#it doesn’t even matter if they consider themselves feminists because they literally all believe that they’re ‘the exception’

[mariathechosen1]

Good lord, I just want one (1) day where I don’t have to interact with men and their bullshit. Just one day!

[agent-cupcake]

Hey AC! I love your blog and was wondering if I could get your opinion on something. I've seen some people complaining that Ingrid and Hilda are treated by the fandom, with Ingrid stans saying that Hilda is also racist towards Almyrans (which, granted, she is) but doesn't get nearly as much hate about it as Ingrid does. But personally I feel like their attitudes and the way they react towards Dedue/Cyril are wildly different and Hilda generally seems less hateful/irrational about it. Thoughts?

This is... kind of a touchy topic... I like it though! It’s worth discussing, especially since I feel like it’s broke criticism to simply deflect blame onto a character in order to prop up another.  Full and obvious disclosure: I very much dislike Ingrid and very much love Hilda. That said, I don’t think it’s fair to compare them for the sake of which is worse. I fall into the trap of character criticism through comparison far too often and it's not really valid unless you can fully explore each character in their own right beforehand. Which is why, while writing this, I came to the conclusion that the ways these two characters are interpreted and the reason people view their racist tendencies differently has far more to do with the characters themselves than their actual beliefs.

From first impressions to subsequent playthroughs, this is pretty much how I feel about Ingrid: she brings up her hatred of the Duscur people and Dedue unprompted and uncontested several times at the very beginning of the game, putting it front and center to her character. This is important, it sets a foundational component for how I could come to view her. According to her introduction, she is honorable and respectful, a model lady knight trope. But, as mentioned, she's really racist. Literally standing around thinking about how awful it is that Dimitri would trust a man of Duscur because they are all bad people. Yikes. And nobody calls her on it. Again, this is very important for perception. People judge Sylvain for his bad behavior in a much more harsh way than they do Ingrid for her vitriolic loathing for another classmate who we have seen as nothing but respectful. It's weird. And then, despite the fact that her close friend Sylvain was able to reason out that it’s not possible for the Duscur people to be at fault for the Tragedy, despite the fact that the prince of the country she supposedly hopes to serve with unwavering respect and loyalty has made it clear that he does not believe that Dedue or Duscar are responsible for the Tragedy, and despite the fact that Dimitri, her close friend and the one most affected by the Tragedy (seriously, she lost a guy she might have married and he lost his best friend, mother, and watched his father be killed in front of his eyes) continuously insists that neither Dedue nor Duscur are at fault, she loudly and openly believes that the ensuing massacre of Duscur was deserved and Dedue is inherently culpable simply because of his race. Her motivations for this hatred feel even more cheap considering her dogged hero worship for Glenn was born out of the fact that she was promised to him, making the fact that she’d use his death as reason enough for the destruction of countless innocent lives even more unsympathetic in my eyes. I mean, seriously, she was around 13 and he was older than her, how close could they have truly been? Dimitri says they were in love, but she was a child. Abandoning my modern sensibilities about age of consent or whatever, kids at that age don't have the emotional or mental capability. Maybe this is just nitpicking, but I have a very hard time caring about that relationship. But, if her actual justification is because of what happened to Faerghus as a result of the Tragedy and feels duty-bound as a knight to find justice through the systematic destruction of the Duscur people, then it just circles back to confusion considering the future leader of said country doesn't hold Duscur or Dedue responsible. The importance of perception comes in because despite these paper thin excuses and her seemingly willfully ignorant hatred, she is never challenged on her racist beliefs. The reason she seems to change her mind about Dedue and consider that maybe excusing a genocide is wrong stems from guilt that Dedue continuously comes to her aid in battle at the potential cost of his own life. I can understand, to a certain extent, why she might feel the way she does. But, again, I have such a hard time with any justification when nobody that she's close to is even nearly as hateful as her, there is plenty of evidence (evidence that the people close to her have found!) to provide a very reasonable counterclaim to Duscur's guilt, and that none of that even matters when it would require her to openly contradict the prince of her country to make the claim that Dedue was in any way complicit in the Tragedy. Which would be fine if she wasn't established as the model Lady Knight archetype, which also brings us into Ingrid's moral high horse. Admittedly, I hate the Lady Knight trope. I have a significant bias against these types of characters. However, I really do think that this moral crusade is where she lost me completely. Without even a shred of empathy or self awareness, she lectures Sylvain about his shitty behavior even though their circumstances are at least somewhat similar and he has his reasons (bad ones, maybe, but ones worth understanding if she actually cares about him), she lectures Felix about not being interested in knightly endeavors (an aspect of his character that is born of the trauma she has appropriated), and she lectures Claude about behavior that is befitting of a man in his position. Not because she cares about the girls Sylvain is hurting, not because she thinks there are any grave stakes from Felix choosing to do his own thing, and not because she knows that Claude's behavior affects his ability to lead, but because she doesn't like these behaviors and thinks they should be fixed. Yet, at the same time, she believes Dedue deserved to lose his family, country, and culture based on his birth and nobody ever does anything to morally correct her, it is something she eventually is forced to acknowledge on her own. It's frustrating, infuriating even, that the game lets her get away with being so grossly hypocritical. And, all the while, she is being painted as sympathetic. Again, I have a hard time feeling sympathy for her about Glenn, and I certainty don't feel sympathetic towards her issues about marriage because there's never any actual tension there. Of course she won't be forced to marry, she's a Lady Knight. Beyond being unsympathetic, I also find her massively unlikable. Awful design, poor voice direction, food-loving-as-a-personality-trait, the fact that she's written as one of those stock "feminist" characters who hate makeup and girly things until it benefits them, and constantly butting in on other characters to give her opinion without taking any criticism herself are all aspects that I just personally dislike. Ultimately, Ingrid being racist is only a symptom of the many reasons her character is one of my least favorites. Most of these points can be countered by someone who doesn't take issue with the things that annoy me and to point out that Ingrid DOES get over her racist beliefs. It's not fair to say that she doesn't change but, for me, the damage was already done by the time she became tolerable so I still have a hard time appreciating her. My assumption would be that there are a lot of other people who feel similarly to me regarding their dislike of Ingrid so they focus on one easy character flaw, her being racist at the beginning of the game, as a reason to validate their dislike of her overall.

On the other hand, Hilda's racism isn't a main trait of her character. It's related to her overarching character flaws, but she doesn't bring it up unprompted and can actually be pretty much missed without the Cyrill supports. Like you said, Hilda does seem less hateful and irrational, it doesn't take willful malice and an active rejection of reason for Hilda to dislike the Almyrans, they pose a genuine and provable threat to her family and territory, seemingly senselessly testing the borders and throwing away lives for the sake of conquest. To be clear, her "you're not like those OTHER Almyrans" schtick is legitimately nasty. Her behavior is gross and condescending and it really underscores the fact that Hilda is ignorant, lazy, inconsiderate, and incredibly comfortable in her privilege. She accepts what she's been told at face value because she's too lazy to look into it further. Cyrill does tell her she's stupid to think that way, though. Which is satisfying because Hilda in those supports is insufferable, it really highlights the worst aspects of her character, dismissive, manipulative, and very selfish. However, for me, she's also very likeable. I'm not interested in going over my opinions on her like I did with Ingrid as I don’t feel it’s as important to my point but a few reasons I really like her is because I think Hilda has a fantastic design, cute supports, amazing voice work, and is secretly sweet in a way that absolutely tickles my fancy. I am sure many people do not agree with me, which is fine. Additionally, just as Ingrid grows out of her racist beliefs, so does Hilda. They both end the game as more tolerant and caring people. Still, for the same reason a person could argue that Ingrid is actually great and I'm being unfair, they could argue that Hilda is terrible and I'm too biased. That's fair and true..... but I think the fact that Hilda is more generally appealing in conjunction with the less obvious nature of her racist attitude makes people less likely to dismiss her as a racist in the same way they do Ingrid. Unless they dislike Hilda, in which case, it’s all fair game.

Anyyyways, a main takeaway from this is that I highly doubt people are truly arguing on the individual basis of who's more racist, but that they're engaging in the age old waifu war. As with many characters in this game, it's easier to argue moral superiority when you can't quite articulate what you like or don't like about a character. Or, even worse, when you're arguing opinion. Even now, as is clear by reading this, I am arguing my opinion of why I don't like Ingrid. Not because she's racist, but because of the character traits and writing choices that make her unlikable to me. I like Hilda because, flaws and all, I find her to be compelling and enjoyable. From the people that I know, at least, that is basically how the Ingrid stans v Hilda racism argument is structured, even if they dress it up in different language.

By the by Hilda never talks about how the Almyrans deserve to be wiped out. I think that probably sours a lot of people's opinions of Ingrid no matter what happened afterward but that’s fine we can just pretend that didn’t happen

[word-addict-lisette]

I can’t believe this!!!

So, something very weird and crazy happened yesterday night. I got i to little debate with my mom. It started from feminism and we ended on the LGBTQ community. But either way it was chaotic.

But the argument ended in me realizing that older generations... As in our parents, don't actually care about this feminism thingy at all. They don't care at all. They want good lives and want equality but it's for themselves, they fail to see that there are different types of women out there too. And even worse is that my mother has no idea of what the LGBTQ community is. And that's sick!

The only thing she is aware of is that gay is a bad word to call some like. What the hell? It sure as hell isn't! So it was like late night, and my mother was randomly scrolling through her phone while me and my sister were just cracking random jokes and laughing among ourselves.

That’s when my mother made this comment on seeing a post, “Women don’t look good until they have good hair.” I gave it some thought, not in the mood for an argument at 11 in the night. But my sister felt the need to speak so she retorted with, “Not necessarily, everyone looks good, and I don’t see how a person’s hair matters.” I agreed, my mother didn’t.

She said, “Not necessarily everyone looks good, we just say everyone is beautiful for the sake of it, but i don’t really think people look good with bad hair. And i don’t think really really short hair suits people either.” I didn’t like that comment one bit, so i stepped in.

“Not everyone says that everyone is beautiful just for the sake of it. Everyone truly is beautiful, and A lot of people look good with really short hair too, you can’t judge them like that.” She threw me a look for that.

“At that rate, you will say that even bald people look good. They don’t necessarily look good. they are people like that.” I shot back at her, cause now it was getting on my nerves. I told her, “Who said bald people don’t look good, i thought i just specified the fact that everyone looks good, and there are no exceptions to that case, even my sister had gotten my bald she was very young, you didn’t call her ugly. Then why others?”

“She said fine, I am not gonna argue with that, not necessarily all women and men look good. I don’t think that everyone is good looking. Beautiful doesn’t mean human, you need to have some things in you to be termed beautiful.”

My sister contradicted with, “I don’t think anyone set the parameters for beauty yet, if anyone has, they are crazy. Everyone is beautiful and if you don’t feel so, i’m sorry i can’t change that. But i’m with my sister in this.”

But i had a whole different topic to discuss after that, “This whole conversion was carried out as if it was pointed towards women, I don’t see why women don’t look good with short hair. Men look good in short hair, men and women are equal, and if men can have short hair and not be judged, it can be the same with women.”

That seemed to put my mother to think, but she didn’t change her thought one bit. she responded with, “Women and men are different, sure women and men are equal, but there are some differences, and by the way women are built differently and they ought to look good. That’s when you feel like a women.”

my sister felt differently, “Men and women are equal, at least they should be. And the word equal, doesn’t come with any exceptions like beauty or anything, so equal means equal. That’s what feminism is for.”

My mother looked confused at the last sentence, she looked like she didn’t know what feminism is. But then she automatically assumed it to have something to do with women being superior than men. She clarified that she didn’t think women ought to be on a higher position in the world, like unless the women actually deserved it with all right. But men had the higher position and the best we ought to get was gender equality, between females and males. 

Until a few years back, i would have agreed with her, just the way my sister did after explaining the real meaning of feminism to my mother. But, I didn’t agree with that statement either. Gender equality did not mean equality between males and females, it meant equality between all the genders. That is when i got in the LGBTQ+ community. My mother had literally 0% idea of what that was. And i felt like digging my own grave and burying myself alive. 

I did not even ask her to google the community like i had asked her to google feminism. I simply asked her what was her view on the transgenders. She said, “not much, they are like okay though i am not sure i really support them. I am still dicy about them.”

That reminded of something that happened long back. When I was in Class 7, one of my classmates accidentally called a guy in our class gay, because he used to make fun of them in class a lot. I truly used to resent it when they used to make fun of transgenders in my school, I wasn’t aware of the the LGBTQ+ community back then, but still I hated it.

When the fact a guy had called a friend of his gay in school spread around and our parents got to know, the kid got suspended for two days, and got a diary note. Moreover my mother told me then that I hope you don’t use such bad words and vulgarized language in school. If I hear you calling anyone such a foul word anytime, consider yourself grounded for a year. 

That day stuck with me forever, How the heck was GAY a bad word? 

So last night during the argument, I told her that gender equality meant it was for all the genders, literally all the genders. And i literally told her about the fact that she told me gay was a bad word whereas it wasn’t. I told her that there are homosexual people as well and just told her about the LGBTQ+ community. She didn’t seem to support them much. But at least she knew about it.

She still didn’t agree about the lgbtq+ community thingy and different genders. she also mentioned that she didn’t know anything about this community, and she wondered if she could have cared less about it before. And she was very shocked about the fact that i supported them, and that I was a feminist. she said that she never taught me any of this and was thoroughly surprised when she found out I knew so many things, that she thought that I shouldn’t.

It sucked that she thought of all of it in such a manner, But before i could go further with the convo, my sister just asked us to cut it out... Though i was so not pleased to know that my mom didn’t even know that there is something called the LGBTQ+ community and feminism. A similar thing had happened a few month ago, where i told her about black lives matter. Turns out our generation is quite more socially knowledgeable and mature than our parents. 

But then again, this morning i was called lazy, and again made to feel like crap. my mother termed that i ought to study and not spend so much time on my laptop and mobile, because, they aren’t going to get me anywhere and social media is poisoning my mind. Interesting part.... TUMBLR is my only source of socializing on the internet! She isn’t even aware of that. But yeah... at the end: I am the stuck up kid in the house.

[unpopularfanopinion]

@pressed-poppy  (because this is a side-blog and I can’t reply)

You are definitely using the slippery slope argument though. It doesn’t matter that there are actual people who complain about grey areas. In fact, I never denied people are complaining about grey area’s nor did I say I agree with those complaints. My point is that you’re using THOSE examples to justify not having to do anything. That is literally the slippery slope argument.

