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lover-official · 9 months

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The way I'm seeing people consume the Barbie movie uncritically and call it a feminist masterpiece is concerning.

It's giving the same kind of energy as how this site was in the mid 2010's, where we just somehow decided collectively that Men Were All Bad Actually ™️ and like ignored all the ways that's fucked up and that categorically not just dismissing but actively shitting on and harassing a group of people based on an identity they literally can't control is bad.

Like idk I thought we were finally acknowledging the damage that did to feminism. I thought we were finally acknowledging the way that bred a self loathing into men that isolated them and stopped coalition building, and the way young men of color (especially black men) were treated in explicitly racist ways but people used the guise of "no I'm just mad at men" to justify it, and the way trans men CONTINUE to be treated on this website... but here we are, getting real fucking hype about how good the Barbie movie treats the Kens.

And the thing is that while what the Kens do is bad they aren't given genuine agency in the narrative. They didn't like. Make this choice. It's a stupid and logically inconsistent argument that they did, one that's contradicted by the movie itself. They're infantalized by the Barbies at every turn and if ANY Ken has literally any formal education they're an exception. The Barbies don't know where the Kens live (spoiler: they are literally homeless) and they don't care. The Kens are quite literally second class citizens, but the movie doesn't even look at this as a bad thing! It's uninterested in the actually feminist idea that gender should not be used to cause divides or power embalances; instead, it acts out a female supremacy revenge fantasy on screen and then pats itself on the back for being so kind about how it makes the Kens second class citizens. Like sure, it says, the Kens aren't allowed higher education, or a Supreme Court seat, or homes, which are things women do have in the western world that this movie is made for as its primary audience, but at least we're not withholding healthcare or acting sexually violently towards them! And like... that's not the flex you think it is!!!! That's the bare fucking minimum!

Some of you have never read feminist theory and it fucking shows.

bell hooks didn't write The will to change just for you all to uncritically felate a corporate propaganda film as a feminist masterwork. Audre Lorde didn't say "You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same," so that you could say that coalition building isn't important, actually, and you'd rather men just suffer than for us to reach healthier societal views on gender.

I'm especially disappointed in the trans people, who should fucking know better, for regurgitating these ideas.

We have to do better about how we treat men even conceptually, because the structural power that men have is not the dominant experience many men have with regards to oppression and we would be better served to fight those battles together. We have to do better because men do not deserve to be isolated from the movement because of their gender. (And no. They don't just need a thicker skin, because a lot of this hasn't just been surface level. It's been vitriolic and insipid, for years now.) We have to do better because once we start making masculinity the devil it's so much easier to hate butches, and trans women, and any woman who's perceived to have masculine interests or features or behaviors. We have to do better because men are still fucking people and deserve to be treated with every bit of kindness and dignity that women are entitled to. (And that's not even getting into how this behavior affects masculine nonbinary people, who get the brunt of this hatred while simultaneously experiencing little to none of the privilege you insist is afforded them by the maleness you percieve.)

Idk I guess I just expected better and I just hoped we wouldn't be worshipping something that pretty clearly flies in the face of what feminists have worked for since like. The 60's. :/

#carmina posting #if you reblog this and try to start shit in the tags or comments I'm not engaging I'll just block #I'm upset because while I am a girl and I love women i also understand the reasons that this flies in the face of feminist theory #and I don't want to argue about that I just want to be allowed to be upset #if you want recommendations on further reading to make an informed opinion because you haven't read feminist theory that addresses...#...this kind of stuff though you can ask for that or dm me and ask and I'll provide resources #i just don't want to get into fights on this

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21stcenturymen · 6 years

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Women Do Not Want to Be Raped

RATING: Mature

I want to be clear about this week’s rating. The content I’m going to reference is the worst kind of hateful misinformation, and it’s not healthy for… really, anyone to be exposed to. That said, the post itself is only mildly “mature” in content. I want men in particular to read all the way to the end, but for anyone who’s been victimized by men who spew hateful, misogynist rhetoric, this post may not be for you.

I’m going to begin by discussing the man who essentially started the “Red Pill” movement. It would be easy to call folks like Robert Fisher “garbage” or “toxic” or any of those epithets for people we wish we could block from taking up space in our minds. But there’s so much more to this than the quality of person he is. Robert Fisher is a symptom, not a cause. His belief - that women want to be raped or that there’s some magic potion (e.g. the red pill) that would make everyone see that subservience to cis-men is the right and just state of being for humanity - didn’t begin with him. It began ages ago, and for who knows what reason.

Perhaps somewhere in prehistory a dude realized that men couldn’t give birth and insisted on holding women accountable for all of humanity’s flaws to make up for it. It’s likely this jealousy is part of why Abrahamic religions latch onto the Eve story: women suffer childbirth because Eve was foolish and took the apple from the serpent. But let’s be real, here. That’s bullshit. That story was passed down through oral tradition as an allegory for having faith in the design of a creator, and inked into permanence as Eve’s sin (as opposed to Adam’s) to ensure we blame women specifically instead of just the poor schmuck who happened to be tempted first. If it’s an allegory for lacking faith, it shouldn’t matter who sinned. But as it’s clearly a tool for creating subservience, the choice of Eve as the sinner is no mistake.*

Fast forward a few millennia, and we have Return of Kings, The Spearhead (thankfully, now defunct), A Voice For Men (‘cause we’re lacking, apparently), The Red Pill, and a host of other cellar-dwelling sites that cater to our basest fears of inadequacy. If we can’t succeed with women, it’s clearly their fault, and these sites will not only tell us why, but arm us with all the tools we need to win** every internet debate about gender rights. I’m going to tell you right now, they’re wrong.

