For these men, women are only an audience for their self-perceived awesomeness and even babies are but props for their performance art lives.
"Disgust is an emotional response of rejection or revulsion to something potentially contagious or something considered offensive, distasteful or unpleasant. I think this is a huge reason why most people do not think that men should be breastfeeding." https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/girls-can-do-anything-but-sorry-boys
Nov 28, 2023·edited Nov 28, 2023Liked by Amy Sousa, MA Depth Psychology
Women have every right to be repulsed by open male perverts who get off on broadcasting their degeneracy. We're right (evolutionarily and morally) to communicate our disgust, and these men are lucky that we don't resort to other means (though we probably should).
The fact that males are truly baffled when we call out their stupid, disgusting behavior, judge them, and then draw boundaries they're told not to cross, really speaks volumes to the lack of male shame. This is why there is a major problem in the first place. I have every right to communicate my disgust at a degenerate like Phil Illy at an event for Genspect (Troonspect). He should be ashamed of himself, and Troonspect as an organization cannot solve any problems if it continues to operate as it has. This organization purports to help young people. It cannot allow open perverts to advertise at its organizations and continue to claim that.
Nov 28, 2023·edited Nov 29, 2023Liked by Amy Sousa, MA Depth Psychology
Thank you for posting this piece, it's very interesting, uncompromising and logical based on the powerful unconscious and conscious urge and mechanisms we have to protect ourselves. For example, we all make judgements, multiple judgements to tell us whether we are safe or can trust the other person(s). I doubt that can be suppressed, but we can intentionally disregard it, as you point out, this happens all the time when men put pressure on women, on the basis of non-judgememtalism of a moral kind, to enable and also validate predatory, exhibitionist behaviour. No, women should not be doing this. If men don't want to confine their sexual behaviours to an appropriate environment, then they should be charged accordingly, it is a form of sexual.abuse.
Women's safety and feeling of being safe should not be sacrificed so some man can get off. I recall reading an interview with Grayson Perry where he explained that he wore expansive dresses whilst portraying that grotesque, painted 'girl' was to conceal his erection. That might seem mild compared to what some men do, but it's definitely cringeworthy. Nevertheless, he feels able to share it because he and men like him think it's fine to disclose information like that, nothing is going to happen to them as a consequence. He can do what he wants, just like men who rub their knobs on lavatory door handles that women will be touching, then put the information on social media. These appalling men plumb the depths of inadequacy.
All in the safety of pretending they believe they're women, where people who could prevent them from being in women's spaces, are falling over themselves to ensure they can enter our spaces on their conditions. The space has been given over to them, men in this position aren't going to hesitate to please themselves whatever that does to women and children.
Point this out or express the slightest reservation and you're a bigot, a hater, a transphobe. You definitely don't want trans people to have human rights and you might even wish genocide on them.
Nov 29, 2023Liked by Amy Sousa, MA Depth Psychology
Men and women alike (though mostly men) have often expressed their disgust towards my lack of engagement in feminine beauty rituals such as leg shaving and makeup. Is this an evolutionarily adaptive disgust impulse, and do you think it is one they ought to listen to and express?
I think men who want women to shave their body hair have been programmed by pedophilic porn. All adults have body hair. I am disgusted by men who want women to look like little girls.
So their disgust response is distinct from the kind of disgust response that is socially adaptive? Are their other disgust responses you think are not socially adaptive?
Men and their responses aren't important. We literally have to file lawsuits to keep them out of girls' bathrooms. Just leave women alone. Go be a degenerate alone.
I used the relatively benign example of leg shaving in order to avoid immediately launching into something that could look a lot like culture war, but I might as well put my cards on the table now - I am a lifelong gender nonconforming lesbian, and my main experiences with disgust - from women as well - have been aimed in this direction (and curiously almost never at, say, the men who have harassed me and my friends and girlfriends - those men have benefited from social groups backing their actions and throwing their disgust reflex my way instead).
This leads me to think disgust is at best a politically neutral reflex, and to be very worried about concepts like "social hygiene" considering who has traditionally been considered "dirty" (certainly not powerful men). But I am a feminist in full agreement with the fight against male violence, and therefore I am legitimately curious about the nuances if a feminist politics of disgust. How do we systematize it? Which heuristics do we use? (I wish the heuristic of "listen to women's disgust, not to men's" was enough - but sadly I, again, have met many women with deep internalized misogyny that colored their disgust responses first and foremost.)
Great point!! Can’t we acknowledge that our disgust responses tell us something truthful though? People DO have a visceral reaction of disgust to women who keep their body hair. Because the body hair is telling them that the woman refuses to conform to certain social mores. If you unpack what the mores are, you see they are female social oppression. So then you have to ask yourself: is it right to follow this disgust response? And if you stand against female oppression, you say: no. I must resist it.
Yes. In this case, men who are disgusted by women with normal adult body hair perceive the hair as dirty/diseased aka a threat bc body hair on women IS an actual threat to men, or at least, to the male supremacy. Body hair on women is a threat to the belief of women as inherently childlike/inferior/sexual decorative objects and therefore deserving of use as objects and social domination by men. So for men, who have oppressed women for at least 15,000+ years, a woman who is visually identifiable as refusing to conform to social submission to men in any way, in this case, through hair routines, is a threat to that man’s ability to hoard and dominate resources be they financial, sexual, social, religious, artistic, emotional, or other resources.
Nov 29, 2023Liked by Amy Sousa, MA Depth Psychology
I’ve commented other forums on the sad clown devil in a blue dress (so to speak) that poisoned the well a bit at the Genuflect event - why is it these men dress like hookers? Good article here, and while I’ve never been disgusted by these sex games - and make no mistake that’s all they are - it’s still surprising that the general reaction was of not wanting to offend the offender. I’ve been a very active gay man for over 45 years, and “seen it all twice”, and a man on the prowl for a sex games is like a flashing neon sign to me. I know a genderfuck when I see one. The offense is the point BTW.
