(from bad brains making bad decisions)
First off, it's really hard not to write about sex because:
1. The other day I read all the comments in an article about a British guy with an intellectual disability who had been ruled by a judge not to be qualified to have sex. Some of the comments were by people who had worked with people with ID, and were saying things like, "When people with ID have sex, they can't handle it emotionally and they go from partner to partner and get very upset."
2. When I was 15 or 16, I read this livejournal flamewar that I'll always remember. Basically, a woman who was into BDSM, who had kids with autism, suggested that people with autism shouldn't be doms because they wouldn't be able to tell if their partners didn't like what they were doing. Other people said that if this was an issue, the couple should use safewords; the woman replied that she didn't believe in safewords because you should be able to tell how the other person feels.
What do these two incidents tell us (besides that parents and staff are assholes and should never talk)? Well, one thing that stands out to me is that both people talking are implying that there's a standard everyone should meet in order to be able to do a certain thing. If you want to have sex, you have to not become distraught by it, or be reckless in entering into affairs and relationships. If you want to be a dom, you have to be able to tell if your partner doesn't like what you're doing, without them saying so.
But...for some reason, this standard is only being applied to people with disabilities.* No one is calling for immature and overemotional non-disabled people to be banned from having sex, and presumably the woman who was so concerned about autism and BDSM doesn't go around telling non-disabled couples that they shouldn't be doing BDSM if they happen to not be able to read each other's body language.
(*It should go without saying that I don't think either of these judgments about developmentally disabled people is true. But even if they were it still wouldn't be fair.)
By the way I was semi-joking because now I'm going to talk mostly as a staff person, oh noes. During training for my job at summer camp working with adults, we were being given a talk about making sure guys shave, or making sure you shave them if they can't do it. Our boss said, "Nothing makes me angrier than seeing a person with a disability walking down the street with a stain on their shirt and stubble."
But nothing makes me angrier than the idea that if a disabled person doesn't look conventionally put-together, that is a PROBLEM and they're not receiving adequate support.
Let's say a disabled guy gets out of bed in the morning and decides not to shave because he's lazy, or because he thinks stubble looks cool, or because he only shaves when he's going to be kissing his girlfriend that day (haha, double panic, disabled people who are lazy AND kiss). He puts on a stained shirt because even though it's stained, it has his favorite movie character on it, or it belonged to his brother who he really likes, or it's comfortable for someone with his particular sensory issues.
All good decisions. Well, not necessarily good decisions. I personally think stained clothes are 100% gross and would never wear them. But these are decisions that a non-disabled guy might make, and no one would seriously respond with, "Someone ought to be taking better care of him." Yes, this ties into the privilege checklist.
Dave Hingsburger made a post last week called Offering, respecting...a huge difference, in which he talked about the difference between "offering choices"--i.e., choosing the set of choices a person can choose between--and respecting any choices a person makes. "Relationships, yes ... kissing, no; movies, yes ... boozing, no; celery, yes ... smoking, no." To me, saying a person can either be cleanshaven or have a beard is offering choices; saying a person can have whatever kind of facial hair they want is respecting choices.
As I was thinking about this I started thinking...well, for me as a staff person there's probably a limit. I mean, if someone never wanted to brush their teeth I would make that very difficult for them. Which I was thinking made sense, because brushing your teeth is just...well, it's not just about how you look, you have to do it.
But then I remembered when my friend found out that her non-disabled boyfriend hadn't brushed his teeth in weeks. Her reaction (and mine) was, "That's gross," but neither of us thought that someone else should start making him brush his teeth. I think there's a very small number of things that non-disabled people could do to get the reaction, "Someone else should be taking care of you because your actions are so incorrect." Most of the examples I can think of have to do with not eating, self-injury and suicide attempts, and addictions.
One of the commenters on Dave Hingsburger's post did bring up the issue of people having preferences in the short term that don't fit into their long-term plans, which I think is important. I just feel weird about brushing teeth now.
Showing posts with label s/m. Show all posts
Showing posts with label s/m. Show all posts
04 July, 2011
29 April, 2011
hurt power and disability 2; or, I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS
I always feel like I'm really hard on my parents here when they're pretty great people and also overpathologizing your kids is such a stereotypical rich person thing, I can't even. But I've written a lot about how I think it's super important for disabled people to be able to make bad decisions without that being seen (especially in the case of people who are receiving services or "dependent" on someone) as a reason that they shouldn't be allowed to make decisions or a reason that their self-expression and decisions should be seen as "part of their disability" in a way that means those things should be suppressed or ignored.
And I feel that is kind of how I was raised; things that in retrospect seem pretty innocent, or at the most things that I would try to stop my kid from doing but would see as funny and not that big a deal, began to feel like ammunition against me and evidence that I a)was someone to be worried about and b)shouldn't be allowed to make my own decisions. Which does a lot to explain the Supercrip Mongoose you see before you, because I feel that if I need support, I won't be able to have anything.
Two entire humans told me they liked and related to the part of my s/m post that talked about submission as a way to experience parts of yourself that you dislike and/or avoid. I was pleased because that was the part that I totally cribbed from other people and mumbled through to avoid saying anything dramatic and getting it wrong. It seems like dominance would be the opposite, i.e. experiencing power that you don't have in real life and sweeping weakness under the rug, but in fact I feel like it's exactly the same failure embrace just in a different way. After all I do stuff with people who know me so it's not like anyone's under the impression I have super good brains and am really tough.
What happens is not exactly a good thing because it means I really overattach to people I do stuff with (and also develop the biggest savior complex in the known universe, which is gross), but for someone to relate to me in that way and vice versa feels like a really radical acceptance of me as a whole person, which is a huge departure from the tendency to either look at what someone does and deny their disability, or look at what someone doesn't do (or does wrong) and say that that's all of them and means something about how they should be treated. For someone to think that it's okay for me to occupy a certain role and make certain decisions, when they know I have all these cracks, is an acknowledgment of The Elevators in me.
And I feel that is kind of how I was raised; things that in retrospect seem pretty innocent, or at the most things that I would try to stop my kid from doing but would see as funny and not that big a deal, began to feel like ammunition against me and evidence that I a)was someone to be worried about and b)shouldn't be allowed to make my own decisions. Which does a lot to explain the Supercrip Mongoose you see before you, because I feel that if I need support, I won't be able to have anything.
