bruh. nypd and eric adams gave evidence to hbo before they gave it to luigi's lawyers. and the evidence obtained was a violation of 4th amendment CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, meaning it can't be used in the case. they're trying soooooooo hard to bias the public against him
Since freshman year, I have felt that having no stress is the equivalent to being unproductive. Because there is always more to do.
There are things that I should be doing, but am not doing. There are things that I'm not doing well enough. There are things that I have tried to do and have failed.
People who say that comparison is an avoidable, unproductive activity have clearly never been an American high school student aiming for a top school.
The pressure, truly, is overwhelming.
The funny thing is, my parents never cared about college at first. Their only requirement was that I went. Somewhere. Anywhere.
But as soon as I made the fatal mistake of caring- semester one of freshman year, after remembering how much I enjoyed academics and how much I wanted to invest into a successful, high-quality college career- they began caring too.
I went from explaining what an AP class was to my father to him demanding I tell him how much I've been studying before my exams.
I know that this is because they care. As we tour the ivy leagues, they have seen how driven I am to succeed at this goal, which makes them driven for me to succeed as well.
And as I've made friends with who I've made friends with- cementing myself as a part of the top ten percent: those who all know each other and although we are friends, also know that we are competing with each other for the highly selective spots at the top schools- something else also demands a portion of my time. Jealousy. My copious amounts of it are beginning to appear neverending.
When someone else gets the internship that you found out that you are both applying for. Or at our annual awards night when, even though you received a prestigious award from a college's alumni club, your friend received one from an even more prestigious college. Or (God forbid) SAT score gaps.
The other truth is, is that I'm tired.
I no longer have the inherent motivation to study for five hours a day as soon as I get home for school. Or complete my Summer homework the day after school ends. Or tirelessly work through all hours of the day without fear, reaching after goals and ambitions as if they already belong to me.
I don't know what it is, but it is as if something within me is stopping me, no matter how much I desire the thrill of leaping through the finish line with first place, I am sprinting, and my legs are growing weary.
There is always more I can do. And it feels as if I'm not doing it. And even though I'm aware of it, I'm not stopping.
It's as if I am actively running in the opposite direction of the race. There's a summer program that I really wanted to apply to. The application is due and five days. And for some strange reason, I'm not doing it.
Because, for some strange reason, I am self sabotaging enough to believe that everything will still work out for me perfectly if I always avoid what is making me scared.
I've never thought of myself as someone who is afraid of failure. But I am beginning to suspect that this is a struggle that has become something more elusive and pervasive, yet damaging all the same.
the concept of civilisation is so romantic. history and eons of human progress, fortitude, and soul etched into the physical and passed through our words and imprinted into the world.
statements like "It's wrong to masturbate about a person without their consent" and "It's wrong to do something that quietly arouses you while you are in public even if no one can see it" show that a person's understanding of morality basically involves magical thinking. like I wrote this post on the toilet. That's not the same thing as me literally shitting on you
Like, you do understand that peeping toms falls under "something that quietly arouses you even if nobody can see it" perfectly? This is what happens when your ethical system is processed through your penis.
Peeping is wrong because it violates a person's real privacy. They do not know they are being watched during an intamate act. They do not want to be watched by you during an intimate act.
Creating deepfakes and posting them is creating a false image of that person in a position they would not consent to be portrayed in. It's a form of defamation.
Imagining the person when masturbating isn't violating their real image. It is creating a false image that only you have access to. If you do not pass on your imaginary image to anyone, it stays in your head, it's not defamation. You are not seeing what they actually look in a situation they don't want you to see them in, so it's not violating the real person's privacy either.
Also this:
"It's wrong to do something that quietly arouses you while you are in public even if no one can see it" is iffy for a diferent simple reason, that being your confidence that no one can see it.
People being like, "I totally believe in redemption and second chances but you never know what's going on in this person's mind even if they never do anything bad ever again*. They might be thinking icky thoughts (which I refuse to research anything about) so we should shun them and shun anyone who associates with them and make sure they are never able to be employed. I'm so open-minded and forgiving!"