The casual shabbinesss of the hooker clothing, the mietennes in the wrong color (look it up), bad makeup, the panoply of cliches playing a specific role in a specific game, intentionally inducing the jarring repulsiveness of contaminated professional circumstances. There’s a reason it’s called getting your freak on.
Gay men feel it too, by the way. A gay male venue invaded briefly by women on a bachelorette night out, clearly enjoying the discomfort of men shy of affection in front of the opposite sex, too polite to ask the women to tone it down. Wrong place at the wrong time, routine in the Castro in SF.
Wrong place at the wrong time.
Is there a right place, right time? Folsom Leather Fetish weekend. Burning Man. Fantasy Fest Key West: you could go every week to a fetish event without difficulty. But! The crowds are not put off, not offended. The desired reaction isn’t achieved, the game fails. You can’t offend offenders.
I hope Genuflect understands that it’s normal to ask people in full kink mode to leave or change attire. Friday Casual is fine, a man in women’s clothing will be strangely unremarkable in a twinset and khakis. Dressing for Saturday Night at Sunset and La Brea turning tricks... wrong place wrong time.
Thank you for this thoughtful response. I appreciate you sharing your experience and insights. Yes, these men are playing sex games that depend on "wrong place/wrong time." And as you also observe, offense is the point.
Aja said: “The men in the top line make me feel uncomfortable. The men in the bottom line do not.”
I see what she means. The guys on the bottom row are fashion models who are being men. They are expanding manhood, not trying to opt out, and they look quite sexy, some of them, even to me, who identifies as a cishet bloke! But they are not role-playing being women, which is what the men on the top row are doing. These are autogynephiles (AGPs) and it’s a sexual fetish.
It's apparent to me that the so-called Trans Umbrella shelters lots of different types of people who don’t necessarily have a lot in common, the most glaring distinction being older male AGPs on the one hand and teenage girls with ROGD on the other.
Nov 29, 2023Liked by Amy Sousa, MA Depth Psychology
Hi Amy
What if we juxtapose our repulsion with public fetish against many people's repulsion at observing, say, someone with severe facial deformities. How does that repulsion differ? Does it?
Should it ? I don't disagree with you but this question did come to mind.
The instincts and impulses for disgust/revulsion are automatic, they are happening at a level below conscious thought. Thus, they will happen regardless of whether we want them to happen or not. My overarching point is simply not to deny, dismiss, or dissociate from these impulses, but to look to them for the insights they offer.
In the example you are describing, if I see someone with "severe facial deformities," I may experience an involuntary revulsion impulse. The impulse itself is value-neutral, it is how I respond to the impulse that matters. Cognitively I would understand that I am having an evolutionary reaction to a perceived diseased state, and I might also understand by further looking that this person is a burn victim, not a person with say, leprosy. The impulse is still a safeguarding impulse, but I can almost instantaneously understand that the person causes me no threat.
Regardless of me wishing to take a moral high ground and not respond with revulsion to "severe facial deformities," the impulses is beyond my conscious control, it is happening at the level of instinct, an embodied reaction to a perceived threat.
Gavin de Becker would say that we should always be curious about our intuitions and investigate them. Sometimes when we investigate them we find that their messages are not useful to the situation. But the point is that we should never ignore them without investigating them first.
Nov 29, 2023Liked by Amy Sousa, MA Depth Psychology
Interesting question. I look at it like this:
When I was seeking a dog-sitter for my elderly dog I ended up discounting the most conveniently located one because during the meet-and-greet he told me his wife volunteered with disabled children but that he found it hard to even look at them.
This was a red flag for me. He was clearly the sort of person who reduces others to their physical differences and can't or won't empathise beyond that to treat them as a whole human being.
I get the same red flag when I see a man who reduces womanhood to a costume he can wear.
They're an idiot, and the bigotry you are currently spreading will be used against people with deformities and other marginalized groups as a form of social control that will be used against all women, as no woman perfectly conforms to the rigid gender norms that this line of logic forces them into. It will be the death knell of your rights in the slim chance that it isn't discarded as it's proponents die of old age
As I show in the essay, the disgust/revulsion instinct is an evolutionary-ingrained instinct for safeguarding. It is not going to go away. As I also explore, there is a difference between gender nonconforming and fetish wear.
Jr. High students use their cringe response/disgust impulse all the time to influence their own social sphere. These impulses are part of living in social groups.
Nov 29, 2023Liked by Amy Sousa, MA Depth Psychology
When I watched the new Doctor Who special, which featured an adult male playing dressup as a female teen, I felt this same revulsion. And writing this fetish, this paraphilia, into the main plotline of the story only revolted me more.
The problem is that I can’t tell by looking at someone what their motivation for dressing and looking a certain way is. I wouldn’t want to go back to a world where women are required to wear constricting and limiting dresses. We’ve come a long way in the past 100 years or so. But there hasn’t been a similar expansion of what’s considered socially acceptable for men to wear. Yes, some men are acting out their sexual fantasies in public by dressing as women. But other men may be gay, or gender nonconforming in other ways, or be the former little boy who was bullied for liking pink sparkly things, or who just never felt they fit into the constricting gender roles that were expected of them. And how can I tell the difference?
I agree with you that paraphilias are creepy. I will keep my distance from anyone I get that vibe from. But I don’t think we can actually police gender nonconforming dress or behaviors, because we can’t read people’s minds. And it doesn’t make sense to impose a strict dress code only based on societal convention on males, who wouldn’t like it any more than females would.
So I arrive back at believing people have the right to dress and present themselves however they want, as long as they are honest about what they are. However, I also have the right to avoid people who give me the creeps.