Two entire humans told me they liked and related to the part of my s/m post that talked about submission as a way to experience parts of yourself that you dislike and/or avoid. I was pleased because that was the part that I totally cribbed from other people and mumbled through to avoid saying anything dramatic and getting it wrong. It seems like dominance would be the opposite, i.e. experiencing power that you don't have in real life and sweeping weakness under the rug, but in fact I feel like it's exactly the same failure embrace just in a different way. After all I do stuff with people who know me so it's not like anyone's under the impression I have super good brains and am really tough.
What happens is not exactly a good thing because it means I really overattach to people I do stuff with (and also develop the biggest savior complex in the known universe, which is gross), but for someone to relate to me in that way and vice versa feels like a really radical acceptance of me as a whole person, which is a huge departure from the tendency to either look at what someone does and deny their disability, or look at what someone doesn't do (or does wrong) and say that that's all of them and means something about how they should be treated. For someone to think that it's okay for me to occupy a certain role and make certain decisions, when they know I have all these cracks, is an acknowledgment of The Elevators in me.
24 April, 2011
hurt, power, and disability
Fasten your seatbelts because this is LONG.
In high school I enjoyed reading flamewars between anti-s/m people and their targets, just because it never failed to make me irritated in a comfortably predictable way. It's only natural that I grew up to be fascinated by "but my child smears feces" and other ableist shock arguments, given that I spent my adolescence reading the arguments of anti-s/m people which often seem to consist of listing sex acts that, while enjoyable to the participants, sound gross or upsetting to the average person.
I think what makes me able to derive masochistic enjoyment (ha ha) from anti-s/m arguments, while ableist arguments just destroy me and break my heart, is that there’s less of a sense of immediate danger. A lot of the time, people who are making ableist arguments are in a direct position of power over disabled people, as parents, professionals, heads of an organization, etc., and are actively working to put their beliefs into practice. People who are making anti-s/m arguments often seem to be talking in this weird philosophical way about what sex acts other people should engage in or fantasize about.
I don’t mean to sound like I think s/m people don't get discriminated against, but when it comes to flamewars on the Internet my response to anti-s/m people is one of being annoyed and baffled rather than afraid. Because most people grow up liking whatever they like, sexually, so anti-s/m people seem to be implying that certain people just shouldn’t have sex, which seems like such an obviously douchey and ridiculous demand to make of another person that I can’t believe they spend so much time saying it and feeling as righteous about it as they do.
That said, if I was going to engage with the argument that people shouldn’t do s/m and/or d/s because it’s bad for your politics and your health, I would say that, in an alternate universe where people could choose what sexual acts they were into, there would be very good reasons for a disabled person to think about choosing to be into s/m and power exchange. As an inhabitant of the real world, I just think the intersection of s/m and disability is a happy accident for the people who experience it, rather than something anyone can or should “try” because it can destabilize and alleviate some of the bad parts of being disabled. But I want to write about what those destabilizations and alleviations can be, in the context of stuff like Failure Theory and The Classic Disability Catch-22. A few of the things I’m saying are specific to autism but many of them are not which is why I’m using the term “disabled,” throughout.
One by one I’m going to discuss hurting someone, receiving hurt, dominance, and submission, and what engaging in each of those four things might do, mean, or bring up for someone who is disabled. Most of what I write will be in the form of questions because I’m talking generally, and even if I wasn’t there probably would still be no cut-and-dry meaning or effect or answer.
Hurting Someone
(I’m talking about “hurt” instead of “pain” because I don’t want to imply that I’m only talking about physical pain. I do think hurt is a problematic word for me to have chosen because it seems to imply actual harm, which I obviously don’t think should be present.)
People with psychiatric and developmental disabilities are constantly living against the expectation that we’re going to be physically violent or, in the more “harmless” version of developmental disability stereotypes in particular, that we’re going to offend people and otherwise misunderstand what they want and need from us. Some of us experience police brutality due to being read as "dangerous" just because of the effects of our disability. The idealized behavior for a disabled person is that of working incredibly hard to fit ourselves around and into other people’s desires. If we don’t do this we risk various stigmas, some merely insulting and some negative enough to cause us to lose our job, be arrested, etc., when we haven’t actually hurt anyone.
So, if you live your life having been taught that you could hurt someone at any minute--or maybe you know that’s not true, but you still know that other people think that and you have to manage their reactions to you--what does it mean to decide to hurt someone, and do so carefully and in a way that’s enjoyable to them? What does it mean to realize that, actually, you are not on the verge of exploding and killing someone like in Of Mice and Men--that you can actually be in control of how you hurt someone, and do it “correctly” (for them)?
What does it mean to throw out your usual mindset--be nice, apologize a lot, don’t talk too loud, don’t move too fast? What does it mean for your concept of being a socially skilled person, being polite, or being a good person, if you interact with someone by a completely different (or even opposite) set of rules from your usual set, and this pleases them? Actually I do think there’s an answer to this one, but I’ll spare you the boredom of hearing it from me again.
This is something that I’ll come back to in every section, I guess, and it’s one of the things that is fairly autism-specific. What does it mean to work hard to affect someone in a certain way, and have them appreciate that and see it as something that takes energy and skill, instead of just expecting it?
Also--and this is a topping/hurting-specific thing I guess--in some people’s dynamic, you could even hurt someone in a way they don’t like, and that would be fine; within limits, their feelings are irrelevant to what happens. What if the way you and your partner/s do sex is that you do whatever you want and they’re expected to adjust to you?
Receiving Hurt
One of the most important qualities for a successful disabled person is the ability to bear pain quietly; and not only should you bear pain quietly, but you should bear pain quietly, quietly. The most perfect disabled person receives emotional and physical discomfort and pain with a complete poker face, and this is in the service of a goal: appearing to experience the same amount of pain as non-disabled people, and for the same reasons. Which is to say that the most perfect disabled person appears non-disabled and is not admired by anyone for her stoicism because, if she’s doing it right, no one knows she has anything to be stoic about. If you’re disabled, you deserve to have pain as an invisible constant force in your life, and you deserve it so much it’s not even worth mentioning.
While I’m at it I should mention that some disabled people don’t know what we want, or what hurts us, or what harms us. This can be because of cognitive and language aspects of our disabilities (not being able to sense we’re in pain, or articulate it), or because we have chronic pain and become inured to the sensation, or because people are always telling us what a normal person would be feeling or wanting in our situation, or a combination of those things.
