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xxlovelynovaxx · 10 months

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Thinking more about the rude anons lately and just... what kind of person do you have to be to go to a random stranger's inbox, assume you know enough about them to tell them they're crazy, or that they need therapy because you disagree with them saying "actually, you should listen to marginalized people about their own oppression and experiences", or that they're a pick-me for using microlabels well-accepted and defended by the community they belong to, or...?

What kind of convoluted reasoning do you have to have, what kind of self-awareness do you have to lack, to think you're somehow doing justice by saying that psych should be used as a tool by majority society to force conformity on anyone who harmlessly annoys you or makes you uncomfortable, and yet not see that historically that's how it's been and continues to be used (in ways that likely actively harm them too)?

How little do you know about psychiatry to not understand that very little of it actually overlaps with neurology, both being infant sciences, and that psychiatry as its intended separate from ableism and capitalism is simply the science of listening to people's internal thoughts and emotions and recording commonalities?

Or to not understand that since its conception, psychiatry has had a proud and storied tradition of able-minded and able-bodied neurotypicals patronizing and infantilizing us and encoding their biases on our perspectives into diagnostic manuals that they then used to imprison, torture, and kill us and other marginalized people? And then to not recognize that doing so as a neurodivergent disabled person only aids and upholds that institution?

On the other hand, what kind of justifications does one have to make to themself to say "actually, this other part of this marginalized community is the only authority on this because they are the only ones really oppressed. It's definitely not circular logic to say that all of your claims of oppression are wrong because you're not oppressed and people who are not oppressed can't claim they're oppressed"?

Plenty of these anons have been so vague I don't even know what they're annoyed about. I know the aphobic one was about a microlabel (and a fairly well known one at that, so probably your average mogai-hater guy) but the others?

"Get help" so you endorse coercive enforcement of a consensus standard of normalcy even when the deviancy you so violently despise, in your own words, is merely annoying?

"I'm just concerned, you're out of touch with reality, spend less time online", somehow you managed to hit ableism, sanism, and some pretty wild assumptions about who I am as a person when you yourself admit you came from a random reblog of mine, all at once! Like truly, what gives you the gall to presume you know anything about my life?

I'd even be willing to extend good faith and say it's reasonable to assume honesty of everyone you meet on the internet. Even with that...

Do I buy my food at a farmer's market or a local employee owned chain grocery store or a supercorp and would that last option be out of ignorance, apathy, or living in a food desert? How often do I go to the local library, what do I do there, and do I get there by bus, uber, a friend driving me, or walking/biking?

What organizations do I volunteer with, and in what capacity/doing what tasks? If I tell you that I volunteer primarily in an online capacity, is it because I'm immunocompromised and no one masks at the physical locations anymore, because my doctor is refusing to provide a mobility aid that I desperately need, because public transport is sensory and chronic pain hell, because public transport here requires a four hour round trip just to get to the Walmart seven miles away, because the primary international org I support doesn't have US locations, because we're in a heat wave that is exponentially deadly to me due to my disabilities, or because I'm simply too sick to leave the house at all most days?

Who are my friends and family? When and where and how do I love them? How much time have I spent helping my incredible partner do the hard, hard work of learning to love herself and to heal, and how many infinities more would I pour into it? How often do I play fortnite with our best friend even though I DESPISE fortnite, just because I love him so much? How many times do I use most or all of my spoons for the day fighting executive dysfunction so I can read another of my best friend's amazing fics, sometimes for fandoms I'm not even in, just to leave comments to build them up?

(Is our landlord fucking us over because we're poor, trans, or disabled? Seriously, I'd like to know, because if it's either of the second, we could sue for damages and get the fuck outta here.)

I mean, that's just it. You don't know me, and I don't know how you can convince yourselves that you do enough to waste both our time being - well, an annoyance! Like, this is not a vent post, I've made those already, I just truly don't get it.

