Lolita's Fist

#Feminism ~ #MeToo is a pivotal moment. It's the moment when women learned that they must stand together to have any hope of toppling toxic men. That it was a public man is the only reason it was publicised and women could see it work. This has worked elsewhere, where I know women who decided to take down a rapist by themselves because you cannot ask the master's tools to help. It saddens me to hear women say 'I' so much. A word deeply Western, patriarchal, and capitalist. The things are so interrelated that they produce oppression without trying. We are 'we'. The Bonobo Sisterhood

I thought you might like to look at this phrase as an indication of why Black should be capitalised. That Black is not ‘just an adjective’, that the adjectiveness and lowercaseness diminishes Blackness. The activists believe that along with ‘European’ (not really accepted in South Africa) the word White and Black are indicative of heritage and culture. Black is an indication of allegiance and statehood that is self-chosen and aligns so broadly with the Black diaspora. Inclusive, diverse, and welcoming. Some Black people born in America strategically avoid ‘African American’ as they feel they are neither, as neither identity is readily accepted by white Americans (see how I decentered white Americans here by lowercasing white). In South Africa, the idea that Whites are South African has also been destabilised, so they become Whites separated from country, and decentered when white. Whites don’t need to indicate allegiance and statehood and have already been White for so long. But y...

Western culture’s fixation on copyright, branding, and ownership creates a toxic environment for activists. And it’s a mindset that activists often don’t know they have. The most difficult thing to do is to get people to overcome inertia . Inertia is the gravity that holds people to the familiar, to the TV, to the job they have hated, and to the traditions of the past. As an activist, once you have managed to create a slight shift, a tiny movement can become an action by feeding that momentum. I don’t want to ask for permission to take a step out of the movement and check in with branding. The mass is moving. It has started to flow… Don’t embolden the slogan? Don’t put a drop shadow on the logo? Put the logo on top of the banner? I am 4000 miles away from your global movement, and I have to wait for you to arrive at work on the other side of the globe to give me the OK. Even if I had to wait for 20 minutes… why? Give me a visual element to rally around and leave it at that. It is...

Dear feminist scholars You have not spoken to the concerns of the patriarchs – women abandoning their careers for family care, elderly care, and sick children. Women abandon their posts due to menstrual cramps and pregnancy. The perception that women are ‘fragile’ and victims of mental health – disinformation campaigns run by the patriarchy claim this. Women leave their posts because they have been raped and harassed. Women cannot focus on their work because the harassment prevents them from doing their work.  The patriarchs want someone on their post no matter what and will harass them out of the post so they don’t have to deal with these issues. The ability of women to lead is severely compromised due to men’s behaviour. They won’t stop. They see it as an effective way to prevent women from entering the workplace and having another place to judge their asses. They homophilically play all day with other men and are free from the demands of women. Women's mere act of demanding is c...

To be a feminist is to believe that one can make a difference. How people behave during #loadshedding tells you about how they think about #voting . It's all about the heater. Do you turn it on or don't you? On the one hand, if you turn it on, it's equal to you-don't-vote because you don't think it will make a difference. It's just one heater. It won't crash the system. On the other hand, if you don't turn it on, you join voices with all the other people not turning it on so that electricity can be more evenly spread throughout the population for necessities. There are people that believe that the saved electricity would be hogged by the capitalist monopolies. And there are people who believe that the saved electricity is shared among the people on the ground. #Worldviews . #GetAFuckingBlanket . Dammit.

Apartheid was vile. And its effects are so far-reaching. Colonialism led to apartheid which led to eugenics. The whole world was gripped with hate. The task of dismantling that hate is slow, and this global recession will set our efforts back because precarity makes the powerful into monsters and conservative monsters.

#StarTrek ~ I'm so disappointed in Kate Mulgrew for being cross with Jeri Ryan. Ryan was used by the patriarchy to insert a 'babe' (yes, I personally heard them use this word in a documentary) into the show. Ryan did an admirable job of ignoring the myriad leering references to her appearance on the show by men from so many species. Mulgrew should know that you can't be upset with women for doing what they need to do. Don't infantilise women by saying they should say No. Their choice is their choice. And if you don't like it, suck it.

In 1896, when William Hadaway was abusing his penis-power by patenting the first electrical stove, I'll bet he didn't walk down to the kitchen where his wife was sweating while tethered to the not-electrical stove and ask her what she would contribute to his design. She would have said, "A timer that switches the stove off so that I can go to a meeting down at Pankhurst's house with the other suffragettes." In fact, I suspect Hadaway intentionally left the timer off to keep her tethered. Fucker. #historicalrevisionism

Teenage movies back in the day were about how we felt different to our peers, we were each unusual and didn't fit. The movies were about how we tried. The films were highly inappropriate, but we were so normalized to inappropriate that we didn't notice. Rapey, racist, sexist, were normal. Grease (1978) was chock-a-block full of sex talk - I didn't notice - children ignore what they don't understand and fit what they do into a world that normalized what they did. Girls getting tossed aside if they didn't put out and accepted if they look like sluts. Normal. But to grown men our ignorance of what we were looking at looks like consent, acquiescence, flirting. "Young girls come on to me." Olivia's pants were fashion. Slut pants were fashion. Even now I am deeply uncomfortable with using the term 'slut'. And does my discomfort systemically play right into the patriarchal agendas depicted in Grease. And movies work like history does. When I lo...

