Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Ansari and #metoo


Put me in the “its assault” corner.  Or, more specifically, the “I think that’s assault, but I also *get* that our society does not recognize this behavior as assault, which is specifically why I have purposefully minimized my reaction to and discussion of such events when they’ve happened to me in the past." 

I have no interest in turning my sexual history into social currency; exchange rates are so unpredictable.


So I hurry up to add, "It wasn't that bad."
  

Because I’ve always known that if I loudly declared that what happened to me (i.e. experiences like Grace’s) felt horrific, there would be PLENTY of people, just like in reaction to Grace, who thought I was crying rape at discomfort, or thought I was (with uniquely feminine misunderstanding or sensitivity or whatever fucking way you want to describe to it) “dramatizing” in order to gain sympathy, or just flat out lying/manipulating others for my own benefit.  All the shade that every woman has thrown at Grace; that’s what would have come my way if I had publicly cried assault. I was never naïve enough to not recognize that Grace’s fate would have been my fate too, if I had ever decided to share, beyond a very few close friends, feelings that I had been “assaulted” after being pressured to engage in sexual conduct by someone I was – at the beginning of the encounter – interested in. So, I stopped talking about it.  And if a friend asked me about it later, I brushed it off.  And I swept it away in my mind under the category of “bad sex.” And now this insightful woman has hit the nail on the head of why I’d felt so uncomfortable declaring a “side” in the Ansari debate.

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Unite the Right Rally


Why do I keep seeing distinctions being drawn between “evil and morally repugnant members of the alt-right” and “participants of the Unite the Right rally who were there to protest the removal of a statute of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.” THOSE CATEGORIES OVERLAP 100%. If you tried to draw a Venn Diagram of these two groups of people, you would have one single circle. The Civil War was fought by Confederates for the explicit and singular purpose of maintaining the practice of slavery. That is a fact. [1] All Confederate generals, Robert E. Lee included, dedicated their professional lives to upholding the morally indefensible practice of enslaving other human beings. So, if you think removing a statute of a person who dedicated his life to that cause is something to be PROTESTED, YOU ARE AN EVIL, MORALLY REPUGNANT HUMAN BEING. NO FURTHER SEMANTICS OR RHETORICAL TRICKS TO PRESERVE YOUR WHITE-FRAGILITY REQUIRED.



[1] Unfortunately, our public education system has in many ways failed to teach this FACT for generations. Thus, it is possible (although not really defensible, because hello, the internet exists, so you have access to education, if you seek it out) that some people believe the false narrative that the Civil War was fought over “state rights.” (Again, hardly defensible, in that it would seem to require almost zero critical thought to connect the “state rights” theory to slavery... I mean, what “state rights” exactly do you think the country was divided over, if you are buying the “state rights” bullshit?). Under such circumstances, the people protesting the removal of a Confederate statute are not so much evil and morally repugnant as they are unforgivably ignorant. In my world-view, on this particular topic, this is a distinction without a difference.