#Why should liberal men care about women when they can show how progressive they are by catering to men in dresses

[genderqueerdykes]

As I read up on terfism and how it hinders progressive efforts I find myself curious, if it weren’t for all the ways that anti-masculinity turns around to bite queer folk would you be as against it? Like if you could be sure that man hating only ever effected cis straight white neurotypical men would it be an issue at all?

it would still be an issue, and i am still 100% against it. i am always 100% against hating someone for their gender, sexuality or neurotype. i do not believe in hating someone, or treating someone like they are beyond redemption just because of their identity, and how their brain works.

demonizing cis straight white neurotypical men is exactly why they behave like this in the first place. when we teach cishet men than they are "just like that" and that "men just suck," it provides an ultimatum where they can never improve. ever. so why would they want to? would you want to improve if everyone around you is straight up telling you you can't? that you're destined to be a rude asshole? that you're a monster who exists just to hurt people?

you have to ask yourself: how would you feel if someone told you these things just because of your gender?

if we want men to improve how they treat us, we have to improve how we treat men. patriarchy only benefits a small handful of men. the rest, we treat like absolute dogshit and we have to acknowledge it. we call men weak the second they have a singular emotion. we call them pathetic if they struggle. we devalue their entire lives if they can't work. we have to show them that they are just as capable of a broad range of lives and emotions as anyone else. we force men to be stoic workhorses that hate anything feminine. we force men to be emotionless. we force men to be distant and cold. we force men to do all of these things.

reinforcing that men deserve to be hated inherently only serves to create a further divide between sexes and genders, which is exactly what we don't need in order to liberate ourselves from the gender binary. by insinuating that one group of person will always be bad, no matter what, and deserve to be hated is not what will bring us forward in life. queer people should never inherently hate cishet people, because that's exactly what they do to us. it doesn't help anyone. hate for the sake of hate only hurts you. hate breeds hate

you, and everyone else, should care about men- yes, including cishet white neurotypical men. when we care for men, we create caring men. we have to show men compassion and kindness in order for them to understand it and reciprocate it. if we treat men with hostility and standoffishness their entire lives, is there any reason why they tend to struggle with emotions, compassion, and kindness?

i don't know why it's so controversial to say this, but you should just respect people and not make assumptions about them based off of how they identify alone. that includes non queer people. man hating will never, ever be okay. no matter what men you hate. if it's not okay to hate women, it's not okay to hate men.

[coochiequeens]

Ladies we need to start aggressively calling out the lies TRAs use as justification to invade women’s spaces.

Following the banning of an 80-year-old woman from her local YMCA earlier this month for expressing discomfort with a biological male in the women’s restroom overseeing little girls changing out of their swimsuits the toilets, protests have been planned in Port Townsend, Washington against the city’s stance on the matter.

Amy Sousa, the event’s organizer, told The Post Millennial that she’s known Julie Jaman, the women at the center of the YMCA controversy, for about 10 years, and noted that Port Townsend is her hometown.

"So this time it’s personal," she said.

On Wednesday, the Port Townsend Council Culture And Society Committee will consider the language of a transgender proclamation issued by Mayor David J. Faber.

That proclamation will be up for public comment and consideration by the city council on August 15, where Sousa and at least 50 others plan to hold a press conference outside of the city hall in opposition to both the proclamation, as well as the city’s stance on the matter of Jaman being banned from her local YMCA pool.

Jaman, a resident of the city of about 40 years, was banned from the pool after she discovered a biological male by the name of Clementine Adams, a Mountain Valley Pool YMCA staff member, chaperoning a group of girls with a day camp to the bathroom.

Jaman asked Adams, "Do you have a penis?," which eventually devolved into Jaman being banned from the facility for not abiding to YMCA policies.

At the time, a manager at the YMCA told The Post Millennial that Jaman had not been banned for that event alone, but rather for "repeatedly violating the Olympic Peninsula YMCA code of conduct, specifically, using disrespectful words or gestures towards YMCA staff or others; and abusive, harassing and/or obscene language or gestures towards YMCA staff or others."

In the wake of the late July event, Faber issues a proclamation stating the city’s acceptance of transgender individuals, noting rates of suicide, poverty, and and contributions amongst the group of people.

"The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law study found that transgender people 16 and over are four times more likely to be crime victims than cisgender people," the proclamation read.

"The Williams Institute reports that 40 percent of transgender adults have attempted suicide inn their lifetimes and 30 percent of transgender youth have attempted suicide in the last year," it reads. This despite findings that reject and disprove that claim.

"Despite the many obstacles, transgender people have contributed greatly to art, culture, and science, including Lynn Conway who revolutionized microchip design and Wendy Carlos who won three Grammy awards," the proclamation added. Carlos underwent surgery in 1972, after presenting as a woman for 4 years, and composed the music for Tron. Conway worked at IBM in the 1960s and was released from that position due to transitioning.

This proclamation noted that "Washington state law protects the rights of transgender people to be free from discrimination and to enjoy all the privileges and protections granted to all people, including full enjoyment of public accommodations, employment, and participation in all aspects of civil life."

Overall, it states that "the City of Port Townsend values our transgender residents and visitors and urges all residents and visitors to be respectful, welcoming, and kind to everyone regardless of gender identity. I further proclaim that discrimination and prejudice, in any form, especially against transgender people, are unwelcome and have no place in the City of Port Townsend."

Speaking with The Post Millennial, Sousa said that her event will gather on the city hall’s steps shortly before the council considers the proclamation on August 15, where she said the microphone would be open for anyone to speak, and added that Jaman would be speaking at the event as well.

She said that people from all over the Seattle area will be coming to the event, including feminists as well as "women who wouldn't consider themselves feminists and men who don't consider themselves feminists, but who this issue deeply touches."

Sousa said that at the center of this is the issue of discrimination. She noted that the YMCA says they don’t discriminate based on things like age, sex, race, or gender identity, but wants to bring up to the city council that the YMCA is denying provisions and protections based the female sex .

Sousa said that she would be bringing the issue forward to the council as sex-based discrimination, "because if you deny women and girls provisions for our bodies, for our sex, that is a discrimination."

In response to Sousa airing these concerns with the proclamation on Twitter, Faber, who calls himself a social democrat on Twitter, said that "the transphobia have found me. Fuuuuuun."

"The mayor of Port Townsend doesn't seem to think my concerns deserve respectful consideration. I think women/girls deserve the sex based provisions that our foremothers battled for centuries to attain, privacy, safety, & dignity for our BODIES," Sousa wrote in response to Faber’s tweet. "Mayor's response: Zoopity boob."

"So this is a little ridiculous to me that this is how the mayor is choosing to respond to women and girls who have legitimate concerns. So he's, he's not taking these concerns with seriousness and the gravity that I think we are due," Sousa told The Post Millennial, who added that the mayor’s response is "juvenile."

In regards to the proclamation, Sousa said that she "can be respectful, welcoming and kind to anyone no matter what claims they make about themselves and their identity."

"That has no impact on my other claim, which is to have sex based rights and provisions around my body, you know, to have boundaries around my body as a woman and for girls," she added, noting that these two points are not "mutually exclusive."

“Sadly, 2021 has already seen at least 57 transgender or gender non-conforming people fatally shot or killed by other violent means. We say at least because too often these stories go unreported — or misreported. In previous years, the majority of these people were Black and Latinx transgender women.”

Versus

”While in France, the word femicide, or féminicide, is now used as a way of describing the epidemic of women killed by men in intimate settings, the term is barely understood outside of niche circles in the US. This, in spite of the fact that there are 10 times more women killed in this way in this country than in France (1,014 confirmed intimate acquaintance killings of women in the US in 2018 compared to 120 that same year in France). Adjusting for population size, the problem is twice as bad in the US than it is in France.

In Turkey, where so-called “honor killings” are reportedly still practiced, and where the murder of a 27-year-old woman by her ex-boyfriend last summer sparked globally-covered protests, the rate of women killed is also below that of the US. There, 474 women were killed in 2019, compared to 2,991 women in the same year here. Even accounting for the fact that the US is four times larger in population than Turkey, the proportion of femicides here remains distinctly larger.”

and versus this

There were more attacks based on race and sexual attraction then gender identity. And the graph would look different if they counted femicide has a hate crime

[96thdayofrage]

Instead of sharing in the outrage of Nia’s brutal murder, they came with fury for being tagged in a post that they felt challenged their own perceived feminist accomplishments. There were grand displays of defensiveness, demands that they be acknowledged for all the things they had done for black people in the past, and a terrifying lashing out that included racial slurs and doxing.

The fragility of these women was not a surprise to me. In a crucial moment of showing up for our marginalized community, there was more concern about their feelings and ego as opposed to the fight forward for women as a whole. What could have been a much-needed and integral display of solidarity and true intersectionality quickly became a live play-by-play of the toxicity that white-centered feminism can bring to the table of activism.

It is the type of behavior that rests under the guise of feminism only as long as it is comfortable, only as long it is personally rewarding, only as long as it keeps "on brand." But if the history of this movement taught us anything, it is that intersectionality in feminism is vital. We cannot forget the ways that suffragettes dismissed the voices of black women, sending them to the backs of their marches, only for black activists like Ida B. Wells and Anna Julia Cooper to make major moves while fighting for the vote in tandem with their fight for rights as black people—ultimately shifting the shape of this country. If there is not the intentional and action-based inclusion of women of color, then feminism is simply white supremacy in heels.

Going up against liberal progressive white feminists who refuse to let down their guard of “ultimate liberation” to actually learn from women of color—who have been fighting this fight with grit and grace for generations—is the most straining part being a black feminist activist. Still, as disheartening as the actions of many of these women who were "called in" became, my highest hope is that this bizarre episode serves as a lesson, a dissection if you will, of what toxic white feminism actually looks like. Let's take a dive into a few of the items in The Toxic White Feminism Playbook:

TONE POLICING

When women of color begin to cry out about their pain, frustration, and utter outrage with the system that is continuing to allow our men to be murdered, our babies to be disregarded, and our livelihood to be dismissed, we are often met with white women who tell us perhaps we should “say things a little nicer” if we want to be respected and heard.

SPIRITUAL BYPASSING

The easiest way for white women to skirt around the realities of racism is to just “love and light it away”. When confronted with ways they have offended a marginalized group with their words or actions, they immediately start to demand unity and peace; painting those they harmed as aggressive, mean, or divisive.

WHITE SAVIOR COMPLEX

Many white women insist that there is no way they could be part of the problem because of their extensive resume of what they’ve “done for you people.” Instead of listening to what the women of color are trying to express, they instead whip out the Nice Things I’ve Done For Black People In The Past, which often includes everything from “says hi to the black man next door every single morning” to “saved a black child through adoption and treats them just as nicely as my white children.”

This is the most common of all. White women get so caught up in how they feel in a moment of black women expressing themselves that they completely vacuum the energy, direction, and point of the conversation to themselves and their feelings. They start to explain why race is hard for them to talk about, what they think would be a better solution to the topic at hand, and perhaps what women of color can do to make it more palatable.

As these things play out over and over again, it is made painfully obvious that many white women believe that the worst thing that can happen to them is to be called a racist. Let me be clear, it is not. Seeing your child gunned down in the street by the police unjustly is much worse, being turned away for medical care due to race and underlying biases by medical staff, resulting in death, is much worse, being harassed by authorities only to be charged yourself instead is much worse.

But even moments of explicit dehumanization to the black community haven’t been able to rally the majority of liberal white women to join us in our fight for racial justice. I've learned through my work that white women seem to only digest race issues when it is reframed in the light of (white) feminism. So I often have to lay it out this way:

When you try to exclude yourself from the conversation of race by saying things like “I don’t see color,” or “I married a black man and have brown kids,” that's just as irrational as a man saying there is no way he could be sexist or misogynistic because he has a daughter.

When you seek to not be lumped into the conversation about oppressive systems against marginalized people, because you view yourself as woke, you are essentially screaming “not all men.”

When you try to rationalize police brutality by saying “but black people also kill black people,” you’re coming in with the same argument that men have when they say “she shouldn’t have worn that skirt, she deserves to be raped”.

When you walk into black or brown spaces and “suggest” how they can more aptly reach white people on the topic of race you are basically mansplaining, only now it's whitesplaining how people of color should approach their own activism.

When you begin to feel defensive about the conversation of race, demanding explanations, it is like a man walking into a women’s space saying: “Make me feel more comfortable in this moment, even though the point of this space is sorting out how I make you feel uncomfortable everyday in multiple ways.”

So what does allyship actually look like? Accepting the reality of this country's dynamics. White skin yields white privilege and an ally is willing to use their privilege to fight with and for those who are marginalized. Allyship means voting for elected officials who have a track record of ensuring the most marginalized among us are heard and advocated for. Allyship means using your sphere of influence whether it be your dining room table or the boardroom of your company to call out racist actions and ideals. Allyship means uplifting the voices and experiences of people of color so that we are not continuously drowned out and ignored.

"Many liberal white woman have an immediate reaction of defense when someone challenges their intentions."

What makes allyship so hard for most? Many liberal white woman have an immediate reaction of defense when someone challenges their intentions. And it is in that precise moment they need to stop and realize they are actually part of the problem. It is never the offender who gets to decide when they've offended someone. If you feel yourself dismissing the words or experiences of people of color—because you think they're "overreacting" or because you "didn't know" or because "it has nothing to do with race"—it's often due to your ego, not rationale. Listen and learn, instead.

Dr. Robin DiAngelo, a white woman sociologist who studies critical discourse, reminds us in her new book White Fragility that “the key to moving forward is what we do with our discomfort. We can use it as a door out—blame the messenger and disregard the message. Or we can use it as a door in by asking, Why does this unsettle me? What would it mean for me if this were true?”

Racism is as American as pie. In order for the feminist movement to truly be progressive and intersectional, white women must face this fact and begin to take on their load of work. We are long overdue to dismantle this system, which, if it is not intentionally and aggressively addressed, will defeat us all in the end.

[a-room-of-my-own]

A bit of reading : orwomen.()scot/did-you-know/?fbclid=IwAR0H7TqxQNqemZcAGFtvR_HLkbkxmZ4FY6srcgrULWxGPyWuc6QPTmDQfVI

Did you know…

…that 80-95% of people who say they are trans choose to have no medical treatment at all – no surgery, no drugs, not even therapy? Transwomen are just male people who subjectively believe that they are female. That’s it. That is all that’s required.

