#they are so abused and actively gaslit and actively oppressed

[firefly-fez]

could anyone else just feel their blood boil at palpatine saying “if the clones will just blindly follow orders” as his excuse to decommission them when we all know damn well that’s exactly what he created them for. that’s what he made them do, blindly follow orders. that’s the only thing he ever needed them or wanted them to do. blindly follow orders: eliminate the jedi threat by being brainwashed to kill their best friends, to blindly. follow. orders. he never wanted them to serve the republic, or the jedi, he wanted them to accrue enough military tactical experience so they would have all the intelligence they needed when the time came. he never wanted them to serve the jedi, he wanted them to kill the jedi. he told them they were born to be loyal to the republic and groomed them to destroy it. and that job is now done so he casts them aside using the earliest available excuse that they are an inferior class of soldiers because they will blindly follow orders.

[manie-sans-delire-x]

What some of the biggest things you have learnt this year?

What have I learned this year? Many things but nothing good.

1- Most people are truly stupid.

2- How easy it is for nonsense, group-think, science-denial, mass gaslighting, and thought control and censorship to take hold, even over an entire nation. I understand how it happens now.

3- Death can truly come at any moment and all it takes is a second. There is nothing you can do. It means nothing.

4- People truly give zero shits about you. Society will leave you to suffer slowly. People will step over you as you die in the street. Death is a merciful escape that is actively denied.

5- Even the "good guys".

6- Your friends are not real friends. They will not show you the same kindness and care that you give them.

7- People will do anything to blame the victim.

8- For some reason the abuser is always believed and the victim is either a liar, the real abuser, or deserved it.

9- "Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always." -Khaled Hosseini (a man)

10- Female oppression is the singularly the most ignored and denied. Women are alone in their fight and mass gaslit.

11- I have always been utterly alone. I will likely live a very lonely, difficult life. I will likely die alone, confused, and afraid like Ive watched so many do.

12- Oppressors will always reverse the narrative and claim to be the true victim, with the real victims being the oppressors

13- The system is set up for the poor to get poorer, and the sick and traumatized to not be able to get help. They want you to die. They kill by neglect.

14- We still live in an age of science denial.

15- Religion is for men, by men, and a tool of mass social control and to validate misogyny, pedophilia, and other violence

16- After a traumatic event, the rest of your life will also quickly fall to shit while youre too fucked up to be capable of keeping it together, thus making you spiral even worse.

17- There is no escaping that sad sad house.

18- We are all captives and slaves of our country. "At least its not North Korea". True! But it is though, it still is. Just not as obvious. Its easier to just accept that, ignore all the feel-good lies you were told growing up. Itll all make more sense once you accept that. You were born in a prison. You have no choice, there is no other possible life. Disobedience is death.

19- Mental health treatment is useless and the system a joke. They will steal from you, reject you from treatment, and leak your information. All we do is keep your body alive for a few more days.

20- It is dangerous to become emotionally dependent on someone, even a bit. You become weak and they will either abandon you or turn on you in your time of need. Trust no one, rely on no one.

21- Most human animals are genuine disgusting scum.

[wordsfromthewick]

Because it's an effective tactic to shut down her whole argument. It's seen as a joke and that fact alone shows how much the world still hates women that anything she says to her defense can be automatically assumed to be attributed to having a bad relationship with a man or seeking love/validation from one as if she's not her own person.

Saying she has daddy issues derails everything she has already said and turns anything she says next into a joke at her expense. There's no fighting it with more facts about her point because that will just further "prove it". If she gets mad she gets gaslit saying she's overreacting or it was "just a joke". If she says she does have a good relationship with her dad they say "surrrrre" or ask her where it comes from then (perhaps an ex or so on). If she doesn't have a dad then "that explains it". And so on.

It is believed that women are so incapable of being our own person that our recognition of facts must stem from being mad at some particular man somewhere. If a woman somehow existed that everyone knew never experienced firsthand misogyny but was still a feminist everyone would still ask who hurt her. Which is also seen as a dismissive joke that blames an ambiguous individual instead of a system of oppression so they don't have to feel bad, argue her points, or do anything about it. Thus making sure there's no progress and it never gets fixed.

P.S. No woman should have to justify her desire to be free from oppression by the health of a relationship with anything outside of her, especially not a damn man.

Side note: If a feminist does have "daddy issues" it's literally because he did the things in the points we were making. Like he is either a big part of the issue (rapist, abuser, violently misogynistic, ECT) or actively contributes to it (prefers her brothers simply because they're male no matter what, forces her to do the so called woman's work, tells her that periods are a punishment for her existing, ECT). Which shouldn't invalidate her reasons in any ACTUAL way and instead give her the creditability of having first hand life experience. So yeah shout out to the women who DO have issues with their father. It's literally as good a reason as any to open the door to feminism and could be a great personal motivator to keep you going, but that does not make the things you are fighting for any less for you and other women as a whole. ❤️

side note why do people think feminists have daddy issues? i love my dad, despite whatever issues we have which we have because we are two complex adult humans with differences. ohhh wait its bc they want to find a reason we dislike men thats anything other than the reasons we freely and repeatedly give them ohhhh okay.

[kinghijinx22]

Elysium by Portishead, an underrated queer anthem?

So Portishead is one of my favourite bands and for a long time this underrated gem of song from their second album has been my favourite from them. And I feel like it's because there's a very easy queer reading of this to be made, so easy that it's feels intentionally written into the song. The lyrics to this song resonate so much with my experiences as a queer person and my personal feelings that it's made a strong emotional impact on me.

"And no one decided that I feel this way" is taken from the first verse and it explains that queer people don't choose to be who they are, they just exist and are themselves different from the cishet norm. The chorus continues this point with "but you can't deny how I feel, and you can't decide for me." This is all stuff that I want to scream at bigoted chuds who try to strip my identity from me including my own mother and it's all very cathartic to hear in song, especially with the aggression that singer Beth Gibbons sings these lines. Nobody decided that I'm queer, you can't deny why I am and you will not make decisions for me.

"No one has said what the truth should be" is about how there is no universal truth or one way that people can exist. People come in every colour of the rainbow and judgemental bigots should stop trying to paint the world in black and white. "If you felt as I, would you betray yourself" is plea for others to put themselves in the shoes of queer people who are told to change themselves. If you were like me, would you betray yourself by forcing yourself to be someone you aren't for the convenience of others? Why should I have to suffer with living a lie while the cishets get to live comfortably as themselves without judgement?

The second verse has lines that dig into bigoted mindsets and hateful propaganda like "No should fear what they cannot see, and no one's to blame it's just hypocrisy." In other words, no one should fear the marginalised minorities like queer people that right wingers like to villainize with their propaganda. Propaganda that is designed to rally the uneducated to commit hate crimes against innocent people who the right wing have deemed beneath them. Queer people aren't to blame for all their problems, and all the made up accusations they want to throw at queer people is always hypocrisy and projection designed to distract the public from their own disgusting crimes. You can guarantee that every nonsense "groomer" allegation is always made by a closeted paedophile who wants people to think that everyone else is paedophile and queer people are an easy target to throw attention at.

"It's written in your eyes and how I despise myself" is the result of the gaslighting and abuse that queer people often suffer from this deranged bigotry. Because when enough people around you have been brainwashed by fox news like maybe even your own family members and they relentlessly abuse you enough it's hard not to start believing the horrible things they say about you, even when you know it's not true. And this can be especially true if you wonder into the wrong places online, places filled with actively harmful right wing echo chambers or on Twitter where literally anyone can say anything and it will often shove the queerphobes in your face who are making violently bigoted posts about you. This is why I stopped using Twitter. To summarize, the hate is written your eyes and the cisheteronormative regime that you've dedicated your life to enforcing has gaslit me into despising myself.

This is when the lyrics most directly punch back at the hate. "And it's your heart that's so wrong, mistaken you'll never know your feathered sacred self." Queer people will never be the problem, other people existing will never be the problem. It's the bigots poisoned and hateful hearts that are wrong, always choosing to hurt others and rotten to the core. Their whole ideology and views on the people they oppress are mistaken and they will never be the glorious master race that they see themselves as. Bigots believe they are inherently superior and so they try to keep down those who are different. In reality the only things that make you less deserving of exitance are judging and hurting others.

This is what this song means to me, what I was able to take from it and why it's my favourite Portishead song. It's means so much to me with how it's able to accurately put into words a lot of my own thoughts and experiences as a queer person and things that I just want to scream at queerphobes. So whether it was intentional or not, to me this song is a powerful queer anthem.

[gch1995]

englishlady is bitter, but you’re just sour. Anakin Skywalker isn’t going to fuck you, you desperate incel

Sure, nonny, I’m the incel!

