On Community and The Jaded Historical Eye
Aug. 12th, 2022 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptI was watching a biopic on Tom of Finland (because I wanted to see what kind of accessibility and other features were available through Kanopy, now that Overdrive has acquired it and it's working towards integrating it into their larger ecosystem), and if struck an interesting chord with me. The picture itself focuses, as a biopic, on the life of the man who became Tom of Finland, and in doing so, ends up focusing on the need to find community when you're someone different than the majority, and even more so when you're in a community that other people want to demonize and destroy. I think the picture's choice to end with a triumphant note, with Tom of Finland addressing the International Mr. Leather contest, and the note that while the person died in 1991 of emphysema, Tom of Finland lives is a way of reinforcing the idea of finding your community, a place to be who you are, is a good thing in your life.
That got me thinking about the trope of the mid-life crisis dude who laments that his best days were in high school / college and everything has gone downhill from there. And, at least for my experience, there's a little bit of truth about the best days being collegiate days. Because it was the time that I had the least amount of adult responsibilities and loans and other largesse was taking care of my expenses, so I didn't have to work any more than I wanted to. Which gave me time to do social things and find interesting people to hang out with, even if I was constantly nervous that people were just tolerating me. (Even though at least one person explained to me in very small words the significance of the things that I was assuming were normal and for everyone.) I was building a community of people that I knew and could hang out with and exercise at least some facets of the person I wanted to be in those situations. There was even a small hint about something that might have been a good way of living, if I could replicate it with another person or people. And there was the experience of doing convention with your group of friends and talking about what you saw and experienced and what went on.
And then I graduated and went somewhere else and was in the process of getting a community back together again when I met my ex, who mostly discouraged me from finding other people to hang out with on my own. She brought her own group of friends for me to associate with, and through her, I had people to hang out with. Sort of. So I lost quite a few years of my life not building my own community, or doing so very slowly and at whatever moments I could that weren't under her eyes. And because of that, I didn't spend enough time finding where and when the local groups meet so that I could build a local community back up again. And then, for a shining moment or few after the breakup, there was community building again and trying to find people to hang out with on my own, along with the communities that came with other people in my life, and that was going okay, being able to do more things and schedule stuff and exist as a being in my own right, rather than as someone's attachment. I still wasn't doing a whole lot about finding all kinds of local groups and building myself a social schedule, but at least I had the opportunity to, should I have wanted to pursue it more.
Then the blasted pandemic hit, and before we've really gotten it under control, there's people declaring it's all over and we don't need to worry about anything, and there's another concerning disease that's being painted as something only certain marginalized segments have to care about, with morality being attached to a virus that doesn't have morals and doesn't care who it infects, and there's some really active pushes, online and offline, to narrow the scope and definition of what's acceptable where someone else might see it to an extremely WASPy conception, and then further to what only the most theocratic men would consider acceptable (for everyone who isn't them, of course. "Everyone knows" that because they are hand-picked by the Deity Himself that nothing they do could ever be wrong or immoral.) All of these limitations (and the concerns about being too visible in a place that my ex is still likely connected to) make it very difficult to build that community of people and maintain it.
I'm riding out the pandemic and a lot of the associated everything by drawing on the same skills I had when I was with my ex. It's not exactly a benefit as such, but knowing that I've already spent a lot of time in a situation like this one makes me think I can outlast it. The biggest benefit to getting through this one, though, is that I'm not spending it with my ex, which would have made everything so much worse than it already was. So, y'know, patiently waiting for when it will be time to build community again, looking a little askance say how much of the time that was supposed to be used for that was instead spent either in a bad situation or trying to wait out the plagues. I could probably say at this point that a lot of my best days are behind me. But I'm also hoping that a lot of my best days are in front of me, as well.
On a related but less personal matter, I was listening to a political podcast recently, and they were talking about the Vice President introducing herself with a short self-description to an audience of disability advocates, some of whom were visually impaired. The conversation (and the associated kerfuffle) was that the vice president introduced herself with her pronouns. For people looking for excuses to decry the "woke mob," this was apparently culture war chum that would launch a thousand advertisements, as proof that the Vice President was fully in the thrall of the interests that are transing your children at school, teaching them CRT and gender ideology and utterly destroying the fabric of the real American family, where everyone is straight, there are only two genders, and you can't find a person of color anywhere, because none would dare show their faces in anything but a subservient role. After some amount of back and forth about the situation, both the conservative and the liberal guest could agree that the problem wasn't actually the pronouns or the use of the pronouns, but that the Vice President didn't stop and take time to explain for the cameras what she was doing, and why, so that the people who aren't Extremely Online would understand what was going on.
