#axes of oppression

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

Regarding "pretty privilege", I think the person who took it apart regarding axes of oppression put it perfectly. Yes, people can receive better treatment from those who think they're good-looking than those they don't think are good-looking. But for looks to be a proper axis of oppression, conventionally attractive people would need to wield power over conventionally unattractive people, and this would need to be true for both sexes, all racial categories, etc.. And they don't. Jeff Bezzos? Elon Musk? Mark Zuckerberg? Bill Gates? Ugly as shit--but they are rich, white, heterosexual, and male. In other words, they're on several actual axes of oppression, on the oppressor side, and have benefitted immensely.

How about Fox News? Most of the women hired on that network were gorgeous and blonde. Certainly that got them the benefit of a job from Roger Ailes and Bill O' Reilly (both also ugly as hell, but rich and white and heterosexual and male!), but those women then had to contend with sexual harassment from the both of them. So where is the power of pretty people if there are a number of ugly people who can just hire them for decoration and then sexually harass them or worse?

Beauty can come with some benefits, sure, but those benefits are conferred by the beholder of beauty regardless of the beholder's own looks, not by beautiful people. And those benefits often come with a catch. So if we want to argue pretty privilege as a thing, we have to be using a complete different framing of privilege than we use for white privilege (conferred by white people), male privilege (conferred by men), straight privilege (conferred by straight people), rich privilege (conferred by the wealthy), etc..

And before someone yells at me, yes, I'm aware that conventionally unattractive women are sexually harassed by men who expect them to be grateful for it. I was the outcast in elementary school and the early part of high school. The way boys treated me then was different than later, when their opinion of my looks changed. I've experienced both the "you should be happy for my attention because you're ugly" and the "you're lucky to be beautiful, you should give me a chance" from men and boys. The point is, whether you're sexually victimized by a man who expects gratitude because he deigned to touch you or by a man who hired you because you fit his type, who has the power? Not the conventionally attractive woman. The man does.

That's privilege. Male privilege. This is literally an oppressor sorting the oppressed out like toys and selecting his favourites. And some of you think the favourite toys make up a separate oppressor class. I'm sorry, that's not how it works.

[bluehawkdustorm]

Is the place this comes from the idea that the axis of privilege is "cis man" > "everyone else"?

Because focussing on the "everyone else" as a singular package makes sense IFF the point of the grouping is "everyone who is harmed by cis male privilege", or "everyone who is denied cis male privilege", but even confusing the needs of THOSE TWO THINGS leads to massive problems, and it sounds like they're confusing a lot more things than that!

I've been seeing a disturbing number of "queer safe spaces" describe themselves as things like "femme & them" and even worse "she+," conflating femininity & nonbinaryhood. cease this immediately. say it with me: nonbinary people are NOT women-lite and it is extremely violent and straight up incorrect to imply that all they/thems are fem adjacent. this is erasure and this verbiage does nothing but make gnc and nonbinary spaces unsafe for masc and male nonbinary people. nonbinary, genderqueer and other third gender people can be and are masculine and men, we can be hes as well as shes and theys, stop allowing yourself and your peers to view nonbinary as woman/femme-lite, signed a butch nonbinary person.

[utilitycaster]

I’ve long noticed and previously commented on the odd fandom antipathy towards characters like Suvi of Worlds Beyond Number and Jonas Spahr from Midst; and simultaneously a far, far more generous approach to outright villains like Will Gallows, many of the witches, and Moc Weepe.

I’ve also commented on the favor and endless forgiveness shown villains before, and to get it out of the way, yes, a lot of this is due to horny reasons, and as someone who does not identify personally as a monsterfucker this might be part of my lack of interest. But I think it would be unwise to chalk this up entirely to people wanting to fuck the villains, and given that Suvi and Jonas are both extremely attractive as well it’s certainly not the whole picture.

Suvi and Jonas are born into and achieve positions of privilege - military/political no less - in imperial societies. They are both explicitly indoctrinated. They are not, in my opinion, brainwashed; but they are driven into who they become through competition.

