thedreadvampy - Tumblr blog

[thedreadvampy]

this motherfucker actually just tweeted this in the middle of his own championship match at wrestlemania

[thedreadvampy]

I think the best advice I ever got to stop myself from getting in my head over issues i was having with a partner/friend was “Are you deciding on ultimatums in your relationship without the other persons knowledge or consent? Are you having conversations in your head where the other party is a projection you supply the responses for? If so; you have done this person a huge disservice in not allowing them to answer on their own terms. You have done so much architecture around this problem in your mind that is impenetrable for anyone who was not there when it was being built.”

That shit really changed my life and honestly? I think made me a nicer person to be around.

[thedreadvampy]

source

Caption:

[[@else: I suppose it's time to tell my abortion story. Of the abortion that didn't happen, that led to me.

A lot of anti-abortion people put words & thoughts into the mouths of the unborn.

Well, I'm one that was recommended to stay unborn, who got born, and here's what I say.

My mother found our very early in her pregnancy that there was an extremely high risk to her if she continued.

Terminating the pregnancy was floated by one of the doctors. It would have been legal due to the risk to her, but heavily stigmatized.

Her family was deeply Catholic. She was deeply Catholic.

She did not terminate. The risk became a reality.

So I'm here, and she's not.

I'm glad to be here.

It is hard to put into words the gratitude you feel to a mother who sacrificed herself entirely for you, and I'm not going to try here.

Because I'm also very angry.

Without in any way taking away from the courage and selflessness with which she bore her situation and which she showed in all aspects of her life

I don't believe she ever really felt like she had a true choice.

The stigma, the religious dogma, the judgement - everything she'd ever known - told her she could not save her own life.

Her parents would have, however sadly, believed she'd go to hell. Her family and friends and community would have judged her.

Everyone she'd ever loved believed it was wrong. And so she believed it was wrong.

Needlessly.

I don't know what choice she would have made if it had been a true choice.

Maybe she would have chosen me anyway. Maybe she would have chosen to stay for her two already-existing children and for all those who loved her so deeply.

But she should have had a real, true choice.

Would I trade being here for that?

In a heartbeat. Without hesitation.

My siblings could have grown up with their mother.

My grandparents could have seen their beloved daughter live out her beautiful life, instead of mourning her every day until their deaths.

Her brothers and sisters would not still thirty years later feel the pain of losing the sistre they loved so much.

She could have continued to bring the light to the world that she had always brought, that I have heard so much about.

My father perhaps would not have descended into the grief & guilt that destroyed him, our relationship with him, the innocence of our childhoods.

Now, I think about how my young nieces & nephews will grow up without her, without the kind of grandmother I had. That pains me too.

I grew up in the devastation of her death.

I've watched the consequences of it play out for thirty years.

I can see what might have been differently if she'd had a true choice and it snatches my breath away, to see the suffering that didn't have to be for the ones I love most.

I know that it is not my family, but it is also profoundly difficult to know that it is because of me.

Or to be more exact, because the world did not allow my mother her right to a true choice, and my being here is perhaps a result of that.

It's not a burden I'd wish on anyone

I wish that I could have told her. It's okay. Stay. Live. Be happy.

I wish I could know that she knew that that was more than ok.

Don't I want to be here? Don't I want to be alive, aren't I glad to live??

Now that I'm here, sure. But had I never been, what would I have lost? Nothing.

You can't miss what you never had. Can't lose anything when you never existed.

There's no pain or loss in not existing.

I didn't exist then, to want anything. I didn't exist to hope or wish or fear anything.

I didn't exist back then. Not me. There was a possibility. An idea, a hope maybe. Some cells, a process in her body. Not me, any more than a sperm was me or an egg was me.

*I" didn't become until much later. Til I was born.

My mother wouldn't have taken anything from me or cause me any pain by living for herself, because I didn't exist to lose anything.