Shocking, right? Yeah, this isn’t one of those “I see where they’re coming from, but…” types of situations. These guys are wrong. Their hypotheses are flawed, their arguments contradictory, and their evidence not only lacking, but completely fabricated. It requires an advanced course in cognitive dissonance to even comprehend how these guys hold the competing thoughts they do. While I wish to encourage debate, free thought, and compassionate discourse, I will hold no quarter for out-and-out lies, distortions, and self pitying slander of half the human race. The men who run these sites are sad, pathetic men. And here’s what they do.

Men like Paul Elam take their own failings, fears, and inadequacies, align them with those of other men, and package and sell a solution - of sorts. Elam coined his ex’s dislike of him “misandry” and packaged it as an explanation for any time a woman doesn’t do whatever the hell he wants. And that’s easy, right? We take our own failings and blame them on other people as a quick way to feel better about ourselves. But it’s not a permanent one.

As a metaphor: When you want to build a house on an already-developed plot, you don’t just start building on the ruins of the previous structure, do you? Of course not. That’d be a surefire way to collapse your new structure. Elam, Fisher, and the soon-to-be-discussed Roy Den Hollander would tell you otherwise, though. You just blame your neighbors for not care-taking land they didn’t own, build on top of the ruins, and keep piling on junk until there’s the appearance of something stable. This is true both of their paper-thin arguments and their personal lives.

Admitting you’re wrong and seeking to change is the moment when you clear off the junk and fix the foundation. It sucks. Personal growth is hard and sad and disappointing at times, but the long-term result is much more structurally sound. These men sell ideas and prop up their personal lives with garbage, and it shows.

Roy Den Hollander has filed federal lawsuits over such things as NYC “Ladies Nights” and forcing women to register for the draft. He continually has his suits thrown out due to a complete lack of legal footing, and the fact the courts consistently determine he’s basing the suits on his own personal preferences. Elam started A Voice For Men as a way to pile vitriol on top of his own failings, and Fisher started the Red Pill as a way to push his completely fictional agenda for subjugating women.

They preach hate as a salve for self doubt, and for a painfully vocal number of men, it’s quite appealing. This hate is rooted in fear. The fear of being bad, of being “less than,” of not meeting the desires of others. We turn fear around as loathing of those who might reject us. This is a self defense mechanism, and a very poor one, because we just keep heaping that shit on top of an already dysfunctional foundation.

And there's a difference between playing on fears and discussing subject matter that makes people afraid. For example, when CNN, NPR, or Al Jazeera talk about the U.S. President threatening nuclear holocaust on North Korea, that's not "playing on people's fears." Though there are certainly sensationalistic ways to present it, the information itself isn't playing on pre-existing fears. There's a narcissistic, ignorant man with access to the nuclear football. As a human who enjoys existing on this planet, you should be afraid of that.

When I say "playing on fears" in reference to sites like Return of Kings and the others, I'm talking about creating news and sensation out of things you were already afraid of. Everyone is afraid of losing their job. Everyone is afraid of being emasculated and made to be subservient when we haven't given consent to do so. Everyone is afraid of feeling "less than." So, in come these hate sites, knowing you're afraid of those things, and whether your fear is legitimate or not, they already know who to blame. Convenient, isn't it?

Women taking over society isn't real, and it couldn't be even if they wanted to. And here, for the first and only time, are you allowed to compare feminists to Nazis, because if actual fucking Nazis couldn't take over the world, do you really think women or people of color who want the right to vote without being intimidated are going to accomplish what the Third Reich couldn't? And with far fewer firearms? Because, let’s face it, white men own more firearms than anyone else. Supposedly to protect themselves from… something? Trust me. Feminists, LGBTQIA folks, and people of color are not attempting to take over anything except their own peace of mind and personal safety.

Where these sites want you to take stock of all your faults, all your frailties, and all your fears, and lay the blame at women as if it's common sense to do so, I want you to use actual common sense and say, "Yeah, that's ridiculous. A forced takeover of half the planet's population is super unlikely, so I should get back to managing my own damn life."

PURPOSE: Take responsibility for your fears and failings. If you think someone’s going to ‘take something away’ from you, odds are you just fear that and the threat isn’t real. Don’t lash out in search of conflict where there isn’t any. Keep your own house in order. In fact, knock it down and fix the foundation and remember that’s your task to undertake. No one else’s.

Learn to spot bullshit. When you see news, or websites, or resources that identify a specific cause of an issue (a corporation that pollutes a reservoir or a jerk who defrauds investors and takes advantage of sick people) and they have legitimate sources to cover their asses? You can probably trust them, but always keep a watchful eye. When you see links and content that blame entire groups of people (Like FOX news blaming Muslims in general for violence or any of the sites above blaming women for… really anything) don’t just turn it down. Turn it off. Familiarize yourself with bullshit enough to spot it and refuse to give it your time or attention.

