(note: I have no romantic or sexualized experience myself, so I admit *some* of these points rely entirely on secondhand stuff and media)
One thing I think is not talked about very much is that straight men live pretty much desexualized lives if we’re not actually having sex at that moment, and then there’s not much room to be the object rather than subject.
As I’ve said before, we men don’t have clothing options for “dressing sexy” in masculine clothing (there is cross dressing but that is different). There’s no male equivalent to the short skirt or low cut top. There’s no male lingerie that isn’t seen as a joke.
Further, we just don’t get validation for our sexuality outside of a sexual partner. We are almost never complimented for our looks or sexiness from platonic friends like women are, especially same sex friends.
There really aren’t many straight male role models for raw aesthetic sexiness in mainstream culture (besides unnaturally muscled men). In fiction, male characters are almost never attractive for embodying sexiness but rather for doing things (saving the world, being extremely witty, being a genius, winning the tournament, etc.). Their sexiness is non-aesthetic and sometimes is in spite of their aesthetics.
Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of men aren’t even called physically hot and sexy by their own sexual partners, who themselves focus on personality. There’s not much room to fulfill the role of passive sexism object for you partner for many/most men.
I think it is telling that a lot of porn for men ignores the man’s personality and has a woman just throwing themselves at the man, overcome with lust.
Also there the fact that women seem to rarely approach men and some seem to often expect the man to do most of the sexual escalation, especially in the early stages.
We talk about women of color or women who are disabled being sexualized, but we don’t talk about how all straight men are desexualized and denied the ability to be sexualized object.
oh my god… that’s why they send dick pics
“witness me!”
There are occasional reddit threads about things like this: “guys who send unsolicited dick pics, why do you do it?”
The answer always seems to be some combination of slot machine mentality (“maybe this one will like it, and make the other 50 worthwhile”) and a desire for witness. Surprising numbers of people admit that it’s validation even if the reaction is negative, simply because they’re still being viewed in a totally sexual context.
At the very least that has obvious consequences for people trying to reduce dick pic sending. There’s some core of people who can’t possibly be reached with “it’s not attractive to women” because that was never their expectation.
More broadly, I think efforts to get (Western?) men to emphasize with objectification wildly underestimate the challenge they’re facing. It’s not just a sympathy shortage, it’s a totally unfamiliar feeling. Making things even harder, it’s a feeling a lot of men say they wish they could have.
The usual narrative on not (politely) complimenting the appearance of unknown women is “sure, it’s nice if it happens once, but think about how annoyed you’d be if it happened all the time”. Fine in general terms, but I think a lot of men don’t have any way to intuit the emotional difference between too-frequent compliments and being pestered with too much of something totally innocuous like requests for the date.
The comments on those articles are frequently from men saying they’ve literally never received a single compliment from a stranger on their appearance, and can’t imagine what it would be like. The ones who have are often talking about a single, years-old compliment they still cherish. That’s not a framework that supports more than a purely theoretical understanding of what’s it’s like to be valued for your appearance too heavily – or at all.
Obviously that’s not universal, any more than all women are catcalled, but it seems like a really serious communication failure to appeal to a sense of objectification that much of your audience has literally never felt, and desperately wants.
Reblogged because thefutureoneandall describes exactly why I have trouble empathizing with feminism columnists.
Can confirm, I’d take literally any compliment on anything at this point, and would cherish it.
one day we gotta get all the men and all the women to sit down together and hash this stuff out between them, how hard can it be.
This discussion kind of reminds me of a story that made the rounds about a year ago, where
a woman, after having gotten a bit tired with dick pics, decided to try to get her “revenge” of sorts, by sending unsolicited vagina pics to 40 random men:
Let’s be honest: while I enjoy penises, I don’t necessarily want
unexpected visual boners intruding on my day. I wondered, “What would
guys do if I turned the tables and sent them an unexpected vagina pic?”
And so, in my own twist on revenge porn, I sent 40 unexpected vagina
pics to men on Bumble.
This … didn’t work out the way she apparently expected it to:
Overall, I was surprised that I didn’t get my, “Gotcha!” moment. I’d
initially hoped the guys would see how invasive it is to receive such
intimate photos from a stranger. When I’m excited to get to know a guy,
his penis isn’t the first part of him that I want to know. But given
that men like to send dick pics, I suppose their enthusiasm for v-pics
makes sense.
So, basically, women experience dick picks as a net negative, as an intimacy violation, while men experience v-pics as a huge positive, as validation and an indicator of interest.
This seems consistent with the above discussion, where it’s a pretty common male experience to basically never receive any sexual attention ever and thus respond really strongly positively to whatever scraps come their way (or to start trolling for attention – with the point of some of these dick pics apparently being to get any attention at all, no matter how hostile), while a common female experience seems to be more like being flooded with unwanted sexual attention and wanting a way to make it stop –
resulting in an absolutely massive inferential gap – with the result that if you’re on one side of the gap and try to describe your feelings and experiences to the people on the other side, whatever words you have will just fall on deaf ears because the feeling and experiences you describe are … not just unfamiliar, but outright alien, to the ones on the other side.
This alienness is … mutual.
For men, it feels like no men are sexy to women.
For women, it feels like all women are sexy to men.
It’s like one person dying of dehydration watching another one drown.
“It’s like one person dying of dehydration watching another one drown.”
the conversation has gotten longer, so i’m reblogging
it is very important to have friends who unapologetically dislike the same things u dislike that other people like a lot so u can talk about it in private and avoid being a jackass in public.
(x) Oh wow. Tbh I don’t think there’s a single thing I wouldn’t apply to antis? Amazing.
I wanted to c/p the text and discuss it, but springhole won’t allow me to that so, sorry.
Honestly I would recommend this entire page as a must-read for anyone. It’s entirely possible for any group to become this toxic and you could end up swallowing extremist ideologies without even realizing that it’s happening.
I know this isn’t an exact answer to the questions you’re still waiting on from me, but I think this website is definitely directly addressing some of your thoughts on how to identify your community as being abusive in the first place.
Here’s the text of the section being discussed above:
The group fosters and nurtures irrational hatred and fear of anyone or any outgroup (often by creating an atmosphere where negative generalizations are the norm).
The group fosters and nurtures the belief that it is inherently superior to any outgroups, and that members of outgroups are inferior by default.
The group justifies actions that in any other circumstances would be considered morally wrong or abusive.
The group ignores or minimizes flaws within its own members and ideology that would be harshly criticized if they came from anyone or anything else.
The group’s narrative and ideology are more important than facts, truth, and logic; and they demonize anyone, inside or outside of the group, that questions it.
The group thinks little to nothing of exploiting people to achieve its goals – eg, by defrauding them, by overworking them, or by pressuring them into giving up absurd amounts of money and assets “for the good of the cause.”
The group takes a “shoot first, ask questions later” or “guilty until proven innocent” attitude, especially toward dissenters and outsiders.
The group doesn’t consider it possible to go too far in what they do to spread their beliefs or agendas, or they have no concept of what would constitute unethical means of spreading their beliefs or agendas.
The group doesn’t consider it possible to go too far in what they do against their opponents, or they have no concept of what would constitute a crime or wrong against their opponents.
I guess nobody remembered that I was on FictionPress, too.
So, hi. I’m the girl you all knew as Tara. My FF.net account really was hacked (twice!), once in 2006 and again in 2009. As of 2017, Support still doesn’t answer my requests to regain it, although I can’t say I blame them. They’re probably scared I’ll flood their site with poorly written sex scenes again.
I’m lucky the hackers never migrated to this account, considering it had the exact same login credentials. (They’ve since been changed, don’t worry.)
I’ll let the account’s creation date speak as to whether it’s legitimate or not.
Thank you all so, so much for keeping My Immortal alive over the years. You fill my heart with so much love. (Preppy moment, oops.)
That’s about all I have to say for now.
—
Because I’ve received several messages asking this, and predict I may receive more, I’ll answer it here. No, I am not Lani Sarem. Really bad fiction simply tends to read the same. No, I’m not on Facebook. Or Deviantart. Or MySpace. Or Youtube. (Etc.) I am on Tumblr. But I use my real name there, and it’s not Tara.
She’s okay!
You know, you almost had me here. This is good. There’s some audacity in what you’ve done, because it took me longer than it should have, and the help of talking to blackflirtlarping on Discord in panic mode, to discredit it, and usually when a “real Tara” pops up I’ve identified eight problems with their story in the span of like a minute. I was legitimately ready to send off a PM to this account asking if the story was fake or not, because I have a 14,000 word essay on why it’s fake that if disproven would destroy my life and reputation. But, mm, no, this. This isn’t right at all.