I mean, do you get some trivial satisfaction of feeling like you've done your social justice for the day by telling some random stranger that they're "insane"?

Does it make you feel superior to tell said stranger that they think non-aspec queers are "whores" for having sex, ignoring their near-CONSTANT aggressive posting about the importance of sex positivity and the harm of whorephobia, puritanism, culturally christian ideals of sex as "sinful", and how this impacts ace people, aro people, genderqueer people, and people of queer sexualities?

(Seriously, how do you act like you know me when ignoring my entire blog? Are you lost?)

Does it make you feel like a good little activist to tell disabled people to touch grass, and ignore every disabled person saying "uh, hey, you should consider the ableist intent behind that statement, or at the very least the ableist impact it has"?

Are you coming from a place of privilege or hurt? Or a mix of both? Are you someone who is not marginalized who is still dealing with genuine problems that aren't being listened to and addressed by the people in your life? Are you a marginalized person who is caught up in the conflation of privilege and oppression and evil, so you're too afraid to recognize your own privilege because that wouldn't be a morally neutral fact but evidence that you're an irredeemably bad person?

Are you a person with a mix of marginalized and nonmarginalized identities (white and trans, goy and plural, perisex and queer) who isn't able to get enough help with the harm you do face and is worried that you'll receive less help within your community if you're seen as an evil oppressor, not recognizing that there are people already receiving even less help and more hurt in your community due to the opposite?

People can say "it's not that complicated", but the truth is, people don't do things for no reason. They may not be self-aware enough to identify it, the people around them rarely have enough context to guess at it, but it's there.

It could be petty; they don't like us and want to make it our problem out of spite. "You wasted our time and made us moderately annoyed so we wanna do the same to you."

It could be out of some twisted sense of justice. Maybe they truly believe they're doing good. A lot of people do. Hell, I believe plenty of r//adfems actually believe they're fighting for women, and very few actually recognize the fascism in their own arguments, in the ones they ally with, or anything. It's a much more extreme example than some rando on tumblr, but the same could apply at a much smaller scale.

But is there some other motivation I'm missing?

I just - I've sent anons and non-anomymous asks when I didn't understand an argument being made for something. If I disagree with someone on something unimportant, I'll either leave it, reblog a joke about it, or block them if I find them annoying enough. If it's something important that they're approaching in good faith, which I assume to the extent of my ability to do so, I'll try to engage without being an asshole.

If it's important and they're engaging in bad faith, I may either reblog a rebuttal or make my own post, but I'll certainly block them - because what's the point in continuing to argue with someone whose goal is to undermine someone's personhood (or the fee things of similar weight) by any means necessary?

I just truly don't understand. Anyone's welcome to contribute to this, btw.

As an afterthought, this anon hate is bigoted, so I don't want to trivialize it. Ableism, sanism, and aphobia are still a big deal even when they are online microaggressions, not just because they cause harm but because these people exist offline and have a material effect on the physical (and medical/legal/social) world. Even the immediate harm is bad, though!

That being said, I want to recognize that I feel lucky (knock on wood) to not have gotten any of the really nasty shit again yet. I haven't seen any suicide baiting or "Keep Yourself Safe"s. I haven't been sent gore or death or rape threats or fantasies. I haven't had anyone tell me that I deserved the horrible traumas that I've been very open about, that I'm lying about being a survivor of things that are literally against T/OS to mention on here, or that they hoped my disabilities were terminal again.

It's uh, obviously coming from a place of trauma to have that as my baseline of "really bad". It's why I respond to anon asks to vent (via screenshotting), why I so vehemently defend the boundaries I set by blocking - not just that I have a right to, but am justified in doing so - why, when I get a fee asks like this in quick succession, and one mentions a reblog, my first thought is "how much worse is this gonna get?"

