Category Archives: Feminism
Atheist Men Hate You Too
When I was younger and more naive, I held out some hope for the atheist movement. When all you see around you is conservatism, religious violence, and traditional male arguments for why women need to be kept down, atheism can, on the surface seem like a fresh, clean wind blowing from a freer, more rational place.
I’ve been a non-believer all my life. My somewhat moderate parents installed me in an Anglican Sunday school when I was five, but when the brainwashers started teaching me my parents were evil for consuming wine, I was pulled out immediately.
I was saved because my parents were borderline alcoholics.
There was some occasional religious sputtering in school. The Lord’s Prayer was a morning ritual in Ontario where I went to school. At some point, that stopped. I can’t exactly remember when it stopped in my particular school since it was meaningless to me. We mumbled for years without understanding. Today, all children in public schools in Canada are free from this form of brainwashing – prayer in schools is disallowed under the concept of Freedom of Conscience thanks to our rights and freedoms charter. I do recall one particularly nasty Christian fanatic teacher who forced children to take home and prepare class lectures from the picture bible she kept in her class (not part of official curriculum), but again, the exercise was so meaningless as to have no lasting effect on my intellect. The same can’t be said for the few Jewish students that that same asshole teacher punished for, you guessed it, being Jewish (although, I, like many others, would argue that children are not religious – they are just the children of parents who are religious – too bad they’re punished for their parents’ beliefs).
As a high schooler, I had friends of different denominations, and I did visit their places of worship to find out what was going on. Each time, bad things happened. At one place, we were treated to a couple of hours of terrifying and repetitive ‘going to hell’ dramatic skits, and afterwards, the adults held a friend and me captive for an hour trying to wheedle our addresses and phone numbers out of us. We managed to escape. At another place, I was taught that one of my parents was evil for practising hypnosis on their psych patients who were trying to quit smoking. Yeah, there was no convincing me of the merits or sense of religion. All I saw were lies, manipulation, and cruelty – even what I would consider law-breaking.
As an adult, I got to know of the prominent atheists – all were men, of course (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, to name a few). Women seldom are given recognition in this world for anything unless they are flashing their tits or doing something *evil*. And then it is notoriety rather than respect or recognition.
As I was becoming a militant atheist, I was also developing my radical feminist standpoint. Initially, I had felt some hope that atheism would help women, liberate them from mandatory, submissive sex roles. But I realized something. And it was a true downer.
Atheist men, including those famous nutsacks I mentioned above, hate women just as much as right-wing, religious or traditional men do. They just put a different spin on it. Some of them use sexist language and outright dismiss anything women have to say, but most of these dudes are wily. They manage to get a few women on board (aka fun-feminists) by supporting abortion and women’s ‘right’ to fuck as much as they want. But the motivation is not to support women’s true freedom. It is to maintain current privileged male access to women’s bodies. If women can have abortions, they’ll fuck more. If women fuck more, they’ll do lots of men for free. So it is more sexual power for men spun as ‘women’s liberation’. And fun-feminists gobble it up like indentured girls do a blow job in a porno – humiliated, and pretending to like it. There is an illusion of freedom and an illusion of male support. But true freedom and true power are still not accessible to women under the atheist and/or left-wing male agenda. And the easiest way to expose a male atheist for the misogynist he is is to a) refuse him sex, b) threaten to take away their porn/hookers/lap dancers, etc., or c) continue fighting for women’s real freedom in economics, politics, etc. You’ll get called every name in the book, receive rape threats, and have support rescinded.
You see, men don’t get behind women’s causes unless it benefits them in some easy-to-understand way that supports the existing power structure. Even though feminism benefits men much more than any domination-submission standpoint ever has or will, it is dependent upon men giving up violence and the power that comes from it. In a feminist world, men don’t get to rape, beat, murder, harass or otherwise dominate women. And to most men, including atheists, they don’t like that scenario.
Atheism is a good, good thing. Necessary for moral advancement. And necessary for female liberation. I stand by that. The problem is that any movement in the hands of men will continue to support the male agenda. Men can take any movement/proposal that has the power to liberate the oppressed and turn it into something that benefits themselves and the existing power structure.
So yes, be an atheist. Intellectual freedom is only possible if you let go of fairy tales. But do it on your own terms. And never go for atheism that doesn’t embrace radical feminism. Otherwise, it’s pointless.
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.
If You’re Blind, You Can’t See
Statements of the obvious. Who doesn’t love those? And yet, in our world, the blind lead. The one-eyed are not queens, and the fully-functioning two-eyed are trampled and enslaved and silenced and over-worked.
We worship our blind leaders. The men.
Confused, yet confident at the same time, men design solutions to problems they can’t truly see. We’re lucky if they acknowledge a problem at all. Often glaring problems are spun in a way as to seem natural or inevitable or something that will be worked out in the end or, my favourite – a necessary evil.
Example: Overpopulation
Let’s look at overpopulation. Women are blamed for this time and again. And the finger pointing comes from men. “They should stop getting pregnant.” “They should take birth control.” “They should stop having babies.” “They should get abortions.” There may be comments blaming women for their poverty. “Poor, uneducated women have too many babies.”
