Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

medium.com

I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out. — Medium

[thegestianpoet]

“Because for some transwomen, femininity can feel asymptotic — the closer you get, the more you feel you can never make it.”

This is a…hard, uncomfortable read if you’re a cis woman, but it’s a good read.

[suffire]

a lot to think about.

[pussy-strut]

as someone who has engaged in a lot of shitty misguided misandry in the past, this was a crucial read. who is invested in the stability of men as a category n why? how can one speak to one’s experiences with weaponized masculinity without reinforcing other kinds of structural violence, like cissexism and white supremacy? 

[collaterlysisters]

This is a bullshit article. It reflects tremendous self-loathing, and it was irresponsible for Medium to publish it. “It’s so hard the other girls don’t know my tragic trans narrative, because I have made a conscious decision to live it only in dreams and online anonymous op-eds and will never ever tell them.”

 This is another case of cis people exploiting the pain and suffering of trans people who aren’t in a position to know better.

I originally discussed this article in some depth on facebook so please read on for a (slightly choppy) elaboration of my reaction:

[antriebsloosigkeit]

I just read the text. I don’t know what I think about it yet, but I know one thing for sure : wow, fuck you :) @collaterlysisters

[mitoticcephalopod]

let me add on to this, fuck you @collaterlysisters

[mitigatedchaos]

Ah, yes, I read this some time ago.

I can never be a true traditionalist, because I want to build the switch and obliterate dozens of category distinctions in doing so.  It’s the only way to end many of the existing tensions within so many systems.  Eventually, you have to go beyond triaging with limited resources and build such an overwhelmingly powerful economy that you can choose all the options you wanted before simultaneously.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

It really seems like a lot of the resistance to sex positivity comes from a desire to be able to appeal to a set of socially agreed-upon standards rather than do the work of asserting boundaries. Or, less charitably, out of a desire to artificially increase your dating pool by making people feel like they’re morally obligated to adhere to your standards for a desirable partner.

[mitigatedchaos]

Higher partner count correlates with lower marriage success rate. Men have also had to deal with paternal uncertainty for millenia. Both are going to have a warping effect. And women are still so protected that men cannot unilaterally order a paternity test in France, so that isn’t going away.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[silver-and-ivory]

are you a “makes fun of otherkin” anti-sj or are you a “writes thousand word posts about intersectionality and the evils of normativity” anti-sj

[mitigatedchaos]

I’m “thinks otherkin are ridiculous since that’s not a realistic variation on human brain designs, but supports their right to morphological freedom in the transhuman future”.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[silver-and-ivory]

Every time that I’ve talked about feeling white guilt and in general being seen as a white person, people have said things like, “But… aren’t you Asian?”

And they’re right to say that, to be clear! It’s really shitty to reduce Asians to Basically-White if they disagree with you, and I appreciate everyone who pointed the gross unfairness of this action out.

But at the same time I feel like they’re missing the point. For all intents and purposes, as someone who’s been adopted across racial lines, I am white. I am white-cultured. I am Western-cultured. I’m American in my individualism and my perspectives.

And that feels wrong to ignore as well.

When kyriarchy tries to cleave reality at inexact and ill-defined fault lines, people rightly object. Categories don’t cut neatly; there are always people who queer binaries by their very existence. Forcing them to Choose a Side rarely works out well.

The same applies to sj. I’m racially Chinese and ethnically white-American; you can’t discredit the white part of me without also ignoring and erasing the Chinese part, and you can’t pedestalize the Chinese part without ignoring and erasing the white part.

Under white supremacy, either my white-American ethnicity is celebrated and my Chinese race is “excused” (and erased), or my white-American ethnicity is erased and my Chinese race is denounced. Under the reverse discourse, either my Chinese race is celebrated while my white-American ethnicity is “excused” (and erased), or my Chinese race is erased and my white-American ethnicity is denounced.

Sj must not forget intersectionality. It must not forget that identities lead to complicated intersections that are inseparable from each other. It must deconstruct and replace kyriarchal categories rather than enforcing them.

I’m not American+Chinese. I’m Chinese American.

[mitigatedchaos]

I propose a model in which power is represented and analyzed as a graph of relationships between individuals, where nodes represent individuals and weighted directed edges represent power relationships.

