#And yes this is why you still need feminism in the year 2023.

[parasite-of-sentience]

The controversy over Limbus Company is exactly what I mean when westerners can't just assume that the political landscape something came out of is remotely as safe and open as say America's just because it's queer coded.

That is an awful decision to make over accusations that your artist might be a feminist.

[nothing0fnothing]

"Radical feminism is terf feminism. We all know what you mean when you tag #radfem on your man hating posts." - literally people who have no idea what radical feminism is, and I can't even blame them because terfs ruin everything for everyone.

Radical feminism is the belief that in order to have a truly equal sociey, old systems that uphold inequality need to be torn down and radically rebuilt anew. (Yes a truly gender equitable society includes trans people, why tf wouldn't it?) Feminists in the 70s beleived it and 50 years later its still true, we cannot create equality within an unfair system. We can patch the cracks to try to make it more equal than it was, but after 50 years of patching cracks we know better than ever that the reason people are still disenfranchised in 2023 is because they live in a society that was not created to fairly treat them.

Society will not be truly equal until we create a system that is. That is the core belief of all radical feminism.

Literally no part of that ideology requires gender essentialism to work. Actually gender essential ideology completely opposes radical feminism at its core and combining the two is pretty fucking braindead.

I mean, you're telling me that you beleive that terfs believe gender equality must be predicated by a society that has completely, radically changed every antiquated system and structure but the structure that needs to stay exactly the same as it was in the 1900s and never adapt into modernity or improve at all is the sociological understanding of gender itself? That's crazy. So crazy I'd argue that, No they don't beleive that.

Terfs beleive trans people are icky and gross but know "icky and gross" is not a valid argument, so they stick "feminist" in front of their weird cis only gender ideology thinking it gives it some validity. It doesn't. Terfs, real radfems see through you and the entire feminist community hate you and you know why.

Truly, terfs aren't actually feminists. They're bigots who identify as feminists. They want to be in progressive spaces because as women (and weirdly a lot of them are lesbians but thats a topic for another day) their views will not be heard in conservative ones, but that doesn't mean they belong here. Their circa 1910 inspired gender theory doesn't belong in any progressive, feminist space today, and they know it because on every lefist space they land in they're torn apart and on every Joe Rogan esque, Fox News inspired platform they thrive.

They don't like being called sugar tits on the street or being hit on by their boss, and they think that that makes them feminists, but the truth is the only change they want to see in the existing power structures is change that will only help them. They want a society that supports only cis women. Primarily the white, straight and wealthy women who are happy to conform to bioessentialist gender ideology and uphold patriarchal values, so long as they can work a 9 to 5 and call it #girlbossing at the same time.

They don't actually want to see old structures of power and inequality brought down and radically rebuilt anew. They don't care about most women and they're not radical feminists. They're feminist identified bigots, so I call them FIBs, because even their feminism is a lie.

[cosmi-ccraft]

If you are gay or a black person, SNW slaps you in the face.

I read your message about SNW. To be honest as a minority who lives and breathe for pop culture and star trek, SNW has left me scared. It is going to take time to heal.

In the 1960s we saw all these characters Spock, Uhura, Kirk, Chapel,Pike, Scotty. Regardless of what you thought about gay couples, if you believed in tolerance Spirk gave you hope from watching Star Trek in the 1960s.

The Spirk pairing is the grand dad of slash. If you did not like slash and wanted to pair spock with a girl. Uhura>>>>>>>>>Chapel. Finally, There was a black girl in the 1960s who people were willing to pair with Spock or Kirk over any other girl. A black girl who was not a maid or a slave on TV, but a black female character that was shown to be the beauty and the brains . This was groundbreaking. Still is.

We did not need the JJ Verse films to push a spock/uhura romance, we can just compare the Spock/Chapel and Spock/Uhura scene from TOS to realise Uhura was the better female character to pair Spock with, if you did not se as gay for Kirk.

This was in the 60s when gay marriages or even interracial relationship were still illegal, frowned upon. Yet Trek chose to be progressive in the 60s by floating the idea of a gay and interracial pairing that fans can play with.

Fast forward 2023, we are now backwards to the 1950s were it is about worshiping the hot blonde woman that society has been doing for hundred of years. A woman who Spock already rejected in the 1960s. The woman Spock would never have been with even if he had the chance. the woman that was not even a big part of spock's life like the main crew he still carried photos off till his death.

I am a minority,a person of colour. I knew how important Uhura meant to women of colour and why she was the lead female in TOS and all the guys liked and respected her for her beauty and brains. Watching SNW were Chapel hugs all the spotlight.

