RES: Social

There is a mistaken notion that trauma is primarily about memory—the story of what has happened…It’s a too-simplistic view in my opinion. Your whole mind, brain and sense of self is changed in response to trauma.
In the long term the largest problem of being traumatized is that it’s hard to feel that anything that’s going on around you really matters. It is difficult to love and take care of people and get involved in pleasure and engagements because your brain has been re-organized to deal with danger.
It is only partly an issue of consciousness. Much has to do with unconscious parts of the brain that keep interpreting the world as being dangerous and frightening and feeling helpless. You know you shouldn’t feel that way, but you do, and that makes you feel defective and ashamed.

@funereal-disease​ asked some people on Facebook what kind of environment they needed from a safe space. I thought the responses were really interesting. It seems like you could break down needs from a safe space into a couple categories:

tone: “I need a space where I won’t be scolded for my anger”/”I need a space where people aren’t acting angrily”; “I need a space where you’re expected to communicate compassionately and patiently”/“I need a space where I won’t be punished for being bitter or impatient or unable to extend the benefit of the doubt”; “I need a space where jokes and flippancy are encouraged”/”I need a space where people take the things we’re discussing seriously”.

content: “I need a space where I don’t have to debate whether I deserve to exist”/”I need a space where I can try to explain and empathize with and inhabit the opinions of my political opponents, even where their beliefs are abhorrent and scary”; “I need a space where people like me are not discussed as scary violent abusers”; “I need a space where I can talk about my scary violent abusers”; “I need a space where my religious beliefs will be respected”/”I need a space where I can complain about the religious beliefs that harmed me without worrying about being respectful”.

social rules: “I need it to be easy to leave”; “I need it to be easy to change your mind”; “I need to know that if I make a mistake someone will talk to me in private instead of calling me out in public”; “I need transparency about moderation and what people get banned or excluded for”; “I need to know that if someone harasses me they will get excluded”.

In other words, needs about how to communicate, what to communicate, and how to handle transgressions.

I would be so delighted if instead of ‘this is a safe space’ posters on doors it became conventional to have signs that said “this is a safe space for emotional expression and venting” or “this is a space where harassment procedures have been refined a lot and work really well” or “this is a space where you can express hurtful and wrong ideas and expect people will try to argue with you but not shame you or attack you or exclude you, with an expectation of confidentiality, and with really emphatic moderation on the ‘not attacking people’ rule”.

I guess it’s a little too big to fit on a sign.

dk i just think that you all western activists- whether you’re whites, poc who arent descended from countries invaded by japan during WW2, or even asians who are but just do not know their motherland’s history - need to actually learn and read about Japanese imperialism. i’m not going to be one of those people who spout antisemitic vitriol like “they were WORSE than the nazis” - the fact of the matter is that while imperial japan carried out the same human experimentation, attempted genocide, call for ethnic cleansing, torture, slavery, massacres etc (along with occupation/colonies like south korea for 35 years and Okinawa to this very day)… somehow in western activists spaces still, we almost reach this point where the term japanese imperialist evokes a lot softer of a response than the term facist or nazi. despite being a nazi ally and committing similar atrocities.

and the i guess that the reasoning behind this is because there is no real benefit to the western white savior complex here (save for the hiroshima bombs which itself were bad and revenge for pearl harbor, not to save the occupied asian nations). unlike how in the western world, the allied powers can gloat over their white savior complex for saving jewish and rromani people (along with other targeted ethnic minority and general minority groups) from nazi germany. the motivating decision for that in upon itself being that nazi germany was harming and posing a threat to the white europeans, not the suffering of the aforementioned groups.

so in a sense i understand how nazism became cemented as the greater evil in the west and how we were forgotten about. but we shouldn’t have been. forgotten about. and you all have no idea how painful and disrespectful it is to see some of you critique japanese media for their imperialist themes only to dance around the word just because it isnt “hard hitting” enough and just call it facism or nazism. or just promote japanese imperialist content in general when it’s not ovbious enough to be called either of those things. the more you forget about us and what japan did to us and our countries, the more they succeed because this is their agenda. read about their war crimes, unit 731, the sook ching massacre, the nanjing massacre, the comfort women and all the other atrocities committed. do not forget about us.

