18 6 / 2013
Oppressed people do not owe anyone an explanation of what they would replace their oppression with.
It is enough to demand an end to the oppression.
There is no need to promise the oppressors that the ill-gotten and undue privileges of their class will not be lost.
It is enough to demand our withheld and stolen rights.
15 6 / 2013
David Mitchell on the apparent “sincerity” of David Cameron’s position on gay marriage
David Often Disappointingly Problematic Mitchell puts it like it is about Sadist Cameron
(Source: imaginonsensemble, via kwerey)
12 6 / 2013
![My Top 12 Personal Political Peeves
People pretending to talk about class when what they really mean is lifestyle – wage slaves listen to Radio 4 and read the Guardian too!
People using ‘accessibility’ as an excuse to be intellectually lazy, especially when the people in question are doing it for the ‘benefit’ of those they probably think of as the Ignorant Masses. Patronising Educated Saviour complex much?[1]
Soft-sell politics in general – if it’s any good, the political product won’t be soft so what’s the point? If it is soft, then equally what’s the point?
Tone policing. Guess what? The revolution will not be polite.
Allies who just can’t get enough cookies.
View Post](http://24.media.tumblr.com/f04614893e712cb1b682d7426e514760/tumblr_moaib5ISN01r6lrx8o1_500.jpg)
My Top 12 Personal Political Peeves
- People pretending to talk about class when what they really mean is lifestyle – wage slaves listen to Radio 4 and read the Guardian too!
- People using ‘accessibility’ as an excuse to be intellectually lazy, especially when the people in question are doing it for the ‘benefit’ of those they probably think of as the Ignorant Masses. Patronising Educated Saviour complex much?[1]
- Soft-sell politics in general – if it’s any good, the political product won’t be soft so what’s the point? If it is soft, then equally what’s the point?
- Tone policing. Guess what? The revolution will not be polite.
- Allies who just can’t get enough cookies.
10 6 / 2013
"One of the benefits that oppression confers upon the oppressors is that the most humble among them is made to *feel* superior; thus, a ‘poor white’ in the South can console himself with the thought that he is not a ‘dirty n– ’ and the more prosperous whites cleverly exploit this pride. Similarly, the most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women."
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Introduction)
* Lots of things to say about this: a) patriarchy and misogyny are instrumental to class oppression (divide and rule, right?); b) however many psychological and emotional advantages the dismantling of patriarchy might bring men (to supposedly counter the loss of material privilege it would entail), it will never be an unambiguous good for them; c) any approximation to separatism is always going to scare oppressed men for this reason, and men from the ruling classes will use that against us.
** I’ll let someone else (who isn’t white) comment on the race implications.
09 6 / 2013
Skinny White Girls and Straight Women
I don’t deny that there are important advantages to being thin in a society that has made ‘thin’ an explicit compliment and ‘fat’ an explicit insult. Whilst my thinness doesn’t get a free pass but is very much and very vocally noted, constantly, this tends to have more positive than negative consequences for me: thinness is associated with patriarchally desirable feminine traits like self-control, conformity, even self-effacement and masochism. A skinny white girl is usually a non-threat until she reveals her hairy armpits and her lesbianism. Even when a skinny white girl is a threat (to other women, I’ve found), in the immediate term this is only hurtful as opposed to harmful – y’know, because of the patriarchy and how women don’t hold much power anyway.
I imagine (and to an extent remember, from my inordinately long time in the closet) that this is what it’s like to be a straight woman. You’re given a pass, but it’s certainly not free.
05 6 / 2013
Is a Minority of One a Lunatic?
Righteous though it might be to give so many fucks you can’t give any fucks at all any more (which is how I’ve experienced depression) doesn’t it still amount to feeling like shit? And, as it’s the existing structures of society with their inherently oppressive dynamics that you hate so much which are making you feel like shit, your feeling like shit amounts to being shit on. Your nemeses are shitting on you; you are clearly losing the battle with them. Maybe that’s a better or at least comprehensible and therefore nominally more empowering narrative than internalising all the oppression and just hating yourself but then you end up hating yourself anyway because who has nemeses?! Your colleagues and siblings and people don’t have nemeses!
04 6 / 2013
"The proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males. The bond that unites her to her oppressors is not comparable to any other. Here is to be found the basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to each other. One could have supposed that this reciprocity might have facilitated the liberation of woman. [But] in truth woman has not been socially emancipated through man’s need - sexual desire and the desire for offspring - which makes the male dependent upon the female. Master and slave also are united by a reciprocal need, in this case economic, which does not liberate the slave."
28 5 / 2013
"The parallel between women and the proletariat is valid in that neither ever formed a minority or separate collective unit of mankind […] But proletarians have not always existed, whereas there have always been women. Throughout history they have always been subordinated to men and hence their dependency is not the result of a historical event or a social change - it was not something that *occurred*. The reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute is in part that it lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts. A condition brought about at a certain time can be abolished at some other time. But it might seem that a natural condition is beyond the possibility of change. In truth, however, the nature of things is no more immutably given , once for all, than is historical reality. If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change […] The women’s effort has never been more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received."
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Introduction)
*I don’t read this as saying “Women, y u so shit?” but as saying that our relationship to men and the relationship of our political struggle to patriarchy is what keeps us from transforming ourselves from Other to Essential, or from Object to Subject.
