#imagine thinking a conversation about sexism isn’t allowed in a conversation about rape | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rametarin · 3 years ago

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We deal with this, “fiction is reality” shit EVERY. GENERATION.

And I mean it comes back among authoritarians playing to sheep EVERY fucking generation on different pretenses.

It always boils down to a bunch of people that are insecure about the effects of culture and media on other people, and as a flimsy pretense/pretext to restrict access to things to other people “in society” for their own safety and sense of security.

And when it comes to, “obscene literature” or illustrations, the source is always jealousy, insecurity and an attempt to reduce other people down to a demographic statistic. Whether it’s reducing black people to a caricature and acting like hip-hop just turns the kids into violent, drug abusing, psychotic felons, or imagining pornography is what turns people into horny fucking do-nothings, it’s always about control.

And we’ve put it off for so long. We’ve put off the conversation about just what demographic these people play to in order to get traction and followers and staying power and warm bodies for their movements. They’re the demographic that makes antis- work, the demographic that screams for censorship because illustrations “hurt them personally,” or “cause men to hurt them.”

I’m talking about women. Particularly, cis women, as trans women are not in numbers enough to affect anything, and it is EXPLICITLY IMPORTANT that the source of the offense and complaint come from the population that are the gateway through which the next generation is born and brought up.

Individual men may be so clueless as to assume the way degeneration works is a person is left improperly or negligently nurtured, and so just make bad decisions because, “they were never taught better.” They embrace the idea that people only do bad shit because, “the society,” isn’t paying attention, or that individual people are just blank slates beholden to the righteousness and morality of the cultural hivemind of said society. That Society is an objective effect, and if bad people exist, it’s proof to them that there’s something wrong with said society.

But individual men know that the bad actions of other men are not caused solely by “male culture,” or the absence of it, or shitty “role models.” They see the shitty natural inborn attitudes of other men, and despite being raised in shitty conditions, naturally develop a good head on their shoulders, and despise actions like that. As men you can’t HELP but grow up watching boys around you make shitty decisions based on shitty impulse control and, no matter how often they’re punished, how much they’re loved, how much they’re compassionately talked to, STILL act the fool and wind up as terrible, stealing, violent adults. As men you can’t do anything BUT reconcile that some people are just fucking shitheads, and the idea as a man YOU should be punished or treated like the “association” of men itself is at fault, smacks of sexism. The same sort of sexism women’s lib supposedly is against- at least, when it happens to women.

Women, however, are not men, are not privy to the thoughts and feelings of men. Men are abstracts to these women, many of whom are so solipsistic or gynocentrist that they just see men as a class of monsters in a videogame. Just a pattern of individuals that surely must all get their code and culture from “society.” Clearly, when there’s bad men about, it’s proof this “society” isn’t doing everything it can to mollify and gentrify those horrible beastly men to make them safe and not dangerous and productive.

These women that see men like living aggregates for society, imagine that in order to “keep men working properly,” they need to not have “bad moral influences,” treating pornography and access to drugs and literature like a cleaning lady treats dirt on linen. They imagine that the only reason rape or murder or theft by men occurs is because “there’s a problem with men, thinking that is okay.” Like the only reason your average man isn’t running around violently raping people or killing them is because they sang enough hymns at church- by force. Or because they were prevented from, “getting deranged by wrongthink.”

So with this in mind, how do they imagine porn affects men, male minds, and this big abstract-turned-monolithic-concept called, “society?”

Well, they imagine fiction is reality. That if “people of lesser intellect” read a thing, then they’ll inherently believe it, because, “it presents itself as factual and reality.” When.. no. That’s not how it works. They believe, absolutely, that without some mechanism there to go, “BUT WE’RE JUST PRETENDING THO, IT’S NOT REAL!” that will inherently make people, whom all have tenuous and toddler-like grasps of reality and object permanence, think a thing in fiction is real and applies to reality.

And naturally, they see men as people of lesser intellect. So they reason, those dangerous statistical anomalies are just men that haven’t been browbeaten, and whom are subject to any given negative influence or writing or opinion or culture that preaches values and ideas incongruent with their preferences, as women. Therefore, they conclude, fiction that does not preach their “good values” is in fact advocating bad ones, bad habits, bad moral character, bad mental health- call it whatever you want based on your generation. It’s ALL THE SAME SHIT. All the same knee-jerk moralism based on justifying societal and institutional use of force to restrict and arbitrate and judiciously enforce and justify dictating censorship and good-think. It’s just a question of where that basis comes from.

And theres’ ultimately no reasoning with that culture of women when they grasp hold of a thing that appeals to them, flatters and justifies their prejudices and biases. You can sit there colorfully or dryly explaining the ways in which this shitty point of view is wrong, much as you can try to walk back a persons beliefs in their homophobia that they base on religious purism or use the purism to validate their homophobia, but you cannot just get them individually to give up those nice, comfortable beliefs.

And when grouped together for mutual support and validation, it becomes this negative-thought, field of fucking SHEEP braying “Nuuuh-uuuh!” and arguing for restriction of content and sanitation and disbarrment from certain subject matter to be in consumable porn or literature or even just art. The only thing keeping them in check being the consequences for vandalism, and the ability for a community or institution to police out the bias usurpers that would seek to enter their foundations and run them on behalf of the values of these easily upset, insecure sheep.

every FUCKING generation, it manifests in some manner. Be they from church ladies, to radical feminists, to intersectional feminists. If you capture the imaginations, insecurities, jealousies, foster and sanction them, interpret them, get young women believing them, participating in the romance that tells them the way to change the bad things or take the edge off the bad men is to foster and enable authoritarianism (be it regional social, regional institutional, or federal institutional) then you have this neverending avalanche of unending support for it. Be it from dictators, or just from pure ideology from a doctrine. They’ll do it. And stubbornly and obstinately believe in whatever compliments their biases, to the contradiction of everything.

And while you can remove a man and his influences on the next gen from the home, from the social radius of the next generation to be a significant source of culture and how they relate to young people, removing women from the equation, from whom the next generation comes from, is virtually impossible. So a male zealot, already susceptible to scrutiny and punishment for being so wild and zealous with their beliefs, can be retaliated against, muted, beaten and removed from relevance until they censor themselves or change their tune.

But you cannot do that to a female human, or women/mothers as a sex, without both women AND men taking it as an attack on humanity at their most prime and kernel. It has to be done with disproportionate authoritarian state power that does not fear mass dissent and violent retaliation, or it isn’t done at all.

