In the Freak Revolution Manifesto, we talk about diversifying your monkeysphere as a way to change the world. In the manifesto, we’re talking about getting to know a diverse group of people.

Today, we’re talking about doing the exact same thing with imaginary people instead of real people.

Produce Imaginary Lesbians

If you’re an artist (author, screenwriter, painter, poet, whatever), create art that diversifies others’ monkeyspheres. Create art that broadens the mind. Create art that helps people connect with those who appear different, unfamiliar, or freaky.

Consume Imaginary Lesbians

Even if you didn’t have any lesbian friends, you might still have some lesbians in your monkeysphere from watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or even The L Word.

Can you think of books, movies, or TV shows that portray other types of freaks as actual human beings that you can relate to and empathize with? Bisexuals? Poly people? Transsexuals? Homeschoolers? Raw foodists? Pagans? Muslims?

Consume more of those. Stretch your boundaries a little. Learn about people who you’re not already comfortable and familiar with. It can be fiction or nonfiction — reading someone’s autobiography can certainly pull them into your monkeysphere.

Freak Revolution Book Club

What are your recommendations for monkeysphere-diversifying books (or any other kind of art), and why?

How about reading a book that someone else recommends?

Our new friend Tracy of Fiercely Loved wrote a blog post about how she’s expanding her monkeysphere and her concept of God by exposing herself to people who aren’t like her, listening with an open heart, and seeing the Divine in each of them.

Sounds pretty darn connection paradigm, right? Pretty darn freak-revolutionary? Most definitely. It touched both of us very deeply.

Some of the phrasing she used, however, triggered one of Kyeli’s landmines, which was planted there long ago by some bad experiences with Christianity. The two of us had a conversation about what came up for Kyeli when she read Tracy’s post, and about our different concepts of the Divine.

We recorded it, asked Tracy’s permission to share it with y’all (which she graciously granted), and are posting it here with all its beauty and warts for you to hear. Here goes. *deep breath*

Kyeli and Pace have an emotional conversation about Christians, pagans, and different facets of the Divine. (12:41)

Favorite quote: “It’s like putting funny glasses with a nose and moustache on the face of God. That doesn’t make it Groucho Marx; it’s still God!”

Welcome to Revolutionary Tuesdays!

While Kyeli is doing Freaky Thursdays, Pace will be doing Revolutionary Tuesdays, where we talk about revolutionary ideas that can change the world.

Today’s idea is the monkeysphere. In this episode, Pace rants and raves about how our brains are wired to connect with others. “Pen pals… from the Stone Age?”

Sources:

A few months ago, Pace and I joined Toastmasters. We quickly realized that, though they are an awesome group of people, most if not all of them are pretty far outside the usual circles we run in. This caused me a huge lot of worry and stress – I’ve been hurt by similar situations quite often in the past (I’ve had groups of friends find out something about me and kick me out), so finding myself here once again was frightening.

I agonized over my Icebreaker (that’s the first speech most newbie TM’s give) for many weeks. What could I say that would help them get to know me that wouldn’t include all the things I felt we didn’t have in common? Indeed, that we had anti-in common?

I decided to give my speech on motherhood. I talked about my pregnancy, from the day I found out about it to the day he arrived – all the joys and fears and cravings and moodswings therein. Most of the people in our group are parents themselves, so it was a theme nearly everyone could relate to.

Once I’d given that speech, everyone in the group had at least one thing they could relate to me with. We had at least one thing in common. And you know what? That made it far easier to talk about the ways in which we don’t relate. It made me a person to them, a compatriot, instead of that freaky lesbian girl with the tattoos and piercings.

There’s this thing, the monkeysphere, which affects how many people can be real to us at any one time. All primates have this, thus the terminology. If we’re not inside someone’s monkeysphere, we’re not real to that person. This is how wars can happen – those people doing all the dying aren’t real people to us. They’re too far away, too different, too unreal to matter. That’s how we can take rights away from whole groups of people. It’s the reason behind a lot of the atrocious behavior we see. Pace likes to ramble on about it for hours and Megan loves to listen to it all, but I’ll leave it at that for now.

What I’m getting at is, if you feel like an outsider, find some common ground. Find a way to relate to the people around you – something you’ve all done, something you all like, something you all hate, even. Talk about that. Make yourself a real person to them.

Then you can be as freaky as you want. Ha!

I think that openness is awesome, at least for me.

By openness, I mean sharing a lot of information about myself publicly. For instance, making a lot of personal LJ posts public instead of friends-locked. Being out about all those wacky things I have the opportunity to be out about. That sort of thing. Here are the three big reasons I think openness is so awesome.

Being open can help others. By sharing enough of myself that I feel like a real person to those who read me or know of me, I enter many people’s monkeyspheres. Just by living my life and sharing it openly, I become an example that it’s possible to be X (X = bi | poly | pagan | trans | B | interdependent) and be a real, living, breathing person with feelings and hopes and desires just like you. And furthermore, that it’s possible to be all these things and live a happy life — a life that’s more like yours than you might expect. And if people do include me in their monkeyspheres, a whole lot of good can come of it. More understanding of what it means to be X, more compassion toward X’s as people rather than objectified freaks, more recognition that there are X’s living in harmony with others in this society, etc, etc, etc.

Openness makes me invulnerable to a whole lot of potentially hurtful things — various flavours of fear and shame. Just imagine how you would feel if some of your secret or private things were discovered. Betrayed? Violated? Hurt? The degree to which one is open is the degree to which one is immune from these sorts of attacks. I don’t need to live in fear of people finding out any of my secrets, because I’ve already shared all of them publicly. And when I dig deep into my motivation for wanting to keep something hidden, it almost always bottoms out in fear or shame. I feel ashamed of being a certain way, I feel fear that others will shame me for being something unacceptable to them, I feel fear that others will think I’m crazy or unhealthy if they know the truth. I’ve made a sacred promise to not let fear rule my life, and shame is just another kind of fear. So I refuse. I refuse to hide things out of shame or fear.

I’m lucky enough to be in a position where I don’t have any reasonable fears that are big enough to compromise on. For instance, if we feared that Dru was vulnerable to being taken away from us, we might compromise. If I feared that I might lose my job, we might compromise. But luckily, we’re not in those situations, so I choose to take full advantage of my opportunities to be open.

I think society’s current concept of privacy is deprecated. Technology continues to develop, more and more people are trading more and more of their privacy for more and more convenience (e.g. using credit cards instead of cash), and more and more data is becoming more and more trackable. As Kate reminded me, this tide isn’t inexorable; it’s possible to fight against it. But it feels inexorable to me. I think that the way we think of privacy today will be outmoded and old-fashioned in just one generation. The paradigm shift is already starting. Kids and teenagers today have vastly different concepts of privacy than their parents did. And when those kids become adults, not too long from now, their new attitude toward openness is going to become the norm. It’ll be easy to dig up personal information about almost anyone, and when that becomes the norm, many forms of privacy are going to stop being such a big deal. People can finally stop being ashamed of huge portions of their lives, because when everyone starts openly sharing those parts of their lives, it becomes okay; it becomes socially acceptable to be all of who you are. I think that’s awesome and beautiful, and I want to be part of that. I want to ride the wave; I don’t want to be left behind as an old fogey clinging to the old paradigm.

I also think that there are scary political concerns — it’s important to make sure that this upcoming lack of privacy can be shared by all (e.g. Google), rather than the powerful spying on the powerless (e.g. wiretapping, subpoenas to access harvested data). But I don’t want to get into that here.

Hooray for openness! (: