The Vivisection of Lindy West

Content warning: this post features graphic discussions of disordered eating, cannibalism (symbolic and otherwise), body dysmorphia, misogyny, and general messy mental health struggles.

Failure is a fascinating thing. On one hand, it has a sort of relentless finality, in culture – a certain inevitability that we absolutely refuse to acknowledge. No matter how good an artist is, eventually, they’re gonna produce something that either you don’t like, or nobody really likes.

The more famous they are, the more reticent we are to admit that they might, possibly, have missed the mark. At a certain point, artists often become “too big to fail” – well, if they’re men, anyway. Women and non cis-men, or men who fail to conform to masculinity, are ripe targets for failure, always hovering a breath away from falling off the balance beam and slamming ourselves square in the crotch.

Taylor Swift got an unfortunate taste of this with her Life of a Showgirl album; Lindy West isn’t as much of an international household name, but she’s certainly getting the same treatment right now.

But maybe you don’t know who the hell this is, or what I’m talking about. (If you’re the kind of person who reads my articles, you probably do know…but hey, more context and validation of facts is generally prudent.)

What everyone’s talking about

If you’ve heard of this memoir from feminist it-girl of the 2010s Lindy West, a seminal and influential confessional writer, you’ve probably heard about The Controversy.

Now, I’m a little trash-picking corvid at normal times. I enjoy gossip and Discourse and I love thinking critically about things, turning over nuggets and crystals and bits of broken glass from the culture, appreciating and evaluating them and hoarding them in my thoughts. I have a strong stomach for rot and filth; I get my hands dirty. I usually don’t do so in the public view of the internet, because I have seen too many people barely survive trolling incidents, but in private, I rejoice in the confessional spaces of group chats and gleefully, ardently consider mess.

Generally, I prefer fictional mess, where no real human beings have gotten hurt – tabletop roleplay games and various genres of fiction are ideal for exploring drama and its fallout. Hell, I’ve written an entire trilogy (I promise I’ll go back to posting chapters soon!) that’s basically just drama: the early 2010s musical.

This is as much to say that when I saw Lindy West’s name crop up on ICYMI, I jumped on it like the magpie I am, viscerally excited about the prospect of scandal and discourse. Then it came up on another podcast I absolutely love, There Are No Girls On the Internet, with a rather scathing take on the whole thing – particularly the absolutely unhinged and deeply unprofessional email that Aham, Lindy’s husband, sent journalist and essayist Scaatchi Cole.

I will have some words about the whole thing with Aham, but that’s for part 2, because I need to get deeper into the book to really share my thoughts. Suffice to say that I’m writing this article with Neko Case’s “The Pharaohs” playing on repeat. “I want the pharaohs/but there’s only men…”

Then yet another podcast I adore, The Worst Bestsellers, weighed in with guest Margaret Willison, Bossy Dame and polyamory alumnus, as she revealed in an episode of Love Letters.

I don’t always dive several episodes deep into researching a topic, but well, this one caught my interest. And then a friend in one of the book clubs I’m in wanted to read Adult Braces.

Reader, of course I enthusiastically supported this proposition. But although I was curious about the “real story” with the whole polyamory situation, I didn’t truly know what I was in for. I didn’t know I was going to walk around a corner and slam face-first into a funhouse mirror version of myself.

The Fame Monster

I’ve always felt a certain guilt about my own lack of success as a writer – surely, had I just tried a little harder and posted more, and etcetera, I could have become a Name; Marlon Brando At The Waterfront, “I coulda been a contender,” etcetera. Who knows, I still might; I’m not dead yet, and even death isn’t necessarily a bar to success (although it’s not a marketing strategy I plan to utilize, for the record).

But until reading Adult Braces – and admittedly, I’m halfway through, but my burning thoughts demanded an article already – I hadn’t realised quite how cannibalistic success really is.

Dr Devon Price wrote a rather good piece examining this side of the memoir. Now, the poly stuff in the memoir is going to be something I touch on, but first I want to talk about this thing that very few people are discussing: Lindy West’s quiet fall from relevance due to what looks like burnout.

I’ll have an article about burnout coming out soon, but I don’t want to write four essays crammed uncomfortably into a SmartCar, so forgive my brevity for the time being. Let us, for the moment, discuss a nasty little overlap between the way Lindy’s work is treated and the way Lindy’s body is treated.

In the memoir, particularly the sections set in Hollywood, West describes being alienated and dehumanized by people who are basically feeding off her work for the show. Now, it’s unfortunately true that a narrative show is just going to have changes made to it. It’s not a documentary, and hell, documentaries lie all the time. But that doesn’t invalidate or decrease the fundamental disrespect of herself and her life experiences that she ran into down in the Hollywood hellscape.

Fat Girl in the Mirror

Lindy either hasn’t quite connected it or hasn’t said it yet (or I missed it, in the 45% of the book I’ve read), but surely, at least some of the dire self-loathing of her body must have been influenced by living in LA. The way she talks about herself in Adult Braces, it would be easy to assume she’s plain, even undeniably ugly, some cartoonish cautionary tale housed in woman’s flesh.

