hold on, stay on my side, don't go
Feb. 17th, 2015 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
houraipeachSo, this one has been a long time coming. But I really need to talk about this and I don't think there's going to be a better time, more or less ever, because it has to do with social dynamics and politics, which is EVERYBODY'S favorite and least-upsetting subject!
DISCLAIMER: I am not angry at anybody. I'm not actually upset right now, this is just a Thing I need to talk about because it's been gnawing away at the back of my brain for a while; more than anything I'm hoping this will actually be comforting.
So, as y'all probably know by now, I consider myself a feminist. I'm in favor of greater and more strenuous critique of the way women and queers are portrayed in media, treated in reality, and for reform that addresses both. And frankly, doing so has gotten me no end of grief, both from former friends, internet randos, and even other feminists who haven't felt I was 'radical enough' or just objected to me being part of the movement on the grounds that I'm trans. All of these things suck, but long-term, I think it would suck more for me to pretend everything to do with how I, as a woman, am expected to behave and react is Just Fine.
I'm probably one of the most public-facing members of our little community. Genuinely not tooting my own horn, but I'm dating and act as a design consultant for a fairly popular artist in the fandom, I have a youtube channel that gets rather a lot of views, and I help run our in-community movie night feature, Drive-In Saturday. There's a lot of things I do that intersect heavily with what would be considered 'the public,' relative to the internet; I may be a fairly small fish in the grand scheme of things(I'm frankly on the 'plankton' scale), but I interact with people not-from-our-community on a daily basis.
Not all of it is pleasant. And of the stuff about being that public that sucks, 90% of it is guys telling me my opinions and work are garbage because I'm a transwoman.
Do you know how many threats against my person I receive, as a result of my youtube channel and presence on twitter? About three per month. Sometimes it's death threats, which I treat with all the seriousness they deserve, which is none, because unless the dude in question(and yes, it is ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS a dude) has a youtube channel dedicated entirely to making creepy rants about my sins against god while wearing a halloween mask, the chances of said bro taking any action on that threat are 'zero' to 'whatever the hell number is lower than zero.' But sometimes, the threats are more personal: rape threats tend to be the norm, because.... because I don't know why. Those are much more upsetting, because I'm a member of a very sexually-open, sexually-active community; my sexual interests and habits are Public Knowledge and it would be very, very, very easy for people to abuse that knowledge. Which has happened!
An average of three of these kinds of threats per MONTH. And comparatively, I am one of the lucky ones! If you think life sucks for me, try being Brianna Wu or Anita Sarkeesian for a few weeks; I genuinely don't know how they even BEGIN to cope with the shit the world has buried them in. And that's just limiting it to outright threats. If we expand it to nasty comments and dismissive remarks and passive-aggressive subtweeting and all that happy horseshit, that number increases quite a lot.
Why am I saying all this? It's not to brag about how badass I am in the face of opposition; frankly, this shit makes me scared and angry. It's hard to deal with how much backlash you can get just for having an opinion; I've still got people leaving mean-spirited comments on an eight-month old video about character design in video games. And sometimes, the fear and anger I have about these issues boil over and I need to vent.
Except... I very often feel like I can't.
Don't get me wrong here; I understand the need to watch my tone. Unlike a lot of the abhorrent 'misandry cuties' out there in the swirling seas of outrage, I understand deeply that a long-term strategy of being rude to potential supporters is catastrophically self-destructive. I want feminism and my belief in it to be something that is comforting, and egalitarian, and compassionate, because the same things that oppress women and queers also oppress men and straight people, because of the tiny little boxes it forces them to cram their identity into and the way that patriarchy punishes them for deviation from the norm. Feminism has got to be about EVERYBODY, because social justice necessitates equitable treatment.
But you know... sometimes, I'm not a frigging saint. Sometimes, after the tenth or twentieth snide, demeaning comment I get, I'm too tired and angry and upset to be perfectly polite. Sometimes, I need to snarl and hoot and holler and just be allowed to be angry. And more than that, sometimes, when I do so, I need to not feel like I am required to reassure absolutely every single person I know that I don't mean THEM when I complain about mean guys.
And that's what's been getting to me. I've been playing my feelings so, so, so close to the vest because by nature, I am a person who wants to please people. I can be kind of a DOORMAT sometimes. And if I feel like someone MIGHT potentially be upset by something I say, 9.998 times out of 10, I just won't say it. And invariably, every time I do, somebody has to jump in with 'but you don't mean ME, right? I'm one of the good ones!' And the thing is, invariably, the answer to that is 'yes, you are one of the good ones! I'm not talking about anything you did.' But for fuck's sakes, how many times do I gotta keep SAYING that?
