Posted here, though I have no idea if it will make it through mod:
"And my answer is this: If people like you would show some compassion and stop using hate speech like “kill yourself” — and would start considering that the way you talk about BDSM is influencing real people who feel real shame and real despair — thenThe thing is, Clarisse, that I honestly think some of these folks think it's good that we think of suicide.
(a) kinksters would be less likely to entertain thoughts of suicide — or commit suicide,"
I don't think anyone in here is actually saying "Go kill yourself" and meaning it.
But I do think that people are saying the world would be safer and sparklier and better if we were not in it.
They wouldn't hand us the guns or the pills -- most people aren't that cruel -- but as long as our despair is not directly their doing, they don't care. They don't see us as fully human.
Until they do, this won't get anywhere. We can talk about how alienated it makes us feel, but until they accept that we are no less people than they are, our stories of nearly killing ourselves will be amusing to them. They will laugh at our weakness, and that will be that.
It won't ever occur to them that it's the same despair that drives the gay youth to believe she should be dead. In fact, the comparison will offend.
Until we are people to them, this is nothing but dark fun.
26 comments:
Your post is live now. Hopefully some of the more militant readers over there will read YOUR post with an open mind and recognize that 92's just a different thread of wingnut.
You, on the other hand, thanks for your exceptionally insightful blog! I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who wants straight talk about feminism and kink, and have on at least one occasion.
I haven't even dared to go over to ND's place to read the whole thread - I knew that if I did, the really, really dark side to me might just explode all over stuff. Just reading some of the shit quoted was enough to get me boiling over with rage, and the "kill yourself" quotation really got me.
I posted my feelings at my own blog.
Brief synopsis of the post: if you want me dead, you'll have to come and do it youself - here's some graphic descriptions of how that might work, and if you can't stomach them, then maybe you need to reconsider your comment - and if you can stomach the idea of doing them for real, then you're way sicker than I am. The climax of my argument was:
"Are you of the philosophy of Louis-Antoine St. Just? Will your feminism demand "a mattress of corpses"? IS THIS WHAT YOU WOULD HAVE WOMEN BECOME!?"
I closed by remarking that the vast majority of serial killers have a history of suppressed or repressed sexual urges.
Thank you, SD.
I don't know if I think ND feels quite that way. But her commenters? Yeah, I think they do.
And let me just say I love that she's now saying people shouldn't compare "aww, you should just stop DOING BDSM, it's not so tough, baby!" with "aww, you should just stop doing other women, it's not so tough, God'll help ya."
I mean... she's getting married to a man. I've never seen any posts about loving women. I'm bisexual. I've had female partners before.
Is it just me, or is, uh, a member of the oppressor class here (unless she IS queer and I missed it) the one who needs to shut the fuck up? Isn't that one of the basic principles of social-class-based activism?
Yeah, I was able to pass the "kill yourself" comment as the brutal rhetoric 9-2 is fond of utilizing, but it didn't get through to me how little they view us as human until I saw the complete lack of empathy for Wiseman's suicidal thoughts.... many such opinions coming from queer or at least queer-friendly people that would shudder at a similar depiction for homosexuality.
She is pretty much exactly a member of the oppressor class, far as I can tell. And I'm shocked, shocked that she refuses to acknowledge that privilege.
Anecdata time! Way back, I spent a lot of time surrounded by radical feminism of this sort. That's about when the reality of my kinkiness was hitting, and I still IDed as a switch. For a lot of reasons, I was intensely self-loathing, not least because one of the few things that I knew did make me happy, and did feel right and worked out for me, was BDSM, and apparently I was just too stubborn and stupid to know any better. I remember thinking about killing myself then. I wonder how reading those words would have affected me. We aren't people to them. We're barely even a concept that exists in their own perception of reality, save as strawmen and punchlines.
Becca:
I was raised to think good people don't "want power" and if they do, they are bad and selfish. As well as to think anything "violent" was bad -- where that could be anything from overly gory movies to boxing.
I was suicidal for quite a while. But other people's suicidality is funny to those who fancy themselves thick-skinned.
They're thick-skinned as long as it's somebody not them. At least from what I've seen.
For the rest of us, can't we take a joke and some style hyperbole?
"Yeah, I was able to pass the "kill yourself" comment as the brutal rhetoric 9-2 is fond of utilizing, but it didn't get through to me how little they view us as human until I saw the complete lack of empathy for Wiseman's suicidal thoughts...."
He's a man and he's dominant, so ITheirNSHO, "women" are "better off" with him dead.
Not sure why this would be, he's just a random, fairly friendly geek from what I saw when I met him, but... logic is not their strong spot.
She is pretty much exactly a member of the oppressor class, far as I can tell. And I'm shocked, shocked that she refuses to acknowledge that privilege.
Remember, online radical feminists are the most oppressedest of us all, because they choose to lock themselves away in little enclaves where the echo chamber effect means they don't have to actually talk to anyone else.