So these zealous Karens that embrace wholly these ideas enabling authoritarianism under a banner they approve of, are allowed to propagate unchallenged, and even if challenged, cannot be subdued or subverted. Their own little cliques and echo chambers and lack of desire to even consider their positions are wrong. Any attempt to point the fingers at this very real, disproportionate and characteristic, objective power female humans have just on the basis of their sex and how that relates among them socially, can and will be trash binned arbitrarily as, “sexism.” Despite the fact, it’s absolutely true.

So long as women that believe “society” is an objective, monolithic thing from which, “that other sex” and other women get their marching orders on how to BE what they are, and don’t see them as billions of individuals with their own ambitions, instincts, inborn personality and character flaws, independent of “society’s failures,” believing those people can be saved or corrected IF ONLY WE CENSOR EVERYTHING or make all media “good thing,” we’re just going to have people with illiberal beliefs asserting their dominance and insisting it’s for the soul of the species, society and the planet.

I mean yeah there are male antis and shit, but honestly. Tell me honestly. How many fucking deranged fandom people that are doing shit like mailing cookies with sewing needles backed into them are male gendered or male sexed, either? As uncomfortable as it may be to acknowledge or consider this might have a sexual grounding, I’m sorry. Not acknowledging it is simply rejecting reality.

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nebris · 6 years ago

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We’re Not Done Here

How the MeToo movement became a feminist sexual revolution.

Laurie Penny | Longreads | January 2018 | 19 minutes (4,764 words)

The problem of sexual violation can not be treated as distinct from the problematic of sexuality itself. The ubiquity of sexual violations is obviously related to what is taken to be routine, everyday sex, the ‘facts’ of pleasure and desire. — Linda MartAn Alcoff, Rape and Resistance

This kind of mania will always at some point exhaust itself. — Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine

***

Oh, girls, look what we’ve done now. We’ve gone too far. The growing backlash against the MeToo movement has finally settled on a form that can face itself in the mirror. The charge is hysteria, moral panic, hatred of sex, hatred of men. More specifically, as Andrew Sullivan complained in New York magazine this week, “the righteous exposure of hideous abuse of power had morphed into a more generalized revolution against the patriarchy.” Well, yes. That’s rather the point.

Sullivan is far from the only one to accuse the MeToo movement of becoming a moral panic about sexuality itself, and he joins a chorus of hand-wringers warning that if this continues — well, men will lose their jobs unjustly, and what could be worse than that, really? The story being put about is that women, girls, and a few presumably hoodwinked men are now so carried away by their “anger” and “temporary power” that, according to one piece in the Atlantic, they have become “dangerous.” Of course — what could be more terrifying than an angry, powerful woman, especially if you secretly care a little bit more about being comfortable than you do about justice? This was always how the counter-narrative was going to unfold: It was always going to become a meltdown about castrating feminist hellcats whipping up their followers into a Cybelian frenzy, interpreting any clumsy come-on as an attempted rape and murder. We know what happens when women get out of control, don’t we?

Charges like this are serious. Too serious to dismiss out of hand. I don’t mean to do so, not least because I am a queer person, and I do not take the notion of sex panic lightly. Why, then, are so many people so anxious to believe that this is one? There is at least one simple answer. It is easier — much, much easier — to manufacture an attack on sexuality than it is to imagine an attack on patriarchy.

Sex is not the problem. Sexism is the problem, along with the upsetting multitudes of men and women who seem unable or unwilling to make the distinction. An attack on sexuality, however, will always find recruits from across the political spectrum as well as from armies of amoral keyboard droppers who just want to read about what celebrities get up to in hotel rooms. An attack on patriarchy, male supremacy, and sexual oppression — that is far harder to accept. It is far harder to allow. Easier to transpose it into a key of prurience and wait for the whole thing to stroke itself into exhaustion. But — forgive me — if you think this movement has blown its load already, you’ve no idea how women work, and you’ve no clue what’s coming.

***

Alright, ladies, you’ve had your fun, and you’ve given us all a fright — but that’s enough now. If we relegate this all-out revolt against male sexual entitlement to the kitchen shelf where it belongs, everyone would be a lot more comfortable — at least, the men in the room would be, and we all know that’s what really matters.

Just look at what happened to poor old Aziz Ansari. They warned us that this sort of thing was coming, and we didn’t listen. A famous and successful man in his 30s goes on a date with an unfamous woman in her 20s, they go home together, he pesters her for a shag, she isn’t strong enough to say no or slap him away like a real woman ought to, like women used to do back in the day, so like the snowflake she is, she gets upset and goes home — and we all know how this one goes. He wins an award, and she decides to take revenge. She goes to the press, the press report the encounter in cringeworthy suck-by-blow detail, the feminazi #MeToo hive-vagina takes over, the hysteria mill rattles into overdrive, and boom — just like that, his career is over. Now everyone’s calling the poor guy a monster and a rapist. He’s blacklisted from every network. He’ll never work again. Another fallen soldier in the sex wars. Predictable. Tragic. Just goes to show how weak modern women really are, how much they hate men and sex, how they always take things too far, how they never miss a chance to play the victim.

At least, that’s what it might’ve gone to show if any of that had actually happened. What actually happened was quite different.

What actually happened was this: A man was rude and sexually entitled, fucked up and hurt somebody, and she told him so. He apologized and took it to heart. An unscrupulous trash publication chased this woman down and got her to tell her story, which it reported in the lurid language of celebrity sex scandal. Babe magazine framed it in a way designed to garner maximum attention, derail important activist work, and humiliate everybody involved. The original piece at Babe magazine is an object lesson in how scummy gutter journalism can be when literally all it cares about is keeping readers salivating. The piece pruriently portrays both parties in the worst possible light: Ansari comes out of it looking like an entitled dick on training-wheels, and “Grace” comes out of it looking not like an honest young person who had an upsetting experience, but like a spiteful child who wanted to hurt a man who hurt her, who wanted to ruin him just like the papers warned us all women do. The reporter makes her look hysterical, which is something she definitely isn’t, because nobody is, because hysteria is a fake disease made up by a sexist medical establishment a hundred and fifty years ago to pathologize women who were traumatized and frustrated and wanted their lives to be different.

Unfortunately for those who were hoping for a crowbar to shove in the wheels of this barrelling machine of social and sexual change, what this moment illustrates is a remorseless and prurient witch hunt failing to happen. Ansari still has his career. He’ll be fine — not because the hand-wringers called time on a movement that went too far, but because this movement is honest. This movement is more than just a ballroom full of fainting maidens who collapse at the sight of their own ankles. It turns out that most women can, in fact, distinguish between sexual assault and a bad date. It turns out that sex is just one more thing we really do not need mansplained to us.