Relationships that effect groups can then be observed and measured without reducing all members of those groups into indistinct blobs where all members are considered interchangeable, or venn diagram intersections.

Edit: May also be of interest to @theunitofcaring.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

huffingtonpost.com

Inside The Online Community Of Men Who Preach Removing Condoms Without Consent

Research on the practice of "stealthing" explores how victims can seek justice.

[marsinlibra]

Men’s Rights Advocates will go on and on about how they think a woman is going to trap them in to a pregnancy (why not get male birth control then?) but in reality, men are more likely to try to trap women to stay with them with a forced/unwanted pregnancy.

There’s even a whole fetish for forced impregnation.

[auntiewanda]

“But why don’t you trust men” men will cry, when there are entire swaths of entitled men dedicating themselves to deceiving women at every turn. 

[theunitofcaring]

According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, about 10% of men and 9% of women have experienced reproductive coercion (lying to your partner about birth control, sabotaging your partner’s birth control, refusing to use a condom). 

I think it’s a mistake for campaigns to raise awareness about forms of domestic violence and intimate partner abuse to try to divide the male and female victims of reproductive coercion like this. There are abusers of both genders who lie about birth control, sabotage condoms or take them off during sex, and ignore their partner’s autonomy in reproductive decision making; there are victims of both genders who have experienced this behavior. We can raise awareness about abuse without implying that men who have been abused in this way, or who fear being abused in this way, are lying. 

In general, if you are writing about abuse and intimate partner violence and your instinct is to say “oh, people say that [this group of people] suffers from this, but in reality, [this group of people] are the ones really suffering from this!!” what you are communicating to abuse victims is that unless they’re in the right category, their abuse doesn’t matter, awareness and solidarity are not for them, and they should stop talking so as not to distract from the real victims.

Instead, the right way to address the content of the article is to say “lots of women experience reproductive coercion, and awareness of reproductive coercion is important! Here’s what it looks like, here’s how widespread it is, here’s how to protect yourself if you’re in a relationship with someone who engages in it.” No need to imply that other abuse isn’t real or doesn’t matter as much. 

Inform and empower people, don’t try to recruit them to one side in The Discourse.

[aellagirl]

Oh I wrote an angry post about this Huffington Article! Copypaste here:

The Huffington Post posted this article, which talks about the phenomenon of men secretly removing condoms before sex.

This is definitely a terrible thing and I agree it happens to women. The article was careful to frame this as such:

“One can note,” Brodsky writes, “that proponents of ‘stealthing’ root their support in an ideology of male supremacy in which violence is a man’s natural right.”

Because of the connection between stealthing and sexual assault, and the fact that both acts are rooted in beliefs of male dominance and supremacy…

Brodsky highlights the online communities who defend stealthing as a male “right,” particularly a right of every man to “spread his seed” ― regardless of if said man is engaging in straight or gay penetrative sex

OKAY. HOLD UP.

1. The ‘community’ of men stealthing women seems to come mostly from this link right here. In the study she implies that there are multiple sources: “One commenter on an article“ and “Another defender, commenting on a blog post detailing one man’s “strategy” for stealthing” are references to the same link above. All further quotes she cites for the misogynistic stealthing of women come from that one page. My google searches for further men-stealthing-women only turned up that one page.

2. That last quote was originally ““So you’ve got a condom watcher[.] Someone who is monitoring too closely for a tip-off broken condom or to slip it off mid-fuck,” he says. “How are you going to breed[?]” from the study. The original quote is on the forum here. This is entirely about gay sex, on a gay sex forum, and even is clarified as gay in the original study. When the Huffington Post quotes it, however, it’s careful to qualify it as: “regardless of if said man is engaging in straight or gay penetrative sex”

3. By far, the longest stealthing-promoting community online is the Bareback Brotherhood, which is an entirely gay community. In fact, nearly every single stealthing advocate online I could find was in the gay community.

—–

In the Huffington Post article, every single victim the author lists is female. I had a hard time finding any personal reports online about being a victim of stealth seeding, except for this one, who is male.

Basically, if we’re going off ‘online communities,’ as this article is, stealth seeding is probably mostly an issue in the gay community, with men as victims. 

