That Feminist Dyke

stfufauxminists:

hellishhallelujah:

“I’ve never heard my male friends speak up about the abuse men face unless I start talking about women first.”

~ From About Male Privilege

That sums up my beef with MRA’s perfectly. If you want to create safe spaces for men who are victims of abuse, that’s perfectly fine. If you want to campaign for awareness of sexual/domestic violence against men, that’s fine, too.

But stop talking over women to do it.

THIS.

Men are never so interested in violence against men as when women are talking about violence against women.

lavenderlabia:

shooting4ownhand:

mattachinereview:

I think the part of Tumblr that makes me the most tired is the party line of:

“We found this person saying/doing a problematic thing(s) and now no one is allowed to like anything that they have ever said or done, because this happened, and now everyone’s previous experiences with this person’s work are invalid and/or must be disavowed”.

This creeps me out for a wide variety of reasons.

Like let’s say a sad queer kid gets really into a certain writer in high school—idk who to pick, let’s pick Hemingway, because I’m tired. 

So this sad queer kid gets super into Hemingway and it helps him survive high school, right? 

And then years later this kid reads A Moveable Feast, which is Hemingway’s memoir, and discovers that Ernest Hemingway was a grade A total complete absolute homophobe who destroyed his own relationship with Gertrude Stein by reacting shittily when she explained she was a lesbian.

So there are a few ways we can go with this, right.

We can accept that Hemingway is flawed and complicated, or we can make this kid feel shitty about ever having been into Hemingway and invalidate his queerness by suggesting that the only possible way to be still into Hemingway is through some measure of internalized homophobia.

THIS IS NOT A GOOD WAY TO MODEL SURVIVAL STRATEGIES OR MENTAL HEALTH.

This is a good way to hate yourself!

We are living in hell world, ok, to steal a phrase from Mehron, and the idea that we can somehow isolate ourselves in someplace that isn’t hell world is so problematic on so many levels and relies on so many creepy notions of boundaries and purity! Hell world is all around us and inside of us and in order to deal with that we have to engage with it.

Why do you think I like WAUGH? Absolutely NOTHING about Evelyn Waugh’s politics is even a TINY bit redeemable, as far as I’m concerned.

I’m just tired of all the different ways ~young radicals~ have of determining who’s a “real” radical.

And I think that loudly forever disavowing people who fuck up is a way of implicitly saying, “because I never fuck up, because obviously I don’t, because if I ever fucked up why would I suggest that all people who fuck up be forever removed from the near sphere of people we might like or value”.

And I think that helps ~radical communities~ to foster a certain quality of “but we are Good People” which renders everybody impervious to call-outs once they have amassed enough cultural capital by, idk, talking loudly at events about how much they hate [x].

Disavowal is an incomplete strategy.

Anyone who pulls the “you are not a real [insert minority here] if you like [insert problematic thing here]” can go fuck themselves. I am so sick of this bullshit mentality on Tumblr, this shit doesn’t exist anywhere else, where you are only a good social justice advocate/person if you hate every problematic thing. Frankly if you do that, you are left with one boring ass life since you cannot like anything. Everything has some problematic elements to it. Also, what really pisses me off about this whole mindset is it assumes people do not have critical thinking skills. However, I guess one wouldn’t have critical thinking skills if they cannot admit something they like has problems. -shrugs-

This is something that’s been bothering me for a long time, and there are particular factions of Tumblr that do this all the fucking time. It’s quite a bizarre way to look at the world actually, especially when you’re advocating fairness and equality. Like everyone fucks up — every single person — that’s the whole point of social justice. It’s a learning process; it’s calling people out; it’s articulating the nuance and grey area of social interactions; it’s critical thinking that allows you to say “this is what I like and this is what I would change”; it’s the analysis of culture and people. And for all the oft-heard cries about paying more attention to intersectionality, I barely hear anyone talking about the intersection of “fucking up” and “being a decent person who’s learning and improving all the time”. Those categories aren’t mutually exclusive. 

I particularly hate when this attitude extends to “if you even reblog from somebody who has done something problematic in the past (whether you were there for the drama shit-storm or not) you are somehow tainted by association”. It’s fucking ridiculous. 

And none of this is takes away from the fact there are obviously super fucked up things where such ostracising the problematic is warranted. But too often that perspective is lost.  

Anyhoo. That’s my rant for the moment. Here’s a pertinent quote on the topic. 

alanaisreading:

The fundamental mistake that most thin people make regarding fat people is that they make the assumption that all bodies work the same way that their own does.  The naturally thin among us look at a fat person and think, “I’d have to eat nothing but cheeseburgers and milkshakes all day long to weigh that much.  Therefore, that person must eat cheeseburgers and milkshakes all day long.”

It doesn’t work that way.  Most fat people eat the same basic three meals a day that thin people eat.  Despite what you have seen on tv and in movies, fat people do not shove food in their faces all day every day.  In most cases, they eat the same things that thin people eat, but their bodies simply process it differently.  But fat people are labelled as “disgusting” and “pigs” because they are only ever shown from a thin person’s point of view, based on these false assumptions.

