ComradeKingfisher
Yup, it's all for the UCPDs
CW misogyny, SA, and discussion of .mil service
Trans guy here, forgive the rambling but edibles are hitting hard rn and I need to dump this somewhere. If anyone can relate or has had a different experience, please feel free to share with the class.
And Stone Butch Blues is already on my to-read list, but if anyone reads this braindump and can recc me theory that deals with any subject that's touched on I would be eternally grateful please and thank you :3
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Evo psych is bs and smarter people than I have discussed at length why that is. This pattern of behavior though is def something I've experienced and observed throughout my life, especially as the majority of my hobbies and workplaces have always been male dominated. What fucked me up the most tho was the form this behavior took in the .mil. It’s notable bc the .mil has an extreme and explicit form of institutionally enforced hierarchy so the behaviors are particularly toxic and unsubtle and vile.
I refrain from going into how race and class and sexuality etc affected the dynamics not because I didn’t see or experience it, but because I don't want to write ten thousand words rn. I might type it out and clean it up and post it here at some point bc it's been rattling around in my head for years and I need to process it. Until then, assume everyone involved is a wh*te cishet enlisted soldier from families of similar income levels.
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The acceptance from high skill males was conditioned on demonstrated competence. There's always an initial distrust from the misogyny ofc, but the second I or any girl proved we could hang (i.e. be good at the job and perform at least some aspect of masculinity), the most skilled and professional guys took us under their wing and kept other boys from fucking with us.*
Skilled males treated the unskilled women slightly worse than they treated similarly unskilled men. Unskilled males treated unskilled women with more contempt than they treated other unskilled men, and the skilled women on par with the below average men.
If a woman met or exceeded the current cultural beauty standard (and thus performed too much femininity to be taken seriously by brains riddled with patriarchal brainworms), she was taken less seriously by both groups than plain janes and uggos—I counted myself among the latter and it was repeatedly made clear to me that my assessment was correct—that were at similar competence levels. If she was skilled she was taken slightly less seriously than the skilled plains/uggos. If unskilled she was take much, much less seriously.
Regardless of competence the attractive women had more success at the social aspect of the job and thus had slightly more opportunities given to them by less skilled males that had a high enough rank to grant them favors they hoped would result in them getting their dick wet. They often succeeded because they mostly targeted low ranking women who couldn’t really say no because of the implication. 
High rank unskilled males treated the unskilled plain/uggo women with disdain but more or less ignored them like they ignored low ranked unskilled men. With skilled plain/uggo women they had active contempt for them and went out of the way to fuck with them. If a skilled plain/uggo woman didn't have the protection of a high rank skilled man of equal or higher rank to the high rank unskilled man, skilled plain/uggo women were in for an especially miserable time.
Now that I pass as a cis guy and am stealth irl, I feel an immense relief that I'm no longer subjected to the treatment women get.
I'm still a militant feminist and revel in using cis male status to advocate for women and shut misogynistic behavior down, but like yeah, not being treated with automatic contempt because of my gender is so freeing. It's a similar reduction in the background stress I got from getting top surgery, and I sincerely cannot emphasize enough how freeing top surgery was.
Tbh it feels silly to say but I think I've got a sort of survivor's guilt from it. Because of the dysphoria rather than the hardship of being perceived as a women there's no way in hell I would ever go back, but I do feel like I abandoned the homies.**
*when I was in there was a soldier shortage and almost every unit was understaffed, so idk how much of this "acceptance" was driven by the necessity of needing every able body they could get to do the job. I'm curious to know if the pattern holds when they've enough skilled males. I’d also be interesting in knowing how each job and each branch’s culture influences the pattern.
**Until I was able to articulate this to myself, I respected but didn't really fully understand why some binary trans men that identified strongly as a butch lesbian or even non butch lesbian prior to realization/transitioning continued do so after transitioning. Like there's a whole culture to being a woman, a stronger culture to being a lesbian, and an even stronger culture to being a butch lesbian–culture and community is such an essential part of our lives that dropping them is like chopping off a favored limb, and no one should be obligated to chop off a limb.
Seems like he didn't just stumble into it, dude's been on the right side for a while
heartening to see Macklemore return to his roots. before he popped off decade ago, he was running in anti-capitalist radical circles in the west coast & did few fundraiser shows for us (grassroots anti-colonial, anti-capitalist migrant justice group). movements keep us grounded.
Love and respect to the west coast artists then and STILL holding it down for liberation, like Gabriel Teodros, Abyssinian Creole, Khingz who introduced me/us to Macklemore and invited him to be part of our events and into community & movement spaces.
https://twitter.com/HarshaWalia/status/1787643511451562328?t=Xg3Kdho0mP8ARXFyHPyMYQ&s=19
I don't know where you are, but where I live this has never been the sort of second hand stuff that is even remotely accessible to poor people.
Good point, the availability of secondhand equipment isn't something that ever crossed my mind.
