I had a really nice evening with the OGF last night, thank god. It consisted of kid-wrangling, cooking my own dinner (since I have vowed never to eat spag bol with mince, ever again), drinking 1/2 a glass of wine, watching a movie while the baby refused to go to sleep, and then giving the OGF a shoulder rub until she passed out on me. I seem to have this effect on women, heh. Except babies.

But, we talked. And it was nice. She's having four new people move into her house. Her hubbies have gotten involved with another woman, and she and her husband and their two children are officially moving in this weekend. Dear lord - five adults and five children, all in the same (admittedly large) space. I'm just relieved I can visit.

Due to the fact that all of these rumptions had been going on while I hadn't spent any quality time with her in literally months, I was feeling a certain degree of insecurity about the whole thing, but she made a couple of observations that were reassuring. Firstly, it appears that there are limits to Puppy Pile Polyamory, at least for her. She doesn't want to majorly bond with the two new additions, especially the "other woman". Of course, the (well, my) definition of PPP is that you want to snuggle up with all your loved ones. These two additions are not her loved ones. Yay boundaries. Secondly, she said this morning that she doesn't have mental or emotional room at all for another woman. This is the first time in her life that that's been the case, since she's apparently always had at least a couple on the go up until I came along. But it seems that I take up as much mental space as any two other women.

Regarding that last, I'm a little unsure what to think. The reason I'm happy she's not all "boots in" with the new additions is time. She and I don't have enough time as it is, and I was quite wibbly about the idea that someone else was going to make it shrink even further (rampaging orgies would be fine, since, you know, that wouldn't impinge on our quality time; emotional investment would be something else). I said that I don't know how I take up so much "mental space", since we hardly see each other, but I apparently "just do". Actually, I do know what she means in terms of thinking about loved ones constantly - I certainly do nearly all the time - and I think that's pretty much what she was meaning. I didn't want to pursue the topic too much, and sound all neurotically demanding about "What exactly do you mean?", so I think I'll ruminate on it a bit further myself.

Why is this niggling at me a wee bit? It's because I tend to get involved with ambitious, go-getting and busy women. And since I'm not particularly those things myself, I like to take on a nurturing and "cheerleading" (if you like) role where I can. [How butch am I? Hah.] And if I'm taking up someone's mental energy, am I being more a drain than not? Because I cannot bear to feel that that might be the case. I'm actually quite sure I'm not, on a gut-instinct basis. All I need to do is sort out in my head what the implications are, and I'll be groovy.

And this is really the point of the post. While I don't think I tend to intellectualise my (and others') emotions much, I obviously do have to make logical sense of them - as much as possible - before I trust my instincts. I'm surprised as to how much it makes a difference to my inner feeling of security - and it's something I wish I'd realised about myself a lot earlier. I might be fairly trusting on an emotional basis, but my poor brane needs some assistance, evidently.

ETA: And I forgot to mention Mistress Matisse's latest column on poly in The Stranger. Leaving aside the primary/secondary terminology, I think it should just about be required reading. Especially, "When you say, "it's fine," really mean that it's fine." And, "Don't stick your dick in crazy."
I liked her thoughts about queerness in relation to poly as well - mainly because it's exactly what I think.

Things that make me happy (in no particular order, and not exhaustively - I'm bound to think of something I've left out):

• Drinking nice coffee or other nice drinks;
• Eating nice food;
• Making something work, with little angst (such as doing something techie at work, or even fixing the lawnmower). Also, the few times it happens for me, creating something new;
• Using a piece of technology that suits the purpose for which it was made and works well (of course, there's a time and a place for going into rhapsodies in that line - people get pissed off if you sit too long at a green light listening to your perfectly-tuned engine tick over);
  
• Seeing or hearing compelling and beautiful things - natural or manmade;
  
• Stimulating conversations (in person and virtual, although I do prefer the former) that allow me to make connections, whether intellectual and emotional internal ones, external inter-personal ones or broader "how the world works" ones;
• Fulfilling the role of catalysing those kinds of connections for other people, or otherwise supporting their reaching a goal (internal or external);
  
• Cuddling up with a cute babe, especially ones who like to engage in the aforementioned stimulating conversations... and other not-so-intellectual pursuits (it's all about balance, eh?);
• Something that engages and works my body, as well as engaging my mind. Sex is good for that, when it's going well; tai chi - even so soon - does the same thing.

