#which practically means women are defined by the patriarchy

[starberry-fag]

something something... the ideology that one *must* be opressed to be part of a marginalized community is something t//rfs, transandrophobes, and aphobes all share.... something something

[bloodbenderz]

there was a lot of mistakes made in the live action but the worst one without reservation was that the creators did not understand patriarchy and they did not understand women's liberation outside of an american context ( or any context if we're being honest )

it's easy to see on a surface level how that fucked up katara's whole character how she wasn't allowed to have her character defining moments how she wasn't allowed to be angry or even excited or impulsive but i think it doesn't really become clear how deeply wrong the show's conception of gender & patriarchy is (and the implications for the political landscape of the show) until you get into how they destroyed sokka's character too

sokka's whole Complex is born of patriarchy. i'm not trying to do men's rights advocacy here but in my experience when a people is under constant threat, constant assault, constant violence (much of which is gendered) and the traditional "protectors" or "providers" of that people are men, the masculine role becomes protecting women and children. i am not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing but it is true the narrative of violent resistance is overwhelmingly about men. to be a man in a time & place like this means fighting to protect your women, & to die for them is honorable. that is where sokka gets this idea that he has to be a warrior & he has to fight & if necessary die for katara & the rest of the tribe. it's about duty. everyone has a part to play, a role to fill

everyone including women! which is the other half of this. the duty of women is to keep up the home, to maintain a country worth fighting & dying for, to raise children so that the community can have a future. it becomes especially obvious in the context of the show when you see how the nwt lives & in specific how yue lives and dies.

many women participate in patriarchy. many colonized women participate in patriarchy. most of my family comes from or still lives in a country completely devastated by colonialism & its aftereffects & many women in my family believe wholeheartedly in the idea that everyone in the house has a role to play. it's not because these women are stupid or they hate themselves. but when you grow up believing that men & women are fundamentally different, and seeing that women are in specific danger because of their gender, it actually makes a lot of sense to expect the men in your family to protect you, and to raise your sons that way.

in practice that means that men aren't really expected to do anything around the house, especially when there's no actual danger. my aunt literally 2 days ago told me this lol like she doesn't make her sons do anything bc she wants to let their lives be easy before they have to go out into the world & take care of their wives & children.

what does women's liberation look like when an entire community is under threat? colonized women have been dealing with this question as long as colonialism has existed. the writers of this show don't even pretend to understand the question, much less to formulate a thoughtful response to it. they just say oh, well, katara, yue, & suki are all the exact same type of liberated girlboss for whom patriarchy is no significant obstacle.

which brings us back to sokka lol. sokka, at the beginning of the show, has completely subscribed to patriarchy, has integrated it into his sense of self. he has a lot of flaws, but he also has a lot of really good traits. his bravery, sense of honor, loyalty, work ethic, selflessness, all of this came from him striving to be a good man. he would die to protect katara, because she's his sister. he also has her wash his socks & mend his clothes, because she's his sister. even after he meets suki, humbles himself, & expands his view of the role a woman can play, he doesn't completely disengage from patriarchy. at the end of the day he believes in his soul that a good man's duty is to fight & if necessary die for his people, & that's exactly his plan. this is a very real psychic burden. pre-aang, it's also largely fictional & completely ridiculous. we're SUPPOSED to think it's ridiculous. he's spending his time training babies & working on his little watchtower. the swt hasn't been attacked since their mother was killed because it has been completely stripped of all value or danger it once held for the fire nation, & everybody knows this. there is very little "men's work" left, aside from hunting & fishing, which is so damaging to sokka's self image he resorts to toddler bootcamp to feel useful. the contradiction here is comical. it's also completely devastating. that's supposed to be the fucking POINTTTT like colonialism & patriarchy convinces this young boy he needs to be a soldier & die for his family. & you know what he does? He acts like a young boy about it. they didn't just leave this unexplored in the remake they completely changed the circumstances to 1. make sokka incompetent for some reason 2. make his "preparations" seem less ridiculous. Which ruins the whole character. Possibly the whole show.

all this makes the writing of katara & the other women infinitely more offensive to me. katara is a good character because she believes in revolution. she wants to liberate her people from imperialism, & she wants to liberate women from colonial gendered violence, traditional patriarchy in her own culture, & the complicated ways those things interact. it is LITERALLY the first thing you're supposed to learn about her. she's the PERFECT vehicle to address the question of women's liberation under colonialism. one of the things i was most looking forward to seeing in this show was how labor is distributed in a place where almost everything that needs to get done is "women's work" & how it affects katara & sokka's day to day relationship when their lives weren't at risk constantly. what actually are her responsibilities every day, & how do they compare to sokka's? how does her grandmother enforce these traditions with katara & sokka, & how is that informed by her own experiences in the nwt? what does patriarchy look like in a tribe made up of mostly women & children? it's so important to who katara is & what she believes! but why bother exploring any of that when u could instead make her a shein model who has nothing in common with the source material except her hairstyle lol.

yue is actually even worse to me bc yue is supposed to be sokka's counterpart. she's supposed to show you how destructive it is for women specifically to internalize this gendered duty so completely. it sucks for sokka, but he is a man & thus his prescribed role gives him some agency. yue's role affords her no agency whatsoever, & this is the POINT. to make her someone who's allowed to break things off with her fiance if she likes, who sneaks off to do what she wants when she's feeling stressed, whose will is respected as a monarch, like what is even the point of yue anymore? in the original the whole reason she was even allowed to spend time with sokka was because her father knew she was with a trustworthy boy. her story completely loses all significance when the dimension of patriarchy is removed from it. the crux of her whole story is that she is not just a princess but the literal & spiritual representation of the motherland. that's what women are supposed to represent during wartime, at the cost of their own sense of self. in order to fulfill her duty to her people she gives her life to them in every single way that matters.

it's just so unbelievably frustrating (and WRONG) that the only types of characters for these writers are "soulless misogynistic fuck" and "liberated american-style feminist." there's no nuance at all! they don't bother exploring how real love manifests in patriarchal communities, & how patriarchy defines the limits of that love. or how for so many of these people their idea of goodness, morality, & honor is gendered. or how imperialism affects not just individuals but entire cultures & their conceptions of gender. but why do any actual work when you could completely change sokka & katara's general demeanors, their entire personalities, & their roles in the tribe so you can dodge any & all nuance

Anyways. in conclusion. it was bad

[nothorses]

this isn't @ anyone or any particular post, but. I do find myself questioning whether it's useful to distinguish "anti-masculism" from like... misogyny and patriarchy.

maybe it's just me, but narrowing the definition of "misogyny" to just describe contempt for women, specifically, has never felt super accurate to me; the overall system of oppression being described here isn't just about a dislike of women, it's a functioning system (patriarchy) relying on, and as a product of, systemitized misogyny. It's misogyny in a dominant role of power.

And that system (as it currently exists) also requires that gender roles are strictly followed and fulfilled, including by men. It requires no deviance; no queerness and no transness. It requires that women be babymakers and caretakers and sexual gratifiers, and it requires that men be protectors and dominant breadwinners, and seek out sex. (Among other things)

I think it's helpful to expand our understanding of misogyny to include the aspects of it that necessarily impact men; it's not just the toxic masculinity that hurts others, but the system that rewards and punishes conformity to misogynistic gender roles.

"Anti-masculism" feels like it's trying to describe an aspect of this; the way this system views masculinity as brutal and violent and monstrous, especially in relation to men of color, and as a corrupting force- particularly when in contact with (whoever patriarchy views as) women.

And these things exist, and happen, but (obv) so does a mirrored phenomena for femininity; are we calling that "misogyny", to the exclusion of attitudes toward masculinity? Because I don't think it's accurate- and tbh I think it's actively counterproductive- to define that by gendered expression rather than perceived gender.

I honestly think it does more to say that these are all a part of misogyny, and to identify contempt for certain expressions of masculinity as being inherently, necessarily intertwined with other parts of misogyny. Patriarchy relies on all of these things to function, and we need to get folks to understand that challenging these attitudes toward masculinity is, in fact, a crucial part of the fight against patriarchy.