No where in the world are women in control of their bodies. In most places, marriage is mandatory. In all places in the world, women must provide sex to men, free or paid. There is no choice to refrain from hetero-sex without serious consequences. Men have designated penis-centred sex as MANDATORY. Most women don’t have access to birth control or abortion or safe spaces free from male pestering and abuse. Men have no interest in inconveniencing themselves with condoms, vasectomies, or masturbation-instead-of-sex. Women and girls get pregnant. Babies are born. The fault lies with men and the the penis-sex they force upon women. Stop mandatory fucking and give women education and opportunities (i.e., reduce dependence on men) and you will lower birth rates (and rape, and STIs, and female death, and female poverty, and and and).
But men won’t acknowledge that they are the source of the problem, so they point the finger at women, and it is, as usual, up to women to shoulder the blame and clean up. But it can’t be cleaned up until we get to the true source.
Example: Prostitution
Ah, the world’s oldest profession. WRONG. The world’s oldest form of slavery. Prostitution is not a profession. Like marriage, it is a direct manifestation of male dominance and female submission and slavery. Prostitution is not a choice, it is a last resort, an act of desperation, or enforced slavery (for many). For a few, it might be a misguided attempt at sexual liberation (as defined by men, of course).
Men may acknowledge it is a problem, but a women’s problem, in that either a) women are spreading diseases, b) contributing to the moral decay of society, or c) aren’t accessible ENOUGH for their liking. However, most men don’t really see prostitution as a serious problem. It doesn’t affect their daily lives, and for many, satisfies a ‘need’ they feel they are entitled to. They may even rationalize that prostitutes save ‘real women’ from the bulk of men’s demands and violence. They are a necessary evil.
But women are not the problem. The fact that prostitution exists at all is the problem and a symptom of vast inequality between men and women. The fact that men believe they are entitled to unfettered access to women’s bodies is the problem. The fact that men dictate women’s available economic options is the problem. The fact that this so-called job affects the status and safety of ALL women, including first and foremost, the prostituted, is the problem.
Women have shouldered the blame and do the bulk of the clean-up. Unfortunately, there is a growing movement of anti-feminist / pro-penis / pro-abuse women seeking to make sure prostitution is here to stay. And it will stay unless we get to the root of the problem: male dominance and entitlement.
Example: Poverty
Systems of currency are based on hierarchy. Hierarchy is a male invention. Capitalism, the ultimate currency-based system of hierarchy tells us that some of us have more value than others and deserve more than others. It also tells us that those of us who cannot survive under this system deserve what we get. Failure to survive is explained away by the men on top (and even men lower down on the hierarchy) as the simple result of ‘natural’ competition rather than bias, disadvantage and just plain unfairness due to misogyny, racism, etc.
Since before the invention of currency, women have been forced into a dependent role by men. The development of currency hurt women even more deeply and reinforced sexual servitude. Not permitted to work for currency, women were forced to assume roles as slaves to men. Women’s labour, even to this day, is primarily unpaid or underpaid. Prohibited from competing on a fair playing field, women have always been vulnerable – their fates tied to male whim and male mortality. Disobedience towards a man, being discarded by a man, or left alone following the death of a father or husband, have left women on the streets destitute and unskilled and in danger from the rest of male society, with very few options for survival.
And so we have poverty.
Men choose to blame the problem of women’s poverty on the women themselves. Women are lazy, vain, focused on their looks, stupid, unable to compete, baby machines, weak, etc. You name it, men have used it as the reason why so many women live in poverty, why women should be kept out of paying jobs, and why poverty exists at all. They’ll never see themselves at the root of the problem.
Male dominance, enforced female dependence, and reliance upon an unfair currency system that over-rewards penised-people for doing unremarkable things are the problems. But until we can name the root of the problem correctly, poverty will continue. Women will shoulder the blame, and will form the bulk of the unpaid/low-paid clean-up crew. Men, meanwhile, will pontificate, design ineffective solutions or ignore the problem altogether.
The Bottom Line
The ‘problem solvers’ who tend to get attention and funding and political support are almost always male. Women are only included when there is blame to be doled out or grunt work to be done on implementing solutions. Women are scapegoats and free labour clean-up crews. Always.
When you don’t approach a socio-econo-enviro-political problem from a feminist perspective, you will never be able to get to the heart of the matter and solve it. Enough with the blind kings, already.
Why It’s Important to Fight Western Misogyny
From all corners, we are exposed to the patronizing tsk-tsking, mansplaining, and of course, much more aggressive threats, from men who think Western women need to shut the fuck up over their imagined oppression. Like all men who think of themselves as intellectuals, they like to trot out Muslim women as examples of the truly oppressed. In mansplainy fashion, they try to derail Western feminists by telling them they should stop whining and focus on helping these poor Muslim women in far-off places – to not do so is anti-feminist or something like that. Of course, not a single one of these offended men helps (or likely even knows personally) the Muslim women of whom they speak. Not one of these men assists at local women’s shelters, let alone marches/petitions to stop honour killings or FGM, donates money to feminist causes abroad, or volunteers in war-torn countries to help oppressed Muslim women. Rather, like the men in the cultures they are criticizing, they are simply using these Muslim women, and easily throw them aside and forget about them once they are finished their tirade against uppity Western bitches and their whining about the imagined harms of pornography or strip clubs or pervasive rape culture. The ‘Muslim women have it worse’ trope is a convenient and oft-used tool to shut feminists up about valid misogyny.
But there is a lot to fight against at home, and it is at home that one always should start because fighting what you know and experience gives you your best chance at success. Success is important if one is to provide an example to the world at large. And if the above male response to Western women speaking out isn’t evidence enough that there is work to be done at home, then we can easily find other things to fight against. And one could start with the current, media-friendly, sexay-fun image of faux-feminism. To those examining feminism for the first time, a false image can be quite confusing and damaging.
