there's our catastrophe

my mum used to work in admin for a social welfare body, for years and years.  a lot of the social workers were very rude to her, especially young female recent graduates.  she didn’t get paid as much as them.  the union for that sector was pretty unhelpful the one time she actually turned to them for help. 

My mum comes from a middle-class family, but she was one of the youngest children of that family, and her father died when she was very young, so she grew up poor, unlike her older siblings.  Later she got into a law degree at an elite university, in a brief window of Australian history when university was free.  She fell in love with my father shortly afterwards, he didn’t finish high school and neither did his father.  She had a baby, my sister.  She came very close to finishing her degree but ultimately dropped out, because of the lack of support for students who were also parents.  My dad was in the picture but it still wasn’t enough, and because they weren’t married there was a lot of stigma.  Thinking about my mum’s relationship to education and class and men and motherhood has been really essential to my feminism. 

I love my mum a lot.  She knows a lot about literature, history, beating bureaucracy, and how to be welcoming and friendly to people.  These are some of the things I care the most about.  It makes me uncomfortable when people are super vicious about their mums having bad politics or whatever — men especially.  I’m not impressed by it.  A lot of my friends would say “yeah but your mum is awesome” but you think she’s awesome mainly because I’m always telling you about cool things that she says and does and I know about them because I listen.  I used to be very condescending to my mum.  Now I know that she knows a lot that I don’t so I should chill with that attitude.  Sometimes she is wrong, I think, but we learn from each other.  Mums know a lot, usually.  I’ve gotten a lot smarter since I started paying more attention to what she says, that’s for 100% definite. 

I badly want kids, mostly because I like kids, but also because I’m more and more committed to, you know, mothers, babies, the future.  I’m scared of being tied to the father or sending myself broke with artificial insemination, though.  I’d like to co-parent with my best friend, but I don’t think that’s more radical than raising children with a partner, I just think it would be more right for me.  Sometimes I feel ready to have a child right now, sometimes I feel like I’ll never be able to deal with how hard it will be.  It’s not the right time but no time is ever going to be the right time, probably.  I know it will cut me off from a lot of stuff, but at the same time, I’m increasingly ready to let go of scenes and movements that don’t have time for mothers and children.  This all seems pretty remote at this point, pretty hypothetical.  I might not ever be able to have kids. 

the whole “socially liberal, economically conservative” thing is so male

I mean it’s obvious that right-libertarians are a bunch of young white dudes who spend too much time editing the “criticisms of feminism” section of wikipedia

but also, I cbf digging any of them up but I keep running into studies of voting patterns showing that men are more “socially liberal, economically conservative”, and women are, conversely, way less into capitalism and possibly more socially conservative

which makes sense because women are more likely to be poor, more likely to have a lot of responsibility for a lot of people, even partnered women are more likely to be responsible for managing family finances and actually making sure everybody eats and they don’t get evicted, and etc

it’s also worth noting here that women’s “social conservativism” is often reckoned with reference to stuff like their feelings on drugs and R-rated movies and asinine “free speech” defences of hateful tripe, individualist, hedonist stuff, rather than attitudes to marginalised groups or liberatory social movements

while these are of course overlapping concerns, there is a large and concrete difference between a discourse like “criminalisation of drug users targets already vulnerable people” and “420 blaze it the government can’t tell me what to do, it’s not my problem if other people can’t handle this shit”

having said that, a lot of women are really invested in stuff like the family and religion, sometimes in a really conservative way, and I think it’s important to think about why that is and what women might find alienating about secularism or discourses of sexual liberation and how we as the Left are approaching that

(abuse stuff)

rgr-pop:

(this is old as hell, been sitting in my drafts, I put two different drafts together into one place)

I.

