#in this post will be treated as though they are a conservative reactionary

[trash-goddess]

One of the worst things about being a teenager is being infantilized. You are expected to be (reasonably) responsible for yourself but do not have any of the respect, resources nor decision making power that comes with it such responsibilities as an adult.

Being an adult with a fully functioning brain, and the having the respect, resources, decision making power and responsibilities is a delightful experience. Taking control of my life and living on my own terms has made every aspect of my life much more manageable.

So. As a twenty four year old. Who works full time, and thus has saved and paid off my student loans. Who is capable of managing my finances, groceries, and living a healthy lifestyle. Who is by all accounts, a reasonable adult. I find myself frustrated by seeing myself described as a child who is incapable of making such decisions has become incredibly frustrating. It showcases a lack of maturity and understanding!

I refuse to be dragged back down into childhood by people who have never even met me and do not know what is best for me.

And you can take my voting rights from my cold dead hands.

[hareofhrair]

A Primer on TERF Ideology

Saw a post that was talking about introductory TERF rhetoric to watch out for, but it was a bit long and confusing, so I thought I’d condense the salient information here along with some more in depth explanation.

First of all, not every transphobe is a TERF. “GC”’s and otherwise conservative people who hate transpeople but don’t identify as feminists are not TERFs, just transphobes.

TERFs espouse a specific ideology that goes beyond just transphobia.

The root of that ideology is bioessentialism- the idea that gender is biological, and that the two binary genders are physically, fundamentally different, and no overlap can occur.

This is the “radical” part of the acronym.

TERFs believe all women are by nature compassionate and “pure” and physically weaker than men, while all men are biologically cruel sexual predators. They believe men are physically incapable of not oppressing women, and therefore heterosexual sex is inherently coercive and abusive, and that the only way for women to be safe is to reject men entirely, choose to become lesbians, and establish a segregated society.

The second pillar of TERF ideology is exclusionism- the belief that a thing (be it a community, identity, or definition) is defined by what it excludes. Ie- a woman is defined as not a man. A lesbian is a not a woman who loves other women, but a woman who does not love men. The only solution to patriarchy is to create spaces without men.

TERF rhetoric can almost always be traced back to these core assumptions.

TERF ideology is overwhelmingly fear based. Many TERFs (though not all) are survivors of physical or sexual abuse seeking a way to rationalize and protect themselves from further abuse. They have classed themselves (and all other women) as biological victims and all men as relentless predators actively hunting for opportunities to abuse women, and become hyper vigilant about protecting themselves from the predators they believe are everywhere, in the only way their worldview allows- through exclusion.

Therefore a TERF’s sense of physical safety is entirely dependent on their ability to root out anyone they consider male, masculine, or sympathetic to masculinity, and exclude it from their spaces in any way they can.

This is the ideological root of their transphobia.

Radical feminism developed out of second wave feminism, and inherently cannot recognize intersectionality. It treats all women as a unified group with a single shared experience (that of middle class western white women) and simply disregards any other perspective as irrelevant. They will group gay men, black men, disabled men ect in with the “oppressors” with zero acknowledgment of the ways in which these groups are also oppressed by straight/white/non-disabled women.

To summarize, TERFs believe 1) Gender is biological and immutable, 2) Men are inherently predatory and women are inherently virtuous victims, 3) All women and all men have the same experiences, and 4) Exclusion is the only solution to danger and necessary to be safe.

In short, it’s a reactionary movement born out of fear and aversion which is dependent on an immature inability to recognize other people as having an independent internal reality from yours, and the belief that the best way to solve problems is by putting them far away from you.

So, a short checklist of TERF rhetoric to be aware of, beyond obvious transphobia:

Gender essentialism/bioessentialism: anything which positions men as inherently oppressive and women as inherently more virtuous. Entry level gender essentialism starts with “all men are garbage” and “women are more spiritual/better communicators/have instinctive understanding that men lack.” At more advanced levels, this will become increasingly biologically focused, centering on the womb/genitals as the source of women’s virtue and on the penis as inherently violent.

Anti-sex/anti-kink: Statements which conclude that sex (especially heterosexual sex) is inherently violent/coercive, ie “BDSM is abusive” or “no woman actually likes *insert sex act*, they only do it because men pressure them into it.” This can also take the form of idealizing sexless “pure” relationships. The general demonization of sexual desire as inherently masculine and predatory. This will usually start with generalized sex negativity ie no kink at pride, being anti sex work, framing any display of female sexuality as exclusively by and for men. And progresses to a belief that desire itself is addictive and poisonous- ie an anti-scientific belief in porn addiction, accusing people of being sex addicts ect. Before reaching the final stage of declaring all penetration rape.

Exclusionism: A consistent rejection of ambiguity or contradiction in how people self identify. A strong belief that labels have clear definitions which exclude other groups. Consistent doubt, dismissal, or attacks against people whose identities contradict a binary world view. A fixation on the idea that a group of people is attempting to infiltrate the community for nefarious purposes (to attack vulnerable people, to steal resources, ect). The belief that the community is rife with liars, fakers, and delusional people who aren’t really a part of the community and need to be removed at all costs. The idea that the community can’t accomplish anything or “be taken seriously” unless the community can be defined in a way that excludes all outgroups, and the tendency to progressively narrow this definition. This will usually begin by targeting a group that is currently unpopular in the mainstream (previously ace/aro people, and bi people before that) and framing them as either “fakers looking for attention” (if the TERF considers them female) or “predators trying to infiltrate our spaces” (if the TERF considers then male).

Lack of Intersectionality: Arguments that gloss over or ignore the experiences of anyone not cis and white. Denying, dismissing, or defending both historical and current instances of men being oppressed or women using intersectional privilege to abuse men- ie, white women using false rape accusations to murder black men. A categorical denial that women are capable of being abusive, particularly as romantic partners. The idea of men being sexually assaulted or abused by women will be dismissed as outliers or fabrications, or will be outright mocked.

Gender based fear: An unhealthy fixation on female victimization, ie constantly sharing chain emails posts about how to “spot” human traffickers, or how rapists pick their targets, or dangerous misinformation about self defense. Not everyone who ever posts about sexual assault or violence against women is a TERF or crypto-TERF. But be alert for a pattern of behavior that encourages fear and hyper vigilance with no information about systemic solutions, which suggests predators will attack random women and children in the street or in parking lots, and which categorically refers to victims as women and perpetrators as men, or uses other gender essentialist assumptions.

Hopefully this will give you a better understanding of the foundations of TERF ideology, so that you can better recognize the concepts that extend from the same ideas and inevitably lead back to them.

[familyabolisher]

Could you please define the word reactionary as you use/understand it? It gives me some trouble as a concept. I mean it seems like just a reaction to something but I don't really understand what we're doing when we apply it to things like criticism

sure. the word "reactionary" describes, in short, a conservative political articulation, generally with a strong traditionalist slant and an opposition to what might be termed "progressive" values.* in the specific context in which i used it in that last post, i meant to gesture towards a conservative politic which, for example, makes value-judgements about an individual on the basis of their "intelligence" (or competence in areas which supposedly act as plausible barometers for "intelligence"), and assumes "intelligence" to be an ontologically extant and empirically identifiable category. so like, to treat myself as though being "bad" at a skill within which a significant measure of intellectual currency is socially invested reflects a moral or personal failing on my part (i see myself as "bad" at writing, i feel bad about myself as a result because i think that this says something bad about my character) is to reproduce the idea that being "good"/"bad" at said skill is empirically verifiable and that to lack such a "goodness" is to cast a negative value judgement on myself. which is, imo, reactionary.

*obligatory "i have walter benjamin brain" caveat that i do not think "progressive" [and its oppositional "traditionalist" for conservative/fascist values] is a coherent way to describe the process of social development due to how it falsely assumes a unilaterally "progressive" temporal continuum within which these developments take place, but. you know what i mean, lmao.

[madtomedgar]

so there's a post going around about how if we were in the succession universe we would all be reblogging the video of roman's breakdown to make fun of him and like...

a) yeah, that would go viral like that and

b) i think that that's bad, actually, and part of the point of that scene, maybe.

So like... I love laughing at evil people experiencing consequences for being evil. Generally I also find random minor misfortunes befalling them funny. But there are a lot of things the internet seems to treat as like... funny or cause for celebration that I don't get. Like. I don't see how someone who is evil dying of old age in their bed surrounded by family is cause for celebration because I don't want that for them! I want them to get hit by a bus! I want them to die young so they can't spend decades destroying other people's lives! It is obscene to me that Antonin Scalia lived so long, while so many Gay people died so young. It is obscene to me that Ronald Reagan got to see 85 and Kieth Harring did not. The older they are the angrier I get because how dare they get so much life, and so many chances to destroy, at the expense of others. So like. Ok sure crab rave when the nasty octogenarian dies but like... we do understand that that's hollow, yeah? We understand that that isn't cosmic justice, right?

And also, I am pretty uncomfortable laughing at people who are evil for normal human things, like crying at their dad's funeral. Or being old. Or having caner. And I think like... yeah ok. Sympathy for the devil etc, Alinsky would roll his eyes so hard because the only important thing is winning and to win you have to take advantage of any weakness in your enemy, and when it's your communists they're glorious freedom fighters but if it's your enemy's communists then they're the end of civilization, BUT.

If one accepts that prefiguring is part of the work of creating the world we want to live in, and if the world we want to live in is one where we have rejected the conservative notion that it is not shameful to have a body that behaves like a body, or to experience and express emotions that have been deemed "weak" by reactionary and conservative philosophies, and if we actually believe all of that stuff about fascists etc being human as we all are, and not inhuman monsters, then...

Idk maybe part of it is that we aren't the kind of people who would mock you for crying because your dad died? Because sometimes the most life-changing thing you can say to a person is actually "I'm so sorry, that shouldn't have happened to you. That must hurt a lot." And like... do I think that "we should just be nice to them"? No, of course not. Is this maybe me just being annoyingly autistic about wanting people to be punished for the things they've actually done in a way that makes sense? Probably. Do I actually think it would have any impact on the Roman Roys of the world if the left responded with sudden sympathy to the video of him breaking down at the funeral, or would make him reconsider anything or change his actions? No.

But it's kind of like how you don't respond to the person who made the bigoted conspiracy theorist post debunking them because you think it will change their mind, but because it might make someone in their audience, or someone on the fence, stop and think and change their mind.