There was so much pain, so much loss in losing her. Loss that will ripple down generations.

So I will say to my dying breath, as the person who only lives because she didn't abort, that whatever she thought or chose or did not chose, she should have had a real choice to abort.

That she should have felt that aborting me was valid and good a choice as not.

Everyone should feel that, and have real access to enact that choice without obstruction or shame or question.

Whether it is their actual life at risk, or not. A forced pregnancy can be the death of many things, not just the end of ther person's life.

Having me took away from the world everything that my mother could have given it.

Forcing someone to have a child against their will can take away what that person could be and bring if they had their choice, whether they live through the pregnancy or not.

Most of all it takes away their right - their inalienable right - to choose how they live their life in their own body.

A non-person, a hypothetical future event, the birth of someone who doesn't exist yet, doesn't have that right.

Other people, who claim to speak for the unborn do not have that right.

We all lose so much by it. It can cause such pain and suffering, for child-bearers, for children, for everyone.

Do not pretend to speak for the unborn.

Do not pretend to speak for the children born against their mother's will.

Do not pretend that you care for them while you hide misogyny behind dogma.

My mother deserved her right to a real choice.

Everyone does. Unconditionally.

As the child who could have been aborted, I tell you - to oppose that right, let alone work to criminalize it, is unforgivable.

I'd like to emphasize because I didn't say it loud enough in the original thread:

There doesn't need to be a tragic story or a threat to life to make abortion ok.

It can be simply because you don't want to have a child. That's all. You still have the right to a choice.

I told my sad story because:

a) it is important to me to counter the rhetoric of anti-choice folks, that claims that if the unborn could speak they would be anti-choice

b) forced pregnancies can really f*ck up lives in many ways and that needs to be recognized.

But:

There shouldn't have to be a tale of woe to justify bodily autonomy.

It's a right. An absolute right. It should be protected by law.

That's it. That's all.

Last thingL I want this point to be heard, but I don't particularly want to deal with blowing up on twitter.

I will probably lock my account down at some point, but I would like this still to be shared. Maybe use an unroll app and share from there if you would like to.]]

[thedreadvampy]

[thedreadvampy]

Source: Curve; The Lesbian Magazine ( January 1997 Vol. 6)

[thedreadvampy]

The unspoken implications of "only" in this passage obsesses me. I had like a 45 minute conversation about that one word with my mother last night.

Her argument is that the family is a site of violence against women, which is obviously true, no dispute here. But 'only 1 in 5 women have experienced violence from intimate partners' is such a fascinating phrasing.

Thoughts:

What proportion of all people experience violence, and what proportion from intimate partners?

If 60% of women who experience violence experience it only outside intimate relationships, then 40% experience it within intimate relationships.

If we take as read that the majority of violence comes from people we know - what proportion of people you have close relationships to are your intimate partners? Is it anywhere near 40%? Is it even a meaningful fraction of 40%?

The 'only 22%' expresses surprise. It implies an expectation that the majority of physical (not only sexual or sexualised) violence against women would come specifically from intimate partners (how do we define that?). When she recognises that a majority of all assaults against women don't come from intimate partners, she leaps straight to familial abuse. If 60% of these women weren't assaulted by intimate partners, somewhere near 60% must have been assaulted by family members.

now to be real a huge, huge amount of physical abuse is localised in the home. but I think this framing - the bafflement that physical violence isn't primarily coming from intimate partners thus must be from family - implicitly suggests some assumptions about what violence against women looks like:

All violence against women is expected to be centred in the home - from intimate partners or from family. Do women not go outside the home? Do women not have non-familial social spheres?

Violence which is sexualised or sexual is only expected to come from intimate partners. How often do women face gendered violence from people who aren't intimate partners but want to be, are frustrated at being denied, or are angry exes?