So imagine the shock that washed over me as I read about this famous fat woman, writing about loathing her own body, and I looked her up – and was shocked to see that she was undeniably beautiful and hot, conventionally pretty.

Now, I’ve occasionally alluded to and mentioned that I struggle with body dysmorphia. I’m fat – a “small fat” in the lingo of fat activists; an absurd term that sounds like a slightly unappealing latte order – but visibly fat nonetheless. Somehow, I have three partners, and multiple other people have been attracted to me visibly over the years, or flirted with me. As a fat femme, this is one of those things we end up compartmentalizing or just putting in a box. Sure, I’ve been flirted with, but I’m still ugly and undesirable.

To be fat is to be subjected to traumatizing social and personal attacks, over and over; is it any wonder that most of us struggle with disordered eating in some way? Of course, the assumption will always be that binge eating is to blame, but this isn’t always true. Conventional anorexia and bulimia diagnoses use thinness as fundamental diagnostic criteria.

It’s entirely possible to be obsessively counting calories, peering at your tracking app after every morsel that crosses your lips, debating the cost of every bite and just how your metabolism will handle it, feeling intense guilt and shame as you dare to eat something you enjoy. It’s possible to struggle with intrusive thoughts about calorie counting years after you abandon the apps, advertisements for various trackers on otherwise innocuous phone games popping up and offering you impossible, AI-generated perfection or the classic before-and-after photo tricks. It’s possible to sit and stew and wonder if maybe, just maybe, this will be the time that your metabolism and body surrender to restricted calories and shed the prisoning rolls of flesh that lie between you and “acceptable” attractiveness.

Ask me how I know.

But Lindy knows too, and the weight of apparent self confidence, of being A Successful Fat Person who publicly loved herself, was drowning her. Now, some of the issues we struggle with are always going to be calls coming from inside the house, our internal voices projected onto other people like bad dubs over 2000s anime. But for Lindy, plenty of those shitty thoughts were being sent directly to her inboxes and comment sections by real people.

We love celebrities because we are desperate to steal a little of their light and prestige and power, to bask in their reflected glow and imagine ourselves in their places of pride. But when does that love become crushing, suffocating, toxic? When you can’t escape your own shadow, as happened to West.

In the early 2010s, that currently romanticized time, there was a serious penchant for TEDTalks, for clickbait solutions, for One Weird Trick that would dispel bigotry or grant self-confidence or heal whatever psychological or social ailments we suffered. Surely, with just the right words, we could reach a racist bigot and fix them! It’s that Aaron Sorkin, cowboy speech type heroism bullshit that poisons an awful lot of Western culture. All it takes is one brave, divine saviour to martyr themselves or fight the Ultimate Evil, and we will all be saved.

Am I saying that Lindy West is Jesus? Sure – but in the sense that every fucking person weaned on the goddamn fucking Hero’s Journey is Jesus. Or rather, that we are being trained and taught to see ourselves as the next potential Jesus, the person whose brave sacrifice and hard work will be enough to tip the Cosmic Balance towards good.

Now, I don’t know Lindy West personally. I’ve never met her, I’ve only read a few of her articles over the years. I don’t have a deep, profound type of parasocial attachment to her, unlike an awful lot of my fellow fat folks. (This is not to insult or denigrate them – if I was immune to idealising public figures, I wouldn’t have spent months in mourning after finding out that Neil Gaiman is a piece of shit.) But I will say that there’s something about Lindy West that hurt her, and has protected me, as I’ve slowly developed it over the years.

Lindy West is a kind, nice person, who cares about other people’s opinions. The visceral hunger for approval and love burns in her writing. And that is only human, and deeply understandable, but Lindy does not have what I have: I’m a mean, bitchy person, and until now, I never realised how much that has saved me.

Surviving the Internet

Anyone who’s spent a lot of time on the internet has gotten hurt on it. It’s as inevitable as gravity. Either by accident or by encountering someone thoughtless or seeking attention for snark, you will get hurt. I’ve certainly gotten hurt many times.

I had a bad experience on GoodReads with snarky reviewers taking potshots at my first book, sometimes misogynistically and queerphobically. (It was 2013, and snarky book blog reviews were all the rage. These were the heyday of vile attack pages like RequiresHate, after all, and the movie review culture of trying to cram in as many jokes per minute as possible.) I had a small but cutting run-in with Gamergaters after I dared to criticize a reviewer I used to like – someone from that dunking school, ironically enough. I’ve had uncountable fights with conservatives and fellow progressives and leftists on Facebook, taking exception to and being scolded for poor word choices and small oversights.

People on the internet are fucking mean, but also wonderfully kind, and publicly interacting on websites is a daily spin of the roulette wheel. But humans, like so many other creatures (including pigeons), are willing to gamble. And so we all do, because most of the time, or enough of the time, people are kind and good and warm enough that it’s rewarding.

