Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

Just found a draft of a post I was working on a while ago, a response to my friend Marcia's review of a movie I hadn't seen (still haven't!), but that's okay because it's not about The Substance as much as it is about bodies and what we embody: race, gender, age.

This film is really about white women’s insecurities and never did I have illusions that I would feel seen and heard. I think it affirmed that I am an object, and that I owe my gender or allegiance to no one; I create myself.

Feeling not female and trying to bend, cut, open and fold this body into female and instead of it being gender affirming, I felt more alienated from female, from woman.

Oof. Yes. So much of femininity is doing little violences to our bodies. I learned the word tribulation because of my grandmother, complaining about the awkwardness of buying clothes or the discomforts of jewelry, I can't now remember which, telling tween or teen me "these are the trials and tribulations we face as women" with a chuckle, but I wasn't chuckling. I didn't know what a tribulation was but it sounded scary. I was not looking forward to a lifetime of those!

I kept waiting for the little violences I did to my body in the name of femininity to pay off, and they never did. Surely this discomfort and pain, actual blood, sweat and tears, had to mean the payoff would be really good right?? And I mostly rejected even high heels and makeup, never mind plastic surgery. Never had to harm my hair and skin with relaxers or skin-lightening creams. So if even I feel such pain, when mine is a small fraction of the pain there is in the demands that femininity puts on Black and Brown people...

Once on Twitter, whilst I was defending Trans folks, a person wanted to misgender me by calling me a little boy. It was a weird sensation to process, someone wants to misgender me by calling me a boy, which is what I thought would make me most comfortable in the end, being boy, that would make life easier, but instead I work to be comfortable in girl.

I was fighting TERFs on twitter way back when they assumed absolutely anybody with pronouns in their profile was trans, so my "she/her" once got someone to tell me I looked like an ugly man and I'd never be a woman. I had never thought I was anything other than cis at the time, but I have held that in my heart for years and now am delighted to be an ugly man who no one would ever believe is a woman.

When I saw the monster, I saw my future without being honest with myself about what beauty really is, what it truly means to de-center the male gaze, to de-center white womanhood whilst being queer, of color and other identity markers; for me, the monster is the culmination of a wasted life...

I do feel like middle age has found me in the last year or so. I'm leaning in to it for the dadcore vibes and grateful that I get to age because to age is to live (I am twice the age my brother ever got to be, so I will never fear growing older). But my age feels so bound up with my gender because when I was in my 20s and first tried to imagine myself as an older person, I imagined a man. I couldn't imagine a woman at all. I never have been able to think of myself growing old as a woman, and I really want to grow old, so that's the thing that finally tipped the scales for me into I must be trans, I better take action accordingly.

I'd rather have had a trans childhood and a trans young adulthood like a lot of people, but what matters much more to me is having a trans middle age and hopefully old age. Maybe my beard will come in gray already, maybe my hair will disappear any moment, I don't care at all (or I don't think I do; maybe I will feel differently when these things happen but neither has so far). A friend of mine once said that second puberty in your 40s disrupts the usual narrative that the changes in your body after you leave your 20s are unwelcome ones. I think there are lots of ways that body changes can be more welcome, but definitely addressing gender dysphoria in middle age is one way to mitigate the "oh my knee hurts all the time now" etc. type of changes to the body.

I'm also struck by someone misgendering Marcia by calling them a little boy specifically; there's some age-related incorrectness in there too (as well as echoing the racism of Black men always being called "boys" by the kind of white people who still want them as slaves); it's setting up a power dynamic often levelled at women (and definitely at people who are incorrectly perceived as women).

I still want for us to want more than to appeal to the gaze. I want all women to want more for themselves beyond ‘beauty’, not because I think anything feminine is bad, but because I want them to consistently examine what they mean when they are reaching for beauty. Who is really defining what you deem beautiful? Who is paving that definition for you? Is it you? Is it white supremacy? Do these things matter? Yes, to a point I think they do. I want us to want more, and to imagine more.

Anyway, their writing and thinking are great; I'm so glad I can now afford to subscribe to their essays and also their DJ sets!

I am fascinated by the Tim Walz memes.

Particularly what they say about masculinity, and whiteness.

I've been thinking about masculinity a lot lately because it's come up among the transmascs in my online circles: can anyone define masculinity in a way that isn't just "being a good person regardless of gender"? Not in our extremely queer and neurodivergent context, apparently. But elsewhere... I forget how different things still are!

