A rolequeer blog

"Rolequeer means: a traitorous relationship to one’s own placement in a privileged position, a subversive orientation towards one’s own power, a subservient mindset to people in a position with less power than yours, and a hundred million other ways to describe the same thing." —Maymay, Your Kinks Are Not “BDSM”

[rolequeer]

'rape play' and therapy.

I want to spend a moment to talk about rape play and therapy, because I think it is something people keep bringing up as a reason to do BDSM but rarely discuss in detail. A personal story first:

I did confrontation therapy to deal with a fear of bees. I got attacked by an entire swarm of bees when I was 7 and it nearly killed me and I was terrified to go outside for years. I had severe panic attacks. I got triggered by humming sounds. I was, in short, traumatized. And then I started confrontation therapy, which turned out for me to be extremely helpful. I started out just looking at pictures of bees (which was difficult enough), listening to humming sounds, and finally I agreed to visit my therapist while a bee was in the building. It was in a jar, in a different room, but it was there. And if I felt up for it, I could walk into the room and see the bee in the jar.

I won’t bore you with all the details of my slow road to unlearning trauma. I can now deal with bees better than most people (even if they walk on my skin!) and I’m quite proud of that. I want to talk about the therapy though. What was defining about this confrontation therapy was that I was always in control of the confrontation. The therapist never pushed me forward, never opened the jar without my consent, never locked the door. If it was too much, I could leave the room. Every step was mine. Every step backwards was okay. That was fundamental. If the confrontation had ever not been mine to control (say, if the therapist had pushed me forward) it is likely I would have had a panic attack and my recovery would have taken a big step backwards. If she had tied me to a chair and let loose a bee on me, well, it’s likely I would have ended up more traumatized then before the therapy.

Now, when I hear people talk about ‘rape play as therapy’ to deal with traumatic events of sexual violence, their stories are usually very different. Along the line of ‘my dom ties me to the bed and we re-enact rape but with a safe word so it’s not real rape’. And to me that sounds, well, awful. That sounds like the opposite of the very slow, always-in-control road I took in confrontation therapy. That sounds more intense than anything I ever did in confrontation therapy. That sounds like a therapist ripping open a jar full of bees on my first day of therapy (but I have a safe word to leave the room so it’s not a real swarm of bees), and every session after that, until I can get through it without a panic attack.

Now, maybe that works for some people. All brains are different, so who knows? But let me ask you: if you chose that method, did you chose that as the best way to do confrontation therapy after examining 50 different ways of shaping the confrontation? Or did you do that because that was the only kind of ‘do-it-yourself-therapy’ the BDSM scene offered you? And if the latter is true, do you think it is remotely suspicious that the only method presented to you was the one method doms happen to find hot?

Because, ya know, I find it very suspicious. 

—

edit: turns out some people read this as ‘don’t do therapy yourself, go to a professional!’ That’s not what I meant at all. The medical system is privileged and expensive and also full of abusive therapists. This is NOT about ‘professional = good’ and ‘do it yourself = bad’. NOT AT ALL. This is about the weirdly limited options for ‘rape play as therapy’ BDSM seems to offer and how those limited options are suspiciously likely to serve the needs of doms. I very much support do-it-yourself therapy and healing-together-without-doctors therapy.

[queeranarchism]

On a related note, I hear about rape play as trauma about 0,01% of the time when BDSMers are talking amongst themselves and about 99,9% of the time when anyone is even a bit critical of any part of BDSM. Oh no no no no, you don’t get to hide behind traumatized people like that, I see what you are doing.

[rolequeer]

sashavart: 

okay fine, but critizing rape culture shouldn’t be a pretext to shame people because they supposedly “give in” to things that could eventually be involved in such culture. To me it hardly sounds like a vicious way to perpetuate rape culture. I’m sorry to say but that’s how I feel. Especially because it’s a sensitive topic, we should be carefull with not making amalgams and false generlizations. Like it’s not either “BDSM/roleplay = rape” culture, either it’s “pure” of any negativity. Maybe it’s a bit more complex than that.

Just wanted to add that it’s also a very difficult topic for me that easely make me get off the edge. And I’m sorry if I said things that may offend anyone. For what it worth, I may sound like a b*tch but I want to make it very clear that your feelings and personal opinions are also valid, and if you feel like any kind of bdsm or role play is dangerous to you, like any kind of real or false and abusive “therapy” : it’s perfectly sane to tell it and to call it out.

I think I need to clarify a few things.

My intention was never ever EVER to shame victims of sexual violence who choose rape play to deal with their trauma. 

My intention was to accuse Dominants of taking advantage of victims of sexual violence. 

Why? Because victims of sexual violence deserve access to the full range of imaginable methods to deal with their trauma. If they choose confrontation therapy as a method to heal than they deserve access to the whole spectrum of gradual, controlled, forms of confrontation therapy possible. And it doesn’t take a professional to provide this, this is definitely something that can be done on a DIY basis with a friend who is prepared to do the work to learn how to do it and prepared to go through the whole slow and probably very unsexy and often boring process of healing. 

Dominants who offer rape play as therapy do not offer  the whole spectrum of gradual, controlled, forms of confrontation therapy. What they offer instead is ONE thing: an act of ‘play’ rape intense enough to turn on the Dominant. This all-or-nothing version of confrontation therapy is a sham, it has nothing to do with DIY therapy and everything to do with getting the Dominant’s rocks off. 

This is a really horrible way to take advantage of victims of sexual violence.

[sashabarad]

Ok Thanks for answering @rolequeer . I think I just over-reacted to your initial post. But this kind of shaming is a permanent reality that also use such arguments (especially against trans and queer people, even “between us”). So thank you for making it clear. Another thing that makes me uncomfortable being that so many people in (pro)feminist/LGBTQI/MOGAI/Queer scenes or backgrounds tend to denounce rape culture everywhere but never talk of practices and challenge themselves on an individual level. So they identify others sexual practices to “rape culture” but never ever talk about their own, if you see what I mean. So it so often sounds to me like an easy way to present themselves as gatekeepers of a kind of new kind of ethical and moral purity. And one will suppose that makes them just incapable of anything that perpetuate rape culture, and less again being possible perpetuators themselves. You know, that’s kind of usefull, just in case you could ever be reproached anything on the topic.

I’m just being really nervous on how “denouncing rape culture” sounds for a certain type of people like denouncing any kind of rape culture but the one they may eventually be a part of.

So, that was my point. But I must admit what you say still make sense to me (especially again, about the bees metaphor), and it clearly question practices and concrete things. More over, I also take note of your clarifications, and I think we could never be “too clear” on such sensitive and serious topics.

So again I hope I’m making myself clear and not wrongly offended anyone.

[rolequeer]

If you’re interested, when rolequeer was a more active tag space there was quite a lot writing specifically about confronting yourself as a possible rapist and abuser. A lot of it is part of other conversations because addressing our own ability to violate consent popped up constantly in rolequeer conversations. So you may have to weed through some other stuff (and drama, soooo many people attacked the rolequeer tag space) to find it,but if you’re okay with that check out posts like: 

You might be a rapist if it never occurs to you that rape is something you’re capable of 

Significant parts of  You Can Take It Back: Consent as a Felt Sense « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

I want Dominants to spend more time with the parts of themselves they’re scared of

Significant parts of the tumblr conversation Why we need a Predator Alert Tool for Facebook

Do you feel safe around people who adamantly deny the possibility that they could ever do abusive things?

