queer & loud about it

victor j. seidler, from unreasonable men: masculinity and social theory, 1994

["MEN, EXPERIENCE AND FEMINISM

Why has it taken so long for men to explore their experience of masculinity? In part, the workings of masculinity within modernity have remained invisible as dominant men have learned to speak in the impartial voice of reason. This has been part of an Enlightenment tradition and is deeply embodied in western inherited forms of philosophy and social theory. So a man's voice assumes a pitch of objectivity and impartiality as it becomes an impersonalised voice, a voice that has 'authority' because it belongs to no one in particular while claiming at the same time to respect all.

Thus it is hard to judge men's accounts of their own experience because often these personal accounts are not forthcoming. Traditionally, men have relied on women to provide them with an account and understanding of what they are experiencing in their emotional lives. It is as if men do not have to learn to take responsibility for their relationships, since this can traditionally be left to women within heterosexual relationships. Often men learn to put up with things since they have to learn to identify themselves with an absence of emotional needs, and so to centre their lives around the demands of work where male identity is supposedly constructed. But it also that feminism has sought to account for men's experience in particular ways, most sharply in the radical feminist idea that all men are 'potentially rapists.' This is a challenging but also a damaging notion, for it works to discount differences between men as 'illusory', for as the story goes, all men are fundamentally the same. They 'have to be' because they all occupy the same position in the hierarchy of power. They are not to be trusted.

This creates a difficult and tense silence, for it means that women often stay silent about their relationships with men. They can constantly feel critical, as if assuming blame is a way of assuaging an underlying sense that relationships with men can only be a sign of weakness. For men it creates a silence because it makes them feel that they do not know their own natures, that there is something to fear in them, and that their emotional lives and sexualities are full of danger. This reinforces, rather than challenges, a traditional Kantian conception of masculinity as somehow dominated by an animal nature and as something that can only be curbed by the strong hand of reason. It also reinforces an idea that women somehow know what men are like better than they can know themselves. It does not encourage men to build a different, possibly more trusting relationship, to their own experience. It tends to encourage men to hide further, feeling that somehow they have to be guilty of all the issues and problems emerging in their relationships with women. It can make it easier for women to take the morally high ground and thereby refuse to recognize their own collusions and responsibilities for the way the relationship is going.

Guilt can help explain why it is not uncommon for men to take to heard and identify with this radical feminist vision of themselves. But it is still in many ways a surprising fact that needs explanation. It tends to reinforce a negative vision of masculinity as a form of self-denial, even self-hatred, which is deeply embedded within a Protestant culture, as Nietzsche recognised. It also allows men to talk about masculinity as a relationship of power in relation to women and so it gives men a kind of security in being able to uphold this analysis. It gives men an overarching rationalistic analysis of the situation and somehow allows them to render their own experience invisible.

But this path hardly helps men to reflect upon their own masculinities, and it blocks any vision that men can really change their lives. It resonates with a feeling that men inherit, within a Protestant culture, that they really are not trustworthy themselves, that they do not know what they are feeling, and that what they come to feel cannot really be trusted. It can become a version of 'mother knows best'. But at the same time it allows men to feel that they are 'right' because they have thereby been able to identify with radical feminism. But it is a strange way to identify for it discounts men's own experience of themselves and their relationships, and it often says them men's accounts of their own experiences are never to be trusted. Paradoxically it means that men do not learn to take responsibility for themselves.

Men can assure themselves that they have the 'right analysis' of 'patriarchy' but at some level this then helps produce a form of self-rejection and self-hatred. There might be a feeling of tension between what men feel about themselves from their own experiences, namely that they are not 'potential rapists', and the pull of the culture notion of masculinity which says that men 'should always have a go', that their masculinity is somehow being compromised if they do not make a move sexually. It reinforces a notion that men cannot help themselves and that sexuality is somehow some kind of irresistible animal urge.

