On Attraction, Sexual Interest, and White Het Male Supremacy

the image above is from here

I chose the chart above to open this post not because it is one that reflects my beliefs, but because I think it does represent some dominant views about how relationships form and progress.

As I noted at the beginning of my last post, I recently submitted two comments to a white transgender feminist's blog. She didn't publish them but did explain that she wouldn't be posting them.

I'd like for the topics to be addressed to allow any of my readers to comment here on these issues. I think each issue is relevant to building respectful, radical, revolutionary community. So I've posted links to her blog's two posts (with my revised comments) here and in my last post, also published today at A.R.P. I've revised my comment quite a bit below to elaborate on and clarify points I'm trying to make.

Thank you to A Radical TransFeminist for promoting and supporting these discussions.

The discussion there, as I understand it, was about challenging our internalised and externalised supremacist attitudes and practices, including the practice of focusing our attention on those atop various hierarchies and leaving out of our vision of attractiveness those lower on various political-social hierarchies.

Related discussions and struggles elsewhere have focused on getting masculinist, pornographic, and predatory values, aesthetics, and practices out of our sexual, romantic, social, and economic lives. This one divided up the white queer community I was part of decades ago. (Masculinism and pornography won out, unfortunately. But with the awareness of the disproportionate number of queer people who are survivors of sexual abuse, particularly in childhood, at least predatory practice has been consistently challenged.) Yet another set of concerns and challenges relates to how lightness of skin, straightness and lightness of hair, and eye shape and color become a measure of attractiveness and value within and without communities of color, including Jewish communities.

Another dimension of this struggle is the one towards decolonial love, something I've heard only a very few white people talk about as an ethical value and political-personal necessity. Novelist Junot Diaz addresses this and intersectionally related matters *here* in a video of a speech he gave last year. This speech generated a very good and deep discussion among many activists and artists I know, which is taking place in email. And, I'll include a link to a critique of his work *here* at the blog QueerBlackFeminist.

On Attraction

http://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/significant-othering-attraction-down-the-privilege-gradient/

Here is a very revised version of my comment.

I’d written something a while back that I’d like to post a link to here as response-piece to what you’ve written above and in your second post on the subject.

Compulsory Sexuality and Asexual Existence

To summarise my reason for linking to it, I experience the perspective above as pro-compulsory sexuality and as pro-sexual, in the liberal sense. I question whether the challenge before many of us, rather than expanding who we find attractive sexually or romantically, is challenging why we find anyone “attractive” in the dominant sense. An argument I read somewhere stated that we ought to see the beauty in everyone. But that sentiment, while admirable on some level, unfortunately puts aside the issue of what ‘beauty’ is in imperialist, racist, colonialist, capitalist, patriarchal societies. I hear a clear demand that we challenge the ways we internalise oppression, writing off classes of people as unattractive.

That makes me uncomfortable. But why?

I get how white singer John Mayer stating that his genital is white supremacist is racist and misogynistic in all kinds of ways. I’m arguing that it wouldn’t be my counsel or charge to him, or wish for him, to find Black or Brown people attractive and to act on that; he’s clearly so bigoted that such interaction flowing from his white and male entitlements to get what he wants would quite likely trigger and oppress anyone of color; it would be my counsel that he interrogate what an attraction to whiteness means and is and see where that leads him.

I live in a dominant culture that requires us to manifest (well, sell and purchase) ‘beauty’ in some form. That requirement comes with the belief and attitude that being not-beautiful is to also be worthless, except perhaps as labor. Implicit in a charge for us to expand the populations of classes of people we find attractive, I see a somewhat anti-asexual charge to be attracted to people in the first place.

I want to support the effort to encourage meaningful, caring, honest, intimate, counter-hegemonic, decolonial mutual relationships among people as a way to build sustainable, healthy, revolutionary community; I just take issue with that being identified as primarily a matter of attraction and sexual interest. I see our struggle as this: to form friendships first–whatever else follows. Friendship, as many feminists and womanists have written over the decades, normally requires and presupposes a kind of equality of interest and needs. Romantic and sexual relating, historically and traditionally, requires and presupposes inequality. This is why sexual relationships are compulsory and institutionalised and friendships, however ubiquitous, are not.

There’s an appeal here in my remarks for people who occupy oppressive positions structurally to stop engaging in the practices that traditionally oppress, and nurture those that traditionally do not, in part because doing something with history and tradition behind it is, I’d say, going to be less exhausting than doing otherwise. Not that ease is a primary value. There's little about challenging and transforming the status quo that is easy. But an argument I hear a lot is how self-condemning it can be for lesbian, gay, het, and queer people to continually interrogate their/our lack of attraction to women or men or transgender people. The process of coming out as lesbian or gay, as I understand it personally and from personal friendships with lesbian women, involves unlearning heteronormative and patriarhcal ways of being, ways of feeling, and ways of acting. It may also lead to challenging ageist, racist, and classist assumptions, among others.

Speaking as a profeminist gay male, radically rejecting heterosexuality and heterosexism means rejecting the ways het men have arranged for people to meet and get to know each other. What het male culture appears to prize is a kind of attractiveness that is directly related to appearance, not substance. Looks are what matter first and often enough, most. Sexual desirability, determined and defined by het men, is what the human objects of het men's attention are supposed to achieve. To reject het men's standards for being "sexy" and "attractive" is to be deemed ugly and worthless--except as labor--by them.

I see the bar and club scenes as doomed to replicate heterosexist and heteronormative standards of appealing to one another as sexy things, as sex objects, as people who must do a whole lot to ourselves before we leave home to go to the bar or club.

So one question is this: in what social spaces are we supposed to challenge ourselves to be attracted to people lower on various social-political hierarchies? In the workplace? In the home? On the street? All of those places are sites of misogynist and racist oppression, and of ageism, of ableism, of classism.

It has been mentioned that if one’s social circle is white, that’s what needs to be challenged. A proposed antidote to someone's all-white circle of potential dates or mates is to bring white folks into potentially romantic or sexual contact with people of color. This, to me, privileges a value of white people expanding our dating pool, but in no way identifies what the benefit would be to people of color, should that pool-expansion occur. So I begin with friendship as a foundation for revolutionary community and affection, not with attraction and sexual behavior as that base. In the realm of friendship, physical and sexual attractiveness isn't a primary value; shared intellectual pursuits, common interests, similar senses of humor, and how people might be helpful to one another are at least as important.

White people, or men, learning to do 'attraction behavior' less oppressively isn't something I hear oppressed people wanting tried out on them. As a survivor of sexual abuse, as an asexual person, as a gay person, and as a Jew in a Christian-dominated country, I certainly don’t want more people smiling at me or approaching me because of ‘attraction’. I’d welcome someone getting to know me in contexts where it is appropriate for us to know each other, due to progressive economic, social, or political work, not in contexts where ‘getting to know someone’ is the sole or primary objective. Not where the reason for people wanting to seek out each other's company is to raise the possibility of obtaining sexual contact or fostering romantic feelings.

I don't want to negotiate social spaces where I'm increasingly put in the position to say no or yes to the advances of het-identified men who are challenging themselves to be open to dating or bedding gay men. Not discussed thus far is the issue of who along the hierarchies ought to be entitled to approach whom? I'd see it as radical if the challenge wasn't for oppressors to find those we oppress more suitable for dating and mating, but rather for us to altogether stop approaching (for the purposes of getting a date or "a fuck") those we oppress.

As I think Catharine A. MacKinnon states in one of her books of essays, consent isn’t all that meaningful a lived concept for women if one only ever is in the position of saying no or yes to the advances of men. One would have to live in a world where such advances are neither compulsory nor anticipated to know what one wants from and with men. I can extrapolate from that to other hierarchies.

