Things to Keep Me Up at Night

*Initially published on whacksingpoetic.blogspot.com*

eally it's a list of questions more than anything else but as it's 4am my time, you can see that these things are currently interfering with my sleep patterns.

1) How did we end up with "feminism" as the default for talking about social justice?

Other oppressions/privileged groups that we want to talk about get defined negatively ("racism" "homophobia" "ableism" "cis-sexism" "heteronormativity" to name a few). We don't have words common to most media vernacular to talk about the beliefs, practices and procedures for combating them ("critical theory" and "critical race studies" come to mind but I haven't seen them used outside of academia really).

With, what I hope, is an actual turn towards intersectionality, why is social justice action still focused (at least linguistically) on gender with the phrase becoming "intersectional feminism" or variants thereof? Along with that, why is "patriarchy" so prevalent while "kyriarchy" is not and I'm not aware of single-word terms that focus foremost on race or class.

In terms of what my limited knowledge of history regarding struggles of oppressed people (both in terms of massive systemic oppression and revolutions for rights) suggests, it's not that gender came first. How did we end up gender-centric and should we try to change our language way beyond adding "intersectional" in front of "feminism"?

2) Why are we acting like facts matter again? What can we do otherwise?

I spent admittedly too long reading comments on snopes articles and media posts about the turnout for Trump's inauguration and the press conference held today. If there's one thing we should have learned from the bold faced lying from Trump and his campaign and subsequent voting for Trump it's that arguing facts don't matter when trying to convince someone who is diametrically opposed or even slightly beyond on the fence (arguably there is a whole world of social psych that also could have told you this before then). So, how do we actually deal with a world where facts don't matter to POTUS and to his supporters? I mean, initially including facts is helpful for fence sitters and people who already have anti-Trump beliefs but they don't actually work in terms of convincing others (nor educating perhaps?). So, how do we interact politically with people we disagree with when realizing that facts and rationality aren't on the table (none of us are perfectly rational)? How must politics (and economics and traffic laws and a lot of other things) change when we stop with the idealization that humans are rational actors in this world?

3) How do you convince people that rights are rights?

There was an article by Slate  that looked at what Trump supporters thought of the Women's March and one of the quotes is from Tate, from Georgia: “I just don’t understand why they are marching. I don’t know what rights they are losing or what’s being threatened.”

And that one in particular I found interesting because I think it in a simple way gets at a common divide. It doesn't have to be that Tate doesn't know that the ACA is being gutted, Trump is emboldening police forces across the country that already are doing massive amounts of violence to persons of colour and queer folk are fearing for their marriages and their ability to just go pee in public without confrontation. It can honestly be read as Tate doesn't think those things are related to people's rights.

So how do you convince people that health care or the ability to get married or live not in constant fear of the police are in fact rights that everyone should have (and perhaps the right to own a gun shouldn't be or at least shouldn't be quite so unlimited)? I've studied theories of rights and what various scholars say is a right and what isn't a right and how to determine them but it doesn't actually answer the question of how to convince people and looking at the question above, how do you do it without relying on people believing rational arguments and without relying on facts? Convincing people matters as long as we live in democracies where others do get to vote on the folks who decide whether I have a right or not (or appoint people to a court that decides or myriad other ways things come back to the electorate). Even if Tate understands some amount of the privilege they possess, if that doesn't tie back into rights in some way, does that matter?

4) This one is a bit different from the rest but I've spent awhile trying to find an article I read from the Feminist Blog-O-Sphere some time since 2010 about how women (according to the author all women but I'd say it more so applies to white women) are allowed and encourage a little bit of masculinity. The examples I remember included barbequing and Jodi Picoult and the phrase, I think, was something food related "a snack of masculinitiy" "a bite of..." etc. How do I find this article again?

Part of me wonders if the marches and protests fall into this idea. It's totally fine for (white) women to have a moment of being loud and saying "no, this isn't okay" as long as nothing gets damaged and then they fall back into complacency (and of course support cis-sexist understandings of womanhood in their protesting). I'd really like to re-read the article but I cannot find it and have no clue when it was published (most likely 2010 or 2011 but not definitely) nor where it was published (I was reading around 80 plus sites daily then so looking in bookmarks and favorites doesn't help either).

Things that Bother Me About the World We Inhabit

*Originally Published 2016*

In no way is this list exhaustive. I've been downhearted, angry, in complete disbelief about a lot of the following and because of this combo I really have a hard time figuring out how to make them better. Sometimes systems just seem too big and people too invested to actually make noticeable improvements.

1. The relation between health and beauty
Why do we think that these two things go in tandem? Seriously, beauty products are not health products nor are beauty treatments health treatments. Let's let people be people and choose how they want to express themselves without attaching moral health trolling to those choices.

