Hey! I Just Saw Your Reply To The Post About Knitting The National Parks. If You Haven't Tried It Yet,

i keep seeing the increasing amount of antisemitism in leftist circles and as a jewish leftist i don't really like it. i don't like when people refuse to listen to jews when they speak about antisemitism.

nobody is immune to bigotry. just because you are a leftist (or claim to be one) it doesn't mean it's impossible for you to show microaggression.

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.

The wardrobe source post

Have had several Asks about where I get my clothes, so here we go.

My general style:

My build: I am 5'10", around 155-160lbs. I am a trans man, so that means some fit challenges. 36R tops, 32x32 bottoms, 8ish shoe.

My preferences: I adore 1930s/40s outdoor "country gentleman" and work wear -- I am building a wardrobe here. I love texture and mixing patterns. I try to stick to natural fibers. I am spending more money on pieces that last longer and shrinking my closet to a modern capsule and a vintage capsule. (Though I will sometimes mix eras.) Brown is my favorite color.

Online thrifting:

Unclaimed baggage. Really great for giving higher end brands a shot at huge discounts.

Gem App. Fantastic for searching multiple sites like ebay, poshmark, etc.

Modern clothing:

Taylor Stitch. Standouts are sweaters and wool trousers. Sizing runs trim - I size up to a 38 here instead of my usual 36. This means it's a great source for smaller trans mascs.

Yiume. Shirts a bit thin, but fun prints and frequent sales.

Imperfects. Small range, but fun, higher waisted fishtail trousers.

Taft Boots. Comfy right out of the box. Great at making small feet look elegant. Men's sizes start at a 6.

Schott. Fantastic pea coats. Recommended by Derek Menswear.

Vermont Flannel. Super thick plaid, flannel shirts. Very warm.

Sterkowski hats. Range includes flat caps and captains/fisherman.

Spier & MacKay. Great winter coats, run a bit trim. Their trousers look hideous and despite a bit of a vintage look, everything else in the catalog is too low waisted and skinny.

LLBean. Great for sweaters. I love my grey commando style one.

Banana Republic. I like a lot of their older stuff, so a brand to watch on Poshmark.

New Vintage:

Cathcart London. Sweaters and jeans are great. Hit or miss fit on the rest. Frequent sales, small runs.

Darcy Clothing. Great all across the board. They are a film supplier, so restocks are regular. Their suspenders are hard to find, fyi, so search under "braces".

Revival Vintage. Dipping into poly blends, but a great selection of fairisle sweater vests.

JoBear boots. Great prices and styles, requires breaking in.

Focusers. Vintage glasses. They will replace lenses. Love the Peabody gold wire frames.

Old Glasses Shop. Frames you won't find at Focusers. You can try on frames before committing to an Rx, but have to pay for the return. Love their round tortoise shells.

I don't care what your perception of the female body has been warped into by the media and advertising prevalent in culture. eat some goddamn carbs

what the fuck was wrong with people that Labyrinth was originally a flop. How could they take any aspect of it so for granted. How could they fucking do that to Jim Henson. Newspapers were calling it boring and even ugly. I want to go back in time and beat their asses.

So the "don't call trans women dude" discourse is back on my dash, and I just read something that might explain why it's such a frustrating argument for everyone involved.

TLDR: There's gender-cultural differences that explain why people are arguing about this- and a reason it hurts trans women more than you might think if you were raised on the other side of the cultural divide.

I'll admit, I used to be very much on team "I won't call you 'dude' if it feels like misgendering, but also I don't really grok why it feels like I'm misgendering you, especially if I'm not addressing you directly." But then I read an academic paper that really unpicked how people used the word 'dude' (it's Kiesling (2004) if you're curious) and I realized that the way I was taught to use the word was different from the way most trans women were taught.

