Blog Archives
O is for Other
This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀
Don’t worry I’m not like other girls
From the song ‘Not Like Other Girls’ by Melbourne-based Bares (fronted by Ella Sterland) – released on their self-titled album in 2017.
I’m a cooler better version than what you have heard
About what women enjoy and what they like to commit to
I’m not like other girls because you treat them like shit
And I’m not about that..
Once in a while, I go back and read old posts. I like to see if and how my thinking has changed over the years and also whether I can include links to past articles in my new ones. I vaguely remembered as I was preparing the current article that I had written something about Other before, and lo and behold, in my first month of writing back in 2015, I posted something called Otherfucker, a sort of tongue-in-cheek proposition to rebrand, but with an alteration, one of our best-loved female slurs (popularized in my generation by good old Samuel L. Jackson in the movie, Pulp Fiction). Note that I’ve never tried out this new word, probably because, believe it or not, I very seldom use cuss words in the meat world, unless I’m swearing under my breath in reaction to something really bad or someone has actually assaulted me and I decide to let loose on them.
Anyhow, today in O is for Other, I plan to talk about the following:
- Women Defending Men – aka Not All MenTM or Not My NigelTM or some variation on Unicorns are Real!
- Men Defending Themselves – the scourge we know as ‘male feminists’
- Women Pandering to Men – or what online misogynists have labelled ‘pick-me girls’
- Men Manipulating Women – à la ‘you’re not like all the other girls’
- People Silencing Women – e.g., ‘at least you’re not a Muslim woman’ or ‘other people have it worse, so shut up’
- Men Depersonalizing Women – or creating an ‘other’ for the purpose of punishment
- Men Dehumanizing Women – the basis of patriarchy, capitalism and porn culture
One thing you’re going to notice about all of these categories is that every one of the people who fall within seems to have an aversion to dealing with reality. Men don’t like reality because it would require them to take responsibility for their crimes and other shitty behaviour. Women don’t like reality because they know they would look very stupid because of their decisions and they’d realize how much of their energy and lives they’d wasted on males who approach relationships very differently than women do. Just a note to the women, it is very good to self-analyze. It is okay to realize you’ve made a mistake (or mistakes!). The important thing is to admit them and learn from them. Then you can get better and go on to help other women do and be better.
So, let’s start with a definition.
In and of itself, ‘other’ is a neutral word. It just means different or distinct. But it can take on a negative connotation in its adjective form, but especially when it’s used as a verb. To ‘other’ someone means to view or treat a person or group of people as intrinsically different from and alien to oneself. Othering can serve to demonize certain people and groups as well as sanitize. One hard, fast rule, though, is that in this game, women always lose and men always win.
1. Women Defending Men. 99% of women are desperate to believe that men are redeemable. They birth males, they let males fuck their bodies, and by and large, women have marginally better relationships with fathers and father figures than they do with mothers. As a result, they are deeply invested in looking for Good MenTM. These men are not like other men – the convicted rapists, the sexist bosses, the gropers on buses and trains. The bar is very low when defining ‘good’. All a dude has to do is not get caught raping a woman to pass as a stellar example of manhood. I’d bet that the average wife or girlfriend would be shocked (and then would rebound with denial and fierce defence of Nigel) to find out what her owner actually thinks and does without her knowledge. In reality, Good Men are unicorns – they don’t exist. There is no ‘other’. There is just a spectrum of shit. The awfulness of the smell is therefore relative.
2. Men Defending Themselves. Lots of men, even gynocidal psychopaths, believe they are special and innocent. They are not like other men. Some of the most dishonest and repulsive these days are what we know as Male Feminists. These are leftie, human-rightsy males who are the strongest proponents of female sexual power. You know, the power to inspire boners! They organize slut marches. They march at the front of Take Back the Night rallies. They attend and dominate the discussions at feminist events and in online discussions. They are super great at leading women and telling women how to do feminism, and more importantly, what they’re doing wrong. And not that they explicitly demand it, but if women want to show their gratitude by sucking their dicks, they fully support them because they believe that women have the agency to do so. See? They’re amazing! Very un-self-serving and humble and feminist. But. Yes, there is a but (if you actually need one). If you are a real feminist and astutely question or challenge this male feminist, you are in for a treat. You will discover a viciousness and misogyny under the surface to rival any MRA or trannie. He will let you know that he is not like other men, and you are unfairly victimizing him by acting like a man-hating, angry, hairy, crazy lesbian. He might express sad-feelz at your total stupidity and/or the obvious trauma you’ve experienced and haven’t yet gotten over. Bottom line is: Support withdrawn, bitch!
3. Women Pandering to Men. Pick-me girls. This is a real phenomenon, but of course, the labelling and awareness of the phenomenon has been influenced by American television and social media. Women have, throughout history, pandered to men out of necessity. When half of the population has the power of life or death, comfort or poverty, safety or vulnerability over the other half, then pandering and many more degrading behaviours result on the part of the oppressed group. You can’t blame the panderers for starting the whole thing, but pick-me girls/women do deliberately sell out their sex for the approval of males, and are thus accountable for their behaviour, especially in a day and age when it isn’t necessary at all for survival. They make a public show of not adopting standard gendered behaviour (such as applying make-up, dressing in a feminine way, or acting like a sexy child, etc) while appearing to adopt the stereotypical, gendered behaviour of males (such as liking sports, being unemotional, and over-eating without concern for gaining weight), and thus are not like the ‘other’ girls. And they publicly point out this otherness to males to show how they are better. Ironically, they are just as woman-hating and dick-sucking as the women they denigrate. All women who pander to males or the male gaze exhibit internalized misogyny. It is possibly even more pathetic than when a female thinks she is doing something ’empowering’, such as wearing make-up, but is actually perpetuating misogyny. But in the end, they are two sides of the same coin that ends up in men’s pockets. There is so much self-hatred and psychological trauma fuelling this behaviour. And despite their sabotage of women, they just end up used and abused like any other ‘heterosexual’ female. One day, these women lose their special ‘other’ status because no woman can be better than all the others forever. It’s not the woman, but the man that decides when she has finally joined the masses.
