It just struck me how weirdly classist a lot of those early 90s environmentalist cartoons were. Like, okay, deforestation is bad, and we’re going to get the point across to the kids by… depicting lumberjacks as chortling ape-men who like to cut down trees because it gives them a boner? I get that delving into the economic drivers behind the despoiling of the environment might be a bit heavy for a nine-year-old audience, but we’re not even going to mention corporate interests? Like, next let’s criticise the food desert phenomenon by portraying front-line fast food workers as evil wizards who derive sexual gratification from making kids fat – that’s clearly how this works.
(Come to think of it, this probably partly accounts for the weird, all-consuming obsession with poachers that a lot of social-justice-minded kids of my generation had. When you’ve spent your whole life being taught by ostensibly progressive media that members of the economic underclasses are, at best, willing collaborators in their own degradation, and at worst leering troglodytes who destroy beautiful things for fun, you’re left with this warped worldview where the biggest injustice on the global stage is being mean to cute animals.)
i forgot to tell this story but the other day i was @ my corporate job and i saw this man in his 60′s or 70′s walking by and i notice he’s wearing a baseball cap that says “corporations have no souls” and we kinda make eye contact and he walks over to my counter. and i was like “hey i like your hat” and he kinda went off about how corporations are given some of the same rights as people and how fucked up that is, and i was like “yeah for real” and then he was like “so i made a bunch of these hats to hand out to people to spread the message, i think i have a pink one in my car if you want it” and i was like yes obviously so he went and got it for me and made me promise i’d wear it to some protests sometime
ok i realize this sounds like a fake post but i promise it isn’t
It’s interesting how most reblogs of my post yesterday seemed to latch onto the hug angle, when I definitely don’t consider that the most salient part of what I was saying.
What I think is much more integral to the entitlement paradigm I proposed is the *emotional* intimacy. I’m talking about the subjects that women are assumed to want to engage in by virtue of being “one of the girls”. I can’t even tell you how many I’ve been in a group of women I don’t know very well and someone has started talking about her period, or her body issues, or some other very personal thing I’m supposed to be interested in because we share the same anatomy. You know the part in Mean Girls where Cady is expected to share something she hates about herself? Yeah, that really does happen. It’s bonding by struggle session.
And this structure has been imported to much of feminist activism. This makes sense; a movement organized mostly by women will likely incorporate feminine norms. It’s also probably a net good. I don’t want to dismantle this structure at the expense of people who find it helpful. What I want is to point out that it’s an axis of conformity that many women don’t even consider that they might be enforcing. It is a competing needs issue, and the people whose needs compete with it are often marginalized in some way.
So much of feminism spins on this explicitly confessional axis. Everyone talk about your assaults, everyone talk about your body issues, everyone bleed all over a room of strangers so that their consciousness may be raised and sororal bonds reiterated. I don’t have a problem with environments like this *existing*, but I have a huge problem with how they’re implicitly and often explicitly assumed to be “safe”. “It’s okay, it’s just us girls. We’re here to support you.” There’s no explanation of why exactly I should accept support from people who are strangers in every aspect but their gender. The intimacy is assumed. And yeah, that’s a pretty significant form of entitlement! I don’t think it’s meaningfully different from the entitlement that some men express toward women’s sexuality: it’s assuming access purely on the basis of gender. It’s just that the one is called a violation while the other is called a sisterhood.
I’m pretty sure this is where “put your marginalization in your about and cite your traumas to prove you cope ship” comes from, too.
Girls are trained from a very young age that privacy is mean.
Holy shit, this.
I wish we had a female “lone ranger” archetype. When men abandon society to Do Their Own Thing, we don’t say they’ve betrayed the brotherhood.
“Don’t say you’re not like the other girls.”
Even our cultural images of “independent women” still praise relying on other women.
Honestly, I’ve always kind of identified with that Jamie Lannister Game of Thrones quote. “There’s no men like me; there’s just me.” It’s meant to be this supremely arrogant boast, but it’s also the character articulating his profound loneliness. And, like, as someone who’s had the whole “twice exceptional” thing (yes I’m getting a doctorate; yes I’m hella neurodivergent) I really GET that. But that’s not something a female character could EVER say, except maybe as a cackling villain.
Honestly, I feel like you and me and @prudencepaccard are this…Axis of Loners in a way that’s rarely portrayed (outside of cackling villainy, as you say).
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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