If you truly and genuinely want to help male victims of abuse, you will start speaking about them independently. You will stop bringing them up only when women are talking about their own abuse. You will stop using them as a ‘gotcha’ to discredit claims of male violence. You will stop saying things that you know are are factually incorrect such as “If the victim were a woman, everybody would be talking about this.” or “If the victim were a woman, this already would have been dealt with.” Your misogyny is thinly veiled, and everybody knows your true intentions.
If I am talking about women’s abuse, and my own experience, and you come to me talking about how men are abused too, I will tell you to shut up. It is not because I do not think men can be abused, and it is not because I do not care about male victims of abuse. It is because I can see clearly through your intentions behind bringing it up to me. You are attempting to silence me.
Bottom line: Rey will always always choose Finn. She already has. When she was offered the universe and ultimate power she chose Finn instead (and Leia and everyone else she’d so quickly come to love).
We don’t have to ask who Rey will choose to be with. She’s already chosen the man who has never for a second believed that she’s nothing.
He can understand how the weight of someone’s opinion can push you to doubt your own judgement, to justify actions to yourself that you would otherwise never take.
He can understand being trapped and having no way out, to desperately search for one, while trying to survive in a system that demands total compliance.
But he cannot understand not searching for such an out, understands even less how someone cannot take it when it is offered, not once, but twice. Doesn’t comprehend how anyone can reject that chance of freely offered escape.
There are things Finn can forgive.
The other Stormtroopers, the cadets that trained alongside him, he finds it difficult to judge them harshly. He knows what they all went through, the violence both mentally and physically they were subjected to, the abuses heaped on them to make them comply. He can’t find it in his heart to condemn those that gave in, those that could not find a way out and – knowing that defiance meant death – obeyed orders, though he asks no one else to share his forgiveness of them.
But he cannot forgive those who visited violence on others with malicious glee, those who had a choice, had the rank and influence to choose differently, but didn’t. Nor can he forgive those who inflicted violence on him, those who for their own goals, or their own joy, caused him pain and injury.
This is why he’ll never understand Phasma, nor forgive her.
This is why he’ll never understand Kylo Ren, nor forgive him.
The point of humanising a mass murdering and unrepentant villain like Kylo Ren is so that we can recognise our common humanity with him, yes. But not so that we can react with sympathy – so we can react with horror.
When Kylo Ren removes his mask, the movie shows us that he’s only a man because it wants us to confront the fact that monsters have human faces. Not because it wants us to stop thinking of his actions as monstrous.
We humanise villains as a warning of what any of us could become if we made the worst possible choices.
white people are racist by default (in the united states as well as other countries). are you white? congrats, you’re racist, and here’s the explanation:
you grew up in a racist society -> you were socialized to be racist thanks to racism being a dominant ideology -> you benefit from racism -> you’re racist no matter how much u think you’re not.
unlearning it is going to be a constant battle and u will never unlearn it fully. accept this. it is ingrained in you as a result of your upbringing and the media you’ve consumed. the sooner you come to terms with your own racism, the sooner u can better yourself. recognize the problem in yourself instead of setting yourself apart from those “other” white people.
I fux heavy with the White people who keep putting this post on my dash
This applies to all social structures by the way.
You’re a man? You grew up benefitting from sexism. You’re straight? You grew up with homophobic ideals. You’re cis? You grew up with transphobic ideals. You’re able bodied? You grew up with ableist tendencies.
The process of unlearning all of the ideology you were surrounded by is what activism is about. Do it.
And even if you’re not privileged under a given social structure, you might still have a lot of internalized things to unlearn
Our society teaches us to hate the oppressed, if an oppressed person says that what you believe or do is harmful and they tell you – don’t get offended, learn and do better
The important thing here is, nobody’s blaming you (the general “you”) for this. I think a big part of the reason people get so offended when they hear these attitudes is because it sounds like “you’re a horrible person and support these things”. That’s not what it means, and that’s not what you are.
But society feeds us a steady diet of memetic poison almost from the day we’re born, and for each blend of poison there are groups who are more or less immune, groups who are harmed in ways they don’t really notice and groups who suffer horribly from it. It’s not your fault that you’ve been fed poison, and nobody is blaming you for having been fed poison.
It’s just… the poison is there, and because you’ve been fed so much of it, it’s in your bloodstream and your lips and your head. And you might not notice it’s there if it’s not harming you or visibly harming others around you, and spread it without realising that’s what you’re doing.
That’s why it’s so important to recognise and identify harmful ideologies for what they are and learn about the harm they do, so you can start checking your first reaction and changing the ways you’ve been taught to act and think.
kylo ren is the prime example of white male villains whose awful actions are excused by white fangirls in order to faun over him because he’s “tragic” and “tortured”, instead of focusing on the black character (finn) who is actually tragic and tortured, and instead of becoming a monster, went against everything that he ws programmed to be and became a good guy
he’s also the prime example of an abusive white man who the fans would rather ship with the white female lead instead of a variety of other, less abusive potential partners, but are not accepted as valid options by them because they’re not white men
I don’t get why people hate immigrants so much… Like they’re literally just… People… From another location….
My partner is an immigrant from the UK and still holds his citizenship. At a recent event, an acquaintance talked about how many “immigrants” get jobs over “Canadians” and they shouldn’t allowed to be management (which my partner is). My partner reaches across the table and goes “Hi, immigrant here!” and she goes “Oh I didn’t mean immigrants like you…” And you can so tell they just mean “brown people” or “Asian people” but they pretend it’s about jobs and shit.
That’s the same with my family. We were war immigrants from the soviet union and now live in Germany. Now the syrians are here because they also have war, and people keep asking me why I’m defending them so mercilessly. And when I tell them that my family (that is still alive) has gone through the same bullshit. But they insist that both scenarios are completely different. They’re not different, you’re just racist.
People wouldn’t say “oh plz protect my poor baby Ben, he’s suffering”, treat him like a 13 year old child even though he is 30, or ship him with Rey after he kidnapped her, tortured her, force pushed her into a tree, killed her father figure, almost killed her close friend, manipulated her, said that she was “nothing, except to him”, tried to convince her to abandon her friends, ordered her to be blown out of the sky, and then threatened to destroy her…because they touched hands…nope.
And if Finn had looked like this.
People would probably think he’s the new Luke Skywalker, shit, even I would. There would be no question that he is the male lead of the trilogy, he wouldn’t be shrunken or removed in posters, removed from trailers entirely, he would have more merchandise, the Finn Skywalker and Force Sensitive Finn theories would be through the roof, Finnrey would be the most popular ship, probably even canon by the end of the first movie.
L.J.'s Obsessions 