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That’s Some Toolbox You’ve Got There, Ladies
Those familiar with the self help world will know immediately what I’m talking about when I refer to one’s ‘toolbox’. It is a metaphorical toolbox that contains a variety of tools and techniques that one can use to cope and protect oneself. To run with the metaphor, basically the contents of one’s toolbox will allow the building of a fort or wall behind which one can stay alive and survive. The better the tools and techniques, the more protected one is.
The Defense
Protection from what, you might ask? From seeing, questioning, defying, attacking and breaking free from Patriarchy, of course. To face Patriarchy head on is a very dangerous business, so women are encouraged to accept it. Unfortunately, it is hard to accept slavery without some defensive strategies in place.
Girls are provided at a very young age with a starter toolbox and examples of how to employ the contents within. The message that accompanies this gift is: Sorry. You’ve had the misfortune to be born a girl. This means you are worthless. But we need you to do a few things. You’re here to serve, submit, take abuse, and erase yourself. All in the service of Patriarchy and its prize citizens – boys and men. In order to help you accept it, affirm male dominance and violence, sing the praises of this system, and even ask for it, we are equipping you with the following tools and techniques. Now spread your legs and enjoy the ride. It will suck. Or rather, you will.
With this bright and shiny toolbox (with more sophisticated tools added over time), many women remain blind to their maltreatment and complicit in their enslavement; men are not forced to take responsibility for their actions and keep on doing what they do best – destroying; and the Patriarchy machine bangs on. Anyone with a background in psychology will recognize many of these tools as ‘defense mechanisms’. Let’s look at how they are employed by women under Patriarchy to ensure that they remain the slaves they were born to be.
Tools and Techniques (aka Defense Mechanisms)
Denial
The most unsophisticated of tools, denial is probably the most frequently employed mechanism women have. Very simply, it is the refusal to accept reality, even in the face of bald facts. Women may even deny having experienced something quite serious.
Example: A woman returns home after being raped by her date. Despite her bruises at the time and years of nightmares and PTSD, she refuses to admit she has been raped. In her mind, it is safer to pretend it didn’t happen. A lot of women also deny that Patriarchy even exists despite soaking and swimming in it every second of their lives.
Repression / Suppression
Both mechanisms serve to keep thoughts or memories out of consciousness. It can be done without realizing it (repression) or deliberately (suppression). The problem is that the memories still have influence even if we don’t realize they are there.
Example: A woman who was molested by her father as a child may have blocked out memories of that time, but ‘inexplicably’ has a hard time in relationships with men, especially regarding sex. She will be labelled frigid, but really, she is just repressing memories of horrific abuse.
Displacement
Anger and frustration are taken out on less threatening objects or people than the actual source of these feelings.
Example: A woman works in a male dominated office under a highly misogynist boss who pays her less than the men, never promotes her, disparages her ideas and work, and makes sexually suggestive comments. The woman says and does nothing so as to keep her badly needed job, but goes home and verbally abuses her children following particularly tense episodes. We also see this commonly with the transgendered and with women who belong to other minority groups when they attack other women instead of men who are the true oppressors. Women are just less threatening and more easily attacked.
Sublimation
A technique where unacceptable behaviour is refocused into something acceptable.
Example: An economically desperate women may find herself with few options but to turn to prostitution, but faced with shame or other morally-derived feelings, may grasp at marriage (publicly acceptable prostitution) to survive.
Dissociation
The creation of seemingly separate representations of the self in order to survive ordeals. It can lead to a disconnection of self such that painful feelings don’t intrude for periods of time.
Example: Women who enter stripping or prostitution or even who are married may retract their feelings and personalities and thought processes while performing mandatory sexual servicing of customers or husbands. Outside of these servicing situations, they will maintain a different or a main identity.
Projection
The act of taking one’s unacceptable feelings towards someone and ascribing those feelings to them.
Example: Fully enslaved and compliant women may hate feminists for forcing them to realize their slavery. As a defense, the enslaved will believe that the feminists hate them, despite clear evidence to the contrary. This is the number one cause of the creation of the term ‘feminazi’. Feminists have absolutely NOTHING in common with nazis, but it is easier to project your hate onto people who just want to help you free yourself.
Rationalization
A mechanism that allows one to avoid the true reasons for a behaviour and instead come up with something that provides an intellectual or logical explanation.
Example: Instead of holding men accountable for rape culture, women will say things like ‘men are naturally aggressive’, ‘boys will be boys’, ‘men have needs’ or something thoroughly incorrect, but seemingly ‘rational’ on the surface. We also see arguments supporting the Patriarchal system using ‘God’s word’ (from the Right) and ‘natural law’ or evolutionary psychology (from the Left). These arguments are rationalizations.
Reaction Formation
Expressing the opposite feeling to that which you actually feel.
Example: Women, especially, are encouraged to show love to those who would do them harm rather than to address any justified anger that comes from being abused. It is a way to partially explain why battered women not only stick with men who routinely beat and rape them, but to insist that they love these men. The defense mechanism assists, but does not wholly explain, survival in a very complex, psychological situation.
Stockholm Syndrome (Identification)
This refers to supporting and even adopting the views and behaviours of someone who has power over you or is abusing you and whom you fear/hate.
Example: This is the mechanism underlying all “What about the men?” and “Not my Nigel” arguments put forth by heterosexual women. Instead of identifying with their oppressed sisters, they see weakness in and feel hatred towards them in much the same way the men they are supporting would. It also plays a heavy role in keeping submissive women in the BDSM scene enthralled (with a little rationalization thrown in for good measure).
