Candyland Amusement Park - Wheels within Wheels

Candyland Amusement Park - Wheels Within Wheels:  In Candyland WE are the amusment, we are the wheels within wheels.  Wife, mother, lover.  Some of them make life just a little harder Lesbian, cisgender, vanilla, monogamous.  Some make life a little more harder, lesbian, cis, kinky, poly.  Some carry a great deal of historical baggage and privilege; Strait, white, vanilla, monogmous, cisgender, male.  Some make life super hard, PoC, trans, female, poly, kinky.  As someone who is white, female, trans, lesbian, kinky and poly, i often find my own wheels within wheels dizzying and difficult to negotiate.  I often feel like a misfit, as i swirl around the Candyland amusement park - the only trans person in the room, the only poly person in the room, the only kinky person in the room - altho, as a white person, i am part of the dominant ethnicity in my region, and therefore carry white privilege with me.  Still, i find myself nearly being flung off the Candyland amusement park Wheels Within Wheels ride, wheels that, for some of us are constantly changing.

From the day you were born, you’re told certain things, the wheels were assumed - strait, cisgender, monogamous, vanilla.  If you were assumed a girl, people would say “she’d gonna break hearts one day.” If you were a boy you were told “some day you’ll want to be around girls and you’ll like when they kiss you.”  If you were a girl you were told, “someday you will get married and it will be the greatest day of your life,” despite the fact that in most cases you’re mostly getting an overgrown baby to take care of.  If you were a boy you were told “avoid marriage for as long as possible, it’s a trap,” despite the fact that, thru marriage you would gain a full time, in house maid.  

For some of us, the wheels change, and continue to change, as we make new discoveries.  Not strait, queer.  Or, not cisgender, transgender - which might make another wheel change - not strait, lesbian - or not lesbian, strait.  Some of us have wheels we grew up hiding - not vanilla, kinky - and we grow so used to hiding we can actually start relationships with vanilla people without telling them we’re kinky, relationships that grow and become love, and marriage, and finally your husband or wife finds out your kinky, and he’s like “i’m just no into that.”  So, what do you do? Surf the net to find other kinky people to play with online. Pay sex workers to play with.  

Then there’s the poly wheel - the myth that we’re all supposed to be born monogamous is shoved so far down our throats it’s practically come out the other side.  And when i say “poly” i am using that term in the broadest sense - relationships that involve more than two people, no matter how that is lined up.  It’s so heavily ingrained in our culture that monogamy would be the end of our civilization, that people don’t even question it.  Despite the fact that there are longstanding cultures that have been around for hundreds of years built on polygamy.  Despite the fact that the First Nation people who were living here first that were in some way poly - Nations that fell to Imperialism not because they were in some way degraded, Nations that fell to colonialism because the nations attacking them were degraded, so degraded as to think that they could enslave, rape, and kill with impunity because they could so easily convince themselves that people with different skin tones weren’t people.  

Even with everything working against it, the poly wheel has been pernicious in our culture - people cheat on their “partners” all the time.  Cheating has been a part of our culture as long as monogamy has, because some of us - a great deal of us - are not born with the monogamous wheel.  And, like the gender wheels, the kinky wheel, the sexual orientation wheel, the poly wheel is not “either/or” but rather, it is multi-faceted, wheels within wheels.  I am a transsexual woman, a lesbian - but i express my gender and sexual orientation thru a femme identity, and not every trans woman, lesbian, nor woman expresses their gender as femme.  The wheels within wheels of the kinky world are the most obvious, because once you admit that you have that wheel, and enter that world of wheels, you have to start figuring out what you like and what squicks you.  You like to get spanked, but you don’t like getting cut, you like being dominated but you don’t like to get spanked, you’re a sadist but you only like doing medical play - or you’re a combo of things, wheels within wheels within wheels, a submissive spanko bondage girl.  

I don’t think these are choices - i think you are born with wheels inside of you, that churn and turn, and sure, as you grow, those wheels develop right along with you.  But you’re either born with the “spanking” wheel or you’re not, and whether or not you’ve were beaten as a kid has nothing to do with it.  In fact, i have found that my having been physically abused as a child gets in the way of the spanking wheel.  I don’t want to be triggered into memories of being helpless, scared, and in a kind of pain i did not enjoy in the least.  

Our culture is only just now developing the tools to explore all these wheels.  Except for a large portion of the culture that wants to keep the, strait, vanilla, monogamous, xstian, white privilege, wife=servant, wheels in place.  Personally,  i think that submissive thing that some married people do is a wheel, coz i have that one inside me too, but because i was assigned male at birth, i wasn’t taught home economics, i wasn’t forced or fostered to do housework.  When i was a child my “chore” to get my allowance was to take out the garbage once a week, my sisters chore was to set the table for dinner every night.  Believe me, i noticed the difference, and the unfairness, but i ignored it and just enjoyed the privilege.  What i didn’t realize was that i would later wish i’d learned those skills, because that wheel within me doesn’t work very smoothly.  Housework is a skill that requires training.  I was able to teach myself a lot of things, and i know many cis men who like to do housework, so i don’t think it’s a “female” thing by any means.  

Wheels within wheels, i believe we are all wheels within wheels, riding around our own little amusement park rides.  It is those wheels that we try to hide that often will fling us off the ride, thru the air, and slam us the ground.  I hid who i was for a long time, and i regret that so much, coz i lost so much time.  But i have found, even riding the wheels of trans, kinky, poly, femme is still a tumultuous ride.  I feel like a misfit almost where ever i go.  Someday, i hope our culture will foster these differences conservanazis want so badly to suppress.  We can’t all fit on the strait, cis, monogamous roller coaster - and forcing us all onto that roller coaster has caused terrible social ills - poverty, classism, racism, sexism, violent religious vanity; violent white terrorist organizations, like the KKK, or radical anti-abortion groups, wantonly killing without regard.  Those conservative people, who are so afraid, many of them are undoubtedly afraid of discovering those wheels within themselves.  They’ve been told, since birth, that they will suffer eternally if they follow wheels other than the ones their religious leaders have approved.  It is those people that are doing the most damage to our culture, it is those people who turn a blind eye to sexual assault, and institutional racism that fosters violence against PoC, creates “shoot first” laws that legalize murder, allows our police to openly commit murder without any objective oversight system in place; creates such a narrow definition of family that children are orphaned at alarming rates either due to unwanted pregnancies, being disowned coz they’re gay, losing their birth parents and having no where to go.  It’s these conservatives who are destroying our culture.  

One of the biggest secrets in history is that the Fall of Rome did not arise from pagan excess, the Fall of Rome came about because of the rise of Christianity.  Rome had been Christian for hundreds of years when it fell, and it was the stultifying effects of Christianity, the narrow confines it created, that gave rise to the tensions that finally blew up and caused Rome to fall.  Christianity isn’t a “superior” culture.  It isn’t “superior” to colonize, murder, and enslave people.  Tell me, who killed more Mayans, the Mayans themselves thru religious sacrifice or the Christian invaders who practically committed genocide?  Cannibalism was a system of justice, not a food source. For instance, if a person from One of the early Nations was raped or murdered by a person from a second early nation, the members of the first nation would go out collectively, capture any member of the second nation, then bring them back to their village, where they would ritually sacrifice this person.   They would boil down the body to fluids, and all members of the tribe would share the fluids, and tribe would retain and display the skeleton in a sacred place.  The first nation had no recourse to find and punish the actual person responsible, but in order to protect their own, they had to respond and punish the nation of the perpetrator.  They all shared in this frontier justice, and displaying the skeleton was a warning to others.  Yes, it sound savage, but people in the American West did the same sorts of things all the time.  If a white person was raped or murdered by someone from a First Nation people, their entire village would often get burned to the ground, every male killed, the women enslaved - you know, like how they handled these problems in the bible -  only they didn’t do it in a ritual manner, the people of a town didn’t all share in the doing of justice - they sent all the people who could shoot strait got together, and they committed the massacre. Is that really more civilized?  

Which is worse, giving a group of people living on land you want. blankets infected with illness? or ritually killing a person from a neighboring Nation as retaliation for a crime committed on your own?  We did things to First Nation peoples that make human sacrifice and cannabilism look like child’s play.  When the Spanish found that a tribe allowed transgenderism, they took all the trans females and fed them to their dogs!  Americans hunted the buffalo into extinction in order to starve out the Plain Indians, who were unbeaten by the American army.  The members of the Plains Nations who did not starve to death were then put onto reservations where the poverty rate soared, and they were rife with social problems.  And this is somehow morally superior to sacrificing a few virgins once a year?

I know that conservatives like to call those of us who actually think for ourselves and can look at our own culture critically “self-hating,” but it’s not my self that i hate.  I hate the people who can commit such brutal crimes without a thought as to how immoral they are because they’ve convinced themselves the victims of those crimes aren’t human.  I hate the people in America today who’ve been taught by their families that black lives don’t matter - which is sadly a popular tag on tumblr.  I hate the conservanazis who want to shove their way of life down everyone’s throats. I love America - i love that i live in a free land, where, as a trans lesbian, i can live openly without fear of either legal reprisal, and i can legally change my gender marker and still legally marry.  But that’s what the conservanazis want to change.  They don’t want people like me to have freedom, they only want people like them to have freedom.  They want to close down my ride in the amusement park, and while my ride is sometimes rocky, i don’t want to be forced onto the strait, vanilla male ride again, because i didn’t fit on that one and i was constantly being flung off of it and slammed onto the ground.  At least now, i fit in the car.

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