***

You want to talk about sexual repression? About wanting women to act like fainting Victorian ladies? The idea that it’s women who are the enemies of freedom in a world where, for centuries, the very worst thing you can call a woman has been “loose” or a “slut,” where for a female or queer person to be openly sexual is to incite violence or excuse it after the fact — that would be laughable anywhere, but in America? In a nation where legal abortion is all but impossible to access in all but the most liberal states, where conservative lawmakers in every district are going after not just safe pregnancy termination, but contraception? We have not even begun to have a real conversation about creating the conditions for meaningful sexual liberty that works for most human beings. If you want sexual liberation, make contraception, reproductive health care, and pregnancy termination easy to access and free at the point of use. Then, Mr. Sullivan, we can talk about “defending sex.”

If anyone is confused about the difference between sex and violence, if anyone is operating under the assumption that men are always and only animals who cannot be expected to control their erotic compulsions, it’s not women. It’s men, because they’ve been socialized to understand sex and violence as synonymous, and it’s the mainstream press, because stars, sex, and violence have always sold copy.

Part of the confusion has arisen from the obvious glee with which the press has sunk its indiscriminate fangs into individual offenders, luridly repeating details of alleged transgressions and sidelining the experiences of victims and survivors, as if sexual activity itself were the so-called scandal rather than whether or not the sucking and fucking and flowerpot-wanking was consensual. There’s always been a ripe news economy of sexual hypocrisy. The same tabloids that sell millions of issues printing pictures of topless teenage girls will gladly jump on any slut-shaming bandwagon that trundles by on its way to the frigid past.

It turns out that women, largely, are not the ones who are confused between sex and violence — not when the stakes are this high. Which is incredible, really, because most of our lives have been spent, especially if we are straight, being gaslit and bullied into believing that sexual violence is normal and fine. We have been socialized to think we need to be reticent and shy about our own desires — that our bodies are for men to desire and own — and yet we are also the ones responsible for setting the boundaries. We have been told that the absolute maximum we can expect, if we are good and quiet and not too provocative or angry, is not to be violently raped.

We are also supposed to put other people’s comfort before our own in every remotely sexual situation. We must not be rude. We must not upset or threaten the man. We must say no when we mean it, but we must take care not to offend him or threaten his masculinity, because heaven knows what will happen then. That’s where this backlash has backfired. Instead of exposing a movement that has overreached itself, instead of proving that MeToo is simply, as a well-reported letter in the French press put it, an attack on men, the Aziz-and-Grace story has opened up a whole new conversation about what we expect from sex, even when it is technically consensual. It turns out that we’re not done here.

We are far from done.

***

There will always be cowardly and conservative elements in society just desperate to take even one irresponsibly reported story and use it to damn an entire movement, and we must not let them, because this matters too damn much. There’s a reeking double standard in the room. Right now, if a man makes a mistake and hurts someone, it might, just for once, ruin his career — but it seems that if a woman makes a mistake and hurts someone right back, or allows her pain to be twisted to serve someone else’s agenda, she damns not just herself, but all other women by association.

This is what happens when patriarchy is on the run. It gets nasty. The mind games ramp up. Women are always the first to lose. But I have a word of advice for those who tried and failed to use this flashpoint to condemn the entire movement:  Gentlemen, do not test us. Women who love their own freedom are all too used to hearing that we have gone too far — in fact, we’ve been hearing that for centuries, whenever we’ve tried to take a single step. The truth is that we have not gone nearly far enough, and we have very little to lose. Attacking our reputations, calling us liars, trying to humiliate us and drive us apart — we’ve seen all that before. Try it and see. This is not going to go the way you want it to go.

No, really. I have crept across the lines of this messy culture war to give you this advice, so please take it seriously, because it is for everyone’s good.

The terms of this war of sex and power have changed, and so have the weapons. Physical violence and threat won’t work for you here. You are trying to fight against whispers and rumors and inference, against righteous rage, against charges of hypocrisy, exploitation, and crass dehumanization that hit home with career-ending accuracy. And you’re trying to fight this war with an arsenal you don’t know how to use, against an army that has been training with these weapons for generations, because these tools of emotional warfare are the only ones they have ever been allowed, because they are women.

You are going to lose.

I don’t care that you’re fighting on your home terrain, that you’ve always been told that sex and power belonged to you and you could set the terms. You want to fight women over who has been more wronged in the field of sex and power. A lot of people also tried to invade Russia in the winter.

I’m sorry to break it to you, but women are not out of control here. They are very, very angry. There’s a difference. Turns out that this is not a runaway train, that women are still driving this sexual revolution — for that is what it is — and the pain and rage fueling the engines are far more profound than we wanted to imagine. It turns out that women want more. More than the right simply to go about our working lives without being constantly sexually harassed. More from men than just being able to keep their fool hands to themselves in the office. It turns out that this is also about the bedroom. It always has been. It’s terrifying, I know, but yes — women want more, women expect better, and it’s time we got it.

***

Back, if you can bear it, to the Aziz Ansari case. If we believe what Ansari himself has confirmed about that night, three things are true about this story:

Ansari acted in a shitty, entitled way towards a young woman. The way that he behaved was not okay or fine.

He does not deserve to go to jail or be blacklisted for it, but that doesn’t make it okay and fine.

Almost every woman I know has had a similar sexual experience — and no, that still doesn’t make it okay and fine.

That last point inflects the first two. The fact that this sort of experience is so goddamn common is precisely why it deserves attention, and should not simply be filed away in a closet marked “women who make too much of a fuss.” Women don’t make enough fuss about how much sex can suck for us even when it is, technically, consensual, even when no crime has been committed. We’re socialized out of making a fuss, just as men are socialized into thinking about sex as something they have to bully and pester out of women. Shitty, dehumanizing sex is not normal, and it is not okay — it’s just very, very common. And because it is so common, because it is a chapter in so many of our stories, it is easier to write this sort of thing off as a “bad date.” The story of the bad date, the bad fuck, and the bad marriage is easy and comforting to tell — almost as easy and comfortable as the story of the young woman who goes hysterical and ruins a man’s life over a bad date. What a pity it isn’t quite so simple.

Sex is many things, but it is rarely simple. Contrary to the popular narrative that opponents of the MeToo movement have propagated, most women don’t like to think of themselves as victims. Most of us would prefer the version of the story where we were in control the whole time, where the hurt and disappointment were our fault, because that way it’s easier to own the horrible things that have happened to us and make sense of the way they make us feel about our own bodies, and about sex in general. It’s easier to smile and repeat the lines that are required of us every time we stand up and demand that women be treated with a bare minimum of human decency: We don’t hate men. No, we don’t hate sex. We’re not like those angry, prudish feminists of the frightening fictional past with their burning bras and man-skull necklaces, ready to castrate any passing politician who accidentally brushes the wrong knee. We are not fainting Victorian maidens. We don’t hate sex. We love sex, and we love men, ok? All of us love sex and all of us love men, all men, no matter how badly they behave, because that’s what it means to be a good woman — it means loving what you’re told to love no matter how much it hurts you.