I dunno, sorry. Privilege what a survivor tells you and what a survivor wants over all other things, always, but. One thing “accountability” is not is when you go to them and say “I know this person fucked you up, is it okay with you if I still talk to them” or “does it make you feel weird that I still hang out with so-and-so” and the survivor says “no, it’s fine, I’ll be okay” or they say “I can’t ask you not to” or “sorry for being presumptuous” and you still hang out with that abuser, even though you know very well that a survivor is experienced in the art of telling people they aren’t upset even when they are, of never asking anyone for anything, of hiding bruises, of not thinking they are allowed to say no, and so on and so on. And like, how is wishy-washy consent in this different from wishy-washy sexual consent? “I can’t tell you not to fuck me” “I can’t tell you not to be friends with my rapist.”

Like, come on. There exist (theoretically, I haven’t seen any) abusers who never abuse again after they are confronted, and there are definitely plenty of survivors who don’t mind if their abuser still exists in their community. But whenever I see an organizer say something like “well, we had an accountability process, and the survivor said it was okay, and so that’s why we still talk to this abuser,” it’s like, please.

I don’t buy it.

and why would you be friends with a person who has raped a person

why would you personally want to do that

you got no standards for company or what

what’s your life gotta be like to know that a person you’re friends with is a rapist but to not feel afraid of them or uncomfortable

II.

tell me truthfully: do you really want “accountability”? who wants this? would this help you? for your whole community to go to your abuser and say “hey you fucked up, are you sorry?” and for your abuser to say “yeah I fucked up, I’m sorry,” is that something you want? even if they never fuck up again—and let’s be honest, they almost never never fuck up again unless they are dead—do you want this? does this give you anything, at all?

pastimperfection:

ourcatastrophe:

I’m really mad/sad about how many women are having (consensual, but) unsatisfying sex b/c of inconsiderate partners, heterosexism, trauma, dysphoria, other mental health issues that make it hard to inhabit your body, etc

I believe that someday we can talk about this without it devolving into “have more sex to be more liberated” but I’m not holding my breath

It reminds me of the “Let people pay for your work!” solution to “I am a freelancer and people expect me to work for free if they even acknowledge that I am working.” 

The problem isn’t incompetence.  It’s not that people are ignorant of what good and bad sex is, any more than employers are ignorant of the value of money and job security.  It’s just that they award these things in unequal, exploitative ways. 

And so, yes, more sex isn’t going to fix anything - not any more than more free artwork will.  It’ll just be more disappointing, degrading, frustrating sex.  Your attitude doesn’t have an effect on your partner’s willingness to care for you and respect you; the problem isn’t their discomfort.  It doesn’t matter how much you do to facilitate a relationship that is inherently broken.  They still get something and offer nothing. 

You have to start from the basic assumption that unequal partnership won’t lead to anything but cemented inequality.  It’s not something to work through.  It’s something to stop. 

I more or less agree with this but I think I need to stress that I am also talking about sexual relationships where the people involved are “equal” and/or have the best will in the world

I’m not just talking about women having sex with men and/or dickheads

if you’re a woman, it doesn’t matter if you only sleep with women, or only people who share some other marginalised subject position with you, or only total sweethearts, or whatever — there are still a lot of barriers to having good sex — to you knowing what that might involve, being able to communicate that, being able to stay in your body

this is the larger point here: no lover, no matter how skilled, no matter how sweet, no matter how equal to you, can remove your history and context in a misogynist society, can give you a life without that

and, you know, that’s kind of dev

courtneylovedcobain:

misandrwitch:

Hands up if large groups of aggressively loud white boys in your vicinity freak you out

Large groups of any men freak me out

idk what courtneylovedcobain’s race is but I feel like the “white” here is important actually

where I live and in a lot of other places, men of colour are routinely harassed by police under the grounds of “public safety”, young black men especially, especially when in groups

for super double irony, there’s a known predator in my area targeting young black men, attempting to murder them, who is suspected of responsibility for at least one death — this was brought up with the local police, who did nothing

so groups of young black men are not only not necessarily a threat, they might be in groups for their safety

in any case

it’s super racist to stereotype all men as dangerous to all women in all circumstances, given that fears for the safety of [white] women have so often been used as a justification for racist harassment and murder

(via wildbayou)