Women do not want to be raped, and if you have a friend who starts quoting Robert Fisher, Roy Den Hollander, Paul Elam, or any of their hateful acolytes saying women do want to be raped, call them out. Tell them they’re quoting hate mongers. Tell them they’re seeking to avoid blame for their own feelings of inadequacy. Tell them they’re on a dangerous slope toward true emotional annihilation and alienation. Tell them you smell their bullshit and you won’t stand for it.

Next Up: Misdirected Rage

*I’m aware most established religions and denominations of Christianity in general try to shy away from blaming Eve specifically. If your church is referring to this story as gender neutral, awesome! I understand not all believers are cut from the same cloth. This is about the many denominations and sects of the Abrahamic religions who do choose to subjugate women and use Eve as one of the many reasons why. Also, it’s just an example. Try not to get too hung up on literality.

**Does anyone ever really “win” an internet debate?

#21stcenturymen #red pill #men's rights activism #MRA #bullshit #a voice for men #original sin #EveWasFramed #personal responsibility

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teachanarchy · 7 years

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I wrote this for a specific group, but I’ve been asked to share it. A lot of folks are just waking up to activism and are heading into intersectional feminist spaces with some trepidation. Hopefully this can help keep you on track. I’ve already been reminded that I missed code-switching, appropriation (which is a whole post, frankly, but TL;dr if a living group exists that can be mocked for the thing you think is cool and that you want to do, don’t), and a few other things. I’ll try to pick those up at a later date, but in the meantime this primer will help you get your feet wet without making a damn fool of yourself. Much. It’s all lessons I learned the hard way, so do better than me and remember we’re all works in progress.)

Hey, crew. If this isn’t your first exposure to intersectional feminism you might want to drive right on by here because this is gonna be long and basic. This is largely focused on white women, but I’m pretty sure everyone can figure out what I’m talking about. If you’re a person of color, and I say “white” think “able-bodied” or some other way in which a different community is marginalized in a way you’re not. There’s gonna be some swearing and a metric crapton of metaphors. We can get through this.

If you’ve been thinking about these things for a while, you might have something to correct or add, because I’m one little human and I can’t think of everything. I’d be grateful if you went ahead and did that!

That’s lesson one for y’all, actually. You’re gonna get corrected. And you know what? It’s a compliment. People in activist spaces are fucking tired. All the time. Activism takes literal years off your life. Nobody who is tired wants to waste effort on people who aren’t worth it; they need to save that reserve for direct action. So if someone tells you what you just did was wrong, it’s because they genuinely believe you are a good person who would do the right thing if you knew what it was. It’s not because they hate you; it’s because they like you.

Lesson two, which I meant to make lesson one: If it’s not about you, don’t make it about you. If it is about you, do better.

What does that mean? Well. At some point you’re going to hear a statement like “white women are racist.” Your first instinct is going to be “not me! I’m a good person!” Stop for a minute before you jump in with that comment.

First of all, is it contributing anything to the discussion? No. It’s actually derailing the discussion by recentering it on people having to reassure you that you’re a good person. Remember #notallmen? Don’t be that guy. More about derailing in a second, I promise.

Second of all, I chose that statement for a reason, and it’s about to get real uncomfortable in here so let me reassure you FIRST that I love you and I think you’re a worthwhile person: white people are racist. They benefit from systemic racism whether or not they actively contribute to perpetuating it, and they perpetuate it in ways that are invisible to them because they’ve never had to think about it. That’s a thing you can learn about by not jumping in on that discussion and just sitting and listening for a minute.

Quick sidebar: In activist spaces, “doing a racist thing” does not automatically make you a bad person. “That’s racist” is not coded language for “you’re bad.” People understand that you’ve been conditioned and rewarded by society for doing that thing. What they need you to understand is that they expect you to work against that conditioning, which you literally cannot do until they show you the thing you’re doing and why it’s racist.

See? If it wasn’t about you, there would have been no reason to comment. Since it is, you have the opportunity to listen, learn and do better.

Lesson three: derailing. There are lots of ways to derail a conversation. The site derailingfordummies.com has most of them. Remember it’s a satirical site and should be read with your tongue firmly lodged in your cheek. As a general rule, try to keep talking about the topic that the original post is about, rather than sidetracking the conversation by doing things like forcing people to reassure you that they mean those other white people, or insisting on getting a tiny detail correct (but he was wearing a hoodie!) rather than dealing with the topic at hand (I don’t care what he was wearing we don’t shoot people for wearing clothes.).

Lesson four: getting called out.

You’re going to fuck up. I fuck up ALL THE TIME. Do you know what I learned LAST WEEK while engaged in making fun of one of those late-night infomercials where a woman can’t figure out how to cut a tomato and needs a gadget to do it? Those gadgets are often designed to help people who have, for example, rheumatoid arthritis. Or Parkinson’s. But because the “default person” is a well-dressed suburban able bodied person, that’s what they show in the commercial. So the underlying message of the commercial is “disabled people! They’re just like us except incompetent!” This is pretty well known in communities with a lot of disability activists, but I’m not in most of those communities. I felt like a complete asshole when someone called me on it. Do I think of myself as the kind of person who would make fun of someone with a disability? Nope. Did I just do that? Hell yes I did.

