#gender wars are such bullshit

[hanzajesthanza]

nooo like reading maria janion's such comprehensive overview of vampires and what defines a vampire and how the myth changes through times and authors, as entirely expected, has contributed to my regis brainrot.

because though it's obvious how many tropes regis subverts as he literally talks about himself, it's more overwhelming when they're all summarized focused on examples from across history and the literature canon, and pretty much hitting none of them or fucking with all of them. because it's not that he just doesn't fit in within his own fantasy universe, but that he doesn't fit in within the broader canonical definition...

"my personal vision of fantasy (...) he is not the typical vampire bloodsucker, according to the dictates of the canon" ... uggghhhh sapkowski, in his witcher, by challenging all genre expectations and tropes, creates all of these characters that don't fit in anywhere, neither in their universe or in the broader canon. and thus, can only find fraternity with each other

i was just reading like 'so... so he doesn't fit in *anywhere*... 🥺'. regis in baptism of fire explaining how he doesn't conform to either vampiric expectations of vampires (socially, for his personal principles) nor of human expectations of vampires (biologically, for his literal existence). but it even goes farther when you look beyond the witcher and to the broader literary and mythological canon. in practically every understanding of a vampire he would not be recognized as one of them... and does he even want to.

[dbphantom]

Hate having adhd went to go work on my fallout modpack, got distracted while going to disable the steam overlay, ended up in the points shop, went to go edit my profile, decided to change my pfp, found a buried folder I forgot existed, found some old Veneer art I forgot existed, spent 45 minutes looking at all the old photos, STILL HAVE NOT TOGGLED ONE SIMPLE OPTION THAT SHOULD'VE TAKEN 30 SECONDS AT MOST

[nando161mando]

It's just patriarchal logic

[owlbelly]

@winkingvoid said: 

femmes can be venomous; i'm glad folks are finally talking about it more. it's gotten so harmful how much it's tainted the public queer/trans narrative it's still somewhat rare to see any non-femmes represented for more than a token I'd like to think times will change for the better <3

i mean. just to be clear my issue is not with people who consider themselves "femmes" (who, in my experience, are shitty in exactly the same numbers as people who consider themselves any other flavor of gender. some people are just shitty)

it's with the weird seesaw thing that continues to happen in queer/trans cultural spaces - having been out for almost 25 years i've seen it rock back & forth multiple times - where different gender groups go through periods of feeling underrepresented or unfairly treated within their communities & there's usually a big push for "centering" and "uplifting voices" then a period where that's like. the only people it's cool to hear from or talk about. followed usually by a backlash & a swing in the other direction! femmes vs. butches/mascs, trans men vs. trans women, etc. it's exhausting. & it's not as though it's not a real thing happening or like people don't have real reasons to be upset about who's "represented" or has social power, it's just that it's a miserable repeating cycle rather than a real examination of power dynamics with any nuance.

also imo it very rarely maps onto whatever's going on in mainstream culture/media with regard to queer & trans people. like it's always been hilarious to me that the standby is "butch lesbians are the cultural stereotype so we need femme lesbians in movies/tv/etc." but if i asked you to point to an actual butch on a big screen, lmfao. or the thing where most trans-focused mainstream media is still only ever about trans women, but in actual queer/trans spaces & orgs it's often heavily skewed towards trans men & transmasc folks now (which is a change that i also saw juuuust begin to happen in the mid-to-late 00s). ofc "representation" & "visibility" are double edged too & don't make people safe.

anyway as an extremely agender person who still can't escape getting shoved to one side by cis & trans people alike, i would love to see this shit even out eventually & i would love even more for people to just let go of the whole "war of the sexes" divisive nonsense, we literally do not have to reproduce that cishet dynamic in a "progressive" way :')

[deep-nerd]

lord give me strength to finish these fucking sketches of Deep Blue being Very Fuckin Gender

[bastardsofravenkroft-blog]

wait what happened with pissditching? im p sure you talked abt them in an ask response but i never understood what happened...

basically pissditching is friends with revengeromance and girlgerard (both of whom i dislike atp*) i said something in the tags of a post abt how i was pissed at revengeromance for something (unrelated) and pissditching found it and lowkey harassed me and several friends over it and said some real fucking weird shit to me so i blocked them (and probably said something snarky abt them on main but i dont really remember)

*i dont personally like these two users bc they (specifically gg) are the forefront of call gerard way nothing but she/her and i think thats fucking weird 🙂 personally. so i have them blocked and don’t interact with anyone around them at all.

[is-this-really--life]

I really wish there were more radical feminist video essayists. So sick of breadtube's bullshit.

