#οἱ λίθοι κράξουσιν

[campgender]

Madeline D. Davis in “The Femme Tapes” by Joan Nestle, Madeline Davis, and Amber Hollibaugh (recorded 1982)

published in The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (1992), ed. Joan Nestle

but I did touch her manually and made her climax and that was the way she came. It was quite a different experience from the next woman I got involved with about four months later, who really was a stone butch. She put her hand up inside of me and she came! And then I thought, “There was something else happening here.”

And this was a woman whom I was not in love with. She was cute, a short chunky version of Beebo Brinker; they were all dark with blue eyes then! You know it’s been a type I have been after. I didn't find too many, but after a while my tastes expanded. They had to. But I still look down the street after a dark-haired, blue-eyed woman.

Anyway, this was a woman who was obviously crazy about my body — the second woman — and I got a whole other feeling suddenly. I mean the men wanted to fuck me, they liked me, but this was a woman who loved my body. I never really loved my body. I was comfortable with it. I knew where all its parts were and that it was functional. But I was always somewhat overweight. I never thought I was pretty, and to this day, you know, eight hundred people can say you're gorgeous and you're never going to believe it. But here was a woman who, when she touched me, trembled, and god — the world opened up.

[life-lollipop]

[Daily Devotional]

"I tell you," he replied, "if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out." (Luke 19:40, NLT)

καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς εἶπεν Λέγω ὑμῖν ἐὰν οὗτοι σιωπήσουσιν, οἱ λίθοι κράξουσιν.

This verse stands out to me today because it emphasizes the attitude of creatures, contrasting the Pharisees and the stones: which attitude more befits His triumphant entry.

[reedreadsgreek]

Luke 19:37-40

37 Ἐγγίζοντος δὲ αὐτοῦ* ἤδη πρὸς τῇ καταβάσει τοῦ Ὄρους τῶν Ἐλαιῶν* ἤρξαντο ἅπαν τὸ πλῆθος τῶν μαθητῶν χαίροντες αἰνεῖν τὸν θεὸν φωνῇ μεγάλῃ περὶ* πασῶν ὧν εἶδον δυνάμεων, 38 λέγοντες·* Εὐλογημένος ὁ ἐρχόμενος,* ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐν ὀνόματι κυρίου·* ἐν οὐρανῷ εἰρήνη* καὶ δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις. *39 καί τινες τῶν Φαρισαίων ἀπὸ τοῦ ὄχλου εἶπαν πρὸς αὐτόν· Διδάσκαλε,* ἐπιτίμησον τοῖς μαθηταῖς σου. 40 καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς εἶπεν· Λέγω ὑμῖν,  ἐὰν οὗτοι σιωπήσουσιν, οἱ λίθοι κράξουσιν.

My translation:

37 And as he was drawing near, already to the descent of the Mountain of Olives, all the multitude of disciples were beginning to praise God, rejoicing with a loud voice concerning all the mighty deeds which they saw, 38 saying, “Blessed is the one coming, The king, in the name of the Lord. In heaven peace, And glory in the highest.” 39 And some of the Pharisees from the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” 40 But answering, he said, “I say to you, if these ones are silent, the rocks will cry out.”

Notes:

The present participial phrase Ἐγγίζοντος αὐτοῦ is a genitive absolute, giving contemporaneous action to the main verb ἤρξαντο.

NIGTC says πρός with a dative is rare.

ἡ κατάβασις, “descent”, is from καταβαίνω, “I go down”. It is a hapax legomenon. EGGNT says it refers to the hillside or the road going down the mountain. Since verse 41 tells us that Jesus has not get caught a glimpse of the city at this point,  Jesus is probably at the summit of the mountain, the place where the road starts to go town to the city (NIV). The whole city would have been visible on the way down.  

The present χαίροντες is a participle of manner, modifying the present infinitive, αἰνεῖν: “began to praise God joyfully” (NASB; sim. NIV). ESV takes it as attendant circumstance, “began to rejoice and praise God”.

For περί, “about, concerning”, most translations have, “for”.

For ἡ δύναμις, literally, “a powerful thing”, NASB, NIV, and NLT have, “miracles”. ESV: “mighty works”.

λέγοντες (v. 38) is a participle of result modifying αἰνεῖν. The present communicates ongoing shouts of praise.

The perfect participle Εὐλογημένος is adjectival/predicate. εἵμι is assumed.

