[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
- Male Submission Art: Chains wrap a young man’s wrists as he holds his hands together, bowing his head.
- Chains wrap a young man’s wrists as he holds his hands together, bowing his head.
I love the way the lighting in this photograph almost seems to drape itself over the model’s hands and the chain around his wrists. The limited view we get lends itself to many possible narratives. Psychoadept, who sent this picture in, had this to say about the image…
- I am a racist
- The point of this isn't just to do a sort of "walk of shame". The point is that I am an incredibly lucky person, who has benefited from all sorts of things – from where I was born, to the color of my skin, to the background of my parents, to my gender. I have recieved, and continue to receive benefits because of those, and many other factors that have nothing to do with my own merit. And except for very rare occasions, that goes unremarked, unnoticed.
People like me think of ourselves as the default – as "normal" people. We consider the incredible advantages that we receive to be normal, unremarkable. We don't notice just how much we benefit from that assumption of our own normality – the benefits we receive fade into invisibility. We don't even notice that they exist. And then when someone who doesn't get those benefits has trouble, we naturally blame them for not being as successful as we are.
The underlying theme of people like the jerk who inspired this post is: "I made it by myself, without any help. So they should be able to make it by themselves, without any help either."
But that's bullshit, because none of us "made it by ourselves". We're the beneficiaries of the system we live in.
The Link(s): Thu, Apr 15th, 11am by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.