What follows was written by Carolyn Edgar of CNN and by Michael Skolnick of GlobalGrind. I found these excerpts posted together at Racialicious. I have inserted my own commentary in bold and brackets.
Trayvon Martin was a teenaged boy who was walking home from a convenience store. He was not engaged in an unlawful activity. [Other than being Black in the US and walking in a place where non-Blacks live.] He was in a place where he had a right to be – near the home of his father’s fiancée. [He should have had the right to be there.] George Zimmerman followed him [read: stalked him with the intention of doing harm], even after being told by the 911 dispatcher not to. [His fragrant disregard for the counsel of the 911 dispatcher demonstrates to me that he was wanting some form of public attention, or applause, for what he was about to do.] Zimmerman left his vehicle holding a loaded gun and began pursuing Martin on foot. It is plausible to infer that Zimmerman, not Martin, initiated the attack. The tapes indicate that Zimmerman may have been the aggressor in initiating contact with Martin. ["Plausible"? "May have been"? In what moral universe does disregarding the advice of someone trained to deal with crime and crisis, and instead stalking--with a deadly weapon--an innocent person, NOT constitute "initiating an attack"? How could a boy walking from a store where he purchased Skittles to the home of family constitute, and then screaming for help when his live was threatened, constitute "intitiating an attack"? The boy, by all accounts, was not seeking to engage in any way with the virulently white supremacist George Zimmerman. Would anyone think that a Black or Brown man similarly going after a white boy armed with Skittles would be regarded as anything other than behaving with an intent to kill?] Assuming the published reports are true, Martin, not Zimmerman, was exercising his lawful right to “stand his ground and meet force with force” by engaging in an altercation with Zimmerman. [Florida apparently has a law which allows (wealthier and whiter) people to murder (poorer and darker) people who are in their neighborhood if deemed "threatening". But last I heard, carrying Skittles and minding one's own business, such as by talking with a girlfriend on the phone, isn't threatening behavior to residents of a neighborhood.] By questioning why Martin didn’t simply stop and answer Zimmerman’s questions, and characterizing Martin as the aggressor [aren't we supposed to teach kids not to talk to strangers?], Sanford Police Department Chief Bill Lee Jr. appears to have assessed the Martin case using the standards that apply to law enforcement officers. [This puts aside the rather unavoidable issue of white supremacist police forces systematically harassing and mass murdering people of color in the US.] This is wrong. Martin was under no legal duty to obey or to cooperate with Zimmerman in being questioned, because George Zimmerman is not a law enforcement officer. [And if he were? What right should a law enforcement officer have to stop such a youth?]
I got a lot of emails about Trayvon. I have read a lot of articles. I have seen a lot of television segments. The message is consistent. Most of the commentators, writers, op-ed pages agree. Something went wrong. Trayvon was murdered. Racially profiled. Race. America’s [uber-white] elephant that never seems to leave the room. But, the part that doesn’t sit well with me is that all of the messengers of this message are all black too. I mean, it was only two weeks ago when almost every white person I knew was tweeting about stopping a brutal African warlord from killing more innocent children. [Yeah, about that: white celebs and news people, and their followers, are upset about human rights atrocities when whites don't commit them against Black and Brown people; let's see George Clooney speak out against white and male supremacy in the U.S.A.] And they even took thirty minutes out of their busy schedules to watch a movie about dude. They bought t-shirts. Some bracelets. Even tweeted at Rihanna to take a stance. But, a 17 year old American kid is followed and then ultimately killed by a neighborhood vigilante who happens to be carrying a semi-automatic weapon and my white friends are quiet. Eerily quiet. Not even a trending topic for the young man. [Thank you. And in a report about two kids who very negligently threw a shopping cart over a railing, causing a white woman below to be seriously injured, I took note of how many whites made sure to characterize the two youth as "thugs". The first comment on this story at Huffington Post reads as follows:
Again, thank you, Michael.
What I take from all of this is that the genocide of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people is on-going without relief across the Americas, across Central Asia
(including the mass murder of an Afghan family by Sgt. Robert Bales),
and across the globe, by wealthy white male supremacists and their
imperialist militias. We know, too, that millions of women and girls
will be raped, tortured, and murdered by men again this year, for the
"crime" of being female, and that the gynocide will not be reported or understood in these terms.
The
issue of what constitutes crime (including hate crime), terrorism, and human rights violation and who is
immune from any and all laws supporting human rights, will not likely be
discussed by the most structurally powerful members of my society who
engage in criminal and violating behavior. What will be defended in
court by supremely well-paid attorneys is the rights of militias and
rich folks and whites--disproportionately male--to threaten, harass,
terrorise, and mass murder Black, Brown, and Indigenous people by any
means "necessary" to sustain and affirm het white male and imperialist
corporate power.
To sign the petition calling for the arrest of the assassin of Trayvon Martin, please see *here*.
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Showing posts with label the true terrorists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the true terrorists. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
The Lynching of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman: a perspective
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Economic Justice Action Alert: Michael Moore: "The Execs at GE Are Laughing at What a Bunch of Suckers We Are for Filing Our Taxes -- Let's Make Them PAY!"!!!!!!!!!
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| image of Michael Moore is from here |
That said, he gets some good points across in some media precisely because he doesn't do any of the above. Even his movie on capitalism has to make it sound as though he likes capitalism.
His politics need to be radically reworked into a more pro-feminist, pro-Indigenous, anti-heterosexism policy or series of campaigns, but let's hear what he has to say on an upcoming tax-day related action.
