This is a guest post from our friend Boytits.
Was thinking this morning about how this little crop of “survivors using lethal force is cArCeRaL” proponents remind me of the post-occupy radlibs who tried to argue that participating in a black bloc was oppressive and problematic.
For those of you who weren’t around in 2012, the argument was that, clearly (🙄) only white cishet men ever participated in black blocs and therefore black blocs were a manifestation of white male privilege and their desire to do indiscriminate violence without consequences.
Now, this is both obviously false and also hilarious if you’ve ever actually been in bloc, but I dredge it up not for its entertainment value, but for the similarities it shares with the current argument formula being mobilized against proponents of survivor autonomy.
First is the reversal of the origination point of violence. Neither survivors nor the black bloc are the initiators of violence.
The state, the forces of capitalism, the rapist, they have initiated violence already, we are just responding in their language. We are defending and liberating ourselves.
This reversal of course serves to both protect and obfuscate the state and the rapist’s monopoly on legitimate violence.
The other shining similarity that stuck out to me was the fundamental inability to conceive of non-men as subjects capable of, and desiring to commit insurgent, liberatory violence.
The radlibs of the early 2010’s called themselves feminists while repeating asinine sexist takes about how women were inherently less violent than men and that is how they knew that the bloc must be all white dudes.
Today’s rabid little gaggle of rape apologists share this myopic worldview. That non-men are passive objects, incapable of desiring or wielding violence in pursuit of our liberation.
They have told us as much when they say that prison abolition means “learning to live with” the perpetrators of sexual violence, domestic violence, and other forms of misogynist violence.
They utterly fail to understand that the state does not protect the marginalized from the violence of their oppressors, but in fact protects the oppressors’ right to do violence to the marginalized and artificially suppresses the liberatory violence of the oppressed.
When the state and its prisons fall away, it won’t be us who has to “learn to live with” anything. We’ve been living with patriarchal violence for thousands of years. It will be the rapists and their defenders who have to learn to live with us
I, for one, am eagerly looking forward to our future free market on the application of violence.
If you’d like to see more from Boytits, you can find them on Bluesky.
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