I try to word my 'argh, fucking dudebros' venting as broadly and generally as possible so I DON'T single people out, and if I'm NOT singling you out, you are not who I am talking about. I'm really not a very subtle person, in case you hadn't noticed; when I say 'I'm angry about guys dismissing me and leaving nasty comments,' then unless you have been dismissing me and leaving nasty comments(and it doesn't count as a nasty comment in my book unless there's at LEAST one slur against my person), you are fine. And before you say 'but mentioning that it's men doing it is singling out men,' what else am I SUPPOSED to do? Have a big vent session where I just never use descriptive nouns? The fact that it is near-universally men who behave this way towards me is not a commentary on GUYS, it is a commentary on these specific men behaving like shitty guys. And every time I need to reassure someone that I otherwise love, respect, and cherish that I don't mean THEM when I complain about that kind of behavior, that's one less person I feel like I can safely express my feelings around.
If I was a literally perfect person, I would be entirely happy to never generalize about anything. If I was perfect, I'd never get angry, or lose my cool, or be afraid and lonely and nervous about what my public presence invites upon me. But I'm not perfect; neither is anybody else. But there is this pervasive sense in dealing with folks that the cost of being upset is having to reassure others while you're upset. And somehow, all the stuff you've done when you WEREN'T upset doesn't seem to actually COUNT. I've defended people's right to self-express in whatever ways they wish, often in the face of shitty, pearl-clutching over-radicalized 'die cis scum' TERFy-ass Dworkinite feminists, and yet when I need to complain about the manner in which I get treated on what's starting to be an almost-daily basis, it's like CLOCKWORK that some of the same people I've stuck up for will go 'it's me, isn't it? I'm terrible and you hate me and I'm literally the worst!' And then I have to address that, in a way that completely derails my ability to actually get closure, catharsis, or comfort on the anger and discomfort I'm experiencing.
Which also leaves me in the awkward position of this whole post probably coming across as accusatory, even though it's really not meant to be, and so I'm fighting the urge to self-censor and argh argh argh I really hate having this much empathy sometimes
At this point I hope you can at least understand my frustration, even if you don't entirely agree with it. The thing is, a lot of this could be solved if I just... y'know, stopped being quite so public. If I confined myself to interactions with just this community, I could avoid like 95% of the bullshit I have to keep shoveling. But that really isn't an option for me; my social life, my work life, and my sexual life are in many important ways predicated on being a public-facing person. I'm an idealistic, optimistic, outgoing extrovert. When I look at a list of my personal heroes in fiction, it starts with 'Pollyanna' and ends with 'Sailor Moon.' My favorite adjectives are 'bouncy,' 'effervescent,' and 'sunny.' I cannot not face outward, it is from other people that I derive emotional energy and spiritual sustenance.
But I do get angry sometimes. A lot of the times, in fact. When your emotions run as hot as mine do, it's kind of inevitable. And sometimes, I'm gonna blow my stack and get furious and start ranting and griping. And so I am saying this as a blanket statement, binding and eternal, that unless I MENTION YOU, I don't MEAN YOU when I am talking about people who upset me. I can support y'all any way you need, all the time you need, wherever and whenever you need it... except when I need support. And asking me to reassure you that you're a decent person when I've just been hit full-on in the face with a blast of alpha-nerd vitriol is really, really not the right time to do it, even though I will be perfectly happy to do so once I'm cleaned off.
So please, don't take this post as accusatory or challenging or pushy. The last thing, the VERY LAST thing I wanna do is upset anybody. If you don't think this applies to you, it probably doesn't! Just understand that... y'know, sometimes I need reassurance too. Sometimes I need to be reassured that my anger doesn't make me some kind of hate-monster, and to be reassured that the people around me know that I love them, even if I'm in a cruddy mood.
Because I do, y'know. I love ALL of you. Just... y'know, when are people actually gonna TRUST ME when I tell them that?
DISCLAIMER: I am not angry at anybody. I'm not actually upset right now, this is just a Thing I need to talk about because it's been gnawing away at the back of my brain for a while; more than anything I'm hoping this will actually be comforting.
So, as y'all probably know by now, I consider myself a feminist. I'm in favor of greater and more strenuous critique of the way women and queers are portrayed in media, treated in reality, and for reform that addresses both. And frankly, doing so has gotten me no end of grief, both from former friends, internet randos, and even other feminists who haven't felt I was 'radical enough' or just objected to me being part of the movement on the grounds that I'm trans. All of these things suck, but long-term, I think it would suck more for me to pretend everything to do with how I, as a woman, am expected to behave and react is Just Fine.
