Porn and Me

I was so blown away by a post of Trinity’s on her experiences with porn that I felt motivated to think about my relationship with the medium. So here are some disorganized musings.

I attribute the whole thing to the fact that I was a rather traditional nerdy girl, who came of age with guys.

Maybe a year or two years ago (it seems so long ago in my head, but I guess it wasn’t), I was learning about and becoming accustomed to ideas of sex, sexual identity, and sexual expression for the first time, and growing into an idea of myself as a sexual being. I started giving names to feelings, responses that I had, and I moved from a stage of “fascination” with certain concepts or people to a stage of sexual attraction and arousal. That feeling I once described to my little sister as “needing to pee” became, I realized (particularly after watching a rather bizarre French documentary on Swedish television), swelling of my clitoris. I learned more, I read more, I talked more, and my hormone balances changed. The stories I told myself to fall asleep at night stopped having a plot, I noticed. Instead I would fixate, almost unconsciously, on the same scene, whether it was the scene where the protagonist (a cooler version of myself) had detention with the incredibly sexy young teacher, or the one where the protagonists committed a disciplinary infraction on an 18th-century Royal Navy ship and the cat was (literally) let out of the bag. (I was fond of that one. But beside the point.)

So here we are, I’m 16 or so, pretty emotionally immature, and not quite sure how to piece together my very extensive reading knowledge of sex education with my own feelings, which I can’t control and don’t understand. In the meantime, I make some new friends—and my new friends, as it happens, are a little more at ease with themselves and a little more at ease with me. Unlike the guys I always tried to make friends with in my classes, these guys were willing to talk about “guy stuff” to each other in front of me. It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone talk openly about their own sexual responses. I was kind of taken aback, but in the interests of being accepted, I adjusted. Naturally, because these were your average adolescent males, I started to hear about porn (in fact, it might have been around the second time I hung out with them outside of school). I’d never heard anyone talk about it before; I had only the vaguest clinical idea of what it was. I’d certainly never seen any. But I heard my friends mention the genre of entertainment in passing, and so formed the opinion they presented: that porn isn’t harmful, that it is normal to watch it, and that this is often done as an aid to masturbation, which is also perfectly natural (well, I knew that part from my teen health websites). I started to “heheh” at sexual references, and I started to become accustomed to their world.

I didn’t really integrate myself completely in it, though—and still haven’t—because, I suppose, I’m undeniably wired like a woman. Sex drive isn’t omnipresent for me, and it especially wasn’t two years ago, as a very late bloomer. Also, all this information was new to me, who had never even considered self-pleasure before I heard it discussed, and I didn’t entirely understand that this porn idea could apply to women as well. At the time I didn’t have very many female friends, and those I had did not tend to be sexually well-adjusted. I was very confused: to a certain extent, I didn’t think of sexualization as something women did, and that was partly because I saw it as “wrong”—I remember having ethical quandaries about the way my male friends would sometimes objectify women (until I, terribly, found myself doing it too, and figured I couldn’t really maintain the moral high ground). But at the same time, because what I knew other people had was a life with a sex drive, I began to think I was not quite normal. I described myself as asexual for a few months, until I grew into myself a little better and realized that wasn’t accurate at all.

So shit, I’ve gotten way off-track. What about the porn? I took 700 words to explain where I am now, and perhaps none too clearly. I think I’m biologically and hormonally as sexually developed as I’m going to be for a young adult woman (if not experienced or comfortable), and here I am. I still don’t watch porn, and I still don’t masturbate. I had problems with the masturbation, and I gave up trying so hard. I still feel bad that I can’t do something everyone else can do (even the female friends I’ve since, happily, acquired), but I also figure it’s probably not worth investing that much stress into it. And porn. What do I think about that?

You must understand I don’t think it’s wrong, or amoral—I’m a big supporter of the porn industry, of the idea of graphic portrayal of sexual material, and all that stuff. I would have no problem with a significant other who watched porn, or indeed one who was interested in watching porn with me. Sometimes someone will send me a clip or a picture and I’ll watch it or look at it—sometimes I’ve seen some very attractive things that way. Because of the way I’ve grown into myself, I think it’s amusing when I can agree with one of those straight guys about a good porn clip, or a hot actress (still a fairly rare occurrence, though). It’s like sharing a taste in, y’know, non-sexual movies. And I do a fair amount of research-type work into porn, reading the old shit and watching the more modern shit. I watched Deep Throat once because I wanted to know what started porno film, and of course I’ve read the standards from Fanny Hill to Story of O.

