#butchanarchy

Schools are sites of extreme social control and abuse, serve as state propaganda distribution centers, and are by and large focused on creating docile servants to capital rather than inquisitive learners. School abolition is a necessary radical demand.

If you got through the experience of schooling with your love of learning and self-esteem intact I’m honestly very happy for you but that is not reflective of how many youth experience school as an institution. Reach beyond your own experiences in your analysis please.

The idea that children can’t and won’t learn unless they are under power of centralized authority has the same roots as the belief that no one would ever labor if not under the coercive control of the state and capital. It’s a myth to justify control and domination.

If you find yourself scoffing at the idea of school abolition I hope you will see that reaction for what it is: a defense of something you have always been taught to see as natural and inevitable. As a radical such a reaction calls for analysis, not dogmatic acceptance.

Liberalism has taught many that politics need only ever be in reaction to what conservatives are doing. Right-wingers attack the institution of schooling? This must mean School = Good and that any critique of schooling = conservative. Radical politics require we step beyond this.

Teenage suicide rates fell when much of school turned to remote learning, and they rose again (by 18%!) when in-person schooling resumed. This is not an institution that needs your defense. It is an institution that inflicts frankly incalculable levels of trauma on youth.

Let’s go even further than just critique the authoritarian institution of school, keep digging up the roots! What would happen if we opened ourselves up to inquiring about the values laden in the conceptualization that education is something that can be “given” Teacher ➡️ Student

Let’s analyze the idea that the Teacher is someone who is Already in possession of Knowledge, who then pours that Knowledge into the Passive Vessel of the Student, who has no Knowledge. Is this the only way learning happens? Is it really the best way?

What other lessons are we teaching youth when we accept the above as true? What are they learning about their own worth, what about themselves and their learning process are they being taught to ignore and suppress because it does not align with the processes dictated by Teacher?

What wounds do we ourselves still carry by being taught in this way? Did this process teach us how to explore, how to be creative, how to drive our own learning process forward without the dictates of an Authority figure? How do we see these wounds reflected in our peers?

And what lessons are we missing out on when we believe that youth are simply receptacles of Adult Wisdom? When we devalue their agency so much as to outright deny its existence in our defense on institutions that control them? Could they not also be our teachers?

The beauty of radical politics is that they reveal that all forms of social relations are vulnerable to critique. Social structures are choices, not states of nature we cannot help but reproduce. We can keep digging, keep questioning. imo it is a moral imperative that we do so.

Fri, April 30, 2021 "Outing abusers as abusers is NOT tarnishing the reputation. It's making it more accurate." - Butch, @butchanarchy

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[image ID: December 7, 2021 tweet by butchanarchy that reads,

If 1 in 4 adults in America truly are estranged from their families it is due to the fact that we have normalized a culture of abuse, not that “cancel culture” has gotten out of hand.

Cutting off someone you have kinship ties with, especially if they are a parent, is not something people do at the drop of that hat or when the mood takes them. It is something that happens when a mutually respectful relationship has shown itself to be impossible.

Please understand that your initial instinct to scoff at arguments made for youth liberation isn’t an indication that those arguments are inherently absurd but instead a result of social conditioning in a system that sees children as private property.

Which, incidentally, is exactly why youth liberation is vital to movements for liberation in general and why it’s really really important that you notice those initial reactions of yours as products of that system rather than expressions of some natural truth.

Like, the whole reason why anti-youth liberation folks glom so hard onto bedtime discourse is because many adults’ initial reaction is to see at as absurd and “childish.”

But that isn’t an indication that the youth-lib position—even in the bedtime discourse—isn’t valuable but rather an indication of how entrenched the idea that any complaint made by children is inherently absurd, unfounded, dangerous, or unimportant.

Which is a prime example of how people invested with institutional power excuse that power by naturalizing it. Seeing the disempowered party’s complaints as inherently absurd/unfounded/dangerous/unimportant isn’t unique to the power imbalance between adults and children after all.

Also consider this your gentle reminder that many of the cycles of harm you are trying to reckon with in your life and in our shared world have deep roots in childhood trauma and we cannot make meaningful change to that without examining the conditions that create that trauma.