I'm probably one of the most public-facing members of our little community. Genuinely not tooting my own horn, but I'm dating and act as a design consultant for a fairly popular artist in the fandom, I have a youtube channel that gets rather a lot of views, and I help run our in-community movie night feature, Drive-In Saturday. There's a lot of things I do that intersect heavily with what would be considered 'the public,' relative to the internet; I may be a fairly small fish in the grand scheme of things(I'm frankly on the 'plankton' scale), but I interact with people not-from-our-community on a daily basis.
Not all of it is pleasant. And of the stuff about being that public that sucks, 90% of it is guys telling me my opinions and work are garbage because I'm a transwoman.
Do you know how many threats against my person I receive, as a result of my youtube channel and presence on twitter? About three per month. Sometimes it's death threats, which I treat with all the seriousness they deserve, which is none, because unless the dude in question(and yes, it is ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS a dude) has a youtube channel dedicated entirely to making creepy rants about my sins against god while wearing a halloween mask, the chances of said bro taking any action on that threat are 'zero' to 'whatever the hell number is lower than zero.' But sometimes, the threats are more personal: rape threats tend to be the norm, because.... because I don't know why. Those are much more upsetting, because I'm a member of a very sexually-open, sexually-active community; my sexual interests and habits are Public Knowledge and it would be very, very, very easy for people to abuse that knowledge. Which has happened!
An average of three of these kinds of threats per MONTH. And comparatively, I am one of the lucky ones! If you think life sucks for me, try being Brianna Wu or Anita Sarkeesian for a few weeks; I genuinely don't know how they even BEGIN to cope with the shit the world has buried them in. And that's just limiting it to outright threats. If we expand it to nasty comments and dismissive remarks and passive-aggressive subtweeting and all that happy horseshit, that number increases quite a lot.
Why am I saying all this? It's not to brag about how badass I am in the face of opposition; frankly, this shit makes me scared and angry. It's hard to deal with how much backlash you can get just for having an opinion; I've still got people leaving mean-spirited comments on an eight-month old video about character design in video games. And sometimes, the fear and anger I have about these issues boil over and I need to vent.
Except... I very often feel like I can't.
Don't get me wrong here; I understand the need to watch my tone. Unlike a lot of the abhorrent 'misandry cuties' out there in the swirling seas of outrage, I understand deeply that a long-term strategy of being rude to potential supporters is catastrophically self-destructive. I want feminism and my belief in it to be something that is comforting, and egalitarian, and compassionate, because the same things that oppress women and queers also oppress men and straight people, because of the tiny little boxes it forces them to cram their identity into and the way that patriarchy punishes them for deviation from the norm. Feminism has got to be about EVERYBODY, because social justice necessitates equitable treatment.
But you know... sometimes, I'm not a frigging saint. Sometimes, after the tenth or twentieth snide, demeaning comment I get, I'm too tired and angry and upset to be perfectly polite. Sometimes, I need to snarl and hoot and holler and just be allowed to be angry. And more than that, sometimes, when I do so, I need to not feel like I am required to reassure absolutely every single person I know that I don't mean THEM when I complain about mean guys.
And that's what's been getting to me. I've been playing my feelings so, so, so close to the vest because by nature, I am a person who wants to please people. I can be kind of a DOORMAT sometimes. And if I feel like someone MIGHT potentially be upset by something I say, 9.998 times out of 10, I just won't say it. And invariably, every time I do, somebody has to jump in with 'but you don't mean ME, right? I'm one of the good ones!' And the thing is, invariably, the answer to that is 'yes, you are one of the good ones! I'm not talking about anything you did.' But for fuck's sakes, how many times do I gotta keep SAYING that?
I try to word my 'argh, fucking dudebros' venting as broadly and generally as possible so I DON'T single people out, and if I'm NOT singling you out, you are not who I am talking about. I'm really not a very subtle person, in case you hadn't noticed; when I say 'I'm angry about guys dismissing me and leaving nasty comments,' then unless you have been dismissing me and leaving nasty comments(and it doesn't count as a nasty comment in my book unless there's at LEAST one slur against my person), you are fine. And before you say 'but mentioning that it's men doing it is singling out men,' what else am I SUPPOSED to do? Have a big vent session where I just never use descriptive nouns? The fact that it is near-universally men who behave this way towards me is not a commentary on GUYS, it is a commentary on these specific men behaving like shitty guys. And every time I need to reassure someone that I otherwise love, respect, and cherish that I don't mean THEM when I complain about that kind of behavior, that's one less person I feel like I can safely express my feelings around.