If we are to deny this position and argue that sexuality is not 'given' but is socially and historically constructed, then we still have to think clearly about imposing a sharp modernist duality between 'nature' and 'culture' and about the nature and character of this 'construction'. We have to think about the ways men can come to know themselves and develop a different relationship to their emotions, feelings, and sexual desires. We have to recognise the ground opened up by different forms of therapy which make it possible for men to work on their sexualities and so to change. All this is denied if we insist on automatically discounting men's own accounts of their experience and saying that 'in reality' men are always 'potentially rapists'.

This does not men that men will always know best, for we have to acknowledge real differences between men and in the level of self-awareness and in the work men have been ready to do on themselves. But it does mean that we cannot automatically discount their accounts of their experience. We have to recognise this as part of a process, for men's perceptions of themselves, at least in personal and sexual relationships, are likely to be on the skew, defensive, superficial and many other things, because of the disconnections which often exist between inherited forms of masculinity and men's relationships with their emotions, feelings, and desires. Men have for so long within modernity learned to discount the impulses of their emotional lives that it is difficult to forge this relationship simply as a matter of will and determination."]

i entirely get why people are like "actually knights were historically land-owning nobles waging war on people" and reminding people that idealised modern conceptions of knights are not historically accurate, it's just really really funny given that people have been idealising the institution of knighthood since like. the twelfth century or earlier, go take it up with fucking chrétien de troyes

(in fact i would argue that when most modern people refer to "medieval knights" they are not in fact referring to the historical institution of knighthood at all, but to the literary tradition of knights as found in chivalric romance, and therefore thinking of them as hot men who rescue damsels and defend the weak is not inaccurate, as long as one recognises that this is a literary knight and not a historical knight, and also that this knight probably still commits wildly horrifying murders every now and again and doesn't really respect women despite rescuing them)

lotta people reblogging this with tags about how the modern concept has drifted so far from the historical reality that the term has lost its meaning or whatever but that's completely missing the point i was trying to make. i'm saying that that idealised fantasy has been there *all along*. practically as soon as you get a formalised institution of knighthood, you've got people writing stories about how cool and sexy and chivalrous knights are. it's not that the modern conception as found in fantasy novels has drifted, it's that the modern conception has always been based on chivalric romance more than on reality.

the literary history of knights is a different strand of history than the historical reality of knights and that is the history that many people are responding to; it remains a historical idea and concept even if it has always been a literary one. "correcting" people's understanding of literary knights with reference to historically 'accurate' knights is, most of the time, comparing apples and oranges and then complaining that the 'apple' has segments when it was in fact always an orange

I mean, literary knights probably just functioned as propaganda for historical institutions of knighthood, no? I'm genuinely asking this, because I will not claim to have looked that hard into the subject.

I just think about how a lot of modern USAmerican feature films are basically pro-military & pro-cop propaganda hidden under the fantastical tales of superheroes and thriller dramas. It seems not only plausible but extremely likely that literary knights were idealized propaganda to soften people's perception of the real deal.

Then again, I am operating on some assumptions here. Would love to hear if anyone who really knows about these topics has any insight.

I want an adaptation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein where you never see the creature’s face. It’s just out of frame or you see him from behind and all you have are people’s reactions to seeing him.

It’s just so hard to visually capture the idea of him because I don’t think it’s just that he has a messed up mug or looks like a corpse that scares people, I think they see him and their instincts go “that thing was not made by god, that thing should not exist. You don’t belong here”

I really like the idea that the creature’s effect on people is more psychological than anything else but makeup doesn’t really cover that, leaving it up to the imagination however….

In the book the creature DOES have a sort of psychological effect on the people he meets. Victor purposefully chooses large body parts and describes the assembled body as "beautiful" or handsome (it's been a few years since I last read it). And though there's nothing specifically wrong with him, once the creature is brought to life, THAT is when Victor gets revolted and rejects the creature. And every person who then comes in contact with the creature is horrified in just the way you say. It's not that he's an animated corpse, and it's not that he's just really tall; it's that he has an aura of Unnatural and Other that people pick up on, causing them to lash out at him or send him away.