What follows is from AlterNet. You may click on the title to link back.
April 15, 2011 |
Friends,
Do you wonder (like I do) what the tax accountants and executives are doing over at GE this weekend? Frantically rushing to fill out their IRS returns like the rest of us?
Hardly. They're taking the weekend off to throw themselves a big party and have a hearty laugh at all of us. It must really crack them up to see us like suckers scurrying around to make sure we report everything to Uncle Sam -- and even send him a check, if necessary.
The joke's on us, folks. GE and tons of other corporations will have a tax bill for 2010 of ZERO. GE had $14.2 billion in profits in 2010. Yet they will contribute NOTHING to the federal government while every last dime is soaked from us.
In the latest budget deal, our politicians could have tackled the deficit by stopping the flow of these ill-gotten billions to corporations. Instead they cut billions from "wasteful" programs that do "wasteful" things, like create new jobs, drive economic growth, and help the needy and our nation's children. It's Democracy in reverse and it sickens me.
GE spends $20 million a year to lobby Congress to throw themselves this party. But do you know what speaks louder than $20 million? 20 million votes! 20 million people, and more, standing together and taking to the streets. That starts now, with you.
This coming Monday, April 18th is Tax Day -- and that's the day when "we the people" will demand our country back from these corporations in events all across the country. You can find the nearest event to you here.
MoveOn members -- along with union, community, and environmental allies -- will gather outside the headquarters and local offices of the biggest corporate tax dodgers to deliver tax bills from the American people. And we'll demand that our leaders make these corporate deadbeats pay.
We're doing this because we don't buy into the Big Lie: that greedy teachers caused the crash on Wall Street! That the selfish firefighters sent millions of jobs overseas! That pregnant woman, infants, and children are sending us into deficit!
No, it was the big corporations that did this. It was the CEOs and the top 1% of the country. THEY brought on the mortgage crisis. THEY made off with trillions of dollars from our economy. THEY are systematically destroying the middle class. And THEY have bought and sold the very people elected to represent us!
On Monday, we will have something to say to Exxon, Chevron, and the big banks that crashed our economy and got billions in bailouts, like Citigroup and Bank of America, who pay little or no federal income tax. In fact, the IRS will likely give them a tax REBATE. If that doesn't boggle your mind then nothing will.
The Tax Day events are about sending this message: We are coming after you, we are stopping you and we are going to return the money, jobs, and homes you stole from the people. This is your tipping point, Corporate America. And I, for one, am glad it's going to happen this Monday.If you've never been to an event like this before, this is the time. And don't go alone, because none of us can win this fight by ourselves. Plus, it's more fun and exciting to go along with friends and family to be part of real democracy in action -- not the store-bought kind Big Business gets on Capitol Hill.
I really hope you can make it. This is our chance, my friends. Take the time on Monday tomake your voice heard. I can guarantee you I will. Please join me.
Yours,
Michael MooreMichael Moore is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and author. He directed and produced Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko. He has also written seven books, most recently, Mike’s Election Guide 2008
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Dedgurlcingztheblooze on Misandry (not a reality) vs. Misogyny (a reality)
To all those who think there's such a thing in the world as organised hatred of men by women, if what follows doesn't clarify this matter very quickly, listen to it again.
You may also link to this post at the source websites *here* or *here*.
Thanks so much, dedgurlcingztheblooze. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
You may also link to this post at the source websites *here* or *here*.
Thanks so much, dedgurlcingztheblooze. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Monday, October 4, 2010
The True Terrorists are not who you think "they" are
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| "the war is terrorism" image is from here |
I've been noticing the dominant media putting out these vague notions of "possible attacks" in any number of places--seemingly everywhere except by U.S. and NATO military forces who are terrorising many places around the world. We don't hear about those actions as "actual terrorists attacks" but rather as "us protecting ourselves". We will never hear the dominant media give other nations the benefit of THAT doubt, will we? Because anything or anyone that threatens the U.S. is "terroristic" but if the U.S. terrorises, including U.S. men terrorising U.S. women, the media won't determine that to be terror at all. Now why would that be, do ya think?
What follows is from The Guardian (UK). Please click on the title to link back.
Be very afraid – we are being fleeced by purveyors of fear
Home Office threat levels are absurd abstractions of no help to anyone except the security lobby raising cash through fear
In case you missed it, since Monday an "Irish-related" attack on Britain has been "a strong possibility". At the same time, an al-Qaida attack is "highly likely" and "only a matter of time". This presumably means one will occur – though, since August 2006, when this alarmist language was first to put us on continuous alert, terrorism has been like mad flu disease, afflicting Whitehall but strangely absent from the nation at large.
I hesitate to tempt fate, but this dog's dinner of nouns and qualifiers cannot mean anything to the general public. Rather than describing a menace to the British state, the words are more a comment on English teaching in schools. They are verbal garbage, reflecting a habit of bureaucratic mind and relieving public services – airport security, railway guards, traffic police – of the need for courtesy. They just want to keep the public scared and paying taxes.
Travelling on a First Great Western train nowadays is like entering Guantánamo – a cacophony of repetitive announcements telling passengers to protect their belongings at all times and inform the police if they see anything suspicious. Likewise the fatuous frisking of old ladies at airports, the half-hearted searching of bags in shops, the reams of safety literature pouring from the nation's printers. It is the white noise of state fear.
Nothing is as absurd as Home Office "threat levels". They purport to grade the risk of something called an "attack". This is not defined, but graces a crime with the glamour of a soldierly act. It grants terrorism political status and thus dusts the security industry with the glory of defending the realm.
