The Antisocial Socialist

Misogyny isn't all of it, of course, but watching that smug piece of shit Fuentes, who looks like he's about 12, go off, I have Thoughts. Because I do work with teenage boys, and yes, many of them are more right wing than they used to be. Though fortunately most of mine personally aren't, I see a certain Type of behaviour pattern that I think is a synecdoche for a broader societal trend.

("Sabotabby, why the fuck are you trying to spell "synecdoche" before finishing your first coffee? FFS.") 

I don't think I have particularly important insights or anything, it's just that I know kids. And I can usually tell which way an election will go by what the kids are talking about. We kind of all assume that the young are more progressive, and in some ways they are, but in other, deeper ways they really are not, and that's concerning for obvious reasons.

We live in an extremely gendered culture, a weirdly gendered culture, and expectations around gender performance begin before a kid's even popped out. I don't know if, under laboratory conditions, children naturally segregate by gender. I suspect they don't. But we're not under laboratory conditions, and so most do.

Accordingly, cishet boys tend to go through developmental stages.

Stage 1: Girls are ICKY.
Stage 2: Oh wait no, girls are CUTE.
Stage 3: WAAAAH no girls like me.
Stage 4: Wait what this girl likes me back. I guess girls are human after all.

In previous generations, Stage 3 tended to be kind of short-lived, and for particularly sensitive and talented boys stuck in that stage, one could give them a guitar and they could write sad songs about it in their garage, which ironically would lead to girls eventually liking them back. But now, instead, we have Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, not to mention their peers and educational professionals concerned about the Crisis In Masculinity, basically trapping them in that stage past when it's developmentally appropriate.

I had a version of this, I guess, where I felt that no boy (or girl) would ever like me back, from around 8-13 or so, and thus I would be sad and lonely forever. This is pretty normal, although at the time it felt like it was the most painful thing ever and would never end. It took the equivalent of a garage and a guitar—though in my case, a sketchbook, pencil, punk and goth—to get me out of that stage. I can't imagine what it would be like for that to have happened in the age of the internet, when there were millions of online enablers assuring me that, no, I was ugly and unlovable and here is a convenient political ideology to latch onto where I could have my revenge.

The adult version of this developmental process is even worse, because not only will you never find love, but you will never have the trappings of financial security. This goes for all genders, but it is particularly acute for young men because the remaining unionized work tends to be in the type of labour that's feminized—teachers, nurses, and so on—thanks to neoliberal policies of outsourcing. This not just robs political movements of natural allies in labour, but robs young men of the ability to connect to older, smarter guys and to each other. It atomizes them in the gig economy, which structurally does not favour solidarity, even as it impoverishes them. It isolates them from history and collective action, just as the No Girls Like Me influencers isolate them from the companionship of other genders. 

I have enough of an individualist streak that I still absolutely do blame everyone who voted for Trump, most of them against their own economic and social interests, whether or not they did it because they genuinely believe women should be chattel or whether they're concerned about the price of eggs. I also blame the Democrats for being idiots and not addressing any of the structural economic problems when they had four years to do so. But I also think that until we address structural misogyny, we're not going to get enough of the type of individuals who make better choices to make any kind of difference. I don't think the US will fall to fascism quite so quickly, largely because Trump is incompetent and senile and too much power is invested in his failing person, and if the Dems aren't completely incompetent, they can make a comeback in four years, if not by midterms. By then, however, quite a lot of damage will have been done, not just to human beings but to institutions and most importantly, to the climate. As long as we have so many young men trapped at Stage 3, both in terms of gender politics and economically, we have a long term problem on our hands.

The good news is I've actually seen this turned around in action. While I'd like to give every kid of every gender a garage and a guitar, the simple act of proximity can be a radical and transformative thing. Piece of shit dudes forced to interact with women as equals can and does make dudes less shitty. Unionization not only makes people more financially stable, but it makes people better politically. If you give a young man the option of being a normal guy who gets laid vs. being a weird little creep like Fuentes, most will choose the former. I don't know how best to do this outside of the school system, or how to do it when the gravitational pull of Rogan's roid-ridden bullshit is so powerful, but I have to believe it's possible.

TL;DR I am not saying misogyny is the only factor in the US elections, I am saying it's a factor.

