Blog Archives
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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The Ice Cube Effect and Feminism
First: A Cultural Curio
When Canadians cross their southern border to spend time in the US, we notice all sorts of weird and wonderful things about how our cultures differ. So I figured I’d entertain you with a small, but significant, difference (significant if you enjoy a properly prepared beverage, that is) before I use it to help illustrate a very significant problem in feminism today.
When a mild-mannered Canadian finds herself in an American restaurant, she usually gets herself a beverage. It might be water, it might be pop (that’s Canadian for ‘soda’, ‘soda pop’ and other American variations on ‘carbonated beverage’), it might be an alcoholic beverage. But no matter where she finds herself, one thing is true: you get a glass with your beverage of choice, and a massive fucking pile of ice within. It sets you to cussing and looking for an extra glass, plate, ashtray (in the old days) and a spoon, so that you can scoop out most of the ice. Canadians don’t like a lot of ice in their drinks, and we are used to getting a choice about it. Go to any Canadian restaurant and your server (if a good one) will always ask you if you want ice in your drink when you are ordering. Most beverages are already refrigerated and are thus cold enough. And if you choose to get ice in Canada, you get just enough to keep the beverage cold. I learned about this as a small child, but when I lived in the US, I very quickly learned to say “no ice” upon ordering whenever I went out.
What’s the big deal, you might ask. Am I just a princess, or rather, are all Canadians princesses? Do we carry ice within our bodies, coming from the Great White North, as we do? Well no. Of course not. I can’t poop an ice cube to save my life. I occasionally have ice in my drink – a few cubes – but really, I seldom need it given that most bevs are refrigerated beforehand. The big deal is that with all that goddamn ice in your drink, it isn’t long before you have this watered down liquid that is no longer flavourful, satisfying, resembling what you wanted in the first place, and is ultimately not worth drinking. The ice cubes are not only plentiful, but they are also usually small, so they melt quickly, taking over with their own seeming agenda instead of just ‘supporting’ the drink. There is nothing more unsatisfying than an expensive, watered down rum and coke – or even just the coke on its own. Yuck to the nth degree! It always made me wonder whether Americans are just really fast drinkers, sucking down gallons of soda pop lickety split. The ‘unlimited refill’ is ubiquitous in and unique to the US – is it because everyone’s drinks are diluted and the time to enjoy beverage perfection is but a fleeting moment?
Anyhow, silliness aside, the melting ice cube phenomenon has nice imagery and application in other, more serious, areas of life. But please note that any comparison with the US is over. It applied to the non-serious story above only. The following is international in scope, and it is one that affects more than just your taste buds.
And so I come to feminism, my drink of choice. And the ice cubes, you might have guessed, are males.
Males pollute and dilute feminism, and if present in a feminist’s life or in the movement itself, very quickly will take over and impose their own agenda. It makes perfect sense if you allow yourself to think about it. Throughout history, men have ruined everything and have made women’s lives hell on earth through their violence and colonization of every aspect of our controlled lives. If it weren’t for this truth, there wouldn’t be this thing called feminism. In short, if women were liberated with equal access to all resources and opportunities, rights and freedoms, there would be no need for a tall glass of feminism. Feminism is the quest to liberate all women from oppression by males. Kaboom.
And so, like ice cubes in a drink of feminism, the more connections you have to males or the more you try to include males in feminism, the more watered down your feminism is. The ice cubes – males – melt and overwhelm the beauty of the drink. Your pure, simple and explicit feminist agenda turns into some unidentifiable, unsatisfying concoction that no longer serves your original interest. Rum and coke with melting ice becomes watery rum and coke. Feminism with males becomes male-focused ‘feminism’.
This truth will hurt the feelings of many women who consider themselves to be feminists. I’m talking about women who have men in their lives, and especially those with very tight and intense trauma bonds with husbands and sons. When you have pledged to take care of all the emotional, psychological, biological, sexual, and economic needs of a male or males, often to your own detriment as a woman, it is near impossible for you put women first. And putting women first is non-negotiable in feminism. After all, feminism isn’t “freeing women, so long as males aren’t inconvenienced, neglected, held responsible, or have their feelings hurt”. So, I’m sorry if this describes you and you feel defensive. Note that I haven’t said that you can’t call yourself a feminist. I’ve said that your feminism is compromised and diluted because your two investments are not complementary, but rather oppositional or contradictory. Supporting and lurving men does not help women. Rather the opposite, actually.
Even if you don’t have special, special relationships with special, special males, there are other ways men can infect how you approach the plight of women. How you conceptualize gender, violence, the cause of violence, and what your social justice priorities are – even painting your face or dressing like you’re advertising sex (no matter how you rationalize it) – will colour your feminism.
But let’s get down to business. I have some interactive fun – in the form of a quiz!!! – for you so you can explore your own glass of feminism to determine how much ice you have included, and ultimately, how diluted your drink is.
Now, I have graduate education in test design, intent, and analysis and I have government training and practice in measurement issues. So I have thought about and have experience in measuring shit and figuring out how bad our (male-designed) assessment tools are. Please note this: there are many problems with this quiz. Most important, my design tool (Polldaddy) was inadequate for my purposes. I wanted more nuance (e.g., weighted responses, assignment of ‘part marks’, etc.), and it just wasn’t possible. Also important, I haven’t tested this test (e.g., reliability and validity) prior to going public to determine whether it measures what it is supposed to. Hell, I haven’t even run it by a human editor or focus group to determine whether people can actually read and understand it!!! I mean, I have a leg up over other test designers, but without proper testing, proper tools, and needed edits and re-edits, this test is no more serious than some dumb-ass personality or sex quiz you’d find in some dumb-ass women’s magazine. So, what you have here is something that was fun for me to do cuz I’m a big nerd, but which shouldn’t be taken seriously other than perhaps to inspire some self-reflection on how much you are infected by the penis virus.
So if you want to take the “How Diluted Is Your Feminism?” quiz, please click the button. There will be a pop-up window care of Polldaddy. And it has 10 questions. Easy peasy.
Note that you’ll get a percentage at the end of the quiz without any explanation as to what it means. There is no ‘fail’. You can interpret your score how you wish. My only suggestion is that if you are scoring below 50%, you probably need to refresh your drink — and all that that implies.
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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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A World Without Women
[This is part of the Year of the Fantasy series.]