[theunitofcaring]

…huh. Thank you for looking into that. The erasure of male victims is horrible either way but the use of quotes about abuse of men, decontextualized to make it seem like they’re about women and then spread around to claim that only women are victimized, really raises it to a whole new level of horrible. 

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

uproxx.com

A GOP Lawmaker Has Been Exposed As A Notorious Reddit Misogynist

State representative Robert Fisher has been revealed as the founder of Reddit's notorious misogynist forum 'Red Pill.'

[kumagawa]

MFMMG??

[zoobus]

The red pill is one of, if not the most female hating subs on reddit, and I mean that. Outright disgust and contempt of women, encouragement of rape, praising abuse, mod sanctioned vileness, and preying on vulnerable men to draw in their ranks.

Assuming you can stomach it (tw casual support of abuse, rape, and misogyny - I mean this literally, one of the first pics suggests a dude film himself sexually assaulting his gf white she sleeps bc she joined the military, another explicitly states women have no value) I recommend checking out the kind of shit that got upvoted and posted to trp. This is what a man working in the law created:
http://m.imgur.com/a/bGiiW

[ranma-official]

what the fuck

[mitigatedchaos]

Heyso usually you can’t trust media reporting on male gender stuff (remember “MRAs Hate Fury Road!”?) but TRP really is so misogynist that I can’t even bring myself to read it. His constituents should be informed of this.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

huffingtonpost.com

Inside The Online Community Of Men Who Preach Removing Condoms Without Consent

Research on the practice of "stealthing" explores how victims can seek justice.

[marsinlibra]

Men’s Rights Advocates will go on and on about how they think a woman is going to trap them in to a pregnancy (why not get male birth control then?) but in reality, men are more likely to try to trap women to stay with them with a forced/unwanted pregnancy.

There’s even a whole fetish for forced impregnation.

[mitigatedchaos]

1. Citation on the numbers or admitting you’re just estimating them, please. There are places where women discuss doing this sort of thing to men as well and it is similarly not seen as wrong locally.

2. What male birth control? A recent study for male hormonal birth control was cancelled due to side effects, vasalgel has not arrived in the West yet (but there was crowdfunding that some MRAs may have contributed to IIRC), and vasectomies are still fairly permanent. Condoms are the existing male birth control that is actually available to men.

3. Women have more options if this happens than men do. You have not actually defeated the MRA point that women have more reproductive rights (in the West) than men do.

4. It most likely is not MRAs doing this.

5. By making it adversarial, you have avoided the space where an actual gender-neutral law could get broader support to prohibit the practice in both directions, which MRAs would like, as well as the moral upper ground. Of course, once that hit the news it would spawn a few national conversations about women that weren’t particularly flattering, but the lack of those conversations is contributing both to what you would call “misogyny” and to the creation of MRAs.

6. No seriously, why are you making this adversarial, burning political energy on fighting men that would be okay with a law banning it instead of men that wouldn’t? You won’t demobilize MRAs with “women are the real victims, male suffering doesn’t matter” type stuff, you won’t prevent the creation of more MRAs, you won’t make passage of a law banning the practice more likely (and if you did make it more likely that would prove misandry on the part of society), all it does is provide reason to oppose something that shouldn’t really be opposed or, being more uncharitable here, prevent conversations where we find out how many women really think like this (enabling us to overcome that and educate them) and maybe spreading from that conversations about why.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[nostalgebraist]

I posted this as a comment over at Ozy’s blog, but I figured it was a long enough ramble that it might as well be a tumblr post.  Cut because it’s yet another post about incels and Nice Guys and all that stuff you don’t want to read yet another post about

[galacticwiseguy]

I’ve always believed that the grain of truth to “girls only go for assholes” culture is that…people who see this spectrum aren’t completely wrong.

In the world we live in, the world of Schrodinger’s Rapist, putting yourself out there at all is kind of an asshole move. Men (if they’re decent and paying attention) are aware that many women are sick of male attention, any male attention with a sexual bent, and that hitting on someone in any way has a strong potential to make that person really unhappy or uncomfortable, especially if you have poor social skills or trouble reading people.

