joreth | Entries tagged with freedom/politics

Just be honest already. You don't actually want "small government", you want no legal repercussions for your business dealings but you're totally fine with a government big enough to invade every bedroom and every vagina and every poor person's pantry, as well as every country that doesn't provide us with cheap labor and expensive imports that you can profit from.

I didn't used to understand pictures of food until I started doing 2 things - 1) got back into baking; and 2) started Eating 'Round The World where my friends and I try a restaurant from a different country every month. Then I understood what other people had tried to explain about food pictures - that food is transient, so we take a picture to remember the event where the food was featured and to celebrate the work that went into such a beautiful and / or tasty meal.

That food represents someone's hard work and time to produce something pleasurable for us, and it's going to be gone in a few moments. That food represents a moment of joy that will be gone almost immediately. That food represents time spent with loved ones that will soon be only a memory. So we record that moment in time the only way we know how - with a picture.

So now, when someone makes a post threatening to unfriend people over food pictures, I'm sorely tempted to start posting food pictures just to spite them.

These are often the same people who give people like me shit for unfriending over such silly things as not wanting to share air space with people who want me dead or who think I'm less human than they are or less deserving of being treated as an equal human being, or even just not wanting to see posts anymore from people who dislike me or my friends and can't help reminding me how much they dislike me. But no, posting food pics is totes worth unfriending people over, whereas I just censor people and live in an echo chamber. Gotcha.

Also, Nickelback - totally worth unfriending over pictures of food and different tastes in music. But I'm just mean, apparently.

You people do understand that when black people ask, or even demand, that cops stop shooting unarmed black people and insist that black criminals & suspects be treated at least with the same level of caution and consideration as rich white criminals, when black people criticize police brutality in general or specifically against black people - you do understand that accusing that message of being "anti-cop" is tacitly acknowledging that police brutality and racism is *inherently* a part of being a cop, right?

Those of us demanding the demilitarization of the police force and better treatment of criminals, suspects, and minorities such as people of color or trans folk are actually saying something very positive about law enforcement. We're saying that racism and police brutality are not necessary elements of being law enforcement. We're saying that it is possible for police to do better, because we say that they ought to be held to a higher standard. If we didn't believe it was possible to live up to a higher standard, we wouldn't insist that we try to force them to live up to that higher standard.

But when you claim that a message of "you can and should do better" is "anti-cop" (just like a message of "you can and should do better" is "anti-men"), you are implicitly stating that "doing better" is opposed to the state of being a cop (or a man). YOU are the ones who believe cops are inherently racist, inherently brutal, because you are telling us that our demands for a more just police force are "anti-cop".

I believe cops can do better. I believe men can do better. I believe we all can do better. That's why I criticize. Resistance to criticism for failing to do better sends a very loud, sad message. You do not believe we can do better because you believe this is the best we can do.

And I hope to all that is good in the universe that you are wrong.

In light of the recent arrests of the militant whackadoodles, I would like to take this opportunity to point out, once again, that the majority of posts that I've seen comparing the Oregon standoff to the ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ incidents were NOT to encourage law enforcement to start treating white people as poorly as they treat black people, but to point out the discrepancy between how armed, aggressive, and outwardly hostile white men are treated vs. unarmed, non-aggressive, and frightened black people are treated.

While it is true that many liberals wanted law enforcement to do *something* to both hold the militants accountable and to prevent as much damage as they did actually accomplish, most of us were not actually suggesting that we firebomb them like they're innocent civilians in the middle east. We wanted *something* done, but most of us are very well aware that storming the castle would make matters worse.

So far, I'm pleased with how the government has handled the situation, I just wish it could have been done on a sped-up timetable so that the Native artifacts and land didn't have to be ransacked or destroyed first and the cost of repair to the local taxpayers wouldn't be as high as it will given the amount of time they've had to screw things up, and I wish there would be harsher penalties than what seems to be the charges that they're settling for.

I, and all the liberals I've seen who had anything negative to say about how the situation was handled, are interested in *accountability*, not blazing gun "justice". That's what their side wants. That means swift action and accurate sentencing, as well as following through on sentencing (like actually collecting the fines owed), not letting them off the hook with light sentences or not charging them at all for things we know they've done illegally.

It does not, and never has to my knowledge, mean a shootout at the OK Corral . As a matter of fact, most of the people opposed to these militant assholes are generally opposed to violence and firearms - that's kinda why they're opposed to these assholes in the first place. So it doesn't make any sense to accuse them of calling for a Rambo First Strike response. We want peaceful but accurate justice, not The Demolition Man.

www.theage.com.au/interactive/2016/the-big-sleep/

I'm seeing this article making the rounds on FB. It's a story about a married couple at the end of their years choosing how to finish their life. Consider this your content warning both for the article and the rest of my comments.

For most of my life, I have never understood the desire for suicide. Death, or as tacit and my metamour call it, The Void, has always terrified me. I want any and all methods possible to prolong my life. I suppose I could be called a transhumanist, because I'm in favor of radical life extension. I want to live for hundreds, thousands of years. I want death to be *optional*.

And that's what makes me support this couple. I couldn't understand this decision until recently, but I also have always known that it was not my place to decide what was right for other people. Just because I couldn't imagine the sort of circumstances that would make someone embrace death doesn't mean that I would *never* understand that decision, and the thought of longing for death but being denied it was just as terrifying to me as the thought of dying itself.

I have been suicidal twice in my life. The first time, I was a very young teen. That teenager doesn't seem like me. I see her from the outside now. So I was unable to empathize with people who wanted to die, although I supported their right to choose on principle. The second time was much, much more recently, and it was after I discovered words like "transhumanism" and "radical life extension". This time, I was able to experience being in the mind of someone who longed for death and who wasn't able to understand people who wanted to go on living. Now I live with the memories of being both people in my head.

You might think that, having come (mostly) out of a suicidal depression, I would feel grateful that I stuck it out long enough to no longer wish for death, and to find life even more precious for those (and other) close brushes with death. But this makes me even more strongly in favor of the rights of assisted suicide. It's true, I'm glad that I did not have the opportunity to go through with it. Now. But I am even more convinced now that our approach to suicide is wrong. There are far too few resources to help people like me who are having an emotional imbalance, for whatever reason, get past it and learn how to embrace life, and there are far too many laws that are unable to distinguish between people like me and people like those in this article. These are not the same kinds of suicidal tendencies, but in both circumstances, the tendencies are treated the same - as a problem we have to legislate against. Instead of placing benches in the courtyard, we put up signs telling people not to sit on the planter.

These people made a rational decision that they considered from all angles for many, many years. They do not believe in an afterlife, which could (and often does) influence someone's desire to die by convincing them that there's something better waiting for them "on the other side". They had nothing to gain from their suicide, and plenty to lose - including their daughters, their freedom if it failed, their daughters' freedom if they were found guilty of assisting the suicides, but most importantly, they stood to lose that which frightened them more than death - a slow decline into pain and confusion.

I am no longer certain that I can face that kind of future with a stalwart, steadfast commitment to life borne of fear of The Void. I'd like to think that I still love life as ardently as before. But I can't fault them for their choice, and I can understand their fear better than I ever have before. I have always stood for making death optional because my goal is to live forever. But in making life optional, that requires making death itself a valid choice. As the unrelated saying goes, consent is meaningless if you can't say no. Making death optional doesn't mean very much if you can't choose that option when you want it.

Surprisingly, this article actually made me feel hopeful and optimistic. Yes, they died. But they died on their own terms, just as they lived on their own terms. We should all be so lucky.

Unlike, apparently, many men, I do not believe that men are children. I believe that men are rational, adult human beings capable of complex thought and logic. I believe that men have it within them the capacity to evaluate basic spatial dynamics by estimating the size of a door, the volume of space their body takes up, and to extrapolate from these calculations the likely outcomes of potential scenarios offered by a door and another human being approaching it, as well as factoring in more subtle nuances such as gender dynamics and positions of privilege to affect the outcome more positively. I also believe that men have the fore-brain skill of grasping abstract thought to understand that the door is just an illustration and a representation of the more important, underlying foundational value that is consideration for those around them and the effects that their actions and presence has on people in their sphere of influence.

I believe that men are able to follow a simple train of logic that leads one down a path of "If [me] = nice, then [X] action is required; but if [X] action is inconvenient then [me] performing [X] = not nice".

I do not believe that men require coddling to protect them from emotions (ours or their own) or to shield them from the consequences of their actions. I criticize men because I believe they are better than they are told they are and are therefore able to improve themselves when they do not live up to their potential. I believe they are *at least* as capable a human being as I am, and therefore they deserve to be treated better than spoiled, fragile children. They deserve to be treated with the dignity and respect that I demand for myself, which means that I expect them to behave to a minimum standard of decency and to be held accountable for their fuckups.

I believe that men have, at the very least, the amount of self control that my pet dog had, who was able to sit still with a piece of meat lying in front of him and not go after it just because I told him he couldn't. I believe that men are not less human than a pet, not less able to control themselves, not less able to conform to a set of social guidelines for decorous behaviour in public or in private. I further believe that, if I can see the humanity in men, then they have the ability to see the humanity in women and to understand why women are not the same thing as a piece of meat or a tempting car or a wallet full of cash.

Men do not get special cookies for being the bare minimum of a decent human being, and they do not get a pass for failing to be the bare minimum of a decent human being. If women have the mental facilities to constantly consider the comfort of those around them and to work to ensure everyone else's safety and happiness (as we are expected to be able to do, whether we succeed or not), then I think men are, at the *very least*, able to live up to the standards of women.

I also believe that men should be the ones to be irate at the implications that they are less well-behaved than an animal, less cognitively functional than a child, and less capable of logic, reason, mathematics, physics, emotional control, and housework than women.

And I can't believe that so many men don't see the irony that most men who are not irate at these implications also tend to think that women-associated traits are inferior while men-associated traits and interests are superior and yet they fail at both when compared to women.

‪#‎ThisIsWhyIAmAFeminist‬

This is going to be long, convoluted, and twisty. This is me trying to work out a concept that I have been unsuccessful at elucidating before, using terminology that is new to me that encompasses what I'm trying to get at.

This is the concept of emotional labor. I've been trying to explain for most of my life that women are expected to do all this bullshit work like remember family birthdays and send thank you cards and maintain the family's religious habits and do the dishes and even know the appropriate attire to wear to social functions to tell the husband and kids when they have to wear a suit and tie and when they can wear a polo shirt. I've been trying to explain for my entire life that it's not "no big deal" or just a few extra details or even that it's "what women are good at". Now, I have a term and research to back it up - emotional labor.

I'm told that "men" just don't "see" a dirty house and I know that's bullshit because my own father was the neat freak of our family. He once threw my homework away *on trash night* because I had left it out on the kitchen table so I wouldn't forget it, but paper doesn't belong on the table so he threw it out and it was picked up in the morning before I was awake, and my homework was just gone (and my teacher didn't buy my story). It's just that men don't *have* to see a dirty house because the women in their lives will get fed up sooner than they will and the mess will take care of itself, feeding the cycle that the longer they wait, the more likely they won't have to do anything about it. The men don't have to see the dirty house because they're told that, as men, they *won't* see the dirty house, and women are socialized *to* see the dirty house and to have it bother them. So the men wait and the women pick up after them, and the gender roles assert themselves invisibly.

I once refused to do the work anymore. I watched my housemates literally step over a pile of trash *in the living room* rather than throw it away. I had long ago put a trash bin in the living room so that no one even had to get up and walk into the ADJOINING kitchen (it was one big room, no wall or counter or bar or island to separate them) to throw anything away and they still couldn't manage it. They'd toss stuff from the couch, and if it missed the can, they'd leave it there. So I stopped picking it up.

I actually broke up with them and moved out of the house before anything got picked up. And I left the trash there on the floor when I left.

In this same household, the bills stopped getting paid. I got tired of nagging everyone to pay their share. The house went into foreclosure and I moved out before anyone started paying (they actually continued to live there until the house got new owners and they had no choice). They were seriously willing to let the bank foreclose on us before either paying their fucking share or working with me to find a way out of the financial mess we were in (including selling). They just. Stopped. Paying.

Fashion is similar, although with less dire consequences. I'm fully aware of the class issues and history regarding social dress codes, particularly anything "business class" or "higher", but *I'm* the one who pays the consequences if my *partners* don't dress appropriately regardless of the class struggle symbolized by those clothes, so I was schooled at an early age to know what the various dress codes were. Men are *expected* to not know fashion, so women are the ones who get the disapproval if "their men" show up dressed inappropriately. In fact, men are *shamed* if they know too much about fashion (see homophobia and misogyny here). Women whose partners do not dress appropriately are either shamed for not getting them to dress correctly (because it's obviously their fault for failing to dress them like children /sarcasm) or pitied for having chosen men who can't or won't dress themselves properly whereas men are rarely shamed or pitied for a woman who dresses "correctly" when they don't, although they might sometimes get a little shame for not dressing up to a woman's standards. The worst that men get is shame or pity for a woman dressing *above* the appropriate dress code, which means she's "high maintenance", but that's yet another rant. *It doesn't matter* that the dress code system is bullshit to begin with and it doesn't matter if the woman herself is a conscientious objector as I am (overlooking the fact that because of those very class issues, many women don't have the luxury of objecting to fashion standards) or if she actively enjoys fashion for its own sake outside of the class issues also as I do, there are still consequences for women whose male partners don't comply with fashion standards, above and beyond any consequences for each given individual not complying with fashion standards (and you really don't want to get me started on women's fashion standards).

Dates, attire, eating meals, shopping, bill paying, caring for guests, housecleaning - all shit that if I don't take care of it, it doesn't get done. So I just stopped living with people so that I don't have to be responsible for it. I have my own difficulty with all this stuff - my OCD makes doing dishes very difficult, for instance, and if I'm not doing dishes and they're not doing dishes, shit gets pretty nasty. Unless I'm baking, I use disposable, or better yet, cook-in-its-own-container stuff so that I'm not making extra waste and I still don't have to do dishes.

But, even now, when I complain about this, it doesn't sound like it's as big of a deal as it is. Like, it's annoying to always do the dishes, but not worth a panic attack or a breakup. But it only seems like it's not a big deal when it's isolated away from the concept of emotional labor.

It's kind of a strange revelation to learn that I would be much less averse to things like cohabitation and even marriage had I not been subject to so much emotional labor over my life. I wonder, even though I'd likely still be just as independent-minded about things like autonomy, would I even consider myself #solopoly if gender-based emotional labor wasn't a thing?

I used to want to date only partnered men because I got burned by so many cowboys. I wanted them to already have a partner so I knew they wouldn't want to dump me as soon as they got another partner. Not only do I now see the flaw in that logic, I'm also very suspicious of guys who cohabit with women, particularly if they married young. They tend to be the worst I've seen for not just expecting women to shoulder the emotional burden but of being totally unaware that they're doing it.

Like, asshole patriarchal men who are still single (probably because they're assholes about it) make it easy to spot and therefore avoid. They're pretty obvious that they want women to shoulder that burden. But liberal men who champion women's rights but who have never noticed how the rent gets paid on time because they went from mommy's house to a dorm paid by mommy and daddy to wifey's house who paid the rent, did the cooking, picked up the trash they step over, and didn't have to remember anyone's birthday because wifey will remind them when it's important - they're something I've learned the hard way to look out for.

They're the ones I get burned by these days, especially before I had this language of "emotional labor" to express this concept. Before, I might talk about each individual chore or responsibility and get "Of course I can cook my own meals [but won't notice that you gradually start taking over more of the cooking duties because I'll just sit here at the computer until you get hungry enough to cook for us and your empathy and hostess training forces you to cook for both of us instead of just getting food for you]" and "I just don't remember dates, that's just how I am, take it or leave it [and I don't recognize the extra burden put on you to "take it" because I think the matter is just a simple "accept your partner for who he is" equation, so by forcing this binary choice on you, I'll also add pressure on you to choose the "take it" option instead of the "leave it" option by resting unintentionally on patriarchal standards that require women to "stand by your man" and making you look like the shrew trying to "change me" or not be accepting enough if you don't - a particularly guilt-laden punishment in liberal circles who espouse acceptance and tolerance of people's differences]."

See, in liberal circles especially, we tend to embrace this idea of accepting people for who they are and not trying to "change" them. Taken to its extreme, this leads to people who actually have very toxic or damaging habits that no one is allowed to confront or address because we might not be "tolerant" or "accepting" enough. I once dated a guy who was extremely emotionally insecure (although I didn't realize how badly at the time). He felt personally rejected every time I turned my back on him while sleeping. He felt that I was metaphorically and deliberately "turning my back" on him. That the act of facing away from him was *about him*. Of course, it wasn't. I have a bad shoulder and lumbar problems. I can only sleep on one side, especially on his hard mattress on the floor. Sleeping on the bad shoulder seizes it up and sleeping on my back or stomach makes my lower back hurt. So I sleep exclusively curled up on my left side. I also don't like sleeping face-to-face with people. That breathing in my face just bothers me. I don't like it when my cat does it and I don't like it when my partners do it. On top of that, I have some trust issues. Turning my back to someone is a sign of either trust or lack of fear. I have to feel very confident about someone (or about myself) to allow them access to me in a vulnerable position. Added to *that* is the fact that, sexually, my backside is very sensitive and is a secondary erogenous zone. So, in my mind, facing away from my partner not only isn't a negative thing, it's a very, *very* positive thing.

So, this guy got his feelings hurt every time I went to sleep. But, instead of talking to me about it, he kept it to himself until a dozen little, correctable things added all up to one big conflict and he broke up with me over it. During the breakup conversation, he admitted that this was one of the reasons he wanted to breakup. When I expressed my surprise that he never mentioned it before, he said it was because he didn't believe in forcing anyone to change for someone else. My turning my back was "just who I am", apparently, and asking for any sort of accommodation, or even asking me to come up with compromises that I would be comfortable with, was intolerant and not accepting of me. O.o

The BDSM community has a similar problem with "Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That's OK". In principle, it sounds like a good idea. It promotes tolerance and empathy and understanding. We don't have to be all alike and we can still get along. But in practice, it ends to work out as a defense for abuse. No one is allowed to say anything negative about another person's sexual proclivities, even if they're harmful and especially if the person in question is a community leader, because that wouldn't be "tolerant". So guys (in general) get away with never having to learn how to use a calendar or run the washing machine because "that's just who I am", and asking them to take on some of their own emotional labor in a hetero relationship would be "intolerant" and "unaccepting" of who they are as a person. When, the reality is that asking for this kind of change is actually *more* respectful of their agency than just mutely taking on the extra burden and not supporting them in taking control of their own life.

I was talking to one friend who found herself recovering from a relationship with an emotionally controlling partner. She's a strong, intelligent, capable, generally secure woman (like me) who nevertheless ended up being controlled and manipulated by someone in extremely subtle and clever ways. No one saw it coming, and no one even saw it happening, until it was too late. So, she asked me one day how she could ever have been talked into giving up so much of herself to this man. How could no one have seen the signs? Neither of us knew or used the phrase "emotional labor" at the time - this was years ago - but she wanted to know how she could have been talked into being responsible for his own emotional landscape. How did it ever get that far? How did none of us see that he made other people shoulder the burden for his emotional care?

This was not something I had thought about before, but sometimes revelations pop out of my mouth without me having consciously considered it, because I see patterns and I connect dots, as I talked about in a FB post that sparked this one. I responded that the reason it had gone so far before anyone recognized the warning signs is because she had been conditioned already to be the one to care for a man. We had both dated men before who had primed us, unintentionally, for exactly the sort of releasing of boundaries that this other man took advantage of. The guys in our past could not care for themselves. One in particular had done the parents-dorm-wife path himself and had never even questioned that life would be managed by the women in his life, mainly because he kept getting involved with women who took their own sense of identity from exactly that role. They *demanded* that role from him, and it suited him, so that's how it was. If someone didn't remind him to eat, he didn't eat. If he finally noticed that he was hungry and there was no food in the kitchen, he didn't correct it by grocery shopping, he bought McDonald's, setting himself up for the same thing to happen the next day because there still wasn't any food in the fridge. He didn't remember anniversaries or dates because he never had to - his female partners controlled his calendar for him and he just showed up when he was told. Although I notice that men in general are terrible at remembering dates like birthdays and anniversaries ... yet they have no problem managing a freelancing schedule that has them going to different cities on different days and different times or part-time jobs with schedules that change at the whim of a boss and not working a set M-F 9-5 job. Some men have secretaries to keep track of client meetings and conference calls and other office type scheduling, but a lot of men, especially freelancers, don't and those also seem to be adequate at managing a calendar. But as soon as they get a girlfriend, it's all "I'm sorry honey, I'm just not good at remembering anniversaries" and "here are some flowers to make up for me forgetting Valentine's Day" and "it's my mother's birthday already? Did you send her a card from us?" Anyway, this partner in question didn't pay attention to fashion requirements because he worked in the tech industry and Steve Jobs brought blue jeans into the office. He didn't even have to cut his own nails or hair because his wife insisted on doing it for him.

My friend had been primed to accept abuse because she, like me, had a long history with man-child partners and a society that says this is acceptable and expected. This past partner who sloughed off the emotional labor onto his female partners, he wasn't abusive. He was loving and considerate and compassionate. He valued the agency of his partners. He is not a bad guy, and he's not even a Nice Guy. He's genuinely a good person who would not *want* to be participating in this system if inequity if he were aware of it. But he *is* participating in this system because no one knew how to make him aware of it - that's how privilege works. The system benefited him so he didn't see that he was benefiting from anything. He dated or married women who embraced the system and considerately let women go who could or would not (rather than abusively making them embrace the system against their wishes). When I dated guys like that, because I didn't have the language to explain any of this, I simply restructured the relationship so that I didn't have to deal with it by not living with him and only seeing him in the capacity where I didn't mind temporarily being "in charge". But even I had simply learned to accept that "men" were just like this, and it was a patronizingly "cute" personality quirk that smart, capable women had to keep the men in their lives fed and clothed. So, with this training in hand, my friend was set up to be taken advantage of by someone who manipulated exactly that training.

You don't want to hurt me, do you? You don't want to leave me when I could hurt myself, do you? Remember your training that says you are responsible for my well-being. If you shirk your responsibility, you are an irresponsible, inconsiderate monster. It's your fault if I get hurt. It's your fault if my life falls apart. You are a compassionate, kind person. You must stay and do what I say, or else your compassion will drive you insane because of how much I am hurting. If you leave, you will not be a kind, compassionate person, and you don't want that, do you?

I'm fortunate in that I'm not particularly bothered by people thinking I'm a cold-hearted bitch. That's not true, I *can* be bothered by it, but if it's applied when I'm doing something I feel strongly that is for my own good and in support of my own agency, that overrules any concern about being considered a bitch. So the "you don't want to hurt me, do you?" form of abuse doesn't work on me. I just raise an eyebrow and point out that what I'm doing is not about hurting them, it's about supporting me and that any harm they do to themselves for failing to care for themselves is on them. Other people, women in particular, don't have this specific defense mechanism. It seems to be internal to me, not something I learned. It can be learned, but usually at great cost and many just don't have the teachers to show them how to learn it.

But I *am* particularly susceptible to ignoring or overlooking abusive tendencies under the "I must be tolerant and accepting" banner, as well as overlooking this whole thing of displacing emotional labor that isn't abusive, per se. I have controlling tendencies myself, and I have overcompensated for them by backing WAY off when someone doesn't change in the way that I think they ought to. So, when I fall in love with a man-child who hands off the burden of emotional labor to his female partners, I don't insist that he take up the slack in his relationships. I just let him pawn it off on his other partners while I back away far enough that he can't hand that burden off to me. I can't make sure they eat their vegetables or pay their rent if I don't live with them or see them often enough to judge their diet or get their bills in the mail, and they can't reasonably expect me to.

They also can't reasonably expect me to assuage their insecurities by controlling my behaviour with regards to other partners if they don't see themselves as "entwined" enough to justify doing so. A cohabiting fluid-bonded partner might feel justified in telling me what kind of sex I can have with someone else, but a long-distance partner might be more willing to deal with it by just wearing a condom with me when we have sex and out-of-sight-out-of-mind keeps him from facing that he'd otherwise be willing to infringe on my autonomy if given the chance. However, I have had some try to justify telling me that he deserved to have a vote in whether and when I took a new partner and which sex acts we were allowed to engage in and at what pace we began engaging in them, even though this partner did not live in the same city, hadn't had sex with me in months, and was currently embroiled in a lot of drama with one of his own partners who I warned would likely cause exactly this sort of trouble but didn't try to enforce a pre-dating veto power that he wanted to give me. He wanted to date her and I didn't see myself as having the right to control his decision about it, although I did give my opinion on it.

He was not content to just give his opinion on my new partner (that I could take or leave) and he wasn't even content to notify me of how my behaviour would affect his own boundaries with me to take into consideration when I made my dating decisions. He wanted voting rights because he had insecurities and was not willing to do the work to eradicate those insecurities. Instead, he fell back on some couple privilege as the pre-existing partner, and palmed off the emotional labor onto his partners, who were required to limit their behaviour until he "got comfortable", at which time *he* would magnanimously declare the behaviour ban lifted. But since it didn't address the underlying issue, he would have to require the same ban the next time, and the next time. Because these bans eventually did get lifted, he offered this as evidence that he was "working" on his issues and making "progress". But the procedure itself never changed - his partners had to limit their behaviour until *he* felt comfortable, and then *he* decided they could remove the limitation. Always, his partners had to carry the burden, not him. He never had to sit with the discomfort himself. Oh, but he would insist that he was uncomfortable! But don't let that fool you like it did me - feeling uncomfortable when your partner does something that you don't like isn't the same thing as feeling uncomfortable by facing *why* your partner's actions make you uncomfortable in the first place. That's a very different sort of discomfort, but easy to confuse.

So, back to the whole pattern recognition thing from the Facebook post that inspired this post (I complained that I can see social patterns that others can't see, and gave emotional labor as an example of one such set of patterns, the entire text of that example is now the beginning of this blog post). The concept of emotional labor as tied up in the feminist movement and patriarchal society and internalized sexism is a dot that I can now use to connect a bunch of other dots - why it's such a big deal to me when men rely on their female partners for domestic labor and upholding social standards, why I tend to back away and structure my relationships more "casually" or less entwined to avoid shouldering that burden, and even more extreme dots like emotional relationship abuse.

If you saw me blow up on Facebook recently about dress codes when I was trying to talk about how men don't know the categories and then some men jumped in to sidetrack the conversation about fashion being tied to classism, this is why. I was bruised and sore about carrying my male partners' emotional labor and feeling the social burden and the consequences for it, while men (those who can most afford to ignore the social burden or consequences for dress codes) were dismissing my complaints and instead choosing to talk about economic class struggles, which, frustratingly, are *part* of the reason why that particular emotional labor is such a heavy load for women, who - all else being equal - are almost always in the lower class than men.

