Nysha Didn't Break It!

This argument is applied to women in STEM, particularly academia. “Why aren’t there more young female physics professors?” The narrative says, “clearly we need to have more cartoon characters aimed at little girls, and have early-career women burdened with the extra work of being Token Representation for their gender. They can, like, do their whole fulltime jobs AND ALSO go into schools to explain how great their lives are.”

This is clearly NOTHING to do with the fact that something like … 0.45% of PhD students will become professors. That’s less than one in 200. While that person actually has a reasonable chance of being a young woman, young women are also capable of looking at a career path that offers insecurity, low wages, and incompatibility with work/life balance, coupled with a vanishingly low chance of a small prize at the end, and simply taking their skills out of the field.

“Why don’t women stay in working relationships where they aren’t valued?” The pipeline wonders, stuffing more schoolchildren into a pipe where half of them will leap for safety as soon as they gather marketable skills.

So in politics? There are plenty of young women at the lower levels in the US and UK, and plenty of young girls who are passionate about politics and changing the world. And we all saw what they did to Monica Lewinsky.

In 2016, we watched as Jo Cox, a British Labour MP known for being a nice pretty friendly young white mother who helped people and Cared, was assassinated in broad daylight by a white terrorist. She fought for refugee rights, she had two young kids, she engaged with the public and was friendly and pretty and nice, she was anti-Brexit and pro-immigration, and she was murdered brutally by a man who screamed white supremacist slogans and cut her down in an English street. We saw that. We saw how there was a flicker of performative sadness, but nothing really came of it, and Brexit stormed ahead regardless. People have largely forgotten it now. Imagine if it had been one of those loud old men, assassinated by a terrorist with darker skin. Politics would have exploded. The world would have changed. But for Jo Cox - a woman in politics who we might have identified with, a woman who seemed Relatable - that’s what happened, she was just murdered and three years later it’s shrug.emoji and Brexit and “oh yeah… the husband was really cut up about it, wasn’t he?”

Oh, and believe me: Hillary Clinton! You could write essays about what we learned from Hillary Clinton.

We all watched the differences between how the press handled Theresa May and the rest of her party. We saw the platform given to those jokes.

We hear about when female politicians mention how much hate mail they get. We don’t pay too much attention to their security arrangements. We assume they make lots of money (most of them don’t) or receive lots of validation and positive attention behind closed doors, that there must be some huge perks of the job, like feeling powerful, but lots of women don’t look at the price of it and say “Dream job!!!” You know??

I mean, obviously we can separate fiction from reality, but everyone watched on Game of Thrones how every female leader was ripped apart by wolves, and the wolves explained to each other, loudly and publicly, that It Made Narrative Sense, You See. We saw the platform the wolves got. The wolves got audiences of millions. The wolves get to make television shows. We are supposed to make small amounts of money and small humble strides, and be bright and brilliant and caring, and then be torn apart for the narrative. Which we will deserve. Because women who hunger for political influence and power deserve this.

We saw how Doctor Who destroyed a female prime minister with six words: “Don’t you think she looks tired?” And then we giggled! because! fandom!! when people made memes with that quote over Theresa May.

We all see how AOC gets treated by the people who hate her, and the platform they get. We see how Mainstream America wants us to feel about her. We see how deliberately, violently lonely her position is made to be, how the conditions are set up for her to fail and snap so she can be picked over for easy meat. Like Monica Lewinsky. Like Jo Cox. It will make narrative sense. There will be no particular justice. That’s not what narrative sense means, for women in politics! The platform is for picking over the meat, not for making the woman look powerful and brave!! The platforms will do backflips to justify the actions of most men in power, but they all agree that the Most Narratively Sensible way to treat women in power is to make them walk naked through the public who hates them, while the platform chants “Shame.”

(In fact, the platform explains, this is actually very narratively empowering for women in politics.)

We see that it doesn’t matter if you’re pretty or nice. Or passionate and powerful. It doesn’t matter if you’re relatable, or cold and distant, if you have Dignity or if you seem like someone that people could drink a beer with. We see that women who enter politics don’t get to Google themselves. That they’re subjected to threats and harassment and abuse. That this is justified constantly because they chose to become Public Figures. We see that the reward for Caring, and Trying To Be Powerful, is to be punished, publicly, forever.

We see that the punishment looks an awful lot like The Worst Nightmares for Women. Or what we’ve been taught the worst nightmares should be. Loss of control. Loss of the narrative. Loss of dignity and reputation. Loss of friendship. Loss of respect and safety. In the worst cases, loss of choice and loss of a future.

