polsref

—

PBS: Language as Prejudice - Myth #6: Women Talk Too Much (via misandry-mermaid)

Every EVERY women’s studies class I’ve been in has had this problem and failed to address it. 

Hedges’ pieces are incomparable!

There is an episode of PBS’s great series Craft In America that features Hedges, and it’s well worth a watch!

People killed: around three quarters of a million.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

This, too, is a trashed bathroom; young queer people living through hell and having precious little control over their circumstances or the world in which they exist can affect something by using the language of social justice as a cudgel on their would-be allies, as well as getting a brief feeling of power over someone else by doing it.

What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominent—elements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.

Most of you have been educated to ignore such elements. You have been taught to seek out and identify the main ideas, dismissing the trivial as you go. This has had to be trained into you: read to a young child sometime, you will notice she has the annoying habit of interrupting the flow of the story to draw attention to some minor thing. Close reading resembles the interruptions of that child. It is a method of undoing the training that keeps us to the straight and narrow path of main ideas. It is a way of learning not to disregard those features of the text that attract our attention, but are not principal ideas.

Oh, but had the artisan who made me created me instead – a worthy woman... ...I would say "how lucky am I"

Father in heaven who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water... ...Who would then transform me from a man to woman? Were I only to have merited this being so graced by goodness...

What shall I say? why cry or be bitter? If my father in heaven has decreed upon me and has maimed me with an immutable deformity then I do not wish to remove it. the sorrow of the impossible is a human pain that nothing will cure and for which no comfort can be found. So, I will bear and suffer until I die and wither in the ground. Since I have learned from our tradition that we bless both, the good and the bitter I will bless in a voice hushed and weak: blessed are you [HaShem] who has not made me a woman.

This means:

If you draw a hard line between "drug" and "medicine" based on current legality where you live (or any other criteria) you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to do massive harm to someone's body, mind or well-being you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to contribute meaningfully to someone's healing, function or happiness you've gone wrong somewhere,

Lesbians being shamed and punished for not liking men.

Bi women being shamed and punished for liking men.

Straight women being shamed and punished for being “incorrectly” heterosexual (being trans, being sex workers, being promiscuous, being polyam, etc)…

Is understanding that under patriarchal order, women aren’t really expected to desire men. We’re expected to desire to be desired by men.

When a woman is a lesbian, she is punished for her categorical, inherent refusal to men. This should be obvious. We’re seen as denying men a fundamental “right” they should be granted, which is why we’re often seen as cruel, hateful or mean by the mere crime of existing as lesbians. This is why it is insisted that we give men “a chance” on a level that is not asked of gay men to give women “a chance”. Women have no right to men, men have a right (and exclusive obligation to subjugate through romance and sex) to women, so while gay men are of course expected to desire women and punished for not desiring women, they aren’t seen as owing women anything the way lesbians are absolutely seen as owing ourselves to men.

Seeing women as naturally, inevitably attracted to men is why too we can inform someone that we’re lesbians and receive the ridiculous answer of “if you keep saying you’re a lesbian men won’t date you”/“men don’t find it attractive when women say they’re lesbians”.

This is also why on average it’s so hard for lesbians to detect that we don’t like men in comparison to gay men detecting that they don’t like women. Men are taught to process their sexualities on the function of what and who THEY actively desire. Women are taught to process our sexualities on the function of who desires us and how we comply or not. Lesbians in denial end up thinking of whether they do or don’t like men in terms of what level of intimacy or servitude they could tolerate granting a man without wanting to jump off a cliff every second of it, rather than thinking of whether they WANT to be with a man or not. Attraction isn’t about tolerating or putting up, it’s about desires and wants, but for women it’s so hard to truly internalize that fact, more so when we’re not straight.