Basically, I was drawing a connection, and I was failing at making myself understood, so I lost my temper as I am wont to do when I get frustrated, and as I am particularly likely to do when someone is "intellectually debating" a topic that affects me very intimately and personally. This idea of emotional labor makes seemingly isolated events like women doing domestic duties or being the sole emotional outlet for men (because men aren't allowed to have emotionally intimate male friends) apparent that they are related to each other. It also shows that these events have more weight than simply doing an extra chore or taking extra time. If all other things in life are exactly equal, having a woman spend an extra 30 minutes doing dishes after dinner doesn't sound like a huge deal, especially if you throw in that the man mows the lawn or something. But add the weight of cultural history and institutionalized misogyny and patriarchy, and those 30 minutes doing the dishes take up more than just the literal minutes of the day in the emotional landscape of the woman's life. Once you factor in that extra weight and see how all these separate activities are connected under the same umbrella, then we see the path light up leading to emotional abuse. It's not the only path, nor is it necessarily the guaranteed destination. But they're connected.

And now I have some language to describe and explain what I'm feeling and those patterns that I can see that no one else seems to see. It will take a few more novel-length blog posts, I'm sure, before I work out some quippy soundbites or before I streamline my ideas based on those take-aways that seem to work for readers most often.

More resources on what Emotional Labor is, how to recognize it, and what to do about it:

http://freethoughtblogs.com/brutereason/2015/07/27/emotional-labor-what-it-is-and-how-to-do-it/

http://the-toast.net/2015/07/13/emotional-labor/

www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/08/women-gender-roles-sexism-emotional-labor-feminism

It boggles my mind how many people conflate "I forbid you" - which is a position of authority over another human being that denies their agency - with "I recognize you as an autonomous individual and I have some steep concerns about this thing in your life, what it represents, and how it affects me as a person and us as partners and I'd like to encourage and support you in moving in a direction where this thing is not a part of your life anymore, and I do so with your full cooperation because you recognize the validity of the claim that your life is better without this thing in it and you take full responsibility for the decision to accept my support and encouragement in your efforts to make this change."

"Forbidding", like "veto", ends the discussion and transfers the responsibility for the decision onto someone else as well as transfers the consequences for said decision outside - usually to a third party who is affected by the "forbidding" or "veto" or whatever.

The second option does not take away autonomy even if the outcome is the same. The second option requires the person who would otherwise be the one "forbidden" to do something to instead say "I have two choices - one where this thing is in my life and this person I care about is unhappy about it, and one where this thing is not in my life and this person I care about is happy that it is not in my life. I am making the choice myself to prioritize the happiness of this person and I agree with them that my life will be better without this thing in it."

There are two kinds of people, I've discovered. One kind of person sees the huge gulf between those two options. To them, these situations are like apples and jet planes. Another kind of person sees that, in both scenarios, the individual loses whatever the thing is and therefore sees no difference between the two scenarios.

These are people who don't understand autonomy or agency. These are people who frighten me. Without being able to understand the difference between agency and authority, they lack the basic, fundamental principles to understand why rape is wrong, why slavery is wrong, and why all the other things I fight against are related to these things, like why abortion is so important and why Planned Parenthood is important and why #BlackLivesMatter is so important and all the other causes big and small that get my ire up. They're all related by issues of agency.

If you can't understand agency, if you can look at the above scenarios and only see similar outcomes and not understand how things can look similar on the outside but have very different foundations underneath, then you can't understand how all these other things I argue about are related to each other and why they're important and I really don't know the right words to make you understand. Even if you happen to agree with me that some of these things are wrong, if you can't see the issue of agency in the two scenarios, you won't understand how all the things I think are wrong (whether you agree with me on them or not) are related and how they affect each other when any are prohibited.

And I noticed those people have a tendency to be the sorts of people for whom their agency is never questioned or never taken away in the first place.

There is a third kind of person, who says, "I forbid people, but it doesn't mean that they're not allowed to do something, it means that we start the conversation and discuss it rationally and they're allowed to make their own decisions, so you're just wrong because I'm making up definitions for words that go contrary to their generally accepted use and I'm going to argue semantics with you just because I feel entitled to make shit up and don't like the cognitive dissonance you're creating by your judgmental posts". If that kind of person feels the need to comment below, I'm just going to delete the comment because fuck you.

Also anyone who caveats D/s or M/s relationships because a healthy power exchange is actually an example of the second option where the sub or slave retains the power to make the decision to transfer power in negotiated ways (just with fantasy-based language like "control" and "authority" and "forbid" to set an illusory scene) and also retains the power to amend, halt, or end said power exchange at any time in spite of the superficial trappings of authority - that's what makes it not abuse.

Back to the point. It reminds me of a scene from a movie I just watched again recently. Bedazzled is a remake of a movie where a guy sells his soul to the Devil for 7 wishes, mostly to get a girl he likes to notice him. In the negotiation scene with the Devil, she tries to convince him that his soul isn't worth hanging on to, so might as well sell it for something good.

She says things like "have you ever even seen your soul? What is it good for? What has your soul done for you lately? You won't even notice that it's gone."

Obviously, as an atheist, I don't believe in souls. But agency is a lot like that dialog in principle. When you live in a world that doesn't even question that you have agency, and never tries to take it from you, what is there about agency to notice? Have you ever even seen your agency? What has it done for you lately?

But spend your life fighting to have your agency recognized, let alone have control over it, and you'll sure as hell be aware of it then. To most of the people I've talked to who struggle to see the difference between acquiescing to "I forbid you" and making the autonomous choice to forgo on your own, they tend to be people who, if someone ever *tried* to say "I forbid" and they disagreed, there is literally nothing that could come of that. They recognize "I forbid" as essentially toothless and a command that requires compliance. So they can't see a difference in the two scenarios because, to them, their agency *can't* ever be compromised, therefore this is not a question of agency and but of goals and both scenarios have the same goal when you remove the question of agency - to get rid of the thing and make a loved one happy.

But those of us who are in a position for someone to "forbid" and there are either no options to refuse or the consequences for refusal are worse than compliance, we can see the apples for the jet planes. The goal is *not* the same. The goal is not to get rid of the thing, the goal is power and control - of the body, of the self, of the mind, of the decision-making process, of that which makes us a person. With our very souls on the line, we have to consider carefully if those 7 wishes are worth signing for.

And some of us do end up signing away our ~~souls~~ agency, either because we're manipulated into it by increasingly stepping past our boundaries just a little bit at a time so that we don't really notice until we're in too deep to get out, or because we're held at pitchfork-point and forced to sign using brute force and intimidation.

While some of us fight the Devil even as the rest of the world thinks we're delusional as we scream about things that they aren't even aware exist. Unlike my soul, I'm confident that my agency exists and that I am an autonomous individual and I will continue to point out every time the Devil shows up in a cop uniform that she isn't the good guy she appears to be and she is trying to steal people's agency and the 7 wishes you get aren't worth the price. And some people will continue to ignore me and think I'm crazy because the Devil never made a deal for *their* agency so they don't even know what it's good for but they just assume they have it.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2016/01/my-time-at-an-anti-government-summer-camp.html

"Over time I came to understand that no citizen is truly independent of every other citizen, that we are all interconnected. I realized that even a private business owner living on their own land and homeschooling their children relies on government roads and government police forces, to scratch the surface. This sort of militia ideology ignores the social contract, the importance of our interdependency and the necessity of the government in providing for the public welfare. This is where the militia movement, and with its anti-government ideology, fails."

This very closely matches my conversations with people of these groups, including a man who, in his late 20s, befriended a bunch of high school boys and created a "role playing" group of sovereign citizens, where they all got dressed up as pseudo-medieval royalty (with himself as King, of course) and went through ritualistic motions designed to cement the group's loyalty (i.e. fealty).

The boys, having been recruited as teens, thought it was harmless fun, like Ren Faire. I, being introduced to it as an adult who had already dated several Libertarians who showed their lack of empathy in some pretty horrific ways, thought it was abhorrent. Because, when they were done kneeling and knuckling their foreheads at his feet while his wife stood mute behind his right shoulder and both gazing down at their subjects while they patronizingly bestowed meaningless honors on them, the revelry started (with lots of beer, of course, only not *American* beer, but the "real" beer - don't get me started).

And it was during these revelries that he *really* held court. His rapt audience of now-30 to 40-something men and their eye-rolling but tolerant wives all sitting around a plush living room cooled by central air conditioning provided by the city utility company, having driven there in hybrid cars on city roads, educated by the public school system, listened to him extol the virtues of seceding from the union, drone on about how to avoid paying taxes, lecture on the illegality of a court verdict based on the position of a flag in the room at the time of pronouncement, and snarl at the law enforcement who had never once done anything to them - no harassment, no attitude, no arrests, nothing.

In fact, the person who introduced me to this group would take out a baton from his car door pocket and shake it at police cars when he passed them on the road, shouting "PIGS!" from behind his rolled up tinted windows where the cops couldn't see or hear. One night, we were walking home from an event, having taken public transportation most of the way, and we passed a police officer in the subway. He tensed up, ready for a fight. The cop smiled and nodded at us, and we both smiled and nodded back. As we got out of earshot, he exclaimed how amazing it was the the cop didn't do anything to him and how he passed some sort of cultural milestone by reaching an age that cops no longer think he's a threat.

I looked at him and said something along the lines of "dude, you're a young-looking middle-aged, blond-haired, blue-eyed white man in a suit. It's not age that made the cop treat you with respect, it's that you look like him or his superiors." Except for being a young man obviously causing "trouble" (like the time they bought out a convenience store's entire supply of glow sticks while having a pool noodle fight in the store, causing the cop inside to give them the side-eye - note, not shoot them 14 times in the back), he's never actually had any encounters with cops that weren't pleasant.

Now, I get being pissed at cops on behalf of those who aren't treated well, but he wasn't that. He wasn't irate at the injustice of black lives or the for-profit prison system (although he did eventually come to adopt those causes). He was angry because cops are pigs who want to take your liberty away just for fun. Y'know, like when you break the law, the cops come and bust you for it. The nerve!

This is now a long story. The point is that I've met people like this, and likely still do know people like this although I try to avoid these kinds of conversations with people I will have to continue to come into contact with after I find out that they're horrible people. There is no sense of irony, no self-awareness, and no real understanding of how the world actually works. In order to be internally consistent with their underlying premise, they would have to find unoccupied land, build everything themselves just with materials found on the land (and not with any knowledge gleaned from public schools or library books), and be completely self-sustaining. Nothing could come in from the outside because those materials would have to use public roads and other public services to get there. And / or anything coming in from outside would have to be negotiated with the US government the way that any international trade is negotiated between independent nations, complete with paying import taxes and customs fees all the rest. They want all the fruits of living in a democratic society with public works without any of the responsibilities that come with coexisting with other people.

And where are all those employees supposed to come from to run your small businesses if everyone is their own business owner?* Trust me, as someone who lives below the poverty line and still has to pay 4-digits in taxes this year (keep in mind that I already pay some taxes through those jobs I hold that use W2s instead of 1099), I definitely understand being frustrated at the idea that the government can just come and take my money that I earned with literally my own sweat and blood. And I certainly don't agree with everything my taxes are spent on. But I did survivalist camping as a kid - and I don't mean my dad and I took our arsenal of guns out to the woods in our SUV and our camo tactical gear and lived off the land and a case of beer for a weekend. I mean that I walked myself into the woods with no other people and no gear other than the clothes I was wearing (which were basic jeans, t-shirt, and tennis shoes), knapped a flint knife with rocks I found on the ground, cut branches off a tree to build shelter, and ate what I could identify as non-toxic.

Fuck that shit. It was an important lesson in survival for me, in case of emergency. I often went hiking alone, so these kinds of skills were important to know. But that's what it means to eschew everything the government has to offer and to be self-sufficient (although, I have to note that I learned these skills through a camp offered to me through a program in my public elementary school). The quality of life is vastly higher with running water and a sanitation system and food inspections and safe transportation facilities and the shipping industry to bring in a variety of food for a well balanced diet and medical supplies and *other people* performing a variety of jobs that aren't all providing materialist, capitalist goods who are all educated to a minimum standard of competency and who are all invested in helping each other out because its in everyone's interest to make sure their neighbors are still there to perform their functions and services every day.

*This is a rhetorical question. I've already read something just today that addresses exactly the implausibility and irresponsibility and unlikeliness to succeed of the rhetoric of venture capitalism that only values small business owners so I'm not interested in more debate on the subject.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/when-the-boss-says-dont-tell-your-coworkers-how-much-you-get-paid/374467/

"Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), all workers have the right to engage “concerted activity for mutual aid or protection” and “organize a union to negotiate with [their] employer concerning [their] wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment.” ... the law "means that you and your co-workers get to talk together about things that matter to you at work." Even "a nudge from the boss saying 'we don't do that around here' ... is also unlawful under the National Labor Relations Act," Estlund added."

I see this all the time in my freelance industry. Contractors and employees are told not to discuss pay. The more honest-seeming of employers will explain that the reason is because *you* are being paid at a higher rate than everyone else, and it would make everyone else feel bad and demand higher pay when they aren't qualified for the higher pay like *you* are. Backhanded flattery is a good way to get people to comply with shady instructions.

So what happens is that we have a handful of people making a shit-ton of money because they figured out how to leverage their experience into a good negotiation session, the majority of people making decent money but probably below what they're worth compared to the high rollers, and a good portion of newbs who don't know any better taking shit pay and thinking they should be grateful for it but who are actually driving down wages for everyone else.

Why would an employer pay me my regular day rate when they can hire some Full Sail kid at half my rate? Doesn't matter that I'm better, this is a transient kind of industry. By the time someone figures out that the newb sucks, the gig is halfway over and they can't afford to replace him. Then, he has that gig to pad his resume with and he can get the next gig now with more experience but still lower pay, and, again, by the time anyone figures out that he's not as good as me, it's too late to hire me.

So, those of us in the majority middle range lower our rates because we're not in the high demand category of the guys making 3 times what we are for the same work, so we can't afford to just work less and only take the high offers that come around. We have to work *more*, which means working for *less*.

So I talk about rates. I tell the newbies what to expect, and if someone reveals that they're getting paid more than me or more than someone else with more experience or seniority, I say so. I know that I don't make as much as some of my coworkers. But thanks to the union losing its teeth here, I haven't had any luck correcting that yet.

So, I work more hours for less pay, and I make a shocking amount "per hour" and I have a minimum wage retail job on the side and yet still live below the poverty line in a little wooden house literally on the "wrong side of the tracks", with no car payment, no smart phone, the lowest bandwidth internet service possible, no cable, and no expenses other than the necessities - rent, utilities, insurance, gas, food. Cost of living has gone up, but I make the same day rate that I have for 10 years and I make the same income per year that I did when I was fresh out of high school and accepting my first full-time job as a secretary 20 years ago. There was a time when that would have been a decent income. Like, when my mom got her first secretarial job 40 years ago.

Because poverty is a trap and the system is designed to keep us here - the system that includes a million large and tiny things like not discussing wages with coworkers so that no one knows that they're not being paid fairly or what their rights are about that, so that no one can demand a higher wage and possibly pull themselves out of the trap.

http://www.the1585.com/dorksawaken.html

Important to read, but with spoilers mainly about the main villain. Although, this article is really more about nerd culture and entitlement, and how those two are linked together than about details of the film. It merely uses character analysis to explore those concepts. I usually copy passages from the articles I'm sharing that especially highlight the point I want people to take away from the article, but I'm finding that hard to do without including passages with spoilers.

So I'll pad this part of my explanation and include them below the cut, and a little out of order because there is a quote further down that isn't really spoilery. At least, I hope by this time it isn't a spoiler, since the potential spoilery detail is in the trailers.

( Quotes that highlight the point I want people to take away from this article. )

Just to be clear, with all my liberal friends posting from liberal sources, I have yet to see anyone advocate (beyond schadenfreude wishful thinking) treating the Oregon terrorists the way that black people are treated. I'm sure that someone, somewhere, is actually, seriously, advocating that "solution", but every single comparison I've seen from my so-called "inconsistent" liberal sources are making the comparisons for the purpose of driving home the point that the way black "criminals" and black suspects are treated is patently unfair and excessive, not to suggest that the correct approach is to turn that same police overreach onto the siege.

With one notable exception that I kinda agree with. I have seen it suggested that, *IF* (and this is a hypothetical here, not an actual suggestion for action) the excessive police brutality was turned on to white Christian males, then and only then would the people defending the police actions against black people and other minorities understand and make a stand opposing police brutality.

The suggestion was that, because mainly white people don't see that kind of brutality enforced on people who they can empathize with (i.e. who look like them and talk like them and hold the same values as them), they will need to see it happening to their "own" people in order to understand the full atrocity of militarizing police and allowing excessive force as SOP.

The hypothesizing was suggesting that the only reason to want, or even contemplate, law enforcement to treat the Oregon situation the same as the way people of color are normally treated is not to encourage or support police brutality, but because that might ironically be the only way to stop it. The hypothetical posed wasn't to suggest that we *should* do this, but to suggest that, *if* it were done, it might have the affect of speeding up the process of getting people on board with demilitarizing police and enforcing corrective action on law enforcement, and ultimately, demilitarizing police and reducing police brutality and enforcing police accountability is the goal.

Fortunately, many of us on the liberal side of the spectrum are also sci-fi and comic book geeks. We've already explored this concept in safe, fictional outlets. I *do* believe it's true that the people supporting shit like BlueLivesMatter won't see the horror of the entrenched police brutality culture unless it's turned on them instead of people they can rationalize as somehow "deserving" it.

But the reason why all the articles and posts that I've seen comparing the treatment of white terrorists to random black people on the street are pointing out the discrepancy and hypocrisy is NOT to suggest that we legitimize the use of excessive force by turning it on white terrorists because that's basically the origin story of a bunch of villains.

Remember Unbreakable? Remember Captain America's story arc through the current crop of Marvel movies? The bad guys are all using ... questionable ... tactics to ensure the safety of the people. They all have justifiable motivations for removing people's liberties, for supporting or promoting violence, for the use of excessive force. They're trying to stop *supervillains* and *aliens* for fuck's sake - extreme measures are called for!

And, in following through with those motivations they turn into the villains.

https://youtu.be/YeT7MzDcpeg

"I believe in something greater than myself - a better world, a world without sin."
"So me and mine gotta lay down and die so you can live in your better world?"
"I'm not going to live there. There's no place for me there, any more than there is for you. Malcom, I'm a monster. What I do is evil, I have no illusions about it but it must be done." ~ the most self-aware villain in nearly all of fiction.

Which is why liberals continue to compare the treatment of Those Assholes (I refuse to name mass shooters and other terrorists to reduce their fame and their reach) to the treatment of people who might be class valedictorians or sports stars or cosplayers or they might be petty criminals but who have the audacity to be doing whatever they were doing when they caught the attention of law enforcement with dark skin or an unfamiliarly pronounceable name or clothing that represents different religious beliefs. To show that these actions are villainous, not to recommend turning around and doing them to those privileged enough not to have experienced them before.

Sure, the downtrodden fantasize and daydream about doing to their oppressors what was done to them. That's the reason an entire genre of revenge fiction exists. In Revenge of the Nerds, the nerds violate the privacy and the agency of all the "cool girls", whether those specific individual girls harmed them specifically or not. Because they're the oppressed protagonists, the movie was loved and their actions were excused as justifiable ... at the time. Now, however, with a new generation of liberals willing to be more critical and hold higher standards, RotN is widely viewed as the jackoff wish fulfillment porn of sad, whiny white dudes who are the current crop of villains in geekdom (see my other post on the new SW movie for more about that).

Progressive means that progress has to be made. We continue to evolve and develop even more nuanced and finer grained understandings of social justice and freedom, forged by compassion. Liberals are not content with our parents' liberalism, but criticism of liberalism continues to see it as a static, unchanging set of dogmatic beliefs.

So when people compare the treatment of high profile, violent, white male criminals to the treatment of, basically, any person of color, it is *generally* not a hypocritical call to treat the high profile, violent, white male criminal exactly the same (although some argument could be made that a white male firing a gun AT A COP and tricking cops into proximity of a fucking bomb really is deserving of having the cop shoot back). It's to point out that even violent offenders who may or may not actually deserve that kind of response are still treated with more respect, dignity, compassion, and care than a kid with a toy gun, a guy who illegally sells cigarettes, a kid who shoplifted, and another kid who smoked a joint.

The point is to treat that child, that shop owner, those teenagers, with the bare minimum of caution and rational threat analysis and avoidance of force that a white dude with a bomb, a deluded Bonnie & Clyde wannabe white couple, and a bunch of white supremacist conspiracist dudes who want to *overthrow the federal government with automatic rifles* (yet forgot to pack enough Doritos to last the winter) get.

Hey, people, we need to have a little chat. I'm glad that the poly community is talking more openly about abuse and all, but could we stop throwing around diagnoses like we have any right or ability to do so?

Stop accusing people of being narcissistic or sociopathic or whatever just because you read that article that one time and the person whom you've never met but got into an online argument with said something you didn't like. Or even that person who you dated who turned into an asshole. He's probably not a sociopath, and if he is, you're not qualified to determine if he is.

Unless you have an actual degree in clinical psychology AND you are this particular person's psychological diagnostician (in which case, you REALLY shouldn't be publicizing diagnoses because it violates patient confidentiality) OR they actually disclosed to you a diagnoses (in which case, unless they're public about it, you're still violating someone's privacy and even assholes have a right to medical privacy), you don't know if they have any particular disorder or what it might be.

Be pissed off at someone if you think they wronged you. Talk about your own experiences at their hands if you think it's relevant. Just stop flinging around these terms. You look like monkeys flinging shit.

They are important labels and we devalue them by using them carelessly and casually. We actually end up hurting our efforts to address abuse in our communities by liberally applying specific terms with specific meanings in medical or psychological contexts to people who just irritate us or say stuff that makes us mad because people become too inured to seeing those terms and it eventually turns into either a witch hunt or a dismissal of people with mental disorders who *could* be productive members of society with the right kinds of help.

I'm glad that we've started sharing things like "5 Warning Signs You're In An Abusive Relationship" and "8 Toxic Relationship Behaviours", and even those articles detailing the criteria for narcissism and borderline personality disorder and all the rest. I really do want people to be more aware and more educated and more sophisticated in their relationship evaluations. But y'know how easy it is for people to put in their symptoms into WebMD, get a list of possible diagnoses from likely to plausible to WTF no one has had this in generations in this country? And then people start freaking out that they have fucking brain tumors when they're just dehydrated and have a headache? Mental diagnoses are like that too. But it gets worse because we start applying these internet checklists to the people we know. And the information we absorb about "is your coworker a sociopath?" changes our behaviour with respect to how we treat these other people and how we interpret their actions.

This is not fair, not medically accurate, not intellectually honest or rigorous, and it's actually making things worse. Apparently, half of all my social communities have Narcissistic Personality Disorder and the other half have Borderline Personality Disorder, and about a third are completely sociopathic, and everyone is an abusive bully - depending on who you're talking to. People are already starting to tune out, and this is extremely dangerous for people who are *actually* trapped in relationships with people who are harming them. Psychological terms need to be used with care, in their proper time and place. The actual victims of abusive relationships need as much support as we can give them, which means that we shouldn't be devaluing the language they need to talk about and process their abuse by accusing everyone of everything just because we don't like someone or someone was mean to us.

Because, here's a newsflash - it's totally possible to be mean to someone without them being clinically psychotic. Just so you know.

I don't have any kind of TV signal at my house, other than what my rabbit ears can pick up (and trust me, with the weather in Florida, that's not much). I have a shit ton of DVDs, access to Netflix and Amazon, and other entertainment-viewing venues, but not much in the way of "live" programming. And I like that kind of programming. I really enjoy just leaving my TV turned on all day and set to one or two channels that play sitcoms or sci-fi or whatever, just to see what comes on. It's the same reason I still like listening to the radio, even though I hate commercials on both.

One of the TV stations that comes through (barely) is a classic TV station - showing nothing newer than the early '80s and some stuff quite a bit older. Late at night, they stick mainly with the '70s. So I've been watching a show I had seen before but wasn't a major portion of my viewing rotation because I was just a bit too young to be really interested in the plot back then - One Day at a Time.

I really like sitcoms, but I'm kind of particular in my sitcom viewing. I like watching shows that are groundbreaking in some way and that are, by their very existence, social commentary. Whatever other flaws that show might have, it had an important message that shaped the society I grew up in.

This show is about a divorced mom trying to raise her two teenage daughters in a "liberated" society that she was never a part of. She grew up conservative and traditional Italian Catholic and married young. But her husband had an affair, so she divorced him - a radical enough notion at the time. To make matters even more shocking, she didn't go home to her parents to help her with the kids, she chose to get an apartment in New York and live alone with the kids - no man or family to protect her or help her.

That alone makes the show worth praising, to me. But every time I see an episode, I'm bowled over by the complexity of the situations and the nuance of the responses. It really was a terrific show. I'd like to sit down with the DVDs sometime and really do some thorough reviews on specific episodes, because there are some gems in there.

For instance, the episode I saw a couple of nights ago had the husband trying to back out of child support because he over-extended himself with his business and his new wife and was now facing financial trouble. This is a really easy situation to get black-and-white about - too fucking bad, it was your bad choices, you owe those kids their money because a single woman in the '70s with no college education couldn't get the kind of job to support the three of them without help, and it's your fault they're on their own in the first place.

To make matters worse, the father wasn't just facing financial hardship due to the economy or not making enough money from his company. He sold the kids' childhood home to buy a mansion with a pool and to hire a full-time maid to live in the lap of luxury. So it seems like a no-brainer that the dad is the bad guy and the solution is to sell the damn house, fire the maid, and live more frugally if he can't support his lifestyle.

Although these points are all made in the show, it doesn't stop there. In the course of the arguments over the child support, the mom figures out that the new wife doesn't even know about the financial hardship, and that the dad wants to quit child support because he wants to maintain his lifestyle so that his new wife never has to find out. The *reason*, he says, is because the new wife isn't "like [the mother]" and "can't handle it". She's accustomed to a life of luxury and wouldn't be able to cope with living a more meager existence.

The mom, here, has a perfectly justified opportunity to say "tough shit, that's part of what being married is all about". Instead, she stops her arguing, stunned that the new wife doesn't even know. She points out that the husband is being patronizing, and orders him to go home immediately and talk to the wife - to give her a chance to be an equal partner in their marriage and how to address the situation. Her sympathy in this moment, goes to the new wife, when the rest of society would have seen the new wife as a homewrecker and not deserving of sympathy.

