its frustrating to see such thinking propagating through groups with no pushback... and i am not about to start lecturing women about prostitution.
or maybe i should go the opposite way and enthusiastically agree, a gross middle income man gloat about buying poor women might give some pause for thought
Ufuk_Surekli posted:if you want to be able to compellingly explain to other working people why you reject identitarianism or prostitutional-empowerment-theory or whatever, you can start by just disclosing where those ideas have originated: in the ivory tower of some bougie, soft-handed professor. a "dour, joyless and privileged sourpuss" if ever there was one. among the right crowd, you won't lose any respect for poo-pooing the intelligensia and their reactionary ideas, you'll probably gain it
i don't think the fact that these kinds of perspectives dominate universities is the responsibility of academic staff. i'm sure this changes on a per-institution basis but in my experience, gender studies and related social science faculties are one of the few places where radical feminist traditions are still taken remotely seriously
the accepted liberal narratives surrounding choice feminism are pretty distinctly non-academic in the sense that they do not substantially engage with any real historical feminist traditions or scholarship - these are internet age, ad-hoc assemblages of shallow, feel good language and shoddy research. these aren't the product of anyone who cares what feminists were saying several decades ago, they're the constructions of corporate PR teams disseminated through social media and press releases to the new york times. the people setting the terms of these narratives in public spaces aren't professors but "activist" bloggers with thousands of twitter followers
the fact that these narratives dominate university spaces aren't necessarily because of what is taught by the faculty but because young petit-bourgeois students are the target demographic for performative social media politics
xipe posted:or maybe i should go the opposite way and enthusiastically agree, a gross middle income man gloat about buying poor women might give some pause for thought
Holy shit—I can't believe he actually held up a sign that said this. That's crazy.
dipshit420 posted:Hot Girls Wanted is a good documentary that gives a glimpse into the modern vampire of capitalism manifesting itself in the sex industry fueled by modern technology and convenience. Fun fact most of the money earned by these young ladies goes to illegal drugs for self medication as well as money spent to maintain the lifestyle (expensive clothing and makeup, restaurants, travel expenses) and most return to society with barely any financial edge, having been cast aside for latest crop of 18 year olds.
the industry chews up and spits out young women in months. it's a good but disturbing watch.
it begins with this human canker sore e-pimp who operates a porn brothel, where young girls come and stay in his massive house and leave when they've been traumatised out of the industry, 3-6 months later, opening a room up for new flesh. he finds the young women in his house contracts and he puts out ads online to keep the meat grinder going, promising free flights and cheap accommodation in the big city. do you like to get paid AND laid? Are you 18 and hot? and so young women who have never had any feminism to help them and are told that porn is sexy and fun turn up looking for adventure and easy cash, fun and fucking and a way out of their home, maybe get some college money or be able to get a deposit together to rent their own place.
one woman who was about 19 signed up for some gross teen girl/daddy's friend pseudo paedo scene (the longer you stay, the less "fresh" your face is, so the offers you are sent become more degrading for less cash. also the amount of money offered decreases in direct proportion to how not white you are, what a shocker). she was visibly repulsed and distressed throughout and several times she said she didn't want to do it. but because of the magic of "consent" she had technically agreed, so it went ahead. afterwards, chainsmokimg, she said she felt "like she had been raped," but couldn't go ahead and call it what it was the full way. that language had been taken away from her.
libfem sex-posi blogs about the magic of consent make me want to vomit blood.
this the logical conclusion of introducing money to sex. it's inherently coercive.
Edited by overfire ()
overfire posted:i am plenty critical of the idea of beauty and women's coercion into conforming to ridiculous standards. many women, people i love and care about, tell me they do beauty for them, and patriarchy does not come into the equation-that they choose to engage in ritualised femininity freely. i do not believe this to be true, and patriarchy functions very well if people believe their actions exist in a vacuum and that ideology plays no part. does this mean that i dislike these women, that i think they should not exist? no. it means i think they are mistaken and that abolishing gender would help them immensely.