I feel that very personally and very strongly, as someone who is gay and a survivor of child sexual abuse and adult sexual exploitation, who unhealthily while normally feels compelled to meet the sexual, emotional, and affectional needs of someone who shows interest in me, especially when they are men. As I contemplate finding someone attractive, and contemplating being found attractive, such imaginings are problematically bound up with racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, misogynist, ableist, ageist, heterosexist, transphobic 'beauty' standards and oppressive interpersonal habits and social customs. Challenging the standards without also challenging and interrupting the oppressive dynamics and habits surrounding them is, for me, a set-up for more oppressive behavior to occur, not less.

To even imagine someone being ‘interested’ in me–when they don’t know me–means that I am led to try and change myself in self-oppressive, self-objectifying, and dehumanising ways. Opting out of the social attraction circuit, like opting out of the social sexual-behavior circuit, can be personally and interpersonally liberatory. I don’t see that course of action identified as valuable and viable in the discussion thus far.

I'm not comfortable with anyone white addressing an audience that isn't only white with a set of demands for what we should do that is deliberately designed to inflict on people of color our own social learning curve. I’ll add that I experience the term “demand” here, in this context, as white or race-superior. Why? Because making demands on readers is something I only experience whites and men feeling entitled to do--and doing regularly. In other words, it demonstrates having enough racial (or, in my own case, also sexual) social power to even proceed in doing it. I believe those of us in dominant structural positions, by race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and so forth, ought not demand something from our political peers that will likely violate and trigger those we oppress.

Also on the matter of race, was the race awareness training session for bi community activists in the UK either white-led, white-organised, or majority-white in attendance? If any of those, I’d then proceed to articulate a critique of such a process for arriving at what terms are most racially respectful and appropriate. Recognising that there are some significant differences between U.S. and UK dominant society that I might not be sensitive-enough to, I’ll add that I prefer the term 'racially oppressed', to 'minority-ethnic' when discussing who is subordinated, marginalised, and imperiled by race. For me, the latter term problematically reinforces whiteness as normal-majority and race-neutral. It also pretends that whites aren’t a global minority. It also conflates race with ethnicity.

While this comment contains challenges, I want that to be held in the context of me strongly encouraging you to keep up the great work. I’m thoroughly enjoying reading your deeply thoughtful pro-radical posts. I find you, a white blogger, to be deeply and sincerely committed to complex, intersectional, counter-hegemonic practice and that’s as rare in my experience as finding a man who does the same.

Feminist Action Alert: Please support "The Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project" before Friday July 29th, 2011!!!

Some of what follows and more info can be found *here*. Thank you to all who can support this project in any way.

 

UBLEP IndieGogo Campaign Update #5: Our Production Process. from tiona.m. on Vimeo.

Help make it happen for The Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project on Indiegogo!

Our Story
THE FILM.
Filmmaker Tiona McClodden and publisher Lisa C. Moore announce their collaboration for a feature-length documentary film, Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project. UBLEP will highlight interviews with black lesbian elders in their 60s, 70s and 80s from across the United States and situate them in a range of black historical movements, spanning the decades between the 1930s and 1980s. The film will feature 8-10 profiles of elders, and show accompanying archival footage and personal ephemera that will reveal rare images of black lesbian life and history. UBLEP will also bring to light a number of black lesbian underground movements, solidifying a black lesbian presence within overall American black history.

We have under a week left in our IndieGogo Online Fundraising Campaign to raise $10,000-$15,000 which ends this Friday July 29, 2011.

We are asking that each of you please take some time to do at least 1 of these things via our IndieGoGo Fundraising Campaign Page: indiegogo.com/​The-Untitled-Black-Lesbian-Elder-Project


*DONATE at one of our contribution levels to assist us with reaching out goal.

*TWEET about our campaign by using the button below our Update #5 video.

*EMBED our campaign widget on your blog or website by using the button below our Update #5 video

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To Hugh Hefner: Old Pimps Don't Die, You Just Keep on Pimping

photo of Hugh Hefner with three young extremely white women is from here

Above, Hugh demonstrates, in action, his racist, heterosexist, misogynist values. He surrounds himself only with the most narrow understanding of female people. Apparently, if you're not Aryan-looking and made up in CRAP-loaded ways, he doesn't want to know you. And even if you are Aryan-looking and made up in CRAP-loaded ways, he doesn't want to know you, he wants to sexually exploit and domineeringly control you.

If you're looking for ageist jokes about an elderly man's penis and Viagra, you've come to the wrong place. This post is about the alleged humanity of Hugh Hefner, not his age or genital functioning.

As Mark Twain said about reports of his demise, rumors of Hugh Hefner's death recently have been greatly exaggerated. What cannot be exaggerated is the extent to which Hugh, over more than half a century, has made US society a far more classist-racist-misogynist society, promoting ideals of women's beauty that has been so horrifically harmful that he ought to be charged with crimes against humanity—the humanity of women, and girls.

To an alarming number of white men, he is seen as a hero; to liberals he is also seen as a fighter of civil liberties and human rights—claims of his humane humanity have also been greatly exaggerated. Not too long ago his soon-to-be wife, Crystal Harris made what some viewed as a surprising decision: she elected to not wed and also dump Hugh Hefner. If anyone doubts the wisdom to be found in women who appear to be what Hugh insists women must look like, let it be noted that before she signed away her rights to self-possession, she got the hell away from this controlling, domineering, manipulative, oppressive play-prick. Hugh is to human rights what B.P. is to environmentalism and what General Petraeus is to the Peace Movement.

On Piers Morgan Tonight, last night, he put forth the nonsense that we can't really know why she dumped him. We can: he was an oppressive, misogynist prick. No, she's not likely to say that on television or in print media. He thinks a case can be made for them not having much in common intellectually. Perhaps: while a successful business-man, he's not especially smart at relationships or anything else that doesn't have to do with his own ego, his compulsively racist-sexist-heterosexist value system, and the bank accounts he has due to profiting off of those values-in-action. Hugh isn't just a pimp; he's also a filthy white supremacist, and an anti-Lesbian activist, and a virulent misogynist.

Hugh is not a lonely man; he makes sure his economic clout and social stature keep women around—women who would not likely know life without economic woes without him. I doubt they are anything resembling economically free while living under his roof—by many accounts he is so controlling that he wouldn't let anyone else co-own his money, not even a spouse.

He brought with him to the program, to wait for him backstage, two “new loves”--both blond, both young--briefly referred to by only their first names as if they were his daughters: one woman has been a girlfriend for a couple of years. Hugh made polyamory into a lifestyle well before it took off in progressive queer community. His brand of polyamory is insistently WHM supremacist. So when I say things like “polyamory” and “monogamy”, what I mean is possession and oligarchy.

Hugh believes liberalism is a solidly good ideal. But when it comes to him hoarding male supremacist power he's entirely conservative.

He says he wanted to give Crystal “what she wanted” by marrying her, but if she wanted freedom and economic independence, he wasn't likely to support her having either. He speculates she had another man, as if this is a reason to not marry—clearly for Hugh it's not a reason—he's never been monogamous. He says “I never played shady. I've always been who I am.” Yes, a pimp. But I doubt he ever tells anyone that's exactly what he is—to the core of his being. Nothing he's done with his life was not done to serve himself.

Hugh and Piers sat together speaking about politics, the kind organised around elections, not erections. Piers remarked: “Like everyone, I'm sure you've been through a very tough time in the last couple of years.” Huh? Right, Piers: most folks live in their own mansion, have plenty of access to health care, and have enough social-sexual capital to sell women and his own image.

