#this is the same kind of 'activism' that usually ends up infantilizing both women as well as poc

[greensaplinggrace]

"you never see darkling fans being alina stans! there aren't any feminist darklina shippers! lesbians and poc would never like something so immoral!" girl what on earth are you fucking talking about. don't make me tap the fucking sign.

[restoringsanity]

I could understand why the people who conflate fiction with reality don't like age-gap/abuse/incest ships, but what I don't get is the 'don't ship someone with their oppresor'. Are these people againts m/f, interacial or straight/bi relationships?? Because I've seen people practically advocating for segregation (especially when it comes to interracial ships) and I can't understand how someone could ever think that is a good idea. Idek if they are serious or is just a bad excuse to hate on ships.

i mean, the whole aging up discourse is just one more way to say women (and “”“women”“”) are degenerate sex demons. “even when there’s no room for sexuality, you go ahead and change the rules! are you just horny all the time? is sex the only thing on your minds? why do you like something so dirty and shameful so much?!” and then they wonder how women that are anti-abortion, slutshamers, victim-blamers, anti-sex ed, etc, can be like that. maybe look in a mirror before asking that.

I’m not super fluent in identity politics and activism speak, but -

Are these people againts m/f, interacial or straight/bi relationships??

Kind of. (Note: When I say ‘ship’, I mean the fictional concept. When I say relationship, I’m speaking of the real life equivalent.) Concerning interracial ships, they’re not disallowed (I think?), but rather considered mandatory. If you don’t actively choose to like the interracial ship, then you’re a racist. So, on one hand ‘don’t ship people with their oppressors’, unless it’s an issue of performative intersectionality. Up for interpretation, though. If it’s a m/m ship, don’t draw/write the person of color topping (because ‘thug’ stereotypes, somehow), but also don’t draw/write them bottoming (because infantilization, and also oppressive notions), and don’t you dare draw/write them like that.

Racism is a delicate subject, and we should be having conversations about it - but not like that. If we’re going to be talking about the issues people of color have to face, and you bring up ships, I’m going to stop talking to you. That is trivializing the suffering of millions to micromanaging inconsequential fictional content. Shipping isn’t activism.

Concerning m/f, heterosexual and bisexual ships - well, why don’t you ask our dearest radfems? I’m a feminist. I even believe in the wage gap, which makes me an ‘extreme feminist’ to some. I’m not a radical feminist, though. I’m currently quite disinterested in even having conversations with militant radical feminists.Their ‘a woman can never consent to sex with a man’, and ‘every instance of a woman having sex with a man is rape’, and ‘all men are oppressors’, their anti-kink and neo-sex-negativity bullshit has begun leaking into shipping discourse. Where do you think the whole ‘pedophilia’ angle is coming from? (So much of radical feminist rhetoric matches extreme conservative/traditionalist/puritan notion, point for point.)If you follow the logic through all flavors of discourse, you eventually realize that what ties a nice bow around it all is victimhood/victimization/self-victimization, etc. “Sex makes victims, so - sex is bad. Unless it’s between women.” (Mmmm, that pure, pure wlw content.) Because apparently victims can’t victimize each other. I’m certainly not calling all women victims. I’m not doing that. I believe women have agency - which is apparently a controversial idea to people who think ‘women can never consent to sex with a man’/etc. Why do you think TERFs don’t like transwomen and transmen? Transwomen are ‘male invaders’ and transmen have ‘internalized misogyny’. TERFs put themselves into a position of having to defend themselves against who they perceive as aggressors, from the outside and inside both. I’d guess it’s a form of selective hyper-vigilance (for a lack of better terminology).

shipping ‘incest’ -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse, disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivorsshipping ‘abuse’ -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse, disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivors shipping ‘pedophilia’ -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse (CSA), disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivors shipping ‘age gaps’ -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse (’power imbalances’), disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivorsshipping ‘a victim with their oppressor’ -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse (oppression), disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivors

That’s the one angle, whenever a ship is criticized. It’s always decisively identifying a victim, and an aggressor.consensual kink (BDSM/etc) -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse (sexual abuse), disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivors yaoi/BL -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse (sexual abuse ‘tropes’), disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivors… and so on.

