gamebird:

thistlecatfics:

Talking about Incest in Public

(both the painful traumatic kind and the hot fictional kind)

As it turns out, lots of the people who read and write taboo fiction have survived some deeply fucked up shit. After talking about incest with other survivors on the Moon, Sun & Stars discord and answering questions, I decided to share more about my experiences and the things that helped me survive and the things that helped me heal, because there are a lot of us, and a lot of us feel very alone, and maybe there are other people who aren’t incest survivors but who might want to know more to better support the survivors in their life.  

–

Incest is not just a sexual act between two family members – it’s a larger system of absence of boundaries within a family, and it’s almost always part of multiple incestuous dynamics, even if only one might be the obvious or explicit dynamic. 

If you’re an incest survivor, you’re almost certainly not the only one in your family. 

-

“The true characteristics and dimensions of incestuous abuse have been masked by the taboo and silence that have surrounded its occurrence. Recent research demonstrates that incest occurs regularly in our society, perpetrated by individuals who, for the most part, would otherwise be regarded as fairly normal. The taboo on incestuous relations is a deterrent to some would-be perpetrators but not to others. The taboo contradicts the reality of incest prevalence, a fact which led Armstrong (1978) to comment that th taboo has been on the open discussion of incest and not on its perpetration.”

-Christine Courtois, “Healing the Incest Wound: Adult Survivors in Therapy” 

–

To use my family as an example - 

My (similarly aged) brother did sexual things to me as a kid, and I had a range of reactions to it including pleasure and enjoyment. And confusion. And fear. I do not think he is bad or even what he did was bad. I think we were both two kids who existed in a family with incestuous dynamics, and we were both shaped by those dynamics and trying our best to survive. 

From a young age, I existed as a physical comfort object to my mom (when she was sad she’d get into my bed to hold me until she felt better while I dissociated), and I took on the idea that my role in the family was for my body to be used to make other people feel good. The sexual behavior by my brother felt like an extension of how my mom held me. 

My mother was the victim of incest from her uncle, and her parents sided with her uncle over her when she spoke out about it (even after he was facing legal consequences for his behavior with kids outside of the family) (even after he fled the country). She didn’t know how to emotionally regulate herself, and I don’t think she had (or has) the capacity to understand a child’s need for physical autonomy and boundaries because her own were never respected. 

There were other incestuous behaviors and dynamics within my family which I’m continuously discovering and unpacking. I think my mom’s uncle abused my grandmother too but I’ll never know for sure. It’s deeply uncomfortable to look back on a happy family story or a childhood nickname and see something sinister underneath and wonder if you’re being paranoid or if it’s actually that bad.  

–

Things that have helped: 

Long term relational therapy (5+ years). EMDR. Adopting a cat. Adopting more cats. Antidepressants. Reading about incest (realistic, terrifying, academic). Reading about incest (fictional, hot, amateur). Being a competitive athlete. Getting a graduate degree. Going on long walks late at night. Telling my family I had Covid so I could skip a family vacation. 

These books specifically: Healing the Incest Wound by Christine Courtois, The Myth of Normal, Dissociation Made Simple, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, The Narcissistic Family Unit, Clementine Morrigan’s writing x1000. 

The protector parts: Eating disorder. Self harm. Drinking. Perfectionism. Depression. Suicidal ideation. I’m grateful to these imperfect protectors I’ve leaned on over the years. 

Things that have not helped: 

You will be shocked to hear that people on the internet yelling about how people who find fictional incest hot are disgusting and bad and dangerous did NOT in fact help me unlearn the belief that experiencing incest made me disgusting and bad and dangerous. Luckily, I’m built of spite. But it certainly did not help. 

(If I think about my vulnerable pre-teen/teen self reading those things, I become deeply angry. How dare you hurt her in the name of protection.)

-
I don’t cater to all these vipers
Dressed in empath’s clothing
God save the most judgmental creeps
Who say they want what’s best for me
Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see

-Taylor Swift, But Daddy I Love Him

-

After I discovered fanfiction in middle school, and then after I realized that there was a world beyond OFC/Draco Malfoy fic, I read a lot of Blackcest. I devoured any I could find, hopping through rec lists on LiveJournal. 