But I don’t go seeking it out to pleasure myself. And I can’t help but think that’s a little weird. I’m not sure if I’m repressed, or if I do secretly think it’s a bit wrong, or unhealthy. I think that to a certain extent, I’m still wedded to that misconception I had back when I started learning about it that porn is a guy thing, and I’m not a guy, therefore it’s not really my problem. I guess I don’t know where to start, or what to look for. I’m hard to please, certainly, and not only do I not like to see cocks (which kind of rules out a lot there), I don’t find anything interesting in mainstream heterosexual notions of female beauty. I guess I’m too lazy or too nervous to go searching for something other than the first Internet pop-up that confronts me. I guess I can tackle porn on a scientific or social or historical level, and when I think about it there’s a lot of sort of unusual stuff I’ve seen in my intellectual curiosity about unusual fetishes, or indeed about my own relatively vanilla ones. But then move outside of the scientific and say “This is hot”? That’s not something I’m too good at doing.

Someone sent me a porno once that I do actually like (and that made me feel like I’d finally succeeded in dealing with my sexuality), and as it’s all I’ve got other than the tenth re-reading of Story of O, there are times in the dark of night when I’ll navigate the complicated folder structure I set up to hide it and sit down and watch it all the way through. I squirm with something—is it discomfort at seeing a naked woman (something that’s never happened in real life), or is it just a little bit of carnal pleasure at what the man in the video says and does to her? I guess I wouldn’t keep watching it if I didn’t like it, and yet I’ve never—in a year, I think it’s been—typed in the URL that appears at the bottom of the video. I’ve never gone looking for more like it, tried to find out what I’m into, or if watching this stuff could help me masturbate the way I first learned it did other people.

Just like, for this 18-year-old virgin, sex is something other people have, porn is something other people derive pleasure from. It’s great for them, and I’m happy they can enjoy themselves. The first thing I learned about porn was that it is fun to watch and a healthy sexual indulgence. Combine that with what I know now about consent and 2257 and all that good stuff, and I have absolutely no qualms about saying that I am completely pro-porn and proud of it.

In a strictly abstract sense.

I hate this feeling

I hate having a crush on someone. It makes me into a person I really find very irritating. I have only contempt for the girls I interact with in classes and whatnot who are always mooning about some boy. I hate it when I get fixated on a person and I end up doing the same thing. But I’m so easily obsessed! I’m thrown into depression by every moment I can’t spend with the person; when we’re hanging out and they leave I silently wish they’d take me with them. I’m too shy to start up conversations with them; I’ll stare at their green dot in AIM and hope to see the icon that they’re typing. Of course, I think about them all the time too, both fantasizing them doing lovely unspeakable things to me and just imagining spending time together (I have a vivid imagination, and my fantasy is quite often totally non-sexual).

I had a boyfriend once, and I made a mistake with that for a variety of reasons. But one of them was that I was crushing on someone else at the time, and I couldn’t put that person out of my head. I said yes to the boyfriend because I knew the crush would never have me—we’d worked that out between us—but all the while, in my head, it wasn’t my boyfriend I was making out with.

It consumes me and it’s so ridiculous, and I can’t get rid of it. I hold these crushes for long periods of time: I’ve had only two major ones in the past eight years or so. I go back and forth to other people sometimes—but I always think that if I were to get together with someone else, I would be emotionally unfaithful to them—I still couldn’t get the crush out of my head.

Stuff about fantasy

I’m talking about fantasy because that’s all I know, other than the Internet. And I wanted to articulate a bit, if I can, what that’s like. This post does include some content that might be considered graphic, so consider yourself warned before you click beyond the break.

Something weird happened Thursday.

The way I leave school every day, I pass the playing fields. I usually cut across the field to get to the path that goes up to the road, because it’s quicker. During this time of year, the football team has off-season practice, and there were a few burly guys in football t-shirts throwing around a football. I guess that on Thursday they didn’t want me cutting across “their” grass, because they started yelling at me. “Hey, you with the bag! Turn around! You with the man-purse! Why don’t you catch the ball?” I take my books to school in a green Lands End messenger bag, but I would hardly call it a “man-purse”. And last I checked, I wasn’t a man. So I kept walking; I didn’t turn around—same as I always do when someone mistakes my sex, I ignore it.

