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azurewishing · 2 months

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Awakening

Part 3 of the Resonance AU. This is in air epic wub's perspective

A little shorter than the previous two entries

Aero- Air epic wub

Eva- Plant epic wub

Nevi- Cold epic wub

~~~

It was only some months after the conundras began, and already two of the epic wubboxes have resonated.

Eva and Nevi… the two who didn’t really like their colossals, turning into warped versions of themselves.

It worried Aero. It was worried about them and worried if it too will face that same fate.

It was scared. Very scared.

“Um, so, Zeffree…” Aero begins.

Unlike the rest of its family, Aero has a positive relationship with its colossal. Zeffree is easy to talk to, and quite kind. They’re sure to understand.

“Recently, Eva and Nevi had something scary happen to them. They’re not like how they used to be… it’s like a demon possessed them!”

“A demon? Those still exist?” Zeffree asked. “No, not literally… just a figure of speech,” Aero replied.

The epic wubbox continued onwards. “I think their colossals did something to them. And I’m not saying you all have done something bad, dear heavens no! But I can’t help but wonder if Lord Grennitch and Lord Frigil took things a bit too far…”

“Those two always take things too far! You don’t have to worry about your wellbeing, cuz I’ll never force you to be someone you’re not,” the colossal reassured it.

Aero smiled at that. “Yeah, you wouldn’t…”

“Come on kid, how about some training to get your mind off of it?”

“Alright, Zeffree.”

The two smiled. Such great friends.

With a swift pull of the bowstring…

BAM!

The targets were smashed to pieces in an instant.

“Wow!! Great job, little one!!” Zeffree praised Aero enthusiastically.

“I told you not to call me little… but thank you, Lord Zeffree.” Aero humbly said, catching its breath.

“And I told you to not to use honorifics on me. We’re both monsters after all,” the colossal replied.

“Right… I apologize.”

Aero jumped up into the air again, with more targets being manifested using its power.

As Aero continues to shoot them down, its mind began to wander.

It began to think about Eva and Nevi, about what happened to them. It still scared Aero. What if Zeffree does that to it?

‘Now that I think about it, Zeffree seems less satisfied with my performance… What if they…’

Thoughts like that swirled in its head. It shot harder and faster. It wasn’t processing anything, just the anxiety in its heart. It bubbles and bubbles…

“Aero, calm down! You shot all the targets; for what reason are you still shooting?!”

“Huh…?”

The epic wubbox passes out.

“Aero, are you okay?”

An unfamiliar room. It was wooden, but strangely cozy. It could see a desk with a bunch of sciency-looking things on it. Is this…

“Wubbox, is this your room?”

“Mhm. I found you on the ground, so I brought you to my room so you can rest up,” the scientist replied.

“On the ground…? What happe…”

Aero was confused for a moment, but then it remembered.

Anxiety and fear.

“…Wubbox,” Aero began, “can I tell you something that’s been on my mind…?”

“Oh, of course! What is it?” Wubbox tilted its head.

“…You know what happened to Eva and Nevi? I’m scared that the same thing will happen to me. I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want to lose my identity. I want to be happy with Lord Zeffree, not become their plaything.”

“Oh… right, Eva…”

Wubbox was as well affected by the resonance of its older sibling. Just thinking about it made it upset. But right now, Aero has the right to be terrified, not it.

Wubbox thought about what to say for a moment. “Well, Zeffree likes you, right? Maybe that resonance phenomenon only happens when you guys have negative thoughts about your colossals.”

“Well, Eva and Nevi did dislike their colossals… Maybe there’s nothing to fear after all. We both like eachother, so maybe I’ll be fine. And even if I did resonate, maybe there’s a way to reverse it that hasn’t been found yet!”

“That’s the spirit! Think happy things, like that,” Wubbox patted Aero’s shoulder.

“Yeah… yeah! Thank you a lot, Wubbox. I feel a bit better now.”

“Better enough that you can get up?”

“Well, not physically… I need to rest a bit more.”

“Go ahead, I’ll let you rest for a bit,” the scientist said.

Perhaps Wubbox’s help was a bit misguided.

“Zefree, I have a question to ask of you,” Aero said.

Aero built a lot of confidence over the past days following its passing out. It wanted to know something important.

“Hmm? What is it, Aero?”

“Have you been satisfied with my performance as of late?”

“Well, if I had to be honest… Not really. I was concerned on how you seemed to be forcing yourself to perform more. Why is that, by the way?”

“Admittedly, I have been overexerting myself, and I apologize for my lackluster performance because of it. However I do express some anxiety over this resonance phenomenon. I’m afraid that you’ll do that to me as well.”

There wasn’t a response from Zeffree for a little while. Then…

“Well, it’s not resonance perse, but I have been toying with the idea of giving you a better body.”

“What do you mean by that?” Aero slightly snapped.

“Now calm down, Aero, I’m not gonna replace your ideals or whatever, I just want to modify you to better suit your current performance. See?”

The colossal conjoured up an illusion of this new Aero. Antennae, metal wings resembling a beetle, nimble legs…

And a yellow-green eye.

“No… this is just like what happened to them…”

“It isn’t, so stop worrying-”

The connection stopped there.

Aero is sitting on the floor, next to its bed. It’s sobbing, slightly.

It’s been like that for a few hours now.

No one was there to console it. And even if there was, Aero wouldn’t listen.

It’s best to leave it alone for now,

A few days pass.

Apparently in a week, Zefree will awaken.

‘How grand,’ Aero thought sarcastically.

Ever since that day, Aero didn’t care for its colossal anymore. Whatever they were planning, it’ll lead to it being mind controlled, so what better to do than not listen anymore?

A puddle. Aero looked down at it, and took its hat off to see its eye,

There was a bit of green in them now.

It could be a trick of the light, or a genuine sign that resonance was occuring.

It was the latter, as Zeffree was around here somewhere.

Aero couldn’t tell where, but it could hear them.