I don't think it works to say "misogyny" is an umbrella term that enconpasses all of this, and that "anti-masculism" just falls under it, either; just practically speaking, I don't think it's helpful to differentiate this particular thing as separate from similar attitudes toward femininity. It's super easy to separate the word from that context (esp without a counterpart for femininity), and while I hate having to factor in optics, I do think there's a parallel here to "transmisandry" in the possible interpretation of the word to mean that men are oppressed/misogyny doesn't exist. Even if we know that's not the intent.

And I don't think it accounts for differences between how either of these manifest for cis vs. trans people, gender-conforming vs. GNC people, straight vs. queer people, white people vs. people of color, etc.; how and why it shows up is gonna be wildly different based on whether you're being presumed more masculine or feminine because of your race, size, or disability status, or whether you're being punished for not conforming to gender expectations one way or another- which will also look different for trans people who present more in line with what's expected of their AGAB vs. their actual gender.

Also- I'm saying this here because I'm open to discussion. I feel like I've read enough about it by this point to have an opinion, but I could absolutely be lacking some crucial info, insight, or perspective, and I want folks to engage with this as a mutual conversation.

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

i think you dont quite understand what real feminism strives to do. i think you might be a little confused by the name. real feminists understand that men are harmed by patriarchal expectations, we care for the toxicity men are forced to perform to fit in, we mourn the men who think the only way out is suicide.

we advocate for conversations about subjects taboo between men: testicular cancer, prostate problems, breast cancer. however women cant just forgive and forget the systematic violence that is inflicted on us every day. you cant blame them for being wary. but real feminists do care for you.

i think you dont quite understand what real feminism strives to do

I don't think you've considered how the definition of "real" feminism you have accepted came about, or taken the time to objectively ask why and how it deviates so wildly from all real world feminist activism in practice.

i think you might be a little confused by the name.

I think you might be a little confused about reality.

real feminists understand that men are harmed by patriarchal expectations

Patriarchy, at least in the sense you are using the word, is a feminist construct, and I'm not a feminist, so I don't accept the ideological framework from which you are starting out. Only people indoctrinated by feminism believe that all societies and civilizations around the world are part of a secret worldwide conspiracy set up to benefit all men through the exploitation and oppression of all women. Any person with a working brain and pair of eyes can look around their own life and realize this is not the case, and that there is no historical evidence of any kind of any point in history in which men suddenly "woke up" from the imaginary Matriarchy, like Ken in the Barbie movie, and decided to come together to wage war upon the female of the species.

"Men", as a class are not oppressing or brutalizing "women" as a class, and in fact such behaviour is very rare in any woman's day to day interactions in the western world, so to actually claim that western society, which feminists call a "patriarchy", should best be defined and categorized in this way is delusional and completely at odds with real life.

we care for the toxicity men are forced to perform to fit in

"Toxic Masculinity" is yet another uniquely feminist invention, and a particularly mean-spirited one, in that, as with the concept of "patriarchy", it simply blames "men" for everything bad that happens to any man, and so the only "help" or "care" it offers is to tell men it's collectively all "their" fault. Masculinity is not toxic, any more than femininity is toxic: both are simply names for recognizable traits seen in both sexes across all societies and periods of history.

we mourn the men who think the only way out is suicide.

I've never seen a feminist mourn for men who commit suicide. But I've literally seen hundreds and hundreds of feminists gleefully celebrate any and all men suffering and dying. There are thousands of examples of this on this very website, and, without exception, all of them are carried out exclusively by people identifying as feminist.

This itself should be enough to make you question your starting assumptions about the movement, because other people don't do that: it is only the teachings of feminist propaganda that makes people behave that way. So once again, the claims you are making here run entirely contrary to actual, empirical reality.

we advocate for conversations about subjects taboo between men: testicular cancer, prostate problems, breast cancer.

Feminists do literally nothing to actively help men in any real-world way at all, other than, as stated above, informing them that whatever is happening to them is collectively their own fault, and attempting to emasculate them by making them view and talk about themselves as women, because feminists refuse to accept that many sex differences in behaviour are the result of millions of years of evolution, rather than being "societal constructs". Because of this flaw in their worldview, even the most well-meaning of them are incapable of seeing men as anything but faulty women.

Here's an idea for you: men are around 80% of all suicides: if feminists really did care about this, and were "mourning" every man planning to take his life, they would simply offer to listen to men in need and help out in any way they can, with warmth and love and understanding, and without any ideological framing and indoctrination and victim blaming. Men are 80% of the homeless: If feminists really did care about men, they would organize at head office to go around feeding those men or taking them home and giving them a bath and a bed.

But feminists have never done this and will never do this. Because "feminist" is the word the world has for people who have been rendered incapable of caring for men.

women cant just forgive and forget the systematic violence that is inflicted on us every day.

You mean "systemic", but even so, there is no systemic OR systematic violence being "inflicted" on women every day in any western nation, and it's hysterical nonsense to claim such a thing. Women have more legal rights, privileges and special protections than men in every first world country, so once again the claims you are making here are actually the inverse of any objective appraisal of the facts.

real feminists do care for you.

Real feminists - the ones who teach gender studies classes, write feminist textbooks, organize feminist marches and slutwalks and are active in any meaningful way in the movement - don't care for me at all: they have, instead, been taught to hate and blame me for every real and imagined inconvenience they come across in their lives, even though they may have never met me or spoken to me. This is precisely the same way that the Nazis viewed and spoke about the Jews, and that is why I say feminism is a hate movement.

[haggishlyhagging]

Two quotes I read today. Written 50 years apart but discussing the same phenomenon of female oppression.

The first is an excerpt of Kate Millett’s masterful takedown of Freud’s conclusions (which were foundational to much of the USA’s mid-20th century backlash to feminist advances) in her work Sexual Politics:

The three most distinguishing traits of female personality, were, in Freud's view, passivity, masochism, and narcissism. Even here, one can see a certain merit in the Freudian paradigm taken as pure description. The position of women in patriarchy is such that they are expected to be passive, to suffer, and to be sexual objects; it is unquestionable that they are, with varying degrees of success, socialized into such roles. This is not however what Freud had in mind. Nor had he any intention of describing social circumstances. Instead, he believed that the elaborate cultural construction we call "femininity" was largely organic, e.g., identical with, or clearly related to, femaleness. He therefore proceeded to define femininity as constitutional passivity, masochism, and narcissism. . . .

In convincing himself that the three traits of femininity were in fact constitutional and biologically destined, Freud had made it possible to prescribe them and for his followers to attempt to enforce them, perpetuating a condition which originates in oppressive social circumstances. To observe a group rendered passive, stolid in their suffering, forced into trivial vanity to please their superordinates, and, after summarizing these effects of long subordination, chose to conclude they were inevitable, and then commence to prescribe them as health, realism, and maturity, is actually a fairly blatant kind of Social Darwinism. As a manner of dealing with deprived groups, it is hardly new, but it has rarely been so successful as Freudianism has been in dealing with women.

The second quote is from Yagmur Uygarkizi’s piece “‘Feminism Allowed You to Speak’: Reinforcing Intergenerational Feminist Solidarity Against Sophisticated Attacks” which was published in the anthology Spinning And Weaving: Radical Feminism for the 21st Century. Uygarkizi is here discussing the foundational tenets of queer theory and its attendant postmodern analyses of women as socially-constructed entities:

Finally, and most importantly, sex roles are no longer imposed but ingrained: gender becomes an identity. If you as a woman are foolish enough to abide by the stereotypes that constrain you, then that's your problem: you could have just identified your way out of it. This is the message the disparaging "cis women" expression hides.

We are witnessing an essentialisation of our oppression: what men do to us is who we are apparently. If they rape us, we are the rape. If they veil us, we are the veil. If they stereotype us, we are the stereotype. One can sense a hint of victim-blaming here: just like a woman in prostitution/pornography might feel that she is only good at that, queer theory rehashes that yes, that is very true. Instead of taking material biological reality as the basis of an identity, socially constructed practices are taken as accurate indicators of someone's identity. What this means is that any criticism of those practices becomes a criticism of the person. Whorephobia. Islamophobia. Transphobia. The basis of the discrimination shifts from the female sex to the sex-based discrimination itself.