I think your suggestion for showing this in film is a really good one! Especially since the Creature stands especially tall compared to everyone else. I personally think it would be most effective if we see the whole body (beautiful face and all) before it gets brought to life, and then switch to only being able to see its body, not its head. So the audience can imagine the sort of strange horror. That's just how I'd imagine it happening, anyway.

If they’re interested in academic writing I would also suggest Collective Turn-Off by Sophie Lewis. It’s sympathetic to women and their position but also does a good job of naming the ways that performing “hating men” works as an othering gesture (and then you can link in how that othering gesture is harmful to butch and trans women, marginalised men, etc) [bold added by me]:

Through spectacle the philosphy becomes reality. The risks must be taken because they are risks. To do what is bold affirms reality. only within the shadow of the spectacle, where a collective consious shows itself, do people believe descisions matter.

Without the spectacle there are no values, there is only lip service and vauge political sense twoards the events fractured throughout a society. When the course of history is fractured from being a spectacle that matches the scale of the insitutions into the small experiences meant to match the scale of an individual- it pacifies and erases itself.

The institutions of power within a society spread themselves thin to blend into the background noise. These institutions and any force that changes society still maintains an endless hubris as they always have, more than ever before society is changing beyond recognition, but any force at play fears to express this through a monumentality.

The world's fair has fallen out of favor as a means of publicity for the institutions of power within society.

Public relations is not a matter of grandeur and action- of showmanship and ambition- but of invisibility. The company, the politician, promises not to exist. In the lack of spectacle, the individuality of tragedy removes us from history, removed from the conditions and course of all things outside ourselves.

Apple is a formidable company on all sides, an extremely influential institution in the heirarchy of power within society, but it has no head, it is an empty hole with nothing inside. Where in this building do the people who control everyone else reside?

Without spectacle there is no outside world, with no outside world we lack any individuation of the self. Within any person's experiential world there is nothing but the self, in a direct link to only their own consumption and production, every person is given an individual world which is nothing but a mirror, this isolation ironically means lack of individuality. Without the outside world, the individual is socially engineered to become part of a closed loop. The individual consumes and produces themselves and nothing else and their leader does not exist in this cycle but he controls it all the same.

The wealthy and aristocratic used to wear jewelry, fine clothes. If this decedance threatened the image of the upper class, it was done anyway. If the wealthly didnt wish for the image of wealth, they would not be wealthy. An ancient king could hide from assasins and revolutionaries by wearing humble sackcloth, but who would recognize him as king without his gold? what was to differentiate him from anyone else? Differentiate him both in the sense that his legitimacy was differentiated by physical means, but also that his literal identity as king and not an imposter could not be confirmed unless he was in possesion of something only a king could own. Nobody knew what the king looked like, not every subject of the nation could see their king's face up close or in person, they could not distribute photos or expensive paintings.

" And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!- Nothing beside remains. "

A king could have a statue of himslef standing on the public street, but again this made him a target, a statue bargans for legitimacy. A statue waits to be torn down, and the strength of a government comes from the fact it's statues are not. And down through the heirarchy of a society, when someone needed authority, they needed to own something which displayed and proved it. The annexed rural village far from Rome had no idea what the nearest tax collector would look like, they did not have any paperwork to check, they simply knew that a man with servants and guards and an engraved silver chest certainly had enough power that he was to be heeded even if he was lying, and for that reason they knew he had no reason to lie.

The destruction of the dictator's statue materializes his loss of power, would the destruction of abstract art outside blackrock bank represent or accomplish anything?

But through technology like always, reality can be erased, immaterialized. The tech millionare can work without showing his face, he can live just the same a thousand miles away from his company. Verify his identity through an encrypted credit card which does not give away his wealth even to a cashier. He can walk the streets in casual clothing and command the same power while wearing those clothes to a meeting of investors. The company is no longer named after it's founder, because if anything went wrong it would be bad publicity for the name. Instead, companies are given a quippy depersonalized buzzword for a name instead. The purpouse of technology is to erase reality. Nobody knows who anyone is, nobody knows anything. History is made an inperceptable background noise, spectacle is hidden.

