I’ve gotten into the bad habit of deleting Instagram Stories after I post them. Three from recent memory: A flash of me lifting my shirt up to reveal a ridiculous banana bikini. A video of me dancing alone in my apartment to a pop song, muted and scored with classical music to make me look like someone who died 50 years ago. A series of memes wherein I overlaid photos of animals with text that indicated I hated the internet. All equally stupid. None remotely useful. Delete delete delete!
had to jump on re: “marriage”. My husband and I met when we were 17... we are now 35 and been together longer than we’ve been with out the other. Marriage was something we were always meh to. What was the point?.. we are married in our eyes, it’s basically a legal document blah blah etc. But, for us it came down to the fact that legal document determines a lot (at least in Canada). The right to make decisions for the other, the right to see the other in a hospital (if something should happen), the right to be each other’s “other” to the rest of the world. Without that document, we would not have the “right” to be as we are... we still think it’s stupid, but so is much of the realities of our current world. And then, the family element. It still means a lot to family, and to be honest it does change things. It’s like the smallest, most subtle, inexplainable difference that is equally huge and “everything”... I think something about “everyone” acknowledging and recognizing you are “one”, brings another level to how “one” you are.. I dunno. Perhaps I should have coffee and wake up before sending this lol, but I feel as someone who never got or cared about getting married, I do think since getting married it has its own beautiful weight and purpose, and you don’t lose anything, but gain so much more... and if nothing else, the legal stuff is important.
I have deleted my online presence multiple times! My Xanga is at the bottom of the ocean, MySpace shot out in space (though I’d advocate for its return, because there’s nothing better to tell people who you are than a profile song, or to passive aggressively let a boy/girl know you know they’re online obsessed with you). My creative writing journal went to a dumpster loooongggg ago. I also consequently have zero photo albums or photos laying around. Idk. I shed my skin, or self, a lot and I’d prefer to have zero trace left of the previous version of me.
I think one main reason I don’t keep much on my Instagram photo grid wise is that it’s just impossible for me to post and not feel like I’m trying to be an influencer. I think influencer culture is toxic. If I post a still photo, I’m trying too hard. Catch me in my stories. That’s the real me and it goes away. It’s more off the cuff, less planned. FB was invented when I was in college and I couldn’t even get Instagram on my Android in my 20s, so I think being an older millennial has a lot to do with it. Life was way easier before social media. I despise it, yet my brain is addicted to the over stimulation, damn it.
I also find that something changed drastically with the advent of social media - like, when I joined the internet it was largely message boards, they could be harsh as fuck, there were genuine creeps who went unchecked for far too long, there was plenty about them that was bad. But at least in some ways you had to exercise personal restraint, in terms of vanity and so on. And when you met people IRL, all the fights and bullshit just dissolved into thin air.
Whereas transitioning to blogspot and wordpress and then social media: in terms of feedback, it's different, because you post and people comment on it, so you're the centre of it. You can just vomit all kinds of stuff out there. In fact you have a bio to summarise yourself in like 10 words, which, nobody can be summarised in 10 words, plus nobody should be reduced to their "self".
I also found 99% of the feedback was "you're the queen of being right about everything" or else "you are Satan and you hate women, puppy dogs, baby seals and nice things and want them all to die". And - somewhat chillingly I thought - IRL meetings definitely didn't dissolve all the petty fights. In fact IRL encounters felt more like acting out the internet.
I see videos of political events now, from Europe or from North America, and often it sounds like they're saying tumblr stuff at each other. I mean I'm generally on their side but, it's like social media has completely homogenized and narrowed down the vocabulary for talking about politics.
I personally have 2 instagram accounts. One for everyone I know to follow and the second is just an instagram account for myself (sort of like a diary), so I only post carefully cultivated posts on my main instagram and I post daily on my personal account. This allows me to have the freedom to delete as many posts as I want on my main account without worrying about destroying my internet existence because I always have the second, personal account to turn to where all my memories are stored and my entire existence is recorded. I don't delete anything on the second account because there's nobody except me to see it and anything embarrassing doesn't matter.