I've joined a "wholesome Tim Walz memes" group (which is a whole thing in itself, but) where I saw that photo of the kids hugging him at the school-meal bill signing shared with this quote from John Pavlovitz, who I now learn is a white liberal Christian:

[Americans] are fully fed up with Trump and his surrogate’s contrived John Wayne dudebro American tough guy cosplay, and they are ready to embrace a better kind of manhood: one that doesn’t need to prove how tough it is, doesn’t have to be the center of attention, and most of all, is not concerned about showing its deep humanity because it revels in it.

Pavlovitz makes the good point that Walz's masculinity was directly under attack when the worst his opponents could think to say about him was to mock his provision of menstrual products in school bathrooms by calling him "tampon Tim". It matters that they didn't attack feeding school kids, they didn't even attack him for saying Minnesota is a trans sanctuary state. They went for the icky word:

MAGAs don’t see how much they expose themselves by using a female medical product as a slur, the way it reveals their complete contempt for women and their agendas toward them.

Another article (which I can't even remember now how I found, ha) makes the same point about the conflicting presentations of masculinity here:

The Trump campaign is targeting aggrieved young men by promising to restore their rightful place of authority through oppressive legislation of everyone else. In the MAGA view, the American man has been unjustly torn down and humiliated, and the only way to rectify this is by seeking revenge. But Walz is a living counterexample to their claims. In a time when many American men feel lonely and useless, Walz is presenting an alternative.

I actually don't think that, the last paragraph of the article, does as good a job of describing that alternative as something earlier in the article:

Beyond highlighting the strangeness of the opposition, the meme-ification of Walz seems rooted in a longing for a type of masculinity that’s going extinct in America: the power of a cheerful, useful, helpful, competent, and moral man.

I think that the people talking about "a better kind of manhood" are talking about a kind of white manhood; that the aggrieved young men targeted by the Trump campaign are largely white young men (with the rest encouraged to further whiteness by believing that if they're more racist towards other people it'll somehow elevate them in the eyes of the racists who run almost everything); that the values listed as the "type of masculinity that's going extinct" are describing a type of white masculinity, where "making polite conversation with strangers" is lauded -- regardless of who the strangers are!

Not everyone deserves polite conversation! Prizing civility or "keeping the peace" -- be that at a family gathering or the aftermath of a cop murdering a Black person -- over justice is part of how whiteness furthers its own interests.

I'm torn because I love stuff from the meme group like

I was telling my 15yo daughter about Tim Walz and all the wholesome Big Dad Energy memes going around and showed her a few examples from this page. She says, “Tim Walz drives you to school, and after reminding you to buckle up, says, ‘You ready to rock ‘n roll?’”

and

Tim Walz always does the one-finger farmer wave from the steering wheel.

and

Tim Walz looks like he stays behind after the potluck to put away folding chairs

and of course the Timdr skit, with its Big Dad Energy punchline

But also I'm aware this is a white culture congratulating itself and preening.

But also, we need white people to stop voting for Trump. Everybody else has gotten the memo and it's just us fucking it up, so if this works is it worth it??

(Why yes I do want this t-shirt and I do feel kinda uncomfortable about how Seen it makes me feel!)

The butt never represents itself. This is how Heather Radke's book Butts: A Backstory begins.

I found out about it from reading 'an interview where the author explains this: "You can’t see your own butt, you are always seeing it through reflection, photography, or other people’s gaze. We don’t have a proper word for our butts, only euphemisms, which is unique to our butts."

She ultimately settles on "butt" as the term she's going to use in her book after discussing other options (buttocks, ass, etc.) and deeming them all inadequate: too vulgar, too childish, too sexual, or something. She also has to make it clear that she's talking about "the cheeks, not the hole."

She says in the interview:

I realized that, unlike breasts, for example, where the biological function is so deeply related to the symbolic meaning (maternity, femininity, etc.), butts really don’t have much inherent biological meaning. And yet their symbolic meaning is so complex and layered. They are deeply tied up with notions of race, femininity, and even hard work (think of the phrases like “work your butt off”). But those associations are ones we have projected onto the butt, and they are always changing."

She writes extensively about Sarah Baartman, an indigenous African woman who was brought to Europe (and given the only name we know her by) by European men who wanted to make money from exhibiting her to European audiences obsessed with big butts and her butt specifically. Radke says

Baartman is a very important figure in women’s studies, African diaspora studies, and the history of science, and so there are a lot of secondary sources about her. I also thought a lot about how to represent her on the page. I wanted to make it clear how difficult her life was, but didn’t want to flatten her story, or participate in another kind of exploitation of her life by making her story seem too salacious.