Despite some commentators describing an “epidemic of violence against trans people“, transwomen are no more likely to be murdered than anyone else, and the best data available shows it’s half as likely. In Scotland, zero have been killed. In fact, transwomen are almost twice as likely to be the perpetrator of a murder than to be murdered in the UK, which is not surprising since a male pattern of violence is retained regardless of any transition or cross-dressing.

The 48% of trans youth have attempted suicide statistic is nonsense too. It was based on just 27 trans people (aged 26 and under), from a self-selecting online survey – which made the data worthless. Yet that hasn’t stopped the TIE Campaign peddling similar in Scottish schools (or is it 27%, they seem confused?), contrary to Samaritans advice on avoiding attributing the cause to any one incident. The NHS Gender Identity Development Service actually says “suicide is extremely rare” and rates of self-harm, distress and suicide ideation are similar to other children seen by CAMHS.

Did you know that 1 in 50 males in prison now self-id as trans according to Ministry of Justice figures? If it is so dangerous to be trans why do so many choose to come out when in jail?

Were you aware that 95% of prisoners are men, and 5% women? That most women in prison are there for financial crime, and most men are in for violent offending. Did you know that men commit 98% of sex offences? That 48% of transwomen prisoners are sex offenders (compared to less than 20% in the general male estate) and would swamp the female estate if they all transferred.

What makes these convicted sex offenders, who were born male, women? Why should female prisoners be locked up with rapists if they say “I am a woman”? Are you willing to be in a prison cell with a male rapist on that basis? And if not, do you think other women should be? Are you aware that women have already been sexually assaulted and raped, in several countries, because of this policy?

Did you know that Scotland already has a policy significantly more liberal than England’s, stating that transgender prisoners must normally be housed according to the “social gender” with which they self-identify? And that this policy was brought in by a senior prison officer, himself now a convicted sex offender? A policy put in place without even talking to women’s groups or considering that there would be any impact on female prisoners at all. Despite warnings of abuse, including from former women’s prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss, the promised policy review has not been forthcoming.

What about women’s refuges, have you considered what it could do to a woman fleeing male violence to encounter a male in that refuge? Read why the CEO of a domestic violence charity, Karen Ingala Smith, considers it imperative that refuges remain women-only, and her speech at the Scottish Parliament.

Did you know that a woman was asked to leave a shelter because, as a rape survivor, she couldn’t sleep in the same room as a strange male, regardless of how he identified? Are you aware that a man used self-id to access a women’s shelter where he sexually assaulted vulnerable women? Are you aware that a rape relief shelter in Canada lost all public funding for insisting they remain women-only, and had a dead rat nailed to their door?

Are you aware that the Scottish Government imposes a transwomen inclusive policy on Scottish Women’s Aid as a condition of funding and that Rape Crisis Scotland refused to guarantee a female counsellor for a traumatised teenager? We know from private meetings that they erroneously believe they cannot provide a single-sex service due to a lack of ‘case law’, despite having previously done so for many years. Did you know there is a male manager of a rape crisis centre, who failed to disclose his sex at interview, and which still claims to be women-led?

Are you aware that despite less than half of changing rooms in swimming pools and sports centres being mixed sex, 90% of sexual assaults have happened in them? Yet mixed-sex, ‘gender-neutral’ facilities are constantly pushed, including in schools – contrary to law and building regulations requiring separate sex provision – when it would be more responsible to increase third space unisex provision for the comfort of those who need it.

That’s before you even get into the issue of how to keep out predatory men who aren’t trans, if you say that any man who ‘identifies as a woman’ can use communal changing/showering areas at will. A man exposing himself in a park commits a crime. A man doing so in a women’s changing room, where you’re also naked, who need not have even told staff he identifies as a woman, may no longer be committing an offence.

Did you know that the Scottish Government funded LGBT Youth Scotland, a spin-off group from Stonewall, to write guidance for schools that breaches children’s rights in at least eleven ways? This includes the unscientific belief in gender identity, which even the Justice Minister is at a loss to define, the promotion of harmful breast binding and the removal of all single-sex spaces and sports. No-one should be surprised at this as Stonewall have long campaigned for the removal of women’s rights, although single issue political pressure groups should have been no-where near schoolchildren.

It took the Government until June 2019 to commit to replacing this guidance, having privately received advice that it was “not legal“. Yet, this new legally compliant guidance is seven months overdue and the Education Minister is refusing to withdraw LGBTYS’s guidance in the interim.

Why should we accept smear tests from any male who feels they have a womanly gender identity – what does that even mean (let’s ask the Justice Minister again)? And yes, it is happening. A rape survivor who wanted a woman to carry out her breast screening found her letter used as an example in hospital trans guidance as ‘unacceptable’ and ‘highly discriminatory’. And a woman in a psychiatric ward who was terrified at being locked in a ward with an “extremely male-bodied” fellow patient was regarded as a transphobic bigot. The truth is that women in mixed-sex hospital wards, particularly psych, have very real reasons to fear men.

Did you know that 35 clinicians have resigned from the Tavistock (children’s gender clinic in London) over their failings, including the Governor? Who later wrote a damning account of the abject failure to heed evidence that their affirmation-only policy is harmful to children, especially to the huge influx in girls who may suffer other complex problems, such as trauma, autism, a history of sexual abuse or discomfort with their developing sexuality. A staggering 48% of children referred to Tavistock have ASD traits, and a BBC Newsnight investigation revealed significant numbers of children seeking transition treatment based on their family’s homophobia.

Are you aware that studies show that puberty blockers result in 100% of children progressing to cross-sex hormones – whereas, if left unmedicated, the Tavistocks’s own research shows over 90%, if supported by counselling, are happy with their sex once they emerge from puberty. Did you know hormone blockers may cause sterility, a large decrease in IQ, bone density loss, and more? An investigation by the Health Review Authority concluded that blockers are really the start of irreversible physical transition and recommended that “Researchers and clinical staff should…avoid referring to puberty suppression as providing a ‘breathing space’, to avoid risk of misunderstanding.” This led to a major overhaul of the NHS UK website which no longer considers blockers to be fully reversible and confirms long-term effects are unknown.

The young person’s gender clinic at Sandyford, Glasgow has recently withdrawn their information booklet and we trust it will be similarly updated. Do you think all the government funded trans organisations will be scrupulous in updating their information too – including LGBT Youth guidance in Dumfries and Galloway, Scottish Trans/NHS guidance, and Stonewall advice, among many more, including of course the already deemed “not legal” school guidance by LGBT Youth?

Are you aware that the number of children referred to Sandyford is rising at a faster rate than the rest of the UK? Yet they don’t actually know how many girls have been referred as children can select what sex they want recorded on medical records – although unofficially, clinicians report similar concerns as elsewhere about the huge proportional rise in young girls seeking to transition. Did you know that bias, and not evidence, dominates the WPATH transgender standard of care followed in Scotland? And it is woefully out-of-date considering the fundamental change in patient make up since it was written in 2011.

Read the speech given by Dr David Bell at the Scottish Parliament and consider why, if his report about issues at the Tavistock prompted the Director to resign, was it not enough for the Health Minister, Jeane Freeman, to instigate an enquiry into identical practices at Sandyford? Perhaps the Government will listen to the outcome of a Judicial Review that is being sought by Keira Bell, a detransitioning woman, who wants to protect other troubled young girls from similar treatment.

Are you aware that women with our views are threatened with violence, rape and death, almost as an everyday occurrence? We are told TERF is not a slur, but I challenge you to find any instances of it being used without abuse or threats attached to it. Do you think it’s in any way acceptable for lesbians to be on the receiving end of these menaces for asserting, or even just trying to be proud of, their right to be same-sex attracted? Do you really think there’s such a thing as a lesbian with a penis?

All that hate is from transactivists, and is aimed at women with our views. I challenge you to find anything remotely equivalent from here, from our recorded talks, or indeed anywhere else. This is NOT a case of two sides as bad as each other. And it’s notable that the hate is not aimed at genuinely transphobic, aggressive men. It’s aimed at women. It’s aimed at us.

And JK Rowling. Read the tweets she posted and look at the replies. Read the essay further explaining her thoughts and ask how anyone could possibly think she deserved such atrocious abuse, or how transactivists thought it in any way acceptable to post penis images in retaliation (don’t worry, it’s been edited!) on a child’s thread about Ickabog art.

Did you know women can be, and often are, fired for believing sex is real, that humans cannot change sex, and women and girls are entitled to privacy when undressing or otherwise vulnerable? And yet poll, after poll, after poll, after poll show that this is the majority view, by at least 80%. You may well wonder why then, is the Scottish Government proposing to bring in Hate Crime legislation that would see even JK Rowling imprisoned for up to seven years for expressing views deemed abusive by transactivists, yet affords women no such protection in law, based on their sex.

Innate gender identity is a belief system. There’s no evidence one exists. If our Government cannot even define it, then it should not be presented as fact to our children. It should not over-ride women’s hard fought for rights.

Do you know that the very word ‘woman’ will change definition, if the trans lobby succeed? If we can’t define what a woman is, how can we accurately capture data? How can we record male violence, the pay gap, our representation in government, business, finance, law, media…anywhere? Police Scotland already record incidences on the basis of gender identity, but can’t seem to recall when, or why that happened, and the census looks to be going the same way, despite the importance of recognising sex being shown quite dramatically by COVID-19.

An influential lobby loudly insisting that they won’t be erased (when trans organisations are heavily state funded and train all major businesses, branches of government, school teachers, universities and NHS boards) are actively campaigning to erase the very definition of what a woman is – best archive it, just in case! Have you noticed how easy it is to define a woman when we’re being aborted, subjected to FGM, married off, denied the vote, raped, murdered, paid less, represented less in every single sector of government and industry, expected to perform most of the world’s unpaid labour, and constituting 71% of the world’s modern slaves? The only places that seem unsure on what a woman is are the places feminism was starting to make inroads. It’s almost like there must be some sort of a connection, isn’t it?

We don’t have any fear, resentment or hatred for trans people. We agree there should be protection in law against discrimination and violence. We just don’t agree that our rights need to be railroaded over in the process. We don’t agree that male people should access women’s spaces, or benefit from women’s provision, at will, without our consent. Our name is WOMEN and our rights matter.

Don’t you agree…?

[whattaloser]

Why I’m a Leftist

I know I’m probably just some dude who reblogs cool stuff to most of my followers but I’ve got a nice long story/rant about my political beliefs here that I’ve been wanting to write for awhile

I am a leftist first and foremost because I value human life. Everyone matters. No person is inherently more important than another person. Everyone has inherent rights that should not be infringed. People who infringe on other’s rights are morally wrong to do so. In essence my leftism is based on doing what is right. Obviously everyone has their own opinion on what is right but what is vitally important is knowing why your moral code is right. This is why so many people become liberals or conservatives or otherwise rather than leftists. They simply do not know enough about how the world works. There are a lot of reasons they don’t know, not the least of which is intentional covering up history and preventing education. I don’t believe people who aren’t leftists are stupid, but I do believe leftists know more. It’s kinda fucked up but it’s the only way you can explain inconsistencies in other’s values.

My path to leftism was full of cringe. When i was 7 years old Al Gore was running against George Bush for president. I did not know enough to have a real opinion on it but I am happy to say that I wanted Al Gore to win. This thought was based on very little if any logical reason. I basically flipped a coin in my head I think. Or maybe there was some outside influence that I wasn’t aware of, like my older sister who I looked up to might have said she liked Al gore. Either way, from then on I was in favor of democrats and did not like George Bush. When 9/11 happened I remembered thinking how dumb it was that people lined up around the block to get gas. Even as a child I knew that some buildings going down wasn’t going to end the great nation of the United States. In general I thought the United States was a great country. I knew from movies and tv as well as elementary school history that the United States was the most powerful country in the world. 

I recall in Sixth grade my teacher mentioned she liked George Bush because he was against gay marriage. Somehow at the time my opinion was the opposite despite being raised Catholic. I believed in god until I graduated high school and suddenly my desire to be religious slipped away and so did my belief. I do not consider this a great loss. 

Sometime in middle school or early high school I had solidified my opinion that the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was pointless and George Bush was a bad president. I was heavily influenced by movies and somewhat by video games that had imparted plenty of anti-war messages. Talks with my dad about nuclear missiles, watching History channel shows about world war 2, and playing Metal Gear Solid which had explicit nuclear disarmament messages, all informed me on the horrors of war. This was not enough to make me totally anti-military. In high school I wanted to join the military because I thought it was an easy way to get life experience and eventually pay for college. I was attracted to the Marines because of how cool movies like The Rock and video games like Call of Duty made it seem to be a Marine. I thought they were the best of the best. I was simultaneously against war, against veteran worship, and very pro-military. I was indoctrinated by years of government propaganda but also disillusioned by all forms of media including the book All Quiet on the Western Front which was about a soldier becoming disillusioned by witnessing horrors of war and the negative impact it had on everyone in his country. I spoke with a recruiter during my senior year and expressed my desire to be a Marine but I told him I wanted to wait a year after high school so I could get physically fit enough. The recruiter did not care that I was underweight and out of shape. He didn’t even care that I was very enthusiastic about joining, he was still putting on his best salesman demeanor which made me incredibly uneasy. The experience is supposed to pressure people into signing up on the spot, I think they even had forms for me to sign (i can’t really remember though) but I was not ready and was aware enough how I was being manipulated although not entirely cognizant. After that I no longer wanted to be in the military.

I also have to point out that I grew up in an unstable household. My parents were both loving but they were flawed and made mistakes and had problems. My dad was a typical Gen x man’s man. A little bit too emotionally repressed, but actually really good with kids when it came to play time and still is. He worked a lot because my mother couldn’t. My mother has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder as long as I can remember. Her medical bills related to her problems combined with other financially bad decisions by my parents caused my home life to be fraught. I lived in varying degrees of poverty until my parents separated and me and my siblings moved with my mother to her parents’ house away from my father. Prior to moving though, we endured great financial difficulty. We were unable to afford school lunches but could not apply for free or reduced lunches because technically my father made a lot of money, however it was all garnished for medical bills. My father always tells about how he bought a car that had hidden frame damage and when he attempted to sue the dealership for selling a bad car he lost and was garnished for that as well. Despite making over 25 dollars an hour in 1999, my father could not afford school lunches for three kids and couldn’t afford to pay the gas bill. Without going into too much more detail, life sucked and continued to suck until I graduated, at least financially. I still found plenty of joy and it wasn’t always that bad. We still found ways to have good things like video games and we could always rewatch old movies but there’s a lot of psychic weight that comes with being that poor as a child and I’m sure it affects me and my ability to empathize with others who in bad conditions. 