Stewart Granger. Mommy curated my (and her) idolisation of Granger. In my head, I know that actors in the 1930s were not like today. Then, the actors belonged to the studios, on contract, in breach of contract if they didn't make the movies assigned by the studios. He would not have been able to say No, and I know what that is like. What a moment to see a fresh-faced young Granger say the N-word. I am shell-shocked. It's a moment where you have to say "I am looking at history with contemporary eyes". A raw case-in-point.

War and Peace (2016) ~ Just as I am about to ask if 'Leo Tolstoy' is a pseudonym of Jane Austen, a hunt and a wolf murder. I was never inspired to read the 'canon' as it's all animal murder, war, and duels. And when they do another version of it in GoT, the man writes women characters in such a way that all that distinguishes them from men is that they are frequently naked and variously raped, wars still in place. Am I unnecessarily suspicious? For whom did Tolstoy and Lawrence write? Women were forbidden educations, and wealthy women who had a version of education had to spend morning noon and night going to fittings and dressing for meals and events. Was Tolstoy interested in love? Have I lost a grasp on my brain?  

  Source: NoFilmSchool.com

#Movies ~ Free Guy (2021). Another spend-the-budget-on salaries-for-men, all-guy movie, with a couple of scenes with a sexy-lamp-called Millie. Traitorously speaking, this scene with Channing Tatum is movie-stealing. Never liked him, especially when he woke Jennifer Lawrence up in Passengers (2016), the last straw. But this scene is classic. Classic I tell you. NSFW.

The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination Book by Elizabeth Parker (webinar) "Inside us is a child that is afraid of the wildwood". Why does the forest manifest. Seven elements of the forest: Fear of the forest. Forest is against civilization. Forest is associated with the past, going back to nature. Forest is a landsape of trial. Forest is a setting in which we are lost, decentred and uncertain - we should walk in a straight line to get out. Forest is a threat of being consumed by something in the forest or by the forest itself - I will meld with it. Forest is the site of the unconscious - ego above ground and the darkness below, forest as shadow to civilization. Forest is an anti-christian space - sacrifices, domain if the devil, temptations in the forest. How does fear manifest. The trees are alive. The wolf and the witch wait for you in the forest. The monsters in the forest are us. 'Backwoods' and 'back to the woods...

I found this article's bias interesting. Can 'signalling' not be the same as, 'Hey, buddy this is what I am up to', for the same reasons one might do it in real life? I know why I do things, to attract like-minded people - who might hear of a nice project and know they should include me so that I can find more like-minded people. I know I let people know about nice opportunities, and they let me know. The circles grow. And non-like-minded people would wonder, in their silence, if we were taking over the world. When people say the k-word, they're signaling. I know what to do with that signalling. In the age of communication, this kind of bias about signalling is a signal. I know what to do with that signalling. Aeon:  https://aeon.co/ideas/is-virtue-signalling-a-perversion-of-morality

You know one of my jobs is I teach ordinary people to work on computers, right? For many years, people have said to me, why don't you do it for yourself? You don't need your boss, you can do this, why let him take a cut? And I don't see it like that. He's a drummer, warm, personable, loyal, reliable. He also provides services to me as my manager. He deals with the client, sets up the online meetings. He makes sure the payments happen from the client and to me. And... here is the epiphany about interdependence - he provides momentum. Doing things alone is much more difficult. Interdependence means he comes to me for stuff, I go to him for stuff, he can jump in when he has time, I can jump in when I have time. And when I jump in I learn what he knows to pass that on, and then I have another skill. And he comes to me. He doesn't think he can do it all, and so I am responsible to him and him to me. That is impetus. That is momentum. I don't want to be splitting my a...

If you prod me in the mornings, this pops out. Someone with a lisp sent me a text about Thamus and Theuth. This was my reply: I don't agree with Thamus who says to Theuth that writing will make people stupid and lazy because they won't use their memories. I think those people are speaking about knowledge and not ideas.  Knowledge is just the sticky stuff (giggle) of ideas. Knowledge is the least important because you can Google it. Ideas are the precursors to knowledge. Ideas are unique and specific to each person. Ideas are what we reach towards when we reach towards people. In community. Ideas may or may not make their way to Google. Ideas live like butterflies.  Ideas float in the ether. The more ideas you are exposed to the more you create. If you had to go speak to Socrates and Plato and Sappho and Steinem and Peterson and Larsen and Hite and Faludi and Ehrenreich every time you wanted to swirl in the world of ideas you'd have to invent time travel an...

" The broad agenda of any feminist project is to understand the sources of male power and to liberate women from its effects." http://www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12/a-pleasure-to-watch-jane-campions-narrative-cinema/

  In watching #BlackLivesMatter I see how dismissive the term 'identity politics' is. "We can't talk about anything or get anywhere in discussions because of identity politics." Who is 'we'? 'We' who have the privilege to decide what is important and when someone is allowed to speak and what they are allowed to speak about.  When 'we' perpetrate violence by holding a (figurative/virtual/literal) bat over someone's head to say 'shut up', that is not conducive to them hearing the content of anything you have to say anyway. An inclusive and welcoming environment does not have to be crashed or boycotted or protested or derailed or identitypoliticked. These actions are your flag that your house is not order. Identitypoliticking is striking against 'we'. I believe in the people's right to strike. It is in their solidarity with each other that they are effective against 'we'. It is in their numbers th...

The next time you're tempted to think that women's choices about subjects to take or jobs to apply for, think about these subtle signals that we are peppered with daily that underscore the message "We don't want you here." The subtle ways that discrimination works https://www.economist.com/business/2019/04/20/the-subtle-ways-that-discrimination-works