O casal monogamico não é necessariamente definido pela exclusividade sexual, muitos continuam juntos apesar de traições… o mais importante é a hierarquia entre o casal e os outros amantes (amizades, familia etc): apenas uma pessoa é considerada legitima. Há constante competição para alcançar e conservar o “núcleo casal”.
No entanto, mesmo com a pretensão da segurança e eternidade desses relacionamentos, hoje temos monogamias consecutivas (namoros e casamentos curtos) que deixam pra trás muitos cadáveres afetivos e quebra total de relacionamentos em rede.
Assim como outros sistemas de controle, a monogamia tambem costuma ser justificada como “natural”, mesmo quando no resto do reino animal não exista como categorizar seres sempre estritamente monogamicos.
A questão do genero binario vem junto no pacote, mas temos diversos casos, como dos amerindios (EUA) em que as comunidades validavam, pelo menos, 5 tipos de generos diferentes em seu grupo. Brigitte também comenta que muitas especies tem individuos que trocam de sexualidade de acordo com a necessidade social do bando.
O sistema monogamico foi se formando juntamente com o cercamento de terras, controle populacional… a igreja, que já teve ritos iniciaticos de sexo grupal para gerar maior coesão de grupo, passa a perseguir essas práticas e usar seu poder para fortificar o imaginário da família heterosexual patriarcal.
✨ No seculo XX já não temos memória de outras possibilidades.
Hoje a positivação da exclusividade esta relacionada com os mecanismos do consumo e da publicidade: Produtos exclusivos, férias exclusivas, clubes exclusivos, diplomas exclusivos, bairros exclusivos, assentos exclusivos… o que não passa de propagandas para produtos efêmeros, como também acabam sendo os relacionamentos.
O tabú da fidelidade, encobre algo maior e mais importante que são a responsabilidade ou a co-responsabilidade, o compromisso ou a interdependência em comunidade… O medo da solidão atual não é apenas sobre não ter redes, há pessoas que estão sós no abismo de nossas vidas contemporâneas, não porque não tem companhia, mas porque ninguém se preocupa com elas.
Brigitte acredita que é possível fazer da nossa experiência amorosa coletiva uma ferramenta de transformação política, que distribui os direitos e deveres de forma mais equitativa do que a formação jurídica e reprodutiva da “família tradicional”, essa que não necessariamente forma vínculos de comunidade, mas sim torna facilmente identificável quem pertence a quem, inclusive no quesito de privilégios hereditários ou no que diz respeito às nacionalidades…
Ela alerta, porém, que romper esse vínculo sexo-afetivo sem abrir outras perspectivas comunitárias também é aventurar-se a solidão que é real no território de desemparo que habitamos de indiferença generalizada…
Na relação poliamorosa, todas as partes se conhecem, sabem da existência umas das outras, por outro lado as redes afetivas não se conformam com o conhecer mas em construir reconhecimento, coletivizando os prazeres e também as dores, tendo o reconhecimento como base da possibilidade de existência comum. Afinal, quando um dos afetos conhece a outra parte, mas não reconhece sua implicação na rede, a rede não existe, só existem fragmentos..
Por outro lado, ela reconhece que estamos caminhando para uma sociedade cada vez mais individualizada e ainda androcentrica (pautada no patriarcado, como no caso da ficção das fotos e vídeos de mulheres feitas para “servir” O prazer de “um” só homem) pautada no desenvolvimento de tecnologias que tornam até mesmo o prazer em algo virtual, nos afastando cada vez mais da real intimidade e vulnerabilidade do afeto, nos aproximando cada vez mais de um sistema altamente controlador, cada vez mais preditivo e opressor, transformando até mesmo nosso prazer em algo limitado e mecânico.
Brigitte Vasallo é uma escritora espanhola conhecida especialmente por sua crítica da islamofobia de género, a denúncia do purplewashinge o homonacionalismo, bem como por sua defesa do poliamor nas relações afetivas. (fonte: wikipedia)
Rich neighborhoods very well delimited and far from the poorest, several subcenters that don’t talk to each other, have you ever had the impression that visiting São Paulo is like visiting many different cities?
The city has a disjointed and segregated formation, mainly the result of the adoption of foreign urban public policies, instead of having created our own policies based on our existing reality.
