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Gorean Day Afternoon

Some of you among my beloved internet friends know I have an account on the Kink site FetLife. On that site I'm a member of several groups. I live here in Vancouver BC Canada, and saw this in the group, Vancouver Personals.

Now those who know me know my huge distate for the Gorean Philosophy, a terribly Misogynist lifestyle that bastardizes BDSM relationships to support the ideal of a purely male dominated society that believes women are inherently inferior and can be truly happy and truly a woman ONLY when serving a man completely surrendering all control and becoming his unquestioning property.

But I'm a generally polite girl, and try to voice my displeasures as nicely as conceivably possible. To that end you can see my reply is very short, not rude, and clear about my disgust without being derogatory. And the reply from the original poster in the public group is so sweet and fun! Why those Gor folk can't be all bad right?

*sighs*

Just like a Bible-thumper, she put a nice face on in public but in private....

In a Private Message titled "Thanks For The Rude Post Bitch!" she wrote, "just because you are not gorean does not mean you have the right to put those of us that are down I do not put what you are down"

Lovely how she accuses me of things I was careful to barely insinuate, let alone actually say, while making a veiled crack about my being intersexed. So I replied.

"Oh believe me dear that was a hundred times more polite than I could have been, or than Gor deserves. It's a masochisit, mysonynist bastardization of BDSM and is a very dangerous thing when it infects real life. Have you ever actually READ the books? Gor thinks women are nothing more than sexual property whose only purpose in life is to completely submit to man's whim and have NO self identity or individuality. I've dealt with Goreans and had experiences that would horrify you. The one man I ever tried dating was Gorean and he held me prisoner for 3 days torturing me trying to break my spirit so I'd make a good piece of property and not be so ornery, spouting the pillars of Gor the whole time telling me how my servitude was the natural order of things and how no woman is capable of being happy unless she belongs completely to a man. He considered rape training. I HAVE SCARS in places NO woman should. And you want to bitch at me because I shuddered and politely suggested that club should be avoided? I wasn't rude in the slighest young lady, but I very justifiably could have been. "I have EVERY right to condemn Gor as the horrifying evil bastardization of real loving BDSM that it is. And fuck you for your pompous arrogance in presuming I don't."

This healthy dose of brutal honest reality could of course not go unchallenged so I got the expected "Oh but your case is rare and we're so much deeper than your silly bondage!" speech.

Her next reply - "i live and breath Gor. Yes i have read the books. Yes you do have the right to condemn Gor, but you DO NOT have the right to condemn those that are Gorean. We do not condemn those that are not. IF you had read the books, you'd know that there is a lot more to Gor then sex. Men do not think that women are just for sex, thank you very much. It is a much deeper connection them most D/s relationships can ever be. i'm sorry that you had a bad experience, that does not however give you the right to be such a bitch to those of us that live the lifestyle and love it."

So me saying I'd make a mental note to avoid them is being a bitch? Me telling her about the very real brutal living proof I am of what Gor in real life represents is being a bitch? How charming of her! Not to mentioning condemning me is EXACTLY what she was doing. So I replied once more.

"You tell yourself whatever you need to to allow your delusions about the horrible reality of Gor to remain intact, but don't even ATTEMPT to tell me I have no right to condenm your arrogant stupidity in attacking me for a very tame commentary that consisted of ONE emoted line and NO profanity or overt rudeness. I was not in the LEAST a bitch in my public reply. I expressed my disgust in a very civilized and non-derogatory manner. YOU were the one who chose to be belligerant and aggressive and yes, a bitch, to someone who disagreed with you. Do not EVER message me again, and keep your delusions about your hateful misogynist lifestyle that is ONLY a bastardization of REAL loving BDSM to your damned self. If you message me again, I will simply block you. Hypocrisy is NOT something I'm willing to humour or tolerate in my inbox."

For a couple of days she respected that and did not reply again. Or sp I thought. Then someone brought THIS to my attention.

The nutjob who started e-mailing me with vitriolic condecsending attacks over a fluffy emote whined to her Gor group about how I victimized her, by pasting the angriest (yet most brutally truthful) part of my reply to her and claimed I messaged her first to attack her. So as I did here I pasted the entire e-mail exchange to show her for the manipulative fruitloop she is. And the crap the other Goreans in her group used to defend her bullshit, oh GODDESS how it hurts my head. For those who prefer to be spared the joy of slogging through that thread, let me summerize the things said after I posted, NONE of which included "Gee you're right, that WAS pretty dishonest and slezy of her".

- I'm as bad as any nazi, because apparently saying "Gor Is Misogynist" is equal to stuffing Jews into ovens.

