5-Link Roundup
Not the Fun Kind of Feminist: How Trump helped make Andrea Dworkin relevant again by Michelle Goldberg: I honestly believe that a lot of the knee-jerk dismissal of feminism pre-2010 honestly comes down to the fact liberal feminism is much more palatable to men and fits in better with the patriarchy (“Actually I’m hot in all the ways men want women to be but for myself!!!”) and that radical feminism is much more reactionary and hostile to them. In the last 20 or so years, feminism has been hardcore commodified and it’s no longer remotely about women’s liberation and equal opportunity for women, but instead about getting women even more Stockholm Syndromed into the patriarchy than we already are, and I’m not here for it at all, which is why I’m including this piece here.
Over the Edge, Over Again by Frank Falsi: This piece about Pirates of the Caribbean lives rent free in my head and makes me cry every time I read it, especially this part:
The world—the new one—is only worth fighting for if we remember why we’re fighting. Because grief means you have loved and lost. Because love is the ultimate inoculation against imperialism. Like any immunizing agent, there’s part of the virus inside the cure: imperialism is the possessing maw by which territories subsume others for profit. Love is its inverse, a possession that sets other bodies free: You are mine and I am yours and we are now free to build a new thing from these parts. Love is roundly unprofitable and staunchly illogical, the prioritizing of another’s needs over your own. Its malleability, the way it can fold and unfold around all the brittle systems that oppose liberation, isn’t just the conduit to a future but proof that we’re always inventing one, in embraces.
Because the marriage of Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner—performed by Hector Barbossa aboard the deck of the Flying Dutchman as two ships careen over the maelstrom at the end of the world—is the most loving gesture I’ve ever seen. “I don’t know if now is the best time,” Elizabeth says when Will brings it up. “Now may be the only time,” Will offers.
And so Elizabeth and Will kiss, and that kiss, that camera spin: it’s the whole world stopping and shattering amid splashes and splinters. It’s undiluted love, the kind that liberates a body and sends it into millions of shivers before bringing it back down, like the rain. It’s the kind you fight for.
The Subversive Power of Gossip by Maria Tatar: All I have to say is that, if you wanted people to speak kindly of you, you should have behaved better. Obviously there are caveats and of course, women (of color) are judged more harshly than men and for things out of their control, but on the whole, I stand by that edict.
It’s really ironic Gawker published the following (very true!) excerpt from this piece because nothing else in their entire publication, including the rest of the very article, indicates that they abide by this ideology.
Like I’m sorry @ Jenny Zhang but “the ascension of any person of marginalized identity into a position of power (no matter how compromised) — is celebrated as a collective political triumph, rather than what it most often is: individual, symbolic, or even actively harmful” just makes you sound pretentious and confused in addition to being out-of-touch with literally everybody outside media Twitter weirdos in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Like, I’m baffled and kind of horrified that a Stanford graduate and Iowa Writers Workshop MFA holder can’t grasp the simple concept that having marginalized people in positions of power won’t fix marginalization instantaneously but having only white men in positions of power will undeniably increase marginalization. There’s no chance in hell the DoD (or DHS) is going to be abolished anytime soon so personally, I’d much rather have a man leading it who’s actively working to excise the white supremacists from the armed forces than a man who like, tells white supremacists to “stand back and stand by.”
Why Don’t We Know How Periods Affect Exercise? by Maggie Lange: I found this piece enlightening as a woman who exercises regularly and gets periods but like, can we put a universal moratorium on the word “menstruators?” Ditto for “birthing bodies.” Just say women and people that menstruate/can get pregnant and stop dehumanizing people and reducing them to their ability to give birth or lack thereof! And, I said it before and I’ll say it again, but just because 0.2% of the people who can menstruate/become pregnant aren’t cisgender women doesn’t mean the overwhelming majority of people who are impacted by period-stigma or abortion bans aren’t women, or that these issues aren’t rooted in misogyny. Then again, understanding that concept requires acknowledging that misogyny is a legitimate axis of oppression and that’s taboo to do nowadays.
Anyways, I’ll leave you today with this cover of “Somewhere Only We Know” by Kacey Musgraves which yes, made me cry a lot as well as a picture of me in animated form.