Reading Blackcest fics, first Bellatrix/Sirius then Sirius/Regulus mostly, allowed me to see my experiences reflected. Those fics gave me a way to contextualize my family and my role in it. I hate the expectation that kids who experience bad things should go to a safe trusted adult rather than find art that romanticizes their experience. The whole point is that there isn’t a safe trusted adult. The whole point is that I needed the art. I got to hold the romanticized narrative until I got far enough away that I could put it away in a box until I had enough therapy that I could safely open the box and build a new, more honest story. 

Obviously plenty of people love incest smut and fic and art. It’s taboo! It’s angsty! It’s a classic! Probably most of those people don’t have direct personal experience with incest in their families. I’m glad they read and write fics too. 

But for me – have you ever experienced something you believe so strongly you will never be able to say aloud? That any time you see your secret referenced it’s in shock and disgust and revulsion? You can pretend – you’re very good at pretending – but you know it’s real, and you know it’s your secret you’ll hold onto for the rest of your life while the world reminds you how disgusting you are? 

Then you find that people are writing about what you experienced in a thousand variations that all contain some nugget of your truth.

I cannot express in words how important it was that I found those stories at that time. 

I never commented on a single fic. I never made a single account on any of the sites I read fanfiction on. I clicked the “yes I’m 18” box without hesitation every time. I wish I could go back in time and have my adult self articulate the enormity of my gratitude for each and every author who helped save me whose work exists on sites I can only revisit with the Wayback Machine. 

I understand why people might feel horrified at the idea of a 11-12 year old reading smutty incest Harry Potter fanfic. People aren’t wrong for feeling that way. 

That said, I truly don’t care what people who aren’t incest survivors think.

I’m so proud of that child for finding a way to survive. She might have hated herself, might have fantasized about death, but she survived and kept the truth of her experience wrapped up in a fictional world where it could be safe to explore and kept it there until years and years of therapy made it possible to engage with it in reality. 

-
I’m a real tough kid
I can handle my shit
They said, babe, you got to fake it till you make it
And I did

-Taylor Swift, I Can Do It With a Broken Heart
-

No one is writing about incest the way Clementine Morrigan is right now. I’m so grateful for her. I’m not sure this little tumblr post would exist without her essay series. 

“Incest functions as a spell of unreality. A structure of nothingness. A completely normal and unremarkable family life in which something unnameable is ominously and terrifyingly wrong. You know in the summer when you can see the heat making the air go squiggly? Imagine those squiggles as an indication that in the seeming nothingness, there is something there. Incest is like that. Subtle, pervasive, unthinkable, unnameable. But present, felt.

As a teenager I came up with this metaphor: Imagine you are in a house full of bugs. There are bugs crawling all over all the walls and all the furniture and in your food and even on the fork you are lifting to your mouth. And you feel disgusted, you feel like something is really wrong. But your whole family is acting completely normal, laughing and eating and talking as bugs crawl over their faces and into their mouths. When you tell them you think there are bugs in your food your family says it’s just pepper and not to worry about it.

There is no way to talk about incest without feeling that you are lying. This is because incest lives in the realm of unreality and everything in the realm of unreality cannot be thought or said or named. When you speak of things that happen in the realm of unreality it will always feel like a lie and be treated like a lie. You are breaking the fundamental rule. You are not allowed to talk about what goes on in the realm of unreality because it isn’t real.”

Read more and pay for her writing if you can on her substack.

-

Without a doubt, the not-explicitly-sexual incest from my mom fucked me up more than the explicitly sexual incest from my brother, but I only feel confident claiming the incest survivor label because sexual stuff was done to me by a family member, and I still feel like I’m lying sometimes because it wasn’t bad enough to count. 

I’m a literal mental health clinician who can map out various incestuous dynamics within my family and who has clear memories of a family member doing sexual stuff to my child body, and I still feel like I’m lying. 

I believe you if you feel like a liar because I bet you do. I believe you if the incest never included anything directly physical. I believe you if you enjoyed it. I believe you if you don’t remember but feel like it’s true. 

I love us. 

If we’re monsters, I love our courageous monstrosity.

If we’re liars, I love the way we make up stories to survive when reality is impossible. 

If we’re an uncomfortable truth, good. 

-

It still impacts me. I’m not over it. 

It’s very difficult for me to imagine love that does not include violation. To be loved and to be allowed to maintain a self. 

But I’m open to learning otherwise, and that openness is new. 

-

I was so, so good at living in unreality. I could make myself perfect, such a flawless object until I couldn’t think of anything except killing myself, but even then I still maintained the image of perfection my family expected. 