“Oh well,” we say, as we create this culture, as we join in the mocking of another woman on the internet who is slightly unlikeable but dared to get attention anyway, “they get to live in big houses, don’t they? Women in politics? They play the victims, yeah, but they live in big houses, we think. Which is why they grab power, because women like to live in big houses. So it’s fine. This is the fair price for them to pay for that… idk, big house and that sensible pantsuit.”

“Oh dear,” we say, as we create this culture, as we sell the dream of power to children and then publicly crucify the ones who try to get Attention and Power and Influence with the wrong tone or the wrong gender or background. “Oh dear,” we say, mercilessly twisting every image of a woman in power into a monster, whether she’s wrong or right, real or fictional, soft or cruel, into a monster who is hated by half the population at any given time, who can be hunted down like game, whose name can be made into mud, who needs to accept the consequences of her actions, who SHOULD be forced to relive her worst moments and mistakes endlessly on television, to a background of laughtrack and millions of people racing to make the most cutting comment on social media, because she deserves it, because she’s a public figure, because that’s what you do to public figures, see, we do it to the men too! and it’s different but it’s not different; you see it’s okay, she WANTED this, she agreed to become public property: “maybe,” we say, looking up from this for a moment, “it’s because kids don’t see enough women on television.”

I mean, cutting out commuting is obvious, but, like, most people with more time on their hands use it for something.

Like, cooking more meals at home, or taking up crafting hobbies like soap-making.

We wouldn’t need as much ready-bought shit.

And even people who physically can’t, say, cook regularly or make their own things would benefit because friends/family members who could wouldn’t be so strapped for time.

I stayed at home while at uni, so I didn’t have to work a lot, and my uni hours weren’t too taxing.

And yeah, if a family member says “hey, can you pop around and help me with this”, it’s much easier to say “yeah, no problem”, if you’re not having to add it to the massive to-do pile in the short time you have outside of work.

And when I make things - like bread, I used to bake a shit-ton of bread - I tend to make way more than I need, so I give it to other people.

Idk, starting on drugs for my ADHD that have made handling things easier has also given me more free time - because it’s not spent struggling to do basics - and one of the biggest changes has just been remembering to keep a reusable coffee cup clean and in my handbag, along with a tote bag for shopping.

5p bag charges did nothing. Being able to think straight was the thing that helped. You know, the thing that overwork prevents?

And, like, imagine if you had a whole extra day? Like if the 4 Day Week campaign succeeded.

I’d be fucking sewing clothes that are actually durable and fit me properly. I’d get into soap-making. I’d look into how to protect the garden from feral cats enough to actually grow some veg in it.

And yeah, that’s probably a lot for one person, but it doesn’t have to be one person. Like I said, I tend to make too much food for just me when I bake. And I imagine soap-making is done in batches. And if I could get a veg patch going, I’d probably have too much for just me to eat.

If you don’t trust the machines to allow you to vote for who you want, you ALWAYS have the right to ask for a paper ballot. If they refuse, get that shit on video and blast them on social media. Election offices HATE having people complain about them on social media. Be sure to specifically get them denying you a paper ballot. PAPER BALLOTS ARE NOT INVALID BALLOTS AND WILL BE COUNTED.

Know your rights, be nice to election workers, be sure to register to vote, and actually get out there and vote!

This article includes a pretty thorough summary of trans exclusionary feminist ties to anti-choice conservatives. Here are some highlights of these connections (emphasis mine), but the article as a whole is worth the read: 

_________

WoLF has made no bones about partnering with misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in order to oppose the livelihoods of trans people to the Supreme Court. […] WoLF’s relationship with ADF extends beyond just filing briefs in key cases. LGBTQNation reported in fiscal year 2017, the most recent year for which the feminist group’s financial records are available, WoLF applied for and accepted a $15,000 grant from the ultraconservative group. The LGBTQNation report additionally revealed in 2017 that WoLF contracted with Imperial Independent Media for help with fundraising, promising a 20 percent commission. At the time, IIM was run by Zachary Freeman, who made a name for himself over a lawsuit to leak abortion clinic employee names to the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-choice group known for propagating heavily doctored videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood profiting off the sale of fetal tissue.