You know, that's cool and all, and I'm not especially careful about spreading my data around either. But it strikes me we're all talking about using, in many cases Instagram, which belongs to Facebook, as the place to store intimate personal memories.
I have to wonder about the disconnect between the intimate stuff we feed to our various accounts, public social media or not, the fact that it all gets turned to just "data" i.e. a raw material, which is used to advertise stuff to us. Like part of me doesn't mind and switches that idea off. But it's a hell of a thing to be able to switch off.
I also wonder, if I used my instagram account, it would be on the most private setting possible, like posting things in a Facebook heck hole somehow feels more "real" than journaling or scrap-booking, even if no one sees it. But also less serious or committed somehow? I mean it's a pretty different exercise to scrap books or whatever, besides. It's curating one's personal brand and aesthetic, rather than curating memories.
I dunno, I've been around since before people used the internet day to day, it's been weird and interesting to watch that evolution in behaviours based on our intimacy being harvested and all fucked up for corporate profit. It's weird cause I talk to older people, even left activists sometimes and they're like "wtf are you talking about, the phone company's evil too and we still use them, it's just a means of communication". But it's a totally different thing.
"I’ve never really wanted my internet presence to “represent” me like a one-sheeter on who I am. I find that stressful." Yes! This thought has been on repeat in my mind recently surrounding social media but also my career and life in general. There is so much pressure to have a niche or narrow definition of self and career services to be “respected” and find “growth” on the internet. I struggle with this constantly as I continue to recognize my inner need for a multifaceted, balanced life that doesn’t include a strict definition of who I am or need to be. Anyways, grateful this newsletter popped up in my inbox this morning. Thank you!
"Real canon is more inspiring, and I appreciate people brave enough to leave their early work up." I think a big part of the post & delete thing now is about the fear of being 'cancelled' because something was taken out of context- or worse losing your livelihood over it (justified or not). It should be normalized to be able to change your opinion without fear of retribution for something you posted on livejournal in 2008. People delete for many reasons that are not about them having an inconsistent identity online- like if you were interviewing at a prospective workplace and you did a scrub or if you were worried about old hack tweets resurfacing and being career-ending.
Weird little coincidence– I learned the definition of 'palimpsest' a few months ago and just this week remembered it while sitting in my front yard. I whispered it a few times because it's fun to say so I smiled seeing it in your 15 Things.
I think of myself as a hoarder of things that have meaning to me, i.e. photos, tickets, moments. I have had my instagram account since 2011 and recently I went back and deleted old posts that I got embarrassed about. That was weird for me because I don't think curating an instagram in necessary. Seems like it's wasted time and energy. I still don't really care about what I post, as long it means something to me.
for those who are connecting to ursula legiun's words, i highly recommend the hour-long doc on her life "Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin" (2018). she was insanely ahead of her time!
I have also been thinking about marriage a lot and I enjoyed the Mandy Len Catron article (looking forward to reading the other article you shared as well!). She makes some really great points in here about the loss of the greater community of family, extended family, friends, etc. One thing I wish she’d have explored more and that I think would add some depth to this discussion is that marriage is very much a settler-imposed institution—I never thought of it in those terms until I started having more in-depth conversations with a friend of mine who is an enrolled member of the Shawnee tribe. She introduced me to the work of Dr. Kim Tallbear who advocates for polyamory as a means of decolonizing your community, though you don’t need to be polyamorous to gain a lot from her work. Would totally recommend giving the podcast All My Relations a listen, especially the episode “Decolonizing Sex.”
Thanks for your newsletter Haley, it’s such a gift!
Just popping in to say I recently read two books by Ursula K. Le Guin (I hadn't read anything by her before) and I LOVED them! so! much!
I've never been into sci-fi so I was reluctant at first, but we read The Dispossessed in my book club and wow it literally changed my life and it's going to stay with me for a long time! The other one is The Left Hand of Darkness and it's also amazing although slightly less revolutionary.
