#if you see an activist framework that encourages people to isolate from others it's not leading anywhere good- avoid

[wild-at-mind]

Not reblogging it for reasons, but I really agree with that person on here who said people are reframing depression and generally feeling shit all the time as a good thing because of the horrors of Gaza. There are people on here heavily implying that you feeling bad and finding it more and more difficult to live with yourself is actually an appropriate response to war and genocide. In some way, it might be. But the thing is, where does that lead? Does it lead to decisive action in accordance to your values, or to nihilistic stewing and self isolation from your community?

The post went on to call it anti-recovery culture- I don't know if I would call it that, because I get why people don't like recovery culture, especially in relation to addiction, but mental illness also. I think that's something I'm not qualified to speak on. So I wouldn't call this anti-recovery culture. Instead I would call it pro-burnout in activism culture. Do you honestly think people who are the most productively working in their communities and participating in actions to help overseas are feeling like this? Or do you think they have learned to use self-accountability and community support to reign themselves in when they begin to burn out emotionally, and rest and recuperate their mind in order to come back stronger? Ask yourself, is that wrong of them to do, because they should be feeling bad, because after all that is the appropriate response....does it mean they don't care, because they don't spend all their time feeling shit? Or perhaps, the truth is, they do care, and are demonstrating it all the time, but they also understand that them feeling shit literally doesn't help anyone. Why can we not talk about or acknowledge this?

#i don't want to make out like i'm some amazing activist- absolutely am not talking about myself here #but i think they key thing is activism is best done as a group and one of the group's important functions is caring for one another #if you see an activist framework that encourages people to isolate from others it's not leading anywhere good- avoid #please do not let these ghouls trick you into thinking your depression and shit feelings are the right thing to feel #or that it's wrong to not want to have them any more #as that other post said: no thought crimes and also no thought activism #it's just thoughts and they don't do anything without actions and guess what makes you unable to do actions? (depression) #by the way i wish there was a better word than burnout to talk about this because it's so associated with work and capitalism #but it's a thing- i have seen it through my environmental activism group over the past 4 years #one woman just cut ties with everyone right down to her best friend and disappeared- we know she is alive but that's it #i miss her. but she had all the tools to avoid burning out and she didn't use them- at the end of the day you can't MAKE someone stop #oh yeah finally the above attitude to mental illness also puts you in a vulnerable place for conspiracy thinking #PLEASE do not become like my dad who listened to his mental illness too hard #and went from a leftist to a horseshoe theory conspiracist #guess how much activism he does now?! (hint: it's 0)

[victorromeofox-blog]

What do SSC and RACK mean??

SSC and RACK - as well as some other popular acronyms - describe basic foundational principles for BDSM and kink play.  Let’s take a broad look at some of the more common and established frameworks.

SSC: Safe, Sane, and Consensual

SSC, which stands for safe, sane, and consensual, is largely attributed to David Stein, who coined the phrase in the 1980s for the Gay Male S/M Activists (GMSMA) of New York (Stein, n.d.; “Safe, sane, and consensual”, 2021).

Safe must mean “without serious threats to participants’ health” (“to hurt, not to harm,” as it is sometimes conveyed); sane must indicate “within the limits of reason”; and consensual, of course, must mean “with the consent of all implicated parties.” Practices and activities within these limits are morally permissible; if an activity falls short on any of these three scores, it is morally wrong. (Nielsen, 2010)

SSC was - and still is - a popular term for describing the safeguards required to participate in ethical kink.  However, many criticize its semantic ambiguities and subjectivity; for example, what is safe or sane to one person may not be for another (Nielson, 2010).  Regardless, it still serves as a good starting point as an introduction to some foundational principles of ethical kink and raises awareness of the importance of consent.  Broadly speaking, adherents to SSC believe that people should not engage in activities that are not safe or cannot be made safe.

RACK: Risk-Aware Consensual Kink

RACK, or risk-aware consensual kink, was coined in 1999 by David Switch as an intentional move away from the value-laden semantics of SSC (Miller & Switch, n.d.; “Risk-aware consensual kink”, 2021).