I think a lot of people are really uncomfortable with characters shown to be complicit in and favored within this kind of society. I think Spahr and Suvi occupy a space that they find too close to home; too close to what they themselves are. A villain validates one’s beliefs: Weepe is ruthlessly self-interested, driven by profit, and terribly violent, and so it’s easier to be comfortable with him, ironically enough, because the story tells you he’s a bastard and you can feel good about clocking him as a bastard, and even like that this character is on a meta level telling you that you’re right in your beliefs.

Suvi and Jonas and those like them don’t permit you that validation. They participate in these harmful systems while believing it to be the right thing to do. They are also young people who grew up knowing little else, with unfathomably high expectations placed upon them. They are flawed, with no shortage of harsh edges, but they are also frequently kind and generous people who are incredibly important, as they currently are, to characters one might find more sympathetic. They are deeply human. And they are both the beneficiaries and the victims of a vast and complicated system. You cannot fit them into the box of a “stripped of choice” victim even though both have found themselves backed against a wall by their respective societies. You cannot avoid that the dissolution of their society would have devastating consequences, even if it might be right (which Midst directly explores; I suspect the Citadel might not be a thing to be dissolved). And while many people do so, one cannot in good faith and intelligent analysis treat them as nothing more than a shipping doll who needs to be programmed to become a mirror of the “correct” character of one’s choosing without ignoring who they are and what they bring to the table: a political savvy, a great deal of talent and intelligence, and a desire to embody the best parts of their respective flawed societies.

As Midst reaches its denouement, one of the core messages is that a harmful society is still one comprised of people: some upholding it, some actively furthering it, and some just living within it. While Worlds Beyond Number is nowhere near its end, Brennan Lee Mulligan’s body of work upholds a similar message; that one cannot lose sight of the personhood of people, even those involved in messy and damaging systems, and that people must be judged with that in mind. Suvi and Spahr are not cogs to be wrenched free and corrected, but characters to appreciate in their complexity. It is a shame that so many reject them in favor of those who consistently choose to do harm because it is less difficult and challenging to think in terms of Good Guy/Bad Guy.

[dykesynthezoid]

I do think it’s really funny seeing people on tiktok have the whole “there’s a difference between being GAY and being QUEER” in that some gay people aren’t politically invested and can’t be counted as “queer” for that, like it’s literally always funny to see people rediscover discourse from the 70s. I know it’s a very tempting argument to make but queer desire is itself always going to be a non-normative radical action, actually.

And it’s fine to feel disappointed when other queer people aren’t as politically invested as you are or haven’t done the work to unpack or deconstruct certain things, but you cannot just decide that they’re an inherently separate group from you despite being affected by the same politics of ‘difference.’ It actually doesn’t work that way. You are a part of the same group. And you just have to deal w that, even when it’s frustrating. Assigning these hard boundaries on what a term like “queer” can mean in practice is actually antithetical to like. Everything the ambiguity and malleability of the term stands for. There’s no arguing that “queer” is a deeply politicized term, but individual queer people don’t have to be active in politics to be politicized. They are going to be politicized regardless, whether they like it or not.

[auressea]

... imagine comparing uprooting someone's Whole Life to ...choosing to ride a bicycle when it's not safe. 👀

What if I don't want to leave Texas? The only option for LGBT+ southerners should not be, "Just move somewhere else."

I don't have any attachment to "somewhere else". I don't have a community "somewhere else". I have to start from scratch "somewhere else", and that should not be my only option. That should not be the option people in big, northern, liberal cities give me whenever I talk about the political climate in the south.

I want to make the south safe for me and mine, not abandon it entirely. This is my home. These are my roots. We should be focused on making these places better, not writing them off as a lost cause.

[marzipanandminutiae]

it's not ALWAYS like this, of course; some of them were okay. but. A Worrying Amount Of Bad Stuff Gets Glossed Over

growing up in the southeastern US as a girl in the early 00s was like

"hey kids, this white woman did something unusual and independent in the early-mid 19th century, despite the misogyny of her time! girl power!"

[5-10 years later when you do your own research]

"so, here's how many human beings she, specifically, held in bondage, and-"

(I'm not saying this would be as easy to explain to kids as "if your classmate is really good at drawing, that's good, right? but it's bad if she also pushes people down on the playground. sometimes people do good things in one way, and bad things in another." but. it definitely would)

[mars-ipan]

God I feel you on this. There are so many avenues for people to get sucked into bullshit infighting too.

