#accusations like from conservative pearl clutchers

[ganymedesclock]

I think there's a tricky place we can fall into with discourse about prejudice where the pattern goes,

"sometimes people will be angry! Demanding minorities to be sanitized and peaceful and pleasant to groups that have hurt them and in the face of behaviors that continue to hurt them is unfair!"

Which is a good thought!

But then it becomes, "it is always ethical to bully people who are More Privileged Than You!"

At which point there are three problems,

Problem one is that bully mentalities are not good, not in a moral sense as much as a practical one. Even incidents we do celebrate, like that one time a neonazi spokesperson got punched, we don't celebrate because it's a bullying action. It was a targeted act of deplatforming. That guy wasn't embarrassed because we wanted to snap his underwear and send him home crying. The punch was a means to take the platform away from a dangerous person who was using it to spread hate speech. The goal is to stop the harm. The goal is to stop the harm.

The goal is not to be a bully, because being a bully feels good and fun and cathartic and the more you encourage that impulse the more you will actively want to find people to bully, because it feels good, and being left alone with your feelings doesn't feel so good. So the categories broaden. As a means to vent anger it fails, because it makes you angrier, because you want to be angrier, because if you have more justifications there are more people to hurt. An endless buffet of people to hurt! You're better than ALL of them! (Not good for you, not good for praxis, not good to be around)

Problem two is that every human being on the planet is complicated and Privilege is a thing we can identify much more easily in vague abstract than we can in practice. Trying to split hairs and divide everything down to the finest degree to rule who outranks who on the great objective scale of privilege, creates a model where people are incentivized to strip themselves down to victim status for credibility. And most of the categories are extremely broad and affect people to very different degrees. Is my disability "disabled enough" for people? Or because I don't have physical disabilities and I'm not nonverbal, should I shut up forever, regardless of what I'm saying? Are strangers on the internet entitled to my medical history?

At that point it's basically just repeating ableism- you're only credible if you're suffering SO much you can't live without help and then we should all pity you and see you as such a victim. And that's just one example. There's a lot of ways this can go wrong.

Problem three- and the thing that inspired me to make this post- is that if you establish a narrative where the closer to a cis, white, straight, perisex, allosexual, able-bodied, english-speaking christian man in America someone is, the worse a person they inherently are, which gives ownership to all these qualities to the worst people.

I feel like I often see jokes or discussions of characters where male characters are ascribed 'stupidity' as a trait when the thing that the audience is clearly actually reacting to is that he's. nice. trustworthy. patient. And I feel like that's kind of unfair, isn't it? Are we implying any sufficiently smart man would hurt and maltreat others? That the best thing he can be is stupid? As a transmasc person myself, I don't really like the idea that if I reached a point in my transition where people saw me as a man more than anything else, they'd be afraid of me and have to decide if they think I'm too stupid to hurt them.

Men don't inherently suck, cis-heteronormativity creates a shitty box to put men in and this experience hurts them. If the hypothetical Perfectly Normative Man I listed above is the winner of the 'game' that prejudice creates (again, in America, not necessarily in every country) he wins a really bad prize. The primary nexus of misogyny, of racism, homophobia, transphobia, acephobia, ableism, prejudice against intersex people and non-christian religions and secular beliefs are directed off him, but he is made a soldier for these causes because he is never that far off the crosshairs. A cis straight man is often culturally socialized to be terrified of queerness because there is always the warning he could fail to measure up, and become rejected like those Others. Virtually always, in some way, he is already Other himself, even if he hits all the 'correct' categories he may not hit them in a way that power approves of.

This is a system that perpetuates itself through suffering, and the worst possible men, cis people, straight people, so on and so forth do not deserve to be given the right and privilege to speak for the category.

#readmore #Obvious disclaimer that like. some people are venting/using catharsis in response to #accusations like from conservative pearl clutchers #oh gays hate straight people #obviously our relationship with language is complicated and I'm not saying this to be the cops looming over your shoulder #I'm basically suggesting that it's good to ask ourselves about habits/jokes we make consistently

[tenaflyviper]

I need to talk about something.

Conservatives are in hysterics over "drag shows for kids", and their concern is nothing but a transparent excuse to freely express their bigotry while appearing self-righteous about it.

Now, I believe venues that are not making sure their content is age-appropriate need to reevaluate. HOWEVER, the very few cherry-picked incidents showing kids at these shows (and often including a falsely-labeled clip of what is clearly a topless woman, and which was proven to have come from South America) does NOT prove that this is a widespread thing, nor that drag performers pose any threat to kids. There is also a post circulating claiming a performer exposed himself to children, which is a lie. There were more mass shootings in January alone than incidents of kids at drag shows--does that mean all gun owners are violent? Clearly not.

These people assume anyone criticizing anti-drag legislature somehow wants children to be at adult-oriented performances. No--the problem is that false claims are being made against an already-marginalized community (which has led to an increase in anti-LGBT hate crime), and some of the proposed legislature would criminalize simply being in drag in public, regardless of time or place.

This hysteria led to not only armed protestors showing up to events for children, but a hate group also stormed into one, screaming slurs and accusations at the reader. The kids were in tears--they genuinely thought they were about to be shot, because that's unfortunately something they have to be taught can happen to them now.

Many of these same people are religious, yet never have anything to say about the fact that sexual abuse of kids in churches has been going on for over 400 years--since the first recorded incident in 1629, in Rome--and continues unabated. One recent incident had 28 victims. Imagine how many there have probably been over the course of 4 CENTURIES.

Ironically, these are the men expected to lecture to kids about "morality" from a book that's over 3k years old.

They insist merely seeing a man in drag will "traumatize" kids--but not being made to think they were about to die, right? Kids on TikTok challenge each other to watch Cannibal Holocaust, and these pearl clutchers think men in dresses will destroy them. Zero common sense.

Ultimately, if a child sees something a parent doesn't like, that is 100% the parent's fault. No one is bringing anything to their doorstep.

These people do not care about children if learning that there is not the threat they were led to believe only makes them angrier. They seem to almost WANT kids to be assaulted by drag queens, because it would validate their own personal hatred.

I'm not even going to get into accusations of "grooming", since we all know parents are the most frequent creators of child sexual abuse material, and drag queens make up maybe 3% of the population--and that's being extremely generous. Meanwhile, I've seen 3 people just today conflate drag with being trans, which only exposes their ignorance.

In the end, this is no different than the "Satanic Panic" was. There was never a single incident of ritual sacrifice of children, but they wanted so badly to believe it that they bought into it--literally. It became a multimillion-dollar industry to keep scared, ignorant fools afraid of something that didn't exist. Today's version is circulating lies on social media to get clicks to your monitized account and YouTube videos.

Anyway, drag queens don't deserve this bullshit, and it can't end soon enough.

#TL;DR #they are literally just artists and performers playing a character