4. Men Manipulating Women. This is the male counterpart of the ‘pick-me’ female duo. Men have a lot of weapons in their arsenal for use in manipulating, using and abusing women (see my post: That’s Some Arsenal You’ve Got There, Gentlemen). The relevant one here is that of bestowing the backhanded compliment of ‘otherness’ on a target. You’ve likely had a dude try this on you before. He’ll say something like, “You’re cool. You’re not a bitch like other girls.” So he pays you a compliment, but he is also insulting you at the same time. You don’t have to be young, naive or inexperienced to fall for this hardcore manipulation technique. Most people want to be appreciated and loved for some special quality. The problem is that the specialness that so many men point out in women is that they don’t act like women, but rather, more like men. (Geez, just go get a boyfriend already, you closeted omnisexuals…). So males will praise females for being accepting of porn use, being open to trying anal sex, or for being thin while also eating as much as a man. It is hyper-misogynistic, but the love-starved female will eat up these pseudo-love-bombs. Her internalized misogyny will be reinforced, and she’ll doubly commit herself to not stepping out of line (i.e., acting human, rather than… god forbid, female). What she doesn’t realize is that one day she will fail. She may question her sub-human status or make a demand on the relationship that doesn’t suit her owner. Or she may not actually do anything different at all. All that needs to happen is that the man gets tired of her. All he needs to do is manufacture a fault or just notice that she is human, rather than an object catering to his every wish. And she becomes just like all the other girls. Again, such a waste of a human life.
5. People Silencing Women. This one, I’ve written about before. These days, it manifests as racist misogyny, it is a form of othering for the purpose of scapegoating, censoring and cancelling, and it is predominantly done to white women. It is a standard reaction to the perception of a group of women getting too much attention. There is always backlash when women get too powerful in the eyes of men and their supporters. In reality, the actual power achieved has been negligible. White women have never had and still don’t have power, have never been equal, and have never been over-represented or even proportionately represented in any line of work, despite what people need to believe. And like all women, they have only had a voice when orbiting the privilege of a male through marriage or male family members or speaking about issues that concern anyone and everyone but themselves. Anyhow, like mentioned in previous posts, calling up a handy acceptable victim group, usually brown or black women, is the fastest way to shame and silence white feminists, even if they are poor or in desperate need of help for rape or violence victimization.
6. Men Depersonalizing Women. As a woman, have you ever noticed that we have limited choices for our ‘identities’ simply because they tend to be discrete boxes or categories that don’t seem quite natural? You often feel like you don’t fit what’s available, and the choices available, as it is, seem equally challenging or unappealing. And if you are a WGTOW – woman going your own way, eschewing categorization – you face serious hardship, unlike men who are worshipped for forging their own path when they do the exact same thing. Men put us in boxes for a reason. Power and control. To create ‘us’ and ‘them’ or ‘other’. And in addition, it is easier to other and dismiss and move on to dehumanization when you can lump a bunch of things/people together. A group has no identity, no face. Without a face, you don’t need to see them as like you. They are undeserving of sympathy or empathy. So it is easy to apply stereotypes and use them as weapons. Men can demarcate the rules and limits for each group. They can judge and punish when a member oversteps or errs. They can designate certain groups as scapegoats and blame them for the very things they themselves perpetrate. Men have done this to the class of women known as prostitutes since the ‘oldest profession’ was forced into being by men. No other class of women has been so used and abused as convenient blame targets for problems that men have created. And many heterosexual, married women have piled on over the centuries, blaming prostitutes for men’s abuses, despite their actual roles as women not being much different.
7. Men Dehumanizing Women. This is the basis of patriarchy in general, and capitalism and porn culture, specifically. Dehumanization is the removal of human status or qualities from an individual or group. Men are human. Women are ‘other’. Sub-human. Non-human. Object. No oppressed group has ever been more dehumanized than females. We see this in language with the sheer number of slurs heaped on women, which include reducing women to body parts, objects and animals. No oppressed group has ever experienced the range and amount of dehumanizing language that females have. And females are still the most slurred and dehumanized group on the planet today even though we focus on every group BUT women. It is so pervasive and normalized that no one even notices it, and women are shamed if they call attention to it. Women and girls even adopt the language of their own dehumanization, which reinforces continued male use. “If women accept it and use it, then it is a-okay! Carry on, boys!” We also see the dehumanization of females in the use of ‘she’ to describe tools and machines. Cars, boats, and aircraft are among the many inanimate objects that are called ‘she’. Men also, throughout time, have referred to the manipulating and using a woman’s body as if they are playing of a musical instrument.
It is only when women are ‘other’, completely dehumanized, that we can be commodified. Women’s bodies are for sale and for rent, and it is the foundation of capitalism. Without the dehumanization and commodification of women’s bodies, capitalism cannot exist. What is even worse, however, is that not only do males consider it ethical to buy or rent a woman’s body, but because she is a thing, they also don’t acknowledge her suffering. Objects don’t suffer; they exist to be used. When a man adopts that attitude, he can justify anything he does to the object as it is his for the period he has paid for.
And I’ll leave you all with this final thought. Otherness is perfectly fine and natural in a world where human complexity allows for individual and group differences. Strict, unthinking conformity is seldom a good thing. Problems only arise, when otherness is forced upon others for the purpose of cruelty or blame, or when you adopt it yourself in order to claim a special or uber-victim status and to manipulate or silence others. It’s all likely easier to navigate if we try to understand where our own personal human rights begin and end, and when they start to trample others’.
