Someone might notice that, when I talk about kyriarchy, the passive voice happens a lot. “People with disabilities are denied accommodations.” “Queer people are made to feel weird and outcast.” “People of color are sometimes asked to speak for their entire race.”
Sometimes it’s not passive voice. Sometimes I use “society” or “cultural narratives” or “the kyriarchy,” which are, if you think about it, basically passive voice too. I mean, someone has to be doing the accomodation-denying and the queer-making-feel-weird and so on. It’s not like it just happens. There is a person behind all this kyriarchy nonsense!
Indeed there is! And NSWATM can exclusively reveal the identity of the kyriarch.
There’s this one dude, okay, and he has a Hitler mustache and a really nice hat, and he lives in an orbital satellite and shoots death lasers at people, and one day he woke up and was like “I know! It’s a good idea to oppress everyone on the entire planet! Muahahahahahaha! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
Unfortunately, a depressing number of people think of the world this way.
Instead of saying it’s one dude with a death laser, however, they say it’s “white cis able-bodied straight men.” Or it’s “feminists.” Or it’s “Democrats.” Or it’s “Republicans.” Depressingly commonly, it’s “the Jews.” That group of people have decided to fuck over everyone on the planet purely for the lulz! Gasp at the enormity of their malice!
If you’re going to be arguing that, you might as well just argue in favor of the existence of Death Laser Guy. At least Death Laser Guy is cool.
“Evil” is an entirely meaningless term, psychologically. Inside a person’s head, evil looks like “making the hard decisions for the greater good,” or like “defending yourself and your way of life from attackers,” or like “not wanting to know about this bad stuff going on,” or like “fighting Group X, which by the way is evil and caused all these problems,” or like “being realistic,” or like “doing a little thing that won’t make that much worse anyway,” or like “following orders,” or like “not knowing that X could cause harm,” or like… well, a lot of things. But very few people’s actions are motivated by the desire to cause harm, and those people almost never manage to accumulate sufficient followers to cause damage.
In the real world, there is no Sauron.
“Hey, wait a minute, Ozy,” some random dude says. “You’re saying no one is evil. But you just postulated the existence of this really terrible social system, the kyriarchy. How could the kyriarchy exist if there aren’t any evil people propping it up?”
Well, there are people propping it up. Everyone is propping it up.
People are surprised when they hear about, say, circumcised women taking their daughters in for circumcision against the wishes of the father of the child. That should not be surprising! The women are part of the same culture and got the same messages about the relative worth of circumcised and uncircumcised girls, and then they pass along the same messages to their children and friends. In fact, if you take a minute to think, instead of falling into a Hollywoodized Evil Oppressor/Saintly Oppressed dynamic, the opposite would be even more bizarre: as if a societal message could only trickle down to half a population!
And don’t even get me started on people who think that being a member of one oppressed group keeps you from being shitty to members of other oppressed groups. Black people can be homophobic. Black people can be racist against Asians or Hispanics or Native Americans. Being oppressed does not give you some kind of magic Get Out of Being An Oppressor Free Card.
I hold up the kyriarchy. I buy a shirt from a corporation with abusive labor practices, or a phone components of which were mined by slave labor. I listen to misogynistic metal music. I call things lame. I say awful things without entirely meaning to about people with mental health issues other than mine. I fuck up other people’s pronouns. I think people are stupid when they can’t use apostrophes correctly. There is not a single day in which I don’t do a single thing that isn’t kyriarchal, and I have been a member of the Social Justice League since before I had motherfucking tits. What hope do well-meaning other people have?
Everyone is an agent of the kyriarchy, and it’s only when we begin to recognize that that we can start to change. It doesn’t mean you’re bad or wrong or evil; it means you grew up in a kyriarchy, and you naturally perpetrate the memes you were born with. The question is not whether you believe fucked-up things, but whether you work to overcome them.
