Author’s note: ok, so this one is going to get a little weird. In response to attracting too many chuds and weirdos online, I’ve decided to adopt a pen name starting on, or about, January 1st, 2021.
You can find out more about what that pen name is, and why I’m employing it, by reading the short essay-length journal below – which I’ve re-posted from my Facebook Page. In the meantime however, in order to protect my intellectual property (as in, my articles) I need to publicly post about taking up this moniker, thereby producing a dated record that would be pretty useful if by some freak occurrence, someone who didn’t like me claimed to be the real author of all the pieces written under that pen name.
Now because this post is one part journal, one part update and only about a third analysis, I posted it on Facebook where all my personal journals go; I generally don’t like clogging up the main website here with a bunch of emo nonsense I hacked out at 5AM one day to explain why I would spend the next week in bed and be unable to write. As I’ve mentioned a few times however, Facebook isn’t exactly the safest place for an anarchist to store things they want to keep online these days, so I’m also going to have to copy the full text here because I trust my provider, and have multiple backups to preserve this site if someone should decide to take it down.
Please excuse the clutter, it’s a necessary precaution in light of my decision to adopt a nom de plume in the coming year. To check out the article on Facebook, you can click on the title header, or the image below; otherwise just scroll down and read it right here on ninaillingworth.com.
Personal Journal: A 3rd Century Kinda Girl
If I’m being completely honest, I don’t entirely know how to approach even writing this awkward post that’s sort of one part journal, one part update and one part social analysis. I decided a very long time ago that I had no desire to be pigeonholed as a “trans-issues” writer and while I’m certainly a feminist, the field of casual writing about gender dynamics in a patriarchal society has largely been colonized by bougie white McFeministsTM who have weaponized a very real societal bias against women to maintain an equally unfair class hierarchy, and in some cases, thinly-concealed white supremacy. Far be it from me to judge anyone else’s methods of resisting the patriarchy, but if it involves writing disingenuous articles about why Bernie Bros are the root of online misogyny from my palatial estates in Kenya, I’ll take a hard pass on that one.
Recently however, a series of incidents, interactions and unhinged behaviors directed at me by random men on the internet, have come together to make me realize that I have hit a crossroads in my life; as a woman, and as a writer. The god’s honest truth is that I am about to go completely Thelma and Louise on the next dude who talks to me like I’m a teenager, offers me unsolicited advice, or tries to neg me while pretending to compliment my writing. Any of you boys ever get your backside beat by a woman in mom jeans? Because at this rate, you’re about to; the only reason I’m not doing time for attempted murder right now is that I as of yet haven’t learned how to force choke a socially maladjusted incel through my monitor, and you can quote me on that one.
Now to be clear, I’m not talking about all men, or even as far as I can tell the majority of men; my daily working life doesn’t resemble an episode of Mad Men and as a fairly homely lady who is really just not a very sexual person online these days, I am mercifully spared the ritual of declining dick pics from strangers that is apparently so common to attractive, well-known women who create content (of any kind) on the internet. Hey, I’ll take it. I am however talking about a significant enough minority of men that not a day goes by online where I don’t have some sort of interaction with a self-absorbed, over-dogging morlock who has absolutely no idea how to relate to me properly because I’m reasonably confident and my name is Nina, instead of Nate. The plain truth of it is that I don’t even believe most of these folks are consciously sexist, but rather they are merely acting out coded behavior encouraged by a thoroughly atomized modern human experience, existing patriarchal or misogynist structures, and a profoundly poor general level of education in our society about how men can relate to women as everyday people, rather than as potential sexual partners.
Now, I know what a bunch of you are thinking as you read this, and I mean that quite literally. You’re thinking “she’s being oversensitive and reading gender bias where there is none because as a woman, she has in fact encountered some degree of discrimination.” I know because, and this is where I play my trump card, although I myself have never been a man, the pure accident of my birth forced me to “play one on television” for thirty-one years of my life. Which means, in a nutshell, that I have three decades worth of experience in terms of knowing how men treat other men, socially and professionally; including inside access to your cherished “guy talks” about women, sexuality and relationships that occur so frequently in male only spaces, like the locker room. Combine that with my twelve years (and counting) of living openly as a woman post-op, and you might say I have an uncommonly broad perspective on gendered social dynamics and the difference between respectful discussion about stimulating topics among the lads, and dominance games designed to establish power, control and superiority over every female in the herd.
