The Classy Ladies' Guide to Wildlife

We are seeing the direct consequences of this in misogynistic baby rabies manosphere, men coercing their sexual partner into keeping a pregnancy she does not want and then being baffled and disgusted when she is not a good mother or not interested in being in the child’s life.

There is definitely a double standard between fathers who have a difficult time connecting with/loving their unwanted child and mothers who have a difficult time connecting with/loving their unwanted child. Women on anonymous parenting forums are so terrified to confess that they do not feel for their infant the instantaneous all-consuming love they have been told they’re supposed to feel, that they find their child’s presence fundamentally overwhelming and they do not enjoy childrearing. This can be the result of postpartum mental health issues in wanted pregnancies but it is also a common phenomenon in babies born from unwanted pregnancies and/or conceived under abusive circumstances and in those cases, it is often a trauma both the mother and child cannot overcome.

I often find that if a man chooses not to be in his child’s life, he is often given a level of grace that a woman who made the same choice would not be given. Absent, deadbeat or otherwise uninvolved fathers are so common it ceases to be notable, a silent shame and acceptance. But women are demonized and villainized for abandoning their children, even children they did not consent to conceiving, disregarding the trauma of carrying the unwanted pregnancy to term and having to give birth. Mothers are expected to love their children unconditionally and put them first at the expense of their own wellbeing, no matter the circumstances.

You can force someone to carry a pregnancy but you cannot force them to love their child and be a mother and when the victims of coercion and abortion bans are incapable of doing what society expects of women, they’re punished even further.

There is a great deal of nuance in this topic but fundamentally, stripping away access to abortion makes everyone fucking miserable.

I thought we made fun of MRAs because they are misguided and misogynistic for believing that feminism is against their interests and they need a movement apart from it. I thought we made fun of them for not understanding that feminism is in favor of men's liberation from the oppressive patriarchal binary as much as women's.

But some of you are actually making fun of MRAs because you think men have no problems to complain about, and feminism ISN'T for men, because they don't need anything, and the patriarchy isn't the enemy, men are?

But some of you are actually making fun of any men who ask to be taken seriously and have their needs met and issues heard, even though they aren't talking over women? Some of you are making fun of marginalized men for talking about the experiences at their unique intersections of identities and asking for justice because you actually DO think "all men [insert bad behavior here]?"

This is why you sound like a clown if you say "trans men who want feminism to be for them are misgendering themselves" and "trans men benefit from the patriarchy because all men benefit from the patriarchy" and "trans men experience no unique injustices because misandry isn't a systemic axis of oppression" and "trans men have male privilege so they can't be oppressed."

Because even if you take "trans" out of these statements, they're still incorrect. Feminism is for people of all genders. Men can be harmed by the patriarchy. The ways in which men are harmed by the patriarchy are different from the ways others are harmed by the patriarchy. Having certain "privileges" in certain contexts doesn't negate the harm of a rigid social structure that punishes nonconformity.

The patriarchy is a system where ALL people have rigid roles imposed upon them. All else being equal, certain advantages are more likely to be given to men (or masculine people, or people AMAB, or people with male sex characteristics, depending on CONTEXT). But all else is RARELY equal and even when it is, the range of experiences is vast, and the system is rigged against almost everyone.

Because the goal most individuals have, and the right all individuals deserve, is to be themselves, and to do so by choice. And no matter who you are, the patriarchy stands in opposition to this goal. It tells you who you're allowed to be, who you're not allowed to be, what you're allowed to do, and what others are allowed to do to you. This is an injustice for people of all genders.

We're ALL trapped. This system can only be dismantled if we understand the WHOLE thing. Which means we need to listen to everyone when they talk about the harms the system is causing them, from where THEY'RE stuck in it.

When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.

There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.

But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.

You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.

It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”

The obsession with finding shit in someone’s past and then claiming that a questionable or even sordid past negates all possibility of a good present needs to become extinct. Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.

We really need to start asking where this purity bullshit came from. I’m not  Christian and was not raised Christian but there has been a lot evidence that much of gold star activism and purity culture originated in of evangelical youth movements and then infiltrated progressive left-wing and center-left politics when those youth left their churches but failed to leave behind the black-n-white puritanical “you’re going to hell if you stray one inch from the righteous path” style of thinking they were taught.

