The process of reclaiming my body was an exceptionally powerful and liberating experience. I understood desire and sensuality from a completely different perspective. I realised that passion is something that everyone can access (it is not reserved for the young and the able-bodied), and it can suffuse through every aspect of our lives. I recognised the importance of self-love as opposed to requiring affirmation from others in order to love myself. I felt pride. I even dared to feel beautiful. I cruised around on my wheels feeling that I had every right to be in the world, as much as anyone else did. And I began to live with a passion and fervour that fundamentally changed the course of my life. Continue reading

But this is the video I’ve really become obsessed with:

I remember when it came out–how most of the people in my neighborhood had some comment to say about the touching and the rotating and dirty dirty man. Most of the kids loved it, the adults hated it. I personally cringed then and I admit, I cringe now. But now I have the words to say why.

I grew up with a very conservative idea of what masculinity looked like. Working class, religious conservative, “good” immigrants, etc all combined to create the idea that “real men” didn’t go grabbing their thingies (although there was never much of a problem with men like Dr. Dre doing the same thing), or rotating those hips or or or or…

And as a good girl, as a good girl who was secretly a butch trying to model herself on the idea of masculinity she most respected, her conservative working class Mexican father–ai, Jesus. It was a shock to my system to see that the masculinity of my father was turned on its head so dramatically (now, i would call it, “challenging masculinity”–but then, I didn’t have the words). I didn’t understand Michael Jackson to be a fag or a homo or any of those words–I understood him to be … embarrassing. Real men don’t have to grab their dicks like that. Real men are John Wayne. Who are just there. Who “do the right thing.” Like providing for the kids. And working until they collapse. And finding a good woman to rub his thingy, rather than doing it himself.

That idea of what makes “masculinity” is hard to get rid of. I still cringe now for exactly that reason. If I want to model masculinity–how on earth can I model *that*? When *I* do that, I’m just a piece of ass, a pussy to fuck (as much as a fat, baseball dykish type queer girl can be a pussy piece of ass, haha)?

But now, I have a son. I have a son that is growing up in a world where masculinity is expressed almost exclusively through a sexualized relationship with women. That is, Dr. Dre grabbing his cock in the middle of a concert is ok fucking kay–because we all know–he is grabbing that cock as a way to model studliness. Machoness. He’s using that cock to fuck women. Or, women’s asses. Or their bitchy mouths. etc. (and not meaning to target Dr. Dre here, this is relevant to, oh, all gangsta mainstream rappers). He’s using his cock to assert his authority, to wield power.

The thing about Michael Jackson…the thing that made/makes me uncomfortable….is that you can’t say the same thing. Even in his music videos that are about women (i.e. dirty diana, billie jean, etc), women do not play a major role or carry even a major presence. Which, this could be looked at in a negative way–he’s not giving women actresses a chance to represent or challenge his representation of them. But…I see it in a different way. I see it as an opportunity, and intervention, for masculinity.

You can’t say Michael Jackson is defining his cock in relationship to the subjugation of women–because the women in the black and white video (as an example), are his equals. Fellow dancers. People who enjoy moving their bodies, just like he does. (the one glaring exception with this assertion is his “the way you make me feel” video which has aggressive street harassment, but ultimately ends with a hug rather than a hooking up).

So when MJ goes into the back street to do his nasty dance, he is grabbing and zipping up…for reasons that many of us can’t even fathom…because it’s a man expressing sexuality that is not in service of women’s subjugation. It’s a man expressing sexuality that is not about power–at least not that kind of power.

And it makes many of us, including me, uncomfortable–to the point that we don’t even know how to understand what we are seeing. There is literally no point of reference in our history. (and for me, the butch wanna be–I didn’t understand it, how can you express masculinity without a woman in the picture? Isn’t butchness as much about who you are attracted to as it is “expressing masculinity?” ai, dios mio).

As I watch this video more and more though, I see it through the eyes of my son. Of my son who hurt his leg trying to dance like MJ. I see it through his eyes, and I see joy. I see a man who loves to dance. Who loves to dance so much, sometimes it makes him feel sexual and excited. A man who loves to dance so much, sometimes, he can’t contain everything inside himself, and masturbation and sexualness just flows out of him in a way that feels good, looks good, has humor to it, and is only dependent upon his own needs. He doesn’t need a credit card on a woman’s ass or a dog collar around a woman…cuz he has his dancing. He has himself.

I see that through my son’s eyes. And the way my son sits in the back seat of our car, with the MJ jamming super loud, and how his fingers start the tapping, and eventually his whole body is shaking in rhythm to Bad. I see that uncontrollable feeling in his body welling and welling until he can’t sit still any more, and I know that someday, he’ll be sweaty and hot from dancing and feel sexual urges–and I know that he’ll have seen a different way of expressing those urges. That natural joy.

And so while I can’t call MJ “liberatory” or “revolutionary” or what have you… I do say…he’s provided something for a woman worried about how her son will live in this world. And it makes me so extraordinarily sad to know that Anxious Black Woman’s words are the truth:

Not one artist who “graced” last night’s stage is worthy enough to step into the King’s shoes, and it pains me to think that Michael Jackson died without one potential artist to pass the torch to.

He was a man who danced with his sister in a public space–as an equal. And while that’s not everything…it’s a start. And that’s all my son needs.

I am in the midst of setting up a group blog for sex workers and allies about, as the title of this post suggests, sex work and sexuality.

I’d like for it to be concerned mainly with the UK and Europe, though I do want to include US bloggers and issues.

I think this has a hell of a lot of potential. Blogging is a fantastic way of getting the message out to people and so often the US dominates discourse, so having a blog to really push the UK and Europe forward will be a very big thing. And I want this to work.