Who is doing nothing?

I am doing my personal best to recognize and unlearn the racial biases I have grown up with. In real life I offer support for black activist and vote for candidates that that I believe will support and build on policies that lead to greater equality and social justice. Which I admit at times doesn’t feel nearly enough, but I am also a single person who doesn’t have much, there is only such much I can do as an individual.

Ao3 is building better tools for POC authors to protect themselves from harassment.

Neither of those is “nothing”

The only thing they’re not doing is creating a system that will allow for censorship of fan authors, which you know goes against their entire mission statement

Is there a reason why you are ignoring the efforts Ao3 is working toward making the site better and safer for all fans? Is it because you don’t think it is enough? What would you prefer Ao3 to do? And how do you propose they do it without any unintended consequences that will ultimately hurt fans and POC?  You admit there are bad faith actors, how would you propose dealing with them?

And I’m sure you think you’re smart and clever by claiming the “slippery slope” argument as if that invalidates what I’m saying, but take a step back and think about what feminist say when they protest laws and regulations that limit abortion. They point out that these laws won’t reduce abortion. They point out that women will die because of these laws. They are also making slippery slop arguments. That doesn’t make their arguments or points any less true or valid.

 And you’re also again repeating the cultural relativism argument that I already disagreed with. Why would it change my mind this time? All I expressed is that these are dangerous and conservative tactics, not used by people who mean well. It’s shady.

I’m starting to think you don’t actually understand what cultural relativism is. Cultural relativism means not looking at another culture and judging them by our standards. You don’t think of another culture is ignorant, barbaric, or in any way “lesser” to your own because they do things differently(like eat food you consider gross, or your that culture has taught you is unclean) than your culture. And is meant to be used by anthropologists to avoid ethnocentrism with studying other cultures.

People have mis-used and conflated cultural relativism with moral relativism which is the idea that all view points can be equally valid, and therefore tolerant people should be tolerant of intolerant beliefs and view points(and just to make my self clear, not i do not agree with that idea. I am well aware of the Intolerance Paradox)

And really I not even making either a cultural relativism, or moral relativism argument. I am merely pointing out that even if you got everyone to agree Racism is BAD!(and yes it’s sad you would not be able to get everyone to agree to that) you would not be able to get them to agree on a single, codified guideline of what racism looks like, and what counts as racism, or racial bigotry.  Which again is what Ao3 would need if they were going to censor works based on “racism” while still being fair to all users.  And again you admit to bad faith actors and grey areas existing, but at the same time seem to want to ignore them.

And again you seem insistent on taking all my statements in the worst and most nefarious manner and calling it shady.  Honestly it sounds like you’ve already decide which side you agree with on the Ao3 discourse, but just don’t want to say it for some reason.  Needless to say. that is shady as fuck.

[laughingmagi]

Thinking about the Hellblazer reboot and the handling of race again and getting extremely tired because look. By far one of the best parts of the old Vertigo comic was the casual diversity. In the city backgrounds, in the characters John interacts with as old friends, informants, lovers, or people he just flirts with. The Black Label reboot was painfully white aside from an antagonist and Noah which...was utterly wasted. I imagine that Spurrier thought he had more time to develop the relationship given the bombshell dropped in the last couple issues and the cancellation of the series was...unexpected.

Still though, it’s hard to ignore the inequity of their dynamic. I suppose in retrospect it was perhaps rather fatherly, but I’m not entirely pleased with the revelation overall that Noah is his son. And no, for once this isn’t me being 😒 when it comes to hetero things. It’s more a matter of...lived experience for lack of a better way to put it. John is someone who doesn’t really seem to have any desire for children. As someone who doesn’t want children either, I have a hard time believing that he’s so irresponsible when it comes to prophylactics. (Yeah, yeah I’ve mentioned before that an accident could have been involved. A broken condom, for example, but that’s not in the text, the text is that John had a one night stand with the woman that would be Noah’s mother. The fact that it came off as kinda sleazy to me, I can’t tell how much that perspective is coloured by my notion of the romanticism that often winds through the old Vertigo series, tho.) The idea that he wouldn’t have a condom at the very least on him on the vague assumption that he could get laid in a situation is very out of character imo because of his self identification as a feminist (side note: this was before a man saying this was inherently a red flag and cringe af). After all, it’s incredibly sexist to put the safety of a female partner entirely her responsibility. I think it’s just one more aspect of the perpetual misunderstanding of his promiscuity as John being a womanizer. 

Anyway, I don’t think Spurrier is racist or anything, Honestly, I don’t think quite so many people are literally racist, just that white supremacy is so deeply embedded that a lot of people don’t see it for what it is in themselves, It’s a matter of not noticing it, you know. Like in the RPC, tho it’s a huge meme to point out the popularity of white characters and face claims in comparison to non-white ones, I sincerely don’t think it’s because the community is full of virulent racists. It’s a matter of entertainment being so dominated by Western culture, which has only recently been trying to be deliberate about diversifying its casting. Even still, there are more popular white characters in media, Not to mention the overwhelming whiteness of popular actors. I’m not saying oh well, that’s the way it is. Just that I think non-white fcs should be encouraged for ocs and race bending popular characters being less considered a hokey exercise in performative “wokeness”.

Ugh sorry, this was just an idle thought that got super serious.

[meangirlpolitics]

I would love it if genderists would read Harel’s “Theory of Rights” because it’s such a solid analysis and critique of every major rights theory, and every single one of them makes it clear that one person’s rights end the moment they infringe upon someone else’s. You have a right to believe literally whatever you want; free thought is probably the only true natural right, because it’s literally impossible to infringe. Even if you had no right whatsoever to free speech, no one could go into your brain and stop you from thinking whatever the fuck you want (unless they did so by infringing upon your right to bodily autonomy and lobotomizing you or something, but that’s an entirely different rights issue).

Dworkin’s theory of “rights as trumps” explains it the most concisely: rights, in a legalized form, are always more important than freedoms. You have the freedom to call yourself transgender, to wear whatever clothes you want, to change your name, and to believe that you have “changed genders” - but the right to freedom of expression is a less important right than the right to free speech or bodily autonomy, so when your belief in gender means that you want to compel other people to use specific pronouns, their right to free speech trumps your pronouns. You can still use whatever pronouns you want, but you can’t force other people to. If a male wants to call himself a woman and “live as a woman” then he’s welcome to do that, up until the point that this turns into a demand that women and girls sacrifice safety (the right to bodily autonomy and protection) so that males can feel like “women” and have access to vulnerable female spaces. Bodily autonomy and safety trumps freedom of expression if they come head to head. I don’t have the right to force you to stop expressing yourself just because I think it’s annoying, but you don’t have the right to express yourself if “expressing yourself” involves posing a direct threat to someone else’s actual safety.

This is true for everything - no matter how much I wish it was possible to do so, because of my own morals and taste, I cannot do anything to punish or restrict people who want to torture and kill other people if they’re just thinking about it or writing about their urges privately, or even if they write a blog about wishing they could torture people or decide to get plastic surgery to look exactly like Ted Bundy. If they don’t act on their evil thoughts, and don’t do anything that demonstrates a legitimate threat to others, then they’re not violating anyone else’s right to safety. If the blog details specific plans, then they’re posing an actual and probable threat, and the situation changes - but up until they violate other people’s right to not be threatened, they have the right to express themselves nonviolently. It’s perfectly legal to think and say whatever you want, no matter how awful, as long as no one else’s safety is threatened or infringed. That’s an important aspect of rights law - it’s why we could all post memes about hoping Trump dies of Covid without worrying that we’d be arrested for treason. If someone had posted an actual, serious plan for infecting Trump with Covid, that would’ve been illegal, although there are so many more serious threats that they’d still be unlikely to have much attention paid to them.

This is why there’s a material difference between a woman posting “kill all men” online, and a transwoman with a known history of physically attacking feminists posting a picture of themselves with a “TERF beating bat.” The former is very clearly not a credible, specific, or even possible threat, and the latter is a person who has demonstrated a capacity and willingness to commit violence expressing a desire and intention to do so again. “Kill all men” is a statement that doesn’t give any rational person the impression that any real violence will follow, and is therefore protected speech which doesn’t infringe upon anyone else’s rights to safety; “I’ve broken TERF skulls and I’ll break more” (paraphrased from Fallon Fox) is very obviously an actual threat about real and possible violence, and is not protected speech, because threats are considered incitement to violence and actively infringe upon other people’s rights to safety.

[rametarin]

Little note hider. Or, alternative title: “Ante up for arguments.”

So a few days ago I made a post about the tactics I remember from my youth.

Actual disruption and propagandists that filled little girls’ heads with emotionally charged political shit and encouraged them to, “stawt convuhsayshuns uwu” to, “change society.” And we’re talking kids being emotionally blackmailed to accept many of these subjective things as truth.

Taught to argue with other children, the age where they weren’t even really clued in on how to read or argue with academic buffoonery or emotionally charged appeals to authority.

I remember quite well the interactions.

Babby Radfem: “Our society is racist.”

Me: “No it isn’t. Societies can’t be racist, only the people in them.”

Babby Radfem starts citing known examples of racism talking about slavery.

Me: “Yes I know you can talk about things that happened, that doesn’t mean society is racist, it means there are racists in it.”

Babby Radfem: “Proof? You have any proof? :^) Because I have proof of what I’m saying! So YOU have proof for what you’re saying?”

And you have to understand; these little socio-politically programmed children didn’t just waltz into a library and grab up some Feminist Book of Statistics. They were coached, they were groomed, they were armed with bogus academia huffandpuff and then set loose to go after kids who’d never even heard of these issues before.

In my case, I learned what the concept of rape was because a baby radical feminist informed me because I was a boy, and, “epidemic societal rape” was a thing, that she could never wholly trust me of be comfortable around me, because, “men in our society are so violent and rape women.” Not really an appropriate mindset for a girl under the age of 7. Or a boy, for that matter.

It’s at that point they’d put on this big performance with that smug, disgusting expression on their face, setting up a bunch of articles and examples of things that’d happened in the past and examples of singular racist assholes operating, conflating that deliberately with, “a racist society.” Because you know, if one member of the hivemind super colony acts bad, I guess to socialists that’s, “proof” that “society” didn’t do its job in programming them right, or something.

And it’s at this point that no matter what you say, they aren’t looking for a reasonable discussion where you respect one another’s positions and perspectives, they’re looking for a show trial, and they think they’re being clever by trying to make you defend the actions of actual racists, since in their minds, you’re denying their actions ever happened.

No matter what you say, like broken interfaces, they’ll just sit there smugly reminding you, “you aren’t proving society isn’t racist yet! Do you even have an argument? Do you have proof? Any actual PROOF, not emotionally charged denials? Still not seeing any proof of what you’re saying. Guess you don’t have an argument. I’m sorry, I don’t accept crybabying nuh-uhs, I’m a rational person with a scientific mind :^)”

I say again, this shit, these big blowhard guns, were brought out and used on me. I was fucking 5, at the time. It’s not like I was going to stand up, shout, “Foucult was a boy toucher and a monster!” and show the 10 page report with bibliographed citations. You can’t spur of the moment refute someone handed a book wwwwaay about their age range just to tell you bogus statistics like women only make 50-75% of what a white man makes, “for the same job,” that demands you also spur of the moment disprove what they’re saying in order to dispute or disregard it at all.

Then plays to the peers around you like your outrage over the things you’re being accused of by proxy of being a boy, is just because you don’t like, “hearing the truth.”

And you know what this behavior influenced? Yeah. Annoying Youtube Atheists of the 00s. I’m an atheist, but the difference between me and An Annoying Youtube Atheist, is I don’t make not participating in an organized religion or believing in supernatural creators. While the other considers themselves an intellectual for arguing with probably the easiest arguments to disprove and discredit you can possibly engage.

So when I talk about shit like this that I witnessed and observed happening in the fucking late 80s, early 90s, of course I’m not going to have “proof.” Who the hell happens to have examples of such a random a sporadic thing in the wild? The odds are literally a million times better now than they were when our communication and interactions were in person, without internet, with only access to the information resources in the books you had in your local library or in your house.

The, 1.) Inflammatory Statement 2.) Whipping out a book that may as well have been written by Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro for all the bias it has 3.) “Here’s my proof. You have proof? Any proof to source your beliefs, or do you just have feefees? :^)” approach, predates on people being both unfamiliar with the subject matter, as well as not having the resources to effectively dispute the claims.

It’s predatory, it’s deceptive, and it is used to socially browbeat women into their corners, whom them become like enablers and believers and supports in the pew after their cryfests, powwows and ‘come to socialist Jesus’ moment.

But no, I don’t currently possess any proof of this phenomenon or effect, and the mercurial social nature of young girls means catching this interaction in the wild is very unlikely. Which is exactly why that disingenuous request for, “Proof? :^)” is so disgusting.

Even when you HAD proof, the next step after isn’t to concede they’re wrong. It usually went in a number of ways.

1.) The person requesting proof goes dead inside and ignores what you’re saying, and if they respond at all, it’s simply to speak as if you hadn’t just shown them the proof, still arguing as if it wasn’t shown. I guess in a silly attempt to socially override the new information from the discussion and give the speaker the burden of proof to try and make it stick to their denial filled, teflon minds.

2.) They meet all the effort taken to argue with stupid shit that wastes your time and energy. Replying to a thorough rebuttal that rebukes and dismantles the things they are saying with, “KUNG POW PENIS, *GIGGLE*” or just going “DURRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!” and giggling to show they don’t actually care what you have to say and won’t take you seriously. This one is done alone or only when they have other supporters there that won’t accept opposition as legit or genuine, proof or not.

3.) They’ll simply retreat and then scream if you follow them. If they retreat, the conversation effectively ends, and they won’t hear any more of it since it threatens to challenge them, OR they simply wanted to convince people to take what they have to say as fact and it’s a waste of their time to sell lies to people that know they’re lies. But they will scream and make the priority that you’re apparently following or harassing them, when they see argument is futile.

4.) They’ll nod along and pretend you’ve corrected them when you demonstrate you aren’t going to believe what they say, because you have both proof and conviction that their argument is weak, they don’t have a leg to stand on, or you throw in their face you know what they are. But, they won’t retract their stance, they’ll simply go on to, “stawt that convuhsayshun” with someone else, to try and convince them of their politically charged talking point.

