The hard truth about autism acceptance that a lot of people don’t want to hear is that autism acceptance also inherently requires acceptance of people who are just weird.
And yes, I mean Those TM people. Middle schoolers who growl and bark and naruto run in the halls. Thirtysomethings who live with their parents. Furries. Fourteen-year-olds who identify as stargender and use neopronouns. Picky eaters. Adults in fandoms. People who talk weird. People who dress weird.
Because autistic people shouldn’t have to disclose a medical diagnosis to you to avoid being mocked and ostracized for stuff that, at absolute worst, is annoying. Ruthlessly deriding people for this stuff then tacking on a “oh, but it’s okay if they’re autistic” does absolutely nothing to help autistic people! Especially when undiagnosed autistic people exist.
Like it or not, if you want to be an ally to autistic people, you’re going to have to take the L and leave eccentric, weird people alone. Even if you don’t know them to be autistic. You shouldn’t be looking for Acceptable Reasons to be mean to people in the first place. Being respectful should be the default.
Something I’ve noticed about people that aren’t men is that when they talk about men, they assume that they know about all men because they live under patriarchy and men’s stories are the ones that are broadcasted. However, it rarely seems to come under consideration that the men’s stories broadcasted are largely those of hyperprivileged men. Primarily, white straight abled men with wealth and power and people serving them so they can spend time creating. That’s, well, a pretty small slice of men, and one deeply removed from the situation of men at large, let alone particularly marginalized men.
So when people that aren’t men make sweeping generalizations about men, manhood, and how male privilege operates without talking to marginalized men, I often find myself going “No, I know that’s wrong.” In a recent example that I’ve seen many versions of, I saw someone assert that male privilege is immutable and men can present themselves however they want without being declared not men. And, well, no. Off the top of my head, east asian men, indigenous men, intersex men, and short men are considered feminine and have to adopt higher levels of gendered signifiers to maintain privilege. Fat men and disabled men are degendered in much the same way that fat and disabled women are, and for the same reason: that fat and disabled people are not considered “fit” to participate in sex, relationships, and family, which is a huge part of gendered roles and expectations. Men that deliberately adopt feminine presentations being violently ejected from manhood is one of the pillars of homophobia.
I wonder if this lack of examining the perspectives of marginalized men is why fragility in your masculinity is so derided. If you’re only looking at the hyperprivileged men that have never had their place in manhood questioned, then it may seem reasonable to assume that men being unsure of their masculinity and worrying over their presentation and actions are being absurd. But there are many, many men that teeter on the edge of being accepted as men, and the penalties for failing to be accepted are steep.
Have you noticed that even in very progressive circles, one of the first things that asshole men are made fun of for are feminine traits? Shortness, high voices, etc.? That’s because if you can move someone outside the bounds of “acceptable” gender, you can enact extreme cruelty towards them with little to no social consequences. You also see this happen with masculine women, or, women who are interpreted as masculine simply because someone doesn’t like them. If you are failing to gender properly, people feel permitted to hurt you more. This is not a defense of assholes, mind. It’s a notation of the tactics that are used, and how they are rooted in gender policing, which has a host of bigotries attached to it.
I wonder what progressive circles would look like if we uplifted the stories of marginalized men more, encouraging them to talk about their experiences with gender and their marginalizations. I wonder if we would get a fuller picture of marginalization, and if more marginalized men would find unexpected solidarity. I wonder if we would actually get spaces where marginalized men can talk freely about their feelings, and what effect that would have on the mental health of marginalized men, who have, on balance, some of the worst mental health in society.
I want more diverse stories of manhood.
if you can move someone outside the bounds of “acceptable” gender, you can enact extreme cruelty towards them with little to no social consequences.
JFC how does anyone make the argument that men cannot lose male privilege and can present themselves however they want? Do they know any men?
In the US, there is far, far more violence directed against men for being gender nonconforming… or even totally gc but gc in a way the violent man disapproves of or doesn’t perceive as masculine, like being a “nerd”… than there is against women for being gnc. And yes, there is plenty of violence against gnc women. But violence against men, by men, for being insufficiently toxicly masculine, is utterly normalized in our culture.