These policies were driven by foreign capital and were practices that created the financialization of land in other countries, forming a more complex real estate market.
As the policies prioritized the profit of some agents and not the better socialization of the population, as a consequence, there was the breakdown of community life, the super individualization of lives, the difficulty for all classes to connect, among other hallmarks of the capitalist system and hyperconsumption.
Even knowing that these policies generated social problems, the Basic Urban Plan (PUB), prepared in 1969 by a consortium between two Brazilian and two North American companies, included among its elements the same American practices that were sold as innovative measures to stimulate the urban development through subcenters.
Instead of enriching and strengthening the existing infrastructure in the city, new centers were artificially created, not because the population indicated this need, but to create spaces where new investors, mainly foreigners, could operate.
One of the emblematic cases was the corporate and financial center, which was previously located on Avenida Paulista and was driven by developers to be dispersed and built from scratch on the banks of the Pinheiros River. In her Ph. adequate housing and relocation for these people.
This process is very similar to the zoning that expelled the poor from New York City in the 1920s: when the number of people in the city increased significantly, it forced different social classes to live very close to each other. Middle-class people, who had access to industrialized consumer goods, now no longer wanted contact with millions of poor and indigent people.
This started the process of gentrification or ennoblement of urban areas, done through higher taxation or definition of uses for each area, among other zoning tools that make it illegal or very expensive for the poor to be in certain districts of the city, these mechanisms bureaucratic led to the expropriation of the tenements and the poor were induced or forced to leave the centers and live in distant housing complexes or found other ways of (over)living by themselves, sometimes with access to mass transportation, the subway.
These urban decentralizing tendencies are considered by the sociologist Bauman — precursor of the concept of liquid modernity and who also thinks about urbanity in this key — as strategies that aim, purposefully, at the segregation and disintegration of community life, since coexistence in the city starts to depend on the Mobility and Time, two luxuries.
Thus, the city entered the 20th century. With the increase in wealth, there was a search for the materialization of comfort in the territory through demolitions, requalifications, landscaping and adequacy of spaces for transport.
On the other hand, part of the wealthy portion decided to move away from the centers and it is also at this time that the suburbs appeared: neighborhoods further away from the city center, but for richer people, generally composed of houses with a garden.
the suburb
In the United States, the pioneering city in this model was Los Angeles, described by Peter Hall as “the city by the side of the highway”, because the suburban neighborhoods were built where the ranches by the side of the road used to be. Those cheap, devalued lands were bought at a bargain price, separated into lots and sold as special, peaceful spaces for family homes.
That is, ranches adjacent to the city were intentionally purchased for real estate speculation. This decentralization model became a great opportunity for developers, it was a life project to be sold to the middle class public.
Around here, more than 50 years later, we copied the model: the Alphaville region was formerly land of traditional and wealthy families in São Paulo, but inhabited by a hundred small producers, the region began to be expropriated and divided into lots from the 1960s onwards. 50 and was launched as a product, a new concept in housing, in the early 70’s.
It didn’t happen that the rich naturally went there, the plan was ingenious to build a new independent urban core: there was a plan to induce people to actually live in these neighborhoods, the condominiums imposed strict rules for building permanent residences to prevent subdivisions become just vacation homes.
To attract these residents, advertisements made appeals such as “Verteville 4 — in Alphaville -, real solutions to current problems” or, as the psychoanalyst Dunker brings in his book on Alphaville “Mal-Estar, Suffering and Symptom: A psychopathology of Brazil between walls”, condominium advertisements are even more explicit: “Vila das Mercês. The right not to be disturbed”.
At the time, articles for the newspaper Estadão, Alphaville is stated as a neighborhood that overcomes the “embarrassment” of the chaos of the city, among other speeches similar to those of the promises in Los Angeles in the 20s-30s, condominiums that would be the “construction of authentic communities”, an oasis of collaboration, protected by private security.
It is not known, however, where such high expectations of advertisements came from, as the housing model in suburbs had not worked in Los Angeles, which suffered impacts as early as 1920.
In his book “City of Quartz”, Mike Davis discusses the decline of the city with the decline of commerce in pre-highway areas, the segregation of recreational facilities, the closing of community centers and the increase in street violence.