2. Valuing money over lives
At the base of it, money is paper or bits of code that WE assign value to. It doesn't have value outside of the systems which we create and reinforce and continue. Lives do. How have we set up a system where it's impossible to value something that is intrinsically valuable over something that is artificially/instrumentally valuable?

3. Nationalism
This goes ALL ways. Everyone who feels like they have to stay in a nation to try and make it better. Everyone who wants to re-take a nation to bring back "the good old days". Again, nations have no meaning outside of what we give them. I think I wish we all had open border policies across the world. I mean, I warrant no extra special treatment because I came out of my mother's womb at a particular location in the world nor because my mom lived within an artificial human made set of boundaries for a certain number of years. Why do I get more things than someone not born in the US or Canada? Why do I have more of an obligation to those countries? All of it strikes me as a nationalism that I'm not okay with it and creates divisiveness over actually helping PEOPLE.

4. Competition vs Collaboration
So we stack capitalism as if competition generates the best results but then also have this idea that you can do more and be better with collaboration (as long as it's internal to a corporation or a sports team). The way we've set up capitalist/corporate systems, we give being competitive (to the point of generating a monopoly if possible and of course preferring money to lives see above) an edge over anything that's collaborative or works as a co-op. Why have we biased everything in favor of adversarial approaches? The idea that competition makes things better is not generally more supported than the idea that collaboration does but generates a lot more collateral damage along the way.

5. Humans are not rational
We know we aren't. We know a billion different ways that we aren't. Can we stop idealizing this idea of rationality and building policies and such that support it as they do real damage to people? Marketing would not be the multi-billion dollar business it is if we were rational. Social psychology would not have a list of over a 100 biases if we were. Also, given that "rationality" is a construct which tends to support status quo ideas, it has real and harmful effects on marginalized groups both in dismissing them, their experiences and arguments as irrational and reinforcing arguments that support the continued oppression of people.

Finally, why do we value rationality to extremes anyways? I remember when my grandmother was ill and senile (and dying no matter what medical interventions happened), doctors would do things against her will because she was irrational. The fact she was irrational didn't lessen her duress about it at all. The harm done to her was if anything greater than if she was rational. Why does it matter that she was making irrational choices, they were choices that felt good to her?

6. Men are emotional
I don't mean in the they can be happy, sad, etc sense. I mean that we, as a society, value men getting angry. They get angry often and are righteous about it and we are okay with this. Why did we somehow separate anger from other emotions and declare it rational? Also, why do we not expect and teach men to control their anger (which expressions of can get incredibly harmful to others in ways that happiness or sadness generally don't) the way we expect and teach mean to show no other emotions?

The doubling harmful part of this is if women are angry about things that don't typically anger men, women are being emotional and irrational but men don't face the same standard of when their anger is rational or reasonable.

7. Individualism, Intentions, Blame and Merit
In this, I really mean when we think individuals have a responsibility to act differently. We (more so in the States than other places I've lived) have this idea that an individual should only be required to change their behaviour if their behaviour was the sole and immediate cause of a problem. So if it's not directly your fault that someone else doesn't have the ability to feed themselves or avoid being shot by police, there is no obligation on you to act differently.

And then, we examine what makes something your fault, we default to examining what your intentions were. I really do not understand how we improve systemic issues without all taking ownership of the fact that we live in them. I didn't do anything to get the rights of a US citizen or the privileges of being white but that's exactly part of why they are problematic.

Systemic oppression is going to reinforce itself across multiple institutions and spheres of influence. Of course one action doesn't make it go away, it's a multi-faceted problem. However, no counteraction means we see the status quo strengthening. We have obligations to make other people's lives better even when we didn't do anything directly to create the system because not doing so does make their lives worse. It cannot be about individual's intentions or blame but about collaboration and an onus on everyone to make the world even slightly more kind to more people.

This whole idea of you can have a one to one correlation between an individual's actions and their responsibilities for redress can only be supported as fair and just if we already live in a merit based society (even them I'm not convinced it works well).

Education, Distancing and Ownership

**Originally published 2016**

While I'm sure I'm now going to write a series of posts about stuff surrounding this election, fallout and reactions, they're still all pretty rambling -so please bear with me if this interests you because I think these ideas are interrelated but I don't have a roadmap as to how.

White cis women, we fucked up. (White men, you fucked up too but that's not a group to which I belong so I'm not as into owning that the same way) (also I'm going to focus on race issues in this post mainly because I identify as queer which means throwing in LGBT as a group to which I don't belong isn't okay but also I don't read as queer which gives me privileges that others don't have and the degree and kind of hatred that trans folk face both due to Trump's election and society more greatly is sufficient that I'm not comfortable suggesting that you can put all LGBT issues in the same category regarding this election).