But adulation is addictive, and as West describes, there’s poison in the honey. But there’s also something oddly compelling about the harm, as West admits, describing her profound act of self harm in cataloguing every bit of trolling she received, thousands of screenshots’ worth.

To survive the internet means having to accept the randomness of human interaction and the horrible unkindness as not necessarily deserved, but inflicted on yourself. As my wife often points out, people can be cruel and unkind because of shit that’s going on for them. This is certainly true of an awful lot of trolls, or even of normally reasonable people who lash out on a particular bad day. It’s worth remembering the basic humanity of everyone we interact with, even the worst people.

However.

What Lindy West seems to struggle with (so far, in as far as I can tell from reading a memoir and not knowing her as a real person in private or offline), is that some people’s opinions ain’t shit. It’s not that “opinions are like assholes; everyone has one and they all stink” – it’s that, in fact, some people act in ways that fucking suck, and are disrespectful, and it’s extremely important to learn how to not give a shit.

Perhaps my readers will have been surprised to hear about my appetite for mess, and drama, and Discourse; those who know me personally probably aren’t at all. And the reason for this is that, fucking frankly, not every opinion needs to be shared on the public internet.  I don’t share my messiest, juiciest, nastiest thoughts with everyone, because quite frankly, I don’t want to contribute to the toxicity in public discourse. It’s one thing to talk shit in private, but I am constantly aware – as I guess, most people fucking aren’t?! – that there’s a chance the subject of my speech could see something posted publicly.

So I don’t. In places where my thoughts can be accessed by search engines, I hold my tongue; I curate my thoughts; I am deliberate, as much as any one imperfect human can be. We are all at a party, and we can all be overheard, and people need to actually think about the fucking concept of privacy and discretion in how they communicate on the wide public internet.

It’s probably good to speak positively, in general, and to compliment people’s work. When I do reach out to or comment on creators’ projects that I admire, I try to write like I’d talk to them if I met them at a convention. That is, sure I’m warm and friendly, but I maintain a self-awareness of the fact that a) I know this person’s work, not the person themselves, and b) they don’t fucking know me, which means that c) I’m not entitled to speak to them in certain intimate ways. It’s okay to form an emotional attachment to someone’s work, and their persona. Hell, the current landscape of the creative internet actually requires that creative people encourage a degree of this attachment to fucking survive. You’re supposed to want to see every update from a “creator”, every video clip, every breath we take.

To be famous at all is to live in the holding pen outside a slaughterhouse

And this is a recipe for self destruction, especially for marginalized people. For a fat person, or a person in a fat body – god, so many of us feel like we’re a thin person just imprisoned somehow! – there is something particularly cruel and horrible about the inevitable scrutiny on us. Lindy writes agonizingly about how people scolded her for losing weight as they projected their insecurities onto her.

It must have hurt. I can only imagine how it hurt. And it is as much a fault of the “good fan” for having shitty boundaries and poor distinctions of self-definition around Lindy, as it is the fault of a troll for dehumanizing her and targeting her. In a horrible way, every fan is a troll waiting to happen.

There’s a speech in the first Sam Raimi Spiderman movie, where Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin emotively snarls advice at Tobey Maguire’s wide-eyed Peter Parker, about how what people love more than a hero is “to see a hero fall, see him fail.” The thing about a dead hero is that they can’t disappoint you. This is also true of dead women; they are perfect ciphers, sexy blank canvases upon which any fantasy can be perfectly projected, painted, embroidered.

Now make the beautiful woman fat. Because we don’t like talking about that, do we, that fat women can be incontrovertibly beautiful? But there is some horrible angle to this, to the way that fat bodies are subject to an extra level of scrutiny. Prodded, poked, laid out flat; as people performatively describe their disgust for us and demonstrate their own virtue at the expense of our fallen bodies. It is like being eaten to death by rats, devoured one bite at a time, though you’ll feel every nibble. Do it to Julia.

Societally, we do not discuss the beauty of fat forms; luxurious, plush flesh, a huge variety of different kinds of softness and welcome. A body you can sink into and rest on. It’s not all about sex: there is comfort here. My toddler son loves to sleep on my tummy, and the way he cuddles into what has been my most hated body feature gives me pause. He is comfortable, happy, on the fattest part of me, and my fat helps me nurture him, while cushioning my bones and organs against twenty-odd pounds of rambunctious little kid flopping against them. My lovers don’t mind my belly, but it’s my son’s joy that is eroding my self-loathing, bit by bit.

Sure, the nineties raved about big tits and the 2010s were the era of the thick ass and thighs – but fat on publicly celebrated bodies is sculpted, curated, strictly controlled; not permitted wildness or softness or malleability. To sag and give in to gravity’s arc is to fail at the task of womanhood, and increasingly, manhood; to admit defeat in the face of entropy. We are supposed to be young and firm forever. We do not discuss or even consider that, maybe, there’s beauty to be found in age, or even that aging isn’t as bad as we claim it is.

