honesty in all things.

I am struck by how much of what I think seems to flow in a couple of veins.

Interpersonal relations are all about respect and trust - earning it, giving it, showing it, having it. All our conflicts, from macro to micro seem to be rooted in some imbalance of either trust or respect.

Honesty is another thing. I suppose I do hold everyone (including myself) and every thing to unreasonably high standards. I dislike dishonesty. It roots back to the respect thing, but that's not what's bothering me today. I dislike fakery. I dislike play-acting and pretending. Now this might be an issue considering that there is much about the BDSM scene that seems to involve fantasy scenarios in which the players adopt roles and play out the scenes. We are headed to the big shin-dig weekend thing in a couple of weeks. I don't expect to play with any of the people there, except L maybe, and I can bet that none of our activities will involve costumes or calling each other things like "daddy." It's just not my bag, that pretending and dress-up stuff.

But you know what? I didn't get it when I was a kid. Not much past the age of 12 anyway. I just didn't. I don't know what happened that unplugged the imaginative/representational play thing in my brain, but it pretty much stopped. Probably someone told me to grow up and stop acting like a child. We stunt children when we do that, I think.

The honesty and fakery thing that bugs me is when people affect behaviors or symbols to try to prove they are something that they are not. Insecure men with shiny sports cars or big-ass trucks come to mind. Women who get all dressed up in the morning to go out and get the paper. Or one I know who drives her HUMMER to the store for coffee and a paper.

What are these folks trying to prove? That they've got fancier vehicles than me? Done. So what? Does that make someone better than their neighbor? Not likely. But somehow they try. It is as unseemly and ridiculous as the middle-aged bald guy with the dead cat toupee. You might as well wave a sign that says "I'M INSECURE!!!! PLEASE GUESS ABOUT WHAT!!!"

You know, therapy, even years of it, would still probably cost less than a Hummer. Particularly if you figure in the cost of fuel and upkeep, never mind damage to the planet just by having the thing sit in your driveway. And the funniest thing? These displays never, ever, EVER come across as the confidence they are intended to project. They come across as exactly what they are: pathetic ploys to use physical external props to fill an aching internal emptiness. Couple in fear of that secret being found out and you get defensive mixed in, which often comes across as arrogant. You know what? Arrogance is a huge turn-0ff. For pretty much everybody that I know. Humility and security are waaaaaayyyyyy sexier. There is nothing in the world quite so sexy as a person who is sure of him or her self and who does not need to defend that. Wow. Self-possessed and unashamed. Damn.

I am about to cross lines and offend great swaths of people with what follows. Please don't jump on me here. This is just the shit that swirls in my head as I work. I am putting it out on the page here so that I can get a better look at it and see what I think.

As I have been chopping ice for the past decade (that's what it feels like) I have been thinking about the term butch and what we generally associate with it. Tough, mannish, often a top, more comfortable in jeans than a skirt, basic stuff, right? Well this is when the fakery thing comes in for me. A lot of what I see as people claiming to be butch is so much role-play-acting stuff. Dressing this way or that. Binding breasts so they don't show.

To me that is not butch, that is trying to be something you're not, perhaps dabbling in trans stuff from the safety of a lesbian identity. It is behaving in a way (that may indeed be quite comfortable) that is designed to have a particular effect on your environment. It dictates how others see us, how we are perceived, and thus, attempts to alter others' behaviors by presenting them with a series of specific images. Fucking with people's minds for fun is one thing. Presenting yourself as a whole package that is so much greasepaint and wardrobe strikes me as fakery.

I have been working with a woman who I would identify as butch. Certainly I am butch. Neither of us does much consciously about that. We are who we are. We wear what works (literally) for us. We don't much give a damn how we are perceived by the world around us. We live our lives completely as we are, as butch women. We work with our hands and our backs and our minds. We do not take off our boots at the end of the day, put on heels and go dancing. Cut me in half, and what you see runs all the way through.

And I guess I resent it when others try to pass themselves off as butch when it doesn't feel real to me. I know. That's totally subjective and totally unfair. Sorry about that. I'm just saying what's in my head. Maybe this is an example that will help.

When I was in college I had a great writing instructor. He was from the suburbs, the pretty affluent suburbs, growing up. He was smart and in the college prep track, but he liked wood shop. He loved the wood and he loved the guys who took wood shop. He worked summers in college doing construction stuff. But every fall he'd go back to school. After graduation, he did construction again, then went to grad school, wrote some books and eventually became a professor and intellectual. He still likes to dabble in fixing stuff, though. He chose to teach at UMF in part because of its rural nature. It was away from the city and all that "culture" stuff.

To me, who grew up in a single-wide trailer a mile down a dirt road and across the road from some cows, it felt very much like he was slumming. My life isn't something that you can do on a vacation, and I resent it mightily when people try it on to see if it's fun. "Oh, I'd have so loved to have grown up in the country." Bullshit. You would have hated it. Trust me. It's a long fucking walk to the school bus stop from where I lived - nearly two miles. We were poor. We didn't have money to pay for gas to drive me there, even when it was 20 below zero, because after all I had two good legs and I ought to use them. So I did.

Growing up poor and rural is no fun. There is not basketball after school because that would mean I had to be picked up and that cost gas money. Sneakers did, too. And uniforms and all that stuff. Pizza after games. Nope. After a while you learn not to ask for stuff. Just bide your time and get out as soon as you can.

And then years later in college, you hear some guy romanticizing about the rural life and it strikes you funny. A guy I know has a term for the wealthy-ish college kids here in town: trust fund hippies. They live like paupers, shop at the used clothing store, recycle everything, dive in dumpsters, make art out of roadside trash and then graduate, return to New York and go on to bigger and better things via mom & dad's connections. Yeah.

I guess maybe it is the safety net that I resent. I resent that people who do not need to live poor will do it, but with the knowledge that if it gets too tough, they have an out. I resent that some will try on the image of "butch" knowing that they can always take off the binder and boots, put on some sensible shoes and go back to doing social work.

I have very little choice about who and what I am. I live as honestly and truly as I can to who and what I am. I am no good at pretending to be something I am not. I could not mingle well in a crowd of millionaires, nor do I do well in groups of city people. After a while, I need to escape. I need to get home. I don't like it when others pretend to play at my life as some sort of an adventure, acting out something they think might be fun. I am not interested in being anyone's sociological study. My life is not anyone's wilderness vacation. It is what I have. It is what I know. It is noble in its own right and not something to be tried on and giggled over like a Halloween costume.

I feel the same way about my pagan spirituality and my Irish heritage. They are deeper and more real for me than anyone could imagine. I would not pretend to be Italian or Jewish or of African heritage, and I resent like hell when others think my holy days are an excuse to dance drunk and naked around a bonfire in the woods or to drink green beer and wear a sparkly plastic bowler.

I am tired now. I did not expect this to go exactly where it did, but I don't think I am sorry. I might be in the morning. God knows that's happened before. Please don't blast me too hard. I welcome your thoughts.