Here in Alphaville, the consequences can be clearly seen in the documentary “from the inside of the wall”:
In his book “Confidence and fear in the city”, Bauman defends the need for an urbanization that creates communities without walls, even though it is known that this urban integration is a permanent clash, an eternal struggle of interests.
Didn’t the propaganda say the poor were going to stay away?
In the decades following these decentralization movements in the city of São Paulo, social differentiation in became increasingly evident due to the location where people transit, mainly due to the relationship with individual purchasing power, which brought striking consequences for Brazilian society.
In 2001, Alphaville received an additional barrier with the inauguration of the first toll booth in the region, located on the Castelo Branco Highway, a few kilometers from the neighborhood.
This measure was met with criticism, because residents of neighboring cities had waited a long time for a faster route to go to São Paulo and, now that it was available, they could not use it due to the high abusive amount charged in tolls, which only thought of profiting from on top of the rich in Alphaville or, in a double movement, push the poor from that neighborhood even further away.
In São Paulo, we saw social segregation intensify, as with private security, walls and electric fences monitored by cameras and other new technologies.
In 2008 the mechanisms were even more subtle and far-fetched, when, at the inauguration of Shopping Cidade Jardim, the city was faced with a novelty: there was no entrance for pedestrians, to avoid those who did not have cars and, moreover, there was no square food at the mall.
Two years later, between 2010 and 2011, residents of the wealthy Higienópolis neighborhood, with less than 5,000 inhabitants, opposed the construction of the subway line in the region, as they believed that this would bring “unwanted people”.
A resident of the neighborhood said, in an interview, that they were “different people”. The dispute for the territories materializes a few weeks later, in response, hundreds of people came together via the internet to hold a barbecue as a protest against the segregationist stance of some residents of the neighborhood, known as “Churrasco da Gente Diferenciada”.
In 2014, the issue related to the low-income population’s access to shopping centers was again highlighted in the media with the well-known “rolezinhos”. In them, low-income young people agreed to go in groups to the most expensive malls in the city, where before they were usually expelled when they went alone, separately. At the time, a well-known columnist ended up highlighting even more the prejudices rooted in society, saying that these young people were “incapable of recognizing their limitation and were jealous of wealthy youth, wealth and educated people”.
In 2019, another criticism surfaced when a famous person said that the airport was becoming a bus station, shamelessly exposing that he considered the clothes and mannerisms of the poorest people inappropriate for environments that until then were only frequented by the richest, like the airport.
Cologne 2.0
It is clear that many of these class conflicts are just a continuation of a society with a history of slavery, where the separation between the main house and the slave quarters becomes even more refined. Added to this, we have a scenario of globalization that induces the continuation of Brazilian submission to stronger economies, keeping the country in a position of colony, but with more refined economic-cultural-political mechanisms as well.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Brazil quickly entered the industrialized international market. However, during the second industrial revolution, countries like the United States and Germany invested heavily in research that generated new, more refined production technologies, increasing international competitiveness. Economist Wilson Cano argues that, at that time, the investment needed for Brazil to reach international levels in new technologies and scale of production was greater than what the Brazilian state could organize.
Foreign capital then enters under the pretext of modernizing what already existed and industrial policies are open to this, leading to the dismantling of various sectors, opening up even more space for foreign capital to denationalize the financial system. This scenario made it impossible for Brazil to become an independent neoliberal country.
In this scenario, São Paulo, the corporate capital of the country, seeks to become a modern and attractive city for investments by foreign companies, which come to “replace” the now obsolete and outdated Brazilian industry.
For this, it adopts public urban planning policies in the United States, such as “cities for cars” and “zoning plan”. This dynamizes capital and complicates the real estate market, still incipient in the city.
As a consequence, we observe an increase in the physical distance between those who can and cannot buy, live and visit areas of the city. The land, the territory and the city, now, are no longer places for coexistence, but products to be bought and financed by foreign capital.
None of this came as a surprise, as the US land planning models implemented did not promote socializing and community, but opened up a huge market for real estate developers. By bringing these models to Brazil, the side effects of such policies had been known for decades, but the weak economy made the dispute between foreign capital and state power unfair.