Upon first glance, at least at the title, you might have clicked over assuming that I fantasize about a world without women. Some of you may have even popped a boner at the idea of not having women around at all. Finally. Yeah no. That’s not it. While this is a series devoted to my fantasies (not sexual ones ya big perv), I’m presenting this one not as what I would like the world to be like, but as a sort of satisfying daydream about what men would be in for if they did away with us for good. It’s pseudo-companion-piece to this one where I give a cursory, fantastical look at a world without men. I say with a straight face that women would easily, not only survive, but thrive, if men didn’t exist. We can create life without them, after all. Thank you science! Not so for men. I’d argue that they don’t do away with us for good because a) they can count on (the majority of) us to tolerate the horrific woman-abuse that they impose on us as a condition of being allowed to exist and that they thrive on and would be lost without, and b) they know they would be doomed to extinction if we ceased to exist. Biologically, women can exist without men. Men cannot biologically survive past a single generation without women. They could become cyborgs, perhaps, which is a hilarious thing to comtemplate.
I look at this fantasy with a superior, pitying eye – the kind that girls and women silently give when watching as a boy or man prepares to do something really fucking stupid. We know what will happen when, say, he builds a ‘ski jump’ on his roof so that he can ride his dirt bike off it, do a flip in the air and then land in the backyard swimming pool while his best bud videos the whole thing. We women know he sucks at math and physics, we know he will land, not in the pool but on his ass or head, and break his arm or leg in the process (which we will then be stuck paying for and taking care of). But we are women, he is a man and ‘knows better’, and besides as a man, he will be given recognition and cocksucking from both men and women for being such a smart and brave jackass. We clean it all up, suck his cock along with everyone else, and the world continues its nosedive into the cosmic bin because of another Great Man’s contribution to humanity.
So let’s take a look.
Although homophobia or gay-hate is rooted very clearly and directly in woman-hate, I do believe the beliefs, behaviours and practices of extreme gay male culture à la post-Stonewall scene (described with plentiful references in Sheila Jeffreys’ “Unpacking Queer Culture”) can provide us with some insights into what a womanless world would look like. In other words, while woman-hate would no longer be a significant influence in how men think and behave, many of the thinking processes and behaviours currently practised by ‘liberated’ gay men would hold.
If you do any reading into either straight or gay male ‘thinking’, and I refer to those men who think they are being transgressive or liberated or true to the essential male ideal (and I find gay men much more honest about what they believe and want than straights, in general, for very obvious reasons), you’ll see that absolutely everything revolves around their penises. Everything. Absoultely everything. And it is a very, very, very adolescent philosophy (if you can call it that). Extremely narcissistic, extremely immature, extremely short-sighted, extremely destructive, and extremely sadistic. The very nature of the thinking is antithetical to longevity, creation, planning, and sustainability. I think it would be a very difficult world to live in for men who actually attempt to think. They would be hated, probably in similar ways to how women are hated.
Without women, men would need to have an underclass. The only reason our current world has lasted as long as it has is because women have always been held as slaves expected to do unpaid labour of all sorts and to clean up after and/or mitigate male damage and disasters. Women are enslaved based on their sex and specifically their ability to create life. So how would subordination work if you only have one sex and you can’t impregnate them? It is anyone’s guess. I suspect it would be based on sheer size and strength and ‘intelligence’, just like in the animal world. I think men would return to an animal state, although with much more of a focus on sex than any other species on earth. Men would die much more frequently than they do now at men’s hands, and even more frequently than women do at men’s hands.
It would be a much more violent world than we have ever seen. Women are not a violent sex, so we don’t generally fight back when men try to detroy us with their violence. Without women, men would be victimized and they would fight back. Violence would be constant. It would be a bloodbath.
Disease would be rampant. Not just general disease from lack of nutrition or self-care. We are as healthy as we are because of women. Women are biophiles. We take care of the body, including men’s and boys’ bodies. Without women, male health would falter. But it wouldn’t just be basic disease, it would be sexually transmitted disease. We have as much sex-disease that we do because of men, specifically gay men living risky lifestyles. Bisexual men, including closeted homosexuals who perform hetero-sex to keep up public appearances, will fuck men and then take their diseases home to spouses/girlfriends or to prostitutes. This has always been true. Secret, unsafe, gay sex (and probably sex with animals, since men will fuck literally anything, animate or inanimate, as data from hospitals, psychologists, and self-report, show) led to disease transmission among men and then into the heterosexual world to innocent women. So a world without women would be a disease-ridden world.
There would be little progress intellectually. There would be no women to steal from. There would be no women to keep men on track or to hold them responsible for anything. The few men who might be concerned about keeping the species going would have a very rough time. It would be hard because men can’t create life as women can. Sperm isn’t a life creator. Women’s bodies are the life creators. And sperm isn’t actually as important as men want us to believe. So male ‘thinkers’ would need to come up with a way to engineer life without the benefit of women. And competing with a massive, unregulated, violent, male population unconcerned with anything but sex and domination, would be near impossible.
The world would be filthy. Men don’t connect with the earth and environment in the way that women do. Men see the world as something to be conquered and exploited. Women know their bodies are connected with nature on a very fundamental level. Men choose to use and discard. You can see this with the fairly recent obsession with exploring Mars. “We’ve destroyed Earth. But hey, let’s find another planet to abuse.” It’s always this way with men. Everything is replaceable. Everything is unlimited. Without women, the world would be like a bachelor pad. Stinky, filthy, unnavigable, toxic, waiting for someone to take care of it. Waiting forever.
This is a cursory look at what I fantasize the world without women would look like. I suspect that I’m not far off the money on this. Men would all be dead within a generation and most of them would, like many of the post-Stonewall gay men during the HIV epidemic (as documented in several sources), embrace death and seek to take as many down with them as possible.
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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.
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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2016: Year of the Fantasy
I’ll start with a note on fantasy since I don’t think a lot of people really understand what it means and it is used incorrectly by men (of course) to justify any number of things they do or say or endorse. Men control language, you see, so they can define something one way, and then when it’s to their advantage, they can spin the table.
Fantasy, essentially, is
the act of imagining something impossible or very, very, very unlikely.
All of the video, pictorial, and written porn that exists supposedly falls into that category, and if men decide not to abuse the term ‘free speech’, they’ll fall back on “it’s just fantasy”.
Except that it’s not. The things that happen in porn happen to women, to quote Andrea Dworkin. So porn doesn’t fit the definition of fantasy because it is based on and perpetuates reality. It is violence. It is crime. It is rape. It is reality.
But I don’t want to be sidetracked here. This isn’t a post about men’s vacant inner lives and the need to fill their void with the worst kinds of hate and destruction.
No, this is a post about real fantasy. A woman’s fantasy. My fantasy. It is fantasy because it is impossible (or very, very, very unlikely). The purpose of a fantasy is to escape from the oppression of reality. And who needs to escape more than anyone? Women.
