Pinned
I am not currently in full control of where and how my money is spent. I therefore cannot donate to gofundmes. It kills me and I wish that I could but I can’t.
Reblogged unmarketableplushy
A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer, Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why. ... Fellow researchers took to social media over the weekend to register their concern over the series of events. "None of this is in any way normal," Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: "Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???" In the same thread, Matt Blaze, a McDevitt professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University, said: "It's hard to imagine what reason there could be for the university to scrub its website as if he never worked there. And while there's a process for removing tenured faculty, it takes more than an afternoon to do it."
Reblogged so-3i3
In general, understanding radical feminism for what it is and why it appeals to many people requires an understanding that the greatest strength of radical feminism as a tool for understanding misogyny and sexism is also its greatest faultline.
See, radical feminism is a second wave position in feminist thought and development. It is a reaction to what we sometimes call first wave feminism, which was so focused on specific legal freedoms that we usually refer to the activists who focused on it as suffragists or suffragettes: that is, first wave feminists were thinking about explicit laws that said "women cannot do this thing, and if they try, the law of the state and of other powerful institutions will forcibly evict them." Women of that era were very focused on explicit and obvious barriers to full participation in public and civil life, because there were a lot of them: you could not vote, you could not access education, you could not be trained in certain crucial professions, you could not earn your own pay even if you decided you wanted to.
And so these activists began to try to dig into the implicit beliefs and cultural structures that served to trap women asking designated paths, even if they did wish to do other things. Why is it that woman are pressured not to go into certain high prestige fields, even if in theory no one is stopping them? How do our ideas and attitudes about sex and gender create assumptions and patterns and constrictions that leave us trapped even when the explicit chains have been removed?
The second wave of feminism, then, is what happened when the daughters of this first wave--and their opponents--looked around and said to themselves: hold on, the explicit barriers are gone. The laws that treat us as a different and lesser class of people are gone. Why doesn't it feel like I have full access to freedoms that I see the men around me enjoying? What are the unspoken laws that keep us here?
And so these activists focused on the implicit ideas that create behavioral outcomes. They looked inward to interrogate both their own beliefs and the beliefs of other people around them. They discovered many things that were real and illuminated barriers that people hadn't thought of, especially around sexual violence and rape and trauma and harassment. In particular, these activists became known for exercises like consciousness-raising, in which everyday people were encouraged to sit down and consider the ways in which their own unspoken, implicit beliefs contributed to general societal problems of sexism and misogyny.
Introspection can be so intoxicating, though, because it allows us to place ourselves at the center of the social problems that we see around us. We are all naturally a little self centered, after all. When your work is so directly tied to digging up implications and resonances from unspoken beliefs, you start getting really into drawing lines of connection from your own point of interest to other related marginalizations--and for this generation of thinkers, often people who only experienced one major marginalization got the center of attention. Compounding this is the reality that it is easier to see the impacts of marginalization when they apply directly to you, and things that apply to you seem more important.
So some of this generation of thinkers thought to themselves, hang on. Hang on. Misogyny has its fingers in so many pies that we don't see, and I can see misogyny echoing through so many other marginalizations too--homophobia especially but also racism and ableism and classism. These echoes must be because there is one central oppression that underlies all the others, and while theoretically you could have a society with no class distinctions and no race distinctions, just biologically you always have sex and gender distinctions, right? So: perhaps misogyny is the original sin of culture, the well from which all the rest of it springs. Perhaps there's really no differences in gender, only in sex, and perhaps we can reach equality if only we can figure out how to eradicate gender entirely. Perhaps misogyny is the root from which all other oppressions stem: and this group of feminists called themselves radical feminists, after that root, because radix is the Latin word for root.
Very few of this generation of thinkers, you may be unsurprised to note, actually lived under a second marginalization that was not directly entangled with sexism and gender; queerness was pretty common, but queerness is also so very hard to distinguish from gender politics anyway. It's perhaps not surprising that at this time several Black women who were interested in gender oppression became openly annoyed and frustrated by the notion that if only we can fix gender oppression, we can fix everything: they understood racism much more clearly, they were used to considering and interrogating racism and thinking deeply about it, and they thought that collapsing racism into just a facet of misogyny cheapened both things and failed to let you understand either very well. These thinkers said: no, actually, there isn't one original sin that corrupted us all, there are a host of sins humans are prone to, and hey, isn't the concept of original sin just a little bit Christianocentric anyway?
And from these thinkers we see intersectional feminists appearing. These are the third wave, and from this point much mainstream feminist throughout moves to asking: okay, so how do the intersections of misogyny make it appear differently in all these different marginalized contexts? What does misogyny do in response to racial oppression? What does it look like against this background, or that one?
But the radical feminists remained, because seeing your own problems and your own thought processes as the center of the entire world and the answer to the entire problem of justice is very seductive indeed. And they felt left behind and got quite angry about this, and cast about for ways to feel relevant without having to decenter themselves. And, well, trans women were right there, and they made such a convenient target...
That's what a TERF is.
Now you know.
i feel like it bears clarifying it’s not that trans women were a convenient target, it’s from what you said before, that they believe biological sex is the number one reality underpinning everyone, and gender expression is fake, which immediately leads to the conclusion that transgender people are misogynistic for (supposedly) reinforcing the existence of gender, which is inherently oppressive to women. this then takes a variety of forms from there on, but i just think it’s important to stress that the transphobia and transmisogyny of terfs isn’t incidental, it’s intentional
Yeah, so I wrote this a few years back with the goal of trying to get folks to understand why radfem ideology isn't actually driven purely by transmisogyny, and in fact why it's very possible to have what's called a "trans-inclusive radical feminist" (TIRF) or radfems that focus on other targets altogether, like sex workers (SWERF), intersex and asexual people, transmasculine folks anywhere along the spectrum, and anyone who can be spun as "letting the side down" against the real enemy, which is men.