I did this on a friend's FB, but in case anyone is curious or wants to participate.

Meme: Pronoun/title/adjective check!
As in, "what I think of these pronouns/titles/adjectives as applied to me"

It/its: Nope
She/her: Yes
He/him: No but I find it amusing when I get mistaken for a dude on the internet, and I'm sometimes deliberately ambiguous about this.
They/them: I don't mind it but it's not me.
( more )

 Listening to some TERF spew TERF bollocks on CBC and I'm struck by how close the TERF (and their buddies, the misogynist right) sound to the arguments of anti-immigration types. You were not born X, therefore you can never be X, etc. Is it then coincidence that the two greatest points of unity on the Alt Reich are the opposition to the human rights of immigrants and trans people?

Hopefully a continuing series where I criticize the left, but from a place of love. You know, if people are interested in that kind of thing.

Today is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. That's something I wholeheartedly support, being an unapologetic man-eating feminist myself. But like many good ideas that are too good for the moderates to fully ignore, it's quite often watered-down and turned into the merely symbolic, especially in public institutions like schools or quasi-public spaces like Facebook.

Dec. 6th is the anniversary of the massacre at l'École Polytechnique de Montréal. Fourteen young women were murdered at the hands of a maniac, simply for the audacity for being female engineering students. In a country where mass shootings really don't happen often, it was shocking and horrific and leaves a deep psychological scar on any of us who remember, vividly, hearing the news.

Dec. 6th is a day for ritual now. Any well-meaning person of any gender dons the white ribbon (even though the original point was for men to show that they were against violence against women*). Schoolchildren make handprints on banners that declare, "these hands will never be used in violence," even though that is statistically unlikely to be the case. Posters go up, most with roses on them.

On Facebook, every other post is a list of the names of the dead, now with the requisite likes and hearts and crying faces and sometimes angry faces (from the leftists).

It's not that I don't think that these are all important rituals to have, or that these 14 women are not worth remembering. They absolutely are. But I'm uncomfortable when something I feel passionate about is reduced to a cut-and-paste of names and ages so that everyone can show how they remember, how important the ritual is, and how very not-sexist they are. It becomes an exercise in form over function.

Violence against women in Canada does not, by and large, look like a lunatic carefully sorting the female students from the male students and then gunning down the former. That has happened, but that is not what usually happens. Women are more likely to face violence at the hands of a loved one than a stranger. The dead are less likely to look like photogenic young students and more likely to look like this:



Oh, you probably can't see that too well. That's the 1181 missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada between 1980-2012, who rarely get spoken about on the one day that we get to talk about violence against women. Marc Lépine is dead, and beyond the reach of justice, but there still might be justice for the women pictured above. We won't know if we don't do anything about it.

It's not a day to talk about the women and girls in prison and foster care, or even victims of domestic violence. Not sex workers or trans women or non-status immigrants, who face a greater risk of violence and exploitation than the general population.  It's not a day to talk about women who have been raped by men who are deemed more trustworthy than they are, and thus are re-victimized in the press and the courts. If we took today to look at those things, we might look at violence against women as something other than a horrible event that happened once but is now safely in the past to be ritualized. We would have to see it as something ongoing, something in which all genders are complicit.

It's not a day to talk about misogyny, today, as rampant and widespread as ever, to shut down any number of MRA and Alt-Reich groups who have seized the zeigeist by the pussy. That would be politicizing things, and the National Day of Remembrance and Action is a hashtag, not, like, a political thing.

My beef is institutional, not individual. On a personal level, listing the names of the 14 victims of Dec. 6th is understandable, even laudable. On an institutional level, however, framing violence against women as a rare, dramatic act rather than a routine and persistent symptom of a patriarchal culture is not productive. I'm not going to lie and tell you I have an answer to this, or even that I know with certainty that it's a problem, per se. I guess I just want a louder, angrier, more complicated discussion. Not symbols, and not copy-and-paste. Ugly, unvarnished truth that moves towards action. For starters.


* Gender is, of course, more complicated, but a lot of us didn't know that in 1991 when Jack Layton was first promoting it.

I have been trying really hard to not post about Trump, because I worry that his stubby choad gets to half-mast every time his name is mentioned, and also because enough people have been posting about the semi-sentient clump of hair and I'm quite sick of hearing about it.

