Category Archives: Violence
Conversations with Men: You’re White, So I Get to Fuck You
Eventually, I’m going to do a whole post on purported ‘white woman privilege’ that every single group (sometimes including self-immolating white lib-fem women) on the planet likes to shout to silence a white woman when she tries to speak. [Update: I went ahead and created the White Girl series to address this huge problem.] White women are still women, and there is the shit heap of hate and violence that goes with that. A white woman doesn’t have anywhere near the advantages that a white man has, and in many cases that a man of colour has, yet has to be held accountable for all the sins of the white man – her lord and master. But know that penis always wins over vagina, no matter the colour. Sex is the original, longest-existing, and most disregarded or pooh-poohed oppression in human history – all oppressions derive from it. Being white doesn’t erase woman-hatred, and can bring with it, in fact, a set of unique problems. But that discussion is for another post. I’m writing today about a recent conversation with a man that falls into this category of penis trumping vagina, despite colour. A man of colour targets a white woman for sexual assault based on sexual stereotypes of her.
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Rewind to six months ago: For those who aren’t regular readers, I live in Southern China. I work at a university that has a handful of campuses. I live on one of the smaller campuses in the staff housing. I am the only white person here. There are a few Filipino teachers and a handful of mostly black students here too. The bulk of the foreigners live at the main campus. I’m a bit lonely. I don’t know many people in my immediate area save a few of my better students who occasionally have lunch with me. While I’m open to meeting new people, I don’t actively seek it out. I’m quiet and a loner and I’m a-okay with that.
The night in question, I had gone into town to meet up with a Chinese friend, and I had arrived back at my campus mid-evening after a truly lovely day. It was starting to get dark. As I was entering the campus gates, a man sidled over and began to walk with and talk to me. I thought he must have been one of the black students who live at our campus. It turns out he was a French-speaker, which immediately piqued my interest as I seldom get to practise my French, so we switched languages. He said he was from Paris and taught French at our school. I was a little surprised. We have one woman from France here and she usually teaches Business English, not French. And we lost our Italian teacher after they started forcing her to teach English. But whatever. The school doesn’t inform me of new staff hires. So we chatted, and when we got to the fork in the road where I went off to staff housing, and he was going off to the dorms where he said he lived, we exchanged phone numbers. I was happy to have a new French-speaking friend who was an adult and had world experience. I like students, but I find there is always a teacher-student boundary that I don’t like to cross with regard to conversation topics. Sometimes, I just want friends – and here, I don’t meet a lot of adult women. Sometimes, I let my guard down and allow the possibility of a male friend. Usually a mistake. Men don’t become friends with women without there being a self-serving purpose. Women are there to be used in a variety of ways. I feel very stupid every time I forget that.
So, I went off on my way home.
Being female, I did what I always do when interacting with males. I checked behind me a few times. No matter how nice a dude is, you want to make sure you’re not followed. It had nothing to do with race (I can just hear someone screaming ‘YOU DID THAT BECAUSE HE WAS BLACK – WAAAAAAAH!!!!!’ Nope. I’m wary of ALL men. Men of all races have attacked me. No one gets a free pass. Penis = justified suspicion. I’d given him my phone number, yes, but no dude can truly be trusted, and I don’t let men know where I live. Ever. So I looked back. I was safe. No one followed me.
About half an hour after I returned, I got a phone call. It was Dude. WTF? And immediately, he aggressively started in with demands to come over and fuck me. Talking over me as I tried to say no. Repeating the demands over and over. At first, I fell into the typical girl thing and said I had a boyfriend. Didn’t matter, he said. He just wanted to fuck. Don’t be so serious. I asked him why he didn’t have a local girlfriend. He said he didn’t like Chinese girls. I knew what that meant. You can’t just fuck Chinese girls – they are more conservative here. I didn’t bother asking about the other African students – men who go abroad often don’t like women of their own race (white men never approach me here in China since they are after Asian pussy). So that meant he targeted me because I was white, and every man of every race knows that white women will fuck anyone. We’re ‘easy’. And that’s when I got really pissed. Like all men, a woman’s ‘no’ doesn’t mean a thing. And the racial component, which I’ve experienced soooo many times before, sent me over the edge. I switched to English to regain a slight feeling of power in the situation. I told him off. Made my position as clear as possible. He was being disrespectful of me. I was angry. And I was not interested at all in sex. I told him he lied to me. I was adamant that he not call me again.