I s2g every time I engage with trans content my for you feed starts serving me a ton of discourse about intercommunity transandrophobia or w/e and like... if people are being weird about trans men that's worth talking about sometimes, but I get the impression there are corners of the trans community that are doing nothing but scream at each other in some pointless transmasc vs transfem war. Meanwhile I'm sitting here on TERF island, transfem people right beside me, hoping our HRT and shaky legal rights don't get nuked in the next 5 years 💀

I feel like a general online discourse rule should be that if you're putting more energy into fighting your own community/policing language/etc than fighting people that materially affect our lives, something's gone wrong and you're at high risk of radicalisation into bigotry. Or might already be there.

ghhrgh LITERALLY….. like .

from what i’ve seen a lot of this transandrophobia debate came up in response to seeing trans women talk about transmisogyny. my theory is that a portion of tme folks saw that people have been discussing transmisogyny and felt that they were having their unique experiences erased. which, like, look . i get it. erasure is something i’ve experienced kinda my whole life. i understand that it feels Bad to have your struggles downplayed. i had that same worry at first. BUT. we GOTTA be able to examine how your own fears and anxieties and biases may be coloring your perceptions!!! bc yes being trans does not make you immune to transmisogyny!! we live in a transmisogynistic world implicit bias is Going To Happen.

like. transmisogyny is a real thing that happens and disproportionately affects transfems. transmisogyny is not something non-transfem people experience unless they are falsely perceived to be transfem. it is a uniquely transfeminine experience coming from the intersection of being trans and female (or female-adjacent). it is not just a unique kind of transphobia, but rather the intentional combination of transphobia and misogyny.

is this to say that transmascs don’t experience their own unique kind of oppression? no! but it’s not an intersectional oppression and it shouldn’t be treated as such. also, the name of “transandrophobia” just gives off. a really uncomfortable energy. you’re not being oppressed because you’re male. you’re being oppressed because you’re trans. i don’t feel like we need to give this type of transphobia a name because it is just transphobia. similar to how misogynoir is a word but we don’t have a word for the specific type of oppression black men face because that’s just racism. just because transphobia impacts you in a certain way doesn’t mean it’s a special type of transphobia, and really why are we playing oppression olympics in the first place? we’re ALL hurting. can we just like… help each other out? can we stop accusing transfems of like…. deliberately trying to overshadow transmasc issues or whatever? and for the love of god if we have to argue can we STOP misgendering and degendering each other mid-argument.

like. at the end of the day this is all trivial shit because In Real Life we’re being targeted by horribly cruel legislation and social movements. it’s like we’re in a burning house and i’m watching my brother and sister argue over black mold. like yes that’s a problem but i think !!!! we should focus on putting out the fire !!!! like i live in texas. lawmakers have been trying to pass anti-trans bills here for ages, and a couple of them have gone through! i remember being sat down in gsa in my freshman year of high school and having the club sponsors tell us that if a bill that was up for ratification mandating that teachers out their students to their parents was passed that they would do everything in their power to keep us safe. i have to be careful about how i dress when i go to certain places. and i’m not even someone who’s transitioning medically— lord knows what kind of bullshit hurdles people on hrt have to go through to get it. and we’re arguing over what we want to call our oppression? we’re all facing transphobia at the end of the day can we PLEASE fix that instead of dividing ourselves into little easy-to-eliminate factions please and thank you

[blood-orange-juice]

Spicy take: I'm starting to think that the concept of "trickster" is about just as meaningful as the concept of Hero's Journey.

Sure, you can fit a lot of stories into it and some were written with that specific archetype in mind but also it conflates Joker, Odysseus, Br'er Rabit and Slavic folktales protagonists and I don't think these should belong in the same category.

Boundary crossing can be done for many reasons and in many ways. The need to lump all such characters into a single category says more about our over-reliance on rigid structures, the lack of play in our culture and a desperate need for something else.

[auressea]

here's your reminder that the Gov of Canada has the power to name activists, protesters and Land Defenders: TERRORISTS.

https://open.library.ubc.ca/media/stream/pdf/24/1.0394048/4

Canada is attempting to deport an SFU student to Pakistan for organizing and peacefully protesting old growth logging in BC. I'd appreciate if your blog would help spread the word and the website set up to help people contact their MPs, sign the petition and/or donate to supporting him with legal fees. Stopzainsdeportation.ca

Stopzainsdeportation.ca

[fleshengine]

A problem I’ve found with dealing with people who are doing something racist is that a lot of racism is unintentional learned behavior, but the concept of racism is so thoroughly ingrained in the american psyche as evil and repugnant. So you have people who think they’re not racist going around doing racist things and if you point it out they FREAK OUT because you’re accusing them of something they view as a heinous crime. They think it’s some sort of social murder to be accused of racism so they come up with every reason under the sun that what they did isn’t racism. By sticking to their guns and insisting they didn’t do anything wrong they come off as more racist than they would if they just accepted that they did something bad, apologized and changed their ways. Because that’s the goal. The goal isn’t to crucify everyone for minor infractions, that doesn’t help anyone. The goal is to get people to stop being racist right?

I’d rather be friends with ten people who were racist and learned to be better than one witch hunter who would have them incarcerated on the grounds of bigotry.

[problemnyatic]

I generallly believe in being nice and respectful and accomodating when educating others and trying to course correct folks. I am also deeply, soul-suckingly tired and not particularly interested in playing complement sandwitch four billion times with people for promising to consider treating me like a fully realized human being someday.

Sometimes I'm gonna take the easy, bitter route and make sure that if people are gonna be all up in their guilt to feel better, they're at least feeling guilty about the right shit. I'm not above holding people aginst their purported morals and dressing down each of their failures to practice them.

The most important thing I ever, ever taught myself, by far, was learning how to be the fuckup without collapsing emotionally, getting defensive, or internalizing it as an inherent flaw I can never escape. I did this, because I knew that it's impossible to be perfect, and that if I want people to tell me when I need to correct myself, I need to be someone who is easy to correct. A breakdown isn't "being easy," getting defensive, starting an argument, bickering, hair-splitting, none of that constitutes being easy to approach or correct.

And also, for god's bleeding sake, we're tired. Trans folks, poor folks, the neurodiverse, black folks, brown folks, palestinians, the chronically ill, every marginalized person is fucking exhausted. Cut us a fucking break if we don't always have it in us to be the nicest about our outrage, about our lack of human rights. Sometimes we'll be bitter, and mean, and disrespectful about our oppression.

Cut us some slack, accept that you feel bad, and pull the best-faith, most critically-thought-through interpretation you can out of our words. You cannot prioritize your comfort in conversations about human rights. If you do, you have already lost. You have already chosen complacency, you have chosen yourself to the exclusion of the opressed.

[theplantqueer]

Been reflecting on my assumptions that anyone who sparks my disabled rage, protectiveness or exhaustion must be abled, and the kneejerk reaction to frame it as a slight by the abled world upon me/my loved ones/our communities.

To be clear, there's many appropriate times and places for acting in defence of us crips, Mad, ND, Deaf, ill and otherwise disabled people. It feels impossible that there'll be a day without that need some time in the future.

And.

I don't think it's as simple as that binary of us vs them. To truly internalise that anyone, anywhere can be disabled (including that random cunt who was just ableist to you!), I think we - I - need to break down this binary of abled & disabled. Not in an "ableism doesn't exist" way or a "disabled is not a useful category" way, but more: There are so many ways to have a body, and to be honest most of the bodies in this world are non-normative.

Whether through being disabled, racialised, fat, queertrans, intersex, gender non-conforming, impoverished, or any other kinda so-called "deviance" from the ""norm"", we have some shit in common! Namely the many varied experiences of existing outside the oppressive boundaries of "normative" bodies. The experiences we have of having these bodyminds in this world are real and important to name, and. the ways we group each of those experiences have arbitrary and ever-evolving, societally/culturally-defined boundaries.

I think in order to be able to not presume the ableist stranger abled-until-proven-otherwise, I/we also need to also come to terms with the ways we let each other down, disappoint each other. Perpetuate shit we shouldn't because the world is a rough place to exist and try to grow. I do it, and so does this random stranger.