All violence which women experience is expected to be specifically gendered or domestic abuse. Do women not get mugged? Do women not get assaulted by policemen or security guards? Do women not fight over things other than sex, or get hit trying to break up a fight, or spill a drink on someone at the wrong moment? Do women not face racialised, homophobic or other systemic physical violence? What are the arenas of physical violence which aren't specifically gender based, and are they exclusive of women's experience?

The consideration is around violence to women, which is probably expected to be more domestically centred than for men, but is that accurate? What are comparable figures for men? Have more or less men experienced physical assault? What sources were they from? If 'only 22%' of men had experienced intimate partners violence, would the assumption be that the remainder of physical violence came from within the family? Would this be accurate?

Separately - it's expected that intimate partners violence would make up more than 40% of people's experience worth violence. Why would we expect that intimate partners, people who we specifically choose to love and care for us, would account for a greater proportion of violence than any other source? Where does this expectation come from? Should it go unchallenged that intimate relationships would be expected to be physically violent in more than a fifth of all peoples experience?

Again, I don't think she's wildly off base. I think a good chunk of those 30% of women who've experienced physical assault but never from intimate partners may well have experienced violence from parents or siblings. but that only. hmmmmmm. it's another one in the consistent pattern where she drops a deeply troubling and crunchy implication and then leaves it hanging without apparently noticing it's there. which is always gonna happen sometimes but things like her attitude to BPD survivorhood etc and this expectation of domestic abuse as the status quo need problematising very badly to contextualise her other points.

and I wouldn't have ever picked up on any of this except - "only". It's the tiniest things sometimes.

I'm trying to give Conflict Is Not Abuse a fair shake because I think it's important to unpick overstatement of harm.

and the introduction felt really clear and coherent and strong in laying out the thesis; acts of harm occur when one of both parties construe the other as having threatened them, and often that threat is not real and could be avoided through reflection and communication.

so she swings into chapter 1 with the idea that we're all responsible for reflecting on conflict rather than immediately jumping to the worst case We Are Enemies Now scenario

ah yes. I agree.

she chooses to illustrate this idea in several ways:

If I flirt with someone I assume she might interpret it as harassment, but she should consider that we're both fine actually because Actually she's probably interested in me but struggles to recognise her own feelings.

A friend is under huge pressure and has to cancel plans last minute so she sends me an email, but I don't WANT an email so she should be understanding and spend 5-10 minutes on the phone so I feel better, and the fact she doesn't means she doesn't care about me

Sometimes Women Say No But Mean Yes

A woman I went on a date with didn't text me back. I'm going to devote 2 pages to how she's clearly full of rage at me because she's unfairly judging me for being overbearing, which is very short sighted of her. At no point in that do I offer any possible explanation for not texting other than She Despises Me.

My most charitable response here is yeah Sarah you're right we should reflect on whether we're assuming harm in arguments. Can I suggest you start by turning the mirror around real quick? cause not one of these examples involves the possibility that she might be making some assumptions of her own.

[thedreadvampy]

'oh psychiatry pop psychology and new age beliefs all agree on this!'

oh good because as we all know none of those theoretical systems have ever had any investment in covering for abuse

(I actually do not think she's wrong here, in that the thing she's saying they agree on is basically 'take a deep breath, cool off and consider your options before reacting in conflicts' but I just think. maybe. if you're a radical lefty anti DV queer feminist activist it may be worth thinking 'hey are there reasons other than Pure Truth that systems of popular thought might want to move towards narratives of personal responsibility for harm?')

I'm trying to give Conflict Is Not Abuse a fair shake because I think it's important to unpick overstatement of harm.

and the introduction felt really clear and coherent and strong in laying out the thesis; acts of harm occur when one of both parties construe the other as having threatened them, and often that threat is not real and could be avoided through reflection and communication.

so she swings into chapter 1 with the idea that we're all responsible for reflecting on conflict rather than immediately jumping to the worst case We Are Enemies Now scenario

ah yes. I agree.

she chooses to illustrate this idea in several ways:

If I flirt with someone I assume she might interpret it as harassment, but she should consider that we're both fine actually because Actually she's probably interested in me but struggles to recognise her own feelings.