What does it mean to say that you want pain, when you’ve spent your whole life pretending pain doesn’t exist because the expression of pain is so horrifying to people? What does it mean to be able to tell someone that you are or were in pain without this being something that makes them either pity you, or resent you because they see you as lying or exaggerating your pain to get pity?
What does it mean if someone actually enjoys your reaction to being in pain, and wants you to say and show them that you’re in pain? Conversely, what does it mean if you can be very stoic about pain, and someone actually appreciates that about you and sees it as a special skill, instead of a prerequisite for being respected as a decent and competent person?
Also, what does it mean to have it actually be important and expected that you try to figure out what level of hurt is harm, and what your limits are? What does it mean to have a word that means “this isn’t okay it has to stop,” and the other person’s actually supposed to listen?
(I just realized that I was using the word pain instead of hurt for this whole section. I still meant it in the broadest possible way.)
Dominance
In The Classic Disability Catch-22, I wrote that in order to be seen as the kind of disabled person who deserves to be successful, you must make it appear as though there’s nothing you can’t do. This means that you have to perform beyond your means, damaging yourself in the process, and/or lie and trick people into thinking you’re doing things you’re not actually doing. Because of the dishonesty and recklessness involved in fulfilling this requirement, no one who is perceived as belonging to this elite class of disabled people actually feels secure as a member of that class. This is Failure Theory. Of course, people who aren’t perceived as belonging to that class of disabled people have it a lot worse; they have shown the wrong kinds of weakness and impairment, and barring some extraordinary feat of illusion or strength, they will not be seen as deserving the support or acceptance they need to achieve their goals.
There’s also the issue of “body language” and what that means about your sense of power, authority, and control in the real world. If you look disabled, you look like prey. You may look, to some people, like you shouldn’t be out on your own. Your eye gaze or the way you speak may cause people to read you as shifty, incompetent, frightened, or shy--and given the way people read you, you probably do feel shifty, frightened, and shy, and may be beginning to wonder if you are incompetent.
You may be told that in order to deserve respect, or to be seen as a competent or smart or secure person, you have to have the ability to speak in a certain way and look at people in a certain way; or, as discussed in the “receiving hurt” section, you may have to be able to be stoic about things that you simply can’t be stoic about.
When someone decides to submit to a person who is stuck on one side or the other of the Classic Disability Catch-22, is regularly mistaken for a child, starts crying on the subway, needs help getting dressed, can’t speak loudly enough to be heard by most people, etc. etc. etc., this is a dissolution of standards about what kind of person is supposed to be allowed to have authority and control, whether by the standards of society or by the person’s own standards (in the case of people who are read as non-disabled or successful disabled people, but suffer from Failure Theory).
Submission
Obviously submission doesn’t have to do with whether someone is “weak” in a pervasive sense, but for a lot of people being submissive involves doing and saying things that are associated culturally with weakness and vulnerability. It also sometimes involves letting go of control and doing what someone else says.
So if you’re in a position, in real life, where you have a chance to be successful only as long as you never show weakness, then what does it mean to be able to express weakness with someone and not be destroyed by it? To have someone actually like and enjoy that part of you, and want to see it, and still respect you when they see it? On the other hand, if your real life position is one of being fucked over because you’re read as weak or because there are things you can’t do--again, what does it mean to express weakness or inabilities to someone and have them think it’s cool, and have them respect you regardless?
Performing weakness, or allowing yourself to sincerely experience weakness, is an act that is comparable to the act of deciding to hurt someone. It involves a similar controlled reversal of the values and goals you usually hold yourself to, and an embrace of the person you’re afraid of being.
I find it astoundingly privileged when anti-s/m people talk about how, for example, doing power exchange is “bringing in” all these terrible things from the outside world into your relationship. When you’re disabled, lack of power is such a huge part of who you are that it’s hard to imagine that not being a part of any relationship you have. So, like, that would be really cool to be worrying about “bringing in a hierarchy” or “bringing in brokenness” into a relationship. It sounds like a charmed life.
I haven’t come across much discussion of the s/m and disability intersection; staticnonsense’s Kinky Disability posts, which I love, are really one of the only attempts to address the issue that I have seen on any disability blog. Before the Disability Internet, of course, there was Bob Flanagan, but I haven’t done enough research to know if he was part of any kind of movement. I feel nervous about posting this because it is so long and I haven’t really written about any kind of sexuality before, but I just think this intersection is a really fascinating one and worth talking about.
In high school I enjoyed reading flamewars between anti-s/m people and their targets, just because it never failed to make me irritated in a comfortably predictable way. It's only natural that I grew up to be fascinated by "but my child smears feces" and other ableist shock arguments, given that I spent my adolescence reading the arguments of anti-s/m people which often seem to consist of listing sex acts that, while enjoyable to the participants, sound gross or upsetting to the average person.
I think what makes me able to derive masochistic enjoyment (ha ha) from anti-s/m arguments, while ableist arguments just destroy me and break my heart, is that there’s less of a sense of immediate danger. A lot of the time, people who are making ableist arguments are in a direct position of power over disabled people, as parents, professionals, heads of an organization, etc., and are actively working to put their beliefs into practice. People who are making anti-s/m arguments often seem to be talking in this weird philosophical way about what sex acts other people should engage in or fantasize about.
I don’t mean to sound like I think s/m people don't get discriminated against, but when it comes to flamewars on the Internet my response to anti-s/m people is one of being annoyed and baffled rather than afraid. Because most people grow up liking whatever they like, sexually, so anti-s/m people seem to be implying that certain people just shouldn’t have sex, which seems like such an obviously douchey and ridiculous demand to make of another person that I can’t believe they spend so much time saying it and feeling as righteous about it as they do.
That said, if I was going to engage with the argument that people shouldn’t do s/m and/or d/s because it’s bad for your politics and your health, I would say that, in an alternate universe where people could choose what sexual acts they were into, there would be very good reasons for a disabled person to think about choosing to be into s/m and power exchange. As an inhabitant of the real world, I just think the intersection of s/m and disability is a happy accident for the people who experience it, rather than something anyone can or should “try” because it can destabilize and alleviate some of the bad parts of being disabled. But I want to write about what those destabilizations and alleviations can be, in the context of stuff like Failure Theory and The Classic Disability Catch-22. A few of the things I’m saying are specific to autism but many of them are not which is why I’m using the term “disabled,” throughout.