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Women Who Abuse Women
It makes me sad, but I really, truly get it when women tell me that they don’t trust or are even afraid of other women. Some people assume that feminists believe that women can do no wrong. No. Not true. There are some horrible, evil female persons out there. You don’t have to fear them in the way that we must all fear men (if we want to stay alive and unraped, that is). But there is a minority of women who are not only damaged like most of us, but who inflict abuse upon us for a variety of reasons. Unlike some feminists, I hold these women accountable for the damage they do. There is no good excuse for aggression and dealing out undeserved harm.
Let me start by saying that the two weeks I’ve had in the U.S. have, until about an hour ago, been fabulous. I have had almost no interaction with men despite not being secluded at a women’s retreat. Refusing all eye contact and not addressing or responding to males has mostly worked this magic. The women I have met have been entertaining, to engaging, to admirable. I’ve made one friend with whom I’ll keep in touch. And I made a last-minute decision to cross the country to visit an old friend and professor for a too-short, but extremely productive and healthy visit. Thanks to that visit and our mini professional ‘girls’ club’, I have some irons in the fire regarding my escape-from-China endeavour. I have the makings of a gameplan.
I’ve been staying in youth hostels, which I generally don’t love as the experience is not what it once was, and I like dormitories and sharing space with strangers less and less as the years go by, but as I said, I’ve have strangely met a lot of interesting women. It really is not always the case.
But now I’m in D.C. where I’m reminded of why I don’t really like the northeastern corridor of Canada (Quebec and Ontario) and the U.S. (D.C. and points north). People are aggressive, sometimes offensive, and somewhat cold. Not in the Chinese way. This is different. I grew up in it, and it has rubbed me the wrong way ever since I left long ago and have occasionally returned to for visits. I much prefer the West Coast. But that is not something I’ll get into now.
Just an hour ago, while engaged in an interesting conversation with a woman from Colombia, a woman from New York about ten years older than me lumbered into our room and proceeded to take up space. Physical space, verbal space, and psychological space. She immediately dominated the conversation, things turned negative, and she pulled a few details from me about my work in China and some of my bad experiences. Normally, women, myself included, will listen to these stories and commiserate or ask more questions. This woman started getting disgusted with me, my choices, my life, and most of all, my inability and unwillingness to drop everything and become once again unemployed and homeless in Canada with no plan in the works or support networks. I literally have no support in Canada anymore. She didn’t know me or my future plans. Didn’t want to know. And then rolled her eyes at me saying “I hear abused women talk about their plans all the time. Then they end up dead.” Then she refused to talk to me anymore, made everything uncomfortable, and shot me dirty looks. I felt upset, and my first impulse was to flee. I was feeling abused BY HER. I made the decision to ask to change rooms. They were extremely helpful in getting me swiftly out of that room.
Once away from my abuser, I found myself extremely emotional and tried to unpack my feelings. Why was I reacting so strongly? Was it weakness that forced me to flee the room? I felt a little afraid of her, to be honest, and I knew I’d have had two sleepless nights if I’d stayed where I was. And I had paid a lot of money. Hostels have been tainted by capitalism, just like everything else good in the world, and they are no longer truly the budget accommodation they once were. Sleep and safety were paramount, so to get out of an uncomfortable, at best, violent, at worst, situation was not unreasonable.
Well, it was simple to explain my emotionality following having that woman forced upon me. I was badly psychologically abused by my mother and grandmother for 20 years. As a result of that abuse and likely because of my personality and vibe, I have also always been a magnet for domineering, bullying women. I always end up escaping once they target me. So, I have a healthy and perfectly justifiable and reasonable fear of older, domineering, energy-sucking, narcissistic women. They find me, and I am exceptionally vulnerable and attractive to them thanks to the damage done by the childhood abuse and my Mommy Dearest. Abusers are exceptionally good at finding the right kind of prey. I don’t yet have the tools necessary to deal with these kinds of women. I only have a flight response. Luckily, it still works.
The other issue here was that abusive though this woman was, she spoke a truth about me that I hadn’t allowed myself to accept because it is painful. She literally called me an ‘abused woman’. I had never thought of myself that way before, and it hurt and scared me. Why? It’s complicated. I had a similar experience when a friend years ago – surprisingly a bleeding heart leftie – told me that I was experiencing racism when I lived in Taiwan. It hadn’t occurred to me. White women are told over and over how privileged and racist THEY are, and that they deserve everything that happens to them. We twist all the horrible things that happen to us into some kind of deserved punishment rather than a crime. Absolutely everyone on the planet is worse off than a white woman. I’ve heard white rape victims negate their experiences – and I too have been one of those in-denial white rape victims – shrugging the horrors they’ve experienced off because “other people have it worse”. (This is also called “white female traveller syndrome” – where white women travelling alone who end up raped or assaulted during their journey refuse to acknowledge it because they think they are complaining/overreacting, or think they deserve what happened because they are ‘privileged’.)
So when this NY abuser likened me to an abused woman, I realized it was true even though I’m abused by multiple people rather than a single domestic abuser. The Chinese have treated me like absolute shit. They’ve locked me in my housing at night. They’ve refused to pay me sometimes. They’ve changed my contract without my agreement or knowledge. They’ve signed my name to legal documents without my permission. They’ve hit me, sexually assaulted me, called me horrible things – males AND FEMALES. And my will to escape and better my life has waned as I have become accustomed to the poor treatment. I’m scared to be unemployed at my age as a woman. It is hard, as an outsider, to understand why women stay in abusive situations. I have never accepted abuse from a man – I leave immediately. But the racism and sexism in employment and in foreign cultures is something I’ve not allowed or trained myself to reject or flee.
So, it’s not domestic abuse, but I am an abused woman. And acknowledging that and having someone else, a stranger, acknowledge that and label me and then abuse me for it, crushed me a little. And I fled. That abuser was easier to flee.