…what?
I realize that we live in a world where a ten second clip, completely divorced from its context, is the sort of thing that goes viral and brings all sorts of people with opinions (and people looking to manipulate other people's opinions) to the yard, but that entire discussion reminded me of the very worst kinds of social media outrage that usually gets directed at marginalized people. It usually goes something like this:
The commentators on the podcast didn't get to it, but I have a suspicion that if the Vice President had stopped to do some instruction or explanation about what she was doing, there would have been a different conversation on that program about whether or not she was talking down to the people or assuming they were stupid not to understand what she was doing. Along with the outrage about surrendering to the woke mob, because that was going to be there was soon as she introduced herself with her pronouns. There wasn't any way that the situation could have been correctly navigated, because the audience was looking for a reason to attack, rather than to go "That's different. What did it mean?" and then go get information from reputable, accurate sources.
This entire battle, whether about pronouns or about whether a teaching moment was present and should have been used seems to rest on a belief that our actions and our words are permanently shibboleths, and the default assumption is that all of those actions and words and choices are deliberate signals of allegiance. Each thing we do, each choice of words, each act of generosity and to whom are all part of a grand dance of showing our plumage to others and seeing who is compatible and who isn't. Looking at the world with a lens that everyone else is always performing something for someone leads to the conclusion that every part of a person's life is part of this performance, and therefore every part of a person's life is fair game for critiquing. Which conveniently removes any imperative to determine things like context, ignorance, or circumstances that might produce complexity of thought or the need to critically examine oneself and others for flaws and biases present in their mental model.
(We pause to note that these critiques are almost always unevenly applied, such that the people who wield the most power and have accrued the most advantages receive the least scrutiny, even when they deliberately invoke their shibboleths, and those who have the least choice and ability to affect their lives are often subjected to the harshest examinations and condemnations when they have to compromise or accept what is forced upon them. So many people believe they can become the former and avoid the latter through the performance of their own shibboleths, failing to recognize who sees them as humans that can improve and who sees them as resources to be discarded when they have been fully exploited.)
The assumption of the Purity Brigade, regardless of how they manifest, is that their performance is the only acceptable one and all others must be completely suppressed from the performance space, so that no person believes that there's an alternative to the path that has been forcefully crafted for them. To that end, the Purity Brigade is always looking for whatever they can find to critique in someone else's performance (and remember, the underlying belief is that everything is a performance, chosen by the target, and so the target has full moral culpability for their choices, no exceptions) and to frame it in such a way that the rest of the Brigade understands it as a call to marshal their allies and attack, to either drive someone away or drive them to ask for forgiveness and bind themselves more tightly to the Brigade, changing their performance to be more like the Brigade's.
An entity that demands complete compliance and harmony with themselves is likely harmful to you, for not only do they set you an impossible task, they usually telegraph what their intent is to those who fail to live up to that impossibility. (Some of those entities may also be good for you in ways that make the risk of harm worth it, but that's a risk calculation, not a removal of potential harm.)
In such an environment as this, how difficult it must be to find enough community to be one's authentic self, even if no community by itself is (or ever will be) sufficient for the whole of one's authentic self. (Admittedly, there are many people whose authentic self I want nowhere near me and with no power to affect me at all, because they authentically desire to be part of or at the head of a Purity Brigade that would seek to erase me. Functioning society is compromise on so many things, after all.) And that brings it back all the way around, to where we started, to feeling unhappy about my community-building successes being out of whack and longing for a time where I felt like I was having greater success at building both a community online and a community of localish in person for myself. Even though I can see the differences between then and now and acknowledge to myself that many of the things that would advance building that local in person community come with risks that I feel are still too high to chance. I live in hope, though, that the project will be able to resume itself…eventually.