But spectacle always exists beyond intention, it lies in wait to become an overwhelming inevitability- anywhere there is hubris.

The curtains were blue because everything in the room was carefully colour coordinated, reinforcing the character’s stylish and controlled characterisation. The curtains were blue because everything in the room was a different colour, reinforcing the character’s eclectic and globe-trotting personality. The curtains were blue because the character is elsewhere established to hate the colour blue, subtextually implying that their deceased spouse was responsible for that decoration choice.

The curtains were blue because throughout their filmography the director consistently uses cool tones to mark moments of distance between characters. The curtains were blue to tie the events in that room into the broader oceanic motif of this particular novel. The curtains were blue because the assonance evoked a contrast with the following stanza of the poem.

Even the curtains looked expensive: floor to ceiling velvet drapes, in a flawless royal blue. She tucked the saucer up on the windowsill and tied back faded blue curtains with a loop of string. The narrow blinds were the same navy blue as the pinstripe suit of the man who served eviction notice that sent them to this office.

The curtains were blue because the author’s childhood home had blue curtains, which they discussed in their letters related to their feelings of comfort in that place. The curtains were blue because the author’s childhood home had blue curtains, which they discussed in their letters related to their feelings of grief in that place.

The curtains were blue as an allusion to the contemporary joke about literary criticism, an extension of the author’s autocritical approach that will be further discussed in section seven.

The curtains were red, as a pun on;

The curtains were read.

The point of literary analysis is to discover important details and ask why these details are being focused on. The point is to ask questions that lead you to a deeper truth about the story, about the author, about the world we live in...

What do you think the curtains are blue for? Why do you think that?: That's the point.

Watching the “you will excel at what you measure” trap devour basic moral practice in real time is fascinating in a terrible kind of way

If you spend any significant amount of time studying any social science or people-related policy, you’ll quickly run into the old adage “you will excel at what you measure”. This adage is a warning.

In order to mark progress in any area, we need a way to measure it. So we develop systems to measure complex social systems and behave accordingly. If you want to measure how effectively children are being educated, you can, for example, decide on what they should know by a given age, test them on that knowledge, and grade them in accordance to how well they do on the tests. A higher grade means a more successful student, a better teacher, a better school. Then you can tinker with what you’re testing as necessary, and with teaching methods and soforth to see how it affects scores on the tests.

Except, if you do this, then you’ve defined successful education as the ability to get high grades. You invite cheating (on the student, teacher and even school level), you invite teaching to the test rather than for general comprehension and ability, you invite boiling down the experience of education to test scores. And, of course, you invite massively increasing the inaccuracies caused by some people simply being better at taking tests than others. Someone with low to moderate comprehension who’s good at tests might get a higher grade than someone who understands the material but has anxiety or is unable to properly intuit the meaning of vague test questions. Grades can go up and up and up, while education consistency and quality falls.

This is, as anyone who’s worked in a school or sends their children to school knows, a known problem. ‘Grading systems cause huge problems in education” is NOT by any means a revolutionary and controversial statement. Over time, grading systems have been changed to favour testing comprehension and skill demonstrations, Individual Learning Plans and testing accommodations have become very popular to give a more accurate idea of people’s abilities, and soforth. A good half of my teaching degree was about compensating for the problems in this system. But you can’t patch up all the holes, and the pressure from people taking letter grades way too seriously – parents, school boards, funding systems, those looking to hire teachers – are always going to cause problems, make teaching to the test a matter of survival. We measure grades, so that is what we excel at.