And he called me again. And again. And again. Over the next few weeks, he called several times. I never answered. And I decided not to block him because I wanted to keep a record of the harassment in my phone log.
I went into the Foreign Affairs Office of my university, which unfortunately was at the main campus – not mine. I reported the guy. I only had a first name and a phone number. There was no record of him as a student. And he definitely wasn’t a teacher either. All I knew was that he was a potential rapist who had targeted me because I was a woman and white. The Foreign Affairs Officer said there was nothing that could be done. I asked if we could call the police (our campus is, in fact, beside a police academy). He said no. Apparently, in China, sexual harassment, stalking or even sexual assault aren’t police matters. What??? I think the guy didn’t want the reputation of the university to be tarnished by a sexual harassment complaint. The Foreign Affairs Officer (a man) suggested that I not go out at night. For fuck’s sake! So, this is MY problem. There is a rapist on the loose, and I have to alter MY behaviour.
I was terrified walking around on my campus. What if I ran into him? I am easy to pick out since I am the only white woman around for miles. What if he followed me? The guy was huge. There was no way I would be able to fight him off. And if I managed to hurt him, I would be imprisoned thanks to misogynist Chinese law. Rape isn’t taken seriously here.
Well, I mostly didn’t go out at night for a long time. I lived in terror knowing that no one was on my side. Eventually, the calls stopped. Maybe he found someone else to rape. All of this became just another of many similar dealings with men and yet another reason not to trust them or interact with them unnecessarily. I’m tired of being threatened and feeling terrified and having to alter MY behaviour and routines.
This is an example of my white female privilege. Are you jealous? We are targeted by men of different races because we are seen as the epitome of whores. The crème de la crème. All women are whores, and all women should aspire to be as light-skinned as possible. The whiter you are, the more of a prize fuck you are. And we are open to it, so the stereotype goes. We will fuck anyone and everyone. We are public property. If you can fuck a white woman – and of course, according to American TV and films (written and produced mostly by white men, many of whom are Jewish), all white women do is look for opportunities to get naked and fuck, so it must be true – then you score big time. You can check it off your list of things to do before you die. This is what happens when men define female freedom. Female freedom = happy for every many to fuck her. For free. Anytime. Anywhere. The word “no” isn’t in her vocabulary. And some white women (e.g., see the slutwalk brigade) have taken men’s words to heart.
I haven’t. Liberation means something very different to me. It means freedom from men’s desires, demands and crimes (which are all the same thing). It means freedom from fear. Fear of men and what they do and get away with. Adopting the dictates of slavery as your own does not free you. It just opens you up to more abuse. And all men know this and try to take advantage of this. So black men, Asian men, Arab men, aboriginal men – all men – have now proclaimed an open season on white women. Mark my words, white girls. By accepting your boys’ definition of (sexual) freedom, you must service all men free of charge. Rape is not possible when men believe you want it 24/7, and all they hear you saying is, “yep, I’m a slut”. I see you as brainlessly complicit in the shit that happens to me. Not the masterminds, but dangerous sheep-accomplices, nonetheless.
And though I’ll cover this in my future post on the intersection of race and sex, I’ll just be clear here since I know reading this will make people uncomfortable because white women aren’t supposed to experience systemic problems or talk about them. I am not negating violence against women of colour or their unique problems resulting from sex and their particular race and location in the world. I am saying that we are not responsible for what white men or men of colour do to them, though. Every group of women experiences a combination of racial and sexual stereotyping and punishment at the hands of men of all different groups. Including white women. The truth is that it is not all fun and games for white chicks despite what you might need to tell yourself to feel at home in your own particular oppression-group or to feel righteous when you attack the white women you feel obliged to ‘other’. We make much easier targets than men of any colour, and it is widely believed that hurting us, the property of white men, is the best way to sock one to the male masters.
