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evidence-based-activism · 1 month

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you’re still ignoring WHY the rates for men are so high, because women get underreported and don’t get taken seriously at all when they commit crimes. Women abuse children more and initiate 70% of domestic violence, yet men are still portrayed as the villains. You should read the comments or some of the reblogs under that post. Full of people who have been abused by women and have been safer when around only men,and never been taken seriously. You say it’s a strawman fallacy but no it’s not, radfems say this shit all the timesee. and are very gender essentialist themselves. Maybe you’re not saying it but a lot of popular radfems are, to mostly agreement from other radfems,so you can’t really blame people for seeing that and understanding it to be a popular TERF take.

Hi -

So, I'm going to answer this ask and the one that includes the bustle link that I expect was also sent by you? However, I'm not going to continue putting in this degree of effort (i.e., reading and researching the information you send) unless you start matching that effort. It will be difficult for you to do so in an ask (although I suppose you could try), so I suggest you reblog this post to further discuss.

So, on to the response:

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No, there is not a significant reporting gap (at least, not one caused by sex).

You said "women get underreported and don’t get taken seriously at all when they commit crimes", but there is no evidence that is the case. Let's take the crime data from two sources: the criminal victimization survey by the BJS [1] and the FBI crime data explorer [2]. These two sources are helpful for this discussion because the BJS attempts to determine total offenses including those not reported, while the FBI only looks at reported offenses.

For 2022 (rounding numbers) and looking at violent offenses (excluding homicide as the BJS report is interview based):

Male violent crime: 4,750,000 estimated by the BJS and 1,990,000 reported by the FBI for an overall 42% reporting rate

Female violent crime: 1,220,000 estimated by the BJS and 777,000 reported by the FBI for an overall 64% reporting rate

These numbers would suggest that more female offenders than male offenders are reported (i.e., a greater percent of female offenders, even though in absolute terms there are far fewer female offenders). However, there are some caveats to this data that makes me reluctant to state this conclusion:

The crime definitions between the BJS and FBI differ slightly. For example, I had to search through the "other crimes" for the FBI to find simple assault and several additional sexual assault categories to try and match the overall BJS "violent crime" statistic.

These stats are incident based not offender based. So, for example, if John commits 10 aggravated assaults and 5 of his victims report the assault to the police, 5 incidents are recorded in the system. Therefore, recidivism may or may not play a role in reporting rates.

I calculated the rate using the offender stats for individual offenders and "both male and female offender". Proportionally speaking a greater percent of female offenders are in the "both" category (23% vs 6%). Other statistics suggest more severe crimes are more likely to be reported to the police (e.g., 50% of aggravated assault is reported vs 37% of simple assault). If we make the assumption that violent crimes involving multiple offenders are more likely to be severe, then this could partially explain the disparity.

However, this point is essentially irrelevant, as the statistics previously discussed in the CDC report don't rely on reported crimes, they specifically interview representative samples in order to determine prevalence rates. (The difference between this data (and data in the BJS report) and the number of reported cases is how we know these crimes are under-reported.)

Just to drive the point home: the BJS study, which again, looks at both reported and unreported crime indicates:

Men take part in 84% of violent crimes and the only offender(s) in 79% of violent crimes (the stats for women are 21% and 17% respectively)

The offender-to-population ratio is 1.6 for men and 0.3 for women. That means the share of men in the "offender population" is 60% more than the share of men in the US population. The share of women offenders is 70% less than their share of the US population.

And before you send me another debunked myth: no men are not victimized more: the victim-to-offender population ratio for all violent crimes is 1.0 for both men and women.

I've also talked about how men don't under-report abuse (at least, not anymore than women do) in the past, so see this post for a couple more sources.

There's also no evidence that crimes committed by women get taken less seriously. However, it is true that when women do commit crimes, they tend to be less severe than the crimes committed by men (i.e., women commit more simple assault and aggravated assault). Given this, women's crimes may be taken "less seriously", but that's because the crimes are less serious, going by the accepted definitions of the crime. (And this is not my personal opinion! There is an actual "crime hierarchy" used in the American justice system that ranks crimes by degree of severity.)

In terms of legal consequences, women and men receive similar sentence lengths with one major caveat [3]. Caretakers of children, especially, young children, routinely received shorter sentences. Since women are more likely to be the primary caretaker of children, they'd be more likely to see this sentence reduction. However, this gap has been closing since the introduction of mandatory minimum sentencing. Some research suggests women may receive harsher sentences than men for "traditionally male crimes" [4].

Either way, crimes by women are clearly taken at least as "seriously" as crimes by men.

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No women do not abuse children more.

You said "Women abuse children more", but this is an oft-repeated statement from terribly misinterpreted data.

The misconception comes from data from the child maltreatment report from the HHS [5]. This report looks at reports of child abuse and neglect. In it they found that 52% of victims had a female perpetrator and 47% had a male perpetrator. At first glance, this looks like women abuse more children (hence the wide-spread misinterpretation), however this neglects to take several things into consideration.

First, since about 51% of the population is female, even if we considered nothing else, these values would suggest parity in maltreatment (abuse + neglect) rates. Of course, even this interpretation is deeply flawed, but I thought it merited pointing out.

Second, and perhaps most important, these stats are not looking at incidence or even prevalence rates. This isn't a rate at all. For example, you may be tempted to interpret these as "52% of children in a women's care are abused" or "52% of women abuse children". These are, and I must stress this, completely incorrect interpretations. These stats say only that of child maltreatment (abuse+neglect) victims identified by CPS, 52% of them were maltreated by a women.

Next, these stats fail to take into account the fact that many more women are the primary caretaker of children. According to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), mothers spend 80% more time caring for children than fathers. This disparity widens even further when you exclude the "entertainment" categories like playing or reading to children (130% increase, or more than double) [6]. This matters because it provides some insight into how rates of abuse would be different. You need to adjust for time spent with children to get a meaningful rate. Another way to look at this is that despite mothers spending almost twice the amount of time around children as fathers, they account for the same number of perpetrators. This alone should tell you that a child is more likely to be safe in the company of a randomly selected woman than a randomly selected man.

In case you still aren't convinced however, the report also clarifies that the perpetrator sex varied widely by maltreatment type. Women were the perpetrator in 58.5% of neglect cases (vs 41%) and 70.5% of medical neglect cases (vs 29%). But men were the perpetrator in 49.5% of physical abuse cases (vs 49%), 89% of sexual abuse cases (vs 8%), and 59% of emotional abuse cases (vs 41%). While no form of child maltreatment is ever acceptable, I hope I don't need to explain how abuse (which "requires an action") is different from neglect (which "occurs from an inaction") and requires different responses.

Speaking of neglect: there is much discourse on how much of the neglect (and medical neglect) registered by CPS is "true neglect" and how much is a result of poverty. This is particularly relevant considering single mothers are much more likely to live in poverty than married couples or single fathers. Examples of this may include: a mother doesn't have enough money to buy food and pay for rent so she and her child eat very little until her next paycheck, a single mother can't miss work without being fired so she sends her sick child to school, a single mother can't pay for child care so she has to choose between leaving her child home alone or having an unfit adult (her own abusive parent? an unsuitable boyfriend?) watch her child. In all of these situations, something absolutely needs to be done to help the child, but it likely isn't the same something as a child who's being beaten or sexually abused by his father.

Other notes on neglect: even the relatively higher proportion of female perpetrators for neglect and medical neglect in this sample are well below parity when adjusted for time spent with the child. It’s also likely that men’s rates of neglect are likely severely under-reported here. Why? Because a neglect case is rarely (if ever) opened for absentee ("deadbeat") dads; it's also unclear how many men with non-primary custody are listed as perpetrators of neglect. (I ask you: if mothers are considered neglectful for failing to intervene on behalf of their child in abusive/neglectful situations, why aren't fathers?)

Other studies on child abuse perpetration (sadly no national reports) show:

Evaluations of child fatalities in Missouri over a 8-year period showed men inflicted 71% of fatal injuries on young children [8]

Evaluations of fatal and nonfatal abusive head trauma over a 12-year period at the Children's Hospital of Denver found 69% of the perpetrators were male (including 74% of the perpetrators of fatal head traumas) [9]

Data from conviction rates and victimization surveys suggest that 4-5% of adult, child sex offenders (as in child sex offenders who are adults) are female, meaning that 95-96% are male [10]

Altogether, this indicates that men are more likely to abuse a child in their care than women. Unsurprisingly, it’s safer for children to be around women than around men.

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No, women do not initiate more domestic violence/commit the same amount of abuse.

You said "women ... initiate 70% of domestic violence". It took me a while to find a source for this statistic, but I eventually found out it comes from a poorly done study that unfortunately finds company with a number of other poorly done studies touted by MRAs and anti-feminists.

Before we address that study specifically: a brief history of the nonsense plaguing domestic violence research.

To be clear, this is not a new discussion, we (the general we) have been having this same discussion about whether there's gender parity in domestic violence for, oh, 50 years or so. It is, possibly not entirely, but certainly mostly the result of the "Conflict Tactics Scale" (CTS). Intended for use in family violence research, it has several methodological flaws which make its results ... let's go with unreliable.

I really thought I'd discussed the CTS before now ... but can't find anything on my blog. But there is this post which is a nice pictograph about this next topic, which I will loop into our discussion of the CTS.

So ... why is the CTS so unreliable? Because "domestic violence" is not a homogeneous phenomenon. If I asked someone to picture an abusive relationship they are almost certainly going to imagine an abusive man controlling his partner through intimidation, likely restricting her behavior, and possibly hitting or otherwise physically harming her. This "typical" dynamic is what we think of when we hear "domestic abuse/violence". (I'd argue that it's what we should think of when discussing domestic violence, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise.)

Notably, what this doesn't include is the -- far more common -- case of situational violence. A "typical" example of situational violence is arguments that "gets out of hand" and end with one partner slapping/shoving/etc. the other (switching between perpetrator for different incidents) or two people who routinely get "nasty" (name calling, personal insults) to each other during arguments. There's no intimidation or controlling behavior and it doesn't escalate. It also is generally not associated with significant victim hardship (i.e., no/little increase in depression, anxiety, or PTSD; little fear or feeling unable to escape the relationship; no or few physical injuries; little or no economic hardship; etc.). It's also what's predominately being measured by the CTS.

This isn't to say that situational violence is "okay". It clearly isn't, no more than a bar fight or slapping a co-worker is okay. It is, however, far more comparable to these examples (bar fight, slapping a coworker, etc.) than it is to the standard conception of domestic violence (which itself is more comparable to being a prisoner of war [11]). Some people have tried to resolve this by renaming the standard conception to "intimate partner terrorism" or "domestic abuse with coercive control". I have ... mixed thoughts on this, so I'm going to leave it at this for now.

If you'd like to read more about this, Michael P. Johnson at PSU (who originally proposed this division back in the 1990s!) has written a book and also has numerous articles about the topic.

