Day: July 21, 2017

jewishtango:

jewishtango:

jewishtango:

them: hey so what gender are you
me: oh actually i… i lost my gender in a terrible accident. its very hard for me to talk abt

them: hey so what gender are you
me: ok so you know that feeling where u arent sure whether or not you’ve left the stove on?
them: ….yeah?
me: its that

them: what’s ur gender
me: oh i have this condition where im allergic to the sugar found in gender, its called genderose-intolerance

tatterdemalionamberite:

variablejabberwocky:

stuffidonthaveablogfor:

queeranarchism:

forumgamer:

queeranarchism:

hadmeatporny:

stik123:

cakeandrevolution:

queeranarchism:

60 year old historian Martin Bühler (who identified himself to the press, I do not identify activists without consent) appears to ‘photobomb’ a lot of media images of the G20 in Hamburg. In reality he is a long time observer documenting police brutality. In Hamburg he chose to cultivate the most non-activist ‘white bystander in a suit with a bike’ look he could manage and casually walked in front of police. As police slowed down or interrupted attacks and waited for the ‘bystander’ to get out of the way (being caught on camera trashing what look like bystanders is bad press after all), activists had time to regroup or retreat.

oh my god, what a fucking badass

This is such an important example of racism playing a major part in how the police treat people.

this is a classism thing not a racism thing. the cops were attacking protesters of all colors, orientations, etc and they stopped only when “one of them” was in the way.

It’s both.

Because of racism POC are never fully perceived as middle or upper class the way white people are. You can be a lawyer in a fancy suit in a restaurant, if you’re not white random white strangers will assume you’re a waiter. You can drive an expensive car, cops will pull you over for ‘looking suspicious’. Etc etc.

The tactic Buhler used in Hamburg can only be done if you are constantly automatically assumed to be middle class or up. Since the middle class is collective imagined to be white, having white priviledge is a big part of being able to do it.

And that’s before even getting into the ‘people of color are seen as threatening 1000 times faster no matter what they’re doing’ aspect of white privilege that allowed Buhler to do this.

(There are probably gonna be white people replying ‘that kind of racism happens in the US, not Germany….’. They’re lying. It happens in Germany they just don’t wanna see it.)

I would say it’s more an example of white privilege than racism, but that’s obviously splitting hairs semantically because it’s two sides of the same coin.

As someone from Hamburg, though, that’s STILL brave as fuck. I know white people, plenty of them, who got on the wrong side of cops during those days and suffered for it, and not all of them were looking “young and lower class”, if you know what I mean. Police also actually targeted reporters with clear press credentials on display, which is on another level of scandal altogether.

All very very true. Privilege in these situations means being less at risk, it doesn’t mean not being at risk at all. Especially with the police being as incredibly violent as they were in Hamburg during the G20. 

If I may:

If protests were a game of poker, cops would all
automatically get a 4 of a Kind. Protestors, on average, might have Straights. Cops
would know, without much doubt, that there’s almost no chance of the protestors
beating them. So, they could do whatever they wanted with them. Mr. Buhler here,
though? He might as well be walking up to the cops, throwing a Royal Flush on
the table, and saying, “Try me, bitches.”

It’s not just that he’s an old, white man with evidence of
high class status. He needs those things to make this work, yes, but those
things alone would only put him on par with the cops. He needs more in order to
make this as effective as it is.

So he puts on a white collar shirt and black slacks, but no tie, jacket, or briefcase: He
dresses nicely because he can, not because he’s going to work. In fact, he
might not be going anywhere. He’s definitely not trying to impress anyone, and
he wouldn’t care if the shirt got ruined—except that, you know, if you ruin it,
you’ll owe him a new one. He could afford ten of them no problem, but he’ll
make you buy the replacement on principle.

He takes a bicycle, but
he doesn’t ride it. He could be high-tailing it out of there as fast as his
legs will pedal him, but he’s choosing to walk. You won’t hit him. You won’t
touch him. He knows you’re on his side, because everyone is. He has enough
money to make sure of that. 