The people who hate Lindy West and other fat people would probably sooner stab themselves in the face than admit that maybe, possibly, some of them find us a little bit attractive, or even just don’t find us that disgusting. But fat bodies are common and normal. Fat bodies are normal.

 Just writing that sentence is, somehow, fucking iconoclastic, even after decades of fat activist work; just saying “fat bodies are normal” feels like it needs some sort of caveat, or apology, or context, or some swooping caveat to condemn the most extreme cases of obesity and high weight. As though stigma and scolding will save people from the shadow of fat this time, in defiance of literally every other piece of evidence we’ve got about the relationship between weight and stigma and mental health.

What Should Lindy West Do?

I can’t speak for what Lindy West needs to do, apart from like, probably more therapy – something, I hasten to add, that I recommend for pretty much everyone who can manage it – but I do think that, if Lindy were to read this article somewhere, I’d say she might wanna listen to some punk music. Punk music is, broadly, about expressing the emotion of telling someone to go fuck themselves, and she could do worse than listening to Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette a couple times. The Regrettes are also high on my recommendation list. I’d also mention Bikini Kill or The Suffrajetts, but I haven’t listened to much of their work yet. Same goes for The Bad Decisions, who are also on my music homework playlist.  

(Don’t fucking gatekeep what counts as punk in the comments, or I will come to your house, knock on your door, look you in the eye, and tell you how much I don’t give a shit.)

No, really. There’s allegedly a  Zen koan that says, “If you see the Buddha on the side of the road, kill him.” The meaning of this is basically that like, someone claiming or appearing to be the Buddha is not the real Buddha, and it’s kind of meant to make you think about the concept of reverence compared to actual reverence, and like the whole sorta-atheistic nature of Buddhism qua not actually treating Buddha as a god but as like, a role model – and other stuff. I’m not actually a Buddhist; just someone who likes thinking an awful lot. In the same way, if you see an internet troll in your comment section, kill them (in your head; for legal and fucking logical humane reasons, I’m not advocating actual violence).

But relatedly, I think there’s a deep and profound importance to learning to shun people’s expectations, especially on the endlessly cannibalistic internet. Lindy West was never going to be good and perfect enough to satisfy everyone, to be a Perfect Fat Person, especially because different ideas and requirements for what it means to be a Good Fat Person exist, clashing and cracking against each other like her poor, abused teeth. But in the same way that her teeth needed the support of orthodontics, individual creators absolutely cannot get by without the support of colleagues.

Community is a bit messier and less ideal than we want it to be. To quote a good friend of mine, “being in community means being annoyed sometimes,” and that’s true. And being annoyed means dealing with your emotions, which sometimes means bitching and gossiping in private, then working your shit out so you can actually still be kind to the person who’s annoyed you. This, incidentally, is also how relationships work, whether platonic, romantic, familial, or some messy alterous nebulous thing you’re trying to figure out.

I’m still unlearning the anxiety and uncertainty and double-back clarifications that Tumblr and Facebook arguments taught me; the uncertainty in my own voice and fear of misinterpretation as I fail to cover ground for every possible meaning. It’s interwoven with real-life trauma I’ve been through in nasty, elf-locked tangles and knots. Some days I win against the self-doubt, some I lose. But when I see my girlfriend hesitate and struggle to share an opinion, the kind Tumblr would have flayed her for in her teen years, I support and encourage her, because in doing so, I’m also putting the boots to my own demons.

Sometimes it’s really fucking hard to tell whether the yelling is coming from inside the house or the street outside. The worst thing of all is when the monsters in the closet and the dickheads on the street are screaming the same things.

So fuck ‘em. Be angry at them. Maybe get real creative with your insults and dismissals. It feels great sometimes. And the best ways to disarm trolls are a) a casual acceptance of fault, if you did in fact fuck something up for real, and b) baring your teeth and showing them that you’re not a helpless little creature.  

And when people who claim to love you try to transgress your boundaries and hurt you, give them a chance to talk about it. And if they keep doing it, over and over, they also might need to go fuck themselves, and you might have to say it.

And I have more to say about that, but we’ll get to it in part 2.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

Silence is Choking Me

 I had plans, last year, to try and write a post a week and publish a chapter of my finished trilogy a week.

That hasn’t exactly happened, but I’m trying to break through the feelings that have kept me silent and frozen, and well, that starts with a few words on a page, so here goes.

Oh, and this post comes with songs that inspired and fit its vibe. Let me know if you like that, because I might start including more song embeds and soundtracks to posts.

Never mind the whole “parenting takes time” thing – the real problems I’ve been struggling with are two primary issues.

1)       Everything is unbelievably hard and absurd

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zz4UG7nA3Q&si=6MoXUbaqbskegi3B – this song keeps playing over and over in my head periodically.

