deadken posted:

also in wddp days i was taking ketamine a lot apparently it has antidepressant effects lol so much for my principled stand against medication

it does but they're relatively short-lived if not accompanied by like therapy or some other form of confrontation with any underlying issues

libelous_slander posted:

does the rhizzone suffer more from depression or anxiety?

both

palafox posted:

like pat's just one example of many, although occasionally a notably unsubtle one, of a stance common to many queer theorists that's diametrically opposed to certain feminists on topics of sexuality, and it's ironic that the feminists they're most in opposition to on these issues tend to be the ones they have the most in common with otherwise. Jack Halberstam's opposed to Dworkin on many things, not just topics of sex, but they agree on almost everything when it comes to taking the structural inequities inherent in sexuality as an a priori, and they both posit failure, hurt, and struggle as integral parts of the sexual experience/perspective for those who aren't hetero men. I wonder why these two discrete stances have formulated among a wide group of thinkers who have so much in common outside of these topics.

I am new here and also much less educated about any of this stuff than just about any other poster so I'm sorry to tell you that I think your posts about this are really good and I apologize in advance for giving my half-baked thoughts.

My guess is that it has something to do with the fact that ultimately whatever other issues are involved the focus for queer theory has to be sex and sexuality in some way. Like even when it's dealing with other issues, those issues are related to signifiers that ultimately "lead back" to who you're fucking and how you're fucking them. So for queer theorists, that focus often leads to an almost mystical appreciation for sexual pleasure and choice as disruptive to the systemic or symbolic order or whatever you want to call it. It almost doesn't matter what motivated you to do the thing: if it feels right, it's in opposition to the demand that you engage in sexual rituals without pleasure. This comes perilously close to, and maybe just is, an if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-em philosophy, but personally I can't shake the idea that there's something about pleasure which is deeply anarchic and perhaps can be channelled in revolutionary ways.

For feminism, the issue is much broader than what and who you can do and sex is sort of distraction.

Sorry for the dumb ideas. I think your questions are worth taking seriously.

discipline posted:

hey mad medico I don't care if every porn actress in california is healthier and more well-adjusted, as well as better paid, than all other women in the world combined it's still misogynist propaganda used to discipline women and men who defend the production and use of it are pathetic

Well except there really hasn't been any objective scientific data showing that porn causes societal harm or strong studies showing a link between porn use and violence.

MadMedico posted:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23167939

The damaged goods hypothesis posits that female performers in the adult entertainment industry have higher rates of childhood sexual abuse (CSA), psychological problems, and drug use compared to the typical woman. The present study compared the self-reports of 177 porn actresses to a sample of women matched on age, ethnicity, and marital status. Comparisons were conducted on sexual behaviors and attitudes, self-esteem, quality of life, and drug use. Porn actresses were more likely to identify as bisexual, first had sex at an earlier age, had more sexual partners, were more concerned about contracting a sexually transmitted disease (STD), and enjoyed sex more than the matched sample, although there were no differences in incidence of CSA. In terms of psychological characteristics, porn actresses had higher levels of self-esteem, positive feelings, social support, sexual satisfaction, and spirituality compared to the matched group. Last, female performers were more likely to have ever used 10 different types of drugs compared to the comparison group. A discriminant function analysis was able to correctly classify 83% of the participants concerning whether they were a porn actress or member of the matched sample. These findings did not provide support for the damaged goods hypothesis.

the more i learn about stats the more absurd psychology as a discipline looks

Backus posted:

Individualism is good. Pleasure is also good. The problem is that being a happy individual isn't the same thing as making a difference politically. Killing the cop inside your head is great but doesn't do anything about real cops, and the same goes for sexual oppression. This kind of top-down idealism is big in politicized queer theory. (I don't think Judith Butler has ever had any illusion that men wearing makeup would destroy capitalism, but I could be wrong.)

To apply this to Gssh's question, there is a difference between the processes it take to work through internal patriarchy as an individual and what it takes to work through that politically. I think in most cases, they do align because as discipline and blinkandwheeze said earlier, abolishing patriarchal personal habits is important to movement-building.

There's a difference between BDSM in general and BDSM where the gendered power imbalance involves the man having the power. A man tying up and beating a woman isn't exactly gender-fucking, it's pretty traditional. I think if you're in a het relationship where sex frequently involves the guy gettin rough on the woman then as a baseline, you have to acknowledge that yeah you are reproducing patriarchal relations in da bedroom.