Aside from this, being desired on itself can be nice even when it doesn’t come from someone we want, especially if we’re told all our worth derives from being desired by men. It’s very hard for many lesbians to detect our unattraction to men because many of us do want to be desired by men not due to us desiring them, but due to wanting that validation of our worth as women. This is often goes exacerbated for trans lesbians, who for obvious reasons can feel much more of a need to validate their worth as women by having men’s attraction to them deem them as women enough. Lesbians who deviate in any other way from normative womanhood besides our lesbianism itself (lesbians of color, gnc lesbians, disabled lesbians, intersex lesbians, fat lesbians, the already mentioned trans lesbians, etc) have an even bigger problem with seeking validation from men being attracted to us than cis, thin, non-intersex, white, abled lesbians do in general, which is saying a lot.

When women are never taught to even consider active wants and are instead taught to focus on passive reception of men’s wants, just wondering if we like men or not is not on the table for us. It doesn’t so much as occur to most of us to practice asking ourselves that. When already realized lesbians dare to invite other women to practice a healthy exercise of questioning their assumed attraction to men (as opposed to scrutinizing and policing bi and trans women’s attraction to men, which is a different story), no matter how polite we are about it or how much we highlight that if they end up coming to the conclusion that they do like men that’s okay, it’s seen as a predatory violent plot intended to force other women to become lesbians so we can steal them away from men for ourselves, as if we were symbolically raping them, instead of it being seen as an act of reclamation of the sexualities of ALL women (not just lesbians) and healthy introspection.

In addition to that, lesbians, who’re “inferior” to men under the order of the patriarchy by virtue of being women/non-men, have the audacity not to just refuse men as I mentioned earlier, but to also exclusively desire women, which is a role that men, our “superiors”, are entitled to, not us. Who do we think we are? Do we think we’re equal to, let alone better than men? No wonder even other LGBT people see us as arrogant and delusional.

On the other hand, bi women disrupt the conception of women as only passive receptacles of men’s desire, despite them liking men. When they love women and men simultaneously, their attraction to men goes from being seen as an inevitable natural circumstance of their womanhood in which they obediently or resignedly allow themselves to be had by men because there’s “no other option”, to being seen as actively desiring men for themselves to use for their own romantic and sexual female satisfaction, which is the reverse of how it should be. In the eyes of the patriarchy, this makes them greedy, filthy sluts.

Men, under patriarchy, are not meant to be objects of desire for anyone, they’re meant to be the ONLY desirers (of women exclusively, as to not turn other men into objects of desire). That’s why a bi woman’s attraction to men is seen as perverse no matter how normative of a woman she is outside of her bisexuality. Bi women’s attraction to men is seen as deliberate in contrast to cis straight women’s supposedly passive, receptive, inevitable attraction to men, and that cannot be in the eyes of the patriarchy. Their mere existence (as well as lesbian existence) exposes that heterosexuality isn’t the natural condition of womanhood, that women do have desires of their own that may or may not include men, and when they do include men, they’re seen as having the gall to “reduce” men to objects of desire for their own gratification.

What’s more, not only do bi women have the audacity of making men objects of their “inferior” female desire, but they put them on equal footing to women as objects of their desire, which is worthy of patriarchal outrage. Women are supposed to be inferior to men. How dare they put that into question by desiring both? How dare they still recognize and claim their love for women when they love men too? Especially those who are monogamously with a man, when a man should be beyond “enough” as they’re always the “superior” choice? How dare they affirm their bisexuality regardless of who they’re with?

Like lesbians are a threat to the expected impossibility of women to escape men, bi women are the looming terror that even if a woman is with a man, it’s still not guaranteed that she’s straight.

When it comes to straight women it should be even easier to spot that the patriarchal obligation of women isn’t for us to desire men, but to be desired by them and having no desires of our own, because straight women, even the most normative ones, are heavily policed in how they practice their heterosexuality.

A straight woman is promiscuous? Much like bi women (regardless of each bi woman’s actual sexual behavior), her attraction to men is now seen as deliberate and active too, instead of as passive complying reception of men’s desires. She is a slut.

She’s polyam? She’s a GIANT slut whose desire for men is so degenerate, active and deliberate, that she can’t be content with just one. She’s no longer in competition against other women for men’s attention, men are in competition for hers and they can be “replaced” much more easily if she’s not satisfied with them, which isn’t women’s place within the patriarchy.

