Whatever mutations social media undergoes in my lifetime, I will always associate it with porn.

Let’s start at the beginning. From 2007 to 2011, I was an independent contractor in a Bay Area BDSM house; imagine a kinky version of Miss Mona’s in the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. For me — a scruffy young punk with a very dirty mind — it was kind of like a femme finishing school.

My fellow pro-dommes (and pro-subs, and pro-switches) inspired in me a newfound gusto for all the things I had never liked about being a girl during my adolescence. And while I’ll admit that the context of performance and the reward of cold hard cash were my first motivations in constructing a feminine persona of grace and charm, I eventually amplified my sexual id through the gleaming sound system of this new persona.

I called her Tina Horn (after fictional teenage temptress Audrey Horn of Twin Peaks, and soul survivor Tina Turner). Sex work permitted me to invent a fantasy character I could embody, and it was thrilling. I became well known for my intelligence and my healthy ass, and I was very successful.

The house had a simple website, and some presence on an online forum for sex work. With a couple of fetish gear pictures and a few hundred seductive words, I advertised time with Tina Horn to the world. I emailed with a few of my clients to arrange appointments, but mostly we booked over the phone.

It never would have occurred to me in a million years to give Tina Horn a Facebook page, or even to keep a blog. Rather, I created an ironclad persona that dematerialized and rematerialized at the discretion of my clients. This was part of the sustainability of this work. Intimacy with the Real Me was not on the menu.

Including fallibility. Many tools of the sex trade that I learned in that house have stuck with me for life. One that really stands out? “Mistresses don’t get sick.”

The house had a rule. If your coworker was ill, and you had to cancel her appointments for her, you never told her client the true reason. We made excuses: the house had accidentally double booked her, or, “We’re so sorry, but unfortunately she has unexpected, important business to attend to.”

Our boss had decided — around the time she started the house in the mid-nineties — that it was important to maintain the mystique of the Mistresses. Our clients didn’t need to know we were fallible. (Or that we were grossly snotty.)

Let’s Dismantle The False Dichotomy Between Porn And Erotica

This made complete emotional sense to me. Tina Horn did not exist outside of the walls of the house. I was safe to explore dangerous zones because it all happened within a very structured and heavily boundary-ed system.

The original “Tina Horn” was like a robot. You put a coin in her slot, so to speak, and she powered up to perform a custom dance for you. She was clever, she was naked, and she tied you up. You could spank her and she would squeal with delight. She would totally kiss other robots. She cared about your problems and she had a penetrating gaze that looked deep into your soul. When you left the house satisfied and several pounds lighter, Tina Horn powered down. Which meant that I could eat a sandwich, giggle with the other girls, count my money, do my paperwork, change into my bike shorts, and leave the house.

I animated Tina Horn, but I was not Tina Horn.

After a few years of working in this house, I started performing in porn. Filmmakers such as Shine Louise Houston and Madison Young hired me for video projects just like my clients had hired me for private BDSM services. I kept the name Tina Horn. But the way I related to Shine and Madison was not the way I related to my clients — the camera was now the proxy for the client.

One of the defining characteristics of the queer porn genre is the behind-the-scenes performer interviews. The directors who were hiring me expected me to answer tons of questions about my personal sexuality on camera. In fact, it often felt that those documentary interviews about gender, desire, identity, and community were as much, if not more, the actual point of the films, rather than the hardcore sex.

This was around 2010, and people were starting to get really serious about Twitter. I thought Twitter was fucking stupid. It felt like a short-form promotional tool that I didn’t think I needed.

Please remind me to put “hermetically sealed humiliating seduction revenge scenes” on my list of services #JessicaJones

???@tinahornsass

It seemed “social” in the worst kind of way — a distillation of fair weather friendships designed as a vehicle for narcissism. Then some porn friends tricked me into joining it by creating an account for my ass. They shared the password with one another. The first tweets of @TinaHornsAss were collective jokes. My friends knew I would use the tool once there was an ironic distance.

I animated Tina Horn, but I was not Tina Horn.
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How could anything I said ever be truly serious, when it was couched within the raunchy concept of tweets emerging from my butt hole? And they were right. Eventually, I took over the account and started tweeting in earnest. Now that I understand the essential role that Twitter plays in being a public figure — now that I’m a journalist, writer, media-maker, and modern prankster — @TinaHornsAss is still the account I use.

And the irony remains that even after almost five years, Twitter and I still don’t really jive. It still feels like an unpaid obligation. I can’t ever seem to find my voice. I struggle to balance ethics and mediate my own love of attention. I agonize over 140 characters: concision is not exactly my forte.

Digital communication has always seemed like the opposite of sex to me. In a room, I feed off the sexual energy of another person. Without that nervous system interaction, I grow exhausted and burn out quickly. Twitter makes me feel that way, too. It doesn’t give me anything I want. Sometimes my followers and I interact, but at this moment I have 7,781 followers, and I interact with maybe 50 of them — mostly colleagues — and occasionally fans. Unlike a client in the BDSM house, I can’t look them up and down and read them. I don’t know how to be Tina Horn to them.

Like sometimes you gotta drink that much whiskey and wear that much leather and frown that hard to be a fucking woman in this world

???@tinahornsass

In Program or Be Programmed, Douglas Rushkov reminds us that the point of all Internet activity is to be social. In my concept of her, Tina Horn doesn’t socialize. Or rather, she does in controlled environments. When I socialize with another queer porn performer, I do so as The Real Me. But when @TinaHornsAss talks to, say, @AndreShakti, we are interacting with the knowledge that our fans can voyeur, and that this interaction is good for business. But that doesn’t give me the social satisfaction of human connection — it makes me feel like I’m putting on a promotional show. I’ve yet to be convinced that this is good for business, or that it’s meant to satisfy anything other than my ego.

But I learned to use Twitter. I learned to give out the information I wanted people to know. I basically tweeted any time I felt “on” as Tina Horn — when I was shooting a scene, or attending an event “as” Tina.

An artist friend teased me that I only tweeted when I was in public at porn events. I looked at her and blinked. “That’s the only time Tina Horn exists!”

Nobody else seemed to think this was reasonable. They were tweeting their impulses, their dark emotions, their vitriol, when they were going to sleep. The closest intimacy I felt comfortable sharing was how I liked my coffee.

But Twitter wanted more from me. Twitter wanted to know as soon I was set up at my desk in the morning. It wanted to know what I was eating. It wanted my funny observations, my insight. It wanted quotes from what I was reading. It definitely wanted my vacations.

Digital communication has always seemed like the opposite of sex to me.
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Everything became potential fodder to contribute to the public character development of Tina Horn. I felt I wasn’t permitted to be The Real Me — even during my most cherished private moments, like while reading a book or masturbating or working out. Those un-Tina Horn moments needed to contribute to the Tina Horn brand, to keep me relevant, to keep people wanting to work with me and hire me.

 

I tried to teach myself to get pleasure from it. Like the occasional dopamine rush of seeing my work retweeted by someone I admire. Once I posted a dream I had about Samuel Delaney, and he responded with a story about Tim Curry. That felt magical, like a real connection with a distant icon.

Trying to find pleasure in social media kind of felt like trying to develop a taste for cigarettes even though they made me nauseous. As we all know, cigarettes make you cool and help you relate to others. And some people really take to them. But there’s probably a reason they make me nauseous. I’m not built for cigarettes, and I’m not suited to Twitter, and I don’t really understand why I should condition myself to need something that feels bad for me.

I am aware that my aversion may simply be a defense mechanism. It is possible that I have convinced myself that if Tina Horn doesn’t have an inner life, I am protected from the horrible things society tells me will happen to me because I’m a whore. That my father will be disappointed in me, that I will be shut out of the jobs I want, that I will lose my ability to have intimate orgasms, that I was just doing it for the attention.

literallyme

???@tinahornsass

On one hand, I’ll admit that it’s incredible for people who enjoy my sex performance to see what I have to say — about sex, or coffee, or music, or an article. But on the other, sometimes I get the impression that people feel entitled to it because of what I am — which is a whore — and what I do‚ which is making money by working hard at the words and sex I love. I feel as if the world expects me to outsource my imagination, and every ounce of my gut screams at me to stop. After all, my imagination is my livelihood.

And yet I tweet on, because I still believe in the potential, and because I am afraid of becoming obsolete. But I long for the time when I was allowed my simple private moments; when I could count my $20 bills, put on my street clothes, and just go home.

I’ve been watching the social media fallout surrounding the trial of Brock Turner, the swimming champion from Stanford who received a six-month sentence for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman in January of 2015. As with any other case that deals with violence against women, the reactions have been equal parts depressing and encouraging. Depressing because even now, the narrative persists that young white men convicted of rape are being unfairly denied their potential bright futures. Encouraging because every time this happens, it feels like we get a little closer to exposing the framework of rape minimization and acceptance that supports incidents like these. This case has made it clearer than ever that we as a society condone rape by privileging men’s feelings over victims’ trauma — and more people than ever have objected.

Most of the discussion has centered around two letters. The first is the impact statement written by the victim herself, which she read out loud in court on June 2 and which was subsequently published by Buzzfeed on June 3. The other is letter written by Turner’s father asking for leniency in his sentencing; Stanford law professor Michele Dauber brought this one to public notice when she tweeted a portion of it. The former letter is as gutting as the latter is tone-deaf. The woman that Turner attacked speaks of what it felt like to wake up in the hospital with pine needles and debris inside her vagina. Meanwhile, Turner’s father laments that his son no longer enjoys pretzels, and argues he has been forced to pay too high a price for “20 minutes of action.”

To read Turner’s father’s letter is to feel an immediate rush of pure fury. It’s tempting to just go full snark on it, because there is lot here to snark here: from Turner Senior’s lyrical description of Brock’s lost love for steak to his obstinate refusal to actually name his son’s crime, the letter reads like a bad parody of how someone might talk about a rapist. It’s much harder to read the letter earnestly; it feels almost impossible to comprehend that this man truly believes his son is the one deserving of pity. It’s more comfortable to mock — but we can’t just mock. We have to look at — really look at, unsparingly and in detail — all the ways in which Turner’s father’s letter exemplifies how rape culture works.

