Magnum opus

  I am very much busy these days with a colossal paper I am to hand in, lest my arse be handed to me. Yet, I adamantly refuse to let an entire calendar month pass by without a single update since my return, and so I shall write on a subject which I have been very much aware of in the past month or two: oppression. I have become very aware of the subject after befriending many transgender people and becoming (even) more aware of what feminism is up against, and, as a true friend or family member can, I have some poignant yet very caring and very, very sympathetic criticism to offer from my point of view:

  First of all, time and time again I see in feminist writings a three-pronged division of society into oppressors, allies, and the oppressed. I see many justifications for the angry, often violent rhetoric used by non-cisgender people used to point out the hypocrisy of oppressors’ dismissive attitude towards the horrible grievances (often lethal violence, discrimination in employment and housing, and a general dismissal from society as the butt of twisted jokes) that transgender people (and, although usually not to the same extent, genderqueer people) endure, ‘die cis scum’ being the most prolific one among them (and no, no-one who uses this motto genuinely wants to kill cisgender people, just to point out to them their hypocritically dismissive attitude towards the same violence directed at transgender people). I see people defending their right to use mocking and dismissive rhetoric towards the oppressive groups in the kyriarchy they live in, often against white people, citing that their actions are entirely disproportionately small when compared to the systemic oppression they have been going through. I came across a wonderful metaphor for this, reblogged on the amazing Tumblr page For Lack of a Better World, saying that vampires should be a metaphor for the privileged and not outcasts.

  While I very much appreciate the sentiment and would probably feel the same way if I were one of those groups... no, wait, I am. I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I’ve yet to see one positive and accurate portrayal of Asperger’s syndrome in any work of fiction. I can cite only two cases I’ve encountered of ‘classic’ autism being portrayed accurately: Yellow Peppers and Barfi!; the former treats autism as a horrible bane on the parents’ lives, the latter... the less said about the latter, the better. I am subject to stereotypes of all kinds―‘benign’ (‘You’re one of the smart ones, right?’), rarely neutral, usually negative (no sense of humour, no empathy, no ability to connect with other people, attention-whoring, a touch crazy and possibly a psychotic school shooter in the making, you name it). I’ve encountered some negative reactions for being bisexual as well, but it’s not even remotely as influential on my life as being an aspie is. So yes, I’ve thought and said (in jest) some mean things about neurotypical people to vent my frustration, mostly that they’re really fucking stupid (I’ve even come up with a joke about NTs that I love telling: how many NTs does it take to change a lightbulb? ‘Seriously? You wanna change the burnt lightbulb? O-kaaayyy...’). Also, the mass media also ‘reprimands’ me often for my not-entirely-male gender identity and expression.

  But you know what? This experience highlighted a very important concept: that the three-pronged division mentioned earlier is inaccurate, and needs to include a fourth category: uninformed privileged masses. The fact is, it’s not ‘white people’ who oppressed black people, but rather a small group of sociopaths/narcissists with power who happen to be white. As a matter of fact, this actually tends to work both ways: back in the early days of the slave trade and colonialism, powerful white people bribed local power-bearers (or power-bearers to be, in case of Iran for instance) into collaborating with them in exchange for power, sometimes with trickery, sometimes not (yes, the slave trade too: in the past, the concensus was that the black chieftains were blameless victims of pillaging white invaders, but recently researchers in the field began looking into their responsibility for this atricity); this practice quietly persists today, notably in the case of Israel, which has the nerve to trade and even sell arms to the global pariah tyranny in Eritrea. The simple coal miner from Wales had no say in the British Empire’s leaders’ decision to colonise half the fucking world; the humble Japanese villager was not the one who urged the Japanese Diet to conquer Korea; the ordinary Ashkenazi Jews, let alone (soon-to-be) Israeli Jews in Palestine were not the ones who made the notorious gesture demanding to ‘drive [the Palestinians] out’ (and certainly not the poor, poor Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors, who were horribly stigmatised up until Eichmann’s trial); and the common American southerner did not own slaves, and most certainly did not establish the slave trade. Those people were simply lucky enough to belong to the same arbitrary groups the people in power belonged to, and kept ignorant and miserable enough to believe it was in fact the member of another arbitrary group that is the source of their woes. In many ways, this is much more of a class issue than it is a race/gender/creed issue.

  Oppressed groups, the privileged are not your enemies; active oppressors are. The cisgender man who reacts in disgust at a transwoman because he doesn’t know any better is not your enemy; the cisgender man who assaults a transwoman for shits ang giggles, the police officers who refuse to take the victims seriously, and the media that actively propagates transphobia despite having been educated otherwise time and again (here in Israel, whenever the media misrepresents transpeople for the Kot-knows-how-many-eth time, they are sent guidelines for proper representation written by Nora Greenberg, former chairwoman of the Aguda, and it never seems to sink in), the legistlators who refuse to give a flying fuck about transgender people, &c.―they are your enemies. And you know what? Male gamers who protest at having a heroine wearing pragmatic, non-revealing clothing saying they can’t, and I quote, ‘fap to this’, are very much women’s enemies. Oppressors in positions of power (primarily politicians) often make new enemies by putting the masses in impossible situations: in Western countries it’s done by perpetuating neglect of oppressed minorities, oftentimes perpetuating conflict between the oppressed and a sub-category of the privileged, the underprivileged (a group with partial privilege due to belonging to the same group as the oppressors, at least to a limited extent; in the US it used to be Italian- and Irish-Americans, in Israel today it’s the non-Ashkenazi Jews); here in Israel it’s caused by constant fear-mongering, sending young men to impossible situations involving warfare against the oppressed groups until they are eroded into actively becoming their enemies, and, once again, perpetuating neglect of the underprivileged, most visibly where African refugees are forced to live.