A friend is under huge pressure and has to cancel plans last minute so she sends me an email, but I don't WANT an email so she should be understanding and spend 5-10 minutes on the phone so I feel better, and the fact she doesn't means she doesn't care about me

Sometimes Women Say No But Mean Yes

A woman I went on a date with didn't text me back. I'm going to devote 2 pages to how she's clearly full of rage at me because she's unfairly judging me for being overbearing, which is very short sighted of her. At no point in that do I offer any possible explanation for not texting other than She Despises Me.

My most charitable response here is yeah Sarah you're right we should reflect on whether we're assuming harm in arguments. Can I suggest you start by turning the mirror around real quick? cause not one of these examples involves the possibility that she might be making some assumptions of her own.

[thedreadvampy]

cuts to the heart of my beef with the common use of BPD diagnoses tbh

no babe there's nothing WRONG with you you just have a DISEASE. don't you feel better now you know it's not that anyone did anything wrong you're just PARANOID and INCAPABLE OF REASON OR MEMORY because of BRAIN DAMAGE (but only when you're with your partner, everyone else thinks you're very rational), and therefore we can't believe you and will have to rely on your partner's account of events? I am a very smart anti DV activist and I love to support survivors.

I'm trying to give Conflict Is Not Abuse a fair shake because I think it's important to unpick overstatement of harm.

and the introduction felt really clear and coherent and strong in laying out the thesis; acts of harm occur when one of both parties construe the other as having threatened them, and often that threat is not real and could be avoided through reflection and communication.

so she swings into chapter 1 with the idea that we're all responsible for reflecting on conflict rather than immediately jumping to the worst case We Are Enemies Now scenario

ah yes. I agree.

she chooses to illustrate this idea in several ways:

If I flirt with someone I assume she might interpret it as harassment, but she should consider that we're both fine actually because Actually she's probably interested in me but struggles to recognise her own feelings.

A friend is under huge pressure and has to cancel plans last minute so she sends me an email, but I don't WANT an email so she should be understanding and spend 5-10 minutes on the phone so I feel better, and the fact she doesn't means she doesn't care about me

Sometimes Women Say No But Mean Yes

A woman I went on a date with didn't text me back. I'm going to devote 2 pages to how she's clearly full of rage at me because she's unfairly judging me for being overbearing, which is very short sighted of her. At no point in that do I offer any possible explanation for not texting other than She Despises Me.

My most charitable response here is yeah Sarah you're right we should reflect on whether we're assuming harm in arguments. Can I suggest you start by turning the mirror around real quick? cause not one of these examples involves the possibility that she might be making some assumptions of her own.

[thedreadvampy]

Like speaking of biases I need to acknowledge that this section is about BPD and I have a Particular Thing about BPD which I think exists as a diagnosis almost entirely to minimise and smooth over the ways in which traumatized people are failed by people around them and instead allows for the responsibility for abuse to fall primarily on the victim. so I'm not coming in neutral.

but FUCK man DO YOU THINK MAYBE. there are MANY reasons people might say that accusations against them are false and ONLY SOME OF THEM ARE BECAUSE THEY'RE FALSE?????

gaslight gatekeep girlboss but like do we think that people collectively grouped only by their partners accusing them of stuff might have some investment in understanding and describing those accusations as illegitimate???

