toyot posted:
this is a really bizarre forums meltdown since just one post before this you said you appreciated talking about the exact thing you now say we refuse to talk about. I don't know if we've been reading the same thread but I haven't seen anyone say any of what you're railing against here with regard to trans identity or men's responsibility to change. Actually the "pornographer's" (I don't think that's a fair label to put on someone selling through onlyfans any more than labeling a hot dog stand vendor as an agribusiness mogul) post seems to be not so far from what you're saying here so what's the issue lol.
I hope you change your mind at least about erasing all your posts because I've appreciated what you've written here over the years.
they are very valuable
Edited by solidar ()
But while that's an easy argument to make for simp or chad which are new to our language, I agree with solidar about the usage of virgin. It not only corresponds directly to the patriarchal concept of sexual worth but draws its meaning from it. Being a simp is bad for different reasons depending on how you look at it but nobody can be said to be a simp independent of the arbitrary values imputed on the word whereas there's plenty of people who have never had sex in the world and its status as an insult is entirely because patriarchy tells us those people have something wrong with them. I don't think we can just divorce our usage from that association by not believing in it and telling everyone who complains that it doesn't have any power if they don't believe it either.
I get the point that actually being a virgin doesn't meaningfully have any consequences for men unless they buy into it, but like solidar said, it's not about their feelings, it's about modifying their behavior. I think it's provably false that the message that virginity = loser only affects a special type of man prone to being awful. It is one of the methods of socially constructing male sexuality, and we'd be better off without the expectations it pushes.
solidar posted:imo direct your anger or attempts at explanation towards the people in this thread that have taken the opposite stance.
Just because I misread your post and decided to talk down to you, as a way of venting my own rage and control issues, that doesn't give you the right to evade a perfectly reasonable flame war that could absolutely escalate as far as any other in this thread
toyot posted:goodbye!
NO DONT
colddays posted:Simp can be a man who doesn't agree with elliot rodger's manifesto on 4chan influenced communities but to most normal people it denotes obssessive, often threatening, and ultimately self-destructive behavior.
to most normal people “simp” denotes a nebulous & necessarily undefined danger zone where someone may be dragged or owned online if they fall into it by saying or doing anything in the general vicinity of a woman’s public presence that can’t be interpreted as hostile to that particular woman, because it can instead be interpreted as an insincere, indirect expression of their desperate and one-sided desire to date or have sex with that woman.
Where I guess I differ from some people is that I don’t think the big deal there is how a man who gets owned in that situation feels about it. It can suck for him and the event doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but the guy’s reaction is pretty far down on the list of priorities for social change because of the relative harm caused compared to, say, how the same event disciplines support for ideas expressed by women in public, whether or not the guy’s feelings are hurt. And I don’t think making the guy feel okay is likely to do much at all to solve that problem, because it’s not like that disciplining behavior started there or like it’s going to end there. It’s incredibly mutable and of course the social pressure is going to favor catering to the men involved.
toyot posted:goodbye!
oh no :(
tears posted:my first encounter with the word simp was a twitch streamer describing herself as managing a "simping page for Ringfinger Leonhard"; i guess you could say ive led a pretty interesting life
toyot posted:it will always be true that one of the most-upvoted posts in the rhizzone's sex and gender thread was by a fucking onlyfans pornographer. what vision of human liberation includes onlyfans?
i find a lot of views expressed here to be actually disgusting. maybe this discussion was overdue. the laissez-faire shoulder-shrug towards solving social problems, socially-taught body dysmorphia, thru individualized, irreversible surgeries. trans discomfort with amerikan culture, demanding they modify themselves to match sex to gender, is just taken here as a given, instead of as a sick reflection on the amerikan masses who deny them love. the stomach-churning rape culture. now the unanimous refusal of so-called radical men here to address the division of intellectual labor about patriarchy. i should have thought deeper about why, by the time i got here, this space was male-dominated. i don't share a vision of human liberation with this forum, and this is my last post here. i spent yesterday working on the lathe i built with my hands, thinking about this, becoming more disgusted as i put the views together into their whole. i don't want my writing associated with the rhizzone. i don't write on any other social media for you to 'follow me' on, and i've PM'd shriekingviolet asking to deep six my old posts, the ol tpaine special. goodbye!
88888 posted:From topic What is really radical in sex/gender politics?:
I wasn't thinking about any of this when I was building my lathe
i was very VERY disappointed to scroll up and discover that the latter was not a lathe of heaven reference
0. Our program is to give sex workers, and women generally, real political power. Not to "guarantee" that sex work will be safer and not to ensure that future generations can become sex workers.
1. Classic sex work - prostitution above all - is (obviously) very physically difficult.
2. Sex work is gendered - it is men buying the sexual complicity of women
3. This involves a violation of their body that we would see as fundamentally transgressive in any job. "Emotional labor" gives us a clue: in the last few weeks, society has so well recognized that the work of pretending to enjoy one's work can be as hard to endure as the actual labor itself, that Mike Judge wrote and directed the movie "Office Space". Emotional labor is this difficult because it throws the body into conflict with itself - pretending to be happy does actually lift our moods, afterward leaving us with the imponderable: was I really happy to spin a Going Out of Business! sign by the highway during rush hour today? Sex work goes further, forcing the performance of deep intimacy and even real sexual arousal on the body. (Also note: sex work cannot be one responsibility out of a larger set without the entire set becoming sex work.)
