it would be great if these subjects could be dealt with purely theoretically without anyone have to put their personal history out there as a disclaimer that they actually do know what they're talking about, but that wasn't what was happening
Though I've been trying lately not to stretch to defend positions that I don't hold, what I was responding to was this:
Skylark posted:i felt like people were really condescending and made my post out to be a terfy thing to dunk on even though I tried to be clear that Im very critical about that movement too and thats not where im coming from at all.. I guess I also assumed that ppl knew enough about my biography to give me a little benefit of the doubt,
...that's not what I get when I read most of the responses to what you posted, Skylark, even if I go the same route and factor in heavily what I know about other people here, about the posters posting those replies.
I hope everyone posting here understands that disclaiming a particular group of people (trans-exclusionary radical feminists etc.), when taken in good faith by people who have good reason to take it that way, provides a reason for taking the rest of what someone says in similar good faith. It doesn't lend support by itself to what someone says, though. It also doesn't shield someone from criticism that they're replicating the same things that disclaimed group of people says or making the same errors, maybe reaching them from different starting points. I mean that, I don't think I need to remind you or anyone else of that, that's not why I'm spelling it out like this.
Instead, I'm trying to point out how quickly all of that seems (to me) to be slipping past in what I quoted above. More than that, I think it's maybe condescending to dismiss those replies that way, to suggest they come from people not knowing you as well as you expect people to know you on this forum, and presumptuous to assume that taking someone in good faith based on what you know about them provides a sort of support or cover for what they say instead of giving a reason to engage with them at all.
Like people here can understand that your goal isn't to shore up a group that you don't want to have anything to do with, and still express disagreement in ways that relate what people in that group say to what they see you saying, implicitly or explicitly. That doesn't make them right either. But it doesn't mean they're just lacking proper background on you before the conversation started.
And in my own way as just a poster plugging away at posting on this forum, it can be frustrating for me too when I feel people are ascribing positions to me here that I thought would be obvious aren't mine when I feel I've expressed that here before. But telling people I'm not one of X group, or even people knowing other things about me that should make that plain, doesn't suffice for people here if they think I'm making the same errors as that group or any other kind of error that matters enough for them to bring it up. Overall I think that's a good thing even when it bugs me, it's one of the things that keeps people posting here, that social ties are not explicit here in the way they are in a lot of "social media".
That said I'm glad you're posting. I think this thread benefits from it. The only reason I'm talking about this one part of it is because I value this place a lot and this is one of the things I like about it, that even when I get riled from it, my reg date and my rep total and so on, much less stuff outside this site, hold less weight here than they would in a lot of places online nowadays (which is funny thinking about places like this forum in the past). It matters that we know each other on here when we do but that prior knowledge isn't taken as a necessary starting point for this sort of conversation. Any noob can own me here.
cars posted:Skylark I think a lot of people here don't consider your biography or your OnlyFans ranking to contribute greatly to the strength of your arguments all on their own and that's likely one big reason why they still post on forums such as this one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
cars posted:like I know one reason I still post here is because big-timing other people on here carries an element of farce, the page that shows your reputation is not one that shows a feed of one-sided content and who's friends with whom is not a nominal, numerical value on a similar page. So counting on your past with people posting here is only going to take you so far in a discussion on theory and practice in politics, and the discussion can turn on a dime from a convincing argument by someone without that sort of familiarity with you and who isn't nearly as familiar to others. And not to be rude, but yeah it's possibly going to be a bit of a shock coming back to that. I think this is exactly the sort of conversation that benefits from those aspects of this site.
I wasnt going to disclose this or make a big deal about it, but I am a Leo♌, so I feel entitled to a certain amount of respect, even worship, from the ppl around me. And when I don't get it, it causes a lot of irritation for me with my emotions. So yeah thats where I am coming from. I am used to guaranteed emptyquotes whenever I post. It was definitely a huge shock yea.. Going forward, I would advise people to be very conscious about the amount of reverence they are showing to me, and to feel a constant nagging anxiety that it isn't enough. Complimenting me is something very easy to do that I recommend, for example.
my experience on this is that most people trying to live in that space aren't trying to stake out a position for political attack or engaging in adventurous showroom politics or actively engaged in a new wave of LGBT self-definition. Like a lot of trans people are, like a lot of people period are, they are just tired. They wake up, they go to work or go out to look for it, they come home, they're alone or they aren't, there's too much to do and too little time to do it, let alone to set up a spotlight on themselves. They're always behind, and when it comes to something like this where no one was going to tell them about it when they were kids (I'm talking most of them right here and now), they are years behind and can't help knowing it.