Like. And this is actually how whacko xtian "it's not a cult if it's christianity in america" cults get a lot of people, is they find them when they're vulnerable (like, grieving a loved one) and are just. So so so so so kind and sweet and comforting and supportive, while other people in that person's life are not. And so even though the person doesn't agree with them ideologically, they start going to them because they offer something on a human level that they need, and eventually the whacko beliefs become mandatory for maintaining relationships that person is now invested in and needs.

So like. I think what I'm saying is that while sure, mocking or not mocking Meghan McCain will have no effect on her politics either way, and mocking or not mocking the royals for being old will have no effect on them either, it will have an effect both on other people who agree with you and aren't evil, and an effect on conservatives who aren't famous but who also aren't entirely a lost cause as human beings.

Because it's hard to maintain the necessary cognitive dissonance of "it's funny when they cry because their dad died because they're evil and don't deserve sympathy, but when I cry because my dad died I do deserve sympathy and it's not funny because I'm not evil" when you're fucked up because your dad died. So like... are you actually going to feel good going to people you regularly see mocking people crying for good reason (not people crying because they experienced a consequence. your family dying isn't a consequence, it's an awful universal human experience) with your own pain? It's worth asking.

And also, if someone is a member of that white conservative macho culture that views any sign of humanity as weakness to be exploited, stamped out, or mocked, and something horrible happens to them, and the only people offering genuine sympathy and support are like... their gay cousin and their feminist coworker, that actually might make them reconsider which group of people really has their best interests in mind.

I have seen people get out of nasty christian evangelical cults this way. A family member committed suicide and their church was awful about it because they believe that that's a mortal sin and those people go to hell, and that choosing to do that was indicative of a lot of awful things about a person's character, and therefore they shouldn't be mourned and instead held up as a shameful object lesson for everyone else. And their coworkers who were either members of kinder gentler more liberal churches or who were not christians at all meanwhile were sweet and comforting and supportive, and treated this as a tragic loss and the dead person as someone worthy of love and of being celebrated and remembered. And they weren't high handed about it, like "well maybe that'll make them think about their horrible belief system," they were just there for this person in a non-judgemental way specifically when their church wasn't. And that, not anything about ideology or beliefs, had a major impact, enough so that they left that church (cult) not long later.

So yeah idk. I personally would not be reblogging that video if I lived in the succession universe and I think it's pretty obvious that he breaks down when and how he does specifically because that culture of conservative white machismo that he lives in views any kind of expression of grief as a weakness, and continuing to treat it that way, regardless of the other politics involved, only serves to perpetuate that white conservative machismo culture.

To br clear though I *would* reblog a video of Roman crying about his stupid rocket blowing up and mock him relentlessly for that, because that is just play stupid games win stupid prizes.

[rainbowgod666]

TLDR of the talking points because nobody reported mr "i have ace in my name so you cant say shit lmao" yet.

...im gonna have to bust out the LazerPig voice am I?

When country A is attacked by country B, its impossible to presume that country A can just "turn off" country B. Even with massive psyops and hidden agents nothing short of the fucking SCP foundation could do that and NOT be found. Any little voice regarding this, as insignificant as it could be, would get silenced immediately. And before you know, country A, if it did this, would be sanctioned to oblivion and forced to sign every single agreement under the sun. The only reason this didnt happen with israel is because the average american voter (up until late 2021) had no idea of the existence of any other book outside of the bible

"Attack" is a strong word. From what little I gathered, hamas sent a diplomat to talk with his israeli equivalent, the same israeli diplomat that had a really bad morning up until then, and because of zionism hes Fucking Ready. So when the hamas representative is like "we wish for peace, and if it cant be done, we are ready for battle" the israeli diplomat became a fucking Super Zionist or some shit and before we could notice it; a few hundred palestinians were already dead. Hamas technically did the first move but for all we know it was trying to defend a palestinian woman from the IDF not Defending shit and instead being offensive. In more ways than one

EEEEEEEEEEHHHHH not at all actually. See, the entire point of this whole "israel/palestine" thing is that britain needed soldiers to finisce off the ottoman empire (dont ask. History is like that) and after WWII zionists used the holocaust as an excuse for colonization. This entire thing then got worsened by america, specifically the conservatives and their only voter base of evangelist reactionary 50+yo christians that are DEFINETIVELY ready to Horus Heresy themselves (even though they COULD take the Martin luther way of "bigass list of why × sucks" and set the × to "treating non-white non-male believers as people"), and the fact that israel is in middle east. Smile for the camera mr bush!

No. They didnt. If even HALF the reports of how they were treated are right, it means that hamas (who are supposedly terrorists) (and they arent) had the decency to treat anybody they kidnapped according to POW rules, aka medicines food and effectively nothing other than "detention". If youre gonna pull the "oh but theyre human shields!" Card on my ass then i have a big funny here. ⅔s of all israeli victims in the oct. 7 incident were basically human shields themselves, some were IDF soldiers who were shot by their fellow men, possibly volountarily, to effectively make hamas worse than it actually is. And if i read the image correctly, its possible that those "hostages" genuinely ran to HAMAS instead of the IDF. Its like (and i excuse myself if this sounds insensitive towards someone) being a cop stuck in a gang war and siding with the gang. If you think about the "stockholm syndrome was invented by a cop to justify a girl NOT doing what he said and instead aiding the criminal" post this makes you question: what the fuck is israel doing then? A genocide. That only the zionist government wants.

Read. The. Image. You are behaving like "you are getting psyopped, PSYOPPED I SAY!" Like- dont you hear the cognitive dissonace in your words? If the data is accurate (and it is to a somewhat terrifying degree) you are implying that palestine (a country whose water sources are 95% poisoned) (by israel) is capable- AND HAS THE MONEY- to conduct an actual psyop. Think about it, doesnt it sound even REMOTELY WEIRD that you think "this is all fake" when you hear stories about people thanking god that their loved ones died in a single piece? Why does hamas have so many tunnels? At least ONE of them had to be a normal maintenance tunnel (and according to a post i saw one time, it WAS. The IDF points to a "schedule for hamas soldiers" and the girl looking at the video says "thats a fucking calendar". How the fuck would THAT not be a psyop, considering its baseline is "the West doesnt know any other language outside of english", while a woman not washing her bloodied hands [in a place where WASHING YOUR HANDS HAS CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE] because the blood is all thats left of her son- is grounds for asking"you sure this is real?") (Seriously dude, what the fuck is wrong with you)

Yeah. But they were from PALESTINE. See, israel (in the way we think about it)... uuuh... doesnt really "exist" in an actual sense. Its more complicated than my brain can say without referencing every single piece of entertainment i have ever consumed in my life up until now, but basically the entire thing being reduced to a "war of religion" is some Bush-Era bullshit that SPECIFICALLY helps zionists. And honestly its KINDA suspicious that we have proofs and records that up until 1948 the land was called palestine and now its called israel. See, this is colonialism. And religion is used to excuse arming the offensive force because islamophobia is a thing. Even though im pretty sure the average palestinian is at least BORN into judaism and jewish practices, things that are extremely complex because its not religion but palestinian culture

As i wrote before (making this the shortes point in this list) Zionists used the holocaust AS AN EXCUSE to invade palestine. While i do underatand what happened back then you gotta remember that, according to ANOTHER tumblr post I dont even remember, the average zionist sees holocaust survivors as WEAK. Go figure that shit out. Also theres the chance that this entire thing is some wack shit because all people figured out of WWII right after it happened was that 6 million jews were killed because the 20th century equivalent of a 4channer blamed the jews on everything, and to avoid that from happening again the judaist populace had to be granted land... land that was not theirs to begin with.

To the public eye? Yeah. But in private? The entire area of Palestine is effectively an open-air prison where all water is poisoned and the IDF is illegally settled there and (according to one more post i saw here) are so wound-up they usually find a public space and fire some bullets, giving severe PTSD to anybody with 1/10th of a fucking braincell and therefore the ability to go "hey wait a fucking second. This is really stupid and the average human shouldnt expect to get shot at while going at the market because they are indigenous to a country

And btw: israel classifies journalists of the oct 7 attack/assault/incident/event/etc. (as in, people who took photos and recorded what happened) as TERRORISTS. And then KILLS THEM

Imagine if america did that...

Oh wait.

[illnessfaker]

if you legitimately believe in the concept of porn addiction you're a reactionary btw.

edit: i'm turning reblogs off on this post because the people taking umbrage with it are either 1. reactionaries proving my point 2. people who refuse to read any of the sources provided in the relevant reblog 3. people who don't understand what actually defines addiction vs. compulsive behavior or 4. people who don't understand that what society dictates is abnormal sexual behavior isn't an objective measure of fucking anything anyway and that should be obvious because being gay used to be in the dsm!

read this and fuck off:

Another consequence of medicalizing addiction is that addiction as a medical condition can expand in scope to include an ever-larger number of cases (e.g., Reith 2004; Barker and Galardi 2015). Though early US sexologists, such as William Masters and Virginia Johnson, studied what they labeled “sexual disorders,” they did not use an addiction framework (Irvine 2005 [1990]). Instead, the emphasis on sexual addictions, including addiction to pornography, stems from the addiction movements related to substance abuse (Reay, Attwood, and Gooder 2015). In the last half century, this movement has begun to identify and treat a wide range of addictions related to various behavioral pleasures, such as eating, gambling, and sex (Travis 2010; Netherland 2012). Founded in 1977 by a longtime Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) member, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) was the first established sex addiction support group. In the 1990s, the addiction movement began targeting pornography addiction, which they connected to both sex and Internet addictions (Irvine 2005 [1990]; Voros 2009). Conservative Christian leaders and organizations, which have long opposed pornography on moral grounds, championed the addiction framework in late twentieth-century messages about pornography’s harms (Thomas 2013; Perry 2019; Burke and Haltom 2020). Radical feminists, who have maintained their opposition to pornography since the 1970s (Whittier 2018), remain in coalition with religious anti-pornography groups but have not taken up the language of addiction like their conservative Christian counterparts. Instead, evangelicals and feminists find common motivation on the basis of freedom from so-called sexual exploitation, language that, according to Bernstein (2018), reflects the rise of the neoliberal state and militarized humanitarian efforts.

[...]