This case has made it clearer than ever that we as a society condone rape by privileging men’s feelings over victims’ trauma.
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Rape culture is the idea that sexual assault does not happen in a vacuum, but rather occurs because we are socialized in a way that normalizes and even celebrates sexual victimization of women. In my experience, most men have a twofold reaction to that definition: first they’ll ask how it can be true that rape is normalized if rape is also understood to be one of the worst crimes a person can commit, and second they’ll swear that they, personally, would never. When they say these things they will absolutely believe that they’re speaking the truth. And then a case like Brock Turner’s will come along and present some very uncomfortable challenges to those ideas.

Everyone can agree that rape is objectively wrong, but problems crop up when we try to parse exactly what rape is and under what circumstances it occurs. I’m willing to bet that more than a few men read the victim’s letter and had a pang of recognition — not of her experiences, but his. Because most men have done at least some of what Turner did. They’ve gone to parties with the intention of hooking up with someone; they’ve zeroed in on the vulnerable girls, the drunk girls, the girls who seem like they’d be easy to take home; they’ve assumed that silence or a lack of clear refusal is the same as consent. And when these men read the account of what Brock Turner did, even if they recognize it as awful, there’s a louder voice in their heads saying something like this could have been written about me.

And the brutal truth is, they’re right. A lot of men, a lot of self-professed good men, have done something like what Brock Turner did: maybe not after a frat party, maybe not on the ground behind a dumpster, maybe not with a girl so intoxicated that she was losing consciousness, but maybe not so far off. Perhaps in their case the girl was drunk, yes, but not so very much more drunk than they were, and she seemed to like it and the next morning they went out for breakfast. Perhaps the girl said yes to kissing and touching and even though she froze up when he tried to penetrate her she never actually said no. Perhaps he thought that every yes starts out as a no because someone told him so, or because every movie or TV show he’d seen showed a women having to be cajoled and worn down befor she agreed to sex. Whatever the circumstances, Brock Turner’s story forced them to look at their actions in a new light and what they saw didn’t jive with how they felt about themselves.

And it’s so much easier to say neither of us are rapists than it is to say both of us are rapists.

Rape culture is the idea that sexual assault does not happen in a vacuum.
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Most rapists aren’t monsters who lurk behind bushes and in dark alleyways waiting for unsuspecting women to walk by. In fact, statistics show that a woman is far more likely to be assaulted by someone she knows than by a stranger. Most rapists are men we know and like: our neighbors and our colleagues and sometimes even our friends. Men who might admit that things got a little bit out of hand, or that they didn’t mean to go that far but they got caught up in the heat of the moment. Men like my friend’s boyfriend, who once referred to beer as liquid panty remover only to declare minutes later that rapists deserve to be castrated. Men who think that consent is a one-time binary, yes or no, and not an ongoing process of checking in with their partners.

Men we think of as nice guys.

Men who look just like everybody else.

And the worst part is, this feels like a best case scenario. In fact, there’s a small part of me that is still somewhat shocked that a white man from a well-connected family was convicted at all.

But please, tell me again about how our society takes rape very seriously.

Brock Turner’s father might be right that he does not have a violent past. It might, in fact, be accurate to say that up until the events of January 17th, 2015, Brock Turner had led an exemplary life. It’s possible that at the time Turner did not consider what he was doing to be sexual assault. But it was. The fact that he’s not a violent monster doesn’t mean he isn’t a rapist. He’s a rapist because he committed a rape. If these nice men who kind of sort of identify with what he did committed rapes, they’re rapists too.

And this is what we need to talk about over and over: the fact that nice boys from nice families commit rape. The fact that assault can happen even when the rapist does not “feel like” he is committing rape, because someone told him that attacks like the one Brock Turner committed are just normal romance. The fact that Brock Turner’s feelings seem to have greatly trumped those of the woman he assaulted.

We need to talk about how so many reactions to stories like these center the mens’ feelings.

And then we need to talk about how we can drown out those voices with the voices of survivors.

In the cosmic calendar of resistance, this may well be the Era of the Punched Nazi.

This fact has caused some consternation and hand-wringing among those who see Nazis as perfect foils for their ideological posturing rather than very real genocidal extremists with a long and bloody track record. For the mainline liberals and conservatives who lament the punching of Richard Spencer, the young white supremacist activist who coined the term “alt-right,” Nazism remains a theoretical construct, an “idea” that can be debated and defeated without a shot being fired in anger. For the rest of us — for many Jews, for ethnic and religious minorities, for queer people — Nazism is an empirical fact with the solidity of iron roads leading to walled death camps.

The camps are Nazism’s endpoint; it is what Nazism is for. Nazism serves as a refuge for whites dislocated by mass society and modernity, who seek someone to blame for their anomic dread. With that in mind, we must be very explicit about what Nazism’s relationship to democracy must be, and refuse dangerous, whitewashing euphemisms when discussing it (e.g. “you support punching someone who disagrees with you”).

Such generalizing language is intellectually lazy at the best of times; here it is outright deadly. Yes, it could be said that I “disagree” with Spencer that a genocide of Black Americans is desirable, but I believe he should be punched because of the very real risk that he could galvanize such an event into actually happening. This is a fear supported by the tremendous weight of our history, and by the fact that we had to fight the bloodiest war of our species’ existence the last time Nazism came into conflict with modern democracy. To call this a “disagreement” is an unspeakable slight against millions of dead.

To be blunt: Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter. There is nothing about the ideology or its practice that is anything but corrosive to democratic institutions.

Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter.
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Fascism is a cancer that turns democracy against itself unto death. There is no reasoning with it. It was specifically engineered to attack the weaknesses of democracy and use them to bring down the entire system, arrogating a right to free speech for itself just long enough to take power and wrench it away from everyone else. Simply allowing Nazis onto a stage, as the BBC did when it let British National Party leader Nick Griffin sit and debate with political luminaries on its Question Time program, is to give them an invaluable moral victory. Like creationists who debate evolutionary biologists, the former benefit mightily from the prestige of the latter.

In using this tactic, Nazis abuse the democratic forum to illegitimately lend credence to something that is otherwise indefensible, the equality of the stage giving the unforgivable appearance of “two sides” to a position that is anathema to public decency. This is not because Nazis love democracy or free speech, but because they know how to use this strategy to unravel them.

But is it enough to say that we must meet Nazism with force because it is so terrible? It should be, morally. I would, however, add that there’s room to consider why force, specifically, is a necessary tool in these extreme times. There is a reason that it works against Nazis, adding weight to the argument that they are a special case where a normal ethic of nonviolence should be suspended.

The goals of Nazism have not changed, but some of its window dressing has. As he was being punched, Richard Spencer was showing off a lapel pin of Pepe, a cartoon character appropriated by extreme right and Nazi 4channers in their reactionary campaigns, which ultimately featured in many pro-Trump memes, some of which were retweeted by the man himself. The new exponents of modern Nazism are eager to exploit what they see as a constituency of young, tech-savvy white people whose online culture is a neat fit for them.

Nazis, It’s Time For A Common Sense Approach To Not Getting Punched

4chan’s “trolling” culture is built on a perverse ideal that prizes the use of offensive speech and borderline criminal behavior as a means of becoming a stronger, superior person. If you are ever offended by something, hurt by it, or made to fear for yourself, you’re weak, a “special snowflake” who’s been “triggered” and a “lolcow” (someone you should keep hurting because their reactions will be funny). In this ethic, all emotion (except rage, lust, or mirth) is weakness, something the troll can exploit to get big laughs for him and his fellows.

This notion has been exploited to great effect by people like Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who believes “America needs more trolls.” Yiannopoulos, who himself has a history of sympathy for Nazi ideas, and who has tried to lend respectability to Richard Spencer—calling him a “bright” “intellectual” figure on the “alt-right”—has since taken 4chan on the road, so to speak, using his university speaking engagements to gin up mob harassment of transgender students. Unable to resist a photogenic Nazi, the press has treated Yiannopoulos to numerous interviews. In one with the New York Times he literally said: “I don’t have feelings.” While this is an obvious lie, it fits with the troll culture ethos he seeks to promote.

The ideal man — the Trollermensch, if you like — is one who does not feel, who sociopathically wounds without empathy, who finds humor in even the most grotesque of suffering. In exchange, you feel no pain, no vulnerability; you cannot be hurt the way you are ruthlessly hurting others.

This is the alluring promise that 4chan’s culture has made to a generation of disaffected young men who feel powerless, adrift, and vulnerable in a rapidly changing world where being a white man is no longer a guarantee of success and prestige. Be mighty, hurt others, never get hurt again. But humanity, in all its little frailties, always catches up with us in the end.

After he was punched, Richard Spencer told the Times, “I am more worried about going to dinner on an average Tuesday because these kinds of people are roaming around,” adding on a Periscope video that “I’m afraid this is going to become the meme to end all memes, that I’m going to hate watching this.” Spencer, who was proudly touting and retweeting 4chan Pepe memes and cheering right along with Yiannopoulos about the world needing more trolling, was expressing fear and vulnerability. The facade had cracked; he was no Trollermensch, just human, equal to everyone he thought himself superior to, equal to everyone he’d see dead.

Nazis have long depended on something like trolling culture to work their dark magic. The concept of the “Big Lie” is right at home in an age of ideologically-driven 4chan hoaxes targeting women and minorities, and Nazism always relied on a certain chicanery to keep people guessing about their true intentions until it was too late — an eerie lesson for the present. Nazism’s fakery, and its ability to distort reality until ordinary people could not trust their own senses, bears more than a passing resemblance to 4chan’s culture of harassment and thuggish hoaxes. But the weak point was always the mythology of superiority and strength.

