flexibeast

It seems to me that, broadly speaking, there are two main approaches to 'flirting'.

The first - which i'll call "type 1" - is flirting-as-an-end. In this approach, it's assumed that the flirter isn't actually interested in sexual and/or romantic interaction with the flirtee. Also, in my experience, there's typically an enjoyment of ongoing ambiguity about what is actually being suggested by the flirter.

The second - which i'll call "type 2" - is flirting-with-intent. In this approach, it's assumed that the flirter is trying to "sound out" the possibility of sexual and/or romantic interaction with the flirtee, possibly in an ongoing way. Ambiguities are expected to be gradually resolved, in the direction of either "yes, there's mutual interest", or "no, the feeling isn't mutual", as the process continues.

If both the flirter and the flirtee are both coming from the same perspective about flirting, there's probably not an issue. Type 1s have some fun, and type 2s are able to get involved in sexual and/or romantic interactions, or move on.

When type 1s flirt with type 2s, however, problems can arise. Say a 1 starts flirting with a 2. The 1 is assuming that the 2 "knows" that it's just a bit of fun. The 2 is assuming that the 1 is perhaps actually interested in them. So the 2 might then respond in a way inviting a more direct expression of interest from the 1. But the 1 isn't going to be any more direct, because for them, such a removal of ambiguity removes the point of flirting. Unless the 2 simply asks directly, "Are you sexually and/or romantically interested in me?", the exchange could go on for a while, with the 1 continuing to have fun, but the 2 wondering "Am I simply being toyed with here? What's this person playing at? Are they enjoying stringing me along?" And if the 2 in question is someone that's been prank-flirted¹ with in the past, they're more likely to feel hurt when they discover that the 1 was "just having a bit of fun". Such hurt might not have been the 1's intent, but the hurt could be inflicted nonetheless.

i'm not sure there's any resolution to this problem, or at least no easy one; the only suggestion i have is for both types to be aware of the existence of the other type, and keep that in mind when initiating and/or responding to flirting.

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1. As i've blogged about previously, "prank-flirting" is where person A flirts with person B with the explicit intent of mocking them. "Hey, I'm interested in you! HAHAHA no of course I'm not - who would be attracted to you, your dork / nerd / geek??" i myself have been prank-flirted with on a number of occasions.

i'd like to discuss an issue pervading Western society which doesn't get anywhere near the attention it deserves. That issue is the commodification of food, and the scourge that is the food industry.

Food shouldn't be commoditised. It is an essential human need. When people buy and sell food, the act of preparing and eating food becomes mere support for, and reinforcement of, the notion that it's acceptable to transform relations between humans into relations between a human and an unimportant unfeeling object. We must reject all buying and selling of food.

Sadly, most people seem to be blind to the way this is damaging all of us.

• Most people feel entitled to pay someone to provide them with food. The conditions in the euphemistically-titled "restaurant industry" are horrible - exploitation is rife, with excessively long hours and poor incomes. Overwhelmingly, those exploited have been trafficked into the situation - although the euphemism "migrants" is all too often used, an attempt by the powerful restaurant industry and its lobby to put a pleasant face on what is in fact modern-day slavery.


• In order to provide the raw materials for the restaurant industry, an entire international network is in place to ensure a steady supply. Again, exploitation is pervasive - long hours, poor incomes, an insistence by high-level people that people must use their bodies as directed, regardless of any consequent physical effects - or face even more dire physical consequences.


• At the other end of this chain of misery, we have entire swathes of media promoting the idea that there's nothing wrong with purchasing food from others, despite the physical sacrifices often required to produce that food. People like Jamie Oliver, for example, spend most of their time focusing on the qualities of the food they have just purchased, whilst only occasionally paying lip-service to the evil industry that has provided that food. Indeed, Oliver is hardly going to do otherwise, since he himself has actively assisted the "restaurant industry" by establishing, or helping to establish, "restaurants" himself.

