tongue-tied and twisted, just an earthbound misfit, I
I have a new Substack. It is entitled Born With Ovaries. I still have the domain name titled similarly, and still have not 100% decided what to do with it, but it was long past time I did this.
Don’t expect any brilliance or anything. I just wanted a place to park feminist-themed musings. I don’t have the usual libfem takes, though, so maybe that’ll be a nice change for you.
If you’re going to text me via the phone number on this site, you should be prepared to tell me who the fuck you are in your first message. If you don’t, you will be blocked. I may or may not say anything before said blocking.
Not anticipating that the people I occasionally hear from will ever read this; they may in fact not have gotten the number from here. But.
Additional note: if you claim to be someone I know, be prepared to prove it.
I have this personality quirk where I feel the need to announce my boundaries publicly, loudly, often, and in great detail. It’s annoying and pointless because one, it makes me look too defensive and two, it gives abusive people a road map for getting under my skin. Over the years as I’ve either matured or gotten mentally rusty (still not sure which), I’ve damped down this tendency a lot but it still comes out to play sometimes.
So, look in the site menu. New page. Right now I link to it from my profile photo description and cover photo description on Facebook, but I anticipate gradually replacing my homepage link with it in all my social-media profiles. I’ve had a few weird confrontations on Facebook in the past couple months and I’m kind of tired of it. Like, most of my recent stuff is public. My comments elsewhere are definitely highly visible. You seriously are going to come into MY online space and be surprised that I’m no different with you? People have been doing that to me for literal decades. It got old halfway through the first one.
Not all of my social-media profiles are in the little social-icon cluster there in the sidebar (at the bottom of the site in other site sections), so at some point I may edit the “ground rules” down to something more readable and less ranty and then add a list of whatever’s not represented in the icons. May. As I do periodically, at this point I’m re-evaluating why the fuck I’m on social media in the first place. I ought to at least nope out of whatever I don’t regularly use, just because it’s a security risk.
But we’ll see. Me being the poster woman for ADHD and all.
What it says in the title. I’ve changed how I update the Substack and found that the description on the “writer” page (see menu 👆) is outdated. Fixed it.
So, I have a phone number down in the info at the bottom of this website’s layout. It is a Google Voice number, meaning it does not ring my phone, though I do get notifications whenever someone contacts it in some way. And I’ve had a voicemail and a text message in the past three days, which is weird; I go literal years with no notifications of any kind usually, other than random spam.
I suspect the voicemail was from someone who dialed a wrong number, because I’ve had this thing for months and it sounded like someone had just recently given the person the number they thought they were calling. Just in case, I’ve texted them back to let them know they dialed the wrong person. My luck it was a landline, though it doesn’t hurt to try. But I don’t know the other person’s circumstances, so I’m posting this here in case here is where they got the number from.
The main reason I have the number on my site at all is so that people who know me but haven’t kept up with my number can still contact me. Primarily it is there for my kids. I am not counting on the older one ever using it, but it’s possible the younger one might at some point. In any case, regardless of who it is, if they’re someone I know then they can’t say they had no way to reach me. This is particularly important as I have not been in a good place to acquire a post office box, though if I ever get around to that I’ll add the address to my contact info here as well.
I cannot fathom why anyone else would want to contact me by phone without so much as an email introduction first. But if you’re wanting me to respond to you, I’m going to need a bit more to go on than “hello.” Google Voice doesn’t seem to have caller ID apart from showing me the originating number. I know you can google phone numbers, but that doesn’t often produce any useful results.
It goes without saying that anyone who leaves me nasty messages will be blocked. That hasn’t happened so far, but you never know. I cannot say whether I will do the mature, sensible thing and pretend nothing happened just so you don’t get your kicks, but if I am immature and non-sensible, very likely I will post your phone number too. Hey, it could be a burner. But maybe it won’t be. You like it? Me too. Let’s not even go there.
I wouldn’t even bring this up as a possibility, but I’ve had too much weird shit happen to me in half a century. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t try to cover all bases.
Speaking of which… and this is a shot so long it’d land me on Pluto. If you’re the big man, better be ready to prove it.
He wouldn’t. But if he did. Just saying.
It’s a small detail but a big one to get wrong, and is now fixed: For a long, long time I had assumed I had done really well on Duke University’s Talent Identification Program for the ’86-’87 school year. Indicated as such on my About page here. I found my records of same a couple nights ago and it turns out I was just one of the two big shots at my middle school, which was all seventh graders that year (it is now a fully-fledged junior high). Which is fine. Between me and the boy top scorer (I think his was probably math — mine was verbal), we got our school a commendation, so that’s good enough for me.