I have seen this over and over again, mostly on YouTube and in various articles and comments on sites where people are making a lot of money from this kind of opinion.
Also, people going, about a whole lot of people, "What's REALLY bad is he has these icky sexual fantasies. Like, let's keep talking about this kink EW it is so gross he is a bad person because of the kink!" Then it turns out that sometimes, yeah, this guy abused a bunch of women, and they'll be like, "oh no. Anyway. DID YOU SEE HIS GROSS KINK?!"
*And the particular person who inspired me to post this was exonerated of the charges but somehow that doesn't count because...?
discussion about right wing radicalisation focuses near-exclusively on men becoming white nationalists but i wonder how it might manifest elsewhere. like, imagine a heavily online subculture of mostly women and they're dedicated to rooting out degeneracy, maintaining a rigid social order, refusing to acknowledge scientific consensus, being violently paranoid of a dehumanised other, adhering to exclusively eurocentric standards of beauty and politically dedicated to exterminating a minority group (possibly one that was already historically targeted for genocide). that'd be fuckin crazy lol
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as vice from virtue.
people like the idea that there is an identity they can claim that will absolve them of the responsibility to examine their beliefs and actions and adjust them accordingly to better align with their values and desired outcomes but there isn't, we all have to practice humility and do the work regardless
the thing is, if your younger self was a bigot or an abuser, u can't make people forgive you. but you still gotta forgive yourself, like that's non-negotiable, dude. that happens before u can even ask the question of earning forgiveness from anyone lese
oops, in your attempt to martyr yourself out of respect for your victims you accidentally sabotaged your own ability to conceptualize yourself as anything but a perpetual evildoer who is always one bad day away from hurting everyone you love, all but guaranteeing history to repeat itself. rookie mistake
im gonna try explaining myself, cus im a gambling addict and im waiting for the day that it actually works.
"forgiveness" is personal, that's why I said in the post that you might inflict harm on people for which they can never forgive you, but that's their quest. if you abuse someone, you can't go no-contact with yourself. you actually keep living in your own head indefinitely, and ultimately you need to learn to live with yourself in order to continue living a full life without further harm. this is not necessarily an anti-carceral thought, although i am generally anti-carceral myself. I simply want people to like, fix their heart and atone for real with measured accountability & self love instead of dissociating, self-marking themselves forever and guaranteeing their recidivism.
You and a remorseful abuser would both think I'm giving the easy, coddling path. It's actually the tough pragmatic path in disguise.
having a process for people who have done morally horrific things to make amends, rejoin community, and do right going forward is actually fundamentally crucial for the left. having a clear and accessible pathway for people to be socially (if not interpersonally) forgiven is how you get people radicalized against capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy. its how you turn "these people think i am a bad person" into "these people think something and someone coerced or forced me into doing bad things, and these people want to help me do something about that."
if you want more revolutionaries, you must have a system to turn guilty, traumatized, angry bystanders and collaborators into revolutionaries. and I say a system and process because its not "oh the drone operator said they were sorry and felt bad so its all good now :)" there is no shortcut here. but it is absolutely necessary. no revolution is comprised of morally pure people. in many cases, the most devoted revolutionaries are the ones who know exactly what it is like on the other side.
#'coerced or forced' is a little too unnuanced for me you are accountable for your actions#but yes everyone needs to have an opportunity to get better#even if that person wasn't coerced or forced in any way actually. yes even then.
to explain what i mean by "coerced":
i think doing things that are morally bad is also bad for the individual. people shouldn't be forced to do things in general, but its especially bad to force someone to do something morally bad. its also bad to coerce them into doing that. and its quite horrific for a system to embed within someone a worldview which habitually leads them to do bad things, and a social system which incentivizes people to do bad things.
