#but also some people seems to be reactionary and say discussion of women’s oppression is TERFy??? which is also weird and stupid

[mesetacadre]

(not the original "maga communism" anon)

tbh i'm not so sure the kke's analysis is not homophobic (or transphobic), i read their statement on same-sex marriage and it rubbed me the wrong way. i don't think it was an issue of translation

https : // inter . kke . gr /en/articles/The-position-of-the-KKE-on-civil-marriage-of-same-sex-couples-and-its-impact-on-childrens-rights-00001/

what do you think of the text?

I hadn't read this text, like I said my opinion was informed on conversations with two KKE militants. The text flip-flops between what I'd consider a principled (albeit rushed in the context of their material situation, marriage abolition is not a realistic position to take at this time) rejection of marriage and the state involvement in it, along with a good point that just legislating marriage won't solve the oppression queer people suffer, and between backwards ideas of parenting and gender. I do think they do genuinely not oppose homosexuality in itself, like they say, they express that they don't think two men or two women can adequately raise a child because of "motherhood and fatherhood".

In the original post you're replying to I did say that "I am not saying that the KKE is free from reactionary tendencies and that it's a paragon of absolute social progress, but just like it isn't that, it is also not comparable with crypto-fascists or glorified socdems playing into transphobic or racist tendencies." and that, in the context of communist parties in the past "Just like we can understand that an individual communist today may be insufficiently educated and express reactionary views and hurt people because of this, I think the analogy can be made that these past communist people and parties hadn't yet been sufficiently educated by practice and theoretical discussions. We can't ignore the harm that they did, but we can recognize that it was in no way necessary, and that it was counterproductive, so we can acknowledge those mistakes, carefully separate those elements from the rest of their achievements, and learn about them.". And I still think these two statements hold true.

The KKE is a historical communist party, one that did not follow eurocommunism. While I'm not intimately familiar with the makeup of their Central Committee, it does seem that their 100 year trajectory along with the resistance against reformism has made their leadership entrenched in excessively orthodox anti-western positions, and they do identify the connection between pro-NATO elements in the Greek parliament with advancing queer rights: "It is important to note that government officials, in order to promote the bill, resort to crude anti-Sovietism and anti-communism, linking its promotion to the further integration of our country into the "camp" of Euro-Atlanticism".

The KKE is still an extremely positive force for Greek workers, their capacity for organization is unparalleled anywhere else in Europe, and I'm certain that, if the sufficient opportunity presented itself, they would be able to overthrow the Greek government. And like I said in the other post, we can acknowledge that, as harmful and backwards as their stated positions are, we can't wholly reject their project because of it, and we can probably expect these positions to change as leadership is renewed. I believe this because one of these militants I talked to is trans, and they (using a gender neutral pronoun to protect their identity as much as possible) do not feel unsafe within the KKE.

TL,DR: Yeah, some positions in that text really suck and are homophobic, transphobic, and generally backwards. But the context of the development of the party and my communication with a couple of militants leads me to believe it is not hostile within their ranks, and that they will improve on this sooner rather than later.

[daffodilhorizon]

i keep seeing thing about how we aren’t addressing that the patriarchy needs to be dismantled systemic and not by asking individual men to change or “just go to therapy” and it’s like a system is made up of individuals. You can’t have one without the other. Every change happened because a bunch of weirdos decided they wanted a change and then found each other and yelled at the world enough to push it in the right direction. People of all genders do need to individually dismantle their own learned patriarchial brainworms to dismantle them. The revolution starts inside, and you can’t join the fight until you see it for what it is and are ready for commit to it. Only then can you actually start on the systemic change part, which requires like minded comrades, and a fucking lot of them. This isn’t the same as saying “just go to therapy lol” but that people who have not addressed their own reactionary thinking imprinted on them will not be able to dismantle the damage systemically. Educate - if you vibe with being a man in some way, set a fucking good example and show other people how to do that, and educate them on why patriarchy bad. Regardless of gender, you can still educate people in your life. Agitate - Keep yelling at the patriarchy and how it hurts people. Refuse to tolerate patriarchial nonsense when possible (turns out consequences actually make people learn!) and Organize - there’s places like menslib that are already starting on this step, simply having a place to find each other is a good starting point for discussion and activism to be done. I don’t need to tell people how to organize, they’re perfectly capable of starting protests and boycotts and supporting anti-patriarchial causes themselves. And therin lies another problem. Everyone fighting for civil rights has had to and oftentimes currently still are actually doing the hard work of organizing, agitating and educating nonstop because we simply do not have the choice to roll over and let ourselves be oppressed. Yet we are getting endless conversation  about how we need men to be babied just a bit more and they can’t be expected to change until the system does magically, and we can’t expect them to do the real work that past generations of men have already done for different causes. What? Real world gay men, black men, communist men, trans men, labour activists, eco-warriors had to unlearn the toxic things they were taught individually before they could even start punching back systemically. Patriarchy bad, but we’re already fucking fighting it. Men and Women and Enbies are already trying to systemically push back. And there is literally hundreds if not thousands of years of history to draw upon in terms of tactics. Radicals usually make up a small minority of weirdos, until they don’t. They seem extreme, until they don’t. All this hand-wringing around if we can ask men to actually do praxis for their own benefit is not only infantalizing them, but disrespecting the generations of men who did organizing before this, and buying into the idea that men are incapable. Men should be the ones deciding for themselves how to dismantle the patriarchy, because they see it hurts them, not us telling them what to do for their own good. You see how fucking patronizing that would be if it was happening to a group of marginalized people? Men need to pick and choose for themselves what parts of the patriarchy to be dismantled first and find self-empowerment in pushing back for themselves. As non-men, our role is to educate, agitate, and support the organizations and individuals pushing back against patriarchy. For example, as a afab i literally never considered the draft. However, that is at the forefront of oppression for many people with an M on their state mandated ID. We also gotta keep in mind that while men and any gender is oppressed under the patriarchy, it also benefits quite a lot of them, and a lot of them get lot of social benefit from the reactionaries setting the goals and boundaries of the anti-patriarchy movement. Like any movement it can and will be co-opted by capitalism to be less dangerous. For example, women are fighting for gender pay parity but... we shouldn’t even fucking have to labour for basic goods at all? All genders are oppressed under a system that views us each of us as an insignificant cog in a machine. Men are used as pawns in war and for manual labour. Women are broodmares (for more labour to exploit) and used for domestic labour. Enbies are simply shafted into either of the two mandatory gender labour groups and disregarded. I guess the point of my post is: People who claim to want to make things better shouldn’t need tips for their own self-liberation if they were actually committed to it, and in fact would be really fucking patronizing if they were actually doing anything real. “Every Man Needs To Go to therapy and that will solve Patriarchy” IS patronizing because it doesn’t address the root issue: that a lot of men are reactionary due to the personal benefits offered to them under patriarchy and that’s not going to change unless they are given a reason and educated to be better, and that’s going to be a LOT of work for everyone, both at the individual and systemic level.

[uncloseted]

tw: transphobia😭 hi I'm a radfem cisgirl (I hate using "cis" and "trans" words but here I need to for the sake of the story) I've got a friend from ny highschool (we're in college now) who's also a radfem and is always sharing great feminist stuff. Yesterday, she shared the comment of a girl saying "this fight for abortion (it is illegal in my country) is for men/people with vaginas too!" and mocked it. I preferred not to make up any opinions about her because of one single post. But today, she shared a picture of Miss Spain 2019 (a trans girl) who talked about her experience with sexism, and mocked her too. This time, it was obvious to me she was just being transphobic trash. She received lots of backlash and deleted the post, but instead made a new post complaining about people caring about transphobia but not about sexism (a very stupid post, if you ask me). This time, along with some comments from other girls respectfully telling her to stop being cruel and mocking towards trans women, she received a lot of support from other TERFS (although these TERFS said they hate being called TERFS just for being honest and brave lmmfao). They said that transwomen don't belong in radfem because they just suffer from discrimination, not oppression, and listed some reasons why: according to them, trans girls don't suffer: obstetrician violence, forced pregnancy, feminicide, child marriage, genital femenine ablation, glass ceiling barriers, being implanted "maternal sense" while kids, getting their ears perfored while babies, among other stuff, and that differentiate ciswomen biological reality from trans women biological reality isn't transphobia. Other girls said they knew transwomen who were mean to them, using derogatory terms to refer to ciswomen and they were mean and cruel, using this argument to generalize about all transwomen smh.

I'm just so stoned that people could be so cruel to transwomen and set them aside from the feminist fight when they suffer from already being excluded from so many things. It sickens me that some people don't belive trans people exist and treat them that bad, specially trans girls. I wish I could debunk the info this TERFS are spreading because it's so dangerous and enables transphobics to keep harming transpeople and I find that unbearable, but I am not as informed as I should be to debute all their lies at once. Could you help me?

So starting with the question of transwomen in radfem spaces, I don’t think many (if any) transwomen would say that they experience the exact same type of discrimination that cis women do.  There’s often this idea that “trans people don’t believe in biology”, but that’s a bad faith argument.  Trans people understand biology very well, often more than their cis counterparts do, because it’s such a big part of their identity.

Yes, transwomen don’t suffer obstetrician violence, forced pregnancy, child marriage, genital feminine ablation, etc. (I can’t even find any articles on the ear thing).  They do experience femicide, at way higher rates that cis women do. Transwomen are women, and they’re discriminated against in their own way; sometimes that’s because they’re women, and sometimes that’s because they’re trans.  Transwomen are largely supportive of fighting with cis women to rid the world of discrimination for all women, cis and trans alike.  

By contrast, TERFs seem to think that because transwomen sometimes suffer a different type of discrimination than cis women, they can’t be “real women”.  But that argument makes no sense to me.  The vast majority of affluent, white, straight, cis women will never suffer the violence that is apparently so central to the cis female experience.  They’re extremely unlikely to experience femicide, child marriage, genital mutilation... and yet they can acknowledge that those issues are feminist issues, even though they’re not universal to all women.  Why shouldn’t the discrimination that transwomen face also fall under that umbrella?  And if they can accept that women who have had hysterectomies, or women who have chromosomal differences, or women who are intersex, or women who present butch are all women, why shouldn’t transwomen also fall under the umbrella of womanhood?

Further, is that really all that womanhood is to TERFs?  Experiencing the trauma and discrimination that so often accompanies being a cis women?  I don’t think inclusion to a group should be predicated on the amount that one has suffered or how many “oppression points” they’ve amassed. And I don’t think being a woman should be predicated solely on biology, especially given that we never really know what kind of biology a person has just by looking at them.  What “being a woman” is is a metaphysical question that derails the discussion of trans feminism, and it’s a question that I don’t think a lot of TERFs actually have a good answer to.  It’s just an easy way to put the burden of proof on trans people and trans allies and waste our time (but if you’re interested, I do have an opinion on this. I just think it’s best saved for a different time).

In terms of trans people being oppressed, there’s all sorts of data to suggest that trans oppression is very real.  In the US, trans people were banned from serving in the military under the Trump administration, a decision that was only overturned a few days ago, and the Trump administration also reversed the Obama- era Title VII policy that protected trans employees from discrimination.  Trans people are overwhelmingly lacking legal protections- there are no federal non-discrimination laws that include gender identity, and in some states, debates over limiting the rights of trans people to use public bathrooms are ongoing.  