Clearly, it is time for the buying and selling of food to end. There is no choice but to criminalise the purchase of food, to attack the problem at its source: the demand for food. We need to send the message to buyers that they are not entitled to purchase food from others; that the "restaurant industry" is not harmless, but indeed merely the peak of a pyramid of suffering; that it is not acceptable to treat fellow human beings as no more than objects to facilitate gustatory satisfaction. Moreover, we need to immediately mobilise governments to rescue all those trapped within this pyramid, as they are themselves completely powerless to change the conditions they have been trafficked into. Nor should we heed the voices of those who argue that it is not the buying and selling of food that is the problem, but the conditions under which that is done: such an attitude ignores the fact that buying and selling food fundamentally robs people of their humanity, and no changes to conditions can remove that stubborn fact. All food must be produced directly for someone else, as an act of love and commitment from one individual to another. For things to be any other way must finally be recognised as morally unacceptable.

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Issue 4 of @ArielleLoren's "Corset" magazine is out, with an article by written by me: "Owned: One polyamorist's relationship with BDSM".

@cuntext asked me if i'd be willing to participate in a Blog-Hop, involving one self-interviewing and then passing the "Blog-Hop baton" to another blogger. i was flattered to have been asked, and agreed!

@cuntext's Blog-Hop post is here; my own tongue-in-cheek self-interview is below. :-)

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When did you decide to start calling yourself a 'woman'?

You know you have those days where you wake up and think to yourself something like: "You know, I should learn to skateboard!" or "Hey, maybe I should put some colour in my hair!" It was like that. Exactly like that. i woke up one morning and thought "Hey, being a chick seems like a lark; why not try it on?" And there it was.

So the original motivation wasn't to be a fifth columnist for patriarchy?

Not at all! The original motivation was just a spur-of-the moment thing. But having said that, it's true that i soon realised being a fifth columnist for patriarchy was going to be a major positive side-effect. For years, i'd been thinking to myself: "Oh how i wish i could destroy feminism! How i wish we could live in a Gorean world where women knew their place, naked at the feet of all men! But, damn those radical feminists! They continue to maintain a staunch defense of feminism against all Male Energies! Man, if only there were some way to break through those lines of radical feminists, and erode the foundations of feminism from within!" Pretending to be a woman, and demanding that i be treated as one despite not really being one, was going to be the perfect opportunity to set my pro-Gor plan in motion.

But hasn't retaining your penis, rather than undergoing genital reconstruction surgery, made your efforts in that regard more difficult?

Oh sure. It's certainly required me to come up with some, er, "creative misinformation" about gender and sex and biology! Like: "One's gender isn't simply about whether or not one has a 'Y' chromosome." [laughs] But, you know, i'm a man, so i'm better at creating things than any female. And anyway, like i'm going to give up the symbol of my natural superiority over all women! [laughs] Sure, i'm happy to make some sacrifices for the patriarchal Thermidor, but, yeah, there are limits.

The big challenge has been being able to flaunt my penis in front of real women in changing rooms. That's a critical bottleneck on the path to Gor: forcing all females to accept the sight of a penis, to psychologically traumatise them with it, so they'll be too damaged to do anything but submit to the superiority of men. And radical feminists know that, so they put in an extra effort to fight against it.

You mentioned "sacrifices" - do you mean, things like getting your gender changed on various pieces of bureaucratic documentation, like for government agencies, private businesses, and so on?

Yeah. There's been a fair bit of effort involved in doing all that. One example: i've had to work with my collaborators in the medical parts of the transsexual empire to get documentation 'proving' [does air quotes] that i should be treated as a woman. You know what bureaucracies are like: things have to be "just so", and even when they are, sometimes common sense gets in the way, and bureaucrats think things like, "Surely it's not possible for a man to suddenly be a woman? Maybe I need to be wary here." And they block you, and you end up having to call in senior officers in the patriarchy, and getting them to order those bureaucrats to do what needs to be done. i mean, those officers understand the bigger picture, that this apparent increase in the number of 'women' [does air quotes] in the world is a temporary, tactical, manoeveur on the path to final victory. But the front-line staff don't.

So it's a been a hassle. But i've got there in the end!

Do you have any advice for any men themselves wanting to become fifth-columnists for patriarchy?

Do it! It can be hard work, but it can be really rewarding. Like, distracting radical feminists from talking about under-representation of women in STEM fields, or in the pool of 'experts' the mainstream media draws on when discussing various issues .... that feels really good! And though you might be asked to commit suicide for the cause, that's not a certainty; what is a certainty is that you'll have helped your fellow men to roll back all the encroachments women have made on men's dominion over the last few decades. That's something to be proud of.