[scientia-rex]

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

[surpriserose]

🔥 jojos

And 🔥 for whatever you want to hate on <3

jojos........i know you mean araki jojos but i legit cant think of anything so i gotta say jojos is a perfectly acceptable name for potato wedges but the wedge shape is not the best way to fry them i used to go to this place with circular slices and they were much better especially texture wise and potato to skin ratio wise

I hate my comics class so much it is run so sloppy and the readings have all be like ya comics that are just. Bland at the best of times. I have to read maia kobabes gender queer in a few weeks and im dreading it i cant lie i dont need a ya nonbinary 101 book on the reading list ive got my own experiences obviously and thankfully they did not include supernatural incest rpf but skill issue or something

[theteaisaddictive]

my mother’s transphobia never ceases to enrage me.

[koallie2]

Wish I had blue skin and lekku

[mugiwara-lucy]

Michelle Rojas was announced as the English Voice of Yamato and said how she was happy and excited for everyone to meet HIM in the dub so are you ready to stop being transphobic and just admit Yamato is a male already?

I looked it up and:

Oh my god.

I hate how she just added fuel to the flames. 😒

Like......why??

This reads as a certain attack or diss tbh.

[autolenaphilia]

It's interesting how intellectually inconsistent the arguments against "problematic" kinks like fauxcest, CNC and ageplay is. Like the anti-kink people get very heated about those kinks for "fetishizing/romanticizing" abuse. And the thing is, that's true for bdsm in general. It relies on roleplaying power inequalties, which would be very abusive if they were real.

That was in fact the argument of the 70s radfems who created the type of anti-kink discourse that relies on exploiting feminist concerns about abuse. They were against all forms of bdsm, including among (cis) lesbians. They used the same arguments we see against fauxcest and CNC today, for what is normal bdsm play.

And the radfems kinda lost this battle of the feminist sex wars, probably because it alienated a lot of the cis women they were recruiting from. Nowadays queer people of all genders do a lot of bdsm and anti-bdsm views don't get a lot of airtime.

Nowadays you see this anti-bdsm rhetoric mostly among proud terfs who use it to prove their hardcore bonafides. (Although I've seen some tenderqueers who admit that they think all bdsm is problematic too.)

And i think that's because the anti-kink people have decided to do a strategic retreat on this question. The radfems took a too extreme stance and alienated people who they otherwise could have recruited. So they have gone for easier targets. Kinks which are seen as extreme compared to "normal" bdsm, like fauxcest and CNC. And they target individual transfems accused of being into or even just "defending" these kinks with callouts and mobbing instead of condemning all the cis gays and lesbians into bdsm.

This leads to intellectual inconsistency. It's fine to play with whips in the bedroom,but doing CNC play is evil. One type of roleplaying abusive relationships is fine, but the other is bad. It's obvious hypocrisy to broaden the appeal of the message.

And of course, their transmisogynistic bias is obvious and I and others have noted this before. And even if the anti-kink people weren't transmisogynistic bigots, they will naturally target us for their moralistic crusade out of opportunism. We transfems are easy targets for callouts on these subjects, because transmisogyny primes people to easily view us as perverted sexual predators and those doing the callouts tend to have tme privilege over us.

And as I said before, the 70s radfems anti-bdsm position and their transmisogyny were intertwined. Janice Raymond literally diagnosed trans women in "The Transsexual Empire" with sadomasochism, something she views as inherently pathological.

And of course their arguments are bullshit anyway. Like sure a lot of kink fetishizes abuse, but I don't see that as a reason to condemn the people doing it. I don't see why I should care if someone gets off on a rape fantasy or CNC roleplay, because it's Not Real. I don't care about fictional murders for the same reason. Most arguments to the contrary tend to rely on the arch-reactionary concept of sexual degeneracy: "if you do enough fauxcest and CNC it will warp your mind and you'll eventually rape your relatives for real, or inspire someone to do so." It ignores the material societal conditions that lead to abuse in the real world.

[autisticexpression2]

This bullshit around Imane Khelif has to be the biggest mass delusion I've seen from the right, and that's really saying something.

Transvestigators are nothing new. People have been calling Michelle Obama a man for years. But it has mostly been a niche thing not even taken seriously by most republicans.

Qanon is unhinged but mostly deals with that which is unknown to the average person, leaving room for speculation, however wild.

But Imane Khelif's gender is a straightforward issue. She is objectively a cis woman. This isn't at all debatable by any sane standard. There is absolutely no reason to believe otherwise. She is a cis woman from a conservative Muslim country where any expression of queerness is illegal. There is no way a transgender or otherwise queer person would be selected to represent Algeria. There are even photographs of her as a little girl if you're still not convinced.