Heartily recommend them both to everyone, the political and social messages she conveys in her fiction are just so well articulated and interesting!
... and finally on "class reductionism", I'm familiar with the term, though not sure how it's possible to "reduce" anything to class. But I find in some left groups, I've noticed it with the DSA, and over here with certain of the trotskyite groups and the Young Communists, there's a kind of polarisation, and I think the DSA statement Haider starts his article with really reflects that. I think it stems from seeing class, race, gender, etc. as identities from which oppressions and inequalities stem and they criss-cross in patterns of unimaginable geometric complexity. Which means concretely, for some of these groups, that they get divided until "OK dear we'll handle your unimportant identity politics shit after the revolution" or else "shut the fuck up you class-reductionist bastard that's just white male bro stuff, what do you mean you're Nina Turner, you don't have to be white or a bro to be a white bro, you've fallen prey to your colonialist masters", etc. (and yeah I was in a trot group at one point, the composition of the group was, like, half a dozen white dude sociology students, a couple of non-white dudes who show up really according to how much they can handle being "token POC" for a couple of hours, a couple of retired public sector workers, one half-man half-tree entity in a hat (I think that's the rule for trot and anarchist groups, you can't not have one), and like, two women, one of whom actually says anything. And the women are under scrutiny for class reductionism, for no other reason than, the guys are trying really hard to be as feminist as possible, and if some chick says she's in it for the Marxism, it completely cramps their style.
Whereas, first off, class isn't a simple case of "oppression based on economics" - like, some anti-idpol people I've seen connected with the DSA, or with trot groups, are actually identitarian about class. So it means when confronted with police brutality, they can't handle the role race plays in that in terms of class. Which, if they were slightly less up their own ass (and committed first and foremost to what kind of leftist they are), class would be the thing that enables them to see it in terms of race.
I think, as in many things, radical feminism provides us with precisely the way *not* to handle class politics: it views Marxism and feminism as competing views of the world, because it talks about "sex-class" oppression. So, either you think class is the main paradigm according to which oppression exists, or you think it's sex. In fact radical feminist theory basically takes a very basic version of Marxism and slaps it onto the condition of women - so you get the means of reproduction instead of the means of production, and women are the class that's oppressed, and so on. Making Marxism and feminism mutually exclusive worldviews, to them (Catharine MacKinnon has the best articulation of the radical feminist position on this I've read - obviously I totally disagree with her but it's worth reading).
But also, if you don't see gender in terms of class, it's barely worth considering politically. In fact you end up with a harshly class-segregated feminist movement, which also entails a harshly race-segragated feminist movement But there's a difference between seeing it *in terms of* class and seeing it *as a * class. And no amount of hand-wringing collecting of oppressed people's lived experiences will help. If anything it makes it worse, because it reduces virtually all participants to just, forms of pain for extremely accomplished ladies of quality to learn from.
Something struck me during the MR reckoning actually: the first thread was quite a lot about race, rightfully so. But there were a couple of women who were very active at the beginning, then as soon as it became more about just shitty working conditions strongly but not only based on racial factors - like as soon as class became a part of it - those people frustratedly posted a couple of "excuse you" answers when people neglected to call Leandra white - which, it's going to be hard for people to call her that when, while her fortune and status probably protect her from it to a large degree, she's still the same race as people who have a hell of a time in airports - and then vanished from the thread.
On marriage - I don't know about the US but in Europe, there were a few alternatives to marriage, legally, that were starting to happen around the turn of the millennium. Forms of civil partnership, mostly, but also legal status given to couples who've just been together for a certain length of time. It's important to note that civil partnership was quite different in various countries - in the UK it had basically the same effects as marriage, except for gay people, in fact Peter Tatchell and some straight couples went to the court of human rights to try and win the rights to civil partnership for straight couples. In the Netherlands, I don't know about the legal effects, but both forms were open to both straight and gay couples early on. In France, there's the PACS which actually doesn't have the legal effects of marriage, or just some of them, and was the only option for gay people until a few years ago. And in I think Belgium and Spain, at least, couples who live together have a legal status. And then some countries like Poland or Hungary are all "ixnay on the omosexualityhay".