First off, although I love Anakin’s character, and do believe there is good in him, I have to say that I wouldn’t be comfortable dating someone with his twisted morality after he joined the Jedi Order and Sidious, and/or without proper treatment, which he never received. Then again, I also have to say that I feel the exact same way about Obi-Wan, Yoda, Mace Windu, and the entire Jedi Order before Luke. Even Luke kind of disconcerts me with how easily he could get over blowing up the entire Death Star and Jabba’s ship. Sure, everyone on the Death Star was an active threat, who needed to be killed in immediate self-defense, but not everyone on Jabba’s ship was. If more of these characters could realize that both the Jedi and the Sith suck ass, just be their own people, and get good therapy, then I could potentially think of dating them if they were real people. Luke is the one of the few from the Jedi who grew up to be a relatively decent and well-adjusted adult since he had 18 years of a normal and stable childhood raised by good guardians who raised him well before he got involved with them.

I’m the self-deluded asshole who can’t deny that her favorite character did nothing wrong when I constantly point out that I know Anakin was a selfish bastard in his desperation to avoid abandonment and further oppression, who’s not entirely innocent for his crimes against the Order, regardless of the mitigating circumstances of being abused, groomed/manipulated, oppressed, and emotionally neglected his whole life by corrupt authority figures in slavery, the Jedi Order, and Sidious!

You guys are the ones who hypocritically say that Obi-Wan, Yoda, Mace-Windu, Ki-Ad-Al Mundi, the rest of the Jedi Order, and Bo-Katan can’t be held fully accountable for perpetuating abuse, crime, moral hypocrisy, enabling slavery, and neglect because it was for the Greater Good™️, they were groomed, and/or they had limited options for healthy support and escape to something better. However, Anakin who was systematically abused, groomed/manipulated, oppressed, and raised by hypocrites in two space cults and slavery his whole life “is the spawn of Satan who must be held entirely accountable for his crimes.”

They are even “secondary victims” when they openly enable the Chancellor to have unsupervised access a a child under their care after he threatens to ruin their public reputation if they refuse, even though they strongly suspected he was shady before finding out he worked for the Sith, and even though they are a highly respected organization and branch of the government that probably could have more easily recovered from saying no to the Chancellor if they refused to allow him to speak with Anakin alone.

Sure, nonny! I’m the incel. I’m the one who’s so in-denial that Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Jedi Order of adults before Luke had become cowardly, hypocritical, and self-righteous assholes who were too afraid to do the right thing, even though there is consistent canonical evidence that they emotionally/psychologically abused and neglected, deceived, limited their options for escape to make them feel obligated to stay, endangered the lives of, isolated, and manipulated almost every one of their recruits.

I’m the incel for not thinking that Obi-Wan Kenobi was the best mentor/guardian ever who could have saved Anakin when he allowed him to speak to Palpatine alone as a a child under his care, constantly shamed and gaslit him, faked his own death for a mission because he suddenly was “too emotional to be trusted,” victim blamed him for growing close to Palpatine, cut off his limbs, and left his “brother” to burn alive because he was too much of a coward to just kill him when he had the upper hand on Mustafar after he committed crimes against the order, even when that would have been the kind thing to do, and spent nearly two decades on Tattooine in hiding with Yoda, wallowing in self-pity, while their former apprentice helped Sidious terrorize the galaxy as his attack dog/murder slave.

If that wasn’t bad enough, he and Yoda did jack shit all of that time in hiding just so they could attempt to use another Skywalker as a weapon to clean up the mess they helped create with Sidious and his father twenty years earlier. Thank goodness Luke didn’t listen to Obi Wan and Yoda.

No, Anakin’s no saint, but at least the narrative doesn’t try to pretend he is either. At least our side of the fandom doesn’t try to pretend that he was a saint, while also understanding why he became the monster he did without entirely absolving him of it. At least there is character development in Anakin’s arc that’s organically positive, negative, and relatable. Obi Wan Kenobi has none of that.

[deliciousscaloppine]

Hot takes galore 2: A brief overview of fandom backlashes that influenced fanfiction writing traditions as I have personally experienced them.

In this segment we examine...THE INDOMITABLE MARY SUE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, as I was entering fandom in 2008 (Bleach, a manga by Kubo Tite), the hottest, sweattiest discourse pertained perhaps to Mary Sues. I thought the hatred of Mary Sues had completed its cycle and it was dead and gone in our days, BUT I happened upon a post that said that we are all stanning Moxiang Tongxiu’s OCs (original characters), in a sort of admonishing tone, and I couldn’t help but smile.

For back in the day, OCs, were termed self-inserts at best, and if they were a female protagonist that would sideline the canonical cast of characters then they were Mary Sues. And there were as many people hating original characters, and Mary Sues in particular that I remember sitting up all night thinking on whether I should post or not this fic that had some OCs in it that were there to just deliver some messages.

And of course this bled into accusations of writing canonical characters as basically “original characters” or “self-inserts”, by use of the term “ooc” (out of character). Personally, I thought this was over, but recently Riri accused me of disregarding the existing characterization and turning the CQL characters into my own original characters...for KINKY HAVOC IN VOLCANO PALACE!

An unjust accusation, I feel, Riri, because I do my damnedest to maintain characterization even under the wildest circumstances. 

People were looking to extend their enjoyment of the existing characters and story, and for some reason fanfic authors could come under fire for not catering to that, and writing for their personal self-fulfillment. 

And there were as many people writing oc’s and Mary Sues as there were people hating them, and the writers for it. It was chaos, there were journals (i was in livejournal) devoted to roasting mary sues, laughing at authors etc. If you came in fandom after me, you live in much much gentler times, and perhaps you have the Mary Sue to thank for that, because the Mary Sue kickstarted a lot of fandom feminist discourse.

Back in the day they usually determined “Mary Sue” as an overpowered, female character, whom everyone loved even though she might not be particularly charming (by whose standards?), who was adept at everything, knew everything, felt everything etc. 

The thing is that Mary Sues did not seem to exist only in fanfiction, but everywhere around us, whenever there would be a project film/show/comic/book that had a strong female protagonist.

And that was because fandom and male nerd culture were intertwined. Anime, games, comic books were heavily “invaded” by swaths of girls who were not quite fulfilled by corny pop stars, or saccharine rom coms, and seeing that there were no female power fantasies available in these media, they created their own.

It was a very interesting time because if you remember, Marvel Movies started getting made around that time, riding on that convention power, which was dominated by male nerd culture - and that is why they gave so little screen time to female characters, because the demographic was pretty thoroughly examined and they were found to dislike any and every female character that was not there to validate the male character’s cishetero sexuality (YEAH BABY)

I mean women, actresses, female characters had a good portion in media, and the marvel cinematic universe and its imitators pretty much sidelined all these people very aggressively. Male stories started exploding and taking over during this time, exploiting that very vocal male nerd demographic. 

But where is the backlash you ask, because so far we’ve only seen the oppression. 

I saw a lot of writers struggle with the validity of the female character, and then the validity of female writing. They conflated writing female characters, as writing without examining themselves, or attaining a neutral voice and a role of representing accurately reality (lol). Writing Mary Sues was bad writing, and at some point all women were Mary Sues.

...So can you guess what happened?

A lot of these people turned to male slash in order to cope. Before the Mary Sue hate, male slash was a considerable but not dominant piece on the fanfic pie, which was mostly dominated by main het ships. Male slash was already enjoyed by female heterosexual audiences, but it started gaining more and more traction until a term was coined (shipping goggles), and accusations were once more flung: that fangirls will ship any two white dudes - not untrue. 

This audience was not very friendly to actual gay people. There were all sorts of strange views passing before my bespectacled eyes at the time. People proclaiming that they loved yaoi (i was in manga, so this was the term used), but would not watch gay porn, and thought gay people were gross. And in the case where gay people were in fandom these people often complained of not being included/invited in fandom activities, or having minimal readership from groups that promoted male slash, but not gay writers.

This is why I often say fandom is not a friendly place for lgbtq people, because this type of audience still exists, even if it had to suppress their discomfort and assimilate the rhetoric of allyship at some point. And sadly a lot of people who dominated these early discussions about fandom becoming more lgbtq friendly since it consumed such relationships in media, managed to set this climate of dishonesty where everyone is pro-lgbtq in theory, but not in action.

Meaning a lot of stereotyping that is not endemic to actual lgbtq communities. Like top-bottom (most people are verses), whiny bottom, subby bottom, violent top, aggressive sex, hypersexual gay characters, almost complete erasure of bisexuality, lesbians what are they?, a complete and absolute fear in portraying trans characters, suppression of genderfluidity, accusing people of writing male gay characters as female characters as a form of wish-fulfillment or supposed homophobia.

A while ago I saw this article asking why lgbtq people are so mean to each other that confused me thoroughly, until I remembered this call out phase that happened a while ago and still goes on, where everyone blames everyone else of abusing and gaslighting them, friendships falling out etc, which is not at all the reality of older lgbtq scenes, because these were not formed online under this climate. 

And because fandom is a vehicle for self-exploration a lot of people to this day conflate consuming lgbtq relationships through media as being lgbtq themselves, or these “actual” relationships being set as these other fictional “idealized” relationships. Whereas in older lgbtq scenes a lot of people come into them by realizing their attraction to actual, real, live people and not characters, or hot celebrities.