[rolequeer]

'rape play' and therapy.

I want to spend a moment to talk about rape play and therapy, because I think it is something people keep bringing up as a reason to do BDSM but rarely discuss in detail. A personal story first:

I did confrontation therapy to deal with a fear of bees. I got attacked by an entire swarm of bees when I was 7 and it nearly killed me and I was terrified to go outside for years. I had severe panic attacks. I got triggered by humming sounds. I was, in short, traumatized. And then I started confrontation therapy, which turned out for me to be extremely helpful. I started out just looking at pictures of bees (which was difficult enough), listening to humming sounds, and finally I agreed to visit my therapist while a bee was in the building. It was in a jar, in a different room, but it was there. And if I felt up for it, I could walk into the room and see the bee in the jar.

I won’t bore you with all the details of my slow road to unlearning trauma. I can now deal with bees better than most people (even if they walk on my skin!) and I’m quite proud of that. I want to talk about the therapy though. What was defining about this confrontation therapy was that I was always in control of the confrontation. The therapist never pushed me forward, never opened the jar without my consent, never locked the door. If it was too much, I could leave the room. Every step was mine. Every step backwards was okay. That was fundamental. If the confrontation had ever not been mine to control (say, if the therapist had pushed me forward) it is likely I would have had a panic attack and my recovery would have taken a big step backwards. If she had tied me to a chair and let loose a bee on me, well, it’s likely I would have ended up more traumatized then before the therapy.

Now, when I hear people talk about ‘rape play as therapy’ to deal with traumatic events of sexual violence, their stories are usually very different. Along the line of ‘my dom ties me to the bed and we re-enact rape but with a safe word so it’s not real rape’. And to me that sounds, well, awful. That sounds like the opposite of the very slow, always-in-control road I took in confrontation therapy. That sounds more intense than anything I ever did in confrontation therapy. That sounds like a therapist ripping open a jar full of bees on my first day of therapy (but I have a safe word to leave the room so it’s not a real swarm of bees), and every session after that, until I can get through it without a panic attack.

Now, maybe that works for some people. All brains are different, so who knows? But let me ask you: if you chose that method, did you chose that as the best way to do confrontation therapy after examining 50 different ways of shaping the confrontation? Or did you do that because that was the only kind of 'do-it-yourself-therapy’ the BDSM scene offered you? And if the latter is true, do you think it is remotely suspicious that the only method presented to you was the one method doms happen to find hot?

Because, ya know, I find it very suspicious. 

—

edit: turns out some people read this as 'don’t do therapy yourself, go to a professional!’ That’s not what I meant at all. The medical system is privileged and expensive and also full of abusive therapists. This is NOT about ‘professional = good’ and ‘do it yourself = bad’. NOT AT ALL. This is about the weirdly limited options for ‘rape play as therapy’ BDSM seems to offer and how those limited options are suspiciously likely to serve the needs of doms. I very much support do-it-yourself therapy and healing-together-without-doctors therapy.

[queeranarchism]

On a related note, I hear about rape play as trauma about 0,01% of the time when BDSMers are talking amongst themselves and about 99,9% of the time when anyone is even a bit critical of any part of BDSM. Oh no no no no, you don’t get to hide behind traumatized people like that, I see what you are doing.

[rolequeer]

sashavart: 

okay fine, but critizing rape culture shouldn't be a pretext to shame people because they supposedly "give in" to things that could eventually be involved in such culture. To me it hardly sounds like a vicious way to perpetuate rape culture. I'm sorry to say but that's how I feel. Especially because it's a sensitive topic, we should be carefull with not making amalgams and false generlizations. Like it's not either "BDSM/roleplay = rape" culture, either it's "pure" of any negativity. Maybe it's a bit more complex than that.

Just wanted to add that it's also a very difficult topic for me that easely make me get off the edge. And I'm sorry if I said things that may offend anyone. For what it worth, I may sound like a b*tch but I want to make it very clear that your feelings and personal opinions are also valid, and if you feel like any kind of bdsm or role play is dangerous to you, like any kind of real or false and abusive "therapy" : it's perfectly sane to tell it and to call it out.

I think I need to clarify a few things.

My intention was never ever EVER to shame victims of sexual violence who choose rape play to deal with their trauma. 

My intention was to accuse Dominants of taking advantage of victims of sexual violence. 

Why? Because victims of sexual violence deserve access to the full range of imaginable methods to deal with their trauma. If they choose confrontation therapy as a method to heal than they deserve access to the whole spectrum of gradual, controlled, forms of confrontation therapy possible. And it doesn’t take a professional to provide this, this is definitely something that can be done on a DIY basis with a friend who is prepared to do the work to learn how to do it and prepared to go through the whole slow and probably very unsexy and often boring process of healing. 

Dominants who offer rape play as therapy do not offer  the whole spectrum of gradual, controlled, forms of confrontation therapy. What they offer instead is ONE thing: an act of ‘play’ rape intense enough to turn on the Dominant. This all-or-nothing version of confrontation therapy is a sham, it has nothing to do with DIY therapy and everything to do with getting the Dominant’s rocks off. 

This is a really horrible way to take advantage of victims of sexual violence.

[radicallyqueerandnow-deactivate]

Some Thoughts on Why Kink-Critical Discourse Bothers Me

I’ve lately come across some posts from folks who identify as kink-critical or rolequeer, and I did some digging to understand their perspective. While I think they have a lot of good arguments—it’s a good idea for dominant folks to examine their own desires and the cultural context of domism and patriarchy, for example—my primary feeling from reading these posts isn’t submissive empowerment, but shame. 

A lot of the kink-critical discourse purports to be very pro-submissive, but ultimately I think it ends up shaming folks who want power exchange, who consent to having control taken away, who kink primarily on the existence of a dominant partner. I’m not against the idea that some submissive folks can get their needs met exclusively with other submissives or rolequeer folks, or the idea that dominant people aren’t necessary for kinky play. That’s definitely a cool and creative idea. But when kink-critical folks suggest that all submissive folks should be able to meet their needs in these ways, it comes across as shaming. It feels condescending, like these folks are saying that submissive people can’t come to the conclusion, as grownups, that they prefer a D/s power exchange. I’m all for awareness of domism and problems in BDSM culture and for serious reflection about what D/s desires mean, but once I’ve done all that, suggesting that I can’t enthusiastically consent to a D/s dynamic feels insulting.

[rolequeer]

Hey, it’s great to see more people taking an interest in rolequeerness. But to talk about it in terms of shame is, I think, to completely miss the point. Traditionally conversations about kink have been taking place between

those who claim kinks are perverted, wrong, the worst parts of our personality etc and that we should hide and shame them on the one hand. 

those who claim kinks are totally not caused by the world around us, totally natural, totally beautiful, inherently never oppressive and just all out awesome.

Rolequeers don’t like either of those groups much. One of the foundations of a rolequeer critique of kink is that our desires don’t exist in a vacuum. That they are in part shaped by the world around us. That there is a relationship between rape culture and the number of men who happen to want do to ‘rape play’ with young girls. Since we live in an incredibly oppressive, broken world, it’s only logical that we have a lot of oppressive, broken desires. BDSM is a celebration of that. It is a fetishization of oppression. That is why we fight it.