I grew up in the California Bay Area. The PMC types buy equipment, use them for a season or less, then get rid of them on Craigslist and/or yard sales—the surplus drives the prices way down, especially during off-season. It's still too expensive if you're struggling to put food on the table and pay rent, but it's viable if there's breathing room in the budget.
In the 90s and 00s a decent set up of used jackets, pants, helmets, skis, and boots could be had for under $100, and last you for well over a decade. Hell, my dad is still using gear he bought in the 90s.
Gear is more expensive now. We recently had to kit up my cousin's bf, and we managed to scrounge everything for $155. He's a min wage worker, but in our cultures multigenerational living is the norm, and that reduces the cost of living enough that spending that much won't put him in the red. He also didn't have spend everything at once, because our family could loan him whatever he was missing while we searched for good deals.
Lift tickets also aren't what they used to be. Growing up, lift tickets at smaller resorts could be had for $10-15, so overall the sport was affordable for working class refugees with only a highschool education and a middling income. Now the cheapest lift tickets at the smallest resorts are $25, and that price is only available once a month.
Had my parents fled to the US now or within the last decade instead of when they did in the 80s, we wouldn't have been a skiing family. With the increase of lift ticket prices, we remain a skiing family only because we have all the gear already, and living with my parents lets me save up enough to buy us season passes. If I were living on my own I wouldn't be able to afford it, nor would my parents since they're on a fixed income.
Skiing with family and friends are some of my fondest memories, and introducing new people to the sport and watching them fall in love with it is phenomenal. Watching year after year as that joy becomes increasingly out of reach for the working class is enraging. Don't even get me started on the insulting, increasingly low pay of resort workers, destroying another solid avenue that working class kids used to use to afford slope time.
You could never really be poor and ski around here, but to the average middle class family it was doable. Now only those in, just below, or above the upper middle class can afford it. It's only going to get more bougie from here on out, which is a travesty.
There are endless tax payer money maintained ski routes in this country during winter that take over walking routes, hiking routes etc. You are not allowed to do anything there but ski during the ski season. The people who do it are all upper middle class or otherwise in a position where they can afford the equipment. The poors don't even get to use the area for walking during this time.
That blows big time, I'm sorry. While the resort slopes are exclusive to skiers, the miles and miles and miles of hiking trails in the Sierra Nevada are open to regular and snowshoe hikers, as well as cross country skiers. Y'all are getting hosed. We're all getting hosed. Death to capitalism.
I'd argue alpine skiing isn't bougie if you live within two to three hours of a mountain. Secondhand equipment is cheap, and lift tickets were affordable until relatively recently.
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Consider the following case:
Alice and her dog: Alice self-describes as being in a romantic relationship with her dog. She cares a lot about his wellbeing and strives to ensure that his needs are fulfilled. They often sleep together; he likes to be caressed and she finds it pleasant to gently rub herself on him. Sometimes, when her dog is sexually aroused and tries to hump her leg, she undresses and lets him penetrate her vagina. This is gratifying for both of them.
Alice’s story describes a kind of relationship commonly described within the Zeta movement, where there is a reciprocal emotional attachment between the human and the animal and sexual contacts are sexually gratifying to both of them. It is tempting to think that Alice’s relationship illustrates one way in which humans can develop more equal and non-exploitative relationships with animals, that go beyond our negative duties not to harm them.
What Alice’s story also illustrates is that there is a continuity between zoophilia and affectionate relationships that ordinary people have with their pets. What is it that makes affectionately caressing one’s cat of a different ethical standing than sexually caressing one’s cat? If there is no clear-cut boundary between the ordinary love that pet keepers express and the romantic love that some zoophiles express, then why accept one and not the other? Alice
White women aren't beating the allegations
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Call EDD because I've not been paid in six weeks despite still having money in my claim balance and being on extension already
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All numbers are maxed out and won't even put you on hold
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latest call has them saying that they're closed and to call back during regular business hours (M-F, 8AM-8PM)
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it's 1pm on a Monday
Goddamn, I'm extremely lucky that I've some cushion (which I really don't want to dip into because that's what I'm using to pay for top surgery this summer), but the vast majority fucking don't. Guys on r/unemployment are talking about how they've not been paid for weeks. They're out of money for food, their cars are being repo'd, they're month's behind on rent, they've not been able to pay bills and their credit is now destroyed, etc. There's been next to 0 communication from EDD, and the new reps they've onboarded are giving out conflicting information on the phone. It's been a month since the new bill passed and the systems are still FUBAR.
Oh, and Gavin Newsom is reopening the state under pressure from businesses, despite SoCal being at 0% ICU capacity, with both the UK strain and they newly ID'd LA strain ripping through the pop.
This past year I've seen the homeless pop only grow and grow, and we've not even hit the lifting of the eviction moratorium yet. Doubly infuriating because WE HAVE ENOUGH FUCKING HOUSING FOR EVERYONE.
It's really fucking hard to not be a doomer knowing everything that's coming down the pipeline :doomer: