Category Archives: Education
Rapetainment
This post is part of the ongoing Birth of a Feminist series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀
As children, we all grow up thinking that what happens in our families and/or households is normal and that everyone pretty much has the same kinds of family relationships and rituals that we do. Over time, exposure to other children, especially when visiting their homes, teaches us that no two families are the same, and even the most mundane of activities may be done a little differently in other households. Your family, for example, might have dinner around 5:30 every night while your friend’s family might eat around 7:00 pm. Or you might have a lot of chores, but another friend might not have any. There are a million variations on how families operate, and it is a function of parental values and experience, and the personalities and dynamics within the family. But despite all the little differences, the average family is more similar than different.
But then, there are families that operate a little differently. Families where the practices and relationships can be downright weird, unethical and even abusive. Now, I think that all families are harmful to girl children – family is not a natural or healthy grouping, but a patriarchal construct designed to give men power through ownership. Patriarchy, by definition is about male domination and female slavery, so all institutions and systems designed by men are harmful to girls, a risky endeavour for adult women if they choose to support and engage with them, and almost universally beneficial to males. But there are degrees of harm to girls in the patriarchal system known as ‘family’. There are families whose practices and relationships are much more abusive and harmful to the female children than those of the average family. But the girl children in those households still grow up thinking that what they are living is normal. Some of these girls may, at some point, come to realize that what they are experiencing is not normal and definitely not healthy, but it can take years for this to happen. Given the nature of some of these family practices and relationships, many of these girls may not actually come to their realization through discussion with others, but completely alone through observation and analysis. After all, what they are living is usually either taboo or extremely embarrassing to even broach with others, and discussion can get them socially tainted, blamed, and even further victimized by their family or patriarchal society.
My own family was a weird one, but I didn’t really understand the extent of the harm they did until I was much older. I was stuck in a household with two strange and damaged parents: an ever-present, NPD housewife-mother who had two modes – antagonistic or stand-by, like a computer in sleep mode waiting for a button to be pressed; and an enabler, narcissistic, psychologist father who was seldom around due to workaholism, but who I later came to realize, probably did more damage in the bursts of time spent around me than my mother did. I’ve written before that women tend to inflict tons of shallow cuts on fellow females, but men inflict stab wounds or else fly in, drop bombs and then leave. For some reason, we tend to pay attention to what other women do to us while conveniently forgiving and forgetting male atrocities enacted on our bodies and psyches. I believe we are well trained from birth to do this. Anyhow, I did eventually come to see my father for what he was – a horrible, entitled, sex-crazed, liberal misogynist. But it took my parents’ divorce and leaving home and developing my own goals separate from wanting to please my hero-worshipped father in order to accomplish this.
There were many forms of harm in my family, but I wanted to get into one daddy dearest was responsible for and that didn’t start to make me question things until I was 19 years old.
My father liked movies. I still remember the first time my family rented a VCR machine in the early 1980’s, invited some family friends over, and watched Star Wars. Not long later, my dad bought a VCR for the family, and began bringing home rented movies for the family to watch together. We were never asked what we wanted to watch. It always seemed to be ‘Dad’s choice’, and that never seemed to consist of anything considered to be kids’ content. And so began my exposure to explicit violence on television (and films). I have a specific pre-adolescent memory burnt into my brain of a scene from one of Dad’s films consisting of a violent beating and rape of a young woman. I also remember standing up shortly after that and going to my bedroom. I can’t remember what happened after that, but I know that I was not spoken to about what I had seen. I am not sure what had gone through my mind other than discomfort. And there were other experiences like this. Other violent films, some weird films. Dad also had taken a lot of pleasure in choosing films randomly – and that is actually something that I have done all my life as well, although I make sure to avoid films advertising explicit violence against women.
I also have a distinct memory of going to the movie theatre with a friend of mine when I was about 14, and for reasons I can’t for the life of me remember, we decided to sneak into another film. I am not sure how we chose the film, but we ended up in Casualties of War, an R-rated film with multiple very graphic and violent scenes of a squad of American soldiers raping and torturing a young Vietnamese girl. It was terrifying, but neither my friend nor I could move – I think we were afraid we would get caught where we weren’t allowed to be. I still remember that horrible film so many years later. It is hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ by men, and they refer to what the soldiers did as a ‘moral quagmire’. Yes, men often say that rape during war is an inevitable moral conundrum. What to do, what to do? But it sure makes for super fantastic cinematography, don’t you think? My 14-year-old self did not think so.
It wasn’t until I was 19 that all of this violent film-watching at home and in public caught up to me and led to a significant realization, and it was likely due to my age coupled with other trauma going on in my life at the time. The previous year, my best friend had gone missing while walking home and then had been found dead a few weeks later, the circumstances surrounding it never released by the police and are still a mystery to me today. In the very same horrible month, my parents decided to announce a surprise divorce leading to my mother’s increased insanity and the longest and most convoluted divorce court case my father’s lawyer had ever profited from. As well, at the time, there had been some high profile abduction, rape, torture and murder cases of teenaged girls in a community near where I lived – this ended up being the famous case of the Canadian serial killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. Needless to say, I was beginning to be very sensitive to violence at the time.
Following my parents’ divorce, my siblings and I would visit with my father on Sundays, stay for dinner, and sometimes watch a film – like old times. I remember one particular night, it was just my father, brother and me, and Dad put on some video. And it wasn’t long before I was presented with a scene of a woman at night in her home preparing for bed. A man was watching her from outside the house and then decided to break in, and start beating the shit out of her and raping her. I started crying. It hit me that most to all television and film entertainment was not for women and girls. It was for men. It is rapetainment. We women and girls sit there watching representations of ourselves being dehumanized, violated and destroyed on a continuous basis and we are expected to accept it and laugh along. How is this entertainment??? For women and girls, that is? I can understand that men might like it and get turned on by it or feel powerful because of it or possibly feel nothing at all. If I decided to write a television or book series centred on the terrorism, torture, mutilation and killing of men and boys, I guarantee you I’d be censored, or I wouldn’t sell anything, movie studios might reject me, and likely a horde of women would descend on me and call me every name in the book. I’d be a ‘misandrist’. And to question the escalating misogyny, slurs and violence against women in entertainment is met with derision, gaslighting, ad feminem attacks and excuses of “it’s art”, “it’s free speech”, “it’s just fantasy”, and “don’t be so sensitive, sweetie.” Would this argument work if the tables were turned???
Anyhow, back to my 19-year-old self. The accumulation of years of vulnerability and experience and fear and confusion resulted in my tears, and finally my father noticed. He stopped the film, whisked me upstairs and left me in the bedroom. Then he went back downstairs to rejoin my 15-year-old brother and to enjoy the rest of the rape movie. It was never talked about again. I felt alone and raw and so utterly hurt and disappointed and confused and angry. Remember that my father was a psychologist. He had trained as a child psychologist, but then went on to specialize in sex therapy. I almost want to say, “Ha, classic!” But that isn’t quite the right way to put it. It is so much worse than that.
There is a profound sense of hurt and betrayal that you feel when you realize a parent has harmed you in a deeply disrespectful way. It is natural for children, as they grow up, to begin to see their parents as regular humans with all the weaknesses and vulnerabilities that all humans have, but it is another thing altogether to realize a parent doesn’t respect you or see you as human worthy of consideration or care. This is even more significant if you are female child as we are all in a process of realizing that we aren’t respected as full humans by society at large. To have it come from your parents as well hits you really hard. I think this was the beginning of a long end for me with regard to my father. I began to see him as a misogynist, and there were countless examples after that to support my suspicions. And I became more vocal over time. He definitely didn’t like me pushing back against what he believed was his right to enjoy women’s degradation and subordination in entertainment form. But still it was confusing. He did respect my superiority to him in math and science, and he was the only one to tell me that it was perfectly fine for a woman NOT to have children. But where so many women would see this as a sign of a ‘great man’ or a ‘good dad’, his harm to me outweighs anything good he said or did. I think any person can have something in common with the worst people on earth, but it doesn’t mean you have to see them as good people or that they have redeeming qualities. Honestly, I don’t know how one can have a daughter and still find rape and violence against women to be entertaining. I just can’t get past this, but I will say that when women say “every child needs a father”, I couldn’t disagree more. Men know what men are, but they have no ability to feel empathy for women and girls. And empathy is the bare minimum you need in order to be a parent.
A last note on rapetainment.
Without getting into what will be a separate post on entertainment as patriarchal propaganda, I’ll just say here that even children’s media is designed to instill a docility and acceptance in females where it concerns how girls and women are seen and treated in the world. As a child moves into the consumption of adult material, the level of graphic and linguistic hostility and outright violence towards female people escalates – and with absolutely no added value, I might add – and thanks to what we consumed as children, we are well prepared to view it as entertainment, sitting happily with the males in our lives and pretending that the material is designed with us as a co-audience alongside men. In fact, the material is designed for males primarily as entertainment and ego-boosting, and then secondarily for females both as a threat, instilling justified fear, and as a confusing reminder that we are supposed to want and need males to protect us from their fellow males. The violence and slurs are normalized through repetition, and entertainment can be seen as a form of education as it works in the same way, burning it into your brain so that it becomes part of how you think and act. As a result, most females, by the time they reach adulthood, don’t even notice what is going on. They sit there with family members, husbands and boyfriends, laughing along to the rape and dead hooker jokes, feeling afraid and then safe when the alpha male slips an arm around them to let them know that they’ll protect them in exchange for docility and other services. And then women go back to their lives where they can pretend that this so-called art that they’ve consumed isn’t actually a reflection of what goes on in the world or that it has larger implications for and effects on women’s lived realities.
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Reissuing of ‘Called It’
Sorry, folks, I messed up on this latest post, and I thank Minka on YouTube (you know who you are) for letting me know. Cheers on that. I really shouldn’t write these things late at night and especially when most of the media is referring to this person as she and by a female name, which isn’t allowed in our current sociopolitical climate. So, I automatically and wrongly assumed that that this was a male in a dress and wig. I was WRONG! So let’s give this another go.
Round 2
Yep, I really did. The first trannie school shooting. And I am going to indulge in a little smug-face for a second…. Okay, that felt good. But seriously, back on March 1st, 2016, I wrote a little post on male violence, which ended up with a consideration of how trannies distort the sex ratio of violent crime stats. I predicted that it wouldn’t be long before they’d break into school shootings (Waiting for It: The First Trannie School Shooting). I’m actually surprised we had to wait so long. But there is a twist that I didn’t predict…
“And I really think it is only a matter of time before one of these social-outcast, mentally deranged, confused, damaged, gun-home-residing boys comes to school in a dress and a mask and toting a metal penis gun, and shoots the fucking place up.“
From my 2016 post. I got a few things wrong – the trans is a 28-year-old former student of the school, not a kid. And this shooter is a WOMAN. She is a FtT or trans-identified female. The police are calling her a ‘she’ and this will likely be listed as a female crime – the first or at most one of the very, very few solely female school shootings.
“And he’ll shoot girls, primarily.“
Almost. Girls and women. And we’ll say ‘she’ instead of ‘he’ because that is what she is. Four of the six murdered were female, including two 9-year-old girls, a substitute teacher and the head of the school. Perhaps it is because all this happened in Tennessee, in a hard-core Christian community and because the perp is female and thus not feared or respected in the way actual men are, but people are using her ‘dead name’ and referring to her as a female. It may be the first time in history that Christians are actually dealing with reality and speaking truth!
I present Little Orphan Annie Audrey Elizabeth Hale. The proud owner and user of a semi-automatic rifle and two handguns, as well as a death wish.
And like all female trannies, she got what she wanted; an attempt at male privilege. Now, as I’ve said before, most female trans are just self-haters who don’t want to have to deal with the shit that women have to endure, but are generally okay to deal with. But Audrey took things a little further. Her quest for male privilege resulted in female destruction and possible martyrdom. TRAs will likely be milking this event for years as an example of how the system failed this woman.
Luckily, this piece of shit was shot dead at the scene. Basically, a suicide (death by cop). It is rare to see a woman take down a bunch of other people while on a death wish. Perhaps this was a quest for the ultimate male privilege. Murder-suicide is a male game. I tend to feel a bit bad for women who are so messed up that they try to become males, but the internalized misogyny stops me in my tracks every time. And if part of your woman-hate involves killing little girls, any sympathy I might have evaporates.
I will say this. Male trans are respected. Female trans are not. In the media, on TV, and by the public at large. If you want any more (like do we need MORE?) evidence of the absolute misogyny that runs through Western society, it is this. This woman is being roasted as a woman, not a man. Society needs to prove that women are bad too, so a female trans will be called female, and a male trans will be called female. If this shooting had been committed by a male in a dress, he would have been called ‘she’, would not have been ‘dead named’ and if taken alive, would have been housed in a female prison.
Oh, and as a side note, apparently there is a ‘manifesto’, and I can’t wait to get a look at that.
I’m including this post in the series, USA: The Downward Spiral.
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When A 5-Year-Old Boy Creeps You Out
Yeah, I know. I disappeared for a while. I’m not gone. It has just been a shitty past half year. Things that should normally be good have ended up being strangely stressful. Perhaps, I’ll get into it at some point. Perhaps not.
For now, it’s just a short post to check in, wish you all a better 2023, and lay some male creepiness on you. Um, sorry? I do have several things in the queue, but I couldn’t resist sharing an experience concerning a very young male that was strange and a little disturbing. I’ll admit that in the past couple of years, I’ve been morbidly fascinated by people’s willing ignorance about little boys and by the shit the boys themselves pull even at a very young age. I’ve written about innocence before, although not specifically addressing boys. I don’t find innocence to be a useful concept. I’m not religious and I don’t like how the concept is used and abused by males and brainwashed females to lift up males and destroy females. Having said that, I don’t believe any male is truly innocent or even born innocent. Males are born weaponized (nature) and then through the system they have created and that women haven’t fought hard enough against, their destructive natures blossom and wreak havoc (nurture).
Background
So, I managed to get a low-paying online EFL teaching gig, and it is a massive source of stress. But it is money, right? I am good at it, and I get some satisfaction from it, but I’ll admit, I wouldn’t be unhappy if I never had to teach again. Too much time and energy and too little pay.
So one of my students is a 5-year-old boy. His English is pretty decent for his age. When his father sits in on the class and helps out, the kid behaves, but lately, Grandma has been supervising. All hell breaks loose. Yesterday, we had an especially shitty class, and the boy didn’t like how I handled his brand of noncompliance. I probably don’t react how the other females in his life do. As I’ve mentioned before, males thrive on antagonism of women and girls and their eventual submission. It’s a game to them. Cat and mouse. Predator and prey. Yeah, I don’t respond ‘correctly’ to that kind of shit. With older males, my behaviour ’causes’ males to make death threats. With the young ones? Well, you be the judge.
After the class, the boy started sending me text messages through the teaching app. It was bizarre and disturbing and not something I would have ever expected from a 5-year-old – until I did a reality check. I know better, as do all females deep down. The attempt to dominate through threats, violence and squishy emotional manipulation starts very, very young. It must live in their DNA and become triggered by the male-female dynamics they witness in day-to-day life. Here is the set of comments he sent. I can’t make this shit up. And by the way, I didn’t respond. Not sure if there is a point to telling the parents. Breeders tend to gaslight and then protect their little angels. And the lifetime of defending their behaviour begins. I didn’t change anything in the text other than to remove identifying information. Note the insults, the threat of violence and then the fake remorse – a pattern we see in males across time and place. It’s the rule, not an exception.
I’m posting this in the Conversations with Men series.
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It’s Biology: They’ve Got ‘Surround, Terrorize and Destroy’ Down to an Art at 12
Bear with me, my Alphabet Series is on hold for the next while. I am ‘this close’ to finding myself in a regular, but low-paying, job with a reputable international organization. So life is a bit weird right now. That is the only word I have for it, although it isn’t ‘weird’ in the way it is normally weird. And yes, weird is normal. For me. Anyhow, that is neither here nor there. For the next little while, as I wait for bureaucratic stuff to move along in its glacial way, I am doing some private teaching gigs of the ESL sort.
I’m an extremely experienced, but highly unconventional, teacher. Unlike most teacher-teachers, I came to the profession with a ton of experience in the non-teaching realm, particularly in research and policy. I’m a statistician and methodologist by training, and my formal, funded-rather-than-paid, research background was in intelligence and abilities measurement, with paid-paid research sidelines in the areas of personality disorders and violent male crime, including sex (hate) crimes against women. So I kinda know a wee bit about how males define intelligence (and how they’ve abused these definitions and the tools they’ve based their ‘thinking’ on), and I’ve developed my own models of unconventionally (woman) defined intelligence, which I’ve guest lectured on in the past. I also have extensive, EVIDENCE-based knowledge of what males do to females, in addition to my extensive personal experience with what males have done to ME. Further, as a long-time educator who has worked with all ages and in many countries and cultures, and who is trained in behavioural assessment, observation, testing, evaluation, and the data-based 5-W’s and 1-H of male violence, I can speak with more knowledge and expertise about the differences between males and females at any age, including the young. Really, this has nothing to do with ‘feminism’ and everything to do with data and seeing reality. You don’t have to be a female seperatist to correctly interpret what the data show. And I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.
Males and females are different.
Males and females are not the same.
One of these things is not like the other, yadda yadda yadda.
So, males do not equal females.
And, the most popular one: the clear and present danger differences are rooted in BIOLOGY, so you can’t dream or plan your way out of the horrors you see as an educator, or simply as a woman in daily life. Period. I don’t care if it makes you feel bad or it sounds ‘negative’. Males are biologically different than females and these differences show up in how their brains works and in the behaviour that is controlled by their brains.
But let me confuse a few of you here because most people are dichotomous thinkers and I am decidedly not. The sadism, the violent and barely controlled, illogical emotionality, and the immaturity that results from male biology leads to a system of socialization. This system was designed by these violent ones, and it serves a purpose. It allows and gives a ‘justification’ to males to maintain their natural violent tendencies and their penchant for domination and destruction, and forces a whole host of unnatural subservient behaviours in females using similar illogical justifications (backed up with violence). So see, it is not simply biological OR sociological essentialism. When does that kind of thinking ever explain anything adequately?
The naturally violent (males) control the rest (females) through violence (biological imperative) and mindfuckery (the system of socialization).
Anyhoo, back to what I was saying. I’m doing a bunch of private teaching gigs at the mo, and unfortunately, many of my students are male. I’ve got an annoying adult Asian male right now, about whom I may write, as he is bizarre and barely tolerable, and he is teaching me the most unbelievable things about Korea that I feel I must share with the world for shits and giggles. He is also a classic mansplainer. But I’ve also got a bunch of boy children. I hate boy children – less than adult males, but still. Yet, I am the consummate professional, and a girl’s gotta eat, so I try to teach these fuckers in the most unbiased way I possibly can. And yes, I’m fucking good at it. I actively work on my control of personal biases – I am highly aware of my behaviour. I’m definitely not perfect. But in a professional role, I take this shit seriously. Unlike male teachers. And unlike women who teach girls (goddammit, I have stories about the shit female teachers say and do to female students…) Anyhow, I’m really good at lying/hiding my true self/compartmentalizing because I am female and have to survive in this world. If women behaved like men and reacted violently and proportionately to all the shit that happened to them in this world at the hands and dicks of males, no male would exist. So, I insist that women are generally better liars and more controlled than men – and think of the illness we carry resulting from the forced suppression of so much righteous anger! So, of course, I’ve learned to pick my battles. Fighting with a 12-year-old future rapist isn’t worth my gynergy. I try to de-sex them in my mind in order to get through my job requirements. In my ideal world (where I’m still teaching, that is), I would only teach female students.
Now, when you teach boy children, a few things become immediately clear. But before I get into that, let me say one other thing first. Mothers constantly pull the superiority crap with non-breeding women. The whole: “You don’t have children, so you don’t know, do you?” thing is a constant, eye-rolling experience for me. Smugness issue aside, I would go along with this, except for one thing. I frequently seem to understand more about children than the average mother. I often think these women are fucking clueless. They have no idea what their kids do online. They have no idea that what their kids tell them is mostly bullshit. They have no idea how to parent children, including setting limits, teaching critical thinking, and for fuck sake, just teaching basic ethics. But it makes sense. There really are no qualifications for the ‘job’ of parenthood. And I’ll stop there as I’m still writing a torturous (for me) post on mothers, which will be uber-unpopular, but which must be said. The bottom line here is mothers don’t have a fucking clue about their sons. I do.
So back to the shit you notice right away about boys vs girls. And yes, I’ve written about boys and girls in the classroom before. First, girls are smarter, more hard-working, and more creative than boys. Sorry, boy-moms. You’ve pooped a turd, to put it vulgarly. Second, boy-moms who manage to get in on your teaching session (seriously, try to prevent this at all cost), will hijack your class, and if there are girls present, they will try to force you to give preferential treatment to their boys and will want you to reward their boys’ laziness and sulking in the same way that you reward girls’ effort and stellar answers. Third, the attention span of a boy is but milliseconds. As my researcher’s mind watches them work their magic, I marvel at how little stamina their brains have, how little computing power (yeah, boys can’t do math either), how little logic ability they possess. The list goes on. Remember that I am an expert in abilities assessment. With the occasional exception that doesn’t negate the general rule, boys are just poorer at everything – and YET, they are rewarded, promoted, and given opportunities while girls’ potential is so often pushed aside so they can focus on becoming mothers. The rage you see in adult males these days is a direct result of being forced to deal with actual competition from females (not low-level competition from other males). Males never had to face reality in the past when they deliberately (guess why!?!) kept females out of school and the workforce. Facing their inadequacy makes men mad. And you see this shit starting in boys in mixed classrooms, reinforced by boy-moms from the sidelines. They sulk and yell and force attention on themselves, thus derailing lessons and redirecting attention from girls.
I insist that it’s biological. It starts early and it happens in every culture and race. Their lower abilities are biological. Their explosive and disruptive emotionality is biological. And moms (dads to a lesser extent, as they don’t give a shit about the mundane details of their property, and are busy reaping the profits of being violent and inadequate) and teachers and the rest of people that make up the patriarchal system reward this biological inferiority and punish female superiority while instilling bizarre, self-hating, and subservient behaviours to replace whatever girls were born with. I ask, will we women ever know what we are truly capable of???
So I’ll get to the anecdote that inspired the title of this post. I teach a couple of 12-year-old males along with a completely fucked up 7-year-old male, and yesterday, things were over-the-top focused on their violent thoughts, even though none of the material I introduced was connected to violence at all. I swear I have never had a class with a girl, woman, or group of females where every fucking answer they gave me involved killing other people or doing other nasty shit. But yesterday, even from the 7-year-old boy, during the language + creativity exercises I gave them, all the boys could come up with were ways to hurt or kill people. There was no actual creativity happening. And then, one of the 12-year-olds told me a story – that he was very PROUD of, like in a moral high ground sort of way – regarding how he and some of his dude-bros taught a girl a lesson online.
Now, the mother of these kids, like all boy-moms, doesn’t have a clue how much time these boys spend online and what they get up to. Said boy is an amateur ‘hacker’ and spends what I consider to be too much time on online gaming forums having discussions with complete strangers and some online ‘friends’. One day, during one of these discussions, a person perceived to be female ‘dissed’ the boy’s mother. Personally, the situation smacked, not of female behaviour, but of male behaviour. That classic ‘your mom is a whore’ taunt-fest is something most boys engage in. When I was a kid, it happened on the playground – there was no online world. Now, it is everywhere, including the internet. I’ve never witnessed girls do this. But anyone can be anyone online, and we know males enjoy masquerading as females for a variety of pervy reasons. So anyhow, this 12-year-old – who, by the way, believes in the current po-mo rhetoric that is spreading from the West to far-off places, including where I live, that males = females, therefore females are as violent and aggressive as males – decided to teach this ‘girl’ a lesson. He gathered his online dude-bros, did some basic hacking, located this girl’s meat world address and then threatened her with coming to get her. Basically, the same shit you see MRAs try to do to radical feminists who dare to speak online. Doxxing, and the requisite rape and death threats in order to scare her into silence or removing herself from the internet altogether. I don’t know if there were rape or death threats in this particular instance of 12-year-old male terrorism of what they thought was a lone female (I still think the kid was actually male), but this boy truly believed, as he explained to me, that her crime of dissing his mom warranted an online, organized gang-bang designed to scare the shit out of her.
Nobody taught him this. The male mind – the manifestation of the activities of the brain, which is part of the body, which is a biological entity, created, not of socialization, but of DNA – goes there naturally. It sees prey, it thinks violent thoughts, it creates justification for that violence, and then it pounces and carries the violence out. And then it gets away with it! Millennia of evidence, and yet so much denial and blindness and belief that it can be changed. Through education, no less!
Wake up.
[Included in the Conversations with Men series. Boy, you’ll be a man soon…]
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One Down…
One of the things that I absolutely hate about straight women and why I’ve stopped supporting their endless, mostly self-created and self-perpetuating ‘man problems’ is their flip-floppishness when it comes to allying with women. This warrants a deeper analysis – ‘why’ is my favourite question, after all – and I’ve written about a part of it in my post on friendship. Some feminists have tackled other parts with allusions to trauma bonds and the like. Really, our system of patriarchal brainwashing and compulsory heterosexuality is a massive topic. I’ll just say for now that I don’t blame women for patriarchy, but I do hold them accountable for hurting other women and refusing to see and/or accept reality (aka being ‘willingly ignorant’). Unlike how men paint feminists (incorrectly, I might add – big surprise), I don’t think women ‘can do no wrong’. And as a non-dichotomous thinker, I also don’t equate males to females either – the bad things that women do manage to do cannot in any possible way compare to the bad shit that men do. I mean seriously, if you take all the bad deeds that women have done throughout history and put them on a scale, and on the other side, you put all the bad deeds that men have done in 2021 alone, the male side of the scale would not only hit the ground, but it would smash into the earth and tunnel a hole straight through to China (or whatever place is directly across from you on the globe)! You think I jest or hyperbolize? Well, the latter, maybe a smidge. But hmmm, keep those blinders on, ladies…
I also don’t automatically assume women are ‘stoopid’ like the average black-pilled woman is annoyingly wont to do (e.g., women are stoopid because even when men rape them, they still go back for more abuse!). The ‘stoopid’ label is incorrect, simplistic (also ‘willingly ignorant’), and woman-hating/an ad feminem attack. In short, I think women are smart enough to see what’s going on, but among all the shitty ‘choices’ available, it is easier and more advantageous in many ways to keep the fuck machine going with men. Despite the gaslighting I constantly experience from these women regarding my life being so goddamn ‘easy’, my way is actually infinitely harder and more dangerous. If my life were so easy, all women would be doing it, and I wouldn’t have anything to write about, amiright?
Anyhow, long preamble over, I write this following getting an email from a former female professor from my grad school days. Or rather, an email forward. The gist of it was that the man who ran our laboratory back in the day has died after several years of brain deterioration (ahem). This man played a part in destroying both of our careers, while uplifting all the careers of the male professors and grad students (including the *oppressed* black males and other non-white males in our lab). I remember back when I interviewed at that university for that lab, I was just this wide-eyed, 23-year-old, superstar Canadian girl, amazed that I was being wined and dined by big American research powerhouse universities. This guy took me out for dinner, and smart though I was, I became confused. He brought along a woman who didn’t have any connection to the uni or the program. Turns out she was his former grad student and he was currently fucking her (whether he was fucking her while she was still his student, who knows?) But classy, eh? Now, the question remains – and I don’t really care, to be honest – did she invite herself along (aka “I don’t trust you because you tend to fuck female grad students…”) or was it his idea (aka “you’ve got competition, bitch”)?
He was an asshole to women in so many ways. And I learned a lot from this turd, although not about my professional field – about life and how it really doesn’t get better for women with increased education. And sorry, liberals, white women aren’t winning. Ever. Nothing you say under the guise of SJWing is anything I’ve ever experienced or witnessed. Ever.
The email arrived a few days ago and I haven’t responded to it yet. I’m thinking about what my response should be, and I hate that this is taking up any of my headspace at all. As I’d like to write an honest response, I’m considering just ignoring the email altogether because honesty doesn’t work for hetero women (or any man). I’ve known this woman for a long, long time – we’re currently not on the greatest of terms. Well, more like ‘not bad, not good’, in my opinion. I know why this is so, but it’s not germane to the current story. I’ve mentioned her before in my post on how women are isolated from one another. She is hetero, feminine, and a mother of two sons. And a repeat abuse victim who keeps finding yet another loser man to attach herself to when she starts feeling lonely and isolated. I suppose I get it, but it is really annoying to be around, because despite the fact that she is super smart, a great researcher, a fucking awesome teacher, and she has a PhD in a field that perfectly places her in a position to analyze and understand literal raw data, she absolutely refuses to see the truth about males.
Part of the problem in deciding on my response is that I’m not sure why my former prof sent the information. I’ve heard through a mutual acquaintance that she has found a new man to fuck, so she could be in a pro-male frame of mind and has sad-feelz about this amaaaayzing dead man. Like I said, hetero women go back and forth in their alliance with non-hetero women depending on what day it is. Perhaps, she is relieved that he’s gone from the planet and knows I will be too? Much less likely. To be honest, I haven’t thought about this asshole since I was a student because so many more assholes came after him to make my life hell. And besides, I found my way out from under his direct influence after my first year of abuse, which helped me move on. It hurt my career, of course, but it might have been worse otherwise? The final possibility is that she is just reaching out and this was a conveniently timed event of shared ‘interest’ that provided an excuse to do it. But really, I’m sick of hetero women needing excuses to bond with me other than “I need someone to complain to about my current abusive man or the loneliness resulting from not having a man.” It’s just sad that this email is also coming about because of a man, pleased though I may be at the thought of his death.
All I am thinking right now is: one down, 4 billion to go…
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Not Gone – Just in Transition
Hey all, just a quick note to update. Nothing has been abandoned, and I will have a post coming up, perhaps in a month. You see I’m in transition. Not a psychological one (or least not intentionally or primarily or deliberately), but a physical, geographical one.
After two years, I finally have a job. I real fucking job. Not a ‘you’re a white girl, so you can work for free because you’re ‘rich’ kind of slave labour position that is constantly shoved down the throats of women like me. And not in my shithole country of Canada, where there is apparently a ‘labour shortage’, while strangely, at the same time, nobody is willing to hire over-educated, over-experienced, middle-aged white women with a strong work ethic and who show up on time and don’t play with their cell phones on the job, and who treat people nicely… No, I mean an honest-to-goodness paying, respectable job. Now, I was studying full time for the first of the two years. But these last 14 months, I can’t tell you how many jobs I’ve applied for. I almost had a job a few months ago, but I was dicked around for weeks and weeks before they cancelled it due to COVID issues. But I kept applying for whatever I could. And finally… something came up.
But I must leave my country to be employed Ahem, like I’m complaining – fuck you, Canada. I never wanted to live here ever again. Forced repatriation sucks. And no, I’m not stealing a job from some local in another country. My job is only holdable by a foreign person with my particular educational and experiential qualifications. I’m going to a country in central Asia that has barely been touched (ruined) by tourists, and I’m learning Russian, one of the official languages, which excites me to no end.
I am writing this in an airport, as I’m starting the second leg of my very long journey. This is my first chance to write in a while. It has been a rough couple of months of sketchy accommodation circumstances…, hell, a rough couple of years. Anyhow, stay tuned. The next month, for sure, will be a monster, but I’d rather that than to continue to be beaten down in a country that so clearly doesn’t want my voracious appetite and capacity for service-oriented work. And woman, I can’t wait to get back to work…
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Misogyny in Academia: Nothing Has Changed
First, welcome to the douchebags from rationalwiki. Ladies, you know your feminist blog has made it when internet scrotal warriors with their self-proclaimed ‘rational minds’ (sorry, let me pause to laugh my ass off here, man-logic is anything but rational, but fuelled by emotional mantrums) have listed you as a ‘webshite’ and angry, privileged followers click on over to your site to become angrier. I’m sure between watching rape porn and eating the meals their mothers provide, they are raging online about how women have destroyed the world with their quest for human rights and not to be raped or to take the scourge of rape porn away. Nothing says ‘rational’ like not understanding the difference between rights and privilege. I won’t go on. Women will understand. Men never will (they don’t have to in this world). Only rational people will get it.
Anyhoo. I’m in the middle of escaping a violent male in a rental situation while unemployed (I talked about insecure housing for women in my last post). Luckily, but sadly, one of the other women in my house has been experiencing related terrorism and we finally ran into each other and shared our experience. We had thought we were alone and thus unable to be believed (he said, she said, he wins, she flees… or dies). The third woman in the house is straight, very male-identified, and will never get on board. She is one of those who is internet dating, currently has a male who is trying to access her twat, gets angry when she says no, and she is still hanging out with him and making excuses for him. You know this common, sad, but tedious, story. She will likely be raped in the near future, and she is in complete denial. There isn’t a straight woman on the planet who hasn’t experienced something along these lines, but most will never admit it because women are still expected to let men rape them and accept it as love and affection. And the excuses they make to have it all make sense… But long story short, the other woman and I have found places to live, and we teamed up and forced the landlord to let us out of our rental agreement. Seldom do women team up – as I’ve mentioned before, this is one reason we haven’t made much progress as a class in fighting our oppressors (see posts on the need for Old Girls Clubs in the professional sphere, female bonding in general, how intersectionality has destroyed the long lost feminist prime directive, and more). Nothing will happen to our abuser, and while we are lucky to escape, it is another example of women having to escape a space that should, by definition, be safe in order to survive. Women often have to leave secure housing and even jobs and school positions because of the threats of violence and actual violence that men pose and enact, while the men stay firmly and securely in place, untouchable, housing secure and careers skyrocketing without the competition that more competent women would normally present, and most important, without the fears that women live with daily at home, in public and in the workplace. I always wonder to myself how many women are destroyed professionally, economically and more because men threaten them. I’ve written a little about this before, and posit the need for danger pay for women in the workforce.
So we get to my topic. Academia. Now, interestingly, but unsurprisingly, educated women are some of the most hated women among feminists (partially addressed in my post on Isolating Women). You’d think that women would embrace and promote women moving into fields that could actually help the world and empower women. But no. I’ve read tons of posts and articles by or about academic women, and the sad comments sections that accompany them, where so-called feminists viciously attack academic feminists and women in general. Complicated stuff going on there. The attacks often fall along the lines of “this bitch has made it; why isn’t she doing more to help less fortunate women? Why is she capitulating?” And and think to myself, “why the fuck don’t you go attack some men? Yannow, the actual problems.” These self-proclaimed feminists have no idea what it takes to make it in academia as a woman. I’m tired of blue collar bullshit. And liberal bullshit. I’ve lived in multiple worlds – I class myself as ‘educated poor’ – and instead of hating other work classes, I suggest embracing women and fighting the men who keep archaic systems in place. It’s simple, logically, but you have to let go of lady-hate to do it… Anyhow, the women they are attacking are likely 10 times as competent as the men they share departments with, are paid less, are less likely to be promoted, are often forced into non-career-advancing busy work like planning parties, and taking on advising roles that would never be forced on men; are often sexually harassed, threatened and so on; and they are usually completely isolated from normal professional goings-on (especially with female colleagues), unless they support the male party line. To put forth a strong feminist agenda, even in a ‘Gender’ Studies department (the name change says it all – welcome to women’s non-rights in the 21st century) will destroy your career. I watched it happen in my own department in the US when I was a grad student. A committed single (sort of asexual, although not labelled) female professor, top of her field, prominent in the media, well-published and cited, yet treated like shit in our department dared to complain about sexual bias. She ended up blacklisted from academia and had to go to the private sector. Meanwhile, the male professor who would play with his crotch while lesbian grad students met with him in his office, and who threw away a week of lectures in our hardcore stats class because he couldn’t figure out what he was doing, is a full professor now. Untouchable. Further, all the non-white male lecturers got tenure; none of the females did while I was a grad student there. Well, one black woman – no white women nor the one aboriginal woman was promoted. Myself, I had the highest teaching rating of all the grad students. I was in line to receive a prestigious teaching award, but the female prof on the awards committee told me that they were going to give it to an Asian male with lower ratings. She said, “he needed it”. And I didn’t? Why did he need it more than me? He didn’t end up in a teaching career. I did. I needed that award. He is making 6 figures. I am unemployed. And I seldom earn above minimum wage, and that’s when people aren’t trying to force me into volunteer work or work-stay exchange situations (which are more likely to be forced on white women than anyone else, since we are all supposed to be the supported playthings of rich white males with time on our hands, right?)
But this was the 1990’s. Surely things have changed, right? Millennials and Gen Z’s I meet keep telling me that women are EQUAL now. They don’t face misogyny in universities, of course! Could it be? Have things changed radically?
Well, I spent a year in the American college system as a student during this past year, and no, things are not equal. Not in the slightest. Almost all the full professorships are still held by men. Women are taken on board on a casual lecturer basis, most often. I looked up the salaries at the public colleges I attended. One of my male teachers was making over $130,000 per year. He showed films all the time, frequently cancelled class, and I remember we had a quiz in class one day, and he announced gleefully, “Nap time!” Working hard, earning his pay! I had two stellar female teachers, highly committed to students, put in extra work, stayed after class, etc. My favourite, had a listed salary of $19,000 despite extensive expertise in her field. Never once yelled “Nap time!” for herself when we had tests. The other was teaching a double load at the College and University because she couldn’t get hired as full-time staff and had to make ends meet.
Canada is no better. No way. I’m currently exploring a possible PhD program as my two Masters degrees have been the worst professional decisions for my career possible, besides deciding to work in China. I would never recommend a terminal Masters to any woman unless she is already in a job that requires it for her to advance. As it is, I’m too educated for lower level jobs (I’m a risk because I’ll leave once I see something better!), but I’m not educated enough for the jobs I’m intellectually capable of. I also have a weird resume – my education doesn’t match my vast, but colourful, job experience, so that is seen as a risk too. (why aren’t I specialized or in management???) So I’m looking at PhDs as a possible option in these turbulent times. I’ve found a perfect program in Canada, and I’ve explored the faculty members thoroughly. Now as we all know, the current political climate is focused on forced diversity. What does that mean? Well, it means ensuring that non-white people populate the higher echelons, even if it doesn’t accurately reflect the local community. And this agenda has been successful all over North America. This department I’m looking at is mostly non-white, despite being located in a province that is over 90% white (try forcing diversity in any non-Western country and see how that works…).