So i watched a lot of movies and documentaries, read a lot of books growing up, discovered internet forums at the age of 11, played video games, moved to a town that had a very large Hispanic population, and I even grew up poor. All of this life experience turned me into a very average liberal upon graduating high school. I was a very optimistic 18 year old. I thought science could save the world. If I was 18 today I would be an average redditor stereotype probably. The point here though is I still wasn’t a leftist. Only vaguely progressive and full of optimism. This is when I got sucked into the anti-feminist pipeline.

I can’t remember what exactly what I had going on in my life but I remember it was around the time of Gamergate. Everyone on the internet, celebrities, and pop culture were saying “if you believe in equality between genders you’re a feminist” an did not like that. And there was a ton of people online to tell me I was right in not liking that. They all said feminism was not necessary anymore because legally you couldn’t discriminate against women and I agreed. Gamergate made it worse for reasons too complicated to get into in this already long post but suffice it say I was “pro Gamergate.” This put me at odds with my closes friends who thought feminism was great and had no qualms with it, and were already embracing the idea of being a “social justice warrior.” Despite reading all kinds of anti-feminist think pieces and reveling in the discourse, I was still very progressive and liberal minded person. Still thought the military was bad, that black people were discriminated against etc. But so many aspects of anti-feminism were appealing to me as a white guy who tried their hardest to do what they’re told is right, had low self esteem, undiagnosed adhd and depression, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what feminism was. Two things got me out of anti-feminism though. The first and most important thing was having friends who were patient with me about it. I didn’t reveal how into anti-feminism I was because I was ashamed but they could sense it and pushed back when they could. The second thing that got me out of it was actually finding feminists online and reading what they had to say, staying away from poorly written clickbait articles that fueled misogynist tirades against feminism. After reading and learning from feminists it finally clicked. Our society is patriarchal and that affects how people interact with each other regardless of what is legal. Many of the complaints of anti-feminism talk about how men have it in society, so how can society be patriarchal. It’s because of patriarchy that men are put in bad positions. Some of the more self aware anti-feminists had retorts against these ideas but they were emotionally charged. There’s still some anti-feminists I have respect for because of how well prepared and logical they were when it came to disputing feminism. But when it came down to the fundamental tenants of feminsim all they could respond with was anger or outright denial of reality. (If you’re like I was and don’t understand how anyone can thing modern feminism is good please feel free to ask me more, I just can’t get into specifics in this long ass post) Anyways, once you understand patriarchy and how it affects an individuals actions then you can start seeing how other institutions and cultural norms can affect an individual. This is basically fundamentals of leftism. I’d say about 90% of my path to leftism was just naturally absorbing cultural and historical information through consumption of media. The most conservative people I know are people who haven’t read very many books or seen very many movies. I’m not saying watching Austin Powers at the age of 10 will make everyone a leftist but constantly recontextualizing the world by learning something new, even if you learned it from some dumb comedy movie, can give you better grounding in a shared reality.  Don’t know how to end this but I want to say when I was a teenager I thought “communism is good in theory but it doesn’t work in practice” and I had almost no historical basis for it other than the vague notion that USSR = bad despite having consumed a massive amount of media. None of it taught me what communism actually was, I didn’t know who Karl Marx was, and I had no clue why communism in the USSR failed. You can know a lot without knowing the truth so if you’re struggling with a loved one who is mind poisoned by conservative keep in mind that they know a lot but they’re missing something important to give clarity. 

This has been my Ted Talk

[inkblotsandeggshells]

My take on feminine enbodyment and female empowerment

This concept of modern feminism and pushing men out of the picture affects me differently than the average woman, because I was raised without a dad. When my mom adopted me and my other siblings, she never got married and instead asked her best female friend to step in and help raise all four of us. I was very loved, but I felt that absence of a father all my life. It affected nearly every part of my childhood and teenage years, and it continues to affect my adult life. I wanted to get a boyfriend and eventually get married, but the only constant guy in my life was my older brother. Therefore, I had very few examples of what respectful, good, masculine men looked like.

When I was a sophomore in college, my roommate at the time showed me a YouTube channel called Blimey Cow, and they had made a video called “Ten Ways to get the Right Guy to like You.” I hadn’t thought about this video or this channel in a few years, because they primarily make Christian content.  I’m not a Christian anymore, nor do I agree with all the beliefs of Christianity. However, I decided to go back to this video two days ago, because I remembered how these creators directly challenged how our culture defines female empowerment. Specifically they used this video to present that challenge, with an emphasis on noting the difference between female liberation and female objectification. Some of the suggestions they made to help girls find the right guys included showing interest in their hobbies, supporting their local chivalry, letting the guys in their lives know they appreciate them, putting less emphasis on how much skin they show and more emphasis on who they are as a person.  As a 20 year old college kid, these young content creators made a bigger impact on my views on men, women and the hyper-sexual movement than I would have thought. As a result, their video gave me the nudge to dive deeper into this topic through writing.

When you first learn of the term “female empowerment”, it sounds attractive enough: women being seen as a force to be reckoned with, authoritative, strong leaders who are goddesses in nearly every way. Rather than being stuck at home to take care of the kids, women are encouraged to pursue their career dreams, step into more masculine leadership roles and “be the boss”, for lack of a better term. It all sounds appealing until you start to dig deeper into what’s behind the phrase “female empowerment.” One big part of how I discovered this occurred last summer.

In July of 2020, I chose to invest a serious amount of money to an online holistic sex course. It was called Well-F*cked Woman, created by a woman named Kim Anami. Through using the tools learned through this six week course, Kim claims to have helped thousands of people all over the world, especially women, to connect with the untapped power of their sexual energy. She believes that a big reason why people are as stressed, unhealthy and unhappy as they are is because they’re not having the right kind of sex. Moreover, they’re not having the right kind of sex often enough. Whether you’re in a couple or single makes no difference. If you want to gain body confidence, get orgasms or even heal ancestral trauma, Kim claims this course would teach you how to obtain all those things by utilizing your sexual energy.

When I read the information on it, I became very intrigued. After several days of listening to her podcasts and reading her blogs, I became more convinced that this course could be a big help for my personal well-being.  At the time, my goal was to use the course to heal some of the imbalanced sacral energy I still had. Hopefully, it could even heal some ancestral wounds I carried in my DNA. If I achieved that, finding a romantic partner would be more of a bonus than a direct goal. So when I received the stimulus check from the government, I used that money to pay for the course and one of Kim’s jade yoni eggs.

For each of the six weeks, we would get a video with a written syllabus to discuss different topics, most of which revolved around sex. One week we would focus on self-love practices, one week we would talk about the relationship between sex and money, another week we learned about food, etc. In that first week, I began the exercises easily enough. However, I also started to feel very conflicted about the information we received in this course. For example, in the syllabus about self-love, one of the first statements Kim made about women is that “most have rape fantasies.” Admittedly, I didn’t really understand what that meant or what it was, until a friend told me. Once I did understand it, it bothered me deeply, to say the least. As someone who claimed that her work helped heal women’s sexual trauma, to hear Kim make such a statement right off the bat made me feel uneasy.

In a separate journal, I had written down my progress of the course and some of the conclusions I had made about what it taught and about the woman who taught it. In one entry, I had observed that it seemed to take a lot of money to become a “well-f*cked woman”, by Kim’s standards. If needed, it could possibly add up to hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. For instance, if you wanted to use a jade egg as a sexual healing tool, that cost $300. The six week course itself cost almost $1000. Kim also recommended using therapy injections to change your neural pathways, if you were a victim of sexual trauma.  Just getting one injection is expensive enough, but if you “need” more than one injection or appointment, that will add up fast. Sadly, such treatments are not easily accessible to everyone who wants sexual healing. It certainly wasn’t for me.

Additionally, a recurring message that came up in the course was that it’s important for couples to have sex more than once a week. In this case, it wasn’t talking about the faster paced sex described as being numb and fleeting. On the contrary, Kim wanted us to aim for the slower, orgasmic, breath focused sex where you’re working to maintain and build up a flow of sexual energy. While in some ways, this course educated people on sex differently than our modern culture, some aspects seem pretty similar to me. For example, one night stands are still seen as acceptable situations to practice generating this energy. We were encouraged to practice sex acts two to three times a week, to the point of becoming sex addicts. Also, even though Kim frowned upon pornography, we were still taught to utilize BDSM as a way to create polarity in our relationships. This was to make sure that “spark of passion” was maintained for the long term. Lastly, Kim would sometimes demonstrate problematic double standards when it came to showing examples of how to respect your partner. In one of her stories about “helping” her partner become confident with himself, she talked about making a point to touch his private parts in public, whether he was okay with it or not. If not, she claimed “it was his problem.” In my opinion, if they’re genders had been switched, she would have been called out for her disrespectful behavior immediately among the group.

In this class, Kim discouraged us from using substances like alcohol and drugs during the practice, because of how they damage the body. On the other hand, she promoted addictions to sex as something positive, as something to attain for as a human being. Whether you are in a couple doing the act or you’re a single adult who’s just masturbating, you were encouraged to have some kind of sex several times a week. According to Kim, it needed to get to the point where you felt you couldn’t go about your day without generating this energy. “What an addiction does is that it causes you to stop thinking,” says Michael Knowles, who was a guest on the Candace Owens Show discussing modern feminism.  “It enslaves you. It makes you prone to certain behavior, and when you’re not thinking, that’s when the people who want to grab power can come in and force it on you.” Too much of anything can be detrimental for your well-being, on all levels.  During a time where protection of boundaries for my spiritual life had become very important, this way of thinking pushed me to discover what kind of boundaries I had and to stick to them. In this case, it lead me to the conclusion that if being like Kim meant being addicted to sex, disrespecting the men I care about, and using methods of sexual control for the sake of “polarity”, then I would rather not be like her at all.

With all that being said, I believe the big question is this: how exactly does the WAP culture of free sex and female empowerment differ from the holistic sex culture I learned about in the summer of 2020? How does our pop culture differ from the Well-F*cked Woman course, in how we’re being educated about sex? In my opinion, one culture pushes the more superficial, fleeting benefits of sex in our faces, while the other pushes for using sex and sexual energy as a way to harness untapped power. This power can, supposedly, be used to energize us, heal our bodies, and manifest things into our lives. Regardless, both cultures seem to be more concerned with using sex to gain power than using it as a means to express true love.  Both cultures seem to encourage women to “embrace their femininity” by leaving their underwear off more often. Both cultures seem to promote double standards on how partners should respect each other and their boundaries. Both cultures still push us to become addicted to sex in order to have a fulfilled, happier life, because according to them, every aspect of our lives will disintegrate without it.

As a result of the lockdown, last year turned out to be most isolating time for us, and it was intense enough to put many people into a deep state of depression. At a time when everyone is stuck online and forced to keep further apart, this is when people in the online sex business—holistic or otherwise—will benefit the most from that loneliness. They can use it to make those profits and fill their own pockets. This becomes more obvious when you observe their marketing tactics, including the ones I noticed for Kim Anami’s website: unless you give me your money and do what I tell you to do, you will never be “well-f*cked.” Everything in your life will deteriorate unless you become “well-f*cked.” You will be a brainwashed zombie forever, easily manipulated, unless you become “well-f*cked.”As my friend Lee Yun would say, “These tactics are designed to create an empty void in people that can’t be filled.” In the cases of some individuals, even if they were to try, it would cost them more time, money and energy than they were lead to believe.

For those of you who wonder if I still keep up with the practices I learned from this course, I haven’t. At least, I haven’t kept up to the degree that would be necessary. My jade egg is sitting on my altar collecting dust, even as I write this. Because of the amount of money I spent to buy the egg, this is not something I’m proud to admit. A jade egg is a sacred, special tool that deserves to be put to use for the highest good, and eventually, I will find a teacher that can help me do so. I just don’t want to have to conform to this holistic “WAP” standard to get there.

Surprisingly, by reflecting on my past through watching Blimey Cow’s videos, I realized there are still some values about sex, intimacy and femininity that I learned as a teenage Christian that matter to me now as an adult witch. In my opinion, sex is something very sacred that should not be taken so lightly, because of how it connects you to your partner in an intense, physical and spiritual way. For me, I take it seriously enough to still choose to wait until I get a husband and to choose not to masturbate. Additionally, when I do have sex with my lifelong partner, it will be as much about him as it will be about me. This means respecting and honoring him as a man as well as I know how. In my opinion, if you encourage people to use something like sex to attain higher spiritual goals, but neglect to show basic respect to your partner’s boundaries about his body, then in the words of Jordan Taylor from Blimey Cow, “you’re doing it wrong.”

 Michael Knowles interview with Candace Owens on the Candace Owens Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejWIEMs8ecg

Blimey Cow’s YouTube video, “Ten Ways to Get the Right Guy to Like You”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqF_PtugyBk

[rotationalsymmetry]

One more thing about the Ferengi on Deep Space Nine and the idea of tolerance.

(Good morning, world.)

This is the so-called paradox of tolerance, ie, do you tolerate intolerance?

As far as we can tell, the main issue Sisko has with the Ferengi at the start of the show, is not anything relatively superficial like them eating slugs or what have you. It’s that he’s uncomfortable with his son making friends with Nog, because he’s worried that the values he wants his son to grow up with like respecting women and valuing education, will be eroded because the Ferengi as a whole do not value those things.

In point of fact this doesn’t seem to happen — Jake rubs off on Nog a lot more than Nog rubs off on Jake. Much to Quark’s frustration. And Sisko relaxing and letting 14 year old Jake make his own decisions was unambiguously the right call, even if it hadn’t gone that way. And it grows into a lovely friendship that is the heart of the show in many ways. But the show was presenting Sisko’s reluctance to let Jake get close to Nog as being equivalent to say white parents not wanting their kids to play with black kids just because of racism, and it really wasn’t that at all.

(And possibly reassuring white people that having some racism to get over isn’t that bad because here look, a black parent struggling in the exact same way. “We’re all a little bit racist”, right?)

That story would have worked a lot better if we’d seen Sisko having stereotypes and assumptions about the Ferengi that turned out to not be true. But...the Ferengi do actually have an incredibly sexist society, the Ferengi men do constantly insult the intelligence of women and largely see women as possible sex partners rather than whole people, they are actually exploitative and money-obsessed, Quark is a smuggler who frequently breaks the law and his brother is a weapons dealer, etc. While the show is weirdly sympathetic to Quark, to the point that you realize he does have an odd sort of integrity, and Ferengi are shown as being capable of embracing Federation values, Quark is actually everything Sisko thinks he is. It didn’t have to be — either Ferengi culture could have been retconned to not actually be as awful as it was shown as being in TNG, or we could have had a new species and entirely new stereotypes that turned out to be not entirely accurate.