The link between Freudianism and postmodern queer theory is a simple one: women exist to be oppressed. We have simply shifted from it being seen as a natural phenomenon, based on the material reality of sex, to a chosen one based on the psycho-social assumptions based around personal identity.

[anamericangirl]

On your post about the Barbie movie, you seemed to take a dim view of feminist themes. So - genuinely just asking because I'm curious about your opinion:

How do you define feminism? (I've found that most people, including many feminists, aren't clear about what it means. Many feminists are prone to the motte-and-bailey fallacy with the motte of "legalise abortion! Sex work is work! Promote strong female characters" and the bailey of "men and women are equal in value and should be equal in law and society").

With feminism defined, how much of it do you object to, how strenuously and why?

I tend to take feminism at face value and accept the definition I see them most often give which is along the lines of advocating for equality between the sexes.

And I don’t object to anything that definition puts forward because I think equality between the sexes is a good thing.

The reason I reject feminism, however, is because feminists do not abide by the definition they provide. They assume there is currently not equality between the sexes and I do not agree with that.

It’s particularly third and fourth wave feminism that are the biggest problems. Their movement does not in any way reflect the alleged definition. From what I have seen their whole goal is to have women dominate over men and I don’t vibe with that.

Furthermore:

I reject the idea that we live in a patriarchy.

Pretty much everything feminists talk about from the wage gap to rape culture is a myth.

They ignore and dismiss issues that affect men. And you can’t advocate for equality between both sexes, like they claim to do, when you only focus on one sex.

They constantly disparage men in order to promote women using made up and false terms like “toxic masculinity” “mansplain” “male tears” “manspreading” and “male gaze.”

They bash traditional femininity.

They advocate for abortion.

They promote the ideas of hiring people because of their sex or race just to get more “diversity” when practices like that are inherently discriminatory.

They promote the idea of “believe all women” over the concept of due process.

And I could go on but hopefully that gives enough a picture. They do nothing to help no one and they lie to women and degrade men. Their movement is as far away from promoting equality as it can possibly be.

[pineapplerightsideupcake]

I don’t wear makeup because I just never grew up doing it, but I do put like Vaseline on my face and lips and I use castor oil on my eyelashes when I remember. I sometimes feel guilty doing these things bc it feels like mock makeup. And I know makeup is harmful for women. But is it a big deal? Is it better that I use jojoba oil and frankincense oil on instead of foundation? I feel bad sometimes like I’m still subconsciously subscribing to the patriarchy’s feminine beauty standards. But I do really want to look good, and I feel guilty about it. Sorry if it’s a stupid question.

Amazing news! Radical feminism is a philosophical framework with which to analyze the world around you and your own experiences within it. Radical feminism is not a list of rules to follow.

You are doing more to battle patriarchy by not micro analyzing your every move for moral purity than you ever would by just stopping wearing makeup alone.

Which isn’t to say that minimizing makeup use isn’t good praxis- just that political purity is impossible. And I think that message is especially important in this era where the appearance of virtue matters more than anything.

As for the more practical side of things- toiletries like moisturizer, Vaseline, anti itch cream, foot powder, deodorant, etc I believe are all medicinal rather than cosmetic. Like tooth paste isn’t cosmetic. You have to brush your teeth!

I don’t really know what purpose things like frankincense oil or jojoba oil serve. So I’m at a loss as to advise on them.

In the end, it’s okay and even important to acknowledge that no one philosophy is perfect or without gaps or grey areas. People are drawn to philosophies and religions that promise them all the answers but there is no such thing. And that’s scary. It means we have to think. And think hard and think everyday.

The philosophies worth listening to admit their limits. And radical feminism can’t tell you if people would still care about their appearance in a perfect world. Nothing can. Because we don’t live in a perfect world. All we can do is analyze the imperfect one we have.

The good news is this means you get to define your own boundaries and ideas in those gaps. The bad news is you have to define your own boundaries and ideas and be ready to defend them. To others and to yourself. It’s work but it’s worth it.

Relax, go for a walk, and forgive yourself for not being perfect. It’s an ugly manipulation women are told that we have to be perfect in the first place. You are allowed to be human. You are allowed room to breathe and grow and explore.

[aronarchy]

[CW: transphobia]

Transmisogyny is misogyny, transphobia is patriarchy.

The only main difference is that trans people are more oppressed than cis women so while cis women have gotten relative progress from feminism trans people are often left behind by cis feminists, and “progressive” transphobes will even naturalize patriarchal gender roles and definitions and manufactured constrictions, specifically bringing them out or bringing them back when it comes to defending transphobia.

This dynamic is especially exacerbated by racism, colonialism, Orientalism; the cultural imperialist Western gaze targets racialized trans people and even cis women and queers to naturalize or essentialize the patriarchal oppression they experience, treating it as an arbitrary cultural quirk occurring because of happenstance which must and/or can only be preserved, rather than a historically contingent form of oppression with specific material causes and consequences which can and should be overthrown. The relativist authoritarian often chastises consistent anti-authoritarians for supposedly being racist, white-privileged, disseminating “Western” viewpoints, etc. (erasing the non-white/Western intersectionally marginalized people who are the most harmed by such discourse, of course), but don’t be fooled: they’re the ones leveraging structures and ideologies originating in Western imperialism (the notion that The East and The West are ontologically different in grand historical ways, that nothing “Western” can be related to anything “Eastern” and vice versa, that The East is static and unchanging and underdeveloped, that The East’s cultures, values, practices, etc. are mysterious, exotic, inscrutable by The West, and so on), and when we expose this we peel away their façade (an important step that they always struggle to prevent by any means possible). (I don’t just say this in a vague abstract online discourse way; these dynamics also pop up in day-to-day personal political contexts, often the mechanism of violence/abuse; they are behind a great deal of material oppression in the real world today and have left a great deal of trauma upon marginalized people.)

It doesn’t occur to relativist transphobes that if someone doesn’t consider themself a woman / man because they feel they aren’t allowed to identify as or be one because they don’t fit the cissexist standard of having to be able to give birth (and fulfill the hegemonically defined (subordinate) wife role) / impregnate (and fulfill the hegemonically defined husband (patriarch) role), then that might possibly be a result of internalized patriarchy/misogyny/(cis)sexism and not an ideal state, and their mental health and self-image might improve and they might be living lives more closely in alignment with their internal selves if some friend went up and told them it could be an option. This is liberal choice “feminism” but specifically a version targeting trans people and transphobic oppression under patriarchy.

If a (white) infertile cis woman / cis man vented about feeling like they’re a failed Other rather than a real woman or real man because they can’t give birth / impregnate and the society around them says Real Women / Men are people who can give birth / impregnate (respectively), would people like this say as readily that it’s true they really are an ungendered unwomanly / unmanly Other, despite their own desire to be a woman / man and feelings which align with that? Or likewise for other forms of gendered nonconformity among cis people. (Much less likely, I think.)

Would they say, “cis women without children” is a whole separate gender from “cis women with children,” a third gender after “cis women with children” and “cis men with children”? Then “cis men without children” as a fourth gender. What about married with children versus married without? Then split the above into eight. Some trans people do get married, either while closeted, as an attempt at conversion or punishment by family or society, while passing for their correct gender (if they have a gender from the binary), or with updated laws which have assimilated trans people more. Trans people can have children too, even if not in the same patriarchal way which secures intergenerational patrilineal inheritance. More gender-categories for them then? (It’s obvious where this leads: there are in fact as many ways to be women and men as there are women and men, and different gender roles and social gender locations are assigned or designated in a gradient or internally distinguished way for all gender differences or social role differences, but there are some general categories which could be broadly termed different “genders” which group together, and thus it would be irrational/illogical and arbitrary to exclude trans women from womanhood or trans men from manhood under such a linguistic system.)