It’s cool I never actually killed myself. 

I find it hard to be around my family now. There are advantages of living in unreality. I drink a lot more when I’m around my family than I ever did before, but I don’t think about killing myself nearly as much. Reality is worth it. Being able to exist as a person is worth it. 

-
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

-Sylvia Plath

-
I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. (I insist.)

It didn’t kill me then. It’s not going to kill me now. (I remind myself.) 

My life is worth living, and there are fights worth fighting, and it is undeniably true the world is full of horror, but it is good to write and create and be alive, and it is good to try. I’m a little afraid to post this, but the fear and shame isn’t mine to hold, and I never should have been the one holding it. 

Consider this a thank you note sent out to the universe in the hopes the sentiment echoes towards those authors who saved me then and to all the writers who are saving people now. Your art matters. No matter how weird or niche or dismissed or hated it is. It matters. 

Thank you.

There’s a lot of crossover here with other forms of domestic abuse. Lots to think about.

(via fatalism-and-villainy)

sreegs:

alright let’s talk about Apple and Tumblr’s current predicament.

If you don’t know already, I used to work at Tumblr as an iOS engineer. Though I keep in touch with current staff at Tumblr (what little that are left that I know) I do not have picture of what’s going on internally. The banned word list is absolutely perplexing and I can only theorize why tags like ‘long post’ are banned from appearing on iOS. What I can do is give you a peek into how the Apple App Store review process works, so you have an idea of the hell that Tumblr staff is dealing with right now.

Keep reading

(via ao3commentoftheday)

gem-femme:

I know that “let people enjoy things” and “it’s okay to just not like something, you don’t need to invent some ethical reason to shit on it” are things we all say a lot because they need to be said, but there’s a flip side to this y’all forget about, which is “let people not like things”.

I think so many people feel the need to pull a random ethical reason out of their asses to not enjoy a thing because so many of you on this site won’t just let them not like the thing unless they have an ethical reason for why they don’t like it. Y’all will bombard a person with “what about in this context?”, “but have you really given it a chance?”, “you just don’t understand it”, “but you need to consume it in this way”, etc, when they tell you they don’t like a thing. You don’t treat their opinion as valid and won’t leave them alone about it. This happens to me every time I’ve told people I don’t like a particular piece or type of media that’s popular on this site or among other communities I’m apart of.

So if you want people to just dislike stuff without inventing a bullshit ethical reason for it, then start actually letting people dislike things when they don’t have an ethical reason for it. Respect their opinions and perspectives and their space.

(via fiction-is-not-reality2)

the-transfeminine-mystique:

idk the thing i’m most pissed about with all this is the purely metaphysical way so many people are thinking about the election: like despite ostensible knowledge of how the election works, there’s this deeper, much more passionately held but unstated and unrealized belief that if everybody who is left of center will just think good thoughts about Biden and will him to win, then the cosmic referee will see our purity and univocity of will and will allow Good to triumph over Evil

(via gendersmear-deactivated20220227)

bireaucracy-archived:

bireaucracy-archived:

i cannot stress enough how terrifying qanon is and how many of you need to be exceedingly careful when you engage in conversations or controversies around csa and child abuse or sex trafficking. like you dont need to be a MAGAer to fall for their rhetoric. a lot of stuff around it is incredibly guilt tripping if you even slightly question the implications (“you’re a pedophile??? you want kids to be abused???”) so way too many people just follow blindly without thinking of who benefits in these wild theories of large pedophilic elites and infiltration in media or massive sex trafficking rings. neither is it protecting kids when once again, this takes attention away from where most csa takes place–the home, religious spaces, school. and it’s also led people to harass csa survivors or attack charities who themselves have expressed caution. please please think carefully before you engage with these people and these posts, think about who’s most likely to be accused of csa from this pov versus who ACTUALLY commits it. im seeing way too many leftists engage in flat out blood libel and homophobic witch hunts at this point, and even reblog/retweet shit from qanon folk because they hide their batshit racist conspiracy theories under “saving children”.

please please please ask yourself where this is going. even if you dont go full Q, ask yourself if the hysterical posts about sex trafficking are truly anchored in reality and who posts them, and what people are callinh for. ask yourselves why it’s easier to imagine a sinister group infiltrating children’s media or authorities to traffic and groom kids than it is to think of your family or next door’s neighbours casually enabling and hiding csa. ask yourself why whenever somebody urges caution, including csa victims themselves, the immediate urge is to call them a pedophile and attack them. ask yourself who tends to be seen as suspect versus how csa actually happens and to whom. ask yourself why so many republicans are jumping on the wagon of Concern For Children when they’ve been letting sexual abuse of migrant children happen in their camps. ask yourself why now every pride people screech rumors about gay men having sex in front of kids and pass around videos of events that are actually 18+. ask yourself, are people actually appealing to your sense of compassion and responsibility, or to your sense of visceral disgust and group punishment?