In particular, there are many cultures that have different roles for men and women that also basically respect women and don’t give the men all the power, and which frequently have culturally established ways for people who don’t fit their culture’s default gender roles to do things differently. Treating men and women as much the same as possible is not the only way to seek gender justice. Nor is it without problems — for instance, when women get stuck with the double shift of a full time job and the lion’s share of the housework and child care as well.

I don’t think the Ferengi should have been brought back for DS9 at all, let alone had their role in the show expanded so much, but perhaps another culture could have been introduced that had gender roles that the Federation doesn’t or different sexual mores or what have you, Sisko might initially assume that means that the men don’t value women, and that might have turned out to be incorrect. That would have been somewhat difficult to handle well I think, without making it sound like “hey, women’s rights progress is totally unnecessary”, but if it was done well it might have worked, and actually made the point that Quark was supposedly trying to make about tolerance and hypocrisy.

(Which, goodness knows Western liberals do actually frequently make false assumptions about the backwardness of other cultures and the superiority of Western culture. So it is a good point. It just doesn’t make sense in context because the Ferengi as written actually do have an unrealistically awful culture.)

What does work with the Ferengi in the show as it is, is one episode where we see a female Ferengi who disguises herself as a man (so that we finally see a female Ferengi character and so that we’re shown that not all Ferengi embrace gender restrictions) and then later we get several episodes with Quark and Ron’s mother “Moogie”, who also has her own way of interacting with and rebelling against Ferengi gender-based restrictions. And again, we do have individual Ferengi assimilating into the Federation. These episodes make individual Ferengis less of a caricature, but don’t actually support the idea that maybe Ferengi culture is not so bad. And this is a problem: Ferengi culture shouldn’t be that bad compared to the Federation, it’s artificial and stereotypical and wrong that an alien culture just happens to be worse than the Federation in nearly every conceivable way.

I suppose it could have been worse. There could have been a whole movement (in the show) to forcibly “liberate” Ferengi women from their oppression, one that paid no attention to the women themselves and assumed they were helpless victims and ...

And you’ll note that tolerance isn’t a value of Quark’s or Ferengis in general. Quark is repeatedly contemptuous of the Federation and the “hu-mons.” Narratively, that speech is equivalent to a villain poking at the hero for (supposed or actual) hypocrisy.

In this past election season in the United States we also had a lot of “paradox of tolerance” handwringing. A lot of concern about how maybe the Democratic Party wasn’t thinking enough about poor or rural white people. Except oddly, the concerns were never things like, “hey, you can’t get work in lots of rural areas so they’re losing all their young people to the cities, what can we do about it?” or, “hey, real minimum wage has been going down because it’s not tied to inflation, let’s fix that.” No, it was “maybe we should forget about this LGBT stuff and Black Lives Matter, because, you know, that’s threatening to these people.” Which I’m pretty sure always meant “that’s threatening to me, or at least not something I care about at all, but I don’t want to look racist or homophobic so I’ll pretend it’s about practical electability concerns and not my own lack of compassion.”

Lack of...what’s that word again? Ah right. Tolerance.

If your “tolerance” or understanding or compassion for one group of people means less compassion for another group, you’re doing it wrong.

And in case I didn’t spell this out clearly enough in all the words I’ve written: you often get a lot farther examining the choices the writers (directors, etc) make, than examining the choices that characters made within the framing that the writers created. Sisko’s attitudes towards the Ferengi are far less interesting and worthy of comment than the writers’ attitudes towards the Ferengi.

“Why did this character choose to make a false accusation of rape” is always less relevant from a social justice perspective than “why is this writer telling a story about false accusations of rape?” “Does it make sense in story that this character is wearing a chainmail bikini” is less relevant than “wow, that author sure made a choice to put that female character in a chainmail bikini.” Luanne in the eponymous comic strip noticing that fashion magazines offer contradictory advice is less significant than looking over a comics page of two dozen strips and noticing only two female names in the author byline, and only one that isn’t co-writing with a male author — even comics that center female characters (which are very much in the minority) are often written by men. Notice the man (sic) behind the curtain.

“How does a representative of an idealized Western-coded future spacefaring society, see people who are outside of that society” is less significant than “how do the writers depict Western-coded societies vs other societies?”

[red-will]

I don't know what to do with good white people.

I've been surrounded by good white people my whole life. Good white people living in my neighborhood, who returned our dog when he got loose; good white teachers in elementary school who pushed books into my hands; good white professors at Stanford, a Bay Area bastion of goodwhiteness, who recommended me M.F.A. programs where I met good white writers, liberal enough for a Portlandia sketch.

I should be grateful for this. Who, in generations of my family, has ever been surrounded by so many good white people? My mother was born to sharecroppers in Louisiana; she used to measure her feet with a piece of string because they could not try on shoes in the store. She tells me of a white policeman who humiliated her mother by forcing her to empty her purse on the store counter just so he could watch her few coins spiral out.

Two summers ago, my mother showed me the welfare reports written about her family. The welfare officer, a white woman, observed my family with a careful, anthropological eye. She described the children, including my mother, as "nice and clean." She asked personal questions (did my grandmother have a boyfriend?) and wrote her findings in a detached tone. She wondered why my grandmother, an illiterate Black mother of nine living in the Jim Crow South, struggled to find a steady job. Maybe, she wrote in her loopy scrawl, my grandmother wasn't searching hard enough.

This faded report is the type of official document a historian might consult if he were re-constructing the story of my family. The author, this white welfare officer, writes as if she is an objective observer, but she tells a well-worn story of Black women who refuse to work and instead depend on welfare. Occasionally, her clinical tone breaks down. Once, she notes that my mother is pretty. She probably considered herself a good white person.

In the wake of the Darren Wilson non-indictment, I've only deleted one racist Facebook friend. This friend, as barely a friend as a high school classmate can be, re-posted a rant calling rioters niggers. (She was not a good white person.) Most of my white friends have responded to recent events with empathy or outrage. Some have joined protests. Others have posted Criming While White stories, a hashtag that has been criticized for detracting from Black voices. Look at me, the hashtag screams, I know that I am privileged. I am a good white person. Join me and remind others that you are a good white person too.

Over the past two weeks, I've seen good white people congratulate themselves for deleting racist friends or debating family members or performing small acts of kindness to Black people. Sometimes I think I'd prefer racist trolling to this grade of self-aggrandizement. A racist troll is easy to dismiss. He does not think decency is enough. Sometimes I think good white people expect to be rewarded for their decency. We are not like those other white people. See how enlightened and aware we are? See how we are good?

Over the past two weeks, I have fluctuated between anger and grief. I feel surrounded by Black death. What a privilege, to concern yourself with seeming good while the rest of us want to seem worthy of life.

When my father was a young man, he was arrested at gunpoint. He was a Deputy District Attorney at the time, driving home one night from bible study when LAPD pulled him over. A traffic violation, he'd thought, until officers swarmed his car with shotguns aimed at his head. The cops refused to look in his wallet at his badge. They cuffed him and threw him on the curb.

My father is mostly thankful that he'd stayed calm. In his shock, he had done nothing. That's what he believes saved his life.

I think about this while I watch Eric Garner die. For months, I avoided the video, until we arrived at another officer non-indictment. Now I've seen the video of Garner's death, as well as a second video I find even more disturbing. This second video, taken immediately after Garner has been killed by a banned chokehold, shows officers attempting to speak to him, asking him to respond to EMTs. They do not yet know that he is dead, and there's something about this moment, officers shuffling around as an EMT seeks a pulse, that is so bafflingly and frustratingly human, so different from the five officers lunging and wrangling Garner to the ground.

In the wake of this non-indictment, a surprising coalition of detractors has emerged. Not just black and brown students hitting the streets in protest but conservative stalwarts, like Bill O'Reilly or John Boehner, criticizing the lack of justice. Even George W. Bush weighed in, calling the grand jury's decision "sad." But even though many find Garner's death wrong, others refuse to believe that race played a role. His death was the result of overzealous policing, a series of bad individual choices. It would have happened to a white guy. The same way in Cleveland, a 12-year-old Black boy named Tamir Rice was killed by officers for playing with a toy gun. An unfortunate tragedy, but not racial. Any white kid playing with a realistic-looking toy gun would have been killed too.

Darren Wilson has been unrepentant about taking Mike Brown's life. He insists he could not have done anything differently. Daniel Pantaleo has offered condolences to the Garner family, admitting that he "feels very bad" about Garner's death.

"It is never my intention to harm anyone," he said.

I don't know which is worse, the unrepentant killer or the man who insists to the end that he meant well.

A year ago, outside the Orange County airport, a white woman cut in front of me at the luggage check. She had been standing next to me, and soon as the luggage handlers called next, she swooped up her things and went to the counter. She'd cut me because I was black. Or maybe because I was young. Maybe she was running late for her flight or maybe she was just rude. She would've cut me if I had been a white woman like her. She would've cut me if I had been anyone.

Of course, the woman ended up on my flight, and of course, she was seated right next to me. Before the flight took off, she turned to me and said, "I'm sorry if I cut you earlier. I didn't see you standing there."

I often hear good white people ask why people of color must make everything about race, as if we enjoy considering racism as a motivation. I wish I never had to cycle through these small interactions and wonder: Am I overthinking? Am I just being paranoid? It's exhausting.

"It was a lot simpler in the rural South," my mother tells me. "White people let you know right away where you stood."

The problem is that you can never know someone else's intentions. And sometimes I feel like I live in a world where I'm forced to parse through the intentions of people who have no interest in knowing mine. A grand jury believed that Darren Wilson was a good officer doing his job. This same grand jury believed than an eighteen-year-old kid in a monstrous rage charged into a hailstorm of bullets toward a cop's gun.

Wilson described Michael Brown as a black brute, a demon. No one questioned Michael Brown's intentions. A stereotype does not have complex, individual motivations. A stereotype, treated as such, can be forced into whatever action we expect.

I spent a four hour flight trying not to wonder about the white woman's intentions. But why would she think about mine? She didn't even see me.

In elementary school, my older sister came home one day crying. She had learned about the Ku Klux Klan in class that day and she was afraid that men in white hoods would attack us. My father told her there was nothing to worry about.

"If a Klansman sat at this table right now," he said, "I'd laugh right in his face."

My mother tells stories of Klansmen riding at night, of how her grandmother worried when the doctor's son—a white boy—visited her youngest sister because she feared the Klan would burn down their home. When I was a child, I only saw the Klan in made-for-TV civil rights movies or on theatrical episodes of Jerry Springer. My parents knew what we would later learn, that in the nineties, in our California home, surrounded by good white people, we had more to fear than racism that announces itself.

We all want to believe in progress, in history that marches forward in a neat line, in transcended differences and growing acceptance, in how good the good white people have become. So we expect racism to appear, cartoonishly evil like a Disney villain. As if a racist cop is one who wakes in the morning, twirling his mustache and rubbing his hands together as he plots how to destroy black lives.

I don't think Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo set out to kill Black men. I'm sure the cops who arrested my father meant well. But what good are your good intentions if they kill us?

When my friends and I discuss people we dislike, we often end our conversations with, "But he means well."

We always land here, because we want to affirm ourselves as fair, non-judgmental people who examine a person not only by what he does but also by what he intends to. After all, aren't all of us standing in the gap between who we are and who we try to be? Isn't it human to allow those we dislike—even those who harm us—a residence in this space as well?

"You know what? He means well," we say. We lean on this, and the phrase is so condescending, so cloyingly sweet, so hollow, that I'd almost rather anyone say anything else about me than how awful I am despite how good I intend to be.

I think about this during a car ride last weekend with my dad, where he tells me what happened once the cops finally realized they had arrested the wrong man. They picked him up from the curb, brushed him off.

"Sorry, buddy," an officer said, unlocking his handcuffs.

They'd made an honest mistake. He'd fit the description. Well, of course he did. The description is always the same. The police escorted my father onto the road. My father, not yet my father, drove all the way home without remembering to turn his headlights on.

Brit Bennett recently earned her M.F.A. in creative writing at the the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan. She is currently a Zell Postgraduate Fellow, where she is working on her first novel.

[nerdygaymormon]

Moral Combat

​Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics—R. Marie Griffiths

I finished reading this book about how Christianity in the United States went from being mostly united on the topics of gender and sex at the beginning of the 20th Century to divided into 2 main camps by the end.

A series of issues served to open and then deepen a division in American Christians. This division is the basis of the culture war in the United States.

At the beginning of the 20th Century there was a national agreement on men as head of home with women submitting to his authority. Monogamous, heterosexual marriage was the only acceptable relationship. Straying from this order was shunned or often punished by law. 

Today we have on one side traditionalists who wish we still lived in a country where men are the wage earners & rule makers and the wife handles domestic affairs while being the nurturer of children. From their perspective, the following things threaten America’s greatness:

Women’s increasing participation outside of the home

Non-Christians becoming more common

Whites losing power & privilege

LGBT people upsetting gender roles

On the other side are progressives who want to undo patriarchy and thereby free women and others to make the most of their talents and abilities. The things that traditionalists view as threats are seen by progressives as opportunities to expand America’s greatness.

Given their two viewpoints, arguments on these divisive issues have often been framed as protecting religious liberty versus embracing the modern world.  

1910′s  women’s suffrage - Women voting would mean they have influence over issues outside the home, and this could increase their desire to know about & a be a part of those things. Many men didn’t like the idea that his wife could choose to vote for someone without consulting her husband

1920′s  getting women access to & information about birth control - Freeing women from the consequences of sex outside marriage was troubling. It also transformed the concept of sex to not be strictly tied to pregnancy, but something for enjoyment. It was believed that this would lead to better care of children because they are spaced out and wanted. Some religious leaders warned this takes away the choice from God of how many babies a woman would have. Some were concerned that the racial makeup of the nation would change if white women restricted the number of children they have.

1930′s  end of the obscenity laws - The Depression caused a drop in movie attendance. In response, film makers started making more dramatic and racy films as a way to boost attendance. When censors cracked down, average American attitudes towards censorship changed. Why should Catholics or any other religious group get to determine what the rest of the country can watch?

1940′s  interracial sex & relationships - Anthropology undid the idea that there are separate races and showed that we all come from common ancestors. This threatened religious teachings that had justified slavery and segregation. It also was seen as a challenge to the racial hierarchy of Southern society.