4. However, "work" is not inherently categorized as something that is hard to endure. Having a migraine isn't work, even if it's torture. Or, let's picture two angry neighbors aggressively shoveling snow onto each others' driveways until one has a heart attack and dies. Not work. This gets at an irritating thing about English or maybe language generally. They are "working" but they have not produced something that we can call "work." Individually, they are working or at work, but they do not belong to part of the collective, "Workers" by virtue of their shoveling.
5. Likewise, having an Onlyfans is not necessarily "work." Someone can put a lot of work into their OF account but what they are doing isn't a "job." It's not involved in social (re)production, (which is only a slam if you see reproducing existing society as good!). It's not inherently taxing, ie., a user can log on, masturbate one time, make (a tiny amount of) money, and log off. While some "sex work is work", if we want to call OF a job, then we should call metal detecting at the beach a job. After all, someone who is desperate to survive and has a metal detector will also push themselves past the point of physical exhaustion to find a little more metal.
6. Calling OF "work" and sex work generally "work" when it is different to work in so many ways is an effort to a) erase the gendered nature of sex work even as it is entrenched as a primary means of gender oppression b) push women and feminists into accepting sex work as "the oldest profession" and something that it would be harmful to eradicate (again this is NOT THE SAME AS ERADICATING THE PEOPLE WHO CURRENTLY CHOOSE SEX WORK TO SURVIVE OR EVEN FOCUSING ON THEM RATHER THAN SAY, MEN) c) is part of a propaganda effort that is meant to hide how little society actually intends to pay the speculative sex worker, and is spread more and faster because a generation of young women have been tricked into porn/OF for no real material gain and the bubble will burst soon
7. Just to run with an alternate: Sex work is abuse. It's gendered abuse, and therefore, heavily approved of by our society. It's so normalized that first of all, there is an identifiable lumpen class of women who are contracted to be abused by men for their living. Their working conditions are characterized by a struggle over limiting how much abuse they can be subjected to. Recently, capitalism afforded sex workers an enormous improvement in working conditions and their ability to advertise themselves, at the cost of increased accessibility to sex work in general. The capitalist theory is that when many more women become sex workers, this will also normalize male abuse of sex workers, thereby growing the market for abuse, and the economy generally. Nowadays, it is easier than ever to be abused from the safety of your home, with you in control of the camera - you can blind and deafen your abuser any time you want the money to stop appearing. And hey, some people enjoy getting abused, right, maybe that could be you? In fact, if your job is to be abused, but you love your job and consent to it...? In this propaganda the abuser is always minimized, but in reality, this new method of sex work merely incentivizes the old methods. My point is that "sex work is abuse" is just as accurate as "sex work is work" and is clearer about the implication that all waged labor is inherently abusive.
8. Rhizzone, what books should i read to develop or correct my thoughts
Edited by swampman ()
swampman posted:8. Rhizzone, what books should i read to develop or correct my thoughts
i didnt really read most of this post sorry but the complete works of andrea dworkin in various formats at the radfem archive is kool http://radfem.org/dworkin/
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swampman posted:Discussing and understnading gender oppression is good, actually
You know whose opinions i want to hear about gender? A group of almost exclusively cishet men on a web forum about maoism and fart jokes
Here we go! TRANSGENDER MARXISM will be published by @PlutoPress this coming May, 2021. We even made the front cover of the Spring catalogue. So excited to share this with you all! 🥰 pic.twitter.com/g15Rgl08hr
— Elle (@eileanorr) September 21, 2020
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:swampman posted:Discussing and understnading gender oppression is good, actually
You know whose opinions i want to hear about gender? A group of almost exclusively cishet men on a web forum about maoism and fart jokes
At the present, is more important that cishet men discuss the current state of gender oppression among themselves and learn about the basics, than it is for academic feminists to explore the frontier of feminism as an intellectual concept. If you come to these threads to see new arguments and discoveries being made by experts thats on you son!! that one is on you
swampman posted:At the present, is more important that cishet men discuss the current state of gender oppression among themselves and learn about the basics,
An obvious right wing concern troll article about what True Leftists should think about bathrooms and sports still manages to generate a 5 page argument among posters who have been here for many years and had ample opportunity to get their heads around the basics. So maybe you're wrong
elias posted:Not reading any of the posts in this thread but i will be upvoting any posts by bnw and skylark. i will also upvote posts by tears, whomst is also not reading the posts in this thread.
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:swampman posted:At the present, is more important that cishet men discuss the current state of gender oppression among themselves and learn about the basics,
An obvious right wing concern troll article about what True Leftists should think about bathrooms and sports still manages to generate a 5 page argument among posters who have been here for many years and had ample opportunity to get their heads around the basics. So maybe you're wrong