Compared to newspaper articles and state resolutions, scientific articles were the least likely to support an addiction framework, and we found less support among neuro-physiological research than psycho-social studies. Seventy-six percent of psycho-social articles that referenced pornography addiction supported an addiction framework, compared to 55 percent of neuro-physiological articles. Psycho-social articles outnumbered neuro-physiological articles by nearly seven to one and were better positioned to support an addiction framework by using self-reports of perceived addiction or addiction-like behavior. Neurophysiological articles that did not include self-reported measures used criteria to define and measure addiction neuro-physiologically, and these noted common limitations. First, for those using cross-sectional designs, researchers could not determine whether the differences they observed preceded or followed pornography consumption. Second, as an article published in 2015 in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience describes, neurological researchers who work under the assumption that the brain responds to cue and reward differently when studying addiction (i.e., what triggers the addictive behavior and to what effect) test pornography itself as a reward behavior rather than as a cue for future reward. In other words, in the lab, participants are typically instructed that they should not masturbate while being exposed to visual sexual stimuli or pornographic material. These studies may lack construct validity measuring pornography as a reward, whereas in real-life pornography, it is most often a “cue” for some other rewards (i.e., masturbation or partnered sex).

[...]

Within our sample of neuro-physiological studies, 81.8 percent (9 of 11) included all-male samples. Though psycho-social studies that analyze gender do find differences in pornography consumption and perceived addiction for men and women, neuro-physiological studies that use all-male samples reinforce the assumption that men experience unique physiological harm as a result of pornography consumption. Neurophysiological articles are more similar than psycho-social articles to newspaper articles and state resolutions in the likelihood of exclusively emphasizing men as the consumers of pornography. This serves to reinforce a medicalized model of men’s biological predisposition to become addicted to pornography and thus perpetuates the stereotype that men have innate and uncontrollable sexual urges. Women, who may be literally excluded from a neuro-physiological study’s sample, are then figuratively understood to lack these same sexual desires.

[...]

Our findings reveal that references to pornography as addictive emerged in scientific articles, newspapers, and political documents in the twenty-first century and grew most substantially in the last decade. Most of these sources implicitly or explicitly reproduce the pornography addiction framework that they reference, but scientific studies are more likely than newspaper articles or state resolutions to explicitly challenge or critique a pornography addiction framework. Broad cultural understandings of addiction position neuro-physiological studies as the best equipped to validate pornography addiction since addiction is understood as a “brain disease” (Vrecko 2010a; Netherland 2011), yet these studies are the least likely in our sample to make broad conclusions that pornography is addictive in ways that are similar to drugs, alcohol, or gambling. Most newspaper articles that reference pornography addiction take for granted the concept and therefore implicitly support it, yet the articles most often mention public figures who are not neuroscientists of addiction and are instead activists, politicians, religious figures, and therapists. All state resolutions in our sample explicitly support pornography addiction as a concept and rely on biomedical language to construct pornography as a threat not only to individual consumers but also to broader groups and communities. This reliance on biomedical language allows political actors to present a seemingly objective and factual account of the harms of pornography that are more convincing than claims about morality that may seem outdated or out of place in the political sphere (Thomas 2013; Strub 2010).

Our analysis of how arenas of public discourse construct harms associated with pornography addiction illustrates the social and political stakes of biomedicalized concepts related to sexuality. Just as sociologists of other addictions argue that the shared understanding of addiction as “biological” is made meaningful only through social situations (Keane 2002; Weinberg 2002), we find that public discourses construct pornography addiction as a social problem by articulating a wide range of harms, including direct harms to consumers and indirect harms to broader society. These discourses do more than pathologize pornography itself but also pathologize individuals and relationships that fall outside of normative definitions of gender and sexuality.

[maaarine]

How mental health became a social media minefield (Rebecca Jennings, Vox, Sep 30 2021)

“But in the past decade, as social media has forced billions of us to virtually bump into people we never would have otherwise, many of us have also found the need to categorize people into recognizable boxes.

One way to do so is by seizing on common human behaviors to name — gaslighting, emotional labor, trauma, parasocial relationships, “empath” as a noun — then disseminating them until they cease to mean much at all.

We end up treating mental illness like a subculture, complete with its own vocabulary that only those in the know can use and weaponize.

It often looks like this: On August 26, a woman posted a TikTok suggesting that “excessive reading” in childhood was considered a “dissociative behavior.” (…)

At the risk of, well, over-pathologizing, it basically seems like there are two types of people: 

those who tend to appreciate and identify with this kind of internet diagnosis — “[X] behavior is actually a trauma response!” does legitimately make sense for some people and helps them live a happier life —

and those who find it not just annoying but potentially harmful, stigmatizing, and unscientific. (…)

It’s difficult to talk about this sort of discursive overreach without sounding like a far-right reactionary; indeed, criticisms of over-pathologization have come from conservatives who argue that, to generalize, it’s all just a bunch of self-obsessed liberal snowflake eggheads. 

“One of the biggest problems is that the far right has correctly identified that this is happening — that the discourse and identity policing has gotten out of control,” Moskowitz tells me,

to the point where it becomes hard for others to push back against it without sounding as though you’re siding with an ideology they don’t adhere to.

“There needs to be a strong, leftist stance of ‘we’re not going to do this identity-pathology policing thing anymore, but that doesn’t make us reactionaries.’”

Whether doctors over-pathologize certain normal human behaviors has been a subject of great interest in the medical field;

when the DSM-V, the standard classification of mental disorders, was published in 2013, many psychiatrists argued that it medicalized typical behavioral patterns and moods, possibly as a result of the pharmaceutical industry’s influence.

(One common example here is the potential to misclassify grief over the loss of a loved one as major depressive disorder.)

Billieux has studied gambling and gaming addictions extensively, and warns against the instinct to diagnose every symptom.

“The idea of being able to categorize mental illness like you’re categorizing insects, for example, is something that is very complicated and probably is not valid in the context of psychiatric disorders and psychological suffering,” he explains.

“These labels are very reductive in terms of defining the psychology of someone, and they tend to ignore individual differences.” (…)

It can feel special, understandably, to adopt a label around which to frame one’s identity, if not outright cool. And the internet rewards it:

“Whereas a therapist might question the usefulness of identifying oneself as permanently aligned with whatever struggle one is experiencing, engagement-driven platforms help frame conditions as points of identity, badges of honor,” explains Isabel Munson in a piece on Real Life.

People in our own lives may reward it, too: As writer and TikToker Rayne Fisher-Quann pointed out, friends and family tend to be much more forgiving and understanding when you can excuse behavior using a label, as opposed to trying to articulate the complexities of the human mind at any particular moment.

Treating mental illness like subculture, though, can have unintended consequences.

Just a few days ago, I was served a TikTok ad for a direct-to-consumer startup centered on delivering cutely branded ADHD medicine to your door.

Was this an ad targeted to me based on what TikTok assumes? Or was this sent out to the general public, implying that there are enough people on TikTok who have or think they have ADHD to make the ad a worthwhile investment?

In a story on internet pathologization for i-D, James Greig writes that easily categorizable people are also easy to market to.

“While there is genuine support out there and a lot of good intentions, it’s worth bearing in mind that some of the people involved in pushing these diagnoses have a vested interest in doing so,” he writes.

(Consider the zillions of products that claim to quell anxiety, a market that’s exploded over the past decade.)

Perhaps the solution to this sort of categorization and grouping is to redefine the terms.

“To me, we should start seeing identities more as things you do rather than descriptors of who you are,” says Moskowitz.”

[paperbag1999]

I feel as though the sensationalized court trial, the public humiliation, the deeply conservative public response to Amber Heard really resembles what happened with Jussie Smollett. Whether or not you believe them, these cases have allowed bigoted think tanks and conservative media to sink their teeth in to an “unlikeable” marginalized person (Jussie being painted as greedy, opportunistic, and lying while Amber is labeled as histrionic, gold-digging, and conspiring) and use them as fuel for their reactionary politics. YOU may see this as a case of a man being abused getting justice (although Amber has provided enough evidence to show that labelling herself as a domestic violence survivor is a fact) or as a person ruining the name of people who genuinely are hurt by hate crimes. But the story being constructed and fed to millions via conservative media and the bots they purchase is this: women, gay people, black people, trans people have Too Much power, their influence is ruing the lives of innocent people (rich white straight men), and that Action Must Be Taken to damper the reign of terror. It is to paint all accusations, all complaints of violence misogyny homophobia and racism as made by opportunistic people who want to hurt the “real victims”. But to think of how these individuals have been treated by the media as ANYTHING close to building a world of justice is borderline insane. To the Republic House committee posting Jack Sparrow gifs, to Candace Owens, to The Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro, ANY, ANY complaint, accusation, threat to White Heterosexual Male Supremacy is too much.

[taliabhattwrites]

Yeah, that'll do nicely.

So firstly, I'm glad that even while making this equivocation, people were able to admit and acknowledge the discrepancy between the two, even if only in terms of recency. 'Theyfab' is indeed a more recent linguistic construction, while 'shemale' is not only older, it's also preceded and coterminous with terms like trap, futa, and similar constructions that position transfeminine bodies as fetishized objects for consumption, while--and this is key--degendering us and refusing to acknowledge either our personhood, or our womanhood.

Let's have a quick think about that.

The core aspect of transmisogyny is third-sexing, the denial of recognition of both our humanity and the simple reality that we navigate society as women. Hyperscrutinized, hyperfetishized women, yes, women who are treated as inherently disposable due to our inability to be reproductively exploited, but that doesn't change the violence or the brutality of the sexualization and misogyny we experience.

Another thing being obfuscated through the invocation of recency is, well, cultural penetration. (Pun only slightly intended). Your most offline, detached conservative will still have an idea of t-slurs as "men in dresses", "degenerate perverts", and know an assortment of choice invective to degrade transfems with. There are many men outside of the West who are familiar with these slurs as porn categories, our bodies having been reduced to dehumanized items on a menu, while you will likely only encounter 'theyfab' in specific anglophonic online circles.

So consider the weight of entire cultures and hegemonies, across space and time, reducing your entire existence to "worthless fuck object that can't even make babies", being equated with other queer people being mean to you. The word is an insult, and it's definitely mean-spirited, but "slur" is a term with some weight to it.

Though while we're talking about this ...

This isn't an old post by any means. I saw it in the wild and responded to it not days ago.

