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P is for Permission
This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀
So imagine you’ve had a stressful day. It could be good stress or bad – a good performance review at work vs being sexually harassed on the street. The body doesn’t actually differentiate between types of stress, even if your conscious mind does. So your body tells you to deal with the stress by doing things that have comforted and consequently rewarded, you in the past. If you’re lucky, these are positive and healthy things like relaxing at home or going out dancing. But for many people, our stress reactions don’t truly help us and can even take the form of an addiction. For those actively trying to conquer bad habits or compulsive behaviours, stress can trigger a crazy-making inner dance that involves giving or denying ourselves permission to indulge in self-soothing and/or avoidance. For me, personally, my only true addiction is to sugar, a problem I developed in childhood to deal with a stressful family environment. And it is a lifelong struggle that is triggered by both positive and negative stress. The permission-granting process is basically a series of rationalizations involving being deserving, being kind to ourselves, making promises about quitting, minimizing negative effects, and the like. We all know this inner dance, and if we’re lucky, the stress reactions aren’t too harmful, but for many of us, they are. And they can be anything from overeating to using drugs and alcohol to allowing abusive people back into our lives after liberating ourselves.
Everything we do is governed by rules. Even in the scenario above, the rules are informal and self-created, even if we don’t realize we have them. Some people are really good at following rules, especially if they are societally policed. A minority of people are exceptionally good at self-control in these situations where we are both the rule-makers and the potential rule breakers. Sometimes it is because they are extremely goal-oriented or purpose-driven or they haven’t experienced a lot of trauma requiring self-soothing or they have had good mentors to help them develop healthy ways of dealing with stress and staying focused.
People break formal and informal rules for a lot of reasons, and in this article, I’m going to explore different kinds of rule-bound situations, and why different people may seek or fail to seek permission for breaking rules. I’m going to say right off the bat that I believe that women and girls struggle more with rules, rule-breaking, and requiring permission to do things than males do. First, as is typical of all male-dominated societies, more rules are imposed on females, and as a result, girls learn to start policing themselves and creating even more nonsensical rules to follow for themselves. This manifests in a great deal of self-sabotage, low self-confidence, and the development of neurotic, self-policing behaviour and associated guilt, shame, depression, and physical and psychological suffering. Males on the other hand, grow up with fewer rules and less punishment for breaking rules, and of course, biologically and intellectually as members of the predator class, I think they are less capable of feeling empathy, shame, guilt or of engaging in self-analysis. So let’s take a look at how permission and rule-breaking factor into different areas of our lives.
Self-Control and Rules We Create for Ourselves
As mentioned in the introduction, we wrestle with the many informal rules we make for ourselves every day. Some of these rules are internalized over a lifetime of programming by parents, school, television, religion, etc. Some of them are developed on our own as we try to control our lives and our natural impulses and learned bad habits. To reference what I have come to call the Freudian Cerberus, a famous, but simplistic and silly, male theory of personality that will be repeatedly rammed down your throat like a forced mouth rape if you are a psychology major, it is a battle between the id, ego and superego. Giving into your impulses or stress-induced bad habits is a permission granting that takes the form of rationalization. You allow yourself to procrastinate, to binge eat, to drink or take drugs, or to allow the abusive ex-boyfriend back into your life to make yourself feel better or to avoid dealing with reality and stress.
Family Rules
The family is the first place we encounter actual rules in our lives and it is where we develop healthy and unhealthy patterns when dealing with life stress. These are the people who lay the foundations for our addictions and determine our mental health path. If we’re lucky, our parents are mentally healthy people with a reasonable and consistent moral compass and an ability to teach rational and critical thinking. Most of us aren’t that fortunate, however, and we end up repeating parental mistakes, and dealing with arrested development. Depending on the roles we’re cast in within the family system, we end up being rule followers and authority respecters, or rebels (usually without a cause). And then there are the outliers who forge their own paths and systems of morality, picking and choosing which of society’s rules have merit and are worth respecting, and which don’t and aren’t.
It is within the family that we see our first sex-based differences in rule establishment and permission denial and granting. Girls will usually discover that compared to any of the males in the family, there is a more complex and vast system of rules for them, that ‘no’ is a more common reaction to the asking of permission to do something, and that the breaking of rules is more harshly punished for them. We see the results of this unacknowledged misogyny in how girls develop in all societies. Compared to boys, girls are risk averse and more conservative in their aspirations, they are less confident, more submissive and rule-abiding and predictable, and they are more accepting of denial of permission, punishment for rule-breaking, and to atone for perceived and real wrong-doings. I suspect none of this is natural, and almost wholly the product of social conditioning. It reminds me of the story of the chained elephant and is a form of learned helplessness. I see the way most girls are raised as a form of child abuse. But what happens in most families is preparation for what happens at large in the world. As women out in the world, girls will continue to face more rules, more denial, and more punishment than men. Girls who rebel as children end up being the ‘bitches’ of the world, labeled as such by all males and compliant, but miserable women. Boys who rebel, on the other hand, often end up respected for breaking rules and even committing crimes, and often are touted as heroes or ‘great men’ making their mark on the world as males are supposed to do.
Unspoken Rules
There are tons of environments where there are rules, but it is sort of a cultural understanding rather than something written in stone. There are still punishments for breaking these rules, and there are more rules with more punishment for females than for males. Females are more likely to be punished and denied permission than males are as well. These environments include marriages, workplaces, schools, social groups and on the streets.
One of the most common and most universal unofficial rules is that concerning breeding – and this is almost completely a rule forced on women and girls. I am not aware of any country that makes it illegal NOT to have children, but every single country in the world pressures women to breed, and the subliminal messaging starts in childhood. There is no true way to gain permission to be exempt from this unwritten rule and still enjoy the perks and respect of motherhood. You can get a semi-pardon if your plumbing doesn’t work and you are unable to have children, but you won’t attain the highest level of female human status. Males don’t experience anything like this and can either breed uncontrollably or not at all without a dent put in his social, financial, or legal status. Fatherhood isn’t tied to primary identity for men. This is solely a female burden.
What’s more, despite world overpopulation, many countries’ leaders are becoming testerical over the large number of non-contributors compared to taxpayers that has resulted from baby boomers aging out of the workforce and today’s youth having fewer children. Many countries are offering women and heterosexual couples numerous incentives to breed, including cash, maternity packages, pardoning of jail sentences for women, and eliminating the requirement to pay any income tax at all. I was speaking to a close lesbian friend in China the other day, and she mentioned that the propaganda mill has been put into overdrive to pressure women into having children, and she is extremely worried that the next step will be to punish women who refuse to breed. And I’ve heard similar sentiments echoed by women in other countries. There is even a conspiracy theory that the recent American overturning of Roe vs. Wade was a step made to force an increase in the birth rate in a country where women are breeding fewer children or not at all. I keep envisioning a dystopian world like that envisioned by famous Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, in her book The Handmaid’s Tale, where women are reduced to baby factories and hating each other – not men, who enjoy all the perks of this world – passionately.
Now, another, but related, unwritten rule in 2/3 of the world is that concerning homosexuality. Like all oppressions, homophobia is rooted in misogyny and male domination, so it makes sense that when men fail to rape women and women fail to seek out rapists – aka the heterosexual lifestyle – male domination is threatened and the world as we know it teeters on the verge of collapse. While 65 of our world’s countries criminalize homosexual behaviour, and 12 countries, including Northern Nigeria – completely or predominantly Muslim, of course – put gays and lesbians to death, legally, there is no country in the world where a homosexual lifestyle is free from the threat of attack, sometimes even fatal attack. Even in the most liberal countries, gays and lesbians are not permitted to walk through the world with the safety and acceptance that their straight counterparts take for granted.
In middle-of-the-road countries where homosexuality is not illegal, but still is far from acceptable, governments will engage in covert methods to shut down groups and render invisible gays and lesbians. When I lived in China, my university went to great lengths to discourage homosexual activity. For example, they reorganized many academic departments and locations of student housing to different campuses to spread out the much smaller female student population so that males could have access to them and to discourage homosexuality. Before this, the majors women tended towards were mostly housed on one smaller campus where I lived, and instances of gay male activity had been noted on the main campus where few women were to be found. Stupidly, the administration didn’t understand that moving women around to provide male student access to suitable rape objects wouldn’t change homosexual tendencies in males. All they achieved was to put ALL the women in more danger by thinning the bit of safety they had due to strength in numbers. I heard many times from my female students that they didn’t feel safe walking around on campus at night, and I myself, was the target of a black man who stalked me for weeks for the purpose of raping me. He made his intentions very clear, and according to him, Chinese women don’t put out for free like white women do, so he didn’t require permission to assault me. I reported the problem, but the university refused to do anything except encourage me not to go outside after dark…
Rules Governing Human Interaction
There are a lot of social rules that don’t have explicit, written law linked to them, but it is understood that permission governs everything. We can sum this up by the following: your rights end where mine begin. There is a two-part problem, however. First is that males and females don’t exist on equal footing. Males understand themselves to be full humans and any transgression they perceive against their body or property is akin to a crime. And females, as they are defined and dominated by males are understood to be partial humans that exist to serve males. Even the most liberal of males does not see a female as his equal, even if it is just on a subconscious level as his words may reflect all the politically correct stuff. His inner predator still sees you as something he can take advantage of in some way, and your permission is granted by default, especially if you have granted it at least once before.
Second, males and females see permission in different ways. Let’s use a well-known saying to illustrate the difference in thinking:
It is better to seek forgiveness than to ask for permission.
Various sources1 and wording, one version dating back to Agnes Strickland’s 1846 work, Lives of the Queens of England.
When males and females go ahead and break a rule and then go back to ask for forgiveness, they do it for different reasons. Males usually don’t give a shit if they do something wrong, even if it harms another person, especially a female. As they grow up, they are imbued with a sense of deserving and entitlement as males, so it may not even occur to them that they need to ask permission to do what they want to do. And as they inevitably break rule after rule, they accumulate a lifetime of forgiveness from females – mom, sisters, classmates, teachers – and learn that they can get away with anything, especially if afterwards, they pretend remorse or use the ‘love’ word, or shower their victim with gifts. Some men do know that they are doing something wrong, although most will feign ignorance and put the onus of their education on their female victims.
When females dare to break rules and then go back and ask forgiveness, they usually do it because they know they will be denied permission. And most of this rule-breaking usually isn’t about sexually harming others. It could be trying to do something at work or school, or trying to obtain something they wouldn’t normally have access to. Girls are used to the word ‘no’ from an early age, so if they are daring enough to risk punishment, they know they might have a fighting chance of getting what they need or want if they just go ahead and ask for forgiveness later.
So as we can see, males tend to be more selfishly motivated, while females are usually just trying to avoid being stopped from achieving something simply because they are girls and they face more barriers than males do. Unfortunately, males are much more likely to break rules, even if they know they are doing something bad. As I mentioned before, girls get used to having more rules, hearing ‘no’ more often, and being punished more frequently and severely, so they tend to risk less and self-sabotage or self-censor more.
Rules Governed by Law or Something on Par with Law
Males have designed all the systems that we use to govern society. This includes the rules written into law and the acceptable and expected behaviours that they believe are allowed by religion, nature, and science. Religion, of course, is a male creation used to control the population, and cement male domination. Nature doesn’t really have ‘laws’ although men like to think it does when it suits their purposes. And science, although just a methodology for seeking answers, has been elevated by some men to a series of ‘laws’ and they use them as such to control women and give men power. The legal system, natural law, and science have all been badly abused throughout history to justify taking rights away from women and girls and to give males blanket permission to commit violence and other atrocities, to justify feelings of entitlement and superiority to all living creatures and the earth herself, and to make up nonsense about what females are and to strip them of their humanity and right to control their bodies and lives.
To conclude, I suspect the crazy dance we are forced to do with men to negotiate our lives and safety in a world catering to their dominance and bent on our subservience, and the crazy dance we do with ourselves in order to deal with the stresses of living in a patriarchal world wouldn’t be an issue in a woman-centred society. I doubt we’d spend even a moment trying to figure out whether we have permission to live in freedom, whether we deserve to be unencumbered. Self-actualization can only occur when there are no barriers to success.
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I is for Infantilization
This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀
Although I’ve touched on this subject in other posts, I thought this would make a nice companion piece to E is for Emasculation. Emasculation is testosterone-fuelled hyperbole where men pretend that having their rapey privileges taken away or even just questioned is akin to the removal of their biological weapons of mass destruction: their cocks and balls. All men see their privilege to harm women and girls as a god or nature given right, and to even question that is a crime against manity. It’s puzzling and frankly, pathetic – if you lose your entire identity when it’s even suggested that you’re not allowed to do violence, what does that say about you and your class of creatures?
In my post, The Female Equivalent of Emasculation, I discuss whether women experience anything like what men do. My conclusion is ‘no’. In order to feel a stripping away of privilege or power, you actually have to have privilege and power, and even more importantly, you have to have them AND feel like you deserve them. Females don’t have privilege and they certainly don’t have any power, and most women don’t even feel like they deserve them, thanks to a lifetime of patriarchal brainwashing. So no, women can’t and don’t feel this unjustified and irrational rage that men often do. But they do experience something that absolutely ensures that they never will gain rights and power, let alone privilege or the feeling that they deserve anything but the suffering that is doled out in the name of male love.
So today, I is for Infantilization.
