About This Blog

About This Blog

The title of this blog is Fugitivus. The Romans would brand this word, usually shortened to FUG, on the foreheads of slaves who had run away from their masters. I can’t think of a better collection of personal qualities than those that would exist in a slave who has run from their master. The term “fugitivus” has personal meaning to me; I ran away from an abusive home as a child, and I left an abusive marriage as an adult. Since then, there have been various smaller escapes; from friends who can’t cope with their own pain or my freedom from abuse, from ingrained concepts of worthlessness and self-hate, from the idea of a future I never really wanted, from a country whose ideology is as abusive as anything my husband or family could dish out. I view my life as one long jailbreak, day by day attempting to shed one chain or another, until eventually, inevitably, I shed the concept of fugitivus as well. Because who wants to be a fugitive all their lives?

My username is Harriet Jacobs, an homage to the author of an autobiography of a life in and escape from slavery. Harriet Jacobs was a helluva woman, and I don’t mean to insinuate that I have experienced a tenth of what she did, or have a tenth of the steel trap balls. But she’s worth admiring, as a slave who ran away from her master, as a woman who escaped sexual exploitation, who fought even being purchased by friends who would free her, because that would be admitting her life was a good to be bought and sold. I’m not trying to build up a comparison, even metaphorically. I’m just trying to tell you that Harriet Jacobs is the shit.

About myself: I’m a mid-twenties white girl living in the Midwest. I work at a non-profit that assists families and deals with a lot of racial politics.

I’ve had a fucked-up life, and I wanted a space to talk where the fucked-up people who did the fucked-up things couldn’t find me and be creepy.

I am a firm believer in the idea of information and communication, and through my experiences, I tend to think the majority of fucked-up things continue to happen unabated because nobody wants to talk about them. The desire to cover our ears and eyes and mouth is just another master I’m trying to escape.

If you want to contact me, you can leave a comment on my blog, or email me at jacobs.harriet at gmail.

Commenting Policy

I guess it’s time for this.

This is a personal blog. It’s in the public sphere, which means anybody can read it. But since it is my personal blog, and I am Lord God King of it, nobody has the right to publicly comment. But because I am interested in hearing other people’s opinions/stories/ideas, 99% of comments go through.

Every now and again, I write a blog post about rape, with the general theme that rape is bad. These posts sometimes resonate with a lot of people — because a lot of people have been raped, or know somebody who has, or know a rapist — and then my blog gets popular for a week. 99% of the comments are good stuff. 1% are “Counterpoint: Rape good? Subpoint: Rape you!” and/or “Rape fantasy? LET ME SHOW YOU IT.” That shit doesn’t go through.

I don’t have an overarching blog comment policy. I only let through what I feel comfortable letting through, so if you make me personally uncomfortable, you get the boot. I don’t always respond to what I let through, which is nothing personal, I just think some stuff stands on its own without my chiming in.

The 1% of what I don’t let through is usually going to be trolls. But every now and again, I will get a comment that may be a troll, or may be somebody who is at the very very beginning of a long journey of realizing that women are human beings with civil rights, and is just beginning to question concepts like “Rape, good?” I don’t consider it my job to educate or help those people, because adults are capable of (and responsible for) educating themselves.

But because 99% of my blog comments on the popular days are from people who have experienced rape and are trying to make sense of it, I want this to remain a safe space for them. That means a commenter who is honestly beginning the journey of undoing their sexism and racism, but is so early in their journey that they are still pondering things such as: “Is it really rape if she didn’t scream?” or “Does racism really exist anymore?”, isn’t going to get their comment approved. Those aren’t questions to be asking victims — victims have no special hold on the knowledge needed to understand racism and sexism (it’s really out there for the observing/taking), and no special responsibility to dispense it to others. Those are questions to ask yourself, perhaps with the aid of shutting up a lot, and listening.

I don’t want this to be a space where victims have to hear the same old shit they hear everywhere else, and have to defend themselves against, or explain. I do want this to be a space where survivors, if they choose, can share their stories, and sometimes teach me a new thing or two.

But above all, this is a personal blog. So sometimes my posts are just going to be about how much I love the Fensler GI JOE PSAs, and if you hate them, your comment is so getting the boot.

More Self-Referential Blathering, Brought About By a Sudden and Nerve-Wracking Spike in Popularity

Up until about two weeks ago, I was lucky to get thirty hits a day. Oh, you know, sometimes I’d be all, “But aren’t I way, way cooler than 30 hits a day?” But most of the time, my unknown little corner of the internet was just the way I wanted it. I started this blog because I wanted a place to write, and anything else that came with that – readership, comments, emails, trolls – was just bonus bullshit to slog through. Not that positive readership and comments and emails are intolerable things, but I decided early on that if I were to let myself interact with and suck up the good, I would be extra vulnerable to the bad. I wanted my blog to stay as personal as I could make it, as All About Me as I could make it, writing posts that amused me and no one else, interacting with the imaginary people of the internet only when it served my personal whims, and never having to consider an audience.