(via butchcurious)

the-transfeminine-mystique:

the-transfeminine-mystique:

Conflating “public” with “right on the street in front of my children” renders invisible the forces of capital and homophobic repression, and does the police’s propagandistic job for them. “Public” and “private” are only neatly separated when one has independent access to property.

If your system of ethics assumes that everybody has a single-family home with a white picket fence, then I don’t know what to tell you other than it’s just replicating the ethics of the capitalist American state.

Crimes which differentiate between public/private space are a way to control the existences of marginalized people, maintain property rights, and uphold the prison industrial complex!

Note how urination is not a crime, but public urination is. ie it’s a crime to have bodily needs while also not having access to your own personal private in-home bathroom and not having the means to afford to use a “public” bathroom for example a pay toilet (more popular outside of the US) or business bathroom for customers only.

Apply the same to public drug use, public indecency, public nudity, public sleeping. If you get to enjoy your right to do something in your own home, you can’t make “but the children!!” claims until you’ve addressed the fact that the vast majority of people hit by these crimes again and again are going to be those without homes.

Making public existence a crime means the state gets to forcibly remove people it hates from the geographic space that “good” society occupies. That’s what jails and prisons are. That’s why it’s a massive queer rights issue when cops start wrangling up homeless trans street sex workers in the weeks leading up to Pride in major cities. That’s why it’s a disability rights issue when bathrooms are inaccessible. When public existence becomes moralized to encompass types of existences which are totally acceptable in private, it means that marginalized people must either hole up in private and never go out (see: having to plan excursions around whether bathrooms are available) or that they will be forcibly removed by being locked up for not having a private space to be.

Human rights aren’t universal if they’re bound up in property rights that are in and of themselves non-universal. It’s fucked up to appeal to the authority of these laws as if they’re actually about the social responsibility of hurting others’ feelings instead of recognizing that this line of thinking is very much a mechanism of social control and that criminality is specifically constructed to maintain state power under capitalism!

littlesystems:

A new fresh hell I’ve started to see pinging around tumblr is replacing “creating” or “consuming” content with “masturbates to.” So instead of saying “X person writes fic about [insert “problematic” content here]” it becomes “X person masturbates to [problematic content].” I wanted to specifically make a post about this because it’s something that’s spilling over from the anti/fanpol types, and people that I follow have started reblogging this stuff uncritically, which is not fantastic. 

WOW. There’s a LOT to unpack here!

So first off, let’s talk about how masturbation is chosen here to inspire disgust: mentioning masturbation in this way isn’t supposed to be a neutral added detail, like, oh, the sky is blue, there are birds and bees, and also masturbation is a thing that humans do. Phrasing things in this way is designed to trigger your disgust reaction. EWW!! Icky people on the internet masturbate! Someone call the police! As though masturbation isn’t a normal bodily function. It’s not about the [problematic content] that someone is accused of, this is about phrasing any criticism like that at all. You can dislike what someone else likes, and you can find it gross. But adding masturbation as an extra layer of disgustingness to an already taboo topic is not a neutral addition. 

Notice this. Notice when posts are manipulative like that. 

Next up: let’s move a step past that. Fandom, by and large, is mostly populated by women and trans folks of all genders. Masturbation is a normal thing for cis men to do, barely deserving of an eye roll; when women or trans people do it, it’s gross, disgusting, icky bad and wrong. Disgusting. 

Notice this rhetoric. 

This is misogyny. This is transphobia. I know that it’s really easy to get caught up in fandom discourse and say “it isn’t that deep,” but this shit is insidious. Notice when a double standard is upheld: if cis men do it’s fine, it anyone else does it it’s deserving of ridicule, deserving of scorn, deserving of disgust. This is radicalization rhetoric. 

Onto the next part: 

I can’t believe that I actually have to say this, but creating/consuming smutty content does not necessitate masturbation. 

