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Scent of a Man
This is a companion piece to that snore-fest of a misogynist classic, Scent of a Woman, starring tired old typecast actor, Al Pacino.
Soooo, let’s pretend I’m blind. All my other senses are heightened. I’m not going to go so far as to say I can identify individuals, unlike the Pacino-pornhound, but I will say this: no matter where I go in the world, my nose knows when I’ve entered or passed a place where men go. And by ‘go’, I’m not just talking location, but also the euphemism.
Yep. I mean urine.
Male urine is one of the worst smells in the world, up there with male jizz and dead bodies/rotting meat. (I’d rather smell poop or farts than those other three, actually.) But you don’t need to be blind or bolstered by heightened olfactory powers to know when males are lurking and leaking. First, they piss everywhere! Not just in washrooms, but in public. On my most recent trip to the US, the very first smell to greet me when I alit from the public transport from the airport was male urine. And the first thought to go through my mind as I choked and tried to breathe was first ‘Welcome to America!’ but I quickly revised it to ‘Same smell, different country’. Interestingly, that smell was the last one I experienced before I boarded public transportation in China on my way to the US. Only my location had changed. The smell was the same. I realized that male wee is the great globalizer. McDonald’s or Walmart may peddle the globalizing shit, but male bodies, literally, produce the globalizing piss. And while all serve to make you feel a sense of familiarity no matter where you are, the urine does so more than anything else because olfactory memory, especially paired with fear and disgust, tends to be one of the most powerful mind-fucks. That scent alone will remind you who is in charge (men), who is destroying the world (men), and of whom you need to be afraid (men).
There are reminders of this power in the form of piss and pissing everywhere you go. One example from my world: I was walking down a busy street in China two days ago in broad daylight, and a dude ahead of me stepped off the sidewalk, unzipped his fly and let loose right then and there under the trees lining the walk. No shame. Just pure, unadulterated male privilege. The privilege to be completely safe while uncovered. The privilege to go unquestioned while exposing genitals. The privilege to filth up common space with human waste. Imagine a woman doing that. Wouldn’t happen. She’d end up raped, beaten, shamed and/or arrested. Children, as well, are given a free pass, especially if they are male. Chinese mothers teach their boys from a young age that they don’t need to learn to control their urges. Male urges must be given precedence over everything else, including public health and safety. I don’t wish to see cock in public EVER, yet I see little-boy dick absolutely everywhere I go in China, even in ‘civilized’ places. Little-boy dick pissing on the sidewalk, on trees, in the street from the curb. Who the fuck wants to be reminded of their masters’ presence on a constant basis?
But let’s get to the toilets. Even in countries where males are sort of required to limit their urination to designated areas (like that is possible…), these places often stink much more than women’s toilets. Part of it might be the spray factor. This need to stand and spray isn’t human, but rather, pure, unthinking animal. Men really should sit down to pee. Basic logic. But given the world we live in, men don’t have to think about their grossness and entitlement because either a woman is cleaning up after them or they just live in their own filth without noticing. I can’t imagine ever again sharing a residential space, including a bathroom, with a male.
In China and other places without a strict cleanliness mentality or understanding of basic hygiene, and with out-of-control populations (meaning high volume male urinating), and with poor plumbing systems, the bathrooms are absolutely disgusting. I even find the women’s bathrooms in China horrific. They stink. Part of the problem is cleaning mentality. People very much believe that if someone is employed to clean, then they can be as filthy and inconsiderate as they want. They leave urine, blood and shit everywhere – for someone else to clean up. But unfortunately, the cleaners seldom know how to clean properly or care about cleaning properly. Another part of the problem is the design of squat toilets. Unlike with the Western sit-down toilet, the squatter bowls are open and shallow. Unless you can force your piss stream to a trickle or position yourself directly over the small hole at the very end of the long and very shallow bowl, urine bounces off the porcelain and sprays absolutely everywhere. Gross.
But the male toilets in China? #$%@! Unlike the women’s, I can smell them from 100 feet away. Directly passing by them is an eye-watering, brain-cell-killing, throat burning, lung-emptying experience. My swearing reflex, much like a gag-reflex, is triggered every time. When I taught high school in the Chinese countryside several years ago, my poor American colleague’s classroom was situated right beside one of the male toilets. Her room was permanently tainted by the smell of wee. Male wee. It must have gotten into the wood of the students’ desks. So, even with the door closed during a low-urination time of day, it was suffocating. I felt so bad for her. I was luckier with my classroom placement.
Now, I got curious. Not that curious – not all-day research curious – just a little. Male stench can’t just be a plumbing or cleaning or entitlement problem, right? There has got to be a difference in male and female urine. I can’t deny what my nose, throat, eyes, and lungs constantly tell me. I read that there are differences in male cat urine (felinine protein for marking territory) and male mouse urine ((methylthio)methanethiol which attracts females), for example. Scientific inquiry (or lack thereof) indicates that there is nothing that really explains why male and female urine might smell differently. The implication is that it must be all in one’s head (and, goddammit, one’s throat and nose…), of course. Individually, urine smell can be affected by dehydration, types of food eaten, and disease conditions. After a cursory look, there is no conclusion that excreted hormones account for male stench. Who knows what is true? Either there is no difference (hard to believe), or men are abusing science to prove they are not gross, or the science hasn’t been done because it is more important to fund studies trying to prove women are natural, abusable fuckholes. I found one poorly written pop-sciencey/interpretation article written by an unintelligent, male-identified woman trying to imply a link (where no link exists) between mice and humans. Sorry lady, women are not fucking ‘turned on’ by the smell of male wee. Quite the opposite… Quite the opposite indeed… The smell of men inspires violent urges in me, actually.
Regardless of whether there is a difference in urine – really, that is not the point here, and I don’t really care – there is still a conclusion to be made. Men stink, and they need to pee in designated places, sit down while they do it, and clean the fuck up after themselves – especially if they are using residential bathrooms or dual-sex/unisex bathrooms where women are forced to use the same facilities. And this is yet another reason to keep male trannies out of the women’s toilets, btw. And their man-pee stench will give them away as dudes even if the bad wig and smirking entitlement don’t. Aside from the fear/intimidation, safety and violence issues, and usurping women’s status and rights issues, trannie men stink, too, and they should put their stinky male urine where it belongs – THE MEN’S ROOM.
Requiring men to self-regulate is not a human rights abuse. It is a tempering of ages-old privilege and infringement upon the rights of women.
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Inadequately Comforting a Distressed Young Woman
I had a rather delightful day on Saturday. I mentioned in a previous post that I was invited to a little grass roots English club. Out of this encounter, I’ve acquired some new mentees. It’s a mixed sex group. I’m quite pleased to have young women present, and I’ve likely mentioned in at least one past post that as a survival mechanism, I de-sex the male students so that I can bear to be around them. In other words, I go out with a group of young women and young students (males). Any outings I have with groups such as these are generally pleasant. If it were unbearable, I wouldn’t do it. I go places I may not have been before, I learn about local culture and history, try new food and new restaurants, and if I’m very lucky, I can give the young women a chance to talk about anything they want. It is my frequent impression that they are not really allowed to voice their deepest concerns or fears. I exist outside their cultural paradigm, and I think that makes me less threatening in a sense.
On Saturday, a group of five students (two females and three students) and I arranged to visit two culturally important venues in our city. It was actually a heap of fun and ended with a glorious meal at a restaurant with Dongbei cuisine. But at one point, the two young women began talking about marriage, which immediately put me on edge. I frequently have to deal with incredulous reactions to being unmarried and child-free. I am on the receiving end of concern, surprise, disapproval, and very, very, very occasionally jealousy. Mostly, it is annoying. I’ve spent my life being told how abnormal I am, that there is something ‘wrong’ with me, and there is always this valuation/appraisal of my human status no matter what culture I live in. Only women deal with this. Even if a man is questioned on his status, which he frequently isn’t, there is no value judgment made of him. Marital and parenthood status does not affect men. With women, you can be denied employment because you are assumed to be defective or lacking an important human quality that magically affects your ability to do work.
But I’m pretty much used to the disdain and questioning. I used to try to justify myself. I don’t do that anymore. Sometimes, I’m downright honest about the whole mess that is female slavery. By the time I’m sixty, I’ll be right salty!
One thing that makes me very sad in places like China is that women have no choice whatsoever about their slavery. Western women have much more choice when it comes to their fates. I get why and how Western women buy into the heterosexuality mandate and why they still cave under the social pressure (which is real, but seldom a life or death situation) to sell their vaginas, uteri, and physical, emotional and psychological energy to men who may not even be the highest bidders. But at the same time, it is bizarre to me and fucks me off to no end. The threat of punishment keeps the majority of women cowering and doing their duty. Those of us who have disobeyed have suffered and will suffer in old age for these important defiances.We help our enslaved sisters when they inevitably suffer at the hands of their Nigels, but we don’t get help in return when we are alone, old, injured or unable to support ourselves. Sigh.
But while I feel fortunate in some ways (economically poor, but somewhat psychologically free) for not being forcefully enslaved, despite my lower status among women and the recipient of punishment no matter where I live, most women in the world really have no choice at all. In China, I’ve never met a single woman who has managed to escape forced marriage and forced motherhood. But I have met a handful of girls who say they don’t want that life for themselves. And I get strong impressions from each of them that they are lesbians or completely sexually naive or asexual. These women, I have great sympathy for. Non-compliance is a much more serious issue here.
On Saturday, one of the young women told me repeatedly in amazement and with some envy that I was so independent. She couldn’t believe my father didn’t push me into anything (I permanently left my mother’s control when I was 20, and the pressure hadn’t started from her at that point in my life). The young woman quietly told me that she didn’t want to get married at all. Interestingly and with insight and sadness, she told me that she wished she did want it. This young woman knows what is in store for her. She knows how difficult something can be when you are forced into doing something you don’t want to do. I’m not sure if she articulates the concept of rape to herself, but she definitely has dreams of freedom, independence and choice. She said she hopes she will change her mind when she gets older. Right now, she is about 19.
It hurts me to hear young women talk about this and that girls of this young age are worrying deeply about this issue. The male students, on the other hand, have nothing to worry about. Marriage was built for them. Marriage benefits men in many ways and it doesn’t negatively affect any aspect of their lives. I’ve never heard a young male talk about marriage or children in anything but a flippant, carefree, positive way, in fact.
The males in our group tried to find out what the conversation was about. I summed it up for them. Marriage was designed by men for men. And it is not good for women. They seemed shocked. Like I said above, they don’t think about this stuff. Life is easy for them. They are the oppressors. One of them concluded that each person is entitled to their own opinion. Sure. Opinions. But I know more about women’s history than they do, so I am coming from a place of facts and reality, as well as my experience as a member of the oppressed, as the basis of my very informed opinion.
These conversations with women are difficult because I can’t do anything concrete to help them. I want for them to have freedom from males and the freedom to do whatever they want with their lives. I’d like to see a worldwide system change away from Patriarchy and female enslavement. I want to see the institution of family and marriage demolished. I wish women to be economically independent so that they don’t need men at all and they can concentrate on healthy, lifelong female relationships. But I know there is nothing at all I can do for them except listen to them, let them know they are heard, and that I care about their experiences and stories.
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One of These Things Is Not Like the Others
Dismay…
There are so many reasons to hate capitalism, but at the top of the list is the requisite and abundant abuse of women. The abuse happens in several ways. One of them is through advertisements. As China has become more capitalist, the objectification of women has gotten worse. Woman-hate has always been there, as it is and has been in all cultures. It just manifests in different ways depending on politics, social system, economy, national history, etc. Capitalism, which is completely dependent on the abuse of women (and would collapse without it), offers men several new ways to hurt women. Using their images in abusive ways is just one.
As I’ve posted before (specifically here), China, like many places, sees white women as the ultimate whores. White female bodies are used to sell all sorts of products in China, but are especially useful for sex- and female-targeted (aren’t they the same? woman=sex) products.
The dismay felt today occurred when I walked past my local, 3-storey department and grocery store. A few times a year, they change the massive 2-storey-tall advertisements. And I noticed something. One of these ads is not like the others. Let’s see if you notice too. I present to you the current set of ads lining the outer walls of the largest shopping centre in my area.
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Did you catch it? Did you notice which one was different? In case you can’t figure it out, let me help. There are two fully clothed, white dudes. Yeah, their styles are kind of effeminate, but that is actually quite normal for straight men in China. Chinese women will probably find these dudes attractive, I think. Then there are two white boy-children. Fully clothed with the ‘too cool for school’ look on their faces. Chinese people will find them acceptable. Then we’ve got a Chinese adult male. Slick, respectably dressed. This dude will command respect. And to be honest, I’d actually wear that outfit. Then we’ve got a young Chinese woman. Fully clothed (hard to see, but there is a tan-coloured shirt under all the red outerwear). She’s young and a cool up-and-comer. Timid, but part of China’s future.
And then we’ve got the White Whore. Dressed in clothes that are the very symbol of female slavery, humiliation, degradation, and inhumanity. Dressed in next to nothing in a culture where uncovered women are only seen as garbage to be used by men. This is part of the dual message that comes through in the advertising. “This is Woman – specifically White Woman – and she should be used, but not respected.”
All over the world, including China, white women are the object of choice for advertising lingerie, wedding rings, condoms, and other woman-as-sex-object items. I face these images of what are essentially representations of ME every single day, and it always occurs to me how much these images and their evil messages are internalized by everyone around me. We know these marketing devices work, otherwise we wouldn’t have advertisements at all. People have degrees in this shit from business schools. Marketing sends messages. So when I encounter people after they are daily bombarded with the ‘white woman as whore and nothing else’ message, how am I supposed to garner respect? How am I supposed to be seen as human? All they see when they look at me and other white women is some sex-crazed, fuckable property of white men. It scares the shit out of me, and I fucking hate it.
This is the intertwined racism and misogyny of China.
[This post is part of the White Girl series.]
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Talking About the Boys and the Bees
I frequently get bored. I do a lot of stuff by myself, which is fine. I’ve always been that way. Since I was a kid. But that tendency is exacerbated in China to the point where I am frequently bored out of my skull. While in other places, doing things by myself can be either indoors or outdoors, in China, I spend most of my time indoors simply because going outside – even just outside my building – means facing too much negative attention from racist, misogynist people who don’t see me as quite human.
So getting bored means that sometimes I sign on to do things that may or may not be fun. I had one such opportunity this week. There are a couple of kids who drop in on one of my English classes at my home campus. I like ambitious people who look for chances to self-improve without being forced to do it, so I let them sit in and participate. There aren’t a lot of truly self-motivated people in the world, and I’d hate to put out what fire they may have. Anyhow, one of them announced he was a member of a little grass roots English club on my campus and invited me to attend. I figured I’d check it out. After all the group was small, and the students were not English majors, but young people just interested in improving their oral language skills that they are sadly not offered in their university programs.
I won’t get into what transpired, as that is not the point of this post, except to say that it was a nice meeting, and I was impressed with all of the students. I think I’ll go again in the future because they really are quite keen on learning and practising. And some of them have interesting things to say – I like to know what young people in a growing economy and weird political system think about the world.
What was interesting – or not, depending on your perspective – was a question that came up and the conversation that ensued. People always ask me what I do in my free time or what I’m interested in. I hate this question because I don’t have a lot to say. I don’t do a lot. I read. I write. I go to the market. I cook food that is suitable for a person living alone. I see friends or students occasionally. That’s about it. Boring stuff. But if I can’t hold back, I will tell people that I love bees. By hold back, I mean that if I start talking about bees, I can go on and on and on. I love them. I have worked with bees and I have fallen in love with them, so to speak. They make me happy. And I like to watch them, photograph them, and think about them. I also like to dispel myths about them, alleviate irrational fears of them, and tell people about how they operate. They are very misunderstood creatures.
One thing I really love about them is that they are a female-dominated society. Now, they are not female-dominated in the way that the few matriarchal human societies have been/are. Human matriarchies are good for women, but they are also good for men. Under human matriarchy, everybody actually does well. It’s not based on domination/submission as patriarchies are. The reality is contrary to what men fear – because men think women in charge would behave exactly like men. Total nonsense and indicative of how limited men are in their imaginations and how aware they actually are of how much they abuse us. They can only project, and they know they deserve to be punished for what they have done… No, unlike human matriarchies, bee society is female-dominated in a way that doesn’t benefit male bees (drones). I approve, actually. Not of the hierarchy with queen on top, but of the efficiency and cohesiveness of bee society. Males are essentially USELESS. Only a few are born and their sole purpose is to impregnate the queen. Other than that, they are completely and utterly useless. They can’t even break their way out of their birth cells, unlike the females. The females must liberate the poor little fuckers from their cells. The drones contribute nothing to the hive. They don’t bring back resources. They don’t clean or heat/cool the hive. They don’t even have a stinger with which to defend the hive. After mating, the females do what no human female has the guts to do: they either drive the males from the hive, or kill them immediately. Bee hives depend upon the contributions of every single bee. Non-contributors use badly needed resources. Males are a drain on hive resources from birth. And the girls deal with this problem effectively.
Whoops, see what I mean? Once I start, it is hard for me to stop.
Anyhow, the students asked me about what I was most interested in, and I started in on the bees. I told them all about this female-dominated society. They were fascinated, but what was interesting to me was how the students reacted. It was a half female, half male group. None of the males said anything at all in response to the cold hard reality of bee life for drones. But several of the young women started lamenting on how unfair it was for the males to be killed. Waaah!!! Poor resource-sucking males!!!
And this is why human society is in the poor, go-nowhere, filthy state that it is in. Women constantly stick up for unproductive, abusive, destructive, poisonous, dominant, rapist, parasitical, disgusting men. Most women accept their brainwashing and support the female slave structure instead of taking their rightful place as leaders and creators and protectors and stewards.
Bee society isn’t my ideal society. I do believe there is a place for those who are unable to be in top productivity (i.e., elderly wise women nearing the end of their lives), but that is probably more practical for human culture and not realistic for bees. And the hyper-focus on breeding is not what I would consider a human priority like it appears to be for bees. But removing destructive, abusive, unchanging forces entirely from a culture or society? That I can get on board with. And I think it is something human females need to do if they ever expect to live in peace, safety and happiness in this world.
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Chinese Male Privilege or ‘You Will Bear My Son, Or Else…’
Because it doesn’t happen a lot, every time I make a new female friend who doesn’t immediately turn out to be a complete raging misogynist, I cheer inside. And often out loud, too. With a happy dance. Female friendship should be cheered. And cherished. Unfortunately, the opposite is true in most corners of the world. Women are trained from birth not to invest in other women. That would undermine patriarchy and threaten their relationships with men.
On the whole, it is really hard to connect with Chinese women. First, I am ‘other’, so engaging with me is seldom something they pursue. They (the women) do violent things me and say mean things to me, oh yes they do. The women are often more aggressive to me than the men, and friendly engagement is rare. This is borne of the divisiveness created by patriarchy that keeps women from bonding. And as I don’t comply with femininity, I am further ‘othered’. With the really young Chinese women, they are usually wrapped up in shopping and beauty products and obsessing about boys and double eyelid surgery (all of which repulses the hell out of me) – and occasionally with studying really, really hard (which I fully support). And come mid-20’s, almost all women are sucked into mandatory nuclear family life. All women, including lesbians, are forced into the drudgery and humiliation of finding a husband, popping out a kid or two, and then enthusiastically embracing the lifetime of slavery that goes with that. It’s not unique to China. All cultures either force or coerce women into the family track through some means. I oppose the family structure because it is designed specifically to isolate and disempower women and to place female friendship and support and the possibility of professional networking at the very bottom of their priority list. It doesn’t work that way for men – quite the opposite actually. Family is a disastrous (male) invention that makes men’s lives easy and destroys the lives of women. But I’ve managed to cultivate a few friendships with Chinese women despite all this. They probably have greater meaning for me than for them, however, given my existence outside the family system and my wish to connect meaningfully with women.
One new friendship is with a lecturer at my university. We crossed paths as we use the same classroom – my class is immediately before hers. She did her Masters degree in Canada, so she has no hesitation about speaking with foreign people, unlike most Chinese who can’t even be bothered to say ‘ni hao’ to me or return my smile (which I gave up on a few years ago). And we have other things in common. We both have backgrounds in statistics and methodology and in addition to our scientific creds, also have degrees in the realm of management.
We got together for lunch yesterday, and even though my new friend told me right off the bat that she is a ‘traditional person’, I really didn’t feel that was entirely true. First off, she has a PhD (more education than her husband) and is currently looking for international opportunities to further her career. That doesn’t sound so traditional to me. Yes, she has several standard heterosexual views that almost all woman hold due to social conditioning, but I find her rather open-minded and reasonably rational for a woman from a very rigid culture in the clutches of dictatorship. I think her international experience really helped broaden her perspective (e.g., she had a gay masters advisor in Canada). And it was really easy to have a discussion on issues while holding sometimes differing views. Honestly, it was the most open face-to-face conversation I’ve had in… years?
I learned a lot of fascinating things during our lunch, but there is one thing I want to talk about in this post. The whole male child obsession.
There is new propaganda out in China about ‘girl children are important, toooooo’. It’s mostly bullshit, but the government is panicking about the backfiring of their population control policy and the disastrous effects it has had years later. And the panicking isn’t due to regrets or fighting misogyny. It is still all focused on male privilege. Let’s spell out what happened clearly.
- China’s population was exploding due to female slavery.
- The government decided to control the explosion by limiting families to one child (with exceptions).
- Like anyone but an idiot might expect, a culture built on woman-hate automatically gravitated towards that single child being a boy.
- Illegal sex determination testing was carried out by all people who could pay for it and many female fetuses were aborted. If people couldn’t afford the testing, they often abandoned or killed female newborns once the nasty surprise was born.
- A few short decades later, and the country is missing 40 million females.
- And note that the crisis is not that females have been killed, but that there now isn’t enough cunt to allocate to all of the males who were allowed to live.
- Boys must have access to pussy! What are we to do!!!!???? Oh no!!!!!
Now, it would be great to shit all over China for the horrors done to girls. But you know what? If you implement this population control policy anywhere in the world, the exact same thing would happen. There is no country in the world where boys aren’t worshipped and girls hated. When push comes to shove, given the choice between breeding a future rape victim or a future rapist, 99.9% of people would choose the rapist. Some of them might delude themselves into thinking they can produce a ‘good one’, but the fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as a good one. There are just entitled ones who ALL benefit from the threat all women live under. A male doesn’t have to rape to benefit from rape. Men (and most women) don’t get this. At all.
Despite being ‘traditional’, my new friend and I got into a good discussion of marriage and male privilege and the whole mandatory breeding thing in China. Women cannot escape from marriage and breeding. It is unthinkable and undoable. Even ‘out’ lesbians, the few that there are, are hounded by the government (in addition to friends and family) to submit and do their duty. Your twat and portable incubator belong to us and all the men in the country!!! And regardless of the deceptive ‘pro-female baby’ campaign, even educated people are still lusting after sons. We discussed a few examples from my friend’s life that made for some depressing food for thought.
In particular, she mentioned one of her closest Chinese friends. Someone she described as at the top of her career, accomplished, smart, talented – a great woman. But of course, she is married. She is also 43 and is now pregnant. This hit me very personally – I am 43 and can’t imagine wanting to be pregnant at this age. Anyhow, this woman had a daughter years before, but her husband is desperate for real human progeny – I mean, a son. So he badgered her. And the threat is that if this intelligent, accomplished woman doesn’t bear this asshole a son, he will leave her. [Me? I say ‘good riddance’. There is no reason for an economically independent woman to stay with a rapist-abuser.] And she relented. Being 43, she has been forced by Husband-Dickface into putting herself at great risk of death and endless physical and psychological complications, disfigurement, and/or permanent injury. Less important, but still worth considering, she is at high risk of having a child with any of a number of problems – which, as the mother, she will be solely responsible for taking care of. But Cock must be satisfied. He has absolutely nothing to lose in this narcissistic frivolity. The bitch must put out, or she will be tossed aside like garbage. I am positive that Cock will pay the money for an illegal sex determination test, and any defects (aka ‘femaleness’) detected will be aborted toot sweet.
My lunch companion then entered into the standard het-female spiel about her special Nigel (I need a Chinese equivalent for a special snowflake, can-do-no-wrong male partner – I may use the the popular name, Ming – 明 – ‘not my Ming’). She said that her husband wants another child, but she is 38, and she said she didn’t want to have another because she is getting too old, and um, she is an accomplished woman moving up in her career. He has given in. So of course, he is the Best Husband on Earth™. But I asked her, do you have a son or daughter? Wait for it… She has a son! Ding ding ding!!! If she had a daughter, her super special Nigel/Ming probably wouldn’t have let her get off so easily.
But she chooses to see his giving in as some superior quality, rather than only relenting because he already has what he wants – a son. And this kind of rationalizing preserves the hetero marriage paradigm, not just in this case but all over the world. Women need to find examples, even the tiniest shred, of positive male behaviour in order to justify their slavery. And cookies (in the West) and dumplings (in the East) are prepared and showered upon husbands and boyfriends for not hurting them. That day. That moment. This is the trap all heterosexual women fall into and it is what will keep het relationships (and male privilege, including forcing women to produce sons) safe until the end of time. Turning the whole ‘he could do x, y, z to me, but he chooses not to’ into ‘he’s a perfect male specimen’ is a defense mechanism. Is that not creepy or scary to you? The implication always is with men that they are choosing not to do something to you AT THAT MOMENT, but it could change at any time. The threat of what could be done with impunity is what keeps all women in line.
But I get it. I don’t like it, and personally, I made my life infinitely more difficult by NOT supporting heteronormative slavery through not getting married and breeding. But not all women have the fight in them needed to resist, or in the case of rigid cultures like China, the mindset to rebel. But, separate from my personal life choices, I like this woman just as I like all my enslaved female friends. We don’t have to agree on how to survive in this world.
