It 1982, Donald Trump was 36 years old and he preferred Hanes pantyhose. Not because other leading brands constricted his balls, but because women belonged in dresses; it pleased the male eye.If you’re a Gen-Xer, you undoubtedly remember these ads.
For nearly two decades, Hanes ran television, print, and radio ads as part of their Gentlemen Prefer Hanes campaign.As for your preferences, ladies? No one gave a shit, least of all, you. You were happy to tuck that ass in Hanes if that’s how gentlemen preferred it.
Why? Because you, Gen-Xer, were socialized not to see a problem with this campaign. Even if you did see a problem, what were you going to do about it in 1982? Form a hashtag army on Twitter?
Gen X. We came of age with movies like Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, and Revenge of the Nerds. Date rape scenes were “funny.” Harassment meant you were “hot.” Getting pinned to a wall by a guy at work, at school, or a party was “normal.” Relax. Don’t be so uptight. You know you want it.
Tag: some points
does anyone have a convincing explanation for why homophobia declined so precipitously
femmenietzsche said: Byproduct of making sex and marriage about individual fulfillment.
that doesn’t really feel sufficient, I mean yes it’s obviously correlated with all kinds of other social change, most of which boost the value of individual lives over traditional institutions, but we’re still going from mental disorder to officially sanctioned love-is-love within 20 years, few other changes seem this fast.
It’s namby pamby liberalism, basically.
You know that black guy who befriended the KKK to get them to give up their robes? Daryl Davis? It turns out bigots actually are reasonably persuadable if you can get in under their defenses. Not to go all Saturday Morning Cartoon very special episode and everything, but the power of empathy and brotherhood is real and just knowing a member of an oppressed group on a personal level makes it hard to keep oppressing them.
And gay people had advantages even Daryl Davis didn’t have. We could and basically had to remain hidden for a long time. Before we came out of the closet, we were sons and daughters, best friends and pupils, the kid on the debate team or the co-worker. The fundamentals of the situation required that the intense personal confessionals and bridge building to bigots happened naturally and on a massive scale. One agonizing conversation with family after another, one difficult decision about whether to hold hands at thanksgiving or invite grandma to the commitment ceremony at a time, we won hearts and minds.
The strategy scaled, and in fact was made easier and easier as time went on. Some people come out, which made it a little safer to come out, which let more people come out, and on and on until everyone had a daughter or a mechanic that they knew was gay.
It baffles me that this is supposed to make me a naive and unsophisticated when most of those same progressives yelling at me about it either were queer themselves or involved in gay activism when all of this as going down. I saw dozens of people go from bigots to grudgingly accepting people to enthusiastic advocates of gay rights, And I’m betting you did, too, so where the current pessimism about converting the bigoted comes from is a mystery to me. Sometimes the spiritually uplifting and optimistic answer happens to be the right one. And the attitude of the modern-day to conversion of bigots strikes me as an intentional decision to stick to comforting and politically easy facts when the truth is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to the past 20 years.
yay for namby pamby liberalism!
I’ve seen people argue that Will and Grace was hugely influential, just because “prime time TV”. You see something weird and scary and unfamiliar, and nothing happens, and you see it again, and nothing happens, and after a while it’s not scary anymore.
But think about the famous judge saying he’s never met a gay person, and his clerk saying “uh, actually”. Back in the 80s, when a kid in my school came out as gay, it was a huge fucking deal. I saw one other kid openly claim to be bisexual, and… like, that was it. That was what we had for anyone talking about being gay or admitting to it or anything.
So that kid came out in his senior speech, and said “you know, people keep saying they think I’m gay, and you know what? Yeah, I am.” And he got a standing ovation. And all the kids at that school got the impression that being gay was something that a cool person you really liked might be doing, and that it was hard on them when people were jerks to them.
And honestly, a big part of the reason it became a massive shift was precisely that homophobia was weaponized as a get-out-the-vote strategy. For a long time before that, the actual degree of active hostility was actually lower in most of the US; people just avoided the topic. So some of this was a result of the realization that this could be used as a topic to motivate people to vote. But that meant making it a major topic. And doing things like pushing for a law banning gay marriage, when no one had seriously been talking about it before that. (Almost no one. I know Quakers whose church was doing same-sex marriages in the late 80s.)
So suddenly it became a major thing people talked about, and it turns out that when it keeps getting talked about, and influential people keep saying “hey, this is… just sorta stupid really”, and stories about kids getting kicked out by their parents are heartbreaking and awful… People just kept moving over, and moving over.
One of my friends decided to come out as a trans girl at school, by showing up at a party in a dress and makeup. No one gave her a hard time about it. We asked.
