With Prodigy season 2 poised to drop 20 episodes on us on Monday, we're trying to decide how to manage the discussions. Each option has its pros and cons, so why not put it to the group? The way I see it, we have three options:...
Okay so what you're getting at is that this kind of speech is violent. It acknowledges a conflict and seeks to further a particular side through the adoption of defensive behaviours and attitudes. And you're taking a position that all violence is bad. But you're wrong. Violence, as you and I are defining it here, is a necessary part of self defence. Violence in self defence can put a stop to violence in aggression. A pacifist who is concerned with all violence, rather than just their own, has a moral obligation to defend the weak, using violence if necessary.
Your racist grandparents were members of the oppressor class, seeking to do violence against the oppressed, and were therefore contributing to the cycle of violence. But the woman who wrote this article, is trying to stop the cycle of violence by engaging in a defensive form of violence against an oppressor class in response to violence by that class. That's not the same thing.
Sun bears are shy and reclusive animals, and usually do not attack humans unless provoked to do so, or if they are injured or with their cubs; their timid nature led these bears to be often tamed and kept as pets in the past
Definitely would rather be in the woods with a strange sun bear than a strange man. What if he tries to get me into Magic The Gathering?
Alright, so I'm on team "alone in the woods with a bear", but since you want to talk statistics, let's talk statistics and the heteronormativity embedded in your statistics.
The figure I'm familiar with is that 1/4 of women have been sexually assaulted. Maybe you have a figure that says 1/3, that's fine. But crucially, these figures do not say who did it. What you've made is an assumption that women only get sexually assaulted by men. Personally, I think that the vast, vast majority of sexual assaults on women are done by men. But not all. I don't believe you can transfer those two statistics - women sexually assaulted and women sexually assaulted by a man - 1:1.
Let me explain where I'm coming from. Half of transgender and nonbinary people have been sexually assaulted. That's double the number of women! This factor, double, is consistent across sources I've seen that investigate both figures with the same methodology. You might have a source that says 1/3 of women are sexually assaulted, that's fine, but the ones that investigate rates for both women and trans people say it's twice as many trans people.
I could go ahead and assume, if I wanted, that half of all trans people have been sexually assaulted by a cis person. That's the same assumption you made that 1/3 or 1/4 of women have been sexually assaulted by a man. But it's a bad assumption. I know lots of trans people who've been sexually assaulted, and most of the time it was by a fellow trans person. You see, trans people have our own community that's isolated from the cisgender dating scene as a matter of safety, and that means isolated, lonely people let their guard down around fellow transes and the victims can't get away from their abusers, nor are trans friends of trans abusers willing to give up a social network in which the abuser is embedded. It's messy and disgusting and it wouldn't be a problem if cis people just accepted us, but it's where we are. I would be wrong to assume all rapists of trans people are cis people.
And I read way too deep into your comment and got a vibe that you were making the assumption that all sexual abusers of women are men. You probably don't actually think that and didn't mean to make any kind of implication along those lines. So I'm just leaving this comment as a general reminder not to use heteronormativity to inform our statistical analyses.
Swing and a miss, mate. Many people who have a problem with the name feminism are nonbinary people, who want equality but have been excluded from the movement by enbyphobic women, AKA TERFs. While there are lots of feminists who say feminism also means uplifting enbies, some enbies feel misgendered by this terminology, and reality is nonetheless more complicated. But your comment reducing every opponent of the term to male privilege is perfectly symbolic of the nonbinary exclusionism practiced by many who use the term feminism, and demonstrates exactly why some nonbinary people have a problem.
It's a complicated issue. I'm being a bit reductive when I say every enbyphobic feminist is a terf. There's lots of people who think of themselves as trans allies, but still don't believe in genderfluidity, xenogenders, or two-spirit. They think they're allies of nonbinary people, because they simply choose not to believe in the nonbinary people they exclude and oppress. Does that make them TERFs? It's complicated.
We haven't assembled into a movement about this because it's not that big a deal, and we have more pressing problems like impending genocide. We can't waste time organising about a word. But on a personal level, the word still makes us uncomfortable. When we're told feminism is for nonbinary people, some of us feel like we're being called female. Misgendered. But if feminism isn't for nonbinary people, well that's a bigger problem.
At this point in time I tend to take terms like "intersectional feminist" to mean someone is probably an ally, but if someone just calls themself a feminist without any adjectives, that gives me absolutely zero information as to whether they're interested in gender equality for all genders. I know they support cis women, but I have no idea whether they support any kind of trans person.
Well this is a debate about prescriptivism vs descriptivism, right? I'm saying the complexities of the ways the word is used no longer make its meaning clear unless certain adjectives are applied. You're arguing we should stick to the "intended" meaning. But at what point does denying the evolution of language to become more transphobic deny the genuine harms suffered by trans people? Surely there's a point where that's the case, right? How do you know we haven't reached that point?
Ah, no, I meant to say that feminism losing its implication of progress for all gender identities (if it had such an implication in the past), is evidenced by the fact that if someone says they're a feminist, that doesn't tell you whether they support equality for enbies.
When you say "cedineg a right wing talking point", you mean admitting the right is correct about something, right? I'm as left as they come but I don't see a problem with that. The right is correct that the sky is blue. The right is correct that water is wet. The right was (partially) correct that chemicals in the water were turning the frogs gay, and the right is (partially) correct that an armed population is a necessary component of a healthy democracy. I'm just seeing this as an issue of ego. If you have an unhealthy ego, then you worry about denying any and all criticism. But if you have a big healthy ego, then you take criticism onboard and improve. 99% of what the right criticises us for is wrong, but that 1% is a chance for us to improve. I have a huge ego, and my thinking is we could either fight the right on this and be 99% correct, or we could be nonbinary allies, "cede a talking point", and get closer to perfection.
I don't know I'm not trying to be reactionary, I'm just thinking that pretending enbies' criticisms don't exist in order to "stick it to the right" is erasure and bad. It should be about doing the right thing, not about winning. We only truly win by doing the right thing.
Prodigy Season 2: How do we want to discuss it?
With Prodigy season 2 poised to drop 20 episodes on us on Monday, we're trying to decide how to manage the discussions. Each option has its pros and cons, so why not put it to the group? The way I see it, we have three options:...
Kate Mulgrew told Rick Berman she wanted a gay character on the Voyager bridge ( collider.com )
About the bear...
So, I'm just assuming we've all seen the discussions about the bear....
The Perception Paradox: Men Who Hate Feminists Think Feminists Hate Men ( msmagazine.com )