#it's not my job to personally tolerate someone who thinks my existence is predatory

[the-sacred-now]

I personally knew a homeless TERF who suffered medical abuse. I stopped hanging out with her after she melted down about how bisexuals made her feel unsafe. She was also a fucking disabled homeless person who deserved food, housing, autonomy, and for her medical needs to be met respectfully--regardless of her making ME feel unsafe. Because she's a person.

i think a lot of liberals need to confront the fact that they don’t actually believe everyone should have basic human rights. a homeless person could call me every slur under the sun and i would still want them to have housing, food, etc. the belief that everyone is entitled to basic human rights should not hinge on whether you “like” someone or not. at that point the entire ideology crumbles.

[nyctophilin]

Adults bullying minors

Warning: I went off because this topic makes me so angry and if you are an adult that has bullied, is currently bullying or will bully minors on the internet you might get offended, so read at your own discretion.

Can some adults stop bullying minors out of fandoms please? Can they do that? Can they start acting like actual adults and stop bullying people they do not want to interact with? Are you aware you can coexist while ignoring each other? BECAUSE TO ME IT DOES NOT FUCKING SEEM LIKE THEY KNOW THAT!

I have seen so much hostility towards minors lately. You mean to tell me that GROWN adults do not have anything better to do than bully minors on the internet? Do you get joy out of making someone’s day a living hell?

And before I continue, I do not want to see anyone bring up NSFW under this post. This is not what this post is about. Minors engaging in NSFW activities on the internet is wrong and I am not advocating for that. I do not want to see anyone put this in my mouth. As an adult, you have all the rights to not want a minor to engage in your NSFW businesses, although you have no right to bully them for it. Tell them nicely, educate them on why what they are doing is not right(because some of you consider minors to be chronically stupid until they turn 18) instead of giving them unnecessary trauma and proving that you are an asshole at the same time.

However, what this post is about is hostility towards minors that do not engage in NSFW. If there is no NSFW involved and the minor is just enjoying a fandom while living their minor life, like we all do at some point in our lives, and you decide to bully them for it, then please, leave the fandom! You are not wanted here.

I have seen adults that run 100% SFW blog tell minor to not interact with them in very rude hostile ways. If you do not want to interact with a minor, you can tell them nicely. You do not have to cuss them out or be rude or block them. Both of you are basically enjoying the same type of content and them asking you from time to time how your day has been is not a tragedy. You will not be put in jail for it. Crazy! I know! Just ignore them. It is as easy as that. Just fucking ignore them.

I have also seen some of you hunt minors down. You purposefully look for them and then you start bullying them. Don’t you have a fucking casserole to make instead? Why would you look for them if they make you uncomfortable? Just do not! You could have done so many things in the time you spend looking for minors so you can expose them for just existing. Grow the fuck up! If you can not tolerate minors partaking in fandoms, then your place is clearly not here. 

Now, I am not telling adults to be best friends with minors. This is the last thing I want. At the end of the day, there is still a risk that minors face when engaging in friendships with adults. All I am saying is: Mind your own business! If they approach you through asks/DMs wanting to have a conversation about the fandom, but you feel uncomfortable with that, let them know nicely and I am sure they will understand. However, if the little dude did not bother you in any way, then why would you go out of your way to interact with them and then act like the victim when you clearly are not? And let me just add one more thing here. If you do not think that a friendship between a 25+ years old and a 18-19 years old is just as predatory as a friendship between a minor and a 18-20 years old then you can unfollow me. I do not even need to make an explanation for this one because it speaks for itself.

And I am not telling anyone that they cannot enjoy a fandom. I do not care how old you are, your gender, your sexuality, how many eggs you eat in the morning. I really could not care less, but if you are going to start unnecessary drama and you, as an adult, are going to bully minors, that did not bother nor have they ever interacted with you, into leaving the fandom, then I have a problem with you. I can do the exact same thing to you, Susan, and I will not hold back.

Like, don’t you have kids to raise Susan? A casserole to make or laundry to do? File a report for your office job? Didn’t I just hear your husband call for you? Why are you browsing the world wide web when you are so busy, Susan? As a person that comes from the younger side of the fandom I feel very uncomfortable with you here and I want you to leave or my group of friends and I will bully you until you do and then we will act like the victims.

Some of the fandoms are not even made for you, Susan. I am sure that when John started developing that video game, he thought of little 15 years old Dave that can and will play it 25/8 and not you, that have diapers to change every hour. You cannot enter a teen dominated fandom and then kick out the targeted audience. This is not how life works. If you know that you feel uncomfortable around minors, then do not join a minor predominant fandom with the thought of kicking them out because they are going to kick your ass. 

