#it's like. the ultimate form of trans closure i think | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ailuronymy · 3 years ago

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I doubt you'll remember this, because it happened such a long time ago, but it's been bothering me for years now and I wanted to get some closure on it. Many years ago, when I was 14, pretty new to roleplaying and completely new to Tumblr, I sent you an anonymous ask laughing about ridiculous unrealistic things that people were having their cats do in a roleplay I was in. Building blanket forts, among other things, and being transgender. At this point in my life I thought transgender only meant someone who had undergone gender affirmation surgery, and the idea of cats doing surgery on one another was hilarious to me. I shared it with the hope that other people would find it hilarious too. Instead, you told me that I had said The Wrong Thing and called me a bigot. I was confused, I was horrified, I didn't understand at all, and I more or less fled from tumblr for about two years. It was a formative experience for me.

Hello there. I do actually remember that post, although obviously since you were anon then as well, I didn’t remember you specifically. But I do remember.

I thought about how to answer this ask for a few days. I’m not sure exactly what it is you’re looking for from me, but I’m going to give you the best reply I can and I hope that’s good enough for the both of us.

When you wrote in to me, about eight years ago, I was younger than you are now. I was nineteen and I’d only been on tumblr for a bit over a year at that point, I think. I’d never had social media before, of any kind. It was all pretty new to me as an experience too, and I’d never expected this blog to get the attention that it did. I never even imagined that was a possibility. But it happened and I learned how to run a relatively popular ask blog on the job, as it were.

There’s a lot I regret when I look back on that early era of this blog. The humour and jokes I allowed and sometimes encouraged and said myself here was often not kind, and that’s something I really regret. Eventually, I put an end to that because it just wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted any of us who have fun here to be doing. But I absolutely allowed it to happen for a long time first, and that’s on me.

Also at that same time, there was a particular way of interacting on tumblr that was very popular. It was a lot of exuberance and hyperbole and insults, and being rude for fun, and overall very over-the-top and often harsh or just plain uncaring that there was someone else at the other end of the message. For everyone who was here in 2012, I think you can probably remember what it was like. It wasn’t a nice mode of communication, but it was popular and got great responses and a lot of people found it fun to read. For a couple of years after I started Ailuronymy, I was absolutely guilty of buying into it and acting this way, until I finally hated it enough to stop. It wasn’t who I wanted to be, in general or on this blog specifically. It felt mean and inauthentic and I wanted to be better. But I did act like that for a long time, and that was a choice I made.

I’m not saying any of this because I want to make excuses for myself. I’m more aware than anyone else of the problems early on in this blog’s history, and it’s something I regret and wish I could go back to do differently with the knowledge and experience I have now. Unfortunately, I can’t change the past. I can only own up to it and do better going forward.

I’m sorry for the tone I often used, including to you in that post, and I’m sorry that because of that behaviour, you felt scared and unwelcome here. That’s a failure on my part. I shouldn’t have used the tone I did, or assumed I had to take a defensive, intense stance the way I did. It’s very sad to me to know that because I did that, you were frightened and decided to leave.

However, I would like to share my context too. Because at the time, I was nineteen years old (which I know probably sounds ancient to younger teens, but it’s not, really), and a bisexual guy (which I still am, obviously), and Ailuronymy was already a place that people (especially queer people) in the fandom were looking to for support and education. Insofar as this blog was developing a niche, that was it. I felt a significant amount of responsibility to champion and defend the people this blog was made for.

2012 was also a time when the Warriors fandom on tumblr was genuinely very homophobic, and also quite volatile. It was common for people to be very angry (in general, and often at me) for saying that ableism isn’t okay, or that Warriors characters can be trans, or sometimes just “canon naming doesn’t make much sense.” I got quite a lot of hate mail--also sometimes just... confused, angry mail, for this naming system or any of the political things I talked about--and I was doing the best I could with what I had to give. A lot of what I learned during my years of running this blog came from making mistakes, but I always did my best.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because what you actually said was: “these cats can be homosexual, asexual, bisexual, pansexual, and transgender--don’t even ask me how that’s possible. I don’t want to know.” You came to me, a queer man, running a blog that in no small part is about how queerness is allowed to exist in this fandom and is in fact not implausible, during a time when the fandom as a whole was solidly anti-queer, with something like that. Like you said, you shared it with me--and the readers here--because you hoped we would find it hilarious and unrealistic too.

But I didn’t, because, to me, that’s just what a lot of the fandom already was. It was a hostile environment that regularly argued that queer characters, or people, had no place here. That was the kind of things people on anon fairly often came to yell in my inbox about how I’m wrong, etc. etc., and how I’m bad, etc. etc.

I reacted defensively, which I wouldn’t do now, because I’m much older, and I have experience and confidence I just didn’t then. At the time, though, what I heard in your ask was “queer characters are absurd and don’t belong here, don’t correct me,” and that is what I reacted to. I’m sure for you, it felt scary and disproportionate, and as I said before, I wish I had handled things differently, and gentler.

But I don’t disagree with what I said. The points I made weren’t wrong. And my response--although not how I would respond now--was not wrong, even though it hurt you. It genuinely is horrible to know that because of my lack of tact, you were scared. It was also horrible to receive your ask at the time, just like many of the rest. It wasn’t hypothetical to me, because I’m queer. It was about me, and other people I care about very much.