But the right has arbitrarily decided that she's a man based on absolutely nothing, and suddenly, the question of whether or not this WOMAN has a penis, an objective true or false question, has become a culture war issue. So now it doesn't matter what PROOF you bring up. Saying this woman is a woman is woke now, so they have to disagree on principle against all evidence and logic. People who have been screaming about precise biological definitions of gender for years now have decided someone's gender based on vibes alone because irony is fucking dead.

And it's not just a niche view held by the more unhinged online sections of the right. Celebrities like Elon Musk, JK Rowling, and Logan Paul are tweeting it. Politicians are tweeting it. Babylon Bee is publishing "satirical" pieces about how abusing women is now an Olympic sport.

We are living in the absolute stupidest timeline.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Wellness surveillance makes workers unwell

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TORONTO on Mar 22, then with LAURA POITRAS in NYC on Mar 24, then Anaheim, and more!

"National conversation" sounds like one of those meaningless buzzphrases – until you live through one. The first one I really participated in actively was the national conversation – the global conversation – about privacy following the Snowden revelations.

This all went down when my daughter was five, and as my wife and I talked about the news, our kid naturally grew curious about it. I had to literally "explain like I'm five" global mass surveillance:

https://locusmag.com/2014/05/cory-doctorow-how-to-talk-to-your-children-about-mass-surveillance/

But parenting is a two-way street, so even as I was explaining surveillance to my kid, my own experiences raising a child changed how I thought about surveillance. Obviously I knew about many of the harms that surveillance brings, but parenting helped me viscerally appreciate one of the least-discussed, most important aspects of being watched: how it compromises being your authentic self:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2014/may/09/cybersecurity-begins-with-integrity-not-surveillance

As I wrote then:

There are times when she is working right at the limits of her abilities – drawing or dancing or writing or singing or building – and she catches me watching her and gets this look of mingled embarrassment and exasperation, and then she changes back to some task where she has more mastery. No one – not even a small child – likes to look foolish in front of other people.

Learning, growth, and fulfillment all require a zone of privacy, a time and place where we are not observed. Far from making us accountable, continuous, fine-grained surveillance by authority figures just scares us into living a cramped, inauthentic version of ourselves, where growth is all but impossible. Others have observed the role this plays in right-wing culture war bullshit: "an armed society is a polite society" is code for "people who make me feel uncomfortable just by existing should be terrorized into hiding their authentic selves from me." The point of Don't Say Gay laws and anti-trans bills isn't to eliminate gender nonconformity – it's to drive it into hiding.

Given all this, it's no surprise that workers who face workplace surveillance in the name of "wellness" feel unwell as a result:

https://www.ifow.org/publications/what-impact-does-exposure-to-workplace-technologies-have-on-workers-quality-of-life-briefing-paper

As the Future of Work Institute found in its study, some technologies – systems that make it easier to collaborate and communicate with colleagues – increase workers' sense of wellbeing. But wearables and AI tools make workers feel significantly worse:

https://assets-global.website-files.com/64d5f73a7fc5e8a240310c4d/65eef23e188fb988d1f19e58_Tech%20Exposure%20and%20Worker%20Wellbeing%20-%20Full%20WP%20-%20Final.pdf

Workers who reported these negative feelings confirmed that these tools make them feel "monitored." I mean, of course they do. Even where these tools are nominally designed to help you do your job better, they're also explicitly designed to help your boss keep track of you from moment to moment. As Brandon Vigliarolo writes for The Register, these are the same bosses who have been boasting to their investors about their plans to fire their workers and replace them with AI:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/14/advanced_workplace_tech_study/

"Bossware" is a key example of the shitty rainbow of "disciplinary technology," tools that exist to take away human agency by making it easier to surveil and control its users:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#bossware

Bossware is one of the stages of the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve: the process by which abusive and immiserating technologies progress up the privilege gradient as their proponents refine and normalize dystopian technologies in order to impose them on wider and wider audiences:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The kinds of metrics that bossware gathers might be useful to workers, but only if the workers get to decide when, whether and how to share that data with other people. Microsoft Office helps you catch typos by underlining words its dictionary doesn't recognize; the cloud-based, "AI-powered" Office365 tells your boss that you're the 11th-worst speller in your division and uses "sentiment analysis" to predict whether you are likely to cause trouble:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Two hundred years ago, Luddites rose up against machines. Contrary to the ahistorical libel you've heard, the Luddites weren't angry or frightened of machines – they were angry at the machines' owners. They understood – correctly – that the purpose of a machine "so easy a child could use it" was to fire skilled adult workers and replace them with kidnapped, indentured Napoleonic War orphans who could be maimed and killed on the job without consequence:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/12/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk/