And I do not want anyone telling me “wAiT uNtIl ShE fInDs OuT wHo WrItEs BoOkS aNd MoViEs, HaHuHe.” because this comeback is not as smart as you think it is. Because Susan, you see, there is a difference between you writing a book about your own adult characters doing whatever the fuck you want them to do and you writing a 10k words smut fic about a real person that is 5+ years younger than you. I can not write a fanfiction for Minho to save my life, and he is just a few years older than me, but you can write that smut about Jeongin that is 10 years younger than you, all while holding your newborn? How do you do that?

The conclusion of this whole post is:

MIND. YOUR OWN. BUSINESS!

Do not bully minor on the internet out of their own fandoms. Fandoms are made for everyone to enjoy and I will welcome you with open arms as long as you are kind and understanding. Bullying someone because you do not agree with their existence is not kind nor is it understanding. If they do not bother you, then do not bother them either. You are not doing anyone a favour!

Thank you for giving me your time! Good night!

[eelsfeelgross]

Conclusions: Trans Activism v. Radical Feminism, a first-hand account

This is current stance after a lot of direct investigation on both radfems online and trans activists online. No group is judged based on the observations, rhetoric, or propaganda of any outside group, but from my own first-hand observations in combination with objective knowable facts such as actions known to be committed in public record by the likes of criminals or celebrities. However, the bulk of this is based on what I have seen, what I know to be true because it’s been done before my own eyes. While my conclusion may lack information on the more nitpicked aspects of things, I believe their overall impressions still hold true with the amount of experience I’ve had. Keep in mind: this is not my only account. I have dipped into the radfem community before, each time from a different perspective, at a different time, and with open eyes ready to receive whatever I was given. The same is true of the trans community.

Trans Activism

I want to make clear that these conclusions were mainly drawn from my direct experience with the trans community from within. I am not relying on critics of the trans ideology to tell me any of this, though they often echo the same concerns and observations.

The trans community has a serious problem with misogyny, homophobia, and sex denial. They employ magical thinking and emotional pleas to justify their conclusions and commit to arguments of definition that are ultimately lacking substance. However, while lacking rational, they are abundant with emotional reasoning and can be incredibly powerful rhetorical tools in convincing others to believe them without the necessary evidence of anything claimed.

This is especially prevalent when discussing sexual biology and sexual orientation. They consider self-harm to be the fault of other people, even in adults, and use this as a manipulation tactic to make it seem as if they’re being killed at higher rates than their general demographics. This plays hand in hand with the appropriation of statistics around things like racial violence or violence against sex workers to make it appear trans people, particularly white heterosexual (attracted to the opposite sex) trans women from the middle class of Amerca who aren’t victims of prostitution, are under much more persecution than their lived experiences actually reflects.

This has grown into a political ideology not dissimilar to a religion, but without the usual trappings we associate with a religious group. It requires blind faith in the concept of gender and the “life saving” virtues of expensive hormone treatments and plastic surgeries without proper regard for the risks and consequences of these procedures. Challenging the dogma or asking critical questions is considered a sin itself, even when done with excessive caution for other’s feelings. Violence towards known dissenting groups is considered not just ok, but admirable. Expressions of this desire for violence against the out-group is seen as virtuous to the point that doing it too much will be taken as virtue signalling rather than a sign of deep-seeded anger issues as it would for any other situation. Self-identity is their belief system, and public shame are their tools of punishment to control those within the belief system. Due to sex denial, females suffer especially in this paradigm no matter how they identify or what presentations they choose.

However,

Radical Feminism

Once again, I want to make clear that these conclusions were mainly drawn from my direct experience with the radfem community from within. I am not relying on critics of the radical feminist ideology to tell me any of this, though they may echo similar observations.

Radical feminism, as it exists today in action and not in theories from the 1990s, has a huge problem with transphobia, homophobia, and racism. The focus has shifted almost entirely from protecting women to attacking trans women, understandable on some level but counter-productive to all but the individual ego. There is a preoccupation with what women are “allowed” to do, rather than whether their actions and the consequences of those actions actually benefit the cause of anti-sexism. People feel entitled to be nasty, hurtful and even downright transphobic and homophobic if it means hurting their “enemies” somehow. I’m not sure if they fail to see the big picture or have just given up on caring, but it makes all their pleas for compassion and an end to the trans community’s homophobia seem pretty disingenuous.

