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Another White Dude Analysis of the World’s Problems
I’m not sure why I bother. Watching documentaries, that is. Roughly 99.9% of English language documentaries are made by white dudes. Sometimes, they’re religious white dudes. Sometimes, they’re environmentalist, lefty white dudes. Sometimes, they’re libertarian white dudes. Sometimes, they’re partially lobotomized, incoherent nutjob white dudes. Most of them are middle class or come from those there parts – not rich enough to be truly devoid of cause. And not poor enough to be barred from funding even a low-budget documentary. Most of them have a basic college education – even the partially lobotomized ones, since we hand out college degrees like candy to white dudes with damaged brains.
But despite the deceptive variety in approach or ideology, the commonality is that they all belong to the class at the top of the human heap. And as such, they are blind to many things; they believe they have more of a right to speak than most; they believe they have a unique perspective than no one else has; they see themselves as leaders and ones best equipped to speak for all of us; and they tend to populate their documentaries with interview clips of their fellow white dudes as if there are no other people available to offer insight.
Most liberal white dudes are tuned in enough to make a documentary that pays lip service to problems of racism and classism – because these, of course, are classes that contain bepenised people – men can be of different colours and can be poor. And all men deserve attention, of course. But their oh-so-unique views of the world almost always miss one of the most important (if not THE most important) cause of why our world is the shithole that it is.
They either ignore or severely downplay the role of male domination – aka Patriarchy – in the destruction of the earth and the degradation of the human condition. They don’t acknowledge the fact that the only reason men have made poor economic models work in the short run is because they’ve built everything on the unpaid or lesser paid backs and uteri of women. You can’t have domination without slaves. And slaves have, for the most part, throughout history and continuing through to tomorrow, been women. But even when you have an unlimited slave supply (women), you can’t make a model of unlimited growth work (à la capitalism), or expect nonrenewable resources to magically become unlimited, or demand unlimited environmental imperviousness to deadly human assault.
It makes for a flawed and incomplete documentary. It has always made for bad science and theories in every field. When you don’t factor in Patriarchy as the primary cause and/or the primary environment, you aren’t telling the story correctly. It would be like trying to measure atmospheric gases, but failing to take into account that the planet being studied is Jupiter.
Men leave this key part – that Patriarchy is the root of most problems on Earth – of the puzzle out for a few reasons:
- Men like women to shoulder some to all of the burden when blame is to be laid and responsibility is to be taken for shitty circumstances.
- Conversely, men like to take credit for things (even when they didn’t contribute) only when it is a positive accomplishment (i.e., male expert dominance to be patted on the back in the awareness-raising documentary).
- Men don’t want to acknowledge that we’re in the shitter because of them, their violence, their greed, and their lust for power.
- They won’t find themselves an audience if they suggest that men fucked up and should take responsibility for the things they’ve done and should immediately relinquish their control and power structures. Men don’t like to be told that their millennia-long culture of dominance and rape is at the heart of most of the world’s current woes. Even a lot of Stockholm Syndrome-affected women won’t get on board with a documentary that says, “Look at what the men have done.”
I’m going to force myself to watch as much of this as I can. I’m into minute 23, and after way too much melodrama and wordiness, this generic, middle class, white dude, has finally laid out what he sees as the four main things that will lead to American downfall. I noticed that all four problems he listed result directly from Patriarchy, yet he doesn’t identify Patriarchy as the ultimate source. He referenced Derrick Jensen early on in the doc, and implied that he interviewed him, so I’d be a little disgusted, but not surprised, if he managed not to talk about Patriarchy in his ‘analysis’. Jensen has paid lip service to radical feminist theory, although I find him a little arrogant for my personal liking.
—
Two hours later:
I managed to get through two hours of, yes, mostly white dudes pontificating on the decline of the American Empire. And no, Patriarchy wasn’t mentioned even once. Dominance yes, but dominance was used to refer to class and race, as I predicted. There wasn’t a single mention of the oppression of women and how all empires have been built on that requirement. It was unsurprising, but still disappointing. Oh, and Jensen was indeed interviewed, and he arrogantly told us his favourite thing that HE ever said. Icky. Self-quoting… Well, white dudes. What do you expect?
I’ve noticed a few things about white dude documentaries. I’m not sure if there is a manual that they all read, but recurring elements creep me out.
White Dude documentaries must display the following:
- Lots of historic film footage of dudes doing something dudely or women doing something degrading or feminine. Preferably from the 1950’s or from some wartime period (if soldiers or concentration camp victims are needed)
- All or an overwhelming majority of those interviewed are white male experts (despite there being tons of non-white and/or non-male experts in any given field)
- Video clips that give a literal enactment of some metaphor used by an interviewee. For example, an expert begins talking about destroying the environment, and suddenly you have a clip of a wreaking ball.
- Quotes from noted misogynists, pedophiles and the like. (This particular film quoted Woody Allen who is both a misogynist and a pedophile.)