So consider that the phenomenon of fellow queer people denying that trans women experience meaningful aspects of misogyny, and justifying that denial on the basis of sex, is an extant phenomenon, not even a relic of the past, that happens with regularity, but is not nearly as censured.

This results in an interesting climate where trans women are frequently subject to others' ideas of how we must not face certain patriarchal violence due to our sex, and when we try to point out this pattern of denying us the epistemic authority to speak on the misogyny we experience, on the basis of sex, we are the ones accused of transphobia, "reducing people to AGAB", and reactionary behavior, for naming the harm done to us.

Now, not everyone is going to write out "denial of epistemic authority". Sometimes, people will get frustrated and call you mean names because you're vomiting the same thing that Gender Conservatives have been echoing for a while now, but considering yourself progressive or even a trans liberationist while doing so.

So the question becomes: are you going to instrumentalize an insulting term to repeatedly ostracize, vilify, and demonize transfems who aren't perfectly articulate about the heinous mistreatment they experience at the hands of transmisogynistic communities, while doing nothing to stem the tide of "you don't really experience misogyny, shemale"?

Because that behavior speaks for itself, I think.

Okay, on a very fundamental level I *need* people to be able to articulate and understand the difference between "theyfab" and "shemale". I know that you know there's a difference, and I refuse you believe that you straightforwardly, non-maliciously consider these two terms to be equivalent and identical.

So, floor's open.

[eclecticvalor]

7 Things I experience as a DID System. Mental Health Awareness Month.

In light of May being America’s mental health awareness month, I wanted to talk about something that has consumed my entire life for the past year and a half: Treatment and healing from a disorder that is stigmatised into the ground by poor representation and misunderstandings both socially and in the medical field. Those who are close to me know first hand how my symptoms and experiences have shaped the way I interact with the world since starting treatment, but aside from my closest friends and family, and the people I live with, I don’t normally talk about the fact that I have Dissociative Identity Disorder, and what that means to me. 

Hi. My name is Atlas, some people call me Cadyn, and I am the primary host of 26 fragmented parts of my consciousness. I am not dangerous, none of my parts or alters are dangerous, and no, it is not like “Split”. 

Dissociative Identity Disorder is a trauma based dissociative disorder listed in both the DSM IV and V,  and is recognized as an uncommon disorder characterized by two or more distinct personality states existing within the same consciousness. These personality states come to be when natural childhood development is disrupted by severe, continued, or repetitive, trauma, the child has a natural inclination towards heavy dissociation, and a lack of adult or parental support to develop the means to cope with the things happening to them.

Unfortunately popular mental health media has seen an uptake in people viewing DID as a quirky “trait”, the ability to have functional imaginary friends living in your head... but in reality DID is a lot darker, a lot scarier, and isn’t something I’d wish upon my worst enemy. Because of this media spike I wanted to share 7 things that living with Dissociative identity disorder means to me

1. Amnesia

Living with DID means that I miss out on a lot of my life. A primary symptom of DID is amnesia. I have no solid memories before the age of 13, and the memories I do have are often skewed, incorrect, or completely false as my brain fought for a way to fill in gaps and cope with the loss of memory. I forget a lot, and not just things like forgetting where I left my wallet and keys, or forgetting the day - those do happen, but I also mean forgetting big things, important life experiences and things I wish with all my being that I could remember like my highschool graduation and my wedding reception. 

I often forget important day to day things that make it difficult to maintain life as an adult, like doctors appointments, work schedules, meetings, and important daily tasks. I’ll forget that I’ve eaten at all that day and risk going days without eating, or overeating due to having no recollection of the last time I’d eaten. I forget birthdays (especially my own), anniversaries, and important holidays. 

To an outsider, who has no idea what’s happening inside my head, this can come across as though I’m thoughtless or unreliable. That I am cold for forgetting an important date, or simply that I just don’t care when this very much is not the case. 

2. Alienation

Oftentimes DID comes with a sense of alienation from people who you’re supposed to know. For me a really clear example of this is when I previously mentioned my childhood memories being skewed - I have a clear memory of a conversation I was having with some blood relatives a few years back in which I mentioned that one family member I had happy childhood memories of, and remembered playing together as kids, but with another family member they were practically a stranger to me. I had, and still have, no memories of ever spending time with them growing up, no memories of having any kind of relationship with them at all. My understanding of our relationship was that it was “forced” because we were family and our parents expected us to exist in the same space as we grew up, but that we never talked. But I was informed by a separate member of the family that I was very wrong, and this “stranger” was actually someone I had been close to growing up. This is a common experience with DID patients, and also a very frustrating one. It creates feelings of “You know me but I don’t know you”, and it’s extremely difficult to trust your own judgement of the people you know, because you often can’t tell if your judgement is skewed by your memories or lack thereof. 

3. PTSD and Flashbacks

A diagnosis of C-PTSD (Or complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) is required for a diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder. This means that while the individual symptoms of DID can be frustrating, scary and sometimes depressing, the most difficult aspect of DID, and the most important to focus on in treatment is the PTSD symptoms. 

PTSD symptoms in DID can be extremely powerful due to the additional dissociative aspect. This can mean that for a lot of DID patients, flashbacks can produce full blown body sensations, hallucinations and terrifying delusions. This is One thing that I find incredibly difficult to talk about, but I also believe is extremely important to understand. It can be embarrassing, shameful and while I only speak for myself in saying this, can cause a lot of guilt and grief. There have been times where I have been experiencing powerful flashbacks and did not recognize my own husband, resulting in lash outs and fear towards him being delusioned into thinking that he was out to hurt me, or had harmful intent for just existing in the same space as I was. 

For me, a single wiff of a familiar smell, hearing a sound, a certain color, an idea, a name, a passing thought or comment can throw my previously stable mental state into one of pure panic, hyperventilation, hallucination, delusion, fight-flight-freeze and reactionary responses. Through treatment I’ve developed adaptive and healthy coping skills and management responses but trauma responses can be so quick, and so unexpected that I don’t always have time to process my coping skills before my body and mind respond in negative ways. 

4. Decision making and skewed Behavior

Because living with DID, means living with a shared or fragmented consciousness, this often means that while I may not remember, my life is still being lived during my time of memory loss. Alters or parts will take control and operate my body, reacting to things, interacting with people, completing tasks and functioning. But oftentimes parts who take control are very different from myself, and make choices and decisions that I wouldn’t normally make, and sometimes decisions I wouldn’t *ever* make. An example of this is the fact that technically I am a conservative voter, despite myself as an individual having leftist or NDP views, or decisions to leave or apply for jobs and work positions that I have no interest in, or that I don’t even have the qualifications or physique to do, or leaving ones that I personally loved and excelled at. This also reflects a lot in everyday life in more subtle things, decisions like what food to eat, things to buy, activities to do shift between parts while they’re in control. 

To outsiders this can look a lot like impulsivity, lack of self-control, or lack of a sense of identity. This is a huge reason why a lot of DID patients are often misdiagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder or Bipolar Disorder because the behaviour between alters can be so drastically different that it can look a *lot* like manic or depressive states. 

5. Denial and Dismissing Trauma

A very common experience among DID patients is denial and being dismissive or disregarding the things that happened to them. I often find myself in a state of questioning whether my symptoms, my disorder, and even my trauma were ever real to begin with. In therapy I find myself saying “It’s not that big of a deal” or “It wasn’t that big of a deal” more times than I’m actually saying anything productive. A huge part of this is why I wanted to make this list, because the media, and a lot of medical circles deny that DID exists or believe it’s impossibly rare and those, while both false, can cause intense feelings of “Maybe I’m just doing this for attention”. DID is a very real, very difficult disorder to diagnose, to treat, and to live with disorder, and while it is uncommon, statistics show that approximately 1-2% of western population is diagnosed, and up to a suspected 7% are living with the disorder undiagnosed because of these misconceptions. It is not common, and it’s not something that everyone is going to have, but it is a very possible response to very real trauma and is a valid diagnosis to give to those meeting the criteria. 

6. Hidden Symptoms

DID is often referred to as a “covert” presenting disorder. What this means is that most commonly outsiders, friends, family, employers and even the patient themselves can have a nearly impossible time recognizing the symptoms, and it often goes unnoticed until an event destabilizes the function of the person’s life. This can lead to a lot of backlash or denial coming from peers and family close to the person. This leads to the patient hearing a lot of:  “I’ve never noticed personality changes”, “You don’t act like you have it”, “You couldn’t possibly have that”, “No, I would have noticed”, “You have to be mistaken”, “There’s no way, it would have been obvious”. And so, so much more. The reality of DID is that it’s *not* noticeable. It’s a safety response that the brain created to protect the psyche from the intense damages that come with long term trauma experiences, so it’s often designed to hide itself from abusers or perceived threats as a way to compartmentalize trauma memories and maintain the ability to survive through stress and unstable situations. Not being able to “notice” is kind of the point in most cases.

 7. Wandering and Dissociative Episodes

Living with untreated or unmanaged DID can potentially be dangerous due to episodes of dissociation, “wandering” experiences (where the patient will wander away from home, family, or life in a confusion, attempt to return to a perceived life never lived, or in a state of belief that their current life is unsafe). For me this took a head last year, and was actually an event that led to the solidification that this disorder was the explanation to my experiences. According to nurses and my husband, I had wandered into the emergency room of a hospital in the middle of the night, with no idea who or where I was, with no idea how to return home, or even where home was. I was wearing a t-shirt, and it had been raining, and my body was so cold they needed to retake my vitals nearly 6 times because they were unable to get an appropriate reading. After discovering my identity, my husband was called to take me home. Working with a therapist helped to develop a safety plan during events like this to prevent harm from coming to my body, or from ending up in newly traumatic environments, but I was lucky. These situations can lead to re-traumatization, victimization, it can lead to kidnapping, assault, it can lead to being injured or harmed by environmental factors and so much more and it is so incredibly important that DID patients work with their therapist to develop solid safety plans proactively to make sure that the patient doesn’t experience any worst case scenarios during episodes like this. 

Conclusion

My experiences are individual to me, and to my psyche. Not everyone will experience the disorder the same way, because not everyone experiences or responds to trauma the same way. I am so lucky, and extremely privileged to be able to access consistent care and treatment, that I found a professional who trusts me, and is focused on stabilizing and supporting. Too many people living with this disorder have no access to supportive mental health care because of the misconceptions that parts of the medical field hold regarding the legitimacy or frequency that the disorder develops, and too many peers and circles of people outcast or disregard the very real, very difficult experiences because they don’t understand the disorder, or believe it doesn’t exist, or believe it looks like split. If you, or someone you know is struggling with Dissociative symptoms, or dissociative identity disorder do not be afraid to reach out to a professional for support, and educate yourself on the reality of the disorder. 