And I think she did an okay job of it. I think she does good generally in addressing race - later, regarding Miley Cyrus popularizing twerking after appropriating it from Black queers, and Kim Kardashian's rumored butt implants.

I was impressed enough with those topics that I was slightly disappointed that Radke re-visited her white-USian-woman thoughts about buying jeans that fit at the end. Having put in effort to extend her curiosity beyond all the messages that an anti-fat misogynist white-supremacist patriarchy has fed her about her body for the course of the book doesn't leave her immune to their continued influence I suppose, any more than my awareness of the racist sexist ableist history of anti-fatness makes me any more comfortable with the way I look after I've gained weight in the last year or so.

But then, at the end of the interview when asked what other body parts deserve the same treatment, Radke says

Bellies would be great! I do think you could really do a deep-dive on anything and you’d likely uncover a similar set of questions about race, gender, fashion, class, and control. Breasts are sort of the obvious one, but I think I’d be more interested in arm flab, necks (a la Nora Ephron), thighs, or maybe even eyebrows? I’m sure women from different backgrounds and of different ages might have other ideas to offer.

I think any part of the body that carries a whiff of shame would be a fruitful study, because shame often suggests hidden, unexplored feelings and histories. We don’t always know where shame comes from, even though we feel it potently. Exploring that shame doesn’t exactly free you, but I do think it offers a deeper understanding and maybe even a greater sense of control. Realizing that the shame we have about our bodies comes from history and culture — that it is, essentially, a human construction and not a biological one — can offer a bit of freedom even if we still all feel bad when we go into a dressing room and try on pants.

By December first this year, when friends started posting about #Whamageddon, I was already feeling personally offended. I had shown them how to live a life beyond Whamageddon! In posts made just before midnight on Facebook which won't show them to all my friends anyway! How dare they not have seen them, agreed with them, and changed their ways by the next afternoon?!

Heh.

How did this happen to me? How did I go from not knowing about Whamageddon to not caring about it for a couple of years to being vehemently opposed by this year?

Well, some time in December 2020, I think it was strange_complex who I saw saying online that she didn't like Whamageddon. I think I remember that it made her sad, because "Last Christmas" is a nice song and she didn't like missing out on it.

This was the first time I started to wonder about this game.

Whamageddon, for those who don't know what it is, is a "game" that consists solely of people complaining on social media (or elsewhere I guess!) when a nice thing happens to them.

Okay I'm not being fair. Like I said, I've been radicalized these last couple years.

Whamageddon is an attempt not to hear Wham!'s song "Last Christmas" from the beginning of December until the end of Christmas Eve. Once you hear it (on the radio or n a store or because your friend has maliciously tricked you), you lose the game, you are sent to "Whamhalla."

( The Whamifesto gets long. )

Anyway, if you want revenge games to play, I have found two over the last couple of years: #ReverseWhammageddon where it's actually good to hear "Last Christmas," and #Bublévion because if you want a Christmas-song-avoidance game, Michael Bublé provides both a much easier and much more rewarding (it really does feel like an accomplishment to turn off the radio when one of his songs appears!) version. I got the rules of both from social media, and I will include them here.

( #ReverseWhammageddon )

( #Bublévion )

Thanks for reading.

I saw a link to this article the other day, about the first Black blind barrister in the UK. She's a woman too, which is why she called this a triple-glazed glass ceiling.

I'm happy for her! But the way she's talked about is so interesting.

Of course this article goes into the details of her condition, which is yet another one I hadn't heard of and leaves me not understanding her any more than I did before (which is what always happens even if it is one I've heard of and that's one reason I hate the fixation on clinical diagnoses whenever blind people want to talk about ourselves and our experiences).

And it mentions a couple of times that Ms. Inaba had to use braille to complete her degree. Like it's such a problem or a chore, it sounds like they're saying "she has had braille inflicted upon her." It's big "confined to a wheelchair" vibes, and it's annoying and ableist for the same reasons. It says "Inaba had to use Braille and help from tutors and friends to keep up with her studies," which at first seemed annoyingly exoticizing because almost everyone uses tutors and friends to get through university. But then I saw the details:

But she said it took seven months for her university to obtain one of her two key study texts so she could read it using her computer, and five months for the other, and her Braille screen also missed huge chunks of material due to pictures and tables in the books.