So for one, this fictionpress account. This “nostalgia”. Interesting that I have never seen or heard about a fictionpress account before. It’s never come up anywhere in any of the accounts or infoposts or links of accounts or anything of the sort. Even the My Immortal wiki, which gives a lot of time to the proven-not-real Youtube channel, only has new mentions of this fictionpress account in the wake of this post. They’ve never seen it before. This fictionpress account that is for you apparently a nostalgic enough part of this saga to want to revisit and look at. But, nobody has talked about it seemingly ever, and it’s not actually listed anywhere on the internet, so I’m just curious as to how you found it and know about it, and the convenience of this account that nobody has ever seen before being the hot get only days after an update.
But wait a second. How did you even find this? Because in trying to search for this, a funny thing comes up
XXXblodyblaktearz666XXX didn’t fucking exist until a few days ago, it seems. Nobody was talking about it, nobody was linking to it, nobody knew it existed until this post came into being. Even Google’s spiders didn’t find it, but fictionpress isn’t spider-proof; find a writer with a distinct enough handle, punch them into Google, and their FP account will come up just fine. So, how is it that this account with no activity or stories or favorites or anybody talking about it fell into your lap?
Well, I think it’s because despite being from March of 2006, the account had on it a very different name until recently. This is not a known account of Tara Gilesbie and it never was. Nobody knew about it, nobody talked about it, and that’s because this is another fake. A well aged fake, I’ll give it that; a fake that at least used an old account and didn’t start throwing around lots of inconsistent stories and reveals that don’t mesh with anything. But one that’s coming about to cash in on the popularity of the Lani Sarem debacle in what is a too sweet, too perfect coincidence to make this sham any less transparent.
The only way that this is the real Tara’s profile is if you are in fact the real Tara herself.
Dammit I fell for this
I KNEW IT. THERE WAS NO WAY. THE MYSTERY LIVES ON. this is my generations D.B. Cooper
Okay, friends, let’s talk about going to protests and weaponizing our whiteness, if in fact we are white.
You know what the protesters who marched with Dr. King wore? Their best. Their clergy stoles, their suits. If you’re a doctor or a nurse? Wear your scrubs. If you’re a parent? Wear your PTA shirt if it’s too hot for a suit. If you’re a student? Dress like you’re going to go volunteer somewhere nice, or wear a t-shirt that proclaims you a member of your high school band, your drama group, your church youth group. Whatever it is, make sure it’s right there with your white face.
This is literally the tactic of the people who marched with King in the 60s, and we need to bring it back, and bring it back HARD.
I do this all the time when I go to marches. I wear my cutest, least-offensive geeky t-shirt, crocs and black pants, or I wear my t-shirt that mentions my kid’s school district, or now I’ll wear the pink t-shirt that says I’m part of the Sisterhood at my shul. If it’s cold enough, I wear a cardigan and jeans and sit my ass in my wheelchair. (I need to anyway.) I put signs on my wheelchair that say things like ‘I love my trans daughter’ and ‘love for all trans children’ or something else that applies to the event. Dress like you are going to an interview if you can, or make yourself look like a parent going to pick up a gallon of milk at the corner store. Make yourself “respectable.” Use respectability politics and whiteness AS A WEAPON.
Fuck yes I will weaponize the fact that I look like a white soccer mom. And you should do this too if you can. Weaponize the fuck out of your whiteness. If you are disabled and comfortable with doing so, turn ableism on its head and weaponize it. Make it so that the cameras that WILL be pointed at you see your whiteness, see your status as a parent, see your status as a community member. See you in your wheelchair or with your cane. If you have privilege or a status that allows you to use it as a weapon or a shield, use it as a shield to defend others or a weapon to break through the bullshit.