The fact I’m queer is probably news to you, and you were new tumblr and probably didn’t know what was going on in the fandom, and maybe you would have said something different if you knew all this.

Likewise, though, you were on anon and I didn’t know who you were. I didn’t know you were fourteen. I didn’t know you were asking in good faith, and not just another one of the homophobic fans thinking you’d found a friend in me, which frankly felt a bit insulting. I didn’t know you were and, again, although I wish I did more back then and was kinder in my approach, I didn’t have insight into your intentions. I also didn’t have the maturity for that not to matter.

That said, even in my very imperfect answer I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt. I specifically said:

“Before you think I’m victimising you - I’m not. This is not personal right now; currently, this is a mistake on your part, and I understand that mistakes are incredibly easy to make. If, by the end of my post, you get where you went wrong here, then it will be like this ask of yours never happened and I will forget you ever said it. I don’t like to hold any kind of grudge if there’s any way to avoid it, and an acknowledgement of where you went wrong here would completely fix everything about this.”

“So what you’re saying when you say that you don’t believe that “homosexual, asexual, bisexual, pansexual, and transgender” cats are possible in the context of Warriors is, basically, that you’re a bigot. I am really sorry to say that, because the chances are - I sincerely hope - that you aren’t. You’re a good person. You’re a good person who said something bigoted by mistake. And if you don’t believe what you’ve said is a mistake yet, let me show you some interesting true facts about our world.“

Because I know how easy it is to make mistakes and how hard it is to get everything right all the time, and know everything, and never do something dumb or hurtful. It’s easy to fuck up. I’ve done it a lot. The answer I gave you back then is just one example.

That what you took from my answer was only fear and confusion isn’t something in my control, however. I hate that that’s what happened, and I regret not being who I am now back then, but even though I did fuck up back then, I still did what I could at the time to mitigate the damage and reassure you that a mistake doesn’t define you. I am sorry it wasn’t enough for you to feel okay coming back. But I can’t say I’m sorry for telling you that coming to me on my blog with that kind of mentality is something I’ll tolerate at all.

Ultimately, I’m sorry that our experience of each other was not a good one. I’m sorry that your memory of me is someone scary and mean, and that you felt you had to leave this site entirely for two years because of it. I regret that my actions left you with such a negative experience, because that was never my intention, even though the way I handled things with you was very poor.

I hope you’re able to find the closure you’re looking for and I genuinely wish you all the best.

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comrade-meow · 4 years ago

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The “world historical defeat” of the female sex continues apace.

Women in their tens of thousands are trafficked into sexual slavery every year. Increasing numbers of poor, black and brown women are virtually imprisoned on commercial surrogacy farms, producing babies for the benefit of rich couples. Brutalisation of women in the porn industry is feeding through into its viewers’ sex lives, with grim consequences, while teenage girls face an epidemic of sexual harassment at school and on the streets.

The frequency of female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage has shot up during the Covid-19 crisis. Domestic violence has likewise rocketed. In the UK, prosecutions are so limited that rape is virtually decriminalised. Abortion rights are under attack, from the USA to Poland. And international ‘men’s rights’ networks like ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ attract millions of viewers to videos that dehumanise and pathologise women to an extreme extent.

This is a resurgent global system of exploitation and oppression targeted on women, a reaction against the many gains of feminism. The increasingly commercial nature of many of these deeply exploitative and oppressive practices - the porn industry, for one, makes billions every year, some of it from content involving rape, child abuse, non-consensual filming and the like - drives home the desperate need for a socialist analysis that exposes the roots of these ancient but enduring patriarchal oppressions. And we need an understanding and a language that enables that analysis.

But at the same time as this shocking acceleration of anti-woman attitudes, practices and policies, the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are being rapidly taken apart in response to a worldwide ‘trans rights’ movement. In a rush to embrace the new world of multiple genders, organisations and corporations as diverse as Amnesty International, Tampax, the stillbirth charity, Sands, the Harvard Medical School and many others are in a sudden rush to delete the words ‘woman’ and ‘girl’ from their vocabulary and replace them with a new, ‘inclusive’ language of ‘menstruators’, ‘gestational carriers’, ‘birthing people’, ‘cervix-havers’ and ‘people with uteruses’.

At the same time, the word ‘sex’ has progressively been replaced by the word ‘gender’, which is used to refer not only to reproductive class, but also to aspects of human life as disparate as individual psychology, personality, mannerisms, clothing choices and sexual roles. And the words ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’, are being repurposed to refer not to the sexes themselves, but to aspects of psychology, personality or clothing that are traditionally associated with one or the other sex.

Is this new language - and the renaming and breaking up of the category of people formerly known as women - the tool we need for the job of dismantling the worldwide discrimination, exploitation and abuse of women that is so often focussed on the female sexual and reproductive characteristics? I would argue not. These misguided attempts to dismantle the language used to describe women’s bodies and lives does nothing to reveal or dismantle the oppression itself.

This is because the conceptual framework that is driving the change in language - and stretching and distorting the categories of man and woman into meaninglessness - is fundamentally wrong. And badly so.