Com tanto tampo em casa, acho que ler, programar, fazer yoga e estreitar laços no relacionamento com o P. foram minhas atividades principais. Até terminei o finalzin de Sapiens depois de miliano e deixei outros tantos, muito bons, pra terminar nos anos que estão por vir… aqui vão os livros que li por inteiro em 2020, os grifados foram meus preferidos:
Quadrinhos
Persepolis
O árabe do futuro 1, 2, 3e 4 (o primeiro foi hilário e os outros não decepcionaram)
Pyogyang: uma jornada a coreia do norte (o último que tinha lido sobre essa temática foi em 2017)
O homem que caminha
Na prisão
Os demais
Spinster -Making a Life of One’s Own: Spinster é o termo em inglês que poderíamos traduzir como “tia dos gatos”, e esse é um livro sobre como é viver uma vida solteira com 20, 30, 40 anos e assim por diante. Fiquei super fascinada por ele e acho que toda mulher deveria ler mais sobre esse tópico, ter um parceiro e ser mãe não são obrigações de ninguém, o que pode parecer óbvio, mas pouco se fala sobre mulheres soteiras sem ser de forma prejorativa.
No seu pescoço: Ganhei de natal de um colega de trabalho, ainda não tinha lido nenhum trabalho da Chimananda, muito boa escrita.
A vegetariana: acho que esse post diz melhor sobre o livro do que eu poderia.
Este livro não vai te deixar rico – tudo o que ninguém te contou sobre empreendedorismo: Escrito pela pessoa que faz um perfil que gosto muito, o @startupdareal
Reinvenção da intimidade: Políticas do sofrimento cotidiano
Adventures in opting out – Um guia de campo para viver uma vida intencional: Já que esse é um blog sobre minimalismo, preciso fazer um review melhor dos livros da Cait, pretendo fazer agora nas férias de janeiro.
Como ser anticapitalista no século XXI
Desobedecer
Necropolítica: escrevi um pouquinho sobre lá no meio de 2020
Na hora da decisão – somos sujeitos conscientes ou máquinas biológicas?: Um livro estilo jornalismo científico escrito por um italiano, bem poética a forma de escrita, interessante.
Não tenho cacife para escrever um post sobre racismo estrutural, mas queria deixar aqui um destaque sobre esse livro:
Imagine a cena: você leva sua filha de 10 anos ao médico e, no final da consulta, a doutora pergunta se sua filha não gostaria de trabalhar na faxina da casa de férias dela, enquanto as aulas não voltam. O detalhe na história parece fazer toda a diferença: a médica é branca; a mãe e a filha são negras. Grada Kilomba traz esse e muitos outros relatos em “Memórias da plantação, episódios do racismo cotidiano”, livro-resultado de sua tese de doutorado.
A autora, que é uma psicóloga portuguesa, começa o livro na versão em português, atentando e pontuando o quão excludente esse idioma pode ser para endossar o racismo, o machismo e outros preconceitos. O livro também começa com algumas conceitualizações sobre o poder que preserva a supremacia branca e mantém posições hierárquicas. Essas ideias são apresentadas em diálogo com Foucault, Mbembe, e Fanon. Seria incrível se esse livro fosse uma das primeiras leituras obrigatórias em qualquer curso superior, ele diz muito sobre nosso fazer científico e sobre o mundo acadêmico em si.
Cait Flanders is a Canadian writer in her early 30s who, at 29, after paying off all her debts, decided to go a year without buying anything. Not because she needed to save much, her career was going well, she was stable, but she wanted to know to what extent buying things played a part in her life and documented this journey on her already successful blog where she talked about personal finance, getting out of debt, living an intentional, frugal, and minimalist life.
“If you don’t replace a bad habit with a new one, it’s likely you’ll ‘relapse’ and go back to your old habits.”
In the first book, Cait outlines the rules of her year without shopping – she could buy food and hygiene items, for example – and narrates details of consumption desires that you and I have already normalized and that, when put into words, seem somewhat silly or even absurd, for example: “One way to spend money without thinking is to buy two books instead of one to reach a certain amount and get free shipping.”
How many minutes or hours of life do you spend paying attention to meticulous details and making completely stupid decisions about the purchase of material goods? (which, in the end, we don’t even use) I admit I’ve spent quite a few hours.
Motivation
To stay motivated for a year without buying, the author remembered the things she already had at home and those she had parted with at the beginning of the challenge; many of those items were purchased for what she calls the ‘ideal version of me,’ and the things she wanted to buy probably served the same purpose.