What I need – some folks from the UK and Europe. So, if you are a sex worker or ally from the UK / Europe and you’d like to participate in this, whether you’d like to be a regular contributer, post sporadically or just want to be in on the ride, give me a shout: shepherd[dot]cc[at]gmail[dot]com. I’ve already got one or two very groovy people, so you’ll be in awesome company

…I decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t live in fear of walking alone at night because I need night walks as much as I need food and water. I need the cool air and the sleeping houses, I need the shadows and the fat spiders up in the arches of the old bridges. I figure it’s a toss-up between possible rape and eternal house arrest, another nice double bind for me to negotiate my way through. River By Davka published in Make/Shift

I love the darkness of the world–I love it especially when it’s the middle of the dog days of summer, and overwhelming heat fades into a just right coolness that bathes and reinvigorates tired skin. I’ve remained awake well into the early morning hours just so I can get a moment of relief, so I can find a smile and a cool hand on my forehead.

But if the darkness is where I find relief, the light, the sun, is where I battle on…

It’s been dark and gray in Michigan for days, for weeks. On my walk, I jump over huge puddles of melted snow only to land in wet, shit like mud that covers my boots. Big loose clumps of snow fall around me and on me like long wet rain drops.

And as I walk, I imagine a different world….

When I started blogging on tumblr, I was very excited to see the huge amounts of erotic smutz all over it. I am not much of a fan of porn, but the art of erotica is something I really enjoy. I DM’d everybody telling them all about my wonderful discovery–hooray, beautiful erotic images coming at me a mile a minute! How beautiful, how sexy!

But then the excitement of newness wore off, and as all us lit crit chicks so often do, critical analysis time set in.

Why were all these women frolicking in the sun, literally becoming one with nature–white?

Is it because the porn world (even erotica!) is racist? Or is it because women of color relaxing in the sun (rather than working) is so far beyond the realm of imagination of most people, it just never occurred to anybody to take pictures of women of color outside?

All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the
branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves
of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of
myself…~Walt Whitman

There is no historical memory of sexual joy, of frolicking, of good old fucking, while out in the open air for women of color. While Walt wrote about the lusty rudeness of a beautiful tree, Native women were negotiating extermination policies that were intimately linked to their sexual and reproductive capabilities. Black women were fighting off Masters, living for years in molded attacks rather than subject themselves to rape.

And from that we get where we are today: Latinas, Chicanas and black women fighting men off in pantie fields by wearing heavy clothes and covering their faces with what I can only imagine are stifling hot bandanas. Native women sitting on top of piles of depleted uranium.

So many bodies devastated.

This is the outdoors that I identify with. It terrifies me to see this picture, even as it brings peace and comfort. I want to look like that when I am dead. I want flowers to come from my body. I want to nurture the worms and the shit mud and be a place for the snow to rest.

But…not yet. Please not yet.
The prayer of a woman of color.
Please not yet…

pazenlavida @bfp could you imagine how great it would feel? to feel the wind blowing through my bush? ::daydreaming::

Right now, I am alive, and I miss the burn of the sun on my arms, on my hips, on my open thighs. I miss a feeling I’ve never had before. I miss that feeling for my daughter, who last summer, refused to go outside without her shirt on any more. I wish I was in Europe or South America, where at least on beaches, it make sense that women are topless. I wish there was some place in the world where, at least in the imagination, it makes sense for women of color to open every part of her body, from the tips of her nipples to the inner layers of her vuvla, to the sun.

I wish that there were Take Back the Night marches for the daytime.

This was one of the few smutz pictures I could find of a woman of color outside that wasn’t dependent on tired animal fetish stereotypes (aka The Black Tiger Woman). And even as this woman is not an animal, she can’t escape the reality of brownness in a white supremacist world–white women interact not with the camera or the viewer–but with the sun, with flowers, with fields, with memories. Their ties to reality are minimal. That woman in the top picture may have a job at a grocery mart, but you’d never guess it. She (and the women who look like her) gets at least one moment in time where the only thing that exists is her pleasure and the world.

The woman of color in her picture, however, gets a quick night of servicing the camera after she has spent all damn day servicing the needs of non-tipping mother fuckers that probably grabbed her ass and leered at her tits.

Which is not to say that I think that every single picture in the entire world of women of color getting it off or being sexual in the outdoors is racist trash or problematic–I’m sure that every person reading this can direct me to 20 lovely pictures of women of color outdoors in all sorts of marvelous angles and positions. What I’m getting at here is that the daytime is not any safer for women than the night time is–that sexual safety and joy exists in pictures for some of us and for others of us, we don’t even get that. That for some of us, an outdoors that is sexualized and beautiful only exists in so far that menial labor can be connected to that space.

And I miss the sunshine…

I imagine this woman with this joy surrounded by blue sky, her skin bare, uncurling like a cat in the sun after a long winter locked up under clothes…

you got me rockin and a’reelin….

To the queer community in the U.S., who has made a fabulous reputation of embracing the slutty whore in us all by doing exactly what I am talking about here–bringing the slut out of the darkness of the night and into the glory of a sun soaked march–I say a thank you and offer profound admiration.

But I do wish it didn’t make me cringe with horror to imagine parades of slutty sun worshipers marching down the tulip lined streets of Holland Michigan. As if the two worlds are so far apart, in different rooms of Dante’s hell.

I can’t believe that Michigan and liberation are so far apart, I can’t believe they are separate worlds…I simply refuse to accept that my world will always be simultaneously so monitored and so unsafe.

could you imagine how great it would feel? to feel the wind blowing through my bush?

Can you imagine it?
Can you?

Can you smell the wind that mixes sun and bush together?

Can you see the glory of your lover, of yourself, through the brilliance of the morning sun?

Do you feel safe?