Repeatedly, as the mom argues with the dad over the course of the series, she sticks up for the wife and insists that he treat her better than he ever treated the mom. She does not let him get away with being the same chauvinistic, overbearing, dismissive prick that he was to her.

And then the show goes one further. The daughters, when they find out all the details, turn to their father and say "Daddy, I know you want to support us, but you forget that we're supposed to support you too. That's what family is for. We'll work something out. Let us help you." Without compromising the kids' well-being or letting the father off the hook from his responsibilities, they insist on pulling together as a family, even though they're not a traditional family anymore. The support and respect isn't a one-way street. In fact, it's an excellent example of support through accountability without becoming a doormat.

In the end, there are no Bad Guys, just people who make mistakes and have messy feelings, who learn from each other and help each other out. The family is changed to match the needs of the people in it, and even though there are growing pains about it, everyone is better off living in a non-traditional family structure which gives each of them opportunities to be their best selves. And they consistently live up to that, stumbling and tripping along the way, but always climbing upwards.

I wonder, since these are the kinds of influences I had growing up, what our society might look like if we still made such programming. And I wonder, since I wasn't the only person to watch and be influenced by shows like this, why I seem to be one of the only people to have absorbed these kinds of lessons.

I find it interesting that the vast majority of the lessons that influence how I do poly and that form the basis for my various activisms, come from mainstream, monogamous, heteronormative culture. I recommend re-visiting these old sitcoms, or visiting them for the first time if you missed them back in the day. Many of them are partially responsible for the adult I turned into, with lessons in empathy and consideration and intentional family and non-traditional choices. Sometimes wisdom comes from unexpected places.

OK secular lefties, here's the thing...

You can disagree with an ideology. You can disagree vehemently with an ideology. You can even believe that the Slippery Slope applies here and is not a fallacy - that the fundamental concepts in the ideology sets up a culture in which the radical extension of that ideology is a natural consequence. You can even hope that some day, reason will win out and that ideology will be relegated to a chapter in a history textbook on "myths previous eras and civilizations once believed."

But what you cannot then do is ACT upon any individual person in the demographic that holds that ideology in a negative way, such as insulting them or physically assaulting them, unless it is a clear cut case of self-defense or it is a clear cut case of addressing their *ideology*, not their person. And I mean clear-fucking-cut, like they're charging you with a meat cleaver shouting "I'm doing this for my ideology!" at the top of their lungs (srsly, guys, entitled white dudes are writing manifestos - it's fucking clear cut race / gender / religion related, not a "loner" with "mental health issues").

When you take "This ideology is bad" and then follow it up with "this individual who uses this ideological label must therefore be bad so I will preemptively beat the shit out of them / call them names with historical or cultural oppressive contexts / refuse them the basic rights of survival and human dignity / bar them from entering a public place on principle just in case they might do something bad even though this individual hasn't actually done anything bad that I have proof of or said anything to me at all", that makes you a fucking bigot and part of the problem.

People are notoriously good at compartmentalizing their beliefs and at dealing with cognitive dissonance. Most people claim an identity label that is associated with a whole passel of shit they don't agree with. While that may actually be one of the problems you might have with that particular ideology or the people who hold it, this means, practically speaking, that you can't predict any given individual's likelihood of acting either harmfully or beneficially just by their identity label.

You need, like, actual proof of intentions for that.

Catholic doctrine, for instance, is very clear that it opposes all form of birth control, sex before marriage, homosexuality, and divorce. It takes a hard stance on those issues. There is no grey area, no wiggle room. Catholic doctrine is definitely, clearly, adamantly opposed. But how many Catholics do you know who have done one or more of those things? And how many Catholic churches do you know have allowed those members to remain part of the congregation?

Fuck that, how many people are fawning all over themselves to gush at the Pope whenever he gets quoted out of context as saying something that can vaguely be interpreted as not being a total douchenozzle on those topics? Even though, in context, he says nothing of the sort and even though his PR team always cleans up after him and makes an official statement that the Pope didn't mean to sound so liberal but that he really is still a douchenozzle and even though the official policy is very clear and has been so for generations and even though he goes on to say exactly that sort of douchenozzlery in other places with other audiences who don't want to hear the wishy-washy version of the Pope but that the liberal media doesn't cover?

People claim all sorts of labels for themselves. Many of those people do not practice the literal definition of the labels, or they don't practice all the things associated with those labels. In fact, that's something that I complain about often - people who use labels in ways contrary to the label's intent and muddying up the waters for the communicative purposes of labels (and please don't derail the comments with "that's why I don't use labels" - I take issue with that too but that's a subject for another rant).

You cannot tell what actual beliefs a person holds by their labels. You ought to be able to, since that's what makes labels meaningful. But you can't. You can use the labels to give a broad, general idea, but they are not predictive. You cannot predict, by a person's label, which specific beliefs they hold or how those beliefs will express themselves on that individual.

That's why the whole men vs. women thing is bullshit. Even for the legitimate times when we can statistically make two categories of people called "men" and "women", those labels are not predictive and you cannot use a category term to make specific assumptions or predictions about individual people. Even statistically different categories like "man" and "woman" have such a high degree of overlap that they become completely useless terms when trying to guess things about a specific individual. At best, they can be used *descriptively* (as opposed to prescriptively) after that individual has self-identified as such and the people you are communicating with all have the same understanding of the label.

For instance, I often use MBTI as shorthand. I identify as an INTJ, so I might try to communicate to someone that I'm having trouble with their spontaneity because I'm a J. That saves me a lot of time trying to explain that being schedule oriented is an innate trait that causes me distress when upset, blah blah blah, and then the other person can know that I'm not having a *personal* issue with *them*, that this is just a thing about me that makes me "me". So, once we have established this baseline set of definitions for communication, then I and that other person can use the labels as shorthand in the future to reference a broader definition that we don't have to spell out every single goddamn time we need to reference that concept. "I am doing this thing because I am an INTJ, not because of some other assumed motivation or intention you might want to ascribe to me." "Oh, got it, I understand your motivations now."

However, I once dated a guy who broke a Valentine's Day date with me to go out with his other gf. He used the excuse "but you're an INTJ, and INTJ's don't care about holidays, but she's an INFP, and they do care about holidays, so it's a bigger deal to her than to you."

WRONG! 1) He changed my schedule, which is a huge no-no for a schedule-oriented person. 2) He didn't ask me first, he just assumed I wouldn't mind, which is taking away my ability to control my own life. I might not have minded, but I wanted to be able to make that decision for myself. 3) I have personal insecurities that have nothing to do with MBTI about my poly relationships not being viewed as "real" by my partners and metamours, so couplehood markers like holiday dates are actually important to me even if the holiday itself is not. 4) She wasn't poly and I was having massive conflicts with her over her inability to deal with being part of a poly network that included me, including doing things that put him in awkward positions of having to "choose" between us and of him too often choosing her "over" me and this was just one more glaring example of how I was "losing" in a relationship that wasn't supposed to have "winners" and "losers".

Back to the main point: you can't predict based on a person's identity label how they will express the beliefs associated with that identity label. At best, labels can be used after-the-fact by the individuals who hold them to describe themselves and then to use as shorthand to refer to that description at a later time.

Of course, we're all going to try to make assumptions and predictions based on those labels. That's what our brain uses labels for. If someone tells me that they're a Catholic, I'm going to assume they hold a whole collection of beliefs that are associated with Catholicism. But I'm going to be *aware* that I'm making those assumptions and I'm not going to preemptively attack them or try to bar them from living in my area on the assumption that they might be anti-abortion, which might then prompt them to bomb an abortion provider's office. There has to be evidence that they are actively planning a violent crime before I can take any action, including verbal, intended to prevent the presumed crime.

So when secularists start supporting policies banning Syrian refugees, for instance, based on the argument that Islam is problematic therefore all Muslims should be presumed to be dangerous based on their holy texts justifying violence, you're being a bigoted racist shithead. I am totally opposed to all forms of religion, including Islam. I could go on at length about the problems with Islam and how privileging religion in general sets up exactly the sorts of cultures where radical extremism can flourish.

But refugees from a war-torn nation fleeing for their lives from radical religious wackaloons is NOT the time for philosophical debate on the pros and cons of ideologies. Now is the time for compassion for human fucking beings who are being tortured and killed and who are asking for our help. Our first priority is to help them as fellow human beings, to protect their lives and their dignity as people. Only then, when their survival is not at stake and their dignity as sentient beings is not being attacked, do we have the ethical high ground for addressing their ideologies in an intellectual debate.

Guys! A woman rejecting you is not "starting it" and not the same as "punching you in the face" so your retaliation is not fucking self defense!

YOU started it by asking her out in the first place. If you're not an asshole, the asking someone out isn't problematic enough to be considered "starting something", but if it escalates to violence in response to her rejection, then you better fucking believe you fucking started it.

Her rejection of you is HER self-defense against YOU.

I was stalked for years by someone who threatened me with suicide if I didn't date him. I still refused (and he didn't commit suicide, because he wasn't suicidal, he was abusive). But, years later, he "wore me down" and I did end up dating him.

One of the worst dating mistakes I ever made.

When I finally got out, he continued to stalk me for another decade. At one point, he actually admitted that if he ever found out that I had aborted "his child", he would, even then years later, still hunt me down and kill me. I hadn't ever gotten pregnant by him, but I have always been pro-abortion and anti-me-getting-pregnant, which he knew. In that same conversation, I found out that he had been sabotaging the condoms during our relationship in the hopes that getting me pregnant would tie me to him. That's when I reminded him that I would have just gotten an abortion, and that's when he told me that, not only would he have killed me at the time for having an abortion, but that he would *still* kill me if he found out after the fact that I had gotten one back then and didn't tell him.

I was also told in school that it wouldn't kill me to just go out with him. Apparently it might have.

Even without some of the more disturbing details about his obsession with me that I kept from my parents, they recognized the danger he posed and, as a teenager, steered me away from him. They did not want me dating him and did not approve of me including him in my social circle. They told me at the time that they worried for my safety. I scoffed at them. I thought he was a lovesick pup but ultimately harmless. I was wrong.

His brother is currently doing life in prison for shooting and killing his wife and infant child. Some days I'm amazed that I survived to adulthood.

This commentary is in response to a note attached to a picture uploaded on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/the.artidote/photos/a.748110521972432.1073741827.742359879214163/838788566237960/?type=3&theater). Usually I just paste the link to articles that I'm commenting on at the beginning of my rant and let y'all follow it to read it directly. But this is a photo on someone's FB timeline, and the commentary I am responding to is in the description of the photo, so this is not a "public" article that anyone can access. If you don't have FB and aren't logged in, you might not be able to see it, so I'm reposting the text below the cut.

( Original Photo Commentary )

In response to some comments I have seen on several other people's threads where they shared that graphic trying to explain that no one *owes* you their time, attention, love, sex, relationship, thoughts, etc. these blog posts are relevant.

Discussions about agency and abuse in relationships tend to get sidetracked by the minutia and strawman arguments of people pursuing *selfish* (i.e. not self-centric, but selfISH where it requires a lack of concern for how one's actions affect others) hedonism. In other words, there is some defense of "but if the other person is doing things for their own pleasure and it hurts you, that's not OK!" Of course it's not, but that's a different discussion.

"This is my experience. You can not know my experience.
That is your experience. I can not know your experience.
These are my choices. You are not entitled to control over them, you are not victimized by them.
Those are your choices. I am not entitled to control over them, I am not victimized by them."

"When we really understand the difference between these statements, we will understand how to support both survivors and abusers.

'I was victimized by acts of control' is not the same as 'I was victimized by the other person’s resistance to my control.'"

http://emmfett.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-community-response-to-abuse.html

And then in the article they reference:

"“An abuser’s behavior is primarily conscious — he acts deliberately rather than by accident or by losing control of himself — but the underlying thinking that drives his behavior is largely not conscious.”

What is this underlying thinking? Well, it’s all around you. It is the foundation of rape culture. It is the fundamental belief that women do not have a right to their own personal power. It is the fundamental belief that they can retain power over their bodies, minds and choices, only so long as we agree with those choices. It is the way in which we punish women if we feel they’ve stepped out of line. It is the way we always suspiciously ask “what is she getting out of this?” when a woman reports abuse, harassment or assault. It is the reflexive dismissal of female anger as irrational, and female pain as imaginary. It is the way we, all of us, men and women buy into the belief that we are entitled to women’s bodies, thoughts and choices. In polyamory, this belief makes it easy for us to treat our partners as things and not people."

https://medium.com/@sheaemmafett/abuse-in-polyamorous-relationships-d13e396c8f85

This part is relevant because most of the objection to that graphic is in the idea that someone just has the *right* to go off and do whatever they want to do. OMG what is the world coming to that anyone can just LEAVE whenever they want?!? What if I don't want them to go?!?

"It is the fundamental belief that they can retain power over their bodies, minds and choices, only so long as we agree with those choices". It doesn't matter if we think they are making a poor choice for themselves. It doesn't matter if we are hurt by their choice to leave us, stop loving us, not liking us, revoking consent to sex with us.

They do, in fact, have that right. They might be behaving like dicks about it, but they still have that right. If someone gets involved in an explicitly monogamous relationship and then decides to have an unsanctioned sexual relationship with someone outside of that relationship, their monogamous partner does not own their body and they have the right to do with their own body what they will.

They're being a dick and I will harshly criticize and name-call and publicly shame people for making choices that infringe on other people's right to consent. *That* is not what they have the right to do. The choice to *remain* in an explicitly monogamous relationship without giving their partner the information necessary to give informed consent is what they don't have the right for. But they, and they alone, hold the rights to what happens to their own body and mind.

That graphic does not address the content of the person's character when it says a person has the right to leave, to not love, to stop loving, etc. It only addresses the one seeking to exert control over that person trying to leave.

"Understand, that when your reasons for disrespecting the boundary become more important than the boundary itself, you are displaying a belief of superiority, entitlement and control, and these beliefs are the foundation of a culture that tolerates rape and abuse."

"But what if…
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether it was unjust. It doesn’t matter if it hurt you. It doesn’t matter in reference to whether or not you respect the boundary. It’s their right to set the boundary because they are a whole and complete and autonomous human being. When you don’t respect the boundary, you are telling them in no uncertain terms, that you think that they are less than this.

But…
No. "

http://emmfett.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-to-respect-boundaries.html

Yep, it absolutely sucks to have someone want to leave a relationship that you want to keep. It absolutely sucks to have feelings for someone who doesn't reciprocate. It absolutely sucks to have a partner make partner selection choices that involve other partners who do not respect your own relationship with the mutual partner. They are still allowed to make their own decisions about their own body, mind, and emotions, just as you are allowed to make your own decisions about your own body, mind, and emotions, including whether or not to remain connected to someone whose choices result in your pain.

http://bettermyths.com/chivalry-isnt-dead-you-just-dont-know-what-the-fuck-it-is/

OTG FUCKING THIS!!!! Stop lamenting the demise of chivalry, YOU HAVE NO GODDAMN IDEA WHAT IT IS!

"The truth is, chivalry has basically fuck all to do with women, and everything to do with horses. ... See, the word “chivalry” comes from the French word “chevalier,” which comes from “cheval,” which means “horse.” Chivalry is literally just “rules for if you have a horse.” ... Chivalry was – and still is – basically a way of saying, “okay, I have an optimized death machine between my legs, maybe I should look out for people who don’t have one of these.”"

"Real chivalry is about noticing when you have a horse and somebody else doesn’t. It’s about being careful not to trample people just because you can."

"There are no prizes for being chivalrous, other than the prize of being a decent god damn human. ... They didn’t need to invent a complex code of ethics to justify getting shit for free, because they already had all the shit. What do you get for the man who has everything? How about some fucking morals."

"The main problem with chivalry, though, is that it can very easily cross over into paternalism, and nobody likes to be treated like a child."

"At this point, you may be thinking “hey, this is bullshit, these are just basic guidelines for not being an asshole!” and congratulations, you’re right. That’s all chivalry is: basic guidelines for how not to be a sack of shit."

And I have a newsflash for you - if you insist that "chivalry" has anything to do with men treating women a particular way, especially if you feel entitled to being angry or disappointed when any woman doesn't like being treated that way, then you are, in fact, a sack of shit and violating the moral codes of actual "chivalry".

T: Hey, so, you may not know this, but some of us are being bullied, harassed, and even killed, just because our harassers are confused by our genitals. It's even legal. It's called the Trans Panic Defense, and it basically says that someone can get freaked out by what our genitals are and how they don't match with his expectation of what people with those genitals are supposed to look like, and while freaked out, he can kill us and it's totally a justifiable homocide because we freaked him out.

C: OMG, that's terrible!

T: Yeah. But we've learned from research and from the experiences of the gay rights movement that simple exposure and normalization can help. People are afraid of things that they don't understand, and when they live in fear, they react with violence. So all we have to do is expose them to the concept of people like me and others with gender identities that don't match their expectations, and normalize them to the idea that we exist and we're human, and over time, people lose their fear. With their fear gone, they don't react with violence. When the society around them finds their fear to be the aberration instead of our existence, then even if they do still harbor some discomfort, they learn that they can't act on their fears or discomfort because the culture around them disapproves of it. So even if they still dislike us, we're safer from the possibility of violence because they'd rather not risk losing society's approval of them.

C: Huh, well, that's good.

T: So, we're asking those of you who aren't totally freaked out by us to help normalize us and help expose people to the concept of us. If you could start by not assuming the gender of people you meet, that'd be a big help. You can ask people what pronouns they want you to use for them, or you can just state your own as if it's a normal thing to state. You can also start using gender neutral pronouns and labels whenever there is one to substitute, like the singular "they" or "spouse" and "partner" instead of "wife" or "boyfriend", even when the people in question have a gender identity that matches what they were assigned at birth. This does 2 things: 1) It makes trans and genderfluid people feel welcomed and accepted in society when we hear it. We may be a small percentage of the population, but we're still a part of the population and we'd like to feel included in it. But more importantly, 2) it reinforces the idea that cisgender people are not the only ones out there, even if they happen to be a majority, by reminding them in casual ways that the rest of us exist. That's the normalization part.

C: Whoa now, back the boat up! You want me to *change* my speaking habits? Let's not get carried away here! I thought you were asking for *equality*, not special privileges!

T: It's not a special privilege. I'm just asking you to be a little more considerate in your use of language. It's literally the least amount of effort you can do for us. Just change a couple of words here and there.

C: But what about *my* feelings? What about how hard this will be *for me*? This is a lot of effort! I'd have to actually *think* about what I'm saying before I say it! You have all this talk about compassion and consideration for other people, but you're not really considering how hard this will be for me!

T: People are literally dying here. All we're asking is that you switch out a couple of words. You've done that before. You don't use the same slang that you used in the '80s. You're comparing changing a *habit* to people losing their fucking lives!

C: No need to get angry! It's really hard for me to take you seriously when you're bullying me like that. It sucks that the occasional person gets killed every now and then, but this is *my life* we're talking about! I'd have to *change*! I just don't think I can make it through a day of interacting with people without assuming their gender or using gender pronouns and titles. It goes against all of the English language! It's awkward and uncomfortable. No, that's too much to ask. People might get weirded out *by me*!

T: O.o

T: Having people who feel uncomfortable around you because you're doing something they're not used to kinda sucks, doesn't it?

C: Yes! Now you're getting it! So, sorry about all the murder-death-kills and all, but it's just not fair to ask me to put myself on the line for you. I have too much to lose! My friends would look at me funny, and that would ruin my life!

T: Have you ever been diagnosed with Irony Impairment?

C: Oh great, now you're going to go on a tear about whatchamacallit - ableism now, aren't you? Geez, just let up on the social justice warrior shit for a moment, will you? Can't you just relax and enjoy life for what it is? If you learn to just let go of things, you'll be a lot happier. Maybe stop reading all those social justice articles on the web and stick to cat videos, like I do. See how happy I am?

T: #FacePalm

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/10/02/before-you-claim-the-ucc-shooting-was-about-christian-persecution-consider-all-the-evidence/

This supports the comments I've been making about this issue - that the culture around Those Assholes* is the important factor, and the ideology merely focuses the targets for them. The underlying motivations for these sorts of tragedies are toxic masculinity, entitlement, and the glorification and celebritization of violent offenders. That's what they all have in common. They are ticking time bombs, all they need is some ideology to point them in a direction.

Even if this guy *was* truly atheist, and not one of those pathetic "I am chaos, the Devil bows before me" poser jackasses who chose Christians just because they have the most power in this country so they make the most high profile targets (and therefore are guaranteed to grant him the celebrity status he so obviously desires), we have that same dark underbelly in our own subculture. We have those same dark alleys of entitlement, toxic masculinity, and the glorification and celebritization of violent offenders and violence.

Those dark alleys have been spilling out their filth over the last several years. They're the reason I now identify as Feminist. I was one of those irritating Chill Girls who thought the gender wars were largely over and we had won, so I didn't need feminism. Until I joined the atheist community. Then I saw how bad misogyny still is and how much of it still reigns in our culture. That's how I became a labeled Feminist. Atheists turned me into a big-F Feminist.

If this guy really is an atheist targeting Christians, I won't pull the No True Scotsman card. Atheists can be assholes and atheists can be Assholes. Any woman who dares to criticize atheists on any topic, but particularly gaming, knows this, especially those women who have been forced from their homes because of the public threats of violence. This is why Atheism+ was born and why, even those who didn't jump on the + bandwagon are fighting from within our own ranks to clean up our atheosphere metaphorical "streets" of these dark alleys and the disturbing elements they produce.

But it sounds more and more likely that he wasn't atheist, and that he targeted Christians for their publicity power. Which brings us right back to the original point, that what those asshole atheists and Those Assholes, and This Asshole specifically, have in common is a deeply ingrained sense of entitlement, toxic masculinity, and the glorification and celebritization of violent offenders.

Gun Rights proponents like to trot out countries with high gun ownership, low gun restrictions, and still low gun violence. The *reason* why those nations exist like that is because their culture is different. They don't have the same entitlement and toxic masculinity permeating their culture. Sure "guns don't kill people, people kill people", but those people are products of their culture.

I was raised in liberal-but-rural California where guns were not glorified, but necessary for hunting. Guns were weapons to be treated with respect. They were not part of our identities, but tools - dangerous tools - to be used with caution and limitations. I was raised in a culture that does not produce mass shooters, racism, or the idea that violence is a solution to anything.

I was also raised in gang-ridden urban California, where guns were glorified as a status symbol and a means to power. I was within the physical boundaries of that culture, but I was apart from it, thanks to my family. I knew of children, my own peers, who had been caught in gang wars. I even dated someone who had been removed from the entire school district because he threatened violence on a teacher (which he gleefully admitted at the time). Violence was all around me and my family. Both of us - my family members and the gang members in my neighborhoods - had access to guns. One of us thought guns were a solution and the other saw them as a tool. Guess which of us has a higher incarceration rate for violent offenses?

The *culture* needs to be changed. And until it can be changed, it shouldn't have easy access to weapons. As a child, guns were kept out of my hands until I could understand and respect them properly. I was handling guns at a very young age, because I could understand. But my father would never have handed a loaded weapon to a 2-year old. He introduced them to me as I was able to understand and respect their inherent danger. Apparently, we need to treat our nation as a toddler prone to temper tantrums with no control and no higher cognitive functioning. You can't have the guns until you understand and respect their inherent danger. When you understand that, like your older sibling - the countries who don't have the same violent glorification tendencies - perhaps you can have them back.

I won't pretend to know which, specific, policies will effect the change I'm talking about. I am not an expert on legal policy, so I'm not proposing specific restrictions because I don't know which ones will work. What I do know is that the evidence increasingly shows it's the culture that's prompting these shootings. It's our *culture*. It's *our* culture. We need to stop promoting toxic masculinity, stop excusing entitlement and start owning up to it when we have it so that we can work on dismantling it, and stop turning these shooters into fucking celebrities. Regardless of their specific ideologies that chooses their targets for them, they choose acts of violence because they think it's a good thing to display anger and aggression and violence as signs of their masculinity and that this version of masculinity is something desirable. They choose acts of violence because they feel entitled to remove other people's agency. They choose acts of violence because they crave the fame, the notoriety and WE FUCKING GIVE IT TO THEM.

They achieve their goals. They choose acts of violence because they're fucking successful. And they're successful because we have given them a clear path to their success. WE have. Our culture. Our society. We gave them exactly what they wanted. The number of people they kill, whether they "get away" with it or not, that's all irrelevant. They've asserted their dominance and commanded our attention. They are successful. *We* are the ones who need to change because we are their final targets.

As an atheist, if any mass shooter is actually atheist, I fight to change our atheist culture so that we stop producing Those Assholes from within, not denying that they exist, not distancing myself from the responsibility of the culture that produced them. I don't see the gun nuts doing the same. I don't see men (who aren't already feminists or feminist allies and therefore largely shunned from masculine culture anyway) doing the same. I don't see theists doing the same when it's one of their own. 4-chan, PUA circles, Southern Pride groups - these types of groups are the tinder for these firebombs.

Our larger culture that excuses rape, excuses casual racism, excuses religious posturing, excuses homophobia and transphobia, excuses any sort of dehumanization, objectification, othering, and the removing of agency - our larger culture gives places for these cesspools to thrive and fester. Just like the guy who doesn't actually agree with rape but who laughs at rape jokes so that the rapist standing next to him thinks they are allies, our culture provides the hiding places for those among us who would do such harm. Our culture built those alleyways and is refusing to install safety lights. It's time to root out the dark places, and that starts with us.

*Those Assholes or That Asshole is the term I use in place of the name of any violent offender, as doing my individual part to deny them the celebrity status that is one of the main goals for their actions.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/09/21/the-dad-who-wrote-a-check-using-common-core-math-doesnt-know-what-hes-talking-about/

To me, this furor over common core sounds an awful lot like anti-intellectualism that's been running our nation into the ground: "I don't understand this! Therefore you're stupid!"

"Instead of trying to figure out what his child was learning, Herrmann did what so many parents do these days: He complained about something he doesn’t understand.

I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t know what “ten-frame” cards were and I wasn’t sure what he was trying to write in his check. Then I spent a couple of minutes doing the research he couldn’t be bothered to do himself."

"what math teachers have realized is that kids who relied on memorization, algorithms, and calculators had a really hard time understanding math as they got older."

"The problem with the method people like Herrmann learned is that it didn’t work when the math got harder. Strong math students find ways around that, but many students just give up on math altogether."

There's an interesting thing about this "new" math that I was never taught and how I do math. I've said before in my previous posts on the subject that I could do algebra in my head and not show my work, and the more I read about this common core stuff, the more I go "oh hey! That's what I do!" I wasn't taught how to do it, but that's how my brain works naturally. So I was considered "good at math".

