Book 61: The Last Time I Wore a Dress by Daphne Scholinski

Title: The Last Time I Wore a Dress
Author: Daphne Scholinski with Jane Meredith Adams
Number of Pages: 211 pages
Book Number/Goal: 61/75 for 2009
My Rating: 5/5

Note: The author now goes by Dylan, but I will use Daphne and female pronouns for the purposes of talking about the book, because that's how the book is written.

Daphne's father beat her. Her mother abandoned her. She was sexually abused many times as a child. She essentially had to raise herself and her sister. When she unsurprisingly acted out, instead of anyone actually caring, she was locked up in a series of mental institutions for most of her teenage years.

Because she was tomboyish, the doctors focused on that, in some cases forcing her to wear makeup every day as part of her treatment. She suffered from depression the entire time she was locked up, was raped several times by male patients, and her parents barely kept in contact with her, yet the doctors continued to focus on the fact that she didn't act like their idea of what a girl should be. She was looked on with suspicion for not having sex with the male patients, as most of the other boys and girls paired up. She was punished for having a female best friend, as they thought the relationship was inappropriate.

This book is really, really depressing to read and basically will make you hate the medical establishment. This quote from the last chapter really sums it up best:

I still wonder why I wasn't treated for my depression, why no one noticed I'd been sexually abused, why the doctors didn't seem to believe that I'd come from a home with physical violence. Why the thing they cared about the most was whether I acted the part of a feminine young lady. The shame is that the effects of depression, sexual abuse, violence: all treatable. But where I stood on the feminine/masculine scale: unchangeable. It's who I am.

Oh, and as if that wasn't bad enough, go to the Amazon reviews and you'll find that all the negative reviews are filled with victim-blaming. Fun!

The book is a really good read, though, and I highly recommend it.

Nostalgic

Earlier I followed a link to a Fandom Wank thread from someone on my flist, and just out of curiosity, I took a look at the main page and was kind of sad to see that not only are all the posts on the front page rather stupid and boring, the comm is also really slow, with posts a couple times a week rather than several times a day.

I haven't been a fan of FW for a long time. I haven't been an active participant since...well, before Crystalwank, I think, and after the flood of new members that brought, I soon stopped reading the much comm at all. I didn't know the new people and with so many new people coming in, it seemed to change the tone of the comm.

But all this time I had assumed it was still going strong. The few times I have read stuff has been when people have linked some huge wank that all of fandom is talking about. And those were always busy, so I figured that was business as usual, but I guess it was just a lot of non-regulars like me who'd come over to comment.

It makes me kind of sad to think of the comm dying, even though I really didn't like it when I left. I found FW soon after it was founded, and followed it to Blurty after it was booted from LJ (IMO Blurty was totally its heyday) and then onto JournalFen. In the early days it was a small group and you knew everyone and it just felt like hanging out with friends. Most of my closest online friends are people I met back then, as is a good-sized chunk of my flist. I have a lot of fond memories of FW.

It makes me want to break out some old FW icons on Dreamwidth (I have no free slots on LJ).

Daily Happiness

1. Got another book read last night. If I can read two books a week from now until the end of the year, I could actually make 75. *chooses short books*

2. The Forbidden Archive is open! I'm pretty excited about this. Years ago when I was in Vampire Chronicles fandom, it was all on the downlow because Anne Rice hates fanfic and her lawyers were harrassing people. But there was one archive and it was kept kind of secret. Then the fandom died off even more, and the webmaster stopped maintaining it. But recently some people have revived it again, this time with a more modern interface that allows authors to upload their own stuff. They've already added some of the older fics and just created accounts for the authors, and will be continuing to add old stuff, but also allowing old and new authors to upload stuff that was never on the old archive. A few of my fics are on there already, and I'll be slowly adding more. I'm just happy that the site didn't die altogether.