But I was intrigued by the latest stupid-ass thing he said, because I don't actually think it was that stupid relative to most of the things he says—and he was forced to retract it.

It's the abortion thing, of course. I had to look it up because I keep seeing references to it on FB and I wasn't sure what the big deal was. He said that abortion should be illegal and women who have abortions should be punished. And enough collective shit was lost that he actually had to back down for once.

I find this startling.

Oh, not because I agree. I don't. It's a disgusting position. But because it is more ethically consistent than anyone else in the Republican/anti-abortion camp, and they're largely the ones bothered by the statement.

There are a number of things I don't understand about people who claim to be pro-life, but probably the biggest one is why they aren't all out there murdering abortion doctors, vigilante-style. I mean, I'm glad they're not. And logically, I know why they're not, even if they haven't examined it all too deeply. It's because they know that their position on abortion is fundamentally dishonest.

Trump's initial stance on punishing women is abhorrent, but it's honest. (I mean, it's not really, because he doesn't actually believe anything and he has the ideological coherency of a fairly dim third grader desperate for absolutely any sort of attention at all. No Republican is actually anti-abortion; they're all of the "it's moral and necessary if my mistress does it" school. But let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that he believes it.)

Those who oppose abortion claim to do so because they believe that the fetus is a person, deserving of full human rights. Except not really. Try asking an anti-choicer why they never protest outside of fertility clinics and if you ever get an answer, you come and tell me right away what it is, because I've never had one capable of justifying that. In their heart-of-hearts, they know that an embryo isn't really the same as a child. But all of their rhetoric suggests that killing an embryo is exactly the same as killing a baby.

So if abortion is actually murdering a baby, Trump's initial position made total sense. It's comparable to a contract killing—yes, you would charge a hit man with murder, but you would also prosecute the person who ordered the hit. The second you suggest that abortion should be legal but only the doctors should be charged, you open yourself up to the legal possibility where it's perfectly fine to arrange someone's death as long as you're not the one firing the gun.

If you ever want to get an anti-choicer to shut up really quickly (which, for me, is all of the time), the best thing to ask besides the question of fertility clinics is how they plan to sentence women who get abortions. Manslaughter? No, you don't just get an abortion on a whim. It'd have to be first-degree murder. I'm not a lawyer and don't even play one on the internet, but that's a lot of years. And given that one in three cis women will have an abortion in her lifetime, that's good news for the prison-industrial complex and deeply uncomfortable for everyone else.

I'm fascinated by this latest kerfuffle because it really exposes how no one who claims to be pro-life actually believes, deep down, that abortion is murder. The root desire in the anti-abortion soul is to punish women; the rest is just window-dressing. Trump had to backpeddle because he once again said out loud what they were all thinking. Whoops!

I just had a bunch of surprisingly productive discussions around feminism and harassment, spurred by the stupid verdict in the case of Gregory Alan Elliott, the latest Tropes vs. Women video, and the overall imbalance in what we mean when we talk about freedom of speech.

Both of these cases have a lot to do with how the law is unwilling (I almost typed "unable," but this isn't true—they're perfectly capable of understanding Twitter threats against cops) to take into account both gender dynamics and internet culture. Elliott was acquitted (and may go on to sue his victims) because they didn't act like perfect victims. Why, one might ask—and the judge did—would they block him and continue to respond to his tweets?

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how these things work. I know, because I've had stalkers and trolls. There is no perfect way to engage with them. Your mother might have said, "ignore the bully and he'll go away," but you knew even as a child that this wasn't true.

Internet discussion is largely public. This means that if I am telling the truth and Igor the Troll is telling a lie, our discussion is witnessed by outsiders. A typical exchange might go something like this:

Igor: Obvious falsehood nevertheless believed by those who have an interest in maintaining the status quo.
Sabs: Bunch of facts in rebuttal.
Igor: Shut up you cunt bitch ill rape your eyesocket.

(If you think I'm exaggerating, you're naïve af. This is mild by comparison to some of the things I've seen.)

Now, a logical judge, not taking gender or power into account, is going to think, "well, she can block him, why doesn't she just block him?" But Igor is not going to shut up. And to an audience—because this is the internet, and there is always an audience—if I shut up, Igor looks like the winner.