“See Aero? This is what I meant by modifications. Slight things like that. It makes you see better. Here, try it out.”

Gear-shaped targets appear out of nowhere. Aero decides to play along with Zeffree, and summons its bow.

Aim… Fire!

The arrow hit dead center in all of them.

“Great job! Do you get it now?” the colossal enthusiastically asked.

“… Yeah,” the epic wubbox said, tired.

As the days went on, new features were added onto Aero’s body.

Long antennae that can sense fainter, more spiritual things. Wings that resemble a beetle’s that can flap under 100 times per second for faster movement. Things like that, in the same aesthetic as its home.

In the same aesthetic as Zeffree themself.

As each new modification was made, a thought rose in its head.

‘Isn’t this nice, Aero? Zeffree is making you into something better, more wonderful. A beautiful amalgam of metal and organicness. How beautiful is that?’

It got stronger and stronger until the day of the colossal’s awakening.

Tell me. If all pieces of a machine are replaced with new ones, is it still the same machine? Or is it something new?

#msm #my singing monsters #resonance au #my writing #msm au #epic wubbox #air epic wubbox

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dickensdaily · 1 year

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In my post about the next stages of Dickens Daily, I asked what people would like to read, and so far there has been one request for A Tale of Two Cities and one for The Mystery of Edwin Drood. These both begin in April and so would leave an eight month gap after the end of Great Expectations.

A Tale of Two Cities very nearly won the original poll, however, and it seems a shame for it not to be an option this time. Since it's such a popular choice, there are two main possibilities for making sure people get their AToTC fix.

Option 1) Instead of running a new poll, I could make the executive decision to run Dombey & Son next (leaving only a two month gap), which would finish in April 2025, and then we could immediately go on to AToTC. This would mean waiting two years for it to start, however.

Option 2) It has occurred to me that there's nothing stopping us from running two books at once. This was even something that contemporary readers would have experienced, especially at the start of Dickens' career. (See my graphic of Dickens serialisation for some fun overlaps!)

If we went ahead with this second option, I would run the poll for the next book, and also run AToTC from April 2024. I could run them both from the usual Dickens Daily account, or I could set up a secondary account and people could only subscribe to the one(s) they want to read.

Depending on the response to this idea, I will probably run a google poll nearer the time and send it out via the email, but this is just for a preliminary response.

As a reminder, the options I originally set out for the next book are below.

Dombey and Son (October 1856/2023 to April 1848/2025)

Little Dorrit (December 1855/2023 to June 1857/2025)

Martin Chuzzlewit (January 1843/2024 to July 1844/2025)

Oliver Twist (February 1837/2024 to April 1839/2026)

Barnaby Rudge (February 1841/2024 to November 1841/2024)

As ever, let me know any thoughts, suggestions, etc.!

#a tale of two cities #tumblr book club #dickens #charles dickens #dickens daily #I'm aware we're talking a year in advance even if we do start AToTC next April #but it's good to get a gauge of what people are thinking #especially since last time it was a back and forth fight between GE and AToTC #with AToTC looking like it would win until very near the end

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hollow-point-heart · 10 months

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If the smallest penguin on the planet is the called little blue penguin, then what is the largest???

Logically, it should be a “large___ penguin” but no, it is the Emperor Penguin.

Oxford English Dictionary says that the word penguin derives from the Welsh ‘pen’ meaning head and ‘gwyn’ meaning white.

Very sad, I think, that there are so many species of penguin (18 species in fact), but we only talk about so few!

Eocene was the time period when giant species of penguin existed! They could be as tall as humans :0

Yellow-eyed penguins are the rarest species, with only 4,000 left in existence.

Orthopteryx was a classification of penguin related fossil discovered in 1905. Sadly cannot find any more information on it.

Undoubtably, I have taught you some new facts about penguins. Enjoy <3

I enjoyed these facts very much, thank you! In fact I have some of my own.

Riddles come in two types, enigmas which rely on metaphorical or allegorical language that require careful thinking for their solution, and conundra which rely on puns in either their question or solution.

Riddles provide some of the first surviving evidence for Finnish-language literature.

Riddles are historically a significant genre of Arabic literature. The Qur’an does not contain riddles as such, though it does contain conundra.

The modern English word riddle shares its origin with the word read, both stemming from the Common Germanic verb rēdaną, which meant 'to interpret, guess'.

There are many possible sub-sets of the riddle, including charades, droodles, and some jokes.

The unsolvable riddle with which literary characters often win a riddle-contest is sometimes referred to as neck-riddle.

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nevadawolfe · 2 years

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I just want to show off my girl Conundrae, she’s so perfect

#fr #flight rising #aberration dragon #original character

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libertineangel · 2 years

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I look good with like 2 days of stubble growth but being clean-shaven might make it easier to attain an air of androgyny but the stubble removal bits of electric razors tend to heat up unpleasantly and I can't deal with cream sitting on my face for manual ones, life is filled with conundra

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warnerbrown · 6 months

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Short Film "Reappearance." Posters | Short horror coming very soon!

poster fun! Pleased to announce that my latest short film is dropping very soon. https://www.youtube.com/shadowcorporation

#short film #psychological horror #shorts #horror #conundra #horror films #horror movies #poster design

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thevagabondexpress · 13 days

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conundra: ch. 24 of a boat without oars

this episode: a common cliché, a forced conversation, an ethical dilemma, and more chapter length comes in at appx. 1.4k

"They don't talk about this in the books, you know?" She looks at him then, her eyes wide. "Jessica Fletcher solves the case and then what? They never talk about the decisions you have to make afterward. Do you walk away, and let the killer or the art thief or what have you go free? And maybe they'll do it again? Or do you call in the authorities, and then have that on your conscience, knowing you're the reason someone might be going to the electric chair? I've been in cells of the Silent City, once, to visit someone there, and I wouldn't wish that place on anybody no matter what they've done."

"So what did they do?"

