anon-sequitur

[anon-sequitur]

“reproductive justice” focusing its tenets on children and not on women, and the infamous “right to have a child,” has led us to the liberal pro-surrogacy pro-child separation hellscape we are in, in part. it’s not about children. reproductive rights are about bodily autonomy, and bodily autonomy is about freedom from coercion, control, and commodification of the body. reproductive rights are also about familial rights, the right to raise your own family, the right to see your children, the right to communicate with them, etc. when you make it about the “right to have children” you fundamentally reject bodily autonomy and familial rights. you cannot have the right to a child if everyone has the right to be free from bodily coercion, control, and commodification, nor if everyone has the right to raise their own family and keep their family intact, to be in contact with their family, for parents and for children. for “everyone” to have a right to a child, women (and all female people) and children by default must lose their humanity and their autonomy. it’s not that “rights” aren’t ever complicated or compromised, or that rights-based personhood is the ideal model, but there is no justice in a “right to have a child.”

[anon-sequitur]

UPDATE: November 9, 2020 Thank you to each and every one of you for your kindness and support! I am happy to share some good news: I’ve been invited to join The Society for Collegiate Leadership & Achievement (SCLA), a national honor society. SCLA is a multidisciplinary honor society with members at over 600 colleges and universities nationwide. Your encouragement has made all the difference through the past few years.

Rehabilitation will always be my challenge. It’s unfortunate but this is who I am now. Yes, I’m doing a lot better but continue to have problems with muscle tone on the left side of my body, severe headaches and migraines, PTSD, anxiety and panic attacks. The muscles in my throat are weak. Sometimes I have trouble swallowing liquids and choke easily. I can’t just walk anywhere I want to go. The toes on my left foot are curled which makes me unbalanced. As a result, I have to get injections every three months to loosen the muscles in the bottom of my foot, ankle, calf, thigh, tricep, elbow, forearm, palm, and thumb. In addition to the injections, I have to take medication for pain and to relax my left side. Meanwhile, I continue to struggle for access to therapy and new, improved equipment.

It’s a non-stop struggle. I can’t drive myself to school and doctor’s appointments. My father has Glaucoma, is losing his vision, and is frustrated that he can’t work. My mom continues working in human services as a Personal Care Assistant for the elderly and disabled. We can’t afford for her to finally retire.

Stay tuned for news about my book that Chivas Sandage, my co-writer, is at work on!

LGBTQ influencer Josh Helfgott just made a video about Mollie and me for TikTok. I’ll post a link here ASAP!

I want to inspire! I want to share my story with the hope of contributing to a world where compassion is stronger than violence and hate. With gratitude, Kristene

[anon-sequitur]

[anon-sequitur]

[anon-sequitur]

there is going to be an arguably even more important election than the presidency happening on january 5th in georgia. the two senate seats in their state did not reach enough of a majority in this election to decide a winner, so theyre doing a “run-off election”. 

if these two seats are won by democrats they will flip the senate to a MAJORITY for democrats. we will have the presidency, the house AND the senate if the democratic candidates in georgia win. the policies biden promised could have a better chance at being passed!

if you live in georgia PLEASE vote for the democratic senate candidates on january 5th

if you do not, i recommend donating to the candidates election fund! :) 

https://electjon.com/

https://warnockforgeorgia.com/  

[anon-sequitur]

GEORGIA VOTERS: 40,000 ballots were rejected in Dekalb County, GA. Check your ballot status. You need to have their ballot "cured" by Friday before it's thrown out. Call 888-730-5816 for GA Voter Protection Hotline.

[anon-sequitur]

1. Would you agree that as a white woman it is most practical to fight for female liberation with black women as the center? I say this because we live in a racist society. So if black women are liberated as a class then white women are definitely liberated as a class. This is a dumb saying but, if a black woman can do or be something and still be treated well then a white woman can do or be that same thing while holding a knife.

I’m not sure how it would look as black women as “the center” of the liberation movement. I think it makes sense to have offshoots for all woc to discuss and work for issues that mainly affect them and/or affect them differently than white women. I still think it’s necessary to all work together on issues that affect every woman, though. 

like, if there’s demonstration bringing attention to domestic violence, i think it’s important to have black women there to talk about their experiences with police and DV because while generally police are useless in these cases for women of every race, with black women it’s especially terrifying to call the police if they’re being abused due to the high likelihood of the cops just shooting everyone without asking questions.

because you could also say, to put native american women “at the center” because they face issues that are different from black women. i feel like this kind of thing sets up a hierarchy of the most oppressed instead of seeing the similarities of the oppression of women as a class as well as the nuances.   

