The above rant, incidentally, is why I get really twitchy when I hear somebody say that we need to get "more militant."
That's the kind of logic I associated with militancy, a need to totalize absolutely everything so that it ties into The Cause, and to judge everything by how well it fits The Cause's running dogma.
I'm a pretty rabid feminist -- for survival reasons if nothing else -- but I'm a Discordian pope first. Y'all have spread a lot of bad order in the pursuit of something good. -__-
very indirect sexual assault reference
For example, I'm probably gonna watch Chinatown tonight. -__- And I'm gonna enjoy it.
And you'd better believe I'm gonna steal it, because I still don't want that son of a bitch to make any money again, ever.
But I'm still going to watch it, because it doesn't constitute an endorsement of the director as a human being, because it's a damn near perfectly constructed film from which I can learn a lot to use in my subversive queer post-humanist fantasy...
very indirect sexual assault reference
...and because it does not in any way constitute an endorsement of that abusive piece of shit Roman Polanski. Because I'm a goddamned grown-up (with a few requisite privileges), and while I would NEVER require anyone with trauma issues to expose themselves to his work, nor mock them for refusing, I'm pretty sure I can take this film in without degrading myself, poisoning myself against women, nor in any way enriching that son of a bitch.
very indirect sexual assault reference
And because dammit, here we have lengthy insight into the mind of an abuser. We can learn a lot about how Polanski thought of women, and how that may have shaped his crimes. That's USEFUL knowledge of the enemy.
By all means, avoid things that traumatize you. Support others in this. But don't generalize it all into some kind of "sinful" knowledge. Humans love forbidden fruit. DON'T EMPOWER IT LIKE THAT.
Kill it, put it on a slide, and inspect it instead.
very indirect sexual assault reference
And as is so often the case, if you're wondering why I'm so fanatical about this stuff, when I otherwise tend to agree with feminists about 90% of the time...
Ex-Christian I had to go through this whole process once before. And it really, really scares me to see signs of that kind of moralist purism in the philosophical home that I fled to after I ran screaming from fundamentalist Christianity.
I would not do this if I didn't think feminism were worth it.