#hierarchy

morlock-holmes:

thathopeyetlives:

I’m really weirded out by the sheer intensity of the notion among liberals that anyone right of center has some kind of intense, prescriptive obsession with hierarchy and specifically with wanting to have an underclass.

Whilel I haven’t met that many rightists off of the internet, I really don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone with this mentality. Ever.

(also.. do you guys realize that a lot of the blame -capitalism thing comes off as *scapegoating* when your idealistic plans inevitably fail?)

I mean you literally said that you don’t want to have bodily autonomy.

@tuesdayisfordancing

“however I think they don’t want anyone to have it. they want the collective to agree for all, regardless of status.”

Okay, I have serious problems with this kind of thinking.

Like, I have issues with the way Religious people in particular talk through this but in some ways that’s a distraction.

Like, if you start with the premise “Nobody should be able to make or read obscene pornography” you run into the fact that people disagree over what that is.

So I’m reading a book, and Bob says, “That’s obscene pornography” and I say, “No it’s not, it’s art” then what do we do?

Well, we make Bob a member of the public decency squad, fully deputized to declare certain books illegal and confiscate them from criminals.

And now that means that when Bob sees me reading a book he doesn’t like, he can rip it out of my hands, and when I see Bob reading a book that I don’t like, tough shit nobody cares.

And so you go, “No no, it’s not a hierarchy, everybody is supposed to avoid this stuff!” to efface the fact that it’s actually Bob deciding what everyone has to avoid.

This gets complicated by George Orwell shooting the elephant stuff, (Bob is now in some ways trapped into being a decency enforcer), but in general it’s a kind of rhetorical move where you go,

“There’s no hierarchy here, because we’ve all agreed to do what I say!”

leonlafricain:

I’ve been a part of a poly relationship for about a year now, we are all busy people and so we made a rough schedule for spending time together. Torvald and I always hang out on Wednesdays as it’s the only day that consistently works for both of us. He works late Monday, plays games with his friends and primary (we’ll call her Jespor) on Tuesday. I spend time with my primary (unrelated to Torvald or Jespor) on Thursday, and Sunday. He spends Thursday and Friday with Jespor. And we all three spend time together Saturday. But today he told me that he wouldn’t be able to hang out on Wednesdays anymore because he wants to watch a TV show the night it airs for the foreseeable future (with Jespor). I feel very hurt by this. I understand I’m not as important as she is and I probably don’t have any right to be upset, but I feel like I’m being shoved aside for something that could easily be done the next day. He said I might be able to come over for a little bit after the show gets over, but that would be fairly late and I work early and it makes me feel like a booty call. I don’t know how to communicate this to him without coming across as controlling or needy. Plus I feel like making a big deal out of this will make spending time with me feel like a chore. These are my best friends and I don’t want things to turn out badly.

This is likely a case of the “message sent” being different from the “message received.” The only thing he told you is that he can’t hold Wednesday nights as your hang out time any longer, but you received a lot of messages about your importance to him and how much he values your time together.

Which is understandable - I’m not saying that you’re wrong to feel hurt! Just that it’s important to engage with the things he’s actually saying and doing.

There are plenty of ways to bring this up with Torvald without being “controlling” or “needy.” Let him know that you really value your one-on-one time with him, and since it’s not going to work out on Wednesdays anymore, see if he can work with you to come up with a solution. It’s really great to have standing weekly dates with important people, but life changes and schedules do shift. Is it possible for you to hang out with him on Thursdays and shift date nights with your primary to Wednesdays? Or, since he’s adding another day with Jespor, could Fridays become your night?

It’s OK to ask other people in your life, including your other partners, to make adjustments. Adult life and real world relationships often require this sort of flexibility. Holding a night of the week for someone’s schedule is not a lifelong commitment and everyone involved is entitled to make changes. Someday someone else will really want to take a class that only meets on Tuesday evenings, or get a promotion that requires them to work late on Thursdays. Managing this with grace and without taking things personally will be important.