In 29 years, the author says she bought and kept most of her possessions to fit the mold of the ‘ideal version of herself.’ Over time, she realized that she was happier when she didn’t focus on what she could have or what she should be. She decided that her values shouldn’t be based on the things she desired, began to find more value in herself as she was and internalized that she owed nothing to the world. Doing what she wanted to do was enough – I’ve heard that this issue is quite common for women, who never feel complete and feel they have to do more to be valid and accepted.
“The hardest part of not being able to buy anything else wasn’t giving up new things – it was having to physically feel the pull of my triggers and change my reaction to them.”
It’s clear in the book that Cait is reinterpreting many aspects of her memories; she believes that the stories we tell ourselves are essential for maintaining our goals. Changing your life or embracing minimalism or any other intentional lifestyle may lead to losing friends and feeling alone.
Alcohol
Another topic that is quite evident in this first book is the time when Cait stopped drinking alcohol. She wasn’t dependent, but she started drinking early and felt that she had made many bad choices because of this habit.
I identified a lot with these passages, especially with the negative reactions of people when she made the decision to become abstinent. Fumio Sasaki also comments, both in his book on minimalism and in his book on habits, on how, despite not being an alcoholic, he prefers to be totally abstinent rather than drinking occasionally.
“Quitting drinking taught me to listen to myself. How to do what is right for me. How to be alone in a crowded room. How to feel my feelings. How to trust that I am resilient and can handle any situation I find myself in. How to build more meaningful relationships. How to be self-aware. And how to let others express themselves too.”
Cait realized that she was taking out her anxieties and unresolved subconscious issues both in shopping and alcohol and, by stopping both, she noticed more clearly even the physical sensations that her anxiety brought and identified two other escape valves: overeating and watching TV.
The Second Book – Changing Life
The second book is a guide to “opting out,” which can be translated as ‘opting out,’ ‘unsubscribing,’ ‘choosing not to be part of an activity,’ ‘voluntarily stopping being involved’… and it doesn’t just tell the author’s story; it’s a compilation of accounts from many people who are willing to share how they took different paths from what was expected of them in their social circles. Questions that arise in this book: ‘having children or not – and at what age,’ ‘buying or renting,’ ‘staying or leaving,’ ‘starting a business or climbing the corporate ladder’…
“I learned several times that every small change you make pays compound interest. It helps you make another change, another paradigm shift, another decision to live in a new way.”
Two years after the first release, it’s clear that Cait doesn’t want to maintain the same blog-like atmosphere in the book, nor a confessional one: she often comments on the importance of protecting her privacy, setting boundaries, and going to therapy. Although she provides some context about her personal life, she does so with the intention of encouraging the reader to explore the nuances of her own story.
You may have heard an inner voice asking to change something, that idea that comes out of nowhere, ‘what if I did this?’. You don’t really know where it comes from, much less what the best path is to follow this ‘calling,’ but one thing is certain: if everyone around you is like you, none of them will have the answer or suggest you make a change; maybe people don’t even think about it, but you think you’d feel much better if you changed clothes or stopped drinking.
The people around you have already gotten used to your ‘current version’ because humans prefer predictable things, both to save energy and to build trust.
The question of taking action regarding the desire for change is kind of difficult; people take a long time to build what they already have, and they don’t know what might happen if they move things around. However, Cait argues that, as long as you make a small plan within your budget, many adventures are not as risky as they seem. “Just adjust the change according to your tolerance level.”
“We keep busy with our routines, go with the flow, do what we always do – in all areas of our lives – and believe the stories we’ve been told, or that we tell ourselves, about how and why things are supposed to be. By sticking to these routines and stories, we don’t give ourselves the time and space to hit the ‘pause’ button, look objectively at our stories, and ask ourselves if this is really what we want.”
Types of Changes
The examples in the book weren’t so radical; there was the case of the guy who wanted to do something different with his business – he didn’t totally change the business plan but decided to test new products.
There was the case of the girl
who, like Cait, stopped drinking, not because she had already been thinking about it as a problem, but simply because someone asked her if she had tried it, and suddenly, it seemed like an interesting challenge.