One by one I’m going to discuss hurting someone, receiving hurt, dominance, and submission, and what engaging in each of those four things might do, mean, or bring up for someone who is disabled. Most of what I write will be in the form of questions because I’m talking generally, and even if I wasn’t there probably would still be no cut-and-dry meaning or effect or answer.
Hurting Someone
(I’m talking about “hurt” instead of “pain” because I don’t want to imply that I’m only talking about physical pain. I do think hurt is a problematic word for me to have chosen because it seems to imply actual harm, which I obviously don’t think should be present.)
People with psychiatric and developmental disabilities are constantly living against the expectation that we’re going to be physically violent or, in the more “harmless” version of developmental disability stereotypes in particular, that we’re going to offend people and otherwise misunderstand what they want and need from us. Some of us experience police brutality due to being read as "dangerous" just because of the effects of our disability. The idealized behavior for a disabled person is that of working incredibly hard to fit ourselves around and into other people’s desires. If we don’t do this we risk various stigmas, some merely insulting and some negative enough to cause us to lose our job, be arrested, etc., when we haven’t actually hurt anyone.
So, if you live your life having been taught that you could hurt someone at any minute--or maybe you know that’s not true, but you still know that other people think that and you have to manage their reactions to you--what does it mean to decide to hurt someone, and do so carefully and in a way that’s enjoyable to them? What does it mean to realize that, actually, you are not on the verge of exploding and killing someone like in Of Mice and Men--that you can actually be in control of how you hurt someone, and do it “correctly” (for them)?
What does it mean to throw out your usual mindset--be nice, apologize a lot, don’t talk too loud, don’t move too fast? What does it mean for your concept of being a socially skilled person, being polite, or being a good person, if you interact with someone by a completely different (or even opposite) set of rules from your usual set, and this pleases them? Actually I do think there’s an answer to this one, but I’ll spare you the boredom of hearing it from me again.
This is something that I’ll come back to in every section, I guess, and it’s one of the things that is fairly autism-specific. What does it mean to work hard to affect someone in a certain way, and have them appreciate that and see it as something that takes energy and skill, instead of just expecting it?
Also--and this is a topping/hurting-specific thing I guess--in some people’s dynamic, you could even hurt someone in a way they don’t like, and that would be fine; within limits, their feelings are irrelevant to what happens. What if the way you and your partner/s do sex is that you do whatever you want and they’re expected to adjust to you?
Receiving Hurt
One of the most important qualities for a successful disabled person is the ability to bear pain quietly; and not only should you bear pain quietly, but you should bear pain quietly, quietly. The most perfect disabled person receives emotional and physical discomfort and pain with a complete poker face, and this is in the service of a goal: appearing to experience the same amount of pain as non-disabled people, and for the same reasons. Which is to say that the most perfect disabled person appears non-disabled and is not admired by anyone for her stoicism because, if she’s doing it right, no one knows she has anything to be stoic about. If you’re disabled, you deserve to have pain as an invisible constant force in your life, and you deserve it so much it’s not even worth mentioning.
While I’m at it I should mention that some disabled people don’t know what we want, or what hurts us, or what harms us. This can be because of cognitive and language aspects of our disabilities (not being able to sense we’re in pain, or articulate it), or because we have chronic pain and become inured to the sensation, or because people are always telling us what a normal person would be feeling or wanting in our situation, or a combination of those things.
What does it mean to say that you want pain, when you’ve spent your whole life pretending pain doesn’t exist because the expression of pain is so horrifying to people? What does it mean to be able to tell someone that you are or were in pain without this being something that makes them either pity you, or resent you because they see you as lying or exaggerating your pain to get pity?
What does it mean if someone actually enjoys your reaction to being in pain, and wants you to say and show them that you’re in pain? Conversely, what does it mean if you can be very stoic about pain, and someone actually appreciates that about you and sees it as a special skill, instead of a prerequisite for being respected as a decent and competent person?
Also, what does it mean to have it actually be important and expected that you try to figure out what level of hurt is harm, and what your limits are? What does it mean to have a word that means “this isn’t okay it has to stop,” and the other person’s actually supposed to listen?
(I just realized that I was using the word pain instead of hurt for this whole section. I still meant it in the broadest possible way.)
Dominance
In The Classic Disability Catch-22, I wrote that in order to be seen as the kind of disabled person who deserves to be successful, you must make it appear as though there’s nothing you can’t do. This means that you have to perform beyond your means, damaging yourself in the process, and/or lie and trick people into thinking you’re doing things you’re not actually doing. Because of the dishonesty and recklessness involved in fulfilling this requirement, no one who is perceived as belonging to this elite class of disabled people actually feels secure as a member of that class. This is Failure Theory. Of course, people who aren’t perceived as belonging to that class of disabled people have it a lot worse; they have shown the wrong kinds of weakness and impairment, and barring some extraordinary feat of illusion or strength, they will not be seen as deserving the support or acceptance they need to achieve their goals.
There’s also the issue of “body language” and what that means about your sense of power, authority, and control in the real world. If you look disabled, you look like prey. You may look, to some people, like you shouldn’t be out on your own. Your eye gaze or the way you speak may cause people to read you as shifty, incompetent, frightened, or shy--and given the way people read you, you probably do feel shifty, frightened, and shy, and may be beginning to wonder if you are incompetent.
You may be told that in order to deserve respect, or to be seen as a competent or smart or secure person, you have to have the ability to speak in a certain way and look at people in a certain way; or, as discussed in the “receiving hurt” section, you may have to be able to be stoic about things that you simply can’t be stoic about.
When someone decides to submit to a person who is stuck on one side or the other of the Classic Disability Catch-22, is regularly mistaken for a child, starts crying on the subway, needs help getting dressed, can’t speak loudly enough to be heard by most people, etc. etc. etc., this is a dissolution of standards about what kind of person is supposed to be allowed to have authority and control, whether by the standards of society or by the person’s own standards (in the case of people who are read as non-disabled or successful disabled people, but suffer from Failure Theory).
Submission
Obviously submission doesn’t have to do with whether someone is “weak” in a pervasive sense, but for a lot of people being submissive involves doing and saying things that are associated culturally with weakness and vulnerability. It also sometimes involves letting go of control and doing what someone else says.