Hugh got in a xenophobic slam against China's economic power, and at least Piers reminded him capitalist China's values are largely [US] American. What could Hugh say: he agreed.

He said he didn't think Casey Anthony acted like “an innocent person”; I'd argue it takes one to know one. I don't mean that Hugh is a murderer of children. I mean he has done gross harm to children—far more children than Casey Anthony ever could. Yet she will continue to be demonised as evil, while he got a film made about him proclaiming him a great human rights activist. This could only be true—well it could never be true—but it could only be proposed as possible truth if we pretend girls and women are not human deserving of the human rights fought for by groups like Amnesty International—not that they have a great record on fighting for rights for women against patriarchal atrocities. He once refused to do a pictorial of Vanessa Williams, a former Miss America, because he knew it would ruin her career. He pretends to actually care about women by stating insincere things:

"They clearly weren't authorized (by Williams) and because they would be the source of considerable embarrassment to her, we decided not to publish them," Hefner told PEOPLE in 1984. [source: here]

He hasn't given enough thought to how perpetuating heteroracist-sexist standards of exploitative femininity harms Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women and girls, I guess--as well as white women and girls. When asked if he thought of Playboy as exploitive, he unsurprisingly, if bewilderingly, said “I don't”. Fortunately Piers reminded Hugh he has his own moral compass on such things. Well, a pimp's moral compass that is not quite only his own. Hugh has a new show, The Playboy Club, coming onto US television this fall; it will likely attempt to airbrush or Photoshop the heterosexism and racist-misogyny of the time and re-present them as forms of liberation for young blond white het non-Jewish, non-Muslim women. The program Mad Men deals with the same era and economic culture, but has reportedly attempted to show sexism as sexism, not freedom.

At the end of the show, Piers misogynistically verbally welcomed Hugh to go off-stage to the “comforting bosoms” of his two girlfriends, who had been shown a few times through the show, never allowed to speak. Hugh chuckled in a unsurprisingly creepy way—these are women who are not yet old enough to be the average age of his own children.

"Sl*twalk"... another point of view

image is from here

The poor people in my family don't walk down the street claiming they are the negative stereotypes rich people assume about them. Their dignity and desire not to participate in their own oppression in such a way is too great for them to do that. The people of color I know well, both women and men, don't walk through the street calling themselves the terms whites hurl at them. Only some structurally privileged women want to publicly use misogynist terms, like "dyke" and "sl*t", and "b*tch". It's part of an anti-radical tactic sometimes called "reclamation". I have lived my adult life using the term "dyke" positively. But I get how that is a race-, gender-, region-, language-, and class-privileged experience to be able to do so.

I'm not comfortable with the term "sl*twalk" being promoted as liberatory or pro-woman as it strikes me as deeply discriminatory against the most poor and otherwise marginalised women who do not have the status to embrace terms like "sl*t" as empowering or part of a liberation movement. The reclamation of oppressive, dehumanising terms--the terms men use to insult and degrade women in an anti-woman society--is not part of my political program, and I don't support it. There are other problems too. Such as trying to salvage a term that describes an idea about a kind of person that is linguistically so culturally relative that to embrace it is to continue to support or "reclaim" the particular anglo-patriarchal cultures in which the term exists, such as those in North America. It's not exactly that all women within a society are oppressing themselves by using those terms; it's that they are oppressing other women.

Ageism: the term conjures a gross stereotype of some women of some ages, none of whom are "sl*ts".

Ableism: the term assumes people walk. Many women do not.

Racism and classism: it is disproportionately race- and class-privileged women who assume that reclaiming misogynist terms and behaviors is empowering to ALL women. It isn't.

Sexism and misogyny: the term is one of the most virulently anti-woman, sexually oppressive terms in the English language.

Heterosexism: the term is generally used against women who are choosing to be sexually available to men, within whatever limited options, with strict codes of compulsory heterosexuality in place. Many women are not choosing to be sexually available to men. And the term invisibilises those women.

The term participates in many other forms of exclusion, discrimination, and marginalisation. Such is the case when privileged few try and show up whenever efforts are made by privileged people to reclaim the terms that are used by men against many multiply disadvantaged, discriminated against women.

I was glad to read this excerpt from another blog, but not for the racism, ethnic insensitivity, and other forms of oppressive privilege on the part of some whites, which result in the need for it to be written at all. Please click on the links below the quoted passage. What follows is something I read over at The Angry Black Woman blog *here*. With thanks to her and also to the author of this writing, Mehreen Kasana.

“As a Muslim feminist woman of color, I cannot relate to Slutwalks as it caters mostly to the definition of emancipation set by white women. Slutwalks deviate in terms of delivering the message against sexual assault. It turns a blind eye to women of cultures where flimsy clothes don’t necessarily lead to rapes. Muslim women get raped too. Nassim Elbardouh is right. “Do Not Rape” Walk sounds better. This isn’t to say that I don’t support Slutwalks. I simply can’t relate to a liberating movement that does not liberate nor acknowledge me. Western feminism, despite its undeniable achievements, still perpetuates the image of a white woman as the liberated one. If these feminists do claim to represent all women, they need to understand the dynamics of the cultures other women hail from. Don’t care if you’re wearing a thong or burka, no one has the right to rape you. Burka clad brown Muslim women get raped too. Represent us. I want a movement that represents me regardless of my color and creed. End victim blaming and rape culture by representing everyone.”

—
Mehreen Kasana  (via intoxicatedspirit)

30 May 2011 UPDATE: Please also see this:

'SlutWalk completely ignores the way institutional violence is leveled against women of color ... and it wont strip the word “slut” from its hateful meaning. The n-word, for example, is still used to dehumanize black folks, regardless of how many use it among themselves. If SW has proven anything, it is that liberal white women are perfectly comfortable parading their privilege...& ignoring women of color.'

http://tothecurb.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/slutwalk-a-stroll-through-white-supremacy/

Dark Daughta, Priya Kandaswamy, Marlon M. Bailey, Matt Richardson, Kenyon Farrow, Dean Spade, and more Great People: Is the Same-Sex Marriage Agenda Racist? ... among other problems

photo of Priya Kandaswamy is from here

photo of Marlon M. Bailey, PhD is from here

photo of Dean Spade is from here

Some of what follows is from makezine.enoughenough.org/prop8

I Still Think Marriage is the Wrong Goal 

Resources for Further Reading

The Beyond Marriage Statement
www.beyondmarriage.org/BeyondMarriage.pdf
Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, by Nancy Polikoff
Book website (Introduction free to download)
The Audre Lorde Project's statement on marriage
http://www.alp.org/whatwedo/statements/marriage
"Is Gay Marriage Anti-Black?" by Kenyon Farrow
http://www.nathanielturner.com/isgaymarriageantiblack.htm
"Ban Marriage," by Craig Willse
http://makezine.enoughenough.org/banmarriage.html
"Is Gay Marriage Racist" by Marlon M. Bailey, Priya Kandaswamy and Matt Richardson
download pdf
"Freedom in a Regulatory State? Lawrence, Marriage and Biopolitics" by Dean Spade and Craig Willse
download pdf
"Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown and the Seductions of Empire" by M.D. Bassichis, Anna M. Agathangelo and Tamara L. Spira
download pdf

Join the discussion on Facebook.

Statement
by Dean Spade & Craig Willse

A lot of stories are circulating right now claiming that Black and Latino voters are to blame for Prop 8 passing. Beneath this claim is an uninterrogated idea that people of color are "more homophobic" than white people. Such an idea equates gayness with whiteness and erases the lives of LGBT people of color. It also erases and marginalizes the enduring radical work of LGBT people of color organizing that has prioritized the most vulnerable members of our communities.

