lupin5th

girl-torture: russianconcussion: I really like what this...

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 13:19:59 GMT

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girl-torture:

russianconcussion:

I really like what this physicist, Lamar Glover, has to say in Behind the Curve.

+ this part from Spiros Michalakis:

Incredibly good take which is really rare for these topics

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star-anise: just-a-zuki: star-anise: donna-dot-paella: rabbitindisguise: star-anise: star-anise:...

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 13:19:55 GMT

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star-anise:

just-a-zuki:

star-anise:

donna-dot-paella:

rabbitindisguise:

star-anise:

star-anise:

So “queer” isn’t just an identity that’s broadly inclusive because, I don’t know, we like big parties. There’s actually an underlying ethic, a queer theory, that has political implications.

Its name reclaims a slur because the point is to say, “I am different, but that’s not a bad thing.” The queer movement is about upholding the right of all people to deviate from an oppressive cisgender, heterosexual, patriarchal norm. Broadening the spectrum of acceptable diversity; questioning and dismantling the social pressures that police and punish deviance. Changing not just our own lives, but how our entire society thinks about sex and gender.

That’s why “queer” embraces so many different groups. It’s not trying to erase their differences, but to try to coherently understand the complex overlapping pressures that affect each of them, and to extend our reach beyond the LGBT+ community. It’s about the right of lesbians to live without men and the right of trans and nonbinary people to be who they are, the right of asexuals to define for themselves what’s significant in their lives, the right of straight men to be vulnerable and emotional and nonviolent. When the great queering project is done, you will see the changes everywhere, not just in small LGBT+ enclaves.

It’s recognizing that something that harms or oppresses one of us is pretty likely to harm all of us, so we all benefit from taking it down together.

For everyone who’s like “Whoa, I was with you until you threw straight men in there”:

Homophobia is a huge part of how all men are policed. If a man isn’t strong, tough, aggressive, and dominant? He gets called gay. So this isn’t “Soft straight men are totally LGBT+ and belong in your gay support group!” but it is “Part of the work of disassembling homophobia is changing how it affects straight men.”

It’s the same way that men aren’t the primary intended beneficiaries of feminism, but part of the work of feminism is addressing and changing toxic masculinity. If you’re effective enough at changing the system, you change it for everyone.

Also getting really tired of that criticism of any activism that dares talk about how it might benefit Straight™ men

Maybe straight men not being as miserable … shouldn’t be an automatic negative, especially not if the whole idea before that addition was to benefit marginalized groups?

Also it’s not just homophobia, it’s toxic masculinity which is the manifestation of hating women so much it impacts their own gender, and also transphobia and transmisogyny, where any deviation from the gender assigned at birth is heavily policed with violence

I really disagree here, and not because I don’t think straight men should have more occasions to be vulnerable and emotional, but because they as a group benefit from the oppression of everyone else

I get it, of course they would in some ways know some positive changes in a less patriarchal/heteronormative society - but maybe let’s not forget who patriarchal/heteronormative society benefits to? Because like. A straight man who is vulnerable and softspoken won’t be as oppressed as a gay man, no matter said gay man’s personality!

I don’t think anybody thinks it’s a good thing straight men are miserable but like are they really? are they miserable? Compared to everyone else?

They’re the norm the queer movement deviates from!

Do they? Broadly, as a class? Is every single straight cis man benefiting from privilege more than every single gay cis man?

I think that men are promised the rewards of privilege. They are told that being homophobic and straight will make them fundamentally better than gay men. They are told that being male and masculine will make them fundamentally better than women. And yes, the people reaping the rewards are generally straight cis men.

But it’s like a pyramid scheme: Every member, when they join, is promised the INCREDIBLE REWARDS they could receive, if they only get a few people to join at a lower level than them! And some members ARE making absolute bank. But when you look at the balance sheet, you see that 90% of active members are earning absolutely no money, and meanwhile the top 1% are fucking millionaires.

I think that, yes, if you look into the lived experiences of men in our culture, masculinity is making them actively miserable. There’s a reason men are, on average, more depressed, more isolated, more violent, and more likely to die by suicide. “Toxic masculinity” wasn’t a term coined to talk about women’s experiences.

The straight-cis-men-always-win argument especially falls to pieces once you look outside the realm of sex and gender–there’s no arguing that things like class, money, race, immigration status, incarceration, disability, and mental health don’t also have huge impacts on peoples’ quality of life. There are a lot of ways queer people can have, comparatively, a lot of privilege compared to straight cis men.