this post is in part inspired by reading the book Dirty Work which talks about moral injury & people (largely marginalized people) who do work that is seen as morally "dirty" in society. and specifically the chapter on people who work with drones for the US military (in a variety of ways). one of the major figures was a woman who grew up in poverty and was terrified of dying that way, went to join the military to get to see the world, and ended up working a job requiring her to watch hours and hours of drone footage, including hours of people living their lives, their gruesome deaths, and their families trying to collect their body parts in the aftermath. she recounts how much this weighed on her psychologically and morally, but not only her fear of poverty but also being court-martialed or otherwise subject to punishment if she spoke out or did anything, and her anger at protestors who seemed to be largely middle-class women who directed their protests at individual workers like her. she eventually did become a whistle-blower and says she experienced backlash from the left as well as the right because of her job.
now, this was a difficult read for me. it can be frustrating to read a whole chapter on the suffering of drone operators when so many people in the US don't give the beginning of a fuck about the people who have been getting bombed for years. the trauma of entire countries doesn't outweigh the trauma of a single US soldier. how can we talk about her anger at women protesting drone warfare because it hurts her feelings when we are still having to protest drone warfare that destroys entire families?
and yet. i think that reaction is partially an attempt to avoid the discomfort of how fucked the situation is holistically. the woman clearly had internalized plenty of dehumanizing, imperialistic, racist, and likely Orientalist beliefs and values. but this was hardly something she consciously chose. its easy to say "never join the US military" when you are someone who 1. already had the time and chance to develop a sense of how evil the US military is (not everyone necessarily does) 2. was not and is not in the position of being 17 and worried you'll die of a fentanyl overdose in the next five years like multiple of your classmates and desperate for any opportunity out.
does it make her decision better morally? i don't think so. but why was it a decision she had to make? why did she have so few options? why did things feel so desperate? why did a certain decision seem better and more accessible than others? if we are going up the line of responsibility here, the reason this harmful, morally bad action took place at all is because of the system of US imperialism and capitalism.
the problem is, that answer does not give us A Person To Punish. which we, as people socialized into a worldview of punitive justice, have been taught to want. transformative justice isn't just switching to A Person To Fix, its directing our energy towards social change and collective thinking and acting. that doesn't ignore the individual, but it always sees the individual through a social lens. the ultimate goal is a system which incentivizes the morals we want to see just as much as the current one incentives individualism and authoritarianism and puritanism and imperialism.
i think the perspective that we are coerced, by social systems like imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, etc. into acting immorally and harming others and ourselves, more naturally invites people to see their own racism, sexism, orientalism, classism, etc. as both morally bad and yet not a sign they are bad. it directly counters the idea that saying "the thing you did is racist" means "YOU are racist and EVIL and CONSCIOUSLY DESPISE PEOPLE OF COLOR"*; the point is that the thing you did is racist, and if you don't want to do racist things, then you have to unlearn the shit you were socialized into believing. "coerced" keeps in mind that there are people who benefit from keeping this status quo. if racism is evil, and white supremacist culture means everyone has internalized racist beliefs, that doesn't mean everyone is evil. it means we have all been coerced into participating in evil, and we are demanding an end to that coercion; that is (one form of) accountability.
this perspective can't exist alone, either. it must be paired with a devotion to the victims of these systems. this is why it is a process. the back-and-forth has to be put into action to get a balanced solution. what is best is what practically creates system change, and having process for (again, social) forgiveness is a practical necessity.
*to be clear, this is what people often feel when they are told they did smth racist; that is itself a racist reaction, but one that people do have & i try to think about how practically to get people to get over that reaction & focus on the actual issue at hand
i 100% agree with all of this. to be clear, my tags weren't meant to deny anything about how society is coercive and systematically pushes people into doing bad things. only that i still think the choice to get better needs to be accessible even to people who could have chosen better, for one reason or another. (whether someone is allowed to be accepted should not be predicated on whether they were 'enough of a victim,' whatever that means.) and we shouldn't conclude that no one is responsible for their actions--they are. but society as a whole is responsible for the coercion and violence done against them, and the solution to that responsibility is not punishment, but restoration.
