From One Survivor to Another
so that “i don’t want to be a feminist anymore post” from feministing is great, except for how:
- it misses the point that feminism is a set of politics, not a personal identity that you can just “give up” on or “quit” for a day
- it is posted on a white cis woman middle class website that rarely cares for non-binary people and PoC
- feminism is not a set of moral beliefs that is superior to others, as the post implies
- along the same lines of this moral superiority, it paints feminism in an either/or dichotomy, as if it is under siege from all sides and not super flawed in itself (i.e., there are people who face the same things the author does, but they have very good reasons to not identify as feminist)
- it focuses on the individual and micro-level actions, painting feminism/feminist action as a one-woman crusade instead of what it should really be— collective, collaborative community action on a larger scale
[general tw: domestic abuse, sexual abuse, child abuse]
what is it with people who make domestic abuse and sexual abuse “awareness” images that are super exploitative? like an image of a naked woman with black and red handprints down her back, or a bunch of words formed into two hands that are choking a little boy.
these posters are designed to shock people, and they do a good job of it, but then, in doing so, they make it triggering as fuck.
i swear, these people are either 1) totally oblivious and don’t realize how common these things are, or 2) they don’t even consider the people they are trying to “help” as a part of their target audience.
but we are here, regardless, and when we see shit like this it just reinforces the way we are objectified and re-victimized by a society that wants to pretend we don’t exist or that wants to cast us as permanent victims.
fsadfds if i ever see something like that in person i will vandalize the hell out of it. i don’t want “allies” who remind me of terrible things they need to go away
[general tw: abuse, sexual abuse]
survivors are not people you want to be around when they are angry, because when they’re mad it’s the worst thing in the world.
we become so cold and distant, or we blow up and destroy things, because we’ve been holding in these feelings or injustice and anger at not just our abusers, but the entire world for so long. it is not good to be around.
and it’s not the kind of anger like, when a prank hurts instead of being funny. or when someone is just being annoying. or when you’re having a bad day and everything goes wrong. it’s not anger that is there for ten minutes and then it goes away and everything is okay after. because it’s not okay. it’s anger from someone’s childhood, or other deeply buried places. it’s anger that has been stewing for years and years and now it comes out of that person’s most basic essence.
you do not want to make a survivor angry.
Can we stop using the sanitized, academic word, “problematic”
and start calling out racism, sexism, ableism, trans-hatred, etc for what they really are?
DANGEROUS
Threatening
Hurtful
Terrible
Because these attitudes are not a little “problem”. They often translate into real-world harm and even death for people.
“your ideas are problematic” no, they’re a threat to people
Why feminism hasn’t taken on disability issues yet
1. Mainstream feminism hasn’t even accepted race as a factor for analysis yet.
We are still having race problems; the Slutwalk sign fiasco is notable. Mainstream feminists like Naomi Wolf and Jessica Valenti getting away with barely mentioning intersectionality (or non-white authors) in their work is another. Or, you can just open up the pages of Ms. Magazine and see how very white it is. When Women of Color are mentioned, we are tokenized or have colonial and racist ideas projected onto us. Two decades ago, Elizabeth Spelman’s Inessential Woman critiqued mainstream feminism for hoisting sexism over all other oppressions, and even suggesting that it was the “root” or precursor to all other oppression. That was in 1988, and people still think this is the truth.
If feminism can’t even handle racism against Black people— a racism that has been consistently studied and tracked, and which has an overarching narrative in the West, then it’s no surprise that it can’t handle disability, which has no overarching narrative and which has only come to public awareness and study in recent decades. Feminism can barely handle a rigorous analysis of oppression against Latin@, Asian, and Middle Eastern peoples as they intersect with sexism. Even fewer people have questioned colonialism or even know what it is; one example of this is how there are still white feminists out there who see the hijab as something “oppressive” and Muslim women as people in need of their “rescue”.
2. Mainstream feminism has not accepted class as a factor either.
In fact, it has an investment in ignoring class analysis.
The commodification of feminism has turned it into middle class, white women’s activism. This is why talks about contraception and abortion focus exclusively on “rights”, without much discussion on being able to actually afford those rights (for more on this, see Andrea Smith’s Conquest). This is why there is almost no push for food stamps and other welfare programs in mainstream feminism, despite study after study showing how poverty has disproportionately affected Women of Color and their children. If mainstream feminism was concerned about class, it would be pushing to free the disproportionate number of imprisoned Women of Color, or finding ways to fund and support survivors of domestic abuse and sexual abuse, with specific emphasis on more marginalized groups. Instead, these fronts are conspicuously silent.