While it's obviously righteous, the fight for gay marriage actually had the effect of pretty much rendering civil partnerships obsolete. Which is a shame because, obviously, there was a lot of demand for something that wasn't marriage, in fact marriage was about to be obsolete. There's obviously a whole lot of traditional and, often, religious baggage attached to it that a lot of couples don't want. Another effect is that the whole anti-marriage part of the LGBTQ movement got completely problematised and marginalised. Like for a start, anyone gay AF coming to the pro gay marriage demonstrations was told like "please look respectable and don't stick a bunch of purple feathers on your butt", but also I've noticed that LGBTQ people who were marriage abolitionists, or just agnostic on the question, but who weren't super enthused about getting access to the institution of marriage, are now considered a bit regressive, or just erased.
And I mean, where a legal status is needed and quite justified if people are starting out life together, it's so weird that we hang onto the institution whereby, I mean, it's not just straight, that's not a bad thing as such, but it's the institution whereby historically, a woman passed from her father's authority to her husband's authority. Because of how commercial marriage became, I think it turned into a whole 'we're hitched!' thing that's all about the couple. But it's basically an empty shell of that specific tradition switching out all the parts. Which is a hell of a weird way to say "OK I love you let's officialise that we're living together and getting a joint estate".
I'm definitely a deleter (in fact I've deleted comments on here because I get embarrassed at how long they are - apologies if that feeds into the "omg the former MR staffer is deleting comments!!!" conspiracy theories). I think it stems from the fact that I'm generation X and it was considered profoundly embarrassing to even be on the internet when I was first on - also, most of my employers for the last ten years have been one or several governments. Plus I was and am trying to get back into academia, and you can't say just anything about feminism, and I don't want to get cancelled - or even notorious in any positive way online - before I've had a chance to publish anything on my own terms. I did have a tumblr for like three or four years, I was on my feminist group's blog a few years before that so some of my bullshit is definitely still on the Wayback Machine.
And I mean with someone like Liz Bruenig, it's fucking obvious why she'd do that: she's been through the wars over the years. Like, she's a Catholic, which means two things: she has a bunch of Catholic opinions people don't like, and she's very "turn the other cheek" in her interactions, which makes her vulnerable. She's had MRAs sicced on her by the allegedly woke before. She has people trying to get her sacked from her job all the time. Her husband was actually sacked from his job for being rude to someone in Clinton's entourage.
Tbh I think it's easy to underestimate both the psychological effects of being on social media, being steamrollered constantly with quick intense bursts of information, and the effects of social media bullying - or it's more that, people can become fair game somehow, and there's a callousness that sets in that's pretty chilling.
And in terms of effects on my writing, it's bad. I mean, social media patter makes its way in there if I'm not careful, just all the same memes, in-jokes nobody is in on, etc. Plus you get used to addressing - if you've ever watched Sunset Boulevard - "all those wonderful people out there in the dark", so sitting down to write without them, accountable only to yourself, feels incredibly silly. And I think while a lot of interaction happens on social media, it happens in spite of the medium. One of the most wearing things about tumblr was the feeling of "seeing" the same group of people every day, because when you're addressing the void they're the ones who usually reply. But one on one interaction starts to feel creepy and weird. It gives me a lot of faith in humanity that anyone can even make friends on those platforms.
I’ve never seen social media as a full representation of people, but as someone who is interested in personal histories, I’d kill to have access to my teenage grandparents’ hypothetical IG accounts. I love reading people’s old journals and letters, like a guilty peek into someone’s living room as you walk by the open window. I’m fascinated by tiny moments of history, and how those out of context glimpses build something beautiful in my imagination. While I can understand “delete everything” as an aesthetic, I’m firmly in the camp of saving.