If I was a literally perfect person, I would be entirely happy to never generalize about anything. If I was perfect, I'd never get angry, or lose my cool, or be afraid and lonely and nervous about what my public presence invites upon me. But I'm not perfect; neither is anybody else. But there is this pervasive sense in dealing with folks that the cost of being upset is having to reassure others while you're upset. And somehow, all the stuff you've done when you WEREN'T upset doesn't seem to actually COUNT. I've defended people's right to self-express in whatever ways they wish, often in the face of shitty, pearl-clutching over-radicalized 'die cis scum' TERFy-ass Dworkinite feminists, and yet when I need to complain about the manner in which I get treated on what's starting to be an almost-daily basis, it's like CLOCKWORK that some of the same people I've stuck up for will go 'it's me, isn't it? I'm terrible and you hate me and I'm literally the worst!' And then I have to address that, in a way that completely derails my ability to actually get closure, catharsis, or comfort on the anger and discomfort I'm experiencing.
Which also leaves me in the awkward position of this whole post probably coming across as accusatory, even though it's really not meant to be, and so I'm fighting the urge to self-censor and argh argh argh I really hate having this much empathy sometimes
At this point I hope you can at least understand my frustration, even if you don't entirely agree with it. The thing is, a lot of this could be solved if I just... y'know, stopped being quite so public. If I confined myself to interactions with just this community, I could avoid like 95% of the bullshit I have to keep shoveling. But that really isn't an option for me; my social life, my work life, and my sexual life are in many important ways predicated on being a public-facing person. I'm an idealistic, optimistic, outgoing extrovert. When I look at a list of my personal heroes in fiction, it starts with 'Pollyanna' and ends with 'Sailor Moon.' My favorite adjectives are 'bouncy,' 'effervescent,' and 'sunny.' I cannot not face outward, it is from other people that I derive emotional energy and spiritual sustenance.
But I do get angry sometimes. A lot of the times, in fact. When your emotions run as hot as mine do, it's kind of inevitable. And sometimes, I'm gonna blow my stack and get furious and start ranting and griping. And so I am saying this as a blanket statement, binding and eternal, that unless I MENTION YOU, I don't MEAN YOU when I am talking about people who upset me. I can support y'all any way you need, all the time you need, wherever and whenever you need it... except when I need support. And asking me to reassure you that you're a decent person when I've just been hit full-on in the face with a blast of alpha-nerd vitriol is really, really not the right time to do it, even though I will be perfectly happy to do so once I'm cleaned off.
So please, don't take this post as accusatory or challenging or pushy. The last thing, the VERY LAST thing I wanna do is upset anybody. If you don't think this applies to you, it probably doesn't! Just understand that... y'know, sometimes I need reassurance too. Sometimes I need to be reassured that my anger doesn't make me some kind of hate-monster, and to be reassured that the people around me know that I love them, even if I'm in a cruddy mood.
Because I do, y'know. I love ALL of you. Just... y'know, when are people actually gonna TRUST ME when I tell them that?
no subject
Date: 2015-02-17 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-17 09:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-17 08:59 pm (UTC)Straight talk, imouto: I would have a hell of a lot of trouble conceiving of you being angry for purely selfish or hateful reasons. I can't think of a single time in our acquaintance that you were angry and I didn't think it was at least mostly justified. Your biggest hot buttons do seem to be injustice and cruelty; I could never see you being *sadistic* under any circumstances whatsoever.
Hell, I couldn't see your Star Trek Mirror Universe version being sadistic. You'd probably die with your teeth stuck in Evil Kirk's flank. Or flee with me to the forbidden Cuddle Quadrant. <3
no subject
Date: 2015-02-17 09:17 pm (UTC)(also I conquered the Cuddle Quadrant last week, I'm thinking of setting up a summer home)
no subject
Date: 2015-02-18 01:19 am (UTC)A lot of the people who DO thrust themselves onto the internet in the small, unpopulated niches - Livejournal, Plurk, the furry fandom, comparatively Tumblr... basically, anywhere that isn't Twitter, Youtube, or Facebook - these people are both heavily damaged and incredibly unable to handle social situations altogether. Ironically? When they hem and haw and go through anxiety breakdowns about how you're totally talking about them, it's guilty conscience. For whatever reason, they're so twisted up in the head that they cannot actually believe that they are good people, so they take broad, sweeping discussions about terrible people and cling to them in the hopes that the shitty-ass voice in the back of their head is right.
It's unhealthy, it causes friction with people who need to vent, but it's really, really hard to kick. Even now (in a general sense) I'm struggling to push away from it, personally.
I'd love to discuss it casually over AIM when you're around, just because it's easier to get my thoughts in order when someone's there to point out I'm not making sense and/or rambling in circles, something journals kind of lack.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-18 07:08 am (UTC)So long as you'll tell us when it's about us, we can try not to let our empathy turn into paranoia.