literally just title. If a society exists where there is a huge disparity in terms of social status and distribution of power, regardless of what gender has greater control, we should be opposed to that power dynamic. Like just swapping genders would literally just place men in exactly the same position that women are in now.

  • SerLava [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    if the march on sexual violence was targeted towards women who suffered from it, that might be a good reason to ban men.

    That's two levels of bad reasons though, with serious consequences. First it's applying a gender to sexual violence, either pretending that men being violated doesn't happen or worse, just doesn't matter because men don't have, like, bodily sanctity or something, or that women are only worth protecting because of reproductive capacity (which is the even more regressive definition of rape, which is sex without consent of the woman's father or community, regardless of her consent). We can say this is false all we want, but it's strongly reinforced with actions like physical and organizational exclusion. That can't be counteracted rhetorically.

    The other issue is that the perpetrator-victim relationship is being applied to completely other people, including other victims. That's so fucking cruel, like, maybe some white person was victimized, and now they're legitimately traumatized by being around minorities or whatever, but taking that out on other victims just can't be part of it. The aspect of the trauma where they are taking that out on other suffering people is not something to be reinforced. Like you have men and women who are all survivors of sexual violence, they can have solidarity with each other, against abusers, not against each other. It's fine if someone is literally in a crisis situation, people should do anything necessary to look after that person's well being, but an activist march or therapy group or political action is not that situation.

    The shit people have to deal with as victims of sexual violence is just fucked, and it's wild how it can be compounded by the actual structures that are supposed to be addressing it

    And that's all before you get to the above poster's points about marketability, basically this stuff makes it really easy for conservatives to paint feminism not as a liberatory force for all, which it is, but as a rolling counterattack revenge project or whatever. The people who aren't strongly ideologically aligned are going to listen to feedback like "no, fuck off you can't join us"