The transphobic takes above prioritize what “society” says, what other (cis) people surrounding someone says about what gender is, what their gender must be, as if what they say matters so much in defining us (or even at all), and then also equates the viewpoint of oppressive surroundings with the viewpoint of the oppressed individual (as if the oppressed will always just bow down and accept their oppression). That is not how we define gender or determine what anyone’s gender is, because that literally goes against the whole point of transness in the first place, which is that we define our own identities, we say what our genders are, we don’t limit ourselves by a cissexist society which constrains people by setting rigid inaccurate definitions; the subversiveness, the contradiction with surrounding norms, is literally the point; it wouldn’t be transness if there were no preexisting cisness (top-down/nonconsensual gender assignments) to struggle against in the first place.

It’s especially nasty to imply that Western trans people identify as “really” the gender they feel they are because the West’s social definitions of gender uniquely recognize that women don’t have to be wives, childbearers, and mothers (for patriarchs) and men don’t have to be husbands (patriarchs) and property-owning child-investing patrilineage-obsessed reproductive futurists. That erases the fact that there’s rampant institutionalized socially prevalent patriarchy in the West too; many people do believe that still; the point is, no society, no culture is a monolith. But it’s very obvious why sweeping portrayals of white, Western PoVs highlight the “progressive” parts while sweeping portrayals of non-white/non-Western PoVs highlight the “regressive” parts (racism, Enlightenment teleology). (And yes, people oppressed by racism can also be racist themselves.)

That also implies that trans people and our feelings and desires are dependent on cis people and their choices. That none of us will think against the grain until cis people create the conditions which allow for it. This prioritizes cis feminism and cis women’s rights over that of trans people, telling us they’ll always come first, we’ll always need them (though they won’t ever need us), if they’re not class-conscious yet then there’s no scenario where we might be more class-conscious already, which erases how we’re actually pressured to know much more about feminism than them, to understand their issues and ours and to be able to argue perfectly for both our rights and theirs in order to be relatively tolerated. These notions are only legible because of cissexism.

Trans people whose gender includes one (or both) genders from the binary are only treated as not being “allowed” to be “properly” considered as people of that gender because of cissexism. This denial is a form of oppression and social subordination, not something neutral or good or just naturally occurring. It’s cruel and it’s wrong. Notice how such discussions about “difference” never say that, e.g., “cis men are Different(tm) from trans men because they occupy different social niches, and trans men are more manly than cis men, because cis men don't fit into our/the Paradigmatic Image of What A Man Is(tm) and we only begrudgingly acknowledge cis men as probably ‘men’ in some way because of their self-identification but that won’t alter how we fundamentally categorize ‘men’ and we couldn’t possibly put forth a cis man as Paradigmatic, Archetypal, or Representative because smh he’s cis not trans, we couldn’t do that, that doesn’t intuitively make sense, a Man(tm) is a trans man unless otherwise specified?” (or likewise for women). Which makes it clear that this is about a power imbalance, a hierarchy placing cis people above trans people of the same gender and prioritizing cis people, which pushes out trans people from equal recognition and epistemic authority. (And no, the “unless otherwise specified” is not good enough, it’s still implicit misgendering; it’s just a half-assed attempt to cover the problems with your ideology; we want more.)

There is a (very obvious) reason why, despite having very different contexts at times, all patriarchies share certain common characteristics (patrilineage; intergenerational private property/power transfer of some sort; socially-mandated, enforced, or disproportionately incentivized binary heterosexual marriage/the couple-form; child-ownership by the patriarch; rigid definitions of “woman” as childbearer and mother and “man” as the one who possesses/owns the children (and “girls” and “boys,” respectively, as future “women” and “men,” requiring coercive socialization/indoctrination); condemnation of autonomous deviation from the prescriptive binary definitions of gender (in desire, in self-regard, in private or public identification/claiming, in differences or alterations in aesthetics/appearance/biological sex characteristics or role performance); etc.). Of course it’s not just arbitrarily landing on that every single time. These are social structures which arose from a historical process during which children, women, and queers were domesticated or forcibly excluded (as colonialism is imposed through an initial conquest and then ongoing counterinsurgency), relatively stabilizing after the patriarchs won the battle.

There is no reason why “man” or “woman” (or male, female, wife, husband, mother, father, boy, girl, masculine, feminine, gender, sex, “two genders,” “third gender”) would be terms any more transhistorically relevant, self-evident, coherent, or applicable than “transgender,” “nonbinary,” “trans woman/man/girl/boy/female/male,” etc. (And for that matter, “transmasc(uline)” (and “transfem(inine)”) shouldn’t be treated as “safer” terms to slide in third-gendering of binary trans people to avoid using the words “trans man” or “trans woman”; there’s no reason why they would automatically be more accurate either.) The people who would be called “trans” here today have existed and will exist in every society, and there will always be trans people under any patriarchy, and some language that would apply (whether a word or set of words or phrase or set of phrases or way of describing) to denote people rejecting or not aligning with their birth-assigned gender, so long as gender is assigned at birth. There will always be resistance, at least somewhere, sometime, when there is oppression. You will never have 100% internalized acceptance of cissexism. It’s time that relativists recognized this.

[taylor14firefly]

https://archive.ph/2023.01.15-174807/https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/11/16/feminisms-second-wave-has-failed-women

Liberal feminism has failed women

by Julie Bindel, 16 Nov 2020

"It is not exactly hard work being a liberal feminist. Nothing has to change, no challenge to the status quo is necessary and men do not need to be admonished. In other words, things stay the same and the quest for individual enlightenment and liberation becomes key. “My body, my choice” is one of the most recognised slogans of second-wave feminism. This is because, prior to the many achievements of the women’s liberation movement, women’s lives were defined by the absence of choice. Women had little or no say over whether or not they married or had children, or even about sexual practice and pleasure. Feminism created a landscape in which women could, to an extent, exercise choice. But lately, the concept of “choice” has been co-opted by liberals to mean acquiescence to harmful practices that benefit men. [...] Liberal feminists are so scared of offending men that they bend over backwards to maintain the status quo as opposed to seeking proper liberation for women. They are happy to be given a seat at the table where they might get thrown a few crumbs, rather than taking an axe and smashing it to smithereens. If men support a particular type of feminism that should be a clue as to its ineffectiveness. Feminism should be a threat to men because we are seeking liberation from patriarchy, which means that they lose the privilege they were afforded at birth by simply owning a penis."

[manic-pixie-dick-girl]

TW trans surgeries, vaginoplasty, genital talk:

I think I've learned something important about vaginoplasty and neovaginas (technical term for trans girl coochie) from my last reblog about the great wall of vagina vulva:

I decided to see if I could tell which of the vulvas were trans women's. I've seen a fair few from looking at post-op result pics and doing research for my own surgery, so I was pretty confident.

I could for certain say two or three were neovaginas, and had maybe 7 or 8 that I thought were but couldn't be sure. What I realised though, was that all of these ones I thought were trans women's vulvas had one thing in common:

A lack of fleshiness, for lack of a better word. No large labia minora, no prominent clitoris, no defined clitoral hood.

This was a huge light bulb moment to me! It says SO MUCH about the state of vaginoplasty, and the people performing these surgeries.

Firstly, having a "neat" vulva is considered more aesthetically pleasing. I have no fucking idea why, but it's true. That's the classic porn star look for some reason. So when we get designer coochies, that's what we get made. "Fashionable" pussy. Which is so fucking weird to me.

Secondly, from my understanding a lot of vaginoplasty's difficulty is that you only have so much skin to work with. It doesn't usually take skin from elsewhere in the body, just reuses genital tissue in a like-for-like manner. The fact that there is barely any tissue around the outside means that practically all of it has been used to achieve as much depth as possible.

Which just SCREAMS "oh a straight cis guy developed this surgical technique" to me! Because if you spend all your working material on depth that means you think it's the most important factor. And why would you think that? I can only imagine it's because you see the vagina as first and foremost a hole for a cock to go. Why else would you care if your vagina is 7 inches deep vs 4? The misogyny rankles. Can the patriarchy please get out of my hypothetical future pussy.