The Rise Of The ‘Alt Right’ And Religious Right Are Chillingly Similar

Deploying force against Nazis always revealed the lie that they belonged to a “Master Race.” And this was not just military force, mind you, but the rolled-up sleeves and bared fists of ordinary citizens who were determined to prevent the spread of fascism’s cancer. To look at British fascist leader Oswald Mosley disheveled after his rally was shut down by angry East End workers in July 1962 is to look not on the leader of a Master Race, but something considerably more ordinary and pathetic.

As I noted earlier, Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter; coming into contact with it is often destructive for our institutions because it is the personification of bad faith with malice aforethought. The only nonviolent solution is to marginalize Nazism from public life in our society — one may be free to hold these views, but not to try and spread them at the highest echelons of our public fora. When, however, someone like Spencer does come along and is being feted in the mainstream, there are no other options available to us.

The vulnerability of Nazis cannot be revealed through debate — many thinkers who lived through the Second World War, from Karl Popper, to Hannah Arendt, to Jean Paul Sartre, have been quite clear about why dispassionate discourse with men like Richard Spencer is not only pointless, but actively dangerous.

The vulnerability of Nazis cannot be revealed through debate.
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The use of force, by contrast, does reveal the shared humanity that Nazis deny. Our vulnerability is one of the things that links us all, seven billion strong, in a humane fragility. These are essential aspects of our humanity that both Nazi mythology and channer troll culture deny. Punching a Nazi, by contrast, reveals it. It reveals they are no masters, but quite eminently capable of fear, of pain, of vulnerability. And that takes the shine off; it eliminates their mystique, and it puts the lie to the idea that their ideology is an armor against the pains of modernity.

That alone justifies Richard Spencer being punched in the face on camera.

To put it in blunt but unsurprising terms, the world is in shambles right now. Fascism is on the rise again. Hate crimes are up in the U.S. Water crises loom on the horizon. Wealth inequality has never been higher. Climate change and natural disasters abound. Mass shootings galore. Police brutality and racism. A rising threat of nuclear war.

Amidst this nightmarish backdrop, many people — particularly younger Americans — are in search of answers, trying to identify a root cause for all of these problems. And one that’s emerging front and center is our entire economic system.

A 2011 Pew Research Center poll found that a slight majority of liberal Democrats held “negative views” of capitalism. In 2016, a Harvard University study revealed that 51% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 “don’t support” capitalism—and only 42% support it.

So if not capitalism, then what?

The study found young people favor socialism, but that’s not the only alternative. There has been an uptick of interest in a 170-year old political system — that dirtiest of C-words.

Communism.

Amidst a nightmarish backdrop, many people — particularly younger Americans — are in search of answers. Communism.
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It’s no secret that the United States doesn’t have the best relationship with communism; “dirty commie” is an insult as American as apple pie. Much of this is rooted in the The Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, which fueled the Cold War and the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and which had a lasting effect on how people in the U.S. view the political system. Since then, the U.S. government has interfered in multiple countries — supporting coups and assassinating leaders — in order to weed out communism anywhere it popped up. Or was even perceived to pop up.

For some, communism brings up images of the oppressive reigns of Soviet-era Stalin and China’s Mao, and the widespread murders attributed to their regimes. Communism is sometimes thought of as Big Government coming and taking everything you own.

Critics of communism say it goes against human nature, that it can’t work because people are naturally lazy and/or selfish, that it won’t work if the state gives citizens food and shelter for nothing. Frank Zappa famously said, “communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff.” Others say it conflicts with people’s desire for freedom by forcing them to submit to the will of big government.

But is that what communism really is?

To understand the goal of communists, it’s necessary to have a nuanced understanding of communism and its relationship to Marxism — that political movement that so many in the so-called “alt-right” are constantly railing against.

A quick overview: Marxism draws from the work of Karl Marx, a German philosopher, historian, and economist from the 1800s. He and Friedrich Engels co-authored The Communist Manifesto of 1848, and since their passing, communists and other Marx/Engels fans have been interpreting and developing upon their ideas. One expert called communism “the endpoint of Marx’s ideas.”

According to Marx, there is conflict between two classes of people. These are the capitalists — people who control the means of production, such as business owners — and the working class, who actually produce all the concrete goods of our society. In its purest form, communism espouses the belief that the means of production should be in the hands of the workers — not the government.

What many people think of as communism is actually closer to socialism, a related system that has many similarities to communism. It is socialism, not communism, that relies on “big government” to get things done. In socialism, the government owns the means of production rather than the people. In a true communist system, government as we know it today would likely not exist.

In its purest form, communism espouses the belief that the means of production should be in the hands of the workers.
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However, it’s important to keep in mind that these are ideas. The theories of socialism and communism are continually being developed and not every communist agrees with the next about how government should look in a communist society. Many value the idea of a true democracy rather than a representative democracy — every person gets an equal vote on every issue in the community. No one person is given power over others. There are no presidents, no governors, no mayors. In this form, communism actually overlaps with anarchist ideas more so than it does with socialist ideas.

In any case, in recent months, communist ideology has seemed to catch on with more Americans. The Communist Party USA — a national communist organization with 7,000 registered members — has reported a significant spike in interest and membership. According to one article, CPUSA had 5,000 members in April 2017; at that time, the organization’s international secretary said, “There is growing interest in communist ideas.”

Local groups, too, have been invigorated. In my own backyard, the Seattle Communists, a chapter of the Pacific Northwest-based Communist Labor Party, has seen its numbers swell. The organization, which came to life as a spin-off of the Tacoma Communists, had only three dedicated members in the summer of 2016. Now it has 25 to 30 registered members, and a lot more people involved in its community programs (plus more than 800 Facebook followers). It also has high-profile partnerships, including with 2017 mayoral candidate Nikkita Oliver.

When A Changemaker Runs For Mayor: An Interview With Nikkita Oliver
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Why the change? Sophia, Seattle Communists’ secretary-treasurer (who doesn’t want her last name used), has no doubt that the increase in membership has to do with the results of the 2016 election. She calls it the “Trump bump” — and the Seattle Communists aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed.

“Public receptivity has gone from, ‘Is this a joke?’ in 2010 to, ‘Why do you hate freedom’ in 2012 to, ‘Yeah fuck Trump’ in 2016,” a representative of the Tacoma Communists told me. “Blessedly, we hear ‘Where do I sign up?’ just as frequently since last summer.”

This trend parallels the increase in membership for far-right groups — the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that the Klu Klux Klan has anywhere between 5,000 and 8,000 members today. And far-right activity has been featured in the news much more than anything the communists are doing, likely due to the well-documented violent tendencies of fascist and white nationalist organizations. It also helps that they currently have a strong figurehead in Donald Trump, who has been reluctant to condemn them and has employed their people in the White House.

Further, communists believe that fascism happens when capitalism is under threat. As the economic system becomes unstable, white working class people are directed to blame immigrants and people of color and are steered toward white nationalism. Meanwhile, those with class and state power use fascism to defend against the rise of the rest of the working class as their quality of life plummets. In this sense, simultaneous rises in both far right and far left ideas are inevitable under capitalism.

It Wasn’t Just Hate. Fascism Offered Robust Social Welfare.
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Against the backdrop of rising hate and bias nationally, coupled with Seattle’s rampant income and racial inequality, it’s unsurprising to see communism take flight.

“We don’t want the government to own everything,” Sophia tells me. In fact, she emphasizes, communists are widely against the U.S. government — they view it as an oppressive entity and an enemy of the people.

“What is government but a tool that a class uses to control society?”

What communists really want is for state and economic power to be put back in the hands of the community. For it to be communal. Hence, Communism.

To that end, the Seattle Communists — whose slogan is “fight the power, serve the people” — leverage community programs centered on efforts to build social institutions so that people don’t have to rely on the government. Their long-term goal: make it so every part of society is controlled by participatory democracy rather than state power.

The group’s earliest community involvement was in response to the rising rates of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, one they felt the government wasn’t responding to effectively. So the organization revived the “Q-Patrol” program, where volunteers are trained in self-defense and de-escalation techniques. The group is also involved in a “serve the people” food delivery program, launched last October to bring free groceries to poor households.

The group’s idea is to actively work to improve the community in order to gain trust, so when participants hear about communism, they won’t immediately dismiss the idea. Sophia repeatedly tells me about “making the leap from protest to action.”

Although there are misconceptions about communism, Sophia believes that the word doesn’t carry the same stigma that it used to. At least in Seattle, she is frequently asked why she uses the word communism because “doesn’t it scare people away?” But only once has anyone told her that they actually object to the term. “Everybody thinks that everybody hates the word and is scared of the word, but in my experience, not a whole lot of people are.”

The real challenge is to prove that their ideas work.

Many of us grew up with the message (some would say propaganda) that communism is impossible, evil, or both. But a new day might be dawning. It’s possible that communists haven’t seen this kind of interest in their ideas since they were so thoroughly persecuted in the 1950s.

I myself have become very interested in alternatives to capitalism in recent months, and although I can’t say for sure if communism is the answer, I also definitely don’t believe it’s evil, as I was taught growing up. I also know there’s a lot more to it than I could possibly get into in one article.

If you’re interested, there’s plenty of reading out there — and you won’t be alone in your exploration.

The Untold Story Of Memorial Day: Former Slaves Honoring And Mourning The Dead

By Sarah Lazare

The African-American history of the federal holiday has been nearly wiped from public memory.

Union General John Logan is often credited with founding Memorial Day. The commander-in-chief of a Union veterans’ organization called the Grand Army of the Republic, Logan issued a decree establishing what was then named “Decoration Day” on May 5, 1868, declaring it “designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

Today, cities across the North and South claim credit for establishing the first Decoration Day — from Macon, Georgia to Richmond, Virginia to Carbondale, Illinois. Yet, a key story of the holiday has been nearly erased from public memory and most official accounts, including that offered by the the Department of Veterans Affairs.

During the spring of 1865, African-Americans in Charleston, South Carolina — most of them former slaves — held a series of memorials and rituals to honor unnamed fallen Union soldiers and boldly celebrate the struggle against slavery. One of the largest such events took place on May first of that year but had been largely forgotten until David Blight, a history professor at Yale University, found records at a Harvard archive. In a New York Times article published in 2011, Blight described the scene. While it is difficult to pinpoint the precise birthplace of the holiday, it is fair to say that ceremonies like the following are largely erased from the American narrative of Memorial Day.