Now, this woman had the gall to call herself a feminist before launching her attack on me. She wasn’t. She was a misogynist. Feminists don’t abuse other women. They listen. Sometimes they help when appropriate, but mostly, they listen and empathize. Feminists should be critical of how women support Patriarchy. And we can lay responsibility on women when they hurt other women. Of course. But this nasty asshole didn’t know anything about me or my life or what steps I have already taken to get myself out of a complicated situation. My kind of situation is not acknowledged as a problem. So I am alone and must solve things by myself. She called me an abused woman, but unlike for domestic abuse victims, there is no police system that will punish China for hurting me. There is no shelter/accommodation for abused female ex-pat workers where I can escape to if I give up my job and home and find myself on the streets.
Long story short, I may not yet have been able to escape my complicated abuse situation in China, but I sure as hell made sure to escape that abusive woman moments after she showed her true face to me. I promised myself when I swore off men that never again would I sleep with the enemy, but unfortunately, sometimes the enemy doesn’t wear a penis.
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Why Men Should Not Be Allowed to Teach
It was Germaine Greer who said, and I paraphrase, that it is women who teach and men who ‘train’. I thought the statement interesting and did a little reflection on what it meant and whether it might be true. Teaching, at least from my perspective as one who has taught on and off for over 21 years, is a symbiotic relationship. The teacher is a guide, whose role and scope depends completely on the student or students under her responsibility. The students depend on the tools, information and guidance given by the teacher and use it to grow and learn. Despite the interdependence, it is also a power relationship. The teacher does indeed have more power than the student(s), and the level and shape of that power depends on the age and sex of the students and the sex of the teacher.
What does it mean that ‘men train’? Well, training is completely rooted in a power imbalance. The trainer shapes (even forces) the mind and behaviour of the trainee into the desired form. The trainer is not expected to learn from the trainee. When I think of male teachers that I’ve had, this sounds familiar, with the often added component that that male ‘teacher’ or trainer takes from the trainee and gives little in return. The training or controlling mentality is natural for men. For the most part, higher education is based on this model. But it is applied differently to male and female teachers.
And indeed, when you look at expectations that institutions and students have for male and female teachers, women are given harsher standards. Women are expected to give, nurture, understand, coddle, and be compassionate as well as be knowledgeable. Oh, and they are very much expected to be fuckable or beautiful to have any kind of legitimacy as a teacher. Age is a weird thing for women. If you are young, you are not taken seriously (especially at a university), but there is a magical, unknown point where you are deemed too old to be taken seriously too. Men are expected to be cold, distant, sometimes charismatic or humourous. Attractive? Not required. Because what does attractiveness have to do with imparting knowledge? None! Age? Ditto. Doesn’t matter. If a dude teacher walks in, lectures at students, doles out punishment, and then leaves, he is doing his duty as a ‘teacher’. Same behaviour from a female teacher, and she gets called a ‘bitch’ (the misogynist equivalent of ‘nigger’ or ‘kike’, except that the latter are verboten and taken seriously as slurs, and can get you into serious trouble if you say them). Personally, I like strict teachers who tailor their instruction to the student(s). I don’t want to be coddled. I don’t want a friend. But I want a flexible teacher who will change the game plan if she sees that something isn’t working and who doesn’t believe in one-size-fits-all lessons. I certainly don’t want to have a sexual relationship with a teacher. But males, whether teachers or students, seem to have very blurred lines when it comes to what is acceptable.
And that brings us to the one added component that we often see in male ‘teachers’. There is frequent abuse and sexual abuse of female students. It happens in all countries at all levels of education. All men benefit from rape. Some men rape. All rapists are men. Some teachers are men. Therefore, some male teachers will be rapists, and all males – teachers, students and the general public – will benefit from female terror in the classroom. And the data show this. Many men see rape as a ‘training tool’ or a job perk, and indeed even in these modern times, women have been trained by rape and the fear of rape to fall in line and allow men to continue to wreak havoc on the world and gain unfair advantages in the classroom and workplace. I am against having men in the helping professions, because a) the helping professions (teaching, medicine, law enforcement, etc) are based on power imbalances by definition, and b) men seek out and abuse power relationships by definition. The only way you can minimize abuse in relationships where power abuse is possible is to disallow those who are most likely to abuse that power to have access to it. To do otherwise is to invite heaps of trouble, and we see that this is true every day, everywhere.
All of this is prompted by another real world example of stuff girls and women deal with every single day. Today, I was talking to a former student of mine from about 5 years ago. He asked me if I’d heard the news about our former college. I said I hadn’t. Honestly, I don’t like to think about my former employer. It was a horrible place where I was locked into my staff accommodation at night (photo in this post), and a lot of other horrible stuff happened that badly hurt me physically, psychologically, and financially. It was such a bad place to work that they have to fire all the foreign staff every couple of years in order to bring on a fresh, naive batch to abuse. They cleaned house the year I finished there and relocated for a better job. Anyhow, my student told me that the college made the news recently. Graduation just happened, and a female student returned to the college to receive her diploma. One of her male teachers refused to sign off on her graduation unless she let him rape her. LUCKILY, she complained or told the right person. Shockingly, they took her seriously, and fired that ‘teacher’ (trainer/rapist). Rape is not talked about very much in China, and I’m guessing it is even more poorly reported than it is in ‘free’ countries where women are more vocal, but are still very much unequal and enslaved. As it is, we female students around the world must put up with all sorts of weird male teacher abuse, sexual or otherwise. Myself, the best letter of reference I got as an undergraduate was from a male professor who enjoyed frequently squeezing and pinching my upper arms so hard it left bruises. Did I say anything? No. I needed that letter of reference. And he was my only ally against another male professor who tried to fail me on my senior thesis and who psychologically abused me for two years. Couldn’t say anything about him either – he was an untouchable full tenured professor. And I was dependent on him for my part-time job (I solely supported myself) and my final grade. I guess I should be thankful none of them tried to rape me. It was only physical and psychological abuse. And guess what? No male students had to go through that. I laugh when males try to tell me how hard their lives are… Try living as an object aspiring to be human and see how much fun you have…
So, I wonder about two things.