I just had to say that I 'consumed' the exact same pair of shoes. Precisely last week.That's all !
Twins!
had to jump on re: “marriage”. My husband and I met when we were 17... we are now 35 and been together longer than we’ve been with out the other. Marriage was something we were always meh to. What was the point?.. we are married in our eyes, it’s basically a legal document blah blah etc. But, for us it came down to the fact that legal document determines a lot (at least in Canada). The right to make decisions for the other, the right to see the other in a hospital (if something should happen), the right to be each other’s “other” to the rest of the world. Without that document, we would not have the “right” to be as we are... we still think it’s stupid, but so is much of the realities of our current world. And then, the family element. It still means a lot to family, and to be honest it does change things. It’s like the smallest, most subtle, inexplainable difference that is equally huge and “everything”... I think something about “everyone” acknowledging and recognizing you are “one”, brings another level to how “one” you are.. I dunno. Perhaps I should have coffee and wake up before sending this lol, but I feel as someone who never got or cared about getting married, I do think since getting married it has its own beautiful weight and purpose, and you don’t lose anything, but gain so much more... and if nothing else, the legal stuff is important.
“You can’t have growth and stability at the same time” absolutely just skewered me. That is the most insightful quote I think I will ever consume.
I agree! At an uncertain time in my life and looking for the next step this quote really got me!
I have deleted my online presence multiple times! My Xanga is at the bottom of the ocean, MySpace shot out in space (though I’d advocate for its return, because there’s nothing better to tell people who you are than a profile song, or to passive aggressively let a boy/girl know you know they’re online obsessed with you). My creative writing journal went to a dumpster loooongggg ago. I also consequently have zero photo albums or photos laying around. Idk. I shed my skin, or self, a lot and I’d prefer to have zero trace left of the previous version of me.
I think one main reason I don’t keep much on my Instagram photo grid wise is that it’s just impossible for me to post and not feel like I’m trying to be an influencer. I think influencer culture is toxic. If I post a still photo, I’m trying too hard. Catch me in my stories. That’s the real me and it goes away. It’s more off the cuff, less planned. FB was invented when I was in college and I couldn’t even get Instagram on my Android in my 20s, so I think being an older millennial has a lot to do with it. Life was way easier before social media. I despise it, yet my brain is addicted to the over stimulation, damn it.
I also find that something changed drastically with the advent of social media - like, when I joined the internet it was largely message boards, they could be harsh as fuck, there were genuine creeps who went unchecked for far too long, there was plenty about them that was bad. But at least in some ways you had to exercise personal restraint, in terms of vanity and so on. And when you met people IRL, all the fights and bullshit just dissolved into thin air.
Whereas transitioning to blogspot and wordpress and then social media: in terms of feedback, it's different, because you post and people comment on it, so you're the centre of it. You can just vomit all kinds of stuff out there. In fact you have a bio to summarise yourself in like 10 words, which, nobody can be summarised in 10 words, plus nobody should be reduced to their "self".
I also found 99% of the feedback was "you're the queen of being right about everything" or else "you are Satan and you hate women, puppy dogs, baby seals and nice things and want them all to die". And - somewhat chillingly I thought - IRL meetings definitely didn't dissolve all the petty fights. In fact IRL encounters felt more like acting out the internet.
I see videos of political events now, from Europe or from North America, and often it sounds like they're saying tumblr stuff at each other. I mean I'm generally on their side but, it's like social media has completely homogenized and narrowed down the vocabulary for talking about politics.
I personally have 2 instagram accounts. One for everyone I know to follow and the second is just an instagram account for myself (sort of like a diary), so I only post carefully cultivated posts on my main instagram and I post daily on my personal account. This allows me to have the freedom to delete as many posts as I want on my main account without worrying about destroying my internet existence because I always have the second, personal account to turn to where all my memories are stored and my entire existence is recorded. I don't delete anything on the second account because there's nobody except me to see it and anything embarrassing doesn't matter.