But I regretted my cowardice intensely as I walked up the hill. I had mental images of myself turning around to give them the finger, being aggressive back at them and picking a fight until I could defiantly say, “What? You’re gonna hit a girl?” Though I realized that wouldn’t teach them the lesson, that what they said was prejudiced on so many levels, from judging me to be male from my appearance to judging me to be an effeminate male with a man-purse who couldn’t catch a ball from that appearance. I passed up a teachable moment out of my fear that those guys would really hurt me, and out of my self-consciousness, and I’m still ashamed.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me often at school. While there’s a lot of latent homophobia, gender stereotyping, sexism, all that stuff, I’ve never gotten that kind of response. People tend to keep their prejudices to themselves, and when they see me in the women’s restroom and think I’m not a woman, they are the ones who double-check the sign on the door—usually they don’t accuse me of being in the wrong place. I’m thinking back, and I don’t really think I’ve gotten teased or bullied for my clothing and bag choices since middle school. I guess that’s what was so weird about this occurrence; it seemed like the football players were being more immature than usual. I’ve been taught that it’s my duty to speak out against things like that, to bring those kids quickly up to how a 17-year-old, and not a 12-year-old, is supposed to behave. But I, who can barely manage to say anything when kids use “gay” as an insult, find it so much easier to just keep walking.

I tend to go through my life thinking that things are really not that bad. More of my friends are allies than antagonists, and my school isn’t as bad in this regard as a lot of others. But sometimes sexism or homophobia or … gender identity-ism(?) will just come up and slap me in the face and I can’t quite believe it’s happened.

And then I remember how this is daily life for a lot of people, and apologize for complaining.

Quote of the day

“And what’s wrong with being a lesbian and still liking a bit of meat on Saturdays?”

I’ve decided that that right there is my sexual orientation.

In other news, I contacted the BDSM discussion group guys at U1 and they told me that their group is very much active and welcomes new members, and also pointed me in the direction of a support group for young BDSMers in U1’s city. It’s going to be very difficult not to make a decision on this basis…

University: my future

Right now, I am in the process of trying to decide what university I will be attending next year. Yeah, I know, like biggest decision of my life so far… and I feel like it’s all coming down in my subjective mindset to sexuality shit.

After sundry rejections and discarding places I just don’t want to go to, I’m faced with a decision between two institutions, both big, academically-prestigious universities in the US. The academics at University II are considered to be better than at University I, but there’s no denying that I’d get an amazing education at either school. In many ways, University II (henceforth “U2″, with apologies to the band) is seen to be more conservative, “old school”, than University I (”U1″), despite its incredibly active and apparently really cool LGBT group. U1’s LGBT group is less active, but they have gender-neutral housing: this year you can only request it if you’re transgender or genderqueer, and I definitely don’t want to get into a thing with my parents about that, and I’m not really sure I’m genderqueer anyway. But next year it will be an option for everyone, and that’s a huge plus for me.

But you know what U1 has which is almost the tipping point in my decision? That’s right: a BDSM discussion group. The only one I’d ever heard of was the one at Columbia, and U1 ain’t Columbia. But there I was reading the list of student organizations at U1, looking for a literary magazine or something to join, and the words “Safe, Sane and Consensual” popped out at me. Yup, it was what I thought it was: really really really truly a BDSM discussion group for students at the school. I was so excited… and then two days later I got my admission to U2.

I’m excited by the idea of being an iconoclastic student at U2, in more ways than sexually. But yeah, I could go ahead and start the BDSM discussion group at U2, and I have no doubts that I could find some people among the undergraduate student body to join it. But I’m just so tantalized by the idea of attending a university where such a thing is active and condoned and all (they even sell funny t-shirts) that I’m willing to discard all trailblazing sentiments, all notions of better academics, and even the great financial aid that U2 gave me (U1 didn’t give me any; all I get are federal grants).

I know this is a terrible reason to make a decision that’s going to impact me for the rest of my life. But oh how wonderful it would be to deal with this shit in real life.

Thinking

It’s 10:30 pm. I don’t know. I’m gonna try to articulate some thoughts and I don’t quite know what they are.

I was reading a new post or two on some sexblogs I read, of the I guess BDSM nature. And I don’t know—every time I stop to think about this, it feels weird. What I’m thinking is just that this is normal. My immediate thought is not porn, not arousal, not even “I would like that to be done to me”. I was reading this one blog, and I didn’t even notice until I’d finished the post that there was a picture of a naked, tied-up woman in the sidebar. You’d think that anyone with half a sane mind would notice that first.