I am not saying that current lgbtq people who discovered that about themselves online are lying, or lying to themselves, but they definitely came out in an environment of fake acceptance, and have a hard time reconciling reality with that lie of acceptance through no fault of their own, of course, because they never developed the language and the understanding that language brings in order to communicate amongst them. The characteristics were set by a group outside of them that might be pro gay marriage, and having a cool gay friend, and the inherent tragedy of homosexuality or something, but are not really for it - as a very wise queer eye contestant once said. 

And so every trespass by their own people, becomes a proof of this generalized rejection with tremendous consequences for young people’s mental health. YOU ARE BEING GASLIT IT’S TRUE - but not by your own people, it’s just a miscommunication going on there.    

BUT WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MARY SUE. She changed. She stopped seeking love, sex, and power, or at least pretended that she did not want any of these things, or did not understand them, she stopped speaking, and became more stoic so people wouldn’t judge her opinions, and finally one day she went on to accomplish great things, because women seeking representation was also a pretty set demographic, and somebody could and would exploit that!

The Twilight Saga, Fifty Shades of Grey, even Hunger Games, are the media progeny of the Mary Sue powering through the entirely of male nerd culture. In a whole decade where people wanted Marvel to release a Black Widow movie, there have been three major spy/action girl movies that did very well in the box office, and since producing and releasing a movie usually takes three years, i’d say the audience was heard loud and clear - even though not by Marvel. 

And the side girls in these Marvel movies, or other action movies, became more and more badass - they all went from damsel in distress, to saving the hero, and of course the male characters were subsequently “queer-ified” until everyone was finally happy, and nerd culture was exposed as having been infiltrated by neonazis and that’s why it was making those unreasonable demands for no women ever in the first place.

And everything was right in the world, except that it was not. Because...girls had also been infiltrated by “neonazis”. A lot of these media, and a lot of these “white” Mary Sues, fall under many conservative criteria. Conservatism being a nice word for fascism. 

A few examples is the person of color always dies, or is brutalized, or is admonished constantly even as they shadow the protagonist in order to reinforce their inherent radiance. Characters who might be poc in books or in the anime (hur hur), are whitewashed in the visual media. The women are almost never comfortable with sex or romance, always thinking about the future and amassing power, not for themselves, but for the benefit of the resistance, or the family, or any other entity they belong to. And of course they are forever incredibly flawed - as opposed to idealized versions of male heroes always on the side of good for the right reasons! Also a minimal cast of women, with one woman being the protagonist, and the rest functioning as side characters or mostly antagonists.

So every time you feel a slight trepidation for not being the right type of lgbtq for writing something that is not strictly anal, or fear to include feminine characters, every time you erase yourself from the narrative it is it, the spectre of the Mary Sue coming to haunt you with a “We won, what more do you want?”  

[rwdestuffs]

I need to vent a bit right now, so forgive me if I go a bit… defensive of the show and its characters… Like all the stans I tend to make fun of.

Recently, Soku dropped this and vagued about a “rwde poster” who was defending Yang and Salem. 

Now, I know he’s talking about me. I’m literally the only person who defends Salem in any capacity. Like I said before, in a setting where names are significant to a character (ie: Pyrrha = “Pyrrhic victory”), Salem being named after the period in time where women were falsely accused of crimes is significant. Which is why I tend to lean towards defending her, and bashing the nameless gods who pretty much decided to not give advice, and decided to act like entitled douchebags who treated humanity like a science experiment that they could scrap at any time. Humanity was sentient, and they wiped them out because they couldn’t handle one person being uppity. Seems to me that they were being spoiled brats about the whole thing more than Salem was about Oz’s death. If you’re not willing to fight god for the people you love, then you didn’t really love them in the first place (Looking at you, Abraham).

Now, should Salem had shown more remorse for what happened during the fight?- Absolutely. But the way that she’s being treated right now is that she’s irredeemable. She’s a total monster who can’t handle loss, and was terrorizing people. Last I checked, she was bumming around in her cabin until Light God was all “I know I had this whole thing about balance that I ignored when my brother and I wiped out humanity 1.0, but I’m bringing you back so that you and your ex-wife can fight for my amusement. Try to unite humanity, or else you’ll all get wiped out again!”

For a bunch of supposedly omnipotent gods, they seem to need Oz to solve all their problems… Well… Mainly Light God, but that’s beside the point.

Like… Maybe it’s because I have my own issues where I want Salem to adopt me, and I was also spoiled by fanfics that made her sympathetic and also the ones that outright made her irredeemable in a more blatant sense, but I can’t hate Salem. It’s just not for me. Like… Sokumotanaka claims that Salem could have broken out at any time with her own power.

Okay. Then why didn’t Blake beat up Adam before Volume 5? Why didn’t any of the abuse victims beat up their abusers prior to the show?

Answer: Emotional Manipulation. They get gaslit into thinking that they’re weak. Now, obviously, this should have been shown in the flashback that the writers decided should only last one episode because they think that the audience hates backstories… Because they’re idiots who don’t actually listen to feedback, but they decided to put it in supplementary material. More on that in this video.

Now, onto Yang.

Now look: I’ve said this before. Yang is pretty much the only reason I still watch the show. I recall being pretty miffed about her being stiffed on screentime back in Volume 4, and being very upset and vocal about her being written inconsistently.

But the bar? It has to be a “wretched hive of scum and villainy” at all times for it to be considered a criminal hotspot? I really don’t want to use this card, but… Ever hear of a front? It’s a front so that they can do their shady dealings in the background. Junior’s sure as hell not going to sell out his customers! Now, it could be inferred that he is in fact, telling the truth, and that he genuinely didn’t know any of that. And yes, Yang endangering the patrons should have been a point that should have been brought up in Volume 3. Does anyone have a count for how many posts I’ve made about how that should have been a thing?- I genuinely want to know.

So really, treating me as if I’m blindly defending Yang is honestly flawed at best. And deliberately blind at worst. If Yang, or any of these characters are supposed to be “perfect” as Soku seems to imply that they should be, then the characters would be boring. There would be no flaws. Now admittedly, they really should be treated as flaws that they should overcome. But people aren’t just going to solve all of their problems. Show me a man who has made no wrong, and I’ll show you a man who has accomplished nothing. These characters are always going to have flaws to them, and while it would be nice to have the show actually acknowledge them as flaws, one has to accept that.

This is all on bad writing, and really… I think those anons that I had to deal with from before burned me out on resenting the show. This show is improving in a sense, but it ignores past transgressions that made it hard to watch back then. It’s only in the recent episode (8:4), that any past transgression was called out on… And it was Miles’ pet.

So excuse me for having opinions conflicting with yours because I focus on other details that you don’t! There are details that you focus on that I don’t. I’m not here to blindly hate the show. I’m here to try to provide an introspection on the show, what mistakes were made, how it can improve, and to provide a source of something that other people can come to for gripes, questions, or opinions.

And really… You’re a coward for vaguing about me in the first place Sokumotanaka. You could have called me out or contacted me directly, and we could have had a calm discussion about this. But instead, you comment in such a way that makes it hard to actually reply to you, and then you go on and vague about me doing things like… Having a take about Salem that you disagree with. Or defending Yang’s choices. I’m not saying that these are good choices, but if you want a perfect character that does no wrong… Then we’d be talking about the show for far different reasons. Pyrrha was the perfect character who did no wrong. And outside of her brash decisions to follow through on Oz’s ultimatum and her not turning Jaune in for forging his way in, what character flaws can you really name about her?

Pyrrha was boring. The most notable thing about her was that she was a good fighter (which didn’t matter since that applied to all the characters except Jaune at the time), and that she was attracted to Jaune of all people. And she was an attractive young woman, but outside of that, there was nothing to Pyrrha. She was a boring character. If Yang was as perfect as you seem to want her to be (I assume, considering your weird resentment of her for daring to have flaws), then we wouldn’t be talking about her being “Bad.” We’d be talking about her being boring. Same with Blake. If Blake was a flawless character who spouted everything right about how to combat oppression, then we wouldn’t be talking about her. If Weiss was actually genuine about wanting to end her company’s racism from the very start, and never had to learn a lesson on not being racist (that for some stupid as fuck reason happened OFF-SCREEN), then we wouldn’t be talking about her. Same with… all the characters.

We don’t talk about perfect characters because they’re boring. And I can’t believe I have to actually defend the writing choices here.

I’m trying to see this from an introspective point of view. Not one where the characters should make all the right decisions. Mistakes are how people and characters grow.

Now if the characters grow, is another question altogether. But given that the show is improving (even if only marginally), then there is some level of hope.

People can link this to Sokumotanaka or @ him. I don’t care. I’m tired, and I wrote this at like… 3 in the morning. This was all just to vent about some stuff that I’m tired of seeing.

So, maybe it’s because HBomb’s video raised my hopes and made me actively start looking for the good in this volume, or maybe it’s because I’ve burned out my resentment, or maybe it’s because I’m taking the table scraps of improvement that this show is giving me, but I’m finding myself liking this volume. It still has its flaws, even when it’s so early into the volume, but it’s actually looking good.

