When I finally went to bed late last night, there was a small part of me that hoped I would wake up this morning to find that Donald Trump’s improbable victory had been nothing more than a very bad dream.
Barring that, which I knew was a bit of a long shot, I hoped that I would at least wake up with the inklings of a plan for what to do about this catastrophe. I hoped I could write a rousing blog post sketching out my thoughts on the road ahead– for this blog and for the anti-Trump movement as a whole.
Alas, that didn’t happen either. I’m still processing the bad news, emotionally and intellectually. And I know a lot of you are doing the same.
And that’s ok. Trump will not take office until the end of January. There will be plenty of time to come up with ways to fight back against the orange one.
Right now the important thing is to take care of ourselves and those around us. Give yourself however much time you need. Avoid stress. Don’t beat yourself up for what happened, and don’t take out your anger on others on our side. Turn off the news if need be. Do whatever you need to do to clear your head and keep yourself safe.
In the comments here, feel free to continue the discussion that started in the “VOTE” post yesterday. And please share any self-help and self-care strategies you have — even if all you’ve got at the moment is pictures of cats and videos of hedgehogs.
If trolls show up, or if there is anything else that pops up in the thread that I should know about, please send me an email about it.
We can fight this thing. We can beat this thing. But first we need to get ourselves centered.
@Joaquin,
One at a time, then.
Great. I’m glad that you concede this. Conceding points is hard in an argument, but is vital for learning and personal growth.
Just so we’re clear, you’re saying that women should be filming themselves constantly in order to guarantee their safety, and that it’s their responsibility to do so?
This applies to other crimes as well. Shouldn’t we all wear cameras, all the time, as evidence? Unless women have a special responsibility in preventing their own rape, that’s what you’re suggesting.
Are you suggesting that everyone wear cameras, or just women? And do I need to draw out what these different implications mean?
http://38.media.tumblr.com/8e48b5738c64f22e97fc68f7c2958cd2/tumblr_nkyvmbA7xz1s2wio8o1_250.gif
You have the luxury of feeling safe around others.
Many of us do not. We’ve learned the hard way that we have to take extra steps to protect ourselves.
I’m going to assume you’re bein’ sarcastic here.
Feminism suggests that everyone has privilege according to their societal lot in life. Women too! So, yes, women do have privilege in certain areas. Especially white, straight, cis women compared to others. You’re right!
Thing is, men have more, and their privilege gives them greater power over themselves, others, and society at large.
An easy case-in-point is the recent election, in which an incompetent, racist reality TV host beat a well-spoken and very studied woman with 30 years of experience. Go look for interviews of Trump supporters from before the election. A great many of them gave “A woman shouldn’t be president” as their reason for supporting Trump.
You do, and that was covered above. Men get raped all the time, it’s just that they never talk about it because it’s deeply emasculating to do so. Men are deeply hurt by rape, and we desperately want to give them a way to speak about it that won’t result in their lives being destroyed. That happens here.
You ARE participating in the topic. We just aren’t patting your head and thanking you for your contribution. We don’t pad the walls here, it ain’t a safe space.
If you’re gonna come here and bait the tigers, you gotta be ready to get mauled.
Thank you for your contribution! Looking forward to your reply.
@ImaginaryPetal
Technically i didn’t lied, i just repeated what someone else told and i shared what i felt about it, bu yes i will apologize WHEN i get to confirm o disprove it, i failed to obtain any information and i’ll have to wait to next wednesday to talk to this guy.
You know what? i apologize now, considering that is false until i can prove otherwise, so i’m sorry for that.
You think i’m a troll? you should really listen to the radio in my country, that is priceless.
“Trump is the most American of Americans. Americans love guns, thay love to wage war, bomb other countries, extort other countries”
If you are fluent in spanish, check it out.
EDIT: and another:
Thanks for your patience.
@Joaquin
I followed your links and read the articles and am mostly at a loss trying to figure out the point you were trying to make.
So, summary of the first one is fewer women are executed because fewer women commit capital crimes. Committing fewer violent crimes is female privilege? I don’t follow your thinking.
Summary of the second one is that although women commit far fewer violent crimes overall, they are almost as likely as men to kill their own children. So, your point is what? Women have the same amount of “privilege” as men when it comes to being able to murder their own children? Um, what? Let’s not discuss child murder as an issue of “privilege” for anybody.
Finally, the third one. Women convicted of the same crime as men are more likely to receive lighter sentences. I will allow that this may be one of those rare arenas where women really do have a modicum of privilege. I don’t deny that there are two or three of these arenas.
