Dr. Wizard

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During the interaction, one cop left to get a “less than lethal” device “such as a beanbag shotgun,” which are weapons and can permanently disable and kill people. As the ACLU pointed out, they could have left the building when they felt unsafe due to Kayden having a knife; instead, they shot him in the stomach.

He was misgendered repeatedly by his mother, the police, and the news (& had apparently been denied testosterone by a doctor “until his disease [autism] was cured” which contributed to his poor mental health).

Boys (*and those read as such) are denied this training. As they age, they are also denied access to increasing swaths of emotional experience, until they are men who are allowed stoicism or anger and nothing else.

Girls*, on the other hand, were taught that their emotions are there to be dealt with. The manner differs - and often changes based on the group they are currently around - but of utmost importance was that they don't let emotions interfere with duty. And part of that duty was to learn and manage the emotions of the boys and men around them, because said boys and men were never to be taught to do this themselves.

Feminism came along and said "hang on - this isn't right."

The important thing to understand about feminism (and every cultural movement) is that it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's pushing back against an existing issue. Systems don't like change. So there will always be an uphill struggle to effect that change.

Also, movements are made up of people. People are messy and come with conflicting ideals and motivations.

Intersectional feminism looks at the situation up top and says "it's important we teach emotional intelligence to everyone because human beings in society must be able to understand and moderate their emotional reactions to live together harmoniously."

But intersectional feminism presents a real danger to the existing power structures. Feminism is too big to remove altogether, but it could be fairly easily defanged. The seeds of its own destruction were already embraced by a not-insignificant portion of feminists. We struggled (and continue to struggle) to get men on board because calling something "feminism" tells them it's only for women. That was the bad faith accusation for decades - feminists hate men. Feminists hate children. Feminists hate families.

A combination of factors - including rising fascism, the explosion of the anti-trans movement, gamergate, the stubbornly persistent belief that life online is not subject to the same rules and laws as offline life, the #Me Too movement and its backlash, wage stagnation and wealth inequality, Black Lives Matter and the violent response from white supremacist society, and so on - beat and shaped pop feminism into what it is today, which is a slightly less vitriolic version of the bad faith interpretation of feminists above.

We have gone from teaching emotional intelligence to only half of the population to teaching it to none of the population. The pop feminist version of raising a little girl is basically raising a little asshole who only knows how to express anger and tantrums when their emotions aren't catered to. Instead of taking the actual feminist route of teaching children of all genders emotional intelligence equally, we decided that if boys* didn't have to care, girls* shouldn't, either.

It's not surprising. Look at every single movement for change that has happened in the US. Look at what was being asked for by the movement and compare that to what is considered proper for its members today. Notice how only the parts that most closely emulate the kyriarchy are allowed to persist. Masculine is generally preferable to feminine. Lighter skin is superior while darker skin is inferior. Physical strength and violence are emphasized over cooperation and compassion. Self-absorption is prized and communal feeling is demonized.

Without solidarity in action and real systemic change, every movement will eventually be absorbed into the white supremacist patriarchy and used to bolster itself.

Entire, massive activist movements have succumbed to this, so expecting any individual to successfully resist at all times is outrageous. If our "successful" movements can't manage to hold the line, what hope does a single mother have?

Which brings me to my next point: my mom and yours - every woman* who has ever raised a child - were not Mothers. They were and are people born into and shaped by the exact same systems as us. Entire complex human beings with everything that entails.

Yet nearly every self-identified feminist I have ever met views their mom as a Mother Character. They will come out with some information about recent history and then clearly not have any concept of their mother as a person who lived through that history. As a person who may have been changed by that history. And who definitely has been changed regularly by the times in which they live, because that's what happens to all of us.

Yes, "people will never just" as a guide to designing systems, but ultimately people must. Nobody else can. It's only us.

You have to do the work on yourself. You have to be the one to make it happen. If you want women* to be equal, you have to believe women are equal. Which means a constant effort to remind yourself because we live in a misogynistic society so we're all absorbing misogynistic messages at all times. You can't assume they aren't getting in. You have to check. You have to dig them out when you find them.

Nobody else can do this. It's not possible. Yes, it sucks. Do it anyway.

Find some standards. Embrace solid principles. Listen to your own words. Look at your own behavior. If there's a mismatch, something needs to change. You have to decide what that is. You have to be the one to do the work.

Nobody else can do this. It's not possible. Yes, it sucks. Do it anyway.

The only way things are ever going to change is if we change the way we do things. Part of that is changing the way we think about things.

Edit:

I like to think of what Project Hail Mary was like from Rocky’s point of view.

mutual aid exists as a force of nature between living beings. it is the idea that we help each other survive, regardless of species and other separation, and exists as a concept to contrast survival of the fittest.

mutual aid may result in systems being built but much of what we are able to do for one another does not require systems. the point of mutual aid is that people don't need the state telling them when or how to help each other, or when or how to receive help.

Human beings being able to exist in large groups in close proximity to each other takes an incredible amount of organization, which involves bureaucracy and central planning, and rules and regulations. Individuals providing aid to individuals is not going to build and manage things like sewer systems and the delivery of clean water, and if you don't have those, no amount of helping your neighbor is going to get you out of having half your children die before age five, which until the sanitary revolution in the late 1800s was the level of infant mortality expected in any society. And today, a reliable indicator of a failed state is a sharp rise in infant and childhood mortality because of thrle breakdown of infrustructure. And that's just one example.

Likewise, anyone who has ever had to deal with bullying or exclusion will tell you that if your ability to survive is entirely dependent on the goodwill of your neighbors, and your neighbors don't like you, you will probably die.

On both a large systems scale and small individual scale, this type of anarchy is infeasible and would be horrific. And the systems humans develop time and time again to deal with these problems are, inevitably, government. Every time humans have lived in groups of more than a hundred or so people, they have developed a government. That is what we naturally do. and the interesting thing is that when you start trying to get most anarchists to tell you how they would solve these problems, eventually, after you break through the buzzwords, and the bs, and get them to start making plans, what they come up with, whether they are willing to call it that or not, is a government.

And the rest of the anarchists? Well they are much worse. These are the anarchists who decide that if humans in large groups inevitably form governments, then the solution is that humans should only ever live in small groups, that we should go back to being hunter-gatherers. The population of the planet is order of magnitudes, too large to support as hunter-gatherers, and this group of anarchists, either implicitly or frequently explicitly, are willing to countenance the death of the overwhelming majority of humans alive today in order to bring about their anarchist utopia. This type of anarchism got real popular for some reason in the 2010s, and the line between these guys and eco-fascists, is fine, permeable, and ultimately meaningless.