Comment on Well that showed them
Dasus@lemmy.world 7 hours agoI mean, insofar that violence is power, yes, the person with someone’s engorged penis filled with blood (the thing people need to live) between the sharpest and hardest parts of their body (teeth) armed with the strongest muscle (the masseter, the jaw muscle), does in fact have power over the other person owning the penis.
Power over life and death is very much “power” in my book, even if I don’t agree with it.
I do agree that they must have trust, otherwise it wouldn’t be smart to give that much power over you to someone else.
And when it comes to regular power dynamics, yeah sure it’s annoying they exist in the first place, but you can’t really deny them, even if they aren’t always one and the same. Not all men would be able to beat up all women, but in general, men have an advantage in physical combat. But that advantage is very much given away at least a bit when you put your dick in someone’s mouth.
Then again it could be a trans woman who owns the penis and a man doing the sucking, so like assumptions, power dynamics definitely aren’t always the same.
So while I agree with you that they shouldn’t be intrinsic, to most people they are.
My sensibilities are more in line with Deadpool.
krooklochurm@lemmy.ca 6 hours ago
Power dynamics are the product of complicated interactions between two or more people.
The ability to physically harm someone is only relevant if a) one chooses to believe someone will harm or then, or might or b) someone expresses that they will harm the other person, or might.
The ability of someone to commit violence is secondary, and dependent on either one or both of those factors to be relevant.
If one person does not believe they will be harmed and the other does not create that belief through threat of action then the ability to commit violence is utterly irrelevant.
Dasus@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
That is to say, “a person you don’t trust”. Implicitly you trust everyone in your society, more or less. Or in your “city”, if you will.
Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Even if a power dynamic is completely equal, it still exists. It’s just balanced.
The ability to commit violence is at the very core of our civilization. Literally. There’s a reason we still call them POLICE officers. They’re the only people “in the city” (“polis” as in Akropolis, Annapolis, Marioupolis, etc) allowed to physically harm other people, and that is what makes them literally powerful.
Your reasoning only applies when you’re already in the context of “we’re not allowed to do violence or each other or the police will come and threaten me with violence unless I obey them”.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence