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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.
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.
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.
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.
Story Ending Never 
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