#it hurts men but the system exists to subjugate women

[sailing-ever-west]

don't join reddit you'll find yourself trying to explain things to men online and before you know it you'll suddenly understand sisyphus

[bloodpen-to-paper]

How the Kendom's Patriarchy Reflected the Patriarchy Within Ken

I know the title sounds stupid bear with me

I noticed the film made a point to show how much shittier the Kendom was to the Barbies than Barbieland was to the Kens. in the world we live in, women are conditioned to be considerate of others, sometimes at our own expense, while men are conditioned to conquer and pursue their goals without considering who that effects. This is what caused patriarchal ideals of women being something for men to "pursue" rather than people. We talk about this when discussing the male vs female gaze, how the male gaze objectifies while the female gaze aims to humanize. The Barbies simply ignored the Kens, the Kens could've made their own society if they chose too, while the Kens brainwashed and subjugated the Barbies. While the movie makes a point to say neither gender group having power over another is good and the gender field should be equal, patriarchal teachings have resulted in way more harmful consequences for women than anything to come out of the femcel/radfem sphere considering patriarchy is the current reality we live in.

Usually this would be enough to make its own point, but Greta didn't include this just to make more commentary on how the patriarchy effects women, but to specifically show what it does to the men within it. Ken's final arc revolved heavily around the idea of men "getting the girl" and feeling useless after Barbie rejected him, because that's a huge part of patriarchy. Patriarchy tells men that women are objects to be won, and that once they win a woman they are true men who have achieved their life goal. Many men base their entirely personality around being attracted to women, and it shows in how they talk, their jokes, how much they sexualize, etc. And when these same men fail to "get a girl" (because we are, in fact, people with our own wants and desires) they feel useless. That anger often leads them to the incel pipeline of thinking they are owed women's time, attention, and bodies, but above all it leads to them feeling hopeless and failed by false promises. The Kendom was fueled by that rhetoric, with Ken breaking down when he realized he couldn't make Barbie love him because that's all he's ever wanted. He was taught that was his life purpose, and he didn't know what to do when he realized Barbie is a woman who exists outside of him, and that he can't seem to do the same.

By doing this, Greta shows the nuance that comes with systemic oppression. Ken's arc is something that holds men accountable and doesn't make them seem like some untouchable and unavoidable boogeyman, but as people who make deliberate choices that negatively effect women. Similarly, because they are people, and because systemic oppression is never good for anyone, the movie shows how the Kens were also brainwashed by this system, and how its hurting them as well. The Kens, and really men, are pumped full of the same lies as women, and the movie calls for them to work on themselves to unlearn these teaching so that they can be better people to those they hurt, and be people to themselves. Not a conqueror, not a mate, but humans who don't need to obsess over their sexuality and ability to get female partners to be worth something. Men's worth doesn't rely on their interactions with women, just like women's value doesn't rely on their interactions with men. The two groups exist and need to start co-existing, because the gender divide has made all of us treat each other as another species rather than a person like anyone we'd find in our families, friend groups, etc. Gender should not be a roadblock, nor a source of fuel for how you interact with people; it should just be, in the same way hair color and height are. This message is not something that will resonate with all, but its important, and Barbie very effectively made it for all those who needed to hear.

[worldwithoutmiracles]

it's so intensely frustrating when people gender a legitimate labor complaint to me. I understand it's a joke, but I hate when people will come so close to the point and still miss it.

"I never had a dream job because I don't dream of labor-" yes! "- I dream of subjugating my existence entirely to a supporting role in someone else's ambitions." no! we need to decouple value from contribution to capital!

"working a 9-5 is dehumanizing and demoralizing-" yes! "- not like a lifetime of cooking and cleaning for no pay and often no recognition, which would be fulfilling and easy" no! capitalism is a system designed only to produce wealth and never happiness!

stop dividing when we should be conquering! this isn't some women versus other women, it isn't even men versus women, it's just capitalism hurting us all! and you will never be free until all of us are free! so stop thinking you can just opt out by trading your privilege and power for a glamorized past that never existed!

this little glamorized misogyny "joke" has run its course right. can we leave this corny demonic shit in 2023. it is done now. we've had enough.

[alines7777]

has anyone here ever heard the phrase ‘misdirected misogyny’ and just started asking themselves,

“well, ok terfs, but what difference does it make?”

i know i have.

like, do you think the proportion of male-to-female transsexuals who are rape survivors is something to scoff at? how does 31% sound? ( x )

do you think men just come to an epiphany like, “o, sorry, wrong target,” and stop? because i can tell you from experience that they don’t.

listen, i understand that it’s about the subjugation of ‘real women’, but do you think that women’s oppression is something that exists for its own sake? because based on everything you’ve told me about the relationship between men and women across civilization, you really shouldn’t.

the idea is about male supremacy.

the subjugation of women is pointless to men if they can’t get any use out of it. the reason he hurts women is for himself, and to assert his supremacy, and he still asserted his supremacy over me as well, and it was no less violent and no less painful when he did.

so what difference does it make?

all it means is that we’re both still hurt by it, and both on a systemic basis, by definition.

[ edit : ] by the way, terfs, that might be the reason why some men are trying to join up with you to to shut the trannies up. so that you would have to thank them. that’s certainly the reason why conservative men decided to stoke fear about the ‘tranny rapist’ in the first place, and for more reasons, they can’t just go having any males who can’t even see the supremacy of manhood, can they?

[the-gay-goblin]

Im doing this next ask game blind; every tenth question including the first and last ones

Oh god you’re making me really think with this one

1. 6 songs you listen to most?

Uuum no clue cause I have a playlist of a bunch of music I listen to all the time

10. When is the last time you played air guitar?

The last time I remember was back in 4th grade (I think) when me and my friend Sel were listing to Life is a Highway by Rascal Flatts cause Cars came out

20. What is your greatest weakness; what is your greatest strength?

Uhhhh I don’t know what my greatest weakness or my greatest strength is. I don’t know myself that well, I don’t get any me time to think about myself (my parents always try to get me to do things with my family but I hate hanging out with most of my family)

30. Stick your right arm out; what do you touch first? Do the same with your left arm.

Right arm: the wall of my room because I’m on my bed

Left arm: my water bottle (stay hydrated everyone)

40. Do you drive? If so, have you ever crashed? Nope I don’t drive machinery makes me nervous (I also don’t have my permit yet)

50. Do you believe in magic?

I’d like to say that I do, but years of subliminal subjugation has told me it doesn’t exist. But I always tell myself ‘it’s just the gods’ whenever something happens that I can’t explain

60. Is there anything pink within ten feet of you?

Yes there is a painting my youngest sister made saying ‘hope you feel better’ but she’s dyslexic and wrote ‘fell’ instead. I had hurt my elbow and the doctors thought it was fractured so her and our other sister and our cousin who was spending the night all made get better soon notes (my youngest sister is the only one who made an actual painting)

70. Are you the kind of friend you would want to be friends with?

Yes and no. Yes because I always try to help my friends and no because I know all my deepest secrets and regrets so I wouldn’t want to be friends with myself.

80. What size shoes do you wear?

12’s in the US (am tol)

90. One night you wake up because you heard a noise. You turn on the light to find you are surrounded by MUMMIES. The mummies aren’t really doing anything, they’re just standing around your bed. What do you do?

I would freak out and break my window to escape. We live in a one story house so I’ll be fine jumping out.

99. If the whole world were listening, what would you say?

“LGBT people exist, and we’re only mean because we’ve been forced down for years, Black Lives Matter, women deserve every right that men have, men can be raped, China and North Korea are terrible countries because of how they treat their citizens, and the US needs to get their shit together. Also, US, your school system needs fixing. Not some little pieces here and there, replace the whole damn thing. And Canada needs to accept natives.

[musherum]

sex positivity will always ultimatley fall short as a line of feminist thinking because it refuses to critically examine how sex, even sex that is consensual and actively sought out, is used to subjugate women.

when your dogma is that “sex is nice and pleasure is good for you,” ala the ethical slut, then any sex that is consensual and actively disempowering or hurtful is seen either as an isolated incident or as the fault of the woman involved for “choosing” to have it. this ignores that, as women living in a patriachal society, we exist in a state of constant duress. women have little choice but to “choose” to consent to misogynistic, degrading and disempowering sex, because we live in a world dominated by misogynistic agendas. not only is misogynistic sex by and large the only sex that the world wants to offer us, but we are taught since birth that misogyny and male domination during sex is attractive and desireable.

many women feel drawn towards sex positivity because they feel it allows them to reclaim the sexuality that has been taken from them. but patriarchy does not work towards the goal of simply forcing women to abstain from sex - patriachy wants to control women as sexual objects, both in witholding sex and in granting access to it. it has traditionally forced us as women to accept a double bind: we are simultaneously made to feel ashamed for having sex, and are expected to perform as sex objects for the pleasure of men.

shame being only one half of the double bind, the half that seeks to shame women out of sex, simply seeking to remove it very much misses the point, because it leaves in place the patriarchal systems designed to coerce women into sex. the sexuality of us as women is still firmly under male control in the “sex positive” model. whereas before we were expected to work as furtive double agents, both madonna and whore, under sex positivity we are expected to function essentially as cattle: being driven to and fro by the conditioning placed on us by men and by what men dictate as being desireable.

sex positive ideology does not preach liberation from shame wrt: sexual activity so much as it seeks to celebrate women’s existence as sexual objects to be traded, used, and eventually disposed of, like any other good under capitalism.