- The man who raped and tortured me can't possibly be a TRUE Gorean (ahhh, the old "No True Scotsman" tactic), to hurt me like he did, despite him doing EXACTLY AS THE BOOK INSTRUCTS (whatever means you need to break her spirit, use, that she may know her true place and find joy in it) in his attempt to break me.

- The rape was obviously my own fault for being stupid enough (they assumed) to be alone and naked with a stranger (Who I'd actually known 8 months before I let my gaurd down and took him as a client, as I was a prostitute at the time).

- That any Goreans in my local area should claim to be spying on me and be out to get me just to make me paranoid and cry. Because apparently "fucking with" a RAPE SURVIVOR'S head is loads of laughs.

- That nothing I said mattered because obviously I'm just a bitter hateful unhappy bitch with an agenda and an axe to grind (by defending myself against a deceitful attack) and I'm only attacking them, (I'm condemning the philosophy, I never once attacked ANY of them let alone the one woman who started this all), because I'm just jealous about the deep spiritual connections that only they have that I'll never feel in my empty life unless I embrace Gor and my true role as a woman, (Tell my wife how I don't have any deep spiritual connections, she'll kick your ass while FEELING my pain).

All in all they all came off as condescending cult puppets, like Scientologists or Fundy Christians, using blatant exxagerations and distortions to defend an indefensible position while pretending the facts offered to the contrary simply don't exist.

A reasonable human being adapts their worldview to the facts and evidence. An unreasonable person tries to force the facts and evidence to adapt to their worldview.

And the Goreans attacking me now on Fetlife are unreasonable people.

Run if they ever offer you a glass of Kool-Aid.

And I'm trying very hard to NOT read anything past my last reply to the group, so I have no idea what further insane nastyness has ensued. Summarize it for me if you like, as if I go read it myself I'll only be tempted to post another diatribe dissecting their bullshit, which will resolve nothing. Someone who, from the very beginning, is so entrenched in a belief, will always go out of their way to ignore or deflect any evidence that contradicts it.

I recently for example had a brief e-mail exchange with the host of a Christian wingnut website who was baffled by my claim that no one has ever given me a valid reason not based on religious beliefs why gay marriage should be illegal. I also asked him to tell me how much canned food and blankets could've been bought for homeless shelters with all the money he's spent fighting gay marriage.

He answered, proudly linking me to studies that proved the evils of gay marriage and being gay at all, carefully refusing to even acknowledge not only my question but that I'd even asked it.

I replied pointing out that all his vaunted studies were A) hosted on another notoriously anti-gay Christian website, and that every single one was either a half-assed rewording of Paul Cameron's long since discredited falsified research, or misquotings from studies wherein the actual authors have repeatedly publicly condemned right-wing misquoting of their work.

I also repeatedly the money question.

He replied with basically, oh yeah well the Bible says yadda yadda and God's word overrides any human research!

I replied pointing out that human men wrote the Bible, and even if God DID give them the words, human men are fallible and will always put their own spin on things. I also cited, with links to REAL established studies, not one discredited by anyoneexcept Christian group whose discrediting consists of "Nyah nyah I can't hear you". I explained that Sodom and Gomorah weren't destroyed because of any gay sex, but because their men RAPED people and were also bad hosts in the desert. I explained in detail how the structure of the english language at the time of the first English Bible translation meant the word lie and the word lay were not interchangable, and that the oft-misused Leviticus quote "Thou shalt not LIE with mankind as with womankind" therefore has nothing to do with gay sex, but is in fact the Bible's version of "Bros before hos dude". I pointed out lesbians and transsexuals are not mentioned in the Bible anywhere in any version in ANY context.

I also AGAIN repeated the money question.

The best reply he could come up with to that was the extremely laugh-inducing "Well who are you to say what God meant by .....?"

To which I replied "Ask yourself that very question, and get your damned priorities straight." Then, since he had still refused to even acknowledge the money question, I gave him the answer, as estimated in US Dollars and researched costs for most canned foods and simple blankets and told him for every $5 dollars he spent fighting gay marriage, 3 people could have eaten at a homeless shelter instead of starving to death on a street corner. He never replied again.

The Goreans in that thread remind me of him, and of those like him. Those who think their way is the true, good, right and natural way to live, and that non-believers in THEIR way are just deluding themselves and can never know true happiness. Those who will ignore even the simplest questions that they can't answer honestly without admitting the fallacy in their ideals. Those who blatantly ignore or try to dismiss anything that offers evidence they're wrong, will cite outdated or discredited sources to prove their case, and when that fails will try to turn everything around and make it all about your supposedly suspect motives which automatically negate any valid points you have because after all, YOU have an agenda so they don't need to ever stop and think about what you've said to them so haw haw they're right you're wrong neener neener neeeeeeneeeeer!.