About 57% of trans people faced some type of rejection from their family upon coming out.  Around 29% of trans people live in poverty (compared to 11% in the general population and about 22% in the lesbian and gay populations), and that number is higher for trans people who are Black (39%), Latinx (48%), or Indigenous (35%).  27% of trans people have been fired, not hired, or denied a promotion due to their trans identity.  90% of trans people report facing discrimination in their own jobs.  Trans people face double the rate of unemployment that cis people do (about 14%) and about 44% are underemployed. This is despite the fact that a reported 71% of trans people have some level of post-secondary education- actually higher than the general population, which is about 61%.  It’s often cited that women earn 77 cents on the dollar compared to men, but that statistic doesn’t even exist for trans women.

54% of trans people have experienced intimate partner violence (compared to about 24.3% of cis women), 47% of trans people have been sexually assaulted (compared to about 18% of cis women), and about 10% are physically assaulted in a given year. 

About 22% of trans people and 32% of trans people of color in the US have no health insurance (compared to about 11% of cis women), and 55% of trans people who do have insurance report being denied coverage for at least one gender affirming surgery.  29% of trans adults have been refused healthcare by a doctor or provider because of their gender identity.  In one study, 50% of trans people said that they had to teach their medical providers about trans care.  Trans people are four times as likely than the average population to be infected by HIV.  41% have attempted suicide at one point in their lives, compared to 1.6% of the general population.  

20% of trans people have been evicted or denied housing due to their gender identity, and trans people are four times more likely than cis people to be homeless.  Only 1/5 of trans people report that they have been able to update all of their identification documents, and 41% have a driver’s license that does not match their gender identity.  22% of trans people report that they have been denied equal treatment by a government agency or official, 29% reported police harassment, and 12% reported having been denied equal treatment or harassed by judges or court officials.

75% of transgender students feel unsafe at school because of their gender expression, 60% are forced to use a bathroom or locker room that does not match their gender, 50% were unable to use the name and pronouns that match their gender, and 70% of trans students say that they’ve avoided bathrooms because they feel unsafe.  78% of trans students report being harassed or assaulted at school.

And these are all statistics that focus on trans people at large.  The discrimination is worse for transwomen and especially transwomen of color.  All of that certainly sounds like systemic oppression to me.

Every person who chooses to be a TERF perpetuates this discrimination.  It’s just bigotry towards trans people, plain and simple.  And for what?  A reactionary fear that all transwomen are secretly sexual predators and all transmen are confused girls who don’t know better?  Unfortunately, men can be sexual predators just fine without having to jump through the convoluted hoops trans people go through to be recognized as their true gender identity, and transwomen are way more likely to be sexually assaulted than they are to be sexual predators.  There are no reported cases at all that transwomen are dressing up as men to assault women in bathrooms.  There aren’t even statistics on how frequently trans people are sexual predators. And transmen are just as capable of making informed, thoughtful decisions as cis women.  

TERFs shouldn’t be pitting themselves against trans people.  There’s just nothing to be gained from doing that.  They should be working alongside trans people to fight the patriarchy and the discrimination that cis and trans women both face, regardless of what that discrimination entails.

Last thought.  Not to be a stan or anything but if you’re interested in learning more about these issues, Contrapoints has a number of really good videos on the topic of TERFs (including one that just released today!). They delve a bit deeper into the actual questions that TERFs often bring up and provide some nuanced answers.

[selfiecharmedlife]

RE: The Politics of Queerness

               There is a character in the Fate/ franchise I’ve been thinking about lately. Astolfo is a recent entry in a long line of characters that have all the aesthetics of a femme enby or trans woman while keeping the character’s gender ambiguous. The appeal to queers like myself is obvious, but I noticed a certain subset of political reactionaries (read: alt-right) also gravitating to these characters. At first, I was confused so I asked some friends what they thought the appeal might be and I heard some interesting responses. Despite how the character looks, their gender is never confirmed. Consequently, Astolfo’s character allows people to play with queerness in a purely aesthetic sense, sometimes for shock value, without addressing the underlying politics of queer life. It’s not even a new thing. I’ve also become aware of a small sub-culture of “femboys” who seem to also cross into the territory of queer aesthetics while remaining ambivalent or even hostile to the politics of queer life.

               Suffice to say that queer life is inherently political. The first Pride was a riot against police disruption of queer spaces. In a world where the dominant message is that trans is worse than cis, just having self-confidence is a revolutionary action. Heck, even just living a normal life and having a slow morning in my PJs is political.However, life in late capitalism has also meant that queerness has also become a commodity. One of the most visible cases I can think of is the case of drag. My first exposure to drag, as I expect is true for many, was through the film Paris is Burning. The movie is a documentary covering the Ball scene in New York during the 1980’s. The film focuses almost exclusively on people of color dealing with the weight of poverty, racism, sexism and homophobia while trying to live their lives with dignity. It’s a beautiful film that I still think about regularly. 

                The community that created culture trends that persist to this day was inherently political. There is an extended sequence in the film discussing the idea of “realness” and how part of the Balls was to show how a person could carry themselves with dignity even in the face of overwhelming opposition. Performers would walk the runway dressed as doctors, lawyers, etc to express the message that they are capable of living that life. It’s hard to talk about drag in the year 2020 without also talking about Ru Paul and Drag Race. The show is extremely popular, and I first found out about it through my straight ex-fiancée. The show managed to take the culture of the New York Ball scene and sanitize it so it would be marketable to a straight audience. Politics aside from milquetoast centrism are usually ignored or only given lip service to avoid making straight people uncomfortable. 

              I watched a few seasons and became a fan of some of the queens but stopped watching after season 10. In this season, one queen made her performance overtly political. The Vixen steered conversations to address intersectional issues like racism in the gay community. It ruled. Her reward for it was being edited to be the villain in scenes and the discourse I saw around the show, especially from straight people I knew, turned against her. For having introduced politics and especially for having drawn attention to how an artform pioneered my queer POCs was being consumed by an audience of largely straight cis women, she was vilified.

               Drag Race is a cultural force that speaks to how queerness as an aesthetic can be packaged in a way that appeals to a straight audience. Another example you don’t have to look very far on twitter to find is “yass queen feminism.” This brand of feminism borrows the aesthetics of queerness while ignoring the intersections of racism and sexism to focus on the wants of straight white women first and foremost. “Yass” is a phrase I associate heavily with Ball culture but yass queen feminism doesn’t seem to care much about addressing the intersectional issues that produced it. It’s the kind of feminism that my sister seems to ascribe to. She would go to Pride and party with her friends to look like a good ally. However, when I came out as trans she hung up the phone on me. We haven’t spoken for almost three years now. I’m sure she believes that she is a good ally. She says the right things and goes to Pride, but she didn’t hesitate when it came time to choose between ally-ship and her comfort.

               I wanted to toss a bunch of stuff at the wall here and there is a dissertation that could be written on any of these topics from the anti-LGBT femboys to the demographic breakdown of Drag Race viewership. Each of these cases highlight how the aesthetics of a sub-culture born out of oppression can be divorced from the underlying politics that helped create it in order to create a safe commercial product. It becomes a fun novelty to be played with or reduced to catch phrases like “love wins” or “love is love.” Neither of those phrases addresses existing structural barriers for homosexual couples and never mind how those barriers interact with other systems of oppression like racism and sexism. They do however sure do look great on a yard sign. These kinds of sayings mostly serve to reassure people they’re being a good ally without having to step outside of their comfort zone. This is just my opinion, but if your ally-ship ends at the point of your own comfort you might just be a good ally.

[if-only-angels-could-prevail]

“American Things” by Tony Kushner

Summer is the season for celebrating freedom, summer is the time when we can almost believe it is possible to be free. American education conditions us for this expectation; school's out! The climate shift seductively whispers emancipation. Warmth opens up the body and envelops it. The body in summer is most easily at home in the world. This is true even when the summer is torrid. I have lived half my life in Louisiana and half in New York City. I know from torrid summers.

On my seventh birthday, midsummer 1968, my mother decorated my cake with sparklers she'd saved from the Fourth of July. This, I thought, was extraordinary, fantastic, sparklers spitting and smoking, dangerous and beautiful atop my birthday cake. In one indelible, ecstatic instant my mother completed a circuit of identification for me, melding two iconographies, of self and of liberty: of birthday cake, delicious confectionery emblem of maternal enthusiasm about my existence, which enthusiasm I shared; and of the nighttime fireworks of pyro-romantic Americana, fireworks-liberty-light which slashed across the evening sky, light which thrilled the heart, light which exclaimed loudly in the thick summer air, light which occasionally tore off fingers and burned houses, the fiery fierce explosive risky light of Independence, of Freedom.

Stonewall, the festival day of lesbian and gay liberation, is followed closely by the Fourth of July; they are exactly one summer week apart. The contiguity of these two festivals of freedom is important, at least to me. Each adds piquancy and meaning to the other. In the years following my 7th birthday I had lost some of my enthusiasm for my own existence, as most queer kids growing up in a hostile world will do. I'd certainly begun to realize how unenthusiastic others, even my parents, would be if they knew I was gay. Such joy in being alive as I can now lay claim to has been returned to me largely because of the successes of the political movement which began, more or less officially, 25 years ago on that June night in the Village. I've learned how absolutely essential to life freedom is.

Lesbian and gay freedom is the same freedom celebrated annually on the Fourth of July. Of this I have no doubt; my mother told me so, back in 1963, by putting sparklers on that cake. She couldn't have made her point more powerfully if she'd planted them on my head. Hers was a gesture we both understood, though at the time neither could have articulated it; "This fantastic fire is yours." Mothers and fathers should do that for their kids: give them fire, and link them proudly and durably to the world in which they live.

One of the paths down which my political instruction came was our family seder. Passover, too, is a celebration of Freedom in sultry, intoxicating heat (Passover actually comes in the spring but in Louisiana the distinction between spring and summer was never clear). Our family read from Haggadahs written by a New Deal Reform rabbinate which was unafraid to draw connections between Pharaonic and modern capitalist exploitations; between the exodus of Jews from Goshen and the journey toward civil rights for African-Americans; unafraid to make the yearning which Jews have repeated for thousands of years a democratic dream of freedom for all peoples. It was impressed upon us, as we sang "America the Beautiful" at the seder's conclusion, that the dream of millennia was due to find its ultimate realization not in Jerusalem but in this country.

The American political tradition to which my parents made me an heir is mostly an immigrant appropriation of certain features and promises of our Constitution, and of the idea of democracy and federalism. This appropriation marries morally and ideologically indeterminate freedom to the more strenuous specific mandates of justice. It is the aggressive, unapologetic, progressive liberalism of the 30s and 40s, a liberalism strongly spiced with socialism, trade unionism and the ethos of internationalism and solidarity.