[tododeku-or-bust]

A list of (extremely simplified) things that i could think off the top of my head as major examples of prioritized Whiteness:

Most relevant to here: the argument that fandom racism is an unfortunate byproduct of avoiding censorship, an argument that often conveniently sacrifices those suffering in fandom spaces for the enjoyment of those who won't

Anybody who thinks that bringing up racism is equivalent to an act of racism (e.g., bringing up the antisemitic goblin trope in the HP) and therefore thinks that their hurt emotions are on par with damage done, thus leading to unnecessary "oh it's okay" posts (I'm not Jewish though, let a Jewish person elaborate on that HP shit to you, they already been doing it)

Policing (I'll be sick if i have to elaborate)

The entirety of the "Woke" Act bullshit Ron DeSantis is pulling, but in general the idea that learning about Critical Race Theory, African American History (an OPTIONAL course, btw) or really any systemically racist policy or action in US (and world, fr fr) history is somehow "encouraging separation" or boldly lying that it's "inaccurate" for the sake of avoiding the conversation that is all that encompasses Whiteness, and Racism's effects on current events

The fact that abortion rights, contraceptive rights, and birthing safety are all at risk, for women of color at higher rates but also including white women, all because of the visceral fear that pure white babies aren't being born enough. Bc non-existent future white children > everyone else.

(this is a real specific one that fucks with me) the fact that there's a Werhner von Braun building made by NASA to honor him for helping the US in the space race, despite the fact that he was a Whole Nazi helping build missiles and aided in a genocidal antisemitic regime....the US picked him up anyway, all forgiven, so that they could accomplish new goals. Meanwhile, you'd see riots over the Bin Laden Explosives Building hosting the Pol Pot Putters on Idi Amin Avenue (NO, i don't think they should exist, but it would literally NEVER HAPPEN. Imagine anybody from these people's groups getting forgiveness and access to US Govt knowledge and explosives, and then a building. You can't.)

(They took em down now, which good!) all those Confederate Statues on Monument Ave in Richmond, and in general really. (Had to drive past a bunch of men that wanted me in chains and in fields, but you know- "history!" "Culture!" Bc the history of my subjugation meant less than the glorified history of racists and "economic progress")

The entirety of Liberal politics in the US right now being built on "well, you wouldn't want a FASCIST REGIME, would you? It's a lesser of two evils!" with a knife at my throat, knowing that they're not going to be the first sacrifices to maintain the lesser evil, that would be me (and yes, I'm going to pick the lesser evil bc i value my civic duty, but God forbid i complain)

Tbh I could just put "US Conservatism" here and it would work. The interweaving of race, sexuality, gender, all that shit really could just go right here and at the end, we would see white cishet people at the tippy top, every time.

What i wouldn't do for white society to realize how much effort goes and has gone into keeping them mentally and emotionally "comfortable"/in order at sacrifice of the rest of us. The way we could all move forward as a whole once that was acknowledged

[ajaegerpilot]

idk. its been on my mind lately wrt radfe/minism assigning moral value to certain .. demographics over others. like i get that there’s some type of appeal there. to be a lesbian, one of the most oppressed groups, and then to assign moral value to your oppression. but i mean, it doesn’t actually track. we’re all just humans. for good and ill. the way the world’s been split up, it could’ve split up differently and then we’d be shitty to each other in different ways. as it is, the dice fell where they lay and i’m not going to for example champion against misa/ndry where it doesnt exist. but saying that men are inherently oppressive.. they don’t have some type of gene that makes them hurt women. or even some unbreakable socialization. some assholes historically brute-forced or slowly boiled the frog to the point where equality was no longer an option socially or economically. there’s nothing genetically unique to white ppl that had us ripping apart the world. conversely there’s nothing about women or poc that invites oppression onto them. oppression isn’t logical.. (in the sense that you could justify oppression of a group, though oppressors try and indeed some members of oppressed groups eg te/rfs agree with them) beyond the logic of abuse and the benefits oppressors reap in a social system that allows them to and does not punish them for harming their victims.

idk. my - way of relating to this world has i think been guided by my desire to reduce pain. that’s why i’m confident in interacting with ppl i disagree with. if their way turns out to reduce pain then i’ll change my mind, as i’ve done in the past. but idk. its wild to me that some people can make some leaps of logic that i just can’t see how to bridge. like i was talking to some white supremacist on fucking runescape the other night (Dont ask how ThIs Shit got started) and like idk. that guy is kind of - okay like first of all. you know what fuck it. i know his game. his game is that he’s accepted a hierarchy of races at which he’s coincidentally at the top, and thus he views equality of other races as a threat to his position (and he’s correct!). and he views degeneracy (lgbt-ness) and probably women’s rights as a threat to his hierarchical position in patriarchal heterosexuality (and he’s correct!) he thinks that people would be happier and in less pain if europe was some white heaven and all the degenerates and poc were excluded, but that has nothing to do with how poc/degenerates are fairing, because he doesnt value them as full human like himself. so for him, everyone that matters is taken care of and pain has been reduced/eliminated (i mean, white supremacy is not sustainable like - it wouldn’t work, there is no white supremacist utopia because its an inherently violent ideology that requires subjugation of SOMEBODY to function it will never stop). but for me, everyone matters, unless they’re causing others pain.

ugh this is not cohesive!! but i lit a fire under my ass because i understand this dude again. but anyway, it’s frustrating because you really cannot convince people of universal humanity when their ideology and self-worth is hinged on there being hierarchies. transphobic radfeminism or like similar types of movements (i wont get into them because i’d be sticking my ass out of my lane) of people assigning hierarchical worth to their own oppression are different but similar. for one, the end result of transphobic radfeminism is, if you follow the logic - the assignment of babies as male or female, and the elimination of all males. like - there is the understanding that men are biologically predisposed to oppressing ‘females’, and that ‘females’ are inherently more worthy because they are biological martyrs in that sense, they are not tainted by a genetic compulsion or ability to oppress (incorrect of course for a number of reasons). so the only solution is to avoid relationships with ‘males’ and if you do they will without fail mistreat you and you’ve brought on your own suffering (by being a bi or straight woman). like i literally saw some terf say ‘welp it sucks that straight women are straight lmao lets get them robot boyfriends’ like WHAT?? there’s this huge disconnect to humanity and reality there, and a huge disconnect from empathy to vast swathes of the human population. it approaches things this bizarre sort of value judgement based on happenstance of birth (birthright, so to speak) from a different angle than ur average runescape white supremacist, but i think why there are parallels b/w te/rfs and white supremacists is because they both draw the same conclusion. like te/rfs say that men are subhuman because they biologically oppress women (and i’d agree within the sense that ppl who oppress others are less humane, except that te/rfs link it to something inescapable), white supremacists will say that poc/degenerates/women are less human because again - something apparently inescapable. the results of either of these ideologies is either genocide or seperatism, the former of which is horrifying and the latter of which is not actually feasible (at least without violence). it is the attempt of a scoundrel to comfort themselves by having pride in something they had no say in rather than their actions.

liike we have to understand that humans are like all CAPABLE of good shit, AND bad shit, and the fact that men (for example) can choose to fight for equality with women and don’t is what makes them uniquely bad. this is also is the only thing that brings hope. like, there’s also the fact that it is real. we are all working with humanity here. its just very hard to argue with people i think if they can’t agree with that premise. am i unique here? did my parents do me wrong by raising me to believe in my inherent humanity and the inherent humanity of others? i don’t think this was very coherent... but basically there is no value or worth that is granted to an individual being because they are a certain race or gender or sexuality. we are all the same damn dirty human worldwide, contending with lines that were drawn to subjugate some to raise up a few. but these lines were drawn, they are artificial. time to rip it down ykwim ;3c

[the-secret-life-of-bi]

A Single Pale Rose - some thoughts

Alright, buckle up, because I just finished school and I finally have the time to write all of my thoughts and feelings about the information we got in the latest Steven Universe episode. I mean ALL of them. There may be a spoiler from some leaks in here, so consider yourself warned. Here we go:

For starters, let’s talk Rose.

So first of all, I have to say, if you have reverted to referring to Rose as Pink Diamond in every context, I think that’s very wrong. Rose is the identity she chose, and that is how she wanted to be known. If you meet someone who introduces themselves one way, and you find out years down the line that this person had transitioned from one identity to this new identity before meeting you, why on Earth would you begin referring to them as the old identity’s name? That seems wrong to me, especially on a show that is so overtly LGBTQ+ friendly. I’m not saying that the complexities of the situation aren’t problematic, just don’t dead-name Rose when referring to her in situations where she was, in fact, Rose. That makes you a jerk, imo. I do occasionally find that referring to her pre-shattering as PD is sometimes necessary for clarity reasons, but as fans of such a progressive show, we must be respectful of the way we treat other people’s identities.