[image ID: an Instagram post by butchanarchy featuring a meme. A person shows a card that reads, “People are inherently too corrupt to govern themselves.” A second person pulls out a card that reads, “Then they’re definitely too corrupt to govern others,” defeating the first person. The text of the post discussing the image above it reads,

If you think that people are inherently unfit to govern themselves why then do you believe that a few people can be fit to govern everyone?

The only possible answer to this is “we have to put the most special/correct people in charge” and, ignoring for a moment how silly that is, how do you ensure that only those “good” people are at the helm of that massive and devastating machine you want to keep around?

Idk, seems to me to be more logical to destroy the ability for a select few to rule over others by force than to leave that capability lying around and naïvely hoping that only your most ideal perfect heroes are the ones to pick it up.

And overall if you’re really stuck on the belief that most people are just inherently corrupt/greedy/inept/etc. (I disagree) it makes even MORE sense to not build tools of domination that anyone good at selling a narrative and gaining power can take ahold of.

Laughable to me that anarchists are the ones routinely painted as hopelessly idealistic when any honest look at history and centralized power makes the “if we can just get the right people in power they’ll fix everything!” look like the most out of touch fantasy.

downbad.comrade replies, This is based af 🔥

lucifersshroud replies, “[They]’re idealists, but some special group of vanguard people will free us and never get corrupt or make bad decisions. Yeah that’ll go well.” 🙄

realkkunt replies, “Silly anarchoid, don’t you know that anarchism is idealist and never works? Also read ‘On Authority’ by Engels. Cope and seethe.” ~ some Marxist-Leninist, probably.

The post, made on July 24, 2021, has 1,558 likes.

Twitter screenshot that reads: “How about adult sexuality can be performed or shown only with the consent of all involved. I dislike the child angle, one doesn’t magically become ok with sexual displayed in front of them once they reach 18. Kink has no place in pride, because such consent is unattainable.”

Let’s break down this claim!

In this thread, I’m going to demonstrate how I would take a claim like this and break down its underlying assumptions and conclusions to see if it still holds under scrutiny. Let’s practice thinking philosophically together!

Proposal: “Adult sexuality can only ethically be performed or shown with the consent of all involved.”

Supporting argument: “People, regardless of age, do not consent to seeing public sexual displays, therefore such displays are unethical.”

Conclusion: “Because not everyone’s consent is obtained at public Pride events, kink and other expressions of sexuality are unethical at public Pride events.”

https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1397338797663133696

Oh! There’s a mistake! I wrote “involved” but really the proposal is actually “Adult sexuality can only ethically be performed or shown with the consent of all potential observers.” The assumption here being that observation is inherently involvement.

Okay, so now that we’ve clarified what this claim is, on the surface, saying, we can break it down further. First, we need to investigate what “the expression of adult sexuality,” and what “kink” is.

“The expression of adult sexuality” and “kink” as it turns out, are not at all specific terms, which is why claims like this begin on incredibly shaky ground. Kissing could be seen as such an expression, so could even an exchange of flirty looks.

We could take any number of practices as “sexual displays.” Would getting dressed up in a non-kink outfit (we’ll delve into how that is not a specific term but we’ll use it for now) be considered such a display if one did it with the intention of finding someone to hook up with?

Generally, a sexual display is defined as anything one does with the intention of attracting another. Are people who go on dates in public places putting on sexual displays that this violate the consent of all those around them?

Much the same for “kink.” Kink is generally defined as engaging in non-conventional sexual behaviors or having non-conventional sexual interests.

Uh oh... we’ve just hit a huge snag.... what is “conventional?”

“Conventional” is another word for a range of “normality” within a culture or subculture. It’s, essentially, what most people are doing. In this case, kink, then, is outside of what “most people” are into.

This is where it gets even messier, folks, and it’s not looking like it’s going to clear up anytime soon. What is “conventional” is not only incredibly context dependent, but tends to vary depending on who’s doing the defining!

For many straight and cis people, queerness itself is outside of normality, no matter how much it’s expressed. So, by those terms, the entirety of Pride could be considered a kink.