If anyone else feels so moved, I'd like to see other people's lists on this topic. :-)

There's just been a fairly frank exchange of views over on the polyamoryaustralia list about the old chestnut of ranking relationships as to primary/secondary/tertiary ...and not. The original discussion was sparked by Mistress Matisse's article on the very same topic, which I rolled my eyes at and disregarded, as I normally do when that subject rears its ugly head.

I briefly said onlist that I was "allergic" to my relationships being defined that way, and that it made me "foam at the mouth" when people used heirarchical language to describe my situation. Well, apparently I didn't acknowlege the fact that relationship heirarchies exist (goodness!), that it's dishonest not to admit that, and that obviously people who believe they don't have such a heirarchy want to live in some hippy utopia.

I got a little cross at this point, hee!, but I didn't use any swearwords in any of my responses! But what it boiled down to for that and at least one other person onlist (the proto-fascist wanker) was that the labels help describe where everyone stands in a relationship structure.

And this got me thinking of the wider issue of people conflating heirarchy with structure. There is a reason these words are not synonyms in English - they are not the same. But many people appear to conflate the two, or say that without the one, the other doesn't exist. Bollocks.

I personally like structure. I'm naturally a very lazy person. If I didn't have to get up and go to work in the morning, I wouldn't. I'd doss around the house all day on the Internet and would generally do sweet F-A. I like to pay my bills so that I continue to get supplied with shelter, food and fun. I like the fact that those organisations I pay money to to supply these things are in fact obliged to do so. I carry out my own obligations (virtually all of the time), and I like people's obligations to me to be fulfilled. All that requires structure, both for the delivery mechanism and for the expectation that things will be carried out as arranged.

A heirarchy is a model for defining inter-personal relationships in any structure that involves people. You know your place, and your boss knows their place, and their boss does theirs... and so it goes. It's a way of assigning authority and obligations. I have authority over the email systems. I'm obliged to my boss. He has authority over 6 staff and the email and storage systems, and is obliged to his boss and his financial reporting. It's very clear as to what place in the structure we're in. We know the rules for each of our positions.

What that doesn't confer, however, is certainty or security. And I think that most people who enjoy heirarchies believe those things are precisely what you get from "knowing the rules". If you're in the military, someone tells you where to point your gun. You don't have any moral dilemmas (well, they're trained out of you), because that is someone else's responsibility. You know you're doing the right thing, because you're following orders. The trouble is, when the orders are wrong, things can fuck up in a bad way. Or they're not applicable. You can't go around saluting people at a cocktail party.

It seems that people who rely on certain kinds of external structures for certainty and security get really fucked-up when they lose them. So, why do some people insist on them, while others are "eh, that's all there is" and others again are strongly allergic? Perhaps there's a genetic component. Heh.

I strongly believe that heirarchies are the 4th Form maths of interpersonal relationships. You have a simple equation, and when you know that x = 5, it's very easy to solve y = (2x + 1)². What if you don't know the value of x? What if it's i? Bugger.

And really, personal relationships are all about i, as far as I can tell, leaving aside other kinds of relationships. Which means there is a limit to how well rules and heirarchies can model what you should do and how you should do it. IMO, of course. :-)

So, I was having a slightly tangential conversation with saluqi today about the "rules" in a community. Being a member of a community implies that you follow a certain set of cultural expectations, but I don't feel that I've bought an entire package of any set of beliefs (although I was close to it in my earnest early-20s). I do think that the mark of a mature community is the fact that it can accept a certain degree of deviation from the norm.

Such as the butch thing. I keep kind of thinking to myself that I'm not that butch, but actually, compared to the average woman (or even the average dyke), of course I am. And it certainly gets highlighted on occasions like last weekend when the CDL and I were walking to lunch, and she spotted some lovely family-man type giving us the Death-to-Queers™ look from across the road.