Now what is blatant, but will never be addressed, is that there are no female core faculty members. I think there are one or two adjunct female lecturers. And it’s not a Physics department where you would expect that kind of misogyny. So I’m thinking to myself – what has been solved here? Why are Millennials and Gen Z’s so fucking deluded? This department is operating in a mainly white community where over half the population is female (the latter being normal in all corners of the world, of course). And they’ve populated their departments with foreign, non-white males, although white males are also present as they always are. And there is a huge immigration drive here. I agree with having foreign faculty in all countries – definitely! you need international expertise to boost your research agenda and perspectives – but I also believe you need to solve your problems at home first. And the problem that needs to be addressed EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD is this: woman are not represented. And it’s not for lack of intelligence, experience or education. Most of our undergraduate students are female. The majority of grad students are female in a growing number of departments. But conversely, in most departments, all or almost all of the tenured faculty are male (of multiple races). And no, the problem is not that women are just starting to get PhDs in 2020. Try decades of increasing numbers of female PhD graduates. So, something else is going on that keeps women out of jobs fitting their education and that pays them for the 8-12 years of post-secondary education they sweated through while living at poverty levels. Where is the drive to allow women into the halls of intellect, of power? How can we effect change when female students don’t see a place for themselves in academic institutions? Let’s stop taking tuition money from women and girls while not allowing them a chance to find economic freedom and influence in policy, research, and the realm of discovery. Everyone is happy to take our money, but we are still denied power. Education is, first and foremost, a tool, not a hobby for women.
Part of the problem in many Western countries with predominantly white populations is that in the drive for racial diversity, white women have been lumped in with white males. And established white workers are almost always male. White female jobs are ‘last in, first cut’. And if those jobs open up, white women are not usually considered ‘diversity hires’ even though they are vastly underrepresented and always have been. See, men only share with us when they are trying to shove some of the responsibility for problems (i.e., racism) onto someone else or to find a scapegoat to blame or punish. White women have never had a kick at the can of power. We have fought harder than most women to achieve rights, but are not actually benefiting our own selves from this hard work despite what non-white women say. We are still underrepresented in all areas of power, including academia, even when we are a majority in the local population. Yet we are told over and over that our ‘white privilege’, which actually is ‘white male privilege’, is unjust. Politically, in the West, it has gone this way: white men have dominated forever. They still dominate, but are slowly on the way out. (And they fucking hate it!) Diversity is the buzzword of the day. So the bottom line is: if a job is going to be a special population hire, white women, who are underprivileged, are ‘white’ and thus left out. We’ve never had our time and never will, in other words.
So is it worth it for me to even try? I’m already an undesirable because I’m middle aged. Second most invisible time in a woman’s life except old age. And men have hurt my career prospects so many times. I’ve been pinched, talked down to/mansplained to, micromanaged (among other psychological techniques used to push women out), sexually harassed, forced into lady-busy-work, passed over for awards and promotions and recognition, given heavier workloads than male counterparts, and threatened by colleagues and bosses and advisors. I’ve often had to leave. Fear. Frustration. Stagnation. Men don’t experience this, can’t understand this, and downplay or dismiss it as crazy talk if you even bother to explain. I don’t get the sense that anything has changed for the better for my demographic, even though I’m told over and over that women, in general, are equal now, and that white women, specifically, have all the power. Where is this actually reflected? I don’t see it. And trust me, I am looking hard.
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My Three Top Online Activity Picks to Improve Your Lady-Brain
No, despite my reference to lady-brain, this isn’t a sarcastic or satirical post, nor is it a trans bullshit post. I’m actually going to give you my top three online fun-times picks for those of you who are in a situation where you are not allowed to work (like me, a foreigner in the US trapped on a student visa), can’t work (you are on disability or have The Virus, or something), have free time (these days, who doesn’t?), or are a lazy fucker (i.e., a man or a man trapped in a woman’s body or vice versa wtf…, or a modern cell-phone-is-attached-to-my-hand-stay-at-home-facebook-mom).
I love puzzles and strategy and solving problems (jeez, maybe I am a trans…), and believe that doing this kind of stuff regularly can maintain and even improve brain function well into old age. Luckily, if you sift through all the porn and cat videos, and narcissistic Gen Y and Z videos on the internet, you can find a few sites to help get your lady-brain a-revving. I like crossword puzzles and sudoku, but I’ve included three sites here that you might not have thought of and definitely need to try.
Here are my faves, and the best part is that they are free to use. You’re going to need a laptop or desktop computer though because they are visual activities, perfect for visual people (and I don’t mean the male definition of visual person):
1] puzzlegarage.com (updated April 11, 2025)
Jigsaw puzzles! All kinds of sizes and themes, from 54 pieces to up to 1176. Guess which ones I prefer…? As much as I love real live jigsaws, this is perfect for the minimalist, the frequent traveller, and/or the space deprived.
A picture logic extravaganza. Japanese in origin, these puzzles are solved by reasoning out the placement of black squares (in black-and-white puzzles) or different coloured cubes (in colour versions) on a grid to create a picture. Numbers indicate groupings of like colours. If you like logic and pretty pics, you’ll like this game a lot. Note that on this site, men exist. Therefore, you occasionally run across a puzzle that ends up being something pornographic or demeaning to women. Usually, ‘kind’ scrotals will put the R-rated or over-18 symbol on the puzzle so you can avoid it. I always make sure to down-rate the puzzle and leave comments because it is my civic duty to leave perfect feminist turds on everything men ‘create’ to hurt us.
3] GeoGuessr 
When I found this site, I became addicted and lost many, many evenings to my computer. If you like geography, attention to detail, and using the most minute of clues to solve problems, you will get lost as you find the answer, too. Basically, you are given a shot of a place and you have to figure out where it is. You have the option of searching particular cities or regions, or you can search the world (that is the option I usually choose). It could be rural, urban, a roadway – anything. You can rotate 360 degrees and zoom (google street view type of sitch), and you have to rely upon visual clues such as languages on signs, license plate information, intuition and knowledge about plant life, the colour of the dirt, how things are organized, and so much more, in order to narrow down your focus. In the end, you guess the location, and then you find out how far off you are. It is pleasingly challenging.
Anyhow, have a go. Improve your brains while having fun.
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My Request is Perfectly Logical if You Remove Your Head from Your Ass
Well, I guess I’m not gone for good. As I said, the story never ends. Sometimes, you need to take a break from it, though, and focus on other things. And focusing on other things I am. On mathematics. My story – the story – still goes on, however. I’ve been back in China for almost three weeks, and I’ve been been physically attacked by men twice already – one on my own small university campus – and I went through a terrifying racially-sexually motivated harassment episode by some drunk Chinese men on the subway who didn’t like the fact that my student was speaking English to me in a country where only Chinese is supposed to be spoken. Sigh. No, the story never ends…
But today, I’m talking about something other than Chinese racist misogyny.
So, I’m concentrating on brushing up on over 20 years of mathematics education for personal reasons, and I’m using some relatively good sites that serve my purpose well. One of the sites, in particular, has made sure to include female and non-Western names in the word problems. But still, the site is run by men, so while they can easily address racism issues, cuz all men can get on board with anti-racism, they still can’t get the anti-misogyny quite right. They still refer to many of the female characters as “Miss” and “Mrs.”. And I sent in a complaint with a very clear explanation of why these titles need to be removed from the material and be replaced with “Ms.” or “Dr.” depending on the circumstances.
I know, I know. No big fucking deal, right? I’m just a bitchy, hairly-legged, lesbian feminist cunt who is nit-picking details that don’t really matter because she can’t get a man to fuck her. Or something like that.
Wrong, bucko. And I’ll frame this issue in terms that people will understand easily and take seriously. Racism. People take racism very seriously (unless it is racism against whites, particularly white women). So let me offend your liberal sensibilities so that you can understand why marital titles for women are a big goddamned problem (STILL!!!) and need to be addressed like yesterday.
So imagine that all your math questions, when they refer to a black person, designate them either ‘house slaves’ or ‘field slaves’. There was no other possible job for them. After all, as we all know, blacks are only good for slavery. We saw that proved through a few years of slavery in the US, initiated by Europeans (especially the British) and embraced by black African race traitors/traders, and by American southern owners of plantations. So knowing this tradition and how effective it was in keeping social order and contributing to capitalism and southern wealth and PROGRESS (don’t forget progress), why should we bother changing anything in say, math questions? And also, keep in mind that during that particular period of slavery, black slaves took their designations and adopted families seriously. Being a house nigger was a source of pride and led to greater perks than if you just worked as a field nigger. And belonging to a prominent house/family, raised them up in the world too.
By now, your skin is probably crawling, and you’re probably denouncing me as some sort of race supremacist. And of course, I’m laughing to myself, because nothing could be further from the truth. If your back is up, then part of my job is done. Now for part two, which will be much, much harder for you to get because you, along with the entire world, hate women whether you realize it or not.
My point is that like black slavery, women have been enslaved, but with a few significant differences. First, female slavery is a much more serious and entrenched problem than any racial slavery ever has been. Without female slavery, the international system as we know it would collapse completely. You see, women have always been enslaved. Women were the first slaves, and they were (are) enslaved on the basis of their chromosomes, genitalia and biological capabilities (aka SEX). Men have only been able to accomplish what they have by stealing the intellectual, physical, sexual, and emotional services and energies of women through slavery and the ubiquitous threat of violence. The other major difference between racial slavery and female slavery is that the latter is the only form of slavery that is not only still accepted, but completely, 100% legal. To this day. Marriage, prostitution, exotic dancing, and everything that exists when sexual slavery is condoned are encouraged by ALL societies, and dog help you if you don’t comply. The above board female slavery system (aka ‘marriage’) is alive and well, with a whole commercial industry supporting it, and we still use the titles associated with this slavery. The ‘house nigger’ for females is the “Mrs.” – she holds a higher place in society than any other group of women, and although a slave whose cunt is owned by one man (unless you belong to a polygamous cult) and who can be legally raped by one man (her husband), has more social, legal, and often, economic, perks than does a single woman. The single woman – the ‘field nigger’ – is “Miss”. By her title, we know that all men can have access to her body any time they wish. When unmarried, she has no protection from a single master, unless she is young and lives in her father’s house, and any man can rape her with few to no repercussions. Although remember, like black female slaves were often raped by their male owners, girls today can be raped by their fathers. So what does ‘protection’ even mean??? Anyhow… most married women, like the proud house niggers of days of old, hold their title and predicament as a source of pride and status. Most hold the slave name (family name) of their masters, just like owned blacks did. And some women even say that they have an ‘M.R.S.’ degree (I still remember the gloating look on my uneducated mother’s face when she told me about her ‘degree’).
Note that there isn’t a single person out there who would shame or destroy a black person for decrying the period of black slavery as one of the most shameful periods in American history. Not so for women who denounce marriage, prostitution or any form of female slavery. It is not allowed. Women are still, as Yoko Ono once said, “the niggers of the world”. I would add that they were the original niggers, though.
I know I’m talking to a brick wall for the most part when I talk about why getting rid of marriage, slave designations/titles, and female sexual slavery are so important. I know that most people relegate me and uppity women like me to the category of crazy, feminazi bitches when we draw attention to parallels between racial injustices of the past and currently embraced injustices against women. I’m sure the anal canal is a comfortable, warm, tight, safe space in which to nestle one’s noggin, but keep in mind that the only thing that truly belongs there is shit making its way out of your body. But ‘head-in-ass’ disease is very common these days.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, there has been no response by the MALE writers at my math site in response to ending the endorsement of female slavery in their materials despite me having graduate education and work experience in test construction and question writing, as well as related experience in research showing the effects of sex stereotyping in content and pre-test-sitting instructions for female testees 😉 (Guess what? telling female test-takers that women are shit before they take a test leads to lower test scores for them, even when they are top of the class and excellent test-takers…) But, what the hell do I know about the effect of target content on special populations of test-takers, right…?
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Why Men Should Not Be Allowed to Teach
It was Germaine Greer who said, and I paraphrase, that it is women who teach and men who ‘train’. I thought the statement interesting and did a little reflection on what it meant and whether it might be true. Teaching, at least from my perspective as one who has taught on and off for over 21 years, is a symbiotic relationship. The teacher is a guide, whose role and scope depends completely on the student or students under her responsibility. The students depend on the tools, information and guidance given by the teacher and use it to grow and learn. Despite the interdependence, it is also a power relationship. The teacher does indeed have more power than the student(s), and the level and shape of that power depends on the age and sex of the students and the sex of the teacher.
What does it mean that ‘men train’? Well, training is completely rooted in a power imbalance. The trainer shapes (even forces) the mind and behaviour of the trainee into the desired form. The trainer is not expected to learn from the trainee. When I think of male teachers that I’ve had, this sounds familiar, with the often added component that that male ‘teacher’ or trainer takes from the trainee and gives little in return. The training or controlling mentality is natural for men. For the most part, higher education is based on this model. But it is applied differently to male and female teachers.
And indeed, when you look at expectations that institutions and students have for male and female teachers, women are given harsher standards. Women are expected to give, nurture, understand, coddle, and be compassionate as well as be knowledgeable. Oh, and they are very much expected to be fuckable or beautiful to have any kind of legitimacy as a teacher. Age is a weird thing for women. If you are young, you are not taken seriously (especially at a university), but there is a magical, unknown point where you are deemed too old to be taken seriously too. Men are expected to be cold, distant, sometimes charismatic or humourous. Attractive? Not required. Because what does attractiveness have to do with imparting knowledge? None! Age? Ditto. Doesn’t matter. If a dude teacher walks in, lectures at students, doles out punishment, and then leaves, he is doing his duty as a ‘teacher’. Same behaviour from a female teacher, and she gets called a ‘bitch’ (the misogynist equivalent of ‘nigger’ or ‘kike’, except that the latter are verboten and taken seriously as slurs, and can get you into serious trouble if you say them). Personally, I like strict teachers who tailor their instruction to the student(s). I don’t want to be coddled. I don’t want a friend. But I want a flexible teacher who will change the game plan if she sees that something isn’t working and who doesn’t believe in one-size-fits-all lessons. I certainly don’t want to have a sexual relationship with a teacher. But males, whether teachers or students, seem to have very blurred lines when it comes to what is acceptable.
And that brings us to the one added component that we often see in male ‘teachers’. There is frequent abuse and sexual abuse of female students. It happens in all countries at all levels of education. All men benefit from rape. Some men rape. All rapists are men. Some teachers are men. Therefore, some male teachers will be rapists, and all males – teachers, students and the general public – will benefit from female terror in the classroom. And the data show this. Many men see rape as a ‘training tool’ or a job perk, and indeed even in these modern times, women have been trained by rape and the fear of rape to fall in line and allow men to continue to wreak havoc on the world and gain unfair advantages in the classroom and workplace. I am against having men in the helping professions, because a) the helping professions (teaching, medicine, law enforcement, etc) are based on power imbalances by definition, and b) men seek out and abuse power relationships by definition. The only way you can minimize abuse in relationships where power abuse is possible is to disallow those who are most likely to abuse that power to have access to it. To do otherwise is to invite heaps of trouble, and we see that this is true every day, everywhere.
All of this is prompted by another real world example of stuff girls and women deal with every single day. Today, I was talking to a former student of mine from about 5 years ago. He asked me if I’d heard the news about our former college. I said I hadn’t. Honestly, I don’t like to think about my former employer. It was a horrible place where I was locked into my staff accommodation at night (photo in this post), and a lot of other horrible stuff happened that badly hurt me physically, psychologically, and financially. It was such a bad place to work that they have to fire all the foreign staff every couple of years in order to bring on a fresh, naive batch to abuse. They cleaned house the year I finished there and relocated for a better job. Anyhow, my student told me that the college made the news recently. Graduation just happened, and a female student returned to the college to receive her diploma. One of her male teachers refused to sign off on her graduation unless she let him rape her. LUCKILY, she complained or told the right person. Shockingly, they took her seriously, and fired that ‘teacher’ (trainer/rapist). Rape is not talked about very much in China, and I’m guessing it is even more poorly reported than it is in ‘free’ countries where women are more vocal, but are still very much unequal and enslaved. As it is, we female students around the world must put up with all sorts of weird male teacher abuse, sexual or otherwise. Myself, the best letter of reference I got as an undergraduate was from a male professor who enjoyed frequently squeezing and pinching my upper arms so hard it left bruises. Did I say anything? No. I needed that letter of reference. And he was my only ally against another male professor who tried to fail me on my senior thesis and who psychologically abused me for two years. Couldn’t say anything about him either – he was an untouchable full tenured professor. And I was dependent on him for my part-time job (I solely supported myself) and my final grade. I guess I should be thankful none of them tried to rape me. It was only physical and psychological abuse. And guess what? No male students had to go through that. I laugh when males try to tell me how hard their lives are… Try living as an object aspiring to be human and see how much fun you have…
So, I wonder about two things.
- How often do male teachers actually rape (forced rape, coerced rape, etc) female students? It is much harder for girls and women to report or rationalize reporting assault when it is committed by someone they know and/or someone with very clear and socially/legally accepted power over them. My guess is that it happens all the time, and it is often reframed by the teacher-rapist, the student-victim, and by society at large as a ‘relationship’, a ‘mistake’ made by the student, a misinterpretation, one of those ‘that’s life’ events that seem to always happen to girls and women, or it just didn’t happen.
- How sensationalized and overblown is female teacher abuse of male students? It is a rare thing indeed and gets more play than any male crime ever would. So rare, they make documentaries on the same few deranged female teachers. Keep in mind two things:
a) women who abuse power should be punished (and yes, women abuse power too – one of my current excellent female students in China is physically KICKED and yelled at by a female professor every time she is forced to meet with her), and
b) women cannot, by definition, be rapists; and males, by definition, cannot be raped. The language has been deliberately confused by liberals in order to downplay what men do constantly to women and to falsely play males as victims. New language should be created by women to accurately define crimes.
Suffice it to say though that virtually all sex crimes are perpetrated by men, and the vast majority of sex crimes are forced on female victims. Given these overwhelming data – you’d be stupid to argue anything else – it is in the best interest of the entire population to keep men out of the helping professions and any professions where abuse of power (male against female) is dangerously possible, and dog help me, oh so very tempting. We (not I) argue that men have brains so they can both control their behaviour and learn from their mistakes. But they don’t. They don’t because they aren’t forced to. And men won’t change unless they are forced to. There is no better nature to appeal to. We’ve been waiting thousands of years for this better nature to magically appear. Keep men away from tempting power abuse situations with females. Female health and safety are more important than hurt male feelings. Any day. One day, I’ll talk more about false positives and why they don’t matter when it comes to female health and safety. For now, for all of you out there saying “Not all men…” or “That’s not fair to men…”, how about the current sitch, where we already operate on these get out of jail free philosophies? We already operate on the “Not all men” principle. It doesn’t work. And what do you say to all of us who have been abused by men in the helping professions? You negate my (your mother’s, your sister’s, your daughter’s, your) right to safety and living free from threats and fear when you give men the benefit of the doubt. That’s not fair to women and girls. It’s not okay to take away from us in order to let men do as they wish.
