Entitled to the Internal Tangle: how working through want makes us human

Part I: Intentional Background

For the last five days I've been reading Anne Leckie's fantastic Ancillary Justice. It's been blowing my mind in all types of lovely philosophical and fictional ways. Seriously that book is an intellectual back-bending inversion and we need that kind of upending fiction. Read it!

But this afternoon it brushed against a nerve whose sensations I've been trying to work through for the past month or so:

For a month I've been trying to write a post that sums up my feelings about desire/thought/intent and how they don't matter or at the very least how they are ancillary to the real world action and behaviors we choose to take.

In January 2010 Kinsey Hope made a satirical post about intent being "magic". The follwoing year Melissa McEwan at Shakesville put up the first post in a two part series about how seeing intent as magic can cause communication to be harmful. (I'm wildly paraphrasing here). Since then so many radical corners of the internet has been touched by the powerful words implied in these posts:

Intent is not magic.

It does not absolve the doer of damage and it does absolutely nothing to resolve, heal, or otherwise take accountability for the effects of the resulting harm. Reconciliation can never start from "I didn't mean it". Because as an adult human person you are expected to do the hard, but deeply human work of navigating how to respect your own desire/wants/thoughts while maintaining respect for others.

Now it's important for me to give this (poorly sourced) background and my take on it because it's crucial to what I am trying to draw out here. The reason intent is not magic, is because it has little to no direct power over how we act and communicate. For the most part, our conscious (not necessarily logical/sensible!) minds determine how we act and interact. The effects of intent are indirect at best.

Intent isn't magic, and in many contexts straight up doesn't matter. As Leckie's extremely utilitarian  protagonist Berq says "Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing."




Part II: The tangle that makes us human

All actions have consequences. As humans in community with other humans; as socially sophisticated animals, it's our evolutionary imperative to anticipate and strategically reduce the harmful consequences of our own actions.

Every moment of our waking lives (and probably a good portion of dreams), we experience a complex tangle of thoughts, desires, wants, and wishes. We all must weed through this tangle to figure out how to act.

Let me give you an examples of my own navigation of this process:

For me a huge part of being genderfuild is engaging in a process of choosing how to follow up on my many and seemingly conflicting desires to express myself. I consistently have to chose from a tangle of erratic desires. These desires often buck lessons I learned about gender, behavior, and societal expectations. And sometimes I come to the conclusion that things I thought were in conflict are in fact not.

But thing is, the internal process that brings me to act and express, it belongs to me. It is part of what makes me me. In fact, I'm willing to take it even further than that. It's part of what makes me human. Take this process away from me and I am less human. Take this process away from anyone and they are dehumanized.

The processes that we go through, whether conscious or unconscious, swift or slow, to determine which of our wants we are going to actualize and how is a process that belongs to each us individually. Because the simple fact is (barring any drastic nuero-tech advances) nobody else can be in your head deciding which of your thoughts mean action, and which mean nothing.

No use for the obtuse (when writing about the less privileged)

Yesterday I straight up walked out of a poetry reading on a college campus. I found the content of one of the readers repulsive and degrading. He was using "washed up" strippers and sex workers as props to create a post apocalyptic fantasyscape and that was not okay with me.

I am a huge fan of post-apocalyptic fantasyscapes. But the use of sex workers as the primary prop to do so made me gag a little. Okay, a lot.

Old white novelist guy this one's for you:

First off newsflash: sex workers are people yo. Please don't use them, or assume that based on the services they provide that they as a group of humans can be treated as a stock of stereotypes to paint a more sleazy setting. You were probably thinking something on these lines: oh yea I want some sleaze, I'll just use some sex workers, they don't mind being used and dehumanized right? They won't mind or have any more thoughts or personality. It's their job to be used so they won't mind! Sir, fuck you. For your sake and for the sake of your readers I hope you learn how to write better in the future.
                                                                                  WRM

In particular this guy's description of the older, desperate-eyed, drug fiend, stripper with "buckshot tits" who would kill you for your money or for drugs, was the moment I knew I had to leave. I couldn't take it anymore.

On the bright side. Two women also walked out during the reading of this same piece.

But both this reader and the one previous read content that leaned on cultures they knew nothing about in order to create bombastic "entertaining" content. The first white cis male reader opened his set with a poem called "Slaves" and featured prison imagery and language reminiscent of what I guess he thinks is the ghetto or prison.

But his poem didn't say anything or reveal anything new or enlightening about the history of dehumanization forced on certain people in our culture. It did nothing to critique the prison industrial complex and the culture of captivity we've forced so many (people of color) into.

Or maybe it did say something. Maybe I'm just not educated enough to have heard his critique. I guess in well off academic circles it's enough just to mention or hint at the forces which violate the lives of so many. Maybe I don't get such subtlety

One of the reasons I am afraid that I will never understand or fit into academic or prestigious schools of writers is because I choke on the implicit. I have no use for the obtuse. I find it clumsy and grating when a poet or writer talks about those of lower status without acknowledging that they have an agenda.

Some advice to those who wish to write about people who are more/differently marginalized than them:

If you're going to talk about people with less power than you be clear, otherwise you are hiding the fact that your voice is more valued by society. When you are confusing or clumsy with these people's narratives you are reinforcing the exact same skewing of value by not clearly stating what you believe. By not writing about these people with their full humanity in mind (not just the affectations you've stolen from your stereotypes) you are erasing these people just by mentioning them. You are rewriting their stories over to top of their very real lives.

And that is a big fucking shame.