As someone who reads and writes smut, and as someone who has read and viewed a lot of 18+ content in my life, I can say that it’s rare for me to be actively turned on by something that I read, or by art I see - so I find it absolutely mind-boggling that people seem to think there’s some kind of one-to-one cause and effect of reading smut (or looking at kinky art) = masturbation. Finding something interesting does not necessarily mean that someone finds it hot; finding something hot does not necessarily lead to actual, physical arousal; and being physically aroused does not necessarily lead to masturbation, either at the time of reading or thinking about it later. There’s nothing wrong with masturbating to fic or art, but it’s not something that everyone does, and it’s not something that people do every time they come across adult content. 

This really, really should be obvious. 

Saying “X person masturbates to [content]” is one HELL of a leap, and unless someone actually personally talks about their masturbation habits on their blog, then it’s an assumption that no one should be making. Seriously. It’s invasive, presumptuous, and deliberately demeaning, and it’s being used as a cudgel against women and trans people. 

The specific person that I saw this type of criticism about did deserve criticism, but it should have been criticism about her dumb posts, not people making assumptions about her masturbatory habits. Seriously. I shouldn’t have to say this. 

Anyway, I’m a pro at curating my dashboard and unfollowing people that post things that I don’t like, but I’ve seen enough of this that I wanted to at least point it out before going on an unfollowing spree. I think a lot of people were reblogging this stuff uncritically but perhaps unintentionally, so I wanted to at least point it out before getting my hackles fully up.

(via curiouscarnifex)

Literally just spend time near a child. They’ll get on all fours and run around and bark all on their own. Children do not view these behaviors as sexual. It’s adults who are ascribing sex onto these behaviors when they are enacted by adults. That means it is your problem that you see somebody on all fours barking like a dog and you assume somebody is having an orgasm off of it. You getting freaked out by it does not mean that kids are. You know what’s important to children? Knowing that adults are allowed to have fun and be silly, too. And also knowing how to establish and enforce boundaries. Teach your kid to say “hey [parent], I don’t want to be here, can we go somewhere else?” If you did your job as a parent and taught them to communicate with you and positively reinforced honest communication and set a lifelong precedent for meeting their needs instead of punishing them, they’ll let you know if they think dog-man is creepy. Which many won’t. Which is fine because there’s nothing the fuck wrong with these public leather pup pictures people keep whipping out of their asses, especially considering how fully-dressed and not having orgasms the participants are. “Those men are playing pretend” is not actually much harder for kids to grasp when it relates to men wearing leather face masks and leashes versus when it refers to men wearing wizard gowns, and yet a lot more adults are willing to give “nerdy cosplayer bro” a pass over “queer man with a sexuality” (both of whom should be allowed to exist in public!). You cannot fundamentally distinguish a shirtless cosplay of an animal-themed superhero from a shirtless guy in an animal-themed costume for any other reason, even if you believe for whatever fucked-up reason that sex deserves to be punished.

There are so many ways you can tackle the “issue” of public puppy play. Literally figure your own bigotries the fuck out. Challenging your gut reactions of disgust is good, it’s how you unlearn problematic shit like “the things queer people do which aren’t fundamentally different from what straight people do are nonetheless dirtier.”

(Source: miseriathome)

bemusedlybespectacled:

bemusedlybespectacled:

since I’m thinking about this instead of studying for bar prep:

people in general tend to assume that a person who’s been arrested is either innocent or guilty. and if they’re guilty, then they deserve fewer rights than the innocent person.

like, if the police break into an innocent person’s house and look for drugs, we recognize that it’s a bad thing and a gross violation of rights. but if the police break into someone’s house and do find drugs, well, that’s just what they deserved. we’d all be upset if the police started randomly murdering people on the street for no reason, but many wouldn’t mind if the police started randomly killing known child molesters. it’s not okay if the police plant evidence to frame an innocent man for murder, but if they know he’s the murderer and plant evidence to help the case along? well, that’s unfortunate but necessary.

there are three problems with this:

1. You cannot always know with certainty who’s innocent and who’s guilty;
2. A two-tiered “innocent” and “guilty” legal structure will always be used against innocent marginalized people;
3. Even guilty people have rights.

this happens a lot on tumblr. not exclusively on tumblr (it’s also a major aspect of most “gritty” police dramas and almost all comics), but it’s definitely there. like, calls to summarily execute rapists sound great in theory, because we all agree that rape is evil. except for when it’s used to kill innocent black men who looked the wrong way at a white woman. 