Kids were grouped into two categories when I was a kid - "good at math" and "not good at math". I was a math tutor, and I helped those "not good at math" kids to be better. I never believed people weren't good at math, I just saw kids who thought in different ways and the system wasn't reaching them. I was taught by that same system, and that same system wasn't reaching me either, but I saw the ways around it.

I've told this story before. My high school classes gave us a syllabus at the beginning of the semester. On it was the entire homework schedule, so I knew what I would be assigned for the entire semester on day 1. In math class on Mondays, I would do the entire week's worth of homework right there in class rather than listen to my teachers. Then I'd have no math homework all week and I'd have the rest of the week to read a book for that 55 minute period. Since I wasn't listening to the teacher, I was teaching myself algebra (and later calculus) out of the book. I didn't show my work, but I grasped the concepts intuitively. I knew how to manipulate numbers. It turns out that I was basically doing some of these common core techniques in my head.

Here's the interesting part. One of my favorite books as a child was Clan of the Cave Bear. In the book, and in the movie, the main character is part of our current line of human who gets orphaned and adopted by a Neanderthal tribe. They (in the book) have trouble with advanced concepts because of the shape of their brains. Counting, specifically, is very difficult for them. Only the most advanced of their holy men can count past a handful and just barely at that. But Ayla is human, and we excel at math - that's why we survived without claws and fangs and fur, because we are engineers who change the environment to suit us instead of the other way around.

So her holy man is her adopted father and, on a lark, he starts explaining some of their most sacred (and secret) counting methods. He's not supposed to, but he figures she won't get it so it won't matter. He gives her a pile of rocks and teaches her to count them by placing one rock near each finger, so that each rock is represented by a digit. That's about where he usually loses his neanderthal bretheren. But Ayla thinks abstractly. So she grabs the entire pile of rocks, breaks them up into smaller piles of 5, places her hand over each pile, and then raises both hands, fingers extended, twice to indicate 20.

This blows the holy man's mind! No one has ever counted that high before! He's the smartest of the smart and he can only just barely grasp what Ayla has done. She took a large group and broke it up into chunks to make it easier to categorize. She was able to quickly count to 20 because she counted 4 piles of 5.

This is common core.

I had no idea. But I read this book in kindergarten and I watched the movie every time it came on TV. This is how I do math. I haven't had a math class in 17 years and I don't use anything higher than geometry in my daily life, so I feel like my math skills have slipped a lot. I feel that loss. But the more I look into this common core stuff, the more I feel that, had I been taught this as a kid, there's no telling how far I could have gone. I could have gone into engineering or physics. Instead, I got swept up in the "I'll never use algebra or calculus in daily life, and I need to save my college credit hours for things that will help me in my career" - the kind of anti-intellectualism that led directly to a nation that thinks the appropriate criteria on which to judge the leader of our nation is whether or not we can "drink a beer" with him.

"Because, to people like him, ignorance is hilarious. He’d rather see his son learn math the old-fashioned way, putting him in danger of struggling in his math career as he gets older, instead of course-correcting early in his education when everything is still fresh.

To answer the obvious rebuttal, yes, a lot of adults are able to get through the day just fine even though they were never very good at math. But why wouldn’t they want their children to aim higher, understand things better, and think more critically?"

"I’m telling you this new way is so much better for students, but we need parents willing to get on board with it instead of complaining because it looks weird.

At the very least, it sends the wrong message to really impressionable kids."

So first, some backstory. There's this guy who used to run a hedge-fund who then purchased a pharmaceutical company which had just acquired the rights to a drug that wasn't used by very many people but those people were pretty damn sick. The previous company had changed its distribution setup so that distribution was very strictly controlled and you could only get this drug through this one path. OK, that happens sometimes, but if anything happens to that path or your specific case is outside of that path, you're pretty screwed. So this douchenozzle bought this company that had this drug and he promptly raised the price from $13.50 a pill to a whopping $750 per pill. You read that right; I did not drop a decimal point.

The internet exploded in outrage about price gouging and the lack of ethics in Big Pharma. And by "internet", I don't mean just those wacko Naturalistic Fallacy conspiracists who think "Big Pharma" is a single evil entity out to kill us all. I mean even rational, science-based people who support science and science-based medicine but who are willing and able to call out the actual flaws in the system when found. So I posted about that on Facebook, but I didn't bother to make an archived LiveJournal post about it. It was just sarcasm about the greed endemic to corporate America. That's also not a conspiracy story - capitalism and corporations are specifically designed to support greed, not the public good. Individual people aren't evil cardboard cutouts of power-hungry villains, but the system is not conscious and doesn't have human values like compassion. It takes actual people working against the system to keep the humanity in corporations. But I digress.

Shortly after I and many other people ranted about this jerkoff, I read an article that basically said "yeah, what he did was despicable but it's only going to affect people with enough money for fancy insurance policies anyway, so whatevs".

What we are all outraged about is not the number of people this will effect. It's the sociopathy and greed that a plan like this reveals. And when you give sociopaths power, they use it. Sociopaths and abusers, on a personal level, test boundaries. They check to see where they can get away with pushing in *just a little bit*. If you're somewhat flexible on some of your boundaries, probably because you're mostly a reasonable person who can make exceptions and can see an exchange of discomfort with another person who is operating with you on good faith as a net positive thing, then you might be willing to bend just a bit on this one thing that is less important than these other things. Because we often have to get burned before we can tell that someone is *not* operating on good faith - that's *how* we know that they're not, by the way they fuck us over.

And then the abuser pushes just a tiny bit more, which seems reasonable. And then he pushes just a skosh more, which might not quite seem reasonable but you've already bent this far, so not bending more kinda seems more unreasonable because it might feel hypocritical. And eventually, those series of tiny pushes and tiny compromises have you both so far inside of your boundaries that he entrenches himself and you can't get him out.

Now take that on a global scale. CEOs, by the very nature of their jobs (or maybe their jobs don't consider human impact because it's people who lack empathy who are attracted to the position?), tend to be more sociopathic and less empathetic than the average person. They push the boundaries to see what they can get away with. And then we let them because they rationalize it as "it's only going to affect this small number of people, and you don't really care about *those* people, do you?" or "but it's necessary for this particular outcome, and you want to help this outcome, don't you?"

The fact that this particular action will only harm a small number of people that we can justify hurting as "they can afford it" is exactly what makes this action so despicable. It's boundary pushing. He's seeing what he can get away with. And our fucked up medical / legal system provides enough loopholes for him to slide through.

Yes, I do sometimes take the stance that the rich can afford to pay more taxes so they should for the betterment of the rest of the country. I have done a risk-to-benefit ratio and decided that having one fewer yacht so that starving children can have one extra meal that they didn't "earn" is worth it. I do not think that the 1000 middle class people who won't qualify for the price-gouging safety regulations but still need that drug are an acceptable trade-off for making this guy even richer.

In this case, it's not the numbers of people who will be affected that makes this story so appalling. It's the inhumanity of the individual making the decisions that does. Patterns are important. This case is symptomatic of a pattern. And those of us who were horrified by the case saw that pattern. That's why it was such a big deal.

This is actually a really good video. Lots of times, videos of this nature are hyperbolic, to make a point. But I didn't feel that there was anything exaggerated for humor's sake at all. I've had every single one of these conversations (except the one about maternity leave, since I'm childfree by choice).

The most striking conversation for me was the one entitled "wow, three men on one team!" I work in a male dominated field. It's heavy labor, mathematical, rational, engineering, technical - all stuff associated with men's interests. So, even though plenty of my coworkers state emphatically how much respect they have for women and tell stories about how much they prefer to work with women because we work harder and do our jobs better (seriously, that's what is said), there is still often surprise when women show up for work and especially when the number of women on a crew reach some magical critical number. Suddenly it's all "wow, so many women on the crew! That's amazing!"

Except women have been involved in entertainment, and in particular backstage work, for ages. Women quite often dominate lighting specifically, which is one of the more manual labor-heavy departments. I am quite often on all female lighting crews. Now, since there are like 5 other departments, the women might still be a minority when you add up everyone all together, but it's really not unusual to see quite a few women working backstage anymore. But the perception remains that backstage is men's domain and women who join it are aberrations.

And what many of my well-meaning colleagues don't see to understand is that this kind of singling out, even complimentary as it can be (see above women work harder comments) is part of what makes the environment uncomfortable for women. In order for a woman to make this industry her career, she has to be really passionate about what she's doing, to overcome all the little microaggressions and mini slights.

Because, you see, making a point to notice our gender makes many of us uncomfortable. And I'm not talking about eradicating flirting either, because a lot of women who are drawn to this line of work are drawn to the bawdy, rough-and-tumble environment. We like the dirty jokes and the flirting too, for the most part. Most of the guys I know flirt with each other on the job too, because it's a *joke* and not to be taken seriously. We all know that. No one is asking anyone to somehow *unsee* our gender or to treat us with kid gloves. But many of us would be a whole lot happier if you'd quit reminding us of our gender when it's not relevant. When I'm at work, I'm a stagehand first and everything else second.

There's a study going around that I don't have at my fingertips that shows that when women make up something like 30% of the group, men (and I think women too) see the group as being overrun by females, and when women talk something like 30% of the time, men (and I think women too) think that women dominate the conversation.

This is related. When the number of women reach a critical mass on the job, suddenly it's all "whoa, look at all the women around here!" Dude, just stop that. We make up more than 50% of the population. So yeah, some of us are going to want to work in thus-and-such industry. You don't need to point it out to us, just fucking treat us like colleagues.

With the whole Kentucky gay marriage license debacle currently unfolding (remember, she is an elected official at the county level who is currently violating a court order to perform the job duties she swore an oath to perform on behalf of the citizens who elected her), I want to remind everyone of the importance of voting at the local level, not just the presidential elections every 4 years.

Don't like any of the candidates? Don't see any difference between the two parties? Don't think anyone "deserves" your vote? This shit starts at home. This starts with school board elections. This starts with county clerk elections. This starts with local government.

The school board educates (or fails to educate) our children - our future voters. That local politician moves up to state politician who moves up to federal politician. Our mayors and city superintendents and police chiefs enact or fail to enact policies that affect us.

I qualify for Medicaid under the new Affordable Healthcare Act because the federal government expanded its scope. But our 'wonderful' governor refused the federal expansion mandate, so I STILL have no health insurance. At least the federal government acknowledged that it wasn't my non-compliance so at least I'm not being fined for it.

Pay attention to your local elections. They make a difference, and YOU make a difference.

One of the things that bugs me about the "why should burger flippers get $15 an hour when soldiers don't?" argument is that it implies that there are people who deserve a living wage and people who don't. It ranks human beings into Worthy Of Survival and Not Worthy Of Survival and it categorizes these people, not on their character or how they behave in society, but on what kind of job they managed to obtain at this one particular point in their lives - a job, I'll remind you, that is one you would definitely notice if everyone who held that job suddenly stopped.

Because, you see, the only people who are making the assumption that demanding a living wage is reserved for one category of people (burger flippers) and not another (soldiers) are the people who think it's appropriate to rank those categories in the first place.

The people demanding the living wage are not saying other people should make less, or even equally low amounts. It's like the ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ crowd - we're highlighting one group who gets shit on because they need that attention right now but it doesn't mean that other lives don't matter. Those of us in support of living wages are not also prohibiting increases for those who already make living wages. "This guy deserves to feed himself and pay rent for working 40 hours a week" is not an argument that leads to or includes "but those guys don't." That is, as a matter of fact, the argument against living wages.

So why should a "burger flipper get $15 an hour when soldiers don't?" (Ignoring whether "soldiers don't" is even true for now). Why should they? I dunno, you tell me, since I'm not the one claiming they should. The question isn't why should one class of people get paid better than another class of people who are doing work that I value more. If that were the question, I'd be ranting about sports salaries vs. teachers, not talking about living wages. The real question here is why *anyone* should be allowed to starve to death or lose one's home when they're willing to put in as many hours as we collectively think is necessary for being "productive" in order to justify keeping those doing the work we *do* value at proportionally low wages.

If so-called "burger flippers" are making better benefits and pay than soldiers, then the people you ought to be mad at are the ones who decided to pay soldiers so little, not those who want to pay "burger flippers" enough to survive, since those paying the soldiers so little are the ones ranking human lives and compensation, not the people who give a shit about everyone being able to survive.

Those of you who don't follow me on Facebook might not know about the Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal. It's a website intended to encourage social partner dancing in the Orlando area, but it also has some good resources for general social partner dancing - like the playlists. Every day on Facebook, there is the Song Of The Day - a post that highlights a particular song by linking to the YouTube video for it and suggesting a style of partner dancing suitable to dance to that song as well as linking to a related page on the website with the history and description of that dance style. I repost all those music videos on my personal FB page but it's not on Twitter or Google Plus yet, so I haven't been reposting there because I could only link back to the FB account. But the point here is that this week highlighted a song popular among the neo-swing culture called Zoot Suit Riot by Cherry Poppin' Daddies. Some of you may have heard of it.

There is some interesting history behind the Zoot Suit Riot that is related to the ‪#‎SwingDance‬ culture that the zoot suits were a part of. Many people don't take the time to really listen to the lyrics and just enjoy the bouncy swing of the song, but it's actually about a very racially charged time in US history.

The basic story of the song is during a time when Mexicans in California were experiencing a lot of racism during WWII. White soldiers and sailors began assaulting Mexicans for what they perceived as a lack of patriotism in spite of the fact that Mexicans were over-represented in the military during the war, simply because of their attire (the zoot suits). In the media, these zoot suits became a symbol and a target of the racial tension and hatred by white servicemen. This lead to a series of riots that targeted Latino youths, and this song is about those Latinos taunting soldiers about to go overseas as sort of a rallying song supporting marginalized people.

As a Mexican American who grew up in California, this song has always struck a particular nerve with me because the racism that led to the riots was never eradicated. As a middle class white-passing Mexican in the '80s and '90s, I didn't bear the brunt of it like some of my more clearly ethnic neighbors did, but I saw it and I felt it.

My own grandfather (who was a teen & young man in the '40s and himself racist) refused to attend my parents' wedding because my mother is Mexican and his objections were things like he didn't want her Mexican family hanging around his neighborhood because the neighbors would see a bunch of hoodlums and thugs with their low-rider cars and Chicano clothes and Spanish language.

I was fortunate enough to not have to personally experienced any race riots, but I wasn't terribly far from where some happened in the '80s and '90s, and the culture I grew up in sprang from some very terrible historical riots that happened right in my own town and the racial repercussions reverberated through the generations.

So I very much understand the rage and frustration that can lead to an entire group of people doing things like taunting soldiers and burning their own neighborhoods. When everything is taken from you - your dignity, your money, your ability to succeed, your children, even your voice, all you have left is the rage to get the attention of your oppressors. Sometimes that rage turns inward, sometimes it turns outward, and sometimes it gets expressed in ways that people who don't feel it, who aren't subject to its causes, don't see as productive.

But, although it may seem to be self-harming in the moment, the long view of history shows that this rage and its expressions are what lead to change. Because the people comfortable at the top can't hear you when you ask politely. They only take notice when you scream at the top of your lungs and break things.

For more information on the Zoot Suit Riots, visit the wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoot_Suit_Riots, and while you're there, you might want to fall down the rabbit hole of wiki links that talk about all the related stuff like pachucos and the arrest that kicked the riots off.

Easy Recipes From Stuff In Your Kitchen For People Who Don't Have Time To Cook And Are On A Budget!

Um, I'm not sure what kind of people you hang around with, but I don't generally have fresh kale, skim ricotta cheese, or tofu just chillin' in my fridge. That's not exactly living "on a budget", nor are those the kinds of foods usually associated with just taking up space on my shelves. Those kinds of things go bad pretty quickly.

Low income people, contrary to popular perception, don't often have a bunch of free time from sitting on their couches all day. We're often running from job to job to daycare to grocery shopping to appointments. So it would be nice if more of those "quick meals" were targeted at people who either can't afford all those fresh and trendy veggies or who don't have the time to take the bus across town to the nearest Whole Foods or farmer's market (or didn't assume we could afford to even if we did have the time) since the store in walking distance is probably a Walmart.

If a recipe could tell me how to make something healthy out of stale bread, cheese wrapped in wax, canned peaches, and Fritos, in under 10 minutes including prep time, that'd be awesome.

In general, I want less government involvement in people's personal lives, overall. But I'd really like to see more legal penalties for people who refuse to fuck off when told.

So, like, two people are in an online forum and get into an argument. One tells the other to stop arguing, but they keep arguing *in the forum*. OK, we can leave that for the moderators to handle.

But say that the forum gives the users the ability to block someone, and one person blocks the other. The blocked person then deliberately contacts them on another platform or using another medium, not to apologize, but to continue the argument that the first person is no longer interested in having. I'd like to see that, since it's text-based and time-stamped, maybe have like a $25 fine for the first offense with increasing penalties for repeat offenses.

Then, let's say that two people are walking down the street and one approaches the other. The other tells the first person to leave them alone, but the first keeps on with "why you gotta be like that? I'm just tryin' to talk with you! Hey, come back here, I'm talking to you!" That ought to be a misdemeanor of some sort too. Doesn't matter that the first didn't touch the other. The other wanted out and that's all that needed to be done.

Like, is it really so hard for people to understand that someone DOESN'T WANT TO FUCKING HEAR WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY? Don't answer that, it's a rhetorical question. Of course it's really so hard for some people to understand that, that's why they keep talking at people who have made it crystal clear that they don't want to hear any more.

And I'm not talking about the police busting down the door to arrest a parent telling their kid why they have to eat their veggies and the kid isn't having any of it, or a boss getting thrown in the clink for telling an employee something that he doesn't want to hear, or people using any sort of public platform for spouting their ideas and opinions to the general public. Don't strawman me or start Pedantically Missing The Point.

I'm talking about when an individual person invades the space of another individual person and deliberately disrespects personal boundaries by following after someone who has revoked or not given consent to the encounter. I'm talking about taking harassment more seriously. Because, legally, we don't give a shit about the guy emailing someone repeatedly using different email addresses or texting with different numbers or using a dozen different social media accounts after she has unambiguously told him to fuck off. We, legally, cared once that I know about, and it took years and his harassment of dozens (if not hundreds) of people with strict record keeping before the authorities finally took notice, and once he got out of jail, he just started up again (look up the saga of David Mabius if you're curious).

Because, legally, we only care about a dude harassing someone after he's killed her. And then we all moan and wail about why wasn't something done about it sooner? Because no one is willing or able to make harassment an actual offense with consequences. No, that would be too Big Brothery. Besides, it's just talking, right? Sticks and stones and all. Until it's not.

You are entitled to your opinions. You are not entitled to forcing me to hear them. I don't care if you don't like me, I don't need to be repeatedly told so, just LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE.

Why I need ‪#‎Feminism‬:

My well-meaning family still thinks it's appropriate to tell *me* to "be safe" and change my behaviour when I complain about someone else harassing me online, as if it's my fault and as if there is actually anything I can do to stop it.

Stop being assholes online. That's how I can be more safe.

Why I Need ‪#‎Feminism‬:

Because some dudes still think that being a Latino male makes life harder than being a Latina, disabled, poor, religious minority, not-exactly-cis-female does and that being that horribly discriminated against Latino male entitles said dudebro to constantly seek out said female on multiple platforms every time she blocks him on one to tell her so.

Because his opinion must be heard, dontcha know. We can't live in a world where someone doesn't want to hear some dudebro's opinion on something.

PSA: When someone blocks you on social media, and blocks your phone number, and reports you to the authorities for harassment, if you find them on some other social media or some other location and try to initiate contact with them there, especially if your contact continues to include insults and attacks, YOU ARE THE BAD GUY. You are creepy and stalkery and a fucking asshole.

Don't do that.

Also, if I have had to block you and I see you on jobsite afterwards, I will tell our employer and ask for you to be removed for my safety. One block and you leave me alone? That's fine. But repeated contact after repeated blocking in multiple spaces? You are officially harassing me and a danger to my safety.

Also, you don't get to pull the race card in the Oppression Olympics when the only oppression you feel is because you're a Latino male.

I'm a minority in race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and in health. I'm not here to out-minority anyone because, together, we all make up the majority and we can wrest power away from the cis-white-rich-christian-male power structure at the top. But if you're gonna puff up your chest at me over your discrimination, I'm gonna win that battle right at the start.

I just *do not* understand why it's so important to some people that they get to address other people the way they want to address them. Like, of all the things for people to be attached to in society, how we address other people shouldn't be the thing we're fighting over.

Street harassment - it's really important that guys be able to say overtly sexual things to women on the street. Or to compliment them. Or to ask for a date. Or to talk to them, period.

Trans & genderqueer invisibility - it's really important to be able to call people "ma'am" or "sir" or other gendered names, labels, and titles.

Racism - it's really important to be able to call by certain terms that people of various races have asked not to be called.

As far as I can tell, the only time I've ever seen anyone say "actually, I'd rather be called this" and have absolutely 100% acceptance from everyone in society and all walks of life and all relationships from strangers to intimates is when a woman gets married and takes her husband's name (with the extremely rare situation where a woman's parents don't approve of the marriage and refuse to acknowledge it, but srsly, don't Pedantically Miss The Point here and derail). In every single other case, there's someone out there why has to say "well, I just don't want to have to change what I've been saying up until now, because I'm used to it, so I'm going to keep calling you X whether you like it or not."

Just ... fucking hell people, change your goddamn habits. It is literally not costing you ANYTHING. When a woman gets married, you learn to change what you call her. So I know you have the ability to do it. You just have to decide that there are other things worth putting in the same amount of effort as fucking remembering someone's goddamn married name and switching to that.

I think I get one of the reasons why I lose my temper online, and I'll try to expand later (but right now I'm running late, as usual). The things I post are about people's subjective experience, their personal autonomy, their personhood, and their dignity. These things are not up for debate.

Yet people treat the posts in my feed as though it's a stage where two equal ideas with equal merit are to be weighed and considered. The counterpoint to the stuff that I post about does not deserve to share a stage with the stuff I post about. They do not deserve equal time, equal consideration.

My rage is part frustration that I'm not being heard and I'm not making myself understood, and it's also the sheer horror that anyone could even think that these topics are up for debate in the first place.

I post things for people's education and information. Which means that people need to *learn*. Learning involves listening, not talking back. People's autonomy, personhood, dignity, subjective experiences, the right to exist - these things are not up for debate, and if you think they are, you're a horrible person and I will not host a platform that helps spread your position. The Flat Earth "theory" does not deserve to share the stage with real science and rejection of other people as people does not deserve the same stage as respect for those people.

*sigh* Sometimes I just want to smack people upside the heads. One of the arguments I've seen defending the Kentucky clerk for refusing to sign gay marriage licenses is that her job *changed*. She didn't sign up for a job knowing that she'd have to do something against her principles, that wasn't part of her job when she agreed to work. Now it is. The challenge was made that, should we now expect everyone to unthinkingly and uncritically follow blindly whatever our corporate overlords tell us to do because they're our bosses?

I just ...

Let's see if I can explain this in simple terms. Her job did not change. She was always expected to issue marriage licenses. That is still her job. What has changed is *who* is eligible for them. She has always, from the very beginning, been expected to issue those licenses to whoever qualifies for them, regardless of her personal feelings about the individuals applying. THAT IS STILL HER JOB. She has never been allowed to deny divorcees marriage licenses. She has never been allowed to deny people of color marriage licenses. She has never been allow to deny atheists marriage licenses. She has never been allowed to deny "mixed-race" couple licenses. She has never been allowed to deny Muslims marriage licenses. She has never been allowed to deny gay people marriage licenses as long as one of them is male and the other is female. She's never been allowed to deny 18-year olds marriage licenses. She's never been allowed to deny marriage licenses to one 18-year old and one 78-year old.

Any of these things she might object to. I have tons of opinions on who "should" get married. That doesn't mean that I can take a government job where it is my duty to issue licenses and to use my authority to impose my personal opinion onto those relationships. It is NOT HER JOB and never has been her job to allow her personal preferences to influence her ability to approve or deny marriage licenses. It is her job and has always been her job to approve licenses or deny licenses based on the official criteria given to her from her employer. Her employer, the government, can and does change who is eligible for whatever benefits and it is not within the scope of her job to refuse the mandate. Who is allowed to get married has changed many times over the years. Expecting the criteria for who is eligible to never change, or to retain the right to ignore the change, is not reasonable.

A pharmacist is legally obligated to fulfill prescriptions. What medication is legally allowable for a prescription changes all the time with new regulations and new medical information. A pharmacist is not allowed to take it upon themselves to decide, in contrast to the *law* and to the prescribing physician, what a patient should or should not have access to. That is not their job. Their job is to fulfill prescriptions and it's someone else's job to decide what prescriptions are allowable.

I am hired to run a camera. My job duties are to aim the camera and follow my director's direction. If, when I get there, the speaker has canceled and another speaker is replacing him, and I disagree with the speaker's speech, I am not allowed to refuse to aim my camera at him just because I don't support his message and I don't want to contribute to spreading it, and still expect to get paid for that gig. I was hired TO RUN A CAMERA, and it doesn't matter if the person scheduled to speak changes after I've been hired. If I don't like the new speaker, I can quit. I've had speakers change, I've had entire performance formats change, I've even had which camera I'm told to run change. I'm still expected to do my fucking job, which is to point the lens where I'm told to the best of my ability or I have to leave so that someone who can do the job can be brought in instead.

Or, as I have actually found myself in the following position, if I cannot afford to quit and I have to implicitly "support" a message that I don't believe in, I can show up for work, perform my job duties, and then spend my free time and disposable income fighting against that message elsewhere.

Now, what this *can* make a case for is getting the government out of the marriage business entirely. If you think "god's law" trumps the government laws, then that is a reasonable position for removing the government's ability to govern over marriages entirely. But until that day comes, it's still her fucking job.

I've been seeing the "polya" abbreviation being used for a while now, and at first I thought it was just someone who didn't speak English very well. Then I started hearing rumblings in the community that some people wanted us to all stop using the abbreviation "poly" to refer to polyamory because Polynesian people also use the abbreviation "poly" to refer to themselves. I didn't get into those debates or follow them very closely, but what I was hearing was that the people who were espousing this change were also being mean to other marginalized identity people, so it didn't strike me as really anything worth following. What I *wasn't* hearing, was from the Polynesian community itself that this was a problem.