This focus on “women deserve more as reparations”, when self-applied to the individual, does nothing to combat sexism as these self serving actions often do little to stop sexism and everything to benefit the individual currently existing within a sexist system. It totally ignores the vital role women play in perpetrating sexism through the generations, from mother to daughter or sister or sister or peer to peer through an intricate web of social pressures.Its not totally ignored mind you, but it is conveniently unaddressed whenever addressing it would prevent them from acting aggressive and toxic toward someone else. However others in the community who aren’t personally benefitting from this at the time will notice, thus leading to endless pointless arguments as the egos clash.

This hypocrisy undermines all attempts at broadening their reach to a new generation of women. Similarly, this toxic attitude undermines all opportunity for organization and real activism which requires a certain level of tolerance and the ability to give basic respect to those you don’t like or agree with. All those who do not tolerate such behavior will simply assume radical feminism must be a hate movement because all they see is vitriol and toxicity, no matter how justified the perpetrator feels about it or the underlying motivators. They will not take the time to read theory because they’ve already seen the practice and they have the sense to know it’s bad. Then when these newcomers see this bad behavior for what it is, they’re belittled or deprived of their agency for their decision to turn away from your movement, called things like “handmaidens” and accused of being either selfishly misogynistic or plainly brainwashed, driving them ever further away. The refusal to take responsibility for your own image and the consequences of your behavior under some false impression of ideological purity justifying it only further cements this takeaway outsiders have.

The most egregious example that comes to mind is the “queers” issue. Radfems are adamant about queer being slur, and they’re right. I myself grew up having queer flung at me by violent straight men and I’m not even that old. I feel no joy in the sanitation and generalization of the term. That is not reclamation, that is erasure and appropriation of pain. Most radfems agree on this wholeheartedly. That is, until you decide to spell it “kweer” and start flinging it at trans people who fit a particular homophobic stereotype: strange appearances, unorthodox body modifications like piercing and colored hair, unwashed, perverted to the point of being predatory, self important children who are just playing pretend to be different. All these qualities call back to the stereotype of queers, gays, and it is deeply intrenched in homophobia going back generations. And yet, while radfems would condemn the trans community for the appropriation of queer and its homophobic implications, they have no problem employing it as a slur when it suits their own toxic impulses.

Some even seem to believe that misspelling the word or being homosexual themselves absolves this. It does not. Anybody without the blinders of radfem internal rhetoric will quickly see past this nonsense. If the trans community came back and started calling radfems “diques” and associating the term with severely lesbophobic stereotypes like being unwashed or too ugly to get a man or any of the other countless stereotypes around the slur “dyke”, radfems would be rightly livid. Making a point to only target straight radfems with this insult would not make it any different. But addressing these kinds of hypocritical positions has become a taboo within the radfem community, yet another spark to relight the fires of senseless infighting.

This is the worst example I’ve personally seen, but it is not the only one. There’s also the tendency for radfems, desperate for others who are gender critical to connect with, to make alliances with right wing conservatives despite their racism and homophobia simply because they’re also transphobic but for completely different reasons. And also a tendency to be much more forgiving of misogyny coming from these new “allies” that will glady destroy you too once trans people are out of the way. But I will not labor my point any further by bringing up everything all at once. Regardless, for those who harp on and on about getting to the root of the problem, the moment anyone suggests you try getting to the root of your own problems, taking accountability and making changes, all that self-righteous posturing seems to go out the window just like it does in the trans community. You’ve become a reflection of what you hate in an attempt to combat it, and it will be the death of your movement if you don’t make a serious effort to reform these behaviors and distance yourself from those who employ these forms of rhetoric.

It’s a harsh fact, but the world at large does not care what you deserve, just like sexual biology doesn’t care about your personal feelings about your sex. It just doesn’t. That’s why patriarchy exists in the first place. It is your job as a social movement to use your words and actions to convince them to care. That is what the trans community has managed to do successfully, in my opinion often for the wrong reasons but successfully nonetheless, but such things do not stroke the ego of the individual radfem and therefore simply doesn’t happen in an organized, ideology-wide manner. Small islands of rational stand isolated in a sea of this pointless vitriol, and alone they are hopeless against the attacks against radical feminism born from the trans community and their sex denial that leads to egregious misogyny.

Conclusion

When it comes to the underlying theory, the ideological core, I find that radical feminism has the best chance of growing to become a social movement for genuinely good change in the world, particularly for women and women-loving-women specifically. Trans ideology, in my opinion, is inherently flawed as its core tenants require faith in what one cannot prove and a rejection of science that doesn’t support said faith.