and there are people who will say that no, of course, the problem isn’t summarily killing rapists, the problem is summarily killing the wrong people (that is, innocent people). which, again, you can’t know who’s innocent and who’s guilty - lots of innocent people aren’t sweet old ladies who’ve never done anything wrong, or have perfect alibis and never contradict themselves. hell, being guilty of a crime in the past doesn’t mean that they committed this specific crime that they’ve been accused of.

and even if they are guilty - even if they are stone-cold, unrepentantly guilty - they still have rights. that’s what “innocent until proven guilty” means. it means that stripping someone of their legal rights is a big fucking deal, so no matter how guilty Obvious McCriminal looks, you still have to follow the rules we’ve set in place to prevent abuses. 

like, it’s not that every person who’s ever been treated shittily by police and the court system is actually innocent, so therefore the system is bad. it’s that we have a system that treats people like shit once we’ve decided they’re guilty, regardless of when the decision is made, and we’re okay with that. after conviction? definitely. after arrest? yup. before arrest, because we just have a feeling about them? sure.

and I get why people make posts or write stories about guilty people being treated badly. wanting vengeance is a powerful emotion. grief and anger are powerful emotions. it is not unnatural to want to hurt people who have hurt others. people like the idea of karma, of cosmic scales balancing out the hurt and suffering inflicted by a person by making them suffer back. I’m not saying that no one is allowed to have those feelings. 

I’m just saying that there are implications behind them that are deeply disturbing (“if I decide you’re guilty, you’re less of a person to me”) and that it’s the primary driving force behind most of the issues in our criminal justice system.

actually, since this post has become relevant (again), I’d like everyone to join me in a little thought experiment: why do the police bring up a murdered person’s criminal record when they are extrajudicially killed?

like, we can all agree that the sentence for drug possession, drunk driving, trespassing, etc. is not execution, and even if it was, that’s after they’ve been arrested and convicted. cops are not judges, so it’s not their call to decide if someone is guilty or to punish them for it. so why does it matter if someone is “a known criminal,” or if they have drugs in their system, or if they have a gun on their person?

“well, obviously it’s to bias the public against the person who was killed,” you might say. okay, but why is that?

it’s because they know that we think of guilty people as less than human, and innocent people as blameless. therefore the murdered person deserved to die (because guilty people deserve what they get), and the cop is innocent (he was just trying to protect people!). if it didn’t work as a tactic, then they wouldn’t do it!

it is this mindset that permits the police to murder. we cannot stop police violence unless we dismantle the idea that being guilty of a crime negates your humanity and your civil rights.

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.

A word on trauma and reactionary movements

Transcription with pauses:

oh i do not like this article not one bit. this makes it seem as though the people getting harassed are minors who are writing about people their age (which i’m sure happens in small percentages), when in reality the hate is mostly directed towards adults who create content that sexualizes minors or puts them in age gap relationships in a way that gets them off, which is indisputably pedophilic behaviour and incredibly dangerous to minors who may see this content and think it’s ok, or at least become desensitized to it (speaking from personal experience from when i myself was an abuse victim on the internet at an early age). this article is literally just abuse apologist rhetoric

See this? This is the steady escalation of a relatively innocuous thing into a quintessentially demonic, absolutist horror.

• Minors writing stories about minors –> Adults writing stories about minors
• Presumed: the article ignored instances of adults as targets for purity wank (false)
• Adults writing stories about minors –> Those stories sexualizing minors
• Presumed: sexually mature/explicit stories, rather than merely stories
• Those stories sexualizing minors –> Adults getting off from it
• Presumed: adults getting off specifically to the involvement of the minor, as opposed to any other part of the story
• Adults getting off from it –> Pedophilic behavior
• Presumed: attraction to/enjoyment of something involving minors is indicative of or analogous to attraction to minors
• Pedophilic behavior –> Desensitization of/acceptance from minors
• Presumed: minors as an audience to the reactions of adults
• Desensitization of/acceptance from minors –> Dangerous to minors
• Presumed: minors respond to social norms rather than critical thought or intuition
• Dangerous to minors –> Abuse apologia and/or abuse
• Presumed: minors who think stories about minors are okay will be abused

This is a trauma response. Trauma responses are not rational. This progression is not a syllogism, it’s absolutist catastrophizing. Note just how many assumptions you have to buy into in order for this escalation to be coherent. This is precisely the kind of spiraling, fixated boogey-man spotting chain of thought that most kinds of cognitive behavioral therapy will seek to address and cut short. A feedback loop of perpetually inflating rhetoric which only stops when the greatest and most horrendous absolute has been reached is not an argument.

