assholemaxxing

or, why dildo protests are an inappropriate response to ethnic cleansing

Why are liberals obsessed with turning other people’s suffering into a festival?

What are the consequences of anti-war interpretive dances and anti-ice dildo marches? Obviously they do nothing to disrupt the day to day flow of empire, but beyond the question of effectiveness, what are the material consequences of flooding social media feeds with images of us dancing gleefully outside concentration camp walls?

Pictured: Protests in the Twin Cities and Chicago outside ICE concentration camps.

Your joy is not revolutionary. ICE is engaged in ethnic cleansing, and marching around with a bunch of dildos outside their camps does nothing to stop it. The US and Israel are engaged in ethnic cleansing, and jokingly calling things “Spiritually Israeli” does nothing but distance ourselves from our own settler complicity.

I’m not discounting the importance of mimetic tools in our present liberation struggles. In fact I’m arguing the opposite. I’m saying that you suck at meme’ing. These protests are an example of bad, even dangerous, usage of the image as a political weapon. Attention is the money maker in today’s world, and what we fill the airwaves with matters. The image of a warehouse on fire is infinitely more powerful than the image of yet another spectacle of radical indifference. If we aren’t going to materially disrupt things ourselves, we could at least have the decency not to distract from those who are. The propaganda of the deed is perhaps our most powerful weapon in the struggle against our all-seeing surveillance state. We should be careful then of the deeds we highlight.

Beyond this, we need to bring as much consciousness as we can to our discursive output. I can excuse poor taste but I draw the line at carelessness. Imagery and symbolism are increasingly important in our political landscape and we should treat them as such. It’s a mistake to discount the image altogether, and it’s a mistake to dismiss critiques of memes as a worthless exercise in liberal identity politics—a phrase that has become a thought terminating cliche wielded against anyone who talks about how race and gender show up in our everyday interactions.

I’ve managed to avoid publicly commenting on this issue, but it’s time to break my silence. The utter disregard for trans issues among people who aren’t trans, and the transmisogyny of people who aren’t trans women, has led to a moment in which many on the left mock my womanhood just as much as those on the right. This is especially disheartening in our moment of trans genocide, in which the state is torturing and medically experimenting on incarcerated trans people. How many commentators were quick to point out the “hypocrisy” of Kristi-Noem having a cross-dressing husband, implicitly linking trans women with male fetishists? As a trans woman who’s waded through the terrible abyss of grindr and other apps, I’m completely unsurprised by the “hypocrisy” of conservative men wanting to engage in misogynistic fetishes, and expecting trans women to facilitate this for them. I’m also unsurprised by the zeal with which cis people loudly proclaim that they view trans women and cross dressing men as one in the same. Unfortunately I can’t just blame cis stupidity for this one, as I came across a (transmisogyny exempt) queer substacker erroneously declaring that “the lines between drag, cross-dressing, and transfemininity are blurry” amidst this fiasco. It’s another example of careless disregard for the actual people living through the struggles that these creators are content farming. To be clear, I’m in favor of mocking fascists. Yet most of the jokes I’ve seen about CDNoem mock trans women’s womanhood far more than they mock Bryon Noem, and this wouldn’t be happening if trans women’s voices and concerns were taken seriously.

Part of the issue here is a confusion about our own power as individuals. Just because we can’t single-handedly end systemic oppression doesn’t mean our actions are negligible. Our greatest impact is in our closest relationships, and thus our real power lies in our relational integrity. This is all to say, please be wary of making light of issues that don’t affect you.