With the commodification of feminism, white feminists have written about the dangers of sexism without ever having to question their own privilege and how that protects them from many of the things WoC have to deal with. Some of them have even gone as far as to piggyback on the work of other Women of Color, using their ideas verbatim without credit, and profiting hugely from it. Mainstream media publications like Jezebel will question sexism while simultaneously refusing to “believe in” trigger warnings. Others like Shakesville talk about how women are not “crazy” without ever questioning why “crazy” is a bad thing to be called in the first place.
3. Mainstream feminism is still invested in the gender binary.
Full stop. Many prominent feminists are still openly transmisogynistic. Others still have the idea that biology is destiny. If feminism can’t get past an either-or western dualism, then it definitely can’t handle intersectional analysis of disability, which often does not present clear choices.
4. Mainstream feminism is not teaching history in a critical way.
Women’s Studies as a whole is still dominated by a white, middle-class, thin, able-bodied, neurotypical, and cisgender analysis. The majority of WST students also fall into this worldview. These students (and casual feminists) are never taught about the racism, cissexism, and heterosexism throughout the history of feminism, much less “privilege” as a concept. Reading lists are still overwhemingly white and middle class— many of these students haven’t even heard the word “intersectional”.
The wave model for feminism is also problematic, in that it prizes physical activism— activism that was only possible for (educated) white women who did not have children, or who had enough money to get someone else (read: Women of Color) to take care of their kids for them. This capitalistic model of success and failure completely ignores analysis, thought, and the mundane but necessary background work that made these things possible. It also prizes a western-centric historical view without acknowledging work done by others.
5. Disability, unlike other oppressions, lacks unifying factors.
There is no underlying dynamic which influences all disability experiences. Disabled people themselves are split along lines of class, race, gender expression, and sexuality. Even the other, “less complicated” axes like race and class are still infinitely complex. But disability is a huge range of experience that even disabled people don’t understand completely. You could be disabled in one way but never understand how another person with a disability experiences the world.
On the outside, ableism is regularly joked about as a non-existent axis of oppression, while inside, we form our own disability hierarchies and try to judge who has a “legitimate” disability and who doesn’t. A middle class white, cisgender woman with a disability experiences a very different reality from a poor Black trans woman with a disability. We have also been raised to believe that things like race and gender take priority over other identities.
In mainstream feminism, where an individualistic, capitalistic, success-based ideology is touted as the way to go, there is no room for people who literally cannot work. There’s no room for disability when women— that is, able-bodied and neurotypical white women— are supposed to be succeeding in the same way that men do.
My Conclusion: If you are a person who deals with disability issues, don’t rely on feminism for it. It’s not going to happen for a long time.
in retrospect i do not like the “more human” part of that post
it implies that you are more/less human for being more/less open and feeling, which is not how i feel at all. i think people are always people. and some people also don’t see themselves as human.
[trigger warning: discussion of triggers, flashbacks]
Kinsey Hope Can’t Focus For Shit: The thing about triggers is…
…people are not suddenly more sensitive than they were before. They are just starting to get more vocal.
We’re talking people who have survived horrible, terrible things. In the past, there was no way for them to really talk about their…
I agree with the main point of this, but I’ll be honest, , I AM often more sensitive when I’m triggered. Like, a lot more sensitive. And I don’t see why that’s necessarily a problem that we have to pretend doesn’t happen. When I’m really triggered, it is often (not always, but often) difficult for me to understand that I am not currently living through the abuse, because the pain and terror IS current. I usually end up noticing that I’m triggered and isolate myself so that a) no one can abuse me and b) I won’t accidentally think someone is abusing me when they aren’t. Thankfully, I’ve never reacted to someone inappropriately while I was triggered thus far, but I recognize that it is a possibility. I just think that’s important to acknowlege, although I might have misunderstood what the OP meant by “more sensitive.”
