Cressida de Nova: The Wayra ...57768

Cressida de Nova: The Wayra ...57768:      there is something wrong can't get you out of my head begone dull lothario get behind me satan am too old for this foolishness   ...

Love it, love it, love it!

And, obviously, I'm not done talking about this incident, but I have a new spin on it.

One day when I went out for a walk with my mobile park bench (my upright walker) this aggravating fellow greeted me to give me one of his unsolicited pep talks. On this occasion, he told me "you have beautiful hair. If we could get your body to match your hair, you'd be a real doll."

I wish I'd thought of saying "yes, and if you'd just shut your mouth, you might be handsome."

Unfortunately, I live in a small town and don't want to make enemies of anyone here, so I probably wouldn't have said it even if I'd thought of it.

Friday Flashback: Sly Speaks: Me Too: The Workplace Edition

Copyright Tara O'Brien

This post was originally published on 13 December 2018. It was penned by my political alter-ego, Sly Fawkes.

I was thinking back to a "wonderful" incident which happened while I was working as an assistant district manager at the Denver Post in 1986. One of the carriers became friendly with me, initially in a perfectly acceptable and professional way, and I enjoyed our little chats. But then one day he said to me: "I'd like it if I could give you a hug sometime and maybe a kiss."

A lot of you ladies, particularly of my generation or older, will be able to relate when I say that I was trained from a young age to "be a lady" when a situation like this arises and to "not hurt his feelings," so rather than asking him in what the hell universe hitting on his supervisor was appropriate, my first response was to say "I'm married," so I wouldn't hurt his feelings. As if doing this sort of creepy thing would have been appropriate if his target wasn't married.

My initial reaction is to think what a doormat I was for reacting this way. Plus I never even told my supervisor, because I didn't want to get the guy in trouble. But my next reaction is to be angry that I believed his feelings were more important than mine, which was disgust and betrayal.

So, yeah, not going to be angry at my younger self for being taken aback and not behaving in a more assertive fashion in this lurid situation. The guy displayed not only gross sexism in having zero respect for my position of albeit mild authority just because I was a young woman, but he displayed zero respect for me as a human being in seeing me as an object that he could potentially grope and slobber on.

For some reason, when I was younger I seemed to draw a lot of creepers like this to me, probably because I tried to be nice. I'm honestly not at all sorry that my current age tends to render me invisible to this breed of asshole most of the time.

~Sly Has Spoken~

Graphic copyright Juliahenze @123rf.com

Real Cie Reviews + FOAD Thursday: Harassment is Sexy and Fat People Aren't Even Human

Rating: Since there ain't no zeros, I'll give you a one

Nora Roberts' Nightshade is a trope-laden mess. Initially, I enjoyed the "hard-boiled detective narrative from a female perspective," but, fairly quickly, the cracks began to show.

I became tired of the male protagonist disrespecting the female protagonist's comfort zones and this being written as sexy rather than as harassment. She was not only supposed to endure it, but she was also supposed to enjoy it. Because nothing is hotter than a guy who won't take no for an answer.

The icing on the unpalatable cake was the "disgusting fat cat lady" who "had two chins and was working on a third," and the hero could see "at least two hundred pounds of bulk under her dress." This woman proceeds to "rub one of her chins."

I thought that Eleanor the cat lady was the most interesting character in the whole mess. I would have enjoyed reading Eleanor the Cat Lady's story. I would like a whole series of Eleanor the Cat Lady stories, where Eleanor is written as an interesting, eccentric, large human being, not a revolting, sub-human stereotype.

How hard would it have been to say that a large, elderly woman answered the door, and the hero could see several cats lying in the windows and on the furniture? The personable lady smiled and invited the hero in for cake and coffee. She was wearing a loudly colorful tunic which she may have made herself.

How easy it would have been to make the character both large and eccentric without being hateful.

Fuck Nora Roberts, and fuck every author who can't write a large character without insulting and dehumanizing them.

So done with this shit.

Cie does not recommend this book and she is unwilling to even share a link to this book even though she needs every cent she can get her broke-ass hands on.

Here is a link to my Goodreads review.

Real Cie Reviews: Wyrm's Warning

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

The following is a duplicate of my review on Amazon and Goodreads for this novelette.

The author really knows how to get inside his characters' heads and describe their motivation. Unlike many male authors writing a female character, he doesn't linger on unnecessary descriptions of her anatomy. Tala is an ordinary young woman who lives in a time and place where women are treated as objects to be done with as males see fit. She faces manhandling by the old woodsman whom she is attempting to assist, and worse from the realm's boorish prince and corrupt priest.

One night while leaving the old woodsman's cottage, Tala is attacked by an unknown creature and mysterious changes begin to take place in her life, subjecting her to moments of terror and rage as she tries to comprehend what is happening.