The Good People Rules
I see people who concerned about perfecting language to the exclusion of all else and I find this troubling and dangerous.

There is no set of rules that you can follow that will make you A Good Person. Being good is action. It is trying to do the best you can. Sometimes it will not always be clear what the right thing to do is, and reasonable people of good faith may disagree.

That is ok. There are going to be times when the path forward is not clear. There will be times when you may hurt people. You try not to, but even with the best intentions, hurt will happen.

There are serious problems with the SJ capital D “discourse” (or as I like to think about it- the Good People Rules).

For one, the people involved in perfecting and refining the Good People Rules don’t seem to care that they are removing the ability to engage in nuance in discussions. That there are no set of rules that can cover every situation or life experience. By trying not to hurt people ever, you will inevitably hurt people.

The Good People Rules are also dangerous because by focusing everything on words and not on actions over time, you are giving people a roadmap to pretend to be A Good Person while not really being one.

If people can gain trust simply by following a set of rules for how to speak, then there will be people who are perceived as trustworthy that aren’t. People who everyone can see acting in ways that are abusive, but they get a pass for saying all the right things. Male feminists are guilty of this, like SO much.

We need to shift some of the energy we spend micro-examining people’s talk to seeing if they are actually walking the walk.

People’s actions over time will ALWAYS tell you who they are and what they are about.

Our communities will be safer for our current members and more welcoming to new people that want/need to be here if we can make this shift.

I think my biggest “huh” moment with respect to gender roles is when it was pointed out to me that your typical “geek” is just as hypermasculine as your typical “jock” when you look at it from the right angle.

As male geeks, a great deal of our identity is built on the notion that male geeks are, in some sense, gender-nonconformant, insofar as we’re unwilling or unable to live up to certain physical ideals about what a man “should” be. Indeed, many of us take pride in how putatively unmanly we are.

Viewed from an historical perspective, however, the virtues of the ideal geek are essentially those of the ideal aristocrat: a cultured polymath with expertise in a vast array of subjects; rarefied or eccentric taste in food, clothing, music, etc.; identity politics that revolve around one’s hobbies or pastimes; open disdain for physical labour and those who perform it; a sense of natural entitlement to positions of authority (“you should be flipping my burgers!”); and so forth.

And the thing about that aristocratic ideal? It’s intensely masculine. It may seem more welcoming to women on the surface, but - as recent events will readily illustrate - this is a facade: we pretend to be egalitarian because it suits our refined self-image, but that affectation falls away in a heartbeat when challenged.

Basically, the whole “geeks versus jocks” thing that gets drilled into us by media and the educational system isn’t about degrees of masculinity at all. It’s just two different flavours of the same toxic bullshit: the ideal geek is the alpha-male-as-philosopher-king, as opposed to the ideal jock’s alpha-male-as-warrior-king. It’s still a big dick-measuring contest - we’re just using different rulers.

Gay Assimilation is “no fats no femmes no asians” in a grindr profile. It’s cops marching in uniform at Pride. It’s a gay man like Milo being a leading figure of the fascist resurgence in the US. It’s banks using us as props for feel good ads while denying loans to trans women. It’s “equal opportunity employers” hiring lgbt+ people to make the drones used to kill queer Arabs. It’s a Starbucks with a rainbow police shield “safe space” sticker on the door while a cop down the street assaults a black trans woman. It’s cramming gay people into the predefined boxes of a cisnormative hetnormative white supremacist capitalist society. It’s abandoning the fringes to the cold so that those of us closest to the mainstream can get a pass as long as we don’t act “too gay” in public. Gay Assimilation is maintaining all the same broken power structures that enabled our oppression to begin with.

Queer Liberation is dismantling oppressive structures. It’s abolishing prisons, opposing war, subverting capitalism, disarming/dismantling the police. It’s building new models of community and resistance, it’s refusing to abandon our siblings on the edges because they are no less deserving than those of us who can “fit in”. It’s refusing to cut out bits of ourselves to accommodate the comfort of straight people. Queer Liberation is striving to create a radically different society where systems of oppression and biases have been challenged and uprooted.