Beauty can't be abolished. Even if all men were liquidated there would still be social beauty parameters, women would still don cosmetics to impress each other, there would still be people considered "ugly" or "undesirable", and all these naturally occurring asymmetries of desire that make life so frustrating yet fascinating. Beauty was a political tool used by fascists to extol Aryan standards and Soviets to portray strong handsome workers and athletes, and everyone in between to this day still uses it. We like looking at nice-looking people, who cares really.
c_man posted:overfire posted:which is why i think it's important that leftists seriously engage in this.
not to mention that if your concern is sexualized violence and trafficking of women, trans women are also exposed to these things so orienting yourself away from trans struggles it strikes me as backwards and boneheaded to orient yourself as something distinct and opposed to trans liberation struggles
Trans movements are uniformly hostile to questioning the enterprise of sex, they really are diametrically opposite to the old guard radfems on every point of the map. The trans sex trade and women's sex trade rarely intersect, which connects to the radfem claim that trans issues are separate from biological women's issues that are discussed in feminist spaces.
I'm not against the hormone treatments or their claim to being women civilians, but the trans movement has gone into so many wacky directions while maintaining a really militant grasp on the media narrative, that:
1. Sober criticism of their flightiest ideas (e.g. administering hormones to "trans" children) is anathema to the normal press and feminists who disagree with them are segregated into these small bigoted spaces together with right-wing cranks. This is why so many of them started to reject the left altogether.
2. Said right-wing cranks gain ammunition against the left when they can suddenly, righteously criticize the myriad bad ideas that seep into the already tiny, weak left because "we" are so over-sensitive to the claims of damaged blackmailing people and accept them no questions asked. This includes the left being infiltrated by pimp-positive garbage like that Gira Grant woman, the trans children's treatments, wild trans claims to various women's spaces, stupid no-platforming -- remember when they smeared that pro-Palestine journalist as anti-black because she disagreed with some twitter slacktivists, or the embarrassing campaign against that Viet Cong band because an anticommunist Vietnamese expat found the name offensive "and they killed millions of people!!!"
I'd say more but basically the left is doomed to be an ever-shrinking nursery of students who get easily co-opted by sex trade lobbies and weird deviants. Oh and there's the really old people in tiny fossil legacy commie parties, who can forget them. Basically I hoped that the crisis would fuel swarms of new mass left parties, but we only have new mass fascist parties instead and Syriza's tepid failure crushed that hope dead, and now the refugee crisis narrative can be easily manipulated by the far-right to make fascist parties even more popular.
Edited by COINTELBRO ()
COINTELBRO posted:The trans sex trade and women's sex trade rarely intersect
i think this is spurious, why would the interests of pimps and traffickers be so discrete and compartmentalised?
COINTELBRO posted:Sober criticism of their flightiest ideas (e.g. administering hormones to "trans" children) is anathema to the normal press and feminists who disagree with them are segregated into these small bigoted spaces together with right-wing cranks. This is why so many of them started to reject the left altogether.
https://www.rt.com/uk/247953-transgender-children-rise-nhs/
"Britain’s only center specializing in gender issues saw the number of under-11s seeking consultation rise from 19 in 2009/10, to 77 in 2014/15.
The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust said the referrals included 47 children aged under five and two under three years of age."
bc gender is now completely confused with sex, playing with trucks and not liking sparkly pink things is seen as a sign of gender dysphoria. most kids exhibiting gender non-conforming behaviour grow up to be gay, it's a minority that go on to be trans, so this functions as another arm of compulsory sexuality and medicalising away gayness
if was a toddler now and had well-meaning but dim liberal parents there is a p good chance i would have been transed before i had any idea what the long term ramifications what that meant
Labour had decent electoral success recently, despite all the vicious media hysteria and narrative of the working class north being Labour-skeptical while only "liberal, student, media-class" London is into Corbynmania or whatever—I know that that can't be dismissed outright, after all there are lots of working class Tories, but it's proof that the press can't overpower the overwhelming common sense of bad Tory administration (though Brexit will be a wild card.) But the most interesting facet is how Scottish nationalism has become an opponent to Labour as well.