Sex as fiction

The political driver behind these linguistic changes is the ‘trans rights’ movement, which bases its arguments on the most extreme and illogical aspects of queer theory. Many trans activists insist that to even question the precepts that they advance is actively hateful, even fascistic in nature - witness the social media furore when any celebrity, such as JK Rowling, dares to say that the word ‘woman’ means a female person. But it is neither hateful nor fascistic to question arguments that have neither intellectual nor political integrity.

I will quote from Judith Butler’s book Gender trouble1 - first published in 1990, and often hailed as a foundational text of queer theory - and its 1993 follow-up, Bodies that matter2, to illustrate the thinking behind the current trans activism movement. Queer theory is an unashamedly post-modernist, anti-materialist and psychoanalytic school of philosophical thought that frames sex, sexual behaviour and sexual identity (being gay, bisexual or straight) as social constructs, and takes its arguments so far that it claims that the two sexes (not just gender, but the sexes themselves) are fictional. The phenomenon of intersex is thought to prove that sex is not ‘binary’, with only two possibilities, but exists on a spectrum between male and female (I, among many others, have debunked this notion elsewhere3). But in queer theory, gender is not just “the social significance that sex assumes within a given culture”.4 Queer theory goes much further, purporting that the two sexes themselves are social constructs, like money or marriage. Thus gender replaces sex altogether: “... if gender is the social construction of sex, then it appears not only that sex is absorbed by gender, but that ‘sex’ becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy.”5

Therefore, according to queer theory, male and female are not objective realities, but ‘identities’. Everyone is required to fit into one or other of those two ‘identities’ in order to enforce reproduction through “compulsory heterosexuality”:

The category of sex belongs to a system of compulsory heterosexuality that clearly operates through a system of compulsory sexual reproduction … ‘male’ and ‘female’ exist only within the heterosexual matrix … [and protect it] from a radical critique.6

It is therefore through the power of language, and the naming of male and female, that gender oppression is created; and it is by the power of language that it can also be defeated. In order to dismantle the oppression that has resulted from this categorisation, it will be necessary to implement an “insidious and effective strategy … a thoroughgoing appropriation and redeployment of the categories of identity themselves … in order to render that category, in whatever form, permanently problematic”.7 This feat is to be achieved specifically by “depriving the … narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: ‘man’ and ‘woman’”.8 The category ‘women’ is particularly promoted as being ripe to be emptied of meaning. It should be

a permanent site of contest … There can be no closure on the category and … for politically significant reasons, there ought never to be. That the category can never be descriptive is the very condition of its political efficacy.9

It is evident that the programme of queer theory is working, in the sense that it is changing and dismantling the language. But does the whole of gender oppression across history really originate in the simple naming of male and female? Because, if it does not, then this new movement is a dead end that is ultimately doomed to failure as far as challenging the structures that bear down on women’s lives.

While it is true that human thought and culture must have developed in tandem with the particulars of our species’ sexual behaviour, reproductive biology and mating systems - such as menstruation, which, although not unique to humans, is unusual among mammals - it is futile to protest that sex did not exist prior to the emergence of the human race.

Queer theory, however, rejects any understanding of human sex or gender that involves biological sciences. Our evolutionary history simply disappears in a puff of smoke:

... to install the principle of intelligibility in the very development of a body is precisely the strategy of a natural teleology that accounts for female development through the rationale of biology. On this basis, it has been argued that women ought to perform certain social functions and not others; indeed, that women ought to be fully restricted to the reproductive domain.10

For those who believe that reproduction is the only societal contribution appropriate to the class of people that possess wombs, by virtue of the fact that they possess wombs, altering the use of the word ‘woman’ cannot change that. It is the reproductive ability itself, not the words used to describe it, that the argument is based on. Nothing materially changes - moving words around will not change the position of the uterus, or its function. It is as futile as rearranging the labels on the deckchairs on the Titanic. Or like renaming the Titanic itself after it has hit the iceberg - thus, miraculously, the Titanic will not sink after all.

Many of the abuses and exploitations that oppress women target the real sexual and reproductive aspects of women’s bodies - our materiality - so a materialist analysis is essential. Can any such analysis work, when its starting point is that sex is a fiction?

Applying Occam’s Razor - accepting the simplest explanation that can account for all the facts - queer theory’s conceptual framework does not cut the mustard. If sex is a fiction invented to enforce heterosexuality and reproduction, it leaves vast swathes of the picture unexplained. An analysis worth its salt would bring together multiple, seemingly different, inexplicable or unconnected aspects of social and cultural attitudes to sex under one schema. A materialist analysis that takes into account the reality that there are two meaningful reproductive sex classes fares far better, and explains far more of the problematic - and often bizarre - social and cultural practices and attitudes around sex.

Is it not a far better explanation that people became aware of the blindingly obvious early on in human development - that there are very clearly only two reproductive roles, and that the anatomical features associated with each are astonishingly easy to identify at birth in nearly all humans? And that the possession of those distinct anatomies resulted in them being named, in the same way that other significant natural phenomena are named - because, irrespective of any relative value placed upon them, they actually exist?