Tala is a brave and level-headed young woman who faces truly awful situations both from the supernatural realm and the natural world in which she resides. Although there are uncomfortable scenes in this story with regards to men's treatment of women and girls as sex objects to be used as a man sees fit, these scenes are never gratuitous or unnecessarily explicit. 

There are jokes about male authors writing women in an overly sexualized fashion. Michael J. Allen manages to avoid being on the receiving end of the joke by writing his female characters with empathy rather than salacity.

I finished this story in one afternoon. It is a compelling page-turner.

~Cie~

Sam & Me

I’ve started and stopped writing this several times. I remember that someone else once mentioned that the reason Sam didn’t look for Dean in season 8 isn’t because he was having such a grand time with Amelia (blech.) In fact, some of us theorize that Amelia never really existed. She was a dream or a hallucination. Most of the scenes involving Amelia have unnaturally bright lighting. I believe (as some other people have postulated) that Sam was in shock and that is why he didn’t look for Dean. 

Also, Sam has had his head messed with multiple times by Lucifer. But at this moment, I’m specifically thinking of the episode in Season 11 where there is an implication that Lucifer is at the very least trying to mess with Sam’s head by sexually harassing him, and it’s quite possible that Lucifer has molested Sam in the past. 

Also, I can’t even begin to say how much I hate the accent with a pantsuit. Torturing someone is bad enough. Messing with their head and convincing them that they had sex with you is beyond nasty. There are few characters that I’ve wanted to see burn as much as this bitch.

As someone who is a sexual assault survivor myself, I can’t even begin to say how uncomfortable that idea makes me. 

You see, what happened to me may have happened close to 22 years ago, but it has never left me. It’s always in the back of my head. It makes me do things that seem irrational, like wanting to sleep up against the wall if on a bed, or wanting to sleep on a couch. It makes it hard for me to convince myself to do simple things (things which I actually like) such as take a shower, because being sexually assaulted fucks with your mind in ways that people who haven’t been traumatized in a similar way can’t understand.

I relate to Sam because while he may be only a fictional character, he gets it, and I’m sorry he does.

Sly Speaks: Me Too: The Work Edition

Copyright Tara O'Brien

I was thinking back to a "wonderful" incident which happened while I was working as an assistant district manager at the Denver Post in 1986. One of the carriers became friendly with me, initially in a perfectly acceptable and professional way, and I enjoyed our little chats. But then one day he said to me: "I'd like it if I could give you a hug sometime and maybe a kiss."

A lot of you ladies, particularly of my generation or older, will be able to relate when I say that I was trained from a young age to "be a lady" when a situation like this arises and to "not hurt his feelings," so rather than asking him in what the hell universe hitting on his supervisor was appropriate, my first response was to say "I'm married," so I wouldn't hurt his feelings. As if doing this sort of creepy thing would have been appropriate if his target wasn't married.

My initial reaction is to think what a doormat I was for reacting this way. Plus I never even told my supervisor, because I didn't want to get the guy in trouble. But my next reaction is to be angry that I believed his feelings were more important than mine, which was disgust and betrayal.

So, yeah, not going to be angry at my younger self for being taken aback and not behaving in a more assertive fashion in this lurid situation. The guy displayed not only gross sexism in having zero respect for my position of albeit mild authority just because I was a young woman, but he displayed zero respect for me as a human being in seeing me as an object that he could potentially grope and slobber on.

For some reason, when I was younger I seemed to draw a lot of creepers like this to me, probably because I tried to be nice. I'm honestly not at all sorry that my current age tends to render me invisible to this breed of asshole most of the time.

~Sly Has Spoken~

Graphic copyright Juliahenze @123rf.com

The Cheese Grates It: Me Too

Image copyright Andrea Arroyo

This is a response to a post by Juliet James on Medium

Honestly, Noah sounds like a horrible human being.

I have plenty of these stories myself. There was a guy named Shawn who I went to junior high and high school with. The girls all called him Scummy Shawn. He was always grabbing our breasts and buttocks. When we would go to an adult about it, we were brushed off as being overly sensitive. Boys will be boys. Just tell him to stop it.

One day Shawn was with a guy named Charlie. Charlie was a bit of a doofus, but he was harmless. Shawn grabbed my buttocks and told Charlie "grab her tits, dude." 

Charlie blushed and said no, he didn't think that would be cool.

Shawn grabbed my breast, and I wheeled around and kicked him in the marbles. He doubled over and groaned that I was being childish. I told him I'd become downright infantile if he ever touched me again. He never did.

I wish I hadn't had to resort to that, but I'm not sorry I did it.

