Cockroach Queer
Apr. 8th, 2019 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressAny dude who starts a conversation with "I'd like to talk about [srs_stuff] if you have time and energy" and then does not wait for an explicit affirmative from you, is not behaving well. It's like...you clearly know that this conversation will take energy. You recognize that you are asking for a favour from me. Yet you still don't actually respect me enough to listen to an answer.
The best line on consent I've ever heard runs along the lines of "the easier it is to say no, the more a yes means". You didn't even give me *time* to figure out how to say "no, I don't want to argue with you on the internet", you just launched into it.
And yeah, this is absolutely the sort of shit that makes me Not Trust People, because I am a petty bitch, and I do keep track of how you react when I set boundaries. But this is *especially* true with serious-implication thought experiments, because you know what? I fucking did my time with that. I'm done. I put seven years into a relationship full of thought experiments, and it's ruined me for the entire field.
So I am answering his fucking questions, which I really shouldn't be doing, with the most basic and direct answers I can think of, and not just straight screaming at him that I am gay and he is using my genuine fears for his philosophical thought experiment and it is so unutterably _cruel_.
"why don't we just reassign the children from bad parents to good ones" because I am gay and because that means I will never have children and my sisters will never have children, you want to take them away from us. And noooo, it's not a homophobia thing, gay people can have children it's fine, but maybe we don't let parents with mental illness have kids. Or parents who have to work long hours and can't be home enough. Or parents who are undocumented immigrants. Let's just take those children and find somewhere else to put them.
I am _spitting_ angry that I am even engaged in this conversation, that I'm having to have any sort of fucking philosophical debate about things far outside my control (do I think all children should have good parents? Yes. Do I think there's _any realistic thing for me to do to ensure that happens_? No, not beyond my immediate reach of taking care of the children I know, as much as I can.)
I don't _do_ philosophical debates about shit outside my control. It's not my jam, it makes me anxious for control reasons, and it makes me anxious because it grates against the memory of a boy who'd rather be right than kind and it makes me anxious because yes I'd rather be comfortable but more importantly, I'd rather _do things_. Tell me the experts, the policy-makers, the people who study social movements and understand the trends of the nations have a bill in place that will make things better, and I will support that. Tell me the enemy is putting children in cages and I will oppose that. Make phone calls, attend protests, write to senators, vote, march, resist. All of that is _doable_ and _actionable_ and _possible_.
"Let's talk about hypothetical situations to help take care of children that involve fundamentally uprooting the last giant heap of social norms" no stop there. Yeah, if the social norms shifted so that there was no cultural compulsion to have kids, so that there was no negative stigma to renouncing your parenthood (be it through abortion before the child is born, or adoption after), so that we could magically make a database of all the "good" parents and ensure they get first pick of all the lonely children, that'd be great! I'd love to live in that world.
But I _don't_. And yes, I can try and make that world, but the way I do that is not by debating how great it would be to live there, it's by telling my students that they don't have to get married and have kids. It's by giving money to Planned Parenthood so they can keep funding reproductive health. It's by affirming my friends who don't want to have children, and being in the extended village of my friends who do.
It's by saying "the phrase 'seizing children by force' is hugely politically loaded right now and you shouldn't use it". It's by saying "Eugenics is racist and ableist and I won't support it, because sure, it'd be great to have a world without 'the dumb people' but how the fuck will the lines get drawn and how many people will be on the wrong side of them". It's by saying "Yes actually, there are countries that take children from their parents, this is one of them, and it's not going well."
But it's not opening any of these statements of mine to a fucking debate. And it's especially not opening that debate with me when I soft-no'd the shit out of you and you steamrolled in anyways. Should I have made my no explicit? Maybe I'm fucking tired of having to make my no explicit and loud _all the fucking time_. Maybe I'd like people to use half a fucking ounce of common sense and think about what they're saying and _read the fucking room_.
I'd be less angry if he hadn't asked, if only because paying lip-service to consent and then just doing whatever the fuck you want anyways is worse. You can wrap it up in whatever feminist rhetoric you want, it's very clear that all you wanted was an object to listen to you, an enthusiastic participant to "debate", and I'll be damnded if that's not what I want.