Because I tell you what: as a massive raging lesbian this seems completely backwards. Given the choice, I'd spend as much tissue as needed to create a fully defined vulva, and then whatever is left gets spent on depth. I care much more about what it looks like in the mirror or if a partner wants to go down on me than how much dick can fit in it.

Besides, if I do end up having sex with a be-penised person then well to be blunt I already have a perfectly good hole to put it in. It even comes with its own g-spot. Why would I need another one?

Okay pussy rant over.

[evidence-based-activism]

Can gou define "the patriarchy" in 2024?

Every time I ask this I get wildly different answers, even contradicting each other. To me that's an indication people just mold it into what suits them.

Honestly just sounds like capitalism to me.

The definition of “patriarchy” from the online Merriam-Webster dictionary:

social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line broadly : control by men of a disproportionately large share of power

a society or institution organized according to the principles or practices of patriarchy

In practice, what does this mean?

In a patriarchy you see — to varying extents — the various types of power (i.e., social, political, economic, etc.) disproportionally afforded to men.

For example, as of 2023, the US census bureau estimates 50.4% of the US population is female. Accordingly, if power was proportionally allocated to men and women in the US, we would expect about half of the various positions to be filled with women.

However, in 2023 according to the Pew Research Center, women occupied only:

25% of the US senate

29% of the US House

33% of the US state legislators

24% of the US governors

11% of US Fortune 500 CEOs

30% of US Fortune 500 board members

33% of US college and university presidents

0% of all US presidents in history

All of these are well below parity and also represent only a small portion of all the positions of power in which there is a disparity (consider: religious leaders, military officers, law enforcement officials, the highest paying occupations, etc.).

Of course, I could cite evidence of the patriarchy with many other examples ranging from: how men commit the vast majority of violent crimes (and also the majority of all total crimes), how almost all married women take their husbands last name, how almost all children of married couples take only the father’s name, how every major religion is male-centric (re: the “Father God”, importance placed on obeying the father/husband), various other culture (gender) norms, and more.

This also is specific to the US. Other countries vary in the specific statistics, but generally have similar (or even worse) patterns.

Why do answers to this question “contradict” each other?

I’d have to actually see/read the responses to answer that. My guess is that they’re all attempting to explain the same concept with varying degrees of success, which may appear contradictory as a result.

“Honestly just sounds like capitalism to me”:

I’m … not sure how you arrived at this conclusion. Capitalism certainly impacts and interacts with the patriarchy, but if it were purely capitalism the hierarchy and effects would be gender neutral. That is, you’d expect to see similar proportions of women and men at the “top” and “bottom” of the capitalist hierarchy, whereas right now the “top” is disproportionately made of men and the “bottom” is disproportionately made of women. In addition, the effects of your place in the hierarchy would be identical between the sexes, whereas in reality (some of) the effects are sex-dependent.

In addition, men have disproportionate amounts of power within their economic class as well. For example, wealthy women face intimate partner violence from their wealthy male partners significantly more often than wealthy men face violence from their wealthy female partners. Daughters of wealthy men face various problems that the sons of wealthy men don’t face.

Ultimately, capitalism and the patriarchy interact, but are different systems. Women face both inter- and intra-class sex discrimination; women also face sex discrimination in non-capitalist societies.

[hungeringheart]

How do you think a Sylph of Doom would affect the session? Like how would the aspect of doom be broken in the session in order for the Sylph to heal it? Would it be like a lack of rules/system in the game or would it affect the players fate? Sorry if this is a confusing question/if it's worded badly

This all really depends on what you as a writer want to do with your story. The class list is dyadic, sure, but people organize their dyads differently (heir-witch? heir-page? mage-witch? mage-seer? sylph-witch? sylph-maid? knight-sylph? over the years the fandom has persuasively argued for any of these).

That being said, you asked what I think! So here's what I think. This can be considered my analysis post for Sylphs and Doom :)

When I was a small girl, I walked through the market

Holding my dad's hand, mitten in gloved hand

At night there were roses, lit up in glass boxes

The heat lamps would keep them from freezing in winter

We never bought them, but somebody must have

Maybe they made it, or maybe they froze up

Before any person had put them in water

And hoped that they'd still be alive by the morning

- Sellers of Flowers (Regina Spektor)

What's a Sylph, anyway?

The fandom consensus seems to be that sylphs heal in some way, or offer other mysterious fae magical assistance. We don't know more than that and what Kanaya sort of facetiously says once, which is that a Sylph is "sort of like a Witch but more magical". Does she mean that? Does she mean that they're nothing alike?

In the end it's your own call what your Sylphs do, and I think you have to define that explicitly for your own fansession.

In my case, I never paid any attention to sylphs at all until someone who was too emotionally dependent on me assigned me Sylph of Heart, and I got so offended (for lack of a better word) that I fell into a research hole and never emerged.

That's coloured my personal interpretation of the class, which is that they're something like a maid but more remote, and something like a witch but more remote, and something like a mage but less remote, and something like a page but less remote.

I think sylphs are... well, ok, let's digress and travel in time for a moment.

You know about Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, a survey of (a limited set of) folklore that uncovered some archetypes that have since this time plagued psychologists with pseudoscience and folklorists with dubious methodology.

You may not know that all this had such a stranglehold on the world that people took it fully seriously as a way for a man to realize himself, in a way presaging the current manosphere. But then that begs the question, what about women?

Enter Maureen Murdock, a student of Campbell's who asked him if women could also have heroic journeys of actualization, and was met with a dumbfounded look out of eyes that had never thought women might need to develop at all.

Well no, said Campbell, women are the thing men are striving to be worthy of. Why would they need to mature?

So of course then in her work as a therapist (working mostly again with the certain type of women drawn to her practice), Murdock identified a common path towards women (in her own, American culture and ones like it) feeling like whole people. Mostly it's about a process of trying to figure out what a woman is, a real flesh and blood breathing woman, and how to be and do that in women's way; there is unfortunate and dated secondwavey phrasing, but it's a solid thing all told.

For a time this has floated around as a kind of Heroine's Journey. It never attempted to actually be folkloristics, and as psychology it suffered at first from the "Undergrad Students Desperate For Study Payments On One Specific Homogeneous Campus Have Really Fucked Lives, More At 11" thing, which also gave us the false idea that absolutely everyone fantasizes about being violated.

But it has a point: for a woman in a patriarchy (which, to return to Homestuck, is allegorized by the female-centric, but still reproductively oppressive society which Kanaya and Porrim are vital to, but readable as marginalized in) to figure out who she is, she has to figure out what a woman is, in a context without much of value to say on the issue. She has to go through sort of an attempt to become other things, things other people want from her, and then eventually find herself.

Personally this is not my culture or my take on womanhood in real life, but at this point we are talking about interpreting Homestuck through the culture that produced Andrew Hussie, and I think it's useful for classpecting purposes.

To me a Sylph is kind of a response to this. I don't want to get into authorial intent because no one can know about that, but in real life a sylph is sort of an amorphous, ageless, healing, positive elemental spirit. So then a Homestuck Sylph is always a player in a social role of their society that corresponds to that - passive, mysticized, anodyne. Mysterious, but not because there needs to be much there. Mysterious because it's irrelevant to the other heroes' journey, which the sylph is led to believe they're there to support.

Morgan Le Fay. The Lady of the Lake on her magical island. Vasilissa the Wise. Ninian, one supposes. Even Kanaya in her fertility-focused mystery cult. All those lovely flat marriageable wise jinni princesses.

Our two canon sylphs are Kanaya - obviously - and Aranea, whose narrative role is to help everyone mystically see and do a bunch of shit they need to, enable things to happen that ought to happen, and not particularly actively do anything else. But do they actually have to stay in that role, or is the point to transcend its limitations and come into one's own?

I would argue that it is, and that we can see that through the character of Porrim, who after all is sort of a parody of and response to the early fan response to Kanaya. We can also see it through the visceral imagery of how Kanaya saves the species (by killing her virgin mother-sister and extracting her womb/ootheca/budding clone).