But we don’t fight it with shame, we fight it with awareness. Shame is pointless. Being aroused by oppression is NOT something to be ashamed of at all. It’s something to be aware of. If we grow up in an oppressive world and end up wanting to dominate people, that’s a reason to be extremely wary of our desires and to spend time with the parts of ourselves that we’re scared of. If we grow up in an oppressive world and end up wanting to be submissive, that’s a reason to be extremely wary of the way oppressors can take advantage of that feeling and to take good care of ourselves. 

That doesn’t mean submissives have some sort of moral obligation to cut D/s relationships out of their lives. Far from it. Their only obligation is to be compassionate to theirselves.

Shame is the last thing I’d want submissives to feel about their D/s desires. Anger at the way the oppressive world has set them up might be a logical response. Pride that out of all relationships they could have to power, they have not ended up wanting to be oppressive or ignoring oppression altogether might be a logical response. Joy at all the possibilities a marginalized relationship to power brings might be a logical response. But in the end I don’t think submissives should feel any particular way. I just think they should take good care of themselves because there are people out there called 'Doms’ who have convinced themselves that their desire to oppress other is natural and unproblematic and those people are dangerous. 

If rolequeers seem somewhat agressive at times, it’s because we see how that 'kink is natural and happy and should never be questioned’ bullshit is actively enabling rapists. I can understand how acknowledging that our desires are shaped by the oppressive world we live in is easy to mistake for shaming. It’s a totally different approach though.

When I hear submissives talk about their D/s relationships, I feel concern for their well-being in an oppressive world, not anger or moral judgement about their actions. And I have no interest in jumping from that to a protectiveness that limits their freedom to do as they please. I merely want to offer them alternatives, safety nets and solidarity.

Finally, about consent. You seem to assume that rolequeers think that enthusiastically consenting to a D/s dynamic is not possible. That’s a mistake. You absolutely can enthusiastically consent to a D/s dynamic. Completely. But what you’re consenting to in that scenario is oppression. 

A D/s dynamic is not fake oppression, it’s not play oppresion, it’s real oppression. Which is something people actually consent to quite often. You can very enthusiastically consent to a great job, but that doesn’t suddenly make the relationship between you and your boss a relationship of equals. The employee/boss relationship is never going to be one of equals. 

And I would never shame someone for chosing employment because I understand how that choice was shaped by the world they live in and I understand that that job might actually meet their needs at this point in time. But I would encourage everyone to realize how harmful bosses are and to consider if they wouldn’t be better off working in a boss-less collective. I would encourage everyone to consider if it wouldn’t be worth trying to aim for a boss-less life rather than looking for a better job with a better boss. 

Our desires for sex are a lot more complex than our desires for work (because our society complicates sex a lot), but it both cases I’m not interested in shaming. I’m interested in adressing the oppressiveness of the fact that the D/s and the boss/employee relationship exists in the first place. I want to help people realize that there are alternatives.I want people to realize that a Dom or a boss is not an ethical thing to be and I want to help create communities that allow (not force, not shame, allow) subs and employees to quit. I want to stand in solidarity with them and offer them tools to survive in an oppressive world. 

[unquietpirate-blog]

Rolequeer: Pro-Critical Analysis; Anti-Shame Radical Feminism: Pro-Critical Analysis; Pro-Shame Sex-Positive Feminism: Anti-Critical Analysis; Anti-Shame Religious Conservatism: Anti-Critical Analysis; Pro-Shame

Neither radical sex-negative nor liberal sex-positive feminism is the clear opposite of rolequeer theory. Instead, they are opposites of each other, but their opposition exists in a space between rolequeerness and its true cultural opposite. What sexual politic is negative on critical engagement and positive on shame? What sexual politic claims that you should feel bad about your sexuality but that you shouldn’t think too hard about it? Welp, stock-standard conservative religious puritanism comes to mind.

Read more: [Bandana Blog] Locating Rolequeer within the Landscape of Sexuality Politics

[the-laugh-of-the-medusa]

I’ve never heard of rolequeer. Having done just a little bit of reading over the last hour, I feel like it really addresses a lot of the things that have always made me extremely hesitant to label myself a sex positive feminist. This is interesting and very important stuff.

[rolequeer]

Commodification

Thought of the day: it’s no coincidence that objectification is such a big kink when we consider what capitalism does to people. A lot of people kink not just on being depersonified, objectified, but specifically on being commodified.

Why? Because products are wanted. 

And under capitalism we do not, generally, feel wanted. Mass unemployment and starvation wages show us that our labour is interchangable and close to worthless in the eyes of capitalism. ‘Professionalism’ means ‘leave everything you are at home’ and further drives home that who we are as people is not something the people who hire us wants to deal with. Under capitalism, we are depersonified machines who provide labour or are a waste of space and oxigen when we don’t work. 

But the product, the product is glorified. The product is put on a pedestal. There is a whole billion dollar industry build around the glorification of the product. And being a product hardly feels like a step backwards in agency and humanity when we compare it to being a cog in the machine. Is it strange that we start having fantasies about being the object of desire?  

[insomniaexpress]

Oh

[queeranarchism]

I need more analysis on capitalism and the shaping of sexual desire, especially when it comes to desires for power, powerlessness, humiliation, where the role of capitalism seems extra relevant.

[rolequeer]

New terms.

I like to mix tea and I just made a new blend and I wrote down ‘spicy vanilla’ on the jar and then stared at what I’d done for 5 minutes. 

[rolequeer]

#Terms you know ‘cool’ BDSMers will hate #like those who see ‘hardcore’ bdsm as somehow superior #like they never grew up #but it’s not innocent childishness #they literally want all people with creative sex lives to identify with bdsm and nothing else #because how can they maintain their rape culture rife empire is people who don’t like it can just kink elsewhere?

Reblogging my own tags like a pro

[isaacsapphire]

<3 <3 <3

Vanilla is an underrated spice and fear of being called “vanilla” drives people to “play” harder than they really want to, the BDSM equivalent of that “couple neither of whom want to have sex having sex because they both feel pressured by social expectations.”

BDSM is an evangelical belief system. This is a very important factor in considering the danger presented by it. BDSM explicitly says that everybody who does kink should be in BDSM, “for their own safety” and everybody who doesn’t do kink is lesser. People are either BDSMers, kink-ers who need to be converted, or boring Vanilla.

And BDSM has pretty well won the battle to be “organized kink” and speak for all kink.

Also, I’ve been getting into mixing my own teas lately too ^^

[nogodsonequeen]

^^

[iwannabeadored]

I love this post. I love it I love everything about it cause everything about it is 10000000000% true

[themerrymisnomer]

power tripping (sub-cultural space)

Every so often I think of kink scenes as demonstrations (in the protest way) because they are sites of power irritation. They require cognizance, understanding, negotiation, and keen spatial as well as physical awareness.

White BDSM-ers have this tendency of pretending that dungeon/play spaces are outside of the context of the The Mainstream and are places where external identities can/should be shed at the door.

But how can that be true? How can I wash off the terror my skin brings and untether the emotional relationship to vulnerability and mortality that my black queerness brings? ———

If I had the spoons (and if V didn’t literally stop me from engaging with these nonsense folks) I’d organize a scene/demonstration during a real big night at the local kinky watering hole.