A hundred years ago, the "Taylorites" picked up where those mill owners left off: choreographing workers' movements to the finest degree in a pseudoscientific effort to produce a kind of kabuki of boss-pleasing robotic efficiency. The new, AI-based Taylorism goes even further, allowing bosses to automatically blacklist gig workers who refuse to cross picket-lines, monitor "self-employed" call center operators in their own homes, and monitor the eyeballs of Amazon drivers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

AI-based monitoring technologies dock workers' wages, suspend them, and even fire them, and when workers object, they're stuck arguing with a chatbot that is the apotheosis of Computer Says No:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

There's plenty of research about AI successfully "augmenting" workers, making them more productive and I'm the last person to say that automation can't help you get more done:

https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/report/augmented-workforce

But without understanding how AI augments class warfare – disciplining workers with a scale, speed and granularity beyond the sadistic fantasies of even the most micromanaging asshole boss – this research is meaningless.

The irony of bosses imposing monitoring to improve "wellness" and stave off "burnout" is that nothing is more exhausting, more immiserating, more infuriating than being continuously watched and judged.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/15/wellness-taylorism/#sick-of-spying

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[ms-demeanor]

i really liked OJST in the mid-2010s but i didn’t stop reading cause of the cuck comic - wasn’t there also a comic erika moen wrote about (functionally) harassing lesbians with her now-husband?

In the mid 2010s closet-keys criticized one of Erika Moen's early diary comics and described Erika Moen as "Reassuring a cishet partner that it’s totally okay to use hate speech towards wlw at Pride" and condoning the harassment and fetishization of lesbians because of a 2007 comic that she had made as part of a webcomic she had written about gender and her interactions with her queerness.

The hate speech in question is the partner asking "are you sure you want to hold my hand with all these dykes around?" while they are pretty clearly at a Dyke Day event during pride, and the reassurance that 'it's totally okay to use hate speech toward wlw' is Erika responding "sweetie, I'm proud to be with you."

The comic is still up with a disclaimer that it was written at a different time, and I know that's probably not going to fly with a lot of people but if you were a bi woman in the early to mid 2000s it was pretty common to use statements like "lol yeah i'm into women my boyfriend is fine with it as long as I take pictures" to diffuse the biphobia from straight people AND to say shit like "I'm not a party bi, I actually love pussy, thanks" to diffuse the biphobia from queer people. (if you were a bi guy in the early to mid 2000s i'm sorry and I'm sorry now because we got LUG but that mostly went away and you *still* have to deal with the "gay in waiting" bullshit).

That comic ends with Erika and her partner looking at a woman and saying "I'd totally do her" while the woman thinks "pigs" and if you think that means that they literally sat on the street and vocally commented about lesbians passing by them or that they condone harassing lesbians (in, I cannot stress this enough, a diary comic written by someone in their early twenties who is realizing they are occasionally interested in some men some of the time after identifying as a lesbian their whole life), then I'm gonna go ahead and recommend signing up for some variety or other of literary analysis class. Do we think that Erika is seriously implying that she is going to make her boyfriend gay if she fucks him in this comic from a year later?

If this comic bothers you and you see it as a straight-passing couple giving the go-ahead to harass lesbians, you do you, I'm not saying you have to read the comic or enjoy Erika Moen.

I am saying it's a bit of a stretch, though, and certainly the least charitable explanation possible, and that we should probably give people some space to say awkward things about their sexuality and to make missteps when discussing it in their early twenties and not call them lesbophobic fifteen years after the fact for a college comic.

Moen also gets called transphobic because she has described trans men as adorable/cute in a way that could be read as patronizing in one comic and because she made a comic about wearing a packer for fun and for sexual gratification with her cis male partner as a cis woman.

Appropriately, all of these things feel very "late twenty teens tumblr callout post."

If it bugs you, you don't have to read the comics but I've talked about Moen before and I've gotten the anons in my inbox calling me lesbophobic for recommending her comic when in 2007 she made a comic about catcalling lesbians and condoning street harassment.

Which is frustrating because Erika Moen writes a comic about sex toys that has incredible body and gender diversity and is interested in making sure that people of all sexualities are having safe, enjoyable sex and talking openly about it. This is Rebecca Sugar condones war crimes level discourse over a creator who makes a genuinely good comic and gets dismissed as cringe by people who hate open discussions of sex and gets dismissed as a bigot (in ways that I think are incredibly unfair given the vast majority of her work) among people who *claim* to love open discussions of sex but who *actually* love witch hunts.