Sexxxism, P.R.I.C.K.s, and other CRAP

I am fond of creating new terms and acronyms for things that are inadequately or deceptively named by the dominant oppressor society I live in. Here's a list of a few of them that may appear occasionally or often on this blog.


1. CRAP

In the summer of 2005, I coined the term "CRAP". It stands for corporate, racist, atrocious patriarchy. Other activists call the oppressive systems we live in by more accurate terms, such as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. I wanted something that was shorter to type, and also had some humor value, even though I'm talking about a network of systems and institutions as destructive to Life as nuclear war and poisoned water.


2. Sexxxism (with many variations: sexxx, sexxxist, sexxxuality, sexxxism industries, etc.)

This refers to the forms of heterosexist, racist sexism that, among other places, permeates industry pornography and other systems of sexxxual exploitation.


3. P.R.I.C.K.

This acronym was also created in 2005. It stands for patriarchal, racist, ignorant, condescending, know-it-all. This phrase was born in response to witnessing and arguing with mostly heterosexual white men who were such deliberate or unconscious jerks to feminists and/or women of color, on the blog The Feral Scholar, that I felt compelled to address them, with an acronym that synthesized most of how they were behaving.

It also identifies a larger group of white men than racist, misogynist asshole blog-commenters. This larger group of white men is those who are intentionally and activity motivated to maintain and bolster CRAP's many systems and practices of harm to women of all colors and ethnicities, among other people. These men have a few reasons for doing so:

a. They profit from this, monetarily.
b. They gain pleasure from doing this.
c. They gain esteem and status from doing so.
d. They claim they don't know how to behave any differently.
e. They are not meaningfully held accountable by any systems or policies.
f. They are jerks or assholes, avocationally if not also professionally.


4. EDC

EDC means the Era of Christian Domination. BEDC means Before the Era of Christian Domination.

Everyone I know is forced, through a lack of socially/historically meaningful options, to use the dominant Christian time-line as some sort of "universal" calendar system. I object!

I know of no other "globally agreed upon" (ahem) calendar system of marking time that I can use here, especially, for example, if I wish to refer to when a book was published, or what today's date is.

In protest, in place of the commonly used AD and BC, I use the letters ECD (or BECD) after the dominant Western Christian calendar system's "year" is written. Today is, therefore, for me, the 26th of October, 2008 ECD.

The Western Academy's scholarly version of this, if referring to the time before or after a man named Jesus was supposedly born, is BCE or CE (in the Common Era/Before the Common Era, respectively). Calling Dominant Christianity and the Christian Era "common" is not only untrue for most of the world's population, it also negates many other calendars, and invisibilises many other ways of understanding and representing time. It is also woefully benign moniker for a period of time in which so many nations, cultures, societies, people, non-human animals, and other Earth-based spirited life, have been savagely and sadistically massacred and otherwise destroyed by what has come to be termed (in English) by many of the sexually and racially oppressed as the white man.