[This post is part of the Wolves in Women’s Clothing series.]
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Whorifying Female Teachers
Horrifying or Whorifying? It’s all the same when it comes to teaching the Chinese as a female. Add being white on top of that, and you’ve got the deck stacked against you.
I’ve been teaching on and off for the last 21 years, alternating between gigs in research universities and government policy shops (as well as farming, beekeeping, baking, and hotel housekeeping). Teaching is something I do somewhat well, although it exhausts me more than any job in manual labour ever has. At least with farming, you get strong and healthy along with your fatigue. And you work with plants! Teaching makes you tired, flabby, and fat. And you constantly wonder whether laziness and stupidity have lower limits…
In China, there is a special nuther layer as a woman and as a non-Chinese. There is a special skill that I don’t have that apparently cancels out any skill or talent I might have as a teacher. And it is something that doesn’t apply to men. Of course.
I refuse to wear ‘lady-face’ or as I have come more and more frequently to call it – ‘whore-face’ – because that is, very basically, what women’s fashion signifies: whore status. I refuse to wear the trappings of femininity, all those things that mark me as a usable fuck-object there to be consumed by men (and as a white woman in China, to be consumed by Chinese men AND women). I don’t wear pretty dresses, or any dresses, for that matter. I don’t wear heels. I don’t wear make-up. I don’t wear pretty colours. I don’t wear cutesy shit. Everything is functional, isn’t fussy, and serves to make me feel less exposed or less easily rapeable. If I trip and fall, nobody gets a look at my crotch. No one can use a selfie stick and attached cell phone to take photos up my skirt. No one gets a special view through armholes or necklines as to what lies beneath my clothes. White women are seen as whores that love to be abused. People believe that and treat you accordingly. You can’t hurt the willing, right?
So basically, you know, I wear clothes that (mostly) could be found on any average male out there. I look respectable. My clothes are clean and simple. I dress more formally than many of my students, which makes sense given our roles. But apparently, that doesn’t fly here. My only ‘girly’ thing is that I have really long hair. But that is only because in the past I have donated my hair every few years to cancer wig charities. But I have been rethinking this lately, and will be cutting my hair blessedly short this summer. I don’t want to contribute to the sexist, racist notion that white women can’t be bald. Black women can be bald and accepted, even without cancer, so I think white women shouldn’t have to suffer from public derision for not having hair on their heads. So that’s enough with the long-hair-for-donation bullshit. But I will pay for it socially here in reserved, misogynist China where you seldom see a non-old woman with short hair. (Cross into more progressive Hong Kong, and it is a different story.) In combination with my ‘man clothes’, short hair will make things considerably more ‘interesting’. I wish I could lose my considerable and distinctly non-Chinese tittage, the bane of my existence in this country, and have people mistake me for male at first. I’d be harassed A LOT less. And be given a little more respect, perhaps.
But back to lady-face. It is, as a white woman in a very racist, misogynist country, bad enough being in public wearing the no-nonsense shit that I do. I get shit for not being feminine enough, but being feminine would be a bad thing, too. It is difficult for me to imagine how much worse it would be if I exposed cleavage or bared my lightly hairy, unshaved, white legs. (Most Chinese don’t shave, but even many of the men don’t have much leg hair.) I think I would be sexually assaulted and harassed more than I am already. And I would be stared at even more than I am now. I’d be on the receiving end of more sexual behaviour from men and more derision/disgust from men AND women. And I would personally feel more uncomfortable and vulnerable. And that last bit is the difference between tolerating going out in public with PTSD under careful control, versus staying at home unless absolutely unavoidable.
Why do I bring this up? Well, I made an interesting discovery in my Business English class the other day. All female, except for a few males. I had planned to talk about giving ideas and making suggestions in the workplace, based on a chapter in their textbooks. But I opened it up by talking about personal suggestions, and I made the mistake of asking each student to give me a suggestion. I hadn’t anticipated all the misogyny and such a clear indication of where these silly assholes’ priorities were. Instead of interesting or creative ideas, several of the suggestions, strangely, by the FEMALE students, were:
- I needed to change my clothing style
- I needed to wear dresses
- I needed to wear bright colours
- I needed to wear things that would make me ‘look beautiful’
- More suggestions about wearing ‘girl clothes’
- I should wear different shoes
At one point, when I started to get annoyed by the implications that all anyone cared about was what I looked like and that my job performance clearly rested on this factor alone, I remarked that once boys started wearing dresses, I would too. You know, even if I wanted to dress like a cocksucker, I think about the following. My classroom is not air-conditioned. It went up to 37°C (99°F) last week. I usually spend 7 hours in that classroom, mostly on my feet, animated and interacting with students. I’m drenched in sweat within the first fifteen minutes. It is cooler (or less stifling, perhaps) when I step out of my classroom. I do tend to over-dress, but that is simply because I am uncomfortable with all the ogling I get in China. I also sweat like a pig. I don’t do well in the tropics. But I’m trying to imagine make-up running in rivulets down my face. I’m trying to imagine a typical lacy, polyester Chinese dress (think 1980’s in the West) sticking to my tits and legs, scratching and unbreathable, giving me a rash or hives. I’m trying to imagine my feet sweating and slipping inside high-heeled shoes. And then I imagine myself passing out in a disgusting mess on the floor with my skirt around my waist, my ankle broken, and all the kids making videos and posting it on the Chinese internet. (I would title it “Horrified or Whorified? White Teacher Fail!”)
Do men get any of this shit? No. Of course not. No one comments on what the black Muslim male teacher at my school wears. No one questions what any of the men wear or don’t wear. Anywhere in the world. No one measures a man’s teaching performance or talent by his shoes, fashion sense, or his looks. No one tells men about their bad B.O or the alcohol leaking from their pores when they sweat and breathe on students. Men show up. In whatever condition they wish. They get paid. They get respect. And they go home where their personal whores cook their food, clean their stinky clothes, and suck their dicks or spread their legs (or ass cheeks in the West!). A good life, and one men feel entitled to, but don’t deserve.
It’s bad enough dealing with my male students, but the Chinese lady-cocksuckers are a piece of work too, and they are racist and misogynist in their own special ways that feel like more of a betrayal than you get with men. You expect abuse from men. For me, I’m waiting for bullshit from men before they even open their mouths. But even when you know women will betray you because of your non-conformity, it hurts a lot when they do it. The women are part of the problem, even if they didn’t start it. I don’t let them off the hook as participants in women’s oppression. In their own oppression. In my oppression. There is never an excuse for keeping your brain turned off and reaping the meager benefits at other women’s expense.
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The Semester Starts with Racism and Misogyny – Mmmm Good
I have a very strange internet friend whom I’ve ‘known’ for a long time from years ago – back when I was a serious researcher doing serious research and not frittering my life and spirit away in China. We collaborated on a short project online, but we have never met in person. At this point, this acquaintance’s role has morphed into one of sending me occasional stories of ‘how fucked up China is’. News of the weird. Of human rightsy weirdness. Bizarre deaths resulting from Chinese neglect. That kind of thing.
The thing is, I KNOW ALREADY. I live here. I experience bad and weird things here all the time. I don’t bother to comb through alt-media sites or even mainstream Western media for Chinese fuckery because the day-to-day stuff that I see in situ is bad enough.
When you come from a country where there are *sometimes* consequences for abusing power – or at least the pretense of consequences – or at least mechanisms and bodies set up to deal with power abuses – it is hard to imagine it working otherwise in other places. So Westerners can’t understand that if they go to China, if anything untoward ever happens to them, there will be nothing whatsoever that can be done. Unless you have managed to get very well connected with powerful people, that is. And the majority of Western people – or any foreign worker, for that matter – are extremely vulnerable to abuse because they aren’t connected. Newbie Western workers will often try to fight what has happened to them with logic or human-rightsy arguments that usually start with: “This would never happen in MY country.” And they might be right. Maybe. It might happen, and you might be lucky to have a way to fight it. There is definitely more of a chance of fighting it in the West. But in China, you learn very quickly that anyone can do anything to you at any time. And you are not allowed to say anything about it. Even contract agreements between you and the Chinese only apply to you. If you don’t live up to the contract they can do what they want to you. But as a Chinese, they can break the contract every single day. You can complain if you want. And they will ignore you. And they might fire you because you don’t take abuse well. Their firing techniques are almost always passive-aggressive, subtle manipulation. It is actually the exact mentality behind Western men complaining about Western women. The whole “I love Asian women” phenomenon. Western women believe they have rights as humans. Most men don’t like that, and some will go East to find the perfect docile slave.
Many of the younger Westerners who come here are ‘liberal’, so they don’t usually complain, and may often make excuses for the Chinese (aka ‘apologism’), because they hold the Western mentality that the Chinese are oppressed – which isn’t actually true anymore in the West, nevermind the East. It’s the older white (and usually incompetent) male who comes here for a pussy and booze free-for-all who gets very angry and loud when he isn’t treated like a member of the dominant race. And both groups are delusional, by the way.
The Chinese are the dominant and the majority race. And China is very patriarchal. And it is still a system that is run as a dictatorship. And with that combination, you get very serious racism, very serious misogyny, and no concept of human rights whatsoever. There is no such thing as a race-motivated crime. There is no such thing as a crime against women. And there is no such thing as workers’ rights or human rights abuse of any sort.
It is hard for many Western people to wrap their minds around that non-Western reality.
I once read a disturbing, but amusing (because I could understand it on a personal level) little essay written by a long-time foreign resident in China about the stages foreigners go through when first living in China. It was written by a man, and thus didn’t take into account that China is much easier for men to deal with for a number of reasons. But I still recognized some of the elements in it. The whole essay reminded me of the grieving process one goes through when dealing with a death – starting with anger, moving through depression, and eventually resolving with acceptance of reality. It was troubling to realize that living in China was so similar to dealing with a serious loss such as a major death, but it is actually very much like that if you stay long enough. Living in China really does mean giving up your personhood or identity. It is a death of sorts. Whether you can be reborn or whether you remain living as the undead, is another thing entirely and is dependent upon either having your mind and spirit broken completely and thus becoming open to brainwashing or being able to escape most of the mundane Chinese abuse through obtaining an elitist kind of job with super-high pay.
I’ve thought about this a lot. Many sociologists and cross-cultural researchers paint this simplistic black-and-white picture of individualistic cultures and group-based cultures. And of course, the former are painted as evil and latter are somehow superior. But I think this conclusion, and the whole type-of-society dichotomy are not quite right. I actually find the Chinese to be much more individualistic and self-centred and heartless in some ways that I have not been able to explain (until recently) using the group-think or collectivist society model. Likewise, that model hasn’t explained the countless examples of supposedly average, individualistic, selfish Americans and other Westerners relentlessly donating their time and money to humanitarian efforts or to helping random people on the street. You may not see this if your knowledge of China has come solely from movies and the news, but given how much time I’ve spent in non-Western countries, I’ll tell you how jarred I am by how much positive and pro-social interaction there is between strangers in the West. Every time I return, I get freaked out. Strangers helping strangers. Hell, strangers talking to strangers. You never, ever, never, ever see this in China. Ever. Ever. People don’t even say ‘thank you’ here. But that is a post for another time [update: here it is, 7 years later 😉 I is for Individualism. I have developed my own theory as to this individualism vs group-based society phenomenon.
My point is that to survive in China, you can’t see yourself as a person in the Western sense. And most people are not able to see themselves as a person in the Chinese sense. It’s not a great way to live. Undead.
I haven’t written in a while simply because my first two weeks back at work have been a racist, misogynist fuck-fest. There has been plenty of Chinese bullshit and some Western male bullshit, too.
The first day of class involved university officials and photographers stopping by my class to photograph me while teaching. I’m never allowed to say ‘no’ to anything they do to me, and in this case, they will use my image for their greedy capitalistic and political purposes. (See! We have foreign staff! Come to our university!!! Pay our tuition!!!) Like a porn contract, you sign on the dotted line, and that means they can do whatever they want to you after that (don’t worry, I’m not equating teaching with porn… I’m telling you that the Chinese mentality is the porn producer’s mentality).
I spent the week correcting the grammar of misogynist sentences produced by my male students, which was fucking awesome and not a mindfuck at all!
And the second week saw a quiet, moneyless payday – and an announcement from the university that they had no intention of paying us this month for last month. They announced to us that the pay schedule will change (again). Now, they are going to start paying us TWO WHOLE MONTHS after the start of each pay period. We get paid monthly, the pay date has been pushed further and further away from the pay period each year that I have been with this university. And now, work that I do on March 1st won’t be paid until April 30th. What??? I am not allowed to protest this. They have implemented worse abuses in past years – like breaking my contract and quadrupling my work load for no extra pay. The foreign staff has protested individually, but as Chinese, they give excuses and end up doing what they want to us. This new payment policy actually feels very much like one of the passive-aggressive Chinese punishments. They may be looking to clear out foreign staff by implementing abusive policy, so they can bring in new, naive people whom they can pay less.
Every night at 11:00 pm, staff were chained into their building. Apparently, it was ‘too dangerous’. For whom…?
This happens all the time. I’m used to it. There is nothing ‘fair’ about the Chinese. It may surprise you to know that this is the best place I’ve ever worked in all the years I’ve been in China. At least these employers don’t chain the staff into our residential building every night like my last employer did. Nobody could get in or out except the key master. The Chinese didn’t understand why the Western staff had a problem with that. A simple, humane solution to the ‘grave danger’ looming over our building would be to install a key card or coded key pad entry system. But that would cost the Chinese money. The Chinese don’t like to spend money.
But the worst of these first two weeks back was actually dealing with a horrible, British, male acquaintance/co-worker and his disgusting misogyny last Saturday. I’m still reeling from it. Unfortunately, I need to stay ‘friendly’ with this asshole, as one really needs allies when you’re working for the Chinese. The Chinese deliberately try to keep Western people in the dark and misinformed and isolated on several levels so that we remain powerless and disorganized. Because foreign workers are ALWAYS abused, it is really key to have as many allies as possible – even if they are assholes. Information needs to be shared since it is so hard to come by, and sometimes protests must be done as a group or at least in numbers. But the cost of being friendly with jerks can be really hard, and the deeper I get into feminism, the harder it is to deal with men who don’t see me as a full human.
I’m going to write about this asshole. It’s one of those things that ended up being successful in my mind even though it didn’t and doesn’t necessarily feel like it. I’m glad I did what I did, but my body and mind are paying for it. More soon…
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2016: Year of the Fantasy
I’ll start with a note on fantasy since I don’t think a lot of people really understand what it means and it is used incorrectly by men (of course) to justify any number of things they do or say or endorse. Men control language, you see, so they can define something one way, and then when it’s to their advantage, they can spin the table.
Fantasy, essentially, is
the act of imagining something impossible or very, very, very unlikely.
All of the video, pictorial, and written porn that exists supposedly falls into that category, and if men decide not to abuse the term ‘free speech’, they’ll fall back on “it’s just fantasy”.
Except that it’s not. The things that happen in porn happen to women, to quote Andrea Dworkin. So porn doesn’t fit the definition of fantasy because it is based on and perpetuates reality. It is violence. It is crime. It is rape. It is reality.
But I don’t want to be sidetracked here. This isn’t a post about men’s vacant inner lives and the need to fill their void with the worst kinds of hate and destruction.
No, this is a post about real fantasy. A woman’s fantasy. My fantasy. It is fantasy because it is impossible (or very, very, very unlikely). The purpose of a fantasy is to escape from the oppression of reality. And who needs to escape more than anyone? Women.
Perhaps 2015 would be better known as the Year of Anger because that’s what it seemed like to me. I’d like to think that this recent period leading up to and including the turn of the year, which has been filled with delightful thoughts of a world that is not possible, will continue through the remainder of the year. We’ll see. I hope so. I tend to be a realist and that is not necessarily a fun place to be – ask any woman who rejects feminism. She can’t handle it because it is a framework based on reality and reality is fucking depressing. And who wants that? Jeez.
I am fantasizing about a world with no men. I don’t care how they disappear. That has not yet entered into the equation. All I have at this point is an established world that doesn’t know men and certainly doesn’t fantasize about having them there! In many ways, it is unimaginable – as I said, it is pure fantasy. We have nothing to base the fantasy on except the negation of the current wrongs, or the opposite of what currently exists. It’s simplistic, but a starting place for a person or people who have known nothing other than slavery and whose history has been effectively erased to support the maintenance of that slavery.
So indulge me in a cursory look at the start of my fantasy, in the form of a list, which is no more than a woman’s surface look at what taking away the testosterone element might effect. At this point, I’m working from the negation/elimination of the current evils men have perpetrated and that have led to widespread destruction. I firmly believe women would not have gone down that same path as we don’t destroy ourselves of our own free will. Once you start thinking about everything you could do if you didn’t have to worry about the threat of men in all areas of life, you find yourself with endless possibilities. I truly think that without men, society would have achieved infinitely more in a much shorter amount of time. Woman-hate is a time and resource waster, a distraction.
Without men, we would have under the following topics:
Sexual Safety
- No rape
- No fear at night
- No sexual harassment or intimidation
- No sexual assault
- Little to no violent crime
- No gangs
- No dominance/submission structures
- No BDSM or sexual power play
- No prostitution
- No stripping/pole dancing/demeaning ‘sex work’ of any kind
- No sex/human trafficking
- No missing girls or women
- No slavery
- No pornography
- No surveillance
- No need for a police force (mediators, perhaps)
- No misogyny
Global/Community Safety
- No property ownership
- No vandalism
- No weapons (other than practical ones for hunting)
- So, no guns, no bombs, no biological weapons, no nuclear weapons
- No territorial disputes
- No need for armies
- No terrorism
- No spies
- No diplomats
- No peacekeepers
- No war
- No refugees
- No racism
Economics
- No money-based system
- No drive for material wealth/possessions
- No bullshit ‘women love shopping’ myth/propaganda
- No corruption
- No privileged class
- No underbelly social class
- No ridiculous demeaning jobs
- No strikes
- No sweatshops
- No greed
- No poverty
- No classism
Ideology
- No religion
- No ignorance
- No blind faith
- No dogma
- No irrational punishments and requirements
- No negation of truth or knowledge
- No needless shame
- No ideological persecution
- Commitment to truth rather than preservation of lies
Social Structure and Breeding
- No family
- No marriage
- No domestic slavery
- No pair bonding
- No forced breeding
- Little need for abortion (medical only)
- No pregnancy worship or denegration
- No myth surrounding biological clocks ticking
- Possible alternatives to natural pregnancy
- Low birth rate / population
- No unwanted children
- No male children
- No orphanages
- No street kids
Health
- No monetization of healthcare
- Universal healthcare
- No denial of services
- Longer life spans without the obsession with longevity
- No sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV
- Little mental illness
- No mental illness stigmatization
- No anorexia / morbid obesity
- Little needless surgery
- Easy, non-stigmatized, humane access to assisted suicide
- Integrated, healthy relationships between patients and all practitioners of the health arts
- Health research not tied to agendas, cover-ups, fuelled instead by a willingness to explore all avenues
- No animal research
The Body
- No ridiculous focus on youth or beauty
- No gender
- No trans nonsense
- No body hate or image problems
- No cutting or self-mutilation
- Comfortable, woman-centric clothing
- No make-up or other hate-driven, toxic/harmful masking behaviours
- No body-destroying fashion
- No illogical body rituals (shaving, bleaching, whitening, etc)
- No surgery designed to ‘augment’ the body
Environment
- No global warming
- No needless waste
- No needless killing of animals
- No water, air, soil pollution
- No massive cities
- Only clean energy
- No property/money/patent-oriented messing with food
- No monocrops
- No large-scale agriculture
- Community gardens
- No animal farms
- Focus on biodegradable products
- Composting, vermiculture
- No chemical pesticides
- Environment-focused, local growing
- No introduced species (animals, plants, fungi, bacteria)
Education
- Complementary technology for life assistance and co-existence rather than life destruction
- No education-as-childcare mentality
- Multiple styles of education available regardless of age
- No rigid age-to-grade classes
- Regular person-focused educational needs assessments
- Universal education to all who want it
- No priority subject areas
- Premium information search tools and information repositories, untainted by pornography and violence
There is so much more. This is just off the top of my head. And I’ll fully admit that it is only a starting point. As I stated earlier, when living in a slave system, it is hard to imagine a world of possibilities and so you must begin imagining the opposite of what you have.
