eyestrain bifauxnen

I couldn't have said it better myself.

As a 30 year old man who escaped the Alt-right pipeline, you're not going to be happy about the answer.

All I hear from leftists is how much they hate me for my immutable traits, how much they blame me for everything wrong with the world, how much they want me and everyone who looks like me dead.

Whereas Alt-right types would call me "brother" and welcome me into their ranks so long as I hated the right ways.

Do you understand the difference?

I'm an ally and support equality because I feel it's the morally correct choice to make, but holy fuck is it difficult to reconcile that with the fact that means fighting for a lot of people who see you as the scum of the earth.

Read this and then read it again and then read some fucking bell hooks because this is a legitimate problem on the left.

"To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being." - bell hooks, The Will to Change https://bellhooksbooks.com/product/the-will-to-change/

I woke up and checked things and started to spiral.

And then I took a deep breath.

Okay kids. It's time to listen to your organizer elders.

I don't care if every call is reversed and she wins by 30 electoral points.

Get involved. Do one thing to make the world better: mutual aid, volunteer, join your local political groups, read to kids, go to community groups.

Survival on this blue spinning ball means coalition building. It means accepting you save the world by doing what you are good at and sharing it with others.

It means to stop looking for saviors in your political choices, and also not crucifying them. It means getting away from political purity and ideology and fucking working toward the next one and the next one.

Political change is different than political theater. It takes work. So much work. And if you are tired, tap out, but don't leave the game.

Guess what happened tonight?

The first openly Trans woman was elected to congress.

2 black women are serving together in the senate.

It is ugly and it sucks and we need to take a breath, take a nap, and then get up off the mat.

We can do better.

But we gotta do it together.

Wallow as you need but turn that emotion into fuel. Canada, too.

I’m not in the US, but we also recently had a shit of an election. I needed this post.

Come together. The more of us there are, the more we can tap someone else in when we need a break.

Find how to help others and build community. We will need our communities more than ever before.

everyone says join your local mutual aid groups and build community, but uh, what do you do if a lot of them seem to have dissolved and the other ones don't have consistent recurring meetings.

this is real, and it's a thing that a lot of people are going to run into in the fact of calls to "get involved," especially if they're people who haven't been deeply involved in their communities before. so here's what I can share:

On twitter I’m seeing dozens of threads from Black activists warning people against burnout, giving all sorts of useful tips about preventing and managing it for the sake of a long-term, sustainable effort.

On tumblr I’m seeing a hell of a lot of young white kids yelling at anyone who actually follows those steps, and acting like burnout is a moral falling rather than a well-proven psychological phenomenon.

Be careful who you get your information from. Don’t let guilt lead you to make choices that will harm both you and the movement.

I’m going to reblog this again since I see more individuals are inquiring about burnout prevention tips in the notes and it’s why I sought out this resource. I hope it helps you!

source

something I think more people need to understand is that rape culture has a very simple way to maintain the plausible deniability that enables mass support and investment, and that is the complete separation of the rhetorical construction of "The Rapist" and "The Pedophile" from any actual specific person who engages in sexual violence.

so often people do not believe that we could possibly live in a rape culture, they do not believe it could possibly be true that people do not care about children who were sexually abused-- they say but everyone hates rapists and pedophiles! but that's not really true. they hate the conceptual idea of The Rapist and The Pedophile, but do not actually oppose--in real world contexts, with real actual complicated people--the use of sexual violence to control, degrade, and otherwise abuse other people. they do not hate their friend who joked that their date "took some convincing" or their neighbor who publicly humiliated their adolescent child by telling their church group he was "caught" masturbating, or the cop who performs cavity searches or the guy who posted tips for "stealthing" online, or their uncle who says he "made some mistakes with women" when he was younger, or the person on social media publicly speculating about a stranger's sexual desires and sharing their nudes to degrade and humiliate them, or their granddad who was "falsely accused" of sexually abusing his daughter when "all he did" was leer and not touch, or their professor who has relationships with their students, or their acquaintance who recommends dating girls with "issues", girls who are "crazy", girls who are trans or fat or queer or have low self-esteem, because "they'll do anything", or the person they organize with who is so valuable to the movement but everyone kind of knows not to be alone in a room with them, or...

specific people who rape are usually not the deviant that most people already want a reason to expel from the community, they are the center of power and influence. they provide vital support or resources to people, they are likable and intimately connected with many people, they have an embedded role in the social fabric and many people benefit from it (whether economically, politically, spiritually, etc). Specific people who rape are incredibly buoyant. They are usually buoyed to places of power no matter how far they're attempted to be pulled down from that power, and most people see this and will cling to a person like this, defending them, because people who rape are the social equivalent to a life preserver, whereas people who have been raped are the social equivalent of an anchor-- no one wants to be dragged down by allying themselves with the person who was raped by the beloved person everyone loves and relies on.

