To be clear, it’s not that academia weeds out the weak. The research on attrition for women and people of color indicates it’s not that women who leave are not confident, or are weak, but that they know their self-worth and have decided they’d rather take their toys to another sandbox where they’ll actually be appreciated.
But those of us who insist on playing with our toys in the academic sandbox need to be radicals. And I do think a lot of the ways we need to be radical involves how we perform our job: we need to set boundaries so that we aren’t always doing the service work no one wants, we need to make our passions our scholarly interests in the face of some who would invalidate it, we need to perform our confidence in front of people who might undermine us. We need to get tenure.

— The three things I learned at the Purdue Conference for Pre-Tenure Women: on being a radical scholar

Most of those guys probably weren’t informants. Which is a pity because it means they are not getting paid a dime for all the destructive work they do. We might think of these misogynists as inadvertent agents of the state. Regardless of whether they are actually informants or not, the work that they do supports the state’s ongoing campaign of terror against social movements and the people who create them. When queer organizers are humiliated and their political struggles sidelined, that is part of an ongoing state project of violence against radicals. When women are knowingly given STIs, physically abused, dismissed in meetings, pushed aside, and forced out of radical organizing spaces while our allies defend known misogynists, organizers collude in the state’s efforts to destroy us.
The state has already understood a fact that the Left has struggled to accept: misogynists make great informants. Before or regardless of whether they are ever recruited by the state to disrupt a movement or destabilize an organization, they’ve likely become well versed in practices of disruptive behavior. They require almost no training and can start the work immediately. What’s more paralyzing to our work than when women and/or queer folks leave our movements because they have been repeatedly lied to, humiliated, physically/verbally/emotionally/sexually abused? Or when you have to postpone conversations about the work so that you can devote group meetings to addressing an individual member’s most recent offense? Or when that person spreads misinformation, creating confusion and friction among radical groups? Nothing slows down movement building like a misogynist.

— Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence in Movements Enables State Violence

The girl watcher should not let this situation disturb him, however. If the girl is watchable, she should be watched, no matter what her motives or ambitions may be.

— 1960s Pall Mall “Girl Watcher’s” Ads [via&via&via]

Because when you say you can fix the problem by consuming the right things, by doing correct individual actions–you don’t have to think about real solutions. You don’t have to think about capitalism or the shit corporations put in our food. And you can look down on people who don’t live up to those individualist morals. You get to feel good about yourself for teaching your niece to say no to dessert, and not to waste water. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so much of the responsibility, in both cases, lands on the shoulders of women. So much of it has to do with food. Maybe it’s time for us as women to let go of guilt for not being vegan, for taking long showers, for leaving the water running, for all of it, just as we let go of guilt for what we eat. Because not only does “every little bit” not necessarily help, the attitude that it does contributes to shaming women, and elevates middle class conservation to a morality that was never allowed the poor. Consuming your way to environmental salvation: the feminism-acceptable diet talk.

— It’s not a diet, it’s lifestyle activism [via,via]

Things that will likely show up in a full body scanner: Urinary catheters. Incontinence pads. Colostomy and ileostomy bags. PEG feeding tubes. Mastectomy prostheses. Certain medication pumps and implanted ports, such as insulin pumps. TENS machines. Pacemakers. The bodies, including genitalia, of transgender and intersex and genderqueer people.

— Backscatter X-ray scanners, security theatre, and marginalised bodies [via]

Married women in the U.S. do about 70 to 80 percent of the housework. When women marry, the number of hours they spend on housework increases; for men, it stays the same. When couples have children, her housework increases three times as much as his. Feminist women do less housework than non-feminist women; men married to feminist women do the same amount of housework as men married to non-feminist women.

—

Of Housework And Husbands [via]

Ugh.

[T]he feminist goal is to eliminate sex and/or gender as a category entirely. Like the proletariat in Marx’s philosophy, women are to constitute themselves as a class for the sake of overthrowing the system that allows classes to exist. One is not born a woman, except in the same sense that one is born a proletarian: being a woman denotes a social position, and certain social practices, rather than an essence or true identity.

— Pendleton Vandiver, “Feminism: A Male Anarchist’s Perspective” [via]

Macho posturing can take many forms. From masking up in counter-productive situations, to throwing things without aim and mission, boasting about criminal records - or worse, criminal activities, or being the person down the tunnel the longest. These activities often operate at a level of competitiveness within the network rather than co-operation and suggest that activism is for the adrenaline and the recognition rather than the daily effort toward building mass resistance. Wanting to be seen to engage in heroic or hardcore activity relies on others’ failure to do the same, and instead of these activities inspiring others to take action they alienate - hence the problem of some people (“activists”) being asked to take action on behalf of other people; e.g.: people being asked to pie someone, or ‘save’ some land from road building. (Why does everyone need to take action when superman can do it for us?) Rather than using the most effective tactics available, macho activists need the most visual; hanging from harnesses is, in our ‘movement’, a more popular approach than mass direct action, and media stunts are seen as ‘worthwhile’ activity despite such an obviously problematic relationship with the media.

— Let Patriarchy Burn! (Do or Die) [via]