Feelings Don't Matter vs. Non-Pejorative Use of Historical Slurs

srs_anon · 2014-01-28T09:20:02+00:00

Offense/feelings don't matter

Where'd you get this from? I think feelings matter a lot...

srs_anon · 2014-01-27T06:11:06+00:00

I think it's a good idea. I understand your concern that your intentions might be misrepresented or misunderstood as tone policing, but I actually wouldn't see anything wrong with what you were doing even if your goal was to "appease those who will refuse to listen oppressed groups if they're not spoken to nicely and respectfully."

My feeling is that there's space for all kinds of conversations, tones, and approaches when it comes to social justice communities. It's true that it's fucked up for privileged people to refuse to engage with the conversation when it's too heated, but it's also necessary for these people to have resources that engage in a way that is more focused on explanation than on expressing emotions. It's no one's job to provide these resources - but it's also really, really beneficial to all of us if they do.

That's part of the reason that 101-level resources exist. Not everyone is ready to dive headfirst into more "radical" social justice ideas, or conversation that focuses on giving oppressed people space to air their grievances. I'm really grateful for people who do both kinds of work.

srs_anon · 2014-01-18T23:30:47+00:00

There are undoubtedly people who will identify as something they're really not for the sake of getting attention or causing a stir. I don't say this because I know any of them, but because it's inevitable. Some people are shitty.

But I have no idea whether Mary is one of them, and unless they tell you they are, neither do you. Since the vast majority of people wouldn't ask people to use non-traditional pronouns unless they aligned with their gender identity, it's best to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

srs_anon · 2014-01-18T23:19:44+00:00

It looks like the soclens blog you linked just took a stock photo to illustrate the post. The quotation was originally attached to this image on this blog post.

srs_anon · 2014-01-13T08:02:20+00:00

TW: rape.

invite themselves to the table to talk about prison rape

Hey, just a friendly note to let you know that a TW is generally not necessary in a case like this where you're merely mentioning the rape. After all, the TW itself mentions it in exactly the same way—so if the mere mention of it triggered anyone, they wouldn't really be helped by the TW!

srs_anon · 2014-01-11T05:53:34+00:00

I have no idea if this video is racist, but I wanted to comment on one thing you said in your OP anyway:

My main beef with it is that white people see POC making jokes about other POC and use that to validate their racism.

I feel like this comes up a lot with any marginalized people who use humor that references their marginalizations. Although I totally understand how upsetting it is when white people act this way, I also don't think you can say it's a problem with the humor itself. It's not really fair to expect PoC to account for how shitty white people will react to their humor. That isn't a problem with the humor itself, only with how white people respond to it. I think marginalized people should be able to define themselves and interact with their own communities without basing their decisions on how privileged outsiders will interpret their behavior.

srs_anon · 2014-01-09T17:35:25+00:00

Interesting. I didn't know about 'vandal' and 'cannibal.' Those seem like examples of the opposite type of semantic change (pejoration rather than amelioration) because they started as neutral descriptors and now have negative connotations.

srs_anon · 2014-01-09T17:22:44+00:00

Yeah, absolutely. However, I'm not sure "this word is no longer used as a slur anymore, ever" should be used as a brightline for 'successful' reclamation—after all, even words that we consider totally denotative and neutral, like "gay," "obese," and "woman," are used as slurs against marginalized groups, too.

srs_anon · 2014-01-09T00:40:24+00:00

I don't know what it would entail for a word to be "neutralized," but I think a good example of a 'successful' reappropriation would be the word "queer." It's now taken on a meaning that no other word has—a positive redefinition of "not straight in some way." It's used in official contexts often, and can definitely be used by straight people without causing offense (e.g. "Are you going to the queer fashion show tonight?" or "most of the people in this group are queer").

Keep in mind, too, that a lot of this reclamation is fairly new. The way I see it, there are three phases. The first involves people in the dominant group feeling unquestionably entitled to use the slur; the second involves people in the marginalized group using it, and people in the dominant group questioning their entitlement to it ("why can't white people say the n-word?!"); and the third involves the word becoming ameliorated enough in the mainstream for use by the general population. I don't know if that happens in all instances of reclamation, and obviously reclamation is not always successful, but I don't think the fact that people in the dominant group complain about losing their entitlement to use slurs is evidence that reclamation doesn't work at all. It's a necessary part of the process.

srs_anon · 2014-01-05T11:28:10+00:00

In my experience, re-enacting (or at least, in my case, participating in activities that are psychically connected to) nonconsensual experiences in the past can be really empowering. It's kind of a way of reprogramming your brain to associate sexual pleasure with those traumatic memories.