1950′s  findings about women’s sexual activity (Kinsey report) - Religious conservatives were upset to learn that a large percentage of women didn’t adhere to their strict teachings on sexual conduct. Liberal leaders used these findings to talk about the importance of joy in sexuality within marriage. Both groups began using forthright language to talk about sex, a change from what had been social norms

1960′s  sex education in public schools - Traditionalists wanted abstinence-only teachings as a way to reinforce their religious doctrines. Progressives viewed sex education as a way to inform teens of ways to prevent pregnancy & disease

1970′s & 1980′s  abortion - Many women had sought for ways to end unwanted pregnancies. Some women were unable to use contraception due to religious beliefs & because their husbands opposed it. Providing access to legal, safe abortions early in pregnancy was seen as an extension of contraception by progressives. Traditionalists viewed aborting even a small clump of cells as murder and it also removed the husband from the decision which undermined his role as head of the family.

1990′s  sexual harrassment - When Clarence Thomas was nominated for the US Supreme Court, Anita Hill came forward with allegations that she had been sexually harassed by him in the workplace. When Bill Clinton ran for the presidency, several women came forward to share instances where he sexually harassed them. Later it was revealed that as president, Bill Clinton had inappropriate relations with an intern.

What was interesting wasn’t that the traditionalists and progressives lined up on opposing sides, but that they switched sides depending on whether it was a Republican or a Democrat who was being accused.

2000′s  gay marriage - people of the same gender who marry cannot follow traditional gender roles. together they have to negotiate how to divvy up all the things that need to get done. They can raise children, which also is a challenge to the traditionalist view that a child needs a father & a mother.

[plsbyallmeans]

Hillary Clinton on Her Surreal Life and New Hulu Doc: “I’m Not the President, and I Got More Votes! It’s So Crazy!”

The former candidate looks back and laughs. What else is she gonna do?

Hillary Clinton sat serenely before me, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. That was my first surprise as I was ushered into a room at a Pasadena hotel to talk to the former Secretary of State and the woman who won the popular vote in the 2016 election about Hulu’s four-part documentary series, Hillary (premieres March 6). Although she’s been accused of being plodding and dour, Clinton exuded buoyant warmth. And then there was her laugh. At first I was convinced that it was deployed for effect. (Politicians get media training; is laughter training a thing?) But gales of it tumbled out so regularly and recklessly that it seemed clear Clinton was just relaxed—maybe for the first time ever?

Sure, sometimes her laughter sounded rueful, but a lot of us feel rueful these days. And while she has stopped ascending the political ladder, Clinton’s name still sparks both adoration and loathing, as well as generalized post-traumatic stress. Some people wish she would withdraw into media exile rather than shadow the current election like the ghost of campaigns past. That gave some pause to Nanette Burstein, the documentary filmmaker behind The Kid Stays in the Picture and American Teen who took on this project in 2018. Burstein knew the Clinton defeat was still a raw wound for liberal America. But it was a cross she was willing to bear, given the complete editorial control and 35 hours of interviews with her subject she was granted, along with leeway to pose any questions she wanted.

I started to ask Clinton how it felt to participate in this legacy-defining project after so many years of having her life’s narrative framed by others, but the word “framed” triggered an explosive howl of laughter. “By all definitions of that word!” she said, eyes flashing, before collecting herself again.

“I decided to do it because I’m not running for anything and I think my life and my story has parallels with women’s lives and stories and what’s going on in politics,“ Clinton told me resolutely. (This was several weeks before the rumor circulated that Mike Bloomberg was considering asking Clinton to be his running mate.) “Thirty-five hours sitting in a chair answering questions is grueling but I felt like if I didn’t tell my side of the story, who would?” she added with a shrug. “At least there’ll be a baseline: Here’s what actually happened in my life. Here’s what I actually said about it.”

That led to some very uncomfortable conversations about the many scandals that engulfed the Clintons, including her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. (“It was awful what I did,” Bill Clinton tells Burstein, barely able to look at the camera. “I feel terrible about the fact that Monica Lewinsky’s life was defined by it.”) “I had to ask the ex-president of the United States about the most personal thing in his life and why he would make such a decision,” Burstein recalled. “It was very intimidating! But it was about: How did this affect Hillary and her marriage and the repercussions of that, which followed her 20 years later, into this last election.”

The series flickers back and forth between Hillary Clinton’s youth and the present, weaving together a complicated and flattering (if not quite hagiographic) portrait of a woman who’s provoked admiration and abhorrence for much of her life. Sometimes she seems like a real-life Zelig, popping up near the center of American culture for the last half century. But Zelig was a bystander, whereas Hillary got right in the thick of the action, sometimes changing the course of events and others times being swept along by them.

Clinton came of age at the exact moment that the women’s liberation movement was rising, and her 1969 Wellesley commencement speech landed her a spot in Life magazine. As a young lawyer, she wrote briefs as part of the staff for Nixon’s impeachment hearings (decades later, in a savage irony, she saw the process from another angle when her own husband was impeached). After following Bill to Arkansas, she confronted good old boy sexism, encountering judges who thought women shouldn’t be lawyers and constituents who felt the first lady of Arkansas should take her husband’s name. When Bill cheated on her in the White House, some women were furious with Hillary for standing by him. Conversely, when Bill entrusted her with the daunting task of devising a universal health care plan 16 years before Obamacare, right-wing rage, and revulsion boiled over. Footage in the Hulu series features protesters brandishing posters with slogans like “Hillary makes me sick” and “Heil Hillary.” At a Kentucky rally, they even burned her in effigy.

“I was threatened when I went around the country talking about it,” Clinton told me of that heated Hillarycare moment, shuddering at the mention of the burning effigy. “The Secret Service made me wear a bulletproof coat at one event because they had taken guns and knives off of people trying to get into the outdoor event. I thought, Shit, I’m trying to get people health care! It’s not like I’m stealing your firstborn here! What is the matter with you?” she shrieked, howling with laughter. “It was so weird—like, what’s happening here? Were they paid? A lot of them were riled up by talk radio…. But yeah, I had a lot of very unusual experiences.”

In the Hulu series, former adviser Cheryl Mills recalls “Hillary hater sessions” during Clinton’s 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination: Women complaining that the candidate was too power-hungry or that she’d been weak for staying with Bill. “It was like watching The Exorcist: The bile would just keep coming up,” Mills said. Clinton herself told me that before she ran for president, a psychological researcher warned her she’d have problems with white women “because they don’t want any conflict with their husbands, their fathers, their sons, their brothers, their boss. And white men are not going to vote for you—they didn’t vote for your husband, they didn’t vote for Obama, et cetera. So there was a lot of pressure on these women.”

Whatever your view of Clinton’s politics, Hillary reminds us that she was voted the most admired woman in America in the Gallup Poll for 16 years in a row. (Michelle Obama knocked her off the top slot.) Clinton fervently believes she had the white woman vote nailed down in 2016 “until Jim Comey dropped that letter on me,” she said. “I was going to win, I am absolutely convinced of that…. What happened is that white women left me, because their husbands or their bosses or whatever said, See? See? She is going to jail! It was a very effective assault on me.” The series points out that not only was Clinton’s career shaped by her own husband’s infidelity, but it was derailed once again by the sexual misbehavior of Anthony Weiner, husband of her top aide, Huma Abedin. The FBI probe into his sexting a teenage girl ultimately led to Comey’s announcement that they were reopening the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. This reignited the frenzied right-wing smear campaign and, she believes, turned off enough vacillating voters to throw the election to Trump.

Burstein didn’t want to lean too heavily on the gender angle because there are elements at play in Clinton’s turbulent trajectory that “have nothing to do with that,” she said. “They have to do with politics. With her own personality. But there are also things that are very specific to being a female when you’re trying to do something no one else has done…. You really see that play out in her story over and over again.” The documentary shows how the battery of conflicting public expectations and right-wing vilification over several decades caused Clinton to build up defenses, which made her seem ever-more guarded and humorless. That armoring process started as early as law school, where she learned to put her head down and work hard “despite whatever obstacles were put up. And when you fast-forward into an age where everybody wants to see what your emotions are and how you respond and all that... It’s really a different environment in which we find ourselves now.”

Clinton first sat down with Burstein for interviews just a few days after the 2018 midterm results came through with their record number of women elected to Congress. The former first lady and Secretary of State regards the anger-fueled impetus that drove so many women to run for political office as the silver lining to her 2016 defeat. “She doesn’t feel that it’s a tragedy, so why should I depict it that way?” said Burstein. “She’s not bemoaning her existence every day. She’s like: Okay, what’s next?”

Sitting in front of me in a nubby tweed blazer, Clinton said she tries to be realistic about the progress women have made during her lifetime. “A lot of legal barriers have disappeared, and that’s a big step. So now we deal with all of these pent-up stereotypes and judgments about what women should and shouldn’t do or should and shouldn’t be. And we have all these forces—political and ideological and religious and financial—arrayed against further progress. And we have a president who is a willing tool. He doesn’t believe any of this stuff. He has absolutely no core beliefs whatsoever.”

Clinton won’t endorse anyone in the primary, she told me: “I just want whoever can beat him to get the nomination. Beat him in the Electoral College. That’s all I care about. I’m not going through this again!” she said, dissolving into laughter once more.

I asked Clinton if she ever thought about what she’d be doing in a parallel world where she hadn’t moved to Arkansas and married Bill. She evaded the question, telling me she moved there because she wanted to decide whether to marry and just fell in love with her life there. But then I mentioned to her William Gibson’s new novel, Agency, which takes place in a world where Hillary is president.

“Oh, I’d love to read it!” she gasped, asking for more details. In our own reality, “I’m not the president and I got more votes. It’s so crazy! So I’m interested in somebody writing something about a different ending.” She smiled and wailed, “I want to live in that world!”

(Link)

[olderthannetfic]

It’s International Fanworks Day and also the 30th and final post in this series. If you follow my tumblr, you know that my true fandom isn’t buddy cops or Highlander or any of those things. No, my true fandom is...

WANK

No matter which bitchy piece of fujo-course nonsense you’re looking at on tumblr, no matter which debate about WNGWJLEO or women in slash or fanfiction vs. media you're reblogging, your grandma was having that fight in a zine somewhere in 1985 and at Escapade in the 90s.

Here’s a vid review from 2002:

"History Repeating," [...] was an Amanda vid. In-fucking-credible. Who knew? Who knew I could like Amanda? Who knew there were fresh HL clips I hadn't seen a thousand times before in HL vids? (Of course, as someone pointed out, she had her own spin-off.) This rocked--sharp, fast cutting and pretty, pretty shots, with a hot bisexy vibe running through it. And, you know, people like to say that there's all this self-hating misogyny in fans--you know, that women hate shows about women, hate women characters breaking up the OTP, etc. But when you see a femme-centric vid like this bring down the house, you really have to wonder. Is it misogyny, really, or is just that we usually see a bunch of crap representations of women in media and resist them?

So on the theme of There Is Nothing New Under The Sun, here is a selection of past Escapade panels on gender, representation, and problematicness:

1993 - Anti-Feminism in Slash Fandom (Or, how 'it was never this good with a woman' syndrome... where are the women, and why do we care?)

1995 - Why Lesbians Read Slash - (What's the attraction? Why do they care? Why do they write it?)

1996 - Character Bisexuality: Convenient fiction or character trait? (Is this a good compromise between "We're not gay, we just love each other" and "I was gay all along and just faking it with women"? Or is this too easy? Special mention for the stereotypical bisexual villian who's evil, sexy, and can come on to everyone.)

1996 - Female Heroes: Female Empowerment, or male power in women's bodies? (Give a woman a gun and make her really tough. Wow, cool! yes, or no? Are we celebrating women, or are we merely putting breasts on male action heroes? Heroines under discussion may include (but not be limited to) Sara Connor, Ripley, Vasquez, Thelma & Louise.)

1997 - Gender Astigmatism (The Gender Continuum: in what we read, in what we write, and what we are, there is always a connection with a point on the gender continuum. How do our definitions of "feminine" and "masculine" influence our creativity? Where do bisexual characters fit in? (besides there, you dirty-minded person!)

1998 - Xena: Does Girl-Slash Get Us Going? (Xena is the first show with a feminine couple to be really popular. What kind of slash fans are interested? Does gender orientation matter? Or do slash fans love slashy couples regardless of their gender? Can m/m fans be 'converted' to f/f fans?)

1998 - Bastards & the Women Who Love Them (When Methos says, "you live to serve me," any normal '90s woman says, "I don't think so!... or does she? A happy contemplation on the virtues of handsome thugs.)

1998 - Slash: a Continuation of Women's Writing, led by Constance Penley (In case you didn't know, in her recent book NASA/TREK (yes, the slash is intentional), she addressed slash as a continuum of women's writing, combining women's romance, and the male quest romance. Join her for a discussion of slash -- where it was, where it is, where it might be going.)

1998 - The Trauma of Slash Fans in Het Fandoms (Or, what to do when find women doing all that cool, tough-guy stuff you love.)

1999 - Male Slash Fans - Welcome Voice, or Infringement? (Slash is written by women for women — or is it? The Internet has attracted new fans, including the "male slash fan". Who is he? What does he think of what "we" do? Do we care?)

2002 - Femslash (General discussion on female/female slash fiction. If Buffy wanted something cold and hard between her legs, why didn't she just choose silicon?)

2003 - Slash: Feminist political act or really good porn?

2005 - Where have all the lesbians gone? (When some slash lists explicitly state m/m only, where do you go for femslash? Are there any hot femslash couples? Pimp your femslash fandom here, or bemoan the lack of strung female characters in the current conservative social climate.)

2007 - Femslash: The Other Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name (Femslash. It's a work that makes some of our hearts leap for joy and inspires complete and total disinterset—or even dislike and disdain—in others. Where can we find the good stuff? What makes it good? And what's up with the haters?)

2007 - SGA: The Women of Atlantis (What do we like about how the women of SGA are written and portrayed, and what makes us wince? What do we think about how their issues are being woven into the show's narrative?)

2008 - Gay is Not Slash (...even though slash is sometimes gay. The current argument about m/m romances by women as taking recognition *away* from male gay writers, depends on m/m writing being intended as gay lit. And slash, for one, isn't, even if there can be overlap. What overlaps? What doesn't? What examples do fans like?

2009 - Female Character Stories: Halfamoon, Full Moon or Just Moony (F/f slash, and other stories centered on female characters, are gaining visibility in fandom. Are there things fens will write about women that we won't about men? (Given MPreg, *are* there?) Should f/f be like m/m, or is it unavoidably different?)

