yeah, at that point I wasn't "meh" on the subject so much as I was on the idea of using it as a label. I'm still of the opinion that it doesn't matter to me if someone functionally *is* a label but doesn't choose the label as part of their identity, and that's the point I wanted to make in the commentary on PW. We all have limited emotional & mental energy that we can put into causes and identities and we all make different, legitimate, choices about which of those causes & identities is most important to us personally.
As a poly & atheist activist, it was important for me to remember that not everyone who *is* certain things feels that those things are part of their identity and I need to not insist that everyone take up the same standards that I have. I'm less concerned about people using polyamory as an identity label than I am about people being factually and semantically correct when speaking about the subject. Refusing to admit that what a person does is poly or atheism when they are, in fact, poly or atheist, is what gets me, not people who don't call themselves polyamorists or atheists or who don't put up logos & user icons on profiles and blog posts :-)
I think that part of the reason why I didn't embrace the label of feminism is because, although I was misinformed on what exactly feminism was, for the most part, when I heard the concepts, I went "well, yeah" so it didn't seem important to me to take on a new label. Those concepts were just so common sense to me that it seemed to me that it was already part of life and not something that needed to be still fought for, except in other parts of the world that weren't where I lived.
I'd still be all "yay women's rights!" whenever someone told me of atrocities in other countries, but if it weren't for the atheist communities, I would probably still be thinking that the women's movement had mostly won & we just had a few loose ends to tie up.
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Date: 1/19/12 07:15 pm (UTC)From:As a poly & atheist activist, it was important for me to remember that not everyone who *is* certain things feels that those things are part of their identity and I need to not insist that everyone take up the same standards that I have. I'm less concerned about people using polyamory as an identity label than I am about people being factually and semantically correct when speaking about the subject. Refusing to admit that what a person does is poly or atheism when they are, in fact, poly or atheist, is what gets me, not people who don't call themselves polyamorists or atheists or who don't put up logos & user icons on profiles and blog posts :-)
I think that part of the reason why I didn't embrace the label of feminism is because, although I was misinformed on what exactly feminism was, for the most part, when I heard the concepts, I went "well, yeah" so it didn't seem important to me to take on a new label. Those concepts were just so common sense to me that it seemed to me that it was already part of life and not something that needed to be still fought for, except in other parts of the world that weren't where I lived.
I'd still be all "yay women's rights!" whenever someone told me of atrocities in other countries, but if it weren't for the atheist communities, I would probably still be thinking that the women's movement had mostly won & we just had a few loose ends to tie up.