Now if only they could have improved earlier… Maybe then, this blog wouldn’t be as active as it is right now…

But anyways, vent over. I’m tired. And I want to sleep. Fucking hell… It’s 3:40 am…

[newx-menfan]

(I wanted to do a Three Part post about Surge-Noriko Ashida; because much like Julian, Noriko is often heavily criticized by readers. Those two characters tend to be the ones that come under fire the most by fandom…)

Part One: Surge in DeFilippis and Weir

Out of all the New X-Men Surge is probably the most mysterious; because where we get a pretty clear picture of the other X-Kids lives BEFORE becoming a mutant, Nori doesn’t really talk much about her past life…

We know Noriko was born in Japan and was very close to her brother Keitaro. Her powers manifested when she was thirteen and she managed to immigrate on HER OWN from Japan to America, since her father rejected her.

That takes some pretty big balls in my opinion! To immigrate at thirteen, ALONE, to a country that’s both very different in culture and language. Yet, Noriko manages to survive on her own.

Noriko DOES accurately represent homelessness, in the fact that almost 34% of the homeless in the United States are under 24, according to HUD’s 2014 Point in Time Report. 80% of homeless youth (age 12 to 21) use drugs or alcohol as a means to self medicate. (Studies on homelessness CAN be really difficult to do, because homelessness tends to be a temporary circumstance, there’s less push for these kinds of studies in the psychological and sociological communities, and because of the stigma around this issue…) Noriko story also touches on the fact that MANY illegal immigrants come to the United States to escape circumstances such as abuse, poverty, political or economical upheaval in their home country, persecution for their identity, ect…

She ends up stealing and using pills (never specified what they were) to control her powers, by sedating her body enough to control the outbursts of electrical power.

The one attempt to reach out for help by going to Xavier’s goes horribly wrong, when she runs into Julian; who at the time has issues with classism and a prejudice around homelessness. (In Julian’s defense- American culture does cultivate this narrative that the poor are somehow at fault for their own poverty heavily. This ties back into the American Dream being represented as widely attainable and America being represented as ‘not having a class system’. We have essentially gaslit the poor into believing they are at fault for their own poverty, instead of admitting that our social systems are inadequate and structured in a way to promote some groups more than others. This ends up being a learning moment for Julian…).

This experience validates Nori’s beliefs that people will NOT provide any kind of help, that the only person she can rely on is herself; so she decides to do what she knows will work-steal and self medicate with drugs. (It also leads to Julian and Noriko having bad blood for a period of time until the Nimrod battle).

Nori accidentally hits ‘the Grind Stone’ coffee shop owner with an electric bolt when robbing the store, and fearing that if she reports it she will end up imprisoned, (keep in mind Noriko is homeless, most likely an illegal immigrant, a person of color, a drug addict, a mutant, and she was actively committing a crime- so she’s probably right in her assumption that she’s not going to get treated sympathetically at all by the justice system…) so she takes the money and runs.

Josh remembers seeing Noriko asking for help and hanging around the Grind Stone, and puts two and two together. Josh convinces the other students to track down Nori; and when they find her Noriko looses control over her abilities, and the students bring Noriko back to the mansion.

Even pre M-Day; the X-Men aren’t all that sympathetic to Noriko. Beast essentially tells her you can either wear the gauntlets I designed for you or get out, where you’ll essentially be put in jail. The only people Noriko really connects with are Cyclops and Dani Moonstar; I’ll come back to this when talking about Kyle/Yost’s run…

David is the other person who tries to connect with Noriko; and while David MEANS well, there are moments that he does come off a little condescending. While David has absolutely faced racism, David has also grown up in a middle to upper class caring family in Chicago; leaving him somewhat struggling to understand Noriko’s experience with homelessness.

While David IS a really great person, he does sometimes struggle with socialization, empathizing, and accepting that people MAKE MISTAKES . This makes sense, because David looks at things from a more logical than emotional place; David DOESN’T DO gut feelings. It’s why the dream around his powers scares him so much, because LOGICALLY it could happen and David knows he prioritizes knowledge. It’s also why Sofia ends up being co-leader of the New Mutants, because David just isn’t very good with understanding the emotional side of things and needs Sofia to handle that side of leadership.

Noriko chooses to stay at the school and takes responsibility of her actions by working at the Grind Stone. This is a common theme with Noriko; no matter what mistakes she makes, she always takes full responsibility for them. She also slowly becomes friends with her fellow teammates.

Noriko’s role on the team in this book was always secondary; in the fact that she had no interest in being leader. She’s perfectly fine with Wind Dancer and Prodigy taking up that responsibility. Noriko acknowledges that her personality ISN’T a good fit for leadership. (This will become important later).

This makes sense, since Noriko is very independent; she doesn’t like to feel like a burden to others and sees herself as ultimately the only person she can rely on. This is because for a long period of time, that WAS true: Noriko had to rely on herself for all care.The idea of working as a team and supporting each other is an extremely foreign concept for her, because her survival for years relied on focusing on the baser needs (food and shelter over emotional health and building emotional connections) and her being her own support system. Essentially, it’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; if you’re Physical needs are unmet or inconsistently there day to day, you’re not going to be as focused on needs around Social, Ego, or Self Actualization.

Noriko HAS a tendency to lash out at others; this is used as a defense mechanism-shun others before they shun you. This comes up every time Nori feels threatened or insecure; she’ll lash out or get defensive at the person SHE VIEWS as attacking her.

One of the big complaints people bring up with Noriko is her interaction with Dust; and yes, Noriko’s views ARE problematic.

But no one is born out of the womb a perfect feminist; because we live in a patriarchal society, we all subconsciously take in problematic views that we may need to deconstruct LATER.

This series was written in the 2000’s, when the Iraq war was in full swing and Islamophobic propaganda permeated the news; one of the favorite narratives was ‘their women are oppressed, our women are fine!’ The fact that DeFilippis and Weir subtly commented on the problems with this narrative, IS pretty DAMN impressive, in my opinion.

The truth is, is many teenagers when starting to learn about feminism, START OUT with problematic views. It’s only when they start to learn more about intersectional feminism, that they start seeing the problems with feminism fixating on western culture being the ‘correct way’ and essentially what’s been labeled as 'White Feminism’ (Feminism from the lens of White, Upper Class, Heterosexual, Cis Gendered Women- often times ignoring other POVs and avoidance in addressing the issues around white privilege). Noriko MAY have internalized a lot of these beliefs.

There’s also a possibility that Noriko had faced harassment while living on the streets on her own; 92% of homeless women reported severe physical and/or sexual violence at some point of their in their lives for example, in a 1997 study. In a survey of homeless youth between ages 13 and 21, 23% of women had experienced sexual victimization on at least one occasion since being on the street, in a 2004 study.

While Sooraya is simply trying to explain her side, this could be bringing up memories for Noriko and an internalized belief that IF something happened, it was somehow her fault. As previously stated; Noriko’s feminism has it’s problems, so internalized victim blaming COULD be part of that.

Nori does kind of apologize in her own way, and while still coming off as crass; does accept that her and Sooyara have different beliefs and that both are valid.

Another complaint lodged at Nori is her reaction to Jay’s suicide; and yes, suicide and mental illness is heavily stigmatized. Nori DOES react badly to his admission, which can have negative affects for the survivor of a suicide attempt.

Nori handled this BADLY, but you can understand why. From Noriko’s point of view- Jay comes from a loving family that accepts him mutation and supports him. While her opinion IS invalidating Jay’s experience around depression and that’s not okay; Jay has things Nori didn’t in her own life (Jay also kinds of invalidates Nori’s experiences as well, by saying things like “You wouldn’t understand”, when Nori herself comes from a background of trauma…). Essentially what is coming up is jealousy.

Noriko and Jay later talk it out, and understand that their reactions in this conversation came from trauma; Nori from being homeless and rejected by her family, and Jay from losing his girlfriend and not being able to cope, and from the stigma that comes from being a survivor of a suicide attempt.

They also notice things disappearing/moving on their own in the school. This turns out to be a dead X-student named Jeffery. Surge bonds with Jeffery, partially because he reminds her of her younger brother and partially because she can relate to the child’s anger at his situation. This is one of the examples that despite Noriko’s tough persona, lies someone deeply hurting inside.

Another example, is her reaction to David’s little sister, Kim. Noriko deeply wants Kim to like her, because Noriko likes David. It’s one of the few times Nori goes OUT OF HER WAY to get someone to like her, and is deeply hurt when she is rejected.

Throughout Noriko’s childhood she has been rejected by her parents and other people she turned to for help. David is the only person to genuinely show concern for her (this will be REALLY important later….)

So while Noriko does HAVE problematic views in this series, a lot of it traces back to Noriko’s history being homeless. Nori is in my opinion, a character who gets unfairly hated on for simply struggling to get close emotionally to others, because she’s been repeatedly hurt in the past…

(I’ll post my sources at the end together, like I did with the post around Julian and disability.)

Next is Part Two: Surge in Kyle and Yost, which will be posted either today or Wednesday!

[nebris]

We’re Not Done Here

How the MeToo movement became a feminist sexual revolution.