Edited by COINTELBRO ()
COINTELBRO posted:I really doubt a Corbyn leadership could win come 2020, not least because the British military
already threatened a coup if he happened to win. But I find the dynamics of UK politics right now
very interesting (more interesting than agonizing over the non-existant "left" in the US).
Labour had decent electoral success recently, despite all the vicious media hysteria and narrative of the working class north being Labour-skeptical while only "liberal, student, media-class" London is into Corbynmania or whatever—I know that that can't be dismissed outright, after all there are lots of working class Tories, but it's proof that the press can't overpower the overwhelming common sense of bad Tory administration. But the most interesting facet is how Scottish nationalism has become an opponent to Labour as well.
my gf has applied for an MA in edinburgh. there's fuck all funding so her chances are slim but getting away from the shitty southern part of this island would be p great, especially after osborne's creepy "northern powerhouse" "power" "devolving" which is just an attempt to turn the north into a financier playground hellscape like london
COINTELBRO posted:Basically I hoped that the crisis would fuel swarms of new mass left parties, but we only have new mass fascist parties instead and Syriza's tepid failure crushed that hope dead, and now the refugee crisis narrative can be easily manipulated by the far-right to make fascist parties even more popular.
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
overfire posted:"Britain’s only center specializing in gender issues saw the number of under-11s seeking consultation rise from 19 in 2009/10, to 77 in 2014/15.
The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust said the referrals included 47 children aged under five and two under three years of age."
do you not think that a rise like this could be just as well explained by increased awareness as the Trans Mafia's crushing grip on human sexuality? people pointed to this same sort of stuff as evidence that gay people are hunting and converting straight people and that is equally bogus.
COINTELBRO posted:Said right-wing cranks gain ammunition against the left when they can suddenly, righteously criticize the myriad bad ideas that seep into the already tiny, weak left because "we" are so over-sensitive to the claims of damaged blackmailing people and accept them no questions asked. This includes the left being infiltrated by pimp-positive garbage like that Gira Grant woman, the trans children's treatments, wild trans claims to various women's spaces, stupid no-platforming -- remember when they smeared that pro-Palestine journalist as anti-black because she disagreed with some twitter slacktivists, or the embarrassing campaign against that Viet Cong band because an anticommunist Vietnamese expat found the name offensive "and they killed millions of people!!!"
this goes just as well the other way. i was talking upthread about how megan murphy's anti-trans agenda has pushed her into objectively reactionary "anti-PC" politics, taking swipes are people protesting cecil rhodes statues, posting about how great the police are, etc. blaming this on trans people is backward and....you're probably just a transphobe if you do! or at least you're agreeing that they're a valid target for scapegoating the problems of The Left
this is all fine and lovely and we'll all dance and fuck together in a big genderless melting pot because rape and sex-based oppression don't exist anymore, oh hang on
this is one of those topics where women and gays are a bit of a canary in the mine because it's happening in our places first. idgaf if someone wants to dress or name themselves whatever they want but i do care about sex segregated bathrooms and locker rooms and places of safety for women, because rape and child predators still exist, inequality between the sexes still exist, and i don't think "because i said so" is a valid reason to believe someone when they say they're a lesbian if they have a cock and balls
dublin's only gay bar made the toilets gender neutral and surprise! someone got raped. it wasn't by a trans person, it was by a common or garden man, but "binary smashing" and identifying however you want has nothing to do with actual reality, which people live in, and struggle under, and women are disproportionately sexually assaulted under.
