****

These, by the way, are hate crimes.  They don’t get counted as such in hate crimes statistics.  They will never be counted as anything else by me.

Breaking News – over 20 years later

Earlier this week it was announced that LAPD is in possession of a composite sketch of a serial murderer who is still believed to be killing black women in South Los Angeles.

The sketch was available about 20 years ago, after his only known surviving victim described him for police following her attack in the mid-1980’s.  I’m having trouble getting clear information about whether the sketch was widely distributed or not when her attack occurred.  Currently the sketch is not available to the public, but news of its existence has been released. 

Prior to stories in the LA Weekly this summer, most Angelenos, including victims’ families and the lone survivor, had not been told by police that these were even suspected of being serial killings. 

Audio of a 911 call related to the case was released earlier this year.  This is not a cold case – this is one of the longest running serial killing sprees in Los Angeles’ history.

Some of the women he’s killed were supposedly prostitutes, and some definitely were not.  All of the women he has killed were black women living in the South Los Angeles area.

I’m glad people cared about this young woman, I don’t begrudge that at all.  It does bother me that I know better than to expect any “Losing Janecia Peters” mournful profiles in even the same publication that first reported on the “Grim Sleeper.” 

One young woman is grieved as much for the expected wonderfulness she was to bring to the world as she matured, as for the amount of wonderful she apparently already was.

Ten women, mostly young, well they get a head shake if anything.  The cops initially were calling their killings “the strawberry murders.”  Nobody makes heartfelt speeches at makeshift memorials about how smart and loving they were, or how shocking it is that they were grabbed off the street and killed for no reason.

Breaking news – a bunch of black women are dead and not much of a damn seems to be given.  Oh wait, I guess it really is breaking news…

Open Letter to

…the little spider who woke me up two nights ago by running up my side under my left arm:

I get it, you’re as scared of me as I am of you, if not more so, hence the nervous scurrying. 

A tip – my fear of you is why I’m not all up in your damn armpit in the middle of the night while you’re trying to sleep.  Learn from it!

Signed,

I Am Not Trying to Be Little Miss Moffett or Whoever the Hell It Is, Thanks

Heterosexuality

From an email to a friend but just crabby enough today to feel like posting it even though there’s little point:

Why is there not a single non-BDSM-classified sex act that a male partner could fathomably do to or for a female partner, to make her orgasm, that would go against any natural reflex of his physical personhood, let alone cause him pain?  And yet, if you are to be considered game these days as a hetero woman – not even kinky – you should be working on suppressing your gag reflex and learning the particulars of “safe, enjoyable” anal sex on the receiving end.

Also, lurkers who come here just to revel in feelings of superiority over uptight prude-y anti-sexers:

Spare me your protestations of how much you enjoy having your ass fucked and no one’s forcing anyone else to get fucked in the ass so why don’t I stop pissing on your cheerios about it.

I am a person who used to only be able to orgasm when being fucked in the ass.  I am also a person who (I learned recently at a most unfortunate, needed-to-be-able-to-induce-vomiting time) has a hair-trigger yet easily over-ridden gag reflex. 

It is not simply that it’s bullshit that deep-throating and having your ass fucked are things that more and more hetero men want and expect from hetero women, although in my cranky opinion it is indeed bullshit on their parts.

It is the complete absence of any reciprocal development in heteros.  It is the MARKED absence of any sexual parity in this regard, that fumes the fuck out of me, that makes the point.  Female people are, as a matter of course, expected and forced in myriad ways to be sexual servants to male people.  And whether any particular female ever has an orgasm or 500 during this course of events is not relevant.  The way male supremacy functions in regular old hetero fucking is, however.  As is the fact that most people pretend it isn’t functioning at all these days.

They’re x-ed out, and then other black women are shown what it means

Harriets Daughter makes the unbearable point.

I’ve seen a news story here and there online about it, but it does seem like – not that it wouldn’t have happened that a bunch of white women got killed, or that I think the media/world would *genuinely* care that they were gone – but for damn sure I would not be able to *escape* this story just watching regular tv.  Every commercial break would be “breaking news tonight… update on the serial killer in Ohio…” etc.