But we asked “did anyone give you a hard time about it”. Not “was anyone okay with it”. Not “did you get seriously injured.” Because that’s where the question is, now, in most of our culture.
So, yeah, you can absolutely persuade bigots. It’s stunningly effective. And I know someone’s gonna jump in with “well, it wouldn’t work on the KKK”, but obviously it does; Daryl Davis has proven that.
And someone’s gonna say “okay, but it wouldn’t work on Aryan Brotherhood people”, but actually it can and does. One guy talked to reporters about it a fair bit; he went to jail, ended up with the Aryan Brotherhood, hated Jews, and all that. Got out, got a job working for a guy who was Jewish, was just dreading the Jewish guy stiffing him on his salary. First paycheck rolled around, guy gave him a bonus and said “you’re a really hard worker, you deserve this bonus, thanks for being a good worker.” Boom. Loyalty to Aryan Brotherhood: Gone. They lied to him and he knows it.
And someone’s gonna say “but it wouldn’t work on someone involved with Stormfront”, but it turns out the kid of the guy who founded Stormfront, who was active in promoting Stormfront, ended up getting outed at school, so some of the Jewish kids said “hey, let’s invite him to dinner since no one else will talk to him”, and now he’s actively speaking against white nationalism.
It’s not just that it works. It’s that it works extremely well, and most of the competing strategies backfire more than they work.
i think a lot of the panicky-hostile reaction against the idea of talking to bigots comes from people thinking “it works” means “you personally have to do it instead of any other thing” and they freak out because they don’t feel confident they can have a civil conversation with a douchebag without becoming a doormat.
folks, it’s fine if you’re not the one to do that. it takes social skills, luck, and guts. it also takes a lot of focus, so even if you have the ability you might not have the time/attention/energy.
YOU don’t have to do it.
but it’s really good that some people do.
For fucks sake!
His FATHER, not him mind you, his FATHER.
I’d be more surprised if a comment from the 80s wasn’t racially insensitive…
Wtf. I double checked the story, because it’s pretty extreme and the link above is to Fox News, but it’s in a large number of other news sources as well, including left leaning news sources like the New York Times, so the story is legit: a race car driver lost a sponsorship because his dad said the n-word literally before he was born, in the early 1980s, and supposedly he only used it at all because he was a recent immigrant from Ireland and unaware of how offensive the word was in the United States.
This is more of a bit outrageous, and extremely troubling; literally punishing someone for the misdeeds of their father.
I didn’t want to respond to this thread on my main, but I was tagged elsewhere, so I feel that I should. Springboarding off isaacsapphire’s reply here due to checking the NYT to verify, but actually elaborating on what @poipoipoi-2016 attributed to me.
Suppose you have a country where the population is 60% white and 40% black, and the number of douchebags per capita of each group is equal. So one group is not superior to the other.
Statistically, there will be people whose entire experience with the other race is chronically negative or acutely negative, because douchebags are not that rare. This contributes to the natural rate of background racism radiation.
However, with prudence and not wanting to stomp on faces with one’s oppression boots, this can be managed. Showing people that actually the other group are normal people too in a direct experience way (as that musician did) can shift them away from it. Enforcing against racism in an equal way (nobody gets to be racist, not even against the majority) creates a pressure that won’t generate collective action because it is solely against individuals for individual acts, which individuals can control.
The failure to totally abolish groups such as white nationalists or white supremacists does not indicate that it is necessary to get out the oppression boots.
As long as they remain marginal, driven only by racism background radiation, people for whom race is the only thing going for them, and people who are naturally way out there on emotional connection to race, they cannot significantly grow through their own actions. The people who value racial identity above all others are out of touch with the general population. The people who only have race going for them are often incompetent, ugly, and socially maladept. The background radiationers don’t match up with the typical person’s experience.
That’s your base pool of white nationalists. Notice how profoundly outnumbered they are at the marches. It’s not because they’re special cowards; it’s because there just aren’t that many of them.
Among this group you generally won’t have competent, charismatic great leaders because they just don’t have a good sample population to start with.
Now, suppose we punish people collectively for the actions of others that they can’t control. If the number is low enough, they’ll never get enough power to overcome it, and most people will just hope it doesn’t happen to them. However, as the number climbs, then regular people start worrying about it happening to them – after all, they can’t control it – and so they will eventually give up on inaction (cheap) and resort to action (costly).
