Jack of Many Trades

B is for Being Respectable

Originally posted: 2014-01-16

My, but there's a lot of prescriptivism going around... I'd say lately, but it really isn't just of late, is it? Unfortunately, it's a long time until we get to P so you get a rant about the idea of being respectable instead. I'm not going to address the specific post that set me off, mostly because other people have already done that so well.

I've written before on this blog about how many of my beliefs go back to my childhood experiences. In fact, I spent all of last year reclaiming those things. One of the reasons they had to be reclaimed is because I put a lot of them aside or tried to cover them up with more "respectable" labels as I moved through pagan circles online and in real life. The other reason was because my ex shared them.

When we decide as a community that X experience is "crazy," "evil" or whatever label you want to put on it, you aren't really stopping people from having that experience. (Tumblr is proof of that. If you could get rid of godspouses by "disbelieving the illusion" like it's a D&D spell there wouldn't be any left. Believe me, better people than you have tried.) You're just isolating the people who do have that experience and making them vulnerable to those who would use that against them.

A big part of the reason that I stayed with my ex as long as I did was because I was told constantly that leaving her would necessitate giving up almost everything I believed or experienced of the gods and powers. When people told me I should leave her, they said "oh you need to get out of that relationship because her beliefs aren't respectable." But her beliefs had nothing to do with why I needed to leave her, not in the way they meant. So I thought that if I believed in my gods and trusted my experiences, I had to stay.

A more malevolent version of this is how cults take off. How someone can move through the Lokean community and take financial advantage of people one after another and no one wants to talk about it until it reaches critical mass, because Lokeans get told over and over again "What did you expect? She's Lokean." This is symptomatic of the same root that causes pagans to protect sexual predators - because if they were prosecuted, it would be bad press. People might get the wrong idea about paganism.

It happens in other minority groups too. I've seen it in the LGBT community, where we're all expected to stop being flamboyant at Pride because now it's a family event covered on the 6pm news, where gay marriage has become the be-all end-all goal of the movement even though trans people can't get health care, where bisexuals and nonbinary people are told they're confusing and make us look bad.

What makes us look bad is not my blog post about Rainbow Brite, or the Lokean godspouses, or the person who eats their food offering in accordance with their understanding of piety. What makes us look bad is our own words. When we, as a community, worry more about the feelings of an outside observer than the members of our own community, we need to re-evaluate why we consider ourselves not just part of that community but the appointed judge of who else is good enough to take part.