5.) They’ll start crying or looking like a kid with their hands caught in a cookie jar, and admit, “I was just twying to stawt a... convuhsayshun..” Which is code that means, “I was trying to propagandize and make you think this thing was true, and make you mad about it as if it was the truth.” This typically happened when I called them out in front of adults that also didn’t agree with the things she was saying, had been programmed to say, and was around adults that could cite proof that what they were saying was false.

It happened so often I realized that at some point it might be in my best interests, to at least THINK about how to prove arguments to random strangers.

In the past, being sidewound by baby radical feminists that, “just started conversations” around the water cooler, axes to grind disguised as random conversations, was a thing. They were like social guerillas or velociraptors. But they were always tangentially rooted in whatever thing they’d been handed to read in order to sound smart.

So, if you knew the contemporary radical feminist talking points, had the time, literacy and resources to research and understand the holes in their claims, where they substituted for integrity, you could unravel them. Or could critique things like sample size or the likelihood they arrived at their conclusion and worked backwards to meet the result they were looking for, or started with a faulty premise.

And when they tried to stretch and flex and get believers and followers, presenting these, “facts” (that were not facts, but lies, subjective talking points, or just feelings) trying to use the trust bonds of friendship to get people to accept them as true for risk of hurting the relationship and their friend’s feelings (an exploitation of people, by the way) you could dispute them.

But they really do not like that, and once you reveal yourself as someone capable of shooting holes in what they say, they’ll only bring out their talking points to your mutual friends when you, ye that has identified yourself as capable of disputing what they say, aren’t around to dispute them.

Pre-internet, pre-cell phone, this was the methodology by which radical feminist zealotry was reproduced among young girls and young women. And drove them absolutely fucking nuts for a few years, until they resolved it and came back to reality. For one reason or another.

But do I have proof of this? Not on hand.

[mtvswatches]

10 Things I Hate About You

Obligatory soundtrack 

1) The late 90s/early 00s were filled with contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays - Julia Stiles starred in three of those, coincidentally - but, in my opinion, none has been more iconic than 10 Things I Hate About You. It’s been over 20 years since the movie was released, and it’s certainly become a teen/rom-com classic. It’s definitely a feel-good movie, and even though it obviously had great source material to work with, it did so in such a unique and fun way. And it was kind of woke for its time, too.

Disclaimer: I am a bit afraid this whole review will turn into me taking screenshots of the movie and just writing “iconic.” You’ve been fairly warned.

Anyway, let’s get into it!

3) I really love how they managed the “show, don’t tell” technique with Kat’s introduction. Her first scene really shows who she is – a jaded, kind of rebellious teenager, who marches to the beat of her own drum. Or to the beat of Joan Jett’s drum…

She’s shown as the opposite of the other girls, but it doesn’t feel like a criticism of the other girls' more cheerful, sunny disposition. We very quickly learn what she is like, but we have yet to find out why.

4) The next characters we meet are Cameron and the school’s guidance counselor. Cameron is the new student and the guidance counselor is just…

I love her. And Allison Janney proves how talented an actress she is by making the token counselor character both memorable and unique.

5) We also meet Patrick Verona, the resident Bad Boy who had “exposed himself” in the cafeteria. Oh, Heath Ledger, you are truly missed!

6) Michael Eckman  shows Cameron around and he basically delivers the token “school cliques scene”, and since I’m not American, I’ve always wondered if this is a real thing in schools? Like, are there really so many cliques that are so visually different from one another? Each group dressing in a particular style and hanging out at a specific spot? Anyhow, the cliques here are the beautiful people (or rather, the assholes), the coffee kids (?), the white Rastas (or white stoners), the cowboys (?), and the yuppies.

7) Michael’s tour gets cut short when Cameron spots Bianca, and he’s instantly infatuated with her. I’ve always found it hard to root for Cameron at first because I’m not really a fan of insta-love, and he ends up doing A LOT of shady things for a girl who he doesn’t know AT ALL. But more on that later. In fact, the movie kind of makes a point of how ridiculous it is for Cameron to be in instant-love with Bianca by having her deliver this little lecture on love:

BIANCA: Yeah, but see, there's a difference between like and love. Because I like my Skechers, but I love my Prada backpack.

CHASTITY: But I love my Skechers.

BIANCA: That's because you don't have a Prada backpack.

Bianca clearly grows a lot over the course of the movie, but it’s clear that Cameron was in love with her appearance and not her brains or personality, which makes his quest to sweep her off her feet misguided at best.

8) And then Michael presents the main plot point…

The question then is, how is Cameron going to get the girl? It’s his quest to get a date with Bianca that creates a domino effect that brings all the characters together. 

9) See what I mean? ICONIC!

And can I say that I just love Kat? Not only is she smart, but also, she didn’t take any bullshit from anyone, especially not males. She was a feminist before being a feminist was cool. And she does grow a lot. 

10) Okay, two things, A) I love Mr. Morgan, and B) foreshadowing? Sort of?

11) Iconic.

12) Michael seems to have a lot of preconceptions about Bianca – and most of them were kind of accurate, at least at the start of the film. She was kind of vapid and shallow and self-absorbed. For someone who believes that Bianca is not only completely out of Cameron’s league but also not worthy, he does get very involved in trying to get Bianca to date Cameron.

13) This is one of my favorite lines in the movie, probably because it sounds a lot like Buffyspeak…

14) This is so random…

And the movie does have a lot of these little moments of slapstick comedy that almost seem to belong to a different type of movie, but for some reason, they work?

15) And this reminds me of the Veronica Mars of yore, the one I used to love…

16) We meet Cat and Bianca’s dad, and he is very overbearing at first, but he truly grows on you once you understand where all his rules are coming from. And of course, he establishes The Rule, which sets off the movie’s shenanigans – Bianca cannot date unless Kate does.

17) Bianca does prove a lot of Michael’s preconceptions right during her interaction with Cameron, who asks her out on a date, and even though he has been tutoring her she can’t remember his name and after he reminds her of it, she calls him “Curtis.” Bianca very clearly sees in Cameron the solution to her dating problem, and she very obviously manipulates him when it’s clear she’s not interested in dating him. She’ll get him to do the dirty work, and then let Joey rip the rewards. On the one hand, this is wrong. On the other hand, Cameron sort of had it coming? He was only interested in Bianca because of her looks, and he was about to manipulate Kat with total disregard for her feelings, so...

18) So Michael and Cameron set out to find a match for scary Kat. And what do you know…?

They figure the only way to convince Patrick to date Kat is by paying him, except they don’t have any money. So they turn to Joey, who gladly agrees to invest if it means this will get her Bianca.

19) Patrick and Joey strike a deal, and let me tell you, this deal never made any sense to me? Like, after some bargaining Joey agrees to pay Patrick 50 dollars? And I might be daft but how would Patrick be making a profit here? If he took her out, he’d be spending most of that on the date, making the whole thing pointless if he’s not making a profit? And Joey was supposed to be loaded, so why not offer more than that, to begin with?

20) I really love how Patrick assumed all he’d need to do was say hello and Kat would be at his feet, and she gloriously turned him down and put him in his place. He tries again the next day and he gets turns down, again. And I can’t blame her, he was acting like an entitled douchebag and assuming she’d want to jump his bones only because he was hot and asking her to go out, like that’s all it’d take.

21) And Joey gets a little bit of what’s coming to him…

22) This leads to Kat getting into an argument with her dad, making a lot of valid points…

WALTER: Is this about Sarah Lawrence? Are you punishing me because I want you to stay close to home? KAT: Aren't you punishing me because Mom left? WALTER: You think you could leave her out of this? KAT: Fine. Then stop making my decisions for me. WALTER: I'm your father. That's my right. KAT: So what I want doesn't matter. WALTER: You're 18. You don't know what you want. And you won't know what you want till you're 45, and even if you get it, you'll be too old to use it. KAT: I want to go to an east coast school! I want you to trust me to make my own choices... and I want you to stop trying to control my life just because you can't control yours!

I can see both sides of this argument, though. He wasn’t punishing her because her mom left, I think he was just afraid they’ll get hurt again and that’s why he was so overprotective. And Kat had just crashed her car on purpose, so I really don’t understand how she managed to turn the whole thing against her father?

23) Patrick renegotiates the terms of his agreement with Joey, demanding a 100 bucks per date. He can’t have had getting something for Kat as his goal at this point, but I think he was just trying to screw Joey over as much as possible, which kudos to him.

24) Michael and Cameron approach Patrick and inform him that they’re actually the masterminds behind this date-Kat plan, and they agree to help him woo her. And I get that Kat was not the most agreeable person to begin with, but it’s still very disheartening to see that literally no one considered her feelings in this whole thing? Like, all of them were so proud they were playing Joey, but she was the one getting played the worst? And Bianca even allows Cameron to go inside Kat’s room and go through all her private things? Everyone was an asshole in this movie, is all I’m saying.

25)

26) And then…

Probably in spite of herself, he managed to get through her shell a little bit.

27) Bianca finally begs her sister to go to the party so that she can go, and what do you know? Kat does have a heart after all, and she agrees to show.

28) Which leads to…

29) Kat seems very happy to see Patrick at her door, although she quickly puts the bitch rest-face back on and pretends his keeping his word and coming to get her did not affect her at all…

30) So, now that she got to the party and gets to hang out with Joey, Bianca demands her sister do not address her in public, and I’m like, wtf?! Kat then begs her to listen, and again, Bianca shrugs her off and tells her to go off and “enjoy her adolescence”, which pisses Kat off and probably hurts her, too. So she decides to enjoy her adolescence the way everyone seems to do, getting trashed and embarrassing themselves.

31) Further evidence that Bianca was, indeed, an asshole… Cameron is the reason she got to go out at all – after he pulled off this elaborate plan to get her sister a date – and she manipulated him by feigning to be interested in him, and now…

But karma is a bitch because Joey might be the most popular boy in school – god knows why! – but he’s as dull as dishwater, and she quickly finds herself regretting her decision to brush Cameron off in favor of Joey.

32) Meanwhile, Kat is truly enjoying her adolescence…

And thank god Patrick was there to catch her because if he hadn’t, I don’t think anyone would’ve helped her.

33) I really love Patrick’s pep talk to Cameron…

CAMERON: It's off, okay? The whole thing's off. PATRICK: What are you talking about? CAMERON: She never wanted me. She wanted Joey the whole time. PATRICK: Cameron, do you like the girl? CAMERON: Yeah. PATRICK: And is she worth all this trouble? CAMERON: I thought she was, but, you know, l... PATRICK: Well, she is or she isn't. See, first of all, Joey is not half the man you are. Secondly, don't let anyone ever make you feel like you don't deserve what you want.

34) And Patrick taking care of drunk Kat is the sweetest thing ever…

35) Of course, now that Bianca no longer wants to hang out with Joey and her friend leaves her high and dry, she asks Cameron for a ride home.

36) On the way home, Kat actually opens up to Patrick, a lot. She admits she’d love to play in a band, and that her father wants her to be someone she’s not – her sister. Patrick admits that he doesn’t really get what everyone sees in Bianca, and Kat delivers what’s probably the greatest compliment you could get from her…

She puts herself out there… and gets shut down. Of course, Patrick was probably feeling remorse about the way he’d gotten to know this girl and the way he’d been playing her because now that he’d gotten to know her a little bit better, he could see that behind that badass façade she was extremely vulnerable and sensitive. Kat feels rejected and humiliated, and who can blame her? He’d been relentlessly pursuing her, and now that she’d opened up to him and offered to kiss him, he’d turned her down…

Anyway, Patrick’s behavior, later on, makes no sense after the way he acted here, but more on that further below.

37) Cameron finally confronts Bianca about her manipulative behavior, and to her credit, she is honest and owns up to being selfish when he calls her on it. And I guess she finally sees he’s worth it…

38)

39) This exchange is so silly and hilarious?

Like, Cameron’s answer seems silly, but what type of answer was Patrick expecting? Where could she have possibly kissed him? On the knees?

40) Kat is clearly not yet over the rejection…

41) See what I mean about the jokes in this movie?

And they just look over and go on talking, as if she hadn’t just nailed her teacher on the ass with an arrow...

42) Joey goes to Patrick yet again and offers 200 dollars to get him to take Kat to the prom. Patrick tells him he’s sick of this game, and Joey ups the ante and offers him 300 dollars, which Patrick somewhat begrudgingly takes. I just would really like to know if it was at this point that he thought he’d used this dirty money to buy something for Kate. Otherwise, he was still being a jerk...

43) This scene just gives me butterflies, okay?

And as charming as he is, Kat is still not over the humiliation of putting herself out there and being rejected.

44) Cameron returns the favor and gives Patrick some very good advice, the reason for that glorious scene later on…

CAMERON: Look, you embarrassed the girl. Sacrifice yourself on the altar of dignity and even the score.

This gets Patrick thinking…

45) And I’m just going to add the video here because this whole scene is just rom-com perfection and bless Heath Ledger again, okay? And why didn’t we get more of him singing in everything he did? His voice just makes me feel things, okay?

Seriously, how do you say no to that boy asking you to let him love you? You don’t say no, that’s how.

Same, Kat. Hard same.

46) Kat goes into detention and distracts the coach while Patrick attempts to escape out the window, and then…

And the teacher is looking directly at her tits? And while the distraction tactic worked, how was she not sent to the principal’s office? Patrick was sent to the principal’s office for “exposing himself” with a bratwurst while joking with the cafeteria lady, and Kat is literally exposing herself and she walks scot-free? Hmm.

47) Patrick and Kat have another heart to heart, and to be honest, it always melts this cold heart of mine…

PATRICK: So, what's your excuse? KAT: For? PATRICK: For acting the way we do? KAT: I don't like to do what people expect. Why should I live up to other people's expectations instead of my own? PATRICK: So, you disappoint 'em from the start and then you're covered, right? KAT: Something like that. PATRICK: Then you screwed up. KAT: How? PATRICK: You never disappointed me.

Same, Kat. SAME.

48) #SWOON

49) And this is the part that doesn’t make sense to me. They’ve just had this perfect date, and they’re growing closer, and they’ve kissed, and he clearly likes her. And the reason he didn’t kiss her after the party was that he was feeling guilty about the way he’d gotten her to go out with him and fall for him – through deception and manipulation. And now that they’re much closer and into each other, he tries very hard to get her to go to prom with him, pushing her in a way that makes her feel uncomfortable, and like, why? They’re clearly not the type of people who go to proms, so why not take Joey’s money and screw the deal? Why did he have to keep his promise? Why not be honest with Kat? Why not tell her, I like you a lot and this idiot is paying me to date you even though I’m honored to do that for free so why don’t we team up and scam him? I know the answer is “conflict”, but it’s always pissed me off.