You know, that's cool and all, and I'm not especially careful about spreading my data around either. But it strikes me we're all talking about using, in many cases Instagram, which belongs to Facebook, as the place to store intimate personal memories.
I have to wonder about the disconnect between the intimate stuff we feed to our various accounts, public social media or not, the fact that it all gets turned to just "data" i.e. a raw material, which is used to advertise stuff to us. Like part of me doesn't mind and switches that idea off. But it's a hell of a thing to be able to switch off.
I also wonder, if I used my instagram account, it would be on the most private setting possible, like posting things in a Facebook heck hole somehow feels more "real" than journaling or scrap-booking, even if no one sees it. But also less serious or committed somehow? I mean it's a pretty different exercise to scrap books or whatever, besides. It's curating one's personal brand and aesthetic, rather than curating memories.
I dunno, I've been around since before people used the internet day to day, it's been weird and interesting to watch that evolution in behaviours based on our intimacy being harvested and all fucked up for corporate profit. It's weird cause I talk to older people, even left activists sometimes and they're like "wtf are you talking about, the phone company's evil too and we still use them, it's just a means of communication". But it's a totally different thing.
"I’ve never really wanted my internet presence to “represent” me like a one-sheeter on who I am. I find that stressful." Yes! This thought has been on repeat in my mind recently surrounding social media but also my career and life in general. There is so much pressure to have a niche or narrow definition of self and career services to be “respected” and find “growth” on the internet. I struggle with this constantly as I continue to recognize my inner need for a multifaceted, balanced life that doesn’t include a strict definition of who I am or need to be. Anyways, grateful this newsletter popped up in my inbox this morning. Thank you!
"Real canon is more inspiring, and I appreciate people brave enough to leave their early work up." I think a big part of the post & delete thing now is about the fear of being 'cancelled' because something was taken out of context- or worse losing your livelihood over it (justified or not). It should be normalized to be able to change your opinion without fear of retribution for something you posted on livejournal in 2008. People delete for many reasons that are not about them having an inconsistent identity online- like if you were interviewing at a prospective workplace and you did a scrub or if you were worried about old hack tweets resurfacing and being career-ending.
Weird little coincidence– I learned the definition of 'palimpsest' a few months ago and just this week remembered it while sitting in my front yard. I whispered it a few times because it's fun to say so I smiled seeing it in your 15 Things.
I think of myself as a hoarder of things that have meaning to me, i.e. photos, tickets, moments. I have had my instagram account since 2011 and recently I went back and deleted old posts that I got embarrassed about. That was weird for me because I don't think curating an instagram in necessary. Seems like it's wasted time and energy. I still don't really care about what I post, as long it means something to me.
for those who are connecting to ursula legiun's words, i highly recommend the hour-long doc on her life "Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin" (2018). she was insanely ahead of her time!
I have also been thinking about marriage a lot and I enjoyed the Mandy Len Catron article (looking forward to reading the other article you shared as well!). She makes some really great points in here about the loss of the greater community of family, extended family, friends, etc. One thing I wish she’d have explored more and that I think would add some depth to this discussion is that marriage is very much a settler-imposed institution—I never thought of it in those terms until I started having more in-depth conversations with a friend of mine who is an enrolled member of the Shawnee tribe. She introduced me to the work of Dr. Kim Tallbear who advocates for polyamory as a means of decolonizing your community, though you don’t need to be polyamorous to gain a lot from her work. Would totally recommend giving the podcast All My Relations a listen, especially the episode “Decolonizing Sex.”
Thanks for your newsletter Haley, it’s such a gift!
Just popping in to say I recently read two books by Ursula K. Le Guin (I hadn't read anything by her before) and I LOVED them! so! much!
I've never been into sci-fi so I was reluctant at first, but we read The Dispossessed in my book club and wow it literally changed my life and it's going to stay with me for a long time! The other one is The Left Hand of Darkness and it's also amazing although slightly less revolutionary.
