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therealvinelle · 3 years

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I've always wondered this, but what do you think the Cullen's political viewpoints would be, given their individual backgrounds? if vampires don't change after they turn, then surely they would all be extremely racist (especially Jasper). would this not come up at some point? they aren't like the Volturi because the Volturi are too old to care, but the Cullens are young enough that they have been brought up with opinions on stuff like sexism, racism, homophobia and the like.

Oh fuck.

You get an early answer because otherwise I'll just chicken out and delete this one, pretend I never saw it.

UMMM.

Since I'm guessing you meant American political viewpoints, we need a disclaimer. I am not American, and not too knowledgeable about your politics. Not just in the sense that I don't follow the day-to-day drama, but as I am not an American citizen there are several things I don't know, can't know because I've never lived in your country and therefore can't know what the effects of living in a country ruled by American policies is like. What I do know is based off of the news in the foreign section, social media (by which I mean tumblr posts), and Trevor Noah's Daily Show.

I am an outsider looking in.

Which is really rather appropriate, since the Cullens are too.

The Cullens go to high school and college, Carlisle works, they pay taxes, they own real estate, and submerge themselves in American culture. Esme, Edward, Rosalie, Emmett, and Bella are young enough that this is in many ways their world, and apart from timeouts they've more or less spent their entire lives, human and vampire, integrated into American society.

Not fully integrated, mind you, they do what they need to to fit in and get to school or, in Carlisle’s case, to work. They go no further. No extra-curriculars for the kids, no book clubs for Esme, no game nights for Carlisle. They walk parallel to humans, not among us.

In addition to this they're obscenely rich, which puts them another thousand miles from the experiences of your average American. They won't deal with the health system, which means healthcare is a non-issue, they're not going to need welfare or other social programs, unemployment is another non-issue. Name your issue, and the Cullens don't have personal stake in it. Even the climate crisis won't be a problem for them the way it will for us.

What I'm trying to say is, American political issues are a concept to them, not a lived reality. Just like they are for me. So hey, you made a great choice of blog to ask.

I'll also add here that you say the Volturi are too old to care, and I agree- from an ancient's point of view, racism is a matter of "which ethnicity are we hating today?", and it all looks rather arbitrary after a while. Same with every other issue - after a while it all just blends together into "what are the humans fighting over today? Which Christian denomination is the correct one? Huh. Good for them, I guess."

I can't put it any better than this post did, really. The Volturi are real people, humans are nerds and tumblr having Loki discourse. Aro thinks it's delightful and knows entirely too much about Watergate (and let's be real, Loki discourse as well), but the point I wanted to get at is that politics really don't matter to vampires.

And I don't think they matter to the Cullens either.

So, moving on to the next point while regretting I didn't put headlines in this post, I'll just state that I don't think vampires' minds are frozen. Their brains are unable to develop further, and they can never forget anything, but... well, this isn't the post for that, but in order for this to be true of vampires they would barely be sentient. They would not be able to process new impressions, to learn new things, nor to have an independent thought process. Yes, we see vampires in-universe (namely, Edward, who romanticizes himself and vampires) believe they're frozen and can never change, but there is no indication that this is a widespread belief, or even true. Quite the contrary - Carlisle went from a preacher's son who wanted to burn all the demons to living in Demon Capital for decades and then becoming a doctor and making a whole family of demons. Clearly, the guy has had a change in attitude over the years. Jasper, in his years as a newborn army general, slowly grew disenchanted with his life and developed depression. James initially meant to kill Victoria and hunted her across the earth, then became fascinated and changed his mind about it.

Had these people been incapable of change, Carlisle would still be hating demons, Jasper would be in Maria's army, and James would still be hunting Victoria.

It goes to follow, then, that they are able to adapt to new things.

The question is, would they?

Here I finally answer your question.

So, we have these people who don't really have any kind of stake in politics, who keep up to date all the same (or are forcibly kept up to date because high school) and are generally opinionated people.

Where do they then fall, politically?

(And this is where you might want to stop reading, anon, because I'm about to eviscerate these people.)

Alice votes for whoever's gonna win. She also makes a fortune off of betting each election. Trump's 1 to 10 victory in 2016 was a great day to be Alice. MAGA!

The actual policies involved are completely irrelevant, she does this because it's fun. Election means she gets to throw parties. Color coded parties for the Republican and Democratic primaries, and US-themed parties for Election Night! (Foreigner moment right here: I at first wrote "Election wake" before realizing that's not what y'all murricans call it.)

Alice loves politics. Doesn't know the issues, but she sure loves politics.

Bella votes Democrat. She actually knows about the issues, and cares about them. This girl is a Democrat through and through.

Carlisle doesn't vote. I can't imagine it feels right. Outside of faked papers he's not a US citizen, this is meddling in human affairs that he knows don't concern him.

More, this guy has never lived in a democracy.

In life, Carlisle lived under an absolute monarchy that, upon civil war, became an absolute theocracy. From there he learned that vampires live under a total dictatorship.

For the first 150 years of his life, democracy was that funky thing the Athenians did in history books thousands of years ago, no more relevant to him than the Ancient Egyptian monarchy is to me. Then the Americans, and later other European countries started doing this.

Good for them.

There's this mistake often made by those who view history from a... for lack of a better term, a solipsistic standpoint. A belief that the present day is the culmination of all of history. “My society is the best society, the most reasonable society; all the others had it backwards. Thank god we’re living in this enlightened age!”

The faith in our current system of government is one such belief. We (pardon me if this doesn’t apply to everybody reading this post) have grown up in democracies, being told this is the ultimate form of rule, and perhaps that is true - but remember the kings who have told their subjects they had were divine and the best possible ruler based on that. Remember also that most modern democracies haven’t actually been democracies for very long at all, America is the longest standing at some 230 years (not long at all in the grand scope of things) and they have a fracturing two-party system to show for it.

Every society, ever, has been told they’re the greatest, and their system of government the most just. Democracy is only the latest hit.

This is relevant to Carlisle because he’s immortal and decidedly not modern. Democracy has not been installed in him the way it was the rest of the Cullens, Jasper included. To him- well, it’s just not his world. He has no stakes in our human politics, and as he is older than every current democracy and has seen quite a few of them fall, he’s not going to internalize the democratic form of rule the way a modern human has.

I think the concept of voting is foreign to him.

It requires a level of participation in human society that he’s simply not at. He does the bare minimum to appear human so he do the work he loves, but nothing more, and I find that telling.

As it is I think he'd be iffy about his family doing it. He won’t stop them, but in voting they’re... well it’s kind of cheating. They’re not really citizens, none of this will affect them, and by voting they’re drowning out the votes of real human voters. He does not approve.

Edward votes Democrat. He's... well he’s the kind of guy who will oil a girl’s bedroom window so he can more easily watch her sleep without being discovered, justifying it to himself as being okay because if she were to tell him to get lost he’d stop immediately. Same guy is so sure that he’d leave and never return again if she wanted him to, except this is the man who returned to Forks to hang around his singer, knowing there was a significant chance he might kill her. To say nothing of his Madonna/Whore complex, or of the fact that he tried to pimp out his wife twice, and was willing to forcibly abort her child.

This guy is very much in love with chivalry, with being an enlightened and feminist man who supports and respects women, while not understanding the entire point of feminism, which is female liberation.

He votes Democrat because he’s such an enlightened feminist who cares about women’s rights.

Emmett doesn’t care to vote, but if he has to he votes Republican. The guy is from the 1930′s, and has major would-be-the-uncle-who-cracks-racist-jokes-if-he-was-older vibes.

Esme doesn’t vote, that would require getting out of the house.

More, I just... can’t see it. I can’t see her being one to read up on politics and The Issues, period, but if she has to then I doubt she’d be able to decide.

Jasper doesn’t vote. Alice can have her fun, he does not care.

There’s also the whole can of worms regarding the last time he went to bat for American politics.

I imagine he stays out of this.

Renesmée doesn't vote. She has no stock in the human affairs. Who would she vote for, on what grounds? When Bella tries to pull her to the urns, she points out that she's three years old.

Rosalie, guys, I’m sorry, but that girl is definitely gonna vote Republican. Perhaps not right now as it’s become the Trump party of insanity, but the Mitt Romney type of Republicans? Oh yes.

And for the record, yes I imagine she does vote. To step back from politics would be another way she was relinquishing her humanity, and that’s not allowed to happen. So, yes, she goes to the urns, less for the sake of the politics involved and more because like this, she’s still a part of society in some way.

Now, onto why I think she’s Republican, I think it’s both fiscal and social.

This girl was the daughter of a banker who somehow profited off of the Depression, and who then became part of a family with no material needs that would soon become billionaires thanks to Alice. Poverty to Rosalie is a non-issue, as it is I imagine she views it as a much lesser issue than what she’s had to deal with. The humans can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Rosalie’s infertility is forever.

Rosalie’s empathy is strongest when she’s able to project onto others, and she won’t be able to project onto the less fortunate at all.

Then there’s the fact that the Republican party is all about traditional family values, and pro-life.

Rosalie, a woman from the 1930′s who idolizes her human life and who‘d love nothing more than to get to live out this fantasy, is down for that. And as of Breaking Dawn she’s vocally pro-life, so there’s that.

This all being said I don’t think Rosalie cares to sit down and fully understand these politics she’s voting for, the possible impact they’ll have- that’s not important. What’s important is what voting does for her.

TL;DR: I bet anon regrets asking.

#long post #twilight #twilight vampires #twilight meta #twilight renaissance #politics #history #twilight history #carlisle cullen #alice cullen #bella swan #renesmée cullen #jasper hale #rosalie hale #emmett cullen

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valeriesrevenge · 3 years

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Thank you for the stuff you post. I'm thankful you are here.

I've been feeling off lately. I wish I could just reblog radfem on main but people know my tumblr irl.

I'm sorry for the vent but I gotta get this off my chest.

The shit the Trans movement has been pulling has pissed me off. Sometimes I feel bad discovering way too late I'm a lesbian. Seriously why is it so hard for them to accept there are people who are attracted exclusively to the same sex? Like I'll respect pronouns and gender identity but why can't they respect other people who do want cis for cis? Why do we have to tip toe around Trans people and throw actual women's health under the proverbial bus? I hate it that men's health never got reduced to male. Yet women's health became AFAB and even that they want to take away.

To make things more frustrating I remember the the early 2000s in high school and getting hate back then for being pro gay marriage. No trans people were advocating for gay rights. They didn't start speaking until 2015 and then it was talking about themselves... It was gay people, feminists, atheists, and other allies calling out conservative bullshit who helped paved the way to same sex marriage. Now the Trans insist religion is harmless despite the violence done in the name of it. I remember being told as a girl that love was fake and that women just settled for a man they could tolerate. That one day I'll lose my love for other girls because it's normal to find them beautiful as a teen its something to grow out of. It took me a long time to accept I wasn't straight. I even tried to date a man hoping if I could make myself take a dick maybe I was normal. I couldnt do it.

When I learned about trans stuff originally I was happy to learn something new. But now I very much regret talking to trans people especially after seeing all the rights they whittled away at and are now chipping away at anyone discussing cis women's health. Its just not fair. I want to say something positive something hopeful at the end of this but what is there to say? Only thing I can do is advocate for women's spaces and safety in the long term. Even then I get scared its not enough without funding.

Thank you for this, anon. I share a lot of these frustrations, as do a lot of women I know online and irl. I think there's still hope for the women's liberation movement, especially when I see crypto-GC feminists like you and others talking about these issues. So thank you for the support and sharing commiseration <3.

The trans movement and its ideology is fundamentally at odds with gay (lgb) rights and women's rights. It's a men's rights movement. The men's 'right' to take over women's spaces, force lesbians to have hetero sex with men, silence women's voices and redefine what being a woman means using misogynistic stereotypes. I drank the TRA Kool-Aid for many years in neo-liberal university, so I think there's hope for peaking a lot of women once they realize what's really at stake. It's not about 'just let people be themselves', it's about who gets to define material reality and women's experiences in the real world. Wear what you want, but pants don't make a man, nor does a dress make a woman.

Women deserve to define themselves based on sex, to feel proud of their body, to talk about women's health and women's issues without walking on eggshells to accommodate men. We deserve our own sports teams, our own bathrooms, our own seats in Parliament.

Sex is immutable. Same-sex attraction is immutable. No matter what trans activists or men's rights activists say or do, they will never be able to take that away from us.

Take care of yourself. I know it's so draining constantly seeing all kinds of awful things online and irl, so make time for yourself and prioritize your own mental and physical health always. Don't let the bastards get you down.

#radfems allowed #radfem do touch #radfem follow list #radfems please interact #radical feminism #gender critical #gender non compliant #same sex attraction #same sex love #lesbians pls interact #gnc bisexuals #bisexual pride #ssa pride

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star-anise · 6 years

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do you have any sources on the claims you made? im always willing to change my stance if you have legitimate backing for it haha

So first, I’m sorry for blowing up at you the way that I did. I’m not proud that I reacted in such a kneejerk, aggressive fashion. Thank you for being open to hearing what I have to say. I’m sorry for mistaking you for a TERF, and I’m sorry my response has caused other people to direct their own hostility towards you.

So, here’s the thing. “You can’t call bi women femmes” is pretty intrinsically a radfem thing to say, and I am deeply opposed to letting radfems tell me what to do. I’m trying to write this during a weekend packed with childcare and work. I’ll try to hit all the high notes.

The one thing I am having trouble finding is the longass post I talked about in my reply, that was a history of butch/femme relationships in lesbian bars, which had frequent biphobic asides and talked about “the lesbophobic myth of the bi-rejecting lesbian”; the friend who reblogged it without reading it thoroughly has deleted it, and I can’t find it on any of the tags she remembers looking at around that time. If anyone can find it, I’ll put up a link.

As far as possible, I’m linking to really widely accessible sources, because you shouldn’t intrinsically trust a random post on Tumblr as secret privileged knowledge. People have talked about this at length in reputable publications that your local library either has, or can get through interlibrary loan; you can look up any of the people here, read their work, and decide for yourself. This is a narrative of perspectives, and while I obviously have a perspective, many people disagree with me. At the end of the day, the only reason I need for calling bi women femmes is that You Are Not The Boss Of Me. There is no centralized authority on LGBT+ word usage, nor do I think there should be. Hopefully this post will give you a better sense of what the arguments are, and how to evaluate peoples’ claims in the future.