Leaving aside that blatantly obvious counterargument, there is a further problem with queer theory: homosexuality just does not need to be eradicated in order to ensure reproduction. Why? Because occasional heterosexual intercourse, at the right time, during periods of female fertility, is all that is needed. A woman could sleep with a man just once or twice a month, and have it away with another woman for 20-odd nights a month, with exactly the same reproductive outcome. While it is true that there would be no reproduction if every sexual encounter was homosexual, strict heterosexuality, or anything approaching it, is not required to ensure childbearing. Likewise, a fertile man can sleep with a woman a few times a year and be almost certain to father children. And since one man can impregnate many women, significant numbers of men could be largely or exclusively homosexual without any impact on the number of children born - so why persecute and punish homosexual behaviour so severely?

The ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ argument has no basis, once examined in this light, and thus a central plank of queer theory falls easily.

Queer theory proposes that the so-called ‘complementary’ aspects of masculine and feminine behaviour have been created by culture in order to justify the compulsory pairing of male with female. Genders, including the two sexes themselves, are understood to be performative: brought into being by repeated ‘speech acts’ that, through the appearance of authority and the power of naming, actually create that which they name.

Thus, each individual assumes - or grows into, takes on and expresses - a ‘gender’ that is encouraged, promoted, and enforced by social expectations. I broadly agree that many of the observable average differences in male and female behaviour are largely culturally created, and reinforced by oft-repeated societal expectations. The fact that the expectations have to be so often stated, and sometimes violently reinforced, is testament to the fact that those differences are in no way innate, but are driven by the requirement to conform. But the origin of the expectations of ‘complementary’ male and female behaviour is not, as queer theory suggests, to counteract homosexuality and force the pairing of male with female.

The specifics of masculine and feminine behaviour do not point towards such a conclusion. Why is feminine behaviour submissive, while masculine behaviour is dominant? Why not the other way around? Why must one be dominant and the other submissive at all? Wouldn’t a hand signal do instead? How do the particular, specific manifestations of gender serve the purpose of enforcing heterosexuality and eliminating homosexuality, when many of them, such as FGM, reduce heterosexual behaviour in heterosexual women? True, any enforcement would require bullying of some kind, but why is it that so much of the bullying related to sex focuses on (heterosexual) women, and so relatively little on heterosexual men? Why is virginity in women prized but of little account in men? Why is so much actual heterosexual behaviour, that could lead to reproduction, so viciously punished? Why are women punished, humiliated, shamed far more than men for sexual promiscuity - heterosexual promiscuity? Why is it girls, not boys, who are the primary victims of child marriage practices? Why, in so many cultures, are women traditionally not allowed to own property, and children are considered the property of the father and not the mother? What answer does queer theory have to all this? None. It is not even framed as a question that needs to be answered.

Patriarchy

All of these disparate cultural practices spring sharply into focus when we understand the simple rule formulated by Friedrich Engels, the primary and founding rule of patriarchy, which exists to enforce the rights, not of men in general, but specifically of fathers: when property is private, belonging to male individuals rather than shared communally, women must bear children only to their husbands.

Why? Because the mechanics of reproduction mean that, while a woman can be certain the children she is raising are indeed her own, a man cannot - unless he knows for sure that the children’s mother cannot have slept with any other man. Thus when private property is concerned, men have a strong motivation to ensure that the children to whom they pass on their wealth are their own offspring. Herewith the origins of monogamous marriage. And with it, as an integral part (indeed as a driving force), the origins of women’s oppression - or “the world historical defeat of the female sex”, according to Engels.11

The gender rules developed in order to ensure paternity and inheritance. This simple explanation takes us a long way to understanding the specifics of how gender oppression manifests itself globally, in the enforced submission of women to men, and specifically to their husbands, and in seemingly disparate cultural values and practices that prevent women from having heterosexual sex with multiple male partners, outside of marriage, or punish them if they do.

How do men, individually and collectively, stop - or attempt to stop - their wives from sleeping with other men? Promises are not enough, as we know. How do you stop anyone from doing something they want to, from expressing their own desires? You bully them. You humiliate, threaten, harass, attack and perhaps - occasionally - even murder them. In these multiple ways you seek to enforce compliance, through assuming social dominance and forcing social submissiveness and subordination. Society and culture evolve around these values, and develop in ways that satisfy the needs and desires of the socially dominant group. Meanwhile members of that socially submissive group are discouraged from banding together (they might mount a revolution), and learn to adapt their own behaviour to avoid harm. And, since conflict is costly, disruptive and traumatic, both groups develop strategies to signal their social position, to defuse and avoid conflict and possible injury, with social rules and expectations developing around these behaviours.

The global hallmarks of masculinity and femininity would be recognised in any other primate species as the unmistakable signs of social dominance and social subordination. Socially dominant primates (and other mammals, plus many other vertebrates) make themselves large, take up space, monopolise resources. These are the core components of masculine behaviour. Subordinate animals drop or avert the gaze, make themselves small, move out of the way, and surrender resources. These are typical feminine behaviours. In primates, attending to the needs of the dominant members of the group, by grooming, is also characteristic of social subordinates. In humans, grooming as such has been replaced by a far broader suite of behaviours that involve serving the needs of the dominant class.

Gendered behaviours and the social values attached to each sex reflect this pattern worldwide. Societies globally and throughout time promote and encourage these masculine and feminine behaviours - better understood as dominant and subordinate behaviours - as appropriate to men and women respectively. Western cultures are no exception.