Laurie Penny | Longreads | January 2018 | 19 minutes (4,764 words)

The problem of sexual violation can not be treated as distinct from the problematic of sexuality itself. The ubiquity of sexual violations is obviously related to what is taken to be routine, everyday sex, the ‘facts’ of pleasure and desire. — Linda MartAn Alcoff, Rape and Resistance

This kind of mania will always at some point exhaust itself. — Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine

***

Oh, girls, look what we’ve done now. We’ve gone too far. The growing backlash against the MeToo movement has finally settled on a form that can face itself in the mirror. The charge is hysteria, moral panic, hatred of sex, hatred of men. More specifically, as Andrew Sullivan complained in New York magazine this week, “the righteous exposure of hideous abuse of power had morphed into a more generalized revolution against the patriarchy.” Well, yes. That’s rather the point.

Sullivan is far from the only one to accuse the MeToo movement of becoming a moral panic about sexuality itself, and he joins a chorus of hand-wringers warning that if this continues — well, men will lose their jobs unjustly, and what could be worse than that, really? The story being put about is that women, girls, and a few presumably hoodwinked men are now so carried away by their “anger” and “temporary power” that, according to one piece in the Atlantic, they have become “dangerous.” Of course — what could be more terrifying than an angry, powerful woman, especially if you secretly care a little bit more about being comfortable than you do about justice? This was always how the counter-narrative was going to unfold: It was always going to become a meltdown about castrating feminist hellcats whipping up their followers into a Cybelian frenzy, interpreting any clumsy come-on as an attempted rape and murder. We know what happens when women get out of control, don’t we?

Charges like this are serious. Too serious to dismiss out of hand. I don’t mean to do so, not least because I am a queer person, and I do not take the notion of sex panic lightly. Why, then, are so many people so anxious to believe that this is one? There is at least one simple answer. It is easier — much, much easier — to manufacture an attack on sexuality than it is to imagine an attack on patriarchy.

Sex is not the problem. Sexism is the problem, along with the upsetting multitudes of men and women who seem unable or unwilling to make the distinction. An attack on sexuality, however, will always find recruits from across the political spectrum as well as from armies of amoral keyboard droppers who just want to read about what celebrities get up to in hotel rooms. An attack on patriarchy, male supremacy, and sexual oppression — that is far harder to accept. It is far harder to allow. Easier to transpose it into a key of prurience and wait for the whole thing to stroke itself into exhaustion. But — forgive me — if you think this movement has blown its load already, you’ve no idea how women work, and you’ve no clue what’s coming.

***

Alright, ladies, you’ve had your fun, and you’ve given us all a fright — but that’s enough now. If we relegate this all-out revolt against male sexual entitlement to the kitchen shelf where it belongs, everyone would be a lot more comfortable — at least, the men in the room would be, and we all know that’s what really matters.

Just look at what happened to poor old Aziz Ansari. They warned us that this sort of thing was coming, and we didn’t listen. A famous and successful man in his 30s goes on a date with an unfamous woman in her 20s, they go home together, he pesters her for a shag, she isn’t strong enough to say no or slap him away like a real woman ought to, like women used to do back in the day, so like the snowflake she is, she gets upset and goes home — and we all know how this one goes. He wins an award, and she decides to take revenge. She goes to the press, the press report the encounter in cringeworthy suck-by-blow detail, the feminazi #MeToo hive-vagina takes over, the hysteria mill rattles into overdrive, and boom — just like that, his career is over. Now everyone’s calling the poor guy a monster and a rapist. He’s blacklisted from every network. He’ll never work again. Another fallen soldier in the sex wars. Predictable. Tragic. Just goes to show how weak modern women really are, how much they hate men and sex, how they always take things too far, how they never miss a chance to play the victim.

At least, that’s what it might’ve gone to show if any of that had actually happened. What actually happened was quite different.

What actually happened was this: A man was rude and sexually entitled, fucked up and hurt somebody, and she told him so. He apologized and took it to heart. An unscrupulous trash publication chased this woman down and got her to tell her story, which it reported in the lurid language of celebrity sex scandal. Babe magazine framed it in a way designed to garner maximum attention, derail important activist work, and humiliate everybody involved. The original piece at Babe magazine is an object lesson in how scummy gutter journalism can be when literally all it cares about is keeping readers salivating. The piece pruriently portrays both parties in the worst possible light: Ansari comes out of it looking like an entitled dick on training-wheels, and “Grace” comes out of it looking not like an honest young person who had an upsetting experience, but like a spiteful child who wanted to hurt a man who hurt her, who wanted to ruin him just like the papers warned us all women do. The reporter makes her look hysterical, which is something she definitely isn’t, because nobody is, because hysteria is a fake disease made up by a sexist medical establishment a hundred and fifty years ago to pathologize women who were traumatized and frustrated and wanted their lives to be different.

Unfortunately for those who were hoping for a crowbar to shove in the wheels of this barrelling machine of social and sexual change, what this moment illustrates is a remorseless and prurient witch hunt failing to happen. Ansari still has his career. He’ll be fine — not because the hand-wringers called time on a movement that went too far, but because this movement is honest. This movement is more than just a ballroom full of fainting maidens who collapse at the sight of their own ankles. It turns out that most women can, in fact, distinguish between sexual assault and a bad date. It turns out that sex is just one more thing we really do not need mansplained to us.

***

You want to talk about sexual repression? About wanting women to act like fainting Victorian ladies? The idea that it’s women who are the enemies of freedom in a world where, for centuries, the very worst thing you can call a woman has been “loose” or a “slut,” where for a female or queer person to be openly sexual is to incite violence or excuse it after the fact — that would be laughable anywhere, but in America? In a nation where legal abortion is all but impossible to access in all but the most liberal states, where conservative lawmakers in every district are going after not just safe pregnancy termination, but contraception? We have not even begun to have a real conversation about creating the conditions for meaningful sexual liberty that works for most human beings. If you want sexual liberation, make contraception, reproductive health care, and pregnancy termination easy to access and free at the point of use. Then, Mr. Sullivan, we can talk about “defending sex.”

If anyone is confused about the difference between sex and violence, if anyone is operating under the assumption that men are always and only animals who cannot be expected to control their erotic compulsions, it’s not women. It’s men, because they’ve been socialized to understand sex and violence as synonymous, and it’s the mainstream press, because stars, sex, and violence have always sold copy.

Part of the confusion has arisen from the obvious glee with which the press has sunk its indiscriminate fangs into individual offenders, luridly repeating details of alleged transgressions and sidelining the experiences of victims and survivors, as if sexual activity itself were the so-called scandal rather than whether or not the sucking and fucking and flowerpot-wanking was consensual. There’s always been a ripe news economy of sexual hypocrisy. The same tabloids that sell millions of issues printing pictures of topless teenage girls will gladly jump on any slut-shaming bandwagon that trundles by on its way to the frigid past.

It turns out that women, largely, are not the ones who are confused between sex and violence — not when the stakes are this high. Which is incredible, really, because most of our lives have been spent, especially if we are straight, being gaslit and bullied into believing that sexual violence is normal and fine. We have been socialized to think we need to be reticent and shy about our own desires — that our bodies are for men to desire and own — and yet we are also the ones responsible for setting the boundaries. We have been told that the absolute maximum we can expect, if we are good and quiet and not too provocative or angry, is not to be violently raped.

We are also supposed to put other people’s comfort before our own in every remotely sexual situation. We must not be rude. We must not upset or threaten the man. We must say no when we mean it, but we must take care not to offend him or threaten his masculinity, because heaven knows what will happen then. That’s where this backlash has backfired. Instead of exposing a movement that has overreached itself, instead of proving that MeToo is simply, as a well-reported letter in the French press put it, an attack on men, the Aziz-and-Grace story has opened up a whole new conversation about what we expect from sex, even when it is technically consensual. It turns out that we’re not done here.

We are far from done.

***

There will always be cowardly and conservative elements in society just desperate to take even one irresponsibly reported story and use it to damn an entire movement, and we must not let them, because this matters too damn much. There’s a reeking double standard in the room. Right now, if a man makes a mistake and hurts someone, it might, just for once, ruin his career — but it seems that if a woman makes a mistake and hurts someone right back, or allows her pain to be twisted to serve someone else’s agenda, she damns not just herself, but all other women by association.

This is what happens when patriarchy is on the run. It gets nasty. The mind games ramp up. Women are always the first to lose. But I have a word of advice for those who tried and failed to use this flashpoint to condemn the entire movement:
 Gentlemen, do not test us. Women who love their own freedom are all too used to hearing that we have gone too far — in fact, we’ve been hearing that for centuries, whenever we’ve tried to take a single step. The truth is that we have not gone nearly far enough, and we have very little to lose. Attacking our reputations, calling us liars, trying to humiliate us and drive us apart — we’ve seen all that before. Try it and see. This is not going to go the way you want it to go.

No, really. I have crept across the lines of this messy culture war to give you this advice, so please take it seriously, because it is for everyone’s good.

The terms of this war of sex and power have changed, and so have the weapons. Physical violence and threat won’t work for you here. You are trying to fight against whispers and rumors and inference, against righteous rage, against charges of hypocrisy, exploitation, and crass dehumanization that hit home with career-ending accuracy. And you’re trying to fight this war with an arsenal you don’t know how to use, against an army that has been training with these weapons for generations, because these tools of emotional warfare are the only ones they have ever been allowed, because they are women.