[…]

Though it’s unknown who funds another prominent gender critical group, Hands Across the Aisle, one of its co-founders is Kaeley Triller-Haver, an anti-choice conservative who has reportedly admitted to committing statutory rape of a teenage boy when she was a youth counselor. What’s interesting about Hands Across the Aisle is how many journalists are seemingly involved with the activist group. A web archive from June 2018 suggested that former New Statesman editor Helen Lewis, recently hired as a writer for the Atlantic, as well as ultraconservative outlets the Federalist, the Daily Caller, and the Daily Signal are associated with the group.

[…]

During the Irish referendum on abortion rights in 2018, some British gender critical feminists withheld support for pro-choice campaigners citing the trans supportive attitudes of Irish feminism, going so far as to schedule an anti-trans meeting in Dublin at the height of the campaign season.

[…]

In February, the conservative Heritage Foundation held an event in Washington, DC, featuring prominent British anti-trans feminists Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (also known as “Posie Parker”) and Julia Long, who came together to denounce the trans rights movement at large as well as a medical community that’s increasingly becoming more open to supporting trans children. The next day, the anti-trans feminists, who had allegedly been flown to the US on Heritage’s dime, stormed a Capitol Hill office where Human Rights Campaign national press secretary Sarah McBride had just concluded a meeting between parents of trans children and legislators. They filmed themselves yelling and taunting McBride with their personal gripes with the trans movement, accusing her of not caring about “lesbian girls.” McBride, to her credit, didn’t take the bait, remaining stone-faced and focused on her computer screen while a coworker attempted to de-escalate the situation.

[…]

In the US, Baltimore gender critical feminist Julia Beck has made a name for herself in conservative circles, appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News and testifying before the House against trans inclusions in the Violence Against Women Act and the Equality Act.

[…]

Just this month, gender critical feminists who have been banned from Twitter for extensive transphobic harassment have recently organized under alt-right message board Gab to form “Spinster,” a social media platform for TERFs. It remains to be seen whether British message board Mumsnet will remain the epicenter for gender critical messaging, but the movement’s growing connections with anti-choice and violent misogynist movements should concern both cisgender and transgender women.

[…]

”For many years we, the indigenous leaders and peoples of the Amazon, have been warning you, our brothers who have brought so much damage to our forests. What you are doing will change the whole world and will destroy our home – and it will destroy your home too.

We have set aside our divided history to come together. Only a generation ago, many of our tribes were fighting each other, but now we are together, fighting together against our common enemy. And that common enemy is you, the non-indigenous peoples who have invaded our lands and are now burning even those small parts of the forests where we live that you have left for us. President Bolsonaro of Brazil is encouraging the farm owners near our lands to clear the forest – and he is not doing anything to prevent them from invading our territory.

We call on you to stop what you are doing, to stop the destruction, to stop your attack on the spirits of the Earth. When you cut down the trees you assault the spirits of our ancestors. When you dig for minerals you impale the heart of the Earth. And when you pour poisons on the land and into the rivers – chemicals from agriculture and mercury from gold mines – you weaken the spirits, the plants, the animals and the land itself. When you weaken the land like that, it starts to die. If the land dies, if our Earth dies, then none of us will be able to live, and we too will all die.

Why do you do this? You say it is for development – but what kind of development takes away the richness of the forest and replaces it with just one kind of plant or one kind of animal? Where the spirits once gave us everything we needed for a happy life – all of our food, our houses, our medicines – now there is only soya or cattle. Who is this development for? Only a few people live on the farm lands; they cannot support many people and they are barren.

So why do you do this? We can see that it is so that some of you can get a great deal of money. In the Kayapó language we call your money piu caprim, “sad leaves”, because it is a dead and useless thing, and it brings only harm and sadness.

When your money comes into our communities it often causes big problems, driving our people apart. And we can see that it does the same thing in your cities, where what you call rich people live isolated from everyone else, afraid that other people will come to take their piu caprim away from them. Meanwhile other people starve or live in misery because they don’t have enough money to get food for themselves and their children.

But those rich people will die, as we all will die. And when their spirits are separated from their bodies their spirits will be sad and they will suffer, because while they are alive they have made so many other people suffer instead of helping them, instead of making sure that everyone else has enough to eat before they feed themselves, which is our way, the way of the Kayapó, the way of indigenous people.

You have to change the way you live because you are lost, you have lost your way. Where you are going is only the way of destruction and of death. To live you must respect the world, the trees, the plants, the animals, the rivers and even the very earth itself. Because all of these things have spirits, all of these things are spirits, and without the spirits the Earth will die, the rain will stop and the food plants will wither and die too.