So, I ended that conversation with an emphasis on the importance of female friendships and support. That might be a topic for another post as I gained some insight into debunking a stereotype that Western women have of non-Western women (specifically the myth that the latter have stronger female bonds because they are family- and group-think-oriented).
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Not a Feminist Ally If…
Feminism. The poor term has been battered time and again, and it is still standing. It started off as a less powerful replacement for the clear and proud Women’s Liberation Movement. It has, more than once, fallen out of favour and acquired an unsavoury taste. It seems to have gained in popularity more recently, but perhaps not in a good way. Everyone and their dog seems to be either calling themselves a ‘feminist’ or saying “I’m not a feminist, but…” or pairing the word with choice hate speech against women. I truly think no one really knows what it means anymore and frequently doesn’t resemble anything that was practised by the warrior feminists of yore.
Perhaps the most disturbing resurgence has been among male-identified women and worse, men – straight men, gay men, and men in dresses (trans). This latest trend has rendered the label either practically meaningless or inseparable from Cock Supremacy. Yes, in the mainstream, feminism has become the quest for men to retain their privileges with enthusiastic yessing from liberated women. And the few who live by true feminist principles (radical feminists, especially lesbians) have become the absolute bottom of the human heap. Evil personified.
If you – especially if you’re a man – are strutting around calling yourself a ‘feminist’, then consider the following statements below. Some of these are more obvious than others. Some are complete ‘no-brainers’. But their inclusion is necessary because you wouldn’t believe how many men feel they have a right to weigh in on and be included in every single thing women do – especially when these things concern women alone. And there are plenty of women who put men first in feminism. Chances are, most men who read this list will not be able to see themselves and their behaviour within. This is standard narcissism observable in most men, partially resulting from biological tendencies and partially from socialization as oppressors. Willful disconnect from women’s reality, a free pass to attack women (often victims, the ignorant, and frequently radfems) under the guise of ‘activist feminism’ and perhaps a desperate, immature need to score activist/liberal points (and lays) from self-appointed, unashamed, feminist *sluts*, are the main motivators for adherence to the latest and most liberal feminist current. Personally, I don’t believe in such a creature as the ‘male feminist’. With skepticism based on years of experience, I might allow the title: ‘feminist ally’, which I’ll use below, but I attach parameters/conditions to this very special status. Look for yourself in the list. I might have to turn this whole thing into a Super Fun Quiz™ at some point. But for now, it’s just a list, and as it’s just off the top of my head, I’m sure I’m missing crucial things.
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If your support of women’s status as humans depends solely upon my ‘attitude’ (how I respond to you, my willingness to tolerate you, and how nice and accommodating I am to you), then you are not a feminist ally.
If you think someone a) stating a fact you don’t like, b) disagreeing with you, or c) looking at you in a way you don’t like is worse than being raped, you are not a feminist ally.
If you are using derogatory words (cis, fish, TERF, etc) or well-worn slurs (b****, c***, w****, s***, etc.) to refer to women, you are not a feminist ally.
If I say ‘no’ to you and you don’t let it go then and there, you are not a feminist ally.
If you spend more time vocalizing (even if you manage not to mansplain) on feminist blogs and in women’s spaces than you do raising righteous hell among men, you are not a feminist ally.
If your support of women’s status does not include criminalizing, with the aim to abolish, the demand for pornography and prostitution, you are not a feminist ally.
If you are still having penile-penetrative sex with women, you are not a feminist ally.
If you think sex (especially intercourse) is a fundamental human right, you are not a feminist ally.
If you are not standing up against trans people’s hate speech and hate crimes against women, and instead support their takeover and further subordination of ACTUAL women, you are not a feminist ally.
If you can’t understand what the big deal is about protecting women-only spaces, you are not a feminist ally.
If you find your feminist voice in loudly holding women responsible for racism (and other isms), you are not a feminist ally.
If you get offended or pissy or outright angry if a woman reacts to your presence or words with fear/aversion, you are not a feminist ally.
If you think feminism has at its core anything other than the liberation of women from the oppression of men, you are not a feminist ally.
If you respond to women’s free speech with death or rape threats or slurs, you are not a feminist ally.
If you see no problem with a born male (regardless of how he ‘identifies’ now) leading feminist organizations, lesbian groups, or women’s studies classes/departments, you are not a feminist ally.
If you believe the presence of a single male (let alone several males) has no effect on the dynamics of a group of women, you are not a feminist ally.
If you put your identity and feelings above the safety of the entire class of people called women, you are not a feminist ally.
If you are quick to blame women for what men have done to you personally, you are not a feminist ally.
If you cherry-pick ‘scientific’ studies to confirm your point-of-view instead of looking objectively for legitimately acquired facts that run the risk of proving you wrong, you are not a feminist ally.
If you are under the delusion that trans or blacks or any other racial or religious group are more ‘oppressed’ than women, you are not a feminist ally.
If you can’t understand the difference between sex and gender, you are not a feminist ally.
If you can’t see the male trans performance of femininity as being as offensive and horrific as a blackface minstrel show, you are not a feminist ally.
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Call me harsh, but seriously, women have been both strong-armed and shamed / manipulated into making concessions to men without getting anything but grief through the erosion of rights and voice in return. None of the above items concerning basic female rights and freedoms hurts men in any way. Removal of privilege does not equal harm or oppression.
This is part of the Wolves in Women’s Clothing series.
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Liquid Courage and Stopping a Dick Mid-Swing
Yeah, this is a rant. Not light, and not short. Warning given. Proceed at your own risk 😉
I don’t drink that much. Alcohol has long been associated with abuse, fear, and rape for me, so I stay well away from drunk men, drinking with men I don’t know or trust (which is, at this point, every single one of them), and places where people drink. In my experience, you severely raise the risk that not only will something bad happen to you, but also that you won’t have a leg of credibility to stand on when (not if) something happens to you. This is women’s reality. Alcohol provides men with an excuse for their criminal behaviour, and takes away from women everything including the slightest shred of believability or humanity.
I almost completely limit my alcohol consumption to the occasional bottle of foreign red wine (decent alcohol is very expensive in China), and I’m such a light weight that it can last me for 3 days. And it does the trick, it dulls my depression and makes me forget the worst parts of living in China. Temporarily.
But in the last few years, there is one other time that I have a few drinks, and that is the two or three times a year that I go out socially with this piece of shit, 61-year-old, white, British, male misogynist whom I’ve tolerated because a) he is a rare atheist, and b) he is a colleague and unfortunately, one of my few ‘allies’ (wrong word) where I work. I’ve described this douchebag before.
I was much less enraged three years ago when I first met DB (douchebag). I tolerated his mansplainy narcissism. And this is a topic for another post, but even though every country’s males have their own unique brand of misogyny, there is something I absolutely fucking hate about British men. I’m not sure if it is my perspective as a woman from the “New World”, but I find men from “Old World” countries (Western or Eastern) have a very deep-seated, centuries-old, traditional misogyny that you don’t see in places like Canada, New Zealand, Australia or even the US. It’s not specifically religious. It’s something else. A colonizer mentality. And there is some left over colonial, British Empire attitude that sits in the DNA of British men – the men who raped, conquered and held hostage half the world and left destruction in their wake. The somewhat subdued, historic pomposity of British men is, in many ways, more obnoxious than the loud, superhero, dumb jock, ‘we’re number one!’ ignorance of modern American men. It’s hard to explain. And I will say that I don’t see any of that in comparing the women of both worlds, except perhaps in how they rationalize their slavery. But of course, women don’t colonize. They don’t attack, invade, rape, pillage, kidnap, infect, kill, or any of that, in the name of discovery, conquering, ‘civilizing’, taming, nationalism, or claiming one’s birthright or cockright. I like British women just as I like American women and any other women from any place. Individual women may pose problems, but as a class, they are not the enemy.
So anyhow, after my first week swimming in Chinese semen, I had planned a strategic Saturday outing with DB. Not for fun. I needed crucial information related to my job. I figured I’d get this toxic event out of the way and be safe from further exposure for months – perhaps even for the rest of the semester.
When out with DB, there is alcohol. He is a fucking fish. An alcoholic (like most older men who come to China). He jokes about going to class everyday having to mask the smell of alcohol consumed the night before leaking out of his pores with his sweat. I usually have a few drinks while I’m on these outings with DB because it helps me suffer through his grossness.
But on this recent outing, I discovered a more practical and useful side effect. I found courage.
I am really good at defending other people – women especially – but I am horrible at defending myself or having general debates. I’m not an orator. I prefer to think, mull, and write, rather than have a verbal discussion. I’d also rather avoid men who disgust me than get into arguments with them about things they don’t understand and that involve my human rights and their male privileges. Once the insanity starts, I tend to close down and fantasize about killing them. But on Saturday, after a few drinks and in the feminist frame of mind I’ve been in, especially recently, I was ready for a fight of the verbal sort. I mean, I still sat there for much of it imagining a clean shot put between DB’s eyes. But verbally, I trounced that fucker, and did it using his own (and all men’s) low-blow and aggressive techniques against him. And those techniques mostly involved interrupting. Shutting down his irrelevant lines of thought before he could complete them. Dismissing his rebuttals. Derailing his derail attempts. Refusing to defend myself and my claims. Keeping on the attack rather than the defense. Basically, I treated him as he has always treated me – as men always treat women. And it worked. It didn’t gain me respect necessarily, and it didn’t feel ‘natural’ to me, but it shut him up. Instead of the male voice, I eventually got silence. Blessed silence. The male voice, silenced. He gave up trying to dominate me and forcing me to back down and agree to his misogynist viewpoint. He took on the pouty, abused, ‘is-is-is she saying no to me?’ look that some men get when women speak with authority or righteous anger. Didn’t stop me. I firmly believe that women can’t ever win or be heard or make men shut up unless they use the ‘master’s tools’ against the masters themselves. Men don’t understand anything but aggression. Reasoning doesn’t work. Appeals to logic or empathy or humanity don’t work. But a good beating, verbal or physical, coupled with shaming, do. It’s what they do to us. I get so tired of women refusing to see that taking the high moral ground will never, ever make men stop their abuse of us. Even men’s request for ‘educating’ aren’t true or real, but women fall for it every time. That derailing technique works every time. Women’s energy derailed and stolen.
Not until you become more self-aware do you realize how much woman-hate is organic to conversations with men. Almost everything men say smacks of misogyny. But we don’t notice, or we laugh along, or we get nervous, or we have already tuned out and are nodding and smiling in boredom. When you become self-aware, it is horrifying how nasty and ignorant men are. And they remain unopposed by all men and almost all women. Honestly, I should have brought a massive fucking misogynist bingo card with me. This guy hit almost every stupid point that men come up with when trying to assert their dominance and entitlement/’rights’. It was trope central. And standard to pretty much all British men, even the young ones, he kicked it all off with basic fighting words: “mankind“. And it went on from there. Here are only a few of the highlights:
Religion, not men, caused gynocidal events in history
DB is a history buff (male history) and he is both a China apologist and an atheist. China can do no wrong and is superior for not being a religious country (except that traditionalism is a form of religion – a topic for another post). DB loves dictatorships and censorship (as long as HE is free to do what HE wants, that is).
I had pointed out that the two worst events in the history of humans: 1000 years of footbinding in China and 300 years of witch burnings and torture of women in the West. DB immediately leapt in with a condemnation of religion. I cut him off. Nope. That doesn’t explain footbinding. I just kept repeating: “Men did it. Male hatred of women. Misogyny.” Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Dumb people need repetition. And you can list all the horrific gynocides throughout history – DUE TO MEN. The 6-week rape-fest in Nanjing, China by the Japanese. Not religion. Men. The perfection of what we now know as the ‘concentration camp’ by Winston Churchill and Lord Kitchener used on Afrikaner women and children. Not religion. Men. Cruise through time. Make notes. Men have done it all to women. Men. Men. Men. To women. Women. Women. And it seldom makes the history books or history class curricula.
Chimps trade meat for sex
Atheist men fucking LOVE LOVE LOVE evolutionary psychology as a tool to try to justify their love of rape and domination. Atheist men hate you too, ladies. This particular stupid douchebag doesn’t have a single course in science. He doesn’t even have a college degree. Through some weird British educational loophole, this idiot was let into a Masters program in something that was decidedly not science, WITHOUT an undergraduate degree. But he loves to try to school ME in science, a woman with post graduate education in science, published articles in science, research in science, and teaching experience in university scientific methodology and statistics. And like most atheist men without an understanding of science, he trots out debunked evo-psych bullshit based on male confirmation biased interpretations of animal behaviour (anthropomorphize much, rapists?) to support his love of rape and prostitution. Dumbass. Anyhow, I shut that fucker down before he could actually finish his first sentence as I saw it coming a mile away. I said, “Debunked. Non-science.” To derail me, he tried the male trick: where is your proof? I said, “Google it.” You prove it. Science, my scientific ass.
Good things always come from war
Nothing smacks of male privilege like dismissing the effects of war. History is basically the male masturbatory recounting of wars. It is also the dismissal of the female experience, the erasure of female existence. So men, when they start jizzing over how fucking awesome a battle was, or how fucking awesome the world became due to some war, they forget one tiny thing. Women are the overwhelmingly large majority of victims when there is war or civil unrest. I was reading a psychological site on PTSD in women, and they cited the statistics that during civil unrest and warlike conditions, women comprise up to 80% of the victims (general victims, not PTSD victims, specifically). Men can’t see this because they only see soldier mortality as victimhood. What they forget are the women civilians killed. And that victimhood isn’t just death. Rape is rampant during any kind of uncivilized event. Men don’t get raped. Women and girls are raped. And tortured and injured and killed. They are raped and killed by the enemies. They are raped and killed by the men on ‘their side’. Women are the largest group of victims during unrest.
As for the good things that come from war? WTF? Is the world a better place when war is concluded? Not for women. And no aftermath is worth all the loss and suffering. Any freedoms or benefits usually go to men and boys. For women, it is business as usual. The only war I can imagine resulting in something good is one where women stand up for their rights, physically fight, and win over men. Liberation for women is the only cause that makes sense for me because every current ill in society results from women’s oppression. Liberating women would help alleviate all human problems as well as environmental, animal, and food/water problems.
We then moved on to:
If we don’t do it, someone else will
Men are positively obsessed with progress and growth. This is the only way they define success. Progress and growth are seldom logical or reasonable and always come with a high cost. A cost that is paid by women and girls.
There is no such thing as creating something out of nothing. There is no such thing as ‘bottomless’ or ‘without limit’ when men seek success. The male demand for more and more is only possible if you tread on the rights and humanity of others – the least powerful. The least powerful are women, so they get less so that more is produced. So women are paid less for the same job. They work more in order to produce more. They are removed from their homes and made homeless so that buildings and structures they will never benefit from can be erected. They suffer through wars and environmental disasters and medical atrocities. Just so men can achieve ‘progress’ and ‘growth’. And I’ll add recognition and power to that list.
I suggested to DB that there are several lines that should not be crossed, whether it is in science or any endeavour. His answer? If we don’t do it, someone else will. We can’t let the other guy get there first! And I hammered him. “What a shitty, amoral excuse for evil behaviour.” This guy swears he is not a capitalist.
The world is safer than it has ever been
For men? Yes. Definitely. Not so much for women. Men don’t have a clue what safety issues are. And how much do you love it when men try to tell you that you are perfectly safe now. I mean seriously, fuck off. They have no idea what women think about, worry about, and have to do in order to get from Point A to Point B.
His measure of safety is that we have longer life spans. Yeah. That’s it. Longer life spans. What an incredibly nuanced way to look at safety. And I told him so. Did I also mention that I have worked in forensics as an analyst? I have worked with an FBI consultant on serial rape data. I have worked with police departments on workplace violent crime. I have also worked in the health field on medical errors research.
In what world does living a long life mean that you have lived free from danger? That you haven’t almost died? That you don’t suffer from fear or trauma or anxiety due to living in a crime-filled, corrupt world of danger for women?
They’re trying to criminalize johns and let prostitutes…!!!
We’d already covered the chimps, meat and sex bullshit, and the world is a safer place bullshit. So why not move into trying to shut down the male right to rape?
I jumped on this one before he even finished his sentence of outrage. There is nothing I hate more than men telling me that they have a right to stick their dicks into women, or that women ‘choose’ lives of rape and degradation over health and happiness. So I derailed him. I said, “Yes!!! Finally!!! The Swedish model is the best thing to happen in a long time. Finally, we can take away men’s right to rape and finally, we have a fighting chance in hell to reduce male violence against women, misogyny, and endless rape – all of which increase when women are jailed for prostitution and males go free in order to pay money to rape again. I launched into the cold reality that prostitution ONLY exists when men refuse to allow women the means to support themselves properly. We have prostitutes because women are poor. That’s it. Holding women severely economically disadvantaged positively ensures that women will be forced to sell their bodies and ensures that men have a constant supply of enslaved cunt to rape.
I didn’t allow any response from DB. There is no response to this issue that isn’t dripping in pro-rape, pro-poverty, male privilege and psychopathy. Did I mention that this guy is NOT a capitalist? Right. Unless it’s something he wants sold for his pleasure as a male.
But but but the Women’s Movement was successful
I mentioned that women-only social justice movements are never allowed to succeed. Only when men’s rights are at stake, do they succeed. And they do so mostly because they have women’s free labour supporting them. Women don’t receive the backing of men when it is their turn. And he came out with the ‘right to vote’ success. Most men don’t know anything about the herstory of women’s struggles. And of course, any successes that occur are assumed by men to have been the single purpose of the struggle. When women won the vote, that was not the whole point of the movement. It was actually a decades-long struggle for several legal rights, one of which was the right to vote. Following backlash from men and possibly exhaustion from that landmark achievement, the women’s movement lost some steam. They didn’t achieve most of what they had set out to do. Would I call the First Wave a success? Not entirely. It wasn’t a complete failure, but it wasn’t a roaring success in the way that all male movements have been – including that of black males in the US.
It’s time to start looking for a Chinese wife
Speaking of prostitution and male privilege… As an over-60, DB has overstayed his welcome in China. The Chinese who, in addition to being sexist and racist, are also ageist. They love Chinese old people, but the foreign people who stay for decades diligently and devotedly educating their youth? Nope. Once you hit 60, you’re tossed to the curb. There is no pathway to residency. There is no pension for foreigners. No ‘thank you’ for your service. You’re out.
Unless you are a man. Foreign males can find local pussy, convince them to marry (which is pretty easy to do), and then stay forever on the equivalent of a green card. This isn’t really an option for foreign women. First, Chinese men, like Western men, want subservient wives and baby factories. Besides, Chinese men only see us as whores. Something to fuck, but not to ‘respect’ in the form of a slave relationship (marriage). Second, most Western women who come to places like China are either already enslaved or they are the most independent women from what are independence-embracing countries. They aren’t looking for a slave-arrangement. So this dealio works well for men who have no problem owning a slave. But it is not an option for women.
The only other way to stay is if you are extremely well connected with someone in government who can ‘arrange’ an illegal visa if you have the money. This is rare. I think about all the people, including those from China, we let stay forever in Canada, despite having little or nothing to offer, and I think about devoting my education and talent to a place like China and their complete disrespect for my years of service and their abuse while I am employed with them. Mind-boggling. There is no reciprocal arrangement between our countries.
Anyhow, DB is 60 or 61 and he has been told that he will be kicked out of China next year. He is joking now that it is time to find a Chinese wife. Who knows, he might just do that.
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There is actually a lot more here to tell, but this is long enough. My bingo card was full by the end of things. And I raged for days. Even though I put this douchebag in his place, thanks in part to the liquid courage of a couple of G&Ts, I spent the following week calming down. When it really hits you full force how much a dude you have known for a while hates women, and by definition, you yourself because you’re a woman, you rage. You rage. You rage. And just think, even your Nigels (if you have one) are the same. Maybe he has different words and tactics, but the woman-hate and privilege is in there. Waiting. Waiting for you to oppose him in some way. Deny him what he feels is his ‘right’ (but which is only a male privilege) and you’ll find out how much your sweetie ‘loves’ you. The truth is these assholes walk the planet taking what they want. They are not used to hearing ‘no’ and having to abide by it. They don’t respect ‘no’ in the way that women do. They are given more than you (more money, more respect, more space, more consideration, more understanding, more freedom, more safety) despite their inferiority simply because they have dicks. So, while I felt a victory – and it was important one, personally – it came with a price and it changes nothing about how the world works. I stopped a dick mid-swing, but unless it is cut off completely, it will live to swing another day, knocking down all women in its path.
Filed under the Conversations with Men series.
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The Semester Starts with Racism and Misogyny – Mmmm Good
I have a very strange internet friend whom I’ve ‘known’ for a long time from years ago – back when I was a serious researcher doing serious research and not frittering my life and spirit away in China. We collaborated on a short project online, but we have never met in person. At this point, this acquaintance’s role has morphed into one of sending me occasional stories of ‘how fucked up China is’. News of the weird. Of human rightsy weirdness. Bizarre deaths resulting from Chinese neglect. That kind of thing.
The thing is, I KNOW ALREADY. I live here. I experience bad and weird things here all the time. I don’t bother to comb through alt-media sites or even mainstream Western media for Chinese fuckery because the day-to-day stuff that I see in situ is bad enough.
When you come from a country where there are *sometimes* consequences for abusing power – or at least the pretense of consequences – or at least mechanisms and bodies set up to deal with power abuses – it is hard to imagine it working otherwise in other places. So Westerners can’t understand that if they go to China, if anything untoward ever happens to them, there will be nothing whatsoever that can be done. Unless you have managed to get very well connected with powerful people, that is. And the majority of Western people – or any foreign worker, for that matter – are extremely vulnerable to abuse because they aren’t connected. Newbie Western workers will often try to fight what has happened to them with logic or human-rightsy arguments that usually start with: “This would never happen in MY country.” And they might be right. Maybe. It might happen, and you might be lucky to have a way to fight it. There is definitely more of a chance of fighting it in the West. But in China, you learn very quickly that anyone can do anything to you at any time. And you are not allowed to say anything about it. Even contract agreements between you and the Chinese only apply to you. If you don’t live up to the contract they can do what they want to you. But as a Chinese, they can break the contract every single day. You can complain if you want. And they will ignore you. And they might fire you because you don’t take abuse well. Their firing techniques are almost always passive-aggressive, subtle manipulation. It is actually the exact mentality behind Western men complaining about Western women. The whole “I love Asian women” phenomenon. Western women believe they have rights as humans. Most men don’t like that, and some will go East to find the perfect docile slave.
Many of the younger Westerners who come here are ‘liberal’, so they don’t usually complain, and may often make excuses for the Chinese (aka ‘apologism’), because they hold the Western mentality that the Chinese are oppressed – which isn’t actually true anymore in the West, nevermind the East. It’s the older white (and usually incompetent) male who comes here for a pussy and booze free-for-all who gets very angry and loud when he isn’t treated like a member of the dominant race. And both groups are delusional, by the way.
The Chinese are the dominant and the majority race. And China is very patriarchal. And it is still a system that is run as a dictatorship. And with that combination, you get very serious racism, very serious misogyny, and no concept of human rights whatsoever. There is no such thing as a race-motivated crime. There is no such thing as a crime against women. And there is no such thing as workers’ rights or human rights abuse of any sort.
It is hard for many Western people to wrap their minds around that non-Western reality.
I once read a disturbing, but amusing (because I could understand it on a personal level) little essay written by a long-time foreign resident in China about the stages foreigners go through when first living in China. It was written by a man, and thus didn’t take into account that China is much easier for men to deal with for a number of reasons. But I still recognized some of the elements in it. The whole essay reminded me of the grieving process one goes through when dealing with a death – starting with anger, moving through depression, and eventually resolving with acceptance of reality. It was troubling to realize that living in China was so similar to dealing with a serious loss such as a major death, but it is actually very much like that if you stay long enough. Living in China really does mean giving up your personhood or identity. It is a death of sorts. Whether you can be reborn or whether you remain living as the undead, is another thing entirely and is dependent upon either having your mind and spirit broken completely and thus becoming open to brainwashing or being able to escape most of the mundane Chinese abuse through obtaining an elitist kind of job with super-high pay.
I’ve thought about this a lot. Many sociologists and cross-cultural researchers paint this simplistic black-and-white picture of individualistic cultures and group-based cultures. And of course, the former are painted as evil and latter are somehow superior. But I think this conclusion, and the whole type-of-society dichotomy are not quite right. I actually find the Chinese to be much more individualistic and self-centred and heartless in some ways that I have not been able to explain (until recently) using the group-think or collectivist society model. Likewise, that model hasn’t explained the countless examples of supposedly average, individualistic, selfish Americans and other Westerners relentlessly donating their time and money to humanitarian efforts or to helping random people on the street. You may not see this if your knowledge of China has come solely from movies and the news, but given how much time I’ve spent in non-Western countries, I’ll tell you how jarred I am by how much positive and pro-social interaction there is between strangers in the West. Every time I return, I get freaked out. Strangers helping strangers. Hell, strangers talking to strangers. You never, ever, never, ever see this in China. Ever. Ever. People don’t even say ‘thank you’ here. But that is a post for another time [update: here it is, 7 years later 😉 I is for Individualism. I have developed my own theory as to this individualism vs group-based society phenomenon.
My point is that to survive in China, you can’t see yourself as a person in the Western sense. And most people are not able to see themselves as a person in the Chinese sense. It’s not a great way to live. Undead.
I haven’t written in a while simply because my first two weeks back at work have been a racist, misogynist fuck-fest. There has been plenty of Chinese bullshit and some Western male bullshit, too.
The first day of class involved university officials and photographers stopping by my class to photograph me while teaching. I’m never allowed to say ‘no’ to anything they do to me, and in this case, they will use my image for their greedy capitalistic and political purposes. (See! We have foreign staff! Come to our university!!! Pay our tuition!!!) Like a porn contract, you sign on the dotted line, and that means they can do whatever they want to you after that (don’t worry, I’m not equating teaching with porn… I’m telling you that the Chinese mentality is the porn producer’s mentality).
