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Thanks to the evil machinations of FB friend Kelly Kel, supported by dozens of others, I have become a Doctor Who fan. It started with promises of hot gay sex on the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, and once I saw that, I was hooked into that universe. Or universes as it turns out.
Like many average looking women, I was completely bowled over by the character of Donna Noble. She is a temp who manages to cross paths with The Doctor and eventually become his companion. Not only is she not the drop dead gorgeous companions of the past, she actively harasses The Doctor in ways none of the other companions did. She pulls his Time Lord pigtails over and over again.
I won’t go into any spoilers about where the following passage comes from, or what the context is, but when I watched this scene in Doctor Who I found myself crying.
NEW DOCTOR
No, but you are. (looking at her as if he’s just understanding) Oh. You really don’t believe that, do you? I can see, Donna… what you’re thinking. All that attitude. All that lip. Cos all this time… you think you’re not worth it.
DONNA
Stop it!
NEW DOCTOR
Shouting at the world, cos no-one’s listening. Well… why should they?
DONNA
Doctor. Stop it.
This scene knocked me flat on my ass. Why AM I shouting at the world all of the time? Why do I have so much attitude, so much lip? Why do I see everything as a fight, a struggle in which I have to prove myself? Why do I make everything such a fucking battle?
Because underneath all that bluster, all that armor, all that stuff I think makes me look like a bad ass, a part of me is terribly afraid that nothing that I say is worth hearing.
It would be easy to stop here and wait for the chorus of people to chime in with accolades of my wit, my intelligence, my beauty, and my general awesomeness. But it would not work. It would be a quick salve that would last until I felt needy again, and then I would once again need to hear it outside of myself.
But guess what else is inside me? A growing part of me that thinks, no KNOWS, that what I have to say, what I have to offer this world is unique and worthwhile. The matter and electrical energy that comprises me has NEVER existed in this combination before, and it never will again. If I compare myself to other people, there will always be someone smarter, prettier, sexier, more feminist, more skeptical, a better writer, or even more bad assed. And that is ok – this is not a competition. But no one can EVER be Heidi Marie Anderson better than me, and I can’t be them.
As long as I try to convince other people of my worth, I will come up short. Haters gonna hate. Someone will always have issues with me.
But as long as I KNOW my worth, that worth can never be taken.
I am still THIS person, the person who wears a tutu on her head for her Princess Son!
“ If women told the truth, the world would crack open,” Audre Lorde
This morning, I got an email that I knew would come. I did not know who would send it, or when it would come, but I was sure of its eventual arrival.
When I first started thinking about losing weight/eating better/etc, I remember being afraid of a backlash. Thinking that people who enjoyed my “fuck you society!” posts about being fat would be disappointed in me. Worried that if I wrote about something so mundane and trivial as weight loss and food, that people would think less of me. That I was “bowing down to the man” or selling out.
Several of my friends thought I was ridiculous to think that this would happen. All of those friends were thin. My fat friends knew exactly what I was talking about.
So this morning, I basically got the “Heidi, I am glad you are trying to get healthy, but why are you writing about it and posting your weight and focusing on this and I am sad to see you become this. You were an inspiration to me and now I am sad.”
And it hurt, but like most things, it hurt because it was true.
I AM writing about weight loss, and posting my numbers, and any petty thoughts I may have. I AM writing about being hungry and how it feels to wear smaller clothes, and the battle that goes on in my heart in regards to my love of being mobile and there for my children that sometimes seems at odds with my love of my curves.
But this is the price I pay for living “publicly” – when you put your thoughts and actions out in the public arena, people are free to comment on them. And I understand that.
But the focus on my weight is only the flip side of what was a false confidence about my weight. I have never thought I was ugly – NEVER! This is not about that. But part of the reason I focused so hard on building my identity into that of the “happy fat girl” or the “outrageous fat girl” was so that I would not have to deal with REAL ASPECTS of myself.
I remember my first encounters with the sex positivity/sex positive movement, especially through the internet. I remember loving the basic principle of the thing: “Sex is awesome! No one should be ashamed of their sexuality or wanting sex! Let’s bring it out into the open so we can all enjoy a healthy, happy relationship with sex!”
Yeah! Rock on. Sex positive is awesome!!!! And then . . .
