throbbing light machine

Protection Racket: The Right Wing wants women injured and miserable by Karen: "trans women don’t threaten cis women anywhere but in conservative fundraising letters. Conservatives ginned up this threat because they need women to believe we’re in all ways inferior to men. Conservatives are biological essentialists. We are nothing but our chromosomes."

Russia: Life After Trust By Michael Idov: "On one of my first reporting trips to Vladmir Putin’s Russia — of which there’d be so many that they’d blend into residence — my friend Alex and I got stuck in Moscow traffic a few cars ahead of an EMT van. The siren wailed, the lights whirled, but no one would budge: The ambulance crawled along at the same pace as the rest of us. When I noted this, Alex scoffed. Everyone knows that ambulance drivers make money on the side selling VIP airport rides, he said. Who knows who’s in that van right now? Fuck ’em."

A Novel Is an Empathy Engine by Cecilia Tan: "When I unleash a book onto the world, I imagine it as a fiction-fueled thresher, reaping hearts and leaving a trail of those who laughed, cried, and were changed in its wake. This might seem like a fantasy unto itself, but this metaphor is based not in my own wildest dreams, but in science. A novel is an empathy engine, and an SF/F genre novel is the turbocharged model."

(I did research on this sort of thing, once. I appreciate the boldness of Tan's tone and approach; got some good swagger)

On Self-Respect by Joan Didion: "Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions."

(a rather hard piece, but one I found bracing, in a moment when I needed bucking up)

Hostile to Female Status Altogether: Reading "Intercourse" With Gender Dysphoria by Jude Doyle: "Though she's rarely given credit for it, Andrea Dworkin was one of the great horror writers of the twentieth century."

(this essay spoke to me; I've loved Dworkin's glorious militant language and anger, the sweep and exhortation of her rhetoric, while struggling with her politics and the rotten legacy seen in the terfs. It was interesting to hear from another person who responded, as a youth, to Dwork's prose, and I like the reparative attitude of taking what you can use from sites and sources that may be, are likely to be, impure or problematic)

Black Alabama Man Thought He Was Mayor. White Folks Said 'Naaah.' He tried that in a small town. By Stephen Robinson. Eye-opening account of very small-town rural political structural dysfunction, racism in the Old South edition

via highlyeccentric, some interesting links on the term "heteropessimism":

On Heteropessimism, by Asa Seresin

from Heteropessism, by Ellie Anderson

-The first was the insight, visible when I was about 25, that it was my sex, and not me, that was hindering my goals. I had started to go a little crazy, not sure why my excellence and dedication was getting me nowhere fast, as the mediocre men around me took it easy and yet (almost) kept pace with me. Structurally, there were two reasons why I wasn't rising. One was that I like the company of women, and societies formed by outsiders, and so my mentors loved me but had no money or power to share with me. The other was that I failed to position myself sufficiently in re: my gender; I do tend at pivotal moments to default to thinking of myself as just human, and I forget that I have to deal with the situation of gender in a more active way. I think I can come across as both over-feminine and very assumptive of male-typed leadership roles; in University I was very much "boxed" as the feminist, and my male faculty had strange and slightly adversarial relationships with my primary archives that they hid behind overtly progressive-sounding language.

-The second was the insight, visible to me only just now, of just how much pressure remains on women to give up their juicy parts, their excitement, their self-exploration, in favor of domestic labor and service to others. Everyone has a different reason, but it all adds up to the same thing: stop having fun and pick up (men's) slack. My now-ex-husband shamed me, once, for writing pornography in fanspace. His reason was that he'd been made uncomfortable, once, in a fannish space on the internet, at a fairly young age. But -- years before that, the boys in our elementary school had been snapping my bra straps. Why is a woman's pleasure, a woman's creativity, a woman's sense of play, so easy to sacrifice? Why does it seem so small and squelchable? My ex needed me to pick up the slack of his life, and tend to his accumulated hoard of stuff, and make him the protagonist of my story; but that made me crazy, in short order. Right now, my feminism is telling me that joyful exploration of the juicy parts of life is essential to living sanely, and it is showing me the forces that want me to forgo that, for their own comfort or profit.

this essay at Alas, A Blog about misogyny and academic models and sociobiology is amazing, and I'm going to have to reread it in a moment when I'm not so stirred up; I was interested and nodding along, and then got to the claim that "Both ignore the scale that involves lying naked next to your husband and listening to him say appalling things about his last-boss-but-one, again, and then watching him pick his nose like an eight-year-old, and realizing you’re going to divorce him, even though at that very moment you have no idea how, and life after marriage is a blank, in your imagination, nothing there at all" - and sighed and settled and said oh yes that's right, I know that -

and then the essayist brought in T.H. White and The Book of Merlyn.