I spent the week correcting the grammar of misogynist sentences produced by my male students, which was fucking awesome and not a mindfuck at all!
And the second week saw a quiet, moneyless payday – and an announcement from the university that they had no intention of paying us this month for last month. They announced to us that the pay schedule will change (again). Now, they are going to start paying us TWO WHOLE MONTHS after the start of each pay period. We get paid monthly, the pay date has been pushed further and further away from the pay period each year that I have been with this university. And now, work that I do on March 1st won’t be paid until April 30th. What??? I am not allowed to protest this. They have implemented worse abuses in past years – like breaking my contract and quadrupling my work load for no extra pay. The foreign staff has protested individually, but as Chinese, they give excuses and end up doing what they want to us. This new payment policy actually feels very much like one of the passive-aggressive Chinese punishments. They may be looking to clear out foreign staff by implementing abusive policy, so they can bring in new, naive people whom they can pay less.
Every night at 11:00 pm, staff were chained into their building. Apparently, it was ‘too dangerous’. For whom…?
This happens all the time. I’m used to it. There is nothing ‘fair’ about the Chinese. It may surprise you to know that this is the best place I’ve ever worked in all the years I’ve been in China. At least these employers don’t chain the staff into our residential building every night like my last employer did. Nobody could get in or out except the key master. The Chinese didn’t understand why the Western staff had a problem with that. A simple, humane solution to the ‘grave danger’ looming over our building would be to install a key card or coded key pad entry system. But that would cost the Chinese money. The Chinese don’t like to spend money.
But the worst of these first two weeks back was actually dealing with a horrible, British, male acquaintance/co-worker and his disgusting misogyny last Saturday. I’m still reeling from it. Unfortunately, I need to stay ‘friendly’ with this asshole, as one really needs allies when you’re working for the Chinese. The Chinese deliberately try to keep Western people in the dark and misinformed and isolated on several levels so that we remain powerless and disorganized. Because foreign workers are ALWAYS abused, it is really key to have as many allies as possible – even if they are assholes. Information needs to be shared since it is so hard to come by, and sometimes protests must be done as a group or at least in numbers. But the cost of being friendly with jerks can be really hard, and the deeper I get into feminism, the harder it is to deal with men who don’t see me as a full human.
I’m going to write about this asshole. It’s one of those things that ended up being successful in my mind even though it didn’t and doesn’t necessarily feel like it. I’m glad I did what I did, but my body and mind are paying for it. More soon…
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Only Men Benefit When Even Feminists Don’t Know What Rape Is
Language is important. I’m not going to do a history of language or do a deep analysis of how language, in the hands of men, has affected and continues to affect women. There are excellent blogs (one in my side bar) devoted to the study of patriarchy and language, and while I teach language and love to learn about meaning, evolution of meaning and word origins, I am in no way an expert nor can I do a better analysis than said experts.
But I want to talk about the word rape and how it is defined. I am not going to provide a deep history of the word or a legal history of the meaning. There are actually some excellent articles out there that do this very thing, which are highly findable through a Google search. I’ll give a brief background, and then plunge into my intended topic, which is current and relevant now, and I’ll tie it in to some unexpected results of my quickie quiz on feminism dilution, which you can still participate in if you wish.
The purpose of language is to communicate. Maybe you’re saying ‘duh’ to yourself, but given that I teach university ESL (speaking, writing, research communication) in China, I’ve noticed that after 10+ years of English study, most of my students can’t communicate to save their lives. (The Chinese government isn’t focused on communication, but obscure-grammar-test-taking.) So, I don’t consider my statement to be all that elementary or obvious. Language exists to allow us to communicate. To communicate problems, needs, wants, states of being, observations, discoveries. You name it.
It’s a tool. And like all tools that exist in our international patriarchy, it is controlled by men. What is the purpose of controlling language? Well, simply, the class that controls language, also controls who gets to express problems, needs, wants, states of being, observations, discoveries, etc. So, as men are in control of language, they are the ones who get to express themselves openly. They are the ones who have legitimate problems, needs, wants, states of being, observations, discoveries, etc. Women? Not so much.
Language forms the bedrock upon which the educational, political, legal, medical, and all other systems are built. So if you control language, you control these systems. And they work for you, the controllers.
The legal system uses male-defined language to protect men from each other and from women and their silly-willy accusations. Women are not protected by the law because the language does not allow them to define their problems/crimes against them.
So we get to rape. The word ‘rape’ has a long history, and men have been fucking around with its definition for centuries. Since the early 13th century, it has been used to mean all sorts of things from speed/hurry, a kind of food, plundering, theft, seduction of men, kidnapping women, and sexually violating women.
In more modern times, most of the various definitions have fallen away, and it has come to vaguely mean ‘sexually violating a woman’. But even that is problematic as it doesn’t address by whom, how, and under what circumstances. And that was the intention. By controlling the meaning of the word, men essentially controlled the crime and its prevalence. If a woman can’t fit the constantly shifting definition of the crime, then no crime has been committed against her. Sweet! For men.
Now there are many other issues and problems with how rape is seen and prosecuted, but I won’t be addressing those here as many, many other worthy people have devoted their expertise to its discussion and analysis. My concern is with language; specifically, defining rape, and by whom and to whom is it done.
At some point in the not too distant past, women started speaking up for male victims of sexual assault (male prisoners, Catholic school boys, DV abuse victims, etc), and the movement took on a life of its own. Once a problem experienced by males has been identified, it takes on immediate importance and seriousness on all levels of society, and almost always, if it is similar to a very widespread problem experienced by females, the latter is brushed under the carpet in order to devote time and resources to men and boys.
This has happened with rape. At some point, it was decided that men and boys could be raped. I suspect, like with backlash to all progress women make in having their oppression acknowledged, this male rape victim business followed women making headway in having rape taken seriously. All of a sudden, we heard: “Men can be raped, tooooo!!!” And everyone got on board. With that movement came the mantra that rape wasn’t a sex-motivated crime but one of violence, which I think is incorrect, despite what experts say. If rape were a crime solely of violence/domination, straight men would be ‘raping’ men right, left and centre. They don’t. And at the same time, straight men would just beat up or kill women like they do men and leave the vaginal penetration out of it. I believe rape is a sexual and violent/dominance/power-motivated crime. And the adamant nature of the ‘it’s not sexual’ argument smacks of a patriarchal system cleverly trying to weasel its way out of naming sex-based oppression and male-domination as real problems, which would then have to be dealt with. Men would be held responsible for once, in other words.
And so, ‘rape’ is no longer a sex-based crime committed by men and boys against women and girls as a deliberate act of terrorism designed to uphold a millennia-long system of male dominance. And when you subscribe to that, you erase the existence of misogyny and hate crimes against women. You give equal importance to the occasional ‘rape’ of one man here and there as you do to the international crisis of the rape of women and girls. They essentially become the same, and thus women no longer have a unique problem.
Now, let’s get to my little quiz. On the whole, the respondents were on board with radical feminist theory. There was a small contingent confused by which factors influenced economic outcome most (15% of respondents didn’t see sex as being the number one factor harming economic success, and instead erroneously chose race or sexual orientation).
But the most surprising outcome was that this mostly feminist group of respondents didn’t have a feminist working definition of rape. It surprised me because they well understood why allowing men to define sex, as we are seeing with the whole trans (MtT) movement, is a problem for women. Specifically, when men can magically become women, and when sex and gender are equated, it erases sex. It erases misogyny and sex-based oppression. Women suddenly become ‘oppressors’ of newly transformed/realized ‘women’, instead of the largest and longest-standing oppressed group in the history of the world. So respondents saw this and understood this issue with men controlling language, and specifically the language of oppression as it related to the trans movement.
But what most respondents didn’t get was how allowing men to define the specific term ‘rape’ to be a crime against men and women where perps could possibly be either men or women, erases the seriousness of a crime of sexual terrorism against women. Rape has lost its unique and important meaning, in other words, and even feminists have bought in. I’m worried about that.
One of the three options to the question was about a male-on-female act (which was the feminist answer). The other two options allowed for male AND female victims with variation in wording of details.
Specifically and sadly, only 26% of respondents correctly defined rape as ‘forced, coerced, or unwanted PIV (penis-in-vagina) sex that is done by males to females.
Now, this quiz is not nuanced enough, as I stated in the original post. As the designer, I’m the first one to admit inadequacy. There is more to explore here. I didn’t look at the sex of perps, specifically, but focused on victims. And you certainly can’t draw big conclusions based on an untested test with one inadequate, related question. So, I honestly don’t know what respondents are thinking. I mean something is going on. Possibly people were thinking that in the case of lesbians, women can rape women. Possibly some people believed that rape could involve the penetration of an anus or a mouth. But what was clear was that most respondents believed that men could be raped. And that is a big problem.
But regardless of what is going on, one thing can be said for sure. We need better, woman-defined language concerning different kinds of sexual assault. I would like to see rape better defined to return to a male-on-female crime (as it was for so long) that is both sex-based and sexual in nature as well as power or violence-motivated. I am not sure why ‘forced sodomy’ isn’t enough to describe the assault of men’s (or women’s) anuses. Prison ‘rape’, speaks to me of male guards and psychologists and doctors (and MtTs) sexually assaulting the vaginas of FEMALE prisoners – not of male prisoners/guards assaulting male prisoners. And I think we need to stop calling it that in order to ensure that assault of women and girls actually means something. We need language to address crime between lesbians. We need language to define the occasional assault of a man by a woman. We need clear language about specific acts. We really don’t have that. There is better definition of acts in porn…
As it is, rape is now a word that can apply to anyone and everyone for all sorts of different acts of sexual violence, which isn’t really sexual, but ‘violent’. Whatever.
[Note: Since this post was published, I created a rape survey, and provided a post-survey discussion.]
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Waiting for It: The First Trannie School Shooting
Like all people, I’m constantly surrounded by male violence and the sensationalism and glorification of male violence. Today was no different.
I was forced to spend precious time dealing with Chinese racist bullshit today, and as I was standing in one of the businesses I had to deal with, my attention swivelled to the television they had turned on in a corner of the establishment. It was news hour, and lo and behold, the story was about some Chinese man who’d made a video (ransom demand? who the hell knows) of himself with a knife to the throat of some Chinese kid. All the customers, including a little kid hanging about, were riveted. I was disgusted. Same shit, different day, different country, different culture. Men being garbage and shitting on innocents.
And that sent my mind to wander. In the US, the same scenario has presented itself time and time again – the weapon of choice is more likely to be a gun, but the intent is the same. Psycho man threatens woman or child or a whole mess of them at once. And my mind turned to how women just don’t do this shit. You never see news stories about women taking hostages (unless they are under the thrall of a male psychopath), or shooting up places, or doing random violence. Very rarely you’ll see a mother who has killed her children; I’m actually surprised we don’t see more of this given how many women are forced into motherhood and marital slavery despite hating children and become mentally broken down as a result, but that is another post. I’m following a train of thought here.
So after contemplating how little violent crime is perpetrated by women, my mind turned to school shootings and the little turds who commit that kind of crime. They are ALWAYS male. Always. Always. It’s a very male thing to do despite most people’s knee-jerk scrambling wish to explain away the behaviour as a random act. Nope. Men are about violence. It is their solution to what they see as problems.
And then my mind turned to trannies, in particular men and boys who feel squishy inside and think that squishiness is an essential and defining female quality. With the desperate push all over the West now to convert boys to girls as early as possible, I really believe we are going to see a change in crime statistics. Suddenly, there will be (we’re seeing it already!) this inexplicable (haha) increase in women raping women. Magic! Sociologists are likely salivating over a new conundrum. Why are girls suddenly becoming so violent? We don’t understand despite all our insight and higher learning. What could be going on??? Is it all the education girls are getting these days? Is it that evil feminism corrupting them???
No, undeserving PhD holders. You see, putting a dress on a boy doesn’t change anything except his outward appearance. He is still a boy with all the violent tendencies that go along with XY status. When he commits violent acts, he is doing it as a boy and because he is a boy. I mean, I read some of the threatening, evil shit they write to and about women online, and all I see and hear is male. Women don’t talk filth like trannies do.
And I really think it is only a matter of time before one of these social-outcast, mentally deranged, confused, damaged, gun-home-residing boys comes to school in a dress and a mask and toting a metal penis gun, and shoots the fucking place up. And he’ll shoot girls, primarily. Because girls – especially ones who don’t trust and embrace them without question – are the natural enemy of a trans, according to most of them. And the news headline will read “First female mass school shooting.” And a whole new cohort of sociologists will have their PhD dissertation material at the ready. And I guarantee you that under the bus, you’ll find a badly smushed radical feminism, an easy target for all that’s wrong with the world.
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Getting Inside the Head of the Head
I’m gearing up to a big post on rape. I’ve been reviewing the data from the fun little quiz that I designed recently (which is still open if you care to take a few minutes out of your day and click the button) to get some ideas about diluted feminism (larger context: The Ice Cube Effect and Feminism Dilution).
I’ll be posting soon on a few interesting things I noticed, namely the overwhelming misunderstanding of what rape is.
Today, I’m preparing for teaching, which starts up again tomorrow, and also procrastinating a bit by listening to Mancheeze’s live meet-up/broadcast on prostitution. Every time I read about or listen to stuff about male depravity – anything having to do with porn, prostitution, violence against women, etc. – I’m sent into a very important, unmaintainable, self-preserving, and ultimately stressful state. It is a state which, if maintainable, would help women quit men for good (which some of us have managed). It is a state that I can only describe as being the chilling or ice-cold, crystal-clear awareness that men absolutely hate women. There is no other way to describe a human who can take pleasure in any of those things that women only do because they are desperate or dependent. I’m not going to get into how all those things are harmful because it is a truth that has been described elsewhere in great detail, and as such, is both Feminism 101 and not debatable to me. Anyone who can’t see the harm to women in marriage, prostitution, pornography, BDSM or any of that line of male domination business is no friend to women. And I don’t get into discussions with them. Men who engage in or defend these unassailable ‘institutions’ hate women. Period.
So when I enter these intense, short-lived states of being highly aware of the male hate that absolutely surrounds and suffocates me and every other woman on the planet, sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to be male or to live like a male. In order to do this, I try to imagine putting at the centre of my motivation and my entire existence a single body part. That single body part guides how I treat other people and how I see myself. It is hard to know whether I love that part, hate it, worship it, or have some complicated mix of all three, but what is clear is that catering to that body part requires that I do harm to at least one other person. How could narcissistic self-love not harm others? So I design my relationships to cater to that body part. My sexual interactions with others revolve solely around that body part. I design and support a world that caters to my body part to the detriment of other people who don’t have that body part. And I defend my body part and the world that caters to my body part against (perceived) attack, questioning, demands for justification and reparations for those who suffer because of them. I defend myself using violence, threats, arguments about the rights and supremacy of my body part. My body part is more important than the lives of millions. And the government, the law, the medical establishment, and every other power structure in the world agree with me.
In other words, cock is king.
In order to get inside the heads (either one) of men, one must put the supremacy of a single body part (the penis) at the centre. That is the best way I can understand how men operate. And I think that women really can’t see men for what they are – apathetic, narcissistic and sometimes sadistic destroyers with a single body part at the centre of it all directing the show/game/war – because women aren’t capable of putting a single, selfish body part at the centre of their pleasure at the expense of the rest of the world. And for that matter, women don’t really have an equivalent body part that can deal the damage that the penis does.
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Gay Men Hate You Too
Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.
Germaine Greer
I generally dislike using quotes and those who quote frequently/constantly either in speaking or writing. I teach my writing students that, unless their essays are specifically about discussing the ideas inherent in a particular quote, to try to avoid using quotes altogether because it breeds a dependency on them and a lack of originality in thinking. My problems with quotes are multi-fold. First, most things have been said before in different ways by many people. Second, men frequently get credit for things that were most likely said by women first (often their mothers or female spouses, but also friends and colleagues). Third, nasty and/or dumb people live on in history for some chance statement that they have stolen and said loudly enough to be heard, and are then remembered as clever or noble. And finally, heavy reliance upon quotes can be problematic as it prevents you from trying to use your own words, and I find that most of us misunderstand the original meaning of quotes or get the attribution wrong. Quotes can be handy for starting discussions or to start an essay, but addiction is easy.
I do take a bit of exception to feminist quotes because for one, women, their existence, their ideas, and their words are typically erased from history by men. When a feminist says something important that is remembered, I try to preserve it. As well, feminists tell us very important truths about reality, and we’d all do well to remember them. Women tend not to remember or even acknowledge their realities. So I have a choice slideshow of feminist quotes in my sidebar, and today, I’ve pulled one of my favourites, one of the simplest and easiest to remember, and of course, one of the messages that pretty much all women forget.
It would be easy and convenient if it were only rich, white, Christian, straight dudes who were the thorn in Woman’s side. They could easily be targeted and dealt with. They certainly are not the majority in the world. But alas, it is not true. The truth is that all men hate all women. It might be seething violent hate manifesting openly in criminal behaviour against women. But it can also be as hidden as an undersized testicle, no one finding out about it until the right set of circumstances put you into direct contact with it. But it is there, in all men. On a continuum from violently open to extremely well-hidden. And one thing women don’t want to believe is that even men who are clear or visible members of Oppressed Groups™ hate them too. One of the worst mistakes a woman can make is to assume that a man can bond with her over being silenced or erased.
No, you see, men are men and all that comes with it (this is the differential interaction effect of nature and nurture on females and males). Key among their group qualities is a real and significant inability to empathize. And this means that men in groups that are hurt by society are unable to feel anything for other marginalized groups and are often quite easily able to abuse those people without any kind of self-reflection. And by ‘those people’, I mean women, primarily. Oppressed men can frequently feel some kind of kinship with men from other marginalized groups, but not with women, in general, or women in said groups. So in this way, a poor man can show support for a gay man, but is open about his rape fantasies of lesbians or watches ‘lesbian’ porn. Likewise, men of any and all groups will take the PTSD of male soldiers seriously, but will have a laugh about or just dismiss the rape of female soldiers by these same male soldiers. (Oh, and by the way, soldiers are not ‘oppressed’ – quite the opposite, in fact, as they are state-sanctioned murderers, and the males are state-sanctioned rapists, as well. I’m referring to PTSD, a mental health condition, which is marginalizing.)
And within groups themselves, women have discovered that fighting the good fight alongside their male counterparts hasn’t been all it’s cracked up to be. Lesbians don’t get support from gay men. Poor women don’t get support from poor men. Atheist women don’t get support from atheist men. Black women don’t get support from black men. Rather, they are expected to do all the grunt work, act as cannon fodder on the front lines including getting arrested, take charge of feeding and watering the male members, look after children if there are any, and (except in the case of LGB groups – although that is changing since adding the T and Q) provide sex. When there are movements for change, what women forget is that men aren’t interested in equality. They are interested in moving up the ladder of power, the rungs of which are women’s backs, and we see this time and again in revolutionary movements. The underclass fights the oppressors, and then replaces them and keeps the same male hierarchy in place. Nothing changes. Women are still on the bottom and left wondering what the fight was for.
So let’s get to gay men – that is, after all, the topic of this post.
I recently wrote a post about another marginalized group – atheists. And as atheist men hate you, so do gay men.
I just spent three weeks travelling through California, which means I was surrounded by tons of out-and-proud gay men loudly spewing woman-hate, and not caring if women were around to hear them. I sat in restaurants PAYING for service that didn’t just include food, but also large sides of misogyny. PAYING to sit there listening to the gay men across the room – including gay staff members – talk about bitches and cunts and say some of the most misogynist things I heard on my trip, even surpassing the bullshit said by straight men I encountered. If I were a gay man having to listen to homophobia in a restaurant, I could probably sue. But as a woman, I have no rights to feel safe in a public place. I would have been laughed out of the joint.
You don’t have to look far to find nice little object lessons. And yet another was presented to me the other day online. The latest horrific piece of news in Trans-World is that some smug little MtT is looking to take leadership within the UK’s National Union of Students as the Women’s Officer. It is distressing. And women are blogging in protest. I headed over to the reblog of an article on this by a woman I read only to find some dude was already jizzing all over the comments. He had provided an insulting reference to a female public figure commenting on how the trans looked like her (he didn’t, actually – I couldn’t see the similarity). He also couldn’t figure out from the title of the original blogged article what the issue was with a trannie heading up the arm of a major women’s organization. He went on a mansplaining, dick-wagging, woman-shaming blah-blah-blah about clothing and how lesbians dress or don’t dress. It actually didn’t make any sense and had nothing to do with why the article was reblogged. If the mainsplaining didn’t give him away as a misogynist, it was the inability to understand the problem with the article that did.
I normally try to resist interacting with clueless men, but he asked a question: what is the issue here? He thought it was clothing. I had no idea he was gay or actually known to and a friend of the female blogger. All I knew was that he was pro-trans and thus anti-feminist. I mean seriously, he has nothing to lose from a man taking over a woman’s movement or women’s spaces. So, of course, he will promote it. Only women are hurt by this. So I let him know that the information about what was being disapproved of was clear in the title (directly naming ‘male pretendbian’, which we all know means ‘MtT pretending to be a lesbian’) of the post. I mean come on, my Chinese students have better reading comprehension, I said. The misogynist responded with a flurry of woman-hate, calling me both a genius AND an imbecile, which was hilarious, and for some bizarre reason, telling me that the article was a reblog, which I and everyone else knew. And then, when I addressed the blogger on the woman-hate in the comment section, Dood attacked me again by announcing his gayness and positing that the only way he could possibly hurt women is by throwing a glitter bomb on us. Clueless, but given that he supports men in dresses, and by definition, of the pro-trans right of men (in dresses) to demand sex from lesbians, this is not a big surprise. Men think they are harmless. Even when they are in the middle of being harmful.
Gay men may not actually rape us, but they play an important role in normalizing violent and denigrating thinking about women and about normalizing the idea of women as objects (e.g., negating women in the LGB movement) and filthy, hateful things (e.g., the ‘ick factor’) or as walking pornified sexual stereotypes (e.g., gender reinforcement through drag queening). And they are often more vocal in their misogyny than straight men. And they are just as excellent at mansplaining as straight dudes. And because they are marginalized, they get away with it.
The lesson here is that you should never forget that no matter how marginalized a man may say he is or that society says he is, he is always more powerful than all women. As I appear to continually say (because it’s true, goddammit), penis trumps vagina. Always. Always. Always. Don’t be fooled. Gay men hate you too. And it’s more than just glitter bombs and cat fights they threaten you with.
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Naming the Problem vs Scoring Points for Slur-Slinging
Sometimes, I write unpopular posts. They are unpopular because they make people uncomfortable. They make people uncomfortable because I don’t jump on bandwagons, I don’t join the fray, I don’t like adopting and using catchy slogans or mantras just to gain points with the ‘socially aware’. When people jump on band wagons because it feels like they are doing the ‘right thing’ according to frenzied activists, the ability to analyze reality is lost. And when you can no longer stand back and analyze what is going on, you don’t realize the harm that you’re doing to people who have more in common with you than you think. You don’t realize that you’ve lost sight of what you thought you were joining up with and what your purpose was in the first place.
It is irresistible to attack women. We have ALL felt that, and all people do it, often without realizing it. It is so normalized, and there really is a feel-good effect of taking down a woman you think has over-stepped in some way. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found pleasure-producing, chemical effects in the brain following attacking an uppity woman. No matter what your credo is, there is an underlying current running through us that women must be perfect, self-effacing, and no matter what place they hold in the male-created hierarchy, they are to blame for allowing it to be so. Even experienced radical feminists are tainted by this lifelong brainwashing that creates an automatic, negative, woman-blaming response to social phenomena and every single evil in the world. It really takes a massive effort and commitment to learn to condition yourself to stop and look at what is really going on.
I read a lot of feminist blogs – not just current stuff, but posts published within the last 8-10 years, and this phenomenon can be seen everywhere. It is incredible how many posts begin with or eventually devolve into woman-castigation, usually riding the wave of intersectionality. If you start off a feminist post or discussion with open, unanalyzed blame for one or more of the most hated and criticized groups of women, including, educated women, academic women, white women, lesbian women, or childless women, you’ve lost me a bit. You’ve meandered off the feminist path and are demonstrating your male-identification. There is a difference between critique and blame. There is a difference between naming the real underlying problem and scoring points for using a tired, smug, bullshit cliché (‘privileged white woman’ and ‘privileged white feminist’ are the most overused, but feel like magic on your tongue) to slam a group that is unpopular in current liberal times, convenient to pick on, and not actually at the root of what you’re complaining about. I mean, I get it. I have particular groups of women that fucking piss me off, and I could rail on them all day. Would it solve anything by shaming them into silence – just like a man would do? Absolutely not. They are women and they are trying to survive in the same world the rest of us are. They may have different conditions presented to them, but they have the same central reason for being targeted that we all do. And no woman is omniscient. No woman can be all things to all people. No matter what you think all her advantages are, she is still part of the underclass and blaming her for not doing enough to see every other person’s point of view as she navigates her survival as a woman, is unreasonable, and frankly, exactly what men want and need in order to maintain their power.
When you really back things up, you’ll find that penis dominance and petty rewards for penis worship are at the root of pretty much everything. If you need to think about that for a moment, ask yourself, ‘Would this shit exist if men didn’t exist?’ We can’t answer that definitively, but you can actually break something down by asking key ‘why’ questions. Why does this particular group of women react this way? Why do these women hold these particular views? Why can’t these particular women see or understand my particular perspective? Why does it seem like these women hate meeeee? And when you answer that – and I mean a real answer, not a knee-jerk, unthinking “Because they are privileged” – you’ll find that male dominance is there running the show, providing the shitty and limited options to women. Women haven’t created the oppression that women experience in this world. That is the important thing that we need to remember and that most forget. In fact, it’s a little presumptuous and self-centred to expect other women to alleviate every one of your specific oppressions for you. Your anger is justified, but it’s pointed at the wrong person/people. Ask the ‘why’ questions and explore reality and who your allies are.