I do deny that these arenas represent more than a tiny fraction of male privilege. And your made-up rape accusation privilege is most definitely made up. A significant number of rape complaints are deemed “unfounded” by the police, meaning they don’t even investigate them. Another chunk of them are not considered prosecutable and never make it to trial.
Even if I grant the possibility that a false rape accusation could very, very rarely make it through those hurdles, it still in no way justifies the idea that there are huge numbers of women out there just waiting to accuse random strangers of rape. What in the world would be the motivation? An addiction to being humiliated in a courtroom?
It is a little bit frightening that MRAs always seem to want the right to abuse or abandon their children. That’s probably their number two issue after it being super unfair that rape is illegal.
It’s like that story about celebrities getting ribs removed to give themselves blowjobs and shit. It’s always a different guy. Last time I heard it, Marilyn Manson did it. Before that, Elton John. It’s slightly less funny when applied to a group of people.
@Trollaquin
From my perspective, your professor doesn’t even exist. All I have is some random moron on the internet assuring me that some guy he knows told him some vague story about some country he visited once. You are a complete idiot for taking his word on such an obviously false claim, and your professor, if he exists, is a fucking liar who should be fired. In fact, you should call him out in front of other students and other professors. Let people know that your professor lies to his students. Let him suffer the consequences of making up harmful lies.
@Skiriki
It’s just part of the right wing narrative that Sweden is a hell hole where all the conservative fever dreams have come true, and feminazis and muslims are roaming the streets murdering white men with impunity. There’s nothing a conservative can say about Sweden that other conservatives won’t blindly accept as true without any evidence whatsoever. Yeah, they never seem to factor in the fact that some people actually live in Sweden and have the ability to fact check. But then again, conservatives don’t believe in facts anyway.
@wwth
lol, right?
However, *sigh* to be fair, I was so repulsed by the second article that I stopped reading. I went back to it. I suppose the point was that women who kill their children are much more likely to be institutionalized after an insanity plea and men are much more likely to go to prison or be executed. I suppose this is an interesting statistic. Even if you take into consideration that more women may actually be legally insane or opt for this defense in the first place, it’s a pretty big difference.
I’m still kind of hard-pressed to care about privilege in the context of child murder, though. What’s interesting to me is that, aside from issues of custody, the “female privilege” MRAs always point out always seems to have to do with bad men get punished more harshly than bad women. It’s not that I completely don’t care; it’s just that male privilege is always about decent men get more and are more easily rewarded than decent women. Considering the percentage of criminals vs. noncriminals in our society, well, for some reason, the latter just feels more important. And okay, I’ll outright admit it, I have more empathy for people who, you know, don’t commit horrible, violent crimes. I’m pretty sure that lighter prison sentencing is a kind of female privilege I will never be taking advantage of.
Maybe it has to do with women being perceived as nurturers while men aren’t so? Women seeing as non-maternal are strange and weird, and murdering their own child is the pinnacle of that so there must be something really wrong with them. Men, however, aren’t seen as nurturing so killing their own kids doesn’t seem in the same wrongness as a mother doing the same.
@Imaginary Petal
What really gets me is how Finnish MRA (and also racist) scene has already bought into this.
Like fuck, ARE THEY REALLY THAT EASILY MANIPULATED? That they can’t even hop a ferry and go across the tiny sea (and get cheap booze) and go see how things are?
It doesn’t make any sense! I mean if they are too embarrassed to find out that nothing, NOTHING nefarious is actually going on, the least they could do is to keep their yap shut about it and tell others who are also eagerly screaming about it to cool it a notch, it ain’t that way, you’re making total fools out of us.
We had couple of undercover reporters heading to check out those rumored “hellish Swedish war zones where white people don’t go” during “the worst hours of the day” and the worst that happened to them was someone asking if they are lost and if everything is okay, IIRC. Everything was neat, tidy and typical for the surrounding area and city in general.
I’m guessing that the reason women who kill their children receive an insanity ruling more often because many of these women had post-partum psychosis. It’s not misandry or a pussy pass. It’s just physically impossible for cis men to suffer from that. Being diagnosed with post partum psychosis is only a privilege if you really want to be able to kill your children and go to psych hospital for awhile instead of jail forever. It’s very creepy that MRAs are so upset about Andrea Yates. I know I certainly don’t envy people suffer a psychotic disorder, kill their children, and then have to live with the horror of what they’ve done once they’ve received treatment and have the capacity to understand what happened.
I notice they also don’t seem to be too upset about the children who’ve been killed. Not much compassion for them. Just for the men who killed their children while not in a mental state that would meet the defination of legal insanity. Boo fucking hoo.