EDIT: also this says 1 and I did not receive any subsequent messages <3

[anon-sequitur]

I want you, if you are not black, to consider a life like this. Every single time you walk past a cop, you do so fully assured in the knowledge that if he wanted to, he could kill you, and he could do it in broad daylight, and he could do it by suffocating you for several minutes while people walked by on the street and his partners watched, and that even if someone recorded all of this (and managed not to be assaulted while doing so) the video that includes your lifeless corpse could spread worldwide and your face could be on thousands of tee shirts and still nothing might happen to that cop. He doesn't have to do it. He probably won't. Individually, he probably has no desire to. But he could, and so could everyone who wears his badge, and the knowledge that they could is a small background terror in your life. I want you to imagine that this is true for everyone you're related to, for your mother and your father and your brother and your sister, and that it was like this for all of your ancestors back to the first ones who were stolen from their home and shipped to be somebody's chattel and that those owners are the people whose names you bear. I want you to imagine that every single day you live with the knowledge that your skin tone and features are quite likely the result of one of your female ancestors being raped by someone that owned her. I want you to imagine that you live every single day of your life under this kind of terror, and that when 200 years of pressure explodes you see white people who love you, white people who vote blue no matter who, white people who have never spoken ill of black people, expecting you to answer for some stolen televisions and broken windows. It is awful in a way you will never understand and that I would not wish for you to understand. It is a deeply and psychically devastating way to live. I'm not interested in talking about a vandalized building when my psyche is vandalized every single day and so were those of my parents, and their parents, and their parents, and theirs again.

[anon-sequitur]

Bonnie Burstow Ph.D, A Critique of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and the DSM

[anon-sequitur]

the most striking thing about “comp het & lesbian existence” that so many people on tumblr who throw around the term “compulsory heterosexuality” seem to either willfully misunderstand or simply not know because they haven’t actually read the essay is that the argument that rich was making was that heterosexuality is a political institution built on male power over women and that this subsequently affects ALL women, straight, bisexual, and lesbian. yes, rich talked about how lesbian existence is denied, how lesbianism is treated as a less mature (in comparison to heterosexuality) choice that some women make, that many books on feminism and about women’s lives are written in complete omission of lesbian experience, that heterosexuality is seen as innate in all women to the detriment of lesbians, that compulsory heterosexuality makes being a lesbian seem like an impossibility for any woman. but she also talked about how compulsory heterosexuality is just as harmful to heterosexual women; she talked about how porn “widens the range of behavior considered acceptable from men in heterosexual intercourse”, how it exploits the labor of women both within and outside of the home, how it makes the rape of heterosexual women easier since violence is seen as a normal part of het intercourse largely due to porn, how it gives men complete physical and economic access to the women in their lives, especially their wives, and how heterosexual women resisting marriage to men is radical in and of itself because of the restraints that heterosexual marriage puts on women. “compulsory heterosexuality” does encompass the assumption that attraction to men is innate in all women, but comp het is much more than just the pressure lesbians face to be attracted to men and deny their own sexual orientation. compulsory heterosexuality is a system set up to confine women in every way imaginable, all women, every woman. i highly suggest everyone who hasn’t read this essay to read it and understand what “comp het” means since the term has gotten so muddled on tumblr.

http://www.weldd.org/sites/default/files/Compulsory%20Heterosexuality.pdf

[anon-sequitur]

honestly though, why do people think radical feminism is ~white hegemonic feminism~ when all that’s taught/tolerated in academia is queer/gender studies

[anon-sequitur]

Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel stated in 2018 that “when the generation that survived the war is no longer here, we’ll find out whether we have learned from history.” As a Polish Jew born in 1925, who survived the Warsaw ghetto, lost my family in the Holocaust, served in a special operations unit of the Polish underground, the Home Army, and fought in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, I know what it means to be at the sharp end of European history – and I fear that the battle to draw the right lessons from that time is in danger of being lost.        

