Activism vs. Romance: Why MIM(Prisons) Does Not Offer Dating Services
MIM(Prisons) gets a number of requests from male prisoners to hook them up with female comrades. They are looking for romance or just “female companionship.” Sometimes this request comes from an activist behind bars, looking to build a romantic relationship with someone who is also an activist.
MIM(Prisons) focuses all of our energy and funds on revolutionary education and organizing, but we understand that people have social needs and desires. Here we will address why we don’t offer dating or pen pal services and why activists should think carefully about what they are really looking for.
We believe that humyns are social beings who need interactions with other humyns in order to be mentally healthy. That is why we say control units are torture. And in our culture, gendered relations can make it difficult for men to provide emotional support to each other, especially in the hyper-masculine prison environment. So seeking out female companionship is one way to deal with alienation of imprisonment and especially isolation.
Many people find their motivation in such relationships. All you have to do is turn on the radio to know that, even if today’s culture has essentialized it to down to body parts and sex acts. But it may be helpful to separate those two things out. There is the patriarchal culture that has trained us to desire certain things, and to be validated by certain things. Then there is some genuine aspect of the humyn brain that craves social interaction.
There is a contradiction with being both distracted and inspired when you are in a relationship. Often when they are in it people can justify it in all sorts of ways, because it becomes the most important thing. Yet, we’ve also seen people who experience some difficulty that turns them off to romance and as a result they put their nose to the grindstone and pick up their work load. In fact, there are studies in the pop science news claiming that being in a depressed state is better for creativity and concentration. So consider how you can turn your state of loneliness to your advantage and not end up wallowing in it.
We don’t hook up our subscribers with conscious sisters for political and security reasons. But even if we wanted to, how would we? Dating is hard. Finding people to date is hard. Doing so from prison has to be a hundred times harder. As cadre, when we look at our political lives and our bourgeois lives, we take a budgeting approach. Everything that isn’t political is taking time away from the political. And so you need to parse out what it is you NEED to do to sustain yourself so that you can continue to do political work. Anything else is taking time away from the struggle, away from the people. And that’s on you.
When people get into relationships they often disappear. Not just from politics, but from life in general, friends, etc. For the petty bourgeoisie it’s probably the top thing to take people away from politics. For the lumpen it’s big as well. If we tell people to just give it up and get over it, they’ll say we’re crazy and don’t understand humyns. But for cadre level people this should be something we can evaluate. We should be able to look at our own lives, look at the society that shapes our lives, see what we’ve been taught and what we know we need, and work towards a lifestyle that best supports our work.