I distinctly remember some conversations I had in the late 00s and very early 2010s with long time social justice activists who were baffled and disturbed by the new crop of youth activists who were practicing something that was decidedly NOT social justice despite stealing that phrase from us.

In the decade and a half that has passed since then, all of this gold-star activism and purity culture has done exactly what I predicted back then: empowered the far-right while sowing division everywhere.

Im thinking of ‘boy moms’ excusing their son’s negative behaviors and favoring them, or moms who get upset with their male children for expressing femininity because they are terrified to have a queer son (importantly a son that is perceived by others to be queer). I think of tradwife influencers that spout bioessentialist rhetoric such as the divine feminine and fated role of women as mothers and homemakers, or the mothers who teach their daughters how to endure abuse by saying “oh he’s only teasing you/hurting you because he likes you” or telling them to “cover up” around their male family members.

I’m also thinking of some of the self named feminists on tumblr who genuinely believe the rhetoric that all women are fragile broken victims and all men are violent predatory aggressors and think this is progressive or promoting feminist values, when really it’s just repackaged misogyny and more of that same bioessentialism that the literal tradwives agree with.

your behavior has made me realize i should be "meaner": horoscopes are fake.

the position of planets and balls of gas did not in any way impact your personality or destiny. it has nothing to do with what kind of people you are compatible with, despite what an app or magazine told you.

i think sincere belief in horoscopes shows a concerning propensity to trust pseudoscience and a susceptibility to confirmation bias.

Carrying stuff is huge.

If you can put meat in a bag, you can carry more meat. If you can put something like nuts in a bag, then nuts abruptly become a food that you can bring back to the tribe or save for later and not a food that you're required to eat on the spot because they are tiresome and stupid to carry by hand. In both cases your ability to feed yourself and your tribe just got a whole fuck of a lot better.

If you can put your baby in a bag, you now have both your hands free to stick a spear into things, pick nuts, fish, dig tasty cicadas out of the ground, etc. Your ability to feed yourself and your tribe just got a whole fuck of a lot better, and so did your ability to defend yourself while you do it. (And let's face it, your babies were already getting downright ridiculous in terms of the time it takes them to be fully walking-ready, due to brain size and being essentially premature; inventing Multitasking With Baby is like, pure survival at this point, and your way to do that is to create a specialized bag.)

If you can put water in a bag (first water containers very well may have been animal bladders or stomachs, not pots) you can bring water to your sick tribe members and they have a much higher chance of recovering.

And then you have elaborations of the basic "thing that contains objects" idea. If you make an exceptionally loosely woven bag and put it in the water, you can on occasion finesse some fish into it. And then you have delicious fish. If you put yourself in a loose and flexible bag of animal skin, your tribe can operate in the cold better, which changes your entire migration pattern and opens up new environments to you. If you make a hard container and fill it with water and put it over your fire, you have invented a new type of cooking that unlocks whole new food types, such as vegetables that need softening in order for humans to eat them. (Of course at the same time your stomach is becoming steadily more dependent on being able to fuck with your food in this way, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing, because the less energy you spend on digestion, the more energy you have to spend on other things, like brains. And big brains are good for unlocking whole new levels of communication, allowing for fantastic new levels of foraging cooperation, passing knowledge through generations, mate selection, and even various sorts of mental recreation where you imagine something that you don't see, and then convey that to your fellow beings.)

Since normative performance is always gendered, deviations from neuronormative embodiment are also inevitably deviations from heteronormative embodiment. Whether a given deviation gets interpreted by the enforcers of normativity as a violation of neuronormativity or as a violation of heteronormativity often depends entirely on context and circumstances. In a context in which a child is known to be autistic (or neurodivergent in some other specific and culturally pathologized way), the child's non-normative usage of their hands is likely to be pathologized as a "symptom" of their neurodivergence. But in a different context, those who are policing the child's embodiment are unaware of the child's neurodivergence, the same non-normative hand movements might be flagged as gender violations: children whom adults have labeled as girls might be reprimanded for drumming on the table with their hands or running their fingers vigorously and repeatedly through their hair, on the grounds that such actions are "unladylike"; children whom adults have labeled as boys might be attacked or ridiculed for flapping their hands, on the grounds that such gestures are "gay."