So if it sounds like I'm downplaying the centrality of transmisogyny to modern, post-intersectionality radical feminism in this post, it's very much because I am. I want to teach people what radical feminism looks like in terms of its ideological roots, not in terms of common targets, because radfem groups often switch their targets based on who can be attacked without incurring too much censure right off the bat. I want people to be able to recognize what has essentially become a fascist ideological understanding of gender before it targets a community that they personally recognize as an ally who needs defending. And that means divorcing your understanding of what a community is from its targets.
That being said, you are also right that transmisogyny has never been precisely accidental, and trans women have been a favorite target within feminist and queer feminist groups for going on fifty years now. They really love that whole secretly infiltrating narrative shit.
This is because as far as radical feminism is concerned, gender relations are an ongoing zero-sum, binaristic struggle between men and women in which one side must triumph, and that side better be women. People who complicate this narrative by embracing uncertainty about the dividing line between these two eternally struggling categories become targets because they question whether men and women are actually mutually exclusive and all encompassing categories, whether you can move from one category to another, whether conflicts have to be zero-sum, whether it's not all our responsibility to ally with and support men trying to build a better world for themselves along with women. That's why sex workers are such a common target: the Pornography Wars were driven by arguments about whether it was women's sexual interaction with men that was inherently degrading or whether the actual problem was the poor worker protections and pay scales within the porn industry.
I'm a butch ace woman, okay? Radfems spent at least a decade mobilizing hatred against my community as a radicalization pipeline for feminists, especially queer feminists, in this exact space on Tumblr. I have never been shy about defending trans women when I see them under fire, but I am also not shy about defending other targets, either. So I want (collective) you to be able to see what I'm talking about in terms of a shitty ideology that is tuned to capture people like us, and that means talking about how post-intersectionality radical feminism has a distinct shape of its own that isn't purely a function of transmisogyny.
You know, I want to reblog this today because one of my reading snippets has been making the rounds through radfem spaces, and I keep getting served the most atrociously bad takes. Here's the quote that kicked it off, from feminist historian of the family Stephanie Coontz in The Way We Never Were:
For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, then, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that middle-class home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies”’ dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.
That's the sum total of the post I released: that quote, Coontz's name and the date her book was last revised (2016).
The thing I find really illustrative about those responses is the sheer level of defensiveness radfems levy at that quote.
I'll add: you get some similar trends with people who, for example, only experience class oppression and see everything through a class-based lens and are convinced that if we just fix income inequality, by golly, surely that'll fix all those other oppressions!
And certainly, class does intersect with other forms of oppression. But, just, it's good to be aware of this tendency in people because it's very easy for people - including you, including me - to think that our own personal experiences and perspective is the Key to Everything, and to thus treat the oppressions other people face as secondary.
Reblogged hopealop3
okay it’s come to my attention that absolutely NONE OF YOU know ANYTHING about how cutie marks work. let me say this simply. a cutie mark isn’t a job being assigned, it’s a special TALENT OR SKILL that the pony enjoys. Most of the time it has a directly transferable job for that skill, like if you enjoy baking and are super good at it WOW! baker. If you are really good at writing and telling stories, author. However, there are some cutie marks that could go multiple ways.
twilight sparkle has exceptional magic ability, so she became a scholar, but she could really do anything that required a good magic skill. same with rainbow dash, her weather controlling job isn’t directly linked to her cutie mark, but it does fit the bill for the job.
i was posed the question of what would a murderer pony’s cutie mark be and wouldn’t everyone know. NO. if somehow murder were to be a special skill, the cutie mark might be something like a knife or a shovel. other ponies might just assume you’re good a cooking or gardening. now with cutie marks like apple jacks, their family has a ‘green thumb’ kind of deal so obviously the cutie mark would be hereditary.
so, the reason i made this post. walter white pony’s cutie mark would NOT be blue crystals. it would be a CHEMISTRY FLASK.
Reblogged aroace-polyshow
Straight guys who use tumblr are the funniest people ever literally how did you end up here
Dei hire
Reblogged aroace-polyshow
okay so I'm having a debate with my flatmates
are these all different things and if so what do you call them
Reblogged aroace-polyshow
IT... IT SHOULD'VE BEEN ME!!! OUR SHARED MUTUAL SHOULD HAVE REBLOGGED THAT POST FROM ME!!!!!!!! IT SHOULD'VE BEEN ME!!!!!!!!
Reblogged aroace-polyshow
'netizen' cutest word for internet user. It's the net and we're living here together ....
Reblogged frxnkendotmp4
uhuh okay homotron6000
Reblogged yukarishoodie
Reblogged hopealop3
I need to get into mobile game development so I can make puzzle games for middle aged moms. those women deserve better than predatory energy systems and weird fetish ads every 3 seconds. I could be the one to give them something better. I could give them a candy crush clone with SOUL.
"I fucked your mom" - weak, meaningless
"I made the match 3 app that turned your mom into an ipad baby" - brutal, devastating
Reblogged hopealop3
The straight girl kinda confused about why liking men feels weird to gay trans man pipeline is real and it's lovely in here
Why do I always relate to gay men on tv that's kinda weird anyways time to stomp down that thought again
If you wish you were a gay man you can just do it if you really want to you know. Just putting that out there for anyone who needs to hear it.
Also same goes other way around if you wanna be a lesbian just do it give it a try life is too short for you to die wondering
Reblogged bugboypussy