- How often do male teachers actually rape (forced rape, coerced rape, etc) female students? It is much harder for girls and women to report or rationalize reporting assault when it is committed by someone they know and/or someone with very clear and socially/legally accepted power over them. My guess is that it happens all the time, and it is often reframed by the teacher-rapist, the student-victim, and by society at large as a ‘relationship’, a ‘mistake’ made by the student, a misinterpretation, one of those ‘that’s life’ events that seem to always happen to girls and women, or it just didn’t happen.
- How sensationalized and overblown is female teacher abuse of male students? It is a rare thing indeed and gets more play than any male crime ever would. So rare, they make documentaries on the same few deranged female teachers. Keep in mind two things:
a) women who abuse power should be punished (and yes, women abuse power too – one of my current excellent female students in China is physically KICKED and yelled at by a female professor every time she is forced to meet with her), and
b) women cannot, by definition, be rapists; and males, by definition, cannot be raped. The language has been deliberately confused by liberals in order to downplay what men do constantly to women and to falsely play males as victims. New language should be created by women to accurately define crimes.
Suffice it to say though that virtually all sex crimes are perpetrated by men, and the vast majority of sex crimes are forced on female victims. Given these overwhelming data – you’d be stupid to argue anything else – it is in the best interest of the entire population to keep men out of the helping professions and any professions where abuse of power (male against female) is dangerously possible, and dog help me, oh so very tempting. We (not I) argue that men have brains so they can both control their behaviour and learn from their mistakes. But they don’t. They don’t because they aren’t forced to. And men won’t change unless they are forced to. There is no better nature to appeal to. We’ve been waiting thousands of years for this better nature to magically appear. Keep men away from tempting power abuse situations with females. Female health and safety are more important than hurt male feelings. Any day. One day, I’ll talk more about false positives and why they don’t matter when it comes to female health and safety. For now, for all of you out there saying “Not all men…” or “That’s not fair to men…”, how about the current sitch, where we already operate on these get out of jail free philosophies? We already operate on the “Not all men” principle. It doesn’t work. And what do you say to all of us who have been abused by men in the helping professions? You negate my (your mother’s, your sister’s, your daughter’s, your) right to safety and living free from threats and fear when you give men the benefit of the doubt. That’s not fair to women and girls. It’s not okay to take away from us in order to let men do as they wish.
[This post is part of the Wolves in Women’s Clothing series.]
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Ask a White Woman
Woman, I have so much to write, so much going on in my mind that I don’t know where to start. Mostly, it is prompted by my current trip back West from China and helped along by my rapid and deep official and deliberate immersion into radical feminist theory during this last year. The general feminist orientation I’ve held for years and years is nothing compared to what I’m going through now. I opened my can of whoop ass and things changed in a more positive, but infinitely more difficult way. And because of this deep immersion, it has really become clear to me how traumatizing living in China is, and how that trauma affects me when I come back to a very different, but equally disturbing West.
I do want to write some things about East vs West, and I also want to write about politics, but I still have much more to say about the whole race-sex interplay and the myth of the privileged white woman, so this post will be a part of the White Girl series.
I and some other bloggers, in light of the escalating white woman hate and the recent rash of sexual attacks on white women by men of colour, have been addressing the topic in a variety of ways. Today, I want to address something that really only clicked for me a few days ago as I was standing on an Amtrak platform waiting for a train. It is a matter of illogic. It is a matter of reactions and beliefs not matching reality.
We all know that white women, especially those of true feminist inclinations, have become the most hated group on the planet, responsible for all the evils and oppressions the world knows. According to the world, white women practise all the newly invented phobias and negative ‘isms’. White women don’t do enough good, but manage to perpetuate all the bad. We are the super-powers that hold the public purse and pull the strings of all the world leaders, apparently. We are turning the education system to shit, and are personally responsible for poverty and school shootings and police brutality. How this all works, I have no fucking clue, but the world says it’s true and they advocate punishment to rectify the situation.
But here’s the thing. When you look at reality and how people behave when not fired up by agenda, you will notice that all people know that white women are the most harmless, most innocuous, and possibly the most do-gooder, free-help-providing and activating people in the world. White women are safe.
Well, that sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? How the fuck would I ever come to such a conclusion?
As I was standing on that Amtrak platform, a middle-aged white woman and a foreigner, I realized that I was the beacon. I was the one targeted as the safe, universal information and protection kiosk. And it has always been that way. And they are right to come to me. I am a helper. I help people. I empathize. I know what it is like to be insecure and lost. I try to be very aware of my surroundings, and when I help the lost, I also try to reassure. I am safe. I make people feel safe. I am a white woman.
I hadn’t taken that particular train in 8 years. I don’t live in the US, as I said, I’m foreign when I’m in America. I’m not particularly knowledgeable about Amtrak or that particular route. I don’t necessarily look ‘American’, and carrying travel gear, I certainly don’t look local. But standing on that platform, it was me that everyone went to for help. In the space of 20 minutes, I helped four people with train and location and logistical information: an older white man from Australia, a middle aged man of colour, a young white woman, and a young black woman with a small child. They could have approached any of the people on the platform, but they all came to me. And when they were finished with me, they felt safe. They knew what was happening, where to go, and what to expect. And they were all thankful.
It has always been this way. I am always asked for information, directions, reassurance. I am always assumed to be the docent in a museum, the librarian in a library, the local person. I’m never in uniform. I don’t necessarily walk around with an air of confidence or knowing. I am not especially tall or striking in appearance. But I am safe to approach. People just know that I won’t beat them, rape them, murder them, steal their money, take them hostage.
So my question is: if I, the white woman, am so helpful and so safe-seeming to all regardless of others’ ethnicity, sex and age, then why the fuck am I so hated? Do we hate that which we can trust most? Is it easiest to lash out at those who help the most?