Trans ideology as it exists in 2020 is more akin to religion than science, and has proven its capability to do harm through its use of magical thinking and distorted points of view that constantly shift and change to make space for the core trans ideology to be “correct”. Core ideas such as: sex is either fake or less relevant than gender, that gender is an objective fact of the human psyche, that others failing to fix your own poor mental health are responsible for your harm or death, that transition is always a good idea if someone wants it and no gatekeeping should be performed regarding using plastic surgery to treat mental discomforts, and so on. Remove all these ideas, and the whole thing falls apart.

Meanwhile, removing the toxicity of the radfem community as it exists now will not destroy its underlying core beliefs. Its just that the current people who advertise themselves as radfems and take up that mantle do not actually follow the core ideology of their own movement when it doesn’t benefit them. It has been infiltrated and run amok with bad faith actors who abuse the movement for personal gain, whether they are aware of it or not. And with their combination of being excessively vocal and lacking any shame for their misdeeds, more and more are drawn into their toxic games to the point that the ones who actually speak to the spirit of the core theory get drowned out or attacked to the point none will associate with them openly. The ones who actually know the theory and practice it end up effectively shunned from a community that widely hasn’t even read the theory and thinks hating trans people and thinking pussy = superior makes them a radfem. And thus, by allowing this, that is what radical feminism has become in practice. No amount of appealing to that core philosophy will matter if the actual people don’t apply that theory properly.

So my conclusion? Radical feminism has the greatest potential for good, but it is grossly unrealized and will remain that way without radical internal changes. However, if anyone is equipped to get to the root of the problem and make a radical change it should be radfems. Or at least, the good faith radfems who aren’t abusing the movement, of which I’m convinced have become the minority of radfems in the present day. Perhaps it is time for feminism to once again branch off, not to try returning to the 2nd wave but to set the stage for a true 4th wave as many have talked about. A 4th wave that is based on the foundations set by 2nd wave feminist thinkers, but forward thinking, self-critiquing, and not limited by the hangups of the last wave. I guess only time will tell what radfems value more: their egos in attachment to the idea of identifying as a radfem, or the effective dis-empowerment of patriarchy through organized effort at the expense of satisfying your personal vendettas against all men.

[ruminativerabbi]

Predators

I didn’t give the whole Harvey Weinstein scandal too much thought at first. I noticed the story in the newspaper, of course, but dismissed it as yet another example of some Hollywood guy I had slightly heard of being accused of behaving poorly by a variety of women he must have imagined would never jeopardize their chances to be cast in one of his movies by reporting his misconduct to anyone at all, let alone to the police or to the public. To the extent the story engaged me at all, I suppose I was pleased that these women had found the courage to come forward and imagined that the police would now go on to determine if there were grounds for an arrest. And, if he were indicted of an actual crime and if he ended up tried in a court of law and if he were to be found guilty, that he would end up being sentenced by the court to some appropriate punishment. Doesn’t that exact thing happen in the courts of our country every single day? So why, I think I thought, why was this even news at all?

But what I didn’t foresee—nor, I think, did many of us—was the tsunami of accusations of predatory sexual misconduct levied against various people that followed—including at least one former president of the United States, several prominent actors, producers, directors, authors, photographers, political pundits, and comedians, a candidate for the United States Senate, and a host of lesser-known personalities.

Some of the accusations involve behavior that took place in the distant past, but other charges relate to far more recent times. Some of the charges are vague, but others are very specific and detailed. Some sound just a bit far-fetched, but others sound—at least to my ear—entirely plausible. Given that the presumption of innocence is one of the bedrock values of our justice system, the question I wish to explore today is not related to any of the specific charges anyone has made about anyone else. Nor do I have anything particular to say about the response of any particular police department or any specific public prosecutor to any of these accusations. (Their job, of course, is specifically not to presume guilt in the wake of accusation, but simply to investigate carefully and thoughtfully when one individual accuses another of wrongdoing and then either to charge or not to charge someone with a crime based on the outcome of their investigations.) But I’m more interested in people who have spoken out in public to accuse others of poor behavior without there being any chance at all of an arrest…either because the person accused has died in the interim, because the incident happened so long ago that the statute of limitations for that crime makes indictment a legal impossibility, because there were no witnesses to the alleged crime and no evidence to adduce in a court of law, or—in some cases—because the alleged incident involved behavior that, for all it may be have been loutish or boorish, did not involve the breaking of any actual laws. In cases like that, should people come forward to speak out? Or is that just so much loshon horo, that to say: gossip of the sort that decent people should avoid not only speaking themselves but even listening to. That is the question I’d like to explore this week.