This has a fair number of notes, so maybe it’s already been mentioned but …
The “Sunday Best” thing from the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s & 60s, or wearing markers of an assigned profession (e.g. scrubs) is an established tactic of social movements. They’re part of what Charles Tilly (one of the academic god father’s of social movement theory) called “WUNC” displays. WUNC can be broken down to:
worthiness: sober demeanor (!!!); neat clothing (!!!); presence of clergy, dignitaries, and mothers with children;
unity: matching badges, headbands, banners, or costumes (!!!); arching in ranks; singing and chanting;
numbers: headcounts, signatures on petitions, messages from constituents, filling streets;
commitment: braving bad weather; visible participation by the old and handicapped (!!!); resistance to repression; ostentatious sacrifice (!!!), subscription, and/or benefaction. (Tilly, 2004, pg. 4 – tumblr-style emphasis my own)
While I’m very much in support of anti-fascist protesting in whatever form it takes, especially when engaged in a counter-protest, one of the great tragedies of the American political climate right now is that we’ve really forgotten some of the biggest lessons of the Civil Rights Era. King didn’t trot out fresh-faced students, church women in big fancy hats, or the elderly and disabled without knowing what he was doing. He (and the other members of his affiliated organizations) knew that if the police were photographed using violent repression against a mother holding her child, or a student in slacks, a cardigan, and Buddy Holly glasses, it would go over very differently than if they were photographed beating up “unruly thugs”. Their presence alone would be notable to people locally, especially in the heat of the south. But so would photographs of repressive violence against “nice people” that would then get picked up by the national media, and maybe in markets that were more sensitive to racial oppression.
[And like, there are other factors as well. People also sometimes think the Civil Rights Era erupted spontaneously from Jim Crowe and segregation in the South, and those are giant factors (”depravation” and “grievance”, in jargon), but there were also legislative things and court rulings brewing since the 1920s (the NAACP had been trying Civil Rights cases, and looking for test cases over the years), and the Cold War meant that America needed to appear to be the perfect image of opportunity and equality (together these things manifest as an “opportunity structure”. again, jargon). Not to get to down on protest as its own thing, but the structuralists do have a bit of a point.]
… There are other types of anti-fascist counter-protesting that have developed in various ways through the years. And like, a big thing in social movement theory overall is that while there are common tactics (”protest repertoires” in jargon), historical contexts matter a lot and some groups will have to do more dramatic performances of the WUNC to get attention. There’s also the move revolutionary antifa-type riot mentality. I’m not gonna call that one wrong either, mind, but since the Civil Rights Movement was brought up, it should be noted that those two forms of protest differed intentionally.
Anyway, as someone turning in a dissertation on this in a couple of days, here’s some drive-by political-sociology. If you want to learn more about the research behind processes of social movements, where they succeeded, and where they failed, I totally recommend checking out:
Charles Tilly (2004) Social Movements 1768-2008,
Sidney Tarrow (2011) Strangers at the Gates: Movements and States in Contentious Politics,
Sidney Tarrow (1998) Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics,
Frances Fox Piven & Richard A. Cloward (1988) Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed and How They Fail, (this is on the Civil Rights Era protests and the somewhat fraught legislative follow-up exactly)
McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly (2001) The Dynamics of Contention
(McAdam has a quite well-regarded book on the Civil Rights Era specifically. I haven’t read it personally as it relates less to my regional context. However like, that’s worth noting and looking into. Also all of these are stodgey academic texts, but they’re not uncommon in university libraries, or even in some bookstores. They’re also all a bit old now and shouldn’t cost you a ton online.)
As a note – My point here isn’t to descend from the Ivory Tower of Academia and say “you people on the streets are doing this wrong!!1!”. Theory doesn’t always match up with Practice, and as noted by pretty much every notable theorist anyway… Context matters a TON. Not all movements will be able to use the same practices or performances. Sometimes their inaccessible, sometimes they just don’t have the cross-context appeal. It’s about experimentation and finding opportunity. To be clear, this isn’t about me telling folks how it should be done. Still, I think it’s worth sharing information when it’s available, especially if people who might not know are trying to draw specific links to historical cases. Social movement theorists have pretty much all agreed that WUNC displays (along with other factors like media diffusion) are super duper important and can be recognized in movements across historical contexts. I think it’s worth it for younger activists who might be looking for protest repertoires that work for their movement as it’s developing to take heed of the successes and failures of the past. Especially since a lot of it is either a) so much a part of history and culture that it doesn’t really get examined for its constituent bits, or b) has been mythologized to the point that it’s hard to look for really good popular historical information on its technical processes.
(If people have questions, feel free to DM me. I might be a little slow the next couple of days as I finish up proof-reading and checking all my citations but yeah. Let’s share knowledge and smash the fash.)