I have a lot of sources about the CTS/differences in violence perpetration rates, but this post is already very long and I plan to make a whole separate post about this at some point. So, I'm going to briefly summarize the points and give some references that would be particularly helpful.

So, the issues with CTS include:

Failure to include a full range of possible violent behaviors, including many that are almost always perpetrated by men, including: rape, murder, choking, and suffocation.

Failure to examine post-breakup/divorce time periods, despite post-separation being one of the most dangerous time periods for abused women (but, notably, not men).

Failure to examine context. This gets back at the paradigm I mentioned above: studies that do examine context have shown that the vast majority of coercive controlling violence (i.e., traditional abuse) is perpetrated by men and the vast majority of responsive violence (i.e., self-defense) is perpetrated by women.

Failure to examine the severity of the violence and/or violence impacts. Studies have also shown that women routinely receive the more severe injuries than men. That applies to both the injuries received from coercive controlling violence and from situational violence. Notably, men are rarely ever injured from responsive violence. Women also routinely report more severe psychological and social problems as a result of abuse.

Extremely poor phrasing of the questions. The CTS is unique in its false positive rate, as has been established by several other measures of violence. For example, simply adding the stem "Not including horseplay or joking around..." reduced the number of violent incidents reported and also showed higher rates of female victimization than male victimization.

Inconsistency with every other scale/measure used for determining prevalence rates of abuse! Hopefully it is obvious why this is an issue, but as an example: if I created a new measure for "depressive symptoms" and I found that it correlated very poorly with every other accepted measure of depressive symptoms then my new measure would be considered to have very poor "convergent validity". In non-politicized situations, my measure would likely never make it to the publishing stage, and would certainly fall out of use once this poor validity demonstrated by another study. Unfortunately, science is not immune to politics any more than the people conducting it are, as we can see with the survival of the CTS.

I gathered this information from a bunch of sources, but I've selected a few reviews (i.e., papers that "review" or condense many other papers into one) that would be helpful to you [12-16]. I recommend [12] in particular, although [13] touches on much of the same information and is much shorter. Ultimately, the CTS can, at most, be considered a measure of situational violence (and it's not even very good at that!).

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So, finally, why is the 70% study [17] particularly bad?

All of the above problems with CTS apply, but in addition to all of that, they didn't just use the already flawed measure as it was ... no they, narrowed it down into 6 total questions. In total it asked about the respondent's perpetration of victimization of the following forms of violence: threatening with violence, pushing/shoving, throwing something, slapped, hit, kicked. They then "assessed" severity by asking a single question about injuries ("How often has partner had an injury, such as a sprain, bruise, or cut because of a fight with you?" and the corresponding victimization version.)

So, let's see ... failure to include predominately male forms of violence? Check. Further exclusion of even the existing items on the CTS that do examine this? Check! Failure to examine time past the relationship? Check. Failure to examine context? Check! Failure to examine severity of violence? Check. (Asking about a sprain or a bruise but not hospitalizations? broken bones? concussions?) Inconsistency with all other measures? Definitely!

Other problems with the study: they asked individuals to rate their perpetration and victimization, they did not examine their partners responses to such questions. This is a problem for a study like this, given that men tend to over-estimate their partners violence towards them and under-estimate their own violence towards their partner, and women do the opposite over-estimating their own violence and under-estimating their partners [12]. A note that a related problem has also shown up for the original CTS (i.e., if you asked both partners to complete the scale, their responses may agree on the "explaining a disagreement" item pair, but there was little if any agreement on the severe items like the "beating up" item pair).

To make a bad problem even worse: they condensed their multi-item (8-point) scales into binary (yes/no) categories and 3-item (low/medium/high) categories. This reduction in variance likely created artificially high rates for women and artificially low rates for men.

Hilariously (infuriatingly), they make it all the way through this data and then acknowledge that their study may not actually have examined domestic abuse at all! Instead it describes "common couple violence or situational violence", which, again, goes back to what the paradigm I introduced earlier. Of course, they don't revise their title or abstract to be less misleading ... that wouldn't be sensational enough.

Also, just to point this out: even this poorly designed, misleading study still showed "men were more likely to inflict an injury on a partner than ... women". So ... there you go. Even tipping the scales/design as far in favor of a "gender symmetry" result as they can possibly go, women still end up injured more than men.

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So, for the rest of your ask:

"yet men are still portrayed as the villains"

well when 1 in 3 men around the world openly admit to abusing women, and they are the perpetrator of 90+% of homicides, and 10-67% of men openly admit to believing non-defensive physical and sexual violence against women is at least sometimes okay it's pretty easy to see why women can see them as the villain/enemy.

"You should read the comments or some of the reblogs under that post. Full of people who have been abused by women and have been safer when around only men,and never been taken seriously."

This is one of those cases where critical thinking skills are pretty important! Let me start you off:

Do I think that a social media post will garner a representative sample from which to draw conclusions? Or is more likely that people who agree with the post will comment on and re-blog it, spreading it more people who are more likely to agree with it?

Can I see the re-blog I'm making comments about (i.e., evidence-based-activism's re-blog?). If not, (hint: it's not in the re-blog viewer :)) is it possible that there are other hidden replies that are disagreeing with this post?

Maybe most importantly: do I need female-on-male or female-on-female violence to be as common as male-on-female and male-on-male violence in order to show compassion to those who do experience it? (Hint: you shouldn't!! Something doesn't need to be common to deserve sympathy and rare =/= excusable.)

In addition, this is touching on a pretty common issue with discourse these days -- the prioritization of "feeling" over "being". Someone (male or female) may feel safer around men, but statistically speaking they are safer around women. It's reasonable to respond to and accommodate people's feelings on an individual basis, it's not reasonable to base an ideology or policy around them.

"You say it’s a strawman fallacy but no it’s not, radfems say this shit all the timesee. ... Maybe you’re not saying it but a lot of popular radfems are, to mostly agreement from other radfems,so you can’t really blame people for seeing that and understanding it to be a popular TERF take."

Similar to the last point ... views on social media are not representative of a population. Views that you, specifically, are seeing are not representative! If they were, then "well, I see more posts preemptively criticizing people for not including men than I see posts excluding men" (which is true, almost every post I read now-a-days includes caveats like "but men are abused too!! and women can be abusers!!") would have been a valid counter-argument to your ask. But see, I know that my experience on social media is not universal, and I should hope you can acknowledge the same of your own!

Also ... to be fair to all these unnamed "radfems", I'm guessing that you would consider my posts (like this response) to be an example of someone "saying this", which is very much not the case. I am acknowledging social trends and making reasonable generalizations to allow for communication about a complex topic (you know, the way people do for any and every topic ever), but I'm not claiming that no women is ever abusive or that no man has ever been abused. I'm guessing that these other posts are pretty similar (if less verbose).

side note, you also said: "radfems ... are very gender essentialist themselves".

Either you don't know what "gender essentialist" means or the people you are talking to/about are not radfems. I acknowledge that there are a number of people going around and saying they're radfems, but the nice thing about a political group like this is they have (at least some) defined beliefs.

So, for example, if someone went around saying they are a communist, but then when asked to describe their desired economic system, describes an economy based around the free market and decentralized production ... then they aren't a communist no matter what they call themselves. A command economy is a central tenant to communism, so much so that a desire to implement one/have one is intrinsic to being a communist.

In the same way, if someone is calling themselves a radfem, but supports the preservation of gender/gender roles or believes that femininity/masculinity is biologically innate ... then they aren't a radfem.

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TL;DR:

Violent crimes for women and men are reported at similar rates.

Women and men are punished similarly for violent crimes (i.e., people do take crimes by women seriously).

Children are safer in the company of women than men. There is insufficient research to accurately describe perpetrator demographics of "minor" child abuse/neglect, but there is significant research indicating that men are the perpetrator of the the vast majority of severe injuries, fatal injuries, and sexual abuse.

Men commit the vast majority controlling domestic violence (the type of violence people think of when thinking about domestic violence); women's violence is predominately responsive. Women are also the recipients of the vast majority of injuries (minor and severe) and are the victim of almost all fatalities.

Social media posts are not representative studies.

Critical thinking skills are important!

And, everyone -- regardless of sex or any other demographic characteristic -- deserves compassion when harmed. It is still appropriate talk about trends and create policies that assist the majority of those harmed.

A reminder that I will expect a reasonable degree of engagement with this information if you plan to engage in further discussion! I'll answer the bustle link ask, but after that I'll simply delete asks that don't make a genuine attempt to think critically about this information. (Clarifying questions are okay to ask though :)).

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References below the cut:

Criminal Victimization, 2022 | Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimization-2022.

“National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) Details Reported in the United States .” Federal Bureau of Investigation Crime Data Explorer, https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend.

Myrna S. Raeder Gender and Sentencing: Single Moms, Battered Women, and Other Sex-Based Anomalies in the Gender-Free World of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, 20 Pepp. L. Rev. Iss. 3 (1993) Available at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/plr/vol20/iss3/1

https://web.archive.org/web/20240406064949/https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2019/jan/12/intimate-partner-violence-gender-gap-cyntoia-brown

Child Maltreatment 2022. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/report/child-maltreatment-2022.

“Average Hours per Day Parents Spent Caring for and Helping Household Children as Their Main Activity.” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/charts/american-time-use/activity-by-parent.htm.

Shrider, Emily A., Melissa Kollar, Frances Chen, and Jessica Semega, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-273, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2020, U.S. Government Publishing Office, Washington, DC, September 2021.

Schnitzer PG, Ewigman BG. Child deaths resulting from inflicted injuries: household risk factors and perpetrator characteristics. Pediatrics. 2005 Nov;116(5):e687-93. doi: 10.1542/peds.2005-0296. PMID: 16263983; PMCID: PMC1360186.

Starling SP, Holden JR, Jenny C. Abusive head trauma: the relationship of perpetrators to their victims. Pediatrics. 1995 Feb;95(2):259-62. PMID: 7838645.

McCartan, K. (Ed.). (2014). Responding to Sexual Offending. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137358134

Comparison Between Strategies Used on Prisoners of War and Battered Wives | Office of Justice Programs. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/comparison-between-strategies-used-prisoners-war-and-battered-wives.

Michael S. Kimmel. (2001). Male Victims of Domestic Violence: A Substantive and Methodological Research Review. The Equality Committee of the Department of Education and Science. https://vawnet.org/material/male-victims-domestic-violence-substantive-and-methodological-research-review

Flood, M. (1999, July 10). Claims About Husband Battering [Contribution to Newspaper, Magazine or Website]. Domestic Violence and Incest Resource Centre Newsletter; Domestic Violence and Incest Resource Centre. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/215068/

Walter DeKeseredy & Martin Schwartz. (1998). Measuring the Extent of Woman Abuse in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships: A Critique of the Conflict Tactics Scales. VAWnet.Org. https://vawnet.org/material/measuring-extent-woman-abuse-intimate-heterosexual-relationships-critique-conflict-tactics

Shamita Das Dasgupta. (2001). Towards an Understanding of Women’s Use of Non-Lethal Violence in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships. VAWnet.Org. https://vawnet.org/material/towards-understanding-womens-use-non-lethal-violence-intimate-heterosexual-relationships

Whitaker, Daniel J., et al. “Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 97, no. 5, May 2007, pp. 941–47. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2005.079020.