It’s not that easy a question to answer. Our Jewish tradition has an extremely strong animus against talebearing. Scripture itself makes this explicit and rabbinic sources seem never to tire of finding ever more extreme language with which to condemn the intentional spreading of gossip, libel, or calumny outside the legal context. Indeed, there are a whole series of ancient texts that equate gossip with murder! And another set of texts that make explicit the point that the prohibition against gossip applies equally when the report is true and when it is false! So extreme, in fact, is the rabbinic aversion to telling tales in public about other people’s poor behavior that the rabbis imagined that the Torah actually needs formally to permit people to testify in court about other people’s bad behavior…and precisely because testimony in which one citizen speaks out in public about another’s bad behavior would otherwise be forbidden as talebearing and gossip. Nor are these strictures solely concerned with the one doing the talking: the classical sources also make it clear that the prohibition against talebearing involves not only telling damning tales about others, but also listening to them. So making a case against speaking up other than to report misconduct to the police or to give testimony in court would be relatively easy to make.

But, even despite the sources referenced above, the evidence of tradition is nonetheless equivocal and, in fact, there are many instances in which the general prohibition about speaking poorly about others is waived. It is not considered slanderous, for example, for an employer to answer honestly if a former employee has given his or her name to a potential future employer so that the latter can ask the former about the employee’s skills and work ethic, and this is so even if the honest answer to the question asked reflects poorly on the employee.  Nor is it prohibited to alert someone to some potential danger even if doing so involves saying something about a third party that under other circumstances would be prohibited as gossip or slander.  And, as mentioned above, it is not only not prohibited but legally required that eye-witnesses to wrongdoing step forward to give testimony in court even though this will obviously almost often involve speaking ill of the accused individual.

Most crucial for the issue under discussion, the fact that the very verse in the Torah that prohibits talebearing goes on to warn against “standing idly by the blood of another” was taken by the rabbis unequivocally to mean that it is actually forbidden to remain silent when speaking out might prevent harm to some innocent third party. The rabbis understood that wrongdoing, and particularly sexual misconduct, is more reasonably to be taken as a function of character than of opportunity. And, that being the case, it seems reasonable to think of wrongdoing as something in which wrongdoers habitually engage rather than as solitary occurrences that unpredictably occur when weak-willed individuals find themselves just one single time at the malign confluence of opportunity, desire, and recklessness. In my opinion, this is the context in which we should evaluate the rightness or wrongness of coming forward to report on predatory behavior directed against oneself outside the context of making a report to the police or giving testimony in a court of law.

We live in a world of almost unimaginable vulgarity. Indeed, we have all become so inured to profanity, tastelessness, and crudity that we barely notice it any longer. Even principled opposition to such things sound ridiculous to most of us or, at best, schoolmarmish and priggish. Imagine, for example, someone who were simply to refuse to watch movies featuring obscene language, or someone who made the conscious decision not to attend theatrical performances that featured indecently dressed actors or actresses, let alone naked ones. There are such people in the world…but which of us would want to be thought of as the kind of naïve, culturally backwards person so unattuned to the reality of modern culture as actually to be offended by its excesses? Nor do I speak as a beacon of virtue in this regard—I myself go to such shows and see such movies without giving the decision to purchase my ticket even a moment’s thought. Perhaps that’s simply how things are in this world we have constructed for ourselves…but that is also the context in which people feel free to behave in ways that would once have been considered not merely degenerate, but truly debauched. This is not to excuse the behavior of the sexual predators among us—just to observe that all of us together have chosen to create, and then to tolerate, a world in which sexual predators feel free to act, some on the supposition that they will never be caught and others simply because they don’t really see what’s wrong with their behavior. They are the wrongdoers, to be sure. But we, speaking for society itself, have created the stage upon which they have been able to perpetrate their wrongdoing. And when we are done being titillated by the avalanche of detailed accusations we have heard and read over these last few weeks, it would be more than appropriate to consider what we as a society have wrought. And also what we could conceivably do to create a world in which immoral, predatory behavior is not merely against the law, but something ordinary people—men and women alike—consider truly unimaginable.

And that brings me back to my initial question. Should people speak up if there is no chance of bringing the people they are accusing of wrongdoing to justice? I think that the question has to turn on the likelihood that a public accusation will rescue future victims. If the accused party, say, is dead—and there is therefore nothing to be gained by the accusation other than besmirching the reputation of someone who cannot defend him or herself—I think it would probably be best simply to remain silent.  If there is a reasonable expectation of legal action against an aggressor, then speaking up is not only allowed but requisite. If there is no chance of legal action, however—for example, if the statute of limitations makes an indictment impossible—then the issue has to turn on the possibility of saving future victims from a predator’s grasp by speaking up. If that possibility exists, then victims should come forward even if there is no reasonable expectation of an arrest or a trial, let alone a conviction.