But now, apparently, someone has made a Tumblr comment asking polyamorous people to stop using the "poly" shorthand because it somehow harms Polynesian safe spaces. So now it's time for me to take it seriously, but honestly, I'm still having trouble with this. For me, the difference is that when asked to stop using other words, it's because those words mean *bad things* and the casual use of bad words normalizes the bad thing. In this case, "poly" doesn't mean anything bad in either context. It's *only* an identifier, and one that is still not in common use outside each group. But polyamorous folk are winning the visibility first. Both are marginalized communities, although we could get into a game of More Persecuted Than Thou, but I'd rather not.

According to the Tumblr comment, tagging your tweets with "poly" instead of "polyamorous" is invading a Polynesian "safe space" and harming aromantic or asexual Polynesian people and making it hard on them because they have to wade through tweets that aren't relevant to them and I'm having difficulty accepting that. Twitter in particular is a character-limited format, and insisting that all posts get tagged with the longer form makes it difficult for *our* communities to find *our* posts. What about *our* "safe spaces"?

I don't see this as the same sort of situation that generally calls for more sensitivity of language. There's no cultural appropriation happening, no normalization of slurs or hate speech, no casual acceptance of marginalization. It's just two different groups who happen to have the same Greek prefix that both use as shorthand for their identity. And both were arrived at independently. Simply establishing which is being referred to when in a confusing context should be all that's necessary. I don't see it as reasonable to prevent the use of similar words *just because* the word is already in use, especially when that word isn't a whole word but a shorthand or abbreviation.

I'd add the reminder that others have pointed out, that not only is the word not commonly used outside each group, but it's also rarely used within the Polynesian community for itself (as I am told), whereas it *has* been embraced by the polyamorous community. If anything, the word "poly" might have more cultural significance and weight to the polyamorous community than to the Polynesian community. But even if we don't try to quantify who has more cultural significance to the word, the point is that both groups do, not just one.

Part of the reason, I suspect, why there's such resistance to dropping the abbreviation isn't just about white privilege but because it's a case of culture clash. White people have a tendency to think of themselves as "without culture" (unless they claim an attachment to, say, Ireland, or something, but being *white* itself doesn't have a "culture", per se). Being part of a non-ethnic subculture like LGBTQ, goth, atheism, etc. gives people without any real sense of culture their own "culture". The poly community has decades of existence, is multi-generational now, and has its own music, art, and even parts of language. It is a *culture* now, along with everything that implies (including the fact that not everyone fits into the cultural stereotypes or molds and that there may be regional differences). For a lot of white people, this is the first time really experiencing what it's like to have a culture of any sort of significance. Being asked to give up that word because some other group "had it first" and doesn't even use it all that often can feel like being asked to give up a part of their identity. In fact, that *is* what is being asked, because that word is an identity label. But, let's not forget that, although white people may make up the majority (or possibly it looks that way thanks to media highlighting pretty, thin, white, middle class people), not all of us polyamorous folk are white. And we are using the shorthand "poly" too.

As I said above, this is not the same thing as asking people to stop calling those A-line tank tops "wife beaters" (a label that I find difficult to give up, btw, because of long-standing habit, but I'm making the effort). That label refers to an inanimate object and normalizes domestic abuse. It's *really* not a hardship for people to stop using it, other than they have to think about it for a while until they change a habit. This perspective on the "poly" shorthand is asking people who feel marginalized themselves, who have built a community and a culture *around that word*, to stop using the very label that they used to refer to themselves as people and to the culture that they've adopted (or grown up in).

Let me ask, would this be an issue if, say, a people from the Pacific Islands and an indigenous group from Australia, both of which were colonized by English-speaking Europeans, if they both happened to be named something similar and the shorthand or abbreviation was the same, would we still see one group asking the other to give up their label? Or is this only an issue because so many polyamorous people are white so we assume that they can't also be experiencing marginalization or cultural identity? When we stopped calling Native Americans "Indians", it wasn't because Indians said "hey, we had that name first!" It was because some Native Americans said "that's not our name for ourselves, stop calling us that!" Being white, sure, we should be cognitive of white privilege, but that's not the only power in play here. I'm *constantly* fighting for my own identity labels and frankly, I'm tired of other people telling me what I'm allowed to call myself.

I want to be clear that I'm not drawing a hard line here. I'm not taking the definitive stance "you don't own that word, so fuck you, I'm gonna use it!" I'm suggesting that this issue is more complicated than simply white privilege asserting dominance over a marginalized brown group, therefore a hard "you can't use that word, it's ours!" isn't applicable either. Some of us polyamorous folk are minorities in a lot of ways, and we're fighting for our own cultural identity and to be free of persecution on many fronts. I don't want to have to fight yet another battle on my identity. I'm a minority in gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, economic class, and even medically / health-oriented. I have to fight for my right to identify myself in every single area that makes up a person's identity. But, at the same time, I have privilege in many ways too because I can coast on my cis-gender, I pass as white, I can pass as hetero, I can pass as mono, my health issues are invisible a lot of the time so I can actually do quite a lot of physical activity, and my religious beliefs are not readily apparent unless I choose to make them so. This means that I do have to be conscious and careful when my resistance to acquiescing to another minority doesn't come from one of those internalized privileges.

I think that this is a complicated matter involving many crossed axis of privilege and oppression. As the arguments are presented to me right now, I do not believe it is reasonable to give up the prefix "poly" as shorthand for "polyamorous" in all contexts, and I think most people agree with that on both sides of the debate. The real question is in that word "all". If not all, then some. If some, then which ones? As someone who is vehement on clarity of language, and who has repeatedly taken the stance "you can define a word however you want, but if you use it contrary* to everyone else's understanding, then it's your fault for not being understood and you're in the wrong", if you were to find yourself at a Polynesian picnic, for instance, where your Polynesian friend invited you to a family gathering, then yeah, using "poly" to refer to your romantic life would be confusing and it would make you the more considerate person to alter your language for ease of communication.

But changing Twitter tags? Blog tags? These are *public* spaces. *Anyone* can click on a Twitter tag and see anyone else's tweets. It's not within the context of a poly *group*, where you have to deliberately join that group and it can therefore be assumed that you're aware of the context. I'm not going to argue against anyone who chooses to not tag their tweets with "poly" anymore. That would be telling someone else how they should identify, which is just as bad as telling them that they can't identify (both examples have exceptions, but generally not a good idea). But I don't see it as reasonable to *ask* us not to use those tags ourselves in public forums. An article defending the use of content warnings in class syllabi explained that the content warning wasn't to "coddle" students, but to place responsibility for their own self care on the student themselves. The content warning was to indicate to the student that they *would* face information that they might find difficult so that they could prepare themselves to address it in whatever way was best for them.

I see use of the internet as similar. I don't use reddit because I just can't handle the misogyny and racism found there. I keep getting told that I should just not read past the first 3 comments, but I have not found anything on reddit to be worth the effort my own self-care would require to wade into that cesspool. Anything worth seeing is often screencaptured and then posted as a meme on FB by people who I have deliberately culled to be people worth interacting with. True, I do not subscribe to the advice "if you don't like it, just don't use it" when applied to all of social media. FB and the like are often the only means of self-care and of contact for marginalized people. I approve of social media *controls* so that we can edit out the parts that are too difficult for us. I can block people on FB. I can choose to join only certain groups and not others. And if I have a traumatic trigger to the use of certain tags, I can choose to follow other tags.

So, for me, I do not see enough justification to give up the use of the poly prefix in polyamorous-specific spaces or in general public spaces and plenty of justification to defend its use. But I wouldn't insist that all Polynesian people adjust themselves to my use of the word "poly" while I'm in Polynesian-specific spaces and I'm just going to have to accept that I may have to wade through tweets that are not relevant to me or that actively engage in sexism and religious bigotry because those things are embeded in the background of colonized Polynesian culture just like they are in US culture (yes, it's true, reading the Polynesian-based poly tweets can be "unsafe" for some of us polyamorous people too). We'll just have to use context to figure out what people are talking about, just like we do for every other homynym in existence, just like we know that someone has rejected an offer even when they don't use the literal word "no" because of context, just like we understand the question "can I?" often means "may I?" instead of "am I able to?" in the right context. Context is important, and I believe that context is sufficient to allow both groups to use the shorthand so that neither is required to give up their own cultural identity.

I do not see this as a white privilege vs. marginalized people issue. I see it as two marginalized groups trying to find themselves and crossing paths. There are definitely some white polyamorous people who are being jerks about it, as there are always some white people being jerks about cultural sensitivity. I just think that cultural sensitivity has to go in both directions in this case, *even though* some people in one of the directions happen to be white because cultural issues are not always and only about ethnicity.

*By "contrary to everyone else's understanding", I am exempting those situations in which someone is attempting to *educate* others on a misunderstanding of a word. So, for example, telling people that you're monogamous but you have 3 live-in romantic partners who all know about each other and agree to the arrangement and insisting that others accept your use of the word "monogamy" is "wrong" because it's contrary to every reasonable and common use definition of the word. But explaining to people that the vast majority of the culture thinks "feminism" means "man-hating" when it really means "equality", that's an exemption. They're not insisting on using a word differently because they want to define words however they want. They're insisting on using a word "differently" because it's actually more accurate and they're trying to educate the population about a miscondeption of identity and oppression.

I know this will piss some people off, but I firmly believe that everyone has a right to not have sex with anyone they don't want to have sex with, for any reason they have, or no reason at all. Even if that reason is stupid. Even if that reason hurts someone's feelings. Even if I think that reason is so full of shit that I want to physically and literally knock some sense into them. They have a right to say no and they have a right to revoke consent at any time.

What they don't have a right to do is treat that person any differently in a non-sexual context than anyone else, or harm them in any way, or participate in a system that discriminates against them or any of that other bullshit. But that's not the issue. Those are good reasons not to disclose private information to people who are not sex partners and it's a good reason not to take on certain people as sex partners (with the added bonus that you don't have to disclose to them). It is *not* a good reason to manipulate someone into becoming a sex partner who would not consent to that role had they known.

"But we can't read minds to know all the possible things that all the people in the world might possibly make them not want to have sex with me!"

Strawman argument. There are things that we know by virtue of living in our cultures what people are *likely* to object to. Just like I know what Christianity is all about, and what the experience of being a white male out in society is all about, and what mono relationships are all about - even though #NotAllWhateverMajorityDemographic, I know enough about those demographics because I'm steeped in the expression of the experience of those demographics every fucking day of my life. I know that if some guy hits on me while I'm walking down the street, there is a greater-than-average chance that he won't like me *because* of my atheism, my polyamory, my feminism, my job, my independence, and my gender identity even though I'm really not that far away from cis. Those things all go contrary to the cultural narrative, so I'm pretty sure that at least one of them will be deal-breakers for the average guy who thinks it's appropriate to hit on me while walking down the street.

But, on the very off chance that he might like me precisely because of those things, or that maybe he won't mind those things, telling him about it up front will be a bonus. It'll give him even more reason to be interested in me. But that's such a statistically unlikely event that it has never once happened to me in all my years of being hit on by randos on the street. Excuse me, not minding the atheism thing happened exactly once, but he was not American-born and he was from a country where religion isn't a big thing, so I don't think it's really an exception to my point.

Now, disclosing all that shit to street randos is not what I'm advocating either - that's a personal call regarding safety. But by the time I've decided to accept someone as a sexual partner, and he has accepted the idea of me as a sexual partner, I know there are certain things that he is, by pure numbers, likely to have a problem with and could affect his willingness to consent. Most of those things are actually related to the act of sex itself and are not unreasonable to want to know, even if their reaction to that information or their beliefs about that information are, in my opinion, unreasonable.

What I absolutely do not want, as a small female person, is to find out *afterwards* that he would not have given consent by *him* finding out afterwards and thinking that I betrayed him. I've actually already had that happen to me and I count myself damn lucky that all I got away with was a hurt pride and some temporary embarrassment at being shoved out the front door without all my clothes on. I know all the excuses - this was just for fun and not some long-term relationship, if that was a deal-breaker for him then it was his responsibility to ask about it, blah blah blah.

I know how mainstream guys (and a lot of poly guys) feel about the idea of putting their dick in somewhere that some other dick has already (recently) been. Telling them up front that their dick isn't the only one is the best way I've found so far of only fucking the guys who won't beat me for it later, and being open about that in general is the best way I've found to locate guys who actually think it's pretty fucking cool that they're not the only ones.

When someone finds out after they have already had sex with someone whom they wouldn't have had sex with had they known what they found out later, it doesn't matter how "wrong" they are for not wanting to have sex. It doesn't matter how unjustified they are for feeling betrayed. It doesn't matter to the people they kill, or beat, or humiliate. Being "right" doesn't save them that beating, that death, that humiliation, that heartache, or that disappointment. Knowing that the potential partner is that sort of person is the kind of information you want *before* you fuck them and not to find it out the hard way.

It didn't feel great when I had to disclose to people who I liked that I had an STD. It really hurt my feelings to have people I cared about be so afraid of something based on stigma, and not facts, that they were afraid to even touch me non-sexually even though it wasn't something they could catch that way and it wasn't even something that was likely to harm them. But it would have hurt them more to have sex with me without the information necessary to give informed consent. It was more than just physically harming them, because I disclosed my STD long after I needed to, long after it wasn't possible to pass it on, just to make sure they understood sexual safety. Not giving them that information would have been robbing them of their agency. It would have been manipulative, and it would have been making decisions for them - deciding what they "needed to know" on their behalf based on what *I* felt about that information. Sure, *I* knew that the STD wasn't likely to harm them, but that wasn't my call to make. They have the right to refuse sex with me on any grounds and to make decisions for their own participation based on their own risk analysis, not mine.

If the information that you're hiding (even passively) isn't a big deal, then it shouldn't be a big deal to disclose. This goes along with the Little White Lies defenses &

tacit's post on truth and virtue- if someone is defending the secret that hard, then it's clearly not "no big deal". Remember, this isn't a situation where one partner is demanding to know something that isn't relevant and is attempting to violate another's privacy. This is something that could *change someone's consent* for having sex with you.

If you can't trust the person you're about to get slippery with to handle the information that you're keeping secret, then this is probably not the safest person for you to be getting slippery with either. If you fear for your safety, then don't take them as a partner. You don't *have* to disclose anything that will make you unsafe, but if you're unsafe with this partner, then choosing them as a partner was your first mistake (assuming you, yourself, weren't coerced or forced into the encounter in the first place - this whole rant is aimed at consensual sexual arrangements, not abuse victims keeping secrets from their abusers to prevent further abuse - again, go back to the truth and virtue post) and keeping the secret is the second in a list of mistakes.

This is about two things - 1) respecting your partner's agency enough to give them the information necessary for them to give consent. You can't read their minds to know that they would revoke consent if they found out that you once masturbated to a poster of the New Kids On The Block when you were a kid and they have an irrational fear of cooties from Donny or whatever the fuck one of their names was, but you can know that there are certain kinds of information that is culturally important and likely to affect someone's willingness to fuck you if they knew about it (and if you don't know that person individually well enough to know their specific deal-breakers, you at least know those culturally likely deal-breakers). Your partners are human fucking beings and deserve to be treated with no less dignity and respect than allowing them to consent to sex with you and I can't fucking believe this still has to be said;

And 2) saving yourself either the repercussions of being found out later, or of being a person who is not your best self. Sure, it's possible that person may never find out, especially if it's a one-night stand in a strange town and you didn't exchange names or phone numbers and have no overlapping social circles or interests to ever run into them again, even on the internet. It's probably even likely. But *you* know that you will have acted with the best of intentions and the highest degree of integrity. *You* will have been a person who respects your partner's agency. *You* will have been the sort of person that you ultimately hope your partners would be for you - someone who does not take it upon themselves to decide on your behalf what information is "necessary" when it's actually something that you think is not only important, but reasonable to be informed about.

This isn't about degree of severity. I have two analogies I often bring out in this debate - murder and jawalking aren't the same thing and don't deserve the same punishment, but both are against the law. A creek isn't the same as the ocean, but both will get you wet if you step in them. I'm not talking about whose the baddest, most evilest, most terrible person out there and I'm not talking about stringing people up by their toenails even for minor infractions. The guy who didn't dislose his HIV and had unprotected sex with a bunch of people, giving them HIV? Yeah, he was a monster, and I'm not putting him in the same category as someone who has a sort-of sexual partner with no arrangement of exclusivity not disclosing that person to a one-night-stand in another country on a business trip. But both are still examples of not disclosing information that not only could affect one's willingness to consent but is *likely* to. Both are still examples of not respecting the other person's right to not have sex, one example just has much more dire consequences than the other.

I'm far less likely to make a personal value judgement about someone who says "I've done some things where I wasn't my best self. I know my justifications for them, and I may even slip and not be my best self in the future, but I know that this thing is not living up to my highest ideals of integrity," than someone who tries to justify their actions, digging in their heels and doubling down on preventing informed consent with excuses, selfish justifications of "privacy" and "not my responsibility" and "too much trouble / effort." Someone who says "yeah, I torrent big blockbuster movies. I know it's wrong, but I do it," isn't getting the same kind of judgement from me as someone who says "I don't care if you're a starving artist, you OWE the world, and consequently me, the right to use your art without being compensated for it." (That's a real example, btw, not a strawman and not hyperbole). This isn't about degree. It's about being your best self and by doing so, treating those around you with the dignity and respect that they deserve, especially those you engage intimately with.

If I want to live in a world where I, as a woman, have the right to say "no" for any reason whatsoever and no reason at all, if I want to live in a world where my body is completely mine and I have ultimate authority over what happens to it, then I have to make that world by defending other people's right to say "no", even if I disagree with their reasons, because it's *not my place* to decide the validity of someone else's reasons for saying "no". If integrity were easy, everyone would do it all the time.

"Ben, there's a story eating at you ... one you know you gotta tell."

"Not that simple."

"Telling the truth is never simple... or easy. Why only the best of us ever really try."

"Cheikh Mohammed, do your friends give you gifts?" I started in Arabic, breaking off a piece of village bread.

"Of course, it's a friendly thing to do." He adjusted his posture on the scratchy woven carpet.

"Now if I'm coming from America to give you gifts, am I your friend?" ...

"You asked me if my friends give me gifts," he said. "Make sure that YOU are my friend. Make certain you understand me, first. Learn my strengths, my heart, my efforts. Once we are established in brotherhood, then yes, send me a present, one that won't hurt me to open."

The above conversation was an excerpt from an article I just posted about voluntourism - the pattern of relatively wealthy white Americans swooping into areas we considered "underdeveloped" and doing things that assuage our white, wealthy guilt, but that don't help those areas in the long term. But I found this conversation was a much bigger symbol.

This is the essence behind the Platinum Rule. This is the meaning behind feminism and feminist critiques of so-called "compliments". This is complaint behind racism. This is struggle behind poverty here in the US with the nation's refusal to provide healthcare and screening welfare recipients for drugs and concern trolling the grocery carts of food stamp recipients. This is what everyone who is oppressed and who speaks out against it is trying to say.

It is not a "gift" when it is not given out of understanding for the other person. It is not a "gift" when the reason for giving it is to make the giver feel good but doesn't account for the effect on the recipient. It is not a "gift" when it doesn't reflect the recipient themselves - their humanity, their feelings, their personhood.

When feminists complain about compliments or opening doors, the comments inevitably get bogged down with "but it's NICE to open doors and tell someone that she's pretty!" This is the very epitome of what's wrong and what this excerpt is trying to say. It's not about the opening of a door, it's about what the gift of opening the door says about the person opening it and the relationship to the person it is being held open for. Opening a door for someone is nice, unless it isn't. And it takes a deeper, nuanced understanding of the person, the culture, the circumstances to know if that gift of "courtesy" is one that won't hurt me to open.

"We are proud of this; we are empowered by this. Now, give a village man a handout? You've just weakened him. You've increased his dependency; diminished his sense of self-esteem. One of the most widely-accepted notions is that Westerners are the solution to African problems. This requires portraying us as helpless and endlessly recirculating images only of abandonment and violence, or innocence and primitivism." ...

[Give a woman a pedestal? You've just weakened her. You've increased her dependency; diminished her sense of self-esteem. One of the most widely accepted notions is that men are the saviours and guardians of women. This requires portraying us as helpless and endlessly recirculating images only of weakness and femininity, or innocence and infantilism.]

"You see, Heather," he set his meat down to look closely at me, "We are not weak. We are not underdeveloped. If you believe we must be helped, look more closely. We are content in our hearts, affectionate to each other, and attentive to our souls. Perhaps the greater need is for us to be helping you."

http://tacit.livejournal.com/611774.html

Psychologists often talk about a quirk of human psychology called the fundamental attribution error. It's a bug in our firmware; we, as human beings, are prone to explaining our own actions in terms of our circumstance, but the actions of other people in terms of their character. The standard go-to example of the fundamental attribution error I use is the traffic example: "That guy just cut me off because he's a reckless, inconsiderate asshole who doesn't know how to drive. I just cut that car off because the sun was in my eyes and there was so much glare on the windshield I didn't see it."

We do this All. The. Time. We do it without being aware we're doing it. We do it countless times per day, in ways large and small.

For the last several years, since I first heard of this error, I've started catching myself when I, for instance, call people assholes on the road. I still do it, but in my head I remind myself that I'm just letting off steam and that they feel just as justified as I do when I do it to other people. I think it's helping me (and is entirely appropriate) to feel my feelings as they are and to be validated in my reaction to situations while still considering my opponents as "people". I think it's important to be able to be angry at someone for doing an assholeish thing, and even to judge people for their actions, while still keeping the situation in context that they are a complete person who believes they are the hero of their own narrative just as I do.

"I would like, therefore, to propose a radical idea:

The world is made of lots of people. Some of those people are different from you, and have different ideas about what they want, what turns them on, what is and is not acceptable for them, and what they would like to do.

Some of those ideas are alien, maybe even incomprehensible, to you.

Accept that it is true. Start from the assumption that even if something sounds weird, distasteful, or even disgusting to you, it may not be so to others--and that fact alone does not prove those other folks have something wrong with them. If someone tells you they like something, and you have no compelling evidence that they're lying, believe them--even if you don't understand why.

I've been trying forever to get people to understand this, and I started by getting myself to understand it. I know lots of people (myself included) who think they have The Answer to other people's problems. I know, for instance, people who get really upset when other people make career choices that are not choices that they would choose for themselves. These are usually people who pride themselves on their "work ethic" because they have bought into the erroneous tale that people who work hard enough will be rewarded with an increase in the quality of life based on capitalistic standards.

So anyone who is poor must not be "working hard enough". Anyone who is poor who turns down a job, or who gets sick and goes home instead of working through their illness, or basically does anything that they, themselves, think they wouldn't do in the other person's situation, those people (by this logic) deserve the poverty they get.

I know, I've had that same perspective myself for most of my life. It gets *really* tiring to keep explaining that other people are DIFFERENT PEOPLE. They have different limitations, different perspectives, different preferences, different goals, different priorities, different feelings, different abilities ... and all these differences add up to making different choices that people should not necessarily be punished for.

People who have lots of sex do not "deserve" to get STDs, or to be beaten up, or to be thought of as some kind of "lesser quality" of person. People who do not want to work 80 hours a week doing manual labor in two or three different jobs and still not get any medical benefits do not "deserve" to remain poor or thought of as "lazy".

We do not all need to have the same house, the same jobs, the same clothing, the same kind or amount of sex, or the same goals out of life. And yes, as long as we live in a scarcity-model capitalistic society, sometimes that means that some of us pay more in dollars than others for that right. But if that means that people get to live the lives that makes them happy (which, btw, ultimately *does* contribute back into society), then I'm all for that.

"Equality" does not necessarily mean or have to mean equal dollar amounts. It means equal opportunity for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".

http://www.myfoxphilly.com/story/29539702/star-wars-action-figure-has-parents-furious

OK, we need to talk. Parents, your fear of female skin is way out of hand. I don't think that any of the adults in this article have ever even seen the movie (except for the 1 parent who said she did).

1) The "for children age 4+" means that it's physically SAFE for children age 4 or above. It means that children under age 4 might choke to death on the parts. That label has nothing to do with the MORALITY of children based on age, it's for the safety of the product and nothing more. It's YOUR job as a parent to decide what's appropriate for your children to view and participate in.

2) When kids ask you why something happens or something exists, it's YOUR FUCKING JOB as a parent to have those answers, or to find them. That's your sole purpose in that child's life besides providing the actual physical necessities for survival. You are responsible for raising them and arming them with information about the world around them. So when a kid asks why this doll has a chain around her neck, making the doll cease to exist so that you won't get that uncomfortable question is not an appropriate response.

3) The answer to that question is actually an incredibly important teaching moment in a child's life, especially a female child. So if you haven't seen the movie, I'll give you the answer:

Princess Leia is a Senator. That's right, she's a government official and a leader of her people. All by herself. She's a leader. Later, when her entire planet is blown up, she stops hiding her involvement in an activist organization that seeks to overthrow a tyrannical government and becomes a full-time leader in that activist organization.

While performing her various leadership duties running the universe and fighting for justice, she meets a man and falls in love. But she remains independent and she keeps her job. In fact, he gives up HIS job to support hers.

Eventually, that man gets captured and she takes it upon herself to rescue him.

During her rescue attempt, she gets captured herself by the same evil mob boss that has her love interest. He attempts to demean her by stripping her of her more modest and functional attire and putting her in objectifying garments as well as chaining her to his side.

In the ultimate act of feminism and female empowerment, Leia waits for an opportunity, then with no concern for her appearance, takes the very chains of her enslavement and kills her captor. Using her own oppressor's tools of oppression against him, she wins her own freedom.

Leia's "slave outfit" and broken chain is more than just scantily-clad hot chick. It's a symbol of both her oppression and her triumph. It represents her empowerment and her independence. She reclaims what is hers - her agency and autonomy - and she uses the very objects used to steal them from her in the first place.

That slave harness and that broken chain are tangible reminders that it doesn't matter what we wear or how we are oppressed, we can overcome. We can break our chains and we can become free. Although the movement for more practical attire of our female action figures is important, in this case, the "immodest" clothing is important for the plot and shows us that revealing attire doesn't *prevent* women from still being heroes. If anything, being able to perform heroic feats in revealing or impractical attire makes the actions even more heroic (a la "Ginger Rogers can do everything Fred Astaire can do but backwards and in high heels").

Slave Leia is the ultimate symbol of feminism and female empowerment, and explaining that to your daughters is an opportunity you are wasting, for which your daughters pay the price. Of all the Disney Princesses, she is the one we should be encouraging our children to emulate. Not in spite of the slave outfit, but especially because of the slave outfit.

And let's just say you forget or disagree with all the feminism stuff symbolized by this outfit - the answer to "what am I supposed to say when my kids ask me about this chain?" is to begin a conversation about the objectification and sexualization of women in our society. Either way, this is a very important toy and you're failing as a parent if you think the answer is to prevent your child from seeing it.

