Okay. I can get behind this, pretty much all of it. Still not sure "woke" should ever be a noun though.
The spirit of the thought is correct. It's the implementation that I think is trickier than you imagine and perhaps has more consequences than you've thought of. I've been thinking through that for awhile now too.
First, it's going to require less virtue signalling and some really tough discussions be had out in the open. Here's a huge challenge for you, I hesitated even to bring up in this venue because it's just the sort of thorny, sticky, gross issue that needs to be tackled but it's also all those things and we don't talk about them in polite society. That would be the rape of Gisèle Pelicot.
Yeah, I know it's happening in France, not here, but the fact that more than 30 of her rapists still don't consider themselves rapists says something about the dark turn onto a dangerous road that masculinity and masculine privilege has sometimes taken. The fact that most of the people involved lived quiet, unexceptional lives before being exposed just means it's bound to be more pervasive than we realized or at least acknowledged. The inability to admit that whatever dark fantasies they had before the rapes should have remained wholly fictional in their minds is both a sad tragedy that our society can't allow the release of such tensions and the fact that somewhere the fault lines of society create and allow such tensions in the minds of men to flourish. Women too, don't kid yourself that their kinkiness is any less, but these men acted and the husband pimped her out. This kind of behaviour must change in order to strengthen the bonds between men and women and sexual minorities of all kinds (we used to be called "deviants" you know) but the truth needs to be out there and the forces of emasculation need to be examined alongside the forces of privilege. Balance can't be meaningfully achieved without very tough, very tragic and very fraught discussions like this. We simply haven't yet done that work or we wouldn't now be in this position.
Another issue would be the fact that two rapists currently sitting on the US Supreme Court were allowed to decide how women's bodies should be managed, without their consent of course. Spoiler, it didn't turn out well. Yeah, that's a US issue, but don't kid yourself that there are no rapists on the bench here or that Canadian gynaecological decisions are wholly the province of women. Or, most importantly, how control of a partner, rather than unconditional support (love) is part of calculus in all relationships in Canada. It goes both to unrealistic female expectations and roles and unrealistic male expectations and roles and the flawed models on both sides.
As I've said before, our national stories are somewhat fictional in order to cover more ground and be more palatable, but perhaps they've become overly fictional and are in need of some raw, unabridged and ugly, messy, unweildy truth.
I like this note. And appreciate it. And I love you. You're a very important person in my life and my story. For whatever reason (probably itself worth discussing), the main discussion about this post is happening over on facebook...
Okay. I can get behind this, pretty much all of it. Still not sure "woke" should ever be a noun though.
The spirit of the thought is correct. It's the implementation that I think is trickier than you imagine and perhaps has more consequences than you've thought of. I've been thinking through that for awhile now too.
First, it's going to require less virtue signalling and some really tough discussions be had out in the open. Here's a huge challenge for you, I hesitated even to bring up in this venue because it's just the sort of thorny, sticky, gross issue that needs to be tackled but it's also all those things and we don't talk about them in polite society. That would be the rape of Gisèle Pelicot.
Yeah, I know it's happening in France, not here, but the fact that more than 30 of her rapists still don't consider themselves rapists says something about the dark turn onto a dangerous road that masculinity and masculine privilege has sometimes taken. The fact that most of the people involved lived quiet, unexceptional lives before being exposed just means it's bound to be more pervasive than we realized or at least acknowledged. The inability to admit that whatever dark fantasies they had before the rapes should have remained wholly fictional in their minds is both a sad tragedy that our society can't allow the release of such tensions and the fact that somewhere the fault lines of society create and allow such tensions in the minds of men to flourish. Women too, don't kid yourself that their kinkiness is any less, but these men acted and the husband pimped her out. This kind of behaviour must change in order to strengthen the bonds between men and women and sexual minorities of all kinds (we used to be called "deviants" you know) but the truth needs to be out there and the forces of emasculation need to be examined alongside the forces of privilege. Balance can't be meaningfully achieved without very tough, very tragic and very fraught discussions like this. We simply haven't yet done that work or we wouldn't now be in this position.
Another issue would be the fact that two rapists currently sitting on the US Supreme Court were allowed to decide how women's bodies should be managed, without their consent of course. Spoiler, it didn't turn out well. Yeah, that's a US issue, but don't kid yourself that there are no rapists on the bench here or that Canadian gynaecological decisions are wholly the province of women. Or, most importantly, how control of a partner, rather than unconditional support (love) is part of calculus in all relationships in Canada. It goes both to unrealistic female expectations and roles and unrealistic male expectations and roles and the flawed models on both sides.
As I've said before, our national stories are somewhat fictional in order to cover more ground and be more palatable, but perhaps they've become overly fictional and are in need of some raw, unabridged and ugly, messy, unweildy truth.
I like this note. And appreciate it. And I love you. You're a very important person in my life and my story. For whatever reason (probably itself worth discussing), the main discussion about this post is happening over on facebook...
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/d1KHS3ZUYx8Y8MHi/