Keep in mind, seldom does only one defense mechanism account for a woman’s participation in Patriarchy. The toolbox is one where all the implements can be inter-attached, and work together seamlessly. It is so incredibly hard for women to throw off the chains of slavery for this reason. There isn’t just one thing keeping women down – even if you stop denying reality, you may be engaging in other coping strategies. It also doesn’t help that few women have support in freeing themselves.
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Stay tuned for “That’s Some Arsenal You’ve Got There, Gentlemen“.
Moron of the Day
If only there were only one moron per day, we all could rest a little easier. But alas, they exist everywhere and the more moronic they are, the more they feel they need to speak.
Anyhow, some background to the moron I managed to run into online, mid-coffee, on this lovely Saturday morning.
The internet is a strange place. Unlike in the real world (for the most part), online, it takes about 3 seconds for one to start out in one place with specific intentions, and then somehow end up in the middle of one of your worst nightmares. And so it happened today. I was googling something, and magically found myself on a pro-capitalism site run by a moron that sums up capitalism in his sidebar in the form of a busty, be-bra’d bimbo holding up an ‘I’m your biggest fan’ poster. Capitalism can only exist when women are enslaved. Good job, Captain Obvious. You made your point without having to even speak!
But that is not the moron I’m talking about – although he does qualify. Morons tend to attract further morons, and no place loves morons more than comments sections on moronic blogs.
Click to the ‘About’ page. And moronic comment gold! Especially this one, whom I will call Dumbass.
I have never found a liberal to admit they are wrong or concede to a debate especially feminazis. They just keep just keep doing attack after attack and unless the fight was physical, it would never end. These liberals today are radical extremist and we have to bend to them is what our society preaches. How come society did not tolerate and still does not tolerate Nazis but embraces radical liberals and feminazis?
We’ve got the classic Liberal hate. But that shit is meaningless to me. Generic American Liberals are frequently as stoopid and misogynistic as Conservatives or Libertarians. And those labels are often meaningless and defined differently outside the centre of the world (aka the USA).
No, I’m talking about the misogyny, which is naturally part of the set meal when you go for the Capitalist Dude lunch special. First, we’ve got usage of the meaningless term ‘feminazi’. It’s so overused that it’s getting old. Although we all know it is an insult directed at women, the term doesn’t actually make sense. And as Capitalist Dumbass so blatantly displays through what I’m sure he feels is a Clever Intellectual Question, he doesn’t even understand what Nazis are. This is what happens when a) you’re not properly educated, b) you’re privileged (person who got into a university simply because he had money, pasty skin, and a penis, but alas, no brain), and c) you can’t keep your damned mouth shut even when you don’t know what you’re talking about.
To answer the question posed by Dumbass, We don’t/didn’t tolerate Nazis because they committed genocide, targeting Jewish people, gay people, and non-White people (some of whom overlapped). You know, human rights abuses. Radical Liberals and ‘feminazis’ – or let’s use the correct word, Radical Feminists – fight for human rights. The former may have any number of oppressed groups at its focus or may focus on protecting the environment rather than oppression, while Radical Feminists focus on liberating women from sex-based oppression, while supporting intersectional issues (race, class, orientation, etc.). So to make it clear for Dumbass, Fighting for human rights is a GOOD THING. Genocide is a BAD THING.
But I’m not sure if feminists are ’embraced’ as, Dumbass asserts. His comment is representative of the majority of men in the world and some women, and their hate speech – and it is hate speech to the letter – is tolerated and even embraced.
In short, hate-spewing, capitalist windbags – even genocide-supporting ones – are still tolerated and even embraced. Feminists are derided, threatened, and harmed daily, unprotected from hate speech (although women don’t classify as an oppressed group anywhere, so legally, hate speech directed at them isn’t hate speech and cannot be prosecuted). They are not embraced.
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ps: I’m not linking to this web site because a) I have no intention of driving traffic to it, and b) through the magic of the internet, you’ll find it or one of the countless millions like it within 3 seconds all by yourself. Besides, I included a hint above 😉
The Telltale But
“He’s a nice guy, but…”
If I had a dollar for every time I heard this… I’d be rich!!!
Girls (and boys, of course) are trained from birth to excuse every single shitty thing a creature with a penis does. It can be anything from lying, to stealing, to fighting, to some pretty heinous stuff. But boys will be boys, so it’s all good. And conversely, girls and boys are trained to criticize and mete punishment out for everything that girls and women do, innocuous or not.
As girls turn into women, they adopt a convenient little survival mechanism that a) helps them rationalize poor decisions they make about men, b) keeps them in the good books of compliance with men and handmaidens, and c) just makes life marginally easier on the surface and in the short-run.
This little mechanism is, “He did/does xyz, but he’s a nice guy.” In that single sentence, you immediately know the guy isn’t nice.
‘But’ is a contrast word. Sometimes, contrasts can exist harmoniously:
He is tall, but fat.
In this case, it is possible to be both tall and fat without being a freak of nature or a paradox.
However, when women start talking about men’s behaviour and personalities using ‘but’ in an effort to defend an asshole, excuse something that has just happened to her at the hands of an asshole, or to placate or dismiss someone who has witnessed or suffered at the hands of a Super Nice Guy TM, the contrast can’t possibly exist.
Nice people don’t do shitty things to others. Or conversely, people who do shitty things to others are definitely not nice folks.
So next time you hear a girlfriend, mother, sister, daughter, coworker or other woman tell you how the boyfriend who calls her a ‘fat bitch’ is actually a nice guy except for when he drinks and trundles out the misogyny that lies beneath his sober exterior, you know she is just trying to survive in a world where men hate her.
Oh how I’d love to say, “I’m a nice lady, but I use weaponry on violators of women” and be excused just like men are. Actually, I’d probably use ‘and’ rather than ‘but’, because I think nice women have a duty to carry out public service acts of niceness such as eliminating those who commit crimes against them and their sisters.
Story Ending Never 
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