After you ask and answer the why-questions, you can easily see that women appear to take on oppressive, ‘privileged’ positions because it has been made clear that in order to lessen the potential harm in their lives, they have to play the power game. Academic women, and business women for that matter, don’t keep their jobs (which they need to feed themselves) if they are aggressive radical feminists, but by playing the male-power game. Rich women usually aren’t as rich as you think they are, or they are the concubines of rich men, which is a different form of prostitution than most people usually think about, and leads to serious penis-identification. Religious women frequently don’t have a choice about their penis-identification because it is all they have known since birth and there is often serious ostracism (and sometimes serious physical danger) threatened if they leave the fold. Heterosexual woman have scary and complicated ties to parasitical males, including birthed sons, and have serious male-identification issues as a result. And on it goes.
I’m not making excuses for people. I do believe that the more ‘freedom’ you have within an oppressive regime, the more responsibility you have to oppose the dominant order. And there are a lot of things that can be done that don’t threaten your life or your survival, although they may threaten your sense of place in a world where you’ve become very used to wearing chains. A lot of women can’t get to that point because it IS scary AND you have to come face-to-face with your own woman-hatred. And while there is a lot to gain from opposing Dick, it is safer when done in numbers, which will never happen. Doing it alone while feeling alone can be very threatening, but it can be done. Life will be hard, and few women (and no men) will thank you for it.
But if you are going to commit yourself to feminism – female-focused feminism – then you have to resist the knee-jerk blaming and shaming of particular groups of women for something that men are fundamentally responsible for. Men need to change it, not women. Point your fingers in the right direction and work together with (or if you can’t then just distance yourself from) the female groups you have trouble with.
That is not to say that critique is not possible. Critique of harmful movements or actions or statements is necessary. Of course. But critique, don’t blame. Women aren’t doing shit you don’t like because they are evil oppressors. They are doing it because they are reacting to (often poorly or in an uneducated fashion) and trying to survive in a system designed to destroy them because of their sex. And sex is at the root of all other oppressions, thanks to men. Critique feminist or anti-feminist movements. Blame patriarchy. Hold men responsible for the lack of options women have and for being forced to choose one of those shitty options.
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Ads and Rape Culture: Only One Message Comes Through
It seems like a year ago now that I was abroad, especially as I look at some of the photos I took whilst away. Some of the photos, I wanted to put on my blog, and others are just for me to remember specific things and are for my eyes only.
I’m going to file the one featured in this post under my White Girl series and include it in my growing collection of ‘Whores: How the Chinese See White Women‘ photos/advertisements.
On my way back to China, I had an overnight layover at the Taipei airport. I spent hours wandering the place – most airports are kinda weird at night, and you can notice things you might not see when things are crazy and populated during the daytime. I’ve being in some shitty airports, and I’ve been in some state-of-the-art airports, and I’ve noticed something. The more modern the airport, the more apparent it is that they are male-dominated, capitalist strongholds that sell rape, and (mostly white) female objectification and subordination to the men of the world, and that convince the women of the world that it is sexy, required, and therefore ridiculous to complain about or oppose. And this is done very, very easily through advertisements. Pictures of vulnerable, pornified women draped over or adorned with crap that no one needs.
And most of the time, the ads are of pornified white women and girls. It is not a mark of privilege to be the most rapable, the most objectified. To be seen as cunt on legs is nothing to aspire to or envy. Sorry, ladies of colour. This is not privilege. And it is not what we freely choose, no matter what a handful of really loud fun-feminist cockpuppets tell you. When they open their mouths, you can actually see the head of a penis directing the show and talking away about its needs. Real feminists want ALL women to be completely free from being used in this way and to figure out what their place in the world is while free of male demands for penis worship.
Anyhow, while walking the miles of corridor in the Taipei airport, I ran across tons of pornified, two-dimensional white women and the products on which [rich men of all colours decided] their tits and pussies put the stamp of approval. And you know what? I often couldn’t figure out what product was being sold. The only thing that I knew for sure was for sale was the white girls and women themselves. I used to wonder if men were that fucking stupid to fall for this. I was disbelieving in my youth. We women always want to believe in the best in people, especially men and especially after they abuse us. But with age and more experience than I wish I had, I have come to know for sure that, frighteningly, yes, men are that dumb. Super dumb. And coupling lack of intelligence with entitlement and willful ignorance, they sink to unfathomable depths of violence and depravity, reducing females to things. So the advertisements are of things (women) selling things (products). All to make men (rapists) feel like men (rapists) who want and own shit – shit being both the women themselves and the stuff they are advertising. And of course, all to make women feel inadequate and distract them from pursuing more important things (careers, skills, independence, self-confidence) than becoming temporarily desired (hated) objects.
The most disturbing advertisement I saw that night was selling white pedophelia. It was a larger than life poster of a vulnerable-looking, white girl-child with almost-exposed, barely-formed breasts. As you can see below, she looks like she has been violated – that haunted, ‘is rape all I can expect from life?’ look – and is just realizing that she is just a fuckhole. I think she might be selling a watch (?), but really, it is just White Girl Tits and Pussy™ that are being sold.
She *might* be 18, but she looks about 12. And that is the point.
It seems like a year ago now that I was abroad, especially as I look at some of the photos I took whilst away. Some of the photos, I wanted to put on my blog, and others are just for me to remember specific things and are for my eyes only.
I’m going to file the one featured in this post under my White Girl series and include it in my growing collection of ‘Whores: How the Chinese See White Women‘ photos/advertisements.
On my way back to China, I had an overnight layover at the Taipei airport. I spent hours wandering the place – most airports are kinda weird at night, and you can notice things you might not see when things are crazy and populated during the daytime. I’ve being in some shitty airports, and I’ve been in some state-of-the-art airports, and I’ve noticed something. The more modern the airport, the more apparent it is that they are male-dominated, capitalist strongholds that sell rape, and (mostly white) female objectification and subordination to the men of the world, and that convince the women of the world that it is sexy, required, and therefore ridiculous to complain about or oppose. And this is done very, very easily through advertisements. Pictures of vulnerable, pornified women draped over or adorned with crap that no one needs.
And most of the time, the ads are of pornified white women and girls. It is not a mark of privilege to be the most rapable, the most objectified. To be seen as cunt on legs is nothing to aspire to or envy. Sorry, ladies of colour. This is not privilege. And it is not what we freely choose, no matter what a handful of really loud fun-feminist cockpuppets tell you. When they open their mouths, you can actually see the head of a penis directing the show and talking away about its needs. Real feminists want ALL women to be completely free from being used in this way and to figure out what their place in the world is while free of male demands for penis worship.
Anyhow, while walking the miles of corridor in the Taipei airport, I ran across tons of pornified, two-dimensional white women and the products on which [rich men of all colours decided] their tits and pussies put the stamp of approval. And you know what? I often couldn’t figure out what product was being sold. The only thing that I knew for sure was for sale was the white girls and women themselves. I used to wonder if men were that fucking stupid to fall for this. I was disbelieving in my youth. We women always want to believe in the best in people, especially men and especially after they abuse us. But with age and more experience than I wish I had, I have come to know for sure that, frighteningly, yes, men are that dumb. Super dumb. And coupling lack of intelligence with entitlement and willful ignorance, they sink to unfathomable depths of violence and depravity, reducing females to things. So the advertisements are of things (women) selling things (products). All to make men (rapists) feel like men (rapists) who want and own shit – shit being both the women themselves and the stuff they are advertising. And of course, all to make women feel inadequate and distract them from pursuing more important things (careers, skills, independence, self-confidence) than becoming temporarily desired (hated) objects.
The most disturbing advertisement I saw that night was selling white pedophelia. It was a larger than life poster of a vulnerable-looking, white girl-child with almost-exposed, barely-formed breasts. As you can see below, she looks like she has been violated – that haunted, ‘is rape all I can expect from life?’ look – and is just realizing that she is just a fuckhole. I think she might be selling a watch (?), but really, it is just White Girl Tits and Pussy™ that are being sold.
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A Quick Note on Bonding
If this diverse group of guys can see past their differences to bond over enjoyment and perpetuation and normalizing of rape, rape culture, and female subordination…
Then this diverse group of women should be able to see past their differences to bond over opposing men’s enjoyment and perpetuation and normalization of rape, rape culture and male domination.
And yet, they seldom do. Instead, they bicker, blame, finger-point, and forget all about what they have in common: that men hurt them because of their sex and that ALL men benefit from both this hurt and the inability to come together over it.
Why can’t women bond?
The answer, my friend, is blowing through the pubic, leg and pit hair that men are allowed to have and wear with pride. Men have divided women through the male invention and maintenance of racism, homophobia, religious bullshit, and capitalism. Without men, women suddenly have no manufactured reason to hate one another.
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Sex Matters: Here’s How You Know No Woman is ‘Privileged’
It gets worse and worse. Nowhere on earth, never in history, and regardless of economic or educational status has a woman been able to speak up about being subordinated without serious repercussions for her. On the rare occasion that a woman has a) believed it’s worth it to speak up, b) been allowed to speak her truth, c) been believed, and d) seen justice done to acknowledge her human status and basic human rights – you are witnessing something of a miracle. An actual miracle, not a bullshit ‘Madonna on toast’ type of miracle.
Every single one of you of the XX variety has experienced this at least once, even if you can’t bring yourself to admit that yes, for fuck’s sake, you have been victimized because of your sex. ‘Victim’ is not a dirty word. It is a temporary status that describes having had your freedom (even if you have very little) taken from you in some way.
Each and every one of you has felt unsure that:
- something is happening to you because you are female,
- something is happening to you because you are female in addition to being white/black/aboriginal/etc, lesbian, old, attractive/unattractive, fat/thin, etc.,
- your intuition that something bad is happening to you is spot on,
- you don’t deserve what is happening to you,
- you have the right not to have your personal space and, yes, your body, invaded,
- you are allowed to verbally question a perceived wrong,
- you are allowed to physically defend yourself against violence towards you, and
- you are allowed to say NO to a man of a visible minority group who is trying to hurt or abuse you in some way or even kill you.
Here are some recent (increasingly common) scenarios where women have something taken away, hesitate, and then talk themselves out of demanding that it stop and that they have their human rights/status upheld.
Women victimized by men pretending to be women
A man looking distinctly like a man or man visibly pretending to be a woman and dolled up in ‘lady-face’ enters a women’s bathroom or change room and proceeds to act like he owns the joint, doing his business, taking his clothes off and possibly even watching or staring at you or other women/girls. You hesitate to interject because you are afraid of his backlash or backlash by society for being a fucking bitch and denying a possibly ‘oppressed’ person his freedom. Meanwhile, you have had your freedom to feel safe in a women-only space taken from you. You can’t see that you deserve to be human, and that feeling safe, which is something you may never have felt in the way men feel safe, is your right. Men’s special, inside-feelings of pervy-sexy-womany goodness, and mental illness of the dysphoric variety are much more important than women’s safety.
Women victimized by *oppressed* men of colour
You are a white woman and a man of colour comes up to you and begins to harass you. It starts as a verbal altercation, but upon the slightest opposition to his attention, escalates quickly. He enters your personal space and rains verbal, sexual, and/or physical violence upon you. You don’t feel you are allowed to defend yourself because you will be labelled a ‘racist’ even though he has targeted you because you are a woman and because you are white and he knows he will get away with anything he chooses to do to you. He yells ‘racism!!!’ if you choose to report him or defend yourself. And you end up terrorized and/or raped and/or beaten, and if he leaves you alive, believing that a) you deserved it because you’re white, and b) you are not allowed to say anything because you are ‘privileged’. Women are not privileged over men. Zero debate about that. And in my educated opinion, there is much evidence to support the theory that misogyny cancels out the possibility of racism given that racism is a male invention based on woman-hate. If you can’t see that, you need to go back and read some world history. History is the story of what men have crapped upon the world, at the expense of women. And take a look at the endless violence against women today and you’ll see that a woman cannot hurt a man in any way regardless of the races involved. Walking While White and a Woman (WWWW) in no way justifies what men of colour do. And they shouldn’t get away with it.
Atheist women victimized by religious men
You are an atheist and a feminist, and you are worried about the increasing number of religious fundamentalists dictating policy on the local, institutional, and national levels in your country. Your gym (in Canada) has been forced to frost all of its windows so that pervy Hasidic Jewish boys who can’t stop looking in the gym’s windows won’t have to look at all the filthy whores working out without full length dresses covering their filthy whore bodies (true story). You are not allowed to oppose this. Your university class project schedule (in Canada) has been extremely inconveniently altered to accommodate the Muslims in the class because the men won’t work with filthy whore white women, and the Muslim women can’t work with any men (true story). You are not allowed to oppose this because Muslim values (de-values) are crucial to introduce into Canadian policy on filthy whores local women. Teen-aged girls attending a high school dance (in the US) are sent home due to wearing filthy, whorish mini-skirts, because the fundamentalist (white and black) Christian fathers of attending students who signed on to chaperone the dance are popping boners and finding themselves with uncontrollable urges to rape the filthy whore cock-teases (true story). No one is allowed to oppose this. Religious ‘freedom’ and male control over female bodies is most important.
In short, while women have never had full human status, current political agendas, which have slipped in under the guise of ‘inclusivity’ and ‘sensitivity’, are making things scarily worse for everyone. This applies to women of all races, who are being held hostage by male terrorists of all races. And the most effective part of this new political agenda has been to silence the most vocal of women (usually real feminists, and most often white feminists – those who have done the most to help ALL women) by calling them privileged, entitled, phobic, and a whole host of other nonsense and slurs.
Women are getting on board with fighting the trans agenda, but what scares me most is the free pass that men of colour and religious men are getting. Women are not getting on board with fighting that. These *oppressed* men have figured out that claiming oppression is a free pass to threaten, attack, beat, rape, and murder women who don’t belong to their group. Feminists are speaking out about the lie that is ‘transphobia’, which is a very good thing, but are still very scared to defend themselves against men’s strategic accusations of racism, Islamophobia, and other isms and phobias designed to shut women up and give men power. When you force a woman to shut up about what has been done to her, you send the message that her sex, which has been and still is at the root of the longest-running and most accepted oppression in the history of the world, does not matter.
And sex matters.
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Shrill, Bitter, Humourless, Prudish Man-Hater
Not super-original, but I’m in a foul mood, and I feel like lightening things up a little. And nothing lightens the mood more than taking a look at the ‘insults’ that men hurl at women.
When a woman, especially, a feminist is called any of the following – shrill, bitter, humourless, prudish, or a man-hater – I really have to laugh. I don’t consider these insults, perhaps because I have a lot of interest in what words mean. Other than the last one – man-hater – all of the terms have broad application. They weren’t designed to hurt women, specifically. The insults that really bother me are those with very specific, woman-harm in mind. I’m talking b****, c***, s***, w****, etc. Those terms, which are becoming much more common, normalized, and publicly used in entertainment accessible to impressionable children, hurt women. They hurt women in the same way that the n-word hurts blacks. But racism is taken seriously these days – you won’t hear the n-word used as a slur in the past few decades of television or film unless you’re looking at a character who is specifically a race-supremacist or within an historical context. Woman-hate or misogyny, on the other hand, is becoming mainstream and embraced. Misogyny has always existed, but it is no longer buried under innuendo in the public arena, and this is reflected in the language. Slurs against women are hurled at females (or as a grave insult to men) in entertainment as comedy and or as hate by male and female characters alike, by all racial groups, and by characters of all ages. I was watching an American show the other day where an older black man forced his way into a white, teen-aged girl’s house, called her a ‘bitch’ with hate behind the word, and when she tried to stop him, he yelled out to the street, “Racism!!! This white girl is oppressing a old, black man!!!” Yeah. That’s where our world is going. Slurs against women are fine and dandy, and men of colour are often leading the pack as some of the most protected perpetrators. ‘Art’ reflects life which, in turn, is informed by ‘art’.
Now here’s the problem. The slurs that are really bothering women, especially feminists, these days, are not the ones I just talked about. Hell, call a lib-fem a ‘slut’, and she’ll take her top off and shake those titties at you with pouty lips and a defiant “yeah, I’m a slut, so what?’ look. No, what really gets women a-scampering these days is being called a prude or a man-hater. And even radical feminists will bend over backwards to demonstrate exactly how they couldn’t possibly hate men or want to stop men from putting their dicks into people.
Let’s break these suckers down, why don’t we?
Shrill
Shrill refers to a sound that is high-pitched or piercing. It is used by men to refer to their dislike of women’s speech. They even use the term to refer to women’s writing, so we know it may only partially refer to the actual sound. The content plays a major role, too. You see, strangely, the voices are more piercing or ‘shrill’ when women are trying to fight for their basic human rights. Personally, I’ve encountered very few women’s voices that you could categorize as ‘shrill’. Occasionally, I’ll run into one that is hard to listen to because it is high-pitched. But on the whole, for me, voices that are annoying or difficult to pay attention to are that way for more complicated reasons. No two are exactly alike. It can include geographically-based accent, pitch, timbre, loudness, and/or whether someone whines or slurs. And a bad laugh can make things worse. I find men’s voices equally or even harder to endure than women’s mostly, but not only, because they are so loud and the content is so boring. I remember years ago, participating in a weekly trivia group thing in grad school, and there was always this one dude sitting across the room who would drive my ears fucking crazy – like poison-ivy-itching crazy – with his freakish, weird, loud voice and laugh. If I’d had a steak knife with me… Anyhow, shrill is more about men not liking to hear about human rights for women than any objective qualities of women’s voices.
Bitter
I’m not sure if I’ve ever met a bitter feminist. I’ve met a lot of bitter men, that’s for sure. And I’ve also met a few women who are IN relationships with men and who defend the penis who are actually bitter. What does bitter actually mean? It refers to someone who is “angry, hurt, or resentful because of one’s bad experiences or a sense of unjust treatment”. The bold is mine because it is the important part of this definition. Having a sense of being treated unfairly doesn’t necessarily mean you are actually being treated unfairly, and this is why ‘bitter’ doesn’t apply to feminists. Women ARE treated unfairly. Regularly. All over the world. For thousands of years. Women SHOULD be angry and hurt and resentful. Men, who often have hurt feelings and anger because they may not get what they feel they are entitled to (i.e., free access to as many women’s bodies and free labour and attention as possible), are bitter. They think life is unfair for them. But it is decidedly not. Bitter. Bitter men.
Humourless
Of course men are funny. To call women humourless is the funniest thing EVER. But seriously, men’s humour, which mostly relies upon slamming the oppressed (women) through rape jokes, cheap ho jokes, female biology jokes, or through boring, repetitive jokes about farts, poop, masturbating, etc., is not funny. Men are humourless. Women are funny. They really are. Now, we’d have a better sense of this if men didn’t control the entertainment industry. As it is, to become a female comedian, you have to be fuckably hawt first. Being hawt is unrelated to comedic talent, so we miss out on probably 98-99% of the funny women out there. Funny women who are not hawt are barred from speaking, performing, acting. I have my personal (growing) list of female comedians whom I like to watch and laugh with, two of my faves being Tig Notaro and Janeane Garofolo. If you like funny of the visual sort, I highly recommend Phemisaurus, who caters to women of the ‘man-hater’ persuasion. She makes me laugh and laugh. But there are many funny women out there. Many. Google. Look, watch, listen. And laugh. They are women and they are talented. And somehow, they don’t need rape, whores, shit, farts, or penises in the mix to do it.
Prudish
Oh, this one makes me tired. Countless rad-fems have spent time doing justice to the ‘we’re not prudes, we just think PIV (penis-in-vagina; aka ‘dude-sex’) is harmful’ argument. So I’m not going to go through the whole thing here. Femonade is a great resource for this, and FCM does it better than I ever could. There is a massive difference between hammering home (yes, I know the imagery I’ve created) the point that penises are the source of most, if not all, of women’s problems, and doing the religious, woman-hating, anti-sex, guilt-hate-shame parade. Feminists aren’t anti-sexuality. They wish for women to be free from men’s sexuality so that they can finally figure out what theirs is about. As it is, men define all sexuality, and it is all about serving men and harming women. Period. There is nothing prudish about wanting women to be free to be or not to be sexual beings on their own terms.
Man-Hater
Perhaps my favourite insult? Maybe. I also like the word misandrist, but most men can’t pronounce it and so don’t use it. Plus ‘man-hater’ is catchy – like a venereal disease! All I know is when men call women ‘man-haters’, it makes me laugh and laugh. Men are so fucking insecure. It is an unassailable truth that men hate women. We’ve got that down, right? And since they can only envision hate, it is impossible for women to exist in a state where they don’t hate men. Or perhaps it is this. Men know that if women treated them the way that men have always treated women, hate would be the inevitable and rational effect. Simply put: “We men treat you women like you are maggots on shit. How can you not hate us?” And craftily, men will use this assumed hate to justify more shitty treatment, anger, ranting, violence, etc. And really, whether we hate them or not is actually irrelevant. All men need is the belief.
But so what if a woman or group of women or all women do hate men? It is justified, reactive, defensive hate. And when we hate, we don’t follow it up with violence. In fact, most women will feel the hate burn, and then find excuses for men, allowing them to continue trying to destroy us. Men, on the other hand, have aggressive, unjustified hate for women that is the fuel for all the violence they do to us. We have done nothing wrong – except exist – they hate us and try to destroy us. And then they blame us if we speak up to defend ourselves.
So ‘man-hater’? Give me a break. Take a look in the mirror, assholes. Read the papers. Take a look at the women around you in a human, non-pervy way. You are more likely to see fear in women’s eyes than hate.
Conclusion
To women and feminists, especially, stop defending yourselves against male accusations in the form of ‘slurs’. It is a waste of gynergy. If you really must fight something, then fight the real slurs – the b- c- w- and s-words. The slurs that actually hurt us and are designed to do so.
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Men’s Intuition: I Can Tell From Looking at You
[Part of the Conversations with Men series, but a different format than the usual post.]
If you’re a woman, chances are extremely good, likely close to 100%, that you’ve had a run-in with ‘men’s intuition‘. It’s not called this, but we’ll get round to that and what it really is.
Rather, we hear constantly about ‘women’s intuition’, which is a real thing, and which is disparaged, downplayed and used by men in their jealousy and fear to hurt women in a myriad of ways. Men define intuition as women’s unthinking, non-rational, knee-jerk, emotional response to everything, or sometimes the ‘neeeeeed to have baybees’ and being naturally good with baybees and unpaid labour. Scientists operationally define intuition as the “ability to discern what other people are thinking and feeling”. But neither are quite correct. I believe the male definition is just bullshit, as most male thoughts on things are. The scientific definition partially covers it. What women often report is that intuition has to do with being able to sense dangerous people and situations before ‘shit gets real’, or the ability to sense what someone is feeling without any information, or the gut feelings they get about things (positive or negative). It’s a hard-to-define, deep sense of the world that results from awareness and experience of how shit works coupled with a deep connection to nature and people. I believe it is strongly connected to empathy and to being part of the prey class. Some scientific studies (with questionable intentions, imo as a bona fide methodologist) posit that there is a partial biological cause for intuition – greater intuition is linked with lower exposure to testosterone in the womb, which explains why they see higher intuition in women. Who knows? Regardless of what the scientists think they’ve found, I see evidence of intuition in women every day, and unlike what men and many scientists like to think, it is unrelated to being rational, analytical or thinking-oriented. Amaaaazingly, people (especially women) can be intuitive AND analytical, as easily as others (especially men) can be unintuitive AND unanalytical. It’s not an either-or scenario. But men love black-white, either-or dichotomies that put women permanently in the shit house when one category can be labelled a ‘woman’s category’, and thus, ‘inferior’.
Let’s get to men’s intuition. First, let’s say straight off that nobody refers to such a thing called intuition when it comes to men. But I’ve done a lot of thinking and omg, analysis of a phenomenon that has happened regularly in my life and, without a doubt, happens regularly in the lives of most, if not all, women. And it falls under this category of intuition, at least on a surface level.
Men frequently have ‘intuitions’ about women’s wants, needs, personalities, states of being, place in the world, etc., and they never fail to let us know, either verbally in advance or eventually, violently, after it is too late to escape, what they’ve concluded from these intuitions.
Before providing some examples of men’s intuitions, I’ll say two things. First, the intuitions/conclusions men come up with and actually tell us about in advance of serious violence are almost always completely wrong. And they are wrong because the intuitions are self-serving AND dangerous to the woman/women in question. Second, men’s real intuitions – the ones they WON’T tell you about verbally – are almost always correct, and are also self-serving and dangerous.
[Note: women’s intuitions are often self-serving too, BUT and this is a huge but, the intuitions are not dangerous to anyone. Even when they are wrong, they are not dangerous. But they sometimes hurt men’s precious and fragile little feelings.]
Let’s look at the first kind of male intuitions. The ones that are always wrong and dangerous and self-serving.
The verbalized intuitions/conclusions men draw fall into two categories, but there is one underlying theme. You are a target. You are prey. And the two categories are these. Positive (for him) – he has ‘intuited’ that he can get something from you that he believes you are offering. Most of the time, it is sexual in nature, but it could also be money, support, free labour. He has spotted some kind of weakness to exploit, in other words. He will frame his intuition in a way to show he can help you. These intuitions are wrong because women don’t naturally serve men unless coerced through violence or brainwashing. Or negative (for him) – he has ‘intuited’ that you are the enemy. He has realized that you are not open to his exploitation and he is going to try to put you straight in some way, including: shaming, guilting, psychological abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse, and/or sexual abuse. He might end up killing you ultimately. While it might be true that you are not open to his exploitation, his intuition is wrong in that you, as a woman, don’t exist to destroy him. He is the destroyer. It is standard male projection that fuels this intuition.
Much of the time, when men choose to share these intuitions, they take a particular language form. “I can tell…” Man has looked at you, and he can just tell something about you from this cursory look. Whenever I hear one of these, I get very, very nervous, as through my REAL intuition and experience, I know that I have become a target for some kind of woman-hate-in-the-form-of-male-love-or-desire-or-need-to-help-me.
