A word about social constructs

I want to caution people from talking too much about problems as they are sources from social constructs. It's alienating to those who disagree and it also takes conversations about humanity to a strictly philosophical level that does not address the nitty gritty real world concerns and oppression and suffering that people face from the enforcement of social constructs.

Yesterday I had a chat with a new friend about whether or not gender itself is a social construct. I used to believe that it was but now experience plenty of doubt about it. I recognize that a lot of the specifics of rigid gender roles certainly are socially constructed but gender itself  (as I am constantly realizing) is complex.

Gender and gender roles are markers used by systems of oppression and those that enforce those systems. Erasing those symbol of oppression (if possible) does nothing to directly combat oppressive behaviors

One of the things we also discussed was a world without gender. In all honestly, this sort of world is appealing to me. But it seems naive on some level. I don't want to slight my friend by saying so. I also find claims that race or class should be abolished naive.

I am skeptical of spending too much time thinking about a world without damaging social constructs. I don't think it's impossible to reach at all. But envisioning and working toward the goal of a world without certain social constructs is work I'm not practically or ethically interested in doing. I'm much more interested in doing work that more directly reduces the very real everyday harm caused by the enforcement of social constructs. The goal of abolishing supposed social constructs like gender roles is not a practical solution to the harm caused by gendered oppression. Especially if those "constructs" provide the scaffolding for people's identities.

Part of this has to do with what confronting ideologies and social constructs means. Changing social constructs requires that everyone change their minds and ways of thinking. I respect the individuality of people, which means I respect their allegiances to social constructs (even if they are not constructs I subscribe to, like say religion). This doesn't mean I condone any dehumanizing behavior people might ascribe to their constructs but I respect social constructs as the legitimate components of identity.

Saying we should work to abolish gender roles or religion or race essentially says to people who consider these things to be vital parts of their identity that they need to abandon and rebuild their identities. And maybe in the future people will, but you know what? Today, in my world, asking people to drastically change and reshape their identities to fit my utopia seems not just impractical but deeply insensitive and even supremacist.

Social change also takes time. And mistakes. Lots of both. If certain social constructs are in the end missteps it's not going to just take more than just an acknowledgement of them to remove their effects.

There's an additional danger in focusing too much on the absence of social constructs. It can often lead us to think that the removal of social constructs is as easy as acknowledging that such constructs exist.

Social constructs are deep seated in our subconscious, which our conscious minds hold little to no immediate power to change. Changing the subconscious, whether it's of the individual or of culture at large is a long difficult process of changing thousands of micro habits of thought and action. When I say "social change takes time" this is exactly that I mean.

I consider myself a normal human (despite my many abnormal attributes) and it's taken me months and years to reach minimal deconstruction of certain social constructs in my mind. The reasons oppression based on social constructs are not very easy to eradicate because social constructs are much firmer and deeply rooted on our brains than most of us realize. Our knowledge of a social constructs doesn't itself mitigate the way we internalize & project that construct. Knowing about social constructs doesn't stop those constructs from affecting us constantly.

For instance:
I am a generqueer/genderfuild person. I try to keep my or other people's genders out of the conversation if gender is irrelevant to our interaction/topic.When telling stories about strangers I use the pronouns "they/them" or say "that person". But my making the gender(s) in such stories neutral is something I do after the fact. Whether I disclose it or not I am constantly making split second assumptions about other people's genders. And my own.

I work at acknowledging these assumptions with language like "the person I perceived as fe/male or masculine/feminine." But I can't stop my, very human, subconscious survival tactic of making snap judgements about my surroundings and social environments.

What stops me from imagining a world without gender roles or race is the knowledge of my own inability to change they way my subconscious has learned to reflexively sort people into socially constructed categories.

I think the denial of these snap judgements is one of the most dangerous risks of putting too much faith in the abolition of social constructs. I've witnessed this denial in many supposedly progressive spaces. The denial of internalized subconsciously oppressive judgments run rampant in the white male dominated spaces. (like say groups of the tech savy, and those interested in science/atheism).

It's not uncommon in such spaces to be ridiculed for calling out sexism or racism with the defense: "if you're seeing it, you're the one being racist/sexist."

This comes from the assumption that conscious knowledge of a social construct absolves the knower of its effects. It puts too much stock in what we can control with our conscious minds (which science has repeatedly shown to be less than we think!). It allows those that have knowledge and education about social constructs to think that they are above its influence. Which is dead wrong. This is how we end up with purportedly progressive people saying that we're "post-racial" or that a code of conduct isn't necessary because a "culture of respect" is enough to prevent gendered violence and harassment at tech conferences.