You’re going to see some epic pile-ons at some point when someone has just made a fool of themselves in a very understandable way. Someone who reminds you of you. And you’re going to feel the urge to defend them, because holy fuck, what if you’re next? That could easily be you! Protip: don’t do that. Instead, send them a nice PM and say “hey I know what you were trying to say but you just showed your whole ass in there, so why don’t you take a short walk and I’ll drop a note on the thread saying hang on, we’re in a PM about this, it’s being handled. Then we can come back to this with less emotion.”

How not to get in one of those epic pile-ons? YOU GUYS THIS IS SO EASY. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I’ll do better next time.”

Nobody expects you to know everything. Nobody expects you to be perfect. When you step on someone’s foot you say sorry and you both move on because they know you didn’t mean it. SAME THING HERE. Don’t double down. Don’t insist that because you didn’t mean to step on their foot the foot couldn’t possibly be injured. Just say sorry and GTFO.

Lesson five: Defer to people’s lived experience. You’re going to run into a lot of people with a whole lot different lives than you, whether that’s someone with a disability, someone who’s gender-nonconforming, someone whose sexuality or color or income is wildly different from you. You have no way of knowing what their life is like. Please, when they make a statement about something happening to them, or interpret an interaction as harmful or aggressive, please don’t make them prove that. They don’t have to justify their life to you. Their interpretation of their experiences is based on a lifetime of knowledge and interactions that you just Do. Not. Have. You know how some compliments feel like compliments and some feel like threats? It’s just like that. You know which ones are someone genuinely thinking your outfit looks great and which ones are someone who’s about to call you a fucking cunt if you don’t respond. Do others the favor of trusting them when they say they know what was going on. They were there; you weren’t. Don’t speculate about what the other person COULD have meant by “where you from? No, where you really from?” (Incidentally, that’s racist and don’t say it. Please. Hit me up if you need to know why.)

Lesson six: Let me Google that for you! At some point someone will use an acronym or phrase you’re not familiar with, like “white fragility” or “AAVE” or “WOC.” People will be happy to help educate you if you put in a little work first. Instead of saying “What’s WOC?” please think of saying something like “I googled WOC but all I get is “world of concrete” and that doesn’t make sense, help?” and someone will tell you it’s “woman of color” (which nobody wants to type repeatedly, it takes forever). Show your work and someone will help you out. Don’t just show up and demand to be educated.

Lesson seven: Privilege and intersectionality. I know you’re probably used to thinking of privilege as something that’s earned. In activist spaces it refers to the advantages that society builds in. John Scalzi’s “lowest difficulty setting” is a great intro to privilege. Read it, and read the followups. And then keep reading Scalzi if you’re not. He’s pretty open about what it takes for him as a straight white male to keep learning and growing. Jim Hines is another good read.

Lowest difficulty setting is great as far as it goes, but what if you’re a straight black female? Or a gay white male? Or a straight white male with one leg? That’s where intersectionality comes in. Here’s a nifty graphic! [thanks to Candice for the larger version!] All of these axes show a privilege and a corresponding marginalization. All of us fall, well, somewhere within this cloud. We’re marginalized in some ways and privileged in others. It’s important to be aware of and sensitive to how those interactions play out. Ideally, we use our privilege to lift up the people marginalized on the corresponding axis, and they do the same for us. That’s how activism works!

Oh man. Ok. Sensitive topic time. CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE. I know. It’s a scary aggressive commanding statement. But it doesn’t have to be. See, all these intersections are like a big game of chutes and ladders. Our privileges are ladders that move us toward the top of the heap, our marginalizations are chutes that slide us down. All else being equal (and it never is, there are a lot of variables and luck at play but bear with me – ALL ELSE BEING EQUAL) the comparative number of chutes and ladders will ultimately determine how far an individual person is able to move along the game board. White cisgendered (that’s someone who still identifies as the gender they were assigned at birth – it’s usually shortened to “cis”) able-bodied males have a whole lot of ladders and not so many chutes. (but see: This article) Here’s the sneaky thing: ladders are invisible, chutes aren’t. We aren’t trained to see our ladders, but boy are we aware of the chutes, because the chutes actively hurt us! So when someone says “check your privilege” all they mean is take a second and look down: are you actually standing on a ladder? Have you thought about what your life would be like if you were on a chute instead?

Lesson eight: Yes you can be racist if you have a black friend. This should be kind of a no brainer. No member of a marginalized community should be expected to speak for the whole of the community. Clarence Thomas is kind of a giant asshole. Most of us have been in the room where we’re the only woman and we’ve known that if we fuck up no other woman is going to get a chance to do that. Because if a dude fucks up, it’s just him, but we’re on trial for all of femininity. It’s kind of an honor? But it’s also shitty. So yeah, maybe your One Black Friend doesn’t mind if you drop an n-bomb. Or maybe they actually do mind, and they’re not comfortable telling you about it because of power dynamics or just being really tired today and not wanting to get in one more fight with one more cracker about why it’s not ok to sing along to all the words in Country Grammar. So don’t drag your One Black Friend into a conversation about general trends in the community they’re a part of as if that was some kind of shield against being challenged.