This was a TERF argument, wasn’t it.
No. They were neither a radical feminist, nor excluding any trans people. Quite the opposite, they’re explicitly and vocally supportive of trans people of all stripes. Not even really parroting the rhetoric, considering how mainstream feminism frequently shows men as a monolith in regards to privilege. They just… had an extremely poorly thought out take that ended up precipitating this post specifically because this was a person whose posts I generally smile at when they end up on my dash. If this was only a sentiment in TERF circles, I would not be painting all progressive circles with this brush, and I would explicitly cite it as a TERF problem. Instead, it is normal enough to end up in the post of someone I respect.
Honestly, this kind of comment is… kind of what I’m talking about. All discussions of the problems and difficulties facing men have been so heavily hijacked by the assumption that they’re bad faith that it’s extraordinarily difficult to get across that marginalized men’s marginalization is affected by gender without people making the assumption that you’re simply protecting patriarchy. Shitty misogynistic hyperprivileged men have poisoned the well for marginalized men seeking to talk about our issues and how they intersect with our gender.
Other marginalized people see them when they look at us. Because of this, they ask us to not talk about manhood. It is not recognized that our manhood is often wildly different from the manhood of the men with power, and that the different shape of it often means that the privileges of manhood are withheld because our manhood is too strange to them. Womanhood and other genders are heavily impacted by marginalization, and their gender affects how they are marginalized because many of the forms those genders take under circumstance are considered particularly unacceptable. Gender is filtered through marginalization, and marginalization through gender. We need to recognize that this complex interaction of gender and marginalization holds true for how manhood forms and exists as well. This issue takes on particular complexity for multigender men, whose genders may be impacted in different ways.
Men are already socially encouraged to not seek help, to be strong and silent, to not be emotional or vulnerable. The betrayed promise of progressive spaces to marginalized men is the promise that they would be spaces where men could be free of this enforced stoicism. When you add intense pressure to not talk about how manhood impacts how oppression is enacted on you, and how oppression impacts your manhood, this multiplies. There is little to no space to celebrate or even discuss marginalized manhood in all of its variety, beauty, sorrow, frustration, and complexity. This lack of ability to express our connections between marginalization and manhood only further widens the gap between our realities and the perceptions of marginalized people who aren’t men.
I want us to work to fulfill the original promise that progressive spaces made to marginalized men.
“The betrayed promise of progressive spaces to marginalized men is the promise that they would be spaces where men could be free of this enforced stoicism.”
i think at least part of this stems from the assumption that gender works in terms of opposites. people assume that, because women are heavily scrutinized for how well they conform to the white cis-hetero perisex patriarchy’s ideals… men must not be. because women are denied their womanhood for not performing closely enough to those ideals… men must not be. because to be a woman is to be the opposite of a man, to have the opposite experiences.
this is, of course, nonsense. but from the perspective of gender as a system of opposite and opposing experiences, it would be the logical conclusion. and that is a foundational perspective for much of the population’s unexamined theories of gender.
It absolutely does.
Tumblr’s not letting me reblog this addition despite me being able to see the blog, but I wanted to address it in detail.
“Not all men” is about denying that people that aren’t men experience fear and anxiety because of living under patriarchy, passing off the problems of patriarchy as “Well, I don’t do that!” or “Well, the men I know don’t do that!”, or even denying that patriarchy as a whole exists as a harmful structure. This is about recognizing that the experiences of marginalized men are not the same as the stories about manhood told in popular culture, and how that can impact how marginalized men are treated and viewed, as well as that a good part of the picture of manhood is missing from the general understanding of manhood and of how patriarchy operates.
There is a difference between denial that patriarchy is a problem and asking for the recognition that within patriarchy, some men are discarded or excluded from manhood, and that manhood is in fact an intersection that affects how marginalization is experienced. Manhood not being a marginalized gender when taken as a whole does not mean that manhood does not affect how marginalization is experienced. The systems are made to cater to men, but they are meant to cater to men that pass the tests of manhood without registering as a threat to be eliminated from society.
