To explain genetic attraction someone who’s never experienced growing up without their biological family is a huge challenge, because it’s something most people take for granted. It’s an even bigger challenge if you call it by the name it usually goes by, and that’s genetic sexual attraction (because er, incest). As I’ve stipulated elsewhere on my site, I believe, in … Read More
Not A Blank Slate, The Secret Life of The Unborn Child
The mother’s experience of pregnancy, whether a happy or an unhappy one, wanted or unwanted, is also directly passed down to the foetus.
Black Market Baby
They felt like they kidnapped me, which honestly is what I felt like from an early age, before I even knew I was adopted.
How the Access to Adoption Records Reflect Patriarchal Attitudes (USA)
There are probably over 1000 books above my desk and I know where I bought each one, even if I haven’t gotten around lovingly fingering their mustily scented pages. Unlike people, my books wait quietly for me to attend to them. The ones in-waiting tend to require a single sitting of immersive reading, but others are “meta-books” like Colin Woodward’s … Read More
Is it Reasonable to go Cold Turkey on Plastic?
Biopolymer looks & feels like high quality glass, but has the weight of plastic. Above all of course, it’s not plastic.
Why Unicorn Hunting is exercising Couple Privilege
Many couples who seek a triad do not realise that their actual seeking of a bisexual female is a form of couple privilege at work.
Relationship Anarchy is not Polyamory
The relationship anarchy philosophy is to not make rules governing our partners’ behaviour in our absence or presence.
Has White Feminism Appropriated Intersectionality?
“Intersectionality as a label combines a level of abstraction with an appearance of value-neutrality”, says one European White Feminist.
What Adoptees Need to Know About Pre-Verbal Stress
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
How I Became The Broken Woman
Illegitimacy was in my blood, and it had tainted me. By the circumstances of my birth my honour was smirched, I was already a broken woman.
Is an Open Relationship Stressful for Kids?
Open relationships are more prone to generating change. Change equals stress. All change equals stress. But is that necessarily a bad thing?
Nurturance Culture In Action
Through this work, an advance reader copy of Turn This World Inside Out, The Emergence of Nurturance Culture by Nora Samaran found its way into my hands. And although at 140 pages it’s only little, its impact on me has been disproportionately large. It has helped me find compassion; it has helped me connect fragments of ideas which existed in my brain already, but floated untethered in abstract (where they were of no use at all).
Response to Dr. Elisabeth Sheff (polyamory #metoo)
I believe we are working towards the same goal, which is to make sure our community is safe and one where abuse cannot flourish.
Ways I Fucked Up So Far (polyamory #metoo)
I realised how susceptible we all are to being abusive. Abuse is so prevalent, and so normalized, and often so easy to do, without being even aware of it.
Is the Polyamory #metoo Research Credible?
My research is mainly qualitative, and it supports conclusions derived from interpretation and context. How might it be considered credible?
#Metoo Motivations (my own harm and privilege)
I didn’t want to believe her. What I wanted to believe was that the harm Franklin caused was not intentional or conscious. That it was a one-off. That Franklin was a nice guy who had made a few wrong steps. I hoped against hope that it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.
Polyamory’s #metoo (to whom it may concern)
There is no shortage of corroboration for Franklin’s harmful behaviours. I have taken the testimony of five women, and the supporting testimony of others.
How I learned that Mental Illness was not a Personal Failure
Achievement and failure exist only as a construct, a way to judge others and my sickness, my health and my worth has nothing to do with either.
How First-Person Shooter Games Affect Our Kids
As a Mum of three, I confess. The iPad is Mummy’s Little Helper. Quarter of an hour screen time may have been allowed to slip past the thirty minute mark on occasion. Or further.
Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With String
With time restrictions therefore, my options are few; but I’m determined to make it work. After all between an apocalyptic future exploding in glorious glitter, and any other future where presents look like World War Two rations, I’ll go for the latter.
My Daughter’s Consent And The Boy Next Door
This boy is kind. But being kind doesn’t disguise the fact that he has no knowledge of boundaries. He knocks at all hours of the day. If the back door is on the latch, he’ll come in uninvited and sit on Maya’s bed to await her return until I show him the door. He once tried to force his way in her room to wake her up and play.