Above all the threat must be kept alive, sorted into classes of low, moderate, substantial, severe and critical. We are currently at severe. What regius professor of English chose these words? I would put severe below substantial, the word being a strengthener of very, while substantial has substance. But I assume Whitehall has done focus groups and sweat tests. Substantial was perhaps greeted with a shrug, while severe brought on the shakes. As for critical – mujahideen "expected imminently" to hurl bombs down Oxford Street – it is surely the most devalued word in the OED.
There is no way a member of the public can sensibly use the information that an al-Qaida threat has altered from substantial to severe. These are abstractions. Are we supposed to calibrate our dread with Theresa May each morning, treating all dark skin as suspicious and every beard as hiding a foe?
The former home secretary, Alan Johnson, raised the al-Qaida threat level in January from substantial to severe, yet added that it would be "pretty daft" to say why. Under his predecessor the security service boasted that it had tabs on 2,000 individual terrorists, 200 networks and 30 active plots. The impression was the more the merrier.
The public pays the police and security services to protect them from these bombs going off, while accepting that occasionally one will get through. But it also pays not constantly to be reminded that there are bad people in the world. It pays to be relieved of fear. May claims to be "alerting not alarming" the public by "raising its awareness". She treats terrorism as, like gay rights and climate change, in need of an Arts Council grant.
In the mid-1970s, the Provisional IRA staged some 50 explosions in London, subjecting the city to far greater mayhem than today. Somehow we survived without the gargantuan counter-terror apparatus in place today. The bombing campaign came nowhere near toppling the British government or infringing the liberty of the state. The chief threat to that freedom today comes not from terrorists but from the government's response to them. Speaking in July on the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 tube attacks, the former head of the Met's Muslim Contact Unit, Robert Lambert, commented that the then Labour government, by taking its lead from a "flawed neocon" analysis of Islam, had "not reduced but increased the chances of terrorist attacks". The government had proclaimed that an evil ideology had entitled it "to derogate from human rights considerations" and "go to war not against terrorism but against ideas, the belief that al-Qaida was a violent end of a subversive movement".
To see what is happening we probably need to return to the old journalistic maxim, follow the money. There is now an extensive police and industrial lobby in Britain dependent for its resources on maintaining a high level of public fear. The lobby thrives on its own failures. The incidents in America on 9/11 (2001) and in London on 7/7 (2005) saw the greatest ever peacetime growth in spending on security. Unlike most forms of public spending, this one could by its nature demand cash with menaces and with no account of value for money.
The fear must be sustained if the resources are to flow. The west has been starkly free of terrorist "attacks" over the past decade. The lobby may plead this proves the money was well spent, but the staggering cost of anti-terrorism since 9/11, including two foreign wars, must have surpassed all actuarial calculation of western lives saved thereby.
Hardly a month goes by without someone in authority reminding us to expect another attack imminently. I have lost count of statements from MI5, the police and other experts that an attack is a matter of "not if, but when". The attacks never occur, or are brilliantly thwarted, like the one reportedly prevented this week, apparently by dropping bombs from drones on Pakistani villages. What is noticeable is that the tempo of such threats increases immediately before Christmas and when the security lobby is involved in a fight over money, as now.
This week the Police Federation chief, Paul McKeever, warned that policing the Olympics would be a "great burden" because of budget cuts. His union has constantly upped the "threat to the Olympics" to win £800m for just two weeks of cover – more even than Beijing. Now it wants more. Meanwhile the Met's John Yates, head of specialist operations, has declared that any cuts to his budget would be exploited by al-Qaida and "leave Britain vulnerable to terrorist attack". This is from a force with so much money that it can spend £48m on a "human resources computer" that is still not ready, and deploy a helicopter and 59 gunmen to kill one Chelsea barrister.
Britain's security/industrial complex has been allowed to run berserk under the long shadow of 9/11 and 7/7. It has been allowed to undermine civil liberty and tax the exchequer of a fortune. Now it has the effrontery to tell Britons that they are not safer but less safe as a result. After 10 years of soaring expenditure, the threat has actually risen.
I do not believe that this apparent failure to deliver value for money is real, or that some catastrophic explosion is imminent. I think this is just another lobby seeking money. As it plays with its words, the rest of us may shrug and go about our business. But I sometimes wonder who is the real terrorist.
I hesitate to tempt fate, but this dog's dinner of nouns and qualifiers cannot mean anything to the general public. Rather than describing a menace to the British state, the words are more a comment on English teaching in schools. They are verbal garbage, reflecting a habit of bureaucratic mind and relieving public services – airport security, railway guards, traffic police – of the need for courtesy. They just want to keep the public scared and paying taxes.
Travelling on a First Great Western train nowadays is like entering Guantánamo – a cacophony of repetitive announcements telling passengers to protect their belongings at all times and inform the police if they see anything suspicious. Likewise the fatuous frisking of old ladies at airports, the half-hearted searching of bags in shops, the reams of safety literature pouring from the nation's printers. It is the white noise of state fear.
Nothing is as absurd as Home Office "threat levels". They purport to grade the risk of something called an "attack". This is not defined, but graces a crime with the glamour of a soldierly act. It grants terrorism political status and thus dusts the security industry with the glory of defending the realm.