This leads the way to my next point pretty clearly. Everyone is dumbfounded how PD could have kept up her her Rose Quartz form for so long. Some have speculated that it’s because she is a Diamond and therefore strong enough, but I think it’s simpler than that. We all know that keeping a fusion together can be taxing, especially when it’s not stable, but Garnet exists almost exclusively as a fusion with very little difficulty (accept during the most trying of times). What if it’s the same for shape shifting? Trying to maintain the form of something you’re not is difficult and can have serious consequences. Since Rose was her true identity, though, keeping her Rose form might have been as easy as keeping her original PD form. 

From here, I want to talk about PD’s motivations to take on the identity of Rose Quartz. A lot of people say that she was selfish and merely wanted to escape her responsibilities. They feel that her tactics only prove that she is truly evil. A lot of people feel that because she was a Diamond, she was able to do what she wanted, and was not oppressed by the system they way that a Rose Quartz soldier would be. This is true, to an extent. Under the Diamond Authority, Diamonds do hold the power and are not in any way under the same subjugation as all other gems and colony planets. That being said, we need to remember that power structures like this often also negatively impact the ones who are in power. For example, the patriarchy is rather oppressive of most non-cismale identities. However, cismen also face oppression at the hands of the patriarchy: their emotions are often forcibly stunted by others when they are young, they are expected to be  both physically and mentally strong in every situation, and their standards of beauty are equally as demanding as those for women. I am not claiming that men suffer more, or even as much, under the patriarchy, just that they do suffer. And as such, PD suffered under the Diamond Authority. She originally wanted a colony and to be like the other Diamonds. Once she got it and understood what it truly meant to colonize something, she realized that she didn’t want that at all. She wanted to be her own gem, she wanted to allow others the same freedom, and she wanted to allow the Earth to survive. However, under Diamond Authority expectations, she could not do this. She had to defy the Diamond Authority as much as any other gem would in order to do what she did, even if it seems like it was easier for her to do so as a Diamond. She used questionable tactics such as manipulation and deceit, but no one ever said war was honest. I’m not condoning the way she handled things or saying she needs to be forgiven. But those condemning her as evil need to consider what she tried to do. Her heart was in the right place, and as a person (well, gem) of privilege, she realized she had the ability to do something and she did it. That is commendable. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Rose hurt a lot of people, but she did what she thought was right in the only way she knew how. That is not an evil person (or gem).

Now, onto Pearl.

Poor, sweet Pearl. This is the most heartbreaking part of this story. Where to begin?

Knowing what we know, can we truly consider Pearl her own gem? She is a Pearl after all, a servant with the predisposition of being ultimately loyal to the gem to whom she is assigned. Therefore, when Rose asked Pearl to “shatter” her, could she really have said no? Could Pearl have said no to anything that Rose asked her? I don’t know. I truly do not know, and this is where I have the biggest issue with what Rose did. It is impossible to tell whether Pearl had actual freedom in this situation, at least at this point, and so I do feel that Rose took advantage of her to an extent. Even if she had already given Pearl her freedom, it was clear that Pearl was still in love with her, so I feel that she at least took advantage of her affection, even if she didn’t take advantage of her superior position by giving her a direct Diamond order to aid the rebellion.

This begs the questions, did Rose actually care about Pearl? I think yes. Rebecca Sugar states that using “my” in front of a gem’s name is a term of endearment or respect, and in “Rose’s Scabbard,” we hear Rose refer to Pearl as “my Pearl”. I think she did care about Pearl, and she did want Pearl to be free to do as she pleased. I think that it was hard for Pearl to let go of her programming to obey Rose’s wishes though, even if she was technically free, and that muddles up all of the intentions in their relationship.

What about Garnet?

Of course, we know that Sapphire is going to struggle with this, and rightfully so. She was a high ranking gem and because of this war, she lost her status, her way of life, and her home. Ruby also lost her way of life and her home, though because she was low ranking, she wasn’t losing much there. I can’t say I blame either of them for being upset. Yes, they wouldn’t have met without the war, and ultimately the freedom they’ve both gained is better than any status they held or could have held on Homeworld. That said, I can imagine it’s confusing and hurtful that the person who told them to accept themselves appears not to have been able to accept herself, either. But in all honesty, I feel like they’ll realize that Rose wanted them to accept what they could be, which she absolutely embraced.

Ultimately, I feel that Ruby feels so lucky to know Sapphire that, even though she feels hurt and betrayed by Rose too, she would rather feel hurt and have Sapphire in her life than never have met her at all. And I think Ruby will help Sapphire to realize that too. Then they get married...?

...and Bismuth?

This will be tricky. If you’ve seen the leaks, she obviously comes back. I don’t know how they will convince her not to go on a homicidal rampage when she finds out the person she most trusted was actually the person she was hellbent on destroying, but they are obviously going to figure it out. Maybe she never really trusted Rose after she was poofed and bubbled the first time, so this won’t seem like so much of a deception? Or maybe, she’ll realize that Steven is not Rose, like everyone else has, and she will spend time with him coping with the information, and do her best to help him set things right. After all, I’m sure she realizes that this is not his fault, even if he has his mother’s gem.

Other gems?

Since the mystery of PD has been solved (at least partially), it seems like the next logical plot point to address would be corruption. And you know what that means? Jasper. Yep, Jasper. Poor gem, she was created for a Diamond that she loved, and that Diamond was also the person she hated most (similar to Bismuth’s predicament, but I think its worse because she was created to do what she did instead of choosing it for herself like Bismuth). Not only will she have to cope with healing from corruption, but she’ll also have to deal with all of those conflicting emotions. I have no clear ideas on how that will go at this time, but I do know I’m very interested in a redemption arc for her now more than ever, and I was always a big proponent. This plot twist makes her 100% an empathetic character, and she deserves a chance to stop hating herself for how and why she was created.

The Diamonds - how will they react when they find out? Relief, confusion, sadness, anger, forgiveness? A combination? Again, the leaks seem to indicate that they don’t destroy the Crystal Gems, and that they reach an understanding, but HOW??!!?! How will Steven prove that his mom was, and he is, technically PD? And what about White Diamond? Will we meet her this season, as a result of this revelation? Will the Diamonds help heal the corruption? That seems to make logical sense to me, but again, there’s too much left up to speculation at this point for me to even know where to start forming theories on this one. I guess we will just have to wait an see.

I don’t really know what to say about Amethyst. She’s kind of a wild card in this situation. I have no idea how she’ll react, but I have this hunch that she’ll be very concerned about Steven and how he’s handling it. She had no stake in the war, and she’s really only ever reaped the benefits of Rose’s choices by always being a free gem. She’ll have some issues with being lied to, sure, but those lies never hurt her or her way of life, really. They’ve been more of a benefit than anything. However, she’ll see how it is affecting her friends, and she’ll see how much more weight was just added to Steven’s shoulders, and I think she’s really going to step up and be there to help everyone sort through the troubles they are facing. She’s grown up a lot in the past couple of seasons, and I expect to see that play an important part in this story arc.

Finally, Steven.

Of all the people Rose’s lies hurt, Steven is hurt the most. He already struggles with his identity and with his mother’s wrongdoings, so let’s just throw all that painfully confusing shit into one pot and stir it up, shall we? I think this revelation is a relief in some ways, that his mother did not go against her morals and shatter anyone. But it’s almost worse (read, definitely worse) that she effectively started a whole war from both sides at once, so that all of the shatterings that ensued were technically her fault. And even when she tried to stop it, she only made matters worse by prompting the corruption attack, whether she originally knew it was a possibility or not. I’ll say again, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I think Steven is learning that the hard way through this revelation. He’s coming to the very real realization that our parents are not always the heroes we paint them to be, even when they are literally war heroes of a sentient space rock species. He’s already grown so much, but I think this revelation will be pivotal in furthering his personal growth. I’m really excited to see how he makes amends for all of this, because we know he will, and I’m already proud of him for how he is going to do the right thing in this situation and try to help the people his mother hurt with her decisions.

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Well, there you have it, my mad ravings. I mostly just needed to get those ideas of my chest, but feel free to reach out if you want to add something, have a question, or want to chat about it!

[lilyliveredlittlerichboy]

@onvochn Well the way toxic masculinity works is that boys are taught from a young age that they must perform masculinity to a certain standard, or else they will be bullied, belittled, excluded, or even physically hurt/attacked. The parameters for acceptable masculinity are extremely narrow, allowing for very little personal expression of style, or even emotions. The standard is so impossible to meet that nearly all men aside from a very privileged few fall short.

