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I'm gonna do some omphaloskepsis thing here and I'm gonna cut it because I expect it will be long and excessively meta and have a lot more poking social dynamics with a stick than should be blatted onto people's read pages without warning.
For various reasons I've been thinking about a bunch of things, like my experience with bullies, which is at least for purposes of this writing to be considered somewhat distinct from my experience arguing with *ERFs as a hobby. But the framing of the arguing with *ERFs is important, because one of the things that they would bang on about uselessly was an essentialising perspective of violence based on presumed sex.
Basically: I was targeted, particularly in junior high school, as a particular favorite of the bullies. The format and structure of that bullying came out primarily as forms of sexual harassment, as well as other things which I did not have the social-structual understanding to parse but which I assumed at the time were probably also attempts at sexual harassment because Occam's Razor, except when they were pretty clearly "you're an acceptable target and we're throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks".
The *ERFs would look at that and say "they are targeting you Because You Are Part of the Sex Class: Woman", and the thing is, intuitively that always seemed wrong to me. I argued about it at times. And not just because the more I talked to *ERFs the more I got alienated from the concept of 'womanhood' (see also my desire to write an epic shitpost titled "I was transed by the TERFs").
But the male bullies didn't target me because they presumed I was female. They targeted me because I was socially inept, withdrawn, and isolated; because I was a 'teacher's pet' who got along with adults better than peers and who focused into academia and art; because we shared a school bus and thus I was a captive target on days that I didn't stay after school to work the school store, do math team, or come up with some other excuse to not be on the damn bus; because I didn't have the fluency with the situation to make targeting me have consequences they cared about. They targeted me because I would sing to myself; I refused to let them make me ashamed of it and I still have a faint impression that one of them maybe regretted what they were doing, but not enough to restrain his buddies.
I sang "If I Had Wings" by Peter, Paul, and Mary, mostly, on the bus. Because I was judging them, and I've always been like this, with a song for the occasion.
Hell of an anthem for junior high.
The male bullies used sexism, sexualised abusiveness, and sexual assault as their tools to try to hurt me, but they were motivated by my weirdness, my social awkwardness, my isolation, my ignorance of local norms ("What do you mean you don't know the New Kids on the Block?!").
(I had one friend in junior high, with whom I mostly had in common two things: that the other kids hated him, and playing Tetris. I don't know what format the abuses he got took; we never talked about them. (Though there were other patterns that that set up that are beyond the margins of this ramble.) But we were both social rejects, and the reasoning on the part of the others seemed relatively similar: target the weirdo. I think there were a couple of kids I could've made common cause with if I'd known how, but of course I did not know how and that's mostly a perspective looking back as an adult.)
The female bullies? I mean, their chosen form of abusiveness was very gender-performative (the best one was the time I was invited to a party! To my great shock and delight that maybe I would make a friend! a slumber party, even! ... at an address that did not exist, leaving me wandering the neighborhood carrying a sleeping bag and a duffel forlornly until my parents collected me again). That's the sort of social violence that is very, very feminine, culturally speaking. But that's not the "males target females because sex class" thing that the *ERFs pushed, but the *ERFs were never good at figuring out that female humans can also be bullies, perpetrate violence, etc. (It would require them to have a modicum of self-awareness and theory of mind, which was not their strong point as a collective.)
My presumed gender was not why I was a target; my presumed gender was a weapon that people used once the target had been chosen. Whether it was being overtly sexist or menacing on the basis of sex, or the whole complicated gender validation of teen girls that I can't even articulate beyond gesturing at it, the way an affirmative group was de rigeur for safety and social acceptance and thus a genuine temptation even in the absence of sufficient social bonds for the offer to be something other than a setup.
(There are so many ways that my experience of gender is tangled up with the whole spicy brains thing. It makes a lot of things really weird and difficult to fucking analyse.)
For various reasons I've been thinking about a bunch of things, like my experience with bullies, which is at least for purposes of this writing to be considered somewhat distinct from my experience arguing with *ERFs as a hobby. But the framing of the arguing with *ERFs is important, because one of the things that they would bang on about uselessly was an essentialising perspective of violence based on presumed sex.
Basically: I was targeted, particularly in junior high school, as a particular favorite of the bullies. The format and structure of that bullying came out primarily as forms of sexual harassment, as well as other things which I did not have the social-structual understanding to parse but which I assumed at the time were probably also attempts at sexual harassment because Occam's Razor, except when they were pretty clearly "you're an acceptable target and we're throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks".
The *ERFs would look at that and say "they are targeting you Because You Are Part of the Sex Class: Woman", and the thing is, intuitively that always seemed wrong to me. I argued about it at times. And not just because the more I talked to *ERFs the more I got alienated from the concept of 'womanhood' (see also my desire to write an epic shitpost titled "I was transed by the TERFs").
But the male bullies didn't target me because they presumed I was female. They targeted me because I was socially inept, withdrawn, and isolated; because I was a 'teacher's pet' who got along with adults better than peers and who focused into academia and art; because we shared a school bus and thus I was a captive target on days that I didn't stay after school to work the school store, do math team, or come up with some other excuse to not be on the damn bus; because I didn't have the fluency with the situation to make targeting me have consequences they cared about. They targeted me because I would sing to myself; I refused to let them make me ashamed of it and I still have a faint impression that one of them maybe regretted what they were doing, but not enough to restrain his buddies.