Above all the threat must be kept alive, sorted into classes of low, moderate, substantial, severe and critical. We are currently at severe. What regius professor of English chose these words? I would put severe below substantial, the word being a strengthener of very, while substantial has substance. But I assume Whitehall has done focus groups and sweat tests. Substantial was perhaps greeted with a shrug, while severe brought on the shakes. As for critical – mujahideen "expected imminently" to hurl bombs down Oxford Street – it is surely the most devalued word in the OED.
There is no way a member of the public can sensibly use the information that an al-Qaida threat has altered from substantial to severe. These are abstractions. Are we supposed to calibrate our dread with Theresa May each morning, treating all dark skin as suspicious and every beard as hiding a foe?
The former home secretary, Alan Johnson, raised the al-Qaida threat level in January from substantial to severe, yet added that it would be "pretty daft" to say why. Under his predecessor the security service boasted that it had tabs on 2,000 individual terrorists, 200 networks and 30 active plots. The impression was the more the merrier.
The public pays the police and security services to protect them from these bombs going off, while accepting that occasionally one will get through. But it also pays not constantly to be reminded that there are bad people in the world. It pays to be relieved of fear. May claims to be "alerting not alarming" the public by "raising its awareness". She treats terrorism as, like gay rights and climate change, in need of an Arts Council grant.
In the mid-1970s, the Provisional IRA staged some 50 explosions in London, subjecting the city to far greater mayhem than today. Somehow we survived without the gargantuan counter-terror apparatus in place today. The bombing campaign came nowhere near toppling the British government or infringing the liberty of the state. The chief threat to that freedom today comes not from terrorists but from the government's response to them. Speaking in July on the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 tube attacks, the former head of the Met's Muslim Contact Unit, Robert Lambert, commented that the then Labour government, by taking its lead from a "flawed neocon" analysis of Islam, had "not reduced but increased the chances of terrorist attacks". The government had proclaimed that an evil ideology had entitled it "to derogate from human rights considerations" and "go to war not against terrorism but against ideas, the belief that al-Qaida was a violent end of a subversive movement".
To see what is happening we probably need to return to the old journalistic maxim, follow the money. There is now an extensive police and industrial lobby in Britain dependent for its resources on maintaining a high level of public fear. The lobby thrives on its own failures. The incidents in America on 9/11 (2001) and in London on 7/7 (2005) saw the greatest ever peacetime growth in spending on security. Unlike most forms of public spending, this one could by its nature demand cash with menaces and with no account of value for money.
The fear must be sustained if the resources are to flow. The west has been starkly free of terrorist "attacks" over the past decade. The lobby may plead this proves the money was well spent, but the staggering cost of anti-terrorism since 9/11, including two foreign wars, must have surpassed all actuarial calculation of western lives saved thereby.
Hardly a month goes by without someone in authority reminding us to expect another attack imminently. I have lost count of statements from MI5, the police and other experts that an attack is a matter of "not if, but when". The attacks never occur, or are brilliantly thwarted, like the one reportedly prevented this week, apparently by dropping bombs from drones on Pakistani villages. What is noticeable is that the tempo of such threats increases immediately before Christmas and when the security lobby is involved in a fight over money, as now.
This week the Police Federation chief, Paul McKeever, warned that policing the Olympics would be a "great burden" because of budget cuts. His union has constantly upped the "threat to the Olympics" to win £800m for just two weeks of cover – more even than Beijing. Now it wants more. Meanwhile the Met's John Yates, head of specialist operations, has declared that any cuts to his budget would be exploited by al-Qaida and "leave Britain vulnerable to terrorist attack". This is from a force with so much money that it can spend £48m on a "human resources computer" that is still not ready, and deploy a helicopter and 59 gunmen to kill one Chelsea barrister.
Britain's security/industrial complex has been allowed to run berserk under the long shadow of 9/11 and 7/7. It has been allowed to undermine civil liberty and tax the exchequer of a fortune. Now it has the effrontery to tell Britons that they are not safer but less safe as a result. After 10 years of soaring expenditure, the threat has actually risen.
I do not believe that this apparent failure to deliver value for money is real, or that some catastrophic explosion is imminent. I think this is just another lobby seeking money. As it plays with its words, the rest of us may shrug and go about our business. But I sometimes wonder who is the real terrorist.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Where's Andrea Dworkin When We Need Her? by JMP
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| image of book cover is from here |
What follows is a cross post from the M-L-M Mayhem! blog. With gratitude to JMP for permission to publish it here. Please click on the title just below to link back to her blog.
Where's Andrea Dworkin When We Need Her?
The recent and brutal gang rape in BC sadly demonstrates, once again, that the late and much-maligned Andrea Dworkin is not an outdated dinosaur. Her analysis of misogynist violence, the institutions and ideology connected to patriarchy, is not something we can easily dismiss. Her speech "I Want A Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape" is still tragically relevant: there was never any truce and this most recent example of misogynist warfare is another terrible instance, in a long list of patriarchal violence, of the ongoing oppression of women.
Somewhere in the counter-revolutionary late 80s the unrelenting feminism of the Dworkins was shunted aside for the so-called "sex-positive" feminism of the 3rd Wave. The sexist violence continued but it became taboo, in certain chic feminist circles, to ask about the normative grounds of this violence, the institutional and ideological props for the material reality of patriarchy. It was just not fun to imagine that Dworkin's critique of pornography and its connection to rape culture still possessed validity. If anything it was "anti free speech" and no one bothered to ask whether, regardless of the tactical problems connected to Dworkin and MacKinnon's attempt to legally associate pornography with hate speech, there was a contradiction between liberal notions of free speech and oppression.