A white man (we’ll call him Fred) who wants to make sure no white nascar drivers are fired for racist remarks made decades ago by other people entirely must remove the people that do so from power over nascar. After this, he has four options:
1. Someone who restores uniform individual punishment.
2. An implicit subconscious racist in his favor.
3. An implicit conscious racist in his favor.
4. An explicit racist in his favor.
#1 is the best option. Fred blames this on nutty college professors and picks someone who likes nascar and doesn’t like unnecessary ethnic conflict. This could easily be a black man from West Virginia. (Yes, there are black men in West Virginia.)
Maybe someone would avoid picking #1 somewhere else, because they believe it’s impossible. But this is nascar, not the cops.
And because this is nascar and not the cops, the primary reason to avoid #1 is believing in collective intergenerational ethnic moral liability, or expecting to be attacked by others who believe the same. (Regular intergenerational moral liability would allow our nascar driver to make a public apology for the statements of his father, and regular intergenerational moral liability is already questionable.)
The primary reason to believe that is to press collective intergenerational ethnic justice* claims.
And so it slides down the ladder. If people conclude that they’re going to be judged as a collective, they’ll probably decide they might as well act as one. If they think they can’t get #1, they’ll pick #2-4. These are more expensive because they require greater levels of coordination and risk greater levels of retaliation. However, none of these people would fire a white nascar driver for a racist remark made by his father. As the perception of threat increases, #2 will be ruled impossible, and then #3.
Past #2, the consequences falling the other direction will open up risk for retaliation as other groups choose their own #3 and #4, increasing the estimate of threat cyclically.
You want them to pick #1. It is important that they pick #1. (And if you can’t get #1, try your hardest for #2.) Collective intergenerational justice is the path of feud, collective intergenerational ethnic justice is the path of conflict and famine.
* This term is a mouthful on purpose. One, it names something that hitherto has hidden behind euphemisms, and two, it should be more difficult to twist the meaning this way.
sometimes i read or skim arguments/talking points with the sense that like…..you’re thinking way too hard about this. like not in a dismissive way, not “you just wasted your time lol what a loser go outside”, it’s more like “why are people being made to think SO DEEPLY about shit that doesn’t matter”.
something that seriously pisses me off is people who say stuff along the lines of “if you do/like/think X then think really hard about why you do” like 1) don’t tell me what to do 2) maybe i have thought really hard about it and this is how i feel afterwards 3) ITS NOT THAT DEEP
this is in all sorts of discourse and honestly it reeks of the guys i met in high school who tried to convince me i wasn’t really attracted to women cause they always told me to think about why i like women instead of men (i ID’d as a genderqueer lesbian back then) and if i said i had they’d tell me to think harder. they didn’t care about me. they just wanted me to not be gay. they just wanted me to be available to them.
people who tell you to think hard about some random aspect about you are not being ingenious. they are not encouraging self discovery. they just want you to admit that they are right and you are wrong because eventually you’ll run out of arguments and statements you’ve rehashed a thousand times and just get mad and then they’ll use your anger against you.
y’all. IT AINT THAT DEEP. queer discourse? it’s faster and easier than saying “nonbinary genderfluid and bi” and encompasses my identities and beyond. for me, that’s it. i’ve typed out paragraphs on why i use the word but it all boils down to that.
shipping discourse? sometimes we just fucking like things and it doesn’t mean shit in our brains because brains are funky things we still don’t understand. i’m not going to dive deep into the inner mechanisms of my psyche because i like a ship with dubcon elements. it’s not that fucking serious. you’re not going to catch me engaging with a lot of “reasons why shipping x is okay” because i’ve grown up with weird ships and characters ever since i was 10 and hey, look at me, i’m queer and mentally ill but i’ve never fucking killed anyone like i apparently would have done if fiction really was at a 1:1 ratio with reality. the irony is that so many shipping arguments are bunk if you use your goddamn brain for ten seconds and engage in some nuance and critical thinking for once.
ace discourse?? “think really hard about why you ID as ace”?? because they don’t experience sexual attraction you utter walnut. and whether that’s due to trauma or internalized xphobia or what, it’s nobody’s fucking business aside from that person.
all these people are doing are trying to worm their gross ideologies into your head and make you doubt who you are. when i was younger i fell into these traps and came out like “okay i thought about it and i still like this so what now,” and they don’t have answers beyond that. because it’s a subtle guilt trip to get you to admit that you’re a liar, that you’re actually cis/straight/not mentally ill/<insert other identity aspect here> because how dare you exist as one of those people.
ugh. that’s my semi-legible rant of the day, the point being that nobody is allowed to dictate or determine my identity aside from me and sometimes therapists, and people who try to guilt people into hating themselves over dumb arbitrary shit can fuck off forever.