Perhaps 2015 would be better known as the Year of Anger because that’s what it seemed like to me. I’d like to think that this recent period leading up to and including the turn of the year, which has been filled with delightful thoughts of a world that is not possible, will continue through the remainder of the year. We’ll see. I hope so. I tend to be a realist and that is not necessarily a fun place to be – ask any woman who rejects feminism. She can’t handle it because it is a framework based on reality and reality is fucking depressing. And who wants that? Jeez.
I am fantasizing about a world with no men. I don’t care how they disappear. That has not yet entered into the equation. All I have at this point is an established world that doesn’t know men and certainly doesn’t fantasize about having them there! In many ways, it is unimaginable – as I said, it is pure fantasy. We have nothing to base the fantasy on except the negation of the current wrongs, or the opposite of what currently exists. It’s simplistic, but a starting place for a person or people who have known nothing other than slavery and whose history has been effectively erased to support the maintenance of that slavery.
So indulge me in a cursory look at the start of my fantasy, in the form of a list, which is no more than a woman’s surface look at what taking away the testosterone element might effect. At this point, I’m working from the negation/elimination of the current evils men have perpetrated and that have led to widespread destruction. I firmly believe women would not have gone down that same path as we don’t destroy ourselves of our own free will. Once you start thinking about everything you could do if you didn’t have to worry about the threat of men in all areas of life, you find yourself with endless possibilities. I truly think that without men, society would have achieved infinitely more in a much shorter amount of time. Woman-hate is a time and resource waster, a distraction.
Without men, we would have under the following topics:
Sexual Safety
- No rape
- No fear at night
- No sexual harassment or intimidation
- No sexual assault
- Little to no violent crime
- No gangs
- No dominance/submission structures
- No BDSM or sexual power play
- No prostitution
- No stripping/pole dancing/demeaning ‘sex work’ of any kind
- No sex/human trafficking
- No missing girls or women
- No slavery
- No pornography
- No surveillance
- No need for a police force (mediators, perhaps)
- No misogyny
Global/Community Safety
- No property ownership
- No vandalism
- No weapons (other than practical ones for hunting)
- So, no guns, no bombs, no biological weapons, no nuclear weapons
- No territorial disputes
- No need for armies
- No terrorism
- No spies
- No diplomats
- No peacekeepers
- No war
- No refugees
- No racism
Economics
- No money-based system
- No drive for material wealth/possessions
- No bullshit ‘women love shopping’ myth/propaganda
- No corruption
- No privileged class
- No underbelly social class
- No ridiculous demeaning jobs
- No strikes
- No sweatshops
- No greed
- No poverty
- No classism
Ideology
- No religion
- No ignorance
- No blind faith
- No dogma
- No irrational punishments and requirements
- No negation of truth or knowledge
- No needless shame
- No ideological persecution
- Commitment to truth rather than preservation of lies
Social Structure and Breeding
- No family
- No marriage
- No domestic slavery
- No pair bonding
- No forced breeding
- Little need for abortion (medical only)
- No pregnancy worship or denegration
- No myth surrounding biological clocks ticking
- Possible alternatives to natural pregnancy
- Low birth rate / population
- No unwanted children
- No male children
- No orphanages
- No street kids
Health
- No monetization of healthcare
- Universal healthcare
- No denial of services
- Longer life spans without the obsession with longevity
- No sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV
- Little mental illness
- No mental illness stigmatization
- No anorexia / morbid obesity
- Little needless surgery
- Easy, non-stigmatized, humane access to assisted suicide
- Integrated, healthy relationships between patients and all practitioners of the health arts
- Health research not tied to agendas, cover-ups, fuelled instead by a willingness to explore all avenues
- No animal research
The Body
- No ridiculous focus on youth or beauty
- No gender
- No trans nonsense
- No body hate or image problems
- No cutting or self-mutilation
- Comfortable, woman-centric clothing
- No make-up or other hate-driven, toxic/harmful masking behaviours
- No body-destroying fashion
- No illogical body rituals (shaving, bleaching, whitening, etc)
- No surgery designed to ‘augment’ the body
Environment
- No global warming
- No needless waste
- No needless killing of animals
- No water, air, soil pollution
- No massive cities
- Only clean energy
- No property/money/patent-oriented messing with food
- No monocrops
- No large-scale agriculture
- Community gardens
- No animal farms
- Focus on biodegradable products
- Composting, vermiculture
- No chemical pesticides
- Environment-focused, local growing
- No introduced species (animals, plants, fungi, bacteria)
Education
- Complementary technology for life assistance and co-existence rather than life destruction
- No education-as-childcare mentality
- Multiple styles of education available regardless of age
- No rigid age-to-grade classes
- Regular person-focused educational needs assessments
- Universal education to all who want it
- No priority subject areas
- Premium information search tools and information repositories, untainted by pornography and violence
There is so much more. This is just off the top of my head. And I’ll fully admit that it is only a starting point. As I stated earlier, when living in a slave system, it is hard to imagine a world of possibilities and so you must begin imagining the opposite of what you have.
It Takes a Village
[First, a big shout out to all the trans who popped over from Facebook for a visit to learn about how you are using your male entitlement and natural, biological propensity for narcissism, violence and misogyny in order to abuse women and take away hard-earned rights. I’m sorry I don’t allow comments on this site, so you likely had to limit your rape and death threats (you know, male violence against women) to the Facebook vacuum and whatever space exists between the ears. But anyhow, thanks for the blog hits, boys! Traffic is always appreciated, and as an educator and life-long learner, I fully and sincerely endorse your commitment to information-seeking. I hope I could help.]
This current post has nothing to do with trans issues. It was inspired by last night’s short venture out to find some food as my apartment’s fridge was empty except for a green pepper and a small jar of hot chili paste care of a friend from Hunan province. The post was also inspired by the latest posts by and subsequent back and forth on essentialism and socialization with other bloggers.
This post got published and then sent to draft since I thought it was too long, and now I’ve reworked it into something more digestible (maybe).
Background: Children
I don’t like kids, generally speaking. There, I said it. I’m the fucking devil, and I can sense hackles rising around the world as people dig in for a full-scale, personal attack on their individual little monsters. Advice: if you’re getting pissy, don’t throw a hissy. I’ve managed not to kill anyone even though I’ve had it up to here (here being really far up my ass) with mostly women and the occasional douchbag mansplaining man giving me all kinds of nasties about wanting to be childless since I was yay tall (yay tall being about the level of where my ass hangs now) and then achieving it. You like kids, I don’t. Who cares? Although I suspect there are plenty of people who don’t like kids who have ’em. I’ve met plenty. And I say, poor kids. I know first hand what that feels like.