Despite the popularity of SSC, some BDSM practitioners eventually began to realize that SSC may exclude edgier forms of play that involve higher physical and/or psychological risk, which may be part of the motivation for participation. Risk, of course, is relative and can vary tremendously across individuals. (Williams, Thomas, Prior, & Christensen, 2014)

In RACK, we see a shift from the “safe and sane” semantics of SSC to “risk-aware” while maintaining the through-line of consent.  Many see “risk-aware” as being less nebulous than “safe and sane”, although they have a large overlap (i.e., you must be aware of the risks in order to play safely).  In contrast to SSC - again, broadly speaking - adherents to RACK believe that people should engage in activities being fully informed and aware of the potential risks, regardless of whether or not the activity is safe, since some activities are inherently unsafe.

PRICK: Personal Responsibility Informed Consensual Kink

PRICK, personal responsibility informed consensual kink (originally, “personal responsibility in consensual kink”), is another evolution of this discourse which appears to have been coined in 2002 at BDSM Overdrive (”Consent (BDSM)”, n.d.).

PRICK builds on RACK, but increases the emphasis on the role each person plays in the consent process. PRICK makes it very clear that a passive role in understanding what is going on is not acceptable. (Hamer, 2016)

PRICK can be seen as an amplification of RACK, where the passivity of “risk-aware” is transformed into a charge of personal responsibility.  It puts a greater emphasis on the obligation of kink practitioners to do their due diligence in proactively accepting personal responsibility, regardless of role or position, and keeping informed of the risks and implications of their kinks.

The 4Cs: Caring, Communication, Consent, and Caution

The 4Cs framework, encompassing caring, communication, consent, and caution, was introduced by Williams, Thomas, Prior, & Christensen in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality in 2014.

While SSC and RACK focus on two shared, essential, concepts (consent and safety/risk awareness), the 4Cs approach retains these general concepts and adds the interrelated dimensions of caring and communication...  

The inclusion of caring in a BDSM negotiation motto reflects an ethical stance while acknowledging individuals as unique human beings. The form of caring (i.e., level of trust and intimacy of relationships among participants in a scene) also shapes the qualitative experiences of BDSM. Communication, while often rightly discussed by BDSM authors under consent, is also strongly connected to caring and caution. Although presented separately, these concepts in BDSM are all tightly interwoven. Emphasizing communication should lead to a better understanding among participants regarding individuals’ unique identities, needs, and motivations, and thus more fulfilling BDSM experiences. In short, communication as its own entity allows for participants to better understand the subjective realities of those with whom they play. (Williams, Thomas, Prior, & Christensen, 2014)

The 4Cs introduce a more human element to kink considerations and places empathy and interpersonal connection as coequal to the activity itself.  There are a few things that stand out about the 4Cs to me - it is a published, intentional, and discursive framework which gives it legitimacy and longevity, and it gives focus to active and actionable items and not passive states.  I highly recommend reading the original paper for a deeper look.

Conclusion

SSC, RACK, PRICK, the 4Cs, and other frameworks which encompass ideologies or values around ethical kink are great ways to start a conversation about your personal involvement, interest, and insights into kink philosophy and practice.  As fairly established and well-understood schools of thought within BDSM communities, they also provide a great foundation for establishing common ground and understanding.  Ethical kink is, after all, what separates consensual BDSM from violence (and, in the context of this blog, consensual non-consent from sexual assault), and creates a safe and healthy atmosphere for its participants.