@faithfromanewperspective @4uru @quantummeep @caterpillarinacave

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bouncinghedgehog · 3 months

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From Ori Hanan Weinberg:

This is a post I've needed to write for a while. I've started it a few times. But it's exceedingly difficult. Both because of my own conflicts and the divisiveness of the topic. If all you have to say about IDF soldiers is that they are war criminals and state terrorists, then this post isn't for you. If you believe in the heroism of the IDF uncritically, then this post isn't for you. In either case, stating your well-known positions will only add heat, but no light. And either way, you will likely judge me quite harshly.

Despite F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous statement that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function," I have no pretentions of qualifying as such. I'm blessed to know quite a few who do, so I have ample context. It's not some false humility, which is also a kind of pretentiousness. You may judge it cognitive dissonance. I think it more a kind of moral dissonance. But in this week of James Joyce's birthday (look at me going full modernist with both those first-rate modernist intellects!!!), I will eschew the principle of non-contradiction, as Joyce so often did, and not shy away from such conundra, as he refused to. It's time for me to speak. Or write, if you will. Or if I will. Though this is in many senses against my will. In the space between two conflicting wills. Regardless of what laying this out will do to my already vexed sleep cycle.

These days, I abdicate my attempts at rest each morning when it's yet dark and immediately grab my phone to check the news. Not in general. That comes a bit later. But with a single purpose. I feel a deep emotional compulsion and moral obligation, which aren't really separable, to check for the fallen as my first act of the new day. This morning, there was only one. Only? Shimon Yehoshua Asulin (pictured), 24, from Beit Shemesh.

Few have been the days when I do not begin my day with images of faces tagged with names and ages and hometowns as such days are scarce. The appearance of names and faces is all too dependable. And no, I do not ignore the fact that exponentially more Gazan non-combatants have been torn from the world and their faces and names are beyond my access to witness. Sometimes, more than a hundred in a single day. It's unspeakable. History is watching. Mothers are grieving. And the future will not reward anyone for this carnage and irrecoverable loss.

I check the hometowns of the fallen soldiers and note that a disproportionate number of the dead have been from Jerusalem. Most aren't less strangers than people from Haifa or Be'er Sheva or Eilat or some kibbutz or moshav or smaller town or settlement. But the more geographically proximate their homes, the more proximate the loss feels. Of course, I'm also checking to see if they are from my community or related to friends and acquaintances. Most importantly, I check if they are connected in some degree to my own kids.

My daughter is currently serving in the Education Corps. My younger children are before conscription. Yes, before conscription. It's one of those dividers that organizes life here. Before conscription and after conscription. Like before Bar/Bat Mitzvah and after. Before high school graduation and after. A marker on one's path of individual and social life. But I need to know in case they need me. In case their trauma is more immediate today than on others. My two elder children have attended funerals. Their first. Not of an octogenarian grandparent, but people they have known through their youth movements and social circles. Siblings of friends. People separated from them by one or two degrees of acquaintance. And I desperately want to undo these experiences. Offer them just a few more years of innocence, ignorance of mortality, or at least less proximate knowledge of it, and of the savagery of politics. And I know there is more coming.

I first came to Israel at 16 in the middle of the first Lebanon War, the first of Israel's wars to spark a debate about its necessity. Yet the aura of the IDF was still absolutely unquestioned here. I remember being packed into Jerusalem buses at rush hour. Back then, people would squeeze in and hand money to the person in front of them to be passed up to the driver. Within moments, a little gray paper ticket would be passed back, along with change. I marveled at the compact that ensured this. We were all in this together. It was emblematic of a social bond that I had yearned for. Then, at the top of the hour, the driver would turn up the radio and a succession of beeps would introduce the news and the hubbub would fall silent as we listened for the names, the ages, the hometowns. And after a solemn moment, chatter and babble would bubble up again. This, too, knit us together. Even more strongly. The social compact I reveled in was never stronger than in the regularized, but never normalized shared grief.

Already then, I was a fan of Casablanca. Who isn't? Okay, I know some who aren't. There are many people I don't understand. I'd seen it two or three times at the art deco arthouse theater in my midwestern hometown that screened classics and cult films and documentaries. I've since watched it more times than I can count. Though likely over 50. I rewatched it just a few weeks ago. And I remembered one of Rick's most cynical lines and understood its bitter bite. When asked if he'd heard of the two German couriers who had been murdered, he declares "lucky guys." When asked how they were lucky, he mutters with unmitigated fatalism that and not a little sarcasm that "yesterday they were just two German couriers. Today they're the honored dead."

At 16, seeking manhood and meaning, I was primed for the allure of self-sacrifice. And I made a decision I've often wanted to go back and unmake. Two years later, I was in basic training in an IDF infantry unit. Everyone was predicting with confidence an imminent war with Syria in which we'd be expected to lay down our lives.

Of course, the survivors would be endowed with a permanent patina of heroism. Like the kibbutz gardener I knew whom someone else told me had participated in the famous hostage rescue at Entebbe. And I looked at him with awe as he pushed his wheelbarrow along the paths and tended to flowers and shrubbery and hedges. Or the father of a girlfriend, a jovial Yemenite family man who greeted me with warmth, not suspicion, despite my very much less than chaste intentions, and cured his own olives, and worked as a custodian of the same building where my current office is located. He'd been a paratrooper who fought at Ammunition Hill in 1967 in Jerusalem and been with the brigade that entered the Old City and danced and wept in front of the Western Wall. Simple men. Extraordinary heroes.

Then the First Intifada broke out. And it tore me in two. My simple desires and ardent imagination was rent by a reality that revealed a deep contradiction in my ideological commitments. I've written about this in a novel manuscript and other posts.

The problem was that I was a Labor Zionist. A socialist committed to human equality as well as the project of securing a Jewish home from a history that had too often threatened to erase my people. My education had omitted the scope and callous intentionality of our mass dispossessions. Or obscured them with various apologetics. And certainly didn't share the genealogy of "transfer" woven through the history of Zionist ideologies. I had thought of the conflict between us and the Arabs as the product of a historical and moral imperative that resulted in a clash between nations. As a socialist, I considered Israel and Zionism at that moment a temporary trial, and looked forward to a resolution that would see a fully democratic republic.