I know I'm making myself vulnerable by even talking about this. I guess I just hope if this doesn't get through to them, anyone who genuinely thinks this has even a lottery's chance of changing a random stranger's mind about anything will get over that. It's not "there's a tiny, one in a trillion chance". It's not even zero. By doing this, you are actively entrenching anyone, of any belief, further against yours. You are working counter to your own goals.

Hell, it's part of why I'm so block happy. I'm not trying to change the minds of the people I refute. I'm just trying to counter their misinformation, logical fallacies, and emotional manipulation to anyone else who may see the posts.

But also... consider maybe just... not. Sending rude anonymous asks to someone already so sensitized by horrific harassment campaigns that at best they'll block and vent about you and move on and at worst you'll trigger them. I mean, maybe that's the goal of some of you? But if so, why not come in guns blazing with the suibaiting? Why even pretend to be a good person to yourself?

Why?

I don't get it.

#the one by SAS was admittedly kinda funny #like. somehow I give less than zero shits about what they think and their ask only further solidified that #like if you're gonna act like my abuser of course I'm going to care about your opinions even less than hers #(and I care negative many about her opinions. but like... she's a family member so there's feeeeeelings wrapped up in that)#(you're nobody to me)#I refute their posts a lot because they're dangerous and sometimes even cruel #and admittedly I can be a bit of an asshole! lol. I can live with that #I also wonder if they're stalking me from an unblocked account what they think of me continuing to talk about them #are they like “you wouldn't say you didn't care so much if you actually didn't” because hun have you ever MET an autistic person #autistic people will repeatedly emphasize how much we don't give a shit #(somethinsomethin the trauma of people never believing that we're honest about our feelings+projecting onto us what they expect us to feel)#are they getting an ego boost from this?#if so hiiiii I'm always happy as a narcissist to give someone an ego boost even if I consider them a reprehensible human being #(I have NPD and if you're gonna be anableist ass about it gtfo)#(incoming norc orbuse anons in 3...2...)#anyway #stars out peace

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deepspacedukat · 2 years

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This Is Just To Say...

I found an old Word Doc from one of my college Creative Writing classes, and it brought up an old rant/thought process in my brain that I never really got to voice. (I tended to be rather quiet in my classes.) So I’m gonna do it here. If you like literary debates/thoughts/rants, feel free to click the “keep reading” and add your two cents, or if you’re not so inclined, ignore this and have a lovely day. No matter what, stay civil, please. And stay hydrated, fed, rested, and take your meds where applicable! ✨

A little background:

The course was just your basic, average Creative Writing class. The prof was nice, about mid-thirties, in the midst of getting a book published, and he was a PhD student. He was not an arrogant man. He was knowledgeable, and when his book came out, I read it happily. It was objectively very good and made me stop to think about things more deeply. I give you this bit of background so that you can understand that he, as a person, was not what I had a problem with.

What I did take issue with was something that he’d been taught and that he tried to teach us: That the highest form of creativity in writing - the only form worthy of attention - was that of the most mundane things being transformed into the art of literary fiction.

Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying that turning situations and experiences into art isn’t valid. Point in case, “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri (there are tons more examples, but I’m currently drawing a blank because low caffeine). I am, however, saying that this is not the only form of writing that is worthy of attention. My professor had been taught that fiction that has some basis in unreality - the things that can never be (vampires, supernatural entities, unicorns, etc.) - wasn’t as elevated or as high-brow as “literary fiction.” Because he was going through the effort of attempting to complete his PhD program, he had to accept this as a universal truth in order to force his own efforts in the direction that his own professors would expect.

When the students in my class challenged this statement, I will always remember the way he paused and blinked behind his glasses. It was obvious that he wanted to argue the point, but something won out in him that allowed him to ask us why we believed what we did. (He was infuriatingly reasonable, despite the absolutely elitist position that he’d been taught to accept - which is perhaps the reason I always liked him. He was always willing to listen to positions other than his own before responding.)

