Anti-racism activist sentenced after being choked by police

Anti-Black Pete activist Jerry Afriyie has been sentenced to pay damages for resisting arrest. Afriyie protested against ‘Black Pete’ at the 2014 Sinterklaasintocht in Gouda, but was violently arrested for wearing a t-shirt that stated ‘Black Pete is racism‘. According to the public prosecutor, Afriyie should not have resisted the violent arrest.

According to police, Afriyie was arrested in 2014 because his protest would cause direct danger. Another 89 people were arrested that day, but Afriyie is the only one who has to appear before the court. According to police, Afriyie pushed police and pinched one officer’s leg as he was being arrested.

The court in The Hague ruled last year that police had indeed used too much violence during the arrest and that there had never been any actual direct danger. The public prosecutor disagreed and appealed the ruling. Afriyie now has to pay 500 euro for damages to the officers who violently arrested him, and on top of that received a conditional fine of 500 euros.

CW: In the video, Afriyie can be heard screaming “Ik kan niet ademen”, “I can’t breathe“.

Empathy and Emotional Reactivity

I think it’s important to make a distinction between high emotional reactivity, rejection sensitivity, social intelligence and empathy. Many of the people I meet who say they are empaths or HSP seem to be remarkably bad at sensing how I feel. It seems they are mostly very highly emotionally reactive, and they end up projecting their high emotion on me, thinking that what they are feeling must be what I am feeling. They come across as very un-empathic, insensitive and closed off from the world around them. It’s all about them, their feels and it’s almost as if I don’t exist – all while they keep repeating how in tune they are with others.

Emotional Reactivity

High emotional reactivity is a real thing, and could be correlated with high general sensitivity. I’ve noticed how my own emotional reactivity varies, depending on how well I am doing. I remember when I was really tired and kind of worn down from some stuff that was going on, and there was a video of a girl in Syria who cried she didn’t deserve anything that was happening to her. It hit me like a fucking brick. When I am doing well, it’s as if my emotional ‘padding’ is better and I can absord the emotional impact of witnessing emotion in others. When I already used up much of that reserve for my own stuff, the pain of others causes more raw responses in me. It’s when people say they can sense tension in the air when they enter a room, and they have a hard time enduring it.

Emotional reactivity is all about our own responses, our own feelings about what we perceive in the world around us. People who are generally high in emotional reactivity can get a bit caught up in their feels about the feels they feel about the feels they feel exist in others. They end up really far removed from the experiences and reality of others, so deep in their ‘feel festival’ that any chance of empathy is out the window.

People with high emotional reactivity are peaks of ‘being’. They have passionate emotions that sweep over them like a strong wave. They love like an avalanche, their loyalty is unmeasurable. They go deep into the abyss and bring up these wonders of intensity and happiness and pain and craving. When I’m with them and I am present with my own pain, they might crumble, not because they are empathic and sense I am crumbling, but because their mirror neurons work normally but they crumble under the pain they feel from me. I’m okay with my pain. But in them, everything is echo’d and mirrored. And they tell me, tears in their eyes “I can sense you’re dying inside” and I’m like “bitch don’t even fucking even”.

Dealing with someone with high emotional reactivity can be lonely.

Rejection Sensitivity

Rejection sensitivity is not the same as emotional reactivity. I don’t know about you, but I don’t generally feel a whole lot about the people I don’t like. It’s just, you know, they’re people I don’t like and my emotional landscape is filled with other stuff. But people who call themselves empaths sometimes describe how difficult it is for them to be around people who don’t like them, because they strongly feel how that other person feels, and they internalise is, causing them to dislike themselves. But I don’t think this is empathy. What they describe is not just feeling what the other person is feeling (as in, they don’t like you), what they describe is how they’re making it personal. They don’t like me, so I must not be likeable.

There’s nothing wrong with personalising rejection, I think we all experience this. I mean, I know for a fact I feel pain when people reject me. It’s one of the most painful feelings in the world. Internalising this isn’t empathy, because empathy is about the other person. Internalising their rejection is about us, about ourselves. It’s about not being liked, which is a small thing to them but huge to us, and about our own response to that.

I do better at dealing with rejection and people not liking me when I am doing well, when I am in touch with myself and most importantly, when my empathy is high.

I deal better with people not liking me when my empathy is high.


I work as a psychologist, a therapist. Part of my job is understanding and feeling into what my client is experiencing, but specifically, what they are experiencing from their frame of reference. It’s about placing myself in their shoes, looking at things from their perspective. I don’t think of myself as a necessarily empathic person. I consider empathy a skill, and I work at strengthening it every day. Empathy is not about me, how I feel or my emotions. Empathy is placing myself in their shoes, looking at things from their perspective. It’s about broadening my perspective and including theirs.

