like, i just don’t like hierarchies, i really don’t. i feel like a lot of things i think or feel come down to this on some level. i don’t like judging people for anything that doesn’t hurt anyone (am i guilty of it, HELL YEAH, but i am trying to back off, mostly), and that’s what hierarchies of desire do, is judge people for wanting a different thing than you. i hate that we’re instructed on what to want - and that “trying to mostly be a decent person as best as we can and not hurt people” is not all that prominent frankly among the lessons we learn - it just bums me out/pisses me off like whoa, whether it’s about what gets you off or who you fall in love with or what your goals are or whatever. i think we should be given blank slates and the space to spend time - spend a lot of time, and not need to figure it out by the time we’re 20 - learning and deciding our desires for ourselves.
This. A lot of sense. It drives me batty when people think that what they want and need should be conflated with the entire world wants. It almost seems like some sort of fucked-up twist on Kant’s categorical imperative (which if I remember right from that college Ethics course about 12 years ago translates roughly to “act in a way that if everyone on earth acted that way, you’d be cool with it”) that seems to leave people feeling invalidated if everyone doesn’t make exactly the same choices as they do!
Or what some people used to (and probably still do) call the “radical” feminist need for equality-as-vanilla-world, where none of us perform any gender at all (which always leads to dressing in pants and loose shirts as if those are genderless) and none of us have kinky sex or in general ever do anything out of the ordinary.
Equality doesn’t mean we all wind up the same. Just because hierarchies and binaries are fucked up doesn’t mean that we all have to prioritize the same things. We have to learn to stop ranking choices and decisions as “better” or “worse” than others if they aren’t hurting anyone—and allow people their own definitions of what hurts them.
/rant