I’d have to find the PEFECT stereotype of a cis white dom to do this scene with (or someone who acts the part well), but I’d have them make a big show of bringing all these props and tools to the scene, big ol bag fulla floggers and whips and knives and fun. And have this cis, white dude kinda place me in the center of the room, maybe in a chair or whatever, and kinda kneel down and just….treat me like a human being…

How farfetched, right? So they just kneel there, painting a picture of a world that does not exist anywhere except in that room/dungeon, a world where a wretch like me could not only live and thrive, but be celebrated and live without worry. And on and on and on, giving power to a powerless person, freely, completely removing himself from the moment on purpose, centering marginalization but removing all the fetish aspects from it. No talk of chocolate skin and Nubian beauty and independence and strength, just kneeling there and reminding me I’m human, that my pain makes me human (not noble or strong), that my presence matters (not all Presences, just mine) and that the world is a better place for having me in it.

Ain’t that the silliest, most commonplace thing though? Doesn’t that scene seem so trivial and trite? Doesn’t it seem like it could be a normal worship scene? Maybe it would look that way. Maybe only to people who get that luxury outside of the dungeon..and maybe to those who wear their kinks as badges, that Dominant would seem like weak or unassertive, but context is everything. To give up an outward display of power for an emotional connection like that is paramount.

But so often, people draw parallel lines in unparalleled situations and assume empowerment must work the same for everyone.

But in a world that derives joy and pleasure from disconnecting my black spirit from my black body, from trampling my personhood, from sexualizing my resistance, why would getting beaten and tied up be a liberatory experience? Maybe for some it helps ease a learned impulse to stay strong in the face of adversity, but for a body constantly being consumed, wouldn’t it make more sense not to further dissociate my pain from my experiences? And why don’t people talk about how hard it is to let down one’s on guard in these spaces with people who mostly don’t look like me. And its one thing being comfortable being doing painplay with folks who dont remind you of your oppressor, but the scopophilic aspect puts a spotlightcon our imbalance whether we want to accept it or not. Why not turn that spotlight into a tool of resistance?

Why NOT bring oppression into kink spaces? Why not highlight it in a radical way?

How can you worship a body that isn’t even granted humanity? Wouldn’t it be sexy to put that humanity back first? Instead of worshipping the fetishization of power imbalance, why not worship Balance itself?

But imagine that scene. To some that isnt hot or sexy or even interesting but to me it seems like an emotional awakening to me. To be able to walk into a space and, not detach from my Self by necessity (because contrary to popular belief white BDSMer DO bring their nonsense everywhere they go), but for someone to help me fully realize it?

People like me are invisible wherever we go. Why would I wanna go to a space just to feel even less visible? People already tend to shy away from kinsters of color because our desires aren’t always translatable. You want slave play and to be a Different person than in your muggle world, I want liberation. I want to be free to BE a person.

No amount of pain play will ever bring me to enlightenment because I’ve been conditioned to accept daily acts of inhumanity.

But the radical potential of power play lies in embracing the hypothetical freedom to that comes with writing one’s own script, refusing to accept the role society gave you and transforming that into a practice.

I’m wont to believe people would leave that scene feeling like their walls are blurring and that’s precisely the point. Resistance must be EVERYWHERE. Or it isn’t as radical as you and your lot believe it is.

[fierceawakening]

songlinwrites:

zefram-cockring:

huliia:

[Name redacted by me as these were sent off anon and I do not wish for this person to get in trouble]

I’m publishing these messages because I feel like they are a great example for demonstrating what’s wrong with the kind of attitude that seems to become more and more common among fandom spaces on Tumblr, namely that people have to disclose very private information to complete strangers to be allowed to draw/write certain things. To the person who sent these, please think about why you thought this was an appropriate question to ask someone. Not only are you expecting me to reveal personal details like this to a stranger, but a stranger who just called me a “fucker” and a “disgusting asshole”.

I’m going to use this as an opportunity to talk about this in broader terms, since I’ve seen a lot of people get attacked about the same thing.    This whole “you must be this traumatized to ride” mindset is incredibly fucked up, and while I’m glad that more and more people feel comfortable talking about their experiences publicly, it should always remain optional instead of required. There are many reasons why people want to keep such things private, and their choice should be respected. What about all the people who aren’t sure if their experience counts? What about all those raised as women who, while they may have never been sexually assaulted, have been taught to live in fear of it, or had to deal with catcalling and harassment, and seek such content as way to deal with those experiences? The people who haven’t been sexually abused, but were victims of other kinds of abuse? This is an incredibly complex and nuanced topic, and while “ only survivors are allowed to ship/write/draw it” might look reasonable at first, it assumes you have the right to dig through and judge other people’s incredibly private thoughts and experiences. No one has that right.

I mean, where will this end? At which point will people only be allowed to create or consume fanwork that mirrors the exact circumstances of their abuse - which also means they have to disclose the exact details of what they went through to complete strangers? Hell, recently I’ve seen a callout post that, after the artist who was being called out disclosed they were a sexually abused (and got accused of lying by the writer of said post) stated that she’s still problematic because she didn’t state the person she was abused by was a relative, so she’s still problematic for shipping anime characters that are related. How can someone look at real people’s lived experiences and tell them their abuse wasn’t the right kind of abuse, so they aren’t allowed to look or create certain types of fanworks? It’s honestly baffling to me how people can think they should be the ultimate judge on who has or who hasn’t been abused properly enough (and in the right ways) to graciously be granted permission to enjoy noncon fiction. 

There are problems with noncon fanworks, absolutely, but those usually consist of people not acknowledging/realizing that what they are writing is abuse/noncon. I brought 50SoG up a few times before, but it’s a good example because, in my opinion, the problem with it isn’t that it’s depicting an abusive relationship - it’s that the author doesn’t think that it’s abusive. That is the kind of shit that deserves to be called out, and not in a “show your victim card” way, but by explaining how the things being depicted qualify as abusive and non-consensual so that it can be properly tagged and warned for so people who are triggered by it can avoid it.

Tumblr user Stereowire put this into words way more succinctly than I could, so please read this post (it’s specifically about an issue in the MCU fandom, which I have no clue about, but I think it applies to fandoms in general).

Here are some important quotes (bolded by me):

sexual assault isn’t a goddamn credential, it’s not a placement test, it’s not some sort of fucking prerequisite you have to pass to have a kink. put another way: you don’t earn the right or deserve to enjoy a thing only after you’ve been sexually assaulted. like, jesus christ, can you imagine someone with no sexual assault history who likes fictional noncon kink reading those shitty judgmental posts and thinking that if only they’d been raped or abused, it would be okay? this bullshit “it’s gross and you’re gross but i guess it’s okay for survivors AND SURVIVORS ONLY to enjoy this as a somewhat unhealthy coping mechanism” viewpoint actually creates a scenario in which having been raped in real life is the better option because now you have a trump card against some fucking asshole teenagers on the internet harassing you, and this plays right into this whole fucking shit philosophy where the more hardships and oppressions you can claim to have endured, the more morally unassailable your position in any argument. seriously, last time i got into it with an anon about the hydra trash party (months ago now, apparently i’ve scared them off), i had a bunch of people send me messages about how they were sexual assault survivors and enjoyed my work. i don’t want or need to know that. i do not fucking care, in the most benevolent way possible— i am not the gatekeeper; if you are a survivor i am proud of you but you should not feel any need to justify yourself to me, and on the flipside, just because i don’t talk about my own personal history to justify my kinks, you also don’t need to feel like you’re granting me permission to post these things, as if sexual assault survivors get to bring a plus-one on their ticket to the noncon party or something. i fucking hate that there is a culture on tumblr that made a dozen or so people feel like that was something they had to message me about, or someone would tell them to die in a fire. don’t tell me that’s somehow a less toxic influence on ~young impressionable minds~ in fandom spaces than people who are self aware enough to actually use the terms “noncon” and “dubcon” as warning labels so people can avoid it if they don’t want to see it.