But there was this lie in the whole thing, and the lie was told by blog after blog, webpage after webpage that talked a great game about how we can be open about sex, but seemed to equate sex with the nude bodies of thin, conventionally attractive, blonde white women in male-gaze centric pornography, as though if I really pushed myself to enjoy such titles as Biker Bitches 5 and clinically lit photoshoots of a woman with her legs in improbably acrobatic positions, I’d be making the world a better place.
Oh yeah. That part.
People have been celebrating the sexualities of attractive white people for centuries. In fact, I’d say if there were ever a time when people’s discomfort towards sex dissipates and they’re willing to accept, tolerate, and engage with sexual content is WHEN it comes in the form of these bodies, these pre-approved forms.
But what about the queer porn?
Worse yet, so many queer oriented blogs are so white, able, and cis that it hurts. I’m a pansexual/cisgender/cissexual person, and when I see these blogs I see the white, Western version of queerdom splattered across the screen.
Oh god. She is right. Jesus.
If you’re sex positive and you’re not making an active effort to include and celebrate all kinds of sexuality from all kinds of people? You’re a fucking liar. There it is. You’re a liar.
Because sex positivity and body positivity and anti-racism and fat acceptance and the disability movement and queer positivity and womanism are part of the same thing.
So I say FUCK sex positivity. I want sex inclusivity.
I think we just got schooled. I know I’m taking notes.
When I was a little girl, I told my mother I wanted to be a firefighter and ballerina. Despite showing a clear path to my later sexuality, that career plan was abandoned when I discovered that both required me to get off the couch.
Now, after 15 years in the sexual assault/domestic violence victim services field, and almost 8 years of doing a mediocre job as a human growth and development facilitator to the Wild Boys of Borneo, my mind is looking onward of what I want to be when I grow up.
How can you help? You can spend 5 minutes and take this survey. How can you hurt? You can spend 5 minutes and take this survey and answer each question in an ironic hipster fashion.
So if you want to help me, or fuck with my life in a cruel fashion, here you go:
My article on Skeptical Parenting that was published in Skeptical Inquirer is finally available online. I know it has been hard for you to sleep at night while waiting for this day.
There comes a moment in every parent’s life when your child asks you
the question you most feared hearing from your dear one’s lips.
“Mom?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Where did people come from?”
“You mean babies? Well, um, first the man takes his penis and . . .”
“No, no, I mean the very first people. Where did the first people on Earth come from?”
I was dumbfounded. What could I say? I knew this moment was coming
and yet was completely unprepared. I would be more than happy to
discuss sex with him, but evolution? How could I explain evolution to
my three-year-old when I myself was fuzzy on the process? I was, after
all, the product of the South Carolina public education system.
And that is when I said the worst possible thing any parent can say
to a child asking about this controversial subject. No, I did not tell
him that we came from God or that we were planted here millennia ago as
an extraterrestrial experiment. I told him something much, much worse.
I just received a lovely email from Kennedy Goodkey, who enjoyed Kylie Sturgess's interview with me on the Skeptic Zone Podcast. The interview was about the different types of activism within the skeptical movement. Kennedy has a blog called "Confessions of An Asshole Skeptic" and has placed me on the Asshole Skeptic Honour Roll. I feel as if I have been training for that placement my whole life :)
The Skeptic movement has so many wonderful, nice, highly intelligent and ever polite people in it (Richard Saunders, DJ Grothe, Daniel Loxton, Derek and Swoopy, Dr. Rachie, Evan Bernstein, The Iwan's, Jeff Wagg, Ginger Campbell, and plenty more that I as an asshole have forgotten). These are the people who need to act as spokespersons for skepticism.
There are also the skeptics that are generally nice and professional, but do not suffer fools lightly (James Randi, Phil Plait, Steve Novella, Kylie Sturgess, Tim Farley, Maria Walters, Ben Radford, Joe Nickell (swoon), Shermer, Dunning, and again, probably a few others). Watching Joe Nickell switch from his uber professional demeanor to his equally professional but clearly righteous tone when calling out the ghost hunters at Dragon Con this year was a highly "stimulating" experience for me. Ben Radford did the same thing last year when he told a priest that "unlike the Bible, at least science updates its books when it learns it is wrong." These are the folk who need to represent us whenever there is any type of public debate with believers, anti-vaxxers, and woo mongers.
Finally, you have your assholes. I am hesitant to place anyone in this category other than myself and the self-described Asshole Skeptic, but I may be willing to make an exception for certain tall magicians, only because he has called himself an asshole as well. The assholes are the ones you need to engage the opposite side's assholes.