So really, does it benefit us, as a group, to outcast and demonize groups of people who are fighting the same forces as us? Do we want to pit large swathes of the population against each other and stage the Oppression Olympics endlessly? Or do we want to recognize that it’s probably 99% of the population getting fucked over by the massively powerful people at the top and doing something about that?

I want to recruit straight cis men to be my allies, not typecast them as my enemies because I think that homophobia is the only kind of evil in the world.

When I said, “cops are oppressed under capitalism,” this is the kind of shit I mean. Oppressor/victim isn’t binary. I particularly like this ‘pyramid scheme’ conception of privilege.

Particularly because pyramid schemes rely on an endless chain of recruitment. The way to move slightly up the ladder is to have people under you. Just slide into a higher role…

Be a shift manager. Get promoted to Corporal. Move from floor staff to the sales desk. Make it onto the police force. Put all your effort into being the best little cog in the whole machine. Someday it will pay off. Someday you’ll move up high enough in the ranks. Oh, you’re still poor? Work harder. Get a better job.

Be a man. Catcall women. Get dates. Have a girlfriend. Have children. Produce an entire family of people who have to respect you as its patriarch! Oh, that’s not happening? You must not be manly enough.

It’s similar to the way colonialism works, where the children of one conquered country are used to fill the ranks of the army that invades the next one, because when colonialism has destroyed your country, being your oppressor’s footsoldier is one of the last viable careers left.

The biggest lie the system sells is that if you cooperate well enough, you’ll get to run the show someday. We have to have the wit and awareness to understand that the entire system is rigged, and we need to take apart the systems that dominate and control people, instead of just replacing the people on top.

Which is part of why I get very nervous about straight-white-cis-abled-man bashing. A lot of people don’t sound like they want people to not be treated badly based on demographic characteristics they have no control over; they just want to be the people wielding the whips.

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intersex-ionality: alarajrogers: findingfeather:

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 13:19:54 GMT

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intersex-ionality:

alarajrogers:

findingfeather:

I’m putting this over here rather than on the thread: https://star-anise.tumblr.com/post/187301803839/just-a-zuki-star-anise-donna-dot-paella

I’m on mobile and it’s really being a PITA about hyperlinking, so forgive me on this one. But I’m putting this over here in part because that thread is already getting long, but also because the point here has wider application.

Because even when you look at what’s discussed, and you recognize that the majority of the people in the pyramid scheme are fucked over and supposedly only a small percent are getting rewards …

… but then you look at how that small percent experience the universe …

… you realize that for the most part the super-rich and powerful are also actually miserable, most of the time. It’s one of the hideous fucking ironies of the whole thing: the top of the wealth class actually have similar rates of pathology, addiction, suicide, mental illness, abuse, neglect, failed relationships and general just Fucked Upness, as those facing the most challenges in the world.

This is not to say you should pity the poor fuckers: that’s not what I’m talking about. My point is more that the actual meaning of “money can’t buy happiness” is on this end, not on the “you should be able to be happy when you can’t get the necessities of life”: that’s obviously bullshit.

But what isn’t is that extreme wealth and privilege are, ironically, not correlated with happiness. Or even basic mental health.

Ditto every other kind of privilege. And this seems absolute madness, until one realizes one very central, very important thing about human society and human existence:

Systems do not actually have to benefit anyone to survive. They just have to self-perpetuate.

A system can literally harm all its members but as long as it manages to perpetuate itself, it will survive. And in fact some of the most resilient systems of thought and belief are actually inherently guaranteed to make their holders miserable and unhealthy and that very fact means that they will get passed on.

Like, well. Toxic masculinity.

It’s one of the biggest emotional challenges, I find, of figuring out how to fix any of these things. Surely, you think, as you’re looking at (for example) the ways in which ablism fucks you over (fucks me over) those goddamn people who fit in the “acceptable” box, the “able” box, the “mentally well” box, surely - given how attached to it they are, given how much time they spend attacking me and mine for its sake - surely it must be rewarding them! Somehow! Materially! Continually!

It isn’t. At most there is a very small, very short-term brain-chemical reward from being an enforcer of social norms. Now, that’s very powerful - of such things are life-destroying gambling addictions made - but it’s not actually, materially, very….well, useful.

And that’s because the only requirement of a system of belief, of understanding, of approaching the world, the only thing it needs to actually keep existing? Is the ability to get people to sign on, and pass it on.