Knowing about social constructs gives us some information about how harm is caused and can be used to build ways of being that cause less harm. But knowing about them, and even being in a community of other who know as well is only half of the work. Whether we know about them or not the harmful aspects of certain social constructs are still inside all of us. It takes more than just knowledge to reduce harm. It takes the constant work of self-interrogation, deconstruction, and the imagination and rigor needed to build new habits of thinking and doing.

No. Consent isn't sexy.

This morning on my twitter feed this question showed up:

After writing two different replies I noticed that perhaps I have more thoughts and feels about this question than can be contained in 140 or even 280 characters.

First off the answer is simple. No. Consent isn't sexy.

There is a huge campaign surrounding the notion that it is and I think it is bull. Or at least too narrowly framed.

There are many non-sexy contexts in which we use the tool of consent.

Consent can be decidedly unsexy when in order to travel by plane we must consent to have our bodies and out belongings searched.

But consent outside sexy contexts doesn't have to be unsavory. On the adorable but certainly non sexy end we have a parent saying yes and allowing their 7 year old son to crawl onto their back for the piggy back ride he's been begging for.

In the questionable middle ground there're many kinds of legal and medical consent that have absolutely nothing to do with sex at all and are unlikely to inspire the arousal of most.

Don't get me wrong consent is extremely useful in sexy contexts. It helps prevent harm. It helps us get clear on our sexual wants and boundaries.

It helps make sex (and other interactions) easier and more doable for those who are interested in doing it with others regularly. On a societal level consent makes sex a more sustainable way of interacting and reduces the physical, mental, and emotional harm we do to each other.

But the consent itself is not sexy in and of itself. In the same way that our bodies and body parts aren't always sexy because we don't always consider them to be. When I'm not aroused or thinking about things/people in a sexy context having my body or parts of it objectified or identified as others as "sexy" can leave me feeling violated/dehumanized.

The claim that "consent is sexy" falls apart especially in the case of asexual folks. Consent, and even consent surrounding intimacy totally exists for asexual people. It's just not sexy. Which is TOTALLY FINE. In the same way that not all sex attracts all people, not all communications of consent are universally sexy.

Consent itself is not what we find sexy. The unique ways that individual people give consent can be vey sexy but that's the delivery not message not consent itself. What we find sexy is their words/behavior. In this sense the delivery of consent can be extremely sexy, however this sexiness is completely subjective.

For instance I once asked a woman I didn't know very well but was attracted to (we'd both been drinking at a party) if I could top her sometime. She smiled, turned around and bent over to signal her consent. Had we been in another context I would've probably found this very sexy, but because I didn't know her very well and we were in a room with other partygoers, I felt a little intimidated, anxious, and even felt pressure to "act more toppy" in that moment. Any "sexy" I'd been feeling in that moment was swallowed up by my social anxiety. This person was consenting to something I asked for (and we did get to play later) but the way she communicated her consent intimidated me and was not sexy to me in that moment.

Fortunately, more often than not, we're going to find the ways that people we're attracted to communicate their consent to sexual activity with us to be sexy. This doesn't mean that the consent is sexy. It means that you find the way that person communicates sexy. Which is actually much more intimate than seeing consent as the sexy stuff. This way of thinking gives me the freedom to give compliments like “I love the way you do consent.” and “The way you say yes is really fucking sexy.”

Now I'm not going to yell at or angrily correct someone saying "consent is sexy". In fact when I hear people using this phrase I'm able to identify them as potential allies in my community. People who say this care about consent and building less harmful and more sustainable sexual practices. And these are people I want to connect and collaborate with.

That said my politics place focus more on consent more than they do on sex. As a consent-positive advocate for less harmful human interactions I'm annoyed when the tools of consent are limited to the context of sexuality. The phrase "consent is sexy" at worst enforces this limitation. At best it does not do what the necessary work of broadening awareness about and use of consent in all human interactions (not just the sexy ones).

On Restorative Justice and Breaking Cycles of Abuse

I don't know much about cycles of abuse. I have never had to learn. What little abuse I have suffered has either been incidental or been suffered at the hands of institutions I'd trusted to take better care of me and my concerns (employers and schools). I'm also just starting to learn about restorative justice (and I want to know more). So I'm extremely hesitant to talk about this and probably have very very few pieces of this puzzle. Please, please, please note that this post is part of a daily blogging project. This topic came up today unexpectedly probably as a result of the things that have been happening in my communities lately and what I've been reading.

I fully intend to come back to this topic. This is just the beginning of a long and ongoing conversation. It is highly likely that some of the following content will be poorly worded or just plain wrong.

What I want to talk about has to do with restorative justice and survivors of abuse and oppression. All humans at some point suffer from oppression but not all humans suffer equally. Often this oppression takes the form of (systematic) abuse.