Pornsick lefty ‘male feminists‘ and libertarian chest-beaters along with their choice-feminist pole-dancing bimbettes (aka Third Wavers or fun-feminists) are lockstepping American women and girls (and unfortunately other Western-world citizens infected with the americo-virus) towards the other extreme of female sexual slavery: 24/7 pussy with a side of empowerment and cheeky smiles. It’s the porn/prostitution/stripping are feminist choices crowd. These days, Western girls are trained in the basics of sluthood (or How to Be a Modern Girlfriend) before they learn Intro to Algebra in school. And the grown-up, self-actualized, I’m-a-slut-so-what feminists are getting right pissed off when someone like me suggests that they’re hurting women as a global class, regardless of how free they feel as individuals to have made their ‘choices’. Yes, individual choices can hurt groups.
It’s all just misogyny taken to one extreme on the female sex class continuum.
I can just imagine all the tired, repetitive, indignant comments I’d receive from those who choose to miss the point to stave off cognitive dissonance (being offended feels soooo much better), which is one of the reasons I don’t allow comments here. They are a waste of time to read and respond to. Deprogramming is a long process, and a comment war on a blog is not how to go about it. Plus, I don’t have the patience to deal with the deluded and the willful ignorant. I’m better with those who truly wish to help themselves. Suffice it to say that I am pro-human rights, wish that all women were free from brainwashing to conform to male demands, and believe that sex and how it manifests could be decided freely between parties outside a structure of dominance. We don’t have that situation now. Not sure we ever will given how few women are really interested in standing up for true liberation. We don’t have the critical mass.
Why is it important to fight this ’empowerment’ and ‘choice’ nonsense that some so-called Western feminists insist they have? Well, when women on other points of the female slavery continuum, such as those who are forced into marriage or who are forced to cover themselves up to hide their filthy female bodies, take what fun/choice-fems do and say as freedom and feminism, they often don’t see the appeal. They don’t necessarily see them as free and don’t see Western freedom as a great alternative to what they endure currently. They may, in fact, see fun/choice-fems as the real slaves (or possibly sister-slaves on the continuum). And when one doesn’t like the alternative to one’s current situation, one is not likely to fight against the latter and will remain oppressed as per local custom.
That’s not good.
Unfortunately, nowhere in the world is there an example of what true freedom for women looks like. I mean, there are radical, Western feminists who are walking the talk and going about it in a way that makes sense. We can tell who they are because they are not receiving the enthusiastic male support that the pole dancers are. And that should tell us something. Men always go along with shit that maintains or increases their privileges. But as for a healthy model we can point to to demonstrate what female liberation and true feminism looks like? It ain’t there. I think we’d need a separate planet for that – Patriarchy wouldn’t allow a separate, liberated society to exist unmolested, unattacked, unraped in such close proximity. There may be small pockets of women’s communities, such as this small separatist community of rape survivors in Kenya who are going strong after 25 years. How unmolested are these individual communities by angry, insecure men? I can’t tell you. But in general, and on an individual level, there are serious consequences for women who cry out for liberation and/or separatism – hell, just voicing an opinion in public can bring on merciless attacks from men as well as their handmaidens.
Western women are nowhere near free or safe, but we do have a little more freedom to speak out than do our sisters in more oppressive cultures. Men may still hate us deeply and will fight us viciously to keep their right to hurt us with impunity, but we can and do find public platforms to speak out against the misogyny and Patriarchy that we live with. And our successes will fuel movements and individual rebellion in other places.
That, at least, is the idea.
Calling All Female Hackers
Although the question is: are there even any female hackers? There must be, but I suspect they’ve all been relegated to fetching coffee or tea or giving blow jobs to all the male hackers in the various hacker movements and missions. Just like every other counter-culture movement or mission in history.
What the hell am I on about now?
I’ve always liked the idea of hackers. But I need to explain this a little so dudes don’t get all puffed up and start jerking off about how great they are. I like the idea of hackers who use their mad skillz to fight The Man – and by The Man, I mean Patriarchy.
I get the sense that most hackers – and note of course, that most hackers are men and thus are privileged – are ‘in it for the lulz’. Which means they are trolls. Which means there is no real mission in the proactive sense of the word. Which means they get off on hurting people indiscriminately.
I dunno, I guess I’m into having a sense of purpose in life – even if the purpose doesn’t make much of a dent – and that the purpose isn’t about spraying machine gun fire into a random ***crowd and laughing hysterically. But then, I’m not a dude, so what the fuck do I know? I believe in leaving the place better off than I found it.
*** a crowd of rapists, I could get behind. But when the fuck do rapists ever get what they deserve…?
If I had the mad skillz of a hacker – and believe me, I’ve fantasized – I’d do something that might actually help people or send a message or piss off people who are given free reign in this world to abuse women and children.
I think, first and foremost, I’d have a go at porn sites. They soooo deserve it. I’d wager they are the single most harmful (and common) genre of site on the web. And they hurt women and girls as a global class of people immeasurably. Porn is protected as ‘art’ or ‘free speech’ despite neither being true because there is nothing more important than boners and hurting women in this world. Rape and depictions of rape rock, man!!!
Why am I on about this? Well, ***supposedly some Russian hackers managed to fuck up Skype, which affected a whole bunch of people around the world who run small businesses or talk with friends and family for cheap to free. I use it – although, I had no calls planned, so the interruption wasn’t a big deal to me. Yeah, Microsoft sucks ass, and it sucks even more that they bought Skype. I don’t like any big company, and that whole system needs to be dismantled. But still, hacking Skype? Fucking idiots. Pick a real target, whydontcha?