The left in this country has always had a problem with liberalism. That whole "right against right but greater force decides" reality of liberal "equal rights", critiqued by Marx, has so often been ignored in the flurry to embrace some pseudo-radical notion of individual liberty. Suppression of dissidence has often devolved into saccharine "free speech" movements that empty the politics of the original dissident act, ignore the systemic situation of oppression, and never bother to ask "whose free speech and for whom?" And thus Dworkin is furiously denounced as an enemy of free speech while the misogynist corporate mogols, with their armies of lawyers and publishing connections, were allowed to prevent her free speech.
Dworkin makes us all feel a little uncomfortable, though it is somewhat odd that many feel uncomfortable without having read any of her work. Since we have the "sex-positive" feminists around to denounce her for us (a sad label since it assumes that Dworkin, without any real evidence besides hearsay, was "sex-negative" - a language slur like how the anti-abortion right calls itself "pro-life") we can feel good about our pornography and never once question how it is ideologically connected to instances of real world rape.
And yet the ugly world of misogynist violence continues, the patriarchal war persists, and we have not at all moved beyond that world of rape-celebration that Dworkin was trying to reveal, examine, and demystify. Ms. Marx, in a recent entry, examined the shocking pro-rape culture surrounding this recent act of oppression: not only was the gang rape posted on Facebook, but the comments under the posting were all the sort of comments one would find on a porn site: she wanted it, she was asking for it, women want to be gang-raped, she's a whore, she's a slut, it's funny...
The parallel between the consumption of real world rape and pornography, a connection analyzed by Dworkin, is not forced. In fact, counsellors and experts at rape crisis centres have been making the same parallel in their comments about this specific rape. One of these counsellors even pointed out that we live in a culture where rape is acceptable; the persistence of pornography (and here I do use the term in the way Dworkin would use it not in the way it's been watered down to include "feminist pornography", etc.) helps make it acceptable - just like the persistence of racist imagery in the media helps make racism acceptable. As Daisy Kier, spokesperson for the Vancouver Rape Relief and Womens Shelter, said:
Perhaps Kier's comment isn't "sex positive" but, as Dworkin would remind us if she was still alive, rape is not sex positive. And if pornography is ideologically connected to rape then maybe, just maybe, we should realize that it's not "sex positive" either. Dworkin understood and examined the "predominant image and theory" of pornography decades ago; the analysis is still relevant today.
But hold on there! Dworkin is just a little too "crazy" (or maybe the appropriate sexist term would be hysterical) isn't she? She wants to take away my porn and make me feel guilty! She's a "misanderist"! She said some things about sex that I never read but that I heard that she said that make me feel uncomfortable! I'd rather read some nice, safe, "sex positive" third wave feminism: they're real feminists because they make me feel good about myself.
There are times when I feel that Andrea Dworkin is the feminist equivalent of Frantz Fanon. Both are stylists as well as theorists and readers who do not take the time (or rely on bad readings rather than read the actual text) fall into the trap of focusing on the surface form rather than reading for content. The number of bad readings done on the first chapter of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth are rather significant, and it is quite common for someone to complain that Fanon is outdated now that we have the nice and safe post-colonialist theorists to replace him. Bhabha instead of Fanon because, hey, I really don't like what that Fanon guy is saying about violence. Like Fanon, Dworkin was interested in practice. Like Fanon, Dworkin was interested in engaging with the material reality of a specific oppression. Like Fanon, Dworkin makes us uncomfortable because she's talking about real world violence and demanding change, something that always makes readers uncomfortable - especially those readers whose privilege is contingent upon the oppression being critiqued. And like Fanon, as this recent instance of misogynist violence should demonstrate, Dworkin is still and sadly relevant.
Somewhere in the counter-revolutionary late 80s the unrelenting feminism of the Dworkins was shunted aside for the so-called "sex-positive" feminism of the 3rd Wave. The sexist violence continued but it became taboo, in certain chic feminist circles, to ask about the normative grounds of this violence, the institutional and ideological props for the material reality of patriarchy. It was just not fun to imagine that Dworkin's critique of pornography and its connection to rape culture still possessed validity. If anything it was "anti free speech" and no one bothered to ask whether, regardless of the tactical problems connected to Dworkin and MacKinnon's attempt to legally associate pornography with hate speech, there was a contradiction between liberal notions of free speech and oppression.
The left in this country has always had a problem with liberalism. That whole "right against right but greater force decides" reality of liberal "equal rights", critiqued by Marx, has so often been ignored in the flurry to embrace some pseudo-radical notion of individual liberty. Suppression of dissidence has often devolved into saccharine "free speech" movements that empty the politics of the original dissident act, ignore the systemic situation of oppression, and never bother to ask "whose free speech and for whom?" And thus Dworkin is furiously denounced as an enemy of free speech while the misogynist corporate mogols, with their armies of lawyers and publishing connections, were allowed to prevent her free speech.
Dworkin makes us all feel a little uncomfortable, though it is somewhat odd that many feel uncomfortable without having read any of her work. Since we have the "sex-positive" feminists around to denounce her for us (a sad label since it assumes that Dworkin, without any real evidence besides hearsay, was "sex-negative" - a language slur like how the anti-abortion right calls itself "pro-life") we can feel good about our pornography and never once question how it is ideologically connected to instances of real world rape.
