watching youtube videos in 2012: woahhhh 5 minutes? didn’t realize I was watching a movie buddy, haha
watching youtube videos in 2018: *sits down with a bag of chips to start a 40 minute video* let hell commence
watching youtube videos while drawing: *puts on an hour long video of someone talking about youtuber drama and zoning out, to the point where you don’t realize for a long time that you’ve been drawing in silence for 12 days* huh
the thing with men is that they all feel like they should be treated as exceptions to the “men are a danger to women” rule. that women are somehow just supposed to know that one specific man is a “good guy” and “wouldn’t do that” so you can let your guard down around him. every man thinks he should be the exception to women’s safety rule because “i’m not one of those guys, how could even think that? you’re sexist against men for not believing me”
and then a woman gets murdered, raped, and/or abused and those same men are saying that that woman should’ve known better. that ALL women should know better. that women should be aware of their surroundings and aware of the people they hang out with and do background checks and make sure they inform every single family member and every single friend of where they’re going before they even leave the house.
other men are the bad guys, not that one guy. not the dude you consider your friend. not your dad. not your uncle. not the guy who’s been nice to you in class or at work. it’s always other men. never that guy.
exactly, thor attracts hopeless lesbians who desperately want advice from this Smooth Motherfucker and t’challa attracts smooth lesbians who like, see this trash pile and are like “he’s the worst we need to help him”
Something I’ve noticed is that if there is any evidence that gender
nonconformity isn’t totally inborn and could be influenced by environmental
factors, then immediately there are people ready to change it or
“correct” it.
In the past, when psychiatrists saw gender nonconformity
as arising from psychological or social factors, they were way more likely
to try to control gender nonconforming people and attempt to “fix” us.
They saw psychological causes as a justification for them to mess with
gender nonconforming people’s identities and behaviors. They tended to see
gender nonconformity as a mistake that developed when the person was
still a child, typically due to dysfunctional family dynamics and they
saw their jobs as “correcting” that as much as they can.
I think that’s one reason gender nonconforming people have tended to favor more biological, “born that way” arguments.
If we’re the way that we are due to something fixed and innate, there’s
no point in trying to change us. If any part of what we are is socially
or environmentally created or influenced, than you can bet there will
be people who will try to control us and shape us according to what they
think is “right”.
You
can see this with how right-wing Christians attempt to use
detransitioned people. They start drooling over how our sense of self
shifted because they want to control gay, trans and gender nonconforming
people. In their view, if people’s sense of self can be shaped by culture than
that justifies them imposing their right-wing Christian culture on
everyone. They want to learn how people’s behaviors and sense of
self can be influenced so they can control people, do shit like
conversion therapy.
It’s
not safe to call attention to any part of ourselves that could be
shaped by environmental/cultural factors because then people will try to
prey on us and control us. I don’t think that a lot of efforts to change us would work but they could still do harm.
Conversion therapy doesn’t work but it can cause a lot of suffering and
a lot of it isn’t designed to really change people as much as modify
their behavior and control them through self-hatred.
We
should be able to talk about whatever social and psychological
influences we see in our lives without people seeing that as a
justification to control us or shape us according to their ideals. Just
because my sense of self has been shaped by trauma and sexism doesn’t
mean that I’ve forfeited my autonomy, that now other people get to decide what I should be and how I should live.
Learning how my sense of gender is shaped by my trauma history and living in sexist homophobic culture has given me a deeper understanding of myself and my relationship to society, as well as opening up new ways of dealing with my dysphoria. When we learn how trauma shaped us, we are better equipped to heal from our trauma. When we learn how our culture shaped us, we can consciously respond to and if need be resist such influence.
We should be able to develop our
understanding of how environments and psychological processes affect us
in order to empower ourselves and each other. When we’re able to see all
aspects of ourselves, the social, biological, psychological and so
forth and how they come together and influence each other, we get
stronger, we come into more power. When we understand how environments
affect us we can use that understanding to create environments we can thrive in.
We’ve been discouraged from looking at certain aspects of our reality because they open us up to abuse and make us unsafe. Knowledge about how family dynamics, social environments, culture and psychological processes can
shape us have been used to control us, used against us instead of
enhancing our power and well-being. But now more of us are developing
our own understanding of how culture, psychology and so on impact our
lives and using this to alleviate our suffering and create community and resources for each other. We can take ideas that were once used against us and turn them into tools to make our lives better and make ourselves stronger.
I don’t believe all men are evil and my trauma hasn’t falsely led me to believe that they are, but it is an actual reality for most female trauma victims that your vulnerabilities make you into a target for evil men and I’m really fucking tired of people glossing over that when they blame trauma for a skewed worldview.
I don’t doubt for a second that good dads exist! But I didn’t have one. I didn’t have one at all, and I had to grow up listening to jokes about girls with daddy issues. I grew up thinking it was near-inevitable for me to have toxic relationships with older men, and that idea was born from a society that frames male approval as something completely essential. It’s fucking wrong that a genuine criticism of that type of society is brushed off as a product of the “daddy issues” it creates.
Almost every man I’ve dated or sexually engaged with has been some type of abusive, and that’s not normal. It’s not every woman’s experience. But it’s mine, and it’s far from uncommon for people whose first relationship was abusive. I don’t care to talk about how I’m just biased because I’m damaged while the people making that accusation fail to address how harmful of a view society has of “damaged” women to begin with. I stayed with my rapist because I thought I had already lost something I couldn’t get back. That I was ruined and that leaving would mean being ruined for nothing, and that wasn’t just the flawed thinking of a thirteen year old girl. There are adults making sex ed videos likening girls who have lost their socially-constructed concept of virginity to chewed up gum or tape that won’t stick anymore.
I don’t want to downplay the impact my personal experiences have had on me anymore. I don’t want to pretend that my personal biases only led me to radical feminism, only led me to realise that society is just as bad to “normal” women, because that’s a half-truth and not one that should be necessary. The truth is that the experiences of people like me are bad enough. Porn stars, prostitutes, women who are exploited by the sex industry almost universally have a history of sexual abuse. The women who get beaten to death by their partners have often had shitty boyfriends since they were 14 and a shitty stepdad before that.
I truly don’t care about how good privileged women supposedly have it if you’re only offering it as a reason why we should stop caring about the fact that we’re living in a society that’s deemed it entirely reasonable for an entire class of women to suffer immensely their entire lives.
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