Somehow the thing that struck me the most at first was reading in one story that someone had said they’d seen a naked woman fall from a second story window at his house.  There was no “and so the cops were called” after it, just – yeah, somebody saw a naked black lady fall or get pushed out of a second story window.  Because it’s normal for naked people to be doing daredevil play-jumps or stunt-woman training or – really what the fuck?

He didn’t even bother to hide some of them after he killed them.  It’s not like there was no – anyway, harrietsdaughter said it all.  I know it’s not helpful and not doing-anything on my end, it just is true – I do my best to blot things like this out a lot of the time.  It’s hard for me not to have vivid pictures in my head of their fear and emotional pain on top of physical, while it was going on.  I can’t stand how alone they are in those moments, moments I can never go back and comfort them in never mind save them from.  And the loneliness of knowing – mostly people can stand it, it seems.

Feel Sorrier for Me

I don’t know how a stomach flu gets worse over the course of six days instead of better, but I am fucked up.  The doctor believes it is in fact stomach flu (not some rare, romanticly deadly disease that would make you all cherish even more the personal emails I’ve sent you.  Or the fact that I haven’t sent you any, depending.)  Who needs drugs with this fever to set me a-fuzz.  I do, actually, I need drugs.  If you could drop some off, the good stuff, let me know and I’ll send you directions.  Otherwise, please forgive ongoing absentee-ism online since pre-NYC really.  This will be over at some point and then I’ll be back here yelling about how we should all get a lifetime supply of free abortions with better drugs *during*.  See people have told me that it hurts – or they describe it as “discomfort,” but I’m not buying the whole idea that anything really has to hurt anymore from a medical perspective.  that came out too vague and sweepy.

What I mean is that I don’t believe abortions have to hurt, or other kinds of shorter term medical procedures that I feel like doctors lazily and/or sadistically decide are too inconsequential for anything that would block the pain.  I don’t care if it’s only 15 minutes of vagina and/or abdomen pain.  If it could be no minutes, and I know with modern science it could be, then why the fuck isn’t it?

Case closed.

Arrogant A-hole pre-empts science and religion

I am telling you definitively that we CAN know when life begins, when it comes to sperm and eggs and collisions thereof.  Or I can know it, anyway, and can confidently pronounce it.

Sperms are alive.  Eggs are alive.  The thing(s) they become when they join up are alive.  Any/everything/one that gets aborted in an abortion is alive.

Abortion ends the life of a living thing.

And that has zero bearing on whether abortion should be freely and safely provided to every single woman who wants one, at any time, for any fucking reason whatsoever.

Please take your bibles and petri dishes and go the fuck home already.

I, for one, am not wondering “how could this happen?”

Supposedly innocuous things about it can set me off.  In how it’s talked about, I mean.

“She’s in the hospital but her injuries are not life-threatening.”

“The whole nation is wondering how this could have happened.”

“…on the grounds of a high school, outside the homecoming dance.”

What a huge consolation it must be for her, that the way she has been injured has officially been stamped not-a-threat-to-her-life.  What a consolation to be alive, through this.  What a life to have, where what you know about your place in it – what you likely already knew long before this, as many of us do whether it happens to us or not – gets to be a question mark for near-everybody else, a problem that needs solving and it’s horrible that something like this had to happen for it to get the attention it deserves, but maybe at least now…  What a relief, that your failure to die from it can now help gird the lies others tell themselves.  Thank god you are at least alive.

 

The only thing I am regularly asking myself, wondering, is how it can be that I’m the only person who is aware that this goes on all the time?  A gang of boys sexually assaulted a girl in my class in middle school, on the playground.  At the end of lunch recess.  Apparently it happened really fast – I didn’t see it.  They swarmed her, surrounded her; in my mind it was something like pictures you see of beekeepers when they’re covered from head to toe in a live, buzzing brown suit.  Except of course those bees mostly aren’t stinging.  And of course she had no male-safe suit on.  I think it can be said that if you are in a female body, what you have is the exact opposite of a male-safe suit on at all times.