Men are much more likely to be perceived as a threat, leading to the killing and mass jailing of men of color and visibly mentally ill men. Men are required to be stoic and silent, leading to underreporting and disbelief of male victims of violence and rape. Disabled men experience a specific kind of disdain and discrimination because men are expected to be the strong ones and because men are expected to become patriarchs. GNC and gay men experience specific and gendered violence because they’re not “gendering” properly, something that cannot be separated from their gender. Men are more likely to be homeless and less likely to have support systems, because of the ways that toxic masculinity places pressure on men to be independent and not accept help. Men are in fact experiencing specific problems influenced by how they are men.
Manhood is not a universal advantage because patriarchy is affected by other systems, such as systemic racism, ableism, homophobia, capitalism, intersexism, and transphobia. These systems cannot effectively be untangled without significant populations falling through the cracks. To get a narrower view of the problems facing people who aren’t men, we can examine patriarchy and sexism in detail. But we must also recognize that when we zoom out, oppression is a massive and tangled system that is heavily interconnected and that actually only unilaterally benefits a small minority of people. If we can get more people to recognize the connections and similarities that exist between oppressions instead of separating based on them, we can form larger and more tightly bound groups to benefit all of us.
This is an opinion I developed by getting my head out of the discourse and working in person with other marginalized men. This is an opinion I developed standing in food bank lines with disabled men, fat men, and men of color. This is an opinion I developed in my work volunteering to assist other poor people, and spending time talking to other mentally ill and trans men. This is an opinion I developed in online support groups for men of marginalized religions. This is an opinion I developed while assisting men and boys from local indigenous nations. This is an opinion I developed seeing how little men are allowed to articulate that their gender does affect how they experience marginalization, and how deeply they expressed how it did when they trusted me. This is an opinion developed due to seeing the real world impacts of the attitude that men are a monolith, and how it affects marginalized men.
I’m not asking for any space to become man focused. I am asking for the stories and experiences of marginalized men to be recognized, and for it to be acknowledged how rarely they are recognized. Honestly? If you really think that being a man doesn’t impact your experiences of oppression, then you are proof of the need for this to be more widely discussed.
i know this website melts brains but sometimes if you go on another website you feel like you are like living two decades ago with some of the wack shit ppl say so ill allow it.
“Shouldn’t the man who invented the iPhone own his own creation?”
An explanation by anti-capitalist brad pitt.
People trying to tell me (an academic researcher) about how businesses innovate so much more than academics blah blah blah drives me insane, because what he is saying here is the truth! Most innovation is mostly pushed by underpaid but very enthusiastic academics. Also citizen scientists often push the cutting edge forward more than any business, because their love for the subject encourages them to share data, which then helps others. When businesses figure out how to do something new and neat, they won’t share it with nobody, and are as secretive as possible, which is why companies have to literally do corporate espionage to figure out how shit works and to copy innovations 🙃
Three days after September 11th 2001, Barbara Lee (D-CA) bravely called for a no vote against authorizing George W. Bush’s wars.
In an op-ed she published in The San Francisco Chronicle 9 days later, she explained her vote by pointing out that the resolution “was a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the Sept. 11 events — anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit.” She added: “A rush to launch precipitous military counterattacks runs too great a risk that more innocent men, women, children will be killed.”
For her lone stance, Lee was deluged with rancid insults and death threats to the point where she needed around-the-clock bodyguards. She was vilified as “anti-American” by numerous outlets including The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Times editorialized on September 18 that “Ms. Lee is a long-practicing supporter of America’s enemies — from Fidel Castro on down” and that “while most of the left-wing Democrats spent the week praising President Bush and trying to sound as moderate as possible, Barbara Lee continued to sail under her true colors.” Since then, she has been repeatedly rejected in her bids to join the House Democratic leadership, typically losing to candidates close to Wall Street and in support of militarism. (continue reading from theIntercept)
On this September 11th, in addition to remembering all of the lives lost in America, Iraq and Afghanistan, I choose also to remember Barbara Lee’s brave example in calling for calm, reflective thought before blindly rushing into endless war in the Middle East. Even at the risk of her political career, she stood up and did what was right.
We need more leaders who know that sometimes, it takes more strength to say “no” when everyone else takes the easy way out by saying “yes” to war and militarism.