*** that is the word on the electronic street at this point, although I wouldn’t put anything past Microsoft. ‘Russian hackers’ might be code for ‘we don’t know what we’re doing’ and we are cowards.
Nevertheless, I would dearly love to see more women entering the esteemed world of hacking so that we could actually address real problems. If a couple of Russian masturbators can cripple Skype, then think what an army of female keyboard activists could do to the online porn industry. It might not dismantle it, but things could get right fucking hilarious.
As usual, though, the problem with male domination of jobs and fields that can actually make a difference/do some damage is that there is no incentive for men to dismantle festering systems that cement viewpoints of dominance and abuse. First, men benefit from dominance. And second, if I know anything, it’s that men always need incentives to do anything. There are huge incentives to dismantling Patriarchy for ALL people, but you might need a few brain cells in operation to see past a raging hard-on into the Big Picture.
I’m quite convinced that male privilege will bring down the human race eventually – either through societal or environmental collapse. It’s just a matter of when. I figure, if you’ve got the brains, why not hack your way to the end of days by harassing the true oppressors instead of Mickey Mouse bullshit like the Skype attack?
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.
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.
Is it a Necessary Concession?
Something is troubling me. Well, okay, many things trouble me, but at this time of writing, there is something at the top of the shit heap that is looking me in the eye and smirking at me.
It’s the whole male feminist thing.
In theory, I really have no trouble at all with men getting on board with advocating for women as full human beings and supporting them liberating themselves from sex-based oppression. In an ideal world, the word ‘feminist’ wouldn’t even exist because all men and all women (if we even retained those words) would exist outside the deeply damaging gender binary (note that I mean gender in the real sense – social construction demeaning women and elevating men, rather than immutable biological sex), and everyone would go about their lives in an endless liberated, safe space. But as it is, we are nowhere near that ideal, and we have this thing called ‘feminism’, defined in a myriad of different ways and with some sometimes worrying underlying goals. I’m currently taking a hard look at motivations of those men who choose to put on the mantle.
When a woman who calls herself a feminist, especially a feminist activist, and behaves in ways that support the label (actions are much more important than labels – always), she talks about rights for all women. I have never once heard a true activist feminist talk about what she expects feminism to do for her. This type of person doesn’t see social movements in terms of what she personally is going to get out of it. The best feminists I’ve met or read or listened to act for those less fortunate, less able, less privileged than themselves. That is, in fact, how social change works. When you act as an individual to benefit an individual (i.e., yourself), you’re not part of a group or a movement. I’m not saying that it is wrong for one to act for oneself – what is wrong is when one claims to be part of a movement/group and demands acknowlegdement of that status.
And so I come to the male feminist.
I have never heard a male feminist talk about what he is (purportedly) doing for those less fortunate than himself. What I so frequently hear when male feminists talk (whether they are writing their own articles, or more commonly, hijacking an online thread in a women’s space) is that men suffer in the Patriarchy toooooo. Women are oppressed, but men are oppressed by having to conform to masculine ideals, the poor fuckers.
Give me a break.
While, yes, I think that life probably isn’t as deep or fulfilling when you lack empathy as so many men do after being socialized in our cock-worshipping world, by the very definition of Patriarchy, MEN DO NOT SUFFER LIKE WOMEN DO. To be honest, I suspect that males are not biologically wired to experience empathy – how else could they create such a horrible system of control and violence and literally get off on it?
Of course, masculinity standards suck, but they are not degrading, repressive, disempowering, harmful, expensive, painful, or dangerous like femininity requirements are. And when you do perform femininity, the rewards are not quite as automatic or awesome or cut-and-dry as those for masculinity performance are (e.g., you can still find yourself degraded or raped cuz you look like a perfectly made up, conforming, hot, cock-sucking slut).
Sure, it must blow if you have to hide a tiny cock away in your pants in a world that worships big cocks, but it sucks even more when you’re not safe just walking down the street while wearing your natural tits on your chest, regardless of size, hidden or not, deliberately slutting or not.
It’s a given that life is hard when, as a dude, you’re relegated to relatively well-paying construction or car sales jobs when you don’t have an education, but it is hell on earth when, as a girl or woman, your only option for survival (sometimes despite a university degree) is to be raped for money as a prostitute.
Patriarchy is so very hard on men, as you can imagine.
When charities approach corporations for badly needed donations, they often frame the donation in terms of what giving that money will do for the corporation. It’s usually along the lines of it improving the image of the company and thereby increasing profits. It’s yucky, but corporations and capitalism are dudely inventions, so go figure. When I see feminists doing the same thing to garner support from men for the feminist movement, I feel a more than a little sick. “Join us, we know you are hurt by the Patriarchy too.”
Hey! Men don’t suffer from sex-based oppression. Women do. That’s why it’s called Women’s Liberation, Feminism, etc.
When men sign on as feminists so they can improve the currently horrible male experience, they are missing the plot. But is that all we can expect of them? They are, after all, members of the oppressor class. Privilege breeds blindness and self-centredness. Women are seldom allowed to claim quid pro quo when dealing with men (especially), so participation in a movement is not really a huge step for them. But I really have yet to see a man do anything that doesn’t involve him expecting something out of it – even if the something is just recognition – for himself. Is a selfless act, nay, a selfless life, even possible for men at this point in time? Must women downplay their own oppression and fabricate victim status for the oppressors to get them on board as honourary members?