So then: yes, sylphs heal or fix others and their fuck ups and life situations, but they also heal themselves and their world and their society's relation to the world. Their mystic function can be argued as something like restoring or finding balance, not necessarily the outcome their party wants or thinks it needs. In that way they might also be read as related to Pages, who go through the same journey of being everything but themselves but for the other binary gender.

Of course gender isn't really the important variable here, it's societal position -- your own sylph's journey can be about whatever you want, as long as it involves dealing with and negotiating the sort of mystic pedestal that people put them on for whatever reason.

That's what I think a Sylph is. They create, repair and preserve the appropriate amount of their aspect for the good of their group, but not because they're "only" good for that or "meant" to do it or somehow "ethereal creatures of [Aspect]" - just because it's necessary, because their aspect is out of balance, because someone has to look at it differently.

I have a fuchsia sylph (of hope) in an unfinished fanwork, Matsya, who might also be instructive as to sylphage and sylphing and so on; in that fanon trolls have a bit more obviously insectile biology, and Matsya is a laying worker, a "mutation" which is normally treated badly in a no longer hive-based society that got this way by chattelizing its queen morph.

But her position (as a queen, the feudal position, in the empire currently run by her biological aunt) gives her breathing room to think about it instead of being bioengineered into the "correct" morph or blacklisted from work appropriate to her caste, and the tension of having that breathing room and no idea what it's really like for others puts her into conflict with others in the setting. The point then isn't necessarily that a sylph Must be marginalized, but that the sylph has to be forced to confront the way that their society runs, react to it, and work to somehow "heal" the problem. Healing bodies and (or) minds can be a component of that -- Matsya for instance can passively inspire people, and insofar as she heals anyone before her gtier powers kick on, it's because all animals can heal themselves better when they don't feel pain and fear. But a Sylph of Rage would nurture and encourage or at least inspire something totally different - and in this way, a Sylph is like an active Muse.

Matsya accomplishes this in a way that restores Hope for a future (by integrating helpful ritual and mystic concepts from the past to serve the present), Kanaya does all this in canon for the aspect of Space by rescuing her species' potential and physical existence, and Aranea I think initially fails to do much more than literally helping Terezi see things because she's too busy playing Captain Save-a-Hoe to think of her role as fixing things in the world, in addition to problems in people.

Aranea's realization as a Sylph is too late for her party (and would probably have mostly benefited her anyway, as her aspect was Light - which is most directly luck, and she was by then working kind of blackhat hackerishly), but I think it comes at some point on the timeline tangential to Act 6, when she appears to be creating and manipulating circumstances and societal constants and understandings to get the Ring of Life (such as by putting John to sleep with her cerulean powers so that he can beat Tavros to it).

But anyhow, that's what I think a Sylph is -- someone who works with and resolves what they're given, in a somewhat more holistic and less servile way than a Maid -- insofar as I write Sylphs any particular way. As always, your mileage may vary.

Who's the winner?

Not the roses,

Not the buyers, not the sellers,

Not the tellers of the stories,

Not the fathers, not their children.

Not those walking on a dark night

Through a memory they're forgetting.

Who's the winner?

Who's the winner?

Maybe winter, maybe winter...

I like this, what about the aspect of Doom?

Doom is straightforwardly about Law, but not in the cyclic sense of Time - in the linear sense of the wyrd of Norse sagas. Inevitable things, death, endings, suffering, decay. But also the emergence of order, through restriction; the imposition of law, Law and Law (the difference is like the difference between the law that makes jaywalking a crime in the USA, sharia, and the law of gravity). In a way, the yin to life's yang -- the antithesis of struggle, striving, flourishing and self-definition, but equally concerned with the way of things. And uniquely concerned with justice; doom is the aspect that governs and introduces the Just and Heroic Death rule, after all.

In the Slavic languages (famously very fatalistic) and in Yiddish there are words that reflect something I think is good to know about Doom and inevitable things; sudba, a neutral word for destiny meaning the thing judged for you, and mazal, both one of a canonical set of lucky stars and luck or fortune as derived from your birth underneath them. People use these words somewhat fatalistically, as in, you miss a shot or lose money to a casino and you say, oh, well it wasn't destined anyway, or oh, my lucky star is off duty tonight I guess. And then you go on with your life, because it's not always all going to be death doom suffering peril death doom death, even if you think it is. Usually something good happens afterward and you remember that your deity or force of choice isn't always completely drunk, just a lot of the time -- and that it does still have to look out for you occasionally.

A Doom player doesn't necessarily need to be dark or unpersonable (my fankid Eden and her uncle Yoel, also a Doom player in a different timeline, aren't, and neither are canon's Sollux and Mituna) -- they just need to have a character arc resolving around some relation to inevitability, law, decline and decay. None of these are necessarily bad things, though Sollux's case might reflect manifestations that are! Inevitability is part of the way of things, and decay, as the Tumblr lore goes, exists as an extant form of life.

And both together now:

In a sylph's case, because their role is to generate, maintain, resolve, repair and re-examine their aspect, yes, the Doom of their session is probably somehow flawed -- or maybe there's a lack of Doom, altogether, and they need to be the one to direct and contextualize the team. The sylph's personal life and journey is probably strongly tied in with beliefs about law and destiny and (by extension) belonging, meaning and social thought -- they could be pathologically unlucky, they could just be a person who believes in justice in a broken system. My partner's Heir of Doom, Aryyeh, has an inversion of this arc where he's placed to uphold and perpetuate damaged systems, but has to grow into someone who can do something about it - Heir of Doom (future perpetrator of crimes against trollkind) to Heir of Doom (worthy instrument of a new and kinder Law).

Either Doom or the Sylph's relation to Doom or both are unhealthy, and in the spirit of their classpect, they're meant to dial down and take things slow and thoughtfully. And of course, maybe they were born to and moulded by it... but I think their bigger concern is that their session itself might be doomed from the get-go. Don't you? ;)

[the-journal-in-law]

This question has been bothering me for some time. Should age define someone's maturity? I know that 'with age comes wisdom,' but some people get that wisdom later than others.

Generally, women mature faster than men - and I'm not making this point to support the 'empowerment of women.' It's a fact. Biologically speaking, women get puberty earlier than men, and that means their mental age grows, too. This alone shows that there are different rates of maturity, so to use a set age of adulthood to apply to a large populace isn't practical.

Does this mean women should have a younger legal age than men? Definitely not. To do so would show unfair privilege towards women (which would be ironic considering society's history of patriarchy). Additionally, not all women are the same. One woman may mature at a slower rate than another. Men can also mature faster than women.

There is no definite definition of 'maturity.' In the dictionary, maturity means 'the state, fact, or period of being mature,' which is vague and could be interpreted in many different ways.

So, to get back to the original question; at what point is someone mature? Why is 18 considered (in the US, at least) a reasonable age to be a legal adult?

Age is socially constructed, which means it is a concept invented by society (humans). If humans didn't put meaning to age, it wouldn't have existed. If age didn't exist, the concept of 'childhood' or 'adulthood' wouldn't have existed either.

In fact, in medieval times, childhood didn't exist. Not in the modern sense. Children were treated as small adults. As soon as they were able to, they were put to work. Boys laboured in the fields with their fathers while girls helped their mothers in the household.

If children and adults were treated the same, then did the concept of age exist?

The obvious answer is 'no.' Regardless of how long they had lived, people were forced to work. There were no laws restricting child labour. Thus, the concept of maturity and how children needed to grow before working didn't exist.

But it's not as simple as that. People in medieval times did count their ages - the nobility and royalty, at least. They would host grand feasts on their birthdays. And this means age - though not as we define it nowadays - existed.

With this, we can infer that age can exist without the concept of maturity. Now, the question is: is there a connection between age and maturity?

Someone who is 40 would obviously be more mature than a 10-year-old. But how are they more mature? Emotionally? Mentally? Both?

From one point of view, we can say that children are more emotionally mature than adults. Hear me out first. Adults may seem more emotionally mature than children, but that's because they are better at suppressing their impulses - a given since they've lived decades more. Adults can secretly hold grudges and lie about their feelings. Meanwhile, children are more forgiving and honest. They forget about negativity easily. There is a reason depression appears more often in adults than children (pre-puberty).