It’s hard to take a documentary seriously if it ignores really key elements. I’m not talking about entertaining and giving equal weight to fringe theories. I’m talking about allowing personal bias resulting from privilege to severely limit the explanation of the phenomenon you’re trying to cover. Feminism is not a fringe theory, and it is globally relevant. It needs to be included to provide an accurate picture of what is going on. It is also hard to take seriously any documentary that pulls testimony from a single group of privileged people (who all look like you) when the phenomenon is a) relevant to more groups than that small one, and b) there are plenty of representatives of many other groups to pull from as experts.
Nice try, white dude. He would have been better off giving his funding to a woman or minority and offering his services as ‘research support’. He would actually have been walking his talk then. But that’s just the thing. When a white dude talks about wanting to change the world, it’s just words. He doesn’t actually follow through on what he’s saying. It would have been really, really easy for him to make a positive change by enabling a traditionally less powerful, and often silenced, voice to deliver the message. When have men every stayed silent though?
*** Note: I’m not going to link to this film. It’s really not worth watching, nor do I offer a time-back guarantee when you demand those two hours of your life back. Anyhow, I wanted to comment on a phenomenon, not this particular documentary.
Can One Defend the Indefensible?
Before I launch into my spiel, I’ll say one thing so everyone knows I’m an equal opportunity blame doler when it comes to pointing out shitty male behaviour. No country or culture is off the hook. Of course, the majority of people often claim moral superiority for their own country or culture and spend a lot of time pointing out the faults of other countries and cultures. And of those others, those upon whom the most blame is heaped are generally women. Women are always to blame for the way misogyny manifests in their country or culture. It’s easy to blame the powerless for the misdeeds of the powerful. So, in short:
- every country and culture hates women,
- the hate manifests in different ways,
- people are generally unable to own the bullshit that happens in their own backyard, preferring to point fingers at other backyards, and
- women are forced to take responsibility for the shitty things men do in said backyards.
Okay, that out of the way, let me move on to what I wanted to talk about.
For a long time now, I’ve lived in a different backyard. It is one that no matter how long I stay in or assimilate into, I will never be allowed to belong to. Monoracial countries are like that. And this particular monoracial country is China. I teach university in China – undergrads, Masters and PhD students. China is a rough place to be in a lot of ways. It has a poor track record in the human rights department. The locals are abused, and foreign workers have severely limited rights and often must put up with very strange and abusive treatment (I’ll save for another post my experience being chained into my college staff building at night.) The people are very racist, xenophobic, traditional, and oh yeah, they hate women. But as mentioned above, they don’t really see any of this, and similar to Americans, most can’t figure out why the world hates them.
And so we get to Americans. China has a love-hate relationship with the US. Personally, I think it’s a ‘study your enemy’ type of thing. There are things they envy about the US (e.g., capitalism), there are things they absolutely hate (e.g., gun violence) and there is a shit-ton of stuff they don’t understand and have developed stereotypes and half-truths about. Even the highly educated believe that what they see in American film and television is true. It is very much like Western people believing that all Chinese know kung fu and play the cello.
One of the things that has become disturbingly and increasingly more popular as a question or topic of discussion among the undergraduates as well as the post-graduate students is what they see as the American obsession with sex. I often get asked why this is so. I also get woman-blaming questions that boil down to ‘Why are Western women such slutty whores???’ and a lot of the male students want to hug, kiss or touch me, because of course, white women are increasingly seen around the world as communal property that will pretty much fuck anyone. We WANT everyone to touch us. Thanks American television and misogyny and dangerous/misguided Third Wave Feminism. Please note that white men are not treated this way. And different racial groups are treated in different ways. You can’t take models that apply in the West and have them work in the same way in other places. And I absolutely don’t want to minimize shitty treatment of non-Chinese women of other races here in China. However, having spoken with several non-white and non-Chinese females living in China, they aren’t treated as badly as white women. They are feared as I am, but not a single one of them has been sexually assaulted or physically assaulted as I have been very frequently. Being an outsider with a different skin colour is bad for all of us women, but being a white female makes you a public whore.
I address the subject of Western entertainment carefully. I definitely want to talk about what is happening and make sure that people do some deep thinking about these very important issues. I also like to introduce radical feminism anywhere and everywhere I can. I do see tiny feminist stirrings in a few of the young women I teach. I like to nurture that kind of human rights thinking.
I begin by telling people that hatred of women exists in every country and culture – educated Chinese are beginning to acknowledge and feel shame over the fact that as a culture they have selectively and deliberately aborted female fetuses and killed baby girls – so they can kind of get what I’m saying.
But woman-hate manifests in different ways, I tell them. It is all based on sex. I tell them that in the US, there are some similarities. For example, as in China, Americans fetishize female ‘purity’. But in the US, while baby girls might not be left to die somewhere en masse, society is inundated with pornography. (Pornography is illegal in China – in the US it is fucking ‘free speech’ and ‘art’.) Boys are taught that women exist only for sex and that sex is owed to boys. Rape is sexy shit, and secretly, girls love it. Girls are taught that they must remain pure, but at the same time, they must be as fuckable as possible. It is confusing and dehumanizing. And what you see in mainstream media – news, TV, and film – is evidence of this fuckability mandate. The burgeoning porn and violent porn industry is becoming the number one American export. Something to be proud of. And worldwide, men of all colours troll for porn. Porn is the majority of traffic-driving on the internet. Hell, my most popular post – about my rape by an Arab Muslim – is accessed by men of colour, primarily from Pakistan and other Muslim nations, using violent search terms involving white women getting raped.