Love is such a huge, strange word, a word that stretches to contain all the silence, pain, and longing that crowd around the corners of your bed. To speak personally, yes, I love sex, but sometimes I also get angry at it — and sometimes wish it did not have to hurt so much. That’s something I’ve heard from a lot of women and girls I am close to, in this rare time where we have been able to talk about this with a little less censure. Maybe you love sex, but you wish it did not come at the cost of your dignity, your livelihood, your self-esteem. You wish you were able to have it on terms that you could bear. You wish you could ask for what you wanted and be heard. You wish you could talk about all those times you didn’t really want it but went along with it anyway to keep him happy, or to keep yourself from harm. Maybe you wish you could remember how to be hungry. Maybe you wish you could still feel the pleasure you used to anticipate before abuse and trauma left their fingerprints all over your body. And maybe people have simply used sex as a weapon against you so many times that you don’t love it anymore, not right now, and you know what, that’s fine too. Asking women if they love sex (implied: with men) is like asking the front-of-house staff how they feel about their work when the boss is listening.

Repurposing an attack on sexual injustice into an attack on sex itself is convenient and easy and wildly, wildly wrong. It also works like a dream. Nobody wants to be called frigid, which is the word for women who aren’t sluts. The actress Catherine Deneuve, along with a hundred other co-signatories to an open letter in Le Monde, condemned the women speaking out about assault as enemies of “sexual freedom.” The problem is that sexual freedom is not something that can be enjoyed in isolation when more than half the human race still fights for the basic freedom to choose when and how and who we fuck.

I resent being ordered to declare my love for sex by milquetoast liberal commentators who think that women routinely lie about rape and by slimeball anti-feminist shock jocks who spend the other half of their time trying to ban contraception because Jesus said so. The entire world hates sex. Yes, we do. If we didn’t hate sex, we wouldn’t talk about it the way we do behind its back.

Those fragile Victorian ladies, with their corsets and their smelling salts, they seem to come up in every banal and predictable condemnation of the MeToo movement — it’s worth asking who they were and what part they play in the long, weird story of human sensuality. Why were those women so apparently frightened of sex? They were frightened because not so long ago, sex was legitimately terrifying if you were a woman — as it still is for many women and girls around the world. Sex was dangerous. It could kill you, or ruin you, and the fact that you probably wanted it made it that much worse — when you crave something that could mean disaster, that doesn’t make the desire go away, it just makes it that much more horrifying.

A lot of men don’t quite understand why women policed sexual morality in the first place: not because they did not have desires, but because they were made to pay such a heavy cost for men’s desires before they even thought about having their own. Because sex was dangerous. Within living memory sex was extremely goddamn treacherous for women — and in many places it still is.

In fact, we do not have to choose between fighting against sexual violence and being sexual. Today still, as it has been for centuries, we are told: one or the other. We could not demand the right to have our bodily autonomy respected and still expect to get to be sexual, to dress like that, to walk like that, to suggest that we might want something good girls don’t. Men could be asked nicely not to attack when provoked, but if we actually showed any scrap of sexual desire ourselves, all bets were off.

The fight against sexual violence and the fight against sexual repression are two sides of the same struggle: to divide one from the other is to collapse the whole enterprise. So-called sexual liberationists of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation failed, and failed badly, by thinking they could have sexual freedom without tackling male supremacy and sexist violence, by clinging blindly to the cozy delusion that women aren’t actually sensual beings in the way that men are, that women’s sexual freedom can remain an afterthought, and any woman who acts as if it isn’t can and should be punished.

This is why in so many places where abortion and contraception are strictly controlled, exceptions are made in cases where the person seeking to end a pregnancy has been raped: because the real issue is and always has been sexual control, and the problem is not unborn babies but adult women with the temerity to think they can fuck who they want and get away with it. Only men are allowed to get away with that.

In the real world, nobody has so far been sent into career exile for asking someone out. There’s a difference between a polite invitation and repeated, aggressive pestering or a boss who refuses to keep his hands to himself because he thinks that power and seniority gives him a right to your body. Flirting is still allowed, but judging by the panicked responses to any MeToo narrative that isn’t clear-cut rape, it is not women who are confused about the difference between flirting and aggression, but men. This is, sadly, a predictable consequence of an erotic consensus that constantly associates male sexuality with violence, that tells straight men and boys that their sexuality is dangerous and uncontrollable and that if they fail to persuade women to “take” it, they are not men at all.

Understand that until women’s sexuality is not closed on all sides by a big, ugly wall of violence and intimidation, until we are allowed to actually access our erotic impulses honestly and think about what we want, until our bodies are no longer bargaining chips for the crumbs of power men sweep off the table for us to fight over, women will not be sexually free — which means that nobody will be sexually free. Understand that rape is a tool of sexual repression as well as of sexual oppression, and that a fight against rape culture is a fight for sexual liberation — the foundation without which true sexual liberation is going to fall flat on its face in a pool of its own juices.

***

The MeToo movement has not gone “too far.” We have not gone far enough. We won’t have gone anywhere near far enough, not until we achieve something like actual sexual liberation — for everyone. I believe that the next stage is going to involve a process of truth and reconciliation. Rape culture and misogynist entitlement are the key in which our current chorus of dissatisfaction is sung. What that means is that a lot of sex that is technically consensual is nonetheless dire and disappointing, especially for the women involved. This is why the demand for better sex — for fewer Cat People and coercive hookups and woke boys taking too long to understand when you’re just not into it — is also revolutionary.

As Ellen Willis notes in her seminal essay, “Towards a sexual revolution,” sexual coercion is “a tool of sexual repression.” We aren’t calling out men and condemning them to career assassination for being shitty, inconsiderate lovers, and a couple dozen humans in the Northern Hemisphere will be glad to hear me say that — but it’s worth asking why they so often are. Turns out that unless you pay attention to the needs and desires of the person opposite you — or however you happen to be angled — you’re going to be a bad lay. She might not say so, because she’s worried that if she upsets you or hurts your pride you’ll hurt her in far more measurable ways, and she might not be wrong. But trust me: Treating women as people, people who have wants and desires and messy, meaty insides, people who have to live in patriarchy just like you, people who can change their minds and get shy and sometimes take all their past traumas to bed with them just like you do — that’s the one position that’s guaranteed to win with almost everyone. The trick is that there’s no trick to it.