The same problem exists in economics. Most countries measure their health via Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is basically a measure of how much money is swilling around in there and it’s an AWFUL yardstick. A country full of sick, desperate people going into massive medical debt has a higher GDP than an identical country not facing a health crisis, for instance. But it is the dominant model, so it’s what investors look at, it’s what other countries look at, it’s what voters look at. It’s what you must excel at, to be considered to have a ‘good’ economy. Other models exist, and are often proposed as a better alternative, but if one of those were dominant, new problems would exist – we’d excel at what they measure, and drop in what the GDP measures, and cause new economic issues. If you boil a system down to measurements, you will excel at making those measurements go up.

You should never, ever let yourself fall into the trap of believing that they tell you anything useful about how the system is doing.

Morality and justice are social technology. They’re a bunch of rules and instincts that both evolution and cultural education have given us to allow us to operate in societies. They’re integral to societies in the same way that math is; you need math complex enough to measure the grain, you need morality complex enough to measure the social harmony. People pretend they’re more than that, but they aren’t. “Good” and “bad” are concepts as real as “millionaire” and “straight-A student”, and nothing more.

In the vast, vast majority of societies out there, the end goal is essentially the same – to minimise harm to the populace. They want everyone to have as much safety and comfort as possible. Most disagreements are about the relative value of different individuals (is one race, religion or culture more important than another? Is one sex more important than another? Is a king more important than a slave?), or about methodology (is it better for everyone to have to follow strict social norms, or for everyone to be free to express themselves how they choose; which creates more safety and harmony? What social norms are best? How much control should one have over one’s property, or one’s animals, or one’s children? When somebody transgresses, what is the appropriate system for judging and metering out discipline? What is the appropriate sort of discipline?). People disagree radically on both relative individual value and on methodology, but the general goal is the same. Morality and justice are social technology, tools to be used. Law and social consequence is how their power is enacted.

People often forget this. And that is very, very dangerous.

People will decide on what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour, isolate it from the system, and proceed to excel at what they measure. They’ll decide that ‘good people’ use certain language and have certain values and ‘bad people’ use other language and do bad things, they’ll look at harmful power dynamics and decide that the world is full of ‘oppressors’ (can be ignored) and ‘oppressed’ (must be supported), ‘abusers’ (should be mocked and attacked) and ‘abused’ (should be believed and coddled), and stumble blindly forward like my robovac with a dirty sensor bumping into every wall in their way. They’ll see a complex social situation and instead of going ‘what’s the best way to reduce harm?’, immediately try to decide who involved is more oppressed and get their answer from that. They’ll see people use language they don’t like and decide that person must have nothing of value to add to a conversation, because they’re a bad person.

Today, I saw someone muse that the fact that American football causes huge amounts of brain damage that compounds over many years might contribute to why USA footballers seem to keep doing random unhinged things. Somebody else immediately attacked them because rape and domestic abuse is common among footballers (footballers being the attackers), so by suggesting a physical reason for unstable behaviour, this person was making excuses for rape. You might notice that this response has absolutely nothing to do with protecting people from rape or domestic abuse, and absolutely everything to do with making sure nobody might accidentally sympathise with a ‘bad person’ by suggesting that brain changes change behaviour. A focus on minimising harm would want to explore this, because removing risk factors for causing rapists means less rapists. Less rape is the goal. ‘Rape is evil’ is the tool used to achieve it. But this person got distracted by the tool of measurement, making sure that the buck stops there.

Yesterday, I saw a post about police violence, pointing out ‘police shouldn’t kill guilty people either’. This was a response to how people often protest police killing innocent people, which is definitely bad, but the point is that the police shouldn’t be killing anyone outside of strict self defense. The justice system is what meters out punishment, not the personal discretion of a state-sponsored gang with too many combat toys. The role of the police to to prevent violence and capture wrongdoers, not deal out extrajudicial executions. I’m sure I don’t have to explain in detail why this is so fucking important, but one set of tags on the posts made the distinction “except for pedophiles and rapists”. I have never seen anybody miss the point of a post so badly. Clearly, this person had once again gotten distracted by the system of measurement – pedophiles and rapists are evil people who do evil things, therefore they should be eliminated as expediently as possible – without considering the effect on the system. No, police randomly shooting rapists does not make a better society. If you support the death penalty for rape, that’s a whole arse different question.