BIG DISCLAIMER: i was 9 when 9/11 happened, so this might be more about my own crystalizing tastes than anything else. i think it’s a pretty darn good theory tho and other people have validated it.
BIGGER DISCLAIMER: i am not saying that country music prior to 9/11 was free from nationalist, racist, misogynist undertones – i just think that these themes became more the norm!
MY HOT TAKE:
with very few exceptions, including goodbye earl, before he cheats, and daddy Iessons (side note – all women!) 9/11 ruined country music. around 2014 onward we’ve got margo price, sturgill simpson, jason isbell etc., who are making country music great again (wink), but those folks are mostly considered “alternative” country. the mainstream country music for well over a decade now is a glut of trash performative patriotic / working-class-but-not-really lab-crafted budweiser-sponsored nonsense that has managed to sound rebellious (or has convinced its fans that it sounds rebellious) without ever actually questioning any power structure. so much so that artists who ACTUALLY criticized the government were literally blacklisted for nearly a decade (the dixie chicks)
pre-9/11 country music, though not perfect or ideologically pure by any stretch, did not have the raging american flag painted truck boner that comes to mind for a lot of people who say “i like everything except rap and country”
SPECIFICALLY, toby keith’s “courtesy of the red, white, and blue (the angry american)” (2002) literally destroyed country music. it was a direct answer to the 9/11 attacks and war song in support of the invasion of afghanistan. the lyrics read like a disjointed feverish email chain letter forwarded from your great uncle sprinkled with glittering american flag gifs and heavily saturated pictures of bald eagles. the entire song is lifted from an estimated 248 peeling bumper stickers collected from rusted trucks on cinder blocks in overgrown yards, cut up and arranged to fit a catchy, formulaic tune that is almost certainly the background music playing in george w. bush’s head at all times.
“we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the american way
and uncle sam put your name at the top of his list
and the statue of liberty started shakin’ her fist
and the eagle will fly, and it’s gonna be hell, when you hear mother freedom start a’ringin’ her bell”country music and the new country musicians that toby keith paved the way for became so pro establishment and so unquestioningly nationalistic that, again, the dixie chicks who went against this grain were blacklisted by the industry and received death threats from country music fans. hell, there are folks who STILL froth at the mouth at the mere mention of the dixie chicks.
9/11 killed outlaw country – how can you sing the praises of law breakers when your main circuit consists of singing to troops? there are some great classic country songs critiquing the police state – especially from johnny cash and merle haggard – now country music artists hold fundraisers for FOPs. new country music is basically in-law country music.
you don’t have to write a pro-bush patriotic anthem to be part of this post-9/11 ruination. playing meaningless songs about living in the heart of (read: white) america, eschewing the city (read: not white), and cracking open a cold one with the boys for “authentic” country music is also important to the war effort.
there’s a progression of themes here:
post 9/11 top tier: war anthem, vocally patriotic, directly used as pro war propaganda;
which paved the way for: “things used to be so much better” thinly veiled racist laments, good for campaign ads;
which paved the way for meaningless party anthems – attempts to make things “like they used to be” and craft a reality that neither the artist nor listener likely ever experience.that brings us to what most people think of today when they say they hate country music: the country party anthem – “tiny hot gal in tight jean shorts who can drink beer like the guys, she doesn’t like beyoncé Like Other Girls, oh she’s so into me and my truck, i’m gonna take her fishing after i finish sowing my corn – sung by a guy who’s never touched a tractor” – has overtaken the tragic, done me wrong, despairing country ballads of tammy wynette, george jones, and even up into pre-9/11 contemporaries like reba mcentire and george strait. you didn’t necessarily have to be country to relate to their pain. now you have to perform suburban redneckness to enjoy luke bryan.
when was the last time you heard a sad country song?
after 9/11, cowboys (whether or not they had ever been near a cow) weren’t allowed to be sad anymore (no more done me wrong country), and they certainly weren’t allowed to question authority (no more outlaw country). partying hardy became the most important American Thing and if you don’t sing about that, our Enemies Will Win.
so – understanding that country music has always had bad stuff, and that like any genre it suffers from commercialization, 9/11 DESTROYED COUNTRY MUSIC. and toby keith gleefully helped destroy it.
for some further evidence of the decline of country music, please listen to the dixie chicks’ “long time gone” which is an indictment of the industry (i believe it was written before 9/11 but my point still stands – the genre was on the decline and 9/11 was the major cultural event that hastened the decline).
maybe i am a curmudgeon – almost every generation of country music has had its own “country music is not what it used to be” anthem, but i really think something distinct happened with 9/11.
