over the weekend where, if I really wanted to fight this off, I should have stayed in bed—but I still resent it. I would like to be writing, but I'm not, and I have to leave the house for an unrelated doctor's appointment this afternoon. I spent most of yesterday on the couch with Dr. Autolycus in my arms, firmly and medicinally purring. I recognize there are worse things to do with my time.

1. Courtesy of selkie: longsword and archery and Gluck.

2. These poems particularly caught my eye: Marion McReady's "Ballad of the Clyde's Water," Sandra McPherson's "Sitting on a Desk," and Durs Grünbein's "The Doctrine of Photography" (trans. Karen Leeder).

3. The Guardian's redesign is driving me crazy, but I found this article by Jill Filipovic useful: "When we haven't yet agreed that female pleasure and clear enthusiasm are prerequisites for a sexual encounter, we lack the ability to peel back the layers of sexual experience, and we end up with two bad options: accept sexual inequity as just how sex is (or just how men are) or wedge truly bad sexual experiences into the category of sexual assault . . . Feminists have been on the forefront of tackling these knottier issues of sex, consent, pleasure and power. And so it's up to us to lead the way in confronting the private, intimate interactions that may be technically consensual but still profoundly sexist."

4. I still don't like the redesign, but I love the evidence of 4500-year-old metalworking and engineering found on Keros in the Cyclades.

5. Courtesy of handful_ofdust: James Cagney restores antiques and Gal Gadot needs to play either Bond or Viola or both right now.

I have nothing eloquent to say about Dolores O'Riordan having died; I heard the news and my reaction was a flat what the hell. She was an even less reasonable age for dying than the usual part of the landscape. "Zombie" (1994) was one of the very few music videos I saw when it aired; I was at the house of my best friend who followed contemporary music and she had MTV on and I had never heard anything like that breathless, breaking voice—or seen anything like the video's flip from mud-spattered black-and-white war games to gold-drenched tableaux, although the latter looks to me now like a director who might have glanced off Derek Jarman. The children's mouths opening, silent gold and screaming. O'Riordan a mourning fury. It still gives me chills.

Comments

[sovay]

But I understand what you're saying. We do need a way to talk about things without having to wedge them under the label of assault.

Thanks. Basically, I think a lot of my feelings boil down to: the fact that something is bad is reason enough to change it. The rules of the game don't need to produce wall-to-wall violence in order to need rewriting. "Awkward and unsatisfying but not technically coerced" should not be an acceptable minimum for a sexual encounter! And I understand that's not even what we're talking about in my case: it wasn't mutual but pushy, it was someone actually behaving as though if he just rummaged around enough in my erogenous zones, a magic switch would flick on and I would suddenly be into it. Was it equivalent to the kind of institutional abuse perpetrated by Harvey Weinstein, either legally or morally? No, and I don't think it was the same as if he had raped me, either. But that's not the point. It should not have happened and things like it should not happen and I don't see what's so very divisive about that. Just because it's not the worst-case scenario doesn't mean it's worth putting up with.

[asakiyume]

Yes to everything you say here.

It reminds me of an encounter I had between my junior and senior years of college. I was in Northumberland, visiting a relative. I was out by myself on a country road and climbed up the hill beside the road to sit by myself. A guy somehow found me there--how, I don't recall (i.e., whether he came up from the road or whether there was a path down the hill, or what). He started exclaiming over me and how wondrous it was to see me there--I was feeling very frightened at that point. I was all alone. He asked if he could kiss me. Terrified, I said yes--then said I had to go and hurried away.

In **his** memory maybe it was a poetic encounter ending in a willingly given kiss. In my memory it was a scary situation that I was lucky to have gotten out of with just a kiss.

Maybe it was wrong for me to assume that the guy might have done worse, or might have been angry if I'd said no--maybe he's have been hurt if he knew. But there it is.