Showing public revulsion is not "policing," it is a democratic social way of letting people know their behavior is unwanted. It is not state-enforced. There is no "strict dress code." In most situations, we already use our disgust impulse to let people we share public spaces with know that their way of dress is unwanted, unnerving, threatening, or gross. Jr. high students do this very well amongst themselves and so do adults. People have the "right" to dress as they want, but if you show up in dirty unkept clothes, you will likely face public revulsion. This is not about attempting to read people's minds, it is about staying grounded in our instinctual responses rather than denying or dismissing the important information these intuitive reactions share with us. Thank you for your thoughtful reading.
Nov 28, 2023Liked by Amy Sousa, MA Depth Psychology
I think we’re in agreement then. I am going to avoid anyone I get creepy vibes from, and that’s going to include anyone who I feel is objectifying or mocking women through their appearance. I just think that a relaxing of social norms for men, similar to what has happened for women over the past decades, has to be a part of fighting the transgender ideology. Men who are sensitive and like pink aren’t women, they’re just men who are sensitive and like pink, and should be able to exist as they are without either pretending to be “manly men” or being convinced they are actually women and need surgery and to reject their male selves.
As long as you’re not talking about actual policing, just individuals avoiding those who they get threatening vibes from, we’re at least in the same book if not quite on the same page. Thanks for the thoughtful article and comment!
Nov 29, 2023Liked by Amy Sousa, MA Depth Psychology
Policing doesn't have to be formal, by the state. Most such policing is done by social conventions and "soft authority" like conformity. It is this that used to stop all but the most flagrant men from indulging their AGP-lia and has been unleashed on society by the naive de-shaming-everything ethos. This movement has an explicit goal of abolishing all normative boundaries and those who want to take advantage rather than "express themselves" are having a field day abusing others' good will and liberal values.
The article makes a very good point - that social norms are there for a reason and the grand liberation project has hit upon a natural bottleneck in collective human behaviour.
Oh my, we are so ‘on the same page.’ I’ve been tip toieing around efforts to alienate us from our own emotional lige in psychology for years. I am going back to square one. I was trained before DSM. I recently started a substack to walk folks through psychoanalysis. Freud wasn’t stupid. He’s been trashed for a reason. As you might guess I have to start with infancy, pure id (instinctual drives,) with a barely comprehensible mind system ready to learn, grow and serve us well. Check it out. https://homecookedanalysis.substack.com/
You know, I genuinely appreciate your honesty. Most GCers are too cowardly to admit that they think trans women are near-universally depraved sexual deviants who should either go back into the closet or be purged from public life (probably because, on some level, they realize (correctly) that it makes them sound like the villains in Saturday morning cartoon), but not you. You've got the integrity to stand up and say, these people gross me out and therefore they shouldn't be allowed in public, no matter how much of a weirdo fascist it makes you sound.
I recently visited the BioSphere in Montreal. The place was teaming with children of all ages on happy school outings. A young man ( not with any group) dressed in “puppy fetish gear” and his “handler” engaged playfully with the children. Yikes my spider senses were up but the groups chaperons did not seem to see the danger. The danger not being violent or malevolent in this case but it was in the fact that it normalized this fetish behaviour there by creating a child safe guarding or self guarding issue. This is grooming. Had we publicly shamed him the message to kids would be to be wary of these individuals. If you see smoke assume a fire so to speak.
The instincts and impulses for disgust/revulsion are automatic, they are happening at a level below conscious thought. Thus, they will happen regardless of whether we want them to happen or not. My overarching point is simply not to deny, dismiss, or dissociate from these impulses, but to look to them for the insights they offer.
Gavin de Becker would say that we should always be curious about our intuitions and investigate them. Sometimes when we investigate them we find that their messages are not useful to the situation. But the point is that we should never ignore them without investigating them first.
To start, you are petite bourgeoisie, divorced from the true intelligentsia by the fact that your field of study, the science of mindfulness, is useless nonsense, but still not part of the working class.
Secondly, your ideology, and the proposed actions in this article, are fascistic. Weaponizing disgust serves only to be used as a weapon against marginalized groups and to secure power for a privileged strata of upper-class/upper-middle-class people who are largely insulated from the repercussions this will have on society. Social disgust is not inherent, it is taught, and since we are all taught by the capitalist system what is and isn't acceptable, you are merely reproducing that oppressive hierarchy. Furthermore, in the real world these ideas are buoyed along by other reactionaries who see the damage that the social progress related to gender will do to the long-term survival of capital. The sex-based understanding of what a woman is after all intended to reduce women to a means of production, property that is used to produce more property (children). By enforcing that binary understanding by attempting to manifest both social and legal policing of people who dare to act outside of the norms that you personally hold (which are both not universal culturally speaking and generally uncommon even within the anglosphere), you lay the ideological foundation for all contemporary justifications for the oppression of women in modern society.
Together, your reactionary ideals, combined with the class interests you possess as a member of the petite bourgeoisie, and the fact that you demand that we as humans use base and irrational disgust that was taught to us by a capitalist system instead of material reality to determine how we interact with marginalized groups, present a fascist method of viewing the world and reveal yourself to be a fascist.
I don't study mindfulness, you need to keep your arguments to the present analysis and not jump to hyperbolic conclusions and assumptions. I am speaking about evolutionary honed instincts. These instincts occur whether you like it or not, they cannot be argued away, they are pre-rational. Capitalism didn't teach us disgust, evolution did. And this is the same disgust that can be applied to the capitalist imperialist consumerist model which dehumanizes humans.
Men who have paraphilias are not a "marginalized group."
If evolution caused us what you suggest, you would see the reaction be universal across cultures, which is isn't. It is not even universal in your own culture, most Americans support trans rights, especially the younger Americans who will stick around for more of your lifetime than the majority of the bigoted ones, who are much older than the median on average. This suggests that Capitalism created the disgust to reinforce itself (as the current means of production it creates almost all ideas) and either changed this to better reproduce itself as a result of changing social beliefs in the proletariat or failed to reproduce the disgust because of some contradiction, conclusively proving it was not evolutionary. Furthermore, our evolutionary reactions to things aren't foolproof or even a particularly good metric by which to organize a society, and you certainly don't base any other aspect of your life around that, so you're being dishonest or suffering from cognitive dissonance. More over, I like you didn't even attempt to refute the fact that you are a fascist, you are just trying to make it seem more logical that you are one by trying to make the disgust argument seem sound and logical. It is very revealing.