It Takes a Village
[First, a big shout out to all the trans who popped over from Facebook for a visit to learn about how you are using your male entitlement and natural, biological propensity for narcissism, violence and misogyny in order to abuse women and take away hard-earned rights. I’m sorry I don’t allow comments on this site, so you likely had to limit your rape and death threats (you know, male violence against women) to the Facebook vacuum and whatever space exists between the ears. But anyhow, thanks for the blog hits, boys! Traffic is always appreciated, and as an educator and life-long learner, I fully and sincerely endorse your commitment to information-seeking. I hope I could help.]
This current post has nothing to do with trans issues. It was inspired by last night’s short venture out to find some food as my apartment’s fridge was empty except for a green pepper and a small jar of hot chili paste care of a friend from Hunan province. The post was also inspired by the latest posts by and subsequent back and forth on essentialism and socialization with other bloggers.
This post got published and then sent to draft since I thought it was too long, and now I’ve reworked it into something more digestible (maybe).
Background: Children
I don’t like kids, generally speaking. There, I said it. I’m the fucking devil, and I can sense hackles rising around the world as people dig in for a full-scale, personal attack on their individual little monsters. Advice: if you’re getting pissy, don’t throw a hissy. I’ve managed not to kill anyone even though I’ve had it up to here (here being really far up my ass) with mostly women and the occasional douchbag mansplaining man giving me all kinds of nasties about wanting to be childless since I was yay tall (yay tall being about the level of where my ass hangs now) and then achieving it. You like kids, I don’t. Who cares? Although I suspect there are plenty of people who don’t like kids who have ’em. I’ve met plenty. And I say, poor kids. I know first hand what that feels like.
Background: Families
The family unit is one of the worst social inventions men have ever come up with in history. It is solely based on and only survives because of a slavery or ownership model. Traditionally, the man of the household owns the home and assets, including his sex and domestic slave (wife) and all children, whether blood-spawn or adopted. He may also have dominion over other female and under-aged relatives. And he can do whatever he pleases with them as they are all trapped there and meant to serve with a smile. The family unit provides the easiest and cheapest possible way for a man to repeatedly access human prey (women and children). The family unit is the most effective way to hobble a woman and destroy her from the inside out in a long, drawn-out sorta way. And the family unit is the worst possible government-sanctioned environment in which to socialize a child (maybe aside from an orphanage). I’m very much of the village model in child raising. That old proverb (origin unknown, common in many older cultures) “it takes a village” has value. Everyone should have some responsibility in ensuring a child becomes an upstanding citizen, although I’m also in favour of keeping men away from children, especially girls, as they inevitably promote patriarchy and good ole male dominance and female inferiority, and frequently turn to them for sexual amusement.
Somewhere along the way in the family model, we’ve run across things like jumping to conclusions about parents based on limited evidence of something ‘going wrong’. Appearances can be deceiving. We also have a shitload of parents who a) are overworked and absent and who try to assuage guilt by trying to be their children’s friends rather than their parents or by buying them off or mollycoddling them (a sad inevitability of capitalism and the pursuit of wealth/excess), and b) are so out of touch with current society/rape culture that they have no idea the kinds of stuff their children are getting involved with or accessing (porn, drugs, sex, violence, gangs). Kids are disconnected, community members don’t care what’s happening unless they are finger-pointing at parents (which isn’t constructive) or guarding their shit. Moral systems and social/human connectedness need to be a group effort. When everyone feels invested in children, children see themselves as worthy and invest back – everyone wins, and a group effort means less work for all.
Background: Animal Abuse
I love animals. I like them better than people for the most part. Along with pro-lifers and rapists and pedophiles and pornographers and prostitute users, there is a special place on my shit list for animal abusers. When I was five, we came back home to where my stay-at-home mum was imprisoned to find our dog locked in the basement with duct tape wound tightly around her muzzle. For how long? Hours? All day? Mum hated animals and children, and I’m glad patriarchy and a controlling husband provided her with unwanted children and an unwanted pet and then forced her to stay home with them 24/7. Still, she gets some blame here – she was a chronic, narcissistic abuser in addition to being a victim, and no abuser gets a free pass in my world. To this day, I try to protect animals when I can to make up for mother’s sins.
And being informed is important. I forced myself to watch “Earthlings” (everyone should – it’s horrific) and cried my way through it just like I do documentaries on porn and human sex trafficking.
Bringing it all together
So last night, I donned my hazmat suit to protect me from my usual dose of misogynistic racism that I’m gifted with whenever I go outdoors, and ventured into the commercial area near my residence. It was early dark. I stood at the corner waiting for the light to change and looked back over my shoulder at the little fruit shop I sometimes go to. In the summer, one of the employees got a sweet little orange kitten (I have a very soft spot for the oranges), which they kept tethered at the side of the shop. Recently, since she has grown quite a bit in size, they’ve been tying her up at the front of the shop to two cement blocks (see the second photo). where, she can sit front and centre for all to admire, interact with, and unfortunately, abuse.
Animals are seen differently in China than they are in the West. Only recently have people started adopting a ‘pet mentality’ similar to, but not as prevalent as in, the West. Really, pets are just domesticated animal slaves. We are emotionally attached to them, but we have done more harm than good, I think, in changing them in very fundamental ways. I say this as a domesticated animal lover. Humans are selfish. Anyhow, in China, there still is quite a difference in how animals are viewed and treated. I find that many ‘pets’ I encounter are quite a bit different from the pets of my Western friends. Although I am a ‘toucher’ (I can’t keep my hands off animals if they approach and want to be petted), I seldom touch animals in China. First, they are a bit feral, not human-oriented, and they generally don’t approach humans. Affection isn’t common among humans (it is amazing how many of my undergrads have never said ‘I love you’ to their parents or heard it from their parents). And it isn’t really common with animals either. And second, they are generally dirty and often diseased. One of my students died of rabies a few years back when his pet cat bit him. It’s not so uncommon in southern China. I’d prefer not to die of rabies.
But this little orange cat, although very dirty, is incredibly friendly and loves to be petted. So I oblige. It appears to be mutually beneficial.
Now when I turned back while standing at the traffic lights, I saw the little orange tethered to and sitting atop the cement blocks. In a circle surrounding her was a group of children, mostly boys with a couple of girls. They were young, ranging in age from about 5 to 8. One adult man – one of the fathers? – was looking on wielding a cell phone camera capturing the hijinks. And there were other adults, including the shop owner, the cat owner, and various workers standing around. The children were tormenting the cat. Smacking her. Dropping garbage on her. Poking her. And laughing their asses off. I was horrified. The cat was cringing, terrified, flattening herself to the cement block, realizing there was nowhere for her to go. I was surprised she wasn’t hissing or trying to bite/scratch. And it went on and on. I noticed the adults didn’t give a shit. I don’t really like the word ‘triggered’, but I think at that moment, I was triggered. All I could see, despite the young age of these little shits and despite the tormented object being a young cat, was a group of men torturing a woman prior to raping and or beating her to death. It was just so fucking familiar from porn, from mainstream film, and even from actual video from places where male mobs attack lone women for some bullshit infraction like wearing the wrong clothes. I couldn’t walk away. So I stomped over to put a stop to the bullshit. Very, very un-Chinese. I broke social rules with that one decision. The rule here is not to intervene when you see something wrong, when a person you don’t know needs help. But you can stare all you want. I called bullshit and moved in. Luckily, I speak some Chinese, so I told them Enough! This is a good cat. Be nice. And I demonstrated how to pet her. Immediately, the cat’s posture normalized a little. The kids were freaked to have a foreign person in their face. And I waited for them to go away. I don’t know if they got the message. They did realize, however, that fun times were over.
I feel I’m part of the village, even in this distant land, that needs to contribute to socializing, instilling humanity and perspective-taking and valuing life in the young. How can they grow up to be decent people if they don’t learn? The problem is this, though. I was the only one who saw what was going on as wrong, or at least the only one willing to demonstrate that I saw it as wrong. If the patriarchal ‘village’ doesn’t see violence against women, children, animals, (pick a group) as wrong, how will children learn? And further, the sadistic tendencies in this mostly-male group of children are unfortunately biological, so can they actually learn and truly understand that sadism is wrong, even if the correct socialization is in place…?
There is more to think about here. But in the meantime, I feel like going on a cat rescue mission. I wish I had a stable enough lifestyle to support a cat.
The Male Therapist (Post-Christmas Navel-Gazing)
I’ve never been to therapy.
I think I badly need it, but I know I won’t ever go. And I’ve come to realize why this will never happen.
I was raised and abused by a father who was a male therapist. I won’t (in this post) even touch on my even more abusive mother (who was not a therapist). Between the two of them, I grew up to be an emotionally paralyzed, very confused, silent, angry, socially anxious and awkward, depressed individual, and then was further abused by these parents for being emotionally paralyzed, very confused, silent, angry, socially anxious and awkward, and depressed. Exactly the kind of person who could use a little therapy to untwist the emotional twine binding her.
But as I said, I’ll never go. Even though I went on to formally study psychology for years, I kept to the hard sciencey specializations (statistics, neuroscience, psychometry) and kept all my clinical dealings as a sideline through clinical and forensic research projects, coursework and collaboration/friendship with the more interesting of the clinical (female) crowd.
Even in the thick of things, I still declined therapy while feeling I desperately needed it at the same time. Instead, I self-examined. I know exactly what’s going on with me thanks to years of this relentless questioning and probing. Unfortunately, therapists are useful creatures – you can self-examine all you want and still not make much progress towards balance or health. Therapists are guides, and they are supposed to support you when you are at your most exposed and vulnerable.
As I am an expert in mind-fuckery, I often think about therapy professions. That was what I wanted to be as a kid, and I discarded it in college. At the time, I thought my classmates were too wishy-washy, and hey, I was really good at math and experimental design, but looking back, I know that I left because it was too threatening. Part of me didn’t want to have to address the nasty truths in my life and thus become vulnerable. I knew what vulnerable was and the therapist I grew up with both made me vulnerable and exploited it relentlessly. Who wants more of that?
And as I’ve explored the therapy professions (social work, clinical psychology, clinical psychiatry, etc), I keep coming back to the same question or set of questions.
What draws men to this line of work? And more specifically, what draws men to therapy for female victims of sex crimes (rape, sexual assault, incest)?
Let’s come back to this and talk about female therapists first.
First off, not all female therapists are good and/or appropriate for your needs. The therapist’s professional orientation may not line up with yours. The therapist has been educated by the patriarchy and likely holds patriarchal views of women and their illnesses. Speaking from experience with clinical psych undergrad and postgrad students and professors, many therapists (male and female) are not the most stable themselves. People with problems tend to gravitate towards this profession and the field is sooo competitive that often, only the most obsessive and neurotic are given admittance to programs. I can’t speak for social work programs, but most of the practitioners I’ve met have been really weird people with weird agendas. But I DO believe that it is people with problems who are exactly the people who should be working in these fields because they understand first-hand what the patient is going through. It is important, however, that the therapist have worked out her issues to minimize the intrusion of said issues into her patient/client’s situation.
All said, there are tons of well-meaning women who gravitate towards the helping professions. Well-meaning doesn’t mean effective or correct, but it is a starting place. Men don’t often have even the correct starting place.
To speak more specifically about work with female victims of sex-based crimes (aka hate crimes against women), it is easy to understand why women get into it. Women want to help women. Therapists are often victims themselves. Oh who am I kidding, all women are victims of at least one sex-based offense and are exposed to male filth on a daily basis. Female therapists want to get in there and do some good. Are they going about it the right way? I don’t know. I don’t think most of women’s energy expenditure actually makes any progress towards ending male violence. But someone has to put on the band-aids, I suppose.
I’ve also known female therapists who’ve worked with rapists and men who sexually assault women and children. I can even understand why women gravitate towards this. The work is, of course, pointless. You can’t fix men, and you absolutely can’t fix a rapist. But again, women pour endless energy into trying to fix male problems that can’t be fixed. It’s a misplaced, erroneous belief in male ‘goodness’ (whatever) and a desire to keep women safe. *Sigh*
So we come back to men. I’ve written about men and the helping professions and volunteer work before. What could possibly bring men specifically into wanting to ‘help’ female victims of sex-based crimes? It boggles the mind. Men have little capacity for empathy, and I have never met a man who can wrap his head around the fear women live with daily as a result of forced proximity to men. So to deliberately be around and ‘help’ female victims isn’t a problem in their minds. The last thing women need after victimization by a man, however, is to be made even more exposed and vulnerable with a man controlling her aftermath. Male therapists must be looking for control or a vicarious experience or something. Perhaps they are invested in putting forth a male agenda in ‘managing’ female victims. Does he want to show that ‘not all men are bad’? How completely selfish and self-centred, if that is the case.
We have a new problem with aggressive MtT’s targeting battered women’s shelters and demanding to work there and be put into direct contact with female victims. They are becoming so self-centred and disrespectful that they are bringing law suits to fight for their right to access female victims. Why are they doing this? Is it an attempt to use women’s real experiences to build up their own sense of victimhood? Whatever they are doing, it is assault. It is disgusting. And it needs to be stopped.
Men also love to gravitate towards helping male sex offenders. I have personal experience with one of these creatures. I was taking a course in a form of counselling and was paired up by phone with a black, American, Christian man who headed up his own church and specifically helped rapists get on their feet after (unfortunately) being released from prison. He and I were to do ‘counselling’ sessions on the phone. He was controlling of me from the very beginning, and took advantage of my commitment to the course. He cancelled our sessions, let me do all the work, and would take other phone calls while we were in the middle of a counselling session. But he was smarmy, saying all the right things to smooth things over. If I were 20, I would have accepted the abuse and chided myself that as a WHITE woman, I supposedly was the privileged one. But I was older and well-versed in how all men have privilege over all women regardless of other group membership. Penis trumps vagina, regardless of race, every single time. One day, I called him on his repeated disrespect of me, and the truth came out. He attacked me mercilessly, and threw all the information I’d given him in my vulnerable state as counsellee in my face. And then he played the god card – he knew I was an atheist, and let me know I was shit because of it. Pure abuse. I suspect he was a ‘recovered’ rapist himself. I put my foot down, complained to the school, and only after my fellow student attacked the teacher was he thrown out of the program.
So, I suspect that sex offenders help sex offenders, and any man who gravitates towards therapy for female victims or male offenders is just there to perpetuate the system of abuse, keep the male agenda alive and well, ‘help’ women to put their experience in a compartment and not paint all men or the patriarchy as bad, and experience personal control and vicarious excitement over female victimization. I advocate for keeping men out of all professions where they have access to vulnerable women and girls.
Heroes and the Penis Prerequisite
A handful of years ago, I was teaching a small class of really motivated, super-smart Chinese girls. I’d just spent a hellish year teaching high school – one of the worst years, if not the worst year, of employment in my life – in the Chinese countryside. I tried to wash away that year in a seaside city at a small, private language school with small summer classes. This group of young women was a salve on a wound that unfortunately still hasn’t healed.
We were doing a short unit on heroes and role models. We were using a crappy textbook produced through some Western-Chinese collaboration, and I hated it. It was sexist and as with any and every book trying to teach Western culture to non-Westerners, it did a piss poor job. Anyhow, as I didn’t like the discussion of heroes in the book, I decided give my own rendition. You see, all the book’s examples were men – men of the Western persuasion – and not a one of them was interesting or heroic. But then, throughout the world, we celebrate men for mediocrity and often, overlook atrocities they commit to celebrate that mediocrity.
So I did some research and looked for women in China, current and past, in a range of domains, that could be put up for nomination as heroes. I chose human rights activists, political leaders, anti-censorship advocates, athletes, actors, even a warrior.
And the girls, smart though they were, only recognized a few of them. I was first shocked, then unsurprised, then saddened. Just like in the West, women are not only barred from public life, but they are barred from recognition, from history, from memory, despite being the ones who actually keep this world running. Throughout the world, we celebrate the mediocrity of men over even the most amazing of women.
Fast forward a little to the years I’ve been teaching college and post-graduate students. Every semester, either through speech-giving assignments or through class discussion, I get students to talk about role models and heroes. And here are my data.
Out of hundreds and hundreds of students in four years of doing this, only two students have provided a woman as a role model or hero. And those women were the students’ mothers.
Many of the male heroes have been killers/soldiers. We’ve had notorious Western rapist athletes nominated. Mao Ze Dong, the great brainwasher and killer of millions. Winston Churchill, the man who perfected the concentration camp and had thousands of South African women and children starved, raped, or killed. We’ve had a few capitalists. Writers. Lots of fathers. Male humanitarians or social justice warriors are never mentioned as heroes – there aren’t that many of those comparatively, I suppose. Plus, activism is still frowned upon and frequently punished in China.
In China or elsewhere, I can’t figure out what makes these nominees heroes or role models other than possessing a penis. It’s not just that women have been barred from doing ‘great’ things. The fact that so many people see fathers as heroes or role models indicates that it is the penis and the qualities that only a penis-wielder is (incorrectly) believed to possess that are important in defining heroism or role-modelship. It has little to do with the accomplishments themselves. If we had a scale with men on one side and women on the other, and we had the ability to see who actually did what (i.e., we could see through stolen ideas, credit-taking, silencing, etc.) and you added weight for objectively positive accomplishments (creating and improving life and knowledge), and subtracted for objectively negative, destructive things (war, cruelty, immorality, development of weapons, greed, etc), women would, hands down, be the greatest contributors, the heroes, the role models. I truly wish there were a way to uncover truth, to reward merit, to encourage positive contribution.
We can’t do that under male rule. Merit will never be recognized under Patriarchy.
Fists and penises used to win the power, (later) the money and the ability to write history. Once money and power were firmly in the hands of men, it became just the threat of violence that has continued to erase women and keep the definition of heroism out of more objective hands.
