I happen to be reading the same book! I started it years ago, then dropped it in the bathtub, and it took me all this time to get it on Kindle and start again.
The book is an eye-opener in a lot of ways and I bet a lot of people have had that same reaction over several blunt facts and perspectives in it. It is really, really easy for... tone, details, the acts and attitudes of others, the way things are put to make you ashamed of the things you've found that make sense to you and make you happy. I'm only now learning to resist it.
Case in point: A friend of a friend has been drawing fertility goddesses for a certain RPG and is getting sick of it, describing the character she is asked to draw as "big breeding cow of a woman". I align with the probable context of annoyance at the sexism; but whoa I do not align with the idea that fertile women or fertility goddesses are "breeding cows" or that it is demeaning to women to be fertile or fat with big tits, like me. I know that person would never have called me a big breeding cow to my face. And yet I could easily internalize what she said and be ashamed of my body, my choices, or being really fucking into the idea of all life on earth being personified in a goddess.
I'm trying to say that shame is horrible and holds you back, and at some point we have to get rid of it. You are not responsible for Victorian classism. Good things can arise from vile things. And if you feel something sacred out there in the countryside as opposed to the asphalt and cleanliness of cities, it's not something you should give up because it's also what some Victorians found and then decided to be dicks about it.
I don't have perfect answers because I'm still trying to figure things out myself. A lot of the stuff I'm drawn to is from other cultures or dead cultures I will never fully understand because I lack the cultural context. Even trying to craft my own concepts of the divine I find myself reinventing Hekate (guardian of boundaries, mistress of liminal spaces). I find I am using the forms and underpinnings I've picked up.
Nothing is perfect, nothing is sacred, nothing is original, nothing is unproblematic. But you gotta let go of shame or you get nothing done. And I'm still working on THAT, too.
no subject
The book is an eye-opener in a lot of ways and I bet a lot of people have had that same reaction over several blunt facts and perspectives in it. It is really, really easy for... tone, details, the acts and attitudes of others, the way things are put to make you ashamed of the things you've found that make sense to you and make you happy. I'm only now learning to resist it.
Case in point: A friend of a friend has been drawing fertility goddesses for a certain RPG and is getting sick of it, describing the character she is asked to draw as "big breeding cow of a woman". I align with the probable context of annoyance at the sexism; but whoa I do not align with the idea that fertile women or fertility goddesses are "breeding cows" or that it is demeaning to women to be fertile or fat with big tits, like me. I know that person would never have called me a big breeding cow to my face. And yet I could easily internalize what she said and be ashamed of my body, my choices, or being really fucking into the idea of all life on earth being personified in a goddess.
I'm trying to say that shame is horrible and holds you back, and at some point we have to get rid of it. You are not responsible for Victorian classism. Good things can arise from vile things. And if you feel something sacred out there in the countryside as opposed to the asphalt and cleanliness of cities, it's not something you should give up because it's also what some Victorians found and then decided to be dicks about it.
I don't have perfect answers because I'm still trying to figure things out myself. A lot of the stuff I'm drawn to is from other cultures or dead cultures I will never fully understand because I lack the cultural context. Even trying to craft my own concepts of the divine I find myself reinventing Hekate (guardian of boundaries, mistress of liminal spaces). I find I am using the forms and underpinnings I've picked up.
Nothing is perfect, nothing is sacred, nothing is original, nothing is unproblematic. But you gotta let go of shame or you get nothing done. And I'm still working on THAT, too.