I looked up “butch” and “femme” with my library’s subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary because that’s where you find the most evidence of etymology and early use, and found:

“Femme” is the French word for “woman”. It’s been a loanword in English for about 200 years, and in the late 19th century in America it was just a slangy word for “women”, as in, “There were lots of femmes there for the boys to dance with”

“Butch” has been used in American English to mean a tough, masculine man since the late 19th century; in the 1930s and 1940s it came to apply to a short masculine haircut, and shortly thereafter, a woman who wore such a haircut. It’s still used as a nickname for masculine cis guys–my godfather’s name is Martin, but his family calls him Butch. By the 1960s in Britain, “butch” was slang for the penetrating partner of a pair of gay men.

Butch/femme as a dichotomy for women arose specifically in the American lesbian bar scene around, enh, about the 1940s, to enh, about the 1960s. Closet-keys has a pretty extensive butch/femme history reader. This scene was predominantly working-class women, and many spaces in it were predominantly for women of colour. This was a time when “lesbian” literally meant anyone who identified as a woman, and who was sexually or romantically interested in other women. A lot of the women in these spaces were closeted in the rest of their lives, and outside of their safe spaces, they had to dress normatively, were financially dependent on husbands, etc. Both modern lesbians, and modern bisexual women, can see themselves represented in this historical period.

These spaces cross-pollinated heavily with ball culture and drag culture, and were largely about working-class POC creating spaces where they could explore different gender expressions, gender as a construct and a performance, and engage in a variety of relationships. Butch/femme was a binary, but it worked as well as most binaries to do with sex and gender do, which is to say, it broke down a lot, despite the best efforts of people to enforce it. It became used by people of many different genders and orientations whose common denominator was the need for safety and discretion. “Butch” and “femme” were words with meanings, not owners.

Lesbianism as distinct from bisexuality comes from the second wave of feminism, which began in, enh, the 1960s, until about, enh, maybe the 1980s, maybe never by the way Tumblr is going. “Radical” feminism means not just that this is a new and more exciting form of feminism compared to the early 20th century suffrage movement; as one self-identified radfem professor of mine liked to tell us every single lecture, it shares an etymology with the word “root”, meaning that sex discrimination is at the root of all oppression.

Radical feminism blossomed among college-educated women, which also meant, predominantly white, middle- or upper-class women whose first sexual encounters with women happened at elite all-girls schools or universities. Most of these women broke open the field of “women’s studies” and the leading lights of radical feminism often achieved careers as prominent scholars and tenured professors.

Radical feminism established itself as counter to “The Patriarchy”, and one of the things many early radfems believed was, all men were the enemy. All men perpetuated patriarchy and were damaging to women. So the logical decision was for women to withdraw from men in all manner and circumstances–financially, legally, politically, socially, and sexually. “Political lesbianism” wasn’t united by its sexual desire for women; many of its members were asexual, or heterosexual women who decided to live celibate lives. This was because associating with men in any form was essentially aiding and abetting the enemy.

Look, I’ll just literally quote Wikipedia quoting an influential early lesbian separatist/radical feminist commune: “The Furies recommended that Lesbian Separatists relate “only (with) women who cut their ties to male privilege” and suggest that “as long as women still benefit from heterosexuality, receive its privileges and security, they will at some point have to betray their sisters, especially Lesbian sisters who do not receive those benefits”“

This cross-pollinated with the average experience of WLW undergraduates, who were attending school at a time when women weren’t expected to have academic careers; college for women was primarily seen as a place to meet eligible men to eventually marry. So there were definitely women who had relationships with other women, but then, partly due to the pressure of economic reality and heteronormativity, married men. This led to the phrase LUG, or “lesbian until graduation”, which is the kind of thing that still got flung at me in the 00s as an openly bisexual undergrad. Calling someone a LUG was basically an invitation to fight.

The assumption was that women who marry men when they’re 22, or women who don’t stay in the feminist academic sphere, end up betraying their ideals and failing to have solidarity with their sisters. Which seriously erases the many contributions of bi, het, and ace women to feminism and queer liberation. For one, I want to point to Brenda Howard, the bisexual woman who worked to turn Pride from the spontaneous riots in 1969 to the nationwide organized protests and parades that began in 1970 and continue to this day. She spent the majority of her life to a male partner, but that didn’t diminish her contribution to the LGBT+ community.

Lesbian separatists, and radical feminists, hated Butch/Femme terminology. They felt it was a replication of unnecessarily heteronormative ideals. Butch/femme existed in an LGBT+ context, where gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people understood themselves to have more in common with each other than with, say, cis feminists who just hated men more than they loved women.

The other main stream of feminist thought at the time was Liberal Feminism, which was like, “What if we can change society without totally rejecting men?” and had prominent figures like Gloria Steinem, who ran Ms magazine. Even today, you’ll hear radfems railing against “libfems” and I’m like, my good women, liberal feminism got replaced thirty years ago. Please update your internal schema of “the enemy”

Lesbian separatism was… plagued by infighting. To maintain a “woman-only” space, they had to kick out trans women (thus, TERFs), women who slept with men (thus, biphobia), women who enjoyed kinky sex or pornography or engaged in sex work (thus, SWERFS) and they really struggled to raise their male children in a way that was… um… anti-oppressive. (I’m biased; I know people who were raised in lesbian separatist communes and did not have great childhoods.) At the same time, they had other members they very much wanted to keep, even though their behaviour deviated from the expected program, so you ended up with spectacles like Andrea Dworkin self-identifying as a lesbian despite being deeply in love with and married to a self-identified gay man for twenty years, despite beng famous for the theory that no woman could ever have consensual sex with a man, because all she could ever do was acquiesce to her own rape.

There’s a reason radical feminism stopped being a major part of the public discourse, and also a reason why it survives today: While its proponents became increasingly obsolete, they were respected scholars and tenured university professors. This meant people like Camille Paglia and Mary Daly, despite their transphobia and racism, were considered important people to read and guaranteed jobs educating young people who had probably just moved into a space where they could meet other LGBT people for the very first time. So a lot of modern LGBT people (including me) were educated by radical feminist professors or assigned radical feminist books to read in class.

The person I want to point to as a great exemplar is Alison Bechdel, a white woman who discovered she was a lesbian in college, was educated in the second-wave feminist tradition, but also identified as a butch and made art about the butch/femme dichotomy’s persistence and fluidity. You can see part of that tension in her comic; she knows the official lesbian establishment frowns on butch/femme divisions, but it’s relevant to her lived experience.

What actually replaced radical feminism was not liberal feminism, but intersectional feminism and the “Third Wave”. Black radical feminists, like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, pointed out that many white radical feminists were ignoring race as a possible cause of oppression, and failing to notice how their experiences differed from Black womens’. Which led to a proliferation of feminists talking about other oppressions they faced: Disabled feminists, Latina feminists, queer feminists, working-class feminists. It became clear that even if you eliminated the gender binary from society, there was still a lot of bad shit that you had to unlearn–and also, a lot of oppression that still happened in lesbian separatist spaces.

I’ve talked before about how working in women-only second-wave spaces really destroyed my faith in them and reinforced my belief in intersectional feminism

Meanwhile, back in the broader queer community, “queer” stuck as a label because how people identified was really fluid. Part of it is that you learn by experience, and sometimes the only way to know if something works for you is to try it out, and part of it is that, as society changed, a lot more people became able to take on new identities without as much fear. So for example, you have people like Pat Califia, who identified as a lesbian in the 70s and 80s, found far more in common with gay leather daddies than sex-negative lesbians, and these days identifies as a bisexual trans man.

Another reason radical feminists hate the word “queer”, by the way, is queer theory, which wants to go beyond the concept of men oppressing women, or straights oppressing gays, but to question this entire system we’ve built, of sex, and gender, and orientation. It talks about “queering” things to mean “to deviate from heteronormativity” more than “to be homosexual”. A man who is married to a woman, who stays at home and raises their children while she works, is viewed as “queer” inasmuch as he deviates from heteronormativity, and is discriminated against for it.

So, I love queer theory, but I will agree that it can be infuriating to hear somebody say that as a single (cis het) man he is “queer” in the same way being a trans lesbian of colour is “queer”, and get very upset and precious about being told they’re not actually the same thing. I think that actually, “queer as a slur” originated as the kind of thing you want to scream when listening to too much academic bloviating, like, “This is a slur! Don’t reclaim it if it didn’t originally apply to you! It’s like poor white people trying to call themselves the n-word!” so you should make sure you are speaking about a group actually discriminated against before calling them “queer”. On the other hand, queer theory is where the theory of “toxic masculinity” came from and we realized that we don’t have to eliminate all men from the universe to reduce gender violence; if we actually pay attention to the pressures that make men so shitty, we can reduce or reverse-engineer them and encourage them to be better, less sexist, men.

But since radfems and queer theorists are basically mortal enemies in academia, radical feminists quite welcomed the “queer as a slur” phenomenon as a way to silence and exclude people they wanted silenced and excluded, because frankly until that came along they’ve been losing the culture wars.

This is kind of bad news for lesbians who just want to float off to a happy land of only loving women and not getting sexually harrassed by men. As it turns out, you can’t just turn on your lesbianism and opt out of living in society. Society will follow you wherever you go. If you want to end men saying gross things to lesbians, you can’t just defend lesbianism as meaning “don’t hit on me”; you have to end men saying gross things to all women, including bi and other queer women. And if you do want a lesbian-only space, you either have to accept that you will have to exclude and discriminate against some people, including members of your community whose identities or partners change in the future, or accept that the cost of not being a TERF and a biphobe is putting up with people in your space whose desires don’t always resemble yours.

Good god, this got extensive and I’ve been writing for two hours.

So here’s the other thing.

My girlfriend is a femme bi woman. She’s married to a man.

She’s also married to two women.

And dating a man.

And dating me (a woman).

When you throw monogamy out the window, it becomes EVEN MORE obvious that “being married to a man” does not exclude a woman from participation in the queer community as a queer woman, a woman whose presentation is relevant in WLW contexts. Like, this woman is in more relationships with women at the moment than some lesbians on this site have been in for their entire lives.

You can start out with really clear-cut ideas about “THIS is what my life is gonna be like” but then your best friend’s sexual orientation changes, or your lover starts to transition, and things in real life are so much messier than they look when you’re planning your future. It’s easy to be cruel, exclusionary, or dismissive to people you don’t know; it’s a lot harder when it’s people you have real relationships with.

And my married-to-a-man girlfriend? Uses “butch” and “femme” for reasons very relevant to her queerness and often fairly unique to femme bi women, like, “I was out with my husband and looking pretty femme, so I guess they didn’t clock me as a queer” or “I was the least butch person there, so they didn’t expect me to be the only one who uses power tools.” Being a femme bi woman is a lot about invisibility, which is worth talking about as a queer experience instead of being assumed to exclude us from the queer community.

#cherryhearrts #staranise original #answered asks #ranting in bisexual #lgbt discourse #terf shit #exclusionist shit #radfem shit #apologies to my girlfriend for not including carole queen in this post #she just didn't fit baby

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a-cai-jpg · 4 years

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frailty, thy name is woman! (HAH)

So the other day, I was ambushed by a group of tiny puppies.

I was in the park, breathing some fresh air and sunshine for the first time in a long, long time. I sat on a grassy hill--notebook just recently closed and resting in my lap--staring blankly at the amphitheater beneath me and suddenly, I hear barking to my right and felt something nudge my thigh.

Not gonna lie, I almost screamed and whacked the puppy in the face.

They were three beagles(?), bounding around the hill because, according to their owners who respectfully stood 6 feet away from me, they hadn't left the house in a week.

(same.)

Anyways, before they came to say hi, I was listening to a sad, acoustic playlist and writing down notes about women.

(it's not weird if u don't make it weird)

That morning, I had woken up thinking about women's issues.

Sexism is not exactly the social issue I'm most preoccupied by. It's prominent in every aspect of life, but because I've been fortunate enough to be sheltered from most of it, the sexism I experience is very subtle and difficult to pinpoint. I grew up in a primarily female household with a lot of strong personalities, and only recently did I begin to take note of the almost indiscernible power dynamic between the men and the women.

So, most of my life, I've just been kind of cruising along, with this vaguely gender-less persona that only started to shift some time in university.

A friend once asked, "How do you know that you're a woman?"

I think this was during the same time I was taking a philosophy course about theories of sexual differences, and so all my thoughts were kind of meta and hypothetical. My initial thought was, uh what do you mean like of course I know I'm a woman that's what I've checked on all the forms. But then I thought about it and I was like. Bruh.

Bruh.

The reply I gave her, I feel like, was unsatisfactory and very personal. I didn't want to fall back onto gender norms, because that was so obviously a cop-out. Furthermore, I feel like I didn't experience a lot of the stereotypical "what it means to be a woman." AND, the definition of "adult human being" was too inadequate.

So, how do I know that I'm a woman?

At the time, I gave her a pretty sloppy answer about internalized misogyny, and I'm not going to pretend I have a better answer now, but I think I've broken it down to two main points.

Number one: I know I'm a woman because I'm constantly in competition with other women. I view women as my primary competitors. Very rarely do I see masculine-presenting individuals as competition, even though technically, all of us are competing for resources, prestige, or whatever it is we seek. Sure, you can play a probability game and say it's all statistics, but I think there's an aspect of misogyny as well.

Number two, I know I'm a woman because I feel anger and indignation on behalf of other women, internalizing it as a personal offense, even when I myself have not undergone the same struggle.

It's the same criteria I think of when I ask myself how I know I'm Asian American. But, in the racial aspect, there's a third criteria, which is the reflexive self. I feel that other people see me as Asian American, and therefore, I am Asian American. For some bizarre reason, I didn't experience the same reflexive self when I thought about my gender.

I think it was this lack of a reflexive self and vaguely gender-less upbringing that pushed me to declare, very loudly, in the middle of a science classroom in highschool that, "I am not a feminist."

(I could self-psychoanalyze and come up with a million reasons why my upbringing was gender-less. It could have to do with the fact that my primary caretakers were women, so there was no other for me to reference, and thereby, no juxtaposition between women and men. It could have to do with early, internalized misogyny that caused me to push away things that identified me specifically as a "girl." It could also be that I'm incredibly not self-aware.)

(I stand by the statement that contrast is necessary for identification, though.)

Anyways.