She got through most of her studies by making her own Braille materials from her lecture notes, or from friends reading books to her, and the university also organised one-on-one tuition to support her when the lack of books held her back. "I was spending more time preparing my own learning materials than I was studying," she added.

"I was hospitalised because I kept fainting in October 2019 because I'd been functioning on about three hours sleep a night for two years."

Her friends were reading textbooks for her, I can't imagine reading out a law textbook is a lot of fun. It's so awful that it came to that rather than them having the appropriate formats in place for Inaba, but her friends sound awesome. And the tutor wasn't a regular course tutor but someone hired by the uni to work with her one-on-one, to help mitigate their failings.

And needing to spend more time preparing my own learning materials than actually learning is so fucking familiar to me and other blind students and academics -- I still think of the Australian lecturer who estimated she lost 25 hours a week to making up for inaccessibility in her work.

She said: "I'm very proud but I do wish it had all gone smoothly. I feel because of disabled access problems my results aren't a true reflection of my ability."

I don't doubt it. And this is on top of racism and sexism.

"I reckon as a black person I have to work ten times harder than others just to be accepted by society. Before I can see a client I have to prove I'm a lawyer and justify my need for my specialist equipment. If I was an older white man who can see my professional life would be so much easier."

When she goes to visit clients in prison, staff always assume she's visiting a family member, because she is Black. She finishes

"I have to accept I might never be competing on a level playing field - that's hard. People from minority groups training to do this will face discrimination, hopefully that will get easier with time."

I really love how well she makes these points and I love that even UK tabloid newspapers printed some of them. (I tried to find how she was talked about elsewhere and saw similarly respectful-and-only-moderately-ableist articles about her in the Mail and Mirror and stuff.)

It's very satisfying watching the last few seconds of my audiobook tick away as I get to bedtime on the night it's due.

It was a really good book too, Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist. It was the only book from the last year's trend for racism books that I hadn't already read and that sounded good. It really is good too! His writing is very clear and he's happy to use himself as an example of racist thinking and to credit the people and experiences that taught him better.

I'd really recommend the audiobook for people who can access it, by the way. He reads it himself and his writing sometimes has a style of repetition and emphasis that really suits being heard aloud.

Answering a question about what a white guy can do about the asshole in his friends group.

consider that when your mutual friends insist that “Barry’s not RACIST-racist, he just says racist things constantly, as jokes, you’re just being too sensitive!” what they’re really saying is: “Barry is an acceptable amount of racist for us.” His racism isn’t ruining their day; your objections to it are, and they would find it easier and much more pleasant if you would either get much more racist or pretend to be.

There's definitely an amount of racism it is required to be in my family; there aren't many out-and-out assholes for reactions to coalesce around, but it's one of those "an awkward conversation would be worse than any amount of racism" kinda deals don'tchaknow.

Why do we pretend that certain people who proudly and repeatedly do and say racist, misogynist, and otherwise violent things “don’t actually mean it?” What would they have to do or say to show they truly meant it?

I found this a really interesting question because I hadn't thought of it quite like that before, and I think "what would the difference be between X's behavior and the behavior of someone who really meant it?" is a potentially useful (rhetorical! we know the answer is "nothing") question to keep in mind for the future.

What the “too sensitive” label does is dismiss any predictable, obvious correlations between violent speech and hateful actions as “bias” rooted in the objector’s identity, an excess of emotion, or both. This reasoning holds that if you are a target of racism, then your arguments and knowledge about racism automatically carry less weight than the “unbiased” opinions of somebody who’s never thought about it before, and no combination of lived experience or scholarly knowledge or facts or data can overcome the gap.

This is part of the reason we need diverse politicians, we need diverse admins and moderators in internet communities because that really is where a lot of this starts these days. We need people who do have that lived experience and often the scholarly facts to back it up (because they know they need that when dealing with entrenched white supremacy and other kinds of bigotry/normativity). They will see red flags the rest of us aren't likely to, and if we miss those then things will only escalate. Or, as Captain Awkward so eloquently put it:

Methinks that people who drove across state lines to smear their poops on the seat of government for fascism* needed A LOT less leeway in the group chats, for starters.

(The footnote that goes with that asterisk says "*I know, they kidnapped people and did terrorisms, but something about the poop, specifically, has broken me inside, probably forever.")