#feminism #male violence

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sadclowncentral · 2 months

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my best friend and i have this theory that many of our interactions with the world around us can be approached from two broad perspectives: life as a narrative (i interact with the world and the world interacts with me) or life as an environment (the world interacts with the world and i happen to be in it).

in almost all cases, both things are true simultaneously, and i believe most people are inclined one way or the other, but depending on the situation, reflecting on which side you view it from might help with acceptance or change.

a narrative perspective can help you see yourself as a actor able to change their fate, but also lead to unfair self-blame or frustration with the rest of the world when you are not able to change said external factors. being stuck in traffic and hating everyone in a car and yourself when you are late at work because this always happens on important days when this is just what being alive in our world means is a benign example, but narrative fallacy can easily make you view a series of unrelated events in your life as divine punishment or personal failure instead.

at the same time, while an environmental perspective can make it easier to accept things you can and could not influence, it can also leave you stuck in unfavorable situations because you don't consider action a viable or productive option. an environmental fallacy would be hating everything about your job and your relationships with your coworkers but accepting this as a natural part of being an adult when actionable steps, be it self assertion or a job change, could improve the situation in your favour.

of course, not every interaction with the world fits into two neat categories, but often when i am frustrated or angry with the world or myself, it helps to take a moment and ask myself. is this my narrative or my environment? and if it's both, am i looking at it from the wrong direction? am i stuck in the environmental perspective, standing in front of an open door and lamenting being locked inside? or am i stuck in the narrative, rattling at the closed window instead of giving up of enjoying the view?

#also helps to develop such thing with a friend because we call each other out on those fallacies all the time and #it has tremendously improved my life

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misscammiedawn · 14 days

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it’s literally your own fault that you have trauma from personality play, idiot. why the fuck would you EVER engage in intense kink with people you didn’t trust/people who didn’t believe in hypnosis/etc. and not practice the most obvious safety precautions during lmao. moronic behavior honestly.

Wasn't 100% sure if I should reply or delete-- My rule is to delete anon-hate without a second thought and the moment the word 'idiot' was brought out it fell into that category. So firstly, no sympathy/support either for the message or the circumstances please. I'm not here for that and it undermines the point if people focus on that.

Buuut here's the thing. I know. This isn't an accusation or an insult or even mean. Everything you say is in the body of the Ethical Personality Play post. Like-- uuuh--- I dunno what to say? Congrats, you read the post?

Fact is these events happened 15+ years ago and the community lacked the support, education and structure that it has now. I'm trying to help build something which I needed back then. Will I save everyone? No. Can I help like one person? I hope so.

But like, I was a self-destructive moronic idiot 15+ years ago and I am sorta open about it?

Like here are direct quotes (key quotes bolded):

I have experience with this fallacy myself. In utilizing hypnosis to ignore my triggers I did severe damage to myself and I am now plagued with intrusive memories and nightmares of events that happened during scenes that I was able to effortlessly indulge in during the scene but as they say "The body keeps the score" and I was in fact doing further damage to myself. Something which my partner at the time was not equipped to deal with because I'd failed to disclose or even treat the situation as worth being safe about. Now I am just burdened with further damage by ignoring my brain's defenses on my existing pain.

Likewise I want to note the power imbalance that comes from play like this. A motivated hypnotee can fling themselves into this arena and do harm to the hypnotist. This does fly both ways. A hypnotee not advocating for themselves or exercising their agency will make a hypnotist accessory to the damage. This is a sin I have committed.

...look... I don't want to be an old lady yelling at the kids for doing things when I did them myself at that age. I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't pretend I didn't see the allure on both sides of the watch.

I just... there weren't 20+ year experienced hypnosis veterans who had been in my character play abusing position when I was growing up. No one warned me. I learned all this the hard way and I hurt people. People I loved. Moreover I hurt me. In ways that will never heal. I just want to spare anyone I can the pain of going through this.

So--- like

Yeah. You read the post and understood it. I'm glad you read the post and understood it.

The landscape was different back then but that's no excuse. We were a fucking dumb child who wanted to be anyone but ourselves and acted recklessly because of it. We were a dangerous and toxic hypnotee and we should have known better.

That's the lesson. That's the point. I'm not here to ask forgiveness from the people I hurt or sympathy for the fact we fucked up. We just want to help build framework that didn't exist when we were starting out.

History on the hypnokink community is a topic that probably does need to be taught-- but if you're young enough that you've never known a place without framework, education and support then I'm glad, honestly. It means a lot of good people, dedicated people, have done work building houses my silly little essays can only manage to move pebbles with. I'm glad for that. Really.

The post isn't there for you to think "Poor Cammie :(" it's there for you to think "What an idiot, I'm never going to be like her"

So-- yeah-- I don't post anon-hate as a rule-- so thank you for the fan mail. Knee-jerk reaction aside, it makes me happy that you got the point.

#cammie asks #hypno asks #hypnokink #hypnokink writings

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marzipanandminutiae · 9 months

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What did you mean by "Spicy Straights™" in the tags of that pro-marriage post? I genuinely couldn't tell what you were trying to get across there.

I've seen some posts like "the cishet man who likes wearing dresses or the straight couple who's into BDSM is more queer than the gay CEO!!!" and it rubs me the wrong way

because like. the word "queer" in this context has a definition. and the definition is "somewhere under the LGBT+ umbrella." you can't kick someone out of it just because they're shitty (No True Scotsman fallacy); you can't shoehorn someone into it just because you like them. it's not a political stance. it's not different from being a cis gay person, any more than being a rectangle is different from being a square- one category contains the other. it's an umbrella term that some people fit under and others don't

also like. a LOT of people who think that way seem to believe you have to have a certain presentation, preferred relationship style, gender, etc. to be queer, or that queerness is a hierarchy where you gain PointsTM for every way that you differ from the cishet, allo, monogamous, gender-conforming norm. as in, they think you can be "queerer than" someone else in the community. which is...so deeply unhelpful and not how this works, IMO

(I've also heard "all of the cool artsy queers who were worth knowing died off in the AIDS crisis and left behind the evil assimilationist boring gays," which. MANY levels of Yikes there)

(see also: that situation I mentioned where the actor playing Anne Boleyn in the West End cast of SIX said that she "would be part of the queer community if she were alive today" because...her motto was Let Them Grumble, This Is How It Will Be. which is fine to be inspired by, but. in context that is about breaking from the Catholic church, my sibling in sin. she was a real person and there is no known proof that I'm aware of that she was not cisgender or was attracted to women. ergo. she's not queer as far as we know. because queer has A Definition; it's not just based on vibes)

obviously this is an inter-community issue and not one with broader society. but still

#ask #anon #queer issues #lgbt

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thesituation · 5 months

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this is such a bad argument on the surface level tho cause it does work like that. it really genuinely does. let’s make a similar corollary argument for example, “you people keep saying babies are cute but you’re pro-abortion” (if you think babies are cute, then you must be pro-life) this is a ridiculous thing to say because one does not necessitate the other, and having appreciation or acceptance of something benign doesn’t mean you also appreciate and accept any and all negatives of the given category. someone’s stance on abortion may or may not be connected to whether they find babies cute, however most pro-choicers would say they find babies adorable. similarly, one can be pro-kink and not have it be in conflict with morality because the things this specific person labels as “kink” are labeled by most people as “immoral and reprehensible.” it’s setting up a false dichotomy where either you accept every conceivable fetish in the world or you accept none, and are therefore a “puritan,” and it’s an argument this flavor of bloggers love to use because it feels like a “gotcha” where logic wins over “pearl clutching morality policing” but it’s just employing a blatant logical fallacy with the hope that people engage within that flawed logical framework anyways

#.txt

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everwizard · 2 months

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OP blocked me for saying this but the evidence they link to is circumstantial at best.

Neither of the sources prove Keanu Reeves is a Zionist. Is he one? I don't know. Maybe he is. Maybe he isn't. The evidence provided does little to concretely place him in either category.

My point in saying this is to do your own research and not instantly believe everything you see on the Internet. This is a prime example of the hasty generalization fallacy leading to libel of a man's character.

#im not making points on the paramount or fatphobia thing #this is EXPLICITLY about the Keanu Reeves allegation #keanu reeves #paramount pictures #sonic the hedgehog #sonic 3 #sonic movie #shadow the hedgehog

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ftmtftm · 7 months

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Genuine question. But how are radical feminists; women's rigths activist who are exactly trying to detect, address and attack the roots of the patriarcy and it's problems (the literal definition of radical, "By the root") to make the world a better place for women and girls, comparable to religious evangelicals, incels and actual Neonazis?

Dunno, correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I checked those 3 last groups and unlike actual radical feminists, not only they don't support but openly and actively despise and try to eliminate progresive ideals like homosexual rigths, reproductive rigths, end workfield innequality, among many others.

Context: This anon is in response to this post. I do want to apologize to anon up front, because I assumed they sent this ask in bad faith based on several other bad faith asks that have been sent to me in the past. They however, did ask this in earnest. I genuinely hope this is a valuable resource to you and anyone else this post crosses paths with.

Okay so there's a lot of things I want to get into here and it's gonna get long so I'm going to break it into chunks. We're gonna look at what political extremism is, what a rhetorical fallacy is, what Feminism is (broadly speaking) and then do a deep dive into the actual nitty gritty people and politics of Radical Feminism in opposition to other types of Feminism.

TL;DR - Radical Feminism is an extremist, female supremacist, hate movement. It has more in common with Political Right / authoritarian extremist movements than it does with any Politically Left / liberation based radical movements.

So let's start with examining political extremism. What is Political Extremism? In turn, what is Political Radicalism?

Political Extremism is a very broad category of belief and action that gets thrown around a lot. Most people just use it to mean "strong politics that exist outside the status quo" however, I'm more interested in the way Astrid Bötticher defines Extremism vs Radicalism. In her definitions (here) she essentially describes that "Political Extremism" tends to get applied to Right Wing leaning politics and "Political Radicalism" tends to get applied to Left Wing leaning politics. She states that there is a fuzzy line between the two (think about the application of the phrase "Go so far left you go right") but that finding ways to define and distinguish the two is still important to political discussion.