To infantilize is to constantly, and even systematically, treat women as if they are children or as less intelligent and capable than they are. It involves a whole host of language and behaviour patterns, is carried out by both men and women, and is often helped along by other patriarchal tools such as gaslighting. I’ve suggested before that infantilization is closely related to feminization, the enforcement of unnatural, gendered stereotypes that place females firmly under the male boot, ready to serve unthinkingly.
So let’s talk purpose and methods.
One could easily devote an entire book and even an entire research career to this topic. It is an international problem for over half the population, and generally seen as acceptable, if it’s noticed at all. Many men and women, including women claiming to be feminists, even consider infantilization to be sweet or sexy. But, infantilization is all about 1) transcending and erasing the boundaries of women and girls, 2) denying them power, intelligence, agency and recognition, and 3) breaking down their confidence. It starts in childhood when girls are more susceptible and vulnerable to harmful messaging. It is possible to infantilize a child by treating her as younger or less capable or less intelligent than she actually is. Boys are given free reign in all areas and bestowed with the idea that they are smarter and more talented than they truly are, while girls are protected and punished and denied the most basic freedoms and acknowledgement. By the time girls reach adulthood, they are well used to being treated like naive and even stupid children and often don’t notice that not much changes despite moving into a new phase of their lives. They are primed for heterosexual relationships and for mistreatment in the workplace.
More on the methods.
1) Transcending Boundaries
Girls are taught early on that their bodies are not their own. They are for public consumption. They see it on television, in advertisements, in the places where their clothes are bought. The entire world comments on their physical manifestation. But it comes from parents, too. The girl is over-protected and punished for things that boys can do freely. She is taught how to make her body small, to lower her voice, and silence her wants and needs. She is dressed to be consumed, not to consume or just exist. Mother presents her daughter to friends, family and relative strangers, and the girl is expected to accept being touched, held and fussed over. She is not allowed to say no as it’s rude or defiant. Denying her agency and body-privacy, mother infantilizes and thereby grooms her daughter for her future role as a compliant heterosexual fuckhole. By the time she reaches her teens and early adulthood, the average girl has little confidence, doesn’t know how to look at herself through her own eyes, and seldom holds or presents herself in a natural way in public. Out in the world, boys and men talk too much and take up more than their share of space, and she accommodates their privilege by silencing her voice and making her body smaller. Males touch her in ways they themselves would never accept, and she sees the attention as tender and loving instead of infantilizing, invasive or degrading. Males grip, and lead and force, and she goes limp, and follows, and accepts.
2) Denying Power and Capability
There are a million and one ways in which females are denied power and any acknowledgement of their achievements. I’ll discuss a few of them here.
The number one way to infantalize a woman is to focus on the physical. It might sound strange at first, as sex and sexuality are supposed to be mature or adult subjects, but in actuality, focusing on female appearance and women’s dichotomous status as either a mother or a child-free non-human, serves to infantilize women and completely ignore their achievements and actual contributions to society. Beauty is decidedly not an achievement. It is subjective and has no relevance, meaning or true value. If it had real, objective value, then men would have taken it over and made it the focus of their own lives. So it serves as a distraction and even obsession for so many girls and women, completely infantilizing them, depleting their limited finances, and turning their brains to mush. As manipulatable as children. A focus on the physical also blurs the lines between adult maturity and childhood in a sexual way, giving outlets for male pedophelia. Girls are pushed to become sexual beings and adult women regress under pressure to become more childlike and youthful in appearance. Women who eschew all things beauty and fashion-related are demonized, ostracized, and banished to a circle of hell that even Dante couldn’t conceive of.
All societies also focus on mother-worship, another non-achievement-based focus on the physical, yet considered the pinnacle of female success. The rewards women reap for getting knocked up are legion. You probably do better financially and socially if you become a mother and wife than if you go to university, and I’m not kidding. But I mean, let’s get real. How is motherhood the number one human female achievement if even cockroaches, giraffes, and mice can do it? This is infantilization – essentially, the childlike having children. And all the while, mediocre males have their career paths preserved, working mothers get maternity leave and baby showers in the workplace, and child-free women are ignored, held back, and denied opportunities and respect.
Women are also infantilized through language, either by being denied existence or by having their female status called out deliberately. The use of man, mankind or manpower is still in wide use and women are supposed to accept being adjunct, but unacknowledged, members of that group. If the tables were turned and we used ‘woman’ to describe all humans, males would start World War T (testosterone) and whine about emasculation and the pussification of society. We also refer to female doctors, but not male doctors, and on American television, female law enforcement is most often called ‘bitch cop’, which is not only infantilizing, but dehumanizing. My modern British ESL teaching materials still include words like ‘mailman’ instead of postal worker or letter carrier. And in North America, we still call female parking enforcement officers ‘meter maids’. In addition, women are regulary denied their titles that denote achievement, such as Dr. even going so far as to refer to esteemed women by their first names only. Instead, we become irrationally focused on titles denoting physical ownership status, namely Miss and Mrs., and frequently bestow diminutives, such as hon, sweetheart, beautiful, and my dear, on adult women, even in professional settings. The British even refer to elderly women, patronizingly, as ‘old dear’, while there is no infantilizing equivalent for old men.
When women demand that they be called Dr., there is often angry backlash, especially from other women. I find this puzzling as female achievement makes it easier for girls to develop professional goals and dreams and to actually have a chance at success. Higher education is a positively gruelling process, rife with misogyny and degradation, and women who have not gone through the process seem to think that educated women breathe refined air. I can tell you, as one of those educated women, that academia was in many ways, more misogynistic than other work settings I’ve experienced. I’d even go so far as to suggest that formal higher education is not necessarily the best option for women these days, unless there is a clear requirement for a specific degree. And I further suggest keeping one’s mouth shut if you are completely ignorant on a topic, especially when what is coming out of your mouth is shit directed at another woman. Anyhow, regarding language, there is no reason in the world where we need to be either linguistically sexing jobs or erasing the female sex entirely from our vocabulary. Language problems are soooo easily remedied, which makes it clear that there is a different motive for keeping things as they are. Yes, infantilization and disempowerment.
Men also constantly use their big mouths to infantilize women in another way, and this is mansplaining. I wrote a short post on this phenomenon a while back, so I’ll keep it brief here. Basically, men feel the need to talk at women. Teach them. Show them. Explain to them. But the problem is that most of the time, the woman or girl being talked at already knows. The female can be educated, skilled, intelligent, and experienced, and the male can be uneducated, unskilled, stupid, and inexperienced. And he knows all of this. But he still explains – or mansplains. It is the ultimate act of infantilization. Every single female on the planet has experienced this, usually thousands and thousands of times in her life. I’ve even had boy children do this to me. I’ve had Chinese male students try to mansplain my own language to me – even more significant as it is a very disrespectful thing to do to your teacher in Chinese culture, so there was an element of racism in there along with the infantilizing misogyny. I’ve also had a Korean man try to explain to me what arithmetic is despite the fact that I have a masters in statistics. These are only a few examples, but there are literally thousands of incidents in my life. And the more educated and skilled you are, the worse it is. Some women just accept it à la ‘we have to coddle the fragile male ego’. But I don’t. You have to be really careful though. Males are used to being able to say and do what they want to you, so reacting rationally and not in a childlike way – meaning that you challenge them – can lead to violence, and as I’ve experienced, you can lose your job and career opportunities if you dare to correct the situation.
3) Breaking Down Confidence
Research has shown again and again that females constantly underestimate their skills, abilities and intelligence, while males vastly overestimate what they can do. This is known, proveable, and we see it all the time. It is likely the number one determining factor in career success, or possibly number two, after connections (as in nepotism and Old Boys’ Clubs). We know that education and experience aren’t nearly as important as people tell us. But how well you can sell yourself, even if it’s all a lie, is. And while confidence is not always appreciated in women in the same way it is in men, an employer will still usually choose a confident woman over a hesitant or unsure one. Our world prefers shiny lies over quiet truths, so it is no wonder that men get the jobs and promotions and opportunities and recognition, and higher salaries.
It is also unsurprising that women will not only underestimate themselves, but the capabilities of other females. A woman will usually throw her support behind a demonstrably mediocre male as a potential, promising leader, than a proven, superior female. And not only is there no confidence in the women in question, but capable females will often be criticized and torn down by both men and women. You even see this in so-called ‘feminist’ communities where women discount a female voice because she is confident, outspoken, educated or appears to have a better-paying job. This is an attempt to infantilize a woman who so clearly breaks the rules about female success and confidence.
My general rule of thumb when evaluating male and female claims is this: take anything a male says about his abilities and cut it in half, and take anything a female says about herself and double it. It amazes me how many stellar, intelligent, capable, multi-talented, and over-educated women I’ve met who are barely getting by financially or who are working jobs that vastly under-utilize and under-value their skill sets. But this impacts single women and lesbians much more than married women because the latter have a husband’s income that keeps them from poverty. They don’t notice the problem unless the heterosexual contract doesn’t end up working out for them.
I can say the exact opposite of males – so many of them land well-paying jobs with opportunities for advancement and recognition despite average intelligence, laziness, lack of experience or education, and a lack of skills and capability. I believe a good part of this is due to the building up of confidence in males and the breaking down of confidence that a lifetime of infantilization inflicts on females. There are other factors that work in tandem, of course. Patriarchy is a multi-front assault on the female psyche.
What’s It All Mean?
As mentioned above, infantilization is a mechanism that serves to prevent women and girls from having power and rights and even believing that power and full human rights are possible for them. To give a female agency, confidence, and a complete sense of power over her body and life throws a wrench in the male privilege machine. Even liberal males want to maintain the illusion that some kind of equal exchange is going on, even when they know on some level that there is a power imbalance. Feel free to test this out by watching the rage flare up when you suggest to a liberal male that the so-called sex that he is having is actually consensual rape since unequal people cannot truly give consent. Men need women to depend on them for guidance, approval, and protection – the very things children require from parents. I argue that heterosexuality depends on the infantilization of women and girls, and I think it’s high time to stop dreaming about screwing your dad or grandpa. It’s time to grow up.
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H is for Hope
This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀
It’s the fluffy stuff of posters, platitudes, politics, and propaganda. It’s the product peddled by motivators, marketers, and movie-makers. And today, it’s the topic of yet another H-post in my Alphabet Series.
H is for Hope
This is a massive topic, and I know I won’t do it justice here. But the concept of hope is a major undercurrent in patriarchy and it is important to understand why this is so. It is also important to think about whether it is a useful concept for women or whether it does more harm than good. So, I’ll give it a rough outline and leave you with some questions, opinions and food for further thought.
Motivation for this topic came from an online conversation I had with an Indian woman I met on Saidit.net a few years ago in a more general and very blackpilled discussion of patriarchy and suicide. I had always been of the opinion, probably thanks to my long education in psychology, that hope was the driving force in keeping people keeping on. Basically, I thought, it was a good thing and should be fostered. My Indian acquaintance was of a different opinion, believing that hope was rooted in religion, which is essentially patriarchal and thus, anti-woman, and I found what she said to be so valuable that it inspired a complete rethink of my position. I haven’t encountered her since, but if she ever runs into me or my writing online again, I’d like her to know that I’m grateful for our short, but meaty, discussion.
Hope vs. Faith and the Link to Suffering
Now, I think religion is one of many symptoms or tools of patriarchy, and thus, hope is not rooted in religion, but just another symptom or tool of female oppression. You can see hope used as a tool in both religious and areligious male-dominated societies. But many often see hope as a religious concept and mistakenly equate it with faith and the non-thinking that goes with it. They do often go together and prop each other up as both require the withholding of critical thinking, but they are not the same. And faith doesn’t have to be religious either, of course. So, first, some definitions.
Hope: a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen.
Faith: complete trust or confidence in something based solely on conviction rather than proof.
So why do these exist? Why is such a state of non-thinking so irresistible, especially for women? Well, my theory is this. Suffering is always present in patriarchy, and as a result, there is a need to explain it and to develop ways of accepting and coping with it. Required suffering is part of every religion and cultural mythology, and it is often explained that women must suffer more than men. It’s god’s plan and therefore women’s duty to accept a life of suffering. We are told to have faith, despite any evidence or rational argument, that there is a reason for what we endure, so instead of thinking critically and then realizing that fighting back is the only way out of it all (aside from suicide), we then develop hope as a means of coping and trying to survive. Religions and political machines often use ‘hope’ as a way of getting people both to accept suffering and seeing it as a way to become better and stronger. And there is a heap of guilting, shaming and morality policing done to those who don’t submit, accept and hope.
Here is an example of the effective use of hope in religion and political campaigning.
…we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
a close-enough version of Romans 5:2-5 NIV
Religious use of ‘hope’ to justify and almost eroticize suffering.
Political use of ‘hope’ to manipulate hearts and minds.
The bonus to men and to patriarchy is that if we accept required suffering as women, it opens the door to more abuse by men. They can do what they want and are allowed to repent and be forgiven ad nauseam, and we are only allowed to hope for things to improve. The reality is that suffering isn’t actually necessary to exist as a human, males are never sorry for what they do, and women can hope until the cows come home, but things will never get better.
Hope vs. Purpose – Is Hope Necessary?