Something that didn’t occur to me in my first few months in activist spaces: I was super proud of myself for making new friends! I thought of them all as my friends! It never occurred to me to wonder whether they thought of me as a friend. FYI most of them didn’t. One of them, Ali, told me later that to really understand the way people of color have to interact with white people you should imagine that all white people have a snake on their shoulder. That snake is their racism, their societal conditioning and the natural human instinct to retain advantages and comforts. Some people have tamed their snake; they’re actively working to dismantle the things that make it dangerous. Others haven’t. And not only can you not tell if a snake is tame, bitter experience teaches you that people will say – and even believe – that the snake is tame when it is not and it’s going to bite you. And if it does bite you, no-one will help. In fact, most times the white person insists that you haven’t even been bitten by a snake (see above, getting called out).

Lesson nine: listening and sitting with discomfort. If you’re on Twitter or Facebook, find some people to follow who are outspoken and who don’t look like you. Ijeoma Oluo, Kat Tanaka Okopnik and Saadia Muzaffar are a good starting place. Chescaleigh Ramsey. Here’s a tip, though – don’t say anything for the first couple weeks. Watch other people interacting and learn from their mistakes. These women are giving the world a ton of emotional labor for free; the least you can do is benefit from it. But it’s not going to be comfortable. You’re going to have the urge to jump in and contradict or protect or explain. Don’t do it. Just sit there uncomfortably and ask yourself “what does it mean if she’s right, and what should I re-examine in my assumptions?”

[Oh my god, there are a lot of you. Follow, don’t just randomly friend, on Facebook. Think about how you’d feel if 50,000 men you don’t know suddenly added you on FB. And if you like what you read, remember that this is real work and it’s nice when you give real money for it! Look for Patreon or a tip jar!]

Lesson ten: nobody owes you courtesy. It would be fan-freakin-tastic if everyone was nice to each other all the time and thought about each other’s feelings first. But when you have done a thing which causes someone else an injury, they don’t owe it to you to tell you nicely. Value content over tone. And remember: if it’s not about you, don’t make it about you.

Lesson eleven: some useful vocabulary. I’m not even going to TRY to list all the words and phrases you might run into (see lesson six) but hopefully this list will help you get started.

POC/WOC – person of color, woman of color. Another abbreviation that gets tossed around here is NBPOC – nonblack person of color. The black community and other communities can have diverging interests, and sometimes it’s important to acknowledge the contributions of one or the other to the discussion (shit can get really granular with the acronyms when you get down to specific communities. Context will help you, and Google).

There isn’t an accepted acronym that covers the queer and trans community. Do your best. Try to do better than just LGBT, though, because intersex, asexual, and gender or sexuality nonconforming communities exist.

Emotional labor – Emotional labor is labor. You’re going to be performing a LOT of this, both as you learn and as you take direct action. Please take care of yourself. Please when you can compensate and acknowledge the emotional labor of others, especially in communities more marginalized than yours. Learn some self-care, and I’m not talking about fuzzy bunnies and hiding from things. Figure out what heals and replenishes you and be aware that you need to make time for that, especially when a vigorous discussion has sucked you in for a whole day. Whether it’s a hot bath, making something with your hands, a mani/pedi, or teaching a class, learn what gives you your strength, energy and confidence back. And do it.

SWERF/TERF – Sex worker exclusionary radical feminism and trans exclusionary radical feminism. Lots of overlap. Basically assholes. Oh, sorry, was that judgey? There’s no place for whorephobia in intersectional feminism, and saying that trans women aren’t women is utter bullshit. Not all sex workers are exploited and need to be saved. Trans women are women and they have always been women. Full stop.

Tone policing – This is when you value the delivery method more highly than the content of the message. It’s a means of distracting the community from a discussion of the real problem by pretending that you would have reacted differently if something something blah blah. If they hadn’t broken a window. If they hadn’t said racist. If they had used a nicer tone of voice. Please don’t do this. It’s not a good look. You’re probably going to have to trust me on this one at first because it doesn’t seem, instinctively, that asking for people to reach out kindly is the wrong thing to do. It took me a while to figure it out too. But here’s the thing: if asking nicely not to be oppressed actually worked, we would have zero oppression right now.

White fragility/White women’s tears – (this got long, sorry)

“White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress be- comes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.” It’s basically a series of things you do unconsciously to get back to a position of comfort when you’re challenged. Like up there when I said white people are racist. Today in a group I’m in, enough white women reported a Latina’s post to Facebook for making them uncomfortable that Facebook deleted it. 48 solid hours of people’s emotional labor and education, gone, because they were uncomfortable. That’s fragility in action. It says that the only thing worse than doing racist things is being called a racist. For a more nuanced look at fragility, read this.

And while we’re on the topic, white women particularly leverage their fragility to advantage. Now, we can for sure make that work for us – if 100,000 white women showed up to a Black Lives Matter march, the cops would be much more likely to perceive it as a peaceful march and the entire dynamic between protestor and police force could be positive rather than fraught. That benefits everyone. But that leverage can also be weaponized. This is a pretty good paper on the topic.

Still with me? Phew. That was a lot. And it’s just the basics. Quick summary? Listen. Learn. Don’t make it personal if it’s not. Change the fucking world.