Bötticher describes that Radical Politics tend to have a focus on:

anti-violence/selective use of violence

building a positive future

democracy/emancipation

pro-human rights, specifically in the context of providing them to the under privileged

disrupting status quo without a total destruction of society/diversity

standing in opposition to Systemic Institutions and The Establishment

coexistent withdraw with society when existing in small numbers

universal morality - a moral system that applies to all

egalitarianism/sovereignty of the common people

ideas inspired and informed by philosophical movements, starting with the 18th century Enlightenment onward

In contrast she describes that Extremist Politics tend to have a focus on:

violence as a legitimate form of action

looking towards an idealistic past

anti-democracy/authoritarianism/intolerance for other ideologies

anti-human rights (specifically in the context of people outside their own ideology - my own addition)

reinforce status quo while closing society off from conversation and diversity

standing in opposition to Systemic Institutions and The Establishment and also anyone who disagrees with the Extremist dogma

provocation and disruption, even when existing in small numbers in society

particularistic (exclusive) morality - a moral system that only applies to the Extremist group

totalitarianism/authoritarian control

ideas inspired by fanatical, usually (but not always) religious ideas that claim to hold a monopoly on truth on the basis of their own vision (that last part is especially important)

As you can probably gather, under these definitions generally speaking one would define most progressive movements as Politically Radical and most regressive movements as Politically Extremist. The Feminist Movement is, by and large, a Politically Radical Movement. Our conversation doesn't end here though. We have a lot more ground to cover. This is just the framework.

So, now that we've established the characteristics of a Politically Extremist movement, let's delve into the rhetoric they use to assert those aspects of themselves.

What is a rhetorical fallacy?

Rhetorical Devices are an important part of not just politics, but every day life. We use them constantly - I'm using them now, you use them, everyone uses them. When I speak to you, the reader, and appeal to you directly I am invoking Pathos (Emotional Appeal) by creating an air of casualness - as though we are engaging in a conversation. When I give definitions, statistics, cite sources, I am invoking Logos (Logical Appeal) by showing there is traceable, factual, credibility to the things I am saying. When I say that I have been studying Political/Feminist/Philosophical Theory both academically and in my own free time for the last decade of my life I am invoking Ethos (Ethical Appeal) by asserting that I have put an immense amount of time and dedication into this topic to showcase my own credibility.

The important thing about Rhetorical Devices here is how they are applied - especially in political discussions. When applied incorrectly or maliciously Rhetorical Devices begin to fall into Fallacies.

Fallacies are errors, or tricks, of reasoning. The provided link is from a college writing textbook and I highly recommend reading it over if you're able (genuine shout out to LibreTexts for their efforts in making textbooks free and accessible to the public). It gives a good enough explanation of fallacies as a whole that I won't be going too in depth myself, so as not to distract from my main points.

The specific type of fallacies that I'd like to get into are Linguistic Fallacies (equivocation, amphiboly, combination of words, division of words, accent, and form of expression) because they are a type of fallacy that Political Extremists (and really? also most people in politics with weak argumentative skills) like to employ a lot to make their points seem stronger or to manipulate their image. Though it is not listed as a part of the six Linguistic Fallacies, I consider Etymological Fallacy to be a kind of Linguistic Fallacy, as it relies on the explicit dissection of language.

Political Extremists and other oppressive regimes often obscure their nature through carefully chosen linguistic descriptors that rely on fallacious intent. Early Nazis called themselves National Socialists when they were, in fact, not Socialists. The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is not a Democratic Republic for the People - it is a Dictatorship - and the Chinese Communist Party of the People's Republic of China is not Communist and China is not a Republic.

To obscure yourself behind intentionally chosen progressive sounding language to gain yourself more followers who simply say "Hey, Democracy and Socialism are good! Those guys must not be that bad!" or "Hey, I agree with women's rights and liberation! I think the world should be a better place for women and girls! Those Radical Feminists must be onto something!" is to rely on an intentional political obfuscation tactic that uses the Fallacy of Equivocation.

What is Feminism? What are the different schools of Feminist Theory?

A distinct and important part of Feminist Philosophy is quite genuinely - debating how to define Feminism and it's goals. Though they all follow similar themes, there are a lot of variant ways of defining this. Some definitions of Feminism include:

"The belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes." - Britannica / Merriam-Webster

"[The goal of feminism is] all genders having equal rights and opportunities." - International Women's Development Agency

"[Feminism is] the movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression." - bell hooks

Generally speaking though, Feminism places itself as a movement for the advocacy of Women as a Class of people, operating under the context of combating / eliminating gender and/or sex based oppression - depending on the Feminist school of thought you are looking at.

Allison Jaggar, feminist scholar, defined four types of Feminism in her 1983 book Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Those types are: Liberal Feminism, Marxist Feminism, Socialist Feminism, and Radical Feminism. These tend to be the schools of thought you see brought up most often today.

I, personally, however, think that it is worth recognizing that there are in fact more schools of Feminist thought than just those four. In particular Intersectional Feminism, which was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in her 1989 paper Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, and Postcolonial Feminism which began to get its footing in 1984 with the publishing Audre Lorde's essay The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House (taken from a 1979 speech) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty's 1984 essay Under Western Eyes.

Postcolonial and Intersectional Feminism exist in direct critique of the Whiteness that was (and still is now) pervasive in Feminist Literature through the 60's-80's and into the beginning of the Third Wave of Feminism, which I will get into shortly.

Who is Radical Feminism by and for as a political movement? Who are the people creating the theory, past and present? Who are the people running the movement via theory, political organizations, and who are the faces of the movement? Who do they truly center?

Let's start with some basic Feminist history for a moment. The Feminist movement is broken into several waves. Presently, we are in what scholars are beginning to define as the Fourth Wave of Feminism, so let's briefly look at all four.

I want to state right off the bat that Feminism and feminist history as a whole is very US American and British centric. The First Wave of Feminism is defined by the Suffrage Movement and (White) Women gaining the right to vote in the USA in 1920. The Second Wave of Feminism is defined by the sexual liberation movement, the beginnings of Queer Theory, and the foundation of Radical Feminism as an organized political movement in the late 60's ('67~'68) on the coasts of the US and in England. The Third Wave of Feminism in the 90's is looser and exists as a dialogue between movements like the Riot Grrls, long standing Radical Feminists, and Feminists of Color (particularly Black Feminists) critiquing the Feminism of the previous few decades. The present Fourth Wave is currently being defined socially by social media usage and the MeToo movement and academically by its continuing recognition of Intersectional Feminist work.

I do think it is deeply important to note the racial dynamics at play here and address the fact that the Feminist Movement has also always been extremely White in many ways. This is not to discredit the work of Feminists of Color, but to say that their work, labor, activism, and theory often goes unrecognized by White Feminists. As previously mentioned, the First Wave of Feminism is largely defined by the Suffragette Movement and women's right to vote - however, Black Women and other Women of Color were not allowed to be fully included in this movement by White Suffragettes. Black Women did not receive suffrage until 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. This was just 2-3 years before the beginning of the Second Wave. I have written about this to a larger extent here so I won't be diving too deep in this ask, since we're already getting very long here.

So let's dive deeper into the Second Wave and Radical Feminist history. I would personally argue that the publishing of the SCUM Manifesto and Valerie Solanas' attempt on Andy Warhol's life is what kick started the Radical Feminist movement. I have talked about this to a larger extent here in relation to Political Lesbianism and really - I just don't want to retype an essay I've already written.

TL;DR - While the SCUM Manifesto may or may not have been satirical (Solanas went back and forth on this publicly) it was the first published work to describe ideas integral to Radical Feminist literature. It was born out of the same New York spaces as the rest of the Radical Feminist Movement and spread thanks to the New York gay newspaper, The Village Voice, and the publicity from Solanas' attempt at Warhol. Male Dominance Theory, the inherent violence of males, the idea that women are safer with other women than with men, the idea that lesbianism or celibacy are the only safe sexual avenues for women, etc. etc. were all published first in SCUM in 1968.

Ti-Grace Atkinson could, and should, be credited with the foundation of organized Radical Feminist politics in written works with her 1969 piece "Radical Feminism". She was an active defender of the SCUM Manifesto and Solanas - going so far as to get in trouble with NOW (The National Organization for Women) during her time as the organization's president for defending Solanas and attempting to involve Flo Kennedy in Solanas' legal defense (pay-walled article, unfortunately). While Solanas wanted no involvement with Atkinson, Kennedy, or NOW it's clear her ideas and actions deeply impacted them and other Radical Feminists. The events with Solanas inspired Atkinson to leave NOW and form the October 17th Movement, which then became the Radical Feminist group The Feminists.

If we look at other foundational Radical Feminists from the late 60's and 70's - Shulamith Firestone, Kathie Sarachild, Carol Hanisch, Roxanne Dunbar, Naomi Weisstein - they all also share one trait in common with Solanas and Atkinson beyond their politics. Whiteness. The only Woman of Color present so far in this history is Flo Kennedy, and Flo Kennedy was open about "Not feeling Black" and not really having community with other Black people. Her work definitionally was more Intersectional than Radical Feminist, however she dedicated most of her efforts to time in Radical Feminist spaces. Unfortunately as the linked book review begins to describe, like a lot of Feminist history, Flo's actual person-hood has been stripped from her work. She is often either used as a Token Black Radical Feminist or as a Token Black Intersectional Feminist in Radical Feminist Spaces, depending on where you look and who you ask.

I don't have the time nor space to do an entire history lesson on Radical Feminism, but suffice to say the works of the women I have previously mentioned very much inspired the works of more commonly cited, more modern Radical Feminist authors like Andrea Dworkin, Sheila Jeffreys, Julie Bindel, Catherine MacKinnon. Again, all White Women. You look to modern Radical Feminist and Women's Liberation activism and you see the same reflected in your average Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist as well as in the women in pop culture who are being celebrated by anti-trans Radfem spaces, like JKR and Kellie-Jay Keen / Posie Parker. Both of whom, by the way are actively buddy-buddy with conservatives and Neo-Nazi's. Shaun, the video essayist, has broken this down better than I can here (JKR) (Posie Parker).

Why talk about all of this? What is the relevance of political extremism and rhetorical fallacies in this conversation?

We began this essay (because, let's be real, that's what this is) discussing Political Extremism vs Political Radicalism so let's come back around to that and my claim that Radical Feminism is Politically Extremist, not Politically Radical now. Radical Feminists, like in this ask, have been in my ask box recently arguing that the "Radical" in "Radical Feminism" means "to the root" - like a mathematical root. That it means "Getting to the root of Patriarchy". However, I genuinely have not been able to find any such claim in any of my research. The "Radical" in "Radical Feminism" has always been used in the political sense of being "politically radical" in all of the reading and historical research I've done. Show me a legitimate source of this claim and I'll take it into consideration though.

I would like to breakdown Bötticher's list of traits of Extremism/Radicalism in relation to Radical Feminism now though, since we have established we are explicitly talking about Political Radicalism several times over.

1. violence as a legitimate form of action

Radical Feminism is founded on the idea that society needs to be completely dismantled in order to procure the safety of women. Be this by genocide, as SCUM suggests, or by a women led revolution as women like Firestone suggested there have always been roots of violence in Radical Feminism. Violence is a complicated topic in of its own right, which I've talked about my own feelings on here. I personally believe that the Radfem idealism towards violence and wanting to "flip" the violence of the Patriarchy back onto men - regardless of it is satirical or not - and the idea that violence begets violence falls under this category of Extremism, rather than under the category of Radicalism.