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It's amazing how cathartic i can find sarcasm .... :-)

@polyvanilla has a blog about being a kinky polyamorous woman happily married to a monogamous vanilla man. One recent post of hers i particular enjoyed was this one on breast orgasms.

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The first piece in my "poly 101" series for Gonzo Times is now up: "Polyamory: Ethical consensual nonmonogamy".

i've been involved in a lot of online discussions, debates and arguments over the years. As a result, for my own mental health, i've developed a set of criteria which i use to determine the extent to which someone is likely to be debating me "in good faith":

• Does this person refer to the documentation i have provided in support of my position? They don't need to necessarily do so in detail; merely saying, for example, "I have read that document, and I still disagree" would suffice.


• Does this person respond to the questions i ask of them, or do they ignore them? This is particularly important when i'm asking clarification questions, e.g. "Can you explain what the word 'queer' means to you personally?"


• Does this person also suggest documents which support their own position, or do they just expect me to take their personal explanations as gospel? The documentation need not be e.g. experimental data; it might simply be a line of reasoning.

Note that "agreeing with me" is not listed above. Of course i am genuinely trying to convince people of my position; i only rarely debate for debate's sake¹, and instead debate because i actually personally care about the issue under discussion.

So i am invested in the outcome. But the outcome i'm looking for is arriving at the position which is "most correct" (for some definition of 'correct', depending on context). There is, of course, a chance that my position entering a debate is either "less correct" or "completely wrong" (or perhaps "not even wrong"²) in comparison to the position of the person i'm debating. In that sense, i actively want to be shown to be wrong.

However, when i feel strongly about an issue, i've usually done a lot of reading about it and given it much thought. So i've probably already considered initial arguments against my position on the issue and found them wanting. Consequently, i seek what i consider to be strong arguments why i'm wrong - 'arguments' of the strength of "Genesis talks about Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!!1!" will not suffice.

i can really enjoy grappling with the complexities of an issue, and being challenged to think about it differently. But through experience, i've learnt that's most likely to happen in the context of the above provisos.

So if it seems to me that a person is failing to meet the criteria i've described, i do one or more of the following:

• Repeat my point or question, in case they've inadvertently missed it.


• Ask them to please respond to the questions i've asked, to help me gain a better understanding of where they're coming from, so that the discussion can move forward productively.


• Note that i am feeling they are not debating "in good faith" in terms of my criteria for this, and that without counterevidence to the contrary, i am unlikely to want to continue the discussion further.

How they respond will help me determine whether to bother engaging with them further, and hopefully sort the debate wheat from the chaff. :-)

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1. And when i do so, i try to be explicit about that fact.

2. A phrase popularly attributed to physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

Earlier today i had a Twitter conversation about the looks of trans people in porn; and i felt it raised some issues i feel are better discussed in a blog post than within the confines of the Twitter 140-character limit. :-)

My initial tweets were:

i must say i often feel intimidated by the looks of the people in 'shemale' #porn .... #trans #lgbt

.... but then, i'm intimidated by the looks of most people in #queer #porn, too. #trans #lgbt

i guess every type of #porn has a 'blessed' look associated with it ....

.... where by "'blessed'", i mean looks which are repeatedly publicly endorsed by various members of relevant communities as being "suitably attractive"; not using that exact phrase, but by comments like "Woah, how hot is this person!", "This person is just so fuckable!", "Seeing this person makes me so horny!", and so on.

In response, @amiewee asked "How intimidated?" To which i replied:

Well, i guess i feel i'm rather 'unattractive' in comparison.

i mean, i know professional porn has to cater to what its target
demographic deems 'attractive', [+]

so in that sense i see it as an issue with wider societal notions of 'attractiveness' rather than something specific to porn.