there are gender-critical trans people out there who see this-miranda yardley is one, she writes for the morning star. the end point is not liberation from gender, it's fetishising it
overfire posted:transgenderism is just the latest tasty flavour of identitarian non-politics anyway and is becoming increasingly replaced with IDing as non-binary or genderqueer anyway, and soon it will be totally square to want to alter your body at all and you should just be able to declare yourself whatever gender you please and have evryone just agree and go along with it (this is already happening-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj4V-Nme86U )
this is all fine and lovely and we'll all dance and fuck together in a big genderless melting pot because rape and sex-based oppression don't exist anymore, oh hang on
this is one of those topics where women and gays are a bit of a canary in the mine because it's happening in our places first. idgaf if someone wants to dress or name themselves whatever they want but i do care about sex segregated bathrooms and locker rooms and places of safety for women, because rape and child predators still exist, inequality between the sexes still exist, and i don't think "because i said so" is a valid reason to believe someone when they say they're a lesbian if they have a cock and balls
dublin's only gay bar made the toilets gender neutral and surprise! someone got raped. it wasn't by a trans person, it was by a common or garden man, but "binary smashing" and identifying however you want has nothing to do with actual reality, which people live in, and struggle under, and women are disproportionately sexually assaulted under.
there are gender-critical trans people out there who see this-miranda yardley is one, she writes for the morning star. the end point is not liberation from gender, it's fetishising it
i guess it seems to me like you're scapegoating trans people for sexualized violence. i dont have a problem with the statement that there are trans people/groups who dont have a good hard line on patriarchy/sexualized violence/porn&prostitution/etc but that's certainly not unique to those groups at all. in fact all of the most notable examples (that i'm aware of) of porn-friendly liberal/corporate feminism are cis women who dont seem to have any strong connections to primarily trans groups (again, that i'm aware of).
swampman posted:yeah i think it's um, something, that the people i see bring up trans issues most often are straight men joining conversations about women's issues.
this is the case for both sides of trans issues tho. goatstein and baby newton think they need conversion therapy or probably chemical castration.
c_man posted:i guess it seems to me like you're scapegoating trans people for sexualized violence.
sexualised violence is not trans people's fault, but it pretends you can identify your way out of sexual difference, that biological sex does not exist. and that is a problem, because it definitely does
it's a p big intracommunity issue that is largely invisible to straight men with the rise of the trans lesbian becoming a thing, and self declared women who have recently started IDing as trans demanding complete and uncritical acceptance of their presence in women's spaces as fine and unthreatening. women who do not want to engage sexually with penises are being branded bigoted and "vagina fetishists." it's driven a lot of lesbians, me included, out of their social and political spaces as increasingly they have become all-gender inclusive sparkle parades.
swappie idiot owen jones wrote an article about how nasty bigoted lesbians should stop being horrible to trans women because obviously he is an authority on womanhood. so people started asking him on twitter if he would sleep with a trans man with a vagina if sexual difference did not matter. his response was to throw a tantrum and block everyone lol
c_man posted:if all you mean is that trans acceptance will not end sexualized violence then sure, i agree, and we can let it rest
the problem is you keep reifying individuals as the site of politics while we see them as expressions of the logic of a mode of production (and the social relations constituted by it). so you say we are "scapegoating trans people" because they embody postmodern identity politics. this has a real effect on socialist feminism but the way to fight it is to abolish capitalism and the conditions that make trans people exist, not to erase trans people. the cause and effect is very important since trans is precisely the idea that one can abolish gender without abolishing capitalism which has real negative effects on people still stuck living in capitalism.
so what does it mean to "accept" trans people? obviously we acknowledge they exist. I can't speak for overfire but gay and lesbian historians were the ones who wrote the history of capitalism and gay identity as intertwined. does this mean global communism which abolishes homosexuality (and heterosexuality) is homophobic? put in terms of "acceptance" it probably sounds that way.
of course good radical minorities argue that persecution of sexual difference is part of enforcing patriarchy which is true. but this is an ideological aspect of patriarchy and doesn't really touch upon its essence in women's reproductive labor. no amount of queer theory can erase that basic fact. trans people are some of the most radical people and tactical alliances are essential for communists but communists must always be in command whether it's with the KMT or Bash Back!