2. looking towards an idealistic past

I am of the opinion that the way Radical Feminism of the 60's and 70's idealized the Suffragettes and their work is a form of this. It is happening again now with the way modern Radical Feminists idealize the politics of Radfems of the 60's and 70's. There's this idealized version of Feminist history in Radfem spaces that completely ignores or denies the presence of Feminist authors that disagree with or criticize Radical Feminist thought. This happens generally via unwarranted assimilation (You see this happen a lot with theorists like Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Judith Butler, and even Leslie Feinberg) or complete dismissal (you see this happen a lot with theorists like bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Roxane Gay). You know the thing those authors have in common? They are all either Black or non-binary.

3. anti-democracy/pro-authoritarianism/intolerance for other ideologies

Current Radfem culture really hinges on dismissing anything Radfems disagree with as "Liberal Feminism" - referencing Jaggar's previously mentioned work. This is something I've noticed a lot in my own conversations with particularly young Radfems who are new to Feminism. There seems to be this idea that you can only be a pop culture-y, soft, liberal feminist OR a to the teeth, political radical feminist - with no thought for what might exist outside of that binary. Even Jaggar herself talks about Socialist and Marxist Feminism, which are in fact distinct Feminist movements in their own rights, and as previously mentioned Intersectional Feminism and Postcolonial Feminism, among many other types of Feminism also exist. To treat Feminism as though it was a binary dichotomy with a right answer is to fall under this category of Political Extremism.

4. anti-human rights (specifically in the context of people outside their own ideology - my own addition)

I've gone almost this entire post without going too in-depth on the subject of anti-trans rhetoric in Radical Feminism because that is, at least presently, something many, many other people have covered in the past. However, Radical Feminism as an ideology is in explicit opposition to the human rights of transgender individuals. This is not the post for that analysis, so I won't be getting into it to much deeper here. You can see my extended watching section at the bottom of this post if you're truly interested in this topic.

5. reinforce status quo while closing society off from conversation and diversity

Many Radfem spaces and a lot of Radfem literature tend to universalize the "woman" or "female" experience without consideration for the nuances and complexities of those experiences. Given the White American roots of Radical Feminism, I see this as an extension of the phenomenon of White Homogenization - which is the phenomenon related to the history of xenophobia towards groups like Irish and Italian immigrants and their subsequent assimilation into American White Identity once it was deemed convenient for White Supremacists. This is, in part why I would classify Radical Feminism as Female Supremacy. It's got all the makings of White Supremacist rhetoric thanks to the race of its founders, just twisted slightly to fit the means of White women rather than White people as a whole.

Radical Feminism constructs this status quo idea of universal womanhood and regularly shuts down conversations that question the authority of that experience, particularly in relation to Race, Ethnicity, Transgender Identity, and Intersex Identity.

6. standing in opposition to Systemic Institutions and The Establishment and also anyone who disagrees with the Extremist dogma

I feel like this one is self explanatory following the last few points about the universalism of womanhood and the way Radfem culture simplifies Feminist theory. Yes, Radical Feminism stands opposed to the Patriarchy and also it stands opposed to any other Feminist thought that might disagree with it to the point of ostracization, misindentification, and outright dismissal. The way many Radfems resort to pejoratives (as I've been experiencing in my ask box with an influx of asks calling me a tranny pooner among many other expletives I won't be posting) and dehumanizing language like calling trans people "TRAs" as a play off of "MRAs" is a good show of this.

7. provocation and disruption, even when existing in small numbers in society 8. particularistic (exclusive) morality - a moral system that only applies to the Extremist group 9. totalitarianism/authoritarian control

Grouping these three together mostly for the sake of brevity, as I've been working on this post for about 4 days and admittedly, I am getting exhausted exposing myself to rhetoric that fundamentally believes my own existence is incorrect and a bunch of other anons telling me to kill myself.

However, I do briefly want to take time here to address the fact that the way Radfems universalize womanhood ends up perpetuating this idea that women are inherently safer than men. That women, or females, are incapable of abuse because that's what men do. This separatism, this isolationism, is in of itself a breeding ground for abusive people to take advantage of others. These last three points are all three points that I think highlight the cult-like nature of Political Extremism. "Violence is good and justified when women do it to men because men are violent to women" type thinking. It preys on unresolved trauma - which I've briefly spoken about here. I could absolutely go into point 8 farther, and I have a lot more feelings about it that I'm getting into here - but I'm tired. I'll make another post another day and update this one when I do.

10. ideas inspired by fanatical, usually (but not always) religious ideas that claim to hold a monopoly on truth on the basis of their own vision (that last part is especially important)

This is one of the most important points in this list I think. A lot of Radical Feminism positions itself in a way that places itself and it's followers as arbiters of truth. If you disagree with Radical Feminism, you're a misogynist, you're a self hating female, you're wrong, you're ignorant, you hate women and support the Patriarchy. It's classic "Us vs Them" rhetoric.

I brought up rhetorical fallacies earlier as a primer to the fact that Radical Feminist rhetoric is full of rhetorical fallacies. Most specifically notably in this ask is the etymological fallacy of saying the "Radical" in "Radical Feminism" means "to the Root". "Woman = Adult Human Female" is also an etymological fallacy. Acting as though there are only two types of Feminism (Liberal vs Radical) is an argument based on fallacy. The list goes on, as most of the requirements for Bötticher's definition of Political Extremism rely on fallacy on the part of the Extremists because Extremism requires a skewed perception of reality based on the manipulation of facts.

That is all why I classify Radical Feminism as a Politically Extremist Female Supremacist Hate Group - especially modern Radical Feminism. That is why I classify it in the same extremist camp as Evangelicals, White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and Incels. They all rely on similar rhetorical tactics to further their goals:

"You are only safe with your own kind. You will only find strength with your own kind. Outsiders are the enemy and you cannot find sympathy or empathy for them, lest you become brainwashed."

What are the alternatives? How do we move forward from Radical Feminism?

One of the most important solutions I can offer, in my opinion, is the encouragement to go and do your own research into Feminism and Feminist history. A Radfem view is one of many, many possible Feminist approaches as I've discussed at length here. I personally think "good feminism" is well-rounded Feminism that takes an Intersectional approach to Institutions of Oppression. Essentially, Feminism that recognizes that the Patriarchy is only one aspect of the oppressive forces of the world and that it works in tandem with other systems to cause direct harm to the oppressed.

First and foremost - I keep a reading list on my blog. I need to go through and do some serious updating to it but what it currently has is still a good jumping off point. The list isn't just reading materials, but also includes talks and interviews and audio books, if those things are more accessible to you personally.

My personal favorite feminist thinkers are bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Leslie Feinberg. Audre Lorde, Judith Butler, and Kate Bornstein are also excellent reads when it comes to theory. I'm also including some extended watching recommendations at the end of this ask because I know for many people watching a video or listening to a talk can be more accessible than academic text. I do however, recommend popping into my reading list and looking at the talks and interviews that I have listed there as well.

If you made it all the way down here? Holy shit - congratulations and thank you for reading all of this, regardless of if we agree on this topic or not. This was a pain in the ass to put together honestly and I'm real fucking tired. I'm gonna go spend a week getting high and listening to live music with my best friend now.

Just remember: Do what you want forever :)

Extended Watching (Interviews + Talks):

In Life: Interview with Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg (captions recommended)

Leslie Feinberg in Buffalo, June 2, 2006

Leslie Feinberg Celebrating Stone Butch Blues at Charis Books 1993 (captions recommended)

Berkley professor explains gender theory | Judith Butler

Feminist icon Judith Butler on JK Rowling, trans rights, feminism, and intersectionality

Extended Watching (Video Essays):

JK Rowling's New Friends - Shaun (previously linked)

Keelie-Jay & the Neo-Nazis - Shaun (previously linked)

Social Constructs (or, 'What is A Woman Really?') - Philosophy Tube

Identity: A Trans Coming Out Story - Philosophy Tube

Transhumanism: "The World's Most Dangerous Idea" - Philosophy Tube

Autogynephilia - ContraPoints

Gender Critical - ContraPoints

#sorry anon i didnt get into the dog whistles like i said i would but i'm much to tired and the scope of this ask got much too big #asks #anon #radblr #terfblr #radical feminism #radical feminist #feminism #intersectional feminism #intersectional feminist #feminist #feminist literature #feminist theory #intersectional feminist theory #(wow unrelated note but desktop text editor sucks now-#I haven't edited a post on desktop in a hot second and haven't set up my extensions well enough yet)

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djuvlipen · 1 month

Note

hey just a question, why did you say the results of the lesbian flag poll were cringe?? is there a problem with the labrys flag that i am not aware of because i learned it existed only some months ago and don't know anything about it or was it about something else like the other options?

I talked about it a few times in the past but basically the association of the black triangle with lesbians is a historical fallacy

There was no State persecution of lesbians in Nazi Germany. German homosexuals were deported on the basis of the §175 of the penal code, which referred exclusively to homosexual males. Some Nazi politicians argued in favour of expanding this article to include lesbians too, but this never happened because the general opinion was that lesbians, as women, could not genuinely be exclusively same sex attracted and could be 'reeducated' by the sexist laws that confined women to the family household. So lesbians weren't sent to any camp on the mere basis of their sexuality. Instead, Nazi lesbophobia looked like that:

closing down lesbian social places, like bars

shutting down lesbian newspapers and cultural magazines

(Weimar Germany had the most vibrant lesbian scene in Europe in the 1920s)

prohibition of lesbian subculture in general

increased social control of lesbians in the public sphere, with lesbians being reported to the authority if engaging in homosexual behaviour, which could lead to jail time (not camp)

In Austria, there were law articles explicitly condemning lesbianism, but lesbians were sent to Austrian jails, not to Nazi camps There is no archival evidence of one single lesbian being sent to a concentration camp (needless to say, there's even less evidence of a lesbian being sent to an extermination camp) for the sole reason of her sexuality. In Ravensbrück, the largest Nazi women-only concentration camp, we found record of only three women whose individual files mentionned their being lesbians. In two of those cases, those women had been deported because they were political opponents, with 'lesbian' an aggraviating factor. In the other case, the woman was deported as an 'asocial' and therefore made to wear the black triangle signifying 'asocial'

Then, in the late 80s, with the emergence of commemoration politics regarding the Nazi persecution of gay men, lesbian activists started attending commemorative events and that is when the argument that lesbians were made to wear the black triangle started to be told in speeches. Those speeches didn't quote any archival evidence. Personally, I think people got this idea because the memoirs and autobiographies that were published in the postwar era were, for the vast majority, written by former political deportees. In Nazi camps, political prisoners and asocial prisoners had a feud and fought to get to the top of the camp hierarchy. Both sides disparaged the others with lies. In Nazi camps, homosexual relationships were common among all prisoner categories, but political female prisoners weaponized this against asocial prisoners to paint them as 'masculine, dominating, Nazi-loving dykes', and they described them as such in their memoirs

tl;dr: lesbians weren't sent to camps en masse because of their sexuality, lesbians weren't made to wear the black triangle on the sole basis of their sexuality except for one lone recorded case, and the association of lesbians with the black triangle comes from postwar homophobic literature

