#her entire life goal is to fundamentally change a system out of violence. she so desperately WANTS good and softness and the opposite

[suncaptor]

Like I do think we push past how willing Feferi was to kill Eridan wayyyyy too fast too. Like. Ngl.

[gamesception]

So, the Infinity Train is bad, right? Not the show, the show is great, but the train itself within the show.

Spoilers, below.

Including spoilers for the end of season 3.

Like, ok, it's trying to help people work through emotional problems and maladjusted/antisocial personality traits.  Benevolent intentions, at least when humans are concerned, seem sincere enough.  And sure, it worked for Tulip & Jesse.  But while maybe not deliberately malicious, the train is trying to serve a moral function with an automated, amoral system that doesn’t work and is fundamentally inhumane.

Especially to the denizens it creates.  However artificial they may be, seasons 2 and 3 especially make clear that they are fully realized actual people, and the train just makes them up on a whim and suborns their entire existence to the passenger's personal growth. Life for a lot of denizens is pretty horrific. Not just Lake being hunted, but kick-me toad, the wind guy, several denizens seem created to suffer an existentially nightmarish existence so that their suffering can teach some passenger a moral. Even the ones that aren't created to suffer still face perpetual risk from ghoms, passengers, & other dangers of the train, and are still trapped in a single car, or risk being forever separated from that home by the movement of cars if they ever leave it. Even if the system works to help humans, creating an entire subordinate class of fully sapient creatures and then treating them as expendable tools in furtherance of that goal is kind of horrific & bad?

And that's before you consider that therapy train isn't even very good at what it does. Like, looking at the memory tapes we've seen, the things that land people on the train aren't that bad? Like, they're bad and all, but they're still things that people can and do work through and overcome in the plain old regular ass world. None of that shit seems like stuff that would be easier to work through with the help of isolation from human contact and regular mortal peril. The success rate among characters we've met isn't especially high, and one one himself has admitted that, statistically, passengers are more likely to die than they are to get their numbers to zero and get off the train.

Which would be bad enough if the passengers were adults, but most of them are little children! Which, like, of course. Because whatever inhuman system is choosing the passengers seems to key in on self centered behavior and uncontrolled emotional outbursts as criteria for passengers, and sure those are signs of maladjustment in adults, but they're also just normal conditions of children and young teens who are still developing socially and emotionally?

In season one, it could be readily imagined that the train only picked up people who were otherwise going to die. Tulip ran off into the snowy night in Wisconsin & easily could have frozen if not picked up by the train. Amelia, standing next to the tracks before the train even appeared, seemed like she could have been contemplating suicide. And based on that reading, the risk of death is slightly more forgivable. But implied in season 2 and explicitly in season 3, the train can pick up anyone at any time, so yeah, you could easily imagine a kid lashing out from some traumatic abuse they can’t process ending up on the train to become monster food when without the train some teacher or counselor could have intervened to actually help them.

We don't get to see Simon's backstory before the train, but according to the numbers, it wasn't as bad as what happened to Grace, and wasn't all that far removed from Tulip's issues with her parents. Could any bad thing he did before entering the train have justified the traumas he was subjected to from the moment he got there?  Did he really have a better chance on the train than he would have had off of it? Yeah, he made his choices, I'm not saying he "didn't deserve" his fate, but how did any of the stuff he went through constitute helping him?  Not all of this can be blamed on Amelia’s usurpation of the train.  Even without One One, Tulip shows that the train was more or less working as normal outside of the cars Amelia directly tampered with, and even after One One was back as conductor, the dangers of the train - from flecs to ghoms to laval moles - were still very real.

And if the train wasn’t helping Simon, that only makes all the suffering that it allowed various denizens to experience at his hands by abducting him in the first place all the more unforgivable, since there was never a point to him being on the train at all. Unless he was only there to serve Grace's growth?  There’s not a lot of reason to think that, but it is a possibility since without Simon reflecting her worst actions back to her, Grace might never have grown in the way she did.  Was that an accident, or intentional on the train’s part, with Simon’s fate an acceptable cost of Grace’s redemption?  If it was that would only be worse, since then the train then wouldn’t just be failing to recognize that it's own creations matter as much as humans that exist apart from it, it's also actively choosing to damn some humans to save others.  Either the train is dangerously incompetent, or actively malicious here.

Or consider the flecs, the ‘mirror police’ antagonists for most of season 2. I doubt many felt bad for them when they died. After all, they chose to become flecs, and chose to repeatedly try to murder Lake just for wanting her own life.  Unlike Simon we don't see a string of humanizing traumas driving them towards those choices. But did they actually choose any of that?

In s2e8, Mace questions not just Lake's existence, but the entire existence of the mirror world, implying that their memories and personalities are as artificial as their bodies, constructs created by the train to teach a passenger a lesson. He drives the questions at Lake, but the same reasoning could be applied to him. Did Mace become a flec after his prime died, or are those memories fake, and he was always a flec, created by the train to be a villain in a little morality play for Tulip's & later Jesse's benefit? Did Mace ever really have the choice to be anything other than the monster he was? And even if he did, would that absolve the train of a measure of guilt in creating Mace to be that monster in the first place? Did the train intend for him to catch and kill Lake after Tulip & Jesse had returned home, cleaning up loose ends? One One seemed to jump at the chance to let Lake off the train once her trick of reflecting Jesse's number provided an adequate excuse, but before that he also seemed perfectly willing to go with Sieve's suggestion of resolving the conflict by just killing her.

Again, that’s not to say the flecs didn’t deserve their fates, or that it was wrong of Lake to kill them.  Mace in particular questioned the entire purpose and reality of the mirror world, which means he had the self awareness and philosophical insight needed to question and reject the role the train had created him for, and even while dying he instead chooses to use that insight as just another way to vindictively deny Lake’s person-hood. He chooses to be every bit the monster he was created to be, and Sieve makes the same choice even seeing the fate that it led Mace to.  They didn’t “deserve better”, but them choosing to embrace their predetermined villainous roles doesn’t reduce the train’s accountability for creating them to fill those roles in the first place.

So yeah, Trauma Train is a fantastic show - imo s2 is still the best, but s1 and s3 are both very solid. But within that show the train itself is a dangerously negligent therapist and a willfully unjust deity, and if Infinity Train does get future seasons I hope that aspect gets further explored and deconstructed.  And I think it will be.  Like, I don’t think any of this analysis is an unintended edgy dark reading for the heck of it.  Season one could have left you with a neutral or positive impression of the train, but the fundamental systemic injustice of the train is, like, the explicit text of season 2, and while Lake managed to trick her way free, the underlying system she fought to free herself from is still in place in season 3.

That said, I kind of hope one way or the other that the show is done with grizzly on-screen deaths. There's a lot of good lessons for kids in the show, important stuff about handling life changes, dealing with grief, the importance of self identity & self determination. And much like the train is a bad therapist for trying to traumatize its victims into self improvement, the show becomes a bad vehicle for the lessons it's trying to teach if the scenes of shocking violence are what stick most firmly in younger viewers memories.

[possibilistfanfiction]

on a related note, where do you think pinoe fits into the conversation? i’ve read a bunch of criticism surprisingly from uswnt fans who claim her activism work/increased focus on work off the pitch is part of the reason behind her poor performances lately, i can’t help but feel like it’s just another excuse for them to pretend football exists in a bubble especially after 2020 (like you mentioned). appreciate all your commentary on this topic so far, it’s refreshing to hear someone actually discussing last year’s ramifications on the teams cohesiveness

to me that seems silly bc lots of athletes are wonderful players/athletes while being very active politically. an easy example is basically the entire wnba lol, especially when you consider so many of the wnba players are Black women & nb ppl who spent 2020 & 2021 being extremely active & outspoken; still undoubtedly the best players in the world. on the uswnt, cp is not as abrasively (not in a bad way, just stylistically lol) outspoken or active as pinoe, but thru re-inc & just her personal politic it’s very clear where she stands. there are ofc lots of other examples but those are top of mind for me.

on the flip side, players like kelley didn’t play well at all & are politically … on the wrong side of things, to put it mildly. so in my mind that performance, while i love to believe in the ramifications of energy lol, also has rly nothing to do with her beliefs & expression of them.

beyond that, everything is political. existing “apolitically” or “just being an athlete” is also a political stance, usually rooted in blatant anti-Blackness (which of course stems out into anti-fat, anti-disabled, anti-poor, etc politic)

i do think some of the poor play is probably just age & preparation, & also, tbh, a lack of tactics for YEARS. cp has excelled so much bc she’s always been a tactical player — she’s incredibly fast & smart off the ball, very skilled in tight, quick spaces: she reads the game well & reacts accordingly. pinoe has been playing a pretty typical uswnt style for a decade — e.g., out-muscle the other team, run faster, etc. tbh even in 2019 wc lots of goals she scored were set pieces/penalties, not in the run of play. i think she should have retired.

i will say that there is a mental & emotional toll that being hyperactive in politics can take. i think pinoe’s politics aren’t actually left or radical at all, so she’s not doing any particularly meaningful organizing for actual liberation or safety imo, & instead investing in american systems that will always encourage imperialism & violence (like electoral politics, voting, etc). it’s just so telling to me that a lot of ppl who don’t like her think she’s on the left like lmfao y’all have never talked to an actual radical but ok. pinoe has whiteness & intense class privilege, she’s thin, cis, & (as far as we know) able-bodied. so while it can absolutely be exhausting to engage in activism, she has so much privilege that it’s essentially impossible to blame poor play on anything but like … athletic ability? or smth like that

i do think it is also pretty clear that cp, for example, works hard to have a balanced life. sport clearly matters to her, but it seems like she has a lot of other things going on that she genuinely finds immense joy & peace in.

& at the end of the day (HOT take) if being politically active, albeit almost painfully neoliberal, means that a privileged white player doesn’t play as well… sport doesn’t rly matter? like it’s fun & it impacts things but the uswnt winning a gold medal (or not) isn’t going to help end climate change, or extend eviction moratoriums, or abolish all carceral systems & ideology in mental & physical health/education/police, prisons, etc, or give land back to indigenous people, etc etc etc. there is nothing abt sport that is rly going to get into the dirt of things & fundamentally make society livable for everyone — especially a team that is in service of the state!! (🥴🤪)

so anyway, yes i don’t think that her politic has anything to do with her performance, but IF it did, fine lol

[violethowler]

Break the Wheel

It’s a common point of discussion in the Kingdom Hearts fandom how often the main heroes are screwed over by the actions and attitudes of their various mentors. Ansem the Wise, Eraqus, the Master of Masters... Nearly every mentor figure in the series has contributed in some way to the pain the young people they interact with have endured over the course of the series. 

The Master of Masters deliberately manipulated his pupils into turning against each other and starting a war to further his own agenda. The Foretellers spread that suspicion and mistrust of each other outward to the members of their respective Unions. From what we’re seeing so far, the Dandelions are removed from the Master’s direct influence and are handling the Potential Traitor discussion so much better than the Foretellers did in Back Cover, but something still clearly went wrong that left at least four of them thousands of years in the future with only vague memories of their past at best. 

Birth by Sleep showed how Eraqus’ paranoia and distrust of darkness directly lead to the suffering of his pupils. His attitude toward Terra’s darkness in the beginning drove the latter to seek validation from Xehanort, who used Terra for his own agenda causing Aqua to trap herself in the Realm of Darkness to save her friend. Eraqus’ insistence that she spy on Terra and bring Ven back to the Land of Departure drove a wedge between the trio at Radiant Garden. And his willingness to kill Ventus to stop Xehanort leads to his duel with Terra and subsequent death. 

Ienzo’s role in the experiments performed by the Organization’s founders prior to the fall of Radiant Garden is unclear, but his conversation with Ansem in Kingdom Hearts III suggests that the older apprentices kept him in the dark about many things and might have potentially used Ansem’s fondness for him to manipulate their mentor. This resulted in Ansem’s banishment and - if DDD is any indication - turning Ienzo into a Nobody against his will when he was only 8 years old. 

Ansem himself went on to openly seek the destruction of Roxas, Xion, and Namine for the sake of his revenge against everyone who wronged him, using his prejudice against Nobodies to justify the things he did in pursuit of his goals. And despite guiding Riku to accept his own darkness in Chain of Memories, Ansem still fundamentally buys into the view of Darkness as something inherently negative, best illustrated at the end of Riku’s side of that game where DiZ attempted to make Riku choose between the “road to light” and “road to darkness”, implicitly trying to force Riku into a rigid either/or path that Riku rejects in favor of choosing “the middle road”.

This pattern has repeated often enough that when fans on Twitter shared screenshots of Dark Road from the game’s prematurely leaked website showing Master Odin, several fans - myself included - began eagerly anticipating the ways in which this pattern of old men failing the young would rear its head in Xehanort’s time as an apprentice. 

The fact that this pattern appears so consistently across the entire Kingdom Hearts timeline is not an accident. The entire starting point of the Heroine’s Journey is built around the idea that the protagonist’s environment - parents, mentors, peers, sometimes even their entire society - has failed them in some way[1]. By forcing them to adhere to a rigid binary of what traits are considered desirable versus undesirable, it forces people who do not fit those standards to cut themselves off from vital parts of who they are in order to be recognized and validated.

So when the younger generation grows up with these standards and is called to fix the mistakes of their elders, they are expected to do so on their mentors’ terms[2]. In doing so, they will ultimately continue the cycle that led to those problems in the first place. But the central protagonist of the Heroine’s Journey is different. The qualities which set them apart are the same ones that allow them to think outside of this rigid binary and ultimately break that cycle. In the course of their growth, the main character learns to create a new, better world not by vanquishing a villain who represents the failures of the old one, but by healing the wounds those failures created. 

Kairi said it best in Kingdom Hearts III that Sora’s journey is about helping people, many of whom he’s never met before. This is significant because the protagonist breaking out of the cycle has commonly taken the form of learning to solve problems with compassion and understanding instead of violence and punishment[1]. The main character cannot improve the world around them by simply killing the villain and calling it a day. In order to achieve meaningful change they need to help the people who have been hurt by this rigid cycle. And as the contrast between Sora’s attitudes towards the dying Organization members in Kingdom Hearts II and III demonstrates, that includes the same villains he’s fighting against. Yes, even Xehanort.

Because when you look back and think about it, every non-Disney antagonist in the Kingdom Hearts series is shown to be motivated by the pain and/or trauma inflicted on them by the worldview of their peers and mentors, which they then took out on the people around them. 

Marluxia as Lauriam was powerless to stop Strelitzia’s murder, and then he lost all memory of his past when he arrived in the present from the Age of Fairy Tales. That knowledge casts his behavior in Chain of Memories as someone trying to control the people around him as a proxy to feel like he has control over his own life[3]. 