  A post I came across on Tumblr, shared by the most wonderful Bow-Boy, responds to cisgender people refusing to show support for people using violent rhetorics with the retort, ‘You didn’t support me in the first place, then.’ This claim is based on lack of division between oppressors and uneducated privileged masses. The masses need to be educated and have their sense of empathy appealed to; people don’t become vegetarians because animals fight back, and refrain from taking this step not because of a desire for wanton cruelty against the defenceless but because they believe they need meat and dairy to survive. The point is to acquire their previously non-existent support. Yes, it’s true that uprisings and rights are achieved by aggressive means, but those were directed at the oppressors: the British army, the American police in the Stonewall riots, Henry Ford (who was sued by Jews for the anti-Semitic propaganda he published), and other cases I can’t think of. Aiming aggression at the masses will just reinforce the notion the oppressors condition them into adopting, namely that the oppressed are a threat to them in some way. An Israeli who lost a friend or a relative to a terrorist attack during either of the Intifádas will not be more supportive of the Palestinian cause; they will instead conclude that the Palestinians are every bit as dangerous as he was told. A man who is fiercely reprimanded for cat-calling a woman, genuinely thinking it’s a compliment, will simply dismiss the woman reprimanding him as ‘a bitch’ and not learn a thing. Treat the privileged kindly and educate them politely, but show your active oppressors you are a force to be reckoned with.

  On this issue: yes, the privileged masses are generally unaware of the oppression you go through. I, for example, genuinely thought in high school that oppressing women in Israel is no longer a ‘thing’, maybe just among certain groups (religious people predominantly), so I honestly thought feminist complaints on the issue was a tedious case of preaching to the choir, especially when ‘white feminists’ were discussed. So yeah, education will make a colossal difference.

  Second, give apparent examples of oppression the benefit of the doubt. Seth McFarlane is an excellent example; his humour is either poking fun at stereotypes to extreme degrees, so they will no longer be taken seriously, and showing his real opinions on oppression by mocking the oppressors―Meg Griffin’s abuse is not meant to be funny because ha ha the uggo gets fucked, but rather to portray people around her as caricature-ish psychopaths. The notorious Haaretz commercial, in which a young man bemoans the poor ‘user experience’, wasn’t meant to represent women as an object to be used, but as a caricature of the man who expects to learn about the Arab Spring from having sex with a woman (another commercial from that series showed a woman with similar expectations from her 3-year-old son). Rape jokes are not meant to ‘trivialise rape’; in fact, trivialising rape would kill those jokes, as they rely on shock value based on a perceived concensus that rape is morally abhorrent, and a glaring lack of understanding of its horrific prevalence. (By the way, I keep hearing about how frequently rape goes unreported and how few charges end in conviction, while the numbers of fake charges is marginal, yet these claims are never accompanied by sources; if any of my readers have any, I would love to be able to back this claim.) Also, I would like to point out that MRAs’ claims that feminists ‘call it chivalry when they like it and sexism when they don’t’ are not entirely unfounded; there are women who adopt a vile ‘halfway’ attitude between claiming the rights feminism demands and the perks of patriarchy (protection, being paid for when dating, &c.). I’ve had the unfortunate experience of arguing with a classmate in 9th grade who asserted that ‘it’s wrong to hit girls’; when I challenged this twisted notion and said that if that’s the case, then ‘women should go back in the kitchen and never get jobs’ (i.e. ‘you can’t eat your cake and have it’), she completely ignored the message I tried to convey and claimed I’d said that women should go back in the kitchen and never get jobs. Fortunately, she was a transfer student, and none of my pre-existing classmates agreed with her original assertion (which only served to make her angrier).

  Third, yes, fearing oppression working in the opposite direction is a legitimate fear. There have been many cases of racist attacks on innocent white people by black people; this is a particularly horrifying example. There have even been cases of non-heterosexual people using heterophobic violence. Some activists, notably (at least over here) Israeli activist Dan Veg, often claim that all the heterophobic/cisphobic rhetoric is harmless and does nothing more than simply offend heterosexuals/cisgender people. I disagree. Also, yes, misandry is a thing. Some of you might have the privilege of living in a Western country where there is no such thing as conscription and infant circumcision is negligible in scale; I don’t have that privilege. Had I not been able to get out of the army using my AS, I would have had to be drafted for three years, while girls my age were drafted for two. Also, while AS is grounds for release (in some cases), the IDF bureaucracy is a notoriously incompetent mess and could overlook that; I have a friend who went through several months of prolonged suffering in the IDF before someone noticed he had been diagnosed as an aspie before being drafted. Aside from that, I lost my foreskin as a baby to peer pressure, which originates from my oppressors, my sworn enemies: the state Jewish Orthodoxy. So, as an unwillingly circumcised male living in a country without public transportation on the Sabbath and without the ability to marry people of my sex or who aren’t registered as being the same religion as I am in the Ministry of Interior or were born the same sex as me without flying abroad, if you want to say something about me being intolerant or disrespectful, I not-very-kindly urge you to SHUT THE FUCK UP. As for feminists (mostly ‘white feminists’ actually) claiming that misandry isn’t a thing, as ironic as this sounds: check your privilege.

  And that’s probably all I had to say, at least for now. Here’s to a month of progress to us all.

  (P.S.: It has recently come to my attention that people who like-like me have the tendency to binge on the archives of this five-year-old blog. I should point out for their sake that while I am flattered by the gesture, they should bear in mind that most of these past entries are old and many of them are no longer relevant and do not reflect many of my current views. If you want to know my current views on a topic I raised months or years ago, ask.)