A Note On Commenting.

Right, so… I’m afraid I have to follow the recent examples of other bloggers and shut down comments alltogether for a while (…CENSORSH…!!1!).

Obviously, I moderate anyway but a) that’s no fun and quite exhausting (lately, excitment over many new comments has been replaced with ominous apprehension – sadly, I’m usually not wrong here), and b) my inner educator wants to respond to the same BS over and over again, and that’s just as useless. So, two lessons for me: 1. It doesn’t matter what one writes, people don’t read it or don’t care anyway (also, they really, really want to use racist slurs towards you, it’s a bit of an obsession, apparently) and there’s no special snowflake exception for me here, 2. Don’t link to almost-mainstream blogs – within mere minutes there’ll be a number of terribly well-intentioned dudes mansplaining to you why it obviously makes total sense to use N* in this particular circumstances, blablabla (nope, can’t be bothered to dispute that again and again).

Pingbacks will remain possible, and comments will open again in a little while. In all honesty: many thanks for reading, and I hope to hear from (some of *ahem*) you soon :)!

[CN: (parody relating to) misogynistic, heterosexist, racist comments.]

Summer Outing.

Dear all, I will Turn Off The Internet for about six weeks from today, so no more rambling through summer (you’re welcome!). Many thanks for reading and commenting, enjoy the sun (or shade) and, hopefully, “see” you back in late August :)!

Here: I’ll leave you with cookies (fresh out of the cookie cave oven!) and cute animal content!

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“Graffiti With Punctuation”: A Narcissistic Anniversary Post.

My blog is a bit of a public diary. On Sunday, it’s one year old – and while the book’s spine is quite alright, it’s a gotten a little fuzzier ’round the edges.

Despite the intrinsically political nature of the topics talked about here (and yes, the old classic: how can you separate them from the “private” ones anyway…?), it is a public diary.

The personal detachment I pictured myself having from the posts and the supposedly “objective” [sic] political analyses did not work out in the least; apparently, this is not what personal blogs are about, no matter how much some people might want to make me (and you) think it is.

Not having come to this meager realization is probably the main reason for actually having followed the wild impulse to start a blog by registering this one in October 2010, but taking more than 6 months to get to the point where it became clear that social network rants are not enough for whatever latest incident, and that I could actually write something about it…

Incidentally, the more personal posts are also the most popular ones, because people seem to be able to relate to them more, I presume. I get it – I like pieces of writing, be it personal and/or political, that are honest, straight forward, and connect you to the author in a sense – I suppose this is simple psychology and a more intriguing writing technique.

Don’t get me wrong: my blog is aggressively unpopular and extremely tiny :)!

I basically get the traffic of other bloggers’ “Tuesdays” in an entire year, and yet (or maybe: because of that), I have virtually met very interesting and awesome people through blogging here and am grateful for that.

The name, “Stop! Talking.”, was the poor attempt of a self-ironic double entendre… It, first and foremost, means “Stop! We’re gonna talk about that now.” It (…increasingly so… ;)) means: “STFU, you’re making my head hurt, and this is why…” And, obviously, it’s showcasing the fact that calling a blog “Stop Talking” makes little to no sense, because virtual talking is all I do here, all the time. Simple – no hidden agenda, that’s all, despite the need of some people to muse about it… Subtlety was never a strong suit of mine, a fact that cannot have escaped anyone.

Keep Right, Except To Pass.

Skin color is a funny thing. Despite the fact that we talk about it so much (yes, that includes me), explicitly and, much worse, implicitly, it is inherently meaningless. It tells you absolutely nothing, except for a vague ratio of pigmentation an individual can call his/her own. It is completely arbitrary, unreliable and unstable what kind of fictional “race” and its fictional meaning people have linked and continue to link to someone’s skin tone, and despite such delightful historical artifacts like “The One Drop Rule”, the concomitant construct of “miscegenation” and the fact that people still think of “mixed” “race” children as the progeny of two people “mixing” their “black” and “white” blood, for example, there is no inherent genetic marker of “race” other than what people have assigned to certain phenotypes. And yet… As always, disclaimers like this one simply have to be followed by actual experiences that show time and again that people cannot be bothered with logic or actual importance or decency.