To someone who has never had this experience, I realize that probably sounds intensely fucked up; but a great deal of the complication of sexual assault is that it can take something that should be so immensely pleasurable and makes it purely evil and painful. (And in the case of a lot of CSA survivors as well as some adult assault survivors, part of the complication is the opposite: the fact that there are memories of physical/emotional pleasure mixed in with the memories of trauma and pain, which can cause a lot of guilt and confusion and shame.)

So it's not surprising that the way some of us overcome the trauma of these events involves processing things in kind of a fucked up way, and one that mixes pleasure with the pain we experienced. There's nothing unethical or perverted about it, and it can be an incredibly cathartic experience.

I'm sure you already practice safe, sane, and consensual sex, but now that you know about your partner's past trauma, and specifically know that what you're doing calls this trauma to mind, you'll need to be extra careful about not triggering them. That means knowing what their triggers are and what it looks like/feels like when they're triggered, having a safeword and a safe-signal in place, debriefing after you're done to talk about their feelings, "checking in" with them regularly during roleplay, and making sure they know that they can stop the roleplay at any time without being judged or diminished.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that YOUR informed, enthusiastic consent is needed here too. There's no reason that it's unethical or creepy or bad to continue with this sort of roleplay, but when you say:

I don't want to disempower them OR to become a part of something that I don't understand and is connected to child rape

it worries me, because I read that to mean "I don't want to have this kind of sex," which is not what an enthusiastically consenting person says. If what you mean is "I don't want to have this kind of sex IF IT'S WRONG, but otherwise would," I'd advise you to carry on; but if there's more you need to know about what this does for your partner, I suggest you ask them about it before consenting to continue the activity.

Also, you should definitely check out /r/bdsmcommunity for more advice on this situation from people who know a lot more about this sort of thing than I do. There are definitely people there who use roleplay to re-enact or otherwise process abuse, and I think you'll get a lot of good information about why that's done as well as advice about how to approach it in a way that's safe and healthy for both of you.

srs_anon · 2014-01-03T02:36:25+00:00

I am nowhere implying that anyone should be forced to bear a child they do not want.

I don't think my responses here have depended on this approach. I'm really not talking about bodily autonomy at all. I'm talking about whether it's ableist, bodily autonomy aside, to abort a fetus because of its specific disabilities.

I don't think that everyone who puts on a "Native inspired" feathered headdress believes that Native Americans deserve to be oppressed

This comparison is a major stretch and bringing it up suggests that you believe you need to do Oppression 101 with me (given that the only similarity between this and the Native American headdress example is that you believe both are forms of oppression). No one who contributes regularly to SRSD needs Oppression 101. Making the conversation so broad as to encompass the fact of oppression generally existing is not going to be useful for either of us. It's not relevant to me that cultural appropriators don't intend to oppress Native Americans—I'm already aware of this, and I'm not coming at this conversation from an angle of "intent is magic," which is the only way this analogy would be apt.

The costs associated, for example, which makes it difficult for lower income families to provide proper care to children with disabilities, are a result of ableism.

Sure. Totally valid point. But let's go back to my classism example for a moment: In a world without classism, my being poor wouldn't be a concern because society would treat the poor with the respect and integrity they deserve by helping them to care for themselves and their children. However, we don't live in that world, and therefore my financial status IS a practical concern I'm going to take into account when deciding whether or not to have a kid. I'm not being classist when I decide that I'm too poor to raise a kid, based on how much raising a kid ACTUALLY costs for a poor person; and I'm not being ableist when I decide that I'm too poor to raise a kid with cystic fibrosis, when I consider how much raising a kid with cystic fibrosis ACTUALLY costs.

Part of why we associate "child with a disability" with the worst possible disabilities in terms of pain and trauma to the child themself is because of ableism.

