SoH Mercy

I do very much believe that within a white Western racial schema, any given masculinity and femininity of color are much more constructed in opposition to white masculinity and femininity respectively than they are constructed in opposition to each other. As such, misandry is very much a relevant dynamic and power system to be able to discuss when it comes to gender as a racialized phenomenon.

(Source: miseriathome)

soilrockslove asked:

it's totally understandable and ok if you're notinthemood, but i stumbled upon the paper about "str8" and it reminded me that you once mentioned something about the formation of masculinity in incel comms. and i'm still interested in that. anyway hoping you are doing well or ok.

 I’m doing well, thank you! I love when people ask me about identity.

The identity formation paper which really made me start thinking about incels and identity formation through the reification of abjection is called ‘That pony is real sexy’: My Little Pony fans, sexual abjection, and the politics of masculinity online, and it’s actually about the brony community on 4chan.

To very briefly summarize the construction of the abject masculine brony identity, you have people who find community among other like them, interested in ponies as objects of sexual attraction. They know it’s viewed as strange to outsiders and at a certain point, being a freaky lonely pervert failure man starts becomes just as much of a trait to bond around as liking ponies. Extreme performance of “I’m a freak, I’ll never find love, I can never be who I am to people in real life, I despise my own existence” is not only expected, but rewarded with community and affirmation of suffering. They are hyperaware of the real stigma and ridicule that will face them should they ever be authentic away from /mlp/, and they direct their righteous outrage against women and feminism. The collective identity of “brony” is characterized by emptiness, shame, victimhood, tension, and social disadvantage which falls across gendered lines.

It follows that many aspects of incel identity formation run a similar course; incel identity is defined by the perception of inescapable suffering and shame at the failure to achieve acceptable manhood. This consuming grief is both relieved and magnified by affirmation from peers, but acceptance into the community is always perilously contingent upon proper performance of failure, self-hatred, and reactionism against acceptable classes/institutions. I definitely had one or two good papers on incels on 4chan or reddit, but I recently lost a very big reading folder and I can’t for the life of me recall anything about them; there are plenty of decent non-journal theses on incels available through google scholar, though, which approach their identity formation and misogyny through various analytical frameworks.

The idea of identity based around abjection fascinates me–after all, that’s a very central theme to queer identity and pride. But as we’ve seen time an time again with various circles and discourses, there are communities in which persecution becomes a marker of validity and suffering becomes not a consequence of stigma, but an identity in and of itself; we’ve seen how truscum have warped transness into its own intrinsic site of pain, and how radfems twist womanhood into being synonymous with victimhood, and how antis stoke the fear that the outside world is malicious and cruel. These groups gatekeep community through extensive performance of suffering and alienate people from other avenues of self-actualization; they emphasize that the only people who will be there for you are the ones who readily confirm your lack of value. They do not challenge the institutions from which the pain stems, they do not seek to uplift each other out of the toxic spiral of self-loathing, and they do not desire solidarity with other hurting people; instead, they provide the incredibly fleeting but oh-so-enticing relief of reactionary politics and targeted aggression.

When we understand these identity formation processes and we consider the complex matrices that overlay binary axes of privilege and oppression, we become better equipped to disrupt the cycle and create more effective outreach. People ridicule bronies for having a persecution complex while being privileged, and yet they readily understand in other situations how toxic masculinity, mental health, sexual purity politics, stigma against paraphilias, amatonormativity, and heteronormativity are all institutions which profoundly impact the lived experiences of non-white, non-straight people. There are real insecurities to be had among the privileged, but by and large the only communities willing to address those insecurities in an affirming way are toxic breeding grounds for reactionary radicalism and bigotry. Men who have some niggling sense of the injustice in this world and how it negatively impacts their own lives are more readily recruited into these depressing, vitriolic feedback chambers, but a comprehensive leftist praxis which makes room for deradicalization and inoculation from radicalization could work to uncouple abjection from shame/destigmatize abjection, and to create spaces for men to feel positively about their masculine identities and process their suffering.

feministdeathparty:

guenhyvar:

feministdeathparty:

Full offense, but people on this site will say the exact same things about atheism as like, an American evangelical youth pastor (atheism is “ bitter and joyless,” it “mocks spirituality and sentimentality,” atheism is all about power and asserting the ego over everything, etc.) and think they’re saying something radical because they preface it with the word “white male” once. I legit saw a post that unironically called atheism “settler-colonialist manhood,” as if one of the biggest news stories of the past year wasn’t that an American endangered the North Sentinalese by trying to convert them to Christianity, as if the Pope didn’t call trans people “ideological colonists.” The gall of it all.

hey op did you actually READ the post ur talking about or. nah. bc it feels like you didn’t read it if your response to ‘4chan dude bro logic fascist atheists are bad’ is. this.