Chiming in also as someone who has done volunteer work with sex education counseling and still does it on a private basis. The degree of sexual self-loathing I see in people surrounded by this type of bullying is pretty severe, especially in people who are still dependents of repressive households since it just reinforces that they are gross, disgusting, immoral, etc no matter where they go, and it’s even worse with victims of sexual abuse. This isn’t only an issue with ethics and bullying, it’s serious health and depression risk too when you can’t have a normal sexual self-esteem.

An important factor the above posts forget is: FICTION. We’re talking about FICTION here. Not endorsement, not condoning, not real life actions or preferences. Fiction.

Last year a friend of mine had her job threatened because some dipshit on this website had a petty fandom grudge saw she’d written a story about an abusive relationship. This tumblr user took the WARNINGS on the fic summary and used them against the writer as “evidence” that she was a Bad Bad Person.

So yeah, I have serious problems with folks conflating depiction with endorsement; equating fantasy with reality.

More so, though, I have a problem with this Tumblr bullshit constantly happening to WOMEN AND NB/GQ HOBBYIST AUTHORS AND ARTISTS rather than to MEN WHO PUBLISH THE SAME STUFF PROFESSIONALLY (lolol who’s john norman lol) and you know, REAL LIFE PREDATORS. But I guess if you’re trying to make yourself look righteous, you can save time and energy going for the easier target.

“i fucking hate that there is a culture on tumblr that made a dozen or so people feel like that was something they had to message me about, or someone would tell them to die in a fire. don’t tell me that’s somehow a less toxic influence on ~young impressionable minds~ in fandom spaces than people who are self aware enough to actually use the terms “noncon” and “dubcon” as warning labels so people can avoid it if they don’t want to see it.”

ONE MORE TIME FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK

Also, saying you have to be traumatized yourself to write about trauma stunts compassion. It means you can’t write to cope with what happened to your best friend, your sister, your partner, someone you heard about on the news and cried for for weeks because *oh my god, that really happens*… Killing compassion in the name of “good” fandom behavior is creepy and wrong.

[thebrightobvious]

@cool-yubari: this seems relevant to your own posts on the subject.

[queeranarchism]

All of this AND we all grow up in a culture that teaches us rape culture before we can count, that eroticizes rape, tells us we deserve it, tells us we’re dirty if it happens and complete responsible to make sure it doesn’t, and then some more. Are we supposed to never analyze how that effects us? or process it?

At the same time, we have to deal with a thousand small violations of our consent every single day. From catcalling to hurting our bodies for our bosses to having to ask our teacher permission to pee. We live in a constant state of consent violation. 

Yes, being a survivor is an experience that’s different from not being one, yes they need their own spaces and conversations, no that doesn’t mean the rest of us are fine.

We all need to find ways to cope, to deconstruct and the to heal.  

[fatgirlopinions]

You don’t have to be drugged to be raped. You don’t have to cry and kick and scream to refer to your experience as rape. You don’t even have to technically say “no” or “stop” out loud, because you know, body language and/or being incapable of speaking for whatever reason, is a thing. You don’t have to come out of a rape or assault with visual trauma to have been raped or assaulted. I will defend these statements until my dying breath. Reject the notion that rape must be violent or it’s not rape at all. Reject the notion that consent must be violently rejected or it’s not rape at all. Reject the notion that rape must mean drugged or forced or it’s not rape at all.

[risskers-deactivated20190616]

Sometimes you can consent and it’s still rape. If this person has bribed you, blackmailed you, or is in a position of power over you it is still rape.

[fatgirlopinions]

^^^^ Yes yes yes Or, you consent to one aspect of a sex act, but then they throw something else at you that you did not consent to (re you did not consent to sex without a condom but they took the condom off or pretended to put one on, etcetera)

[themerrymisnomer]

@rolequeer aaaaaand this is where we link the consent-as-a-felt-sense article. I’m on mobile and hate mobile and refuse to html right now but click through the tag and the link is in the resources page. A very thorough breakdown of multidimensional discussion of power and politics and rape culture.

[rolequeer]

You can take it back: Consent as a felt sense

[tgstonebutch]

Queer Kink Praxis

Queerness can’t thrive in a vacuum. Part of what I ache for in queer stories is queerness that looks like the queer cultures and communities I know, where queers are not solitary or isolated, but have webs of connection with each other. We need that, need those sorts of chosen families and activist networks and artistic communities and public sex spaces and support groups and play parties and…

View On WordPress

[themerrymisnomer]

Yes. Want. @rolequeer what do you think of the descrip/writeup?

[rolequeer]

Meh. Apart from one sentence about ‘queers who are careful about how they play with power’, I’m not seeing much to get optimistic about here just yet. And I see a lot more sentences like ‘daddies that are terrifying in delicious way’ that make me think I will probably not like much of this at all. The table of contents has some snippets from stories and almost all of them sound like pretty cliche queer bdsm porn with maybe a little role challenging or genderqueerness in it without digging much deeper than that and with a real ‘harder = hotter’ theme going on which has become really off putting to me. First impressions could be wrong and you know what they say about judging books and covers, but I’m not optimistic on this one.  

[themerrymisnomer]

Yeah that part snagged me too.

I kinda just wanna know if there’s any rq elements buried in these narratives but at the same time…I don’t really want rq undertones I want rq overtones.

All that talk about stories that exemplify queer community the way it is in real life but I kinda wanna see if they examine abuse and reified oppression dynamics in those stories…because queer communities and I guess queer kink practices aren’t without sites tension and resistance but you have to be verrrry explicit when you describe those scenarios.

Idk I won’t judge them by their catch, line, sinker approach to the description but I wanna know if they write with those nuances in mind.

Perhaps I was just overly optimistic that they mentioned power examination at all.

Maybe I should just write my own damn book ugh

[rolequeer]

I’m with you on wanting those rolequeer overtones. But I totally understand that when good food is scares, anything potentially non-poisonous looks apetizing. 

[queeranarchism]

Just based on what I know of you from reading rolequeer and know of the book from reading parts of it, I do not think the book would be things you would like. Though if you're interested in the author, they have posts on being a trans erotica reader and such that you might like more. Or might not, not sure.

Ok, thanks for the advice :)

[rolequeer]

Posting this on the rolequeer blog since that’s where we talked about this book. 

