“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, December 2, 2017

Yes, Quite Simply

I don't know about you but I'm gutted ever day that Clinton, who won the popular vote and for whom Houstonians voted I think 5-1, is not my president. The intensity (good) and staying power (hooray) of the current focus on sexual assault by powerful men is an incredibly salutary result, I'm sure, of the incredible stuff that happened last year. I've been waiting for something like that to happen since I was old enough to understand what misogyny was in a vivid way (which would be about the age of seven), and in general as the child of a strongly feminist mum.

The day I realized I really couldn't be friends with David, was the day he asked, in bookstore of our beloved Tate Gallery, "Why are there no women artists?" I knew it couldn't possibly be true and that the utterance was doing more kinds of work than just being an innocent question, but I had no language to articulate those thoughts yet, so I was only able to say "David, that can't be right." Which didn't deter him at all. I was super glad to get to university and be given the language (thanks Kate Flint!!!) to spell that out better.

The pincer movement whereby people opposed to Trump were set against one another (whether by Russia or internal whatever or some combination) was exquisitely painful, given how I like to think about politics.

The noises Russia makes on the world stage are deeply misogynist, homophobic and racist. I bet they (metonymy for the official Russian look) hated the idea of a black president. Let alone a woman one. Let alone ones who had been endeavoring to keep them in check. You don't have to be specially or secretly in cahoots with such a force if you too are sporting these attitudes. You just like it when you see your view reproduced.

Case in point: I was hassled for several months by a tweep who called themselves putin_cyber_agent. Who cares if they were or were not Russian, or whether or not there were an American Trump or Sanders supporter, or whoever. The name (designed to call the bluff of the reader, like shoplifting in plain sight) is enough for me. Along with what they said.

I tolerated them during the election, thinking that at least I was wasting a tiny bit of their time. After the debacle, the day I blocked them was the day (right after the election) they started stirring it once again with the Sanders supporters, saying Trump had won because of people like me.

No. He won because of men like this:
A pervasive theme of all of these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton was that she was dishonest and unlikable. These recent harassment allegations suggest that perhaps the problem wasn’t that Mrs. Clinton was untruthful or inherently hard to connect with, but that these particular men hold deep biases against women who seek power instead of sticking to acquiescent sex-object status.--New York Times
American voting districts are, across a lot of the country, deeply messed up by having been gerrymandered by right wing politicians. Just enough white men and women had to be convinced not to vote for Clinton (remember, she won the popular vote by the biggest margin ever). It worked. Who cares whether the forces were conscious or unconscious or both? (Except for the fact that we would like to have the current administration destroyed by the Mueller investigation.) We know what the forces are. The forces are misyogyny.

You're never, ever going to persuade me that the result was a good idea, for whatever reason. This is going to suck for me for the rest of my life.


2 comments:

akrasia said...

Have you seen this in today’s guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/dec/02/hillary-clinton-mary-beard-donald-trump

Clinton definitely is chin forward and knows that our greatest defense is our capacity to describe how the monstrousness works and to embrace other women and male allies. Bigotry flourishes in our isolation, feeds off it.

As long as space endures may I remain to kick some sexist, racist ass, (with apologies to Shantidevaj

akrasia said...

Have you seen this in today’s guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/dec/02/hillary-clinton-mary-beard-donald-trump

Clinton definitely is chin forward and knows that our greatest defense is our capacity to describe how the monstrousness works and to embrace other women and male allies. Bigotry flourishes in our isolation, feeds off it.

As long as space endures may I remain to kick some sexist, racist ass, (with apologies to Shantidevaj