huh. i wonder why i never needed that. don't get me wrong, if it's pragmatic then i'll get behind it, but it makes no sense to me. in order to amend ONE value of a thesis you undo the entire premise behind the thesis? and then you miraculously return to the original thesis with the value corrected?

i sound like, oh who cares. i'm upset today. in short: i'm clearly weird.

what matters to me:

be born, go to school, go to college so you can get a good job and make lots of money to buy bigger and better things, work for the rest of your fucking life making more money for your boss than for yourself and THEN pay another 30% of your wages to a goverment that disgusts you, get old, get sick, and then die poor, leaving your family poor as well.

regardless of age, race, sex, creed, religion, blah blah... we're ALL going through what i described above. and we'll never get out of it because everyone uses their very own sob story to gain pity from the rest of the world, rather than overlooking differences to come together to fight our way out of the cage we all share.

imagine 3 people are in a prison cell, and they come up with an escape plan. one of the prisoners is gay, another is black and the other is just ugly. they can each hold their own little rally, to say "gays in prison get fed low quality food," or "black prisoners are just being opressed" or "ugly guys in jail don't get any cock..." but all it's done is delayed and prevented their escaping. and by the time they're done rallying, the prison has installed a new outer wall, built 8 more guard towers, and hired 40 new guards.

so for you, in the absence of an identity that alienates you from monoculture (disabled, queer, whatever), the class struggle is primary. That's normal - that's why socialism is, has always been, dominated by white men. But for some other people, identity politics are primary - some people experience alienation in ways that are MORE pressing and important to them than what you described above (gay men in Jamaica, for example, where being beaten to death for your sexual orientation is a distinct possibility, may find that more pressing than the poverty that many Jamaicans also deal with). And I think it's fundamentally rude and reductive to say to those people 'the alienation I'm describing is more important and deserves more of your energy and effort because it's common to more people'.

It's not undoing it as such. It's more like if I wanted to get someone into Sonic Youth, I wouldn't go straight in with Daydream Nation, even though it's widely regarded as their best album; I'd start with Dirty, because even though it's not really representative of their work, it provides an accessible entrypoint for a pop fan because it has something in common with pop - the structures are more conventional, the songs are all under 5 minutes, that kind of thing. Once you've got them over that hurdle, once they're used to Dirty, then you can start getting them into the more experimental stuff. If you try and throw them right in at the deep end, they're a lot more likely to just reject it as shit because it's so alien to what they're used to, whereas if you work them round to it then there's a progression and it's less of a shock.

Now, apply that to complex social ideology rather than Sonic Youth.

Just out of curiosity: are you a straight white male?

cute. so gay men should go through a straight-acting phase?

i know it's a shitty analogy, sorry. but i hear this argument - about palatability - from straight acting gay men all the time. and i'm just never really sold.

what the fuck? first of all, im as queer as anyone else. i love sexy boys as much as i love sexy girls. secondly, i was born premature and addicted to heroin and it's created a ton of health problems my whole life. thirdly, by the time i was 15, i was out on my own because my druggie parents were dead.

i could go on and on with shit like that, yep, ive got a fucking sob story too. maybe it'd be more convincing if i was black, but you still have had no provocation to make assumptions about my motives.

the people who've created the separation of classes are the same folks who brought us slavery and bigotry in all of it's forms. and we all sit around feeding right into it, while they tighten the screws.

im sorry, but i think you're an idiot now.

I didn't realise you were queer, I'm sorry - I've only ever seen you post about women. I'm not talking about having suffered or not having suffered - people either identify or they don't. It doesn't always correlate to their life experiences, either.

what? who are 'they'? the same people always have power - cross culturally and ahistorically? are you serious? or have I misunderstood you?

No. But I've used the "if it bothers you, think of me as a woman" argument to straight men, and even though that doesn't really reflect who I am (because the similarity between me and women begins and ends with who I want to sleep with), it does at least get over a hurdle that they seem to have trouble with early on. Once they know me better, I can explain that I'm actually more like a guy who finds guys attractive and they eventually get how that's possible, but the point is that if I'd led with that they probably wouldn't have understood. It's like you need to tell a lie to make yourself more accessible and understand to them, and then over time demonstrate it to be untrue, rather than just tell the truth and have them not believe you, which serves nothing.

im a half-gay half-mexican male? but i think most people who look at me see a white boy.


and let me clarify... Bigotry kills me. Misogyny kills me too. But I think that once the battle for (insert minority type here) rights is won and finished, gay people will still have to fall in line either way, or suffer the consequences for their dissent.

wow. well, it sounds like you have some exceptionally moronic straight male acquaintances. i'd never put myself through explaining how i'm possible.