- I can tell from your face…
- I can tell from looking at your eyes…
- I can tell by the way you walk…
- I can tell by the way you are looking at me…
- I can tell from what you’re wearing…
- I can tell from the shape of your [insert body part here]…
I’ll give you an example. There are so many to choose from in my life. Likely, you can think of at least one of your own, and I truly hope, your own real intuition allowed you to get away as quickly as possible before, he acted on his incorrect intuition.
I can tell from your eyes, you are lonely and need a man.
Through 2009-2010, I once again found myself broke and almost living on the streets (yay white privilege!), and since a) I’m not attractive enough to be a prostitute/stripper, and b) I could never bring myself to do that anyway since I’ve had enough rape in my life, and c) I at least try to turn any indentured servitude I do into something beneficial learning-wise, I ended up doing a series of volunteer work/’internships’ within the realm of agriculture. The last one was with a beekeeper. I was seriously impoverished, and was forced to exchange some hard core physical labour for a place to sleep. Not actually a fair exchange. It never is for women, actually. Luckily, I liked the work a lot, but being really, really poor is a very scary place to be as a woman as you don’t have options and you can find yourself vulnerable to every single man around you with nowhere to run to.
And so it was when I answered the door to the ‘bee house’ where I lived and worked one day. I was expecting a delivery of all the pieces/parts to a massive greenhouse I was going to help assemble. The delivery guy was a middle-aged Russian or Eastern European. And he was an aggressive piece of shit who immediately started in with anger and accusations of things I couldn’t understand – just a general, underlying sense of violence filled the space around him and of course, me. I boldly told him: “I don’t understand why you are so angry with ME. I haven’t done anything to YOU.” This took him aback. It astounds me constantly how abusing women seems to be so many men’s natural state. It is so natural to them and unquestioned by the women they abuse that they don’t even notice it. And I have had endless problems with immigrant men OF ALL COLOURS who bring their extra abusive misogynist attitudes – which are accepted in their own countries – to the countries that welcome them and take it out on the local women they encounter. And the local women are expected to shut the fuck up since they are usually “privileged, rich, white bitches” of course, and let their ‘advanced’ cultures slide backwards into the Dark Ages. No fucking way.
Russian(?) fucker did make a switch in behaviour at that point, but it wasn’t any better. It was the same attitude, but coated with honey. He pulled the truck over to our driveway, and there was a fuck ton of really heavy shit to unload. I immediately began unloading it and carrying it the distance to a dry spot (it was pouring rain). And I tried to move quickly to get the ordeal over with and get rid of this asshat. He didn’t help other than to move the pieces to the motorized lift on the truck so that I could pick them up at ground level. And the rest of the time he spent just watching me. He commented, disbelieving, on how hard a worker I was. Um, yeah, I’m a woman. No fucking kidding, you piece of shit! I work harder than you. AND I’M NOT EVEN GETTING PAID! Like you are. In MY country. For doing nothing.
And then, it came. I was drenched, exhausted, scared, pissed off. It came. His magical intuition.
“I can tell from your eyes that you’re lonely and need a man.”
fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou
I said, “Nope. Thanks for your help. I need to get back to my work.” I was terrified that he would come back. He knew I was alone. And he thought he could fill some kind of need that he intuited I had.
~~
Now, let’s briefly look at the second kind of men’s intuitions. These are the ones they WON’T tell you about – are almost always correct, and are also self-serving and dangerous.
Men are actually pretty good at determining one thing. They can tell how easy a prey a woman is or will be. There is some interesting research on male psychopaths, the ultimate hunters. They are incredibly good at reading female body language. For example, they can tell by the way a woman walks, how easy it will be to overpower her. Scary, but it does suggest to me that all women and girls should take martial arts classes to develop the confidence they need to put off opportunistic predators reading their subconscious body language… Anyhow, as men are constantly on the prowl for easy prey, they have to be on high alert for all the signs that make their lives and ultimate purposes easier. I’d argue that all men are like this to some extent. Not all men are psychopaths, but they all have the self-serving hunter in them. And all women are prey. The better they are at determining the high return for low effort ratio, the more successful they will be.
Now is this ‘intuition’? I’m not sure about that. There are elements that are similar to how women determine how dangerous a predator a man is. But if you can call it intuition, it is not very deep. It is a ‘gut sense’, but it isn’t based on deep connection with people or the earth or anything in the way that some aspects of women’s intuition are. They read body language, and rely upon experience to determine how far they can go with a woman towards her destruction, and the risk involved.
Regardless, what we can say is this: men are not very good at understanding women’s thinking, feelings, needs, wants or states of being. But they are, indeed, good at determining how good a mark women are based on our verbal and physical cues. And it’s all about predation.
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Freeing Women: Deprogramming and Reprogramming as First Steps
I decided last year that I had to transition. From Male-Focused to Female-Focused. I mean, a lot of women know that men harm them fundamentally and relentlessly on a daily/constant basis. But knowing is not the same as committing to doing something about it. Commitment is fucking hard, especially one that requires that you deconstruct an identity formed through years and years of 24/7 programming that goes against your nature, and to create a new one that has no model to which you can look for guidance or upon which to build.
Becoming a ‘natural woman’, by which I mean ‘free woman’, is uncharted territory, or perhaps undocumented territory is the better term, given how thoroughly men erase any evidence of women’s progress and even their basic existence beyond the second dimension. There are just so few amazing role models for women seeking to free themselves. Those few that exist are so thoroughly punished, excoriated, eviscerated by men, patriarchy, and frightened, brainwashed, penis-identified women, that you wonder whether it is even worth it to try even conservative emulation.
But you have to do it. You open your can of whoop ass, and you realize there is no going back. The price of self-immolation is too high. You start to see all of these things about yourself – evidence of your brainwashing – and you know you can’t continue. You realize even the ‘nice guys’ you have in your life aren’t really that nice. They, too, use you, and will turn on you the moment you fail to fall in line. You realize that despite your independent spirit, you do all the things you hate about male-identified women’s behaviour.
You realize that deprogramming is going to be much harder than just making realizations. It will take time and effort and repetition. But realizations, acceptance and commitment to change are the first steps. Negative automatic behaviours – we’ll call them acts of femininity compliance – must be noticed, stopped mid-action, and then replaced with positive, new programming. And yes, it is new programming until you can successfully remove detrimental behaviours, free yourself, and then have options for how you deal with the world.
Given that I have a weird, very isolated, and highly unhealthy life in China, my first real opportunity to test out the 1) noticing, 2) interrupting, and 3) replacing methodology for freeing myself, was my recent trip to the US. Just being in a more social, human-interaction-oriented country offered so many more opportunities for me to test out behaviour in a variety of situations. I’ve probably inadvertently provided examples of pro-feminist behaviour in some of my previous posts. This one is a good example. In a previous life, I almost certainly would have engaged more with the male narcissist. I might have listened to him, provided him his energy supply at my great expense (especially as an introvert with limited people-oriented energy stores). But using my methodology, I (a) recognized the role he wanted me to play, (b) stopped my automatic, compliant behaviour, and (c) reprogrammed my response to benefit me instead of him. And he didn’t like it. And that, primarily, demonstrated the success and promise of my endeavour, and now I need to repeat, repeat, repeat, until it becomes my natural response to male narcissistic demands for my attention and energy.
There were other examples, some small (but still important), and others that were really significant. An example of the latter came in the form of dealing with two long-standing relationships with men. I wrote about one of them a few times, including here and here. And there was a second one whom I consented to meet with before I left, that I don’t want to write about because it is very personal and very difficult. But the essence of both situations is this: I had kept two males in my life for a long time. I put up with and explained away their misogynist treatment for years since they were Liberal Nice Guys™ instead of blatant, raging MRAs. And they caused me frequent pain, which I suppressed in order to maintain the relationships. Well, these recent interactions went differently, even though they were incredibly difficult. I (a) recognized the roles they expected me to play / what they wanted to take from me, (b) stopped my automatic, compliant behaviour, and (c) reprogrammed my response to benefit me instead of them. My interactions with these types of guys had previously been part of cycles of abuse. They hurt me, I spend an enormous amount of time explaining my feelings, my hurt, etc. The don’t quite apologize, but do just enough to placate me, and then shit goes back to the way it was only to build up to another abusive event. I stopped that. I didn’t explain myself. I acted. I walked away. I gave them what they gave me – the bare minimum – instead of what they wanted/needed. And although it hurts now, I know I did the right thing, and I have begun building a model of behaviour that I can rely upon if forced to enter relationships with men in the future. It is impossible to avoid them completely in this world, after all. And with respect to one or both of these dudes described above, I unfortunately need to keep them in the periphery of my life, at least for now. But I don’t need to maintain the abusive cycle of the relationship anymore.
To sort of wrap this up, I’ll say the following. If you can find a female partner/friend (or group) in this endeavour, I highly recommend it. Being able to review what you’ve done/learned with someone, having someone support you and comment and make suggestions, and getting positive reinforcement for your successes (because sometimes they feel like pain rather than success and you wonder if you did the wrong thing) is so very important. Many women don’t have this, and they must navigate their struggle on their own. Support is invaluable. But if you don’t have it now, you shouldn’t stop yourself from heading down the road to healing and rebuilding.
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Wolves in Women’s Clothing: A New Collection
Just an announcement that I’ve started a new series, or collection might be a better word, in the right side bar. Once you get writing for a while, certain themes become apparent. The new collection deals with the people who pretend to support women’s concerns, but who have ulterior motives.
We’re talking about ‘liberated’ men, male ‘feminists’, male ‘acti
vists’, transfolk (specifically MtT’s), liberal ‘feminists’, and very occasionally women who seem to walk the talk of radical feminism, but who may eventually cave under pressure to support particular male rights that hurt women.
Anyhow, the collection can be found here.
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Conversations with Men: You’re White, So Put Down Your Lunch and Give Me a Blow Job
I’m baaack. Not that it matters to online readers, since we all transcend time and place here, but I’m back in China after 3 incredibly long weeks in the US.
Get set. I’m about to drag another one screaming from the vault. While I have much to talk about that is more current or more recently on my mind or related to events during my travels, I think it was my trip back to Asia the other day via a Taiwanese airline, sitting beside a few Taiwanese folk on the long first leg of the trip, and then spending an exhausting 9-hour layover in the Taipei airport in the middle of the night, that stirred up some memories.
I lived in Taiwan for a couple of years in the early part of this century, and it was rough. As rough as living in mainland China? Jeez, that’s hard to say. China is probably worse in many ways. But Taiwan is no picnic either. I was younger, fresher, less apocalyptic than I am now. I still had so much to learn then. And learn I did. Taiwan was full of hard lessons that have helped shape me, helped turn me into the tough, middle-aged, jaded, hard-to-disappoint-further, been-there-done-that woman that I am today.
Before I get into the story, I want to talk a little about this thing called ‘white privilege’. First, I’ll just say that ‘white privilege’ is a thing, but I want to talk specifically about what it means and where it applies. You see, even though it is a real thing – for men – it is also a buzzword used by Western people to shut other people (mostly women, mostly white women) up. Westerners forget that they usually cannot apply Western socio-political models to non-Western countries. We are taught that in all cases and in all places, whites rule. But on the ground, in individual countries, it is easy to see that that isn’t actually true. Racism isn’t a black and white issue like misogyny is. The ‘white privilege’ trope is Western liberal-speak / non-think, and typically it is people who have never lived – and I mean, really lived – in a non-white-ruled country who scream the loudest about this non-existent, international white privilege, and also who point the finger at white women to shoulder all of the blame for what white men have done throughout history.
So, I’ll tell you how this works based on my experience living and working for about 8 years among the ‘real people’ (not staying in 5-star hotels working for international corporations and making 6, 7, or 8 figures a year) in countries with non-white rule. There is no such thing as ‘white privilege’ in a country where there are no white nationals and no whites in political office or policy shops. There are countries where white men came in and wreaked havoc on local populations (especially the women), ruled for a while, and then left. While there, they would have had white privilege, and now that they don’t rule, they don’t. The race that rules has to have political, legal, and economic power in that country. They don’t have to have to be the demographic majority, they just have to have the political, legal, and economic power. And extremely important, racial privilege is predominantly a male thing. Nowhere do women have political, legal or economic power to rival men. The only time a woman can have any claim to racial privilege is among women, and even then, the power isn’t that great. Women just don’t have much power. Period. And race does not win over sex. A woman of the ruling race does not have power or advantage over a man of the non-ruling race. That is true everywhere in the world. We see that with the recent horrors in Germany. Muslim men have relentlessly attacked white women in a country where there is ‘white privilege’, but the crimes are being hushed up. It’s as if they didn’t happen. The women have been blamed and controlled and continue to suffer and are terrified. The non-white men have been coddled and are allowed to stay and continue what they’re doing. People feel sorry for them. Penis trumps vagina, regardless of race. Always. Always. Always.
In Taiwan, there is Asian privilege, and it applies to the Taiwanese males of the country (except in groups of women, where Taiwanese women will have Asian privilege over non-Asian, non-Taiwanese women). White men may be given some respect or consideration because they are men and because their success and riches are envied by the world. White women are not respected, however. They will get attention, but it is not the enviable kind. The attention a white woman is given is based solely on what women everywhere in the world get attention for: their physical attributes – specifically, their fuckability– which is decidedly not power. ‘Sexual power’ – a term invented by men and lib-fems to mean attention from and ability to distract men due to being highly fuckable – is not power.
And so with that out of the way, I bring you another tale from the Conversations with Men series and White Girl series. Enjoy, enjoy!
~~~
Rewind to 2004: I had spent my first 14 months in Taiwan as a workaholic living in the small, over-crowded, and very polluted city of Taipei. I had worked 6-7 days a week. I had a primary job that secured me my work visa, and a whole bunch of little jobs on the side in publishing, editing, writing and teaching. Part-way through 2004, I decided to cut back on the work and started studying Mandarin formally and regularly. There were aspects of this life that I liked, but there was a lot that was unacceptable and that I wouldn’t put up with nowadays. Even with the work-focus change, and with the increase in free time that went with it, life didn’t improve that much, and that was 100% due to the racism-misogyny, white whore special that I was experiencing, but not quite seeing for what it was.
I had been living near Liberty Square (not the name when I lived there), which is a fabulous little park with winding paths surrounding three major monuments/buildings, including the National Theatre and the National Concert Hall. It’s a great place at any time of day for exercise, meeting up with friends, or quiet contemplation.
Or at least I thought it was until one day at noon.
With my greater free time in my second year there, I sometimes went to this park to find a quiet bench on which to eat my lunch and read. I was in the middle of doing just that when a man came up to me. He approached slowly with his wallet out. Without any attempt at verbal communication, he began indicating through body language that he wanted me to suck his dick, and that he would pay me for it. I noticed a male friend of his waiting in the distance to see what would happen. Was he offering me money for the both of them? Just him? I had no idea. I told him to get lost and used a hand motion to indicate I was sweeping him away from me. He persisted. Insisted. Took the (pitifully low amount of) money out of his wallet and started shaking it in my face. Pointed at his groin. Pointed aggressively at my mouth. Friend in the distance, laughing and looking eager, nervous, antsy. I couldn’t get rid of him. For some reason, he had decided that I, with short hair and no make-up, in my trousers and short-sleeved, men’s buttoned shirt and sensible shoes, sitting on a bench eating my lunch, with a book in one hand, was obviously on prostitution duty. I will tell you this. There could have been no mistaking me for a prostitute. It was simply this:
I was a white woman.
He was male and the dominant race.
I existed as a whore to service his cock, just like all white women in the world.
I knew I was in danger. Even though I was not yet clued into the idea that I was experiencing misogyny and racism on a daily basis, instead of just ‘bad luck’, I did know that I was in serious danger. I quickly left the bench, lunch and book in hand and ran. I ran like hell. Despite it being broad daylight with lots of people around, I wasn’t safe. And strangely, almost all of the ‘Asian man assaults’ I have experienced have been in broad daylight with people around and not giving a shit. Sometimes watching me be assaulted. Apathetically. White whore. Look at what they do in our country. They make trouble.
Needless to say, the park was ruined for me. Lunch never happened there again.
I’ve been talking to folks recently about the Burning Times and the whole thing about dicks in a box. And as I was writing this post, I thought wryly, when a woman orders a boxed lunch*, she definitely doesn’t want dick on the menu… Not related, but the mind does what it does.
*aka ‘packed lunch’ or ‘brown bag lunch’
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My Special Group of One: The Problem with Intersectionality
Years and years ago, when I started my first round of grad school, I got a tiny, simple tattoo that made the tattoo artist laugh because it was the easiest money he’d made in a long time. I’d wanted an important reminder, and did a ton of research to find the perfect symbol for that reminder. The reminder was that I had a tendency to overthink and overcomplicate things and I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out which steps to take. My dithering was stressful, and in graduate school, there is enough stress from external sources that you don’t need to add more of your own.
The symbol was historically and scientifically important, and to me, signified the idea that simple solutions tend to be the best way of going about things, even when problems are complex. I haven’t always heeded my reminder, but I have saved myself some grief because of it. And it has stayed helpful in many areas of life – it wasn’t just useful or applicable in my grad school world of scientific inquiry.
I approach feminism in this way, too. Although many of the problems women face in this world are complex, the best way to approach them is actually incredibly simple. And a non-intersectional, radical feminist approach is one that works the best. It starts with a basic, true, inclusive premise that all women need to be liberated from the sex-based oppression of all men.
All women, women as a class – the XX people – no matter where in the world they live, what language they speak, what colour their skin is, how much money they have, how attractive or intelligent or able they are, or what they are wearing
Are held against their will and nature, through violence and the threat of violence, under sex-based oppression
By all men, men as a class – the XY people – no matter where in the world they live, what language they speak, what colour their skin is, how much money they have, how attractive or intelligent or able they are, or what they are wearing.
But all of those details aren’t necessary. The basic premise includes all of that by definition. By all women, we mean all women. And by all men, we mean all men. Period.
One of the worst and most divisive things to happen to feminism, and which likely made men laugh, relax and order up another beer from the bar wench, was the introduction of intersectionality. You see, there is nothing like focusing on our differences to break down solidarity over our very important commonalities. Feminism is, at its root, about men’s oppression of women. With the introduction of intersectionality, women stopped focusing on male oppression and started pointing fingers at their fellow women as their major enemies. Very basically, women, in their fight to stop doing men’s dirty support work for free, ended up doing even more of men’s dirty support work for free.
And we saw horrible things happen. And it is getting worse and more violent towards individual groups of women as we speak.
- White women became solely responsible for racism
- Rich women (who are all apparently white) became solely responsible for homelessness, poverty, illness, capitalism, the poor education system
- Able women became solely responsible for the prevalence of mental illness, the cost of medication, lack of health services, misdiagnosis
- Educated women (who are all apparently white) became responsible for the Pink Ghetto, the rising cost of education, grammar snobbery, learning disabilities and dyslexia, massive and sudden male failure in school, and lack of job opportunities for the uneducated
- Single women became solely responsible for the breakdown of the family and the ’emasculation’ of entire nations of men
- Childless women became solely responsible for the race war (the race that produces the most children wins!!!), declining birth rates (like that’s a bad thing???), and posing threats to working women with children
- Atheist women became solely responsible for natural disasters (magical religious thinkers have told us) and the breakdown of entire societies and social orders
In short, every single problem that has actually been caused and exacerbated and maintained by men suddenly found an easier blamable target cause: some specific group of women. Through intersectionality, women were able to ‘other’ other women and blame them for their problems. Attacking other women a) was safer since women generally aren’t violently retaliatory, and b) garnered huge support and ‘rewards’ from men. For example, black women who demand that black men become accountable for and actually stop raping them might find themselves in further danger at the very hands and dicks of black men. But by making up a story and blaming a powerless group of women, such as white women, for black male rapeyness, they garner support in all communities, including confused, over-guilt-burdened, activist, white women, themselves. White women, in fact, have nothing to do with black men raping anyone, but it has become a popular way of saving men from taking responsibility for anything they do. And besides, it makes great press. Men control the press. And it is very hard to stop the domino effect of delusional and persecutory thinking once it starts.
Another major problem with intersectionality is the competitive atmosphere, and the derailing and thought-stopping behaviour that it creates in discussions of reality. No longer can a group of women come together to discuss female oppression without things going off track as soon as someone says something unpopular. People lose focus of the fact that they all have a common experience and begin to form groups, ‘other’ each other, and focus on individual feelings and individual experiences. These individual experiences are held up to a measuring stick of oppression and it becomes a typical male pissing contest over who has been hurt the most, and even worse, who is allowed to speak given their level of bona fide hurt. Those who are perceived to be less hurt or less oppressed lose credibility and even status as a woman. A white woman’s rape becomes less important than an aboriginal woman’s rape. A middle class woman’s beating becomes a joke next to a poor woman’s beating. A mentally healthy (whatever that means) woman’s workplace harassment becomes infinitely less significant than that of a woman with autism. It is disgusting to watch unfold, and unfold it does. The nastiness, slurs, hatred, silencing tactics, and sometimes outright banning or banishing can spring forth in the blink of an eye. It’s so gross that I’ll wonder to myself, how can you determine the relative horribleness and validity of two women’s victimizations? How can you deny compassion to one woman simply because you don’t like her supposedly ‘privileged’ status? Oftentimes, the privilege we *think* a woman has isn’t quite what we want it to be, if it even exists at all. Not that we’ll ask her. Her truth might humble us and destroy our vendetta/agenda. Stereotyping hurts and perpetuates ignorance and violence. But men and their institutions (media, law, etc) work to keep sister-hate going. The play that men give to women’s ‘problems’ in the news has nothing to do with women oppressing women, even thought it might be presented or interpreted as such. Women who care about women don’t downplay other women’s realities, traditionally. Men do. Don’t forget that. All men oppress all women, directly and/or indirectly, and we need to bond over that fact alone. We need to believe each other, listen to each other, and support each other. Accusing and blaming women for something they had nothing to do with – like colonization or rape, for example – serves men, not yourself and not women as a class.
And yet another problem with intersectionality is not knowing when to stop dividing. At some point, we all find ourselves in groups of one according to our unique disadvantages. It is important for data collection and research purposes to know what women face on a detailed level. Complex issues should be studied and approached while armed with this knowledge. I’m not advocating for group blindness or erasing. I have my own pet groups that in my world, deserve more of my attention than others. Personally, I am quite concerned with the oppression of elderly women and of single, childless women, and I believe they are two of the most vulnerable groups in the world, regardless of culture. They are also two groups that get almost NO attention. But I won’t derail a feminist discussion or effort or activism in order to demand their immediate attention by all. If I want to call attention to oppression of elderly women or to that of single, childless women, I will either form my own group, or I will join a group focusing on these populations and their issues. All while also being part of general feminist groups/discussions. And I would ask the same of any other sub-group member. You’re a woman first, and you are also part of other groups that can be of equal importance TO YOU. To date, things have not worked like this. Established groups are infiltrated and shamed, derailed and forced to deplete already limited resources in order to be ‘inclusive’ to every single sub-group of women (and sometimes of non-women, i.e., MtTs). I believe these derails weaken feminism, which is supposed to work to benefit all women by focusing on the common oppression. It is unreasonable to demand that sub-group interests take precedence over general interests – and that applies to anything, not just feminism. General mandates apply to all members; group-oriented, specific mandates only apply to a few, and suddenly you find you have several mandates and a broken, distrusting, self-protective group of groups. No solidarity is possible when everyone is too special and self-involved to focus on a very clear, central mandate.
Divide and conquer. Maybe not the original intention of intersectionality, but it is certainly the outcome. Ask a male ‘feminist’ how much he loves shaming women with perceived ‘privilege’ instead of focusing on what he and other men gain from oppressing women. When we’ve got men enthusiastically on board with showering particular groups of women with hate, then you know that’s not feminism you’re doing.
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What Does It Mean if I Find You Neither Endearing nor Horrifying?
Still travelling, still stuck in Doodville. Two more nights. Like infants, the doods demand constant attention and to suck at the collective tit of Woman. Some more than others. Most women deliver. Fawning. Patiently listening with an interested look. Cooing, clucking, nodding. Reassuring. Building up their confidence and egos. Laughing at their rape and ‘dumb ho’ jokes. Tee hee, you’re right, girls are so [insert misogynist stereotype here]. For the pathologically narcissistic of them, you could be lying there, clearly dying, with a knife protruding from your throat, and they’d still keep up with their demands on your energy. Yap, yap, yap.
I’m puzzled and perhaps only slightly amused by a new dichotomy presented to me by an egotistical, but untalented, ‘travelling artist’. He fascinates himself. He is tickled by what a jerk he is and its effects on the women he comes across during his travels and the female students he instructs (apparently he teaches some art class somewhere – details apparently not necessary to the casual inquirer, I discovered). He fully admits with a scary, psychotic laugh, that he enjoys how he treats people. Disapproval, insults. He said it makes fledgling artists better and they usually thank him later. Who knows if that’s true. We live in a mandatory S&M world where abuse is seen as positive attention and even love. So maybe he’s right on a surface level.
But Artiste says that in general, women either find him endearing or they find him completely horrifying, both of which he enjoys, but he says he clearly prefers the former. This means he gets laid, although, I suspect, given how this world brainwashes women and as evidenced through every bloody romantic comedy out there (those misogynists are so damned sexy, aren’t they?), those horrified women let him fuck them too.
But where do I fit in? I’ve thrown this guy for a loop because I find him neither endearing nor horrifying. He is boring, typical, standard, an EveryMan. And my reaction, or perhaps non-reaction is the better word, to him clearly rubs him in a way that he is not used to. I’m waiting for Gowan to pop out of nowhere and sing the chorus to ‘You’re a Strange Animal’. Artiste waxes on loudly about himself to anyone who enters the room. I can see him looking at me from the corner of my eye. “Why isn’t she paying attention? I don’t understand how this reaction fits in to my schema.”