Boy, You’ll Be A Woman… Soon
For a woman like me–a die-hard fan of The Rocky Horror Show who lustfully watched Sweet Transvestite on loop –the news that Chanel launched it’s first make-up for men on September 1 2018 in South Korea, was wildly exciting.
TBINAA | Why We Should Say ‘Female Genital Cutting’ and Not ‘Mutilation’
Mutilation depends on perspective for women who’ve experienced it. They call it Female Genital Cutting and Western feminists should listen.
The Face of a Dying Breed, The European Brit
These are the people we need to focus on nurturing as geographical and technological mobility create a growing crisis of clashing moral standards and integration of cultural opposites. He is the type of ambassador I want out in the field demonstrating the best of what it means to be European Brit.
Why Communists turn into Nationalists
As causes grow in popularity, the original victims are often left behind whilst those already in power claim more space and more status by piggybacking on these issues without having suffered first-hand experience in order to promote their own agenda.
TBINAA | 7 Things I Teach My Kids About Consent, Sexual Harassment and Assault
We don’t treat people like we treat oranges because people are not things. No one can treat you like an orange. No one can take your juice aka… your power.
Life without Facebook? Is there any chance for escape?
Depressingly, a portion of those ‘success stories’ who did not return to Facebook had simply replaced Facebook with other social media. Far from extracting themselves from an algorithmic life, they had only jumped out of the proverbial frying pan into the fire.
What Aziz Ansari Did Does Not Make Him A Criminal, Unfortunately
Power is the capacity to influence others which–notwithstanding systemic privilege–fluctuates, sometimes on a daily basis according to self esteem, personality, age, maturity and in every unique relationship dynamic. How can power be measured or compared, when there is no absolute, and perception of power is also a form of power?
Lovecraft Was Racist, So Isn’t That How His Legacy Should be Remembered?
Great art changes the status quo and incites critical discourse. Lovecraft’s work, by this definition, is worthy of continued recognition.
TBINAA | Why I’m Grateful I Have a Borderline Personality Disorder Diagnosis
I googled ‘famous people who have borderline’ but I shouldn’t have. Amy Winehouse, Marilyn Monroe, Britney Spears. All touted as hysterical, unstable women.
Thor Ragnarök: A Baby Step in Equality
World building, as Marvel has proven it can pull off over the last decade, is a skill I admire, it’s an escapist’s ultimate playground–yet my aversion to imperialism and the influence of a feminist education on how I perceive fictional heroes and supervillains ate holes in the fabric of my appreciation.
7 Things You Learn Raising in Kids in an Open Relationship
A polyamorous relationship changes the environment your kids grow up in, because polyamory isn’t something you do like badminton on a Thursday night.
Overheard Conversations Are The Most Interesting
A few choose to queue, indicating their impatience by folded arms and tapping feet. Others return chastened to their tables littered with remnants from the first round, but their bodies stay tense, mouths quivering with injustice.
The Local DE | Life in suspense: the refugees in Germany who can’t reunite with their families
Jihad made a bid for a safe life as a refugee, never expecting that protecting his family would mean long term, permanent separation.
TBINAA | How Do We Make Online Feminism Less US-Centric?
I work as an online feminist activist. English might be a common language for the US & UK, but it also erases important differences.
TBINAA | When white people are silent in the situations of injustice, they have chosen the side of the oppressor
It is the balance of power which determines whether an action crosses the line from hurtful to abusive. When the power dynamic is out of balance and the person with the power inflicts harm on the person with less–even when it is unconscious–it reinforces their position of power and becomes abusive.
One Alternative Sex Shop Leads the Way in Consent
Sex shops themselves serve as a kind of a sex-toy curation service and could theoretically buy healthier selections for their clientele. That’s a responsibility few sex shops choose to shoulder in a capitalist system where sex sells.
TBINAA | #MeToo: Will My Son Grow up to be a Rapist?
And if predatory behaviour is as ubiquitous among men as it appears and as I have experienced it to be, statistically it is likely that my son will violate someone, at some point, in his lifetime. That could be anything from ignorant boundary violation to, god forbid, rape.