A basic premise of 'queer porn' is that it's about diversity - showing a wide range of people, regardless of their size / gender / ethnicity / shape / sexuality / ability / looks etc. But in my experience, even though the queer porn i've seen does show a range of body sizes and shapes, and a range of queer sexualities, i've felt it often has a certain aesthetic about it which i find difficult to describe, but which i tried to describe to @amiewee as being rooted in looks i think of as 'trendy'/'alternative': piercings / tattoos / brightly coloured hair done in certain styles. And i further feel that there often doesn't seem to be that many trans / genderqueer women i can identify with.

i know of a number of trans women who feel we as a group are underrepresented in queer porn; there's been discussions about the issue in groups on FetLife, for example. i admit, i initially thought that the issue might be with attitudes/biases from queer porn producers/creators. But two things have changed my mind in this regard:

• i tried creating a Tumblr, 'AmateurTransSex', seeking submissions from a variety of trans people - but certainly from trans women - showing them having sex, to show the diversity of trans people's bodies, and how one can't automatically assume the gender and/or sexuality of people in pictures of sex acts. i announced the project in relevant groups on FetLife, and prominent people within the queer porn community helped to promote it on Twitter.
  
  The response? Near-silence. Even after further attempts to promote the project.


• A similar Tumblr project is the TransQueersXXX Tumblr. When it became apparent that TransQueersXXX was having more success than my own Tumblr along these lines, i 'officially' ended my AmateurTransSex Tumblr project and directed any interested people to TransQueersXXX. But although TransQueersXXX is getting a fair number of submissions in general, they often seem to be struggling with a lack of submissions from trans women, despite, to their credit, regularly putting out calls for such submissions.

So the overall impression i've been getting is one of enthusiasm from queer porn creators for supporting getting more trans women into porn, and other people making active efforts to try to display more representations of trans women being sexual - but an apparent lack of willingness on the part of trans women to put themselves forward. Which in turn has made me ask: Why might this be the case?

Some thoughts that i've had in this regard are:

• i would wager that when the average-person-in-the-street thinks of trans women in porn, they think of the 'shemale' genre. i know quite a few trans women, and hardly any of them look like 'shemale' actors; they often don't completely 'pass' as cis women¹, which i feel many 'shemale' actors do². And i suspect many, if not most, trans women are very aware of the extent to which they don't 'pass', and thus feel they are therefore 'unsuitable' for appearing in such porn.


• More broadly, representations of trans women in the mainstream media in general - are very limited at best; and when we are represented, we're often presented as "eww, it's an ugly man in a dress, gross!" So we don't often receive societal messages suggesting that we're an attractive group of people overall, or even that we can be attractive; only when we 'pass' sufficiently well does the possibility of us being 'attractive' begin to be assessed. In this context, it's hardly surprising that many trans women might not feel particularly comfortable putting themselves on display, to be mocked and labelled ugly by people on the Internet - particularly when we often get that going about our daily lives in any case.


• More specifically, however, the experience of myself and, from what i've read, a number of other trans women is that queer communities often seem to have an aesthetics which lauds AFAB³ people in a way that AMAB people aren't - which often seems to not be apparent to people who aren't trans women, just as straight people often don't notice the lack of non-heterosexual people/relationships in the mainstream media. Enthusiasm for 'androgyny' often seems to accompany pictures of trans guys / AFAB genderqueers⁴; in my experience, it rarely accompanies pictures of trans women or AMAB genderqueers. So again, the overall metamessage that this can send to trans women is: "You're unlikely to be someone who is attractive".


• Despite the constant message that it's self-confidence that makes people attractive, we live in a world where pictures of dark-skinned people get modified so that their skin appears lighter, regardless of how self-confident those people might be - because 'whiteness' is an aesthetic that is highly valued, not only in Western countries, but in countries such as India. In this context, the metamessage that gets sent is: "Even if you do think you look okay, others won't necessarily think so unless we change how you appear in pictures."

Thus, even when queer porn creators actively seek trans women, there are factors working against trans women responding to their call. And this creates a catch-22, because this reduces the representations of trans women in queer porn, which then reinforces trans women's notions that we're not attractive enough for it.

To me this is yet another example of how we need to start critiquing standards of 'attractiveness'; there's an interesting post on the Radical TransFeminist blog on this issue called "Significant Othering: Attraction Down the Privilege Gradient". [NB. The author of that post has expressed concerns about my use of the post in this context.] Still, that's a long-term task; what can we do in the meantime?

