Let's Play Pretend

sorry i isolated myself for a month i was having a depressive episode and it’ll definitely happen again

hot take: the capitalist cultural construction of “humans are naturally greedy and self-centered” is just an attenuated version of the feudal christian construction of “humans are inherently sinful”; both are designed to make people internalize cultural problems and externalize morality.

building off that hot take: western individualism (the American Dream, meritocracy, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality) is actually a hopelessly sentimental cultural fantasy that stems from this toxic capitalist conceit, and it’s high time we start admitting in our personal lives and in our public policy that humans actually live in dynamic and overlapping webs of inter-dependency

I think one of my least favorite types of responses to people speaking up on sexual harassment and sexual assault is are articles like “in wake of weinstein, men wonder if hugging women still ok”, and comments like “this is why men don’t pursue women anymore”, “i don’t wanna work with women cause i don’t want a lawsuit”, or “i don’t even look at women anymore cause everything is sexual harassment”. this is a particular brand of rape culture, men acting as if women are overreacting, as if men don’t have the basic social skills to know the difference between wanted and unwanted advances, as if women simply setting boundaries is “cramping their style” and “emasculating” them, as if the rules of respecting women are super confusing, so confusing that they’re supposedly forcing men not to interact with us altogether.

this is an act they’ve been putting on for decades: playing stupid, pretending not to know better and then getting upset when we tell them what “better” is. if that doesn’t show you how emotional and emotionally manipulative they are, i don’t know what does.

WIN LIKE A GIRL

i may be a terrible person but at least i say please and thank you and use my fucking blinker