So I will NOT be reading any updates to that wretched thread. It will only upset me and drive me to again try telling a wall that it is a wall and not a door as it so desperately wants to believe.

And you just won't achieve ANYTHING talking to walls. Better to talk to the doors and the windows. At least THEY can be opened without a sledgehammer.

Why I Don't Care What Olbermann said

Yesterday Kieth Olbermann, in an attempt to insult Ann Coulter, (whom I admit is generally a loathsome woman), said she looked like a transsexual, mostly because being aggressive and not wearing dresses but instead pantsuits apparently are solely male traits and thus suggest Ann is less than a "real" woman.

Now, not surprisingly, all my under-30 trans friends are justifiably angry and blogging angry rants about this asinine stunt on Obermann's behalf, protesting not only the hateful innacuracy of using trans women as a bogeyman to insult a challenging woman for not being femme enough, but because no one BUT trans women seem to care that he did so.

Now maybe it's just proof that I've gotten old and jaded but I am at worst, mildly annoyed by Olbermann's doucheyness. I am however not the least bit shocked or surprised that a priveleged white male Sportscaster/MSNBC host like Olbermann would say something so nasty and use a highly marginalized people as a basis to insult a woman for a perceived lack of femininity.

After all we live in a world where society at large still sees Trans women as a big bad wolf of sorts. For example the wingnut right-wing outrage over a trans woman getting a government job under President Obama, and the so-called comedy that resulted from her appointment that clearly suggests the widely believe grossness of "men dressing as chicks" that so many both think is hilarious even as it is frequently used as a murder defense. Although in the case in that last link, we actually got justice for a change, so there IS hope for the rest of us.

So many people really don't understand Trans women, or what our lives are really like. Some men for example who watch porn see titles that refer to us as "Shemales" or "trannies", terms which a lot of trans women find offensive, and, not knowing any trans women in their own lives, think that such terms are the correct ones. other people will see a movie like "Mrs. Doubtfire", or "To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmarr", both movies about men who identify AS men dressing up as women, and, again, not knowing anyone in real life to correct them, mistakenly believe that it represents what trans women are.

This is why when the religious right brings up the "Men dress as women to get into women's washrooms" defense as the bogeyman to get people to vote against measures that would grant Trans women equality and safe protection under the law, a lot of people are stupid enough to buy into that fear mongering because they don't know enough about us to know any different.

There are so very few examples of trans women in the media, which is where the average person learns about such things. The more positive portrayals there were, for example, of gay men and lesbian women on TV, the more widespread the general acceptance of gay and lesbian people became. Offhand in the last 15 years, I can think of exactly 6 positive portrayals of trans women that painted the character as a real human being. Any other trans character on TV or in movies was a derogatory charicature that relegated us to the stereotypical confused man in women's clothing, usually played BY a man who couldn't come close to looking even like a bad Drag Queen, let alone a feminine woman. Even this casting itself is done out of ignorance of real trans lives. And of the positive portrayals, only one is played by an actual Trans woman.

Another problem IS how vitriolic and angry some trans women get. While anger is COMPLETELY justified when being marginalized, especially considering that somewhere in the world a Trans woman is murdered every three days because of attitudes like these, becoming verbally abusive in reaction to trans-ignorance does more harm than good. I sadly know more than a few of my sisters who in their anger spewing invective have made trans haters out of people who just didn't know any better and were willing to learn until they were attacked for making a mistake.

I prefer to make allies out of such people. Change is never acheived by attacking the active haters. For example, no one is ever going to eliminate homophobia by pointing at the nutjobs of the Westboro Baptist Church, (You know, the funeral picketing "God Hates Fags" people), and screaming "You're an ignorant fuckwad!".

But if you talk, and educate, those who look at nutcases like those and say "I don't get what he means? Why do they say that?" and teach them about the people being attacked by the haters, and help them understand where the hate really comes from and why it's misguided, then you've changed the world just a little bit for the better.

The more people I talk to and teach about the lives my sisters and I lead, and the struggles we go through just to live, (a lot ofd us got into porn to pay the bills, and I myself was a prostitute for four years to just keep food in the house), the LESS people there are to be fooled and swayed by the haters.

Hatemongers count on people who are ignorant of the facts to spread their hate. There is nothing a hatemonger fears more than an educated person, because an educated person will always see through their bullshit.

