there's our catastrophe

even my female friends who make a high hourly wage still usually have less money than the men I know, mostly because they often can’t work consistently, mostly because they

a) have other responsibilities or commitments, mostly caring related, often unrecognised or

b) are in industries where you move from contract to contract rather than having salaried positions (like the arts) or

c) have disabilities inc. mental illness issues or

d) are doing sex work or another stigmatised trade, don’t necessarily see themselves doing that forever, don’t want a huge hole in their resume if going for non-sex work later, and thus need to take on other jobs or projects or study

plus we usually have more expenses — one big thing I’ve noticed is that women with mental health issues tend to eventually start seeing a counselor or psychologist, which is incredibly expensive, whereas men are more likely to refuse to seek paid help for their mental health issues, which incidentally also always always adds to the emotional labour the women in their lives need to do

also we mostly have more student debt — this is a thing, it’s related to the fact that traditionally female-dominated low-to-medium paid jobs like community work or teaching or nursing now usually require tertiary qualifications at a bachelor’s degree level or higher, whereas male-dominated trades at a similar pay scale don’t usually require such qualifications (think the trades or being a cop)

it’s almost like there are a number of social factors pushing women into a subordinate economic position

why be happy when you can be interesting?

terror-incognita:

Slavoj Žižek, ‘Why Be Happy When You Can Be Interesting’ (2 min 11)

For example, let’s be serious, when you are in a creative endeavour - in that wonderful fever, my god, I’m onto something, so on - happiness doesn’t enter it. You’re ready to suffer. 

This is the silliest and most pervasive cliché about creativity but it showed up on my Facebook feed today and it caught my attention because I’m feeling pretty much the opposite of this. I’m done with interesting and ready to be bored by happiness now, please, thanks.

Thinking further: Maybe the relationship between creativity on the y-axis and happiness-suffering on the x-axis is like a negative quadratic function (frown parabola), where creativity peaks with mid-range emotions. Total happiness flushes out creativity and total despair paralyses any endeavour. I’m not sure how to factor time and variety into this graph but they might be the most important factors, because if you’ve been feeling any one thing for long enough, eventually your mind stops responding to it creatively. The best writing about a feeling comes after the feeling.

In the midst of it there’s just the sensation, which is unintelligent and unintelligible. The sensations are all too similar - just a scattering of spaces inside the body in which you feel heat and pressure. For me all emotions are this: heat, pressure, being conscious of a space inside the body in a way that doesn’t make physical sense. Being haunted inside your body, by your own memory or imagination. Probably this doesn’t apply so much for other media and modes of creativity, and maybe not even for other people, but for me with words, when deep in a feeling, there’s just no point trying to tell it. What does it matter if anger sears through your spine or sits heavy under your lungs, dragging down your breath? I don’t know that anyone else’s psyche locates things in the same places; all I know is weight and pain in strange pockets of anatomy means nothing to read.

I’ve been kind of fragile and despondent lately and it makes it really difficult to do any kind of work. It’s like I’m all out of focus except for this hot blur of grief. I can’t concentrate, I can’t prioritise and I don’t have much capacity to deal with criticism or confrontation or failure, all of which seem essential for creative or political work and especially those projects at the intersection of the two, where everything is so tender and profound, so intimate and huge, and everyone seems to be angry at me about something I did or didn’t do, and there’s just so much shouting outside my face that’s pushing up against the noise in my head so the pressure sends cracks down through the lines. All my thoughts noise and contradiction. And if I try to stop there’s the kick of guilt because somewhere along the line I came to believe in this ethic of work and suffering, I came to see work as rent for living and then the payments spiralled out of control into several lifetimes, so in this one I’m just so damn tired. It’s a stupid way to think, and it makes me unhappy and uninteresting. 