That said, i get the 'stripping them of their power through play' (aka being a power bottom) idea, and this can be one way for an individual to work through their own internalized patriarchalism but (1) isn't part of working through something eventually shedding in it? If you as a woman get off on that, it doesn't mean you're a Bad Feminist but it probably means you could be a better feminist. It's only a desire for affirmation, of being able to say "i am a feminist therefore whatever i do is feminist" that leads to confusion. you can be a feminist who does not-feminist shit, "we all negotiate these things in our own way" etc. I mean even from a militant feminist perspective this is true; it's not like all radfems engage in political lesbianism or celibacy. The difference is between a stance that takes the inevitability of being caught up in this stuff as a reason to say "whatever" and a stance that tries to identify and minimize the compromises we make.

(2) I think a lot of the time when people bring up the "working through it" bit they are, frankly, using that as an excuse to cordon off sexuality as this sandbox area of their life where up can be down and black can be white and I don't see how that works. AFAICT the "working through it" thing takes an idea that resides in a very narrow area of psychoanalytic practice having to do with personal trauma, and broadens it to suggest that doing something=overcoming something, and the next thing you know we have Zizek saying we should ironically redo the Holocaust just to prove we're over it. Does playing with something necessarily derive it of power? When boys play at being cops and soldiers are they queering masculinity?

welcome to the r h i z z o n e, please continue to make good posts

roseweird posted:

Lessons posted:

if anything it's the opposite

i agree , but her concept of the self is pretty introspective and esoteric. i'd def never say she intends anything in the service of atomization, rather i think she intends much of her work and especially giving an account of the self as an effort against such entropic encroachment on self and communication. personally i find her outlook convincing, useful for evaluation, at best a tool for escaping useless recursive reflection, establishing clarity, etc. but i could also understand someone disagreeing, not about her intentions so much as about her success

discipline posted:

Why doesn't someone make a queer theory thread? Seems like a good discussion to have, not something relegated to pg 14 of a thread about porn

ive been thinking of this and a thread on religion , the former would be less work than the latter. palafox sounds like he's read this stuff more recently than i have and might have a reading list and also could prob pad things out w more reflection on transmasculine ideas than i could, if he's into halberstam

oh! just saw this. i think you or lessons should do a post on the whole field, if you feel up to that, because i'm only well read on a tiny little space of it (edit: i'm only solid on a little transmasculine stuff, i know more about the 'poetics of failure' and its glorious academic & literary precedents, and what very little i know about transmasculinity is w/r/t to that and the lovely pat califia's personal story). i'll make an effortpost on what i know about though

Edited by palafox (April 25, 2014 16:19:42)

NoFreeWill posted:

my last gf showed me a movie that glorifies bdsm and requested rough/er sex. what should you do in that case?

let me talk to her

roseweird posted:

i guess i've really only read her more abstract philosophy and i'mnot familiar with her political program. could you expand on this?

Okay, Butler opens Gender Trouble by rejecting the notion of patriarchy on the (probably familiar) grounds that it posits a trans-cultural transhistorical agency where none exists, but goes further in reflexively redirecting this criticism back at the category of women, a term which she sees as paving over myriad differences in human societies. She acknowledges the existence of what we might now refer to as 'intersectional feminism' but ultimately finds it insufficient both on a practical level and categorically*.

Much later, I believe it's in the 3rd chapter, she expands on this and rejects any sort of universalizing 'liberatory' politics because, in her view, this liberation represents only a renegotiated dominance that continues to exclude (and presumably thereby oppress) further groups that are not sufficiently present in the understanding of the political term, (the ones she concentrates most on here are women and lesbians, but it presumably applies to the entire field of gender/sex and for that matter all cultural groups). That is to say, any sort of identity politics runs into a brick wall because ultimately they're playing by the same ontological rules as dominant society and can, at best, only rearrange the orthodoxy rather than expanding it.

So what does that leave us with? Well, she basically encourages people to push the boundaries of gendered behavior to expand what's culturally possible, (to expand the range of what's intelligible, as she puts it). There's no real way out of the system of gender and it's not really clear that it would even be a good idea if we could. As Butler sees it, without a cultural system to direct our desires it wouldn't be possible to feel pleasure at all, so the best we can hope for is to aim for maximum inclusivity that's still ultimately driven by difference and Power.

*put concisely: "The feminist 'we' is always and only a phantasmatic construction, one that has its purpose, but which denies the internal complexity and indeterminacy of the term and constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it simultaneously seeks to represent." emphasis mine