In conclusion, there are different ways to measure maturity. It differs between individuals, which is why it is hard to generalise the meaning of maturity.

Therefore, age does not define maturity, which, in turn, means a set age cannot be used to define when someone can be a responsible adult.

Disclaimer: not backed by research

[the-feminist-philosopher]

Gender is "real" in the sense it affects people's lives. I'd like to think all feminists probably agree on that point. Gender is about as "imaginary" as any other social or cultural identity, which are also socially constructed. Someone identifies as Canadian because a social construct decided to draw borders where it did and name the land which they were born upon as "Canada." But we don't go around saying "Canada doesn't exist." In practice and in the sense this social structure affects people's lives and reality, it does, and that's why the questions we are asking are regarding such things as borders and the names of things. For example: "should we have borders," "how do borders segregate families and peoples," "who has the authority to draw and enforce a border," "who should have stewardship of this land," and "who should decide the names of land/landmarks." All of these are questions about power and authority.

Gender polarity is not real. Gender is not tangible. It's a social construct even though it still has a tangible effect on people's lived realities. The pressures of gender/sex-differentiation shape our lives. And there is not a single feminist who is not critical of gender, especially its consequences on real life and the way that it effects our political, economic, and social institutions. The critical evaluation of gender is why so many feminists support trans people.

You cannot do something like "abolish" gender without tackling the way we gender things socially or politically or economically; without championing epicenity; without confronting the importance we place on such things as "being a woman" and "being a man;" or without addressing the way our society suppresses and demonizes variation in presentation and identification and really anything outside the idea that there are two self-evident and discrete sexes (often which are considered opposite yet harmonious).

In feminist theory, it is commonly accepted that there is no single property that is the 'sex-making' property; that our sex doesn't reach critical mass when a certain number or configuration of properties converge at a particular time; that there is no Platonic Form of our sex against which all human bodies are measured or *should* be measured. This Platonic Form literally does not exist. Which is why we must ask WHO gets to decide which properties are the male v. the female-making properties, WHO gets to decide at what point male v. female has happened, and WHY are they the authority?

Sex, as a "biological" category, is just the outcome of a social and cultural battle over who owns the meaning of things. The language we use *has* been shaped by the patriarchy and white supremacy. The language we have inherited is limiting because language is a limited tool. And the thing about tools is that they can be weaponized.

"[I]mplicit in any claim about which property or properties are female-making are assumptions about authority, proper functioning, and morality. These claims are normative claims; they are not claims about what is material and what is not. They are value judgments... they carry the same flaws often ascribed to 'gender:' [] it doesn't correspond to material reality [and] it is an oppressive social construction... Trying to set up 'sex' as some kind of material reality distinct from 'gender' doesn't actually DO anything differently in practice. So, if you're going to critique gender as an oppressive social force and ask questions about who gets to say what a woman is and what a woman does, then you must also ask the same questions about who gets to say what 'female' is." X

The crux of the disagreement actually lies not in what differentiates men and women, but in who has the authority to define the bounds of each and whether/how this serves to liberate or oppress people. Who has the power and authority in our society to decide who is male vs. female-enough and what is male vs. female-enough?

Which is why, I will once more reiterate:

Biology, biological discourse, and the terms and words we use to refer to our corporeality are structured by historic and current social and political views. A biological reality becomes cognitively significant through this discourse and these terms we use and concepts we engage with. So, defining “women” as “females” and defining "female" with the properties you have chosen are themselves political choices influenced by one’s socialization rather than ones that can claim to neutrally reflect what the world is “really” and "materially" like.

Just like when indigenous communities call on people to ask "who has the power to draw borders and segregate land, and why," we are calling on you to ask "who has the power to draw the borders between male v. female and why?"

The challenging of these norms is exactly what leads feminists to accept trans people for who they are.

[dwellordream]

Thinking Patriarchy: Defining Power; Defining Patriarchy

“Studying power and power relationships is complicated by both issues of definition and the nature of human interaction. What does it mean to hold power and what types of power are most powerful? For many, the exercise of power entails some form of domination, or, at least, the opportunity to gain the upper hand in a given instance. Max Weber defines power as the ‘probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance’. For Weber, when that power is legitimate, it is known as authority. 

M. G. Smith sees power as ‘the ability to act effectively on persons or things, to make or secure favourable decisions which are not of right allocated to the individuals or their roles’. For these thinkers, holding power involves conflict with the rights or wishes of others. It is an inherently antagonistic, if frequently non-violent, process. Power can be exercised in a myriad of ways, from direct personal interaction, such as forcing your will through violence or the withholding of economic resources, to power that is exercised on an ideological or cultural level, such as control through religious indoctrination, or the removal of freedom through the promotion of wider social values. 

It can be written into the structures of language itself, so that the very act of communicating is both predicated on and reinforces particular power relationships. The exercise of power is not simply about restricting the rights of others, but can be productive, allowing people to exercise agency and choice, even if those choices are constrained. This picture is complicated as different manifestations of power cannot be ranked. It is not clear whether a woman is more oppressed by a socio-ideological system that views her as property, or when she is the victim of domestic violence. 

Lines of power are not transparent or unidirectional, and, even where they are proscribed, resistance can alter their shape. The varying manifestations of power do not operate exclusively of each another, but combine and conflict to create the complexity of human interaction. As a result of this, it can be very difficult to measure when and to what extent an individual exercises power. Power is given meaning by the context in which it is exercised. In Scotland, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, power within marriage was informed by a patriarchal culture. Definitions of patriarchy are rarely given by historians, possibly because of the difficulty of summarising a complex social experience in a few words. 

Yet, those who attempt to do so usually agree on certain key issues. The first issue in defining patriarchy is that it is a social system. Sylvia Walby, who defines patriarchy as ‘a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women’, asserts that the words ‘social structure’ are crucial to her understanding of patriarchy.  Judith Bennett, adopting Adrienne Rich’s words, offers a definition, which, she believes, incorporates the pervasive and systematic nature of patriarchy. 

She defines patriarchy as: A familial-social, ideological, political system in which men – by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, tradition, law and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division of labour, determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male. She emphasises that patriarchy is ‘rooted in ideology, culture and society’ and that it is wider than male dominance ‘rooted in the patriarchal household’. 

The second key issue is that patriarchy is a term used to explain gender inequality. It is because women have been consistently disadvantaged across time in comparison to their male counterparts that a single word or phrase is needed to describe this phenomenon. It is to give the social position of women a sense of history and continuity that the term patriarchy is both useful and powerful. Bennett believes that historians are discouraged from using the word patriarchy as it is seen to tend towards the universalism of a complex and changing social experience. 

She believes the word patriarchy should be used by historians, but that a sophisticated, expanded definition is needed, which recognises patriarchy as a lived experience. Margaret Ezell notes that historians tend to use patriarchy to denote ‘authoritarianism rather than sharing of responsibilities, relations between husband and wife expressed in “terms of authority and obedience, not consultation and consent”’. 

She does not deny that patriarchy creates hierarchies of power, but argues that it should be recognised as a system that was lived in and therefore a system which was constantly negotiated. Within this system, power is not simply understood as male domination and female exploitation, but recognises the differences between the structural systems that shape the holding and exercise of power and the day-to-day experiences of individuals, which are more complex. 

As many historians have noted, male power was frequently insecure, threatened and contradictory, while women held authority within the system over their children, servants and those of lower social class. As feminist analyses of power become complicated by the intersection of race, class, and sexuality with gender within historical place, so must definitions of patriarchy integrate more than a sense of male domination and female subordination. 

Patriarchy was much more than a system of oppression, but a system of life – or, as Michel Foucault puts it, power is productive. The concept of a patriarchal system is not uncontroversial. Bernard Capp argues that between 1558 and 1714 in England, ‘there was no patriarchal system, rather an interlocking set of beliefs, assumptions, traditions and practices, and the largely informal character of patriarchy enabled each generations to adapt to its changing circumstances’.