I always look at these discussions of whether we can call people on the ways they enforce the kyriarchy or not, and if that counts as an attack, and start getting lost in the thicket of philosophy and moral-justice-logic. It gets too abstract to think about it clearly – particularly in the matter of words and pronouns. That’s I take a step back and try to make it simple: this is about real human people, being HURT. When you casually use an offensive term (“fag”, for example), unless you are alone there is the possibility that someone who hears you… Read more »
“Women should stop being shoe shopping addicts and talking too much and gossiping with her ‘girlfriends’ about my failings and being bitchy when on their period and any other annoying womanly thing I dislike, because I reject gender essentialism!” None of those recommendations sound bad, but they’re not exclusively about women. Less materialism, not being gossipy, and limiting one’s hostility are all ways that people can self-improve, be they female or male. I reject gender essentialism as an excuse for bad behavior, be it men committing assault or women engaging in verbal/social bullying. That’s not a valid reason to do… Read more »
Just because you can’t stop the system that doesn’t mean you can’t examine your own behaviour and try and alter it so as not to be unintentionally mean to people
This reminds me of a scene from Nixon, in which a protestor confronts RMN about the Vietnam war. The protestor says “You can’t stop it, can you? Even if you wanted to. Because it’s not you, it’s the system. The system won’t let you stop it.”
Scariest movie ever.
“Until it comes down to the actual matter of sexual contact, I could allow that.” Thankyou so much for allowing trans people to exist, it’s very generous of you *rollseyes* “I think it comes down to how deeply one embraces gender essentialism.” The problem is though that there are different kinds of gender essentialism, there’s the kind that says men and women should (or rather inevitably will) act a certain way simply because they are men and women, and then there’s the idea that there’s something deeper than that which causes people to feel strongly that they are either male,… Read more »
Some posters in the thread seem to wondering, why so much cynicism towards the politics of marginalized people? Part of the reason is that historical social justice movements when it became acceptable for the oppressed to discriminate against their oppressors. The historical examples I mention are extreme, but I’m sure they started off as seemingly-benign, also.: – The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution – The Red Terror during the Russian Revolution – Struggle Sessions during the Cultural Revolution in China – The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia Modern day Western social justice movements are not in the same universe… Read more »
dave: I think it comes down to how deeply one embraces gender essentialism.
Perhaps it’s considered a foregone conclusion to reject gender essentialism entirely, but it’s a double edged sword.
Just think what would happen if MRAs got their hands on gender essentialism denial:
“Women should stop being shoe shopping addicts and talking too much and gossiping with her ‘girlfriends’ about my failings and being bitchy when on their period and any other annoying womanly thing I dislike, because I reject gender essentialism!”
“Until it comes down to the actual matter of sexual contact, I could allow that.” How generous. Why is sexual contact the proverbial Rubicon? Also, what qualifies as sexual contact? A kiss? The “base” system? I admit that it might be problematic for a trans person to not disclose this status to someone prior to sexual contact, especially if they want a LTR with that person, but trans is not an STD. It’s a self-identified status. I haven’t told all my sexual partners I’m Jewish, and if they’re anti-semitic, well, it’s on them. I have the right to self-disclosure, and… Read more »
Black Humour, if we go down that route shouldn’t the woman going on a date with Jon Finkel have posted on her profile that she was bigoted?
“So for this particular issue you just need to accept that you don’t get it, that other people’s experiance is different from their own, and that a person’s right to self identification in terms of gender trumps whatever those around them think they should identify as.”
Until it comes down to the actual matter of sexual contact, I could allow that.
“To be fair, he totally should’ve. That he didn’t is not an excuse to publicly shame him, but just because a bad thing happened to him doesn’t mean he didn’t also do a bad thing.” You don’t need to list your job and your hobbies, in the off-chance that they might offend your potential date. If said date wants to know out of being anti-geek, they talk before and ask, especially given it’s an online venue. I’ve also seen anti-trans radfems profess of not wanting to date trans women out of sheer prejudice, but they did own it by saying… Read more »
“As for trans and gender, I’m a bit conflicted on the matter. On the one hand, I can kind of understand a non-cis point of view because of the occasional dream where I believe myself to be a woman, but at the same time, it sometimes does feel like a person just deciding for themselves what gender they are, and treating everyone who disagrees like they’re some sort of horrible monster.” From what I have experianced in my life, it is incredibly difficult, if not pretty much impossible for a non-trans/cis-gendered person to really understand what it’s like to be… Read more »
To be fair, he totally should’ve.