An integral and necessary part of radical politics is acknowledging this oppression, it's discriminating distribution, and offering space and resources for the healing processes of those hurt by oppression and abuse.

image credit 

This is the sankofa bird. It's associated with the Ghanian proverb “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi," which translates "It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten." and emphasizes the value of of reaching from the past in order to move forward with wisdom.

I chose this image to demonstrate that finding wisdom in the past is essential to moving forward sustainably. I also believe the reverse to be equally true. If we do no make strides to move forward after going back to retrieve what we have forgotten, it may not mature into the wisdom we need.

When the healing process in our communities stops us from moving forward it stops history from becoming wisdom. This doesn't mean forgetting or abandoning our histories but moving forward means not dwelling on our own healing process to the detriment of others who want to share our community.

Helping each other heal is one of the most important functions of radical politics, but it's not its only function.

So what does this mean in the real world? It means that women who claim they cannot heal in spaces that includes people with genitals and childhood experiences of gender that differ from their own ('feminists' who exclude trans women) need to realize that their healing is not the only job to be done.

It means that while victims/survivors of harassment & assault deserve to have their community insulate them from their abusers and offer resources for their healing, the abuser and those who match the abuser's demographic must still be respected as human beings.

Being treated in an inhumane way does not give the recipient of that suffering someone a free pass to treat others inhumanly or incite the inhumane treatment of those who contribute to their healing process.

Believe me when I say, that was a hard sentence for me to write. There are certainly people in my history I want to yell at and even do physical harm to. I personally will not hesitate to use physical violence to stop someone from physically assaulting someone I love.

But when we enable and encourage the inhumane treatment of our abusers/oppressors and those who look/behave like them we are enabling the cycle of abuse. We send the message that violence and exclusion are the proper way to heal and even that such violence is radical. We excuse such violence by calling it solidarity for victims/survivors.

I don't mean to invalidate the very real instances where immediate violence is required for personal survival. That shit exists and I hate that it does. I don't think there is a single anti-oppression activist that would feel otherwise. But I now realize that encouraging the violence and exclusion between ourselves and our oppressors/abusers perpetuates the notion that that there are people who are abusers and people who are not.

We are all capable of treating others inhumanely. Saying or thinking that some people just can't help it or thinking that they are unable to take responsibility, enables us to think of them exclusively as abusers and even monsters, and to treat them inhumanely.

This nasty loophole of twisted solidarity & assumption can enable cycles of abuse to continue. Some men abuse some women, and some of those women go on to use their experiences of abuse/oppression as an excuse to to exclude, deny and dehumanize trans women because they are assume that trans women are "like the men who abused them". Some men abuse some women, some of those women and those who care about them say "kill all/your rapists" in order to 'support' survivors of rape. This is the same loophole that allowed 2nd wave feminists of the 70s to claim that all penetrative sex was rape.

Make no mistake. I am in no way saying that rage over experiences of abuse are unwarranted. I feel mad as all fuck about the injustices of rape and abuse. There is wisdom to be found from that rage. And we do not have to forgive or even let go of that rage if we don't want. But we do have to take personal responsibility for it.

It's not our fault that certain traits trigger past memories of abuse and trauma, but it IS our responsibility to treat the people with those traits humanely. Trauma is not an excuse to deny someone from existing. It's totally okay not to be able to deal when past trauma is triggered. But what triggered it, no matter who it was attached to, has less to do with your trauma than the person who inflicted that trauma on you.

I personally struggle a lot with this distinction. I have a tendency to dismiss and feel ill-at-ease around people who show apparent signs of wealth and financial flexibility. If a person I don't trust touches me in a certain way or place on my body my trauma comes up. And sometimes (later) I am viciously angry. But the trigger I have aren't the fault of the people who triggered. Oppression, abuse, and violence are the source. I don't need people who trigger me to be excluded or punished. And doing so will certainly not serve to protect me or other prevent harm to others in the community.

I don't need the people who've abused me to be punished either (though I will want to be excluded from spaces that I & other they have abused will be). Survivors/victims of abuse don't need anything from their abusers. They need support and resources from their community in order to start their healing process.

It's the community that needs the abuser to responsibility. We've been hoodwinked by punitive justice systems to think that someone has to "pay" for what happened. I believe in restorative justice model is better for this. Which doesn't mean that the direct relationships between abusers and those the abuse should be repaired, but that we can raise our expectations and build better more respectful scripts for interaction. It also means that we know who needs to work harder at respecting the humanity of other and taking responsibility for their actions.

Let's stop essentializing abusers, oppressors, and those that look like/remind us of them with violence and oppression. The potential to be violent and oppressive exists within all of us and each of us has the power to be less oppressive and violent. Let's hold everyone acceptable to this. It's what can heal communities and makes them safer, less harmful places. It's how we can both look look back and move forward at the same time.