In terms of skeptical outreach, I like to imagine that Daniel Loxton, Dr. Rachie, and Richard Saunders will get us in the door, Randi, Nickell, Radford and Novella will lay down the law, and assholes such as myself can be hidden from view until we need to rally the troops with inflammatory remarks or get into ridiculous yet funny screaming matches (real OR online) with the asshole believers.
So why are assholes such assholes?
My son had some difficulty with authority at school last year
(genetics much?) and the school psychologist wanted to label him with oppositional defiant disorder. Upon hearing this, I went to EVERY therapist/psychologist/psychiatrist friend I had, described his
symptoms, got their opinion, and systematically used the DSM IV (diagnostic guidelines for mental
illness) to completely demolish the school psychologist's report and diagnosis, not to mention her competence. Bottom line, he hadadjustment disorder and anxiety, not oppositional defiant disorder. This was later confirmed by a several practitioners at the doctoral level who spent more than two hours on his case.
After the meeting where I presented MY findings to the school psychologist, my son's Nazi
teacher, and the principal, my husband looked over at me and said
"Sweetie, you were right. Hollis does NOT have oppositional defiant
disorder."
I beamed. He was proud of me!! Even after 10 years of marriage, there is no other person in the world whose approval means more to me :)
Then he said "YOU however, sure as hell have it. In fact,your entire family has it."
Our family got a dog about two weeks ago. I called a local no-kill shelter (funny, considering we took our bad dog to the yes-kill shelter four years ago) and asked if they had any dogs that were good with kids. They told me about a four year-old, male poodle/bichon mix they had, and my son and I went to visit him.
He was absolutely adorable, we adopted him (although I think we could have gotten a chinese baby girl for less money) and I have once again become a dog person. The same woman who can not sleep with her husband now shares a bed with a warm pile of fluff that loves her unconditionally, never slaps her and screams for juice, never punches kids at Montessori, and never talks. Ever. About anything, but especially not about Lego Star Wars.
So what is a white, liberal/bordering on socialist woman with an extremely high IQ(email me – I will tell you!) and sense of social justice to name her dog? Well at the shelter his name was Kiko. I did not like that, so I changed it to Biko. You do know who Biko is right? Stephen Biko, the South African anti-apartheid martyr that Peter Gabriel immortalized in his mid 1980′s song of the same name?? Of course you don’t because I am not only smarter than you, I’m better.
Only this week has it occurred to me that perhaps it is, oh I don’t know, slightly douchebaggy to name your dog, an all white dog no less, after the hero whose death mobilized the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. I bet his children and grandchildren would think, “Thank you, oh beautiful nice white lady. It is only through you naming your dog after our father do we feel his memory truly lives on. Thank you for carrying the torch of freedom throughout the neighborhood of Fernwood, in the magical land of tolerance, Spartanburg, South Carolina.”
If I die tomorrow, please have the dog carry my ashes in a pouch on his body, while Peter Gabriel’s Biko plays throughout whatever secular meeting hall you can reserve. I think that Stephen Biko, who died in the custody of the South African police who were not held accountable and claimed it was suicide (he beat HIMSELF to death) would approve and say that we are indeed brothers in the fight against evil.
Ok, I never do these things, NEVER, but so many cool people seemed to want to know about me that I had to do it. I must give the public what they want. This was originally on Facebook.
1. I created a Star Trek fan club when I was in 6th grade in 1985. I created flyers and everything, including a club song. I have attached the flyer on Facebook.
2. My husband and I were on the front page of the Greenville News in January 2004 because we were willing to talk about being Democrats. Seriously! I was most angry at the reporter when he referred to the setting of our interview in our downtown bungalow (under renovation at the time) as "a makeshift table in a half-remodeled home." It pissed me off.
3. As a child I wanted Princess Diana and Prince Charles to adopt me. I cried like a baby from the time I found out she was dead until the week later at her funeral. I watched the funeral while crying into Peggy Hamrick's dog Frodo's fur.
4. I once tried to fly a homemade kite made from a trash bag and a coat hanger. The Canadian neighbors next door bought me a kite for my next birthday.
5. Although I have always been jealous of my sister in many ways, and we fought like, well, sisters as children, I now consider her one of my best friends and would kill for her. Or at least maim.
6. My husband broke up with me in 10th grade because I was ready to have sex and he was not.
7. When I finally did have sex at 17 (ahem, not with him) for the first time, I planned the event for about 4 months ahead of time. And it was perfect, absolutely perfect. I feel like it set the standard for my expectations of sex for the rest of my single life. I believe teens are responsible enough to choose when to have sex.
