Wrong echo chamber
Mar. 29th, 2022 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormTwo issues: social media and violence.
The ongoing issue is that of folks I used to know well and be friends with down south, a bunch of them have been on the (and I don't say this lightly) cancel culture (eg summoning mobs to spam/insult/threaten/doxx folks who show HP logos incidentally in a picture or video or who have someone as a fb follow or fb friend)/violence is ok if you're hitting the right person/etc sort of train. Most of those folks I manage by either removing them or keeping them hidden, but because we were all part of a social group this stuff comes up on my social media pretty often through people who I do keep in touch with. I find it super stressful. I'm not sure how to manage the situation; I don't really want to remove everyone I knew in person from that group so that I don't get bycatch but I also just don't want the bycatch.
I did a big push over the last year to get stuff I do like on social media: seed swap groups, jewelery and ceramic artists, garden groups. These have been great! But they also mean I don't want to leave social media because I get this good stuff there. It's certainly made it a better environment for me, but every once in awhile something pops through this space I've made for myself from the previous world.
In the last 24 hours something has come up about an ?Oscars? event. Someone joked about someone's wife, so they hit him. Basically the spillover is saying this was the right thing for the hitter to do because of where it lands on the race/gender/disability stuff.
I'm really fucked up about this. Writing is actually really helping, but I was in a tailspin for awhile. There's lots of *stuff*:
Folks are like "verbal violence that was done to the wife is real violence"
My dad was verbally abusive to mom and to us kids, or at least to me. I was verbally abusive to partners. I believe that verbal violence is real, because I lived it and it was real. I also have been told, and I believe, that what someone does isn't justification for hurting them. Provocation doesn't mean the thing is ok.
Folks are like "what the first guy did was so bad it couldn't be let stand"
This is the first time I've been paying attention from a place of masculinity when something like this has happened. When I'm read as a woman people are always saying "violence is never ok" and "no matter what the victim did, they didn't deserve this". Now I see that's what folks say to women. What folks say to men is, "if you're a bad man you deserve violence done to you, and good men step up to do that violence (even if haha maybe they shouldn't but of course a real, good man couldn't resist doing violence to another man in defense of a woman)
It's a scary shift. What does it take for me to be bad enough, if I'm a man, that it's ok to do violence to me? Am I supposed to look for bad men and hurt them? It's been important for me not to do violence to people. It's also been important to me not to normalize or legitimize violence to anyone.
The left I know has tended to tolerate harm to men in service of more pressing goals. This feels like turning over a rock and finding it unexpectedly crawling with bugs, though: it's not toleration, it's endorsement. It's a desire to visit fear and trauma on folks to keep them in line rather than addressing underlying issues. And folks are doing it with such vigour.
To make it super surreal, the joke involved... like, I've done the reading. I know there's a lot of nuance involved. The way I receive the joke is not how it was received in that context. But, the joke involved is one I had directed at me at minimum ten times a day when I shaved my head in high school, thousands of times a year, it lands on me as profoundly unoriginal background noise. Clearly that's not how it landed here, stuff about hair culture, power, and disability all contribute, but it's like suddenly being in a world of funhouse mirrors.
My therapist is booking a month out. I'm sure I'll settle it out for myself before then. But this isn't the world I want to build, it's not way I think it should be built, and I really want to be well away from it.
The ongoing issue is that of folks I used to know well and be friends with down south, a bunch of them have been on the (and I don't say this lightly) cancel culture (eg summoning mobs to spam/insult/threaten/doxx folks who show HP logos incidentally in a picture or video or who have someone as a fb follow or fb friend)/violence is ok if you're hitting the right person/etc sort of train. Most of those folks I manage by either removing them or keeping them hidden, but because we were all part of a social group this stuff comes up on my social media pretty often through people who I do keep in touch with. I find it super stressful. I'm not sure how to manage the situation; I don't really want to remove everyone I knew in person from that group so that I don't get bycatch but I also just don't want the bycatch.
I did a big push over the last year to get stuff I do like on social media: seed swap groups, jewelery and ceramic artists, garden groups. These have been great! But they also mean I don't want to leave social media because I get this good stuff there. It's certainly made it a better environment for me, but every once in awhile something pops through this space I've made for myself from the previous world.
In the last 24 hours something has come up about an ?Oscars? event. Someone joked about someone's wife, so they hit him. Basically the spillover is saying this was the right thing for the hitter to do because of where it lands on the race/gender/disability stuff.