#prison abolition#the problem is that over and over we are saying we need rehabilitation we need transformative alternatives to prison#but I have yet to see any thorough ideas on what that looks like!#part of the point of Angela y davis's book “are prisons obsolete” is that we cannot imagine a system without punitive justice#she spends 9 chapters explaining why prison is bad#and I'm on board!#and then one paragraph on what we could do instead???#girl YOURE the expert you gotta have some ideas about this because I'm coming up blank!!#yeah we need transformative justice. how do we change what we have into that. or even just What does that look like when we get there???#seriously if anyone has a genuine proposal on this I want to read it
(gonna add what i wrote in another reblog here):
i want to highlight something important: societies where sexual violence was essentially unthinkable and extremely rare have existed (one example here). societies where restorative justice was the status quo have existed. these are not just new speculative theories on how we could live, it is based on how human beings have lived already. we are not starting from scratch here. we have lived like this before and we can live like this again.
from Histories of Kanatha: Seen and Told by Georges Sioui, a historian from the Wendat Nation of what is currently Canada:
Two of Achiganaga’s sons readily admitted that they, along with the Menominee, had killed the Frenchmen and barely covered the bodies with branches, then left the broken canoe at a distance to create the appearance of an accident. Although Dulhut tried to implicate Achiganaga, all others agreed that the father himself had no part in the incident. When Dulhut announced at the end of the council that the three guilty men should be executed, the assembled Indians refused to approve the verdict. For the next three days, the Indians took counsel among themselves.
To the Indian people gathered at Sault Ste. Marie, the punitive methods of European law seemed wrong: two murders are not settled by committing three more. In their view, the initial injury to society—to all the people—should be healed and not compounded; the rip in the social fabric should be mended and not enlarged. To restore balance to society, Indian people in northeastern North America have two basic strategies: first, to provide gifts and services to compensate for the loss, and, second, to turn over actual human beings to the person who has suffered the loss: that is, to give lives to take the place of the lives lost. In Indian figures of speech, action is taken, either to ‘cover the dead’ with gifts as a form of restitution, or ‘raise up the dead’ by replacing a life lost with another human life. Everyone has a stake in restoring harmony, in making the social order whole again.
& this comes from the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, quoting a French Jesuit missionary's observation of the Wendat people & conceding that their non-punitive justice system worked better at creating social harmony than the French justice system:
"I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever – so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger …"
Lallemant’s account gives a sense of just how politically challenging some of the material to be found in the Jesuit Relations must have been to European audiences of the time, and why so many found it fascinating. After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective. Actually, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance that they might take’.
Wendat ‘captains’, as Lallemant then goes on to describe, ‘urge their subjects to provide what is needed; no one is compelled to it, but those who are willing bring publicly what they wish to contribute; it seems as if they vied with one another according to the amount of their wealth, and as the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions.’ More remarkable still, he concedes: ‘this form of justice restrains all these peoples, and seems more effectually to repress disorders than the personal punishment of criminals does in France,’ despite being ‘a very mild proceeding, which leaves individuals in such a spirit of liberty that they never submit to any Laws and obey no other impulse than that of their own will’.
i am not going to sit here and say that i can explain exactly how sex offenders would be treated in some hypothetical version of society, and i'm not sure of how this worked across the many societies throughout history that have practiced restorative justice. but society and culture truly shapes so much of what we think of as real, possible, how we interpret our experiences, how we relate to others. it's not that everyone will magically become pacifistic and docile and we'll never have any problems - but again, human beings have already lived like this!