A couple of years later, I ended up in the mental hospital after a half-assed suicide attempt. There were a lot of things that led to this. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had type 2 bipolar disorder, which didn't help. The factors leading to this incident were the fact that my aunt and my two cousins had moved in with me, and the cousin who was my age picked on me constantly. I was bullied at school, and my boyfriend, who was two years older than me, coerced me into letting him take my virginity. He then dumped me.

I was treated abominably at the mental hospital and promised myself that I would die before I ever ended up in one of those places again. I have kept that promise.

Looking back on it, the majority of sexual experiences in my life have been coercive. The guy who ended up raping me after I broke up with him used the come-on line "you don't want to be celibate for the rest of your life, do you?"

In fact, I would have been fine with being celibate for the rest of my life. I don't like sex very much. However, I have a very low self-esteem and still carried in my mind the idea that a woman without a man was somehow not a complete person. This is an extremely toxic idea and leads to women remaining in abusive relationships, but many of us have been fed this idea from a very young age.

It is distressing to me that there are enough people in this country who think a woman being assaulted matters so little that we now have "President" Pussy-Grabber in the highest office.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

The Cheese Grates It: The Effects of Bullying Last a Lifetime

A response to a post on "The Mighty."

I'm now almost 54 years old, but the bullying that I endured all through school still affects me to this day.  I have always felt that I was hideously ugly. If I'm completely analytical about my appearance, I'm actually fairly ordinary-looking, but when one lives in a society which has a very narrow view of beauty and constant bullying is added to that, one learns to loathe one's physical appearance. I honestly don't like it when people compliment me on anything because my initial thought is that they are just trying to get something out of me.

When I was in the third grade, I was sexually assaulted by two of my female classmates. I was too ashamed to say anything.  Later, a boy in that same class pinned me up against the wall and told me that he was going to kill me with his pocket knife. I wet my pants, and when I went to the school nurse, she laughed at me and told me that I was being silly. This boy was very popular, and he was never punished.

Throughout school, the bullying that I endured often had sexual overtones. There were horrible rumors that I would have sex with any boy who wanted it. In fact, I was so naive that I thought a "bl*w j*b" was blowing in someone's ear, and I wondered why anyone found that sexy.  Boys would often grab my breasts or buttocks. The adults never did anything about it. In one math class, the teacher was sitting right there while my classmates said things like "she plays with herself" and "she'd play with her t*ts if she had any." Up until I turned 18 and realized that my breasts tended to get in the way when I was doing things, I hated my "flat chest." I actually have rather average-sized breasts, not that anyone should be bullying someone with smaller than average breasts.

I have never enjoyed sex, but once I got into high school, I allowed my boyfriend to take my virginity. He dumped me after that, and I ended up in the mental hospital over the weekend with a slew of unkind doctors and nurses looking down their noses at me. One nurse even told me that I was a freak and I would never be normal. To this day, I'm proud of my sixteen-year-old self who told her: "better a freak than a b*tch like you." I don't know how I found the strength in me, but I stood up to those jerks, and I tried to be helpful to the other patients who were in there with me. My roommate was a woman in her 50's who was so severely anorexic that all her bones were showing. She had trouble voicing her needs, so I tried to be her voice.

Remembering these things makes tears of anger come to my eyes, but they won't last long because the message that crying is weak was so deeply internalized. I have a lot of trouble crying. I didn't cry after the deaths of some of my close relatives. I didn't cry when I had to have my beloved rescue cat put to sleep on his sixth birthday due to kidney failure. It's not that it didn't matter. I've never recovered from it. There's a gaping wound in my heart that will never be filled. I get accused of being cold and uncaring because I don't cry, but I simply can't. Crying was a weakness that my bullies would exploit, so I never let them see me cry.

I have major mental illnesses (type 2 bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder which manifests as hoarding objects, not animals.) Any coping skills I have with these diseases have been developed on my own. "Mental health professionals" have only tried to medicate me into normalcy even though I do not respond well to psych meds. They make me manic and psychotic. Family members offer wisdom like "just stop being like that," "just stop thinking like that," "just stop looking for attention," and "just act normal."

I have been completely unsuccessful in life, and, if it weren't for my son, the honest truth is that I would have been long gone. My life has been a series of loss and disappointments. With the psych conditions I have, it would have been an uphill battle anyway, but with the self-loathing I learned from being bullied all through school, the battle became impossible.  

When my diabetes worsened, I became unable to work the difficult jobs and long hours that I had always prided myself on being able to work. I am now living in poverty. If it weren't for my son, I'd be homeless. I do not have hope for things getting better.

Bullying destroys lives, but all I ever heard is that it was my fault that I was bullied, and if I would just "act normal" and "ignore it," I wouldn't "bring it on" myself.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~