Can confirm. Alan Jackson and Toby Keith, the blacklisting of Dixie Chicks, literally the only singer I can think of that ever spoke out against anything from 2001-2010 was Johnny Cash. I’d also say that the uber-patriotic stance lead to the shiny, vapid County Boy® nonsense that lead to so many of the solo artists all sounding and looking the same.
Johnny cash wrote an entire album about the destruction of Indigenous lands and of Indigenous people, Kris Kristofferson has been an activist most of his career working closely with the UFM, Woody Guthrie was a social justice advocate and union activist, Dolly Parton has tackled explicitly feminist issues even in the 60s and has been an avid supporter of her lgbt fans, Willie Nelson made Farm Aid to try and help farmers in danger of losing their farms due to mortgages keep them and is also an avid supporter of LGBT rights as well as marijuana legalization, Lorettea Lynn wrote about birth control in the 70s and had her song banned, i could go on!
When in the correct hands, country music is a powerful medium, but post 9/11 it’s been handed off to apathetic white men who have turned it into the most useless genre of music out there.
So you don’t think male privilege is real?????? Or that people with penises oppress people with vaginas?????? Maybe I need to take you with me when I visit family in Chennai to better understand how sex-selective abortion has decimated the female population of India, menstrual stigma affects schoolgirls’ education, child marriage makes girls more suspectible to domestic violence, the police don’t investigate sexual assaults…You don’t believe being born with a penis is a privilege?? Wow.
Me:
Misogyny certainly has a hideous and profound effect on the world, but it’s not the sole root of all gendered evils
Also me:
penis privilege isn’t the root of everything wrong with the world
You: [this ask]
Anyway, I think we can all agree that a lot of hideous shit is perpetuated on people born with vaginas of all genders and that people born with penises are, in general, less prone to experiencing violence based on their genitals … until people born with penises start presenting as anything other than male. In other words: the only people experiencing penis privilege is cis males and being born with a penis is dangerous as fuck for anyone else.
In other, other words: it’s not just having a penis that creates privilege. (Not to mention all the other reasons humanity finds to dehumanize or declare one another of lesser value, like race or what region they come from or religion or on and on ad infinitum)
Even cis males who are not gender-conforming to whatever their current social standards for gender conformity are end up in a lot of danger. They may still have privilege, but it comes at a terrible price. There was a cis, het man, married to a woman, who was shot and murdered by a homophobe because he was holding his wife’s purse for her while she went to the restroom. (I can’t find the link; this was years ago and far too many men have been shot by cops for holding wallets since.) And gay men have historically faced enormous violence, moreso than lesbians, for being gay.
The other thing I’d like to point out is that men are the violence class, and I’m not actually sure we can argue that people born with penises are less prone to experiencing violence based on their genitals. Like, very, very few people set out to murder a man because he’s a man as opposed to an Adjective man, where Adjective is seen as the reason for the murder. But… 80% of all murder victims are men. 90% of all murderers are also men, but this isn’t much consolation for the dead guys. I feel like we’re missing something when we analyze sex-based violence. Violence done to women is usually done because they are women, and yet, far more fatal violence is done to men. Could the very fact that we don’t notice that they are men specifically, that women are the gender-marked class and men are thought of as default humans, be hiding the fact that being male marks you as an “appropriate” recipient for violence? Or the fact that all of our paradigms for understanding oppression center around inter-group oppression (X group oppresses Y group and there is very little overlap between X and Y) and not intra-group oppression, where the same group is oppressing other members of the group? Is it even oppression then or is it something else?
Mind you, I’m not saying men have it worse. When we’re not looking at violence, things like the fact that men think women talk too much when women are talking more than 30% of the time, that all the burden of elder care usually falls on women when there’s no biological reason why that should happen, that women are more likely to live in poverty, that women’s ability to control our own reproduction and our own sexuality is always under attack in a way that no het man has ever suffered… overall I’m pretty damn sure women have it worse. But when we are looking at violence toward people based on their gender… women are singled out for violence because of their gender, and yet the male gender experiences a lot more violence-related fatality. There’s something wrong with our models here that we’re missing that.
the infamous free speech xkcd – you know the one, the one that gets pulled out every fucking time some troll on the internet attempts to rules-lawyer their way out of a ban because they have free speech- that XKCD has one big flaw when applied to anything bigger than a close-knit internet community.
there comes a point where it’s technically legal to say something, but in practice, if you say that thing, your life is over. you will not be able to get or keep a job. you will not be welcome anywhere that ‘respectable’ people spend time. anyone who tries to defend you will get written off as a fringe nutjob- a person to be ignored or avoided. you will likely get doxxed, get rape/murder threats, and/or be at risk of literal violence. if there’s anyone who agrees with you and has the power to help you, they are probably in another state/country/continent, and they will probably think that some of the other things you think are just as awful as the toxic thing you just said because they’re from another country.