That got me thinking about the trope of the mid-life crisis dude who laments that his best days were in high school / college and everything has gone downhill from there. And, at least for my experience, there's a little bit of truth about the best days being collegiate days. Because it was the time that I had the least amount of adult responsibilities and loans and other largesse was taking care of my expenses, so I didn't have to work any more than I wanted to. Which gave me time to do social things and find interesting people to hang out with, even if I was constantly nervous that people were just tolerating me. (Even though at least one person explained to me in very small words the significance of the things that I was assuming were normal and for everyone.) I was building a community of people that I knew and could hang out with and exercise at least some facets of the person I wanted to be in those situations. There was even a small hint about something that might have been a good way of living, if I could replicate it with another person or people. And there was the experience of doing convention with your group of friends and talking about what you saw and experienced and what went on.
And then I graduated and went somewhere else and was in the process of getting a community back together again when I met my ex, who mostly discouraged me from finding other people to hang out with on my own. She brought her own group of friends for me to associate with, and through her, I had people to hang out with. Sort of. So I lost quite a few years of my life not building my own community, or doing so very slowly and at whatever moments I could that weren't under her eyes. And because of that, I didn't spend enough time finding where and when the local groups meet so that I could build a local community back up again. And then, for a shining moment or few after the breakup, there was community building again and trying to find people to hang out with on my own, along with the communities that came with other people in my life, and that was going okay, being able to do more things and schedule stuff and exist as a being in my own right, rather than as someone's attachment. I still wasn't doing a whole lot about finding all kinds of local groups and building myself a social schedule, but at least I had the opportunity to, should I have wanted to pursue it more.
Then the blasted pandemic hit, and before we've really gotten it under control, there's people declaring it's all over and we don't need to worry about anything, and there's another concerning disease that's being painted as something only certain marginalized segments have to care about, with morality being attached to a virus that doesn't have morals and doesn't care who it infects, and there's some really active pushes, online and offline, to narrow the scope and definition of what's acceptable where someone else might see it to an extremely WASPy conception, and then further to what only the most theocratic men would consider acceptable (for everyone who isn't them, of course. "Everyone knows" that because they are hand-picked by the Deity Himself that nothing they do could ever be wrong or immoral.) All of these limitations (and the concerns about being too visible in a place that my ex is still likely connected to) make it very difficult to build that community of people and maintain it.
I'm riding out the pandemic and a lot of the associated everything by drawing on the same skills I had when I was with my ex. It's not exactly a benefit as such, but knowing that I've already spent a lot of time in a situation like this one makes me think I can outlast it. The biggest benefit to getting through this one, though, is that I'm not spending it with my ex, which would have made everything so much worse than it already was. So, y'know, patiently waiting for when it will be time to build community again, looking a little askance say how much of the time that was supposed to be used for that was instead spent either in a bad situation or trying to wait out the plagues. I could probably say at this point that a lot of my best days are behind me. But I'm also hoping that a lot of my best days are in front of me, as well.
On a related but less personal matter, I was listening to a political podcast recently, and they were talking about the Vice President introducing herself with a short self-description to an audience of disability advocates, some of whom were visually impaired. The conversation (and the associated kerfuffle) was that the vice president introduced herself with her pronouns. For people looking for excuses to decry the "woke mob," this was apparently culture war chum that would launch a thousand advertisements, as proof that the Vice President was fully in the thrall of the interests that are transing your children at school, teaching them CRT and gender ideology and utterly destroying the fabric of the real American family, where everyone is straight, there are only two genders, and you can't find a person of color anywhere, because none would dare show their faces in anything but a subservient role. After some amount of back and forth about the situation, both the conservative and the liberal guest could agree that the problem wasn't actually the pronouns or the use of the pronouns, but that the Vice President didn't stop and take time to explain for the cameras what she was doing, and why, so that the people who aren't Extremely Online would understand what was going on.
…what?
I realize that we live in a world where a ten second clip, completely divorced from its context, is the sort of thing that goes viral and brings all sorts of people with opinions (and people looking to manipulate other people's opinions) to the yard, but that entire discussion reminded me of the very worst kinds of social media outrage that usually gets directed at marginalized people. It usually goes something like this:
Person A: I like toast.
Troll: You didn't say that you condemn people who eat babies, so you must be in favor of baby-eating and trying to get everyone else to eat babies, too!
Person A: What?