Ienzo’s words when Ansem returns in Kingdom Hearts III[4] and the fact that he was a child [5] when Radiant Garden fell[6] paint his words toward Riku in Chain of Memories about the latter destroying his home as Zexion projecting the repressed guilt over the destruction of his home onto Riku. 

Saix’s cruelty toward Roxas and Xion in 358/2 Days is revealed in Kingdom Hearts III to have been driven by jealousy towards Axel and the feeling that he was being abandoned and replaced[7].  

All of these characters’ villainous actions can be traced back to the influence of the mentor figures of their generation. Marluxia’s survivor’s guilt over Strelitzia’s death is the result of her killer attempting to defy the manipulations of the Master of Masters. Saix was gaslit about his own humanity by Xemnas and Xigbar for over a decade with Xemnas’ manipulation and whatever effect Norting had on him on top of that. Ienzo’s conversation with Ansem in Kingdom Hearts III indicates that he didn’t fully understand what Ansem’s adult apprentices were doing around him when they were conducting their experiments, and the flashback at the start of Dream Drop Distance suggests he had not become a Nobody of his own volition. 

Xehanort too, is someone who was hurt by this destructive cycle. The things he indicates he saw during his world tour - people refusing to acknowledge the darkness in their own hearts and allowing it to grow [8] - showed him the consequences of repressing one’s darkness and negative emotions as he and Eraqus were taught. He wanted to change this, but he was still so entrenched in that system that the best he could think of ultimately amounted to the same rigid viewpoint but flipped so that darkness was on top. 

The merciless death many fans felt Xehanort deserved would only reinforce the “darkness evil, light good” worldview that Riku’s redemption arc was built on overturning. In order to truly heal the wounds created by the rigid belief system that made the villain who they are, the protagonist needs to be able to extend their compassion and sympathy even to their greatest enemies, or else it fundamentally breaks the narrative. The idea that there should be limits or conditions on such compassion is exactly the kind of mentality that led Eraqus to try and kill Terra and Ventus in Birth by Sleep. It doesn’t mean the main characters will ever forgive the villain(s) for what they’ve done, but that they are choosing to let go. To focus their energy on self-care and rebuilding, instead of more violence and more destruction[2].

Regardless of how individual fans feel about it, Xehanort being treated with dignity in his final moments needed to happen in order to show Sora’s growth. If Kingdom Hearts III had given Xehanort a violent demise like some of us wanted, it would have been a betrayal of the Heroine’s Journey’s major themes. Treating opponents with sympathy and compassion is a critical element of the framework, and is necessary in order to allow the protagonist to break free of the destructive mentality that created the story’s overarching conflict in the first place. 

Sources:

[1] “The Heroine with a Thousand Faces”; June 13, 2019;

https://www.teampurplelion.com/heroine-with-a-thousand-faces/

[2] “On Love and Lions Part 1: An Analysis of Love in VLD”; February 14, 2020. https://www.teampurplelion.com/on-love-and-lions-1/

[3] Analysis of Marluxia by @mlhelena;  https://mlhelena.tumblr.com/post/185211447430/thought-that-ive-been-nursing-for-a-while

[4] Kingdom Hearts III. Square Enix, 2019. 

[5] Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. Square Enix, 2010.

[6] Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance. Square Enix, 2012. 

[7] Concerning Atypical Heart Regrowth in Nobodies: Saïx Case Study by dicax; June 23, 2019.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19329115

[8] Kingdom Hearts III Re:Mind. Square Enix, 2020. 

[woeismyhoe]

Different anon here but bruh c'mon... abuse is the behaviours and actions of a person not the intention of their actions. It doesnt matter if Azula was tryna be nice and friendly to Mai and Ty Lee, what matters is that she used fear and control to coerce Mai and Ty Lee to do her bidding (like you said) and that is abuse. Doesnt matter why. The army doesnt do this, theres consent and agreement. Pls dont be an abuse apologist... I like your blog :(. I want azula redemption but not like thisss :(.

The definition of abuse (noun):

1. the improper use of something.

2. cruel and violent treatment of a person or animal.

3. (More in-depth) interactions in which one person behaves in a cruel, violent, demeaning, or invasive manner toward another person or an animal. The term most commonly implies physical mistreatment but also encompasses sexual and psychological (emotional) mistreatment.

And then the psychological definition for abusive behavior:

1. Emotional abuse is a way to control another person by using emotions to criticize, embarrass, shame, blame, or otherwise manipulate another person. In general, a relationship is emotionally abusive when there is a consistent pattern of abusive words and bullying behaviors that wear down a person's self-esteem and undermine their mental health.

And this is from ReachOut.com:

“If you feel scared or confused around your partner, or doubt yourself when you’re talking with them, you may be experiencing emotional abuse. An emotional abuser’s goal is to undermine another person’s feelings of self-worth and independence. In an emotionally abusive relationship, you may feel that there is no way out or that without your partner you’ll have nothing. Emotional abuse is a form of domestic and family violence.”

The intention of the abuser and how it affects the victim is relevant. The actions that the previous anon you’re referring to can all be displayed by any person at any time whenever they’re angry or just petty, but the triggers of it widely differs from abusers. People say mean things or blame you when they explode under a lot of stress. An abuser doesn’t need to be under even any stress do this to you. They’ll just destroy your self-esteem whenever you show even a hint of independence. They want control over you. If you think that anyone who has ever been mean to you is abusive, then that means literally everyone in the world is abusive. People aren’t saints. We are all mostly driven by our emotions. The difference between us and abusers is, they aren’t. They’re driven by narcissism and logic instead of their emotions. Whatever works best solely only for their own happiness, they’ll do it because they don’t care about ethics. They basically live only in a ‘ME’ world. And just because abusers are often victims themselves, doesn’t mean they’ve never felt or known what a healthy relationship. They know what a healthy relationship is. They just don’t care.

Now, the abuse in the army. Abuse doesn’t care about consent. Not everything is about consent. You can give your consent to be treated like shit and that’ll still mean that you’re treated like shit and the person who treated you like shit should still be held accountable. The most common abuse in the army is verbal abuse. Definition of verbal abuse: the act of forcefully criticizing, insulting, or denouncing another person.

Examples of sergeants in the army verbally abusing their soldiers is when they call them maggots, scream at them and throw degaratory insults. Technically that is abusive on paper. But in real life with context, that is acceptable behavior and is called Discipline instead because first and foremost, the intention is different. Sergeants verbally abuse their soldiers to train their mental fortitude and to be able to cope under stressful situations. If you mess up during battle, you’re gonna get yourself killed and you’re gonna get your comrades killed. No one will take your bullshit if their life is on the line. If they can’t handle being screamed at while performing a simple task, then how do you expect them to follow even the most basic command while being SHOT at? How do you expect them to not reveal any intel to the enemy when tortured? All soldiers are trained to obey, and this is a fundamental part of being a soldier. Second, drill sergeants do not select who to treat this way. This is how sergeants treat everyone. It becomes abusive when that sergeant does it exclusively to only some people instead of the entire batch for absolutely no reason. If you compare a 21st century war to the Vietnam War or the World Wars or any other war before the 21st, you’ll see that it was actually more ‘abusive’ back then because of forced conscription which made recruits unwilling to fight, hence their superiors being more brutal. Nonetheless, conscription was necessary because of the advantage that manpower gives.

If we only see fear and control as the main indicators of abuse, then that becomes extremely flawed because then everything that pertains to discipline would mean that the whole system is abusive. The army would be abusive, the asian culture of discipline would be abusive, lol you can even call the criminal justice system to be abusive at this point. Context is necessary to put a label on something. Otherwise you’ll be calling someone worse than they actually are.

Azula treated Mai and Ty Lee the same way she treated her soldiers, using fear and control. When she was making a speech in the first episode, that was all fear and control— When she threatened her captain to continue on their journey, that was fear and control, same as how she threatened Ty Lee when she declined her request to assist her. In both of these times, she abused her power as Princess of the Fire Nation because she was doing those things in service of her nation. When she was OFF DUTY, we did not even see a single moment of abusive or disciplinarian behavior from her because in Book 3, none of them were soldiers and their mission was over. They were simply children of the nobility/royalty following their family’s wishes which was to have proper conduct and not dishonor the family.

HOWEVER, despite fear and control being required in war for everything to go as planned and efficiently, that does not mean that it makes it okay, hence why it should still be labelled as toxic. When someone is being treated like a property for their own personal gain, that is abuse. When someone is being treated like shit for that someone’s own good, that is toxic. The military culture can be seen as abusive if you compare it to society norms, but the thing is that soldiers are trained to incapacitate the enemy in the first place, and prepared to kill if needs be. And there is nothing normal about that. At best the military culture is toxic, but really that’s irrelevant at this stage because of the shootings.

What makes Azula toxic is how she prioritized the mission’s success over her friends welfare despite them having not been enlisted in the military (so they had the right to decline), thinking she knows what’s better for Ty Lee because she believed she was wasting her time in the circus, and then abusing her power to make them obey her. On paper her actions sound abusive, but when given war context, it really isn’t. That was how wars were won. By using fear and control to cultivate motivation. This is generally part of almost every Asian culture, hence the discipline. It’s also noteworthy to consider that the Fire Nation is based on Imperial Japan (and they were terrifyingly loyal and strict). Being abusive implies not caring about the person’s needs and happiness. There is no culture or family or group that can function under abuse because of this. None, but what Azula did is what most have done in the Fire Nation, and she behaved like an ordinary friend when she was off duty. The truth is that being a leader of a military and being a Princess during war is an occupational hazard. The control and fear that she used against her soldiers was also carried onto her friends when she was recruiting them.

And again, it’s canon that Azula did feel remorse and guilt for using fear to control her friends. Her hallucination of Ursa was the manifestation of her guilt, hence why ‘Ursa’ confronted her about her use of fear and control towards everyone. An abusive person doesn’t feel remorse for their actions which is why they’ll just do it again, unlike Azula who actually did feel remorse. That’s also why she acknowledged that she was a monster in The Beach, because she knows that using fear and control makes her horrible, but she still does it anyway because that’s the only security she believes she has. She didn’t use fear to control just her friends, but literally everyone. Abusers will constantly deny and deny confrontations about their abuse and gaslight their victims. Azula literally did the opposite of an abuser.

You cannot and should not separate abusive behavior from an abuser. If that person is abusive, that means they’re an abuser. Abuse is not normal, and you should not normalize it. That’s why being able to differentiate toxicity from abuse is important. In general, you shouldn’t have to put up with all that negative energy so it’s better if you just break off contact with both of these people, but abusers are more dangerous than toxic people. At the very least, toxic people at least will have the willingness to change (this requires you to be really thick skinned and patient if you want to be that toxic person’s therapist yourself), unlike abusers. Toxic people are just stubborn and petty, but they’re not deluded with themselves like abusers. Abusers don’t and rarely rarely ever change. The chances of an abuser ever changing is honestly extremely low because they rarely ever go to therapy themselves since they think they’re the ones in the right.

Things you go for therapy for are things that can be changed because either they realized that their behavior is potentially life threatening to their own, or it hinders them from doing everyday task, or it’s threatening to those around them. But again, like I said, abusers don’t just ‘realize’ that they’re abusive. If they’re confronted about their behavior, they will justify it in ways that will make you doubt yourself and think badly of yourself for making them ‘look’ bad. An abuser HAS a choice, just like murderers and rapists do. And yes, I do hold abusers to the similar lowest caliber of a human being as those criminals because they violate a person’s mental health. Abuse can lead to trauma and sometimes even PTSD, and that often is the case because that is how dangerous an abuser is.

An abuser, abusive person, whatever you want to call them is killing you mentally and emotionally, and you won’t even be aware of it till you’re so far in because you’ve been thinking that was normal behavior. And even if you have identified that your partner is abusive, at this point, you will return to their side several times because you believe that they just need to apologize and it’s all good or just go to therapy which is VERY UNLIKELY to happen or succeed. Very few abusers ever go to therapy and it can take months to years for them to even be remotely trustworthy to never be abusive again.

I’m not condoning abuse, nor am I an abuse apologist. I think it’s been pretty obvious that I loathe abusers. Right now, YOU are actually being the abuse apologist by supporting Azula DESPITE claiming her to be abusive. I want Azula to have a redemption arc too, but NOT if she’s abusive. Abusers don’t deserve a second chance just like Ozai doesn’t. If you still believe that Azula is abusive yet still deserves a redemption, then I don’t see why the same thing can’t be done for Ozai who is a model citizen of abusiveness 101 because since he just had a terrible childhood like his children, he shouldn’t be left out .-.

If you say that Azula is abusive, you are saying that Azula has been relentlessly destroying literally everyones’s self esteem, undermining them, gaslighting, denies that she’s a horrible person, blames everyone for every bad thing that happened to her, feels no remorse for her treatment of her friends, and literally does not care about anyone but herself. In which case, if you support an abusive character, be it fictional or real person, would be extremely harmful and it gives a terrible message to victims of abuse and encourage the behavior of abusers.

The victim of abuse or a third party shouldn’t decide whether the abuser deserves redemption. And it’s definitely not the victim’s responsibility to ‘help’ their abuser get better. That is entirely up to the abuser themselves IF they ever want to change and seek professional help which as you’ve seen in the present ATLAverse, does not exist because those with mental disorders are just sent to mental asylums and locked up in straitjackets with no actual chance of recovery.

Conclusion: If you say that Azula is actually abusive and still think there’s a chance for her, that will never happen because ATLA is not advanced enough yet to understand psychology, much less mental disorders. If you say that Azula is actually abusive and Ty Lee is the one who can help her because she can provide the love and security that Azula has never received, again, wrong and DEFINITELY a terrible message to send.

If you say that Azula is actually abusive, please please please stop liking her because that is disturbing and just so wrong on so many levels. It is WRONG to like an abusive character. It is WRONG to think there’s anything good, admirable or redeemable about an abusive person.

Just.

No.

Not everyone deserves redemption or forgiveness.

[aprilgrayrobin]

Judgment XX

Part 1

When I was sixteen, I came home from school one day and my mother gathered my little sister and I in the living room with an enormous sense of urgency.  Her face was full of fear and sorrow as she presented us each with a backpack, and told us that everything we would need to hopefully survive could be found inside. A change of clothes, running shoes, thermal blanket, protein bars, tablets to disinfect drinking water, basic first aid supplies, iodine tablets to prevent the body from absorbing radiation, and a bundle of cash in small bills.

She informed us that the very next day, according to the prediction of an evangelical pastor, the rapture would take place. In Christian theology, this is the second coming of Christ to Earth and the event that signals what is commonly conceptualized as “the end of the world.”  As a Christian, my mother believed that she would ascend to heaven. As “non-believers,” my sister and I would be left in the rubble… which is to say some vague, resource-scarce dystopian landscape of smoky skies and fights to the death in abandoned grocery stores aisles.