It doesn’t need to actually benefit anyone. Systems just need to self-replicate and self-perpetuate, they don’t need to do anything else.

Some of the most ardent supporters of all kinds of shit - of homophobia, of toxic masculinity, of white supremacy, of classist bullshit, pick your poison - who are supposedly among the people it purports to uplift, are actually among those most damaged by it, because it doesn’t need to actually help them at all: it just needs their buy-in.

And there doesn’t need to be a mastermind. There doesn’t need to be someone who’s secretly driving it all with a master-plan to do … something. In the same way that we don’t end up with physiological traits - body-traits, things about our physical being - because of some guiding hand, but because for some reason on a species-wide scale they self-perpetuate? Same thing with our behavioural systems.

Nobody has to win; the system just has to self-perpetuate. And an aspect that many systems use to self-perpetuate is in fact making absolutely damn sure that nobody, nobody caught in the system is ever actually satisfied. Actually content.

Because then they’ll get out there and push the system more.

Now, I don’t think that’s “destiny”. I don’t think that’s an irreparable aspect that we’re just trapped dealing with forever: after all, that’s also more or less how viruses and other infectious diseases reproduce, and we’re learning how to stall, slow, and in some cases even eradicate those. We are learning how to make that kind of behaviour (making people metaphorically suffer until they metaphorically spew the contagion out where someone else catches it) unrewarding as a survival strategy.

But I think realizing this aspect is actually hella useful to getting there. I think it’s useful to let it inform strategies and temper how we work so that it’s potentially more effective in getting these toxic, poison systems of belief and behaviour out of us.

[nb: now, in any human interaction, there are in fact system within systems: obviously people on a small scale use the systems I mention above for smaller-scale goals all the time. And yeah, I’m including things like “getting to be president of the USA” in “smaller scale goals” here because compared even with the history of humankind this is a tiny, temporary sliver of time. But if you look at even the Cheeto’s life, and that of his family, it takes barely a scratch at the surface to see this deep, ugly misery, insecurity, gnawing terror of impermanence, and bitter/resentful anger all the time - and yet they “should” be blissfully happy, being at the top of the heap. The system doesn’t actually reward them, insomuch as “reward” means “end up not suffering”. It just plays on their fear and their greed and their envy and their resentment to drive them to amass useless piles of money and power they’re unsuited for, to the MASSIVE MASSIVE detriment of EVERYONE ELSE - and they AREN’T EVEN HAPPY.

That’s the point here. That’s what I mean by “systems don’t actually have to fully benefit anyone.”

I am reminded of a story about George W. Bush, how when he was 7, his beloved little sister, who was 3, died of an illness. From his perspective she disappeared and never came back. His parents went golfing.

I don’t feel sorry for W – he participated in the destruction of my country as much as Reagan and his dad did, and there are enormous quantities of blood on his hands – but I feel sorry for the little boy he once was, whose parents were so disconnected from emotion, they didn’t acknowledge that their son needed to grieve for his dead sister, regardless of whether they were cold enough to shove their feelings about her in a box and bury them.

Some of the super-rich may be happy. The ones who got there through doing something they truly love, maybe. Bezos and Musk reportedly have terrible marriages and/or divorces, but Bill Gates as far as I know is genuinely devoted to his wife and is enjoying his life of philanthropy after building one of the most powerful and influential software companies on the planet. But I strongly suspect that most of them, especially the ones who got there because it was handed to them on a platter, are absolutely miserable.

Personally, I’d like to be as wealthy as, say, the Obamas. Two professional highly paid incomes and money from writing books? Financial security and the freedom to travel at will? Sign me up for that! But more wealth than that, I don’t see how you live with yourself, with what you need to do to yourself and to other people to achieve it.

You live with it by repressing anything negative you feel, until you end up repressing everything you feel.

It’s wildly unhealthy. I’ve a friend who worked as a therapist for the ultra-rich in the 90s. Most of them have so fundamentally lost touch with their own emotions–let alone the emotions of anyone else–that they live in a state of permanent dissociation.

If they weren’t the most powerful people in society, we would call that complex PTSD as a result of severe and sustained childhood trauma.

But they are the most powerful in society, so we all just kind of call it normal. Or, at best, we call it monstrous and inhuman, without recognizing the fundamental humanity that caused them to move down this path of exploitation, violence, and repression.

Systems just need to self-replicate and self-perpetuate, they don’t need to do anything else.

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