If you’re aware that any attempt to make a romantic or sexual connection could really easily end up threatening and unpleasant, then you have a clear moral imperative to never hit on anyone. And therefore you’re alone, and you see people who do hit on people (assholes by definition) succeeding in their romantic endeavours, which leads to bitterness and resentment against both the “assholes” and against the women who “reward their behavior,” their behavior being “having the temerity to ever approach anyone.”

this is also what leads otherwise-decent people into “friendzone” thinking: approaching people in explicitly platonic ways doesn’t incur this worry that you’ll hurt them or make them uncomfortable with your attention. (This is of course contrary to reality: friendly approach by someone who gives you the heebie-jeebies is probably going to cause a lot more distress than a socially-competent pass. But I think this is the construction going on in their heads.) Because these people see themselves as performing the correct and moral actions of never subjecting women to explicitly sexual attention, they end up feeling like they deserve a reward.

i guess the point I’m trying to make is, I completely agree with your post and find it very illuminating, but I question the central thesis that there is a complete qualitative disconnect between the confidence of decent human behavior and the confidence of asshole hypermasculinity. existing as a man in patriarchal society means that acting with even a baseline, moderate level of confidence can make you a threatening figure.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[anaisnein]

To expand a bit, it’s clear to me at this point that I do have dysphoria, physical and socio-emotional, but I don’t think that I’m trans in any meaningful sense. 

Becoming a guy emphatically does not feel like a solution or a goal. It feels like a whole other giant sack of trouble I don’t want. One which would be even more difficult to execute on and maintain because I don’t have the experience or expertise or fluency in it that I do with this one, and I’d have to outsource key infrastructure which would involve a lot of overhead and basic insecurity,.and let’s not even get into the brand equity, personal, professional, relational, etc costs of transition like holy fucking shit, and I don’t even want this? I don’t have this vision of how if things were just different I could be a guy and it would be right-feeling and comfortable and authentic. It wouldn’t. It’d just be more performance, and I’d be considerably worse at it. 

That doesn’t make it any more comfortable to be permanently trapped in a Jessica Rabbit flesh-and-bone costume, but you don’t get to fix that unless you want to be a guy and frankly the available technologies for it aren’t that goddamn great even if you do..

What I really-really want is to not have all this unbelievably extra anatomy. It’s wrong-feeling, infrastructurally unsound, painful, inconvenient, unaesthetic and a huge pain in my ass. (Secondarily it would be nice to not have my gender be the screamingly obtrusive most noticeable thing about my body so the misogynists can tell from 200 feet away who to de-agentize and make jump through extra hoops and I can’t go outside at night without fear and etc, but if it were just that and not any of the physical stuff I think I could write this off as internalized misogyny. Unfortunately the physical stuff is worse.). And if I thought transition would really solve all of those problems and I could magic it by hitting a button, then yeah, it’d be the least-worst option, but I don’t think it would, and there isn’t a magic button, and “least-worst” just doesn’t feel like grounds for pursuing it.

[anaisnein]

@limnaia asked on the other thread: 

Seriously, though, have you considered perhaps you’re non-binary gendered and just want a body that reflects that?

I think it probably does net out to nonbinary. But “nonbinary” doesn’t seem to pull much problem-solving weight semantically or practically. Then what? Do solutions follow?

I know how this plays out. I’m bi/pan, and in my actual life that has washed up mostly as “not entitled to claim to be gay so living a superficially straight life while feeling bad and stuck and angry and bitter about it but also still alienated from queerness so whatever,” and I can already feel this going the same way but I don’t know what to do differently. Trans stuff in 2017 is about where sexuality stuff was in 1987 and there’s a reason that that went the way it did for me. And it feels higher-stakes to act on anything or claim a label wrt gender than sexuality, and we’ve established that I am a wuss. 

And again, what’s the prize? There are no super great solutions out there to go claim. Hip reduction surgery doesn’t exist, T is a goddamn injectable because FDA said no to pills and all the effects I want are reversible, late, require major effort to support etc and all the effects that are permanent and reasonably quick are the ones I’m meh or wary of, and I probably couldn’t even get it on a nonbinary basis, IDK. (I talked to someone on here who has T gel and also E and an endocrinologist sympathetic to hormonal experimentation and was like, ooooh, but that’s a rough fucking goal to target, like, Endocrinologist Georg is an outlier adn should not have been sought)

[fierceawakening]

This resonates with me very strongly. Particularly the “I think I would not fit in in exactly the opposite way if I lived as a man” part.