This is something that just won't make sense unless you spend a lot of time around kids, which I do. If you show kids a political debate and ask them who won, the kids will not identify the person who said the most accurate facts. They will identify the person who was the loudest and who, preferably, spouted the most insults. The primary reason, I'd argue, why Trump is popular is because most Americans haven't progressed past the developmental stage that my kids are in.

So my choosing to block and ignore may be, to me (and the judge) a sensible move of self-preservation, to Igor the Troll, and everyone watching, it looks like he won. Now, I can choose to ignore this, and I probably would, but it will be galling. It will sit under my skin. Igor the Troll will not stop talking because I've stopped talking. He may go on to talk about me, to spread rumours and lies, and he's less likely to be challenged because sensible people don't bother.

I fully understand why Guthrie and Reilly wouldn't, in this circumstance, act like perfect victims and just ignore the scum harassing them. Why should they? Why does Elliott get freedom of speech and they do not? Why is it always down to the woman to run away, to withdraw, to not go out at that time of night wearing that skirt?

Anyway, one dude messaged me and said he didn't get feminists. Did we want equality or supremacy? He compared feminism to vegans, and how there are some vegans who just are, and some vegans who reminded you that they were vegan every five minutes.

I used to draw this distinction too, before I saw what was happening to a vegan friend of mine on Tumblr. She'd post a vegan recipe and immediately get anon hate. Was it any wonder that rather than be intimidated into silence, she'd get louder in response? That got me thinking to just how often omnivores remind us that they're omnivores—bacon memes, posting jokes about vegetarians murdering carrots—but this stridency is entirely invisible, because most people are omnivores. Vegans are perceived as more obnoxious about their dietary choices not because they are (I'm firmly convinced they're not) but because it's Other, and thus marked as a political statement, while eating meat is neutral and unmarked.

Dude admitted he was afraid of women, so I unpacked that. It's the old Margaret Atwood quote: "Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them." We went back and forth for about 45 minutes, at the end of which I think he got it a bit more.

I had a similar conversation with another young man who'd posted a "political correctness has gone too far; you can't say anything without being called a racist or a sexist, FREEZED PEACH"-type rant. Now, it's probably not a secret that I don't believe in freedom of speech—as in I don't believe that it exists, period, or can exist—but I questioned him on his consistency. Did he believe, for example, that ISIS sympathizers on Twitter should have free speech? Was he vigorously defending their rights to say what they liked? Of course, he wasn't, so I walked him through his own flawed assumptions about what was violent and what was peaceful. I don't think he agreed with me by the end—I wouldn't expect him to, as he's not the sharpest chisel in the toolbox—but he remained remarkably civil throughout and thanked me.

I don't always have the time or patience to educate people about power dynamics or feminism or anti-racism, and I tend towards the hairtrigger emotional at the best of times, but I'm kinda pleased with how these various discussions went. I mean, it stresses me out that we still gotta fight these stupid battles, but what else can you do?

There's a long discussion thread on one of the teacher groups I follow about a soon-to-be married woman who's wondering if she should change her name at work. (Keep in mind that changing your address when you're a teacher can be a nightmare of bureaucracy, so one generally doesn't do anything that can affect either staffing or professional certification if one can avoid it.)

And it occurs to me that this is one of those instances where I am so radically at odds with most of society, because I didn't know that women still frequently changed their names to their husbands upon marriage. Yes, some of my co-workers did, but they were very traditional and religious types. I didn't think most women did. But apparently the majority do.

I'm not going to comment because it's not my business (besides, my kids call me by my first name and I have no intention of ever getting married), but it seems very strange to me.

I haven't read any of the articles. Don't really care to. Bad things happening to children is something that I find difficult to read about and so I don't do so recreationally.

But. Whenever a woman publicly accuses a man of raping or molesting her, she is held up for public excoriation. She's accused of lying and worse. Her sexual history is interrogated, her name is dragged through the mud. It's bad enough in the case of a regular man; in the case of someone famous and well-loved, it is exponentially worse.

I don't believe in most cases the trade-off is worth it to lie. I mean, you'd have to be deeply fucked up to put yourself through that.

The Honourable Wife-Beater, of course: “Women love money. Give ‘em a couple thousand bucks and they are happy.”

Same with voters, actually.