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More comments I've posted elsewhere on LJ:
In response to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nhudris_embrace, on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
metaquotes, who said that
See the second act of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, which explores what happens after "happily ever after."
Okay, the prince and princess get married and live happily ever after, Beowulf has killed the monster, Ulysses is back in Ithaca with Penelope--now what? What do they all do, happily ever after?
There's also a nice bit in one of Miss Manners's books, about a woman (one of her people with obviously made-up names, who exist to be examples of appropriate and inappropriate behavior in various contexts) who planned a huge, fancy, wedding, to be the "happiest day of her life"--and it was, and each day after was a little less happy, and so of course she wound up divorced.
In response to one ofcatamorphism's polls, I observed that I don't think of my relationships as "primary" or "secondary". flata asked me whether I would date someone who was hierarchical:
I don't know. The question hasn't come up.
It's not that I expect to have the same role in my partners' lives as their other partners do, or that I treat all of my partners the same--they're different people, after all. But primary/secondary seems to be an artificially strong distinction, and one that doesn't describe my life well.
If someone I was interested in, who was interested in me, used that model, I'd have to find out what they meant by the terms, and then figure out whether that worked for me.
This was in response tooursin writing about a conference she was attending:
Laura Doan's conclusions [in a paper on 'Topsey-Turveydom: gender inversion and sapphism in the Great War' presented at the Berkshire Women's History Conference] seem entirely unsurprising to me: some of the skills labeled "masculine" would have been appealing in themselves, to at least some of these women, and you don't have to be lesbian or bisexual to recognize that masculine skills are identified with independence and agency. There's an odd and little-discussed assumption that heterosexual women would be content with not choosing their own life paths or sexual partners. Yes, the people who explicitly advocate male dominance say that all women (or all "normal" or "healthy" or "virtuous" women) would be content that way--but beyond that, there seems to be an undercurrent of assumption that, while straight women also benefit from these choices, they aren't the ones pushing for them, that they'd wind up with acceptable-to-them lives.
rho posted some interesting thoughts about elitism and mind-body dualism, which prompted this "Yes, but" from me:
The second thing (because it's at the end of the post) first: being fat does not mean that I disrespect my body. It may mean that I had bad eating or exercise habits 20 or 30 years ago (having a mother who simultaneously told me she was too thin to give blood, and was frequently dieting, probably didn't help). In the present, it means I respect my body enough not to subject it to the common dieting cycle of starve/lose 10 pounds/gain back 15/repeat.
I also tend to think that a certain amount of self-sorting in social groups is for people with similar levels of skill and interest: someone whose main recreation is pickup basketball needn't think that non-basketball-players are somehow inferior in order to socialize mostly with other basketball players. And that's equally true of people who put on amateur theatricals, or like to talk about books: people enjoy spending time with others who share their interests. That can feed, or be fed, by elitism, but the two are not inherently connected: I don't think my enjoyment of weight-lifting makes me somehow better than people who find it unutterably boring or actively unpleasant, it's just part of who and how I am. The same is true of my enjoyment of science fiction. I don't expect any of my friends, or my partners, to share all of my interests--but if there are no interests in common, there's no basis for a friendship, because the two people would have nothing they liked to spend time at together and nothing to talk about.
In a discussion of reading and writing,papersky used the made-up sentence "Distrained by glimmerodes, compassed by cimmerons, she bobbed in a ocearine, solitary." as an example of something that would require a lot of work from the reader, and had "better not be the first sentence".
I replied:
That sentence feels vaguely Delany-ish, the same seeking of rhythm and not-always-clear imagery (the most recent Delany I read, the only in a while, is "We, In Some Strange Power's Employ, Move in a Rigorous Line," because I happened on it while packing for my trip to Seattle).
What counts as strange? I subconsciously/automatically parsed "ocearine" as an octarine ocean, and of course octarine isn't a real word either, and refers to something that doesn't exist in our world. But someone in an ocearine almost certainly would be solitary, either planning or performing some work of magic, or stuck there by someone else's magic, intentional or otherwise.