Then, as I faced a popular revolt in Gaza, and then also in the West Bank, I looked at the protestors, rioters, resistors, and I realized a class dimension. Who were the workers and who were the bosses? And for whom was I bearing arms? Was it to defend Jewish children in our ancient homeland and revived political autonomy, or to suppress a working class? Who was I? To what was I dedicating myself? How could I be both? Living on a kibbutz and serving in a combat unit had seemed clear and coherent and somehow purer than the bourgeois American life I was born into. Richer and fuller. Definitely more dramatic. I had made myself an instrument and agent of history. And I wanted to be on the right side. But where was it?

It took several years until that brutal tear in my identity came fully into focus. The pain was there. But only later did its full depth and scope and source reveal itself. And I'm still trying to live with it. Come to terms with it. The people I loved most have paid a great price for this process.

Among those who have paid a price for my trauma and intermittent and fallible attempts at recovery is my son. I've written about him before. He's a very special person. He was born a "mensch," a Yiddish term from German for "man" that connotes someone who is upright and kind and gracious, not macho and aggressive. Nothing necessarily alpha about a mensch. In fact, it's a challenge to be both. Some succeed. He might be one. Very popular. He has a natural charisma and good looks. Phenomenal dimples from his mother. An athlete's body.

He's a serious basketball player and a student at a boarding school an hour from here that houses a special basketball academy for gifted players with high ambitions. I see him on weekends and I drive every Monday to watch his games. Last game, his team lost by 30 points. But for half the game, he guarded a player at least five inches taller and with a bigger body who also plays for the elite national youth team. And he shut him down. Didn't get past him once. Not sure he scored a single basket while my son was guarding him. Yes, a man whose life from very early on has been about music and literature and philosophy and politics is now a committed sports dad. I love it. My son's grace on the court is gorgeous. Artistic. His grit and passion and discipline amaze me.

He has wide concentric circles of wonderful friends and has been an admired leader in his scout troupe. Younger kids are mesmerized by him. And plenty of girls crush on him. He knows it. Plenty are friends of his. Yet he somehow remains humble. Nothing angers him more than cruelty. And he stands up to it. Already in elementary school, he would face down kids who were bullying those younger than them.

I know no one with a bigger heart.

Have no fear, I don't fail to recognize his flaws and challenges. He can be a real brat to his sisters. He doesn't always apply himself to his studies the way I'd like him to. He can be surly and monosyllabic with me as a 17-year-old can be with his father. And he's not as curious about some things as I'd like him to be. But I'm enormously proud of him, of who he is, and I tell him that regularly. Which often results in the kind of extended embraces one doesn't usually expect from a teenage boy. Yet I enumerate his qualities for the following reason.

Just two months ago, he had his first pre-conscription interview with the IDF. He told them that his first choice is to be an athlete. Top athletes do minimal service that allows them to develop in their sport, or there would be no athletics in the country. But if he doesn't make that rarefied cut, he wants to begin the tryout process for the top commando units.

We've talked about the army many times. When he was little, he would ask to see my memorabilia. Old insignia and such. And pictures. I always frustrated him by demurring. I didn't want to feed the fantasies. As he got older, I explained my very complicated relationship to IDF service.

A year ago or so, I told him that if he refused, I would support him. I knew there was no chance. His education would make that very uncommon. His scout troupe produces a high percentage of people who go to elite units and become officers. Herzi Halevy, the current Chief of General Staff, was a member of his troupe. Same thing with his school. But his answer was one I couldn't even argue with. Much as I wanted to. He's not looking to do this out of social pressure or to chase a kind of aggressive masculinity that's quite foreign to him. It isn't an ego building desire.

This is more or less how he answered:

"Abba [father/dad], look, without those units, we wouldn't survive here for five minutes. I'm an athlete. A scout leader. I am capable of discipline and teamwork. I'm very social. And I'll have the opportunity because we know there's profiling involved. My school. My troupe. My address. I'm Ashkenazi and Anglo. We need people to do this. Not many can. I can do it. So I have to."

What am I supposed to say? Don't be such a good citizen? Forget this ethic of service to others, to your community and society? Leave it to people who don't object to racism and savagery and cruelty?

I can't argue, as many of my readers certainly would, that this just contributes to the problem. Of course, in many senses I agree. But this is a problem of immediate necessities contributing necessarily to the entire context of awfulness, not just sustaining but driving it.

The thing is, I agree that if people don't do this, we are in immediate existential danger. Decommission the IDF tomorrow. What happens? My family will be in mortal danger. My community will be in mortal danger. My society, vexed as it is, so needing change, will be on the precipice.

Justify October 7th as resistance as you might (I emphatically do not), I will not facilitate a million more murders of my people. I don't know how to break the cycle. But I'm not willing to simply commit suicide. Yes, we need another way. But the process of getting there is not clear. And this isn't abstract. Real lives are at stake. This doesn't mean I support this war. I protested it before it began, in the wake of October 7th. I knew it was coming. I spelled out my arguments and voiced my proleptic rage and grief. But baring the throats and hearts of my children is not an option for me.

There's a parable in the Talmud of two men stuck in the desert. One has a waterskin that contains enough water for one of them to reach the nearest city. If they share, they will both die. What should they do? Should the one with the water sacrifice himself and demonstrate selflessness so his friend will survive? This is a moral question. It seeks to articulate a clear 'ought', an imperative, a morally correct solution. Rabbi Aqiva, one of our greatest sages, explains that the one with the water must keep it, drink it and reach the city. He is not at liberty to commit suicide and sacrifice himself for his friend. Why? He cites the end of the biblical verse from Leviticus 25:36 that famously prohibits the charging of interest, the rationale given there being "so that your brother shall live with you." Your obligation to your brother is that he be with you, not without you. Self-preservation takes precedence. Only then can your brother live with you.

