Raving mad and somewhat slightly dazed

I'm sleep depped and it's been a bad brain week (of the "self harm via upsetting blog posts" variety) and last night I went through a spat of "oh hey look it's someone who thinks darkfic directly causes sexual assault let's read their blog for a half hour" and, well, that was that. Thankfully Nen was online to talk me through the inevitable anxiety attack and sick feeling in my stomach.

But it's still in the back of my mind, and I think I have some Thoughts about it.  So, here we go. Also, writing these out makes me feel better.
My first instinct this morning was to pull out a particular selection of music - alice cooper, Lordi, avenge sevenfold, that kind of thing.  Darkness and power, glory and domination, sexualized violence and violent sexuality. Fear me. Worship me. Hallowed be my name.

And then I stopped and thought - okay, so /why/ is that comforting to me? It would make moralizers clutch their pearls and gasp, sure, but that's not all. It - makes me feel better about myself, takes away some of the sickness in my throat.

And I thought - I want to feel powerful. I want to feel untouchable.  I will be the storm, the desert, the conquering darkness and the stain of blood. If I'm going to be a monster, then I want to be the /best/.

(There's a reason I identify with Kylo Ren as strongly as I do.)

It's not something I feel all the time. It's not someone I want to be in real life. But it's there when I need it.



But, the thing is....  this isn't something that girls are... supposed to feel. I know that's an awful way of phrasing it, but it's the only way I can think to say it. Girls don't want darkness, don't feel like the world only makes sense when they're at war. Girls don't feel the sick urge for violence crawling up their throat, addicted to the rush of power. Women don't identify with characters like that. Women identify with women before they identify with /monsters/.

The people who /do/ identify with monsters, who are expected to, who are Supposed to be those types -They're shitty straight white boys. I think I called him That Guy once - the Health Ledger Joker fanboy, the Tyler Durden fanboy, who collects guns and is way too interested in serial killers and nazis. Entitled boys who think they deserve the world and throw tantrums when they don't. The insecure nerd with dark eyeliner and prop weapons.

Girls don't /do/ that.

And then there's me.

It makes me feel guilty. Like I'm... failing some feminist duty or some shit, identifying with the people everyone else calls the enemy. Finding comfort in what some people call the worst parts of masculinity.

( It's - about the only thing that causes me dysmorphia, tbh. It's the one of the things convinced me that I was nb - the rush of /relief/ when I realized that I didn't have to identify with women above all else, that I didn't have to identify primarily on lines of gender. I didn't have to pretend that I had something in common with them just because we share genitals.

I honestly don't know if that's a me problem or a them problem. Is it a shitty definition of womanhood or am I not really a woman? I have no idea.) 

Feminism doesn't get it, it feels like. Social justice doesn't get it.

25 years and I still exist in a different world. No matter how much they talk about acceptance and redefining womanhood, their definitions still don't have words for me.  I'm still the thing from beyond their universe, warping things beyond recognition simply by being around them.

(If I were a monster, I wouldn't /care/.)


I - as usual, I don't have a solution. I've just named the problem. It's just so - well, frustrating on a good day, to see this total breach of experience that no one on their side seems to see.

I don't know if I've made any progress. But I've articulated myself, at least kind of. So there's that.