Heartily recommend them both to everyone, the political and social messages she conveys in her fiction are just so well articulated and interesting!
... and finally on "class reductionism", I'm familiar with the term, though not sure how it's possible to "reduce" anything to class. But I find in some left groups, I've noticed it with the DSA, and over here with certain of the trotskyite groups and the Young Communists, there's a kind of polarisation, and I think the DSA statement Haider starts his article with really reflects that. I think it stems from seeing class, race, gender, etc. as identities from which oppressions and inequalities stem and they criss-cross in patterns of unimaginable geometric complexity. Which means concretely, for some of these groups, that they get divided until "OK dear we'll handle your unimportant identity politics shit after the revolution" or else "shut the fuck up you class-reductionist bastard that's just white male bro stuff, what do you mean you're Nina Turner, you don't have to be white or a bro to be a white bro, you've fallen prey to your colonialist masters", etc. (and yeah I was in a trot group at one point, the composition of the group was, like, half a dozen white dude sociology students, a couple of non-white dudes who show up really according to how much they can handle being "token POC" for a couple of hours, a couple of retired public sector workers, one half-man half-tree entity in a hat (I think that's the rule for trot and anarchist groups, you can't not have one), and like, two women, one of whom actually says anything. And the women are under scrutiny for class reductionism, for no other reason than, the guys are trying really hard to be as feminist as possible, and if some chick says she's in it for the Marxism, it completely cramps their style.
Whereas, first off, class isn't a simple case of "oppression based on economics" - like, some anti-idpol people I've seen connected with the DSA, or with trot groups, are actually identitarian about class. So it means when confronted with police brutality, they can't handle the role race plays in that in terms of class. Which, if they were slightly less up their own ass (and committed first and foremost to what kind of leftist they are), class would be the thing that enables them to see it in terms of race.
I think, as in many things, radical feminism provides us with precisely the way *not* to handle class politics: it views Marxism and feminism as competing views of the world, because it talks about "sex-class" oppression. So, either you think class is the main paradigm according to which oppression exists, or you think it's sex. In fact radical feminist theory basically takes a very basic version of Marxism and slaps it onto the condition of women - so you get the means of reproduction instead of the means of production, and women are the class that's oppressed, and so on. Making Marxism and feminism mutually exclusive worldviews, to them (Catharine MacKinnon has the best articulation of the radical feminist position on this I've read - obviously I totally disagree with her but it's worth reading).
But also, if you don't see gender in terms of class, it's barely worth considering politically. In fact you end up with a harshly class-segregated feminist movement, which also entails a harshly race-segragated feminist movement But there's a difference between seeing it *in terms of* class and seeing it *as a * class. And no amount of hand-wringing collecting of oppressed people's lived experiences will help. If anything it makes it worse, because it reduces virtually all participants to just, forms of pain for extremely accomplished ladies of quality to learn from.
Something struck me during the MR reckoning actually: the first thread was quite a lot about race, rightfully so. But there were a couple of women who were very active at the beginning, then as soon as it became more about just shitty working conditions strongly but not only based on racial factors - like as soon as class became a part of it - those people frustratedly posted a couple of "excuse you" answers when people neglected to call Leandra white - which, it's going to be hard for people to call her that when, while her fortune and status probably protect her from it to a large degree, she's still the same race as people who have a hell of a time in airports - and then vanished from the thread.
On marriage - I don't know about the US but in Europe, there were a few alternatives to marriage, legally, that were starting to happen around the turn of the millennium. Forms of civil partnership, mostly, but also legal status given to couples who've just been together for a certain length of time. It's important to note that civil partnership was quite different in various countries - in the UK it had basically the same effects as marriage, except for gay people, in fact Peter Tatchell and some straight couples went to the court of human rights to try and win the rights to civil partnership for straight couples. In the Netherlands, I don't know about the legal effects, but both forms were open to both straight and gay couples early on. In France, there's the PACS which actually doesn't have the legal effects of marriage, or just some of them, and was the only option for gay people until a few years ago. And in I think Belgium and Spain, at least, couples who live together have a legal status. And then some countries like Poland or Hungary are all "ixnay on the omosexualityhay".