Jeezus cripes. I think that making such a serious concession can only come back and bite feminists in the collective oppressed ass later on. We already see it, for example, in places where men have taken over “Take Back the Night” marches and insist on standing at the front of the group. (Men aren’t safe at night either!!!! Fucking ‘ell.) But it can get so much worse. Personally, I think we don’t need to invite men to participate if they can’t understand what’s going on. If they choose to participate – which is always better than conscription – they must first accept the idea of ‘support role’ and then let go of the whole what about me-me-me approach they take in most things they do. And personally, I don’t hand out special recognition or awards for acting like a human.
Hell, is a real movement even possible at this point?
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?
What’s This Internet Contraption Doing to Women?
I don’t necessarily think that the hatred men have for women has either increased or decreased over the years. What appears to be the case (and one could say this holds for every aspect of societal evolution over long periods of time) is that how the hate manifests can appear to intensify. The hate levels and proportion of infected hater population can stay the same, but the manifestations of the hate can appear to escalate in horrificity. With globalization and improvement in modes of communication and information sharing, there has definitely been a change in the spread of hatred towards women.
A handful of years ago, whilst living in rural China, a local teacher explained to me that the internet made people bad. It is still a commonly held view in China that information censorship is a good and necessary thing. My immediate reaction was to oppose her view. I like freedom of speech despite that the principle does not yet serve the oppressed like it does oppressors. We just don’t live in a world where the principle is applied equally. Oppressors (men, religious people, straight people, breeders, etc) use freedom of speech to spew hatred and perpetuate violence, while those they oppress (women, atheists, lesbians and gays, non-breeders, etc) are often censored. And I think the definition of ‘speech’ is often twisted and abused in order to include and protect violent acts like pornography that serve to hurt the oppressed and make money for the dominant class.
Communication tools can be harmful and beneficial at the same time. Unlike the Chinese teacher, I don’t think there is a simplistic and direct, one-way, causal relationship between tools and people’s goodness or badness. That is not to say they don’t influence each other. They do. I would argue that there may be more harm than good being done, but then again, I don’t think any society in our world is set up to reward good behaviour to the extent that they do bad behaviour. That is Patriarchy, and it’s not a good system for most people. The internet was created as a tool to serve Patriarchy, and while some have managed to do good things with it, it still serves its masters: men.
Anyhow, back to the people.
Assholes existed before the internet was created. Awesome people existed before the internet was created. And then came the internet. Assholes became more assholish (perhaps a few stayed the same or reformed). Lots of people found ways to become assholes thanks to this thing called ‘relative anonymity’ – one key, defining element of the internet. And many awesome people became more awesome. Some people used the internet to learn and self-improve, or help isolated people organize and overcome various hardships. Other people found convenient and rewarding outlets for their hate and self-indulgence that they never had before, or found ways to make money off peddling hate. In short, like any other tool, it is impossible to label the internet as good or bad. It made some people better, had little real effect on several folks, and it made lots of people worse. And of course, people had an effect on the internet in a myriad of ways. Cause and effect are hard to discern.
Let’s get back to the woman-hate problem.
Woman hate has existed for a long, long time. The internet has provided a means for that hatred to manifest in disturbing ways. And these manifestations are colouring human interaction in the meat world, which then continues on to affect the online world. Now, the internet has:
a) provided a common, virtual space for men to meet and bond regardless of race, age or religion in a new kind of brotherhood of hate,
b) provided a platform for manifestos and other writings advocating for hate of and violence against women that can be accessed by anyone in the world. Unlike in previous times, ‘publishing’ is no longer limited to those who can write well or think well, or who are connected enough to find a respectable publishing outlet, In essence, any dickface can jizz online and be read by millions of other dickfaces,
c) increased men’s boldness and willingness to hurt women by allowing anonymous hordes of dudes to e-threaten or e-gang rape a woman who dares speak in public. The kind of repulsive hate speech you can easily find online is like nothing we have ever seen before. These dudes far outspew historic sex-based hate writers, such as de Sade. Previously, men had few places where they could go to bond with other men over rape and sexual violence (e.g., strip clubs) and were limited to private hate at home, in the office to a certain extent, or during the clandestine paid rape of a prostitute. Before the internet, men who couldn’t find support for their hate may have suppressed or localized their violence, and may have even questioned themselves, out of fear of repercussion and lack of support. But these days, group think and group acceptance has increased male boldness and made it easier to let loose on women violently, both online and off.
d) provides unlimited access to free or inexpensive depictions of horrific sexual violence (e.g., porn, ‘edgy photo art’ and BDSM sites) for many who never before had access, including young boys. The latter are getting their sex education primarily from sites fetishizing gruesome sexual violence against women and girls. And pairing this ‘learning’ with boners and orgasms (previously not possible in public, but now possible anonymously at home) is unnervingly effective.
There is plenty more to say on that, but I’ll stop at four.
On the positive side of things, the internet has:
a) allowed abused women who have been socially isolated by patriarchal structures such as marriage and poverty to find support, strength and the courage to escape in online support groups,
b) allowed women who haven’t found a community of like-minded women in the real world to find hope and support in online communities,
c) provided knowledge of and access to feminist literature that cannot be found in most libraries due to censorship of women writers/radical material or bias towards providing published penis’ pointless pontification,
d) allowed marginalized radical feminists an outlet and a voice in the form of blogs and web sites that they themselves can control. Men still try to attack them and derail them, but women can choose how much to interact or allow on their sites. They can also choose anonymity and still speak to promote positive change. This is impossible in the real world, and many women have stayed silent in the past due to very real, constant threats to their safety at the hands of men and sometimes patriarchy-supporting handmaidens,
And of course, there are other ways women benefit from the internet.