Really in the current mode of production they are EXHAUSTED. In every sense of the word, money, time and energy. They face down a future where there is NOT a lot of surgery in their likely future, where there is NOT a route they can discern between where they are and somewhere that provides a reasonable match between themselves and how others see them, even how trans people see them. They do not see that happening in the world they experience every day. One of the things trans-exclusionary "radicals" derive from this when they sus it out for trans people is a quick slide over to, well, those people are dangerously insane and we can't accommodate them, further, they are wreckers designed to sneak oppression in the back door. Which does exactly nothing to address anything and can only be sustained in absence of personal experience of those people as people. I see similarities here in certain ways.
I think a lot of "non-binary" people, not all of them but maybe most of them, are trying their best to live within their means, in a very real and material sense. They recognize, consciously or otherwise, that gender as a dichotomy is both a social construct and a reality, something in which they and everyone else has been reared and can't be dismissed. They know it will be enforced on them for the rest of their lives in cost of real value, work-hours, money and time and calories. They also realize they have a limited time on Earth and a responsibility to the people around them to try and reach a place, if they can, where they feel safe & secure enough to meet responsibilities to others, mostly in the current world to people who care about them. They are seeking someplace that can accommodate them and where they are before they run out of chances to find it and benefit from it. They will take what they can get, in the hopes that they can move in and out of places and social settings without drawing attention they don't want, and they find it baffling and frustrating—and an easy way to hate on themselves in a world that already encourages that—to be told they are just seeking attention, when they are trying to diminish the attention they know their own stress provokes in others.
And of course there are exceptions. There are show-people and celebrities and any number of exploiters, as liberalism will always provide when there's a buck to be made. But I think most "non-binary" people just want to be seen as not worthy of special comment at all, as not notable for being "bad" at being trans or not trans. I think it takes a lot of resources expended by a consumer-product-driven system with a falling rate of profit to promote the idea that everyone wants to be famous and to, when possible, promote ways to become famous without challenging the structure of class. I think without it, most people's desires are reasonable because they can only see and consider and want so much as people, and that's one reason why socialism is scientific if that makes any sense.
The best future for that majority would be one where the material cost of this reality were not shouldered by the individual. It would be one where knowledge of gender as both construct and reality were reflected in widespread social understanding, how people approach other people every day, the way they see someone when first meeting them, the way they treat someone when stress hits a group & diminishes sympathy that otherwise exists, etc. But in the absence of that, people are living and dying. This is not to me so much a question of reformism vs. revolutionary demands as it is a question (for socialists) about whether or not to treat experience as a material reality.
The usual alternative (and I'm not laying this on anyone here, I'm saying in the wider world) is to treat it as a choice in the liberal sense, as a part of your atomized identity where you either pull yourself up by your bootstraps to where most people don't look at you funny when you walk in a room, or you fail because: you didn't try hard enough; or you're spoiled; or you're either the mastermind or the tool of a nefarious political agenda. I see this in left groups, socialist groups, Communist groups. You want to be special, you're a brat, it's bourgeois, never mind where you came from. And there's this air to it for many people like, We've accepted trans people because all the red groups are filled with trans people, don't push your luck, go sit at that table and you'd better make it the most squeaky-clean version of that table anyone who doesn't share our politics has ever seen. At the worst, it's this air of finally dragging yourself on board a helicopter and pulling up the rope ladder before someone who could embarrass you climbs up and you get blamed for it.