50) Seriously, though, Cameron. Why?

51) In true teen-rom fashion, everyone needs to be paired up, right?

52) See what I mean about the jokes?

53) Loved the Dawson’s Creek reference…

Believe it or not, a lot of people thought DC was scandalous at the time. And DC was so naïve compared to its predecessors The OC or Gossip Girl…

54) Kat finally opens up to Bianca and explains why she has so many issues and why she doesn’t want to conform to high school’s social rules and expectations and stereotypical idea of “normalcy.” She’d had a less than stellar dating experience back when she was way too young and far too vulnerable with none other than Joey, who had slept with her and dumped her right after. Oh yeah, and it all happened right after her mom had left them. In an attempt to prevent the same thing from happening to her little sister, she had agreed to their dad’s rules, effectively preventing Bianca from experiencing anything on her own. It’s kind of a case of the pot calling the kettle black, considering she’d complained about the very same thing to her father.

55) Kat finally realizes she’s been unfair to her sister and decides to go to prom, to their father’s dismay. Kat even swallows her pride and actually apologizes to Patrick for questioning his motives to ask her to the prom, and he has the nerve to forgive her. Dude, you do have ulterior motives, and the girl you like is actually apologizing even though she’s done nothing wrong and you’re blatantly lying, and he doesn’t even bat an eyelash when he tells her “You’re forgiven.” I mean, I love Patrick, but still… not cool.

56) Bless Walter.

57) I guess they’re a thing, because why not?

58) And this is, among many other reasons, why I can’t hold anything against Patrick Veronica…

He got her favorite band to play in the prom.

59) Chastity is such a bitch for no reason? Like, she and Bianca were close friends, and then, all of a sudden, they aren’t? And she’s so mean to Bianca!

60) And leave it to Joey to ruin everything…

61) And I truly love that Bianca is the one to put him in his place…

62) See? He’s a good guy, he was just trying to protect his daughters the only way he knew how…

WALTER: Bianca did what? KAT: What's the matter, upset that I rubbed off on her? WALTER: No, impressed. Fathers don't like to admit it when their daughters are capable of running their own lives. It means we've become spectators. Bianca still lets me play a few innings. You've had me on the bench for years. And when you go to Sarah Lawrence I won't even be able to watch the game. KAT: When I go? WALTER: Oh, boy. Don't tell me you changed your mind. I already sent 'em a cheque

63) And I also have to include the video for this scene because it’s just… *chef’s kiss*… Julia Stiles absolutely nails this one, and it never fails to bring me to tears…

Same, Patrick. Same.

64) And while the fact that he doesn’t immediately run after her always has me screaming, he does make up for all of it…

KAT: A Fender Strat? Is it for me? PATRICK: Yeah, I thought you could use it, you know, when you start your band. Besides, I had some extra cash, you know. Some asshole paid me to take out this really great girl. KAT: Is that right? PATRICK: Yeah, but I screwed up. I, um... I fell for her. KAT: Really? PATRICK: It's not every day you find a girl who'll flash someone to get you out of detention. KAT: Oh, God. You can't just buy me a guitar every time you screw up, you know. PATRICK: Yeah, I know. But there's always drums and bass and maybe even one day a tambourine. KAT: And don't just think you can...

65) This movie is hardly a masterpiece, but it doesn’t intend to be either, and not every movie needs to be. It’s a feel-good movie, and it delivers on so many levels. It’s funny, it’s tropey, it’s cute, it’s romantic, it has a great soundtrack, and you just feel a whole lot better after watching it. It’s the 90s at its best, and that’s why it became a classic.

What I love the most, though, is Kat’s character development. We see this girl who is a badass and super smart, takes no bullshit, holds everyone accountable for their shitty behavior, and has a great wit. But she is not without flaws. She’s closed off because she has been hurt before, both by her mother and her first love. She holds everyone at bay because it’s easier that way. Throughout the movie, however, she shows empathy and a lot of vulnerability. And she soon finds out that she had been missing out on a lot of things by shielding her emotions. She’d missed out on having a good relationship with her sister and on finding love again. What is truly admiring about Kat, though, is that when she’s hurt the most and she has every reason to close herself off again, she does the exact opposite. She opens herself up not only in front of the guy she’s in love with but everyone. The shrew cries and bares her soul for the world to see. Regardless of the happy ending, I think that in itself s truly inspiring, don’t you? 

66) Bonus: bloopers!

67)  Hope you enjoyed my recap, and, as usual, if you’ve got this far, thank you for reading! If you enjoy my recaps and my blog, please consider supporting it on ko-fi. Thanks!

[newtgeiszler]

You don’t have to believe it but I happen to care about and respect your opinion specifically since I’ve been following you a long time. I’ve seen all of your fandoms. Pacific Rim, It, One Punch Man, My Hero Academia, TFTB. I was honestly asking you to convert ME by helping me understand your experience better and I offered my perspective but I guess that doesn’t appeal to you either which is fair enough since I’m anonymous.

you know what? maybe it's because some time has passed since you first came here but i respect that... a little. i think you definitely could have approached me a lot more respectfully. even if your tone wasn't intentionally rude it ended up being rude anyway. it's very difficult to respond to walls of text through the tumblr inbox, especially on mobile, where i can't look back on your message and reread it so i can more easily respond point by point.

if you're being genuine then i will be a little nicer, but the comparisons i made to being "skeptical" of other marginalized weren't for nothing. every argument a terf makes, no matter how convincing it is from a certain perspective, is just as backwards as any other right wing bigoted hate speech. think of how easily people can be convinced that immigration is bad despite how ridiculous that seems to a seemingly rational person. you know how they spread ideas like that? cherry picking, the favorite strategy of terfs everywhere. if ever seen a 100 link post showing incidences of trans people being evil and think "damn, what a good argument." wrong! and no, not just because it hurts trans people's feelings, it's objectively wrong. collecting a bunch of sources that agree with your opinion is not an intellectually honest way to prove a point. there could very well be just as many sources that prove the opposite point, your sources could have a right wing bias, there could be repeats (this is something i see a lot in those terf megalink posts) and most of the time it doesn't even prove the point on a basic level. like for example, you could give me 300 articles of trans women committing rape and they could all be unique stories and honorable journalism. what would that prove? you can't use that to extrapolate that trans women commit rape more often than cis women because you're not presenting a comparison. this is literally the kind of shit you learn in high school.

now i know what you're gonna say, "but i'm not saying trans women are rapists, i'm asking you why trans people are the genders they say they are" which is fair and i'll get to that but the reason why i even bring this up is because bigotry is always bigotry. i don't think there really is a quintessential difference between saying "trans women aren't women" and saying "trans women are rapists." they are both saying that trans women can't get the resources they need from feminism despite the fact that they provably have a high rate of suffering misogynistic violence.

culture changes. at a certain time, trans women might say "i am a biological male but i'm a woman" and they may tack on "spiritually" if they felt that way about it. or maybe "socially." but now some trans people will say our sex is already our gender. why? because they both exist on spectrums--which is something i hope you're already aware of--and are, as a result, both constructs. this is where a lot of "skeptics" get lost: "sex isn't a construct, it's physical. it's your genitals, your chromosomes, your secondary sex characteristics etc etc." exactly, right? so if your sex is a series of physical characteristics why do people--like you, who just said this--say "sex doesn't change" when all of those but one (chromosomes--and most people aren't that interested in changing that and there isn't much purpose to anyway) can change. how is changing almost every single characteristic of your sex not changing your sex? simply because i can't change the one characteristic that absolutely no one can see--except a geneticist who i may or may not ever consult in my life! really, when your only thread of saying i'm for sure female is getting my chromosomes analysed that's not much of an argument for material reality is it. no i mean think about it like a human being, not a computer or something. i'm "not technically male" because i've got xx chromosomes the same way i'm "not technically human" because when you think about it i'm really just atoms. "but it's not the same" you say "being male and have xx chromosomes are mutually exclusive, being a human and being atoms are not." kay why? everything has meaning because of what people ascribe to it. why is being a human a meaningful distinction from being a clump of atoms? why are my chromosomes meaningful when they will never do anything in my life? why am i not a male when the whole world's perception of me is colored by the gender they see me as and vice versa? but those chromosomes will never be on anyone's mind unless they are a bigot (or i guess a geneticist if i ever need one for some strange reason)

kay, this is a lot, this is so much. this is a huge conversation with a lot, a LOT of ground, especially at 4:30 am and i haven't slept. especially publicly. it's not easy to put me on the spot and be like "defend your right to be seen as how you perceive yourself." i can give you a lot of answers that are backed politically, sociologically, and scientifically--and maybe i will a little later, but that's really hard right now because that's so much to parse--but the shortest and possibly the best answer because it's the nice thing to do is to just take trans people's understanding of ourselves at our word. i know i'm not the nicest person, i often wish i was a lot nicer than i am. it can be very difficult to be kind to people when life is so frustrating and complicated. but being skeptical of trans people because you personally don't understand it is a particular cruelness. why am i a man? because i can look in the mirror and say, and KNOW, "i am happier with the word perceiving me as a man" and no, mysterious stranger, by that i don't mean "i would be happier if i didn't experience sexism or have periods" because unfortunately, i still do experience sexism, and while i don't really have periods, i do get dysphoric. i am happier being CALLED a man, i am happier being given a man's name by my mom, i am happier having changed that name legally, i am happier with a little "m" on my driver's license, i am happier with a family where every single person who i see regularly respects my gender--calls me their brother, their son, their grandson, their nephew. i am not in a relationship but i would be happy to be called a boyfriend or a husband. i am happy considering myself a part of the mlm community. and for every single one of those things i would be miserable to have it any other way. i lived that life. i know which side makes me happier. it's very easy for me to see that i am a trans man, and it's something a cis person would never understand. but i don't understand what it's like to experience a lot of things. doesn't mean i have any right to be skeptical those experiences exist. again, the parallels to other bigotry are inescapable. mras will say misogyny isn't real because they don't know what it's like to experience it. lack if empathy is not a valid argument

i am trying to wrap this up so i'll just end it on one more thing: i hope i've given you something to think about, but if you don't change your mind, that won't mean i'm wrong. i never claimed to be the best debater in the first place, but in any case, i watch a lot of leftubers, a lot of debunking anti-sjw vids, a lot of prageru debunking vids, etc etc. i've seen the insane levels of gish galloping some leftists have tasked themselves with debunking for a fucking job. i know that 99.9% of the time it falls on deaf ears. it sucks. maybe this huge wall of text will be another one to fall on deaf ears. maybe it won't. but for now if i still haven't convinced you i would at least like to ask that you watch some leftubers. pretty much any leftuber. there's loads of great ones. some controversial ones but i like a lot of them too. pretty much all of them, from the feminists to the marxists to the anarchists, are all pro trans. being anti trans is pretty out of fashion for all but two groups of people: right wingers and terfs. like, if i made a comprehensive list of everyone with public opinions on trans people you'd see a lot more dogshit on the transphobe side than the ally side. you ever think it's maybe not a good thing if right wingers are doing it?

i hope this brick shithouse of a post finds you well. try not to be an asshole in the future. peace ✌

[safflowerseason]

What would Amy think about Bernie, Biden, Warren, and Trump?

What would Dan think about Bernie, Biden, Warren, and Trump?

Hi! What a fascinating question! I also saw your q about Dan, but I’m actually going to talk about them in the same post, if that’s okay, because I think it’s more interesting to think about them side by side :-) (and also because fundamentally…I think Dan would just follow Amy). Also, I’m approaching this question as if Dan and Amy are considering Bernie, Biden, and Warren as candidates, and thinking less about their politics. In Veep, one’s policies always matter less than..literally everything else. 

Also, I’m just going to assume that we’re talking about S1-S6 Amy and Dan, not Dark!Amy or Sex-Psychopath Dan of S7. Both of them belong at Fox News, to be honest. And in general…so much has changed from the earliest seasons of the show! I’ll get into this in more detail below, but Veep is fundamentally a show about establishment politics, and right now, we’re in a moment where multiple politicians are trying to tear down that establishment. So in that sense, it’s a difficult comparison!

As for Trump, I’m going to sidestep this question, slightly, because I think Trump is now too “big” for Veep comparisons. On his own, without being propped up by a corrupt Congress and evil billionaires, Trump is a narcissistic buffoon. But he has now become the face of a much larger and profoundly anti-democratic, racist, oligarchic, and patriarchal movement. I find it hard to talk about Trump now without placing him in the context of the global struggle for a more just, equal, open, and healthy society. And Veep…is not really equipped to explore these fundamental questions about how to make the world better, and how to fight those in power who actively want to oppress people. Veep, in its best years, was interested in the everyday grind of establishment politics: the banalities, the absurdities, the miniature power plays, the balance between political ideals and the dirty reality of achieving those ideals. Trump and his ilk are only interested in enriching themselves to the detriment of everyone else, and that…lack of nuance doesn’t really fit with Veep’s approach to politics. Mandel-era Veep is more focused on the narcissism of politicians, to be sure, but he completely skips over the real-world stakes of that narcissism. So neither era of the show is really structured to deal with the realities of Trump in 2020.

So I’ll just say that Trump is of the opposite party than Dan and Amy, who are political strategists working for a Democrat-equivalent, and so they’d never consider working for him in the first place. Amy, especially S1-S4 Amy, would find him nothing more than a repulsive, empty gasbag shouting into the void. Dan might recognize and respect Trump’s ability to manipulate the media (the one instinctive skill Trump possesses), but he’d never go work for him. Not to mention…the version of Dan who is visibly disturbed by Teddy’s harassment of Jonah would never work for a man who has sexually assaulted multiple women (and likely raped women as well).

As for the others, it’s a really interesting question! It’s a lot easier with these kinds of “Veep/real-world” questions to focus on intra-party dynamics, which was one of the show’s sweet spots.

Biden sort of strikes me as a Doyle-like figure…he’s been around forever, but doesn’t exactly inspire much political fervor. Doyle, like Biden, would probably be a pretty limp-dick candidate. It’s hard for me to see Dan or Amy getting very excited about Biden in the face of other candidates with more charisma. If this were a regular political primary (ie, no Trump), I think they’d both pass him over in favor of someone younger. (Also, if it were a regular election year, there’s no way Biden would be running. Notice how Doyle is done running for things in the Veep universe). Dan, especially, seems to be drawn to politicians who perform (superficially) well on TV, such as Danny Chung or Tom James. Still, because Biden has been around forever and has a lot of establishment friends, they can’t exactly write him off. Biden is capable of pulling a lot of strings behind the scenes that can change the entire political landscape in an instant (see Jim Clyburn’s last minute endorsement in the South Carolina primary). 

