promethea.incorporated

Feminism has a problem with men- and it’s hurting people.

earlgraytay:

Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s talk.

So there’s this thing that happens when people are in a group, especially when that group is dedicated to feminism or SJ, where people decide that the outgroup has bad dynamics and they’re going to reject them.

A few examples: “Men are privileged in our society, therefore, we’re going to make sure that women do most of the talking and planning in this group. Male allies can listen and agree, but mustn’t talk over the women.” “Allistic people’s social norms are bullshit, we’re going to work in accordance with the social norms that feel right for autistic people like us, and allistic people who feel uncomfortable can piss off.” “We’re completely opting out of binary gender, people can identify as anything and use any pronouns they like, and if people won’t use my nounself pronouns, they’re rude.”

Now let me be clear: I think this is a value-neutral thing. It’s not bad to reject outgroup norms in favour of your ingroup, and it’s not necessarily bad to expect people interacting with your ingroup to abide by your outgroup’s norms. For example, if your ingroup has a norm of expecting rational, coherent arguments, and someone comes in spewing badly-formed Nazi apologism, no one is going to be too happy. But I think some varieties of feminism have dominated the landscape of the left long enough that they’ve changed the norms to the point where they’re Not Okay anymore. 

For example: 

• “It is acceptable to say things like ‘men are worthless and disgusting’, or even ‘kill all men’, as long as I say after the fact that I was joking. Never mind that it hurts men of colour, trans men, depressed men, and men with scrupulosity issues.”. 
• “Male allies are never allowed to contribute to discussion or debate, because they have nothing of value to say.” 
• “Trans women are not really women and are going to be excluded from all women’s spaces (or even worse: ‘are even more disgusting than cis men and [insert grossness here]”. Or the flipside of that, “trans women are more important than cis woman, should have final say in all discussions about what it means to be a woman or what it means to be trans, and are never wrong, even when they’re saying things that are patently false”. 
• “People need to fuck people who they’re not attracted to, or they’re transphobic.”
  
• “Trans men are worse than cis men because they chose to take on masculinity and should [insert grossness here]”, or, conversely, “trans men are more pure than cis men because they weren’t raised with male privilege, they’re not really men, and thus are allowed to talk because they’re not icky cis men.” 
• “It’s acceptable to use ableist slurs, fat-shaming, various other forms of body-shaming, and even (if the person saying these things is truly terrible) suicide baiting, as long as it’s against nerdy cis men.”
  
• “Consent ethics is so intuitive that anyone can understand it and it’s a requirement of being a decent person… what do you mean you’re autistic?! What do you mean that social rules aren’t intuitive to you and you need explanation on how to follow them? I don’t need to explain myself to you, creep!” 

And so on, and so on, and so on. 

Sometimes it feels like, in trying to fight oppression and discrimination, we have gone too far in the exact opposite direction. Within our own communities, we’re perpetuating dynamics that are the exact opposite of the ones we’ve been fighting, where certain people don’t get to talk because of their genitalia or their trans status. 

Let me be clear, I think the dynamics we’re trying to get rid of still exist in the outside world- I mean, the backlash to the two new Star Wars movies having female leads is enough to prove that. 

But within the community? You’ve got trans guys afraid to come out because they know that they’ll be ripped to shreds by angry people- or worse, feeling guilty about being trans because they’re afraid identifying as a dude will make them a bad person. You’ve got cis guys- especially gender non-conforming cis guys- feeling guilty and disgusting about who and what they are, with no way to change it and no way to tell people what they’re doing is not okay, and unscrupulous people like monetizeyourcat trying to get them to transition for political reasons. You’ve got people playing Oppression Olympics just to be heard, people lying about their gender or trans status or race so that people will listen to them, abusers using their status as oppressed victims to make their Less Oppressed partners look bad… it’s a mess.

Determining a hierarchy of who gets to talk and who doesn’t, perpetuating violent ableism, judging people’s worth based on their genitals or appearance, telling people that they should die based on things they can’t help- aren’t these the things we’re trying to fight? Isn’t the goal to give everyone a fighting chance to be heard?

Previously guilty to a couple of these, nowadays working to eradicate them all.

(via multiheaded1793)

2 months ago · tagged #steel feminism · 90 notes · source: earlgraytay · .permalink

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   As I’ve suggested before, people seem all too willing to revert back to patriarchal/racist/other normative ideals the...

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    Previously guilty to a couple of these, nowadays working to eradicate them all.

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