I like the idea of holding space. I like the idea of being space for them, being an arena for the other where they can kind of place it all and look at it, without me adding all of my stuff. Empathy is about them.

When I am high in empathy I can understand why some people don’t like me. I can see things from their perspective, and I don’t bring myself into it. I can see how I hurt them without immediately considering what that says about me or how I feel about me. Empathy is not about my ego or about my needs. From empathy, compassion follows. It makes us a better, nicer person.

Social Intelligence

And then there is social intelligence.

That’s the thing people on the autism spectrum experience trouble with. People with autism can be plenty emotionally reactive, having allll them feels. And they can be sensitive to rejection, just like anyone else. People with autism can be amazingly empathic. But social rules and cues don’t seem so obvious to them.

They seem obvious to psychopaths. Psychopaths lack emotional reactivity or empathy, but they know how this shit works.

All of these things can exist independent from each other.

Emotional Reactivity and Empathy

I have this feeling that emotional reactivity and empathy might be a bit negatively correlated. When you’re all up in your feels about the feels you feel about how they might feel… that’s not about them. That’s not being sensitive to how the other person is feeling. I’m amazed how people who call themselves empaths are so often wrong about the feelings of others. They often seem to project what’s inside of them.

Empathy is about allowing the other person to be everything they are, and being curious about it. Tapping into it. Trying to place yourself in their shoes. When they don’t like you, that’s part of their experience and that’s that. They have their whole landscape of consciousness, such an amazing spectrum of experience, and their feels about you is so marginal…

I’ve found people low on emotional reactivity to be generally more empathic, because they focus on the other. They don’t assume to know how the other feels because they have all these feels. Instead, they are interested to know. There is room for me, because they are not full of their emotions. They hold space. Empty space, inviting space, not just triggered responding space that is all over itself.

I like my people intense. I like avalanches. I love their entire universes and hope to invite them in, so I can experience it with them. I care about my own emotional experience and I think it’s important to delve into it, embrace it, and feel free to share it with others. I think that raw vulnerability is a part of real intimacy, connecting with others. We are more than arena’s for others, we are more than our ability to place ourselves in another’s shoes. We have our own shoes, our own perspective, our own experience to fill.

But I like having the occasional empath around. They are nicer, kinder people.

ESSM School: Hi from Budapest!

The ESSM School of Sexual Medicine is a multidisciplinary, comprehensive and crazy intensive 10-day course on human sexuality. I am having SUCH a good time. I’ve had some training in sexology before, of course, but it’s always been kind of fragmented. This school is everything I’ve been dreaming of, it really is. The schedule is punishing though. We have breakfast in the hotel, class starts at 8.30, lunch is served in the hotel at 13.00, then more class until 19.00. We get half an hour to freshen up, meet in the lobby at 19.30 and have dinner at a different restaurant each night around 20.30. After that we might go dancing, have a drink somewhere (Buddha Bar is great!), last night we went on a boat cruise. Then back at the hotel around 23.00, and do it all over again the next day.

Topics include everything including endocrinology, gynaecology, urology and psychology. Because of my own background I would have liked some more sociology, sex education and gender studies, but I have to say, I’m having a great time watching surgeries on penile fractures and all sorts of other stuff I usually would’t see. This school is on sexual medicine after all.

marijkevonkessmThe participants come from all over the world, every continent and completely different cultures. Most are medical doctors but I’m not the only psychologist. The group is great, it’s just so amazing to be around this many academic sex geeks! These are all people like me who think talking about sex during dinner is a great idea, who are scientists and evidence-based and ah it’s just lovely.

And exhausting. Sunday will be our last day and I’m flying back home on Monday morning. I think I’ll spend my Monday afternoon imitating a vegetable while watching Netflix. Anyway, if you’re a psychologist or medical doctor and you want to become a sexologist, I can totally recommend this school.

Please support Dutch sex workers

Sex workers in Groningen and PROUD, the Dutch union for sex workers, are concerned about the illegal registration of personal data of sex workers. This is happening through the mandatory intake and distribution of a registration card in the city of Groningen. Both the intake procedure as the registration of personal data are serious violations of human rights and a breach of privacy laws.  Please support Dutch sex workers and sign the petition.

groningenThe mandatory intake is illegal, stigmatizing and humiliating. It has serious consequences, including profiling by the police and discrimination by the authorities. In addition, the mandatory intake can also be potentially dangerous for foreign sex workers and/or sex workers that still live abroad, as sex work is not legal everywhere.