Now that people are reading (hi, people, you are making me nervous, no offense, it’s me, not you), I’m constantly fighting the urge to set down Rules and Structure to Let Everybody Know my internal thoughts about how this blog should work. I feel like that’s the death knell of a personal blog, and that’s really all I want this blog to be.

I’ve been trying to think of a non-geek-related way to explain this, but I’m failing, so okay, let’s do this. I like to role-play. Like, D&D. And there is this whole esoteric world of role-playing game theory out there (yes, really). I’d say about 80% of RPG game theory is based not in the structure needed to create an interesting, innovative, and flexible experience (because that is not actually what role-playing is about, dontchaknow), but instead in the intensely constrictive structure needed to keep assholes from being assholes. Because there is an assumption (not unrealistic) that you are going to be playing with a bunch of slobbering stinkfreaks, and will therefore need an impartial and authoritative third party to refer to when shutting down the stinkfest (TEH RULE BOOK SEZ TO WASH YER BUTT GUYS ALSO PLEASE STOP ROLLING UP SEXUAL ENCOUNTERS WITH MY TABLE). Because, naturally, slobbering stinkfreaks got that way because they don’t respond appropriately to social boundaries and conversation, so simply and assertively telling them that you, personally, would like it if they washed their butt and stopped humping your table has no effect. If they could respond to that sort of direct behavior modification, they wouldn’t be slobbering stinkbutts tablefucks in the first place.

So there’s this whole body of work that is all based entirely upon the premise that you will be surrounded by people who are intolerable and offensive and need to create a way to have fun with them anyway. Basically, game theory is a resource-intensive middleman that assumes you will never have the tenacity or brilliant idea to refuse to play with stinkfreaks in the first place.

This applies to a lot more than RPG game theory, obviously. I know, in the past, I have come up with elaborate theories on what my moral understanding of certain issues are, and things you “just don’t do,” and ways that are and aren’t appropriate to react, and a whole distinct body of Ms. Mannerisms that are all based on the assumption that I can’t just tell shitbuckets to get out of my sphere, and enact a sphere-removal policy when they don’t. In fact, I can do this, at least to some extent, in every situation in my life. And that also applies to my blog.

So, this is my problem with Rules and Structure. I have a commenting policy that is enormously vague right now, and even within that vague policy, I have frequently run up against weirdness that makes me want to enact policy subpoints. Such as: Don’t post shit that creeps me out, subpoint A: also don’t post shit that isn’t exactly creepy but is kind of patently dumb even if it’s not really offensive in any given way and subpoint B: I don’t appreciate your spelling or paragraph breaks, fucknugget. It could go on forever, until my blog just becomes a self-referential navel upon which I demand you imperiously gaze.

What all this means is, well, I’m not sure what I meant to say originally, to be honest, because I got more interested in new swear words halfway through. Which is, actually, kind of the point. This is still my personal blog, which means it exists primarily for my own amusement at the word shitbucket. Despite all the new readership, I still plan to pretend all of you are imaginary. Because anything else will require me considering a multitude of factors when doing my thang, and that is odious to me. A lot of you imaginary people seem good-natured and fun, but I probably still won’t be chatting with you much, not because you have failed to capture my attention, but because I like it best when comments stand on their own, even and especially when they are comments that are asking a question. I love it when a direct statement, like “I’d like your opinion on this issue,” turns into an echoing statement of self-doubt when it hangs unanswered in the ether, the unstated response becoming an introspective “Why do I want other people’s opinions?”

So if I don’t approve your comment, and you email me to ask why, I’m going to leave that email sitting there, repeating its question rhetorically in the darkness, until you supply your own answer, because I am not the answer bucket, dude.

And if I refrain from posting for weeks because I am really really into re-reading The Vampire Diaries right now, and I don’t respond to your email asking when I might post again, it’s because you have not engaged my interests (could Elena ever really love Damon?), so I’ve got no need to engage yours (what can we diagnose about rape culture and masculinism based in the aggressive violence of Damon and the seemingly benign possessiveness of Stefan, both of which inevitably lead to the death of women?)

And if I write something like this, which is trying way too hard to be clever, it means I’m disappointing myself and might disappear for another while until I feel less fucking pretentious on my blog that is supposed to be fun.