Background: Families
The family unit is one of the worst social inventions men have ever come up with in history. It is solely based on and only survives because of a slavery or ownership model. Traditionally, the man of the household owns the home and assets, including his sex and domestic slave (wife) and all children, whether blood-spawn or adopted. He may also have dominion over other female and under-aged relatives. And he can do whatever he pleases with them as they are all trapped there and meant to serve with a smile. The family unit provides the easiest and cheapest possible way for a man to repeatedly access human prey (women and children). The family unit is the most effective way to hobble a woman and destroy her from the inside out in a long, drawn-out sorta way. And the family unit is the worst possible government-sanctioned environment in which to socialize a child (maybe aside from an orphanage). I’m very much of the village model in child raising. That old proverb (origin unknown, common in many older cultures) “it takes a village” has value. Everyone should have some responsibility in ensuring a child becomes an upstanding citizen, although I’m also in favour of keeping men away from children, especially girls, as they inevitably promote patriarchy and good ole male dominance and female inferiority, and frequently turn to them for sexual amusement.
Somewhere along the way in the family model, we’ve run across things like jumping to conclusions about parents based on limited evidence of something ‘going wrong’. Appearances can be deceiving. We also have a shitload of parents who a) are overworked and absent and who try to assuage guilt by trying to be their children’s friends rather than their parents or by buying them off or mollycoddling them (a sad inevitability of capitalism and the pursuit of wealth/excess), and b) are so out of touch with current society/rape culture that they have no idea the kinds of stuff their children are getting involved with or accessing (porn, drugs, sex, violence, gangs). Kids are disconnected, community members don’t care what’s happening unless they are finger-pointing at parents (which isn’t constructive) or guarding their shit. Moral systems and social/human connectedness need to be a group effort. When everyone feels invested in children, children see themselves as worthy and invest back – everyone wins, and a group effort means less work for all.
Background: Animal Abuse
I love animals. I like them better than people for the most part. Along with pro-lifers and rapists and pedophiles and pornographers and prostitute users, there is a special place on my shit list for animal abusers. When I was five, we came back home to where my stay-at-home mum was imprisoned to find our dog locked in the basement with duct tape wound tightly around her muzzle. For how long? Hours? All day? Mum hated animals and children, and I’m glad patriarchy and a controlling husband provided her with unwanted children and an unwanted pet and then forced her to stay home with them 24/7. Still, she gets some blame here – she was a chronic, narcissistic abuser in addition to being a victim, and no abuser gets a free pass in my world. To this day, I try to protect animals when I can to make up for mother’s sins.
And being informed is important. I forced myself to watch “Earthlings” (everyone should – it’s horrific) and cried my way through it just like I do documentaries on porn and human sex trafficking.
Bringing it all together
So last night, I donned my hazmat suit to protect me from my usual dose of misogynistic racism that I’m gifted with whenever I go outdoors, and ventured into the commercial area near my residence. It was early dark. I stood at the corner waiting for the light to change and looked back over my shoulder at the little fruit shop I sometimes go to. In the summer, one of the employees got a sweet little orange kitten (I have a very soft spot for the oranges), which they kept tethered at the side of the shop. Recently, since she has grown quite a bit in size, they’ve been tying her up at the front of the shop to two cement blocks (see the second photo). where, she can sit front and centre for all to admire, interact with, and unfortunately, abuse.
Animals are seen differently in China than they are in the West. Only recently have people started adopting a ‘pet mentality’ similar to, but not as prevalent as in, the West. Really, pets are just domesticated animal slaves. We are emotionally attached to them, but we have done more harm than good, I think, in changing them in very fundamental ways. I say this as a domesticated animal lover. Humans are selfish. Anyhow, in China, there still is quite a difference in how animals are viewed and treated. I find that many ‘pets’ I encounter are quite a bit different from the pets of my Western friends. Although I am a ‘toucher’ (I can’t keep my hands off animals if they approach and want to be petted), I seldom touch animals in China. First, they are a bit feral, not human-oriented, and they generally don’t approach humans. Affection isn’t common among humans (it is amazing how many of my undergrads have never said ‘I love you’ to their parents or heard it from their parents). And it isn’t really common with animals either. And second, they are generally dirty and often diseased. One of my students died of rabies a few years back when his pet cat bit him. It’s not so uncommon in southern China. I’d prefer not to die of rabies.
But this little orange cat, although very dirty, is incredibly friendly and loves to be petted. So I oblige. It appears to be mutually beneficial.
Now when I turned back while standing at the traffic lights, I saw the little orange tethered to and sitting atop the cement blocks. In a circle surrounding her was a group of children, mostly boys with a couple of girls. They were young, ranging in age from about 5 to 8. One adult man – one of the fathers? – was looking on wielding a cell phone camera capturing the hijinks. And there were other adults, including the shop owner, the cat owner, and various workers standing around. The children were tormenting the cat. Smacking her. Dropping garbage on her. Poking her. And laughing their asses off. I was horrified. The cat was cringing, terrified, flattening herself to the cement block, realizing there was nowhere for her to go. I was surprised she wasn’t hissing or trying to bite/scratch. And it went on and on. I noticed the adults didn’t give a shit. I don’t really like the word ‘triggered’, but I think at that moment, I was triggered. All I could see, despite the young age of these little shits and despite the tormented object being a young cat, was a group of men torturing a woman prior to raping and or beating her to death. It was just so fucking familiar from porn, from mainstream film, and even from actual video from places where male mobs attack lone women for some bullshit infraction like wearing the wrong clothes. I couldn’t walk away. So I stomped over to put a stop to the bullshit. Very, very un-Chinese. I broke social rules with that one decision. The rule here is not to intervene when you see something wrong, when a person you don’t know needs help. But you can stare all you want. I called bullshit and moved in. Luckily, I speak some Chinese, so I told them Enough! This is a good cat. Be nice. And I demonstrated how to pet her. Immediately, the cat’s posture normalized a little. The kids were freaked to have a foreign person in their face. And I waited for them to go away. I don’t know if they got the message. They did realize, however, that fun times were over.
I feel I’m part of the village, even in this distant land, that needs to contribute to socializing, instilling humanity and perspective-taking and valuing life in the young. How can they grow up to be decent people if they don’t learn? The problem is this, though. I was the only one who saw what was going on as wrong, or at least the only one willing to demonstrate that I saw it as wrong. If the patriarchal ‘village’ doesn’t see violence against women, children, animals, (pick a group) as wrong, how will children learn? And further, the sadistic tendencies in this mostly-male group of children are unfortunately biological, so can they actually learn and truly understand that sadism is wrong, even if the correct socialization is in place…?
There is more to think about here. But in the meantime, I feel like going on a cat rescue mission. I wish I had a stable enough lifestyle to support a cat.
The Male Therapist (Post-Christmas Navel-Gazing)
I’ve never been to therapy.
