there's our catastrophe

this is a post about a rapist I know

I just heard that this Rapist Punk Dude’s rich parents paid for him to get surgery to close his distinctive very large stretched piercings and apparently he’s legally changed his name as well?   we don’t know what to yet

the level of support to avoid any consequences that he’s getting from his rich family and his apologist friends is so completely revolting

I’m also upset because I have a really shitty memory for faces (even for people who I’ve known for a while, like this guy) and I’m overly reliant on details like haircuts and body mods to help me remember and spot people like him and kick them out or at least warn people, especially because they quite often have really common names or change their names frequently, and I was confident that this at least was one dude I could spot across a room, and now he’ll have a different face and a different name.  I really hate knowing his fucking money has so drastically compromised whatever ability I had to keep people safe from him

fuck

some guy on a punk message-board discussion of the public call-out of Ben McCullagh-Dennis for rape said that such call-outs were literally the only thing that made him question his strong position against libel laws and censorship and for 100% unmoderated free speech and then a whole bunch of dudes agreed with him

good to know where you stand, guys

I’ve never met a 20something who was super into “teen culture” and “anti-ageism” who actually made a serious effort to reach out to anyone other than similarly nostalgic 20somethings to get sanctimonious with

really I’m just super-bitter because of this one time I was going to go to a kind of expensive 18+ gig and someone I know started ranting about how nobody should ever go to shows that weren’t all ages, much less pay for them, or for that matter go to shows that cost more than $10, sorry if that was “punk elitist”, then changed their mind when they realised a lot of their friends were going (because someone they knew was gonna be a dancer and was getting people on the door), made a few phone calls, got on the guestlist, started excitedly dressing up, and in the meantime I realised I was the only person I knew who wasn’t getting in for free, and felt so small and so uncool that I couldn’t face going at all, and also felt stupid for wasting money, and also for having spent money to waste in the first place, in a recursive dorky-feeling loop, and I generally have pretty OK social confidence so you can imagine how depressing the whole situation was to bring me to that point. 

like, my emotions were affected by a lot of other things going on at that time, I’m not trying to say that person’s terrible cultural politics caused me to collapse in a puddle of anxiety, but fuck you if you think having better connections than other people makes you more radical than them

also the thing that builds those connections is years spent in a scene, and few teens from the sticks have those connections, teens are generally much more able to rustle up a fake ID than get on the fucking guestlist for an international act

I just really want people to remember what it was like to be a teenager, rather than romanticise the figure of The Teen, because that’s no different to Impulse deodorant advertising

anyway, that person is super into Rookie now and still doesn’t hang out with actual teenagers

Microcosm Distribution makes custom buttons now, eh?

alexwrekk:

I think that the the Microcosm Publishing/Distribution split is a laughable attempt at change, but I don’t really care enough about it to spend much time on it. They still support and carry Microcosm Publishing titles so I still see them as supporters and apologists for Joe Biel.

What I found today annoys me. Apparently Microcosm Distribution makes custom buttons. Microcosm Publishing didn’t and doesn’t make custom buttons since I left. Do you know why? Because I was the one who made custom buttons when I worked there and when I left Microcosm and divorced Joe there was an agreement that Microcosm would not make custom buttons and compete with my business. So, Microcosm Distribution is a  totally different company? Great, I guess that means they don’t have to honor the agreements made by Microcosm Publishing.

If you would like to get custom buttons made by someone who has been doing this since 2000, you should follow me to my new project Portland Button Works.

rgr-pop:

I was wondering whether anyone knew anything about that cross that Femen cut down. Is it an Orthodox cross, or the cross of a minority Christian group? Was it a public monument? Reuters called it a “Christian cross,” which is the silliest thing I have heard. But according to RT, The Sun, and a handful of other places, it was, in fact, an Orthodox monument. You are probably thinking “to a white American feminist, this makes no difference” and you are probably right. But it matters! Both Pussy Riot and Femen are concerned with a “conspiracy between church and state” (a curious phrase to use outside of the U.S., and if not an issue of translation then maybe you should consider why they chose to use it), but American feminists who don’t know anything about Eastern European or Russian religious history might abuse this.

