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As a teacher I'm incredibly hopeful. I will give the caveat that I live and work in New York City, so there is a liberal bias. I get to teach the progressive book that defines various gender identities and sexualities to twelve year olds (That goons helped support!). Sexual education has moved far beyond just avoiding pregnancy and STIs. There is a huge focus on healthy relationships, self-image, and consent. Beyond that, consent is incredibly built into my kids' minds. Parents talk about it and it's all over media my kids consume. Sometimes the kids even mention it in a joking way (A kid announces in their D&D group that their character is married to another character but sly says, "It's okay, I asked for their consent first.") Like even in that incredibly dorky and weird, half joking example, you see how aware kids are of the concept. More than that, there does seem to be less pressure for gender norms. A lot more kids are experimenting with non-binary and ace identities. Maybe those won't be the identities that define them longterm, but to me it shows that their is less a need to wrap one's self worth in narrow identities. Having taught for ten years, it's a huge difference. One of my early teaching experiences, I was treated like I was overreacting for becoming concerned with how often boys were grabbing girls' butts in schools. I think people get way to obsessed with traditional power hierarchies when they talk about sexual harassment and assault. My own harassment experiences have come from people who are my peers. I do understand people getting upset when the powerful get away with things, but I'll be frank, those who ring in with the whole me too is dead stuff aren't really helpful. I do think there are cultural shifts that we don't see on a daily basis, but they are there. FilthyImp posted:Not in the field, but the way MeToo was co-opted by White Brunchlib women and then discarded (looking at you, Alyssa Milano) was loving sickening.
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Nov 12, 2020 02:44
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I do understand frustration with Biden as President who had questionable interactions with women even if you don't believe Tara Reade. But I feel like a lot of the sentiments in this thread are undermining the continued efforts of the Movement, the individuals involved in the movement, and, probably most importantly, the international nature of the movement.
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Nov 12, 2020 04:28
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Ytlaya posted:Believing that you're succeeding when you're not succeeding is not without a cost. Joe Biden is President but Harvey Weinstein is not only in prison, but they literally put a statue outside the courthouse to celebrate the fact. Louis CK lost some of his ability to create, but Anthony Anderson is weirdly grandfather-claused in. Al Franken is out, Bretty Kavanaugh is in. The systems of power are complicated. Victories against them are inconsistent, and how you fail in some ways and win in others can be baffling. But that doesn't mean there haven't been victories at all be they in actually taking down select powerful abusers, raising awareness, pushing corporate policies, and public policy. And some of the victories are going to be subtle which is why I posted my anecdote of how the notion of consent is becoming so central to the lives of children. When Tarana Burke created the movement, the first spark was telling a child who had been sexually assaulted, "Me too." Reform is important, but it actually does matter that we demystify sexual assault and harassment. We cannot get anywhere unless we see it as a pandemic, something that does not happen in isolated cases, but something that happens to an outrageous amount of people by their fellow human beings at very hierarchal levels. We're in agreement that longterm, systems of powers must be dismantled, but it actually does matter that we focus on the experience of the victims, not just preventing new victims, but creating a globally empowered community. I think on that level the MeToo movement has been enormously successful. I think listening to Burke is helpful... Tarana Burke posted:I hope people can move away from the idea that... it's more than just a hashtag to take down powerful white men, and understand it's about shedding light on the global pandemic that is sexual violence. It's about doing the work to eradicate sexual violence, while also supporting the people who have experienced it. We will work closely with other organizations, like Black Lives Matter and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, because sexual violence is the common thread that runs through almost all social justice issues. We also want to continue to contribute to national conversations, work in communities, and lead the charge to create change.
