we walked through berkeley, south of campus, today. there was some kind of major sports event and everything was covered in crowds of, predominantly, young people in dark blue and gold, walking around and enjoying themselves. these people were very, very gendered—clothing, affect were not just loosely bimodal, they were *partitioned*.
we felt oppressed by these people: looking at them hijacked visual information processing because they’d so neatly split themselves into exactly two types of people. this felt like a violation, like they were forcing me to pay attention to their weirdo kink in order to understand my environment. it also made me dysphoric about those items of clothing i wore which could be worn by at least one of (exactly one of) College Sports Fan (M) and College Sports Fan (F), since they were observing me and being forced into their frame, even in the mind of another where it did not affect me, would be horrifying. they exerted pressure on the social field and forced it to reshape itself to fit them through sheer strength in numbers, so that i felt it pressing on me just by being around them
if it was a sports event there should have been four types of people
Couldn’t someone feel oppressed by the opposite as well?