The present participle ἐρχόμενος is substantival. I would have expected the aorist participle ἐλθὼν; perhaps the present tense is futuristic. The phrase is a direct quotation of Psalm 118:26 (117:26 LXX), with the addition of ὁ βασιλεὺς. NIGTC says this Psalm was used commonly as a greeting to pilgrims. Some manuscripts have only, “The King”, others only, “The one coming”.

EGGNT notes that ἐν οὐρανῷ εἰρήνη (as opposed to ἑπὶ γῆς) is odd; it may refer to the peace which Jesus brings from heaven, the peace Jesus achieves as he is exalted to heaven, or is a part of the praise addressed to God (the God of glory and peace).

EGGNT says that ἀπὸ τοῦ ὄχλου (v. 39) could modify either τῶν Φαρισαίων (“Pharisees in the crowd”) or εἶπαν (“they said from [the vantage point of] the crowd”).

The aorist imperative ἐπιτίμησον indicates a rebuke for this instance only. The Pharisees are perhaps friendly to Jesus, but are perhaps afraid that such proclamations about a king (and a messianic king at that) could incite civil unrest, and thus invite military action from the Romans.

The participle ἀποκριθεὶς (v. 40) is pleonastic.

σιωπάω, “I keep silent”, occurs 10x in the NT. We might have expected a subjunctive after ἐὰν, but EGGNT says that a future is sometimes used. The difficult reading was smoothed to the aorist subjunctive σιωπήσωσιν in Byzantine texts.

Jesus may be referencing Habakkuk 2:11, although there βοάω is used instead of κράζω, and in Habakkuk the stones are crying out with condemnation about iniquity, not praise for God. NIGTC notes that the stones may be crying out against the disciples who would sin by keeping quiet. Or, it may be meant to anticipate verse 44, “not one stone will be left on another”, to foreshadow the destruction coming on Jerusalem due to iniquity.

[talmidimblogging]

Luke 19:40 Lexham Discourse Greek NT

“SENTENCE 40 καὶ ‹ ἀποκριθεὶς › εἶπεν SENTENCE “ ‹ Λέγω ὑμῖν › [CD ἐὰν οὗτοι σιωπήσουσιν CD] οἱ λίθοι κράξουσιν ””

https://ref.ly/r/ldgnt/Lk19.40 via the Logos Bible Android app.

[campgender]

Jacqueline looked confused. Then she laughed till tears streamed down her cheeks. “Honey,” she’d start, but she was laughing too hard to continue. “Honey. You can’t learn to fuck from reading Popular Mechanics. That isn’t what makes a butch a good lover.”

This was exactly what I needed to know! “Well, what does make a butch a good lover?” I asked, trying to sound like the answer didn’t mean all that much to me.

Her face softened. “That’s kinda hard to explain. I guess being a good lover means respecting a femme. It means listening to her body. And even if the sex gets a little rough, or whatever, that it’s what she wants too, and inside you’re still coming from a gentle place. Does that make sense?”

It did not. It was less information than I wanted. It turned out, however, to be the information I needed. It just took thinking about it for the rest of my life.

Jacqueline took the rubber cock from my hands. Had I been holding it all this time? She placed it carefully on my thigh. My body temperature rose. She began to touch it gently, like it was something really beautiful.

“You know, you could make a woman feel real good with this thing. Maybe better than she ever felt in her life.” She stopped stroking the dildo. “Or you could really hurt her, and remind her of all the ways she’s ever been hurt in her life. You got to think about that every time you strap this on. Then you’ll be a good lover.”

I waited, hoping there was more. There was not. Jackie got up and puttered around the kitchen. I went to bed. I tried to memorize every word that had been said to me before I fell asleep.

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (pg 28-29)

[campgender]

hooooly fuck

literally crying from reading what i consider one of the historical origins of anti pillow princess sentiment

even with things i have a decent understanding of, theory always breaks me open & brings me clarity in ways i’d given up on considering possible

why? why do they hate us so fucking bad? is so often the question & you decide it’s partially because they hate themselves & partially just doesn’t, won’t, can’t make sense

but the historical record lays it out so plainly!! if a woman is “too passive” during sex, she’s challenging your masculinity. this sex manual from 1946 says that’s her saying “All right, now let's see what you can do”

[campgender]

quotes on stone dynamics from a couple of different places in the chapter:

The butchfem erotic system did not consistently follow the gender divisions of the dominant society. The active or “masculine” partner was associated with the giving of sexual pleasure, a service usually assumed to be “feminine.” […] The unique sexual desire of the butch opened the pathway for the exploration and enjoyment of the fem’s sexual potential.