I remember when I said those words, my best friend looked at me with exasperation and a classmate looked at me with disgust. For good reason.

At the time, the word "feminist," to me, had a lot of negative connotations. I equated it with the "feminazi." I didn't buy into sexist ideals, but neither did I understand the angry, seemingly unnecessary reversal of gender roles that "feminazis" were proclaiming.

And my friend patiently explained to me that no, you don't have to be a feminazi to be a feminist.

But see, even that in itself is anti-feminist, isn't it?

We were, again, drawing lines for what it means to be an acceptable woman--an acceptable feminist--and what it means to be an unacceptable woman.

Why is there a negative connotation to the term "feminazi"? Why is there a negative connotation to the term "feminist"? Isn't the term "feminazi" in itself misogynistic?

I think it has to do with the fact that the general culture is uncomfortable with women stepping beyond what their gender roles have prescribed them. The culture has moved in a direction where it is acceptable and almost expected for women to be feminists, but being a "feminazi" is still frowned up.

This might seem very obvious to some, but I actually haven't thought about the term "feminazi" in a long while. So, to make sure I actually knew what a "feminazi" was, I pulled up the Wikipedia article. Here are a few words used to describe a feminazi:

a committed feminist or a strong-willed woman

radical feminists

see as many abortions as possible

militants

quest for power

belief that men aren't necessary

well-intentioned but misguided people who call themselves feminists

the term came to be widely used for feminism as a whole

marginalize any feminist as a hardline, uncompromising manhater

hate men

dogmatic, inflexible, and intolerant

an extremist, power-hungry minority

I've never met anyone who fits that description, though [Limbaugh] lavishes it on me among many others

bossy, hating men and femininity

hyper-vigilant to perceived sexism

vindictive

puritanical

The term was apparently, popularized by a dude named Rush Limbaugh, and I'll be damned if I let a man determine what kind of feminist I am.

Maybe I am biased because a militant women's group seeking to overpower the patriarchy sounds pretty lit and like good material for a new Netflix show, but like.

Tell me again why it's not okay to be a feminazi.

(my primary reactions to the list above are: "i wonder why," "sounds ok to me lol," and "who the fuck are you to say")

ANYWAYS.

"Feminazis," according to Mr. Limbaugh (who even is this guy) is an unacceptable way to be a feminist.

He is a man governing what it means to be a feminist (again, who the fuck are you), but let's be real, there are many women out there who draw similar lines, maybe for others, maybe for themselves. The popular "Am I not a good feminist if I __________" questions in themselves are anti-feminist. Once again, it is a show of how women are policing themselves and each other.

I'm not big on philosophy because I can't understand most of it, but Foucault made the assertion that policing and discipline in a modern society lies with the self, or an invisible, anonymous power embedded in society.

(Ok, I'm going to be honest, I didn't want to read through 30 pages of feminist theory and I barely understood the four pages that I did read, so if I'm wrong, don't hate me.)

In other words, men and women become the gender police for themselves. Even as women gain more rights and freedom, they continue to police themselves in a new way, like asking themselves what it means to be a good feminist.

(Bartky introduces the argument that there needs to be an upheaval of social norms to end the policing.)

(And okay, so, the more I read Bartky's Foucault, Femininity, and Patriarchal Power, the more excited I get, so I'm gOiNg To StOp mYsElf hERe.)

I ask myself this question often too.

Am I not a good feminist if I express vague disapproval at someone who switches boyfriends every other day?

Am I not a good feminist if I am grateful for men opening doors for me or offering to grab my suitcase for me on the plane? (I'm 5'2 okay, I have to stand on the seat sometimes, it's embarrassing.)

See, I appreciate chivalry and I don't think chivalry is dead because what does that even mean, but I also recognize that chivalry isn't the same thing as gender equality or liberation for women (or dare I say, liberation of gender?). But, gender equality doesn't mean that women and men do all of the same things and are assumed to be able to do all of the same things. Because we, as humans, have varying abilities, don't we?

The question of what the fuck is gender equality plagued me for an entire semester and bothers me even now but I just kind of stomp on it and make it go away. The easy answer to it, for me, is a fair division of labor agreed upon by both parties, ensuring there is no abuse of power within the relationship.

But that statement in itself is problematic because it introduces a possibility of stasis, of complacency that might revert to a new abuse of power.

(It's also not one that every feminist agrees on.)

But let's return to the question of what it means to be a woman.

I wrote that contrast is necessary for identification, but I fear the statement implies that women are defined in opposition to men, which is false. Like, non-men = women. And, since gender is a spectrum, that obviously is not true. But, since gender is a spectrum, is it necessary for us to identify ourselves?

At the end of my notes, I scribbled a series of questions.

Why does it matter to me what gender people are?

Why does it matter to me what gender I am?

Is there a correlation between sexuality and gender? Especially since we are all on a spectrum for both? Are we socialized to choose? Is this or is this not evolutionarily favorable?

(I see now that the flaw in me writing blog posts is that I can't actually have a conversation about this and that's frustrating.)

(Also, I recognize that I live in an immense amount of privilege to be asking these questions and not, I don't know, fearing for my life.)

I briefly entertained the idea that women are essentially the oppressed party in the larger narrative of gender. But there are two problems with this statement. One, women are definitely not the only oppressed party. Two, everyone ultimately suffers when there is an accepted narrative.

But, the undeniable fact is that there is a common reality that people who identify as women live. It has nothing to do with anatomy, organs, chromosomes, hormone levels, brain structure, or sexuality. It is an experience that is placed upon us by the patriarchal society, regardless of whether or not we recognize it, based on how we present ourselves.

This is how the reflexive self began to develop, in Calc B, freshman year of college.

I try to talk about gender as removed from sex as possible, because I get terribly confused when I talk about them in conjunction with each other, but also because I do think there is a difference between the feminine experience and the female experience. I just don’t really understand it.

I wrote in my notes somewhere: Gender is a spectrum. You are your own individual, gender be damned.

I don't proclaim myself an expert on this matter. These are words that chased their own tails in my mind as I tried to understand how to function in an infuriating society that constantly made me angry.

The other day, I saw a Facebook post from a stranger who was talking about how their boyfriend didn't believe women were being oppressed because even though women get paid less, men pay for dates. And this led me to think about the wage disparity and how people always tell me, well, no, it doesn't exist. It's the woman's fault for not asking for a higher wage.

And I’m just kind of like, ???

A student of mine came to me one morning, a little disappointed and a little annoyed, because he had been shut down by a fellow classmate when he made a comment about the wage gap not being an actual thing.

(the thing about talking to students is that it's a lot easier to forgive ignorance and to actually have a conversation without getting angry.)

He said that he wished the classmate, a girl, wouldn't just be all angry about it and call him dumb.

I didn't know how to respond to that then, aside from agreeing that it is necessary to have actual dialogue around important issues and asking a few questions so he could critically think about gender issues in the U.S.

But, I thought about it the morning before I got ambushed by the dogs, and I wish I asked him to think about why people get so angry talking about these matters.

I think the reason why it's so difficult to have these conversations is because--

God, imagine the privilege of not having to have these conversations and not feeling angry and humiliated because you are pulling out this vulnerable bit of you that's been attacked by Society and trying to make someone who is implicitly attacking you understand.

That's not a comfortable feeling, and adults can't even manage it so how is a teenager expected to?

The same feeling rises within myself when I talk about race and when I talk about gender. Some of it is internalized racism and misogyny, but a whole lot of it is not wanting to be vulnerable, and that in itself is a little fucked up (and maybe, misogynistic?).

See, when I feel very strongly about a matter, I expect strong, rigorous, academic debate. I want to break down the logic in every sentence and refute facts and opinions with Better Facts and Opinions, complete with citations, and I don’t want to fall back on anecdotes even though I end up resorting to it anyways.

(I am also the annoying person who would do the Hamilton thing and be like i have the honor to be your obedient servant, A DOT CAI.)

But, so often, we don't have the luxury to do that. And also, very often, we are utterly consumed by the larger narrative that facts end up not meaning very much to us.

We are all part of an accepted narrative, and that, along with the social norms that come with it, is the enemy.

Men are not the enemy in feminism, which is why men need to calm the fuck down and get behind the feminist movement. Men are also suffering from this accepted narrative and gender policing that lauds toxic masculinity.

I'm not saying there's a right way to be a feminist, but I strongly believe there's a wrong way to be a feminist. I think being a feminist means you support gender equality, regardless of what gender someone identifies as. I think being a feminist means you want everyone to embrace their true selves. I think being a feminist means you stand with every individual, and so I think being a feminist should be the default for a human being.

But if a person identifies as a feminist and draws rules and regulations for how to be one, then that is anti-feminist.

(Come at me, feminist philosophers, I'm very zen and I'm willing to listen to you tell me about how society needs to see an utter deconstruction of feminism and masculinity.)

Be you, my friend. Be you and let other people be themselves. It's not like they're hurting you by being trans or gay or bi.

Like jeez, why is that so hard.

(stop hating on Irene 'cause she's a feminist, she's fucking beautiful and i will fight you.)

I don't know, I love women. They are inspiring and beautiful, and the term "woman," as much as I've broken it down, actually matters because society has forced it to matter. And weirdly enough, as difficult as it is for me to truly identify with woman at times, I like being one and I'm proud to be a feminist.

But it's also a little scary to be a woman. There are the general things a woman has to worry about, like walking around at night or traveling alone or going to a bar alone or doing anything alone to be completely honest. But there are also the other concerns, like what does a family dynamic look like with my personality and my ideals? How do I navigate a patriarchal society in terms of work and relationships? Which values do I give up to make sure I can actually go somewhere? When do I tell a friend to shut the fuck up because he’s mansplaining? How do I respond to defensiveness without getting defensive myself? How do I ensure that my daughter lives in a safer, more equitable world? How do I ensure that my son doesn't turn out to be a misogynist? Like? Help?

(sos i drank too my caffeine and now my hands are shaking)

Feminist theory, crudely put, falls into two categories (fuck i’m literally dragging things out of my ass, i don’t actually know if this is true lol), with one firmly asserting that a feminist revolution is rejecting the societal definition of femininity and the other embracing femininity.

(idk if there are only two camps, but these two perspectives definitely exist in feminist theory ok)

I definitely fall in the latter, because I can’t wrap my head around the rejection of femininity. Like, is that not misogynistic? Camosy’s Behind the Abortion Wars uses a similar argument to proclaim abortion as inherently sexist. It strips females of what has traditionally given them power, rendering them...males. Or some version of a male.

(i’m sold on camosy’s argument. don’t misunderstand, i’m definitely pro-choice, but i have thoughts.)

See, all of this is very complicated. Sometimes I see quotes about feminist theory and it’s so intellectually exhilarating that I just have to file it away and think about it on a day where I’m wired on caffeine. But even on those days, I feel like my brain falls short on trying to understand this very meta gender theory thing.

So, obviously, I don’t hope to convince you to believe in my ideal, because I don’t know what I’m talking about. But, if you have read this far, I leave you with the same thing I said a number of paragraphs back.

BE YOU AND LET OTHER PEOPLE BE THEMSELVES.

Recognize when you are causing harm, explicitly or not.

Recognize when other people are causing harm, explicitly or not, and engage them in conversation.

(these are actually goals and guidelines for me because i have no backbone and generally just fume in silence.)

(between me brainstorming this and me actually writing this, a number of different things have come to my attention)

(one of them is the erasure of non-masculine stories in history) (and yes that's obvious, but i also watched a bunch of TedEd videos about women so it's just very salient in my mind right now)

(another is the nth room south korea scandal, and i don't even know where to begin with that)

(Disclaimer: I don’t actually know what I’m talking about but I welcome counterarguments. I also realize putting a disclaimer at the end is really dumb, but I don’t want to interrupt my non-existent narrative flow. I feel like my take on gender is too simple and not nuanced enough, but honestly, I just don’t really get gender at times? So I really shouldn’t be talking about gender theory. Yet. Here we are.)

I LOVE WOMEN.

So here is a song from a woman that I recently found and fell in love with:

陳粒 - 无所求必满载而归它让你受折磨觉得痛觉得渴 [life] makes you suffer, makes you hurt, makes you thirsty 觉得无路走无处躲 makes you feel like there's nowhere to go, nowhere tohide 无所求也求不得 even if you want nothing, you can't even have that 当我昏昏欲睡摇摇欲坠 but when i'm about to sleep, about to fall 却学会放下错与对是与非 i learned to put down right and wrong, yes and no 无所求必满载而归 if i want nothing, then i'll receive everything

(on a side note, i've done nothing but read a chinese, boys love light novel. i have read three chinese novels in my life, and all three were boys love. this doesn't seem right.)

(but also, my chinese literacy is basically at that of a fifth grader, if even, so i think it's fitting that i read some trash novels.)

(but this one talks about the psychology of sexuality and gender, and i'm all for genre novels spreading ideas about bEiNg YoUrSeLf.)

(GAH.)

#this is both senseless and aimless #but it's nice to just blergh sometimes #u feel?#skrrt skrrt

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femmesfollesnebraska · 6 years

Text

Naida Mujkić , poet

Thrilled to feature the poetry of Naida Mujkić along with an interview. Enjoy!

Where are you from? How did you get into creative work and what is your impetus for creating?

That is a a key philosophical question. J Where do we all come from? I was born in former Yugoslavia, but not as a free human being, you know, because in those 7 years of my life in that country, I didn’t have the right to my own language and to my identity, as the basic right of every human being. I survived the hell of a Bosnian war, and now I live in a maybe free small country that goes by the name of Bosnia, but I also spent some time in Australia and Austria.

What moved me to be creative is the agony of the war. Sad, but true, as is was the main topic of my writing and my life, and its influence on the life of every woman who was lucky to survive. So many woman were raped, and abused in so many ways in the past 25 years in my country, and I felt the need to use the language of art to express the my pain and pain of others. It doesn’t hurt less if you share your pain with another person, but pain becomes bearable.

Tell me about your current/upcoming show/exhibit/book/project and why it’s important to you. What do you hope people get out of your work?

Well, last year I tried to write my first novel. And it went well, for that six months, but then I leave it aside and went back to writing poetry. Now I have been working on a book that I call “Old Clock” and it is a book of poetry that includes a lot of poems about migrants from Asia whom I spent some time every day in trains and buses while travelling to work.

Does collaboration play a role in your work—whether with your community, artists or others? How so and how does this impact your work?