Clearly more of us trans women need to either be putting our hands up to appear in queer porn, or start making more of it ourselves. It seems to me both things are happening: i'm a fan of Tobi Hill-Meyer (@Tobitastic) and Maya Mayhem (@Maya_Mayhem), and there are other trans women whose work i've not yet seen, such as Drew Deveaux (@DrewDeveaux). i would suggest that trans women can work to increase their profile and visibility, and if finances permit, pay for porn featuring them. (i myself had a subscription to QueerPorn.TV which i unfortunately recently had to cancel due to financial constraints.) Further, whilst acknowledging that we regularly receive many messages that we're inherently unattractive, we can, as an act of political resistance, try to put such messages into their broader sociopolitical context, and work on reevaluating societal notions of who is and isn't considered 'attractive'. And i say this as someone who certainly does not think she's attractive enough for any porn, including queer porn; i don't feel i have 'trendy'/'alternative' looks (despite my body piercings :-P).

If we can work on rejecting notions of the extent to which we're 'attractive', it increases the possibility that we would feel comfortable making our own porn. Of course this is not an option for many trans women, for various reasons, including:

• overall body dysphoria;


• not wanting to provide 'evidence' (e.g. still having a cock) that one is "not a real woman";


• not wanting to 'out' oneself as having been AMAB / that one is trans;


• having other life / community / activist / personal commitments which take up the bulk of one's time/resources;


• more generally, social sanctions - which include such things as losing employment, when unemployment is already very high amongst trans women - for appearing in porn in general.

But even if there are at least some of us who do have the option to consider appearing in professional or amateur queer porn, and even if only some who do consider it end up actually choosing to do so, i would feel that's progress which might well help many other trans women feel better about themselves and their bodies.

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1. i note here that i feel there are significant issues involved in the 'passing' concept; but i feel those issues are relatively tangental to the issues i want to discuss here.

2. Hence the term 'trap' often used by cis men to describe trans women; "It looks like this person is a woman; but the pants come off, and Woah! there's a cock. So this person isn't really a woman - the whole thing was a trap!" i find it terribly offensive, particularly when it's used by "tranny chasers" who think it's a term of endearment. :-P

3. ETA, 2013.04.13: Nowadays i would write 'D[F|M]AB', "Designated [Female|Male] At Birth", out of respect for concerns expressed by intersex activists about inappropriate usages of the word 'Assigned' in the context of sex/gender. However, i don't believe in rewriting my old blog posts to pretend that i didn't write things i now find problematic (or indeed, simply wrong).

4. Cf. this old post of mine on 'androgyny', which explains why i tend not to identify as 'androgynous', even though, as a two-gendered transgenderqueer, it should technically apply to me. To my satisfaction, in more recent times i've seen increasing numbers of people making similar critiques.

In recent years, my ongoing experience of 'progressive communities is that issues around gender, sexuality and race seem to get acknowledged in a way that issues around class seem not to be.¹ And i can't help but wonder if much of this is due to many progressive communities being dominated - either in terms of numbers or influence - by middle-class² people.

i should preface what i'm about to say by noting that i myself come from a middle-class background. Both my parents were professionals. i wouldn't say we were particularly well-off - at least by Western standards - but neither did i ever want for food or shelter. So i had access to resources when growing up that many less privileged people don't. My enthusiasm for reading was supported through the purchase of books and access to the wide variety of books, both fiction and non-fiction, in my parents' libraries; my interest in computing was supported through the purchase of a IBM-compatible PC; my learning in general was supplemented. My family background also resulted in me developing a "general Australian" accent, rather than a "broad Australian" accent; the latter is often read as implying that one is not particularly intellectual. All of these things, together with extra-class privileges such as being Anglo, contributed to my success at school, at university, and in finding work. So my comments here are written from the perspective of someone trying to be conscious of hir class privilege.

For decades, 'class analysis' was damaged by the often simplistic reductionist perspectives of strands of Marxism such as Stalinism. The 'New Left' movements of the 60s helped to address this; rather than dismissing any non-class systems of oppression as ultimately unimportant, they were increasingly treated as objects worthy of change in their own right. Further, the late 60s saw the rise of postmodernism and its important critiques of 'grand narratives', particularly those based in modernism, such as Marxism. The eventual collapse of the "actually existing socialism/communism" in the Eastern Bloc further marginalised class-analysis perspectives, as people like Fukuyama declared "the end of history".