I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of young people in different countries, and I think this world is filled with people who don’t have anyone to talk to honestly or anyone to just listen to them. I’ve listened to a lot of youth, and if asked for advice, I try to give them the benefit of my experience without sounding like a finger-wagging old person. They get enough of that from family and society. The young seem to be preoccupied with the elusive concepts of success and happiness, and everyone seems to tell them to be positive and hopeful and focused on the pursuit of money and love. What a recipe for mental health problems. I have found that those obsessed with hope and happiness tend to be extremely unhappy, very confused, and even quite depressed. Hope is about expectation, and the youth of today seem to have a lot of expectations. I think the internet has had a hand in this, present lies as reality and telling young people that they can expect to have everything they see even when what they are seeing isn’t real. But it’s complicated.
Anyhow, in my experience, letting go of expectations, of hope and of this silly notion of constant happiness are key to navigating a patriarchal world without entering a downward spiral and considering killing yourself. Is this ideal? Of course not. But as there is no solving the Man Problem, you need to find a way to deal. And I don’t mean adopting an “if you can’t beat them, then join them” mentality. Sadly, that is what the majority of straight women do. Denial is a little more comfortable than living in reality, but you are still suffering even if you don’t realize it for a long time, usually after it is too late. I’ll write more about this when I get to the P’s of my Alphabet Series. No, what I mean is that you should conserve your gynergy and make your efforts mean something.
Here are some examples:
- Pick your battles wisely. If you are going to fight for something, then make sure it’s worth the consequences. There are always consequences when women go against men and their handmaidens. Even if you manage to accomplish something good for women, almost no one will thank you for it – probably the opposite actually. So fight for your higher principles and without expectations or hope.
- Live for ‘moments’. I’ve tried to help young people who are confused about why they can’t attain a constant state of bliss with the following. Enjoy small things. Notice details. Take pleasure in what is happening now without thinking past its ending. Myself, I actually am one of those people who literally stops to smell flowers. Once I started doing this type of thing regularly, I was freed from the burden of not being constantly happy. I have moments. A piece of chocolate. A good conversation. Taking an amazing photo of a bumble bee. No. I am not a member of the Cult of Positivity. I am skeptical, jaded, and have very low expectations of other people and of my own life.
- Find a purpose. Hope and purpose are not the same. Purpose has nothing to do with expecting that things will get better. They can be linked, but they don’t have to be. And I think that it’s better if they are not. Having a purpose is about doing something that has meaning to you. It could be about morals or principles. It could be about achieving mastery in something. It could be anything. And while it would be great if your purpose contributed positively to the world (i.e., it is a feminist purpose), you need to start with something that helps you sleep at night and helps you get up in the morning. I think most of the world is suffering from lack of meaningful purpose and so many bad things result.
In conclusion, I’ll say this. For women, hope is a useless concept. I think it only exists because suffering exists, and suffering only exists becuase men exist. Forcing hope down women’s throats serves men by keeping women compliant, accepting of forced suffering, and illogically believing that things will get better without questioning the status quo or fighting to change anything. Hope doesn’t float; it is the anchor that pulls you under the water and drowns you slowly.
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Fell in Love With a Girl
Fell in love with a girl
I fell in love once and almost completely
She’s in love with the world
But sometimes these feelings can be so misleading
She turns and says, “Are you alright?”
I said, “I must be fine ’cause my heart’s still beating”The White Stripes
Once every couple of years, I fall in love with a girl, or I suppose woman is the better word. And perhaps love is not the best word to use because I don’t think I believe in love, much in the way that I don’t believe in happiness. I don’t believe in constant states. I believe in outliers and their undue influence – we tend to remember extremes and they colour our memories of the past and general impressions of the current state of things. More specifically, a few spectacularly great experiences are likely to make us overestimate how great life is, and conversely, a series of equally spectacularly horrible experiences is likely to darken our perception of our state of affairs. So, I’ve found it better to appreciate moments, positive or negative, for what they are, and in this way, I don’t have to pretend that things that don’t truly exist are real. (Guess why I could never be religious, even at an early age…?)
I’m meandering down some path I didn’t intend to, so let’s trot back to the trailhead. So yeah, every so often, I meet a woman that I ‘fall in love with’ briefly. I think I used to fall hard when I was younger, but as Jack White said above, “Sometimes these feelings can be so misleading.” And I learned. See, it’s never an available person that I fall for – and no, I don’t intentionally create these situations so that I have an excuse not to ‘commit’ to someone. It’s just that the women I tend to be attracted to seldom meet the crucial criteria for relationship-making.
First, they are almost always ‘straight’. Yeah, I put that in quotes. I don’t believe in heterosexuality for women. I remember watching Todo Sobre Mi Madre back in 1999, and one of the characters (I think one of the drag queens, actually, which sullies the sentiment and turns it into a bit of a joke, but whatever…) comments something to that extent – that all women have a bit of lesbian in them. And I would have completed the thought by saying that almost all women have the lesbian stamped and shamed out of them early in life. All this is to say that I’m attracted to women whose inborn lesbian shines like a beacon, despite the hetero life they are living and whatever their expressed feelings about lesbians are.
Another issue is age. I keep forgetting how old I am. I don’t live a life typical of a woman my age, my heart is young despite any wisdom gained from experience, and I seldom get to meet or spend time with my age group because of my lifestyle and mindset. So I either tend to meet women who are a lot older or a lot younger, and while I am fine with cross-generational friendship, I don’t think romantic relationships between people with large age gaps are appropriate. I don’t like power imbalances, and age can be a major source of imbalance and resulting creepiness. Not quite as bad between women as it is between men and women, I think, but still… I have principles and comfort levels that are derived from those principles.
The other major issue is values/beliefs. Even if I were to meet an age-appropriate lesbian, it would be hard to meet someone who puts women first, who is a female separatist, who isn’t in the mother-worship cult, who isn’t anti-white, and who sees the trans bullshit for what it is – an anti-woman, anti-lesbian, conservative, rape-apologist, male-energy-driven shit-show.
And finally, I’m looking for a companion, not someone who espouses straight thinking on what relationships should be (sex-driven: no sex = no relationship). That doesn’t mean an aphysical relationship – physical affection is great from my point of view. I think not wanting to touch or be touched is a sign of some very serious trauma. But I’m not looking for a fuck-buddy. I think I’ve had enough of that in my life, and it didn’t provide or solve much for me. Bottom line is it’s hard to imagine meeting a woman like myself ideologically who also wants a companion.
All of this is to say that I’ve fallen in love again, and it is another go-nowhere situation, sadly. I’ve found myself in a difficult (workwise), but otherwise socially interesting situation. I’m working in a girls’ school (one of the reasons I jumped at the job offer – I really hate teaching boys…), and almost all of the teaching staff and most of the administration are female. And it is culturally quite different from my native homeland and China, where lived for so long. In North America, females are physically rather cold to one another. It varies greatly, but generally, as a culture, there is a huge anti-lesbian sentiment, and that drives the stigma against excessive physical contact between women. China is much worse in some ways. While girls and women can hold hands if they are family or close friends, it is not a physically affectionate culture, generally speaking. They don’t hug, and they certainly don’t kiss in an affectionate way like many other cultures. I actually like physical affection. I’m touchy, although I’ve learned to be hyper-aware of modern Western hypersensitivity, so I’ve probably become more reserved over the years.
Where I currently live and work (it’s the same thing, currently…), physical affection abounds. It is refreshing – I feel like I’ve had to bottle myself up for so many years, in the uptight places I’ve found myself. But it is very multicultural here, AND it is also extremely sex-segregated. The few males that work at my school have separate rooms for working and eating, which is Awesome with a capital A, and likely due to Muslim values in this area. It’s funny to think that I agree with this very traditional way of thinking, and we might actually agree with the reasoning for the segregation on some levels, but at the same time, I would probably be fired if they found out I wasn’t straight and that I think that women are superior to men in all ways, and that all males should be microchipped at birth… Now, I can’t speak for how things work with the men at my workplace, but among the women, I’d say that the female affection mostly comes from the local people and what appears to be strong Turkish influence. I don’t get the impression that the locals of Russian heritage are driving it – they seem to be cold in the way that North Americans generally are, but I’ll admit that I know little about Russian culture, in general. It just seems cold to me and reminiscent of home.
Of all the people with whom I work – and as I said, we are rather multicultural – the Turkish women are my favourites. They are exuberant, kind, welcoming and confident. And as you may have guessed, I’ve fallen for one of them. She is closer to my age, and while not what I’d call beautiful in a traditional way, walks with a confidence and energy that is just sexy and I just want to be around it and her. And we click. She has a sense of humour, and I think she likes the weirdo in me (the comfortably conservative of the women at my workplace, on the other hand, are comfortably uncomfortable with my energy – nothing unexpected or new there). I really wish I could spend time with this lovely woman, but she is married with children. Just my luck. I’ll just have to appreciate the moment while it lasts and for what it is.
Perhaps my next job should be in Turkey…
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Just Call Her Crazy
Every so often, I get a flurry of traffic to this site (or more frequently, a particular post) from the manosphere. I don’t consider myself a mover or shaker in the feminist world, nor has it ever been my goal or expectation to be so. I’m not an activist, I don’t for a minute think I, or anyone else, for that matter, can make the world better. I don’t promote myself or advertise, and I don’t allow comments on this blog. I write for myself, primarily, and secondly, I’m out there for anyone else looking for reality-oriented, non-mainstream, woman-centred writing, especially that talking about issues NO ONE will touch because they don’t fit into today’s political agenda. There are very few true female liberationists these days, alas. So basically, I’m small beans, and that’s the way, uh huh, uh huh, I like it.
But, like I said, every once in a while, I’m found, and it tickles me. Sometimes, the referrees are proud, semi-literate, and rather low-intelligence misogynists, such as those from rationalwiki (site that tries to debunk pseudoscience, which I approve of, and to destroy feminists, which I don’t, but these are insecure males, so what do you expect…?) or kiwifarms (internet cretins of the ‘chan’ variety; mom’s-basement-dwellers). Occasionally, I’m referred to on more mainstream liberal ‘feminist’ sites, such as Feminist Current. And then every so often, I show up on some obscure political sub-thread on one social media site or another.
And I say welcome. I don’t personally care whether people agree with me or not because it is important to be exposed to other viewpoints. The vast majority of people don’t realize (or don’t want to acknowledge) that is not possible for a women’s liberationist to have a voice on mainstream social media. We are immediately censored if we don’t virtue signal, or support male agendas (especially if they are ‘oppressed’ groups of males), or suggest that women are oppressed – or these days, just state the most basic fact that women are human females and you can’t opt into or out of that category. So I suppose some are surprised when they head on over to this site and suddenly find my viewpoint, which they certainly won’t read anywhere in the e-homes (especially Reddit or Facebook) where they normally spend their time. And I think some of these folks are probably disappointed that they are not allowed to drop turds in the form of comments, letting me know that I am ‘wrong’ or ‘confused’ or:
CRAZY.
As well as your male-supporting mother and male-dominated society, including school, the police, entertainment, etc.
Yeah, crazy. Super logical argumentation technique that I call ad feminem (because it only applies to women, thus not ‘hominem’). People – men AND male-supporting, heterosexual women call women like me ‘crazy’ all the time. It isn’t anything new. Throughout history and across cultures, men have done a whole host of horrible things to women who haven’t fallen in line, who haven’t behaved correctly and like other women who haven’t agreed with everything males say, who have spoken publicly about the reality that everyone knows exists but won’t acknowledge, and ultimately who have scared them in some way. That has not changed in millennia. And it is effective. Women are the only group of people on earth who can have their entire existence dismissed with the application of a single word, a single categorization. She is ‘crazy’, therefore, you should ignore every single word she says or writes. Calling a woman ‘crazy’ can even effectively negate any victimhood she experiences, especially if it is a sex crime (hate crime), and especially if it is committed by an Oppressed Male ™.
In reality, very few women are actually what could be defined as ‘crazy’. And of the women who have been punished and continue to be labelled and punished, I’d bet you that few to none are clinically crazy. Frustrated, angry, questioning, yes. And outspoken. And that is what this really comes down to. Like I wrote in a past post about the criticism of female voices (see the Shrill section of Shrill, Bitter, Humourless, Prudish Man-Hater), it is all about trying to silence women who speak truth or who fight for female human rights. Things all males and all racial and religious groups are allowed to do and have and be. In Western cultures, ‘crazy’ women have fought so hard to win freedom from waterboarding on dunking stools, being forced to wear Scold’s Bridles (imagine wearing 14 lbs of metal fixed to your head with a spiked metal prong forced into your mouth for hours on end), stripped and paraded through town strapped to a dung wagon, etc. We aren’t taught about women’s slavery and torture through history in our own culture, so people assume that white women were born ‘free’. Nope. My foremothers – the craziest of the ‘crazy’, hated by all – are the reason the woman-hating, cock-sucking dudettes of today have the freedom that they DO have (and who still choose to be with men and criticize outspoken women…). And yet, women still aren’t free to speak. Women are still censored. Women are still called ‘crazy’. Often with no prompting at all, but especially when they dare to talk about women’s history, women’s current status, women’s liberation, rape statistics, the fact that 99% of violent crime is committed by men and that it might suggest that there is a biological basis for that universally observed fact, and more.
To not enthusiastically say ‘yes’ to men and everything they STILL think they deserve to take and have from women is to be crazy. And in all honesty, if you look at some of the shit these labellers believe in themselves, you start wondering if they themselves are the crazy ones.