In the 1940s most butches—Black, white, and [Native]—were “aggressive” and did not allow their partners to “reciprocate” in lovemaking. (This was the language used for butch sexual behavior at that time. The terms “stone” and “untouchable” were not yet part of common usage.) Their satisfaction came from pleasing the fem. “Oh yeah. If I could give her satisfaction to the highest that gave me satisfaction. And her putting her arm around me and the necking back and all this, to a certain degree, it was beautiful” (D.J.)

As for the fem, she not only knew what would give her physical pleasure, but she also knew that she was not the receptacle for someone else’s gratification. Charlie remembers her pleasure: “I really didn’t do anything, just laid there and enjoyed it.”

from Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy & Madeline D. Davis (2nd ed, 2014; originally published 1994)

[campgender]

anyway i love you any & all forms of stone. i love you high femmes & stone butches, i love you stone femme tops & stone butch bottoms, i love you stonebutch4stonebutches & femme fag4dyke stone lovers & pillow princesses

i love you men who are stone, i love you women who are stone tops & want to fuck men, i love you transhet stone people, i love you stone aces, i love you people who only identify as stone

i love you people who are stone because of dysphoria & people who are stone because of trauma & people who are stone because they feel like it. i love you people who wish things were different & people who’d choose stone every time

i love you stones who’ve only encountered ur sexual boundaries as a strawman & i love you stones who’ve never witnessed ur kind of fucking be imagined at all. i love you stones whose existence has been deemed an ontological impossibility.

sexual boundaries aren’t restricted to certain sexuality & gender experiences, & whatever ur stone looks like it’s beautiful + lovable <3

[campgender]

wait do people know that certain influential ~1980s lesbian separatisms really pushed “mutual” sex as a requirement to be a good feminist? like “oh we aren’t like those dirty stone butch / high fems, we practice equality because we both touch each other’s junk.” i feel like i didn’t know that for several years & it would’ve made a big difference in understanding the roots of the rhetoric around me

[campgender]

“Stone Butch, Drag Butch, Baby Butch” by Joan Nestle

published in A Restricted Country (1987)

1.

New words swirl around us

and still I see you in the street

loafers, chinos, shades.

You dare to look too long

and I are turn your gaze,

feel the pull of old worlds

and then like a femme

drop my eyes.

But behind my broken look

you live

and walk deeper into me

as the distance grows between us.

Shame is the first betrayer.

2.

The birth of Lesbian feminism. New York. The old firehouse on Wooster Street. Wooden chairs pulled across the cobbled floor. Pretty young women form a circle to form a group called the Lesbian Liberation Committee. Two old-time Lesbians arrive, grey-haired, short DAs. They stand on the outskirts. I go to the bathroom on the floor below. Two of the young women stand in front of me. “Why do they have to look like men? I hope they don’t come back.” When I returned upstairs, the grey-haired women were gone. They never returned. Jean and Ginny told the world who we were and what we wanted. Books were written saying the bad old days were over. The national organizations started, the presses and newspapers began, and the grey-haired women receded further and further, as if they had blended into the walls.

Shame is the first betrayer.

3.

Stone butch, drag butch, baby butch

the litany of the unwanted.

I see your eyes smoking

behind the self-congratulations

of the vegetarians

the Goddess worshippers

the healers.

Your magic worked in other places

in church alcoves

in diner toilets

in moving cars

pants with sharp creases

shirts cuffed

hair slicked back

riding Brooklyn subways

at five in the morning

shades worn just right

for mystery, for protection.

Rigid, you walked the gauntlet of their sneers

Hey lezzie, hey queer

and even when it was the end of the line

you kept moving.

A strange witch,

my baby butch.

4.

Stone butch, drag butch, baby butch

leaned me back against the bathroom door

tuned for the intrusion, you sucked my breast.

Alert and wanting, we made love in a public place

because territory was limited.

You pushed my wetness out

only when cunning had won for us a place.

In a subway station toilet

I held your head between my thighs

heard the roar and thought it was

our secret rushing out.

5.

Stone butch, drag butch, baby butch

Sandy tells me of the time

she walked in Prospect Park

with her lover on her arm.

Forgetting they were freaks,

they let the bending trees

caress their day.