I just don’t quite understand my responses to this stuff. I like reading the funny lines that the intelligent bloggers I read generate, and if the funny lines come out of a play party, well, that’s why it’s funny. You know? But “funny”? What person thinks a story about whips and ropes and shit is “funny”?

I don’t know, I can’t understand it. Sometimes I wonder whether I really am into this, which is stranger than the times I wonder whether I’m as submissive as I portray myself to be. But then I wonder whether I’m anything at all, because I guess I feel like I should be seeing this all more sexually than I do. I’m sorry; I can’t talk to the point about my sexual preferences. You’ll have to excuse my verbal circumlocutions.

I guess I find myself thinking, “I wish every college had a group like Conversio Virium [the Columbia student BDSM discussion group].” Or “It would be cool and interesting to go to one of these events, just to see.” And then I think “WTF, alterisego, did you just say that? Did you just say you wanted to out yourself, to be up-front about your fetishes with strangers? Can you even claim to legitimately have these fetishes anyway, since you’ve never had an orgasm in your fucking, no pun intended, life?” It seems weird. It seems weird to look at these people who are just incorporating BDSM into their daily lives and blogging about it, and think that could happen. Between my conversations with my mother, common sense and a generally internet-based life, I’ve trained myself to think this is private. That it’s slightly odd, and the sort of thing you talk about anonymously on a messageboard. And also that I can’t legitimately claim to be any part of it, because I’m laughing too hard at porn to get off on it, I’m repressed as the world’s most homophobic Catholic, I’m very immature and just barely overage, and I’m just generally ignorant about this world. The world of sex, and the world of BDSM. Wiki-surfing in multiple languages just doesn’t cut it to actually living in a world that involves ess ee eks, and perverted ess ee eks at that.

And I guess there’s just a lot of second-guessing about myself that goes on here. When you see something entertaining, you automatically want to copy-paste the link to your friend who’s online. I’m sure that’s happened to any of us. When I see an entertaining line, it takes me a minute to go, “Oh, wait. This is awkward.” And there are about three people I know who are actually okay with it, and my relationships with them make it somehow just as awkward as someone who doesn’t have a clue. And then I’m like, what the fuck? This is someone else’s porn, and you’re copy-pasting it as a link because you’re laughing at it? And do you see something slightly wrong with the picture of copy-pasting a porn link to a guy, for example, even if he is your friend and okay with it? Get a clue, alterisego. Grow up. Have normal reactions to things.

I dunno. I’m really confused.

What was that, my coming-out conversation?

Originally posted on my private blog on 28 February 2008.

I just had the most terrible conversation I’ve ever had with my mom. I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but I think I feel worse right now than I do after the screaming matches, the hysteria, the bleak depression and the exasperation of the two hour-long circular conversations.

Because on the way home in the car tonight, my mom asked me if my Facebook profile is private. She assumed it was public, because she assumed I just like to be as open and exhibitionist and unsafe about myself as possible, and that I wanted to let everyone in the world know what books I read and what movies I see. Sorry, I’m being unfair to my mom with that. I’ll tone down the resentment. She was just concerned that I might be denied a job in the future, or hurt in some other way—not because there are any pictures of me doing anything illegal or irresponsible on my Facebook, but because Story of O and Coming to Power are listed in my favourite books.

So we had to have a conversation. A very, very awkward, beating-around-the-bush conversation, about my “signalling”, her “notions of what constitutes privacy” versus mine, and how people “will put two and two together”. She said she didn’t judge the content, just the openness. But to me the two go hand in hand, and now I feel wrong. Just, wrong. I tried to justify myself, my actions and my identity. Mom said that she didn’t base her identity on sexuality, and it almost seemed like she was criticizing my sense of sexual identity. I tried to defend that, saying how that sense of collective identity is important for any minority. I said that I wasn’t ashamed of anything on my Facebook, that no one but my friends and people in my high school network could see it anyway, that I know how to be safe and responsible online, and keep private what should be private, and what seemed very important to me, that I am theoretical and dispassionate. I tried to imply (of course not in so many words) that this had nothing to do with porn, what turns me on, whatever. This is to do with literature, with cinema. This is to do with the fact that there are certain things I, unusually, see as normal—and so that doesn’t disqualify certain good pieces of writing and film from making it onto my lists.