This action figure should be proudly displayed on every child's shelf, along with the lessons of tyranny, slavery, freedom, autonomy, empowerment, and female strength. You should be more concerned with the symbols of violence in the toy aisle than your child possibly seeing plastic lady skin or having to learn a lesson about female subjugation and freedom.

http://www.48hills.org/2015/06/22/mayors-sneak-into-uber-behind-police-barricades/

I'm finding this whole Uber controvery fascinating. It reminds me of the problem my own industry has with unions. Here's the thing - I support unionizing and the right to unionize. I've seen far too many employees and workers get shafted because of rich people at the top not caring about the people at the bottom. But, at the same time, I've seen that exact same thing happen because of entrenchment of unions.

There seems to be this trend, this path that workers' rights fights have - workers get stomped on by people who don't care and have no legal incentive to care. Workers organize and build up enough power to make them care. Things improve. Then unions get a *lot* of power and start behaving like the previous employers. So the people at the bottom start getting stepped on again and they start going around the unions. Which solves the immediate problem, but undermines the more abstract concept of unions and the protections they serve.

I'll give an example of my own business. Stagehands were treated like crap - low pay, long hours, hard working conditions. Unions came in and regulated the industry - gave us standard workdays, decent pay, compensation for things that the industry needs to keep going like longer-than-standard days or the inability to schedule lunch breaks at decent times. When the "show must go on", we can't just stop for a sandwhich because it's noon. Fine, that's a reasonable objection to regulating the industry like the rest of the country's businesses, but they have to compensate us for that with extra money. Stuff like that.

So, that's all well and good, but then the unions got entrenched. The rules started getting lengthy, and counterproductive. Like, in some locations, a Project Manager (i.e. the site's head boss) can't plug in his laptop because that's "electrical" and requires a union-assigned electrician to come down to the site to plug it in for him, costing him the time in waiting for an electrician to be found and sent in and also costing him the salary for said electrician. And, it's not just the electrician's pay, but also the union's fee on top of that. Like, the electrician might make $30 an hour, but the union is going to charge that Project Manager $70 an hour and take the extra $40 for union fees. Oh, and they're gonna charge the union worker his own fees for belonging to the union and finding him a job.

As one of those lower workers who might benefit from getting work as the electrician if I had laws that required clients to use me, I find this to be unreasonable business practices. But I'm not exaggerating, this exact story actually happens. There are places where you have to hire a dedicated truck-unloading crew, a dedicated dock crew that pushes the cases from the truck to the building's entrance, and another dedicated pushing crew who takes it from the entrance to the room where the gear will be stationed. Dedicated truck loaders, I get. A separate dock crew, I don't. That's a lot of money to pay pushers when there are already people who can push cases.

On top of that, unions are supposed to protect the worker, but I've found it to be very difficult to actually get union protection in many places. The unions that I've had contact with seem to want to keep people out, not bring them in. So where does someone find work if the unions won't hire them? They have no choice but to find an employer willing to hire non-unionized workers, which means that they're subject to abuse without regulation, which is exactly what's happening in my industry right now.

So, this Uber thing. Taxi unions protect cab drivers by negotiating fair wages, compensation, and working conditions. But here in Orlando, the Mears company has a monopoly on public transportation that isn't specifically city-provided like the buses. They're strong enough to pressure Disney, which is usually the heavy hitter in this town. Mears might be protecting their employees, but they're also strangling free trade in this city. So Uber comes in offering much more affordable pricing to people whose economy just tanked and can't afford taxis and offering jobs to people who desperately need work.

But at what cost? We've seen from the alt-med industry that lack of regulation is not in the consumer's best interest. There's no training program for the drivers. There's no accountability. There's no adherence to other protective laws like ADA compliance. It's up to the random people who get hired to make sure that they're good drivers and that their cars are in working conditions because there's no centralized method for keeping things up to a minimum standard.

The unions in my industry have behaved so poorly that they've convinced even freelancers who would benefit from union protection that unions aren't worth it. So what happens? Companies sweep in and fill the void, and once they've built a firm base for themselves, they start whittling away at those benefits that the unions once fought for us, because there's no union now to stop them. I've gone 10 years in this business without a raise. I've seen the lowest, entry-level stagehand wages get raised, but I'm making the same money as a camera operator now that I did a decade ago. As a freelancer, if I raise my rates, some companies just won't use me.

I'm seeing the eradication of Day Rates - a guaranteed salary for reserving my entire day for a company. Since we usually don't know how long our work is going to go, when we take a gig, we reserve the entire day for the gig. That means that we have to turn down other work. If the day ends up being short, it used to not matter because we were paid for an entire day. But lately, companies want to pay us by the hour. If we don't know what time we'll be done, or we can't guarantee that we'll be done by the estimated time given, then we can't schedule other work for later in the day to make up for the lost hours.

I'm seeing the loss of food being provided. That was a perk, but given the heavy manual labor, hard working conditions (usually in rooms without air conditioning in Florida and a violation of many OSHA rules), having food provided is good for morale. There is a surprising amount of shit that workers will put up with if they just get fed.

And there are other small erosions. Weird stuff that you might not think of as an eroson of "workers' rights", like dress code. It used to be assumed that backstage workers were "lowlifes", and we could wear whatever we wanted (as long as it didn't compromise safety, so, like, no sandals at work). But more and more companies are expecting us to do hard labor in humid temperatures wearing nice slacks and collared shirts. Or to sit still in freezing air conditioning but not wear appropriate clothing to keep warm. Because appearances are more important than comfort these days. It's ironic that tattoos, piercings, unnatural hair color, and other body modifications are becoming more and more socially acceptable but less and less acceptable in an industry known for its uncouthness.

Not every company is doing this. It's not consistent across the industry or across regions. And not every company is doing every one of the things. Sometimes one thing is taken away but another is given in compensation (they might not feed you, but they'll double the lunch break time to give us time to go off-site to find food). My point is that unionization was important to protect the worker, but when those protections prove to hamper job efforts for those very workers, then the workers themselves will sabotage their industry by allowing in unregulated employers in order to just get work, any work.

I don't have the answer to this problem. I don't have the training or the experience of working where these kinds of decisions are made and the data is collected. I only know what I see. What I see is that regulation is important to protect the people, but the people need to feel protected by those regulations, otherwise they'll cut off their noses to spite their faces and go around those very regulations to fill immediate needs without benefit of seeing the big picture of the regulations. And when they do that, they open the door for exactly those sorts of employers that the unions were protecting us from in the first place.

A union is great, but if I can't get hired by the union, I have to get a job somewhere. And if the union's version of "protecting the worker" costs the employer so much money that he can't make a profit, right or wrong, this is a capitalist society and profit is what the employer wants. If he can't profit, he'll find some disillusioned worker like me who is willing to take some cuts because half the benefits is better than no benefits which is what the employee was getting from the union.

With Uber, I'm strongly in favor of regulation. That's my life on the line in that unregulated driver's car. I want some assurances of safety and I want some accountability. But as a poor person, I'll be back to begging for rides from friends because I can't afford cabs in those situations where I've needed to use a service like Uber. And a lot of people will lose a lot of money if Uber has to change their policies. I'm not arguing in favor of Uber. I'm saying that I'm interested to see if a solution can be found to this problem, because I'm in the category of people that is most susceptible to being preyed on by exactly this sort of union / employer power struggle. I really hope there can be an answer that requires regulation and accountability while still providing the public with affordable services and jobs.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122110/i-dont-want-be-excuse-racist-violence-charleston

I've had people trying to put me on a pedestal my entire life. Some women eagerly accept being raised up, because it gives us some leverage, an illusion of power, in an otherwise powerless existence. They embrace their pedestal and enforce the hierarchy of being "goddesses".

I, however, noticed how little room I had to move on that pedestal, and how far I had to fall if I ever made one misstep. I have always resisted the pedestal. I've never wanted to be raised up. I wanted to be on equal ground. "But I don't treat you this way because I think you're weak! I treat you this way because you deserve to be treated like a queen! I treat you this way out of respect!"

"Respect" is a slippery word. That's not respect. I am human, not a goddess, not a queen, not a work of art. That kind of respect only lasts until you decide that I'm not worthy of that respect anymore, if I step out of line and behave in a way un-goddess-like. I have never liked the pedestal.

But women everywhere think I'm nuts. Women, who subconsciously know that we have no real power so they grasp at the scraps thrown to us by our oppressors, couched in pretty language like "goddess" and "respect", those women have always resisted my message that we are not goddesses, we are not works of art to be protected like the Mona Lisa from a thief in black.

I have always known this intuitively. So I have not always had the language to explain why it's so wrong. Who wouldn't want to be cherished? Worshiped? Protected? Anyone who can see the cage surrounding the object needing to be protected, that's who. But if you are someone who knows this intuitively, and haven't had it explained to you, then you, like me, might not have had the words to explain the feeling of wrongness. And you, like me, might not have always been able to unpack how tightly race and gender are woven together, like delicate steel fibers in the mesh that makes up the cage we are being "protected" in.

You can keep your pedestal. I wish to run free on the ground.

"American racism is always gendered; racism and sexism are mutually dependent, and cannot be unstitched."

"There is an important distinction between white women, a people, and the concept of white womanhood—one that holds that a white woman is the best thing you can be in America after a white man, and that it is the responsibility of white men to protect your virtue at any and all costs. This white supremacist and benevolently sexist ideology depends both on the subjugation of white women by white men, and on the subjugation of all people who are not white—by white people (including white women)."

"This highly selective concern about preventing sexual violence is dependent on the peril of white women;"

"It was, and remains, necessary for white women to decry the violence that is done in our name. It is on us to dismantle racism with just as much commitment as we dismantle sexism, for one cannot happen without the other."

" those women were shot because the belief that white women must be protected at all costs depends on the belief that black women aren’t truly women, that they’re barely people. That they’re disposable. Racism is always gendered, and gender always raced."

www.elephantjournal.com/2014/10/when-emotional-abuse-looks-a-lot-like-love/

"Because abusers see their partner merely as an extension of themselves rather than their own person with every right to their own opinions and limitations, boundaries are often blurred."

This. This so clearly and succinctly explains the problem I have with our culture's view on relationships. And this toxic attitude has seeped into the poly community. It starts as the One True Love fantasy. It morphed into the Soulmate dream and the "two halves of one whole" myth. When we subsume our identity into the relationship, and when our partners accept that submission, that enables abuse even if the abuser never *intended* to abuse or be malicious.

The act of viewing a partner as an extension of oneself rather than an independent person who has chosen to entangle their life with one is an abusive act. Merely seeing a partner as an extension is a dehumanizing event and robs them of agency, even if you are "benign" about what you do with that view.

When it moves into polyamory, we see this in closed groups and in typical unicorn hunting "add a third to our relationship". I shouldn't have to say this, but I will because I do have to: this is not a commentary on the *structure* of triads or of core couples with extramarital or extrarelationship partners. This is about the *mentality* that often leads to a particular structure rather than other structures because those structures are so compatible with abusive mentalities. It is possible to be in a triad that is not abusive. I was in one myself. But the structure of a pre-existing couple wanting to add a very specific sort of person to "complete" their household has, at its very foundations, the script for abuse.

It's right there in the descriptions - "complete us", "add to our relationship". This could be a quad or a quint or anything else. It's the context, which is why motivations are so important.

Abusers see their partners as extensions of themselves. Couples who see their "secondaries" or their "thirds" as an extension of themselves or an extension of their relationship are starting out with the exact same dehumanizing, agency-removing viewpoint as abusers. People in quads that put the "family" group above the needs of the people in it are dehumanizing their partners, which removes their agency, which *fundamentally* removes the ability to consent.

I was in an 6-person group that was ostensibly "open" (because I don't do closed relationships). Some members viewed the other members as extensions of themselves via the family group. This led directly to abuse.

It's not the structure, it's the mindset. It's just that there aren't a whole lot of dehumanizing abusers out there deliberately setting up *open* networks. That's too difficult to control.

But a triad filled with unexamined gender assumptions and gender and/or racial privilege, with a dash of cultural discrimination in the form of couple privilege is much more logistically easier to control because those things are tools for control, as well as including built-in support for isolation and other common abuse tactics.

Poly folk are so busy reinventing the wheel and thinking that mono-based scripts don't apply to us, that we're all too ready to ignore and rationalize away abuse under the well-intentioned but very damaging rose-colored lens of "there's no Right Way" and "truth is relative" and "we are trailblazers making up our own society as we go".

It's so very easy to hide abuse when the culture has its own persecution complex mixed with our fucking harmful American Rugged Individualism. Galileo Effect, Dunning-Kruger Effect, No True Scotsman, and our fantastically good innate ability for self-deception - it's past time to stop harboring abuse in our communities and in our relationships.

Share The 8 Inforgraphic - 8 Warning Signs Of An Abusive Relationship

So, I'm new to the Social Justice War. I know it doesn't seem like it, but I spent most of my formative years fighting for environmental issues, and I moved immediately into poly issues, which doesn't really feel like "social justice", at least not in the early days because the level of persecution doesn't even compare to any other social justice issue. Feminism, racism, homo- and transphobia issues, these all came to me recently, even though my *feelings* on the subject have always been for equal rights. So bear with me here, because this needs to be fleshed out.

It has come up in several different contexts over the last week that there is a lot of confusion over what an ally is, what an ally should do, intersectionality, privilege, and oppression, and related topics. Because I'm so late to the game, I'm sure someone better researched and more knowledgeable than I has already come to this conclusion and written about it somewhere. But this is a new concept *for me*, and I wanted to share it as a way to work through it and refine it in my own head.

People with privilege have come to hate the word "privilege" and they have stopped listening when that word comes up. But we *all* have privilege in some ways, and we are all disadvantaged in other ways. I'm female, so I'm disadvantaged. But I pass as white and I grew up middle class, so I'm privileged there. But I'm currently lower / working class and I'm technically an ethnic minority as well as a religious and sexual minority so I'm disadvantaged there too.

And just because I'm part of a class of people who is *structurally* disadvantaged by *the system*, it doesn't necessarily mean that I, personally, experienced the kind of systemic discrimination or oppression that others in my class have, or of other disadvantaged classes. And just because I'm part of a class of people who, as a *group*, are given *group* privileges by that same system, it doesn't mean that I, personally, haven't had some hard times, or even that I haven't had some hard times specifically because of that same class that is supposed to be privileged.

So I want to stop all this bullshit fear of the word "privilege" and instead I want to just recognize *where* we have it and where we don't - because we all do and we all don't. I refuse to play the Oppression Olympics. My oppression is not worse or easier than someone else's - I've had some benefits and I've had some shit in life, that's just how it goes. My oppression is not *equal* to others, either, I just don't think the relative level of oppression is relevant here.

Instead of arguing over who has privilege and who doesn't, I want to recognize where my privileges come from, and then I want to *use* that privilege to "punch up" (to steal a phrase from a different issue). Here's where being an ally gets complicated.

People who pride themselves on being allies often find themselves feeling confused and betrayed when, after all their hard work they've done for underprivileged people, those people turn on them and tell them that they're doing it wrong. Some of us might just cross our arms and say "well, fine, then, if you don't like my assistance, then I'll just stop helping!" Others really want to help, but if they've spent any time at all listening to disadvantaged people, they've probably heard "you can't know what it's like to live my experience" somewhere along the line. And if they've heard that phrase, then they might have no idea what they can even do to help, since the privileged person can't possibly know what it's like to be someone who is in a class that they're not in so they don't feel that they can talk *for* that class.

Here's what, in my opinion, it takes to be a good ally: First, listen to the group that we want to be an ally for. That way, we can learn what their position is. Next, take what we hear, and speak about it. But, here's the tricky part. We have to speak to people *in our privileged class*, but we cannot speak *to that group* that we are defending about their own experience.

So that's what I mean by "punch up". We have to use our status as white, cis, straight, male, whatever to be an amplifier for the voices of the non-white, non-male, non-straight, non-whatever that we are trying to support. We have to say the words that are being spoken by the underprivileged group, and we have to say those words *to the privileged group* that we are a part of, because that group only wants to listen to other members of the same group.

But then here comes the next part ... after listening and after speaking, we then have to go back to listening. We have to be conscious that we aren't taking on the mantle of the White Savior. The words we are speaking are not our own. We are only repeating them to people who refuse to hear them otherwise. But if the people we are speaking for don't like that we're speaking for them, or they don't like *how* we're speaking for them, being a good ally means not arguing or defending ourselves against the people we are trying to support. That would be "punching down". In the end, this is not our fight, so it is not our place to decide that we are the warriors the fight needs or that our fighting style is the proper strategy. THEY are the generals, and if we step out of line, it is our duty to be corrected.

We have to "punch up" by punching a hole in the defenses of our own class or higher so that those from beneath can rise up. It is not appropriate to "punch down" by telling those beneath us how they should run their war. We are the support team. We are not the drivers of the movement. And, as part of the support team who happens to have better armor and weapons, we might end up being put on the front lines to absorb some of the attack as we take the more effective shots from the front while others direct us from behind our human body shields.

As someone in a privileged group, I can afford to be put out in front. They can't. That's why they're underprivileged in the first place. As someone in a privileged group, I have less to lose therefore I have less need for additional defenses or reinforcements to watch my own back. Not zero - remember, I am part of privileged groups but I am also part of underprivileged groups. As a woman, I need men to stand up to other men on my behalf because the men they are standing up to *won't hear me* when I speak. As a white-passing woman, I can afford to face down other white people because they will hear me better than a black person when it comes to issues of race.

I have other, related thoughts on this - stuff about how it's our responsibility to sacrifice for those less privileged but to not expect the same level of sacrifice in return, but I'm going to save those for another post. This one was specifically about punching up. That phrase came from criticisms on comedy. Comedy is a necessary tool for discussing difficult issues in the public sphere. But what differentiates a particular joke on a difficult issue from being funny vs. being offensive is whether it "punches up" or it "punches down". Does it make fun of of the privileged class or the underprivileged class? Making the rapist the butt of a rape joke is funny. Make the victim the butt of a rape joke is offensive. Who is being targeted? Someone above, or someone below? Are we punching out the big guy with muscles and a bullet proof vest or the little guy who is already beaten and bloody on the ground?

In a similar vein, we all need allies in our social justice battles. We need people in higher classes to help us fight our wars. But since people belong to multiple classes, it can sometimes feel like we're trying to rank people when we talk about privilege and who has it worse than whom. And then it can feel like, when we *do* try to help, our help wasn't appreciated. Or maybe we're so conscious about the Savior Complex that we're afraid to help because we don't want to step on anyone's toes.

So I'm proposing some simple rules of thumb to help potential allies navigate this complex privilege discussion. 1) We all belong to some classes that might be considered privileged and we all belong to some classes that might be considered underprivileged. Accept that and leave off debating who has it "better" than whom in any area. It doesn't matter if someone is part of 3 privileged classes but only 2 underprivileged classes and someone else is part of 4 underprivileged classes and only 1 privileged class. Pick one category, and if you're in the privileged class, then shut the fuck up and listen to the person in the underprivileged class *on that class experience*. If we're talking about race, leave out your underprivilege-ness in some class that isn't race. That's a distraction. We're talking about race here, and in race (for example), you are not the underprivileged one so shut up and listen. If you belong to some other underprivileged class, then use your experience to develop *empathy* internally for this group that you are not a part of, but we don't need to compare and contrast our various classes.

2) Use whatever privileged status you have to repeat the words of the group you want to be an ally to to others in your same class. Point those people in your class directly to the source of your words as soon as they are finally able to hear the source instead of needing it filtered through your shared class. Your responsibility is to get them to listen. Once they are able and willing to listen, pass them off to the source so that you don't become The Savior. Our job is to *borrow* the words of the underprivileged class, not to steal them. They still get all the credit.

3) Never presume to tell someone in the class you are trying to be an ally for what they ought to do or what their experience is, especially if someone is directly contradicting you. Let them debate amongst themselves the best strategies, if there is any debate to be had. If one of them asks you for advice, and you happen to have information or experience on the subject, you can share what has worked for your other underprivileged classes in those fights, but they may not be directly comparable so don't get too attached to the group you're talking to actually adopting your advice.

4) Retain your humility and always be ready to apologize and change strategies when someone of the group you are trying to be an ally for tells you that your efforts aren't appreciated or are contraindicated. Remember, this isn't your fight and if you're doing it for the social cookies, then you're not really an ally. We've all had to adjust our methods as the groups we're defending have matured and tried different tactics over time. We just have to learn to try and keep up and accept that we are not the experts in their fight.

These are the lessons I'm hearing right now from the various groups that I wish to be an ally to. These are not the lessons I grew up with and I'm trying to change my tactics to accommodate. I hope that I will be a good enough ally, that when the strategies change again as the culture changes in response to all these social justice battles, that I will be able to rewrite these rules of thumb to better reflect the needs of the communities that I wish to ally myself with.

You know what I find highly ironic? The people I knew as children - family, school friends, etc. - those people are, today, complaining about misbehaving teens and supporting police violence against kids and internet shaming their kids as suitable forms of punishment.

Those same adults, when we were kids, were those kids who played their music too loud, who jumped people's fences to illegally horse around in other people's backyards, who mouthed off to cops enforcing the city's curfew, who sat around basements with illegal drugs complaining about "pigs" busting up their good time, and who fantasized about calling the authorities on their own parents for "brutality" and "child abuse" when they were spanked or grounded or publicly humiliated by being yelled at when they misbehaved.

My own sister actually got a noise pollution citation for driving with a stereo turned up too loud (California had laws like that). I got bullied for NOT smoking pot and not getting drunk with the rest of the middle schoolers (yes, ages 12-15). Half of our collective music collection among my high school friends were tapes and CDs stolen from record stores (the other half was taped off the radio, which is still piracy). Our normal weekend activities included sneaking out of our parents' houses way after curfew and breaking into the backyards of people who were on vacation or the fenced-off school yards where it was illegal to be after school hours.

In fact, the thing we did most often was called Ice Blocking. We'd get a giant block of ice from the grocery store, then, about 2 in the morning, we'd scale the fence to a school yard that had a large hill in it somewhere, climb to the top of that hill, and either sit or stand on the block of ice and try to "surf" it down the hill while the rest of our group sat at the bottom getting stoned or drunk out of their minds. That's not even broaching the part where we were hired as lifeguards - literally being responsible for the lives of other people - and the entire staff spent as much time as possible hotboxing the office (closing off any form of ventilation and then smoking pot to fill it with smoke they could continue to inhale even when not then-currently taking a hit), so that their judgement was impaired while on duty. People's LIVES depended on us! But we did what we wanted to do, even at the expense of other people's lives.

Another thing that was very common in my circles was highway racing. We didn't do "street racing" as most people think of it - where two cars start out at one end of an empty street and race to the other end. We raced each other *in traffic*. That's how I ended up rolling my car down a hill at age 16 - I was trying to beat someone's speed record on this particular road, I lost control of the car, but got back control only by moving into the left lane. I lost control again because I had to swerve to miss oncoming traffic, and that's what spun me to the curb, which then tipped my car over and I rolled down the hill into someone's back yard. There was absolutely no concern for the lives or the property of the other people we could have (or did) destroy. And every single person I knew then (and many I know now) blamed the *cops* for writing them tickets when they were the ones breaking the law. Everyone had some excuse why, when *they* did it, it was somehow justifiable, but those other assholes on the road were crazy assholes.

These people doing the complaining about "no respect" and "gotta teach them a lesson" are the same people who tailgate and speed when they're late, because it's somehow "different" when they do it. These are the same people who have a hard drive full of pirated movies and music. These are the same people who go to Google Images and download and repost copyrighted images and who then get all pissy when called on it because they somehow deserve the "right" to use intellectual property that they don't own.

The key ingredient threading all of this together is entitlement. As kids, we felt entitled to use other people's property and to break laws that didn't suit us. As adults, now it's *our* property that people are using without permission, so it's somehow fair, now, to treat those kids exactly the same way that we felt was "abusive" (yes, that accusation was slung out a lot towards parents, teachers, and cops, when I was a kid, when those adults weren't even doing anything remotely as serious as the news articles I see passing around these days) back when we were kids and it was directed at us.

I don't think people remember being kids. They remember getting smacked when they misbehaved and, as adults, they wish kids would behave, so they think that getting smacked is what made them value social etiquette. I don't think it is, because I see them doing all sorts of bullshit as adults (many of which I named above, like speeding and piracy). I don't think they really remember the shame or the humiliation or the anger that these kinds of punishments bred in them as kids. Because they definitely don't recognize that same anger or defensiveness at authority that they continue to have as adults. They only admire and respect authority when it suits them, when they're the recipient of the benefits of that authority. It's all "yay, cops!" now, but still "fuck TSA!" and "fuck Metallica for suing their fans who illegally downloaded their music!" I wish irony actually burned. Maybe then my generation would understand the hypocrisy they're espousing and learn to have some fucking empathy to teach children right from wrong without resorting to the same bullshit that made us resent authority when we were kids.

Don't let your mind be so open that your brain falls out.

I see this is lefty politics, in right politics, and in poly groups. People want to keep "considering the options" even when the evidence against efficacy mounts.

There comes a point at which it is no longer reasonable to continue considering certain options. It is no longer reasonable to continue considering the possibility that the world is flat. We have such overwhelming evidence, that we can safely discard that hypothesis without being "close minded".

When the poly community erupts over a book or a blog post that carefully details a more effective, efficient, and ethical way of doing relationships, the *reason* why the community erupts over that literature is because someone has finally written a Theory Of Ethical Relating that explains and summarizes the overwhelming evidence that this method is more effective, efficient, and ethical.

That's what a Theory is - it's not a guess, it's a summation of the facts that exist and an explanation that ties those facts together. You may not like the conclusions, but the "open minded" person doesn't keep their mind continually open for bullshit and crap. Being "open minded" means being willing to consider the evidence. When the evidence is in, you can accept the conclusion and still be an "open minded person", because you did what open minded people do - you considered the evidence.

All this to say, if everyone in the community is saying "dude, that method is fucked up", then the community is not the bad guy for discarding your fucked up method. You are not Galileo. The "experts" agreed with Galileo, and the religious nutbags were the ones who condemned him. The "experts" are not agreeing with you. You, in this analogy, are the close-minded nutbag who refuses to accept the changing consensus which was developed as more and more evidence accrued.

Being open-minded is considering the evidence. Insisting that your lone wolf maverick idea is the right one when everyone around you is saying "dude, that's not new, we already tested that one and it failed testing multiple times over" is the very definition of "close minded". You are not willing to consider the evidence. You are the close-minded one.

So this is interesting. I've noticed a trend now, that I started seeing many years ago, but had less nuanced and accurate language to describe.