The markers distinguishing BDSM sex from violence include 1) voluntariness 2) communication 3) a safeword (the ability to stop the activity) 4) safe sex and 5) access to information about BDSM. The “healthy” BDSM partnership is characterized by 1) the absence of fear from the partner, 2) no feelings of guilt or worthlessness, 3) respect to the partner 4) the sexual meaning of the “scene”: distinguishing the “sex scene” from real life, no psychical violence (no manipulation, no psychological pressure, no destructive criticism) 5) the absence of the failure and compensation cycle but stable behavior 6) no isolation from family, friends, colleagues; access to money; no aggression 7) only mild hierarchy disparity between the partners in everyday life. (Jozifkova, 2013)

If you are just starting to learn about these terms and concepts, I encourage you to conduct some additional research and introspection to see what parts of them speak to you, resonate with experiences you’ve had, and lead you to deepen your connection to kink.  These frameworks are not meant to be a comprehensive checklist; there is plenty of latitude within them for nuance, so it is more important to gain an understanding of the underlying principles and moral considerations to find your grounding.  If you’re not sure of where to begin, I have included both scholarly and casual references that I think are good starting points for exploration. ▪

References

Consent (BDSM). (n.d.). Retrieved February 23, 2021, from https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Consent_(BDSM)#/PRICK

Hamer, W.J. (2016). BDSM and Helpseeking. Auckland University of Technology. Retrieved February 23, 2021, from https://openrepository.aut.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10292/10457/HamerW.pdf?sequence=6&isAllowed=y

Jozifkova, E. (2013). Consensual sadomasochistic sex (BDSM): The roots, the risks, and the distinctions between BDSM and violence. Current Psychiatry Reports, 15(9). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-013-0392-1

Miller, E., & Switch, G. (n.d.). Safe, sane, and consensual (SSC) and Risk-aware Consensual Kink (RACK). Retrieved February 23, 2021, from https://web.archive.org/web/20090501182232/http://vancouverleather.com/bdsm/ssc_rack.html

Nielsen, M. E. (2010). Safe, sane, AND CONSENSUAL—CONSENT and the ethics of BDSM. International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 24(2), 265-288. https://doi.org/10.5840/ijap201024223

Risk-aware consensual kink. (2021, January 20). Retrieved February 23, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-aware_consensual_kink

Safe, sane and consensual. (2021, February 07). Retrieved February 23, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe,_sane_and_consensual

Stein, D. (n.d.). The origin of SAFE SANE CONSENSUAL. Retrieved February 23, 2021, from http://www.leatherleadership.org/library/safesanestein.htm

Williams, D.J., Thomas, J.N., Prior, E.E., & Christensen, M.C. (2014). From "SSC" and "RACK" to the "4Cs" : Introducing a New Framework for Negotiating BDSM Participation. Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, 17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-013-0392-1

#vrf #out of character #faq #ethical kink #anon #asks

[benajahccjoseph]

The enchantment of a piece of writing delivered by the human voice may come on little cat feet, so to speak, slipping in so softly that we hardly notice its arrival. It can also dash forward and strike with a blow, as it did one night in 1917 to the future novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston had enrolled in a night high-school English class taught by a man named Dwight O. W. Holmes.

In her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston wrote, “There is no more dynamic teacher anywhere under any skin. He is not a pretty man, but he has the face of a scholar, not dry and set like, but fire flashes from his deep-set eyes. His high-bridged, but sort of bent nose over his thin-lipped mouth—well, the whole thing reminds you of some Roman like Cicero, Caesar or Virgil in tan skin.”

One fateful evening, this teacher opened a volume of English poetry and began to read to the class:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round; And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery . . .

Hurston was transfixed. “Listening to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan for the first time, I saw all that the poet had meant for me to see with him, and infinite cosmic things besides. I was not of the work-a-day world for days after Mr. Holmes’s voice had ceased. This was my world, I said to myself, and I shall be in it, and surrounded by it, if it is the last thing I do on God’s green dirt-ball.”

What happened to Hurston that night was a kind of intellectual and aesthetic liberation: the sound of her teacher reading Coleridge was so thrilling, so arresting, that it cut her loose from the life she might have had and freed her to find her destiny as a writer.

At other times in history, and in other places, reading aloud has been the means of more literal liberation. The human voice is just a sound in the air, and yet it has built bridges from ignorance to knowledge, and from bondage to freedom. In the American South before the Civil War, for instance, it was illegal in some states to teach enslaved people to read and write. There were no laws against listening, though, which is how the future abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass got his first taste of what words could do. He was about twelve at the time, and as he later wrote, “the frequent hearing of my mistress reading the Bible aloud awakened my curiosity in respect to this mystery of reading, and roused in me the desire to learn.”