In response to
nhudris_embrace, on metaquotes, who said that To be honest I have never had the urge to end a book "the price and the princess got married and lived in misery for the rest of there lives. … The princess committed suicide and the prince turned to alcohol and drugs.....*lather, rinse, repeat*"I don't know it just doesn't have the appeal of "happily ever after" even if it's unrealistic.
See the second act of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, which explores what happens after "happily ever after."
Okay, the prince and princess get married and live happily ever after, Beowulf has killed the monster, Ulysses is back in Ithaca with Penelope--now what? What do they all do, happily ever after?
There's also a nice bit in one of Miss Manners's books, about a woman (one of her people with obviously made-up names, who exist to be examples of appropriate and inappropriate behavior in various contexts) who planned a huge, fancy, wedding, to be the "happiest day of her life"--and it was, and each day after was a little less happy, and so of course she wound up divorced.
In response to one of
catamorphism's polls, I observed that I don't think of my relationships as "primary" or "secondary". flata asked me whether I would date someone who was hierarchical:I don't know. The question hasn't come up.
It's not that I expect to have the same role in my partners' lives as their other partners do, or that I treat all of my partners the same--they're different people, after all. But primary/secondary seems to be an artificially strong distinction, and one that doesn't describe my life well.
If someone I was interested in, who was interested in me, used that model, I'd have to find out what they meant by the terms, and then figure out whether that worked for me.
This was in response to
oursin writing about a conference she was attending:Laura Doan's conclusions [in a paper on 'Topsey-Turveydom: gender inversion and sapphism in the Great War' presented at the Berkshire Women's History Conference] seem entirely unsurprising to me: some of the skills labeled "masculine" would have been appealing in themselves, to at least some of these women, and you don't have to be lesbian or bisexual to recognize that masculine skills are identified with independence and agency. There's an odd and little-discussed assumption that heterosexual women would be content with not choosing their own life paths or sexual partners. Yes, the people who explicitly advocate male dominance say that all women (or all "normal" or "healthy" or "virtuous" women) would be content that way--but beyond that, there seems to be an undercurrent of assumption that, while straight women also benefit from these choices, they aren't the ones pushing for them, that they'd wind up with acceptable-to-them lives.
rho posted some interesting thoughts about elitism and mind-body dualism, which prompted this "Yes, but" from me:The second thing (because it's at the end of the post) first: being fat does not mean that I disrespect my body. It may mean that I had bad eating or exercise habits 20 or 30 years ago (having a mother who simultaneously told me she was too thin to give blood, and was frequently dieting, probably didn't help). In the present, it means I respect my body enough not to subject it to the common dieting cycle of starve/lose 10 pounds/gain back 15/repeat.
I also tend to think that a certain amount of self-sorting in social groups is for people with similar levels of skill and interest: someone whose main recreation is pickup basketball needn't think that non-basketball-players are somehow inferior in order to socialize mostly with other basketball players. And that's equally true of people who put on amateur theatricals, or like to talk about books: people enjoy spending time with others who share their interests. That can feed, or be fed, by elitism, but the two are not inherently connected: I don't think my enjoyment of weight-lifting makes me somehow better than people who find it unutterably boring or actively unpleasant, it's just part of who and how I am. The same is true of my enjoyment of science fiction. I don't expect any of my friends, or my partners, to share all of my interests--but if there are no interests in common, there's no basis for a friendship, because the two people would have nothing they liked to spend time at together and nothing to talk about.
In a discussion of reading and writing,
papersky used the made-up sentence "Distrained by glimmerodes, compassed by cimmerons, she bobbed in a ocearine, solitary." as an example of something that would require a lot of work from the reader, and had "better not be the first sentence".I replied:
That sentence feels vaguely Delany-ish, the same seeking of rhythm and not-always-clear imagery (the most recent Delany I read, the only in a while, is "We, In Some Strange Power's Employ, Move in a Rigorous Line," because I happened on it while packing for my trip to Seattle).
What counts as strange? I subconsciously/automatically parsed "ocearine" as an octarine ocean, and of course octarine isn't a real word either, and refers to something that doesn't exist in our world. But someone in an ocearine almost certainly would be solitary, either planning or performing some work of magic, or stuck there by someone else's magic, intentional or otherwise.
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