Conversations with Men: The Belt
I kicked off a new topic last month: conversations with men (first post in that category). These posts will consist of interactions I’ve had willingly and unwillingly with men. These are the interactions that have cumulatively led to me gradually pulling away from dubious friendships, support of, and even chance encounters in public with men. I’ve become much more selective and self-protective in deciding who stays in my life and with whom I’m willing to cross paths. Women are not always so lucky in being able to select. We often find ourselves in horrible, damaging or life-threatening situations with men who want us to know where we stand with them. Often we have no control over what happens to us.
The conversations I will recount will be both verbal and non-verbal. A lot of the time, men convey very important and dangerous messages through their non-verbal conversations with us. Words don’t need to be exchanged for information to be delivered in a loud and clear way, you see.
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Rewind to 1996: Pre-9/11 Belgium. Pre-hysterical-Islamophobia-obsession. But not pre-gynophobia among Muslim men – they’ve hated women for millennia, and they have a special, violent hatred for Western/Westernized women.
I had taken a short trip to Europe prior to starting graduate school in the US. I tend to travel alone, and often meet interesting people as a result. I’d met a few travelling German women, and together, clothed conservatively in jeans, t-shirts, and our hiking boots, like most budget-travelling women, we went out to enjoy some music.
It was a lot of fun for me. Until I was unwillingly entered into a frightening conversation.
One minute, I was dancing in the crowd, and the next, I was lifted backwards off the ground by the neck. I couldn’t breathe.
After struggling for my life – no one had noticed or helped me – I managed to break free. Or had I been released…? A group of Muslim men had gotten it into their heads to engage a white whore in conversation and remind her that her life was in their hands and that she was garbage. Disposable. The ring leader had taken his belt off and put it around my neck, and jerked me backwards off the ground, dragged me over into his group in the corner – a thoroughly effective way to bring me into their conversation on male dominance, Islamic superiority, and Western whoredom. I screamed at them afterwards, once I was able to breathe again. They laughed. A good joke.
I don’t know if they had intended to kill me or whether being in public had stopped them short, and the conversation was enough for them. If I had encountered them in the street while alone, would they have raped me? Beaten me? Killed me? Like in the club, they would have gotten away with it. Especially now, they’d be home free in our post-9/11 world where associating Islam with violence is a no-no – especially violence against women.
I am terrified of men. I am terrified of religious men. I am especially terrified of Muslim men (although apparently, I subconsciously hate Christianity more). According to many liberals, me writing about this true event in my life is likely to be seen as hate speech. But what those men did to me wasn’t hate, wasn’t crime. Still isn’t. Racially-motivated crimes against women are not hate crimes.
There is a reason I stopped going to clubs after that. I realized that I had done nothing wrong. I existed. In public. I was a woman. I was white. Apparently, that is enough to sentence me to death. And the message from that conversation came through loud and clear. There is nothing I can do about it save avoid going out.
And I have complied. And I still remember the feel of that belt around my neck nearly 20 years later.
That’s Some Arsenal You’ve Got There, Gentlemen
Part one: That’s Some Toolbox You’ve Got There, Ladies.
In the previous post linked to above, I talked about several of the tools and techniques women have at the ready in order to survive as slaves in a patriarchal system. These are the mechanisms that lead women to:
- accept abuse, rape, heaps of discrimination without complaint;
- seek out and stay in romantic relationships with men where anything can and does happen (keep in mind that no relationship between men and women is equal);
- comply and perpetuate Patriarchy by attacking potential allies (non-compliant women/feminists) and indoctrinating children in the ways of gender; and
- fail to notice the millions and millions of daily messages, large and small, direct and indirect, aimed at women to let them know that they are members of the sex class, meant to serve men, and undeserving of freedom or respect.