While this often overlaps with “it’s illegal to say this thing”, it doesn’t always. This is especially true in the USA, because we have strong protections of your legal right to say nonsense, but it can happen in other places too.
…and lest you think that this is a good thing because racists/misogynists/homophobes/etc. ought to be afraid to say things, let me remind you that there are plenty of places where saying “no, gay people are not sinners/degenerates/pedophiles” or “birth control is a human right and will not fill your OMG WOMB with dead fetuses” still falls into the “only technically legal” category. This can happen with any unpopular opinion, no matter how right or wrong.
The problem here is that there comes a point where enough people deciding “you’re an asshole/degenerate/bigot” and showing you the door means you can’t speak freely. Even if you’re not going to be thrown in jail for saying what you’re saying- the forces of social convention can ruin someone’s life just as effectively as the forces of THE LAW.
Freedom of association is just as important as freedom of speech, and you can’t effectively have freedom of association if assholes keep invading your space. I get that this is a really atomised phenomenon and that the solution might well be worse than the problem. And there are times when the only moral thing to do is to use the forces of social convention to shut people up- I’d say any group of people that advocates for DEATH TO ALL [X] does not deserve a platform.
But… I dunno, I feel like a lot of people who say things like “I am not a government so I can shut you down, it’s not an infringement on free speech” are not thinking about how social conventions are a weapon. They are not thinking about how de facto free speech is just as important as de jure free speech, and they are not thinking about how saying de facto free speech is unimportant could come back to bite them in the arse.
If you can’t express an idea in public, you aren’t really free to express that idea. If you can’t express an idea in public without your life being ruined, you aren’t really free to express that idea. And while there are a very small handful of cases where that’s warranted, most of the time it’s not.
Oh my GOD you managed to articulate the thing.
I despise that comic.
Also I am not speaking for anyone but myself here but this is also why I really dislike “my civil rights are not up for debate,” too.
Accepting that civil rights matter without needing to argue about it is a good state of affairs! Of course it is! And I sympathize with people who are closeted and don’t want to debate whether homosexuality is immoral in class, which is what I think they actually mean.
But the thing is? There is always a group whose civil rights ARE treated as up for debate. (Right now it’s “illegal immigrants” EVEN IF THEY ARE REFUGEES.)
As something they can lose, if they haven’t already. As something they have to prove themselves to get
If you’re not in that group, if you’re in the group that gets to say “I can’t believe you even said that,” you’re higher up on the ladder than you actually realize. You’re a rung higher, and have at least a little power to shame people who say “yeah but.”
I don’t like “my civil rights are not up for debate” because it ignores that somebody’s always are… and that you could easily be somebody again.
Be Prepared.
Pass on the debate when you need to for your sanity, but know how to have it.
Because someday, you might not get to take that pass.
And because some of your fellow humans already can’t.
This is exactly why I really really really want the left to take debate back. Debate, done properly, is powerful and wonderful. And yet most leftists seem to have decided that, since a group of jerks who can’t even debate properly by even the most basic standards, have started ambush-insulting people under the guise of “debate” we should abandon it wholesale.
That’s it. That’s the thing. That’s the thing that ruined this hellsite and maybe also America.
Saying that a disabled child or adult “will never live independently” is such a slap in the face. I think it’s unacceptable and I think it’s lazy. No one will ever live independently! No one is living independent of medical care, emotional support, and goods/services provided by others. Humans are a deeply interdependent species. Disabled people are sometimes rendered ~dependent~ specifically on a state or family apparatus in a way that makes them vulnerable to abuse or exploitation, but this isn’t the only way to experience “”dependency.”“
Some people are just told that they are “independent” because their lives and needs are normalized to such an extent that the enormous amount of support they receive is invisible.
I feel the need to summarize two other commenters posts on this because, while well meaning, just glosses over things which is a problem.
When people say “will never live independently”, they aren’t talking about the medical system, emotional support, or goods/services. They’re talking about being able to count change. They’re talking about not scalding themselves while running hot water, […] being able to feed themselves, being able to protect themselves, and countless other things that most people take for granted.
We know most people still rely on one another, on their family, for help. But the fact is that disabled people face these “normalized” issues and then have more so on top. To imply that the level of help needed for both disabled and not disabled and that it’s really NBD is detrimental. It’s kind of like the whole “I don’t see race, we’re all human”. On the surface yes we are human, yes we still need help, but that ignores and glosses over their situations that makes them unique. Sure you need to ask your parents for financial help from time to time, but do you need direct help to do the most basic every day things? Do you need to be spoon fed, need help showering or going to the bathroom, need help talking, help walking from room to room? Do you need a nurse to come to your home?