8. Although I am ardently pro-choice, I believe technology will change enough where fetuses can be transplanted. That WILL change things, in my eyes.
9. I have never understood what people's looks have to do with their sex appeal. I have found many "unattractive" people very sexy, and many "hot" guys unappealing.
10. I weigh 251 pounds, and have not weighed under 200 in about 15 years. And I am mostly ok with that! Dr. Miles can suck it!
11. I once dreamed that a man would look past my frumpy appearance, my oppositional demeanor, and my constant sobriety to find me a fascinating, sexy, minx of a woman. About two years ago, I realized that one had – my husband.
12. Although I am not an alcoholic, I don't drink at all. The last time I drank was in 1997, before my friend Laura McGeorge's wedding, and I ended the night throwing up on myself in my bushes. I never got buzzed when I did drink, I went straight from sober to fucked up beyond belief. With the family history of alcoholism, I decided not to mess with it.
13. I am secretly judgemental of all those who drink and/or use drugs. I feel superior to them.
14. I have never had sex drunk.
15. I spend about 5 hours per week 80 hours per week on my actual job, and still manage to get everything done.
16. Although I am fat and funny, I am not jolly at all. I am one of the most angry people you will ever meet. If I am not pissed off, just talk to me about Dr. Sears, John Rosemond, or Joel Osteen. You will then see the anger.
17. I am bisexual – but have never even kissed a girl. This does not make me a poser, it makes me monogamous. I knew this the first time I saw Catherine Deneauve and Susan Sarandon in the Hunger.
18. I have had a massive crush on Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller for about three years now, and I don't really like magic at all. His NPR This I Believe was literally life changing for me, and helped me come to grips with my atheism. I am terrified of meeting him.
19. If I could afford it, I would hire a housekeeper/cook in a heartbeat. I hate the majority of traditional female roles, other than pregnancy and breastfeeding. I often resent my husband for the freedoms our society gives men in regards to parenting.
20. Even before I worked in my current field of domestic violence/sexual assault, people have always disclosed their abuse to me. I once had a woman disclose her sexual abuse to me while I was being interviewed by a group for a job. She had never told her co-workers until the interview.
21. I wrote awful, awful, awful, vampire porn when I was in high school, and I used some of the "popular" guys by name in the story. To top it off, the high school girl who was the main character vampire lost tons of weight after becoming a vampire. Mary Sue much???? And yet it was probably still better than Twilight.
22. I love Bollywood movies and their soundtracks.
23. I fall down alot – about two or three times per month.
24. I have my own bedroom. It has been hard for me to sleep in the room with anyone else for about 20 years.
25. My female friendships have caused me more heartache, betrayal, and drama in my life than anything with men ever has.
I have been very upfront with my husband about a crush/fascination I have with a certain minor celebrity. He knows about it and tolerates it, even to the point of knowing that I have emailed back and forth a couple of times with this person.
However, this morning my husband gets onto Amazon and tries to order something from my account. All emails/internet accounts are open with him, so this was normal. However, he then says "Why are you sending $25 kids books on evolution to a millionare?"
Once at a restaurant, I saw a man that looked familiar. He looked at me as well, and we realized that we knew each other somehow. We spoke and tried to figure it out. Finally, he said to me "Where do you work?" When I told him, we realized that I had assisted his wife in getting a restraining order against him.
I once took a trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina by myself. It was amazing and empowering, and all that stuff that happens when women travel alone.
I decided to go hang gliding from Kill Devil Hills. When I called the company that does it, the salesman said "How much do you weigh?" When I told him (224 at the time) he sighed and said "We're gonna need a lot of wind!"
In high school I tried to ingratiate myself into a group of very smart guys. One day, they were discussing the economy and the stock market. I tried to join in the conversation. One guy said, "Oh yeah, what company do you invest in?" I said, "The Dow Jones Company!"
Once when I was at a national domestic violence conference, I went up to an amazing Native American speaker (there is at least one at every conference – white women love Native American speakers) and asked her what it was "like" in her community as a "woman of size."
So basically I said "Hey, you're fat and Indian, how's that working out for 'ya?"
Thanks to the evil machinations of FB friend Kelly Kel, supported by dozens of others, I have become a Doctor Who fan. It started with promises of hot gay sex on the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, and once I saw that, I was hooked into that universe. Or universes as it turns out.
