#an octopus from a very heterosexual patriarchal and settler-oriented viewpoint

[joelletwo]

#Everybody go read that sophie lewis article about eroticism and octopuses

actually while im at my desk can i go ahead and say ive been using my bored downtime at work to get into sophie lewis's most recent work on enemy feminisms (text interview) (youtube podcast interview) (different youtube bookstore talk/q&a <- my favorite)

The “bad” news is that digging deep into the history of reactionary and even fascist feminism does make it harder to dismiss the bigoted self-described feminists of today as non-feminist grifters. It is so tempting to make that gesture in the current climate—“That’s not real feminism!”—even though it simply doesn’t work. Yet what I’m trying to say is: this need not confuse us. That is the good news. Learning our multiple antagonistic histories actually strengthens our ability as feminists to fight today’s soi-disant “gender critical” women.

and from trying to find decent audio quality youtube links from there her work on family abolition that finally made various encounters w anarchal approaches to relationships click in my brain (youtube interview)

[kollontai] who talks about 18:36 love as something that is infected with the germ of property so she has this concept property love 18:43 which is I think a really interesting and important understanding of how the 18:51 love that we deserve as human beings is not fully available to us yet under 18:57 conditions of capitalism because we cannot help but um view the objects of our love in a 19:04 slightly propertarian or possessive way

and from there discovering the other day that she got into a lockdown twitter scuffle with all sides about octopus eroticism and wrote a banger and beautifully-visioned article about the whole thing

Not long before, a human person—let’s say it was me—had dropped acid and walked into the clear, cold water of Harriman Reservoir, the two-thousand-acre lake created by the Harriman hydroelectric dam in Vermont. By the time she walked out of it again, three hours later, she estimated, a good 0.01 percent of its contents were surely composed of her cum. ... The enemies of queer life (including on the left) see whatever we do as disgusting, regardless, unless we do it within the institutions of property or marriage, and even then behind closed doors. The octophobes, for their part, were wittingly or unwittingly sanctioning a capitalist ordering of sex and the erotic. Sure, the octopus is not queer, and nor is Foster, but the outcry at my reading of their encounter as queer, and as sexual, was of a piece with the biopolitical imperative to police public expressions of deviant sexualities: a centuries-old project of class war and state formation that primarily affects dykes, whores, faggots, kinksters, and sodomites, but equally sucks a lot of joy out of life for everybody else.

needless to say im obsessed