However, the needed correction to reductionist political analysis has, i feel, become an overcorrection: class analysis has become at best ignored, and at worst dismissed as irrelevant. In turn, 'progressive' politics, lacking in class analyses, has become dominated by middle-class voices whose class privilege - not only in terms of economic capital, but in terms of social and cultural capital as well - allows them to both speak and be heard.

Some common - and, i feel, problematic - perspectives that i think are probably linked to middle-class privilege include:

• The (at best naïve) belief that Western states are an essentially neutral institutions that just need "the right government".

Western 'democratic' governments care about people who have at least middle-class levels of access to resources. They care about home owners, those who have investment properties, and those who have shares beyond those that exist in their (in Australia, compulsory) superannuation funds.

To these people, governments can seem relatively (or potentially) responsive to their needs, because, due to the above, they are indeed responsive, at least relatively speaking. But that overlooks the fact that governments aren't particularly responsive to people who don't have those sort of resources: those who can only afford to rent housing, those who are homeless, those who have to use public transport because they can't afford to run a car, and so on. Governments only care about meeting the needs of this latter group to the extent that society would be substantially destabilised were they to do otherwise; they generally do the minimum amount necessary to prevent such a destabilisation from occurring.

Related to this is an emphasis on - and sometimes an apparent obsession with - electoral politics. i've often noted with wry amusement that a number of people who look down upon those who enjoy television soap operas and/or 'reality tv' nevertheless seem to follow the sayings and doings of parliamentarians with a similar fervour. "Did you hear what Julia said?" "Oh I know! And then Tony's response, well, that was even worse!"³.


• Hostility towards unions.

Middle-class people often have, or have had, access to resources that have allowed them to spend time in education to develop skills for which a premium is paid in the employment marketplace, and which they can bring to the table when looking for work.

People that don't have these skills, or who at best have 'commodity' skills - such as those required for entry-level construction work - don't have this bargaining power. The strength-in-numbers that unions provide is a significant way in which many people can improve their bargaining power to ensure that they receive a living wage.

One of the grounds on which i've observed 'progressives' to attack unions is that they are, in some sense, corrupt organisations. And it is true that, in Australia - and, i believe in most Western countries - many, if not most, unions are dominated by careerists and opportunists for whom union activity is not so much about improving working conditions for union members as about being a stepping stone on their path of personal advancement, often into electoral politics (cf. Martin Ferguson). i feel this not inherent to unionism, however; i consider it to be connected to unions believing that the state is a neutral institution which can be filled with 'worker-friendly' politicians. "Don't let a Coalition government get power, that will be so much worse for workers than a Labor government!" "Striking is a last resort that we use to help get the ALP back in to power!"

More concerning to me, however, is when 'progressives' argue that people working in 'essential industries' - e.g. power supply - should not be allowed to take any industrial action which significantly affects the ability of those industries to provide their goods and services. i find this appalling. If one is not allowed to withdraw one's labor power, one is effectively a slave. And countering with "if you don't want to work under such conditions, find work elsewhere" significantly ignores the probability that for many people, practical employment options are quite limited, which further suggests privilege-made blinkers.


• Hostility towards the "uneducated unwashed masses".

Here in Australia, this often manifests as derisory attitudes towards 'bogans', who are regarded as inherently lacking in intelligence and/or 'progressive' attitudes (such as "If you don't vote ALP, you're letting the reactionaries win", or "You should be forced to work to provide power to my computer" :-P ). And not only that: actively reproducing such stereotypes is itself somehow regarded as a demonstration of "progressive street cred".

Ironically, dismissing the "uneducated unwashed masses" as unsophisticated is, to me, a highly unsophisticated approach, which i can only (charitably) assume comes from regarding the 'lower' classes as a homogeneous mass in the same way that Anglo racists feel that "all Asians look the same". It assumes that 'education' - where 'education' is defined as "credential-producing education" - is there for anyone who wants it, and that anyone who isn't 'educated' is therefore simply willfully ignorant and/or stupid. And it also arrogantly dismisses ways of being intelligent and/or analytical which don't involve e.g. the tertiary education system.


• An overoptimistic belief in the possibilities of technology alone producing political change.

A number of 'progressive' people seem to have the belief that the development of new technology can automatically and inherently bring about positive social and political changes, as though if and how technology gets deployed isn't strongly influenced by social and political issues.