Current conversations about Prop 8 hide how the same-sex marriage battle has been part of a conservative gay politics that de-prioritizes people of color, poor people, trans people, women, immigrants, prisoners and people with disabilities. Why isn't Prop 8's passage framed as evidence of the mainstream gay agenda's failure to ally with people of color on issues that are central to racial and economic justice in the US?

Let's remember the politics of marriage itself. The simplistic formula that claims "you're either pro-marriage or against equality" makes us forget that all forms of marriage perpetuate gender, racial and economic inequality. It mistakenly assumes that support for marriage is the only good measure of support for LGBT communities. This political moment calls for anti-homophobic politics that centralize anti-racism and anti-poverty. Marriage is a coercive state structure that perpetuates racism and sexism through forced gender and family norms. Right wing pro-marriage rhetoric has targeted families of color and poor families, supported a violent welfare and child protection system, vilified single parents and women, and marginalized queer families of all kinds. Expanding marriage to include a narrow band of same-sex couples only strengthens that system of marginalization and supports the idea that the state should pick which types of families to reward and recognize and which to punish and endanger.

We still demand a queer political agenda that centralizes the experiences of prisoners, poor people, immigrants, trans people, and people with disabilities. We reject a gay agenda that pours millions of dollars into campaigns for access to oppressive institutions for a few that stand to benefit.

We are being told marriage is the way to solve gay people's problems with health care access, immigration, child custody, and symbolic equality. It does not solve these problems, and there are real campaigns and struggles that would and could approach these problems for everyone, not just for a privileged few. Let's take the energy and money being put into gay marriage and put it toward real change: opposing the War on Terror and all forms of endless war; supporting queer prisoners and building a movement to end imprisonment; organizing against police profiling and brutality in our communities; fighting attacks on welfare, public housing and Medicaid; fighting for universal health care that is trans and reproductive healthcare inclusive; fighting to tax wealth not workers; fighting for a world in which no one is illegal.

Now, check out this awesome comment from Dark Daughta, which will close this post because it's so awesome.

photo of my friend Dark Daughta is from here

Dark Daughta said...
I think that as the different segments of various movements spend more time interacting with each other and reading each other there will be a kind of coalescing of political agendas. I will definitely appreciate lefty men developing a layered analysis that includes the people of colour and native people they oppress. I'd also appreciate the middle classes of various communities who do radical work to incorporate an analysis of status, hierarchy, class and career that points fingers back at them. I'd like people of colour who are immigrants like me to think and read and write more about the relationship between their immigration, their status as low level settler occupiers and the plight of native and inuit peoples. I'd like married radical political folk to think more regularly about queers and nonmonogamists. I'd like to have more conversations with people about the politics of aging both in and outside communities of resistance. I'd like to talk more about beauty, evil limited construct, with people inside communities of resistance who nonetheless set up artificial standards related to who is attractive and who is not. If I see one more bony jutting hipped white dyke or transman with limp jauntily cut kewl hair presented as the epitome of what it means to be politically radical, conscious and kewl, I'm gonna scream. Well...err...not scream, really. :) But it's just that every community, instead of obliterating oppressive standards and beliefs based in hierarchy seems really comfortable creating new ways to exclude and/or raise up a handful. It's frustrating.

How WHM supremacists protect one another's privileges and entitlements. Cases in point: The Roman Catholic Church, Ken Wilber, Andrew Cohen, and David Christopher Lane

photo of Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber is from here

With thanks to theoreticalgrrrl for inspiring this post.

Whatever men's ages, if men serially prey on other people for their own sexual, political gain, out of a sense of entitlement to do so, this behavior--the rapist's behavior, the child molester's behavior, the incest perpetrator's behavior, will be called "childish" and "immature" (read: not only not adult behavior, but not at all gendered behavior) and many other things that deny a crucial component of how it is men abuse so many times with so little accountability: it's because they are adult, grown men. They aren't boys if they're men, and I wish other men would stop excusing men's oppressive adult actions as if they were happening only because there's some inner child acting out, who only needs therapy, not permanent removal from society. Case in point: David Christopher Lane's pro-patriarchal analysis of serial abuser Andrew Cohen, who posed as a spiritual leader in order to gain intimate access to many victims.What has Andrew's colleague, and very well-followed author and god-figure to many, Ken Wilber, got to say about Andrew's abuses?

Ken? What have you got to say?

For more on Ken's chummy relationship with Andrew, please see *here*. For critical discussion about their work, including their work together, please see *here*, and please check if there is any discussion at all about both men's many forms of privilege, and their many entitlements to abuse because of those privileges.

It should not be too difficult to get this:

Men consuming pornography of raped and incested girls and women, men committing all manner of heinous political/spiritual violations and social degradations of girls and women, and some boys and men too, are not being boys, folks. They're behaving as men, if and when they're men, unless it is the case that they truly do not have the cognition and mental functioning of an adult, in which case they still are not boys, but are impaired men--regardless of their level of functionality, their behavior is generally registered by victims as occurring from a grown man, not a boy-child.

If a boy was doing what they were doing--sexually assaulting many other children and assaulting young or older adults too, they wouldn't get away with it. Men usually get away with it, because they have the status of being both males and adults, and also because they do very adult things to accomplish their decades of crimes, such as plan and execute financially or socially successful careers which place them in close proximity to the people they wish to abuse. (Children don't do that.) Raping people isn't a "childish" activity. It's a male supremacist adult man's activity, far too often.

See below to read one small example of how this patriarchal protection racket works. It's a White Boy's Club, all right, except that the adult members are all men. It's the same damned deal with the adult male preachers who the Catholic Church wants to pretend were not abusing children. The Church--a huge institution of patriarchal men of varying sexual orientations--has recently attempted to avoid the term "pedophile priests", claiming the victims' ages don't place the perps in that category--because the Church, which protects such abuses of children, of minors, says so. Got it.

I'm all for banning the term "pedophile" as I've stated on this blog before. We don't call rapists "woman-lovers" and we ought not call rapers of children "child-lovers". But I'm not for pretending that people who are legally children are called "not children" only when it serves a vastly criminal Catholic Church (led overwhelmingly by white male supremacist men) to do so.

Reality check:

"Bishops ignore and conceal child sex crimes because they can," said David Clohessy of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP). "So any 'reform' that doesn't diminish bishops' power and discretion is virtually meaningless." (source: *here*)

It's no different with any man who abuses serially. He does it because he can, and society won't do anything to lessen his social-political power to abuse others both interpersonally and institutionally. Men form institutions inside which they can and do abuse people with less power than they support one another having. If an institution is patriarchal--whether religious, legal, political, cultural, medical, or academic--the fact of it being patriarchal means abuse against women and children is happening there, and that exact abuse is being protected by fucked up, if normal, brotherhoods of men.

Everything that follows is from IntegralWorld.net.

David Christopher Lane, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy, Mt. San Antonio College Lecturer in Religious Studies, California State University, Long Beach Author of Exposing Cults: When the Skeptical Mind Confronts the Mystical (New York and London: Garland Publishers, 1994) and The Radhasoami Tradition: A Critical History of Guru Succession (New York and London: Garland Publishers, 1992). For the reviewed book and its author see: www.americanguru.net

Andrew Cohen
Exposed

A Review of "American Guru"

David Lane

After reading William Yenner's edited volume, AMERICAN GURU: A Story of Love, Betrayal and Healing—Former Students of Andrew Cohen Speak Out, I felt a number of emotions, ranging from depression, to anger, to frustration, to disbelief, to finally gratitude.

