Forced labor is still slavery if you are technically getting paid. If you have no choice in the matter it's slavery.
If you're in California, you can support the California Abolition Act the next time it's introduced to the state legislature; its most recent incarnation was killed in June of 2022 after passing the state assembly but dying in the Senate. That doesn't mean that it can't be reintroduced, and you can help make that happen by supporting the End Slavery in California Act Coalition (the site is messed up right now but the news page is still updated). District 11 Assemblywoman Lori Wilson is currently leading the charge on getting the act reintroduced, which you can see her recent (February, 2023) press conference about it for more info:
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Disgusting display of white supremacy and groomed virtueless moms.
Rot in hell you piece of shit!!!
“We don’t value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way!”
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, 1995
Once again, Calvin is far too right
It feels taboo as a childfree person to admit this but I actually do have concerns about who is going to take care of me when I'm old. The elder care system in our nation relies A LOT on the unpaid care labor of adult children. I just don't think that's a good reason to have kids.
"But you'll have more money!" does not completely put this to rest for me. Neither does "Buy care insurance!" Even if I can afford direct personal care, who is going to advocate for me to get it? Who is going to navigate bureaucracy for me when I'm 80?
"If you do have kids, there's no GUARANTEE that they'll take care of you when your old!" That's true, but doesn't solve my problem.
I think childfree people get very defensive about this question because its used as a kind of "gotcha!" against us, but I actually do not feel we can afford to be in denial about this reality. Based on current trends of more people in their 30s stating they intend to be permanently childfree, we are going to see a huge wave of childfree adults hitting the eldercare system at once in a few decades. Childfree people in their 30s should be advocating around eldercare NOW.
So I read this interesting post from the MensLib subreddit, about how men's issues are always blamed on men themselves and never on society. The post itself as well as the comments are a very good read in digging in to antimasculism & the ways in which feminism has failed to critically examine men's suffering under the patriarchy. For example (all bolding by me):
Here again, the problems predominantly affecting women are addressed by changing society, while those predominantly affecting men are addressed by changing men (or by telling men to change themselves). The difference is not that one approach is right and the other wrong; they are both 'right' in the sense that they highlight genuine issues, but the approach to men's problems is more superficial. When dealing with men's problems, we focus on the immediate cause, which is usually the men's failure to cope with mental strain ("he should have gone to therapy", "he should have learned to open up more"); in contrast, when dealing with women's problems, we focus on "the cause of the cause", and try to remove the systemic social issues causing the mental strain, rather than telling the victims what they should have done to better cope with it.
I think this is a great point, and something we really need to tackle. OP also goes on to talk about self-repression, comparing girls avoiding sexual harassment and boys avoiding bullying:
Boys (and men) are notorious for repressing their emotions. They have a good reason: in boys' peer groups, a failure to control your emotions is almost as shameful as a failure to control your bladder; it is a sign of weakness, and any sign of weakness makes you a target for bullying and ridicule. So boys learn to wear a permanent mask of aloof toughness to avoid inadvertently revealing any sign of weakness or uncontrolled emotion, and many keep this habit into adulthood. It is generally well recognized that suppressing emotions is unhealthy in the long run, but it seems to me that the commonly proposed antidote is misguided: boys (or men) are told to "just open up more and be vulnerable" or to "learn how to cry", as if their reluctance to show emotions were some kind of irrational emotion-phobia, rather than a perfectly reasonable, perhaps even necessary, defense against the ridicule, contempt and loss of respect that society inflicts upon those who can't keep their emotions in check in the proper "manly" way.
It's something we don't really question in mainstream feminism. Women's issues have a societal root, and men's issues are issues that men put on themselves, and therefore men just need to fix it themselves and change.
And while yes, we all have a responsibility to unlearn harmful societal teachings, just saying "men need to fix their shit" doesn't help anyone. I've been annoyed for a while at how people will react to men suffering under the patriarchy with "UGH they need to go to therapy", as if
- Needing therapy is a sign of failure or a bad thing, and someone not going to therapy when they need to is them being an asshole on purpose and not potentially a sign of them not feeling safe enough to go to therapy, feeling too ashamed, not having enough money or time, etc.
- Individual men getting individual therapy will solve the societal problems of forcing boys and men to repress their emotions and view themselves as only valuable if they can perform manual labor and have a lot of sex with women. It's a problem that is only perpetuated by men themselves and if they just stopped doing that, then the problem would disappear.
No self-respecting feminist would ever react to a woman obviously suffering from the patriarchy with "ugh, she needs to go to therapy and fix herself." Yes, therapy would be helpful most likely, but that's not going to actually fix the underlying cause of her issues. So why do we, as feminists, think that "men just need to fix themselves" is an okay response to societal suffering under the patriarchy?