This is the intellectual quality of dolts on the internet who defend cross dressing male perverts who hate women. Then they wonder why they keep losing.
Bottom of the barrel of humanity. Literally worthless.
There is no such thing as "trans" right because there is no such thing as "trans." The vast majority of normal people do not support allowing mentally ill men into women's sports, bathrooms, or spaces. You simply have no clue what's going on.
Crying about fascism when normal people don't want cross-dressing degenerate males in women's spaces won't help. As if someone like you even knows what fascism is (crying "Nazi" is too played out, now you idiots try this). You aren't intelligent. Be quiet and stop embarrassing yourself.
"Trans" doesn't exist. Perverted males will leave women alone or they're going to pay the price. Now run along.
Rights exist in a legal context. Trans rights exist in a legal context and have been codified in multiple countries, including the USA. Your arugment is a total non start from this
The intelligentsia as a social class that exists under capitalism, it controls the creation of new ideas, it's their part of the mode of production. Liberalism, desperately attempting to keep capitalism going, has been attempting to loosen repressive measures on a variety of people to attempt to trick them into supporting the status quo despite the erosion of labour. Trans rights are a part of that, as while the only way to truly secure the rights of marginalized people is proletariat revolution, capital offers them acceptance within the system as a carrot to prevent them from seeking true liberation at the expense of capital and the present state of things.
My comment refers to the fact that the terf movement, is petite bourgeoisie, a class which does not control the production of ideas. The petite bourgeoisie sees the expansion of the rights of marginalized people as a threat to their place in society as they are capable of losing their wealth and desperately need to prevent that from happening. They either blame marginalized groups that they think can't fight back, like trans people, for this happening, or simply want to prevent those groups from being able to gain wealth and compete with them, since they know that there's a good chance that they'll lose out if they aren't artificially held up.
So the petite bourgeoisie attempts to recreate the true intelligentsia by creating minor blogs and supporting petty intellectuals that give them some measure of credibility within their own circles (they aren't respected anywhere else) and use that to push ideologies that wouldn't be accepted within the mainstream. A good example of this is The Stormer, the NSDAP's newspaper, and the fact that they propped up talking heads like Goebbels and other failed intellectuals that you probably wouldn't know the names of because you haven't read Shirer. That's what this article is. It's an attempt by a fascistic petite bourgeoisie ideology to give itself intellectual capital by waffling about how the fact that a bunch of out-of-touch white women hate a group is actually proof that they deserve to be forced out of society, something that a shrinking group of people who are on average too old to use a rifle effectively could definitely do when faced with the overwhelming support for the rights of minorities within the western proletariat.
these male pretenders can't even see women because they are so blinded by their own bigotry. all they see when they look at a woman is pornographic fragments. they are deaf to us. blind to us. and we will always be a complete mystery to them. they are as far away from women as is possible. they haven't got a clue.
The site says this is a reply to a post I made, but this isn't related to anything I said and has no bearing on the content of my arguments. I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you meant to respond to the article in general because otherwise, this is just an unhinged screed. Not that it wouldn't be unhinged normally, but the article was also a meaningless and fascistic screed, so it'd at least fit in with the general tone.
Also, the Marxist view of women is more accurate to material reality than your own. Your ideology fetishizes women as mere producers of commodities and therefore reduces women and children to property, the Marxist understanding of material reality sees women as humans and acknowledges that the differences between men and women in any given society are created by the mode of production and not invariant, opening the path to the liberation of working-class women by virtue of recognizing them as humans who are part of the proletariat. Obviously speaking trans people are part of this understanding, they prove this thesis and logically speaking neuter any attempted justification for the oppression of women outside of those based entirely on the same vulgar bigotry you are peddling, which is more easily defeated than bigotry that pretends to be logical.
Plus, in general, trans rights are a good litmus test for separating people who operate on a materialist view of reality and can therefore be taken seriously, as a materialist view would reveal that trans rights are good and simply a result of the normal human condition for a group of people that are oppressed by reactionary systems being acknowledged for what it is, normal. All other people can be written off as bigoted idealists, who chafe against the idea of a hierarchy being challenged because of ideology and their own false consciousness. Ie people such as yourself.
There is nothing sadder than when an unintelligent person tries to sound intelligent by using words he doesn't even understand.
There are no "trans" people. They don't exist. Delusional males, porn addicted males, stupid males, misogynist males are all still male--nobody is "trans." There is no category for delusional people who refuse to accept the reality of their sexed body. They're simply mentally ill.
And if "materialism" simply means reality to you, that means you're delusional. Get off the computer and join a gym. Go away.
calling groups you don't like perverts is inherently an excuse to try and justify your mistreatment of them lmao. It's the same shit the NSDAP did with jews and Reagan did with gay people to justify their state-sanctioned violence.
It is absolutely terrifying how entire societies can be brainwashed into a self-harming cult, mainly on the basis of "being kind" to delusional men with sexual fetishes. https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/how-to-establish-a-new-reality-aka
For these men, women are only an audience for their self-perceived awesomeness and even babies are but props for their performance art lives.
"Disgust is an emotional response of rejection or revulsion to something potentially contagious or something considered offensive, distasteful or unpleasant. I think this is a huge reason why most people do not think that men should be breastfeeding." https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/girls-can-do-anything-but-sorry-boys
This is great! Thanks for sharing!
Women have every right to be repulsed by open male perverts who get off on broadcasting their degeneracy. We're right (evolutionarily and morally) to communicate our disgust, and these men are lucky that we don't resort to other means (though we probably should).