These kneejerk reactions don’t just happen with pedophiles and rapists (although they are very effective for it, which is why dangerous and unsavoury elements like to call the groups they hate pedophiles). I’ve also seen people get upset at historical demonstrations of queer unity and support because the people in them called each other words they don’t like and get all distracted by minutae on who’s ‘allowed’ to ‘reclaim’ what words, preferring to condemn gay men calling lesbians ‘muffdivers’ despite the massive personal risk and great benefit of the demonstration. I’ve seen people quibble over what groups of disabled people experience more ableism than others, and which queer subcommunities are more oppressed, in order to determine who the good guy in a complex situation is or who deserves their support more. I’ve seen people slip all the minorities they belong to into an argument like they’re laying out the cards to summon Exodia (because most oppressed person is most deserving of support person and therefore most correct person), I’ve seen people distract from arguments they’re having in order to try to trap the other person into saying something that can be interpreted as sexist or racist so they can show that their opponent is the Bad Person (and therefore they’re the good person and therefore correct in the argument), I’ve seen people look at two people with conflicting needs (such as an autistic person who verbally stims and one who reacts badly to too much sound) and stop to decide which one is oppressing the other one to determine which one is being ableist.

This is all fucking bullshit. It’s meaningless nonsense. The only reason any of this matters is in how it relates to causing actual real world harm. I’d rather be called a tranny bitch by someone who votes in support of my healthcare than the most polite and up-to-date language by someone who votes against it. I’d rather know about risk factors that make someone more likely to be an abuser or rapist than shy away from such things because I don’t want to risk thinking of them as anything other than an Unknowable Evil. I don’t fucking care what Problematic ™ views someone holds about a cartoon and I don’t care who’s the Most Pure or the Most Oppressed or who used to say slurs online when they were fifteen if they’re behaving appropriately now. None of that fucking matters, and it’s not justification for harassing or hurting people.

Your sense of justice and morality are social tools. Sharpen them, clean them, look after them. And use them to build with purpose, rather than blindly hacking at whatever’s in front of you. Or you’ll just make a mess.

[[Description: Image of a reply from darkenedyeastextract on October 7th. It reads, “i think i 80% get what you mean but can you expand on this”

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I agree with the idea that most things boil down to “can you have compassion for others”, but I’d be more inclined to use: “can you treat others with humanity and dignity, and put their rights at the center of your convictions, even if you have nothing in common with them, and even if you cannot emotionally relate to every tragedy in the world.”

And sometimes, you all need to understand that you don’t have the full context to understand a situation in its full complexities and that you probably never will, which means that your public commentary may be unnecessary and even tactless. 

Jeanette Winterson on Substack

realizing cis women also struggle with “passing” a lot of times and has a lot of the same issues with dysphoria trans women have (issues with putting on/losing weight, dissatisfied with bust size, not feeling “feminine” enough, etc.) has done a lot to combat dysphoria for me, cause it’s like, wow, we really have a lot more in common than we have in difference huh

Cis men get super dysphoric too. Are they muscular enough, are they tall enough, etc etc. It's one reason why dysphoria, though often felt by trans people, is not an exclusively trans feeling. Nor do *all* trans people feel dysphoric. We really are just all humans having a wide variety of human experiences out here.

I guess one of the things about my politics is that I'm a principled pluralist in basically every regard, and as far as I can tell this isn't something that's in vogue anywhere on the political spectrum right now. I run up against nationalists by believing in the value of diversity-for-diversity's-sake; I run up against "wokeness" for believing this extends not just to a narrow and rigid selection of identity categories, but to all aspects of the human condition, including ones that might be considered rather ugly; I run up against technocrats of all sorts (leftist, liberal, rightist) for actively opposing the desire to build a socially optimized society, in favor of one that accommodates a wide range of people and things and communities. I just like the world, I think it's beautiful and awe-inspiring and amazing in all its chaos, and I fundamentally don't want to destroy that. I feel like I'm constantly repeating this on here because somehow it seems like deeply held pluralist values are just really rare.