It’s not exactly revelatory to mention that, you know, the world order has been upended and norms have been disrupted further than we thought possible. Nor is it particularly shocking to hear a millennial lamenting, but hey, that’s what I’m gonna do – reflect on how I feel about where We, as a society and maybe as a species, are at right now.

So obviously, this comes with the caveat and blinders of being a white North American from Canada, but the fact that we’ve all just kind of gotten used to what ecologists and scientists are referring to as “ecocide” [citation] is um, a trifle fucked up? Just a little bit. One of my cousins, whom I love dearly, posted about this recently.

Ecological issues are deeply important to me, but I’m often unable to focus on them because of the sheer existential dread and grief that comes with trying to think about them. I’m certainly not alone there, but I want to remind people who are trying desperately not to think about the climate crisis and water issues and plastic pollution and methane levels and deforestation – you are not alone in being scared as fuck, and upset, and angry.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=v2e6nVHfXa0&si=XyY1DlX9hN9FFt8B

But there is an upside to this. Doomerism is the weapon of the elites against us, and it’s also a vast, inaccurate scientific oversimplification. Have things gotten worse? Well, yeah. I’m not going to sugarcoat that. But a hundred small things make a difference, and there is no point at which we should just throw in the towel. Yes, things can get worse, but they can always get better, too. Every inch we fight for counts. Every tenth of a degree centigrade that we keep from advancing matters. Every species we protect and give a chance to rebound, matters.

Nature is more resilient than we think. This is not a video game, where we fail at a number of conditions and the game is just fucking irreparably over and lost. It’s not even that we still have “a chance,” it’s that we have thousands of chances. And we should not, and cannot, squander them.

This entire screed also applies entirely and completely to the political situation we’re dealing with. Democracy is not fucking dead, and billionaires and the elites are not invincible. And yes, it’s hard not to give up sometimes, and yes we need to take breaks and focus on joy to survive – but friends, there is so much more fight left in us than we realise. We just might have to try some different strategies. I’ll be talking more about politics in a post soon.

2)       Oh hey, apparently I’m more disabled than I realised

So another fun thing I’ve been grappling with is a number of health issues that – I haven’t been ignoring, I’ve just been unaware/haven’t realised how much I was struggling with them. Reader, I recently went and applied for some specific programs and initiatives, government things. Without getting into the precious and specific details of my diagnoses, it wa truly humbling, shocking, and in every way upsetting to realise just how much I’ve been dealing with, without…really realising or understanding the extent of my own problems.

It’s so easy to fall into default expectations of physical ability, especially if any or most of your disabilities present invisibly. I kind of thought the whole mental illness and autism things were bad enough, but hey, apparently there’s more I’ve been struggling with, and having to describe it for bureaucratic purposes really put it in ugly, ugly perspective.

So honestly, I’m grieving right now; over what I thought I could do and time I’ve lost, and I’m trying to adjust my expectations of my future. I don’t have any conditions that are immediately life-threatening or degenerative – to my knowledge, and so far – so in some ways, I do count myself as very lucky. But it’s still not what I envisioned and what I expected, and adjusting to that is goddamn hard.

So that’s where I’m at, but I have too many long-form thoughts and poems and stories percolating to be silent for long. But hey, I don’t want this post to be entirely either a) a bummer or b) kind of toxic, hopeless complaining, so I’m gonna close with a list of some things that are bringing me joy right now.

3)       The comforts and remedies

I’m lucky to have really good friends and relationships in my life, and I haven’t really had any friction from the people who care about me or socialise with me over my struggles. I’m really grateful for that. I recently finished an absolutely epic-length play-by-post roleplay game based on the Monsterhearts 2 roleplaying game system, a Powered by the Apocalypse build, and it was very fulfilling and deeply satisfying. We’re doing a few little epilogue-y things, but the actual game and a bunch of emotional stuff is pretty wrapped up.

That said, many of the same people and a couple of new faces are also involved in a second play-by-post game with a different system and storyline, involving Triangle Agency (which is a really cool system and game in terms of its design; strongly recommended!) and that’s been a blast. These games have been absolutely essential to my sanity and morale over the past couple of years, and I’m so grateful to have made some excellent friendships and deep bonds with my tablemates.

In terms of my other creative pursuits outside of writing, I’ve had a pretty good time with my knitting and jewelry-making; my wife and husband got me a chasing hammer and a new set of flush cutters for wire for Mother’s Day, and my god, having the right tools can make such a huge difference. I’m also pushing myself a bit with some market appearances this summer, like the local South Country Fair, and that’s pretty exciting.

Here’s a couple of pieces I’ve made (May 15^th, 2026, hot off the bench) and some in-progress knits.

  (This was a progress shot, but the bolero is now finished, and extremely soft and fluffy, btw)

I’m also enjoying parenthood a lot more than I feared; my son is absolutely wonderful, and a very kind, sweet, bright little creature, full of spirit and curiosity, but also immensely helpful. I couldn’t be a parent without the support structures of my spouses, and I’m so grateful that I get the chance to have this, and to have such a fantastic kid. I was so terrified that I’d hate parenthood, especially this toddler stage – and sure, sometimes it’s very hard work and tiring, but I’m inexpressibly happy and relieved that my greatest fears have been proven utterly wrong.