Even if we narrow our scope and look only at queer subculture norms, good luck finding a solid definition of “conventional” sexuality at all 😂

Even if we skip over that conundrum of defining exactly what kink is and approach it as it’s often used, we still don’t clear up any issues, because there are literally so many kinks!

Try and look up how many different clothing fetishes there are, for starters. It’s not all leather, you know. There’s fetishes for certain materials (fur, wool, cashmere), certain outfits (uniforms, suits), and far more.

So really, it doesn’t seem that this claim has a problem with all kink, does it? If it did, none of us would ever be able to leave our homes! Even more so if we include all sexual displays!

Instead, it seems that this claim really has a problem with expressions of kink that can be explicitly and immediately recognized as relating to kink. Leather and BDSM wear, most likely.

Then we have to ask, are those forms of wear more acceptable if someone just wears them because... they like the way they look? What if I had NO sexual association to leather-wear, but I just liked how it looked on me as an outfit and chose to wear it? Is that still not allowed?

If it isn’t, why not? Is it because it shows so much skin? Why don’t you have the same issue with someone in shorts and a crop top that covers the same area? Or is it because someone else could see it as sexual? Sounds like my shorts and crop top friend might still be out of luck too.

We’ve taken a lot of time with the clothing and kink bit of this argument, and we could go even longer, but I’d like to move on to the argument about consent, as it’s the point on which this whole argument stands.

First, we need to think about this standard of sex is not even the remotest option for many people in the world. There are many situations in which multiple families live in a few rooms. Is ethical sex and sexuality a privilege only those who can afford total solitude can access?

Second, we need to investigate the heavy lifting the word “consent” does in a claim like this. Here, consent shakes its standard usage “permission for something to be done to one/agreement to do something” and expands to “permission to let others do something.”

An example for this distinction: it’s my claim that bodies are not inherently sexual. I have no problem with someone being nude in public. However, if someone in a trench coat came up and flashed me, that would be a violation of my consent because it’s a targeted action at me.

So, at what point do consenting adults need to ask the permission of all those around them to do something together/wear something? What is the basis for such a claim that getting such permission is an ethical mandate? What are its limits? Is it consistently applied?

We’ll find, in asking these questions, that the answers are applied incredibly specifically to... sexuality considered to be “deviant.” You don’t have to throw away all your clothes someone has a kink over, nor your shorts and crop top that shows just as much skin.

A shirtless guy can absolutely still jog down the street, a beachgoer can still wear a bikini, you can still go flirt at a festival, even if any or all of those things are meant to attract someone to then have sex with.

It boils down to the reality that the specific person making this claim has certain things about “kink” that make them uncomfortable, and are seeking to expand that discomfort into a far-reaching ethical claim, breaking down “consent” into something nonsensical in the process.

If we can’t find the limits of an ethical claim, if it can’t be applied consistently, if it has exceptions that fit in well with general cultural expectations of “normality,” we have to question and challenge it as a meaningful ethical claim.

We have to ask “who gets to set the standards for what is conventional, or not?” “Why are deviations from constructed ‘normality’ seen as unacceptable, repugnant, and an assault on those who witness it?” “Are these standards something new? Or a repacking of the same old values?”

We have to investigate the historical context of these assumptions and the claims that follow them. In this case, it is on a massive backdrop of a history in which sexuality itself is seen as base and shameful, and queer sexuality most of all.

We especially have to ask: who does this serve? Who are we protecting, really? Are we really holding consent as sacred? Or are we using the language of consent as a means to continue to do what we’ve always done: police the bodies of those we see as Other?

Do we really want a definition of consent this wide? How would such a definition be used? With some reflection and study we can see that it’s already been used: “I’m fine with the gays so long as they don’t throw it in my face.” “If my kid sees gays in public they’ll be corrupted.”

There is SO much more to say but I hope I’ve said enough to be helpful. Not just in breaking this one claim down, but showing the practice of breaking claims down in general. It’s a vital skill I want to help people cultivate! If y’all like this, I’ll do it again in the future!

https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1397604631363026947

I’d also like to add that going through this inquiry does not mean that you will then automatically become comfortable with “kink” at Pride/anywhere else or that you’re fucked up if you aren’t.