My first encounter with an Andrew Cohen devotee occurred several years ago when one of the editors of their slick magazine, What is Enlightenment? (now called, EnlightenNext), wrote me a personal letter asking for my appraisement of her guru. She had read a book I had co-authored with Professor Scott Lowe (University of Wisconsin) entitled "DA: The Strange Case of Franklin Jones" (Walnut, MSAC: 1995), which harshly criticized the late American guru. She clearly saw problems with Da Free John and I got the impression that she felt that Andrew Cohen was different and perhaps a genuine spiritual master.

I hesitated in writing back because I had read enough about Andrew Cohen to almost immediately realize that he, like Da Free John, suffered from an acute case of adolescent narcissism. In other words, both of these so-called spiritual teachers had yet to grow-up and act like mature adults. When they don't get their way and cannot control the behavior of their fawning devotees (which happens a bit more frequently than one might at first suspect), they have hissy fits. Da Free John would invariably go into one of his spiritual sulks or lash out in an indignant rage if he felt that his disciples didn't "get" his teachings.

In Yenner's explosively revealing book, American Guru, we learn that Andrew Cohen displays all sorts of loutish behavior when his disciples don't kowtow to his every neurotic whim. Women devotees especially receive harsh treatment from Andrew Cohen, including his own mother who eventually left him and exposed her son in her ironically titled book, The Mother of God.

What an outsider might find both unbelievable and astounding is how so many very bright and men and women can be so hoodwinked by a guru like Andrew Cohen who has never impressed me (unlike Da Free John, for instance) as being particularly intelligent or insightful. He reminds me of someone I knew in high school who got picked on and perhaps roughed up a bit by other students (for maybe not being athletic enough in gym or sharp enough in algebra class), and who vowed early on to someday get his revenge.

Andrew Cohen doesn't at all act like an enlightened guru passing on valuable gems of wisdom. Rather, he acts like a spoiled brat who suffers from a chronic case of high school insecurity and has finally discovered a way to get even.

And who does he get even with? Those spiritual seekers who are naïve enough to transfer over to Andrew Cohen their deep-seated yearnings, their love, and, finally, their wallets and purses. Even Andrew Cohen's obvious infatuation with Ken Wilber is indicative of Cohen's chronic intellectual insecurity. Cohen's and Wilber's tete-a-tete is grounded in their own self-interests, but the fact that Ken Wilber has aligned himself once again with an abusive self-proclaimed guru, such as Andrew Cohen, speaks volumes about Wilber's so-called "integrity".

Ken Wilber has never fully admitted how mistaken he was about Da Free John and his nefarious actions (lamely back-peddling, albeit slightly, only after the New York born guru was exposed in the national media). It is all too clear that Wilber hasn't a clue about the gurus he associates with or endorses. Or, to put it in a darker [read: whiter] light, it seems as if Ken Wilber will chummy up with any guru provided he or she will give him a featured section in their monthly journal.

I have read a large number of books that have exposed modern spiritual leaders and their organizations, including The Bare-Face Messiah (L. Ron Hubbard), Monkey on a Stick (the Hare Krishna movement, Life 102: What To Do When Your Guru Sues You (John-Roger Hinkins), etc. I think that American Guru is a valuable addition to the growing literature devoted to exposing fraudulent gurus.

American Guru is not a mean-spirited book. It is, rather, a refreshingly honest one. I think American Guru should be required reading for all of Andrew Cohen's past and present students. Hopefully, it will be read by every spiritual seeker before they make a choice of becoming a student of this so-called master who cannot even reconcile with his own mother.

I personally think Andrew Cohen is in deep need of long term therapy. The first step in his recovery process should be for him to sit down and read American Guru closely line by line. After doing such, he should apologize first to his mother and then to every student he has ever taken under his wing. Hopefully, he will then refund whatever money he has manipulatively gathered in his name.

I don't think any of this is likely, but I do have confidence that anyone who reads American Guru will be properly forewarned not to buy into any of Andrew Cohen's childish antics.

If you are on the fence about Andrew Cohen and his methods, American Guru will help you get off it and provide you with enough telling detail (and, hopefully, some confidence) to walk away from this spiritual poser. His mother did and so should we all.

William Yenner, American Guru: A Story of Love, Betrayal and Healing-former students of Andrew Cohen speak out, Epigraph Publishing, 2009.

Black Swan (2010) starring Natalie Portman, story and screenplay by Andrés Heinz; screenplay also by Mark Heyman and John J. McLaughlin, is one of the most misogynist movies I've ever seen

image of movie poster is from here

Plot summary paragraph added on 8 May 2011. 

There's a lengthy rant before the review. 
If you want to cut to the chase, go down about ten paragraphs. This note was added on 21 Sept. 2012. 
***Added 12 Oct. 2012: Even easier--scroll down to the row of red asterisks!***

This post concerns misogyny, whiteness, darkness, and movie-making. I'm unsure of how it is that misogyny about white women is so revered and celebrated by men as a form of entertainment. I only know that it is, as is misogyny against any woman--it's just that Hollywood knows that if it makes movies about white people, more white people will go see the movie, in theatres or by renting the DVD. In a racist society in which there are white people--a majority population or not--where the economic system is racist too, whites will rule both socially and economically.

In the West, white men will possess more money than any other group and will hoard it using any and all means necessary, including military, legal, and police force. This is the current news story of the U.S. economic crisis--not mentioned this way exactly. Nowhere are rich white men calling for and end to the racism or the classism, coded into  financial and cultural currency, that keeps them rich, and richer, and richer. These white boys just did a calculated sell-off of oil futures. They knew that the U.S. people wouldn't tolerate gas prices above 4 bucks a gallon, and voila, as soon as that became the national average, they make their profits and now will wait to see how much more money they can make in the next quarter of the year. What is it that oil is sometimes called? Ah yes: Black Gold.

It takes a lot of men to make so many movies featuring misogyny. It also takes the support of a lot of women too. Jodie Foster is now promoting her film made with racist-misogynist Mel Gibson. As I understand it, he revealed the latest depths of his racist-misogynist raging and ranting, and abusiveness and terrorism, only after shooting of the film was completed--this is according to Jodie, who appeared on David Letterman's show and only quickly noted that Mel's behavior cannot be excused--but she said nothing else about him and has only publicly defended him as a good person.

She's quite willfully maintained a professional relationship with him long enough to determine that he's a racist misogynist--if you consider what he's said in public and done in private to be racist and misogynistic, that is--without making excuses for him.

To blame Mel's attitudes about and treatment of women across race, and of people of color across gender, and of Jews, as only a consequence of his drinking, which Roger Ebert does EXPLICITLY *here*, is to make it seem like alcohol possesses the ability to determine our attitudes about specific groups of people, which it does not. Shame on Roger Ebert for avoiding the truth of Mel Gibson's life, and to pretend his career and his abuses of women are not intimately linked. See this snippet of his review:

[H]ere is another of Mel Gibson's fine performances, a reminder that he is after all a superb actor. His personal life is in ruins because of the disease of alcoholism, which he is still struggling with. Though he's responsible for his outrageous acts and statements, I think this is not the good man I have met many times. From what I know about alcoholism, I believe he goes through personality changes, that he is content on some days and consumed by rage and madness on others, and that such changes are symptoms of the disease. Make your own diagnosis.

It took some courage on the part of Jodie Foster to direct this film. I believes she knows Gibson's good side and respects his talent. He was certainly the right choice for this material. All of his troubles through recent years are summed up by her opening shot, of an exhausted man floating on a raft in a swimming pool, his arms wide like the crucified Christ. A voice (later revealed to be the Beaver's) informs us this is Walter Black, a man so deep in depression, he has alienated his family and nearly destroyed his business.