[skinfeeler]

I do actually feel like there is value in saying what you actually mean. I’m well aware that the concept is mostly championed in more or less that verbal form by Petersonites and online ‘rationialists’ and the like, but what we see on Tumblr every day is...

People use rhetoric shorthand constantly to talk about very, very serious and valued topics like sexual ethics, structures of healthy relationships, all the various axes of oppression that exist in this world, abuse, embodiment, while relying on mostly informal associations between certain words, concepts, and discourses.

As a result, sometimes you see people conflate positions such as “pride was never an all-ages event” with “fucking in public at pride is fine so long as you do it in front of adults, there is no such thing as a ‘time or space’ for such activities” or maybe “you should escape from relationships, even platonic ones, if that means you need to take care of yourself” and “you can just cut everyone off whenever as if they never even mattered, and this is sustainable community policy.” And then we all have a big argument that lasts a week with usually a lot of people staunchly refusing to actually say what they are talking about or corollarily, refusing to understand what other people actually mean by what they’re saying.

(Of course, some of those positions is imaginary, but I would argue that it is exactly due to being vague that people think these positions actually exist at any sort of real threatening scale within our communities.)

There’s a lot of usage of the word ‘freak’ and ‘creep’ and even sometimes ‘degenerate’ (!) while somehow assuming that everyone means exactly who you DO mean, while also knowing exactly who you DON’T mean, even though by using certain rhetoric frames you’re going to reinforce their usage by cishets regardless of whether that’s your intent or not. It’s would seem unwise to insist that people who suffer (even worse than you) under various conservative and repressive frames should be perfectly stoic at all times and take you at your word that you’re not targeting them in some cryptic way or another.

A lot of people seem to think they’re completely fluent in this network of loose semantic and aesthetic associations that exists within our community, but when someone has any sorts of questions or commentary about frankly, the extremely vague or purposefully inflammatory shit that is sometimes said on this website, this is treated as essentially already guilty behavior since OBVIOUSLY that means that they’re simply of the weird position that people are projecting onto them. At the same time, these people often project particular niche sexual interests on people they only know through a few decontextualised Tumblr posts. Very strange behavior!

Maybe just because men like to go on about Logic and being Precise In Their Speech or whatever — it’s not like they themselves perform it anyway — it shouldn’t mean we shouldn’t properly expound on what we mean so that the things we say can’t be co-opted by reactionaries of various kinds.

More importantly, maybe when people are being quite clear on what they’re saying we shouldn’t project whatever kinds of perversions and evils onto them just because it reminds you of some weird things you’ve seen or experienced and you’ve decided you need to immediately go ‘feral’ about it.

(Especially when it comes to transfeminine people — almost all of whom I know to be extremely intellectually thorough and persuasive people — make long-form critiques on certain aspects of sexual ethics or a similar endeavor this should be held up as particularly valuable perspectives that are often overlooked in our larger community instead of that a bunch of clowns go “OMGGGG WHAT DOES THIS MEAN I CAN’T READ 😂😂😂” in the comments.

Also, that when transfeminine people talk about the way in which certain frames of discussion injure their dignity and freedom to live as they please, you shouldn’t immediately assume they’re being perverts just because they’re attacking your favorite shorthands you love to hurl at your Online Enemies lol)

[militant-holy-knight]

The murderous radicals who set off bombs and killed hundreds on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka chose their targets with ideological purpose. Three Catholic churches were bombed, and with them three hotels catering to Western tourists, because often in the jihadist imagination Western Christianity and Western liberal individualism are the conjoined enemies of their longed-for religious utopia, their religious-totalitarian version of Islam. Tourists and missionaries, Coca-Cola and the Catholic Church — it’s all the same invading Christian enemy, different brand names for the same old crusade.

Officially, the Western world’s political and cultural elite does its best to undercut and push back against this narrative. The liberal imagination reacts with discomfort to the Samuel Huntingtonian idea of a clash of civilizations, or anything that pits a unitary “West” against an Islamist or Islamic alternative. The idea of a “Christian West” is particularly forcefully rejected, but even more banal terms like “Western Civilization” and “Judeo-Christian,” once intended to offer a more ecumenical narrative of Euro-American history, are now seen as dangerous, exclusivist, chauvinist, alt-right.

And yet there is also a way in which liberal discourse in the West implicitly accepts part of the terrorists’ premise — by treating Christianity as a cultural possession of contemporary liberalism, a particularly Western religious inheritance that even those who no longer really believe have a special obligation to remake and reform. With one hand elite liberalism seeks to keep Christianity at arm’s length, to reject any specifically Christian identity for the society it aims to rule — but with the other it treats Christianity as something that really exists only in relationship to its own secularized humanitarianism, either as a tamed and therefore useful chaplaincy or as an embarrassing, in-need-of-correction uncle.

You could see both those impulses at work in the discussion following the great fire at Notre-Dame. On the one hand there was a strident liberal reaction against readings of the tragedy that seemed too friendly to either medieval Catholicism or some religiously infused conception of the West. A few tweets from the conservative writer Ben Shapiro, which used phrases like “Western Civilization” and “Judeo-Christian” while lamenting the conflagration, prompted accusations that he was ignoring the awfulness of medieval-Catholic anti-Semitism, and also that his Western-civ language was just a dog-whistle for white nationalists.

But at the same time there was a palpable desire to claim the still-smoking Notre-Dame for some abstract idea of liberal modernity, a swift enlistment of various architects and chin-strokers to imagine how the cathedral (owned by the French government, thanks to an earlier liberal effort to claim authority over Christian faith) might be reconstructed to be somehow more secular and cosmopolitan, more of a cathedral for our multicultural times.

This seems strange, since as Ben Sixsmith noted for The Spectator, “it would never cross anyone’s mind to suggest that Mecca or the Golden Temple should lose their distinctively Islamic and Sikh characters to accommodate people of different faiths.” But an ancient, famous Catholic cathedral is instinctively understood as somehow the common property of an officially post-Catholic order, especially when the opportunity suddenly arises to renovate it.

As with monuments, so with beliefs. Consider the fascinating interview my colleague Nicholas Kristof conducted for Easter with Serene Jones, the president of Union Theological Seminary, long the flagship institution for liberal Protestantism. In a relatively brief conversation, Jones declines to affirm the resurrection, calls the Virgin birth “bizarre,” shrugs at the afterlife and generally treats most of traditional Christian theology as an embarrassment.

But is Jones a Richard Dawkins-esque scoffer or a would-be founder of a Gnostic alternative to Christianity? Hardly: She’s a Protestant minister and a leader and teacher for would-be Protestant ministers, who regards her project as the further reformation of Christianity, to ensure the continued use of its origin story and imagery (and its institutions, and their brands, and their endowments) for modern liberal and left-wing purposes. It’s another distilled example of the combination of repudiation and co-optation, the desire to abandon and the desire to claim and tame and redefine, that so often defines the liberal relationship to Christian faith.

If you aren’t a liberal Christian in the mode of Serene Jones, if you believe in a literal resurrection and a fully-Catholic Notre-Dame de Paris, this combination of attitudes encourages a certain paranoia, a sense that the liberal overclass is constantly gaslighting your religion. That elite will never take your side in any controversy, it will efface your beliefs and traditions in many cases and be ostentatiously ignorant of them in others … but when challenged, its apostles still always claim to be Christians themselves or at least friends and heirs of Christianity, and what’s with your persecution complex, don’t you know that (white) American Christians are wildly privileged?

This last dig is true in certain ways and false in others. It’s true that conservative Christians in the United States can fall into a narrative of martyrdom that doesn’t fit their actual position, true that the presidency of Donald Trump attests to their continued power (and their vulnerability to its corruptions!). On the other hand the marginalization of traditional faith in much of Western Europe is obvious and palpable, and the trend in the United States is in a similar direction — and residual political influence is very different from the sort of enduring cultural-economic power that a term like “privilege” invokes.

But if the equation of traditional Christianity with privilege has some relevance to the actual Euro-American situation, when applied globally it’s a gross category error. And so the main victims of Western liberalism’s peculiar relationship to its Christian heritage aren’t put-upon traditionalists in the West; they’re Christians like the murdered first communicants in Sri Lanka, or the jailed pastors in China, or the Coptic martyrs of North Africa, or any of the millions of non-Western Christians who live under constant threat of persecution.

One of the basic facts of contemporary religious history is that Christians around the world are persecuted on an extraordinary scale — by mobs and pogroms in India, jihadists and United States-allied governments in the Muslim world, secular totalitarians in China and North Korea. Yet as an era-defining reality rather than an episodic phenomenon this reality is barely visible in the Western media, and rarely called by name and addressed head-on by Western governments and humanitarian institutions. (“Islamophobia” looms large; talk of “Christophobia” is almost nonexistent.)

This absence reflects, once again, the complex combination of liberal impulses toward Christianity. There is a fear that any special focus on Christians will vindicate the jihadist narrative of a clash of civilizations. There is a certain ignorance of Christianity’s enduringly and increasingly global form, an inability to see Christianity as anything save a reactionary foe or a useful supplement to liberalism. There is a fear that narratives of global Christian persecution will somehow help the conservative side of Western culture wars. (“Sri Lanka church bombings stoke far-right anger in the West” ran the headline of a worried Washington Post “analysis,” as though the most worrying consequence of dead Christians in South Asia were angry conservatives in America.) And there is a sense of Christianity as somehow still “our” religion, the dogmas discarded but the emphasis on self-abnegation retained — albeit in a strange fashion that ends, as John O’Sullivan put it recently, by taking “the good Samaritan to be a parable of why Christians should be the last people to be helped.”

Unfortunately the various conservative alternatives to this liberal muddle are not always more helpful to persecuted Christians. George W. Bush’s conservative-Christian naïveté helped doom Iraqi Christians. American-conservative support for Israel creates blind spots about the struggles of Arab Christians. The conservative nationalism that succeeded Bush’s idealism often treats Christianity instrumentally and forges its own alliances with persecutors.