The fact that males are truly baffled when we call out their stupid, disgusting behavior, judge them, and then draw boundaries they're told not to cross, really speaks volumes to the lack of male shame. This is why there is a major problem in the first place. I have every right to communicate my disgust at a degenerate like Phil Illy at an event for Genspect (Troonspect). He should be ashamed of himself, and Troonspect as an organization cannot solve any problems if it continues to operate as it has. This organization purports to help young people. It cannot allow open perverts to advertise at its organizations and continue to claim that.
Keep up the great work, Ms. Sousa!
Thank you for posting this piece, it's very interesting, uncompromising and logical based on the powerful unconscious and conscious urge and mechanisms we have to protect ourselves. For example, we all make judgements, multiple judgements to tell us whether we are safe or can trust the other person(s). I doubt that can be suppressed, but we can intentionally disregard it, as you point out, this happens all the time when men put pressure on women, on the basis of non-judgememtalism of a moral kind, to enable and also validate predatory, exhibitionist behaviour. No, women should not be doing this. If men don't want to confine their sexual behaviours to an appropriate environment, then they should be charged accordingly, it is a form of sexual.abuse.
Women's safety and feeling of being safe should not be sacrificed so some man can get off. I recall reading an interview with Grayson Perry where he explained that he wore expansive dresses whilst portraying that grotesque, painted 'girl' was to conceal his erection. That might seem mild compared to what some men do, but it's definitely cringeworthy. Nevertheless, he feels able to share it because he and men like him think it's fine to disclose information like that, nothing is going to happen to them as a consequence. He can do what he wants, just like men who rub their knobs on lavatory door handles that women will be touching, then put the information on social media. These appalling men plumb the depths of inadequacy.
All in the safety of pretending they believe they're women, where people who could prevent them from being in women's spaces, are falling over themselves to ensure they can enter our spaces on their conditions. The space has been given over to them, men in this position aren't going to hesitate to please themselves whatever that does to women and children.
Point this out or express the slightest reservation and you're a bigot, a hater, a transphobe. You definitely don't want trans people to have human rights and you might even wish genocide on them.
Men and women alike (though mostly men) have often expressed their disgust towards my lack of engagement in feminine beauty rituals such as leg shaving and makeup. Is this an evolutionarily adaptive disgust impulse, and do you think it is one they ought to listen to and express?
I think men who want women to shave their body hair have been programmed by pedophilic porn. All adults have body hair. I am disgusted by men who want women to look like little girls.
So their disgust response is distinct from the kind of disgust response that is socially adaptive? Are their other disgust responses you think are not socially adaptive?
Men and their responses aren't important. We literally have to file lawsuits to keep them out of girls' bathrooms. Just leave women alone. Go be a degenerate alone.
I used the relatively benign example of leg shaving in order to avoid immediately launching into something that could look a lot like culture war, but I might as well put my cards on the table now - I am a lifelong gender nonconforming lesbian, and my main experiences with disgust - from women as well - have been aimed in this direction (and curiously almost never at, say, the men who have harassed me and my friends and girlfriends - those men have benefited from social groups backing their actions and throwing their disgust reflex my way instead).
This leads me to think disgust is at best a politically neutral reflex, and to be very worried about concepts like "social hygiene" considering who has traditionally been considered "dirty" (certainly not powerful men). But I am a feminist in full agreement with the fight against male violence, and therefore I am legitimately curious about the nuances if a feminist politics of disgust. How do we systematize it? Which heuristics do we use? (I wish the heuristic of "listen to women's disgust, not to men's" was enough - but sadly I, again, have met many women with deep internalized misogyny that colored their disgust responses first and foremost.)
Great point!! Can’t we acknowledge that our disgust responses tell us something truthful though? People DO have a visceral reaction of disgust to women who keep their body hair. Because the body hair is telling them that the woman refuses to conform to certain social mores. If you unpack what the mores are, you see they are female social oppression. So then you have to ask yourself: is it right to follow this disgust response? And if you stand against female oppression, you say: no. I must resist it.
Yes. In this case, men who are disgusted by women with normal adult body hair perceive the hair as dirty/diseased aka a threat bc body hair on women IS an actual threat to men, or at least, to the male supremacy. Body hair on women is a threat to the belief of women as inherently childlike/inferior/sexual decorative objects and therefore deserving of use as objects and social domination by men. So for men, who have oppressed women for at least 15,000+ years, a woman who is visually identifiable as refusing to conform to social submission to men in any way, in this case, through hair routines, is a threat to that man’s ability to hoard and dominate resources be they financial, sexual, social, religious, artistic, emotional, or other resources.
I’ve commented other forums on the sad clown devil in a blue dress (so to speak) that poisoned the well a bit at the Genuflect event - why is it these men dress like hookers? Good article here, and while I’ve never been disgusted by these sex games - and make no mistake that’s all they are - it’s still surprising that the general reaction was of not wanting to offend the offender. I’ve been a very active gay man for over 45 years, and “seen it all twice”, and a man on the prowl for a sex games is like a flashing neon sign to me. I know a genderfuck when I see one. The offense is the point BTW.
The casual shabbinesss of the hooker clothing, the mietennes in the wrong color (look it up), bad makeup, the panoply of cliches playing a specific role in a specific game, intentionally inducing the jarring repulsiveness of contaminated professional circumstances. There’s a reason it’s called getting your freak on.
Gay men feel it too, by the way. A gay male venue invaded briefly by women on a bachelorette night out, clearly enjoying the discomfort of men shy of affection in front of the opposite sex, too polite to ask the women to tone it down. Wrong place at the wrong time, routine in the Castro in SF.
Wrong place at the wrong time.