So basically I think Žižek is being an arse. I don’t know if happiness is the name of what I want either, though. Maybe I just miss the resilience I had for a little while, which made a lot more things possible. Everything got very tight and small all of a sudden. I feel very small and closed and unable. Something like the feeling you get in an aeroplane as it rises and the air starts to thin. You’re belted to your seat but the ground is falling away, and there’s a rush of noise and pressure, and then all you can hear is inside your own head. You’re supposed to be going somewhere, and you’ll know it when you get there, but in the meantime you’re locked in and all you can do is swallow and breathe.

I kind of want to go somewhere with what you’re saying about suffering and the body and debt, but I’m stuck on how that Žižek quote is actually the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard from a major philosopher.  not the most offensive, although it is offensive, but definitely the most flat-out stupid.  I’d hope that the context makes it slightly less stupid but I can’t be bothered checking it out because honestly, Žižek makes my skin crawl.  

anyway, it’s true that sometimes creativity is about exploring a negative emotion, writing-in-your-diary style, something that’s plaguing you.  that may not be pleasant, exactly, and sometimes it can make things worse, but you generally do it because you’re stewing and it would plague you regardless.  I find a lot of joy, or at least relief, in creativity.  I experience the more stable emotion of happiness or contentment when I have consistently laboured to achieve something.  this idea that happiness is in conflict with achievement, creativity, that which is most vital in life — that is some serious angsty teen bullshit I would’ve pulled out when I was sixteen.  I had never been more miserable; I have rarely been more bored and boring. 

in fact… once, when I was a teen, my friend K and I were staying overnight at another friend’s house in an outer suburb.   late that night, our other friend’s mother heard us talking through the wall and became convinced we were talking shit about her.  she tried to kick us out, in the middle of the night, long after the buses had stopped, far from home.  Worse things have happened but it wasn’t great.  We froze up.  her ten-year-old son, with the eerie calm of kids for whom this shit is normal, talked her down and we were allowed to stay. I tried to make light of the tension by remarking to K that at least it wasn’t boring.  She thought about it, looked me in the eye and said, “actually, I think it’s extremely boring.”

I realised she was right. I’d been frightened, confused, unhappy — and also found the whole situation tedious.  misery is grinding, it’s endless, the same shit keeps happening and you don’t know what to do about it.  for both you and the people around you, unhappiness is dull. 

(You, Lia, are always interesting, happy or unhappy, but I’d obviously rather see you happy.  If your unhappiness is interfering with your writing — and I can’t imagine how it couldn’t — then that’s one more reason for the rest of us to regret it. )

everythingbutharleyquinn:

ourcatastrophe:

I generally restrict myself to reblogging the words of sex workers on sex work, because non-sex working feminists speaking for sex workers is a fucking plague.  but I really want to say something about how feminists who are critical of “sex positivity” need to stop lumping in self-organised sex workers’ movements in with that…. <snip>

wow, thank you… I’m really grateful to you for writing this because I know people will actually listen to you and respect you because… you’re not a sex worker.  I mean, that’s the truth. you’re a respected blogger and you’re not a worker so people are gonna listen to you and I feel like I’ve been screaming into a void lately.

It’s something that’s been really bothering me too. I think one of the most hurtful tumblr moments I’ve had in the last couple of months is one tumblr who I otherwise really like summating sex workers lives as nothing more than “brutal and degraded”. I don’t understand why she can’t comprehend how misogynistic, vile and cruel that is or how wrong, but the sex workers arguing it aren’t worth listening to… because, why? Because we’re whores and therefore too degraded to know our own reality or something? or because we’re forming sentences on the internet we must be too super duper special privileged or something (also not true).

they often choose not to share their negative experiences or their negative experiences at work with non-sex workers, because it makes them more vulnerable, and because destigmatising sex work is not a distraction from sex workers organising as labour, it’s part of that project. 

feeling this. There’s so much I would share if I felt remotely safe to do so, if I felt remotely like my words would not be taken to assign the totality of my experience and perceptions to me and my words - my actual life experience - not be taken to be told what I and other workers need and should want and then have my experience defined for me by outsiders who just read a lot of fucking books and that is exactly the sum total of experience they have with sex work at all. 

but I really want to say something about how feminists who are critical of “sex positivity” need to stop lumping in self-organised sex workers’ movements in with that.