[tgstonebutch]

Queer Kink Praxis

Queerness can’t thrive in a vacuum. Part of what I ache for in queer stories is queerness that looks like the queer cultures and communities I know, where queers are not solitary or isolated, but have webs of connection with each other. We need that, need those sorts of chosen families and activist networks and artistic communities and public sex spaces and support groups and play parties and…

View On WordPress

[themerrymisnomer]

Yes. Want. @rolequeer what do you think of the descrip/writeup?

[rolequeer]

Meh. Apart from one sentence about ‘queers who are careful about how they play with power’, I’m not seeing much to get optimistic about here just yet. And I see a lot more sentences like ‘daddies that are terrifying in delicious way’ that make me think I will probably not like much of this at all. The table of contents has some snippets from stories and almost all of them sound like pretty cliche queer bdsm porn with maybe a little role challenging or genderqueerness in it without digging much deeper than that and with a real ‘harder = hotter’ theme going on which has become really off putting to me. First impressions could be wrong and you know what they say about judging books and covers, but I’m not optimistic on this one.  

[rolequeer]

I’ve spoken of queer tango as a way of queering dance, now get ready for... contact improvisation! A dance where the only rules are the boundaries of your partners, where involving unconventional moves and bodyparts isn’t just okay but encouraged and where the experience is more important than the beauty of the dance.

[rolequeer]

I want you to know that it is not always easy to love me. That sometimes my chest is a field full of land mines, and where you went last night, you can’t go tomorrow. There is no manual, there is no road map, no help line you can call; my body does not come with instructions, and sometimes even I don’t know what to do with it. This cannot be easy. But still, you touch me anyway.

Ivan Coyote

This quote resonated very strongly with me and it got me thinking about my relationships and sex life. I have never been a person for whom sex was easy and I have never dated anyone for whom it was easy. 

When we are broken, dysphoric, fluid, figuring ourselves out, the fact that we will at some point not know our own limits, the fact that we will at some point unintentionally cross each others boundaries and end up in situations where consent got fucked up, is almost inevitable. 

In most of my relationships that was sort of quietly understood and we both grokked the difference between fucking up together, and expoitation. But getting there meant embracing out imperfection and the fact that we would fuck up. That isn’t something I see a lot in conversations about consent, which seem to be interested only in “was there consent?” as a state of purity. I never grokked purity, or stable unchanging boundaries, or relationships without boundaries crossed. But I always felt the difference between lifes’ mess and violation. The feeling couldn’t be more different. 

[rolequeer]

The nasty authority of identity in social justice narratives. (first draft).

This is a longer version of a post I already made about how social justice communities often use being part of an oppressed group as a form of authority. Which basically boils down to ‘If a trans person is speaking about transphobia, they are right. If the person disagreeing with them is cis, they are wrong.’ Replace transphobia, with racism, misogyny, ableism, etc and repeat. 

This is an understandable system. “believe the person with actual lives experience, not the person with privilege to protect” is a good social instinct to have, We live in a world where having privilege is presented as being ‘objective’, and thus more right and where people who speak on their own experiences of oppression are constantly required to provide proof of the bleeding obvious. (And make no mistake: the constant demand that we proof that racism/sexism/transphobia/etc exists is an exhaustion mechanism designed to keep us from doing the real work of destroying these things). 

But where someone is automatically believed and does not need to prove their points, there is authority. And authority comes with a long range of problems. I’m going to list a few:

1. It doesn’t help us to get to the truth. 

The fact that there are a lot of different narratives about what it means to be trans, all by transgender people, should be a first clue that being a member of an oppressed group doesn’t make you right. Some trans people claim that only those who experience ‘gender dysphoria’ are transgender, others reject this. They can’t both be right. 

Yet a cis person is told always to believe a trans person, even if there seem to be flaws in their stories and theories. This may seem like a thing that protects trans people, but actually, it has the convenient side effect of relieving cis people of the burden of figuring out who is right. If trans people are always right, then cis people can stop thinking for themselves. But to quote cool-yubari:

If someone’s arguments aren’t adding up, automatically expecting that they’re acting in the interests of all oppressed people simply as a result of being oppressed is wrong. […] Being victimized, or having been victimized, doesn’t automatically give you wisdom, and it sure as hell doesn’t teach you kindness.

We are not achieving the best possible understanding of our world by using oppression-group-membership as a requirement to speak at all, and even less by automatically assuming that every member of a group is always right. Sometimes we’re wrong. And as controversial as it is to say this: being a member of an oppressor group can produce really valuable insights that we need. Some of the best writing on how toxic masculinity can be and how exactly ‘boy’s don’t cry’ is connected to rape and violence has been done by men. Some of the work of unraveling cissexism and transphobia must be done by cis people. 

2. It results in a tyranny of definition. 

When being a member of an oppressed group grants authority and being a member of an oppressor group means shutting up and sitting back, the result is that identifying becomes mandatory. Welcome to a social justice conversation, please name your side, rank and number. Label all your privileges and lacks of them. This is violence, because so many of us do not identify as one thing or another or do not want to always be known by the identity labels that we sometimes use. 

As I said before:

Does a person who does not define their gender experience male privilege? Do they experience misogyny? Do they experience either of these things dependent on who encounters them and when?

MRA’s and feminists alike erupt in rage when they do not know how to label us, when we do not name our privileges and our sides. This tyranny is often enforced as ruthlessly by those who made the norms as by those who resist them. There has always been special punishments reserved for combatants who do not wear a uniform or list a rank and number.

When we do not identify, people do not know what to expect from us. But they also do not know which authority to ascribe to us and where to rank us in the order of ‘allowed to speak’ and ‘probably right’. Instead, they have to actually listen to our words to figure out if they’re worth something. Which, as I mentioned above, is work we’ve been told we don’t have to do. 

3. Authority can be used by abusers.

There are abusers who can and will use any system to their advantage, no matter how awesome that system is under normal circumstances.We have important social cues in social justice communities, like “always believe people who say they have been victimized”. And 99,9% of the time, that’s a really good social routine to have.But even that routine can be abused and I’ve seen that happen a few times by people who were just plain bullies and abusers and who used this specific social routine to do their abusing, capitalizing on their ‘more oppressed than the person I’m bullying’ status to get away with it.

Quoting myself:

In the case I’ve witnessed, the abuser started out calling out real shit (and continued to do that) going on in a community and as a result gained a lot of respect and status, to the point of being considered sort of the expert on transphobia.

Then they started capitalizing on that gained status by using the treat of a call out as a weapon in any situation. First they’d see if they could get away with minor bullying by calling the bullied person transphobic or responding to a minor act with a massive lash out, then they’d expand on that. Eventually, they’d create a climate of fear within their community, a “you better not mess with me or I will find any excuse to call you transphobic and in that case I will scream in your face and use any violence I deem necessary and people will support me because I am a trans person calling you transphobic and they have been trained to respect that”.

All the while, they’d continue to be an actual valuable activist calling out actual transphobia, but they’d also become a person who could bully anyone, abuse anyone, because no one would dare mess with them anymore for fear of being expelled from the group as a transphobe.

There are many other ways an abuser can use these social routines to their advantage, and we’re going to have to recognize each instance as it happens. But also, we’re going to have to recognize that these kind of things to not happen by pure coincidence, they happen because we created systems of automatic authority that abusers can capitalize on. I’m pretty sure this abuser, as others, used different bullying techniques before they discovered social justice lingo as a tool. But once they found that tool, it proved incredibly powerful because of all the authority that we ascribe to people without acknowledging that that power can be absed. 