How does it balance out? Impossible to say, exactly. The positives are encouraging and do provide help to individuals, although I doubt women are taking advantage of it in the way they need to to effect real change on a societal level.
The negatives are disturbing, and I’d hazard a guess that one of a few things will eventually happen.
1) Violence against women will become so normalized that we’ll regress as a society and end up with a repressive something-or-other akin to what Margaret Atwood depicted in her classic novel or the way things went in Iran, post-Revolution.
2) Western men will become so addicted to and distracted by the pornification of women that more controlled and focused societies (aka China) will easily take over global dominance. China is no picnic in terms of women’s status, but they are definitely not as obsessed with porn and normalized, widespread depictions of rape as the West is.
3) Highly unlikely, but I dream – women will finally wake up, get out of their Bibles and off their dance poles and say, “Enough is enough. Time for revolution. Either you’re for human rights or you’re against ’em. Pick yer side!” and shoot the whole place up. Not for the imposition of another dominance structure such as matriarchy, but for liberation from sex-based oppression.
I root for #3, but I suspect #2 is the most likely scenario. As I mentioned in another post, I increasingly find myself in the position of having to explain the American porn and sex obsession to my Chinese undergrads, Masters and PhD students. It’s what they’re learning about and are confused about in Western entertainment.
I love the internet. My life would be incredibly different and much smaller without it. But I worry. It depresses me to no end that so many men have used such a valuable and amazing tool for the most disgraceful, shameful, boring and base of power fantasies.
An Easy-To-Use Measure of Talent
As someone with an advanced degree in psychometrics, I often think about the ways in which we go about assessing things. It was how assessment is misused and abused that got me into the field in the first place, although its applications are many and are used formally and informally by one and all every day.
Some people of the more intellectual or academic sort use formal assessment methods, but are so burdened with bias (especially that derived from privilege), that even applying rigourously developed quantitative methods go horribly wrong once it comes to interpretation of analyses.
Most laypeople rely upon subjective ways of determining something’s value (on whatever scale is relevant), and in many cases, this is problematic. For example, I’ll never give a male friend’s assessment of another dude any credence whatsoever because of his guaranteed blindness due to male privilege. I speak from way too much unfortunate experience. Guys often respect each other, but most dudes hate women on some level. So a male friend’s dude-friend may be ‘cool’ among dudes, but a complete fucking rapist or rape apologist when among women.
Honestly, I like the idea of parsimony. If I can find a simple and quick way to figure out if something or someone is worth my increasingly precious time (ladies, you likely won’t come to start valuing your time until you get older and will waste almost uncountable hours on the bombastic sex), I cherish and hone it.
Given that I’m in between teaching semesters, and I have hours upon hours to devote to entertainment of one sort or another and to copious reading and writing, I’ve been putting some thinking into how not to waste my time. Essentially, how do I assess whether what I’m viewing, reading or listening to is worth my time?
As my commitment to radical feminism develops and deepens, I find there is little to view, read or listen to that has much value. There are very few women – never mind radical feminists – that produce entertainment or ‘art’. The male viewpoint predominates, and attempts by women to break into entertainment are often thwarted, especially if they aren’t willing to destroy the existence of women, and ultimately themselves, in the process. As a result, it is impossible to watch a film or television program that isn’t peppered with misogynistic slurs and insults, increasingly horrifying and glorified sexual violence, empornulated female characters, and really damaging, backwards, and confusing ‘moral lessons’. Truly good books that don’t trigger my ‘sausage alert’ with sexist language (he/mankind/man) and misogynistic stereotypes are few and far between. And even documentaries are heavily dickish. Most art isn’t really that inspiring. And is output from the past much better or worse than that of the present? Same shit, different seasoning, different era.
Sooooo, I have come up with a basic, little formula/criterion that I want to test out. And it’ll work with material produced during any era.
If you have to rely upon denigrating or exploiting women as the sex/subhuman class in some way in order to achieve success in your work, you don’t really have talent.
I’d argue that 99.9% of the work men have produced throughout time and including that of today lacks talent based on this criterion. And honestly, much of the shit that is produced today is so unoriginal, that the only thing that makes it any money is the Tits and Ass it exploits. So if you’re an artiste or a createur in some way (including you fun feminist types), put your s̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ work-of-art to the test. Have you relied upon sexual stereotypes, anti-woman slurs, sexay sexual violence or outright sexual exploitation in order to get it some attention? If you can say ‘no’ and it isn’t a defensive, knee-jerk sort of ‘no’, then I’ll take a look with a skeptical and critical eye.
And be honest with yourself, for fuck’s sake. Exploiting women is fucking shameful. And fucking unoriginal. And fucking boring. And sadly, too fucking easy these days.
Art is supposed to teach us something. Make us better as a society. If what is being produced today is any indication of the social/intellectual/creative/ethical direction our world is going in, it is certainly not forward motion.
Truth Will Out
You get to a point in your life where you realize you’ve heard it all before. Some women get wise earlier in their lives than others, and they are both safer and more heavily burdened for it. Cutting through the crap can save you time and peril at the hands of men, but it can also sand the fuzzy edging off what might be your positive outlook on life.