During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.

After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

A key story of the holiday has been nearly erased from public memory and most official accounts.

The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.

After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.

This story of Memorial Day, also reported by Victoria M. Massie of Vox, was not merely excluded from the history books but appears to have been actively suppressed. The park where the race course prison camp once stood was eventually named Hampton Park after the Confederate General Wade Hampton who became South Carolina’s governor following the civil war.

In 1966, former President Lyndon B. Johnson declared Waterloo, New York to be the official birthplace of Memorial Day. Then, in 1971, Congress established “Memorial Day” as an official federal holiday to honor all Americans who have fallen in U.S. Wars. In an article published in 2013 on Snopes.com, writer David Mikkelson used these official declarations, as well as the decree issued by Logan, to bolster his argument that African-Americans in Charleston probably should not be credited for establishing the holiday. He further noted that numerous other towns and cities claim to have created the first ceremonies. Yet, Mikkelson’s reasoning fails to account for the systematic and proven appropriation, erasure and distortion of African-American history by presidents, lawmakers, generals and scholars alike. The fact that the role of African-Americans is missing from the official record is precisely the problem. At the very least, the contribution of Black people in Charleston has been erased from the public narrative of Memorial Day and deserves to be recognized.

World War II veteran Howard Zinn argued in 1976 that the holiday has since become an uncritical celebration of war-making. “Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees,” he wrote. “Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.”

Yet Memorial Day has other troubling modern-day manifestations. Today, while confederate symbols across the United States are increasingly rejected as racist, civil war reenactors still gather in Charleston for a public ceremony, held shortly after Memorial Day, to honor the confederacy on the anniversary of General Stonewall Jackson’s death in 1863. The ceremony is slated to take place even after last summer’s white supremacist massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in which nine African-Americans were slaughtered.

Mikkelson’s reasoning fails to account for the systematic and proven appropriation, erasure and distortion of African-American history.

Charleston officials have taken some small steps towards recognizing the city’s African-American history. Following a community campaign, the city of Charleston finally held its first formal commemoration of the African-American roots of Memorial Day in 2010, and the following year it established a plaque. Yet, the history of former slaves’ efforts to give the union dead a proper burial is missing from the park’s official history, made available online by the Parks Conservancy.

Dot Scott, president of the Charleston branch of the NAACP, told AlterNet, “Many of the issues we have around race are based on the fact that these stories have not been told. It sends the message that the contributions of African-Americans are not valued and respected.”

*This article was updated to include a response to a Snopes.com article.

This story first appeared at AlterNet, and is republished here with permission.

W hen I was in graduate school, I worked part-time in retail. One of my co-workers — let’s call him Jake — was a white gay man who liked to tell stories about his various dating exploits each time we had a shift together. These conversations quickly went from amusing to problematic. Jake’s tales frequently centered on his conservative rural upbringing, his “love” of black men, in part because of how “masculine” he thought they were, and how he didn’t like guys who were too “femme.” “How would your family react if you were dating someone who wasn’t white?” I asked, trying to make small talk during a lull between customers. “That would never happen,” Jake said. “Black men are for fucking; white men are for bringing home to your family.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the frankness of his words stunned me into silence for the remainder of my shift. I later tried to make Jake aware of his racism, but he said that had nothing to do with him. He couldn’t possibly be racist because he was attracted to black men. Not long after, I quit in order to have more time to focus on my dissertation. Jake tried to reach out to me via social media. When I saw that his Instagram feed was comprised primarily of images of muscular black men, I declined to follow him back.

Jake’s attitudes are a microcosm of many of the toxic behaviors enacted by white gay cisgender men: the adulation of conventional masculinity and muscularity, the rejection of femininity as undesirable, and the sexual objectification of black and Latino men due to their supposed exoticism and hypermasculinity.

In light of the #MeToo movement and the exposure of sexual violence and misconduct in Hollywood, the federal government, and society at large, much attention has been directed towards the toxic behaviors exhibited by heterosexual men that contribute to a culture in which sexual violence and misconduct thrive. There has been little mainstream discussion of the ways white gay male culture, in particular, is rife with its own brand of toxic masculinity.

Here’s How Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us In So Many Ways

Still, the conversation is beginning to move in positive ways. Jacob Tobia, in a recent New York Times op-ed, critiqued the film Love, Simon for portraying its lead character as “the right kind of gay” (typically masculine, not flamboyant) in contrast to the character of Ethan, a queer black gender nonconforming teen. Ethan’s story is underexplored and, as Tobia argues, his racial and gender nonconformity are presented as a foil to Simon’s average white masculinity, telling gay teens it’s okay to be gay as long as you are gay in a “respectable” way.

But I disagree with Tobia that Netflix’s reboot of Queer Eye follows this same formula. In my opinion, Jonathan Van Ness, Queer Eye’s “grooming expert” and an unabashedly femme gay man, carries the show. In contrast to Van Ness’ dynamic personality, his more masculine counterparts, such as Antoni Porowski and Karamo Brown, recede into the background. Van Ness’ expression of gayness is depicted as equally valid, not as a trope to highlight normative masculinity. Queer Eye has its problems, but foregrounding a gay man like Van Ness is a welcome change to the mainstream media’s typical representations of respectably masculine gay men. However, Van Ness’ popularity is the exception that proves the rule.

Gay male toxicity contributes both to the oppression of queer men and to the pervasive culture of violence against women (particularly any who are feminine, people of color, and/or trans) and anyone outside of the gender binary. If we are serious about eradicating sexual violence in all its forms, then we must move beyond discussions of toxic masculinity that center heterosexuality and work to name and uproot the toxic behaviors of both dominant and marginalized men alike.

The phrase “toxic masculinity,” oft-cited in social justice circles, originates from the work of psychiatrist Terry A. Kupers. Though Kupers focuses on how so-called “toxic” expressions of masculinity impact men’s mental health outcomes in prison settings, scholars and activists have found his concept more broadly applicable, particularly as a way to describe how masculinity fosters a culture rife with sexual violence.

All expressions of masculinity are not inherently toxic. Kupers differentiates between what we might refer to as “typical” masculinity — the dominant or “normal” notion of masculinity within a particular context that stipulates what it means to be a “real man” — and certain aspects of masculinity that have socially harmful, or toxic, effects. “Toxic masculinity,” he explains, “is the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence.” In other words, “toxic masculinity” embodies a constellation of the worst aspects of masculinity as a whole.

Because toxic masculinity is defined, in part, by expressions of homophobia, we may falsely assume that regressive male traits are the property of straight men alone. Gay, bi, or queer masculinity, because they differ from the ideal, are often positioned as inherently transgressive.

Sexual minority men, however, are still exposed to the same expectations of masculinity as all men, and can also exhibit socially regressive traits, though they may not look exactly like those expressed by their heterosexual counterparts. If toxic masculinity as a whole is based primarily on the domination of women, then gay toxic masculinity is based on stigmatizing and subjugating femmes, queer men of color, and trans men via body norms, racism, and transphobia.

Sexual minority men, however, are still exposed to the same expectations of masculinity as all men.
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Gay culture, like the dominant culture, creates a hierarchy based on norms of masculinity. At the top are those who occupy the position of what we might call the “normate gay”: those who are thin, toned, muscular, white, cis, able-bodied, and express their gender in conventionally masculine ways. Despite pervasive stereotypes that gay men are improperly feminine in comparison to straight men, gay male culture often dictates that conventional masculinity is the most desirable. This hierarchy of gay masculinity also contributes to our inescapable culture of sexual violence. Part of masculinity is domination over those deemed feminine (not solely those who possess “female” bodies), so sexual violence functions as one way to reinforce what it means to be “masculine.”

A conventionally masculine appearance is prized within mainstream gay male culture. Indeed, it is not uncommon for gay men to post images of their toned bodies and exercise routines on social media, or to express their preference for men who are “straight acting” on dating apps. Preferences for masculinity indirectly shame those whose bodies are “soft,” “curvaceous,” or “fat” — qualities associated with femininity — and position femininity as shameful and undesirable. Body shaming and policing, therefore, support the invalidation of femininity as a legitimate way of occupying the world. As someone who often inhabits gay male spaces — though I identify as queer — I witness such behaviors on a near-daily basis.

The Remarkable Intersection Of Anal Sex And Toxic Masculinity

Gay men who care about physical fitness or their appearance are not automatically toxic. It is understandable, to a certain extent, that gay men would seek to challenge the stereotype that they are feminine or “sissies” by masculinizing their bodies through diet and exercise. This challenge, however, ultimately has toxic effects by reinforcing gender norms as opposed to subverting them.

Gay men can choose to care about their appearance, or express preferences for hypothetical partners, while also working to undo the systems that oppress those who do not conform to normative standards of masculinity. Too often, gay men seek to alleviate body shame and feelings of unworthiness by disciplining their bodies and policing the bodies of others who do not conform to masculine standards of appearance. While adhering to masculine norms may temporarily mitigate the effects of oppression, conformity does little to dismantle the systems which cause it.

Gay toxic masculinity also manifests in the form of racism and transphobia. Jake, for example, fetishized black men both for their racial difference and due to the fact he saw them as hypermasculine and therefore more desirable. Racial stereotypes intersect with those of gender and sexuality to exacerbate toxic masculinity in gay male culture, primarily through sexual objectification.

Mainstream white gay male culture objectifies queer men of color who, because of racial stereotypes, are seen as desirably masculine (such as black and Latino men) and shames queer men of color who are seen as undesirably feminine (such as Asian men). Furthermore, gay toxic masculinity is often transphobic, as it invalidates the identities of transgender men who may be seen as unable to fulfill the criteria of what it means to be a “real man” because their sex assigned at birth is emphasized over their gender identity and expression.

How Can The Queerest Generation (Ever) Still Believe In Gender Roles?

