If I lay down on the street today,
Would you lie with me, or would you step over me for a book sale?
The words that dissipate from my shining body would be delicious.
You could construct many beautiful sentences from it.
Made up stories. You the hero in every one.
You could tell me how I felt about it all, once and for all.
There will be no screenshots for the revolution.
Nobody will care anymore what I had to say.
f I drove to the mountains, would you drive with me,
Or would you use my absence to further the abuse?
“They never did take full accountability” You could write on the door of my abandoned house.
I sign on the dotted line, leaving you to fill in the rest. You can use my ostracism as social control. That would be a result, right? An achievement?
She was complicit, she was good friends with the wrong. You could list the crimes. Unsafe and unstable, a real suckerfish. The elephant was smarter than her. We never approved of her when she disagreed with our made-up stories.
Disagreeing is harm
They say the enlightened ones accept those who are beneath them.
Are you enlightened Clementine Ford?
You the leader. Me the follower. Would you drive with me?
And when I’m falling apart, would you fall with me.
Because wouldn’t this be a testimonial to your success?
Another human, broken because they said something sexist. There had to be a reason right.
A reason for the abuse.
Your best bet is standing upright, when I fall. You owe it to your fans.
Afterall
It wasn’t a numbing. It wasn’t a reckoning. It was a ritual take down.
It’s another party I never got an invitation to. The party I paid for. The unending debt.
I understood the joyous celebration. Better me than you, I would say.
And when I tear it apart, will you destroy with me?
Or is this the big moment? After all it’s about appearing like you care about justice.
Read those issues on the back of the cornflake packet, soak your fingers in the milk.
Decipher the sacred symbols on the apple store floor.
My targeting will benefit your reputation. Damn straight it will. Leave the apple store as it is, buy the latest I phone.
My hands are full of sin.
My heart is full of fear.
I am the object. I am acted upon.
I had it coming.
You and your followers are the subject.
I hope the gain in your reputation feels good.
I hope your book sells.
This is your success story. This is your redemption. My humiliation has brought you all such joy.
I will lie down on the ground, and wait for your book sale
I cough up the accolades, asbestos, accidental acolytes. Boots on the neck.
I shiver with cold in the media storm.
We are wearing the same shirt, I manage to say.
Please, will someone lie down on the ground with me, and look up the clouds
Imagining an ocean
Imagining I can breathe.
Secretworld322
Art: Hannah Hoch
What is this poem trying to say?
It’s an anarcha feminist critique of the politics of radical feminism, which is heavily reliant on the use of ritualised take downs via social media, using humiliation, ostracism and doxxing as techniques.
Radical feminism, even when it drops its transphobia is still biologically deterministic in nature, and therefore flawed.
Since the bourgeois revolution, freedom has been defined negatively; My freedom is based on your unfreedom. In more proletarian lingo it’s, ‘Hooray for me, fuck you.” Is it any wonder that bourgeois feminism operates on this operational principle?
Could freedom be defined any other way?
“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” In other words, freedom means equal political power between all adult Homo sapiens.