SNW took a lot of Uhura's traits from TOS and gave it to Chapel. Did this writers not see how racist this is? Since when is Chapel, hot? can fight Klingon and Gorns? She is meant to even be a nurse. In TOS, Uhura not Chapel used to be the hot girl who could also do action and combat scenes when necessary.

SNW claims it is progressive but all what the show has done is take a lot from the black girl (Uhura) and the potential gay guy(Kirk) and merged their traits into SNW Chapel, all to push the spock/chapel thing that fans and writers already rejected in the 60s.

I feel a lot of black fans, especially black female star trek fans who watch SNW are going to be traumatised- because again, we are seeing society and hollywood still pushing the narrative that the hot blonde woman will always win, always get the guy, always be the status quo.

In the 1960s TOS Uhura challenged this narrative as not necessarily the truth. This is the reason she was far more popular as a character than Chapel. Nearly 60s years later SNW has told us ....yes, that is the truth. the hot blonde women still wins the war, you women of colour only win battles.

As a trek fan who came to respect the spirk pairing and the spuhura paring because they did not represent the status quo-as both pairing been a gay and interracial couple. I am not sure I can ever look at TOS the same again, knowing how the prequel has re-written the narrative. spock should not even be paired with Uhura in SNW either but please anyone but Chapel.

I am sorry but the spock/chapel pairing is an assault on gay and interracial couples

This is all so correct for how I've been viewing the show so far. It feels like they took all of the traits that men are comfortable seeing in women and divided them up among a mostly female crew and said "we did it guys! #feminism!"

It's such a safe and wholesome show that's incredibly conservative in how it's portraying the Enterprise. That's not my ship! My TOS Enterprise was radical and futuristic because the portrayal of its progress was so unbelievably otherworldly. But humanizing the humans alongside Spock, the writers have brought us back to the stone age instead of showing us the wonder and amazement of progress.

Anon, you and I are mindmelding right now and I'm loving what I'm seeing. And please! If anyone wants to message me about their personal experiences as PoC I absolutely want to hear what you have to say. I'm white and queer wasn't sure how much of what I was feeling translated into the PoC experience so please share your thoughts and feelings!!

[illionoisprelawland-blog]

Confusion Surrounding Sexual Assault On A College Campus

By Elena Vara, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Class of 2023

December 4, 2020

College is a place designed to give students a space to learn and grow. It gives young adults the space to learn independence while still being in a controlled space. Even with this structure in place there are situations that fall through the cracks. In recent years more and more attention has been drawn to sexual violence on college campuses across the nation. This attention has come from protests around the country asking for consequences for their attackers. Many college students turn to their university when they face a violent act on their campus. It is fairly easy to find the words to define a robbery or a carjacking, but the language used to define sexual assault is not easily provided or easy to share for many people. This brings the question of what is considered sexual violence and how should college campuses address reports of sexual violence when it is brought to their attention. Is a university qualified to respond to and decide the punishment for sexual violence?

For many women, the definition of sexual violence is very confusing and for many carry taboos that are hard to work through. According to the AAUP, “Between 20 and 25 percent of college women and 4 percent of college men report having been sexually assaulted during their college years.”[1]The definition of sexual assault is very subjective and debated by many feminist academics for years. This statistic has been questioned by people like Kate Roiphe who say that if that many women have been sexually assaulted; she would’ve heard about it through her friends[2]. Others like Heather MacDonald claim that this crisis is a way for what she calls “radical feminism” to fall into the category of “vulnerable female victimhood.”[3] According to MacDonald, the act of rape has to be explicitly violent, to the extent of the perpetrator breaking in to the victim’s home and gun being held against them.[4]Both MacDonald and Roiphe have criticized the University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss and her definition of rape when she asked young girls about their sexual experiences; from which she then decided if the circumstances constituted as rape, even if the women themselves did not classify their experience as rape. With Koss’s definition, the 1 In 4 statistic is true.[5]

For many women, these two opposing viewpoints leaves them confused as to how they should define their own experiences. Luckily, many women have not been held at gun point while forced to have sex, but many women have been forced into situations that they no longer feel comfortable with or no longer have control in. Even without a gun to their head, these women can still feel violated, but they question if it is enough to report as rape. According to the AAUP, “As we have noted, the widely accepted estimate is that fewer than 5 percent of completed and attempted sexual assaults on college students are brought to the attention of campus authorities or law enforcement.”[6]When Mary Gaitskill describes her personal experience of being raped in On Not Being a Victim, she shows why many women do not know how to respond and why it is so often underreported “…I didn't know what to do in a situation where no rules obtained and that required me to speak up on my own behalf. I had never been taught that my behalf mattered. And so I felt helpless, even victimized, without really knowing why”[7] In her case, she did not fight her attacker, but she still was unwilling and felt violated while it was happening.