The latest thing seems to be to dismiss ALL sex workers rights groups as run and operated by pimps. It’s the most hurtful, diminishing bullshit, especially when the org I’m associated with (and have worked for) absolutely FORBIDS owners/operators/pimps from being involved at ANY level, it is strictly and 100% run by and for WORKERS. ONLY. And oh my god, the work so many of the amazing people I know have put in to fight for our rights, on their own time, voluntarily, the submissions and proposals for funding that have been written down time in brothel back rooms, pooling resources to edit and refine and draw on collective talents, skills, expertise, knowledge… the risks taken, even in masks and hats, to protest outside government houses, to organise responses at the drop of a hat to new announcements… blah I’m rambling but this is an emotionally invested subject for me, it’s my real life and to see my voice and that of my peers constantly be dismissed and silenced simply because we are seen as the enemy to these feminists own agenda is grotesque. 

Me believing in sex worker labour rights is not a statement as to my personal feelings about sex work (which are complicated and conflicted as they pertain to me), not a statement about my actual experiences (which are personal and which I should be under any onus to disclose in order to be taken seriously as someone with real experience of something feminists like to blather on a lot about having compassion and empathy for the women involved in, except when we talk a line counter to their approved and very narrow version) and NOT NOT NOT a statement about SEX AND SEXUALITY, of all things, christ (though sometimes that does come into play, and intersect, like the sexuality of people with disabilities for example, but I digress…).

And me believing in sex worker labour rights ALSO COMES from having worked in a LOT OF DIFFERENT WAYS through a LOT OF DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES in my own life AND interacting with the sex worker rights movements means I have also met many workers from other countries working in completely different conditions and so having encountered/formed relationships with/worked with etc workers of many different backgrounds, including the junkie street walkers with abused pasts and the poor brown women working out of necessity from non-western countries that everyone likes to trot out as a reason why sex workers rights is bogus, nevermind that these women WOULD HANG YOU ALL OUT TO DRY if they ever read or heard the way you all talk about them because, actually, they ARE human beings, REAL people, not just tokens for you to hang your agendas on and their experience of sex work is way more complicated than you will ever allow and also did u noe that upper class escorts can also be junkies and have abused pasts?? but may not be talking about because of all the stigma attached, exacerbated by their sex work status?  but yeah, I believe in sex workers rights because I BELIEVE in the essential and basic humanity of all people in the sex industry and our right to dignity, compassion, respect and empathy and the incredibly complicated ways we interact with our work and how it variously serves us or limits us and that it limits us largely because of the societal stigma intersecting with a lot of prejudices and labour rights for us way more recognises the role sex work variously plays in our lives waaaaaaaaaay more than brutal and degraded exploitation or sex work should always be for fun and pleasure angles do.

And seriously, if you think for one second that sex workers rights organisations are entirely populated by super happy super educated super privileged super remote white cis people who’ve always had awesome joyous experience then sit down and shut up forever because you are ACTIVELY diminishing and erasing the work of so many people who fall far outside those experiences and how the fuck dare you, really and truly.

Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

sort of re: this thread. 

I dunno man, I don’t like these assertions that if you fixed your mental health problems with effort and discipline and medical advice then they must not have been very serious to begin with, that if you were truly crazy you would not be able to take any steps to improve your situation, only to ameliorate it around the edges. 

it’s true that I’ve had few non-mental-illness-related problems that I didn’t bring upon myself, like I don’t know shit about direct experience of trauma and can’t speak to that.  but I transitioned from “pretty nonfunctional” as a teen to “pretty functional” now through years and years of really constant effort and discipline and work.  like, just because that is not always possible or not immediately possible doesn’t mean it’s not also the only thing that works. 

the only mindset that has ever helped me is thinking “how can I be useful?” and taking steps to increase my long-term usefulness.  if my only goal is just to feel better then I will never feel better.  it’s a hedonist’s paradox situation. 