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My Three Top Online Activity Picks to Improve Your Lady-Brain
No, despite my reference to lady-brain, this isn’t a sarcastic or satirical post, nor is it a trans bullshit post. I’m actually going to give you my top three online fun-times picks for those of you who are in a situation where you are not allowed to work (like me, a foreigner in the US trapped on a student visa), can’t work (you are on disability or have The Virus, or something), have free time (these days, who doesn’t?), or are a lazy fucker (i.e., a man or a man trapped in a woman’s body or vice versa wtf…, or a modern cell-phone-is-attached-to-my-hand-stay-at-home-facebook-mom).
I love puzzles and strategy and solving problems (jeez, maybe I am a trans…), and believe that doing this kind of stuff regularly can maintain and even improve brain function well into old age. Luckily, if you sift through all the porn and cat videos, and narcissistic Gen Y and Z videos on the internet, you can find a few sites to help get your lady-brain a-revving. I like crossword puzzles and sudoku, but I’ve included three sites here that you might not have thought of and definitely need to try.
Here are my faves, and the best part is that they are free to use. You’re going to need a laptop or desktop computer though because they are visual activities, perfect for visual people (and I don’t mean the male definition of visual person):
1] puzzlegarage.com (updated April 11, 2025)
Jigsaw puzzles! All kinds of sizes and themes, from 54 pieces to up to 1176. Guess which ones I prefer…? As much as I love real live jigsaws, this is perfect for the minimalist, the frequent traveller, and/or the space deprived.
A picture logic extravaganza. Japanese in origin, these puzzles are solved by reasoning out the placement of black squares (in black-and-white puzzles) or different coloured cubes (in colour versions) on a grid to create a picture. Numbers indicate groupings of like colours. If you like logic and pretty pics, you’ll like this game a lot. Note that on this site, men exist. Therefore, you occasionally run across a puzzle that ends up being something pornographic or demeaning to women. Usually, ‘kind’ scrotals will put the R-rated or over-18 symbol on the puzzle so you can avoid it. I always make sure to down-rate the puzzle and leave comments because it is my civic duty to leave perfect feminist turds on everything men ‘create’ to hurt us.
3] GeoGuessr 
When I found this site, I became addicted and lost many, many evenings to my computer. If you like geography, attention to detail, and using the most minute of clues to solve problems, you will get lost as you find the answer, too. Basically, you are given a shot of a place and you have to figure out where it is. You have the option of searching particular cities or regions, or you can search the world (that is the option I usually choose). It could be rural, urban, a roadway – anything. You can rotate 360 degrees and zoom (google street view type of sitch), and you have to rely upon visual clues such as languages on signs, license plate information, intuition and knowledge about plant life, the colour of the dirt, how things are organized, and so much more, in order to narrow down your focus. In the end, you guess the location, and then you find out how far off you are. It is pleasingly challenging.
Anyhow, have a go. Improve your brains while having fun.
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Women Who Abuse Women
It makes me sad, but I really, truly get it when women tell me that they don’t trust or are even afraid of other women. Some people assume that feminists believe that women can do no wrong. No. Not true. There are some horrible, evil female persons out there. You don’t have to fear them in the way that we must all fear men (if we want to stay alive and unraped, that is). But there is a minority of women who are not only damaged like most of us, but who inflict abuse upon us for a variety of reasons. Unlike some feminists, I hold these women accountable for the damage they do. There is no good excuse for aggression and dealing out undeserved harm.
Let me start by saying that the two weeks I’ve had in the U.S. have, until about an hour ago, been fabulous. I have had almost no interaction with men despite not being secluded at a women’s retreat. Refusing all eye contact and not addressing or responding to males has mostly worked this magic. The women I have met have been entertaining, to engaging, to admirable. I’ve made one friend with whom I’ll keep in touch. And I made a last-minute decision to cross the country to visit an old friend and professor for a too-short, but extremely productive and healthy visit. Thanks to that visit and our mini professional ‘girls’ club’, I have some irons in the fire regarding my escape-from-China endeavour. I have the makings of a gameplan.
I’ve been staying in youth hostels, which I generally don’t love as the experience is not what it once was, and I like dormitories and sharing space with strangers less and less as the years go by, but as I said, I’ve have strangely met a lot of interesting women. It really is not always the case.
But now I’m in D.C. where I’m reminded of why I don’t really like the northeastern corridor of Canada (Quebec and Ontario) and the U.S. (D.C. and points north). People are aggressive, sometimes offensive, and somewhat cold. Not in the Chinese way. This is different. I grew up in it, and it has rubbed me the wrong way ever since I left long ago and have occasionally returned to for visits. I much prefer the West Coast. But that is not something I’ll get into now.
Just an hour ago, while engaged in an interesting conversation with a woman from Colombia, a woman from New York about ten years older than me lumbered into our room and proceeded to take up space. Physical space, verbal space, and psychological space. She immediately dominated the conversation, things turned negative, and she pulled a few details from me about my work in China and some of my bad experiences. Normally, women, myself included, will listen to these stories and commiserate or ask more questions. This woman started getting disgusted with me, my choices, my life, and most of all, my inability and unwillingness to drop everything and become once again unemployed and homeless in Canada with no plan in the works or support networks. I literally have no support in Canada anymore. She didn’t know me or my future plans. Didn’t want to know. And then rolled her eyes at me saying “I hear abused women talk about their plans all the time. Then they end up dead.” Then she refused to talk to me anymore, made everything uncomfortable, and shot me dirty looks. I felt upset, and my first impulse was to flee. I was feeling abused BY HER. I made the decision to ask to change rooms. They were extremely helpful in getting me swiftly out of that room.
Once away from my abuser, I found myself extremely emotional and tried to unpack my feelings. Why was I reacting so strongly? Was it weakness that forced me to flee the room? I felt a little afraid of her, to be honest, and I knew I’d have had two sleepless nights if I’d stayed where I was. And I had paid a lot of money. Hostels have been tainted by capitalism, just like everything else good in the world, and they are no longer truly the budget accommodation they once were. Sleep and safety were paramount, so to get out of an uncomfortable, at best, violent, at worst, situation was not unreasonable.
Well, it was simple to explain my emotionality following having that woman forced upon me. I was badly psychologically abused by my mother and grandmother for 20 years. As a result of that abuse and likely because of my personality and vibe, I have also always been a magnet for domineering, bullying women. I always end up escaping once they target me. So, I have a healthy and perfectly justifiable and reasonable fear of older, domineering, energy-sucking, narcissistic women. They find me, and I am exceptionally vulnerable and attractive to them thanks to the damage done by the childhood abuse and my Mommy Dearest. Abusers are exceptionally good at finding the right kind of prey. I don’t yet have the tools necessary to deal with these kinds of women. I only have a flight response. Luckily, it still works.
The other issue here was that abusive though this woman was, she spoke a truth about me that I hadn’t allowed myself to accept because it is painful. She literally called me an ‘abused woman’. I had never thought of myself that way before, and it hurt and scared me. Why? It’s complicated. I had a similar experience when a friend years ago – surprisingly a bleeding heart leftie – told me that I was experiencing racism when I lived in Taiwan. It hadn’t occurred to me. White women are told over and over how privileged and racist THEY are, and that they deserve everything that happens to them. We twist all the horrible things that happen to us into some kind of deserved punishment rather than a crime. Absolutely everyone on the planet is worse off than a white woman. I’ve heard white rape victims negate their experiences – and I too have been one of those in-denial white rape victims – shrugging the horrors they’ve experienced off because “other people have it worse”. (This is also called “white female traveller syndrome” – where white women travelling alone who end up raped or assaulted during their journey refuse to acknowledge it because they think they are complaining/overreacting, or think they deserve what happened because they are ‘privileged’.)
So when this NY abuser likened me to an abused woman, I realized it was true even though I’m abused by multiple people rather than a single domestic abuser. The Chinese have treated me like absolute shit. They’ve locked me in my housing at night. They’ve refused to pay me sometimes. They’ve changed my contract without my agreement or knowledge. They’ve signed my name to legal documents without my permission. They’ve hit me, sexually assaulted me, called me horrible things – males AND FEMALES. And my will to escape and better my life has waned as I have become accustomed to the poor treatment. I’m scared to be unemployed at my age as a woman. It is hard, as an outsider, to understand why women stay in abusive situations. I have never accepted abuse from a man – I leave immediately. But the racism and sexism in employment and in foreign cultures is something I’ve not allowed or trained myself to reject or flee.
So, it’s not domestic abuse, but I am an abused woman. And acknowledging that and having someone else, a stranger, acknowledge that and label me and then abuse me for it, crushed me a little. And I fled. That abuser was easier to flee.
Now, this woman had the gall to call herself a feminist before launching her attack on me. She wasn’t. She was a misogynist. Feminists don’t abuse other women. They listen. Sometimes they help when appropriate, but mostly, they listen and empathize. Feminists should be critical of how women support Patriarchy. And we can lay responsibility on women when they hurt other women. Of course. But this nasty asshole didn’t know anything about me or my life or what steps I have already taken to get myself out of a complicated situation. My kind of situation is not acknowledged as a problem. So I am alone and must solve things by myself. She called me an abused woman, but unlike for domestic abuse victims, there is no police system that will punish China for hurting me. There is no shelter/accommodation for abused female ex-pat workers where I can escape to if I give up my job and home and find myself on the streets.
Long story short, I may not yet have been able to escape my complicated abuse situation in China, but I sure as hell made sure to escape that abusive woman moments after she showed her true face to me. I promised myself when I swore off men that never again would I sleep with the enemy, but unfortunately, sometimes the enemy doesn’t wear a penis.
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One Good Thing about Old Communism in China
Occasionally, I’ll talk about communism with my students. It doesn’t happen often. For one, I think a lot of them aren’t that interested. It ain’t the 1950’s or 1960’s anymore, and none of my students was alive through the scary part of it. As well, it is not necessarily all that safe to talk about it in public, especially if we are critiquing it. There are unspoken rules about what you can criticize and how far you can go. I remember going out for lunch with a university professor in Mao’s home province (Hunan) where I worked about 6 years ago, and he refused to talk about communism at all, and got very, very nervous and quiet. We changed the subject.
Despite what you see in the news about China’s modernizing, things are still, under the surface, very controlled here. Every high school, college and university has a communist student group on campus, and even my PhD students must take a required course in Marxism during their program, even though they have been taking the exact same course almost every year of their student lives. (How often is too often…?) Many students join the communist student group despite having no passion whatsoever for or connection to the ideals, because it is well known that you’ll create a network, gain ‘face’ and have better career prospects if you do so. And interestingly, over the years, I always have at least a few gung-ho communist students who’ll try to talk about that great man, Mao, in class every chance they get – and they remind me strangely of fundamentalist Christians, Jews or Muslims I’ve encountered who can’t shut the fuck up about their beliefs. Fanatics are fanatics no matter what the flavour of kool-aid. It has been suggested more than once by Chinese I know that there may or may not be spies in my classes – a student placed by the communist groups to ‘keep tabs on things’. Who the hell knows…?
But despite the persistence of communism here in China, capitalism has gained momentum, unfortunately. It is a weird world where they exist side by side. I brought this up to one of my masters students recently, and he said with a laugh, “Well, yeah, we need capitalism to pay for the communism.” I thought that was pretty funny. And true.***
Now, personally, I’m not a big fan. But neither am I a capitalist. I don’t think I can subscribe to any political or economic system that men come up with, to be honest. Whatever the ideals, men will ruin it. Men function on domination and hierarchy and hatred of women. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that communism didn’t work. Men can posit ‘equality’ all they want – but they can’t do without their power struggles and rapey nature. Equality is good, men will tell you, as long as they get what they themselves want. Yeah, remember that British fuck I wrote about earlier (here and here)? He loves China and loves communism. We waxes poetic about how much he loves dictatorship and censorship, and how necessary they are – with a straight face, I might add. But if you poke a little, you’ll get what you’re looking for. As long as HE lives outside the restrictions. How’s that saying go? Dictatorship is great, as long as you’re the dictator… That’s how it rolls with men. They’d never make communism work, and to be honest, I find capitalism a much more honest expression of the male ego. A house of cards built out of delusions and promises of freedom, equal opportunity, and abundance. Yeah, that hasn’t worked for most people, and still they cling…
Anyhow, back to the East. There is an historical site not far from where I work that I’ve visited a few times. It’s a place I’d take any visitor as there is a lot of cool stuff to see and watch: architecture, traditional performances, traditional food, etc. Outside an old (Mao-communist era) film house, there is a write up on the wall about posters. [See the shots I snapped below.] China was really into politically-motivated posters during this time. There were the occasional advertisments of goods and services, despite being much less on offer than now. Quite a bit of the write-up talked about women and the perception of women during this era. And I will say one positive thing about old Communist China. Women weren’t anywhere near as exploited as they are in capitalist times or in places running on capitalism. As you can read in the attached photos below, when women appeared in posters and advertisements, they weren’t sold as sex. They were humans with a new vital role to play in society. They were workers, students, soldiers. Robust, hard-working and energetic. Not whorish objects – things – to be consumed by men. They were clothed like rest of the humans (men) in the posters. Dressed for respect. [I actually like communist fashion, I have to admit. Keyword: comfortable.] They didn’t look helpless. They were role models to be looked up to by men and women alike. I have no doubt that women were still abused by men off-stage. You can’t have a world with men in it where women aren’t abused. Not possible. Men would never go for that in a million years. Dicks must stay hard, right!?! But at least, under Mao, the rape and destruction of women weren’t glorified in public as entertainment and marketing tools, as they are in the putrid West, and sadly, as they are fast becoming in modern China (with the whorification of white women leading the way here – thanks capitalism!!!)