This liberalism at its best held that citizenship was bestowable on everyone, and sooner or later it would be bestowed. Based first and foremost on reason, and then secondarily on protecting certain articles of faith such as the Bill of Rights, democratic process would eventually shift power from the mighty to the many, in whose hands, democratically and morally speaking, it belongs. Over the course of 200 years, brave, visionary activists and ordinary, moral people had carved out a space, a large sheltering room from which many were now excluded, but which was clearly intended to be capable of multitudes. Within the space of American Freedom there was room for any possibility. American Freedom would become the birthplace of social and economic Justice.

Jews who came to America had gained entrance into this grand salon, as had other immigrant groups: Italians, Irish. Black people, Chicanos and Latinos, Asian-Americans would soon make their own ways, I was told, as would women, as would the working class and the poor -- it could only be a matter of time and struggle.

People who desired sex with people of their own gender, trans-gender people, drag kings and drag queens, deviants from heterosexual normality were not discussed. There was identity, and then there was illness.

I am nearly 38, and anyone who's lived 38 years should have made generational improvements on the politics of his or her parents. For any gay man or lesbian since Stonewall, the politics of homosexual enfranchisement is part of what is to be added to the fund of human experience and understanding that we pass on to the next generation-upon which we hope improvements will be made.

The true motion of freedom is to expand outward. To say that lesbian and gay freedom is the same freedom celebrated annually on the Fourth of July is simply to say that queer and other American freedoms have changed historically, generally in a healthy direction (with allowances for some costly periods of faltering, including recently), and must continue to change if they are to remain meaningful. No freedom that fails to grow will last.

Lesbians and gay men of this generation have added homophobia to the consensus list of social evils: poverty, racism, sexism, exploitation, the ravaging of the environment, censorship, imperialism, war. To be a progressive person is to believe that there are ways to actively intervene against these evils. To be a progressive person is to resist Balkanization, tribalism, separatism; to be progressive is to seek out connection. I am homosexual, and this ought to make me consider how my experience of the world, as someone who is not always welcome, resembles that of others, however unlike me, who have had similar experiences. I demand to be accorded my rights by others; and so I must be prepared to accord to others their rights. The truest characteristic of freedom is generosity, the basic gesture of freedom is to include, not to exclude.

That there would be a reasonably successful movement for lesbian and gay civil rights was scarcely conceivable a generation ago. In spite of these gains, much of the social progress which to my parents seemed a foregone conclusion has not yet been made, and much ground has been lost. Will racism prove to be more intractable, finally, than homophobia? Will the hatred of women, gay and straight, continue to find new and more violent forms of expression, and will gay men and women of color remain doubly, or triply oppressed, while white gay men find greater measures of acceptance, simply because they are white men?

The tensions which have defined American history and American political consciousness have most often been those existing between the margin and the center, the many and the few, the individual and society, the dispossessed and the possessors. It is a peculiar feature of our political life that some of these tensions are frequently discussed and easily grasped, such as those existing between the states and the federal government, or between the rights of individuals and society's claims upon them; while others' tensions, especially those which are occasioned by the claims of marginalized peoples, are regarded with suspicion and fear. Listing the full catalog of these claims is sure to raise howls decrying "political correctness" from those who need desperately to believe that democracy is a simple thing.

Democracy isn't simple and it doesn't mean that majorities tyrannize minorities. We learned this a long time ago, from, among others, the Moses of that Jewish American Book of Exodus, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, or, in more recent times, from Thurgood Marshall. In these days of demographic shifts, when majorities are disappearing, this knowledge is particularly useful, and it needs to be expanded. There are in this country political traditions congenial to the idea that democracy is multicolored and multicultural and also multigendered, that democracy is about returning to individuals the fullest range of their freedoms, but also about the sharing of power, about the rediscovery of collective responsibility. There are in this country political traditions, from organized labor, from the civil-rights and black-power movements, from feminist and homosexual liberation movements, from movements for economic reform, which postulate democracy as a dynamic process. These traditions exist in opposition to those which make fixed fetishes of democracy and freedom, talismans for reaction.

These traditions, which constitute the history of progressive and radical America, have been shunted to the side in an attempt at revisionism that began during the McCarthy era. Over the course of American history since World War II, the terms of the national debate have subtly, insidiously shifted. What used to be called liberal is now called radical, what used to be called radical is now called insane. What used to be called reactionary is now called moderate, and what used to be called insane is now called solid conservative thinking.

The recovery of antecedents is immensely important work. Historians are reconstructing the lost history of homosexual America, along with all the other lost histories. Freedom, I think, is finally being at home in the world, it is a returning -- to the best particulars of the home you came from, or the arrival, after a lengthy and arduous journey, at the home you never had, which your dreams and desires have described for you.

I have a guilty confession to make. When I am depressed, when nerve or inspiration or energy flag, I put on Dvorak's Ninth Symphony, "From the New World"; I get teary listening to the Largo. It's become one of the alltime most shopworn musical cliches, which is regrettable. My father, who is a symphony conductor, told me that Dvorak wrote it in America and then contributed all the money from the New World Symphony's premiere to a school that accepted former slaves. But as the story goes, his daughter fell in love with a Native American and Dvorak took the whole family back to Bohemia.

Like many Americans I'm looking for home. Home is an absence, it is a loss that impels us. I want this home to be like the Largo from the New World Symphony. But life most frequently resembles something by Schoenberg, the last quartet, the one he wrote after his first heart attack. Life these days is played out to the tune of that soundtrack. Or something atonal, anyway, something derivative of Schoenberg, some piece written by one of his less talented pupils.

The only politics that can survive an encounter with this world, and still speak convincingly of freedom and justice and democracy, is a politics that can encompass both the harmonics and the dissonance. The frazzle, the rubbed-raw, the unresolved, the fragile and the fiery and the dangerous: these are American things. This jangle is our movement forward, if we are to move forward; it is our survival, if we are to survive.

[queernuck]

Do you think that there are ways of telling whether or not a leftist is going to be a future reactionary? I've heard that sexual conservatism, transphobia, and work fetishism are telling, but I wonder if there are other signs as well.

I think that looking to any singular trait as an absolute indicator of reactionary tendencies is erroneous specifically because of how convergence between certain critiques can contribute to a more meaningful revolutionary position where individual thoughts, critiques, so on are apparently-reactionary or at least seem to contribute to reactionary positioning, but not noticing trends, certain lines of thought, certain ideological positions tend to lend themselves to future-reactionary status would be counterproductive and indeed even counterrevolutionary. 

sexual conservatism is one that I would want to problematize specifically because it can mean numerous things: generally, the TERF-and-adjacent types who talk about “cumbrained trannies” or contribute to similar ways of repeating the autogynephile ideology, creating such a category out of trans women’s experience to contribute to the idealization of Blanchard-influenced accounts where event t4t lesbianism is somehow degenerate, where innocuous enjoyment of anime is in fact defense the worst works with an anime aesthetic (when you can find plenty of reactionaries they’ll be a degree or two away from who unironically and openly post that exact content), so on: sexual conservatism manifests on and through the phallogocentric account of trans womanhood by making us into traps, into continual infringements on the virtue of Natural Womanhood, the conceptualization of the hypersexual transsexual as a continual menace, not to mention the means by which the transmisogynist line of critique is used to advance and codify racist ideological turns around the acceptability of different bodies and modalities of embodiment, acceptable metastructural bridges between the body-as-conceptual-object and embodiment as part of performativity, the bodies untied as such, and so on. 

this was shown, in part, by the readiness with which the idea of the “leather community” was condemned a few months ago in a rather ridiculous discursive turn, one which ignored the cultural history of “leather” and the identities it relates to, the acceptance of a certain field in which the sexualized body is acceptable and an exclusion of gay and lesbian identities from that, the idea that a relatively typical lack-of-clothing would suddenly be scandalous if the clothes are made of leather. the discussion of exactly what kinds of sexual activity and the phallic ideation, the implication, thereof are acceptable publicly is a worthwhile discussion but this was a reactionary appropriation of it. transphobia as well, of course, but transmisogyny more specifically seems to be an indicator of this: the radfem-to-tradfem pipeline is incredibly sobering when realized, given that various critiques of converging ideological tendencies foster this reactionary shift. the critiques of exploitation of sex workers, the genuinely horrifying content of much mainstream pornography (and misattribution of the origin of such degradation, the way in which misunderstanding of the ideological forces going into such producing-production, the creation of exploitative spaces like PornHub as a kind of ideological repository reflecting and creating cultural norms all at once, the rhizomal influence between these structures and their performative repetition in sexual encounters is of course an issue of great importance, but one which requires a genuine question of what exactly creates and produces what, how flows of desire interrelate) and how this leads to critiques on culture, on womanhood in relation to concepts of the West, the fetishization of the West and Western ideology, and how the supposed-radical critique seems to then turn such that preservation of hegemony replaces counter-hegemony as the goal.

The general acceptance of “TERF” or “RadFem” as a designation is something which is a strong, strong predictor that a person is tending toward radical ideology, and I absolutely believe that there are those who are in the latter group, those who look toward Radical Feminist genealogies, critiques, and so on as part of their own influence and development of feminist theory who turn to a more “materialist” feminism, although “materialist feminism” can itself be a mere reduplication of the same reactionary critiques. At best, materialist feminism is just that: a form of feminist critique which concentrates on the oppression of women through an applied, Marxist materialism, usually specifically informed by Marxist-Leninist concepts of what the “material” constitutes and so on. And conversely, the influence of various successes and failures alike of Political Correctness as a modality of critique as well as psychoanalytic imposition that moves toward attempting to do the same as mentioned earlier, the creation of the autogynephile as well as the way in which abuses against nonbinary people (often focusing on the creation and codification of an “AMAB themby” that goes alongside racial and colonial notions of sex) people of color, trans women, trans women of color, all find commonality in strange moments of convergence, passing tangents of relevance. Also, while this is something I want to say with a great deal of reservation and with caveats, certain tendencies may eventually lead to a sort of similar third-positionist falling-in wherein the general (but not exclusive) whiteness and hegemonic acceptability of reactionary ideologies appropriating critiques that bear resemblance to revolutionary ones. The way that right-anarchists are often actively recruiting other anarchist tendencies, how fascists use the idea as well as the actual politics of the NazBol as a kind of aesthetic prefix for their outright fascist ideologies (or call themselves NazBols, considering the lack of difference between fascists and NazBols and how the limited context of “legitimately” NazBol politics seems to be expanding due to the internet) means that people of certain tendencies palling around with people who seem sketchy? Almost certainly are.

As you mentioned, work fetishism is one I will at least acknowledge, in that it misunderstands how and moreover why movement-building and revolutionary labor must be done. The structure of “work” is one wherein primitivist critiques are often at least a starting point for questioning the structure of interaction, activity, how one considers an ethics of what is often understood as “work” and so on, such that anti-work anarchism provides a valuable counterpoint to work fetishism. Similarly, a reluctance to endorse antifascist actions, prison abolition, and other revolutionary actions on the part of certain Marxists due to anarchists taking part is counterproductive and even counterrevolutionary. The processes of Radical Democracy described by Chantal & Mouffe and the learning (as influenced by Mao) and Badiou’s account of Maoist self-criticism and study has enormous potential for convergence, I do not think that things are as hopeless as we feel.