And again, like... it's one of the things about me, personally, my experience in life, that I have never been terribly picky about the people I get to know and make friends with, for better or for worse. But it put paid to all those ideas about people in my mind, whether I can claim to personally understand what they're going through or not. Like it's funny to me when I read some of the glib things people say about "queer" on here & places like it and what it means, straight booj Democrat wreckers or whatever, when the one person I know nowadays who calls herself "queer" is a woman who was raised as a woman in the USSR, married to another woman who was raised as a woman in the U.S., whose last vote cast in Russia was for the Communists. She mainly just wants to barbecue and have someone they'll call if she ends up in a hospital room somehow. She just has other ideas besides, reflecting how she got to where she is now, and it doesn't seem terribly bad to me, let alone a symptom of creeping liberalism, to call her what she wants to be called and not join hands with people I find disgusting over the principle of whether she needs extra hassles in her life or not. "Queer" is a slur and other people I know don't want to hear it out of my mouth ever, but specifics are pretty real to me and there are no easy answers if I want to be responsible to other people who are responsible for me.
Skylark posted:I wasnt going to disclose this or make a big deal about it, but I am a Leo♌, so I feel entitled to a certain amount of respect, even worship, from the ppl around me. And when I don't get it, it causes a lot of irritation for me with my emotions. So yeah thats where I am coming from. I am used to guaranteed emptyquotes whenever I post. It was definitely a huge shock yea.. Going forward, I would advise people to be very conscious about the amount of reverence they are showing to me, and to feel a constant nagging anxiety that it isn't enough. Complimenting me is something very easy to do that I recommend, for example.
And the best of luck to you.
blinkandwheeze posted:the virgin complaining about appropriating memes vs. the chad skylark onlyfans flex
No really, /thread!
A lot of this discourse is driven by the fact that it's made up of people whose only meaningful loving relationships are with their parents, because they are teenagers and/or terminally online tumblrites, with minimal experience with the issues they pontificate about so much.
chickeon posted:It reinforces the marignality of important issues and struggles by having them associated with marxish sounding critiques of 'gender ideology' or whatever. The shit about athletics has been inseparable from this made up non-issue since its earliest days, presumably because it provides some sort of reference for the nonsense invocations of materialism. The fact that such arguments are obviously advantageous for preserving the institutions and sstructures of patriarchal gender relations is basically never addressed, because it was lifted directly and deliberately from extreme reactionaries with whom it is actually a bad thing to be associated with.
It's a made up non-issue for you because your only hope to escape cyclical poverty is not an athletic scholarship to a university.
It's a made up non-issue for you because you weren't in a university when athletics became the ground upon which title IX court battles were fought.
It's a made up non-issue for you...
blinkandwheeze posted:yes, queer people are subject to entirely conventional and horrific homophobia and misogyny in their everyday lives. that's why dedicated spaces for the autonomous social organisation of those impacted by such conditions materialised in the first place. and why they can be vital to their lives and fundamental to any organisation of queer people as a political subject
From the individual to the sub-group, everyone needs their own space where most importantly, they are not meeting (or worse yet organizing with) others that might have similar interests.
That's what we call co-opt'in!
pogfan1996 posted:A simple question for those who claim to want to end sexism and foster sex/gender justice: is a society likely to achieve that justice if one group of people (women) can be routinely bought and sold for the sexual pleasure of another group (men)?
It's a huge leap from the observation that commerce in sexual activity occurs to the assumption that it is inherently exploitive via a very narrow traditionalist lens (in that men are automatically the purchaser of female-as-property).
The more material, for lack of a better word, fact of the matter is that getting closer to an ideal of gender equality has some real everyday-life hurdles, which liberalism has done a better job of addressing than leftist political movements, albeit in places other than the USA. The idea of no-fault divorce to avoid trapping people in compulsory material arrangements due to an unhappy marriage goes all the way back to the Ur-republican liberal John Milton, for example. The idea of capital being suspended for the purpose of infant care is also a victory achieved in virtually every wealthy western democracy except the USA. On the other end of the spectrum, conservatives rail against the faults in family court prejudices all the time, which is ironic because those prejudices are borne out of their punitive Christian ideologies. There are a multitude of unaddressed issues regarding human sexual relationships that are unaddressed by any political ideology (joint legal contracts/obligations, credit reporting, how children are transformed by capital into objects of financial burden, etc).
But is there a leftist critique there to meet the divide between victories achieves and reactionary critiques of the present? Or at least have some sort of token overlap with a critique of theocracy? Nope, because leftism in the USA denotes young, middle to upper class, single, and well educated. A significant and rarely addressed reason "the left" beats around these issues and fails to address them is because gender and sex are the only means otherwise solidly bourgeois people on "the left" have of differentiating themselves. And differentiate themselves they must, because solidarity is just a word while a media career? Or a grad school scholarship for sociology or gender studies? That's praxis!