I can see what you’re saying here. I was kind of unclear. I meant that it’s not that people suddenly started reacting to horrible things like abuse or rape or murder in a more “sensitive” way, it’s that people have always been vulnerable and sensitive, and now their voices and stories are more visible. I didn’t mean to imply that being sensitive (i.e., reacting how most people would react to X horrible situation, or flashbacks of that situation) is somehow wrong. It’s totally reasonable and okay.
happiness is not automatically good
[trigger warning: depression, prescriptivism, brief mention of suicide]
Let’s talk about “happiness”, and how it’s not automatically good.
What people don’t understand about depression or any number of other similar conditions is that happiness is not always a “good” thing. When I was a teenager, after two suicide attempts, even getting back to “baseline” was a struggle. I had been stuck in this depressive rut for so long that it was painful to feel anything else— I had gotten so used to the idea of being sad, so attached to it as the norm, that to feel or attempt to feel anything else was a struggle. When you’re sad for a long time, you get used to it. To not feel sadness would mean being incredibly uncomfortable (read: unsafe).
So happiness was not automatically good at that time— it was actually really terrible and painful to get to. I still have times when I subconsciously avoid situations that would create not-sadness, because it is such a difficult thing for me. I am sure there are others who feel the same way— others who understand that happiness is not automatically good.
When people who are outside of depression tell you that things will “get better”, or that if you just do X, your life will improve, they are doing that from their perspective of what happiness is. They assume that all people in the world are trying to achieve happiness, when actually a lot of people just want to get to okayness or not-unsafeness. For those people, it is impossible to imagine happiness. It actually hurts to, because they cannot believe it would ever happen, or they’ve never really felt that way to begin with, so they have no point of reference.
It’s much safer to just remain with what is comfortable. Yes, eventually most people do have to push through their discomfort/feeling of being unsafe to finally get to something better. But when outsiders (that is, people who are no longer in that place or people who have never been there) say this it’s insulting. They don’t have that understanding that the emotional and sometimes physical risk involved in that push can make being happy seem far too dangerous.
it may be time for me to get rid of a few value judgments.
I’ve seen several posts by different people (and had others reblog my own posts disagreeing with some things I said) that have made me think on this.
For example, “strength”. It is an entirely subjective thing. Some people think it’s all about physical strength, other people think of emotional strength, and others still just don’t like the idea at all. I’ve found that I constantly toe this line in my head between “I am not strong, i’m just lucky”, and “I am a superhero with super strength”.
The “luck” part is what I am concerned about. Because my “strength” is derived from my sheer luck in having a family with strong values, decent financial and educational resources, having been born in a modernized country, etc. It would be much harder to deal with abuse and rape if I did not have these resources behind me— things which I take for granted and forget about existing around me all of the time.
Someone could say I’m strong for making X choice, but for others, they don’t even have the opportunity to make a decision in the first place (maybe they are from a poorer background, for example). So to call it all my own doing is just ridiculous and unrealistic. (Emotional) Strength is subjective. There’s no way to measure it in some quantitative way like you can with weight-lifting. It just is and it’s a different thing from person to person.
You also have to think about who is deciding these things. Who’s defining them? Because the mainstream idea of what strength is = white, able-bodied, neurotypical, cis gender man. It is all questionable.
Another judgement I worry about is intelligence— it doesn’t make sense to judge people just because they were born into crappy schooling, or they just think and feel differently. And it’s not even a binary path— there’s many different kinds of intelligence— many different ways of thinking and experiencing. Who decides what is the “best” or the “worst “?
i hate more than anything when people call me strong (followers i’m lookin at you)
i’m not being strong, i’m SURVIVING, and barely fucking scraping by with the immense privileges that i have
[tw mention of suicide] i’m not strong because i didn’t kill myself any of the times i came so close to doing so in the last six months, whether it were kneeling into my friend’s kitchen floor cabinets crying my soul out or the time i actually wrote that full-fledged suicide note.[/tw]
i’m so tired of peoples’ attempt at comforting me being “you’re strong, you’re smart, you’re beautiful” just don’t hold me on a fucking pedestal, none of that is relevant
sorry if this wasn’t the main point of the original post :x
Nooooo, this is exactly what I meant. I’ve met several survivors who feel the same/similar ways lately, like other people tell them that they are “strong”, but it ultimately doesn’t mean anything because they don’t see themselves that way. Maybe there are times when hearing that from others is useful, but there is a point where it starts to become hurtful. Sometimes people even use it in this backwards kind of emotion-policing way, as if to say, “you are strong and therefore you shouldn’t feel sad/fucked up/whatever”. Which is a problem, because it starts to imply that there is something wrong with that person, or that they really are failing out of poor personal decisions when it’s not their fault at all.