I know some of my friends in porn hates the porn example but I've experienced it personally so many times. A guy will call me a tranny or a shemale because that's what girls like me are called in the porn he watches, and will be legitimately surprised when he's told it's offensive. Hell it happened to me just yesterday. And their excuse is always "But that's the name they used in porno?"

Now when I was younger and still jumping before looking, I'd scream and cuss at these guys, insulting them, telling them to go fuck themselves, yadda yadda. The result was always a resounding "Well fuck you too you tranny cunt!". These days, I take breath, stay calm, and politely explain to them why tranny and shemale are incorrect terms, why they offend most trans women, why porn uses them, (market recognition. As Danielle can attest to, if you Google Tranny or Shemale you'll get a LOT more porn results than googling Trans woman will net), and then I educate them about the proper terms, pronouns, and about respecting us as women.

You know what happens now? They apologize. They admit they honestly didn't know any better, tell me they're honestly sorry if they offended me, and thank me for being so understanding and for teaching them. the more men I can reach and get through to, the less men there are out there who could potentially suffer from a sudden "Did I just fuck a man" guilt and murder one of us. The more people I can teach about who we really are, the less people there are who will vote against our equality and basic human rights.

Here in Vancouver BC Canada last year, a Women Only pharmacy called Lu's opened up in the Downtown East Side, (Vancouver's version of a Skid Row), with a "Women Born Women" policy. Through peaceful protesting and talking openly with the charity who runs the place about our lives, me and other local transwomen and our cis allies got through to them, and three weeks ago Lu's dropped the trans-phobic policy. We're now as welcome there as any other woman.

But if we had verbally attacked them, screaming about what ignorant hateful bigots they were being, it would have just been Kimberly Nixon all over again.

So, yeah, Kieth Olbermann was a douchebag. No I'm not going to piss and moan and send him long angry e-mails over it. I AM however going to tell as many confused cis folks as I can, calmly and intelligently, exactly WHY what he said was wrong and damaging.

Make the uneducated your enemy, and the enemy grows strong enough to kill you.

Make them your friend, and you castrate your enemy's power.

So don't worry about Olbermann. Get through to the people who don't understand yet why he was an idiot.

Bloody Nightmares...

Just woke up. My skin is crawling and my body as always is screaming in crippling pain. Most of that is normal, except the skin crawling. I just woke up from a very long dream that went from uncomfortable to weird to just plain violently disturbing and I'm trembling as I type.

First I dreamed about my current landlord having been my landlord while I still lived with my abusive ex Kimmy, pressuring me to kick Kimmy out or be kicked out myself and I had to watch myself making "I walked into a door" excuses until I wanted to scream at myself. This oddly was after Fran had left in a car we don't own to drive to a store back in Georgia to buy a product that doesn't exist.

Somehow the dream shifted to a small pub with a tv crew, and I was for no apparent reason now on set at a Doctor Who taping where Leonard Nimoy was replacing Anthony Stuart Head as the narrator of Confidential. Aware I was dreaming but helpless to go lucid enough to actually control the dream, I thought to myself "Whew, the dream won't be so bad now". I watched amused as Matt Smoth in a Tennant blue suit pretended not to know Nimoy for a moment before going all fanboy on him. At which point I was asked to go outside to make sure none of the crowd had videocameras.

And that's when my brain decided to really stab me in the gut. This part may be highly triggery. So here's a jump to avoid accidental triggering.










Outside on the sidewalk the crowd wasn't watching the filming. They were hooting and hollaring as a bald biker looking man was violentally anally raping two drunk and near unconscious women, while NO ONE could be bothered to try and stop him. He frequently dragged them around the pavement by their hair before switching from one to the other and punching when one tried to crawl away. No one in the crowd cared, they were all laughing and cheering him on. A few were even masturbating. And I stood there watching the me in the dream cowering against a shop window hiding her eyes, scvreaming at her to do something, to stop this, to go kick the bastard square in his throat or crack his skull open with the pipe laying right at her/my feet, but she/I just ran inside to pee, trying to pretend she saw nothing. And wanting to vomit, and thankfully having to actually get up and pee, my body forced me awaker to go drain my bladder. I have never in my life been so grateful for my overactive bladder.

I keep trying to tell myself it was just a dream. That if something so horrible ever happened in real life in my presence that I'd intervene. But I'm still haunted by the Anne-Marie incident. I'm still haunted by the wondering.

I fucking hate my cruel subconscious.

I Was Paid To Want To Vomit

I've been torturing myself this morning for some reason. I replied to a topic on a group in Fetlife about rape and consent issues and linked from one page to the next to sites all over the web with stories of prostitutes being left to suffer for moral reasons as if they weren't human or deserved fair protections. It bothers me on a deeply personal level as both a rape survivor and a former prostitute that so many people use bullshit morality as an excuse to justify stances against offering more safety measures and protections to women who are using their own bodies just to survive.