So that’s all for this post, but expect some political posts and a musing on the ends of, among others, Good Omens Season 3 and some other media properties coming soon, plus some more poetry.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

Fuck Charlie Kirk

[So, I actually wrote this not long after the whole assassination thing happened, buuut it’s December and I feel like posting more poetry this month while I work on some upcoming posts, so that’s what you get!]

They held a rally for the fascist who died
there were pyrotechnics at his funeral
he said people like me
“should be dealt with like they did in the 50s and 60s”
And I’m still being scolded
for not mourning
Their small-featured martyr
apparently a calm white man with a baritone
deserves canonization for
being killed by the same words
he used as weapons

But when people demand grace and patience
without showing any
then say you deserve no quarter in the same breath
that’s just abuse in a cheap red ballcap
the tolerant have left
and if we’re using words as weapons
then catch the sharp end
of my self defense

I will not be quiet
I will not perform sadness
For a monster, a scam artist, or a grifter
I will not gracefully excuse
the fact that my member of Parliament,
Rachel Harder,
called for a standing ovation for a man who said
he’d make his daughter
bear a child of a rape to term
because forcing people to
give birth matters more than
our pain or our choices
I will not sit down and bite my tongue
For the potential of a career in politics
Because pinching our noses and making nice
Is how we got here

And if this poem makes you uncomfortable
and you want me to shut up
or be kinder
then look me in the eye and tell me
why I should care
about your feelings
more than my own or those of my communities

We will not be cowed
by your cowardice or fumbling snatches for power
we said “this pussy grabs back”
and now it’s got teeth

If this poem makes you uncomfortable
you do not have the right
to tell me to be nicer
and you can’t fucking make me.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people’s manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

 

 

 

Marx's Loophole

 So, I mentioned in a previous article that I've been agonizing over leftist infighting issues for - well - a few years now. Despite the sharp tone of my previous posts and some others, it should be noted that I don't hate modern communists - in fact, I generally agree with a lot of their aims (with the exception of the small number of dictator apologists). I am, however, significantly more comfortable around people who talk about democratic socialism and who generally aren't demanding a one-party state, because of my previously stated vehement opposition to totalitarianism. 

But today, I want to take a stab at a greatly revered dead old white male theorist's basic ideas. This is another article I've been considering for some time, but I'm going to endeavour to make it less lengthy and meandering than my last release. (Especially because I'm not entirely sure most of my readers are here for extended musings on political theory from an admitted non-expert.) 

In a nutshell, then, Marxism doesn't work and is incomplete, and we on the left need to stop making everything try to fit its exact circumscriptions. 

There are two relatively simple reasons why I would put this relatively obvious theory forward, and they both come down to the scientific fact that we are social animals. 

Money represents attention; both represent power

In other social species, such as chickens, chimpanzees, bonobos, or dolphins, hierarchies naturally develop. Before I learned about more of the basic concepts of anarchism, I thought it was devoted to resisting hierarchies under all circumstances, which struck me as innately ridiculous. How could one organize and get anything done without some kind of chain of command? Then I found out that the point was destroying unjust and entrenched hierarchies, which made more sense - but is still a tricky proposition.

The thing is, as anyone who's spent five minutes on the leftist internet will tell you, those hierarchies will recapitulate themselves, even without monetary incentives. Memes and art are shared freely, as is fanfiction, and that certainly supports the idea that resources are being artificially restricted from the public by the actions of the wealthy and their corporations - but the people who produce these things and the algorithms that promote and share them are not created equal. Unjust hierarchies are not only bone-deep, but are inevitably recycled, even when they're reversed. Attention is a form of currency and exchange because it represents power; money also represents power. But trying to remove power from human society and interactions is like trying to run a battery without electricity. 

The most we can do is try to redistribute power as equitably as possible, while working intentionally to compensate for historical and present-day injustices. I don't believe there will ever be an end point, because new injustices will happen as the world progresses - but trying to compensate for them brings improvements, and a better world. The alternative is to just try and embrace the inequality, which is pretty much the thesis of fascism - and if you haven't gotten the idea from my other articles, fascism is bad. Not only that, it's fundamentally unsustainable and precarious. Even if it didn't lead to suffering and injustice, it wouldn't work. But communism as depicted in Marx's writings doesn't exactly work either, because of this whole power and imbalance thing I keep talking about.

The fight for justice will never end

It is vitally important, even required, resist and break down unjust hierarchies, even the most entrenched. As stated previously, I don't support attempting this with violence, but resisting and protesting fascists is also a form of societal self-defense. Being present at white supremacist rallies discourages them, because fascism is fundamentally a belief requiring cowardice. 