We meet his much-suffering wife Meredith (Jodie Foster), his resentful son Porter (Anton Yelchin) and his disbelieving colleagues. Meredith finally throws him out, not without love. He buys a bottle, checks into a motel, tries to kill himself and is interrupted by the hand puppet.

And we get to feel so sorry for another privileged white het male abuser of women and his child, and of many other people too. Got it. Spare me the violins.

I understand Jodie wanting to make money off of her film. I can only hope it is her last professional collaboration with Mel Gibson. I recommend boycotting The Beaver. (And pleeease with the title--and the ridiculous story. It's not funny. It's not cute. The movie sucks. It's yet another "oh, the poor, poor very privileged MAN" movies. There have been entirely too many of those. We need far more murder-suicides where the murder isn't of a woman and the suicide is of a man who takes his own life before, not after, ruining the lives of others.) One last note on "The Beaver". (And we're not talking about *this* Beaver either, although it too celebrates the colonisation and domestication of white women.) How does one decide to name a movie after a misogynist insult to women? Jodie explained, semi-facetiously, that the title might help it sell well on DVD, because there will be het men wanting pornography who will order it. What a great idea for the selling of a serious film! (Not.) She also told us about how almost entirely wonderful her two sons are, how much better it is to have sons than daughters, and how wretchedly insulting to her Jodie's overbearing mother has been, except to her sons as a grandmother. It appears we cannot escape these themes of man-adoring and woman-hating.

I'm not sure who has more social clout: Roger Ebert or Jodie Foster. He reviews movies. She makes them. He's male and heterosexual. She's not. I've witnessed for a long time how if a woman is marginalised in some ways in Hollywood, by appearance, by sexuality, by age, or by race, she is expected to publicly support MEN, by those who pay her, more than it is expected of other women who are less marginalised. Even and especially, it appears, the most misogynistic among the menfolk are expected to be supported. What if we all stopped supporting misogynist and racist men? And stopped featuring them in movies and TV series and other programming (for example: Charlie Sheen). But there is non-gay boy-bonding of course, and it does preclude any man from speaking out against abuses that are primarily perpetrated by men against women.

Another theme in society is that when men are entranced by boys or men, they will betray women and girls utterly. This goes alongside the theme that when men are entranced by girls and women, they will betray women and girls utterly.

I guess it's men being entranced that's the problem. For when in such as state, men routinely conclude they are not in power, they are not in control, even while they take possession of and kill all who they are entranced by. That's a curious bit of logical phallusy, now isn't it? When women have been accused of taking possession of boys--such as in custody conflicts with abusive men, or of men's penises in the night, as in some of the witch trials, that never works out well for the women. If they don't burn her, they tie a stone to her ankle and toss her into the river: if she sinks, she was not a witch; if she floats, she is a witch and must be burned. Clever men: they get to destroy women either way.


***********************************************************

But on with the featured show.

This cinematic psychological thriller is called "Black Swan". The title comes from the ballet. The ballet comes from some of the cultures of Russia and Germany but was written by Pyotr Tchaikovsky and was later modified by his brother Modes. Almost immediately, I waged a bet with myself, not knowing much about the film's creators. I bet myself that the writers and director were all male. I bet that no woman was involved in constructing this story, as it appeared, in every respect, to be nothing other than a tangle of men's misogynist fantasies about pretty pale young females, as men define pretty, pale, young, and female, put on film. Indeed, we are led to believe that Winona Ryder, who plays the "aging" dancer, is so far over the hill that she might as well be dead. Oh, that's practically a spoiler alert. To the extent that she is alive, one has to ask: why is she alive and for whom? Surely not herself.

Here's the main plot: a young, thin, white woman who is pretty according to conventional Hollywood and Madison Avenue standards, is grossly and abusively manipulated in body and mind by a prestigious white het male choreographer of a revival of the ballet, Swan Lake. She hopes he will cast her in the role of Swan Queen which would allow her to perform (dance) as both the White Swan and the Black Swan. She lives with her mother; she is attracted to another woman dancer. And she is battling with various forms of psychosis as she is brought close to a complete mental breakdown well-choreographed by the instructor/choreographer.

The story braids together these themes: white heterosexualised female beauty being overpowering to presumably straight white men; men's need to control, manipulate, and dominate women sadistically, socially, and sexually; people changing from birds to humans; goodness and purity of love represented by whiteness and lightness; evil and seduction by blackness and darkness; and the on-going question men seem to have about women's sanity. The sexist and racist themes are well represented--more symbolically with the racism, more interpersonally with the sexism. (Where HAVE I heard this before??? Oh, I've written about it *here*.)

Added to those are "problems" of lesbianism and how closely it relates, to the filmmakers, to a woman's insanity. Crazy = dark = female. Crazy = dark female. Dark = crazy female. Female = dark and crazy. Remember that. When a woman is darkest, she is at her most insane, according to white het men's myths.

One of the messages of the film as written is that attraction to men is sometimes destructive, but attraction among women is only destructive and all attraction among women amounts to incest in one form or another. You know women: they can't tell one from the other! Mom sees herself in her daughter; daughter sees herself in her female dance competitor. (Sarcasm alert: Thank goodness it isn't men who mistake different women for one another! Ask any consumer of Playboy: he'll be able to tell you what distinguishes about Miss April from Miss August. But it won't be the depth or breadth of the women's humanity, I assure you.) To the extent that such attraction among white thin females is sexualised in the film, it must be presented to het men publicly for their own private enjoyment. Again and again and again. We are allowed--or is it forced?--to gaze upon Portman's breasts, covered only in a very thin white leotard. It, like her own skin, will not keep any man out.

One of many misogynist sub-plots in Black Swan might just as be described thusly: "See how male filmmakers write and direct a story requiring Natalie Portman to fake masturbation and orgasm as often as possible." Her character can try to keep her mother out of her "private" sexual life in the fantasy sequences in the film, using a wood pole, curiously. In the reality scenes, she cannot keep men out, publicly or otherwise: there aren't enough wood poles around when she needs them to beat the predatory man over the head, or to use to stab men in the crotch or the eyes. Men wouldn't write such scenes anyway. Sighted men don't stay aroused by seeing men hit in the crotch or the eyes by a woman. They "feel" such assaults viscerally, in the groin or they eyes not as pleasure. Most men want their erections and their vision too, and use both to penetrate women's bodies which, in men's stories, are everything but private.

All the disgusting invasive assaults against Portman's character--and there are so many I lost count--are meant to evoke pleasurable responses from men, or a kind of revulsion-titillation response, typical of how men view women they lust for and simultaneously hate. This movie is a het male serial rapist and fatherly incest perpetrator's delight. Just check the demographic of who is renting it. I predict it will be (or already is) mostly white het men. Like over 90%.

"Art"--using the term loosely, sometimes, is pornography: the graphic depiction of woman-as-wh*res. Women are depicted and referenced as "wh*res" throughout this film--whether or not they are "frigid" or "hot", they are wh*res and must be sexually available to men when men want them to be. Portman's character has the scratches on her back to prove it. Roger Ebert only alludes to this; he doesn't use the word "misogyny" at all, which I find shocking as I know he is conscious of it both as a term and a social reality. *Here's his review*. But true to form, the female lead only ever wants or admires the man who possesses and destroys her--even while she resists him; she only resents the woman who possesses and seeks to protect her, and also resists her. Portman's character attempts to tear down her mother's image, which fantastically mocks and shames her. But the male lead who tears at her and breaks her down can only be either secretly desired or submitted to. Alas, in misogynist cinema and other stories, is there any difference between the two?

This was one of the more disturbing films I've ever seen--unrelentingly disturbing, in fact. It wasn't just that it was gross--and it was gross--repulsive--a lot. What was repulsive was how the writers and director subjects the audience to scenes that seem only to exist to make the viewer recoil or retch. There seriously ought to be a trigger warning on this movie for anyone with an eating disorder that involves self-starvation or throwing up. It's not a safe movie; not only for that reason.

In addition to Portman's body being scratched, it is also bloodied in many other ways--indeed, menstruation is the only blood-event not mentioned. This was clue number 5000 that it was written by a man or by men. She peels back her own skin, off of her finger; she examines her cracked and bloody toenail; she gazes at lesions by her fingernails; she presses her fingers into abrasions; she sticks things into her flesh; she tears at herself. This is the most perversely self-touching movie of a young woman I've ever seen. But then again, I haven't seen much pornography in the last 25 or more years.

This fictional woman who is spawned from the utterly infertile minds of men (Russian, German, and U.S. American) has a boundary called "skin" that betrays her; or she betrays it. But underneath all the peeling, picking, pinching, poking, and bleeding, if you're paying attention, is a story of how men ruin women's lives. You just have to endure all the very graphic female self-injury along the way. It was like watching a movie of a bird systematically and painfully plucking out its own feathers. Oh, she does some of that too.

This and boy-war movies like Platoon rank up there in "movies I plan never to see again". Watching movies about how men graphically and violently destroy other men and how men pornographically destroy women isn't my idea of a good cinematic time. But men do love their violence and violations, don't they? And it's only when feminists notice this theme that men take umbrage and deny it altogether.

Men can do whatever they want to women--men have demonstrated this enough times for it to be received as an unquestionable statement of truth. Men can and do possess women and girls. Men can and do rape women and girls. Men can and do dictate the terms by which many women live their lives, and thrust, assert, and insinuate themselves into women's and girls' lives in such ways that women's freedom with men is not possible, and the only freedom women have from invasion is to live without men. Men arrange societies so that the only way to accomplish that is by not living at all. Suicide-as-liberation, I'd argue, is not a pro-feminist idea. Liberation by murdering the male invaders, the male abusers, the male violators: that to me is pro-feminist because it removes from men the complete lack of accountability that men currently enjoy and exploit in too many ways to imagine or contemplate. Instead, it seems we all want to think of men as "good" at least some of the time. That men choose to waver dangerously between something called "goodness" to something called "evil" only shows us how easily men project their own moral and sexual struggles onto women, making women the source of all that is good or bad in men--as if men weren't in charge at all.

It is a primary conceit of contemporary corporate pornography--and all mass produced material that is about "pornos" graphically, that because women's sexual power is greater than nuclear, wind, hydraulic, and solar power combined, it must be tamed, controlled, and punished by men. So too must animals. So too must the Earth, sea, and sky. There is nothing that white men, in particular, can keep their grubby hands off of. And there is nothing they touch that is not ruined, made to feel or be utterly without value or worth. It's like The Golden Touch in reverse, a curse from which there appears to be no remedy or relief.

Black Swan (from IMDb):

Directed by

Darren Aronofsky 

Writing credits
Mark Heyman		screenplay
Andres Heinz		screenplay
John J. McLaughlin		screenplay
Andres Heinz		story

Who Has Moral Capital? A discussion about the good and evil people among us.

image is from here

About the image above:

Good = right, light, white, blond, angelic, and unearthly--of the sky. Evil = left, dark, black, demonic, and animalistic--horned and spiked as well as winged. For those who don't know, "human having horns" is coded visual anti-Semitism. For more on that see *here*.

"Woman" here is both good and evil. "Man" is what?

This image of a woman is designed to appeal to het men raised on anti-human images of women, generally portrayed as variations on a very narrow socially-constructed fantasy, to be large-busted and small-waisted, ensuring that many heterosexually active girls and women will--in reality, not in fantasy--feel inadequate or insecure about men being attracted to them or staying with them if they don't look like the woman above, minus the wings--angelic and demonic.

As for studies measuring evil in U.S. institutions, well, of course "evil" is a bit hard to measure or even define, and while U.S. institutions are quite probably the source of more evil stuff than any other country right now, that's only because they're the ones (currently) on top. But understanding evil, yes, that's the name of the game here. These kinds of studies are fascinating for me because, if they can be found to reveal something universal about human nature, then we can relax a little! Think of how freeing it would be to identify the moral defects that are built into every human being's architecture, and exactly what activates them. Then, instead of wasting energy castigating every person who misuses power for things that everyone in their same position would also likely do, we can get to work focusing on ways to build our own lives so that we can attempt to improve the world around us in ways that avoid the same traps.

If you click on the link embedded in the paragraph above and read the article, please note the color of the men with the word "ASS" written on their foreheads. And note what race they are not. White men, there, are presented as evil enough, but none are humiliated by having the word "ASS" written in their foreheads.

The passage above is part of a larger conversation that takes place underneath a recent blog post here, in which Quin links us to the results of a very interesting study, wherein people, in various contexts, are told they have or don't have various forms of power, and then are measured for how empathic or callous they become--based solely on the power they believe themselves to possess at that moment. I'd say that the study shows us something about human nature--that it is not fixed, that it is context-dependent, and that it is quite possible all of us can be manipulated by social forces to act more humanely or inhumanely towards other people. As a Jew with knowledge of my people's history, I'm quite familiar with racist societies capabilities to manipulate and destroy people, with public acquiescence and passive social approval. I know it because I live in a country, the United States, that denies it is committing genocide against American Indians.

I've raised a few challenges to the study, to its assumptions about "human beings" given that it's never just "human beings" who are studied: it's people who volunteer to be studied who are studied, and that's a particular group of people, often enough: for example, if the study is done at a university, the subjects studied might be traditional college-aged people, are often male more than female, are often white more than of color, are often middle class rather than not middle class.

The media repeatedly, unrelentingly tells us that white = human, male = human, and upper middle class or wealthier = human--also that thinner = human, Christian = human, heterosexual = human, able-bodied = human, and not-a-child and not-elderly = human.

This is to say, if you're not someone who is part of those demographic characteristics above, you're likely experiencing class-based systematic degradation, subordination, and violence, institutionally and interpersonally. If you're all of these: white, upper middle class or wealthier, male, thinner, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied, and are not a child or elderly, you are not likely experiencing much in the way of class-based dehumanisation and oppression. Your humanity likely matters and is relatively visible to and represented by corporate media, to dominant society generally, and to the U.S. government and corporations.

I've witnessed how people who possess few of the characteristics above are not represented in media and are not valued socially. It's painful to witness. I know what it is to be rendered invisible because of not being Christian or heterosexual, to be told--in too many ways to name here--that my existence and experience is wrong, bad, or dangerous, simply due to not being a white upper middle class heterosexual Christian male.

I know what it is to feel and be invisible as a disabled person with disabilities that aren't readily visible to others. But as a white male with economic privilege I am, for the most part, visible to a large degree to a lot of people. I exist. I matter. Regardless of my own sense of myself, I matter to this country in a way that poor lesbians of color--of any faith, with any level of ability or disability--do not.

That simple while systemic reality--that possessing some characteristics means we will be seen, valued, and represented, is one that many people deny. Many people prefer to think what happens to us happens based on personal history only, or on individual qualities that are unique to us. The study linked to above puts into question this theory widely circulated in corporate media: that some people were and are born less humane and more dangerous than others. That some people are--for the whole of their lives--more brutal or savage or murderous than others. That some men are the kind of men that rape, and other men are not. That some people can be terrorists--from childhood--and others of us cannot be, no matter our age.