That post was about defense. This one is about offense. I want to talk about the tools and mechanisms – or weapons – men have in their arsenals to reinforce their supremacy by keeping women in line. Note that ALL men are given starter arsenals as boys, and most grow up to add more vicious and effective weapons as they get older – even the liberal, so-called ‘Nice Guys’.
I’m not going to talk about physical weapons like guns or knives or physical violence like rape or beatings or BDSM torture. These are obvious. Instead, like in the previous post, I’m going to talk about psychological warfare and what men do to mindfuck ‘loved’ ones, acquaintances, and strangers.
In case, you’re prepared to jump in with a standard, knee-jerk “But women do it tooooooo!” whinge-fest, please note that a) this post is not about individual women attacking individual men as DOES happen, but is not a systematic problem, and b) this post is about class warfare – by men as a class against women as a class. There has never been a war waged by women against men. If so, there’d be millions of dead and maimed men out there. As it stands, the only ones killing men in any number are MEN. So zip it and read on!
Offense Mechanisms
Note that some of the defense mechanisms talked about the the previous post can be used by men as attack mechanisms. Projection, for instance, can work the following way in the hands of a man on the attack. As a rule, men have a socialized, underlying hatred of women. Many men will project their hatred of women onto the women themselves claiming that women actually are the ones who hate men. This is the current chant of the MRAs (morons’ rights activists), and is why terms like ‘feminazi’ and ‘man-hating, lesbo feminist’ exist without evidence for them. Men’s hatred is turned into women’s hatred to make men feel justified in issuing rape threats, actual rape, beatings, and psychological warfare.
Gaslighting
This is a form of denial, but it is denial used to attack or manipulate. By refusing to admit that something is true, often repeatedly, the attacker causes their victim to begin to question their perceptions and lose confidence. The more off-balance a victim is, the more likely she is to remain in thrall to an abuser. The victim is increasingly likely to overlook often outrageously bad behavior, especially if they are in a relationship.
Example: On an individual level, imagine a newbie to the BDSM scene. She feels like what she is experiencing is abuse, but her dominant repeatedly says it didn’t happen or reframes her experience as something entirely different – submitting isn’t abuse, it is freedom, it is love. It is actually she who has the power. He invalidates her perceptions and she comes to doubt herself. She becomes primed for a deep commitment to submissive status.
We also see this in the low incidence of rape reporting – we can apply gaslighting to women as a group. Women are almost never believed when they dare to speak out about being raped. As a result, women as a class, often doubt their own experiences of rape and don’t bother to speak out. Women are not believed, so most women believe their experiences aren’t real.
Infantilizing
I’ve devoted a post to this topic, so I’ll keep it brief here. Infantilizing is the treating of woman as if she were a child or as less capable or intelligent than she actually is. You can also infantilize girls by treating them like younger children and over-protecting and denying confidence and agency. Infantilizing goes really well with gaslighting. Imagine being treated like an idiot over and over, and then if you dare to complain, you’re told that you’re imagining things or are oversensitive. You eventually come to believe that how you’re being treated is perfectly normal and you become an ineffective and relatively useless adult with no confidence and always second-guessing yourself.
Pathologizing
It is common for those who don’t conform to mainstream expectations to be pathologized. If someone doesn’t meet expectations, there must be something wrong with her. She needs to be fixed, medicated, given therapy, subjected to surgery, controlled and brought to heel.
Example: The current craze in pathologizing is, of course, centred on sexuality. These days, women need to be ready for sex and thrilled about it 24/7. Of course, sexuality and sex are still defined by men for men, so the perfectly reasonable avoidance or lack of desire on the part of women to engage in something that will not benefit them in any way (and is actually dangerous in many ways) becomes ‘a problem’. Instead of seeing and accepting it for what it actually is – a normal response to sexual slavery and erasure – women are labelled ‘frigid’ or ‘depressed’ or something that indicates that they aren’t fulfilling the expected role. Out come the drugs, sex therapy, psychological abuse, demands for polyamory, and porn.
Shaming and Guilting
Very simply, the act of inspiring feelings of guilt or shame in someone to get them to do something they don’t want to do or to back down on requests for fair treatment.