The woman began to teach Douglass the letters of the alphabet, but her husband soon put a stop to it. After that, Douglass recalled, her attitude toward him changed. “Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me,” he wrote. “Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamb-like disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness.”

At one point, Douglass’s mistress became so enraged at the sight of him holding a newspaper that she yanked it from his hand. “She was an apt woman,” Douglass observed dryly, “and a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other.”

Like Douglass, the future missionary and preacher Thomas Johnson paid close attention to readings of the New Testament at night. Johnson would ask to hear certain passages repeated, so that he could fix the words in his mind, and then he would compare what he’d heard with what he saw printed in a stolen Bible that he kept hidden away. Reading aloud became, for these determined men, a secret staircase that led to the open air of intellectual escape.

When a cell door slammed on Yevgenia Ginzburg, a Communist Party official caught in the purges of Stalin’s Great Terror, she was left with one source of consolation: “Poetry, at least, they could not take away from me!” she declares in her memoir, Journey into the Whirlwind. The prisoner prowled her cell, racking her memory to recite aloud the literature she’d read. “They had taken my dress, my shoes, my stockings, and my comb . . . but this was not in their power to take away, it was and remained mine.”

A few years later, eight hundred miles to the west, retelling literature from memory came to the rescue for Helen Fagin, a young prisoner of the Warsaw ghetto. “Being caught reading anything forbidden by the Nazis meant, at best, hard labor; at worst, death,” she writes in an essay for the collection A Velocity of Being.

I conducted a clandestine school offering Jewish children a chance at the essential education denied them by their captors. But I soon came to feel that teaching these young sensitive souls Latin and mathematics was cheating them of something far more essential—what they needed wasn’t dry information but hope, the kind that comes from being transported into a dream-world of possibility.

One day, as if guessing my thoughts, one girl beseeched me: “Could you tell us a book, please?”

Fagin had spent the previous night devouring a contraband copy of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, so her own dream-world was still “illuminated” by the story.

As I “told” them the book, they shared the loves and trials of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, of Ashley and Melanie Wilkes. For that magical hour, we had escaped into a world not of murder but of manners and hospitality. All the children’s faces had grown animated with new vitality.

A knock on the door shattered our shared dream-world. As the class silently exited, a pale green-eyed girl turned to me with a tearful smile: “Thank you so very much for this journey into another world. Could we please do it again, soon?” I promised we would, although I doubted we would have many more chances.

Only a few of the children in the secret school survived the Holocaust. The green-eyed girl was one of them. “There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts,” Fagin concludes. “To read a book and surrender to a story is to keep our very humanity alive.”

  It is no accident that repressive governments often limit people’s access to books and information. That was true in Spanish Cuba, when the authorities put a stop to the public readings in the cigar factories. That was true in the Warsaw ghetto for Helen Fagin. Books consumed in private cultivate independence of mind, a thing unwelcome and even dangerous when the culture outside is in the grip of orthodoxy.

The experience of Chen Guangcheng, the blind human rights activist who made a dramatic escape from house arrest in China to the American embassy in 2012, speaks to the power of reading out loud as a means not only of liberating the listener’s imagination but also of engaging his critical faculties. If those faculties happen to be subversive, well, the responsibility for that doesn’t lie with the thinker but with those who would stop him from thinking.

Chen was born in 1971, and in rural China the blindness that took his sight after a fever meant that he could not get a formal education. As a result, he spent his days isolated from other children. While the rest of the kids in his village attended the Communist Party–run local school, Chen spent his time trapping frogs, devising gimcrack homemade guns, and building kites that he couldn’t see, but whose airborne vibrations he could feel through the string in his hand. His mother was illiterate, but his father had picked up the rudiments of reading and writing just before the Cultural Revolution shuttered the schools in 1966. In the horror and tumult of the next decade, young Red Guards plundered libraries and ransacked temples, smashing and burning books and antiquities.