In the poly community, there are frequent debates on how much information we are supposed to share with our partners, usually regarding our other partners. To me, this completely sidesteps the issue. It's like Franklin's blog post on Radical Truthers where the question isn't between "truth vs. white lies" but about compassion and empathy. I've noticed that the following people tend to side with the following argument:

Pro - you should share EVERYTHING with your partner and keep no secrets ever! This includes no password locks on cell phones or emails or computers, or if you do, both parties should have the password.

I've noticed that this position is overwhelmingly held by people who are in primary-style relationships (or desire one) and only applies to the primary couple (or group if they're equilateral poly types) but not to anyone outside the couple, regardless of length of time of that "outside" relationship. These people nearly always disregard the suggestion that this level of entwineness is actually an invasion of privacy on the poor "secondaries" who do not receive an equal level of snoopiness into the couple's privacy. Sometimes this is not held by both members of the couple, and usually after some digging, it comes out that the one who does hold this position would rather that their relationship be more couple-centric hierarchical than it is, while the one who doesn't hold this position doesn't favor the couple-centric hierarchical model.

This position also finds favor more among straight cis-men whose female partners aren't exclusively interested in dating other women. Maybe they already do date other men, maybe they only date other women but they're bi, or maybe they even *say* that they don't want to date other men but their primary male partner picks up some "vibe" from them that makes them afraid that the woman might want to in spite of what she says she wants. That "vibe" could be completely in his head, too, as misogynistic men don't really believe that women can know what they want or make valid choices for themselves, and may suspect desires of their female partners that their female partners explicitly state they don't have.

I wanted to include the other side here, but it turns out that there are a whole bunch of different kinds of people who favor the con side, with several different motivations, and it's a mixture of both reasonable / respectful rationales and unreasonable / abusive rationales. So I'll explore that perhaps in another blot post where I can go into more depth.

Basically, as someone who fully embraces transparency and honesty in relationships, it's really disturbing to me to see so many people swing to the abusive and controlling side of the "honesty" spectrum, and use "honesty" as a blunt instrument with which to beat their partners & metamours over the head by disrespecting autonomy, privacy, agency of both their partners and their metamours. These sub-categories of people aren't really about "honesty" so much as they're about control and objectification, but it's couched in "honesty" language because that's more reasonable (and they perhaps don't even know that they're motivated by control because they may not have examined their insecurities deeply enough yet).

Demanding passwords and sharing accounts and the like is about controlling their partners and dehumanizing the metamours. This is *fundamentally different* from actual transparency in relationships, which still seeks to protect the privacy and agency of all involved. When it's motivated by compassion and respect for agency, then there is no conflict between transparency and privacy.

When desire for knowledge about one's partner is motivated by respect for agency, the desire for that knowledge is not about preventing people from "keeping secrets", but about sharing your life, your intimacy, and your vulnerability with someone. Because this person understands that it's about intimacy and vulnerability, this person also understands the need to protect the privacy of their partner and metamours BECAUSE they know that what is shared between the partner and metamour is ... get this ... intimate and vulnerable. If you respect intimacy and vulnerability, then you should also understand why it's so fragile and must be protected in others.

If you have empathy, then you understand that another couple's relationship (your partner and metamour) has the same right to have its privacy settings be set wherever that relationship needs them to be set just as your relationship with your partner does, regardless of your personal preference for *where* that boundary goes. if you have empathy, then you know to respect the other person's perspective, not to insist that whatever *you're* comfortable with is what everyone else should be comfortable too.

But when the motivation for information is about controlling other people, it's all too easy to rationalize why one person is privileged above another to invade their privacy and to force their way into another couple's intimacy and to demand a third party's vulnerability. Because, with this motivation, it's all about YOU, the person making the demands for information, not about the intimate experience that's shared between two fully-formed, vulnerable, sentient human beings. YOU need to "know" this. YOU need to feel "secure". YOUR feelings trump any space set aside for other people to be intimate or vulnerable and your feelings trump consent.

It doesn't matter if the other people involve acquiesce to the demand. It doesn't matter if the metamour says "sure, I have nothing to hide, so go ahead and share all our text communication with your wife." This only means that the person making the demands happened to find someone whose boundary is so far back, that it hasn't been stepped on yet. But the demand is still an attempt at boundary-pushing. The demand is still invasive, still intrusive, and still dehumanizing. And if the insecurity driving all this behaviour isn't dealt with, it'll only escalate until they DO find the boundary. And suddenly they'll wonder why everyone is yelling "abuse!" at them. When the truth is that they were abusive the whole time, it's just that no one ever pushed back at their boundary pushing before.

There were some good comments in the FB thread for this post I want to copy here. Eventually I will feel this pattern & put everything together. I'm going to leave these comments without attribution for now, but if you read my blog & you made one of these comments & you want attribution, feel free to identify yourself.

""but that I share more with my wife than another love is an interesting quandary"

It's not really about which partner you share more with. One of the biggest misunderstandings about poly relationships is this concept of "equal" vs. "fair". Lots of people think that relationships need to be "equal" in order to be fair, but that doesn't take into account individuality. It's not which of your partners gets more access to your information. It's whether or not your partners get access TO YOUR OTHER PARTNERS that causes the problem with the couple-centric model.

To give just one example, let's take a hypothetical couple Sam and Samantha. They share everything because they've built a life together and are blissfully happy and secure about it. They don't pry or snoop and they respect each other's privacy, but out of convenience, they have each other's passwords and occasionally get into each other's emails or phones for pragmatic reasons.

Now let's say that Samantha begins dating Steve. Because of the level of sharing that Sam and Samantha have, Steve has to factor in the possibility that anything he shares with Samantha via email or text might be seen by Sam. He isn't trying to hide anything from Sam. But certain moments and certain conversations between Steve and Samantha are an intimate moment between the two of them. Maybe Steve even doesn't mind if Samantha *tells* Sam about it later. But with the current setup, he has to always keep in mind that anything intimate or vulnerable that he shares with Samantha has to either be done in person and private, or he has to be willing to extend that *exact same level* of intimacy and vulnerability to Sam - a man that he is not dating.

This limits the paths of intimacy that Steve can share with Samantha. Maybe Steve is OK with that. Maybe he just naturally operates under these conditions anyway. I'm not suggesting any kind of maliciousness or mal-intent on anyone's part. I'm not even intending to imply a value judgement about the above scenario. I'm just pointing out that when we "share everything" with a partner, that affects how safe others feel to share with us.

When I write an email to one of my partners, I almost always am fine with their partners reading it. But I know that their emails are password-protected and they won't share my emails without my explicit permission. That affects how open and free I feel about sharing my intimacy through the medium of email with that partner. If I knew that they shared an email account with a spouse, every email that I wrote would be with the thought in mind that I am writing for *both* of them, not just one of them, even if I'm not in a romantic relationship with both of them. No matter how "open" of a person I am, that still places a limitation to the intimacy and vulnerability on my relationship.

And I had a relationship with someone once like that. I am so on the "open and honest" bandwagon that it didn't bother me at all, at first, that he shared everything with his wife. She was a friend too, we were hoping this was going to lead into a close family tribe, etc. But then when things started not going so well, the fact that their "open with each other" rule didn't protect *my* privacy hindered our ability to work through our issues. It wasn't the main reason that we broke up, but the speed and specific nature of our progress (or lack thereof) was negatively affected by it." ~ me

"I can't help noticing that all of the folks who responded saying 'My partner knows my passwords' used the word 'partner', 'spouse', or 'SO' in the singular. I actually had to go and look at the top of the page to check this was a poly group."

"Okay, here's how I see it. --- A password is much like a house key. Maybe some of you would be okay with copying your house key for everyone who asks. I'm not. That doesn't mean I am 'hiding' things inside my house. It means it's a private space where I want to be able to feel safe.

My phone and my email account are like a house I share with my friends and family, as well as my various partners. I can't just give someone a key to that space without first checking in with ALL of the other people who live there. That violates their boundaries and their privacy, not just mine. "

"The two big selling points I’ve seen for total transparency (to the point of reporting on and sharing everything) are intimacy and security. And I think, even brushing all resulting problems aside, it doesn’t actually work for either one. It’s kind of like how promising someone that you will never leave them, or you will never change, or you will never die will actually make them feel *more* insecure. Why? Because you can’t promise that, and the more you try to build a life in service of these goals the more you will both become aware of your mutual powerlessness to manage change.

Similarly, trying to share everything with a partner is a way to try to pretend that you aren’t fundamentally separate. The more you try to merge, the more you will be reminded that they are different, the more you will become aware that you cannot know them completely, that you cannot control what they are or how they change. Your attention will constantly be drawn to the fact that you are outside of them, and there’s no way to erase your fundamental isolation from everyone else.

Differentiation is required for intimacy. Expecting that your partner will not be separate weakens differentiation, and actually prevents intimacy.

As for the poly situation where you are expected to share everything you do with other people? Even if everyone agrees, in my experience this just starts to leave you feeling sicker and sicker. In the service of transparency I’ve shared things I wish I hadn’t shared, been forced in situations where I either had to feel like I was lying or breaking a confidence (seriously, the worst feeling ever) and been made a part of things that I didn't want to be a part of. And at the end of the day, it severely eroded intimacy and trust and left everyone feeling insecure.

Now when someone shares an experience with me I see it as something that belongs fundamentally to them, I feel honored to share some small part of that, I don’t feel it’s owed to me, and I don’t feel betrayed if they need to take it back.

* I feel like I should put the caveat in that a certain amount of honesty and sharing is required for intimacy, but that baseline of trust and openness is not what we’re talking about here."

"I would think the common factor isn't insecurity so much as entitlement (which tends to be the common factor in almost all forms of abuse, from what I've been reading recently). I can't stand it when people equate honesty with having no privacy. I recently wrote a big post about honesty, and made sure to include this point:

'While I tend to value privacy less than most, people still have a right to it, even from intimate partners. However, this doesn’t extend to a right to be dishonest. The key difference between privacy and dishonesty is that an honest person will admit to keeping things private. An honest exercise of privacy will involve phrases like “I don’t feel comfortable telling you that,” “I don’t want to talk about that,” or “that’s private.” Rather than misleading or misdirecting, an honest private person will merely state that they don’t wish to disclose.'

Something like sharing an account password or not has no implications for honesty. There's a difference between honesty and openness. So long as you're saying "no, I won't share that with you," there is nothing dishonest going on."

This was created as a Facebook event worldwide by the rather well-known Lee Harrington (look them up). Since not everyone has FB, I'm sharing it here. I wanted to make sure all the details came through even for people who couldn't visit the event page, which of course meant that it's too long for Twitter, so I'm making a public blog post so that I can tweet *that* and anyone can see it (hopefully).

I HATE April Fool's Day. Our culture has begun to reward and celebrate the sorts of pranks that punish belief and gullibility. Now, as a skeptic, I would ordinarily say that's a good thing. But we aren't just teaching people to be more skeptical, we're teaching people to be more cynical because we're presenting these false stories by TRUSTWORTHY SOURCES and then humiliating people when they have the gall to believe a person (or a business) who has previously earned their trust. April Fool's Day isn't about teaching people to investigate or question, it's about setting someone up with a totally believable story or prank as presented by someone they have reason to believe, and then publicly displaying their belief in the most humiliating way possible. April Fool's Day has become:

"Ha ha, I'm a good friend that you have every reason to believe, and I'm telling you a totally reasonably believable story, BUT IT'S FALSE and you believed it, you fool! You're such an idiot for believing me, even though I deliberately set you up to believe me!"

And that's the nice version. Other popular forms of pranks involve other sorts of humiliation that don't require belief but often require destruction of property or poking at people's vulnerable spots (like fake pregnancy announcements on social media when there are women who can't have children but who desperately want them, for instance, or fake-coming out as gay when real people face discrimination, ostracization, violence, homelessness, and even death). So I am really opposed to April Fool's Day as a national holiday. But THIS is a holiday that I can get behind:

In our culture, April Fools Day has become a day of pranks and emotional confusion, deceit cast in the guise of playfulness.

Let us make a new holiday to counter the experience, one week later...

April 8th
Honesty and Vulnerability Day!

Turn to a friend and share how you adore them. Tell the world about a joy of yours, or a tender shadow that has been weighing you down. As you do so, let them know that you are being vulnerable and honest, and ask that they receive your gift of honesty and vulnerability from a place of love as well. This is not just an online event, this is a push to make the world at large a better place for us all.

Day of Honesty and Vulnerability is a chance for us to build strength and connection in our world rather than perpetuate pain and confusion. Let us build a better world for us to all live in, one day at a time.

#HonestAndVulnerable
#HAVDay
#HonestyAndVulnerabilityDay

https://positivejuice.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/an-anonymous-open-letter-to-people-in-abusive-relationships-who-want-to-stay-in-the-relationship-despite-the-abuse/

I've made comments before about having been in relationships with abusive men before, but their abuse didn't "stick" to me, so I didn't recognize what they were doing as abusive tactics until much, much later. I might say that we weren't compatible or I might even say that someone was a jerk, but I don't always recognize patterns of abuse when I see them and I don't identify as an abuse victim because I don't feel as though I *have* been abused. Instead, I feel as though people have attempted to abuse me and they were unsuccessful (with the exception of my second fiancé).

I actually have a whole series of blog pieces I'm writing now on abuse in the poly community, and one of the pieces is devoted entirely to that concept - being in relationships with abusive men but not being actually abused. I'm finding this series very difficult to write, precisely because I don't consider myself to have been abused so I don't feel like I'm qualified to really talk about it, at least not in depth like that. This article was pointed out to me, and I think that it is giving me a little clarity on the subject.

"My abusive behavior started because I thought I was entitled to control what people thought and how they reacted. A lot of people fuck up there – even people who never hit anybody, they still think it’s ok to mess with your mind and make you feel bad so you’ll do what they want. That counts as abuse. Abuse is about putting someone down, not just physically hurting them."

I find that a lot of people's control issues have sexist roots. We are told from the beginning by some sources that the Man is in Control at all times. He is in control of himself, he is the head of the household, he provides for his family ... control, control, control. If I acted in a way that someone felt was inappropriate, my male partners might be told to "get your woman under control." In fact, this is actually a direct quote.

Once, a person was having some personal emotional issues and, just by coincidence, I and two of my metamours just happened to touch on those subjects in conversation with that person in very close proximity to each other. So, like, I said something to that person's partner, then my metamour said something to that person, then another metamour made some kind of suggestion. Keep in mind that we weren't offering any sort of advice like "hey, your hair is dumb, you should change it." No, I mean that I talked to that person's partner once about, oh, I dunno, let's say being adopted. Then my metamour mentioned in passing something about babysitting. Then another metamour said something about wanting kids. And this person had, let's say, an emotional crisis about being sterile, or something. Obviously this wasn't the subject, but I think it's still a fairly accurate analogy.

So, just by coincidence, we all happened to have these totally unrelated conversations about kids, and we all did so without knowing that the others were having their respective kid conversations and without any of us knowing that this person was having a sterility issue. This person then had a massive freakout, accused us all of attacking them, and then emailed the partner that made us all metamours and told him "get your women under control". He, not having any idea what this was all about, responded "have you MET my partners?!"

So, to get back to the point, control. Our culture has a deeply rooted relationship with the word "control", in a variety of ways - sexism is just one of them. We fetishize control. And I say this as a self-admitted control freak myself. The reason why I'm harping on this point is because wanting to be in control, by itself, doesn't make anyone a bad person. Wanting control, disliking feeling out of control - I'm not making a negative judgement on that alone. There are completely valid and legitimate and appropriate reasons for people to feel that being in control is a good thing and something to aspire to.

However, here's where we can start to have problems. If you start with the mindset that control is good, and you follow that up with the idea that you need to be in control, it is not a very big step to keep going with "in order to be in control, I have to control other people around me, or else my life will not be in my control". We have examples of this all around us - from the police maintaining civil order, to parents being expected to "control" their children in public, to wrangling our office minions in order to increase next quarter's sales, etc.

What I'm trying to say here is that, with all our cultural and familial influences, it may seem perfectly reasonable and a sane and rational adult might not see anything wrong with wanting control even if it means controlling other people. As Franklin said in his keynote at PolyLiving this week, we are not all divided into Good Guys and Bad Guys - we are all both. And if we could just get comfortable with the idea that good people can sometimes do bad things, we might all find it easier to correct our own mistakes when confronted with them.

"Abuse grows from attitudes and values, not feelings. The roots are ownership, the trunk is entitlement, and the branches are control"
~ Lundy Bancroft in Why does he do that?

This quote is saying that abuse isn't about feelings. Feelings can be changed. An abuser doesn't feel like being an abusive dick. Abuse is about attitudes and beliefs, and that's much harder to change. If we have a controlling attitude, if we think that we need to be in control all the time including in control of other people, that leads to abuse. That's much harder to change because, to the abuser, they aren't doing anything wrong. A man who hits his wife does so because he has an attitude or a value that women need to be "put in their place". In his mind, he's not doing anything wrong because women need correcting and it is right for him to correct his wife.

But what does all this have to do with my original premise? What does this have to do with my self-identiy as not an abuse victim? Well, this next quote from the article is what caught my attention and prompted this piece:

You wanna know why we continue to abuse? Because getting your way with someone can’t be a one-time deal. If I abuse you once and give you time to really think about it, you’re probably gonna be better prepared the next time, more confident, with a plan. We gotta feel like we control you.

So the reason why I say that abuse doesn't "stick" to me is because I go into my relationships already "prepared" and "confident" and "with a plan". See, I have ridiculously high self-esteem, as I have said many places before. Self-esteem doesn't come from believing that you're the cat's pajamas. I mean, sure you can think you're awesome, but self-esteem actually comes from honesty. Self-esteem comes from truth. It comes from looking at yourself, seeing your flaws and vulnerabilities and warts and wrinkles and thinking "hey, I'm a pretty awesome person and it is totally OK that I have these flaws and vulnerabilities and warts and wrinkles because that's just who I am."

I'm a pretty thin person. But my weight fluctuates and I have been different sizes over the years. I am currently a larger size than I'd like to be and larger than I have been at other times in the past. I am also lacking some of the muscle tone and definition that I have had in the past. This bothers me and I'm working on it. That's not the important part. The problem is that, when I talk about this, I get a lot of responses along the lines of "but you're not fat!" and "please, you don't need to lose weight, you're so thin!" and even worse, "I think you look great!" and "you're so pretty!" Look, I'm not fishing or compliments and I'm not passing negative judgement on myself. I'm stating facts - I *am* a larger clothing size than I have been in the past and I am not as strong or well-defined as I have been in the past and I have reasons for wanting that fact to be changed. Those are simply facts, and facts exist whether we like them or not. That's what I mean about self-esteem. I accept these facts about myself. I'm not hurt or upset or depressed at these facts. I'm not bothered by the fact that some people find me unattractive. These facts just are. I am aware of how I look and I accept it. The same goes with other of my attributes.

Again, I'm running off on tangents to better explain my point. So I have this ridiculously high self-esteem. That means that abusers try their abuse on me and I don't react to their abuse in ways that benefit them, that don't give up control over me to them. When someone attempted to gaslight me, I'm far too confident in my memory of events, even while acknowledging the flaws in human memory to succumb easily to gaslighting. So I don't recognize gaslighting when I see it, sometimes. When someone attempts to control me, like setting rules that dictate how my other relationships should go, I resist that control.

Now, if I'm all in the middle of NRE, and we're talking about our preferences and goals for our relationship, I might miss someone's attempt to control me, and I might sound like I'm agreeing to give up control. I'm human, after all, and things that might present as a red flag when I'm sane may sound just peachy-keen when I'm all hopped up on happy brain chemicals at the beginning of a relationship and not necessarily thinking straight. But you can always tell, when the rubber meets the road, that I do. not. give. up. control. When it comes time for that new relationship to start, for example, that relationship goes in whatever fucking direction it's going to go, and suddenly the controlling partner is left bewildered and panicked and wondering how the fuck they lost control so quickly.

You never had it to begin with.

"Because getting your way with someone can't be a one-time deal." Abusers typically build up to abusing. They don't start out on the first date smacking someone around and they don't bring a 40 page contract to the restaurant and insist you sign it, except when we build communities that support abuse and consent violations (*cough*Christian Grey*cough* *cough*unicorn hunters*cough*). They start out small, by pushing boundaries just a little to see what they can get away with. And they push the boundary just a bit, so that your boundary has to move now. And now that it's moved, they push it just a little bit more so that it's over just a tiny bit more. Until eventually you're sitting at home one day trying to figure out how your life got to be such a mess and how will you ever get out of it?

Like most people, I have some soft boundaries and some hard boundaries. So abusers might push on some of my soft boundaries and, thinking that I'm someone ~~they can manipulate~~ they're compatible with, we get into a relationship. And they use all their charm and cute puppy dog eyes, so I think they're a great person and we have so much in common. So they keep pushing on the soft boundaries. But something that I do differently, is that every little soft boundary that gets pushed back is kind of like a small papercut. I might not notice it right away, but it'll start to irritate me the more it gets touched and the more I think about it. So that the next time he tries to push on a soft boundary, I'll be more resentful and more impatient about it. It won't take too many of these soft boundary pushes before I've lost my patience, so that when he hits a hard boundary, I push back.

And here's where that quote is relevant. It "can't be a one-time deal. ... We gotta feel like we control you." When I start to feel like someone is trying to control me, whether it's even true or not, I push back and I mean I push back hard. Their tactics don't work. So I find that one of two things happens: 1) They recognize me as someone that they can't control and they bugger right off. Not that they're necessarily thinking of it like this; they may be thinking of me as a stubborn, selfish bitch who won't compromise or consider their feelings. But as the blogger Emma Fett said, "I was victimized by acts of control" is not the same as "I was victimized by the other person’s resistance to my control." People get really defensive when I resist their control.

So, either that or 2) They double-down on their efforts which makes me dig in my own heels and we spiral very quickly into an impasse, usually ending with me getting fed up and leaving. Either way, my relationships with abusers seem to be fine, fine, fine, BIG FUCKING BLOWUP OUT OF NOWHERE. They will think things are going just fine because they're getting away with some soft boundary pushing, but I'll be building up resentment. I'll be thinking things are just fine because it's only some soft boundary pushing that I can rationalize away as "compromise" and learning to adjust to someone who is different from me. Then they'll push on a hard boundary and I'll be surprised at their audacity to want something so awful, and they'll be surprised at my sudden lack of passivity or acceptance.

See, most of my relationship partners remark, in the beginning, about how easy I am to get along with. I know it doesn't seem like that to people who only know me from my rants online, but I am actually fairly easy going and generally a happy person. I'm cool with a wide range of things and I don't particularly need to be in charge all the time or make a lot of decisions. So, like, what's for dinner? I don't know, what do you want? I legitimately don't know and don't have a preference most times. Want chinese? OK, I'm cool with that. Want Indian instead? Sure. Want vegan-gluten-sodium-free? Well, OK, but not as a daily diet please.

Point is that I seem like I'm pretty easy to get along with and most of my partners agree. At first. Until they push on a hard boundary. And then they blink in shock at Joreth suddenly showing up. Hence all my "hello, have we met?" posts on Twitter and Facebook. That's why I keep showing guys who are interested in me my online social media - I'm sick of them acting surprised when they push me and I push back.

So they'll push a boundary and I'm like "I had no idea you actually think trying to control me in this way was a good idea, haven't you read anything I've written?" and they're all "whoa, where did the pliable, happy, nice girl go and who is this selfish bitch who won't even compromise with me? Can't she see how much she's HURTING me that she won't let me control her?!" and I'll be like "OUT, OUT YOU HELL DEMON, OFF YOU MUST FUCK!" and they'll be going all "dude, that Joreth is totally crazy, everyone block her!"

So ... this is my very long and rambly way to say that articles like this one are helping me to recognize, acknowledge, and understand my past experiences with abusive people, and why things became abusive or failed to become abusive with me. Articles like this one are making connections for me so that I can look back over my history and see the abusive patterns in people that I didn't see before. And this is helping me to recognize abusive patterns in people that I meet now. So I write about these connections because I see too many people who, like me, don't recognize a whole bunch of abuse as abuse. They defend it, they enshrine it, they hide it, they offer it shelter and dark places to grow and fester like fungus or bacteria. Why? Because being in control is good, right?

Well, perhaps being in control of oneself is a desirable state for most of the time. But losing control doesn't have to be the end of the world, and controlling others is both inherently unethical and ultimately impossible. So I am trying to highlight all the myriad ways in which we justify, rationalize, and accept controlling other people. Maybe, if it doesn't shine a light on the motivations of an abuser and get him to stop, maybe it'll shine a light on a victim or an abuse apologist and get them to stop accepting it.

And if it sounds like your partner has a long way to go to get there with you, well, now you know why people say it’s pretty much impossible. Abusive people don’t just “stop abusing.” They have to change completely. They have to go through a transformation in which they completely leave behind many of the core values they had before, values that make it ok in their mind to act abusive.

This author may not be willing to suggest that a victim leave, and I understand why it's hard to leave. So I'm also not going to suggest that any particular victim leave at any specific time - that's not my call to make. But I am going to hope that reading posts like mine and the ones that I've been linking to and referencing will encourage enough victims to leave and enough apologists to leave off that we will eventually change our culture to one in which abusers are held accountable and no longer have hiding places to get away with their abuse, and people who genuinely want to be Good People won't ever develop the attitudes and values that lead them to abuse in the first place.

Because abusers do think they're Good People. It's just that their abuse comes from attitudes and values that lead them to abuse (and many abuse victims develop attitudes and values that lead them to accepting abuse, or at least not fighting or fleeing from it, which is a whole other rant on society priming victims). And that's what I'm hoping to see changed.

I think I might be zeroing in on why it pisses me off so much that people are defending 50 Shades. This is still rough, but I think I'm getting closer to what's wrong with these defenses. I've been spending a lot of time learning how to support abuse victims over the last couple of years. Over and over, the message to victim supporters is "just listen, and accept". Believe victims, listen to them, accept their story. You don't have to "take sides" by accusing the abuser or doing anything active against the abuser. You can even reserve some empathy and support for the alleged abuser. The important part is that you make a safe space for the victim to heal and to feel.

In all the various rants and criticisms of 50 Shades, what I'm hearing is pain. Sometimes it's from abuse victims being triggered, and sometimes it's from people who feel such empathy that they feel fear and pain on behalf of all the women who have been abused or who will experience abuse because of the rape culture that 50 Shades contributes to (or, as in the 2 articles I read recently, the abuse and murder of women that were directly linked to 50 Shades).