You are going to lose.

I don’t care that you’re fighting on your home terrain, that you’ve always been told that sex and power belonged to you and you could set the terms. You want to fight women over who has been more wronged in the field of sex and power. A lot of people also tried to invade Russia in the winter.

I’m sorry to break it to you, but women are not out of control here. They are very, very angry. There’s a difference. Turns out that this is not a runaway train, that women are still driving this sexual revolution — for that is what it is — and the pain and rage fueling the engines are far more profound than we wanted to imagine. It turns out that women want more. More than the right simply to go about our working lives without being constantly sexually harassed. More from men than just being able to keep their fool hands to themselves in the office. It turns out that this is also about the bedroom. It always has been. It’s terrifying, I know, but yes — women want more, women expect better, and it’s time we got it.

***

Back, if you can bear it, to the Aziz Ansari case. If we believe what Ansari himself has confirmed about that night, three things are true about this story:

Ansari acted in a shitty, entitled way towards a young woman. The way that he behaved was not okay or fine.

He does not deserve to go to jail or be blacklisted for it, but that doesn’t make it okay and fine.

Almost every woman I know has had a similar sexual experience — and no, that still doesn’t make it okay and fine.

That last point inflects the first two. The fact that this sort of experience is so goddamn common is precisely why it deserves attention, and should not simply be filed away in a closet marked “women who make too much of a fuss.” Women don’t make enough fuss about how much sex can suck for us even when it is, technically, consensual, even when no crime has been committed. We’re socialized out of making a fuss, just as men are socialized into thinking about sex as something they have to bully and pester out of women. Shitty, dehumanizing sex is not normal, and it is not okay — it’s just very, very common. And because it is so common, because it is a chapter in so many of our stories, it is easier to write this sort of thing off as a “bad date.” The story of the bad date, the bad fuck, and the bad marriage is easy and comforting to tell — almost as easy and comfortable as the story of the young woman who goes hysterical and ruins a man’s life over a bad date. What a pity it isn’t quite so simple.

Sex is many things, but it is rarely simple. Contrary to the popular narrative that opponents of the MeToo movement have propagated, most women don’t like to think of themselves as victims. Most of us would prefer the version of the story where we were in control the whole time, where the hurt and disappointment were our fault, because that way it’s easier to own the horrible things that have happened to us and make sense of the way they make us feel about our own bodies, and about sex in general. It’s easier to smile and repeat the lines that are required of us every time we stand up and demand that women be treated with a bare minimum of human decency: We don’t hate men. No, we don’t hate sex. We’re not like those angry, prudish feminists of the frightening fictional past with their burning bras and man-skull necklaces, ready to castrate any passing politician who accidentally brushes the wrong knee. We are not fainting Victorian maidens. We don’t hate sex. We love sex, and we love men, ok? All of us love sex and all of us love men, all men, no matter how badly they behave, because that’s what it means to be a good woman — it means loving what you’re told to love no matter how much it hurts you.

Love is such a huge, strange word, a word that stretches to contain all the silence, pain, and longing that crowd around the corners of your bed. To speak personally, yes, I love sex, but sometimes I also get angry at it — and sometimes wish it did not have to hurt so much. That’s something I’ve heard from a lot of women and girls I am close to, in this rare time where we have been able to talk about this with a little less censure. Maybe you love sex, but you wish it did not come at the cost of your dignity, your livelihood, your self-esteem. You wish you were able to have it on terms that you could bear. You wish you could ask for what you wanted and be heard. You wish you could talk about all those times you didn’t really want it but went along with it anyway to keep him happy, or to keep yourself from harm. Maybe you wish you could remember how to be hungry. Maybe you wish you could still feel the pleasure you used to anticipate before abuse and trauma left their fingerprints all over your body. And maybe people have simply used sex as a weapon against you so many times that you don’t love it anymore, not right now, and you know what, that’s fine too. Asking women if they love sex (implied: with men) is like asking the front-of-house staff how they feel about their work when the boss is listening.

Repurposing an attack on sexual injustice into an attack on sex itself is convenient and easy and wildly, wildly wrong. It also works like a dream. Nobody wants to be called frigid, which is the word for women who aren’t sluts. The actress Catherine Deneuve, along with a hundred other co-signatories to an open letter in Le Monde, condemned the women speaking out about assault as enemies of “sexual freedom.” The problem is that sexual freedom is not something that can be enjoyed in isolation when more than half the human race still fights for the basic freedom to choose when and how and who we fuck.

I resent being ordered to declare my love for sex by milquetoast liberal commentators who think that women routinely lie about rape and by slimeball anti-feminist shock jocks who spend the other half of their time trying to ban contraception because Jesus said so. The entire world hates sex. Yes, we do. If we didn’t hate sex, we wouldn’t talk about it the way we do behind its back.

Those fragile Victorian ladies, with their corsets and their smelling salts, they seem to come up in every banal and predictable condemnation of the MeToo movement — it’s worth asking who they were and what part they play in the long, weird story of human sensuality. Why were those women so apparently frightened of sex? They were frightened because not so long ago, sex was legitimately terrifying if you were a woman — as it still is for many women and girls around the world. Sex was dangerous. It could kill you, or ruin you, and the fact that you probably wanted it made it that much worse — when you crave something that could mean disaster, that doesn’t make the desire go away, it just makes it that much more horrifying.

A lot of men don’t quite understand why women policed sexual morality in the first place: not because they did not have desires, but because they were made to pay such a heavy cost for men’s desires before they even thought about having their own. Because sex was dangerous. Within living memory sex was extremely goddamn treacherous for women — and in many places it still is.

In fact, we do not have to choose between fighting against sexual violence and being sexual. Today still, as it has been for centuries, we are told: one or the other. We could not demand the right to have our bodily autonomy respected and still expect to get to be sexual, to dress like that, to walk like that, to suggest that we might want something good girls don’t. Men could be asked nicely not to attack when provoked, but if we actually showed any scrap of sexual desire ourselves, all bets were off.

The fight against sexual violence and the fight against sexual repression are two sides of the same struggle: to divide one from the other is to collapse the whole enterprise. So-called sexual liberationists of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation failed, and failed badly, by thinking they could have sexual freedom without tackling male supremacy and sexist violence, by clinging blindly to the cozy delusion that women aren’t actually sensual beings in the way that men are, that women’s sexual freedom can remain an afterthought, and any woman who acts as if it isn’t can and should be punished.

This is why in so many places where abortion and contraception are strictly controlled, exceptions are made in cases where the person seeking to end a pregnancy has been raped: because the real issue is and always has been sexual control, and the problem is not unborn babies but adult women with the temerity to think they can fuck who they want and get away with it. Only men are allowed to get away with that.

In the real world, nobody has so far been sent into career exile for asking someone out. There’s a difference between a polite invitation and repeated, aggressive pestering or a boss who refuses to keep his hands to himself because he thinks that power and seniority gives him a right to your body. Flirting is still allowed, but judging by the panicked responses to any MeToo narrative that isn’t clear-cut rape, it is not women who are confused about the difference between flirting and aggression, but men. This is, sadly, a predictable consequence of an erotic consensus that constantly associates male sexuality with violence, that tells straight men and boys that their sexuality is dangerous and uncontrollable and that if they fail to persuade women to “take” it, they are not men at all.

Understand that until women’s sexuality is not closed on all sides by a big, ugly wall of violence and intimidation, until we are allowed to actually access our erotic impulses honestly and think about what we want, until our bodies are no longer bargaining chips for the crumbs of power men sweep off the table for us to fight over, women will not be sexually free — which means that nobody will be sexually free. Understand that rape is a tool of sexual repression as well as of sexual oppression, and that a fight against rape culture is a fight for sexual liberation — the foundation without which true sexual liberation is going to fall flat on its face in a pool of its own juices.

***

The MeToo movement has not gone “too far.” We have not gone far enough. We won’t have gone anywhere near far enough, not until we achieve something like actual sexual liberation — for everyone. I believe that the next stage is going to involve a process of truth and reconciliation. Rape culture and misogynist entitlement are the key in which our current chorus of dissatisfaction is sung. What that means is that a lot of sex that is technically consensual is nonetheless dire and disappointing, especially for the women involved. This is why the demand for better sex — for fewer Cat People and coercive hookups and woke boys taking too long to understand when you’re just not into it — is also revolutionary.

As Ellen Willis notes in her seminal essay, “Towards a sexual revolution,” sexual coercion is “a tool of sexual repression.” We aren’t calling out men and condemning them to career assassination for being shitty, inconsiderate lovers, and a couple dozen humans in the Northern Hemisphere will be glad to hear me say that — but it’s worth asking why they so often are. Turns out that unless you pay attention to the needs and desires of the person opposite you — or however you happen to be angled — you’re going to be a bad lay. She might not say so, because she’s worried that if she upsets you or hurts your pride you’ll hurt her in far more measurable ways, and she might not be wrong. But trust me: Treating women as people, people who have wants and desires and messy, meaty insides, people who have to live in patriarchy just like you, people who can change their minds and get shy and sometimes take all their past traumas to bed with them just like you do — that’s the one position that’s guaranteed to win with almost everyone. The trick is that there’s no trick to it.