Unfortunately, despite their many flaws, democracies are the best system we've come up with for self-determination thus far. It seems like fascism is, rather than a one-time event, cyclical. One thing that Star Wars (I know, shut up, hear me out) represents well is that democracies are always going to be susceptible to fascism and predatory conservatism. But the alternative is totalitarianism, and that, we must fight. As Benjamin Franklin put it, "A republic, gentlemen - if you can keep it." 

There is no "one last person to take resources from and then we can yeet into the beautiful future" stage. There is no socialist paradise. It's like the stuff in the New Testament about building the Kingdom of God on earth, and which leftist christians understand as being "hey not being a dick is a continuous process." There will be no messianic Revolution where All the Bad People Die and the Rest of Us get to live in Egalitarian Heaven. 

(I'm not Christian, but I do really like ex-Christian and leftist Christian media; it's been good for my spiritual health.)

Can we have a beautiful future? I don't know, but we can certainly try to make now better. The healthier our democracies and systems become, the more resilient they'll be to the next wave of fascist or conservative backlashes. 

Humanity will never be able to stop trying to balance altruism and self-interest. Even if we damage the planet to the point that we struggle to inhabit it, I very much doubt that we'll actually go extinct. However, if we refuse the temptation to discard the tools at hand, and use our cracked, damaged systems to their fullest extent, we stand more than a snowball's chance in hell of conquering our worst instincts and remedying historical and present atrocities. 

Source.

And yes, I know she's called "Tank Girl," and that modern-day dictator apologists are known as "tankies," but the point still stands.

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and their cats. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people’s manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet: * OG Blog * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * Paypal.me * Ko-fi

Horseshoe Theory is Not Enough

 I was crawling through my Discord and Facebook threads about politics and chatting with friends when a buddy shared a screenshot of a tweet that made my jaw drop. (Discord is a social chatting platform similar to old IRC chats, but with a nicer interface; if you don't know what Facebook and Twitter are, I would like to know the location of your rock, and exactly how many other blind salamanders live under it, because it should probably be protected by UNESCO.) 

Anyway, there's a content producer called Peter Coffin. They create video essays on Youtube, and since I tend to watch my fair share of "Leftube"/"Breadtube"/educational and witty videos about current events and philosophical topics, I've come across their work. They're very aggressively against "horseshoe theory," which is the idea that the extreme left and the extreme right bend around to being similar to each other. This makes it seem as though the center/centrism is the most rational perspective and belief - obviously, I personally disagree with that. 

(All screenshots were taken on January 15th, around 12 AM, by myself.)  

The tweets I've screenshotted here are, to put it colloquially, cursed as fuck. Proceed with caution (and some type of memory-scrubbing agent, especially for that Pence tweet).

However, the way this political theorist has spoken about Gamergate has been - to put it mildly - a warning sign. Gamergaters launched targeted harassment at game designers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu, among others, citing their role in...somehow prejudicing the industry against white men? "It's about ethics in games journalism" became a rallying cry - but any amount of examination made that ostensible excuse fall apart like a dessicated wasp nest. 

To reiterate: they (Peter Coffin) are sympathizing with people who created an entire narrative structure to validate their anger at BIPoC, women (+), and LGBTQ people for both wanting to be represented in games and designing their own games and stories. 

If nothing else, more art makes art better. Straight people, white people, and especially men actually benefit from these stories existing, because it will lead to more nuances and better stories being told for them, too. 

Gamergate, QAnon, and MAGA

Unfortunately, when people equate a desire for representation with hate, and when they also ignore power structures, we get things like the violence against Black Lives Matter protestors. These movements share very similar ethics and values. In fact, the pickup artist community and the "manosphere," as well as the incel movements, have all been linked to the alt-right. These communities directly feed into each other and stoke violent hatred. 

And why wouldn't they? Defensive, angry people hearing that their way of life is Bad, Actually are going to group together. Unfortunately, arguing with these people online tends to push them further into their bubbles. Discussion etiquette is in a dire state, but some arguments are also too stupid to be countenanced. Instead, de-radicalization therapies and approaches are more effective. 

Trying to debate a cultist doesn't work. I've tried. Unfortunately, understanding how the violent kind of radicalization and cults work has given me insight into something unpleasant. The left doesn't become like the right - rather, the alt-right tends to use the trappings of the left, and sometimes, converts us. Two groups of people who distrust the government, albeit for drastically different reasons, can come together over that link. The same thing happens with flat Earthers - some believe in a dome, and some believe in a weird ice-wall thing, but they're basically just united by their opposition, rather than a core set of principles.  

And when people get so focused on one element of inequality that it blots out their understanding of all others - for instance, class reductionists like Coffin, who think that capitalism and clout culture are the only explanation for every problem - their logic tends to disintegrate.

]

But empathy? 

Here's the thing. Empathy with the people on the other side is actually important. I speak in harsh terms about white supremacists because we can't excuse their behaviour, but understanding their anger and fear is important. Hell, even understanding why rich, powerful people probably don't want to hand over their comforts and resources helps. 