The enactment of dominance (‘masculinity’) and subordinance (‘femininity’) can be understood as partly learned and partly innate. Innate, in the sense that the expression of these behavioural patterns is an instinctive response to a felt social situation, or social position - anyone will signal submissiveness in the presence of a threatening social dominant who is likely to escalate dangerously if challenged. Thus, nearly everyone signals submissiveness extremely effectively, and unconsciously, as soon as they have a gun pointed at their heads. And it is hard not to display these behaviours, when we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a socially dominant or subordinate individual or group.

So femininity is a stylised display of primate submissiveness - a behavioural strategy that reduces or avoids conflict by reliably signalling submission to social dominants. Members of either sex, when they find themselves towards the bottom of any social hierarchy, deploy different, but similarly ritualised and reliable, submissive gestures. Examples include bowing, curtseying, kneeling or prostration before monarchs; the doffing of caps with downcast eyes and slumping shoulders in the workplace; and the kneeling and bowing (in prayer) that is such a large part of patriarchal organised religions. It is easy to recognise such gestures as signals of submission to social superiors, and they should be opposed as manifestations of social hierarchies that need to be abolished as an implicit part of the project for universal liberation. Neither the bowing and scraping of the dispossessed nor the arrogance and high-handedness of the wealthy should be welcomed or celebrated. It is time to apply the same approach when it comes to gender.

Moving beyond their instinctive component, the specifics of so-called ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ behaviour are learned and then practised until they become habitual; and sometimes deployed consciously and strategically. People do what other people do; children start to mimic others around them, especially those they perceive to be like themselves, at a very young age, perfecting gestures, postures and vocal tones that may be cultural or, within each culture, gendered. Learned and practised from a young age, it is no wonder that these behaviours can feel like a natural part of a person’s core being - especially when they also incorporate an instinctive response that is deployed after rapidly gauging the level of threat posed by others. In addition, both sexes are explicitly taught to behave as expected - and so the dominance of males and the subordination of females is reinforced and perpetuated from one generation to another.

Anything that undermines the position of men as dominant and female as subordinate is a threat to the established order. Thus the second rule of patriarchy: men must not act like women, and women must not act like men.

This explains why homosexuality, cross-dressing and other forms of refusal to conform to gendered expectations are persecuted in many societies. For men to start acting ‘like women’, either sexually or socially – ie, submissively, which has come to include being penetrated sexually - would be to undermine and threaten the superior role of all men. Similarly, for a woman to act ‘like a man’ is a shocking insurrection - she must be kept down, and such behaviour has to be punished and made taboo. Since clothing and other behaviours are cultural markers that help to distinguish between the two sexes, cross-dressing breaks this law very blatantly. And further, to allow cross-dressing potentially allows the mixing of the sexes in ways that could undermine paternity rights.

On this reading, then, the persecution of homosexuality, cross-dressing and all other forms of gender non-conformity originated secondarily from the enforcement not of compulsory heterosexuality, but of compulsory monogamy for women in the interests of ensuring paternity rights. This is an important distinction, for, while it accepts that gendered behaviours and values are cultural, it acknowledges the material existence of the two sexes as a real and significant phenomenon, with powerful influences on societal development.

Combating oppression

Understanding and placing ourselves as animals with real, material, biologically sexed bodies - rather than the smoke-and-mirrors erasure of sex and materiality itself that queer theory promotes - gives us a far more powerful tool to understand and combat the oppression of women, and homosexual and transsexual or transgender people, than queer theory’s baseless speculations ever can.

It explains not only the different social and cultural values and expectations around men and women, but it also explains many of the specifics of what they are and why the expectations are so strongly hierarchical. Women must be submissive to men (‘feminine’) because they must be controlled - from the male perspective, in order to bear children fathered by the man who controls them. From their own point of view, they must allow themselves to be controlled, and teach each other to be controlled, in order to avoid injury or worse. It also explains widespread cultural practices that control the sexual lives and reproduction of women - from FGM to child marriage, to taboos around female virginity and pregnancy outside of marriage. These things happen because sex is observable, and real, and known from birth. At birth, it is in nearly all cases blatantly obvious whether a person can be reasonably expected to be capable of bearing a child, or of inseminating a woman, and it is on this basis that the two sexes exist as classes. To suggest otherwise is to enter the realm of absolute fantasy, or at least of extreme idealism, which indeed queer theory does, since “to ‘concede’ the undeniability of ‘sex’ or its ‘materiality’ is always to concede some version of ‘sex’, some formation of ‘materiality’.”12

The current queer theory-led trans movement seeks to dismantle the second law of patriarchy - men must not act like women, women must not act like men. We do indeed need a movement against sex-based oppression that acknowledges and unites against that law. We need to work towards a world where qualities like strength, assertiveness, caring and gentleness are rewarded, encouraged and promoted in both sexes rather than mocked and punished when they are exhibited by the ‘wrong’ sex; where it is impossible for men to act ‘like women’, or women to act ‘like men’, because gendered expectations attached to each sex no longer exist and anyone can, without censure or even mild surprise, be an engineer or a carer, be logical or emotional or wear a dress or make-up or high heels or a tie or cut their hair short, irrespective of their sex. But to pretend that the sexes themselves do not exist is a nonsense. And it is a dangerous nonsense, when it obscures and denies the existing power relations between men and women.

