Dissociologist

i wrote a paper in my masculinity studies class in college about this exact phenomenon, specifically about how high heeled shoes started as a practical way for Persian cavalry to keep their feet on their stirrups, then likely due to that association, became a popular fashion item and status symbol among the upper classes of Europe, before the Great Male Renunciation of the 18th-19th centuries, when men started shunning opulence in favor of utility, leaving them as a fashion item for women instead.

“There are not two sexes, there are n sexes; there are as many sexes as there are assemblages. And since each of us enters into several assemblages, each of us has n sexes. When children discover that they are reduced to one sex, male or female, they discover their powerlessness: they lose the machinic sense and are left only with the signification of a tool. And then a child really does fall into depression. They have been damaged; their countless sexes have been stolen!”

“Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples. The ports of Holland, the docks of Bordeaux and Liverpool were specialized in the Negro slave trade, and owe their renown to millions of deported slaves. So when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude.”

The Palestinian People have consistently made it crystal clear that our enemy is Zionism, an ideology of dispossession, an expansionist and racist settler-colonial enterprise. Zionism, not Jews. Our capacity to produce such distinction is admirable and impressive, considering the heavy-handedness with which Zionism attempts to synonymize itself with Judaism. However, this distinction is not our responsibility, and, personally, it is not my priority. A Palestinian’s perceived resentment doesn’t have the backing of a Knesset to codify it into law. Tropes aren’t drones, nor can one convert conspiracy theories into nuclear weapons. We are past the early 1900s. Things are different, power has shifted. Words are not murder.