So why the fuck can’t we keep this good part of communism – the publicly accepted, respected, human side of women – and throw out the fanaticism, propaganda, demand to conform, and punishment for intellectualism? Can we not develop a freedom-based system where women are independent, powerful, respected, and separate from male definitions of sexuality? No. Not in my opinion. As long as males are alive, dictatorship of one sort (capitalism, liberalism, etc) or another (communism) will always exist, with women under the male boot.
Posters for the films: Woman Driver; The Song of Youth; and The Red Detachment of Women
*** You might be reading and thinking, ‘Those crazy communists.” or “Those crazy Chinese.” But you know, the West is just as fucked up, but in a different way, and in some ways, I prefer the weirdness of capito-communist China. The West is experiencing its own psychotic break from reality with the whole trannie movement. Women are being silenced, censored, no-platformed, erased as biological beings, and literally abused, and even raped and killed, by a tiny, powerful group of dangerous, delusional men who have scared politicians, the media, and the government shitless. How is this any more frightening than the censoring of the Chinese government? At least, the Chinese censor men and women alike. The West hates women with a regressive passion not seen since… when? Decades ago? A century ago? I’m too embarrassed to bring up trans bullshit and identity politics with my Chinese students. They’d laugh their asses off. Seriously.
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Inadequately Comforting a Distressed Young Woman
I had a rather delightful day on Saturday. I mentioned in a previous post that I was invited to a little grass roots English club. Out of this encounter, I’ve acquired some new mentees. It’s a mixed sex group. I’m quite pleased to have young women present, and I’ve likely mentioned in at least one past post that as a survival mechanism, I de-sex the male students so that I can bear to be around them. In other words, I go out with a group of young women and young students (males). Any outings I have with groups such as these are generally pleasant. If it were unbearable, I wouldn’t do it. I go places I may not have been before, I learn about local culture and history, try new food and new restaurants, and if I’m very lucky, I can give the young women a chance to talk about anything they want. It is my frequent impression that they are not really allowed to voice their deepest concerns or fears. I exist outside their cultural paradigm, and I think that makes me less threatening in a sense.
On Saturday, a group of five students (two females and three students) and I arranged to visit two culturally important venues in our city. It was actually a heap of fun and ended with a glorious meal at a restaurant with Dongbei cuisine. But at one point, the two young women began talking about marriage, which immediately put me on edge. I frequently have to deal with incredulous reactions to being unmarried and child-free. I am on the receiving end of concern, surprise, disapproval, and very, very, very occasionally jealousy. Mostly, it is annoying. I’ve spent my life being told how abnormal I am, that there is something ‘wrong’ with me, and there is always this valuation/appraisal of my human status no matter what culture I live in. Only women deal with this. Even if a man is questioned on his status, which he frequently isn’t, there is no value judgment made of him. Marital and parenthood status does not affect men. With women, you can be denied employment because you are assumed to be defective or lacking an important human quality that magically affects your ability to do work.
But I’m pretty much used to the disdain and questioning. I used to try to justify myself. I don’t do that anymore. Sometimes, I’m downright honest about the whole mess that is female slavery. By the time I’m sixty, I’ll be right salty!
One thing that makes me very sad in places like China is that women have no choice whatsoever about their slavery. Western women have much more choice when it comes to their fates. I get why and how Western women buy into the heterosexuality mandate and why they still cave under the social pressure (which is real, but seldom a life or death situation) to sell their vaginas, uteri, and physical, emotional and psychological energy to men who may not even be the highest bidders. But at the same time, it is bizarre to me and fucks me off to no end. The threat of punishment keeps the majority of women cowering and doing their duty. Those of us who have disobeyed have suffered and will suffer in old age for these important defiances.We help our enslaved sisters when they inevitably suffer at the hands of their Nigels, but we don’t get help in return when we are alone, old, injured or unable to support ourselves. Sigh.
But while I feel fortunate in some ways (economically poor, but somewhat psychologically free) for not being forcefully enslaved, despite my lower status among women and the recipient of punishment no matter where I live, most women in the world really have no choice at all. In China, I’ve never met a single woman who has managed to escape forced marriage and forced motherhood. But I have met a handful of girls who say they don’t want that life for themselves. And I get strong impressions from each of them that they are lesbians or completely sexually naive or asexual. These women, I have great sympathy for. Non-compliance is a much more serious issue here.
On Saturday, one of the young women told me repeatedly in amazement and with some envy that I was so independent. She couldn’t believe my father didn’t push me into anything (I permanently left my mother’s control when I was 20, and the pressure hadn’t started from her at that point in my life). The young woman quietly told me that she didn’t want to get married at all. Interestingly and with insight and sadness, she told me that she wished she did want it. This young woman knows what is in store for her. She knows how difficult something can be when you are forced into doing something you don’t want to do. I’m not sure if she articulates the concept of rape to herself, but she definitely has dreams of freedom, independence and choice. She said she hopes she will change her mind when she gets older. Right now, she is about 19.
It hurts me to hear young women talk about this and that girls of this young age are worrying deeply about this issue. The male students, on the other hand, have nothing to worry about. Marriage was built for them. Marriage benefits men in many ways and it doesn’t negatively affect any aspect of their lives. I’ve never heard a young male talk about marriage or children in anything but a flippant, carefree, positive way, in fact.
The males in our group tried to find out what the conversation was about. I summed it up for them. Marriage was designed by men for men. And it is not good for women. They seemed shocked. Like I said above, they don’t think about this stuff. Life is easy for them. They are the oppressors. One of them concluded that each person is entitled to their own opinion. Sure. Opinions. But I know more about women’s history than they do, so I am coming from a place of facts and reality, as well as my experience as a member of the oppressed, as the basis of my very informed opinion.
These conversations with women are difficult because I can’t do anything concrete to help them. I want for them to have freedom from males and the freedom to do whatever they want with their lives. I’d like to see a worldwide system change away from Patriarchy and female enslavement. I want to see the institution of family and marriage demolished. I wish women to be economically independent so that they don’t need men at all and they can concentrate on healthy, lifelong female relationships. But I know there is nothing at all I can do for them except listen to them, let them know they are heard, and that I care about their experiences and stories.
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The Need for an Old Girls’ Club
Since I was old enough to really take notice, I realized there is just no equivalent to the ‘old Boys’ Club’ for girls and women. Through my own struggles both in school and in my professional life, and through observing the struggles of other females around me, I noticed that the absence of this system had and still has much deeper and more significant implications and repercussions than we may realize. Male dominance ensures complex safety nets for men and boys only. And female success in life is fairly random – there is seldom anyone looking out for girls and women and so much talent and intelligence and creativity are lost. Such a shame.
One might argue that playing to the Boyz (i.e., complying and going along) is good for women’s careers. Perhaps on the surface, for individual women, it might seem that way. But if you take a closer look, compliant women aren’t reaping the benefits that the boys do. They still aren’t included in the ‘important’ stuff. Their climbs to the top are limited and controlled by men. And further, they are constrained by the yes-girl role they’ve opted (yes opted – compliant vs non-compliant, those are the options) to take on in order to get the crumbs they are given. Like in a lovey-dovey, standard hetero relationship, once compliant, women can’t suddenly start standing up for themselves. They’ll find out exactly how much they are considered ‘equal’ by the male(s). ‘Acceptance’ and ‘love’ are conditional for women whether in relationships or in professional lives.
Not having a ‘Club’, girls and women lose out in the following ways. There is a dearth of role models, mentors, supports and go-to people. Their (female) peers are set up as the opposition, rather than teammates, and girls often struggle on their own. Their learning and earning opportunities are severely limited. Information access is random, patchy, and unreliable. Achievement requires more time and effort and is much less acknowledged or rewarded. Less able, intelligent and talented, but more connected and supported, people (males) always seem to have a leg up in all situations. There are fewer socially and psychologically healthy outlets available. In short, girls and women are seldom supported and nurtured in the same way that males are, and thus, have a much less chance of achieving intellectual and professional success.
While I’ve always been a bit of a social outcast and always struggled to find a group I felt comfortable joining, I somehow managed to see the value in at least trying to start women’s networking groups. They don’t always last long. It’s hard to be a one-woman organizer on a long-term basis for something that most women don’t seek out in the same way or find important. I’ve found that a lot of women just don’t seem all that comfortable in all-woman professional settings. I found this fascinating, but sad. On a strictly informal level, getting together is easy/easier for most women. But, disappointingly, I found these gatherings always seemed to devolve into talking about babies and children, which I had zero interest in. Why did women always reduce themselves to that? Yes, it is important to SOME women, but why does it have to be the default topic/focus? Why couldn’t a group of women come together regularly and talk intellectually or professionally on a casual basis (i.e., not a conference)? Still I tried. And these outings were fun. Don’t get me wrong, there was bonding. Having social connections is needed and awesome. We managed that. But that networking synergy that men seem to gravitate to and create naturally? It wasn’t there. I never felt that I was making connections with women that would extend beyond enjoying food or a laugh. And that is what women, still to this day, are missing on the scale that men have it. Where are the women’s professional networks? I know some exist, but they are not natural and pervasive and informal. They are usually extremely constructed and intentional. Partly, it is because women are so new to the workforce, and partly, many women see themselves as secondary earners in hetero relationships. Partly, it might be that women don’t see other women as allies because of how men have pitted us against one another. Whatever it is, it needs to change. We need an old Girls’ Club, and we need it now.
Anyhow, having entered my 40’s, and now being around young people all the time (when I’m with people, that is), I worry about my female students. Traditional China is even harder for young women than in Western countries. There are huge pressures from most families to achieve, but not ‘too much’. And of course, women earn much less, are herded into lower pay and respect jobs, are 100% required to marry and breed at a young age, and will often be excluded from jobs on the basis of their looks. Some of the things my young students tell me are heartbreaking. A few of my English translation majors told me that despite wanting to become interpreters, they know they won’t be able to get a job because only ‘beautiful’ girls are hired. Skills or ability, who cares? Fuckability is much more important in securing a job as a woman. Just like in the West. Another of my former female writing students told me today that her options upon graduating (in a year) will be limited because the jobs available to women are low-paying and difficult.
I have made it my mission to act as mentor to any and all of my female students. I may not be able to hire them myself, but I will always write them excellent letters of reference. For jobs where English skills are required, a letter from a native speaker of English who is also a university instructor can go a long way, and I was happy to find out recently that one of my students successfully got a part-time job over this past holiday thanks, in part, to my letter. Yeah! She has a new round of applications going out for summer jobs in foreign countries soon, and I’ll be contributing to that.
I also act as a confidence-builder and supportive counter to their parents’ conservatism. Many young women have ambitious ideas, but fearful, traditional parents will easily crush their dreams and prevent them from thinking further about their potential. With some parents, however, they can actually be convinced to allow their daughters to try out something if the girls just push a little harder. I try to give these young women the confidence to push. And push again. I mean, hell, if an entire life can be changed for the better based on the strength of an argument and a show of passion, I will try to make sure it happens. I know one young woman whom I taught in high school about 6 years ago who is turning out to be very ambitious. Her mother wants her married like yesterday (she is only 22!!!). But dad is on the fence and therefore malleable. My young protégée likes to bounce ideas off me. I support her dreams, and then her dreams become more concrete, she becomes more confident, and the dreams get a little bigger. She came to me last year with this idea that she wanted to have her own business as a buyer for foreign businesspeople who come to China looking to import goods to their countries. She has been working freelance in this line of work and is slowly building a client base, and it occurred to her that she might want to travel to Kenya to meet with several potential clients. Hell, I wasn’t even dreaming that big when I was 22, and my parents didn’t give a flying fuck what I did with my life! So, we discussed the idea of finding a like-minded female travel and business partner to make the idea more palatable to her parents. Long story short, she ended up going to Africa over Chinese New Year this year, and she even extended her stay. I’m waiting to meet up with her and hear about the adventure. Yeah, again!
But these are just small and isolated things I can support. And I certainly don’t take credit for these young women’s achievements. But the bit that I’m doing reinforces to me the need for professional female networking and mentoring. This needs to be happening on a wider and more automatic basis for women. Women need networks for idea exchange, confidence-building, opportunity discovery and crafting, and professional collaboration. And until this becomes a more natural part of women’s lives, the professional world will be dominated by men, who by and large, are not the most talented out there and who are getting jobs because they are men and they are naturally and well connected.