We have too long constructed our relationship as a zero sum game. I envision a future in which there's indeed enough water in that waterskin and we will both have something beneficial to offer one another and skills to support one another and we will exist in a context of mutual benefit as guarantors of one another's rights and security. Jews in the Land of Israel have been aggressors, though this doesn't preclude also being victims. We have engaged in acquisitive violence and continue to do so, and oppression and vicious inequalities. How do we break that cycle? I have a vision, but I don't know how to accomplish it. I know at that what is happening, what we are doing, is making things less possible not more possible. And I believe that there is no moral justification for the hell we are unleashing.

And yet, I cannot see our troops, though some are committing war crimes, and perhaps the entire endeavor is criminal (I've already stated clearly that I think it morally unjustifiable), as jackbooted stormtroopers. Many are genuinely putting their lives on the line to defend millions of children and an entire society. Some disagree with what we are doing but accept the authority of our democratically elected government (I have no illusions about Israeli democracy, such as it…isn't, but this is how they see it). Some intervene to stop abuses. I've witnessed this myself. One of the reasons I decided in the end not to refuse to continue my service was because I thought I could be a "balam musari" a moral brake. And sometimes, in some frightening situations, I was. But I was never confident that this was the best course of action. I think I would likely choose differently if I could choose again.

I do admire those who refuse. But I admire many who serve as well. And I grieve for our "honored dead," just as I resist their glorification. I remember at the end of my service having a conversation with a comrade and deciding we would never mention the names of those we knew who were killed in the line of duty without saying something unflattering we remembered about them. We didn't want them to become perfect angels. Become less human. Become less real. Nonetheless, I honor them.

And every morning, I will continue to check my phone. First thing. And I will read names and ages and hometowns. And I will look at their pictures. Learn their faces for a moment.

And the grief will be barely tolerable.

If at all.

#israel #palestine #idf

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repriseofthereprise · 4 months

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From Practice to Theory, or What is a White Woman Anyway?

By Catharine A. MacKinnon, as published in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, edited by Diane Bell and Renate Klein, Spinifex, 1996)

And ain’t I a woman? –Sojourner Truth (1)

Black feminists speak as women because we are women… –Audre Lorde (2)

It is common to say that something is good in theory but not in practice. I always want to say, then it is not such a good theory, is it? To be good in theory but not in practice posits a relation between theory and practice that places theory prior to practice, both methodologically and normatively, as if theory is a terrain unto itself. The conventional image of the relation between the two is first theory, then practice. You have an idea, then act on it. In legal academia you theorize, then try to get some practitioner to put it into practice. To be more exact, you read law review articles, then write more law review articles. The closest most legal academics come to practice is teaching–their students, most of whom will practice, being regarded by many as an occupational hazard to their theorizing.

The postmodern version of the relation between theory and practice is discourse unto death. Theory begets no practice, only more text. It proceeds as if you can deconstruct power relations by shifting their markers around in your head. Like all formal idealism, this approach to theory tends unselfconsciously to reproduce existing relations of dominance, in part because it is an utterly removed elite activity. On this level, all theory is a form of practice, because it either subverts or shores up existing deployments of power, in their martial metaphor. As an approach to change, it is the same as the conventional approach to the theory/practice relation: head driven, not world driven. Social change is first thought about, then acted out. Books relate to books, heads talk to heads. Bodies do not crunch bodies or people move people. As theory, it is the de-realization of the world.

The movement for the liberation of women, including in law, moves the other way around. It is first practice, then theory. Actually, it moves this way in practice, not just in theory. Feminism was a practice long before it was a theory. On its real level, the Women’s Movement–where women move against their determinants as women–remains more practice than theory. This distinguishes it from academic feminism. For women in the world, the gap between theory and practice is the gap between practice and theory. We know things with our lives, and live that knowledge, beyond anything any theory has yet theorized. Women’s practice of confrontation with the realities of male dominance outruns any existing theory of the possibility of consciousness or resistance. To write the theory of this practice is not to work through logical puzzles or entertaining conundra, not to fantasize utopias, not to moralize or tell people what to do. It is not to exercise authority; it does not lead practice. Its task is to engage life through developing mechanisms that identify and criticize rather than reproduce social practices of subordination and to make tools of women’s consciousness and resistance that further a practical struggle to end inequality. This kind of theory requires humility and it requires participation.

I am saying: we who work with law need to be about the business of articulating the theory of women’s practice–women’s resistance, visions, consciousness, injuries, notions of community, experience of inequality. By practical, I mean socially lived. As our theoretical question becomes "what is the theory of women’s practice," our theory becomes a way of moving against and through the world, and methodology becomes technology.

Specifically–and such theory inhabits particularity–I want to take up the notion of experience "as a woman" and argue that it is the practice of which the concept of discrimination "based on sex" is the legal theory. That is, I want to investigate how the realities of women’s experience of sex inequality in the world have shaped some contours of sex discrimination in the law.

Sex equality as a legal concept has not traditionally been theorized to encompass issues of sexual assault or reproduction because equality theory has been written out of men’s practice, not women’s. Men’s experiences of group-based subordination have not centered on sexual and reproductive abuse, although they include instances of it. Some men have been hurt in these ways, but they are few and are not usually regarded as hurt because they are men, but in spite of it or in derogation of it. Few men are, sexually and reproductively speaking, "similarly situated" to women but treated better. So sexuality and reproduction are not regarded as equality issues in the traditional approach.(3) Two intrepid, indomitable women, women determined to write the practice of their lives into the law, moved the theory of sex equality to include these issues.

In her case, Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (4), Mechelle Vinson established that sexual harassment as a working environment is sex discrimination under civil rights law. Her resistance to her supervisor Sidney Taylor–specifically, her identification that his repeated rape, his standing over her in the bank vault waving his penis and laughing, were done to her because she was a woman–changed the theory of sex discrimination for all women. In her case, California Federal Savings and Loan Association v. Guerra (5), Lillian Garland established that guaranteeing unpaid leaves for pregnant women by law is not discrimination on the basis of sex, but is a step in ending discrimination on the basis of sex. Her resistance to her employer, the California Federal Savings and Loan Association, in its refusal to reinstate her in her job after a pregnancy leave; her identification of that practice as illegal treatment of her because she was a woman, gave sex equality law a decisive spin in the direction of promoting equality, away from its prior status quo mirroring regressive neutrality. The arguments that won these cases were based on the plaintiff’s lives as women, on insisting that actual social practices that subordinated them as women be theoretically recognized as impermissible sex-based discrimination under law. In the process, sexual assault and reproduction became sex equality issues, with implications for the laws of rape and abortion, among others.