I am not proud of my 4 years as a sex worker but I refuse to be ashamed of it either. If I were thinner now and my wife was willing to allow it I'd probably still be doing it now to bring in extra money so we can afford to eat. As it is I rescue restaurant leftovers from dumpsters so we can eat, but I guess at least I don't have to touch men.

My original reason for prostitution was survival, same as it would be now, but with a different motivation behind the survival. If I were to resume the work now it would be solely so Fran and I can afford to eat. Back then it was so my then common-law spouse Kimmy wouldn't beat the shit out of me.

I prostituted myself to buy food and give Kimmy money to get drugs with, because if Kimmy went hungry or couldn't get high she got violently nasty. My spine is permanently crooked because of her abuse. I vomited after every client and spent a lot of time crying because I felt so disgusted by the work, but it was literally keeping me alive to do it. Every dollar I brought in prevented another beating.

I'm not Pro-Prostitution. I never will be. But I'm Pro-legalization/decriminalizing it, because keeping it criminal only hurts the women who have to do it to survive. Ideally I'd like to see a world where no woman has no other choice but selling sex to survive, where only those few who do it because they honestly enjoy the work ever have to do it, where those who don't like doing it have other options and are safe and protected from harm. But that world will never happen as long as these moral crusaders have their way.

I'd like to ask these supposedly strong moral people something. Prostitution, Marijuana, GLBT Equality.... all these things they throw so much money at to try and prevent in the name of some righteous morality...

How many wife beaters and rapists and murderers could be in jail right now if even HALF the money spent on prostitution stings was spent on real crime?

How much Crack and Meth and Cocaine could be out of circulation if you'd stop villifying a medicinal herb like Marijuana?

How many blankets and cans of food could be bought to stock homeless shelters with all the money you spend on fighting to keep gay people as subhuman under the law?

My name is Penny Sautereau-Fife. I am a former prostitute and a lesbian IS/Trans woman. I was paid good money to vomit after my clients left so I could survive. No one protected me, no one cared about my welfare or safety. There are people now who care and are fighting to give today's sex-workers the rights and safety protections that I and others like me never dared dream about. Please support these people however you can. It's about priorities. And if your priorities including ignoring real crimes to persecute non-evils because your "morality" tells you the non-evils are somehow worse than violent crime, hard drugs, or taking care of the helpless, you are nothing CLOSE to a moral person.

If you can afford a few dollars here and there, feel free to click on that button. The less I have to eat Burger King's leftovers pulled out of the garbage, the less my health suffers. No donations are obligatory, nor am I actively asking any of you to do so. I just promised some friends I'd put the damn button here so the option was there for anyone who felt like helping out.

Feminist Musings From Hedon? That Or I'm Really Tired

I've been reading a lot online in blogs of late about various different ideas of feminism, which are as varied and different as the gap between Christianity and Aethism. One thing they all agree on is that a lot of men have a bad habit of making assumptions about what they're allowed to do or say to women.

I've also learned from personal experience that this is doubly so for transwomen. If a man isn't disgusted by me and assuming he has a right to shove me around, he's assuming right off the bat I'm a porn shemale stereotype who will be gratefully receptive to crude advances.

Last month for example a security gaurd took exception to my using the women's washroom at a Safeway, and assumed that he just automatically had the right to call me a faggot and grab my breasts to see if they were real.

Also on several of the social networking sites I'm on for the purpose of making friends, (I'm already married), I get messaged by several jerks in a day who willfully ignore the parts of my profile that read "married", "lesbian" or "NO GODDAMN MEN", and proceed to message me with lewd come-ons or long-winded speeches about how they want to marry me and make a god-fearing woman out of me, completely disrespecting my clearly stated boundaries. Then when I very clearly reiterate my "not interested, they seem genuinely mystified by the very concept that I don't want to jump down their pants.

Cis women know all too well the joys of presumptive sexist men and their skin-crawling charms, but they need to know trans women suffer from the same sleaze. Now I'm not for a moment saying all men are like this, but if you define as a woman, cis and trans alike, there will always be men who honestly believe it's their god-given right to treat us like sexual property, and are incapable of fathoming the idea of us not liking it when they do.

We are all women, and we all have the right to expect to not be treated like meat. The kind of man who will call you a bitch if you say "Not interested" all need to learn that we are not obligated to be their fantasy. We belong only to us, and the only person we have any obligation to is we ourselves.