Now yeah, talking about how men are oppressed for being men - or perhaps, for not being men to the standards of society - is much more complicated than discussing misogyny, at least on the surface. Women have been actively subjugated by men historically. But if you scratch the surface, you'll find that the construct of femininity and female oppression is upheld by many people who are not men: Like mothers who clothe their daughters in pink, tell them they have to look pretty and don't allow them to cut their hair short or play rough with the boys. Parents, family who assume that a female child will inevitably grow up to be a wife and mother. Shop assistants who will encourage only a certain type of toy for a specific gender. Etc etc etc, these are just some fairly innocuous examples. Like, anyone is capable of keeping women oppressed.

And the same is true for men. You can't point at one group and say "men are oppressed by THEM!" because that's not how oppression really works. Oppression is systems of power and stereotyping and putting people in boxes and enforcing those boxes with violence.

The majority of the victims of violent crime are men. Toxic masculinity and the oppression of men is reinforced anytime a man is treated like all he's good for is work. Like he's incapable of cleaning or looking after kids. Every time he's looked down on for expressing emotions. Every time he wants to wear a fucking colour other than black blue or brown, for heavens sake!! I can't even imagine those kind of limitations on your life.

That doesn't mean men can't oppress others; they can and often do. As mentioned before, anyone can enact oppression in certain situations.

Like, often so-called feminists will be like "oh, you can't compare the brutal subjugation and murders of women to men being told not to cry". But it's so much more than that, and anyway, stunting someone's emotions their whole life is gonna leave them damaged. The whole system tells men that there's specific, narrow, acceptable ways of being men, and if you fall short, often the privileges of masculinity will not be afforded to you. And violence is one of the few acceptable outlets for these emotionally stunted men (white, abled men especially); so to those men, society says "be violent, or else be on the receiving end of violence". that's really fucking oppressive, and it results in the oppression of and violence towards men, And other groups - such as women, poc or queers. In this way, men are being used to reinforce oppression and existing power structures but it's not exactly to their benefit, I would say.

Basically, oppression isn't as simple as x group oppresses y group and honestly most people are oppressed in some way.

And the opposite of oppression isn't privilege; it's liberation, and men as a group absolutely need and deserve to be liberated from the shackles of toxic masculinity, patriarchy and capitalism. Not just for them, but for everyone!

Hope that makes a bit of sense.

i wish ppl understood when we say "transandrophobia exists"

here's what we are NOT saying:

trans men have it worse than trans women

trans women oppress trans men

trans men are the poorest little meowmeows in all the queer community

trans women need to shut up about their oppression

here's what we ARE saying:

trans men are oppressed for being trans + men

(yes men are oppressed as a class and i can elaborate on that if you need me to)

trans men and mascs deserve to have words to talk about their unique oppression

trans men and mascs face challenges trans women and femmes often don't (& vice versa)

transphobia comes in many forms. trans men can experience transmisogyny and trans women can experience transmisandry.

we're not taking your words or experiences. we are talking about our own. it's not an attack on trans women or any other trans people i promise

please can we. not shout each other down over these things. we all experience oppression on the basis of being trans. it looks a bit different to different people. it largely looks different to transfemmes and transmascs. doesn't mean either is more important. doesn't mean one of them is made up.

we need to have solidarity with each other!!! please!!! it's so important!!! it's not enough that we're fighting society at large and terfs and baeddels, now we have to fight other trans people too??? please stop im begging!!!

[theliterateape]

Resolve of the Righteous: What to Do Once the Protests are Past

By Don Hall

It’s called a narrative frame.

For over two hundred years, the narrative frame of America has been that of men imbued with a sense of manifest destiny, visionaries tired of British subjugation who, borrowing from everyone from the British to the ancient Greeks, forged a system of governance for all men to realize their full potential.

Narrative frames tend to leave out a lot of pertinent information. Simple and clean frames tend to last longer. The frame exists to promote the foundation of control, of maintaining the fragile status quo, or to foment a change from the previous frame.

The attempt to reframe a long held narrative is difficult. 

The easiest part is to break down the inconsistencies within the current frame. These founding fathers intentionally prohibited women from having a voice. They were slaveholders so their vision that “all men are created equal” was bullshit. The frame long held is a hypocrisy.

Once the old frame has been shredded, rebuilding a new one is where the hard work comes in. We’ve just spent energy debunking the narrative handed down for generations but without a replacement that can inspire forward momentum, one that foments a hope for the future, the replacement fails.

Full disclosure: I don’t participate in protests. This is not because I don’t believe in many of the causes or do not fully support the idea of protest as a valid form of political expression. I’ve done my fair share of on-the-street, sign-carrying, slogan-yelling protest. And I’ve too often been brutally disappointed in the fact that the less specific the demand, the more pointless it feels. I don’t participate because they often feel like bad theatre with no point.

Perhaps I’m too pragmatic with political stuff these days but “End Racism” and “Abolish the Police” aren’t really solid plans on which to hang a protest designed for change. The country isn’t going to abolish their police forces any more than we’d just get rid of the military. And given that every human being since the beginning of recorded history uses race to create tribal divisions, racism is in our DNA. Might as well have a worldwide protest against thumbs or penises (Oh. Wait. They’ve had the protest against penises...)

Lots of gauzy concepts like acknowledging your privilege without the inevitable follow-up that after you acknowledge it you have to be willing to give it up. In this case, privilege is power and control, and that’s like demanding Jeff Bezos just feel so shitty about himself that he hands his almost trillion dollars to poor people and resigns himself to a minimum wage job in a post office. Sounds good but it simply is never going to happen.

While rewriting the narrative frame needs to be simple and easy to digest by eighth graders, it needs to be feasible or there is no room for hope. It also needs to be free of too much inaccuracy or it, like the Founding Fathers myth, will be taken apart just as quickly.

✶

Beginning with the brutal beating of Rodney King in 1992, the cracks of the national narrative were seen and heard. It wasn’t the sight of four white police officers cracking the skull of a black man that signaled the fracture. It was that we saw it, raw footage, and the legal system in place refused to punish the true criminals. It was the verdict that set the tinder ablaze.

The quick follow up was the acquittal of OJ Simpson. Again, we saw it play out in real time on our televisions. Almost as if the justice system was trying to take back the injustice of King’s lynch mob in blue, we watched a black man who committed a vicious double murder walk free. Quid pro quo.

Then, like dominos falling, one after the other, in real time and with companion film, we saw Michael Brown killed. And Trayvon Martin. Eric Garner. A dozen more. Those rewriting the narrative took to academia, took to framing the country’s story with the murders by police at the fore. This was not about the system’s failing or about the nuts and bolts of true citizen oversight over the various police forces. This wasn’t about culture or class or poverty. This was about race.

While race is certainly an ingredient, the stew is comprised of far more. It is about race. It is also about culture and the tribal need to either assimilate or separate. It’s about class, injustice, and a hard-baked human requirement to find Others to push back against to feel forward momentum.

But we aren’t prepared for complexity. We need simplicity in the narrative. So, like the early authors of Christianity needed to convince the crowd of their need for God, bigotry became the original sin of America. Unlike the concept of Christian original sin, this sin has no Savior whose sacrifice washes us clean of it. The narrative insists that if you’re white, you’re guilty and in perpetuity. It isn’t enough to avoid your biases and racist practice, you have to be anti-racist and even then never free from the debt.

It’s a solid narrative frame. Worked for religion for thousands of years.

Like I said, I’m more pragmatic as I get older. The plan to end racism is passion-inducing but not actually possible. Every person born finds a way to prejudge others based on tribalism. I don’t march in protest because no matter my intent, if I speak out I’m taking up the room for black voices, if I am silent, I’m complicit, and if I ask what organizers think I should do, I’m asking for their emotional labor. Solid frame. It’s like a maze from which there is never an exit. Like being black in the United States.

My protest sign wouldn’t make for a good chant or be funny enough for a Twitter moment. Given the circumstances of police killing approximately 1,500 people last year (most white but of a vastly unequal proportion of the black community) the pragmatic solution is not to abolish police, fuck police, kill police, or fire all the racist police. My sign would say:

“For George Floyd  Proper Training for Police  Citizen Oversight with Real Authority  Accountability Guaranteed by Special Prosecutors Who Do Not Work with the Accused”

Not very sexy.

That’s the thing about change. Rewriting the narrative frame is a challenge but genuine, on-the-ground, measurable progress is really quite dull. And slow. It is methodical and requires lots of data collection.

The goal isn’t eliminating racism because that’s a fantasy of Tolkien proportions. The goal is to create systems that prevent racists (and angry politicians) from benefiting from their worst efforts. The goal is to make it nearly impossible for a brutal cop to ever be put on the street and, if one manages to squeeze through, holds him or her accountable for the crimes he or she commits while on the job of keeping the peace.

I hope these historic protests give us a new narrative frame. I hope, instead of laced with rage and hurt, it is scented with optimism and inclusion. I have nothing but respect for the Grand Dreamers and every black person out on the streets of cities across the globe are grand and courageous and inspiring.

I also hope that once the narrative has shifted, the people who can focus on legislative change, scientific methods of de-escalation training, experts on how to apply the law justly and effectively for every citizen get to work doing the slow, methodical stuff.