In short, whom we honour and reward in our global society has little to do with good works or positive accomplishments or contributions. As with everything, it is all about dick. And I’m so very tired of worshipping violence and lies.
A Whole Lotta Beauty and Nothing Else
I teach a few different things in China. My least favourite course is ‘advanced oral English’. First, there is nothing advanced about the abilities of the majority of students – ‘advanced’ is just a word that, in typical Chinese fashion, is for appearances only . And second, I am not an orator. Decent teacher, yes. Orator extraordinaire, no. Oh, and third, trying to have a heavily interactive class when the standard number of students in a small, participation-based university class is 50 is a waste of everyone’s time.
If I must teach communication methodologies, I prefer to teach writing. But if I had my druthers, I’d be teaching a variety of other things within the analytical realm.
Anyhow, I’m in the middle of two weeks of the dreaded speech-making unit. This is where I give a choice of topics (ranging from easy to requiring more insight and imagination). One of the topics requires these 18- to 23-year-olds to think about what they want their lives to look like in 20 years.
If they choose this topic, inevitably, they talk about the family they want. If you can believe it is possible, the Chinese romantic narrative is even more boring and standard than the Western one. Everybody says almost exactly the same thing. I have never, ever, ever met anyone here who wants something different than the rest of the 1.35 billion people.
While it is depressing to hear the young women spout the romantic dream that is the curtain that hides their impending slavery, it is worse listening to the men. And sadly, most of my students are men. Even though I spend an entire class talking about how to describe personality or character, and get them to brainstorm adjectives, they ALL describe their future wives in exactly the same two-dimensional way, and unsurprisingly, there is never a reference to character unless it is to imply that she exists to wait on him and provide children, which is still not really ‘personality’. They describe Future Wife as ‘beautiful’ and that is it. She has no substance. The only thing that matters is that she is beautiful. One of the better speakers did say: “I don’t like girls with strong opinions.” So there you go.
Interestingly, when I teach the class on character and do the brainstorming exercise, most of the students include beautiful, pretty, or cute on their lists, and I do the requisite explanation that physical attractiveness is not a personality characteristic. And although you could, in English, call someone beautiful and refer to their personality, that is not at all what people are thinking here when they put it on their list of personality traits.
When describing men, there is a much richer palette. Men are allowed to be intelligent, talented, creative, hardworking, diligent, responsible, etc. Oh, to be multifaceted – dare I dream?
If you do manage to get people to describe women in any detail, you get a more intense and benevolently misogynist list than you get in the West – today’s Western woman might be called strong, but what is meant is that she is a sexual being with all that entails regarding character (wild, masochistic, uninhibited, slutty, etc). It’s just as superficial, in my opinion. In China, it is all naiveté, innocence, and purity – these are all ideal ‘girl’ qualities. The ideal woman is ‘a girl’ – she acts like, looks like, and thinks like ‘a girl’. It’s so ingrained in the culture – even trying to get people to refer to females over 18 as women is really hard to do. They have no problem calling 18-year-old males ‘men’, though.
I decided I have to stop assigning this topic for speeches. As my educational techniques regarding women and personality and human status are clearly not working, I am now going to give my barf trigger mechanism priority.
In another post, I’ll tell you about a) Chinese misogyny in hero/role model discussions and b) how my writing classes approached their assignment on short fiction.
Well Read and Willfully Ignorant
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.Ray Bradbury
I’d go a step further with that quote. After all, it was said by a man, so he doesn’t see the whole picture. I’d say, the best way to prevent a group of people from existing, from contributing to a culture is to prevent them from writing and/or being read. Most people don’t read or take seriously those women authors who are allowed to be published. And most women are not allowed to be published unless they are willing to tell men’s version of the truth. So essentially, the world doesn’t get to read what is not allowed to be there. And that is the story of women.
There are tons of people who don’t read. They can read, but they just don’t. Can’t be bothered. It’s too much work, and requires too much sustained attention, I reckon. I was watching a documentary about the future of reading, and I recall a PhD student commenting that she had to retrain herself to read proper articles in a focused and analytical way after her modern immersion into social media skim-reading. I imagine that an actual work of literature must seem a sisyphean task when you normally spend your day ‘reading’ Twitter and Facebook feeds.
Even among the supposedly superiorly educated Chinese (according to people who’ve never been to, let alone worked in, China), reading non-mandatory books is not common. Last year, I brought in a pile of English language books from my own collection of modern literature to my writing class full of English majors here in China. I’d told them that to become a better writer, reading was a requirement. Only two of my students borrowed books. No one else even attempted to look at the books. Disappointing. But unsurprising. Only occasionally does a Chinese student tell me that they both read and enjoy reading non-mandatory books. It’s all about texting and reading other people’s constant status updates – just like in the West. How is this interesting?
Regarding documentaries, I know plenty of people who’ve never watched even a single one. And those don’t even require a fraction of the attention that a book requires!
But of those few who do read – and I’m talking about great works other than Fifty Shades of Shit or Maxim (seriously, I once dated a British dickface who told me with a straight face that Maxim was the ‘thinking man’s magazine’) – they are still woefully and willfully ignorant of topics and authors who should be a required part of school curricula. The tired old classics are standard, and those classics are written by penises for penises. For most school children and college students, women don’t exist on paper or in politics.
Women authors of literature and feminist philosophy and politics are unsurprisingly absent from school curricula all over the world. Dangerous thinking relegated to Women’s Studies programs, I suppose? As I mentioned, the classics are priapic, but even the edgy or avant-garde have a phallic bent. For many students, misogynists, J. D. Salinger and George Orwell and their social and political commentary have possibly appeared on school reading lists, but who but an English major in Canada has read Margaret Atwood (who is actually a better writer than both of those men)? And everyone knows who Karl Marx is, but Andrea Dworkin’s vast collection of work remains in obscurity in danger of complete obliteration.
But all of these works are available in the public domain, at least for now. There is no reason not to read, not to know.
There is something I find very interesting. I think about my liberal-minded male friends, the few of them I still keep around, and I know they read. They watch documentaries. They learn stuff. They know stuff. They can talk about a number of topics with a level of understanding. And they have one thing in common. They know zero, nothing, nada about women, women’s struggles, the women’s movement, the status of women today. About the movement that concerns half of the world’s population directly and the other half in an important way – they know bupkis. They can talk about other social movements. They know something about racial struggle.
Some of these men, once they come into contact with struggling groups, go out of their way to learn about what these people go through. One friend in the American TV and film business, upon meeting Albanians who had fled their country’s turmoil, went out of his way to learn about the history of their country and plight. But when he was casting actresses for one of his films, he couldn’t figure out why they made sexual overtures to him (other than the idea that all women are sluts always looking to service men). The idea that the film business requires female actors to ‘consent’ to rape in order to get jobs and how that came to be (female subordination/male domination) was completely beyond his educated mind. He got angry when I tried to tell him what many people have said about ‘his business’, the film industry, as an outsider. Yet, while I don’t work in entertainment, I am better read about the plight of women in film than he is. I’ll bet you money that he hasn’t read Rose McGowan’s recent whistleblowing of Hollywood’s widespread sexual assault of its female acting population. He doesn’t have to know about it. He benefits from women’s slavery and to know about it means he has to take responsibility and change the way he does business.
This is the willful ignorance of supposedly intelligent and educated men. The one group all of these men actually live in close proximity to, and sometimes in the same home with – women – they know nothing about. They can’t be bothered to learn about what their close female friends and loved ones have endured and continue to endure. Women don’t matter except when they stop delivering that which is taken for granted. They are objects. They serve men and men’s struggles. The struggle of men is assumed to be the struggle of women. There is no struggle outside that. The concerns of racial groups, religious groups, and gay people matter because men are members of those groups. Women aren’t men, so their continued slavery does not matter.
But these knowledgeable men do know about what the fun-feminists are doing. Oh yes, they are well aware of topless events in the name of political reform. They do know about slut shaming and the movement to embrace sluttiness as a defiant, ‘feminist’ response. They know those powerful ‘feminists’, the Suicide Girls. And by knowing about this kind of stuff, they think they have their fingers on the pulse of feminism. Women just want to fuck more! That’s all. And men don’t need to know more than that. They don’t need to explore the history of struggle. To look for real information might push them out of their comfort zone. Fun-feminists have given ignorance their stamp of approval as per historic male agenda.
Willful ignorance is dangerous. And it comes from failing to read. That failure to read starts at the school level with the censorship of books written by and about women. And it continues through college and into the world of work and survival. We destroy our culture by promoting willful ignorance, by de-emphasizing reading, and especially by negating the contributions of women writers. After all, you can be well read by today’s standards, and still incredibly ignorant by choice.
Another White Dude Analysis of the World’s Problems
I’m not sure why I bother. Watching documentaries, that is. Roughly 99.9% of English language documentaries are made by white dudes. Sometimes, they’re religious white dudes. Sometimes, they’re environmentalist, lefty white dudes. Sometimes, they’re libertarian white dudes. Sometimes, they’re partially lobotomized, incoherent nutjob white dudes. Most of them are middle class or come from those there parts – not rich enough to be truly devoid of cause. And not poor enough to be barred from funding even a low-budget documentary. Most of them have a basic college education – even the partially lobotomized ones, since we hand out college degrees like candy to white dudes with damaged brains.
But despite the deceptive variety in approach or ideology, the commonality is that they all belong to the class at the top of the human heap. And as such, they are blind to many things; they believe they have more of a right to speak than most; they believe they have a unique perspective than no one else has; they see themselves as leaders and ones best equipped to speak for all of us; and they tend to populate their documentaries with interview clips of their fellow white dudes as if there are no other people available to offer insight.
Most liberal white dudes are tuned in enough to make a documentary that pays lip service to problems of racism and classism – because these, of course, are classes that contain bepenised people – men can be of different colours and can be poor. And all men deserve attention, of course. But their oh-so-unique views of the world almost always miss one of the most important (if not THE most important) cause of why our world is the shithole that it is.
They either ignore or severely downplay the role of male domination – aka Patriarchy – in the destruction of the earth and the degradation of the human condition. They don’t acknowledge the fact that the only reason men have made poor economic models work in the short run is because they’ve built everything on the unpaid or lesser paid backs and uteri of women. You can’t have domination without slaves. And slaves have, for the most part, throughout history and continuing through to tomorrow, been women. But even when you have an unlimited slave supply (women), you can’t make a model of unlimited growth work (à la capitalism), or expect nonrenewable resources to magically become unlimited, or demand unlimited environmental imperviousness to deadly human assault.
It makes for a flawed and incomplete documentary. It has always made for bad science and theories in every field. When you don’t factor in Patriarchy as the primary cause and/or the primary environment, you aren’t telling the story correctly. It would be like trying to measure atmospheric gases, but failing to take into account that the planet being studied is Jupiter.
Men leave this key part – that Patriarchy is the root of most problems on Earth – of the puzzle out for a few reasons:
- Men like women to shoulder some to all of the burden when blame is to be laid and responsibility is to be taken for shitty circumstances.
- Conversely, men like to take credit for things (even when they didn’t contribute) only when it is a positive accomplishment (i.e., male expert dominance to be patted on the back in the awareness-raising documentary).
- Men don’t want to acknowledge that we’re in the shitter because of them, their violence, their greed, and their lust for power.
- They won’t find themselves an audience if they suggest that men fucked up and should take responsibility for the things they’ve done and should immediately relinquish their control and power structures. Men don’t like to be told that their millennia-long culture of dominance and rape is at the heart of most of the world’s current woes. Even a lot of Stockholm Syndrome-affected women won’t get on board with a documentary that says, “Look at what the men have done.”
I’m going to force myself to watch as much of this as I can. I’m into minute 23, and after way too much melodrama and wordiness, this generic, middle class, white dude, has finally laid out what he sees as the four main things that will lead to American downfall. I noticed that all four problems he listed result directly from Patriarchy, yet he doesn’t identify Patriarchy as the ultimate source. He referenced Derrick Jensen early on in the doc, and implied that he interviewed him, so I’d be a little disgusted, but not surprised, if he managed not to talk about Patriarchy in his ‘analysis’. Jensen has paid lip service to radical feminist theory, although I find him a little arrogant for my personal liking.
—
Two hours later:
I managed to get through two hours of, yes, mostly white dudes pontificating on the decline of the American Empire. And no, Patriarchy wasn’t mentioned even once. Dominance yes, but dominance was used to refer to class and race, as I predicted. There wasn’t a single mention of the oppression of women and how all empires have been built on that requirement. It was unsurprising, but still disappointing. Oh, and Jensen was indeed interviewed, and he arrogantly told us his favourite thing that HE ever said. Icky. Self-quoting… Well, white dudes. What do you expect?
I’ve noticed a few things about white dude documentaries. I’m not sure if there is a manual that they all read, but recurring elements creep me out.
White Dude documentaries must display the following:
- Lots of historic film footage of dudes doing something dudely or women doing something degrading or feminine. Preferably from the 1950’s or from some wartime period (if soldiers or concentration camp victims are needed)
- All or an overwhelming majority of those interviewed are white male experts (despite there being tons of non-white and/or non-male experts in any given field)
- Video clips that give a literal enactment of some metaphor used by an interviewee. For example, an expert begins talking about destroying the environment, and suddenly you have a clip of a wreaking ball.
- Quotes from noted misogynists, pedophiles and the like. (This particular film quoted Woody Allen who is both a misogynist and a pedophile.)
It’s hard to take a documentary seriously if it ignores really key elements. I’m not talking about entertaining and giving equal weight to fringe theories. I’m talking about allowing personal bias resulting from privilege to severely limit the explanation of the phenomenon you’re trying to cover. Feminism is not a fringe theory, and it is globally relevant. It needs to be included to provide an accurate picture of what is going on. It is also hard to take seriously any documentary that pulls testimony from a single group of privileged people (who all look like you) when the phenomenon is a) relevant to more groups than that small one, and b) there are plenty of representatives of many other groups to pull from as experts.
Nice try, white dude. He would have been better off giving his funding to a woman or minority and offering his services as ‘research support’. He would actually have been walking his talk then. But that’s just the thing. When a white dude talks about wanting to change the world, it’s just words. He doesn’t actually follow through on what he’s saying. It would have been really, really easy for him to make a positive change by enabling a traditionally less powerful, and often silenced, voice to deliver the message. When have men every stayed silent though?
*** Note: I’m not going to link to this film. It’s really not worth watching, nor do I offer a time-back guarantee when you demand those two hours of your life back. Anyhow, I wanted to comment on a phenomenon, not this particular documentary.
A Young Chinese Woman’s Exposure to the World
As a university instructor in China, I take great delight in mentoring young women who venture outside the traditional ‘women are property’ box. Planting seeds of personal rebellion is my specialty, as is providing validation for the stirrings of feminist thinking that normally get stamped out by controlling parents and concerned friends.
One of my young protégés, a lively English major who took my writing class last semester, had an exciting summer. We had lunch last week and I heard all about it. She had joined up with a volunteer organization that brings young people from different countries together to teach children. I’m not quite clear on what they teach. I thought it was English, but most of the people who came to China to teach were not native speakers of English. Maybe culture? There were young men and women from Vietnam, Indonesia, Russia, Egypt, Tanzania, and the US, in addition to the local Chinese.
But I was less interested in the teaching experience and more curious about my former student’s exposure to people from around the world. On the whole, I think it was a good thing. But there were several alarming elements.
First, it becomes quite clear how sheltered and naive the Chinese are. All of the foreigners, save the Vietnamese and the Indonesian, spent time teaching my young friend English slurs and general swearing. And most of it was woman-hating, of course. She learned how to say cunt, bitch, fuck you, retard, etc. And she also got some odd, inaccurate advice from the non-native English speakers. Apparently, “Screw you!” is a very polite form of “Fuck you!” Huh? I worry about a) ESLers, and b) 19-year-olds, teaching the intricacies of language to the impressionable. So, we had an in-depth discussion of nasty words and who they hurt (usually women, and other oppressed groups), and by the end, I think she was much less enthusiastic about hurling insults at people. But swearing is the number one thing most people want to learn when they are first exposed to a new language. I just give a different perspective on it – I do, after all, swear a lot, and put a lot of thought into why and who gets harmed by it.
Second, the poor thing ‘fell in love with’ the young Egyptian dude in the group. She thought he was awesome. Luckily, he was crushing on the properly diminutive and dainty Vietnamese girl and wasn’t interested in my more outgoing Chinese friend. I got to watch a few videos she took featuring him posturing in his macho way, and I wasn’t quite so taken with him as she was. Personally, I don’t find Egyptian men or Egyptian culture all that progressive. The country is, after all, in full support of female genital mutilation – over 90% of the current female population has lost their clits and/or had their fuck holes sewn up in the name of ‘respecting women’. I personally have had way too much experience with the rapeyness and violence of Muslim men (both strangers and a man I had the misfortune of dating) in a few different countries, and I worry about non-Muslim women who get involved or find themselves trapped with men of that persuasion. Men are scary enough on their own, but when they are religious, there is a whole nuther layer of justification for woman-hatred present.
Third, my young friend got an instructional dose of the ‘female dichotomy according to men’ care of the young Tanzanian man. The viewpoint certainly isn’t limited to Tanzania or to black men – it’s universal. But the dude laid the viewpoint out quite clearly and matter-of-factly. And my friend, being young, female, Chinese and naive, didn’t see anything wrong with it. The viewpoint goes something like this:
There are two kinds of girls: the ones you have fun with and the ones you can take home to your parents and marry.
What my friend didn’t understand, because Chinese girls are not educated about sex, was that ‘the ones you have fun with’ translates into: bad girls, the ones you can fuck, but don’t have to ‘respect’. She didn’t see that men have this thing called privilege where they can place value on women. You fuck the trash and then throw it away when you’re done, but you marry the pure. And both types of women are objects. You are a whore one way or the other – either a public whore (the bad girl/slut – girlfriend material) or a private whore (the pure, wifey-wifey material that you can only rape after marriage).
I made sure to explain all of this.
Do I do young women a favour by telling them how the world really is? How men will always enslave us? I don’t know. As a Chinese woman, she doesn’t have options. She must get married. Her parents definitely don’t want her marrying a foreigner – that is just racist, Chinese culture talking. But marrying a Chinese isn’t going to be any better than marrying a foreigner – they are all men, and marriage is the slavery of women. So is it better to go into female slavery naively than going into it with wide open eyes? I don’t know. I’d like to think that being prepared is better than being bitterly disappointed that the fairy tale that girls are force fed from birth isn’t true.
I was much less naive when I was 20 and a budding feminist to boot, but I do so wish I’d had an older woman in my life to open my eyes to reality. It would have saved me a lot (not all) of the grief I went through in navigating a world of woman-hate.
~~~
Addendum written after leaving China. That young woman never spoke to me again after that lunch. Not an isolated incident, in my experience. Most women don’t want reality. The rape-coloured glasses fit way too well and make life shiny and fun, at least if you don’t pay attention to detail. Some women will tell people like me that we are too ‘negative’. Presenting facts is ‘negative’, logic is negative, and we just can’t have negativity around us, right? I call it realistic, but ya know… Most women are just weak. They know what I say is true, but they also know there is immense punishment involved in holding men responsible for what they do. For example, she (and 99.9% of women in the world) socially punish me and women like me for speaking out through isolation. As well, this woman will get married and be financially better off than me – that is the financial punishment a woman like me experiences. And there is so much more.