That’s how it seems. And if you want a definition of unfairness, that is it right there. You use us, and then you brutalize us. We are safe, and we take our abuse in silence like we deserve it. We are told we deserve it. We tell ourselves that we deserve it.
Yes, it is the definition of unfairness.
Fine, Let’s Just Have Two Male Bathrooms
Living in China and Taiwan has frequently made me feel I’m living out surreal Kafka-like scenarios. Strange racist demands or limitations or really unfair policies directed only at foreigners are delivered with a straight face to the foreign victim, and there is always the implication that you are psychotic for not going along quietly and seeing how rational the treatment is.
I’ve been told I can’t have a university faculty email address because I might be a spy for my government. I’ve turned down jobs where I was told I would have a significant portion of my earnings withheld until I could prove I was honest. Guilty until proven innocent are foreigners. And I’ve been chained into my residential building at night because it was ‘safer’ that way – in some places, I was not allowed by the police to live outside the school, so there really was no avoiding a prison atmosphere.
And because many people’s knee-jerk reactions will be: you’re Western, you can’t complain, and this doesn’t sound so bad – let’s paint this in another way. Imagine in your country, disallowing Chinese university instructors staff email addresses, withholding only the Chinese instructors’ paycheques, or chaining Chinese instructors into their staff housing at night if they are forced to live on campus. Yeah, that makes it sound a little crazier, yes? Well, it is normal to do this to foreigners here.
This is Chinese thinking and they explain and do these things as if they believe they are correct and good for Chinese for foreigners. To the recipient of these edicts, your mind starts spinning. In what world is this rational? In what world are these not human rights abuses? One has no way of fighting this. I’ve spoken about China being another planet before. China is a fucked up place, but it is fucked up in a different way than Western or other countries are. For example, they are not dealing with the West’s equally Kafkaesque trannie issues.
In the trans wars, the victims expected to accept human rights abuses are women, not foreigners. I’ve read countless examples of what appear to be very male-entitled, mentally ill MtT people (men) demanding the conversion of a safe’ish female-only space (bathrooms and change rooms) into man-friendly zones.
I don’t believe on principle that non-gender-conforming men should be messed with by other men because of their non-conformity – it is stupid and unfair and typical male bullshit. BUT it is a men’s issue, and I won’t waste my precious energy policing man-on-man violence. If they want to kill each other, have at it. If they all disappeared, women would finally be safe. How would this be a bad thing???
These non-conforming men lose the tiny bit of sympathy I can muster for them when they try to solve their problems at the expense of women. And of course, that is what they automatically do. That is what men do. “Poor me. Men hate me. I, I, I know! I will make myself feel better by shitting on women! Yeah! We’ve been doing it forever, and they are not allowed to fight back! Problem solved.” Instead of creating trannie spaces, which is the logical and fair thing to do, they just take the little that women have. It is so much easier to conquer an already conquered class than to start from scratch and forge your own resources and spaces and identities.
And so the invasion of women’s very private and safe’ish spaces – the very places we piss, shit, deal with our menstrual blood, cry, hide, escape from men, have a private moment, change our clothes, and sometimes exchange woman-oriented information and bonds – is well under-way. Men under the delusion (and sometimes not so deluded delusion…) that they are women because they like Hello Kitty and sparkly nail polish are convincing the legal system in general, and institutions/organizations one-by-one that they need to invade have access to women’s bodies, privacy, feeling of security, spaces.
And what can women do when they try to argue against the invasion of men into their very private spaces? Nothing. It is a Kafka-like scenario – it is so messed up, it is hard to even get a handle on rational thought. Women are suddenly the oppressors. Trans are being victimized. No word is made of how they are treated in the male bathroom/change room and that the violence being done to them (if any) is by men. It is women preventing the individual from feeling safe. It is women preventing the trans from having a place to do his business. It is not logical, rational, sense-making. And given that she is now painted as an oppressor, the woman has two ‘choices’: accept having to do her business in a male space, or not entering the space at all (having nowhere to go at all). There is no longer a woman’s bathroom/change room, but two men’s rooms.
And the best part? If a trans commits any kind of hate crime against the women whose space he has now legally taken over and in these very spaces, it is seen as woman-on-woman crime. Mark my words, we are going to see a ‘strange’ and ‘inexplicable’ jump in sex crimes with female perps, and men will sit back and smugly say: “See? Women are violent too.”
The Male Therapist (Post-Christmas Navel-Gazing)
I’ve never been to therapy.
I think I badly need it, but I know I won’t ever go. And I’ve come to realize why this will never happen.
I was raised and abused by a father who was a male therapist. I won’t (in this post) even touch on my even more abusive mother (who was not a therapist). Between the two of them, I grew up to be an emotionally paralyzed, very confused, silent, angry, socially anxious and awkward, depressed individual, and then was further abused by these parents for being emotionally paralyzed, very confused, silent, angry, socially anxious and awkward, and depressed. Exactly the kind of person who could use a little therapy to untwist the emotional twine binding her.
But as I said, I’ll never go. Even though I went on to formally study psychology for years, I kept to the hard sciencey specializations (statistics, neuroscience, psychometry) and kept all my clinical dealings as a sideline through clinical and forensic research projects, coursework and collaboration/friendship with the more interesting of the clinical (female) crowd.
Even in the thick of things, I still declined therapy while feeling I desperately needed it at the same time. Instead, I self-examined. I know exactly what’s going on with me thanks to years of this relentless questioning and probing. Unfortunately, therapists are useful creatures – you can self-examine all you want and still not make much progress towards balance or health. Therapists are guides, and they are supposed to support you when you are at your most exposed and vulnerable.