It’s possible that the best sex of our lives, as my friend Meredith Yayanos told me the other day, does not exist yet. When it does, it will be in a world beyond rape culture. In 10 years of trying to fuck like I lived in the early days of a better nation, I’ve found spaces where it seemed that, for a time, something like real sexual liberation was possible. Usually they were queer spaces, or at least spaces with their own reasons to mistrust received ideas about gender and pleasure. But they were mere cracks in the carapace of violence, little chunks in the brittle social exoskeleton of bitter sexism and shame sealing us off in units of terrified longing, even when the clothes came off. I found myself running up against rape culture over and over again. The retinue of bad and selfish and shitty behavior of grown men in bed. The violent fragility of masculinity that could have been so much more. I wanted more. I still want more. And women who want more are a problem.

I’m not promising that the great consensual anti-sexist revolution to come will mean an end to broken hearts and hurt feelings. I would never lie to you about a thing like that. I would anticipate that it might make the breakage cleaner and the scarring easier, but I have only my own experience to go on there. I have been let down and messed around in my time by a few rare and special snowflakes who managed to find entirely new ways to hurt me — ways that did not involve being sexually violent or at any point treating me as less than human, even though I was female and they were not. You can be anti-sexist in theory and in practice and still be a goddamned brat and a soul-sucking mindfucker, it just takes a lot more work and creative chops. I take my hat off to these rare young men, and I will probably end up taking off other things in the future, because people are fascinating and the flesh is weak.

Only when we consider the possibility that male sexuality might not be inherently violent and exploitative can we ask why so much of it is. Why does the joyless, coercive sex that we so often have to settle for under patriarchy have to be the norm? Can’t we do better?

We can, and we must, for reasons that go way beyond the bedroom. If the main problem with rape culture and sexual repression were the fact that they make sex less satisfying, well, there are simple ways around that, and they plug in at the wall. But the rolling crisis of toxic masculinity does not just kill the mood, it kills human beings. It ruins lives. It is a species-level disaster that causes trauma on a scale most of our tiny minds cannot stretch to comprehend. And it can’t go on like this. There is a bigger and scarier social and sexual revolution on its way, and the fact that it will make fucking a lot more fun in the future is just a bonus.

Buckle up.

Note: The original version of this essay has been slightly amended to provide additional context on the Babe magazine story about “Grace” and Aziz Ansari.

* * *

Laurie Penny is an award-winning journalist, essayist, public speaker, writer, activist, internet nanocelebrity and author of six books. Her most recent book, Bitch Doctrine, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

#The Sisterhood

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browngirlwisdom-blog · 7 years ago

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“Hurt People, Hurt People” on Junot Diaz’s piece on Silence & Childhood Trauma by @BrownGirlWisdom__

Cw: sexual violence, mention of suicide

I've had some time to process Junot Diaz’s piece on silence and childhood trauma. I laid in bed, listened to the audio recording because I really had no energy to visually read it. If you have not read it, find the article here. In the presence of Sexual Assault Awareness Month and the #MeToo movement it is quite the time to really invest, revisit the reality of sexual violence and how it impacts folks of color. Many points resonated with me in his piece. My intent is not to discredit the pain, trauma and courage it took for him to be vulnerable in a patriarchal world that is not kind to vulnerability. I intend to provide my reflections as a survivor, a recovering Catholic, Mexican identified, non-Black, queer girl on masculinity, mental health, sexual violence, the familial structure as potential toxic site and religion as an oppressive institution that were brought up in Junot Diaz’s piece.

Interrogation of Catholicism as an Oppressive Structure and Tool of Conquest

What happens when praying isn't enough?

Religion is not always the cure for mental illness. Junot states, “Of course, I never got any kind of help, any kind of therapy. Like I said, I never told anyone. In a family as big as mine—five kids—it was easy to get lost, even when you were going under. I remember my mother telling me, after one of my depressions, that I should pray. I didn’t even bother to laugh.” First, families of color just do not have the language to put into words what depression is so they resort to calling us “locas/locos” and tell us to go “pray” which continues to stigmatize mental illness within our community. I often think about how religion is usually the mode of “healing” for many. It is important to interrogate how religion can be an oppressive force. Specifically in the context of Catholicism on the island of the Dominican Republic, Junot Diaz in an interview states that it is important to critique, be more “transparent” about the “syncretic” religion that has a history rooted in the plantations and a dictator as he states in a Youtube interview titled “Junot Díaz talks religion, Dominican identity, and writing.” on his reflections on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wilde. He advocates for a democratic Dominican Republic and states he is “not here to comfort anyone”. Religion, specifically Catholicism has a history of being used as a tool for manipulation, coercion, displacement, forced assimilation of native folk to whiteness and enslavement of Black people. Religion then becomes a place of isolation, dehumanization, ostracization and massacre. Catholicism has been used as a form of indoctrination of the gender binary and gender roles. Which again, reinforces the dichotomy that men must always be strong and women must be fragile and passive. I feel like many of you who really rely on religion as a form of healing space please take this in slowly. I do not suggest to completely get rid of religion in itself because I used to rely on Catholicism as a form of escape and healing. Now I identify as a “recovering Catholic” for many reasons of my own. I will push us as a community to continue to think about the role of Catholicism as a hegemonic force that continues to uphold much of the systems that hurt us as a community. How can we push the church to recognize its power, misuse of power as an institution, as a socially accepted religion as opposed to practices rooted in the Quran, Santeria, Brujeria, and other spiritual and religious practices? Religion is not always a cure for mental illness within our community, especially given it’s violent history. Connecting this back to sexual violence, what happens when the church demonizes sex, promiscuity without taking into account sexual violence and it’s history of abuse of power? What happens when praying isn't enough?

Addressing Rape Culture

All this to say that sexual violence exists within our communities and we must not remain silent or complacent in rape culture. Here are ten reasons why rape culture is so bad in the Latinx community according to Mala Munoz in “10 Reasons Why Rape Culture is So Bad in the Latinx Community”. These are some of the reasons: the risk of deportation, difficulties seeing sexual assault for what it is, age and generational trauma, lack of family support, family unity takes priority, community supports the perpetrator, lack of consequences and accountability for abusers, negative responses are psychologically damaging, lack of support means high likelihood of revictimization, and survivors forced to create their own support system.

Accountability Now: Men of Color Need to Hold Men of Color

Boys and Men of Color Create Spaces to talk Masculinity!

I also believe that Junot Diaz’s piece is a start to a conversation that men of color should start to invest more time in their feelings, trauma, healing so we can collectively combat systems like the patriarchy, misogyny culture that continues to silence us and enables us from being our authentic selves. Junot Diaz describes his sexual relationships and failed relationships with women which is important to note. We must think about how Junot’s promiscuity and act of using women to move along the world with his trauma was harmful. I think that this is also an opportunity to talk about how men of color need to take accountability of the trauma they cause women of color, while having experienced trauma. Men of color should be having a conversation among themselves about the realities of toxic masculinity and trauma that womxn of color have to experience due to the lack of spaces that allow men of color to work through their trauma. Men of color should hold space for other men of color to be vulnerable. In short, men of color hold other men accountable and make space for each other to process and own their experiences and be honest. And womxn of color should not have to be there to process, but the reality is that many womxn of color do do that emotional labor to support the men of color in their life. So men of color, if you have womxn of color in your life that love and support you, say your Thank You’s.

Womxn of Color Can We Stop Making Excuses For Men of Color

So I also invite womxn of color to reflect on how we possibly navigate the world internalized and how we can move beyond that to really challenge these larger structures like sexism

We as womxn of color need to also stop apologizing for men of color. Internalized patriarchy and misogyny that convinces us to continue to protect and hold delicately the men of color in our lives. And the reality most of of us are not in a place to do that work due to violence we have felt from men of color and/or we can potentially put ourselves in a violent situation due to retaliation. All these concerns are real. Where do we start? Connecting with each other and building solidarity among one another and not pitting against each other for men of color that treat us like trash and waste basket for their toxic coping mechanisms. So I invite us womxn of color to reflect on how we possibly navigate the world internalized and how we can move beyond that to really challenge these larger structures like sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny. Have a conversation among each other. Check-in with each other at a family event, work space, within academia, in the streets, at a party setting and etc. We also need to address transphobia that is deeply embedded in our culture. I invite us to think critically about the gender binary and not only support our cis-ters but all of our sisters. Just like...”We deserve more complexity in these narratives. As corny and played out as the phrase is, it is true that hurt people hurt people. One can both be a survivor and a perpetuator of harm, especially if their trauma compacts with patriarchy. I would love for more attention, gratitude, credit, agency and space be given to those women who helped or loved or were hurt by those hurt men along their way, especially Black women. We deserve it.” as stated by Briana L. Urena “In the darkness men leave behind the women and emerge in the light clean and free”.

Moving forward:

I appreciate Junot Diaz’s vulnerability and became very emotional closer to the end since again, I resonated with a lot of what he expressed. It became sort of a mirror to feelings I have been carrying within myself. I also imagine how men of color can use this as an opportunity to lean more into their vulnerability. Of course, Junot Diaz is not free from critique but also it is a honest way to reflect on his reality to hopefully begin to own the harm he caused along the way. This becomes a larger conversation around addressing rape culture within our community, cultural stigma and inaccessible mental resources within the Latinx community, the need for informal spaces for men of color to address toxic masculinity, and for women of color to invest in each others wellbeing. How can we move forward with Junot Diaz’s vulnerability to change the culture of silence among the Latinx community? This is a start and I believe a platform to address sexual violence, mental health, and religion is always vital and much needed moving forward.

And I still have questions, so I ask: What is the impact when our Latinx families keep trauma silenced? What does it mean when we are unable to unpack what hurts us and who hurt us? What does it mean when we continue to uphold and reinforce toxic structures that lead many of our community members to call it quits? Where do we start? How do we move forward as a community? Towards a more healing and nurturing place? How do we take into account inequities that our communities face and also hold each other accountable for the damage we may have inflicted? How do we hold space for one another? Who should be holding that space?

Finally, I end with this quote by the one and only Gloria, “Why am I compelled to write?... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger... To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit... Finally I write because I'm scared of writing, but I'm more scared of not writing.”

Resources:

http://ocrcc.org/the-intersection-of-sexual-violence-and-disability/

https://www.amnestyusa.org/pdfs/mazeofinjustice.pdf

https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/posts/colonial-history-creates-religious-syncretism-in-the-dominican-republic

https://www.schoolhealthcenters.org/healthlearning/boys-and-young-men-of-color-bmoc/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/03/16/feminism-glossary-lexicon-language/99120600/

https://eji.org/history-racial-injustice-sexual-exploitation-black-women

https://www.rainn.org/articles/sexual-assault-men-and-boys

https://transequality.org/issues/anti-violence

#junot díaz #sexualassaultawarenessmonth #sexualviolence #mentalhealth #mentalillness #writersofcolor

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nextgennews-blog1 · 7 years ago

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Knowing My Limits by Elizabeth Scher

The greatest gift I ever received was getting fired for the first time. I, like so many in the restaurant industry, am a struggling performer. I had been making my way through the ebb and flow of constant rejection, and not necessarily handling it well.

For the past few years at this point, I had been bouncing around from restaurant to restaurant. I had just moved to New York in 2013 and was having difficulty finding my footing. Wherever I worked was filled with a myriad of issues. I never made enough money, there were never enough shifts, the managers were terrible, etc. There was rampant sexual harassment everywhere I worked. This, unfortunately, was to be expected.

I have been battling severe anxiety for years, which, at this point, been repressed to dangerous degrees. In July 2016 I reached a point where it could no longer be ignored. Realizing I could not safely live on my own, I went back home. I let my job know, and they were incredibly supportive. At no point did they show annoyance or belittle my experience, and I will forever be grateful for that. In fact, many of my coworkers and bosses could empathize seeing as how many have gone through similar issues themselves. Working in restaurants, you are bound to find people who have gone through what are patronizingly referred to as “imaginary problems”. Issues such as addiction, depression, anxiety, extreme anger, etc. Ailments where ignorant advice is given such as “just learn to smile more,” or “it’s all in your head.”

I eventually got to the point where I could live on my own and go back to work. I insisted that working in a restaurant was not contributing to my anxiety. In spite of the following events I still believe this to be true. The types of problems that arise in a restaurant are often immediately resolved. My anxiety is generally concerned with the abstract and/or long term. In a restaurant you have many problems at once, but there is often a clear solution. That being said, I did not go back to work full time. I felt, as did my doctor, that I needed to ease into normalcy. My wallet disagreed, but my body felt it necessary to listen. My job was very cooperative, yet again, and I was allowed to come back on a part-time basis. Based on how I have been talking about this place is seems like the ideal serving experience. It is, however, by far the most dramatic place I have ever worked. I have seen drunk servers fight customers. I, myself, pulled a knife out of a cook’s hands to stop him from cutting himself. One time a manager was fired for literally stalking another manager. This place made Maury seem like a lovely family reunion.