I’m referring, in this case, to the uber-dangerous Faux Male Feminist. Some feminists will tell you that ‘faux’ is implied and therefore unneeded in the title – that there is no such thing as a male feminist to begin with.
Male Feminists (or perhaps Feminism Supporter might be better) are those men who claim they believe that women are human and deserve to be treated as such. They acknowledge their male privilege and claim they make efforts to fight the Patriarchy!
But if you scratch the shiny surface of most of these male feminists, you’ll quickly realize that the shininess covers a hard turd of misogyny. And what has motivated the joining of the movement is usually just a simple desire to git laid and/or feed off of women’s bottomless capacity to praise men for ordinary things that one should expect from all humans and to give people (especially men) the benefit of the doubt. Simply stated, men often take on the appearance of supporting women because the benefits of doing so are many. Many men have a hard time doing things that don’t have immediate or apparent benefit to them (although feminism actually does benefit everyone). To men, there must always be pay-off. Nothing is for free, goddammit, unless it applies to a woman giving freely of herself (volunteer work, blow jobs, housework, childcare, etc.)
How can you reveal the misogynist turd that is at the heart of the majority of male feminists? It’s quite easy, actually. There are many techniques, but I’ve listed a few that will save you a lot of hurt, verbal attacks/threats, and sometimes even sexual/physical attacks by so-called male feminists. It’s probably best to have back-up around so that you stay safe during the unveiling.
- Don’t give cookies, ever
- Don’t allow mansplaining
- Refuse sex / rebuff the inevitable sexual advances
- Launch a verbal test attack calling out misogyny of the dude in question
- Make a sweeping statement about how shite men are
- Ask men to demonstrate how they help women they’re not sexually attracted to
Faux male feminists will get offended by lack of attention and acknowledgement, rejection of their advances, and the calling out of their personal behaviour or male bullshit in general. The majority of men will get defensive, then angry, and then lash out using the standard slurs (bitch, cunt, feminazi, etc) and then say something like “That’s exactly how you lose male supporters in your cause!” or something equally passive-aggressive, huffy and petulant.
It will hurt. This turn-about. Mostly, the hurt will come from realizing that you gave trust, possibly against your judgment, to someone from the class that traditionally hurts women, and who lied to you about their motivations and used you.
If you fail to unveil the turd, there may be hope. Myself, I still haven’t met a dude who is a feminist and who doesn’t have an underlying agenda for claiming that ‘women are people too, dammit!” I have met one man who claims to put himself in serious harm’s way to help oppressed women escape and recover from really, really evil male shit, but I only met him in passing and can’t confirm whether what he told me is true. The rest of the dudes I know and tolerate claim to be Nice Guys, but don’t actively do anything to help women, educate men, or smash Patriarchy in general. Their accomplishments amount to not being total shitheads. That’s it. Nope, after 43 years, I’ve still not met a male feminist. But I’ve outed several faux male feminists.
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And by the way, real male feminist-supporters don’t spend all their time with women. They’re out there teaching men the errors of their ways and smashing Patriarchy. And when they are with women, they aren’t doing the talking. They’re listening and supporting.
…
Oh and as another by the way, I am practically hearing women reading this spouting knee-jerk, “but that’s not fair to the menz” arguments against what I’ve proposed. And I get it. As mentioned above, women are trained from birth to be nice and give everyone the benefit of the doubt, even when their spidey-sense is tingling and they are at the risk of being harmed. It takes years of practice to get over this conditioned response, and to learn to respect yourself and not take shit from those who have been trained from birth to deceive and oppress.
The Benefits of Gittin’ Older
On or around the onset of my 40’s, something wonderful and magical happened.
My ability to hear male voices declined.
All of a sudden, my auditory world became more peaceful and what I could hear increased in quality. I had hours and hours of extra time to devote to me and other people capable of listening and performing intelligent conversation. And I was dealing much less often with lies, narcissism, information NOT based on fact, misogyny, jokes that aren’t funny, mansplaining and endless, self-flattering, personal anecdotes.
All from being suddenly much less capable of hearing the male voice.
Men have often experienced a similar, but more nefarious, effects with the female voice. Many men claim that they don’t ‘hear’ when women talk. In fact, it has nothing to do with ability or physical failings. Men don’t WANT to hear women due to widespread socialized misogyny. It is completely self-serving and Patriarchy-sustaining. Magically, men can hear women if the latter whisper from miles away, “Who wants a blow job without having to reciprocate?” Magic, I say!
Similar to this male disability, my new-found inability to hear men when they yap isn’t neurological or tied to malfunctioning ear apparatus, but unlike the male situation, I do suspect it is related to age. With many women, with age comes wisdom, confidence, less energy, and an ‘elevator-pitch’ relationship to tolerance of bullshit. Frankly speaking, I just can’t bear to listen to most men spout off about nothing – aka ‘themselves’ – anymore. They’re just not interesting. What they say doesn’t enhance my world or my understanding of the world in any way, shape or form. Their privileged experiences are boring. Their blindness and inability to truly see the world and empathize with anyone other than men in their socio-economic bracket make me want to puke all over them. And as truly funny as puking all over them would be, I find it safer (for me) to just avoid them or cut them off once they start loudly and obliviously telling me how awesome they are.
I love gittin’ older!
Moron of the Day
If only there were only one moron per day, we all could rest a little easier. But alas, they exist everywhere and the more moronic they are, the more they feel they need to speak.