I get that your and my initial reaction is to point out how it's not us. I voted for Hilary. I'm with her. I'm not even a swing voter. I go dem all the time. White college educated women voted for Hilary and I'm part of that group. White queer women probably voted for Hilary (I don't actually have stats on this claim but I have seen breakdowns for the rest nor have I seen breakdowns based on cis/trans but I'm going to make an educated guess trans women aren't the white women who voted for Trump).

I don't think that distancing is okay. I get the desire to and how uncomfortably it sits to think that this is our fault. But I don't think that we can really rest on the above arguments.

Why don't I think that?

White cis women voted for Trump. Yes, when you break it down by education level as well as gender and race, the difference means that smaller group of white women to which I belong didn't vote more for Trump than we did for Clinton but I don't really think that because I belong to a more privileged group that's a subset of a larger group somehow absolves me of the issues for that larger group (maybe this also explains why I'm focusing on white women and not white folks generally).

I also think it continues class divides in ways that aren't actually helpful and allows folks to feel superior and smug rather than forcing us to identify with the group to which we belong and are recognized by others as belonging to. While there have been times that I've lacked money, I've never been poor and I've never been lower class and there are lived experiences that are substantially different from childhood up to adult for folks belonging to classes other than mine. Acknowledging those differences in constructive ways isn't what's going on when I try to not own the fact that white cis women voted for Trump and instead focus on uneducated white cis women. Blaming poor people and lower class people is.

Distancing ourselves from white women who did vote for Trump is part of what allows us to be "not our America" and "not my president" without really considering what those things mean. The majority of people who 'look' like me voted for that guy. The majority of people who have the same race privileges, and cis privileges and lack the same gender privileges voted for that guy. I don't think I get to say "it wasn't me so it's not my burden and my bad." I don't get to opt out of a group identity like that in this circumstance. My group made things worse for persons of color, for transpeople, for already marginalized groups.

We (I'm assuming most people reading this are feminists btw) believe that in conversations about rape, assault, patriarchy, it's not okay for guys to say "not all men" or "but I don't do that." We believe that a male ally needs to call out sexist shit when they see it and hear it.

More specific to me, I believe that it's not a marginalized group's job to educate. I don't owe men an explanation of how particular acts are sexist. I don't owe men an explanation of how particular words are misogynistic. I'm welcome to provide those things but it's not my job and men while having an obligation to be educated, don't have a right to demand that I educate them.

If I believe the above, then it stands to reason I don't get to distance myself from other white women when it comes to racism. Nor do I get to distance myself from cis women when it comes to transphobia. It doesn't matter that college educated women voted for Clinton. White cis women voted for Trump. Furthermore, the fact that under-educated women voted for Trump suggests I (and other college educated white cis women) have probably done a really bad job at recognizing class differences that are salient to being an ally when discussing racism and transphobia with white cis women of other classes. I don't get to be like "oh there's a class difference, not my job then" I should be working harder to understand how class is intersecting with gender and race in order to be better ally (for lower class folks, persons of colour and transpersons).

I think not owning the role white cis women played and distancing ourselves from the white women who did vote for Trump means we miss where we are falling short on our obligations as allies. It obfuscates what work needs to be done and by whom. It allows us to shirk educational duties and say things like "not my president" to make us feel better. In a shallow way, yeah, he's not my pres because I didn't vote for him but anyone meeting me on the street should be making the opposite assumption based on the data. He is the white cis woman's president right now and part of my job is to change that.

Politics and Privilege

**Initially published on a different blog of mine in 2016**

This is more just rambling and unconnected thoughts about the election, reactions to it and my own personal survey. I would love to have discussion about these things (with the proviso that it's my blog so my censorship rules)

Thinking politics is about good governance and business is a privilege. For marginalized groups, politics is necessarily personal. It is about our bodies and our bedrooms.

Being able to cast your vote based on principle and not on survival is a privilege (and one that I would like for everyone).
Being able to cast your vote based on whether you believe in big government or small government is a privilege (and one that I would like for everyone).
Being able to cast your vote based on whether you want OTHER folks to have access to various social programs and medical options is a privilege (and one that I want for no one).

Not listening when marginalized folks tell you how a person's politics or a political platform affects their personal lives is an abuse of that privilege.
Not allowing folks to react the way they need or want to when an election returns results that affect their basic rights and equality is an abuse of that privilege. (see also every tone argument that ever existed)
Not owning the extent to which people like you (and like me, hello white women) are responsible for the outcome is an abuse of that privilege.
Claiming it's just politics is an abuse of that privilege.
Putting the onus back on marginalized folks to continue equality denying, rights denying, hate filled conversations (and doing education on these issues) is an abuse of that privilege.
Forcing marginalized folks to take the "higher road" is an abuse of that privilege
Forcing marginalized folks to be the ones to put their bodies and persons on the line to make change happen is an abuse of that privilege.