Who does this help? Who benefits from us ignoring these issues? Why do we assume that men's experiences under the patriarchy are so one-dimensional and that we have no responsibility for unlearning our societal biases around men and masculinity?
Someone in the comments also added this quote from the "perpetually relevant" I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out essay by Jen Coates:
Have you noticed, when a product is marketed in an unnecessarily gendered way, that the blame shifts depending on the gender? That a pink pen made “for women” is (and this is, of course, true) the work of idiotic cynical marketing people trying insultingly to pander to what they imagine women want? But when they make yogurt “for men” it is suddenly about how hilarious and fragile masculinity is — how men can’t eat yogurt unless their poor widdle bwains can be sure it doesn’t make them gay? #MasculinitySoFragile is aimed, with smug malice, at men—not marketers.
And then another commenter left this (and referenced bell hooks' work on men!!):
"Do you agree that we tend to approach women's problems as systemic issues, and men's problems as personal issues?" Yes, and there's even a name for this: Hyperagency. Individual men are assumed to be immune to systemic pressures because the people at the top of the hierarchies generating those pressures are also men. "And if you do agree with that, do you think this difference in approach is justified, or do you rather think it is a case of an unfair bias?" It's pretty clearly not rooted in reality. The idea that billions of ordinary men aren't beholden to the social constructs under which they were raised is just plain silly. I'd blame the empathy gap, but honestly I feel like it's more than that. Patriarchy hyper-individualizes every struggle a man faces as a way to shield itself from critique and gaslight ordinary men. The motivations there are readily apparent. However, we see the same blind spot appear even in more academic Feminist spaces (taking for granted that "Feminist" spaces on social media are hardly representative of the cutting edge of Feminist thought). bell hooks once postulated that some Feminist women are deeply afraid of acknowledging how little they understand about men, let alone taking the steps to broach that gap.
Another person explained hyperagency by saying "Every single individual man is a hyper agent who is just expected to bootstrap his way out of the patriarchy through sheer force of will."
If you are interested in antimasculism as a concept I think this is a necessary concept to learn about. You can see in a lot of little ways how we expect hyperagency of men & look down on men who "fail", and how men's issues are often either attributed to their own failings, or individual men are treated as though they have far more influence over the patriarchal system than is reasonable (i.e "well the patriarchy benefits men, therefore if men are suffering because of it they should simply make the patriarchy go away, it's their own fault" rather than seeking solidarity with them)
I'm genuinely interested in this, it's another element we rarely hear about (also really hope you get better)
thank you (both for indulging me & well wishes)
So its something I've thought about a lot because I've heard MANY feminists talk about how men are oppressing themselves, but often its said with a tone of "men are the cause of their own suffering, so I don't have any sympathy for them".
But I feel like this ignores how interesting the concept is. We tend to view oppression as an interaction between two (or more) classes, but I think its interesting to examine oppression works a class oppresses itself. People will say this as a way of brushing off concerns about men under the patriarchy, rather than taking it as a chance to view men as potential allies as another group suffering from the same system, because they assume that "men oppress themselves" means that individual men could just choose not to have the patriarchy, rather than that men as a class benefit from the patriarchy while also being deeply harmed by it because of the patriarchy's own way of self-regulating.
If you are in a class that oppresses itself, you don't have an enemy you can point to for why you are suffering. You can only point to yourself. I feel like this is why men's issues tend to go more or less undiscussed; outside of the reactionary "its women/queers/foreigners/etc. fault", there isn't anyone to point to, so its not seen as something worth complaining about. Women can very clearly point to an outside force that causes their oppression- women can point to how cis men have power over them as a class separate from themselves, and therefore recognize how unjust their situation is. But men can't; either you rally around a boogeyman thats used to justify further bigoted violence, or you don't rally at all, and simply accept that the system is how it is for you. And the patriarchy encourages this because it thrives on male suffering: it thrives on keeping men in competition with each other, on being constantly insecure and needing to defend their manhood under the threat of ridicule and violence and loss of self-worth.
Women's issues have become obvious because women realized & were loud about gendered injustice. But if you don't recognize something as injustice, or as a part of a system of injustice, you don't speak up. But cis women (who have always been the loudest voices in feminism) also aren't going to be aware of the intricacies of how the patriarchy treats men for the same reason cis men aren't going to be aware of the reverse. & feminism, for good reason, has spent most of its lifespan focused on (cis) women's issues, so even though many feminists have put time and energy into analyzing and making efforts to help men under the patriarchy, its not nearly as discussed and there isn't nearly as strong or active a movement centered around it.