They brutalized and rusticated the educated, the once-prosperous, and the insufficiently zealous in a state-sanctioned campaign to extirpate the “four olds”: old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture.

The fever would pass, but even as Chinese society was shuddering in the aftermath of the revolution, Chen Guangcheng’s father was doing something extraordinary. Quietly, every night, he read to his blind son. In doing so, he imparted old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture.

“My father and I would sit under the kerosene lamp as he read aloud, making out the words in a halting rhythm, his voice rough and low,” Chen recalls in his memoir, TheBarefoot Lawyer. Their books ran from folktales to history to Chinese classics. Father and son read the sixteenth-century novel Investiture of the Gods. They read the sprawling, tragic eighteenth-century love story Dream of the Red Chamber (banned during the Cultural Revolution). They read the fourteenth-century epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms, also banned, on the grounds that it encouraged mythology.

Hour after hour, sometimes sitting up, sometimes lying by his father’s side on a narrow bed, the boy listened. “The stories my father read to me served as a counterpoint to the official party line and the usual propaganda,” Chen writes.

Just as important was that my father’s stories and our discussions about them gave me an organic education in ethics, providing a framework with which to understand my experience as a disabled child. The stories I heard when I was young allowed me to imagine myself in the position of the characters, to consider how I would react if faced with similar challenges, to devise my own responses and then to compare them with what actually took place.

Chinese history is full of examples of the disempowered overcoming the odds through wit and daring. Though I lacked the conventional education of my peers, I also avoided the propaganda that was part and parcel of the party’s educational system. Instead, my father’s tales became my foundational texts in everything from morality to history and literature and provided me with a road map for everyday life.

It is a brilliant testament to the dedication of a loving father, and to the excellence of five olds: old ideas, old customs, old habits, old culture, and the old practice of reading aloud.

Wherever young people are growing up, they deserve to know what went into the making of their world. They have a right to be free to enjoy the richness thereby.

January 17, 2019  By Meghan Cox Gurdon

Reading Aloud to hear the characters true voice The enchantment of a piece of writing delivered by the human voice may come on little cat feet, so to speak, slipping in so softly that we hardly notice its arrival.

[gardencityvegans]

Weekend Reading, 10.8.17

http://www.thefullhelping.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/weekend_reading.jpg

This week in my Strategies for Nutrition Education class, we spent a little time discussing Self Determination Theory. It’s a behavioral theory that posits three essential conditions of a person’s motivation, engagement, persistence, and creativity: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Autonomy refers to feelings of freedom and self-governance, competence to feelings of mastery, and relatedness to feeling connected and engaged with others. The more these conditions are evoked, the theory goes, the better the chances an individual will have of successfully implementing and maintaining behavior change. For the purposes of the class, we were studying the theory in the context of health behaviors, like eating more fruits and vegetables, exercising, or reducing soda consumption.

As we began to explore interventions that have used SDT as a theoretical framework, I was surprised to see how often relatedness was indicated as a major precondition of successful behavioral change. I guess I’d assumed that competence—feeling in command of certain skills or knowledge—might be more consequential. But what the studies we examined suggest is that it’s incredibly difficult for people to change or maintain health and diet-related behaviors without strong social support.

The more I thought about it, the more this finding aligned with what I’ve observed among those who are trying to transition to a plant-based diet, which is that support and reinforcement play a critical role in sustaining the lifestyle over time. Such support doesn’t always come from friends or family—sometimes it resides in the online community, in local organizations, or in activist gatherings and activities. No matter where it comes from, though, it helps to make people feel connected, and it inspires a sense of belonging that eases the admittedly difficult work of changing dietary habits.

Some time ago, a reader commented with the question of whether or not isolation or a sense of disconnection might play a role in cases of those who fail to thrive or feel well as vegans. I didn’t have an answer then, and I still don’t: every person’s story is unique. But I suspect that feelings of social isolation, rift with tradition, and/or lack of familial support can injure a person’s experience of being vegan or vegetarian, if only because they create considerable stress. All the more reason for vegans to continue building a supportive, welcoming, enthusiastic, and inclusive community, both “IRL” and virtually.