Female oppression is not an inevitable consequence of the differences between male and female bodies. Yes, the fact that men are bigger and stronger on average can make it easier for them to establish social dominance through direct physical threat; while the risk of being left literally holding the baby and having to provide for it can put women in an economically vulnerable position, where social subordination is a likely outcome. But under different material conditions - and a different value system - there is no reason why we cannot shed these destructive, dysfunctional habits of gender that oppress and limit our humanity.

There is nothing inherent in being a man that makes men oppress women - it is their position in society that allows them to do it, and rewards women who collude with them. Power is the ability to harm without being harmed yourself, and therefore, with sufficient motivation, many people when they have power will use it to cause harm. Currently, men very frequently have that power in relation to women, and so they use it, resulting in very many harms. When, within any given social grouping or class, men occupy a position of power with respect to women, it is not an inevitable effect of human biology: it is a position gifted by property, by wealth, by tradition and by law.

We must seek to rebalance power to prevent harm. That involves, among many other things, abolishing both masculinity and femininity - no progressive cause should support or perpetuate a social system in which dominance is encouraged in one group, while social submissiveness is promoted in others. It is absolutely contrary to all ideas of human dignity and liberation. How could any liberatory movement adopt a position that posits an innate, inescapable hierarchical system at the heart of human nature, with close to 50% of humanity born inescapably into a submissive role?

But in today’s gender debate, the position of queer theory-inspired trans activists is exactly that. For them, to be a ‘woman’ is not to be female, but to be ‘feminine’- in other words, to be a ‘woman’ is to be submissive. It is here that we begin to see the true social regressiveness of this supposedly liberatory movement. For, while it is understood that biology does not determine the gender of trans people, the flipside of that argument is that most people’s gender is indeed innate, as social conservatives have always thought. Why? Because, according to trans activism, most people are ‘cis’ - they ‘identify’ as the gender they were born into. If 1% are trans, then 99% are cis; perhaps being trans is more common, especially if it includes the non-binary category, but still the vast majority of people are cis. So, since most people born with female reproductive systems are ‘cis’ women, they are supposedly innately feminine, which is to say, innately submissive, subordinate, and servile. Meanwhile a similar proportion of people born with male reproductive systems are considered to be ‘cis’ men: innately masculine, and therefore born into a socially dominant role. It is likely that many activists and well-meaning people on the sidelines of this debate have not thought it through far enough to understand that this is the logical and necessary conclusion of their arguments.

While most trans activists avoid definitions like the plague, such a conclusion is borne out by the attempts of some to redefine ‘woman’ and ‘female’. Definitions of ‘woman’ include such gems as: “a person who acts in accordance with traditional gender roles assigned to the female sex” and “anyone that culturally identifies and presents as the combination of stereotypes and cultural norms we define as feminine” or “adhering to social norms of femininity, such as being nurturing, caring, social, emotional, vulnerable and concerned with appearance”. And femaleness is “a universal sex defined by self-negation … I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another … [The] barest essentials [of femaleness are] an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.”13

This is what we are fighting. It is why we are fighting. We refuse to submit.

#Anglo.txt

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bigyack-com · 5 years ago

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When Department Stores Were Theater

