el tercer ojo

Nobody's Mother and Somebody's Wife

On her charming blog, A Farmwife With a Twist, Amber wrote a bit about her views of right and wrong specific to the BDSM scene in this entry.  It's interesting to read her points of view -- sometimes it's easy to forget in a scene world of tolerance, of "your kink is not my kink but your kink is okay" that there are those that find our life not okay.  I've got a few acts of my own I feel that way about --for instance, I won't play with people whose partners don't know that they're playing with someone else --but that's as much an unwillingness to risk being dragged into their relationship drama.  Also, I've been cheated on and it sucks.

Anyway, as I said, Amber spells out clearly some things that bother her, writing:

I find that there's a lot room for utterly appalling moral behavior in BDSM realm, or at least from what I've learned from kinky blogs [...]

Those things that steadily continue to appall me are:

-adultery

-unwillingness to have children and selfish hedonism

-polygamy/swapping partners/offering your partner to others "to use"

All of the above to me are a fundamental assault on basic human dignity and are certainly not pleasing to God [...]

And there is one more thing I literally have 0 tolerance for - a weekness of character as expressed in fear of commitment to one partner for life with the purpose of starting a family.

[The dots in brackets mark places where I snipped information out just for focus (hopefully without changing the meaning.  You can go check her blog and read the whole article if you like.]

From what I wrote above, you can probably guess I kind of agree with her about adultery.  But to me, it isn't "adultery*" when both people are honest and agree -- that is, there's nothing wrong with me playing with whomever so long as P doesn't have any problem with it and vice versa.  What would be wrong (imo) would be if I did this either without regard for objections he had or somehow sneaking behind his back. 

As to the rest...

... I don't even know what would actually be an example of "selfish hedonism" in my marriage.  Staying in bed with P on a Saturday morning rather than getting up and helping my friends move?  Using all the hot water for an extra long bubble bath?  Taking all the whipped cream for my strawberries and leaving none for his? Not quite sure. 

Polygamy?  I don't have a problem with that at all.  It's not my thing --I'm introverted enough that maintaining a relationship with P is about all the "primary" I can handle.  While we play with other people, they're friends (beloved friends in many cases).  But while I think poly relationships can be complicated, I don't think the idea that one can love and be committed to multiple people or that three or more adults can be a family is anything but beautiful.  From what I've seen, poly relationships can be remarkably unselfish and passionate.  In my opinion, any relationship that's honest and helps each person involved in it to be happy and grow is an honorable and a blessed one.

What I found oddest, however, on Amber's list were her statements about being appalled by people who are "unwilling" (she does make exceptions for those who are "unable") to have children and the notion that a lacking a desire to "start a family" somehow reflects an "assault on human dignity."

My first answer to that would be that P and I committed to each other and became a family years before we were married.  By then we had re-arranged our lives to be together, changed countries (in his case), lived together as much as the law allowed for several years and shared as much about ourselves as we could find to share.  In fact, I know I found things I didn't know about myself in the course of getting to know him.  While I think our relationship has deepened in the two and a bit years since we married, I think that probably would have happen anyway.  When do I think P and I started to become a family?  The first time he wrote in a whisper that he loved me.  And 9 years ago when he came to see me for the first time.

There's nothing incomplete about our relationship now -- nothing waiting for a child to somehow make it more real.

Why don't we have children?  There are a lot of reasons, but they boil down to the fact that neither of us want them.  Speaking for myself, I've never wanted any -- something I started telling my mom back when I was 3.  I like other people's babies and young children fine for a little while, but not to live with.  I do like teens, but the odds of giving birth to a 13 year old are pretty low.  To me, what would be an "abomination"  would be someone who is pretty sure doesn't like or want children having one on the off chance that she would 1) feel differently about one of her own and 2)hoping it would somehow deepen their marriage and somehow make them a family.

Anyway, I had some more thoughts, but they've drifted away and it's time for bed.  I've probably written enough anyway.

The title of this entry is adapted from Sanda Cisneros's author description in her first book, The House On Mango Street.  In it she writes she is "nobody's mother and nobody's wife."
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I'm not talking about strict Biblical law here, but rather about when the act (whether sexual or spanking) becomes immoral / unethical.