But as much as the institutions punishing the protestors suck, and as much as they've been used against the oppressed, it doesn't mean that we should sympathize with people who believed the election was fraudulent because their candidate didn't win. My Canadian representatives and my preferred American candidates haven't won every single election, but the correct response to that state is to protest or strike and use democratic means when possible. Even setting aside the absolutely awful, stupid things Trump and his movement stand for, vicious and abusive tantrums are unacceptable. 

Sympathizing with people choosing to attempt the murder of others is bad, actually. Seeing this perspective voiced by someone who has been so adamant about the fact that horseshoe theory is fake is painfully ironic. 

What can we learn from Peter's screwups? 

There's plenty to laugh at and cringe at here. The most important thing to take away from all this is approaching all of our ideas with caution and awareness of our biases. Empathy and pragmatism have to go hand-in-hand. Finally, if we try to make everything fit a single pattern, all we'll do is draw a red-string conspiracy board, and strangle ourselves. 

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and their two cats. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people’s manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find her all over the internet: * OG Blog * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * Paypal.me * Ko-fi

Just Desserts

 Oh, how the turn tables. 

With Trump impeached for the second time in one term - a historic first for the US - I wanted to take a moment to really just savour the backlash against him and the fascist movement threatening him. 

Despite what a small number of people on the left and liberals are saying - you know, that we ought to be kind to these discontented "patriots" trying to do their best, etcetera - the reprecussions have been severe. Delayed, granted - this should have happened years ago. Trump should never have been allowed to run. The deplatforming should have started with Alex Jones' denial of the Sandy Hook shooting, but it was allowed to go on. Still, I cannot help but celebrate. 

It was so overdue. 

Koch, Disney, and Hallmark  are a few of the names rescinding or "reconsidering" or pulling funding outright from either the Republican Congress and Senate members who encouraged the riot, or the entirety of the GOP. Dow Chemical - you know, from Dow Jones in the stock market? - announced a similar kneecapping. And this comes after Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok, even Pinterest. The app Parler, which was funded heavily by a GOP supporter,  has been scrubbed from the Apple and Google app stores. 

If you're wondering why I'm gleeful rather than concerned about this, I've written about the paradox of tolerance before. Suffice to say that saying something does not mean that anyone is obligated to listen to or support what is said. Furthermore, here in Canada, we distinguish between free speech and credible threats of violence. "I could strangle him, I'm so mad" may be incriminating, but is not a crime; "We should go strangle him right now, and I'll drive. Get the rope and a shovel" has a specificity that makes it dangerous. 

After years of the Black Lives Matter movement and of antifascist protestors and the black blocs being painted as terrorists, and years of LGBTQ+ and BIPoC being silenced and treated more harshly than others on these very platforms, the other side is getting a taste of it. It will never make up for the fact that people who simply didn't want to be murdered by institutional forces were fired, traumatized, threatened, and worse - but it's progress. 

Source. 

The catch 

Unfortunately, it's not over yet. The violence in DC may betoken a wave of terrorism on Inauguration Day. Journalist Sarah Kenzior and her colleague Andrea Chalupa, as well as reporters from Slate and Vox, expressed concerns that further conflict and sabotage will occur at various state capitols - as well as at the Inauguration itself. 

As much as I'm blowing the world's tiniest noisemaker over this victory, we can't be complacent. We have to be vigilant. White supremacy-based, Christian-rooted violence has been underestimated for decades, and now we're reaping the price. 

Listen. The FBI, RCMP, police, and other bodies of law enforcement are tools of colonialism and oppression. I wish it were otherwise, but police officers were present on both sides of the terrorist acts at the Hill. Both Canada and the USA are settler nations on stolen land, founded on oppression - but these messy democracies are the best we've got, and we can keep working from within them to vote, protest, and strike for change. Democracy has to be protected and defended, and we cannot assume that the fascists, conspiracy theorists, and cult followers in Trump's motley crew will rest. 

A brave and careful person going by the handle donk_enby scrubbed terabites of identifying information from Parler, helping the FBI locate these terrorists. This is not "thought-crime" or any of the buzzwords invoked by conservatives and centrists who skim-read a few paragraphs of 1984. These were actual criminal and morally reprehensible actions, the type of which all social species have to deal with and circumscribe for their own survival. 

Even if you dislike, loathe, or distrust these institutions, the fact that they're doing what they're designed for is a win. The system is bad, but we must try to bend it to our will, and take advantage of this moment of reprisal. 

Source. 

In the meantime, while we catch our breaths, we can spare a moment to smile. For once, something fair happened to people who wanted to hurt others. A bunch of Gen Z staffers who endured school shooting drills saved the lives of many elected representatives. 

Retaliatory murder does not bring justice - only pain and and more disorder. Instead, we need restorative justice - and the prosecution of the white wannabe secessionists is a little start in that direction. 

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and their two cats. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people’s manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find her all over the internet: * OG Blog * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * Paypal.me * Ko-fi