Fat people can be guilty of this mistake too.  Sometimes we see someone very thin and, knowing that we would have to stop eating entirely and exercise obsessively in order to be that thin, we assume that the thin person must be anorexic, when they may just be naturally thin.

The difference is, in our culture, thin people are assumed to be morally superior.  These wrong assumptions about how body size happens paint the thin as disciplined and the fat as lazy, when the reality is that there are as many lazy and undisciplined thin people as there disciplined ones, and there are as many disciplined and active fat people as there are lazy ones.

“But every time I’m out I see fat people shoving food in their faces.”  Really?  And you never see thin people eating in public?  Are you sure you aren’t just noticing the fat people because you started with the assumption that fat people eat all the time, and every time you see a fat person eating, you take special notice of that as proof that you are correct?  

Some people will always be naturally thin, no matter how much junk food they cram in their faces, and some people will always be naturally fat, no matter how little they eat or how much they exercise.  The naturally thin may gain weight now and then, but their bodies will always eventually settle into being their own natural thin size.  The naturally fat can lose weight, but eventually will gain it all back as their body regains its natural shape.

Attaching moral weight to a person’s body size will always be wrong.  When you think that thin people are better than fat people, you may as well be saying that tall people are better than short people, or blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.  

The truth is that people are people, and all of them should be treated equally.

lavenderlabia:

darkjez:

downlo:

I’ve been reading some old commentary on Hugo Schwyzer due to this recent Tumblr post defending him, which was written by a woman who identifies him as a father figure. And I came across a blog post that explains why Schwyzer’s fatherliness is just more evidence why he can’t be trusted. He’s so sketchy that even other white male feminists are creeped the fuck out:

Here’s how Schwyzer described his relationship to his students not long ago:

Go ahead, call me paternalistic. I’ll wear that title with pride, thank you. I see my students not merely as independent, autonomous agents whom I need to empower, but as vulnerable young people whom I — and others around me — need to protect. And I still have the nerve to call myself a feminist.

This notion that feminism calls him to protect the weak — to save them from themselves, to guide them to the right path — recurs again and again in his writing. As the co-organizer of the LA Slutwalk earlier this year, he referred to his role as “Herding sluts. In the best and most responsible way.” His students say he’s an electrifying lecturer, but complain that he severely restricts class discussion. And he frequently conceptualizes moral behavior as a matter of denial and restriction. (He has, for instance, described feminism as a “cold pool” in which “none of us can fully immerse ourselves forever.”)

I don’t have any reason to believe that Hugo Schwyzer is likely to attempt another murder anytime soon. But the man who described his girlfriend as fragile and broken and in need of his sheltering strength as he plotted her death has not gone entirely away. The paternalistic impulse to save that young woman from herself — an impulse that came to him with “incredible clarity” then, one which he remembers “perfectly” today — is still in him, still driving him. It’s an impulse he’s redirected, but it remains unexamined, unchecked, and dangerous. (It particularly inflects and infects his writing about sexuality, about youth, and about people of color.)

There’s nothing pro-women, feminist, or new about being a man who wants to rescue, protect, teach and otherwise be the master to women, particularly young and vulnerable women (like the one who wrote that Tumblr post). That’s pretty much the essence of patriarchy.

I’m so glad you & I both are on this anti-Schwyzer-stan tip right now. I was just about to make a video talumbout this white feminist fuckery that keeps his name in circulation…

Just reblogging because I love anyone and anything that highlights what a douchefuck Hugo Schwyzer is.

ethiopienne:

Pro-tip: white privilege doesn’t mean white people have perfect lives.

It means that white people do not have to deal with institutionalized, systemic racism in addition to their everyday problems. It means institutionalized, systemic racism does not cause white people’s everyday problems.

It means when white people go home and turn on their TVs after a long, hard day at work, they can rest assured knowing that they will not only be guaranteed to see people who look like them on the screen, but they will never have to actively search to find a positive depiction of people who look like them.
It means even when white people buy their groceries with food stamps, they don’t have to worry that they’ll be followed around the supermarket for “no reason.”

You think you have no white privilege because you’re poor? Think again. You think your white privilege disappears because you’re not a cisgendered heterosexual? Think again. You think your white privilege disappears because you’re disabled? Think again.

It means that all problems white people face are not exclusive to white people. People of color face those same problems, too. But in addition to any problem white people face, people of color must also bear the burden of dealing with an entire social, cultural, political, economic climate that works against us each and every single day.

And here’s the thing about the effect of racism on PoC’s everyday lives: it’s not like adding one more little thing. This isn’t simple math. Racism isn’t just a “minus 1” on our radar. It informs, guides, and shapes the way every other problem is handled.
Think about it. When white people are pulled over by the cops, their biggest fear is jail time. When black people are pulled over by the cops, our biggest fear is that they’ll kill us and we won’t even get 30 seconds on the 5:00 news.