Mija's Vagina Monologue

On the The Spanking Writers blog, Abel wrote a cute-ish post about the reaction to the Vagina Monologues suspensions at  John Jay High School in Cross River, New York, a public school.  The principal in question, Richard Leprine, had told the girls their performance of excerpts from the piece could not include the word "vagina" because he deemed the term was "inappopriate."  The line the three opted to read in defiance of the order was

My short skirt is a liberation flag in the women's army. I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina's country.

The girls were initally suspended for one day by the school's principal for having disobeyed his order. Their suspension was overturned, despite the girls not having appealed it, by the president of the school board, apparently after it was pointed out that a male student had been allowed to say the word "fuck" in his performance without his being sanctioned.

One of the questions I had when I first started thinking about this issue is how could the author and work even have been cited as the performance source if the word "vagina" wasn't allowed to be spoken?  Would the students have to have had to say "this selection is taken from a play with a title this school's principal deems too obscene even to be uttered"?  I suspect that wouldn't have gone over very well either.

As part of his reply to some of our comments in support of the students, Abel (who's from the UK) made the point that (edited to add the entire passage for context)

I’m not sure even the most ardent fans of the play would necessarily argue that it’s written for consumption “by all the family”, though. So the performers - apparently - pledged to steer clear of certain passages given the age of some of the audience. This isn’t censorship: it’s more akin to TV programmers avoiding more sensitive material until after the 9pm ‘watershed’.

I could understand Abel's "watershed" comment if the word used had been one of the FCC "bad words" or of the passage the girls were forbidden to quote from was the the section on rape or the play's exploration of the usage of the word "cunt."  In fact, when I first started reading about this case, I had expected that the word they'd said after being forbidden not to was "cunt" which would have made the principal's objections more understandable.  But the word "vagina" is one that can be said on TV at any hour.  It's the correct medical term for that part of the body.  And it's actually part of the title of the play.  There isn't another word that could be put in its place to somehow be less obscene because the word itself isn't any sort of an obscenity.

The comment that he made initally that the reason the word wasn't to be allowed was that there were members of the audience who were very young.  This objection turned out to be false -- apparently the youngest audience members anyone can confirm were there were 13.  The original statements out of the principal were that the girls had defied their teachers, a statement which was denounced as false by the teachers themselves, who were apparently supportive throughout.  My feeling is that respect isn't some sort of default -- it has to be earned.  I haven't seen much regarding the principals actions in this case that would be worthy of respect.  Aside from everything else, he was apparently verbally outsmarted by three sixteen year olds, assuming because they didn't say they disagreed with him that he had their agreement not to use the term.  As the child of a retired high school vice principal and someone who themselves works with teens and twenty somethings, I don't find this impressive for a school administrator.  By contrast the girls made a good choice and were willing to take the fallout from it.  What more could one want from 16 year olds?

Also, the girls in question didn't request that their suspensions be overturned -- their original comments after the fact were that they expected to be suspended but decided leaving the play's language intact was worth taking whatever punishment the school might give.   The overturning of their suspension was a decision made by the school board president.   He decided that the decision to suspend them was incorrect because the orginal order to remove the material was not a correct one, especially given that, as stated above, a male student's use of the word "fuck" hadn't been questioned. 

School, especially public (or "state" for my UK friends) schools  are in an interesting position.  School attendence is required -- school is not a freely-made association that a club or even a place of employment might be.   Yet students remain part of a free society with free speech rights.  It is therefore important that schools not abridge the free speech of students unless doing so is absolutely necessary.  This clearly wasn't the case here -- another alternative could have been presented rather than attemption to restrict student speech.  If they issue was concern over audience sensibilities, the school could have included a mention in the program that selections from "The Vagina Monologues" were being performed.  One would guess an audience member, reading that, would realize that the word "vagina" might be used and could opt to leave if they didn't want to be exposed to the "v-word" word.  Instead, the restriction would seem to speak more to the principal's discomfort with normal medical terms for parts of the female body rather than anything to do with the content of the play itself. 

What bothers me most about this is not even the issue of censorship, but the fact that by is actions (which I have to think were done without a lot of thought) this principal went a long way toward inappropriately shaming and sexualizing the female students.  I don't have children, but I know from friends with teenage daughters that one of the hardest tasks they undertake is keeping their teens from developing shame about their bodies.