As for Bernie…the thing about Bernie is that he’s a very anti-mainstream politician, and, for better or for worse, Dan and Amy are absolutely mainstream political strategists. They are not interested in upending the status quo. Amy did not invest in Selina so early on because she was planning to burn down DC and establish a feminist political utopia. Yes, she absolutely has more progressive causes, but Selina would never eschew Wall Street donors because she believes the whole system is fundamentally broken and billionaires are inherently immoral. (Remember, Selina is the daughter of a corrupt millionaire, who herself married a corrupt millionaire…)

I was reading a Vox article about this the other day (it was a conversation between Ezra Klein and Matthew Iglesias about what a Biden administration vs. a Bernie administration would look like.) I felt this line summed up S1-S4 of Veep perfectly: 

“To the extent that the “establishment” means anything to me, it does mean that kind of nexus of Democrats who migrate back and forth onto K Street and other business community-type things. That wing of the party will have its share of the pie in a Biden administration.” 

This is what Veep S1-S4 is exploring. There’s an ever-evolving migration flow that exists between the White House and Capitol Hill and all the lobbying and consulting firms. Dan and Amy do exactly this in S4—they leave the White House and migrate to lobbying. And while to the audience it’s presented as a big change for both of them, in the big scheme of things, it’s really not. And this is what Ben proposes to Dan and Kent, regarding BKD, because it’s just the natural order of things for D.C. “lifers.” Eventually, you parlay your White House/campaign experience into some downtown consulting firm (if you have more of a conscience, you work for a big non-profit, and if you really have no conscience, you go work for Wall Street). Maybe, if you have a candidate who really blows up, you’ll end up in the White House again, but also maybe not—it doesn’t matter, you can still make a very, very good living consulting for congressmen and influencing policy from the outside.

Anyway, so because Bernie positioned his candidacy as an insurgency against the D.C. establishment, I don’t think Dan and Amy would support him, even if they might appreciate some of his policies, and even though he obviously stands at the head of a powerful political movement. Dan and Amy are establishment strategists, and they are pragmatists above all. D.C. politics is all about making alliances with people you don’t actually respect, and Bernie has, according to some, never really played that game.  

As for Warren…I can definitely see Amy being drawn to her, especially S1-S4 Amy. I do think Amy is drawn to working for women, for a variety of reasons. I could see her, like, consulting on Warren’s campaign from afar…probably to try and reign in Warren’s idealism. Dan would probably get all riled up about Warren’s wonkish tendencies and how they translate on camera. Warren was more willing to play with the establishment than Bernie was, so I think Dan and Amy would be more open to working with her even though her ideas were similarly radical. 

We do see, in S5, Amy and Dan working to elect Jonah…but he is presented as far less anti-establishment in that season. And then in S6, his stupidity just becomes a tool of the Tanzes, an evil billionaire if there ever was one. So…for me, answering this question really comes down the establishment dimension of Veep as a show. Dan and Amy aren’t revolutionaries. In so much as they want to effect change, they want to do it from the inside of the existing political system. 

[fightmeyeats]

Wrath Month: Probably Not Gonna Calm Down

I feel very frustrated by @taylorswift​’s “You Need to Calm Down” (currently “#3 On Trending” on youtube). This is not a particularly hot take.

Corporate pride tends to be highly contested in general: on the one hand, some argue that it's helpful to LGBT+ youth to see themselves represented in the hegemony and suggest that maybe it’s better that corporations are courting LGBT+ dollars over the money of homophobes; on the other, normalization (especially normalization through capitalist/corporate interests) has historically been complicit in the further marginalization of many queer folks--especially trans women of color. To some, “You Need to Calm Down” is simply one example of corporate pride, and therefore represents the same potential for an ambiguous reading. Personally, I have tried to imagine whether this song would have meant anything useful to me as a closeted queer teen; I remember looking desperately for queer themes in “straight” music, and I remember being slightly older (18, maybe?) watching Hayley Kiyoko’s “Girls like Girls” on a loop and how much my first exposure to actually queer music produced by actually queer artists meant to me, and I don’t think even that version of me would have felt connected to Taylor Swift’s attempt to reconcile her experience as a celebrity who has literally capitalized off of internet drama to the harassment queer folks experience daily for existing as themselves.

The Onion’s article “Taylor Swift Inspires Teen To Come Out As Straight Woman Needing To Be At Center Of Gay Rights Narrative” does a great job of simplifying why exactly this video and song is so exhausting to me and many other LGBTQ+ folks: the author argues that Taylor Swift uses “LGBTQ iconography to advance her career” and that, rather than letting people speak for themselves and control their own narratives, she’s making Pride Month about herself. The Atlantic and Vox both have run more in-depth articles breaking down the multitude of reasons why this song is deservedly coming under fire, which I highly recommend reading.

One counter argument I’ve seen here and there is that Taylor Swift is actually not a straight woman centering a gay rights narrative around herself--now that she’s said the word “gay” in a non-negative way in a song, its only a matter of time before she comes out! So one of the things I want to emphasize here is that while I personally don’t believe she’s queer (and per Swift’s own tumblr post explaining why she didn’t kiss Katy Perry in the music video where she says “To be an ally is to understand the difference between advocating and baiting. Anyone trying to twist this positivity into something it isn’t needs to calm down. It costs zero dollars to not step on our gowns.” she doesn’t seem to anticipate coming out either), regardless of whether or not she turns out not to be straight, this song and its lyrics are appropriating LGBTQ iconography to advance her career, and Swift is using queer folks as accessories to perform “wokeness” and draw parallels between herself and actual marginalized communities for her own gain. She may end the music video with directions to sign her petition for Senate support of the Equality Act, but the links in the song description are all promotion for her song, her merch, and her social media accounts. She does not even follow through on the optics of social justice.

The main way I want to trace this argument is through her fundamental misunderstanding and, more significantly, misrepresentation of what homophobia is.Throughout the song/music video Swift is consistently trying to render compatible her own supposed experiences with being bullied/criticized on the internet to the violence of homophobia which is, quite frankly, fucking wild. She sings: “Say it in the street, that's a knock-out / But you say it in a Tweet, that's a cop-out.” What seems to be the intended interpretation of this line is that negative interactions online are cowardly, because people are “hiding” behind usernames and icons, rather than being “brave” enough to offer direct criticism and publicly/visibly own their words; I am not going to go into the potentials of this line of conversation, because I do think in another context (and said by other people) real conversations about the potentials and pitfalls of online culture in regards to purity/call-out culture, social activism/organizing, and bullying can be and are already being had. What I want to point out here is the cognitive dissonance: who can say anything in the street to someone as rich, privileged, and insulated as Taylor Swift? If Swift only accepts criticism delivered in person, she doesn’t accept criticism and she might as well own up to that. And when she is trying to tie this into a commentary on homophobia, maybe she should have considered for two seconds the kind of actual danger queer folks (especially trans and gender non-conforming) are actually in on the streets every day while she’s in a mansion/penthouse apartment (and to that extent, the gentrified trailer park imagery didn’t sit to well with me either, but I’ll get into the discussion of class later on). Queer folks really are getting knocked-out in the streets (1, 2, 3). Furthermore, in her desperate attempt to center her psuedo-discourse on homophobia and queer liberation around herself, she sings the lines: “But I've learned a lesson that stressin' and obsessin' / 'bout somebody else is no fun / And snakes and stones never broke my bones”. I’m not really surprised that it doesn’t “break her bones,” given how successfully she has marketed and monetized her feuds and her own victimhood; this is just a newnother rebranding of said victimized persona, and even though she may not be bothered, there are real stakes to it beyond the “lack of fun”.

So let’s get into it. As I said before, Swift is dangerously misrepresenting what homophobia is and what it looks like, namely through the use of a progress “wrong side of history” narrative. The lines run “Why are you mad when you could be GLAAD?...Sunshine on the street at the parade / But you would rather be in the dark ages” and the music video shows what Kornhaber, writing for The Atlantic, aptly describes as “an unwashed-looking mob” holding childish signs with misspellings and the all-time classic “Adam + Eve Not Adam + Steve.” Korhnaber points out the more common use of “God Hates Fags” signs; personally, I’ve also seen a lot of the “HolyBible” “After Death, the Judgement” signs. In Swift’s narrative, homophobia looks like the obvious, regressive, primitive villain; the already defeated. Perhaps worse, it looks like the rural poor, against the backdrop of rich queer celebrities. This narrative works to render invisible the poor-and-queer, and it undermines the real dangers homophobic violence poses by imagining homophobia has already lost. Imagining homophobia as thirteen unwashed rural poor people who can’t spell the word “moron” obscures the reality that there are also the Mike Pences and the Philip Anschutzs and the laundry list of other rich and connected anti-LGBT politicians, activists, and donors who have very real effects on the lives of the disabled, people of color, women, LGBTQ+ folks, the poor, immigrants, and all the intersections thereof. This also ties into the way Swift puts forward the solution “You just need to take several seats and then try to restore the peace / And control your urges to scream about all the people you hate.” As meaningless as these lines are overall, the insinuation that there is a “peace” that we can be “restored” to that would benefit the marginalized and oppressed is ridiculous and harmful, and again misrepresents the problem. Moreover, it suggests the problem could be understood as one of bodily discipline: if homophobes “controlled” themselves better, didn’t scream so much, there wouldn’t be a problem--this gets us back to the problematics of representing homophobia as exclusively the undisciplined poor, rather than the rich and connected. It also leaves room for the potential insinuation that everybody who is angry on the internet needs to calm down; I’ve seen a lot of jokes that this Pride Month, the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, we’re returning to our rebel roots and also celebrating Wrath. I certainly don’t plan to calm down, thanks anyway, Taylor. 

In this same vein lets consider the much quoted line: “'Cause shade never made anybody less gay”. This was the first line I heard from the song, and my immediate problem with it was, as Korhnaber also points out, that throwing shade comes from queer communities of color, and “there are many ways to describe a parent who disowns a trans kid, or a lawmaker who tries to nullify same-sex marriages, or a church member who crashes a gay soldier’s funeral. Shady isn’t one.”

Swift hides from potential criticism/backlash behind a psuedo-feminist “female solidarity” with lines such as: “And we see you over there on the internet / Comparing all the girls who are killing it / But we figured you out / We all know now we all got crowns.” While there certainly are people who try to pit women against each other on the internet, again this is something which Taylor Swift has directly utilized multiple times to make herself money. I’m glad celebrities know they’ve all got crowns, but in what world does this benefit the non-rich and famous?

[nebris]

Hating Valerie Solanas (And Loving Violent Men)

by Chavisa Woods 

My fourth book, and first full-length work of nonfiction will be released by Seven Stories Press in June. 100 Times (A Memoir of Sexism) is a 240-page memoir, written as in-scene vignettes, telling the stories of one hundred experiences of sexist discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual violence I have personally experienced and witnessed, beginning at age five, through the present day.

I recently shared an excerpt of this book on social media, and immediately an old friend who I’d long ago lost touch with, a man from the Midwest, began arguing with me, and compared me to Valerie Solanas. I could tell from the tone of his comment, he expected me to recoil at the mention of that name — Valerie Solanas — the direst of insults; queer female hysterical violent “femi-nazi” insanity personified. This name was meant to summon shame in me, like invoking some Goetic demon to bate and restrain my crazed feminism.

He’s not the only one who sees her that way. When so many people think Valerie Solanas, they think, “bat-shit crazy, violent, murderous, ridiculous, woman.”

In a recent season of the popular television show, American Horror Story, for instance, Solanas was depicted by Lena Dunham as a demented serial killer who led a cult of murderous feminists to kill heterosexual couples — kids hooking up in cars, happy newlyweds and such — in a bloody, nationwide feminist murder spree. This, of course, is a completely fictional narrative, and for the purposes of this show, Solanas’s epitomal work, The Scum Manifesto, was interpreted as a literal, earnest text. Dunham portrayed Solanas as a frumpy, grumpy, clownish homicidal lesbian.

In the mainstream media and collective consciousness, Solonas has been written off as a worthless artist, and remembered only for her violent act against Andy Warhol.

All of this got me thinking about unconscious bias, and what it takes for us to denounce a female artist’s historical worth, versus what it does for a man.

William Burroughs shot and killed his wife while drunk and high, playing a game they called “William Tell,” wherein his wife placed an apple on her head, and he shot it off. He missed, killed her, and later wrote about it, implying it was possible he subconsciously wanted to kill her, because he was gay and resented having a wife. He served only two weeks in jail for this slaughter. Because the homicide occurred in Mexico, and through a combination of bribery and fleeing the country, he avoided serving any prison sentence.

Burroughs, of course, is still widely celebrated as a great author. I, in fact, had a poem published in a literary magazine a few years ago, the cover adorned with a photograph of him holding a rifle. This image was considered darkly humorous.

Almost every other author I’ve spoken with about the ethics of celebrating Burroughs and his art points me in the direction of compassion; he had a drug problem, he and his wife were “in it together.”

After the murder of his wife, he served as a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters. His body of work still remains relevant, is widely taught in English and Writing curriculum in colleges, and is written about reverently in current scholarly articles and in major media outlets worldwide. He is generally thought of as good man. In his bio on Wikipedia, the slaughter of his wife doesn’t even come in until the sixth paragraph. (I am citing Wikipedia, because it represents the most current, popular, collective opinions of the general public, not as a scholarly reference.)

Valerie Solanas, on the other hand, shot Andy Warhol, not killing him, but severely injuring him. He died twenty years later from health complications possibly exacerbated by the injury, as well as a speed addiction.

Solanas and Warhol had a documented horrible working/personal relationship, rife with insult. She saw Warhol as constantly demeaning her privately and publicly, even after featuring her in one of his films.

Warhol agreed to look at a play she’d written, possibly to produce it. She gave him the only manuscript to read, and he (claimed he) lost it, though she believed he threw it away to spite her. This was the catalyst for the shooting.

Pablo Neruda raped a servant while he was visiting her country as a diplomat. He wrote about it quite matter-of-factly and unapologetically in his memoirs (I Confess that I have Lived, first published in 1974, in English in 1977):

One morning, I woke earlier than is my custom. I hid in the shadows to watch who passed by. From the back of the house, like a dark statue that walked, the most beautiful woman that I had ever seen in Ceylon entered, Tamil race, Pariah caste. She wore a red and gold sari of the cheapest cloth. On her unshod feet were heavy anklets. On each side of her nose shone two tiny red points. They were probably glass, but on her they looked like rubies.