It isn’t a Grand Dream but even a pragmatic dream is worth the effort.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

I suppose it ultimately depends on whether they're enforced. The more enforced, the more negative.

If they're not enforced, they just become stereotypes, and as mentioned, stereotypes typically still have a kernel of truth in them. Sometimes that kernel is larger, sometimes it's smaller.

In Islamic countries and communities, they're enforced very strictly, and justified as the will of Allah.

In Western societies, by and large, they're not. This actually results in greater differences between men and women. For example, mothers are more likely to favor part-time work, or not working at all. That's not enforcement of a gender role, it's the freedom from other pressures, such as basic subsistence.

Where there are enforced social roles occurs in a few places people don't often recognize.

Firstly, while there are dozens of programs and scholarships to encourage women into STEM - more specifically, maths, physics, engineering, etc, and in spite of the fact women dominate in the "life" sciences, such as biology, medicine, etc - there literally zero programs or scholarships to encourage men into fields such as kindergarten teaching, dental hygiene, or secretarial careers. There are also, strangely (but also not), zero programs to encourage women into sewer maintenance, coal mining, boilermaking or roofing.

If very low female participation in sewer maintenance and coal mining is not regarded as an issue, and if very low male participation in reception and dental hygiene is not regarded as an issue, we need to stop considering slightly low female participation in maths, physics and engineering to be an issue and a demonstration of "misogyny." If theoretical physics has a "sexism" problem, then doesn't the roof-tarring industry have an even bigger problem? (Similar to how the NBA must be "systemically racist.") As long as the hurdles to enter it are fair for both men and women, stop pretending that women not making the same choices as men is a real issue, as that effectively makes men and men's choices the default.

Related, there's a weird sort of inverted gender role often imposed upon women by feminists, wherein if women aren't taking a political stand by foregoing children and climbing the corporate ladder (of the cisheteronormativecolonialistcapitalistpatriarchy, oddly), they're "traitors" or "brainwashed" or subjugated to "the patriarchy." And this isn't even only targeted at the right-wing conservative tradwife types, either. If a woman loves motherhood, or isn't rushing back to work after, or only wants to work part-time so she can focus on the kids, there's something wrong with her. It's only "empowerment" and "agency" when you do what we want you to. The same types often insist that Muslima wearing hijab is a "choice," weirdly.

Lastly, and perhaps more insidiously, is the enforcement of gender roles and stereotypes in the rise of gender ideology. A girl wearing a hoodie might be trans. A 2 year old boy who likes to play dress-ups and doesn't want to play t-ball must be trans. "Refusing to get a haircut, or standing to urinate, trying to stand to urinate, refusing to stand to urinate, trying on sibling’s clothing, playing with the ‘opposite gender’ toys, things like that." Being in "the wrong body" is about colors and clothes. This particularly targets and hurts gay and lesbian kids, and those on the autism spectrum, who are statistically more likely to be gender non-conforming.

I don't see a problem with those gender roles or stereotypes existing. As I previously mentioned, one positive thing they do is provide a rough, highly generalized rubric. Men are more likely than women to pursue higher pressure jobs, women are more likely than men to seek part-time employment and to retrain based on personal fulfilment rather than financial reward. While we can really dig right down into things, such as the "pay gap" (i.e. earnings gap) with details and statistics, high level trends, roles and tendencies help us glance over society and go, yeah, that's about what we would expect.

The question isn't whether these roles, stereotypes, averages, tendencies exist at all, it's whether they exist because people are being limited or, as the statistics suggest, they are magnified by the lack of constraint by free, egalitarian societies.

This is why fields like evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology should be guiding us, not evidence-free, faith-based theologies like "Gender Studies."

I hope that answers your follow-up.

Where does your opinion lie on the matter of sex and gender and the relationship between biological sex and gender roles/ gender prescriptions as a social construct.

We don't ask the same questions about tigers, peafowl or bees.

Sex-based behaviors (gender) are real. We can see them in other primates in a way that mirror ourselves.

Nobody wonders whether the peacock grows feathers and shows off for the females because of social expectations.

Nobody wonders whether the female mantis eats her mate because she's "fIgHtInG tEh PaTrIaRcHy!"

There are very real human sex-based averages that are derived from the evolution of our species, the pressures it has been under, the variations that have been most successful, and what each sex has needed of the other.

This means that, for example, boys are more inclined towards thing-based activities - careers, toys, pasttimes - while girls are more inclined towards people-oriented activities... on average. This is replicated cross-cultures.

Of course there are girls who want to fix trucks for a living, and boys who want to be kindergarten teachers. They are still girls and boys who will grow up to be women and men. And nobody should get in their way.

What you like doesn't define what you are. But what you are is still statistically significant, because it offers societal-wide information. The society-wide trend doesn't predict or define individuals, and individuals don't negate a society-wide trend. Which many people don't seem to understand.

Here's a good example. Average intelligence of women and men is the same.

While the means are the same, male intelligence is more variable, so you'll find more highly intelligent men at the higher end, and more really stupid men at the lower end. You possibly know at least one highly intelligent woman who is smarter than most of the men you know. That doesn't change the societal-wide trend.

This is simply a fact. You can get angry or offended, but it doesn't stop being true.

And in a similar way, men and women having different average interests, tendencies and behaviors - e.g. women tend to be more socially-oriented, men tend to be more action-oriented - makes sense in the light of evolution and the demands and pressures our primitive ancestors were subjected to by the natural world and the battle for success. And the demands males and females put upon each other.

Nobody gets angry when we mention that humans are prone to pareidolia - interpreting or perceiving meaning where it isn't there, such as a smiling or pouting "face" in the front end of a car. Evolutionarily, it makes sense. In the same way, noticing that sex-based differences are real might make people angry or offended, but that offence doesn't matter as far as what is real.

The idea that "gender is a social construct," then is nonsense. It's a denial of evolution itself, a denial of the way we came to be as a species. To suggest that the same tendencies we see in our primate ancestors - e.g. maternal instinct in female chimps carrying sticks - is some kind of social brainwashing requires believing that those tendencies disappeared from humanity's evolutionary line, then re-emerged, identically, as socially imposed roles.

That's creationism. Actually it's worse. Xian creationism simply asserts that everything is as it always was. Everything was created in its current form. Gender creationists must assert that humanity wound backwards to a blank slate state, then had the wherewithal to form a conspiracy of oppression to reinstitute the same vestigial traits back into society. Oh, and this happened either sufficiently far back in our development to precede or dispersal throughout the lands of Earth, or coincidentally every society on Earth came up with it more recently. Gender social constructivism is evolution-denying creationism.

This level of magical thinking makes me long for the days where Xians rambled about the laws of thermodynamics that they don't understand. The talking snake and donkey seem almost reasonable.

The domains that produce this kind of thinking are not science-based, they're political and ideological, such as Gender Studies. People in these fields don't study biology, they don't study demography, they don't study anthropology. They don't even study basic statistics.

Feminist theory, which is where "gender is a social construct" was really incubated as the justification for patriarchy theory, is not scientific, and is opinion (grievance)-based, not evidence based. One of the most tragic examples of this is the John/Joan case, where David Reimer was raised as a girl after a botched circumcision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

Finally, on 14 March 1980, Reimer's parents told him the truth about his gender reassignment, following advice from Reimer's endocrinologist and psychiatrist. At 14, having been informed of his past by his father, Reimer decided to assume a male gender identity, calling himself David. He underwent treatment to reverse the reassignment, including testosterone injections, a double mastectomy, and phalloplasty operations.

[..]

His case came to international attention in 1997 when he told his story to Milton Diamond, an academic sexologist who persuaded Reimer to allow him to report the outcome in order to dissuade physicians from treating other infants similarly. Soon after, Reimer went public with his story and John Colapinto published a widely disseminated and influential account in Rolling Stone magazine in December 1997. The article won the National Magazine Award for Reporting.

This was later expanded into The New York Times best-selling biography As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (2000), in which Colapinto described how—contrary to Money's reports—when living as Brenda, Reimer did not identify as a girl. He was ostracized and bullied by peers (who dubbed him "cavewoman"), and neither frilly dresses nor female hormones made him feel female.

Human nature is not as malleable as some people would like you to believe. You are a sexed being. How you "identify" can't change what you are. That doesn't mean you can't do what you want, express yourself how you want, but you are what you are.

This is only controversial to the people who want to push the story of humans being infinitely moldable, existing as divine gender thetans imprisoned in vulgar meat bodies.

Now, it is true that some of these tendencies and behaviors will tend to be limited or shaped by the culture of the society. But they're not constructed wholesale. For example, Japanese society is highly structured around honor. So male and female behaviors will tend to be expressed through those norms; male aggression and female agreeableness may take unique culturally influenced forms. But they're not created by them. Societies which have different pressures - e.g. in the freezing north regions of North America, vs the arid deserts of Africa - will unsurprisingly produce different cultural expectations upon men and women. Recognizing that isn't a form of bigotry, it's an acknowledgement of reality.