These thoughts were running through my mind as I read this article, a powerful piece of reporting on the impact that culture has on the experience of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. The article is long, complex, and focalized on the story of psychologist Nev Jones, who has herself received a schizophrenia diagnosis.

One of the points the article makes is that people who experience schizophrenia in cultures that are less likely to stigmatize or isolate people with mental illness tend to fare better; in many ways, they’re worse off in Western culture, where mental illness can be medicalized and problematized in a way that is profoundly alienating for those who have been diagnosed. The article touches on the idea of “abjection,” or the marginalization of people by labeling.

The insights brought me back to reading Lonely City, a book that addresses the ways in which lonely or isolated people are often pushed deeper into their alienation by societies that fail to embrace and accomodate difference. And it made me think about the ways in which our treatment of mental illness might profoundly undermine the sense of relatedness that seems to be—at least according to some theories—so essential to our well-being.

Self determination theory is just one lens, but it resonates with me; I know that my sense of self suffers greatly when I feel dispossessed of autonomy, competence, or relatedness. In the last six months I’ve tried particularly to evoke my relatedness more strongly, and it has helped me to grow and heal.

Now I’m thinking about ways that I can bring more awareness of relatedness and its importance to my work; I’m more conscious of the need to ask my clients about their social supports, interpersonal resources, and sense of belonging when I’m talking to them about dietary change. And I feel encouraged in my efforts to keep writing about mental health, not only because it helps me, but also because it’s my own, small contribution to the goal of tearing down stigma.

Enjoy the reads this week, and of course, I hope you enjoy these tasty recipe finds from around the web!

Recipes

Hooray for yet another awesome, packable lunch idea: Shannon’s collard greens pesto chickpea salad. It’s a simple recipe, but I’d really never have thought to smash these ingredients together, and I’m so intrigued. Always looking for new ways to use collards.

These grilled portabello mushrooms are so versatile: you could stuff them into a sandwich or wrap, use them to top grains or polenta or grits, throw them on a salad, or serve them with pasta. A great way to fold umami into vegan meals.

I’ve never tried a homemade vegan gumbo before, but I’d really like to. When I do, this vibrant recipe will be my inspiration.

Tamarind paste is one of my favorite, flavor-packed ingredients to work with (most recently this stuffed eggplant recipe), and I’m loving Lisa’s healthy, colorful tamarind glazed vegetable tacos.

Plums are still in the farmers markets in New York right now, and before they dissapear I can’t wait to make these plum muscovado cupcakes with spiced compote. Just beautiful.

Reads

1. First, insights into the connection between culture and mental illness/health.

2. This article touches on the same topic, but with a particular focus on how Chinese people experience depression. The article touches on research suggesting that Chinese people demonstrate a greater tendency toward somatization—that is, the expression of feelings and/or psychological distress through their bodies—than do Westerners.

It’s interesting to me because I find that my depression manifests more and more physically as I get older, and I’d imagine that the research has important implications for cultural literacy in mental health screenings and treatment.

3. Really interesting reporting on new developments in IVF and fertility treatment, which are calling into question previous standards about what makes an egg viable.

4. A roundup of awesome, cutting edge innovations that are bringing “smart” technology to biosensors and more.

5. There’s plenty of evidence in favor of the value of eating breakfast, and in my work I emphasize a balanced, fulsome morning meal as an important “anchor” in healthful eating patterns. Now evidence is linking breakfast skipping to increased rates of atherosclerosis—another good reason to whip up something tasty, soulful, and sustaining early in the day.

Happy Sunday, friends. I’ve got a killer, perfectly seasonal vegan dessert to share with you this week. And if you haven’t yet, be sure to enter my giveaway to win a copy of Celine Steen’s Bold Flavored Vegan Cooking, which is truly awesome!

xo

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#infrared #health