That he didn’t is not an excuse to publicly shame him, but just because a bad thing happened to him doesn’t mean he didn’t also do a bad thing.
The Magic the Gathering thing is not at all the same thing, and I am again surprised how some of the geek women were perfectly willing to throw geek men under a bus just because they were afraid the Nice Guy(tm)s were, heaven forbid, feeling any vindication about the issue.
Anyway, I’d still say the trans issue is different than even those things you mention, but I’m willing to cede the argument until I come up with better arguments.
“I’m not too worried about whether or not I accidentally end up with a trans unexpectedly, for me it’s just a matter of, I do think they have a moral duty to disclose and I question the good nature of those who don’t do so.” Well, some people have criminal antecedents, are unemployed, are violent, are boring, are [fill in blanks] but I don’t expect they have a moral duty to disclose their status. You’re getting the same argument that got the Magic: The Gathering guy. That he should have disclosed that he played this (on his online profile), so… Read more »
“If it’s a dealbreaker to you, just ask everyone you meet if they’re trans. That way no surprise. But don’t expect 100% self-disclosure.”
I’m not too worried about whether or not I accidentally end up with a trans unexpectedly, for me it’s just a matter of, I do think they have a moral duty to disclose and I question the good nature of those who don’t do so.
“I am trying to ascertain if you have any real-world experience in the things you are saying, or purely internet/theoretical experience, as I suspect. They really are VERY DIFFERENT.”
Judge by whether my information is right, not where it comes from.
If you feel I’m wrong, then say so, and that’s fine.
“Point being, I don’t believe that the right of a trans to self present as the gender of their choice overcomes the right for a person to choose whether or not they want to engage in a relationship with a trans.”
If it’s a dealbreaker to you, just ask everyone you meet if they’re trans. That way no surprise. But don’t expect 100% self-disclosure.
It’s important because if I said “I wouldn’t intentionally marginalize blacks/women but I don’t consider it a moral duty not to” that would not be considered acceptable, nor should it.
Point being, I don’t believe that the right of a trans to self present as the gender of their choice overcomes the right for a person to choose whether or not they want to engage in a relationship with a trans.
“I wouldn’t go for no strings attached sex, so it doesn’t really concern me really. I ONLY look for LTRs.”
Doesn’t mean I don’t care, it’s that I don’t know how it works out, or how it should work out, and I’ll leave that up to people whom are concerned.
“As Schala said before, though I don’t entirely agree, the only moral thing to do with power is to relinquish it.”
I don’t think it was me who said this.
balconyscene: As for whether it’s in online or real life, that’s not important, however if the winning of hearts and minds via this online discourse is as nothing, then why are you here? Who said it was nothing? What are you talking about? I have been blogging for four years… if I thought it was nothing, why would I bother? I have a radio show too… why would I bother doing that if I didn’t care? What are you TALKING ABOUT? I am trying to ascertain if you have any real-world experience in the things you are saying, or purely… Read more »
“Well good, but would you agree that it’s a moral duty for all to disclose, especially if before sex? And that you would disavow those fellow trans who don’t agree?”
Not a moral duty. It’s not as STI.
I wouldn’t go for no strings attached sex, so it doesn’t really concern me really. I ONLY look for LTRs.
I only sound right wing to you because you’re, by your own admission, ‘left of Trotsky.’ In any case, I won’t try to convince you that I’m not right wing, partially because that is what you want, for me to bog myself down trying to prove my left wing bona fides, and partially because I don’t think it matters to you anyway, as long as I don’t kowtow to you and “accept my privilege,” I’m still white male oppressor man to you regardless. As for whether it’s in online or real life, that’s not important, however if the winning of… Read more »
balconyscene: So, enough with the damselfication act. Where is the strong, confident, take no guff white radical grandma from before?
I am from Second Wave Radical Feminist Female Identified Womyn’s Collective-ville. (boo!)
“Damselfication”? Um, in case you didn’t notice, YOU are the one who brought up the rapist and demanded I scream on cue.
Well, its been real, its been fun, but it hasn’t been real fun… see you later, I have a big important political meeting to go to. Lets hope it amounts to something!