There's a reason stereotypes exist - because there is an element of truth in there, even if it's a tiny seed. If there wasn't, we wouldn't be able to recognize or apply them. They exist because humans are prone to cognitive shortcuts, as we have a lot of information to process and making choices or decisions doesn't always allow one to sit down and think things through methodically. Our ancestors wouldn't have had the time, and probably wouldn't have had the cognitive power.

"Girls like dolls, boys like trucks," is a very dirty shorthand. At its core is a demonstrable truth regarding societal-wide averages and tendencies that takes several paragraphs to explain more accurately (and some people will still be determined to be pissed off, no matter how you frame it). But stereotypes are not all we are, and there's no reason not to acknowledge them, but put them aside, or try to. And certainly no reason to use them to structure society itself, "fixing" girls who like trucks and boys who like dolls.

I don't know if that answers your question. Suffice to say that just as a scientific view of the world makes a god unnecessary, a scientific view of the world make social constructivism (postmodern creationism) unnecessary. We can explain the world without resorting to magic or conspiracies.

P.S. Reminder: social constructivism is a social construct.

[hollywoodjuliorivas]

This contrast—of women raring to assert their agency in one context, then willing, even eager, to relinquish it another—captured my interest in part because of its familiarity. I’d seen it crop up recently in widely praised works both written by and featuring brazen, outspoken, and almost always middle-class white women. It’s in Sally Rooney’s “Conversations with Friends,” when Frances tries unsuccessfully to get Nick—older, married, kind—to choke and hit her during sex. And in Rooney’s “Normal People,” when Marianne discloses to gentle, sensitive Connell, her on-again-off-again boyfriend, that another man has hit her with a belt, choked her—that she asked for it, enjoyed it. It’s also in the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s TV series “Fleabag,” when Fleabag confesses—literally—to the priest she lusts after. All she truly wants is someone (by implication him, or maybe Him) to tell her “what to wear every morning,” to instruct her on “what to like, what to hate, what to rage about . . . what to believe in . . . how to live my life.”

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These scenes both do and do not seem like ordinary kink. All sex, of course, is psychological, but the source of the charge here is more than just a dom-sub mind game. What vitalizes them is the friction of the characters’ incongruent desires: on the one hand, to embrace the simplicity of someone else’s authority; on the other, to assert their own authorship. Popkey’s narrator, though not a writer, has a literary sensibility—her dissertation is on “female pain in Jacobean revenge tragedies,” and her idea of a beach read is “The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962”—and it’s on masterly display in the scene with the single moms. Like a plotting author, she engineers a game: they will go around in a circle relaying their origin stories, the narrative that explains how they got to this place, “with the wine and the kid and the no partner, the moment when that became inevitable.” It’s a premise that grants her permission to deliver a personal monologue, to test-drive the story of her becoming. She tweaks some of the facts (instead of a student, she’s an intern; instead of a professor, he’s a peer), but she is emphatic in the authority of what she’s saying. She tells the single moms that “there’s a line” through her life, and “it runs straight from that hotel room.”

Does she believe all this? Is she trying to make herself believe it? Years earlier, listening to Artemisia, she envied the older woman’s narrative control: “I, at twenty-one, did not, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life. Had not yet realized the folly of governing narratives.” And yet, a part of her seems to hope authorial mastery will overcome personal folly: “of course life is random, a series of coincidences, etc., but . . . to live you must attempt to make sense of it, and that’s what narrative’s for.” Maybe if she tells the narrative well enough it will be true. And, if it is true, then maybe she can finally be coherent; the past decisions that perplex her most, those moments that reek of self-sabotage or that hurt people she loves, were all along foreordained, set in motion by that catalyzing moment. Even if she had tried to, she could never have done anything otherwise. The right narrative, she understands, can release her of responsibility.

Rooney’s Frances and Marianne and Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag share with Popkey’s narrator a literary proclivity, which can also manifest as an anxiety. They, too, want to assemble the type of story that is also a kind of proof. Frances gets her first story published in the course of the novel, Marianne is bookish and academically successful, and they are both so-called digital natives. For them, communicating through text and e-mail, Facebook and I.M.—which is to say through writing—is as instinctive as speech, sometimes preferable to it. “I had been so terribly noisy and theatrical all the way through,” Frances worries after sleeping with Nick the first time, “that it was impossible now to act indifferent like I did in e-mails.” To be online is to craft—and control—a persona, however deliberate, however fussed over, however much it resembles (or not) one’s I.R.L. self. Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag is likewise aware of her audience—not an online one, although all of us watching at home are, in a sense, her followers—and may in fact be the one who’s most invested in authorial control. When she turns to the camera, to us, with direct narration, her clever quips and wry asides annotate and editorialize the plot. We are not observers of a neutral story unfolding; we are observers of a story unfolding the way she wants it to.

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These women behave in ways that are harmful to people they care about—Frances to Nick, Marianne to Connell, Fleabag to her best friend, Popkey’s narrator to her offenseless husband—sometimes with tragic consequences. Most of all, they do things to hurt themselves: drink too much, eat too little, carve wounds into their skin. What kind of person am I, they worry, to be so self-contemptuous, so bent on self-defeat? Their behavior mystifies them, and they discover that the selective work of authorship can relieve their confusion: if they choose some moments from their past and discard others, if they arrange these moments in just the right way, they might be able to understand themselves as logical and consistent, free of the messy task of figuring out what they want, and the even messier one of fully accepting these wants.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

New Words, Favorite Clues, and the Year in Crosswords

Is whatever these women want—and however they decide—O.K.? What if they want bad things? “Bad” because they have been deemed perverse, or illogical, or are likely to undermine longer-term goals; “bad” because they could be harmful. Such vexed questions spurred me to revisit “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?,” a vibrant, perspicacious essay by Amia Srinivasan, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, and published in 2018, in the London Review of Books. The essay, among other things, resurrected a feminist debate that for years had been mostly dormant: Should feminism have anything to say about desire? Should feminism develop a political critique of sexuality? During the sex wars of the nineteen-eighties, anti-porn radical feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that heterosexual sex under patriarchy inevitably normalizes male violence and reinforces female inequality; women should, on account of this, consider repudiating their desires. Celibacy and political lesbianism were the theory put into practice.

Sex-positive feminists countered that the radical critique denied women the right to pleasurable sex. Women should instead be taken at their word: if a woman says that she enjoys submitting to a man—the activity that, at least superficially, seems most to reënact women’s subjugation by men outside of the bedroom—or if she says she finds it emancipatory, then feminists must believe her. For feminism to do otherwise risks slut-shaming, prudery, and charging others with false consciousness—creating yet more binds for the very people it means to liberate. Srinivasan reactivates the argument because, although she too is wary of these risks, she is equally distressed by the implication that a feminism without a critique of desire gives cover to wants that replicate more general patterns of oppression and exclusion. The “rape fantasy,” or the “unfuckability of black women and Asian men,” or the “sexual disgust expressed towards disabled, trans and fat bodies” passes for mere personal preference—nothing at all to be done about it.

Popkey is plainly conversant in these debates. In an early chapter, the narrator listens to a woman’s story about a date rape that took place on her college campus, at a party she attended: a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate, still a virgin and in her behavior more innocent than most, was assaulted by a thirtysomething male grad student, widely known to be something of a lech, a “sexual predator.” The friend wonders why no one tried to alert the unworldly undergrad, much less intervene. “We told ourselves she must have known what she was getting into. We told ourselves that she was an adult. . . . The porn wars were over and porn had won and we were porn-positive, we were sex-positive, we probably wouldn’t have even called ourselves feminist. Who were we to judge.” Walking home after hearing the story, the narrator ruminates on the woman’s account, tries to assess her own desires in light of it. “Could what the graduate student did be wrong,” the narrator asks, “and what I sometimes felt I wanted also be right.” Of course, what’s right for some may not be right for others. As Srinivasan notes, in a summary of intersectional feminism, sexual submission may have an altogether different valence for a woman of color, or a trans woman, than it does for a white woman—like Popkey’s narrator, who “by virtue of her whiteness, is already taken to be a paradigm of female beauty.”

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If the feminist debates parse desire on a theoretical level, Popkey’s novel reveals where these analyses intersect with the more mundane, familiar kinds of self-analysis: Should I choose one direction or the other, act this way or that? She depicts what it feels like to exist, actually live, at that intersection, which can so often bring about paralysis. Always there is a “churning,” as the narrator calls it, that ongoing fusillade of impulses and counter-impulses reverberating through the closed system of the mind; we weigh facts and then counterfactuals, consider social or cultural conventions, weave a thick weft of reality and fantasy, deference and denial, then wish we could tear the tapestry apart. How can we ever know what it is that we want, rather than what we have been taught to want, or what we resist wanting because it, too, is what we have been taught?