But now I feel judged. I feel wrong. I feel like I’ve made mistakes. I don’t want to go against my mom’s wishes, against our family values, whatever it is. I feel like the right thing to do is to take all my giveaways off the Facebook, that if my mom says to hide it that’s the right thing to do. I’m trying to tell myself that my belief in not living in secret is wrong, that my desire to share my favourite books is just disgusting exhibitionism, that what I am is inappropriate for public and maybe even inappropriate for private too. I don’t want to disappoint my mom. I don’t want to be inappropriate. I must be wrong in thinking that I have a good handle on my privacy, the difference between theory and TMI, and all that real-world stuff. I should be trying harder at delineating sexual topics as taboo. I should be reinforcing those societal norms. If I have to do it, I should do it in the privacy of my head and offline and in the dark, furtively.

That’s not the way I want to live. That’s not how I think anyone should live. I don’t think it’s healthy, I don’t think it’s right, and fundamentally I don’t see a real problem with me being me. I have the inclinations I have, and I like to analyse myself, understand myself, and be open about this process. I also like to instigate dialogue, teaching moments, and a whole new range of innuendo. I like to open people’s minds. I like to insinuate. I never go round to random strangers and get in their face about sex. I don’t even like to discuss my bisexuality at GSA, for crissakes. I just like to insinuate, drop hints, and not be scared to hide my books. Matter-of-fact. Not embarrassed. And if I want to read a book that’s, um, non-mainstream, why shouldn’t I? It’s not like I have sexual responses. It’s not like I’m jacking off in public. It’s literature. And I know people don’t understand that. But to me, if porn isn’t funny, it’s academic. And the books on my favourite books list aren’t funny and aren’t quite academic. They’re enthralling, psychologically mesmerising. But they’re books. They’re my books. And why should I hide them?

Oh? Then why do I have a backpack filled with verboten books under my bed?

I’m hoping someone is going to reassure me that there is nothing wrong with what I have on my Facebook profile, and nothing wrong with me. I want someone to tell me I’m not a gross pervert or whatever because there are books with omg sex! in them on my Facebook. I want someone to tell me that writing “Story of O” on my Facebook doesn’t constitute describing my fetishes in graphic detail to random strangers.

But I’m scared of what you will say. I’m scared you will tell me I go to far, that I need to be more circumspect, that sex—and especially my “version” of what sex constitutes—isn’t appropriate for high-schoolers and Facebook. I don’t want you to tell me that my mom is right. But I’m scared you will. I’m scared there is something wrong with me, more fundamental than my repression and my body image issues and all that normal stuff. I’m scared to be twisted. I feel like I should be apologizing. But if I think about it, I don’t really quite know why.

Oh Yale.

The pro-porn and kink-friendly and whatnot blogs I read seem to be rather upset about certain happenings at Yale University’s “Sex Week”, and I really have to say I agree. According to the Yale Daily News, one of Sex Week’s events was a screening of a porn film that the Week’s organizers hadn’t previewed prior to the screening. Now I would say that it’s their own damn fault that a bunch of kids are happily watching a movie “which depicted fantasy rape, bondage and piercing”. They should suck it up and deal with the fallout, and let the audience get on with it. According to the Yale paper, there were certainly no objections from the audience as to the content. However, the event organizers stopped the film midway (to audience protests), because I guess the phrase “consenting adults” means nothing to them?

I feel like there’s really no point to my going on a rant about this, because Yale kids are more or less like the mainstream everywhere else, and I’m not going to start blaming folks for being uninformed. It’s not like you come out of the womb knowing about kinky porn. The only thing I can really say is, “Stupid kids should have previewed the movie before showing it, if they were going to object.”

Both the article and the Sex Week organizers definitely seem to have the wrong end of the stick, though, as I’m sure I don’t need to repeat. They’re going on about how this is a great opportunity to speak out about violence against women and whatnot — but, um, have these people ever seen a movie? Never mind a porno, just a film in a theater, or on DVD? Do they get the idea that in films (unless they’re documentaries), things are not real? Did they (for example) go to see Lord of the Rings and think that Middle Earth really exists? I’m dubious, because clearly they don’t understand that “fantasy rape” is not real rape, and that perfectly non-alarming BDSM practices are not equal to violence against women.

Excuse me, I’m feeling particularly intolerant towards the uninformed tonight.

EDIT: I spent about an hour doing research. D’you think The New Devil in Miss Jones (IMDB link) might have been the film referred to? I’m not totally sure it meets the Yale Daily News’s description, but since it seems to have won several awards, it makes sense for the director, Thomas, and the production company, Vivid, to have chosen to showcase it.