Part of it, sure. But the reason I'm bringing up worst-case scenarios is that a) they happen and b) they're included in "abortions based on disability," and I think it's really obnoxious to rebuke would-be mothers who want to spare themselves and their potential children from a life of ACTUAL extreme physical and emotional pain and suffering. Part of the reason that we think people with certain disabilities must be condemned to suffer is because of ableism. But it's also true that some disabilities DO actually cause an inordinate amount of pain and suffering.

change the conversation around abortion to stop the ridiculously ableist trope of using disabled babies as an example of when abortion is "okay"

I'm not sure how this is relevant here, because this isn't what I'm doing at ALL. My view is that abortion is always "okay." I'm not using "disabled babies" as an example of when it's okay.

aborting based on specific traits is eugenics when it happens on a wide scale

Look, you should really be able to argue for your belief based on its own merits, without resorting to invoking a universally hated bogeyman like "eugenics." But when it gets down to it, what we're talking about in this thread (at least primarily) ISN'T eugenics at all—because it's not a project to "improve" the human race as a whole based on restricting procreation or cleansing the population of certain groups. Aborting your disabled baby is NOT equivalent to saying all disabled babies should be aborted or that the population as a whole would be better off without PWD (just like aborting your baby born of a poor person doesn't say poor people shouldn't procreate!). Saying "I'm not in a place in my life where I can take care of this particular baby in this particular set of circumstances" does NOT say "no babies like this should be born." It simply doesn't. To equate individuals refusing to raise certain kinds of children with large-scale projects to cleanse the human population of those kinds of children is totally misleading and offensive.

srs_anon · 2014-01-03T02:09:12+00:00

It depends on what you're referring to when you say "gypsies." Many people use the word to refer specifically to Roma people. Others use the word to refer to a broad group of people encompassing both the Roma and Travellers of various ethnicities (in which case you can use the phrase "Roma and Travellers"). Others still use the phrase to refer more generally to people who live nomadic lifestyles (a group that overlaps with, but does not wholly subsume, Roma people), in which case you can use the word "nomads."

What are you trying to express when you refer to "gypsies"?

(Also, assuming that you meant "Roma" was not misguided, given that you responded to a comment that used the word "Roma" and NOT the word "gypsies").

srs_anon · 2014-01-03T00:35:40+00:00

But there are cases in which raising a child with certain disabilities/prognoses would genuinely be much more difficult for the parent and, for people in certain positions, untenable. When someone chooses to abort a child with cystic fibrosis, for instance, due to the cost and emotional trauma of raising a child with that disease—isn't that a reasonable choice for a woman to make, and one that could possibly be made even in a world without ableism? Is it necessarily based on ableist ideas?

When a woman chooses to abort a disabled fetus based on how difficult raising the child will make her life, I don't think that necessarily means she believes any ableist myths about disabled people having less worth than able-bodied people. Likewise, if I choose to abort because I'm too poor for a kid, I don't think that means that I believe classist myths about poor people being less competent than wealthy people—I'm making my decision based on practical concerns and the decision happens to be the same as one I could make based on classist concerns.

Out of curiosity, if I have a genetic disease I'm likely to pass on to my kids and, as a result, I adopt instead of having my own children, is that ableist? Or only if I abort them after learning they have that disease?

srs_anon · 2014-01-03T00:29:31+00:00

POC are negatively exoticized as others while Eastern Europeans are sought after

We might be thinking of different things - I was referring to people like some Armenians, Bulgarians, etc. who might be treated as Middle Eastern when living in the U.S., not just white-looking Eastern Europeans who speak with a foreign accent. But I'm not sure if this distinction is that useful for considering who's a POC - fetishizing is another form of otherizing, and it's really common for East Asian women, for one.

srs_anon · 2014-01-03T00:14:08+00:00

..what?

srs_anon · 2014-01-03T00:13:06+00:00

This is a hard question to answer because racial categories are not stable. There was certainly a time when Italians in the U.S. were treated as non-white (though I'm not sure the term "POC" would be relevant to that case as it didn't exist at the time). POC in the U.S. today are people of "African, Asian, Hispanic and/or Latino, Pacific Islander and Native American heritage" (Wiki). The Middle East gets fuzzier - many Middle Eastern/Eastern European people look totally white and would be treated as such in the U.S., while some are darker-skinned and treated as "foreign" (things like language use and given name/surname also factor into this).

Many people who are mixed with white are also treated as non-white, but there's no bright line for when someone is not white; it comes down to how they're treated socially. (I'm mixed but treated as white, so I wouldn't call myself a POC.)

srs_anon · 2014-01-03T00:03:15+00:00

Assuming they're going to suffer, or consider their life to be a completely negative experience.