And yet the ugly world of misogynist violence continues, the patriarchal war persists, and we have not at all moved beyond that world of rape-celebration that Dworkin was trying to reveal, examine, and demystify. Ms. Marx, in a recent entry, examined the shocking pro-rape culture surrounding this recent act of oppression: not only was the gang rape posted on Facebook, but the comments under the posting were all the sort of comments one would find on a porn site: she wanted it, she was asking for it, women want to be gang-raped, she's a whore, she's a slut, it's funny...
The parallel between the consumption of real world rape and pornography, a connection analyzed by Dworkin, is not forced. In fact, counsellors and experts at rape crisis centres have been making the same parallel in their comments about this specific rape. One of these counsellors even pointed out that we live in a culture where rape is acceptable; the persistence of pornography (and here I do use the term in the way Dworkin would use it not in the way it's been watered down to include "feminist pornography", etc.) helps make it acceptable - just like the persistence of racist imagery in the media helps make racism acceptable. As Daisy Kier, spokesperson for the Vancouver Rape Relief and Womens Shelter, said:
"The whole mythology sold to men and the fantasy perpetuated through most pornography is how women are willing participants who really love sex and really want five men having sex with them. That is a predominant image and theory that's being put out by pornography."
Perhaps Kier's comment isn't "sex positive" but, as Dworkin would remind us if she was still alive, rape is not sex positive. And if pornography is ideologically connected to rape then maybe, just maybe, we should realize that it's not "sex positive" either. Dworkin understood and examined the "predominant image and theory" of pornography decades ago; the analysis is still relevant today.
But hold on there! Dworkin is just a little too "crazy" (or maybe the appropriate sexist term would be hysterical) isn't she? She wants to take away my porn and make me feel guilty! She's a "misanderist"! She said some things about sex that I never read but that I heard that she said that make me feel uncomfortable! I'd rather read some nice, safe, "sex positive" third wave feminism: they're real feminists because they make me feel good about myself.
There are times when I feel that Andrea Dworkin is the feminist equivalent of Frantz Fanon. Both are stylists as well as theorists and readers who do not take the time (or rely on bad readings rather than read the actual text) fall into the trap of focusing on the surface form rather than reading for content. The number of bad readings done on the first chapter of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth are rather significant, and it is quite common for someone to complain that Fanon is outdated now that we have the nice and safe post-colonialist theorists to replace him. Bhabha instead of Fanon because, hey, I really don't like what that Fanon guy is saying about violence. Like Fanon, Dworkin was interested in practice. Like Fanon, Dworkin was interested in engaging with the material reality of a specific oppression. Like Fanon, Dworkin makes us uncomfortable because she's talking about real world violence and demanding change, something that always makes readers uncomfortable - especially those readers whose privilege is contingent upon the oppression being critiqued. And like Fanon, as this recent instance of misogynist violence should demonstrate, Dworkin is still and sadly relevant.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Will the Actual Buttman Please Stand Up? No, really: there's this one white het dude, San Fernando Curt, who doesn't think ANY straight men get off to misogynist pornography! (Proof here.)
What follows is from here at TPM. It is being reproduced here for non-profit, political discussion purposes only. This is the author of the article that follows. And after that is me taking him to task for his silliness and stupidity.
San Fernando Curt
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Porncone
July 30, 2010, 5:42PM
OK, folks, we can wrap up the vigil: Buttman walked.
I know some of you dreary wags out there are ignoring our government and media protests that there's nothing new in the WikiLeaks documents. That they're as interesting as plastic spoons, revelatory as barking spiders and profound as Snooki. Yeah... some of you have gone right ahead and dove in to discover silly stuff like Task Force 373, our super-secret targeted-assasination squad - and its nasty habit of shooting the shit out of anything that doesn't look Taliban, including innocent children and various barnyard animals in Afghanistan.
Few of the rest of us give a damn.
There are ideas, once popular and prevalent, that are now obsolete, unfashionable "dead horses" we still pointlessly kick. Racial superiority is one of these. Any white person above the age of, say, eight knows white people are superior to nothing. The feeble-minded antics of too many friends, embarrassing relatives, and our own misshapen pasts convince us by adulthood that we honkies are but commonplace among the human species.
Then there are ideas - theories, if you will - that can only be called "zomboids". These are scholarly proposals and popular fairy tales that either are disproven or never validated yet return from the Dead Zone of dumb assumptions to totter about in tiresome replay.
And that brings us back to the case in point: That much-proffered, never-proven feminist theory that pornography is a threat as great as nuclear weapons and dengue fever to our healthy human commonweal. According to the corkscrew logic of this dim brainstorm, porn takes normal, happy, sexually repressed men and turns them into raving BONIACS! They hanker only for cootie! They lust for anything pink!
This somewhat insulting proposal, which galvanized that strange Right-Libber alliance decades ago, holds that any man is a potential rapist, that beneath the calm exterior of nerdy khakis and short-sheeve seersucker lurks highly stimulated lunatics on the hunt for sexual prey. All they need are the hot buttons of full-color, two-panel twat shots to set off monstrously horney fission.
In case you thought this crusade went the way of Kalso Earth Shoes and lava lamps, think again. A Boston professor and veteran of those long-ago windmill tilts, Gail Dines, has come up with a new book to pump some fresh blood back in an old nag.
If all this sounds familiar, it should. We've heard it all before - from Dines, in fact. Seems she was feverishly publishing anti-porn diatribe back in the '70s and '80s. As with this new book, her case always has rested on anecdotal evidence, urban legend and not a speck of scienfitic research or credible statistics. There is nothing to support her contention that many men are aroused by degrading porn. Or, get this, that they hate women. Nothing at all. In an earlier interview she said, "Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy. In nothing else is their hatred of us quite as clear." Ah... patriarchy. I knew that old chestnut would be lurking somewhere. Daddy did it. Daddy's a big penis-Nazi! Smash his capitalism and Western civilization! EVIL!