It’s possible that the best sex of our lives, as my friend Meredith Yayanos told me the other day, does not exist yet. When it does, it will be in a world beyond rape culture. In 10 years of trying to fuck like I lived in the early days of a better nation, I’ve found spaces where it seemed that, for a time, something like real sexual liberation was possible. Usually they were queer spaces, or at least spaces with their own reasons to mistrust received ideas about gender and pleasure. But they were mere cracks in the carapace of violence, little chunks in the brittle social exoskeleton of bitter sexism and shame sealing us off in units of terrified longing, even when the clothes came off. I found myself running up against rape culture over and over again. The retinue of bad and selfish and shitty behavior of grown men in bed. The violent fragility of masculinity that could have been so much more. I wanted more. I still want more. And women who want more are a problem.

I’m not promising that the great consensual anti-sexist revolution to come will mean an end to broken hearts and hurt feelings. I would never lie to you about a thing like that. I would anticipate that it might make the breakage cleaner and the scarring easier, but I have only my own experience to go on there. I have been let down and messed around in my time by a few rare and special snowflakes who managed to find entirely new ways to hurt me — ways that did not involve being sexually violent or at any point treating me as less than human, even though I was female and they were not. You can be anti-sexist in theory and in practice and still be a goddamned brat and a soul-sucking mindfucker, it just takes a lot more work and creative chops. I take my hat off to these rare young men, and I will probably end up taking off other things in the future, because people are fascinating and the flesh is weak.

Only when we consider the possibility that male sexuality might not be inherently violent and exploitative can we ask why so much of it is. Why does the joyless, coercive sex that we so often have to settle for under patriarchy have to be the norm? Can’t we do better?

We can, and we must, for reasons that go way beyond the bedroom. If the main problem with rape culture and sexual repression were the fact that they make sex less satisfying, well, there are simple ways around that, and they plug in at the wall. But the rolling crisis of toxic masculinity does not just kill the mood, it kills human beings. It ruins lives. It is a species-level disaster that causes trauma on a scale most of our tiny minds cannot stretch to comprehend. And it can’t go on like this. There is a bigger and scarier social and sexual revolution on its way, and the fact that it will make fucking a lot more fun in the future is just a bonus.

Buckle up.

Note: The original version of this essay has been slightly amended to provide additional context on the Babe magazine story about “Grace” and Aziz Ansari.

* * *

Laurie Penny is an award-winning journalist, essayist, public speaker, writer, activist, internet nanocelebrity and author of six books. Her most recent book, Bitch Doctrine, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

[a-woman-apart]

Off with the kid gloves; how about boxing gloves?

For most of my life, I have valued being “considerate.” I, like many others, have claimed to value honesty while telling innumerable white lies. Even though I hated the statement “what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you” I celebrated “lies of omission”, a way of keeping others ignorant about unfortunate aspects of my life, including what I really thought about them. 

I swallowed my tongue and pushed down my anger because I didn’t want to “be the bad guy.” Being nice was more important than being honest. 

I know that there are times when saying what is right, or being right, is unhelpful. For example, you may honestly believe your grandma’s teal cardigan is hideous, but there probably isn’t a good reason to tell her that unprompted. If she asks, there are probably also ways to tell her your opinion without being needlessly unkind. 

There is also something to be said about lying to an abusive guardian who holds disproportionate economic power over you. You’re not a coward if you choose not to be open about your sexuality, religion, or gender identity to a family member who will throw you out or abuse you if you do so. You are allowed to exercise your basic human instinct of self-preservation. They’ve created a hostile environment where honesty is punished, and you are not at fault.

However, when there are topics that are not a matter of your human survival and more a matter of the survival of your delicately constructed image, then your dishonesty not only hurts others, it hurts you.

Every time you muzzle yourself, either to “save face” or “save someone’s feelings”, you tell yourself that how other people feel about you is more important than the things you feel and believe. 

Over time, that constant denial of your own right to speak and your own self worth, serves to erode your belief in yourself. At least, that is what happened to me and others who I saw struggle with self esteem. 

It’s taken a few years for me to become aware of this destructive cycle, but now that I can see what is happening, I am actively choosing to speak up in as honest a way as I can as often as I can.  

We live in a highly politicized world where attacking someone’s ideas is tantamount to a personal attack on the person who believes them. Knowing this, I was “sensitive” about how I framed political and theological arguments around my family. Now, I almost never hold back, unless I just don’t want to argue, in which case I will change the subject but not concede the point. 

Very few people today understand that highly educated people can believe unintelligent, pseudo-scientific, extremely wrong things.  If I tell you that your beliefs are unsupported by facts, and your knee-jerk reaction is to accuse me of being dismissive or calling you stupid, then that’s definitely a problem with you and not with me, and guess what? 

If you continue to hold completely unsupported beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary, you are stupid. Stupidity isn’t an ableist buzzword; it’s a description of someone who is willfully ignorant. 

If you lack mental capacity to understand something, you are not stupid. If you lack information on a subject, you are ignorant, not stupid.  

If you choose to be ignorant, you are stupid.  

If, in a debate, you are more concerned with debating how I said something, than whether or not my statement is true, you have a weak argument and likely, you are stupid.

If at any point, semantics, procedure, or decorum are more important to your movement than fighting inequality and oppression on a societal or legislative basis, then you are stupid. 

Everyone on the Authoritarian Left (yes I said it) is concerned about platforming bigots, but I am tired of apologizing for stupidity. I am tired of second-guessing myself and questioning myself in the face of people whose arguments are completely disingenuous and demonstrate an egregious lack of critical thinking. 

When I noticed how much the misery I experience when being gaslit in discussions by my right-wing, conservative, hyperreligious, Evangelical Christian mother was similar to the angst I experienced when reading ultra-Leftist bloggers on this platform, I realized that radical extremism is always irrational, no matter what side it emanates from. 

There is a caveat though. Extremism is often inevitable, but being an extreme force for truth and equality is the best way to escape the partisanship dishonesty of most movements. 

So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. --Martin Luther King Jr. 

I will end with a warning. For anyone who even still reads this blog, you are going to see a shift in the content. It is going to be a little less “nice.” 

But just remember, there are two kinds of “nice” people: 

There are the kinds of nice people who see that you have spinach in your teeth, and bravely face the awkwardness of telling you, because as your friend, they do not want to have you suffer the public embarrassment of going through the whole night with spinach in your teeth.  

Then there is the nice person, who, to save your feelings in the short term, and to save themselves the awkwardness of confronting you, rationalize that it’s better not to tell you, even though they know that when you go to brush your teeth that night and realize that you spent the whole night with spinach in your teeth, you will be embarrassed more. 

America has spinach in her teeth. I’m going to tell her, and her citizens, because I care enough to be honest. I care enough to have difficult conversations, to try and help make this country a better place before everything is completely wrecked. 

[digital-strategy]

http://bit.ly/2w5xofn

danah boyd

Apr 26

On April 17, 2019, Data & Society Founder and President danah boyd gave a talk at the Digital Public Library of America conference (DPLAfest). This is the transcript of that talk.

Illustration by Jim Cooke

I love the librarian community. You all are deeply committed to producing, curating, and enabling access to knowledge. Many of you embraced the internet with glee, recognizing the potential to help so many more people access critical information. Many of you also saw the democratic and civic potential of this new technology, not to mention the importance of an informed citizenry in a democratic world. Yet, slowly, and systematically, a virus has spread, using technology to systematically tear at the social fabric of public life.

This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, most of Silicon Valley in the late 90s and early aughts was obsessed with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. How did they not recognize that this book was dystopian?

Slowly, and systematically, a virus has spread, using technology to systematically tear at the social fabric of public life.

Epistemology is the term that describes how we know what we know. Most people who think about knowledge think about the processes of obtaining it. Ignorance is often assumed to be not-yet-knowledgeable. But what if ignorance is strategically manufactured? What if the tools of knowledge production are perverted to enable ignorance? In 1995, Robert Proctor and Iain Boal coined the term “agnotology” to describe the strategic and purposeful production of ignorance. In an edited volume called Agnotology, Proctor and Londa Schiebinger collect essays detailing how agnotology is achieved. Whether we’re talking about the erasure of history or the undoing of scientific knowledge, agnotology is a tool of oppression by the powerful.

Swirling all around us are conversations about how social media platforms must get better at content management. Last week, Congress held hearings on the dynamics of white supremacy online and the perception that technology companies engage in anti-conservative bias. Many people who are steeped in history and committed to evidence-based decision-making are experiencing a collective sense of being gaslit—the concept that emerges from a film on domestic violence to explain how someone’s sense of reality can be intentionally destabilized by an abuser. How do you process a black conservative commentator testifying before the House that the Southern strategy never happened and that white nationalism is an invention of the Democrats to “scare black people”? Keep in mind that this commentator was intentionally trolled by the terrorist in Christchurch; she responded to this atrocity with tweets containing “LOL” and “HAHA.”