So do my family members who deny their disabilities and wonder why I don't or can't do the same. So do average height crips who forget Little People exist in access audits & checklists. So do the Deaf people who express their unneeded sympathy when I talk about my wheelchair use, and so do the disableds who ask why there can't just be one sign language that everyone worldwide uses. So does the other wheelchair user who avoids my solidarity glance at the shops. So does the non-immunocompromised cane user who's dropped all pandemic precautions. So does that neurodivergent person who's forgotten they're not the only one in the vicinity with Brain Shit going on.

We love and uplift and protect and care for one another, absolutely! but we can also fuck each other over just like anyone else. We disappoint each other in big or little ways all the time. It doesn't make us abled, it makes us imperfect people in a world solely populated by imperfect people.

[auressea]

"large, expansive family units tied together by kinship and marriage that labour toward a common purpose" come in all shapes and means of relationship, leadership, structure and power.

These are wildly different across cultures.

The violent and oppressive system OP is describing is Very Real and Very Scary. However, their experiences are not universal.

break out in hives when self identified progressive interlocutors position that the problem of modern alienation is located in the fractured nuclear family. like, if you want, you can lament that it in the west, there are no longer large, expansive family units tied together by kinship and marriage that labour toward a common purpose. except this has been a violent form in all the history i know. in parts of the world where the family still represents this feudal image the price paid by victims of its inevitable violence is escalating. the social control the average hindu joint family is capable of enacting with a police empowered to serve the family when recognised explicitly by the state as an engine for organising productivity is terrifying. please stop fantasising about the benevolent patriarch and the loving matriarch.

the greatest single contributor to much of my childhood happiness compared to many of my peers was being raised in a nuclear family, my parents financially indepedent and physically removed the hindutva fascists that pepper my family tree.

[indielowercase]

all women are oppressed and all men are oppressors. thats what patriarchy is. dumbass

This ask came in because I responded to a post about radical feminism and TERFs, saying it tends toward "race blindness," which refuses to acknowledge the realities of racism.

"Emmett Louis Till[...] was an African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 at the age of 14, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store"

"On May 25, a clip captured in a section of the famed park known as "The Ramble" generated attention on Twitter. In it, a White woman called the cops after a Black birdwatcher asked her to leash her dog, per park regulations."

Jury: Former Seattle cop discriminated against black man using golf club as cane

A Brief History of The Women's KKK- JSTOR

Why White Women Keep Calling The Cops On Black People: "[T]he power of white men has always been ubiquitous, and so the abuse of their power was easily seen. But white women and their fears represent a less public terror – their gender obscuring the lethality of their tactics. Lying is a minor concern as long as the social order between races is maintained.

Identifying as the victim allows the women in these scenarios to maintain both innocence and ignorance"

There is a long history of white women's presumed innocence being used to justify violence against and oppression of men of color. This is not even bringing up how people's sexuality, class, and ability status are effected by social power structures. This anonymous ask is very much proving my point.

[aromanticbastards]

i see so many posts about generations that don't take this into account, but generational nostalgia is closely related to class. and most of the experiences that are discussed are blatantly only applying to middle class kids.

i often see people a few years older than me (and technically from another generation) talk about their childhood and more or less exactly describing my experiences with technology, while a lot of people who were born in the same year have had vastly different experiences. of course you grow up with cassettes and cds side by side if your parents can't really afford to buy the music they already have new just because there's a new medium for it. of course your family only has one computer for nearly the whole time you lived there, who could even afford multiple? let alone one for each kid? of course you have a flip phone until you are thirteen, the damn thing works and smartphones are expensive.

i don't really know where i am going with this, but i get tired of seeing people talking about experiences i had growing up, and then implying i can't have had them because i am five to ten years younger than they'd expect from those experiences.

generations and generational divide are artificial, anyways, but even more if you examine the traits that are supposed to define them, and then find out that a lot of those traits and experiences are tied to money. yes, technical progress is a real thing that defines life, but it is not on the same timeline for everyone. i won't pretend class is the only thing that shows this so blatantly, but it is one thing i frequently notice and don't ever really see discussed

[dickgreyson]

med schools trying to make students think more abt the societal implications of technologies and ethics are all well and good but you have to actually lay the groundwork and TEACH kids how to think sociopolitically. most of these kids are mathletes who have believed their entire lives that the social sciences arent valid, and you cant just put a question about differential patient outcomes in front of them and expect well reasoned responses. they dont even know who zizek is.