This is an angry post, but you know what? I'm almost thirty, and I have almost entirely stopped caring what men think about me. Good Girls Aren't Here, but I'm not a girl and I'm sure as fuck not good. Piss in the wind, if you wanna whine about it.
~Sor
MOOP!
The best line on consent I've ever heard runs along the lines of "the easier it is to say no, the more a yes means". You didn't even give me *time* to figure out how to say "no, I don't want to argue with you on the internet", you just launched into it.
And yeah, this is absolutely the sort of shit that makes me Not Trust People, because I am a petty bitch, and I do keep track of how you react when I set boundaries. But this is *especially* true with serious-implication thought experiments, because you know what? I fucking did my time with that. I'm done. I put seven years into a relationship full of thought experiments, and it's ruined me for the entire field.
So I am answering his fucking questions, which I really shouldn't be doing, with the most basic and direct answers I can think of, and not just straight screaming at him that I am gay and he is using my genuine fears for his philosophical thought experiment and it is so unutterably _cruel_.
"why don't we just reassign the children from bad parents to good ones" because I am gay and because that means I will never have children and my sisters will never have children, you want to take them away from us. And noooo, it's not a homophobia thing, gay people can have children it's fine, but maybe we don't let parents with mental illness have kids. Or parents who have to work long hours and can't be home enough. Or parents who are undocumented immigrants. Let's just take those children and find somewhere else to put them.
I am _spitting_ angry that I am even engaged in this conversation, that I'm having to have any sort of fucking philosophical debate about things far outside my control (do I think all children should have good parents? Yes. Do I think there's _any realistic thing for me to do to ensure that happens_? No, not beyond my immediate reach of taking care of the children I know, as much as I can.)
I don't _do_ philosophical debates about shit outside my control. It's not my jam, it makes me anxious for control reasons, and it makes me anxious because it grates against the memory of a boy who'd rather be right than kind and it makes me anxious because yes I'd rather be comfortable but more importantly, I'd rather _do things_. Tell me the experts, the policy-makers, the people who study social movements and understand the trends of the nations have a bill in place that will make things better, and I will support that. Tell me the enemy is putting children in cages and I will oppose that. Make phone calls, attend protests, write to senators, vote, march, resist. All of that is _doable_ and _actionable_ and _possible_.
"Let's talk about hypothetical situations to help take care of children that involve fundamentally uprooting the last giant heap of social norms" no stop there. Yeah, if the social norms shifted so that there was no cultural compulsion to have kids, so that there was no negative stigma to renouncing your parenthood (be it through abortion before the child is born, or adoption after), so that we could magically make a database of all the "good" parents and ensure they get first pick of all the lonely children, that'd be great! I'd love to live in that world.
But I _don't_. And yes, I can try and make that world, but the way I do that is not by debating how great it would be to live there, it's by telling my students that they don't have to get married and have kids. It's by giving money to Planned Parenthood so they can keep funding reproductive health. It's by affirming my friends who don't want to have children, and being in the extended village of my friends who do.
It's by saying "the phrase 'seizing children by force' is hugely politically loaded right now and you shouldn't use it". It's by saying "Eugenics is racist and ableist and I won't support it, because sure, it'd be great to have a world without 'the dumb people' but how the fuck will the lines get drawn and how many people will be on the wrong side of them". It's by saying "Yes actually, there are countries that take children from their parents, this is one of them, and it's not going well."
But it's not opening any of these statements of mine to a fucking debate. And it's especially not opening that debate with me when I soft-no'd the shit out of you and you steamrolled in anyways. Should I have made my no explicit? Maybe I'm fucking tired of having to make my no explicit and loud _all the fucking time_. Maybe I'd like people to use half a fucking ounce of common sense and think about what they're saying and _read the fucking room_.
I'd be less angry if he hadn't asked, if only because paying lip-service to consent and then just doing whatever the fuck you want anyways is worse. You can wrap it up in whatever feminist rhetoric you want, it's very clear that all you wanted was an object to listen to you, an enthusiastic participant to "debate", and I'll be damnded if that's not what I want.
This is an angry post, but you know what? I'm almost thirty, and I have almost entirely stopped caring what men think about me. Good Girls Aren't Here, but I'm not a girl and I'm sure as fuck not good. Piss in the wind, if you wanna whine about it.
~Sor
MOOP!