I would also warn against general riot porn (although then again, I do love it as well), that interrogation of aesthetics of militancy is often similar-looking to the repetition of it (such that, again, the kind of juxtaposition of various state and non-state actors is an attempt at looking toward militancy-or-refusal-thereof), and of course because it’s me, conservative attitudes on drug use. The way in which discussion of how the black market has benefited reactionary and right-wing groups is of course necessary, but conversely the idea that drug dealers and users are some sort of group in need of purging, that similar strategies are not employed by leftist groups (or that leftist groups have never taken part in drug trafficking, or that destabilizing a reactionary state through such means would be indefensible) can be a bad sign. I mean, I’m an IRA supporter but I also love heroin, that’s just me.

So, there are lots of things, it isnt just looking for an anime avatar or seeing that someone once read some radfem theory or is this or that or the other tendency.

[canmom]

thinking about ‘masochistic epistemology’ vs all that leftist theory stuff

i watched contrapoints’s video on incels (it’s a decent video, but fairly long, so like only watch it if you already like contrapoints imo, and cw for discussion of self harm and quoting people expressing a misogynistic worldview), and like, main topic aside...

lots of tw I know have some history of using 4chan (me included, though to a pretty minor extent). what I didn’t know until watching that video is that in the (many) years since I was in school, they added a /lgbt/ board (now derisively nicknamed /tttt/), which has somehow turned into a place for closeted/newly transitioning trans women to go to validate each others’ self-hate and tell each other that they’ll never pass because of bone structure or some other nonsense reading.

that’s like... an entire trans subculture I wasn’t even aware of! i knew about the ‘trap’ thing, but this seems to be different.

and it is also really really fucking sad, and I hope those women escape that space.

but on another level it’s also really weird to me that 4chan, which fancies itself the place where the rules of society are suspended, where people post the wildest porn they can imagine on /d/ etc., would turn out to be the place where tw would recreate the dynamics of the thankfully-dying ‘trans support groups’, obsessed with appearance and ‘passing’ and telling each other to get expensive surgery and shattering each others’ self-esteem.

I mean, I guess it makes sense on some level that 4chan, one of the most ‘reactionary’ (in whatever sense you prefer!) parts of the internet, dominated by the concerns of young white men beyond all else... would be the place that a punishing reactionary dynamic takes hold among trans women who end up there. I guess it would be in less toxic and hostile spaces that we’d find a way to take pride in being trans and refusing to ‘pass’, process our traumas, refuse ‘stealth’ and surgery, build solidarity etc. Far from a hugbox full of disingenuous praise, ‘you look beautiful, hon’, as the ‘tttt’ users would apparently have it, this is a place where we’ve realised our priorities are different.

and yet. there’s still a level where it feels weird to me.

Contrapoints’s discussion of the incels and their fucked up worldview, and the similar attitudes that prevail in ‘tttt’ - what she terms a ‘masochistic epistemology’, a kind of ‘online self-harm’ - also I think kind of underlines just how much difference it’s made to de-naturalise all these categories of sex, gender and so on; to present it as a temporary system of a social relations with its own history rather than ‘just the way the world is, lie down and rot’, to raise the possibility that it could function differently or perhaps even not at all.

which isn’t to say I’m naive enough to think that gender, capital, etc. will end in my lifetime any more than they did in Marsha P Johnson’s lifetime or the lifetime of any of the other tw who struggled with this throughout history; but just knowing it doesn’t have to be this way, that there’s a possibility of defiance, means a lot.

so like... that’s one reason I read all this leftist theory and all that. not because I believe I am going to find the key to changing the world somewhere in a communist journal from Brighton or a dusty book from the 1800s, the Correct Theory that I can hand out to the Masses and and bring about the revolution, but because it helps make sense of all the awful shit I encounter, to change my own priorities, because critical engagement is some kind of antidote in its own right...

and ok, sometimes it can be more depressing, because you learn about all the awful miserable things that happened in history, the genocides and executions and systematised misery. reading history and theory can still be part of the ‘masochistic epistemology’, with a theme of ‘I’m not doing enough, things are so bad and I will never be doing enough to fight them’ or perhaps ‘oppressive social systems are too strong for us to overthrow’, rather than the incels’ obessions like ‘I will never have my socially mandated Wife And 2.5 Kids a Girl Friend(TM)’. it’s not a panacea to ‘masochistic epistemology’.

but still. I think this is a dimension of how like, “online trans women saved my life” etc., that I haven’t really acknowledged. and a better answer to ‘why do you spend all this time reading theory if you can’t do anything with it’. my therapist used to say that i should stop living in my head so much, but I think that’s to fail to acknowledge how all that ‘in my head’ stuff has helped - even if it’s just a temporary coping mechanism.

Marx may have said “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. And he was right! But also interpreting the world is important too, I guess, if changing it is to even seem like a possibility.

[sadachmesarthim]

Blaire White, Riley Dennis, Arielle Sarcella, and some thoughts.

CW for the below: cissexism, transphobia, generalized bigotry, conversation about genitals, internalized homophobia. i also use some crass language and references toward MYSELF - I am of the mindset that words cannot hurt me if I use them in jest, and take away their power. That being said, I do not use them in reference to other people. if that’s not your cup of tea, I’m sorry, here’s your warning now

I’ve been an active part of the LGBT community for about 6 years now, and I’ve been watching LGBT members on youtube for about 4 years. Since my discovery of my transness, and my flaming queerness, I’ve  subsequently discovered many a gay/trans/nb youtuber - I started watching Arielle Sarcella in 2014. She helped me open my mind toward things like sexuality and appreciating yourself for being gay. This helped a lot during my coming out season, and the season of life I characterized by depression and anxiety. 

That being said, I fucking despise her now. Her videos with Jaclyn discussing “dating preferences” being inherently part of sexuality, and not at all rooted in societal bigotry and innate biases is completely wrong, and very damaging. Here’s why:

1: They missed Riley’s point completely and twisted her words

This was pretty common among reactionary videos, tweets, and posts. Riley was simply stating that dating preferences (”oh, I only date cis guys”, “i only date tall men”, “i only date skinny women”, etc) can possibly be rooted in societal biases, and not actually what we believe or feel. 

Riley’s whole point wasn’t that not dating trans people is inherently transphobic - because it’s not. It;’s a specific preference, just like being more attracted to blondes/tall people/POC/etc. That preference and bias, however, could be rooted in societal transphobia and hatred, and should be analyzed to truly understand whether or not you’d genuinely not date someone outside your preferences. 

Riley is challenge us to analyze our inherent biases and prejudices, to not only help us step out of our own bubble and echo chamber, but to also help us grow as people, because if we continue to stew in our internal and societal biases without exploring other sides of issues and challenging our thinking, we will never become as understanding as we think we are. 

We can’t continue to let our biases drive us. That’s all Riley was trying to get at. We have to be more than our biases, and we have to learn to overcome them.

2: Continuing to misgender not only Riley, but also invalidate her experience as a trans woman and as a lesbian, not only hurts Riley, but it also hurts you. 

I have seen Arielle and Jaclyn invalidate Riley’s womanhood on the basis of her trans identity. That’s not okay. I have also seen Blaire continue to misgender Riley even AFTER she posted her measly “apology” video. It’s upsetting to watch, because people that claim to be LGBT (specifically to Arielle, partially to Blaire) are attacking members of their own because they don’t understand Riley’s argument or just refuse to try and understand. 

Riley is just as much a woman as Arielle, Blaire, and Jaclyn are. They are women. Riley is a woman. Plain and simple. I don’t understand what’s so hard about that to understand. 

People are also consistently reducing Riley down to her features and trying to use them as an invalidation for her arguments. For instance, Blaire (and some of her followers) have consistently bashed Riley for having a prominent Adam’s Apple, having a deep voice, being tall, and having a more traditionally “masculine” face, even after FFS. This I find is incredibly annoying and a very low blow. So what if she isn’t traditionally feminine or fit into your little box of what trans women SHOULD look like and strive to be? It’s her body, they’re her finances, and it’s her choice on whether she continues hormones/surgery/transitioning. 

This also stabs you in the back for trying to make those arguments. Why? Because it shows that you not only reduce people and their identities to their looks, but it also makes you look like a monster that only sees women as beautiful if they’re beautiful to YOU. 

3: Trying to seem like the centrist voice of reason makes you complacent in your own oppression. 

Arielle and Blaire are on the opposite side of the spectrum, and yet they both share the same sentiments: Trans people aren’t the same as cis people and need to be treated as lesser or different. Arielle, a terf, and Blaire, a conservative, are both hankering for a handout from the conservative right by trying to seem like the token LGBT voices of reason, and it’s infuriating. They’re literally shooting themselves in the foot to try and get brownie points from the right. It’s obscene and is only getting them further and further away from full acceptance and appreciation. They’re not only looking like nasty bootlickers, they’re also making the rest of us look like “triggered little sjw bitches”. I’m sick of it. 

4: Talking on things you have no legitimate stake or experience in doesn’t help your argument either. 

This mainly applies to Arielle, but it also applies somewhat to Blaire. Arielle, as a cis woman, cannot talk on trans topics without looking like an idiot. Why? Because she has no experience as a trans woman, and she never will. She is a cis woman, with only that walk of life under her belt, and she’s never experienced the type of oppression trans women suffer every day. Therefore, she cannot speak for the trans community as a whole, and she needs to stop sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong. 

5: At the end of the day, you can have your preferences, but that doesn’t mean people won’t get hurt by what you’re saying. 

This was touched on briefly by uppercaseChase1 on youtube, but I’d like to reaffirm the point and elaborate a little more. You dont’ have to agree with anything I say, anything Riley or Fiona say, and you can have your inherent and societal biases dictate your sexuality and dating preferences. That’s fine. But continuing to beat a dead horse and claim over and over again that you don’t find specific people attractive because of things they can’t control is cruel. No one asked for your opinion, and it will hurt people if you continue to shout it from the rooftops. 

[shutdownld50-blog]

ABOUT LD50'S REACTIONARY TURN

The LD50 gallery in Dalston, London last year ran this series of talks featuring 6 high profile far right reactionary speakers:

#9 Sunday – 7th August 2016– 12pm NICK LAND on Techno-Commercial NRx

#8 Saturday – 6th August 2016 – 6pm MARK CITADEL [as virtual avatar] 'Christianity, Progressivism, and the Occidental Soul' watch here

#7 Saturday – 6th August 2016 – 6pm BRETT STEVENS [as virtual avatar] ‘The Black Pill’ watch here

#6 Sunday – 31st July 2016– 6pm PETER BRIMELOW on Imigration, Ethnicity and Economics listen here

#5 Sunday – 24th July 2016 – 6pm IBEN THRANHOLM on The Sanctuary of Traditionalism in Russia and the West listen here

#4 Saturday – 28th May 2016 – 6pm Dr PETER SAUNDERS ‘Epigenetics and Evolution Theory’ screening: The Monk and the Honeybee (1989) listen here #3 Saturday – 21st May 2016 – 6pm Dr FLORIAN PLATTNER ‘Can we enhance memory?’ screening: TransHumanism ( h+) / Genetic Modification of Life (2010) listen here

#2 Wednesday – 18th May 2016 – 6pm ‘Autoimmunity’ (hosted by Goldsmiths university) watch here

#1 Saturday – 7th May 2016 – 6pm Dr SILVIA CAMPORESI ‘CRISPR Genome Editing Technologies: Which possible futures?’ screening: Gattaca (1997) listen here

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.ld50gallery.com%2Ftalks%2F

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

The talks programme mixes straight up fascists and reactionaries with other innocuous seeming figures with no known right wing affiliation or convictions.