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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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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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Goddesses Meet, Talk, Bond, Fuel Up
When you’re travelling on a budget, you often find yourself staying in places of the more communal sort. Youth hostels (which are not just for the young) are a good example of this kind of accommodation. Dorm rooms are usually sex-segregated (oh jeez, have the effing trannies infiltrated those as well??? Life used to be simpler.) Some places will have a mixed dorm which is slightly cheaper – as in, if you’re a woman, you can pay less for greater access to pervs looking at you and a higher risk of being raped in your bed. Very, very occasionally, you’ll run across a women-only hostel. I stayed in the fabulous Frauenreisehaus in Christchurch, NZ years ago. Sadly, an earthquake got it and it is closed. I’ve heard rumour of a hostel with a separate women’s wing in Perth, Australia. And these are not battered women’s shelters. These are regular budget accommodations with the good sense to recognize that the world isn’t a friendly place for women travellers, especially those without much money and who are travelling solo. (I’ve written a little about the differences between men’s and women’s travel experiences before.) The energy in women-only places is different. Safe. Healthy. Conversation doesn’t revolve around the men staying there, (since there are no men) who are, for the most part just looking for a one-night stand with an anonymous, cute, young traveller. You think I exaggerate? Let me tell ya, honey. I’m an experienced traveller. I’ve seen it all. Hell, I’ve been that anonymous, cute, young traveller and I’ve heard all the lines, all the mesmerizing accents, and seen how easily hostels are mismanaged in such a way to put female travellers in grave danger and to create a fertile hunting ground for males. I’ve fantasized about running a women’s hostel of my own. Women need safe places to sleep and rest and refuel.
I’ve gotten pickier over the years as I’ve gotten older and less tolerant of danger and discomfort. I don’t earn much, but I also don’t travel much anymore, and I live an incredibly spartan lifestyle in China. So when I do travel, and I’m not staying with friends, I no longer put myself in dangerous and uncomfortable situations if I can help it. I strongly dislike sharing rooms with people, I hate bunk beds, and I don’t like being in parts of town centred in the middle of all the clubs and bars. But hostels that allow men (which is most of them), even if you splurge and get yourself a private room, can be infected with the male voice, which can grate on your brain like nails on a blackboard even if you hone your skills in tuning them out. I stayed in one place in China which seemed to have such little discretion that dangerous, woman-hating men were allowed to stay. One psychotic, Middle-Eastern nutjob walked into the common area, and unimpressed with the selection of women travellers present, shouted “Where are all the fucking bitches!?!” In the same place, the desk staff gave my room number to a nasty Australian man who was trying to follow me around and tell his boring stories to. And oh yeah, in the same place, this PUA Indian man who was trying to immigrate to my country (yes please!), after trying to get sex from me and failing, asked me if I wished I could have Asian skin, since they were much more attractive than me…
But if you can avoid the men, you do run into goddesses – and I don’t mean that in any religious or spiritual sense as I’m an atheist and materialist and don’t feel the need to come off as enlightened or to barely suppress a secret smile over having achieved a soulfulness/mindfulness/gratitude tier that those around me obviously haven’t. No, I mean goddesses in the ‘awesome women’ sense. I always meet a few on my travels. They are not always feminists in the way that I am. But that isn’t always the most important thing in the formation of an immediate bond. In my current location, which is infected with doods, I had a Goddess Session. This one, like all of them, happened unexpectedly. And like all of them, it was healing, gynergy-generating, insight-giving, and mutually burden-lightening. My fellow Goddess, to whom I will give credit for this post as she is the one who recognized a kindred spirit and named what was happening in the way that I have here. And while we shared only an hour of talk and emotion and non-judgment, we probably smoothed over hours and hours and even days and weeks of toxic male infiltration of our souls and beings. At the parting, she related something a friend had told her, “the road will be hard, but you will meet angels along the way.” I’m not religious/spiritual in any way, but I got the gist of it. We had just experienced evidence of the truth of the essence of this statement. And we were ready to face the day’s challenges as a result.
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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.
Conversations with Men: Liberal White Dude Explains a Main Difference Between Men and Women and How White Women Aren’t in Danger
Recently, Miep wrote a post talking about the difficult decision to remove a problematic male of long-term acquaintance from her life. I get it. I get the feelings and frustrations associated with making a decision like that. I’ve been going through some really difficult and similar situations of that nature over the past couple of years, and especially in this past year. Men are problematic, and it is really difficult to rationalize keeping them in your life as a feminist.
I’m currently visiting some uber-liberal friends, and already I’m being irked to no end by nonsensical, politically-correct, but misogynist, analyses and explanations. I discussed the MLK event dilemma in the last post. And less than a day later, I’m deep into conversations with a liberal white dude on how shit works (this ties in, don’t worry, you’ll see).
Over coffee, a liberal, white dude decided to explain to two white ladies, including a scowling me and an open-to-sexist-bullshit woman, a major difference between men and women. A difference that can be seen in young children! Apparently, boys want to know how shit works. Girls don’t. Girls expect things to work the way they want them to work without wondering or caring why they don’t. This explains why we get mad at computers when they malfunction. (Fucking what? That actually describes how males behave, in my experience.) So liberal white dude gave an example of how some three-year-old boy got super impressed with how some adult showed him how something worked and equated that knowledge with being smart. In fact, the conversation between the boy and the adult was generic and demonstrated nothing to me about the kid wanting to know how something worked. And in fact, if liberal white dude had told the same story, but substituted a girl instead of a boy, I’m sure the story would have illustrated how girls want to understand social communication or some sexist bullshit like that. It’s all in the interpretation and agenda. Always.
I continued to scowl at the stupid sexist story and completely invalid theory, and the other white woman contributed a story of her own about some ex-boyfriend travelling to some far-off land with her with a complete lack of interest until he bonded wordlessly with some foreign monk over some stupid tool. Then he was interested in culture. See? Men are interested in how shit works. It allows males to bond. How this explains all the women in science I know, and how talented women and girls are at building and using machines, I know not. But clearly this unvalidated theory achieves something for men. And I suspect it has something to do with men wanting a special domain of talent all to themselves. Unfortunately, women can do everything men can do, as well as create life. So nice try, but nicer fail, dude.
The funniest part is that liberal white dude then told an unrelated story about his wife, that was meant to be some kind of criticism of her, but was actually a really, really good example of how she was exceptionally good at trying to figure out how shit works. He didn’t see that though and neither did liberal white lady. I tried to point it out subtly “How interesting that she was so adept at quickly figuring out how that worked!” but no one picked up on the hint, sadly.
Bottom line, these bullshit unproven biological arguments, which have been used for centuries to keep women out of the sciences and maths and any domain that would gain them independence and public recognition, have no merit and make liberals look really stupid when they use them to prove something.
Next. The same liberal white dude started talking about how the poor brown and black dudes are getting all shot up by police. I pointed out that white women are increasingly being used as human shields and hostages so that these often CRIMINAL individuals can get away with the CRIMINAL acts they are committing. He tried to negate my statement, and I pointed out that I had just been reading another example of this happening. That didn’t fly. You cannot point out facts about men of colour. They are victims. White bitches are just white bitches. They have no voice, they have no valid claims to human rights. They definitely are not victimized by men, goodness no. I didn’t bother pointing out that white women are increasingly the victims of sexual violence and sexual-racial threats and attacks, and I definitely didn’t venture into the recent German rape crisis and the problem of Muslim men. Unsurprisingly, none of my liberal friends has said a single word about what’s going on over there. You. Cannot. Criticize. Men. Of. Colour. And they stick to that. Religiously.
I’m tired. So tired. How can I keep friends like this? They spout insanity. They subscribe to stereotype-based biological essentialism that looks a lot like determinism. And they are so filled with racial guilt that they are willing to overlook or explain away crime, negate real victims’ rights and exaggerate reality in order to feel better. They refuse to name men as the problem that women experience. And they refuse to see sex-based violence as a thing especially when it is commmitted by men of different SES, colour or religion, and a more common thing than say, occasional police violence towards males. Violence directed at women is a much more serious, and long-standing problem than anything else going on today.
I’m not sure how long my visit will be. I feel like I wear a mask in China where I pretend to be something I’m not. But I’ve realized the same is true in the West. And acting is exhausting. There is no place for a radical feminist to take off the costume and speak truth. Except maybe on her own blog.
Lunch with Ladies of the Law and New Year’s Shenanigans
It’s officially New Year’s Eve in China – about 8:30 pm. I’ve settled in with a bottle of overpriced red wine from Australia, and I won’t make it to midnight. I’m in a musing frame of mind.
I’m not a traditional person. I don’t have many rituals that I manage to keep for years. I have rituals that serve a purpose, and then when no longer needed, they go away. That’s their function, in my opinion. So the turning of the year isn’t that special to me. I don’t take stock or make resolutions. And if I wanted to, I don’t think I could anyways. I’m comfortably uncomfortable in my unstable life, and the comfortable part of that discomfort means that I haven’t been all that motivated to make big changes in my life. Under all that, I really just don’t know what I want anymore. The few things I know I do want/need are not achievable anyhow.
So what do you do when you’re low-key, unmotivated, feeling a bit lazy, and kinda strangely okay with all that? Well, you organize a huge group of young ladies with whom to go out for lunch and act crazy.
I mentioned in earlier posts that a) most of my students are male, b) I do occasionally go out with the most motivated and least offensive of those, c) I try to nurture female students if they want help, and d) a couple of young, first-year, undergrad law students crashed one of my Masters English classes this year. I’m happy to say, there are a lot of women in the law program, and it is with a group of 8 of them that I went out with today. No testosterone!
It happens so seldom these days. There used to be so many more opportunities to go out with groups of women when I lived in the West. When I was part of the working world then, I would always organize ladies lunches – and called them that too because it we all thought it was funny. And I miss those days so much. Gynergy. I’d like to say, if you could bottle the stuff… but it is definitely something that shouldn’t be sold and to even utter those words is to soil it with typical male non-thinking and greed and devaluation. Gynergy is priceless and should be free to all WOMEN. Not men, women. They get the stuff for free now, and women have to pay to keep the tiniest bit of their own.
So anyhow, to once again get a bunch of nutty girls together, even if they are all less than half my age, was a good thing. Yep, there are generational and culture differences. As soon as we sat down in the restaurant, half of them whipped out their cell phones to log into the free wifi. That is ubiquitous here and among the young world-wide. But there was plenty of talk about life, school, reading, plans, the upcoming Chinese New Year holiday. And then, it was photo time.
When young people tell me they have a hundred thousand photos on some social networking account, I used to disbelieve them. I remember the very first camera I got when I was 12. It was precious, and you had to really consider when you decided to take a photo. You only had one chance and then later you paid to have the roll of film developed. It was a crap shoot, and an expensive one. Cell phones have changed the world in so many ways (most of them not good ways). Photo-taking is constant and definitely not as valued as it once was. If I go out with a group of students, hundreds of photos are taken. When you add a foreigner to the mix, multiply the number of photos by a gazillion. Today, I was the only one without my camera out. That is not always the case, but I can usually have a few of the cooler shots sent to me. Today, things got pretty crazy, and with 8 people taking shots, I can’t even imagine how many photos there are. I wish I could include at least a group shot and a couple of the more charming concoctions, but you know, men ruin absolutely everything about a woman’s online existence, so I’ll remain faceless and anonymous. *Sigh*
Today was so great for everyone, that I’ve invited the crowd over to my place on Sunday for a dumpling-making party.
Dumplings are an important staple snack in China, and a very common thing to get together and do with family and friends. They are easy to make, and a hell of a lot of fun to prepare (especially if you are just learning how to make them). You can buy the little circles of dough (translated from Chinese as ‘dumpling skins’) fresh from the local farmers’ market if you don’t want to make your own. And you can make whatever filling you want. I’m meeting the students beforehand to go to market. This is part of the fun, for me, at least.
I also have a few games planned (which they might not have experienced in China) for after everyone has eaten too much.
I can’t imagine a better way to kick off the new year: cooking, eating, playing fun games, and sharing gynergy – oh, and of course, there will be a butt load of photo taking.
‘Out There’ Women
We live in a world where men are allowed to follow their thoughts to the very end and announce them in bold caps, surround sound and techni-colour.
How?
Men are the censors, the thought police, the free-speakers, the fuckers, the threat-issuers, the policy-, law-, and rape-makers, the law-breakers, the judges, juries and executioners, the johns. The Free.
This is how they turn their fantasies into reality. This is how they turn their crimes into rights. This is how they turn their mediocrities into merits. This is how they turn their hate into freedom.
Women are not allowed to speak freely. We must support Dick or shut up. If we don’t shut up, we will be shut up. Women may not state the facts. Women may not question the status quo. Women may not ask ‘why?’ Women may not fantasize in response to what men put out there in the name of ‘free speech’, in the name of our annihilation, in the name of their orgasms. Women may not defend themselves.
It is a rare woman who dares to follow her thoughts to the end, and she pays dearly. A few applaud her bravery within earshot, eyes gleaming and then darting, careful. A few more silently support, nodding in privacy and anonymity. And the majority wish her harmed, silenced, erased, dead. Sometimes, they get their wish.
I wish to see, hear, read more women who are ‘out there’. Daring to follow their thoughts to the end. Speaking the unspeakable – women’s words. Daring to be seen, heard, read… potentially silenced. But ultimately, daring to be believed and joined.
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Lordy, I have FINALLY found myself on YouTube and made a recording of this post. Only 7.5 years later 😉
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Transitioning: But Not The Kind You Think
I’m in the middle of transitioning from MF to FF.
No! Don’t worry! I’m in no way thinking that my brain would be happier if I had balls to scratch and I could pee standing up.
My transition doesn’t involve taking dangerous hormones or denying mental illness or cutting up my body. And it is not rooted in woman-hate. No, that would describe the transgender kind of transitioning.
The kind of change I’m talking about is health-oriented and woman-friendly and doesn’t require me to erase myself or my lived reality. It is just a refocusing of energy, a streamlining of behaviour to remove unnecessary actions, and cutting a swathe through the hard, impacted bullshit that is Patriarchy.