4. Authority brings out the worst in all of us. 

While an abuser can use the ‘rules’ os a social justice oriented community for their own game in ways that are really manipulative and cruel, any of us, and most of us, abuse those same rules to some extend. In a culture where being ‘wrong’ or not having a response to a ‘call out’ is viewed as a very negative thing, the pressure to always win an argument (even if we’re not sure we’re right) is on. And if we have lived experience of an issue and our opponent does not, then it’s not hard to use the ‘rules’ to make ourselves look right and reaffirm our feelings of rightness.

But the response “sit down and take a lesson” or “I’m right because I belong to the group who gets to talk about this” is not just a smackdown without real arguments, it’s an act of domination. It’s using your authority in this social justice space to silence someone else. The amount of institutional power as this person may have over you doesn’t change that. The fact that you felt hurt and attacked doesn’t change that, a lot of dominant acts come from a place of feeling vulnerable and not liking it.

None of us like being wrong. None of us like losing an argument. Most of us like the feeling of having ‘smacked down’ someone who we perceived as wrong. And to be a little blunter: let’s not pretend to be social justice monks meditating on a pure state of being. Most of us, on some level, like winning, being admired, and feeling like our words are authoritative. These things feel good, but they are an ugly side of us. 

The authority of being able to say ‘I am right because I am identity X’, brings out that nasty, dominating side in us. I, for one, don’t think that is good for our communities or ourselves. 

Closing

These are some problems and there are probably more. But that doesn’t mean we should throw everything we have out of the window. We came from a place where newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people doing the opressing. And we build a place that works the other way around. That’s good. 

But we need to be much much more aware of the fact that we, in a search for easy answers, are creating authority and power relationships in our communities that are not helping. In fact, that are suffocating conversations, creating a tyranny of always identifying yourself, that are empowering abusers and bringing out the worst in all of us. 

[queeranarchism]

Keep an eye on the emergency exit in your social routine

I thought today might be a good day to remind people that there are abusers who can and will use any system to their advantage, no matter how awesome that system is under normal circumstances. 

Example: We have important social cues in social justice communities, like “If a trans person tells you something is transphobic it’s probably true and cis people should not speak over that” and other variations of “believe the person with actual lives experience, not the person with privilege to protect”. And 99,9% of the time, that’s a really good social routine to have. 

But even that routine can be abused and I’ve seen that happen a few times by people who were just plain bullies and abusers and who used this specific social routine to do their abusing, capitalizing on their ‘more oppressed than the person I’m bullying’ status to get away with it. 

Recognize this and use the emergency exit of your social routine when needed. And don’t use that to run, take action. Deal with that abuser. Even if you know you’ll look very uncool being a cis person calling out a trans person who is calling you transphobic. If someone is actually abusing the system, find the courage to be that fucking uncool. 

(and, ya know, don’t use that as an excuse to destroy the entire social routine, because it’s there for some very good reasons)

[queeranarchism]

joyful-avocado said: What does/could this abuse look like? I’m not doubting the concerns you raise, I just wonder if I’d be able to recognize it. I’m not sure I could. If you have the time/energy, a specific example would be really helpful. Thanks

It could take various forms. In the case I’ve witnessed, the abuser started out calling out real shit (and continued to do that) going on in a community and as a result gained a lot of respect and status, to the point of being considered sort of the expert on transphobia. 

Then they started capitalizing on that gained status by using the treat of a call out as a weapon in any situation. First they’d see if they could get away with minor bullying by calling the bullied person transphobic or responding to a minor act with a massive lash out, then they’d expand on that. Eventually, they’d create a climate of fear within their community, a “you better not mess with me or I will find any excuse to call you transphobic and in that case I will scream in your face and use any violence I deem necessary and people will support me because I am a trans person calling you transphobic and they have been trained to respect that”. 

All the while, they’d continue to be an actual valuable activist calling out actual transphobia, but they’d also become a person who could bully anyone, abuse anyone, because no one would dare mess with them anymore for fear of being expelled from the group as a transphobe.

[nimashkawizii]

Wow, this is some insidious shit, thank you so much for the example!

I can picture this being such a hard thing for communities to address. Because of course we want to challenge oppression, so on the surface these accusations would seem reasonable, especially if they’re mixed in with legitimate, non-abusive action. So people begin to doubt their perceptions, questioning themselves and not feeling right about speaking up when they have concerns. Which is just how abuse works!

I think this probably (hopefully?) only occurs rarely, but it’s still something to be mindful of, and reflect on. Also, this is probably another reason why it’s a good idea to build communities that have a balance of power across members, rather than having a few people who become de facto representatives or authorities on social justice issues.

[queeranarchism]

Yeah. And when people hear stories like this or come across a situation like this, their first response is to think “this can’t be true. Surely the person must have done something transphobic to warrant this response”. And that is a really really good instincts to have. It means you’re inclined to trust the story of the person with the least social power. Anyone with that instinct should keep it. 

But then there’s the catch: real, calculated abusers can notice this instinct and use it to their advantage. I’ve come across 3 abusers so far who operated like this. I think the most important tools against them are to know that it happens, to continue to use your own judgement and to be fundamentally prepared to look bad in front of people you care about. That last part is the scariest. No one wants to look like the attacker, but if how you appear becomes more important than stopping an abuser, that’s something an abuser can work with. 

As for balanced communities, while that’s generally a good idea, I think it’s important to remember that abusers can play the long game and can shape communities to meet their needs. The trans person from this example was white and knew that they could only play there ‘I’m truly oppressed so I know more than you’ scheme in an all-white group. So what they did was at first bully only the white community members while pretending to be best buds with the people of colour. At the same times they told those people lies about how racist the white people were behind their back and spread general lies about how racist this community was so other people of colour would steer clear of it. The result, of course: they seemed like a great ally in the eyes of people of colour, while achieving the all-white community that they required for their manipulation.  

[rolequeer]

I wrote this a while ago, with a specific situation in mind. Thanks to the thoughts of some others (thanks cool-yubari and others) and a little time, I’ve come to the realization that I want to write (or co-write, or watch someone write it before I get the change, as long as the result is a piece of writing existing) a bigger piece (or bits and pieces) about this in a more structural way. Because this is about more than single abusers, it’s about the bigger issue of authority in social justice oriented communities. I haven’t processed it all yet, bu the first building blocks seem to be:

While an abuser can use the ‘rules’ os a social justice oriented community for their own game in ways that are really manipulative and cruel, any of us, and most of us, abuse those same rules to some extend. In a culture where being ‘wrong’ or not having a response to a ‘call out’ is viewed as a very negative thing, the pressure to always win an argument (even if we’re not sure we’re right) is on. And if we have lived experience of an issue and our opponent does not, then it’s not hard to use the ‘rules’ to make ourselves look right and reaffirm our feelings of rightness. 

But the response “sit down and take a lesson” or “I’m right because I belong to the group who gets to talk about this” is not just a smackdown without real arguments, it’s an act of domination. It’s using your authority in this social justice space to silence someone else. The amount of institutional power as this person may have over you doesn’t change that. The fact that you felt hurt and attacked doesn’t change that, a lot of dominant acts come from a place of feeling vulnerable and not liking it. 