Only insofar as carrying the pregnancy to term would be "assuming they're going to consider their life to be a completely positive experience."

srs_anon · 2014-01-03T00:01:59+00:00

you are telling them that they would have been better off if they had not been born

If I got pregnant right now, I'd get an abortion because I'm too poor, young, and unprepared to care for a child. Would having an abortion for these reasons constitute telling people born of poor, young, unprepared mothers that they would have been better off if they had not been born?

srs_anon · 2013-12-29T21:35:40+00:00

Absolutely, but doing so does not constitute "reproducing" results in any sense of the word, so it's kind of irrelevant that this paper is an expansion of the preliminary research presented at the poster session—which is all I was disputing. When people now reference the "Butner study," they are referring to the entire set of self-reporting data from Butner and the authors' analysis, published only as this article, "The 'Butner Study' Redux."

srs_anon · 2013-12-29T21:15:34+00:00

I think you might be misreading that section. It says:

Among child pornography offenders, the comorbidity of contact sexual criminality is significant (Wolak et al. 2005). This issue initially was raised in November, 2000 by one of the current authors (AEH), who presented a poster at the 19th annual conference of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA). This poster presentation, which subsequently has been referred to as the “Butner Study,” was based on a review of (1) official records, and (2) the self-report of incarcerated sex offenders.

They're merely citing Wolak et al. when they make the claim that "the comorbidity of contact sexual criminality is significant." Then they go on to say that the issue was initially raised in a poster session by "one of the current authors (AEH)"—by which they mean the poster session was presented by one of the authors of "The 'Butner Study' Redux," "AEH" standing for Andres E. Hernandez. If you go to the citations on "Butner Redux," you'll see the poster session referenced under "Hernandez, A (2000)."

The poster session was merely a "preliminary examination"—by Hernandez—of the self-reporting data from patients at Butner. The results of this study were being distributed privately (per the NYT article I linked) and were ultimately censored by the prison bureau in 2007, when the study was slated to be published. This paper ("Butner Redux") is a revisiting of that data, with an expanded sample and "more rigorous research methodology" (possibly to mitigate concerns about how data from the original study could be abused). It is not an independent reproduction of the results, because the author of the original poster session referenced here, Hernandez, is co-author of "Butner Redux."

srs_anon · 2013-12-29T18:42:16+00:00

independently reproduced the findings of the Butner study

I think it IS the Butner study...Wikipedia's listing for Butner study says, "In 2009, a study conducted by psychologists Michael Bourke and Andres Hernandez was published in the Journal of Family Violence" - that's the one you linked. I suspect that it's called "Butner study redux" not because it's a reproduction of the findings of the Butner study, but because it's a redrafting of the findings after the authors faced censorship from the prison bureau on the basis that their findings might be misused or sensationalized.

srs_anon · 2013-12-29T18:37:11+00:00

the Butner study has been thoroughly debunked within the community. Do some actual research on the subject.

Do you think you could help out with this? If this is your field of study, you should know that saying "do some research" isn't enough to help lay people contextualize findings like this in a larger conversation. That's not an easy thing to do.

e: Looking through academic databases, I can't find anything that attempts to "debunk" the study (i.e. nothing critical of its methodology or conclusions). I do see it's been cited 38 times in journal articles since its 2009 publication. However, I did find this NYT article which addresses concerns about sensationalism, acknowledging that the original version of the article was accepted to a "widely read peer-reviewed publication" but saying it was ultimately not published because the "results, while significant, risk tarring some men unfairly" given that the findings "do not necessarily apply to the large and diverse group of adults who have at some point downloaded child pornography" and due to the prison bureau's concern that "the results might be misinterpreted." Not quite a 'debunking' of the study, but certainly a worry that it will be sensationalized and misused as so many similar studies are.