I’m transitioning from Male-Focused to Female-Focused.
Whether women are aware of it or not – and I’d argue that it’s mostly unconscious – we are trained to serve male ‘needs’. In reality, men don’t ‘need’ anything from women, but over time, desires and a sense of entitlement have created a whole host of needs that cannot be realized without one or more female slaves. And the needs are uncountable. They can be the obvious and universal: “I need my dick serviced when, where and how I want” or “You will prioritize my words and ideas – I can interrupt you and any girl/woman no matter what you are doing, everything I say is right, etc.” But the needs can be sub-group-, geography-, or man-specific. It is elaborate, but has one simple rule. Woman caters to man to her detriment.
I lament the female energy, talent, and intelligence that has long been and continues to be wasted on catering to the weaker sex.
Back to my personal transitioning.
It is hard. I can imagine it would be next to impossible if you lived with a man in a heterosexual relationship. You just wouldn’t be allowed not to cater. I don’t really have any advice for women in this situation other than: leave. That simple, but really key, suggestion can inspire angry reactions (my Dick isn’t like that! He caters to my needs too!); sad reactions (I wish I could, but I can’t for X, Y, Z reasons); and the sacrificial lamb reactions (He would be lost without me – I can’t leave him. He can’t help it.) And I’m sure there are other categories.
In addition to romantic relationships, it is hard when you are forced to work around males. Most of us can’t work in a man-free environment. Most women have male bosses, colleagues and clients. Myself, I seldom have to deal with supervisors – male or female – which is awesome. But as a university instructor in science and engineering in China (the land of propaganda and conformity to rigid Patriarchy in a way I’ll write about in the future), almost all my students are male. That sucks. They demand so much more of my energy than female students because they act like 5-year-olds, can’t focus, don’t listen, don’t follow instructions, and wear misogyny like a bad perfume. [I have a whole post on dumb boy-children in education.] I find I dissociate almost completely when I teach in order to stay Female-Focused. I have a completely separate persona/identity/mask/hazmat suit that I put on when I enter the classroom. I do help some of the more enthusiastic students outside of class, though – that is the teacher in me, and I’d feel like I wasn’t doing a good job if I trampled on natural motivation to learn/improve. Unfortunately, female students with ambition in China are few and far between. Women are not supposed to help themselves, or pursue goals other than finding a husband and an acceptably low-level job and popping out a preferably male kid and catering to its every need. So most of the students I help are male. To deal with the obvious male-focus, I try to de-sex them and just see them as ‘youth’ or ‘student’. It goes better if I tell myself, “I am helping a student.” If I do get an ambitious female student, I try to help them as much as possible. This semester, for example, a 17-year-old, first-year, female law student crashed my class (it was a class for Masters-level Management/Finance students). Afterwards, she came up to talk to me, and she told me she was reading “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir. I think my jaw hit the floor. Most Western woman have never read it, and feminism is very frowned upon in China. Anyhow, I’ll nurture this one as long as she wants it. She is highly unusual in her self-confidence and thirst for forbidden knowledge.
Finally, it is hard to evaluate friendships with men. Once I started transitioning, I realized that most to all of my friendships with men were ones from which I got very little and sometimes had to put up with a lot of bad stuff I wouldn’t have to with most women. There are weird abuses, confusing insult-compliment combos, the inevitable sexual intrusions, the demands on your energy, and having to overlook a whole lotta misogynistic behaviour that wouldn’t be acceptable if you were honest with yourself. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been shedding many of these male parasites over the last few years. One of the things that becomes really hard – and I think this is true of friendships as well as romantic relationships – is seeing one’s investment (time, money, emotion) as a waste or a loss and then letting it go instead of using it as a reason to stay. It doesn’t help that relationship-building isn’t easy, and it gets harder to make friends as you get older. But ultimately, breaking an unhealthy tie is better for you than allowing a parasite to feed and drain and ultimately kill you.
Transition periods can be very, very difficult. You often question what you’re doing. You often feel alone and lonely. You worry about what your future will look like. You wonder whether you deserve to have a better life and whether you are being selfish for taking care of your own basic needs. You may find yourself insulted in a variety of different, but standard ways, but that will just show you how right you were about leaving.
But what you have to remember is that no one deserves to be second or less important or a slave to anyone else. And that basic belief will sustain you and get you to a better, healthier place.
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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.
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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.
The Girl and The Stranger in The Car
This post is part of the ongoing Birth of a Feminist series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀
Although our goals may be similar, there are two significant differences between serious feminists and superheroines. First, true feminists wear comfortable, woman-friendly clothes. And second, unlike superheroines, feminists don’t usually have a clear, specific origin story. Rather, we have moments of clarity or realization. Moments that accumulate. Moments that may not become significant or actionable until later, sometimes in combination with other moments. Sometimes, it is a seemingly small event or moment that puts a lifetime of horror into perspective. You meet someone, you read something, you see or experience something that just makes you say ‘I see what is going on, and I’ve had enough’. It is a matter of right time, right place, and readiness/openness. Although it may happen, I think it is a rare woman who, like Athena, is born clad in full warrior gear.
In this vein, if asked when I became a feminist, I don’t think I could tell you. There have been many significant events that have made me what I am. And I’m still developing. I still make typical mistakes. That is gender programming. It takes a lifetime to siphon the poison from one’s personal psychology and behaviour.
I still remember an early formative moment. It’s something I think about decades later, and it still guides me. It’s not the most important formative event, but rather, one of many.
I was 13. It was a winter evening at about 9:30 pm. It was freezing, dark, snow everywhere. I had attended my father’s university lecture in psychology. We were driving home. I was sitting in the passenger seat in the front of the car, looking out the window.
And I saw her.
A woman being dragged by her hair across the snow into a bush. She was fighting, but not winning. The man who had her was bigger and determined. And it was late on a weeknight in the winter. There was no one around.
I shouted to stop the car. Startled, my father pulled over. I pointed and insisted. We intervened. The man ran off. We hustled the woman into our car and drove her home. She was mostly silent, but we learned her attacker was her ex-husband. I was also silent, emotions confused. I was learning something important. I realized that had I not seen her and done something, something BAD would have happened. But my understanding wasn’t nuanced.
And afterwards, my father, the brilliant psychologist, never spoke a word about it. I was not debriefed. Not counselled. I was left to draw my own conclusions. Possibly, he remembered having to intervene when his father beat his mother. No excuse though. When I look back at that child from the perspective of an adult, I’m shocked, saddened, and I wish I could go back to do damage control. But would I be what I am and do what I do if I’d not worked through that business alone?
A girl is exposed to explicit, real life violence – a stranger’s near rape/beating/murder. She plays a significant role in ending that violence, shares a space with the stranger for a few minutes, the significant connection between them left unarticulated, the silence controlled by another man, and then, and the child is left to wonder, to analyze, to worry, to fear. To build a schema.
It was only years later after many, many object lessons on what men were, thought about and did to women, after intervening in other near-rapes and beatings, that I realized that the woman I had saved years before was only temporarily safe. Temporarily safe from this specific man in her life, and generally, from all men no matter where or when. There is no beginning and end to violence for women. There are episodes in a lifetime of fear. And there are many lifetimes. This woman was one of millions and millions and millions through time. We are all that woman at some point. And to not be a feminist – to not want female freedom from male violence and control – is just not an option. For me, at least.
This post is part of the Birth of a Feminist series.
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Not Afraid of the Bears
I hate the city.
Sure, there are moments. Moments when you realize that there are certain things only a city can offer you. Like you’re tired of the ubiquitous Chinese food where you live and tired of your own home cooking, and crave some semi-authentic food from another part of the globe. A large city can provide you with that. You are also more likely to find open-minded people who like to use their brains and who eschew traditionalism and religion. That is harder to find in smaller places.
But I still hate the city.
I grew up in Canada. I have lived in most of the largest cities there. Having lived in large Chinese cities, and spent time in Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, and London, these ‘tiny’ Canadian cities are villages in comparison.
I’ve also lived in plenty of smaller places. I deliberately chose a small, relatively isolated, Canadian town for my undergraduate experience. It was mostly for research opportunities and to get the hell away from my abusive, NPD mother, but I have to admit that the kilometers of forest, lakes, and fresh air called to me.
Similarly, when I went to grad school in the US, I chose a very small town – still for the research opportunities – but there were mountains and forest in close proximity.
I’ve also lived in the Yukon in Canada’s North. Pristine rivers, lakes, forests. Pure air. Silence. Anti-intellectual and cliquey, but nature reigns supreme there.
In all of these places, hiking and other outdoor activities were a given – one of the perks of living there. But I didn’t take advantage of the locations as much as I could or should have. Afraid of bears or other wild animals? No, actually. There are plenty of things you can do to co-exist with animals that, for the most part, aren’t deliberately looking for you.
In all these places, I was afraid of the men. The existence of men, and the threat of attack or rape is what kept me out of the forests and hiking by myself. Men are the only animals that will deliberately hunt you down or opportunistically target you, and hurt you for pleasure.
I remember, as an undergraduate, one day enthusiastically heading off onto the hiking trails in the forest behind the college. There had been reports of bears, especially at that time of year. But my thoughts weren’t on them at all. Within minutes of starting my hike, I was plagued with doubts about being in the forest alone, and then, as if reading my mind, out of nowhere, men on mountain bikes took over my trail. Scared the shit out of me. Men, in a group – scariest thing on the planet. A panic attack resulting from knowing that they could do whatever they wanted to me with impunity turned me around towards the safety of my research lab.
At that time, I forgot that there is no safety indoors either. Like all women, while I’ve experienced a lot of harassment, violence and sexual assault in public, all of the violent rapes I’ve experienced have happened in my own bed at home or indoors while travelling. This is women’s experience, women’s reality.
Will there ever come a day when a woman can leave her home and not have to feel afraid? Will there ever come a day when a woman can stay in her home and not have to feel afraid? Just the threat of what can happen is unacceptable. The threats are based on reality and they have power. They do.
It’s not the bears we have to worry about.
A Whole Lotta Beauty and Nothing Else
I teach a few different things in China. My least favourite course is ‘advanced oral English’. First, there is nothing advanced about the abilities of the majority of students – ‘advanced’ is just a word that, in typical Chinese fashion, is for appearances only . And second, I am not an orator. Decent teacher, yes. Orator extraordinaire, no. Oh, and third, trying to have a heavily interactive class when the standard number of students in a small, participation-based university class is 50 is a waste of everyone’s time.
If I must teach communication methodologies, I prefer to teach writing. But if I had my druthers, I’d be teaching a variety of other things within the analytical realm.
Anyhow, I’m in the middle of two weeks of the dreaded speech-making unit. This is where I give a choice of topics (ranging from easy to requiring more insight and imagination). One of the topics requires these 18- to 23-year-olds to think about what they want their lives to look like in 20 years.
If they choose this topic, inevitably, they talk about the family they want. If you can believe it is possible, the Chinese romantic narrative is even more boring and standard than the Western one. Everybody says almost exactly the same thing. I have never, ever, ever met anyone here who wants something different than the rest of the 1.35 billion people.
While it is depressing to hear the young women spout the romantic dream that is the curtain that hides their impending slavery, it is worse listening to the men. And sadly, most of my students are men. Even though I spend an entire class talking about how to describe personality or character, and get them to brainstorm adjectives, they ALL describe their future wives in exactly the same two-dimensional way, and unsurprisingly, there is never a reference to character unless it is to imply that she exists to wait on him and provide children, which is still not really ‘personality’. They describe Future Wife as ‘beautiful’ and that is it. She has no substance. The only thing that matters is that she is beautiful. One of the better speakers did say: “I don’t like girls with strong opinions.” So there you go.
Interestingly, when I teach the class on character and do the brainstorming exercise, most of the students include beautiful, pretty, or cute on their lists, and I do the requisite explanation that physical attractiveness is not a personality characteristic. And although you could, in English, call someone beautiful and refer to their personality, that is not at all what people are thinking here when they put it on their list of personality traits.
When describing men, there is a much richer palette. Men are allowed to be intelligent, talented, creative, hardworking, diligent, responsible, etc. Oh, to be multifaceted – dare I dream?
If you do manage to get people to describe women in any detail, you get a more intense and benevolently misogynist list than you get in the West – today’s Western woman might be called strong, but what is meant is that she is a sexual being with all that entails regarding character (wild, masochistic, uninhibited, slutty, etc). It’s just as superficial, in my opinion. In China, it is all naiveté, innocence, and purity – these are all ideal ‘girl’ qualities. The ideal woman is ‘a girl’ – she acts like, looks like, and thinks like ‘a girl’. It’s so ingrained in the culture – even trying to get people to refer to females over 18 as women is really hard to do. They have no problem calling 18-year-old males ‘men’, though.
I decided I have to stop assigning this topic for speeches. As my educational techniques regarding women and personality and human status are clearly not working, I am now going to give my barf trigger mechanism priority.
In another post, I’ll tell you about a) Chinese misogyny in hero/role model discussions and b) how my writing classes approached their assignment on short fiction.
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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Well Read and Willfully Ignorant
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.Ray Bradbury
I’d go a step further with that quote. After all, it was said by a man, so he doesn’t see the whole picture. I’d say, the best way to prevent a group of people from existing, from contributing to a culture is to prevent them from writing and/or being read. Most people don’t read or take seriously those women authors who are allowed to be published. And most women are not allowed to be published unless they are willing to tell men’s version of the truth. So essentially, the world doesn’t get to read what is not allowed to be there. And that is the story of women.