Like. I see people talking about how moving out of your household is a western culture thing as if that’s what it means by living independently. Which honestly isn’t that true, families will still move out when it gets too crowded you’re just not expected to as a young adult. Back in my mother’s home country several generations live together and help each other with groceries or cooking and things. But you can’t kid yourself in comparing niceties to constant essential aid that is purely for living. You can teach an able bodied person to remember a number in a heartbeat. Doing so with someone who has short term memory loss due to severe brain trauma? Not so simple and I say that from experience.
My point is that disabled people need extra help and that’s okay!! It’s nothing to be ashamed of nor does it make you a burden. It’s a part of life and that extra help is one given lovingly and willingly. Saying you get more help than usual isn’t an attack on your abilities.
And also as a side note you WILL inevitably live without any help from family members or friends, just not as a young adult. It can happen when you’re 40 or even 50 although I knew a few who were forced to be completely independent at 19. I feel like we’re expected to be some self made, worldly, experienced business man making 6 figures right out of high school or college. But it’s just not true and parental wisdom will always be there for you.
Solidarity, not allies.
The more I look at it, the more I think one of the worst thing to happen was that people started replacing the concept of solidarity with the concept of allies.
Solidarity was this amazing idea that we’re all getting screwed over by the systems and the way we fight back is by working together. And that means doing work against forms of oppression that you don’t experience and following the lead of people who experience that form of oppression because it’s their struggle. But you’re there as a partner, as a comrade. And you know they’ll be there for you if you need help in your part of the struggle. That’s solidarity.
Allyship has none of that. it’s a one-way relationship that carries in it a form of authority, and where there is authority there is harm. The failures of this system are everywhere.
- You have the exploitative savior ally who is always looking to find the most oppressed group to ally themselves for in order too look like the coolest person, pushing themselves into spaces and exploiting people’s struggles for ally points.
- You have the perfectionist ally who will only ever do work once they’re sure that they’re found the most perfecrt ‘grassroots’, never problematic in any way movement, rehardless of where their help is actually needed and useful.
- You have the drone ally, only ever following directions and wasting all their potential to contribute anything meaningful, terrified of doing any thinking or acting for themselves that may at some point set them ‘called out’.
- You have the oppressed person or group who sees allies as convenient punching bad to work out their rage on, piling on them the hatred and contempt they wish they could pile on the system.
- You have the oppressed person or group that treats allies as defined entirely by their allyhood, ignoring that they have struggles of their own and treating them as disposable. Shouting ‘allies to the front’ when the police brutality hits without a thought to the previous traumas and vulnerabilities of individual allies.
In all of these ways and more we are hurting each other, feeling unsafe around each other, becoming estranged and embittered with oneanother.
The concept of privilege has brought us some very useful things that help us be better activists and better humans to each other, but when I look at the way that is translated to the concept of allies, I mostly see us being worse activists and worse humans to each other than we are when we act out of the concept of solidarity. Being in this fight together means taking care of each other.
Fandom as a whole is not “minor-friendly”
Nor should it be.
If you want to live in a “Children of the Corn”-style bubble of innocence and purity, well, to me, that’s a startling approach to adolescence, but every generation’s got to find its own way to reject the one before, so: do as you will. But you can’t bring the bubble to the party, kids. Fandom, established media-style fandom, was by and for adults before some of your parents were born now. You don’t get to show up and demand that everyone suddenly change their ways because you’re a minor and you want to enjoy the benefits of adult creative activity without the bits that make you uncomfortable. If you think you’re old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised, then you also think you’re old enough to be working out your limits by experience, like everybody else, like I did when I was underage and lying about it online. If you’re not old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised and you’re doing it anyway, then that’s on your parents, not on fandom.
If you were only reading fic rated G on AO3, if you had the various safe modes on other media enabled, you would be encountering very little disturbing material, anyway (at least in the crude way people tend to define “disturbing” these days; some of the most frankly horrifying art I have ever engaged with would have been rated PG at most under present systems, but none of that kind of work ever seems to draw your protests). In the end, what you really want is to be able to seek out the edges of your little world, but be able to blame other people when you don’t like what you find. Sorry. Adolescence is when you get to stop expecting others to pad your world for you and start experiencing the actual consequences of the risks you take, including feeling appalled and revolted at what other people think and feel.
