Friday, February 12, 2010

Ten Signs a Man you know is a Patriarchal Atrocity-Denier

[image is from here]

1. They don't ever use the terms "patriarchy", "patriarchal atrocity", or "male supremacist violence against women". They deny such a system and ideology even exists. They vehemently deny they have "male privileges and entitlements" and they get pissed off, whiney, or pouty if anyone says they do.

2. They think there is either a level playing field between the genders, or that men are disadvantaged. You know, the way whites and the rich are disadvantaged. Poor things.

3. They refuse to read books about patriarchal atrocities, because they might actually learn something about conditions they don't experience against themselves. They condemn perspectives and understandings that make such violence recognisable as "insane" while committing atrocious acts and calling them "humane".

4. They run governments, are heads of state, are the majority population of people who make and enforce law and religious customs. They also run the media and multi-national corporations, regulate the global economy, and are the media's mouthpieces. They have the authority, therefore, to name and define reality in ways that invisibilise their crimes against half of humanity.

5. They are and/or defend rapists, including the rights of men who are rapists and batterers of women to have visitation with the children of the raped and battered woman. They think rape is a an evolutionary phenomenon.

6. They rape and call it consensual sex. They think pornography is an idea, not an industry. They are very confused when they are called out on raping someone, or when a woman says she feels like her husband looking at pornography twenty hours a week is a form of cheating. Or they feign confusion, to be able to claim "innocence" as if any patriarchy-denier is innocent. (And the non-Nazi Germans were all innocent too, right?)

7. They call some women "feminazis" as if women are national rulers of fascist states, who gather up and kill men; as if male pimps aren't sexual fascists; as if men's rape of women isn't sexual terrorism and gender dominance. As if men don't silence women in innumerable ways, including by preventing radical feminists from getting air time in the dominant (white het male supremacist) media.

8. They call prostitution something that is harmless and happens consensually, without economic coercion. But they can't explain why it is predominantly and overwhelmingly poor women and trafficked women and children who are abused in those systems of exploitation.

9. They may, if they wish, speak out about all manner of abuse... except the abuses most committed by men against women. They use misogynistic abusive language to describe women they like, women they dislike, and women they are indifferent to.

10. They are normal privileged men. They look like the men on the street, in the boardroom, selling stock, preaching a sermon, getting married, getting divorced, suing women for custody, being self-serving, being self-absorbed, being ignorant and arrogant in equal proportions.

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