After several minutes of statements back and forth, he explained to us that in the higher-level Creative Writing courses that he’d gone through and was going through at that time, it was commonly accepted that fiction in the realm of sci-fi, fantasy, magic, etc. was less elevated - less sophisticated - than that of “literary” fiction. He claimed the elements contained in those books were excuses for poor writing.

I recall raising my hand and asking “What about Tolkien? He’s considered a literary genius, but he wrote about magic rings and elves.”

He looked at me as if I’d sprouted two heads. After a rather lengthy pause, he said that Tolkien was an exception. It was a followup question from another student about why Tolkien would be exempt from these almighty rules that convinced our prof to consider allowing us to study/write fantasy short-stories.

Throughout the semester we’d elaborate and expand on this debate between “literary” fiction and “common” novels, as the supposed literary powers that be determined that they should be called. And I still have a lot to say on the subject to this day.

The thought that literary fiction is more “elevated” and “sophisticated” than that of other forms of fiction begs the question of why it is considered to be so, and who makes that oh-so-crucial judgment. The answer to both questions, of course, is the socially elite - the Harvard/Yale/Ivy League academics who are so engrossed in their own superiority that they consider more accessible fiction to be less important or impactful simply because it is more easily approached by those whom the elite consider the “Common Folk.”

The authors who attempt the monumental task of writing such “elevated” fiction tend to put out long-winded essays with no more meaning beyond a few sentences. They can go on for pages at length about why they opened a door - the meaning behind it, their motivations, and the possible impacts. There’s a certain introspectiveness in that level of detail and examination that is hard to obtain and even more difficult to get a reader invested in. I acknowledge that the struggle to do so is ultimately an integral part of that particular art form. At no point, however, do I deny its validity or the author’s skill in doing so. Rather the opposite - people who can do this have excellent command over language and diction and should be commended for their persistence and skill.

As it is unfair to accuse a literary fiction author of waffling on in dryness without content or point, it is equally unjust to accuse a fantasy writer of utilizing the tools at their disposal to gloss over a lack of skill and effort in their craft. The magnitude of asking a reader to suspend their disbelief long enough to allow themselves to be drawn into a completely fictional world that could never possibly exist is enormous. The fantasy author creates beings/places/items that have no more or less meaning than they themselves assign, and they ask their readers to accept their meanings and metaphors, creatures and characters in a leap of faith - an act of trust that the author is a master of their world and knows exactly what they’re doing. Such an exercise, surely, cannot be ignored. For authors of the elevated fiction that started this whole rant, they work within set parameters in a world where meanings have already been assigned - which I grant is incredibly difficult for someone who wants to stand out. But this struggle is one that has been accepted by the author.

The struggle to articulate these things - these everyday things made extraordinary - is why they do what they do, just as creating whole new worlds to convey messages in a new and exciting way is why fantasy authors do what they do. Surely there shouldn’t be this divide, this conflict between the two viewpoints? I’m aware this argument is old - many times my own age - and that people have been coming down on one side or the other since the advent of fiction. My own position that both forms are equal, passionate as it may be, is not new. It’s highly unlikely that I’ve even presented it in a new or original fashion. But I still think it’s important to put forth the idea that all creativity is valid, every once in a while, lest it be forgotten in the jungle of academia.

So:

This is just to say, that by the end of our semester in that Creative Writing class, we - the less-educated, common group of students - had convinced our professor that maybe “common,” fantasy-type fiction wasn’t so low-brow after all.

Beyond conveying my thoughts and personal opinion on this phenomenon of contention between the genres, I really had no end goal. If perhaps one person who believes that fantasy is “low-brow” gives it a second, objective chance, no matter what their findings, I’ll be content.

Anyway, I’ll shut up now. *tosses this into the void of tumblr dot com*

#deepspacedukat rambles #mini essay incoming #I'm not sorry #I'm a quiet person but I do have strong opinions on certain subjects #like this one #anyway hmu if you have literary opinions #I don't discuss them a lot but I enjoy them

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