Why is Joaquin dragging the opinions of an Argentinian TV star turned talk radio host into this? Is Baby some kind of activist for the affirmative action programs Argentina needs to address its systemic racial, gender and age bias problems? Do I have to google everything myself?
‘Cause I’m not finding anything about all Argentinian jobs being advertised as “men need not apply”
@WWTH
That makes sense.
@Skiriki
I live smack in the middle of one of the most notorious of these war zones, so it’s quite easy for me to debunk these stories by just walking down to the supermarket.
Hopefully Luzbelitix (sorry if that’s mispelled) will come by to confirm how full of shit Joaquin is. From what she’s posted here, it sure didn’t sound like Argentina is a hardcore matriarchy.
From my cursory Googling, the male labor participation rate is 74.9% and female labor participation rate is 47% http://www.bls.gov/fls/country/argentina.htm
Maybe there’s some sort of program to help more women get into the workforce and the troll is interpreting that as all the jobs ever go to women.
@Paradoxical Intention
well, everyone knows that the earth is flat, is shaped like a pentagon, and Sweden, like Ohio, does not actually exist /sarcasm
Re: women who kill their children (and women who kill in general)
Handsome Jack and WWTH, between them, basically covered this: post-partum psychosis is a factor, and even when it’s not, women who kill their children don’t fit with the nurturing female paradigm and courts find it very difficult to deal with them as a consequence.
Not always, interestingly – in previous periods, (poor) women who committed ‘infanticide’ were severely punished.
Criminology isn’t my main area; I only teach into it a bit, but in general, violent women are what one researcher calls ‘aberrations’ in the eyes of the law and society. Male violence, otoh, is seen as an extension of masculinity. Needless to say, these ideas seriously hamper understanding and knowledge.
ETA: on an unrelated point, to be fair, JoaquinRL1 posted those videos in relation to trolling, not re matriarchies or any other point.
@ wwth,
I’d value Luxbelitix’s input on this too. Meanwhile, I think I’m going to distract myself for a while with this source of info on Joaquin’s non existent white privilege,
https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/710008
then maybe read about the feminist utopia that is Argentinian employment:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2010/08/argentina-the-gender-roots-of-labour-inequality/
@Jack, wwth, and Mish
The Slate article Joaquin linked to did address all of those points. I don’t necessarily buy everything the article was saying, but I will say that the article itself was actually surprisingly interesting.
@Belladonna, yes it did. Slate has some good stuff, on the whole. Agree with you – I have reservations about some of it too; e.g. the feminist hivemind assumption; the idea that mental illness is an excuse or an easy option; and of course the casual use of ‘crazy’.
But the author’s argument about children being seen as women’s property … interesting.
@Mish
I agree with your reservations. I also have some reservations about the author’s argument about children being seen as women’s property. I agree that it’s interesting and have been thinking about it a lot, but it seems to me that traditionally women and children both have been seen as men’s property. Modern custody arrangements do rather support the argument. And perhaps children could be seen as women’s “property” in the same way that the kitchen has been the part of the man’s house that “belongs” to a woman. Applying this property idea to legal sentencing in cases that you wouldn’t normally think of as property related is definitely something I hadn’t thought about before.
I also found her discussion about different motives a little lacking. She discusses the different motives of men and women, but I feel like she’s missing answers to her own questions there. For example, it seems like killing your children to save them because you think you’re a bad mother lends itself quite a bit better to an insanity defense than killing your children to punish their mother.
Strong reading comprehension here.
Nobody here considered that the info i posted realtes to DIFFERENT topics, but yeah thibk what you can.
Post partum psychosis? ha! nice one, i bet planned parenhood could profit from that shit too!
A woman that kills her own children it’s a monster. Period.
I’m done here.
Oh, watch out, errybody! Julio is about to blow the medical establishment wide open! We’re thru the looking glass here people…
Yep, if everyone else thought you were saying something different than you intended it must be everyone’s reading comprehension and not your own clarity in communicating your meaning that’s the problem.
Do you think it’s mental illness in general that he doesn’t believe in or just postpartum psychosis?
A person who kills his or her own children? Not a monster? Just a woman? No matter what? Maybe reading Beloved would give you an interesting perspective. Probably would be wasted, though.
Actually, the reason I asked you to explain the points you were trying to make is because I couldn’t quite figure out what points you were trying to make. Possibly it was a lack of reading comprehension, as you say, but I think maybe you didn’t provide enough context about what these DIFFERENT topics might be that you were trying to address.
Aw, and here I thought we were all getting along so well.