As I am an expert in mind-fuckery, I often think about therapy professions. That was what I wanted to be as a kid, and I discarded it in college. At the time, I thought my classmates were too wishy-washy, and hey, I was really good at math and experimental design, but looking back, I know that I left because it was too threatening. Part of me didn’t want to have to address the nasty truths in my life and thus become vulnerable. I knew what vulnerable was and the therapist I grew up with both made me vulnerable and exploited it relentlessly. Who wants more of that?
And as I’ve explored the therapy professions (social work, clinical psychology, clinical psychiatry, etc), I keep coming back to the same question or set of questions.
What draws men to this line of work? And more specifically, what draws men to therapy for female victims of sex crimes (rape, sexual assault, incest)?
Let’s come back to this and talk about female therapists first.
First off, not all female therapists are good and/or appropriate for your needs. The therapist’s professional orientation may not line up with yours. The therapist has been educated by the patriarchy and likely holds patriarchal views of women and their illnesses. Speaking from experience with clinical psych undergrad and postgrad students and professors, many therapists (male and female) are not the most stable themselves. People with problems tend to gravitate towards this profession and the field is sooo competitive that often, only the most obsessive and neurotic are given admittance to programs. I can’t speak for social work programs, but most of the practitioners I’ve met have been really weird people with weird agendas. But I DO believe that it is people with problems who are exactly the people who should be working in these fields because they understand first-hand what the patient is going through. It is important, however, that the therapist have worked out her issues to minimize the intrusion of said issues into her patient/client’s situation.
All said, there are tons of well-meaning women who gravitate towards the helping professions. Well-meaning doesn’t mean effective or correct, but it is a starting place. Men don’t often have even the correct starting place.
To speak more specifically about work with female victims of sex-based crimes (aka hate crimes against women), it is easy to understand why women get into it. Women want to help women. Therapists are often victims themselves. Oh who am I kidding, all women are victims of at least one sex-based offense and are exposed to male filth on a daily basis. Female therapists want to get in there and do some good. Are they going about it the right way? I don’t know. I don’t think most of women’s energy expenditure actually makes any progress towards ending male violence. But someone has to put on the band-aids, I suppose.
I’ve also known female therapists who’ve worked with rapists and men who sexually assault women and children. I can even understand why women gravitate towards this. The work is, of course, pointless. You can’t fix men, and you absolutely can’t fix a rapist. But again, women pour endless energy into trying to fix male problems that can’t be fixed. It’s a misplaced, erroneous belief in male ‘goodness’ (whatever) and a desire to keep women safe. *Sigh*
So we come back to men. I’ve written about men and the helping professions and volunteer work before. What could possibly bring men specifically into wanting to ‘help’ female victims of sex-based crimes? It boggles the mind. Men have little capacity for empathy, and I have never met a man who can wrap his head around the fear women live with daily as a result of forced proximity to men. So to deliberately be around and ‘help’ female victims isn’t a problem in their minds. The last thing women need after victimization by a man, however, is to be made even more exposed and vulnerable with a man controlling her aftermath. Male therapists must be looking for control or a vicarious experience or something. Perhaps they are invested in putting forth a male agenda in ‘managing’ female victims. Does he want to show that ‘not all men are bad’? How completely selfish and self-centred, if that is the case.
We have a new problem with aggressive MtT’s targeting battered women’s shelters and demanding to work there and be put into direct contact with female victims. They are becoming so self-centred and disrespectful that they are bringing law suits to fight for their right to access female victims. Why are they doing this? Is it an attempt to use women’s real experiences to build up their own sense of victimhood? Whatever they are doing, it is assault. It is disgusting. And it needs to be stopped.
Men also love to gravitate towards helping male sex offenders. I have personal experience with one of these creatures. I was taking a course in a form of counselling and was paired up by phone with a black, American, Christian man who headed up his own church and specifically helped rapists get on their feet after (unfortunately) being released from prison. He and I were to do ‘counselling’ sessions on the phone. He was controlling of me from the very beginning, and took advantage of my commitment to the course. He cancelled our sessions, let me do all the work, and would take other phone calls while we were in the middle of a counselling session. But he was smarmy, saying all the right things to smooth things over. If I were 20, I would have accepted the abuse and chided myself that as a WHITE woman, I supposedly was the privileged one. But I was older and well-versed in how all men have privilege over all women regardless of other group membership. Penis trumps vagina, regardless of race, every single time. One day, I called him on his repeated disrespect of me, and the truth came out. He attacked me mercilessly, and threw all the information I’d given him in my vulnerable state as counsellee in my face. And then he played the god card – he knew I was an atheist, and let me know I was shit because of it. Pure abuse. I suspect he was a ‘recovered’ rapist himself. I put my foot down, complained to the school, and only after my fellow student attacked the teacher was he thrown out of the program.
So, I suspect that sex offenders help sex offenders, and any man who gravitates towards therapy for female victims or male offenders is just there to perpetuate the system of abuse, keep the male agenda alive and well, ‘help’ women to put their experience in a compartment and not paint all men or the patriarchy as bad, and experience personal control and vicarious excitement over female victimization. I advocate for keeping men out of all professions where they have access to vulnerable women and girls.
I Love Asian Women
Men. They’re all different, but they’re all the same.
That doesn’t make sense now, does it? Well, what I mean is that when, as all women are, you’re forced to listen to the constant stream of stupid shit straight men say, you notice that they all have their different sexual fetishes and proclivities. But, at the root of all of these delightful differences is a deep-seated hatred of women. Men reduce women to their body parts (I love tight pussy, big tits, long hair, etc), race/skin colour, and culture. By culture, I don’t mean the proper definition of culture, I mean cultural stereotypes – male fantasies aren’t based on deep meaning or understanding. So while they ‘love’ certain exploitable things about particular women, they actually hate women as a class. Love of women’s junk or affiliations does not translate into love, or more importantly, respect, of women.