Couple of years ago I started a female poets group with some of my female poets friends and students. “Euterepes poetes group” was the name of the group. We tried to write some themed poems (about mass graves) and then performed it in the streets and parks of our town. I could not imagine my writing without other writers and poets, and so far I have friends among them all around world.

Considering the political climate, how do you think the temperature is for the arts right now, what/how do you hope it may change or make a difference?

Hmm, from its early beginning, from Sumerian and Akkadian ancient literature till now – it seems to me it was never right temperature for art and artist. Even today in some countries artists are imprisoned (and even dies) because of their art, because of the way they see and describes this world. This winter my son asks me “What is eternal in this world?”, and at that moment I stopped and think and gave him that one answer that I could give “Art is eternal”. But, the main thing always was that art helped changed the way people think, it pushes humans to woke up and think about their role and meaning of their existence in our world.

Artist Wanda Ewing, who curated and titled the original LFF exhibit, examined the perspective of femininity and race in her work, and spoke positively of feminism, saying “yes, it is still relevant” to have exhibits and forums for women in art; does feminism play a role in your work?

Feminism and its ideas liberate woman across the world. It set us free from the male dominance, but of course there are so many things we need to do until we truly can say that we are equal to men in all the ways there are. Some time ago in my home town it was forbidden for woman to drive bicycle. Can you imagine that? But that change. And I wrote about it.

Ewing’s advice to aspiring artists was “you’ve got to develop the skill of wen to listen and when not to;” and “Leave. Gain perspective.” What is your favorite advice you have received or given?

First time I left my son with my parents for a couple of days, a strange woman I’ve accidentally met said to me “Separation is a part of growing up.” Time pass, my son is old enough to take care of himself, I have my writing and work, and everybody are happy.

The city of birds

I had a dream that I've moved

To the city of

Cockcatoo birds

They're bringing shells to my

Feet

And little hearts of wood

There was a seaweed there too

And a woman's rubber boot

In front of my doors

In fact

It only appeared to be a woman's boot

As it was red and tiny

And I picked up the heart

And got back to the house

Inside everything is dead

Flower paintings are growing into the walls

Dead curtains from which dust comes off

And lies in the light on the floor

There're no flies inside

Because the windows are covered with thick

Iron grids

Birds are not inside

What the hell could the birds

Be doing in the house?

Ever since I came to this house

The rain hasn't fallen

My lips are cracking

My arms are cracking

The eyeball front

Is cracking

Pencils in my hands are cracking

The bread in the pan has cracked

So I don't know if I should bake it

Or leave it to the birds

The next morning

I found letters in the mailbox

They were cracking in my hands

"Come back", it said

But now the birds wouldn't let me come back

They wanted to hurt me

And I wanted to give myself to them

Their eyes are mesmerising me

The sea

Gets into the cracks on my hands

I feel its mystery

Reminiscence

There is a woman residing in my wardrobe.

In the morning, she thinks I am sleeping,

so on the tips of her fingers she gets into the kitchen.

She opens the fridge. I hear the glimmering of milk

in her throat, I hear her yawning and wiping her lip,

I hear her stretching, and afterward

her fingers cracking the shell of egg and sipping.

She takes a look out of the kitchen window a little bit

and returns to the closet again on the tips of her fingers.

A floor is antique, broken up and sometimes it screaks.

When floor screaks, she pauses and bites for a lip.

Beneath her it is a puddle of blood that has my face.

But we do not meet there, because it is late for great love.

How many times have we been flourishing and falling?

That tastes of rotten herbs, and those brown spots that blaze.

Corpses of mornings under my bed.

Now she does not know whether to go back

into the closet or fall out of the window.

At the street, a man is singing an unknown melody:

rain comes ... black clouds string in the sky…

Mornings are shorter every day, and

our apples of the eyes are spreading, as usual,

demanding the passion that keeps us alive.

No one believes that an unknown woman lives in my wardrobe.

'Everything is fictional,' they say. Rivers of illusions. Anxiety.

Only a man who is singing under the window, with lost feelings,

sees the lines of two shadows.

Little Shoes

As he took his hand out of her panties Italian licked every finger, she got up and went to the door – obviously, that needed to be done after they honored their part of the deal – and he said “come back”.

“Come back”, he said. “I did not measure your foot”.

Of course he did not have to measure her foot, she could have told him her size. He did not need to bother, it would be more practical. He held sewing measuring tape in his hand and she took of her boot with the help of a wooden floor. That took time, since she was not wearing any socks, so the boot sticked to her skin. She felt ashamed for her dirty shriveled leg – she always thought that hygiene reveals alot about little girls. In her case: that she did not spend much time in her house, and that her mother is more involved in other things.

How did they say goodbye? Did they shook hands? Kiss on her hair? She could not remember.

But she saw his face covered with tiny hair, without wrinkles and cube chaped glasses that gave him serious framing, It was a fair face, one of those that you could let yourself to it freely. She thought how her life could have been diferent if she could see that at that point. But, that was a long time ago, in the last year of war, and she did not know much about shoe sizes, or about faces.

Naida Mujkić (1984) Bosnian poetess. She holds PhD in Literature. She was a guest artist at Q21 Museumsquartier Wien and Goten Publishing Skopje. She published 6 books of poetry and over 30 scientific papers.

Les Femmes Folles is a volunteer organization founded in 2011 with the mission to support and promote women in all forms, styles and levels of art from around the world with the online journal, print annuals, exhibitions and events; originally inspired by artist Wanda Ewing and her curated exhibit by the name Les Femmes Folles (Wild Women). LFF was created and is curated by Sally Deskins. LFF Booksis a micro-feminist press that publishes 1-2 books per year by the creators of Les Femmes Folles including the award-winning Intimates & Fools (Laura Madeline Wiseman, 2014) , The Hunger of the Cheeky Sisters: Ten Tales (Laura Madeline Wiseman/Lauren Rinaldi, 2015 and Mes Predices (catalog of art/writing by Marie Peter Toltz, 2017).Other titles include Les Femmes Folles: The Women 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 available on blurb.com, including art, poetry and interview excerpts from women artists. A portion of the proceeds from LFF books and products benefit the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Wanda Ewing Scholarship Fund.

Current call for collaborative art-writing: http://femmesfollesnebraska.tumblr.com/post/181376606692/lff-2019-artistpoet-collaborations

https://www.facebook.com/femmesfolles

#feministart #artistpoetcollaborations

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scifimagpie · 6 years

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Solidarity and Other Dreams

One of the most subtle and painful things about the internet age - perhaps any age - is finding out that someone you admire has acted in a far less-than-admirable way. Reconciling that with continued affection can be tricky. For example, I've heard some mega-questionable things about Amanda Palmer, wife of Neil Gaiman - who has been thoroughly castigated ad nauseam in public and private. And so it goes for many celebrities and important figures around the general Leftist/leftist/liberal community. You can probably think of someone you like who's done or said something insensitive, ableist, transphobic, racist, homophobic, misogynist, or otherwise disappointing. Someone who didn't take a strong enough stance, or too strong a stance, or said something that made your skin crawl.

Have I been this person? Probably. I try to hunt down and deal with my own mistakes, relying on the trauma-survivor skills of micro-self analysis. I count my sins and errors and mistakes like pre-reformation Scrooge with his money. I do not forget or forgive myself. This is not necessarily a character strength, either, nor something I recommend to others.

And of course, many of us do that with others.

But recently, after ditching a friendship that was bad for me, I went to my "blocked users" list on Facebook and really had a look at this. I remembered most people on it. Some were casually encountered, but some had become friends - who had, at one point or another, said something I really, really didn't like.

And I considered...is it really worth keeping someone blocked if you can't remember the exact nature of their infraction?

What makes someone unsafe?

I've seen my share of panicky, touchy arguments on Facebook, including one where an activist I looked up to accused someone else of "gaslighting" them for having a different opinion about interpretations of a Steven Universe character's race. I've been in those arguments, too. (Not that one in particular, but similar situations.)

Part of the problem for those of us on the left is that calls for solidarity usually result in a backlash of people saying, "we have to work with those we don't like? But that means supporting abusers!" Well - sometimes it doesn't. It's tricky to talk about abuse, because those of us who've survived it in various ways tend to be extremely gun-shy - sometimes excessively or even unhealthily so.

And in the moment, it can be hard to tell if someone's comments about, say, a given woman or actress represent their feelings about All Of Womanity, or anything else.

Do we tolerate mistakes?

This is such a tricky problem. Obviously, as a white woman - even a queer, plump, neurodivergent, partially disabled one - I have a giant swath of privilege that affects how I'm coming at things. I'm cisgender, and I'm white, and even femme - all things that can, in certain circumstances, give me a free pass that would not be afforded to others. Obviously, kyriarchy - hierarchies and power that exist outside of patriarchy - is a thing that exists. Dealing with it sucks. Some people get forgiven for their screw-ups a lot more readily than others, and the people forgiven are usually white. The people who don't get away with things are usually black, or other people of colour; men also tend to get away with more than women. BUT - there are also times when we have to question whether conflicts or errors are as important as the general need to fight for our rights. And perhaps we need to be more honest about how dangerous or not-dangerous specific people are.

As one of my found-family siblings, Iskara, put it,

The left are collectivists and the right are individualists. We know this. But you can't use those traits to compete with others who have the same trait, you're pretty equal. So to establish a hierarchy within their respective groups, they use the opposite approach. The left will attack individuals who are below them to prove that they are the wokest. The right will attack entire groups of people who don't have the right values as individuals. Therefore, the right is willing to unite with people it disagrees with because those disagreements are part of the life of an individualist, but collectively they hate this other group more and they have that in common. Meanwhile the left is trying to figure out which single persons belong in or out of the collective which makes us far more likely to attack our allies over trivial matters, because we consider the purity of the person beside us to be a reflection on our own purity.

The hidden rules

The thing is - and trying to put this politely is difficult - white people who are queer tend to engage in this purity-testing a lot more often than others. Black people and people of colour, and those with multiple intersections of disability, are already used to forgiving others a lot or gritting their teeth and bearing things. As members of a visible majority in North America, we feel confident in our ability to reject others and replace them as need be. We're inherently comfortable, a lot of the time, in the belief that someone else will come around and fill the empty seat, because there are just so many white and queer people. This can be less true for transgender people, but the squabbles I've seen online suggest that the sense of white social complacency is still basically applicable.

This is not to excuse myself. When I was a teenager, and even in my early twenties, it seemed a lot more important to be strict about whom I interacted with, within the left, and how they perceived things. As much as micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions both matter, and as much as both can grind us down - those of us with the emotional resources and privilege to do so need to be aware of our padding. (That's not just a pun on my own weight, but hey! I can't resist a punchline.)

Forgiveness and calling in

Since our family expanded to a third person, our housemate and queer-platonic partner Kit, we've had a lot more small discussions about being offended and annoyed. Honestly, instead of making fights or tension worse, it tends to disperse them. Anyone who lives with someone else will be familiar with the struggle of doing dishes, making food, handling laundry, cleaning the house, dealing with work duties, and arranging transportation. But being clear yet tactful about one's feelings can handle conflict far better, and keep it from becoming "a thing."

The same is true of our long-running D&D group and some of my various friend groups. Learning to filter my communication to people, talk to them after the rush of emotions, and avoiding that ever-so-tempting duel of witticisms that is the Facebook philosophical fight, have all been really good for both myself and the people around me.

Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves - what are we trying to accomplish? If the answer to that is "protection of people's human rights," then the only people really worth kicking out are trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), sex-work exclusionary radical feminists (SWERFs), and people who have exhibited a pattern of abuse without repentance.

Everyone else? Well, maybe we need to be honest about our hurt feelings, cool off a bit, and try to talk stuff out in private.

Does that mean we need to forgive abusers?

Ooof. Even with a counselling degree and many years of sad-violin life experience, I don't know if I'm equipped to answer this one. Apart from saying, "it's a case-by-case basis, but worry about the people who aren't just rude, but really dangerous," I'm not sure what to recommend.

Maybe we just need to stop sanctifying and demonizing people, and present them - both celebrities and individuals - as complex people with tokens on both the good and bad sides of the scale.

I do think that there are cases where people can reform. I hate to be mealy-mouthed or seem indecisive, but if internal politics were easy to handle, the left wouldn't be falling apart like an improperly-chilled gelatin dessert.

Ultimately, all I can recommend are emotional self-validation, politeness, patience, and forgiveness with each other. We are stronger together, and since we, in multiple countries, have to fight to maintain our very existence, we need to defend each other's existence.

Maybe this means forgiving someone you're still mad at. Maybe this means going to apologize to someone. But with actual far-right activists, neo-nationalists, anti-choice activists, and violent racists and transphobes in the streets, and more active and internationally validated than ever, we simply can't afford the ephemeral and impossible luxury of complete ideological purity.

Does this mean allying with people we disagree with? Well, as long as they're not advocating for killing us...maybe yes. But again, my tired and beleaguered siblings and family, those of us who are white need to do the work on this. Reach out to others. Offer comfort. Give forgiveness - after you're done being mad. Sleep on things.

Nobody else is going to fight for our lives.

***Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime, housemate, and their cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and nightmares, as well as social justice issues. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. The mailing list * Books on Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * Blog

#social justice #politics #internal critique #the left #leftists #discourse #dialogue #civility #calling in #thoughts #manosphere #conservatives

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petite-gaufrette · 3 years

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When I [26f], an AOC type liberal feminist, hooked up with a Proud Boy [29m]

My girlfriends insisted on taking me out for New Year's Eve 2019. I got into a fight with my then boyfriend the week before and we were not talking at all. Amongst a few other things, we were arguing about him not staying in Brooklyn for the holidays and then not inviting me to spend the holidays with his family. Needless to say, I was pissed. But my girlfriends told me to stop being a grumpy bitch, get dressed, and go bar hopping with them. So I did.

Now, I don't want to sound conceited here, but I am a very attractive woman. I'm a formally trained professional dancer/choreographer (mostly Modern dance and ballet) and I work as a dance therapist. So, basically, I'm moving my body around all day, everyday. Whether it's dancing or stretching or teaching or healing or doing yoga or kickboxing, I'm always very active. I have a tight petite body and I stand at 5'5" with long blonde hair. I decided I wanted to dress up for the evening to make a point, so I wore a high slit black bodycon midi dress and black heels. And I looked foine!