The Nazis of 2017 gained the ground they have with articles about how they were “dapper.” That was a political choice, and it worked. It snowed a lot of gullible goyim. People refused for almost a year to call “the alt-right” Nazis because they looked “like average white people.”
Nazis see their whiteness as a weapon already. Get yours out there and show them – they will never sway everyone. “If you have privilege or a status that allows you to use it as a weapon or a shield, use it as a shield to defend others or a weapon to break through the bullshit.”
Not someone who typically adds to an already long post, but I have done the whole dressing dapper af thing and it WORKS. A few years ago there was this big city council vote about an anti-discrimination ordinance that was going to be passed in my relatively progressive, but still very southern hometown. There were huge protests on both sides, both for and against the ordinance, with each side wearing a specific color (red was for, purple against) to show which side they supported. Most of the people against the ordinance were bussed in by hyper conservative churches and many didn’t even live in the town. It was a lot of old people and many of them wore nice clothing. I knew this would probably be the case, so I, being a southern girl at heart and knowing how these people work, broke out my crinoline and nicest red dress and perfect white gloves. I curled my hair and put on makeup and I showed my ass up to the protest. Made a point to be the picture of a perfect southern belle. And it threw the bigoted assholes for a serious loop. It was like they were short circuiting or something. They kept telling me how I reminded them of someone from their church or how pretty I looked and “how would a nice girl like you like a big cross dressing man in the ladies room???” which of course allowed me to explain, ever so nicely, that they were being bigoted assholes. And they Did Not Like that, because I was forcing them to look in the mirror, at someone who looks like them/someone they claim to be “protecting” and question their motives and beliefs. Seriously guys, it fucking works. Weaponize the fact that you look like the oppressor and throw it in their faces.
To be quite honest, I do not think WUNC would work in current climate. In Poland, only violent protestors are ever listened to, and nonviolent ones are being accused of the most horrible crimes, even when they are nurses on hunger strike. And please bear in mind that in America government has much more social consent to use violence (in democratic Europe, it has zero). Plus nowadays the government is explicitly on the side of the nazi, and the nazi do not care how you look or behave, as for them you are a rat in a tuxedo.
Yeah, I would imagine it definitely depends a lot on those types of things.
In the US, there’s still a lot of lingering influence from the Puritans, so the general public tends to be really focused on how you look, on whether you “look” like a worthy and good person to them or not.
The Puritans had this idea that if you were privileged/rich, or if you had a good life in general, it meant you were a good person. Because it meant that God was rewarding you for being a good person. And therefore, if you’re oppressed, it’s because you’re secretly bad/unworthy.
So there’s this centuries-long culture of basically retconning people who have bad experiences, trying to find a reason to blame them. Basically so that you can pretend whatever happened to them would never happen to you. Victim-blaming.
Plus, the US is ridiculously large, thanks to our bullshit colonialism and genocide. Which makes it really difficult to govern. And the focus on states being able to mostly govern themselves also takes some power away from the federal government.
So even though we have a system of government, in a lot of ways public opinion is just as powerful as the government is. If the media sees a large force of “good” people speaking out against Nazis, (who are by definition “bad” people, except they tricked the media into treating them well for a while by dressing “good”), then the media jumps on board and starts telling everybody that there are bad terrible Nazis around. And that Good Americans are fighting them.
And then politicians either lose political power by ignoring that, or gain it by going along with public opinion.
I mean, that’s a simplistic explanation. The current administration doesn’t care what people think, because the current “President” is not a politician. But when public opinion is against everything he does, the politicians in his party stop supporting him enough to pass the kinds of legislation he wants.
TL;DR: around here, violent protesters are immediately seen as Bad, and therefore their positions must be Wrong. (Which is a big part of why the police does use violence against protesters. Because the public will immediately assume that they would only have used violence against Bad and Wrong Violent People.)
If you can make it look like it would be really, really dishonorable to use violence against you, because you are so clearly Good, because you have a suit and tie on or some shit, then the government/police can’t use violence without looking like THEY’RE Bad and therefore Wrong.
forget wanderlust, sonder, all those words for vague dreamy feelings… what I’m asking for is a concise word for the feeling you get when someone makes an assumption about you that’s 100% correct but you really don’t like that anyone was able to make that assumption. for now I’m calling it a fuckor
“he asked me ‘you main junkrat right’ and a wave of fuckor wracked my feeble body”
just moving along like everyone else 