I was actually referring to a general trend I’ve seen on this website about how people talk about atheism that includes the post you mention but is not exclusive to it. My entire point is that racism, misogyny, transphobia, antisemitism, and a settler-colonialist mindset are not unique to atheism and to talk about atheism like they are obfuscates the actual mechanisms (primary among them: living in a racist, misogynistic, transphobic, and antisemitic society and a settler-colonialist state) that allow these beliefs to gain footholds in different spaces. Drawing a causal relation between fascism and atheism in particular strikes me as extremely dangerous, as it completely erases the existence of neo-nazis in Pagan spaces, the American religious right’s tolerance of fascists, the general fascination with the Crusades and crusader imagery among the alt-right, etc. Aditionally, any criticism of atheists/atheism that relies heavily on what are fundamentally mainstream, Christian arguments about atheism (that it’s joyless, that it’s fundamentally unfulfilling, etc.) undercut themselves by being easy to argue against.

#you seem like the kind of person who thinks there should be another telescope on mauna kea 

This is is also a pretty wild thing to say to someone who you literally don’t know. 

(via russian-hackers-official-deacti)

don’t confuse man hate for lesbian positivity

(in before this post or its tags get called out for being problematic when willfully misconstrued)

(Source: miseriathome)

wedontcareaboutyourbinary:

What they hear: “#NOTALLMEN!! Stop critiquing patriarchy!!! Stop complaining about your bad experiences with men, you could hurt the feelings of #the good ones!!”

What we fuckin said: “Could you think for one second about whether your gender theory is even remotely true when applied to men of color, trans and nonbinary men, disabled men, etc, or whether it actively misunderstands, damages and demonizes vulnerable marginalized groups disproportionately? Cuz right now all I can hear is white radfems with their hand up your ass making your mouth flap like kermit the frog while you deny any association with them.”

(via theomachomai)

Just so you know, bad activism looks something like “men are so fragile because they claim they don’t care about looks but then they have products like Just For Men Touch of Gray that specifically exist to dye their hair but ONLY SOME OF IT because of course men have to exist right in the middle space between being TOO YOUNG LOOKING, LIKE BABIES and looking OLD, all the while having to use SPECIAL HAIR DYE called JUST FOR MEN.”

Better activism points out the fact that cultural images of why looks are important and what kinds of masculinity are acceptable (ie the intersection between masculinity and other identities, like age) are built up by powerful industries with capitalistic interests. Many of the patterns of beauty standards that have been identified as socially harmful to women also exist for men, and the reason for that is because they are rooted in other systems of oppression which transcend gender/sexism while also being completely intertwined with and inextricable from gendered identities. It turns out that refusing to comply with certain standards for existing–including having certain kinds of hair–can bar individuals from opportunities which allow them to function within a capitalist landscape, and these difficulties are only magnified when a person’s experiences fall along multiple axes of identity which are targeted and policed through similar means. Because of this, individuals are coerced into participating in the system at large as a means of survival. It is not the fault of individual men that this marginalization exists and it is not within their power to change it, as individuals. It is not only the product of patriarchy, but multiple other systems within the kyriarchy, which surpasses the sum of merely all individual men. And as activists, it is our duty to consider how our rhetorical choices affect a broader audience and to find ways to speaking to systemic issues without resorting to putting certain people or groups down in order to raise others up.

(Source: miseriathome)

silver-and-ivory:

morlock-holmes:

argumate:

focusing on “access to sex” buys in to incel framing that Chad is monopolising Stacy and overlooks single women; I think it’s better to make it explicit that it’s not about achieving fairness between men but about coercing women into relationships they don’t want and preventing them from leaving.

I’m too drunk right now to do my big essay on what I think is really going on, but, like, if you think the issue is “access to sex” then you actually really need to think a bit more about the fact that a lot of these guys could pay for the services of prostitutes. Like, a lot of these guys have “Access to sex” so if they aren’t availing themselves of it something else must be going on.

buying (and selling) prostitution is illegal and sometimes means that you’re registered as a sex offender. even an incel who only wanted sex would probably be wary of these consequences.

So online spaces can function in wildly different ways than in-person spaces–especially when it comes to the formation of masculinity. The fact that incel is considered by those who use it to be its own meaningful identity signals to me that there is a process of identity formation happening, and in turn also a system of maintaining, asserting, and policing that identity within the community. There are lots of cases where abject masculinity can become a way for men to find themselves online, and extreme ownership of an abject identity is not uncommon. This is also not to mention how many kinds of online (ie faceless or anonymous) masculine identity formation processes are also enacted through different expressions of misogyny.

(via silver-and-ivory)