Y’all probably know that (to simplify a lot), under Soviet control, religion was hugely suppressed in Russia. This was stratified a lot: more peasant communities, remote areas, and places that weren’t heavily abused for industrial projects or movement work were able to maintain relative religious autonomy. But, in general, the Orthodox church was repressed (or “oppressed”) under Communism. The anti-church struggle looked different across Soviet history, but was maybe most famous and “brutal” under Krushchev in the 1950s. From the 1920s through the 1960s in particular, thousands and thousands of churches were closed, dismantled, vandalized, and destroyed by the state. Priests and church laborers were executed en masse. There are some important main ideas that you should keep in mind: (1) the church, along with the family unit, was considered the biggest contender for a domestic power struggle with the state and this is why it was targeted, (2) “infiltrating” the family and the church was considered a crucial step toward social reorganization and more unilateral social control, and (3) anti-Orthodox rhetoric was primarily a device to construct and divide a category of “backwardness” and “progress,” a rhetorical device which was classed, stratified, and which remains (to some extent) in public memory.

This church/state struggle played out more than anything on the bodies and lives of women. The state realized that earning and maintaining the allegiance of women was the only way they could manage to reorganize social divisions in their favor: women were viewed as the glue that held the family together. They were seen as a danger, in some ways, prioritizing a family unit over collective and state models. The state also thought that women were peasants’ main tie to churches, that they were most in control of a family’s religious practices and that weakening that bond would loosen the nation’s allegiance to religion (and thus weaken the church’s power). So they sought to convince women that the church was a sexist patriarch that did not care about women, that the church was an overbearing and uncaring patriarch as much a Czar, and that collectivization processes would be most beneficial to mothering processes and make their lives better. This might have been true! I’m sure lots of women were liberated by this rhetoric! But it’s rhetoric, and that’s the history that Femen and Pussy Riot are operating out of.

One poster, undated but probably from no later than 1950, listed a series of Bible passages that were “anti-woman” and concluded with:

Woman! Go to the Soviets, to the factory committees, to the unions, listen to lectures, study, read newspapers, enroll in the workers faculties, the technical schools, colleges. Know: you’re foolish to search the heavens. Remember: how did you live in the past? The working woman is a comrade, throw away your belief in the priests and god.

I can’t remind you enough: this is not about faith or dogma or really political models as much as it is about state control.

In Ukraine, it’s a little more complicated. Soviet occupation is remembered as, well, a brutal “occupation” (which it was), and there is a powerful post-Soviet association between the religious scourges and occupation. The anti-church campaigns in the rest of Eastern Europe and Central Asia were pretty mixed and weird: in areas with large Muslim populations, (remote areas that weren’t as publicly targeted as the cities), propaganda campaigns against the Orthodox church didn’t really make any sense to anyone. In Ukraine, which was (and still is) a majority Orthodox nation, there were similar mixed results. Minority religious groups—Jewish and Catholic groups in particular, but also a Muslim minority—saw basically the same oppressive treatment from the Soviet Union’s occupation that they had gotten under a Tsarist regime. But one of the Soviet occupation’s first goals in Ukraine was to target and dismantle the Orthodox church and its dominance, and this was a shock to the nation. One of the USSR’s very, very first actions in Ukraine was a mass public execution of church leaders and church members. (When Ukraine gained its “independence” from occupation, they established a National church, and much of Ukrainian history for the next few decades was characterized by politics and upheavals within the church and with the state, with Soviet forces supporting this new National church in order to try to destroy the re-building Orthodox church, but ultimately they decided to “liquidate” religious organizations again in the 1930s. By the 1960s, Soviet control of religious institutions in this area had loosened somewhat. It’s a little convoluted, but worth noting.) The important things to understand is that the Orthodox church in Ukraine held a pre-Soviet control which was targeted by occupying Soviet forces, and that the attack on the church (and religious people in general) is inextricable in public memory from the violent occupation and “repressive” decades.

I don’t know when that now-severed cross was erected, but it was likely since the 1990s. The cross was, in fact, a public memorial to the [largely Orthodox] religious groups who were executed under the first Soviet occupation.

Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine looked a little bit different from each other. Ukrainian religious politics were characterized by schisms within and between Orthodox sects and National religious groups (the Ukrainian Orthodox Church). There was actual fighting, the new independent president supported an independent National Orthodox church, and each group was fighting to have control of the nation’s churches (a lot of which had remained unused since before the second World War and re-opened). All of this is still going on, and was significant during the Orange Revolution.

In Russia, there was a much more explicit post-Soviet state-sanctioned religious revival. Under Gorbachev’s glasnost, an “opening” of religious freedom became entrenched. There are a million historians and political theorists who argue about the reasons behind glasnost. Most notably, transparency was hoped to save the regime. Most of all, it was thought that criticizing the failures of past regimes would promote more faith in the current regime,* and one of the population’s (alleged) most serious grudges was against Stalin and Krushchev’s religious persecutions. To Gorbachev, opening and reinvesting in these institutions would prop up the supremacy of a “reformed” Soviet government. Another important influence on glasnost was international policy, though. The United States government is almost always unwilling to open relationships with nations that limit two things: markets and Christianity. The post-Soviet reinvestment in Orthodoxy was, to some degree, the result of American meddling. (And, in fact, Gorbachev actually opened Russia’s borders to foreign missionaries around this time.) (Just like, you know, capitalism.)

*there is a name for this? similar to China’s Mandate of Heaven? But I can’t remember.

Right, so, let me simplify things to an absurd degree: Gorbachev started letting people have religion again, then the wall fell, then a decade or so passed and people started rampantly and actively and publicly Do Religion again. Somewhere in there, the Orthodox religion (as well as a few others) was officially protected as historically important to Russian culture, as part of a movement to re-establish a Russian nationalism. Then Putin rolled around. Putin is Orthodox, and he supported a whole bunch of political reforms which re-established state control and sanctioning of “the church.” (This includes religion and prayer in schools.) Putin’s church-state relationship revival had everything to do with re-wresting control of the churches, and it also had everything to do with “diplomacy” and control of the peripheral states. (Putin has a very superficial public image of diplomatic relationships with Muslim and Buddhist groups, in particular. No coincidence that these groups represent the demographics of the most fraught areas of the continent—the Caucuses, Manchuria, etc.) So when we talk about Putin’s “conspiracy between church and state” we need to think about these things. Putin uses his own religion to re-assert an Orthodox hegemony which ultimately upholds the state. This isn’t about faith, this is about hegemony. This is about state dominance.

American feminists, especially white American f*eminists, support Pussy Riot and read their church protests without any nuance of these histories. Listen, Pussy Riot is not making a statement against the church as a patriarchal institution, as it were. But that’s really the only way American feminists seem to be able to understand, uh, anything. American liberal (especially leftist, and especially feminist) discourse approaches this “church and state” binary in a way that (typically) deifies the state itself over a “patriarchal” or “backwards” religious unit. That’s a heuristic which just doesn’t apply in Putin’s Russia. Pussy Riot are criticizing state actions and church complicity in state actions, and that’s a very different approach which is historically situated.

I admit that I am slightly more skeptical of Femen’s approach. Remember, these are the same (mostly white) ladies who protested the Olympics for supporting “bloody Islamist regimes” which “treat women like third-class citizens.” I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume a nuance, here. But my initial reaction was “Femen would cut down a cross even if it wasn’t Orthodox” and, yeah, these distinctions matter. And remember how she wrote on her body in English? Do you think this wasn’t prepared for an English-speaking audience as much as anything?

Mostly I just wanted to make sure that feminists circulating these mostly-contextless images had something to work with. Because to so many of y’all, cutting down a cross is cutting down a cross is cutting down a cross. (Let’s get inverted cross tattoos lol.) But not a lot of people (when I started writing this, anyway) were asking these questions about context. This just demonstrates a few things to me—both Femen and Pussy Riot are very, very smart and very, very good at organizing and very, very good at manipulating the fact that American feminists are very, very stupid and very, very powerful. I’ve never been mad at Pussy Riot, and I hope nobody is interpreting the very good criticism of white f*eminists’ Pussy Riot-worship as a wholesale dismissal of the group. But I also hope that no one is interpreting these organizations’ criticisms of Church institutions through the same lens they might interpret, say, American resistance to Protestant and/or Evangelical bullshit.