I suspect "their hatred..." means, for Dines, "men's hatred". All men. Everywhere.
Self-described on her website as "scholar, activist and social critic", Dines has worked with and has been annointed successor to the late Andrea Dworkin, the great, chronically angry, overstuffed couch of a woman who was a pioneer of the anti-porn movement.
That tells me juuust about what I need to know. And it's time from some, uh, deconstruction of this particular oeuvre.
Andrea Dworkin was an unhappy, mentally unstable, thoroughly untrustworthy fanatic who hated men. Dines, obviously, is more than suited to step into Dworkin's self-assigned role as the "world's leading anti-pornography campaigner." Their's is the kind of thinking that cooked up, out of thin air, the ugly fabrication that men commit sexual abuse of women and children as commonly as we wear shoes. That never-walked-back lie has destroyed families and ruined lives. It lives today, since unquestioned infamy has the veneer of truth. And, God knows, our media and academia never has doubted this crap. It's absolutely convincing simply because it's trash spouted by the RIGHT people.
Obviously, as a heterosexual male, it's not in my best interest to support a revival of this tripe. Dines is a product of a world long ago, when dogmatic bullies hustled their way into academia and bit off press attention by combining loud overstatement, pure obnoxiousness and fake "scholarship".
Even with the milk enemas, I prefer Buttman, any day.
Julian's reply:
Does internet media need to be accurate, or just play up the same old politically correct tropes over and over and over again?
I'm not seeing much above that hasn't been filtered through a truly astoundingly inane mass media lens; that concerns me only because if news, including political and cultural commentary and analysis, isn't anything but what conservative-liberal (no meaningful difference any more) corporate media sells us, what do we really know about anything? I'll cite a few examples of this problem from your post here.
I know some of you dreary wags out there are ignoring our government and media protests that there's nothing new in the WikiLeaks documents.
Except that is does back up our arguments that the U.S. government is in the war business, and not in the business of promoting democracy anywhere, including in the U.S. That our government sees it as a right to go abroad, illegally invading countries, raping women and bombing children, and mass murdering non-combatants, out to be a source of outrage, not apathy.
The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.
One might even be tempted to actually listen to what Malalai Joya has to say about the U.S. "protecting women in Afghanistan" as she is, well, a woman who has been living in Afghanistan. And she wants the U.S. out, and CNN won't let you that, unless you catch the British feed of CNN, that is.
that weird consortium of radical feminists and Christian fundamentalists who wanted dirty pictures stricken everywhere as indecent!
So where did you get that assessment of alleged alliance? From what faulty, very intellectually and factually flawed academic book? Because it's one of those lies that just flies around and around without anyone really caring to know the truth about it.
There are ideas, once popular and prevalent, that are now obsolete, unfashionable "dead horses" we still pointlessly kick. Racial superiority is one of these. Any white person above the age of, say, eight knows white people are superior to nothing. The feeble-minded antics of too many friends, embarrassing relatives, and our own misshapen pasts convince us by adulthood that we honkies are but commonplace among the human species.
And yet, the laws in Arizona, which may or may not remain in tact, do reinforce white supremacy in the U.S., so for you discussing racial superiority may be passe, but for people of color in the U.S. it's, how to put it, a "hot topic".
Then there are ideas - theories, if you will - that can only be called "zomboids". These are scholarly proposals and popular fairy tales that either are disproven or never validated yet return from the Dead Zone of dumb assumptions to totter about in tiresome replay.
Such as radical feminists were, in any meaningful, effective, or systematic way, working with the Christian Right-wing? Or that radical feminists are "crazy"? Those kind of "zomboidal" observations that are never proven or validated? Is that the Dead Zone of dumb assumptions you are speaking about?
That much-proffered, never-proven feminist theory that pornography is a threat as great as nuclear weapons and dengue fever to our healthy human commonweal.
That's not been the theory, ever. So you're just making this up, aren't you? How zomboidal of you. The theory, which you obviously didn't fact-check before writing this Dead Zone material, was that males are not born misogynists, just like so-called whites are not born racists. Misogyny and racism are learned, and culture is a teacher. That's pretty basic stuff. Is that really too controversial for you to identify as coming from years of feminist theory and sociological analysis?
This somewhat insulting proposal, which galvanized that strange Right-Libber alliance decades ago, holds that any man is a potential rapist, that beneath the calm exterior of nerdy khakis and short-sheeve seersucker lurks highly stimulated lunatics on the hunt for sexual prey. All they need are the hot buttons of full-color, two-panel twat shots to set off monstrously horney fission.
You enjoy your writing, don't you? Well, at least it's sort of witty. Never mind if it reflects anything non-zomboidal, eh?
A Boston professor and veteran of those long-ago windmill tilts, Gail Dines, has come up with a new book to pump some fresh blood back in an old nag.
Old nags like pretending the Religious Right and radical feminists were shacking up? You've got that one on an IV drip, don't you? Have you found a pulse yet?
"Pornography today is not your father's Playboy,'' says Dines, 51, a Wheelock College professor of sociology and women's studies. "It's hard-core, cruel, and brutal. So you're bringing up a generation of boys who are more cruel, bored, and desensitized.''