Everyone else in the whole world might say that a person is “strong”, but if that one person who is the subject decides that they don’t like to hear that, then maybe we should stop using that as a descriptor for them. Maybe we need to reconsider strength and, instead of seeing it as something that can be used in a broad sense for certain qualities, start seeing it as a very personal, individual label that people take on when/if they want to.
i have this theory
[trigger warning: sexual abuse, rape]
You know how in academic (especially English) critical theory now there’s this idea of applying “lenses” or “theories” onto works? Like you’d analyze The Great Gatsby from an environmental angle, or from a Marxist theory angle, or from a gendered angle, etc., each time finding out something new and interesting. It might not be true, or how the author wanted it seen, but it is still an exercise in different perspectives and sometimes a great way to check your privilege.
I want there to be a theory— let’s call it Survivor Theory for now— that asks, “What if the characters in this story have been sexually abused?”, “What if the author was sexually abused?”, and maybe even, “What if the author is close to someone who survived sexual violence?” It would then demand analysis from that theoretical perspective.
The idea is that sexual violence is so prevalent that it HAS to have affected people and society on multiple levels, regardless of direct experience or not. This theory would require people to know about how trauma responses work, how triggers work, and how people process memory, especially as children or in altered states. It would require people to question nuclear family structures and to question innate ideas of authority (parents, medical establishments, siblings, etc) and credibility.
Of course, there is no one experience of sexual violence, and surviving sexual violence. That is one of the big drawbacks of such an analysis— it’s always very limited and does not go into much depth or nuance. But I think it would be worth it to always have Survivor Theory on hand. I’ve been close to survivors long enough now to understand that
sometimesmany times, we act or react in ways that at first may seem to be caused by some other thing, but actually stem out of our abuse or other triggers (i know i do it quite a lot). Often, if the person does not explain how/why X is an issue, sexual abuse would never have even come up; if we start to take the initiative and suggest to ourselves the what-if, the possibility of sexual abuse, we can break down a lot of these barriers and start to understand things more. By having a specific theory to remind of us of this very likely possibility, we can check our privileges and find new ways to analyze work.I like the idea of Survivor Theory because a lot of us survivors (i’d say most) are not given the space to even consider the very simple idea that our experiences with abuse and sexual violence are pervasive and have influenced almost every aspect of our lives. By saying, “hey, this issue could be here” across all critical analysis— in art, film, music, politics, academic theory— we can start to get the space and awareness of the issue that we need.
A person reblogged this and pointed out how intrusive and terrible it would be to analyze the author or creator of a work. I wouldn’t want strangers making up things and asking about my experience(s) without my permission. That would be really terrible in a prescriptivist kind of way, like I am supposed to feel X way. Survivors/victims should have the right to decide who can or cannot discuss their experience(s). People doing that without consent is pretty awful in itself.
I do still believe that this analysis could be useful for analyzing fictional people in a book, film,etc . Not sure if that crosses any boundaries but I don’t think it does (at least for now), since these are self-contained worlds without real people that are meant for analysis and outside consideration.
How I feel about survival:
Some days: 90% guts, 10% luck
Other days: 60% guts, 40% luck
But most days: 5% guts, 95% luck and pure coincidence.
This is why it feels strange when people tell me that I am an “inspiration” or whatever. It’s because I don’t feel like the work was really something I tried super hard for. The majority of my survival has been tucking my arms and legs in and letting the current carry me wherever it was headed. I just happened to get lucky and it took me somewhere better.
Many people are not so lucky. They are still fighting, or they didn’t make it. Those are the ones with real guts. Not me.
i don’t understand the LOKI mechs in the Mass Effect universe…
They’re slow and incredibly awkward. All they do is march out into plain sight for you to shoot at, and they miss half the time. But for some reason every military organization uses them.
The LOKI mechs are like a parody of themselves— it reminds me of old Ray Bradbury-era 1950s science fiction, when the robots were super clunky, they took ten years to walk one step, and they could only respond in little snippets. But the Mass Effect universe is is set in an era of deep-space travel, of interspecies cooperation and nanomachines. It makes absolutely no sense economically to invest resources into a bipedal 300-500 pound metal robot that can barely defend itself when you’ve got nanoprocessors, force fields, and anti-gravity technology. They are this weird anachronism in the time period.