So what is meant by treatment "as women" here? To speak of being treated "as a woman" is to make an empirical statement about reality, to describe the realities of women’s situation. In the USA, with parallels in other cultures, women’s situation combines unequal pay with allocation to disrespected work, sexual targeting for rape, domestic battering, sexual abuse as children, and systematic sexual harassment; depersonalization, demeaned physical characteristics, use in denigrating entertainment, deprivation of reproductive control, and forced prostitution. To see that these practices are done by men to women is to see these abuses as forming a system, a hierarchy of inequality. This situation has occurred in many places, in one form or another, for a very long time, often in a context characterized by disenfranchisement, preclusion from property ownership (women are more likely to be property than to own any), ownership and use as object, exclusion from public life, sex-based poverty, degraded sexuality, and a devaluation of women’s human worth and contributions throughout society. This subordination of women to men is socially institutionalized, cumulatively and systematically shaping access to human dignity, respect, resources, physical security, credibility, membership in community, speech and power. Comprised of all its variations, the group women can be seen to have a collective social history of disempowerment, exploitation and subordination extending to the present. To be treated "as a woman" in this sense is to be disadvantaged in these ways incident to being socially assigned to the female sex. To speak of social treatment "as a woman" is thus not to invoke any abstract essence or homogeneous generic or ideal type, not to posit anything, far less a universal anything, but to refer to this diverse and pervasive concrete material reality of social meanings and practices such that, in the words of Richard Rorty, "a woman is not yet the name of a way of being human…"(6)

Thus cohering the theory of "women" out of the practice of "women" produces the opposite of what Elizabeth Spelman has criticized as a reductive assumption of essential sameness of all women that she identifies in some feminist theory.(7) The task of theorizing women’s practice produces a new kind of theory, a theory that is different from prior modes of theorizing in form, not just content. As Andrea Dworkin said quite a long time ago, women’s situation requires new ways of thinking, not just thinking new things.(8) "Woman" as abstraction, distillation, common denominator, or idea is the old way of thinking, or at most a new thing to think, but it is not a new way of thinking. Nor is thinking "as" a woman, as one embodiment of a collective experience, the same as thinking "like" a woman, which is to reproduce one’s determinants and think like a victim.

Some recent work, especially Elizabeth Spelman’s, could be read to argue that there is no such thing as experience "as a woman" and women of color prove it.(9) This theory converges with the elevation of "differences" as a flag under which to develop diverse feminisms.(10) To do theory in its conventional abstract way, as many do, is to import the assumption that all women are the same or they are not women. What makes them women is their fit within the abstraction "woman" or their conformity to a fixed, posited female essence. The consequence is to reproduce dominance. While much work subjected to this criticism does not do this (11), one can trace it, surprisingly, in the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Brownmiller.

De Beauvoir, explaining why women are second class citizens, says:

Here we have the key to the whole mystery. On the biological level a species is maintained only by creating life itself anew; but this creation results only in repeating the same Life in more individuals…Her [woman’s] misfortune is to have been biologically destined for the repetition of Life, when even in her own view Life does not carry within itself reasons for being, reasons that are more important than Life itself (de Beauvoir: 1971, p. 64).

Here women are defined in terms of biological reproductive capacity. It is unclear exactly how any social organization of equality could change such an existential fact, far less how to argue that a social policy that institutionalized it could be sex discriminatory.

Susan Brownmiller argues the centrality of rape in women’s condition in the following terms:

Man’s structural capacity to rape and woman’s corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the primal act of sex itself. Had it not been for this accident of biology, an accommodation requiring the locking together of two separate parts, penis and vagina, there would be neither copulation nor rape as we know it. By anatomical fiat–the inescapable construction of their genital organs–the human male was a natural predator and the human female served as his natural prey (Brownmiller: 1976, pp. 4, 6).

Exactly how to oppose sexual assault from this vantage point is similarly unclear. Do we make a law against intercourse? Although both theorists have considerably more to offer on the question of what defines women’s condition, what we have in these passages is simple biological determinism presented as a critical theory of social change.

The problem here, it seems to me, does not begin with a failure to take account of race or class, but with the failure to take account of gender. It is not only or most fundamentally an account of race or class dominance that is missing here, but an account of male dominance. There is nothing biologically necessary about rape, as Mechelle Vinson made abundantly clear when she sued for rape as unequal treatment on the basis of sex. And, as Lillian Garland saw, and made everyone else see, it is the way society punishes women for reproduction that creates women’s problems with reproduction, not reproduction itself. Both women are Black. This only supports my suspicion that if a theory is not true of, and does not work for, women of color, it is not really true of, and will not work for, any women, and that it is not really about gender at all. The theory of the practice of Mechelle Vinson and Lillian Garland, because it is about the experience of Black women, is what gender is about.

In recent critiques of feminist work for failing to take account of race or class (12), it is worth noting that the fact that there is such a thing as race and class is assumed, although race and class are generally treated as abstractions to attack gender rather than as concrete realities, if indeed they are treated at all. Spelman, for example, discusses race but does virtually nothing with class. (13) In any event, race and class are regarded as unproblematically real and not in need of justification or theoretical construction. Only gender is not real and needs to be justified. Although many women have demanded that discussions of race or class take gender into account, typically these demands do not take the form that, outside explicit recognition of gender, race or class do not exist. That there is a diversity to the experience of men and women of color, and of working class women and men regardless of race, is not said to mean that race and class are not meaningful concepts. I have heard no one say that there can be no meaningful discussion of "people of color" without gender specificity. Thus, the phrase "people of color and white women" has come to replace the previous "women and minorities," which women of color rightly perceived as not including them twice, and embodying a white standard for sex and a male standard for race. But I hear not talk of "all women and men of color," for instance. It is worth thinking about that when women of color refer to "people who look like me," it is understood that they mean people of color, not women, in spite of the fact that both race and sex are visual assignments, both possess clarity as well as ambiguity, and both are marks of oppression, hence community.