Peter Brimelow is hardcore fascist: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/peter-brimelow

As is Brett Stevens: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2011/07/26/american-blogger-praises-oslo-shooter

Mark Citadel seems to be part of the 'Return of Kings' manosphere blog, so is clearly another reactionary voice. (‘Return Of Kings is a blog for heterosexual, masculine men. [...] men should be masculine and women should be feminine.’ – to quote their own philosophically self-undermining self-description.)

Iben Thranholm is a proponent of racist, anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant, homophobic and misogynist politics. She routinely discourses on the need to resurrect strong ‘european' gender binaries and ‘strong men’ to ‘protect women’ from 'male immigrants' who she presents as a violent sexual threat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaOLgy3YKtA

Nick Land: One can split hairs by saying that Nick Land isn't a white supremacist and is just into eugenic selection for intelligence so we can survive the coming AI singularity. However, a close reading of his recent writing reveals he just doesn't like immigrants and black people. He likes Asians because they are deemed to be smart and polite, and he likes Japanese because they've resisted immigration. Racism is an aura around all his other pronouncements.

The first three named speakers in the talks series – Peter Saunders, Silvia Camporesi, and Florian Plattner – are all reputable scholars. The topic of epigenetics (Saunders’ subject) is a hot button one for the new biological racists, because it shortens timelines over which evolutionary change can potentially happen, meaning that changes in historical time can have significant effects on human populations. This is usually used to argue that evolution within NW European populations has led to the wonders of the Enlightenment and enhanced IQ, while everyone else are just cousin-marrying knuckle draggers who are resistant to democracy because they haven't selected for non kin altruistic behaviour. The fact that HBD (human biodiversity) proponents use and sometimes misuse epigenetics doesn't mean anyone talking about it is necessarily fascist.

Considering the rest of the line up, however, it seems these figures fulfilled a kind of legitimating function for LD50’s project. Openly reactionary speakers could enjoy credibility by association with reputable academics. However innocent, they became tools in what appears to be a conscious and extended attempt to promote extremely reactionary ideas by introducing them, uncritically and indeed enthusiastically, to an art world and art educational context.

The live streams still available on the gallery’s blog testify to LD50’s gushing reception of and advocacy for racist, white supremacist, misogynist and homophobic views. If we can learn one thing from the above, it is the need to stop assuming everything programmed by small or large galleries is at worst ‘exploratory’, ironic or even critical – either an intellectual provocation or contribution to ‘discussion’. This programme appears to have been part of a wider far right push to infiltrate academic institutions, and to normalise and promote extremely reactionary ideas.

THE ART OF ENTRYISM

As well as the talks programme, LD50 also mounted a gallery show, 'Amerika'. Dedicated to the so called alt-right, and featuring wall to wall Pepe memes, kek, 'neoreactionary' esoterica, and misogyny, the same structure of plausible deniability allowed some at least to view the show as a kind of enquiry into a cultural phenomenon rather tha a direct act of political infiltration. Any illusions about the disinterested or critical ambitions of the gallery have been dispelled by the recent public revelation of the gallery's politics. A brief review of the gallery's blog reveals a show brimming with sympathy for affluent white male mass murderers of of women and muslims, but nothing that would pass for actual critique – let alone the visceral disgust this material evokes in those who side not with abstractions ('free speech') but human victims of violent oppression.

A similar standard of fascist entryism is seen in artwork still displayed on the gallery's website: a pseudo-critique of consumerism by replication (look, Taylor Swift!) exuding a will to distinction and superiority, at the same time functions to run fascist ideas (text by Hitler) and symbols (the Afrikaner white supremacist flag) past the un/knowing art consumer:

https://www.ld50gallery.com/exhibitions/

Some further background and analysis from the Horrible Gif blog's piece on the LD50 debacle:

'LD50, a small project space in dalston junction, had some exhibitions of questionable taste and arrangement in recent months. The alt-right exhibit it staged using scavenged parts of the aesthetic and philosophical matter online wasn’t immediately partisan on the surface. It could have been bad satire, it could have been one of those things many adult-child digital artists do where they incorporate the very thing they critique. Obviously the depraved chasm which 4chan and allotments of reddit are located in is morbidly fascinating, to someone who feels they’re on an important media archaeology tip even moreso. Despite the Hitler quotes coupled with anime motifs and other bizarre conflations of alt-right imagery, the show itself didn’t offer a concrete position. This is a commonplace exhibition model that allows “racy” subject matter to be presented with critical immunity, because the art moves to within a viewers praxis. More often this is used with cultural appropriation, where a white artist will extract reference points and framing devices from culture they do not belong to and situate the art itself on the intersection of their gaze, etc etc. So the art is about the white gaze on other culture, that way it removes itself from, at best, being accused of ignoring postcolonial theory or, at worst, just being mildly racist. Very meta though, and you can extract 2000 words from meta quite easily. With the benefit of hindsight plus a screenshot of a private fb conversation, it became obvious the curiosity with the alt-right wasn’t coolly detached in the LD50 show. Given the social media output of LD50 runs along moaning lines about the apolitical nature of net artists and glib rejoinders to political/social occurances, strangely they might have found the blazing political net art they were looking for… just the bad kind of politics. HEY, bad is a construct in art that is irrelevant after postmodernism and pop art, so who is to say it is bad? It’s just neo-reactionary. Sounds like the working title of a group of Final Fantasy rebels. These dodgy politics weren’t always so clear, even in that classic uncertain/ironic way, so it’s possible it was a slippery slope slodden down.

As said in the beginning of this longform rant, the social media microdramas of the art cottage industry aren’t very interesting in themselves beyond the sorry online appearances of calculated hostility and contrived artjoke acumen. But with artist Sophie Jung posting in a public way a ‘call-out’ to a curator of a gallery holding quite dodgy fascist views, the fallout is more interesting than the usual bruised/inflated egos or comment flame wars. The gallery itself has responded by “archiving” the post and all the comments on the main page, as doxing (a strategy of online shaming perfected by the alt-right) bait to sentient pepe memes and twitter eggs. It’s an obfuscatory and aloof reaction, one that shows particular acumen to online psychological skirmishing. Take away the veneer of irony and you see only a few slimy individuals toying with repugnant ideas that most good artists would give no merit, even as illusory discourse.

Is it right to call out someone by posting private convos? Well, check the gallery events and talks - they were pretty public (albeit small and within purposely obfuscating platforms) call outs to those neon genesis authoritarians. A lighter discourse than “is it ok to punch a nazi?” but no less annoying. Of course the answer is yes. Do you argue the inverse that the alt-right should be given platforms? Do you agree with the BBC giving airtime to UKIP but not the Green Party, who have existed for longer/have more members/more elected MPs/have actually run a fucking area of the country? Logic has associations, and while you can spin them away, we fucking see you. The alt-right would legislate for the structural, hidden bureaucratic violence against non-white/foreign people but it is not OK to punch them? They’d happily punch you. It can be so easy if it doesn’t affect you, or to think it wouldn’t, to think that exposing their bullshit is better. Hindenburg thought Hitler wouldn’t be as evil when he finally was given power, the tories seemed to think appeasing the UKIP types was the best way to keep themselves in power. Fuck m9, punch tories AND nazis if you can get away with it. Yeah, if you can back it up, calling people out on something as basic as nazi sympathies is OK. Why did it take so long to be called out on? The alt-right are super zeitgeisty right now and net art dorks are into that because it can be processed into smug “political” diatribe and gestural academica. Things within the art gallery mechanica are afforded un-anchored critical protection at least until the management are revealed to think the muslim ban is fine.'

http://horriblegif.com/post/157189463814/level-drama-50

[fycanadianpolitics]

To ring in the New Year The Walrus magazine decided to run a rather long, and very odd piece about the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE) and the attempts by its leader, Justin Trottier, to allegedly mainstream men's rights activism (MRA) in Canada.

CAFE, for those unfamiliar with it, and as I have written about several times before, is the Canadian front group for the broader MRA movement generally. While for years now CAFE has tried to portray itself as a benign, charitable organization that is supposedly attempting to help men and boys in crisis, it has overt and clear ties to anti-feminist extremists and to their ideological aims, a point to which we will return.

The article -- which was penned by no less than The Walrus' editor Jonathan Kay and one of its editorial fellows Lauren Heuser -- portrays Trottier as somehow in juxtaposition to the extremists and as in some kind of struggle against them for the soul of the movement in Canada while acknowledging that, for all his words to the contrary, Trottier seems to not be doing a very good job of this.

The article highlights this by pointing to some of the speakers at CAFE's recent 2016 conference in Ottawa that Kay and Heuser admit as 'problematic' (another point to which we will return) and by also acknowledging that some of the MRA's most "strident online supporters are directly involved with CAFE."

It ends on a somewhat critical note by stating:

As rational-seeming and pleasant as Trottier may be, he risks forever being overshadowed by the noisier and more extreme MRA advocates who ally themselves with his cause—some of whom are even given speaking roles at his events. Until the haters get shown the door, the men’s rights movement will never truly come of age.

Given that the article was titled "Don't Call It Men's Rights" this is all very contradictory and strange. It is also inherently, despite the relatively mild criticism on the part of Kay and Heuser, fundamentally a whitewash of what CAFE is actually all about and a bit of a weird decision to dedicate so much space to on the part of what has traditionally been seen as a progressive magazine.

The closing sentence "Until the haters get shown the door, the men’s rights movement will never truly come of age" implies that it is a movement that could possibly be meaningful (and come of age) without the "haters" when, in fact, they are intrinsic to the movement and its worldview. It is akin to saying that a White Rights movement could "come of age" by showing the "haters" the door, i.e. it is absurd and misses totally what the MRA is and what its aims are. Without the haters the men's rights movement would cease to exist.

Much of this ground I have covered before. From CAFE's misleading claims and its campus recruitment tactics to its overt ties with extremists like Dan Perrins to their association with the American hate site A Voice for Men.

In the Kay and Heuser article they mention that at CAFE's conference two of the speakers were Karen Straughan and Janice Fiamengo and while calling them "prominent MRAs" they barely scratch the surface (which could have easily been done with a Google search) of what these two are about. Straughan has a long history as a "contributing editor" with the A Voice for Men hate website and with making outrageous and offensive statements about women. Fiamengo, meanwhile, has written articles on Islamaphobic and extreme right websites and has even appeared on white nationalist radio programs to attack feminism, among the other highlights of her illustrious crusade.

The fact that these two spoke at the CAFE conference says all one really needs to know about any supposed desire to become more "moderate".