Quoting cool-yubari:

If someone’s arguments aren’t adding up, automatically expecting that they’re acting in the interests of all oppressed people simply as a result of being oppressed is wrong. […] Being victimized, or having been victimized, doesn’t automatically give you wisdom, and it sure as hell doesn’t teach you kindness.

If this idea makes you uncomfortable, if this idea makes you look back to the times you’ve defended yourself through your authority as an oppressed person, if this idea makes you look back to the times you felt good about smacking someone down and not liking what you see, then I hope you’re willing to work with me on finding that dominant strain inside the way we win arguments, and laying it bare. I’m trying to work on uncovering mine. 

[ritavonbees]

For me, this is usually about mental illness. I can have very strong emotional reactions to the appearance of social conflict and things that make me feel attacked, and it is difficult to walk the line correctly between allowing myself to be hurt disproportionately and using my reaction that another person had no way of anticipating to silence someone. I’ve even had overly-formal language I use to calm myself and explain my position without descending into the nonverbal part of a panic attack interpreted as emotional detachment and evidence of my privileged position, but I don’t want to frame that in a way that allows people who are genuinely detached to use it as cover, you know? And I definitely don’t want people to avoid calling me out for fear of triggering a panic attack, because that would just leave me making whatever mistake I was making until I ran into someone who genuinely doesn’t give a shit about my emotional wellbeing.

[queeranarchism]

Keep an eye on the emergency exit in your social routine

I thought today might be a good day to remind people that there are abusers who can and will use any system to their advantage, no matter how awesome that system is under normal circumstances. 

Example: We have important social cues in social justice communities, like “If a trans person tells you something is transphobic it’s probably true and cis people should not speak over that” and other variations of “believe the person with actual lives experience, not the person with privilege to protect”. And 99,9% of the time, that’s a really good social routine to have. 

But even that routine can be abused and I’ve seen that happen a few times by people who were just plain bullies and abusers and who used this specific social routine to do their abusing, capitalizing on their ‘more oppressed than the person I’m bullying’ status to get away with it. 

Recognize this and use the emergency exit of your social routine when needed. And don’t use that to run, take action. Deal with that abuser. Even if you know you’ll look very uncool being a cis person calling out a trans person who is calling you transphobic. If someone is actually abusing the system, find the courage to be that fucking uncool. 

(and, ya know, don’t use that as an excuse to destroy the entire social routine, because it’s there for some very good reasons)

[queeranarchism]

joyful-avocado said: What does/could this abuse look like? I’m not doubting the concerns you raise, I just wonder if I’d be able to recognize it. I’m not sure I could. If you have the time/energy, a specific example would be really helpful. Thanks

It could take various forms. In the case I’ve witnessed, the abuser started out calling out real shit (and continued to do that) going on in a community and as a result gained a lot of respect and status, to the point of being considered sort of the expert on transphobia. 

Then they started capitalizing on that gained status by using the treat of a call out as a weapon in any situation. First they’d see if they could get away with minor bullying by calling the bullied person transphobic or responding to a minor act with a massive lash out, then they’d expand on that. Eventually, they’d create a climate of fear within their community, a “you better not mess with me or I will find any excuse to call you transphobic and in that case I will scream in your face and use any violence I deem necessary and people will support me because I am a trans person calling you transphobic and they have been trained to respect that”. 

All the while, they’d continue to be an actual valuable activist calling out actual transphobia, but they’d also become a person who could bully anyone, abuse anyone, because no one would dare mess with them anymore for fear of being expelled from the group as a transphobe.

[nimashkawizii]

Wow, this is some insidious shit, thank you so much for the example!

I can picture this being such a hard thing for communities to address. Because of course we want to challenge oppression, so on the surface these accusations would seem reasonable, especially if they’re mixed in with legitimate, non-abusive action. So people begin to doubt their perceptions, questioning themselves and not feeling right about speaking up when they have concerns. Which is just how abuse works!

I think this probably (hopefully?) only occurs rarely, but it’s still something to be mindful of, and reflect on. Also, this is probably another reason why it’s a good idea to build communities that have a balance of power across members, rather than having a few people who become de facto representatives or authorities on social justice issues.

[queeranarchism]

Yeah. And when people hear stories like this or come across a situation like this, their first response is to think “this can’t be true. Surely the person must have done something transphobic to warrant this response”. And that is a really really good instincts to have. It means you’re inclined to trust the story of the person with the least social power. Anyone with that instinct should keep it. 

But then there’s the catch: real, calculated abusers can notice this instinct and use it to their advantage. I’ve come across 3 abusers so far who operated like this. I think the most important tools against them are to know that it happens, to continue to use your own judgement and to be fundamentally prepared to look bad in front of people you care about. That last part is the scariest. No one wants to look like the attacker, but if how you appear becomes more important than stopping an abuser, that’s something an abuser can work with. 

As for balanced communities, while that’s generally a good idea, I think it’s important to remember that abusers can play the long game and can shape communities to meet their needs. The trans person from this example was white and knew that they could only play there ‘I’m truly oppressed so I know more than you’ scheme in an all-white group. So what they did was at first bully only the white community members while pretending to be best buds with the people of colour. At the same times they told those people lies about how racist the white people were behind their back and spread general lies about how racist this community was so other people of colour would steer clear of it. The result, of course: they seemed like a great ally in the eyes of people of colour, while achieving the all-white community that they required for their manipulation.  

[rolequeer]

I wrote this a while ago, with a specific situation in mind. Thanks to the thoughts of some others (thanks cool-yubari and others) and a little time, I’ve come to the realization that I want to write (or co-write, or watch someone write it before I get the change, as long as the result is a piece of writing existing) a bigger piece (or bits and pieces) about this in a more structural way. Because this is about more than single abusers, it’s about the bigger issue of authority in social justice oriented communities. I haven’t processed it all yet, bu the first building blocks seem to be:

While an abuser can use the ‘rules’ os a social justice oriented community for their own game in ways that are really manipulative and cruel, any of us, and most of us, abuse those same rules to some extend. In a culture where being ‘wrong’ or not having a response to a ‘call out’ is viewed as a very negative thing, the pressure to always win an argument (even if we’re not sure we’re right) is on. And if we have lived experience of an issue and our opponent does not, then it’s not hard to use the ‘rules’ to make ourselves look right and reaffirm our feelings of rightness. 

But the response “sit down and take a lesson” or “I’m right because I belong to the group who gets to talk about this” is not just a smackdown without real arguments, it’s an act of domination. It’s using your authority in this social justice space to silence someone else. The amount of institutional power as this person may have over you doesn’t change that. The fact that you felt hurt and attacked doesn’t change that, a lot of dominant acts come from a place of feeling vulnerable and not liking it. 

Quoting cool-yubari:

If someone's arguments aren't adding up, automatically expecting that they're acting in the interests of all oppressed people simply as a result of being oppressed is wrong. [...] Being victimized, or having been victimized, doesn't automatically give you wisdom, and it sure as hell doesn't teach you kindness.

If this idea makes you uncomfortable, if this idea makes you look back to the times you’ve defended yourself through your authority as an oppressed person, if this idea makes you look back to the times you felt good about smacking someone down and not liking what you see, then I hope you’re willing to work with me on finding that dominant strain inside the way we win arguments, and laying it bare. I’m trying to work on uncovering mine.