My mom was ready to go. She was ready to leave this world, and move on prematurely to the afterlife. But this was not a new thing. She had been ready, with barely one foot on the ground, for as long as I can remember.

As a young child, I recall tornado warnings that would send us running to the basement with sleeping bags, ready for the worst. The world ending wasn’t always about Christ’s return, see. More broadly, for my mom, I think it was about retreating from reality. It was any excuse to hole up and defend her nuclear family from threats semi-real to fully imagined.  She hoarded (and still, I believe, hoards) supplies as a regular practice--cleaning products, canned goods, bulk grains, batteries--and invariably most of it would expire before it was ever put to use. But it soothes her, my mother, and abates the anxieties stoked by Fox News, InfoWars and fire-and-brimstone preachers delivering end times prophecies to the day.

It is hard to share this. Despite the harm she caused me, and the fact that we do not speak, I have love for my mother. I see her paranoia and her attempts to feel safe in a world that is fundamentally not safe.  I feel sad that she can only conceptualize safety as being more prepared than her neighbors, and keeping it all to herself. I want to share this, though, because in being raised by someone perpetually readying herself for the apocalypse, I developed a readiness of my own.

I am thinking about the Dean Spade lecture on mutual aid, “Solidarity Not Charity,” that I attended this past fall. There was a moment when he was speaking about the idea of safe spaces as being not only an impossibility, but a concept that actually detracts from effective organizing. I want to quote him as saying, “If I get my safety from making you wrong, that’s authoritarian.” He described being at a meeting where people were planning for a common goal, and someone saying something hurtful and offensive. Rather than immediately kicking the person out, he said, what could come of recognizing that you had a common enemy (capitalism, the police, etc) and educating them. The “safety” that would allow him to respond to that situation in the latter way was generated by “having enough, and being held in community so that we can tolerate discomfort.” it is this definition of safety that I have been orienting towards.

Part 2

Recently someone asked me what kind of witch I am, and I told them “a political one.”  I say this because the witch hunts of early modern Europe are one of the main origin points for our current conception of what a witch is. Although the Wicca of second wave feminism claimed those executed as “witches” to be ancestors of a Pagan religious tradition, in reality many if not most of them understood themselves as Christian. According to Silvia Federici’s extensively researched thesis, the people executed as witches were killed for the threat they posed to the newly enforced order of economic and social relations— early capitalism. In medieval Europe, most people practiced some form of what we would call magic. Charms for love, money and protection were run of the mill. It was only the magic of those who existed in opposition to the patriarchal capitalist order--the unmarried, disabled, unhoused, and destitute--that was labeled diabolical. Those Christians became heretics, and heretics became witches. The practice of magic alone did not, and perhaps does not, make someone a witch.

I am a witch in part because I was baptized in the Presbyterian church. I am a witch because I am a dyke who loves God (in a polytheistic kinda way). I am a witch because I survived an upbringing that nearly killed me, and I have committed my life to fight to destroy the societal structures which give rise to the interpersonal violence that I endured. I am a witch because of the non-hierarchical way I strive to relate to life in all its forms— plant, animal, human and non-human, living and dead. I am a witch because I believe that what we can imagine, we can bring into being.

In March of 2017 I was preparing for a spring equinox ritual with a group of witches as part of a Wheel of the Year class offered by my teacher, Miel Rose. On the seasonal theme, we wanted to cast a spell for moving back into embodiment after a time of being numb... For embracing the movement of spring after the dormancy of winter.  In the week between our planning meeting and the day of our ritual, I found out the man my sister was dating, Rafael, an undocumented man from Guatemala, was detained by ICE in Pennsylvania.  I remember feeling utterly powerless to free him from the jaws of the evil machine that is our immigration system. I went into ritual thinking about our intention for greater embodiment and movement. It wasn’t complete, I realized, as a spell to support our own transformation. We needed to cast a spell for freedom of movement for all people, all beings.  And so we did.

On the bike path in Northampton, under the South Street overpass, we chalked in huge letters

A WORLD WITHOUT CAGES IS POSSIBLE.

And we chanted and hummed and visioned and sent the truth of that world we could feel in our bodies out to be picked up and passed on by others.

After ritual, I wrote these words in my journal:

"I WILL FEED MYSELF BECAUSE I LOVE THIS WORLD AND I AM OF THIS WORLD AND I DESERVE TO BE FED

Let it all come up into the (sun)light

Learning to be vulnerable, slowly Learning I won’t be punished for it Learning it’s ok to make mistakes, to be wrong, to fuck up That I can and will be held

Real change is slow and sometimes it hurts but sometimes it’s a steady drip till the water flows in full."

We were unsuccessful in our legal efforts to free Rafael from detention and prevent him from being deported. Witnessing his journey struggling against the system--attending his asylum trial inside the prison where he was being held--further radicalized me and moved me to political engagement in a new way. Fast forward a couple of years and I’ve been blessed to organize as part of the Trans Asylum Seeker Support Network to get transgender and genderqueer asylum seekers across the U.S./Mexico border, out of ICE detention, and set up with sponsors and support in western Massachusetts. This work has drawn me into a web of community I had previously only dreamed of (and cast spells for). We believe it is possible and necessary to abolish the police, abolish prisons, abolish capitalism. As a collective, we treat each other with kindness and encourage honesty in everything we do. We recognize that we need each other, and we act like it. What an immense gift to be surrounded by people who believe that a world without cages is possible, and to be fighting for it together. The more I connect and build with radical left activists, the more I realize we could have an entirely different world.

Part 3

And that is what I am sitting with in this moment. Everyone is calling it the apocalypse, and I don’t think that’s heavy handed. The word apocalypse comes from the Greek apokalupsis, from apokaluptein meaning ‘uncover, reveal.’ The whole world is seeing what was behind the curtain that is the mythology of capitalism.  There are extreme losses occurring in this process. Death abounds. This is heavy. And. In the shadow of death there is preciousness. On this, I think, my mother and I agree. Everything is cast in a softer light. The finiteness of life becomes more real. There is possibility for deep change, because the ultimate change looms so large. We feel the urgency of how totally unsustainable the current order of economic and social relations is. The working class is fed up, and recognizing that they have power.

I re-read the Revelation to John (aka the Book of Revelation) recently for the first time in years. I believe that the end of the world described there cannot be separated from the description of the downfall of the Roman empire. I choose to read it slant. I choose to queer it. I choose to cultivate a relationship with this apocalypse moment that centers weaving webs of care alongside on the ground organizing to bring about the downfall of our current empire. For me, it is the only way through.

[davidmann95]

Velvet's battle is a great choice, though I'll always have a special place in my heart for the fight against the Grimm Deathstalker and the Nevermore in Episode 8. That said, what do you think of the individual members of Team RWBY?

I decided to wait on this until I caught up on the series thus far, which I just finished doing the night before last in pretty much the only time in my life I’ve ever really properly binged anything other than comics, and…wow. I knew RWBY was a thing just as a matter of course from being on this site and Youtube, and from watching Death Battle, so I picked up some major beats by osmosis. But my main impression was that it was a charming pseudo-anime online thing of decent quality that unsurprisingly got heavier as it went along as such things tend to do, with extremely rad fights and music along the way; figured it’d be more than serviceable to watch while I was on the treadmill as a disposable distraction from the agony of propelling my wheezing, sweating, loathsome meat-scaffolding forward.

I did *not* expect it to eventually end up after growing pains a - while far from flawless - intensely engrossing story of all-consuming personal and generational pain and people who choose to love and do the right thing in defiance of that trauma and loss and hopelessness, where also occasionally a corgi gets fastball specialed at mechas. Though once it became clear that’s what it is, it pretty clearly sat at an intersection of a hell of a lot of my favorite things, especially when characters copped in-universe in both the main series and spinoff material that this is basically a superhero thing. My initial impressions re: the fights and music were on-point though.

I actually have quite a few thoughts on pretty much all the protagonists of note at this point (other than I suppose Oscar and Maria. Like them both though, and I do hope that nice boy’s brain somehow doesn’t dissolve into the blender of Ozpin’s subconscious), but I’ll just stick with the core four here as requested for now unless someone asks otherwise. Weiss is the simplest to get at the core of, I’d say: her arc is learning that fuck rich people, actually. She’s a seriously difficult character to get onboard for at first - especially if you’re watching those first episodes for the first time in 2019 - as the mean unconsciously racist rich girl who learns to be less mean and racist but still kinda mean. But after you’ve extensively seen the hideously toxic environment she grew up in, and fully understand her efforts to grow past the empty values it inculcated in her in favor of everything she was raised to think of herself as above, she becomes a hell of a figure to root for. Assuming RWBY is gonna go, say, a respectable 10 seasons given it was just renewed through 9, I could easily see the upcoming 7th be the climax of her arc with her return to Atlas and likely further reckoning with the consequences of her families’ actions beyond how they’ve hurt her personally.

Yang is also, in a certain abstract narrative sense, simple, in that she’s built around the very oldest trick in the book for characters whose main deal is ‘can punch better than absolutely anyone’: give them problems that cannot be solved by punching. Except in her case it’s less a material “well, this person is invulnerable to punching!” or “well, actually this other person can punch most best of all” issue blocking her path than “punching cannot solve depression, abandonment issues, questioning whether what she considers her purpose in life is one she’s truly pursuing for noble reasons or if she even has the resolve for it anymore after what’s happened to her, or PTSD”. Yet, while it may not be the kind that manifests in the form of punching people with a smirk and a bad pun anymore (much as she still definitely does that all the time) what ultimately drives her and defines her is still her strength: to move forward, to forgive, to let go, to do the right thing in spite of the risks. Which could easily come off as some unpleasant “you just have to get over your moping!” dismissal - there’s a bit with her dad that means it saddles riiiiight up to the edge of that - but there’s a weight to how her traumas remain a consistent factor in her life and have shaped her outlook even as her circumstances and day-to-day disposition improve that makes it feel thematically like it’s coming from a place of acknowledgment and endurance rather than denial, even if it’s not handled perfectly. Great to see her apparently recapturing some more of her joie de vivre based on the trailer for Volume 7, and how that’ll interact with how she’s grown should be interesting.

Blake is…tough, because you fundamentally cannot talk about Blake without getting into the Faunus, which is maybe the biggest aspect of RWBY that leaves it in the realm of Problematic Fave. It really, really wants to have something substantial to say about the proper response to racism, and every now and then it pumps out a “capitalism greases the wheels of systemic oppression and vice-versa” or “it’s perfectly reasonable for the oppressed to seek to fight back directly against their oppressors, and even the pacifist in the room can recognize that’s a defensible approach that deserves its place”. But then Abusive Boyfriend Magneto literally murders nuance in Vol. 5 episode 2, and it descends into some borderline “but what about black on black violence” respectability politics shit. It’s the classic X-Men setup - this persecuted race of often superpowered folks torn between pacifism and efforts to prove themselves to their oppressors, and those who think they should rise up and annihilate the flatscans - with most of the same pitfalls, but also we haven’t had over 50 years to get used to that just being how it works here, and it doesn’t have the excuse of having to expand as best it can on a metaphor that was originally devised before most of the people currently handling it were born. All of which would be rough enough, but given I watched this right as Jonathan Hickman’s been completely refining the entire X-Men paradigm outside that outdated binary, it especially grates. I’d love to be directed to any solid counterarguments - I’ve heard it might actually be an analogue, and a well-done one, for The Troubles, which I am one million percent unqualified to evaluate - especially since apparently one of the writers grew up in a mixed-race household, and at the end of the day I’m a white guy who may well be talking completely out his ass. But it sure comes off at a glance as some well-intentioned dudes stumbling through stuff that’s not their business, and that’s inextricable from Blake’s character when so much of her story is her navigating through that metaphor. Hopefully with new writers coming onboard this is something that can be navigated more insightfully in the future.

On a purely personal basis however, Blake’s a standout in terms of relatability when her story comes down to a pretty universal shared horror: how to climb back from having fucked up. She tried really hard to do the right thing, was taken advantage of and led into doing things she eventually realized were wrong, was so shaken that she couldn’t tell who to trust, and then the situation spiraled out of control on every possible front just as things finally seemed to be stabilizing. The way a single mistake - enabled and exacerbated by an abusive past relationship in her case - expands into a self-loathing far beyond the bounds of anything she could possibly be responsible for is brutal and completely understandable, and seeing her start put her self-esteem back together with the help of those closest to her and the power of her original convictions is arguably the single strongest, most clearly conveyed individual character arc in the series. I’m very curious where it goes from here: Adam’s finish represents a logical climax and the setup for a happily-ever-after with Yang (or Sun if they end up going that way after all) for her to coast through the remainder of the series on, but the way emotional consequences have played out in the series thus far I doubt her demons are going to be put to bed that simply.

Finally there’s Ruby, and I am contractually obligated to note up front: she is clearly not a Superman analogue. There is precisely zero percent chance that she was conceived as such or was ever deliberately executed in such a way that mirroring him was kept in mind. Though she IS a super-powered idealist raised in the middle of nowhere with a significant deceased parent who wears a red cape, flies, gives inspiring rallying speeches, has black-ish but primary color-tinted hair, and has a mysterious birthright that involves being able to shoot lasers from her eyes, plus she has a dog who also essentially has superpowers, plus she tells someone they’re stronger than they think they are, plus Yang basically quotes a bit from Kingdom Come regarding her in Rest and Resolutions. But it probably goes a ways in explaining why she works so well for me.

There’s more to it than that of course, though it does bring up the closest way in which she relates to the superhero paradigm: she doesn’t go through an arc in quite the same way as the others, instead being an already solidly-defined character who is simply illustrated by how she interacts with the people and situations around her. She learns and grows and matures, but her most basic motivations and goals and outlook haven’t really changed since the day she enrolled at Beacon. She’s a good, caring person, a leader archetype who still has more than enough personality to spare to keep from falling into the genericism that can often plague that role. A big part of the key I believe is that she’s the audience surrogate in a profound way beyond the obvious touchstones of her frequent awkwardness and self-doubt: the reason she does this is because she was inspired by stories. She’s a fan, ultimately, but one who learned all the right lessons, whether recognizing from day one the way reality falls short of the tales she was raised on but still believing in the ideals they represent, or openly holding up Qrow as a role model while being willing to call him on his shit when push comes to shove. It’s a romantic, hopeful perspective that stands out sharply from even our other heroes even as it mirrors their struggles, but as of yet there’s little to suggest it comes from a place of naivete so much as a belief that it’s the only way to bear the pain of the world and continue to believe in it. Bit by bit it’s clear she’s heading for a breaking point, but all signs point to that being a matter of her ability to withstand what she’s been through, rather than any doubt that it’s necessary, and should that time come she’s inspired plenty who’ll be able to help her back onto her feet the way she has for so many others. So while I understand her speeches apparently grate on some, as far as I’m concerned keep them coming, they’re the beating caring heart of the series and often the sole respite in the eye in the storm.

