are you fucking kidding me?

sex negative feminists are emphatically not the object of a wider culture of oppression embedded in every single institution.

I wholly agree with you. What I did was take these paragraphs of Sula’s:

Just a thought, but what if you read it as violent, because that is how you may automatically assume “they” always behave?

Perhaps you should think about that.

–and substitute “sex-negative” for “violent.” I did not do this to equate the two things; they are emphatically not equal. I did this to illustrate why I believe that attributing motives to others that they do not themselves endorse often makes them defensive. Belledame did get defensive, and rightly so–because that’s not actually how she is or what she thinks.

Marc attributed a motive to Blackamazon that wasn’t hers; she got angry, a perfectly natural reaction. I sure as hell can’t blame her for being sick and tired of being expected to explain the significance of her choice of symbols, where she was coming from in that post, yada yada, when she already wrote the post once and people who were familiar with her style, her audience, knew what she meant the first time.

Marc didn’t get it right the first time (or, judging by the comment thread at Blackamazon’s, even the second time). I don’t get from this post or anything he’s said since, though, that the problem is that he thinks all people of color are naturally violent or that “‘they’ always behave that way.” I could be wrong. I’ve had to rethink quite a few things in the course of trying to follow all this.

To be clear, I was not picking on belledame, of whom I am very fond. Just noting the futility of putting someone on the defensive and then complaining that they’re being defensive and not listening, not getting it, etc.

Enough.

my mother is possessed of the belief that she is “direct” and straightforward. Unlike -her- mother, who is yer classic “don’t worry about me, I’ll just sit here in the dark, alone, *sigh*.”

And my granny, you know, was raised by a woman who emigrated here from Hungary at the age of ten, worked in relatives’ candy store till she married my great-granddad; none of them had formal education. granny no more than high school; great-granny, all DIY since the age of ten.

and granny (who’s still alive as of this writing) is, love her, but not the most -sophisticated- person in the world.

Not intellectually/culturally, which, BL, tangentially related to your post from Maria Lugones, was it? i have observed though never remarked on a certain tension there; Mom, the PhD Harvard grad, is embarrassed, i think, among other things, although she’d never admit it;

anyway, point being: not emotionally, either.

That is: there’s no question that she’s more…expressive of , say, her anger and so on;

but somehow it hasn’t led to more straightforward communication. Like, at all.

And mom, bless her heart, for all her book larnin’ and genuine smarts and kindness too, yes, also has a bunch of big ol’ blind spots.

Which, as i see it, have fuckall to do with anything except the reluctance to take the inward dive; to really engage with self -or- others (including, sigh, me)

So ultimately as i see it, while the ability to sit around and really look at -any- of this shit can be seen as a luxury (i know how much that pisses you off when people imply that the -academic- analysis is a luxury, BL);

…uh. brain fart. but anyway: these are actually separate if related things we’re talking about here, imo.

And i guess my own thing has been learning, my own way, that no: intellectual smarts aren’t everything either. Nor is simply -emoting.- Much as I, too, prefer the stylistic approach of FUCK YOU, MOTHERFUCKER! hahaha okay let’s get a beer to, I don’t know, “Ordinary People;”

but.

It’s something else I’m talking about, here, really. There’s more to it.

/tangent, sorry guys.

but that doesn’t mean that they can’t or shouldn’t, see; and in fact there have been movements within psych to specifically address such shortcomings.

the way the health industry is set up contributes too, of course; mental health care is a luxury that fewer and fewer can afford these days; and people who are more likely to be on the more impersonal, less careful end of any such treatment (i.e. people who have to rely on not-great insurance plans, i.e. people who aren’t generally too economically privileged and is far more likely to include people who are marginalized in other ways as well) are naturally gonna have a different experience of the whole thing than are people who’re able to pick and choose at more leisure.

this is getting tangential to what you’re talking about, i think, as the mental health care industry =! self-help speak; and yet of course the self-help field sprang up in part, i expect, because traditional psych has simply been made unavailable to most people. Typical American can-do: I’ll do it myself!

and of course, it ends up being mass marketed to mainstream mores (like the alliteration there?), including -by-your-bootstraps capitalism; so of course a fair lot of people who aren’t really the main target audience there either are likely to be turned off by the whole “no, really! you have the power of the universe in your little finger! now: let’s talk about this one incident that happened to you when you were only five, which will unlock everything and voila! problem solved! thank you for sharing! i feel so VALIDATED.

i’m just sayin’: well, yeah. I get frustrated when i think that this is peoples’ understanding of the whole general field, this, this pop-mainstreaming thing; sort of in the same way it’s frustrating when people decide that sex-positive is not for them because it’s all a bunch of privileged white straight women taking lap dancing classes to please their huz-bins.

know what i mean, jellybean?

the problem isn’t that the white women want to talk about feelings, or use yadda a frame;

it’s more what they AREN’T addressing.

sort of roughly parallel to: yes, we are all women, here; yes, we probably -do- have -certain- commonalities we could talk about; but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ALSO things we do NOT have in common.

wrt feelingspeak: that touches upon the larger complaint a lot of people have about mainstream psych in general: to wit, it doesn’t take into account shit like, “well, yes, that is an interesting point about the relationship between me and my older sister, I never did think of -that- quite that way; HOWEVER, it STILL doesn’t address my PRIMARY POINT here, which is that i am FREAKING OUT because of economic stresses.”

…at which point one can either dither off into “self-esteem” talk (annoying New Agey whatever) and/or blithely chirp along as though one’s own framework for dealing with such things (well, why not borrow money from the bank/ask your parents/sell the second car/scrimp on restaurant outings) is universal.

…at which point we’re back into very familiar territory indeed.

and i won’t argue that you will find this sort of thing happening in a number of “therapeutic” settings;

but, well, dammit, I’m protective of the field (psych) and what it’s done for me; perhaps that’s why i feel the need to defend here; but still i wonder whether that is not in fact because of the -approach- so much as the fact that the people leading the workshop/giving the therapy/initiating the “talk” or whatnot are, well, privileged, and blind to it in all the usual ways.