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MAN IS IT HOT IN HERE OR IS IT JUST ME I SAY YOUNG MAN
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something I think more people need to understand is that rape culture has a very simple way to maintain the plausible deniability that enables mass support and investment, and that is the complete separation of the rhetorical construction of "The Rapist" and "The Pedophile" from any actual specific person who engages in sexual violence.
so often people do not believe that we could possibly live in a rape culture, they do not believe it could possibly be true that people do not care about children who were sexually abused-- they say but everyone hates rapists and pedophiles! but that's not really true. they hate the conceptual idea of The Rapist and The Pedophile, but do not actually oppose--in real world contexts, with real actual complicated people--the use of sexual violence to control, degrade, and otherwise abuse other people. they do not hate their friend who joked that their date "took some convincing" or their neighbor who publicly humiliated their adolescent child by telling their church group he was "caught" masturbating, or the cop who performs cavity searches or the guy who posted tips for "stealthing" online, or their uncle who says he "made some mistakes with women" when he was younger, or the person on social media publicly speculating about a stranger's sexual desires and sharing their nudes to degrade and humiliate them, or their granddad who was "falsely accused" of sexually abusing his daughter when "all he did" was leer and not touch, or their professor who has relationships with their students, or their acquaintance who recommends dating girls with "issues", girls who are "crazy", girls who are trans or fat or queer or have low self-esteem, because "they'll do anything", or the person they organize with who is so valuable to the movement but everyone kind of knows not to be alone in a room with them, or...
specific people who rape are usually not the deviant that most people already want a reason to expel from the community, they are the center of power and influence. they provide vital support or resources to people, they are likable and intimately connected with many people, they have an embedded role in the social fabric and many people benefit from it (whether economically, politically, spiritually, etc). Specific people who rape are incredibly buoyant. They are usually buoyed to places of power no matter how far they're attempted to be pulled down from that power, and most people see this and will cling to a person like this, defending them, because people who rape are the social equivalent to a life preserver, whereas people who have been raped are the social equivalent of an anchor-- no one wants to be dragged down by allying themselves with the person who was raped by the beloved person everyone loves and relies on.
On the other hand, The Rapist" and "The Pedophile" as cultural tropes are treated very differently from specific people who have raped others. "The Rapist"/"The Pedophile" is often a racialized, gendered, and classed archetype that exists to be the ideological load bearing pillar of rape culture, to reinforce the belief (against the weight of evidence) that rape is something committed by Deviant Others who can be identified and expelled from social life. When sexual violence is not understood as one of many possible tactics of control and is instead as the result of the uncontrollable desire of innate deviants, then accusations do not even require there to be a specific person who was harmed by a specific act. All you need is evidence of "deviance" and all the justified anger at sexual violence can be offloaded onto whatever scapegoat you want.
In fact, within rape culture, harassment campaigns are much more successful than any actual instance of a survivor asking for support. That is no coincidence either! Rape culture hates survivors! But because in harassment campaigns there is no actual survivor speaking up, rape culture's default of disbelieving specific, actual survivors is never triggered, and so the accusation becomes perceived as more credible because there is no victim to discount.
If there is no actual specific instance of someone engaging in sexual abuse of another specific person, there are no details to question and pick apart ("but why was she naked if she didn't want to have sex?" "was he really raped if he had an orgasm?" "how do you know it was sexual? adults have to bathe their kids" "why did she post that photo if she didn't want it shared?" "I've never seen that side of him!" "maybe you misunderstood" "maybe she didn't hear the safeword" "why wait until now to bring it up?") and no demands of the public that implicate them and demand change from them (are you sending survivors funds to help them move out? to help them afford therapy? are you examining why you didn't notice it was happening or didn't believe it could be true? are you able to understand that as part of this person's community, you failed to protect them, and that actual restorative justice involves you changing your beliefs and behavior too? that it's not just about rehabilitating the person who raped someone?)
If there's no survivor, then the imagined victim can be perfect, innocent, and worthy to rally around. The imagined victims are only good and only hurt and have no problematic opinions about anything (no opinions at all! so they can be imagined to believe whatever you believe), no burdensome expectations of you, no resentment towards you.
Focusing on identifying "The Rapist" as a deviant instead is so easy; it only requires condemning someone who you probably either already dislike or a complete stranger who has no direct connection to your life. It's so much easier to pin responsibility for the entire (abstracted) concept of Rape onto someone you already hate and is already a social outcast and show how much you're "against rape" by venting all your anger and fantasized violence against them. It feels good too! the way righteous anger always does. It can be energizing when a whole community comes together to hate the same person.
Supporting actual survivors does not feel energizing, it feels exhausting. It requires so much work and effort, and you don't feel righteous while you do it, you may even feel ashamed, frustrated, deeply sad, resentful, angry, hopeless, or emotionally numb. It enters the deepest parts of your consciousness and you find it hard to breathe during certain scenes in movies, seeing certain arguments play out in the news cycle. It changes you, too, and that is the point.
We want to be against rape culture, because we want to be good people. but we don't want it to be hard.