We started bar hopping early. I think we hit five or six bars before 11pm, which was when we reached the final bar of that evening. We grabbed a table and I put my coat down next to my friends and told them I was going to get a drink. It was crowded. I had a little trouble getting to the bar, but I eventually did. I kept trying to get the bartender's attention but I'm not super tall. I don't think he could see me. Suddenly, a man just stepped in front of me. He didn't exactly push me away, but he definitely got in my personal space and I thought it was rude. I was drunk at this point and it took a second to realize that he was tall and very muscular. His arms were at least. He turned to me and said, "What do you want?" with a confident grin on his face. Normally, this would have pissed me off, but he was gorgeous! I mean, he was fucking HOT. I was taken aback. He must have been around six feet and had straight curly blonde hair like Heath Ledger had. He wore a tight black polo shirt with some gold symbols and black jeans. I had to collect my thoughts and then I finally said, "Whiskey."

He bought me the drink and we started talking at the bar. He was flirting with me and I was flirting right back. It was like a game and I'm very competitive. He bought me another drink. He told me he was a former hockey player and it was no surprise that he was still athletic. I kept casually touching him as the conversation went on.

Normally, I wouldn't bring this up, but it is important to the story. I should mention that I was a huge liberal at the time: never voted or dated a Republican, excited about AOC, basically a vegan, total feminist, no affection for guns, openly hated all things MAGA, etc. I bring this up because Mark (fake name) revealed to me that, not only was he a huge Republican and Trump supporter but, he was a Proud Boy. It took me a second to process what he said and remember what that meant in my drunken state. Proud Boys, as a group, were not as famous in the way they are now. But, more less, I thought it meant that we was something of a Fascist. I got mad at myself, Yes, he was a Fascist, but he was a HOT Fascist.

We never argued exactly, even though I got heated a few times. But he knew exactly how to deal with it. He would joke or tease me when I started to get upset. He was very clever and never lost an ounce of confidence in himself. And I felt a little guilty about the times I did get upset because he remained cool and collected the whole time. And he kept buying me drinks every time I made a point. So we definitely did more whiskey shots. I lost count.

At one point he told me that he had three different MAGA hats at his place. I don't know why, but I said, "Bullshit!" He then asked if I wanted to see them. He told me he only lived two blocks away and could show me. He had a grin on his face and I couldn't get over how gorgeous he looked. He said it would be quick and we could get back before midnight, even though I was pretty sure that wouldn't be the case. Regardless, I agreed.

I went back to my table with my girlfriends and told them to hand me my purse because I was going out for a cigarette (I only smoke on New Year's Eve). I went outside and Mark was waiting for me. He walked me back to his place and he put his hand on my lower back. Eventually, it got to my ass and he squeezed it a couple of times, but made it seem like it was accident each time.

We got to his apartment and I was struck by his living room. There was a lot of beautiful ancient Athenian paintings and classical Germanic art. I understand the implications of that now, but I was impressed by them at the time. He told me his MAGA hats were in his room. I grinned and walked to his room. It was dark when I stepped inside. He turned on the lights and the first thing I saw was a huge Trump poster. It was a poster of him speaking at a rally. I then saw there was a Trump/Pence campaign sign that hung over his bed. It would have turned me off right away, but before I could even process all of it, he spun me around and started kissing me. We made out hardcore instantly. I was so horny at that point I couldn't think straight. We made out for a minute or so and then he started to gently push my head down and I got to my knees and started to undo his belt. He took off his shirt and tossed it aside. I looked up and he had a beautiful chest: broad shoulder, hard muscular pecs, shredded abs, big strong tight arms. It looked like his body chiseled out of marble. This got me excited and I finally got his belt undone and pulled his pants and underwear down and out flopped the most perfect white cock I've ever seen.

He smiled at my reaction. I just stared at it, mesmerized. I slowly took it in my hands and admired it. My mouth was watering as I looked at it. He asked, "Bigger than you're used to?" And I said, "Uh.....yeah!" He laughed slightly and grabbed his red MAGA hat and put it on his head. He then put his hand on the back of my head and guided my mouth to his massive dick (think Manuel Ferrera).

I kissed the head first. Then, I started to tease the head with my tongue. I then started to lick the shaft up and down, up and down. I put his wet cock in my mouth and jerked it off at the same time. I had to adjust to it because my boyfriend isn't nearly as big. By comparison, he's tiny. I know that might not be fair, but Mark's cock was amazing. Hudson (my boyfriend) couldn't compete. His cock was so big and tasted so good. I got wild pretty fast with it: sucking, bobbing, slurping, jerking, etc. His moans and grunts turned me on so much. He radiated pure masculinity effortlessly. His cock felt so warm in my mouth. I can't describe the taste as anything other than manly, but a rich, delicious taste of manliness. I know that sounds lame, but it's true. i don't know how else to describe it.

He stood me up and took off my dress in one motion and I was left only in my black thong. He then gently pushed me onto his bed. I felt his strength. His power. He then kicked his pants away, took his socks off, but left the hat on, and approached me. He ripped my panties off like dental floss, which made me gasp and yelp. He started going down on my shaved pussy. I would like to say he was good at eating me out, but he wasn't. Most guys aren't. But it did make me realize just how soaked I was at that moment.

Eventually, he got on top of me and we started fucking. I told him to go slow because I would have to get used to his size. He didn't even respond. He started fucking me hard and deep right away. It surprised me at first, but there wasn't much I felt I could do about it. I just took it with the pain and the pleasure mixed. Then, less pain and more pleasure. Then, just incredible pleasure. I always thought I wasn't much of a moaner during sex, but now I think it's because I've always messed around with beta male types with average to smaller dicks. I had never had an alpha male with massive cock fuck me like this before.

We rolled around and I got on top. I teased my clit with the head of his cock a little before he shoved right back in. I took his hat off and put it on myself. I'm not sure why. It just felt right and sexy at that moment. It felt like we were hate fucking each other while being insanely attracted to one another at the same time. I was riding his cock and right in front of me on the wall was the Trump/Pence campaign sign. It was weird to look at that sign while getting fucked by the most amazing cock that's ever been inside of me. I felt the orgasm build and build as I looked at the sign. But, then, he flipped me over, took the hat off me, put it back on his head, and started fucking me doggystyle.

Doggystyle is my favorite position. He pulled my hair and told me to look at the sign. He smacked my ass every time I thought I wasn't looking at it. He was mostly right. This was when the name calling and dirty talk kicked in. He called me his, "little liberal slut." I told him that I liked that he was fucking me like a whore. I once asked my boyfriend to smack my ass during sex and he got offended by it. So, I never asked him to do it again. I didn't ask Mark. I didn't have to. He was going to smack my ass and make me say, "My boyfriend is a liberal beta bitch," regardless. He asked, "Do you like being fucked by a real man?" I was moaning so loudly at that point and I yelled, "Yes! Fuck me like a man!" I couldn't even recognize myself. My eyes were rolling into the back of my head. He finally said, "Say MAGA." I didn't want to. It felt like a betrayal of sorts. But he kept insisting and fucking me even harder if I didn't. I whispered it. He said, "Louder!" SMACK! "Louder!" SMACK! I finally moaned/yelled, "Make America Great Again!" He started fucking me like an animal. His grunts were so hot. We were getting sweaty and it smelled like sex.

He laid down on his back and I rode him reverse cowgirl. Now I was facing the huge Trump poster. This was even stranger: Feeling such intense pleasure while looking at that poster. He slapped my ass some more. I loved it. I started to rub my clit and he could tell I was going to cum soon. He said, "Who's your President?" SMACK! "Who is your President?" SMACK! "Who is your President?!?" I moaned out Trump as I came all over his cock. My muscles tightened. My body was shaking. He started fucking me doggystyle again after I came and then he pulled out and came on my ass a few minutes later. I looked back at him as he came. It was so fucking hot.

We both collapsed onto the bed, breathing heavily while covered in sweat. His muscles looked so hot as they glistened and I could tell he thought the same thing about me. It suddenly occurred to me that my girlfriends were probably wondering where I was. I started to panic for some reason. I reached into my purse and saw I had two text messages from my friends asking where I had gone. My heart started beating fast and my mind started to race a mile a minute. I started getting dressed and muttered something like, "I have to go." Mark chuckled a little.

He lead me to his front door. He was still totally naked aside from his MAGA hat. He was very proud of his body and not shy about showing off his cock. He shouldn't be. He opened the door. I was still in a daze. We made out for a few seconds. I said bye and he slapped my ass one last time before closing the door. I guess he still has my ripped panties.

I walked back to the bar not knowing exactly what to think. It didn't occur to me until that moment that he didn't wear a condom. He did pull out though, which comforted me a bit. But I didn't even get his last name or his number. I wouldn't have been able to recognize the building I just left if my life depended on it. My mind was in the clouds: "Did I like being fucked like that? Was I turned on by all that dirty talk? Would I like to be dominated like that again?" I got back to the bar. It was 12:45pm. My friends told me they were starting to worry. They could see I was a bit flushed. One of them asked, "Wait! Did you make out with that guy you were talking to" I just nodded yes. I didn't tell them the truth. I still haven't. They all knew my boyfriend at the time. I broke up with him a week later.

Now, I'm sure Alt-Right morons will try to use this story as proof that Conservatives are the real alpha males and know how to be a real man and know how to fuck a women. Honey, please. You're not that interesting. First of all, Mark was the only attractive Proud Boy I've ever seen. Proud Boys tend to be super ugly, out of shape, and are legitimate racist Fascists misogynistic pigs. So, I've never hooked up with another one. I have hooked up with some more good looking Right-Wingers though and, honestly, they are no different in bed. They're the same as liberals and leftists. Politics don't determine how good someone is in bed. In fact, I've been dating this black BLM activist for the last three months. And he's no punk ass, soy bean eating liberal. He's a legit anti-Fascist libertarian socialist. But, unlike my ex-boyfriend, he is very masculine, muscular, and hot. He has gorgeous muscles and a cock that rivals Mark's. And, yes, my current boyfriend is fantastic in bed.

I discovered I'm attracted to that type of masculinity and not male fragility. But it all started with me being fucked like a whore by a hot Fascist. I still get wet thinking about it. My mouth is watering now...

submitted by /u/BlackRosesInThePines [link] [comments] from Sex Stories https://ift.tt/ebI3DB0

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yak-leather-whips · 4 years

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What do you believe distinguishes you from other females to the point you must identify as genderfluid? What makes you want to construct more gender identities than be yourself?

Great question! It’s a little hard to respond to, because I don’t think that’s necessarily an accurate way to phrase it. I haven’t constructed any additional identity, because I’ve been genderfluid since I’ve had a concept of gender. I’m simply using the word that described my experiences. Genderfluid is a label I applied to a thing I always was, just like lesbian. I didn’t “construct” my lesbian identity. I am attracted exclusively to women including trans women and non-binary women, so I’m a lesbian. That’s what that word means, so it’s the word I use. My gender identity fluctuates to a point that there is a noticeable difference to both myself and those around me. The term to describe that is genderfluid, so that’s the term I use. I’m a firm believer in descriptive identity, not prescriptive. I use the words that fit my experience, I don’t fit my experiences to the words.

What distinguishes me from other females? The fact that I am an individual of my own mind and body which is both separate from and influenced by the society and other people which surround me. There isn’t a universal idea among trans people about what makes someone the gender they are, but my current understanding is that gender is constructed by our brains internal categorization mechanism. Our brains spend our entire lives categorizing the world into “me” and “not me.” I usually call this in-group out-group mentality, which isn’t what that term means, but it’s close enough and I don’t remember what it’s actually called. Individuation or something along those lines. Anywho.

Gender is an artifact of that tendency. It’s used to help us categorize where we fit in with the people around us. They help us categorize how we relate to other people, whether they are “like us” or “not like us.” These categorizations happen in our brains and are a reflection of a socially constructed identity, but that socially constructed identity is reflected in a genuinely ingrained psychological reality. Something can be both socially constructed and have real neurological reinforcement.

I also think gender can be a useful construct. It can help us find people with similar experiences to our own and help us identify areas where different perspectives may be needed. I honestly think an abolition of gender would do more to advance sex-based oppression than anything else, as it would likely be abused by cis-men as a way of saying “look, everybody’s equal now, and if we’re all equal, you don’t need special protections.” As such, while I agree with the idea that gender as currently understood by our species is a harmful power dynamic used to reinforce an unjust hierarchy, I feel the best approach to changing that is a postmodern one rather than an abolitionist one. To realize the ways that we construct these things within ourselves and each other, and choose to construct them differently.

Ok, now that I’ve gotten that little rant out of the way, what makes me feel like I’m genderfluid? A lot of things. The way I can go from fine with myself and comfortable in a dress one day, bouncing and twirling and absolutely in love with my beautiful figure, and the next day I can wear that same dress, look in the mirror, and feel physically sick with anxiety, which is then immediately solved by putting on more androgynous clothing. The fact that my entire life I’ve looked at photos of myself and felt no connection to the person in the photo. The fact that I can look in the mirror on my way into the bathroom and see myself and look on the way out and see a stranger.

Put another way...I’ve never been quite sure whether I actually existed. I never developed a proper theory of mind or individuated to any real extent. I saw myself as merely an object for others to act out their agency through, rather than an agent of my own. I became involved in theater at an early age, and for me, all the world truly was a stage. My life felt simply like an all encompassing performance, and the curtain isn’t coming so you’d better make the audience laugh or you’re on the hook.

As a teenager I read a bit about agency via feminist theory, but I always felt...disconnected from it. I heard all these people telling all their stories and talking about liberation and becoming agents in the world, but I felt the same way about it as I would about critical race theory: something that applied to me, but wasn’t really FOR me. I didn’t see myself as a person, let alone a woman, so all that talk about liberation wasn’t really for me, but rather, it was something I could do for others. I was still conceptualizing myself via what I could do for others. I wasn’t an agent.

Transness (along with a LOT of therapy) bridged that gap. It didn’t just connect the dots on my gender, it helped me connect with my humanity. All of the sudden, I was a person who existed in the real world, not just a character in a show I could never end. Suddenly the feminist theory I’d been reading for years wasn’t just about an abstract idea of women and men, it was about me and the people I knew. Suddenly I wasn’t just an extension of whoever I happened to be mirroring at the moment, I was a person who could exist in relation to others. And that relationship changed, even just with the same people, and the key part is: I still existed when that relationship changed. I felt differently about who I was in relation to others at different moments, but there was still a me to feel that way, and that me was the same me I was yesterday. My gender had changed, but I was still me. I was an ocean, and while the tides may go in and the tides may go out, the ocean remains.