Police in the Netherlands have informed families of sex workers about their profession, they enter homes without a proper warrant, they take money from sex workers without their consent and ask prostitutes invasive and humiliating questions. Sex workers need to be protected from human rights violations and state and police violence.

Sex workers will leave Groningen, have done this already or will choose to work illegally. Illegal working sex workers have no acces to the legal system, thereby being at greater risk of experiencing violence.

The sex workers of Groningen and PROUD want the city of Groningen to reconsider its policy and stop the mandatory intake and illegal registration. Please support Dutch sex workers by signing their petition.

Gender complexity: Male/Female/Other

Gender isn’t as simple as male and female. Even purely biologically speaking there is more natural variation than that. Sex seems to be more of a spectrum rather than two neat categories. And it’s a social construct. Nature hasn’t given us clear distinctions, obvious characteristics of what should be considered male or female. Instead, we’re presented with a great variety in reproductive and sexual anatomy. It’s humans who try to fit this complexity into two groups.

Intersex conditions are then defined as natural variations that deviate from cultural norms concerning male and female bodies, including variations in chromosomes, hormones and sexual organs. Take these ladies on the right, for example. Would it make any sense to say they are men, just because they have XY chromosomes? Of course not. It shows how amazingly diverse human bodies really are, and how silly it is to insist sex is a simple thing. We should recognise it for the sociale construct it really is.

And that’s just biologically speaking. Gender is so much more than that. Part of it is gender identity, whether you feel like a man or a woman or maybe neither or both. Gender identity is a personal thing, it’s how you feel about yourself, how you perceive yourself. Your gender identity can match the cultural norms associated with body characteristics, so for example I feel like a woman and my body looks like what we call female. If I felt I was really a man, I would be considered transgender and perhaps I’d feel the desire to change my body to match my gender identity.

And then there’s gender expression. The way we’re supposed to look, how we are supposed to present ourselves to the world, is deeply connected to ideas about femininity and masculinity. People want to know, when they look at me, ‘what I am‘. If I’m a man or a woman. If I felt like a woman and my body matched what we call female but I yanovskacomwould get a short haircut, stop removing facial hair and would wear clothes we associate with men, people get… confused. Annoyed, Angry, even. Because I’d be messing up their nice boxed up ideas of how you’re supposed to look, what a woman is supposed to be.

I love it.

And I love this project by Lana Yanovska showing the variety of gender expression.

The Worth of Whores

Don’t measure a woman’s worth by her clothes, it says. With bad words describing the kind of judgement you might get when you wear clothes that are too revealing. Worse than “slut”, worse than “asking for it” is the word “whore” all the way on the bottom. It’s quite correct, I fear. In our minds, sluts and cockteasers are bad enough. But whores are most certainly the lowest of the low. I was watching an episode of American Horror Story the other day. One of the characters cried to her lover “I’m not a whore, I matter! I matter!”.

Dutch media usually depict sex workers as victims, innocent girls forced into a life of prostitution. Never because they thought it was their best option, but always coerced by pimps or poverty. But tv shows and movies usually seem to take it a step further. Sex workers become completely dehumanised. A dead hooker is just a thing, not really a person. Their death isn’t even worth reporting. Their murderer gets away with it, or is chased by police after he makes the mistake of killing a real woman. Suddenly, all those dead hookers become an interesting trail. This happens so often and so completely that it becomes in a sense almost invisible. Unless you are a sex worker or love a sex worker, and then it starts to hurt.

When you work in an industry as stigmatised as the sex trade, jokes which dehumanise workers and normalise violence have a considerable impact. As long as the viewing public continues to get a kick out of tropes such as “dead hookers in the boot of a car”, the violence some of us encounter at work will be seen as inevitable, and, worse still, unchangeable.

If Romances Movies Were Feminist




The Weekly Personal (aug 2016)

gay prideI’d never been to the Amsterdam Gay Pride before. I went to Pink Sunday in Tilburg once, that was great fun. But I’d only seen parts of the Canal Parade on tv a couple of times, and I was excited to experience it in real life. And yeah, it was great. A couple of friends of mine live in Amsterdam and a whole group of us met up to watch the boats, drink wine and eat crap. I think it’s nice how gay pride has become the cool thing to do, even though it’s sad actual LGBTQ groups and people hardly have any space in the whole Parade anymore.

Many visitors were wearing the Gay Pride Hema t-shirts. Hema is a family-friendly shop that sells stuff like towels and pens and kettles. For Gay Pride they sold shirts with the Dutch treat ‘tompoes‘ which translates into Tom Puss (puss, right?) and sausages (haaa!), and I thought they were hilarious. We’re not there yet, obviously, gay rights are still something to be fought. But we’ve come a long way! (why were all the models White though?)