Posts by Emma Hart
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Hard News: Party on, dudes, in reply to Bart Janssen,
MY EYES!?!?!?!?!
But your brain is better for it, isn't it darling? Yes it is. Good boy.
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and we will be moderating for quality
Ahahahahaha yeah nah.
I’ve engaged offline to try and bring people around.
For serious, the amount of work Russell does to make this community what it is that you can’t see from in front of the curtain? Mind-buggering. Cheers, dude.
I’m overwhelmingly grateful to Russell for picking me out and giving me a column so I could get yous all to google things and wish you hadn’t. And the support of this community over the last few years, through my brain tumour and the death of my mother and the earthquakes is completely moving and humbling and has given me all this pesky inconvenient faith in humanity.
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Hard News: Crossing the line into idle bigotry, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
That they don't is significant - it's their *job* to scare us with the "other"
It generates traffic. That's why it's so, so easy to find offensive and inaccurate 'opinion' columns.
He's a bit a WMFOCA, or White Male Feminist Of a Certain Age.
Which is intersectionality was invented: so, basically, nobody gets to use feminism as an excuse to be racist. Or homophobic, or transphobic.
Here is a very thorough explanation of why
To slightly undermine my own credibility now, I would do All The Things to Martin Robbins.
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
The "real" Romney will emerge - compassionate, moderate, practical and data-driven, as in Massachusetts - the day after he is elected.
This, and the whole 'we don't really know who Romney is' thing bugs the shit out of me. He has a record. While he was governor of Massachusetts, same-sex couples had to apply to his office for special permission to register the births of their children - whose birth certificates were then altered in biro. This is the man who said, "I didn't know you people had families," and "I don't care what you tell your adopted daughter*, tell her what you've been telling her the last eight years."
Which Mitt is real? That one.
*She wasn't adopted. He just couldn't get his head around a lesbian giving birth to a child.
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to Russell Brown,
with its historic shout-out to disabled citizens
I held my breath that little bit longer for "straight or gay".
In other news. turns out Nate Silver is probably a witch.
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Up Front: Staying In, in reply to Max Rose,
But in most circumstances, I wouldn't feel the need to tell an acquaintance, colleague or family member whether a particular relationship was a vanilla or D/s one.
Neither would I, but that's very different from whether I am vanilla or kinky.
I think it's probably a bigger thing for me because, y'know, nobody's ever bailed me up at a party and spent an hour telling me I can't possibly consent to being bisexual. Nobody's ever told me my bi-ness is false consciousness, or that it means I'm contributing to the abuse of women.
Um, whoops! I hope I haven't ... outed you.
Ow. Turns out beer can't be nasally ingested.
But no, I do both columns under the same name, they're materially attached to each other. It's just a matter of my instinctive feel for who's listening.
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Up Front: Staying In, in reply to Max Rose,
It can also avoid some dangerous misunderstandings among vanilla people, as another of Emma's posts (not sure whether it's here or on TLG) demonstrated.
The post Max is referring to is this one at The Lady Garden, which is coincidentally the same post I referred to in the column as having caused a Bit of a Thing. An actual horrible bit of a thing which badly damaged a 20 year friendship. Turns out the secret hadn't been that badly-kept after all.
Writing posts like those at TLG instead of here is one of the precautions I take. I feel safer simply because of the smaller and more focused audience. Likewise I'll say things in the comments here I wouldn't in comments, because it feels safer and more intimate.
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Up Front: Staying In, in reply to Max Rose,
whether BDSM was an aspect of my life that counted as "coming out".
Blatantly ignoring the way this conversation is threatening to become deeply ironic, I'll take a moment to talk about using the concept of "coming out" for something like BDSM.
I think coming out is a useful concept when you're dealing with something where if you don't tell people, they don't assume they don't know, they assume you're something you're not. So if we've never talked about sport, you'd be okay with the fact that you don't know my sporting preferences. But if you don't know someone's "orientation", most people (outside the Bubble) will unconsciously assume that they're straight, cis, monogamous, and vanilla. And I have other signifiers in my life (suburban mortgage, kids) which make people even more inclined to think that.
Coming Out is about correcting those assumptions. The more people who come out, the more people become aware of those assumptions and how flawed they can be.
ETA: For me, BDSM is an orientation. It's more than what I do, it's part of who I am. I totally accept that it's not like that for everyone.
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Up Front: Staying In, in reply to Moz,
where pseudonyms were the norm... many posters (particularly in the US) had a strong sense that ... linked to their real identities involved a real risk to their careers,
Eh, I'm going to mention this anyway even though Andre's deleted his post. Tough noogies, Andre. I love the fact that being closeted for a Wiccan is called, at least in the US, "being in the broom closet". I've heard stories of really vile harassment campaigns against people outed as Wiccans in small US towns.
And yes, I benefit from having a reasonably common name. I'm not an artist, or that woman from the telly, or Nelson's mistress. I'll use my partner's first name because that's also fairly common. Whereas if you google my daughter's name, all the hits on the first page are for us. (As a measure of my paranoia, I've also googled the rest of my immediate family as "first name + my surname", and it's satisfactorily misleading in every case.)
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And I am generally shit at this, but I just want to say thank you for everyone's comments here. It's a two-way street, of course: it's your behaviour, your support and your trustworthiness, that makes it possible for me to do this.