So, here I am, being told that we need to hear victims and to listen to people's pain and to support them, on one hand. But on the other hand, when it comes to 50 Shades, I hear "oh, lighten up, it's just a book!" and "geez, don't take things so seriously, it's FICTION for fuck's sake!" and "c'mon, nobody REALLY believes this, so just back off and stop making me feel bad for getting turned on by something that other people are afraid of" with a handful of Dear Muslima responses thrown in (in reference to Dawkins' famous reply basically suggesting that there are worse problems in the world so we shouldn't waste any time talking about the less-worse problems until the worse ones are solved).

In other words, all the defenses of 50 Shades sound exactly like rape apologism. But, more than that, there are people who are trying to say "this hurts me and this hurts others", and yet people, even those who are normally right there on the support-the-victims side, people are hearing those cries of pain and dismissing them out of hand.

As with polyamory, not having a One Right Way does not necessarily mean that there are also no Wrong Ways. Some things are morally wrong, some things are factually wrong, some things are less likely to succeed than other methods and therefore "wrong".

And a story that romanticizes abuse, as opposed to a story that simply tells of abuse, is wrong. So is opposing all those voices crying out in pain. It's OK to enjoy problematic media. It's not OK to silence and dismiss criticism of that media, and it's especially not OK to dismiss the cries of abuse that the media is triggering.

This is a comment I made on the FB post for this blog piece. I'm still trying to find the right words to express what's in my head about this, and the following comment got me another step closer, so I'm adding it to this post:

This revelation is coming from a different angle [from the usual criticisms that 50 Shades is how actual abusers break down their victims which is being touted as "romantic" instead of dangerous], and I'm still teasing it out. I'm seeing a lot of defenses of 50 Shades coming from people who are usually right there on my side in the domestic violence discussions. But when it comes to the book, they suddenly switch sides.

And I think what's niggling at my brain is that this is more than just the standard rape apologism rearing it's ugly head. This is the book itself doing harm, and the defenders aren't being rape apologists for real, but it's as if the *book* is the "abuser" itself and its victims are crying out through their book reviews and criticisms, and people who normally fight against rape culture are now defending *the book* as if the book was an abuser that they are desperately trying to ignore is an abuser simply because it's popular and they don't want to lose access to it.

Like, in the kink community when all those rape accusations started coming out a few years ago. A bunch of people defended the rapists because they were leaders in the community, and if you cut off ties to the rapist, then you couldn't go to the awesome bondage parties anymore because the rapist was the only one with a dungeon who threw parties. So people refused to "take sides" or support the victims, and defended the rapists because they stood to lose something socially if they did so.

The defenses of this book are feeling like the exact same thing. People who are totally in favor of SSC or RACK (Safe, Sane, & Consensual or Risk Aware Consensual Kink for those reading this & who don't know) nevertheless defended rapists in the community because the rapists provided stuff that the defenders didn't want to lose access to, so they did the usual sorts of rationalizations that people do when they're invested in a concept and need to hold onto it in order to protect their investment. I'm sure many of those rape defenders absolutely believed their own arguments, but they were still doing well-known and well-understood logical fallacies, rationalizations, and other mental gymnastics to avoid facing the fact that someone they knew, trusted, perhaps liked and probably needed for something, did a Bad Thing. It even has a name - the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

The defenders of this book, who are normally supporters of abuse victims, are defending the book in much the same way, where the book has "abused" people and the victims & supporters are crying out, but the defenders don't want to lose their precious jerk-off story or examine their own attachment to unhealthy relationship patterns, so they're dismissing the cries of pain from those who are feeling harmed by the book.

Hypothesis: Some defenses of 50 Shades may be an example of a Sunk Cost Fallacy, where people dig in their heels to defend something they are invested in, resulting in treating the book in the same way one might treat an accused abuser that one wants to deny is an abuser (usually when one receives something beneficial from association with the accused abuser, such as social status, access to social events, even love or a relationship) and dismissing claims of harm from its victims and victim-supporters.

http://www.mamamia.com.au/rogue/fifty-shades-of-grey-review-rosie-waterland/

I've seen a lot, and I mean A LOT, of strawman arguments that it's insulting and overly simplistic to claim that people are too stupid to realize that 50 Shades is fantasy and fiction and that we shouldn't be worried about its impact on society, especially considering the mountains of other material contributing to rape culture in our society.

First of all, it's a strawman because no one is saying that anyone is "too stupid" to know the difference. We're saying that it reinforces an already-existing set of cultural tropes that lead people into abusive situations because we are not told that these situations are abusive. One does not have to be "stupid" to find oneself in an abusive situation. One only has to be unaware of the warning signs, and that's most people. Even people who have been in abusive relationships don't know all the warning signs, and many think that their experience is the ONLY version that counts. I've seen a lot of abuse victims say "I've been in an abusive relationship, and this wasn't it!"

Hell, I've said that myself. Except I said that about a real situation. And that's exactly the problem. I was in an abusive relationship. So I thought I knew what abuse looked like. And when someone else's different abusive situation was presented to me, I, with all my sociology experience and alternative relationship experience and feminist views, I looked right at that relationship and said "I've been in an abusive relationship, and this one isn't the same, therefore it's not abuse." I am deeply ashamed of that now. I could have been a source of support. Instead, I was an enabler.

So, fuck you for saying this movie is no big deal. It is. Not because people are too stupid. Because abuse is that big, that complex, and that difficult to identify.

Second, the reason why we're singling this story out over that aforementioned mountain of material contributing to rape culture is because it's currently the one getting the most positive press, the most defense, and making the most money from deliberately obfuscating, dare I say "blurring the lines", between romance and domestic abuse. Unlike some other examples given, this one is being held up as something to aspire to, whereas most of the other examples (Game of Thrones, just to name one) are depicting graphic violence but not idealizing or romanticizing the graphic violence.

IT'S NOT THE GRAPHIC VIOLENCE that's the problem. It's the ACCEPTANCE of the violence as romance, as desirable, as masking it behind a subculture that already has trouble being understood and accepted in society that's the problem. Remember, I participate in consensual non-consent, and I do so without a safeword. I became a weekend sensation one year at Frolicon because of a take-down scene involving me and my two male partners trying to rape me in the dungeon, and I fought so hard that they actually couldn't succeed without my deliberate assistance. I've been exploring rape fantasies since before puberty. This is NOT ABOUT THE KINK, it's about actual domestic violence, manipulation, and emotional abuse.

"But I screwed up. I screwed up big time. I went into this film thinking it would be two hours of B-grade hilarity about bondage that I could make fun of. It was actually two hours of incredibly disturbing content about an emotionally abusive relationship that left me really, really shaken. And now I’m embarrassed that I ever joked about it."

"And my opinion was, well, if they’re two consenting adults, and being tied up and slapped is their thing, then what’s the big deal? But I had no idea that Fifty Shades of Grey isn’t just about the sex. It’s also about an incredibly disturbing and manipulative, emotionally abusive relationship."

"And let me be clear to the women who are incredibly defensive of the book that gave them a sexual awakening: When I talk about domestic abuse, I’m not talking about the sex. In fact, I considered the sex to be the least offensive part of the movie."

"Because as I was sitting in that cinema last night, I was completely floored by what I was watching. And by what millions of women had accepted as a relationship to aspire to."

"It’s emotional abuse disguised as a ‘naughty sex contract’. It’s domestic violence dressed up as sexy fantasy.

And it’s a genius, subtle move. Putting this kind of controlling, emotionally abusive relationship in the context of a sexy billionaire who just needs to be loved, makes it ridiculously easy to convince audiences the world over that this kind of behaviour is okay. He’s not some poor drunk with a mullet, hitting his wife for not doing the dishes. Christian is classy. Rich. Educated. He’s not what most women imagine an abuser to be, and his kind of abuse is not what most women would immediately recognise."

"The blurred lines in this film mean any kind discussion about abuse can be easily shut down by those determined to be obtuse because they like the sexy blindfolds.

But there is no doubt in my mind that the film I watched last night was a disturbing and clear depiction of a controlling and emotionally abusive relationship. This was domestic violence. I don’t care how many women learned to embrace sex because of Fifty Shades of Grey. THIS WAS DOMESTIC VIOLENCE."

"This was domestic abuse marketed as Valentine’s Day fun."

So, everyone knows that I am utterly, emphatically, antagonistically opposed to 50 Shades Of Fucked Up. I've been posting links explaining how it's romanticized abuse pretty much since the books came out. But here's something ... when the books came out, I didn't yet realize that I was in a relationship with an abuser. I've been in a relationship with someone who tried to abuse me. And, for reasons that I plan to go into in another blog post, abuse doesn't seem to "stick" to me. I don't react to abuse attempts the way some other people do, so manipulation and abuse seems to act like a fiery catalyst, ending with an explosion of the relationship. When I was engaged to someone who attempted to abuse me, I got the hell out of there without, I believe, much damage to my own psyche.

But then I dated someone who abused his other partner. And, in spite of my experience, I didn't see it. Actually, I think it may have been because of my experience. Because they had slightly different tactics, and because the victim didn't react the way that I did or like the way victims are portrayed in movies, I couldn't see what was happening right in front of me. To be fair, a lot of it wasn't right in front of me. Most of the abuse was when they were alone. That's how it was able to fly under the radar. But I've since had the opportunity that only space and time can bring, to go over my own experiences and to hear the victim's story of what happened in privacy as well as to read and learn more about what emotionally abusive relationships actually look like.

So, let me tell you, when I found this link of 50 Abusive Moments In Fifty Shades, I could have used a trigger warning. Now, I don't TW or CW my posts. I figure that I am a trigger, so anyone who follows me should just know that. And I generally don't need warnings myself, even though I have plenty of my own triggers on a variety of subjects. I read what I read and that's just how it goes, for me. But I wasn't prepared for the connections this article made in my head. And I think it needs to be shared.

For the most part, negative reviews of 50 Shades are much like any other - they all go into great detail explaining how the book is about an abusive relationship, many of which cite domestic violence resources as evidence, and many of them save a little room to attack the poor literary quality of the writing on top of the content. Many of these reviews are written by people who are not familiar with BDSM but who take care to point out that they are not attacking the BDSM but the abuse, that they see a distinction, and that they are echoing criticisms from their kinky friends and resources. And many of them are abuse survivors. Such as this one.

Here's what got me. In the second book, when Ana seems like she really might leave him (again), Christian goes catatonic. It was this blogger's use of the word "catatonic" that triggered me. See, the ex who abused his other partner did this. When things got too stressful for him, he literally shut down. I'd never seen this before, or so I thought until this article. His other partners had seen it, and they just accepted that his brain was broken and this is what they had to deal with. So I accepted that explanation too. Everyone bent over backwards and treated him like a special needs child until he was coherent again. What I didn't see was the pattern, until much later.

I can remember times when I got legitimately upset with my ex for things. I'd tell him I was annoyed and I'd reject his advances and the next thing I knew, he'd clam up. He'd lie there, all sad-eyes and mouth opening and closing like a fish on land, breathing like like every intake was painful. Sometimes he'd start to shake, too. And I'd panic, thinking "shit, I've broken him!" and set about trying to make it all better again. Sometimes I'd try to touch him and he'd swat my hand away. Sometimes I'd start trying to explain my feelings and he'd shush me. But you can mark my words; the second I started saying I was sorry and that I loved him and was going to support him? Suddenly he'd regain the power of speech and he'd start talking about something painful from his past, until I'd forgotten what I was angry about in the first place, because I was too busy comforting him. That happened pretty much every time I questioned his behaviour, until I just stopped questioning it altogether. It's manipulation. It's calculated emotional and psychological abuse. And okay, maybe I didn't see it as such at the time, because I loved him.

This is from the blog, not me. But I swear I nearly looked up at the URL bar to confirm if it was written by me or by his victim because this was exactly what happened. And this is when I connected his catatonic state to the one my ex-fiancé used.

My ex-fiancé was a pathalogical liar. He started out with small, easily-believable lies so that it wasn't until we were engaged and living together that I finally started hearing lies big enough to detect as lies. Sure, looking back from the vantage point of post-breakup, the pattern is obvious and even the small lies are easy to spot. But when they're still in front of you and the pattern hasn't been revealed yet, it's not so easy. One of his lies, the one that finally smacked me upside the head with a clue-by-four, was that he would conveniently get "sick" after or during an argument or just before I was about to do something that he didn't want me to do.

He had been raised by a stay-at-home mom who was my grandmother's age, and consequently, of a different school of thought on gender and family roles. So he didn't have a single homemaking skill like cooking or laundry because his mother never taught him. When we moved in together, even though I had been clear that I was not going to assume the same role as his mother, all the cooking and cleaning and domestic chores fell to me on top of my part-time job and full-time college schedule, while he worked only one full-time job to "provide" for us. So, when he got sick, he didn't even know how to make himself chicken noodle soup. And I, of course, as the loving fiancé, felt compassion for him in his time of need.

But then I noticed that his upset stomachs always happened when I was winning an argument. And after arguments. And before my night classes when he would be left at home alone. And on days when I went to my mother's house to do laundry and wanted to go without him. And right before my friend's bachelorette party that was no-men-allowed. And... and... and... Yes, I stayed with him through an awful lot of these episodes, but I was already resentful and irritated by about the 2nd or 3rd "upset tummy" and I very quickly lost my compassion. I also didn't stay home to nurse him for each episode either, but he continued to get "sick" each and every time. It was these "illnesses" that made me realize that he was lying, and I began to question all the other "convenient" things that had happened in our relationship too. Those things aren't relevant to this blog post, but I do have another one all about this relationship coming.

So I got the fuck out. The thing is, he wasn't a terribly good liar and he used the same excuses too often. As I said, in the beginning the lies were small so it was easy to believe and rationalize them. But as soon as they had any real importance, his duplicity became fairly obvious. So when the other ex would go catatonic, I didn't connect them because he wasn't obviously, blatantly lying. To this day, I'm not entirely sure how much was faked and how much was a real reaction due to his mental illness (which was diagnosed after we broke up). For all I know, he really, legitimately, could have lost his ability to function each and every time as a reaction that he had little-to-no control over.

But, here's the thing. Mental illness is not an excuse for abuse. There are plenty of people who have mental disabilities who do not abuse and who learn coping mechanisms for functioning in relationships. His breakdowns happened during very specific times and the result of each breakdown was that people would "panic, thinking 'shit, I've broken him!' and set about trying to make it all better again." And as soon as the person he was in conflict with apologized and took all the responsibility for the scene, "Suddenly he'd regain the power of speech and he'd start talking about something painful from his past, until [they'd] forgotten what [they were] angry about in the first place". I spent years trying to talk down a friend from suicide every time he asked me out and I refused to be anything other than a platonic friend, because I didn't know that suicide threats were also a form of abuse. I spent years until I had finally reached my limit and I lashed out at him. That limit never reset itself, so I don't have very much patience for people who "get sick" when we are in conflict. I've been accused of being a cold-hearted bitch for it, but now I see that the people who accuse me of that most often are those who are trying to use tactics that are classified as "abusive" by domestic violence agencies. So I take those accusations with a grain of salt, and I actually feel very grateful about my instinctual reactions even though it hurts to be called "cold" by people who I thought cared for me.

As the blogger here says, "It's very much a thing and it's what made me utterly suicidal when I finally walked away from my abuser, because I thought he'd die because I'd abandoned him and I was a horrible bitch like all the others." This is exactly what abusers do and this is exactly what Christian Grey does to Ana in this story. "And then this chapter goes on to play on the ridiculously dangerous 'if I love this man right, I can cure him' trope", which is right out of the #WhyIStayed hashtag movement (and if you haven't followed that yet, you should). I have, on more than one occasion, found myself in a relationship where I thought to myself that I would "prove" that I'm "not like the others" who were so heartless and cruel as to abandon this poor, mistreated, misunderstood man. But it's not a mark of a good relationship to turn it into a competition between myself and his exes as to who can withstand his bullshit the longest. I am not a better person if I can cope with abuse longer than others. You know that saying that goes "if all your exes are crazy, the thing they have in common is you"? Well, if "all" his exes felt like they had to escape because they couldn't handle his damage, maybe there's a reason for that.

This subject is a difficult one because there are legitimately people out there who need help and they can't do it on their own. There are legitimately people out there who rely on their significant others to get them through rough patches. In fact, I'd argue that this is even one of the functions of a significant romantic relationship - to be someone your partner can rely on in hard times. I've had moments myself when I wasn't sure that I would make it, but a partner helped me through it. So I am not going to tell other people whether their relationships are abusive or not (although I will point out when I see people exhibiting abusive behaviour). I am going to tell you all, however, that this is a common tactic of abuse.

Shutting down mentally, emotionally, and communicatively until after the victim has switched sides and embraces their fault and wrongdoing is one of the steps in the cycle of emotional abuse. I get it, really I do. When I'm upset with my partner, and I really believe that they have wronged me, it might cause me to disconnect from them emotionally, at least for a while, because, hey! they wronged me. When they have seen and acknowledged the wrong that they've done to me, it can result in warming back up to them. Apologies that really display both remorse and understanding are worth considering and can repair a damaged relationship and damaged trust. So this can be extremely difficult to see as an abusive step when you're the victim and you're in the middle of it. This can also be difficult to see as an abusive step when you're the abuser, since abusers are not cartoon villains, twisting their mustachios and plotting on how to manipulate their victims trapped in their dark towers.

This confusion, this masquerade of a real phenomenon, is what an abuser is counting on to continue the abuse, even if they aren't consciously aware that they are abusive. And this social acceptance of abuse as "romance" is what abusers count on to provide them with a steady supply of victims who will have no support network to help rescue them because no one around them will believe that this is wrong. This is why I am so opposed to this series and movie. It is not being billed as an abusive relationship. As I posted the other day elsewhere, this isn't like when my generation and before read Flowers In The Attic - we all knew that book was a horror story. We knew that book series was about twisted minds and abusive relationships. We read it the way we read any horror story. It's completely OK that Flowers exists and that people read it, because it was not intended to get people off and it was not defended as some gateway for the mainstream to learn about "alternative family structures". It was drama and psychological horror.

And so is 50 Shades, but it's not being read that way. It's being billed as "erotica" and it's being defended as an open door for mainstreamers to learn about BDSM. I believe this is wrong, harmful, damaging, and frightening. I'm supporting the boycott solely because I do not wish to reward society for romanticizing abuse, not because I think this story should not exist. I've read the entire Flowers series more than once. If the author was making a fortune because society was holding up that series as the new How To Guide for family values, I'd boycott that series too.

This week's episode of Poly Weekly is on abuse in relationships. EVERYONE NEEDS TO LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE, not just poly people. It's not about abuse in poly relationships, it's about abuse in relationships, because poly relationships are really just relationships like any other.

In addition, everyone needs to read this blog post on the community response to abuse: http://emmfett.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-community-response-to-abuse.html

"When I first tried to articulate what I thought the community response to abuse should be, the only thing I could really think was that abusers need good friends. The kind of friends who are willing to tell them when they are not being the best that they can be."

I knew an abuser*, only I didn't know he was an abuser at the time. He had very good, close friends. But his friends were not willing to tell him when he was not being the best that he could be. After stumbling into a handful of roadblocks with him myself, some of his friends actually contacted me privately to tell me that they supported me, they thought he was being unreasonable, they wanted me to know that, but they wouldn't tell him about it because it "wasn't worth the argument".

Each argument I had with him resulted in him going to his group and telling them about the argument, then coming back to me to say "I talked to everyone else, and we all agree that you're wrong." Even knowing that wasn't always true, it's a horrible, isolating feeling that drove a wedge between me and our mutual friends. When I broke off contact with him, I lost my entire social circle because of the isolating effect that siding with an abuser has on his victims, and I wasn't even a "victim" because his abusive tactics never took a hold on me. But I wasn't immune to the effects anyway.

"Both survivors AND abusers need community support.

Specifically, survivors need protection and validation and abusers need support for accountability.

Abuse does not always look like what you think it should look like, and it usually occurs behind closed doors. As a community member, it is important to get rid of the idea that you will know abuse when you see it. It is ignorant to think that we will always be able to spot abuse in our communities."

I thought I knew what abuse looked like because I've been on the periphery of relationship sociology and psychology my entire life. And yet, when it happened RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME, I missed it. I couldn't see it, and as a consequence, I contributed to it - I enabled it. To my horror and shame, I didn't hear and I didn't see someone very dear to me being abused right in front of my own eyes.

"People who don’t want to change will often tell you that they don’t change because of the way that you are asking. This is horse puckey. Change is a personal matter, and it’s hard no matter what. If you want to change, no amount of assholery will be able to stop you. If you don’t, no amount of gentle crooning will make it happen. ... The methods that will get through to someone are varied. I don’t buy the idea that if we were just all nice that we could stop the bullying."

There are 2 basic camps in the atheist communities - those fire and brimstone atheists and those who walk around telling everyone not to be a dick. The thing is, the fire and brimstone atheists are not telling the DBAD guys to shut up. We know that it takes a wide variety of methods to change the minds of a wide variety of people. Go with your strengths. Mine is anger.

"Be willing to distance yourself from people who display abusive behaviors

Sometimes you can’t be a friend of someone who is abusive unless you support their beliefs. It’s hard to fracture your community that way, especially when it is already small. It’s hard when you realize that maybe you can’t just invite everyone to your party."

I'm glad there are people out there with a softer touch who are willing to be that bridge and try to help others back on the path of Greatest Courage and Integrity. I, however, am the one who will throw the party who doesn't just invite "everyone". When I created the local poly discussion group, I deliberately held our meetings in our local LBGTQ center because our previous community had a problem with homophobia. I created an environment that made homophobes uncomfortable. They were not invited to my party.

Sometimes, I *am* in a position to be connected to both sides of a toxic relationship, because the circumstances give me enough space to do so safely (I am not a target, I am not personally affected by the abuser so I can maintain my temper and be that "softer touch", the victims have enough distance with me to not be overly affected, etc.). But when there is a conflict, I am choosing the safety of the victims of abuse.

"'I was victimized by acts of control' is not the same as 'I was victimized by the other person’s resistance to my control.'"

This is SO SO SO SO important. I cannot stress enough how important this statement is. This is the difference between real abuse and entitlement. This is the difference between racism and "reverse racism". This is the difference between misogyny and "misandry". This is the difference between oppression and privilege.

As someone once told me, the victim in an abusive relationship is the one who is struggling to escape. The one holding on is not the victim. This is *obviously* an oversimplification, because there are plenty of reasons why victims remain with their abusers, as even a cursory glance at the #WhyIStayed and similar hashtags will tell you. But, underneath all the complexity and all the confabulations and all the confounding factors, if you are being hurt by acts of control, then you are being harmed. If you are being hurt because someone is resistant to your attempts to control them, then you are doing the harming - both to your victim and to yourself. Theists are not being oppressed because gays want to get married. Those theists are feeling hurt because gay people are resisting their control. When you attempt to impose rules on your partner, and your partner says those rules are hurting them and they behave in ways that are resistant to those rules, and you feel hurt because they are rejecting your attempts to restrict their behaviour, you are the one doing the hurting, even if you are doing it out of your own feelings of pain or insecurity. You need different types of support. And I will hold you accountable.

*I've actually known quite a few abusers, and have been in relationships with several abusers. I have a whole post in the can elaborating on this very subject. I have a particular quirk that leaves me somewhat resistant to abuse - not totally immune to their effects, but abuse tactics tend to backfire when people try them on me. So, for much of my life, I was not aware of what emotional abuse looked like even when I saw it first-hand because I do not react to attempts to manipulate and control me the way that an abuse victim does when the abuse attempts are successful. So it is only much later that I learned to recognize what emotional abuse looked like in my previous relationships, and I am still learning. What I have learned so far is that I have actually had numerous encounters with abusers throughout my life, and that thought is rather chilling. Pulling the wool over my eyes, tricking me, and making me not see what's right in front of my nose tends to make me angry, and when I get angry, I get stubborn and impatient, so I have very little compassion or tolerance for abuse now that I know some things to look for. I'm sure many of my regular readers are familiar with my low-tolerance reaction by now.

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Joreth

The Inn Between

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Just Be Honest, You Don't Actually Want "Small Government"
The Hypocrisy Of Food Picture Shaming
You're Anti-Cop!!!
Justice For Ferguson! Vengeance For Oregon!
The Big Sleep
I Am A Feminist Because I Believe Men Are Better Than That
Emotional Labor - Or Why Men Should Do More Laundry
Would You Ever Be With Someone Who Forbid You...
Sovereign Citizenry Ignores The Social Contract & Importance Of Our Interdependency
Divide & Conquer - Don't Talk About Your Salary
The Dorks Awaken, Hopefully - Why The New Star Wars Film Is Very Important For Geekdom
Send In The Tanks Like We Did To Ferguson!
He's Totally A Narcissistic, Bi-Polar, Borderline, Sociopath!
Learning Lessons One Day At A Time
When A Legitimate Criticism Of Ideology Becomes Bigotry
If She Had Just Gone Out With Him He Wouldn't Have Gotten Mad
People Are Allowed To Maintain Their Own Agency
Chivalry Isn't Dead You Just Don't Know What The Fuck It Is
But What About ME?!?!
Before You Claim The UCC Shooting Was About Christian Persecution Consider All The Evidence
Common Core Hatred And Anti-Intellectualism
Price-Gouging Pharma Bro Under Investigation For Corporate Looting, Fraud, Stalking
Addressing Unconscious Bias
Our Federal Politicians Are A Reflection Of Our Local Apathy
Why Should Burger Flippers Get Paid More Than Soldiers?
Upbeat Swing Song & History Lesson In One
Poverty & Food Privilege Blindness
Not Fucking Off Should Be Illegal
A Couple Reasons Why I Still Need #Feminism
I Will Call You What I Want To Call You
Dignity Is Not Up For Debate
But It's Not My Job!
Should We Stop Saying "Poly"?
Don't Worry Your Pretty Little Head, I'll Decide For You What's Important Here
But Teach Him To Fish...
Re: Some Thoughts On Porn, Coercion, & The Fundamental Reconstruction Error
Parents, Stop Freaking Out About The Wrong Things
But What's In It For Me?
I Don't Want To Be An Excuse For Racist Violence
When Emotional Abuse Looks A Lot Like Love
Privileged Ally Guidelines
Get Off My Lawn!
Don't Let Your Mind Be So Open That Your Brain Falls Out
Transparency Vs. Controlling
New Holiday Proposal To Counteract The Cruelty Of Pranks On April Fools: Honesty & Vulnerability Day
Learning To Recognize Abusive Patterns
Why I Get So Angry At 50 Shades Defenses (aka You People Should Know Better)
"And Now [That I've Seen The Movie,] I'm Embarrassed That I Ever Joked About [50 Shades]"
A Personal Response To The Abuse In 50 Shades
The Community Response To Abuse

August 2024

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Ranty Lessons by Joreth

Entries tagged with freedom/politics

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