this is not a point that will translate well into tweets probably, but generally i think people's relationship to the concept of "why" a thing happens - causes - is weirdly fucked in a way that i have trouble concisely pointing to
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like - you can imagine a big-ass causal network of reasons things happen - X happens because Y, Z, W because Y1, Y2, Z1, Z2, Z3, W1, etc. etc. - and laying out the whole network is costly and confusing so in practice we single a node out somehow and stop there
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in public discourse depressingly often people ask "why thing bad?" and traverse the network until they get to "ahh, because outgroup bad," raucous applause from ingroup, but does not go far enough imo - even to the extent that it's true... why outgroup bad???
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ex: common tactic in feminist discourse to traverse the network until you get to "because men bad," but... why men bad??? i don't dispute the point, many men are awful in many ways, but haven't you ever gotten curious about why???
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(some hints:)
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Replying to @SpaceXponential @maybegray and @TylerAlterman
i was just reading the beginning of richard schwartz's "you are the one you've been waiting for" and he says some very relevant stuff, better than i could say it:
ifsca.ca/wp-content/upl
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the problem, obviously, is that if you ask "why outgroup bad?" and actually try to find out, and get an answer sympathetic to outgroup, that would be... bad, right? this is the kind of insane group dynamic that keeps people trapped in their thinking forever
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the really depressing bit about this dynamic to me is that ofc a big thing that draws people to feminism is traumatic experiences of being hurt by men, and imo part of healing from those experiences is understanding men in enough detail to really get *why* they did it
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I think for trauma in the "man imposes his will on a woman" family, needing to spend time understanding him to heal is just a continued uninvited imposition. That might be an aspect of hard-boundaries feminism.
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yeah i don't mean to *impose* this on anyone, it really actually sucks, i spent years refusing to try to understand my parents (one of whom is a man!) for this exact reason
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Yeah, I didn't mean you were imposing, just feeling out the idea and thinking how it interplays w/ different types of trauma.
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