I sang "If I Had Wings" by Peter, Paul, and Mary, mostly, on the bus. Because I was judging them, and I've always been like this, with a song for the occasion.
- How can you ask if I'm happy goin' my way?
You might as well ask a child at play
There's no need to discuss or understand me
I won't ask of myself to become something else
I'll just be me
If I had wings no one would ask me should I fly
The bird sings, and no one asks her why
I can see in myself wings as I feel them
If you see something else, keep your thoughts to yourself
I'll fly free then
Hell of an anthem for junior high.
The male bullies used sexism, sexualised abusiveness, and sexual assault as their tools to try to hurt me, but they were motivated by my weirdness, my social awkwardness, my isolation, my ignorance of local norms ("What do you mean you don't know the New Kids on the Block?!").
(I had one friend in junior high, with whom I mostly had in common two things: that the other kids hated him, and playing Tetris. I don't know what format the abuses he got took; we never talked about them. (Though there were other patterns that that set up that are beyond the margins of this ramble.) But we were both social rejects, and the reasoning on the part of the others seemed relatively similar: target the weirdo. I think there were a couple of kids I could've made common cause with if I'd known how, but of course I did not know how and that's mostly a perspective looking back as an adult.)
The female bullies? I mean, their chosen form of abusiveness was very gender-performative (the best one was the time I was invited to a party! To my great shock and delight that maybe I would make a friend! a slumber party, even! ... at an address that did not exist, leaving me wandering the neighborhood carrying a sleeping bag and a duffel forlornly until my parents collected me again). That's the sort of social violence that is very, very feminine, culturally speaking. But that's not the "males target females because sex class" thing that the *ERFs pushed, but the *ERFs were never good at figuring out that female humans can also be bullies, perpetrate violence, etc. (It would require them to have a modicum of self-awareness and theory of mind, which was not their strong point as a collective.)
My presumed gender was not why I was a target; my presumed gender was a weapon that people used once the target had been chosen. Whether it was being overtly sexist or menacing on the basis of sex, or the whole complicated gender validation of teen girls that I can't even articulate beyond gesturing at it, the way an affirmative group was de rigeur for safety and social acceptance and thus a genuine temptation even in the absence of sufficient social bonds for the offer to be something other than a setup.
(There are so many ways that my experience of gender is tangled up with the whole spicy brains thing. It makes a lot of things really weird and difficult to fucking analyse.)
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What you're describing matches my experience.
Bullying is (so far as I can tell) someone asserting "I have higher status than you" via variations on the basic primate status assertion. ("I can hit who I want; I can fuck who I want.")
So the expression might intersect gender somewhere but the thing itself, the bad insecurity management, is orthogonal.
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(Which of course gets me off on a whole mental tangent about gender, not as social improv tool, but weapon, though of course any social improv tool is also a weapon, and now I'm contemplating nephilim again. Like I do.)
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As one does, yes.
If "weapon" is about "imposition of necessity" (and we don't fuss about self and mechanism and object), if everything involving the imposition of necessity is a weapon one winds up asking of the buddha-dharma has the weapon-nature, and I'm fairly sure there are at least two other categories of necessity; things consequent of history (we evolved, planet has this particular size, the value of the Hubble constant, it is snowing where one happens to be...) and things consequence of the effort of the construction of facts.
I think it's nigh-universally the substitution of preference for necessity where fault arises with weapons.
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One difficulty of these days is that it is difficult to say "hark to the hard fate" without some implication of sarcasm, even should no such thing be intended.
Not a thing to argue with; permit me to hope it's not any more intransigent than it cannot avoid being.
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I am unfond of being pressed to them, but I suppose it does get things done.
ETA: For unrelated reasons I had a tab to this song open and I just played it and welp:
Be afraid
Be very afraid
but do it anyway
Do it anyway
Be afraid
Be very afraid
but do it anyway
Do it anyway
We don't take requests
We won't shut up and sing
You tell the truth enough,
you find it rhymes with everything
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Things are getting overly overtly connected again.
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This, yes. I keep trying to formulate a more complex comment, but you've pretty much nailed it there.
The essential component of bullying is "You're weird/isolated, and I can push myself up in the social hierarchy by pushing you down." How it's applied is fairly arbitrary.
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(I know you know this, I'm at least attempting to build to a point.)
Here, lemme go find the thing I said last time this happened, I was pleased with how that one came out.
Like I said, IKYK.
The radfem way of dealing with all these women (people they count as women) saying that it doesn't work like that for them is by chalking it up to "false consciousness". The idea that women who want to talk about any other oppression they experience as more important is a symptom of just being completely saturated in sexism, producing these "false" views.
So if I say, as a cis woman, that the bullying I took was much more ableism than sexism, then that is my "false consciousness" talking, and they get to dismiss it. And everybody else, too. They are inured by this to not-listen just like conservatives are by their positions. And they've been holding this line for decades, despite all the evidence. They are inherently reactionary. Which is the reason why they ally so readily with conservatives.
"False consciousness" is what they use to build walls between themselves and other women, while claiming to speak for "all women". That itself is exclusionary. All radfems are *ERFs, it's just the variable first letter.
...I think that got to where I was going. I think.
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