... So the thing about the word 'dude' that's really interesting is that it's used differently a) by people of different genders and b) across gender lines. This study is, obviously, 20 years old, but a lot of the conclusions hold up. The gist is, there's ~5 different ways that people use the word "dude":

marking discourse structure- AKA separating thoughts. You can use the word 'dude' to signal that you're changing the subject or going on a different train of thought.

exclamation. You can use the word "dude" the way you'd use another interjection like "oh my god" or "god damn".

confrontational stance mitigation. When you're getting in an argument with someone, you can address them as 'dude' to de-escalate. If you're both the same gender, it's homosocial bonding. If you're different genders, it's an attempt to weaken the gender-related power dynamic.

marking affiliation and connection. Kiesling calls this 'cool solidarity'- the idea is, "I'm a dude, you're a dude. We're just guys being dudes." This is often a greeting or a form of address (aka directly calling someone dude).

signaling agreement. "Dude, you are soooo right", kind of deal.

Now, here's the important part.

When [cis] men use the word 'dude', they are overwhelmingly using it as a form of address to mark affiliation and connection- "hey, we're all bros here, dude"- to mitigate a confrontational stance, or to signal agreement.

When [cis] women use the word 'dude', they're often commiserating about something bad (and marking affiliation/connection), mitigating a confrontational stance, or giving someone a direct order. (Anecdotally, I'd guess cis women also use it as an exclamation - this is how I most often use it.)

Cis men use the word 'dude' to say 'we're all guys here'. It is a direct form of male bonding. If a cis man uses the word 'dude' in your presence, he is generally calling you one of the guys.

Cis women use the word 'dude' to say 'we're on the same level as you; we're peers'- especially to de-escalate an argument with a cis man. Between women, it's an expression of ~cool solidarity~; when a woman's addressing a man, it's a way to say 'I'm as good as you, knock it off'.

So you've got this cultural difference, depending on how you were raised and where you spent time in your formative years. If you were assigned female at birth, you're probably used to thinking of the word 'dude' as something that isn't a direct form of address- and, if you're addressing it to someone you see as a girl, you're probably thinking of it as 'cool solidarity'! You're not trying to tell the person you're talking to that they're a man- you're trying to convey that they're a cool person that you relate to as a peer.

Meanwhile, if you were assigned male at birth and spent your teens surrounded by cis guys, you're used to thinking of 'dude' as an expression of "we're all guys here", and specifically as homosocial male bonding. Someone using the word 'dude' extensively in your presence, even if they're not calling you 'dude' directly, feels like they're trying to put you in the Man Box, regardless of how they mean it.*

So what you get is this horrible, neverending argument, where everyone's lightly triggered and no one's happy.

The takeaway here: Obviously, don't call people things they don't want to be called, regardless of gender! But no one in this argument is coming to it in bad faith.

If you were raised as a cis woman and you're using the word the way a cis woman is, it is a gender-neutral term for you (with some subconscious gendered connotations you might not have realized). But if you were raised as a cis man and you're using the word the way a cis man uses it, the word dude is inherently gendered.

Don't pick this fight; it's as pointless as a French person and an American person arguing whether cheek kisses are an acceptable greeting. To one person, they might be. To another person, they aren't. Accept that your worldview is different, move on, and again, don't call people things they don't want to be called.

*(There is, of course, also the secret third thing, where someone who is trying to misgender a trans woman uses the word 'dude' to a trans woman the way they'd use it to a man. This absolutely happens. But I think the other dynamic is the reason we keep having this argument.)

I like watching sheep dogs work.

I search online for videos of muddy farm dogs doing their jobs—

Effortlessly—

Tirelessly.

They love to do it.

In Ireland I paid a euro to see a border collie demonstration—

how fast she brought the sheep in.

We all remarked on her agility. Her intelligence.

But I noticed that as soon as she was on their heel, the sheep turned their bodies toward us—

Toward home.

They already knew where to go, what to do.

The border collie only told them it was time.

But we all know—a sheep is not a good animal to be.

We never call the sheep smart.

But I don’t see myself in the border collie,

Not in her hard work. Her agility. Her endurance.

It’s easy to see myself in the herd.

They’re scared,

so they come home.

And I am often scared.

I am often facing home.

I often wish someone would tell me it’s time to go.

Sheep,dog — another old poem originally shared on a different platform.

Continuing on the topic of connection being not a feeling, but a rather a set of circumstances in which you are engaging and participating, I think a lot of people out there just don't realize how dangerous the way many of us have been taught to think of feelings in relation to spirituality really is.

