Just Your Friendly Neighborhood Asexual

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

I got inspired by that one special PnF episode lol

saying 'actually the pregnant female body is disgusting and horrifying and terrifying that it has to happen for life to happen' is not the feminist move you think it is.

Shall we talk about how gross and disgusting periods are next? Shall we preform disgusts to more feminised bodily processes in order to beat the patriarchy? surely if we just insist the pregnant or menstruating body is gross and nasty that will somehow uncouple womanhood from pregnancy.

If this is your genuine response to seeing discussions of how we have to uncouple womanhood from pregnancy, and how giving pregnancy a 'girl powerrrrrr, that's your womb energy' does not do that, then you really need to do some introspection on how you think about women's bodies and pregnant women in particular. Saying their bodies are horror made flesh is a deeply misogynistic thing to say, have some shame.

Hey, people can come at issues with their own perspectives! I was viewing this from my own disabled perspective, where I already have a ton of unpredictability and issues with my body, and a lack of autonomy, so pregnancy is kinda picking at all of my worst fears at once!

It might not be body horror to other people, but it is to me. Whatever you think of that is your own issue.

What IS the issue/ misogyny in projecting those personal internal issues onto pregnant women specifically and talking about their bodies as horror, as a fearful object. Something which has been done by men for centuries. Disgust at the female pregnant body is a driver of medical misogyny and social abuse of pregnant women.

also 'words in my mouth', as if calling something an 'eldritch horror phenomena' doesn't imply disgust directly in its terminology. Do you not know what the terminology you use implies? Lovecraftian horror/ Eldritch horror its itself obsessed with the ' biologically macabre' and is centred around disgust these horrors invoked in its witnessers, horrors which often drove them to the point of insanity.

Can you think for a little bit WHY describing a feminised body process in this way might just be misogynistic? Why saying it belongs in such a genera of horror is insensitive and down right hostile at worst? Can you see WHY?

I challenge you to work to view women's bodies (including the pregnant female body, a body which most women will inhabit at one point in their life cycle) as a neutral thing. As a body preforming a process which due to patriarchy places it in an extreme state of risk both socially and medically.

optionally a cat furry version

New Secret Knots comic, "The River". I hope you like it!