She solemnly approached the toilet without giving me the slightest look, without acknowledging my existence, and disappeared with the sordid receptacle on her head, retreating with her goddess steps. She was so beautiful that despite her humble job, she left me disturbed. As if a wild animal had come out from the jungle, belonging to another existence, a separate world. I called to her with no result.

I then would leave some gift on her path, some silk or fruit. She would pass by without hearing or looking. Her dark beauty turned that miserable trip into the obligatory ceremony of an indifferent queen.

One morning, I decided to go for all, and grabbed her by the wrist and looked her in the face. There was no language I could speak to her. She allowed herself to be led by me smilelessly and soon was naked upon my bed. Her extremely slender waist, full hips, the overflowing cups of her breasts, made her exactly like the thousands year old sculptures in the south of India. The encounter was like that of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes open throughout, unmoved. She was right to regard me with contempt. The experience was not repeated.

No one remembers him for this.

Charles Bukowski is on video kicking and punching his girlfriend during an interview about his writing, and was said to have been physically abusive to multiple female partners. He is still celebrated worldwide as a great poet.

Louis Althusser strangled his wife to death in an act of cold-blooded murder. In his Wikipedia bio, he’s described as, “A French Marxist philosopher, whose arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism.”

As I write this, the murder of his wife doesn’t receive mention until the last paragraph, and then it simply says, “Althusser’s life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. In 1980, he killed his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, by strangling her.”

He is widely celebrated. The murder of his wife is mentioned only in the context of his mental illness.

Valerie Solanas suffered from Schizophrenia. She was also a victim of childhood incest. Her father repeatedly raped her, and then she was sent to live with her grandparents as a teenager, and then her grandfather raped her, and then she ran away from home and became a sex worker.

The shooting of Andy Warhol is currently the first sentence of her Wikipedia bio. She is widely regarded and repeatedly portrayed as a worthless, angry, bat-shit crazy piece of human garbage. Where is this compassion that we are asked to have for male artists, for her?

She was a brilliant artist. The SCUM Manifesto is a masterwork of literary protest art, which is often completely misread. Much of it is actually a point-by-point re-write of multiple of Freud’s writings. It is a parody.

In his essay The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman, Freud suggests that a good treatment for lesbians would be having their (most likely already hermaphroditic) ovaries, and genitals removed and replaced with grafted “real” female genitals.

Freud’s exact words:

The cases of male homosexuality which (have) been successful fulfilled the condition, which is not always present, of a very patent physical ‘hermaphroditism’. Any analogous treatment of female homosexuality is at present quite obscure. If it were to consist in removing what are probably hermaphroditic ovaries, and in grafting others, which are hoped to be of a single sex, there would be little prospect of its being applied in practice. A woman who has felt herself to be a man, and has loved in masculine fashion, will hardly let herself be forced into playing the part of a woman…

In The SCUM Manifesto, Solanas posits that a good “treatment” for straight men is to get their dicks chopped off: “When the male accepts his passivity, defines himself as a woman (males as well as females think men are women and women are men), and becomes a transvestite he loses his desire to screw (or to do anything else, for that matter; he fulfills himself as a drag queen) and gets his dick chopped off. He then achieves a continuous diffuse sexual feeling from ‘being a woman’. Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female.”

Freud’s texts are rife with suggestions of female castration and hysterectomies as treatments for all sorts of psychological troubles suffered by women, and in response, The SCUM Manifesto is infamous for suggesting castration might improve the behavior of men.

Freud posited that heterosexual women are sexually passive, engaging in sex only because they want children. He invented the theory of “penis envy.” He claimed that because girls do not have  penises, girls come to believe they have lost their penises, and eventually, seek to have male children in an attempt “to gain a penis.” He believed women, on some deep, subconscious level, viewed themselves as castrated males. In his theory of psychosexual development he posited that for women, sex (with males) may also be a subconscious attempt to gain a penis.

In his essay, The Taboo of Virginity, Freud writes: “We have learnt from the analysis of many neurotic women that they go through an early age in which they envy their brothers, their sign of masculinity and feel at a disadvantage and humiliated because of the lack of it (actually because of its diminished size) in themselves. We include this ‘envy for the penis’ in the ‘castration complex’.”

Solanas, replaces the envy of the penis, not only with envy of the vagina, but most often, with women’s emotional openness, complexity and individuality as the focus of men’s envy. She writes of men: “The female’s individuality, which he is acutely aware of, but which he doesn’t comprehend, and isn’t capable of relating to or grasping emotionally, frightens and upsets him and fills him with envy. “

At the time of the writing of The SCUM Manifesto, Freud was a celebrated figure in psychology, and his theories were being widely touted in academic and popular spheres alike. Solanas took issue with this, and wrote The SCUM Manifesto as a parody, mocking the popular, sexist, and hetero-centric thinking on gender and sexuality at the time. But the text is a reversal. In The SCUM Manifesto, Solanas directs everything Freud said with an equal amount of vigor and confidence back at men. So, instead of “female motherhood” being a primary drive, she reverses this to attack/analyze the “male sex drive” through the same line of thinking as Freud.

In his essay, Leonardo Da-Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, Freud hypothesizes that homosexuality in men stems from their relationship with their father and mother. He proposes that homosexuality (which he assumes is a bad thing) is caused by a relationship with a mother who is too tender to her son (as in all his texts, he repeatedly states that children are naturally sexually attracted to their parents of the opposite sex), and a mother who is, at the same time, too assertive and independent in relation to her own husband (the boy’s father.) This causes the boy to see his mother figure, who’s also an object of his  sexual desire in childhood, as a man, not a woman. And this makes the boy gay. He writes:

In all our male homosexual cases the subjects had had a very intense erotic attachment to a female person, as a rule their mother, during the first period of childhood, which is afterwards forgotten; this attachment was evoked or encouraged by too much tenderness on the part of the mother herself, and further reinforced by the small part played by the father during their childhood. Sadger emphasizes the fact that the mothers on his homosexual patients were frequently masculine women, women with energetic traits of character, who were able to push the father out of his proper place. I have occasionally seen the same thing, but I was more strongly impressed by cases in which the father was absent from the beginning or left the scene at an early date, so that the boy found himself left entirely under feminine influence. Indeed it almost seems as though the presence of a strong father would ensure that thee son made the correct decision in his choice of object, namely someone of the opposite sex.

In The SCUM Manifesto, Solanas takes this analysis and flips it on its head through an extreme feminist lens, where becoming a “real (straight) man” is already assumed to be a bad thing. She writes: “The effect of fatherhood on males, specifically is to make them, ‘Men,’ that is, highly defensive of all impulses to passivity, faggotry, and of desires to be female. Every boy wants to imitate his mother, be her, fuse with her. So he tells the boy, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, not to be a sissy, to act like a ‘Man.’ The boy, scared shitless of and respecting his father, complies, and becomes just like Daddy, that model of ‘Man’-hood, the all-American ideal — the well-behaved heterosexual dullard.”

While Freud accuses the mother of being to blame for the horrible fate of a boy becoming a homosexual, Solanas accuses the father of being to blame for the horrible fate of a boy becoming a straight man.

As you can see from the above, The SCUM Manifesto in many places is an almost line-by-line mockery of Freud’s writings on women and homosexuals, and was never meant to be read as a literal, earnest text throughout. This does not mean it is intended as a joke or to be taken lightly, though. As some may have noticed in the above text, it is not without serious, meaningful and resonant critiques of patriarchal institutions. There is a lot of truth in this parody. It is a political satire. It is simultaneously dead serious, yet written with a nod and a wink. In keeping with the protest art of the time, if you didn’t get it, she wasn’t going to explain it to you. She was happy to make cocky comments, like, “I mean every word of it,” knowing, and indeed, hoping that the “squares” who didn’t understand the sarcasm inherent to the foundation of the text, would be that much more shocked at her effrontery.

Valerie Solanas just said, in a modernized (now dated) vernacular, exactly what Freud had said about women, only about men, and everyone freaked out, because when we talk about men the same way men have talked about women for centuries, it reads as grotesque and insanely violent, un-compassionate, and shocking, which was exactly her point.

Her work is still misinterpreted as a literal text by many to this day.

After shooting Andy Warhol, Solanas turned herself in to the police. She was charged with attempted murder, assault, and illegal possession of a gun. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and pleaded guilty to “reckless assault with intent to harm,” serving a three-year prison sentence, including treatment in a psychiatric hospital. In a darkly ironic twist of fate she was subjected to a nonconsensual hysterectomy during her hospitalization. Shortly after her release from prison, she became homeless, and never published another work.

Michael Alig, known for being a famous party promoter and club kid in the 1980s (in the film about his life, Party Monster, he was played by Macaulay Culkin), brutally murdered his friend, Andre “Angel” Melendez, over an argument about a drug debt.

Alig cut his friend up into pieces and threw him in the Hudson River. He’s been released from prison and is currently working as a club promoter in New York City.

Since his release, he’s also appeared in an indie film with artists I know personally, called Vamp Bikers, in which Alig plays a homicidal sociopath who slowly, brutally murders his friend.

I accidentally watched this at a film screening I attended in Brooklyn years ago, having no idea what I was getting into. It made me want to throw up, seeing him happily take part in a campy fictional portrayal of a murder so similar to the one he actually committed, and being celebrated for this. Many people around me were excitedly saying they hoped that Alig might attend the screening.

His website, michaelalig.com describes him as an “artist, writer, curator.” You can hire him to produce your party, or buy one of his many pop art paintings for $500 a pop.

I think this is all abhorrent. I’ve had debates with friends over this, and have been asked, “Well, he served his time. Shouldn’t we have compassion? He was young and on a lot of drugs when he did that. Don’t you think he should get a second chance?”

Perhaps. Perhaps a chance at living as a free person again, yes, perhaps that, but definitely not a chance to be celebrated for being the famous club kid who murdered his friend. And it’s not lost on me that the person he murdered was a poor, lesser known gay man of color, and I wonder if he would have gotten out of prison so early if he’d been the one who murdered Michael.

Perhaps more shocking than this, is the life and reception of essayist and novelist Norman Mailer. When speaking about feminism and women’s liberation Norman Mailer said: “We must face the simple fact that maybe there’s a profound reservoir of cowardess in women that had them welcome this miserable, slavish life.”

In his book Advertisements for Myself, Mailer claims that a writer without “balls” is no writer at all:

I have a terrible confession to make — I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed, I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe that it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict may be taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure — that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.

I would argue that Norman Mailer spoke and wrote just as violently, grotesquely and shockingly about women as Valerie Solanas did about men. But he was not saying any of these things or writing his sexist texts as a parody or protest of his own subjugation.

Norman Mailer is still widely celebrated for both his fiction and essays, including numerous works that take a stand adamantly against feminism and women in general. In 1968 and 1980 he won the Pulitzer Prize. In 2005, he won the National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 1960, he attempted to murder his wife by stabbing her multiple times in the chest, barely missing her heart.

While his wife lay in the hospital in critical condition, a day after the stabbing, Mailer appeared in a scheduled interview on The Mike Wallace Show, where he spoke of the knife as a symbol of manhood. He was briefly arrested two days later, though his wife refused to press charges, saying that she feared for the safety of their children if she did so. She did, however divorce him once she recovered.

The parallels between Mailer and Solanas are as astonishing as their differences. The only reason I can find for the differences in how they are popularly viewed is that Mailer was a man, speaking and acting violently against women in a sexist society, and Solanas was a woman, doing the reverse in this same society.

I can’t help but conjure Solanas’s legacy when looking at the current questions that keep popping up on the subject of violence, art, and who we celebrate today. Do we forgive Louis C.K. for serially masturbating on countless women he worked with? What does forgiveness mean? Does it mean he continues to enjoy the same level of reverence and celebrity as before? Can we still enjoy Michael Jackson’s music knowing that he had ongoing sexual relationships with what seems to be an endless stream of young boys? Should we still be patronizing Woody Allen’s films? Is it alright to feel heartbroken over the loss of the Bill Cosby so many knew and loved? What of the beautiful works of so many beloved male authors I have spoken about above?

I do not have clear answers to these questions, nor do I think there is one rule of response that is correct for every situation, but I do know that the social hammer has come down hard on women who commit similar acts of violence, especially when those acts are directed at men. I do know that sexist bias has judged one of my artistic heroes much more harshly than her male counterparts.

I do not condone or celebrate Valerie Solanas’s shooting of Andy Warhol. But when people bring up Valerie Solanas as if she is a horrendous, murderous, bat-shit crazy, worthless, hysterical, violent criminal whose literary artwork is as valuable as the ramblings of a madwoman, suggesting that she should be written off as nothing more, I always think to myself, “Well, that’s exactly what she would have expected from this society.” Much less has changed since she first released the book in 1967, than I would have hoped. Those opening lines still remain eerily significant: “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore, and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.”

http://www.full-stop.net/2019/05/21/features/chavisa-woods/solanas/

[megashadowdragon]

some of the comments in the YouTube comment  section

“So in other words slut shaming is wrong in real life but completely ok in fiction. Kinda shows what these people truly think about themselves and their scantily dressed sisters.” “ Wait a minute an sjw is attacking my girl velvet? Oh boy, I could make a huge thesis paper on why this person's claims just doesn't work but all I'll say is just because velvet is dressed the way she is it doesn't make her in any way weak at all. Moreover it's the fact that she is still a strong woman regardless of her fashion sense. Her journey her struggles and her character development were all the things that bundled up into the reasons why I love her so much as a female lead and as a character “

“ Thanks once again for protecting our waifus form out of control censors and rabid sjw feminists you are the best. All these girls looks beautiful, powerful and unique compared to their boring and outright puritan designs we she in western games. Have you seen the female fighters in MK11 they all wear burqas just with different colors so unimaginative... “

“What kind  of Catch 22 nonsense is this? So if a female character is made by a man then it's shameful because it's appealing to the male gaze. But if it's made by a woman then it's internalized misogyny and still appealing to the male gaze. It would be nice if they pick which is fine and what isn't. So the ideal solution is to just not have female characters and just have male characters, but then it would be seen as sexist to not include female characters. You literally cannot win.Show less” “ "She didn't choose the outfit, the creator did" No shit “

“

Funny story: “High heels” as we call them today where originally designed to be worn by Nobles (mainly MEN) while riding on hose back. They where never meant to be worn as walking shoes by anyone, regardless of gender, even less so as dress shoes. The where never originally designed to support a person’s weight. The long heels where used in the same way as a cowboy would use the spurs on their boots, its one of the reasons they’re so sharp.