I think I badly need it, but I know I won’t ever go. And I’ve come to realize why this will never happen.
I was raised and abused by a father who was a male therapist. I won’t (in this post) even touch on my even more abusive mother (who was not a therapist). Between the two of them, I grew up to be an emotionally paralyzed, very confused, silent, angry, socially anxious and awkward, depressed individual, and then was further abused by these parents for being emotionally paralyzed, very confused, silent, angry, socially anxious and awkward, and depressed. Exactly the kind of person who could use a little therapy to untwist the emotional twine binding her.
But as I said, I’ll never go. Even though I went on to formally study psychology for years, I kept to the hard sciencey specializations (statistics, neuroscience, psychometry) and kept all my clinical dealings as a sideline through clinical and forensic research projects, coursework and collaboration/friendship with the more interesting of the clinical (female) crowd.
Even in the thick of things, I still declined therapy while feeling I desperately needed it at the same time. Instead, I self-examined. I know exactly what’s going on with me thanks to years of this relentless questioning and probing. Unfortunately, therapists are useful creatures – you can self-examine all you want and still not make much progress towards balance or health. Therapists are guides, and they are supposed to support you when you are at your most exposed and vulnerable.
As I am an expert in mind-fuckery, I often think about therapy professions. That was what I wanted to be as a kid, and I discarded it in college. At the time, I thought my classmates were too wishy-washy, and hey, I was really good at math and experimental design, but looking back, I know that I left because it was too threatening. Part of me didn’t want to have to address the nasty truths in my life and thus become vulnerable. I knew what vulnerable was and the therapist I grew up with both made me vulnerable and exploited it relentlessly. Who wants more of that?
And as I’ve explored the therapy professions (social work, clinical psychology, clinical psychiatry, etc), I keep coming back to the same question or set of questions.
What draws men to this line of work? And more specifically, what draws men to therapy for female victims of sex crimes (rape, sexual assault, incest)?
Let’s come back to this and talk about female therapists first.
First off, not all female therapists are good and/or appropriate for your needs. The therapist’s professional orientation may not line up with yours. The therapist has been educated by the patriarchy and likely holds patriarchal views of women and their illnesses. Speaking from experience with clinical psych undergrad and postgrad students and professors, many therapists (male and female) are not the most stable themselves. People with problems tend to gravitate towards this profession and the field is sooo competitive that often, only the most obsessive and neurotic are given admittance to programs. I can’t speak for social work programs, but most of the practitioners I’ve met have been really weird people with weird agendas. But I DO believe that it is people with problems who are exactly the people who should be working in these fields because they understand first-hand what the patient is going through. It is important, however, that the therapist have worked out her issues to minimize the intrusion of said issues into her patient/client’s situation.
All said, there are tons of well-meaning women who gravitate towards the helping professions. Well-meaning doesn’t mean effective or correct, but it is a starting place. Men don’t often have even the correct starting place.
To speak more specifically about work with female victims of sex-based crimes (aka hate crimes against women), it is easy to understand why women get into it. Women want to help women. Therapists are often victims themselves. Oh who am I kidding, all women are victims of at least one sex-based offense and are exposed to male filth on a daily basis. Female therapists want to get in there and do some good. Are they going about it the right way? I don’t know. I don’t think most of women’s energy expenditure actually makes any progress towards ending male violence. But someone has to put on the band-aids, I suppose.
I’ve also known female therapists who’ve worked with rapists and men who sexually assault women and children. I can even understand why women gravitate towards this. The work is, of course, pointless. You can’t fix men, and you absolutely can’t fix a rapist. But again, women pour endless energy into trying to fix male problems that can’t be fixed. It’s a misplaced, erroneous belief in male ‘goodness’ (whatever) and a desire to keep women safe. *Sigh*
So we come back to men. I’ve written about men and the helping professions and volunteer work before. What could possibly bring men specifically into wanting to ‘help’ female victims of sex-based crimes? It boggles the mind. Men have little capacity for empathy, and I have never met a man who can wrap his head around the fear women live with daily as a result of forced proximity to men. So to deliberately be around and ‘help’ female victims isn’t a problem in their minds. The last thing women need after victimization by a man, however, is to be made even more exposed and vulnerable with a man controlling her aftermath. Male therapists must be looking for control or a vicarious experience or something. Perhaps they are invested in putting forth a male agenda in ‘managing’ female victims. Does he want to show that ‘not all men are bad’? How completely selfish and self-centred, if that is the case.
We have a new problem with aggressive MtT’s targeting battered women’s shelters and demanding to work there and be put into direct contact with female victims. They are becoming so self-centred and disrespectful that they are bringing law suits to fight for their right to access female victims. Why are they doing this? Is it an attempt to use women’s real experiences to build up their own sense of victimhood? Whatever they are doing, it is assault. It is disgusting. And it needs to be stopped.
Men also love to gravitate towards helping male sex offenders. I have personal experience with one of these creatures. I was taking a course in a form of counselling and was paired up by phone with a black, American, Christian man who headed up his own church and specifically helped rapists get on their feet after (unfortunately) being released from prison. He and I were to do ‘counselling’ sessions on the phone. He was controlling of me from the very beginning, and took advantage of my commitment to the course. He cancelled our sessions, let me do all the work, and would take other phone calls while we were in the middle of a counselling session. But he was smarmy, saying all the right things to smooth things over. If I were 20, I would have accepted the abuse and chided myself that as a WHITE woman, I supposedly was the privileged one. But I was older and well-versed in how all men have privilege over all women regardless of other group membership. Penis trumps vagina, regardless of race, every single time. One day, I called him on his repeated disrespect of me, and the truth came out. He attacked me mercilessly, and threw all the information I’d given him in my vulnerable state as counsellee in my face. And then he played the god card – he knew I was an atheist, and let me know I was shit because of it. Pure abuse. I suspect he was a ‘recovered’ rapist himself. I put my foot down, complained to the school, and only after my fellow student attacked the teacher was he thrown out of the program.
So, I suspect that sex offenders help sex offenders, and any man who gravitates towards therapy for female victims or male offenders is just there to perpetuate the system of abuse, keep the male agenda alive and well, ‘help’ women to put their experience in a compartment and not paint all men or the patriarchy as bad, and experience personal control and vicarious excitement over female victimization. I advocate for keeping men out of all professions where they have access to vulnerable women and girls.
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.
New Series: The Birth of a Feminist
I’m beginning a new series in my sidebar. It will be the Birth of a Feminist series, a record of what went into my formation, or I suppose I should say rebirth (given my understanding of feminism) as a radical feminist.