I, myself, am traumatized. I, myself, do not have the resources I need to seek out professional therapy at this time. I mean this with all sincerity when I say that if this is where your brain brings you with only the slightest provocation, you need to stay away from discourse and from the people who tell you that the world really is as dark and bad as you think it is. There’s a reason why people with intense climate grief are so easily swayed into ecofascism, there’s a reason why people who were hurt by transness get taken in my terfs, there’s a reason that anti-Clinton psyops so effectively achieved a demographic of leftists who supported Trump in 2016; people who tell you that everything is irredeemably bad and unfixable are preying on your vulnerabilities and priming you to hurt others.

Reactionary movements rely on trauma to suck new people in. They keep you in their grasp by stoking your most primal concerns and convincing you that the rest of the world is cruel, immoral, corrupt, fearsome… but that you’re safe with them. You’re safe with them and you have access to their love, their community, their affirmation, their protection… so long as you inflict new trauma onto others and browbeat them into submission as well.

Your mental health is more important than being judge, jury, and executioner. You do not need to be a martyr for your cause by putting yourself on the front lines again and again. It’s not noble to put your traumas on display over and over again for the public to fear–it’s just painful. And airing out your traumas to the world as a gotcha for discourse sympathy authority points isn’t coping or processing, either. Being praised for being traumatized and learning that being traumatized is an admirable trait will eventually hurt you and your relationships beyond measure. Trauma is a fact of life and we should neither pedestalize it as a knowledge base nor expect to ever eradicate it completely. But we do have a civic responsibility to create a society which can support people and minimize the damage done to them by traumatic experiences.

However, meaningful conversations about ethics cannot happen without measured responses. Measured doesn’t mean tone policing, but rather a meaningful effort towards being articulate, precise, practical, unobfuscating, etc. Continually burying ideas by using the most reductive and affronting turns of phrase possible doesn’t contribute to progress or good faith philosophizing–it just diverts resources to having to disentangle and deconstruct the misinformation in order to proceed with talking about it. Antis don’t want to talk and they don’t want to collaborate on a functional plan of action–they want to scare people away and shame them for thinking meaningful conversation was ever on the table. Antis don’t believe in following evidence-based protocols or understanding the wealth of life experience that exists within society–they merely want everybody to shut up and be what they’ve declared is right. And that is puritanical authoritarianism in a nutshell, and that kind of reactionary idealism which falls apart as soon as you account for the diversity of real people.

Links:

• What purity policing fans get wrong about censorship (the article in question)
• The Alt-Right Playbook: The Ship of Theseus (the entire series is worthwhile for understanding radicalization, but this video in particular deals with moral outrage via inflation of rhetoric)
• The Alt-Right Playbook: Endnote 4: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship (live)
• Fiction is Not Reality on Dreamwidth (18+)

(Source: miseriathome)

You can, in fact, have boundaries about things without your boundaries having to be framed as ethics. It’s also not immoral to engage with the world as much as you want even despite the understanding that things may violate your boundaries, because it’s ultimately largely on you to enforce those boundaries and disengage with things which do not comply. Viewing your own self as having agency and having the introspective ability to read your own state of mind is okay, actually.

(Source: miseriathome)

This is an EXTREMELY uncharitable and rude take by me, but like. Fucking Christ.

Keep reading

(Source: miseriathome)

the-real-numbers-deactivated202:

The way we talk about people who do evil acts as senseless and inhuman does others a disservice because people who are doing evil just have to demonstrate humanity or deliver some sort of justification and Bam suddenly they can’t be doing evil, because they’re just another human with a different set of ideas than you. They’re not senseless or inhuman! “Lol they lied to you about me, I’m not eviiiil, they just hate me because I…” This effect works on liberals too, it’s step two of the radicalization pipeline.

The myth of pure, unreasonable, terrifying evil is harmful because it’s not related to the way we experience the world. And the truth is, evil presents itself as a relatable, potentially likeable person who has a reason to not put the sanctity of life first.