I gotta say tho, Nazis burnt a lot of archival evidence so maybe there used to be a lot of texts pertaining to groups of lesbians being deported for their sexuality but since that has never been brought up in any witness testimony, that's unlikely

Also, badge identification systems varied from one camp to another (like in some camps, Jews didn't wear a yellow star but a blue and white armband), that's something people seem to forget when they want to argue one badge necessarily meant one thing exclusively. as for Sinti and Roma, the black triangle, the black triangle with a white Z in it, and the brown triangle were used depending on context. At Auschwitz, the people made to wear the black triangles were 'asocials' (people whose behaviour was detrimental for the well-being and development of the race; you could conceptualize it as a form of 'social racism' or racism applied to social classes as the poor were the most impacted by it; petty criminals, prostitutes, alcoholics, homeless people, etc.; they served a time in the camp before being allowed to come back to civil society. this was not the case for the Sinti and Roma who were associated with the 'asocial' because criminality, prostitution, etc, were deemed natural to the Romani race, and who weren't allowed to ever leave the camp because they were destined to be killed)

Books:

on the tensions between asocial and political prisoners

Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

on the persecution of lesbians in Nazi Germany and Austria

Regis Schlagdenhauffen, Queer in Europe during the Second World War [yes, I know, it says 'queer', but it's a bad translation. the original title says 'homosexuals']

on political female prisoners associating lesbianism with asocial prisoners to paint them as masculine, dominating and pro-Nazi in their memoirs

Claudia Schoppmann, “This Kind of Love”: Descriptions of Lesbian Behaviour in Nazi Concentration Camps (available here)

#black triangle #labrys flag #asks #anon

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disillusionedmonster · 2 years

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I am sick of the way transpeople act like radfems are uneducated on transgender theory and identities. They love to say that we need to listen to non-binary voices or the experiences of trans-women/men in order to reach conclusions, instead of making assumptions. The issue is that it only works if your movement is coherent with a group of people who have an ability to articulate what it is to be non-binary or trans with a solid explanation. This explanation cannot rely on circular reasoning, logical fallacies and inconsistencies, or misogynistic stereotypes. Radfems have reached our conclusions because we listened to transpeople, and we applied our critical thinking skills to assess the validity and truth of what they were saying. The conclusion we reached is that these categories, as defined by transgenderism, have no definition making them nonsensical terms to use.

I am over the way that they have decided the only voices that matter in this debate and discussion are theirs. The validation of their identities relies on dismantling and denying the identities of all people who understand that man and woman are sex categories. It's hypocritical of them to expect us to listen to their voices and validate their identity when they refuse to extend the same courtesy to us.

To all transpeople: your comfort is not my problem, and it's not my job, or the job of oppressed groups, to give up our rights in order for you to gain the privilege of dismantling the progress wenhave made in the fight for women's and LGB rights. You need to grow up and realise that your individual identity does not matter nor do you have the right to control the way people speak and view you. You are just as insignificant as the rest of us.

#radfem #radical feminism #gender critical #radical feminists please interact #rad fem #radfems do interact #radfems please interact #radfems please touch #radfems do touch #trans #trans hypocrisy #trans religion

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iloveschiaparelli · 17 days

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currently writing my longpost about Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes but OMG i just have to speak out

It's SO FUNNY to me that fandom's response to Noamae is either to ship it wholeheartedly or declare it Zoophilia

Mainly because the whole premise behind Planet of the Apes is the idea that through a series of events, Apes became like humans and humans became like Apes. So essentially, the positions of "human" and "animal" are reversed. Zoophilia is wrong because animals aren't on the same level of intelligence, communication, and sentience as humans and so can't really consent.

Since all of this is fiction we also have to look at how society reacts to shipping between races equally genetically distinct, but mentally and soully on the same level. Personally I think D&D is a great example since it's hard to get away from and half the players on this site are deviants. There are humanoid and nonhumanoid races but no one really seems to have a problem with shipping any combination together? On the other hand apes and humans are remarkably similar, so much to the point that the evolutionary consensus is that we have common ancestors and even evolved from apes. I don't believe in (macro)evolution but if I did I would say that apes and humans are really... hardly genetically distinct at all, compared to humans vs other species.

So far the zoophilia camp is claiming that it's zoophilia because (as far as I've seen) Noa is an animal and Mae is a human. So Mae would be committing zoophilia.

But like... there's two routes you can take here on this ship.

If it's zoophilia, in the context of the universe of Planet of the Apes, Mae is the animal in this situation, because the majority of humans have become "animals" whereas pretty much all apes on earth are in the "human" position. Mae is the exception. To put it into perspective for you, if James Franco's character started a relationship with Caesar in the first trilogy film, then Caesar would be the animal in the zoophilic relationship. It's the same situation just the roles are reversed.

If it's not zoophilia, it's because zoophilia is determined by intellectual status, not by difference in species. Which is consistent with how this site usually treats relationships between nonhuman+nonanimal race combos. Therefore, since Mae and Noa are on the same level as far as intelligence, communication, and sentience go, it's not zoophilia because neither of them are animals.

Personally I think it's weird regardless to have in a mainstream film, especially since the lines blur so much in this series as to where humanity stops and animal begins. Even if you have a religious belief that sets humans apart from animals regardless of intelligence, I think it's pretty clear that that isn't the direction that the movie is coming from.

But like, honestly as far as logic goes it's the zoophilia camp who are committing logical fallacies?? Unless you also think a relationship between an Aarakocra or Tabaxi and a Human would be zoophilia as well. I think it's actually a pretty nuanced situation whether it's acceptable to ship Noa and Mae and it can't be easily shoved into the zoophilia category due to the nature of the story and the questions it intentionally presents.

If you're uncomfortable with the ship, you have every right to be! I definitely am and probably will not be interacting with most Noamae ship content lol. But I don't think there's an objective answer as to whether there's a moral problem with it, nor do I think the zoophilia camp is being consistent in their beliefs unless they're also applying this logic to shipping inter-racially in other fiction content where they have comparable intelligences.

by the way no i am not a proshipper <3 i just think this particular question is tied to the questions inherently presented by the media through its existence.

#kingdom of the planet of the apes #noamae #shipping

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wisdomfish · 9 months

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Category fallacy to ascribe sensory qualities to God

A category fallacy is the mistake of ascribing the wrong feature to the wrong thing… assigning a property which applies only to another… It is a category fallacy to fault colors for not having a smell, universals located at only one place, and God for not being an empirical entity [visible to the senses]. God, if he exists at all, is by definition (in Orthodox Christianity) an infinite Spirit. It is not part of the nature of a spirit to be visible empirically as a material object would be. It is a category fallacy to ascribe sensory qualities to God or fault him for not being a visible object! ~ J.P. Moreland

#category fallacy #god #the five sense #spirit being #christianity

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transandrophobia-truther-turtle · 2 years

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"Pro-shippers should try telling normies [family members, coworkers, random strangers] about their ships, those people won't accept them" is an example of the appeal to popularity fallacy.

The appeal to popularity fallacy can be used to support many things that should not be supported. For example, transphobia: the general public is fairly hostile towards trans people. If I picked a random person to come out to as nonbinary, there would be a fair chance of them reacting badly. Does this mean that transphobia is the correct belief to hold? No, of course not. The popular belief can be wrong.

And this belief ("pro-shippers will be ostracized if they talk about their ships") isn't even accurate. "Problematic" ships are super common. Incest porn is a big category on porn sites; you can't look at mainstream porn art sites without wading through tons of noncon; underage characters in anime are very frequently depicted in a sexual manner. Lots of people have watched Game of Thrones.

Plenty of pro-shippers have told their friends and family about their "problematic" ships. Of course, you have to have a relationship where that's appropriate, and there are many people who will react badly, but reasonable attitudes toward fictional content are actually pretty common. It's much more likely that someone will be horrified by the existence of a group (antis) dedicated to cyberbullying others.

Stop using this argument.

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liaromancewriter · 8 months

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May I Have This Dance?

Premise: Is there anything more romantic than slow dancing in the kitchen on a do-nothing day?

Book: Open Heart Pairing: Ethan Ramsey x F!MC (Cassie Valentine) Rating/Category: Teen. Fluff. Words: 1,175

A/N: For narrative purposes, this is set on the same day as Sleeping Beauty. Submission for @choicesprompts Flufftober prompt "Can I have this dance?" I'm also using @choicesflashfics week 54, prompt 1

Ethan Ramsey stared at the announcement for this year’s homecoming dance tacked onto the noticeboard in the hallway. His hands itched to snatch a flyer to peruse later, but he kept them tightly fisted to his sides.

There was a reason he’d ditched the whole thing last year, he reminded himself morosely.

He couldn’t dance and wasn’t about to embarrass himself in front of the entire school. Plus, there was the whole awkwardness of asking a girl out. They tended to travel in packs, and getting one alone long enough to ask her without her friends staring and giggling nearby was as impossible as travel to Mars.

It was a pipe dream, he thought in dismay but unable to unglue his feet. He wasn’t in a position to go, and that was that. Besides, who decided that participating in homecoming dances and proms was a right of passage for high schoolers?

Hollywood, that’s who. Twentysomething actors playing high school students didn’t make it all so. It was a fallacy, as most things in life were.

“Wow, you look fierce. Did you have a fight with someone?”

Ethan glanced sideways at the concerned voice of his neighbor and friend, Miranda Clarke. He inwardly grimaced at being caught boring a hole into the noticeboard.

She’d been the nerdy girl with braces and pigtails all through elementary and middle school. At the start of freshman year, he did a double take when she greeted him at the bus stop, no braces in sight, her blonde hair in a waterfall behind her and a pretty headband sparkling under the sun.

Miranda might look different now, but she was still one of the smartest and nicest people he knew. She also understood what it was like to be abandoned by a parent, or both parents in her case.

“Not a fight,” he said, lowering his voice to avoid being overheard by others, and inadvertently eyed the flyer.

“Ah,” she said, following his gaze. “I didn’t think school dances were your thing.”

“They’re not,” he muttered, feeling the redness splash across his cheeks.

Miranda’s eyes softened in sympathy, and he felt sorry for lying to his friend.

“It’s okay to change your mind, Ethan,” she said, lightly touching his arm. “No one’s going to care if you attend a dance one year and skip it altogether another. This isn’t about what anyone else wants, just you.”

“I know that,” he protested, stopping himself from rolling his eyes. Miranda had a habit of lecturing him when he was being cagey.

He straightened away from the wall and shrugged, adopting an air of indifference. “It’s moot anyway since I can’t dance.”

