Tired and Happy. :-D

Oh, my fucking gods. Everyone has to go out and buy "Icky Thump" by The White Stripes because it is goddamn fucking mindblowingly awesome!
Go do it.
I'm talking to you!

This has been a public service announcement. :-)

***


In other news, Paul and I had a lovely anniversary evening last night. :-)

I got him The Smiths (a CD of their singles) and the aforementioned "Icky Thump" (daaaaaaaaaaamn!).
He got me Kate Bush's "The Sensual World" and tickets to see Jeff Martin.

Yes.

I finally (bloody hell) got to see one memeber of The Tea Party perform live.

There was a huge ammount of waiting.
This was somewhat annoying, but I passed the time happily enough contemplating ideas of gender within the context of The Matrix (Oh, I'll be yammering about that some time this evening, I think), bu tit would have been nice if our 2.5hrs of music had not been accompanied by 3+ hours of waiting for the damn acts to come on. :-P

The show was quite good, though.

The opening act was someone called Ben Cooper, who has a very rich voice (somewhat Jeff-like, to my mind, which only goes to show that Jeff's still a narcisist. ;-) and who had a friend playing with him. He played guitar, and the friend (James something or other) played piano. James Something-or-Other fucking blew me away. My goodness, but that boy can play. :-)
So I was quite impressed with that.

Jeff was quite good, too. I like the way he'll take two or three different songs and weave them all together. He sang a lot of Tea Party stuff, too, which was nice. :-)
I sang along (and possibly annoyed people sitting around me - too bad for them, dammit) in harmony, of course. :-)
He sang "Requiem" and put NIN's "Hurt" in the middle of it.
He sang a piece he'd written far more recently (solo piece, therefore) called "I Love You", and cut it with "The Messenger" and "Heaven Coming Down" and that pop-song by Keane called "Somewhere Only We Know". I thought it was pretty cool. :-)

He did "Halleluia" (Leonard), too, which was nice. The whole audience sang along to that. :-)

It was lovely, and I *quite* enjoyed it.

The fellow he had playing the drums was a total wild man. I was quite impressed with him, too. :-)


Anyway. We got home at just about 3am. An anniversary evening well-spent. I am now (1) Still tired, despite getting up at 11am (thank you, Paul, for the wakeup 'cause I probably would have slept another hour if it hadn't been for him) (2) about to head out the door (dressed and awake, thanks to said wakeup call) to meet the illustrius Ami_B for coffee, and (3) mildly worried about toddler-proofing the house for the imminant visit of Paul's best friend and his wife and toddler. :-)


- TTFN,
- Amazon. :-)

Gender and The Matrix

Okay...

Disclaimer: I have no fucking clue about what I'm about to start talking about. However I'd like to remedy that situation. As such, if I say something that is stupid, rude, cruel, or just plain wrong, do please let me know and fill me in on how to better go about it. :-)
I'm thinking/theorizing/guessing out loud, so to speak. So do please help me out, if you can.


And now, what I've been thinking about:

Switch.

Big shock, I know. ;-)


See, I wrote (and am continuing to write) a Trinity/Switch fic that (already) contains explicite sex. In this fic, I decided to write Switch as a cisgendered female (self-identifies as 'she/her'). There are a few reasons why I did this.

1) Because it's easy.
I know. Shame on me for that one.
Here's why. I'm basing this idea pretty much entirely on Pat Califia's "Layers of the Onion, Spokes of the Wheel" essay, in A Woman Like That, so do bear with me. I suspect that one is more likely to want to have one's girl-bits touched if one is actually a girl[1].

2) Being Born in the Wrong Body = Computer Glitch in the Matrix
This sort of stems what the character Mouse was saying about 'Tastee Wheat' and how it's possible that the machines weren't sure what chicken tasted like, so they made chicken taste like everything.
Basically, the program sometimes gets stuff wrong.
As such, it would make sense to me that if Switch were trans, she would have been MtF, not FtM, discovering upon being pulled out that, in fact, she did have the body she was supposed to have all along.

3) Related (sort of?) to this is the was Switch manifests hirself. See. Despite the way you can break the rules if you know the rules can be broken, I still have trouble understanding why Switch would opt to manifest in traditionally feminine - and *really* impractical - high heeled boots, unless some part of her self-identified as feminine in the first place.


Which brings me to the other side of that coin.

I look at Switch and I think that zi/hir is really the most appropriate set of pronouns.
I look at Switch and I see someone who in Real World appears as feminine(-ish) on the top and masculine(-ish) on the bottom (in so far as one can do that with loose-weave clothing and a no-mess hairstyle) and the reverse of that - a man from the waist up, a woman from the waist down (more or less) - when zi manifests within the Matrix.
I see someone who is intergendered (or possibly bi-gendered) - not quite man, not quite woman, somewhere in between the two poles of the continuum, if you will, a little bit of both.


So my question then becomes (the inevatable, this is me talking here, after all), how does this play out sexually?

If Switch is bi/mixed/inter-gendered, but biologically female - is zi happy with this? Does zi feel like half hir genetalia is missing?[2] How does zi feel about hir breasts (other than, apparently, the need to cover them at all)? How does zi feel about having hir cunt touched? Does zi wish zi could slip hir genetals inside those of someone else? Is it enough to use hir hands? How does zi feel about having fingers/tongues/penises/anything-else inside her vagina?

I realize that preferences for, or aversions to, any of the above have nothing to do with one's gender (or sexual) identity. However I would think that one's gender identity *might* have something to do with how one wants to be touched (maybe only at a given time, maybe always. I don't know).

In a similar vein, how does Switch's identity effect (affect?) the sexual identities of hir lovers? Does Apoc identify as gay? bi? het? Some fluid combination of all of the above? Something else entirely?
What about Trinity? I'm writing her as bi (regardless of how Switch identifies), but how would she think about (classify?) her relationship with Switch? Girlfriend? Boyfriend? (Sweetheart, Lover, Partner, Beloved... much better terms for this, I think. I rather like them). Would she define it at all, or just accept it for the gift that it is? (I'd like to think so. I certianly hope so. :-)


So I put it to you, People of the Internet. Any chance you can answer (or try to answer) any of those questions? Thoughts on the subject matter? Anything? I could use some help bouncing ideas around. :-)



- TTFN,
- Amazon. :-)


[1] "What I do know is that I can't continue the way that I have been for the first forty-four years of my life. I'm tired of being unhappy with my body. Tired of pushing people away from my breasts and cunt, [...] worn out by the laborious process I have to go through if I'm going to perform sexually as a woman. My body feels liek the biggest and most inconvenient piece of drag anybody ever had to lug around." -- Pat Califia, "Layers of the Onion..."

[2] I'm inclined to guess 'no' to that one, if only because when zi manifests in the Matrix, zi does not appear to have gained any extra anatomy under hir trousers (though I could have missed something there) and if you felt that - in Real World - something was missing, and you had an opportunity to feel that it wasn't, in some way, if only for a little while... wouldn't you do it? (Maybe, maybe not... as I said in the disclaimer, I have no idea about any of this stuff).