Anyhow, some background to the moron I managed to run into online, mid-coffee, on this lovely Saturday morning.
The internet is a strange place. Unlike in the real world (for the most part), online, it takes about 3 seconds for one to start out in one place with specific intentions, and then somehow end up in the middle of one of your worst nightmares. And so it happened today. I was googling something, and magically found myself on a pro-capitalism site run by a moron that sums up capitalism in his sidebar in the form of a busty, be-bra’d bimbo holding up an ‘I’m your biggest fan’ poster. Capitalism can only exist when women are enslaved. Good job, Captain Obvious. You made your point without having to even speak!
But that is not the moron I’m talking about – although he does qualify. Morons tend to attract further morons, and no place loves morons more than comments sections on moronic blogs.
Click to the ‘About’ page. And moronic comment gold! Especially this one, whom I will call Dumbass.
I have never found a liberal to admit they are wrong or concede to a debate especially feminazis. They just keep just keep doing attack after attack and unless the fight was physical, it would never end. These liberals today are radical extremist and we have to bend to them is what our society preaches. How come society did not tolerate and still does not tolerate Nazis but embraces radical liberals and feminazis?
We’ve got the classic Liberal hate. But that shit is meaningless to me. Generic American Liberals are frequently as stoopid and misogynistic as Conservatives or Libertarians. And those labels are often meaningless and defined differently outside the centre of the world (aka the USA).
No, I’m talking about the misogyny, which is naturally part of the set meal when you go for the Capitalist Dude lunch special. First, we’ve got usage of the meaningless term ‘feminazi’. It’s so overused that it’s getting old. Although we all know it is an insult directed at women, the term doesn’t actually make sense. And as Capitalist Dumbass so blatantly displays through what I’m sure he feels is a Clever Intellectual Question, he doesn’t even understand what Nazis are. This is what happens when a) you’re not properly educated, b) you’re privileged (person who got into a university simply because he had money, pasty skin, and a penis, but alas, no brain), and c) you can’t keep your damned mouth shut even when you don’t know what you’re talking about.
To answer the question posed by Dumbass, We don’t/didn’t tolerate Nazis because they committed genocide, targeting Jewish people, gay people, and non-White people (some of whom overlapped). You know, human rights abuses. Radical Liberals and ‘feminazis’ – or let’s use the correct word, Radical Feminists – fight for human rights. The former may have any number of oppressed groups at its focus or may focus on protecting the environment rather than oppression, while Radical Feminists focus on liberating women from sex-based oppression, while supporting intersectional issues (race, class, orientation, etc.). So to make it clear for Dumbass, Fighting for human rights is a GOOD THING. Genocide is a BAD THING.
But I’m not sure if feminists are ’embraced’ as, Dumbass asserts. His comment is representative of the majority of men in the world and some women, and their hate speech – and it is hate speech to the letter – is tolerated and even embraced.
In short, hate-spewing, capitalist windbags – even genocide-supporting ones – are still tolerated and even embraced. Feminists are derided, threatened, and harmed daily, unprotected from hate speech (although women don’t classify as an oppressed group anywhere, so legally, hate speech directed at them isn’t hate speech and cannot be prosecuted). They are not embraced.
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ps: I’m not linking to this web site because a) I have no intention of driving traffic to it, and b) through the magic of the internet, you’ll find it or one of the countless millions like it within 3 seconds all by yourself. Besides, I included a hint above 😉
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.
Let’s Kick Things Off
Let’s face it. It is NOT easy being a woman in this world. It never has been, and still isn’t. When compared to all other oppressed groups, women have been enslaved the longest, progress towards their liberation has been the slowest, and it is the group with the largest number of its members refusing to fight back, remaining brainwashed into compliance and self-sabotage. Misogyny has lived and still thrives in all cultures, all nations, all eras, and all age groups.
Misogyny is so ingrained that most people don’t even notice most of it. When it is noticed, many people rationalize it away or develop defense mechanisms to cope with it. Even egregious examples of woman-hate are held untouchable, and those who dare to expose it are attacked mercilessly, even by the oppressed themselves.
Even in this supposedly enlightened day and age (a common way to view one’s current times, despite all evidence to the contrary), the willingness to see women as full human beings doesn’t exist. Those who fight for this very logical wish to be human are castigated, seen as evil pariahs, and likened to the most psychopathic mass murderers in history.
Internet feminism has served to get the word out there. It is still a dangerous, exhausting business, however. Women who speak and who have opinions are universally hated and are at the receiving end of some horrific backlash. I’ve noticed so many feminist sites start up and then die off after a few years. My guess is that having to constantly deal with the ignorance and hate and violence of men online in addition to that which every woman endures in daily life eventually breaks the writers. Part of the problem, I posit, is allowing discussion. Discussion is important for women, but opening up a forum for this online also attracts evil in the form of ignorant men (and some women who don’t want to accept reality). Constantly moderating and being bombarded with idiocy and violence is very psychologically difficult. Only a superwoman could remain immune. And so, my current policy is to write, but disallow comments/discussion. It is for my self-preservation. Writing is healing and intellectual, and getting the words out and repeating the message trumps any secondary need to interact, at this point. If someone reads and learns, that is a bonus.
I link to other feminist sites (in the sidebar) where discussion is possible to varying degrees. Each writer chooses her level of willingness to interact with men who, generally speaking, are too emotional, impulsive, and illogical to realize that they should just be reading and learning.
Story Ending Never 
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