Years after her ur-erotic hotel-room encounter, the narrator finds herself in another hotel room, this time with a man she has picked up in the bar downstairs. Her husband is at home and thinks she is away at a job interview or visiting friends; she can’t remember. Alone with the stranger, the narrator tells him that she wants to be dominated. This time she’s articulating her desire, rather than discovering it through someone else’s, and in the act of articulation she can’t help but come face to face with her own agency. But the fantasy itself is for the opposite: “I hate making choices,” she says. Desire inevitably leads to a paucity of control; we make decisions, take chances, but don’t always get what we want. Or we get what we thought we wanted, but it leaves us worse for the wear, exposes the way we didn’t know ourselves, or someone else, well enough. Giving up control to someone else can be a way of regaining control by relinquishing the stakes and, in turn, the possibility of being disappointed—of trying and failing, of feeling responsible for doing the wrong thing. If choice can be its own kind of prison, submission can be an escape plan.

At the end of the novel, we find the narrator facing entrapment and casting around for an alternate means of escape. She lives with her son in Fresno, where life is lonely and remote. The days of relaying stories with women seem to be in the past. Now, when others inquire about her life, she no longer holds forth: “Sometimes I say nothing. Silence: The great conversation killer.” Once more, she seeks an explanation for how she has arrived at her destination. She bought a house in this small town, she says, because of a short story she read. The short story is by a man, about a man. The author is an “exemplary jeans wearer”; the protagonist is a promiscuous husband who leaves his wife, driving off into the distance, from Maine all the way to California. En route he stops in various towns and calls up former mistresses, asking each one in turn to run away with him. All the women decline. When eventually he dials a number that is disconnected, the story ends. The town he’s in—it’s Fresno. The man must have stayed there, Popkey’s narrator concludes, because “he has run out of road.”

The narrator seems to fear that she, too, has reached the end of the story; the “line” that she traced for the single moms has turned into a dispersion of dots. And so, it seems, she has turned to other people’s “governing narratives,” just as she once turned to Artemisia’s. In the story, inspired by Sam Shepard’s short story “Coalinga 1/2 Way,” the man is “abhorrent,” and yet the story demands that the reader empathize with him. “Did I imagine myself as the lone driver, making a life for myself in a town full of strangers?” the narrator asks. “Yes, I did. Pay attention to enough men and you will begin to think of yourself as one. You will think of this as an improvement over fantasizing about being mistreated by one and you will, probably, be right.” On the one hand, this new independent life might be seen as an achievement, proof of her autonomy—the kind of life that women are judged for having and men are not. But it’s not just a man’s freedom she has borrowed; it’s literally a man’s narrative. The act of submission is replaced by the act of substitution. And if she’s merely borrowing, can we really say she’s gotten what she wants?

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When a literary protagonist introduces the question of literary influence, we ought to wonder what all this means, at the meta-level, for the novelist herself. One clue comes in the novel’s end notes, in three and a half pages of “Works (Not) Cited,” an expansive list of titles including books by the authors Annie Ernaux, Norman Rush, Janet Malcolm, and Mary Gaitskill, films by Olivier Assayas and Paul Verhoeven, and episodes of “Frasier” and “Mad Men.” (It also includes Srinivasan’s essay.) These are works the author credits for giving shape to the novel, and, in some cases, she says, they are referred to only “elliptically.” This polyphonic model of influence—of many voices speaking and listening, avoiding and arguing—might be seen as an alternative to the narrator’s longing for a single origin story, her longing for total authorial control. In acknowledging that she is part of a wide-ranging conversation, rather than a singular narrative, Popkey, by contrast, suggests that she may be willing to cede some of this control. On the novel’s final page, the narrator finally admits: “Perhaps all this time I have been wrong about the story’s protagonist.” She is referring to the “abhorrent” protagonist of the Shepard story, but, in a book that grapples explicitly with how and why we craft narratives, with the perils and gratifications of the stories we invent and inherit, the line invites another reading. Popkey may in fact be making an admission of her own, casting doubt on the narrative that she herself has constructed, acknowledging the ultimate impossibility of the authorial pursuit.

[asrarblog]

 Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #265. Pharma Veterans shares the wealth of knowledge and wisdom of Veterans for the benefit of Pharma Community. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. If you wish to share your stories, ideas and thoughts, please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here.

Marriage is a union between man and woman. Some call it civil contract, some legal, some religious; whatever the terminology, marriage provides a legitimate platform in society for men and women to commit their lives to each other. Marriage is probably the most misunderstood institution. Because it is riddled with many myths, ill-formed ideas, illogical thinking and baseless assumptions. Rather than looking at marriage, we shall try to examine the basic ground; which is man-woman relation.

Man-Woman Relation – Romance: The all starry eyed, cloud nine, out of this world type romance does happen in this very world and for ordinary mortals. Problem occurs when we demand life-time warranty on it which is not admissible.

It is a lovely relationship in which both are at their best. Chivalry, courtesy, generosity, forgiveness, sensitivity, intensity, empathy and every other conceivable good feeling is abundant and free flowing. In all that glitz and glitter, the real people are not visible to each other. As soon as the real faces show up, it leads to confusion, denial, anger, disillusionment, disappointment and contempt; in that order. There is an American group of researchers who have recorded and viewed hundreds of couples to see what early indicators leading to future separation could be. The one common factor they have identified is CONTEMPT. Contempt robs away all good feelings from a relation. In Pakistan, we don’t separate due to social pressures and keep living miserably, subjecting our partners and ourselves to a slow death.

Man-Woman Relation-Friendship: If such a thing exists. Contrary to popular claims, it is impossible to have true friendship between men and women. There are always undercurrents of physical attraction. What we see and label as ‘friendship’ is actually a mild form of romance from which physical factors are deliberately kept away. It is a great relation nonetheless as it has all the fine ingredients of romance but does not carry the burden of excessive expectations. In our social system, man-woman friendship has limited prospect as our value system does not allow free mixing up of sexes.  Women particularly are not allowed to move around freely and at will. It is also common observation that the so-called friendship frequently turns into ‘romance’ or even ‘marriage’.

Man-Woman Relation – Marriage: All said and done, it never was and never will be an equal relation. In patriarchal and male-dominated societies like Pakistan, it is more so because men have no intention to treat women any better than property. Anyway, both parties enter into marital relation with apprehensions and carrying all the burden of ‘advices’ given over time and reinforced just before the event. They see one another suspiciously and are fearful. No wonder then that both attack simultaneously and try to ‘kill’ or ‘subjugate’ other. Since it is a war, there will be victory and defeat; there will be plots and schemes and conspiracies; and there will definitely be oppression. There are three possible scenarios.

One Party Wins. The winner takes all. Winning husband will openly treat wife as dust, misuse her, hurt her, disrespect her, cheat on her; degrees vary from mild to severe. Winning wife will treat husband with contempt, take undue advantage where she can, maltreat in-laws and alienate children from father; degrees vary. This may be more common and visible in illiterate, rural and suburban areas; but other segments are not free either.

No Party Wins – Fight Continues. This is probably more common in urban areas. The fight may be open but mostly it is below the surface, simmering type. It is a conflict here, an argument there. Life is not too bad if the intensity is low.

Both Parties Give Up On One Another. This is common among more affluent types. The wife and husband bring their own baggage into relation and remain busy with that. Both look at each other and understand there is no reason to make an effort. Both then carry on the relation publicly (physically?) but are so averse to each other that they usually choose to even live in separate rooms.

Marriage sounds scary, isn’t it? It is unless we enter into relation with an open mind and open heart, liberated from the shackles of myths and advice and aloof to the interference of families. Since the conditions are met rarely, a good, mutually satisfying marriage happens rarely. It is not impossible, just a little demanding. If both or even one partner acts sensibly, then after the initial bumps, things settle down and work out well.

This then is the ‘other side’ of relations, very briefly.

What do we do? How do we survive? Should we allow ourselves to be carried away by the charm of romance or security of marriage? Yes, and Very Yes.

Men and women have been created to be together. One is not complete without the other. The world has been designed around them. There are several reasons for this design though we may not know all of them. Women bring the much-desired softness, patience, perseverance, consistency, reliability, affection, care and service to this world. Men contribute physical strength, ambition, power, domination, persecution, winning, passion and freedom. If they willingly complement one another, it is a great relation. Feminist movement has achieved much but they get on the wrong foot when they insist that women must get into men’s roles to get rights. Women must get rights as women and not by aping men.

The world would definitely be unworthy of living without the presence of women, in all their roles. Men need to grow up and understand and give the rightful place to their finer counterparts.

Marriages Are Made In Heaven – But …… – Blog Post #265 by Asrar Qureshi  Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #265. Pharma Veterans shares the wealth of knowledge and wisdom of Veterans for the benefit of Pharma Community.

[fashiontrendin-blog]

How to be an intersectional feminist (and why it's important you know how)

http://fashion-trendin.com/how-to-be-an-intersectional-feminist-and-why-its-important-you-know-how/

How to be an intersectional feminist (and why it's important you know how)

On the Monday following the Academy Awards, after checking out all the awkward moments and red carpet outfits, I noticed a data spreadsheet doing the rounds on social media. It detailed the breakdown of dialogue between men and women in the Best Picture-winning films from 2016 to 1998, and ladies, it did not do us any favours.