In response to second-wave feminists who have decried the apparent lack of gender activism among younger generations, some feminists have essentially said "Hey, grandma, we're doing stuff - it's just that we're doing it online". But Internet access is strongly mediated by various forms of privilege - class privilege not least amongst them - and such attitudes don't do much to dispel the oft-justified notion that feminism is a white middle-class pursuit. And not only 'net access: although it's true that one can get second-hand hardware for free and install FOSS on it, this overlooks the fact that doing so often tends to require middle-class privileges.

As i noted above, my own middle-class background enabled me to develop a certain level of literacy, and an idiolect, which in turn enabled me to relatively easily obtain skilled work, which in turn enabled me to purchase (good quality, but expensive) O'Reilly and Associates books, which in turn enabled me to develop skills in programming and system administration, which in turn has allowed me to set up several FOSS-based LANs for my extended family on the cheap, using second-hand hardware provided to me gratis by people whose workplace was planning to throw them on the garbage heap.

As with formal education, it's not true that technology is accessible to anyone who wants or needs it.


• Overestimating the extent to which government services are available and accessible.

As someone who has presented to government agencies looking very dishevelled and the worse for wear due to CFS, i can tell you that one gets treated very differently by bureaucracies depending on how one looks when one presents oneself at government offices.

People see advertisements on television saying "Help is available!" for mental health problems. So they assume that anyone who isn't getting help for mental health problem must merely be indolent / lazy / slack etc. Anyone that has actually tried accessing those services, however, knows the very different reality; the mental health system in Victoria is a shambles, and i know a number of people who have been continually bounced from one service to another in their quest for help.

So there are many people who "fall through the [many] cracks"; and if you're one of those people, and still actively want counselling and support, you'll find that accessing private mental health services doesn't come cheap. Even when one can, in Australia at least, claim back most of the expense via Medicare, one still needs to have the cash to spend it in the first place - something that's not necessarily the case for those whose mental health issues prevent them from earning a living income.

The middle-classes can have a strong interest in defending the status quo, and diminishing or ridiculing class-based analyses, since they can be threatened by the possibility of losing their privileges and being "cast down" into the pit of the lowly masses. They can also have an interest in promoting and buttressing the mythos around middle-class values, beliefs and aspirations (such as "You can achieve anything if you're just willing to work hard enough"). So the middle-classes don't occupy some unique position which 'transcends' society, politics and culture, and which leaves them able to 'objectively' assess how society should work, "based purely on merit". On the contrary, they are as deeply influenced by their sociopolitical position (and its attendant social and cultural capital), and the class-based privileges and "invisible knapsack"⁴ that usually accompany it.⁵

i think it's well past time for class issues, and recognition of class privilege, to become a more significant part of 'progressive' discussion and debates.

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1. By "acknowledged" i certainly don't mean "always acknowledged upon and resolved appropriately"; that's all too far from being the case. Rather, i mean "at least acknowledged in a theoretical sense, if not practically". Issues of disability, which frequently end up connecting with class issues, are also less acknowledged than i think appropriate; but i'd like to focus primarily on class here.

2. An important issue is "what constitutes 'middle-class'?" Although e.g. one Marxist perspective might be "the petit-bourgeoisie; that is, small business owners", i'll here be using 'middle-class' in the lay sense i most commonly encounter. This sense contrasts "the middle class" with both "blue-collar workers" (i.e. those whose work primarily involves physical labour, such as construction workers, farm laborers, assembly-line workers etc.) and with "the upper classes" (i.e. those with many millions of dollars of assets, on the boards of corporations, those from "old money", etc.).

3. Rogers Waters, ex of Pink Floyd, has referred to "the soap opera state", e.g. on his Radio KAOS album.

4. A reference to Peggy McIntosh's influential essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack [PDF]".

5. Thanks to Flavia Dzodan for raising these issues in a private email.

Those around me for any substantial period of time eventually get to hear me complain about the "feminine energy / masculine energy" concepts beloved of so many religious / magickal / spiritual systems. As a feminist dual-gendered transgenderqueer, i feel my lived experiences make this notion problematic at best, particularly given the more general issues around defining 'sex' and 'gender'.