We all breathe this one air, we all drink the same water. We live on this one planet. We need to protect the Earth. If we don’t, the big winds will come and destroy the forest.

Then you will feel the fear that we feel.”

It was a fucking mess. Here are some highlights.

-there were probably like 10 white women and about 200 incel white men

-a bunch of the dudes made a point to set up right next to the holocaust memorial, as someone pointed out on twitter

-my personal twitter feed today was just bostonians taking pictures of the dumpsters outside their apartments and being like, “look at the straight pride parade, everyone!”

-businesses along their march route prepared by putting up lgbt flags or signs that said “go home alt-right scum”

-the floats were just trump 2020 floats

-milo fucking yiannopoulos showed up and made a speech but there were so many counter-protesters that no one could understand what he was saying

-legit there were counter-protesters flooding the streets. lots of rainbow and trans pride flags out today

-small bands along the route popped up to drown out the white supremacists’ hate with good upbeat tunes

-this dude in a clown suit and his buddy in green face paint drove 8 hours to protest the ban of a legit incel subreddit. yes you heard me. apparently incels are “reclaiming” clowns?

(im not showing a pictures of him or milo or anyone else like them because im not giving them the attention they’re so clearly begging for)

-people legit just flipped off the marchers as they walked by

-then the police decided to start arresting people. apparently there were 34 arrests of counter-protesters in total

-eventually fights broke out

-BPD started punching and driving motorcycles at counter protesters who refused to move out of the way for the straight pride parade

-the police ended up using mace on the counter-protesters towards the end of the parade

-there are reports of tear gas use also though i haven’t seen any photos of it yet

In areas where protestors were already surrounded by cops in roads that had been blocked off specifically for protestors, police rode in on bikes and motorcycles for no other reason than to clash with protestors. Several people refused to move out of the way and were beaten and arrested.

Several times throughout the day I found myself being pushed along in groups of people who were running to get out of the way of cops who had pepper spray. Whenever the cops wanted people to move they attacked them with mace.

Some people were beaten and sprayed so horribly that they couldn’t walk and they were either dragged away by their comrades or by police.

At the end of the protest, the alt-right speakers overstayed their permit in the plaza. The police did not force them to move and did not pepper spray them. Pepper spray was reserved for us queers, not the fascists.

While people stood outside the plaza at the end of the protest, police actively mocked and taunted protestors.

From the arrests that I witnessed the police seemed to be specifically targeting people who were visibly trans, POC, or disabled.

Between the alt right rally and the protestors was a fenced off section where the cops stood. They were facing towards the protestors. Many had their badge numbers covered with black tape or were hiding their badges. Some of the cops took out their batons to intimidate peaceful protestors.

Its name reclaims a slur because the point is to say, “I am different, but that’s not a bad thing.” The queer movement is about upholding the right of all people to deviate from an oppressive cisgender, heterosexual, patriarchal norm. Broadening the spectrum of acceptable diversity; questioning and dismantling the social pressures that police and punish deviance. Changing not just our own lives, but how our entire society thinks about sex and gender.

That’s why “queer” embraces so many different groups. It’s not trying to erase their differences, but to try to coherently understand the complex overlapping pressures that affect each of them, and to extend our reach beyond the LGBT+ community. It’s about the right of lesbians to live without men and the right of trans and nonbinary people to be who they are, the right of asexuals to define for themselves what’s significant in their lives, the right of straight men to be vulnerable and emotional and nonviolent. When the great queering project is done, you will see the changes everywhere, not just in small LGBT+ enclaves.

Homophobia is a huge part of how all men are policed. If a man isn’t strong, tough, aggressive, and dominant? He gets called gay. So this isn’t “Soft straight men are totally LGBT+ and belong in your gay support group!” but it is “Part of the work of disassembling homophobia is changing how it affects straight men.”

Maybe straight men not being as miserable … shouldn’t be an automatic negative, especially not if the whole idea before that addition was to benefit marginalized groups?

I get it, of course they would in some ways know some positive changes in a less patriarchal/heteronormative society - but maybe let’s not forget who patriarchal/heteronormative society benefits to? Because like. A straight man who is vulnerable and softspoken won’t be as oppressed as a gay man, no matter said gay man’s personality!

I don’t think anybody thinks it’s a good thing straight men are miserable but like are they really? are they miserable? Compared to everyone else? 

I think that men are promised the rewards of privilege. They are told that being homophobic and straight will make them fundamentally better than gay men. They are told that being male and masculine will make them fundamentally better than women. And yes, the people reaping the rewards are generally straight cis men.