I am a light-skinned Afro-german person. Not that this should matter, but it actually does. Having been raised in a white, small town family with middle-class aspirations, this proved to be somewhat of a problem. And what’s the german way of dealing with those? Right: denial! Denial in the form of years and years of not addressing the simple fact that I don’t look like the rest of this side’s family, of dressing me in super-frilly white dresses, of never allowing to let this “unruly” hair be unbraided, of teaching me poems of every dead white literary person one can think of, and of making sure this foreign looking kid is extremely well-behaved, to not stick out more than she already does.

The thing is: I actually believed I was white, or like everybody else, and would emphatically deny that I am also Black when people would ask me why I have all that pigmentation going on (…to somewhat paraphrase). Friends of mine would emphatically defend my whiteness, saying that I was not Black, but “Brown” (which is so much better, apparently), and others would give me “compliments” about being so light, because, obviously, things could have gone a lot “worse”… All in all, I was extremely embarrassed when being called out for that apparent difference from the enforced norm.

Too Much Information?

I was going to write a different blog post. For some time now, I had a text in mind that, in the wake of Jacquelyn Friedman’s new book on ‘feminist’ (obviously, broadly spoken…) dating and sex, concerned itself with the question many people who are attracted to men™ have asked and discussed and never answered: feminist men interested in heterosexual relationships – anyone? Anywhere?

Obviously, this has been debated a lot (e.g., on Feministe when Jill posed the question how people “date while feminist”) and is a complex issue; for me, due to personal reasons, especially regarding heterosexual relationships and all the negotiations and potential deal breakers they can entail. Thankfully, I have not yet had to deal with super special misogynistic snow flakes (…and being fat helps when it comes to weeding out the people who do not deserve to get laid in the first place…), and since my private environment is either in support of feminism or at least somewhat aware of my political base line (albeit due to my snarky comments or raised voice or the combination of the two… *ahem*), I can be quite happy to report that overt, unchallenged sexism is something I seldom have to deal with in my immediate (male) surroundings now (…it used to be different).  And having any sort of (intimate) relationship with someone who does not share key features of this basic value system, i.e., “leftist” or “progressive” policies or whatever you want to name it, is a clear “deal breaker” and dude would neither get a second glance nor open ear.

Notwithstanding, as “Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street” has just recently shown yet again, defining yourself as a progressive or even explicitly feminist man does not mean that you actually are one. I think this is a problem due to a lack of individual reflection and comprehension (and here is a fantastic piece about the horrors of “faux feminists”), but also a structural complexity: of course, overcoming socially engraved beliefs and practices is hard, especially when you are living within the culture and society that reproduces and reinforces said beliefs and practices every single day, and belittles or threatens you if you refuse to play along. I expect you to try damned hard, however – it is your responsibility if you claim to support gender equality (that should be an integral part of your “progressive” stance).

I was now going to start dissecting the question as to how feminist exactly a man has to be (and in which regards), so one can “work with” that – clearly, certain issues that I would deem feminist in principle are somewhat relational negotiations in practice, and although the slogan “the personal is political” holds true, intimate relationships tend to not function satisfactory for either person/people if handled as party conventions where the goal is to push your political wing’s programme to the fullest extend (…although I’ve heard that works for some people – and I’ve once tried… hard… ;)).

Yet, right in the middle of the classic thought about how much (anti?-)feminist compromise is justifiable and how to write about that, something else happened, and kind of caught me off guard.

As said above, feminism does not come as a surprise to virtually every man I know on a more personal level, is somewhat common in the professional/humanities/academia surrounding I am working, and I am far from ‘hiding’ it in daily interactions (although, apparently, simply stating a differing opinion is still considered radically feminist, even totally akin to the SCUM manifesto… :: eye roll ::), although I do not roam the streets yelling about it (yet) or wear batches (anymore). This blog is written under a pseudonym, nonetheless, because I actually like to not be identified for once, would find it a bit too revealing to share things like these under my real name with the internet, and think that words can carry without names (although most of my friends and some of my colleague actually know who occupies this virtual space :)). As I had to experience, however: in times of googling people, privacy is just shot to shit anyway.