All the wedding-related excursions have had me quite busy lately. I did have time to see Eddie Izzard at the Schnitz last week. Awesome seats. Fun. You could spot the religious people in the room because they got up and left when Izzard posed the question “Did God create us, or did we create God?” I would say…B. Sometimes it’s a useful creation. It’s nice to have someone/thing to blame. Yawn.

There are volumes to tell of how the wedding brought out my mother’s latent insanity. But it’s all rather pointless. At one point, talking on the phone with my dad, I told him I thought she was having some crazy ideas. He replied, “You have noooo idea.” Poor, poor man.

Baby sister had cheesecakes at her wedding. In the past, I once made many, many cheesecakes for a friend’s wedding, so I am a ninja cheesecake cutter. All you need is plain dental floss, of course. So what kind of dental floss does my mom hand me? Tea tree oil dental floss. “Mom, I said UNFLAVORED dental floss.”

“This IS unflavored. It is tea tree oil.”

“Mom, tea tree oil IS a flavor. Do you think anyone wants to eat tea tree oil cheesecake?”

“Wellll….”

“Take it back! Take it back now, and get me some plain dental floss!”

My mother. Fucking crazy.

And I leave you with a photo. It’s from a couple weeks back…that’s how far behind I am.

Who am I kidding? I would drink and play the piano late at night. But I would NOT swoon.

At least I’m appreciating the fact that portrayals like these are far less common now, even if we have traded them in for more subtle and insidious representations of women.

Voting done, I sealed the ballots into a secrecy envelop, then sealed that into the mailing envelope and signed the back. Then I realized that my ambivalence over the presidential candidates had caused a major problem: I hadn’t voted for one. So I got back in to the ballot, and it seemed right to vote for Hillary.

The trajectory of my allegiance has looked something like this: Edwards. Then Obama. I loved Edwards. Obama…meh. But there are ethical concerns I have about Clinton that kept me from ever feeling like she was my candidate.

Until the sexist shit piled up so deep that it became really clear to me that this qualified and driven candidate would never get elected president because she was a woman, that is. Everyone has skeletons in their closet. Even a cursory involvement in local politics makes that clear. Clinton has hers. Obama has his. And I am not excusing for one second the actions of racist, ignorant assholes across this country who attack him because of his race. But to see Clinton’s qualities that would be admired in a man–decisiveness, tenacity, pragmatism, firmness–twisted into “see, she’s a bitch” liabilities, that makes my blood boil for her, for me, and for the 50% of the population out there who are my sisters.

See, I have this idea that sexism precedes racism. That patriarchy and discrimination on the basis of sex teach us how to treat anyone we perceive as “other” badly. That people who bought in to patriarchy invented colonialism because they already had the perfect model of oppression.

I don’t think the world should be this way. And I know my vote is pretty meaningless, at this point. But still, I’m proud to say I will cast my ballot tomorrow for a woman who would make a great president. There are plenty more like her, and I hope we’ll have one in office before too much more time passes.

I remember what she said because it connects with another memory, or rather, two memories that are at odds with each other. One is of an experience of sexual violence as a very young child, one which I didn’t share for years, and which is at some level related to my life-long feeling of being alone. No one, besides the perpetrator and me, knew. The other is the memory I made up of that event, one that made it “ok,” even if it was awful. That memory was that my father had seen what happened, and had not interfered to stop it, and thus that the experience I had was stamped with his approval.

I’ve had these two memories since then, and while I was conscious that the part about my father seeing originated somewhere in my imagination, I have been surprised at its tenacity. I’ve also wondered at its function. To an extent, I believe that sexual violence against children informs broader cultural norms and ideas of sexuality, even if it is ostensibly not tolerated or is marginalized. It’s simply too widespread to not have an impact on our larger cultural imagination of what it means to be sexual beings.

Perhaps my process of creating (explanatory) memories of what happened to me as a child involved encoding a cultural message that I had already internalized at that point into my idea of Self: keep quiet about bad things that happen to your body. Perhaps it was an unstated family value, not rocking the boat. Perhaps it has to do with me and who I am and my personality, or perhaps who I am is uncomfortably influenced by what happened to me one night when I was three years old.

But the part about my father has troubled me. Why did I imagine that? How could I know what Professor K would say years later, “The father knows everything. Nothing happens without his knowledge, and nothing happens without his permission,” without having ever heard that formulation? This suggests the power of culture, pervasiveness of the values of patriarchy, the somewhat predictable psychological complexity which makes us human together–it suggests that life is complex and at the same time rather simple.

“The father knows everything. Nothing happens without his knowledge, and nothing happens without his permission.” I have been thinking about that. I don’t believe it, rationally. In fact, a lot of my adult life has been spent consciously objecting to a world ordered in such a way.

Fer asked me the other day if I respected the opinions of men more than women. I said no, and backed it up with examples of my preference for learning from women and my repeated decisions to not take courses from male professors unless there was no other option. I do feel safer in the world of women, whatever the hell that is. This seems unfair, though. There are particular, individual men who do horrible things. It is sad to me that part of my subconscious processing of the world involves an idea that they are all willing participants in violence against women. It’s not something I believe, or rather it’s not something that I am aware of believing. But it is there. And there’s part of me that divides men into two groups based on those memories: the ones who hurt little girls, and the ones who stand by and watch it happen.

The latter, I think, is mainly an attempt to order the world. There should be a reason, a why. Why did this happen to me? Why wasn’t it stopped? What does it say about me that I was “chosen”? But these are questions without substance or answers. My father no more allowed that to happen to me then I would allow it to happen to my own daughter or son. But the imaginary world in which someone else’s negligence explains my own existence is a prison with ephemeral bars.

Anyway, this has been on my mind for a couple of weeks now. Part of my semiotic role in my culture is perhaps to signify “woman who has experienced sexual violence.” It’s a very strange signification, though. In the end, it doesn’t mean much, as it is so extensively interwoven with who we are as a society that it also signifies everyone affected by that abuse. That is to say, all of us.