There are tons of people who don’t read. They can read, but they just don’t. Can’t be bothered. It’s too much work, and requires too much sustained attention, I reckon. I was watching a documentary about the future of reading, and I recall a PhD student commenting that she had to retrain herself to read proper articles in a focused and analytical way after her modern immersion into social media skim-reading. I imagine that an actual work of literature must seem a sisyphean task when you normally spend your day ‘reading’ Twitter and Facebook feeds.
Even among the supposedly superiorly educated Chinese (according to people who’ve never been to, let alone worked in, China), reading non-mandatory books is not common. Last year, I brought in a pile of English language books from my own collection of modern literature to my writing class full of English majors here in China. I’d told them that to become a better writer, reading was a requirement. Only two of my students borrowed books. No one else even attempted to look at the books. Disappointing. But unsurprising. Only occasionally does a Chinese student tell me that they both read and enjoy reading non-mandatory books. It’s all about texting and reading other people’s constant status updates – just like in the West. How is this interesting?
Regarding documentaries, I know plenty of people who’ve never watched even a single one. And those don’t even require a fraction of the attention that a book requires!
But of those few who do read – and I’m talking about great works other than Fifty Shades of Shit or Maxim (seriously, I once dated a British dickface who told me with a straight face that Maxim was the ‘thinking man’s magazine’) – they are still woefully and willfully ignorant of topics and authors who should be a required part of school curricula. The tired old classics are standard, and those classics are written by penises for penises. For most school children and college students, women don’t exist on paper or in politics.
Women authors of literature and feminist philosophy and politics are unsurprisingly absent from school curricula all over the world. Dangerous thinking relegated to Women’s Studies programs, I suppose? As I mentioned, the classics are priapic, but even the edgy or avant-garde have a phallic bent. For many students, misogynists, J. D. Salinger and George Orwell and their social and political commentary have possibly appeared on school reading lists, but who but an English major in Canada has read Margaret Atwood (who is actually a better writer than both of those men)? And everyone knows who Karl Marx is, but Andrea Dworkin’s vast collection of work remains in obscurity in danger of complete obliteration.
But all of these works are available in the public domain, at least for now. There is no reason not to read, not to know.
There is something I find very interesting. I think about my liberal-minded male friends, the few of them I still keep around, and I know they read. They watch documentaries. They learn stuff. They know stuff. They can talk about a number of topics with a level of understanding. And they have one thing in common. They know zero, nothing, nada about women, women’s struggles, the women’s movement, the status of women today. About the movement that concerns half of the world’s population directly and the other half in an important way – they know bupkis. They can talk about other social movements. They know something about racial struggle.
Some of these men, once they come into contact with struggling groups, go out of their way to learn about what these people go through. One friend in the American TV and film business, upon meeting Albanians who had fled their country’s turmoil, went out of his way to learn about the history of their country and plight. But when he was casting actresses for one of his films, he couldn’t figure out why they made sexual overtures to him (other than the idea that all women are sluts always looking to service men). The idea that the film business requires female actors to ‘consent’ to rape in order to get jobs and how that came to be (female subordination/male domination) was completely beyond his educated mind. He got angry when I tried to tell him what many people have said about ‘his business’, the film industry, as an outsider. Yet, while I don’t work in entertainment, I am better read about the plight of women in film than he is. I’ll bet you money that he hasn’t read Rose McGowan’s recent whistleblowing of Hollywood’s widespread sexual assault of its female acting population. He doesn’t have to know about it. He benefits from women’s slavery and to know about it means he has to take responsibility and change the way he does business.
This is the willful ignorance of supposedly intelligent and educated men. The one group all of these men actually live in close proximity to, and sometimes in the same home with – women – they know nothing about. They can’t be bothered to learn about what their close female friends and loved ones have endured and continue to endure. Women don’t matter except when they stop delivering that which is taken for granted. They are objects. They serve men and men’s struggles. The struggle of men is assumed to be the struggle of women. There is no struggle outside that. The concerns of racial groups, religious groups, and gay people matter because men are members of those groups. Women aren’t men, so their continued slavery does not matter.
But these knowledgeable men do know about what the fun-feminists are doing. Oh yes, they are well aware of topless events in the name of political reform. They do know about slut shaming and the movement to embrace sluttiness as a defiant, ‘feminist’ response. They know those powerful ‘feminists’, the Suicide Girls. And by knowing about this kind of stuff, they think they have their fingers on the pulse of feminism. Women just want to fuck more! That’s all. And men don’t need to know more than that. They don’t need to explore the history of struggle. To look for real information might push them out of their comfort zone. Fun-feminists have given ignorance their stamp of approval as per historic male agenda.
Willful ignorance is dangerous. And it comes from failing to read. That failure to read starts at the school level with the censorship of books written by and about women. And it continues through college and into the world of work and survival. We destroy our culture by promoting willful ignorance, by de-emphasizing reading, and especially by negating the contributions of women writers. After all, you can be well read by today’s standards, and still incredibly ignorant by choice.
If You’re Blind, You Can’t See
Statements of the obvious. Who doesn’t love those? And yet, in our world, the blind lead. The one-eyed are not queens, and the fully-functioning two-eyed are trampled and enslaved and silenced and over-worked.
We worship our blind leaders. The men.
Confused, yet confident at the same time, men design solutions to problems they can’t truly see. We’re lucky if they acknowledge a problem at all. Often glaring problems are spun in a way as to seem natural or inevitable or something that will be worked out in the end or, my favourite – a necessary evil.
Example: Overpopulation
Let’s look at overpopulation. Women are blamed for this time and again. And the finger pointing comes from men. “They should stop getting pregnant.” “They should take birth control.” “They should stop having babies.” “They should get abortions.” There may be comments blaming women for their poverty. “Poor, uneducated women have too many babies.”
No where in the world are women in control of their bodies. In most places, marriage is mandatory. In all places in the world, women must provide sex to men, free or paid. There is no choice to refrain from hetero-sex without serious consequences. Men have designated penis-centred sex as MANDATORY. Most women don’t have access to birth control or abortion or safe spaces free from male pestering and abuse. Men have no interest in inconveniencing themselves with condoms, vasectomies, or masturbation-instead-of-sex. Women and girls get pregnant. Babies are born. The fault lies with men and the the penis-sex they force upon women. Stop mandatory fucking and give women education and opportunities (i.e., reduce dependence on men) and you will lower birth rates (and rape, and STIs, and female death, and female poverty, and and and).
But men won’t acknowledge that they are the source of the problem, so they point the finger at women, and it is, as usual, up to women to shoulder the blame and clean up. But it can’t be cleaned up until we get to the true source.
Example: Prostitution
Ah, the world’s oldest profession. WRONG. The world’s oldest form of slavery. Prostitution is not a profession. Like marriage, it is a direct manifestation of male dominance and female submission and slavery. Prostitution is not a choice, it is a last resort, an act of desperation, or enforced slavery (for many). For a few, it might be a misguided attempt at sexual liberation (as defined by men, of course).
Men may acknowledge it is a problem, but a women’s problem, in that either a) women are spreading diseases, b) contributing to the moral decay of society, or c) aren’t accessible ENOUGH for their liking. However, most men don’t really see prostitution as a serious problem. It doesn’t affect their daily lives, and for many, satisfies a ‘need’ they feel they are entitled to. They may even rationalize that prostitutes save ‘real women’ from the bulk of men’s demands and violence. They are a necessary evil.
But women are not the problem. The fact that prostitution exists at all is the problem and a symptom of vast inequality between men and women. The fact that men believe they are entitled to unfettered access to women’s bodies is the problem. The fact that men dictate women’s available economic options is the problem. The fact that this so-called job affects the status and safety of ALL women, including first and foremost, the prostituted, is the problem.
Women have shouldered the blame and do the bulk of the clean-up. Unfortunately, there is a growing movement of anti-feminist / pro-penis / pro-abuse women seeking to make sure prostitution is here to stay. And it will stay unless we get to the root of the problem: male dominance and entitlement.
Example: Poverty
Systems of currency are based on hierarchy. Hierarchy is a male invention. Capitalism, the ultimate currency-based system of hierarchy tells us that some of us have more value than others and deserve more than others. It also tells us that those of us who cannot survive under this system deserve what we get. Failure to survive is explained away by the men on top (and even men lower down on the hierarchy) as the simple result of ‘natural’ competition rather than bias, disadvantage and just plain unfairness due to misogyny, racism, etc.
Since before the invention of currency, women have been forced into a dependent role by men. The development of currency hurt women even more deeply and reinforced sexual servitude. Not permitted to work for currency, women were forced to assume roles as slaves to men. Women’s labour, even to this day, is primarily unpaid or underpaid. Prohibited from competing on a fair playing field, women have always been vulnerable – their fates tied to male whim and male mortality. Disobedience towards a man, being discarded by a man, or left alone following the death of a father or husband, have left women on the streets destitute and unskilled and in danger from the rest of male society, with very few options for survival.
And so we have poverty.
Men choose to blame the problem of women’s poverty on the women themselves. Women are lazy, vain, focused on their looks, stupid, unable to compete, baby machines, weak, etc. You name it, men have used it as the reason why so many women live in poverty, why women should be kept out of paying jobs, and why poverty exists at all. They’ll never see themselves at the root of the problem.
Male dominance, enforced female dependence, and reliance upon an unfair currency system that over-rewards penised-people for doing unremarkable things are the problems. But until we can name the root of the problem correctly, poverty will continue. Women will shoulder the blame, and will form the bulk of the unpaid/low-paid clean-up crew. Men, meanwhile, will pontificate, design ineffective solutions or ignore the problem altogether.
The Bottom Line
The ‘problem solvers’ who tend to get attention and funding and political support are almost always male. Women are only included when there is blame to be doled out or grunt work to be done on implementing solutions. Women are scapegoats and free labour clean-up crews. Always.
When you don’t approach a socio-econo-enviro-political problem from a feminist perspective, you will never be able to get to the heart of the matter and solve it. Enough with the blind kings, already.
Calling All Female Hackers
Although the question is: are there even any female hackers? There must be, but I suspect they’ve all been relegated to fetching coffee or tea or giving blow jobs to all the male hackers in the various hacker movements and missions. Just like every other counter-culture movement or mission in history.
What the hell am I on about now?
I’ve always liked the idea of hackers. But I need to explain this a little so dudes don’t get all puffed up and start jerking off about how great they are. I like the idea of hackers who use their mad skillz to fight The Man – and by The Man, I mean Patriarchy.
I get the sense that most hackers – and note of course, that most hackers are men and thus are privileged – are ‘in it for the lulz’. Which means they are trolls. Which means there is no real mission in the proactive sense of the word. Which means they get off on hurting people indiscriminately.
I dunno, I guess I’m into having a sense of purpose in life – even if the purpose doesn’t make much of a dent – and that the purpose isn’t about spraying machine gun fire into a random ***crowd and laughing hysterically. But then, I’m not a dude, so what the fuck do I know? I believe in leaving the place better off than I found it.
*** a crowd of rapists, I could get behind. But when the fuck do rapists ever get what they deserve…?
If I had the mad skillz of a hacker – and believe me, I’ve fantasized – I’d do something that might actually help people or send a message or piss off people who are given free reign in this world to abuse women and children.
I think, first and foremost, I’d have a go at porn sites. They soooo deserve it. I’d wager they are the single most harmful (and common) genre of site on the web. And they hurt women and girls as a global class of people immeasurably. Porn is protected as ‘art’ or ‘free speech’ despite neither being true because there is nothing more important than boners and hurting women in this world. Rape and depictions of rape rock, man!!!
Why am I on about this? Well, ***supposedly some Russian hackers managed to fuck up Skype, which affected a whole bunch of people around the world who run small businesses or talk with friends and family for cheap to free. I use it – although, I had no calls planned, so the interruption wasn’t a big deal to me. Yeah, Microsoft sucks ass, and it sucks even more that they bought Skype. I don’t like any big company, and that whole system needs to be dismantled. But still, hacking Skype? Fucking idiots. Pick a real target, whydontcha?
*** that is the word on the electronic street at this point, although I wouldn’t put anything past Microsoft. ‘Russian hackers’ might be code for ‘we don’t know what we’re doing’ and we are cowards.
Nevertheless, I would dearly love to see more women entering the esteemed world of hacking so that we could actually address real problems. If a couple of Russian masturbators can cripple Skype, then think what an army of female keyboard activists could do to the online porn industry. It might not dismantle it, but things could get right fucking hilarious.
As usual, though, the problem with male domination of jobs and fields that can actually make a difference/do some damage is that there is no incentive for men to dismantle festering systems that cement viewpoints of dominance and abuse. First, men benefit from dominance. And second, if I know anything, it’s that men always need incentives to do anything. There are huge incentives to dismantling Patriarchy for ALL people, but you might need a few brain cells in operation to see past a raging hard-on into the Big Picture.
I’m quite convinced that male privilege will bring down the human race eventually – either through societal or environmental collapse. It’s just a matter of when. I figure, if you’ve got the brains, why not hack your way to the end of days by harassing the true oppressors instead of Mickey Mouse bullshit like the Skype attack?
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.
Story Ending Never 
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