timberwraith

timberwraith, 16 days ago

@Greenseer It's like the u.s. military decided to imitate the Keystone Cops while trying to build a pier from Legos and everything went FUBAR.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

You've also reminded me of the abuse that cis adults and cis peers put me through as a child who hated sports and was forced into a boring as fuck activity as a child which offered unrestricted opportunities for cis children to abuse the fuck out of me.

If it were up to me, I'd yank every single bit of institutional recognition of sports and all of it's funding and you boring, loathsome people would be forced to relegate your boring loathsome pursuit to an informal hobby.

If only. 🖕

timberwraith, 17 days ago

But let's put this into perspective:

You people have managed to turn something which might be fun for some children into a means of training children into a mindset of sectarian conflict between warring groups (teams) and have entwined the whole pursuit into a legalistic framework which encourages unhealthy obsession with competition against and fucking over anyone who is in the out-group.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

It's socially and emotionally unhealthy, and you train kids into this bullshit via sports from the earliest age.

This kind of "fuck over the out-group" mindset, by the way, also lends itself quite readily to undergirding hurting anyone who is in an out-group. It's the perfect way to groom children into bigoted ways of interacting with others.

And that meshes with bigoted attitudes against trans people, as a tiny out-group relative to most of the human populace.

Fuck you for this.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

I'll also mention that sports winds up entwined with toxic notions of masculinity which are drilled into cis boys from day one. "Win at any cost," "strength and dominance are all that matters," and "if you can't compete, you're inferior" are attitudes that permeate sports culture and are effective ways of grooming boys into horrific, toxic behaviors which they carry into adulthood.

Fuck you for this, too.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

So again, if it were up to me, sports would be driven into the culture's dusty corners as a hobbyist's pursuit that has no place in schools and it would not be an industry in which billions of dollars are wasted as a means of lining a few pockets with community funds siphoned off from taxes and ticket sales.

Play at your local park and leave the rest of us the fuck alone.

timberwraith, 16 days ago

@Wraithe Yeah, school was fun like that. I remember. 😩

timberwraith, 17 days ago

How do I know? Because society, my peers, my father, my family, TV, and pretty much every friggin' thing in my sphere of awareness when I was a confused (and still pliable) kid sent this message:

"If you're a human with external plumbing, you need to learn how to be a massive dickhead so that the other external plumbing people respect you and don't turn you into a punching bag and murder target."

I said that in an over the top way, yes, but that's not really an exaggeration, sadly.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

What I'm getting at here, is that each era of patriarchy has its mode of cultural transmission of patriarchy and other forms of cultural ideation which support and reproduce oppression.

Today's internet grifters are just the latest version.

The mode of transmission changes with technology and shifts in culture but it remains firmly in place.

That should not be surprising because, well, human beings are motivated to hold onto power, and patriarchy funnels a lot of power to half of humanity.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

Like most forms of prejudice and the oppression supported by that body of ideas, the system of belief which forms the foundation of all of this, is a self maintaining, self reproducing, internally consistent body of ideation that retains its resiliency across the ages.

You are born into a culture that is permeated with people who firmly believe the ideas of patriarchy and misogyny are grounded in "reality, " you are surrounded by people who present this as reality, and it is all that you know.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

Furthermore, if you are a beneficiary of that system of ideas, you will likely have a self-serving motivation to embrace and internalize those ideas.

Humans are kind of selfish that way.

Yeah, I know. This is as dark as my usual posts.

Thankfully, not every person, and not every boy/man, buys into these ideas... but enough do to pass this system of self-serving prejudicial ideation on to the next generation of boys and men.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

I'm not saying that there is no solution and can be no solution.

However, I think people need to be quite clear on exactly what is going on, "under the hood" of this process.

I like some of the solutions that the video offers, particularly the more practical solutions offered at the end about boys/men getting out of their toxic homosocial bubble and actually interacting with girls/women as friends rather than as sexual/romantic targets.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

One part of his video that I sort of rolled my eyes on was a bit of messaging that I find in a lot of white leftist rhetoric:

"If we improve the economic prosperity of [white/male] people, they'll see the light and be much nicer toward [POC/women]."

It's not that simple. Prejudice and motivation to hold on to social/political/economic power does not go away with economic prosperity.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

It's a nice idea but I'll point out that my father and his age peers were born in the 1920s, went through one of the most prosperous times for white males of the u.s. (1950s/1960s), made a nice chunk of change, and were still massive racist, sexist assholes.

And they (including their racist female age peers) passed on the habits/beliefs/ideation of being massive racist, sexist assholes to the next generation.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

My brothers (1 boomer, 1 greatest generation) both turned out to be toxic sexist, racist people. My sister (boomer) was also amazingly racist, and to varying degrees, also embraced a payload of sexist ideation.

My brothers lived to become "successful" middle class men and clung to their racist, sexist bullshit. They still do.

My sister was working class her whole life, lived from paycheck to paycheck, and was sadly reactionary in her beliefs (past tense because she died a few years ago).

timberwraith, 17 days ago

So, the white liberal/leftist notion that more money brings less prejudice is hollow.

It does not work that way.

In fact, when people wind up with more money, they want to protect that money and limit who has access to it.

And racism and patriarchy provide useful schemes in hoarding access to wealth and social/political influence to the people who already have that access.

Sounds depressing, I know. But you need to be real about how these social process work.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

And by the way, let's toss in this "extra credit" observation, just to link in both halves of humanity:

The funny thing about patriarchy is that it works in a way that serves to force women into economic/social/political dependency upon the men in their lives.

To utilize/maintain access to resources that come with this dependency upon male privilege/power, there is a motivation, both through socialization and survival pressures, to buy into at least some parts of patriarchy.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

And if you are a white woman, that often means you are tied to whiteness and male power as a source of greater access to resources (wealth/social status/political access).

That means, there's a motivation to support white patriarchy specifically.

And now you know why so many white women support Trump in the election booth and are solid members of the GOP.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

Sadly, women also participate in transmitting patriarchy across the generations, too.

It's a relationship bound in the dependency upon male access to power that is inflicted upon girls/women by patriarchy but nevertheless, a good subset of adult women are invested in, and actively participate in various patriarchal processes in society.

Some see their survival as dependent upon this "buying into the system."

It's a fucking mess.

I wish we lived in a different world.

timberwraith, 17 days ago

I know those last 3 toots might be a hard notion for some of my female peers to want to look at straight in the eye.

I wrote those posts as a transgender woman. I have seen how cis women, and cis white women in particular, support their end of the [white] patriarchy in holding on to the modicum of social power they do have.

Good grief, have I seen this.

I kind of get why women of color look at white feminism, shrug, and say, "You're missing A LOT in your analysis."

timberwraith, 17 days ago

Personally, the way that cis women hold on to the parts of patriarchy that specifically elevate and maintain their power as cis people, as cis women specifically, has been a cold, icy bucket of political water tossed into my naive feminist face.

It has been a sad, depressing learning experience.