Transness has brought me closer to my femininity, and to feminism. For the first time I felt like a woman, because for the first time I felt like a PERSON. For the first time in my life, I feel like the advocacy that all these amazing women have done wasn’t separate from me. The theory these people spoke about wasn’t something I could give to everyone else. I was a part of this movement. I was a part of womanhood. I was a part of humanity.

So yeah, that’s how I see my genderfluidity. Not constructed, but a facet of my humanity that was a necessary part of my individuation. Not sure if that answers your question, but I’ve always been somewhat of a rambler.

#trans #trans rights #gender #feminism #femininity #tw terfs #dysphoria #self-discovery #cw: dysphoria

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sapphicscholar · 7 years

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Supergirl, the Bechdel Test, and Critiques of Critiques

Because asks–ranging from fans who have been made to feel guilty for not liking the current season of Supergirl, though many are still watching and hoping, to angry anons who cannot believe I would dare criticize any aspect of a show–keep popping up in my inbox, I’m addressing the issue once here and deleting all those asks clogging up my inbox (because dammit I like order, and my inbox no longer has it). So hold on tight (and ignore/don’t read if you don’t care…really fucking simple rule) while we hit a few of the points I see appearing over and over again on my dash and in my inbox.

First of all, regarding the post about the Bechdel Test (that I’m going to assume was written by someone with the best of intentions and has been misappropriated to yell at other fans and tell them they’re wrong–blanket statement, no wiggle room). Yes, the scene did end up passing the Bechdel test, but that original post to which you refer was written and reblogged by most folks before the episode ever aired, making it an accurate enough assessment with the limited knowledge we had. The fact remains that the way the episode/that scene was marketed and promoted did not pass the test, and that says a lot about the kind of audience they’re hoping to attract (if you don’t believe me, feel free to go read the research about marketing).

Furthermore, please dear god stop talking about how you know the rules better than anyone else because once upon a time your Intro to Women and Gender Studies professor gave them to you or mentioned them in passing. Bechdel herself has written about sometimes wishing she wasn’t associated with that test (not that she often is these days, just her last name…) because it sets such a fucking low bar, gets plucked out of context, and held up as some gold standard for representation without any thought about the woman who created it, the context of its creation, and the motivation behind it. (Also, if you’re not going to read the blog post by Bechdel that I linked to, just know that the test is inspired, in many ways, by Chapter 5 of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own on a chapter that talks about the invisibility of lesbian representation, and Woolf’s work as a whole is all about criticizing the “Angel in the House” and men’s writing for reducing women’s lives to their attachments to men, children, and families, which is literally what that scene is Supergirl does.) And I’m so tired of seeing straight feminists reblogging these posts calling LGBTQ fans of the show anti-feminist for daring to complain about it because this test does not belong only to you, and it is the brainchild of an early-twentieth-century bisexual and a group of self-identified “dykes” from the 1970s and 1980s who wanted to talk about why the state of current media (both the novels of Woolf’s time and the movies of Bechdel and co’s time) failed them as women whose concerns weren’t tied to traditional narratives of what a woman’s life looked like (marriage to a man, followed by children).

The Bechdel test as we know it today comes from a niche comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, which documented the lives of queer women (primarily) from the 1980s through the Bush era and the struggles day-to-day life during that time period entailed, and that context gets ignored far more than your precious rules. And yes, the test (though god that word is infuriating because it implies the same sort of inflexibility that is already rampant in fandom and internet culture) is about movies as a whole (so by your own logic, we shouldn’t even go near a TV show with it), but it’s not incorrect to talk about a scene passing or not passing it, nor is it wrong to use the test as a kind of signpost or easily recognizable language with which to discuss the shortcomings of a given scene (if you want to know more, and I mean this quite earnestly, not to be a jackass, go read linguistic, structuralist, and poststructuralist theorists and find out all about signifiers, then come back when you realize that the meaning of words and phrases isn’t confined to the letters on the page, but encompasses all of the cultural signifiers to which they are tied, which is actually what makes so much of communication as we know it possible).

To insist that fans cannot be upset because a scene featured 5 whole women together and that’s “unheard of” in television forces us to settle, forces us to praise a scene that’s setting up the poorly written demise of a couple that many of us showed up for, upped Supergirl’s ratings and viewing numbers for, because we saw a woman whose journey toward self-realization, acceptance, and actualization looked like ours, found in Sanvers a couple whose story wasn’t perfect but felt realistic in a way many same-sex relationships on television still don’t. And yes, I’m calling this breakup poorly written. As I’ve written before, yes, not having the same idea about what your family should look like is a good reason to end a relationship. Not having had that conversation months into a fucking engagement when both participants in the relationship are adults who have been shown learning about how important communication is and recognizing why it’s a bad idea to make assumptions about what partners want and who apparently have incredibly strong opinions on the matter is beyond unrealistic. And for a show to know that they’re going to break up a couple after just a few episodes makes featuring the proposal and demanding praise for “groundbreaking” television irresponsible marketing–it sets fans up to be disappointed and disillusioned. (And now, because they’ve written Maggie’s absence as this kind of a breakup, rather than the myriad other ways they could have done it, if they do want to bring Maggie back, it’ll be far more difficult and will entail a fundamental reevaluation of what either Alex or Maggie wants in life, which we likely wouldn’t get to see depicted at length or in any kind of realistic way.)

I’ve seen so many posts criticizing those who have critiqued the show and insisting that they clearly haven’t watched the show or that they ignore all the good it has done. Does that kind of post exist? Yeah, of course it does. It’s the Internet/fandom/Tumblr; there’s anything you can think of here. But these posts demanding appreciation for the show reek of the attitude that has, for decades, told LGBTQ people to sit down, shut up, and be grateful for what we’re given. Shows don’t have to listen to our critiques (and I’m not here defending folks who get violent or spout vitriol directly to the actors who cannot control their storylines, though let’s remember those folks exist on both sides of the issue), but to try to tamp down the rights of fans to be upset and express that frustration is, to be quite frank, embarrassing to see in 2017 from self-ordained progressives.

I’m still here and watching and producing content that I like to think does right by the show Supergirl could have been (and may well become again), to the kind of nuanced, complex characters and storylines the first season and writers like Ali Adler gave us. But don’t tell me I have to like every second of it. Don’t tell me that I’m not allowed to feel misled by a show that created an endgame narrative for a couple only to break them up in such a way that the reconciliation they continue to lure in front of us as a possibility is nearly impossible (or, at the best, decidedly unrealistic). Don’t tell me that I should accept the flirty subtext between Kara and Lena or a one-off hook up between Alex and Sara that will never hold the same potential for representation as a multi-season lesbian relationship as “equal to” or possible of making up for the loss of Sanvers. And most importantly, don’t ever tell me to shut up when your username includes the words “white” and “conservative” because, oh, honey, nothing gets a liberal academic going quite like the possibility of showing you just how little power you truly have.

#supergirl #season 3 spoilers #rant #3x04 #bechdel test #sanvers #alex danvers #maggie sawyer #educational post #virginia woolf #history of the bechdel test #long post #text post

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theessaflett · 5 years

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Wicca & Whispers: My Unexpected Month as a Pagan Convert

My first and, to date, only, experience of a spiritual revelation happened in the summer of 2017.

Half an hour into a meditation session, eyes closed, legs crossed, I had a startlingly clear image of a gigantic oak tree growing out of the ground in front of me, unfurling its leaves and stating in a deep voice: I am Mother Earth. I am the one true religion. Convert to the Wiccan Faith.

This spiritual revelation, crystal clear in my mind’s eye, was a little unexpected…not least because that meditation session was part of a Christian retreat. When we went round the circle afterwards sharing any godly moments we’d had during our prayerful meditation I, unsurprisingly enough, kept quiet. Right sort of experience. Wrong religion.

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With no small amount of trepidation and some curiosity, I recently asked around my friend group and requested that they describe me in one word. Some responses were:

Focused Self-Assured Unique Creative Warm Versatile Funny

And, my favourite: “Essa” …Fair enough.

Now, this is a wide reaching list, but there was one word that didn’t make a single appearance from anyone: religious. I am not surprised by this. I am generally known as the cynical one, the sardonic one, the pessimist, the sensible thinker, and rightly so. (I am Scottish, after all.) Essa the logical. Essa the skeptic. Many, if not most, of the people who meet me in my day to day life would probably expect me to be agnostic, even atheist.

And yet.

And yet the institution of the church and Christianity itself has had a profound and far-reaching importance in my life. My mother is a lay-reader, church organist and choir leader. My dad is also a church organist. My Mum’s family are Church of Scotland Elders, My Dad’s folk are Salvation Army, some of them even founding members of the London branch of the institution. My family tree is heaving with religion, my own childhood spent in church buildings and prayer meetings. I was playing violin in the praise band at aged 4, playing the organ and helping run local church summer workshops by age 12, arguing on theological issues with church camp youth leaders by age 13. When people ask what my relationship is with the church, I usually just say, “I grew up in the church and my family is very involved with our local church community” and leave it at that. At that point most folk presume this to mean that I have given up on religion myself and leave the matter be, much to my relief.

And yet.

And yet I do still go to church, when I can. I am a congregation member of a very liberal C of E church in London, the type of church where God is referred to by female pronouns, people don’t guard ‘their spot’ on the pew and metropolitan gay couples bring their aesthetically flawless children with them every Sunday morning. I don’t tend to experience much great spiritual uplifting during the service but I enjoy the sermon, which usually has a disruptive, feminist slant, the sense of community, the feeling that here is a group of people who care about each other and are trying to just generally be nicer to everyone. I’ve told myself for years that there isn’t a need for a powerful sense of the otherworldy, of godliness, to make church worthwhile: surely a sense of that community and a reminder to be kind is a generally good thing, worthy in of itself.

I was the church organist for this tiny yet friendly congregation in Tayport between the ages of 15-17. They did excellent cups of tea. I’m the one with the ginger hair. (2013)

And yet.

And yet since I was very small, I have yearned for that ‘aha!’ moment. That euphoric experience of spiritual enlightenment where I would know that God was out there in the world. An unmistakable KA-POW.

“You just need to send one sign!” I remember fervently bartering late one night when I was about eight during my bedtime prayers. “Just send one sign to show you exist and I won’t ask again and I’ll be extra good!” I was unaware then, in the midst of my doubt, of the irony of my paternal grandmother’s maiden name: Thomas. (Theology joke).

Years passed, and my wish for clear ‘godly proof of life’ faded into the background but didn’t entirely dissipate. From the ages of 10-13 I went to increasingly evangelical church summer camps where everyone else and their pet dog had seemingly had a personal meeting with Jesus, throwing myself into bible study groups and arm-waving to cheesy pop worship songs in the desperate hope that some sort of visitation from the Holy Spirit might eventually happen by Day 9 of camp. Nothing.

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My teenage diaries are filled with fears of a malignant God, or a long-dead God, or a God that simply had decided that I personally was worthy only of being ignored. By seventeen I had given up on God entirely and announced myself agnostic. …This proved to be a very short-lived phase. Homesickness and a wish to find that specific sense of belonging that only churches can truly give led me to my current liberal C of E church in 2014, but that wish for that ‘just one sign’ was still a background hum.

You can perhaps appreciate my frustration, then, when I finally got my sign in that prayer meeting in 2017. This was it. The visitation I’d been waiting for since eight year old me had laid down the gauntlet, demanding proof. It was just such a shame that it was the wrong bloody religion.

What would you do? On the one hand I was a church goer, who came from a church family, who had been brought up in the Christian faith.

On the other hand I had been wanting a spiritual sign from the heavens for about 14 years by this point and there it was. Ridiculous in nature and almost certainly brought on from a combination of severe sleep deprivation, high caffeine intake and end-of undergraduate-degree existential stress, but there nevertheless.

Reader. I went for it.

As my girlfriend at the time watched in mild, and then moderate alarm, I went out on what can only be described a ‘Wiccan Spree’, where in the space of about three weeks I obtained four spell books and a brand of incense called ‘Dragon’s Blood’, started following about eight different ‘Witchy Aesthetic’ Instagram accounts, watched countless YouTube spell videos, joined a Facebook group called ‘Divine Goddesses’, signed up for a MeetUp event where you joined a ‘coven’ and casted spells in woods, guilt-read a blog called ‘So You Used To Be Christian And Now You’re Pagan: An Introduction To Your New Faith’, collected leaflets for a Pagan festivals that included activities such as ‘Tree Yoga’, drew my very own pentangle, made a wand and repurposed tea-light holders as containers for random household items that I decided represented the four elements. I was, in retrospect, almost certainly having some sort of small nervous breakdown, but at the time the sense of sudden purpose was truly wonderful. Wonderful, that is, until I got to the chapter about gender roles in my new, shiny Wiccan textbook.

The enthused, evangelical pages about the powerful, strong energy of men and the sensitive, delicate energy of women left a sour taste in my mouth, particularly when it became clear that male and female energies were always expected to ‘intertwine’ exclusively with each other. I’d thought I was pursuing a fresh, exciting new way to explore my spirituality, a way that left the more archaic views and beliefs of the church behind. It was a disappointment, then, to discover that heteronormative expectations of gender and sexuality permeated more than just the ‘mainstream’ religions. Wicca wasn’t going to be my ‘true path’, after all. The vision of the tree suddenly seemed like a silly figment of my imagination, and I was glad that I’d kept it mostly to myself. The spell books quietly and sheepishly went to the charity shop.

…And yet.

As I write this here in late 2019, there is still, somewhere in my brain, that eight year old child who is waiting for the moment of indisputable proof of a higher power. I am, of course, in good company, as countless Christians have searched for exactly that proof right from the beginning of the faith: the New Testament is chock-full of disciples needing massive, indisputable signs from the Heavens before they’ll believe practically anything, much to Jesus’ frustration. In John 20:29 a newly resurrected and very irritated Jesus says to Thomas, a disciple so skeptical that he’s known as Doubting Thomas (…told you my earlier Thomas joke was a theological one) and who has refused to believe in the resurrection of Jesus right up until the moment Jesus literally appears in front of him, “ Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed!”