On the other hand, I'm conscious of the ethical burden this sort of thing places on society. There are, in fact, things I am fully against—various forms of violence and suffering and so on—things I truly believe have no place in the world. And this leaves me conflicted! A truly pluralistic society would, at some level, have to accommodate these things too. But of course pluralism isn't my only value, it's tempered by many others, and in the end there are some things I don't want society to accommodate. But deciding precisely what these things are is hard: from a utilitarian perspective, everything that isn't ruthless optimization for the Good is, in some sense, evil. I am actively opposed to taking things that far, but if I have any ethics at all (which I do), the line must be drawn somewhere. I think that precisely where to draw it is the single biggest philosophical struggle that I have, politically speaking.

Anyway, just trying to articulate this again. I feel very... unusual in looking at things this way.

The strange thing about growing up in conservative Christianity and then leaving it behind is that there are a lot of secular/progressive spaces that engage in similar thinking while sincerely believing their ideas are counter to conservative ones. So I thought I would just make a list of things I was taught within conservative Christianity, the stuff that was either the core of our beliefs, or the social dynamics that we created. Some of the language I use is specifically either scriptural, or Christian-speak.

This list isn’t to say “stop thinking this way.” This is actually intended to simply be informative because sometimes social justice spaces assume, “we are crafting our ideals in opposition to conservative ideals therefore whatever we think surely must be the opposite of whatever they think,” without ever seeming to know that their language and ideals look and sound the same.

So, let’s begin:

Sin-leveling: x is bad, and y is bad, and all bad things deserve an equal reaction

Sin-leveling part 2: because all things are equally bad, there’s nothing wrong with inverting the consequences. Hurting others becomes acceptable (because it’s no different than doing something distasteful), doing something distasteful is unforgivable (because it’s no different than doing something harmful)

Avoid all appearance of evil: if I assume that your behavior looks wrong, then you are wrong, even if further context would say otherwise. You should avoid doing anything that others would see as wrong because you are not allowed the benefit of the doubt or to defend yourself.

Sin by association: x company contracted with y company. Y company engages in something sinful, which means x company approves of said sinful thing which means if you purchase from x company, you are condoning, supporting, and have actually committed the sin.

Think only on what is good: or as the pastor of my old church liked to call it, “garbage in, garbage out.” Whatever ideas, thoughts, words, arguments, stories, pictures, books, movies, songs, friends, love you put in your head will create the desire to become that. If you want to be good, you must avoid any bad thought because you will “slip” into wanting it and then be unable to stop yourself from being it. (For example, type into google “is secular music” and click on the autocomplete of “a sin”)

Language as an in-group test: if you do not describe your life, experiences, and beliefs with the exact same vocabulary and in-group speak, you are either not really one of us, or you’re someone who hasn’t thought through their ideas as deeply as I have.

By any means necessary: Also known in the ex-Evangelical world as “lying for Jesus.” If my words create the necessary beliefs and actions in others, then it doesn’t matter if I am exaggerating, saying half-truths, or using manipulative language, because I’m saving others and helping them do what’s right.

Touch not God’s anointed: any critiques of those our community trusts, critiques of those we’ve deemed “the good ones,” are actually people trying to sow discord and disunity to destroy our community and their voice should be silenced because they must be lying.

Judge not lest ye be judged: A scripture that we throw at people when someone says our leadership is abusive, a scripture we cry is being taken out of context when we want to harshly critique someone ourselves. 

There’s more, lots more, but this post is already fairly long. Once again, though, this isn’t intended to be combative. I just want people to know the actual social dynamics that a lot of us grew up with in conservative Christianity communities, so they know when sometimes they’re sharing those social dynamics, not countering them.