What it does mean is that you can now investigate why it makes you uncomfortable!

Once we realize that what we thought was a broader ethical claim is really a statement about ourselves (rather than kink gear being unethical in public, it’s a matter of you as an individual being uncomfortable with kink gear), whole new realms of reflection open up to us!

We can ask: why does kink gear make me uncomfortable? Why am I not uncomfortable about other outfits that show a similar amount of skin? Or why am I uncomfortable with skin showing in general? What is it about X expression of sexuality that bothers me? Where did that come from?

We can reflect on our own past, our broader historical context, our personal associations, media depictions, political rhetoric, and more to find answers to these questions. And the wonderful thing is that this is how rich and nuanced analyses are born!

For example, certain expressions of sexuality make ME uncomfortable! But I’ve learned over time to understand that that feeling is about me not about others doing something wrong. It’s about my past and my trauma and the fucked up shit poured into my head at a young age.

And understanding that has also allowed me to sit with the discomfort, or make the decision to remove myself from the situation I’m in, rather than deciding that my discomfort needs to dictate what everyone else is doing/can do with their bodies.

Anarchism doesn’t rely on the idea that there just won’t be any harmful people in an anarchistic world. Many of us recognize there will likely always be some harmful people, so it’s best not to keep around apparatuses of control that allow them to do that harm on a massive scale.

Truly, if you believe “there will always be bad people” then the logical conclusion of that is “so let’s make sure the harm they can do is limited and challengeable,” not “so let’s build a huge social structure that allows us to control them and hope 🤞 none of them take power of it!”

You don’t need to have an optimistic view of how much better humans will be without systems of domination to be an anarchist. You can just be like “yeah a lot of folks are fucked up so it’d probably be better if we didn’t have a system that gives some the power to kill thousands.”

I do hold that optimistic view, but it’s also secondary in terms of why I’m an anarchist. I’m a survivor of several different kinds of violence that were made possible by structures of domination. I know people have the capacity to do so much harm and I want to limit that capacity.

If people will continue to be harmful regardless of the system they live in, then it would be a profound improvement to make sure that the people they hurt have the capacity to respond and to challenge them, rather than being restricted by that person’s system-granted authority.

Ex: Would the abuse I experienced as a child not have occurred if I had grown up an anarchist world? Quite possibly. The values they had were in many ways the products of the historical and social context in which we lived that validated and encouraged that abuse.

But what’s more important to me is not the idea that my parents just would have been good and not abusive in a different world, but rather I would have had the agency to leave or to find allies in challenging that abuse even if they had still been abusive people.

I experienced harm from my individual parents, yes, and we can talk all day about the social/historical context that made them abusive. But the point is that the larger system of control that gave them total authority over me is what made the trauma I experienced possible.

This goes for so so much of the violence and harm in our world. It is astronomically compounded by structures of domination that make it incredibly easy for people who want to do harm to take advantage of and advance their own power.

My view is, if there truly are always going to be harmful people, I’d much rather encounter them on equal terms than have social systems in place that make it exponentially more dangerous to resist or challenge them.

And that’s anarchism, too.

https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1490811884848783361

Comments limited now because I have little patience for liberals today but since this is the second version I’ve gotten of this question since posting I’ll try to answer shortly below.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220207215801/https://twitter.com/Variant_Scott/status/1490805788452941825

What’s going stop the harmful people from creating their own apparatuses of control?

Anarchism is not simply a process of negation, nor has it ever been. Destroying systems of domination also requires building collective and ongoing practices of anti-power, which includes building the capacity to attack new systems of domination as they arise.

[image ID: a Twitter thread by butchanarchy reading:

The lesson I’m continuously (and painfully) learning as the adult child of an abusive parent is that there is really no combination of skills/perfect words I can develop that will magically change them into the caretaker I needed when I was young.

I can challenge them whenever I can and hold the boundaries I need to feel safe but holding out hope for an incredibly unlikely outcome in order to feel okay about having any kind of relationship with them is just never going to facilitate healing for me.