There is one important character that is integral to much of the drama that took place. His name is Jake. Jake was the bane of everyone’s existence. He was an annoyingly loud regular who was crude, young, rich, traditionally handsome, and had a hoard of fake friends at his disposal. The main bartender, Evan, who was also good friend of mine, happened to be rather fond of Jake. Jake essentially paid Evan’s entire salary so it’s hard not to see why Evan had his back. Jake is a truly disgusting person. He would sexually harass every woman, but that is to be expected. He manipulated a host into sending what I’ll politely call “suggestive” videos, and then showed them to all of his friends. He would hand out cocaine like it was candy as though we were some sort of drug Santa. He called one of my friends, a fellow server named Brittany, a “miserable cunt” and was subsequently “banned” for 10 days. He tried to go back the next day as if nothing happened. The only reason he even got reprimanded was because Brittany was leaving for graduate school at the end of the week. The minute she left he was back to his old antics with full force. He has done, and continues to do, terrible things with no punishment. The final straw for me was when he exposed himself to a coworker and a female manager. I personally witnessed the female manager reporting it to the the higher ups and nothing was done. Jake didn’t even so much get a slap on the wrist.

Jake started to weigh on my mind more than I care to admit. Before he was just a slimy irritation, but I never thought he actually would effect me in the way that he did. I started to have panic attacks about possible scenarios involving him. They were only in my imagination, but there was something different about them than my other panic induced downward spirals. Although these events were fabricated, they were not out of the realm of possibility. Jake’s money made him very appealing to the higher ups. He was even being courted as an investor for a future location. He was untouchable. I was starting to think that he could literally rape us and the owner would just say we shouldn’t have been in his way. Unrealistic, yes, but given the way rape is treated these days, that idea is more realistic than I wish it was.. At one point I literally broke down crying about this in the middle of Union Square. There I was, sitting on the sidewalk on a Saturday night, crying about a piece of shit who, frankly, had already mostly decided not to mess with me. I wasn’t exactly nice to him after he called Brittany a cunt.

One of the main lessons I took away from my mental breakdown was to stop repressing stress. I decided I needed to confront this issue. I couldn’t go to management because that had already proven to be futile. At best we were ignored and at worst we were openly mocked. What I decided to do was talk to Evan, the bartender, and my friend. Evan and I grew close because we would commute together. We would rant to each other, talk about our fears and frustrations, and confide in each other. He has fought and won many battles that I won’t go into out of respect for his privacy. He helped me while I was struggling and I will always love him for that. What I thought I could do is go to Evan, as a friend, with my fears about Jake seeing as he actually has some influence. Evan isn’t a manager, but he could deny service. Another thing to mention about Evan is that he is incredibly defensive and stubborn. He has alienated a lot of people who have confronted him about similar issues. I knew that if I confronted him there was a possibility that I could lose a friend. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, but I had no choice. The conversation went exactly as I expected. I was crying, he was yelling, I was saying we don’t feel safe, he said I should have gone to management and not him. I said that these were panic induced thoughts, but felt they were still legitimate worries. I suggested that Jake not be given so many “perks” which, I felt, validated his behavior. I also said that Evan encouraged this behavior. He did not take kindly to that. Both of us were emotional and probably not as articulate as we could have been. I had to go to work as he was leaving for the day. I went to cry before my shift, he went right to management.

I left for a little while because I was already scheduled to go on vacation with my family. I came back after about ten days where I learned I was no longer allowed to work shifts until I have a talk with the general manager. My coworkers agreed that I was probably going to be fired in this “talk.” We all agreed that this was, in fact, probably what I needed. This place was making me miserable and the environment was toxic. Lo and behold, I come in the next morning and I have the “talk.” The general manager said I was “causing unnecessary drama.” and they can’t have that, especially from a part-time employee. I then asked him if I could explain why I did what I did. I did not hold back. I explained how I was coming to Evan as a friend, how going to management was futile, and how genuinely terrified we all are around Jake at times. I also made a point to tell him about how Brittany, the aforementioned “miserable cunt,” had gone to the owner the day before that incident occurred. She went to the owner, with another manager, and raised her concerns about Jake. She stated that he is always condescending and sexually harasses her. She had also said that she was afraid to go to the owner about this because she was scared to talk negatively about his friend. The owner’s response to these concerns was “well next time they do that say ‘yeah, well Evan doesn’t have these,’” and made fake breast gestures. It bears repeating that this was in front of another manager; the general manager apparently never knew about that incident. I also thanked the general manager for treating me so well when I needed the time off. It is a rare thing, and I still wanted to show appreciation.

I am not happy about how the confrontation went down, but I am happy I did it. If I had to get fired for anything I’m happy it was for standing up for myself and my coworkers. The whole experience made me realize that I never want to work in restaurants ever again. I wish I could say this type of incident is uncommon. I can’t count how many times a female coworker, at any restaurant I’ve worked, has encountered sexual harassment that has made them feel genuinely unsafe. At one point or another, at this place, every single female staff member had to be talked out of quitting over the sexism. We all said the same line: “it’s just part of the job.”

I learned that I can be a commanding force if I need to be. The whole experience has made me stronger. I still battle with anxiety daily and I am adjusting to the treatment I receive for it, but it has made me a better person. I’ve realized that learning how to get rid of unnecessary stress is difficult, but crucial. The second I walked out of that restaurant after being fired a huge weight was lifted off of my shoulders, as cliche as that sounds. I mean that in a very real sense; I feel lighter. Job searching is awful, but I will take that any day over forcing myself to suppress more anxiety. I know my limits. More importantly, I know how to properly expand my limits without causing more stress. Baby steps are crucial and not a sign of weakness. I always thought that getting fired would be humiliating. I never considered that it could be the most empowering thing that has happened to me. I will be forever grateful.

#anxiety #feminism #restaurantindustry #knowingyourself #recovery #babysteps

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theturnips · 8 years ago

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Letters Between Two Women, One in the USA, One in Switzerland, Following the US Presidential Election of the Man Who Grabs Pussy & Lost the Popular Vote

By Beth Couture & Renée E. D’Aoust

From: "Renee E. D'Aoust" To: "Beth Couture" Subject: Letter from Renee Date: Saturday, November 12, 2016 12:14 PM Lugano, Switzerland

Dear Beth:

And so the US Electoral College elects the sexual assaulter in chief—Trump. I’m gutted. Devastated.

How are you feeling, my beloved friend? I think of you on the front lines, serving people, finishing your MSW. How can I support you better?

How does it feel in America?