Sometimes it can be kind of difficult to tell people that you don’t have a specific goal but would like to change one thing or another in your life. The fear of judgment from others is almost tangible, “That would make me look boring, or average, or mediocre, or lazy,” but the idea of **”Opting out” that the author brings is much more an internal decision than an external one: it doesn’t necessarily need to be announced, you don’t need to prove anything to anyone, and the thing to be changed doesn’t need to be something incredible, grand, or phenomenal.
Friendships
Changing old habits or trying new possibilities can be quite difficult to do alone. “You want someone around who will help you stay on this new path and do what you feel is right,” it’s good to find people who seem to understand what you’re trying to do; they don’t need to be your best friends, and you don’t need to be the one who understands them in return. These people aren’t always very much like you; they just see value in the change and respect your decisions.
Throughout the book, Cait tells about her colleagues who like to hike in the mountains with her, those who are writers too, and many other cases; many of them have routines and lives totally different from hers, but they are good friends and good company for the activities they both have in common – which can be just having coffee and chatting.
“Sometimes you’ll meet someone once, and it will be enough. And sometimes you’ll meet her a second or third time, each meeting better than the last. But not necessarily.”
The author says that the more authentic the path you choose to follow, the more you discover that, no matter how different people are, they may have things in common and can see value in each other. What unites people can be precisely the fact that they value differences.
Things Change
The book emphasizes that things are ephemeral, both the relationships we have and the conditions of the decisions we make. Letting go, trusting the process, observing changes—these are messages that Cait conveys in various ways. Here are four examples of how things inevitably change:
It may be that you’ve tried something many times without success. After years of trying, you’re almost giving up and lamenting that this isn’t for you. But then, one beautiful day, it works! That was the case with her and alcohol; she tried to quit drinking for years, even told people she was going to quit and couldn’t do it, but at some point, it worked! And now she’s abstinent. She didn’t try anything different from the previous times; the commitment was the same, but this time, it ‘worked.’
It seems like you’re not going anywhere, that your decisions were wrong, or that life doesn’t make sense, but after a few months or years, you realize that everything is fine just the way it is. “Opting out is not a race. You don’t need to prove anything to anyone, and it doesn’t have to be a continuous struggle. You have the reins to continue at every step of the way.”
There’s a conception, which she considers Western, that you should think about the next steps: what will be the next goal and what will be the next measure of success… she doubts a bit about the usefulness of this progressive and Cartesian view “there’s no ultimate goal. You’re doing it because you want to and because you can. This is your life.”
She puts self-knowledge as a continuous process:
“It may take years for you to discover who you are and what life can be,” and something that doesn’t always need to make sense and be explained all the time “as if you had to justify that you’re changing your path and tell every detail of your new plan.”
And what seems to be a key point of the book is the question that a successful relationship doesn’t have to be one that lasts forever. “Instead of being afraid, maybe we can try to remember that our time together will always be temporary.”
Cait Flanders
If you liked Cait’s ideas and want to know more, both the first and the second book have book flow, it feels like a blog or a friend talking to you.
Currently, the author no longer has a blog (in fact, she deleted all the content she had), but she maintains a conversation on her podcast, “Opting Out.“
Ano passado não li muito, a rotina de trampo e estudo tava puxada demais, assim como a vida social. Mesmo assim, olhando agora essa pequena retrosectiva, vejo que minhas decisões do que manter, o que prosseguir e o que criar, de 2019 para 2020, foram muito influeciadas pelas leituras que fiz.
Os títulos em negrito foram meus preferidos:
A morte da verdade: Notas sobre a mentira na Era Trump – Kakutani Michiko
A identidade – Kundera
Fascismo Eterno – Umberto Eco
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world – Cal Newport
The year of less: How I stopped shopping, gave away my belongings, and discovered life is worth more than anything you can buy in a store – Cait Flanders
Do Less: the unexpected strategy for women to get more of what they want in work and life – Kate Northrup
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and new technologies of power
Scrum: a Arte de Fazer Dobro de Trabalho na Metade do Tempo
Arriscar é viver – Jim Powell (risos para esse presente de grego que ganhei: um romance sobre um homem de esquerda que aceita a derrota política e abraça as bonanças do novo mundo liberal)
O design da sua vida: Como criar uma vida boa e feliz
Company of One: Why Staying small is the next big thing for business – Paul Jarvs