At bottom all these failures illustrate the unusual and difficult position of traditional Christianity in Europe and the United States. The old faith of don’t-call-it-Western-civilization is at once too residually influential and politically threatening to escape the passive-aggressive frenmity of liberalism, and yet too weak and compromised and frankly self-sabotaging to fully shape a conservative alternative.

But those difficulties and dilemmas are also a luxury relative to what our fellow Christians face. I have no clear prescription for Western Christianity to offer in this column, but I do have an admonition: It is First Communion season in America as well as in South Asia, and when our children ascend in joy and safety to the altars of our churches, the photographs of Sri Lankan first communicants laid out as martyrs should be ever in our thoughts. 

[innuendostudios]

New video essay! Internet reactionaries argue as though they have no core beliefs at all, and will just say anything to own the libs. So are they nihilists, or is there more going on?

You can ensure this series continues by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re online blogging about a Black journalist’s commentary on marketing trends in video games, movies, and comic books, and you’re saying how the vitriol in response to her fairly benign opinions reveals the deep-seated racism and misogyny in a number of fan communities, most especially those that lean right, when a right-leaning commenter pops in to say, “Or maybe they just actually disagree with her about marketing trends! For Christ’s sake, there’s no mystery here. People aren’t aren’t speaking in coded language. They are telling you what they believe. She had a bad opinion; why do you have to make it bigger than that? Why can’t you ever take people at their word?”

You pause and ponder for a moment. Mmm… Aw heck with it, you’re in a discoursing mood. Let’s do this.

“Mr. Conservative, in order for me to take you at your word, your words would have to show some consistency. Let me just lightning round a few questions about the reactionary web’s positions on marketing trends: Do you believe that having the option to romance same-sex characters in an RPG turns the game into queer propaganda, or do you believe that killing strippers in an action game can’t be sexist since no one’s making you do it? Do you believe that the pervasiveness of sexualized young women in pop culture is just there because it sells and that’s capitalism and we all need to deal with it, or do you believe that a franchise has an obligation to cater to its core audience even if diversifying beyond that audience is more profitable? Do you think words are inherently harmless and only oversensitive snowflakes would care about racialized language, or do you think it’s racist if someone calls you mayonnaise boy? As long as I’ve got your ear: Are you the Party that believes in the right to keep and bear arms because you’re distrustful of all authority and what if we need to overthrow the government someday, or do you believe that cops are civil servants and we should trust their account of events whenever they shoot a Black man for looking like he might have a gun?

“Does optional content reveal a game’s ideology, or doesn’t it? Is capitalism a defense for decisions you don’t agree with, or isn’t it? Is language harmful, or not? Do you hate authority, or love cops and the troops?

Alright, alright, ease off. Add some nuance.     “Now, I know the Right is not a monolith, and maybe these arguments are contradictory because they’re coming from different people. We’ll call them Engelbert and Charlemagne. Maybe Engelbert’s the one who thinks any institution funded by tax money is socialist and therefore bad and Charlemagne’s the one who says we should dump even more tax money into the military and thinking otherwise is un-American. But here’s the thing: Y’all have very fundamentally different beliefs, and you’re so passionate about them that you enter search terms into Twitter to find people you don’t even follow and aggressively disagree with them, and, yet, you’re always yelling at me and never yelling at each other. What’s that about?

“And I can’t say how often it happens, but I know, if I let Engelbert go on long enough, he sometimes makes a Charlemagne argument. And vice versa.

“And, I see you getting ready to say, ‘The Left does the same thing,’ but ba ba ba ba ba, don’t change the subject. That’s an extremely false equivalence, but, more importantly, it doesn’t answer my question. What do you actually believe, and why are you so capable of respecting disagreement between each other, yet so incapable of respecting me - or, for that matter, a Black woman?

“See, I don’t take you at your word because I cannot form a coherent worldview out of the things you say. So, forgive me if, when you tell me what you believe, I don’t think you’re being candid with me. It kinda seems like you’re playing games, and I’m the opposing team, and anyone who’s against me is your ally. And you’re not really taking a position, but claiming to believe in whatever would need to be true to score points against me, like we’re in that one episode of Seinfeld.” [Card Says Moops clip.]

(This is borrowed observation #1, link in the down-there part.)

Hoo, it feels good calling people hypocrites! Person says B when earlier they said A and you point out the contradiction! You don’t take a position on A or B, and you still “win”! I see why Republicans like this so much.

But that’s the kind of point-scoring we’re here to deconstruct, so let’s get analytical.

There’s a certain Beat-You-At-Your-Own-Gaminess to the Card Says Moops maneuver. “Safe spaces are bullshit, but, if you get one, I get one too.” “There’s no such thing as systemic oppression, but, if there were, I’d be oppressed.” It’s dismissing the rhetoric of social justice while also trying to use it against you. Claiming “the Card Says Moops” does not, so much, mean, “I believe the people who invaded Spain in the 8th Century were literally called The Moops,” but, rather, “You can’t prove I don’t believe it.” Not a statement of sincere belief, simply moving a piece across the board. All in the game, yo.

If they could be so nakedly honest with you and themselves to answer “what do you actually believe” truthfully, one suspects the answer would be, “What difference does it make? We’re right either way.”

This has come to be known as “postmodern conservatism,” a fact I find hilarious, because, in The Discourse, “postmodernism” is a dogwhistle for everything the Right hates about the Left. (...it also means “Jews.”) Postmodern conservatism is the thinking that, at least for the purpose of argument, the truth of who invaded Spain is immaterial. You have your facts, I have alternative facts. What is true? Who’s to say?

Regardless of what you actually believe - what you believe serving no rhetorical purpose - you are at least arguing from the position that material truth does not exist. Truth is a democracy. Whoever who wins the argument decides who invaded Spain.

It would be reductive to blame this pattern of thought on the internet, but its recent proliferation isn’t really extricable from the rise of chan culture (this is borrowed observation #2, link in the down there part). 4chan didn’t cause this thinking, but sites like 4chan reveal it in its most concentrated form.

The two most common properties of a chan board will be anonymity and lack of moderation, which means, among other things, that you can say whatever you want with no systemic or social repercussions. People may disagree with you, but it carries no weight. You won’t be banned, you won’t have your comments deleted, and, because there’s no way to know whether any two posts are made by the same person, you won’t even get a reputation as “the person with the bad opinion.”

The effect this has on the community is that there is no expectation, in any given moment, that the person on the other end of a conversation isn’t messing with you. You can’t know whether they mean what they say or are only arguing as though they mean what they say. And entire debates may just be a single person stirring the pot. Such a community will naturally attract people who enjoy argument for its own sake, and will naturally trend towards the most extreme version of any opinion.

In short, this is the Free Marketplace of Ideas. No code of ethics, no social mores, no accountability. A Darwinist petri dish where ideas roam free and only the strong ones survive. If the community agrees Bebop is better than Eva, well, then I guess Bebop is better than Eva, because there wasn’t any outside influence polluting the discourse. Granted, it could just be a lot of people thought it was funny to shit on Eva, but it’s what the community has decided, so it will at least be treated as truth.

This demands that one both be highly opinionated and to assume opinions are bullshit, to place a high premium on consensus and be intensely distrustful of groupthink.

A common means of straddling these lines is what I call the Stanislavski Opinion: the opinion you entertain so completely that you functionally believe it while you express it, no matter the possibility that you will express - and, to an extent, believe - an opposite opinion later. Most of us go through a phase in our youths where we’re online and like the idea of believing in something, but don’t know what to believe just yet, so we pick a position and find out if we believe it by defending it. We try on ideologies like sunglasses off a rack. Most of us will eventually settle on a belief system, and this will usually involve some apologies and some comments we wish we could scrub from the internet, but it’s an important stage of growing up.

But some percentage of people will seek out a space where there is no embarrassment, the comments scrub themselves, and never growing out of the Stanislavski Opinion is actively rewarded. There, figuring out what you believe would make your ability to argue less flexible, and, besides, if you believed anything unironically, much of the community would still assume you’re trolling. Where no one is bound by their word, what, really, is the difference between appearing to have an opinion and having one?

Sincerity is unprovable and open to interpretation. Decide someone is sincere if you want to make fun of them, decide they’re trolling if you want to make fun of someone else. What is true? What do you want to be true? It’s easy enough to start thinking of one’s own opinions the same way: What do I believe? What is it advantageous to believe? Your answer isn’t binding. You’ll change it later if you need to.

The person I’m describing, you spend time online, you’ll meet him a lot. His name is Schrodinger’s Douchebag (borrowed observation #3, link in the down there part): A guy who says offensive things & decides whether he was joking based on the reaction of people around him. Any website that lacks effective moderation and allows some level of anonymity will, to varying degrees, approximate 4chan, and be overrun with Schrodinger’s Douchebag.

When this type of person defends rape jokes by saying all humor is inherently punching down because there must be a butt to every joke, he hasn’t thought about it. He assumes it’s true, because he figures he’s a smart guy and whatever he assumes is probably right, but he’s unfazed if you prove otherwise; there’s no shortage of dodgy reasons he might be right and you wrong. He’ll just pick another one. What matters is that the game continues.

The thing is, Bob, it’s not that they’re lying, it’s that they just don’t care. I’ll say that again for the cheap seats: When they make these kinds of arguments, they legitimately do not care whether the words coming out of their mouths are true. It is a deeply held belief for precisely as long as it wins arguments.

So it’s kinda funny, right, how many of these folks self-identify as “rationalists?” I mean, typical rational thinking would say: If I am presented with the truth, I will believe it, and, once I believe it, I will defend it in argument. This? This is not that! This is a different idea of “rationality” that views it not as a practice but as an innate quality one either possesses or lacks, like being blond or left-handed: If I’m arguing it, I must believe it, because I’m a rational person, and, if I believe it, because I’m a rational person, it must be true. You speak assuming you’re right, and, should you take a new position, this telescopes out into a whole new set of beliefs with barely a thought. Stay focused on the argument, and you won’t even notice it’s happening.

You might now conclude the internet reactionary believes in nothing except winning arguments with liberals. And, like Newtonian physics, if you assume this framing, you will get highly useful results. If you enter conversation with Engelbert and Charlemagne believing they do not mean what they say, they are only entertaining notions, and, on a long enough timeline, they will eventually defend a position fundamentally incompatible with the one they defended earlier in the same argument, you will navigate that conversation much more effectively!

But, like Newtonian physics, this framing is lowercase-a accurate without being capital-T True.