The #MeToo movement, particularly through the case of Aziz Ansari, has brought to light the difference between behaviors that are illegal versus those that are socially detrimental. While some expressions of toxic masculinity may not be criminal, they are, nevertheless, harmful and speak to the necessity of a broad shift to address our current culture of pervasive sexual violence. To this end, we cannot leave white gay men’s toxic behaviors and the general toxicity of mainstream gay male culture untouched.

Some of this can be done by calling on others to change their behavior, whether by pointing out instances of gay toxic masculinity when you see them, asking both mainstream and LGBTQ media to present diverse representations of masculinity, or amplifying the voices of those who don’t conform to masculine stereotypes.

But the hardest work is internal, especially when it comes to expressing “preferences.” We often mistakenly feel that our attractions are just what they are, rather than influenced by social context. As social justice educator Beverly Daniel Tatum explains, “racism is like smog in the air.” In other words, even though we may not see ourselves as racist, if we live and are socialized in a racist society, we invariably absorb its prejudices. Jake didn’t get the idea that all black men were “hypermasculine” out of nowhere.

We cannot help but breathe in whatever toxic particles are in the air. Just as we cannot simply choose to stop breathing, we cannot exempt ourselves from exposure to racist, sexist, and queerphobic images and messaging. You can’t force yourself to be attracted to anyone, but you can interrogate the societal influences on your preferences.

We often mistakenly feel that our attractions are just what they are, rather than influenced by social context.
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Privilege and oppression do not cancel each other out. Because they are on the receiving end of homophobia, white cisgender gay men, in particular, may perceive themselves as incapable of oppressing more marginal members of the LGBTQ community. Intersectionality forces us to consider the ways we are simultaneously privileged and oppressed and to broaden the lens through which we view the world beyond our subjective experiences.

White gay men can no longer profit from the toil and labor of their queer ancestors — many of whom were trans, femmes, and people of color — without also holding themselves accountable and working to dismantle the systems that oppress those who fall outside masculine, white, cis, and able-bodied ideals. The implications of gay toxic masculinity extend beyond gay male culture and contribute to our general culture of misogyny in which women, femmes, genderqueer people, and others who don’t or can’t perform mainstream masculinity are consistently devalued and undermined, often in violent and dehumanizing ways.

If white gay men are committed to the work of our collective liberation, then they must take a hard look at their own behaviors, because their time, too, is up.

Men who hate women will continue to hate us, and hurt us, no matter how much sex they’re having.

flickr/StephenRMelling

A s a woman who makes a living putting pen to paper, my second worst fear is that I will communicate so poorly that I’m misunderstood (I’ll leave you to guess what the worst fear is). So I have a certain amount of empathy for Ross Douthat fretting about that very thing after a severe backlash to his latest New York Times column, entitled “The Redistribution of Sex.” My empathy went out like a tide when I recalled that, in typical fashion, he refuses to be honest about the implications of his crypto-misogynistic thought experiments.

In the piece, he argues that while leftists and feminists are opposed to the idea that anyone is entitled to sex, this is a natural and logical outcome of societies that “look for fixes that seem to build on previous revolutions, rather than reverse them.” As he sees it, our vaunted sexual revolution means that we are inevitably sliding towards the society yearned for by mass-murdering misogynists like Elliot Rodger or Alek Minassian, because we have imbued sex with so much value — both personal and political — in the wake of the 1960s.

This has been mischaracterized as Douthat arguing in favor of the “incels’” ideal world. He doesn’t, but this is hardly exculpatory. While the caricature of Douthat’s argument misses the particulars, it nevertheless captures the spirit of a piece that is resolutely androcentric and utterly ignorant of sexual culture.

This Is The Story Of The Story I Can’t Write

Although Douthat is not in favor of this proposed redistribution, by entertaining the idea at all and going so far as to propose it as an inevitable dystopia (which, really, is the fault of us damn feminists for wanting too much sexual choice) he nevertheless embraces fundamental aspects of a worldview shared by reactionary malefactors like incels and men’s rights activists. It all starts with the “sexual hierarchy” that he and other writers have cited as a social problem that gives rise to incel terrorism. In short, they can’t get dates or get laid, so they blame women and society at large; inevitably, some act out violently. But accepting this argument is to take the embittered propaganda of these communities at face value. There’s a difference between understanding that a worldview can shape behavior, and implying that the worldview is factually correct.

Thus, without endorsing their ends, Douthat endorses an MRA view of sexuality. He simply proposes a more conservative solution, arguing “that our widespread isolation and unhappiness and sterility might be dealt with by reviving or adapting older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence.”

“The sexual revolution,” he argues, “created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.” This is strikingly similar to an equally credulous analysis advanced by the nominally leftist thinker Angela Nagle, who writes:

“Sexual patterns that have emerged as a result of the decline of monogamy have seen a greater level of sexual choice for an elite of men and growing celibacy among a large male population at the bottom of the pecking order.”

Pun unintended, I’m certain. Nagle’s words, which even more explicitly regurgitate MRA-ish talking points about sexual elites and celibacy, were passed around after the Toronto massacre by other leftists as “a perceptive point” about these men who keep killing women en masse. What Nagle and Douthat share, aside from being all too willing to take the promoters of these extreme views at face value, is an argument that fails to account for the existence of women and queer people.

There’s a difference between understanding that a worldview can shape behavior, and implying that the worldview is factually correct.

In short, we have a good A/B test available to us that suggests the problem isn’t sex and who’s getting it, but how different groups conceive of their entitlement to it, and what they do about it.

So let’s break this down.

There’s a sexual hierarchy, but nerdy young white guys aren’t the only ones on the wrong side of it.

It is striking to me that these conversations proceed almost entirely without discussing women who are perceived of as sexually undesirable. Fat women, disabled women, nerdy women, non-white women, trans women, all fall short of beauty standards that are structured by prejudices as much as the advent of the “sexual revolution.”

Douthat does mention this when he tries to use a recent essay by Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan to buttress his argument, where he notes that Srinivasan makes the exact point I just made, but then breezes over its implications entirely except to suggest — bizarrely — that she implies sexually undesirable minorities must someday be redressed by the very “redistribution” feminists find so appalling. Neither Srinivasan, nor myself, nor indeed anyone in that milieu has ever made that argument nor sought to imply it. Douthat was undaunted: “This wouldn’t instantiate a formal right to sex,” he says of Srinivasan’s argument, “…but if the new order worked as its revolutionary architects intended, sex would be more justly distributed than it is today.”

This is speculation in its purest form and it mistakes analysis of ideology (recognizing that norms of attractiveness and desirability are highly politically charged) for a proposal of a “redistributive” solution. But beyond this, it also ignores the elephant in the room. If all of these groups experience a certain dislocation and loneliness from being on the wrong side of sexual hierarchies, why aren’t we awash in mass murderers from those groups? Where are the lonely, nerdy women who kill because they can’t get a date on Tinder? Where are all the black women mowing down pedestrians in a rental van because society’s beauty standards aggressively privilege whiteness? In failing to grapple with this, every writer who entertains incel/MRA ideology, even as a mere thought experiment, makes a catastrophic analytical error.

Being at the bottom of a sexual hierarchy does not mean you don’t have sex.

This is another point that should be obvious but has, apparently, been lost in the vacuous prattle that followed the Toronto killings. Society has hegemonic norms, but people violate them constantly and form microcultures. As an autistic transgender woman with non-white features, I’m certainly on the “wrong” side of a few beauty hierarchies in this society and I pay a price for that; I still have sex and two very committed partners with whom I share very deep connections.

Sexual hierarchies can be fluid and micrological. In some communities, they may even be reversed outright. This doesn’t even begin to grapple with how your individual notions of attractiveness, honed over the years by uniquely personal experiences, may affect things. Hierarchies of desirability do have an impact, but not necessarily on the practical outcome of whether or not you have sex. It may affect your ability to feel sexy, and hurt your self-esteem of course; goddess knows I’ve been there. But that’s less about your ability to have sex, than it is how you feel about yourself and what struggles emerge from that. Through it all, people from every position on the “hierarchy” still manage to frequently find meaningful and exciting relationships.

Sexual hierarchies can be fluid and micrological. In some communities, they may even be reversed outright.

Even a casual glance in your own social circles will reveal many happily bonded people who, in one way or another, are considered socially undesirable or “unattractive” by the ruthless metrics of conventional beauty standards. Meanwhile, our media is saturated with the image of “unattractive” men who are loved deeply by conventionally attractive women; it’s the conceit of a dozen and one sitcoms and it does reflect a partial reality where men who look like, say, Kevin James are quite capable of finding loving relationships. (I say “partial” because, naturally, it fails to reflect what life is like for women of all shapes and sizes.)

In short…

Sexual hierarchies aren’t really about sex.

They’re wired in to all manner of socio-economic and political mores, certainly, but bear only a passing relationship to your actual ability to find dates and slap your genitals against someone else’s. Rather, they are norms about social value which determine other aspects of your reality that are untethered to your sex life. For women, those who are seen as conventionally attractive will have to endure constant imprecations about their careers — “is she sleeping her way to the top?” will haunt her every step, and her beauty will be taken as blanket consent for everything from drawing porn of her against her will to dismissing her point of view to undervaluing her accomplishments.

The Case For BDSM As A Feminist Manifesto In Art

Conventionally “unattractive” women, meanwhile, will be ruthlessly mocked and derided by men (including incels — just look at what they say about women they deem undesirable, impervious to irony as reactionary bigots often must be). Such women may be ignored outright or deemed unworthy of making even professional connections with, seen as uncharismatic, unhealthy, or shamed for what they look like.

This is all, indeed, a function of the sexual hierarchy; but it’s markedly unrelated to one’s sex life as such. Which brings me to the final point…

Sex will not cure these extremists.

Implicit in arguments like Nagle’s and Douthat’s is the idea that if only these lonely nerd boys got laid more often, maybe the victims in Isla Vista or Toronto would be alive today.

There’s no evidence to suggest this is the case.