2011 - My ***** is Not Ideologically Driven, But is it Homophobic (Slash fandom often sees itself as a mostly liberal community. IDIC, right? But recently there's been a slash backlash: it's anti-feminist, a 'symptom' of internalized misogyny. We're 'erasing' the women characters after all. Is slash homophobic? Does slash fandom appropriate gay culture? Is it awesome and ennobling as it makes us happy in our panties, or is all that self-hatred bubbling just beneath the surface of our porn?)

2012 - Natural Woman (We've lamented the lack of strong, believable female characters (who dress appropriately). But now we have them: Gemma Teller and Audrey Parker; Salt and Haywire; we've got Bechdel-passing women who look like they can throw a punch. Still, most of them are in the sci-fi or action genre, so are we really seeing progress? And what are we doing with them, as fans?)

2012 - Don't Call It a Bromance (It's Just Canon) (TPTB are increasingly aware of slash, and bromance is regular fare on TV canon these days. Does overt bromance make the fic and art hotter or just vanilla? Is there an anti-slash backlash in our shows? Is the emphasis on men's relationships making women disappear? Inquiring minds want to know. If you have answers, theories, or just want to squee, join in the fun!)

2014 - (The End of?) Ladybashing in Slashfic (Slashfic used to regularly feature bashing of female characters. Now, blatant bashing seems less fashionable. If you recognize this trend, let's talk! Were most ladybashing fics ones for juggernaut pairings in megafandoms, or were they everywhere? What's causing the change: more women in leading roles/ensemble casts, fic writers being more conscious to avoid bashing ladies even if they're not their favorites, more willingness to blame show writers' bad writing (instead of the character being just bad/evil/stupid) for bad female characters, or something else entirely?)

2015 - Fifty Shades of Fandom (Fifty Shades of Grey has become the representation of fan fiction in mainstream culture. It’s bad fan fiction, and it’s being used to ridicule women while making millions off women readers and viewers. Can we connect with these women: proto-fans who would love to read, and maybe write, great fan fiction if they found it? Can we use the FSoG phenomenon to expand our community? Does keeping our doors closed and our mouths shut perpetuate both monetization of our fan culture and misogynist scorn?)

2016 - Who Are We? (How do we define ourselves in this age of so many OT3s and team orgy pairings? Does m/m/f count as "slash"? Is slash-only space slipping away? (And would that be bad?) Do m/m and f/f belong together more than they do with m/f? Is "Media Fandom" a valid term any longer? Who are we if we start shipping het?)

2016 - Ladies Loving Ladies. (There would seem to be enough queer women in fandom to write/want more f/f. Do lesbians write f/f, m/m? Both? Do straight women? Or are we still missing the iconic female characters and relationships that create a great slash fandom? Did they figure out the answer to this question at TGIF/F and if so, what is it?)

2016 - By Us For Us (Fic, even kinky slash, is practically mainstream these days. The ebook revolution puts publishing within reach of almost anyone. Sundance hits have been filmed on iPhones. So why aren't fangirls making more media? Or is it happening right under our noses? Is this a place where our women's gift economy does our community a disservice? Discuss what's out there, what we'd like to see, and what's holding us back.)

2017 - LGBTQIA+ in Slash Fandom (Queer fans have always been here. In a subculture often defined as "for" straight women, what do we as fans have to say about non-straight, non-cis, and non-conventional sexuality and gender in fanfiction, in fandom, and in the larger culture?)

2018 - Confronting the Tensions Between Slash and Queer Representation (Slash fandom thrives on homoerotic subtext. Many queer fans are unwilling to settle for this quasi-representation. Part of every slash fandom seems loudly invested in their ship becoming canon. Some are queer fans who want actual textual representation in their favorite shows, and some are fans using queer politics to fight ship wars. Then the “slash is not activism” posts make the rounds. Is slash activism? Is advocating for slash ships in canon the same thing as advocating for queer representation?)

2018 - Representing Slashers (What does "representation" in the media mean to us? We know what more gay or POC representation means, but what about slash fandom, which is largely female and focused on bodies that don't resemble our own? Would better female characters in media better represent us? Or male characters written for a female audience? Come talk about the intersection of slash, personal identity, and media representation.)

2018 - Anonymity in Slash Fandom: Choosing to Hide (Why do the majority of slash fans hide their hobby? Is it fear of blackmail? Embarrassment? Fear of losing employment? How does this affect your happiness? How does this affect your security? What would an ideal world look like? Who would/have you told about your interest in slash? Who would you never, ever, tell?)

2019 - Fandom Post-Slash? (In an era of "ships" and #pairing #tags on Tumblr and AO3, has the "slash" label lost its meaning? Same-gender pairings are as popular as ever and fans still ID pairings with a virgule between the names, but how many fans still call m/m and f/f slash or femslash? How many fans identify as "slashers?" Het and slash were opposing binaries which few fans crossed. Are these barriers breaking down? What purpose has the term "slash" served? Has fandom moved

past it and, if so, what does that mean?)

[science-fiction-is-real]

STOP TRYING TO GET ME TO VOTE FOR BIDEN.

Okay.  Look.  If you plan to vote for Biden, I won’t stop you.  And I understand.

But I would like to make a few points as to why I personally will NOT be voting for Biden.

We do actually have other options.  Biden is evil, not just “less than perfect,” but actually evil.  Donald Trump is not the cause of our problems, and this becomes especially clear when you look at the behavior of past Democratic presidents and when you apply a little Marxist theory regarding the State. Also A Biden victory is in itself a form of harm, not harm reduction.

1) WE DO ACTUALLY HAVE OTHER OPTIONS BESIDES VOTING FOR BIDEN.

First of all, the fact that you can even mention 3rd and sometimes even 4th and 5th party candidates indicates that: Yes, we LITERALLY DO have other options.  Are they LIKELY to win? 

No.  But only because people don’t vote for them. We are not trapped in a two party system, though we may be trapped psychologically.  It IS actually possible to create new political parties, and for existing small parties to grow into large parties.  This is a long-term goal, and probably not something that will happen by November.  But the first step is to realize that the democratic party are not our friends.

Second, and most important, voting is a tiny plastic water gun in the vast nuclear arsenal we have at our disposal when it comes to political activity.  Historically speaking, even the most nasty and reactionary asshole presidents suddenly start acting REAAAAAL progressive when they are faced with mass populist movements causing civil unrest.  This also applies to senators, congresspersons, and members of the court.  Remember Richard Nixon passing landmark Women’s Rights legislation?  In fact, the level of political activity of the masses is 8 millions times more important than who is in the Whitehouse.

Where we should really be focusing our efforts is in organizing and movement building.  Protest. Go on strike.  Propagandize.  Obstruct.  Disrupt.  And most importantly:

JOIN AN ORG! Join an org.  Join an org. Join an ORG!  Join labor unions.  Join political parties.  Join non-profits.  Becoming a dues-paying member of a Socialist organization is worth a thousand votes.  You will meet experienced comrades who know the ins and outs of political activism, who will show you the ropes, and will put you to work doing something productive.

Join the Democratic Socialists of America.  Join the Industrial Workers of the World. I’m a member of a political party called the Socialist Alternative.

2) BIDEN ISN’T “LESS THAN PERFECT.”  HE IS A MUSTACHE TWIRLING SUPERVILLAIN.

Biden is not a Liberal.  He’s a center-right conservative.  He embraces Neoliberal policies that leave working class people to die in poverty and debt.  He has made no serious attempts to cater toward Bernie’s base.  He is unspeakably Racist, and actually wrote the bill that created Mass Incarceration as we currently know it.

As part of the Obama Administration he was complicit in all of Obama’s abominable atrocities.  From the drone strike program which killed countless civilians, to the escalation of a draconian surveillance state, to the mass deportation of 3 million immigrants.  Obama created the structures that Trump is currently using to terrorize immigrants, minorities, and protestors.  And he created them for the very purpose Trump is using them for.  Biden was there every step along the way.  Biden has espoused violent rhetoric about doing violence against protesters, arresting people with certain political beliefs, and condoning police brutality.

Biden is better MAAAAYYBE better only on 2 issues.  Abortion rights and LBGT rights.  And while those issues are important.  I highly doubt he will make any progress on those issues.

Biden has said over and over again that he would pander to the republicans and compromise with them every chance he gets.  He certainly has stated callous disregard for the lives of working class people.  And we can only assume that he will betray women’s rights and LBGT rights the moment he finds it politically convenient.

And don’t give me crap about RBG.  Biden will not replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg with another liberal.  He will replace her with a centrist, or do what Obama did and let the Republicans pick the replacement for him.   And also the supreme court is a tyrannical, undemocratic institution anyway and should probably just be abolished full-stop.

Joe Biden’s rhetoric isn’t even less fascistic than Trump's either.  He says his racist, sexist, anti-working-class sentiment out loud.

And with his billionaire and corporate backers, he certainly can’t be trusted to act on climate change.

He will not respond positively to the pandemic either.  He has expressed out loud no plan of how HE would handle the pandemic, and if his democratic colleagues in congress give us a clue… well, the Dems have been incredibly stingy with their money, refusing funds for relief for the working class.  They have not put up a serious fight for any measures to actually stop the Virus’s spread.

If he’s the “Lesser of Two Evils.”  He is just evil.  

3) IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY MATTER WHO THE PRESIDENT IS.

Trump is not actually the cause of our problems.  He isn’t.  Donald Trump is a fat asshole with a desk job.  Donald Trump did not invent racism.  He did not invent sexism or xenophobia or hatred against the LBGT+ community.  If Donald Trump died tomorrow, the forces of reaction would carry on their merry way.  Donald Trump is in office because he is willing to carry out policies that are favorable to the ruling class.  And the moment he stopped doing that, he would be quickly disposed of, either by impeachment or by a military coup.

And in fact, the violence we are seeing from the Trump administration comes from the way the government itself is constructed.  Not from some diseased ideology unique to the American Right Wing.

So let’s think about this a little more carefully.  Why do we have a government in the first place?  You know, a government, the “state,”  the law itself?  It’s not to negotiate peace between different conflicting segments of society, because they are obviously very bad at that.  It’s not to ensure the public good and protect the rights of the citizens.  Because the government doesn’t really do that either.

And this isn’t just a problem when Republicans are in power.  See my previous examples of Obama’s unspeakable atrocities.  

The reason we have a government is to enforce and maintain class based society.  The State is nothing more than Armed bodies of men who exist for the purpose of allowing one class to suppress another class.  The government’s job is to suppress uprisings, control the working class, assume risk on behalf of the capitalist class, and to fight wars on behalf of the capitalist class.  That’s why the Feds are kidnapping protestors.  That’s why immigrants are being put in cages.  That’s why the police harass and intimidate Black people.  To maintain and enforce the power structure.

All of these bad things happened when Obama was president.  And All of these bad things will continue to happen if Biden is elected. This violence we’re seeing isn’t the result of Trump.  You can’t even call this violence Fascism, because this is NORMAL. Fascism is a specific political phenomena that occurs under very specific circumstances . This violence is literally just the government doing its job.  It’s worse now because the economy is going through a rough patch, which isn’t the government’s fault, it’s just because Capitalism is unstable.

The Right and Left Parties represent different segments of the ruling class, and the election process is about the ruling class negotiating differences among itself.  The democratic party does not represent the interest of regular people like You and me, and you DO NOT OWE THEM YOUR VOTE.

2) VOTING FOR BIDEN ISN’T HARM REDUCTION.  IT IS ITSELF A HARM.

A Biden Victory could have several negative consequences.

The democratic party will continue its decades-long drift toward the right.  The democratic leadership will see once and for all that they can get away with running any evil sleazy candidate they want who will serve the interest of their corporate benefactors, and that the public will remain loyal as long as they coat their sleeziness with “Woke” rhetoric.  If the Democrats learn that you will vote for them no matter what they do, then your vote loses all of its power.

It could trigger violent backlash from Trump’s far-right base.

It gives legitimacy to an ultimately UNdemocratic system which is breaking at the seams.

It could pacify a lot of the militant, but less educated segments of the working class who have swallowed the rhetoric that Biden is their ally.  They will disperse from the streets, meanwhile Biden is free to continue the violent, racist, war-hawkish, neoliberal agenda that Trump, Obama, and Bush did before him.

CONCLUSION

Joe Biden is not our friend.  The Democratic Party are not our friends.  Trump is awful, and he sucks.  If we DON’T vote for Biden, Trump may very well win the Presidential Race.  But considering that Biden himself is very evil, and that Trump is not the true cause of the violence and hatred we see coming from our government, the stakes in this race are a lot lower than you have been led to believe.

A protest vote could send a strong message to the Ruling Class that we are not satisfied with racist, violent, neoliberal leadership, and that we want real change.  

Also, we actually are NOT stuck in a two party system.  There is a growing movement within the United States to create and grow a worker’s party that represents truly progressive ideas, one where regular people hold party leadership directly accountable, and the party is forced to serve our interests instead of those of the ruling class.  The first step in building such a party is to let the Democrats go, and stop placing our hopes in people who do not care about us.

But the most important thing to remember:

The ballot box is not the end-all and be-all of political activity.  The ruling class has created this little ceremony of “voting,” inviting us working class folks to come and play their little game of “pick the dictator,” and giving us the illusion that this makes a real difference.  But we have no way of holding politicians in office accountable when they break their campaign promises, and we are only allowed to vote for options the ruling class allows us to see on the ballots. 

We DO have power to change the system, but we have to do it outside the ruling-class’s terms.  We have to be organized and active and militant enough that the ruling class believes we pose an actual threat to their authority.

We have to do the type of things we currently see American’s doing in the streets right now.  Causing a major disruption, threatening the capitalists’ profits, and threatening the politicians’ sense of authority and control.

But we have to remain organized and militant even after the current wave of protests dies down.  And we do that by building left wing institutional power -- by JOINING ORGS.

JOIN A GOD DAMN ORG YOU COWARDS.

[saintambrose]

haha it’s US politics hours

listen, this tumblr has always been a fandom place since its inception and I’ve not really designated it as a space for political discussion because 1) I have several other avenues for that arena of discussion and 2) escapism was the theme here; but I’ve finally watched The Comey Rule and I have some THOUGHTS 

and I’m not really sure how active anyone is here anymore anyway, because I’ve not really been around as regularly as I was before the nsfw-ban shitstorm, so. Diving right in.