In this connection, it has recently come to my attention that the white woman is the issue here, so I decided I better find out what one is. This creature is not poor, not battered, not raped (not really), not molested as a child, not pregnant as a teenager, not prostituted, not coerced into pornography, not a welfare mother, and not economically exploited. She doesn’t work. She is either the white man’s image of her–effete, pampered, privileged, protected, flighty, and self-indulgent–or the Black man’s image of her–all that, plus the "pretty white girl" (meaning ugly as sin but regarded as the ultimate in beauty because she is white). She is Miss Anne of the kitchen, she puts Frederick Douglass to the lash, she cries rape when Emmet Till looks at her sideways, she manipulates white men’s very real power with the lifting of her very well-manicured little finger. She makes an appearance in Baraka’s "rape the white girl,"(14) as Cleaver’s real thing after target practice on Black women (15), as Helmut Newton’s glossy upscale hard-edged, distanced vamp (1976), and as the Central Park Jogger, the classy white madonna who got herself raped and beaten nearly to death. She flings her hair, feels beautiful all the time, complains about the colored help, tips badly, can’t do anything, doesn’t do anything, doesn’t know anything, and alternates fantasizing about fucking Black men with accusing them of raping her. As Ntozake Shange points out, all Western civilization depends on her (1981, p. 48). On top of all this, out of impudence, imitativeness, pique, and a simple lack of anything meaningful to do, she thinks she needs to be liberated. Her feminist incarnation is all of the above, and guilty about every single bit of it, having by dint of repetition refined saying "I’m sorry" to a high form of art. She can’t even make up her own songs.

There is, of course, much to much of this, this "woman, modified," this woman discounted by white, meaning she would be oppressed but for her privilege. But this image seldom comes face to face with the rest of her reality: the fact that the majority of the poor are white women and their children (at least half of whom are female); that white women are systematically battered in their homes, murdered by intimates and serial killers alike, molested as children, actually raped (mostly by white men), and that even Black men, on average, make more than they do. (16) If one did not know this, one could be taken in by white men’s image of white women: that the pedestal is real, rather than a cage in which to confine and trivialize them and segregate them from the rest of life, a vehicle for sexualized infantilization, a virginal set-up for rape by men who enjoy violating the pure, and a myth with which to try to control Black women. (See, if you would lie down and be quiet and not move, we would revere you, too.) One would think that the white men’s myth that they protect white women was real, rather than a racist cover to guarantee their exclusive and unimpeded sexual access–meaning they can rape her at will, and do, a posture made good in the marital rape exclusion and the largely useless rape law generally. One would think that the only white women in brothels in the South during the Civil War were in Gone with the Wind. (17) This is not to say that there is no such thing as skin privilege, but rather that it has never insulated white women from the brutality and misogyny of men, mostly but not exclusively white men, or from its effective legalization. In other words, the "white girls" of this theory miss quite a lot of the reality of white women in the practice of male supremacy.

Beneath the trivialization of the white woman’s subordination implicit in the dismissive sneer "straight white economically privileged women" (a phrase which has become one word, the accuracy of some of its terms being rarely documented even in law journals) lies the notion that there is no such thing as the oppression of women as such. If white women’s oppression is an illusion of privilege and a rip-off and reduction of the civil rights movement, we are being told that there is no such thing as a woman, that our practice produces no theory, and that there is no such thing as discrimination on the basis of sex. What I am saying is, to argue that oppression "as a woman" negates rather than encompasses recognition of the oppression of women on other bases, is to say that there is no such thing as the practice of sex inequality.

Let’s take this the other way around. As I mentioned, both Mechelle Vinson and Lillian Garland are African-American women. Wasn’t Mechelle Vinson sexually harassed as a woman? Wasn’t Lillian Garland pregnant as a woman? They thought so. The whole point of their cases was to get their injuries understood as "based on sex," that is, because they are women. The perpetrators, and the policies under which they were disadvantaged, saw them as women. What is being a woman if it does not include being oppressed as one? When the Reconstruction Amendments "gave Blacks the vote," and Black women still could not vote, weren’t they kept from voting "as women"? When African-American women are raped two times as often as white women, aren’t they raped as women? That does not mean that their race is irrelevant and it does not mean that their injuries can be understood outside a racial context. Rather, it means that "sex" is made up of the reality of the experiences of all women, including theirs. It is a composite unit rather than a divided unitary whole, such that each woman, in her way, is all women. So, when white women are sexually harassed or lose their jobs because they are pregnant, aren’t they women too?

The treatment of women in pornography shows this approach in graphic relief. One way or another, all women are in pornography. African-American women are featured in bondage, struggling, in cages, as animals, insatiable. As Andrea Dworkin has shown, the sexualized hostility directed against them makes their skin into a sex organ, focusing the aggression and contempt directed principally at other women’s genitals (1981, pp. 215-16). Asian women are passive, inert, as if dead, tortured unspeakably. Latinas are hot mommas. Fill in the rest from every demeaning and hostile racial stereotype you know; it is sex here. This is not done to men, not in heterosexual pornography. What is done to white women is a kind of floor; it is the best anyone is treated and it runs from Playboy through sadomasochism to snuff. What is done to white women can be done to any woman, and then some. This does not make white women the essence of womanhood. It is a reality to observe that this is what can be done and is done to the most privileged of women. This is what privilege as a woman gets you: most valued as dead meat.