Men who hate women will continue to hate us, and hurt us, no matter how much sex they’re having. Domestically abusive men are often having sex with the partners they assault, after all. Meanwhile men like Harvey Weinstein or Roger Ailes were, indeed, raping countless women. These men were getting the sex they wanted, at the expense of women who were forced into silent submission to their power. In fact, as heterosexual men who were married they were, to a large extent, living Douthat’s ideal. But, if anything, their abuses begat more of the same; nothing was ever enough, and each new assault seemed only to feed a void that grew into the prodigious litany of crimes that each man is now justly infamous for.

These men were getting the sex they wanted, at the expense of women who were forced into silent submission to their power.

The cancer must be cut out from the root. Implying, as so many often do, that the solution is to “give” sex to men like Minassian is merely to feed the lust of insatiable loathing. The problem is not that they aren’t having enough sex; the problem is that they despise women, and will do so no matter how much sex they’re having.

The proposition that sex is “unequally distributed,” which is taken for granted in all of these chin-stroking arguments, is a highly contestable claim. Being outside of hegemonic beauty norms does not inherently deny you love or sex; your place in that hierarchy instead shapes other things untethered to your actual sex life.

Yet this dubious claim has legs because, as ever, we must privilege the perspective of the loudest and angriest men as worth consideration. The scope of their entitlement determines the seriousness with which we must take their worldview, however horribly skewed it may be. Thus, lightly laundered mainstream interpretations of this worldview linger, despite the obviously dehumanizing implication of likening women to a currency or resource that must be paternalistically apportioned by the powers that be.

Douthat laments that progressives seem to be demanding that “the greatest possible diversity in sexual desires and tastes and identities should be not only accepted but cultivated, and that virginity and celibacy are at best strange and at worst pitiable states.” But by disingenuously linking these two things, he poisons the discussion he claims to want to have. Asexual people, after all, don’t figure into Douthat’s argument. Yet, as a political force, they’ve argued very forcefully against the idea of compulsory sexuality — and done so in a way that neither shades into anti-feminism, nor into arguing that the sexual revolution was some kind of mistake. Theirs is a call for greater pluralism, a far cry from Douthat’s lustful homogenization.

The proposition that sex is ‘unequally distributed,’ which is taken for granted in all of these chin-stroking arguments, is a highly contestable claim.

It’s old hat by now to claim that crimes like Rodger’s or Minassian’s are the fault of growing liberalization, that somehow women’s choice has left some men so forlorn that they can only resort to murder. There is no way to take this argument seriously without courting a misogynistic worldview that stands ignorant of even obvious facts. Even if Douthat is worried about the coming of a “redistributive” sexual culture, such concerns are founded on the hot air of hyper-ideological drivel that he had no business entertaining in one of the nation’s largest newspapers. But I can see why he did: His preferred prescription for us would see — as always — women and queer people stripped of our rights and, presumably, forced into straight and monogamous relationships. In the end, Douthat does seem to believe in “redistribution,” just of an altogether different sort to produce a society akin to his fantasy of the 1950s.

In the end, all that needs to be said is this: Incels and their ilk do indeed believe they’re entitled to sex, and that such contact would cure them of all that ails them, sparing society from their wrath and vengeance.

We do not have to take them at their word.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/what-happened-that-made-us-numb-to-these-deaths-8dcc2d8fcf5e/ Wed, 02 May 2018 21:34:02 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2603 Read more]]> When a school shooting hits close to home, everything reminds me how unsafe we really are.

I didn’t have a name for all the feelings that resided in me when I thought of Janeera.

What I did know was that I refused to go to the Texan famous Whataburger restaurant because the part of me that was Californian was loyal to In-N-Out. Eventually I relented and said my first time would be with her.

What I did know is that we took goofy videos of us on the bridge behind our community college that she posted on an obscure photo sharing app.

What I did know was that we kept postponing our hiking — we called it exploring — plans beyond the bridge, because we just knew we would be tired and aching and would complain about it for the rest of the week.

What I did know was that if I went to school the day she was murdered, she would have walked me to my class’s building on the opposite side of the school.

And she would still be alive.

Friendship opportunities during community college were scarce. Sure, I was lonely, but was it really worth making friends in this new state when I could possible move again when I transferred to university? I figured I could probably last one more semester.

After the first week of spring semester, I entered my Spanish class about 2 minutes earlier than usual and noticed a small girl sitting in the seat next to mine. I sat down, settled my things, and asked her how she had fared through the homework.

We consistently became the only people that showed up to the class that early. I told her that I came early because if I even came in a minute late, everyone’s heads would swivel in my direction. And even if only for a second, their attention would be solely on me, and the idea of that made me want to vomit. I sucked in a deep breath of air after the fat text bubble I had just blurted out. She agreed with me.

And from then on, an unexpected friendship bloomed.

Janeera and I would hang out at the bridge behind the school. She called the bridge a secret; she said that nobody ever hangs around this far behind campus. So we claimed the “secret” bridge as our own and went there almost every day.

On the school’s side of the bridge was a garden — it was green with mold and just the right amount of neglect that made it feel a little sad. It had tall trees with leaves covering the sky and the occasional duck that had strayed from the small stream under the bridge. It was always cold there, but she never wore jackets––she said she didn’t feel so cold. The other side of the bridge was what we called the forest. A forest was too big of a word for what it really was; a cluster of trees with a few trails here and there to make it walkable.

One cloudy day we stood on the bridge and looked over to see the muddy waters below us slowly undulate away. She told me about how she identified with her Hispanic culture and how the political climate made her upset — not angry, she reiterated. Just sad.

“What’s your opinion on guns?” I asked. “I hate them. I would feel safer with more gun control.”

“I also believe in gun control,” she replied. “But I like the concept of gun ownership. What about you?”

“I am scared to death of guns,” I told her.

I didn’t go to school the day she died. There was no reason for my absence — I was lazy and the spring semester was winding down as summer approached. My phone started to light up around 10 a.m. — someone in my history class group chat asked if anyone else had heard the noises that sounded like shots. They all replied no. I told them I skipped classes that day. A few moments later, someone else in the group chat said that yes, the noises were real gun shots, and that they were following intruder protocols right that moment.

I scoured local new sites, incredulous that a shooting would happen in the small suburb of nowhere Irving, Texas. I pulled down the touchscreen on my phone, morbidly curious for the next update. Every refreshing of the page followed was followed by a dark curiosity accompanied with a pit of dread. Thank god I wasn’t at school, I thought.

I didn’t even text Janeera to see if she was fine.

The evening the shooting happened, I went to Panera Bread with a family friend. I had macaroni and cheese and an M&M cookie. My history class group chat lit up again with the latest update on the incident: that there was a reported one fatality.

“Thank God,” one of them texted. I clicked on the link and the first image on my phone screen was Janeera’s face with a flower crown Snapchat filter on her head. I excused myself and shuffled my way through the restaurant until I stood still in a bathroom stall. The idea that my only friend, a quickly close friend was dead — no, murdered — was unbelievably impossible for me to grasp. I didn’t know how shock felt, but I was sure it felt like it did then.

The feelings that flowed through me were foreign. How was I supposed to untangle my emotions if I had no idea how to handle them?

How was I supposed to untangle my emotions if I had no idea how to handle them?
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I told my mother about Janeera. She didn’t understand that I wanted to lay my head on her lap and cry. I told a friend about Janeera. She didn’t take me seriously. I suppose it has to do with the façade that I wear that everyone sees: I’m funny, I make jokes, I’m never serious, and I definitely do not have friends that are victims of gun violence. She just looked at me and asked if I was joking. Why would I be joking? I answered back.

One hot day, I walked across the bridge to the forest for the first time ever. I followed the path between the trees and not a single tear formed in my eyes. Which was strange for who I was, I normally cried at the simplest of things.

When Janeera’s brother messaged me on Twitter with information about her wake and funeral, I cried.

When my history group didn’t believe that I was Janeera’s friend and I basically had to prove to them that I actually was Janeera’s friend, I cried.

When I listened to “Blue Jeans” by Lana Del Rey — a song we used to listen to — I cried.

Why Are We Used To Violence But Caught Off Guard By Hurt?

So yes, it was quite strange that after all the talk we had about our potential exploration, I didn’t cry when I went into the woodsy area without her.

I walked for about two hours. My headscarf burned an embarrassing tan line around my face and my Converse high-tops were definitely not the right shoes for the activity.

When I went to Whataburger for the first time with a few coworkers, I remembered my promise to Janeera that my first time trying the traditional Texas staple would be with her. I didn’t cry then, too. I felt melancholy; a longing for a friend who understood me in a way that I thought rare for someone as complicated as myself.

The police say that this man was stalking her after she had turned him down multiple times. If that story was correct, I knew nothing about it. She never told me about a guy persistently asking her out on dates, or that he was following her. I wondered why. Every time I walked outside and saw a man holding an object, or walking a little too fast, or with his hands in his pockets, panic began to brew in my chest. Theoretically, I knew that every man wasn’t a potential school shooter, but there was a small part of my mind that totally believed that every man was.

I was lying down on my bed and scrolling through my phone. School had been canceled and professors sent out emails addressing Janeera’s death. Teachers were giving out accommodations on finals due to the tragedy. My Spanish teacher called me personally after she sent out a class email. I picked up the incoming call and when the professor told me who it was, tears slipped out of my eyes as I remembered the way our friendship had begun.

I didn’t understand the pull that made her use a tragedy for comedic purposes.
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A girl I knew recorded a few “story time” videos about the shooting and posted them on Snapchat. Her videos were of her laughing and making inappropriate jokes about the gun and the man. I tapped on the screen to skip to other clips of her talking. She continued to laugh and joke.

“And as soon I heard those gunshots, I got up and sprinted! I didn’t wait for any professor or anything!” She laughed hysterically. “At least only one girl got shot — she should have run like I did!” More laughter.

I didn’t understand the pull that made her use a tragedy for comedic purposes. And honestly, as stories go, it wasn’t even the slightest bit funny. A few days later, she approached me at school. She offered her condolences and wrapped her arm around me in a halfhearted hug. I wondered if people talked to me to become closer to tragedy. I accepted her words but eventually walked away. All I could hear were her videos and how she trivialized Janeera’s death.