Probably my favorite thing was how it painted the American right wing as this faux-centrist bastion of impartiality at first, the whole circus with HiLLaRy’S EmAiLs being about how they legitimately believed they could play the angle that the emails were a threat to national security all while they knew damn well it was a huge big nothingburger (with a side of hatred of women) while doing that thing that right wingers have done since the Reagan administration where they malign anything left of fascism as communism (including basic human rights) and then, predictably, you have all these very furrowed-browed old white men sitting around a conference table being VERY CONCERNED that precisely the thing they wanted to happen came true and they are completely unprepared to do damage control on the mess they engineered because WHITE MEN ARE INCAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING THE CONCEPT OF CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR OWN ACTIONS. 🤣😂🤣😂

In all seriousness. I wasn’t crazy about Hillary either. I don’t like dynasties of any kind, royal or political. I don’t like establishment dems who are really just center-right in the real world while masquerading as left in backwards-ass bizarro-world USA. But I’m an old motherfucker now, I’m well into my 30s, I’m boring and watch CSPAN for leisure and shit. I read the reports coming out of the DOJ. One of my degrees is in political science, though admittedly, that’s the least thing that matters, in the scope of everything else these days. But it’s safe to say Hillary was unfairly maligned while republicans committing atrocities exponentially worse have been treated with kid gloves for decades. A very distinct double standard has been applied here for....longer than I’ve been alive, that even the most educated people on the left have refused to acknowledge for far too long. I watched that entire BeNgHaZi hearing (which is easily accessible on youtube, so there’s literally no excuse not to know the facts on this), and everyone knew -- everyone knew it was a bullshit smear campaign. 

So, this post isn’t so much a review of the miniseries more than it’s an indictment of the corruption of American politics. The most damning aspect being that, on principle, US politics has always had a problem with embracing progressive policy, and basic civil rights in general. That’s not news; people have known this for some time. But the thing that this miniseries really illustrated in a very cartoonish, yet succinct, way is that there are experienced professionals who hold the highest, most powerful seats of authority in this country who won’t bat an eye at dedicating their entire careers to denigrating common decency, basic human rights, and even constitutional law, while being absolutely incapable of conceiving the long-term consequences of these actions, who will then turn around and concern troll over the ashes of the empire they enthusiastically helped to burn down. It’s nauseating. It’s infuriating. It shows a pathological disregard for personal responsibility.

Everyone was so preoccupied with their massive turgid erection for hating the Clintons (and women) that no one saw they were enthusiastically living in a henhouse built by fucking foxes. No one saw the genuine threat. 

And, by extension, no one had the balls to acknowledge that age-old instinct of white men willing to engage in a scorched earth campaign simply to satisfy their worst impulses and entitlement complexes. 

Can you fit “Who cares if we’re screwing over several generations with corrupt court-packing and a flagrant disregard for checks-and-balances predicated entirely on the honor system; we just don’t feel like doing domestic labor or respecting women and minorities so we’ll continue expediting reprehensible policies that exploit the most vulnerable people in this country because we can’t compete in an authentic meritocracy" onto a campaign slogan banner? 

I sounded the alarms on this trend 20 years ago, meanwhile. My parents and I had just gotten US citizenship, luckily months before 9/11 and the patriot act; and as an outsider looking in, as someone who had risked their life escaping a dangerous regime at an incredibly young age, I saw the warning signs in the republican party even back then. Naturally, I was denigrated as an alarmist and a butthurt liberal. 

You know, I’ll acknowledge that as a white person, I’m not the average American’s image of what an “immigrant” looks like. My experiences here over the past couple of decades have thrown into sharp relief how “immigrant” is just a dogwhistle for racist bullshit, because people who concern troll about us don’t seem to have many problems with us white ones. But I came out of a communist country. I’m straight outta the eastern bloc. And I don’t think there are any words in any spoken language that can do justice to how insulting it is when americans try to americasplain communism to me. Bitch. Y’all don’t fucking know. You just don’t.

The point is, even back then, I could see the slippery slope republicans were tumbling down, and I can't say I derive any pleasure from being vindicated in such an extreme fashion. Like. I told y’all motherfuckers. TWO DECADES AGO.

People who aren’t familiar with US politics, and even long-term US citizens who for some reason feel like it’s a waste to pay attention to your own shit, seem to spend a lot of time trying to unpack what precisely went wrong. My observations came up with 1) the manipulative aspect of US history in public schools glossing over, and even omitting, the most gruesome aspects of the revolutionary war, the holocaust, and the cold war (and oftentimes, the cold war is NEVER EVEN COVERED, which is especially insulting to me, for obvious reasons); 2) the manipulative aspect of US history in public schools teaching kids that the Declaration of independence and the Constitution are unassailable doctrines of freedom and liberty, and, as such, after independence was won, no further activism to maintain democracy was needed so we can all just smoke a bowl and be complacent because all those authoritarian third world regimes we constantly ridicule and criticize can NeVeR HaPPeN hErE 😒; and 3) how limpdick both-sidesism replaced civil, comprehensive political discussion because the right spent so long abusing, denigrating, and bullying the left that it was just easier to play it safe and take the milquetoast ~centrist~ stance, which always, always, always capitulates to the lowest common denominator, which is always the oppressor. 

And generally just this age-old trend of holding the victims of systematic oppression to a higher moral and behavioral standard than the perpetrators of systematic oppression. 

Guys, I’m tired. I’m so tired. 

I’ve gotten a few questions over the years about why my writing is so angsty, why it always seems to follow the same themes; war crimes, PTSD, gore, torture. 

I already escaped one authoritarian regime. The USA promised us one thing, and then once we got here, it started emulating the very tyrants we worked so hard to get away from. A lot of people have no idea what that feels like. How much of a betrayal that is. Especially considering all the financial and legal landmines one has to navigate just to do it, and then we’re punished for that, too.

I write about PTSD because I fucking have it. I write about war crimes because I’ve experienced them firsthand - just as a victim and not the perpetrator. I so often write about soldiers committing them because I want to roleplay what it’s like to not be a victim for once. 

tbh writing a fucking Hamilton fanfiction is one of the most cathartic things I’ve ever done, but the extensive research I’ve had to do to be able to write this thing has been low-key traumatic. There’s a lot of historical material I’ve consumed that should have been covered at the most basic level of compulsory education, but conspicuously isn’t. And I know that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s by design. 

Democracy - and independence, freedom, liberty, justice, civil rights in general - isn’t just some final xbox achievement that you unlock and then just shelve the game and forget about it for the rest of your life. You have to keep grinding to maintain it, because there will always be selfish, malicious people out there who will dedicate their entire lives playing a long con to ensure you don’t get the same opportunities as them. For the love of god, stop playing the both-sidesism game. From someone coming out of the eastern bloc, I can tell you with great confidence that that was part of the propaganda campaign you were fed to keep you from engaging so they could install a dictatorship under your nose. Do some self-guided historical research, guys. It can be very illuminating.

Anyway. I’ve gone on long enough here, but damn, don’t screw this up again, guys. Today is the first day of early voting in Texas, and I’m going to do my duty. When I first came to this country, after experiencing the rigorous vetting process and labyrinthine legal requirements of US citizenship, I was led to believe that in exchange for that privilege, I was personally responsible for my own civic self-education. It’s so much more important than you've been led to believe. 

[arabfanon]

The debate over Afghan women’s miniskirts have become the latest salvo in the War on Terror.

Last month, Donald Trump announced that the US would be extending its military occupation of Afghanistan, reversing a stance he has held for years demanding a rapid pull-out. Instead, the country will see a continuation of the endless war, a war that has left tens of thousands dead but which has failed miserably to achieve any of its goals – like securing peace for the Afghan people.

Now, it looks like the war could be increasingly privatized – and Trump has shown interest in persuading Afghanistan’s government to clear the way for US mining companies to exploit the country’s untapped mineral deposits – valued at $1 trillion – as payment. Like the Iraqi oil lootseized after the 2003 US invasion, it is hard to imagine a more brazen form of armed robbery.

How do miniskirts play into this picture?

US national security adviser McMaster showed Donald Trump 1970s-era photos of Afghan women wearing miniskirts in order to convince him to maintain the 16-year-long US military presence in the country, the Washington Post reported this week.

“Kabul, Before the Taliban.”

This isn’t the first time Afghan women’s clothing has been used to justify war. Back in 2001, Republicans took up the blue burqa worn by many Afghan women – and enforced as law by the Taliban, then in power – as a symbol of women’s oppression. Continuing a long history of complicity with imperialism, some feminists began to rally around US guns and missiles as the best hope of “freeing” Afghan women – apparently not considering that bombing a country and killing thousands of people hardly creates much of a path to freedom.

Like the Europeans who supported the “civilizing mission” of colonialism before them, this new generation of colonial feminists jumped on the bandwagon to “free” Afghanistan’s women without considering what liberation at gunpoint would deliver.

Sixteen years later, the US is still occupying Afghanistan, and women are hardly freer. Indeed, heavy-handed US tactics have isolated large segments of the population and fueled the Taliban insurgency, which is now accompanied by an ISIS insurgency as well. While there are bright spots of progress across the country, these are often in spite of the US occupation and its support for the corrupt central government.

So what do photos of Afghan women’s miniskirts have to do with all of this?

In recent years, photo essays purporting to “reveal” how was Afghanistan was before the war have circulated widely, showing women and men in trendy 1970s outfits studying on the campus of universities in Kabul, taking trips to mountains and rivers, and generally wandering the streets happily.

Often, these essays are accompanied by descriptions of how Afghan women prospered during the 1960s and 70s under the rule of Ahmed Zahir Shah or his cousin who took power in a 1973 coup, or following the triumph of the socialist Saur Revolution in 1978, especially before the Soviet invasion in 1980 engendered militant resistance to the new leaders and the US started supporting the Afghan mujahedeen against the USSR’s military. Sometimes, a point is made about how the US sent money, expertise, and weapons to the groups that would eventually come to comprise the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, noting how these interventionist policies led to a cycle of violence that has not ended since.

For Afghans, these articles are an important way to remember a past when the future ahead seemed promising. In the photos, Afghanistan appears on a path toward a future of modernity, secularism, and development, a path that was interrupted by revolution, war, repression, and occupation. These albums are a way to consider an alternative future, how things could have turned out, if it had not been for the foreign interventions, wars, the rise of militias, the triumph of the Taliban, and so on.

Given the myriad problems facing modern Afghanistan, it is not surprising that for many Afghans these photo essays offer a sense of pride and hope. Sharing these photos is a way to remember an oft-forgotten past, a time before war changed the country beyond recognition. For Afghans, this is not just about nostalgia; it’s about remembering that just as Afghanistan hosted dreams of a better tomorrow in the past, it can host those dreams today. It’s about remaining optimistic and envisioning a future where the pain of war has receded far into the past.

As Mohammad Qayoumi, who published a book of old photogaphs explained: “Remembering Afghanistan’s hopeful past only makes its present misery seem more tragic. But it is important to know that disorder, terrorism, and violence against schools that educate girls are not inevitable. I want to show Afghanistan’s youth of today how their parents and grandparents really lived.”

Defining ‘Freedom’

But for the broader English-speaking public, the point of these articles is often not reducible to dreams of a better future, nostalgia nor historical learning – especially when one considers how few other articles about Afghanistan on any other topic manage to go viral. Why is it that non-Afghans only care to learn about Afghanistan when there are pictures of women in miniskirts involved?

The point of these essays is to suggest that before 1980, Afghanistan was on its way to becoming a “westernized” society. Some even note that if the US hadn’t supported Islamist extremists, it might have remained one. This appears to be how the images were explained to Trump, to suggest he shouldn’t give up on Afghanistan because Afghans could, essentially, be “civilized” again.

The idea that these photos reveal a time when “women were free” seems to equate “women’s freedom” with miniskirts. This is essentially the same standard, albeit in reverse, used by those who measure women’s freedom in terms of how covered women are.

Instead of defining women’s freedom in terms of social, political, and economic rights – like literacy, access to healthcare, and so on – both positions reduce “freedom” to how much skin is showing or not showing. A photograph becomes all it takes to decide that women are free or not free.

The problem is not that these images are inaccurate. Indeed, some people in Afghanistan did live the lives of those pictures. But this was a tiny segment of the population, comprising a Kabul middle class that enjoyed the support and patronage of a King who built a bubble of prosperity in Kabul but kept the rest of the country in utter poverty – part of the reason for the 1973 coup and the 1978 Revolution.

In the 1979 – at the end of Afghanistan’s “Golden Age“ – only 18% of Afghans were literate – and average life expectancy was only just above 40, meaning that half of Afghans died before that age.

The average Afghan was certainly not wearing miniskirts and attending Kabul University, nor were they taking fashionably-dressed vacations to the mountains in imported cars. This was a very small urban elite and middle-class segment of society shown in the pictures of Kabul in the 1970s, and one that did not reflect the conditions of the majority of Afghans.

The pervasiveness of these photos and their spectacularly misleading claims to be representative of Afghan life in the 1970s contribute to the idea that only when women have thrown off their hijabs can they truly be free, that an Afghanistan without burqas is an Afghanistan where everything is good and free.

Few of these articles mention that veils were widespread in Afghan society outside of that tiny elite – or that, since 2001, many Afghan women wearing veils have attended schools, universities, and become gainfully employed.

These articles simplify the slippery realities of the past – that pre-1978 Afghanistan was a largely impoverished place and that Soviet warfare as well as US-backed mujahedeen warfare were both violent and had negative consequences for women – and instead present a narrative suggesting that Afghan society was once hijab-free and could (and should!) return to that reality.

This narrative, however, is not only misleading – it is also extremely dangerous, as shown most clearly by its use to convince Trump of the justness of endless warfare. This narrative suggests that the despair that continues to overwhelm Afghan society is rooted not in the widespread corruption, lack of economic opportunity, obliteration of large swathes of the built and natural environment, drone warfare that has left thousands of innocents dead, or anything else that is related to the political, economic, and social realities that confront 35 million Afghans trying to live their lives – but instead in the lack of miniskirts that fail to grace Kabul’s streets.

No one asks why the Americans have failed to even rebuild those streets in the background in these sixteen years. By refocusing the debate on women’s clothing yet again, broader questions around the problems facing Afghanistan become elided – and the discussion returns to a simplistic dichotomy between Islam and secular modernity.

It’s useful to note that the weaponization of nostalgia is not limited to Afghanistan, but is common in countries across the region.

Consider photographs from Iran from before the Islamic Revolution, which are often used to depict a time when women were free to wear miniskirts – and thus supposedly “free” in the broadest sense of the word. In Iran, as well, these pictures tend to show an extremely distorted and limited view of Iranian society. In 1979, a small minority of Iranian women attended college – compared to 55% today – and while there certainly were bars and clubs in big cities like Tehran, the majority of Iranians lived in rural areas, did not wear miniskirts, and did not regularly attend cabarets.