But it’s like a pyramid scheme: Every member, when they join, is promised the INCREDIBLE REWARDS they could receive, if they only get a few people to join at a lower level than them! And some members ARE making absolute bank. But when you look at the balance sheet, you see that 90% of active members are earning absolutely no money, and meanwhile the top 1% are fucking millionaires.

I think that, yes, if you look into the lived experiences of men in our culture, masculinity is making them actively miserable. There’s a reason men are, on average, more depressed, more isolated, more violent, and more likely to die by suicide. “Toxic masculinity” wasn’t a term coined to talk about women’s experiences.

The straight-cis-men-always-win argument especially falls to pieces once you look outside the realm of sex and gender–there’s no arguing that things like class, money, race, immigration status, incarceration, disability, and mental health don’t also have huge impacts on peoples’ quality of life. There are a lot of ways queer people can have, comparatively, a lot of privilege compared to straight cis men.

So really, does it benefit us, as a group, to outcast and demonize groups of people who are fighting the same forces as us? Do we want to pit large swathes of the population against each other and stage the Oppression Olympics endlessly? Or do we want to recognize that it’s probably 99% of the population getting fucked over by the massively powerful people at the top and doing something about that?

Be a shift manager. Get promoted to Corporal. Move from floor staff to the sales desk. Make it onto the police force. Put all your effort into being the best little cog in the whole machine. Someday it will pay off. Someday you’ll move up high enough in the ranks. Oh, you’re still poor? Work harder. Get a better job.

Be a man. Catcall women. Get dates. Have a girlfriend. Have children. Produce an entire family of people who have to respect you as its patriarch! Oh, that’s not happening? You must not be manly enough.

It’s similar to the way colonialism works, where the children of one conquered country are used to fill the ranks of the army that invades the next one, because when colonialism has destroyed your country, being your oppressor’s footsoldier is one of the last viable careers left.

The biggest lie the system sells is that if you cooperate well enough, you’ll get to run the show someday. We have to have the wit and awareness to understand that the entire system is rigged, and we need to take apart the systems that dominate and control people, instead of just replacing the people on top.

Stephen Colbert, who is obviously privileged, and will be the first to talk about it, also talks about being called queer when he was a kid. Whatever you may think about his penchant for kissing guests regardless of gender and wearing drag, he describes himself as a cis, het, white, Christian man, and I tend to go with people’s self-identification. And he spent a lot of time in school being bullied for perceived gayness.

I know a child close to me who loves her assigned gender so much that we describe her as “Gender euphoric” who was actively teased for “wearing boy shoes” because her sandals were black and red. Another child close to me, with a slightly less deep attachment to his assigned gender but who still uses male pronouns, has always had a deep and abiding love of sparkle and twirl and glitter and now picks the plainest clothes he can to avoid teasing at school. It doesn’t matter that the school has strong antibullying policies and a clear policy of support for trans kids… they don’t have support for kids stepping outside the binary, and they don’t know what to do with “teasing”. 

I honestly think most people with cis, binary, het identities who present that way have no fucking clue who they would be if that overwhelming social pressure to conform wasn’t there. “Masculinity” as a concept has changed SO much just within my lifetime. I think about hair bands in the 1980s and how from the time I was born until the early 90s the absolute most popular singers, bands, etc. were incredibly androgynous in presentation, in voice… and then it shifted and there was this huge binary pressure that just kept getting worse. 

Most of these things have pendulum swings, but the fact that it shifts so much, so quickly speaks to how fucking arbitrary it all is. 

One of the core ideas of the feminism I learned from infancy was that feminism is for everyone because patriarchy hurts everyone. That the problem is not, for example, housework and childrearing, but the idea of gender roles being mandatory, that men are even worse for crying and being emotion and wanting to caretake for their children than women might be for going to work. That calling women less than men and defining things as women’s work limits both women and men. (The language was very binary growing up.) And the thing that became obvious in the past few years is that sexism is the heart of homophobia and transphobia alike. 

This is what happens when you don't raise people to understand that posh people are the enemy. In a better world, everyone would understand that Boris Johnson doesn't give a shit about anyone but Boris Johnson.

Sorry to go all "class war" on you but we have a Prime Minister who only a handful of people voted for and he's been given permission to shut down parliament by an unelected monarch, and there are people who have absolutely nothing that sincerely believe that these rich assholes care about them. Those people have been horribly fucking failed by a society that should have taught them different.