#in the most genuine way possible i admire the faith so many ppl have in this show to like. make good choices. i just can't hashtag believe

[twocutlines]

ok can i say. nobody throw rocks at me but despite the beautiful wonderful tommy sleeping on the couch scene and the eddie diaz of it all that episode did concern me a little bit re: tommy because if we have to sit through an arc about him healing from his dark and troubled past and learning to let love into his heart and find the family he never had in the 118 i fear i am going to be on the news. and unfortunately i do think the chances of that are not zero

[cypr1anlatew00d]

sigh

the “t/rf accusations are over-used and stopping any form of REAL f/minism” being the emerging cr/pto narrative, especially in response to ppl rightly cluing into how they’re using algo-friendly content/accounts as an entry ramp to larger audiences, like, the exact alt-r/ght playbook, is such a good gambit I’d admire it if it was like a round of among us and not treating aspects of living people’s lives like chess pieces for the cruelest and stupidest possible outcome...

like A) it’s a great way to get people to again entertain the possibility that we lose something by being more disinclined to entertain & spread posts that make broad, essentializing generalizations about “men” (no matter how “inclusively” you try to phrase them, lol) or other not necessarily transphobic but frequently co-occuring reactionary positions often masqueraded as the hard core real ass “materialist analysis” “they” don’t want you to know about, ie sex negative, anti-porn, anti-sw, carcereal f/minisms (at least one of the above tends to be the “actual issue” if you investigate what the op is being “unfairly criticized” over). This hilariously sometimes expresses itself in an attempt at stoking nostalgia for like 2014 male tears mugs era tumblr. This Is What They Took From You ladies... the true high water mark of effective demands for womens equality.

What these “important” lines of argument mostly have in common is that they’re a well-critiqued element of “consciousness raising” f/minism, where personal traumas or even just icks are expanded fractally to explain all social and political phenomena as this sort of Ur-historical pattern of interpersonal cruelty inherent to “male” psychology... as early as the 70s this was identified as a great way to get an increasingly paranoid and standoffish clique/cult together that achieves little politically. But as a tactic it frequently comes back despite its ineffectiveness (I would even argue that it is and remains the main expression of f/minism in the US and UK at least, despite arguments that uh... caring about trans people or treating sex workers as human adults with jobs or whatever has put it on the back foot), because it is comforting to have some quasi-religious universal explanation for your suffering, even if it relies on reifying a binary & hierarchal narrative of gender much more than it takes steps to dismantle it. (in fact, especially to white or gender conforming or middle class or cis women, changing things too much or past a certain point can be “scary!”, an unexamined impulse that unites many libs rads and trads.)

There are actually a ton of practical political demands that don’t require or hinge on this language at all, and it’s not a coincidence that most of these supposedly “vital” arguments intersectionality has given us less of a taste for mainly propose policing interpersonal behvior rather than creating a scenario where power is more evenly distributed, where people have more autonomy over their life, so individual asshole sexists become less important and less able to flex power over people in their orbit.

And B), which is probably more importantly to address: it’s convincing because it flatters notatively f/minist cis women’s perceptions that it’s both overly-likely and self-evidently ridiculous that someone would call them transphobic, and also that there’s like, outsize risk or consequences for them if someone says this. Which of course, is the classic “I’m Being Silenced!!” line but from a slightly different angle. This feels like an innovation because it’s so obviously a bad faith tactic when you put it that way, but has, apparently, finally found a way to be phrased in barely-progressive terms that have people genuinely worrying again that The Down With Cis Bus will come for them. Anyways sigh. come back to this post in a year to see if I was right. I sure hope not.