I am saying, each woman is in pornography as the embodiment of her particularities. This is not in tension with her being there "as a woman," it is what being there as a woman means. Her specificity makes up what gender is. White, for instance, is not a residual category. It is not a standard against which the rest are "different." There is no generic "woman" in pornography. White is not unmarked; it is a specific sexual taste. Being defined and used in this way defines what being a woman means in practice. Robin Morgan once said, "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." (1978, p. 169) This is true, but Andrea Dworkin’s revision is more true: "Pornography is the theory, pornography is the practice."(18) This approach to "what is a woman" is reminiscent of Sartre’s answer to the question "what is a Jew?" Start with the anti-Semite.(19)

In my view, the subtext to the critique of oppression "as a woman," the critique that holds that there is no such thing, is dis-identification with women. One of its consequences is the destruction of the basis for a jurisprudence of sex equality. An argument advanced in many critiques by women of color has been that theories of women must include all women, and when they do, theory will change. On one level, this is necessarily true. On another, it ignores the formative contributions of women of color to feminist theory since its inception. I also sense, though, that many women, not only women of color and not only academics, do not want to be "just women," not only because something important is left out, but also because that means being in the category with "her," the useless white woman whose first reaction when the going gets rough is to cry. I sense here that people feel more dignity in being part of a group that includes men than in being part of a group that includes that ultimate reduction of the notion of oppression, that instigator of lynch mobs, that ludicrous whiner, that equality coat-tails rider, the white woman. It seems that if your oppression is also done to a man, you are more likely to be recognized as oppressed, as opposed to inferior. Once a group is seen as putatively human, a process helped by including men in it, an oppressed man falls from a human standard.(20) A woman is just a woman–the ontological victim–so not victimized at all.

Unlike other women, the white woman who is not poor or working class or lesbian or Jewish or disabled or old or young does not share her oppression with any man. That does not make her condition any more definitive of the meaning of "women" than the condition of any other woman is. But trivializing her oppression, because it is not even potentially racist or class-biased or heterosexist or anti-Semitic, does define the meaning of being "anti-woman" with a special clarity. How the white woman is imagined and constructed and treated becomes a particularly sensitive indicator of the degree to which women, as such, are despised.

If we build a theory out of women’s practice, comprised of the diversity of all women’s experiences, we do not have the problem that some feminist theory has been rightly criticized for. When we have it is when we make theory out of abstractions and accept the images forced on us by male dominance. I said all that so I could say this: the assumption that all women are the same is part of the bedrock of sexism that the Women’s Movement is predicated on challenging. That some academics find it difficult to theorize without reproducing it simply means that they continue to do to women what theory, predicated on the practice of male dominance, has always done to women. It is their notion of what theory is, and its relation to its world, that needs to change.

If our theory of what is "based on sex" makes gender out of actual social practices distinctively directed against women as women identify them, the problem that the critique of so-called "essentialism" exists to rectify ceases to exist. And this bridge, the one made from practice to theory, is not built on anyone’s back.

NOTES

* Reprinted from Yale Journal of Law and Feminism (1991b), 4 (13) pp. 13-22. This paper benefited from the comments of members of the Collective on Women of Color and the Law at Yale Law School.

Bert J. Loewenberg & Ruth Dugin (1976, p. 235).

Audre Lorde (1984, p. 60). The whole quotation is "Black feminists speak as women because we are women and do not need others to speak for us."

I detail this argument further in Reflections on Sex Equality Under Law (1991a, p. 100).

Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 (1986).

California Fed. Sav. & Loan Ass’n v. Guerra, 479 U.S. 272 (1987).

Richard Rorty (1991, pp. 231-34) states "MacKinnon’s central point, as I read her, is that a woman’ is not yet the name of a way of being human–not yet the name of a moral identity, but, at most, the name of a disability."

Elizabeth V. Spelman (1988, pp.158-59).

"[O]ne can be excited about ideas without changing at all. [O]ne can think about ideas, talk about ideas, without changing at all. [P]eople are willing to think about many things. What people refuse to do, or are not permitted to do, or resist doing, is to change the way they think." Andrea Dworkin (1974, p. 202).

Spelman (1988, pp. 164-66, 174, 186) defines "essentialism" largely in terms of central tenets of radical feminism, without being clear whether the experience "as a woman" she identifies in radical feminism is a social or a biological construct. Having done this, it becomes easy to conclude that the "woman" of feminism is a distilled projection of the personal lives of a few comparatively powerful biological females, rather than a congealed synthesis of the lived social situation of women as a class, historically and worldwide.

Spelman implies that "differences" not be valorized or used as a theoretical construct (1988, p. 174) but others, building on her work and that of Carol Gilligan (1982), do.

The philosophical term "essentialism" is sometimes wrongly applied to socially based theories that observe and analyze empirical commonalities in women’s condition. See for example, Angela P. Harris (1990). One can also take an essentialist approach to race or class. In other words, a theory does not become "essentialist" to the degree it discusses gender as such nor is it saved from "essentialism" to the degree it incorporates race or class.

I am thinking in particular of Spelman (1988) and Marlee Kline (1989, p. 115), although this analysis also applies to others who have made the same argument, such as Harris (1990). Among its other problems, much of this work tends to make invisible the women of color who were and are instrumental in defining and creating feminism as a movement of women in the world, as well as a movement of mind.

This is by contrast with the massive feminist literature on the problem of class, which I discuss and summarize as a foundational problem for feminist theory in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989a). Harris (1990) discusses race but does nothing with either class or sexual orientation except invoke them as clubs against others.

Imamu Amiri Baraka is also known as LeRoi Jones (Baraka: 1964, pp. 61, 63).

"I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto–and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey." "[R]aping the white girl" as an activity for Black men is described as one of "the funky facts of life." In a racist context in which the white girl’s white girlness is sexualized–that is, made a site of lust, hatred and hostility–for the Black man through the history of lynching. Eldridge Cleaver (1968, pp. 14-15).

In 1989, the median income of white women was approximately one-fourth less than that of Black men, in 1990 it was one-fifth less. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Report (1991, p. 60).

This is an insight of Dorothy Teer.

Personal communication with Andrea Dworkin. See also Andrea Dworkin (1991, pp. 304-7).

"Thus, to know what the contemporary Jew is, we must ask the Christian conscience. And we must ask, not What is a Jew?’ but ‘What have you made of the Jews?’ The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew; that is the simple truth from which we must start. In this sense…it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew." Jean-Paul Sartre (1948).

I sense a similar dynamic at work in the attraction among some lesbians with "gay rights" rather than "women’s rights," with the result of obscuring the roots in male dominance of the oppression of both lesbians and gay men.

#race and class

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