I think this reality is the reason why a lot of young organizers think they can throw themselves into restorative justice and then find themselves completely burnt out a few months or a year later. People start thinking it'll be energizing, and then have to contend with the reality of what is, essentially, providing material support for disabled people whose health and capabilities have been permanently decreased from trauma. Some folks think they're gonna be "fixing things" so everyone can continue their reliance on the person who raped someone and the survivor can "move on" and everything can be "restored."
And then (if they're serious and not just performing at activism) they are inevitably faced with the terrifying reality of trying to make ends meet, with cobbling together strategies to meet community needs outside of the person who everyone relies on. they are faced with this person who raped someone losing interest after a few meetings and deciding "the accountability process" is dragging on too long and interrupting "more serious things than one person's emotions." they are faced with trying to get more people involved supporting the acute needs of the survivor even when the survivor is "difficult" or "ungrateful", and realizing that no one wants to do it. it is overwhelming to realize how deep the roots of rape culture run through everything, how much stability is upturned when you uproot any structures and beliefs that rely on rape culture. it is deeply demoralizing when you realize nothing can change without collective effort and very few care enough to do it.
It's so much easier to do nothing and pretend you don't know what happened. It's so much easier to decide it doesn't have anything to do with you and maybe this is something the survivor should "work out" with the person who raped them. It's so much easier to not try.
that's the function of rape culture. and we are all implicated in it.
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“One of the most solid pieces of writing advice I know is in fact intended for dancers – you can find it in the choreographer Martha Graham’s biography. But it relaxes me in front of my laptop the same way I imagine it might induce a young dancer to breathe deeply and wiggle their fingers and toes. Graham writes: ‘There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.’”
— Zadie Smith (via campaignagainstcliche)
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Under communism the wait staff will not ask if Pepsi is okay. You will not even find out that's its Pepsi instead of coke until you take your first sip. Unless you train like me, to know the difference from the sound of the Fizz alone, that is the only way we can beat communism and I can teach you. Take my hand. Not like that you grabbed it gay. Stop. Giggles. I SAID STOP
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every day I wake up sobbing because of the casting for Murderbot in the Murderbot Diaries live action
ticking off the nine stages of grief over here
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ID in ALT Text
sooo... @ranilla-bean wrote a fic The Iconoclast
beta read by @faux-fires
but before rana and i got to talk lots about sout eats asian clothing and khmer cuture and...
i stat down... drew the first one... and the other two. enojoy?
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i’m gonna kill the next cis man i see & it’s because of the person who wrote this tag they directly caused the death of some random cis man i hope you’re happy
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Glaze is out!
Tired of having your artwork used for AI training but find watermarks dismaying and ineffective?
Well check this out! Software that makes your Art look messed up to training AIs and unusable in a data set but nearly unchanged to human eyes.
I just learned about this. It's in Beta. Please read all the information before using.
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MORE trans Jane agenda
These two make me SICK reading their introductories back to back was actually killing me the way the narration describes jakes blue ladies and janes detective/funny men are direct parallels of eachother it makes me INSANE
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Transman Jane agenda
Can we take a moment to appreciate the following:
Jane is the first female human to outright wear pants in this comic. The others wear leggings or skirts or some combination of both. (I don’t know if Dream Selves count, but those are uniforms everyone gets.) She’s also wearing that style of t-shirt that Dave seems to like, I forget what they’re called.
Jane voluntarily wears a mustache. Jane. Voluntarily. Wears. A Mustache.
Jane is wielding a King’s Scepter. Not only that, but she’s merged it with a giant fork, so now it’s bigger than she is. It’s a King’s Fork. Apparently forks were a nobility thing back in the day? Not really relevant, but
Mustache + The Pants + King’s Fork bigger than she is
Jane is now the manliest person in the session. Dirk and Jake are out being boys, with their shorts and utility belts. Dad Crocker is… somewhere, and the Kings seem to not be a factor. Roxy knows where the REAL party’s at. ;D
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I’m sure all you Tumblr users have heard by now about the changes being made to Tumblr’s ecosystem so that the site can make more money. And I’m sure most of you are as uneasy as I am or, in fact, are angry about the proposed changes.
The reason they need to make more money is simple: Tumblr is $30 million USD in debt.
For this site to run and for them to pay employees, the site needs to generate revenue.
This place maybe a hellsite but it’s our hellsite. We are still here because we actually like it here. Besides, the other social media sites are crashing or will crash soon. Where else would we go?
Now, I did some research. There are at least 300 million users and over 500 million blogs. One of the cheapest things to buy on the Tumblr store is the crab package you can gift to another blog, which is $3 USD.
If each and everyone of us buys a crab package, we get to keep Tumblr alive and kicking. @oracleoutlook suggested that we make a holiday of it on July 29th. It seems to have resonated with people. Others have also asked for that to extend to August 5th, as some people don’t get paid til the beginning of the month.
Many people have already agreed to celebrate July 29th as Crab Day, a day of posting crab memes and gifting crabs to other users. And if you cannot afford to buy crabs, that is a-okay! Participate in the crab memes. Who would pass up the chance to make and reblog memes about crabs, after all?
This hellsite is ours. Let us remind them of that.
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