Example: Men love to push women to the edge and over it in relationships, and inspiring shame or guilt – some of the first powerful feelings young girls experience in all cultures – is a very effective way for men to get what they want. Men often play the victim. Their lives are so hard, and according to them, women make their lives even harder with their nagging and unreasonable demands for respect or consideration. It is these techniques of shaming and guilting that inspire the following: “If you loved me, you would…” and the demands almost always entail some demeaning, degrading, brutalizing, unfair sexual performance or concessions on the part of the woman.
Shaming and guilting (in addition to spreading lies and misinformation) are the key tools in the Pro-Choice movement’s assault against women who need abortions.
One-Upping
A tool used to silence another person by claiming greater victimhood status.
Example: This has recently become a very effective tool in our modern age of oppression status. Everybody is being oppressed. It is a common tool used by men of colour against white women who rebuke their rape or harassment attempts. These men will scream ‘racism!’ or society will do it for them if the rape attempt becomes public knowledge. It is one reason I didn’t report being violently raped by my Arab Muslim boyfriend 8 years ago. ‘Islamophobia’ is a buzzword right now, and current Liberals can get enthusiastically on board with the idea that a white woman is using her poorly suppressed Islamophobia/racism to make a false rape claim but have an incredibly hard time believing that a man has raped a woman.
Some of these men know exactly that is what will happen when they scream racism – it is a joke and a get out of jail free card since racism is taken seriously, but misogyny and violence against women are not. For others, they truly believe they are being oppressed when a woman refuses or fights against their violence. Men of all colours (and SES, religions, etc.) are taught from birth that they are entitled to pussy any time they want it.
Others argue that this is also what is happening with some of the male-to-female trans community trying to silence women by one-upping them on the oppression scale. By using male tactics of aggression and claiming status as ‘women’, actual women are forced into silence. Again, some of these folks know exactly what they are doing, while others may wear oppression as clothing and truly believe everyone is hurting them personally.
The most egregious examples of one-upping occur when a white dude with no true difficulties in life claims victimhood status that is more important than a woman – any woman. This happens CONSTANTLY (see MRAs, for example).
I truly can’t count the number of men – white and non-white – who have silenced me by shouting me down with examples of how they perceive themselves to be the most unfortunate victims on the planet. It has been especially effective when coupled with guilting.
Hope / Manipulated Forgiveness
Hope, is probably one of the most powerful forces out there. Giving someone the impression that things will get better can erase the effects and memories of an incredible amount of abuse.
Example: The most common scenario is that of the battered spouse/girlfriend. Despite the well-known mantra of psychologists and statisticians that past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour, the battering male will erase this idea by promising that he will change. And he seems to… until the next time he beats and rapes his wife/girlfriend. It helps that women are programmed from childhood to forgive.
Bestowing the Backhanded Compliment of ‘Otherness’
I have an entire post devoted to the concept of ‘other’, and there is a section on how men psychologically manipulate women into enabling them and accepting misogynistic abuse through a sort of backhanded flattery: they are not like all the other girls. Women can feel special and ‘loved’, but eventually may come to realize that this status can change immediately if they dare to question the flatterer.
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There are many more psychological attack devices that men use against women to keep their system of dominance firmly in place. This is just a taste.
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Pond Skipping and the Universal Whore
It’s my first post of October. Alas, I have been out of town and away from my keyboard. It’s my first chance to write.
I normally find it healthy to get out of China once or twice a year. China is not the greatest place to live as a non-Chinese woman. Outside of your apartment you are public property, permanently on display for every man, woman and child. And they’re not polite about it. I’ve learned to dissociate as soon as I leave my apartment, much like I have done during a pelvic exam at the gyno’s office or during a sexual assault. I pretend I’m not there. I wonder at the long-term damage to my spirit, all this dissociation.
But for a few reasons, I’d been stuck in China for about 14 months. And then I found a way to leave for about 10 days that overlapped with a Chinese holiday and the rest, well, I took a few days off work. I went to the United States, Los Angeles specifically, to visit a complicated friend. Or is it a simple friend with whom I have a complicated relationship? Dunno.