in fact, many people are still actively trying to! in spite of its struggles under constant attack and de-legitimization, the restorative justice system of DAANES / Rojava has been afaik quite successful, given the circumstances they are forced to deal with. the system of community arbitration helps prevent a lot of issues from getting to the courts in the first place, it is explicitly designed to protect women's autonomy and the right of women to have a say in topics that impact them, and the focus is overall on doing what is necessary to keep people safe but also believing in the ability of people to change. before the influx of ISIS detainees which caused massive strain on their justice system, they had the second lowest rate of imprisonment for any self-governing region in the world (from here, which goes into detail on how they handled rehabilitation of ISIS affiliates before, well, the Syrian transitional government allowed the escape of many such ISIS affiliates and sympathizers during their violent attack on DAANES recently). If curious, check out this article as well:
Rojava’s restorative legal system offers a different model of community care, seeking to minimize police involvement. Original article publi
(also, from this reblog, which focuses more on how restorative justice frameworks can be weaponized & how Rojava & the Wendat framework try to counteract this):
Notably, both the Wendat and Rojava systems of justice take into account gender in a way that I think is very important for not just gender but how restorative justice needs to deal with marginalization as a whole. In Rojava, any issue regarding women (especially issues of marriage or sexual violence) must have women involved in the justice process from start to finish. On an institutional level, there must be gender parity across systems, including the justice system, and women can seek recourse on the most basic level by going to their local Mala Jin (women's house) to get support from their community. The Mala Jin are required to be consulted in any legal issue concerning women. Similarly, in the Wendat nation and many other nations, women had their own independent councils which had authority over their own issues.
Obviously, gender and race are different issues. But one can easily imagine how "restorative justice" could be used to excuse gendered violence by having a bunch of men demand a woman who was abused by her husband forgive him and prevent divorce. This is why Rojava is modeled the way it is, on every level; ethnic minorities are treated similarly, having their own democratic organizations and positions in councils to ensure they have a collective voice. The (Kurdish, Assyrian, Yazidi, Arab) women of Rojava have meaningful power over their lives and social organization, and they make sure that restorative justice is built to work for marginalized groups, rather than simply assuming the system itself is just so inherently good and moral in theory that everything will work out if its kept gender/race/class neutral.
It's not just a matter of implementing a system and then expecting everyone's mindset to change. Both the Wendat and Rojava systems involve a certain culture that facilitates people engaging in these systems, and the Rojava Revolution has involved dedicated work to spread the political and philosophical framework that underlies its justice system and allow it to function. In cases where restorative justice utterly fails, its a lot of times the result of either a poorly-made framework, people lacking the theoretical/cultural understanding to use that framework properly, or both.
The models of the Wendat and Rojava come from cultures that were/are both communalist and anti-authoritarian. For many Indigenous nations, the idea that someone could be forced to obey a political leader, or even that a child should be forced to obey a parent, was ridiculous and unjust. Leaders had to be constantly generous and persuasive to get people to follow them, and people had the inherent right to refuse orders. That is a very different way of relating to people than in more authoritarian cultures, like most European cultures. So trying to just cut + paste that kind of justice system without adopting any other part of the culture or political framework is obviously going to fail. It is a very European-Enlightenment way of thinking to imagine that if you just build a system that sounds really good and moral in theory, then in practice you can act and think however you want and the system will always spit out good results because it just looks so good on paper (this video from The Alt-Right Playbook isn't really relevant to restorative justice, but it is where I first heard this cultural idea of "the system will Just Work, no matter how many bad ideas are in it!" & I think it explains why a lot of white leftist attempts at various things are shitty. People don't want to put in the effort to do good, they just want a system that lets them act however they want and still feel good).
Any restorative justice system worth its salt should preempt situations like the above. No victim who is marginalized should be in a position where they, alone, have to defend themselves against a group of people who do not share their marginalization, even if those people (claim to) have good intentions. The system should be built specifically with that situation in mind, in order to ensure that no group is able to hoard the power and control what justice looks like. It should be a ground rule that if an incident involves people of a marginalized group, that the system has a way to ensure that group has authority over the proceedings. If the victim is a Black person, step one should be bringing in other Black people to support the victim and ensure that the victim as an individual, and the community as a whole, has not just a perfunctory voice but the power to dictate what restorative justice looks like in that situation.