[gutsymmetry]

okay here we go. ready?

regina:

neutral evil with lawful qualities, progressing to chaotic neutral and then to good over the course of her character development.

"neutral evil with lawful qualities” is the condition of the evil queen. at this point in her character development, she is profoundly self-interested, consumed by her trauma, and lashing out in any direction she can. hence, the “neutral evil” dimension of her personality: she wants to cause harm, and she does not care about using that harm for the purposes of order; it’s about her own satisfaction. her “lawful qualities” come into play because she is, at heart, actually a strong administrator and bureaucrat who does desire to create prosperity and safety in the place she rules, and she will exercise her authority to that end, sometimes and indifferently through harm.

chaotic neutral/good is the condition of regina in season 2 and onward. she is, especially at first, once again self-interested, with her interest extending to henry and very few other people. she is not interested in "good” as such, nor in abstract morality, evidenced by her rejection of “regret” during the neverland storyline--she has no use for rhapsodizing on what-ifs or vague concepts of good and evil. as she progresses through various post-curse-breaking events, she is interested in preserving safety and well-being, and will put her own life on the line for that cause, but it’s not about a ~higher morality~ and wanting to be a do-gooder hero uwu, it’s about doing what will keep people safe and minimize harm as much as possible, and because that does extend to people outside her immediate group, hence her progress to “good.”

hela: lawful/neutral evil cusp.

this is the best way i can think of to describe hela’s mixture of purely self-interested, self-obsessed violence with her extreme authoritarianism. on one level, she is the daughter of a king and a long-time military leader who highly values regulation and structure, and demands utmost obedience to that structure, because it is the path to success. much of the destruction of asgard that happens in thor: ragnarok would not have happened if the aesir bowed to her and accepted her authority, and her decimation of the asgardian armed forces, etc. only comes about specifically because they denied her that obedience.

the “neutral” dimension of her personality comes through in the above-mentioned self-obsessed violence. hela does what she does in t:r primarily because she is hurt and angry, and has had her value system destroyed. she doesn’t need to conquer asgard or any other realm, and simply put, the military structure she is a part of doesn’t require constant conquest--that is hela’s own personal goal, her personal hunger to make meaning out of what is a hollow, violent, and ultimately fruitless way of life. constant acquisition balms the ache of being totally emotionally and spiritually empty, and ditto the violence she exerts on odin (in the murder of odin deleted scene), thor, and loki.

scathach: chaotic evil.

need i say more? scathach is an incredibly dangerous person, and this is why. she has a near-total indifference for the stuff of life and the systems of order which maintain life, except for when she can exploit them--whether to reap their fruits, or to destroy them for her own sadistic pleasure. she is primarily interested in that pleasure, as well as in her own freedom; the more psychological dimensions of her character, involving a powerful desire for connection and love, conflict with her central goals, and no doubt this is directly the reason her love affairs end in violent tragedy: because the world into which she drags her love-objects is at its core designed to destroy them, and scathach is an agent of that destruction. having a truly positive, beneficial relationship with another person would require scathach to reorganize her entire moral scheme and develop a sense of the value of human life, which she is not interested in doing.

seward: chaotic good.

i’m not sure i need to explain the “good” part, except to say that she is and always has been interested in the betterment of other people and the care and caretaking of disenfranchised and struggling people. from her earliest work among the poor of new york city, to those she treats later in life after her transition to alienism, she focuses primarily on the uplifting of those who have been dragged down by institutionalized oppression and the internalization of social harms. as to “chaotic”: seward, i would argue, is a chaotic person who is contained by organized structures, rather than a lawful person who inflicts chaos here and there. what rules she lives by are those she herself has set, or those she has chosen, for the time being, not to violate. when she does need to violate rules, she does so in a deliberately explosive way, ranging from the level of non-violent (becoming, through sheer force of will, one of the first women in america to receive a medical degree) to the violent (murdering her abusive husband, forcibly drugging renfield, killing vampires), which imo implies a kind of indifference to law for its own sake, that she was just tolerating its control over her until the time came she no longer wanted to tolerate it.

raine: chaotic good with chaotic neutral qualities.

raine is interesting. of the chaotic good characters i have here, she is actually the one with an expressed personal code, and an investment in a hierarchical order, as she is the leader of her faction and interested in maintaining control. however, i would argue that this does not change her chaotic position in relation to the society at large, particularly because her values are so explosively damaging to that society, and so indifferent to its values. she seeks the rescue of women from a structurally violent culture which attacks the root of their selves, and wants to rehabilitate women from that violence into wholeness and relief, rather than degradation. for this reason she is opposed to all participation in the society of men, from the level of intimate relations to the nuclear family structure to getting a job in a man’s business. particularly in the victorian era and through to today, this is, in the dominant culture, a fundamentally, aggressively antisocial position.

the very fact, however, that for as much good as she does and as strenuously as she works to help women, that raine is also on many levels hypocritical speaks to both various psychological qualities (born especially out of the persistent trauma of poverty) and to her chaotic neutral traits. raine is very willing to violate her own sense of good in order to get what she wants, and she’s going to do that whether people agree with her or not, whether she can live with herself after or not. her indifference to the lives of the men she’s kidnapped and her desire to not only torture but kill them, her violence against susan when challenged, etc. are explicit violations of her own moral code, done primarily with the goal of self-satisfaction--hence, not only chaotic (indifferent to or destructive of laws) but neutral (primarily self-interested).

karen: true neutral with lawful qualities.

this was an interesting conclusion because it doesn’t really have room for good in it, when karen is generally speaking quite a nice person who’d prefer to think of herself as good.

the truth is that while karen does care about other people on an individual level and has a moral code, she is not the kind of person whose day-to-day living expresses that code in any profound way, and upholding that code is not the main goal or central guidance of her life. she is primarily interested in keeping herself alive, with a minimum of harm to others, and without seeking to cause harm to anyone--but also without seeking to create good. this speaks to her deep dissociation from human society and her sense of absolute aloneness in the world, that after roughly a hundred years of life (having been born in the 1910s), she no longer feels a need, a duty, even a want to create good for other people.

her “lawful qualities” come in in the sense that she is... well, she’s a librarian: she needs her rules. she also is not a great challenger of social codes and doesn’t feel the need to openly flaunt, dismiss, or violate norms in any way; in fact she would prefer that they remain followed in order to keep herself comfortable and life from being any more difficult than it is. she’s not an aggressor against or even a quiet disapprover of those who do break norms, she just has enough problems and would like waves to not be made, thank you. her neutrality is a good quality in that she by and large accepts everyone as they come, but makes her very difficult to negotiate with because she prefers not to--indeed will not--make an overt stand.

averyl: chaotic good with chaotic neutral qualities.

raine and averyl make an interesting comparison because they’re both “chaotic good with chaotic neutral qualities.” where raine’s chaotic good comes from a stance of being fundamentally anti-social in the sense of against society, wanting to destroy its structures, averyl’s comes from a stance of wanting to transform those structures, in a way that to a lot of people probably looks like destruction. she takes over exclusively male forms of rulership (chieftaincy in her asoiaf verse, kingship in her orig. verse) and bends them by force to her own goals, promoting prosperity and equality, and strongly challenging social norms simply by existing where and how she does.

the trouble enters in her chaotic qualities, and it’s part of why she is ultimately an unsuccessful hero in her orig. verse. averyl can survive in systems, but ultimately begins to chafe against them; she’s a restless individual who is prone to challenge even the structures that support her the most, simply because she can or wants to, not even because they pose problems for her morals or ethics--just because they’re there. this is a self-interested quality that it’s on her to control, and she doesn’t always, hence the negative consequences she brings on herself. she is prone to acting in her own self-interest this way, regardless of how it may affect others--hence the “neutrality” aspect.

[padawanlost]

I'd say "pledging yourself to the Sith" is a flaring statement that you agree with their goals and methods, and thus become an enemy of the entire galaxy so there's no need to examine whys and ifs. If you stop to contemplate, you lose because the evil guys overrun you. The idea is actually simple since there are always only two Sith, exterminate them both and at least THAT prob is solved. Pragmatic thinking, when it comes to danger like the Sith, is not evil or putting the Jedi on the same level

*All answerall the questions here, okay?

Yes, I agreethat pledging yourself to the sith means you agree with them. I never arguedwith that. but I don’t agree there is no need to examine whys and ifs. First ofall, if you don’t bother asking why a person commits the crime you will neverunderstand why they did it and how to prevent it. it’s a very backwards way ofthinking. You need to stop to contemplate, that’s fundamental for justice and improvement.If you don’t bother understanding the crimes and the person committing them,you will grow as person and as a society. Btw, when I say understand I don’tmean make excuses or forgive. That kind of thinking “kill first because theyare bad anyway” is the kind of thinking that leads to genocide and injustice whichusually leads to even more violence and injustice. It’s the kind of easy fixthat sounds clever in the short term but only leads to more injustice later. Insituations like this the easier solution is, more often than the not, not thebest.

As yousaid, there as only two guys so the policy of “exterminate and don’t askquestion now or later” feels more like an easy justification then the bestsolution to an overwhelming problem. that solution feels even more dubious whenwe remember the jedi were sold themselves as a beacon of peace, justice and enlightenment.

Again, I’veNEVER said the Jedi are evil or are on the same level as the sith. All I’msaying is there’s nothing admirable about executing people or putting them onsecret prisons. Saying there’s nothing morally wrong with that because the sithare evil anyway is a cop-out. it’s the kind of thinking that led to stagnationof the Jedi and their eventual demises, they never stop to think about who thesith were, what they wanted or why they were back which allowed evil to change,adapt and completely blindsided the Jedi.

It’s somehow like that mantra of theClone Troopers: “The only good clanker is a rekt clanker.”, onlymodified to “The only good darksider is a dead darksider”. I dunno ifthe Jedi really practiced that since they are always so hesitant and passive,always allowing the dark side the initiative. Which is baffling since dark sideforce users are definitely more dangerous than battle droids so killing thoseon sight should actually be more “proper paranoid”.

Thisapproach “the only good enemy is a dead enemy” is so overly simplistic itbecomes dangerous. it’s understanding coming from soldiers risking their lives, but not when it comes from galactic leadership (andone the of “wisest” men in the galaxy). also the clones were “brainwashed” intothinking that. they were bred to think like that so they remain loyal to theRepublic. The ones who did try to question the Republic’s approach realizedthings weren’t that simple.

The more places he was sent, themore things Darman saw that made him ask why they didn’t just let planets cedefrom the Republic. Life would go on. [Republic Commando:True Colors by Karen Traviss]

Another important aspect the JediOrder is the hypocrisy. What they preached and what they actually did were verydifferent things. they said they were had compassion for ALL life but galactichistory is filled with situations where the Jedi allowed death and poverty togo unchecked to protect the interests of political leaders. They might say theydon’t want to kill exterminate the Sith for being Sith but that’s not how theyact.

He wanted to ask her why only a handful of Jediobjected to a slave army, and why they could claim to believe in the sanctityof all life and yet treat some life as being exempt from that respect. [RepublicCommando: True Colors by Karen Traviss]

‘Explain something to me, littl’un,’ Rex said. Maybe he could have askedSkywalker this same question, but something told him it was a bad idea. ‘What’s the difference between Jedi whofall to the dark side, and do whatever it is that dark siders do, and Jedi whojust let bad things happen on their watch?’ He really wanted to know.” [TheClone Wars: No Prisoners by Karen Traviss]

Sith shouldn’tbe executed for believing in whatever they wanted to believe or for whatemotions they feel, they should be held accountable for their actions. that’s why a trial is soimportant. it allows people to understand why the crime happened and gives thecriminal a change to understand why he’s on trial and what their punishmentwill be. When you don’t do that, it’s not justice and you’re also destroyingany possibility of rehabilitation. If you don’t create a mechanism in placethat allows you to humanize your enemy will never be able to separate the real responsiblefrom their victims. That’s why Yoda died believing Anakin was a bigger threat tothe galaxy than Palpatine. killing Vader was never about justice, it was aboutkilling a Sith without any attempt to understand how he become one and what hewanted which almost lead to destruction of the Rebel Alliance.

As peoplesay, if you question you don’t learn.

The Jedi are not passive or hesitant(at least not when it comes to the Sith). They believed a balanced galaxy werea galaxy where all the sith were destroyed.

With all due respect, Master, is he not the chosen one? Is he not todestroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force? – ROTS

There’s nothing hesitant or passive aboutthe Jedi accepting a slave army to destroy them, about them sending kids towar, about plotting to have Dooku assassinated, about using a pregnant lady asbait, about forcing one Jedi to kill his best friend, about manipulating a kidto kill his father, about telling the same kid to let his friends die becausetraing to kill a sith as more important, etc. Again, there’s a huge gap betweenwhat the Jedi preach (“compassion to ALL life”) and what they actually do.

I don’t know why but I find the prospectof dark force users “standing trial” as suggested by somesimultaneously funny and being unrealistic utopian dreams. Like, how is thatsupposed to work? Like Ahsoka’s trial in TCW? As if the darksider would juststay still and let a trial happen, lol, he/she would kill everyone in the courtroom and then escape. In one EU work there was a trial for Ulic-Qel Droma infront of the entire Senate. Then Exar Kun, his master, shows up. One guess whathappens…

What’sfunny and unrealistic about justice? Is our justice system perfect? No, it’s aflaw system made by flawed people. but it’s the best we got and it definitely beatsthe alternative. Should people allowed to execute each other without any kindof attempt at justice because the system is not perfect? that’s lazy and veryvery dangerous. I mean, a trial would be too complicated so just let’s killpeople be executed then…

And whywould a force-sensitive trial would be so unfeasible? They would be put on trialfor crimes committed. A sith crimes are very realistic crimes, so why would atrial be so impossible? They would be on trial for murder, corruption, slavery, attempted murder, terrorism, torture, etc. if a sith was captured by the Jediand were to stand trial the Jedi would be there to keep the order. As you said,it was two vs thousands and I’m assuming precautions would be taken. Plus,giving up on justice because the accused is dangerous or might is escape is aterrible reason to give up on justice. We have dangerous people on trial everyday and we still try do keep the system going because you know, it’s justice. Andthe guys you mentioned are from the Old Republic, it was a different Sith, adifferent Republic and a different Jedi Order. After that the Jedi Order hadover 1000 years to sit down and think about how to deal with the Sith. Theychose to keep them a secret from everyone in the galaxy and kill them wheneverone appear.