I feel like if I lived in a society that had a “female masculine” gender, like some cultures do, I would uncomplicatedly consider myself that gender. I’d probably at least try hormones IF the society would still recognize me as that gender.

I do not think I want to be seen as a guy. I think I want to try masculinizing my body to see if it brings my body more in line with my internal map, because I think it might.

I know that in my current culture I have the option of calling myself nonbinary, and I did for a while. But my mind associates nonbinary with a particular kind of cultural/social role (and most especially a role tied to a youth culture that I don’t identify with) that doesn’t match what I think I am very well.

[mindthelspace]

I’m relating very much to this conversation. My relationship to sex and gender is also totally incompatible with a lot of the more popular queer theory (albeit for slightly different reasons to the above posters). 

Like, the Right Thing to do these days in young queer circles is to minimise the relevance of biological sex (to the point of saying it doesn’t exist and that bodies can’t be gendered), and augment gender as this important aspect of your self that has nothing to do with your body, and that you sort of feel your way to. 

… But my self-concept of gender is tied entirely to my body. know I’m a woman because I am biologically female and don’t (with a possible slight exception*) experience gender dysphoria. However, I’ve never had any real desire to feel ‘girly’, ‘feminine’, or ‘womanly’, gendered social treatment is something that I wish would get away from me forever, and I couldn’t even begin to guess how I’d respond in one of those hypothetical scenarios involving waking up in a male body. So, if “birth sex is irrelevant, gender is important and all about feels” becomes the status quo, then, well,… good luck navigating that, me. 

Of course, I understand that the “birth sex irrelevant, gender important, bodies aren’t gendered” construct exists because its helpful to some people. I’m increasingly seeing all this as a competing access needs issue, not between cis and trans people (as many are prone to construe it), but between people who have a strong internal sense of gender which is separate to their body, and those whose sense of gender is very tied to their body. Group A needs “bodies aren’t gendered, your breasts and vagina are male if you want them to be”, and group B needs “Your gender= your birth sex + presence or absence of dysphoria”. And I’d imagine there are also a lot of people who’d prefer something in between the two, or an entirely different metric. 

*This exception is muscle strength (or lack of it). This can’t be fixed on it’s own, and I don’t think identifying as a different gender would make me feel any more comfortable about it (it may even make me feel worse). It’s also the only sex characteristic I’m uncomfortable with, so I feel the cause is more likely to be related to my discomfort with feeling weak, or with gender roles/expectations, than discomfort with my sex. 

[fierceawakening]

This makes a lot of sense to me. I’ve never disputed whether I’m female. I’m not entirely sure what doing that would even mean.

I have and do wonder if I am happiest in an unmodified body, and I also know the connection between my unmodified body and “femininity” is part of the problem for me.

It seems very easy for the queer theory kids to say gender, expression, and bodies don’t link. But I still can’t seem to UNLINK mine.

[madeofpatterns]

I don’t think demanding that others deny the physical realities of our bodies is a legitimate access need.

[fierceawakening]

I’m… I don’t know.

Like, I really really have trouble with “biology is cissexist,” when the reason “male” and “female” exist as classifications is not JUST to talk about social constructs but also to talk about reproductive capability. I can’t get past that.

But I also don’t have a problem with someone who isn’t saying “any body is male or female if you just say so” and is saying something more like “well my body is not the paradigmatic male body, but hormones and surgery have altered it enough that I feel comfortable calling it good.”

I don’t want to take that second thing away from people. But the first thing baffles me.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[earthboundricochet]

Everytime an anti-sj/”skeptical”/whatever says that using the right pronouns for trans people is a matter of courtesy I want to scream in the void

[nvidiatitanx]

What’s wrong with saying it’s about respect/courtesy?

[brazenautomaton]

if it is about respect, then you misgender people you don’t respect (as we see SJ do to any outside The In Clique) and then accurate pronouns are something you must earn by adherence to their ideology

[mitigatedchaos]

It’s about winning the local battle (pronouns), since it’s easier than winning the war (trans is legit), and maybe if the local battle is won people will go easier.

But it does have that side effect.