It’s not Our Fault Your Boy-Child is Stupid
Oh men. When girls and women wise up to your bullshit and beat you at your own game, you give the table a good ole spin. It’s a tired, long-used tactic and we ain’t buying it no more.
The game goes like this. Men predominate in a domain of work or academics. Women are grudgingly granted access. Access with serious conditions like harassment, lower pay, rape threats, actual rape and other violence, exclusion, lack of promotions and opportunities, etc. Yet despite all these unfair and criminal conditions, women not only excel in said domain, but exceed the ability and performance of men. Men flee from said dominion in droves, tails between their legs. Men find excuses for their failure, relegating the domain to the ‘feminine’, lowering its value, denigrating the new experts, and implying strongly that there is something wrong with the domain since women are good at it. It would be funny, if it weren’t so fucking pathetic and horrible, especially since salaries and respect for those jobs tend to go down once men dismiss them as women’s work. But we’ve seen it time and time again.
Education
And so we come to the newest domain of disdain. I’m referring to the growing reality that boys can’t handle school. When they’re faced with actual competition, that is.
For hundreds of years, education was artificially made the domain of males. Men, afraid of the demonstrated potential of female intelligence and power, put a stop to any and all possibility for actualization. Girls and women were banned from school and condemned to lives of marital rape, mandatory pregnancy, cleaning, cooking and shopping. In some cultures, wealthy girls were given educations in music, sewing, and languages, although not in a to-be-taken-seriously way that would allow them to escape from men. In many cultures today, girls are still barred from school and from many professions, and can be killed for attempting to learn. Even in China, where I live, impoverished families will choose to educate boys over girls. The girls get to stay home as slaves. In some countries, the girls will be sold into prostitution so that the family can eat and have one fewer mouth to feed.
Only very recently in human history have girls and women been allowed (in most countries) to walk the hallowed halls of schools, albeit under constant misogynistic threat of violence and actual sexual assault and rape; routine dismissal of credibility; exclusion from ‘boys’ clubs’ and opportunities; and exposure to male-centric learning materials and environments. Despite all this, girls and women have soared academically, achieving in decades what it took boys and men centuries to learn. It makes you wonder how much further we would be as a society if girls had been allowed to study centuries ago. It is truly sad that men will sacrifice global human well-being to keep their dicks hard.
Anyhow, fast-forward to today. The majority of men as well as handmaidens who have spawned boy-children feel threatened and angry. We’re seeing something interesting in schools. Unlike during most of scholastic history, boys actually have serious competition now. Girls. And the boys aren’t measuring up. Despite the violence and dismissal girls still face even in First World countries, they are kicking boys’ asses academically. The possibilities resulting from girls and women succeeding finally in education are very positive.
Girls and women tend to do positive things with their education – giving back to their communities, sharing their knowledge online and on the ground, starting pro-social projects, and contributing fewer children of their own to the world’s overpopulation. Males on the other hand, tend towards more selfish, destructive and violent goals when they are given education and opportunities. Women use their education to help lift everyone’s quality of life, while men generally will use their education to maintain dominance structures that hurt girls and women. So, more educationally successful girls and women means a better world for all – including boys/men.
But we have to figure out what to do with the growing number of angry violent boys, moron’s rights activists (MRAs), boors’ (boys) rights activists, and handmaidens who are threatening the positive change we are seeing in girls’ status and the potentially positive future of our communities.
The kinds of problems we’re seeing in boys are nothing new, but when set down beside girls’ success, they indicate a possible and very serious problem with male mental deficiency that has likely always been present. When faced with a slightly more level playing field, boys regularly:
- can’t read
- especially can’t read books with female characters
- can’t pay attention
- can’t refrain from violence
- can’t treat others including the teacher with a modicum of respect
- can’t deal with more inclusive learning materials that treat girls/women as human
- can’t work cooperatively
While this is being commonly reported in the US and other Western countries, I see this among my male Chinese university students. I maintain that it is nothing new. What is new is the availability of comparison data. We are finally seeing data on girls in the West, and they are doing better even with the threat of violence, actual violence and pervasive misogyny that has always been present. In places like China, those data aren’t in yet. Chinese girls still have enormous pressure to underperform AND with the shortage of girls (40 million girls should exist that don’t due to selective abortion and female infanticide), there is massive pressure for even the ‘ugly and unmarriageable’ to marry and breed instead of pursue higher education, and when they are allowed education, they’re relegated to girl-acceptable professions. I teach science and engineering students primarily, and there are usually no more than 2-3 girls in a class of 50. It has nothing to do with intelligence or aptitude. But in China, men MUST be smarter than the women they marry, and they MUST make more money than women, so there is a lot of faking it going on on the part of girls and a lot of relegation of girls to low-pay professions.
I remember reading a post on this phenomenon in the last year, where some clueless, American mother was lamenting over the fact that her mentally deficient son wasn’t able to read any children’s books because all the new books had female main characters doing “implausible things”. It was bizarre. Girls have been raised on books and films (still are, actually) featuring puffed up males doing impossible things. Yet, they are kicking ass in school. How can girls manage, but boys can’t…? This mother certainly wasn’t doing her son any favours by enabling his deficiency and privilege.
The ‘Feminization’ of Education?
It has been suggested by the angry and stupid and privileged that this magical failure of boys (again, it is not anything new, it just shows up when boys have to compete with girls and the intelligence and talent bars are raised) is due to the ‘feminization of education’. This is a new term that has been designed by MRAs as an excuse for male ineptness. I’m not even really sure what they mean by it – their descriptions are usually based on lies or there isn’t actually a problem from an ethical point of view. They see a problem with girls being protected from rape and sexual violence and intimidation in the classroom. They see a problem with equal opportunities for girls. They see a problem with taking away historically unfair advantages from boys. They see a problem with a merit-based system and prefer a penis-based system. What is ‘feminizing’ about addressing human rights abuses? Nowhere in education are boys being treated the way girls have been treated throughout history (and still today). These loud, angry types are deluded.
In fact, it is a matter of adaptation vs privilege.
Girls, in order to survive in a world that hates them, have always had to adapt to their surroundings. Finding that their proclivities for learning or greatest interests are routinely dismissed, they find a way to get through, learn, and succeed. This is the way women and girls have always survived. Adaptation.
But boys have never had to adapt. They have always been catered to. But that is changing, luckily, and we’re seeing how well they are dealing with having their privilege challenged. Taking away an unfair advantage (privilege) is not taking away rights. This is the key thing that MRAs and handmaidens don’t get. Ever. An equal playing field is the best way to find the best students. And while the playing field is still not equal and still is biased in favour of boys, girls are showing themselves to be very successful, nonetheless.
Instead of resorting to threats and violence and hand-wringing and changing policy to hurt girls yet again or dismiss education as some ‘girl thing’, I suggest that boys learn to adapt and work hard for the first time in history. Adapting is a basic learning skill. It is basic humanity. And it is necessary to survive as a being. If you don’t adapt, you die out. That’s what happens to things that have outlived their purpose or have no purpose. And I have no problem with useless, and especially violent, things dying out…
Naiveté, Stupidity, and Ignorance
Let’s take a look at a few terms that get confused often. I will reference men and privileged people, but my end goal is to ask a question about religious goombas of all flavours.
Naiveté
Naiveté is a lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment. It implies innocence or a lack of sophistication about how the world works. It is a word that can usually be applied to children that have been fortunate enough to miss out on serious abuses of one sort or another.
Naiveté is neither good nor bad – it is just a typical stage people who have not yet had exposure to a wide range of experiences go through. But it often implies a value judgement when it is applied to girls and women. In this case, it blames or insults the person in question regardless of whether she is naive or she is not (i.e., a naive girl is a stupid girl, and a girl who is not naive is a slut or seductress). Girls and women, can never win in this world, and this is just one of many examples that show the damned if you do, damned if you don’t rule of ladyhood.
Nevertheless, with age and life experience, most people lose their naiveté and find themselves in another state of being.
Unfortunately for some, naiveté can morph into willful ignorance with age either as a coping mechanism (for women) or as a maintainer of privilege (with men). For example, regarding the latter, a good friend of mine is a 47-year-old man who was shocked to find out from some recent news story that a huge number of men use online dating sites advertising hot women in order to cheat on their wives. What appeared to be naiveté was really a willful ignorance (see below). How can a middle-aged American man not know that men are shitheads? Because he isn’t on the receiving end of misogynistic abuse every day of his life, and he has no reason to give a shit about what women experience. Because he hasn’t been forced to open his eyes, he is not responsible for anything. And that’s how men can look innocent/naive with looks of horror on their faces when really they just can’t be bothered to notice how their lives are better than women’s. Note that men, once eyes are opened (honestly, I do believe they know exactly what is going on in the world, but just feign innocence), still don’t do anything to end the hurt done to women.
Ignorance
Ignorance is simply a lack of knowledge or information. Every single one of us is ignorant about many things. It is impossible to know everything even if we devoted every waking moment to learning. Thus is cannot be a blameworthy state on its own. In certain contexts, however, it might be suspect. For example, it can be sometimes surprising when a young, supposedly educated adult or group of adults appears to lack basic information in a number of rather important and basic areas of knowledge. We’ve heard this said frequently of the current, young, American population – most university students can barely deal with a map of their own country, never mind a world map. The comment on their ignorance is one of blame, although how much of it is the fault of the young people rather than their parents, the government, and the education system that they are so woefully ignorant of what is going on around them?
Stupidity
Stupidity is a lack of intelligence, understanding, or ability to reason. Some believe that stupidity is a biological limitation of the brain, much like height is a limitation of physical stature, that one is born with, and that cannot be overcome, even with great effort to learn or improve. Like with height, some believe that there is a range one is limited to at birth and that the conditions one lives in determine the point within that range that one will achieve.
While limited intelligence in and of itself is not blameworthy, when coupled with privilege and especially willful ignorance, it can be very dangerous. It doesn’t take great intelligence to be able to understand basic human rights for all, you see.
Some people use the term stupid to refer to behaviour, especially harmful (to self and others) and cruel behaviour, which of course invokes blame. Whether stupid behaviour results from privilege or from biological stupidity, I’m not sure. But note that most behaviour that could be categorized as stupid is committed by boys and men. There are tons of movies and television programs devoted to celebrating stupid male behaviour. Also note that girls are more likely to be called stupid, especially when they do things that make it easier for males to hurt or take advantage of them. I am somewhat loathe to call females stupid when males hurt them, moreso when the female is young and truly naive to the sheer horrors of what males perpetrate every second of every day.
Willful Ignorance
Willful ignorance is the decision to ignore evidence and information that contradicts one’s beliefs or that may lead to a loss of benefits. This kind of behaviour or way of thinking/being often results from and maintains a state of privilege (e.g., being male, being religious, being straight, being a breeder, being non-white in a Western country these days, etc.) or as a coping mechanism in women who might find themselves in danger if they allow themselves to fully absorb the reality of their slavery.
To admit one is wrong or deliberately ignorant requires one to be humble, to take responsibility for one’s behaviour, and to give up things no human should do or have (e.g., control or ownership of another human). For women, to admit reality can be very difficult and requires some serious decision-making regarding one’s slave state as a woman. It is decidely easier in many ways for a woman to maintain a state of willing ignorance than to live in reality.
While one may understand the psychology of willful ignorance, it is still the most blameworthy and shameful of states to be in, and it is a state occupied by a lot of men and by religious people (especially religious men of all races). Note that I place much less blame on women who are willfully ignorant of their slavery (Note – 2021 – although my views have been changing a bit on this issue over time as 6 years have passed since this post was originally written). Some women have little choice to escape without risk of death, rape, beatings and/or stalking/harassment, and pretending all is well is sometimes a necessary way of surviving. Yet, at the same time, there are plenty of women who don’t risk death, but who just don’t want to deal with reality or making hard decisions. Unfortunately, these women’s choices affect ALL women negatively. As someone who has rejected happy-fun-lies and made some hard grounded-in-reality choices (out of the limited choices men allow me as a woman), I can tell you that while I have attained more freedom in my mind, there is a lot of pain and vulnerability associated with my choice to face reality and act on it. I blame the men and the shitty slavery system they have created and maintain. Women shouldn’t have to escape reality and tell themselves lies just to exist.
Final note: one can be willfully ignorant and very stupid at the same time. And those folks are dangerous.
A Question
A question that often gets batted around both online and in the meat world is: Are religious people stupid? My knee-jerk reaction is a resounding ‘YES!’ But let’s consider a little.
I think religious people fall into all of the categories discussed here. The children are naive. The fact that they are brainwashed into the major religious cults is child abuse. I wish Richard Dawkins hadn’t have backed down when he was confronted during an interview by a Muslim male breeder. Said Muslim asked Dawkins whether he – a religious father – was a child abuser. Dawkins, of course, said ‘no’. I guess it’s hard to tell people to their faces that they are in fact doing something horrible to their children.
Many religious people are ignorant. And I blame this on their families, idiocy on the parts of certain governments, and dreadful education systems that place religious teaching higher or on par with the teaching of science, philosophy and logic, for example.
Many religious people are biologically stupid, and I think early religious training limits how far people can push their brains within our given personal ranges of intelligence. But don’t take my word for it. People are researching the link between religion and intelligence. For example, a meta-analysis of 63 studies does indeed show a strong correlation between religious beliefs and intelligence. Lower intelligence is related to higher religiosity. And smart people just tend not to be religious. Nevertheless, it isn’t news to me. These are obvious correlations, although having data to back them up is necessary, of course.
Religion is just magical thinking that preys on fear and reinforces fear-based misogyny. Intelligence allows us to work logically though fear and adjust our world views accordingly to become better people. With low intelligence, easy, bullshit non-answers are appealing and soothing. Hate is justified and requires no personal responsibility. No effort required.
Lastly, I think most, if not all, religious people are willfully ignorant. To see reality would be to reject religion for the hateful, backwards, dangerous nonsense that it is. Clear-thinking and humility are incompatible with religion. To be willfully ignorant, one has to feel that there is something to lose in accepting reality. Like men with their privilege over women, so too do the religious have the same things to lose – comfort, political power, money, sanctioned violence, and that smug sense of superiority that you see in most religious people. Give up the privilege and you just have to accept being… human.
Perverting Herstory – A Slice from China
As is well understood by women, the history of humankind is the story of men. And it is a boring story of repetition: rape; war; rape; the stealing of women’s ideas; rape; denying education to women; rape; the development of various economic/religious/political systems of dominance favouring men; rape; war; more rape, ad infinitum. Boring. And the story is pretty much the same no matter which culture or part of the world you drill down into. And there is no end in sight. History is written by the victors, and men are always the victors. History is written to get men off, not to regret, not to learn, not to become better beings. It’s just the stuff of boners.
I’ll provide one teeny tiny example.
A few years ago, I lived and worked in Nanjing, China. For those who know little to nothing about China, Nanjing is famous for a few things. For one, it is a former capital of China, and secondly, it was the site of one of the most brutal mass rapes and mass murders in history. Over a period straddling December 1937 – January 1938, Japanese troops occupied Nanjing and rained atrocity down on the women and other citizens of Nanjing. I’m not going to recount the whole history here – you can check out Iris Chang’s book, “The Rape of Nanking”, to avoid being forced to swallow a male point-of-view. Men tend to focus on how off-duty Chinese soldiers were executed – as if that was the highlight and greatest tragedy of the whole disgusting mess.
Anyhow, modern-day Japan poured money into the building of a memorial/museum in Nanjing. And I went. It is a spectacular building.
I did, however, feel there was a cock-centric over-focus on soldiers being killed. Personally, I couldn’t give a shit about soldiers. They sign up to kill and be killed. Many of them rape local women/girls and/or use prostitutes, which demotes them to non-human status for me. So fuck ’em. War is a man’s invention. Not women’s. You make your bed, you sleep in the damn thing, men. I just wish women could be left out of the whole business since it has nothing to do with us.
Now, out of the whole museum, there was one wall that also included a corner, detailing the whole rape business, which for me was the centre of the whole multi-week siege. I think it would have been over sooner had there been no women there. The display consisted of all sorts of large photos and text describing what had happened.
But I couldn’t read any of it. Why?
Because I couldn’t get close to it at all. There were 200+ Chinese men all pushing and shoving each other, including me, trying to get close enough to see the naked photos of the Chinese women. Unfortunately, for the men, there were no actual mid-action rape photos – just dead women with bayonets sticking out of their vaginas, and naked, devastated, brutalized women lined up for viewing, crouching, cowering, crying. Still, titillating stuff for China (where porn is illegal). These fucking turds were excited by the idea of what had happened. No learning going on. No tears shed (except mine). Just excitement. And hatred for the Japanese, but also excitement.
Naked, brutalized women. Very, very cool stuff.
By the way, there was no pushing or over-crowding or excitement at any of the other displays. And there were no women pushing or shoving to get close to the rape display. Actually, the Chinese women visiting the museum avoided that whole corner for the most part.
But this whole phenomenon is not unique to China. Men all over the world love depictions of rape. Love seeing women degraded, hurt, brutalized. Even if they don’t consider themselves rapists (ahem…), they can live vicariously through those who do.
And women don’t fantasize about rape (please read that again American porn-dogs). Women who claim they do have been socialized/trained/brainwashed by the Patriarchal ‘romance narrative’ into believing that seduction and sexayness need to be violent. There is nothing healthy or ‘natural’ about getting hot about the idea of rape. Sorry.
I appreciated the memorial and museum very much, but I was disgusted. Nothing ever changes no matter how much time goes by. Men still love to hate women. And we still accept it.
Those Debates Aren’t for Everyone
I’ve watched many a debate between staunch atheists and rabid godfuckers of various flavours over the years. The debates are in and of themselves pointless in that there is no common starting point. When the two parties don’t exist on the same planes of reality – atheists base arguments (mostly) on facts and evidence, while godfuckers rely upon nonsense and use an incorrect definition of ‘evidence’ as argument support – you can’t proceed in a productive way. To even consider the positions equal is crazy because of this.
But I suppose the debates serve a few purposes. Myself? I wouldn’t bother. I don’t enjoy public speaking – although I formally train students of the debating arts. But for those skilled in oratory, with hidden depths of patience, and who enjoy the process of debate as an intellectual exercise, a few things can be achieved. First, those on the fence about their religious stance may be convinced by the logic, goals, sanity, and evidence supporting the atheist position. Second, neophyte-atheists can become familiar with the sad, tired non-arguments of the religious and learn how to defend themselves properly when under (sometimes literal) attack. Third, we can publicly remind the world of the evils that have been perpetuated and defended by the religious. And finally, the debates can be pure entertainment of the dark sort. There is amusement to be found (usually coupled with sadness, pity, and/or anger) in watching the religious defend bullshit. So while, for many, it is mostly a waste of time to bother arguing with idiots, the ignorant, bullies, and the fear- and hate-filled, there can be benefits in the exercise to the public.