Although that hasn't happened to me for years, it's interesting that I have most frequently gotten it when I'm with a more feminine-presenting woman. It's all about the juxtaposition. And the other interesting thing is that it hasn't really happened if I'm walking with a straight woman, like a colleague - only when I'm with girlfriends, who of course tend to be more fem than I. Perhaps there is some body language going on there, although I'm not a big one for PDAs (dance parties excepted).

Anyway, getting back to the community package thing, part of the mystique of being a butch dyke is that you are supposed to pick up all the chix. ( boring personal data ) But, yep, it's not just the butches who are "genderqueer". Thank god. And so much for the entire butch mystique package. Oh well, I'm sure I have the parts that count.

The timing of the wee gender/sexuality meme was apposite, due to this rant I've had brewing. It's the old identity politics chestnut, which I thought was over and done with. However, it's been bugging me for the last several months, where it was an issue that hadn't bothered me for a decade. The trigger was the last series of The L Word, which featured a character who was initially billed as a "butch lesbian"; I was bloody irritated when it turned out otherwise. Then, last week, I read a discussion of the handling of the whole issue on AfterEllen.com, which made some good points, but I felt missed some of the main ones. Add to that some comments I've been reading from people who should know better, and it's all a bit annoying.

( Cut a humungous blurge on gender presentation - you have been warned! Fully skip the parts you're up to speed with already. Please. )
Personally, I'd rather that people spent their efforts on supporting all the variations of gender presentation and sexual morphology rather than pathologising things unnecessarily. Intervene medically when necessary, yes. But not because of some stupid preconceived binary view of what sex and gender are all about. I'm grateful that studies like this are finally being done which help overcome those old prejudices, wherever they originate from. Also, I can stop trying to cudgel my brain for facile definitions that fit my experience (as well as encompassing a few others'). :-)

Things have certainly moved on since the early 90s, which is when I last read up on this stuff. I'm going to have to fork out $US40 for The Misunderstood Gender: A Model of Modern Femme Identity, which isn't available in full online, alas.

If you've read my user info page, you know that I espouse anarchism as my ideal political philosophy. I was chatting about it to a colleague last week, and explaining the concepts of mutual aid (my being an anarchist of the socialist persuasion), no laws, no state, etc, and he goes, "Wow, that's very idealistic, isn't it?"

You know, it's not, it's totally selfish. What's the best way to get someone to do something for you? Help them out first. Ok, with some tossers, you'll never have the favour returned, but most people can understand the concept "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours". Virtually the entire sum of human knowledge has come about through collaboration and co-operation. There may be the occasional lone genius who can come up with a concept that will shake the earth, but it takes other people to disseminate the idea, put it in practice and enhance it.

We are told that the main motivation for these kinds of co-operative endeavours is profit, but that's a crock. Anyone who's ever taken or stayed in a job despite a drop in potential pay (because of the location, or the work, or the team) knows how little money can count once we have enough. And for some people, all the money in the world isn't enough. You read of multibillionaires who don't care about the money they make, it's just the fact that the extra zeros give them a sense of achievement. Speaking for myself, using money to measure one's sense of achievement seems rather pathetic.

Look at the internet, for god's sake. Look at the people here on Livejournal, of all parts of the political spectrum, who put up art and comment and ideas for no gain whatsoever, other than that of acknowledgement. Once we have the basics of life (food, shelter, fellowship/love, fun), profit is pretty much the least of the reasons we do anything. And one could argue that gaining profit is just a means of having fun for some.

Getting back to the idealism, what political philosophy is not idealistic? Even our so-called representative democracy is idealistic. Unless, of course, one day 100% of the population does happen to voluntarily vote. A good proportion of the population is so ignorant that their vote consists of what name they happen to recognise on the day (the power of advertising). Another growing proportion of potential voters have so lost faith in the ability of their vote to achieve anything that they don't bother. I struggle myself every election with the futility of voting, but I remind myself that the alternative is worse.