This morning, Tube of Fur woke at five a.m., as she does, and she grunted. Last night, we walked our chestnut trail; it’s called Sentiero Eden. Waddle up, waddle down. It is small comfort to me that Tootsie does not know how screwed we are. She has stayed close by me all week, as I get out of bed, to teach, to write, to go to physical therapy. Wednesday after the results were clear, my physical therapist (she’s Dutch) said: “this affects everyone!”

This is global climate change. This is the normalization of racism, hate, sexism, climate change denial, the denial of responsibility we have to our brown & black & every color & LGBTQ sisters and brothers, the sham that I'm supposed to get along, the idea that I'm supposed to normalize the sexual assaulter in chief, the idea that I'm supposed to support a system of white supremacy in the country whose passport I carry. This is the normalization of excuses that favor of fascism.

I say, white people, this is on you. Squarely. I'm a white woman. This is on me.

Our black and brown and LGBTQ brothers & sisters have been terrified to live in America. We have killed our First Peoples through genocide and called it assimilation. No more. I'm now terrified, too. I never wanted to leave America to live in Switzerland. Now, I do not want to come back. Why? I don't feel safe. Know: I've been raped, sexually abused, harassed, stalked. A friend told me last summer that I did not understand domestic violence. And I wondered, "Have I done such a great job of normalizing my self? The violence in my past?" You see, 25 years ago when I spoke up, my extended family stopped talking to me. My mother’s two sisters shunned my mother. My aunt told me I was "precocious" and "guilty of everything [HE] would do from now on, to any other girl" if I didn’t report. Another abuser stalked me online for years. Another woman told me “I wanted it.” Have I spoken of how my body is a locus of assault? Have I written about it? In obscure terms. I will now speak up. I am terrified of global climate change. Global climate change affects my body and the earth. But brown and black and LGBTQ bodies have been terrorized for years. So my fear is privileged; I am a white body. I am terrified that the sexual assaulter in chief has normalized ignorance, normalized grabbing pussies, normalized grabbing my pussy.

I have been practicing a potpourri of radical self-care that includes drinking too much coffee, eating too many Italian cookies, breaking up with Facebook so I can freak out on Twitter, and grabbing Tube of Fur to cuddle.

Kindness is my religion, being a doormat is not. My belief in kindness has meant I keep my mouth shut. As a white woman, it has been my privilege to keep my mouth shut. But when my brother killed himself, I swore I would not abide bullshit. I have not kept my pledge. IN IAN'S NAME: I WILL SPEAK UP.

Beth, please be my witness. I am terrified.

I’m so grateful for the readings you sent last time. Please continue to help me see my own blindness, to break down my privilege, to serve.

Give my love to Esteban, too. I send you love during a time of war.

Renée P.S. I'm attaching my new motto.

From: "Beth Couture" Date: Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 9:19 PM Subject: Letter to Renee To: "Renee E. D'Aoust"

Philadelphia, PA, USA

Dear Renée,

The other night I dreamt about dying. In the dream, I was somehow certain that I was going to die, and I was so scared and so angry and sad. I kept saying I wasn't ready, I had so much left to do, I couldn't die. Not yet. It reminded me of when Ed and I talked about death, about the afterlife, and it hit me in such a powerful way that maybe there wasn't anything after this life. Maybe we really do just die and rot, and that's it. I have never been able to accept that idea. I don't believe in heaven or hell, but I've always believed that we don't just stop, that there must be something after this and we will be aware of it. I don't know if I believe this because I actually believe it, or if I'm just too scared to think about the alternative. In that conversation with Ed, and in the dream, I faced it. I allowed myself to think that maybe that's all there is--death and no longer being. And I sobbed like I have never sobbed. I couldn't stop. It felt like someone was tearing out my insides. That's what it feels like now, almost all the time. Like I am looking into the face of something too horrible to comprehend and I can't stop sobbing. Like I am seeing the possibility of death for the first time. And I'm not ready to. I'm not ready to look, but I have no choice. I'm not ready to face the possibility that this is all there is.

Esteban and I decided a few months ago that we wanted to have a baby. This was such a big decision for us. I don't think it was something I had ever allowed myself to imagine, because I am terrified of being a mother, of fucking the kid up, of raising a kid in such a scary world. Getting pregnant always felt like such a selfish thing. There are so many kids in the world who need parents, so few resources to go around, so little certainty that the world would be okay for the kid. But we decided that to have a kid, to make one ourselves, would be an act of hope.

The day after the election, I realized that I could not bring a child into Trump's America, that I no longer believed enough in the good in the world to get pregnant. I think about having a baby now, and it feels so cruel, so absolutely harmful, and I can't do it. I think Esteban could still do it even though he understands my feelings, but I can't. I don't have that much hope. And it breaks my fucking heart every time I think about it. It feels like death, and the grief is so big, so powerful that I don't know what to do with it at all. We are looking into adoption now, and that may be the most ethical decision anyway. Certainly we can love the child the same. But it hurts so much to think that we don't, can't have the same hope we used to, the hope we worked so hard to have.

I guess that's what I'm feeling most of all--hopeless. For the first time. I've always been, in spite of my depression and anger and fear, in spite of the reality I see as a social worker, an optimist. I have always believed that no matter how bad things are, they can and likely will get better. Not without a fight, of course, not without a hell of a lot of work, but they will get better. Things will be okay. I'm not sure I believe that anymore. I know the US is a country built on slavery, on genocide, on greed. It's a country that claims values it so often acts in direct opposition of. Trump really is no surprise. But the loudness of his bigotry, his fear mongering, his stupidity, still surprises me.

My sister got married a little over a year ago and is now afraid that her marriage will be nullified, that the woman she loves will no longer be seen by those in power as her family. My three black nephews now have even more to be afraid of when they walk down the streets, because of the violence Trump endorses and encourages in his supporters. I work with students who are afraid for their lives, the lives of their families, their futures. This isn't how it should be. And I'll fight for how it should be, for how it will one day be. Because there's no other choice. Right now I'm grieving, and I feel there's no other choice but that either. I'm so grateful you're with me in the fighting, in the grieving.

So much love to you, and please give my love to Daniele, to your sweet dad, to the Tube of Fur (who always gives me hope).

Beth

Beth Couture is the author of Women Born with Fur (Jaded Ibis Press). She received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. She currently lives in Philadelphia and is completing a Master’s degree in Social Work at Bryn Mawr College.

Renée E. D’Aoust’s first book Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press) was a ForeWord Reviews 'Book of the Year' finalist. D'Aoust teaches online at North Idaho College and is the Managing Editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She lives in Switzerland. www.reneedaoust.com

#writersresist #writeourdemocracy

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