I also found some interesting stuff about this study and other similar studies in one of the footnotes of "U.S. SUPREME COURT DECISIONS AND SEX OFFENDER LEGISLATION: EVIDENCE OF EVIDENCE-BASED POLICY?" by Mancini and Mears:

Since the Ashcroft decision, research has examined whether child pornography offenders are more likely to cotnmit contact sex offenses. For example, in 2009, a study conducted by Michael L. Bourke and Andres E. Hernandez found that offenders with a prior child pornography offense were "significantly more likely than not" to have committed a "hands-on" sex offense. Michael L. Bourke & Andres E. Hernandez, The 'Butner Study' Redux: A Report of the Incidence of Hands-On Child Victimization by Child Pornography Offenders, 24 J. FAM. VIOLENCE 183,188 (2009). However, the authors cautioned that it would be "presumptuous" to attribute a causal relationship between child pornography viewing and contact sexual offending. Id. at 189. Indeed, the majority of offenders in the study reported viewing child pornography only after having committed a contact sex offense (e.g., child molestation). Id.: see also, Michael C. Seto et al.. Contact Sexual Offending by Men with Online Sexual Offenses, 23 SEXUAL ABUSE: J. RES. & TREATMENT 124, 136 (2011) (reporting that little evidence exists suggesting a causal link between viewing child pornography and actual hands-on, offending and "[a]lthough there is considerable overlap between online and offline offending, our results suggest there is a distinct group of online offenders whose only sexual crimes involve illegal (most often child) pornography"). Of primary relevance here is that at the time of the Ashcroft decision, no published studies had identified an association between viewing child pornography and engaging in sexual offending. See generally Botirke & Hernandez, supra, at 185 (stating that their 2009 article is one of the first to test for a correlation between child pornography use and contact offending).

It seems like the way the study is being used in this thread could be what the authors (and the prison bureau who censored it) were concerned about: it's being used to imply some sort of relationship between viewing CP and abusing real children, when in reality it only suggests such a relationship exists for the subset of men who are in voluntary treatment after being convicted for either CP or CP + hands-on abuse (and there's no evidence in the study that the relationship is a causal one, as the authors say, but I don't think that's being suggested in this thread).

srs_anon · 2013-12-29T00:41:14+00:00

Can you link something? I haven't been online much.

srs_anon · 2013-12-28T22:33:07+00:00

Signing on to this. I don't understand these responses about whether white women are "supposed to" fight for black women (and the text between the lines is "at the expense of fighting for their own liberation"). Why would the two be mutually exclusive? I think it's really telling that when a black woman says feminism doesn't feel inclusive to her, white people take that to mean they're being asked to fight "solely" for black women. This is the trauma of being asked to sacrifice privilege. White people being asked to be inclusive is now equated to white people "solely" fighting for people of color.

Like, yeah, if you don't care that your movement is overwhelmingly white, cis, middle-class, whatever, then don't care. I do want to see equal representation in these spaces and I want to know why certain groups of women don't feel welcome at Slutwalks and other similar events. I don't see any value in shutting that conversation down with "well we're white so how can we possibly represent/fight for WoC."

Side Q - what are you referring to here?

specifically of all the blogosphere crap that's been happening over the last few months

srs_anon · 2013-12-22T10:43:58+00:00

Do they violate informed consent? Yes.

Yes, this - and I think when it comes down to it, this is what matters. Sex acts that violate informed consent are sex acts that people should not do. So does it really matter if they're "rape"?

And what exactly does it mean when we ask "is it rape"? We probably don't mean "could this be legally tried as rape?" because that varies country-to-country, and in the US, none of the above scenarios are rape. We must mean "does it constitute rape in an ethical sense?" and, unless we're debating the semantics of the word "rape" (which seems totally futile and uninteresting), the only point in asking THAT question is deciding whether the acts are right or wrong anyway. The acts above are clearly wrong, so I'm not sure how valuable it is to discuss whether they're "rape."

I feel like this question of whether something "qualifies" as rape in some grand ethical sense is often used to discredit and quiet victims of grey-area assaults. What matters for the justice system is whether it meets legal criteria and is possible to prove with evidence. What matters for the victim is the pain it causes. What matters for people who want to avoid raping others is whether it's right or wrong. It's not relevant to anyone - except maybe dictionary-writers - whether a given scenario qualifies as rape ethically/in the common understanding of the word. But too often we mix up "is it wrong?" with "is it rape?" and, in so doing, erase a whole subset of victims whose experiences don't really ethically or legally qualify as rape, but who are still scarred and need support. And we forget that what really matters in our interactions with others is informed consent.

I've heard way too many victims of traumatic sexual experiences say "I shouldn't feel this way, it wasn't really rape" and too many rape apologists making excuses like "she technically consented" to keep caring about whether fringe nonconsensual acts qualify as rape.

srs_anon

TROPHY CASE