and like, it sucks when people think that I’m being avoidant when actually I’m just prioritising more important things, or don’t see the amount of discipline it takes just for me to not have a nervous breakdown, or don’t understand the difference between that discipline and OCD-type behaviour, or want me to be “fixed” where “fixed” means not having to think about this stuff all the time. 

but I swear to god I can’t hear the phrase “self-care” anymore without locking up with anger and frustration and nausea, it’s so misused.  maybe my self-care is rolling my eyes at the concept of self-care, it’s no less useful or more toxic than some of the stuff I’ve seen labelled as self-care. 

I think this is also why I can’t deal with anarchist critiques of the concepts of “work” and “productivity”.  like being passive-aggressively bitched out for saying “I didn’t do anything productive today”, fuck that.  a related thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is that I don’t find many archetypally “fun” activities that fun and never have.  I can take or leave theme parks, rides, picnics, changing outfits with your friends for three hours, music festivals.  it’s often this self-conscious performance of frivolity, LOOK HOW MUCH FUN WE ARE HAVING, that I find stressful and a bit empty. 

and like, what is more capitalist than a rigid divide between work and joy?  than a concept of “free time” which is all about frivolity and consumption? having said that, I find parts of DIY culture strange.  I don’t find fulfillment in making my own rope or expending thirty minutes of effort in order to not have to buy an eight dollar new bike part. 

I would like to be able to talk about hard work and discipline in a way that moves beyond a critique of the protestant work ethic as the spiritual justification for worker’s exploitation.  I want to talk about work a way that’s not purely reactive and bratty.  but then, what’s the point of putting so much energy into another reactive discourse?  probably I just need to BE A GROWNUP and expect that of others and hang out with people who take that expectation for granted. 

So the ~feminist blogosphere~ seemed eerily silent on Twitter, wrt May Day

leonineantiheroine:

suzy-x:

Y’all talk about money, status, equal pay and all that jazz. But you really need to talk about WORK.

If anything, May Day (and all the preparations for it) have made me reconsider feminism as a movement of disgruntled reproductive and affective laborers who are fed up with The Bullshit. There is a lot of labor that goes into maintaining social relations and even performing gender under a hetero-patriarchy. But contemporary cultural/liberal feminism stops at gender as an ~identity~ in and of itself, and not as something that is maintained by such labor. Like, think harder will you?

If they focused on labour then they’d have to indirectly refer to all the thieving, exploiting and appropriating that they do when it comes to their writing and marginalised women’s writing and lives. But yeah I love this so much. 

(via leonineantiheroine-deactivated2)

you have a different minimum wage for youth? yikes. that’s even worse (or just as bad anyways) than BC’s former “training wage” of $2 less for the first 500 hours at a person’s first ever job.

I’d have to say it’s so much worse than that.  I mean there’s been a similar policy to the british columbia one in new zealand since 2008-ish, and it’s generally considered to represent progress from a baseline similar to the current australian legislation. 

here, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been working full time since you were fifteen (unlikely, but legal in most places in australia), you’ll still get significantly less than the minimum wage until you’re twenty. 

here’s the minimum wage payscale:

For junior employees, the minimum rates are:

• Under 16 years of age  $5.71
• At 16 years of age   $7.34
• At 17 years of age   $8.96
• At 18 years of age   $10.59
• At 19 years of age   $12.80
• At 20 years of age   $15.15.

For apprentices, the rates are:

• Year 1 of apprenticeship $9.93
• Year 2 of apprenticeship $11.74
• Year 3 of apprenticeship $14.45
• Year 4 of apprenticeship $17.16.

via fair work ombudsman. 

plus there’s some weirdness with “adjusted minimum wages” for people with disabilities which it’s hard to get solid numbers on. 

having said that, $15 is a pretty high minimum wage by global standards.  on the other hand, the cost of living is also high, and a lot of people (especially people with visa restrictions on their working hours) don’t get anything close to the legal minimum.