…A phrase probably written into the Bible for the early Christians, encouraging them in their belief in a Messiah they hadn’t personally met, and a phrase that still holds comfort for Christians around the world today.

It’s one of those deceptively easy-sounding sayings, ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed’.

I’ve always been someone who’s a stickler for facts - for instance, I worked out that Santa didn’t exist when I was five and then couldn’t understand for the life of me why everyone else was perpetuating a lie that was, in my mind, simply unnecessary. (It took quite a lot of persuading from my parents for me not to share my newfound knowledge with my friend group. I settled for pitying looks and pointed questions along the lines of, “But how exactly does he get down the chimney, Karen?”)

People who are Fact People don’t like the concept of blind belief. We don’t like it at all. It makes us feel exposed, and icky, and foolish, and like we’re being played for suckers.

I am a Fact Person. I am also not many people’s typical idea of a Christian.

I have tattoos. I am openly queer. I believe abortion and birth control are fundamental human rights, I don’t believe Mary was a virgin or that non-believers need ‘Saving’, I consider the Bible to be a fascinating tapestry of sociological history best read with the expectation of cross-culture misunderstandings rather than it being the undiluted Word of God, and I think that in institutionalised religion there is often too much fixating on a possible future Heaven when Hell is already happening now, in this lifetime, to so many people who need Earthly help rather than lofty prayer.

I am, in short, too much of a questioner to ever be a ‘true believer’. Blind Evangelical faith is just never going to come easy for this Doubting Thomas.

And as for my tree vision? My queer, feminist relationship with gender and gender roles stopped me from identifying as Wiccan, the restricted binary expectations making that path an instant no-go.

And yet. I am far from an atheist.

Me (now with blue hair) at a spiritual retreat with members of my current church community (Spring 2019)

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As I move away from my teens and deeper into my twenties, I can slowly feel a subtler understanding of what God might be beginning to lap at the edges of my understanding of the world. Be it Mother Earth, be it the Holy Trinity, be it whatever you want to call it, I have noticed the small things I do in day to day life to honour the unexplainable.

The fact that I knew that lighting a candle and conducting my own small service for the flat I was about to leave after living there for 3 years was absolutely the right thing to do, despite the fact that that building was theoretically just bricks and mortar? Unexplainable.

The fact that I sometimes enter a house and go “yep, this is good” and sometimes am like, “ABSOLUTELY NOT, NOPE, DO NOT WANT TO STAY HERE THIS HOUSE DOES NOT LIKE ME”? Unexplainable…and ridiculous to witness.

The fact that, every so often, in the woods or on a deserted beach, I get a strange sense of flickering connection? A sense of an electric undercurrent that could be sparked into life if only two wires were connected? Unexplainable, unexplainable, unexplainable.

Celtic Christianity, that ancient and now largely forgotten Spiritual meeting-place between Christianity and Paganism, has a term for these moments where the Other can be felt, if only for a half-second: they are ‘thin places’, the places ‘in the world where the walls are weak’.

In the words of 1 Kings 19:12,

After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

I’m beginning to suspect that perhaps in all my straining, in all my looking for divine ‘massive earthquakes’ and ‘impressive firestorms’, I’ve missed countless gentle whispers.

My relationship with faith is destined to wax and wane. The only certainty is that it will never stay the same. That, I’m beginning to realise, is allowed. Normal, even. For now, unsure of what the future may bring, I am content to search for those thin places and whisper into the quiet.

You never know. I might hear a whisper in return.

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gobigorgohome2016 · 7 years

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Jury Duty, Wedding Planning, and Mileage Ramping

Hi. I’m still alive! ...there’s nothing quite like serving as a juror on a murder trial to remind you of that fact. The past few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. In a nutshell: I am steadily building mileage, I got engaged, and I learned that serving on a jury is really stressful while balancing mileage, wedding planning, and having your puppy-parent-co-pilot out of town.

On May 31st, Dave and I decided that after 7 years of being together (4 living together) it was time to get married. Let me rephrase in an utterly unromantic way: after me not having health insurance since July 2015 and Dave having an adult job with benefits, we decided it might be time for me to stop playing Russian roulette. Let me rephrase in another utterly unromantic way: this was all decided through tears in the Whole Foods parking lot (let’s be real…how many excursions to Whole Foods don’t end in tears, though?) We bought a simple ring together two days later and have been wedding planning ever since.

Unintended consequence: it turns out that getting engaged – no matter the circumstances – makes you really happy and remember why you got together in the first place. I thought that after spending so much time together, getting engaged would just be a formality. Instead, there seems to be an ever-so-slight shift in the way we interact with one another, which has been a lot of fun.

Now, obviously we are both extremely nontraditional people. We chose a date (July 29th of this year) solely around the fact that my two best friends (who now live in Idaho and Australia) were just randomly going to be within an hour of my hometown that weekend. I was in their weddings, and I would love for them to be in mine.

So, yeah, we planned our wedding around two my bridesmaids’ schedules.

I don’t fancy myself to be a bridezilla (I mean…my engagement ring and dress combined cost less than our celebratory meal…), so I never thought our wedding planning would be stressful. We are funding the day ourselves, which already relieves decision fatigue. Seat covers? Table linens? Wedding favors our guests will leave at the table? Can’t afford them, doesn’t matter!

Putting together our website has been a lot of fun...and a lot of work. The biggest stressor has been that we had so little time to secure a venue (found one- the Washington Park Zoo!) and send out invites (they arrive tomorrow and will be sent out Friday) that we had to cram A LOT of planning into a short period of time. Oh yeah, add to that the fact that Dave was out of town for 3 days last week and 4 days this week, which has made things slightly more difficult, since he is very much involved in the planning of our day. [if I was making statuses saying “Future hubby asked if he could help make a small decision with our wedding! So #blessed” he definitely wouldn’t be the one I am marrying.]

All of this wedding planning reminded me how terrible I am at multitasking. Suddenly, 5 hours have gone by while we are at my computer designing our invitations (which ALMOST got purchased without the wedding date on them…) and I haven’t had a bite to eat, much less gone for my run. I have had to really double down on planning the day and doing a better job about compartmentalizing tasks, as well as taking time to care for myself. I am living off of Orgain nutritional drinks, cheese, and Lara bars.

Over the weekend, my (20 year old) niece/ bridesmaid spent a few days with me. She helped me plan a few things since she is in another wedding this summer, and also kept me focused (apparently she has never seen a person have so many internet tabs open at once..). Even though having her here was awesome, I definitely didn’t get as much sleep as I needed, especially because I was getting up extra early to run and work so that we could spend uninterrupted time together. On top of a lot of late nights the previous week so that Dave and I could do wedding stuff, I was already pretty tired. She reminded me on Sunday night to call the courthouse to see if I had jury duty, and unfortunately I did. So, I woke up at 6 AM, grinded out some work, and arrived to the city county building by 8 AM. Nbd, I’ll just get my run in after I’m released from the jury pool, I thought, because surely a far left liberal feminist with a master’s degree in analytical chemistry isn’t going to make it onto a jury for a murder trial, right? (at least that’s what everyone told me).

During jury selection, I was asked if I felt that certain circumstances could justify a crime, and how I felt about false confessions. I was honest: I do not believe in victim blaming, and I think if someone falsely confesses to a crime I would have to question the person’s mental capacity, which makes me wonder why he/she is fit to stand trial in the first place. Surely my honestly meant that I wouldn’t be chosen for this murder trial right? Wrong.

Until 5 PM on Monday we listened to the strangest case I have ever heard in my life. Side note: in middle school/high school I was involved in a volunteer organization called Teen Court, which taught me a lot about the legal system. If you have kids that need to volunteer for honor society or whatnot, I HIGHLY recommend.

Since the trial is now over, I can legally share details:

Woman 1 (W1) was (unhappily) married. Husband brought home Woman 2 (W2) (who was married to W1’s ex-husband) and suggested W1 and W2 be sister wives. W1 said no. Meanwhile, W1 brings Man 1 (M1) home and has him sleep in her bed “for security purposes.” She also meets Man 2 (M2), who happens to be her 4th cousin, and they develop a close (romantic?) friendship. Husband upsets W1 by continually sleeping with W2, so W1, M1, and M2 plan to murder Husband. M1 and M2 murder Husband, but leave body, vehicle, and murder weapon at the scene. M2 (who was on trial – M1 and W1 have already been convicted) was charged with murder and conspiracy. He confessed to the crime, but defense was arguing it was a false confession given under duress.

We made it through most of the witnesses on Monday, but the defense motioned to break for the day right before we were shown the confession tape. We had to be back by 9:15 on Tuesday.

I make it home around 6 PM and have two attention starved dogs. I take care of them and then am utterly EXHAUSTED. I still need to run.

In my own personal coaching, I tell my athletes that sleep comes first. Never force a run when you are completely sleep deprived. So, I listened to my own advice and took a nap…and fell asleep for the rest of the night. I got up at 6 the next morning and took the dogs for an hour long walk, then went for an hour long run. I hurried up and made it to the courthouse, only to wait. And wait. And wait some more. At noon, the judge told us that we were released, but had to return by 9 AM on Wednesday.

Fortunately, this meant I would be able to catch up on wedding stuff, go for another run, and tire out the dogs, since we were told that the case would last all day and into the night on Wednesday. I woke up at 5:35 AM today, took the dogs for another hour long walk, and then went for an 8 mile run. I can’t believe I would regularly meet my friends at 5 AM to run in grad school. I was dragging both yesterday and today. When that happens, I break my run up into 10% segments. Today, I just thought about 6.5 minutes at a time. Make it to 10%, then 20%, then 30%.... It helps. I got to the courtroom only to be greeted by the bailiff and both attorneys. It turned out the defendant signed a plea agreement and we were no longer needed. Kind of a bummer that I drove all the way downtown, BUT, the bailiff said that we still get our per diem for the day. I will walk away from the last three days $120 richer (plus whatever they give me for mileage). Not a bad way to make a little extra cash for the wedding.

As for running, I’m actually really happy I had this experience. I am aiming for 70 miles this week, which has always felt like a hard in-between mileage week. It takes more effort than 50, because it is usually when doubles start, but it isn’t as exhausting as 100 mile weeks. However, since you’re in the process of building, it feels like you’re running more than you are. Having a sleep deprived schedule has reminded me how fortunate I am that I’ve been able to build my life around training, and I’m going to try and remember not to take that for granted!

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qanoor · 7 years

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jaded

here’s that poem i wrote 4 years ago about sam. i actually didn’t write it the night after we first fucked, but rather just one of those nights during the early days of our relationship. it’s not a good poem or anything. i think i actually showed sam parts of it (maybe the edited version?) much later -- which is probably yet more evidence of how horrible i can be.

after you left I put yet another cum-stained sheet in the wash took off my dress and underwear ate an ice cream sandwich, a cookie and some pita chips took my medicine and went back to sleep.

after you left I dreamt all sorts of horrible things as usual waking up, lying around, still smelling of condoms and spermicide. “Yeah, doing guys is one thing, but you don’t want to smell like them.” (It’s not all guys, or just guys.)

after you left I emptied the dustbin that smelled like pee and cum into the trash. I told a girl I like about the dreams remembered that somehow it was easier to fuck maybe ‘cause my period had just ended (forgot to check if there were any spots on the condom) it really was fucking.

you are interesting masturbating in super-rapid jerks I could never manage you like jazz music and have a strange kindness even though you can’t relate wanting to be there for me but all you know is distraction I don’t really like The Wire I don’t really like funny movies even when I laugh at them

when you told me you got your therapist to help you forget, and that you can cut people off easily (“you just have to know how to do it right”) that you don’t want to remember I wanted to respect it but I also wanted to know all the things you have done (if anything.)

you are boring looking for libertarians to make fun of on reddit defending your cisgender straight white existence I also dreamt/thought that my ex would look at you with so much disdain— showing you her okcupid profile as if she could ever, ever be a match for you (she’s out of everyone’s league) (she would never settle for you like I have)

they said don’t date guys who like 4chan and reddit you’re not a 4chan asshole but you like reddit there are feminists on reddit too, so what I said we should watch a bollywood film you said you wouldn’t be into it, all that singing and dancing much like my ex— except sometimes. but when I asked if we could watch any South Asian cinema you said you weren’t into “foreign films” “probably because I’m an American” you mean USAmerican you mean this citizenship we share but this profound cruelty I could not profess.

you swerved to the other side of me to avoid holding my left hand. I said you could hold it but you said something about grip. you seemed to feel a bit guilty as I thought about how my girlfriend wrote a poem about how she loves my atypicality, how my childhood friends alternated between whatever and gushing over my “cute” little fingers I told you, like I told my ex, that I hate the word “cute”

you don’t like my short short short hair you think liberalism is left-wing you’re halfway attractive though my friend says you’re ugly but my friend also said I was out of your league because “I know this is racist, but you have that ‘exotic’ thing going for you”

people ask me about my pronouns, whether they can call me a lady a woman a girl a— what grey means (you don’t know this yet) I tell you how crazy I am and you don’t really know what to say except that you’d “prefer” I didn’t cut myself you don’t get, like my friend does, that ripping my artwork up was worse. “art can be rebuilt” hell no.

you dislike your thirteen year old stepsister because she puts her feet up on the kitchen counter, stole coins from you, stole your retainer, and doesn’t listen to her mother. if that isn’t a massive red flag I don’t know what is. you want me to write poems about you and I won’t blame you for not getting art but this isn’t what you meant.

sensory overload. touch, caress, bite. fucking, even if it was almost good at the time, is cringeworthy in remembrance. even the best times with the best people, sometimes. still clinging to “making love” still want to meet someone who really knows how to fuck me.

your politics are a mess. you think you are better than my men’s rights activist friend but it makes only the slightest hint of difference that you don’t blame me for being attracted to men who treat me like shit, when he does. you want to watch only the movies and shit you like; at least he washed my dishes. (but he doesn’t get poetry/art either.) you’d both probably like me thinner, smaller-chested, longer-haired, whiter, saner, with more money.

you are my boyfriend you are part of my “support structure” “you’ve got me” “do you want me to always tell you all the things I like about you?” (she said that too) “maybe” teasingly “no, it’s okay” (yes.)

after you left I told my friends it was good sex it was— comparatively— but you don’t love my crazy you don’t know what it’s like to fall in love that’s okay but I am not a counterbalance. (I want you to fall in love with me I want to be able to break your heart like you break mine.)

