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Found this via Twitter, and enjoyed it a LOT. You may also, so I made a topic about it.
A bit more at the link. Really interesting read, and worth discussing if you're up for it.
http://www.ravishly.com/2015/01/12/social-justice-wrestling-lessons
I will find the courage to heel.
An attachment to the negligible long-term benefits of a clean fight is for chumps. Though I was perhaps born a chumpI prefer assigned chump at birthI am not a chump. Playing by the rules, having to maintain moral integrity, is only ever imposed on the marginalized. The police will knock down your door without a warrant, they will shoot you for standing in the street. Political organizers transparently game the voting process to keep the voices of people of color out of national discussion. And this behavior, though called out day in and day out, does not incite a widespread moral outrage because you have always accepted that the people with power do not maintain that power freely.
We binge-stream House of Cards and quote its mock-Machiavellian dialogue on our social media. We play video games about secret extrajudicial military operations. We give Facebook likes to a trailer for a film about two guys who pretend to be cops.
And then once the shows over we go on Twitter to take the protesters to task for a few broken windows.
Playing fair is a paralytic intended to hold the oppressed to a higher moral standard.
Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat.
I will ask for help.
Hulk Hogan is, in the shared universe of pretend that is professional wrestling, a bona-fide demigod. You simply cannot beat him by mortal means. At some point he hulks up, becomes impervious to damage, and brains the fuck out of you with the power of rock and roll.
Consider: Is it a greater cowardice to work around The Immortal Hulk Hogans sway over the squared circle, or to tell yourself that that hes the underdog and you are somehow believing in the indomitable will of the American spirit by cheering for him? Or, worse: to pretend arenas of vocally affirming fans, and a personality and look that fit the industrys needs at that time, are not in some way an advantage his opponents do not have.
When meritocracy and equality are centered on the accessibility of the ruling class (i.e. white men), any attempts to have community amongst the marginalized is immediately suspect. A white American journalist covering the wars his country started in another country is objective, nonbiased. For women to write about other women, for a person of color to focus on issues other PoC facethis is cheating, cherry-picking, having a bias.
We must support one another, and be remorseless, even brazen about it. Otherwise we all have to fight Hogan alone, and no one person is enough to kill a god surrounded by 10,000 of their followers.
I will allow myself to have nice things.
Anita Sarkeesian may have bought shoes. Lauren Chief Elk likes handbags. We build a society around consumption and then punish certain people who, despite a life of struggle, take pleasure in wanting and having things.
Its easy to flaunt your material detachment when you havent spent your whole life told by society that you will never have nice things without the intervention of a (white) man to provide you access to finery in exchange for compliance in patriarchal normativity.
Presumably Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmanns political forays were enabled by fundraising, and yet no ones begun a documentary project proclaiming either of them as frauds for dressing well and having access to gratifying aesthetics.
I will get pedicures before protest marches. I will buy a new dress before I participate in live debate. From The Crying Game to Orange is the New Black, you have told me from day one that women like me deserve to be feared, poor, unloved, and shamed for every shred of femininity that I acquire. Every inch of self care is an act of defiance.
A suitable reward for saving the world is to look good as you do it.
I will allow myself to be needed.
Ox Baker did not kill two men with his dreaded heart punch, the reviled maneuver that incited a riot in 1974. Two fat-addled Adonises with heart problems wrestled Ox Baker and then died from complications wrought by a sport with a long and established disregard for the health and safety of their performers. But better ticket sales and diffused accountability is behind only one of these doors. Thus: Baker explodes peoples hearts for money.
The marginalized are, for better or worse, not the only people who need me.
You and I and everyone we know are actively complicit in the very societal evils we claim to counter.
I am not perfect, but I am willing to call myself out (most of the time) and try hard to hear and accept other people calling me out. I am letting go of my goodness, of my image. But there are others. People who will not, as my father so often accused me of as a child, take responsibility. They will not own up to the ways they reinforce an unjust world.
They are holding onto their goodnessthey fear that to admit they have made mistakes will be to surrender that moral high ground. They need people like me, who will interrupt and sabotage and dispense digital screams into the blogosphere at critiquing gender, reclaiming words, just trying to pay tribute other cultures.
They need someone like me to take their discomfort with themselves at possibly not having done enough or done the right thingand give it back to them, packaged in agitation.
I give them the gift they wont give themselves: unease.
And god, I like it.
Liberation does not occur with the middle grounds approval. If it was, wed use a different word for it, like agreement.
We will win, in time. Its only a matter of who we will consist of.
2015 is the year of the social justice heel.
A bit more at the link. Really interesting read, and worth discussing if you're up for it.
http://www.ravishly.com/2015/01/12/social-justice-wrestling-lessons
