OH MY GOD OH MY GOD A PLAN

YOU GUYS YOU GUYS I HAVE A *PLAN*. A wobbly baby fledgling of a plan, but one which doesn't rely on such things as my chances of getting a government job in Sydney, or me just slogging away at my job for another couple of years until I can comfortably up and leave it.

Firstly, note that, although I want to keep up with the medievalism, I keep coming back to the idea of doing *something* on Evelyn Dickinson and/or Louisa MacDonald. 19th century / early 20th century lesbian-like relationships are GROSSLY under-studied. [Says my mother: "don't you think that's for a reason? Says I: "yes. Systematic homophobia."] Evelyn's novels, so far as I can tell, are... odd. I will need to track down the rest of them and read them *properly* but they're odd. On the basis of the one I read, her depiction of romance and sexuality was *odd*. Her lead female characters had little to no personal investment therein. Plus there was the political side - a novel about a upper middle class british girl investigating NSW labor politics? That's just weird.

K tracked me down a reference: Evelyn wrote a review in a Sydney literary journal, of My Brilliant Career. If she wrote one, she may have written others. If she reviewed Miles Franklin's work, did she ever meet Miles? Did she know Miles was female? If Louisa MacDonald never met Louisa Lawson, but Evelyn was known to be more forthright, more masculine, and (from what I gather) maybe more hardline in her politics, and Evelyn was a writer... did Evelyn know the Lawsons? I'm starting to get a sense of a loose network of female Australian authors and feminist activists, and I want to know where and how Evelyn fits in with them.

I saw Awesome on Monday, and she pointed out that if I did an MPhil in Aus. lit and a PHD in medieval, I'd have two completely different streams of literature for my research fields. This might not give me an advantage at one of the big Sydney unis, but it sure would if I were applying for jobs in one of the regional unis. Oh hai, I can teach English literature up to 1500 and also I work on turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australian women's literature. Two fields in one academic!

This is sound advice.

TODAY, it occurred to me that I wouldn't need to go to Sydney to do an MPhil in Aus lit. I could do it here! I wouldn't need to be taking huge chunks of time off for research trips - just a week here or there in the NSW State Archives. I reckon I could do this part-time while working. It might send me crackers - part-time thesis on top of full time work???? - but it might also give me SOMETHING TO DO WITH MY GODDAMN BRAIN.

ZE PLAN IS TO READ AS MUCH OF EVELYN'S STUFF AS I CAN GET HOLD OF WITHOUT INTER-LIBRARY LOANS. Wait and see what happens with the current recruitment at work, find out where I'm going to be next year. Start looking for a supervisor in whichever city that is. Start mid-year next year, if I can.

OMG A PLAN.

Stuff worth reading!

Que[e]rying Sex Ed, by Hoyden About Town. H/T to kayloulee for the link. Hoyden summarises the sex ed lesson of her gender and sexuality course.:

I’m sure many women are grateful people know where the clitoris is. And did you ever find that knowing where your fallopian tubes were improved your relationships? Or your ovaries? Because I know that for me, that has done almost nothing…

A: [laughter] No…

Q: And I don’t know about you lot, but I learnt that stuff in biology as well, so… And what about working out when to have sex? Whether you should have it? Or whether to say no? And how to say no?

A: [this one varies a bit] Well, we were told to always say no. I went to a Catholic school./Well, we were told we should always respect it if someone said ‘no’./Well, we were told we could say ‘no’ if we didn’t want to have sex, but not really how, or how to know when.

[That last one, I usually probe a bit more, to get into the complexity of consent, by saying something like: 'And anything about working out whether you really did want to have sex? Or how to say 'no' without just yelling 'no!' in someone's face? Because it can be a bit hard, if, say, the person you're with, who you really care about, wants to have sex, and you're not sure, and you kinda want to please them, and you're not positive you don't want to have sex. And then it slips too easily into not wanting to be rude and 'would it be so bad to really give them what they want,' where you're not really thinking about what you want, just about whether you're sure enough that you don't want it to yell 'no!' at someone. Which obviously, can lead to the bad, especially for women. So any of that covered?' Generally, the answer is 'No'.]

I was thinking the other day about how little of my sex-ed experiences (these included: formal welcome-to-puberty sex ed in sixth grade; year ten biology; smatterings of weird, chastity-focused instruction in religious context at school; family conversations; informal conversations in (my liberal, Uniting Church) church friend groups; a couple of bible studies at uni and maybe the odd mention in other religious contexts; a lot of college chatter; and two formal presentations by a sexual health educator at college. Add to that a handful of sex-ed books and the Life & Style section of the Sydney Morning Herald, but exclude the blogosphere for the purposes of this argument) dealt with anything other than how to say *no* to *first time* sex.

One of my great frustrations with my church groups is that we were all very happy and liberal and mostly accepting of pre-marital sex (a reasonable chunk of the group were personally abstinent, I believe, but it was rarely touted as the Only Choice), but all the conversations centred around whether you COULD - I don't remember having any conversations with anyone about how to decide, granted that premarital sex wasn't going to send you to hell, *when* to have any. "If you're in love" is an AWFULLY VAGUE AND UNHELPFUL DESCRIPTION. Also, given that in church circles many people in love are *not* having sex, it's also not a logical justification.

We also talked about it pretty much exclusively in terms of the *first* person one might sleep with. I know quite a few of my camp friends were serial monogamists from their teens - and a small number weren't monogamous at all. But I suppose I assumed that someone who was *having* sex knew what they were doing, because questions like how do you decide when or if to sleep with a new partner, how do you negotiate church-circles dating if you're not a virgin... that never came up.

That aside... all my formal and informal sex ed seemed to be directed toward how to say no to first time sex - if not how to say no to ALL premarital sex, then how to say no to sex before one reaches an unspecified state of "ready", or how and how long to delay sex with a new partner.

Topics rarely covered:

* How to say yes
* Why you might say yes
* How and why you might say no to sex on particular occasions or in particular circumstances with someone you're already sleeping with, up to and including sex acts and so on that you may normally enjoy.

The notable exception to this was in the National Christian Youth Convention convention handbooks - there was a ten-point list of things to consider before having sex at camp, regardless of your marital status. It included things like "is this encounter affirming for both participants and our relationship", which is... still vague. But a whole damn lot less vague than most things. I wish I'd memorised that list, now.

In short: sex ed. Needs more que[e]rying. Go read Hoyden's post!