And here, despite the usual order, his weight is a benefit: This is a man who never leaves his chair. He never runs paperwork to his boss, because he doesn’t have one. He
never gets coffee from the break room, because he has a secretary and three
assistants who do that for him. He can either afford a restaurant every day, or he has a trophy wife who brings his food to him wherever he prefers to eat it. 

So, he walks. He
walks slow and looks around. He moves straight through the dangerous spots as
if it’s just too much of a bother to avoid them. He knows you’ll move out of
his way, because everyone does,
sooner or later. He’s used to being accommodated, no matter how inconvenient he gets.

This isn’t just a rich, old, white man. This is a carefully
crafted, impeccably replicated, Rich, Old, White Man™ of the most dangerous
order. This is a politician who will fire your entire department because you
dented the bike he never uses. This is a lawyer who would rather sue you for
twice the cost of damages than draw another breath. This is the spoiled CEO who
thinks assigning every lawyer he’s got to finding legal ways of making you
suffer is a normal reaction to being insulted. This is a man who, for whatever
reason, knows that nothing you can do to him will be worse than what will happen
to you if you do it.

Sounds like that’s not who Mr. Buhler really is, of course,
but having grown up in a town full of just that kind of man? That’s 100% what
he looks like in those pictures. And no, the cops don’t touch those men. The cops want to be friends with those men, because those men are the Friends in High Places that could get them promotions or raises while erasing all evidence of their misdeeds.

this is how you lawful good

That analysis from @stuffidonthaveablogfor is breathtakingly on-point.

Source: queeranarchism

littlealiengirl:

I’ve not really seen much of the shit I’m anticipating yet, so I just want to say this preemptively:

Chronically suicidal people exist. I spent years of my life having to frequently chose to not die. I’m only alive to this day because I made that choice more times than I can count.

“It gets better.” is a bullshit narrative. It’s not negative to recognize that. It’s a bandage, and it burns you like a rash once you’ve gone years and watched nothing get better and felt your life fall apart in your own hands over and over. “It gets better.” is nothing but an attempt to feel like you’ve said something helpful so you can get away from an uncomfortable topic.

I’m not blaming individual people for saying shit like that. I’d like to think most people are really attempting to be comforting. But it’s only comforting to people who are suffering short term.

This afternoon I went for a walk. I had to pull myself out of sobbing so hard that I made myself sick. I came back from my walk and I had a thought that actually startled me: “I’m going to live.”

Any time I’ve fought with myself and these thoughts, the thoughts fought me harder. Eventually the concession would be “I’m not going to die.” That wasn’t a victory, it was narrowly escaping defeat.

What I’m getting at with all of this is that we all have our own shit. When you play into the “It gets better.” narrative, you’re feeding the idea that suicidal ideation is a short term fight for everyone. Unless you’re really close to someone, you don’t have a clue how long or how hard they’ve been fighting, and even then you might be more clueless than you realize.

I want to encourage people to keep fighting, but there has to be a way to do this without acting like life sorts itself out. You could be fighting for your entire life. Even as I’ve gotten better, it’s not completely gone. It needs to be recognize that even with treatment and love, the fight doesn’t go away for everyone.

earlgraytay:

gaslampsglow:

thelightofthingshopedfor:

raithnait:

thelightofthingshopedfor:

the biggest thing I don’t understand about Straight culture is why so many people put so much emphasis on dating and even marriage when so many couples don’t actually seem to like each other

(this post brought to you by the two middle-aged coworkers in the breakroom commiserating about their wives, and like I guess it’s nice that they were trying to keep the conversation relatively quiet while I was there waiting for the toaster to finish but also could you just…not complain about your wives in public)

Like, my coworkers are constantly like joking about how their husbands (especially the already-retired husbands) are basically useless about stuff and I’m like, whyyyy would you want that? 

and I was talking with another (young, single) coworker about how I definitely don’t want that and one of the middle-aged married ones was like “oh they’re great once you train them!” and I was like “I don’t want to have to teach another grown human how to be a person, though? I’m not looking for someone to train? I’d rather be single forever?”

god, yeah, and I’m just listening to this stuff like…yo this is fucked up on multiple levels, how are you so used to it that you don’t even recognize it’s fucked up, why is this the default

I hear the male version of this at Lowe’s almost constantly, that of course being this fucked up idea that our workplace is a better place to be than home.  “What do you mean you go home for lunch every day?  Why?”