This ambiguity of a situation is why rape culture continues to be seen especially on college campuses. Roiphe patronizes women by saying “The idea that only an explicit yes means yes proposes that, like children, women have trouble communicating what they want.” [8] She says this without considering the kinds of backlash women can receive by saying no. In 2019 a young 19-year-old student, Ruth George, was raped and murdered on the University of Illinois Chicago campus while walking to her car because she ignored catcalls.[9] Women live in fear of the possibility of a man turning violent because of how she reacts, or doesn’t react to a situation. Yet, even with countless cases of women being injured or killed by men Roiphe calls Take Back the Night Protests held in many college campuses, “grotesque festivals of victimization.”[10]

Many colleges and universities claim to being providing a lot of resources for victims to reach out to.  With the establishment of 24-hour hotlines, setting up ways for students to get home safely, mental health professionals on call, and emergency phones just to name a few ways campuses claim to have their student’s safety as a priority.Based on the University of Illinois Urban-Champaign, there are a lot of short comings when looking at the resources given to students for their safety. For example, there is a system called Safe-Rides in place that will pick you up from a location and take you home at night, but if you are close to a bus stop, they will refuse to pick you up. There are very few emergency phones on campus and they are genuinely hard to find sometimes. There are not enough campus resources like counselors and therapists to accommodate such a large population of students.

College campuses genuinely have good ideas when looking at what they say they have implemented. If these sentiments were actually made into sufficient actions that did more than just the bear minimum, many college campuses would be a lot safer. The college also has the responsibility to reasonable take action against a group or organization associated with the university if they have been accused of sexual assault. Their response must be large enough to genuinely deter the behavior in the future. Also, colleges do need to be involved with their student’s actions but ultimately in a sexual violence case, that must be given to the police right away, without any delay. They are not equipped to handle law and order against adults, this is ultimately a job for the judicial system and needs to be dealt with accordingly as long as it is within the victims wishes.

________________________________________________________________

[1]American Association of University Professors (AAUP), https://www.aaup.org/report/campus-sexual-assault-suggested-policies-and-procedures

[2]Katie Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim”, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/13/magazine/date-rape-s-other-victim.html

[3]Heather Mac Donald, “The Campus Rape Myth”, https://www.city-journal.org/html/campus-rape-myth-13061.html

[4]Mac Donald

[5]Mary Koss, “Defending Date Rape”, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/088626092007001010

[6]AAUP

[7]Mary Gaitskill,” On not Being a Victim”, https://harpers.org/archive/1994/03/on-not-being-a-victim/

[8]Roiphe

[9]Faith Karimi, “A Man Strangled a Chicago Student After She Wouldn’t Talk to him, Prosecutors say”, https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/27/us/university-of-illinois-chicago-ruth-george/index.html

[10]Roiphe

Photo Credit: Daniel Schwen

[zedecksiew]

The Free Cantons of the Linggi Valley

( Future Ministries / 2063 was some kind of weird Frankenstein-monster of devised performance, policy conference, and science-fiction dream. It got “24 individuals to reconsider current Malaysian ministerial portfolios and propose their own visions, ideas and updates for the year 2063″.

I was one of these 24 people. I was given the Ministry of Defence to play with, and 7 minutes presentation time. So I read the following text. )

+++

Whenever I see cops with MP5s, I have to hope that the government, with all its armed forces, has my best interests at heart. The alternative is terrifying.

When I got the “Defence Ministry” brief, I started thinking about a place and time where I would no longer need to hope on the nation-state.

+

This is a pastiche-utopia about the responsibilities of freedom.

It is drawn from fiction and theory - the fiction of Le Guin and Mieville; Murray Bookchin’s ideas about libertarian municipalism.

And Sharon Chin, my partner, who introduced me to the aforementioned texts, and argues with me about them.

It is also drawn from lived reality – primarily from Syrian Kurdistan. There, the autonomous communities of Rojava, facing ISIS and other terrible forms of annihilation, have practiced feminist, ecological, polyethnic grassroots democracy since 2014.

+

Imagine a 77-year-old uncle version of me. A revolutionary version of me. Here goes:

+++

Good afternoon, saudari-saudara.

On behalf of the Free Cantons of the Linggi Valley, I wish prosperity, clean health, and liberty to you all.

+

I would like to thank the Universiti Bangsar Political Science Department for inviting me here today, to speak.

The opportunity to be in Kuala Lumpur again moves me deeply.

I have not set foot in this city for over thirty years. I spent my twenties and early thirties here. I remember the shopping malls, the cafes. The trains. Even some of the older hab domes.

+

My name is Zedeck Siew. I left KL in June 2030.

When I left, I committed treason against the Malaysian government, defecting to territories then known as the Negeri Sembilan Autonomous Zone.