It recently occurred to me, however, that maybe the problem here is one of people confusing a map with the terrain. i can easily imagine individuals who have had spiritual revelations / insights trying to convey a feeling of connection with the Divine, and reaching for a metaphor that is likely to resonate with the majority of people: sexual union between a cis woman and a cis man. But then people infer this to mean that 'female' and 'male' are the underlying, fundamental concepts involved.

In Kabbalah's Etz Chaim, "Tree of Life", the first sephirah above Malkuth, "Kingdom" - typically associated with the material universe and/or the "Schechinah", the immanent Divine - is Yesod, "Foundation". Yesod is often considered the "Sphere of Illusion", in that neophytes at the beginning of their magickal / spiritual journey can erroneously believe that the images they're discovering and working with are 'things-in-themselves', as it were, rather than simply a 'best representation' created by the human mind as it tries to interpret what it's perceiving.

So while the "feminine energy / masculine energy" metaphor might well work for most people, it's not a map that works for me. On the contrary, its attempted symbolism creates sign(post)s that don't make sense to me given the personal understandings i've developed on my life journey. But that doesn't mean the terrain isn't nevertheless there for me to explore; it just means i need to create my own guidebook as i go.
 

Several times recently i've encountered commentary in which anarchists¹ are accused of being self-centred jerks who are unconcerned with others' welfare and/or wellbeing. More specifically, i've read it argued that whilst anarchists may go on about how we could have a society where people are supported by something other than the state, anarchists don't put their money where their mouths are, and rather than providing practical support to other people now, have a "Somebody Else's Problem" attitude towards doing so.

Well, i'm an anarchist. Moreover, my anarchist politics are partially rooted in those of individualist anarchists such as e.g. Benjamin Tucker. And as we all know, individualism can only ever be egotistical and uncaring, right?²

i am a homemaker for two households. i do (at a minimum) several hours worth of volunteer work per week for an organisation supporting the SGD communities. i regularly provide at least a few hours' worth of emotional support each week to close friends. And i do all this as someone in semi-remission from CFS.

If we're going to engage in political caricatures, it could equally be said that leftist statists' position is: "People should be looked after, but I personally don't want to do it, so how about confiscating part of people's income under threat of physical retribution, and then using that money to pay someone else to do it?"

i recently wrote a comment in which i said:

It depends on what you mean by 'anarchist'.

i now identify as an anarchist, having for many years identified as a Marxist. i do so because i've come to distinguish what i call "political anarchism" from what i call (with a nod to Diane Vera's writings on theistic Satanism) "brat brigade anarchism".

"Brat brigade anarchism" is basically "You're not the boss of me now / I should be free to do whatever the fuck I want". There's no real serious political analysis involved. And this is the 'anarchism' that the mass media likes to promote as all anarchism 'really' is.

In contrast, political anarchism is simply the position that there should not be an institution - "the state" - that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical violence within a particular graphical [sic - should be 'geographical'] area, which one cannot consent to not be a part of. Beyond that, political anarchists take many different positions; but i feel it's a straw man to assert that political anarchists think that everyone would simply be nice to each other and not try to harm one another. Instead, anarchists tend to argue for things like community self-defence organisations which people voluntarily join, and which are directly accountable to the communities they serve, rather than current Western systems in which policing is often done to less privileged community [sic] rather than for them.

i can assure you that i have only begun to take on anarchist political positions after decades of political activism and thinking about the tendencies i've observed in human behaviour. :-)

i would suggest that analysing anarchist politics on the basis of the loudest and most obnoxious anarchists is like trying to analyse Christian theology via the Westboro Baptist Church. Just as there are literally millions of self-identified Christians quietly working every day against social and economic injustice, rather than devoting their time and resources to spreading hateful propaganda, i'm sure there are anarchists apart from myself also working to build grassroots community organisations for the purposes of mutual aid. Beware the possibility of biased samples.

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1 And 'libertarians' too, although i've noticed a failure to distinguish between right-libertarianism - which is often what people associate with 'libertarians' - and left-libertarians, which is a distinction that needs to be made.

2. Although 'defences' of individualist anarchism such as this don't do much to reduce that perception. i found the linked-to piece started off promisingly, but then descended into such a morass of fail that i gave up on it.