I was raised academically as a quantitative analyst. A boys’ club to be sure. Statistics are important in describing problems and in predicting outcomes, and being able to quantify things is useful to some extent for a variety of reasons. I was further raised in this tradition to pooh-pooh everything that seemed subjective or qualitative – we were ‘hard’ scientists in the ‘soft’ science of psychology – there was a lot of posturing needed, of course, to make sure *our* dicks stayed hard. This is how men roll. The unspoken rule was that that qualitative shit was the domain of women. Women and their experiences. Women and their stories. Women and their emotional ties to information. And I believed it for some time. I didn’t take my fellow graduate students in community and social psychology so seriously. After all, I was mapping the brain and quantifying male-defined forms of intelligence. I had access to numbers. I was using math. So there. We win.
And then years later, I went back to graduate school expecting to do more work in numbers and business and technology, and I found myself exposed to different forms of knowledge creating, dissemination and preservation. I learned about the art and value of story-telling. I learned about the complexities of non-quantifiable knowledge exchange. It was fascinating. I followed that academic degree with a year of research with a group of doctors and, more interestingly and importantly, qualitative analysts. Our work was in mixed-methods (quant and qual working together). I realized that numbers only take you so far. You need stories and personal accounts and understanding and sometimes including biases to truly explain reality. You need both. I felt I improved as a researcher. I was humbled. Humility is essential in a researcher. So I see value in stories. They have an important place in our record. Our early ancestors communicated this way, and somehow we moved away from it as men have come to dominate.
So anyhow, onto Genesis: my series on the (re)birth of a feminist.
Genesis:
the origin or mode of formation of something
Feminists, or women-centred women:
- are born;
- swiftly and relentlessly undone and subordinated; and then
- remade through
- experience resulting from
- systematic, impersonal misogyny through rape culture, and
- unique, chance encounters with particular individuals, times, places, and situations;
- and glimmers of remembrance of the collective memories of feminists-past lying in their subconscious.
- experience resulting from
Or something along those lines.
If I think about how I became a feminist, that is how I would describe it. I think all girls are born to be free. The majority (excluding those with the propensity for the nastier of the personality disorders) are born with the capacity to be free, intelligent, creative, empathic, mindful, and cooperative.
I think girls are born into the flavour of subordination dictated by their culture/patriarchy whereupon all members are subject to that culture’s indoctrination. But girls are also individually stripped of their birthright to feminism upon entry into the world when all the ‘cutesy’, protective, paternalistic, and dismissive, underestimating treatment particular to their family/group starts.
All girls test out rebellion – a natural response to the language-free remembrance of their real woman-defined purpose as women through what Jung* termed the ‘collective unconscious’ – in small ways. They defy gender-defined behaviour. They break rules designed for them as girls. And they are smacked down in a variety of ways – verbal, emotional, psychological, physical and sexual punishment. For almost all girls, this works effectively to keep them in their chains and then to do the work themselves to keep the chains in place unquestioned.
* [Note: I have little use for the misogynist, Jung.]
For others, for one reason or another, the punishment doesn’t take. The call of the wild, the natural, their real purpose is too strong. And they take a better, but harder, path. The one to feminism. Woman’s natural and rightful state.
This collection of stories was/is my path to feminism. Many of the punishments worked on me, but my feminism was always so close to the surface of consciousness, that in the end, I got back to where I belong.
Genesis I: The Girl and The Stranger in The Car
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.
Why I’d Rather Deal With Women
If we remove from the population all those men and women with unfixable and publicly dangerous mental health problems such as personality disorders (psychopaths and narcissistic personality disordered individuals, specifically), I can easily make the blanket statement that I’d rather deal with women exclusively in all areas of life. I’d even go so far as to say that my life would improve immeasurably, and I wouldn’t shed a single tear, if I never saw another male – adult or child – ever again in my life. Just thinking about it fills me with this wistfulness, this longing, this impression of wings unfurling and endless possibilities and freedom. And then I remember that it’s an impossible dream, and I sink back into the cocoon I call ‘survival mode’ that is what awakened feminists must live in, daily.
I’m sure many people have their backs up, their knickers in a twist, and knives sharpened at what I’ve just intimated. Defensive retorts after a split second of recognition on the lips of women. Threats of violence, misogynist slurs, and haughty, mansplanatory rationalizations in the minds of men. I see you all.
But I don’t care. My fantasy world without men is a safe world. A good world. A sane world. A healthy world. In my fantasy, it is that way. If it were to become reality, I have no doubt it would indeed be safe, good, sane and healthy. Because this fantasy is borne of 43 years of experience of the violence, fear, hurt, damage, threats, filth, disrespect, insanity, cruelty, coldness, incomprehensibility, greed, pride, othering, dehumanizing, and death, death, death that is the male gift to the world. No amount of rationalizing or lies or rare exceptions provided by men or the women who support them in serious denial can controvert thousands of years of evidence, nevermind the evidence of one 43-year-long life.
Again, removing the most dangerous of men and women and looking at the average person, I can say the following confidently. Dealing with the average woman is much different – and better – than dealing with the average man.
The absolute, most important difference between dealing with men and dealing with women is safety. I don’t feel safe with strange men, but I also don’t feel safe with men I know. Anything can and does happen. Betrayal can happen in the blink of an eye depending on how his dick feels that day, how he interprets your non-verbals in relation to his ‘needs’, or how threatened he is by your intelligence, talent, attitude or confidence. Any of these variables can lead to his violence against you. I’ve never felt unsafe with a woman, stranger or known. Men can’t understand this feeling of unsafeness. Men don’t look over their shoulders. Men don’t evaluate options or potential outcomes for travel or just getting from Point A to Point B prior to setting out. Men don’t worry about having their identities or home locations known. Men don’t worry about friendships with women or what it means to accept help from them, whether there is an unspoken or unacceptable price to pay down the line. I’d rather a female delivery person or electrician enter my home than a male. I’d rather have a meeting with a female client than a male. Safety issues touch every aspect of your life. And women are safer to deal with.
Men make everything filthy and dehumanizing. This is, of course, tied to safety – with men, sex and violence cannot be separated. I can contemplate any neutral scenario or even a potentially sexual scenario, and as soon as I imagine a man entering that scenario, it is ruined. I have an automatic pulse of revulsion, of anger, of fear. They sexualize everything, including the unsexual or neutral. And in a potentially sexual situation, the way they sexualize is degrading, humiliating, unequal, and can make you feel dirty. Their presence automatically imposes hierarchy on a situation where no hierarchy exists. If it is a discussion, the entrance of a man changes the dynamic for the worse. He becomes the sun around which everyone orbits. If I think about a roomful of women in a state of undress, it doesn’t have to be sexual at all. Just human. Functional. Natural. It could be sexual – but in a clean, joyous, equal way. I think this is how sex would be between women living without the taint of Patriarchy ‘dirtifying’ everything. As it is, I think many lesbians look for ‘dirty sex’ and that is a marker of Patriarchal conditioning. But anyways, the thought of a man entering any kind of dynamic makes it filthy for me. I’m still trying to analyze this in a way that I can express, but it first struck me tangibly that I felt that way when I was about 30 and still trying to hold onto the idea that men were at least part of my sexual landscape. It’s material for another post.
