Yeah, I've read stuff like that before, and I don't disagree with the broad strokes, but it doesn't really resolve my personal issues and tends to make me feel like I am a bad person for having complicated feelings that I don't fully understand about kink and ethics ("Your kink is okay; your triggers and feelings are not").
I have found self-examination useful, and the fact that it is usually uncomfortable at best does not make it less useful for me, and I don't feel my personal motivations for examination involve a) foregone conclusions that everyone must agree with me on, since I don't really know what I think about everything, or b) the assumption that kink is bad and intrinsically unfeminist, since I don't believe that.
I'm not telling or asking other people to examine; but I do feel that there's often a general pressure against it for people who want it, and I'm not comfortable with that.
And this is why I don't like talking about this stuff in public.
(And I find the implication in the first post that radfems are "the powerful" really...odd. I'd say radfems are marginalized by mainstream feminists as well as by mainstream society. While I certainly don't agree with many radfems on all topics, I do think they often have uncomfortable things to say--right or wrong--and that is generally not a popular thing with the mainstream.)
I do think #4 is something of a strawman: there's NEVER an ultimate arbiter in any social justice debate, but that doesn't mean we should stop talking about things and pretend everything is always awesome. People aren't going to agree on everything, of course, but...that's people?
...anyway, this has kind of wandered off-topic, but I wouldn't be surprised if these sorts of things come up at a panel discussion, depending on who's in the audience.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2011-09-13 05:47 am (UTC)I have found self-examination useful, and the fact that it is usually uncomfortable at best does not make it less useful for me, and I don't feel my personal motivations for examination involve a) foregone conclusions that everyone must agree with me on, since I don't really know what I think about everything, or b) the assumption that kink is bad and intrinsically unfeminist, since I don't believe that.
I'm not telling or asking other people to examine; but I do feel that there's often a general pressure against it for people who want it, and I'm not comfortable with that.
And this is why I don't like talking about this stuff in public.
(And I find the implication in the first post that radfems are "the powerful" really...odd. I'd say radfems are marginalized by mainstream feminists as well as by mainstream society. While I certainly don't agree with many radfems on all topics, I do think they often have uncomfortable things to say--right or wrong--and that is generally not a popular thing with the mainstream.)
I do think #4 is something of a strawman: there's NEVER an ultimate arbiter in any social justice debate, but that doesn't mean we should stop talking about things and pretend everything is always awesome. People aren't going to agree on everything, of course, but...that's people?
...anyway, this has kind of wandered off-topic, but I wouldn't be surprised if these sorts of things come up at a panel discussion, depending on who's in the audience.