Never mind CAFE's attempts to hold an "Equality Day" concert (as if it is men who need equality!) in Toronto a couple years back that was cancelled when many of those involved discovered what CAFE was about or the bizarre interview with NOW Magazine that occurred in its wake.

CAFE and other men's rights groups also actually erase the very real oppression related to class, racism and bigotry, and homophobia that many men face by derailing nonsense about men being oppressed as men or by the mythical concept of 'misandry'.

The fundamental issue with the very notion of the need for a group like CAFE or of the Men's Rights Movement generally really comes through in the The Walrus article when Trottier says "We put aside the question of who has it worst in our society, men or women. That kind of polarizing debate doesn’t help in assisting individual people and families.”

The problem with this is that putting aside the notion "of who has it worst in our society, men or women" means ignoring the existence of systemic sexism and misogyny and amounts to a fundamental denial of the historic and continuing inequality of women, never mind the shocking prevalence of male violence both against women and generally, and the reality of rape culture. There is absolutely no doubt "who has it worst in our society" and it is inherently reactionary and misogynist to imply that there is even a question about this of any kind on a societal level. Doing so is both dangerous and harmful to countless "individual people and families" most especially women and children.

It is incredibly important not to put this reality aside in any discussion of "equality" and it is only polarizing to those who oppose the very need for a feminist movement or for a continued fight for women's rights.

It is through this type of obfuscation and pretend "moderation" that Trottier and CAFE continue to both be totally entwined with the extremists while peddling what amount to thinly veiled denials of the actual reality of our male supremacist society and the ongoing struggle for women's equality.

[antinonymous]

Our Friends

“Maybe these folk can bring us some good news.”

Kenny looked up from the desk that he and his brother shared with a scowl. It was a scowl in bitter agreement.

There hadn’t been a lot of good news recently. No, there were a lot of tensions. International tensions from issues mankind has dealt with for God knows how long. France has had a series of tumultuous leaders ever since their civil war, and the American colonies were yet-again filled with righteous folk preaching the end of the Monarchy. Kenny’s kid said to him that morning that he hoped one day to see the colonies.

Kid, our queen hopes to just keep the colonies, he thought to himself.

He still hadn’t replied to his brother Kemmy. He was generally upset that the two of them were assigned to work this case together in the first place. They both knew that there weren’t any genuine questions they could ask because the four men in their custody were all innocent with solid alibis, only taken to them to be rid of from America.

“Look”, he finally said, “We won. We have the four main people involved with the neo-revolutionaries and the People’s Continental Congress. There will be another culling for Queen and Country. They will learn -”

He spoke with plastic confidence.

“No we don’t. We have four influential men, yeah, but they are nonetheless entirely innocent. They are prisoners of war- an unspoken war. A rather embarrassing war. You should really reconsider my offer to leave. Trends look slim for British America. You can never kill ideas-”

“Oh shut the fuck up, Kemmy. It’s the modern day! The American Civil Wars had their times, their chiefs, their gods and their powerful men back in the 70s and 80s. George Washington is rotting! So is Elias Steward!  I’ll believe in the revolution when I see it. From what I see, revolution is dead! America is Britannia, and Britannia rules Supreme forever, so help me God!”

“Kenny.”

“What?”

“I know some kids drew a Betsy Ross flag outside your flat.”

Some silence.

“If we’re gonna get anything from these four Americans, I think you have to calm down first. We’re both well aware that colonies’ days are numbered and that our recent mass bombing striking 26 colonial cities means we may as well see what this fire is like before it burns everything in our theatre.”

Kemmy knew his brother like that, and always woke up early enough that he could check in on his brother as he slept, since Kenny lived much closer to the station. Even if he knew who did it, Kenny didn’t need to know.

Kenny scowled more intensely, saying “You sound like a separatist.”

Kemmy laughed.

“I’m a realist. Honestly, let’s just go in now. I think this is the calmest that I can get you.”

Finally, agreement.

“So who’s this first bloke?” asked Kenny.

“One Levi Wingley.”

“Ah yes, one of Steward’s personal henchmen.”

“The only one to come here willingly”

They began walking down the hall to the interrogation room.

“He’s the one of two who actually knew Elias Steward in person”, began Kemmy, “We have his brother and another one who met him a few times, but this guy is one of the founders of the original People’s Continental Congress in the early 00s. He smells rancid.”

They finally entered the room. Before them sat an old man with thick and short white hair wearing all red. His eyes were closed, and he was mumbling to himself in a language that the brothers could not recognise.

Kenny began.

“We need you to answer some questions in English, por favor.”

The man opened his brown eyes with a look of disgust.

“I’m practicing my Spanish for when I travel down there after I’m released. Do you honestly believe I intend to stay in England?”

“What languages do you know?” asked Kemmy, hoping he could mend the interview as it was happening.

“French, Spanish, Dutch and English.”

“Ah”, retorted Kenny, “From your college education, yes?”

Levi laughed, “From stealing your universities’ linguistic manuscripts”

Some silence returned.

“I was a tax collector from the University of Pennsylvania. God bless Benjamin Franklin. My formal education was learning how to, like a proper gentleman, reap what I do not sew. I hope you two are happy for the personal good that I’ve done for your economy.”

“Oh you’ve done plenty.” Kemmy was well-aware of both Levi’s anti-capitalist actions and history working for many British aristocracies. He had to deal with as well his own brother’s reactionary self.

“You went to the University of Pennsylvania, yeah?”

Levi nodded, adding,

”Pennsylvania was always my favourite. They don’t just quake when they’re spiritual.”

“How did you meet Steward?”

Levi was now inclined to scowl at Kenny, but he had no motivation.

Levi responded

“I don’t remember. I’ll be honest, Elias and I spent a lot of our time together doing copious amounts of drugs. I’d seen him several times throughout Philadelphia beforehand, but I remember he was, in a chance encounter, parallel to me on the street as the cops were harassing a man one night. Elias set him free, and I was there to pay the bail. Does an eye for an eye create blindness or visual depth?”

“What year was this?”

Levi struggled.

“Oh, it’s 1848, I met him in my early twenties. I’ll guess around ‘98. After I began hanging out with him was when we all really began experimenting with lots of drugs.”

Kemmy asked “is this what attracts people to the movement?”

Levi replied “the movement attracts the people to the drugs. People need an escape from reality every now and then. There is no soul, so we make souls. We need a heart where there is no heart, and the people thus find Opium. Monarchy and Capital create the Spirit of The World which I denounce as a Christian as the work of antichrist.”

“You complain about capitalism and imperialism and yet you do you so high as a kite while reaping the benefits of it!” said Kenny, thinking he was clever.

Levi lit up.

“Capitalism is not creation. In fact it inhibits the creation of new things when they are not profitable or marketable. Besides, the fact that we have this technology and this ease of use and this ease of life - I believe it is good. But, it is to embrace the common and ban the luxurious. And I intend to send this good out to the world. That which does oppress has with it the tools to liberate. It is the limited access to resources, such as drugs, that I fight against. I go after the cause of ailment.”

“Is this the type of stuff you and Steward would discuss?”

Levi looked at both brothers before responding.

“He and I did have conversations like this. These conversations have played out many times throughout many histories using many names and many languages.”

“When does it stop being a conversation? When does it turn into one of the most infamous court cases of the last 50 years? When does it turn into organised violence and nihilism?”

“The trial of Elias Steward was itself a conversation just like this. And that conversation started with the love of money. It was Jeffrey that betrayed us in Alexandria-“

“Why do you always need violence?” Kenny cut off Levi, but he was still calm.

“Our Party sought to re-unite the thirteen colonies under the peace of man and that which can fill every hand and every mouth. Mark my words- liberal revolution is the only one which will ever seize the thirteen colonies. Those terrorists from several months back do not see the black man as a man, and they have no comment whatsoever on women and the Indians. It will be based on capitalism directly, whatever America turns into. You don’t live in America, so I don’t think you don’t appreciate how Kaiser usurps our queen. Self-defence is very violent, and I’ll always only call for lots of self-defence. I wanted to create a country without capitalism. I aimed for only working to one’s needs.”

“So you’re like Jesus without the Christianity.”

“We wanted a union of workers leading the people instead of some arbitrary hierarchy which long outlasts their usefulness in civilised nations. 2nd Thessalonians 6:10: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

“Jesus didn’t call for violence.”

“Elias didn’t call for violence! What he and Jesus and myself always called for was the awareness that violence is always present.”

“Who was this Jeffrey person?” Kemmy asked this is a desperate attempt to get what they came for.

“Jeffrey was also a tax collector, but he was a reactionary. He gave away our locations to the government in 08, forcing Elias to court and forcing me into indentured servitude.”

Levi sighed, continuing

“I won’t beat around the bush; you have both myself and three of my famous allies with me, no? They won’t do you any good. None of those bombs were planted by us nor were we ever involved in the planning of the attacks.”

Kenny and Kemmy looked at each other. They already knew.

Kemmy asked, “then why did you agree to come here?”

“To watch this mess unfold from a good, safe distance. The others are to die in the crossfire, I presume.”

Levi began laughing again.

“The best you’ll get from us is a mild understanding of what people are revolting for. Now, Kenneth, Kemuel, may I please leave?”

The brothers looked at each other in angst, but left Wingley to be escorted out by other officers. Kenny was transcendent and unusually quiet as he and his brother strolled about watching Levi Wingley walk to a carriage and leave. By the grace of god, he was to survive whatever war.

“We’re still interviewing the rest of them, right?” asked Kemmy in a timid manner as they walked.

“Yeah. This next guy’s a lot younger. Marcellus Jonson. He’s a journalist who covers the neo-revolutionaries in the press.”

“Another scholar it seems.”

At this point the brothers were right outside Jonson’s room. Kenny had no emotion in his eyes. He pat his brother on the the back.

“Let’s learn.”

Before them in the room sat a scrambling man. He was looking at the walls in a mess, with his one hand twirling his short, brown hair and and the other below the table. He was the first to speak.

“What day is it?!”

The brothers didn’t want to be with this man for very long.

“It is Thursday, the first of June.”

Now his hands were in his lower head and beard. Kenny’s response must have not been well for him to have heard.

Kenny inquired “Is this important?”

Jonson was livid, replying “you arrested four of us, right?”

“Right.”

“Where are the others?”

“Well aren’t you the curious type.”

“...says the interrogator. Where are they?”

“My brother, Kemmy, and I have been assigned to deal with you four to get your testimony. Your friend Levi Wingley is on his way to some fucking port and going to the continent or wherever.”

“I could tell the crowd was quieting down.”

Neither brother had mentioned, to themselves or to one another, certain roughhousing taking place near the station by informed townspeople.

“We’ll be free to walk the streets of London by nightfall.”

“Well, whilst we have you, I would like to ask a few questions. I am uninformed, I’m an ameteur historian, the furthest one can be from an expert. What’s a man like Elias Steward doing with a boy like you? You began your career when you were 12- what’s- what’s his reaction?”

Jonson looked at both of them, having tried to forget the plagues of his youth.

“He and I had the same enemies.”

Kemmy chimed in, “the same enemies? That sounds like a process of elimination of what you know you don’t like rather than what you know you like.”