This morning, he sat down across from me at the breakfast table, and I didn’t look up from the newspaper and my coffee. Somehow, even as he loudly started announcing things about his newly shaved head and the reasons for doing so, and how often he does this, and how much time the hair takes to grow back in, I registered nothing. I mean really, who gives a shit? I was busy reading about a local firefighter who had taken a teenaged girl as a sex slave, raping her continually. She got away and is telling her story. She will be labelled as a whore. You can see the set up in the language. “She had sex with him many times…” I put the paper down before finishing. I left the table and the hair monologue. A woman from the room I was staying in came in as I was preparing to get up, an apparent ‘nurse’ with tracks and several healed, self-inflicted cuts on her arms and wrists. Ignoring me, she entered the ‘he’s endearing’ camp and was enticed out to Artiste’s van to look at his collection of masterpieces. He has enough groupies. I’m not one of them.
Look at my hair cut, I’m endearing/horrifying, pay attention to meeeee, trusted community protector rapes teenaged slave repeatedly, teenaged girl is a slutty whore, not a victim… its all on the same continuum of male domination and narcissism and violence, violence, violence against women. It’s the sea we’re all forced to swim in.
Can someone please make it all stop? Make men stop. Make them accountable. Take away the entitlement. There aren’t enough goddess sessions to counter it all. What does it mean that I’m bored and tired rather than endeared or horrified? I think it means that I’m opposing the social order. I’m behaving naturally, and it’s a very simple, but threatening, position to take.
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Black American Men and the Air Crash Effect
Let’s talk about fantasy and reality, sensationalism and mundane facts, penis-loving and woman-hating.
The media loves a good story. The more gore and horror a story has, the more play it will get in the public eye. And the more attention it will receive. And the more distorted the facts surrounding the story will become. There will be a kernel of truth, and then the rest will be blown out of proportion and lead to the masses and very often the supposedly educated hordes going on an illogical rampage in a blood-thirsty, scapegoating frenzy, and society at large will adopt illogical, fear-based, hate-satisfying behaviour.
A good example of this phenomenon is perceptions of safety concerning air and auto-vehicular travel.
Many people are terrified of flying because they believe flying is more dangerous than driving or riding as a passenger in a motor vehicle. But if you look at actual data compiled by government or insurance organizations on number of accidents, number of accidents per miles travelled, the number of fatalities per million miles travelled, and odds of dying in a lifetime, you get a different story. No matter how you slice it, car travel is considerably more dangerous and the odds of dying in a plane crash (if you actually travel by plane – even a lot) are much, much lower.
But air crashes, on the rare occasion that they occur, are catastrophic and deliciously interesting. Being both rare and devastating, they end up getting a lot of play in the media. Car crashes, on the other hand are frequent, even deadly ones, so they don’t get worldwide (or even nation-wide) play. Let’s just say, if you want your name to live on after your death because you haven’t made it big by showing your tits in public (if you’re a woman) or perpetrating a school or workplace shooting (if you’re a male), your best bet is to fly and make sure your plane goes down. It works for Muslim extremists, so why not you? [Yeah, I said it. It’s true, so get a grip.]
Let’s call this ‘the air crash effect’: rare, extreme events get a) a lot of public attention, and b) lead to irrational conclusions. Air crash gets attention and people develop unjustified fear of flying.
Race and Sex: An Eye-Opening Comparison and the Stark Reality
Let’s apply this phenomenon to social problems. I’ll use a current, massive problem that has hit the radar in the US recently, but is having ripple effects in other countries. It is the old racism vs misogyny war.
Women are constantly silenced by liberal men (and women) when they attempt to talk about violence against women. This happens across history and in all countries. But we’re going to talk about the current American climate right now. The most common current argument is that cops are shooting black people right left and centre and that trumps the petty, indulgent, narcissistic claims of American women whose few rights are being fast eroded. So noticeable in fact that the UN has uncovered and given legitimacy to the claims of the deplorable state of women’s rights in what is supposed to be a country at the forefront of human rights. Women in the US are suffering and no one gives a shit or believes those few brave women who are speaking out, in other words.
At some point in the American collective subconscious, it was decided that women, who hurt more than any other group both in the US and on the planet, had to take a back seat to men of colour (many of whom abuse women, themselves). And the issue of the day is violence experienced by men of colour (specifically black men), and in particular, the killings of black men by police officers.
Now, before I dig in here, I want to be clear. I don’t use data reported by MRAs or right-wing or ‘concerned white male’ groups (aka: white supremacists). First, I don’t trust anything any and all men say about violence, regardless of colour. Second, I can’t stand MRA’s or any kind of racial supremacists or purists. Too much agenda, too much testosterone, and thus, lies, lies, lies – and even worse, the woman-hate. You never get racism without deep, frightening woman-hate. I don’t personally give a shit about which race ‘wins’. That is a male concern. Racism is a male invention and it is rooted in woman-hate. Men, concerned with who gets to fuck their slaves (women), get violent at the idea of men outside their racial group having access. That is where racism comes from. Men own the pussy of their own racial group and they’ll fight to the death to keep it that way.
So, back to the data. I prefer to look at the data that black activists themselves provide. They will either be accurate or exaggerated, and I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, because it helps my argument, which I am basing in reality and on fact. According to black activist groups, fewer than 5 blacks (men and women) are killed by police per million (as compared with 2 per million for both whites and hispanics). [Note, I have found another more statistically-based site that offers raw data for 2015/2016 that 568 blacks were killed by cops in total in the US. Blacks are also the racial group most often armed with guns. Asians, for some reason, love knives more than any other – markedly so…] The majority are armed, mostly with guns, occasionally with knives. I have no reason to argue with these figures. I believe the activists. I am not a racism denier or cop apologist. And I don’t think people who are not committing crimes should be killed. If people are committing crimes, especially violent ones against women or girls, that is another matter entirely. Shootings of blacks by cops is a big deal and is widely reported in the news. Whether the cops are prosecuted is another matter.
And these killings are getting A LOT of play in the media, a lot of shouting and demonstrating by activists, and white liberals are completely on board and behaving the way they are supposed to by saying all the right things and silencing anyone who questions the data or anyone who would rather focus on larger social problems.
And so we get to those larger and longer-running social problems. We are getting to the car crashes. Violence against women. Cops killing black men is the deliciously salacious air crash, violence against women is the too common, too boring car crash. Let’s look at some conservative estimates (most women don’t report crimes against them, so these data are low-ball estimates of reality).
152,000 women per million are stalked. Remember, the number of blacks killed by cops is 5 per million. Also note that of all the women killed by their partners, more than 3/4 of them are terrorized through stalking first, and that is more than 5 women per million.
200,000 women per million are raped in their lifetime. Remember, the number of blacks killed by cops is 5 per million versus 200,000 raped women per million. And that is a very conservative estimate due to refusal to report, self-denial, mishandling and trashing of rape reports by law enforcers and hospitals, and doesn’t take into account multiple rapes by different men and repeated rapes by the same man/men. This figure is also conservative because of the very narrow, male definition of rape. And this figure doesn’t include sexual assault, sexual harassment, and other sexual terrorism. That figure would be 1,000,000 women per 1,000,000. And many of these women are living an aftermath that makes death look sweet and kind. Often, rape is the worst torture imaginable. Men can’t imagine. It doesn’t happen to them.
111,111 little girls per million are sexually abused by adults. The adults are almost always men and almost always men they know. 111,111 abused girls (who often go on to kill themselves, abuse drugs, develop mental illness, and fall into rape lifestyles of porn and prostitution) per million compared with 5 blacks per million. And this figure, unlike killings of black men, are hard to confirm or identify and vastly underreported.
15 women out of 100 rape victims will try to kill themselves because of what men, including black men, and cops of any race for that matter, consider to be harmless and natural and hilarious fun times. I think most rape victims at least think about killing themselves. And I think the figure is conservative as most women don’t talk about what has happened to them.
This is why I’m just not that concerned about a few killings compared to an insanely more prolific phenomenon. There is a REAL problem out there and that is men committing violent acts against girls and women. It is shameful and insulting to ignore, negate and erase the millions and millions of women suffering and dying at the hands of men of ALL COLOURS and including male police and men from all walks of life and all professions, from homeless men to male politicians and male doctors. It is insulting to erase the millions of women and what they suffer through in order to focus on a few very well-publicized killings of men. It is not my job to fight for (often) armed black men. I support innocent women and girls victimized simply for existing while female. A woman doesn’t even need to leave her home or even her bed to be brutalized.
Bottom Line
For most people, their thinking is greatly affected by what they read in or hear on the news. We have brains so that we can think critically, analyze information, ask important questions, and draw correct conclusions. Our media tell us what is important, and what is important has little to do with reality, facts, and statistics/numbers. Importance wears a penis. That penis has many colours, but it is still a penis, and reality is bent to accommodate and support that penis.
When you look at the numbers, the facts, reality, you see that it is still safer to take a plane than drive a car, and it is certainly safer and better to be male than female regardless of your race in this world. And in the specific example here, it is safer to be a black male than a woman of any colour in the US. Regardless of what liberals tell you and how loudly. There is no shortage of black men despite the fact they are being *constantly* killed by police (5 per million), but women are being raped right, left and centre (200,000+ per million) and living with the aftermath of that torture, the negation or erasure of their ordeals, and the physical complications for the rest of their lives.
Another Oppressed White Male is Liberated by Yours Truly
Last night, I went to bed lighter, but with a heavy, heavy heart. Only if you have felt it yourself do you know what that phrase ‘heavy heart’ means. The words don’t do the feeling justice. All at the same time, you feel like something hard and weighty has crept into the space where your heart should be, a coldness invades you as emotion sears you from the inside out, you feel like you are slowly and uncontrollably, physically sinking. It is weird, and I don’t feel like I can describe its complexity.
As I lay down, I felt some relief, but more poignantly, a bottomless sadness bordering on despair. The layers of this despair are many and might be better understood through a reading of all of my posts. But this post alone will convey at least the sadness part of my emotional state, and perhaps some of the relief too.
I’ve had to let go of another misogynist male in my life.
In the space of four months, this is the second important and long-term relationship I have nixed. Both men, both from California, both uber-liberal ‘nice guys’. Not self-professed feminists (thank goodness), but guys who are totally on board with opposing (not fighting) racism (against males is the unspoken part, I’ve realized). It is fucking hard to end a long-term relationship. But it is harder to accept being treated as less. It is harder to silently accept really sexist opinions, pontifications, theories, actions and orientations from men who profess to be my friend and to care about me. If you cared about me, you wouldn’t treat me as less. It’s really that simple.
This current misogynist – I am staying with him and his wife (until this morning, that is) – didn’t seem to be so horrible in the past. I mean, he was horrible, and I chose not to examine it too closely. Until recently. I’ve been talking to another feminist online about some of the shit this guy has done over the years, and only when you talk about it do you realize what you’ve not allowed yourself to process in a necessary way. When you say it out loud or in text, you realize you’ve been tolerating abuse from or the existence of an abusive individual. But this ‘nice guy’ has become worse over the 8 years that I’ve known him. I think it is because of two things: 1) he has a dysfunctional relationship with a wife whom he both needs and antagonizes and who also is an antagonizer and controller herself – they are both fucked, co-dependent; and 2) he has been spending more and more time online engaging in ‘virtual BDSM’ with women who buy the male idea that female slavery is empowering. (I may have to do a post on the online BDSM community, where I have spent time trying to figure out what makes these idiots tick. It is the silliest thing. Ever.) Use of misogynistic sexual material or services has been correlated with increased violence against women by men. I’m not surprised that liberal dude’s online playtime has made him more outspoken against women.
Said misogynist is the liberal white dude that I wrote about in this post. He is behaving atrociously during his wife’s second bout of cancer just as he did during the first. I was around at the beginning of the first, and the second was announced just before I arrived this time. So, I’ve been around at the beginning of both and watched how this dude has mishandled both situations. Eight years ago, when her first and more serious episode of lady-cancer was diagnosed, dude realized he wasn’t going to be getting laid for a long time and issued an ultimatum that they adopt a polyamorous relationship or else he would leave. What choice did she have? She needed help through recovery. She had to say yes. He got what he wanted and still didn’t support her properly. But he still got to live for free in the house that SHE owned. And this time, it is a very treatable, slow-growing breast cancer. He announced to me and the liberal white lady from the post I linked to above that his wife’s cancer was going to kill HIM. I gave him shit for that, which he didn’t like.
And I’ve since opened my mouth several times to challenge the bullshit that has come out of his. And it has been endless. Him explaining away the cute pedophelia theme in a film we watched one night. Sexist comments when he is ‘forced’ to listen to a small group of women talking about health, travel and misogyny in the world. And the endless harping on the topic of black men getting killed by police. (I am soon going to post on the actual data on these killings provided by black activists and give the issue some perspective that you won’t get by the media, any male, or any government agency.) As I’ve become more observant and less tolerant of this man’s abuse, he has become more petulant, and has adopted a facial expression that speaks of serious male oppression. Pouting, sulking, and then more verbal antagonism towards me. This man in all his years, has never been challenged by a woman. His misogyny has gone unchecked. Because he pretends to be an activist for the poor, he receives serious cock suckage, despite the fact that he relies very heavily on free female labour (I worked as a full-time volunteer for his non-profit for 8 months, which he tends to forget about or downplay) and seldom follows through on his ideas unless a woman is involved.
I’ve had enough. I thought I could deal with or handle this stuff. I need to retain some connections in the meat world for some very practical reasons. I feel that I’ve invested too much energy in relationships with males, and now that my eyes are open, it is practically impossible to respect myself, be healthy, and maintain those relationships. I think to myself that I should have made more connections with females, but they are not necessarily any better. So many women are male-identified, and any relationship you have with them is inevitably tainted by the toxic males in their lives and the female friend’s requirement that you accept abuse that she herself Is willing to accept. And when push comes to shove, these women will often throw you under the bus to support the male abuser.
Where are the feminists in real life? I used to have a few. All were lesbians. But that was years ago. Perhaps, I need to go on a mission, a pilgrimage… Things to think about.
As I contemplate that, my heart is heavy and will be for a while. I still can’t quite figure out which is the worse feeling, dropping toxic males/connections from your life and being almost completely or completely alone, or subordinating yourself in order not to feel alone. Both suck. In different ways.
But at least from Liberal White Dude’s perspective, he has been liberated (a little) from the oppression of a feminist unwilling to accept his free range misogyny. Luckily, there are other women in his life to burden him and fuel his victim mentality and justify his beliefs and the ways he acts on them.
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.
Conversations with Men: Liberal White Dude Explains a Main Difference Between Men and Women and How White Women Aren’t in Danger
Recently, Miep wrote a post talking about the difficult decision to remove a problematic male of long-term acquaintance from her life. I get it. I get the feelings and frustrations associated with making a decision like that. I’ve been going through some really difficult and similar situations of that nature over the past couple of years, and especially in this past year. Men are problematic, and it is really difficult to rationalize keeping them in your life as a feminist.
I’m currently visiting some uber-liberal friends, and already I’m being irked to no end by nonsensical, politically-correct, but misogynist, analyses and explanations. I discussed the MLK event dilemma in the last post. And less than a day later, I’m deep into conversations with a liberal white dude on how shit works (this ties in, don’t worry, you’ll see).
Over coffee, a liberal, white dude decided to explain to two white ladies, including a scowling me and an open-to-sexist-bullshit woman, a major difference between men and women. A difference that can be seen in young children! Apparently, boys want to know how shit works. Girls don’t. Girls expect things to work the way they want them to work without wondering or caring why they don’t. This explains why we get mad at computers when they malfunction. (Fucking what? That actually describes how males behave, in my experience.) So liberal white dude gave an example of how some three-year-old boy got super impressed with how some adult showed him how something worked and equated that knowledge with being smart. In fact, the conversation between the boy and the adult was generic and demonstrated nothing to me about the kid wanting to know how something worked. And in fact, if liberal white dude had told the same story, but substituted a girl instead of a boy, I’m sure the story would have illustrated how girls want to understand social communication or some sexist bullshit like that. It’s all in the interpretation and agenda. Always.
I continued to scowl at the stupid sexist story and completely invalid theory, and the other white woman contributed a story of her own about some ex-boyfriend travelling to some far-off land with her with a complete lack of interest until he bonded wordlessly with some foreign monk over some stupid tool. Then he was interested in culture. See? Men are interested in how shit works. It allows males to bond. How this explains all the women in science I know, and how talented women and girls are at building and using machines, I know not. But clearly this unvalidated theory achieves something for men. And I suspect it has something to do with men wanting a special domain of talent all to themselves. Unfortunately, women can do everything men can do, as well as create life. So nice try, but nicer fail, dude.
The funniest part is that liberal white dude then told an unrelated story about his wife, that was meant to be some kind of criticism of her, but was actually a really, really good example of how she was exceptionally good at trying to figure out how shit works. He didn’t see that though and neither did liberal white lady. I tried to point it out subtly “How interesting that she was so adept at quickly figuring out how that worked!” but no one picked up on the hint, sadly.
Bottom line, these bullshit unproven biological arguments, which have been used for centuries to keep women out of the sciences and maths and any domain that would gain them independence and public recognition, have no merit and make liberals look really stupid when they use them to prove something.
Next. The same liberal white dude started talking about how the poor brown and black dudes are getting all shot up by police. I pointed out that white women are increasingly being used as human shields and hostages so that these often CRIMINAL individuals can get away with the CRIMINAL acts they are committing. He tried to negate my statement, and I pointed out that I had just been reading another example of this happening. That didn’t fly. You cannot point out facts about men of colour. They are victims. White bitches are just white bitches. They have no voice, they have no valid claims to human rights. They definitely are not victimized by men, goodness no. I didn’t bother pointing out that white women are increasingly the victims of sexual violence and sexual-racial threats and attacks, and I definitely didn’t venture into the recent German rape crisis and the problem of Muslim men. Unsurprisingly, none of my liberal friends has said a single word about what’s going on over there. You. Cannot. Criticize. Men. Of. Colour. And they stick to that. Religiously.
I’m tired. So tired. How can I keep friends like this? They spout insanity. They subscribe to stereotype-based biological essentialism that looks a lot like determinism. And they are so filled with racial guilt that they are willing to overlook or explain away crime, negate real victims’ rights and exaggerate reality in order to feel better. They refuse to name men as the problem that women experience. And they refuse to see sex-based violence as a thing especially when it is commmitted by men of different SES, colour or religion, and a more common thing than say, occasional police violence towards males. Violence directed at women is a much more serious, and long-standing problem than anything else going on today.
I’m not sure how long my visit will be. I feel like I wear a mask in China where I pretend to be something I’m not. But I’ve realized the same is true in the West. And acting is exhausting. There is no place for a radical feminist to take off the costume and speak truth. Except maybe on her own blog.
Why Do I Have to Be One or the Other?
I’m on the road, Jack. For the next I’m not sure how long. At least a month and up to six weeks. Chinese university is on holiday – we are between semesters and there is Chinese New Year to celebrate or take advantage of, depending on your perspective on Chinese festivals. This year, I decided to leave the country. About half the time, I don’t. I don’t love travelling like I once did. Something about men existing and ruining a woman’s exploration into the unknown, or something. I get tired of being assaulted when I venture into the world.
But this time, I have a little personal business to take care of, and I don’t know, my energy feels a little more up than usual. So I’m travelling. I spent a few good days in Hong Kong, a night in San Francisco. And now I’m with old friends in Northern California. I’ll be around for a spell. Where to after that? Not sure.
Now here’s the thing about California. While it has its rednecks, and certainly while it has its pockets of conservative communities, it is a pretty hardcore liberal state. I know I’m not really telling you anything new. California is known for its ‘fruits and nuts’ of both the food and human variety.
Sometimes, when talking about American ideology, it is hard to separate viewpoints from official political stance. For me, it’s like trying to separate culture and religion for homogenous societies (for example, in the US or Canada, religion doesn’t define the culture in the way that it does in say, Israel or the Middle East). When you start talking about conservative and liberal, however, at least in the US, it is hard to separate the thinking from the politics. Liberal thinkers, on the whole tend to subscribe to Liberal/Democrat politics. This is a result of a two-party system. You can’t apply this in Canada, which is not a two-party system and where the Liberal party is much more conservative than the party to which most liberal thinkers subscribe. So for non-Americans, this whole conservative-liberal divide gets very confusing, especially when you are naturally categorized once you start talking about issues.
The next problem is that since there are only two real camps, you are assumed to be part of either one or the other. And frankly, neither one is attractive. Frequently, I find liberal and conservative thinkers are on the same page, even if the words sound different.
And so I find myself deep in liberal/Liberal country, and scared shitless. I am definitely not conservative, but I can’t get on board with unthinking, knee-jerk liberal reactionaries. I deliberately don’t talk politics or social issues here. It some ways, it’s worse in the US than it is in China. I’m expected to be a crazy, weirdo in China with my strange Western ways and viewpoints (I have to remind people that I am not like most Western people). But in the West, especially the US and even Canada, talking my crazy talk about feminism and religion and culture can get me hurt. So much for free speech and thinking in the West, eh? China is not a safe place to have opinions, but I’d argue that the US isn’t either.
My first night with friends, I found myself with my first conundrum/ethical issue. I’m staying with a liberal couple, and the female of the duo is a full-time activist/volunteer. And she announced that is is MLK (Martin Luther King) Day coming up. Whoops, forgot about that. Not on my radar. Apparently, there is going to be some event involving marching to some given place and then lots of food, probably some speeches. She is going and she really thinks her husband and I should go too. Now, knowing her and the type of person she is, I know this is more than a suggestion. At the risk of sounding high school, there is serious peer pressure here.
I don’t want to go.
My primary reason for this is that I’m a radical feminist. Yeah, you heard me. If you are American, you probably automatically put me in the conservative camp when I failed to support MLK Day. You’d be wrong. I’m not a white supremacist or a ‘down with black people’ kind of asshole. I’m a radical feminist, and I am done supporting Dick and his many manifestations. And MLK Day is about Dick. Black Dick, but still Dick. MLK was a misogynist who wanted to free black men. MEN. Black women were expected to support their men in this cause. And today, white women are expected to support black men, despite the fact that these men are doing better economically than even privileged white bitches (yes, there are data on this). Women of colour have always taken a back seat in this movement, which defeats the whole purpose for me. I support female causes, and I am also not taking reponsibility for white men’s racism, another thing white feminists are expected to do. I’m still waiting for a pile of black men to support a radical feminist cause (not a slut-walk where they have their cameras out to capture liberal feminist titties for future wanking purposes). Since that is never going to happen, I see no reason to support a black men’s rally. More precious gynergy wasting, imo. Female causes only.
But of course, I’m not allowed to say this to the woman who is hosting me in her home. I will have to fabricate a reason not to go as a fellow guilty white lady. In a dichotomous world, there is no third stance. There is no position where you can divert your energy and attention to women as a class without focus on race as a diversion and not be seen as a conservative racist. I hold true to the belief that racism is a direct result of misogyny and that focusing on the latter is the way to go in order to tackle both. But I can’t say that in public.
Welcome to America.
How to Respond to Male ‘Feminists’
I’m going to enter this under my ‘Conversations with Men‘ series for obvious reasons, although I’ll follow a slightly different format than I usually do for posts in that category.
If you’ve been reading along, you’ll know that not only do I assert that male feminists don’t and can’t exist, but I really dislike men who apply that label to themselves. Further, I’m not too keen on the women, including supposed feminists (ffs!), who shower praise and blow jobs on these self-professed activist woman-lovers either, but I get why they do this even if it is enormously damaging to women.
I’ve written about these creeps before:
They Don’t Do It Because They Care: Where I talk about why men join the helping professions, activism, and volunteer organizations.
Is It A Necessary Concession? Where I talk about the hidden, selfish agenda underneath the male feminist costume.
Truth Will Out: Where I talk about how you can reveal the misogynist turd that is at the heart of the majority of male feminists?
Today, I want to demonstrate how to respond to a male ‘feminist’ who tries to ‘engage’ you in dialogue. The thing with most male feminists is that they always end up in the same place using the same set of tactics. Most of them, with their keen male predatory radar, will sniff out real feminists. What are real feminists? There aren’t many around despite the label starting to become fashionable again for pole dancers and identity politickers. Real feminists are those radical women who are consistent in their belief that men as a class oppress women as a class on the very basis of sex. Real feminists name the problem: men. Real feminists understand the interplay of biology and socialization, and that men are free to be their biologically violent selves and have created a society that supports this through socialization, while women are NOT free to be their natural selves and constantly fight against gender socialization and comply against their will to attempt to avoid male violence.
So having zoned in on a real feminist, the male feminist starts a conversation. It might start out in a seemingly innocent or friendly way, but it quickly devolves into antagonism. (Or he might just dive right in.) The dude just can’t help himself. You see, men, no matter how human rightsy they say they might be, are not on board with radical feminist theory because they don’t see themselves as part of class, male. They are special, different. And they neeeeeed to make you see that you’re doing feminism wrong. Your thinking is wrong. You’re mean. You’re rigid. You’re responsible for everything bad in the world. You’re not doing enough to help women less fortunate. You… you’re something. And whatever it is, you are wrong and you should feel ashamed and guilty. Luckily, he is there to set you on the right path. And if you want to help him out somehow to show your thanks, well, you are free (free!!!) to do so.
Where most women, even real feminists, go wrong is in dealing with these douchebags. Even the most hard lined feminists have been socialized from birth as females to be constantly on the defensive. Being a woman means constantly being under attack in many ways. So women will spend enormous amounts of energy trying to explain themselves. No, I’m not a man-hater. No, I’m not humourless. No, I’m not violent. No, I’m not… oh, please just stop. I’m sorry I’m alive.
It is endless, and even staunch feminists cave under this relentless apologizing, self-defense, and explaining. We’ve seen bizarre capitulations by women once seen to hold the flag of feminism. I’m sure you can think of a few.
Online, these dickheads are even worse. They’ll flounce into a women’s space like the king of the castle and pounce on a feminist. They’ll either ask short, snarky, derailing questions, or they will lay it on thick with multi-paragraph mansplanations. What is expected is that all interested women drop everything they’re doing to address the male feminist’s concerns, defend their positions, and answer his stupid questions.