Thus, there are some autistic people who were forced in childhood to suppress their natural hand movements because those hand movements were flagged as "symptoms of autism" and targeted for elimination by autistiphobic adults, and other autistic people who weren't recognized as autistic in childhood but were still forced to suppress their hand movements because those hand movements were violations of heteronormativity that got them targeted for homophobic and transphobic abuse by adults and/or peers. And of course, there are many who were targeted on both neuronormative and heteronormative grounds at different times— e.g., autistics who in their youth were abused by adults for moving their hands autistically, and by homophobic peers who read those same hand movements as queer. The professional ABA perpetrator and the homophobic schoolyard bully are ultimately in the same line of work, enforcing the same compulsory normativity from different angles.

Since distinctively autistic movements of the hands violate the rules of both neuronormative performance and heteronormative performance, to refuse to suppress such movements functions as a simultaneous queering of both neuronormativity and heteronormativity. When an autistic person chooses to allow themselves to follow some or all of the impulses toward non-normative hand movement that spontaneously arise in them, rather than suppressing those impulses in the interest of normative performance, that's a form of neuroqueering."]

which meant i went and read about snail brains.

here's the bad news, at least by human standards:

snails do not have anything like a centralized brain. their nervous system is made up of small clusters of neurons (ganglia) that mostly handle very local tasks. they don't have a cortex, they don't build big integrated models of the world, and they almost certainly don't experience things like appreciation, anticipation, or savoring.

pudding is not looking at the sky and thinking it's beautiful.

snail eyes are basically light sensors - they can tell bright from dark, but not form images. snail "taste" is done through chemoreceptors on their tentacles and around their mouth. those receptors don't produce flavor the way ours do; they just detect chemical compounds and sort them into "approach," "ignore," or "avoid."

so there's no evidence that snails enjoy food, or wind, or views, the way mammals do.

and that does sound kind of sad. but then i thought that maybe we are asking the wrong question.

snails do have valence. they detect aversive things (like salt or dryness) and withdraw from them. they detect non-aversive or beneficial conditions (like moisture) and stay extended. when pudding is stretched out like this, it means his nervous system is basically saying "this is safe; nothing is wrong."

if we define pleasure not as our human experience of dopamine and reward chemicals but instead as "the absence of aversion" - a state where the organism is open to its environment instead of defending itself - then this does count as something positive, even if it's extremely nothing like human enjoyment.

pudding isn't appreciating the wind. but his body is registering humidity, safety, and the ability to keep functioning, and that matters to him in the only way his nervous system can make things matter. he does not think "this is great, this is awesome, i love the weather", because he doesn't think in the way we do at all, but the neurological action in his ganglion tell his body that he is safe, that the moisture is an acceptable level, that it's not too dry or windy, and that there's nothing imminently threatening.

i think a lot of the sadness comes from assuming that a good life has to look like ours: full of enjoyment, meaning, and aesthetic experience. but a snail isn't missing those things. its world just isn't built to include them.

snails don't have a sense of flavor. they don't even have tastebuds. this seems like a gimme, right? but again that might be asking the wrong question about what "taste" is. biologically speaking, it's chemoreception. we taste sweet because it indicates high value, high calorie sugar molecules. we taste salty for salt, umami for proteins. so in what way does pudding's chemoreceptors differ from ours instrumentally? we can say "by our human perspective, pudding can't experience "preference" or "savoring" or "anticipation of delicious food"", but from pudding's perspective we have radically overengineered ourselves for the task at hand. pudding can tell what's salty, what's high value, what has the chemicals he needs. the functional outcome is that he can discriminate food souces based on their composition. is that not taste?

Self / Own

It is not good for women to be afraid all the time, and we should not encourage it! When you consume a media diet of mostly true crime, buy a surveillance device for your house, and commiserate with the girlies online about how scary it is to see a man in a public place, you are basically cultivating an anxiety disorder. This will make your life more unpleasant, because you have trained yourself to be scared all the time, and it will not benefit you, because your fears are based on memes, not reality. You're not protecting yourself from anything; you're just giving yourself an extra flinch response.

And it plays right into the hands of conservatives! The right wing would love it if all women, especially all white and/or wealthy women, were terrified to leave their houses alone because they might see a strange man. They want you to be on a quest for One Good Man who will protect you from all other men and to be too scared to go anywhere without him. They want you to be on a hair trigger, ready to call the cops on anyone who makes you uncomfortable, because that is your function within their hierarchy.