Anyway, the About page is now corrected accordingly.
Honestly, I’m not sure why the universe saw fit to bestow very good (I will not say top-shelf brilliant) verbal skills upon me when no one fucking listens to me, but apparently it is my best superpower, and I’m still trying to figure out how to put it to best use.
That and art are the only things I ever really won awards for doing. And those were all long ago. I fear I’ve been left behind now.
I have mentioned on the “woman” page (look at the menu) that I have a domain name called “born with ovaries” but that I hadn’t quite worked out what I wanted to do with it yet.
Last night I was poking around looking at a domain-name seller and seeing what was available and thinking about Our Bodies, Ourselves and how they sold themselves out to troonery many years ago and then up and quit. I thought, You know, we still need a resource like that. I didn’t figure on being able to get the OBO name — even if it’s available, and it’s probably not, the owners likely wouldn’t give or sell to TERFs. (Fun fact: the WordPress software corrects me if I write “terf” in lowercase, but does not correct me if I write it like “TERF.” Fucking genderdorks. They’re like roaches.) So I pondered what the fuck else you could call a resource like that.
And as I was falling asleep, it hit me: I already had a good candidate.
So! I don’t know when it’ll happen, but… it’s a-gonna happen. It probably won’t ever be a book, but we’re gonna bring women’s health information back online all in one place and it WILL NOT be man-intersectional. No men! Ever!
I won’t announce this anywhere else because I have no idea how I’m going to go about it just yet. I have an idea, but we’ll see if it’s practical. We also have to take into account my extreme flakery about stuff like this. Sorry, everybody. But I’m kind of excited now!
It’ll be under the Gynemedia aegis. Obviously.
I see I get hits from Victoria every now and again.
If that’s you, I sent you an email at your subversive dot org email address some days ago. I don’t know how often you check that thing, so maybe you haven’t seen it.
Saw you in photos in MM’s recent piece. Good to see you going to bat for women, but given how you’ve treated me, I find it difficult to take it very seriously. Interested in MM maybe? She’s cute, I’ll give her that. (No lesbo.)
You make me sad. I don’t like people making me sad. I already had people making me sad, and you just made it that much worse. What did I really do to deserve that? Really?
EVEN NOW we could sort this out. If you wanted to. If you felt I was worth the risk.
Will you? Probably not.
I am pleased to announce that recently I acquired the domain name Gynemedia. I got it because I already own Gynepedia, and since that was already inspired by Wikipedia, it was just that one step further. (For those who don’t get the joke: Wikipedia is owned by Wikimedia, which also provides the software Mediawiki upon which Wikipedia and a whole bunch of other wiki sites are based.) The latter will fall under the former and be linked from it (there’s nothing at either domain yet), and I probably also want to do some zines and offer them from the former. I have some ideas.
I have yet one more idea that involves a space to upload videos, but I’m still mulling it over; I already put too much on my plate and then never do anything with it, but I know someone who runs a feminism-related video site akin to YouTube or Rumble, and she isn’t that happy with her current site name. I may just put a bug in her ear instead. But given how volatile the socialfem community is, I don’t know if I want my idea running away in someone else’s hands. I would be sad if I got shut out of it.
Relatedly: When I get the ‘pedia going, it will not be open for public writing and editing. I still haven’t decided if I’m willing to let in feminists who are known to me. But I probably won’t be. Maybe if some of you stop blocking my ass on Facebook because I said something you found annoying once or because you couldn’t control my friends list for me, but so far I don’t like your track record. So we will be proceeding very cautiously with that project. I welcome ideas of what new articles to include and that’s probably going to be all for a while.
Yes, I know about Feminist Wiki. One, I don’t want to limit the subject matter to women classified as feminist because we’ll be arguing all fucking day about how to define that and anyway, for a complete picture of the full range of womanhood, we need to include women who might not fit that label. Two, FW is owned and run by a man. If you like that, you go ahead. I do not like that, so I will be offering another option. Good talk. Glad we could sort that out.
I said a while back, “Wait’ll I tell you about the Hound,” and here we are weeks later and I haven’t done it.
Grievous oversight. Must correct.
