My mother took to referring to Kamala as “Kamel-Toe” for some reason. Within the last few years I remember telling my mother something along the lines of, “It pains me to see the woman who raised me to believe in fairness and treating others with decency abandon all the principles she taught me.” I still make it a point to visit my mother once a week, but we don’t really talk about much as I don’t trust her judgment on anything of importance.
Dividing the world in such a manner leads to some odds beliefs. A few years ago there was a song called “Rude” by a Canadian Raggae fusion band called Magic! On one message board I participated on, there were some complaints about cultural appropriation because none of the members have any Jamaican ancestry. That is until someone pointed out the lead singer was a Palestinian-Canadian, and all such criticisms of appropriation dried up. Apparently if you’ve got some Palestinian ancestry you can’t appropriate anyone else’s culture. It gets quite complicated trying to figure when it’s okay for one person to borrow from another culture and when it’s not. It just depends on where you rank on the oppression pyramid.
This is probably not the right thread for my rant about cultural appropriation. I feel like a lot of human progress comes from groups stealing good ideas from each other. And i mean that culturally, not just technologically.
But I’m happy to learn that at least oppressed people are allowed to borrow a variety of musical styles.
Probably in most cases. But parents disown their kids for stupid reasons all the time, like because the kid is gay, or trans. So I wouldn’t assume there is always a good reason for a kid to disown a parent.
This particular example is definitely not common. But I think the general point is true. It’s easier for a man to hurt other people physically, whereas women tend to express aggression less directly by necessity.
Empathy is a funny thing. People into social justice sell it as simple caring, but their empathy is extremely selective. Once you’ve experienced that, you generally end up totally disillusioned. Another recruit for the right.
But there’s some serious philosophical problems with the whole concept. Take a look at this:
All of the violence I’ve seen in my life came from a woman, although she enjoyed hurting people emotionally just as much. I don’t want to stereotype people with Borderline Personality Disorder too much, but I think with my Mom, even her threats of self-harm were attempts to cause emotional suffering in others. I believe she was suffering too, a lot, and I don’t think she was consciously aware of any of this… She has extremely low self-insight.
But there was a lot of straight-up violence too.
I went through a mercifully brief phase in grade school where I behaved like a mini-her whenever I was angry. She had taught me that’s what you do when you’re angry. Total nuclear mode. And prior to regular meditation I used to experience rage on a fairly regular basis. I didn’t do anything with it other than feel like a monster. But hell, if you look at my writing, it’s full of rage, violence, aggression, people can take it well if the character is a man but it’s a lot harder coming from a woman.
My empathy is sometimes useless because I’m paralyzed by the intensity of the feeling. I actually had to learn to dial it back to be effective at my job.
And I do feel empathy for people you’re not supposed to feel empathy for. It annoys my husband sometimes when he just wants to rant about Republicans.
Last night he told me he has low emotional empathy but high cognitive empathy and I believe he is right. That’s why he’s so good in a crisis. He’s super compassionate but never bowled over by people in crisis and their heightened emotions, even if it’s someone he really cares about, like me. I’ve never met anyone as calm as him in a crisis. I am the exact opposite.
What made you stop acting like that, if you don’t mind me asking?
So it is about gender roles. You could just write gay romance, but that seems like a cop out. More interesting to carry on with what you’re doing.
Are your books published?
That’s pretty rare.
This paragraph I quoted isn’t controversial as written:
But ingroups don’t have to be people who look like you. When someone on the left reads a story about a hard-working, law abiding immigrant who got deported, or LGBT person who suffered discrimination, or a black person shot by (implied to be racist) police, it stokes anger and hatred towards Republicans/Maga/anyone who doesn’t share their views on social issues. Such stories are often biased or misleading, but they are effective.
Same deal with the conflict in Israel: on one hand we get horrifying stories of children killed by Hamas, and missing person posters put up for the hostages. On the other, stories of kids or whole families killed by bombs in Gaza, or suffering in hospital. Depending which side they identify with more, viewers can end up hating the other. A few have even reacted with violence against random members of one or other group.
Empathy is important for caring about other people, but it also has this dark side of inspiring hatred. And as you say, it can be paralysing. I guess the point is that we need to use our heads as well as our hearts when weighing up issues like this.
I’m really only interested in writing hetero romance.
My books are not published. I’ve been told, by editors and other writers, that my work is ready to ship, but I am extremely perfectionistic, to my own detriment. I get so stuck on details that aren’t gelling just right. But I am pretty close to done on a complete rewrite. I already have 3/4 of the sequel written which came a lot easier. The first book has been so challenging because I knew nothing about how to write a novel when I wrote it, so I’ve had to fix some fundamental structural elements.
Incidentally, my book is about a lot of the stuff we’re talking about in this thread. This is fantasy. The female main character is the Prime Minister’s daughter trying to get her mentor out of a terrorist prison because she thinks he’ll be the ideal face of the revolutionary war - she is a secret defector. This is in many respects an ethnic conflict. The male main character is the revolutionary leader’s half brother, who is an oppressed ethnic minority that doesn’t give two shits about the revolution because he’s been treated so badly by the revolutionaries on account of his race. But he wants to get his brother out of prison, too.
This is intersectionality. He’s oppressed because he’s a from the country of Levia but he’s also oppressed by the Levians because he’s Kelhili.
So the oppressive state is the enemy. But one of the major antagonistic forces of the novel is the revolutionaries themselves. Even though their cause is just, they shit all over the Prime Minister’s daughter despite her slavish devotion because she’s not one of them. Her thoughts and opinions don’t matter. So it’s a lot about her disillusionment with the people she’s serving. She has to let go of her naive view of them and learn to work with them on her own terms, which includes not compromising on their treatment of her Kelhili boyfriend.
When I was in fifth grade I got mad at a girl over some petty kid thing and wrote her an absolutely viscous letter. I had no concept of how inappropriate and disproportionate it was until my teacher shared her opinion about it. I felt really bad about it.
So it’s possible I just realized, oh, this isn’t how most people do anger.
It’s also possible my Mom talked to me about it and told me to knock it off, in a “okay for me but not for thee” sort of way.
It’s also possible my Aunt told me to knock it off. I lost my temper once at her house and she shut it down hard. But I don’t know if it was around the same time.