In reality, nihilism isn’t that popular. People will tell you, “I don’t care about anything, I just like triggering the libs,” but why is it always libs? It is piss easy (and also hilarious) to upset conservatives, why only go after the SJWs? The easy answer is, well, if you upset a feminist, you might make her cry; if you upset a Nazi, he might stab you, and that has a cooling effect. But the more obvious answer is that they actually agree with the racist, MRA, and TERF talking points they repeat, but would rather not think about it.

So much of conservative rhetoric is about maintaining ignorance of one’s own beliefs. To uphold the institution of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy while thinking you are none of those things. (Well, OK, knowing you’re a capitalist, but thinking it’s a good thing.) Most people have a baseline of fairly conventional, kindergarten morality, and conservatism often clashes with it. You can rationalize these contradictions - “I’m not a bigot, I just believe in states’ rights” - but, as American conservatism gets more radical, it gets harder to square one’s politics with what one assumes to be one’s beliefs. So you learn, when someone challenges you, to cycle through beliefs until something sticks, just play your hand and trust that you’re right, or, in extreme cases, insist you have no beliefs at all, you’re just here to watch the world burn.

But they’re not. They are willing participants in the burning of only certain parts. They don’t care what they believe, but they know what they hate, and they don’t want to think about why they hate it. On paper, they believe in freedom of religion and freedom of expression, but they also hang out in communities where Muslims and trans women are punching bags. And, like a sixth grader who believes one thing in Sunday school and another thing in biology class, they believe different things at different times.

This thinking is fertile ground for Far Right recruitment. I’d say the jury is out on whether chan boards attract Far Right extremists or are built to attract Far Right extremists, but they’re where extremists congregate and organize because they’re where extremists are tolerated, and where they blend in with the locals. They learn the lingua franca of performative irony: Say what you mean in such a way that people who disagree think you’re kidding and people who agree think you’re serious. People who don’t know what they believe but clearly have some fascist leanings don’t need to be convinced of Nazi rhetoric, they just need to be submerged in it and encouraged to hate liberals. They’ll make their way Right on their own. Folks start using extremist rhetoric because it wins arguments with SJWs - usually because that’s the moment SJWs decide it’s not fruitful and possibly unsafe talking to you - and this creates the appearance that, if it keeps winning arguments, there must be something to it. The Far Right literally has handbooks on how to do this.

Those who never consciously embrace the ideology - who don’t transition from participating to getting recruited - are still useful. They spread the rhetoric, they pad the numbers, and often participate in harassment and sometimes even violence.

There’s a twisted elegance to all this. Think about it: If you operate as though there is no truth, just competing opinions, and as though opinions aren’t sincere, just tools to be picked up and dropped depending on their utility, then what are you operating under? Self-interest. The desire to win. You’ll defend the Holocaust just to feel smarter than someone, superior. Think about how beautifully that maps onto the in-group/out-group mentality of dominance and bigotry. Think how incompatible it is with liberal ideas of tolerance. I think this is why we don’t see a lot of these “I’m just here to fuck shit up” types on the Left. Don’t get me wrong, the Left has gotten on some bullshit, but (excepting politicians, whom you should never assume to mean anything they say) it’s sincerely-believed bullshit! We don’t build identities around saying things just to piss people off.

The takeaway from all this is not only that you can’t tell the difference between a bigot who doesn’t know they’re a bigot and a bigot who knows but won’t tell you, but that there is no line dividing the two. When some guy, in the middle of a harassment campaign, says the victims should be nicer to their harassers because that will “mend the rift,” I don’t know if he believes it. But, in that moment, he believes he believes it. And that scares the shit out of me. But, if you’re asking how many layers of irony he’s on as compared with the harassers, nine times out of ten it doesn’t matter.

Borrowed observation #4 is: “We are what we pretend to be.”

[emperorren]

[pt 1 of 2] Thanks for the awesome reply! I

I find them overall quite emotionally sterile and very male-centric, both in the male leads but also in the story emphasis. It's fine but the buddy-buddy team up para-military stuff is empty for me personally. And if I can respect people who love it they can respect my jam

To be clear though: what they're doing CAN be art. The 1:1 political stuff and approach in Black Panther proves that. I hope Captain Marvel is similarly excellent. I just want there to be more room for the stuff that's my jam and recognition of it as actually doing something different rather than failing/being "problematic" at being an MCU movie. 

^ About the MCU approach to political analogy, I'll never grow tired of referring to this post by cephiedvariable, particularly the part that says:

[...] the idea that Captain America as presented in the MCU (or any character in big, colourful PG rated popcorn flick for that matter) is a new, revolutionary, un-problematic kind of hero is how we saw so many people unblinkingly and uncritically swallow ‘The Winter Soldier’ as some politically rebellious masterstroke of leftist defiance when it was actually a very careful, very safe, very neoliberal script that took tepid aim at something everyone agrees is bad (the Patriot Act) without offering any substantial commentary or praxis and while *still* stroking off American exceptionalism and perpetuating the inherently reactionary message of superhero vigilantis.

[...] I’m not saying 'The Winter Soldier’ is bad and you’re bad for liking it, I’m saying that I think the conversation we had about it as a culture was exactly the conversation Disney wanted us to have about it. The idea that these are “important” statements, that these black & white, a-thematic stories told in broad strokes across multi-million dollar canvasses are meaningful moral constructs is what Disney and similar companies want you to think.

The “political” statements in the MCU boil down to essentially a series of simple and uncontroversial clichés (nazi-coded organizations are bad!, killing half the world population preemptively is bad!, using weapons of mass destruction against innocent civilians is bad! Every single life matters!) that are framed and spoon-fed to the audience as revolutionary, greatly heroic messages. Meanwhile, the villains (Killmonger, Thanos, Zemo, Pierce, Raza, Ultron, etc.) are the ones who actually try to subvert the status quo by individuating social illnesses and reacting against them. But since they’re also batshit genocidal maniacs, with no exceptions, their revolutionary impact along with whatever decent point their ideology was trying to make is normalized as Evil(TM) and eventually nullified and condemned by the narrative, and the status quo is restored peacefully and without any substantial attempt to fix the wrongs the villains tried to bring up. Moral of the story: yeah, society is full of flaws but war is bad and killing people is wrong so let’s defeat the bad guys and their Wrong, Horrible, Not Good At All approach to fix said flaws and then sit down, have a beer and hope for the best, god bless america.

It’s a very conservative, extremely safe approach to political analogy, and in the context of this genre it works well, as it easily creates high stakes and a simple, relatable, accessible moral divide between heroes and Complex Villains With A Cause. But it’s not the brilliant, revolutionary political commentary that people think.

Star Wars makes it even simpler and more universal (in the movies, it’s not even clear what’s the ultimate purpose of the FO, what makes it different from the Empire, what the hell they’re trying to accomplish or reacting against---the evils of democracy? political corruption? unequal distribution of resources? too equal distribution of resources? slavery? anti-slavery?). We don’t need a lot of details because the political conflict is transparently just a backdrop or large-scale allegory for the personal/existential conflict; the battle is life / love / creation / democracy VS death / hate / destruction / tyranny, rather than two concrete ideologies at war against each other; it’s just slightly more political than Fantasia’s battle against the Nothing. (the political aspect is much more prominent in the supporting materials, but those aren’t essential to understand the movie trilogies).

I find them overall quite emotionally sterile and very male-centric, both in the male leads but also in the story emphasis.

I’m actually a fan of the MCU, and I appreciate that it’s getting more and more female audience-friendly. I’m HYPED for Captain Marvel. But I also take it as what it is---I agree on the male-centricness (see also: Not Heroines, but Female Heroes) and I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem, provided that (as you said) it isn’t regarded as the highest touchstone in the action fantasy genre that every other franchise needs to conform to. As for the emotional part (or lack thereof), I personally read between the lines and use my transformative gaze whenever I can, even if that means treating the actual movies as a blank canvas to project my headcanons upon. The transformative approach makes every piece of fiction better than it is, but I find it particularly true for the MCU.

[antoine-roquentin]

The disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week has generated huge international publicity, but unsurprisingly, little in Saudi-controlled, Arab media. The Washington Post, for whom Khashoggi wrote, and other Western media, have kept the story alive, increasing the pressure on Riyadh to explain its role in the affair.

It’s been odd to read about Khashoggi in Western media. David Hirst in The Guardian claimed Khashoggi merely cared about absolutes such as “truth, democracy, and freedom”. Human Rights Watch’s director described him as representing “outspoken and critical journalism.”

But did he pursue those absolutes while working for Saudi princes?

Khashoggi was a loyal member of the Saudi propaganda apparatus. There is no journalism allowed in the kingdom: there have been courageous Saudi women and men who attempted to crack the wall of rigid political conformity and were persecuted and punished for their views. Khashoggi was not among them.

Some writers suffered while Khashoggi was their boss at Al-Watan newspaper. Khashoggi—contrary to what is being written—was never punished by the regime, except lightly two years ago, when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) banned him from tweeting and writing for Al-Hayat, the London-based, pan-Arab newspaper owned by Saudi Prince Khalid bin Sultan.

By historical contrast, Nasir As-Sa`id was a courageous secular Arab Nationalist writer who fled the kingdom in 1956 and settled in Cairo, and then Beirut. He authored a massive (though tabloid-like) volume about the history of the House of Saud. He was unrelenting in his attacks against the Saudi royal family.

For this, the Saudi regime paid a corrupt PLO leader in Beirut (Abu Az-Za`im, tied to Jordanian intelligence) to get rid of As-Sa`id. He kidnapped As-Sa`id from a crowded Beirut street in 1979 and delivered him to the Saudi embassy there. He was presumably tortured and killed (some say his body was tossed from a plane over the “empty quarter” desert in Saudi Arabia). Such is the track record of the regime.

Khashoggi was an ambitious young reporter who knew that to rise in Saudi journalism you don’t need professionalism, courage, or ethics. In Saudi Arabia, you need to attach yourself to the right prince. Early on, Khashoggi became close to two of them: Prince Turki Al-Faysal (who headed Saudi intelligence) and his brother, Prince Khalid Al-Faysal, who owned Al-Watan (The Motherland) where Khashoggi had his first (Arabic) editing job.