(this is not to say that none of them were falsely accused. but there is a weight put to the denial of abuse here implicitly tied to the idea that trauma/BPD renders an accuser less likely to be telling the truth, and again she's just not interested in questioning or problematising the idea that "borderlines" should not be trusted to speak about their own experiences. because she also consistently speaks about past experiences of trauma as making accounts of current abuse less believable without specifically acknowledging the fact that abuse is often recurrent throughout survivors' lives)

I'm trying to give Conflict Is Not Abuse a fair shake because I think it's important to unpick overstatement of harm.

and the introduction felt really clear and coherent and strong in laying out the thesis; acts of harm occur when one of both parties construe the other as having threatened them, and often that threat is not real and could be avoided through reflection and communication.

so she swings into chapter 1 with the idea that we're all responsible for reflecting on conflict rather than immediately jumping to the worst case We Are Enemies Now scenario

ah yes. I agree.

she chooses to illustrate this idea in several ways:

If I flirt with someone I assume she might interpret it as harassment, but she should consider that we're both fine actually because Actually she's probably interested in me but struggles to recognise her own feelings.

A friend is under huge pressure and has to cancel plans last minute so she sends me an email, but I don't WANT an email so she should be understanding and spend 5-10 minutes on the phone so I feel better, and the fact she doesn't means she doesn't care about me

Sometimes Women Say No But Mean Yes

A woman I went on a date with didn't text me back. I'm going to devote 2 pages to how she's clearly full of rage at me because she's unfairly judging me for being overbearing, which is very short sighted of her. At no point in that do I offer any possible explanation for not texting other than She Despises Me.

My most charitable response here is yeah Sarah you're right we should reflect on whether we're assuming harm in arguments. Can I suggest you start by turning the mirror around real quick? cause not one of these examples involves the possibility that she might be making some assumptions of her own.

[thedreadvampy]

I've developed a kneejerk reaction to the word 'emails' because I think it's the 'send her cruel emails' line in this that makes me go 'ah so your ex said you abused her and that's why any of this'

which may be unfair, and if I was reading it in a more optimistic light I would be more likely to think it was an accident that the thesis of this paragraph seems to be 'medicalising trauma is good actually because it allows us to readily dismiss accusations from traumatised people as the result of intractable brain damage'

like an excessively good faith reading might be: this is an example of one way in which people who have been diagnosed with trauma or BPD may escalate conflict, which is true sometimes, eg my grandmother Genuinely Believed that my mother pushed her down the stairs even though my mother was in London and physically could not have. the intended implication is not that all people who've experienced trauma are lying when they level accusations of abuse, but that this is what's happening when they do

however 176 pages in my reading is that at no point has Schulman ever engaged with the idea that a person making an accusation of abuse might be doing so honestly with a genuine basis. and maybe that's because she's more interested in the specifics of false or deluded reports, which do sometimes happen. but the other part of my reading is that there are specific things she regularly brings up as examples both of her own experience and of How People Act While Dishonestly Escalating Conflict which are clearly personal grievances, which often come through when she describes a 'false accusation' - 'she won't engage', 'the partner claiming abuse has a traumatic backstory', the Fucking Emails, the idea that claims of abuse are a delusional projection - and it's hard not to feel like this whole book is about a couple of specific personal beefs where she needs to place the people she's in conflict with as being fundamentally, ontologically Reacting Wrong while placing herself as a perfectly rational actor.

and I do feel bad about this reaction because I do not know the woman. and of course I'm bringing my own biases to play here and my reading is not a definitive truth. but dear GOD does this book read defensive.

I'm trying to give Conflict Is Not Abuse a fair shake because I think it's important to unpick overstatement of harm.

and the introduction felt really clear and coherent and strong in laying out the thesis; acts of harm occur when one of both parties construe the other as having threatened them, and often that threat is not real and could be avoided through reflection and communication.

so she swings into chapter 1 with the idea that we're all responsible for reflecting on conflict rather than immediately jumping to the worst case We Are Enemies Now scenario

ah yes. I agree.

she chooses to illustrate this idea in several ways:

If I flirt with someone I assume she might interpret it as harassment, but she should consider that we're both fine actually because Actually she's probably interested in me but struggles to recognise her own feelings.

