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I sort of get the abortion thing.  I don’t agree with it on any level but I understand some of the arguments.  But contraception?

Contraception prevents abortions!  Contraception prevents more abortions than outlawing abortion!  If you believe an embryo is a life, contraception saves lives by the gajillion!

But saying you oppose contraception because you “respect life” implies that you believe an egg and sperm that haven’t met yet are a life.  Which is… well, how far do you take that?  Doesn’t that mean, on some level, that any fertile person who fails to have as much sex as physically possible is aborting potential lives?  That seems kind of tiring.

(And if you believe sex should only take place in marriage, does that mean that every day after puberty that a person isn’t married is an abortion?  Or at least every 28 days?)

THIS IS WHY YOU NEED TO THINK YOUR SHIT THROUGH.

(Source: johannahsamurai, via ozyreads)

I think it comes down to this:

If you live in a small community, and your friend or neighbor or family member contacts you and says “someone just committed a horrible act of violence here!” you have to drop everything and listen.  Your discomfort is so insignificant compared to the magnitude of the event, you can’t ignore something like that.

You certainly can’t answer “sorry, I need you to stop right there, I’m trying to do some self-care right now and I’m avoiding triggers until I feel ready to engage with difficult subjects.” They’d crown you King Butthead.

But on the Internet, the “community” is 2.4 billion people. Something horrible will be happening to thousands of them every day.  You can’t apply the same ethics.  It’s emotionally impossible, and not terribly helpful to the world, to even try.

So hand me my Butt Crown.

Depression-blogging 2/7.

Having feminist and socially-conscious friends online is great.  It’s something I really treasure and am not looking to change.

But sometimes it’s like having a firehose of horrible emotionally-challenging news aimed straight at your brain.

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"There are the occasions that men—intellectual men, clever men, engaged men—insist on playing devil’s advocate, desirous of a debate on some aspect of feminist theory or reproductive rights or some other subject generally filed under the heading: Women’s Issues. These intellectual, clever, engaged men want to endlessly probe my argument for weaknesses, want to wrestle over details, want to argue just for fun—and they wonder, these intellectual, clever, engaged men, why my voice keeps raising and why my face is flushed and why, after an hour of fighting my corner, hot tears burn the corners of my eyes. Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that’s so much fun for them is the stuff of my life."

Melissa McEwan, of course, on the terrible bargain.

Reblogging because I’ve been sucked into this a couple different ways.  One really messy one was when I—for some reason—agreed to go to dinner with a monogamous woman who basically wanted me to defend polyamory for her intellectual amusement.

And this was at a time when I frankly wasn’t 100% secure in my own poly relationship—not because it was poly, but because it was a new relationship and our roles and level of commitment were still a little undefined. (Also, this was a couple days after I’d gotten out of the hospital for a major illness, so I was kinda wibbly-wobbly emotionally for unrelated reasons.  But that’s also relevant to this “arguing someone’s life for fun” business; realize that even people who might sometimes be up for arguing about their life aren’t always ready to play when you are.)

She started asking questions like “how do you three schedule things,” and I was doing pretty well in the role of Friendly Helpful Poly Tourguide with “oh, we have a Google Calendar and regular date nights!”

But then she started asking questions like “which one of you does he love more?  are you sure?  how do you know he really loves you?  how can you be sure you aren’t just their sex toy?”

I lost it.  The tourguide persona broke down.  I started crying.

And then I started trying to stifle myself, and consequently cried harder, because I knew that my crying said to her “yep, you were right all along, this poly stuff really is inhuman and unnatural, and Cliff is crying because on the inside he’s really being hurt by his poly ways, and you just exposed the harsh reality of the poly life.”

That wasn’t why.  It was because anyone, mono or poly, would be a bit stressed by questions that cruel.  And it was because it was a reminder of why I didn’t tell my parents about my relationship, didn’t tell my classmates or my coworkers, because I didn’t want to face this kind of judgement every time I casually mentioned my partners’ existence.  But I couldn’t explain that to her very well from my position as Irrational Crying Person.

She was rather taken aback by all this.  We’d only been having a friendly intellectual discussion.

—

And yeah, I’ve had the same experience quite a few times with people who want to have detached intellectual conversations about sexual assault, child abuse, and whether such a thing as a genderqueer person could ever be theoretically possible.

(Source: sanitywatchers, via fauxmosexualtranstrender)

Fuck Feminist Jargon.

There’s a fundamental problem I see in a lot of feminist writing.  And that problem is WORDS.  (Since writing is made of words, this is a very bad problem.)

If you are writing in English, and you want to stand a snowflake’s chance of reaching anyone who isn’t already your exact brand of feminist, you need to respect the consensus meanings and connotations of English words.

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We are the 95%. →

There’s one big lie that rapists tell.  Most of the other lies are just part of it.  ”Consent is complicated and confusing and there are a lot of gray areas.”  ”She dressed/acted/talked like she wanted it.”  ”She never said no; how was I supposed to know?”  ”She just regrets having sex.”  ”We were both drunk and the alcohol muddied things.”  ”He sure seemed like he was enjoying it.”  ”I guess I just got caught up in the heat of the moment.”  ”People do this all the time and only paranoid feminists call it rape.”

The one big lie at the center of all these little lies is: “If you were in my place, you could have done the same.”

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[BIGGER THAN USUAL TRIGGER WARNING FOR GRAPHIC AND EMOTIONALLY INTENSE RAPE TALK, SERIOUSLY, I MEAN I EVEN TRIGGERED MYSELF]

Yeah, that’s what I’ve kinda been freaking out about tonight.  I started out ticked off about this whole GMP thing, but in my usual relatively-detached way, and then it hit me like a ton of bricks: how would my rapist describe ME?

Then I kinda had an eensy little meltdown. :/

(It’s also been a very hard day at work, and I had my final exam yesterday, and I’m pretty tired and stressed about a bunch of stuff really, and… oh my God look at me making apologies and excuses for being upset about rape.)

I mean, I’m very sure he wouldn’t say “Well, I just decided I was going to treat her in increasingly cruel and bizarre ways until I finally straight-up sexually assaulted her. I guess I made that decision because I’m a narcissistic misogynist and I don’t really think she’s a person.”

He wouldn’t say that because I doubt he’s said it to himself.  He’d say that it was very, very confusing.  And I was very unreasonable.  I did agree to have sex with him that night!  But then I got all weird about it and withdrew consent, but he couldn’t understand why, and that’s hardly fair.  Besides, I was quiet and wishy-washy and “um please maybe not right now?” about it, so how’s a guy to know.  And he really just wanted to please me.  And he didn’t even know it was rape until I suddenly started screaming at him like some kind of unpredictable crazy lady.  And we were kinky, which you know just muddies the water even further.  And he did stop eventually, it just took him a little while to understand my bizarre mixed signals.

Oh, and by the way, he’s a very nice guy with a good job and a lot of friends and a complex emotional life including past traumas of his own, just so you know.  It’s not like he’s some rapist type. And you should know, this whole experience has been very upsetting for him and he’s still in the process of recovering from it.

It’s very, very easy to construct the whole situation as “gray” and “complicated” and “confusing”—and to characterize me as incredibly unstable and hysterical, while he’s a baffled victim of circumstances that could happen to any unlucky guy—and not even technically lie about it.

(If you’re thinking “shit, maybe it was kind of confusing after all,” all I can tell you is that I was saying “no, safeword, no, stop,” but he didn’t untie me until I said “I’m going to scream until the neighbors hear.”  A little harder to put yourself in that “gosh, I might have done the same thing” place now, isn’t it?)

I would not like my rape written about that way.

I do not think it adds to the world’s knowledge about rape to hear a rapist’s shitty, dishonest self-justifications. We don’t learn about what causes shoplifting by letting a shoplifter write about how he thought it was free and anyway he forgot it was in his pocket.  At best it’s useless and rubs salt in survivors’ wounds; at worst, it’s feeding social validation and prefab alibis to future rapists.

I would not like my rape used that way.

Ozy Has Thoughts On Gender Identity And Things

ozyreads:

pervocracy:

[snip]

Also “this exists because patriarchy” =/= “this is a bad wrong thing that I need to not do”

Being *caused by* patriarchy is not the same thing as *perpetrating* patriarchy. 

Yes, this also.

Everything on Earth is influenced by patriarchy.  (Which, you may note, includes how cis people express their gender and vanilla people express their sexuality.)  So following the rule “if it’s influenced by patriarchy, it’s hopelessly sexist and feminists should have nothing to do with it” is logically impossible.

Ozy Has Thoughts On Gender Identity And Things

ozyreads:

Cut for gender rambleyness.

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My thinks are:

Questioning if you’re making a personal choice because of internalized patriarchy - good idea*

Questioning if someone else is making a personal choice because of internalized patriarchy (unless the choice involves imposing their will on others) - bad idea

Questioning if someone else is making a personal choice because of internalized patriarchy, but selectively limiting those questions to trans, poly, sex worker, or kinky people - piss off, your “feminism” is now 100% aligned with the same damn prejudices I coulda gotten at my local junior high for a lot cheaper

—

*bearing in mind that you may find the answer is “nope! I’m not,” and you don’t need to agonize over it forever