Valentine’s Day and college applications

I hate Valentine’s Day. Loathe it. Detest it. Revile it. Abhor it. Et cetera. This vitriol has been born of several years of external pressure to “have a valentine”, I suppose. Even if you aren’t “together” with someone on February 14, it seems like you’re expected to express your affection in other ways. My school ran a “Valentine Gram” thing and we were presented with various opportunities to send messages to our secret crushes. Folks ask other folks out. And of course all the established couples have to do the whole roses/chocolates/dinner ew stereotypical clichéd expensive sexist materialist version of romance thing. And I can’t stand the industry, and I resent the pressure that I need to be with someone or pursuing someone. It’s sort of like how in junior high and early high school, the reason I completely stopped hanging out with girls for a time was because they were always asking me, “Who do you like?” and I usually felt ashamed of my crushes, either because they were other girls or because they were unpopular or conventionally unattractive (male or female) kids, and I hated the invasion of privacy. It’s just the same on Valentine’s Day. We’re asked to publicly declare our love, make a holiday and an occasion out of it — that’s not so much my style.

I mentioned the materialism, and I guess that’s the easiest element of Valentine’s Day to pinpoint as unpleasant. One of my major annoyances in life, that I’m not nearly as vocal about as I’d like to be, is the popular assumption that maintaining a romantic and/or sexual relationship with someone entails buying them off: with dinners, movies and other entertainment, tokens of affection like flowers or jewelry or other presents. I have never been able to understand the way that to so many of my peers, the people who they say “I love you” to become prostitutes: folks date people they don’t even like personally, trying to win them over with these material gifts just because they’re attractive, good in bed, etc. I know that it works this way slightly less in the real world, but in the world of not-quite-adults, this is what I see. This is how Valentine’s Day looks to my eyes: a passing period that’s an unusual sea of red and pink, heart-shaped balloons floating above the seething mass of teenagers and your risk of bumping into someone carrying a tray of cupcakes increased exponentially.

And don’t even get me started on the subjugation, theory terms. Sexism, of course, and heteronormativity. Valentine’s Day promotes everything that is “acceptable” to the mainstream. And I know that loads of “unacceptable” folks are expressing their love on Valentine’s Day — the event was touched on at the lesbian parenting blog Mombian, for example, and Valentine’s Day productions of The Vagina Monologues have happened across the country. But ask the proverbial, er, person on the street, and they’re hardly going to call Valentine’s Day a celebration of sex-positivism and love having no boundaries and all that good stuff. No, it’s candy hearts and pink paper decorations and mainstream, mainstream, mainstream.

So enough of that, and now we’ll transition neatly into another rant, also having to do with heteronormativity. In the process of figuring out what corner of North America I’ll be in come September, I also have to find some funds to get me there. Doing so requires filling out quite a few forms, such as the Federal Application For Student Aid (FAFSA) and the College Board company’s CSS/Profile, in addition to various schools’ individual forms. Now, my family is of the one-mom, one-dad, still-married variety, but I’ve paid close attention to the wordings on the forms asking for copious details on every aspect of yours and your parents’ finances. Of everything I’ve filled out to date, only one form — the CSS/Profile — contains spaces for “Parent 1″ and “Parent 2″, then asking you to further specify whether each parent is a mother, father, stepfather, stepmother, legal guardian, etc. You could conceivably complete the form with two mothers, two fathers, a mother and a stepmother, etc. However, no other form is so forgiving, restricting your options to just one mother and one father. It’s mind-boggling: I mean, I expect this sort of thing from the government, so wasn’t too surprised to see it on the FAFSA. But then you have these private universities who are supposedly so enlightened as to have gender identity listed in their non-discrimination statements, and can’t manage to account for families with LGBT parents. I wrote an email to one school, since they asked for feedback on their online financial aid application, protesting this set-up. Somewhat predictably, I didn’t receive a reply.

I also have to wonder how parents with any more complicated family configuration deal with the intricacies of the financial aid forms. I have friends whose parents (of the one mother-one father configuration) are divorced, and these require that the non-custodial parent fill out an independent form, in addition to the standard form being filed by the custodial parent and the child. But what about families where the parents live together, but one was unable to secure second-parent adoption? What about families where one parent is not the biological mother or father? There are also, I am sure, even less traditional parenting arrangements, not limited to sets of parents less than or equal to two, that sort of thing, though I don’t suppose anyone can expect them to be accounted for anytime soon.

Anyway. So I know we can pretty much expect discrimination everywhere, but I was honestly surprised by the situation of financial aid.

And that was your set of rants for this evening.