About organizing feminist spaces of communication and connection…without anger…

We.
We pose there.

Recently, I started posting on a feminist group’s page, participating in some conversations that I found interesting. This came on the heels of me deciding to dial back my interactions with the mostly heteronormative, apolitical Black people I’d met there, who I first decided to attempt to engage with. That didn’t work out very well. You see, I started off interacting with the Black wimmin and fell in love with them, their spunk, their fire, their insistence on attempting to make choice and be powerful in ways that made sense for them. I also really liked the fact that they did not cringe when I described the kinds of things I like to do while naked.

But then…
I met their men folk. Our…men…folk…? Not.
I found them to be typical, overly dominant, hugely making assumptions about what they knew and what kinds of language and understandings I shared in common with them, what values Black people could assume to all hold dear, who a “good” Black mother was, who a “good” Black woman was and what she could be expected or peer pressured into doing or performing or maintaining when/if she encountered a “good” Black man. 1950’s in full effect people had some seriously fuk’d ideas about what a Black woman’s role was/is in relation to a Black man, how she is supposed to speak, the kinds of space she should make for Black men’s insecurities, feelings of threat at the very thought of a Black woman not just nodding as they speak and letting them know how brilliant they are, ignorance of their own patriarchal privilege, of the power they wield inside Black community…
Oh my fucking GAWD! I could go on and on. In fact, I did go on and on, posting, questioning, journaling, challenging, redirecting, laughing at their (our?) men, raging against their shared values, against their insistence that I share their values…

Soooo…
Eventually they started to shun me. hehehe Old time, old school primate behaviour. The wimmin ceased popping by as did their (our?) backwards ass men. 🙂 I also had to block one man from messaging me. He was writing, as one of the most dominant and unrepentantly ignorant, anti-feminist men in their grouping, to jeer at me checking to see if I was satisfied with how people were responding to my queries, to my insistence on not falling into line. He checked in to laugh at me, to attempt to mount me, to offer a little bit of fear juiced incentive to someone who clearly did not know her place. 🙂

But I’m accustomed to that. I had someone on fetlife, a white anarchist Jewish person also respond with extreme ire when I said that a bunch of white anarchists sitting around typing about pacifism and violence but speaking with sneering disdain at the thought and mention of ghandi had racist implications regardless of whether he was an effective fulcrum of change or not.

This person attempted to incorporate a consciousness of Ghandi having been an anti-semite in a way that said they thought speaking of him and his contribution (or lack of contribution) to struggle that was racist as acceptable. Locating me as an amerikkkan, this person tried to say that I was clearly not knowledgeable or up to date and that they would be the one to forcibly re-educate me. They attempted to institute a baiting interaction where I was, I think supposed to show my true colours as rabid anti-semite, disinterested in exploring the intersecting relations of privilege and oppression in a way that spoke to them being more interested in dominating me and mounting me than this person being interested in sharing communication and knowledge.

That didn’t work for me. I left the white anarchists right there and then but not before pointing out that this person was trying to say that one kind of oppression was worse than the other, not that consciousness of both simultaneously was possible. But I lost my interest in having conversation with them. I shouldn’t have had to explain why my point about their racism still stood. I shouldn’t have had to deal with that person’s unbridled, misdirected rage so willingly directed at me.

sigh…

So, first I engaged the anarchist kinksters and had to back out of their little group firing off rounds as I retreated.
Then I engaged the Black kinksters’ patriarchal phallus heads and got the silent treatment.
Then I decided to go visit the radical feminist kinksters.

That’s been trippy. Not because I didn’t know what to expect when I opened the door and stepped in, but because I did know what I would find there…as I understood what I’d encounter in the anarchist group space, as I understood what I’d encounter in the Black kinkster community space.

Nothing much changes for me as I go visit the different communities I’m linked to. So, I’m always prepared, always ready with things that I can say, questions I can ask, challenges I can pose…things I can offer that might be useful…somewhere…somehow…I…hope.

As it turns out, I did end up writing a comment that offered something useful. So happy about that…genuinely happy in a thoroughly non-sarcastic way.

I wrote about anger, about what it means to be angry, what it means to see no end to being angry, what it means to communicate while angry, what it signifies when certain spaces expect me to wait until I’m not angry to communicate.

Some of the people in the feminist fetlife group asked if I would post my thoughts on anger somewhere. So, I thought I would take that opportunity to invite them over to my irreverent, annoying, bratty, tantrumming, unrepentantly complex, interdimensionally walking, radially politicized, completely unaffiliated space of exploration.
My home.
My core.
So filled with me being angry about pretty much everything under the sun…

“Some of us live angry. Wake up angry. Eat angry. Walk the street angry. Love our families while angry. Dance while angry. Make love while angry. Remember our childhoods while angry. Watch movies while angry. Pee while angry. Shit while angry. Go into labour while angry and come out the other side happy to have babies but still fucking angry.

For some of us who are too full of oppression, who encounter it in a myriad of ways and have no way of avoiding its sticky residue even for a moment here or there, there is always angry.

Other emotions folded in, roiling and rolling in tandem with angry, yes. But angry never goes away.

I’m typing a response to you right now and I know I’m angry. I’ve been angry most of my life.

There are a few things about being angry that make me angry.

I live in a white racist world where people are constantly accusing Black people of being angry, recoiling from us in abject terror over the possibility of seeing the undisguised, unbridled face of our anger, as if this in and of itself, will cause them to self destruct.