“

“ Femininity is in part defined by both what men want from women and what women are willingly to do. Generally speaking women want to be beautiful and men want women that way too. It seems to me that these feminist believe feminine beauty is only for men when it's convenient for them. When it's their clothing it's "sex positive" and empowerering when it's animated characters it's "internalized misogyny". It's a double standard that they use like a weapon. Ps. One that occasionally works. Like when Hi-rez covered up Furia's thighs because of complaints. “

“ Fictional characters having no real-world agency has to be the biggest non-argument I've seen and is definitive proof that these losers know they have nothing to complain about, and are just doing it because they need to complain about something to make themselves feel good, but complaining about real issues is too hard apparently. Going by the logic of fictional character having no real-world agency, it's wrong to make any character anything because the fictional character has no say in the matter. They can't be an orphan, a female, an [insert race here], [insert sexual preference here], etc. Heck, or even existing in the first place!

“ Actually Velvet's clothes kinda reflect her state of mind. The tattered state signifies her broken condition while the red and black colours allude to how she has become a violent daemon who only wants revenge against Artorius. But it's not just her clothing that fits her character but that of the other characters in the game as well. Aside from the obvious main characters, I noticed a theme with the uniform of the Abbey high ups. The less the person values emotions, the less colors he has other than  the standard white and gold. We see Artorius mostly lacking any other colour other than the white and gold while Teresa and Oscar have little more. Laphicet has more blue and a collar (can signify his enslavement) while Eleanor wears clothes that are mostly blue with little white. And finally with Shigure, his colors are a contrast as he merely fights for the Abbey because he feels like it and not because he is committed to its ideals. Coming  back to Velvet, I consider her to be one of the best designed female characters in fictional media. Not only does she possess traits that make her an empowering female character but she also has a decent amount of other likeable traits as well. On top of that, she is not devoid of human flaws  like how she is so obsessed with her revenge that she does not care much about anything else, leading to situations like when Phi was forced to open a portal to the leylines or how Innominat almost made her sink into despair. Overall a good character who is also quite human. And this in turn actually fits the themes of human morality in the story really well. While people criticise the slow starting part of the game, it actually serves the purpose of showing us how circumstances changed Velvet from a sweet top waifu material to someone akin to a genderbent Guts/Edmond Dantes. Then as the story progresses, we see her acting like a villain but still root for her because we know what she has been through. Then because of Phi, we do learn that her human side still remained within her and later Phi is able to help her. In the end, she kills Artorious not out of revenge motivated by pure hatred but because the Shepard had lost sight of his own self and ideals. I  noticed that most of the "maxims" Artorius talks about don't exactly feel like maxims when you compare them with Immanuel Kant's philosophy (someone who Artorius seems to follow quite a bit as Kant considers actions driven by principles to be moral instead of those driven by emotions, which he considers irrational) as they have a definite condition/purpose behind them (such as controlling emotions IN ORDER TO control the tide of battle.). From what I read about the Maxim's Kant Spoke of, those maxims were supposed to be unconditional i.e general truth like do good. So we see that Arthur's maxims have conditions which contradicts Kant's definition. Except one. Don't despair. The same one Velvet reminds Artorius as she stabs him. In the end Arthur actually became more of an act utilitarian in his wish to create a peaceful world by removing emotions. That's some really amazing writing right there. Makes me glad I got this game and made me more interested in the Tales series. Hopefully we can see Velvet and Phi reunited in Crestoria. He deserves to be with her far more than Sieg deserves to be with Jeanne. “

[firstpuffin]

The infuriating politics behind Captain Marvel (2019) [with spoilers]

I watched Captain Marvel the morning of writing this and to make things clear: I liked it. It was fun, I enjoyed her character (which I’ll expand on earlier) and best of all it wasn’t in-your-face feminist propaganda. I call myself apolitical, the “a-“ prefix meaning “not” so I am “not political”. I’m not a feminist because there is modern baggage behind that word and there are very few labels that I actually subscribe to. The ones I do usually have the “a-“ prefix, so that probably says a lot about me.

  I hate that I have to bring this up but people, including people whose opinions I generally respect, can’t see past the politics of a situation. I’m not not a feminist because I don’t believe in the cause; I do. I’m not some kind of red pill manist or whatever they are called, because I’m comfortable in myself. I’m apolitical because I see the content first and the agenda second. And Captain Marvel has good content.

  Yes there are issues. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t find problems with fiction. Where did Mar-vell get the Tesseract after Stark found it in the sea? Why did only Carol get powers from the explosion and not the others who were there? And it most definitely had the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s villain problem.

 To make it clear this article is not about the film, it’s about people whose reviews repeatedly talk about the freaking patriarchy. Such as yes, Jude Law’s character is revealed to be a part of the conspiracy to suppress her true self. As a man he is clearly oppressing our female hero-

  Or maybe he’s just a bad guy. You know, the bad guy. The villain. And we all know that if he had been a woman instead then the same people would claim there were too many women in the film thus feminist agenda. You know what has too many female characters? The Supergirl television show. But if you were to switch everybody’s sexes then it would look like an ordinary male-lead show. You could consider that as them pushing a bit too hard, but it is not only understandable but is also far from the worst part of that show.

 So, our antagonist is suppressing the powers of our hero. Maybe that’s because as we see in the final part of the story (what is known as the Falling Action and is when the heroes turn things around) she is practically unstoppable. Maybe it’s because they are trying to use her. Maybe it’s because he shot her out of the sky six years ago and is responsible for the death of the person she admires most and is possibly the person who wiped her memory. Maybe it’s not patriarchy but assholery.

  I started watching one review that said it was bad because it didn’t follow the Hero’s Journey, an old method of story-telling that he claimed is essential to a good story (which it isn’t, especially in our post-modern age) and while it seemed to follow it at the beginning it quickly departed. How? Well the mentor character (Jude Law again) wasn’t actually a mentor character, he just pretended to be one. Except he was a mentor, but the twist (admittedly a predictable one) was that he was a villain. And if you think that doesn’t count, then look at it this way: he’s training her to be a bad guy too. So he’s still a mentor.

  And he claimed that there was no “call to action”, which is the reason why the hero ventures out to adventure, saying that she was just “sent on a mission”. And yes, that wasn’t a call to action (except maybe in the most literal sense), the call to action comes later when she discovered hints about her past and found out that everything was in danger if she, the only person in the position to do so, didn’t help; by which I mean she was the only member of her organisation on Earth for the next day. If galactic danger and self-discovery aren’t calls to action then just what is it that motivates most stories?

  So clearly this guy wanted to dislike the film. I stopped watching less than half way through his video after he said patriarchy for the fifth time. Like, shut up about it already.

 The next complaint that I’m going to cover is that apparently only boys like comics and so a strong female character is off-putting? I’m not sure, this guy confused me. Yes, comics were (and possibly still are; I don’t check demographics) aimed at young teenage boys, hence the silly action and terrifyingly bombastic female figures (like seriously, those proportions would be fatal). But you know what I like? To use my own terminology, capable characters.

  I don’t use “strong” as an adjective without purpose because it has connotations of physical power, which isn’t what is meant by “strong female characters”. I use capable because I feel it is a better fit. Carol Danvers is capable, strong and generally badass anyway. Why? Well for one thing, she always gets back up. You know, that thing that Captain America always does? That is important to his character? She does it too, and it is hinted at all throughout the film so it isn’t just some cheap “drama” for the climax.

  I’m going to go full nerd here and talk about anime. My favourite characters in the action genre have always been those who stand back up. They get beaten down (physically or mentally) and force themselves back up. It’s cheesy as all hell and it is done in anime better than I usually see in western comics or films and stuff. It’s cool, it’s dramatic and it works really well at getting you to root for the hero.

  Many people probably know of Dragon Ball Z and we see it in Goku, the hero of that series. I’d also like to point out that when it comes to raw power, the Dragon Ball fighters are similar yet stronger than Captain Marvel. A character in the series who is less frequently called “strong” is Bulma. She isn’t a fighter and she doesn’t have all of the superpowers of Goku or the others, but she’s a scientist who often provides support. More than that though, she never lets her lack of planet-destroying power prevent her from standing side by side with the fighters. Heck, she stands up to literal gods when they piss her off.

  She is what I think of as a capable female character, because she can’t kick ass but that doesn’t make her weak.

 Growing up, Carol Danvers is obviously what we call a “tomboy”. She wants to do what the boys do and she pushes herself to do so, despite being condescended to regularly for it. She literally gets knocked down, she falls and she (again literally) crashes and she gets back up. Even more impressive for me is that she is mentally and emotionally shaken, but stands up again to protect others and to regain control of her life.

  And there is nothing in that above paragraph that is uniquely masculine.

  A girl can fall over and stand back up. A woman can be emotionally manipulated only to pick herself back up. And because they aren’t masculine actions, seeing a female character do so isn’t at all feminism. It’s just a person doing what a person does.

 So, what else? Well there are complaints about her character being “snarky” or her being a bad loser (she is beaten in a sparring match and lashes out). Except I loved seeing her cocky mannerisms (which are common in male action heroes) and her obvious pleasure to be doing something, because it’s pretty clear that they haven’t let her do anything but train for the last six years. And this isn’t patriarchy again, she is in a military group with strict guidelines on when you are ready to go into the field (plus as we know, they are scared of her power).

  She was bored, she was restless. She’s a character who obviously like to act, being held back. That’s why she lashed out; she was frustrated and angry at not doing anything and yes, it could be seen as a flaw. But it’s a humanising and understandable flaw if you just try to empathise with her instead of looking for things to dislike. And one last point, Jude Law’s character said that if she couldn’t control her power then she’d have to visit the Supreme Intelligence(SI), who is a sort of commanding officer (I don’t know the terminology). So what does Danvers do? She uses it. It is not a stretch at all to suppose that she may have intentionally lashed out so that she could confront the SI. Plus, they are all something that we see again and again in male action heroes.

  Yes, I keep comparing her to male action heroes and that’s because she is also an action hero. They will have similar traits regardless of sex or gender. She is confident and willing to have a laugh and it is great to see.

  And finally, and this may come across badly but hear me out first, I loved seeing her smile. I don’t mean that in the “give us a smile, love”, but in the “she’s excited” way. I love to see people excited and when she’s about to go on a mission or when she’s figuring out her powers towards the end, she is clearly having fun.

  I’d love to see that in a male character too, it doesn’t matter. Seeing action heroes excited to do what they do, is great. Again, that’s something we see a lot in anime so it’s no surprise that I like seeing it here.

 This has run longer than I intended so, to conclude: Captain Marvel is an action hero who is frustrated from doing nothing for six years and when she gets the chance, she acts. She is driven, her power is suppressed and she is oh-so clearly a good person. Oh, and she’s confident, which I suspect is a big problem for those who are not used to seeing it.

-Note= I found it interesting that according to the dictionaries I looked at, bombastic means flowery or pretentious language; think of people who use excessively complex language. But as soon as you look at how people use the word (including but not limited to Urban Dictionary) you see that is not only how people use the word. Language is fascinating.

-Note= Releasing these every two weeks isn’t working, I can’t keep it in mind and so I keep missing the upload date. Instead I’m considering releasing a short 500 word-ish between uploads, just to keep myself from slipping.

[zolaliz]

Trans v terf discourse:

Hey so I wanted to make a post of my own about the whole terf discourse thing I stumbled upon yesterday and the post I made out of spite today (which I took down, because it was a mistake, and if you saw it I truly, genuinely apologize) and explain a little bit more calmly about the whole thing, about where I'm coming from

Basically I happened upon the account belonging to @/redkatherinee and saw some art that really.. had me shaken up, I guess. It was disturbing, and i felt sick in a way I haven't in a long time. Now I myself am not trans. But I'm going to come out and say that I support trans women, because 1.) I am not ashamed of this, and would never be, and 2.) it's gonna be kinda vital to my whole conversation here. If you are a terf, (trans exclusionary radical feminist for anyone who doesn't know) you might read the sentence before this one and immediately think of my opinion as invalid. You're might (or might not, I don't know) not even bother to read the rest of this. You might start gearing up counter arguments before I even start with my point. That's okay. I am not looking for a fight here. I just want to explain my point of view. If you don't want to listen, if you don't care, if you think I'm wrong, I'm going to politely ask that you don't let me know about it. If you're looking to talk, I'm going to be cautiously open to that. But keep in mind I know the difference between the approaches of someone looking to talk and someone looking to fight. So if you want to send hate or anything else, please refrain. Just as I am going to try to refrain from insulting anybody with this post. Because that's not my intention here. And if I do, I'm sorry.

I'm going to talk about two of @/redkatherinee's art pieces in particular. One displays a witch with a cauldron, with hands reaching out of the boiling liquid, with trans flag bracelets on their wrists. The other displays a women holding a bloodied pie, with eye balls inside it, and a caption that says "terfs literally eat transwomen". Both are drawn in satire. I do believe they were drawn for the purpose of satire, and upon further reading, found out they were drawn because the artist wanted to illustrate how trans supporters and trans people view terfs. Even if they were drawn for satirical purposes, it does not make these images okay. Far from it.

I've always disagreed with terf's stance on transwomen, how they treat them and view them, but I've never seen this hate so openly displayed. Because it wasn't the images that disturbed me, not exactly. It was how I imagined a transwoman stumbling upon them. Maybe this isn't something a terf can empathize with, as some terfs don't see trans women as worthy of empathy, but please try.

If I were a trans woman I would feel beyond despised, I'd feel scared and panicked over how much hatred someone could have to construct those images. To put time and effort into them. The whole thing feels wildly out of hand, but if I had stumbled across those posts as a trans woman, especially without any context provided in the captions, without any context of why the artist drew those (and honestly, even with the context), I'd feel like hiding. I'd feel scared of how someone could have so much hatred towards me. I'd feel angry and start hating in return.

Terfs argue that not all transwomen are good people, and therefore should not be supported. But the truth of this is people can be bad, regardless of sexual orientation, identity, background, opinion. Not all people are good, but that shouldn't mean we stop supporting the ones that are.

For those who say that terfs get hatred and death and rape threats, I am here to say that none of that is okay. Your beliefs do not give others the excuse to be nasty to you. Me included. But you must understand that when you tell others you believe transwomen are rapists and murderers and horrible people, people that don't deserve respect, their first instinct is to lash out (as was mine). It doesn't excuse the behavior, merely explains it.