“Friends come and go in a different way than enemies do. It’s a division of identity among all of us based on mood, preference, and trust, among other things.”

“You’re missing my point.”

“I don’t care about your point! In different contexts I would perhaps discuss the ways of shaping identity. Are those the questions you’re asking?”

“No” answered Kenny, “in these meetings you attended, you became Steward’s friend. Now I’m his friend. Who are our friends? Why are they our friends?”

“Our friends need something. They lust. Our friends need to eat but sometimes can’t. They need land but sometimes have none and must be either indentured servant or landlord’s pet. Honestly, our friends are disgusting. They’re vile, sinful, lustful, sadistic, perverse, and wholly unclean. But their energy is never spent on fucking on me over.”

“Us” interrupted Kemmy.

Jonson smiled at him gleamingly.

“Never spent on fucking us over. Our friends are the victims of State and Capital. Cops are the tools of State and Capital. People can be good, cops can’t be our friends.”

His tone changed.

“But rest assured, our friends don’t massacre themselves en masse for taxation-related reasons. The men who carried out those attacks fucking hate our friends.”

“These are men are not with Elias Steward-“

“Quit bringing up that name! It’s meaningless and irrelevant! And yes, they hate him. His father was a slave, and your terrorists in America, who are likely already warring with the Empire, would never see him as anything more.”

Silence briefly engulfed everyone.

Kenny asked “then why are they so conflated?”

“Because there’s a range of deviation, a lot of deviation, from Empire. I remember hearing these terrorists get called Stewardites or Stewardists or something like that and that cannot be further from the truth.”

The man cleared his throat and spat on the floor, continuing “I know a bit about the actual followers of Elias Steward from the People’s Continental Congress from 1795 to 1808. A bunch of criminals whose writings I collected and archived. Do you have any questions about them? Look, Elias Christopher Steward was a man of the people, and people tend to misinterpret. He and his party didn’t really want to “free America”. He wanted to overthrow the world’s elite and have the world be operated by the worker’s; the actual operators. It would have been in North America, but the goal was to inspire others against imperial reaction. These terrorsists will fight against reaction, presumably, through the French, the Dutch and the Germans. But it will be a cold monster of a bourgeois nation with some other autocrat Washington. Can I leave? I am so sick of answering to yinz. Luka knows his shit, I’m so- please get me out of here.”

Kemmy asked what the rush was about, and Jonson replied that he fell in love on holiday with a man in his youth whom he had seen outside the police station.

“Luka Oxford? Is that who we need to ask about the acts of Elias Steward’s followers?”

“I haven’t slept in four days.”

With that, the brothers walk to Oxford’s station to have Jonson get out.

“Oxford wrote extensively on what happened to America after Steward’s trial”, Kenny says.

“Who was the judge of that? Wasn’t he famous for being a separatist sympathiser who executed him out of fear?”

“Uh,” Kenny hastily recalls, “Balder Byron. As far as I know, he was loyal up to his death, though it must’ve been terribly inconvenient.”

“I think he killed himself when he retired.”

“He worked other cases after that?”

“He had to.”

“Doesn’t sound like he had many friends.”

And with that, they’re at Oxford’s room.

Kenny asks, “who’s the last after this? Elias’ brother?”

Kemmy nods.

“So” Kenny says “I wont need much from him.”

They see another man with dark hair and dark brown eyes, just like Marcellus.

Kenny states “You Americans look all the same.”

He laughs remarkably, responding in posh Received Pronunciation.

“And cops.”

“Your friend Marcellus Jonson told me a few things about friendship. He told me lots stuff about friends.”

“He does that. I actually base my writing style off of him sometimes. A lot of us do.”

“And we’ve come to learn that not all of you follow Steward.”

“I mean, we all try to read him. It’s good to know what he did but his image has been distorted with time. During his trial, false accusations had been made of him of conspiracy with Satan, Jews and the Indians.”

“What?”

“That’s what got popularised. He was just a degenerate who wanted to end civilisation, and the Indians and Jews have had awful relations in America since. Everyone just blew Steward’s execution way out of proportion, and in the trial, those two groups were singled out as being the people whom Byron could be manipulative. After the trial, he plead for mercy by his fellow working class people, saying that he had to kill Elias, and that if he didn’t, everything would’ve actually gotten way worse for everyone. He tried to push the blame away from himself to save face. In reality, he executed a political radical and traitor; the leader of a Socialist party, and wanted to be the good guy. Even after his cousin was killed less than a year prior. ”

He puts his palm to his face.

“Are you men Christian?”

They looked at each other. Anglican.

Learning this, Luka asked for paper, ink and quill.

“Go buck wild” says Kemmy.

He writes to them

Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good: His love endures forever.

“Psalm 107:1”

They examine the calligraphy.

“Steward is dead. Who knows who’s next? And I’ll die. But actions speak louder than words. This forever lasts. I remember once Elias was told that he was an impersonator through Philadelphia and he said to leave him be. We never learnt what came of him.”

“Thanks. You’re free to go.”

Kemmy says as they walk to their last man “we didn’t need a lot from him, are you planning on reading later?”

Kenny didn’t like reading. But the written word had powers. Kenny needed power.

They walk silently to John’s room. Kemmy says that life is absurd. Kenny lights up and rolls his eyes.

“John Eagle? I see you have had a name change.” Kemmy says.

“Is that what we’re talking about?”

“No, I can understand the need for a new name. I can’t imagine the type of stress that puts a person under. To be honest, we’ve asked as much questions as we needed to the rest of you.”

“...so I’m free to go?”

“Woooah there. Slow down. You can tell us one thing they never could, as his brother.”

“And that’s?- ?”

“What’s to come?”

“Who’s to say? Prepare for everyone.”

“What?”

“I don’t know what’s to come. What I can advise to you is prepare for everyone.”

“Who’s everyone?” Kemmy asks.

“They’ll show you. You’ll find everyone. And Socialism will always have the voice of criticism.”

Kenny laughs. He’s had enough of this.

“So chaos?

“Chaos.”

He walks out silently, and his brother is forced to leave after him.

“What?” Kemmy asks.

“Wait out here.” Kenny goes back into the room for a minute.

“He’ll be leaving with us.”

“What?”

“I’m taking John back to America. And you’re coming with me. And my family.”

Kemmy was happy to resign.

“Tonight.”

They both smile and clear their offices before leaving the building.

[avalidpoint]

An open answer to a question about classism...

Specifically, a Facebook status that a friend of mine posted asking:  “In America, it's never just about class, and I'm so sick of white men trying to frame it that way. Why are people so obsessed with drilling things down to a single cause when that's almost never the case?” You know the drill. I wrote a super-long comment and didn’t want to clutter up his space, so I wrote it here instead. Simple: it's one of the few instances of social inequality that affects them - or could affect them - directly. And I'll give them this much: it often affects white men in a very specific way, because privilege comes with an expectation of success, and patriarchy demands that a man must bear himself in a certain way. (that good ol' patriarchy-enforced burden of "you *must* be the breadwinner, you *must* be successful, you *must* work yourself into an early grave, you *must* prove yourself, etc.") Classism, and the negative byproducts of capitalism, hurt other groups too, obviously. However, American culture reserves a very special type of poison for the poor in general, and the "head of the household" is generally supposed to drink more of it. Here in America, if you're poor, it's your fault - and the blame must start with useless ol' layabout Dad. Sure, he might've been laid off after developing a pain disorder due to poor working conditions at his job. Sure, he might have been prescribed pain meds and became addicted to them... but it's all his fault anyway because the patriarchy demands his sweat to grease the wheels of capitalism and he was unable to provide it. 

Granted, most of the dudes who actually say that "class is the only thing that matters" are academic types who are so far removed from that scenario, they might as well be on a different planet. However, if they live and work in academia, they might have noticed that class is the *one* thing student/faculty activist types *don't* like talking about, since - quite often - they didn't exactly grow up poor themselves, and they know on some level that *their* status has a certain amount of class privilege to it, and it makes them reeeally uncomfortable. They'll bring it up in connection with race, and gender, and so on, but *almost never* on its own. The rich kids only bring it up as a way of admitting their own lives and privileges, and the poor white kids don't bring it up because, well, this is America, shame on you for being poor. Also, it *can be seen* (for good reason, mind you) as appropriating oppression, or "talking over" marginalized folks. And while that’s super frustrating when you’re listening to a queer woman of color talk about how she was almost kicked out of school for holding her girlfriend’s hand on the class trip to Paris, and your family couldn’t even afford to send you on a class trip to Paris, Texas, but you can’t bring it up because it’ll look like you’re “talking over” her or invalidating her pain... I can still understand her reaction, because there are way too many white boys out there acting like they’re the real oppressed ones and - unfairly - you’re just going to look like one of those idiots. Yeah - modern day “liberal academia” doesn’t have a lot of room to talk about classism. That sucks. The real problem is, though, that Americans are bad at talking about classism in general. It’s considered rude to discuss money, or how much you make at work. We’re more generally awkward about poverty and the attending shame it brings than we are about anything else except maybe sex. 

Not only does that breed resentment in these mostly-privileged-except-for-class-maybe white guys because they feel like they aren't being listened to... it also means that sometimes, um, they're actually not being listened to. Hence the fable of the unemployed blue collar factory guy from Cleveland who's about to be evicted from his house, and meanwhile some college kid is yelling at him for wearing an Indians cap and telling him to "check his privilege." Is that a total strawman example? It is. I made both of those people up. But for a lot of people, that scenario *feels* very real, and it ain't too far off from what often happens on Facebook when people from two separate political bubbles cross paths. You’ve seen it, and so have I. So yeah: of *course* they're going to shout "It's all about class!" People who *should* be on their side keep slapping them down for even bringing *up* class, and the prevailing attitude in this country has always been that it's impolite to talk about money, which is an attitude that benefits capitalism so damn hard that it probably explains at least half of the gender pay gap (we’ll get back to that in a second.)  In that environment, shouting "it's all about class!" must feel downright transgressive. Problem is, of course, it's not *all* about class. Remember how I mentioned the gender pay gap a second ago? There’s some who theorize that it has to do with women being less willing to ask for raises or be forceful in negotiations. We’ll talk about the underlying toxic masculinity of the modern work environment on another day, but... isn’t it interesting how a) women are raised to be more polite than men, which leads to b) not speaking up when they might be up for a promotion or a raise, which leads to c) making less than men. Let’s think about step “A” for a second, folks - why, exactly, is *not* bringing up money supposed to be polite? You know who benefits from that? People who want to pay different people different wages for the same job, that’s who. There. I found a concrete, real world example of how sexism and classism intertwine to create a scenario where someone’s wages are effectively stolen from them. See? It’s not just about class, and classism exists. Boom. I win. Look, kiddos: racism and sexism and homophobia and so on existed before Adam Smith ever put pen to paper, so you can't pin everything on the evils of capitalism. Yes, class matters more than some people on the left think it does. Yes, sometimes it's actually a privilege enjoyed by the person who's yelling at you to "check your privilege," and they don't seem to know that, and yes, that is fucking ironic. Yes, classism is inextricably linked to racism and sexisms and all the other -isms. But all those other -isms exist, too, and they also have a very real, very destructive impact on the lives of... well, everyone, really, but mostly people who aren't "white guys." So, yeah, if you take your typical white boy "privilege of not knowing what women/PoC/LGBTQ+ people go through", but you mix in the *very real* oppressive effects of capitalism (and he *does* know what *that* feels like), and *maybe* - if you're being really kind to this guy - you add a cup or two of "capitalism benefits from division and resentment, and the hierarchal structures that keep women from full equality are essentially the same ones that keep Average Joe Whiteguy strapped to the grindstone 60 hours a week, so - technically - classism, sexism, racism etc. are all branches on the same tree," (like I said, if we're being *really* generous, we'll give him that one) - that's how you get the "It's All About Class, Stupid!" concept. Problem is, like most reactionary white boy ideas, it's about 40% "wow! you're so right!" and 60% "wait... what? Fuck off!"