On the other hand, The Rapist" and "The Pedophile" as cultural tropes are treated very differently from specific people who have raped others. "The Rapist"/"The Pedophile" is often a racialized, gendered, and classed archetype that exists to be the ideological load bearing pillar of rape culture, to reinforce the belief (against the weight of evidence) that rape is something committed by Deviant Others who can be identified and expelled from social life. When sexual violence is not understood as one of many possible tactics of control and is instead as the result of the uncontrollable desire of innate deviants, then accusations do not even require there to be a specific person who was harmed by a specific act. All you need is evidence of "deviance" and all the justified anger at sexual violence can be offloaded onto whatever scapegoat you want.

In fact, within rape culture, harassment campaigns are much more successful than any actual instance of a survivor asking for support. That is no coincidence either! Rape culture hates survivors! But because in harassment campaigns there is no actual survivor speaking up, rape culture's default of disbelieving specific, actual survivors is never triggered, and so the accusation becomes perceived as more credible because there is no victim to discount.

If there is no actual specific instance of someone engaging in sexual abuse of another specific person, there are no details to question and pick apart ("but why was she naked if she didn't want to have sex?" "was he really raped if he had an orgasm?" "how do you know it was sexual? adults have to bathe their kids" "why did she post that photo if she didn't want it shared?" "I've never seen that side of him!" "maybe you misunderstood" "maybe she didn't hear the safeword" "why wait until now to bring it up?") and no demands of the public that implicate them and demand change from them (are you sending survivors funds to help them move out? to help them afford therapy? are you examining why you didn't notice it was happening or didn't believe it could be true? are you able to understand that as part of this person's community, you failed to protect them, and that actual restorative justice involves you changing your beliefs and behavior too? that it's not just about rehabilitating the person who raped someone?)

If there's no survivor, then the imagined victim can be perfect, innocent, and worthy to rally around. The imagined victims are only good and only hurt and have no problematic opinions about anything (no opinions at all! so they can be imagined to believe whatever you believe), no burdensome expectations of you, no resentment towards you.

Focusing on identifying "The Rapist" as a deviant instead is so easy; it only requires condemning someone who you probably either already dislike or a complete stranger who has no direct connection to your life. It's so much easier to pin responsibility for the entire (abstracted) concept of Rape onto someone you already hate and is already a social outcast and show how much you're "against rape" by venting all your anger and fantasized violence against them. It feels good too! the way righteous anger always does. It can be energizing when a whole community comes together to hate the same person.

Supporting actual survivors does not feel energizing, it feels exhausting. It requires so much work and effort, and you don't feel righteous while you do it, you may even feel ashamed, frustrated, deeply sad, resentful, angry, hopeless, or emotionally numb. It enters the deepest parts of your consciousness and you find it hard to breathe during certain scenes in movies, seeing certain arguments play out in the news cycle. It changes you, too, and that is the point.

We want to be against rape culture, because we want to be good people. but we don't want it to be hard.

I think this reality is the reason why a lot of young organizers think they can throw themselves into restorative justice and then find themselves completely burnt out a few months or a year later. People start thinking it'll be energizing, and then have to contend with the reality of what is, essentially, providing material support for disabled people whose health and capabilities have been permanently decreased from trauma. Some folks think they're gonna be "fixing things" so everyone can continue their reliance on the person who raped someone and the survivor can "move on" and everything can be "restored."

And then (if they're serious and not just performing at activism) they are inevitably faced with the terrifying reality of trying to make ends meet, with cobbling together strategies to meet community needs outside of the person who everyone relies on. they are faced with this person who raped someone losing interest after a few meetings and deciding "the accountability process" is dragging on too long and interrupting "more serious things than one person's emotions." they are faced with trying to get more people involved supporting the acute needs of the survivor even when the survivor is "difficult" or "ungrateful", and realizing that no one wants to do it. it is overwhelming to realize how deep the roots of rape culture run through everything, how much stability is upturned when you uproot any structures and beliefs that rely on rape culture. it is deeply demoralizing when you realize nothing can change without collective effort and very few care enough to do it.

It's so much easier to do nothing and pretend you don't know what happened. It's so much easier to decide it doesn't have anything to do with you and maybe this is something the survivor should "work out" with the person who raped them. It's so much easier to not try.

that's the function of rape culture. and we are all implicated in it.

My comic about why we should all be activists. Made possible by my wonderful patrons at patreon.com/davidhellman Please share, and get involved in your local community!