But you have to understand that this behavior is provoked by someone telling them that their existence is invalid, that it automatically makes them something they may not be. And telling a trans person that they shouldn't exist, that they are wrong, that they are something they aren't- that behavior is inexcusable too.The same way you may feel about people hating terfs, sending them death threats, rape threats, and worse- is what others feel like when they see you excluding trans people and telling people that they don't deserve to exist in the gender they identify with, that they are pedophiles and rapists and murderers themselves. It makes them angry and defensive and scared. It makes them sick and cruel and irrational. It continues the cycle of hate.

But you see the biggest difference between the hate terfs receive and the hate trans people receive is that terfs receive hate because of their beliefs, while trans people receive hate because of their identity. You can change one's beliefs, but no one can change who they are . Trans women are hated because of who they are, their existence, and by excluding them, by targeting them and discriminating against them, you receive hate for your beliefs. Because your beliefs harm others.

Please understand, if you are a terf, in the same way you most likely cannot change your opinions of trans women, these women also can't change who they are. That's right, these women can not change who they are. They aren't men in skirts. They aren't monsters. Because monsters can be monsters regardless of identity or gender, so saying that they are a monster because they are trans is absurd. I wouldn't insult a whole religion for the few who use it to promote hate and ignorance. The actions of some don't speak for the actions for everybody. Everyone, in their own way, is only trying to get by. To live their life as they identify.

Now to people who violently hate on terfs, I was you about six hours ago. Through writing this and after writing this I realized hate isn't the way to approach this. Hate should never be a way to approach anything. Because how on earth do you expect people to even consider your opinion if you approach it with hate? So the telling them to kill themselves and jump off a bridge and die and all that horrible shit, that needs to stop. These are humans, no matter how different their opinions are. No matter how harmful their opinions are. Hurting them back won't help, even if that's your first instinct (as it was mine.)(to be clear though I've never sent a terf a death threat or anything similar). I get it, okay, I really do, but that's not the right way to go about this. This isn't saying that terfs are in the right, or that the hate they receive is anything compared to the decades of discrimination, violence, and worse that trans women have received, but sending them hate won't make the situation any better.

It's exhausting going about it this way and anger and anonymous hate is easier and quicker and makes you feel better- but it won't solve anything.

So to everyone, trans supporters and terfs and trans people themselves- we're all so eager to go at each other's throats, but to take a step back and talk, that could accomplish a lot more. Terfs; maybe a trans woman won't ever be a woman to you, but the least you can do is try and remember that they are a human being. That they aren't defined by anyone else's actions except their own. Trans supporters; you aren't doing the trans people you support any favors by telling terfs to go kill themselves, by calling them disgusting. It comes off badly on the people you're trying to defend. And trans women; I know it's difficult, and I know some terfs won't even give you the time of day- or worse, they do, and they target and harass you. They hate you for your existence, which isn't something you can change (or ever should have to change). So I'm not going to tell you you have to be understanding of people who want you gone, who don't respect you. Talk to them as you see fit, and if they can't talk to you like you're a human, that's on them, and I'm sorry that it being on them doesn't mend the damage done to you by talking to them or being targeted by them.

Respect goes a long way on either end. Stop the death threats, rape threats, suggestions of suicide, exclusion, targeting, and worse.

Hate really doesn't give anyone the high ground. But talking? Talking can help some people reach a middle ground.

[idiopathicsmile]

Why You May Already Be A Unitarian Universalist! Or, a short guide to the goofy hippie aunt of the theological world (but the kind of aunt who has been to protests and Seen Some Shit)

Do any of these sound like you:

“I’d like a safe setting to explore my spiritual beliefs, but I’ve got baggage about organized religion!”

“I wish there was a church for atheists!”

“I wish there was a church for people who aren’t sure if they believe in god or not!”

“Over the years I’ve slowly assembled a highly personal grab-bag of spiritual beliefs and practices, but I miss service projects and singing hymns and drinking coffee on Sundays!”

“I need a religious community that supports rights for people of all genders, races, religious beliefs, sexual or affectional orientations, ability statuses, and national origins!”

“I want to raise my kids in a church that offers an extremely comprehensive, LGBTQA-friendly, shame-free sex ed program to all teenagers!”

Or conversely,

“I’ve already found a different personal belief system that feels right for me, but I am intellectually curious about where you’re going with this!” (Perfectly valid!)

If any of the above is true, or if you just feel like killing some time on the internet (also valid), read on!

“So, what do you guys believe?”

Modern Unitarian Universalism is a religion without a creed. That means you can be UU while believing in as many or as few deities as you want (including none or “I don’t know” or even “the very question doesn’t feel that important to me”). There is no consensus within the church on an afterlife (if any), or a holy book (if any), or even which holidays to celebrate, other than presumably, like, the birthdays of your friends and loved ones.

Plenty of UUs identify as agnostic or atheist, but we also have members whose beliefs are informed by Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, earth-centered/Pagan traditions, and/or Humanism, among others.

Asking an individual UU about their beliefs is sort of like asking someone about their taste in music. It’s meaningful to them, it’s shaped by their own history and experiences, and no two people will have exactly the same answer.

“Wait, you guys don’t agree on anything? What even brings you together?”

A DEEP AND EVERLASTING LOVE OF COMMITTEES.

No, sorry, that was a hilarious joke playing off an old Unitarian Universalist stereotype, which is that we are super into discussing things and then voting on them as a group.

Hilarious.

It’s hard to speak for all Unitarian Universalists, and some of them might quibble with the exact wording I’m about to use, but I feel like part of what makes us a bonafide religion is a deep shared conviction that trying your hardest to be kind, fair, and moral is itself sacred.

“If you can’t agree on a religious text, how in the world are you guys on the same page about what it means to be moral?”

I mean, sometimes we’re not? We like a good debate.

But although we don’t have a creed, we do have a common set of principles we try to use as a guide. Here they are, straight from the Unitarian Universalist Association website:

The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;

A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;

The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;

Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

“Uh, that’s compatible with every world religion and also, like, Captain Planet.”

Listen, nobody in the Unitarian Universalist church is gonna stop you from using a nineties environmentalism cartoon as a holy text. Embrace your truths. As a group of young sages once said, “Saving our planet is the thing to do.”

“I already believe all of those principles. Am I a Unitarian Universalist?”

I mean, if you want to be!

…although the definition of a UU is broad enough these days that we’ve got a quirky (and in retrospect maybe kind of problematic?) habit of retroactively claiming dead historical figures* who demonstrated a belief in the seven principles during their lives. Like, “That person PROBABLY WOULD’VE BEEN Unitarian Universalist, given the chance! One of us! One of us!”

That said, if you’re reading this, you’re probably alive, so at least for the time being it is your call!

*I am now bound by ancient UU law to list to you some dead historical figures who actually self-identified as Unitarian Universalists (or Unitarians or Universalists, since the two didn’t meld together until a series of meetings in the 1960’s):

Olympia Brown (the first fully ordained female minister in the U.S., also an abolitionist and feminist)

President John Quincy Adams 

Joseph Priestley (18th century theologian credited with discovering oxygen)

Ralph Waldo Emerson and a number of the early American Transcendentalists

Louisa May Alcott

Elizabeth Gaskell (author of North and South, among others)

Rod Serling (Twilight Zone creator)

Beatrix Potter

Pete flippin’ Seeger, hell yeahhhhhh

“Who runs this show?”

Rife as it would be for comic possibility, there is no Unitarian Pope. There are no cardinals. Authority is for the most part pretty decentralized. Individual congregations govern themselves, through committees and elections. A minister has to be approved by their congregation before it’s official.

Those Seven Principles above came, like I said, from the Unitarian Universalist Association, which is made up of delegates from churches all over the country, and every year they get together and vote on major stuff. But yeah, congregation to congregation, things can vary pretty widely in terms of how they do stuff, or even whether to use the word “church.” (Some instead call themselves a “society,” or a “fellowship.”)

“What the heck does a UU hymn even sound like?”

Oh man, this reminds me of that classic Unitarian Universalist joke, “Why are Unitarians so bad at hymns?”

Answer: “Because they’re too busy reading ahead to make sure they agree with all the lyrics!”

Priceless.

But in reality, some of our songs are, like, transcendentalist poems that have been awkwardly squeezed onto the melody of some older hymn or classical piece. Sometimes you sing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” seemingly without a trace of irony. Sometimes you’ve got old spirituals about justice (like I said, things can tip towards well-intentioned appropriation) or Christian hymns that have been revised to be nondenominational and gender-inclusive. Sometimes you break out the classics, like “This Little Light of Mine.”

Here’s one of my all-time faves, which is based on a translation of a poem by 13th century Persian philosopher and mystic Rumi. You’ve got to wait until the rounds kick in. So good.

“What’s the official stance on rights for the LGBTQ+ community?”

It’s formally recognized by the UUA that our seven principles are totally incompatible with homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, or any other type of bigotry.

Because the power is so decentralized, I can’t say that every congregation has always been enlightened, but as religions go, I think it’s pretty widely accepted that the UU church has long been on the forefront of LGBTQ+ rights. There have been UU ministers performing same-sex marriage ceremonies since at least the seventies, and there’s a long history of activism within the church.

The UUA website has a section detailing our ongoing efforts to be inclusive of all genders and orientations. If you’re a member of the LGBTQ+ community and nervous about visiting a UU church for the first time, you might also want to aim for one of the churches that’s specifically opted into our Welcoming Congregation Program, which requires the congregation to go through special training and to offer gender-neutral bathrooms, among other things. (Most UU churches at this point have opted in. If you’re trying to find the closest location that’s also a Welcoming Congregation, there’s a checkbox you can click on this handy look-up tool.)

“So for decades when American politicians were arguing that same-sex couples couldn’t marry because it ‘went against religion’, it literally went against this particular religion to discriminate against those same couples?”

Yes. Yes, it was. The Bush years were a weird time.

“What’s the official stance on racial justice?”

We’re in favor of it. (Again: if you take those seven principles seriously, there’s no pussyfooting around opposing racism.)

I’m not gonna lie: at least in the suburban midwest UU churches I’ve attended, we are by and large, uh, pretty white. So I can’t really speak to whether or not a person of color would feel comfortable there. I’d imagine it would widely vary by individual and by congregation.

Our track record with Civil Rights is probably on par with any ultra-liberal, service-based American religion. We had a lot of early white abolitionists (given how low the bar was back then, I’m sure many would be considered racist by today’s standards), we had members active in the Civil Rights movement (if you saw Selma, that minister who gets killed by an angry mob was one of ours), and I think there was even a while pre-McCarthyism where we were closely allied with socialism and our members included some people of color who were key activists in confronting racism and supporting unions.

And then the Red Scare happened and our religion barely survived and we leaned away from socialism, and since then we’ve always kinda been predominantly an upper to middle class white liberal thing, with all the blinders that implies.

But a lot of UU churches have expressed solidarity with Black Lives Matter and with the protests at Standing Rock, and there is a growing movement within the church to confront and examine any latent white supremacy in ourselves and in our congregations.

One of the things that endeared me to my current church was when the minister announced that we were all invited to a racial justice protest, which had been organized by a black Christian church in the Chicagoland area. And the minister said, essentially,

“Listen, they are going to use religious wording that may not align with your personal beliefs. And what I need you to do is imagine you’ve got a Universal Translator like in Star Trek. And if they say “the glory of God” and it makes you uncomfortable, think “the glory of human kindness.” If they say “the spirit of the Lord”, you can think “the spirit of Life.” Because these Christians are out there doing the work that fits with our deepest values, and in the end, we have more in common than not. Sometimes we need to get over ourselves, and follow where they lead.”

At our worst, I’d characterize us as well-meaning but clueless (i.e. using the stories or imagery of world religions as a metaphor, in a way that flirts with appropriation). At our best, we’ve got some activists of color on the front lines, doing cool shit.

“This all sounds...so incredibly Politically Correct…”

Yeah, we strive to be accepting of everyone but I should warn you upfront that if P.C. culture upsets you, Unitarian Universalism is probably not gonna be a good fit.

“Did you say something about comprehensive sex ed for teens? In church?”

I certainly did! Through the OWL (Our Whole Lives) program, specially trained adults teach the youths a multi-year curriculum about bodily autonomy, consent, respect, healthy communication, gender identity, sexual orientation, safe sex (including passing around condoms and dental dams), destigmatizing sexuality, and relationships, among other things. Also, you can anonymously submit questions at any point, and your teachers will do some research and provide an answer next week.

When I was young, this was seventh and eighth grade Sunday school. I think since then, they developed the program to include age-appropriate components for younger kids, and to focus more on high schoolers.  

“Seriously?”

When my older brother went through an earlier iteration of the program, the curriculum included a slideshow with photos of actual naked people, who were just random UU volunteers from the seventies. By the time it was my turn, these had been replaced by tasteful charcoal drawings.

“So on a scale from one to ten, how warped is your brother?”

He’s doing great! Actually, he’s a member of his local UU church and a volunteer OWL teacher. Though if I had to guess, he’s probably pretty relieved he doesn’t have to contend with those slides.

“Where can I find out more about Unitarian Universalism?”

Here’s the UUA website. Here’s that nearest-church-finding tool I mentioned before. If you don’t know if you’re ready to jump from 0 to physically stepping into a sanctuary, especially if you’ve got a bit of that ol’ social anxiety, here’s the ask that reminded me to post this whole mess in the first place, about how to maybe ease yourself into things a little first.

“Hang on…if you break these words down into their roots, ‘Unitarian’ implies existence of a single god, as opposed to the widely accepted Christian trinity, while ‘Universalism’ surely refers to the notion of universal salvation, meaning that both terms seem to point to a specific concrete (if perhaps somewhat heretical) doctrine based around Christian concepts like God, Jesus, and Heaven—meaning, in short, that the very name of your religion seems to belie the nigh-endless spiritual possibility you’ve been describing in this blog post…what gives?”

Well, you’re not wrong. The name at this point is largely vestigial. But to understand how we ended up where we are today, and how we arrived there with this awkward polysyllabic soup of a name, I’m gonna need to take you through a couple of centuries of heated theological debate.

“Do you NEED to?”

I mean, ‘need’ is relative, but that’s definitely my plan!

Stay tuned for part II, “A (Very Very Very) Informal History of Unitarians, Universalists, and their Unholy (or Possibly Very Holy) Melding”