I could spend several more pages detailing the various experiences in my life that have lead me to the point where I feel it necessary to name the beast, but the truth is that living each of these small moments, every single day, is exhausting enough in its own right and I simply don’t care to invest a lot of energy in trawling them up here to demonstrate the fundamental truths of my own lived experience to skeptics and yes, some percentage of bigots. Furthermore, I’m not even sure how much such an activity would really help me; once again my lived experience has made it clear to me that gendered coding in our society puts women complaining about sexist and patronizing behavior at a disadvantage socially. We’re whiners, or hysterical, or taking things too personally; whereas a man repudiating a general lack of respect towards his person is courageous, standing up for himself and “telling it like it is.” Almost every time I lose my temper with some brain-dead chud treating me like his fourteen-year old kid sister while we’re interacting online, some dude or another watching our conversation is thinking “she’s gone too far” and putting me in the “bad pile” of hysterical women he’s not going to listen to anymore – it’s a cycle as old as time itself, or at least as old as patriarchal societies.
In other words, I can’t win the argument in the long run, I don’t care to internalize the feelbads produced by this abusive behavior any longer, and I’m not committed enough to keep spending energy explaining to socially inept keyboard warriors why merely having a penis doesn’t give them standing to tell me how to write articles. Something has to change, and since I can’t seem to change how society behaves towards women, I’ve decided that I’m simply going to reduce how often random chuds online, identify me as a woman.
Now obviously, there’s really only so far I’m going to be able to go with this little social experiment; half the places I publish my work have my name somewhere in the title, including this Facebook Page. Furthermore, I didn’t go through the difficult process of transitioning so that all of my online friends could call me Mister – I’m quite attached to my she/her pronouns and even if I wanted to do so, forcing my associates to participate in an elaborate charade to ward off a couple forum trolls a day seems like an excessive social burden to place on the people around me. What I can do however, is stop signing my work as Nina Illingworth and force folks to do a little digging if they want to find out my articles were written by a woman.
Will this stop all of the annoying gendered social interactions online that are driving me crazy? Absolutely not. But given that my Twitter profile is already pretty gender neutral, I believe there’s a decent chance I can cut these enervating gender-biased interactions at least in half; particularly if I change my Twitter avatar to something male-coded. To this end I’ve decided to change my avatar to a picture of Zhuge Liang from the movie Red Cliff, effectively immediately and then starting on or about January 1st, 2021, I will begin signing all my work as “Kongming” which is Zhuge Liang’s style name. I may also change my screen name on Twitter but for now I’m still pretty interested in reminding people that we haven’t closed the migrant concentration camps just because Trump lost the election.
My choice of moniker here is both personal and purposeful; I am at heart a very big fan of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms story and its numerous fictional adaptations. Additionally, because Zhuge Liang is arguably the greatest military strategist in all of fiction (historical, or otherwise,) I think Kongming is the kind of clearly male-coded name that will help discourage over-dogging jackanapes from wasting my time with power games. Is that arrogant? Sure, but I can live with that perception if it cuts down on energy draining drama. Secondly, because it’s a famous style name from a non-Western culture, it should be apparent to folks that I’m using a pen name – I’d hate to write a bunch of things under the handle “John Smith” only to have new readers then mistake me for another writer really named “John Smith” or something similar. I should once again like to stress that this is merely a change in my pen name; I would very much prefer if my friends all still called me Nina online and there’s no need to play silly pretend games about who actually wrote my work. I’m not ultimately trying to deceive anyone with these changes, merely to screen out the most frustrating interactions in my day, driven by gender-biased arguments with the most insecure dudes online.
Although there is a small part of me that wants to keep fighting the good fight against casual gender-bias on the internet and in general scholarship, I’ve ultimately just come to feel that I’m neither particularly good at it, nor is it a particularly good use of my finite levels of energy. If signing my articles with a pen name cuts out just one such frustrating and even sometimes humiliating interaction per week, I’m willing to bet that will still make it significantly easier for me to keep writing, and more often. As such, please indulge my strange experiment and consider this written notice of the impending changes; thank you for your patience and understanding in advance.
PS – I’m aware that in the hustle and the bustle I missed last weekend’s video session and I’m actually in the middle of screening a very heady, fifty-five minute long production right now. I will publish a write up and link soon, and then we’ll do another one on Sunday like nothing is different. Unfortunately I jammed out two essays at the beginning of the week, and I’m still pretty deep in another two similar types of pieces, so I plain just forgot to watch a video worth sharing this past weekend. My apologies; keep your eyes peeled for a make up episode later today or early tomorrow.
• nina “Kongming” illingworth
Related