After the hundreds of jobs going poof and the thus-far inadequate discounts, the saddest thing about the closure of Barneys New York is that its signature naughty window displays will recede even further in collective memory.A Hail Mary campaign earlier this year imploring shoppers to go inside even as the store declared bankruptcy (“STRUT STRUT STRUT STRUT STRUT STRUT”) was but a faint echo of the era when subversive tableaus of papier-mâché public figures, found objects, condoms on Christmas trees and the occasional scampering vermin mesmerized crowds, offended cardinals and even sold some clothes.But “we’re in a post-window-display world,” said Simon Doonan, the Barneys O.G. window dresser, in a telephone interview, noting the “impenetrable facade” of Dover Street Market, heir apparent to the luxury avant-garde. Its New York entrance has only small, high apertures above pedestrian eye level.“In the old days, window displays were the primary form of marketing — fashion was the same as butcher shops and fishmongers,” he said. “Now, if you’re waiting till someone walks past your store, you’ve lost the fight.”Indeed, the bustling new Nordstrom on 57th Street dispenses with traditional boxed-in display windows entirely, replacing them with a shallow, wavy facade that John Bailey, a spokesman, assured would be festooned with red and white lights come Black Friday. The facade is “an interactive viewing experience for customers walking by,” he wrote in an email, “connecting the shopping experience in store to the energy of the city.” (And the energy of customers’ phones.) A young employee at the central help desk said elliptically that “our windows are our customer service.”Gather ’round, children, and let Auntie Alexandra tell of when department stores, now mostly glassy, anodyne places you go to exchange online purchases, used to put on a show. Sometimes more entertaining than the theater.First, though, a quick gallop through what remains of New York’s holiday windows in 2019, and the hopeful cornucopias within.At the doomed Barneys flagship on 61st Street, there was of course bubkes, just signs reading: “Everything Must Be Sold! Goodbuys, then Goodbye.” Inside on the fifth floor, female customers were listlessly flipping shoes to glance at the soles and calculate the markdown, as if with muscle memory from the much-lamented warehouse sale. Four creaky flights up, the power lunch spot Fred’s, named for Fred Pressman, Barneys’ charismatic chairman who died in 1996, was full — even as a worker held a headless naked mannequin steady by her neck on a hand truck, waiting for the elevator to go down, down, down.A few blocks away preens Bergdorf Goodman, the beautiful princess whose holding company, Neiman Marcus, muscled recently into the Hudson Yards, like a watchful mother-in-law moving into the guest cottage. There are no old-school windows at the gleaming new Neiman, being that it’s high up off the dirty street in a mall (and incidentally charging kids $72 per head for breakfast with Santa). But at Bergdorf, David Hoey, the store’s senior director of visual presentation, and his team have gamely produced a concept called Bergdorf GoodTimes. Literally gamely. Like, filled with actual games.One window was captioned “Queen’s Gambit” (chess); another, “Jackpot!” (pinball); another, “Winner Take All” (casino — perhaps a dry subconscious commentary on the high-stakes state of retail). Around the corner, a life-size board game, “Up the Down Escalator,” was dotted with fictional gift cards, coin of the online-shopping realm.Mr. Hoey’s sophisticated, colorful creations did not seem intended for little ones — and anyway those were scampering around across the street, splashing in small pools and peering into mirror-glass “sky lenses” outside the Fifth Avenue Apple store. Paging Dr. Lacan!Further east on 59th and Lexington Avenue, dear old Bloomingdale’s was flagrantly violating several of the decorative precepts set out by Mr. Doonan in his seminal 1998 book, “Confessions of a Window Dresser: Tales From a Life in Fashion.” Specifically: “do remember that technology is boring” and “don’t incorporate sex.”If Bergdorf is rolling the dice on the future of the department store — eroded perhaps irrevocably by Amazon’s mighty, corrosive flow — Bloomie’s is searching the stars. Not the celebrities whose daffy effigies used to populate Mr. Doonan’s windows, mostly with enthusiastic cooperation (Madonna, Magic Johnson, Norman Mailer, Prince, Queen Elizabeth), but a lavish commingling of astronomy and astrology titled Out of This World.Robots were placing ornaments on a tree and sitting at a synthesizer ready to play the carol of your choice at the push of a button. Google Nest, a sponsor, was poised to turn on the tree, the lights; the fire. And astronauts were floating in a “3, 2, 1, Gift Off,” or was it a “GIF Off?” Female mannequins embodying various figures of the zodiac were outfitted like go-go dancers, all pearls and feathers and curvature: propped up against each other on a pedestal as a recording played of John Legend singing, incongruously, “Christmas in New Orleans.” Inside, on the main floor, one embodying Cancer the Crab hung upside down from the ceiling: eyes closed, suspended over a hoop, hand-claws splayed, rotating slowly. Her bared, inverted legs conjured less the #MeToo era than the infamous “meat grinder” photo of the June 1978 Hustler magazine that feminists used to protest on Manhattan sidewalks.