Edited by Over9000ft ()
Over9000ft was probated until (Jan. 2, 2021 03:16:12) for this post!
Over9000ft posted:which liberalism has done a better job of addressing than leftist political movements
Please explain how this is the case tomorrow
88888 posted:
toyot posted:the really radical thing today in sex/gender politics, is what 100 posts all skipped: men discussing their actually-lived sexualities, without fear or suspicion.
lmao I'm putting everyone who upvoted this post on a personal list for future reference
Edited by solidar ()
not actively buying in to public and active displays of male sexual socialisation doesn't exempt individual men from the enormous social power the abuse of women gives them. they're still generally completely comfortable with their sexual identity and role because patriarchal society is dedicated to validating them as much as possible
we shouldn't be expected to pet the heads and coo softly to beleaguered men because a rude joke may hypothetically make them feel insecure about their position in a hierarchy of sexual exploitation
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
Edited by solidar ()
chickeon posted:simp is originally an ableist slur-by-design from a PUA ultramisogynist
The word "transgender" was invented with a specifically homophobic intent of distinguishing heterosexual crossdressing fetishists from the gross icky fgt transexuals who want to fuck men, but here we are!
toyot posted:if you believe 'virgin' to be an insult, perhaps it's because you share a value system with right-wing men, who judge other men harshly, when they don't aggressively pursue women. in life, it is normal for single men to go years between sexual partners, same as with women.
this is exactly why i think using this language is trivial and pathetic to complain about. virgin isn't a real insult. men who do not aggressively pursue women are completely normal, validated and actualized by basically every facet of patriarchal society. the only harm they could possibly face is feeling slightly insecure because a meme online made them feel bad
it's a trivial, toothless insult that only carries weight if you actually buy into the attitudes you're accusing me of having. it's just a cartoon frog.
toyot posted:this being just one of many. but you believe i was talking about men getting together to plot sexual conquests of communist women? be careful how much you reveal about yourself online!
the validation of outward male sexuality in political spaces "without fear or suspicion" is inevitably going to be a validation of its predatory impulses. it's purely idealist to imagine you can untangle the patriarchal contortions of male sexuality by having a tender discussion and not a fundamental reconstruction of the modes of gendered relations
the personal sexual concerns of any individual should not be a subject of political discussion at all, communist organisations are not for validating the neuroses of sexually insecure men
it should be clear that i'm not implicating discussions of concerns with sexual assault and impropriety in this. those are actually serious issues, rather than the petty personal concerns of members sex lives (or lack thereof). the idea that it's simply men's failure to have a tender discussion with each other about their sexual feelings that leads to the proliferation of sexual assault in these spaces is absurd and offensive
the idea that you can deprogram through discussion and education the behavioural consequences of the patriarchy on an individual level is just liberal cultural idealism. as if through our brotherhood and learning we can simply pull ourselves out of these systems that are actively reproduced on a material level every moment of our lives. these can only be undermined through active, organised political interventions in the modes of gendered relations
these aren't simply cultural spectres in our heads that we can excise thru confronting our neuroses. they're consequences of actual material social conditions. they're not going to disappear by you refusing to say their name.
chickeon posted:Please explain how this is the case tomorrow
I gave examples in the text, you apparently chose not to read them (how sexual relationships are made economic by liberal legal systems in terms of contractual obligations like leases and mortgages, credit reporting, insurance liability, lack of right to counsel in divorce proceedings, etc). I also stated in the text how despite being glaring opportunities for purported leftists to address these real life issues, purported leftists have no experience with these issues and are thus blind to them, because they are either young and single without much said real life experience, or trust funders who don't have to worry about them in the case of Jacobin writers and DSA management.
Which leads me to the conclusion, also posted already in the first text, that the problem with the supposed leftist voices in the USA addressing the material aspects of sexual relationships is not leftism, it's that those people are solidly children of the bourgeoisie.
You can shall we say, have some anal sexual discourse with your one day bans. I see no need to type all of this a third time and have real a problem with typing it twice.
Edited by Over9000ft ()
blinkandwheeze posted:it's just a cartoon frog.