If an attempt at restorative justice is not foundationally anti-racist and built to force white people to deal with discomfort and distress and social consequences for engaging in racism, it does not deserve respect. When cis/male/white/upper-class people are never made, in a justice system, to do any restorative acts that challenge the privileges they gain from those positions, the only clear end-goal of the process is the victim's forgiveness. And rather than that forgiveness being the natural result of a process that amends the harm done to them, the whole process collapses into "how fast can we get this person to shut up about what they went through?" because the process has been built for the comfort of the offenders, not for restoring harmony in the community to ensure the well-being of all its members. Good restorative justice sees the reform of offenders as a practical way of establishing that safety and harmony for everyone; if it didn't demand anything from the offenders, it would be completely inept. In one of those quotes in that post I linked, the restorative justice process is explicitly meant as an alternative for the victim('s family) demanding violent retribution, with the idea being "if they are not satisfied through restoration, they will demand blood and probably take matters into their own hands, so our restoration system needs to be genuinely effective to keep the peace." There was no assumption that the victim would just have to get whatever the community decides they get and have to deal with it (which ties back to the cultural anti-authoritarianism).
(I hope this helps a bit to give you a sense of what such a framework could look like when lived out!)
There’s this city councilor of Algerian descent in France. His name is Ismael. He is openly anti zionist and he managed to infiltrate a telegram group filled with “French-israeli” zionists. The group was filled with Islamophobia, terror attack threats, anti Arab racism, they took pictures of their guns and shared it with each others… they talked about planning false flags. They also threatened to attack public figures who are anti zionists in France and Ismael’s own name came up.
Ismael took all the proof and went to the cops. For weeks he tried to get the cops to do something but nothing.
Eventually Ismael decided that for something to happen he needed to make it public, so he posted all the screenshots and videos and mentioned everything that happened.
The “french-Israelis” supremacists who were in the group decided to sue him for doxxing. Members of the French government also claimed that Ismael’s actions had put in danger Jewish people and that he should be condemned by a judge for it… his trial ended up being a joke. The magistrate were obviously biased, members of the government were involved… the “French-israeli” who were threatening him and all Arabs and all Muslims and were considering terror attacks in France were painted as the victims…
This week the judge took his decision. He dismissed a bit more than 1/3 of the case against Ismael. The zionists tried to also accuse him of “supporting terrorism” because of his pro Palestine tweets and the judge dismissed that part (some of the stuff that were dismissed were pretty interesting in a positive way). But the court also decided that Ismael was guilty for exposing the “French-israeli” terrorist group. And they condemned Ismael to 6 months in jail + 6 months suspended sentence as well as a fine.
Ismael is making an appeal on the decision of course. And the Defender of Rights is supporting him and looking into having Ismael recognized as a whistleblower which would make any sanction against him for exposing this group impossible.
Long story short: If you expose a group of “French-Israelis” full of racists and planning attacks in France and try to get the cops involved but they ignore you so you make it public you end up being the one judged guilty for exposing the group.
You all need to understand that autonomy and especially bodily autonomy NEEDS to include being allowed to do things that are bad for you. True bodily autonomy includes being allowed to do things that are risky, drugs, cosmetic procedures and the like. Bodily autonomy needs to include being allowed to get high or smoke or get a BBL. The important part is education about the risks
Another point that reminds me of my privilege in this world is when I think about the fact that we sell the cure for tuberculosis to people to give to their dogs for a UTI. Millions of people literally die every year because they can't access this medication and I'm giving it to people to shove down their dogs' throats to make them stop peeing in the house. It's one of the more expensive antibiotics and people always whine about the price but then it's not their daughter they have to watch slowly suffocate as bacteria turns her lungs into swiss cheese. It's not their father that coughs and coughs and coughs until he's spitting up blood.
The deadliest infectious disease in human history is cured by the same packet of chewable tabs individually packed in foil. It comes in beef flavor so your dog won't resist taking its meds as much. It's like a hundred bucks for 30 tablets on pretty much any pet pharmacy.