Women don’t impose insanity or irrationality upon situations. Perhaps it’s because women have natural (yes, I said it – natural!) tendencies to listen, empathize, sympathize, relate and cooperate, but negotiations with a woman (who doesn’t fit into the mental illness categories described above) seldom become ridiculous. It’s actually very easy to develop consensus with women or to work together on a project when the taint of Patriarchy is as absent as possible. With men, on the other hand, things can be crazy. Dominance is always present. There is always a power-play, and the less you wish to be dominated, the more insane, irrational (and violent) a situation with a man can become. Men don’t cooperate – they dominate. If they can’t dominate, they get violent one way or another, and often will abandon or sabotage a project if they don’t get their own way.
Women are concerned with health. I like dealing with women because they think about health in a different way. Men don’t think about health because the women in their lives do it for them. Women will talk about health and problems and how they are related and will share information. I think this is a remnant from older times when wise women and healers and those of their persuasion had some prominence. When men took over (and by took over, I mean discredited and often tortured and killed these women) the health realm, they turned it into a business. It became another field in which to dominate women, and a new realm for greed, profit, sadistic experimentation (power) and prominence/fame. Although I’ve worked in health policy, health research, and worked extensively with and for doctors, I find the whole world revolting and frightening. I truly think there is an opportunity for women to take it back and return to the old ways.
—
Our world is currently one where dealing exclusively and authentically with women is roadblocked by men in multiple ways. The effects of this have been serious. With men in the way, we have lost our safety, our purity (not to be confused with the religious bullshit concept of purity), our sanity, and our health. If only fantasy could become reality.
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.
♀️ If you care to support Story Ending Never, we are appreciative. ⚢
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.
What You Won’t Find in Discussions of Syria
I’ve been reading about the latest nonsense in the Syrian saga and refugee crisis, and one thing strikes me – not as odd, but as typical.
There is no mention of the fact that only in a world run by men is this kind of horror story possible.
With men in charge, you get dominance paradigms. You get religion; you get female slavery; you get baby-overproduction through enforced pregnancy and rape; you get guns, bombs, tear gas; you get human trafficking; you get war, war, war.
None of the articles I’ve read has mentioned the word Patriarchy. Neither has any criticized the disgraceful, violence of Islam. Everything is couched in political terms that takes responsibility away from men as a group. It’s the government elite or radicals/fanatics, not men, not religious men.
Neither this nor any other ‘political’ problem will ever be solved until we can get down to it and call it what it is: a direct result of Patriarchy, religion and the enslavement of women.
But without men shitting all over the world on a daily basis, what would the media write about? War and violence make money on so many fronts. We’re addicted, and peace under rational equality and freedom would take all the fun and adventure out of life.
Is it a Necessary Concession?
Something is troubling me. Well, okay, many things trouble me, but at this time of writing, there is something at the top of the shit heap that is looking me in the eye and smirking at me.
It’s the whole male feminist thing.
In theory, I really have no trouble at all with men getting on board with advocating for women as full human beings and supporting them liberating themselves from sex-based oppression. In an ideal world, the word ‘feminist’ wouldn’t even exist because all men and all women (if we even retained those words) would exist outside the deeply damaging gender binary (note that I mean gender in the real sense – social construction demeaning women and elevating men, rather than immutable biological sex), and everyone would go about their lives in an endless liberated, safe space. But as it is, we are nowhere near that ideal, and we have this thing called ‘feminism’, defined in a myriad of different ways and with some sometimes worrying underlying goals. I’m currently taking a hard look at motivations of those men who choose to put on the mantle.
When a woman who calls herself a feminist, especially a feminist activist, and behaves in ways that support the label (actions are much more important than labels – always), she talks about rights for all women. I have never once heard a true activist feminist talk about what she expects feminism to do for her. This type of person doesn’t see social movements in terms of what she personally is going to get out of it. The best feminists I’ve met or read or listened to act for those less fortunate, less able, less privileged than themselves. That is, in fact, how social change works. When you act as an individual to benefit an individual (i.e., yourself), you’re not part of a group or a movement. I’m not saying that it is wrong for one to act for oneself – what is wrong is when one claims to be part of a movement/group and demands acknowlegdement of that status.
And so I come to the male feminist.
I have never heard a male feminist talk about what he is (purportedly) doing for those less fortunate than himself. What I so frequently hear when male feminists talk (whether they are writing their own articles, or more commonly, hijacking an online thread in a women’s space) is that men suffer in the Patriarchy toooooo. Women are oppressed, but men are oppressed by having to conform to masculine ideals, the poor fuckers.
Give me a break.
While, yes, I think that life probably isn’t as deep or fulfilling when you lack empathy as so many men do after being socialized in our cock-worshipping world, by the very definition of Patriarchy, MEN DO NOT SUFFER LIKE WOMEN DO. To be honest, I suspect that males are not biologically wired to experience empathy – how else could they create such a horrible system of control and violence and literally get off on it?
Of course, masculinity standards suck, but they are not degrading, repressive, disempowering, harmful, expensive, painful, or dangerous like femininity requirements are. And when you do perform femininity, the rewards are not quite as automatic or awesome or cut-and-dry as those for masculinity performance are (e.g., you can still find yourself degraded or raped cuz you look like a perfectly made up, conforming, hot, cock-sucking slut).
Sure, it must blow if you have to hide a tiny cock away in your pants in a world that worships big cocks, but it sucks even more when you’re not safe just walking down the street while wearing your natural tits on your chest, regardless of size, hidden or not, deliberately slutting or not.
It’s a given that life is hard when, as a dude, you’re relegated to relatively well-paying construction or car sales jobs when you don’t have an education, but it is hell on earth when, as a girl or woman, your only option for survival (sometimes despite a university degree) is to be raped for money as a prostitute.
Patriarchy is so very hard on men, as you can imagine.
When charities approach corporations for badly needed donations, they often frame the donation in terms of what giving that money will do for the corporation. It’s usually along the lines of it improving the image of the company and thereby increasing profits. It’s yucky, but corporations and capitalism are dudely inventions, so go figure. When I see feminists doing the same thing to garner support from men for the feminist movement, I feel a more than a little sick. “Join us, we know you are hurt by the Patriarchy too.”
Hey! Men don’t suffer from sex-based oppression. Women do. That’s why it’s called Women’s Liberation, Feminism, etc.