I knew the girl – she was in the group I had peripheral access to, the cigarette-smoking, step-father-molested 13 year olds who went out on the soccer field every recess to smoke Marlboro Reds and try and out-cool each other in front of the stoner boys.  I guess I’d call what I was “grandfathered-in”: I was allowed to be a hanger-on because one of the actually-cool (by the definitions of the time) girls had been my best friend since 5th grade.  It was her stepbrothers who got her, both of them, not her stepdad.  But the rest of the girls in the group…I don’t know how we knew, or how I knew anyway, I don’t remember any of us talking about it openly.  It was something in my gut, about every one of us, although even now the least I know of any of us is what happened to me.

B talking about her stepdad like he was a sometimes-dickish boyfriend who was moody (instead of consistently generous) about giving her some of his coke.  L, my 5th grade friend, talking about wanting it to stop with the older of the two stepbrothers (they at least had the courtesy to prey consecutively and not concurrently, god love ‘em), but he was only a few years older than all of us, and we thought he was cute, so we didn’t talk of it as rape or incestuous-anything.  Honestly?  L’s situation, it was like the book Petals in the Wind by V. C. Andrews had come to life, for a slew of rabid fans.

For those of you who are unfamiliar – the first book, Flowers in the Attic, was about a sadomasochistic incestuous family of impossibly beautiful white people.  The second book, Petals in(on?) the Wind, was about how the star of the original show (the beautiful daughter who is raped by her older brother and of course falls irrevocably in love with him because of it in FITA) comes of age (yes) by way of various older men raping her.  Each one of whom she falls in love with.  Because they are all also impossibly beautiful, these rapists, and because naturally it’s called romance in the books, not rape.  It’s how men are; being on the receiving end is how you know you’re desirable.  My friend L was in a round the clock state of desirability, as were the others.

C was the one who was attacked on the playground.  All I remember hearing by way of details at the time was – they took her pants off.  And I remember thinking, but they like her, she’s popular in that girl-who-would-get-called-a-skank-today-but-who-was-cute-and-caught-the-boys’-eyes type of way, why would they try to embarrass her like that?  Pantsing someone was what you did to humiliate them – stronger boys doing it to weaker boys, generally.  Why did all these cute popular boys suddenly get mad at C and want to treat her like the nerdy boys?  That’s how much I understood of…anything, everything, at 13.

If C ever talked to any of the group about exactly what had happened – apparently the only ones who knew for sure were C and the boys whose bodies were closest to her in the huge swarm as it was happening so as to get a bird’s eye view – she surely didn’t talk about it to me.  Nor did any of the adults at the school.  I don’t even know if any of the boys got in trouble.  I feel like – I don’t think they could have, otherwise it would have been known, then, who was involved?  And there was one detail about what happened to C that was crystal clear – it was to be disappeared as quickly as possible by those who had any power to do anything about it.  The boys, most of them were popular and well liked, that much I had heard.  C, well…C wasn’t from around here if you know what I mean.

That’s who it generally happened to – or that’s at least who it happened to where the news ever got out, even to the tiny extent it got out.  I grew up in a place where there was nearly 100% middle to upper middle class white people and basically zero outside-the-home crime.  The biggest crime wave that I can recall is when two girls in my fifth grade class went on a Jolly-Rancher-shoplifting spree to amuse themselves on a day they played hooky.  And I still couldn’t tell you if it was the shoplifting or the hooky-playing that was considered the bigger shock.

There were no people on the street in cardboard boxes or tents or under newspapers.  And not because there’d been some Guiliani sweep action at an earlier time either.  South Torrance was just not a place where people were poor or homeless or violent.  Outside the home.  Except for what happened to C.  And the next year, to my friend T.  And…

T. had been walking home from school, with boys she knew from her neighborhood, they were all friends.  T. also had a rapey stepdad.  Whereas C lived outside the school district lines but had a relative within who claimed she stayed with them, so that she could get into the better  schools in our area, T. lived within district lines but was one of the few who, like L, had either no parental guidance or only the incestuous kind.  They were great friends to have if you wanted some place to hang out and smoke cigarettes and cloves and pot and mess around with boys or each other.  Not so great for 13 and 14 year old girls to be home alone with the fam.  Not that the outwardly-traditional type households were either.