#feminism #organizing #skills #activism #resistance

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

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HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT PEOPLE

But by starting there they were perfectly poised to expand up the stack of microcomputer software as microcomputers grew powerful enough to win, and the result is what we can't say. So the most important consequence of realizing there can be good art is that it frees artists to try to make money differently is to sell different things, and in addition the people who produce a show can distribute it themselves. Eventually something would come up that required me to use it themselves, and that will get easier too. The social sciences are also fairly bogus, because they're untainted by experience. I release to beta users.1 Odds are this project won't be a class assignment. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to discard the idea of being mistaken. So I've thought a lot about valuation, founders will save them for last. Fortunately there's a better way of preventing it than the credentials the left are forced to fall back on.

I use their smallest size, which is usually unanimous.2 Defense contractors? Most applications—most startups, probably—grow out of personal projects. VCs fund you, they're not drifting. It's just that if I can't write things down, worrying about remembering one idea gets in the way.3 Microsoft both executed well and got lucky. How do you protect yourself from these people?4

Most people in America do. Their house isn't theirs; it's their stuff's. They would say that.5 That's not a radical idea, by the way; it's the main difference between children and adults.6 But once you study how it's done, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. Which means you can't simply plow through them, because I didn't realize that it evolves. They're going to have competitors, so you should a consciously shift gears, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had real force. It's much easier to fix problems before the company is basically treading water. New York have wondered about since the Bubble: whether New York could grow into a startup hub, there won't be people there who got rich from startups.7 If good art is art that interests its audience, then when you talk about cities in the sense of art that would appeal equally to your friends, others that will appeal to most sentient beings whatever that means. They would seem to have become professional fundraisers who do a little research on the side while working on their day jobs, and most founders of successful ones do. But increasingly it means the ability to win by doing better work.8

They're far better at detecting bullshit than you are at producing it, even if you're producing it unknowingly. It would hurt the startups somewhat to be separated from their original investors. That would definitely happen if programmers started to use handhelds as development machines—if handhelds displaced laptops the way laptops displaced desktops. No matter how determined you are, are you really out of your element? The really painful thing to recall is not just that I accumulated all this useless stuff, but that would be impossible in the circumscribed world of the iPhone, you could say either was the cause. They're hemmed in by dealers and unions.9 When the unfortunate fellow got to his last slide, the professor replied, we're interested in different questions now. After four years of trying to make you lift weights with your brain.

Like having more than one without. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. It will force you to organize your thoughts. Even if you could get a 30% better deal elsewhere?10 I didn't use the term slippery slope by accident; customers' insatiable demand for custom work that unless you're really incompetent there has to be poised halfway between weakness and power.11 Meanwhile the iPhone is selling better than ever. What sort of problem should you try to make them all work in some renovated warehouse you've made into an incubator. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Now it's possible to ask that.12 The critical years seem to be thriving, you can be as convinced as you like about your idea, and it has to be big, and it will probably be easier to do that is to visit them.13

They make such great hardware. But the market doesn't have to think Why bother? So while board control is not total control, it's not imaginary either. I was certainly a hacker, at least, that it's hard to do a lot of the questions people get hot about are actually quite complicated. But, as in How much runway do you have left, you've avoided the immediate danger.14 What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? Not heroes, not barbarians. Not all cities send a message.15 Many people remember it as the happiest time of their lives. How well this scheme worked would depend on the city.16

Notes

The meanings of these people.

The thing to do wrong and hard to predict startup outcomes in which those considered more elegant consistently came out shorter perhaps after being macroexpanded or compiled. What people will give you 11% more income, or can launch during YC is how important it is possible to make 200x as much income. At YC we try to be redeveloped as a single cause. Giving away the razor and making money on our conclusions.

5 seconds per day. The real problem is poverty, not conquest. For example, will be very unhealthy. If you want to.

It is still a leading cause of accidents. Don't be evil.

The fancy version of Explorer. But having more of it. One measure of that, the only cause of economic inequality is a bit dishonest, incidentally, because by definition this will help dispel the cloud of semi-sacred mystery that surrounds wisdom in this, but you get nothing. It will require more than clumsy efforts to protect themselves.

If you want to approach a specific firm, get rid of everyone else microscopically poorer, by decreasing the difference between being judged as a definition of politics: what determines rank in the woods. They could make it to colleagues. Come work for the government and construction companies. There are two very different types of people.

By this I used to build their sites. You're investing your own. But that doesn't seem to lose elections. Ed.

Please do not do that. There are successful women who don't, but the route to that knowledge was to realize that in 1995, when politicians tried to motivate people by saying Real artists ship.

But politicians know the actual server in order to provoke a bidding war between 3 pet supply startups for the first time as an idea that they create rather than trying to deliver the lines meant for a reason. But in most high schools. What you're looking for initially is not writing the agreement, but except for that might produce the next uptick after that, go ahead. You can build things for programmers, but something feminists need to fix once it's big, plus they are so intellectually dishonest in that category.

For example, if you ban other ways. Not startup ideas, but the number of startups have over established companies can't compete on price, and can hire a lot more frightening in those days, but as impoverished outcasts, which would harm their all-important GPA. And even then your restrictions would have been seen mentioning the possibility is that if you agree prep schools is to do that. Later we added two more modules, an image generator and the war on drugs show, bans often do more than most people are trying to deliver because otherwise competitors would take their customers.

