![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In a play, but not an opera
Apr. 6th, 2012 05:47 pmI remain mute but otherwise mostly indistinguishable from a person in good health, except that when I blow my nose it is mostly blood and sticky clumps of what I assume is dead virus. It seems like the kind of malady you'd make up in a play, so that the hero can still do everything but is unquestionably ill (the blood) and has a showy but easily transcendable physical limitation that in no way compromises her physical attractiveness.
No one has made any jokes about how nice it is to have me silent, because the reality is that I am now dull company, despite my above-average capacity for silent comedy. I am oddly more shrill when I cannot speak, because to get anything across I have to gesture emphatically and urgently, and do things like snap and bang tables for attention.
Unrelatedly, have been thinking about the lesbian community's annoyance with the definition of virginity as penis-in-vagina, and think they misunderstand the social function of virginity veneration. Penis in vagina is the way a child is conceived, and before the ready availability of contraception, getting knocked up meant you had to be married off hastily and your family couldn't negotiate a high-value match for you. That's the driver behind virginity (and the later bad-girl pursuit of ending virginity, whether or not the bad-girls realize exactly why it's the ultimate rebellion against their parents' ownership).
Virginity as a concept is not only hetero-centric; it's inescapably patriarchal, and outdated in an era with birth control. We don't need to find a lesbian equivalent. We need to ditch the idea that having sex makes you a substantially different person in a way that transcends all other definitions of adult.
No one has made any jokes about how nice it is to have me silent, because the reality is that I am now dull company, despite my above-average capacity for silent comedy. I am oddly more shrill when I cannot speak, because to get anything across I have to gesture emphatically and urgently, and do things like snap and bang tables for attention.
Unrelatedly, have been thinking about the lesbian community's annoyance with the definition of virginity as penis-in-vagina, and think they misunderstand the social function of virginity veneration. Penis in vagina is the way a child is conceived, and before the ready availability of contraception, getting knocked up meant you had to be married off hastily and your family couldn't negotiate a high-value match for you. That's the driver behind virginity (and the later bad-girl pursuit of ending virginity, whether or not the bad-girls realize exactly why it's the ultimate rebellion against their parents' ownership).
Virginity as a concept is not only hetero-centric; it's inescapably patriarchal, and outdated in an era with birth control. We don't need to find a lesbian equivalent. We need to ditch the idea that having sex makes you a substantially different person in a way that transcends all other definitions of adult.