So if you’re in a position, in real life, where you have a chance to be successful only as long as you never show weakness, then what does it mean to be able to express weakness with someone and not be destroyed by it? To have someone actually like and enjoy that part of you, and want to see it, and still respect you when they see it? On the other hand, if your real life position is one of being fucked over because you’re read as weak or because there are things you can’t do--again, what does it mean to express weakness or inabilities to someone and have them think it’s cool, and have them respect you regardless?
Performing weakness, or allowing yourself to sincerely experience weakness, is an act that is comparable to the act of deciding to hurt someone. It involves a similar controlled reversal of the values and goals you usually hold yourself to, and an embrace of the person you’re afraid of being.
I find it astoundingly privileged when anti-s/m people talk about how, for example, doing power exchange is “bringing in” all these terrible things from the outside world into your relationship. When you’re disabled, lack of power is such a huge part of who you are that it’s hard to imagine that not being a part of any relationship you have. So, like, that would be really cool to be worrying about “bringing in a hierarchy” or “bringing in brokenness” into a relationship. It sounds like a charmed life.
I haven’t come across much discussion of the s/m and disability intersection; staticnonsense’s Kinky Disability posts, which I love, are really one of the only attempts to address the issue that I have seen on any disability blog. Before the Disability Internet, of course, there was Bob Flanagan, but I haven’t done enough research to know if he was part of any kind of movement. I feel nervous about posting this because it is so long and I haven’t really written about any kind of sexuality before, but I just think this intersection is a really fascinating one and worth talking about.
09 November, 2009
This is v. v. unfinished
Stop barging in here and infecting me with your anxiety: Pete, Peggy, and Passing
Peggy: Well, one day you’re there and then all of a sudden there’s less of you. And you wonder where that part went, if it’s living somewhere outside of you, and you keep thinking maybe you’ll get it back. And then you realize, it’s just gone.
Pete: Why would you tell me that?
--Mad Men 2x13, "Meditations in an Emergency"
I read this really beautiful post on Basket of Kisses that basically discusses the idea that Pete Campbell is (or is supposed to be) an s/m switch. And he lives in a world where there’s no room for being that kind of weird, so it comes out of him in messy, negative ways; he can’t learn control. The reason this was such a beautiful post is because it didn’t look at the show through the lens of period. Or, maybe, because it didn’t have this idea that certain things that are innate in some people, like s/m, are just a trend or a fad and therefore couldn’t really have existed in the 60s--because it realized that all kinds of minority experiences can be period, even if they weren’t recognized at the time. I would like to talk about something else that is innate in some people--Asperger’s Syndrome. I don’t like to use that term because it’s a bit reductive and calls up a lot of stereotypes; I would rather just say, I’m talking about verbal people with autism spectrum disorder.
Because Asperger’s has been portrayed in recent high-profile movies and books, it is popular to say that it is new or made up, but really autism spectrum disorders have always been around, just not identified. At the time the show takes place, a nonverbal ASD person would have been diagnosed with a mental disability and probably put in an institution, just like Arthur Miller’s son with Down’s Syndrome was in 1966. A verbal ASD person would have just been thought of as odd or annoying. But that doesn’t mean that, inherently, objectively, that’s all they were. Not having a name for what you are doesn’t make what you are go away, as Sal Romano unfortunately learned.
I read Peggy Olson and Pete Campbell as people with ASD. Because they live in a time when they can’t know what they are, each of them is a type of ASD person that should never exist:
1. Peggy forces herself to do what’s normal, and usually her perseverance pays off and she gets what she wants, but it also means that she is constantly acting. And also, although she may do all right in the short run, the people who see her every day know she is different and she doesn’t really have any true friends (except maybe Don--big surprise that he would feel connected to someone like her).
2. Instead of fighting his difference like Peggy does, Pete ignores it; because he doesn’t try to be normal, he gets to be more carefree, but he is hobbled by the fact that most people can’t stand his raw guilelessness, which affects him both personally and professionally.
Guileless may seem like a weird word because Pete is so manipulative--but he isn’t actually good at it, is he? Really, setting the two up as opposites is not correct, because Pete tries to do what’s normal too, but with a lot less awareness and determination than Peggy. People say that Pete is like a robot but I don’t see it at all--his boundless confusion is written all over his face. That’s why he’s always throwing things and punching people, it’s why he doesn’t really understand sex, because he is so full of a feeling of powerlessness, and he doesn’t know why.
Let’s talk about hunting. Obviously this is about s/m, whatever you want to call it; Pete gives Peggy a lingering description of killing a deer, carving it up, and taking it to a woman who cooks it for him and watches him eat it, while Peggy listens shivering with delight. But I don’t think it’s just about s/m. Pete doesn’t understand how to do things, he doesn’t understand his life, so he bought a gun to make himself feel better; but he doesn’t live in prehistoric times where he can just prove himself by killing something. He has to do things right, he has to be likable. This seems like a huge mountain to scale for a person like Pete, and he can’t take it, so he thinks about something else instead: a world where all he has to do to be loved is to accomplish a physical act. Where he has a very specific role. And Peggy, who is screwing up all over the place too, is also thrilled by Pete’s fantasy. She doesn’t have to lie, she doesn’t have to dress a certain way; she has a very clear, uncomplicated submissive role as the deer/cook.
This can also be seen when they have sex in the next episode. They’re just two people early at work, and then they create this space between them where it is okay to fuck up, to want too much--Pete hisses creepily, “Do you know how hard it is to see you walking around?” as if he owns her, just as obsessive and needy as taking two trains to drunkenly lean on her door. Pete has gone too far with girls before and he will again, but here, when he pulls Peggy’s hair and tears her shirt, he gets a positive reaction instead of a negative one. Because he doesn’t feel inadequate like he usually does, he’s much sweeter in this scene than he is with other people. He thinks about her feelings about her writing that he was supposed to read; she grumpily says “I know what you’re going to say” and he says “no, you don’t; you haven’t been right once” with a lot of affection. Pete never knows what people are going to say either. Peggy, who is always so tense and ineffective, is very serious and brutal when they have sex, and then afterwards when she does that incredibly cute incredibly awkward thing where she touches his hair--ohhh man. Okay this is not an essay anymore it is just a geekout.