So many of us go to such great pains to present as not angry because of white domination and it’s insistence that we not show any sign of anger over having been so thoroughly dominated for such a long time.

I live in a patriarchal world where wimmin are constantly being asked to be happy with their lot. Where we are invited to find the upside of everything. Where we are told repeatedly that if we do not paste idiot smiles on our faces at all times our families, our communities, the whole world will self destruct…in the face of our baldly expressed emotions. We are not allowed to do anything while angry. Even though many wimmin’s and/or feminist writings point to the fact that a woman’s anger is her early warning system and it’s her having been socialized out connecting with her anger that causes difficulties for her, not the act of connecting to it.

I live in a WASP city. Passive aggressive central. Evil emotional sewer of a place. Hate it. Many people I’ve encountered, in response to a city wide culture of emotional suppression, many people who are in different ways grounded in alternative cultures across the city, have spoken or unspoken prohibitions against powerfully expressed…anything. There are a lot of fluttered eye communications, hand waving, cold energy environment building as a way to say “get the fuck out. we don’t want to be around you…”, people doing the shocked, wide eyed, doe in the headlights of oncoming traffic stares meaning “holy shit! we’re not speaking. I’m not speaking to you. how am i going to get away from you before i say something…extreme…”

No one in this city is allowed to have any emotions whatsoever unless they’re defined as within “pleasant” or “palatable” range. You’re definitely not allowed to be angry.

Angry.

There is a school of professional, academic, social thought linked to the above locations for me that says:

“If you’re angry, you are somehow incapable of processing information well. You can’t function. You cannot skillfully discern your reactions from the content of any event, exchange or conversation. If you’re angry, you’re of no use to anyone let alone yourself. If you’re angry you’re not actually fit to interact. If you’re angry, you might say something that upsets someone that, on further thought, if you’d given it more thought but were unable to because you were so angry, you’d realize that this person is of strategic importance and you should not have challenged them in the ways you did…because you were angry. You said/wrote things that now that you’re not so drunk on rage you will regret, even if it’s because others thought you should and are now jockeying for you to lose your job, your promotion, your academic standing, your tenure, your place in your circle of professional friends, your place in your circle of really, really cool and fascinating friends. Expressing angry, being angry and attempting to communicate when you’re not able to be completely detached, detached being what we’re all striving for, isn’t it (?) communicating while angry is just sloppy.”

If I wait until I’m not angry to communicate across my opinions, I’ll be dead, cremated and in an urn on a mantle somewhere and still not be able to speak.

If I tell myself that I’ll be clearer when I’m not angry, I’ll miss the clear, honest, crisp kind of wording, so calculated and straight shooting that comes for me when something angers me…well, everything angers me in some way shape or form. 🙂

I disagree with you adding that to your otherwise flawless list of suggestions. I don’t think that people being angry is the issue. I think that people who have been raised to not deal with their anger, who never learned how to deal with strong emotions while in the midst of them, who came out into political life, still not able to deal with their feelings might want to take a step back when they feel angry.

I think that people who feel as if they’re functioning through a thick red hot haze when they’re angry, who do not know how to take responsibility for what they say when they’re angry because being angry is so alien to them or abnormal for them that they literally experience being angry and doing things while angry as someone else taking over their psyches and doing stuff, saying stuff and then running out the back door leaving them holding the bag…those people should not interact or pose challenges or write things here when they’re angry as they will not be able to take full responsibility for what they say or do when the smoke clears.

I think that people who have difficulties expressing themselves with clarity when they’re angry might want to think about self deselecting if they know that communication works better for them when powerful emotion is not causing them to communicate in ways that they find not effective.

I think that people who can identify themselves as indirect communicators, who were taught to not directly express annoyance but instead taught to cushion killing blows behind reprehensible indirectly aggressive behaviours imperceptible to most, should be honest about this fact, even if their chosen tools call for them to never be honest in the moment…and back away rather than harm people who can’t quite put their finger on that sense of having been painfully winded or how.

This particular approach to expressing feelings, I’ve dealt with a lot. It’s very common in this city, but also very common online. I’ve unfet-friended a few people recently for being horridly indirect, I’ve blocked two non-feminist wimmin for expressing upset in ways that I’m sure they thought was a sign of them being proper, more civilized, showing restraint and being “good” Black girls. All I knew, is that I had a powerful sense of needing to move back away from them. I listened to that.

Anger is not the issue.

Anger is an emotion in a range of emotions that are natural for human beings to experience.
It’s not that we get angry.
It’s what we do when we’re angry, how we do it, why we do it and whether we can claim any after or negative effects real or constructed, that came out of what we chose to say or do.
It’s whether the people around us have been taught to shy away from anger, taught to punish anger, taught to ignore it, taught to cordon it off, taught to shun it.
It’s whether our communities have genetic memories of angry people doing horrible, violent things, hurtful things, things that can’t be taken back…and whether these memories trigger us even hundreds of years later so badly that we can’t even deal with our own anger collective or individual.

“Ask participants to never post while angry.”

Perhaps we could change this to “Ask participants to never post if they know they know they have difficulties recognizing, dealing with anger or if they have a history of not being able to speak/write effectively if they are angry or if they know that they have difficulties taking responsibility for the things they say/write/do when angry.”

That way, the issue doesn’t end up being anger. It ends up being what people do and how well they’re able to responsibly claim it.”