Anyway, I don’t remember who T said was the boy who started it, but somehow she ended up on the ground, with one of the boys trying to shove his hand inside her, partially succeeding.  While the others watched.  Or helped.  Or joined in.  I don’t remember the exact choreography.  They were not the straight laced popular boys but they were the group of cute “punk” rocker dudes.  “Nice” boys who tried to affect a “bad” countenance with some spikey hair and ripped clothes.  I wasn’t much more sophisticated at 14 than at 13 – I didn’t understand why the one who fingered her, why he hadn’t just asked her out or something?  I mean he was cute, she would have said yes, and she had told me that she’d already had sex with another boy who we all thought was cute, so it’s not like she was uptight or something.  Why would a boy act like that if what he wanted was sex stuff, and he could have had the sex stuff without acting like that?  And why wouldn’t his friends have been like, eegads man, this is something you do in private, stop creating awkwardness, help her up and let her go, what’s wrong with you?!

These are a couple of the things that spring to mind for me, this is not an exhaustive list.  These things happened in broad daylight.  On school grounds.  In incredibly privileged neighborhoods on paths children walked every day together.

So when I see headlines or hear a phrase or two before clicking past a channel, where anyone is going “What the…????!” about what those males did to this 15 year old girl in Richmond, I swear to you I never know if I’m going to fucking laugh or cry.  Especially when people want to talk about “healing the community” or how to get boys to not-turn-out-like-this or how to teach them to have skills to “do something” instead of doing nothing if/when they see other boys or men attacking a woman or women.

Because I DO have some questions.  And they pre-date this gang rape and any/all conversations I’ve seen about it.  In other words, these questions I have are not actually a cover for “omg how could you have written something elsewhere that I don’t agree with!”  Which I stress only because a) it is in fact very hard for me to reach out on this subject one-on-one with almost anybody and b) especially anybody I really fucking love and c) I don’t want to hurt anybody I love and d) this is all so raw for me that I don’t know how to be saying it and make sure that everyone I love knows that I’m just saying what I feel compelled to say and that I love you even when we have different things to say.  And also I realize it could be incredibly hard to think of me as someone you can talk to or someone who you can tell whether I think we’re agreeing or disagreeing when I have a hard time with one-on-one discussions about this.  Ugh.  My questions:

In the movie Walk the Line, I can’t remember if it’s Johnny Cash’s father in law or mother in law or June herself, but somebody comes outside with a shotgun and tells Cash’s dope dealer to fuck the hell off and never come back.  They were protecting him from going back on the junk, determined to save him from something he alone was not seemingly capable of saving himself from.

There are also stories of mothers or grandmothers confronting male gang members and telling them to leave their boys the hell alone or they – the mom or granny – would kill those male gang members themselves.  Determined to save their boys from the despair and suffering that is thought to be inherent to gang life, and from the soul-diminishing participation in causing pain and death to others that is also believed to be a requisite to belonging.

And even as I think – I am glad for whoever they are, these individuals who have someone saying “fuck no he won’t go, or not unless it’s over my dead body!” – I do also think: who’s coming outside on their lawn to ward off despair and death with a rolling pin for all those other boys already in the gang?  Who’s threatening to kick ass or kill abusive or absent parents, or the poverty such parents battle against, or the need for so many hours at work that even the most loving of parents can’t be there to even know where to find the rolling pin in the first place?

And I’m not going to lie to you – I don’t wonder about that because of some identification with any of those young males.  Or some enduring love that I feel for all of humankind and so naturally extend to even the males who attacked (but thank the good baby Jesus didn’t kill!) this 15 year old girl in Richmond.

It only figures into my imaginings because of what I know it means.  Which is – while all those boys who are already in gangs are considered some evil force from which “good” boys must be saved, you can be damn fucking certain that there will be not an ounce of trickle-down looking-out for any girls.  “Good” or otherwise.

There will be no grannies showing up at my old middle school threatening the heads of good looking popular boys for pantsing her granddaughter or even contemplating same.  I don’t know if the young men in Richmond were considered “good” boys or the bad boys you want to protect your own sons from, but I do know there will be no Oprah shows about how to risk our own lives to save our girls from their clutches.  There will be talks about “healing the community,” but not about why any female would want to belong to a community in the first place that responds to the occasional highlight on the relentless attack of femaleness by strategizing about how to save male children from becoming the types of male teenagers or grown men who would participate in or watch a group of other males do everything but finish her off.