Is there a right place, right time? Folsom Leather Fetish weekend. Burning Man. Fantasy Fest Key West: you could go every week to a fetish event without difficulty. But! The crowds are not put off, not offended. The desired reaction isn’t achieved, the game fails. You can’t offend offenders.
I hope Genuflect understands that it’s normal to ask people in full kink mode to leave or change attire. Friday Casual is fine, a man in women’s clothing will be strangely unremarkable in a twinset and khakis. Dressing for Saturday Night at Sunset and La Brea turning tricks... wrong place wrong time.
Thank you for this thoughtful response. I appreciate you sharing your experience and insights. Yes, these men are playing sex games that depend on "wrong place/wrong time." And as you also observe, offense is the point.
There is a post on X from Aja the Empress @Aja02537920 about this headed “AGP or GNC”, which I think is helpful in relation to this blogpost by Amy. It is https://x.com/Aja02537920/status/1727745772970471686?s=20
Aja said: “The men in the top line make me feel uncomfortable. The men in the bottom line do not.”
I see what she means. The guys on the bottom row are fashion models who are being men. They are expanding manhood, not trying to opt out, and they look quite sexy, some of them, even to me, who identifies as a cishet bloke! But they are not role-playing being women, which is what the men on the top row are doing. These are autogynephiles (AGPs) and it’s a sexual fetish.
It's apparent to me that the so-called Trans Umbrella shelters lots of different types of people who don’t necessarily have a lot in common, the most glaring distinction being older male AGPs on the one hand and teenage girls with ROGD on the other.
Thanks for this! Great examples. I made a tweet response to this. https://x.com/KnownHeretic/status/1729666903755645080?s=20
Hi Amy
What if we juxtapose our repulsion with public fetish against many people's repulsion at observing, say, someone with severe facial deformities. How does that repulsion differ? Does it?
Should it ? I don't disagree with you but this question did come to mind.
The instincts and impulses for disgust/revulsion are automatic, they are happening at a level below conscious thought. Thus, they will happen regardless of whether we want them to happen or not. My overarching point is simply not to deny, dismiss, or dissociate from these impulses, but to look to them for the insights they offer.
In the example you are describing, if I see someone with "severe facial deformities," I may experience an involuntary revulsion impulse. The impulse itself is value-neutral, it is how I respond to the impulse that matters. Cognitively I would understand that I am having an evolutionary reaction to a perceived diseased state, and I might also understand by further looking that this person is a burn victim, not a person with say, leprosy. The impulse is still a safeguarding impulse, but I can almost instantaneously understand that the person causes me no threat.
Regardless of me wishing to take a moral high ground and not respond with revulsion to "severe facial deformities," the impulses is beyond my conscious control, it is happening at the level of instinct, an embodied reaction to a perceived threat.
Gavin de Becker would say that we should always be curious about our intuitions and investigate them. Sometimes when we investigate them we find that their messages are not useful to the situation. But the point is that we should never ignore them without investigating them first.
Thanks Amy. I appreciate you taking the time to address my question.
Interesting question. I look at it like this:
When I was seeking a dog-sitter for my elderly dog I ended up discounting the most conveniently located one because during the meet-and-greet he told me his wife volunteered with disabled children but that he found it hard to even look at them.
This was a red flag for me. He was clearly the sort of person who reduces others to their physical differences and can't or won't empathise beyond that to treat them as a whole human being.
I get the same red flag when I see a man who reduces womanhood to a costume he can wear.
They're an idiot, and the bigotry you are currently spreading will be used against people with deformities and other marginalized groups as a form of social control that will be used against all women, as no woman perfectly conforms to the rigid gender norms that this line of logic forces them into. It will be the death knell of your rights in the slim chance that it isn't discarded as it's proponents die of old age
As I show in the essay, the disgust/revulsion instinct is an evolutionary-ingrained instinct for safeguarding. It is not going to go away. As I also explore, there is a difference between gender nonconforming and fetish wear.
Jr. High students use their cringe response/disgust impulse all the time to influence their own social sphere. These impulses are part of living in social groups.
Here is a great example of the difference between gender nonconforminig and fetish, see if you can spot the differenct: https://x.com/KnownHeretic/status/1729666903755645080?s=20
When I watched the new Doctor Who special, which featured an adult male playing dressup as a female teen, I felt this same revulsion. And writing this fetish, this paraphilia, into the main plotline of the story only revolted me more.
The problem is that I can’t tell by looking at someone what their motivation for dressing and looking a certain way is. I wouldn’t want to go back to a world where women are required to wear constricting and limiting dresses. We’ve come a long way in the past 100 years or so. But there hasn’t been a similar expansion of what’s considered socially acceptable for men to wear. Yes, some men are acting out their sexual fantasies in public by dressing as women. But other men may be gay, or gender nonconforming in other ways, or be the former little boy who was bullied for liking pink sparkly things, or who just never felt they fit into the constricting gender roles that were expected of them. And how can I tell the difference?
I agree with you that paraphilias are creepy. I will keep my distance from anyone I get that vibe from. But I don’t think we can actually police gender nonconforming dress or behaviors, because we can’t read people’s minds. And it doesn’t make sense to impose a strict dress code only based on societal convention on males, who wouldn’t like it any more than females would.
So I arrive back at believing people have the right to dress and present themselves however they want, as long as they are honest about what they are. However, I also have the right to avoid people who give me the creeps.
Showing public revulsion is not "policing," it is a democratic social way of letting people know their behavior is unwanted. It is not state-enforced. There is no "strict dress code." In most situations, we already use our disgust impulse to let people we share public spaces with know that their way of dress is unwanted, unnerving, threatening, or gross. Jr. high students do this very well amongst themselves and so do adults. People have the "right" to dress as they want, but if you show up in dirty unkept clothes, you will likely face public revulsion. This is not about attempting to read people's minds, it is about staying grounded in our instinctual responses rather than denying or dismissing the important information these intuitive reactions share with us. Thank you for your thoughtful reading.