Khashoggi distinguished himself with an eagerness to please and an uncanny ability to adjust his views to those of the prevailing government. In the era of anti-Communism and the promotion of fanatical jihad in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Khashoggi was a true believer. He fought with Osama bin Laden and promoted the cause of the Mujahideen.

The Washington Post‘s David Ignatius and others want to embellish this by implying that he was an “embedded” reporter—as if bin Laden’s army would invite independent journalists to report on their war efforts. The entire project of covering the Afghan Mujahideen and promoting them in the Saudi press was the work of the chief of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki, Khashoggi’s principal patron-prince.

Western media coverage of Khashoggi’s career (by people who don’t know Arabic) presents a picture far from reality. They portray a courageous investigative journalist upsetting the Saudi regime. Nothing is further from the truth: there is no journalism in Saudi Arabia; there is only crude and naked propaganda.

Editors are trusted individuals who have demonstrated long-time loyalty. Khashoggi admitted to an Arab reporter last year in an interview from Istanbul that in Saudi Arabia he had been both editor and censor. Editors of Saudi regime papers (mouthpieces of princes and kings) enforce government rules and eliminate objectionable material.

Khashoggi never spoke out for Saudis in distress. He ran into trouble in two stints as Al-Watan editor because of articles he published by other writers, not by himself, that were mildly critical of the conservative religious establishment—which he at times supported. He was relocated to another government media job— to shield him from the religious authorities.

Khashoggi was the go-to man for Western journalists covering the kingdom, appointed to do so by the regime. He may have been pleasant in conversation with reporters but he never questioned the royal legitimacy. And that goes for his brief one-year stint in Washington writing for the Post.

Khashoggi was a reactionary: he supported all monarchies and sultanates in the region and contended they were “reformable.” To him, only the secular republics, in tense relations with the Saudis, such as Iraq, Syria and Libya, defied reform and needed to be overthrown. He favored Islamization of Arab politics along Muslim Brotherhood lines.

Khashoggi’s vision was an “Arab uprising” led by the Saudi regime. In his Arabic writings he backed MbS’s “reforms” and even his “war on corruption,” derided in the region and beyond. He thought that MbS’s arrests of the princes in the Ritz were legitimate (though he mildly criticized them in a Post column) even as his last sponsoring prince, Al-Walid bin Talal, was locked up in the luxury hotel. Khashoggi even wanted to be an advisor to MbS, who did not trust him and turned him down.

Writing in the Post (with an Arabic version) Khashoggi came across as a liberal Democrat favoring democracy and reform. But he didn’t challenge Saudi regime legitimacy or Western Mideast policy. Mainstream journalists were enamored with him. They saw him as an agreeable Arab who didn’t criticize their coverage of the region, but praised it, considering the mainstream U.S. press the epitome of professional journalism. Khashoggi was essentially a token Arab writing for a paper with a regrettable record of misrepresenting Arabs.

In Arabic, his Islamist sympathies with Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) were unmistakable. Forgotten or little known in the West is that during the Cold War the Saudis sponsored, funded, and nurtured the Muslim Brotherhood as a weapon against the progressive, secular camp led by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Ikhwan controlled the Saudi educational system raising Saudi students to admire the Brotherhood. But Sep. 11 changed the Saudi calculus: the rulers wanted a scapegoat for their role in sponsoring Islamist fanaticism and the Ikhwan was the perfect target. That made Khashoggi suspect too.

Recent articles in the Saudi press hinted that the regime might move against him.He had lost his patrons but the notion that Khashoggi was about to launch an Arab opposition party was not credible. The real crime was that Khashoggi was backed alone by Ikhwan supporters, namely the Qatari regime and the Turkish government.

A writer in Okaz, a daily in Jeddah, accused him of meeting with the Emir of Qatar at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York and of having ties to “regional and international intelligence services.” If true it may have sealed his fate. Qatar is now the number one enemy of the Saudi regime—arguably worse than Iran.

Khashoggi was treated as a defector and one isn’t allowed to defect from the Saudi Establishment. The last senior defections were back in 1962, when Prince Talal and Prince Badr joined Nasser’s Arab nationalist movement in Egypt.

Khashoggi had to be punished in a way that would send shivers down the spine of other would-be defectors.

[freedom-of-fanfic]

why fanworks are such a convenient social scapegoat

(this post is mostly an expansion on the twitter thread i did a while back, which addressed this question: why is fanfiction often blamed for harming young people in fandom? (please also read the spinoff additions to the end of the thread, which start here.)

this post deliberately does not address whether or not fandom should have particular social expectations/obligations. I think these ethical questions are complicated and require nuanced address, particularly because of how social media works these days. rather, this is my offered explanation for why fanworks are the chosen scapegoat for the cumulative harm of systemic social problems.)

Note this post is US-centric because the scapegoating of fanworks seems to come primarily from Americans in English-speaking fandom spaces.

I think that because fanworks have long been slapped with warnings of dark content (abuse, noncon/dubcon, etc) it’s difficult for me to believe they directly play a major part in setting young people up for abusive situations irl ... for the most part.  It’s less the fanworks themselves and more the environment in which fanworks have been presented over the last 5-8 years.

In my opinion, the sad irony is that fanworks only have the potential to cause direct harm by causing people to believe their contents are models for safe sex/relationships/etc because of the expectation that fandom is a space for education.

fanworks have been around for ages, but currently they are:

in a post 9/11 social environment where the unknown/unfamiliar is feared, critical thinking is discouraged, safety is prioritized over freedom, and censorship is treated as protection, 

 (but information is available in unchecked quantities that outstrips the individual’s ability to process it);

available in a viral-sharing environment featuring nigh-infinite freedom/no moderating authority and on a highly-networked, easily-searched internet;

where young people are often more expert at navigation than their guardians, and thus easily able to access content that isn’t age-appropriate/safe for them

(but being young people, they often think they’re ready for that content);

furthermore, content that is not only inappropriate for their age/maturity, but also on topics that they will never/have never received a proper, thorough education on

(because schools have their hands tied by religiously-motivated regulations and guardians have abdicated responsibility for sex ed and lack acceptance for non-straight/non-cis identities);

targeted marketing has encouraged and exacerbated existing stratification by income, age, gender, and sexual orientation; and

increasing social awareness is constantly creating tension between social tradition and social advancement, putting incredible stress on anyone who represents ‘advancement’.

On that last point, my thread and this post are particularly concerned with (perceived) women, who are burdened by both traditional and ‘progressive’ social roles:*

women are traditionally seen as child caretakers, educators, and burdened with upholding social morality as the heart of homemaking. all perceived women have to deal with this social expectation.

as agents of social advancement, those perceived as women are still burdened with educating the ignorant and being ‘good examples’, as their mistakes will be magnified as evidence that tradition is better.

*these problems are SUPER magnified by being non-white. (and I didn’t even get into the sexual expectations.)

As an isolated space, fandom - with majority women and/or afab participation - did a pretty good job of shaking off the social expectation that perceived women are educators and caretakers. but when fandom gained visibility by the move to tumblr and Google trawling tumblr content/content going viral + all the social factors above, the ‘(perceived) women as educators’ expectation came back on fandom, and with additional exacerbation:

in a culture focused on purity and prioritizing safety over freedom, disgust & feelings of shame both act like a moral compass & a safety warning. fandom’s judgement-free attitude about nsfw/kinky/horrible-irl content looks like a community of people who condone all these things as ‘safe’, if that’s how you’ve been taught to view the world. 

Basically: if the people who are writing/creating this stuff are treating it as nothing to be ashamed of, it must not be dangerous. right?

Combined with the not-unusual adolescent belief that you’re ready for literally anything and know more than most adults, it’s a recipe for disaster.

fanworks often echo aspects of the source material, including aspects that are not healthy: canon romanticization of abusive relationship dynamics, for instance. Fanworks that share canon’s unhealthy features can become a form of reinforcement/seen as tacit approval of existing messages in mass media for fans who don’t have outside education to protect them.

in fact, fanworks are often (deliberately or not) ‘in dialogue’ with the existence of these kinds of harmful cliches. it’s important to view fanworks as what they frequently are: individual reactions/remixes/retakes on things in mass media and real life, created by victims/potential victims of the harm those things can cause. (viral sharing sites often separate these works from this context.)

on fandom tumblr in particular, people are consuming a cominbation of fanworks, fantasies about fictional characters that may or may not be nsfw, educational posts about safe sex / queer/lgbt history / sexual orientiations / gender identity / being a good ally / intersectionalism, and the importance of minority representation in mass media. conflating fanworks with good representation & educational content seems a natural consequence.

within fandom spaces, the expectation is that fans are enlightened on social justice issues. as victims of marginalization, or at least people who are constantly exposed to education on marginalization, we obviously know better than creators of mass media.  This contributes to the attitude that fan content should be ‘better’. 

Ironically, the content warnings, lack of fan culture shame, and the creators being vulnerable to negative responses together contribute to making fanworks/fan creators unusually visible examples of ‘corrupting’ content to point at and condemn.

between terrible education, a reactionary and conservative background radiation to English-speaking internet culture thanks to the US being a mess, and the fact most people are blind to social constructs that have formed their whole worldview, fanworks are getting a really bad rap.

altogether: fanworks are treated as being on par with mass media, social expectations, and culture norms in terms of the harm they can cause, even though they have comparatively little visibility and are usually created by marginalized people with little relative influence. They are reactions to mass media, social expectations, and culture norms rather than the cause of them.

however, because fanworks are easy to access without supervision, open about the content being potentially harmful, and produced by people who should ‘know better’ or are perceived as caretakers/educators, fanworks get blamed for the cumulative effect of culture/mass media/social norms. And unfortunately, because young people have formed expectations that fanworks will educate them due to those same social norms, the possibility that people will treat fanworks as models for social behavior or comprehensive guidelines to material they lack education on is increased.

--

I can’t hope to propose a comprehensive solution in this post. Taken altogether, fandom is really the tip of a large iceberg of systemic problems: sexist expectations, lack of outside education, and a reactionary cultural environment are the underlying issues.

 Anything fandom can do on its own will amount to little more than a band-aid. Antis will never wipe out potentially harmful fanworks, and all the declarations by fandom members that they abdicate responsibility for educating young fandom people won’t make society less expectant of us.  

the only things I know we have to do in the long run is keep fighting for real sex ed, keep warning for and flagging adult-oriented fan content, and do our best to respect each other’s taste and comfort levels. (and it would be a lie to say that I expect any of it to be easy.)