Is Nancy Grace going to show up to the high school in the Valley here in the L.A. area where a sixteen year old girl I met in AA was raped in the girls’ bathroom, by a male student she continued to go to school with afterwards?  Or never mind “the” high school – there are god alone knows how many.  Are you as on the edge of your seat as I am with the expectation that this terrible tragedy will bring light and change to all the girls’ bathrooms and all the homecoming dances in the country, the world?

Also, I regret to inform you, America, but I can guarantee you that the gang rape of this 15 year old girl at the Richmond high school is not the first such sexual assault of female children on those grounds or most any other in the vicinity.  I can guarantee you this because it is thus, everywhere.  Those young men who gang raped and those young men who watched, whether actually “gang-affiliated” or not, they are not a “phenomenon.”  They are not a shocker.  They are not the threat from which otherwise-decent male people need to be saved.

The news of this attack did not upset me because of its imagined singular savagery.  Or because of some aching sorrow or rage about why the fuck male people did it or watched it or cheered it or ignored it.  I don’t actually know why the fuck, but I no longer expect or hope to find out either.

The thing that is the most painful for me about this attack and every one like it or somewhere on the continuum is that I cannot even conceive of a different “how could this happen” question.  How could *this* happen: how could female people ever live in male-safe suits?  How could male people ever stop hating us?  And though, like others, I don’t want to teach my niece that her navigation system for life should just be one simple compass of fear, I also want to know where the fuck I can get a big enough rolling pin, and how the fuck to be on every front lawn or playground her feet may touch, and I want to know when healing the community is ever going to mean: her, first.

Something’s still weird but I’m going to see if this works

I deleted the other original blog address, in the hopes that it would solve the problem of every time I try to make a new post here, it just automatically went over there no matter what the fuck I did. Right now though it seems like the only way I can get to this site’s dashboard and actually use its functions is if I am logged out, log in fresh, and then it takes me directly to this dashboard. If I click “dashboard” from the site itself, it takes me to the “this blog has been deleted” page – as in, is still redirecting to the old url for some reason. Really wordpress I still hate you right now.

Different pre-emption of crazy cat lady spiel that follows

Because it is something that never fails to enrage me, and because I love the whole post, and especially this:

Then there’s the old “I was flogged as a child, and it didn’t do me any harm. I turned out great!” Yeah, you turned out great alright. You turned out to be an adult who thinks it’s ok to hit children. Well done, you.

 

______________________________________________________

One of my cats, Felix, has been biting me almost every day for no justifiable reason.  His unjustifiable reasons are basically – whenever I’m doing something he doesn’t want me to do.  Examples:

He wanted me to be sitting all the way back on the couch, so he could spoon my left thigh like he loves to do, but I was sitting on the edge since I was about to get back up again.  Bit me so hard on the back of my upper arm I thought I’d be bleeding when I went to look.

Didn’t want me on the phone the other day so hopped his fat ass up on his hind legs and bit my thigh.

But last night I don’t know what the reason was.  I was sitting all the way back on the couch.  Not on the phone.  And he still bit my forearm.

So last night, after days of this mounting aggravation (it certainly doesn’t cause real injuries but it’s unnerving and it fucking hurts some every time and I don’t know why I even feel like I have to explain why it would be bothersome to continue being bitten by someone in your household!), I retaliated.  That’s why I feel badly today, well and last night too right afterwards.

It was after he’d bitten my forearm.  I felt resentful and frustrated.  So even though it was several minutes after he’d bitten me, I reached over and messed up the fur between his ears.  You know how cats don’t like their hair rubbed in the wrong direction?  I rubbed the hair between his ears on top of his head in the wrong direction, to irritate him.

And then immediately felt like, what the fuck?  I’m a grown woman.  He’s a clearly-emotionally-disturbed little animal whose brain likely doesn’t understand the concept of later-retaliation.  So for all he knows, I just was mean to him for no reason, just like he’s mean to me for no reason.  Is that the kind of cat-have-er I want to be?  Fuck.

Thanks, PMS, for making everything feel like a crisis and a tragedy and seriously Felix if you read this, I’m sorry I did that, but please stop biting me.  It’s hard on me after a while.