[theworstpartisbeingawake]

No One Can Hear You When You Yell: On the Inclusion of the Male Voice in Feminist Dialogue

“Feminism ain't about women / No, that's not who it is for”

—Ani DiFranco

I think that young or new feminists can be reflexively and detrimentally extreme. And in a variety of ways. I know that I went through an extreme and emotional transition from internal misogynist to rational feminist. Feminism can be an epiphany, a new way of understanding how the world works and what our place in it can be. It can change core aspects of our lives.

As a young bi/pansexual woman having a whirlwind romance with feminism itself, I went from questioning my gender identity due to internal misogyny to loving and glorying in my womanhood and all womanhood to the exclusion of all else. Men became an enemy or, at best, lesser beings who could not fathom the feminine depths. My attractions became almost entirely directed toward women and I was always ready to point out oppression and the failings of men.

This wasn't fair to women, men, or me. By putting women on a pedestal, I was erasing their humanity and, to some degree, holding myself separate from the concept of "woman." It was the extreme opposite of my previous misogyny. Before feminism, I stereotyped and focused on the expressions of femininity that I disliked and associated myself with expressions of masculinity I enjoyed. After feminism, I demonized and stereotyped men while still avoiding seeing women as whole, diverse individuals. I was cheating myself out of having realistic, compassionate views of both sexes and limiting my ability to interact with either fully. It took me a while to integrate my feminism with considered, compassionate reason and to adopt a more moderate view that, hopefully, allows for diversity and individuality for the entire spectrum of humanity. I had to examine and adjust many habits as well as beliefs and ways of communicating.

One thing that we, as feminists, do, but should not, is alienate male allies and not allow men to be feminists. We do this by not allowing them to have or express opinions about women and feminism. We do this by attacking their expressions of feminism and feminist thought without considering it or attempting to correct inconsistencies via calm dialectic. We do this by ending discussion with men by citing their privilege when personal privilege is irrelevant. We do this by not listening and, more importantly, by not listening to understand. Our goal should be to encourage all people to understand and embrace feminism and create a global environment that is amiable and equal for all people.

It is okay for men to have opinions, even if they do not coincide with our own opinions. Even if said opinions are about feminism, women, and feminist issues. Of course, there are many men (as well as women) who are not feminists and who have not devoted intelligent thought to the major inequities women constantly face. These are not the people I am concerned with here. I am concerned with men who see and want to correct the inequities; men who are learning about our issues and attempting to be the best allies they can be. When we dismiss the opinions of these men because they are men and because their opinion does not match our own, we are doing a disservice to them and to ourselves.

We can and should acknowledge that even active, educated feminist women are going to have differing opinions on the details of issues and the implementation of solutions. It's natural and unavoidable that people with different backgrounds, interests, and skills will not always agree entirely. That doesn't necessarily mean that one is Right and another is Wrong, only that the issue is multifaceted. I think it's important, as a feminist, particularly as an intersectional feminist, to acknowledge that diversity in thought is both inescapable and beneficial. Debate can broaden our understanding and provide insight into mindsets we would have no access to otherwise. Thorough understanding of any issue will make it easier to come up with and work towards positive solutions as well as improving our ability to state our positions in logical, relatable ways that can help further the understandings of more people. We are also creating a safer, more comfortable space for women and allies when we don't hold rigid opinion requirements for the community.  

Part of creating a safer space for feminists, both women and men, involves evaluating  how we interact with them. If a woman and a man can each consider themselves feminists and share an opinion that is not your opinion, it is important to avoid disagreeing more adamantly with the man. When you ignore the woman's statements to focus on dissecting the man's opinion, you are valuing the man's opinion more than the woman's. Especially when motivated by a dislike of men or a low estimation of their opinions, it is puzzling when we choose only to respond to the man when we could address both equally or first address the woman's position. This can seem like we are overlooking and disrespecting the woman, while targeting and attempting to alienate the man. Women are silenced and passed over enough by society, so even if the woman herself does not recognize the inequity, we are still perpetuating anti-feminist habits in our rush to deprecate the man.

We should certainly ask ourselves why we do this. Is it reactionary? Do we feel we are protecting the feelings and rights of our fellow women by avoiding engaging in discussion directly with them? Do we feel an emotional desire to invalidate another individual's opinions purely based on their sex? Does it seem to bolster our own opinion to tear down the arguments of someone who would appear to be less of an expert (while simultaneously dismissing the same opinion from someone who shares our qualifications)? Regardless of why we sometimes focus on disagreeing simply to disagree with a man, we invalidate our arguments by doing so. We poison the well by assuming that the feminist opinion of a man is wrong simply because he is a man. If we truly have the logical higher ground on an issue and should refute an opinion, we should be able to state clearly and unemotionally what aspect of the other person's opinion is in error.  

In my experience, aggressive and reactionary attitudes toward other people's opinions only create greater polarization and end conversations. If we want to be understood, we should seek to understand. To best argue our point, we must listen to and understand the opposing points. And, if we want our opinions to be respected, we must respect those of other people. A dialogue is impossible when one or both parties are unwilling to allow the expression of the other person.

Also, if there is truth in a feminist position, it is observable by any individual, regardless of sex. It may be easier for a woman to understand a specific feminist concept because it more closely relates to her life and experiences, whereas a man may not be aware of it immediately because it doesn't directly relate to his experiences. But a compassionate, logical man is equally capable of seeing the relevance and benefits of feminism. This same man is capable of forming his own unique feminist opinions based on his observations and his empathic absorption of the ideas and experiences of the women he encounters. His opinions, therefore, are as relevant and valuable as those of any woman.

Direct experience of an issue, such as sexual discrimination, certainly brings more facets of the issue into relief and provides emotional data regarding the affects of the problem. Experiencing sexual discrimination provides insight which is impossible to gain for a person who does not experience it. But a purely intellectual understanding is not a false understanding, it just doesn't have the same nuances and strong emotional knowledge as experiential understanding. Both are valuable. Both are necessary to having a full picture of an issue.

While there are many instances of oppression that men will never experience, most men experience some negative effects of oppression at some points in their lives. Even the most privileged of landowning, white, straight cis-men will be on the receiving end of prejudice at some point. A man can be harmed by fatphobia, ageism, ableism, racism, etc., as well as sexism. Men will be rejected for a variety of reasons, many of which will be arbitrary and meaningless. This is not to equate the oppression and discrimination experienced by men to that of women or to lessen the importance of the struggles of women, merely to suggest that we have a common ground to build on. When a man experiences the harmful effects of prejudice, he has a new tool for relating to others. He can apply his feelings about his situation and his understanding of what was wrong to another situation without having to directly experience that situation. This promotes empathy. A good feminist ally will not seek to gain due to his experiences of prejudice, but will use his direct experiences to help him understand the feelings or potential feelings of others. Experiencing just one instance of personally directed prejudice can make real to a man the possible range of emotions a person feels in other circumstances.

So, if we invalidate a man's opinion because of his privilege we aren't allowing for the possibility of his intellectual understanding and empathy being comparable to or valuable in comparison with our own experiential understanding. In a sense, we are using a victim's "privilege" to limit another human being and disregard his understanding. Yes, we have knowledge that can't be shared which is wider in scope than that of the man, but if he is earnestly trying to bridge that gap and become a better feminist, we shouldn't condemn him or seek to exclude him. If a man has a feminist opinion that differs from our own and we say his opinion is flat out wrong because he experiences privilege that we don't, that ends the discussion. If his opinion is flawed because his privilege obscures an aspect of the issue, how will he improve when we dismiss him instead of explaining our view and helping him to see his flawed logic? How can he appropriately challenge his privilege when he is not fully aware of its harmful ramifications? Also, if his opinion is different from ours but coincides with that of another feminist woman, we may be incorrect in our estimation that his privilege is causing the disagreement. This is not to say that another feminist woman will have necessarily explored the issue as fully as we have or to say that women are infallible or that a man's opinion is only defensible when a woman corroborates it. When we face all sides of an argument openly and logically, we will prevent ourselves from causing injustice.

I don't think that any woman owes anything to any man due to their respective sexes. I don't think that women should be responsible for improving men, correcting/creating feminist allies, or explaining their experiences and opinions to men. It is not our job to teach people how to respect us or understand us. If a man (or woman) is not respectful and is not genuinely interested in our perspectives and opinions, it is not worth our time and effort to try to change that. And, if a man is genuinely trying to become a better feminist ally, we need not directly involve ourselves in his education. There are many sources of information available and there are many personal experiences that can and should be consumed, and the person who is trying to become a better feminist ally will seek those out. The onus is always on the individual to improve her or himself. However, when we engage in public discourse about sexism and feminism, we are choosing the role of educator. We are trying to impart our reasoned, feminist opinions to others so that they, too, may understand an issue with the fullness that we do. A valuable educator is an active listener who tries to understand what is being said for the benefit of the learner. When one understands why an incorrect opinion is held, one is better equipped to point out errors in logic, thus showing why the opinion is incorrect. If one only wishes to vent emotion, public venues are inappropriate and invite the same venting from people with less considered opinions, which can create a cycle and fuel negative emotions on both sides.

I do think that engaging with members of the feminist community in ways that encourage improvement and camaraderie is beneficial to all. I, personally, received a lot of guidance from other, more knowledgeable, better-versed feminists when I was newly becoming a feminist. I got guidance from literature and articles as well as from personal interactions and discussions with real life feminists. Other women cared enough about me and about women in general to help me form my own opinions about issues and to point out when my logic was flawed or I was starting from a false premise. I am eternally grateful to these people, who were not obligated to educate me, but did share their thoughts and engage in meaningful discussion with me despite the disparity in our understanding and experiences.

A key part of furthering understanding and knowledge is listening to others with the purpose of hearing and understanding what they are saying. If a man comes to us ready to hear and comprehend what we have to say, we should meet him the same way. If we want a world in which men and women are equal, we should treat each person as an individual regardless of sex. That means listening to and trying to understand anyone. That means not dismissing a man or his opinion just because he is a man. If we feel that we have not been listened to or respected by the patriarchy, are we fighting against what we hate about the patriarchy by ignoring or demonizing nearly half of the population?

Arguments, like people, should be judged by their individual merits logically. A bad argument doesn't help anyone, nor does it do justice to our beliefs.