The chart showed that women got to speak far less than men in each movie, even when the film had a female lead – here’s looking at you, Million Dollar Baby and The Hurt Locker! But after seeing the numbers, all I could think about was how, if you broke it down by race as well as gender, you’d find that women of colour would be practically silent.

This, my friends, is intersectional awareness and it’s exactly what feminism needs to really flourish in 2018.

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Now “what is intersectionality?”, I hear some of you asking, and I say some because I bet there’s plenty of you who came across the term in recent days, weeks, months or years. For me, I came across it just after finishing university when I was first trying to make my way in the world of journalism. I saw someone tweet about it, so immediately I did a Google search to find out what it actually meant. I discovered that the word was coined in 1989 by American civil rights advocate and law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw who recognised that society often treated issues of race and gender as though they were mutually exclusive, when really that hasn’t been the case.

For decades there have been multiple systems of oppression that can hold a girl down because inequality comes in many forms. From gender to race, sexuality to economic background, disability to any number of variables that impact our individual experiences of life. An intersectional feminist understands that at the cross section of these distinct factors, the WORST bias occurs.

Is 2018 FINALLY a good time to be a woman?

Take myself for example; I’m a straight, mixed race, cisgender woman from a middle class background. I have suffered inequality because of my gender and racial discrimination because of my ethnicity, but I have also benefited from a supportive economic background (nice one, mum and dad), my “normative” sexual preference and the fact that I was born into a body that I identify with.

Every woman can recognise their privilege and subjugation in this way, but sometimes we fail to acknowledge it in others. Sometimes by actioning our feminist values without an intersectional approach, we end up doing more harm than good and set ourselves up for a dragging.

Just look at what happened to Taylor Swift after she took offence to Nicki Minaj’s criticism of the MTV VMA nominations. Nicki was making a point about the double standard for women of colour in the music industry and Taylor made it about her. It wasn’t about her. Then there was the Suffragettes film campaign that saw Meryl Streep and the cast rocking T-shirts that said “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave”. Their intention may have been to empower all women but what these fashion statements actually did was ignore the experience of black women who were *actually* slaves and those descended from them.

These are just a few examples of white women making mistakes but, despite our best intentions, women of all backgrounds can get it wrong. German-born, Palestinian filmmaker Lexi Alexander made this point this week when she tweeted: “I wish people would face their own racism and sexism more often.

“I catch myself constantly making judgements that are racist, sexist, misogynistic, especially when I’m writing. It’s in all of us. Face it and fix it.”

Face it and fix it is exactly what Emma Watson did when she was accused of being a white feminist. Instead of getting on the defensive, Em made Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race the first read of 2018 for her book club and wrote about how it made her examine her own privilege.

“When I heard myself being called a ‘white feminist’ I didn’t understand… was I being called racist? I began… panicking,” she wrote before explaining how she *should* have asked questions about how her race, class and gender could have affected her perspective, or how she may have supported a structurally racist system.

“Instead of seeing these differences as divisive,” she added. “I could have asked whether defining them was actually empowering and bringing about better understanding.”

I think that this is the biggest thing you can take away from an intersectional approach to feminism: understanding and empathy for women who are both the same and different to you. No one is the model feminist – I think we can all admit to having a few flawed moments – but together, through intersectionality, maybe women can empower each other better than ever before.

Girl power! 10 things that wouldn’t exist if a woman hadn’t invented it

[820poetics]

Loving with No Boundaries: The Art of Mothering

              Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines (2016) explores the many facets of radical mothering. What is revolutionary mothering? The text pushes the boundaries of what it means to be a mother. Each narrative within the text conveys that society’s traditional notions of mothering may exist outside of traditional, patriarchal conceptions of what mothering qualifies. For instance, Ross says that “Audre Lorde and Angela Davis mercilessly attacked the underlying racism within feminism, describing it as reinforcing the patriarchal white supremacist system” (xv). By condemning the “patriarchal white supremacist system,” Lorde and Davis and other authors within the text help us to conceptualize that our notions of mothering should embrace the fact that mothering can be a “liberatory practice” (xv) that involves many women. Indeed, homosexual, lesbian, heterosexual, non-bio females can participate in revolutionary mothering. Finally, when I think about revolutionary mothering, I think of women who carry their hurts on their backs but are still able to push through the many complicated matrices of subjugation and systems of oppression to care for others. I believe that she—all revolutionary mothers—stand tall and are unbreakable.               How do women nurture life? June Jordan (2016) posits that “love is lifeforce” (p. 12). The lifeforce to which Jordan refers encompasses unconditional love, which represents the possibilities of loving in spite of the vast experiences to which we bring to mothering. I can think of two such people whom I adore who represent revolutionary mothering. Divorced recently from her husband of twenty years, one of my best friends began a relationship with a beautiful, lesbian woman. To watch her girlfriend, I feel no need to question her sensibilities about mothering. She defies prevailing homophobic notions that she cannot mother my friend’s children because she is a lesbian, and did not give birth to my friend’s children. Unfortunately, our society has the propensity to engage in subversive acts, which contribute to the “demonization of Black lesbian” (Gumbs, 2016, p. 30) women. Gumbs (2016) points out that this demonization is more about “the threat of women who live their lives in a way that shows that they do not need patriarchy or subservience to men” (p. 30). Although she is both lesbian and a non-bio female, she nurtures and loves my friend’s children. For example, her girlfriend attends basketball games and birthday parties. She helps with homework, and she feeds love and strength into their soul. And then there was my mother, who was born in the South and who left Winston Salem to travel North for a better life. She worked full time, and at one time went to school to pursue a master’s degree. Also, she taught other mother’s children for over thirty years. Still, she found the time to breathe life into my brother and me. To those whom she did not give birth, she “gifted of one’s talents, ideas, intellect, and creativity without recompense” (xv) and never complained. A powerful matriarch was she. At times, she lived outside of patriarchal boundaries despite its dominance and power. She persevered.               Cyril’s (2016) narrative, which is in Revolutionary Mothering, asks the question, “How can a household, a community, or a nation be effectively governed when women are held disproportionately responsible for its future yet are disproportionately neglected, abused, excluded, isolated, and invisible” (p. 33). She says that it cannot. I agree, but I believe in the possibilities of redemption. As long as we are breathing, there is the opportunity to renew and enlighten a society in ways that can contribute to the humanization of a nation. Right? What is the problem? I believe that the erasure of groups of people and our nations’ engagement of fear mongering of groups that do not reify dominant notions of patriarchal ways of living continues to threaten our way of life. We must work in solidarity to do more. Accepting that revolutionary mothering is not a cultural phenomenon but represents the sensibilities of many women should be the norm. We must reject that our ideas of mothering are socially constructed. Let us all move to act! Although Alexander (2006) is not talking about revolutionary mothering, she gives some stellar advice that may allow for more acceptance of Blacks more broadly. I center, however, her argument to cover revolutionary mothering. She (2006) acknowledges that as a nation that             we need to adopt, as daily practice, ways of being and of relating                     modes of analyzing and strategies of organizing in which we             constantly mobilize identification and solidarity, across all borders,               as key elements in the repertoire of risks we need to take to see             ourselves as part of one another, even in the context of difference             (p. 265).

Feminists would agree that our Black lived experiences have been “compounded by the fact that a critical component of colonialism throughout the America, which involved the imposition of Western gender roles of patriarchal social structures” continues to permeate our society (Suzack et al, 2016, p. 2). Acceptance is paramount.            Today, my twelve-year-old gave me a hug and told me that he loved me. Often, I feel a deep sense of lament by the physical time that is taken away from him because I must work and go to school. Although Walker’s novel Black White and Jewish may or may not tell the whole truth of her relationship with her mother in that her mother took more time to engage in the mothering of millions through her work, I was impacted by her story nonetheless. Perhaps in some ways, I identified with Alice Walker. I, too, spend an abundance of time with my work. However, like my mother, I can dare to do it all. I can engage in acts to promote social justice healing and the humanizing of all Black women despite my biological connection to my boys. I love them unconditionally and will teach and inspire them to disrupt dominant notions of patriarchy. Balance is essential. Oka’s (2016) narrative, which is in Revolutionary Narrative, says that “mothering as revolutionary praxis involves exploring how we might reorganize ourselves to meet common needs in this historical moment (e.g., Black Lives Movement), including the capacity to raise and nurture whole, resilient individuals as wells autonomous communities of resistance” (p. 53). We may need more men to work in solidarity with the Black feminist’s mission to abolish sexism, class oppression, racism, and the multi-faceted ways in which women conceptualize their gender identities. Perhaps my sons will join in solidarity with Black feminists. Black women must be respected. I desire that my life’s work will contribute to the communities in which they will work and live one day.

Davena Jackson

References

Alexander, Selections from Pedagogues of Crossing [2006]

Suzack, Cheryl, et. al., selections from Indigenous Women & Feminism [2011]

Gumbs, et. al., Revolutionary Mothering [2016]

Walker, Rebecca, Black, White, and Jewish [2000]