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I don't think it is fair to say that it achieved nothing. And I think it is also unfair on the people who stepped forward and took risks to try and make it work to say that. That it was attacked by a lovely political party the minute it was politically convenient is something all emancipatory movements go through. But I think the exercise will have shown a lot of people what can be achieved by self organization, and not all of them will drop that at the whim of the democratic party. What we want, surely, is more of it, for it to continue unmoored from what some lovely political creeps think. Maybe it won't get there, but I think it is at the very least owed recognition for being an attempt at that. And I hope it will be remembered as contributing to women's emancipation in the future.
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Nov 13, 2020 00:45
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I would suggest that perhaps if the metric of success is "ability to secure prosecutions or consequences through the media" then yes, that requires institutional support. And equally I think that is why it is so difficult to get that even with institutional support, because the ire of the media is fleeting. The lesson I hope that will be learned is you can not rely on institutions to give you justice, as BLM has learned about the cops, or perhaps rather how BLM has so many mass protests because it understands the institutions will not solve their problems. It isn't weird that the first attempts will attract a lot of people who put their hopes in the official channels, but what happens is that the official channels remain ineffective, and each successive wave of demand, of need for justice finds more and more people who have seen what happens to prior ones and how the institutions will not support them. As I said it's what all such movements go through. The more that happens the more people start trying to take it to unofficial channels. If I had to guess at possible future optimistic things to look out for it would be things like strikes over abusive behaviour in the workplace, efforts to dump information about abusers out on things like twitter, with whatever receipts can be gathered, efforts to support people who come forward directly rather than relying on the tender mercies of the press and the establishment. Building solidarity, essentially. This kind of thing is still very nascent, it is arguably only able to happen like this at all because of the new tools people have online to communicate directly, build their own nationwide and international networks, and to document poo poo. I just don't think it is helpful to say "you fools, you trusted the system, now all you have desired is ash, your ideals are worthless, your hopes are for nothing, go and scatter yourself to the winds" The system exists because people default to trusting it, it takes them ending up on the receiving end of its indifference or outright hostility for them to stop trusting it, and it also really helps if they have something else to put their trust in instead, and each time it shows its claws, more people see it for what it is. Each time people become invested in a movement that it turns on, it alienates them, and it drives them to form their own solutions. People are not born as revolutionaries, they have to learn how and why to do it. This behaviour, this process of networking with others and outing people who abuse others should be normalized, it can be applied on any scale, every tiny success helps, because if this does become normalized, people will start to ask why politicians should be exempt? Why should power insulate people from consequences? It all helps to normalize the idea that abuse should not be tolerated, and to normalize what lack of tolerance for it looks like. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 02:52
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Neurolimal posted:As loathe as I am of the concept, I think #metoo needs to achieve a level of bipartisanship respect to get any further when it comes to politics, so that it gets harder for either 'side' to close ranks around someone. I would perhaps take away that what is more likely is that it attains bipartisan opposition and necessarily becomes a facet of the fundamental inability of the political process to accomodate the material needs of a lot of people. Which I think aligns it far more with political radicals and, given the far right's innate hostility to feminism or any sort of gendered egalitarianism, specifically with the radical left. I also think the way it's carried out has some definite applications for radical leftists too. The idea of people speaking up against entrenched power when it hurts them, with the support of other ordinary people, in a decentralized manner, does not seem like the sort of thing any political party can abide, because partisan politics is all about the desires of an entrenched few. Which is why it's simultaneously not surprising that the democrats turned on it the minute they felt it convenient to, and also why I think the future lies in the rejection of operating within that limited window of the consent of the people in charge. Doing that seems anathema to exactly what the people who come forwards seem to be trying to achieve. They might not personally reject all power but the act itself I think is inerently iconoclastic. You can't really say "don't come forward if you're accusing a democrat" because to the person coming forward the need is no less urgent. If you tell people that they can and should come forward because they themselves have a right to be heard, you can't effectively mandate it only happens to the people you want it to. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 03:03
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I don't... really know that you can avoid personalizing it though? Like that's just a thing people do. And I don't understand how you can declare it dead when the capacity to do that and share experiences is still there and people are still doing it? They're not going to stop doing it and I don't see how any future movement could possibly work without incorporating that activity? Like, how can the metric of success be the number of high profile scalps claimed and also simultaneously that behaviour be bad? If the metric of success is highlighting lovely behaviour then people talking more about their experiences achieves that whether or not any heads roll for it? You cannot stop the media reacting to grassroots efforts, saying that the grassroots effort is dead because the media types had a fad over it for a while and then dropped it seems utterly bizzare because it is accepting the media fad as the part that matters. Why the gently caress should I give a poo poo what some media weirdos do? It may be the part that matters to some people but not to the people who use the grassroots tactics out of need? If you're suggesting everything "is dead" the minute it stops being a news story I don't see how literally anything could possibly live past obscurity? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 03:25
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