Going from China to the US – or any Western country for that matter – is always strange to me. They are such different experiences, although there are many underlying similarities. As this is a short post, I’ll just mention one thing that really stands out to me that illustrates this unique quality – the differentness and the similarity of the places.
China is distinctly not white. White people don’t rule the day-to-day business. On a global scale, that is a different matter – although I think that is starting to change. But on the ground, white people don’t have special rights, and in fact, are often denied rights and are abused in the way that foreign workers or tourists usually are anywhere without workers’ rights or human rights standards as the norm. Chinese is the dominant race and culture. Among the foreign population, most (in my city) are not white. Among the white population, white women are a rare thing. Men are always more plentiful among travellers and foreign workers. Women are just less likely to work abroad unless they come with a partner or have a personal well of confidence. So if you see a white woman, it is an uncommon thing, indeed.
Los Angeles, on the other hand, is distinctly multiracial and multicultural. White is still the dominant race power-wise, and more specifically and pointedly, white men rule.
Yet, in both places, white women are the universally-accepted whores.
When I walk around in the very, very non-foreign-populated community in which I live in China, you will see large poster advertisements in the commercial areas of white women in lingerie or in sexy poses for some stupid product or other. It is offensive and disconcerting. Most people have never seen a live white person, but might be faced day-to-day with a larger than life advertisement of a scantily-clad white woman. And then they run into me. How do they see me? I have first-hand knowledge of the poor treatment that can result. Going by the behaviour of some of them, I can only imagine they think I am public property, especially if they are watching American films and television in addition to viewing misogynist advertisements.
While in L.A., even in my friend’s upper middle class neighbourhood, there were plenty of billboards and advertisements along the commercial streets. And most of them were of nearly-naked white women selling all sorts of shit from construction boots to gym memberships. There were a couple of new, highly-offensive and scary ones that had been put up since I was last there. I’ve never understood the logic of what is done in advertisements. It can’t just be catering to men’s penises. The ads are so hateful, I can only imagine that they are also designed to remind women of what their place is and the fact that they will never truly measure up. You are all whores. You need to have this skin colour. And of course, you need to look like this. Why would we want to be whores, though? Why do women accept this pronouncement? These ads?
For some reason, white women have become the target of many, men and women, alike. Women, in general, do make the easiest targets, and white women are easier to attack than the real culprits – white men. They are the cannon fodder. The ones white men put in front to take the heat, to shoulder all the blame. And because white women are part of the sex class, they become the whore all women should both aspire to and hate at the same time. But the thing is, white women don’t have real power. Forget what some dumb fun-feminist tells you about empowerment through nudity and sucking cock. They still have less power than all men of all colours. Always have. They are still victimized by the lowest men on the male hierarchy. A homeless, mentally ill man of colour can terrorize any woman on the street and get away with it. He can even scream racism at her as she cowers from his male threat, not his race. The woman can’t escape. She just needs to ‘relax’, ‘take it easy’ – she is the privileged one, right? The public and law will support him over her. He is justified. As long as women are objects, they have no power. As long as we have to witness our naked bodies on display for entertainment and marketing, we will never be free or be safe or have power or be taken seriously. Those billboards hurt.
If your only rejoinder is that ‘sex sells’, well, guess what? None of this is sex. It is debasement, objectification, exploitation, and subjugation. Of a class of people.
It’s not ‘sex sells’. It’s ‘sexual slavery sells’. And it sells everywhere in the world, thanks to men of all colours, led by the white boys. The solution is not to include more women of colour in the public nudie parade. It is to take the group-specific sexploitation out of entertainment and marketing entirely.
I’d like to live in a place where advertisements (if they must exist at all) are limited to the product and its qualities. No whores needed. In China, in the US, anywhere, everywhere.
He Was a Good Man
Most abuses and rapes of girls and women don’t make it to the newspapers or news desks of the world. First, there are too many of them – if all incidents were properly and publicly reported on we would have to admit there is a problem – a problem with men. A problem with how the world works. And we don’t want that. Men are untouchable and should remain that way.