Same goes for Iraq. Photographs of the 1970s are frequently passed around to show a time before Saddam Hussein, war, sanctions, and US invasion. But the photographs of women in miniskirts in Baghdad hardly speak to a broader reality for the majority of Iraqi people, who were living in agricultural areas at the time. Nor do they speak to the repressive policies of the Baathist state, which were in full swing at the time.

But these photo essays are not concerned about these kinds of statistic or messy details. These essays rarely offer statistics about education, employment, or much else. The main point is the visuals: the miniskirt, the free walking around. And we are thus offered a past that is reducible to the length of a woman’s skirt – and not any of the context or conditions in which the vast majority of women (or men) actually lived.

So were women “freer” back in the 1970s in these countries? It depends how you measure it, of course. But the point is that miniskirts or lack thereof do not prove the existence of women’s freedom or civilization in a country. Their use to convince Trump to continue the occupation of Afghanistan reveals the continuing dangers of these facile equation of women’s dress with freedom as well as the weaponization of nostalgia.

This nostalgia is dangerous because it erases the very real material and social inequalities that existed in the past and that need our attention in the present. These photo essays too often present a misleading view of the past that takes elite history as if it represented the nation as a whole, thus obscuring the reality of most people’s memories of the past and instead replacing them with a narrative that equates freedom with clothing and nothing more.

[arcticdementor]

Over recent weeks, political turmoil raged in the form of mass demonstrations that saw 1 in 7 Hong Kong residents take to the streets to protest an extradition bill that would have allowed alleged suspects to be deported to stand trial in Mainland China, where the legal system is subject to the arbitrariness and discretion of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The fear that any dissident could be targeted isn’t unfounded as stories about billionaires and booksellers being kidnapped by Beijing operatives, only to be prosecuted in show trials on the Mainland and in some cases even tortured in jail, are well known. The extradition bill left almost no room for doubt about China’s ambitions to further override the civil rights guaranteed to the people of Hong Kong by the Sino-British Joint Declaration and renege on the agreed-upon “One Country, Two Systems” framework.

…

For those who embrace the ideological frameworks of various forms of “Social Justice” Theory including postcolonialism, decolonialism, critical race theory and intersectional feminism, seeing the Asian inhabitants of a former colony raise its colonial flag simply does not compute. Within this ideological conception of the world there is a very simple understanding of power dynamics in which oppression must always come from people seen as having dominant identities – white, male, western, heterosexual, cisgender, ablebodied and thin – and be inflicted upon those seen as having marginalized identities – people of color, colonized or indigenous people, women, LGBT, disabled and fat people.  When all of these elements are considered together, we get the framework of ‘intersectionality’ and it is through the language and activism of intersectional scholars and activists that most people encounter these ideas.

Eastern people who complicate the narrative of Western oppressor and Eastern Oppressed are understood to be speaking into and perpetuating oppressive discourses of colonial power which apply much more broadly than their own situation. From this perspective, by aligning themselves symbolically with the flag or philosophically with the ideas wrought by colonial legacy, the protesters were understood to completely invalidate the legitimacy of their liberation movement. Other criticisms reserved for the protesters include rebukes for lacking sensitivity and solidarity toward other countries with victims of colonialism. The journalist Ben Norton went so far as to say that the British flag was a symbol of “genocide, murder, racism, oppression and robbery,” and that the “pro-democracy” activists in Hong Kong were in effect, pro-colonialist groups, funded and backed by the “Western NGO-Industrial Complex.”

This argument perfectly exemplifies how one’s basic reasoning and moral calculus can get muddled when steeped too heavily in this kind of postcolonial theory. To deride the fight against one of the most repressive and autocratic regimes is to completely undermine and disparage Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy and freedom. Semantically equating being “pro-democracy” to being “pro-colonialist”, where the latter is essentialized to “pro-evil,” Norton instantly reveals the moral incongruence of embracing the actual oppressor (China) at the expense of the oppressed (Hong Kong), all in the name of opposing an institution which has become a bogeyman used by progressives to blame only the West for all of the world’s ills. Does it ever occur to him and other like-minded critics that perhaps the vast majority of the protesters simply do not want to live under the tyranny of a surveillance state that censors dissidents and implements dystopian social credit score systems?

…

The entire historical trajectory of our species and the geopolitics of our world are grafted upon a map drawn by colonial violence. Colonialism has existed in nearly all states and civilizations and has been the norm, not the exception, for the better part of human history. Since the ancestors of modern humans set out of Southeastern Africa around 70,000 years ago, despite the clear record of intermixing, people have been conquering territory, sometimes by way of committing genocide. Proto-Indo-European Yamnaya people spread from the Pontic steppe and ended up settling from the Tarim basin to Ireland millennia ago. The Thule displaced the Dorset in Canada’s Arctic less than a thousand years ago, the latter being almost wiped off from the face of the earth. Our own DNA bears testimony to this tyrannical tendency embedded in us: 1 in 200 men on Earth can trace their ancestry from Ghengis Khan. The status of conqueror and the conquered has changed hands repeatedly throughout history. These and countless other examples, such as the expansion of the Umayyad Caliphate into the Iberian Peninsula and the occupation of Eastern European states by the Ottoman empire, should shatter the myth that colonialism was a uniquely Western transgression. With the moral arc slowly bending toward justice, post-colonial guilt has taken a stranglehold on Western thought, manifesting itself in two forms: one constructive and the other, destructive.

Constructive guilt allows us to critically evaluate various historical injustices and current inequalities that were shaped by European colonialism. Destructive guilt leads to the moral myopia exemplified by some progressive reactions to the plight of the Hong Kong people, which disturbingly echo that of Chinese-run state media. For one, the sight of the British flag among the Hong Kong protests has united intersectional progressives and CCP apologists in calling the massive demonstration a Western-backed uprising and accusing them of, ironically, “internalized colonialism.” This particular criticism is both condescending and patronizing as it alludes to the lack of self-agency among Hong Kong protesters, who must be so mentally weak as to become unwitting shills and puppets for the Western agenda. This epitomizes the postmodern notion of colonialism stretching beyond just physical land occupations to include a sort of cultural or ideological transformation of the mind. This is, indeed, exactly how postcolonial scholars from Frantz Fanon to Edward Said to Gayatri Spivak have seen it. If there is any merit to this idea, then why isn’t what China is doing considered a form of colonization of the Hong Kong mindset? Do we only care about the injustice of colonialism when the respective groups, defined as the “colonizer” versus the “colonized,” harbor differential levels of melanin? This logic not only provides the license to discount instances of colonialism between ethnically homogenous groups, it also allows progressive elites who rail against the lack of civil liberties, the imprisonment of dissidents, the mistreatment of minorities, abuses in detention centers and police brutality back home in the West, to be willfully blind to the hypocrisy of somehow supporting some of the very same things for the people of Hong Kong.

[cannabisrefugee-esq]

(via "Medically Futile Care" As Ritual. I Fucking Knew It. And People Are Okay With This?)

I’ve been researching so-called “medically futile care” lately, or more accurately, it’s a rabbit hole I fell down while researching nursing and what nurses have to say about witnessing and participating in medically futile care, otherwise known as medicalized torture.  My own mother is a nurse and I know that she, after being a nurse for some 30 years, started to become disillusioned by Western medicine and the horrific procedures and treatments imposed on intractably and/or terminally ill and actively dying patients.  Of course, she didn’t start having a problem with it until after she had reaped the social and material rewards of being a disgusting handmaiden and middle class patriarchal enforcer for her entire adult life including subjecting her own children to medicalized torture: my own brother died from it and earlier this year she brutally criticised me for abandoning Western medicine after 2 years of conventional Crohn’s treatments that were not helping and only making me worse.  With a Western medical nurse as a mother who needs a firing squad (or torturer) amirite?

https://youtu.be/ujANeiNYHU8

I have written here before about disillusioned Western medical doctors resisting their evil profession by leaving the field, including leaving via suicide. Apparently there is currently a movement headed by Western medical doctors themselves to challenge abusive practices in their field including but not limited to hazing and domination rituals in medical school and medical residency; overwork, sleep deprivation and other conditions related to employment in the Western medical field; and cruel standards of care including those implicating medically futile care where doctors feel “forced” to literally torture sick, injured and otherwise vulnerable patients lest they lose their jobs or be sued for medical malpractice. Doctors are actually feeling sorry for themselves because their jobs as patriarchal enforcers and medical torturers makes them feel bad, and while anyone who has ever worked before knows what it’s like to be coerced for money (and survival) those who literally, physically harm and torture other people in order to maintain their own standards of living will garner no sympathy from me.

The same goes for Western medical nurses who my research indicates suffer greatly from vicarious trauma and professional burnout from “having” to witness torturous medically futile care in their professions.  Examples of such care include flogging corpses which have no reasonable chance of being revived; continuing invasive so-called “life support” for those who are dead to the world and will probably never regain consciousness or if they do will be horrifically and permanently impaired; refusing to let extremely premature or terminally malformed or diseased infants die naturally, and so on.  Get a real fucking job, no matter how low it pays, is my response to all medical professionals who have a problem with physically harming and torturing people…yet continue to do it anyway because some man somewhere tells them they have to lest they lose their jobs if they want to continue to fund their own middle- to upper middle-class lifestyles.   Seriously fuck you a million times you poor, poor self-proclaimed victims of workplace abuse who continue to physically torture vulnerable people for money.  You absolute monsters.

As a chronically ill person suffering from an incurable and progressive disease that is notoriously unresponsive to conventional care, I recognized awhile ago that for me to engage with Western medicine when it has nothing to offer me in terms of pain and symptom relief or a net increase in my quality of life (net meaning overall, or a positive rather than negative score in benefit-minus-risk) would be nothing more or less than an engagement with a patriarchal ritual, and one that as a radical feminist would give me no comfort.  Because I see no objective or subjective value in participating in patriarchal rituals I have declined to use the doctors’ office as a confessional, to confess my sins of being a disabled female under capitalism and patriarchy to a patriarchal authority figure who can do absolutely nothing for me except to witness my confession and absolve me of the emotional burden of being sick in the first place, and medically noncompliant in the second.  That is literally what Western medicine is to me now — a patriarchal ritual — and I reject that on its face as a female who is deliberately denigrated and harmed (not healed) by patriarchy and patriarchal rituals by design.

Well come to find out this business about Western medicine and medically futile care in particular being a patriarchal ritual has been described by other people and wasn’t just something I and other radical feminists have made up in our heads: researchers actually admit it’s true in a medical journal article entitled “Rituals, death and the moral practice of medical futility.”  Of course, they frame the use of ritual in this context as a positive thing.  Here is the abstract of that article:

“Medical futility is often defined as providing inappropriate treatments that will not improve disease prognosis, alleviate physiological symptoms, or prolong survival. This understanding of medical futility is problematic because it rests on the final outcomes of procedures that are narrow and medically defined. In this article, Walker’s “expressive-collaborative” model of morality is used to examine how certain critical care interventions that are considered futile actually have broader social functions surrounding death and dying. By examining cardiopulmonary resuscitation and life-sustaining intensive care measures as moral practices, we show how so-called futile interventions offer ritualistic benefit to patients, families, and health care providers, helping to facilitate the process of dying. This work offers a new perspective on the ethical debate concerning medical futility and provides a means to explore how the social value of treatments may be as important in determining futility as medical scientific criteria.”

Oh by all means, let’s remove the expectation that medical care provide positive “final outcomes” for the one being subjected to it — the patient.  Because to ignore fail to extol the broader social function of torturing sick and dying people in a medicalized authoritative setting would be problematic, you see.  Do you see what they did there? They are talking about social engineering and the effects on society at large of flogging corpses, equating zombification/maintaining a state of undead with “life support”, and spitting in the eye of natural law by refusing to allow congenitally unviable infants to not-survive infancy and so on.  And while the abstract does not list or detail the alleged benefits, the writers believe the social engineering effects are positive. Sure, if the reader is one who benefits from collective trauma and trauma-based mind control among other things.  The rest of us, I suppose, are just expected to adopt the perspective of our oppressors.

These medical researchers aren’t even hiding the fact that most if not all medically futile including end-of-life care is ritualistic and does not benefit the patient.  They assert that it is not intended to and should not be intended to benefit the patient because why waste an opportunity for social engineering and propping up medical (patriarchal) authority by “facilitating the process of dying” as if natural law needs their help?  This is megalomaniacal.

The shit icing on the cake may even be that these researchers used a woman feminist’s ethical framework in order to justify using patriarchal authority as social engineering in cases of intractable illness and injury, including at the end of life.  They rely on Margaret Urban Walker’s Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics, published in 1998 which is described here:

The central concept of Walker’s work is the development of the expressive-collaborative model of ethical discourse.  The expressive-collaborative model is a participatory model that engages people of all different kinds in a deliberative process that develops shared morality for a community.  She develops this model as an alternative to the theoretical-juridical model [which model is a top-down authoritative model that assumes a universal moral code applies and does not accept input from the community it asserts moral authority over.]

Of course, assuming Walker is actually a feminist, she is proposing an alternative to patriarchy and providing an entrance for women and feminists into ethical discussions surrounding social policy and practice that disproportionately negatively affect us.

But her work is not used here to challenge patriarchy, quite the opposite.  These prick researchers appear to use Walker’s alternative feminist ethical framework to support the use of medicalized patriarchal torture as ritual and beneficial social engineering…why?  Because men and Western medical doctors should be included in the creation of social policy and practice and to not include them would be unfair because they are part of the communities they serve?  (Have we hit peak liberal feminism yet?)  Because using the bodies of sick and dying people to literally send messages to other people is perfectly fine?  You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, considering that men in general and Western medicine in particular, as a fundamental patriarchal institution, already wrote the whole show including the foreword, the afterword, and the credits — and have used women and women’s bodies as useful objects the whole time.  The world is their stage, the rest of us only players, yet we mustn’t disallow men and patriarchal institutions their voice literal actual physical abuse because not only ethics, but because feminist ethics.  Got it.

Did I mention that I was right about medically futile care being nothing but a patriarchal ritual that can only harm women because that’s what it’s intended to do?  Yep.  I absolutely did mention it and I will again.  I have also discussed how sick women’s bodies are in fact used to send messages to other people, in the case of requiring women to accept harmful and misogynistic Western medical treatment in order to collect disability benefits, the message is comply or literally die. Of course, I also framed Western medical treatment of untreatable, incurable and progressive disease as medically futile care which for some people is probably controversial but hardly a stretch if you just think about it a little bit.  Goddammit I hate being right all the time.

https://youtu.be/Auxn2VAdiKI