I think we’re in agreement then. I am going to avoid anyone I get creepy vibes from, and that’s going to include anyone who I feel is objectifying or mocking women through their appearance. I just think that a relaxing of social norms for men, similar to what has happened for women over the past decades, has to be a part of fighting the transgender ideology. Men who are sensitive and like pink aren’t women, they’re just men who are sensitive and like pink, and should be able to exist as they are without either pretending to be “manly men” or being convinced they are actually women and need surgery and to reject their male selves.
As long as you’re not talking about actual policing, just individuals avoiding those who they get threatening vibes from, we’re at least in the same book if not quite on the same page. Thanks for the thoughtful article and comment!
Policing doesn't have to be formal, by the state. Most such policing is done by social conventions and "soft authority" like conformity. It is this that used to stop all but the most flagrant men from indulging their AGP-lia and has been unleashed on society by the naive de-shaming-everything ethos. This movement has an explicit goal of abolishing all normative boundaries and those who want to take advantage rather than "express themselves" are having a field day abusing others' good will and liberal values.
The article makes a very good point - that social norms are there for a reason and the grand liberation project has hit upon a natural bottleneck in collective human behaviour.
Oh my, we are so ‘on the same page.’ I’ve been tip toieing around efforts to alienate us from our own emotional lige in psychology for years. I am going back to square one. I was trained before DSM. I recently started a substack to walk folks through psychoanalysis. Freud wasn’t stupid. He’s been trashed for a reason. As you might guess I have to start with infancy, pure id (instinctual drives,) with a barely comprehensible mind system ready to learn, grow and serve us well. Check it out. https://homecookedanalysis.substack.com/
Gag - a piece of cloth put in or over a person's mouth to prevent them from speaking.
Gag - a joke or a funny story, especially one told by a professional comedian.
Gag - to gag - to prevent a person or organization from talking or writing about a particular subject
Gag - sudden uncomfortable feeling of tightness in the throat and stomach that makes you feel like you are going to vomit
gag/gagging - is also a verb used to mean to be very eager to do something - ie gagging for a pint of beer or sex -
gag reflex - the gag reflex is an attempt to prevent a person from choking or swallowing something potentially dangerous
You know, I genuinely appreciate your honesty. Most GCers are too cowardly to admit that they think trans women are near-universally depraved sexual deviants who should either go back into the closet or be purged from public life (probably because, on some level, they realize (correctly) that it makes them sound like the villains in Saturday morning cartoon), but not you. You've got the integrity to stand up and say, these people gross me out and therefore they shouldn't be allowed in public, no matter how much of a weirdo fascist it makes you sound.
I recently visited the BioSphere in Montreal. The place was teaming with children of all ages on happy school outings. A young man ( not with any group) dressed in “puppy fetish gear” and his “handler” engaged playfully with the children. Yikes my spider senses were up but the groups chaperons did not seem to see the danger. The danger not being violent or malevolent in this case but it was in the fact that it normalized this fetish behaviour there by creating a child safe guarding or self guarding issue. This is grooming. Had we publicly shamed him the message to kids would be to be wary of these individuals. If you see smoke assume a fire so to speak.
This is just petite bourgeoisie fascism
The instincts and impulses for disgust/revulsion are automatic, they are happening at a level below conscious thought. Thus, they will happen regardless of whether we want them to happen or not. My overarching point is simply not to deny, dismiss, or dissociate from these impulses, but to look to them for the insights they offer.
Gavin de Becker would say that we should always be curious about our intuitions and investigate them. Sometimes when we investigate them we find that their messages are not useful to the situation. But the point is that we should never ignore them without investigating them first.
In what sense?
To start, you are petite bourgeoisie, divorced from the true intelligentsia by the fact that your field of study, the science of mindfulness, is useless nonsense, but still not part of the working class.
Secondly, your ideology, and the proposed actions in this article, are fascistic. Weaponizing disgust serves only to be used as a weapon against marginalized groups and to secure power for a privileged strata of upper-class/upper-middle-class people who are largely insulated from the repercussions this will have on society. Social disgust is not inherent, it is taught, and since we are all taught by the capitalist system what is and isn't acceptable, you are merely reproducing that oppressive hierarchy. Furthermore, in the real world these ideas are buoyed along by other reactionaries who see the damage that the social progress related to gender will do to the long-term survival of capital. The sex-based understanding of what a woman is after all intended to reduce women to a means of production, property that is used to produce more property (children). By enforcing that binary understanding by attempting to manifest both social and legal policing of people who dare to act outside of the norms that you personally hold (which are both not universal culturally speaking and generally uncommon even within the anglosphere), you lay the ideological foundation for all contemporary justifications for the oppression of women in modern society.
Together, your reactionary ideals, combined with the class interests you possess as a member of the petite bourgeoisie, and the fact that you demand that we as humans use base and irrational disgust that was taught to us by a capitalist system instead of material reality to determine how we interact with marginalized groups, present a fascist method of viewing the world and reveal yourself to be a fascist.
I don't study mindfulness, you need to keep your arguments to the present analysis and not jump to hyperbolic conclusions and assumptions. I am speaking about evolutionary honed instincts. These instincts occur whether you like it or not, they cannot be argued away, they are pre-rational. Capitalism didn't teach us disgust, evolution did. And this is the same disgust that can be applied to the capitalist imperialist consumerist model which dehumanizes humans.
Men who have paraphilias are not a "marginalized group."
If evolution caused us what you suggest, you would see the reaction be universal across cultures, which is isn't. It is not even universal in your own culture, most Americans support trans rights, especially the younger Americans who will stick around for more of your lifetime than the majority of the bigoted ones, who are much older than the median on average. This suggests that Capitalism created the disgust to reinforce itself (as the current means of production it creates almost all ideas) and either changed this to better reproduce itself as a result of changing social beliefs in the proletariat or failed to reproduce the disgust because of some contradiction, conclusively proving it was not evolutionary. Furthermore, our evolutionary reactions to things aren't foolproof or even a particularly good metric by which to organize a society, and you certainly don't base any other aspect of your life around that, so you're being dishonest or suffering from cognitive dissonance. More over, I like you didn't even attempt to refute the fact that you are a fascist, you are just trying to make it seem more logical that you are one by trying to make the disgust argument seem sound and logical. It is very revealing.