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dixie-diamonds · 7 years

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The (non) Fridging of one Ms. Emma Frost.

For our initial offering, dear followers, we bring you our thoughts on the sad, tragic, and sadly unnecessary, fate of one Ms. Emma Frost at the end of the sordid, editorially driven to the ground, non-event Inhumans vs. X-Men.

We wanted to get some distance from the events of this installment before putting down our thoughts to keyboard about…well there’s really no better way to say it…the character rape-ification that happened to Emma on IvX # 6. So now a few days later. I think our thoughts have settled.

One of the most awful truisms in life is the notion of having to take one’s own advice. It sucks. Particularly when it comes to comics. We’re usually the one to tell folks, right after their favorite characters get nuked because some writer thinks awful writing choices means ‘genius’ or something, that one of the only constants in our hobby/culture/life is the constancy of change. Status quos last only rarely and even something seemingly permanent can be rebirthed, rebooted, forgiven, recast, retconned, whatever. That’s a long winded way of saying that…even though things are bleak at the moment, to quote Avenue Q, ‘this is only for now’. We know it’s small, fleeting comfort fellow Emma fans. We feel you. But…it’s the only silver lining we can see emerging from this hot mess of a fucked up sitch we’re in right now. It’s hard to swallow. We find it difficult to accept it at times still. At the end of the day though, I think it’s also important to assess and realize that look, at the end of day, and as much as we all love her, she is just a fictional character. Her status quo now, as awful as it is, hasn’t killed anyone (as far as I know) or made the Trump regime even worse (again as far as I know). So we’re ok.

So now that the table-setting is out of the way…let’s get on with the nitty gritty. We’re not gonna summarize the plot of IvX, as that’s available plenty of other places. And if you’ve read the story…well you know.

We’re not unhappy about Emma’s reversion to an out and out villain. Honestly, after the events of Death of X and the earlier installments of IvX, any other kind of conclusion, or hell even having her returned to the X-Fold wouldn’t make much story sense. Lemire and Soule have laid down enough story real estate that having it end any other way than that would just be silly or horribly contrived. And you know what? That’s fine. That’s totally fine. Why not? It might even be interesting. What would an anti-hero Emma, skirting on the darker sides of the gray lines she already inhabits, look like? What would an Emma-ized notion of Magneto’s previous ideology look like? Would that even be her motivation? Or would it just be (and to us far more interesting plot-wise and commentary wise on the X-franchise as a whole) more of Emma finally saying ‘FUCK IT’ to all the endless thumb-twiddling the X-folks have been doing ever since Bendis took over? Or hell, she can just go full on Black Cat and just be an international jewel thief coz she is so sick and done with the X-Men’s perennially regressive approach to things and the endless Uncle Tom-ing they all seem to be doing lately. All of these options are cool to us and they would be interesting to read about.

But that isn’t what we got. What we got instead is Emma literally assuming the identity of the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (also known as Cyclop’s secondary mutation, seriously man, you should check that, it is a serious condition), and without the wit or awesome musical numbers that you get from the CW show. Her motivation for turning the heel is literally, and we wave our fist to the sky as we type this, ‘my boyfriend died and I’m nothing without him’. A notion that Soule (and Lemire too? It isn’t clear which of these two editorial puppets came up with the notion, though most seem to argue that it’s Soule) ratchets up to a level beyond creepy when he has Emma don an outfit THAT LITERALLY IS HER PUTTING ON HER EX-BOYFRIENDS SKIN. What in the fuckity fuck fuck fuck is this? How/why does this make sense? As many other fans (and non fans) have said…we are talking about a woman who a) watched many iterations of her students die b) survived the 9/11-ing of Genosha by Sentinels (more on that FUCKITY FUCK plot point in a little bit) c) killed her sister for killing one of her students d) lost her brother, whom she cared for deeply to insanity because of an abusive father e) literally started from the bottom to build up a massive financial empire. We can go on. The point is, in the grand scheme of traumas that Emma has experienced, losing Scott would probably just amount to a small paper cut. The fact (that Soule and Lemire forgot about?) that she and Scott ALREADY BROKE UP BEFORE DEATH OF X makes the notion of this crazy, stupid love even more ridiculous. Also, remember, in her diamond form, she is supposed to feel nothing, NOTHING, now let’s go back to IvX and count how many times Emma assumes her diamond form... bored of counting already? This characterization of Emma as jilted lover, turned all the way up to level 100 gazillion, is just idiotic writing borne out of some editorial mandate.

And look ok, fine, let’s make Emma unstable. Sure, why not, we can go there too. But seriously? You’re going to show that by having the woman who, when she got god-like Phoenix powers (which, by the way also maybe made her a little crazy?) MADE IT HER FIRST PRIORITY TO LITERALLY DESTROY EVERY SENTINEL ON THE PLANET. How does this even fucking work? If Emma is really all ID now and she’s gone off the rails, and is now doing whatever the fuck she wants…why in the hell would she want to create Sentinels? It makes no sense….even if the aim was to show her instability. It also lacks the kind of deeper, elegant hurt that she’s capable of and prefers to inflict. This Sentinel shit is amateur fucking hour, and she is anything but. See, for contrast, the way she handled Laura’s previous handler Kimura. That wasn’t the kind of mustache twirling fuckery we got handed. That was Emma going for the elegant kind of pain: one that’s long lasting and deliciously poetic. If Emma is going to be a baddie, then that’s the kind of next level shit they need to show her being capable of, not this two-bit hysterical monologuing bullshit we got. Cullenn Bunn has stated in a recent CBR X-Position that Ems will be playing a big role in X-Men Blue. Now, we trust Bunn, he does good work, particularly with anti-heroes like Magneto and Sabretooth...perhaps he can salvage something from this horrible situation.

Making Emma the big bad of ResurrXion, the next Magneto, now that Magneto is a hero (at least this week), is all fine and dandy. But do it well. Make it meaningful. It takes about 2 panels for her to kill hundreds of inhumans. Almost as a side note. Those panels are going to define her as a genocidal villain for the rest of her days, the same way Hank Pym has been defined by a single panel that was not even scripted.

Why is all this happening? Why did it have to happen this way? Our completely unscientific (and admittedly conspiracy theory-leaning) argument is that it all has to do with nostalgia. RessurXion seems to be banking on regressing everything back to the 90s…the time when the X-Men were walking around in tights, constantly playing baseball, and involved in 30 plus year subplots that don’t ever get resolved. And look, there’s nothing wrong with that. But, why does that shiny new reboot have to be bought and paid for by throwing both Cyclops and Emma under the bus? Why does this have to come at the price of wiping away so much of the compelling additions that the Scott/Emma era of the X-franchise created? The notion of mutants as a tribe, as one people; of mutants being an actual political minority that exists in the larger Marvel firmament; the notion of an X-character, who not only is a compelling, multi-layered female character, who doesn’t go for the usual liberal/assimilative platitudes the X-People usually spout. Why does all this need to be wiped away? Are the new writers just not good enough to create something that the nostalgic mouthbreathing focus groups want (and is this even a real demographic? Who exactly did this development please? Other than godawful Jean partisans and non-intelligent comic readers?) while being respectful of and keeping (mostly) intact the import of stories that have already been told. The fact that what happened happened feels like a slap in the face to all the fans who are rightly asking these questions.

Secondly….we think this development also owes a lot to the kind of demographic Marvel is targeting, and the kind of female characters that that demographic is interested in reading and supporting. That is, the kind of female character who is a modified distillation of the manic, pixie dreamgirl: spunky, ‘strong’, sexual (to a degree), feminist (to a degree, but also only in a very specific second wave kind of a way) and of course have to be tumblrflower, Bleeding Cool and Mary Sue approved, lest the wrath of twitter be provoked. I’m talking of characters like America Chavez, Kamala Khan, Kate Bishop and Carol Danvers. Strong, feminist, etc. But, not threatening, not overtly sexual, not swagger-y, and god forbid, not sexual only for the sake of sex; they are the equivalent of Boy Bands in the 90′s and early 00′s, attractive, easy to sell, tame. Remember She-Hulk being a strong woman with a brilliant career, kicking ass and taking names, having sexual fantasies with fellow Avengers in the 90′s? well, that She-Hulk is also gone. After Civil War 2, poor Jen is being written as a very mousey Millennial...who’s afraid of her own power and strength. Seeing a pattern already?

Emma, in our view, represents one of the last few fabulously written female characters that counters this second-wave feminist tendency in current comic writing/production of female characters. She has an unproblematic relationship with sex for pleasure and she isn’t here to make you feel good about your goddamned feminist struggle or your sophomoric need for representation. And for that, she had to be punished and made the bogeywoman of all the twitter warriors who insist that female characters be feminist-strong…but only in the way that they find palatable and ‘relatable’. I’ve always been very aware that Marvel is a business (a point I belabor to anyone who thinks Marvel OWES them something)…and of course they have to go where the money is. But, it doesn’t make this direction for Emma, or the character assassination she and we have endued, any more palatable.

Which brings us full circle to the essay’s title. She may still be alive, walking around the Marvel U in an outfit that can only be described as ‘too garish, even for pre-Joanne Lady Gaga’, but for all intents and purposes, Emma Frost has been fridged. Not physically, and in a way this is even far more cruel to her fans. They could have just taken her away from us cleanly, ending her story, not in the best of places, but at least it would have ended (for now) and we can go on, missing her, but at least with the comfort that it couldn’t get any worse. But that isn’t what happened. Instead, they took her away from us, one sordid, horribly mandated development at a time, until all that’s left is this ghoul-caricature of a character, walking around; sapped of all of her vitality and that je ne sais quoi that made her so unique, endlessly compelling, and the source of such pure comic joy. That woman is long gone. And what’s in her place now is just a zombie that Soule and Lemire should have just put out of her misery.

It’s fine that Marvel needed an X-Men reboot. Hell, in many ways as a fan, I might have welcome it with much more enthusiasm than my tepid ‘oh great I guess I’m obligated to read it’ feeling that I’m having right now. If only, this shiny new future for the merry mutants didn’t have to bought with the merciless, cruel, and absolutely unnecessary, and far worse, character fridging of one Emma Frost.

At least, we’ll always have the trades fellow Emma fans.

Keep the faith.

We’re hanging on with you.

#Emma Frost #IvX #review #rants #XMenladies #hey there

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A new social media project gives much-needed historical perspective to Trump's executive order.

Hundreds of Jewish refugees were turned away by the U.S. government on the eve of World War II. Dozens were killed in the Holocaust's concentration camps. St. Louis Manifest, a bold new Twitter project that takes its name from the vessel bearing that precious human cargo, pays homage to its victims as the U.S. and other European countries ban Muslims fleeing catastrophic wars fueled by the West.

In May 1939, the MS St. Louis traveled from Hamburg, Germany to Havana, Cuba. Nearly all of the ship's 937 passengers were Jews, most of whom were German citizens, trying to escape the Nazi regime.

Cuba, which was a virtual U.S. colony at the time, refused to accept most of the refugees. Right-wing newspapers and politicians stoked fear and paranoia about the asylum-seekers, claiming they were communist infiltrators.

When Cuba turned them away, the ship's passengers subsequently contacted U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, requesting asylum. He declined to respond. The State Department and the White House decided to reject them, acting on strict immigration quotas and pervasive xenophobic sentiment. The refugees were forced to return to war-torn Europe, where hundreds died.

My name is Lutz Grünthal. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Auschwitz http://pic.twitter.com/DyS8NXrk2P

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 27, 2017

St. Louis Manifest puts a human face to the refugees who were turned away, using photos and stories documented by The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The project was launched on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the day in 1945 when Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp, was liberated by the Soviet Union's Red Army.

My name is Horst Rotholz. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Auschwitz http://pic.twitter.com/2qoCtYrnFN

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 27, 2017

Russel Neiss, a St. Louis-based Jewish educator, technologist, and activist, co-created with Charlie Schwartz, a rabbi in Cambridge Massachusetts. AlterNet interviewed Neiss via email.

"It was made on a whim last night over the course of about two hours," Neiss said, referring to Thursday, January 26. "Its primary purpose is to honor the memory of a small sliver of the 10,000,000 victims of the Nazis on International Holocaust Remembrance Day."

My name is Selma Simon. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Sobibor http://pic.twitter.com/znXwe8zqCU

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 28, 2017

Far-right political movements and anti-refugee xenophobia are on the rise across the West amidst the worst refugee crisis since World War II.

On Thursday's day of rememberance, President Donald Trump signed an explicitly racist executive order barring all entrants from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S., including those with green cards and visas. (Five of the blacklisted countries are currently being bombed by the U.S., and the U.S. has destabilized the other two.)

Neiss drew parallels between the plight of Jewish refugees who were turned away 80 years ago and the plight of Muslim refugees fleeing Western-backed wars today.

"'We Remember' and 'Never Again' ought to be more than empty platitudes," he stressed.

Neiss condemned the Zionist Organization of America in particular for its anti-refugee stance. Leading pro-Israel groups have jumped on the Trump bandwagon and either expressed support for, or remained silent on, his extreme anti-Muslim, anti-refugee policies. The Zionist Organization of America even hosted Steve Bannon, a far-right racist who has been accused of anti-Semitism, to speak at its gala.

Neiss also criticized the Jewish Federations of North America, the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, "for their silence on the issue."

"If the goal of these organizations actually mean 'Never Again,' and 'We Remember,' they ought to do something to prove it," he said.

"The Anti Defamation League has been the only mainstream Jewish group to have taken a pro-refugee stand on this issue and they ought to be commended," Neiss added.

The racist, anti-Muslim sentiment that plagues the U.S. and Europe today echoes the anti-Semitism of the early 20th century. In fact, many of today's Islamophobic myths employ the exact same language as the anti-Semitic stereotypes of yesteryear.

In World War II, the Nazis and their fascist allies killed more than six million Jews in one of the worst genocides in human history. They also murdered millions of communists, socialists, anarchists, labor organizers, feminists, Romanis, people of African descent, homosexuals, and the disabled.

Nazi Germany was only defeated through the enormous sacrifices of the Soviet Union. At least 26 million Soviets lost their lives in the fight against Nazism, more than half of whom were civilians. In contrast, just around 400,000 Americans and 400,000 Britons died in the war.

Some 20 million Chinese, more than three-quarters of whom were civilians, also died in the fight against the Japanese empire, which was allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

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