(via butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway)

silver-and-ivory:

big-block-of-cheese-day:

“My employees will rise to the occasion” is a huuuuuuuuuge red flag. It’s the same thing you hear when a company lays off 20% of the staff to boost profitability. Basic translation of both is, “I have given no thought to how you will handle this, but you will handle this if you want to keep working here.”

(BTW, I’m all in favor of more maternity and paternity leave, not least because, over months instead of weeks, a temp can get up to speed and take some of the burden off a short-handed team.)

However, this blasé attitude from the boss, with wishy-washy follow up from one of her staff, gives me no confidence that she doesn’t think her righteousness gives her free reign to be a bad boss. This thinking is unbelievably common in the nonprofit world, so it’s not just on AOC.

https://theslot.jezebel.com/people-rise-to-the-occasion-how-alexandria-ocasio-cort-1835415040

>Earlier this spring, Ariel Eckblad returned to work as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s legislative director following twelve weeks of paid parental leave with her new baby. In another congressional office, several things might have gotten in the way of that time: for one, congressional staffers are not guaranteed any paid leave and Eckblad was one of three on a small team who were expectant or new parents within the congresswoman’s first six months in office.

>But Ocasio-Cortez decided to offer her staffers twelve weeks of paid parental leave anyway, and Eckblad felt comfortable taking it, because the team was designed to handle multiple absences in an effort to be family-friendly.

'People Rise to the Occasion:' How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Office Makes an 'Unusual' Parental Leave Policy Work

Earlier this spring, Ariel Eckblad returned to work as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s legislative director following twelve weeks

The Slot

“’My employees will rise to the occasion’” is not what’s being said in this article. This article is about an interview with one of AOC’s staffers, not with AOC herself. It was a staffer who said “people rise to the occasion.“

Three members of your small team are expectant or new parents in a short period of time. How has the office dealt with staff absences?

People rise to the occasion. It would be a myth to suggest that other people don’t have to shoulder additional work or figure out how to reprioritize so that the things that are critical and time-sensitive occur. Yeah, that happens, and that’s important to note, but it’s worth it. Making those adjustments is worth it, because this is a natural part of the human experience, deciding to start a family and deciding how to do it and trying to do it in a way that allows you to continue to work, or not work, should you choose.

This idea that, oh, we can’t do it because it might impose a burden on some societal factor, well, yes it will be difficult, potentially—but it’s something that we need to figure out and address head-on. That difficulty isn’t a stopping point. We don’t presuppose because it might necessitate some adjustment or reimagining of work that we don’t figure out how to do this in an elegant way. So, in our office that’s what we’re constantly trying to do. We want good people, we want people who are able to live their full lives, as they define them, and we need to figure out how to make that possible for everyone involved.

Meanwhile, the preference to introduce a medium-term temp over trusting an established team to work out what kinds of labor redistribution best works for their own dynamic is a pretty oversimplistic take (especially given how much notice these teams have prior to a member’s leave to make arrangements and schedule). The introduction of a temp always comes with the introduction of a lot of extra labor which isn’t always ultimately beneficial to a workplace, so the decision to hire a temp or not is actually a legitimate consideration. (Also the ethics of temp work are tetchy at this point unless you’re seriously overlooking all the anti-laborer abuses that happen within temp agencies and by administrators who hire temps and the culture of workplaces which rely on temp work, but labor relations in’t really my area–also a non-profit that was set up to introduce temps every time somebody went on maternity leave would also be a huge red flag of “bad boss-iness” so like idk, seems like an impossible/unproductive/unrealistic double bind.)

The section before the quoted section above is about Eckblad’s (the interviewee’s) experience interviewing for AOC as a pregnant person and heavily implies that AOC was receptive to collaboration when it came to shaping a workplace that would allow each individual the option to have a family. Just in general, the framing of AOC as a “boss” akin to corporate powerhouses when in fact all this just relates to AOC having a small staff of people that she personally hired is… dubious.

It turns out that people who are treated well in their jobs are… more willing to pour their energy into them? Is this a thing that needs to be discussed?

Also when did Jezebel become a valid political “source” worth talking about? An interview with a staff member about labor practices sure could be an enlightening read no matter what position you take on it, but one that’s been condensed and altered to an unknown degree (”our conversation has been edited for length and clarity”)–potentially to better fit with the post-interview-determined agenda of the day on the site that is essentially an opinion blog with a political bend–without a full version available? Probably some kind of sensationalist fodder that shouldn’t be looked at too hard.