The men, outraged by Sandy’s pants

and Carol’s skirt,

attacked with chains.

The women fled,

past playgrounds

past the benches made for lovers.

Sandy, smiling, says

through all the years

they never hurt me,

but we both know better.

6.

A hot dark night on Eighth Street.

Held tight with love,

the butch yells up to a shadow on the wall

all she can see of her lady

who calls out

“I’m here baby”

and we all hear her.

A shrine for separated lovers,

the Women’s House of D.*

They tore it down

replaced it with a garden

but those voices still are there

the lasting blossoms of our surviving time.

Stone butch, drag butch, baby butch

I keep you deep within me

warning voices in a changing time.

Shame is the first betrayer.

*The Women’s House of Detention stood for many years on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village.

[campgender]

i know carly rae jepsen didn’t write “am i the only one who’s insatiable / waitin for someone who’s untouchable” for the stone4stones but like what if she did

[campgender]

is... is it ok to be stone without trauma??

short answer: absolutely hon!! you can develop & maintain whatever sexual boundaries you want forever 💖💖

long answer: people don’t have to conceptualize themselves this way if they don’t want to & i want to respect the perspectives + language individuals use for themselves, but in a political sense i believe everyone is sexually traumatized, because we’ve been raised in cultures with oppressive sexual ethics & expectations.

this is informed by Emily Joy Allison’s work on what she refers to (link) as “the sexualized violence of nonaffirming theology” — i consider purity culture & rape culture interdependent systems of sexual violence which widely produce what Allison conceptualizes as complex sexual trauma, ‘even’ in people without discrete experiences of specific trauma/violence (such as rape or assault).

i reflected on this concept a bit in a post last year (link):

stone doesn’t have to be an attempt to cobble together a new foundation atop sexual trauma but i do think all stones are, to some extent, sexually traumatized, because it is sexual harassment for a bunch of strangers to tell you what kind of sex you should have & how & with whom.

obviously not all stones have had our sexual practices directly invalidated by others, but most if not all of us have spent our lives being taught to have a certain kind of sex—from mainstream society, sex that prioritizes patriarchal power as represented by (in a system of enforced cishetero monogamy) the man’s pleasure over all else; in feminist & queer spaces, a reactive emphasis on egalitarian orgasms that ends up being oppressive as shit in its own ways:

not everyone can orgasm or wants to orgasm

not everyone wants to give other people orgasms

constructing orgasm as synonymous with pleasure is one of the major projects & requirements of rape culture, & contributes to the immense stigmatization of experiences categorized under PGAD + spontaneous orgasm

…& so on. furthermore, because i’m feeling particularly feisty today, i would go so far as to say that i & all stone victims/survivors need there to be stones without sexual trauma, or with complex sexual trauma that is illegible as such to society, or however else they define themselves (y’all define yourselves? an invitation without expectation), because if the legitimacy of my sexual boundaries is predicated on my victimhood/survivorship, then all society needs to do to invalidate my boundaries is convince me i wasn’t really assaulted, a project it’s been pursuing intensively since before i ever experienced assault.

i reject their movable goalposts, their game entirely; it is okay to be stone without trauma because it is okay to be stone. it is okay to be stone.

[campgender]

“I wanted to satisfy them [women], and I wanted to make love—I love to make love. I still say that’s the greatest thing in the world. And I don’t want them to touch me. It spoils the whole thing. … I am the way I am. I’m not doing this because I’m pretending. This is my way. And I figure that if a girl is attracted to me, she’s attracted to me because of what I am.”

“I experience something like that [an orgasm], but it’s not—I don’t know, it’s really not a physical thing. I’m not lacking anything, don’t want anything more. I can’t say that I’m never satisfied, maybe not quite to what they [fems] want.… Like I feel a great excitement and a great joy. But not like they say they get. … I don’t know how to explain. Like when they go off, like when it’s there, I am just so enthralled, I just …”

quotes from white stone butch “Sandy” as published in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy & Madeline D. Davis (1994)

[campgender]

this seems like the place to put this little manifesto, so enjoy.