It is a feminist belief, in my experience, that men are not born to be rapists, and cannot be. And it is a feminist belief, in my experience, that whiteness is social and political, cultural and learned, not at all biological or natural. And that whiteness cannot be biological or natural, even while levels of pigment in human flesh is often related to matters of heredity and genetics. Pigment doesn't equal race; and having a penis-shaped genital that is medically and socially named as such doesn't make someone into a rapist. Social and political forces have to forcefully work to make people white and into men. And those forces do work, and are both systemic and systematic.

When people argue that some men are born rapists, I ask them if they believe some whites are born racists. The issue then, is: How "determining' is society? What role does it have in developing us individually and as members of various groups or classes of people, with or without entitlements and privileges, and with or without access to and use of certain forms of power exercised interpersonally and institutionally?

Let's return to the opening paragraph. I offer the following responses to the many issues and questions Quin raises.

As for studies measuring evil in U.S. institutions, well, of course "evil" is a bit hard to measure or even define, and while U.S. institutions are quite probably the source of more evil stuff than any other country right now, that's only because they're the ones (currently) on top. But understanding evil, yes, that's the name of the game here.

I think evil is measurable, depending on what you individually or collectively determine to be "evil". For example, lots of Tea Partiers and social conservatives determine "evil" to be something gay men do when they are sexual, or that white heterosexual women are because they are socially and economically subordinate to white het men; to the extent that white men socially recognise and acknowledge women of color, such women are not recognised and acknowledged as being just as human as white men are presumed to be. And various groups of Asian people, living in various regions of Asia or not, are viewed to be "potentially evil" in a way that white North Americans, living in North America, are not. This leads to images designed to sell magazines, like these:

image of magazine cover is from here

image of magazine cover is from here

We can note who Newsweek assumed "we: the audience, the public, the people" are: whites. Because that very pale baby who is "ours" above is not likely to be the child of anyone with dark skin. And the lower image is perplexing in that it makes a link between being a child of someone who is Central Asian and part of a particular political organisation, with being a Black male wearing Western clothing. In so many ways, U.S. media reinforces that light = good (if possibly racist in attitude), while being Black equals being a potential terrorist who will do harm to whites in practice, not in thought. Evil is well-understood, well-defined, and clearly represented in media. You can't miss it. Evil is never stereotyped as looking like a white het man.

The subtitle uses this language: "the mutating extremist threat" as if being a Black terrorist, or just Black and male, is something that is a mutation, a dangerous genetic and social threat. I'd argue that such images give whites the impression that we are "better", morally, than Black people--and that U.S. whites are better, morally, than Central Asians too. And with this attitude, "we" can commit all manner of crimes against Black people--within and beyond North America, and against Central Asian people, and still carry the status of being good and holy, not the stigma of being bad and evil. With this form of social-political moral capital, we can commit mass murder on a scale never seen from Central Asian males or African American males towards U.S. white American males ever.
 
These kinds of studies are fascinating for me because, if they can be found to reveal something universal about human nature, then we can relax a little!

I'd like to question who the "we" is in that statement who can relax? I'd argue that within the West, those who are white het male supremacists are more likely to be able to relax with this news because only those with race, sexual, and gender privileges and entitlements have moral capital. Those without moral capital might agree with the findings of the study, but lived experience will remind the oppressed who is assumed to be dangerous and who really is: whites are dangerous to people of color. Men are dangerous to women. Heterosexuals are dangerous to queer people. How relaxed is an African American lesbian woman going to be among those who oppress her in various ways? How relaxed ought she be?

Whites, men, and heterosexuals actively engage in and passively support terrorising (through interpersonal bullying or institutional discrimination). And they also dehumanise women, people of color, queer folks, and other oppressed groups--regionally, for example, in producing images like those above, and by controlling media that spits out these images faster than the human eye can register. And those groups only will get away with it due to having moral capital.

Think of how freeing it would be to identify the moral defects that are built into every human being's architecture, and exactly what activates them. 

For whom is it freeing to realise this, in reality? Feminists, for example, have argued for forty years that men's behavior is socially constructed, such as through institutional versions of what the study identifies as socially coercive forces. Does knowing that anyone can be a rapist free women to be less afraid when only women--along with children (girls twice as often as boys) are targeted for rape in the general unincarcerated population? I accept that anyone can be coerced to do anything, more or less. But this awareness doesn't stop me from seeing who, in fact, is harming whom, and with what social means and protections--legal and otherwise--they do so.

Then, instead of wasting energy castigating every person who misuses power for things that everyone in their same position would also likely do, we can get to work focusing on ways to build our own lives so that we can attempt to improve the world around us in ways that avoid the same traps. 

For me, this solution doesn't adequately call us to action against institutions which are, when they function as designed, profoundly violent--dehumanising and subordinating--against oppressed people far more routinely and with much more precision than against oppressors. And such institutions, and the people who run and support them, award moral capital only to some demographic groups. And we know who those groups are. I call them out, systematically, here on this blog.


I call us to action against the institutions and privileged, protected people who commit acts of violence against us: the us who are women, who are people of color, who are working poor people, who are lesbian and gay and Two Spirit, who are disabled, who are elderly, and who are deprived the moral and economic capital--the spiritual and material well-being reserved for the few: usually white, usually heterosexual, often men, who rule the rest of us with impunity, and often enough, with our belief in them as morally superior people. 

Michael Moore is tonight telling us that U.S. Americans "are better than them" (al Qaeda) morally, and that to celebrate the murder of Osama bin Laden without a fair trial is to give up on being an [U.S.] American. Tell the mourning citizens of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, who have lost loved ones due to terrorism committed by U.S. and NATO troops, that U.S. Americans are "better" than al Qaeda. Personally, I don't see the evidence of that at all. If we go by body count alone, the U.S. is the most evil empire on Earth.

Piers Morgan asked him if he were leader, what would his priorities be. He quickly responded that he'd end both wars and cut the military "war" budget (something I agree with him about) and use that money to stimulate jobs, to get the U.S. economy going again. The Empire's economy he wants to stimulate is deliberately, not accidentally, designed to be horrendously atrocious to girls and women, Indigenous people, people of color, the Third World, and the Earth. When do Michael Moore's beliefs and actions move from good to evil?

U.S. CRAPitalist Empire's supporters and rulers--who don't and won't call it what I just did--believe it to be so moral and so great that it is incapable of evil, and nothing will guarantee someone or some nation behaves immorally and evilly than believing itself incapable of committing atrocity.

Which is why white het male supremacist Amerikkka is so racist in thought and genocidal in practice, so heterosexist in thought and so anti-lesbian and anti-gay in practice, so misogynist in thought and gynocidal in practice, and so in denial that the U.S. empire and its dominant culture is everything other than "good".

"Objectification is Worse for Men", and other loads of CRAP. A public response to Andre, Alexei, Lawrence, and Dave

image was found here

What follows is from the comments section of a post from Sociological Images *here*, showing many examples of how nude men are being displayed in advertising. My comments are a response to that collection as well as to men's ridiculous patriarchy-denying and CRAP-ignorant comments below.

With thanks to JPLee for her responses to Alexei and Lawrence.

Julian's note:
Dave is demonstrating how incredibly privileged and clueless he is. His rant is not worthy of much of a response. Anyone who believes "nobody cares about men" has no grasp of reality. Which gender is wiping the asses of baby boys, then? And which gender is feeding and taking emotional care, physical care, and often economic care of males of all ages? Men's logical phallusy appears to know no bounds. But we already knew that, didn't we?