Escaping the Trunk

You might not know this about me, but I went to prom with another girl. She wasn’t my girlfriend. We weren’t dating. I just wanted someone to go with me, and due to pure social fuckery and indecisive bullshit on my part, none of the males in my romantic life were really available (nor was I available for them).* She agreed to go after I blurted out an invite, and we actually had a good time. We ate a nice dinner together, danced to utterly pedestrian music at absurd volume, and sacked out in her bed that night. If we had only been in love, it would have been a perfect date.

At no point did anyone tell me this wasn’t allowed. Not her parents. Not mine. Not my ASB rep. In fact, I don’t even recall wondering whether it was allowed or not. The concept of “allowed” never entered my mind. Maybe that was because my high school had already make it clear that they took all sorts. Or maybe I just honestly never expected it to be an issue, and amid finals and hormones and the afore-mentioned social disasters going on in my eighteen-year-old life, it got lost in the shuffle.

That’s not the case in Mississippi, where Constance McMillen’s high school shut down prom rather than allowing the openly lesbian student to attend with her girlfriend. When sued by the ACLU, the school re-opened prom, but parents of the school’s other students organized a private party, and Constance’s “official” prom was only attended by seven people.

This isn’t just hate, it’s spite. It’s petty spite. It’s ignorant petty spite. It’s PIG-ignorant petty spite. I could throw out more adjectives, but there’s one other P-word that describes what went on. Privilege. These (pig-ignorant, petty, spiteful, hateful, moronic, dastardly) townsfolk were privileged enough that they knew they could get away with this. That’s what privilege does: it shapes who you are and what you do, by (and this is the most important part) creating your possibilities for you.

I was privileged enough to have a lot of possibilities open for me. My prom was nine years ago. I went with another girl. It’s strange, and very sad, to think that something that was a foregone conclusion for me then could be such a problem for another young woman now.

*Story for another time.

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Still, the “K/S” material confirmed something that I already knew from my own life: that there are just as many heterosexual women who are turned on by the idea of men having sex with one another as there are heterosexual men who are turned on by the idea of women having sex with one another — that the engines of desire are far more complex than we usually give them credit for; and that if lesbians and gay men didn’t exist, heterosexual men and women would have had to invent them — because they constantly do.

–Samuel R. Delany, quoted in “Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture” (Dery, Mark. Duke: 1994, 206)

I went to Dery’s book looking for stuff on fan labour, but found this fantastic quotation (which summarizes both slash fandom and Foucault quite neatly, I think) instead.

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Today, I thought that I would share this article on the death of rave culture and how Frederic Jameson predicted it, originally posted by Bruce Sterling. But then at Scalzi’s I saw, this, er, piece on why human penises look the way they do. Which led to this particular money shot:

Hopefully you’re thinking as an evolutionary psychologist at this point and can infer what these survey data mean: by using their penises proficiently as a semen displacement device, men are subconsciously (in some cases consciously) combating the possibility that their partners have had sex with another man in their absence. The really beautiful thing about evolutionary psychology is that you don’t have to believe it’s true for it to work precisely this way. Natural selection doesn’t much mind if you favor an alternative explanation for why you get so randy upon being reunited with your partner. Your penis will go about its business of displacing sperm regardless.

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