Spring semester was my last time physically at school until I eventually transferred to Seattle University, the following year.

Something about the school felt out of place, like it had shifted in its fixed position in time and space. Someone had been shot dead at our school.

Janeera used to sit at this particular couch that was to the side of the college’s common room. We would meet there and sit for an hour or so before heading to our Spanish class. I don’t know exactly where she died, but a morbid piece of my mind imagines she was shot on that couch.

Something about the school felt out of place, like it had shifted in its fixed position in time and space.
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I imagine her face in shock as she realizes that she is about to die, I imagine the bullets hitting her as she bleeds through her clothes, staining the carpeted floor and couch. I know that following that trail of thought will not get me anywhere productive, but I can’t help but follow it anyway. The idea of walking into school and passing the common room everyday sickened me.

When brainstorming this piece, I sat and talked to a close friend. She has a degree in sociology, and is the perfect person to turn to when you need help with big pictures in social settings. “Why do you think that some school shootings get more attention than others?” I asked. “What happened that made us numb to these deaths?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Later that day, the news broke on the Parkland school shooting on Valentine’s Day 2018. The thoughts that ran through my head when I heard of the tragedy— I knew they were not logical.

Every rational part of me knew that these thoughts were unreasonable, but the combination sadness and guilt overrode the logic. I thought: “I spoke the shooting into existence when I speculated aloud earlier. And it’s my fault.” For the rest of the day as I refreshed the news on my phone, I berated myself for causing the tragedy: If only I had chosen a different topic to write on, if only I had kept my mouth shut and not asked stupid questions, 17 kids would still be alive and I would be spared from having to revisit the death of my friend as if it was the first day.

The vigor that I see in the Stoneman Douglas high school students inspires me. They say every movement starts with one moment. And I think that we are in a moment right now — the high school students that are demanding for their safety is a moment. The national and international support, and the momentum they have is a moment. Their ability to organize events, marches, and movements in less than one month is a moment.

I can only hope that I can tap into my strength and contribute my voice to a cause that is deeply personal to me.

It took me six months to tell my therapist about Janeera. During the session I used nearly half of her tissues. She called it a “multiple Kleenex day.” After the session, she gave me a hug. She had never hugged me before.

Dr. Novinsky told me that I didn’t know for sure that if I was at school that day Janeera wouldn’t have died. In fact, she told me that if this man was stalking her, he would have known that she would be with me and I would be dead, too.

And I wonder if death would have been more peaceful than the seemingly perpetual sadness that followed me long after Janeera’s death.

People care a lot more about whether or not Bernie Sanders might have said something mildly sexist 35 years ago than they do about whether sex workers live or die.

flickr/Phil Roeder

For years, I have been writing on Twitter about the impact of legislation on sex workers, which is to say, on my community. Sometimes people pay attention, sometimes strangers write to me about it, sometimes I get threats and name-calling.

But never have I faced on the internet the kind of vitriol or the kind of frighteningly zealous support as I have since I told a family story online last week about Bernie Sanders behaving less-than-perfectly-progressive toward my mother some time in the early ’80s:

My whole life, my mother has told this story: she went to a democratic socialists’ convention when I was about a year and a half old where they had promised there would be childcare. She showed up, with me. They said,

???@MissLoreleiLee

Sorry, we didn't get the money we thought we'd get, so we cut the childcare." So she was like, okay, taking my kid to these talks then. She went to hear the keynote speaker. We were in the back of the room. I was playing with a toy and making some toddler noises.

???@MissLoreleiLee

The keynote speaker stopped what he was saying and said, "could someone tell that child to be quiet.

???@MissLoreleiLee

My mother has never been a patient woman. She lost it. She stood up and started to shout. "How dare you," she said. "How dare you pretend to support families and working women when the first thing you cut during a budgeting failure is childcare.

???@MissLoreleiLee

She definitely said it with more swearing.

???@MissLoreleiLee

Folks, that keynote speaker she stood up and swore at was Bernie Sanders.

???@MissLoreleiLee

The response to the tweet was overwhelming. As it turns out, people care a lot more about whether or not Bernie Sanders might have said something mildly sexist 35 years ago to a “porn star’s mom” — as a Newsweek story about my tweet put it — than they do about whether sex workers live or die.

Even after many years of living in the world as a sex worker, after the deaths of so many friends and coworkers — some of them uninvestigated and unreported, others followed by online comments like “good thing she’s dead” — the passion with which people will apply themselves to protecting (or destroying) the reputation of a politician, while ignoring the impact of legislation he supports, still surprises me.

Sanders, along with 96 other Senators, passed H.R. 1865, also known as FOSTA-SESTA (or just SESTA) on March 21. On April 11, Trump signed the bill into law. SESTA removes protections in section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to create new civil and criminal liability for “anyone who owns, manages, or operates” a website “with the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person.” The law does not clarify what this means. Is warning other sex workers about dangerous clients (as workers have done online for many years) facilitating prostitution? What about sharing safety and health information with sex working people? How many harm-reduction tactics are now against federal law? How will the owners, managers, and operators of social media and other communications websites respond to this, and what impact will that have on already-marginalized people?

The Legislation That Would Harm Sex Workers—In The Name Of Their Own Protection

For months before this law passed, my friends and I wrote to reporters, we tweeted and posted to Instagram and called our representatives and made as much noise as we could. It seemed obvious that this legislation would be devastating to the safety of our loved ones, and had the potential to cut all of us off from each other by making us a liability to websites that facilitate the everyday online forms of communication everyone has come to rely on. When the bill passed the Senate, our predictions came immediately true.

Websites that sex workers relied on to screen clients shut down. Google Play and Microsoft changed their terms of service. Skype and Microsoft Office have banned “offensive language” and “inappropriate content,” to go into effect on May 1. Google Drive began to delete sex workers’ content and lock out users. Sex workers started an alternative social media site called “Switter,” to ensure we would have a place to communicate with each other if we were summarily kicked off of social media. This week, Switter was kicked off of its content delivery network.

There has been other impact as well: reports of an increase in sex workers working outdoors, and stories about friends who have gone missing or harmed themselves. A friend had her bank account frozen. Another friend said that though she’d had plans to leave the adult industry, the hostility of the current climate had convinced her she would not be able to do any other kind of work. This impact is widespread and has hit folks whose work was criminalized as well as those doing legal forms of sex work such as stripping and working in adult film.

Since the law passed, my friends and I have been holding meetings, gathering donations for sex worker emergency funds, sharing information with each other as quickly and as widely as we can. All of us are frightened. All of us are angry. I’ve posted continuously about this impact on social media. I’ve criticized celebrities and politicians who supported these policies. Yes, to all of you writing to me, I’m angry at Kamala Harris too.

But my mom never yelled at Kamala Harris, as far as I know.

The story I wrote on Twitter has never been, in my family, a story about Bernie Sanders. It has always been a story about my mother. It’s a story about her standing up to authority, as she frequently has done, when she believed that what they were doing was wrong. Prior to his presidential bid, Sanders was incidental to the story’s telling. It is a family story. When he began to campaign in 2016, the funny part of the story became the fact that the politician mom once yelled at was now famous. Incidentally, most of us supported Sanders in the primaries. I even gave an interview in 2016 in which I said that I believed his policies would be better for sex workers than the policies of the other candidates. In my house, we had no trouble reconciling someone’s once less-than-perfect behavior with a larger question of who might implement the best overall policies.

I did not fact-check the story before I posted it. I’ve criticized many politicians on my social media, and I’ve shared many personal stories. I have never before had something I posted retweeted thousands of times and then reported as news. Perhaps I should have been more savvy. It’s easy to say, in retrospect, that I should have known how the internet can take hold of something and make it symbolic of one hundred other things. That I should have foreseen, with the recent attention paid to Stormy Daniels, the temptation for online publications to write anything with a headline referencing a “porn star” and a political figure. I did not foresee these things.

Among the hundreds of messages I received were:

“Better disrespect your mom than grab her pussy”

“she raised a porn star so she probably deserved it”

“Porn actresses are just whores with contracts”

“Couldn’t they use that whore who took down Al Franken again?”

“I think you’re a Russian bot middle aged white women trump supporter go home to Moscow traitor”

“Why do white women have to lie?”

“HAHA that’s right, you better fucking hide you liar.”

“You scared?”

Strip Club Raids And Closures Are Weapons Of Gentrification

There were some people who seemed to have spent hours researching the details of my tweets — in order to “debunk” them. They wanted “the truth.” I did some googling with the scant additional information I have about the incident. My family members disagree about the exact details of time and place, and I couldn’t determine with certainty whether the story was true or not. My family believes that it is. I did not, initially, question its truth. In part because I grew up with it, but also because the details about Sanders himself seem utterly banal. That a man might have told a woman to keep her child quiet while he talks seemed to me utterly unsurprising. The only part of the story that I find remarkable is that the woman stood up and shouted rather than leave the room. But my mother has always been that kind of remarkable.

The internet commenters who were the most vicious seemed to believe that I had been paid to write these tweets, that they were part of a calculated political “smear.” They seemed to believe (perhaps accurately) that this kind of anecdote holds more political power than any kind of substantive analysis ever could. I will tell you, I did not post this story with the intention of doing even minimal harm to Sanders, or with the hubris that I might be capable of doing such harm. Despite my rage at the impact of H.R. 1865 on my community, I do not wish harm on anyone who voted for it. What I wish for them is only knowledge.

The story I wrote on Twitter has never been, in my family, a story about Bernie Sanders.

I wrote that story down because I am inspired by my mother. Because I know her to be a woman who has never once kept her mouth shut. Whether or not this story is true about Bernie Sanders, I know it is a true story about my mother. Whether she shouted at Bernie Sanders at a democratic socialists convention (“I think it was actually a democratic socialists conference,” she texted me) or at (as another family member remembers it) a rally about a housing bill, or at some other less-famous, equally-imperfect politician at some other kind of early ‘80s leftist political event, the most important part of the story is not where she was or even who she said it to. The most important part is that she refused to cower. That she has always refused to live quietly.