I'm really fucked up about this. Writing is actually really helping, but I was in a tailspin for awhile. There's lots of *stuff*:
Folks are like "verbal violence that was done to the wife is real violence"
My dad was verbally abusive to mom and to us kids, or at least to me. I was verbally abusive to partners. I believe that verbal violence is real, because I lived it and it was real. I also have been told, and I believe, that what someone does isn't justification for hurting them. Provocation doesn't mean the thing is ok.
Folks are like "what the first guy did was so bad it couldn't be let stand"
This is the first time I've been paying attention from a place of masculinity when something like this has happened. When I'm read as a woman people are always saying "violence is never ok" and "no matter what the victim did, they didn't deserve this". Now I see that's what folks say to women. What folks say to men is, "if you're a bad man you deserve violence done to you, and good men step up to do that violence (even if haha maybe they shouldn't but of course a real, good man couldn't resist doing violence to another man in defense of a woman)
It's a scary shift. What does it take for me to be bad enough, if I'm a man, that it's ok to do violence to me? Am I supposed to look for bad men and hurt them? It's been important for me not to do violence to people. It's also been important to me not to normalize or legitimize violence to anyone.
The left I know has tended to tolerate harm to men in service of more pressing goals. This feels like turning over a rock and finding it unexpectedly crawling with bugs, though: it's not toleration, it's endorsement. It's a desire to visit fear and trauma on folks to keep them in line rather than addressing underlying issues. And folks are doing it with such vigour.
To make it super surreal, the joke involved... like, I've done the reading. I know there's a lot of nuance involved. The way I receive the joke is not how it was received in that context. But, the joke involved is one I had directed at me at minimum ten times a day when I shaved my head in high school, thousands of times a year, it lands on me as profoundly unoriginal background noise. Clearly that's not how it landed here, stuff about hair culture, power, and disability all contribute, but it's like suddenly being in a world of funhouse mirrors.
My therapist is booking a month out. I'm sure I'll settle it out for myself before then. But this isn't the world I want to build, it's not way I think it should be built, and I really want to be well away from it.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-29 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-29 09:48 pm (UTC)On the generalities: yeah, I think there's a fairly thorough set of norms in male culture (at least the one I've lived in) around "when violence towards other men is appropriate". I don't like this part of it, and I'm fairly strongly in the "how about I run away rather than fight" camp, but it's definitely there.
(Off-the-cuff examples: lots of fictional male heroes literally fight -- hit, hurt, kill -- the villains of the struggle in which they're embedded, and they are depicted as right in doing so. And there's a whole culture of male hitting-sports and fantastical killing-games. And lots of men describe and enact violent-defense postures with respect to protecting their partners or families from perceived threats. It's a .. broad theme in the cuture. There's also a fairly broad carve-out for women doing violence to protect their kids, though less often their partners.)
I think you can exist as a man and not habitually do or condone violence (at least no more than the average being-on-earth periodically does violence in the course of existing). I don't agree that it's an intrinsic part of masculinity. More like a "mainstream norm with a bell curve around it of both assent and dissent". It's really a bit of a theme in men's fiction and cultural discourse, exploring and debating exactly what "appropriate violence" is. If you look for it you'll see fairly nuanced gradations embodied in stories and characters in men's fiction. Like self defense, ok to do defensive violence immediately; but you're supposed to let the aggressor withdraw and reconsider their actions; but maybe not if they were being threatening to vulnerable people or close relations; and all of this depends substantially on which violence-rules framework you're working within (law abiding citizen; arm of the state; outlaw; person at war), etc. etc.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-30 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-30 07:57 pm (UTC)But I do think on balance men get much more socialization about the appropriateness or even duty to sometimes physically harm others.
I think (to widen the scope a bit) there's a way in which genders make claims to (or are forced into) specific areas of physical "hard, real work" that is not always surfaced explicitly but at work implicitly in a lot of people's mental models. Think of the way industrial or resource-extraction manual labor jobs code for masculinity in many contexts, or domestic care-work and reproductive labor codes for femininity in many contexts. In both cases I think people steeped in these gender roles feel their work is "the real stuff" that needs doing, that when push comes to shove their gender carries a special burden of. I think the work of "doing socially-appropriate violence" falls in the same basket: coded male, and a little too stark and crude for polite conversation.
I think a lot of men have class-mediated and resentment-tinged relationships to this similar to other such coded work; perhaps similar to the relationship many women have to their implied work roles. A lot of men don't want to do this work, and resent it! See all the men's rights activists complaining (legitimately) about being conscripted to fight in wars, or feeling forced to do dangerous industrial work. But many also view it as their role, perhaps even duty, and draw a sense of solidarity and identity from the shared burden, see men like me who try to avoid it (or by nature of class happen to be able to buy our way out) as sort of soft half-formed non-real men.