Bringing Attention to Atrocities in an Apathetic Western World
But there is no victorious ‘democratic’ ending to this story. In Syria the civil uprising has gradually been transformed into a full scale civil war. Sayid and his colleagues have all lost loved ones to this war and their political is personal. Sayid’s own crime–and why he is here–was to film government violence and put it up on YouTube, after which he was put on the list of wanted terrorists.
TBINAA | How Do We Create Consent Culture For Our Children and Ourselves?
Consent is not true consent where there is a power imbalance. You cannot make a free and retractable agreement about something, if that agreement is made in fear of losing your access to income, and resources–financial, emotional or otherwise.
TBINAA | Dear White Women: Why We Need to Stop Crying When POC Call Us Out
Don’t do your crying in the company of people of colour. Don’t beg them for forgiveness, after all you are part of a system which abused them.
TBINAA | The Price of Polyamory & the In-Laws…
So many polyamory self-help books focus on the fact that time is limited but they rarely mention that time is needed for multiple in-laws.
TBINAA | What Can We Laugh at Now?: Political Correctness and Humor
What we find funny is indicative of our beliefs, attitudes, judgements and opinions. It is a useful barometer. When we mock those who by birth or circumstance are less fortunate, we become persecutors and make others our victims. We have no less duty of care for verbal abuse even through humour, than we do for physical abuse.
TBINAA | How Racism Fueled the Manchester Attacks
Britain has never taken responsibility for the bloodshed and exploitation which built the empire. This is evidenced by Theresa May’s hardline on Brexit. We want to take without giving anything in return. We make no apologies for our xenophobic attitudes; our comedy ridicules ‘those bloody foreigners’, our narrow-minded and disrespectful behaviour often shames us in the countries we visit.
“Love, Retold” by Tikva Wolf
‘Love, Retold’ personifies non-violent and exploratory angles on our perceived powerlessness created by an ultimate truth; we cannot control others or their willingness to be in a relationship with us, if we truly seek to love.
Harry Potter Normalizes Abuse
Maybe it’s my depression that twists a rainbow world into shades of grey. Or maybe the Order of the Phoenix really is a minefield riddled with C-PTSD.
White Fragility and the path to White Depression
Gone are the days when I positively affirmed every day in the shower, and shared uplifting memes. Now I see these past behaviours as tragic extent of mine and others’ unawareness. I thought if I changed my mindset and concentrated on dismissing the negative and amplifying positive activism, that the world I wanted would resettle itself with my aligned actions.
White woman in the mirror
Privileged white woman pain is more gradual and less dramatic than that experienced by intersectional minorities. It is insidious. Kind of like bonsai trees, white women have the innate capacity to grow to a normal size but our roots and branches are cut so that we grow far smaller. Stunted or trained along a trellis in such a way that few see, sometimes not even us.
Mithridatism and the Validity of White Guilt
Like Mithridates, the ancient Greek King who–legend has it–ingested small amounts of poison to create immunity, it is the art of swallowing what we hate little by little, of being formed by it, developing an immunity to it and even learning to appreciate the rush it gives us so we can make it in this sick world. If it is no longer poisonous to us, it is easier to dish it out as we deny that it’s poison. It’s still poison though.
No Such Thing As Legitimate Democracy in the U.K. & U.S.
Thus a racist, classist and hierarchical society which favours the few over the masses cannot be truly democratic because power is unequally distributed among and through many channels. And where there is a power differential, this compromises the ability of the marginalized groups to consent.
“But I Can Still Cook!”
This world built me without boundaries, brought me up to accept authority, to obey and to work in the system. I was preprogrammed to play my docile part.
The Rapist in the Mirror
But what of the men who were genetic fathers to these lost children? Male privilege absolved them of personal responsibility.
Losing Friends Through Theoretical Whiteness
The very notion that whiteness is a social construct rather than a descriptor of skin tone, is difficult for white folk to understand.
The Gift of Amorality and Alcohol in Dark Times
But the loss of religion, shame and guilt left me without morals. Quite by chance, I found that I was amoral by choice.
The Violent Birth of The Awareness Baby
Perhaps that’s what’s so fearsome for many, they know that with awareness their current selves will never be the same again, they will be damaged.
TBINAA | The Cowardice of the White Woman
Maybe it was then I first asked the question: would I risk my own life to protect the Anne Franks of this world? The answer was always yes. But hindsight is a flattering bedfellow.