My view on anarchy is fairly much to the left-left. I don't believe in ownership of the means of production, including land. I don't believe that the state or the soviet or the Crown or the lord of the manor should own it either. The nice thing about living in this modern age is that we have fewer hoops to jump through than Marx did when it comes to defining the price of something. Given the efficiency of manufacturing today, we all have to acknowledge that the cost of labour is almost the least part of the price of goods. Marketing those goods is most of the price. We need fewer production means to create goods for anyone who needs them. In the Western societies, how much of our work is crap work? Call centre drones, burger flippers, all manner of service work? How many hours would we actually need to really work to make and repair goods enough to survive on, and to have some luxuries as well? Worldwide? I don't think anyone's worked out that particular sum, but I'm quite sure it's much less than 8 hours a day.

I do however believe in possession of one's personal goods, which is pretty much defined as what I use. Various political philosophers have gone on about it being a fuzzy concept, and complain that you would have idiots walking off with your clothes as soon as you left the room. Well, that happens anyway, in our wonderful capitalist system. However, if you've moved in with a partner, you know exactly what I mean about being able to identify what is yours. That is "mine", those are "hers", that is "ours". As time goes on, those boundaries get fuzzier, and you certainly accumulate more of "ours", but that's a mark of trust, really. You can still identify what is "yours" and "theirs" once it comes time to separate. (It's the "ours" that's the problem). I think that concept can be extrapolated to the macro level.

The thing I've struggled the most with over the years is how to get from here to there. How do we get from a regimented, law-riddled, selfish society to an anarchist one? The most famous option from anarchists at the turn of last century was to chuck bombs around. Well, that achieved a lot. I can't stand the idea of violent revolution, because as soon as you pick up a gun and start coercing people to do what you want, you're doing precisely the thing that you're supposed to be against (if you're an anarchist). That's one of the main problems I have with communism. Oh, and the fact that the "educated elite" are supposed to lead "the proletariat" into the promised land. The proletariat has become the sweatshop workers in third-world countries, while the rest of us on this side of the world are managing them (directly or not) or else we are part of the non-working underclass. That last statement isn't about "woe, we are teh oppressors!"; I'm just pointing out that the classical communist means of deliverance is not that relevant any more. If it ever was.

But I've been reading up on dear old Leo Tolstoy, and he had a bloody nice "evolutionary" mechanism that avoids throwing out the baby (culture, industry, innovation) with the bathwater. As he says, "All the attempts to abolish slavery by violence are like extinguishing fire with fire, stopping water with water, or filling up one hole by digging another. Therefore, the means of escape from slavery, if such means exist, must be found, not in setting up fresh violence, but in abolishing whatever renders governmental violence possible..."

Avoid the things that don't measure up to one's view of how things should be organised. Tolstoy talks about avoiding military service, refusal to pay taxes, refusal to follow the law. But he also says that taking the extreme actions are not for everyone. So, you do the things you can. Don't send your kids to a state school; pay a teacher yourself. Don't buy goods from big business, if you can. Get into barter and recycling. Participate in co-ops. Minimise the amount of tax you pay. Minimise the amount of resources you consume. Don't take jobs that perpetuate the system (for example, I was tentatively offered a job with Australian Defence. Like hell would I take it.) Don't take the dole, and as few state handouts as possible. Try justice methods that don't involve the police or courts (mediation and the like). Treat others as you would like to be treated. The more we avoid the system (whichever system), the less relevance it has. The more of us who engage in that kind of avoidance, the more that the oppressive parts will wither away. I hope. And really, life is about hope, isn't it? And think about how things have progressed since feudal times. It is possible for society to move towards more equitable arrangements if some or all of us agree.

Final word to Tolstoy: "Between the existing order, based on brute force, and the ideal of a society based on reasonable agreement confirmed by custom, there are an infinite number of steps, which mankind are ascending, and the approach to the ideal is only accomplished to the extent to which people free themselves from participation in violence, from taking advantage of it, and from being accustomed to it..."

Many anarchists would call the foregoing a cop-out, but I don't believe that oppressing other people (the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, whatever the scapegoat) in turn is the way to reduce oppression in general.