Second, straight up rape and child abuse and other forms of sexual assault are fucking boring to our knuckle-dragging, drooling masses. I mean seriously. You’ve heard one story of a terrified woman being assaulted, you’ve heard ’em all. Can you imagine if we had to listen to them all?
But there is a special genre of woman-hurt that gets boners a-raging. Women pay attention too, but if the reporting didn’t titillate men, it wouldn’t make press at all. Women don’t get off on assault of their sisters regardless of what your misogynist husband or boyfriend or choice-feminist BFF tells you.
That is the sex-slave-held-captive-and-made-to-do-unspeakable-things genre of lady abuse.
The reporting of these horrible, horrible stories of tragedy are salacious. It is porn. It is men’s fantasies made real. The victimized girls and women are treated to various rounds of further abuse as they are made to relive their ordeals for the rapacious (male) public. And it is sport – a national/international pastime, if you will – with enough detail, you can always find some angle from which to blame the dirty little whores for what has been done to them.
I was coming of age during the infamous Ken and Barbie murders in Canada, and was luckily spared from having to read or watch too many details because of where I lived at that time and the fact that I was too busy studying to go searching for more information. In Canada, the rape videos and perpetrators’ testimony were banned from public access for legal reasons, but disgusting (male) Americans dusted off their poorly misunderstood and extremely abused Constitution in order to get access to everything. For offering support to the cause of crimes against women and girls? Hell no!!! They widely distributed the graphic detail on the internet. Pure boner material, I’m sure. I distrust any American who spouts off about freedoms of speech and expression. These jizzings are almost always made by men who don’t understand what freedom of speech actually means or the true purpose of the Amendments concerned (nor do they care), and when you get right down to it, are really only motivated by exploiting women for profit or want to preserve the privilege to jack off to women’s pain and humiliation.
[Note: Having cruised a few sites covering this disgusting event in Canadian history, I’ve noticed that the Barbie of the Ken and Barbie pair receives most of the attention, all of the blame for the crimes, and some sites post nude photos of her taken by Ken to degrade her as they do the female victims of the couple. Thank you, Patriarchy! Well-reported!]
I generally avoid reading about this genre of crimes against girls and women for these very reasons. Given how the media work today, it seems impossible to respectfully cover the crime. News is entertainment. Nothing less, nothing more.
Yet, I somehow managed to run across a video today about that psychopath, Ariel Castro, today. You know – that human stain who kept three girls in his basement as sex slaves for 10 years. How did I get to this video? I have no idea. I had been watching stuff on economics. And then blam! Suddenly, I’ve entered a whole new world, and couldn’t look away, and of course, couldn’t resist reading a few comments. Two things: YouTube videos are often misnamed on purpose. And internet commenters are often stupid. Unbelievable, huh? Anyhow, I started watching this thing, and one of the neighbours actually said: “He was a good man.” And other neighbours were similarly stunned. How could such a decent guy be such a – a what? What is the word for a guy like this?
And so we get down to an important piece of reality. A lot of men lately have been getting pissy when they discover women are increasingly cautious around men, in general. Or are afraid of men, in general. Or have a growing, *defensive hatred of men, in general. Given that neither men nor women can seem to spot a rapist and sadist upon looking at him or even knowing him superficially, and that there are probably a lot more of them out there than we hear about in extreme cases like this Castro horror show, I think that distrust and hatred are perfectly reasonable responses. Think about it this way, if men are doing the raping and hurting and violating, then they need to solve that problem – the onus is on them to earn trust. Women are not responsible for men’s psychopathy.
* Defensive – yes defensive. Notice that when women ‘hate’ men, it is in response to male hate of women. In this case, we know which came first – male hatred. If women hated men first, men would be dying at the hands of women. Often. Instead of the reverse. And really, even our defensive ‘hate’ doesn’t lead to violence and rape like aggressive male hate. Male hissy fits only serve to avoid accepting reality.
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.
Story Ending Never 
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