(Usually Tabloid Right Wing) Media Article: Person A is a Baby-Eater, according to these Twitter quotes we didn't bother fact-checking!
Troll: See? Even the media agrees Person A is a baby-eater!
[Harassment Intensifies.]
The commentators on the podcast didn't get to it, but I have a suspicion that if the Vice President had stopped to do some instruction or explanation about what she was doing, there would have been a different conversation on that program about whether or not she was talking down to the people or assuming they were stupid not to understand what she was doing. Along with the outrage about surrendering to the woke mob, because that was going to be there was soon as she introduced herself with her pronouns. There wasn't any way that the situation could have been correctly navigated, because the audience was looking for a reason to attack, rather than to go "That's different. What did it mean?" and then go get information from reputable, accurate sources.
This entire battle, whether about pronouns or about whether a teaching moment was present and should have been used seems to rest on a belief that our actions and our words are permanently shibboleths, and the default assumption is that all of those actions and words and choices are deliberate signals of allegiance. Each thing we do, each choice of words, each act of generosity and to whom are all part of a grand dance of showing our plumage to others and seeing who is compatible and who isn't. Looking at the world with a lens that everyone else is always performing something for someone leads to the conclusion that every part of a person's life is part of this performance, and therefore every part of a person's life is fair game for critiquing. Which conveniently removes any imperative to determine things like context, ignorance, or circumstances that might produce complexity of thought or the need to critically examine oneself and others for flaws and biases present in their mental model.
(We pause to note that these critiques are almost always unevenly applied, such that the people who wield the most power and have accrued the most advantages receive the least scrutiny, even when they deliberately invoke their shibboleths, and those who have the least choice and ability to affect their lives are often subjected to the harshest examinations and condemnations when they have to compromise or accept what is forced upon them. So many people believe they can become the former and avoid the latter through the performance of their own shibboleths, failing to recognize who sees them as humans that can improve and who sees them as resources to be discarded when they have been fully exploited.)
The assumption of the Purity Brigade, regardless of how they manifest, is that their performance is the only acceptable one and all others must be completely suppressed from the performance space, so that no person believes that there's an alternative to the path that has been forcefully crafted for them. To that end, the Purity Brigade is always looking for whatever they can find to critique in someone else's performance (and remember, the underlying belief is that everything is a performance, chosen by the target, and so the target has full moral culpability for their choices, no exceptions) and to frame it in such a way that the rest of the Brigade understands it as a call to marshal their allies and attack, to either drive someone away or drive them to ask for forgiveness and bind themselves more tightly to the Brigade, changing their performance to be more like the Brigade's.
An entity that demands complete compliance and harmony with themselves is likely harmful to you, for not only do they set you an impossible task, they usually telegraph what their intent is to those who fail to live up to that impossibility. (Some of those entities may also be good for you in ways that make the risk of harm worth it, but that's a risk calculation, not a removal of potential harm.)
In such an environment as this, how difficult it must be to find enough community to be one's authentic self, even if no community by itself is (or ever will be) sufficient for the whole of one's authentic self. (Admittedly, there are many people whose authentic self I want nowhere near me and with no power to affect me at all, because they authentically desire to be part of or at the head of a Purity Brigade that would seek to erase me. Functioning society is compromise on so many things, after all.) And that brings it back all the way around, to where we started, to feeling unhappy about my community-building successes being out of whack and longing for a time where I felt like I was having greater success at building both a community online and a community of localish in person for myself. Even though I can see the differences between then and now and acknowledge to myself that many of the things that would advance building that local in person community come with risks that I feel are still too high to chance. I live in hope, though, that the project will be able to resume itself…eventually.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-13 05:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-13 05:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-13 05:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-13 10:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-13 01:25 pm (UTC)Nobody 'transed' me- I managed that all by myself, clever girl that I am!
no subject
Date: 2022-08-13 02:18 pm (UTC)Coincidentally, most of them have never worked with children, even if they've tried to raise some.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-13 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-14 01:29 am (UTC)And, hi! I was pointed at this post by
no subject
Date: 2022-08-14 03:40 pm (UTC)Hello and welcome. You can look at my entries page and see what you're most likely going to get from me.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-15 02:25 pm (UTC)Excellence. That's what they're going to get.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-15 02:36 pm (UTC)