why does everything keep connecting back to that

Dear Mr. Dawkins,

in re: your dumbass tweet,

Natasha Trethewey is a better poet than Shakespeare, Fabiola Gianotti, Higgs Boson discoverer, is a better scientist than Einstein, and Zitkala-Ša was a greater musician than Schubert.

be pleased to note that this was not difficult.

up yours,
me

been thinking about violence, misogyny, and mental illness. I think that one of our takeaways as a culture NEEDS to be a re-evaluation of the seriousness of sexist hate speech; don't know that it's gonna happen, because we're so saturated in men's words of sex and gender violence that it's genuinely difficult to take them seriously. I don't want to know how much men hate me. I don't want to know that about them. But to brush aside rape and murder threats as "just internet trolling" is manifestly unsafe. when a man writes that he intends to murder women in an act of entitled "retribution," we need to be aware of the very real possibility that he will do so. nothing incomprehensible about it.

the fact that his mother noticed, understood, called the police on him, but when they came they thought he was "shy" and "polite" and so did nothing, shows that the flip side of the tone argument is also active and insidious: say horrible things in a "civil" way, and people will excuse you. "civility" is a dirty goddamn word.

as always, when a white-passing male pulls this sort of shit, everyone says he's mentally ill. many others have done the important work of showing how this assumption gets the axis of violence in relation to mental illness ass-backwards, indicating us crazy folk as perps when really mentally-ill people are so much more likely to be victims. but I also had the thought, this morning, that ideas about mental illness, violence, and sexism were part of what screwed me over in re: my ex, who was both mentally ill and abusive. When we met he was struggling to function through his OCD; his family hadn't done their research, swung from enabling his neurotic behaviors to asking why he didn't just stop them. he wasn't quite a misogynist, but he was definitely a bitter geeky manchild, and yes the way he talked about the girl he'd been with before bothered me a little. The only reason my mother could ever give me for the way she hit the ceiling when I started seeing him was his mental illness. I wonder, now, if she saw something of what was coming to me, if she perceived his potential for abuse - but because all she could say to me was "not that one he's crazy," and because I saw myself as "crazy," I got tangled up in a whole bunch of stuff about how mentally-ill people are still deserving of love. Not only does the labeling of entitled violence as mental illness contribute to the stigmaticization of non-neurotypicality, it also allows the mis-naming of entitled, violent, or abusive behavior as just mental difference. I'm reminded of Lundy Bancroft's observation in Why Does He Do That that individual therapy can actually make abusers much much worse. In fact, the argument could be made that while the shooter's parents DID get him diagnosed and into therapy, which would have been the right line of action in the case of mental illness, he may have never been crazy at all, just entitled and bitter and willing to damage others in order to ameliorate his own pain. obvs I can't know that, but I do know that I made that mistake with my ex, seeing problems as part of his disorder that we actually part of his assholishness and entitlement.

am finding Dark Angel to be sufficiently man-hating escapist catharsis; recommendations for further misandrist viewing would be appreciated. might have to go whole Hepburn tonight and rewatch Adam's Rib.

I foresee a strong need for these arguments in the future, as nerd engagement with the new Star Wars movie ramps up: ( why it's not okay to bag on Carrie Fisher about her weight )

I've spent several hours tonight reading Love, Joy, Feminism, by Libby Anne, a blog by a survivor of Christian Patriarchy, and I'm nowhere near through. I didn't expect to find personal connection when I opened a link to her so much as sociocultural analysis, but there are a number of interesting intersections between her experiences and mine: a child of a family-centered family with a lot of closeness and some major boundary issues, a former funny old-fashioned little girl who liked to sew patchwork and wear Laura Ingalls Wilder dresses (and also couldn't afford entrance to the worlds of mall fashion and pop music that my peers inhabited), someone who essentially "married" her very first boyfriend as a young teen. Not to mention my years of decidedly secular but also decidedly oddball homeschooling and the distrust for mainstream culture my parents raised me to. Opposite ideological bent, but same basic set of doctrines: question them, they're not to be trusted. The family way is Best.

There's a weird balance between liberalism and conservatism in being an outsider, I think; I couldn't have been brought up with more radical politics, and certainly in the eyes of Christian Patriarchalists I have been the worst of sinners, but in other ways I recognize the defensive snobbery of the girl-child who wants to believe that she's better than the other girls because she's industrious and family-oriented instead of crass or materialistic, and I'm not sure it mattered that much that my parents were anti-capitalist intellectuals instead of religious fundamentalists, not in the virtuous outsider social psychology of that sort of thing.

But it's awkward, because I still also do often think that the family ways I was raised to ARE Best, really & truly, and I want to be loyal to them.

Relatedly (?), I guess my Mormon childhood bff and intermittent crush object is also moving back up north. I have ... complex? ... feelings about this.