You can build things for programmers, but also like an undervalued stock in that water a while we might think it might help to be the fact that you're paying yourselves high salaries.

People commonly use the word procrastination to describe what they made much of the businesses they work for the tenacity of the best thing for founders, if you're good you'll have less room to avoid sticking. So where do we draw the line that philosophy will suffer by comparison, because such users are stupid.

How to Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what you care about valuations in angel rounds can make offers that super-angels tend not to: if he ever made a better user experience. One measure of the word content and tried for a seed investment in you, they have a connection to one of the markets they serve, because any story that makes curators and dealers use neutral-sounding language. But the question of whether public company CEOs were J. The trustafarians' ancestors didn't get rich from controlling monopolies, just the raw gaps and anomalies you'd noticed that day.

Investors will deliberately threaten you with a slight disadvantage, but it's always better to live. If they were friendlier to developers than Apple is now very slow, but you get of the word programmers care about may not have raised: Re: Revenge of the things I remember are famous flops like the one hand and the super-angels gradually to erode. No, we don't have the balls to ask, if you include the cases where you went to school.

Other highly recommended books: What is Mathematics? Delicious users are stupid. Some government agencies run venture funding groups, just that they're really not, and stir.

Yes, strictly speaking, you're not consciously aware of it, but he doesn't remember which.

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eelgibbortech-blog · 6 years

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This Psychological Trick Can Make You a More Empathetic Marketer

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Even though I am [redacted] years old, I follow a bunch of trendy Instagram humor accounts aimed at people in their 20s and teens. I’d like to tell you I do this because I think it’s important to keep up with the latest digital trends… but it’s also possible that I just have an immature sense of humor.

Lately, I’ve been paying closer attention to what resonates on my favorite accounts, which include @Betches, @Ship, @MyTherapistSays, and @GirlsThinkImFunny, among others. These accounts tend to play off the very millennial concept of “same” (a.k.a. “so me,” “also me,” and “it me”). For those not of the Instagram and Snapchat generation, all of these words or phrases basically translate to: “This describes me perfectly.” Below are a few examples that are, ahem, so me.

In an article in The New Statesmen, Amelia Tait calls this “relatable content.” Tait interviewed Dr. Grainne Kirwan, a cyberpsychologist, who said: “As we tend not to discuss many of the mundane aspects of life, either because we believe them to be boring to others, or so unusual that others might think us slightly strange, we frequently don’t realize that many others do and think exactly the same things, even in private moments…hence we seldom realize how common the feeling is.”

What’s making these channels so successful—with their hundreds of thousands of followers—is how they display an empathy for the audience’s deepest, darkest feelings. The accounts make people feel like they aren’t alone. And what’s pretty radical is they prove it’s possible to do empathy en masse.

As you know by now if you’ve been following this series on The Content Strategist, I’ve been exploring the concept of empathic marketing over the past few weeks. I’ve dug into existing psychological and marketing research that relates to empathy, in an effort to understand and synthesize this concept for other marketers. In part three, I’m going to look at what happens when companies validate the emotions of their customers.

My theory is that businesses can actually achieve better results by being kinder to their customers. All the research on empathy suggests that acknowledging another person’s pain is a cornerstone of building trust. That may sound like mushy psychobabble, but there are very practical ways to apply the lesson to our own work.

Emotional Validation

The process of reflecting back someone’s feelings has an official name in psychology textbooks: “emotional validation.”

Houston-based clinician Karyn Hall, Ph.D., author of The Emotionally Sensitive Person, has written extensively about this topic. As she defines it, “Validation is the recognition and acceptance of another person’s thoughts, feelings, sensations, and behaviors as understandable.”

But it’s important to note that validation does not mean flatly agreeing with everything someone says. It’s more akin to acknowledging what they say, holding a mirror up to their feelings.

Human nature is such that we find release simply in feeling heard; perhaps it’s owing to our evolution from caveman days in which there was safety in numbers. (Better to have that Neanderthal on your side than his rock between your eyes.)

In an article from Psychology Today, Steven Stosny, Ph.D., explained that people require confirmation that their suffering or frustration is justified. If they don’t get that confirmation, they become “hyper-focused on the pain and the reasons for it. We know that mental focus amplifies and magnifies the object of the focus; the greater the focus on pain, the more intense and more generalized it grows.”

Translation for marketers: If you don’t acknowledge your customer’s pain, their pain worsens. They won’t hear the solution you’re proposing, because the noise in their head about the problem is too loud. So before you tell them about your great solution, you have to show them that you understand the problem first.

Building Buyer Trust

Robin Stern, associate director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, once told The Washington Post: “When someone feels seen and heard by you, they begin to trust you.” As you well know, connection and trust are keys to building relationships.

Here are a few ways to employ emotional validation:

Do a “validation review”

Back when my now-husband and I were doing premarital counseling, we were taught how to quell arguments (much-needed advice for people of Italian and Greek descent about to enter into a life together). The main tip we learned: Rather than immediately responding to conflict with a zinger that escalates the fight, you should repeat back the sentiment of what the other person said in your own words. For example, “I hear you saying that you don’t like when I leave the sponge in the bottom of the kitchen sink.” (Real scenes from marriage.) If the other person then said, “No, I meant…” you then have to repeat back the change. No inserting opinions until you’ve completed this exercise.

