And Not So Fuckable

Recently I had to do something that I have never had to officially do before, break up with a friend.

This friend and I have a somewhat volatile history. We have had conflict around feminist issues for almost as long as we have been close, which is probably about 3.5 years or so. He is a white gay boy, and he is basically of the mindset that feminism is outdated, that feminism just means equality in the eyes of society, that women have attained this equality and should quit bitching, that as a gay man his lack of rights is far more egregious, and therefore fuck feminists. To him all feminists are "hate-mongers," which is particularly ironic as I have never known another person who used the word "hate" so much.

The "fight" that broke the camel's back, for instance, was instigated when he woke me on the morning that I was to give a speech at the pro-choice rally about my abortion experience with a text that said simply "I hate lesbians."

Anyway, fuck him. I'm done having that same fight over and over with him. he is not the main point of this post.

This is about my community, in particular the music community.

OPIUM is a list serve (olympia punk indie underground music), and it's pretty vibrant. Technically it's a music list (show postings, other musically related posts), but it frequently blurs boundaries, people post a lot of community oriented stuff, as well as silly stuff like youtube videos and weird pictures.

Two threads have gotten somewhat heated over the past week or so. One of them originated around the name of a band playing at the pizzeria tonight, DAD FAG. People expressed wonder about the use of the word "fag," it stimulated a discussion about meaning that I found to be quite interesting and worth having (especially when people actually responded when I brought up Wittgenstein, my current philosophical boyfriend), and a lot of STRAIGHT WHITE MEN tried to squash the conversation by mocking it or just being stupid.

The other thread was started by Sarah Utter, who some of you may be familiar with because of her musical projects (Bangs, Witchypoo) or her art (letterpress/painting). The other night at a show a popular boy about town said some pretty fucked up shit to her. What was exactly said is hotly debated, but either way it was fucked up. He either insulted her attractiveness and devalued her because of this apparent lack of attractiveness OR he overtly praised it and made comments that assumed she'd fuck him if he were available. So she brought this to the attention of the community, and the first responses to it were from STRAIGHT WHITE MEN telling her that the OPIUM list was not the place to bring this up, that she should have called this guy out on his behavior when it happened (which, she did, I was there and saw it happen, she called him out over the microphone in front of the entire audience), and that she should just ignore him because he's a drunk idiot.

FUCK!!

The OPIUM list is exactly the sort of place that this shit needs to be discussed. If we're going to be such a community that we want to infiltrate each others' email in-boxes, we need to be able to discuss the hard and nasty shit that is going on at shows or other places in which members of our community are moving.

This post, unlike the last, ends optimistically. Once women started speaking up for themselves and sharing their experiences around this issue a pretty awesome conversation was stimulated. There's even talk of trying to organize a cross gendered discussion group around all of this. I see the potential for amazing things to happen here, and you know what? It never would have happened if Sarah hadn't had the guts to say something publicly about what happened to her.