there's our catastrophe

reminder that MRAs in Australia chose to call themselves “blackshirts” because they are more or less explicitly fascist

I’ve never seen a militant MRA who wasn’t white

fascist agendas have historically been rigidly patriarchal and obsessively concerned with reproductive politics (restricting access to abortion and contraception for white women, attempting to prevent people of colour from having or raising children) because protecting the borders of the white nation means ensuring its viable reproduction, which is bad news for all women (inc. women who can’t get pregnant, because suppression of reproductive freedoms comes with a whole host of other anti-woman developments)

illegalplumpudding talks a lot about the gendered character of border politics/the nationalist character of efforts to control women, you should go read her blog

monetizeyourcat:

whoneedactionswhenyouvegotwords:

monetizeyourcat said: mras have hella actual power tho

i’m sceptical, masculism is basically unheard of as a movement. anti-feminism is influential though, which can often end up being similiar.

mras are the modern face of an anti-feminism that wears and discards faces with trivial ease because it’s plugged into power. it’s also one of the dominant reactionary intellectual currents of the main consumer demographic - twenty-something white men with disposable incomes and niche interests.

i get that there are unpleasant people within feminism but its dialectical opposite is unpleasant people; it’s a fever swamp of human malevolence. you can’t really weigh one against the other

defs but it goes way beyond a simple “MRAs push the political climate in such-and-such a direction”

MRAs and specifically “fathers’ rights” activists have been really influential in australia

they have a group called the “blackshirts” that harass women who’ve gotten custody of their children

they’ve bombed the homes of judges who’ve ruled against them

in the mid-2000s MRAs specifically were really influential in changing the way family court rulings were handled in australia to a “presumption of shared custody” post-divorce which sounds innocuous enough but in implementation made it really really difficult to escape abusive husbands and fathers, like, almost impossible.  for example they pushed successfully for a condition named “parental alienation syndrome” to be considered when granting custody.  parental alienation syndrome is a psychological condition wherein one parent turns the child against another parent through making them believe they have been abused.  what this meant was that non-abusive parents (primarily mothers) developed a justified fear of being seen to support or believe their children who had been abused.  a whole lot of women had to make a choice between allowing their children’s abusers access to them or facing the possibility of losing custody completely. this happened to friends of mine when I was in school and it fucked them up really hardcore. 

things are a little bit better now I think than in the Howard era but it was grim and it was directly connected to the lobbying of men’s rights groups

basically people need to stop leaving it at “lol men’s right’s activists, nerrrrrrrds”, and saying “but men have more power so QED” without looking into or elaborating upon the very real consequences of MRA activism is not really much of an improvement

ultraviolent-revolution-deactiv asked: god do i hate u tumblr sjw leftists. so zizek is a "vile misogynist" because he told one distasteful joke. u are alienating so many people from communism and socialism by insisting that everyone who isn't on board with your latest sj tumblr craze is tantamount to a nazi. sexists jokes are the least of any woman's problems.

presented without commentary

life’s way too short to read Žižek

I’m not gonna waste my time supporting the career of a living theorist who bemoans the way political correctness has made it harder to hit on women and makes jokes about how women are better dead than unfuckable.

I get it, ~provocative~, but actually he’s the epitome of the pseudo-subversive recuperation of criticism of capitalism by capitalism that he thinks he discovered.   what does he actually have to say that’s original or interesting?  I’m sympathetic to the idea that someone can be more important for their method or for their role as a public intellectual than for the concrete concepts derived from their work but I just don’t see that in Žižek.  it’s all cynical and incoherent and vacuous and irrelevant to anything I care about.  the guy is an industry, he pretty openly says whatever gets the biggest reaction, he’s a troll, he’s link-bait, he’s the Andrew Bolt or Ann Coulter or whoever of the left.  that’s his function. 

— & there are a lot of other reasons why I don’t like Žižek’s actual ideas but I honestly don’t think I should be required to have any reason to want him broke and forgotten other than that he’s a gross misogynist. 

I snark about him a lot without going into it but this is, for reference, my Official Position. 

further adventures of “the queer art of failure”

justaswell138:

ourcatastrophe:

<snip>

i shouldn’t be participating here because i didn’t read this book and wasn’t planning on it, but this conversation got me interested in reading it, especially re: the “moving goalposts” thing.

i am interested in failure/moving goalposts to the extent that i am interested in constantly interrogating how actual, material shit challenges or defies “ideals,” and in being prepared to shift accordingly.  or shed.  or grow.  i think often now of the futurist manifesto which says something like “we will kill for an idea.  we hate women,” not those words obviously but the sentences are right next to each other…

the affiliation of “family” and especially “children” with “heteronormativity” is a constant source of disgust for me in this way…you’d think if the people who say shit like that didn’t realize it was anti-poor they would at least realize that even if it sounded logical in some really specific trajectory of academic “queer” thought, in practice it’s always entirely misogynistic.  this is just one of the reasons i refuse to use the word “heteronormativity” and always use heteropatriarchy instead. 

maybe halberstam will care more about memory if his book ever becomes one of those to “mysteriously” become out of print?  i think a super celeb academic making this point is kind of tacky, tbh.  don’t get me wrong i get the critique of memory/embrace of forgetfulness to an extent, as my personal like, computer-like memory hasn’t helped me at all, really.  but of course me remembering over and over again some stupid humiliating thing i said that once is different than like, my terror at all the oral histories i happen upon that i’ve virtually never seen in print….and i’m being a little jokey here, but i think there’s just a sort of differentiation that fails to happen when theorizing memory.  actually adore nietzsche’s kinda ambivalence about this topic…but i haven’t read that in awhile. 

anyway, i guess i will read the book.  might be a semi-hate read for me, tbh. oh and the bit i bolded from oc (am i supposed to say “you?”) is so real. 

(via jabwell813)

hugoschwyzer:

there’s our catastrophe: brief note re: the centrality of beauty and image to “body positivity” discourses

ourcatastrophe:

1. people who care a lot about their own beauty usually have strong and complicated reasons for feeling that way. feeling beautiful is not just about feeling beautiful, it’s about feeling like a beautiful person, like the protagonist in a movie, like maybe you could be the hero in your own life,…

Please refrain from reblogging my writing.  That’s using my labour to build your personal brand.  Normally I wouldn’t care except that I, unlike you, actually experience misogyny; I, unlike you, do not get paid to write about feminism; I, unlike you, have never tried to kill my girlfriend and then used that experience to build my brand; and I, unlike you, have made my revulsion with the Hugo Schwyzer, Male Feminist phenomenon perfectly clear. 

(Incidentally, I don’t even care if this is actually the real Hugo Schwyzer — I’m very annoyed either way — but I am curious.  Does anyone know?)  (ETA: katydidnot suggests it is because of this thing.)