Pierre Bourdieu, and less explicitly Michel Foucault, suggest that forms of power only become systems over time, when domination is no longer constantly renewed in a direct, personal way, but is integrated into the means of economic and cultural production and reproduced by their functioning. In the context of Scotland during the period 1650 to 1850, patriarchy was embedded in Scottish cultural, economic, social, legal and political institutions, which influenced how people conceived of themselves and their relationships with others. 

Patriarchy was reinforced through daily interactions between men and women that drew on patriarchal discourses to give them meaning. It was only enforced directly, usually through violence as discussed in Chapter 7, when explicitly challenged. Patriarchy, in this context, can be understood as a system. A number of historians emphasise the importance of negotiation to the working of the patriarchal system. Capp notes, ‘without challenging the general principles of patriarchy, women frequently sought to negotiate the terms on which it operated within the home and neighbourhood, seeking an acceptable personal accommodation that would afford them some measure of autonomy and space, and a limited degree of authority’.

Deniz Kandiyoti describes this negotiation as the ‘patriarchal bargain’. She argues that: systematic analyses of women’s strategies and coping mechanisms can help to capture the nature of patriarchal-systems in their cultural, class-specific, and temporal concreteness and reveal how men and women resist, accommodate, adapt and conflict with each other over resources, rights and responsibilities … Women’s strategies are always played out in the context of identifiable patriarchal bargains that act as implicit scripts that define, limit and inflect their market and domestic options.

For Kandiyoti, it is through these negotiations that patriarchy evolves. Negotiation allows for the questioning of the nature of relationships between men and women, which in turn breaks down the current form of the patriarchal system and allows the development of a new form. Negotiation is key to the functioning of patriarchy, not only because it relieves tensions and limits its impact, but as it is how the system evolves. 

Michel Foucault argues: Power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organisation; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formal action of the law, in the various social hegemonies.

By allowing the opportunity for resolution, negotiation allows patriarchy to repair and survive. Resistance and agency by women can reap benefits in the short term by improving their status or conditions, but in the long term, due to patriarchy’s ability to adapt, it ensures their oppression. As Judith Bennett notes, the experience of women in the past is marked by ‘patriarchal equilibrium’, where they experience change in their day-to-day lives, but not in their status in relation to men.

Patriarchy can expropriate methods of resistance for its own purposes. As Donald Hall shows for Victorian Britain, male writers appropriated and modified the words of female writers to reinforce patriarchal ideology. It is integral to the survival of patriarchy that this is the case. Pierre Bourdieu argues that ‘any language that can command attention is an authorised language … the things it designates are not simply expressed but also authorised and legitimised … they derive their power from their capacity to objectify unformulated experiences to make them public’.

An act of resistance may not be legitimate, but it does have power. Patriarchy needs to expropriate any acts of resistance as it cannot afford for authority to rest in any other place. For the patriarchal system to survive, this power has to be subsumed into the system. Negotiation is a vital part of the patriarchal system, but this should not be understood to imply that there is no room for agency. Negotiation is the space where women and men resist, contest, evade, manoeuvre  and limit patriarchy, where they cooperate with other people, and hold power. Women can have victories. 

Furthermore, the act of negotiation keeps patriarchy in flux. Foucault notes that power relationships are ‘modified by their very exercise, entailing and strengthening of some terms and a weakening of others … so that there has never existed one type of stable subjugation, given and for all’. Negotiation ensures the evolution of patriarchy, but also its instability. Relationships between men and women under patriarchy do not have to be antagonistic. 

The family is at the heart of the patriarchal system, although its operation is not restricted to it. All members of the family are educated to believe their interests are the family’s interest. As a result, it is difficult for women to form a ‘class (gender?) consciousness’ as they cannot perceive of their interest outside of the family. There are historical exceptions, where women have chosen to work together in the interests of their sex, but these movements are usually short-lived and are usually not directly in conflict with women’s identities as part of a family.

This sense of shared interest can obscure the exercise of power. As men and women understand the family’s interest as their own interest, they work together for its benefit, allowing ‘all the positive, happy interactions of women and men’. It has been argued that the rise of individualism, which has been variously located between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, helped destroy this sense of family interest. 

Yet, notably individualism is not seen as conflicting with shared interest between partners. Macfarlane argues that with individualism came the rise of romantic love and the expectation that marriage was a ‘blending of two personalities, two psychologies’. If there is any erosion of ‘family’ interest, then the shared interest of husband and wife ensured that individual interest lay in the home and not with other members of their gender. 

For the purposes of this book, drawing on the theory of Kandiyoti and Bennett, patriarchy is understood as a relational and dynamic system of social relations rooted in ideology, culture, and society, which operates to reinforce male power at the expense of women. It is a system that is recreated everyday through relationships between individuals and in the reconciliation of personal experience with wider social, and, in this context, patriarchal, narratives or discourses. It is social practice. As a result, patriarchal systems are constantly in flux and unstable, adapting to the changing needs and experiences of those who live within them. Patriarchy is an evolving system of power that can only be understood in its particular historical context.”

- Katie Barclay, “Thinking Patriarchy.” in Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650-1850

[sylathas-world]

Stories without Heroes

Reading "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" by Ursula K. Le Guin, I had quite an enlightenment. In short, Le Guin puts forward a theory in which the central part of a story doesn't concern a hero that often recurs to violence to accomplish something and be considered a saviour. A killer story. Now the story becomes a carrier, a bag holding meanings. No heroism is involved because being human doesn't mean being a hero: it's about relationships, what we do and feel, and how we relate to each other. To be human, you no longer have to feel like you want to be a killer.

Since I was little, my mind completely missed the aggressive part of what being a "man" seemed to mean in the culture I was living in. It was always about the hero, which when I was a child meant being a soccer player or an actor, and often the actor played roles where he was "cool and badass". I wasn't like that, but for years I wanted to: I even dreamt about being a hero, saving and being loved by girls. The whole package. I liked what I wasn't cause I wanted to feel accepted by others and myself.

Now, in retrospect, it makes sense that I consider myself non-binary: I don't fit into the gender role of a man. Being born as one, though, estranged me from my peers. This hero perspective, the fact that you have to be aggressive to be human, not only involves women but everyone who doesn't fit into a specific "man" category. The "Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" could relieve a lot of people, which often are the ones already with problems about their identity or not being treated equally by society.

We should change the meaning of what a story is because our lives, dreams, and hopes are based on them. Making them more inclusive makes our world more inclusive, and we should aim at that.

Edit: I've watched a couple of youtube videos on the manosphere*, and they introduced many concepts around man's role in our society that intersect interestingly with this post. A significant factor that F.D Signifier, the author of those videos, points out is the presence of a certain kind of cultural hegemony in the world that we live in: hegemonic masculinity. Coined by Raewyn Connel in 1987, the term describes "a set of values, established by men in power that functions to include and exclude, and to organize society in gender unequal ways. It combines several features: a hierarchy of masculinities, differential access among men to power (over women and other men), and the interplay between men's identity, men's ideals, interactions, power, and patriarchy." [1] The values differ from culture to culture, but I think that, through globalization, the hero that Le Guin talks about is a product of this hegemony. What I didn't have, and these heroes had, are the values of masculinity, which are often enforced on female and queer protagonists.

To change the meaning of what a story is, we need to change the cultural hegemony surrounding it; we need to start by changing the masculine hegemony that has historically defined the hero.

*: to the lucky uninitiated, the manosphere is, as defined by Wikipedia, "a collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting (to varying degrees) masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism." What makes it interesting is this cultural phenomenon's prevalence on the internet. For example, the Urban Dictionary defines it differently: "A group of websites made for men to discuss men's interests and issues without women nagging them." There are other definitions on the side of Wikipedia, but they have many dislikes. This proves the pride people in that community feel about themselves and their numbers online.

1: Jewkes R., Morrell R. Sexuality and the Limits of Agency among South African Teenage Women: Theorising Femininities and Their Connections to HIV Risk Practices. Social Science & Medicine. 2012.