Armanandra

The summer I turned fourteen, I visited my sister at college. She introduced me to someone who didn't like his real name and I called him Alex.

I've recently realized my sister was probably intentionally throwing me under a bus and setting me up to socially isolate her then boyfriend from his social network. 

I thought my sister was a nice person. I knew her as the person who baked all our Christmas goodies from the time she was twelve, the person who read to me at bedtime sometimes until she was hoarse, the person who seemed to singlehandedly practically run the high school newspaper, spending long hours in the library on base where I laid on the floor in the children's room reading every Dr. Seuss book in existence until it was time to go.

Looking back on it, I did a LOT of making excuses for her shitty behavior over the years and assumed she wasn't socially savvy and assumed she made a mistake and assumed something got overlooked or miscommunicated because I had fond childhood memories of her and don't confuse me with the facts.

So I met this guy and was falling in love for the first time because we had interests in common and I enjoyed his company and enjoyed talking with him. We read books together and talked for hours and I had always been one of the top students in school getting mocked and called Einstein as a nasty dig from hateful, jealous people and I never had that before, someone I could talk with like that.

I had read a book recently called Spawn of the Winds. I believe it is a third generation Lovecraft mythos story. I've also read some original works by Lovecraft. The grandchildren of his stories tend to be more my cup of tea, I guess.

Armandra is a demigoddess in the book, half human and fathered by Ithaqua, the wind walker.

I've tried to research this and can't come up with anything conclusive. In my teens, I understood Ithaqua to be a Native American concept adopted by Lovecraft and something like bringer of the winter storms. Not a nice guy but not evil either.

Recent attempts to research it have brought up information suggesting he was a truly evil concept of people doing things like committing cannibalism to survive famine. And I don't know how to explain or defend my impression as a teen that Ithaqua wasn't a nice guy but was kind of cool and not just bad, bad and all kinds of bad.

I liked the character Armandra. I was doing a lot of reading looking for female role models and for whatever reason I liked this character a whole lot.

I added a syllable to the name and Armanandra became my private nickname when I was alone with a man whose nickname was Alex while we lived in a Fantasyland better world than the reality of our lives.

And then my sister sprung her planned sabotage and my parents forbade me from seeing Alex ever again or even saying goodbye. 

My brother, who had raped me, had been at the family meeting behind my back where this decision was made. I fixated on that and it messed up my mind for years WORSE than being molested by him had done and that fact helped prevent me from going "Uh, wait a minute. My sister, his so-called friend who introduced us and fostered the relationship, was also at that meeting. What is wrong with this picture??" for decades.

At age seventeen, I became a girl gamer. My first DND character was a Red Sonja like fighter mage that I named Armanandra without telling any of my gaming buddies where that name came from and what it meant to me.

I was typically the only girl there and multiple men and boys looked out for me and protected me, were my friends -- the most genuine friends I've ever had -- and a remarkable thing happened. I got to role play a lot of my hurt and anger as a lone girl in a mostly male group playing a fighter mage with long red hair who was obviously patterned on a fictional character who became a woman fighter because her parents were murdered and she was gang raped by their murderers.

Role playing is psychologically powerful and gets used by professional therapists sparingly for therapeutic purposes.

At some point, I retired the character because playing the role required me to put back on the mantle of angry man-hating bitch I had worked hard to successfully put down.

Of all the comics I read about Red Sonja and Conan, the one that made the biggest impression on me is one where Conan defeats Red Sonja in battle and based on that, she's willing to sleep with him and he declines to spend the night with her.

She has a warped policy that she won't have sex with a man unless he defeats her in battle and Conan is a giant man whore who ends a lot of comics in bed with some random chick he'll never see again and he decides this isn't the kind of sexual encounter he wants.

I was a kid when I read that. I played a Red Sonja like character in DND but made the conscious decision to NOT have any amazingly fucked up personal policies like "Because I've been raped, I won't ever agree to consenting sex with any man ever and the only way to get into my bed is some defacto TAKE me against my will thing."

I used to do a lot of reading on sexual topics and personal anecdotes and etc. From what I gather, women who have been raped routinely do some form of the following:

1. Demand that men they know be PERFECT and if you're not perfect you're obviously an evil asshole exactly like their rapist.

2. Try to be physically unattractive to try to protect themselves from ever again being raped only to find this doesn't really accomplish their goal of security and instead had other negative social consequences.

3. Operate on a premise that the best defense is a good offense and run around being offensive as hell especially to men.

I didn't expect my male friends or lovers to be perfect. They weren't fried and damned to hell for making mistakes and doing normal things men do that sometimes weren't comfortable for me as someone with serious baggage.

I've spent a lifetime analyzing the hell out of clothes and appearance and trying to figure out how to be socially acceptable in appearance and feel good about myself without dressing like a whore while becoming steadily more aware that most cultures basically see "socially acceptable and attractive attire for a woman" and "whore" as synonymous. We mostly don't have a concept of looking good and being respectable as a woman because respect for women is nearly non-existent in this world.

I've worked at finding other ways to protect myself while simultaneously working at being diplomatic and building bridges and learning to talk to men and respect them in a world where men get a lot of bullshit from women who want to act like any man wanting sex at all makes him a bad person and not promoting or paying women is entirely about being sexist pigs and couldn't possibly have any valid basis like "Honey, you can't do the job and don't even really understand what I need done here. That shit you got As in at school isn't HALF of what I need you to know about life, the universe and everything."

I still can't make my life work. But if there is some secret sauce for something about me you envy because you feel your life is even worse than mine, that's probably it right there in a nutshell.