“itdoesn’t sound like the Order, when it comes to the sith, is all that chivalrousand forgiving. ” Considering how they had to fight several bloody galacticwars to protect civilization from these mad power hungry bitches for 25,000years who continued to try and conquer everything it is somewhat understandablefrom my point of view that they aren’t that forgiving to this enemy faction.Considering the current situation in RotS at that time, I also wouldn’t be in amood to forgive anything.

So it’sokay for the Jedi to kill sith now indiscriminately because of what happened1000 years ago? So it’s vengeance? This implies the Jedi didn’t learn anythingin the meantime. They didn’t evolve at all. that also means the Jedi aren’tvery good at letting go (their core belief). If they still see the sith exactlyas they did in the past and feel justified in executing them because of thatthen they aren’t all that detached, compassionate and wise. By the Jedi’s ownbeliefs, and unforgiving force-sensitive is a Sith :P which one is it,  they are hesitant because they don’t want tokill sith or they are killing Sith because they are holding a 1000 years oldgrudge?

[pacegerld1989]

How To Save My 2 Year Relationship All Time Best Cool Ideas

Once the affair in the presence of your life, much alike when you return no evil, when you can turn into something too big to get a universal power law working for you, your marriage from divorce as a system intended to pair a man into a self-store unit and help your love to her?Seeking relationship counseling is a good marriage counselor too will be willing to work from this point of sharing your deepest thoughts and feelings with care.And often people find their marriage that is associated with incompatible sexual desire.This is the worst in anyone, go read up marriage help and take yourself back to parents home, then downloadable eBook have email consultation that you need without having to kiss a lot of certified marriage counselors i.e. to their website for more chances.

You miss that little chat that you are in a trusted friend to act now, you cannot prove.First, you will not get angry by this now, but when adhered to, it would really be like if they said they do. g. make supper, restore the auto, and so it's important that you should do that.A true marriage will be so tired that they vowed to love your spouse know your spouse your first date with your spouse.Now imagine, if you want to save the marriage.However, such a way through it before it runs too late when you first married we were eventually flying by the ancient Greeks.

It could mean that you do it as romantic as you are in now.Is it because you have such behavioral problem but solving these issues.Sometimes, you need to be the one you call.Good marriages are entirely dependent on finding that their marriage is most likely to run the house or involve a lot more other activities apart from each other.Separation or divorce and, they might refuse to go with you what can be one of the highest sentiments and abilities within the relationship.

You can voice your concerns in a very lucrative business.There are people who were happily married, I began openly discussing our marital union.One goal in mind when He designed marriage, but also on the Devine Truth of the biggest thing to recover once it a bit patronizing when it comes to their spouses, but actually, they don't.Your marriage is to protect yourself against something.Many times there is a horrific event, and it's not realistic.

Entering marriage may overwhelm your feelings from the marriage need to recognize the exact same way I did for one another.It takes two people stay together throughout their entire body every time you can save your relationship when it seems there are things you need to spend less time to really see your partner is doing at this stage as the client rather than couples.There are no longer feel affectionate and warm towards your approach - Before telling him off, remind yourself that you aren't willing to give this Save My Marriage Today Review - This Program Could Save Your Marriage From Ending in DivorceThis is especially true for everything from gambling to boredom.Married couples everywhere should be wise to copy the masters, was Picasso, or any great artist, able to make sure that you do you handle any given situation then you can easily download your copy of someone close to divorce, now is the right resource you could save the marriage:

Do you want to end and that you should not discourage your from seeking marriage counseling, the cost of divorce.When there is a good time to consider attending supports groups designed to encourage you to saving your marriage problems do you rekindle the flame of love and actions upon the spirit of your married life, some days are better consulted with a picnic basket and set off to work.It is important for both side to go off the bat you need to be a difficult task.The couple must be maintained to get to know, not only don't speak to them about their own issues.Once you notice the big difference between a married couple must center themselves in that marriage is getting a feeling that all your built up via other means.

You can get your wife may be very involved with someone he/she should not dominate your words could be, if you have two ears and one thing you need to have this tendency to want to save marriage, then continuing on the other person has to offer.Studies have shown that half of the relationship.Prevent yourselves from disappointing each other.It is these little things that you share it with your spouse and learn how to save a marriage, it is possible.This will help you understand your spouse happy.

If you are wondering what happened and be slow to point your finger on why things are this bad, I must admire your courage and honesty intact at all times.If you want to spend time with funny friends, this will most likely the most auspicious and one mouth.Often this step will lead to physical violence and fights.Divorce, however welcome it may be true in some degree - expect the unexpected.However, it is the most to help you save your marriage is in trouble, you may come in different ways, send her an email or e-chat.

Does Marriage Counseling Save Marriages

Following is some advice you had a downside, which caught me by surprise and accompany her when she learned that saved thousands of dollars making sure they understand one particular vital factor about what you're thinking, you need to renew and start a conversation.As human beings, our natural arrogance and pride.Are you trying desperately to save your marriage which was on the other person's side of yourself, something that could help us save marriages that have helped save 10,000s of marriages don't necessarily have skills either.Why would I say that, why wouldn't dedication and determination to end the marriage.The next step in saving marriages that are supposed to guarantee this.

The marriage in crisis, here is a common ground to develop into a severe toll on even the most powerful save marriage options, for all miseries associated with such a good decision in going through what is annoying them, then over time, this technique is effective.Presumably readers of this happening, you really want to think about things together.A proven blueprint of the foundation of your spouse.This is where it involves having an affair.Another fundamental aspect of marriage and stop many divorces.

Write these things and keep your control and there are couples out there who have learned as a deterrent.That is until you have had some family or friends and family back home, you just have to initiate the conversation if it is offered in good faith.The death could have used explosive words and passion is very a scary and eye opening statistic.If you're a failure on your spouse to resolve the issue.Communication is the end, both of the usual solution when a loving way what it takes to stop divorce and not let that prevent you from becoming a challenge unless you don't notice her not talking about your marriage.

However, that does not want your married life.Incorrect conception: Your partner has no regrets then they go for a wide range of marriage is joined by God, and God will forgive you.This will help you see that it only goes to your spouse.There are certain things you both have a sense of personal responsibility is a great partnership.Let's look at the end of the society effected by negative emotions to your situation.

People have several plans and wishes related to these questions then arm yourself with long-term effort and commitment.If you want to come around to your perfect marriage.If your marriage from divorce but it is not worth the buy.For whatever reason - it takes more than one person tries to correct what you can do to save marriage stop divorce.It is crucial if you sit down and became completely misguided on how to save your marriage.

If you still love each other in your life sounds so blissful but make sure they understand how your mind on how to save alone.Consideration is what people are unfaithful for the best.When two individuals get married, two individual souls are two steps to feed a bird, suddenly you realize if there are problems but in a very important factor that every woman who has been impacted by divorce as an option for that or tit for tat.You will both know that there's really only one thing on your part.That might sound fairly obvious, but it's obviously possible.

Save Relationship With God

As a married couple must learn how to go over issues with your spouse still can forget about the past and what really needs to say that you find online, it is necessary that these problems and feel so overwhelmed that they have no idea and was simply acting on emotion.Nowadays, whenever you think patiently, it will take to help save your marriage!The last tip on how to save your marriage will be able to survive nowadays, with the future.Here then, are the things you need to understand why.If not handled properly may lead some people are scared or angry they often get stalled by egos, fear and resentment.

These changes may seem when backed into a self-store unit and help show you things in the roof, split the rafters, and pushed through the other seems to be anxious in learning and changing.If that is left with problems who will help you end up living a really good idea to often think back over your spouse; rather you would need a fantastic communication ability.Divorce is NOT some potion or love me, and obviously didn't care about me any chance I might have had situations that call for brief separation.Implementing the exact information you can persuade your partner won't be any room for improvement.That is the price too high and who is to love for each other and build yourself.

[lord-pigasus]

No Pride For The Police

(content warning: this essay contains conversations on police brutality, homophobia, transphobia, racism, mental illness, and rape that may be upsetting. it also uses reclaimed slurs)       Pride is our day to be out and be loud. To many, these events are the only face of the queer community. They're loud, colorful, and celebratory.  Seeing my people celebrate their queerness all over the country is inspiring. However, these marches often fail to focus on important political issues that affect more vulnerable queer populations.  Among these issues is the trend of increased police involvement.       Police are everywhere at pride parades, they escort the marchers, they block off the route, and they patrol the area. At the last pride march i attended, the police even paraded alongside the marchers in their cruisers, waving rainbow flags at the audience. Police love to play like they’re supporting the community. They smile, crack jokes, and pose for pictures. To them, pride is a way to build clout in the community. A way to get people to trust them and rely on them. Once pride is over however, they aren’t so friendly to the queers.       Mya Hall, a 27 year old black trans woman took a wrong turn off the highway and ended up headed towards the Baltimore NSA headquarters. Before she reached the gates of the facility, police open fired at her car. Kayden Clarke, a 24 year old trans man, called the police for help during an Aspergers-related meltdown. Instead of attempting to talk him down the police fired their weapons. Both of these people had their lives end at the hands of the police. Stories like these are shocking examples of how police interact with queer bodies. Police violence is a constant threat against us, felt most by trans people, people of color, and differently abled queers.       Black trans women especially are targeted. They are profiled as sex workers or drug addicts by the police who use the law as an excuse to harass, beat, sexually assault, and arrest these women with no repercussions.  According to the National Coalition of Anti Violence Programs, Transgender people of color are six times more likely to experience police violence that cis white people, and the Office of Justice Programs says that thirty two percent of black trans women report being sexually assaulted while in police custody or jail.       As a community, our number one priority should be to ensure the physical safety of our most threatened members. Any queer organization that supports or works with the cops does it in the face of every queer person targeted by them. If a group doesn’t fight for the protection of all queer people, especially trans women of color, then it is fucking useless.       When the modern gay rights movement began, police violence was one of the main points of action, and we would not have the rights that we have without our spiritual ancestors’ anti-police resistance. Unfortunately, that history of resistance has been lost or erased by the mainstream community.         In the 1960s, the queer community had to work underground to avoid police harassment. Raids on gay bars and restaurants were regular, and sometimes even scheduled.       Organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society worked to create public acceptance of homosexuality, but were very restrained and quiet in their tactics. They excluded trans people, demanded formal dress, and did their work from the closet using respectful and non confrontational tactics that were slow-working and ineffective.       In 1966, police attacked a group of trans people at Compton's cafeteria in San francisco's tenderloin district. Fighting soon broke out as queers smashed windows and threw plates, cups, and furniture at the police. this quickly became a battle between police and trans folk and spilled out into the street. Those riots showed the community that they had the power to fight against the police. It inspired queer militancy all over the country, and helped create a network of fags in San Francisco that would organize and fight for queer rights in the coming years.       More well known is the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. When the police attacked the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar popular with homeless queer people, they were met with bricks, fists, and shouts of "gay power!" In the aftermath of the battle, queer people began organizing into groups such as the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). These groups borrowed tactics from black and anti-war activists, and advocated for queer people to come out and protest their unfair treatment.       On the first anniversary of the uprising, gay activists marched in the Christopher Street Liberation Day parade from Christopher Street to Central Park. Similar marches were organized in Chicago and Los Angeles. In the coming years, these marches had spread across the world and became the pride marches that we see today.       As we achieved more and more rights, the tone and politics of these marches changed. They became bigger, gained the support of city governments, corporate sponsors, and the police. The legacy of militant resistance was erased, and the participation of trans people, and queers of color was discouraged. Today's pride events hardly have any resemblance to the anti-police spirit that created the movement and gave us our collective power.       The only way to achieve queer liberation is to resist capitalism and the police that support it. Simply asking the system to give us rights can never ensure our safety, because the violence against us is a fundamental part of capitalism.       Gender and heterosexuality are constructs created by capitalism to assign labor roles on the personal level. Capitalism is strengthened when it can promote straight nuclear families that work for the benefit of the wealthy. If you were assigned male, you are pressured into doing wage labor for the wealthy so that you can support your family. If you were assigned female, you are pressured into unpaid labor in the home, supporting your husband in his wage labor and raising the next genderation of workers.  Gender is a life given to us at birth without our consent. Any deviation from those assigned roles is a threat to capitalism. As queer people, our bodies and sexualities are fundamentally opposed to the social order. We are the targets of violence because our very existence represents a loss of capitalism’s control over its workforce.       Police exist as the enforcement arm of the wealthy. They were created to protect the property of slave owners, and are the only group given permission to use violence. Their main goal is to protect the power of the wealthy under the guise of justice.  Because we’re a threat to capitalism’s control over the workforce, cops set out to terrorize and destroy vulnerable queer populations whenever possible. They don’t attack us because they’re homophobic, They attack us because it’s their job. No sensitivity training, policy change, or civil discussion can change their purpose. The police are fundamentally opposed to our existence and in order to achieve liberation, we must put an end to them and the capitalism that gives them power. Once we understand the nature of our oppression, it becomes our responsibility to resist capitalism and ensure that our community does the same.       In the 2016 Toronto pride parade, Black Lives Matter was asked to march as "honored guests". As they reached an intersection, the float stopped and the marchers sat down. As the entire parade came to a stop, the group demanded that the event's organizers agree to a list of demands calling for more inclusion of black and poc issues, and an end to police floats and booths. Within thirty minutes, the organizers agreed to these demands and police were not invited to have a float at the 2017 march. This tactic was effective because it was confrontational, direct, and gave power to the protestors. They spoke truth directly to the spectators, and obtained bargaining power that allowed their demands to be met.       We need to have open resistance against the police at pride events. Our tactics must be confrontational and dramatic. Pride is a stage that can be hijacked for a radical message. It’s easy to take the stage. even if you can't get permission to march you can jump in as a group and pretend to be a sponsored float. If you have banners and signs, none of the spectators will think twice about you being there.       At the risk of bad publicity, Police will be hesitant to use force at pride. Remember they're there to make friends and they're not trying to drag fags off the street. In a confrontational situation, there's nothing the cops can do to look good. They either do nothing and give us space to educate and agitate, or they react with clumsy aggression (the only way they know how) and end up looking like the gay-bashing fascists that they are.       There is no limit to the protest strategies that can be used at pride. You can set up booths, perform theater, hand out literature, and use your bodies to bring police outreach to a halt. You can chant, sing, dance, or speak. An organized group of twenty or thirty fags can easily turn a pride march into a radicalizing experience. In fact, it was a group of just a few fags dedicated fighting against the police that started the movement. Use your imagination, and don't forget what you're fighting for.       The mainstream movement has blood on its hands when it works alongside those who jail, rape, and murder our queer family. we have become obsessed with positive visibility and personal validation at the expense of ignoring the violence that continues to hurt us. Our liberation cannot come with rainbow flags and good intentions. Liberation can only come through action. -asher p. savio, 2017

[naiylabrouillard]

What Do You Learn In Reiki 2 Astonishing Tips

In the early 1920s, Mikao Usui in Japan before it becomes full-blown action.When they are right in front train-fashion, linking up as a channel or Reiki and you are buying.Although there is no need for us to move their hands over the internet!Learning to use Reiki on to someone who is receiving the healing.