I propose something different, and I’ll illustrate with a real example put in my lap a few days ago.
~~
I left a comment on one of the blogs I follow. I can’t remember the exact topic, but it had something to do with male ‘feminists’. My comment was:
“Just as there is no such thing as a woman with a penis, there is no such thing as a male feminist.”
A concerned penis-brain responded to me, quoted the second half of my comment “there is no such thing as a male feminist”, and then said “Really?”
I did what most women automatically do, I wrote a draft explaining my position and a few other choice things. And then I stopped. This asshole spent two seconds to write one snarky word that demanded that I defend myself. And I almost fell for it. I found that as I was writing my answer, my stress level increased, and my anger flared. And then all became clear.
I decided to respond. And I responded in kind.
“Yup.”
And it felt good. It felt right. And he didn’t engage me further, which was exactly the right thing to happen. Some people might include their blog address or specific posts, and let the dude know that the argument is laid out there. I don’t bother. This kind of guy isn’t interested in feminism, and he will definitely not take the time to read your blog or post. He is looking to antagonize. He is looking for followers and praise and possibly a liberal woman who will be feisty, but who will still suck his dick because he is so fucking awesome.
In other words, not a feminist. Feminism isn’t about individualism, selfishness, or men/male ‘needs’. It is about women as a class. And if men want to be feminist allies/supporters (not feminists), they should go educate men, not spend time on feminist blogs antagonizing already overburdened, harassed women.
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Opening Your Can of Whoop Ass
There are a lot of containers that, once opened or broken or dumped out, cannot be resealed or refilled with their original contents. Think of a tooth paste tube, a piñata, or an aerosol can. Release the contents and there is no going back. Sometimes, the containers are fragile – batter or abuse them too much, and they lose their integrity and ability to hold anything anymore. With other containers, the contents may be such that there is no possible way of getting it back into the container once released – it’s all over the place.
The worst containers of stuff are those figurative cans of whoop ass. Not only can you not re-contain said whoop ass, but it is toxic, toxic stuff. The worst can of whoop ass out there is one that sits on every woman’s shelf in the pantry and is that which we call society or culture (aka Patriarchy). Patriarchy is a nasty little container full of toxic shit, and everyone is really, really careful to guard the can and prevent it from coming to harm.
Because once a woman damages or opens that can, something monumental happens.
She sees the actual contents of the can. She realizes that the list of ingredients has nothing to do with what is inside, and what is inside is poison. Whoop ass is dangerous shit, and once a woman opens that can and whoop ass leaks out, she can’t put it back in. She can’t return to that state of ‘can-protection’ that previously ruled her life.
Many believe that knowing the contents of the can is worse than relentlessly protecting the can. And it can seem that way. Once the contents spill, you see it and understand it for what it is, and you realize that there is no way to clean it up. You can try to get away from it, and succeed in some small ways, but you can’t un-see the whoop ass and return to your tiny, limited world of can protection.
Many women, however, admit that they always hated that damned can looming on the pantry shelf. They’d always asked themselves why the can was so special anyways. It was processed, unappetizing. They’d always cooked fresh food, and doesn’t the can have an expiry date anyways…? But men always insisted on the can being there, and many women, their families, their friends, most of them had their own cans and didn’t approve of can-criticism. And it remained a centrepiece. Those who questioned can-care did the minimum, kicked it around a bit, and some finally opened it as a brave, defiant, and curious act.
I opened the can, myself, once I found the right tool. And although I don’t personally celebrate Christmas, it is my holiday wish that in every stocking of every celebrant in the world might be found the tool needed to open their can.
Seasons greetings to can-protectors and can-openers alike.
Conversations with Men: The Cambodian
In my last ‘conversations with men’ post about the rape holiday, I mentioned that I would pull another experience from my Cambodian visit. In the former, I was an observer. In this story, I was an object.
Women are constantly divided and divided again. It is a male strategy to prevent women from joining against them in solidarity to fight back in a serious way. But scores of women get on board for a variety of reasons in order to show their sisters that the dissimilarities and points of disagreement are much more important than their common experiences and needs.
Despite being the violent and sadistic sex, there is a great deal of evidence that men of different races, socioeconomic classes, religions, and political leanings are always quite able to come together – and even bond – over a single common cause: abusing, torturing, terrorizing and destroying women and girls. It is a pity that women cannot come together over the single common cause of liberating themselves from men, their violence, and their parasitic tendencies.
And it is with this thinking that I present a conversation from several years ago. Reviewing my two experiences well after the fact made me realize that despite the many differences between me and the young, female, Cambodian prostitute, we both shared the reality that we were objects. We were both seen by men, first and foremost, as bodies to be used.
~~~
Rewind to 2003: I was in the middle of a two-week trip by myself to Cambodia. It is very common for travellers, especially if you’re alone, to hire motorcycle guides in the larger areas. These drivers are often connected to guest houses, and you can hire them for single trips or pay a flat fee for a period time. While in Phnom Penh, I hired a driver who was able to speak some English (I don’t speak Khmer, and those few Cambodians who speak French are quite old now). I did a number of things, including seeing some of the historic sites, checking out one of the riverside, local clubs for some live music (no other foreigners there), and on one of the days, spending an afternoon by the water in the shade eating durian.
Through conversation, I was able to get an inside look into the life of a typical, low-earning, young man. And I also was reminded of my place as a woman.
At that point in my life, I sported very short hair, so I had to provide an answer as to why. Surprisingly, I wasn’t asked why I never wore skirts or dresses. After many more years living in China, I’ve come to expect and hate this whole line of questioning about hair, clothes, husbandlessness, childlessness. But at the time, I was still in my first year in Asia.
But then we moved on to other things.
Dude took on an air of sadness. He said he was too poor to get married. he had to share a room with several other guys. And he had to go to prostitutes.
Yeah, he lost me there. One thing I do hate about traditional cultures is the mandatory marriage thing and the idea that you need to have X amount of money in order to live up to expectations and procure a slave. But I don’t feel sorry for the MEN. I feel sorry for the women. Being sold into slavery – which is exactly what marriage was and still is – is not something I agree with or think is part of a healthy society. And in traditional cultures, if a woman can’t get married, there aren’t a lot of other options for her to support herself. Further, she becomes vulnerable to all men when she isn’t owned by one man. It’s a racket that men designed. Women are screwed no matter what happens. But married men benefit, so who gives a shit, eh?
But the marriage thing wasn’t where dude lost me. It was the ‘had to go to prostitutes’ comment. Men believe they must have sex. And they believe that if they can’t get it from their personal whore (wife/girlfriend/family member), then they must get if from a public whore. And then there is outright, payment-free rape of strangers, which I won’t get into in this post. The thing is, nobody has ever died from not having sex. And I say this as someone who, for much of my life, has had a demanding sex drive that no man (or woman, for that matter) I’ve known could match. Ever. And yet, despite almost never getting what I wanted – quality or quantity – and then eventually just ditching men altogether when I came to my senses about ‘how shit works’ in both the greater world and in my own world, I never felt I was entitled to sex. And I haven’t died from the lack. Presto magic. So take it from me, men don’t need sex.
And then the conversation got worse.
Dude got it in his head that he should have sex with me. The suggestion was put out there. He didn’t actually offer to pay me for sex. No. The idea was that I could continue to pay for his driving services as well as the food we were consuming, and he could have sex with me. It was almost as if he were offering himself up as a prostitute (although he didn’t ask for extra money), except for one very, very significant difference.
This difference lies in the sexes of the people in my last story versus this current story.
Women generally don’t offer themselves as prostitutes because they like sex or want random sex with strangers. Prostitutes are generally desperate, vulnerable women with a history of sexual, physical and psychological abuse. Both men and sex are dangerous to women, and men generally don’t cater (let alone acknowledge) women’s sexual needs. Don’t believe me? Well there is a shit ton of evidence on all. I don’t need to provide statistics. Spend five seconds on Google.
Men seldom offer themselves as prostitutes to WOMEN. To men, yes. That is more common and I don’t really care about that dynamic. When a man, like in my scenario, suggests sex to a woman, he is looking to get off. And in this case, especially, a) he didn’t suggest a monetary exchange, and b) in most cultures, especially traditional ones like Cambodia, men don’t service women – they use them. And if they give something, it is never without the expectation of something in return. So this dude wasn’t offering me anything. He was expecting something.
Of course, I said, “No.”
Everything about this exchange was repulsive. There was fear that he would attack me because I said no (luckily, that didn’t happen – HIV rates were at an all-time high in Cambodia at that time – and nobody wants to be raped anyways). I realized that none of my ‘privilege’ could erase the fact that I was still a woman and thus was under the thumb and at the whim of this guy and every single man on the planet regardless of their status among other men. I realized that because he, a man, brought up sex, no matter how this guy had framed it, he was insulting me: to offer me money would be to tell me I was a piece of meat, but to not offer me money told me that I wasn’t worth paying for and I should give it away like (they think) all ‘free’ Western white women do.
I went away from that conversation with another piece chipped off my tiny block of female self-confidence and then added to the growing pile of evidence of male yuck.
Perfume and Shit
During my first go-round in graduate school in the US, my closest friend was this brilliant, quirky, and tortured Dutchwoman. Through her and other Dutch I’ve encountered, I, the over-polite Canadian, came to appreciate their delicious bluntness. I’ve since found that they have a just-so way of putting things that hits the nail on the head without destroying your thumb.
I’ll always remember something my friend said that has since had great application in various situations. While she was speaking literally, her words provide a great metaphor.
We were talking about bathroom habits for some strange reason, and I think she was commenting on what she believed was the American tendency to spray perfume or some other artificial smell after doing one’s business in the bathroom. She said:
“I don’t know why people do this! I’d rather just smell your shit than a mixture of your perfume and your shit.”
The implication, of course, is that you can’t cover up reality. And to follow: why should we try? It doesn’t actually work.
I’ve found myself coming back to this simple, but brilliant, comment on the recent human tendency to put a positive spin on political/social/research conclusions and theory. And recently, I’ve been reminded of it in critiques of certain feminist conclusions about the state of things. Conclusions and theories are discarded with the sweep of a hand simply by calling them ‘pessimistic’ or ‘depressing’. It’s not even a valid argument. Something may well be depressing, but that is unrelated to its veracity. This kind of dismissiveness can show up when feminists rightly point out that men have behaved as vicious sons-of-rapists for millennia, and if they wanted to change, they very simply would. Dick supporters will start in with their “That is too pessimistic! Too depressing to contemplate!” spiel. They insist that men can and will change if we just reason with them. Show them the error of their ways. They just need our bottomless female understanding, coddling, and education. But smart feminists have pointed out that men already have been sucking our helpfulness dry for a long, long time. We’ve done all of the above and then some. To no avail. Men don’t want to change. And they never will change. And hell, yes, it is depressing. But it is true. The truth usually isn’t roses and puppy dog kisses. The truth is slavery and rape for women and girls, ad infinitum.
And there are other arguments/theories/conclusions about the state of things and the state of things to come that receive similar reactions. To be honest, it is much the way many women are treated when they try to talk about their experiences of rape and assault – their reality – people don’t want to hear it. It’s too depressing. Too… real? You can lose friendships, family ties, and partner-relationships if you try to talk about your depressing reality (been there a few times, myself).
Why can’t people handle truth? I think this is subject matter for a future post. I want to get into suicide and death and such. People absolutely hate those topics and I think they are very important. Not only does each person have to face reality eventually, but we are soaking in effects of the male death drive and all that implies from the day we’re born. Ignoring it gets us nowhere but a world of hurt.
I prefer the Dutch approach. I may not want to smell the shit, but I’d rather smell it than have my brain confused by the conflation of two incompatible scents. You can’t spray optimism on the toxic air of Patriarchy and expect to find a viable solution or ‘hope for the future’.
I Tried, and I Had to Leave
For some of us, it’s a process. It can be a lengthy process if you score high on empathy, have any kind of draw to the helping professions, and/or come from an abusive family (for females, not males) where you’re not allowed to stand up for yourself. I’m referring to shedding the dead weight known as men.
Dead weight is only a partially correct term. Yes, men give you a heavy load to drag around with you, draining your limited (and often low) energy. This energy will be redirected from the little self-care you allow yourself to listening to their endless whining, helping them with their endless problems, taking care of them, paying for them, cleaning up after them, etc. But they also fill you with lies and misinformation. They attack your limited self-confidence. They make you doubt yourself. They steal your ideas and creations. They stop your thoughts when you start to appear a little too independent or critical. They’ve got a dangerous arsenal at the ready.
And there is only one solution for that. Get the fuck away from them. Don’t tie yourself to them. Do serious vetting if you are considering being around one. Ideally, never deal with them, although that is next to impossible as this is NOT ALLOWED and besides, practically impossible given that there is unfortunately no female-only territory/country (never mind woman-space, these days).
So, for many, it is a process. I’ve been doing just that. It has been a long process. Very gradual, although more accelerated in the last year.
Except for one or two I haven’t managed to eject from my life and except for mandatory listening that is part of my job as an educator, I don’t willingly listen to them anymore – so much so, that find myself automatically tuning out when one speaks. I jokingly attribute it to age and my hearing, but of course, it’s just that I’m tired of feeling ‘vampired’ after interactions with their non-stop verbal dick-swinging and too-apparent mental deficiencies.
I also don’t bother joining any groups that aim to ‘change things for the better’ if men are involved at all. There is no such thing as an honest to goodness male activist. It doesn’t matter whether said dude is an environmentalist or an atheist fighting religion, the changes dudes look to effect are ones that maintain male dominance. Women don’t factor in as recipients of positive change. And male feminists, as I’ve said before (here and here), the scourge of activism – well, I truly don’t know what they are doing exactly. Soapboxing, perhaps. Men naturally gravitate to self-righteous pontification. But the majority of them spend way too much time telling women what to do or not do. Many of the white male feminists like to shit on white female feminists and accuse them of not only doing feminism wrong, but calling them racist or transphobic. It’s as if they take some kind of pleasure in finding someone else to blame for everything they’ve done on their own. It’s revolting.
And this leads into my latest shedding of dead weight. I forced myself to sort of suffer through the reading of ‘We Hunted the Mammoth’ posts for a while. When I first ran into the site, I thought “let’s see what happens here”. I much prefer men who purport to be fighting the fight (although, I can’t be bothered to go and check whether the author calls himself a male feminist) to keep their own blogs and to read, but not comment, on women’s blogs (for the reasons mentioned above). I was amused that he was taking on the Morons Rights Activists (seriously the dumbest, loudest and most violent men on the planet besides MtT dudes and both Christian and Muslim male fundamentalists). I think this is a job for men. But of course, because men truly don’t understand women’s issues, it is impossible for them to take down these assholes completely. I get the impression that WHTM sees the MRAs as a joke primarily, and he slaps them around like a cat does a mouse. And indeed, if you look at who comments on WHTM, it is mostly dudes who like swinging their dicks around, feeling superior as if they are doing something Important. There is no real talk of women’s rights or feminism. There is no willingness to get on board with or understand radical feminism. It is just an amusement to write about and comment on the latest ‘hijinks’.
I have been commenting occasionally. No one interacts with me, which is fine – that’s not what I went there for. For me, it was more like dropping a beautiful, perfectly-shaped, feminist turd in the middle of a circle jerk, and it gave me a little pleasure and satisfaction. A few people clicked over, likely to check out the bitch who dared comment on an anti-MRA site (remember, male feminists aren’t activating for women’s sake, but just to feel superior). But it didn’t take long to get bored. The writing is not interesting, and neither are the verbose commenters. The blog has no purpose other than poking fun, and if I want that, I read the comics. I’ve noticed other feminist blogs commenting that all the rad fems that initially stuck around that blog and tried commenting ended up leaving. Too much misogyny and dick-swinging – and no real purpose.
I feel much lighter for having shed this silly corner of the internet.
If you want to visit a blog that is much more effective and on point and with clear purpose in dealing with MRA bullshit, you must, of course turn to a woman (don’t you always?). Mancheeze takes things seriously. You won’t be disappointed.
Scribbles on Liberal Feminism
My girlfriend used to just swear and give guys the finger if they harassed her. now she shows them who’s boss by flashing her tits with an angry face.
Finland: Winning Weird Awards
Dogdammit, I just missed the International Pole Dancing Championships in Hong Kong this past week. I don’t live that far away. But while I admire physical strength in women very much, pole dancing holds a serious ick factor for me. I don’t see it as sport or art. I see it as porny and sleezy objectification of women to serve the male gaze. I’d have a hard time enjoying the performance on these grounds. I’d rather watch women playing soccer/football, frankly.
I remember visiting a good friend 8 years back and she mentioned she’d been helping out an ambitious local girl with the design of her new business web site. She seemed kind of proud – both of her web endeavours and of this fierce, young businesswoman. Cool. I like that. Sisterhood. Female networks. I had that long ago for a too-short spell. It is an awesome thing that should be fostered.
So then we got down to details. The business in question was pole dancing gear sales.
What? I had no idea what that meant. Well, I had an idea. There are enough scenes of strip clubs in shitty American, male-oriented tv, and I’d seen ‘True Lies’ before – another film where Jamie Lee Curtis is forced to humiliate herself sexually. There’s that scene where she pretends to be an under-cover hooker or something like that and tries and fails at performing a ‘pole dance’ on the bed post without realizing her husband is her customer. Hilarity for men at the expense of a woman. Good fucking times.
What I hadn’t realized, trapped in 100-hour-a-week work/research/study, was that the world had slid a little further down the poop shute (um, dance pole?) of male decadence. Unbeknownst to me, pole dancing had suddenly been transformed into an empowerful activity. Effective exercise! Not just for whores anymore, dontcha know. Wink wink. And then the lib-fems took it up much in the same way they enthusiastically brought back burlesque.
Every realization deflates the feminist lifeboat a little more.
I took a polite look at my friend’s web design efforts, and found myself faced with ‘clothes’ no woman should ever have to wear, and that men never have to wear unless they’re performing ladyface for a joke or as a Hallowe’en costume or because of mental illness.
And, like the beauty pageants that humiliate women globally, pole dancing has become an international ‘thing’. Competitions. Prizes.
And while pole dancing does require great strength and fearlessness (it takes some serious courage to spread your legs for the world and call it feminism), when you defend it as a positive thing for women, you’re living some serious denial. This is not FOR women.
If you want to trot out, “well, there are male pole dancers competing too.” I don’t care. Pole dancing is marketed to women (and now girls) primarily as the epitome of a powerful woman. Women must harness their Sexual Power! But it symbolizes something very different to women than it does to men. It serves as a further normalizer of stripping and prostitution, which is not work, but sexual slavery. Very simply, pole dancing The Sport! wouldn’t exist if girls and women weren’t subordinate to men worldwide and regularly trafficked and groomed into providing sexual services (rape opportunities) out of desperation and/or vulnerability. When we normalize practices that come out of this slavery, we desensitize people to its harm, and we make it harder for women and girls to escape falling into a life where they are degraded, abused and raped regularly. If, on an earwax cleaning mission, I stick a q-tip into my ear so far as to burst my eardrum, I don’t tell people that thank goodness my ear is clean and that everyone should do it.
Regarding the above mentioned international competition, well, congrats go to Finland. Something to own proudly.
I’m waiting for the day that blow jobs become an Olympic sport. I swear, it’s around the corner. And yet again I find myself mumbling under my breath: I am so glad I don’t have children.
The Girl and The Stranger in The Car
This post is part of the ongoing Birth of a Feminist series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀
Although our goals may be similar, there are two significant differences between serious feminists and superheroines. First, true feminists wear comfortable, woman-friendly clothes. And second, unlike superheroines, feminists don’t usually have a clear, specific origin story. Rather, we have moments of clarity or realization. Moments that accumulate. Moments that may not become significant or actionable until later, sometimes in combination with other moments. Sometimes, it is a seemingly small event or moment that puts a lifetime of horror into perspective. You meet someone, you read something, you see or experience something that just makes you say ‘I see what is going on, and I’ve had enough’. It is a matter of right time, right place, and readiness/openness. Although it may happen, I think it is a rare woman who, like Athena, is born clad in full warrior gear.
In this vein, if asked when I became a feminist, I don’t think I could tell you. There have been many significant events that have made me what I am. And I’m still developing. I still make typical mistakes. That is gender programming. It takes a lifetime to siphon the poison from one’s personal psychology and behaviour.
I still remember an early formative moment. It’s something I think about decades later, and it still guides me. It’s not the most important formative event, but rather, one of many.
I was 13. It was a winter evening at about 9:30 pm. It was freezing, dark, snow everywhere. I had attended my father’s university lecture in psychology. We were driving home. I was sitting in the passenger seat in the front of the car, looking out the window.
And I saw her.
A woman being dragged by her hair across the snow into a bush. She was fighting, but not winning. The man who had her was bigger and determined. And it was late on a weeknight in the winter. There was no one around.
I shouted to stop the car. Startled, my father pulled over. I pointed and insisted. We intervened. The man ran off. We hustled the woman into our car and drove her home. She was mostly silent, but we learned her attacker was her ex-husband. I was also silent, emotions confused. I was learning something important. I realized that had I not seen her and done something, something BAD would have happened. But my understanding wasn’t nuanced.
And afterwards, my father, the brilliant psychologist, never spoke a word about it. I was not debriefed. Not counselled. I was left to draw my own conclusions. Possibly, he remembered having to intervene when his father beat his mother. No excuse though. When I look back at that child from the perspective of an adult, I’m shocked, saddened, and I wish I could go back to do damage control. But would I be what I am and do what I do if I’d not worked through that business alone?
A girl is exposed to explicit, real life violence – a stranger’s near rape/beating/murder. She plays a significant role in ending that violence, shares a space with the stranger for a few minutes, the significant connection between them left unarticulated, the silence controlled by another man, and then, and the child is left to wonder, to analyze, to worry, to fear. To build a schema.
It was only years later after many, many object lessons on what men were, thought about and did to women, after intervening in other near-rapes and beatings, that I realized that the woman I had saved years before was only temporarily safe. Temporarily safe from this specific man in her life, and generally, from all men no matter where or when. There is no beginning and end to violence for women. There are episodes in a lifetime of fear. And there are many lifetimes. This woman was one of millions and millions and millions through time. We are all that woman at some point. And to not be a feminist – to not want female freedom from male violence and control – is just not an option. For me, at least.
This post is part of the Birth of a Feminist series.
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That’s Some Arsenal You’ve Got There, Gentlemen
Part one: That’s Some Toolbox You’ve Got There, Ladies.
In the previous post linked to above, I talked about several of the tools and techniques women have at the ready in order to survive as slaves in a patriarchal system. These are the mechanisms that lead women to:
- accept abuse, rape, heaps of discrimination without complaint;
- seek out and stay in romantic relationships with men where anything can and does happen (keep in mind that no relationship between men and women is equal);
- comply and perpetuate Patriarchy by attacking potential allies (non-compliant women/feminists) and indoctrinating children in the ways of gender; and
- fail to notice the millions and millions of daily messages, large and small, direct and indirect, aimed at women to let them know that they are members of the sex class, meant to serve men, and undeserving of freedom or respect.
That post was about defense. This one is about offense. I want to talk about the tools and mechanisms – or weapons – men have in their arsenals to reinforce their supremacy by keeping women in line. Note that ALL men are given starter arsenals as boys, and most grow up to add more vicious and effective weapons as they get older – even the liberal, so-called ‘Nice Guys’.
I’m not going to talk about physical weapons like guns or knives or physical violence like rape or beatings or BDSM torture. These are obvious. Instead, like in the previous post, I’m going to talk about psychological warfare and what men do to mindfuck ‘loved’ ones, acquaintances, and strangers.
In case, you’re prepared to jump in with a standard, knee-jerk “But women do it tooooooo!” whinge-fest, please note that a) this post is not about individual women attacking individual men as DOES happen, but is not a systematic problem, and b) this post is about class warfare – by men as a class against women as a class. There has never been a war waged by women against men. If so, there’d be millions of dead and maimed men out there. As it stands, the only ones killing men in any number are MEN. So zip it and read on!
Offense Mechanisms
Note that some of the defense mechanisms talked about the the previous post can be used by men as attack mechanisms. Projection, for instance, can work the following way in the hands of a man on the attack. As a rule, men have a socialized, underlying hatred of women. Many men will project their hatred of women onto the women themselves claiming that women actually are the ones who hate men. This is the current chant of the MRAs (morons’ rights activists), and is why terms like ‘feminazi’ and ‘man-hating, lesbo feminist’ exist without evidence for them. Men’s hatred is turned into women’s hatred to make men feel justified in issuing rape threats, actual rape, beatings, and psychological warfare.
Gaslighting
This is a form of denial, but it is denial used to attack or manipulate. By refusing to admit that something is true, often repeatedly, the attacker causes their victim to begin to question their perceptions and lose confidence. The more off-balance a victim is, the more likely she is to remain in thrall to an abuser. The victim is increasingly likely to overlook often outrageously bad behavior, especially if they are in a relationship.
Example: On an individual level, imagine a newbie to the BDSM scene. She feels like what she is experiencing is abuse, but her dominant repeatedly says it didn’t happen or reframes her experience as something entirely different – submitting isn’t abuse, it is freedom, it is love. It is actually she who has the power. He invalidates her perceptions and she comes to doubt herself. She becomes primed for a deep commitment to submissive status.
We also see this in the low incidence of rape reporting – we can apply gaslighting to women as a group. Women are almost never believed when they dare to speak out about being raped. As a result, women as a class, often doubt their own experiences of rape and don’t bother to speak out. Women are not believed, so most women believe their experiences aren’t real.
Infantilizing
I’ve devoted a post to this topic, so I’ll keep it brief here. Infantilizing is the treating of woman as if she were a child or as less capable or intelligent than she actually is. You can also infantilize girls by treating them like younger children and over-protecting and denying confidence and agency. Infantilizing goes really well with gaslighting. Imagine being treated like an idiot over and over, and then if you dare to complain, you’re told that you’re imagining things or are oversensitive. You eventually come to believe that how you’re being treated is perfectly normal and you become an ineffective and relatively useless adult with no confidence and always second-guessing yourself.