I love being stone. I love being butch. I love not having expectations put upon me in my relationship, and how my stone affects my sexuality and gender. I love being a “woman” who doesn’t bottom, and who is rarely touched at all. I love being able to be comfortable when I’m having sex, without having to be constantly vigilant of having my boundaries pushed or crossed. I love how it doesn’t matter if I’m stone as a result of trauma. I love how I might have always been this, might have always been meant to be this. I love being able to demystify sex, being able to see it for what it is- just another fun thing to do with a person/people you trust. I love seeing my partner not doing anything, being a perfect pillow princess for me. I love going to bed feeling completely satisfied in spite of having not been touched at all. I love wearing the strap over my underwear. I love keeping my clothes on during sex. I love not having expectations put on me during sex!!!! because during sex I’m not a “woman” I’m a butch!!!!!!! I love that my partner knows that I’m happy, that this is exactly what I want. I love that we’ve completely thrown out the idea of reciprocal orgasms, or orgasms being the point of sex. I love that I can feel safe during sex!!! I love that being stone is what gives me that feeling of safety!!! I love knowing that there are butches out there just like me, and femmes on the flip side who are just like me too, except that you’re different. I love that we’re more alike than we’ll ever be different, even if people outside of the butch/femme dynamic will never get that. I love the identity of being stone, of being butch. I love having a community where that identity is understood.

omg i’m delighted to receive your (& anyone’s) stone manifesto!! this is absolutely lovely, i’m so happy for you + so grateful to be in community with you 💖💖

you’re so right that we [have the potential to] ‘demystify sex’ !!! shine a flashlight on the thing & show its screws. it is able to be taken apart; it was built, was made, & we can unmake it, reassemble it in our own images.

also, “I love seeing my partner not doing anything” made me cry. truly believe that every time someone openly adores their own & their partners’ boundaries, they (re)make such a thing possible in real time — the world tells us stone bottoms are selfish but real & insists stone tops don’t exist, so imo imagining + articulating stone top desire is one aspect of making stoneness (slash more broadly, sexual boundaries that are affirming + exciting + respected + adored) an option for people.

so much love & solidarity to you!! tysm for this 💖💖

[campgender]

feel like trying to be intentional about highlighting happy high fem moments always ends in me oversharing about my aftercare life but whatever:

i said hey ik you said i did fucking amazing & i really appreciate that but i am struggling with feeling like i couldn’t have done a good job because i didn’t do anything. & it said oh but you did such a good job letting me please you.

[campgender]

nsfw text

----

I’m an anorgasmic stone butch and I am kissing you so tenderly in appreciation for your posting demystifying orgasm/mutual orgasm and also in equal opposite solidarity

(this ask brought to you by the fact that I just spent 3 hours w a wand on full power before having like 20% of an orgasm and calling it a night)

omg hiii this means so much to me (& also made me blush lmao 😳💕), often stronger than the desire for explanation & validation of my own experiences is to understand, put simply, why the people i fuck are used to the people they fuck treating them like shit.

i have/had multiple partners who don’t come at all & even more on the spectrum of not orgasming easily/often, & the times people are surprised by me not shaming them for that, the memories of how some people disguised their experiences behind performances of normative ‘sexual function’ the first nights (or months) we fucked because of the ongoing shame inflicted upon them, never stops being heartbreaking to me, & i never want it to. i never want to fuck without thinking about it:

something joan nestle wrote and jaqueline said in stone butch blues about penetration in a culture of misogynistic violence, but a premise that i think it’s vital we extend to other angles as well (eg stone topping, anorgasmia, vaginismus). there are a lot of other violences wrought by sexual norms, some of which imo fems &/or bottoms underplay to de-emphasize our capacity for & history of perpetrating sexual violence in addition to experiencing it.

you’re so right about the equal-opposite solidarity, too, though — there’s a certain aspect that feels very intuitive, me who people hate for not giving enough of a fuck about making them come & others who people hate for not giving them the validation of coming for them. but i wasn’t expecting how underlying that seemingly simple connection is this web of the same patriarchal eugenic structure — and the countercultural responses to it which are often still harmful to / exclusive of people like us.

i’ve started a tag, the cult of reciprocity (after Michael Gordon’s “the cult of mutual orgasm”), to collect some of my & others’ previous posts as well as upcoming excerpts i think are relevant to queer discourses of reciprocity & egalitarianism… i’ve been telling my partners i am in full red string corkboard mode rn like i have fully contemplated 1) taking over the communal kitchen whiteboard 2) literally tacking things to my wall bc i am just like Finding Connections!! & i’m planning a few informal posts + very very tentatively potentially some sort of more formal publication submission to get into some of that in depth so it means a lot to me that you’ve been interested in the stuff i’ve been posting so far!!

thank you so much❣️💋