Anyhow, I use simpler words, but I get this message across to my Chinese students. I want them to see the truth that unites what happens in their country with what happens in the US and everywhere else. That truth being ‘woman hate’.
I also challenge their ideas about television and film. Most of my students tell me that they learn about American culture (meaning ‘all Western culture’) from what they watch. Most can’t afford to travel, so they learn from whatever materials they can get their hands on. So most educated Chinese take what they see on TV and in movies literally. Everyone is rich and beautiful and fucking is the most important thing in life. So I ask them, “Do you believe everything you see in Chinese TV and film? Does everyone do Kung Fu in China like Jackie Chan (Chan Kong-sang)?” They say, “Of course not! That’s crazy!” Then I ask, “Then why would you believe everything you see in American TV and film? Just like Chinese media, it is just entertainment.” That stops them. They think about it. And they realize that TV and film are not educational materials.
I hate being put in a position where I have to defend American culture – especially as a non-American, and especially as a feminist. Some things, I’m happy to talk about. I did post-graduate education in the US and many of my most excellent human-rightsy, hippie friends are American. I have good memories of living there, and I love many things about being there. I’ll talk about volunteer work and hippies and human rights protests. These are positive things about the US. The entertainment world is NOT one of those things, however, and I think it’s only getting worse. Having seen and experienced the impact in developing countries of the mainstream shit that is churned out in the US, and having been at the receiving end of ‘white chicks are rapeable sluts’ in Western and developing countries (which I think is a very serious outcome of what is going on in popular culture), I worry. I worry a lot. And I truly hope these American ‘values’ about white women are not adopted and promulgated elsewhere. I think it is too late, based on my personal experiences, however.
The only thing I can do is make sure dialogue occurs and try to get people to think on a deeper level about what misogyny is and the power it has to destroy all cultures.
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.
Hollywood Hates Women
I constantly lament the downward spiral our world seems to be taking with regard to female status and treatment. I really, truly don’t believe women are better off now than they were at any time in the past. In many arenas, women are much worse off.
What’s the problem?
We are still missing a proportional number of women at the helm in every single area of life. When women aren’t the decision-makers, women suffer. It is very simple, very obvious, and actually very easy to solve. But only if you are working on a rational playing field with rational people. With men, it is never rational. It is privilege. Entitlement. Not rationality or fairness. And therein lies the problem.
…
I’m not a tabloid or magazine reader, and I’m generally not ‘up’ on entertainment, but I ran across an article on one of the more fabulous female actors of our time: Emma Thompson. Talented, versatile and funny, Emma was an actor I grew up watching. Perhaps it was because she is British, but she didn’t bring to the table the pornulation that Americans force upon their female actors. She was just a pleasure to watch
And very recently, she has spoken out about misogyny in her line of work. Specifically, she talks about how things have gotten worse for women in Hollywood. She thought things were better and were moving in the right direction when she was starting out.
When I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women, and I find that very disturbing and sad.
I’d been thinking the same thing – there is so little that is watchable these days – but it’s nice to hear confirmation from inside the penis, I mean, the industry.
Emma, who at 56, despite her great experience and talent, recently landed a part as a 77-year-old prostitute in a film. [Readers: don’t get sidetracked with knee-jerk defenses of prostitution and how I’m denigrating women everywhere – this is not what is at issue here, so grow up.] Why can’t a 77-year-old actress take that part? Why isn’t Emma landing spectacular leading roles?
Oh yes, the old intersection of misogyny and ageism. Actors who are 56-year-old women aren’t watchable (what???) despite being seasoned actors, experts in their craft.
Entertainment is a brutal industry. It’s very much a sausage club. Men’s voices show up in the writing (even women writers must conform to male points-of-view to get a job) and men control what gets produced. Not having women at the decision-making levels ensures that misogyny is only going to get worse and worse as porn-addled, privileged male viewers get bored with the current level of rape and violence they consume. The actresses get younger, more pornulated, and more violated both on- and off-screen. And the more violence and degradation there is, there is corresponding decrease in respect and humanization of women in the real world. Women are losing their voices more than ever before. And worse, they internalize the message and don’t question it (unless they don’t care about working anymore!)
My question is: where are all the viewers who have had enough and actually want to watch talent and have had enough of stifling misogyny? Misogyny makes life boring for everyone, and hurtful to women.
I teach university in China, and I’m getting an increasing number of questions and comments from undergrads to PhD students about the American obsession with sex. I tell my students that hatred of women exists in all countries/societies, and that men express their hatred in different ways. In the US, the current way for men to hate women is through hyper-sexualizing and degrading them. And further, American men give special pats on the head to women who have turned their subjugation into a fun, feminist choice. Basic psychological conditioning – it works!
In China, they show their hatred in other ways. It’s still all about sex, but it manifests in different ways. Hatred of women is universal – not just at Universal.
Story Ending Never 
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