When men sign on as feminists so they can improve the currently horrible male experience, they are missing the plot. But is that all we can expect of them? They are, after all, members of the oppressor class. Privilege breeds blindness and self-centredness. Women are seldom allowed to claim quid pro quo when dealing with men (especially), so participation in a movement is not really a huge step for them. But I really have yet to see a man do anything that doesn’t involve him expecting something out of it – even if the something is just recognition – for himself. Is a selfless act, nay, a selfless life, even possible for men at this point in time? Must women downplay their own oppression and fabricate victim status for the oppressors to get them on board as honourary members?
Jeezus cripes. I think that making such a serious concession can only come back and bite feminists in the collective oppressed ass later on. We already see it, for example, in places where men have taken over “Take Back the Night” marches and insist on standing at the front of the group. (Men aren’t safe at night either!!!! Fucking ‘ell.) But it can get so much worse. Personally, I think we don’t need to invite men to participate if they can’t understand what’s going on. If they choose to participate – which is always better than conscription – they must first accept the idea of ‘support role’ and then let go of the whole what about me-me-me approach they take in most things they do. And personally, I don’t hand out special recognition or awards for acting like a human.
Hell, is a real movement even possible at this point?
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.
Story Ending Never 
All Along the Watchtower
Dec 27
Posted by storyending
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 ♀ ♥
I’ve called myself a feminist for a long time. I’ve had ‘crazy’, unspeakable-in-public, totally ‘offensive’ notions since I was quite young. But I’ve never been formally educated in feminism, I had no stable or lasting feminist role models in my life, nor did I seek out specifically feminist writing until not that long ago. And getting to where I am (and where I am still going) has been a process. I’ve made tons of mistakes with regard to men and how to frame my reality in a man-made world. I’ve had realizations that didn’t have complete impact until years later – when I was ready for their full force. This is all part of the development of a radical feminist that I’ve begun writing about in my Birth of a Feminist series.
About a year ago, I realized I was missing and needing something in my life. I was feeling lost, hurt, alone, lonely, chronically and mildly depressed, and unable to come up with at least a short-term plan or desire or motivation for the future (which is unusual for me – the survivor, the Plan/Strategy Queen). Without a lot of thinking about it, I found myself one day googling radical feminism, and a year later, I’m in deep. What had been missing was a philosophical system that spoke to me and how I work and that could help me pull everything together and make sense of the world. No other philosophy has ever done this for me. You see, they’ve all been male-orientated, and I’m not a fucking male. That initial internet search drove me directly to some of the most hard-core radical feminist blogs around (or archived). And I was home. I lamented that had I been able to find such intelligent, outspoken and honest women sooner, life would have looked quite a bit different. I think a lot of the misery could have been avoided. And I might not be stuck in China completely and utterly isolated from the kind of women (especially near’ish my age and older) I really need and want to be around. But better late than never?
Well, yes. Better late than never. Radical feminism saved my life. And that is not a unique sentiment. I’ve read it and heard it countless times by women who, one way or another, found themselves in RF’s comforting arms. Radical feminism gives you a framework in which to understand why you feel so damned angry, why you don’t fit in, and why the majority of people not only don’t understand you, but often react violently to you when you state your opinions and experiences.
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As you’re getting your footing among women who’ve been RFing for years, and finding out where you’ve gone right and wrong on your unaided journey prior to that, you encounter a lot of confusing stuff.
Calling yourself a rad-fem doesn’t mean you’re perfect. There is always room to grow. And that is a-okay. Growth comes from dialogue, sharing and learning from those more experienced than you and with different takes on similar situations. But more troubling – and this is where things can be confusing for those entering ‘the scene’ – are RFs who appear to hold all the basic tenets of rad-feminism to be true, but who will engage in behaviours that contradict the main objective. And I’ve noticed two confusing and thought-stopping behaviour camps present in online interaction. Both are actually common among liberal feminists, but I’ve seen purported and community-accepted rad-fems engage in them, as well.
The first one is well-documented: these are the ‘oppression olympians’. These folks are very concerned with making sure everyone understands all the ways in which they are disadvantaged. They often believe they are worse off than anyone else, and they will whip out the relevant oppression to thought-stop/silence any person they disagree with. It also serves as a derail technique. Many an excellent discussion has veered off track once an olympian shows up to remind everyone about how hurt she feels because of her special status. This kind of posing is antithetical to radical feminism as any RF worth her salt sees women as the primary focus of any RF discussion, movement, action, protest. Focusing on ‘intersection’ (and really, intersection can get so crazily defined that we all end up in groups of 1) is a divide and conquer technique that only serves to benefit men and take power and solidarity away from women as a class.
The second group I call the Watchtower snipers. These are most often women who instead of identifying first and most importantly as women – an oppressed class and the very subjects of radical feminism – take whatever privileged group membership(s) they have very, very seriously as a badge of shame. So seriously, in fact, that they will negate their own valid, horrible experiences because they are not as oppressive or legitimate as any other more oppressed woman’s. They also become hyper-vigilant for any sign of offense-giving in others, ‘shoot down’ anyone and everyone for these perceived offenses, and coddle olympians who show up to throw tantrums and to abuse perceived oppressors (their fellow women! ffs!). For some reason, these rad-fem watchtower snipers are also uniquely prone to neurotic grammar policing and will derail a thread by picking apart another woman’s comma or contraction usage. Weird. Snipers shoot wildly and indiscriminately to protect a perceived uber-victim. And sadly, it produces a similar result to olympianism by derailing, silencing and thought terminating.
The first blog I read from cover to cover, so to speak (which I won’t name here as I won’t shit on women who are, for the most part, doing important work and have my utmost respect for speaking dangerous thoughts and moderating comments), was brilliantly, brilliantly written by a woman with deliciously , what I call ‘out there‘ views. But to my great sadness, I found her to be a bit of a sniper, and allowed and supported olympians in her comments section, and wouldn’t tolerate trans-criticism. It really confused me as I quickly got up to speed on current feminist issues. She called herself a radical feminist, but failed on a few crucial points. Nevertheless, this blog was really, very important to me.
Women need to be able to criticize other women on important issues. Women are also allowed to feel and express their righteous anger. Nitpicking grammar (and I say this as an English instructor) is not a serious issue in feminism. Whether trans folk (men) should be allowed to take over the few safe spaces we have left is. And if comments are allowed on blogs, well of course, bloggers can have whatever policy they wish, but coddling trolls (who are probably very damaged women in need of real help/support – not anonymous blog discourse) and shooting supporters in the head doesn’t make for good female solidarity.
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Posted in Anti-Feminism, Birth of a Feminist, Feminism
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