Friday

It’s starting to have been a long time since Shanda and I have been able to relate easily, and I’m not sure it’s going to get better until at least the middle of next week. She’s been sick and before that I was disregulated; we’re both mostly better but still not better together. And we’re scheduled to continue. Shanda feels too busy with work today to even take a proper lunch, then B is coming over and staying the night. Tomorrow we’re going directly from B to a party with Eed, and Sunday we’ve got D&D and likely the usual back-to-work anxiety from Shanda in the evening. I’m off Monday but Shanda isn’t, and I’ve got a window repair and robots until after supper even if she were. So Tuesday maybe, if all goes well between now and then, and if we can keep from sliding further apart. That feels a long time from now ¹Everything turned out better than expected..

I’m having a hard time today with the discussion of sexual assault as a men vs. women issue. I can understand why it’s easy to frame that way but I think it’s ultimately contrary to the goal, and I know for a fact that it’s currently hurting a non-trivial number of victims of sexual assault who happen to own a penis. But I’m not sure I know how to talk about it without being dismissed myself as uninterested in the topic of the oppression of women, and without dismissing harm I cannot directly see.

I also don’t want to leave it alone – I can never leave anything alone ²I once told Shanda that A) she has to be 100% compliant and if possible display anxious subordination with border agents because I can hardly keep it together enough to not get detained and B) I would go fuck with border agents for fun if we planned for it and were diligent about not actually committing any crimes. Can’t leave it alone. The … Continue reading. So I guess you can watch me try to work out a sensible statement here.

The things that are getting to me ³And I’m aware that some of these are specifically crafted with the intent of dividing support as a tactic to reduce the overall strength of the movement, but that doesn’t mean much when people hoping to support the movement promote these. are the things like “male victims don’t have to put up with shaming” or “males don’t have to worry about assault because they could use violence to resist” or “males are listened to when they talk about it”. I know for a fact those things aren’t true, at least not in enough cases to be in any way representative of a typical vicitm.

We tell women they should worry about assault and be prepared to use weapons so they can use violence to resist. We tell men not to worry about assault because they’ll have all the violence they need ⁴We spend a lot of time telling women that being small means they’re in danger and men that being big means they’re safe. Maybe there is a world where that is true – where muscle mass determines who has power – but that’s not a world I’ve ever lived in. And anyone who has ever been in a real fight will tell you … Continue reading available without weapons. In both cases we tell victims they don’t matter because they didn’t use enough violence to avoid being raped.

We tell women they must have done something to seduce their rapist. We tell men it wasn’t an attack because their rapist owned a vagina. In both cases we tell victims they don’t matter because hetero sex is simply expected under certain conditions. That no sufficiently real man/pure woman would ever be in such a situation if they didn’t want that sex.

We dismiss women because their assailants are more powerful than them. And we dismiss men for exactly the same reason. The roles we expect people to play vary with gender, but the outcomes are very similar once you’ve looked past the divisions the patriarchy asks us to apply.

I do think that being part of any specific societal category can make sexual assault and the aftermath harder or easier in certain ways. Intersectionality is relevant in most social circumstances, and many factors influence who has applicable power. Victims are more likely to be young, poor, black, female, incarserared, etc. We may need different strategies to address those factors and their specific harms, but we have to keep all the strategies pointed at perpetrators and away from victims, even when victims and perpetrators are in the same demographic group.

I’m not arguing against changing culture to expect better behavior from people who feel justified in hurting others. Or even against targeting such efforts toward the statistically most relevant demographic groups. There are definitely a bunch of men who feel entitled to sex, and raising the bar on what we demand of other people is the only hope for humanity. But denying the harm suffered by male victims is not necessary it achieve that goal. Denying the harm caused by rape is a vital part of rape culture, and making the rules for social behavior different because of the shape of your genitals is one of the ways we perpetuate it.

“Who’s the real Nazi?” isn’t really the flavor I want, particularly given the use of that tactic by actual Nazis, but I’m not sure what I mean instead.

I think I got a parents meeting cooking. October 13. Now I just have to invent 50 small jobs for them to do, so I can stand there and shame them for trying to leave before all those jobs had volunteers. It probably wouldn’t hurt to get a parent to tell me things parents want; I shouldn’t imagine their interests as necessarily contrary to the team’s interests.

I didn’t get to make S react to my earrings with help today, but he only had one weird itinerary interaction before he could talk normally. Someday I’ll explain S’s itinerary issues, but for those who know – literally started with an itinerary question that I had preemptively answered. Once he got going and we established that “body art” was a category he admitted to liking wearing painted nails to work when M did them last year, which I think is adorable. Then he unintentionally related his image of me to some hippy he’s related to, but only in a moderately derogatory way. I’m gonna call it a win just for attempting to relate, even if it’s not a great methodology.

I decided to notice SJ today in a specific way, for fear that not noticing would have been worse. I expect no reaction to my communication – I sort of specialize in sending messages that don’t get replies – but I always worry that I’m making things worse not better, and it’s hard to not know. Hard to tell if I’m doing good, and hard to stay motivated to attempt it.

And I think that today I may have, contrary to all sensible expectations, actually done at least 85% of the things on my MBOs. I still need to write them up this weekend, but I think I can write them all up as completed. And I’ll have excellent SR stats this quarter. They’re meaningless and even at that this quarter they’re fake as fuck. But it still counts, because so are the MBOs.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.