Of course, I want it to be a story about Sanders. I want to know that my fierce and rageful and impolite mother stood up in a crowded room and shouted at one of the 97 people who would, 35 years later, vote to harm her daughter. I want this even though it is petty to want it, even though it does nothing to change the circumstances in which we now live.

On April 18, Sanders wrote:

Cardi B is right. If we are really going to make America great we need to strengthen Social Security so that seniors are able to retire with the dignity they deserve. https://t.co/B8cOkoOdLc

???@SenSanders

I do not disagree with this statement. Former stripper and current genius Cardi B has said many true things. However, what Sanders is doing with this tweet is a move that is as old as sex work. Anyone who has been a sex worker has seen this behavior a million times before. Powerful people are happy to associate with sex workers when they think we are just “edgy” enough to gain them something by association, and quick to distance themselves when confronted by the systemic stigma in our actual lives.

Bernie Sanders praising Cardi B after voting for SESTA is every ex I’ve had who brought me to a few parties, but wouldn’t let me even be seen in the vicinity of their parents or their boss. Every sex worker I know has exes like this.

Once You Have Made Pornography

At marches and demonstrations, my friends and I have spent so much time shouting. We’ve spent so much time writing letters, calling legislative staff, talking to journalists, showing up at administrative and legislative hearings. We’ve spent so much time being unheard by anyone, from any political party. Equally vehement in the messages I’ve received in the last 48 hours are ones from folks who think my story demonstrates some allegiance to Hillary Clinton or the DNC. Apparently there is a thing called donut twitter and something else called rose twitter, and the 2016 democratic primary is still alive on the internet as though all of this were about gaining and losing points in some ongoing adversarial sport.

Sex work, however, is not a partisan issue. Sex workers are equally hated by the right and the left. Conservatives and liberals and socialists alike have supported policies that have led to the deaths of sex workers. Nonetheless, sex workers hold beliefs across the political spectrum. We continue to vote for people who are demonstrably flawed. We vote for people who we know do not like us. We vote for people who are imperfect, and then we call them on the phone, we show up at their rallies and at their offices and demand that they become the representatives that we need them to be.

We know that they are flawed and we believe, still, that one day they will hear us.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-heroic-actions-of-some-in-toronto-cant-erase-canada-s-shameful-truths-4d498eaba7/ Thu, 26 Apr 2018 06:30:04 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2768 Read more]]>

The Heroic Actions Of Some In Toronto Can’t Erase Canada’s Shameful Truths

‘We are comparatively free of racial, sectarian or ideological strife’? Absolutely not.

Unsplash/Pam Menegakis

“The Truth Canada Needs To Remember,” by John Ibbitson, was published in the Globe and Mail on April 24 — the day after one of the deadliest acts of terror in recent Canadian history, when a 25-year-old white man in Toronto weaponized a large van he had rented to plow into unsuspecting pedestrians, killing 10 people and critically injuring 15 others. The public is still reeling from the atrocity.

Yet despite the tragedy of the situation, much has also been made of one positive fact: The assailant was taken down without the use of force.

Focusing on the heroism of benevolent bystanders is right. But the officer simply did his job by actually adhering to his training. Moreover, most framings of this incident have failed to address a crucial fact: Lack of force by law enforcement is something rarely afforded Black and Brown people in this country.

In the Globe article, Ibbiston takes this erasure one step further, stating that in Canada, “we are comparatively free of racial, sectarian or ideological strife.” The basic premise of his article is an ode to the so-called tolerance, diversity, and benevolence of Canadian society, and how we are better for it (while touting that we are far better than our American neighbors and to a greater extent, the entire world).

Let me repeat the part which immediately pained me to read: “We are comparatively free of racial, sectarian or ideological strife.”

Ibbitson calls this a “truth.” But the truth is, I have never read such a one-dimensional white-privileged view in my life.

Yes, innocent bystanders heroically showed up to help in trying times. Yes, the officer involved did what he was supposed to by not using excessive use of force against a white man. But this does not make Canada some beacon of freedom.

How do you say that to the countless Black and Indigenous lives that have been ruined by this state?

I have never read such a one-dimensional white-privileged view in my life.

How do you say that to the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people who have been victimized by the residential school system — the last of which didn’t close until the ‘90s?

How do you say that to the families of Indigenous youth like Colten Boushie, Indigenous girls like Tina Fontaine, and Black men like Jermaine Carby, whose lives were taken by white men who were never held accountable for their actions by a broken justice-less system? How do you say that to the countless Black and Brown people — some children even — whose lives have been taken because they were clearly never really free under this white supremacist system?

The lives of these and other victims have been deemed disposable by not only those responsible for their deaths, but a broken system that has declared their deaths somehow their own fault. Even after such tragedies, the Canadian media, investigating officers, and general public took to victim-blaming, evidence-tampering, and spewing racist anti-indigenous and anti-black hatred about these victims, instead of giving their families the dignity of fair and just trials that honored the lives of their loved ones.

Moreover, how do you say Canada is free of racial strife when there is such an alarming rate of Black and Indigenous kids in the crumbling racist foster care system? When there are so many children who have been (and continue to be) victimized as wards of the state when they are supposed to be protected? When there are cases like that of Abdoul Abdi, yet another refugee child failed by a broken racist foster care system?

How do you say that when the so-called “heroic” actions of the police officer don’t extend to people like Abdirahman Abdi, who was mentally ill and shot down like a rabid dog, instead of supported during a mental health episode in which he had harmed no one?

How do you justify such a low bar set that a police officer actually adhering to his training is somehow a heroic revelation? How do you not see that this also proves what racialized people have been protesting since Ferguson: that police are indeed capable of apprehending suspects without shooting and killing them?

You Can’t Avoid Racism By Moving To Canada

How do you explain such a fact to the countless Black, Brown, and Indigenous civilians, like Sammy Yatim, Dale Anthony Chatrie, Duane Christian, or Joey Knapaysweet, whose interactions with police have far too often turned fatal before police properly assessed the situation in which these individuals were deemed suspects?

How do you account for a litany of such staggering facts?

Like this: Black people account for 36.5% of all police-involved civilian fatalities despite representing only 8.3% of Toronto’s overall population. In the 52 instances of police-involved fatalities since 2000, nearly two-thirds (35 of the 52) were killed by being shot, while the remaining died from excessive physical force or medical complications while being restrained during their interactions with Toronto police. And yet, only seven officers have ever faced charges and only one has been convicted for their involvement in the death of a civilian.

In Saskatchewan, of the 16 people who have died in police encounters since 2000, 10 were Indigenous — accounting for 62.5% of all victims, despite Indigenous people representing only 11.7% of Saskatchewan’s population.

Black people account for 36.5% of all police-involved civilian fatalities despite representing only 8.3% of Toronto’s overall population.

I surmise these numbers are actually much higher, considering police departments have often failed to adequately collect race-based statistics about their encounters with racialized civilians.

And still, I am not done with my questions yet.

How can you say Canada is free from racial strife when it has one of the highest child poverty rates among developed countries, and when the majority of the hundreds of thousands of starving children are Black, Brown, or Indigenous?

How do you say that to the countless Indigenous families that have been devastated by the alarming rate of suicide among Indigenous youth, which our government has failed to adequately address? How do you say that to the dozens of Indigenous communities that have been under boil water advisories for decades without end, without access to basic necessities like clean water on their own land, while their resources are plummeted for white supremacist capitalist gain?

How can you say Canada is free from racial strife when it has one of the highest child poverty rates among developed countries?

How do you say that to the tens of thousands of Black and Brown people locked up in immigration detention centers across the country without basic necessities that are afforded even to incarcerated Canadian criminals — like access to basic medical care, sanitary products, internet, or access to lawyers to help them get out? As a result of Canada’s broken immigration system, hundreds still remain indefinitely held in immigration detentions at remote locations with little to no access to the outside world to even properly appeal their denied asylum applications.

How do you say the country is free to those who have been impacted by Canada’s broken refugee claimant system, which has failed people like Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam over and over again — particularly when the claimants are Black or Brown?

How do you say that to the families of people like Skantha Navaratnam, a Tamil man at the margins of his already marginalized community, who along with other men of color like Kirushna Kanagaratnam were targeted by a serial killer because of their race, and whose lives, disappearances, and eventual murders were dismissed repeatedly, carelessly, and callously by Toronto Police Services?

These Indigenous Feminists Are Ready To Lovingly Detonate The Patriarchy

How do you say that to African-Canadians who only represent 3% of Canada’s population yet account for over 10% of the overall prison population? How do you say that when the Black prison population has grown 69% in the last 30 years despite remaining such a tiny portion of the overall state population? When Black inmates are not only overrepresented in incarceration, but also subject to nearly 15% of all use-of-force incidents, and are more likely to be placed in maximum security institutions despite being at a lower risk of reoffending? (The numbers for Indigenous incarceration statistics are even more abysmal.) How do you say that when Toronto’s Black residents are targeted in 85% of racially motivated hate crimes and 27% of carding incidents?

“Freedom” and what it means to be free seems to only be a basic right guaranteed under the premise of whiteness, on this stolen land. Those of us that fall outside of that scope were never really free — no matter the comparatively small advancements we have managed to carve out thanks to our own determination, mobilization, resistance, and resilience.

Using the instance of an extreme tragedy as fodder to push some kind of “inclusive” and “tolerance” and “diversity” propaganda, when there are thousands of us who have never seen this equity play out in our lived experiences, is disillusioned at best. For those of us facing these very real realities, this is ahistorical, dishonest, and only continuing the cycle of unchanging conditions for the countless racialized people who do not benefit from the alt-reality that privilege and whiteness affords.

We can indeed be grateful to our brave fellow Torontonians who put their safety on the line and helped during the terror attack on Yonge street, and we can speak of their benevolence and strengths. But we must be mindful to do so without blatantly erasing the many racialized and marginalized people who still suffer under this white supremacist patriarchal capitalist system — people are who are in no ways close to being “free.”

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