A Dyke A Broad #77 The Birdbrain edition
On parrots, Paris, and more on self-censorship. Plus notes on Ukraine. And photos.
Hello from Paris!
Sunday, I managed to find a functioning bike, and zipped over to the Jardin des Plantes where I watched the humans and the birds. Paris is joyfully and loudly parrotty. I saw several at the Jardin, but also earlier this week at Lac Daumesnil where they were gobbling something from inside the ravishing blossoms of a cherry-type tree.
There’s a bunch of parrots in my neighborhood, too. They especially like the sports fields surrounded by trees and tiny parks buffering the edge of Paris from the highway that encircles it. When I go jogging at the nearby track and soccer field I hear them jabbering to each other, probably mocking the bunch of laconic boys tossing a basketball at a naked hoop, which is never disturbed.
It’s weird how different this world is with its pollen and noise and humans and birds above it all, from what I imagine when I’m online and everybody’s giving their hot takes on everything, all based on an ersatz place we imagine from too much time spent inside our heads. There, we can persuade ourselves that almost anything is true, or anything false with a little help from google’s algorithms and social media’s peer pressure.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that, lately, trying to finish my book. The problem was that the last third was totally tangled up—essentially by fear and self-censorship. It’s not a good time to write about female bodies, which is what I’m doing, putting them in the context of sex and gender and misogyny in the LGBT community where many of their august number have called me, unimaginatively, “TERF” just for using the word lesbian, and accused me of hating all trans people since the beginning of time and far into the galactic future, for declaring a minority of trans activists and their allies misogynists because what else can you call them when they regularly threaten to rape, kill, and mutilate women they disagree with? And of course, not just threaten, but actually attack them in Real Life like they did during International Women’s Day marches all over France.
Revising, I got more and more depressed, realizing that self-censorship has a grip on me so tight I don’t even know what I think half the time, and the words I choke out are a kind of trail of breadcrumbs which I have to follow before the birds eat them and they disappear.
Part of the problem is that when you’re a woman there’s always so much pressure to see things from everybody else’s point of view. #notallmen. He didn’t really mean it. It won’t happen again. You misunderstood. You shouldn’t have started it. Why don’t you read X, listen to Y, pursue Z?
Which means the real challenge for women, for females, is, as always, to say no, refuse others’ words, visions, approval and affirmation, to harden your heart instead of opening it because sympathy propels you into, and traps you in the quicksand of another’s world, killing any chance you have, even once, to inhabit your own life, see through your own eyes, think your own thoughts, speak with your own halting tongue that will no doubt promptly be cut off.
On Ukraine
A war historian who’s not just blabbing based on that one article he read once. Click on the tweet to go to the thread.
What’s happening to women fleeing Ukraine.
What Russian forces are doing to women in Ukraine.
Our New Class Wars
Here are two long reads worth diving into.
In Woke Capital in the Twenty-First Century Wesley Yang writes:
While we are accustomed to seeing culture war issues as an ideological struggle, the rise of woke capital suggests a better framing of our predicament. We are deeply mired in a class struggle. One could even compare this exercise of distant elite power to colonialism. To put it in the starkest of terms: globalized professionals and managers are on one side; regional elites and the middle classes are on the other. The stakes are high, impinging on democratic self-government and the power to define reality itself.
Also compelling, China, Ukraine & The Western Soul with N.S. Lyons. The focus here is on the new divide between those privileged enough to live virtual lives, and the others stuck in the material world. Which itself has interesting repercussions about who gets to shape and claim identities…
[N.S.] explores a growing class war not just in Canada but in many Western democracies, framing it as a split between the Virtuals (as described above) and Physicals. Unlike the Virtuals, the Physicals tend to be connected to a particular place, and often do manual jobs. They drive the trucks, build the bridges and maintain the logistics of society that make life for the Virtuals possible. His framing is not dissimilar to David Goodheart’s ‘Somewheres and Anywheres’, but I find it more useful as it points not just to a class difference in how people relate to place, but to our physical bodies.
That’s it for this time.
Disgruntledly yours,
I often struggle with self-censorship when I'm writing or speaking in public, for all the reasons you outline above. I have this May Sarton quote above my desk to remind me not to give in to it:
“At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.”
Thank you for always giving us your personal truth, Kelly.