While it's obviously righteous, the fight for gay marriage actually had the effect of pretty much rendering civil partnerships obsolete. Which is a shame because, obviously, there was a lot of demand for something that wasn't marriage, in fact marriage was about to be obsolete. There's obviously a whole lot of traditional and, often, religious baggage attached to it that a lot of couples don't want. Another effect is that the whole anti-marriage part of the LGBTQ movement got completely problematised and marginalised. Like for a start, anyone gay AF coming to the pro gay marriage demonstrations was told like "please look respectable and don't stick a bunch of purple feathers on your butt", but also I've noticed that LGBTQ people who were marriage abolitionists, or just agnostic on the question, but who weren't super enthused about getting access to the institution of marriage, are now considered a bit regressive, or just erased.
And I mean, where a legal status is needed and quite justified if people are starting out life together, it's so weird that we hang onto the institution whereby, I mean, it's not just straight, that's not a bad thing as such, but it's the institution whereby historically, a woman passed from her father's authority to her husband's authority. Because of how commercial marriage became, I think it turned into a whole 'we're hitched!' thing that's all about the couple. But it's basically an empty shell of that specific tradition switching out all the parts. Which is a hell of a weird way to say "OK I love you let's officialise that we're living together and getting a joint estate".
I'm definitely a deleter (in fact I've deleted comments on here because I get embarrassed at how long they are - apologies if that feeds into the "omg the former MR staffer is deleting comments!!!" conspiracy theories). I think it stems from the fact that I'm generation X and it was considered profoundly embarrassing to even be on the internet when I was first on - also, most of my employers for the last ten years have been one or several governments. Plus I was and am trying to get back into academia, and you can't say just anything about feminism, and I don't want to get cancelled - or even notorious in any positive way online - before I've had a chance to publish anything on my own terms. I did have a tumblr for like three or four years, I was on my feminist group's blog a few years before that so some of my bullshit is definitely still on the Wayback Machine.
And I mean with someone like Liz Bruenig, it's fucking obvious why she'd do that: she's been through the wars over the years. Like, she's a Catholic, which means two things: she has a bunch of Catholic opinions people don't like, and she's very "turn the other cheek" in her interactions, which makes her vulnerable. She's had MRAs sicced on her by the allegedly woke before. She has people trying to get her sacked from her job all the time. Her husband was actually sacked from his job for being rude to someone in Clinton's entourage.
Tbh I think it's easy to underestimate both the psychological effects of being on social media, being steamrollered constantly with quick intense bursts of information, and the effects of social media bullying - or it's more that, people can become fair game somehow, and there's a callousness that sets in that's pretty chilling.
And in terms of effects on my writing, it's bad. I mean, social media patter makes its way in there if I'm not careful, just all the same memes, in-jokes nobody is in on, etc. Plus you get used to addressing - if you've ever watched Sunset Boulevard - "all those wonderful people out there in the dark", so sitting down to write without them, accountable only to yourself, feels incredibly silly. And I think while a lot of interaction happens on social media, it happens in spite of the medium. One of the most wearing things about tumblr was the feeling of "seeing" the same group of people every day, because when you're addressing the void they're the ones who usually reply. But one on one interaction starts to feel creepy and weird. It gives me a lot of faith in humanity that anyone can even make friends on those platforms.
I’ve never seen social media as a full representation of people, but as someone who is interested in personal histories, I’d kill to have access to my teenage grandparents’ hypothetical IG accounts. I love reading people’s old journals and letters, like a guilty peek into someone’s living room as you walk by the open window. I’m fascinated by tiny moments of history, and how those out of context glimpses build something beautiful in my imagination. While I can understand “delete everything” as an aesthetic, I’m firmly in the camp of saving.