Okay, so if you’ve followed my adventures with the Rory McCann fansite for long enough, you have seen me address this already, though I’m pretty sure I shitcanned that post when I started the blog over. You probably won’t mind reading my theory again. For the rest of you? This will probably blow your mind. When I first thought of it, no one in the fandom seemed to be talking about it, so far as I was able to ascertain. I would be surprised if they have since picked it up. I have this whole aura around me that prevents people listening to me. Well, fine. I don’t mind keeping it all to myself. Fuck all y’all.
But I do need to put it out into the internet again with a date stamp on it, just so you can see I said it and when. Haha.
All right. Pull up a chair. To sit in. Not to hit me with. You good? Okay.
Now, this is going to be about the books, not about the TV show. Several elements I’ll mention here never made it into Game of Thrones. Keep up.
So. We all know about the scene during the Battle of the Blackwater when Sansa goes back to her chambers and it turns out Sandor Clegane is there. The Hound is, in fact, massively drunk and has been lying on her bed, possibly in a drunken half-stupor, waiting for her to come back. We find out in A Storm of Swords in his final fevered rant to Arya, just as she’s about to abandon him, that he had been planning to rape Sansa but for whatever reason, he changed his mind. The actual sequence of events: he grabbed Sansa, he put a knife to her throat, and he ordered her to sing him a song. She complied, he started to cry, he stepped away from her and ripped off his Kingsguard cloak, and then he left her alone in the room.
With me so far?
Okay, so. In a later book we have a scene where Sansa is remembering the Hound from the night of the Blackwater battle, and specifically “remembers” him kissing her. Fans caught on to this quickly and pulled George R. R. Martin up about it, to which Martin replied that Sansa was an “unreliable narrator.” But it didn’t make any sense to me that Sansa would just convince herself the Hound kissed her, and while she strove to be unfailingly polite and to cover her tracks so the Lannisters wouldn’t murder her, she didn’t strike me as someone who lied for fun, either to others or to herself. So what was going on here?
After observing the other Stark kids with their direwolves, it hit me.
If you only saw the show, you didn’t get to appreciate the strength of the warg connection between the Stark kids and their direwolves. These kids were literally reading their direwolves’ minds. Actually, child and wolf talked with one another, sometimes across great distances — Nymeria, for instance, found Arya’s dead mother and Arya witnessed the find from hundreds of miles away. In her sleep. Even Jon/Aegon — even though we find out in the show that he’s a Targaryen (and Martin backs this up), even though as a Targaryen he can warg a dragon, we see he can also warg a direwolf, as he does Ghost. (Another nod to the “song of ice and fire”???) Human and wolf can sense one another’s emotions, see the world as the other party sees it, and all of this long distance.
Remember how I said Sandor told Arya in their last conversation that he had wanted to rape Sansa? He also stated that he regretted not doing so. “I should have fucked her bloody… before leaving her for that dwarf.” (In the books, Sandor despises Tyrion. He is quite upset to learn that Tyrion has wed the “little bird.”)
So here’s a scenario for you. We know that in that last conversation with Arya, Sandor was trying to rile her up into killing him. What if he hadn’t actually wanted to rape Sansa? What if… he actually loves her?
What if he was consumed, after the Blackwater, with the wish that he’d kissed her?
What if Sansa was picking that up long distance? Because think about it. When you really want to do something, you envision yourself doing it usually, right? If that’s what Sansa picked up, it would have been like she was experiencing the kiss.
“What Sansa picked up?” you’re asking. “Why would Sansa pick anything up from the Hound?”
Because… Sansa warged him.
Remember, Sandor first took an interest in Sansa AFTER Lord Stark executed her direwolf, Lady. And this happened around the same time the other Stark kids (and Jon/Aegon) began forming a psychic connection to their wolves. Sansa’s to Lady must have just been developing when Robert passed sentence on Lady. So… would Sansa have needed to redirect it?
It wouldn’t have been on purpose. And it wouldn’t have been strong at first. And Sansa wouldn’t have known she was doing it, because she didn’t believe in wargs. Sandor must have felt as if he were developing feelings for her and of course he couldn’t figure out why. But if it’s gotten to the point she’s “seeing” him wishing he’d kissed her, and misinterpreting it as her own memory?
And, I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s a bit in the books about the wildlings having a taboo against wargs riding people. If Sansa ends up Queen in the North in the books the way she did in the show… I dunno, what do you think? D’you think there might be an itsy-bitsy little complication should the wildlings find out what’s happened with her and Sandor?
Could be all sorts of interesting.
So, yeah. My take on “SanSan” is that there is no SanSan. It’s just Sandor feeling a psychic bond he doesn’t understand and Sansa mistaking someone else’s thoughts for her own memories. Wait and see.