To what end? I don’t know. There’s just something about controlling people that is so, so enticing. No matter who you are - the concept of power is oh so tempting, and you’ll reach for it in the smallest of ways.

“My body, my choice” isn’t usually up for debate among radical feminists, unless it is. Too often the body in question is a collective one. Radical feminists have decided that women can decide for other women what to do with their bodies, and with their lives. Whether it’s a matter of sexual activity (kink/etc), identity (transitioning/etc), or career (stay-at-home mother), among other issues.Women are supposed to decide for themselves how they want to dress, because it’s their body - unless it’s catering to the ‘male gaze’. We are against slut-shaming, unless a slut needs to be shamed. We are sex-positive, unless the sex isn’t ‘pure’.I wouldn’t be surprised if the statement ‘pro-abortion, but only if the fetus is male’ has already been made.

As a feminist, it pains me to see that some feminist movements have become oppressive. As someone who endorses and supports the idea of social justice, it pains me to see that some extreme iterations of it have become a farce.

The whole ‘shipping discourse’ is neither an issue of feminism, nor social justice, or activism to me. It’s fucking embarrassing. More often than not (on Tumblr especially), it’s always about someone’s personal agenda, and what they want - and if they can’t have it, and if not everyone wants the same, they’ll fucking come for whoever wants something else.

[viralhottopics]

If you were an elephant

the world would be a brighter, smellier, noisier place and you would be a better, wiser, kinder person. The author of Being a Beast explains all

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If you were an elephant living wild in a western city, youd be confused and disgusted.

Youd have one two-fingered hand swinging from your face a hand as sensitive as tumescent genitals, but which could smash a wall or pick a cherry. With that hand youd explore your best friends mouths, just for the sake of friendship. With that hand youd smell water miles away and the flowers at your feet. Youd sift it all, triaging. Category 1: immediate danger. Category 2: potential threat. Category 3: food and water. Category 4: weather forecasts short and long range. Category 5: pleasure.

Grumbles from trucks and cabs would shudder through the toxic ground, tickle the lamellar corpuscles in your feet and ricochet up your bones. Youd hear with your feet, and your femurs would be microphones. As you walked 10 miles for your breakfast youd chatter with your friends in 10 octaves. A nearby human would throb like a bodhran as subsonic waves bounced around her chest.

Even if it swayed with grass instead of being covered in concrete and dog shit, the city would be far, far too small for you. Youd feel the ring roads like a corset. Youd smell succulent fields outside, and be wistful. But youd make the most of what you had. Youd follow a labyrinth of old roads, relying on the wisdom of long-dead elephants, now passed down to your matriarch. Youd have the happiest kind of political system, run by wise old women, appointed for their knowledge of the world and their judgment, uninterested in hierarchy for hierarchys sake, and seeking the greatest good for the greatest number.

No room here for the infantile phallocentric Nietzscheanism that is destroying modern human culture. If you were a boy youd be on the margins, drifting between family groups (but never allowed to disrupt them) or shacked up with your bachelor pals in the elephant equivalent of an unswept bedsit (though usually your behaviour would be gentler, more convivial and more urbane than cohabiting human males). Your function would be to inseminate, and thats all. Government would be the business of the females.

Youd hear with your feet, and your femurs would be microphones. Photograph: Bruno Guerreiro/Getty Images/EyeEm

Youd be a communitarian. Relationality would be everything. Its not that you couldnt survive alone, although there would certainly be a survival benefit from being a member of a community, just as humans live longer if they are plugged into a church, a mosque or a bowling club. Yes, at some level your altruism might be reciprocal altruism, where you scratch my back if I scratch yours, or kin selection, where you are somehow persuaded to sacrifice yourself if your death or disadvantage will preserve a gene in a sufficiently closely related gene-bearer. But at a much more obvious and important level youd be relational joyously shouldering the duties that come with community because it made you happy. Why do elephants seek out other elephants? Not primarily for sex, or for an extra arsenal of receptors to pick up the scent of poachers, or because they assume that the others will have found particularly nutritious food, but because they like other elephants.

This should be terribly unsurprising. Yet many humans will be surprised. That shows how fully weve fallen for the anthropocentric lie that only humans have minds and real emotions. The lie is the high-water mark of scientific fundamentalism. Fortunately its going out of fashion now, but for years it paralysed the study of animal behaviour.

