dear tweens and teens: please dont equate “self care” with buying a bunch of useless shit because some shill account on instagram told you to. any type of “self care” that involves consumerism is snake oil and a better way to care for yourself and build your personal self worth is through self actualizing activities i.e. go make art, go plant trees, go volunteer for a food bank, go organize!!!
“‘But what will you do with the lazy man, the man who does not want to work?’ inquires your friend. That is an interesting question, and you will probably be very much surprised when I say that there is really no such thing as laziness. What we call a lazy man is generally a square man in a round hole. That is, the right man in the wrong place. And you will always find that when a fellow is in the wrong place, he will be inefficient or shiftless. For so-called laziness and a good deal of inefficiency are merely unfitness, misplacement. If you are compelled to do the thing you are unfitted for by your inclinations or temperament, you will be inefficient at it; if you are forced to do work you are not interested in, you will be lazy at it.”
It’s not wrong to want to be powerful, but authority is a cursed power. A power that you can never own yet will be owned by.
Self-power means building your ability to turn energy into effect. To turn calories into body-power through the learning of skills and abilities. To turn these abilities into actions that undermine the means of control.
This is power without authority. To build what you know and what you can do and then to actualize this against your opponents– alongside your friends and accomplices.
whoa yeah I’ve never really thought of it this way but mainstream (liberal) feminism really is about “learning to enjoy patriarchy”
How is that?
this might be difficult to explain from scratch so to speak but liberal feminism is essentially based on the idea that femininity is devalued and generally under attack. this is opposed to 2nd wave feminism (which is what most of my feminism is routed in) which states that women are under attack and femininity is an oppressive construct intended to keep women subordinate.
the idea that it’s femininity which is under attack implies that femininity is inherent to women, and that women are oppressed for our femininity. again, this is opposed to the idea that women are oppressed with femininity.
this ends up leading to ideas like ‘masculine privilege’–butch women oppress & have power over feminine women, and butch women reject femininity due to internalized misogyny (since they’re supposedly rejecting their nature). I’ve actually been accused of the above by a liberal feminist.
2nd wave feminism would state that “masculine privilege” doesn’t exist, because masculine women are still oppressed for being women under patriarchy and are punished in various ways for rejecting femininity (the tool meant to oppress them). only male privilege exists, and masculinity is only rewarded in males.
the foundation that mainstream/pop/liberal feminism has built itself on is why there’s a huge emphasis on ‘weaponized femininity’ (think ‘eyeliner so sharp it could kill a man’), enthusiastically embracing femininity, far more sex-positivity than sex-critical discussion (leading to ideas like “criticizing porn is anti-feminist”, “criticizing bdsm is anti-feminist”, etc.), a general distrust of butch or gender non-conforming women (“trust no butch”), “feminist” articles about what type of lipsticks stay on best while giving blow-jobs (I’ve actually seen this), body-positivity that centers around ‘all body types can be beautiful’ rather than ‘women do not have to be beautiful and should not focus on it’, etc etc etc. I hope this was an ok summary even though I’ve really oversimplified the whole thing lol.
