Not Feminism 101

Politics
2902

This. This thread. This is how you should respond when someone points out that “hey, just so you know, that thing you said was sexist/racist/ableist/-phobic.”

It’s hard to accept that we fucked up, that we aren’t as good a person as we think we are, as our self-image shows us to be, but getting defensive doesn’t make us better. Listening, acknowledging, fixing what we can (we can’t fix the past, but we can reduce damage for the future), are the appropriate responses. So, too, is transparency. She’s not just changing it quietly and denying it ever happened. This is how we learn and get better.

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2903

With one important caveat: if it’s in the book because a vile person is saying it and they mean to be vile.

Not every word in a book is supposed to represent how the author thinks, or what they approve of.

See: Dire Straits, Money for Nothing

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2904

By contrast:

I’ve been reading an absolutely massive fanfiction of the Young Justice cartoon called “With This Ring.” The word count is in the low 7-digits.

The current plot is that a male character has just been turned female against his will. That, in itself, has the potential to be problematic, but I’ve seen that kind of thing handled well, as well as being handled poorly, so that, in itself, wasn’t the issue.

So, the narrator/main character started referring to the transformed character as “she” rather than “he,” despite still thinking of himself as male and, in fact, being quite distraught at being in a female body. Again, not necessarily an issue, as the author is not the main character (even though said character is something of a self-insert).

No, where it actually started to come apart was when the author started to defend that decision in the comment thread, first saying something to the effect of “the person who first made a distinction between gender and biological sex had done a lot of harm to humanity,” and then doubled down by saying that he wouldn’t recognize any identity that a person claimed that didn’t correspond to their current body, be that a gender identity or an identity as an attack helicopter.

If you’re not familiar with the latter reference, it’s an insidious meme that attempts to delegitimize gender identities by equating them to a choice, and a rejection of reality (“Well, if he1 identifies as a woman, I want to be an attack helicopter!”), rather than an acceptance that the reality of someone’s mind doesn’t necessarily match that of their body.

Anyway, given that the forum where the fiction was being posted was founded by a trans woman, you can imagine this didn’t go over well with the moderation team. The author got suspended for a day, came back, lost his appeal, doubled down on the “attack helicopter” meme, and took his story to a deferent forum to post.

Had he shown any sign of self-examination, any hint that he thought that he might have been in the wrong, I might have kept reading, but when someone reacts like he did, it’s because they’re unwilling to consider that they might be wrong.

So I guess that’s one fewer web serial that I’m following now.

1Mis-gendering present as an example of the meme-poster’s mindset, not mine.

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2905

See: Dire Straits, Les Boys

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2907

I’d be surprised if they even have a single damn left.

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2908

Or a plugged nickel or a fig.

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2910

I fluv McSweeney’s…

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2911

And the correct musical accompaniment:

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2912

Gah.

I had just gotten that out of my head!

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2913

Oh sweet FSM, no.

One way controlling, abusive men control their partners is via diet. And in a controlling, abusive relationship with an abuser who professes to be left-wing, food type restriction is the preferred path.

I was vegetarian for twelve years – starting with when my ex decided we should be, based on a Mother Jones article he said he read at the library and wouldn’t give me the reference details for so I could read it. He’d already talked me off the pills for my chronic anemia because they were “not natural” and therefore could be secretly bad for me. His father was a doctor – he knew how to talk about pills to make them all sound bad.

I only resolved that anemia a few years ago – turns out I don’t absorb B12 well, and you need that to absorb iron. So back then I was meat-free – the most common source of B12 – and off iron supplements.

We weren’t quite vegan, but close to it. At least, I was, lest I get lectured with horror stories about the evils of meat and dairy. I have good reason to suspect he ate as he liked when I was at work: friends who would have known had no idea he was vegetarian, I learned after he left.

So I’m exhausted all the time, can’t think straight, no energy, will do anything to avoid a fight, and underslept as well (which is another very common method of controlling someone; physical force is way down the list and typically only shows up later in a relationship).

Another example not to do with me: the woman who was constantly bullied by her partner for eating so much, only to learn from one of his co-workers that he had a huge lunch every day, which is why he could eat less than her at dinner.

And then she found his anorexia porn.

Then above and beyond all that, include how marginalised communities like indigenous communities tend to consume meat more than the rest of the population – meat the community has caught themselves, pretty much the opposite of factory farming.

How are you going to say you support Indigenous rights and especially Indigenous women’s rights after you’ve declared only real feminists are vegan?

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2914

Thank you for that. I have chronic folliculitis, as well as dizziness, and wonder if I have some kind of anemia myself.

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2915

But she never said that, as far as I can see.

It’s an argument that dovetails well with, for example, Peter Singer’s work. Animals are one step down from women and people of color, in terms of how they’re perceived as existing for the use of others.

It’s like how people who torture and/or kill animals when they’re young have a tendency to grow up to be violent criminals. It’s a harbinger.

This doesn’t mean that all men who eat meat are sexist. But that’s not what she’s saying. She realized that as a woman, she has a lot in common with animals in our society, and it motivated her to treat animals the way she would want to be treated.

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This is something that would be a huge pill for USA society to swallow, doing away with factory meat. More so than reversing pollution.

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2917

https://www.instagram.com/p/BtLxCEzhtbx/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=8upl3cq0gk8k

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2918

I don’t necessarily buy this, but having lived rural, and now in an impoverished Deep South state, it is really hard not to see diet changes as feminist and anti-racist. When I lived in IA, I can tell you now that the people drinking the most hog polluted water and breathing high pig-shit particulate air were not factory farm owners. And those owners bought all kinds of exceptions from state environmental laws. Same here in LA. All that agriculture run off goes somewhere, and hogs are among the worst causes. But factory farm owners aren’t sustenance fishing eutrophied lakes.

So I guess maybe I don’t see that as intrinsically tied to meat-eating. But I do regard the factory farmed meat industry in the same way as I look at oil: the worst excesses of capitalism, willing to burn everything and everyone to wring the last red cents out of a dying planet.

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2919

On the contrary. My ex said he should have got a dog instead of me, because at least a dog was trainable.

It’s just not a good argument to me. It’s culturally insensitive and insulated.

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chatty3.jpeg1000×780 146 KB

“I’m so sorry, I no speak ze English.”
“Ah! That is no problem to me, I also speak French.”
“I speak no French.”
“But I just heard you –”
“I speak no French, monsieur. Good day to you.”

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2921

Apologies if you’ve all seen this.

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