Razzle-Dazzle in the Mezzanine

Mr. Doonan had called from Los Angeles, where he was, among other activities, promoting a monograph to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Maxfield, the boutique there. This even though when he was in the window-dressing business, “I was very anti-anniversary and I vetoed all of them. They just made the company seem old and boring. It looks dusty.”Though I agree 100 percent and moreover think the ascription of significance to particular numbers is as ridiculous as astrology, it also happens to be the 40th anniversary of a seismic and undersung event in department-store history: when the performer Elaine Stritch was the M.C. of an elaborate fashion show at Liberty of London, the emporium known for its fine fabrics. (Many women in those years still sewed household clothes from patterns.)Arranged by Peter Tear, then Liberty’s head of marketing and publicity, and choreographed by Larry Fuller of “Evita,” the show somehow managed to cross-promote the low-tar Silk Cut cigarette with a silk congress happening in London. Concordes were deployed with top models on board. Cocktails were concocted by the Café Royal down the road. Fifty-odd designers contributed special outfits for the occasion, including Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Yves Saint Laurent.Another was David Emanuel, who, with his wife and partner, Elizabeth, would design the show’s bridal gown (and later Princess Diana’s).“People gasped,” he said, remembering the Liberty event on a crackly trans-Atlantic phone line. “They were aching for ‘larger than life.’” Mr. Emanuel described Stritch — subject of my recently published biography, “Still Here” (hey, it’s the selling season) — in a sequined tuxedo jacket, singing among other numbers “Falling in Love Again” à la Marlene Dietrich to the enraptured ladies who lunch who had paid five quid admission apiece for the show, which ran thrice daily over the course of a week. “It has more punch and pulchritude packed into its 51 minutes than most West End musicals twice as long,” one newspaper commented.Mr. Doonan theorized that Liberty, fighting a dainty, twin-set image, had taken inspiration from what the storied retailer Marvin Traub was doing then at Bloomingdale’s. “The whole thing was that the store was the stage — the razzle-dazzle of flash and pizazz and lo and behold, there’s a swimwear fashion show with Pat Cleveland coming down the escalator,” he said. “Every day was ‘curtain up!’ at Bloomingdale’s.”Truly, what could be more of an ultimate fantasy set than the department store of yore, with its infinite “costumes,” props and built-in risers, its endless potential for comedy, dance, drama and even horror? Florenz Ziegfeld’s pre-code movie “Glorifying the American Girl,” showcasing his Follies, starts in one. The heroic airman in “The Best Years of Our Lives” returned to work as a soda jerk in another; ennobled by the theater of war, he chafed at his diminishment in the feminine one of trade.Barbra Streisand gamboled through Bergdorf in 1965 for her TV special, trying on fur coats and hats, spritzing perfume and singing a Fanny Brice-ish medley of “Second Hand Rose” and “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” to funny and glamorous effect. James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim’s “Twilight Zone”-inflected broadcast musical, “Evening Primrose,” was set in a department store called Stern’s, and featured a poet played by Anthony Perkins remaining after-hours, giddy at the idea of the creativity that his solitude, enhanced by all the products he needs, will stimulate. At one point he stands on an escalator belting, “I’m here! I’m here!” foreshadowing the famous anthem in Goldman and Sondheim’s own “Follies” taken up late in life by Stritch. (Later a young woman he discovers there sings of remembering snow: “Soft as feathers/ Sharp as thumbtacks.” She had been left there, in Hats, as a child by her preoccupied mother, but now with climate change the lyric sounds like prescient ecological lament.)Even after the fiasco of Andrew McCarthy at Philadelphia’s Wanamaker’s (R.I.P.) in “Mannequin” 20 years later, and the slow creep of the suburban mall, there was yet another remake of “Miracle on 34th Street.”“Where did Auntie Mame go when she lost all her money?” Mr. Doonan reminded. “Selling roller skates at Macy’s.”It’s hard to imagine, though not impossible, that department stores will remain important sites of commerce and culture much longer. But the largest one in the city is not about to go quietly. At Macy’s, which takes up an entire block, there is a jumble of every sort of window.There are old-fashioned windows devoted to the story of Virginia O’Hanlon, the little girl who wrote to The New York Sun in 1897 asking if there was still a Santa Claus. Around the corner, there are high-tech windows giving voice to a little girl who wants to be Santa Claus. And around another corner: still other windows filled simply with giant Barbies. Being female in the early 21st century is nothing if not a series of mixed messages, but this attempt to empower seemed already antiquated; if Mr. Doonan were still working on windows, surely he would have gone straight for Mx. Claus?The ghost of Barneys yet to come is at Saks Fifth Avenue, which has licensed its former rival’s name, and where windows have been themed with glittering corporate efficiency to the international blockbuster “Frozen 2.” This may delight the tourists, but city dwellers remembering the craft and chance and silliness of the old holiday extravaganzas — when the designers and the famous people and the window dressers were all sticking pins in each other, and the audiences crowded four-deep on the pavement for the free sideshow — will probably be left cold. Source link Read the full article

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almaasi · 7 years ago

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dean no protec

dean attac

but, more importantly

castiel is back

(reaction post typed while watching SPN 13x04 “The Big Empty”)

03:16

don’t know what to expect but cas cas cas cas cas

03:19

dude: “but you’re dead”

lady: “i was.... aren’t you gonna say hi back?” (leans in for kiss)

could the destiel parALLEL BE MORE OBVIOUS

(edit afterwards: welllllllllllllllll.... i guess this wasn’t really a parallel? but it could be)

03:21

wHOOPS AND THEN DEATH

05:2

dean to sam: “what, you ready to ditch damien?”

who’s damien

what

did i miss somethin already

............i guess it was a reference to something, regarding jack?? weird

03:24

there’s so much everything in jensen’s/dean’s eyes

05:26

i kinda hate anakin too

and yes i agree it probably is for the best that jack hates anakin

alexander calavert has REALLY long eyebrows whoa

03:29

of all the times i’ve read or written fics where dean is a parent, i can’t believe i never considered how great a parent sam would be

he’s......so good

03:30

JACK IS SO PRECIOUS

and just by this, i get the sudden feeling that dean is actually going to be right in the long run. later in the season something’s gonna turn jack bad, but in the meantime their characters and the situation would have changed so much that dean will be on the other side, defending jack and fighting to save him

03:3

DEAN HE’S NOT A DOG

but if he was a dog he’d be a chubby lil golden labrador

03:35

sam: “you’re starting to sound like dad”

dean: “is that a bad thing?”

YES IT FUCKING WELL IS

AND HOLY SHIT THE JOHN/MARY DEAN/CAS PARALLEL ALSO

JOHN TURNED ABUSIVE WHEN HE LOST MARY

OH NO

03:38

dean: “what gets burned stays dead”

except they burned cas..................

(which is the point of that line)

this episode so far seems to be setting up for There’s No Hope For Cas Coming Back And Everything Being Okay

except we know he does so ????

03:39

AND THERE’S CAS

03:41

so the pattern so far has been romantic partner back from the dead, a child back from the dead....

i guess what remains is: parent, sibling, or friend back from the dead

followed by cas

but what does that make cas, exactly

(edit: it ended with just those two. so never mind)

03:48

the big empty seems very much like the place eleven in stranger things goes when she’s in a trance