Possible good news in development:
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Sometimes it’s the little things…
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@infundibulum might especially find this of interest and be able to offer some insight into this story.
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I know a couple of those folks quoted in that article. Their stories are credible. BAM has done some good things, but also perpetrates a cycle of harm against people who disagree with her. Hurt people hurt people and all that.
It’s a real bummer. And it makes me really worried about the state of scientific research. Shit has been so broken for so long, of course people are fucked in the brain. Where does all this anger go? I semi agree with several of the people quoted that maybe #MeTooStem didn’t need a leader. The power structure of academia is the cause of these problems - why replicate that by centering one person as the head of #MeTooStem?
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This makes sense to me.
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It does to me, too. But, MTS has done a fair amount of organizing, advocacy, and some legal things like helping survivors file FOIAs on their institutions. Those things aren’t free, let alone in the personnel time. Clancy, who brought this up in the article, is in a department that is more well-funded in terms of support staff, etc. And I think the “leaderless” movement idea makes it difficult to nucleate those sorts of resources. I’d like to see the idea of a more diffuse leadership model explored more. But to wonder why this leadership structure keeps being propagated is a bit of prestige-institute white womaning.
[Disclosure: Clancy is also personally friends with my sex harasser. I don’t wholly trust her motives.]
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I’m curious to see how the movement for / administration of … democracy in a social institution … will bear fruit in some rich asshole’s pet project.
This is relevant to the experience of all democracies, not just social movements but also administration of all teams and hierarchies. Election by who? Representing who and what? America started as the pet project of Yurpan aristocracies; that cannot be our limit. Conversion to democracy is every culture’s question.
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Right … I quite like the idea of diffuse organizational structures. But my experience trying to set them up is that when no one owns something, no one feels any ownership. It comes down quite quickly to “Well, what do you want for dinner?” at an industrial scale. I was hoping to be able to use a diffuse leadership model to increase community representation and engagement while decreasing my workload. But I rapidly realized I’d spend more time managing the community this way. That work needs to be rewarded, which implies some central body that can reward. And there we go again.
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Fifty billion gangster movies/TV shows about men.
Where is this one?
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Without wishing to detract from your valid point re: patriarchy and the resulting imbalance in representation, you might enjoy this exception to the rule:
Or the book it’s based on:
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Trigger warning for frank discussion of rape, etc.
I don’t come at the argument the same way this writer does, but I also have had difficulty with the idea that we’re not allowed to call people who suffer violent crime “victims”, but rather “survivors”.
I think that surviving is part of the process of moving forward as best as one can, but that doesn’t negate that a CRIME occurred. If you say there’s no victim, it’s like saying there’s no crime. Like the writer, I have used the ‘correct’ terminology with others, but I feel like it silences the horror and negates my own perception when I do.
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I think it’s similar to the debate in the disability community over IFL versus PFL. If someone tells you that they have a preference, use that.
Not everybody likes the “survival” narrative, just like many disabled people prefer IFL over PFL. We need to stop erasing people from their own stories.
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^^^This^^^
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It seems like the idea behind “survivor” is to reclaim your power and see the resilience within you rather than to feel helpless. But when other people tell you that you need to claim the survivor narrative to move forward just because it worked in their case, I think it’s insulting.
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(edit to remove autoplaying link, click through tweet for BBC interview)
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Good writing.
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That auto-played for me, fwiw.
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Sorry about that, edited to fix.
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