Like Zan pointed out, Evangelical Christians are taught that positive emotions are actually the Lord moving through them, rather than their own personal reactions to their experiences. Meanwhile, Evangelical church services are deliberately engineered to elicit these kinds of of feelings in people. It's pure emotional manipulation.

Similar ideas are found in New Age spirituality, where "spiritual discernment" is frequently boiled down to "does it make me feel good or not?" People are taught to evaluate politically charged information based on whether it, for lack of a better term, sparks joy. Now, determining whether or not something sparks joy is a wonderful way to decide whether you want to keep your old tea kettle, but here we're talking about information that people will based crucial personal and political choices on.

Meanwhile, New Age influencers do everything they can to make sure they're sparking joy for you. Let's take Paul White Gold Eagle, for example. His videos are constantly talking about things that sound exciting, like messages from archangels, dragons of light, and emerald transmissions. This type of baiting - joybaiting, I'll call it - is meant to hook you emotionally and make you think that this has to be true because it elicits that oooough, shiny reaction. Next thing you know, you've been joybaited into falling down the conspirituality pipeline and you believe some version of QAnon's conspiracy theories.

This kind of thinking is even dangerous in pagan circles. You find yourself thinking about a thing and noticing a lot? You feel an intense pull to study it? You'll find people out there telling you that you have a spiritual connection to it, like, maybe you were part of it in a past life. And maybe you go and get a past life reading, or even undergo hypnosis. And now you, the whitest gal in the surburb with zero familial connections to any Native people, feel entitled to appropriate some form of Native spirituality because you felt fascination with it, or what you thought it was, and now you're contributing to white sage decimation and spreading around some sort of Native-flavored form of neopaganism as if it's actual Native spirituality.

Or maybe you fall in with a neopagan cult leader who uses your fascination to convince you that you knew each other in a past life, and you were led to them in this life so you could continue some important work in this life, and they pull you completely into their bullshit.

Finally, it's dangerous because it encourages stalkers. A lot of stalkers are people with incredibly powerful fixations on others. These types of beliefs get them convinced that their victims are actually their soulmates or twin flames or whathaveyou, and make them feel justified in engaging in stalking behavior.

All of this is why it's important to recognize that connection is a circumstance, not a feeling. Your feelings are utterly irrelevant to whether you are actually connected. What most people take for "feeling connected" is literally just fascination or fixation, maybe reinforced by the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Real connection is something you cultivate and build, and it does not exist outside of your actual, physical engagement and participation.

When I was a child, I knew that boys grew up and married girls, and vice versa. And this was simply the way the universe worked. 

By the time I was six I knew the basic mechanics of sex, the progression of pregnancy. The former sounded uncomfortable, messy and embarrassing, and I couldn’t figure out why anyone would do it, except that it was apparently necessary for the second. And the second was fascinating and magical, so I supposed that made sense. 

(When I was ten, I was probably in love with my “best” friend, inasmuch as a ten year old can be in love with anyone. I worshipped the ground she walked on; her attention or lack thereof devastated me. In every cute little kid “so in love” story you’ve ever heard of, I was in the role given to the little boy, hearts-in-eyes, blindly devoted, absolutely in love.) 

When I was eleven, I encountered the idea that men could marry men, and women could marry women, and it seemed entirely pointless to me, and also I couldn’t figure out how two women could have sex. How did that even work? Men I could sort of figure out although it seemed even more uncomfortable and messy than men-and-women. It was weird. But I supposed if that was what people wanted, that’s what they wanted. 

(When I was thirteen I fell in love with one of the ladies in my father’s community choir. It was full on courtly love, and I languished silently. I wanted to sit near her and I wanted her to talk to me and I wanted to carry her bag and I wanted to help her do things and I wanted to beat up her good-for-nothing husband who made her sad and insisted they get the cat she loved declawed as the only way to not get rid of it at all, and I wanted to find some way to show her that the expectations that their Mormonism were heaping on her were so unfair and so messed up and so keeping her from realizing how amazing and smart and pretty and funny and clever she was. I would have gone on quests against dragons for that woman.) 

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