The very same can be said for debates between radical feminists and dangerous misogynists (e.g., MRA’s, NiceGuys, Right Wing Religious Nutjobs, Porn Sick Left Wing Men, trannies, and Fun/Choice/Third Wave Feminists). The former argue from a position of human rights, freedom, and benefit to ALL women and men. The latter argue irrationally from a position of domination/submission, human rights abuse, privilege, individualism, and selective censorship. Like with the atheist/godfucker debates, there is no real common ground from which to begin the debate. It is a logic vs nonsense war. But I applaud those feminists with the bottomless patience an oratory skills to take on what are truly dangerous opponents. The debates are ultimately pointless and unwinnable, but they can indeed a) convince those on the fence about women’s status as human beings to join the side of logic and empathy and human rights for ALL, b) arm neophyte-feminists with the tools to defend themselves against dangerous and aggressive anti-woman, rape-supporting proponents, c) give misogynists a platform upon which to display the full extent of their ill intentions and past crimes, and d) give us something to laugh at cynically.
Those courageous, rational people (especially women) who stand up to and openly debate proponents of cultures of hate and oppression, whether they be Religion or Misogyny/Patriarchy, and who have won freedoms for us all, are brave souls who put themselves in danger for the benefit of the world. They (especially women) are on the receiving end of death threats, rape threats, censorship, and hate speech accusations, simply for speaking truth and calling upon criminals to defend themselves in public. The saddest realization for me is that so many people currently benefiting from the bravery of those who have stood up to religion and misogyny, have turned around to castigate these same crusaders.
Is it human nature to kill the person who unlocks the cage and extends a hand in friendship and compassion?
My First Week of the Semester or White Whore Put in Her Place by Male Students
As I’ve mentioned before, I am a university instructor of writing, academic English, and general speaking classes in China. I’m 43. I don’t practise femininity, although everyone easily knows I’m a woman cuz I have tits. You’d think that I’d become a little more invisible because of my age and androgynous clothing, but sadly, that is not the case. I’m reminded on a daily basis that I’m a woman and that I exist as sub-human, a sexual object, and there primarily for male use.
When you teach in China, unless you are teaching at an all-female school or are teaching non-science or non-technology majors, you are stuck with classrooms full of dudes. Female students still face many barriers to entry into these ‘male professions’ here, and of course, China is missing millions upon millions of girls because of selective abortion resulting from the One Child Policy. I teach at a technology university, so you know what I’m stuck with. Wall-to-wall dickitude.
Last semester, I was fortunate to have a lot of English-major classes (almost completely female), tourism classes (female-dominated, male minority) and business grad students (equal gender divide). I knew I should cherish that time, and that I would be unlikely to be so fortunate again. Having predominantly female students is a very different experience from having a predominance of male students. It’s a more pleasant, non-aggressive, and intellectual experience. You get more questions about real issues. And all of this matters even more when you’re a female instructor trying to preserve your safety, sanity and dignity.
After such a positive semester of academics and womanhood, this new semester began in stark contrast. Aside from having to tell classrooms full of young men to shut the fuck up and listen every five seconds like they were out-of-control toddlers, misogyny reared its ugly immediately.
First, there were endless comments from the males about what a shame it was that there ‘weren’t enough girls’ in their classes. (I think there were five women in total out of 140 students.) Now, the concern wasn’t because these young men wanted to see equality in science and technology, or that they wanted to do something to rectify China’s history of gynocide, or that they wanted more opportunities for women, in general.
Simply, they wanted more and convenient access to pussy.
To all men in the world, these Chinese boys included, women exist to be looked at and used sexually. So, I wasn’t fooled. These privileged dudes weren’t feeling sorry for women. They were feeling sorry for themselves. It was all about their entitlement.
I watched the faces of the few girls in the class when these comments were made amid the snickers of fellow male classmates. The young women’s faces reminded me of those being victimized in porn or in violent scenes in film/tv. Checked out. Blank. Knowing full well they had no escape from the misogyny of the four years of their degrees or the lifetime following graduation. Knowing that speaking up and defending themselves would unleash the hate and violence that lives in all males. They were trapped and according to Chinese culture, had to accept their fate as objects. It is rare that women speak up for themselves in China, and I’ve only ever witnessed it in one-one-one discussions or in my classes where women predominate. I feel for these young women, and I’ll stand for them as much as I can in class.
And then there was the misogyny directed towards me.
Keep in mind that both elders and teachers are *generally* still given respect in China – unlike in the West, where both older people and teachers are constantly criticized and regularly disrespected, even by small children. So when you see disrespect in China, it is a big fucking deal.
Respect in China, I’ve learned over the years, is meted out differently to men and women. As a woman, and especially as a foreign w̶h̶o̶r̶e̶ woman, I can be easily and justifiably disrespected. And I am constantly disrespected. Out of three classes I conducted during this first week alone, there were three notable instances of disrespect that no man, Chinese or foreign, would experience. Chinese women are not on par with men in this culture either, but I guarantee they are not on the receiving end of unwanted touching or solicitation in a university classroom. So upon first meeting of their university instructor, my classes of dudes gifted me with the following:
- My ownership status was questioned. In an introductory exercise meant to get students thinking about asking questions, I had my surname put on the board. They were meant to come up with: “What is your family/last name?” But no one thought of that. One dude immediately came up with “What is your husband’s name?” (I have to justify my non-married AND childless status every goddamn semester. My male counterparts don’t.) Instead of a justifiable, but unprofessional “FUCK YOU” directed at the student, I decided instead to let the boy know that the name was mine (technically, my rapist, wife-beater grandfather’s…) and that neither was I married nor did women ever need a husband. The class laughed. Of course they would. Women’s words and needs can’t be taken seriously.
- One male student tried to hug me. China is not a cross-sex touchy culture. And you definitely don’t touch strangers, even of the same sex. And no Chinese student over the age of 5 would EVER attempt to touch a teacher, especially on the first day of class. But I am a foreign woman. Thanks to misogynistic Western media (primarily American film and television) and thanks to Chinese misogyny, white women (not black or hispanic or other women of colour) are seen as sluts who are not only obsessed with sex, but who are open to being touched and fucked by every single interested male on the planet. “No” isn’t in our vocabulary. ‘Sex in the City’ is frequently watched here, and provides a model of the typical white, Western woman as public fuck toilet. As a woman who is personally well-acquainted with assault in many countries, I am hyper-vigilant about men, regardless of colour, when they are near me. Nevertheless, I’m frequently surprised by men trying to objectify me, touch me or otherwise assault me in this country. When it happens in the classroom, I get really pissed off because I am not some random, nameless stranger men can rationalize abusing by ‘othering’ me, but a teacher who, according to culture, should be automatically given a modicum of respect. One of my quite young (24), white, female colleagues has told me that the sexual disrespect from males in her classes is quite frequent. She doesn’t know how to deal with it, she admits. I would have thought that being 43, authoritative, very confident, and not overly thin or super attractive would have done the trick, but alas, it appears no woman can escape misogyny. I don’t have a lot of advice for her other than to maintain as much professional distance as possible. She isn’t paid to be either their friend or fuck toy.
- I was asked either as a joke or in seriousness (I’m still not sure, to be honest) in front of a class of 40+ young men whether I could go on a date one of the student’s room mates. I can’t even imagine such a disgusting and disrespectful question being asked publicly of a female prof in a Western university classroom setting. So experiencing this in a Chinese classroom was an incredibly huge insult. Again, no Chinese teacher or foreign male teacher would be so disrespected here.
So in short, that was my first week of teaching. I’ve accepted that every time I leave my apartment, I am at risk. I’m constantly ogled, sometimes assaulted by local men and laughed at when I vocally oppose the assault. But even in my classroom, I’m disrespected and have to be very careful about the actions of my male students towards me.
A white, British, male colleague of mine can’t for the life of him understand why his health thrives in China, but mine is actually worse than when I live in the West. (I suffer chronic depression and anxiety, and I get sick frequently as a result.) He is a white male, the ultimate symbol of power in the world. White men here, as everywhere, are on the top of the heap. Unless rich, they do have fewer rights than Chinese men, of course, simply because working foreigners have fewer rights than say, Chinese tourists in our own countries, but foreign men can walk around in safety in China.
I, on the other hand, have discovered through years of experience in China, that I represent the universal whore – the white woman. Valued for skin colour, seen as animals rather than humans because of our varying eye and hair colours, viewed as sexually insatiable and omni-available thanks to American entertainment, and not taken seriously in any professional way whatsoever. My male acquaintance and I have had very different experiences. Women of other colours are also treated very poorly, but in different ways. Race and sex interact in different ways in different parts of the world, but one thing you can count on – women ALWAYS lose.
Can One Defend the Indefensible?
Before I launch into my spiel, I’ll say one thing so everyone knows I’m an equal opportunity blame doler when it comes to pointing out shitty male behaviour. No country or culture is off the hook. Of course, the majority of people often claim moral superiority for their own country or culture and spend a lot of time pointing out the faults of other countries and cultures. And of those others, those upon whom the most blame is heaped are generally women. Women are always to blame for the way misogyny manifests in their country or culture. It’s easy to blame the powerless for the misdeeds of the powerful. So, in short:
- every country and culture hates women,
- the hate manifests in different ways,
- people are generally unable to own the bullshit that happens in their own backyard, preferring to point fingers at other backyards, and
- women are forced to take responsibility for the shitty things men do in said backyards.
Okay, that out of the way, let me move on to what I wanted to talk about.
For a long time now, I’ve lived in a different backyard. It is one that no matter how long I stay in or assimilate into, I will never be allowed to belong to. Monoracial countries are like that. And this particular monoracial country is China. I teach university in China – undergrads, Masters and PhD students. China is a rough place to be in a lot of ways. It has a poor track record in the human rights department. The locals are abused, and foreign workers have severely limited rights and often must put up with very strange and abusive treatment (I’ll save for another post my experience being chained into my college staff building at night.) The people are very racist, xenophobic, traditional, and oh yeah, they hate women. But as mentioned above, they don’t really see any of this, and similar to Americans, most can’t figure out why the world hates them.
And so we get to Americans. China has a love-hate relationship with the US. Personally, I think it’s a ‘study your enemy’ type of thing. There are things they envy about the US (e.g., capitalism), there are things they absolutely hate (e.g., gun violence) and there is a shit-ton of stuff they don’t understand and have developed stereotypes and half-truths about. Even the highly educated believe that what they see in American film and television is true. It is very much like Western people believing that all Chinese know kung fu and play the cello.
One of the things that has become disturbingly and increasingly more popular as a question or topic of discussion among the undergraduates as well as the post-graduate students is what they see as the American obsession with sex. I often get asked why this is so. I also get woman-blaming questions that boil down to ‘Why are Western women such slutty whores???’ and a lot of the male students want to hug, kiss or touch me, because of course, white women are increasingly seen around the world as communal property that will pretty much fuck anyone. We WANT everyone to touch us. Thanks American television and misogyny and dangerous/misguided Third Wave Feminism. Please note that white men are not treated this way. And different racial groups are treated in different ways. You can’t take models that apply in the West and have them work in the same way in other places. And I absolutely don’t want to minimize shitty treatment of non-Chinese women of other races here in China. However, having spoken with several non-white and non-Chinese females living in China, they aren’t treated as badly as white women. They are feared as I am, but not a single one of them has been sexually assaulted or physically assaulted as I have been very frequently. Being an outsider with a different skin colour is bad for all of us women, but being a white female makes you a public whore.
I address the subject of Western entertainment carefully. I definitely want to talk about what is happening and make sure that people do some deep thinking about these very important issues. I also like to introduce radical feminism anywhere and everywhere I can. I do see tiny feminist stirrings in a few of the young women I teach. I like to nurture that kind of human rights thinking.
I begin by telling people that hatred of women exists in every country and culture – educated Chinese are beginning to acknowledge and feel shame over the fact that as a culture they have selectively and deliberately aborted female fetuses and killed baby girls – so they can kind of get what I’m saying.
But woman-hate manifests in different ways, I tell them. It is all based on sex. I tell them that in the US, there are some similarities. For example, as in China, Americans fetishize female ‘purity’. But in the US, while baby girls might not be left to die somewhere en masse, society is inundated with pornography. (Pornography is illegal in China – in the US it is fucking ‘free speech’ and ‘art’.) Boys are taught that women exist only for sex and that sex is owed to boys. Rape is sexy shit, and secretly, girls love it. Girls are taught that they must remain pure, but at the same time, they must be as fuckable as possible. It is confusing and dehumanizing. And what you see in mainstream media – news, TV, and film – is evidence of this fuckability mandate. The burgeoning porn and violent porn industry is becoming the number one American export. Something to be proud of. And worldwide, men of all colours troll for porn. Porn is the majority of traffic-driving on the internet. Hell, my most popular post – about my rape by an Arab Muslim – is accessed by men of colour, primarily from Pakistan and other Muslim nations, using violent search terms involving white women getting raped.
Anyhow, I use simpler words, but I get this message across to my Chinese students. I want them to see the truth that unites what happens in their country with what happens in the US and everywhere else. That truth being ‘woman hate’.
I also challenge their ideas about television and film. Most of my students tell me that they learn about American culture (meaning ‘all Western culture’) from what they watch. Most can’t afford to travel, so they learn from whatever materials they can get their hands on. So most educated Chinese take what they see on TV and in movies literally. Everyone is rich and beautiful and fucking is the most important thing in life. So I ask them, “Do you believe everything you see in Chinese TV and film? Does everyone do Kung Fu in China like Jackie Chan (Chan Kong-sang)?” They say, “Of course not! That’s crazy!” Then I ask, “Then why would you believe everything you see in American TV and film? Just like Chinese media, it is just entertainment.” That stops them. They think about it. And they realize that TV and film are not educational materials.
I hate being put in a position where I have to defend American culture – especially as a non-American, and especially as a feminist. Some things, I’m happy to talk about. I did post-graduate education in the US and many of my most excellent human-rightsy, hippie friends are American. I have good memories of living there, and I love many things about being there. I’ll talk about volunteer work and hippies and human rights protests. These are positive things about the US. The entertainment world is NOT one of those things, however, and I think it’s only getting worse. Having seen and experienced the impact in developing countries of the mainstream shit that is churned out in the US, and having been at the receiving end of ‘white chicks are rapeable sluts’ in Western and developing countries (which I think is a very serious outcome of what is going on in popular culture), I worry. I worry a lot. And I truly hope these American ‘values’ about white women are not adopted and promulgated elsewhere. I think it is too late, based on my personal experiences, however.
The only thing I can do is make sure dialogue occurs and try to get people to think on a deeper level about what misogyny is and the power it has to destroy all cultures.
Why Repetition Matters
“Hasn’t it all been said before? I mean, we’ve heard all of this feminist crap before. It’s like a broken record…”
Okay, let me answer that initial question with a question (or five).
If it has all been said before, then why are women still the sex class, given value only for our level of fuckability? Why haven’t we achieved liberty anywhere, let alone worldwide, yet? Why is violence against women escalating? Why have MRA (Moron’s Rights Activists) groups sprung up all over the place? Why does rape still exist? And, and, and…?
If women were free and safe and thriving, we wouldn’t need to have the word feminism. Women’s liberation wouldn’t need to be a topic of discussion if we had the freedom that men have. This blog wouldn’t need to exist if I didn’t breathe in the toxic fumes of misogyny every single day of my life.
Here’s where I’m going. I’ve spent 23 years of my life in full-time study. And many more part-time years studying formally and informally, as well. I’ve been teaching on and off for the past 20 years. As a result of all of this education, regardless of where I stand on the giving-receiving spectrum, I’ve discovered a few things.
The more information is repeated, the easier it is to remember and the deeper and more long-lasting the learning is.
The most effective learning occurs when information is repeated in a consistent way, in different situations, by different people, frequently over time.
These principles apply not only to the classroom in any subject one might be studying formally, but also to human rights issues, such as female oppression. In short, more women need to speak up and out. And they need to repeat the message in a consistent way in different contexts, on a frequent basis.
The densest of people tend to be those in positions of power and those with the most egregious of abuses, so the message needs to repeated enough for even them to get it.
Ladies, if you feel like a broken record, brush it off. We aren’t speaking up nearly enough to be heard on the level we need to be in order to effect change. We don’t have a movement anymore. But unlike the 60’s and 70’s, we now have the internet. It is not used effectively, though. There is this idea that you shouldn’t bother blogging/writing online unless your goal is to become ‘famous’. Wrong. In my mind, it is better to have thousands of small, radical feminist blogs than one or two watered down ‘acceptable’ feminist sites. The more ways you can reach truth, and the more often it is repeated, the better. I don’t think I’ve read a single mainstream pseudo-feminist blog in my life, but I happen across smaller, more raw, feminist sites, and that reinforces my thinking and urges me to write. Again, it is all about repetition – different words, with a coherent truth – coming at us from all directions.
And men, if you truly support women – those in your life and women, in general – you need to speak up too. Not to women. We don’t need you to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do. We’ve had men talking at us all our lives. We KNOW what we need and want. Rather, speak up amongst your neanderthal buddies when they engage in verbal misogyny, pay for and/or support rape (aka hire prostitutes; watch porn; tell rape jokes), or otherwise hurt women. Staying silent is aiding and abetting. Luxuriating in your male privilege by remaining willfully ignorant of what women go through is unforgivable. Speak out the following truth: “Women are human and they owe us nothing.”
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Story Ending Never 
Male Student Comment of the Week
Sep 11
Posted by storyending
Not that I feel bad about disabling comments on this blog, but now that the university semester has started up, any pause that I might have had has definitely gone out the window.
You see, I’m forced to listen to the stupid shit my overwhelmingly large classes of male students say. It’s China, it’s traditional, and my classes are almost completely populated with young men. Blech!
The comment of this past week came after asking students to work together to describe where they were from. I put people from the same provinces together, and within the province of my university (as most students stay in their home province for schooling), I grouped people by town.
And of course, there were the standard, meaningless Chinese comments. “People from my hometown are very friendly.” Which, by the way, I guarantee you they are not – people hate outsiders here in China – even among Chinese people – and parents teach their children not to talk to or help strangers EVER. Only family and those in your guanxi (business-social network) count. Outside classroom assignments, my students tell me what their parents really teach them about strangers.
And then of course are comments about girls and women.
The comment winner this week jizzed out the following.
“The girls from my hometown are very beautiful. The men from my hometown are very hardworking. So if you want to get married, you should come to my hometown.”
And this is the general worldwide view of women. It’s not just China, of course. Women are there to serve as eye candy, fuck-holes and baby factories. C’est tout! Despite the fact that women almost always work several times harder than any man on the planet (for anywhere from less to zero compensation), it is the men who are always deemed hardworking and smart and strong and interesting and funny and good leaders, and and and just so fucking multifaceted.
I’ll say it again, I miss having predominantly female classes. The women are just as brainwashed by dick-think, but they say much more interesting things when they have a receptive, non-punishing, woman-supporting audience (me). Only in these classes have I ever heard young Chinese women speak the unspeakable: “I don’t want to get married.” I always give them a loud, enthusiastic round of applause when they are brave enough to speak their minds on female slavery.
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Posted in Education, Language, Male Privilege
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Tags: beauty, brainwashing, China, comment, traditional, university