A friend is under huge pressure and has to cancel plans last minute so she sends me an email, but I don't WANT an email so she should be understanding and spend 5-10 minutes on the phone so I feel better, and the fact she doesn't means she doesn't care about me

Sometimes Women Say No But Mean Yes

A woman I went on a date with didn't text me back. I'm going to devote 2 pages to how she's clearly full of rage at me because she's unfairly judging me for being overbearing, which is very short sighted of her. At no point in that do I offer any possible explanation for not texting other than She Despises Me.

My most charitable response here is yeah Sarah you're right we should reflect on whether we're assuming harm in arguments. Can I suggest you start by turning the mirror around real quick? cause not one of these examples involves the possibility that she might be making some assumptions of her own.

[thedreadvampy]

I am now feeling some earache and the balance issues have not receded OH NOOOOOOO

Trying to get up but I'm feeling real fucked up in the inner ears. I went to the loo and I was just reeling into walls on the way.

friend at work has recently had labyrinthitis and I really hope I don't have something similar I'm meant to be on holidaaaaaay

[thedreadvampy]

Trying to get up but I'm feeling real fucked up in the inner ears. I went to the loo and I was just reeling into walls on the way.

friend at work has recently had labyrinthitis and I really hope I don't have something similar I'm meant to be on holidaaaaaay

[thedreadvampy]

I'm the "voting is good" guy but I intend to direct basically all of my you-should-vote energy next year towards the reelection of the 18 progressives who've stuck their necks out to call for an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire. They've dedicated themselves to a basic standard of human decency, and for it they will be punished with an immense tidal wave of financial and political resources seeking to get them kicked out of office, to say nothing of the threats against their lives. Biden's on his own.

[thedreadvampy]

why do you care so what zionists think?

Because zionism is a colonialist political movement.

Jews have a right to live in safety, to live free from oppression and hate.

What they don't have is the right to kill thousands of people, destroy their homes, kick them off land they lived on for centuries and claim that they're entitled to the land because a religious text says so.

No one has that right.

But zionists think they do. Zionists think it's acceptable to slaughter innocent people and burn their houses down and disrespect other religions. And they use antisemitism as a shield to block any criticism of their ideals.

It would be like saying you can't criticise the Hutu and Tutsi genocides because that would be racist.

[thedreadvampy]

[thedreadvampy]

GET OVER IT SARAH!!!!!!!

I'm trying to give Conflict Is Not Abuse a fair shake because I think it's important to unpick overstatement of harm.

and the introduction felt really clear and coherent and strong in laying out the thesis; acts of harm occur when one of both parties construe the other as having threatened them, and often that threat is not real and could be avoided through reflection and communication.

so she swings into chapter 1 with the idea that we're all responsible for reflecting on conflict rather than immediately jumping to the worst case We Are Enemies Now scenario

ah yes. I agree.

she chooses to illustrate this idea in several ways:

If I flirt with someone I assume she might interpret it as harassment, but she should consider that we're both fine actually because Actually she's probably interested in me but struggles to recognise her own feelings.

A friend is under huge pressure and has to cancel plans last minute so she sends me an email, but I don't WANT an email so she should be understanding and spend 5-10 minutes on the phone so I feel better, and the fact she doesn't means she doesn't care about me

Sometimes Women Say No But Mean Yes

A woman I went on a date with didn't text me back. I'm going to devote 2 pages to how she's clearly full of rage at me because she's unfairly judging me for being overbearing, which is very short sighted of her. At no point in that do I offer any possible explanation for not texting other than She Despises Me.

My most charitable response here is yeah Sarah you're right we should reflect on whether we're assuming harm in arguments. Can I suggest you start by turning the mirror around real quick? cause not one of these examples involves the possibility that she might be making some assumptions of her own.

[thedreadvampy]

one of those many days where I say groundbreaking things such as 'hmmmm...perhaps my life...has been somewhat bad at some points'

'perhaps..........this may have had some amount of lasting emotional impacts.........?'