(admittedly, usually when that kind of issue comes up it's gay people i'd be explaining to. it's been a lot harder coming out as bi to gay people than it ever was coming out as gay to straight people, though.)

Valerie Solanas? A hippy earthmother?
My dear boy, I've bumped into you making these little digs at feminism before, despite the fact that it sounds like you are pretty unfamiliar with first wave, second wave or any 'wave' of the feminist movement, and seeing you're obviously intelligent, it's starting to put a royal bug up my ass!

Mary Wollstonecraft published "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" in 1792. Feminism is over 200 years old. Most people, I suspect, with any access to mainstream, overt "feminist" thoughts, ideas and theories at all get their information from books. Precisely which feminist books, which feminist authors have you read? Arguably pre-feminist authors like Jean Rhys, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton? Or maybe Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi, Camille Paglia, Andrea Dworkin? Feminist authors are actually a bottomless pit, but anybody who had read even just a couple of these authors (and I'm hardly trying to boast, because I haven't read all of them myself) would figure out very quickly that feminism is not monolithic and there are no simple answers to most of the questions you asked. But kudos for at least asking them.

"Lad-ettes"? Please. Knock it off.
How would you like it if somebody kept quietly sniggering and belittling gay equality (whatever that might mean, or what-ever any individual gay man or woman wanted or was asking for, in the name of the "right" to be openly gay) by making snide references to Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, or the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras, implying that such trivial, but highly visible shite is what 'gay equality' is all about, or what the cause of gay equality has come to?

And thank you to Left Turn, but no, I wouldn't go to this event even if I could. I'm shy and don't enjoy working in groups. But I get exasperated at the amount of people tittering or sneering at feminism when it's abundantly obvious they know fuck all about it, and have no clue how incredibly diverse and fascinating it can be.

The reason you see me posting about women is because i love women. And unfortunately i'm not always comfortable enough to talk with strangers about the vastness of my libido.. especially since im not 100% sure or okay with my sexual identity.

and "they" are:
Wealthy, white, land-owning men. They started imperialism, and they're going to be the ones to finish it too.

but the end of imperialism won't be the end of sexism, racism, homophobia... and I'm not even sure that it's the primary form of hierarchy. Gender, for example - there's a strong case to be made that gender inequality didn't arise from division of labour.

even if somehow the system were to suddenly collapse we'd divide ourselves tommorow on the grounds of gender race and class
~tawm frampton

somethin like that anyway



WHAT THE WOOOOOORLD NEEDS NOW IS
THAAAWNG SWEET THAWNG
tight too
a good anus cradling
can i get a witness


identity is a disease

See? You're a prime example. I know Germaine Greer's gone batty in her old age, but if you actually read "The Female Eunuch" which she wrote in her youth, you'd discover one very sexy young feminist who never said "boo hoo". Never blamed men. Never claimed HER life sucked because of her gender. Never claimed men didn't also get "fucked left right and centre by everyone who has more money". In fact, you'd discover a feminist who managed to piss off and alienate almost every other well known feminist of the late 60's early 70's, by disagreeing with them on literally everything and making it abundantly clear that she "dug" men and identified with their "struggle", in a very, very big way.
In 1970 she even posed naked with her legs spread for a porno, for chrissakes, all in the name of feminism! I'm not saying Greer was the 'best' feminist; just citing her as an example of how diverse it is. Likewise Naomi Wolf, who admits to a penchant for obsessively looking through glossy magazines just to look over pictures of traditional wedding gowns.

I wasn't saying she was a hippy earth mother. I was using "hippy earth mother/Valerie Solanas" as a description of the more extreme end of feminism that the majority of feminists would at best distance themselves from and more likely publicly decry. I wasn't in any way implying that it represented the majority of feminism. I was saying that it represented an idea of female superiority, which is almost the exact opposite.

So I dunno, is any of this relevant, with that in mind? If it is I don't get it.

Sorry, are you saying people don't do that? Well, they do. They're wrong, but they do. That was what I was saying; that ladette culture got ankled to feminism (largely due to pseudo-intellectual media pundits having to meet their weekly wordcount), to the extent where the people involved actually started to believe it, and that it was detrimental to gender equality as a result, regardless of how much it misrepresented it.

Same with Gay Pride marches, in a way; sure, they're done in the name of equal rights, but if anyone who thinks they do much more than any other big street party with funny costumes is fooling themselves. They make gays seem less scary to straight guys, but once you've got over that, they don't exactly put across a great message.

I figure it's easier to give them an answer. I'm not saying I have to do it for everyone I meet or anything, but some really don't seem to understand how it even works. But if you relate it to why women are attracted to men, it becomes something that affects their daily life.