If you are a woman, especially a white woman, then your fear is used to justify violence against poor people and people of color, especially men. From the perspective of conservatives, this is what your fear is for. And your fear is, in large part, what you are for.

As a kid, I used to get so anxious when me and my grandmother would have to walk home from her job at the pub, back to our house on the other side of the estate. It would be dark, the streets would be mostly empty, and the other people we saw would loom up out of the dark and be terrifying to a small child - What if this was Stranger Danger! What if they wanted to attack us, rob us, kill us? At this point the Yorkshire Ripper was either still active or only recently caught, and the news was full of how dangerous it was for women to walk alone at night.

A lot of other trail users, especially in the backcountry, are male.

And you know what?

I feel not only perfectly safe with a couple of dudes camping nearby, but I even feel *safer.* Because the most dangerous things in the backcountry are accidents, and accidents are less dangerous when other human beings are around.

All the guys I have met way out in the woods have been stellar. Why? Because they're out there for the exact same reason I am. We are all having fun in the woods together. Sometimes someone sees a tarantula and you get to see who's afraid of spiders and who thinks spiders are fucking cool.

If you've never found yourself as the victim of a cult, or sexual assault, or abuse, the only thing separating you from people who have been victimized by cults / sexual assault / abuse is circumstance. That's it. Sheer luck. Luck over what family you were born into. Luck over who you were surrounded by when you were emotionally compromised or in any way vulnerable. Ect.

You are not better than people who have been victimized. They didn't do anything wrong to ask to be victimized. Anyone can be victimized by these situations given the perfect storm of circumstances. You are not better than people who have been victimized by cults / sexual assault / abuse.

You need to understand that if you are lucky enough to have never been victimized by cults / sexual assault / abuse, it's very little to do with how smart or strong you are or you doing all the "right" things. Someone can be smart and strong and do all the right things and still find themselves a victim given the perfect storm of bad circumstances.

Bullying.

Funny how when I was being bullied as a kid, I did fight back and I did do everything I could to stand up to my bullies. But that didn't make it stop. All the adults at school just told me that the bullying was my fault because I was "giving the bullies the reaction they wanted, if I would just be quiet and ignore them the bullying would stop."

But now that I'm an adult, I hear other adults saying all the time that kids who get bullied are only bullied because they're too weak and insecure to stand up for themselves.

Isn't that funny? How I spent years fighting back and trying to stand up for myself, and this got me told that it was my fault for not just ignoring them? But now I hear other adults, most of whom are parents, saying if a kid is bullied it's their fault for not standing up for themselves or fighting back?

It's a lose/lose situation, either way if the kid fights back, or doesn't fight back, they're told its their fault for how they respond. It's almost as if, the bullying isn't the victim's fault or smthing 🤔

And this type of victim blaming rhetoric ignores that there's in the majority of cases a power imbalance between the bullies and victims.

Common dynamics we see are: white kids bullying children of color, neurotypical kids bullying neurodivergent kids, gender conforming cishet kids bullying GNC and/or LGBTQIA+ kids, abled kids bullying disabled kids, boys bullying girls (he's only teasing you because he likes you!), rich or middle class children bullying poor children, ect. ect.

And this is exactly WHY adults often victim blame bullied children instead of holding bullies accountable, and these adults blaming the children are often privileged themselves. White adult school staff blaming children of color who are getting bullied instead of holding the white children doing the bullying accountable, neurotypical adult school staff blaming neurodivergent children who are being bullied instead of holding the neurotypical children doing the bullying accountable, ect. ect.

Find someone currently emotionally vulnerable in some way. Isolated, lonely, and/or emotionally compromised in some way (maybe just lost a loved one or experienced an equivalent trauma or tragedy, etc). Then you lovebomb the everliving crap out of this emotionally compromised individual. Then once you've earned their love and trust, you slowly over time chip away at their self esteem, their sense of self, their ability to trust themselves and their own judgement, and slowly exert more and more power and control over them.

If you couldn't tell if I was describing an abuser seeking out their next victim or a cult recruiting their next victim, that's because it's essentially the same playbook.

I think this is really important to point out because personally I've encountered a lot of people both IRL and online who, at least on paper, accept that victim blaming survivors of abuse is wrong, but then will turn around and say that people who join cults are gullible idiots who deserve whatever they endure within the cult for being such gullible idiots.