               Now 93 years old and living in Tel Aviv, I have watched from afar in recent years as armchair patriots in my native Poland have sought to exploit and manipulate the memories and experiences of my generation. They may think they are promoting “national dignity” or instilling “pride” in today’s young people, but in reality they are threatening to raise future generations in darkness, ignorant of the war’s complexity and doomed to repeat the mistakes for which we paid such a high price.        

               But this is not just a Polish phenomenon: it is happening in many parts of Europe, and our experiences hold lessons for the whole continent.        

               Given what I’ve learned over my lifetime I would, first, urge future generations of Europeans to remember my generation as we really were, not as they may wish us to have been. We had all the same vices and weaknesses as today’s young people do: most of us were neither heroes nor monsters.        

               Of course, many people did extraordinary things, but in most cases only because they were forced to by extreme circumstances, and even then, true heroes were very few and far between: I do not count myself among them.        

               The same applies to those who failed in their moral obligations during that time. Of course, there were many who committed unspeakable, unforgivable crimes. But it is nonetheless important to understand that we were a generation living in fear, and fear makes people do terrible things. Unless you have felt it, you cannot truly understand it.        

               Second, just as there is no such thing as a “heroic generation”, there is no such thing as a “heroic nation” – or indeed an inherently malign or evil nation either. I must confess that for much of my life, I maintained the view that it was important for Poles to feel pride in their wartime record – leading me, when recounting my experiences serving in the Home Army in Warsaw under Nazi occupation, to omit certain examples of indifference and uncooperativeness on behalf of my fellow Poles. It is only in recent years, as I have seen that pride turn into self-righteousness, and that self-righteousness into self-pity and aggression, that I have realised just how wrong it was not to be completely open about the failings I witnessed.        

               The truth is that, as a Pole and as a Jew, as a soldier and as a refugee, I experienced a wide spectrum of behaviour at the hands of Poles – from those who sheltered me at risk to their own lives, to those who sought to take advantage of my vulnerability, and all possible shades of concern and indifference in between.        

               And although the Third Reich destroyed my world, it was a German woman who saved my life by introducing me to the men who would recruit me into the Polish underground. No nation has a monopoly on virtue – something that many people, including many of my fellow Israeli citizens, still struggle to understand.        

               Third, do not underestimate the destructive power of lies. When the war broke out in 1939, my family fled east and settled for a couple of years in Soviet-occupied Lwów (now Lviv in western Ukraine). The city was full of refugees, and rumours were swirling about mass deportations to gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan. To calm the situation, a Soviet official gave a speech declaring that the rumours were false – nowadays they would be called “fake news” – and that anyone spreading them would be arrested. Two days later, the deportations to the gulags began, with thousands sent to their deaths.        

               Those people and millions of others, including my immediate family, were killed by lies. My country and much of the continent was destroyed by lies. And now lies threaten not only the memory of those times, but also the achievements that have been made since. Today’s generation doesn’t have the luxury of being able to argue that it was never warned or did not understand the consequences of where lies will take you.        

               Confronting lies sometimes means confronting difficult truths about one’s self and one’s own country. It is much easier to forgive yourself and condemn another, than the other way round; but this is something that everyone must do. I have made my peace with modern Germany, and hope that all Europeans can do the same.        

               Finally, do not ever imagine that your world cannot collapse, as ours did. This may seem the most obvious lesson to be passed down, but only because it is the most important. One moment I was enjoying an idyllic adolescence in my home city of Lodz, and the next we were on the run. I would only return to my empty home five years later, no longer a carefree boy but a Holocaust survivor and Home Army veteran living in fear of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. I ended up moving to what was then the British mandate of Palestine, fighting in a war of independence for a Jewish homeland I didn’t even know I had.        

               Perhaps it is because I was only a child that I did not notice the storm clouds that were gathering, but I believe that many who were older and wiser than me at that time also shared my childlike state.        

               If disaster comes, you will find that all the myths you once cherished are of no use to you. You will see what it is like to live in a society where morality has collapsed, causing all your assumptions and prejudices to crumble before your eyes. And after it’s all over, you will watch as, slowly but surely, these harshest of lessons are forgotten as the witnesses pass on and new myths take their place.        

• Stanisław Aronson took part in the Polish resistance under Nazi occupation. He lives in Israel