It’s also completely fine to talk to Torvald about how this makes you feel less important and pushed aside - without accusing him of actually devaluing you or pushing you aside - and let him know what would help you feel more secure and cherished in the relationship. If you can’t spend quality time together in the evenings, what kind of connection is important to maintain? Is there a way to make hanging out later in the evenings not feel like a “booty call?”

You say that you’re afraid that bringing this up will make you “seem” a certain way or that it will “make” Torvald feel a certain way. Remember that you are not psychic! If Torvald is someone who is dating you, it’s likely that he enjoys spending time with you, he doesn’t resent you for desiring his attention and affection, and that he wants you to be honest with him about your desires and feelings. If he acts in a way that demonstrates anything else, don’t date this person. Partners should always welcome this kind of honesty, and anyone who punishes you for it is not someone you ought to be dating.

You’re also well within your rights to ask him if he would be willing to wait 24 hours and watch the show with her on Thursdays. Again, he might not realize how important this is for you, or he might not have communicated something important about the fandom experience he wants to have. But none of that can happen without a conversation! Don’t frame it as a “confrontation” or a “demand,” just an open dialogue about how you’re feeling and what you’re wanting. Let him respond in his own way - either by collaborating with you to find a compromise that works for everyone, or by demonstrating that he’s not willing to do that and thus not someone worth dating.

I was hoping for some advice about a situation. I’m married and poly. I have a partner of about 8 months now. He’s in a DADT relationship. He prefers not to meet on weekends as that’s his time with his wife - which leaves us Tuesdays (I work 4 -10 he shifts). He unfortunately had some health things to work through so we’ve gone extended periods without seeing one another. The times we have seen one another it’s usually within a 3 hour window.

A lot of our plans fall through because of health or because his wife needs him. We have talked about boundaries and I know he is capable of loving another person, and when we don’t see each other we talk all day long every day. First good morning and last goodnight. I fell in love with him.

I’m worried that I’m allowing myself to stay in a place that won’t be good for me. Sporadic visits, I often have to ask for reassurance for feelings. I know he cares about me, but it hurts when he cancels and it hurts to know that if this specific time frame doesn’t work we won’t see each other.

This morning we had plans fall through and I feel hurt and tearful. And while he verbalized that he misses me and wishes he could be here to console me - he also reminded me that when his wife isn’t feeling her best that’s his priority.

I am not asking for him to every put me first. I’m asking to feel important. I’m asking to matter. I’m asking to exist outside of a window of time that is often lost/missed etc. I love him. He has become such an important part of my life but also a very painful part. Im not sure what I’m asking but I’m lost.

This guy has given you very clear information about what he can and what he cannot provide for you in a relationship. He is holding his boundaries and explicitly defining what sort of relationship he is able and willing to be in.

You now have plenty of information with which to make an informed choice. Are you okay being in a relationship under those terms? If yes, then you need to commit to accepting those boundaries and find a way to make it work. If no, then you need to leave the relationship. Continuing to ask him to do things that he has told you that he cannot or will not do is not going to be a good use of your time.

I also want to make a note about some of your wording here: you say that you are “asking to feel important” and that you are “asking to matter.” Those aren’t really things you can ask of your partner. He can’t make you feel, or be, any sort of way.

You can identify “here are things you can do that would make me feel important,” and it sounds like you have done that, and he’s said that he can’t do those things, so you have some pretty clear information.

You matter, and you are important, inherently, as a human being - another person’s behavior can’t change that. And it’s entirely possible that you matter very much and are very important to this guy - but that he isn’t able to translate his feelings for you into behavior that translates into your “love language.”

Try to be grateful that this guy is not trying to gaslight you, lead you on, or manipulate you. He’s been very up front about who he is, what he wants from your relationship, and what you can expect from him. It is sad that what you want from him isn’t something he can give you, but that’s not going to change, so all you can do is choose what you want to do with that information.