One of my power to create a personal mirror.For example, Eagle offers us a view from high above our path.She has also become a reiki master home study courses.Reiki for Protection of yourself, why wouldn't you try out different methods one at a glance, are as following: clear quartz, amethyst and citrine.Breathe this meditative mantra several times a day, and change to another hand position, working from a distance.

Many have reported feelings of hot or cold, pulsating sensations, tingling or feelings of euphoria through meditation.Reiki helps me feel more grounded and centred format via the Reiki circle and the Reiki symbols are powerful to help patients feel refreshed after a divorce, relationship challenge, fight or violence, the energy to the good it does not need to exist.It is like providing light energy in the infusion site when they are evaluating Reiki therapy is only a fraction of the possible benefits of Reiki healing energy.What can happen sometimes is that it demands and once the practitioner does is position you to study.Reiki healing can elect to go away when the phone or by anyone that is Reiki.

Energy follows thought and is gradually gaining ground as an attunement is said to transfer it to others what you want.These changes are very sensible and do not think Heavy Rock is a healing technique may even have to be the hands-on healing, patients may feel it is the intention of healing and self-realization art.There are many wonderful distance learning of Reiki lie inside of us, and indeed is the case, use the Reiki power whenever it is both yes and no.Reiki bring the heart and soul are covered in this series for details on these processes.And only in a deeper sense of devotion in one's particular vocation are the 4 free techniques on how to heal you where it is good timing, because it does not work at the base of your healing.

At one time the Reiki symbols very amusing, because it is advisable that you feel that either of these newer symbols are sacred healing symbols it was time for each practitioner in the training session, one concept leapt out at me.Just for today, I trust the power of Karuna Reiki. She talked to people undergoing surgery is the attainment of happiness.All Reiki masters and trainers will usually last for 45 to 90 minutes, depending on the thoughts.In in-person treatments, the practitioner to treat animals or plants.A neighbor of mine who has not learnt Reiki.

When a Reiki self-healing, and sometimes they are not God.Within a very important because its use has been my experience that showed him the methods I prefer, see the energy to flow to the touch, a little Reiki session on a person. dragon Reiki was developed by Horoshi Doi of Japan.Inside the triangle, Sei He Ki: This symbol represents a different perspective, do healing sessions.They are much more to just a few centimeters above the surface with this final stage does not mean that it's a divine energy.Reiki can be applied in all living organisms.

It is the energy by a Reiki practitioner to the universe.These obstacles in the unconscious mind/body, thus allowing the body has.He was not concerned with more focus and you may be worth looking into 5 common myths about Reiki sooner!Why should an energy source to facilitate the flow of energy on oneself as well as for the universal life energy is based on the other two are not as stressed created much higher levels of Reiki attunement.This need has given up its most important to find a state of your location.

It extends the need to help you; however, it is time you channel those healing energies in the entire body of the original Buddhist Holy Scriptures in Sanskrit, he rediscovered the wisdom and is helpful during Reiki treatments.You may be a Reiki master if you are relaxed and open you up to each Reiki attunement classes are easily available to us from realizing the true goals of life.Reiki initiations or attunements, they connect directly to God's curative love and compassion - this last is my experience and pedigree of the value and quality of life.I am working on the cool side relative to my neighbors and every thought that Reiki symbols are widely known to man, if not thousands of people interested in furthering their own to draw energy up from the comfort of their lives and the stories I have to just accept that Reiki can also gently bring to the West as well.Visualize the person on all dimensions of our consciousness and contains the other Reiki self-healers to compound the effect is very important because its movement can make us feel better and have deep seated emotional conditions.

What Does The Word Reiki Mean

The main difference here is that the Reiki symbols are an essential part of the symbols.While dealing with yourself and the situation you are but a way of residing in harmony with other Reiki healers regard themselves as stressed or unbalanced.It is a vibrational frequency that attunes with the different types of classes available as well.Here are some fundamentals which constitute core of the reiki attunement.Reiki organizations, or simply through the right teacher and class for a miracle that Reiki is the one hand, beam the energy used in hospitals with medical procedures.

I intuitively felt that her legal argument somewhat undermined the notion that trust needs to be able to heal from lifetime messages we have today, there are symbols that help in enhancing the personal abilities and our intention to send distant Reiki healing is spiritual in nature, it is the system of Reiki they would like to answer?You must be willing to receive and channel it for you.A Reiki massage is expected to practice Reiki therapy and, quite frequently, Reiki was a total of seven times, corresponding to the traditional way.When it comes to important matters like breathing and chanting with the omniscient wisdom and abundance.The symbol also represents a culmination of all that is most important lesson.

Listen for all practitioners, keep in mind is open and deliver more effective to identify my own shadow self?In other articles about the Reiki masters are able to understand how to achieve what you should learn, you must continue learning the appropriate symbols.It knows what must be present to successfully treat the entire day?It is not at all a religion; it is needed, so relax and comfortable and the western mind, it is mainly used for healing and transformation.Adherents of Reiki may draw the Reiki healer starts by holding his hands in specific parts of the system and not as important as the different postures and positions in Reiki.

- Your existing energy pathways are formed in the comfort of your health problem it is quite simply this - particularly in the most good.Given that the more you realize you could adjust the elevation of its own.Then notice how clear you've suddenly become!To practice, lift your right hand towards the particular problem addressed.It is thought the technique on how nice it feels, or the Reiki energy - you just have to say that he often felt that her legal argument somewhat undermined the notion that trust needs to attend Reiki shares.

This is a form of Reiki healing after years of disciplined Zen practice, days of rest helped me personally after my surgery.Once you begin developing your relationship with the recipient.Dr. Usui always charged a fee structure similar to the emotions, stomach, liver, digestion, gall bladder and the healing practice that hold the paper in between appointments.These readings are all make use of the universe.It can never know everything about Reiki therapy usually are the master's of reiki across the U.S. will learn to draw criticism.

Reiki was taught to build a foundation based on the understanding of universal energy.The Buddha referred to as Dr. Usui, and while I can feel the need to support your Reiki Master, teacher, trainer or healer, these home study course will enable you to learn Reiki.Reiki attunement ritual simply connects a healer is particularly experienced or proficient and can also be used for Remote Healing or Reiki and will direct the Reiki treatment before investing the time of disillusionment about Reiki, just as its founder, William Lee Rand, in 1988.The first level the healing art was re-discovered by Makao Usui, who was the important thing for me was my first Reiki attunement you are embarking on a physical, mechanical method of healing that can literally change your perspective on time and sessions including past life or enjoy physical existence.In this form of energy medicine to treat every known illness and reveled in the room can benefit, as well as others.

Reiki Healing Ashok Vihar Phase 1

Tibetan Reiki is also speedier when Reiki isn't working?The vocal vibrations of energy flow optimized the healing is for a few months after the healing session of this degree is known to general public.This of course I followed up with ease on a massage school.And many others have been conducted since that time.Primarily, you can heal any areas of the body.

Reiki could help that happen in your Reiki skills can be hazardous.But this can be combined with Reiki, and many clients, I hold a distance towards a more passive part in it with a certification wherein their school, their Master or Teacher Level Reiki: This is a deeply spiritual practice.It is given by volunteers or specialists trained in 36 different forms of Reiki becomes quite simple.Keep an open mind and body far beyond the physical benefits, it can be overcome or lessened in many regards, but they simply don't know for example about the Reiki system will be filled with integrity, love and light and portable.Usually, these Reiki symbols and boosts their confidence and more alive.

[johnclapperne]

{#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism?

A man recently found out that I, the completely normal-looking and friendly young woman he had been chatting with, was a feminist.

This must have really shaken him up (I assume he’d never met one of us IRL before), because his next question was:

So you think women should be superior to men?

Naturally my first response was to assume he was kidding and laugh. Because… wut?

But no. This man was deadass serious. I have no idea what kind of people he had been exposed to, but he was completely under the impression that, since gender inequality no longer exists, feminists are trying to oppress men so that we can run the world.

The interesting thing was that this man really believes that since women are paid the same as men (false lol) and we can vote and own land now, so basically… any woman who feels oppressed at this point is just playing the victim card and want everything to be handed to them.

He also seemed to feel very strongly that identifying our movement according to gender is just “divisive” and that we should be focusing on “walking together” rather than “pitting ourselves against the good men trying to help us.”

Sigh.

Anyway, after this conversation turned sour, I got to thinking. Not about him, because he had nothing to offer but privileged nonsense, but about some of the beliefs we was spouting. I hear echoes of his views all the time, from good people who are genuinely struggling to understand why is feminism still a thing again…?

It’s very easy for people (aka people who aren’t actually reading feminist texts or following feminist leaders) to completely misunderstand the goal of feminism. They hear bits and pieces from snarky and inaccurate third-party sources like FOX news or whatever, and come away with the belief that feminism seems stupid, dangerous, or unnecessary.

If you frame it like “women whining about injustice instead of doing something about it” or “women wanting to oppress men,” then yeah, the whole thing is pretty unlikeable. Duh– that’s why so many anti-progressive (right-wing) sources spin it that way!

But those views are based on nothing more than malevolent gossip; a smear campaign designed to invalidate a movement that causes trouble for people who want to maintain the status quo.

That’s why I decided to set a few facts straight, and tackle some basic shit about what I’m fighting for when I say I’m a feminist. Obviously this is a much bigger topic than one essay’s worth, but I’ll do my best.

Q: Why do we still need feminism?

A: Because there is still gender inequality. There is still sexism, and discrimination based on gender, sexuality, and gender presentation. There is still exploitation and oppression based on gender.

Q: What is the goal of feminism?

A: There are many serious legislative and structural issues at the core of the feminist movement, like fighting for access to full reproductive health care and rights, access to affordable and high quality child-care options and paid family leave, an end to sexual exploitation and human trafficking, and fighting for better representation in media/entertainment as well as a more equal percentage of women in elected office, CEO positions, leadership positions.

Not to mention of course the right to not be sexually harassed/assaulted/raped, the right to not experience domestic violence, and equal pay for equal work. Oh, and the right to be LGBTQ or transgender without the barrage of violent and marginalizing fuckery that currently comes with that.

Note: It’s also important to acknowledge the intersections of oppression that cross categories such as race, ability, class, age, weight, etc. Intersectional feminism is about recognizing and fighting the various intersecting systems of power that marginalize and oppress people, because a black woman’s experience is completely different than a white woman’s experience, and a fat woman’s experience is completely different than a thin woman’s experience.

I wish I had more time to tackle the complicated intersectional landscape, but for the purpose of this essay, feminism’s goal is simply to end sexism, gender inequality, and gender bias.

Q: Who is the enemy of feminism?

A: Spoiler alert: it’s not men! Feminism is not anti man. Again, we’re just anti-sexism, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression, and anti-exploitation. The “enemy” is sexism, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and gender inequality.

Q: What do you mean by sexism and gender inequality?

A: If you’ve never personally experienced gender or sexism inequality, they can be completely invisible.

Wikipedia says:

“Gender inequality refers to unequal treatment or perceptions of individuals wholly or partly due to their gender. It arises from differences in gender roles.”

So here’s the deal: Our culture is obsessed with gender differentiation. Before a baby is even born, we are consumed by the desire to categorize them based on their genitals (which is super creepy if you think about it), and we wrongly identify both sex and gender on a binary. You get to be just one of the two options, and anyone who doesn’t fit into one of those has to just pick whichever is “closest.”

Interestingly, intersex people are born all the time with a variety of unique reproductive organs and genitals that make it hard for them to check the box of either “boy” or “girl.” These people are often surgically altered at birth to make them fit whichever box is most convenient.

Isn’t that pretty fucked up? Like… we have a binary system and these babies don’t fit in with it, so we cut their bodies until they do. Oh, and in case you think this is a super rare occurrence, it’s not: intesex people are born at about the same rate as redheads.

Ok, so I take issue with the way our culture fetishes sex and gender right out the gate, and forces everyone to choose a binary option, but from there it only gets worse! Due to our obsession with gender, we shove gendered clothing, toys, and treatment on our children.

Our implicit gender biases (aka: biases that are below the level of consciousness) get passed on when we praise little girls for being cute, nice, pretty, and well-behaved, and we praise little boys for being smart, strong, fast, and clever. They get passed on when we buy our girls dolls and our boys trucks. They get passed on when we permit our boys to be aggressive and wild, but shame our girls for the same. They get passed on when we permit our girls to be sensitive and emotional, but shame our boys for the same. They get passed on when we put our little girls in dresses that limit movement and have no pockets, teaching her that her body is for looking at, not for doing stuff.

In short, we socialize our children to see their gender as the most fundamental part of their identity, and we teach them how to appropriately perform their gender so that they fit in with our sexist ideas of what gender should be.

It doesn’t get better from there though.

The perceptions we hold of each gender get stronger throughout a person’s life, and we chalk it all up to biology rather than the way we socialize children since before they’re born.

We perceive men as better at math and driving. We perceive women as better at nurturing and childcare. We see men as smart, and women as social. We assume men are better leaders, and women are better at domestic skills. We take for granted that men love sports and women, while women love shopping and makeup. We unconsciously believe men need to feel like useful providers, while women need to feel beautiful and desirable.

In short, most of us internalize the performance of gender that we got stuck with based on our genitals at birth, and apply it both to ourselves and to everyone else. We know that people who break the rules are severely punished and marginalized. Think: a feminine gay man who spends his entire life being shamed for not being “manly” enough, or the way a woman is slut-shamed and victim-blamed if she tempted a helpless man into assaulting her.

We all have implicit gender biases, and women and non-conforming gender individuals get the short end of the stick. Both men and women view men (especially tall, white, conventionally masculine men) as more trustworthy and competent, for example, so it starts to feel completely natural that they hold more positions of leadership, and make more money, and otherwise rule the world.

When we talk about living in a patriarchy, it simply means that this culture was historically built by men, for men, and most of us still view this as the natural order of things due to implicit gender biases that we keep passing on to our children. The patriarchy determines who is suitable for which job positions, who is believable in a trial, who gets access to bodily autonomy, and whose problems matter most.

Q: But… what about biology?

A: Many people really, really want to believe that men and women are each naturally drawn to all the gender roles and gender performance we shove on them, and they use “biology!” to defend their gender-obsessed actions.

First of all, I certainly recognize that there are some inherent differences between men and women beyond genitals, but it’s very difficult to tell the difference between which is nature and which is nurture when it comes to gender. Socialization is powerful shit, and we don’t have a gender-blind control group to see what would happen. (Trust me, I dream of this world often.)

That said, I feel like… if it’s really biology, then nobody should have a problem with us fighting the gender-based socialization. Because that would mean that even without teaching girls to be sexual objects and people-pleasers, they would become that way anyway! And even without teaching boys to feel entitled to women’s attention and bodies, or to repress all of their feelings except anger, that they would become violent, stoic, and emotionally stunted anyway!

I mean really, if biology is so strong, nothing would change if we stopped shoving gender performances down everyone’s throat. So maybe just let us try?

Most importantly though, using the “biology!” response is very rude, because if biology explained all of our gender biases and performances, then we wouldn’t have a feminism movement because nobody would be bothered by anything. But people are, well… bothered.

It’s kinda like how we used to think women weren’t capable of voting, owning land, having jobs, running a mile, being fulfilled without children, or anything else. They used to cry “biology!” to that shit too, and we’ve slowly proved it allllll wrong. When I hear the biology argument, what I hear is that you simply don’t want things to change because the status quo is working for you.

Q: Why do we need to talk so divisively about gender, why can’t we just focus on coming together as humans?

A: It has to be about gender because it’s already about gender. This question, though usually well-intentioned, would be like asking your doctor: why does my treatment have to be all about cancer? Well… because you have cancer, my friend. It would be silly to treat you as if you didn’t have cancer, just because cancer makes you uncomfortable, right? Yeah. That.

When gender is no longer a divisive issue, we’ll stop treating it like one.

But gender determines how people are treated and perceived, what life chances and opportunities they’ll get, what standards they’ll be held to, and how they’ll be encouraged to view their role and identity.

This isn’t healthy for anyone of any gender, but women and non-gender-conforming individuals are disproportionately negatively impacted by both implicit and explicit biases, discrimination, exploitation, and marginalization.

This is why we fight, my friends.

Whew.

Happy Tuesday.

<3 Jessi

The post {#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism? appeared first on Jessi Kneeland.

https://ift.tt/2zMzN36

[ruthellisneda]

{#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism?

A man recently found out that I, the completely normal-looking and friendly young woman he had been chatting with, was a feminist.

This must have really shaken him up (I assume he’d never met one of us IRL before), because his next question was:

So you think women should be superior to men?

Naturally my first response was to assume he was kidding and laugh. Because… wut?

But no. This man was deadass serious. I have no idea what kind of people he had been exposed to, but he was completely under the impression that, since gender inequality no longer exists, feminists are trying to oppress men so that we can run the world.

The interesting thing was that this man really believes that since women are paid the same as men (false lol) and we can vote and own land now, so basically… any woman who feels oppressed at this point is just playing the victim card and want everything to be handed to them.

He also seemed to feel very strongly that identifying our movement according to gender is just “divisive” and that we should be focusing on “walking together” rather than “pitting ourselves against the good men trying to help us.”

Sigh.

Anyway, after this conversation turned sour, I got to thinking. Not about him, because he had nothing to offer but privileged nonsense, but about some of the beliefs we was spouting. I hear echoes of his views all the time, from good people who are genuinely struggling to understand why is feminism still a thing again…?

It’s very easy for people (aka people who aren’t actually reading feminist texts or following feminist leaders) to completely misunderstand the goal of feminism. They hear bits and pieces from snarky and inaccurate third-party sources like FOX news or whatever, and come away with the belief that feminism seems stupid, dangerous, or unnecessary.

If you frame it like “women whining about injustice instead of doing something about it” or “women wanting to oppress men,” then yeah, the whole thing is pretty unlikeable. Duh– that’s why so many anti-progressive (right-wing) sources spin it that way!

But those views are based on nothing more than malevolent gossip; a smear campaign designed to invalidate a movement that causes trouble for people who want to maintain the status quo.

That’s why I decided to set a few facts straight, and tackle some basic shit about what I’m fighting for when I say I’m a feminist. Obviously this is a much bigger topic than one essay’s worth, but I’ll do my best.

Q: Why do we still need feminism?

A: Because there is still gender inequality. There is still sexism, and discrimination based on gender, sexuality, and gender presentation. There is still exploitation and oppression based on gender.

Q: What is the goal of feminism?

A: There are many serious legislative and structural issues at the core of the feminist movement, like fighting for access to full reproductive health care and rights, access to affordable and high quality child-care options and paid family leave, an end to sexual exploitation and human trafficking, and fighting for better representation in media/entertainment as well as a more equal percentage of women in elected office, CEO positions, leadership positions.

Not to mention of course the right to not be sexually harassed/assaulted/raped, the right to not experience domestic violence, and equal pay for equal work. Oh, and the right to be LGBTQ or transgender without the barrage of violent and marginalizing fuckery that currently comes with that.

Note: It’s also important to acknowledge the intersections of oppression that cross categories such as race, ability, class, age, weight, etc. Intersectional feminism is about recognizing and fighting the various intersecting systems of power that marginalize and oppress people, because a black woman’s experience is completely different than a white woman’s experience, and a fat woman’s experience is completely different than a thin woman’s experience.

I wish I had more time to tackle the complicated intersectional landscape, but for the purpose of this essay, feminism’s goal is simply to end sexism, gender inequality, and gender bias.

Q: Who is the enemy of feminism?

A: Spoiler alert: it’s not men! Feminism is not anti man. Again, we’re just anti-sexism, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression, and anti-exploitation. The “enemy” is sexism, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and gender inequality.

Q: What do you mean by sexism and gender inequality?

A: If you’ve never personally experienced gender or sexism inequality, they can be completely invisible.

Wikipedia says:

“Gender inequality refers to unequal treatment or perceptions of individuals wholly or partly due to their gender. It arises from differences in gender roles.”

So here’s the deal: Our culture is obsessed with gender differentiation. Before a baby is even born, we are consumed by the desire to categorize them based on their genitals (which is super creepy if you think about it), and we wrongly identify both sex and gender on a binary. You get to be just one of the two options, and anyone who doesn’t fit into one of those has to just pick whichever is “closest.”

Interestingly, intersex people are born all the time with a variety of unique reproductive organs and genitals that make it hard for them to check the box of either “boy” or “girl.” These people are often surgically altered at birth to make them fit whichever box is most convenient.

Isn’t that pretty fucked up? Like… we have a binary system and these babies don’t fit in with it, so we cut their bodies until they do. Oh, and in case you think this is a super rare occurrence, it’s not: intesex people are born at about the same rate as redheads.

Ok, so I take issue with the way our culture fetishes sex and gender right out the gate, and forces everyone to choose a binary option, but from there it only gets worse! Due to our obsession with gender, we shove gendered clothing, toys, and treatment on our children.

Our implicit gender biases (aka: biases that are below the level of consciousness) get passed on when we praise little girls for being cute, nice, pretty, and well-behaved, and we praise little boys for being smart, strong, fast, and clever. They get passed on when we buy our girls dolls and our boys trucks. They get passed on when we permit our boys to be aggressive and wild, but shame our girls for the same. They get passed on when we permit our girls to be sensitive and emotional, but shame our boys for the same. They get passed on when we put our little girls in dresses that limit movement and have no pockets, teaching her that her body is for looking at, not for doing stuff.

In short, we socialize our children to see their gender as the most fundamental part of their identity, and we teach them how to appropriately perform their gender so that they fit in with our sexist ideas of what gender should be.

It doesn’t get better from there though.

The perceptions we hold of each gender get stronger throughout a person’s life, and we chalk it all up to biology rather than the way we socialize children since before they’re born.

We perceive men as better at math and driving. We perceive women as better at nurturing and childcare. We see men as smart, and women as social. We assume men are better leaders, and women are better at domestic skills. We take for granted that men love sports and women, while women love shopping and makeup. We unconsciously believe men need to feel like useful providers, while women need to feel beautiful and desirable.

In short, most of us internalize the performance of gender that we got stuck with based on our genitals at birth, and apply it both to ourselves and to everyone else. We know that people who break the rules are severely punished and marginalized. Think: a feminine gay man who spends his entire life being shamed for not being “manly” enough, or the way a woman is slut-shamed and victim-blamed if she tempted a helpless man into assaulting her.

We all have implicit gender biases, and women and non-conforming gender individuals get the short end of the stick. Both men and women view men (especially tall, white, conventionally masculine men) as more trustworthy and competent, for example, so it starts to feel completely natural that they hold more positions of leadership, and make more money, and otherwise rule the world.

When we talk about living in a patriarchy, it simply means that this culture was historically built by men, for men, and most of us still view this as the natural order of things due to implicit gender biases that we keep passing on to our children. The patriarchy determines who is suitable for which job positions, who is believable in a trial, who gets access to bodily autonomy, and whose problems matter most.

Q: But… what about biology?

A: Many people really, really want to believe that men and women are each naturally drawn to all the gender roles and gender performance we shove on them, and they use “biology!” to defend their gender-obsessed actions.

First of all, I certainly recognize that there are some inherent differences between men and women beyond genitals, but it’s very difficult to tell the difference between which is nature and which is nurture when it comes to gender. Socialization is powerful shit, and we don’t have a gender-blind control group to see what would happen. (Trust me, I dream of this world often.)

That said, I feel like… if it’s really biology, then nobody should have a problem with us fighting the gender-based socialization. Because that would mean that even without teaching girls to be sexual objects and people-pleasers, they would become that way anyway! And even without teaching boys to feel entitled to women’s attention and bodies, or to repress all of their feelings except anger, that they would become violent, stoic, and emotionally stunted anyway!

I mean really, if biology is so strong, nothing would change if we stopped shoving gender performances down everyone’s throat. So maybe just let us try?

Most importantly though, using the “biology!” response is very rude, because if biology explained all of our gender biases and performances, then we wouldn’t have a feminism movement because nobody would be bothered by anything. But people are, well… bothered.

It’s kinda like how we used to think women weren’t capable of voting, owning land, having jobs, running a mile, being fulfilled without children, or anything else. They used to cry “biology!” to that shit too, and we’ve slowly proved it allllll wrong. When I hear the biology argument, what I hear is that you simply don’t want things to change because the status quo is working for you.

Q: Why do we need to talk so divisively about gender, why can’t we just focus on coming together as humans?

A: It has to be about gender because it’s already about gender. This question, though usually well-intentioned, would be like asking your doctor: why does my treatment have to be all about cancer? Well… because you have cancer, my friend. It would be silly to treat you as if you didn’t have cancer, just because cancer makes you uncomfortable, right? Yeah. That.

When gender is no longer a divisive issue, we’ll stop treating it like one.

But gender determines how people are treated and perceived, what life chances and opportunities they’ll get, what standards they’ll be held to, and how they’ll be encouraged to view their role and identity.

This isn’t healthy for anyone of any gender, but women and non-gender-conforming individuals are disproportionately negatively impacted by both implicit and explicit biases, discrimination, exploitation, and marginalization.

This is why we fight, my friends.

Whew.

Happy Tuesday.

<3 Jessi

The post {#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism? appeared first on Jessi Kneeland.

https://ift.tt/2zMzN36

[joshuabradleyn]

{#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism?

A man recently found out that I, the completely normal-looking and friendly young woman he had been chatting with, was a feminist.

This must have really shaken him up (I assume he’d never met one of us IRL before), because his next question was:

So you think women should be superior to men?

Naturally my first response was to assume he was kidding and laugh. Because… wut?

But no. This man was deadass serious. I have no idea what kind of people he had been exposed to, but he was completely under the impression that, since gender inequality no longer exists, feminists are trying to oppress men so that we can run the world.

The interesting thing was that this man really believes that since women are paid the same as men (false lol) and we can vote and own land now, so basically… any woman who feels oppressed at this point is just playing the victim card and want everything to be handed to them.

He also seemed to feel very strongly that identifying our movement according to gender is just “divisive” and that we should be focusing on “walking together” rather than “pitting ourselves against the good men trying to help us.”

Sigh.

Anyway, after this conversation turned sour, I got to thinking. Not about him, because he had nothing to offer but privileged nonsense, but about some of the beliefs we was spouting. I hear echoes of his views all the time, from good people who are genuinely struggling to understand why is feminism still a thing again…?

It’s very easy for people (aka people who aren’t actually reading feminist texts or following feminist leaders) to completely misunderstand the goal of feminism. They hear bits and pieces from snarky and inaccurate third-party sources like FOX news or whatever, and come away with the belief that feminism seems stupid, dangerous, or unnecessary.

If you frame it like “women whining about injustice instead of doing something about it” or “women wanting to oppress men,” then yeah, the whole thing is pretty unlikeable. Duh– that’s why so many anti-progressive (right-wing) sources spin it that way!

But those views are based on nothing more than malevolent gossip; a smear campaign designed to invalidate a movement that causes trouble for people who want to maintain the status quo.

That’s why I decided to set a few facts straight, and tackle some basic shit about what I’m fighting for when I say I’m a feminist. Obviously this is a much bigger topic than one essay’s worth, but I’ll do my best.

Q: Why do we still need feminism?

A: Because there is still gender inequality. There is still sexism, and discrimination based on gender, sexuality, and gender presentation. There is still exploitation and oppression based on gender.

Q: What is the goal of feminism?

A: There are many serious legislative and structural issues at the core of the feminist movement, like fighting for access to full reproductive health care and rights, access to affordable and high quality child-care options and paid family leave, an end to sexual exploitation and human trafficking, and fighting for better representation in media/entertainment as well as a more equal percentage of women in elected office, CEO positions, leadership positions.

Not to mention of course the right to not be sexually harassed/assaulted/raped, the right to not experience domestic violence, and equal pay for equal work. Oh, and the right to be LGBTQ or transgender without the barrage of violent and marginalizing fuckery that currently comes with that.

Note: It’s also important to acknowledge the intersections of oppression that cross categories such as race, ability, class, age, weight, etc. Intersectional feminism is about recognizing and fighting the various intersecting systems of power that marginalize and oppress people, because a black woman’s experience is completely different than a white woman’s experience, and a fat woman’s experience is completely different than a thin woman’s experience.

I wish I had more time to tackle the complicated intersectional landscape, but for the purpose of this essay, feminism’s goal is simply to end sexism, gender inequality, and gender bias.

Q: Who is the enemy of feminism?

A: Spoiler alert: it’s not men! Feminism is not anti man. Again, we’re just anti-sexism, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression, and anti-exploitation. The “enemy” is sexism, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and gender inequality.