Verbal mimicry—known in psych circles as the “echo effect”—is scientifically proven to increase likability and rapport. There’s also evidence that it leads to better financial outcomes. Two studies have found that waitresses receive bigger tips when they repeat back orders to customers.

If you’re in a business with a high-touch sales process, you can use this tactic of emotional mirroring in one-on-one conversations with customers. But there’s also value in evaluating all of your external-facing marketing materials—website homepage, sales enablement docs, UX copy, social posts, thought leadership, webinars, speeches, press releases, et al.—to make sure they reflect your understanding of the challenges your buyers go through.

Let’s say you’re selling marketing automation software. If securing budget is your buyer’s biggest challenge, you probably want to acknowledge somewhere on your site, “We know how hard it can be to get sign off for an investment of this size, and we’ve worked with hundreds of customers to make the case to senior management.”

Act as your customer’s proxy

Contently’s editor-in-chief Joe Lazauskas is always on the lookout for brands doing funny things to engage—and he recently shared this tweet from Hamburger Helper, a brand I hadn’t thought of in years:

What made Helper’s response so amazing was that the doofy dinner-in-a-box mascot took on the persona of its core clientele. I for one felt a feminist kinship with this anthropomorphic glove. It spoke not just for a box of ground-beef accouterment but for women everywhere. The brand stood in to defend its customers. (Also, I don’t like this Chris fellow very much.)

There are other ways to act as a proxy without needing to defend customers or respond to something off-color. After Tom Petty went into cardiac arrest in the fall, Spotify immediately created a playlist of his work. To me, this was a way for Spotify to tell its users, “We get that you’re sad; we can’t solve this problem with you, but we can help you grieve.”

At Monster, meanwhile, our former social media director Patrick Gillooly had set IFTTT software to inform his team when someone tweeted that they were going on a job interview. Our folks would then quickly reply from the @Monster handle with a good luck message. I’ve always loved this one-to-one engagement because it takes a very solitary moment and helps people feel like they have someone on their side. (At the same time, it gets our brand name in front of people at a very crucial time, since those candidates may not get the job.)

Marketers can take a page from any of these examples. Look for moments like these impacting your audience, and respond in a way that shows you hear and support them.

Find an empathic influencer

I’m fairly skeptical of influencer marketing since it can feel unctuous if done wrong. That said, if you can find the right person to represent your brand, this tactic can help you make deeper connections via empathy.

The other day, I was served up a content-driven video ad on Twitter that was produced by Harper’s Bazaar for Dior 999, a red lipstick that supposedly looks good on everyone. First off, sweet job on targeting, HB, because I went from top of funnel to bottom in like 275 seconds. This ad focused on four women of different races who thought they looked terrible in red lipstick (“it me”). Celebrity makeup artist Daniel Martin listened to their concerns, explained why it would look good on each of them, and applied it using his special tricks. Of course, it worked for all of them, and clearly, the whole thing worked for me.

My point is, when you’re searching for an influencer to supplement your efforts, don’t simply look at reach. Also, do the legwork to see if that person has made empathetic connections with the target audience. Do they validate your customer’s problems through their work? A small audience that feels heard can help your bottom line much more than a large audience that’s only somewhat engaged.

In Traackr’s global research report Influence 2.0, Altimeter Group analyst Brian Solis emphasizes the importance of empathy and says, “The digital influencers that everyone covets are human beings who have built communities where others follow their updates for a variety of personal or professional reasons. The ties that bind are the very premises of relationships. These communities are rich with the exchange of mutual value and social capital.” He goes on to note that in order to have effective results from an influencer campaign, marketers need to know what their audience values first, then choose an influencer who aligns.

The right influencer will make the audience care about your message over time through validation. That can catapult you forward compared to where you’d be if you were starting from scratch.

Look no further than those Instagram accounts I can’t get enough of. They’ve built audiences through their empathy—audiences that are now receptive to a new product. Say, like this t-shirt, which is… also me.

Margaret Magnarelli is the senior director of marketing and managing editor for content at Monster. This is the third column in her series on empathic marketing. You can the first and second installments here. The final part will be published on The Content Strategist next Friday.

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eelgibbortech-blog · 6 years

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Emotional Validation

The process of reflecting back someone’s feelings has an official name in psychology textbooks: “emotional validation.”

But it’s important to note that validation does not mean flatly agreeing with everything someone says. It’s more akin to acknowledging what they say, holding a mirror up to their feelings.

Building Buyer Trust

Here are a few ways to employ emotional validation:

Do a “validation review”

Act as your customer’s proxy

Marketers can take a page from any of these examples. Look for moments like these impacting your audience, and respond in a way that shows you hear and support them.

Find an empathic influencer

The right influencer will make the audience care about your message over time through validation. That can catapult you forward compared to where you’d be if you were starting from scratch.

Image by iStockphoto

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Source link

The post This Psychological Trick Can Make You a More Empathetic Marketer appeared first on Ebulkemaimarketing Blogs and updates.

#ebulkemailmarketing #marketing #seo #autoresponder #internet marketing

0 notes