Pathologizing
It is common for those who don’t conform to mainstream expectations to be pathologized. If someone doesn’t meet expectations, there must be something wrong with her. She needs to be fixed, medicated, given therapy, subjected to surgery, controlled and brought to heel.
Example: The current craze in pathologizing is, of course, centred on sexuality. These days, women need to be ready for sex and thrilled about it 24/7. Of course, sexuality and sex are still defined by men for men, so the perfectly reasonable avoidance or lack of desire on the part of women to engage in something that will not benefit them in any way (and is actually dangerous in many ways) becomes ‘a problem’. Instead of seeing and accepting it for what it actually is – a normal response to sexual slavery and erasure – women are labelled ‘frigid’ or ‘depressed’ or something that indicates that they aren’t fulfilling the expected role. Out come the drugs, sex therapy, psychological abuse, demands for polyamory, and porn.
Shaming and Guilting
Very simply, the act of inspiring feelings of guilt or shame in someone to get them to do something they don’t want to do or to back down on requests for fair treatment.
Example: Men love to push women to the edge and over it in relationships, and inspiring shame or guilt – some of the first powerful feelings young girls experience in all cultures – is a very effective way for men to get what they want. Men often play the victim. Their lives are so hard, and according to them, women make their lives even harder with their nagging and unreasonable demands for respect or consideration. It is these techniques of shaming and guilting that inspire the following: “If you loved me, you would…” and the demands almost always entail some demeaning, degrading, brutalizing, unfair sexual performance or concessions on the part of the woman.
Shaming and guilting (in addition to spreading lies and misinformation) are the key tools in the Pro-Choice movement’s assault against women who need abortions.
One-Upping
A tool used to silence another person by claiming greater victimhood status.
Example: This has recently become a very effective tool in our modern age of oppression status. Everybody is being oppressed. It is a common tool used by men of colour against white women who rebuke their rape or harassment attempts. These men will scream ‘racism!’ or society will do it for them if the rape attempt becomes public knowledge. It is one reason I didn’t report being violently raped by my Arab Muslim boyfriend 8 years ago. ‘Islamophobia’ is a buzzword right now, and current Liberals can get enthusiastically on board with the idea that a white woman is using her poorly suppressed Islamophobia/racism to make a false rape claim but have an incredibly hard time believing that a man has raped a woman.
Some of these men know exactly that is what will happen when they scream racism – it is a joke and a get out of jail free card since racism is taken seriously, but misogyny and violence against women are not. For others, they truly believe they are being oppressed when a woman refuses or fights against their violence. Men of all colours (and SES, religions, etc.) are taught from birth that they are entitled to pussy any time they want it.
Others argue that this is also what is happening with some of the male-to-female trans community trying to silence women by one-upping them on the oppression scale. By using male tactics of aggression and claiming status as ‘women’, actual women are forced into silence. Again, some of these folks know exactly what they are doing, while others may wear oppression as clothing and truly believe everyone is hurting them personally.
The most egregious examples of one-upping occur when a white dude with no true difficulties in life claims victimhood status that is more important than a woman – any woman. This happens CONSTANTLY (see MRAs, for example).
I truly can’t count the number of men – white and non-white – who have silenced me by shouting me down with examples of how they perceive themselves to be the most unfortunate victims on the planet. It has been especially effective when coupled with guilting.
Hope / Manipulated Forgiveness
Hope, is probably one of the most powerful forces out there. Giving someone the impression that things will get better can erase the effects and memories of an incredible amount of abuse.
Example: The most common scenario is that of the battered spouse/girlfriend. Despite the well-known mantra of psychologists and statisticians that past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour, the battering male will erase this idea by promising that he will change. And he seems to… until the next time he beats and rapes his wife/girlfriend. It helps that women are programmed from childhood to forgive.
Bestowing the Backhanded Compliment of ‘Otherness’
I have an entire post devoted to the concept of ‘other’, and there is a section on how men psychologically manipulate women into enabling them and accepting misogynistic abuse through a sort of backhanded flattery: they are not like all the other girls. Women can feel special and ‘loved’, but eventually may come to realize that this status can change immediately if they dare to question the flatterer.
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There are many more psychological attack devices that men use against women to keep their system of dominance firmly in place. This is just a taste.
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A Slut-Free Halloween
I’m in China – it is Hallowe’en morn. For many of you, it is still October 30th or ‘Devil’s Night’ (at least that is what we called it in Canada when I was a kid) – the night bad kids will sneak out and tp or egg people’s houses. Until about the age of 30, it was my favourite festival of all the observable Western holidays. I like the night. I like costumes. And I like chocolate. I don’t participate in the traditions anymore, but now that I’ve gotten older, I’ve researched the history of the festival (which I won’t get into here), and it is truly fascinating. I have a deeper understanding of how it came about and has evolved over the centuries.
To my complete puzzlement, and to be honest, my disdain, China has begun taking on Western holidays. Let me clarify. They take on the marketing and capitalistic rewards of holidays such as Hallowe’en and Christmas, but none of the meaning. Some of the people put on this weird fake enthusiasm for them, but like much of Chinese enthusiasm, it is all surface. There is no understanding of the festivals and they definitely don’t give a shit about them on a deeper level. These holidays mean nothing to them. Why should they? Festivals are rooted in culture, religion, and history. I just wish they wouldn’t bother – it is deeply offensive.
Not that these holidays are well understood by Western people either, but for all of us, there is tradition and cultural meaning, both positive and negative, regardless of whether we are religious or not.
So the Hallowe’en decorations have gone up here in China, and in the department stores, I’ve noticed candy and costumes for sale. Here’s where things get curious for me.
I haven’t seen a single slutty/sexy costume anywhere. And it’s a fucking relief.
Apparently, the Chinese didn’t get the message. The basic purpose of Hallowe’en is to let women AND little girls release their inner whores for the titillation of men.
I’ve put together a little comparison of current Western costumes to illustrate my point. And if you’re wondering, all of these photos I found individually. They were not already paired as mini-slut and mommy-slut. The unplanned similarities in costumes and mannerisms are depressing and creepy in a Stepford-slut (terminology attribution: Gail Dines, I believe) kind of way.
and
When the fuck did this happen? I don’t remember this at all from my youth. Hallowe’en was just about fun and eating too much candy. Adults sometimes had their own Hallowe’en dress-up parties, but there were no ‘sexy anythings’ then. Girl children were NEVER trotted out as whores or ‘sexy anythings’ – except for the princess thing, which I’m proud to say, I never did. But now it’s harem girls, sexy cops, sexy nurses, sexy witches (used to just be wart-covered, scary witches), and even, gulp, French maids.
One significant thing. During my youth, more people made their own costumes. I have never worn a store-bought costume. My mother sewed everything, and then when I got older, I either sewed, but more often, crafted from various non-clothing and thrift-store clothing items, something interesting and very original.
But at some point, capitalism inserted its stiletto heel into Western culture’s brain, and it has been a slut-fest ever since. People say they are too busy or too unimaginative these days to spend time on costume creation and construction. I agree on the latter. Capitalism and porn have stripped (ahem) people of their ability to think of interesting things. It’s all sex, all the time. A woman must be sexy 24-7, and this includes when dressed up for Hallowe’en.
I did NOT look like this.
I seldom dress up for Hallowe’en anymore, but about five years ago, I did a year-long stint teaching high school in rural China. My colleague and I decided to have a Hallowe’en party, and we got excited about creating some simple costumes. I bought some thin, black electrical tape and black construction paper, and I luckily had a yellow shirt of my own and black pants, and voila! I became a bee. My colleague spent equally little – white tape and some construction paper, and became a zebra. They were great costumes.
I worry about the future of the West, and especially the safety and self-image of Western girls and women. Capitalism and its evil spawn, digital pornography, are damaging the culture, likely beyond repair. I think porn will lead (hell, we can see it already!) to the intellectual downfall of the United States, whose number one export is porn, and number one import is intelligent foreign students and labour.
As much as I dislike China, they have managed to keep porn out of the mainstream – it is illegal. More on this another time, but while I am anti-censorship, I am firmly against hate speech and pornography is, without question, hate speech. In China, unfortunately, women are seen as chattel in other ways, but (without touching on the shameful 1,000 years of foot binding) they are not yet being degraded the way Western women are. But, I fear that is only a matter of time. Until that time, there are no Chinese Hallowe’en sluts on offer.
Pond Skipping and the Universal Whore
It’s my first post of October. Alas, I have been out of town and away from my keyboard. It’s my first chance to write.
I normally find it healthy to get out of China once or twice a year. China is not the greatest place to live as a non-Chinese woman. Outside of your apartment you are public property, permanently on display for every man, woman and child. And they’re not polite about it. I’ve learned to dissociate as soon as I leave my apartment, much like I have done during a pelvic exam at the gyno’s office or during a sexual assault. I pretend I’m not there. I wonder at the long-term damage to my spirit, all this dissociation.
But for a few reasons, I’d been stuck in China for about 14 months. And then I found a way to leave for about 10 days that overlapped with a Chinese holiday and the rest, well, I took a few days off work. I went to the United States, Los Angeles specifically, to visit a complicated friend. Or is it a simple friend with whom I have a complicated relationship? Dunno.
Going from China to the US – or any Western country for that matter – is always strange to me. They are such different experiences, although there are many underlying similarities. As this is a short post, I’ll just mention one thing that really stands out to me that illustrates this unique quality – the differentness and the similarity of the places.
China is distinctly not white. White people don’t rule the day-to-day business. On a global scale, that is a different matter – although I think that is starting to change. But on the ground, white people don’t have special rights, and in fact, are often denied rights and are abused in the way that foreign workers or tourists usually are anywhere without workers’ rights or human rights standards as the norm. Chinese is the dominant race and culture. Among the foreign population, most (in my city) are not white. Among the white population, white women are a rare thing. Men are always more plentiful among travellers and foreign workers. Women are just less likely to work abroad unless they come with a partner or have a personal well of confidence. So if you see a white woman, it is an uncommon thing, indeed.
Los Angeles, on the other hand, is distinctly multiracial and multicultural. White is still the dominant race power-wise, and more specifically and pointedly, white men rule.
Yet, in both places, white women are the universally-accepted whores.
When I walk around in the very, very non-foreign-populated community in which I live in China, you will see large poster advertisements in the commercial areas of white women in lingerie or in sexy poses for some stupid product or other. It is offensive and disconcerting. Most people have never seen a live white person, but might be faced day-to-day with a larger than life advertisement of a scantily-clad white woman. And then they run into me. How do they see me? I have first-hand knowledge of the poor treatment that can result. Going by the behaviour of some of them, I can only imagine they think I am public property, especially if they are watching American films and television in addition to viewing misogynist advertisements.
While in L.A., even in my friend’s upper middle class neighbourhood, there were plenty of billboards and advertisements along the commercial streets. And most of them were of nearly-naked white women selling all sorts of shit from construction boots to gym memberships. There were a couple of new, highly-offensive and scary ones that had been put up since I was last there. I’ve never understood the logic of what is done in advertisements. It can’t just be catering to men’s penises. The ads are so hateful, I can only imagine that they are also designed to remind women of what their place is and the fact that they will never truly measure up. You are all whores. You need to have this skin colour. And of course, you need to look like this. Why would we want to be whores, though? Why do women accept this pronouncement? These ads?
For some reason, white women have become the target of many, men and women, alike. Women, in general, do make the easiest targets, and white women are easier to attack than the real culprits – white men. They are the cannon fodder. The ones white men put in front to take the heat, to shoulder all the blame. And because white women are part of the sex class, they become the whore all women should both aspire to and hate at the same time. But the thing is, white women don’t have real power. Forget what some dumb fun-feminist tells you about empowerment through nudity and sucking cock. They still have less power than all men of all colours. Always have. They are still victimized by the lowest men on the male hierarchy. A homeless, mentally ill man of colour can terrorize any woman on the street and get away with it. He can even scream racism at her as she cowers from his male threat, not his race. The woman can’t escape. She just needs to ‘relax’, ‘take it easy’ – she is the privileged one, right? The public and law will support him over her. He is justified. As long as women are objects, they have no power. As long as we have to witness our naked bodies on display for entertainment and marketing, we will never be free or be safe or have power or be taken seriously. Those billboards hurt.
If your only rejoinder is that ‘sex sells’, well, guess what? None of this is sex. It is debasement, objectification, exploitation, and subjugation. Of a class of people.
It’s not ‘sex sells’. It’s ‘sexual slavery sells’. And it sells everywhere in the world, thanks to men of all colours, led by the white boys. The solution is not to include more women of colour in the public nudie parade. It is to take the group-specific sexploitation out of entertainment and marketing entirely.
I’d like to live in a place where advertisements (if they must exist at all) are limited to the product and its qualities. No whores needed. In China, in the US, anywhere, everywhere.
He Was a Good Man
Most abuses and rapes of girls and women don’t make it to the newspapers or news desks of the world. First, there are too many of them – if all incidents were properly and publicly reported on we would have to admit there is a problem – a problem with men. A problem with how the world works. And we don’t want that. Men are untouchable and should remain that way.
Second, straight up rape and child abuse and other forms of sexual assault are fucking boring to our knuckle-dragging, drooling masses. I mean seriously. You’ve heard one story of a terrified woman being assaulted, you’ve heard ’em all. Can you imagine if we had to listen to them all?
But there is a special genre of woman-hurt that gets boners a-raging. Women pay attention too, but if the reporting didn’t titillate men, it wouldn’t make press at all. Women don’t get off on assault of their sisters regardless of what your misogynist husband or boyfriend or choice-feminist BFF tells you.
That is the sex-slave-held-captive-and-made-to-do-unspeakable-things genre of lady abuse.
The reporting of these horrible, horrible stories of tragedy are salacious. It is porn. It is men’s fantasies made real. The victimized girls and women are treated to various rounds of further abuse as they are made to relive their ordeals for the rapacious (male) public. And it is sport – a national/international pastime, if you will – with enough detail, you can always find some angle from which to blame the dirty little whores for what has been done to them.
I was coming of age during the infamous Ken and Barbie murders in Canada, and was luckily spared from having to read or watch too many details because of where I lived at that time and the fact that I was too busy studying to go searching for more information. In Canada, the rape videos and perpetrators’ testimony were banned from public access for legal reasons, but disgusting (male) Americans dusted off their poorly misunderstood and extremely abused Constitution in order to get access to everything. For offering support to the cause of crimes against women and girls? Hell no!!! They widely distributed the graphic detail on the internet. Pure boner material, I’m sure. I distrust any American who spouts off about freedoms of speech and expression. These jizzings are almost always made by men who don’t understand what freedom of speech actually means or the true purpose of the Amendments concerned (nor do they care), and when you get right down to it, are really only motivated by exploiting women for profit or want to preserve the privilege to jack off to women’s pain and humiliation.
[Note: Having cruised a few sites covering this disgusting event in Canadian history, I’ve noticed that the Barbie of the Ken and Barbie pair receives most of the attention, all of the blame for the crimes, and some sites post nude photos of her taken by Ken to degrade her as they do the female victims of the couple. Thank you, Patriarchy! Well-reported!]
I generally avoid reading about this genre of crimes against girls and women for these very reasons. Given how the media work today, it seems impossible to respectfully cover the crime. News is entertainment. Nothing less, nothing more.
Yet, I somehow managed to run across a video today about that psychopath, Ariel Castro, today. You know – that human stain who kept three girls in his basement as sex slaves for 10 years. How did I get to this video? I have no idea. I had been watching stuff on economics. And then blam! Suddenly, I’ve entered a whole new world, and couldn’t look away, and of course, couldn’t resist reading a few comments. Two things: YouTube videos are often misnamed on purpose. And internet commenters are often stupid. Unbelievable, huh? Anyhow, I started watching this thing, and one of the neighbours actually said: “He was a good man.” And other neighbours were similarly stunned. How could such a decent guy be such a – a what? What is the word for a guy like this?
And so we get down to an important piece of reality. A lot of men lately have been getting pissy when they discover women are increasingly cautious around men, in general. Or are afraid of men, in general. Or have a growing, *defensive hatred of men, in general. Given that neither men nor women can seem to spot a rapist and sadist upon looking at him or even knowing him superficially, and that there are probably a lot more of them out there than we hear about in extreme cases like this Castro horror show, I think that distrust and hatred are perfectly reasonable responses. Think about it this way, if men are doing the raping and hurting and violating, then they need to solve that problem – the onus is on them to earn trust. Women are not responsible for men’s psychopathy.
* Defensive – yes defensive. Notice that when women ‘hate’ men, it is in response to male hate of women. In this case, we know which came first – male hatred. If women hated men first, men would be dying at the hands of women. Often. Instead of the reverse. And really, even our defensive ‘hate’ doesn’t lead to violence and rape like aggressive male hate. Male hissy fits only serve to avoid accepting reality.
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.
My First Week of the Semester or White Whore Put in Her Place by Male Students
As I’ve mentioned before, I am a university instructor of writing, academic English, and general speaking classes in China. I’m 43. I don’t practise femininity, although everyone easily knows I’m a woman cuz I have tits. You’d think that I’d become a little more invisible because of my age and androgynous clothing, but sadly, that is not the case. I’m reminded on a daily basis that I’m a woman and that I exist as sub-human, a sexual object, and there primarily for male use.
When you teach in China, unless you are teaching at an all-female school or are teaching non-science or non-technology majors, you are stuck with classrooms full of dudes. Female students still face many barriers to entry into these ‘male professions’ here, and of course, China is missing millions upon millions of girls because of selective abortion resulting from the One Child Policy. I teach at a technology university, so you know what I’m stuck with. Wall-to-wall dickitude.
Last semester, I was fortunate to have a lot of English-major classes (almost completely female), tourism classes (female-dominated, male minority) and business grad students (equal gender divide). I knew I should cherish that time, and that I would be unlikely to be so fortunate again. Having predominantly female students is a very different experience from having a predominance of male students. It’s a more pleasant, non-aggressive, and intellectual experience. You get more questions about real issues. And all of this matters even more when you’re a female instructor trying to preserve your safety, sanity and dignity.
After such a positive semester of academics and womanhood, this new semester began in stark contrast. Aside from having to tell classrooms full of young men to shut the fuck up and listen every five seconds like they were out-of-control toddlers, misogyny reared its ugly immediately.
First, there were endless comments from the males about what a shame it was that there ‘weren’t enough girls’ in their classes. (I think there were five women in total out of 140 students.) Now, the concern wasn’t because these young men wanted to see equality in science and technology, or that they wanted to do something to rectify China’s history of gynocide, or that they wanted more opportunities for women, in general.
Simply, they wanted more and convenient access to pussy.
To all men in the world, these Chinese boys included, women exist to be looked at and used sexually. So, I wasn’t fooled. These privileged dudes weren’t feeling sorry for women. They were feeling sorry for themselves. It was all about their entitlement.
I watched the faces of the few girls in the class when these comments were made amid the snickers of fellow male classmates. The young women’s faces reminded me of those being victimized in porn or in violent scenes in film/tv. Checked out. Blank. Knowing full well they had no escape from the misogyny of the four years of their degrees or the lifetime following graduation. Knowing that speaking up and defending themselves would unleash the hate and violence that lives in all males. They were trapped and according to Chinese culture, had to accept their fate as objects. It is rare that women speak up for themselves in China, and I’ve only ever witnessed it in one-one-one discussions or in my classes where women predominate. I feel for these young women, and I’ll stand for them as much as I can in class.
And then there was the misogyny directed towards me.
Keep in mind that both elders and teachers are *generally* still given respect in China – unlike in the West, where both older people and teachers are constantly criticized and regularly disrespected, even by small children. So when you see disrespect in China, it is a big fucking deal.
Respect in China, I’ve learned over the years, is meted out differently to men and women. As a woman, and especially as a foreign w̶h̶o̶r̶e̶ woman, I can be easily and justifiably disrespected. And I am constantly disrespected. Out of three classes I conducted during this first week alone, there were three notable instances of disrespect that no man, Chinese or foreign, would experience. Chinese women are not on par with men in this culture either, but I guarantee they are not on the receiving end of unwanted touching or solicitation in a university classroom. So upon first meeting of their university instructor, my classes of dudes gifted me with the following:
- My ownership status was questioned. In an introductory exercise meant to get students thinking about asking questions, I had my surname put on the board. They were meant to come up with: “What is your family/last name?” But no one thought of that. One dude immediately came up with “What is your husband’s name?” (I have to justify my non-married AND childless status every goddamn semester. My male counterparts don’t.) Instead of a justifiable, but unprofessional “FUCK YOU” directed at the student, I decided instead to let the boy know that the name was mine (technically, my rapist, wife-beater grandfather’s…) and that neither was I married nor did women ever need a husband. The class laughed. Of course they would. Women’s words and needs can’t be taken seriously.
- One male student tried to hug me. China is not a cross-sex touchy culture. And you definitely don’t touch strangers, even of the same sex. And no Chinese student over the age of 5 would EVER attempt to touch a teacher, especially on the first day of class. But I am a foreign woman. Thanks to misogynistic Western media (primarily American film and television) and thanks to Chinese misogyny, white women (not black or hispanic or other women of colour) are seen as sluts who are not only obsessed with sex, but who are open to being touched and fucked by every single interested male on the planet. “No” isn’t in our vocabulary. ‘Sex in the City’ is frequently watched here, and provides a model of the typical white, Western woman as public fuck toilet. As a woman who is personally well-acquainted with assault in many countries, I am hyper-vigilant about men, regardless of colour, when they are near me. Nevertheless, I’m frequently surprised by men trying to objectify me, touch me or otherwise assault me in this country. When it happens in the classroom, I get really pissed off because I am not some random, nameless stranger men can rationalize abusing by ‘othering’ me, but a teacher who, according to culture, should be automatically given a modicum of respect. One of my quite young (24), white, female colleagues has told me that the sexual disrespect from males in her classes is quite frequent. She doesn’t know how to deal with it, she admits. I would have thought that being 43, authoritative, very confident, and not overly thin or super attractive would have done the trick, but alas, it appears no woman can escape misogyny. I don’t have a lot of advice for her other than to maintain as much professional distance as possible. She isn’t paid to be either their friend or fuck toy.
- I was asked either as a joke or in seriousness (I’m still not sure, to be honest) in front of a class of 40+ young men whether I could go on a date one of the student’s room mates. I can’t even imagine such a disgusting and disrespectful question being asked publicly of a female prof in a Western university classroom setting. So experiencing this in a Chinese classroom was an incredibly huge insult. Again, no Chinese teacher or foreign male teacher would be so disrespected here.
So in short, that was my first week of teaching. I’ve accepted that every time I leave my apartment, I am at risk. I’m constantly ogled, sometimes assaulted by local men and laughed at when I vocally oppose the assault. But even in my classroom, I’m disrespected and have to be very careful about the actions of my male students towards me.
A white, British, male colleague of mine can’t for the life of him understand why his health thrives in China, but mine is actually worse than when I live in the West. (I suffer chronic depression and anxiety, and I get sick frequently as a result.) He is a white male, the ultimate symbol of power in the world. White men here, as everywhere, are on the top of the heap. Unless rich, they do have fewer rights than Chinese men, of course, simply because working foreigners have fewer rights than say, Chinese tourists in our own countries, but foreign men can walk around in safety in China.
I, on the other hand, have discovered through years of experience in China, that I represent the universal whore – the white woman. Valued for skin colour, seen as animals rather than humans because of our varying eye and hair colours, viewed as sexually insatiable and omni-available thanks to American entertainment, and not taken seriously in any professional way whatsoever. My male acquaintance and I have had very different experiences. Women of other colours are also treated very poorly, but in different ways. Race and sex interact in different ways in different parts of the world, but one thing you can count on – women ALWAYS lose.
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.
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.
—
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 😉
Let’s Kick Things Off
Let’s face it. It is NOT easy being a woman in this world. It never has been, and still isn’t. When compared to all other oppressed groups, women have been enslaved the longest, progress towards their liberation has been the slowest, and it is the group with the largest number of its members refusing to fight back, remaining brainwashed into compliance and self-sabotage. Misogyny has lived and still thrives in all cultures, all nations, all eras, and all age groups.
Misogyny is so ingrained that most people don’t even notice most of it. When it is noticed, many people rationalize it away or develop defense mechanisms to cope with it. Even egregious examples of woman-hate are held untouchable, and those who dare to expose it are attacked mercilessly, even by the oppressed themselves.
Even in this supposedly enlightened day and age (a common way to view one’s current times, despite all evidence to the contrary), the willingness to see women as full human beings doesn’t exist. Those who fight for this very logical wish to be human are castigated, seen as evil pariahs, and likened to the most psychopathic mass murderers in history.
Internet feminism has served to get the word out there. It is still a dangerous, exhausting business, however. Women who speak and who have opinions are universally hated and are at the receiving end of some horrific backlash. I’ve noticed so many feminist sites start up and then die off after a few years. My guess is that having to constantly deal with the ignorance and hate and violence of men online in addition to that which every woman endures in daily life eventually breaks the writers. Part of the problem, I posit, is allowing discussion. Discussion is important for women, but opening up a forum for this online also attracts evil in the form of ignorant men (and some women who don’t want to accept reality). Constantly moderating and being bombarded with idiocy and violence is very psychologically difficult. Only a superwoman could remain immune. And so, my current policy is to write, but disallow comments/discussion. It is for my self-preservation. Writing is healing and intellectual, and getting the words out and repeating the message trumps any secondary need to interact, at this point. If someone reads and learns, that is a bonus.
I link to other feminist sites (in the sidebar) where discussion is possible to varying degrees. Each writer chooses her level of willingness to interact with men who, generally speaking, are too emotional, impulsive, and illogical to realize that they should just be reading and learning.
Story Ending Never 
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