Btw "CAPITALISM CREATED THE DISGUST"
This is the intellectual quality of dolts on the internet who defend cross dressing male perverts who hate women. Then they wonder why they keep losing.
Bottom of the barrel of humanity. Literally worthless.
Also I live in Canada, a place were trans rights demonstrably are not losing lol
There is no such thing as "trans" right because there is no such thing as "trans." The vast majority of normal people do not support allowing mentally ill men into women's sports, bathrooms, or spaces. You simply have no clue what's going on.
Crying about fascism when normal people don't want cross-dressing degenerate males in women's spaces won't help. As if someone like you even knows what fascism is (crying "Nazi" is too played out, now you idiots try this). You aren't intelligent. Be quiet and stop embarrassing yourself.
"Trans" doesn't exist. Perverted males will leave women alone or they're going to pay the price. Now run along.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/americans-oppose-inclusion-trans-athletes-sports-poll-finds-rcna88940
Rights exist in a legal context. Trans rights exist in a legal context and have been codified in multiple countries, including the USA. Your arugment is a total non start from this
The 'true intelligentsia' - is that a gag? The term induced an involuntary gag. Of the scornful kind.
The intelligentsia as a social class that exists under capitalism, it controls the creation of new ideas, it's their part of the mode of production. Liberalism, desperately attempting to keep capitalism going, has been attempting to loosen repressive measures on a variety of people to attempt to trick them into supporting the status quo despite the erosion of labour. Trans rights are a part of that, as while the only way to truly secure the rights of marginalized people is proletariat revolution, capital offers them acceptance within the system as a carrot to prevent them from seeking true liberation at the expense of capital and the present state of things.
My comment refers to the fact that the terf movement, is petite bourgeoisie, a class which does not control the production of ideas. The petite bourgeoisie sees the expansion of the rights of marginalized people as a threat to their place in society as they are capable of losing their wealth and desperately need to prevent that from happening. They either blame marginalized groups that they think can't fight back, like trans people, for this happening, or simply want to prevent those groups from being able to gain wealth and compete with them, since they know that there's a good chance that they'll lose out if they aren't artificially held up.
So the petite bourgeoisie attempts to recreate the true intelligentsia by creating minor blogs and supporting petty intellectuals that give them some measure of credibility within their own circles (they aren't respected anywhere else) and use that to push ideologies that wouldn't be accepted within the mainstream. A good example of this is The Stormer, the NSDAP's newspaper, and the fact that they propped up talking heads like Goebbels and other failed intellectuals that you probably wouldn't know the names of because you haven't read Shirer. That's what this article is. It's an attempt by a fascistic petite bourgeoisie ideology to give itself intellectual capital by waffling about how the fact that a bunch of out-of-touch white women hate a group is actually proof that they deserve to be forced out of society, something that a shrinking group of people who are on average too old to use a rifle effectively could definitely do when faced with the overwhelming support for the rights of minorities within the western proletariat.
these male pretenders can't even see women because they are so blinded by their own bigotry. all they see when they look at a woman is pornographic fragments. they are deaf to us. blind to us. and we will always be a complete mystery to them. they are as far away from women as is possible. they haven't got a clue.
The site says this is a reply to a post I made, but this isn't related to anything I said and has no bearing on the content of my arguments. I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you meant to respond to the article in general because otherwise, this is just an unhinged screed. Not that it wouldn't be unhinged normally, but the article was also a meaningless and fascistic screed, so it'd at least fit in with the general tone.
Also, the Marxist view of women is more accurate to material reality than your own. Your ideology fetishizes women as mere producers of commodities and therefore reduces women and children to property, the Marxist understanding of material reality sees women as humans and acknowledges that the differences between men and women in any given society are created by the mode of production and not invariant, opening the path to the liberation of working-class women by virtue of recognizing them as humans who are part of the proletariat. Obviously speaking trans people are part of this understanding, they prove this thesis and logically speaking neuter any attempted justification for the oppression of women outside of those based entirely on the same vulgar bigotry you are peddling, which is more easily defeated than bigotry that pretends to be logical.
Plus, in general, trans rights are a good litmus test for separating people who operate on a materialist view of reality and can therefore be taken seriously, as a materialist view would reveal that trans rights are good and simply a result of the normal human condition for a group of people that are oppressed by reactionary systems being acknowledged for what it is, normal. All other people can be written off as bigoted idealists, who chafe against the idea of a hierarchy being challenged because of ideology and their own false consciousness. Ie people such as yourself.
There is nothing sadder than when an unintelligent person tries to sound intelligent by using words he doesn't even understand.
There are no "trans" people. They don't exist. Delusional males, porn addicted males, stupid males, misogynist males are all still male--nobody is "trans." There is no category for delusional people who refuse to accept the reality of their sexed body. They're simply mentally ill.
And if "materialism" simply means reality to you, that means you're delusional. Get off the computer and join a gym. Go away.
You keep saying that trans people don't exist. I will repeat the words of an esteemed scholar to refute your point.
"Men are props on the stage of life, and no matter how tender, how exquisite... A lie will remain a lie."
It does not matter how much you want that lie to be true. It will remain a lie. And the arc of the universe bends toward justice.
We need no excuse to police perverts. No amount of name calling will prevent us. Next!
calling groups you don't like perverts is inherently an excuse to try and justify your mistreatment of them lmao. It's the same shit the NSDAP did with jews and Reagan did with gay people to justify their state-sanctioned violence.