Straight men who infantilize women’s friendships have no fucking survival instinct. Like my uncle is always making fun of and rolling his eyes at my aunt’s friend lunches and telephone dates with her lady friends, teasing her like she’s a gossipy teenage girl in high school drama. And my aunt just laughs about it but I know for a fact that if it wasn’t for her best friend K, she would have probably set him on fire by now.

Like straight men are capable of maybe a quarter of the indepth emotional labor and support women do for each other. Like men can literally have one friend named Bob that they go fishing with once a year and still be content for life. Then they think it’s cute and girlish that their wives have these long term, integrated, emotionally intense relationships with women but like…LOL, it’s not because men don’t need those kinds of relationships, it’s just that they get it all from their wives while offering peanuts in return. PEANUTS.

Like if your woman is on the phone for 2 hours with her friend and you think that’s childish of her, just know that she spent half of that time getting the support that you should be giving her (but are incapable of) and the rest lamenting what a giant fucking baby manchild you are.
This is how homophobia and misogyny hurts men: it makes these kinds of in-depth, deeply emotionally invested friendships a feminine thing to do, and therefore unmanly (and un-straight) for men to do. Men are brought up to shy away from cultivating these kinds of deep and platonic friendships with other men. Because, you know, if you talk to your male friends all the time and hang out with them and cry in front of them and hug all the time and lean on each other (emotionally and physically) when you need support, it makes you gay and womanly. Which is, apparently, the worst thing you can be.

I’ve read articles and personal stories about and by men, talking about experiences they’ve had that have shown them how painfully out of touch they are with their own emotions and their own ability to open up and connect with people, including themselves.

I worry about men a lot. I worry about the number of men who find themselves incapable of providing emotional support for their friends, their significant others, and themselves, all because of how they’ve been raised to bury and ignore their more vulnerable emotions and tactile tendencies because they’ve been taught that this kind of closeness has to be stamped out at all costs.
!!!!!
So important.
So so so important
Studies have shown that this sort of emotional shallowness is a leading factor in why men are more likely to be violent, to drown their sorrows in drug and alcohol abuse, and to successfully commit suicide.

They throw all their eggs in one basket with a significant other, or at times a parent, and when problems arise in that relationship, because they have no other relationships to speak of, they quickly turn to destruction.

This is why I often give out advice that people need to expand on their relationships. You literally CAN’T have it all hinge on a single person, it is a horrific idea and it will destroy you and the things and people you love. You HAVE to have relationships with other people.

Anyone with any mental health issue can tell you that the inability to talk it out, the lack of having someone to turn to, makes things go careening downhill, faster than we can catch them back.

Somehow this is considered an acceptable way of being for men, and their lashing out is “just how men are”. It’s more masculine to shoot yourself than to take medication. It’s more masculine to beat your partners than to have a conversation with them. It’s more masculine to bottle everything up until it erupts and people die, than it is to simply ask for help.

And people want to blame women and feminism for it, for “making men afraid”, or simply try to list the likelihood of surviving suicide and avoiding drug abuse as “female privilege” or something that is a nature-given trick of “biological sex”, rather than address the very serious issue of toxic masculinity and extreme, self-destructive hatred of being perceived as anything like women.

I was trying to explain my political philosophy to someone, and the only words that didn’t feel wrong in my mouth were, “evidence-based ameliorist.”
I believe in whatever works to make shit better. I believe our decisions should not be informed by lofty and distant ideas, but the concrete evidence of what works and what doesn’t. What helps people survive? What helps them thrive? What sounds like a great idea but never works in real life?
I believe in politics informed by legitimate social sciences. Social policy informed by statistics, not scripture. Financial policy that safeguards the future instead of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. Political conversations based in careful examination of what’s actually being proposed, not ignorant discussions of ideals.
This isn’t some revolutionary thing I’m talking about. This is how I’m used to cities, regions, countries, being governed. Because good governance is more often about coalitions of evidence-based ameliorists with very different ideologies, than ideologically pure groups of people who reject anyone who believes differently than they do.