The s/m essay interprets Pete’s rejection of Peggy at the end of that episode as showing that he is threatened by her power and assertiveness, because he is kind of turned on by it and doesn’t know what to make of it. I’m not sure I would say that; it seems to be taking that scene out of the context of the episode. Pete feels powerless and he doesn’t exactly understand why, but the truth is, it’s because he’s weird/off/whatever you want to call it, and everyone thinks he is slimy, and he doesn’t understand how to get what he wants. And he feels like Trudy is trying to control him (I love Trudy, more on this later, but I’m just saying that’s how he feels). I think that when Pete is overwhelmed by how much he can’t seem to do things right, he takes it out on people less powerful than he is. And also, I think there may be a bit of a betrayal, because when they had the hunting talk, and then when they slept together, those were both very weird outsider bonding sessions. Now Peggy has succeeded at something and is cheerfully doing the Twist; she seems normal and is asking Pete to do something normal with her. The way Pete sits in this scene is striking; I’ve experienced this myself, that when I am made very conscious of my difference, or when I am overwhelmed, I try to calm myself with these very stiff postures, things like wrists out, or ankles turned out. Pete is very prone to these tense little gestures and he is doing it here. He says “I don’t like you like this” partly because he wants to make someone, anyone, feel bad. But it’s also true; he liked Peggy because she was his home, a person he could make this tiny strange-person world with. Of course, Peggy still did want to make that world with him, he just couldn’t see it.
One of the most upsetting things about the way Pete treats Peggy is that he seems to forget they have the same problem. When he freaks out about her promotion, or snits, “Everything is so easy for you,” there’s the obvious dramatic irony that he got her pregnant and she had to deal with that while he remained blissfully ignorant. But there’s also the fact that Pete knows firsthand that it is hard to get anything if you’re the kind of person that other people just don’t like. Peggy works so hard; she is always changing, always moving forward. She takes Joan’s advice about changing the way she dresses and she lets Kurt cut her hair. When she feels her coworkers are leaving her out of things, she tries to figure out how to fix the problem, unlike Pete, who just complains and bullies women when he feels left out. Whether or not she has said it in words, Peggy knows she has trouble (and this isn’t just about being a woman in a man’s world, because she had trouble even when she was a secretary) and she tries to improve herself. Pete isn’t self-aware enough to try to fix his impairments, except very occasionally, like when he goes to Don after his father dies.
The thing is, Peggy is a person to root for but I’m not sure I want to be her. Her accomplishments are always about winning, getting some particular thing. I think an ASD person who is incredibly focused on looking normal as a means to an end sometimes ends up with a life that is fairly empty. Of course I love the two recent episodes that involve Peggy learning a social script, experimenting with it, and getting what she aims for--first a one-night stand, and then a roommate. When Peggy dourly intoned, “I’m...fun...and I like to have...fun,” and Libby Dreifuss actually bought that Peggy was a normal girl, I felt the same rush I have felt in real life, when I’m incredibly conscious that I’m faking, but I somehow slide under the radar and am not perceived as odd. But the rush of putting one over on people can’t be your whole life. And Peggy ends up not really being friends with the guys at work, sleeping with a guy she can’t face the next morning, and living with someone she has nothing in common with. This is success?
More and more, I’m finding I want to be Pete. Not early Pete, of course; he’s horrible. But at some point between seasons two and three, Pete realized how incredibly smart and cool Trudy is and started opening up to her the way he’d previously only opened up to Peggy and sometimes Don. When Pete talks to Peggy after they have sex, in 1x08, he says “Trudy and I are supposed to be one person, but she’s just another stranger,” and when he’s confessing his love to Peggy, in 2x13, he says that Trudy would care if he died, but it doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t know him. But it’s Pete’s fault that Trudy doesn’t know him, of course, and after Peggy lets him down, he must grow up a little, because in season three the Campbells are more and more partners in crime.
Pete presumably reeled Trudy in with his smarmy anachronistic scripting (and what better evidence do you need of ASD than Pete’s endless supply of exclamations and terms of endearment that are just slightly off for a person of his time, age, and gender?). Then, he exploded a bunch of times, with the turkey, and the trying to whore her out to publish his bear story (oh Pete how I love you), and “WHY ARE YOU COMING TO MY OFFICE? WHAT WILL PEOPLE THINK??” so Trudy figured out pretty early on that Pete was a really strange and really immature person--but okay, I’ll allow that this doesn’t mean she knows him. Usually the worst part of someone is the part you find out last, but it doesn’t have to be that way, and Trudy obviously doesn’t understand in season one and two the relationship that Pete has with his parents, and she hasn’t really connected with the good parts of his immaturity, the sometimes uncontainable energy and excitement. But in the first episode of season three, we get “Oh Peter, don’t go to the well; there’s no water there,” when Pete wants to call his mother, and a few episodes later we see the two of them pooling their manic energy into the BEST DANCING EVER.
I think it would be disingenuous to say that Pete didn’t rape Gudrun midway through season three. I mean, he does have trouble reading people, but I think his issue is sometimes that he knows people don’t like him and want him to go away, and he doesn’t want to think about it, so he doesn’t put in the effort to read them better; so maybe he didn’t want to think about what he was doing, but the fact that he didn’t think about it is not an excuse. I think it’s important to acknowledge what he did. But what’s notable for my purposes is what he does afterward, when he tells Trudy he doesn’t want her to go away without him anymore. Some feminist bloggers read that as Pete blaming Trudy for what he did, but I think that’s an overly harsh characterization of a really important and positive decision. Throughout this essay, I have emphasized how Pete isn’t aware of his impairments like Peggy is and how this both gets in his way professionally and leads to him hurting other people. When Pete said that Trudy shouldn’t go away from him anymore, I think he was saying that he knows he isn’t capable of making good decisions at this point, and he wants her to be his moral compass, at least for a while. And it is doing a disservice to Trudy to say that her pleased reaction was delusional, like she thought Pete was declaring his undying need to be around her at all times. Trudy is a practical person and, because she does know Pete much better than she used to, she understood why it was a big step forward for him to a)feel guilty, b)want to be better, and c)ask for her help.
Throughout season three we see Trudy giving Pete advice and talking about his decisions with him. This is one of the few really equal and honest relationships we see on the show and it makes me happy that Pete, despite all the issues he still has, has grown enough that he can have this relationship. Because of his relationship with Trudy, I’ve started to see Pete as more successful than Peggy, even though Peggy tries to be normal a lot more. The thing about Pete is that, now that he has finally started to change, he’s not changing in the direction of being normal, but of being good.