As an elephant, youd have a mind. You would, no doubt at all, be conscious. All the evidence agrees. None absolutely none disagrees. Youd have a sense of yourself as distinct from other things. When you looked out contemptuously at humans, wondering why they ate obviously contaminated food, opted to be miserable and alone, or wasted energy on pointless aggression and anxiety, it would be your contempt, as opposed to generic elephantine contempt, or reflexive contempt that bypassed your cerebral cortex, or the contempt of your sister. It would be you looking out, and youd know it was you.

Youd have a mind. You would, no doubt at all, be conscious. Photograph: Palani Mohan/Getty Images

The American ecologist Carl Safina argues that elephant X can understand the relationship that elephant Y has with elephant Z whether it is a kin relationship or simple friendship. Just think about that. Think about what it entails for Xs knowledge of itself; for Xs ability to think itself into the head of another, and for the way that X must articulate to itself the concept of a third-party relationship. Perhaps elephants are explaining the world to themselves by formulating, evaluating and selecting propositions a faculty we tend to think of as uniquely ours.

That will be too much for most. Indeed, its a mistake to assume that in order to have a mind one has to have a mind that is like human minds. So lets just say that, according to the evidence, its not obviously ridiculous to invite you, the human, to imagine yourself as an elephant. Theres some biological justification for what sounds like a whimsical, sentimental literary device. You and the elephant both have minds, wrought from the same stuff. And your minds engage with the world using the same devices. Your neurological hardware differs only in sensitivity: sodium and potassium surge in the same way through the same molecular gates when you and the elephant step on a nail; the same ancient hormones mediate pleasure, anger and stress. If you prick us, ask the elephants (using a chromatic orchestra of sounds, and well over 100 distinct body movements), do we not bleed? Indeed they do.

We can be cautiously Beatrix-Pottery with elephants. When the temporal glands near their eyes stream in circumstances that, for us, would be emotional, theyre crying. When a bereaved elephant mother carries her dead baby round on her tusks, or trails miserably behind the herd for weeks, her head hanging down, shes grieving. When other elephants sit for hours around the body of a dead elephant, theyre mourning. When they cover an elephant corpse with soil or vegetation, or move elephant bones, theyre being reverential. When they cover a dead human, or build a protective wall of sticks around a wounded human, theyre showing an empathic acknowledgment of our shared destiny that wed do well to learn. These, dear reductionists, are, as you would put it, the most parsimonious hypotheses.

Youd smell water miles away and the flowers at your feet. Photograph: Simon Eeman/Alamy Stock Photo

If elephants have minds, and minds (as seems likely) can extend beyond the brains in which we conventionally assume theyre situated, wed expect them to tune into distant elephants, and perhaps into the minds of other species too. There are some tantalising hints that they can. Safina was told by a keeper at a Kenyan elephant sanctuary that the resident elephants knew, from distances well beyond the reach of ordinary senses, that other elephants were on the way just as Kalahari bushmen know, from 50 miles away, just what a hunting party has killed, and when it will return. When the elephant whisperer Lawrence Anthony died, two groups of elephants that hed rescued came to his house on two consecutive days. They hadnt visited for a year.

Perhaps one of the reasons were so keen to deny non-human creatures minds, consciousness and personhood is that, if theyre people, theyre embarrassingly better people than we are. They build better communities; they live at peace with themselves and arent, unlike us, actively psychopathic towards other species. They know, and take account of, a great deal more information about the natural world than we do.

Back to the shamanic fantasy: youre a city elephant. Youll inhabit the city much more intensely and satisfactorily than most of its human denizens. All your senses will be turned fully on. You wont, like most woefully unsensual humans, use only your eyes, and then translate the visual images into self-referential abstractions with only a slight and dysfunctional relationship to the real world. Youll be much more properly local than any cockney, New Yorker or Madrileo, though you call Africa your home. Youll know far more of the city than any geographer, historian, zoologist, botanist, policeman or lover. By trying to become an elephant, you might become a much more thriving human.

Be careful, though. Youre likely to end up dead because someone wants a couple of your teeth.

Charles Foster is a fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, and author of Being a Beast. Some of the speculation in this article is based on elephant lore recorded in Carl Safinas Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel.

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