“Can’t?” Miranda placed a hand on his elbow to stop him as he turned to go. “Or don’t know how?”

Ethan sighed, his lips parting to deliver a well-versed white lie. But this was Miranda, and they’d known each other all their lives. She’d just hound him on the way home until he told her the truth.

“Don’t know how,” he admitted reluctantly. “I can’t exactly ask my dad to teach me, can I? He has enough to worry about.”

“You could ask me,” she suggested.

Ethan watched her warily. “You’d be willing to do that?”

She laughed. “Of course! That’s what friends do.”

Suddenly, her face turned serious, and she stared at a spot behind him, a light red staining her cheekbones. “Maybe after, you could ask me to homecoming? Only if you want to,” she added quickly when he froze like a deer in headlights.

“I would like that,” he said quietly, thinking about it for all of five seconds.

The bell rang for the next period, and he cleared the gruffness in his throat, raising his voice above the noise. “Thanks, Miranda. I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome, Ethan,” Miranda smiled. “If you’re not working today, we can have the first lesson after school. Around four, your house?”

Dance lessons and a date to homecoming, he marveled as they parted ways to head to class. The year was suddenly looking much brighter.

Twentysomething years later…

“I want to spend the day with you doing nothing. And by nothing, I mean…”

Ethan grinned as Cassie Valentine leaned on the kitchen island and wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.

It was the first Sunday since his return from Brazil and Cassie’s first official sleepover. There hadn’t been time for that before he left a couple of months ago. But now that they’d decided to give this relationship a real chance, they wanted their private moments to be less stolen and more intentional.

“In case you haven’t noticed, the day is half over,” he said, pretending disinterest as he rinsed a skillet and stacked it in the dishwasher with the rest of the dishes from a late brunch. “If only you’d woken up earlier, we could have had so much fun.”

“Sunday mornings are made for sleeping in,” Cassie’s brows knitted in exasperation. “Especially after the week I had. And I thought intern year was bad.”

“You’ll adjust,” he commented unconcerned, pressing a button to start the dishwasher’s cycle before grabbing a cloth to wipe down the counter.

“What?” he demanded when he looked up to see Cassie watching him with amusement in her eyes.

“Nothing,” she said, coming around the kitchen island to stand before him. She glanced at the wipe cloth in his hand. “I had no idea you were so domesticated, Dr. Ramsey.”

He smirked, caging her in his arms. “I’m a man of many talents, Dr. Valentine.”

The sun was high in the sky, the glare of its rays bouncing off the treated glass. Soft music drifted from a Bluetooth speaker in the corner, casting a magical spell over the kitchen and its occupants and lending an air of romance.

“But can you dance?” Cassie whispered, caressing the nape of his neck with her fingertips.

“What brought this on?” Ethan arched one brow in curiosity.

“Since we’re getting to know each other,” she pulled his head down, “you should know that I love to dance, especially slow dancing in the moonlight.” Her green eyes sparkled, and her lips curved into a soft, dreamy smile. “Or in a sun-dappled kitchen on a lazy Sunday afternoon.”

The music changed to something slow and romantic, and Ethan found his lips hovering above hers, heart pounding with potent anticipation.

“So? Can you?” she murmured.

“Yes.”

Cassie closed the distance between them, gently pressing her lips against his, and he fell into the moment.

“May I have this dance, Cassie?” Ethan asked, sliding his hand into hers.

“I would love to, Ethan.”

He placed one hand on her waist, splayed his fingers and tugged her close. Cassie rested her hand on his shoulder, and he led her into a slow dance, their bodies swaying to the rhythm.

He followed the moves he’d learned all those years ago, dancing in the living room with Miranda. And when Cassie laughed as he dipped her low, Ethan sent a silent thanks to his friend for giving him this.

-------------

All Fics & Edits: @bluebelle08 @coffeeheartaddict2 @crazy-loca-blog @genevievemd @headoverheelsforramsey @lucy-268 @jamespotterthefirst @jerzwriter @lady-calypso @mainstreetreader @peonierose @potionsprefect @queencarb @quixoticdreamer16 @rookiemartin @socalwriterbee @tessa-liam @trappedinfanfiction

Submissions: @choicesficwriterscreations @openheartfanfics

Ethan & Cassie only: @cariantha @custaroonie @hopelessromantic1352 @mrs-ramsey @youlookappropriate

#open heart #ethan ramsey #open heart choices #ethan ramsey x mc #choices fanfics #open heart fanfics #open heart fanfiction #choices fanfiction #choices fic writers creations #cfwc fics of the week #ethan ramsey x cassie valentine

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tanadrin · 8 months

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Hey... sorry if this is too much, but im a baby trans and ive been struggling to grasp the concept what gender is, everytime i try to look for a definition i only find the vague basics like "its what you identify as!" Or i find bigoted shit from trasphobes. If you have any recommendations of essays about gender from trans people who dive deeper unto the concept it would really help. Sorry if im bothering you i just dont really know who else to ask 😅

i don't know how helpful i can be. i have a very instrumental view of transition--i.e., if you think it might make you happier than you are now, you should give it a try and see. i think a lot of pointless verbiage is spilled on trying to nail down difficult-to-elucidate questions about purely internal experiences, about the distinction between gender and sex, and about what all this gender stuff means anyway. i think that stuff can be interesting to discuss, if you like that sort of thing (and i do!) but that loading yourself up with a lot of gender theory isn't actually useful for figuring out what you should do vis a vis your gender presentation and how you identify.

for those latter questions, i think the answer is simple: what makes you happier? when you imagine a given gender presentation, or your body being different in certain ways, or people calling you by a certain name, does that sound appealing? doesn't matter why. if so, go for it! and frankly this advice is quite agnostic of whether or not you're cis or trans. people should adopt the identities that feel most conducive to their happiness. you do not need elaborate theoretical justifications for any of it. anyone who demands an elaborate theoretical justification for how you dress or what name you choose to use or anything like that is an asshole whose opinion you can safely ignore. i guarantee you they are selective in this demand, and are only using it to try to find an excuse to be a dick.

that said, you want a definition of gender, and i guess i can try.

"gender" has no definition. that's not meant to be a smart aleck answer. what i mean is: "gender" is a conceptual category. conceptual categories do not exist outside of our discourse about them. there is nowhere in the world you can go to lay your hands on A Gender. there is no Gender Particle. and while in most philosophical traditions we think of categories as having necessary and sufficient conditions for membership ("a human is an animal descended from the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees" might be such a taxonomic definition), conceptual categories aren't actually constructed that way. because that's not how the human brain actually works: when you're a kid learning what words mean, you don't learn "a chair is a thing with four legs you sit on." that wouldn't be accurate anyway (a horse is not a chair). you see lots of chairs and pictures of chairs and you form an image in your mind of what a chair is and when you see a thing your brain compares it to other things like it you've seen before, and if it looks like your mental model of a chair, you think, "chair."

(this is in fact how almost all definitions work in practice. even for formal scientific categories for which it seems like a traditional definition might be workable, because our terms are so specific, there are problems and corner-cases. is a HeLa cell a human? it's certainly an autonomous organism. it's certainly descended from the last common ancestor of a chimpanzee and a human being. but it's a single-celled organism that exists only in laboratory cultures, and lacks everything else we expect a human to have.)

so, uh, gender. "gender" is from the latin word "genus" meaning "kind." it is a doublet (that is, shares an etymological origin) with the words "genre" and (more distantly) "kin." obviously, a word's etymology is not its meaning. confusing the two is called the etymological fallacy. but originally when we talked about "gender" we were pretty explicitly talking about categories in general, and i think that's useful to keep in mind. incidentally, "sex" (also from Latin) has a similar etymology--it's related to "section," i.e., the creation of a category by dividing a group. though "sex" acquired something like its current meaning much earlier.

most human cultures group humans into two broad conceptual categories. this is based on a variety of traits, of which physical traits like genitals are seen as frequently foundational. some cultures explicitly create additional ancillary categories, or provide a means to move (often only partially) from one category to another. contemporarily, there has been an effort to distinguish "biological sex" (seen as what chromosomes you have, reflected by what genitals and other physical characteristics you have) from "gender" (seen as a question of social presentation).

i think this is a mistake. you might be able to spot why--biological sex is a conceptual category! most humans are xx or xy, but there is in fact a wide variety of sex-chromosomal arrangements that are possible. xx and xy are only the most common. biology is messy, and it's hard to tell how messy, because we don't routinely karyotype people. the existence of rare-but-noteworthy conditions like complete androgen insensitivity (frequently reuslting in a chromosomal "male" that is "mis"identified as and lives their whole life as a female) highlight that even within the purely biological realm, sex emerges only as two broad clusters, not as two clearly divided bins. moreover, a trans person who has been taking cross-sex hormones for many years is in a sort of willingly-imposed intersex state. so saying a trans woman is a "biological male" or a trans man is a "biological female" (especially if they have had an orchiectomy or hysterectomy and can no longer produce gametes of their respective assigned sex at birth) is sort of funny--we're privileging an (assumed) chromosomal arrangement over the biological facts on the ground. and while DNA does control a lot about how our bodies grow and develop, it can in fact be overridden! otherwise, cosmetic surgery, or hair dye, or LASIK surgery would all be exercises in futility.

"gender" is sometimes also talked about as a set of internal experiences. you "feel like" or "identify as" a particular gender. and while it's certainly plainly true for some people (both cis and trans), it seems not to be true of everybody (cis or trans), and for other people it's hard to say. not everybody has perfect access to their own feelings all the time. people get told they're lying about what they feel when that's socially inconvenient for other people. and internal states are impossible to measure or verify. they're also often pretty hard to put into words, and we mostly can access them only indirectly, by sidling up to them, or by trying to find other people whose experiences/thoughts/feelings seem to resonate with our own.

so i don't have a definition of gender for you, or an etiology, or even a very robust account. sorry! but i also think that anybody trying to tell you they do is operating from an understanding so narrow that they don't even begin to understand its limits.

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dailyanarchistposts · 10 days

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G.3.5 Would individualist anarchists have accepted “Austrian” economics?

One of the great myths perpetrated by “anarcho”-capitalists is the notion that “anarcho”-capitalism is simply individualist anarchism plus “Austrian” economics. Nothing could be further from the truth, as is clear once the individualist anarchist positions on capitalist property rights, exploitation and equality are understood. Combine this with their vision of a free society as well as the social and political environment they were part of and the ridiculous nature of such claims become obvious.