+

Now, the Charter of the Social Contract, our constitution, is freely available.

And our history, that you are taught – although told from the archist perspective of the Malaysian state, and full of ideological misunderstandings – is generally free of factual errors.

So today I shall be speaking from personal experience, and hope to offer a sketch of life in the Cantons.

+

I am a writer, English teacher, militiaman, and orchard farmer. My daughter and I grow jackfruit.

My canton, Port Dickson, is the only geography in the entire Peninsula still able to grow natural fruit crops – though we are seeing progress in the Jelebu plantations, with regenerative entomology.

My daughter Shivani is a nano-horticulturist and printmaker. My wife Seri was a videogame designer and militiawoman.

She was killed in the Big Rain of 2042, fighting Chlorine Singapore.

+

Yes. We are gun-toting militant guerrillas. I have smart-guns and ammunition in my garden store.

For much of our history we have faced violence. Chlorine Singapore raids us whenever it enters its spawning cycle. I was deployed to the southern front twice, in the mid-2040s.

I also fought in the Seremban Offensive, in 2038, when Malaysia realised that an independent Linggi Valley would succeed, and tried to reclaim us.

+

I was not in the Cantons when they fought the Caliphate, in 2023. Seri fought, though.

She watched the Malaysian Army withdraw. She witnessed, first-hand, how Daddy Nation-state chose to protect itself, leaving her and her sisters to die.

Seri always told me that we defend ourselves, because we have to. Because nobody else will.

+

Life is hard, air-conditioning is rare, synth-coffee is a luxury. We grow our own food, raise our own livestock. We sometimes go hungry. There are shortages during periods of blight.

2050 was particularly bad. Port Dickson’s communal rice paddies were destroyed by salt algae, and remained poisoned for two years.

Almost all of us work the land in some way. Every town has environmental engineers. The Cantons’ ecological focus is a matter of survival.

+

Many things in the Cantons are held in communal trust. Land, food, energy.

We only own the things we use, and our labour. I sell surplus jackfruit. I own my sarongs. Salleh, my fabrician neighbour, traded these sarongs for the biography zine I wrote for him.

Nobody is rich. But we trade, we work, and we prosper, when we can.

+

And we argue. We argue all the time.

When I first arrived in Port Dickson, in 2030, I volunteered to teach at the academy in my home community. I thought I would teach whatever I knew – English, some literature, some journalism.

Do you know the first thing my students did?

They asked me how it was ethical for any one person to tell any other person’s story.

+

Those young people were revolutionaries. Already veterans. Most bore scars. Some were orphans. All had lost friends.

They were rude. Assertive, outspoken, they questioned everything. They discussed ethics, ideology, and philosophies of power. They argued anarchist theory as urgently as the argued about where to get clean water.

+

As you are probably aware, our basic political unit is the municipal assembly. Local, neighbourhood-level government is the essence of the Cantons.

Direct democracy is as uncomfortable as you may imagine. Personally, I find the endless debates on my municipal Net very, very tiring.

But it is vital. It is why my students were the way they were.

+

We choose our envoys, our committees. How to ration food and fuel; how patrol schedules are structured. We argue, we disagree, and we choose. To study, take up arms, start a family. 

Freedom, after all, is a responsibility. We choose, because we have to. Because nobody else should do it for us.

+

I guess I can talk at length our ideology. I am somewhat of a true believer. You know what they say about the zealotry of converts.

+

I said I would speak personally.

The Free Cantons of the Linggi Valley, for me, is a love story. I wasn’t born there, but I was present at its birth.

When I met my wife Seri, I was a reporter covering the Caliphate invasion.

It was night-time. The Women’s Militia had just retaken Mantin. An armoured car burned behind her. She rallied her squad, and they sang. Seri was magnificent. A woman of the revolution.

+

I’ve been saying “wife”, because that would be easiest for you understand. But of course Seri and I were never married. Not in any legal sense.

I defected to be with her. Our bersanding was held under the distant thud of gunfire. There was a large kenduri, but no dais. We had prayers, but no akad nikah.

Seri’s father did not give her away. She refused to let him. I remember her, saying, to his face: “I was never yours to give.”

+++

Notes:

Ursula Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia”, a sci-fi meditation on capitalism, anarchism, the collective, and the individual. 

China Mieville’s “Iron Council”, a fantasy about the hope and pitfalls of socialist revolution.

Murray Bookchin’s “The Next Revolution”, essays and ideas about how a society based on direct democracy could work.

“A Mountain River Has Many Bends”, a good primer on Rojava.

“A Dream of Secular Utopia in ISIS’ Backyard”, a writer’s account of teaching journalism in Qamishli.

This interview with Kurdish activist Dilar Dirik, on dealing with power, revolutionary feminism, and refugee community organisation.