When you go to the crashed ship site to find Jacob’s father in ME2, you encounter mechs from ten years ago and they are THE EXACT SAME as the present day ones. This means that the company making them has not improved on them in ten years— ten years in an era when computer speeds probably double every week. My theory is that they have some kind of huge monopoly over the market, and so they have no need to improve upon the design. And maybe it’s some super cheap material you can just throw away.
If anything, it’s a big joke on capitalist markets and how they don’t actually encourage human innovation or improvement— once you secure your spot in the economy, you can just coast along and keep pumping out the same crappy product. You might add one or two novel improvements every market cycle, but because the market is so unpredictable, it’s actually less risky to stay with what works than to take a leap of faith and completely revamp your product into something radically better.
Anyway, LOKI mechs are terrible and they make me laugh
i have this theory
[trigger warning: sexual abuse, rape]
You know how in academic (especially English) critical theory now there’s this idea of applying “lenses” or “theories” onto works? Like you’d analyze The Great Gatsby from an environmental angle, or from a Marxist theory angle, or from a gendered angle, etc., each time finding out something new and interesting. It might not be true, or how the author wanted it seen, but it is still an exercise in different perspectives and sometimes a great way to check your privilege.
I want there to be a theory— let’s call it Survivor Theory for now— that asks, “What if the characters in this story have been sexually abused?”, “What if the author was sexually abused?”, and maybe even, “What if the author is close to someone who survived sexual violence?” It would then demand analysis from that theoretical perspective.
The idea is that sexual violence is so prevalent that it HAS to have affected people and society on multiple levels, regardless of direct experience or not. This theory would require people to know about how trauma responses work, how triggers work, and how people process memory, especially as children or in altered states. It would require people to question nuclear family structures and to question innate ideas of authority (parents, medical establishments, siblings, etc) and credibility.
Of course, there is no one experience of sexual violence, and surviving sexual violence. That is one of the big drawbacks of such an analysis— it’s always very limited and does not go into much depth or nuance. But I think it would be worth it to always have Survivor Theory on hand. I’ve been close to survivors long enough now to understand that sometimes many times, we act or react in ways that at first may seem to be caused by some other thing, but actually stem out of our abuse or other triggers (i know i do it quite a lot). Often, if the person does not explain how/why X is an issue, sexual abuse would never have even come up; if we start to take the initiative and suggest to ourselves the what-if, the possibility of sexual abuse, we can break down a lot of these barriers and start to understand things more. By having a specific theory to remind of us of this very likely possibility, we can check our privileges and find new ways to analyze work.
I like the idea of Survivor Theory because a lot of us survivors (i’d say most) are not given the space to even consider the very simple idea that our experiences with abuse and sexual violence are pervasive and have influenced almost every aspect of our lives. By saying, “hey, this issue could be here” across all critical analysis— in art, film, music, politics, academic theory— we can start to get the space and awareness of the issue that we need.
The thing about triggers is…
…people are not suddenly more sensitive than they were before. They are just starting to get more vocal.
We’re talking people who have survived horrible, terrible things. In the past, there was no way for them to really talk about their experiences. There was this huge culture of silence and shame. The internet and post modern critique and the explosion of voices in past decades have broken open that wall and given people a chance to improve the way they live and see themselves.
If you are not interested in people being more human, more capable and more productive members of society, and giving the respect required for that, fine. Your loss. But don’t be surprised when those people turn out to be your closest friends, your loved ones, your teachers, your siblings, or even YOU. Society is not perfect— it’s far from that— and we are all around you as the examples of that imperfection. Not broken, but getting better.
We are going to demand that the traumas in our lives are treated with respect not because we’re petty and shallow, but because we have as much right to survive as you.
[trigger warning: rape, language]
AHEM
Using “go eat a bag of dicks” as an insult is completely unacceptable.
Using any kind of insult in which a person is forced to participate in sex acts without consent is essentially the same as saying “I hope you get raped”. It is not okay, and it’s incredibly triggering for a lot of survivors.
To some extent, it also reinforces the idea that bodies and body parts are shameful.
IF YOU USE THIS INSULT I HOPE YOU GET EATEN BY STARVING LASER SHARKS AND THEN CRAPPED OUT INTO THE OCEAN AND DEVOURED BY PLANKTON