At its most basic, Individualist anarchism was rooted in socialist economic analysis as would be expected of a self-proclaimed socialist theory and movement. The “anarcho”-capitalists, in a roundabout way, recognise this with Rothbard dismissing the economic fallacies of individualist anarchism in favour of “Austrian” economics. “There is,” he stated, “in the body of thought known as ‘Austrian economics,’ a scientific [sic!] explanation of the workings of the free market … which individualist anarchists could easily incorporate into their so political and social Weltanshauung. But to do this, they must throw out the worthless excess baggage of money-crankism and reconsider the nature and justification of the economic categories of interest, rent and profit.” Yet Rothbard’s assertion is nonsense, given that the individualist anarchists were well aware of various justifications for exploitation expounded by the defenders of capitalism and rejected everyone. He himself noted that the “individualist anarchists were exposed to critiques of their economic fallacies; but, unfortunately, the lesson, despite the weakness of Tucker’s replies, did not take.” [“The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine: An Economist’s View”, Op. Cit., p. 14] As such, it seems like extremely wishful thinking that the likes of Tucker would have rushed to embrace an economic ideology whose basic aim has always been to refute the claims of socialism and defend capitalism from attacks on it.

Nor can it be suggested that the individualist anarchists were ignorant of the developments within bourgeois economics which the “Austrian” school was part of. Both Tucker and Yarros, for example, attacked marginal productivity theory as advocated by John B. Clark. [Liberty, no. 305] Tucker critiqued another anarchist for once being an “Anarchistic socialist, standing squarely upon the principles of Liberty and Equity” but then “abandon[ing] Equity by repudiating the Socialistic theory of value and adopting one which differs but little, if any, from that held by the ordinary economist.” [Op. Cit., no. 80, p. 4] So the likes of Tucker were well aware of the so-called marginalist revolution and rejected it.

Somewhat ironically, a key founders of “Austrian” economics was quoted favourably in Liberty but only with regards to his devastating critique of existing theories of interest and profit. Hugo Bilgram asked a defender of interest whether he had “ever read Volume 1 of Böhm-Bawerk’s ‘Capital and Interest’” for in this volume “the fructification theory is … completely refuted.” Bilgram, needless to say, did not support Böhm-Bawerk’s defence of usury, instead arguing that restrictions in the amount of money forced people to pay for its use and ”[t]his, and nothing else, [causes] the interest accruing to capital, regarding which the modern economists are doing their utmost to find a theory that will not expose the system of industrial piracy of today.” He did not exclude Böhm-Bawerk’s theory from his conclusion that “since every one of these pet theories is based on some fallacy, [economists] cannot agree upon any one.” The abolition of the money monopoly will “abolish the power of capital to appropriate a net profit.” [Op. Cit., no. 282, p. 11] Tucker himself noted that Böhm-Bawerk “has refuted all these ancient apologies for interest — productivity of capital, abstinence, etc.” [Op. Cit., no. 287, p. 5] Liberty also published a synopsis of Francis Tandy’s Voluntary Socialism, whose chapter 6 was “devoted to an analysis of value according to the marginal utility value of Böhm-Bawerk. It also deals with the Marxian theory of surplus value, showing that all our economic ills are due to the existence of that surplus value.” [Op. Cit., no. 334, p. 5] Clearly, then, the individualist anarchists were aware of the “Austrian” tradition and only embraced its critique of previous defences of non-labour incomes.

We have already critiqued the “time preference” justification for interest in section C.2.7 so will not go into it in much detail here. Rothbard argued that it “should be remembered by radicals that, if they wanted to, all workers could refuse to work for wages and instead form their own producers’ co-operatives and wait for years for their pay until the producers are sold to the consumers; the fact that they do not do so, shows the enormous advantage of the capital investment, wage-paying system as a means of allowing workers to earn money far in advance of the sale of their products.” And how, Professor Rothbard, are these workers to live during the years they wait until their products are sold? The reason why workers do not work for themselves has nothing to do with “time preference” but their lack of resources, their class position. Showing how capitalist ideology clouds the mind, Rothbard asserted that interest (“in the shape of ‘long-run’ profit”) would still exist in a “world in which everyone invested his own money and nobody loaned or borrowed.” [Op. Cit., p. 12] Presumably, this means that the self-employed worker who invests her own money into her own farm pays herself interest payments just as her labour income is, presumably, the “profits” from which this “interest” payment is deducted along with the “rent” for access to the land she owns!

So it seems extremely unlikely that the individualist anarchists would have considered “Austrian” economics as anything other than an attempt to justify exploitation and capitalism, like the other theories they spent so much time refuting. They would quickly have noted that “time preference”, like the “waiting”/“abstinence” justifications for interest, is based on taking the current class system for granted and ignoring the economic pressures which shape individual decisions. In Tucker’s words (when he critiqued Henry George’s argument that interest is related to time) “increase which is purely the work of time bears a price only because of monopoly.” The notion that “time” produced profit or interest was one Tucker was well aware of, and refuted on many occasions. He argued that it was class monopoly, restrictions on banking, which caused interest and “where there is no monopoly there will be little or no interest.” If someone “is to be rewarded for his mere time, what will reward him save [another]‘s labour? There is no escape from this dilemma. The proposition that the man who for time spent in idleness receives the product of time employed in labour is a parasite upon the body industrial is one which … [its supporters] can never successfully dispute with men who understand the rudiments of political economy.” [Liberty, no. 109, p. 4 and p. 5] For Joshua King Ingalls, “abstinence” (or the ability to “wait,” as it was renamed in the late nineteenth century) was “a term with which our cowardly moral scientists and political economists attempt to conjure up a spirit that will justify the greed of our land and money systems; by a casuistry similar to that which once would have justified human slavery.” [“Labor, Wages, And Capital. Division Of Profits Scientifically Considered,” Brittan’s Quarterly Journal, I (1873), pp. 66–79]

What of the economic justification for that other great evil for individualist anarchists, rent? Rothbard attacked Adam Smith comment that landlords were monopolists who demanded rent for nature’s produce and like to reap where they never sowed. As he put it, Smith showed “no hint of recognition here that the landlord performs the vital function of allocating the land to its most productive use.” [An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, p. 456] Yet, as Smith was well aware, it is the farmer who has to feed himself and pay rent who decides how best to use the land, not the landlord. All the landlord does is decide whether to throw the farmer off the land when a more profitable business opportunity arrives (as in, say, during the Highland clearances) or that it is more “productive” to export food while local people starve (as in, say, the great Irish famine). It was precisely this kind of arbitrary power which the individualist anarchists opposed. As John Beverley Robinson put it, the “land owner gives nothing whatever, but permission to you to live and work on his land. He does not give his product in exchange for yours. He did not produce the land. He obtained a title at law to it; that is, a privilege to keep everybody off his land until they paid him his price. He is well called the lord of the land — the landlord!” [Patterns of Anarchy, p. 271]

Significantly, while Rothbard attacked Henry George’s scheme for land nationalisation as being a tax on property owners and stopping rent playing the role “Austrian” economic theory assigns it, the individualist anarchists opposed it because, at best, it would not end landlordism or, at worse, turn the state into the only landlord. In an unequal society, leasing land from the state “would greatly enhance the power of capitalism to engross the control of the land, since it would relieve it of the necessity of applying large amounts in purchasing land which it could secure the same control of by lease … It would greatly augment and promote the reign of the capitalism and displace the independent worker who now cultivates his own acres, but who would be then unable to compete with organised capital … and would be compelled to give up his holding and sink into the ranks of the proletariat.” [Joshua King Ingalls, Bowman N. Hall, “Joshua K. Ingalls, American Individualist: Land Reformer, Opponent of Henry George and Advocate of Land Leasing, Now an Established Mode”, pp. 383–96, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 39, No. 4, p. 394]

Given Tucker’s opposition to rent, interest and profit is should go without saying that he rejected the neo-classical and “Austrian” notion that a workers’ wages equalled the “marginal product,” i.e. its contribution to the production process (see section C.2 for a critique of this position). Basing himself on the socialist critique of classical economics developed by Proudhon and Marx, he argued that non-labour income was usury and would be driven to zero in a genuinely free market. As such, any notion that Tucker thought that workers in a “free market” are paid according to their marginal product is simply wrong and any claim otherwise shows a utter ignorance of the subject matter. Individualist anarchists like Tucker strongly believed that a truly free (i.e. non-capitalist) market would ensure that the worker would receive the “full product” of his or her labour. Nevertheless, in order to claim Tucker as a proto-“anarcho”-capitalist, “anarcho”-capitalists may argue that capitalism pays the “market price” of labour power, and that this price does reflect the “full product” (or value) of the worker’s labour. As Tucker was a socialist, we doubt that he would have agreed with the “anarcho”-capitalist argument that market price of labour reflected the value it produced. He, like the other individualist anarchists, was well aware that labour produces the “surplus value” which was appropriated in the name of interest, rent and profit. In other words, he very forcibly rejected the idea that the market price of labour reflects the value of that labour, considering “the natural wage of labour is its product” and “that this wage, or product, is the only just source of income.” [Instead of a Book, p. 6]

Liberty also favourably quoted a supporter of the silver coinage, General Francis A. Walker, and his arguments in favour of ending the gold standard. It praised his argument as “far more sound and rational than that of the supercilios, narrow, bigoted monomentallists.” Walker attacked those “economists of the a priori school, who treat all things industrial as if they were in a state of flux, ready to be poured indifferently into any kind of mould or pattern.” These economists “are always on hand with the answer that industrial society will ‘readjust’ itself to the new conditions” and “it would not matter if wages were at any time unduly depressed by combinations of employers, inasmuch as the excess of profits resulting would infallibly become capital, and as such, constitute an additional demand for labour … It has been the teaching of the economists of this sort which has so deeply discredited political economy with the labouring men on the one hand, and with practical business men on the other.” The “greatest part of the evil of a diminishing money supply is wrought through the discouragement of enterprise.” [Liberty, no. 287, p. 11] Given that the “Austrian” school takes the a priori methodology to ridiculous extremes and is always on hand to defend “excess of profits”, “combinations of employers” and the gold standard we can surmise Tucker’s reaction to Rothbard’s pet economic ideology.

Somewhat ironically, give Rothbard’s attempts to inflict bourgeois economics along with lots of other capitalist ideology onto individualist anarchism, Kropotkin noted that supporters of “individualist anarchism … soon realise that the individualisation they so highly praise is not attainable by individual efforts, and … [some] abandon the ranks of the anarchists, and are driven into the liberal individualism of the classical economists.” [Anarchism, p. 297] “Anarcho”-capitalists confuse the ending place of ex-anarchists with their starting point. As can be seen from their attempt to co-opt the likes of Spooner and Tucker, this confusion only appears persuasive by ignoring the bulk of their ideas as well as rewriting the history of anarchism.

So it can, we think, be save to assume that Tucker and other individualist anarchists would have little problem in refuting Rothbard’s economic fallacies as well as his goldbug notions (which seem to be a form of the money monopoly in another form) and support for the land monopoly. Significantly, modern individualist anarchists like Kevin Carson have felt no need to embrace “Austrian” economics and retain their socialist analysis while, at the same time, making telling criticisms of Rothbard’s favourite economic ideology and the apologetics for “actually existing” capitalism its supporters too often indulge in (Carson calls this “vulgar libertarianism”, wherein right-“libertarians” forget that the current economuy is far from their stated ideal when it is a case of defending corporations or the wealthy).

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