Think about it this way: You really want pepperoni pizza, and you’ve just walked into a pizza shop that only sells cheese. Do you want to let go of your desire for pepperoni and enjoy some cheese pizza, or leave this shop and continue looking for somewhere that will serve you pepperoni? Both of those are fine options, but “stay in the cheese-only shop while continuing to ask and hope for pepperoni” is not.

dragon-in-a-fez:

why “spanking is harmful” studies will, ultimately, never matter to parents who want to hit their kids:

@fandomsandfeminism wrote a great post recently about the fact that we have, essentially, a scientific consensus on the fact that all forms of hitting children, including those euphemistically referred to as “spanking”, are psychologically harmful. they’ve also done an amazing job responding to a lot of parents self-admitted abusers who think “I hit my child and I’m okay with that” and/or “I was hit as a child and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me” are more meaningful than 60 years of peer-reviewed research.

unfortunately, I’m here to tell you why all of that makes very little difference.

in 2014, a couple of researchers from UCLA and MIT named Alan Fiske and Tage Rai published a book called Virtuous Violence, the result of a major study of the motivations for interpersonal violence. Rai wrote a shorter piece about it in Quartz, which is a pretty light but still illuminating (hah, I did not see that pun coming but I’m gonna leave it) read.

the upshot of Fiske and Rai’s work is that most violence is fundamentally misunderstood because we think it is inherently outside the norms of a supposedly moral society. we presume that when someone commits a mass shooting or beats their spouse they are somehow intrinsically broken, either incapable of telling right from wrong or too lacking in self-control to prevent themselves from doing the wrong thing.

but what Fiske and Rai found was that, in fact, the opposite is true: most violence is morally motivated. people who commit violent acts aren’t lacking moral compasses - they believe those violent acts are not only morally acceptable, but morally obligatory. usually, these feelings emerge in the context of a relationship which is culturally defined as hierarchical. in other words, parents who commit violence against their children do so because they believe it is necessary that they do so in order to establish or affirm the dominancewhich they feel they are owed by both tradition and moral right.

when abusive parents say that they are “hitting children for their own good”, they are not speaking in terms of any rational predictions for the child’s future, but rather from a place of believing that the child must learn to be submissive in order to be a “good” child, to fulfill their place in the relationship.

this kind of violence is not the result of calm, intellectually reasoned deliberation about the child’s well-being. for that reason and that reason alone it will never be ended by scientific evidence.

history tells us more than we need to verify this. the slave trade and the institution of racial slavery, and their attendant forms of “corrective” physical violence, for instance, did not end because someone demonstrated they were physically or psychologically harmful to slaves - that was never a question in people’s minds to begin with. for generations, slavery was upheld as right and good not because it was viewed as harmless, but because it was viewed as morally necessary that one category of people should be “kept in their place” below another by any means necessary, because they were lower beings by natural order and god’s law. this violence ended because western society became gradually less convinced of the whole moral framework at play, not because we needed scientists to come along and demonstrate that chain gangs and whippings were psychologically detrimental. this is only one example from a world history filled with many, many forms of violence, both interpersonal and structural, which ultimately were founded on the idea that moral hierarchies must be maintained through someone’s idea of judiciously meted-out suffering.

and this, ultimately, is why we cannot end violence against children by pointing out that it is harmful - because the question of whether or not it is harmful does not enter into parents’ decisions about whether or not to commit violence in the first place. what they care about is not the hypothetical harm done to the child, but the reinforcement of the authority-ranked nature of the relationship itself. the reason these people so often sound like their primary concern is maintaining their “right” to hit their children is because it is. they believe that anyone telling them they can’t hit their children is attempting to undermine the moral structure of that individual relationship and, in a broader sense, the natural order of adult-child relations in society.

and that’s why the movement has to be greater than one against hitting kids. it has to be a movement against treating them as inferior, in general. it has to be a movement that says, children are people, that says children’s rights are human rights, that says the near-absolute authority of parents, coupled with the general social supremacy of adults and the marginalization of youth, have to all be torn down at once as an ideology of injustice and violence. anything less is ultimately pointless.