It's a very long, very involved and very good read for fellow white people or people privileged on whatever axis (cis, male, able-bodied, etc.), anyone sick of the assholes in their friends groups or their families or their workplaces. The varying dynamics there will affect how much this answer applies, but I think we all need to think about how to make those people more uncomfortable and unwelcome, and shunning assholes is actually good for our own well-being too.

Since we learned about Chicken, Alaska, from a list of "the silliest place names in each state," diffrentcolours was aggravated that a couple on the list that were just indigenous names, which only sound weird to white settlers who refuse to learn the languages.

So I've been thinking about that a lot lately and looking at indigenous place names around where I grew up. There's nothing too local to me but lots about Bdote, now Minneapolis and St. Paul: like the Bdote Memory Map​ and work from The Decolonial Atlas.

It's just coincidence that I'm looking at this today (indigenous place names and languages are interests I periodically poke at), but I guess this Day of Mourning is a good day for USians to think about what was lost, and what still lives in the indigenous people and cultures that remain.

Well I say I can't find anything about place names too local to me, I mean I can't find much information but even the white settler maps are full of names derived from indigenous words: Waseca, Owatonna, Mankato (which has lots to mourn every day, not just Day of Mourning)...

Reading these names -- and others I know well like Bemidji (where we used to go on vacation) or Shakopee (for Valleyfair) -- makes me feel so homesick. I've never been away so long. I've never spent so much time so far from people who know how to say these names.

By now probably everybody knows the statue of a slaver was torn down in Bristol and thrown in the harbor.

Someone I know tried to pre-empt people justifying it as "of its time" by saying that it was put up significantly after he died and after the abolition of the slave trade. It's apparently like the U.S. Confederate statues made in the twentieth century.

But this itself was an idea I wanted to nip in the bud because it implies that contemporary statues of racists should be left as they are. Indeed this person also said she's "not in favor of erasing the past" and I cannot possibly give this all the eye-rolling it deserves. So I said:

Even if it was "of its time," that's no reason to keep it. Opposition to slavery has existed alongside the whole history of slavery. What about that bit of "its time"?

And even more, what about our times? We aren't beholden to the bigotries of the past. Their celebration is either used to prop up our own bigotries or to make us feel better about having cleared some astonishingly low bar like not trying to own other humans (or profit from that). Either way, we can do better. Otherwise in the future, people will be saying we were fine with racism because it was "of our time." So far, racism absolutely is of our time.

The argument that removing statues is "erasing history" is so frustratingly ridiculous. As the news of this statue spreads, it's starting conversations in many other places scrutinizing their local statuary, and every time I've seen locals say "oh that's who that is?!" or "he did what?!" or "jesus christ we've got a statue of him?!" They're not meant to be history lessons, and they don't work very well as such.

po8crg made the good point that someplace like Manchester has too many statues of people relatively recently dead when the Victorians put up lots of statues and not enough of twentieth century people. (The only twentieth-century people I'm aware of who have statues in Manchester are Emmeline Pankhurst (that one's very new, no doubt doesn't mention her racism, and was immediately appropriated by TERFs) and Alan Turing.) It hadn't even occurred to me that statues could be of someone contemporary. But that's what the Victorians did. The psychic wallpaper provided by all these old white guys in funny clothes or on horses or whatnot is very different now from what they'd intended. To really emulate history, we should get to put up our own statues and to take theirs down. We should get to be "of our time" too, and not have all their baggage to drag around all the time.

Someone on Facebook linked to an article the other day that I wanted to share there because it had a kind of call-to-arms at the end that I liked:

After a man on a number 22 tram in Warsaw punched a university professor for speaking German to a visiting German colleague, protesters rode number 22 trams in Kraków speaking foreign languages and reading aloud from books in German and Russian. British bus and train passengers could imitate that example to send an unfamiliar but necessary message: “We respect and appreciate languages in this country.”

I instinctively love this idea, but it quickly occurred to me that I couldn't even participate in such a thing -- because, while an immigrant, I'm from the other country that is so proud of and so violent in defense of its monolingual English culture. And then it occurred to me that the people best placed to do this in Britain are likely to be more vulnerable: non-white people, and more "obvious" immigrants from the EU, especially now that perpetrators of these hate crimes are quite happy to explicitly link Brexit to their violence and antagonism. So it's not my place to organize or encourage this, but I did want to share it.

( Lots of commentary from me on this article: kinda depressing, sorry )