She’s a sex worker? Not only is she a slut, she has the double audacity of materially exploiting men’s desire for her (triple the outrage for lesbian, bi women and trans women sex workers), when love and sex between men and women is supposed to be an act of submission to men that should only materially benefit men. Sex workers DARE to have their sexual labor compensated, monetarily no less, when all of women’s labor to men is supposed to be an unpaid granted; from domestic labor, to sexual and romantic labor.

She’s trans? Besides betraying the manhood she was assigned, being living proof that traditional gender can be challenged, turning someone who “should” be a man (herself) into an object of desire, she is also turning men into objects of her desire as deliberately as bi women do – desire from the “wrongest” type of woman at that – and luring men who would otherwise be perfectly straight out of “proper” heterosexuality. Similar indignations of blurring the lines of “proper” heterosexuality are evoked when it comes to cis women who happen to be intersex. It gets more complicated for trans women who’re intersex too.

This is all without analyzing how these things intersect with race, with an emphasis on antiblackness/misogynoir, colonialism/the exploitation of Indigenous women, the simultaneous hypersexualization and desexualization of all woc, and so, so much more. Then there’s (dis)ability, whether we’re psychiatrized or not, class, etc.

This is why it can be perfectly true and coherent within a singular gendered system to shame and brutalize women for not liking men and for liking men, if liking men isn’t done in the very narrow particular way women are expected to do so; by being cisgender, exclusively devoted to men, prioritizing men’s desires over our own (which shouldn’t exist to begin with) with no compensation, etc.

This is why although all women are allowed to prioritize our particular experiences (as lesbians, as trans, as bi, as disabled, as woc, and so on), we cannot disregard the experiences of women different from us, including when we’re more marginalized than them, but much more so when they’re marginalized in ways we’re not (be us being privileged over them, or just equally disadvantaged in intensity but in different ways, such as it happens between lesbians and bi women).

I am not uptight about privacy because I'm hiding something. I'm uptight about it because the people who dismiss my right to privacy are dangerous to you and me and our families, personally, all the time.

“Class based or economic grievances” added as a domestic terror indicator:

Apparently juries in Texas are now issuing life sentences for possessing information ?? There was no terrorism involved, no assassination plot; the couple mentioned in the article did not do or plan to do any violence. They literally just got sentenced to life in prison for being associated with anti-fascism (aka... a pro-democracy movement).

So just to be clear:

Attack the US government and attempt a coup = Pardoned and free to go!

Be present at a protest or in possession of leftist information = Life sentence.

Last year on the Fourth of July, a small group from Dallas-Fort Worth held a night-time noise demonstration, setting off fireworks outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility south of the cities, in solidarity with the detainees. A few protesters broke away and spray-painted graffiti on employees’ cars and a security post, slashed the tires on a government van, and broke a security camera. The facility’s guards ordered the protesters to disperse, and most of them did. When a police officer arrived at the scene, drawing his gun, an armed protester shot her rifle, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.

After a three-week trial, a jury found eight of nine protesters guilty of “providing material support to terrorists”, among other crimes.

For the Sotos, this “material support” included owning a “printing press” used to print anarchist zines and being part of a leftist book club, the federal government argued. The couple had already left the scene by the time guns were drawn. All eight of the defendants sentenced so far have received unusually harsh sentences – 30 to 100 years – essentially life in prison.

Their attorneys announced their intention to appeal, but many supporters are doubtful that anything short of a presidential pardon from a future administration would free them.

The Prairieland case was the first tried and convicted under the Trump Department of Justice’s “counter-terrorism” initiatives targeting “antifa” – short for antifascist – a decentralized movement the administration has officially categorized as a “domestic terrorist organization”. The federal government argued the Prairieland defendants, what they called a “North Texas Antifa cell”, had planned the demonstration as an assassination attempt against a law enforcement officer. The government alleged this conspiracy even though the defendants were loosely connected, and some who attended the protest did not even know each other.

So being anti-fascist is llegal and worthy of going to prison for life in the United States.

And they got. Life. In. Prison.