It makes me think about medicine scarcity and how it's all fake in order to get enough capital that you can have individuals with higher net worth than entire countries. And in the mean time, hundreds of millions of people are dead because they don't drive the bottom line.
using violence to liberate people from sweatshops, unsafe mines, and grinding poverty isn't the same as using violence to impose those things on people. the idea that violence is morally repugnant regardless of context is a belief that every oppressor throughout history would love for the oppressed to hold
i just saw the saddest tiktok in the world that purported “im not like other girls, i dont masturbate because i know it would make disinterested in men forever” baby girl you have to jack off and never talk to a man again im literally begging you.
It's literally just "If I masturbate I'll get addicted to it and I'll let myself and my future spouse down" in fewer words 😔
So, as a woman who has been where this girl is rn, is married to a man, and was sexually active with this man prior to the marriage, let's clear a few things up:
1) There is no guaranteed future spouse or "the one" for everyone. Churches may tell you this and even secular materials may tell you this, but it is not true.
2) Marriage and sexual activity often go together, but they do not have to, and a healthy marriage depends on way more than just sex.
3) Even if you do end up getting married in the future, you are not cheating on your future spouse by masturbating or having sex before you meet said future spouse.
4) Whatever you do and think about to pleasure yourself are entirely private and have zero bearing on the health of your future relationships--except, of course, perhaps in a positive way: if you learn what you like ahead of time, you'll be able to teach that to your partner, and you'll enjoy sex more, and by extension so will they!
5) You will not get "addicted" to masturbation just because you enjoy it, and you're not addicted just because you do it multiple times a day. There really is no such thing as masturbation addiction.
6) There also really is no such thing as porn addiction.
7) People who fear such a thing happening to them or who believe they are in that position are often found to have been conditioned to feel that way due to sex-negative religious upbringings. Usually what's found is that their masturbation frequency/level of porn consumption/etc is entirely normal.
8) There is such a thing as compulsive masturbation or compulsive porn consumption--when you do either or both to the point that it's getting in the way of you being able to be present in your daily activities and relationships--but usually there is some root cause, like avoidance of deep feelings or problems. The same thing can happen with any activity, like food, video games, or work.
9) Masturbating does not leave you incapable of receiving sexual satisfaction from or desiring sex with another person.
10) Same thing with consuming porn, by the way.
11) And on that note, using porn within a relationship doesn't necessarily mean you are cheating or that you are dissatisfied with your partner. But knowing their partner is doing that hits differently for different people. What really seems to have the most negative effect is discovering secret usage despite setting boundaries about it ahead of time. Checking in with each other to make sure you're on the same page is important.
12) Using toys/vibrators to masturbate and even during partnered sex is entirely normal, healthy, and sometimes necessary for some people, especially those who have a clitoris. If your partner feels jealous or inadequate because of that, it's because of their own insecurities and hangups, not because you are doing anything wrong.
One thing I've been seeing a lot is the implication that patriarchy oppresses both men and women and actually only benefits a small minority.
This position is a fundamental misunderstanding both of how capitalism uses social divides to create division among works and of basic feminist principles. Proletarian men fail to organize with proletarian women specifically because patriarchy gives them a position of power over women.
Men can find their actions constrained by patriarchy as well, which I've seen many people mistake for genuine oppression, but in reality men who can conform to patriarchal norms and standards are making a small sacrifice of emotional vulnerability in order to gain access to power and privilege women will never be able to attain within patriarchy. By contrast when women conform to patriarchal norms we find ourselves ever more severely limited and endangered, often losing basic bodily autonomy by force.
This is kind of a side note but women are also punished if we DON'T conform, in the forms of discrimination in the workplace and carceral and medical systems, as well as interpersonal exclusion and violence including, for some women, actual physical assault and murder.
This atmosphere of coercion is one reason women DO accede to patriarchy's demands despite the way those demands constrain women's lives.
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