Now, ironically, fandom’s actually a fairly good place for such risk-taking, as, for the most part, you control whether you engage and you can choose the level of your engagement. You can leave a site, blacklist something, stop reading an author, walk away from your computer. Are there actual people (as opposed to works of art, which cannot engage with you unless you engage with them) who will take advantage of you in fandom? Of course there are. Unfortunately, such people are everywhere. They will be there however “innocent” and “wholesome” the environment appears to be, superficially. That’s evil for you. There are abusers in elementary school. There are abusers in scout troops. There are abusers in houses of worship. Shutting down adult creative activity because you happen to be in the vicinity isn’t going to change any of that. It may help you avoid some of those icky feelings that you get when you think about sex (and you live in a rape culture, those feelings are actually understandable, even if your coping techniques are terrible), but no one, except maybe your parents, has a moral imperative to help you avoid those.
In the end, you’re not my kid and you’re not my intended audience. I’m under no obligation to imagine only healthy, wholesome relationships between people for your benefit. Until you’re old enough to understand that the world is not exclusively made up of people whose responsibility it is to protect you from your own decisions, yes, you’re too young for established media fandom. Fandom shouldn’t be “friendly” to you.
So this whole minors-in-fandom seems to be the big hot button topic right now, and this post pretty much sums up everything I have to say about the issue. But after reading this post, I had an epiphany while cooking dinner. While I usually don’t jump into The Discourse myself, I needed to share my discovery. So a few years ago I read this excellent article “The Overprotected Kid” – if you haven’t read it, go do it. Now. Seriously. It’s ostensibly about “millennials” but it’s talking mostly about kids that were 5-15 at the time the article was written, i.e. kids who are 8-18ish now. So, basically, this entire white-knight age group of kid crusaders.
Basically, all of this boils down to a generational divide on how we were raised. Like, I could have told you that, but. Really. Basically every line in this article is solid gold, and completely explains the phenomenon we’re embroiled in right now. The article specifically talks about how playing in “dangerous” playgrounds helps children mature and learn how to safely take risks. Well, fandom has long been called a sandbox for a reason, and the parallels are so close it’s bizarre.
Like, navigating your way through fandom spaces that have explicit content or disturbing themes?
“The idea was that kids should face what to them seem like “really dangerous risks” and then conquer them alone. That, she said, is what builds self-confidence and courage.”
Or
“At the core of the safety obsession is a view of children that is the exact opposite of Lady Allen’s, “an idea that children are too fragile or unintelligent to assess the risk of any given situation,” argues Tim Gill, the author of No Fear, a critique of our risk-averse society. “Now our working assumption is that children cannot be trusted to find their way around tricky physical or social and emotional situations.”
Or
Even today, growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions. By engaging in risky play, children are effectively subjecting themselves to a form of exposure therapy, in which they force themselves to do the thing they’re afraid of in order to overcome their fear. But if they never go through that process, the fear can turn into a phobia.
Basically, the problem is this: the 14 and 15 and 16 year-olds on this sight have been, largely, helicopter-parented for every moment of every day of their lives. Many of them have never had to take care of themselves, or navigate difficult emotional situations without parental guidance. When I was a kid, the internet was the wild west, and parents universally told us that everyone on the internet was a pedophile who wanted to kill you, so you had to keep yourself safe. Now, kids always expect there to be a parent there to take care of their emotional needs, and when they go onto online spaces, the just assume that the nearest adult will fill in that role for them, whether that adult is interested or not.
Now, kids are out here saying shit like “i dont know how you dont know that as an adult its your responsibility to maintain a safe environment for children, just as much as it is their parents. for ex not swearing around kids or letting teenagers drink alcohol like every adult knows that.. “
I am not your mother. It’s not my responsibility to ensure that there isn’t underaged drinking. If I walk past a couple of teenagers drinking beers on the street, do you know what I’m going to do about it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, because I don’t care and I’m not their mother, and I’m not your mother either. I’ll watch my mouth if I notice that there’s a kid near me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t swear in public, even if there could be kids around me that I haven’t noticed.
This expectation, that every adult is there to monitor you and watch out for you, and if they aren’t willing to do that then they’re a bad person?
“in all my years as a parent, I’ve mostly met children who take it for granted that they are always being watched.”
Or how about this chilling factoid?
“When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years.”
These are the kids on here shouting “I need an adult!” and then getting offended when no adult rushes in to take care. It’s baffling to me, honestly, but. I didn’t grow up this way. My parents taught me how to make good decisions, take care of myself, and navigate difficult situations, both in the “real” world AND online. I… don’t really know what to say to kids whose parents didn’t.
I’m not your mom. If I want kids, I’ll have my own. And I won’t raise them the way your parents raised you.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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