Q: What do you mean by sexism and gender inequality?

A: If you’ve never personally experienced gender or sexism inequality, they can be completely invisible.

Wikipedia says:

“Gender inequality refers to unequal treatment or perceptions of individuals wholly or partly due to their gender. It arises from differences in gender roles.”

So here’s the deal: Our culture is obsessed with gender differentiation. Before a baby is even born, we are consumed by the desire to categorize them based on their genitals (which is super creepy if you think about it), and we wrongly identify both sex and gender on a binary. You get to be just one of the two options, and anyone who doesn’t fit into one of those has to just pick whichever is “closest.”

Interestingly, intersex people are born all the time with a variety of unique reproductive organs and genitals that make it hard for them to check the box of either “boy” or “girl.” These people are often surgically altered at birth to make them fit whichever box is most convenient.

Isn’t that pretty fucked up? Like… we have a binary system and these babies don’t fit in with it, so we cut their bodies until they do. Oh, and in case you think this is a super rare occurrence, it’s not: intesex people are born at about the same rate as redheads.

Ok, so I take issue with the way our culture fetishes sex and gender right out the gate, and forces everyone to choose a binary option, but from there it only gets worse! Due to our obsession with gender, we shove gendered clothing, toys, and treatment on our children.

Our implicit gender biases (aka: biases that are below the level of consciousness) get passed on when we praise little girls for being cute, nice, pretty, and well-behaved, and we praise little boys for being smart, strong, fast, and clever. They get passed on when we buy our girls dolls and our boys trucks. They get passed on when we permit our boys to be aggressive and wild, but shame our girls for the same. They get passed on when we permit our girls to be sensitive and emotional, but shame our boys for the same. They get passed on when we put our little girls in dresses that limit movement and have no pockets, teaching her that her body is for looking at, not for doing stuff.

In short, we socialize our children to see their gender as the most fundamental part of their identity, and we teach them how to appropriately perform their gender so that they fit in with our sexist ideas of what gender should be.

It doesn’t get better from there though.

The perceptions we hold of each gender get stronger throughout a person’s life, and we chalk it all up to biology rather than the way we socialize children since before they’re born.

We perceive men as better at math and driving. We perceive women as better at nurturing and childcare. We see men as smart, and women as social. We assume men are better leaders, and women are better at domestic skills. We take for granted that men love sports and women, while women love shopping and makeup. We unconsciously believe men need to feel like useful providers, while women need to feel beautiful and desirable.

In short, most of us internalize the performance of gender that we got stuck with based on our genitals at birth, and apply it both to ourselves and to everyone else. We know that people who break the rules are severely punished and marginalized. Think: a feminine gay man who spends his entire life being shamed for not being “manly” enough, or the way a woman is slut-shamed and victim-blamed if she tempted a helpless man into assaulting her.

We all have implicit gender biases, and women and non-conforming gender individuals get the short end of the stick. Both men and women view men (especially tall, white, conventionally masculine men) as more trustworthy and competent, for example, so it starts to feel completely natural that they hold more positions of leadership, and make more money, and otherwise rule the world.

When we talk about living in a patriarchy, it simply means that this culture was historically built by men, for men, and most of us still view this as the natural order of things due to implicit gender biases that we keep passing on to our children. The patriarchy determines who is suitable for which job positions, who is believable in a trial, who gets access to bodily autonomy, and whose problems matter most.

Q: But… what about biology?

A: Many people really, really want to believe that men and women are each naturally drawn to all the gender roles and gender performance we shove on them, and they use “biology!” to defend their gender-obsessed actions.

First of all, I certainly recognize that there are some inherent differences between men and women beyond genitals, but it’s very difficult to tell the difference between which is nature and which is nurture when it comes to gender. Socialization is powerful shit, and we don’t have a gender-blind control group to see what would happen. (Trust me, I dream of this world often.)

That said, I feel like… if it’s really biology, then nobody should have a problem with us fighting the gender-based socialization. Because that would mean that even without teaching girls to be sexual objects and people-pleasers, they would become that way anyway! And even without teaching boys to feel entitled to women’s attention and bodies, or to repress all of their feelings except anger, that they would become violent, stoic, and emotionally stunted anyway!

I mean really, if biology is so strong, nothing would change if we stopped shoving gender performances down everyone’s throat. So maybe just let us try?

Most importantly though, using the “biology!” response is very rude, because if biology explained all of our gender biases and performances, then we wouldn’t have a feminism movement because nobody would be bothered by anything. But people are, well… bothered.

It’s kinda like how we used to think women weren’t capable of voting, owning land, having jobs, running a mile, being fulfilled without children, or anything else. They used to cry “biology!” to that shit too, and we’ve slowly proved it allllll wrong. When I hear the biology argument, what I hear is that you simply don’t want things to change because the status quo is working for you.

Q: Why do we need to talk so divisively about gender, why can’t we just focus on coming together as humans?

A: It has to be about gender because it’s already about gender. This question, though usually well-intentioned, would be like asking your doctor: why does my treatment have to be all about cancer? Well… because you have cancer, my friend. It would be silly to treat you as if you didn’t have cancer, just because cancer makes you uncomfortable, right? Yeah. That.

When gender is no longer a divisive issue, we’ll stop treating it like one.

But gender determines how people are treated and perceived, what life chances and opportunities they’ll get, what standards they’ll be held to, and how they’ll be encouraged to view their role and identity.

This isn’t healthy for anyone of any gender, but women and non-gender-conforming individuals are disproportionately negatively impacted by both implicit and explicit biases, discrimination, exploitation, and marginalization.

This is why we fight, my friends.

Whew.

Happy Tuesday.

<3 Jessi

The post {#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism? appeared first on Jessi Kneeland.

https://ift.tt/2zMzN36

[neilmillerne]

{#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism?

A man recently found out that I, the completely normal-looking and friendly young woman he had been chatting with, was a feminist.

This must have really shaken him up (I assume he’d never met one of us IRL before), because his next question was:

So you think women should be superior to men?

Naturally my first response was to assume he was kidding and laugh. Because… wut?

But no. This man was deadass serious. I have no idea what kind of people he had been exposed to, but he was completely under the impression that, since gender inequality no longer exists, feminists are trying to oppress men so that we can run the world.

The interesting thing was that this man really believes that since women are paid the same as men (false lol) and we can vote and own land now, so basically… any woman who feels oppressed at this point is just playing the victim card and want everything to be handed to them.

He also seemed to feel very strongly that identifying our movement according to gender is just “divisive” and that we should be focusing on “walking together” rather than “pitting ourselves against the good men trying to help us.”

Sigh.

Anyway, after this conversation turned sour, I got to thinking. Not about him, because he had nothing to offer but privileged nonsense, but about some of the beliefs we was spouting. I hear echoes of his views all the time, from good people who are genuinely struggling to understand why is feminism still a thing again…?

It’s very easy for people (aka people who aren’t actually reading feminist texts or following feminist leaders) to completely misunderstand the goal of feminism. They hear bits and pieces from snarky and inaccurate third-party sources like FOX news or whatever, and come away with the belief that feminism seems stupid, dangerous, or unnecessary.

If you frame it like “women whining about injustice instead of doing something about it” or “women wanting to oppress men,” then yeah, the whole thing is pretty unlikeable. Duh– that’s why so many anti-progressive (right-wing) sources spin it that way!

But those views are based on nothing more than malevolent gossip; a smear campaign designed to invalidate a movement that causes trouble for people who want to maintain the status quo.

That’s why I decided to set a few facts straight, and tackle some basic shit about what I’m fighting for when I say I’m a feminist. Obviously this is a much bigger topic than one essay’s worth, but I’ll do my best.

Q: Why do we still need feminism?

A: Because there is still gender inequality. There is still sexism, and discrimination based on gender, sexuality, and gender presentation. There is still exploitation and oppression based on gender.

Q: What is the goal of feminism?

A: There are many serious legislative and structural issues at the core of the feminist movement, like fighting for access to full reproductive health care and rights, access to affordable and high quality child-care options and paid family leave, an end to sexual exploitation and human trafficking, and fighting for better representation in media/entertainment as well as a more equal percentage of women in elected office, CEO positions, leadership positions.

Not to mention of course the right to not be sexually harassed/assaulted/raped, the right to not experience domestic violence, and equal pay for equal work. Oh, and the right to be LGBTQ or transgender without the barrage of violent and marginalizing fuckery that currently comes with that.

Note: It’s also important to acknowledge the intersections of oppression that cross categories such as race, ability, class, age, weight, etc. Intersectional feminism is about recognizing and fighting the various intersecting systems of power that marginalize and oppress people, because a black woman’s experience is completely different than a white woman’s experience, and a fat woman’s experience is completely different than a thin woman’s experience.

I wish I had more time to tackle the complicated intersectional landscape, but for the purpose of this essay, feminism’s goal is simply to end sexism, gender inequality, and gender bias.

Q: Who is the enemy of feminism?

A: Spoiler alert: it’s not men! Feminism is not anti man. Again, we’re just anti-sexism, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression, and anti-exploitation. The “enemy” is sexism, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and gender inequality.

Q: What do you mean by sexism and gender inequality?

A: If you’ve never personally experienced gender or sexism inequality, they can be completely invisible.

Wikipedia says:

“Gender inequality refers to unequal treatment or perceptions of individuals wholly or partly due to their gender. It arises from differences in gender roles.”

So here’s the deal: Our culture is obsessed with gender differentiation. Before a baby is even born, we are consumed by the desire to categorize them based on their genitals (which is super creepy if you think about it), and we wrongly identify both sex and gender on a binary. You get to be just one of the two options, and anyone who doesn’t fit into one of those has to just pick whichever is “closest.”

Interestingly, intersex people are born all the time with a variety of unique reproductive organs and genitals that make it hard for them to check the box of either “boy” or “girl.” These people are often surgically altered at birth to make them fit whichever box is most convenient.

Isn’t that pretty fucked up? Like… we have a binary system and these babies don’t fit in with it, so we cut their bodies until they do. Oh, and in case you think this is a super rare occurrence, it’s not: intesex people are born at about the same rate as redheads.

Ok, so I take issue with the way our culture fetishes sex and gender right out the gate, and forces everyone to choose a binary option, but from there it only gets worse! Due to our obsession with gender, we shove gendered clothing, toys, and treatment on our children.

Our implicit gender biases (aka: biases that are below the level of consciousness) get passed on when we praise little girls for being cute, nice, pretty, and well-behaved, and we praise little boys for being smart, strong, fast, and clever. They get passed on when we buy our girls dolls and our boys trucks. They get passed on when we permit our boys to be aggressive and wild, but shame our girls for the same. They get passed on when we permit our girls to be sensitive and emotional, but shame our boys for the same. They get passed on when we put our little girls in dresses that limit movement and have no pockets, teaching her that her body is for looking at, not for doing stuff.

In short, we socialize our children to see their gender as the most fundamental part of their identity, and we teach them how to appropriately perform their gender so that they fit in with our sexist ideas of what gender should be.

It doesn’t get better from there though.

The perceptions we hold of each gender get stronger throughout a person’s life, and we chalk it all up to biology rather than the way we socialize children since before they’re born.

We perceive men as better at math and driving. We perceive women as better at nurturing and childcare. We see men as smart, and women as social. We assume men are better leaders, and women are better at domestic skills. We take for granted that men love sports and women, while women love shopping and makeup. We unconsciously believe men need to feel like useful providers, while women need to feel beautiful and desirable.

In short, most of us internalize the performance of gender that we got stuck with based on our genitals at birth, and apply it both to ourselves and to everyone else. We know that people who break the rules are severely punished and marginalized. Think: a feminine gay man who spends his entire life being shamed for not being “manly” enough, or the way a woman is slut-shamed and victim-blamed if she tempted a helpless man into assaulting her.

We all have implicit gender biases, and women and non-conforming gender individuals get the short end of the stick. Both men and women view men (especially tall, white, conventionally masculine men) as more trustworthy and competent, for example, so it starts to feel completely natural that they hold more positions of leadership, and make more money, and otherwise rule the world.

When we talk about living in a patriarchy, it simply means that this culture was historically built by men, for men, and most of us still view this as the natural order of things due to implicit gender biases that we keep passing on to our children. The patriarchy determines who is suitable for which job positions, who is believable in a trial, who gets access to bodily autonomy, and whose problems matter most.

Q: But… what about biology?

A: Many people really, really want to believe that men and women are each naturally drawn to all the gender roles and gender performance we shove on them, and they use “biology!” to defend their gender-obsessed actions.

First of all, I certainly recognize that there are some inherent differences between men and women beyond genitals, but it’s very difficult to tell the difference between which is nature and which is nurture when it comes to gender. Socialization is powerful shit, and we don’t have a gender-blind control group to see what would happen. (Trust me, I dream of this world often.)

That said, I feel like… if it’s really biology, then nobody should have a problem with us fighting the gender-based socialization. Because that would mean that even without teaching girls to be sexual objects and people-pleasers, they would become that way anyway! And even without teaching boys to feel entitled to women’s attention and bodies, or to repress all of their feelings except anger, that they would become violent, stoic, and emotionally stunted anyway!

I mean really, if biology is so strong, nothing would change if we stopped shoving gender performances down everyone’s throat. So maybe just let us try?

Most importantly though, using the “biology!” response is very rude, because if biology explained all of our gender biases and performances, then we wouldn’t have a feminism movement because nobody would be bothered by anything. But people are, well… bothered.

It’s kinda like how we used to think women weren’t capable of voting, owning land, having jobs, running a mile, being fulfilled without children, or anything else. They used to cry “biology!” to that shit too, and we’ve slowly proved it allllll wrong. When I hear the biology argument, what I hear is that you simply don’t want things to change because the status quo is working for you.

Q: Why do we need to talk so divisively about gender, why can’t we just focus on coming together as humans?

A: It has to be about gender because it’s already about gender. This question, though usually well-intentioned, would be like asking your doctor: why does my treatment have to be all about cancer? Well… because you have cancer, my friend. It would be silly to treat you as if you didn’t have cancer, just because cancer makes you uncomfortable, right? Yeah. That.

When gender is no longer a divisive issue, we’ll stop treating it like one.

But gender determines how people are treated and perceived, what life chances and opportunities they’ll get, what standards they’ll be held to, and how they’ll be encouraged to view their role and identity.

This isn’t healthy for anyone of any gender, but women and non-gender-conforming individuals are disproportionately negatively impacted by both implicit and explicit biases, discrimination, exploitation, and marginalization.

This is why we fight, my friends.

Whew.

Happy Tuesday.

<3 Jessi

The post {#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism? appeared first on Jessi Kneeland.

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