Tuesday, July 03, 2007

I don't believe in civility as an political thing. Why? Because I don't like politics being reduced to who likes who or whatever. One of the worst parts of femininity is the idea that there are no facts, no reality, just who is popular right now or who likes who right now. If you're superficially nice, you're right, even if your facts are wrong, AMIRITE? The reason I'm for being precise about who said what about what is to head off feminine acting individuals from playing scandal, a game in which you whisper about what bad things your enemy possibly did without any facts to support them (in high school, a popular 'scandal' was that the scapegoat used a marker as a dildo in the restroom) . You'll note that I avoid playing scandal here- I don't run to my blog yelling A SEX POS PERSON SAID THAT RAPING 12 YEAR OLD THAI GIRLS WAS OK AND TOTALLY EMPOWERING without any links or attribution because my goal is not to elicit "OH, it's a hard life being rad fem" responses. We all know that saying raping thai girls is OK is bad, so claiming that my 'enemy' said something bad just to say it is too feminine* for me. Of course, I prefer to focus on one's pattern of behaving rather than particular words. Like if someone is like, hey, shan, you b*tch! but is otherwise respectful, I'm more likely to trust that person than a person who shows a pattern of playing scandal, queen beeing, and the like. That sort of crap doesn't build trust for me. I can't work with you if I can't trust you.

I am not saying it's totally helpful and great to say rude words, I'm just warning that by putting the focus on who was nice to who and who was mean to who that our real goals are obscured. If we want to work for the sex workers in our communities, we have to remember that 99.9% haven't heard of whatever we are fighting about today. Let's listen to their needs if we want to organize in their name.

*When I use the words feminine and femininity, I mean the stupid bullcrap women are expected to do, which tend to be the exact opposite of an adult role.

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