Your shameless thinking something else is oppressing them! Recognising their hatefulness as hostility is so unfair! It's all just prejudice!
and really, wrt suicidal sadists/dominant people: actually that's kind of... noble
fucked up, yeah, but noble
because such a person is actually saying
"I would prefer that I die than that I slip and harm others."
the mistake is of course that this stuff actually, yes Delphyne, CAN be done safely and respectfully
but for someone who doesn't know that to say, okay, i'll take the responsibility of removing myself
well... how these people can *not see* that someone who would feel that way *isn't* violent
is beyond me.
bonobobabe or whoever the hell she is is busy making a fine example of herself as someone who truly just needs to STFU...
bonobobabe
February 11, 2009 at 2:55 am
(quoting lor)
"Does is completely escape you that all those things made me happy? That i love those pins, the gloves were the best Christmas present we got? That, until i was formally punished for upsetting him so greatly with my disappearance, i was a complete wreck and i couldn’t function? He did that FOR ME because i needed a physical form of forgiveness."
What doesn’t completely escape me is that if you DON’T say in a public forum that you love all these things, then maybe you get worse, eh?
And it shouldn’t matter if you do something that upsets your boyfriend/husband. These things happen. If he gets his panties in a bunch over something small, then maybe he’s not someone you ought to be hanging around?
And if you want and/or need him to hit you to make you feel better for upsetting him, then all I can say is, “You. Therapy. Now.”
bonobobabe
February 11, 2009 at 2:56 am
And for the record, BDSM is not kinky. It’s A-B-U-S-E. Physical and psychological abuse. Not hip, not edgy, not fun, not kinky. ABUSE
BUT NO, these wonderful feminists have no interest in shaming the women or infantalizing them or blah blah blah blah.
Bullshit.
I left a couple of comments over there, I'm not entirely sure why. I suspect my comment on the 'Question for Doms' thread will be totally ignored - as a female switch who doesn't do any sort of full-time power exchange or much psychological kink, I probably don't fit the stereotypes which support their theories.
I've been reading Pat Califia recently, mostly the newest edition of 'Public Sex'. There are some very interesting articles about the Sex Wars & feminist debates of the late 70s-early 80s. It's bizarre to think that the online radfem/anti-porn gang are making exactly the same arguments that were being trotted out THIRTY YEARS AGO. Still, I suppose we should be grateful the current generation are all talk and aren't breaking into play parties armed with baseball bats anymore. Right? *gag*
I like this blog, by the way :)
I'm sorry to get all heavy on you guys, but I've been a follower of 92's blog for a long time and this whole thing is really getting to me. I'm a female submissive who recently attempted to commit suicide for reasons closely related to this whole discussion and I was wondering - is there anyone out there I can talk to?
Rainah,
I'd say you can talk to me, but I'm not sure how much of my contact info I want free-floating right now. Are you comfortable finding a way to give me yours?
ms.durden08 (at) gmail
Rainah,
I just sent you an email. :)
Rainah, I hope that you're all right and getting whatever support you need.
I am. At Kitten's suggestion, I started a blog to start trying to work through these issues. Trinity and her have both been very wonderful and supportive. Thank you so much!
(The url for my new blog is http://minuteofperfection.blogspot.com/ if anyone is curious)
This kind of talk makes me think of when Anthony Comstock would brag about how many people he had driven to suicide by prosecuting them for obscenity.
There's a weird Jungian Shadow effect going on here, the desire to protect morphing into the desire to punish.
"But I do think that people are saying the world would be safer and sparklier and better if we were not in it.
They wouldn't hand us the guns or the pills -- most people aren't that cruel -- but as long as our despair is not directly their doing, they don't care. They don't see us as fully human."
*sigh* Yeah.
I'm still waiting for a radfem to give me a straight answer as to why mandoms are evil but womdoms are just weird and non-threatening.
"I'm still waiting for a radfem to give me a straight answer as to why mandoms are evil but womdoms are just weird and non-threatening."
Its probably based on the idea that dom men are supposedly practicing the ultimate form of patriarchal sex and hence willing perpetrators of patriarchal evil. (They don't actually use the term "evil" very much, but its certainly there in the subtext.) Women, I guess, are simply reproducing the patriarchal script and just flipping it, and hence are misguided, but not on the continuum of male violence and not directly contributing to male-on-female domination.
That's what I would guess the reasoning would be.
In the 70s, many radical feminists, at least the separatist wing, would have simply said that its because men are evil. Now that radical feminism has reinvented itself as "social constructionist", more elaborate ways of saying basically the same thing are called for.
Trin - I object to the claim that I don't see someone who is into BDSM as human. That's going too far. I can disagree with someone's choices or opinions without considering them a subhuman, and I don't appreciate the accusation.
ND: And I object to a whole lot of stuff you've said over there, and that you've let other people say (eg Delphyne) while calling people out left right and center for saying all sorts of nasty shit.
But yes... whether you object to my saying so or not, "go kill yourself" (which is what I was responding to with this post) is dehumanizing.
You may believe theory gives you an excuse to behave that way, but I don't. I think "kill yourself" is dehumanizing, vicious, and out of bounds, in just the way "sadist/rapist" was in anti-SM "theoretical" essays in 1983.
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