Uh, so I can see Jo before she goes to work, and drink coffee, and pet my dog.

“Sure, ok, the dog I get, but…wouldn’t you rather just stay here, drink store coffee, and not have to deal with the woman?”

Always, of course, in standard disgusting othering tones like that.  The men, especially the old white men, of my job think its great that they get paid to be around tools and pretend like they know what they’re doing with home repair (spoiler: most of them don’t) but best of all they get away from the wives they can’t stand.  Obviously there are exceptions, many of them really great people who love their families, but the ratio of yuck to cool is…not great.

This plays so heavily into corporate culture that when I say “No, I won’t stay late, I want to go home and see my girlfriend” they legitimately do not believe me.

TBH, I don’t think this is a Straight Thing as much as it is a social cohesion thing. From what I can suss out- being autistic, neurotic, and never having had a committed adult relationship, mind, this is from an outsider’s point of view- this social interaction serves three purposes.

First, it gives everyone a common topic of conversation. Most everyone over the age of 30 or so is married. Most everyone has minor disagreements with their spouse. Bitching and moaning about your spouse thus gives you something in common with all the other people in the group, without forcing you to have meaningful common interests.

Second, it lets everyone perform their gender without having common interests or easy access to other means of self-expression. Bitching and moaning about one’s spouse commonly takes the form of ‘haha, [gender], right? they’re so strange and incomprehensible’. It’s a way of going, “yes, see, I am a [gender] like all of you, I am not [other_gender]!“ without putting any real effort into it or putting yourself at risk for mockery.  

Third- and this is more common in friend groups, but the Lowe’s Guys seem to be doing it too- it’s a way of saying, “hello, yes, this ingroup is important to me.”  By trashing your spouse in front of your buddies, you’re communicating that yes, they’re more important to you than the person you love most in the world. 

For some people, this is true- they really do care about their group of friends or their coworkers more than they care about their spouse. But this is usually a polite fiction- or to be more blunt, a lie- and I suspect everyone involved knows this. I’ve seen people who genuinely love and care about their spouses in private do this in small groups- especially in settings where this is institutionalized, like the Mormon church- because it’s an easy way of signaling “this group is important to me, I trust you enough to gossip with you about how my spouse is terrible.”  

Don’t get me wrong, I think most groups who do this do have at least one member who is in a toxic relationship, and that person nudges “Two Minute Spouse Hate” into the list of steps in the Social Group Cohesion Dance. But the fact that both men and women do it makes me suspect that it doesn’t really boil down to sexism or straightness, and that most of the people who do it aren’t that unhappy with their partner.   

It’s a form of homosocial bonding. It’s a way of saying “I’m okay, you’re okay.  I’m a [gender], you’re a [gender]. 

I’m part of the group, you’re part of the group.” The actual mouth noises made in the process don’t so much matter- people don’t care that your husband snores or your wife never does the dishes. They care that you’re Part Of The Group and are willing to make the mouth noises you need to make to prove it.* 

And the reason people freak out when you don’t do this- it isn’t because they expect that you hate your partner. It isn’t even that they don’t believe you like your spouse and want to spend time with them. It’s that you’re not doing the Social Group Cohesion Dance. 

You’re not eating with the boys or going “haha WOMEN amirite? anyway i have errands to run see you after lunch” as a pretext to spend time with your partner. You are saying “no, fuck you, my partner is more important to me than you chucklefucks are, and I’m not even going to pretend otherwise to keep you happy.” You’re saying “this group doesn’t matter to me.” 

That is a thing that most groups of people can’t tolerate, and so they will disbelieve or mock you in order to try to nudge you back into line.

*(I don’t hang out with too many IRL QUILTBAG people, but from what I can tell, going “ugh, straight people” or “the Cis Are At It Again” often serves the same function in queer communities. Most QUILTBAG people are under pressure to pretend their relationships are perfect, and most QUILTBAG people suffer from some kind of discrimination, so if there’s an Other to thrash for social group cohesion, people-who-are-not-QUILTBAG are usually it.)