When you are ASD it’s all very nice to say that you just want to understand people and be more sensitive to them, but when you really start trying to manage your ASD, it usually just becomes about not wanting people to bully you, and being able to have a normal time making friends, and just fit in. But Pete’s recent spate of self-correcting (apologizing to Hildy about the hot cocoa, keeping himself under control when Kenny and his haircut triumphed once again, and of course the thing with Trudy) has been more about being kind, not yelling at people or exploiting the fact that they’re weaker than he is. That means that, while Pete’s self-awareness has been a long time coming, it looks to be an awareness that will make him more whole. While Peggy’s self-awareness, the awareness of a person who is trying to pass at all costs, is tearing her apart.
Peggy: Well, one day you’re there and then all of a sudden there’s less of you. And you wonder where that part went, if it’s living somewhere outside of you, and you keep thinking maybe you’ll get it back. And then you realize, it’s just gone.
Pete: Why would you tell me that?
--Mad Men 2x13, "Meditations in an Emergency"
I read this really beautiful post on Basket of Kisses that basically discusses the idea that Pete Campbell is (or is supposed to be) an s/m switch. And he lives in a world where there’s no room for being that kind of weird, so it comes out of him in messy, negative ways; he can’t learn control. The reason this was such a beautiful post is because it didn’t look at the show through the lens of period. Or, maybe, because it didn’t have this idea that certain things that are innate in some people, like s/m, are just a trend or a fad and therefore couldn’t really have existed in the 60s--because it realized that all kinds of minority experiences can be period, even if they weren’t recognized at the time. I would like to talk about something else that is innate in some people--Asperger’s Syndrome. I don’t like to use that term because it’s a bit reductive and calls up a lot of stereotypes; I would rather just say, I’m talking about verbal people with autism spectrum disorder.
Because Asperger’s has been portrayed in recent high-profile movies and books, it is popular to say that it is new or made up, but really autism spectrum disorders have always been around, just not identified. At the time the show takes place, a nonverbal ASD person would have been diagnosed with a mental disability and probably put in an institution, just like Arthur Miller’s son with Down’s Syndrome was in 1966. A verbal ASD person would have just been thought of as odd or annoying. But that doesn’t mean that, inherently, objectively, that’s all they were. Not having a name for what you are doesn’t make what you are go away, as Sal Romano unfortunately learned.
I read Peggy Olson and Pete Campbell as people with ASD. Because they live in a time when they can’t know what they are, each of them is a type of ASD person that should never exist:
1. Peggy forces herself to do what’s normal, and usually her perseverance pays off and she gets what she wants, but it also means that she is constantly acting. And also, although she may do all right in the short run, the people who see her every day know she is different and she doesn’t really have any true friends (except maybe Don--big surprise that he would feel connected to someone like her).
2. Instead of fighting his difference like Peggy does, Pete ignores it; because he doesn’t try to be normal, he gets to be more carefree, but he is hobbled by the fact that most people can’t stand his raw guilelessness, which affects him both personally and professionally.
Guileless may seem like a weird word because Pete is so manipulative--but he isn’t actually good at it, is he? Really, setting the two up as opposites is not correct, because Pete tries to do what’s normal too, but with a lot less awareness and determination than Peggy. People say that Pete is like a robot but I don’t see it at all--his boundless confusion is written all over his face. That’s why he’s always throwing things and punching people, it’s why he doesn’t really understand sex, because he is so full of a feeling of powerlessness, and he doesn’t know why.
Let’s talk about hunting. Obviously this is about s/m, whatever you want to call it; Pete gives Peggy a lingering description of killing a deer, carving it up, and taking it to a woman who cooks it for him and watches him eat it, while Peggy listens shivering with delight. But I don’t think it’s just about s/m. Pete doesn’t understand how to do things, he doesn’t understand his life, so he bought a gun to make himself feel better; but he doesn’t live in prehistoric times where he can just prove himself by killing something. He has to do things right, he has to be likable. This seems like a huge mountain to scale for a person like Pete, and he can’t take it, so he thinks about something else instead: a world where all he has to do to be loved is to accomplish a physical act. Where he has a very specific role. And Peggy, who is screwing up all over the place too, is also thrilled by Pete’s fantasy. She doesn’t have to lie, she doesn’t have to dress a certain way; she has a very clear, uncomplicated submissive role as the deer/cook.
This can also be seen when they have sex in the next episode. They’re just two people early at work, and then they create this space between them where it is okay to fuck up, to want too much--Pete hisses creepily, “Do you know how hard it is to see you walking around?” as if he owns her, just as obsessive and needy as taking two trains to drunkenly lean on her door. Pete has gone too far with girls before and he will again, but here, when he pulls Peggy’s hair and tears her shirt, he gets a positive reaction instead of a negative one. Because he doesn’t feel inadequate like he usually does, he’s much sweeter in this scene than he is with other people. He thinks about her feelings about her writing that he was supposed to read; she grumpily says “I know what you’re going to say” and he says “no, you don’t; you haven’t been right once” with a lot of affection. Pete never knows what people are going to say either. Peggy, who is always so tense and ineffective, is very serious and brutal when they have sex, and then afterwards when she does that incredibly cute incredibly awkward thing where she touches his hair--ohhh man. Okay this is not an essay anymore it is just a geekout.
The s/m essay interprets Pete’s rejection of Peggy at the end of that episode as showing that he is threatened by her power and assertiveness, because he is kind of turned on by it and doesn’t know what to make of it. I’m not sure I would say that; it seems to be taking that scene out of the context of the episode. Pete feels powerless and he doesn’t exactly understand why, but the truth is, it’s because he’s weird/off/whatever you want to call it, and everyone thinks he is slimy, and he doesn’t understand how to get what he wants. And he feels like Trudy is trying to control him (I love Trudy, more on this later, but I’m just saying that’s how he feels). I think that when Pete is overwhelmed by how much he can’t seem to do things right, he takes it out on people less powerful than he is. And also, I think there may be a bit of a betrayal, because when they had the hunting talk, and then when they slept together, those were both very weird outsider bonding sessions. Now Peggy has succeeded at something and is cheerfully doing the Twist; she seems normal and is asking Pete to do something normal with her. The way Pete sits in this scene is striking; I’ve experienced this myself, that when I am made very conscious of my difference, or when I am overwhelmed, I try to calm myself with these very stiff postures, things like wrists out, or ankles turned out. Pete is very prone to these tense little gestures and he is doing it here. He says “I don’t like you like this” partly because he wants to make someone, anyone, feel bad. But it’s also true; he liked Peggy because she was his home, a person he could make this tiny strange-person world with. Of course, Peggy still did want to make that world with him, he just couldn’t see it.