Speaking of Christchurch, let’s talk about Christchurch. We all know the basic narrative. A terrorist espousing white nationalist messages livestreamed himself brutally murdering 50 people worshipping in a New Zealand mosque. The video was framed like a first-person shooter from a video game. Beyond the atrocity itself, what else was happening?

He produced a media spectacle. And he learned how to do it by exploiting the information ecosystem we’re currently in.

This terrorist understood the vulnerabilities of both social media and news media. The message he posted on 8chan announcing his intention included links to his manifesto and other sites, but it did not include a direct link to Facebook; he didn’t want Facebook to know that the traffic came from 8chan. The video included many minutes of him driving around, presumably to build audience but also, quite likely, in an effort to evade any content moderators that might be looking. He titled his manifesto with a well-known white nationalist call sign, knowing that the news media would cover the name of the manifesto, which in turn, would prompt people to search for that concept. And when they did, they’d find a treasure trove of anti-Semitic and white nationalist propaganda. This is the exploitation of what’s called a “data void.” He also trolled numerous people in his manifesto, knowing full well that the media would shine a spotlight on them and create distractions and retractions and more news cycles. He produced a media spectacle. And he learned how to do it by exploiting the information ecosystem we’re currently in. Afterwards, every social platform was inundated with millions and millions of copies and alterations of the video uploaded through a range of fake accounts, either to burn the resources of technology companies, shame them, or test their guardrails for future exploits.

What’s most notable about this terrorist is that he’s explicit in his white nationalist commitments. Most of those who are propagating white supremacist logics are not. Whether we’re talking about the so-called “alt-right” who simply ask questions like “Are jews people?” or the range of people who argue online for racial realism based on long-debunked fabricated science, there’s an increasing number of people who are propagating conspiracy theories or simply asking questions as a way of enabling and magnifying white supremacy. This is agnotology at work.

What’s at stake right now is not simply about hate speech vs. free speech or the role of state-sponsored bots in political activity. It’s much more basic. It’s about purposefully and intentionally seeding doubt to fragment society. To fragment epistemologies. This is a tactic that was well-honed by propagandists. Consider this Russia Today poster.

Russia Today poster.

But what’s most profound is how it’s being done en masse now. Teenagers aren’t only radicalized by extreme sites on the web. It now starts with a simple YouTube query. Perhaps you’re a college student trying to learn a concept like “social justice” that you’ve heard in a classroom. The first result you encounter is from PragerU, a conservative organization that is committed to undoing so-called “leftist” ideas that are taught at universities. You watch the beautifully produced video, which promotes many of the tenets of media literacy. Ask hard questions. Follow the money. The video offers a biased and slightly conspiratorial take on what “social justice” is, suggesting that it’s not real, but instead a manufactured attempt to suppress you. After you watch this, you watch more videos of this kind from people who are professors and other apparent experts. This all makes you think differently about this term in your reading. You ask your professor a question raised by one of the YouTube influencers. She reacts in horror and silences you. The videos all told you to expect this. So now you want to learn more. You go deeper into a world of people who are actively anti-“social justice warriors.” You’re introduced to anti-feminism and racial realism. How far does the rabbit hole go?

One of the best ways to seed agnotology is to make sure that doubtful and conspiratorial content is easier to reach than scientific material.

YouTube is the primary search engine for people under 25. It’s where high school and college students go to do research. Digital Public Library of America works with many phenomenal partners who are all working to curate and make available their archives. Yet, how much of that work is available on YouTube? Most of DPLA’s partners want their content on their site. They want to be a destination site that people visit. Much of this is visual and textual, but are there explainers made about this content that are on YouTube? How many scientific articles have video explainers associated with them?

Herein lies the problem. One of the best ways to seed agnotology is to make sure that doubtful and conspiratorial content is easier to reach than scientific material. And then to make sure that what scientific information is available, is undermined. One tactic is to exploit “data voids.” These are areas within a search ecosystem where there’s no relevant data; those who want to manipulate media purposefully exploit these. Breaking news is one example of this. Another is to co-opt a term that was left behind, like social justice. But let me offer you another. Some terms are strategically created to achieve epistemological fragmentation. In the 1990s, Frank Luntz was the king of doing this with terms like partial-birth abortion, climate change, and death tax. Every week, he coordinated congressional staffers and told them to focus on the term of the week and push it through the news media. All to create a drumbeat.

Illustration by Jim Cooke

Today’s drumbeat happens online. The goal is no longer just to go straight to the news media. It’s to first create a world of content and then to push the term through to the news media at the right time so that people search for that term and receive specific content. Terms like caravan, incel, crisis actor. By exploiting the data void, or the lack of viable information, media manipulators can help fragment knowledge and seed doubt.

Media manipulators are also very good at messing with structure. Yes, they optimize search engines, just like marketers. But they also look to create networks that are hard to undo. YouTube has great scientific videos about the value of vaccination, but countless anti-vaxxers have systematically trained YouTube to make sure that people who watch the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s videos also watch videos asking questions about vaccinations or videos of parents who are talking emotionally about what they believe to be the result of vaccination. They comment on both of these videos, they watch them together, they link them together. This is the structural manipulation of media. Journalists often get caught up in telling “both sides,” but the creation of sides is a political project.

The creation of sides is a political project.

And this is where you come in. You all believe in knowledge. You believe in making sure the public is informed. You understand that knowledge emerges out of contestation, debate, scientific pursuit, and new knowledge replacing old knowledge. Scholars are obsessed with nuance. Producers of knowledge are often obsessed with credit and ownership. All of this is being exploited to undo knowledge today. You will not achieve an informed public simply by making sure that high quality content is publicly available and presuming that credibility is enough while you wait for people to come find it. You have to understand the networked nature of the information war we’re in, actively be there when people are looking, and blanket the information ecosystem with the information people need to make informed decisions.

Thank you!

danah boyd is the founder and president of Data & Society and a principal researcher at Microsoft.

via Data & Society: Points

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

When a vulnerable person comes to you saying they feel guilty for feeling betrayed about their partner’s deception, the correct thing to do is to validate the feelings of betrayal and let them know they deserve better than this, not to validate their fucking abuser and tell the victim her feelings of guilt are correct. Jesus Christ, you people are awful.

This is yet another example of the kind of behaviour I point to for why I stopped supporting the trans movement years ago. Housing is a human right. Living free of violence is a human. Getting laid is not. No one entitled to a romantic/sexual partner. No one. Regardless of their identity. Regardless of how many oppression points they have. It is not okay to withhold information that is pertinent to sexual activity for this long from a romantic partner. Period.

And for fuck’s sake, if someone’s afraid of their partner committing violence against them for being trans, do you really think someone is more likely to commit violence against someone who was honest from the start than against someone who springs this shit “after a while”, right after deciding to be in a relationship? You know they’re not, and so do the people who pull this shit. This is an attempt to trap people who want to be good allies into relationships and sex with predators who get off on the violation.

Anon, if you’re reading, your partner lied to you. Whatever justifications tbhstudying uses for it, whatever justifications you’ve been gaslit into using for it, the fact is you were lied to. And not about something small. A penis is an organ that pisses, and that ejaculates semen which can transfer STIs or impregnate you. It is an organ made of flesh that moves and responds, and if you are not attracted to males, you will not find any sexual activity involving it to be a good experience. I don’t know how much you’ve seen of the rest of your partner’s body, but being up close to it in the flesh will be noticeably male as well. If you are homosexual, you cannot have a good experience from this. Even if you were bisexual, if your partner lied about that, what else then? How can you trust your partner to respect your sexual boundaries when you’re alone with them and vulnerable? Your partner is a predator who targeted you thinking to groom, gaslight, and coerce you into an experience you didn’t want. This doesn’t have to be a success for your partner. Please leave.

I had been talking to this girl for a while now and we finally decided to be together in a relationship. It’s my first relationship so I’m extremely inexperienced. However after a few months she says she wants to do it and I notice she’s kinda nervous and she says she’s trans and hasn’t fully transitioned yet! I was shocked at first but tbh I had no interest in dating a trans person who didn’t transition fully yet. And I don’t know I feel like that’s transphobic but at the same time it is my

Preference. I told her I need a break but I completely understand that trans people coming out to their significant other usually results in them being killed and I understand how difficult it must have been for her. I still ofc love her. I always will. I can’t help but say I feel like I’ve been lied to? And it somewhat hurts because this was my first relationship ahaha but I don’t want to be transphobic. I thought I’d take a break for a few days from seeing her bcs my heart went 💔 ):

The lie is what hurt the most. Idc that she is trans. I just ?? I’m hurt. Oof typing it out makes me feel a little better.

well, the thing is, she lied precisely because of the fear of your reaction. it’s understandable and she did it for her safety and that’s that. i can’t blame her for not telling you. i personally believe that there shouldn’t be anything stopping you from loving her because she is still the same person you fell in love with. she’s still the same vibrant person with all the characteristics that made you start liking her in the first place, and she will continue to be that same person from this point on, yknow? with regards to sex, there’s this one ask i remember seeing on tumblr abt not liking penises + i think it was a good response that answered the terf/transphobia bit of the question. maybe that’ll help as well? anyhow, wishing you and your girlfriend all the best 💕