You Do Not Have To Be Valid.

WHAT

nearly my entire dash is people who were once into a fandom I was once into

(all different ones)

another day, another dollar, another instance of wanting to write a long post calling out the 2015 discourse’s massive, massive classism problem but not wanting to invite the wank and criticism it would induce

but in short: the rural poor are not your punching bags for jokes about homophobia, trump supporters, and fat ugly americans, and poor people as a whole are grossly underrepresented in talking about marginalization and are not included in discussions about the issues that affect them directly. and a massive part of that comes from there not being a vanguard of like, Poor Academics the way that there are Feminist Academics and Queer Academics and Black Academics and so forth. every other institutionally marginalized group is represented in academia but because of the inherent lack of opportunity to pursue higher education that comes along with being poor, poor people’s voices aren’t really heard to the same degree. 

not to mention that structural and institutional poverty is a problem that can only really be solved by politicians, and the problem is that right wing politicians have a vested interest in keeping poor people poor and uneducated so that they will continue to vote against their own interests and effectively continue to marginalize themselves, and meanwhile said conservative politicians keep their jobs and nothing changes. and even well-meaning leftist economists can’t do anything about it.

and MEANWHILE, youth activism is so intently focused on gender and race to the exclusion of class because most activists are college students, who have not really had to deal with the effects of Poverty with a capital P. see also: the difference between being poor and being broke. and activist language policing is so inherently classist in the first place because it serves to exclude and silence anyone who doesn’t have an academic background or the free time to read blog after blog on the internet to figure out why, exactly, using that word or that asterisk is so offensive and makes you such a terrible person even if your intent is, actually, good. so much of activism requires a significant time investment and a certain level of education that people who work minimum wage jobs and have families just cannot afford. so because they’re insufficiently educated, they’re regarded as insufficiently oppressed or treated like they’re actively part of the problem. 

(not to mention the internet’s obsession with degrading service workers who are employed by problematic – ugh that word, but it’s the one that fits – companies. “we went to party city and threw all the racist costumes on the floor!” “we vandalized the ‘girl toy’ and ‘boy toy’ signs at target!” literally nothing enrages me more than this.)

see also: the co-option of the term “emotional labor,” which originated as a phrase coined to describe the mental and physical toll of the requirement for service industry workers to display cheerful, positive emotions toward customers, which has been bastardized by middle-class feminists to refer to standard politeness and talking about feelings within any form of relationship, be it with a friend, significant other, or parent. 

i could go on and on. i won’t, because i already wrote way more than i intended. it’s a massive, massive intersectionality fail. i’m just so tired of it.

epic sax office 

This is just to say

I have eaten

the spiders that were in my cave

and which you were probably counting for statistical purposes

Forgive me I am an outlier adn should not have been counted

Me, a disgraced academic turned farmer, surveying my crops: Finally... I am out standing in my field

... my apologies but do men really need even more coddling over how women being at an extreme risk of violence at men's hands makes things harder for men somehow?

Specific individual people who have never engaged in violence, and who are experiencing guilt and shame over being in a category with people who have, deserve reassurance that they’re responsible for their individual actions and only for their individual actions, and that it’s healthy for them to pursue their happiness while treating other people well. 

Crimes aren’t committed by Men, they are committed by individual men (and by individual women, sometimes), and Men are not responsible for them, the attackers are. 

To the extent that our society socializes people in ways which make them likelier to commit rape and violence, and likelier to get away with that, every one of us as individuals should be figuring out how we can avoid participating in that process and how we can send messages in the other direction. But the time and place for that conversation is not “this innocent person feels tremendous shame over attraction to women”, any more than that post was a good occasion to tell anon about how malaria nets can be cheaply purchased from the AMF and that you can send poor people money through GiveDirectly.

I want individual people to believe that they are accountable for their behavior but not for strangers’ behavior, and that they are not reducible to their gender. I want everyone equipped to participate in making society safer for victims of intimate violence, but I don’t want to achieve that at the expense of every possible conversation about sexuality and attraction, because conversations about sexuality and attraction are also really important.

This lady is Alethi and you can’t tell me otherwise

By Jan Lehner for Russh Magazine

Fear Itself

I get the point of all the “can’t you just wear a fucking mask, it’s not like anyone’s asking you to storm the beach at Normandy” discourse, but I think it misses something about our current predicament. 

Wearing a mask is actually a big deal. I mean for me it is. It feels really weird, it restricts your air flow, and the longer you wear it the more you have this big wet cloth sticking to your nose and mouth which makes you feel like something is very wrong. And all of that makes the whole pandemic thing real in a sensory way and not just an intellectual way. It’s scary.

I do it anyway, and just, you know, am scared, and am learning to get over it, the way I’ve always learned to deal with my various anxieties.

It occurred to me at some point that this is probably true for a lot of the anti-mask assholes too. Wearing a mask is a scary prospect. It involves acknowledging that the risk exists…and also *feeling* and *seeing* the risk in a way that you don’t have to if you don’t wear them. All the macho bullshit about “freedom” is really a screen for a completely different kind of emotion, which would be fear. Not just fear of the virus, but fear of fear itself. 

This truly deranged behavior that we see people exhibiting when asked to wear masks is of course a product of entitlement, but it is also, I am willing to bet, driven by fear. Instead of accepting their fear and dealing with it, these people turn their anxiety into anger and direct it outwards, attacking the people who ask them to mask so that they don’t have to think about *why* they’re being asked to mask. They go after people who they think they have not only the right but the *ability* to defeat, in order to protect themselves from the fear that the real danger is beyond their control.

That doesn’t make any of it right. But we would all probably benefit from acknowledging that wearing a mask is not a trivial thing that is easy for everyone to do. Wearing a mask requires us to acknowledge that we are surrounded by an invisible and potentially deadly threat, and that we have a terrifying responsibility now for the wellbeing of total strangers because your own breath could now actually kill people. It requires us to be aware, on a visceral level, of the danger we are all in.

Anyway. Good for you if you’re wearing a mask even though it makes you feel weird and unsettled and freaked out. We are grateful to you for being brave and doing it anyway.

ultisols said: wxke af

broke: woke

woke: wxke