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Nov 12, 2020 05:29
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Somfin posted:Something that the very public ditching of #metoo and #believewomen by prominent figures punches a hell of a hole in. "We are with you as long as you only talk about bad things done by the other team" was a kick in the gut to folks who felt a lot more comfortable coming forward for a hot minute there. I know from the 2020 thread that a lot of folks are abuse victims themselves, and I understand that some of this stuff is coming from a sincere place of frustration. I'm not defending Biden, the media, or making GBS threads on Reade. But throwing the MeToo movement under the bus and exaggerating its failures isn't helpful. And tying failure to the goalposts of dismantling power structures and bringing down every powerful man who abuses his power is entirely unfair. Timeless Appeal fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Nov 12, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2020 13:32
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To be clear, the Al post that I don't love because it feels glib, came from a line of argument that was in response to this stuff: VitalSigns posted:It's not a coincidence that MeToo was allowed to come to prominence at the precise moment we had a rapist Republican president instead of a rapist Democrat for a change, a Republican that Democrats hated (not for the rape obv, but for being crass and rude and for mocking the political system), and one that Democrats were desperate to differentiate themselves from on some issue since they agree on 90% of stuff (cage immigrants, endless wars, gently caress the poor, kill the earth, etc). Pretending to care about rape for a hot second was useful politically, and this had some good knock-on effects because assault victims were allowed to take down powerful men like Harvey Weinstein and Al Franken, but now that window is closed because the most powerful man in the world is a rapist Democrat so there's no longer any appetite in the Democratic Party or the liberal media to hold powerful rapists to account. There is a lot to dissect about the Democrat Party and their failure in 2020 to learn 2016's lesson of the primary being necessary tool to vet people. Biden's creepiness was only a non-issue because Trump is a rapist. Someone like Rubio who doesn't seem to have skeletons in his closet and seems fine on an interpersonal level would correctly make hay of it despite his lovely politics. But the retroactive branding of MeToo as a partisan effort when the Hollywood leg of it was sparked by a prominent Democratic donor is both ridiculous and untrue. it's not just Franken who was impacted. In fact, in the 2018 election cycle, the majority of politicians who had their campaigns hurt by the movement were Democrats. Yes, obviously the stakes and reasons and context of Biden are quite different. Prior actions do not excuse current actions, but that's not the core issue. The issue is that the failure to keep Biden accountable is being exaggerated to not only paint the movement as a failure but to retroactively paint the whole movement as as a failure. And that's weird and lovely. Biden is lovely. People's response to Biden was lovely. You don't need to throw a loving movement under the bus to prove it.
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Nov 13, 2020 00:02
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^ This is also a good post^Crane Fist posted:...we aren't the ones throwing the loving movement under the bus! The loving Dems did! The DNC was lovely in how it handled BIden and specifically the Reade case. That does not invalidate the movement, and I don't really understand the urge to claim that it does. OwlFancier posted: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. Timeless Appeal fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 01:18
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So, when Indian domestic workers banded together and stood up for their rights under the MeToo movement a year after Milano's involvement, a world away, the movement was already dead?
Timeless Appeal fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 03:25
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Majorian posted:A movement can be dead or gravely wounded in one part of the world and alive and thriving in another.
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Nov 13, 2020 04:55
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Crane Fist posted:What are these guys actually doing? I went through the website and I found a lot of words about centering voices and calling out and creating spaces but the only concrete thing I could find was a bunch of links to other organizations and series of calls to vote, which strikes me as the usual worthless empowerment rhetoric that ends up boiling down to "we see you, we hear you, now work within the system that hates you"
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Nov 13, 2020 13:21
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Crane Fist posted:I was just looking for an overview, if I have to do loving homework to understand what your movement wants then you're doing it very wrong
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Nov 14, 2020 14:16
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Crane Fist posted:What I'm seeing is a lot of obfuscating language and a proud partnership with the anti-healthcare psychos at CAP, but honestly unless you work for them I'm not really interested in yelling at you about this or in derailing a potentially interesting thread to kick over the minutiae of this one specific NGO You claimed that the MeToo movement was dead because of Joe Biden and then dead in the cradle once it was popularized by rich white women. I showed you a non-for-profit run by women of color who want to fix the material conditions of poor people to help stop sexual assaults. You said they had no clear vision, so I told you to read their 30 page plan. You refused to read the 30 page plan, so I suggest to read the three page vision statement and then used tangential criticism with CAP to disregard them. I think Somfin said pretty eloquently that the Tara Reade case as did similar cases in which powerful man escaped consequences for their actions damages the movement--although I think people are caught up in an incomplete vision of the movement. But just because these men and their powerful, hypocritical enablers exist doesn't mean that we should give ourselves permission to give up on a movement. MeToo does not need to be dead for the criticisms to stand and for components of the movement to be examined. But it felt like folks were just shifting goalposts around to prove that is. And obviously the Survivor's Agenda is new, but our exchanges have mostly felt like you just sticking your fingers in your ear and making up excuses to not engage in an agenda that is pretty Leftist friendly. Timeless Appeal fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 01:40
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I appreciate the intent and the vulnerability that was brought to the OP, but it really might be helpful to have some stuff to really refer to and discuss. Like some articles that ground us. I think maybe a thread title change too since I think it unintentionally engenders some of the shittier rhetoric. Honestly, I think ignorance is a bit of an issue although I assume most people are in good faith. There is a lot to discuss like the longterm racist history of sexual assault allegations and how we reconcile that with creating a safe modern environment for victims, the impact of reforms in the workplace, how unionization can both stop and exasperate sexual harassment, reconciling girls feeling being respected without criminalizing children, how we teach consent, when do power dynamics override the possibility of reasonable consent in a relationship. Timeless Appeal fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Feb 5, 2021 |
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Feb 5, 2021 20:32
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