I’ve spent the past few years removing men from my life. It’s depressing, but stress-releasing and self-preservational. Depressing because I’ve realized that the wiser and more self-respecting I’ve gotten, the less able I am to endure men. And being around men, I’ve also realized, is about enduring, tolerating, bearing – in essence, negating/erasing myself and my self-worth. I’ve never felt this in the company of women. I’ve not felt that women hang around with me because of anything other than shared interests or compatible personalities.
Coming to Asia for Pussy and a Sense of Power
The most recent batch of men that I’ve had to offload or detour around once I encounter them are ones that have come out with the all-too-common: “I love Asian women.” and the complement of that: “I hate Western women.”
Unfortunately, I have lived in Asia off and on for the last 13 years, so I hear this shit all the time from non-Asian men. Many of these dickfaces come to Taiwan and China (and other Asian countries) so that they can score Asian pussy. Some of them just want to use and fuck, but others want the whole wifey-wifey deal. Part of it is so that they don’t have to learn about the country they’re in or learn the language – if you pick up a local woman, she will navigate for you and make your life easy.
My favourite comment thus far came from a South African dude who smirkingly told me that he’d finally scored a ‘rice-powered bed-warmer’. Classy. And yet, I didn’t reward him with a high five.
The other thing that foreign men like about Asians is the whole subservience thing that they believe is built in to Asian women. Asian women will cook, clean, let you rape them regularly, and will never complain about anything you demand of them. They are also femininity-compliant and believe that the man is the head of the house. Oh, and you can be old, fat, ugly, stupid, and have a personality disorder and still score a hot, young Asian babe. There are many online discussion groups devoted to this “Asian bitches are better. They know their place” phenomenon. These men are vomit-inducing. Thank goodness they have the internet so that they can get together and circle jerk.
I worked with one obnoxious, stupid and really ugly Australian guy who had scored an accomplished, employed Taiwanese woman. I remember her rushing to our place of work with the lunch that he had forgotten. I watched as he upbraided her for some transgression in the middle of our populated staff room. She stood there, head down, like a child. She was in her 30’s.
One thing is always true though, I’ve noticed: these guys are big losers in their own countries. Women can smell the rot within them and won’t give them the time of day. I would bet money that they have raped at least once. I used to wonder why these dudes didn’t just join the fucked up BDSM scene, but I suspect that most of them don’t see themselves as kinky or alternative – they just want subservience. BDSM is lame and gross, but probably too weird for the “I love Asian women’ crowd. Control, without perversion.
The average Western woman (outside BDSM or strict religious communities) is ‘uppity’, ‘demanding’, and is vocal about having some semblance of human rights. We don’t like to be raped. We have the word ‘no’, which we like to use. In Chinese, there is no distinct word for ‘no’ – or for ‘yes’ for that matter. You can say ‘don’t want’, ‘don’t have’, ‘am not’, but there is no resounding ‘NO!!!!’ Once you own a Chinese girl, you can do whatever you want. No one will stop you. Foreign men love this.
But You Can Love Asian Women at Home Too!
But these dudes don’t even need to leave the homeland to enjoy what the world has to offer. Luckily, Asian women are everywhere.
I recently had to dismiss a former boss-turned-acquaintance from Canada (originally England). After one relationship had gone south with a Canadian woman, he found himself living alone on a farm. He started taking on WWOOFers (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) to help out as volunteers with the work. He was particularly taken with some young Korean girls in their late teens who were travelling and volunteering. Dude (who is about 55) told me he had a hard time keeping his hands off them, and then announced to me that he hated Western women. He then told me he was using a dating site matching up Asian women with Western men (mail order bride site?), and he wanted my help in procuring an impoverished Filipino woman who was working as a slave/house cleaner in China to support her children back in the Philippines. Prostituting herself to a Western fucker instead of a Chinese fucker looked like a better option, apparently. I suspect that will change as the average Chinese, despite what racist, ignorant, white, liberal Americans will tell you, are much richer than the average white person these days. And China is the new power, still growing – white guys are less and less of a catch in comparison. Things are a-changing.
Anyhoo… I told British-Canadian-immigrant to fuck off, that I wouldn’t participate in his rape fantasy-turned-reality, and I haven’t spoken to him since. Piece of shit.
A few years back, I went back to Canada for a spell to get my health back after a horrid, demoralizing stint in the Chinese countryside. I ended up working for an abusive Turkish immigrant who sexually and psychologically harassed me on a regular basis, starting on day one when he told me that I was older than he thought I would be (I arranged the job online and via phone before I got back to Canada).
We had a number of Japanese women working for us that he appeared to leave completely alone, unharassed. At one point, after I showed myself to be an uppity Western bitch when he wouldn’t leave ME alone, he told me that he ‘really liked Asian women’ working for him. They never complained. Of course they didn’t. Asian women don’t talk back to male bosses who are hurting them. AND they had WORK VISAS. If you have a work visa in foreign country, you are well aware that the visa is tied to a specific job. If you lose the job, you must leave the country until you can find another employer to sponsor you. To stay would get you deported and banned. The best way to get fired is to complain.
Conclusion
One thing I want to make clear. I’m not lamenting the loss of these nutsacks to more compliant women. I wouldn’t touch these fuckers with a 10,000 foot pole. Rather, I’d prefer to live in a world where women aren’t reduced to their parts, and where men aren’t given universal permission to treat women as acceptable or unacceptable based on how much abuse they’re willing to take. As it is, this little ‘rating’ system does convince many women that there is something wrong with them if they can’t catch a man, and that wrongness is directly tied to having to give up their humanity.
First, women don’t need men. Ever. Second, if you really must be with a man, it should be someone who sees you as an equal deserving of respect. But that, of course, isn’t what heterosexuality is or can be. It is, despite what you say (fuelled by your Stockholm Syndrome and programming from birth), based on inequality and dependent on women hating themselves and accepting (even subconsciously) the male rule of law that females are inferior in all the ways that matter.
Story Ending Never 
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