One of the most upsetting things about the way Pete treats Peggy is that he seems to forget they have the same problem. When he freaks out about her promotion, or snits, “Everything is so easy for you,” there’s the obvious dramatic irony that he got her pregnant and she had to deal with that while he remained blissfully ignorant. But there’s also the fact that Pete knows firsthand that it is hard to get anything if you’re the kind of person that other people just don’t like. Peggy works so hard; she is always changing, always moving forward. She takes Joan’s advice about changing the way she dresses and she lets Kurt cut her hair. When she feels her coworkers are leaving her out of things, she tries to figure out how to fix the problem, unlike Pete, who just complains and bullies women when he feels left out. Whether or not she has said it in words, Peggy knows she has trouble (and this isn’t just about being a woman in a man’s world, because she had trouble even when she was a secretary) and she tries to improve herself. Pete isn’t self-aware enough to try to fix his impairments, except very occasionally, like when he goes to Don after his father dies.
The thing is, Peggy is a person to root for but I’m not sure I want to be her. Her accomplishments are always about winning, getting some particular thing. I think an ASD person who is incredibly focused on looking normal as a means to an end sometimes ends up with a life that is fairly empty. Of course I love the two recent episodes that involve Peggy learning a social script, experimenting with it, and getting what she aims for--first a one-night stand, and then a roommate. When Peggy dourly intoned, “I’m...fun...and I like to have...fun,” and Libby Dreifuss actually bought that Peggy was a normal girl, I felt the same rush I have felt in real life, when I’m incredibly conscious that I’m faking, but I somehow slide under the radar and am not perceived as odd. But the rush of putting one over on people can’t be your whole life. And Peggy ends up not really being friends with the guys at work, sleeping with a guy she can’t face the next morning, and living with someone she has nothing in common with. This is success?
More and more, I’m finding I want to be Pete. Not early Pete, of course; he’s horrible. But at some point between seasons two and three, Pete realized how incredibly smart and cool Trudy is and started opening up to her the way he’d previously only opened up to Peggy and sometimes Don. When Pete talks to Peggy after they have sex, in 1x08, he says “Trudy and I are supposed to be one person, but she’s just another stranger,” and when he’s confessing his love to Peggy, in 2x13, he says that Trudy would care if he died, but it doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t know him. But it’s Pete’s fault that Trudy doesn’t know him, of course, and after Peggy lets him down, he must grow up a little, because in season three the Campbells are more and more partners in crime.
Pete presumably reeled Trudy in with his smarmy anachronistic scripting (and what better evidence do you need of ASD than Pete’s endless supply of exclamations and terms of endearment that are just slightly off for a person of his time, age, and gender?). Then, he exploded a bunch of times, with the turkey, and the trying to whore her out to publish his bear story (oh Pete how I love you), and “WHY ARE YOU COMING TO MY OFFICE? WHAT WILL PEOPLE THINK??” so Trudy figured out pretty early on that Pete was a really strange and really immature person--but okay, I’ll allow that this doesn’t mean she knows him. Usually the worst part of someone is the part you find out last, but it doesn’t have to be that way, and Trudy obviously doesn’t understand in season one and two the relationship that Pete has with his parents, and she hasn’t really connected with the good parts of his immaturity, the sometimes uncontainable energy and excitement. But in the first episode of season three, we get “Oh Peter, don’t go to the well; there’s no water there,” when Pete wants to call his mother, and a few episodes later we see the two of them pooling their manic energy into the BEST DANCING EVER.
I think it would be disingenuous to say that Pete didn’t rape Gudrun midway through season three. I mean, he does have trouble reading people, but I think his issue is sometimes that he knows people don’t like him and want him to go away, and he doesn’t want to think about it, so he doesn’t put in the effort to read them better; so maybe he didn’t want to think about what he was doing, but the fact that he didn’t think about it is not an excuse. I think it’s important to acknowledge what he did. But what’s notable for my purposes is what he does afterward, when he tells Trudy he doesn’t want her to go away without him anymore. Some feminist bloggers read that as Pete blaming Trudy for what he did, but I think that’s an overly harsh characterization of a really important and positive decision. Throughout this essay, I have emphasized how Pete isn’t aware of his impairments like Peggy is and how this both gets in his way professionally and leads to him hurting other people. When Pete said that Trudy shouldn’t go away from him anymore, I think he was saying that he knows he isn’t capable of making good decisions at this point, and he wants her to be his moral compass, at least for a while. And it is doing a disservice to Trudy to say that her pleased reaction was delusional, like she thought Pete was declaring his undying need to be around her at all times. Trudy is a practical person and, because she does know Pete much better than she used to, she understood why it was a big step forward for him to a)feel guilty, b)want to be better, and c)ask for her help.
Throughout season three we see Trudy giving Pete advice and talking about his decisions with him. This is one of the few really equal and honest relationships we see on the show and it makes me happy that Pete, despite all the issues he still has, has grown enough that he can have this relationship. Because of his relationship with Trudy, I’ve started to see Pete as more successful than Peggy, even though Peggy tries to be normal a lot more. The thing about Pete is that, now that he has finally started to change, he’s not changing in the direction of being normal, but of being good.
When you are ASD it’s all very nice to say that you just want to understand people and be more sensitive to them, but when you really start trying to manage your ASD, it usually just becomes about not wanting people to bully you, and being able to have a normal time making friends, and just fit in. But Pete’s recent spate of self-correcting (apologizing to Hildy about the hot cocoa, keeping himself under control when Kenny and his haircut triumphed once again, and of course the thing with Trudy) has been more about being kind, not yelling at people or exploiting the fact that they’re weaker than he is. That means that, while Pete’s self-awareness has been a long time coming, it looks to be an awareness that will make him more whole. While Peggy’s self-awareness, the awareness of a person who is trying to pass at all costs, is tearing her apart.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