& of course, that doesn't make the injustice go away. Its being caused by a wider social system that intrudes on every part & every level of our lives, and is primarily benefiting the wealthiest people at the very top who are situated to benefit from the entire kyriarchy. And people are still going to feel the injustice even if they don't see where its coming from or why. So when you have this unspoken, unnamed injustice without a large movement to call it out & connect it with women's & queer's issues, and many of those impacted are (often white) cishet men with un-analyzed biases, it creates the perfect spot for reactionary movements to pop up. They get their energy from this unrecognized pain and suffering.
In an HBomberGuy video on flat earthers, he talks about how a lot of the people who are into that are doing so because they have a deep feeling that the system is not working, something is deeply wrong, and no one is dealing with it- and they are right to feel that way. They just don't have the conceptual framework to point them to the actual reasoning (i.e capitalism). And I think the same applies here. It doesn't mean there isn't real harm done, or that it should be excused, but I think a lot of cis men out there are reacting to a valid feeling of injustice that they aren't able to correctly place. They may have biases against feminism which prevent them from getting into feminist theory, but also many cis boys aren't going to be exposed to feminism as something that's For Them. Growing up AFAB I 100% got the message, even vaguely, that feminism was For Me and therefore I had vested interested in learning about it. But for many cis boys, there isn't any messaging that feminism is in any way for them- in fact, either through listening to other men/boys or through shitty feminist memes about how men should die, they get the message that at the very least, feminism isn't for them, and at worst, that it's hostile to their very existence. And again, this is 100% motivated at least in part by misogyny. But the only reason people who were AFAB tend to be less aggressively misogynistic is because we have a vested interest in Not Doing That because its a clear existential threat to us- everyone in a misogynistic society is going to have ingrained misogyny. It's just that some of us have more chances to recognize that its hurtful.
So when you combine all of this, and the obvious benefits for grifters & fascists to take advantage of this, then you get MRAs and pick-up-artists and "women are the problem" type shit.
This is why I feel so passionately about men's liberation. People hear "men oppress themselves" and write it off as "men choose to suffer under the patriarchy" instead of taking the more compassionate road of "the class of "man" is made to be self-oppressive". Cis men shouldn't have to be oppressed in the same way women & queers are to be considered oppressed by the patriarchy. Its a cruel trick of the patriarchy that we assume that because something is true for one gender, the inverse must be true for its "opposite", like sexism is fucking quantum entanglement. We assume that because cis men don't have an outside oppressor class, they can't be "really" suffering, instead of saying that patriarchal manhood is a unique sort of oppression. And from there, we need to seek solidarity with cis men, and anyone else, who is suffering under the patriarchy. There are oppressive cis men, and cis women, and queers! But I truly think compassionate, pro-feminist men's liberation could allow a lot more men, especially cis men (& anyone else who might be classed with cis men without being men themselves) achieve feminist class consciousness. And then the fight against patriarchy & sexism would be stronger, and so many serious issues could get desperately needed activism.
& many people will argue that they should not have to have sympathy or compassion for misogynistic men. And I agree, you aren't obligated to do or feel anything like that. But we can't fix things unless we address their root causes, and when the root cause is suffering and injustice, hostility and cruelty aren't going to help. So either we can give up on cis men ( or [insert group here]), or we can be activists. And its fine to not be an activist if the emotional labor is exhausting. But if we want big social change, we can't accomplish that with this "well they suck so it doesn't matter that they act this way because they are suffering" attitude. Its the attitude of prisons, that criminals trauma & circumstances don't matter, all they need is firm hand to punish them and they'll start have more appropriate emotional responses to said trauma and circumstances.
If the way to solve problems is by addressing the root cause, and the root cause is suffering, then compassion is vital to solving the problem. There's no way around it. If you call yourself a vet and you have a hurt animal that's lashing out, hitting the animal with a stick isn't going to make the animal realize you could help it. It's just going to keep it in a state of panic that makes it even more irrational. And, sure, if the animal attacks you, get it off of you and kill it if you are in danger- but you can't call yourself a vet and then kill every animal that bites you. You'll just end up with a lot of dead animals that could have been happy and loving if you had just put your own pain aside and tried some compassion. Either do that, or don't be a vet.
I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said “might as well see if it works.” I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if you’re a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.
dude.
$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.
re-reblogging and thinking about when i have another collection agency calling that i can just do this
“Morty! This is an eggpla… Why did you?.. How did this?… Whoaaaa”
But how do we stop evictions when politicians won’t respond to our needs? By shutting down the courts 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼
direct action works, and it’s all we can count on. The working classes only have each other to rely on
👏 bring 👏 this 👏 back 👏