She's doing the motel/scrambled eggs tour for her new "Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality'', which makes the specious case that this new, ugly stuff risks nurturing millions of future predators. The thesis, simply put, is that any ambulatory, air-breathing male is a de facto attacker already; he's only waiting for an opportunity to drop his drawers and commit serious felony. Porn lurks ever-ready to push him to his erectile brink.
Uhhh, no. Can't you even accurately interpret quotes you put in your own post? Seriously. THAT'S sad, man. Damn sad.
What she's saying is that culture is part of what socialises us. You know, that same theory from before that has been shown to be accurate--like, say, that my cousin's son watched Top Gun and from that moment on decide--with no military folks in our family--that he'd go into the Navy to gleefully kill those foreign people of color? And that his dad's affection for strip clubs has infused in him a sense that "going to strip clubs" is cool, and he and his dad go, together. And that his dad, before he was born, was a Hustler magazine subscriber, and his wife (my cousin) had to ask him to please stop subscribing because they had three growing sons. And so my cousin's son is into calling women wh*res and using women as if they actually were wh*res. You don't see any analysis there that my cousin's son was "born that way" do you?
It's a case of academia and the media taking itself a little too seriously, assuming perversion of their magical crafts can mesmerize the public to deviant action.
Deviant action like not being able to analyse a quote that's pretty straight-forward in its meaning, because you've got some tired old nag of a theory you can't let go of, that's wrong?
If all this sounds familiar, it should. We've heard it all before - from Dines, in fact. Seems she was feverishly publishing anti-porn diatribe back in the '70s and '80s.
Nothing you've read, apparently. Or, well, comprehended without the Misogynist Mass Media and McAdemic Cliff Notes.
As with this new book, her case always has rested on anecdotal evidence, urban legend and not a speck of scienfitic research or credible statistics.
Like, say, what millions of people experience. Because those millions weren't in a lab, right?
There is nothing to support her contention that many men are aroused by degrading porn.
Are you kidding? You're actually stating--seriously--that men don't masturbate to men ejaculating on women's faces? Really? You're actually saying gonzo porn isn't selling well? Really? And that men go limp watching it? Really?
Or, get this, that they hate women.
No, because, pssst: there's no such thing as misogyny! That's something those feminists made up so they'd have stuff to write about. Yeah, about that. About the women who leave men and then are murdered--3000 a year in the U.S.: as many as the number of people killed by the Taliban on 9/11/2001. Yet there's no "terrorism" when men do it to women, is there? Nope. None at all. (Never mind that the women were terrified when the guy shows up with the gun. Never mind that a medical assistant I knew is dead because she rejected and walked out on a man, who, apparently, according to your theory, was what? Not misogynistic?) What do you call what Mel Gibson spews? Woman-loving cooing?
In an earlier interview she said, "Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy. In nothing else is their hatred of us quite as clear." Ah... patriarchy. I knew that old chestnut would be lurking somewhere.
Because you live in a matriarchy? Since when? Either men (and white men at that) rule every significant social, religious, economic, and political institution in U.S. society or they don't. Hold on... I'm going outside to check... Yup--men still rule them. Sorry to put a crack in your chestnut. (Well, yes, Black women do have a significant role in the Black church. I'll give you that. Funny, though, how men won't let those women be the preachers, isn't it?)
Daddy did it. Daddy's a big penis-Nazi! Smash his capitalism and Western civilization! EVIL!
Calm down. Take a breath--you're getting a little too worked up here. When we speak of "patriarchy" we're speaking of "a male-dominated society", yes? You grasp that, right? We're not talking about "daddy", so climb down off your Freudian dead horse please.
I suspect "their hatred..." means, for Dines, "men's hatred". All men. Everywhere.
You know what it does when you "Assume" right: it makes an ASS out of you and me. Or, in this case, out of you and you. Where does Dines say or write that? Hold on... lemme check... Oh, nowhere! So you like pulling stuff out of your *ss, don't you? Which brings this full circle, in a jerky sort of way.
Self-described on her website as "scholar, activist and social critic",
As opposed to, say, actually being a scholar, activist, and social critic? What parts of those descriptors seem especially "off" to you? Do you get, yet, how silly you're being here? And, well, kind of sexist, to be honest. I mean why do you need to question her credentials, white straight man? You appear to be taking advantage of those social entitlements to put down women and make them seem like idiots. What's that called??? Ah, yes: sexism. What are your credentials for dismissing her? Is it that you know your audience has also been well-trained by mass media, and hasn't read anything carefully that feminists have written?
Dines has worked with and has been annointed successor to the late Andrea Dworkin, the great, chronically angry, overstuffed couch of a woman who was a pioneer of the anti-porn movement.
Wow. You're respect for dead human rights activists--hmmm, again, a woman you're disrespecting because of her weight--isn't that, um, well, your sexism showing? Chronically angry? As opposed to you, who are not chronically angry? I mean, seriously: who isn't chronically angry? Only the brain-dead. And, Andrea Dworkin was far more of a scholar than you'd ever hope to be. Have you checked the books she read, which she listed in the backs of most of her books? I'm guessing now, but I'll wait for your reply. Have you seen the scholarship in her book Scapegoat? Have you studied the Nazi Holocaust, in which she lost family, as much as she did? I'm guessing not. Or the history of Israel? Have you traveled the world to listen to what women around the world have to say, honestly, about their experiences of their particular "patriarchies" (which doesn't mean "daddies" remember)? I'm guessing not. But you tell me.
That tells me juuust about what I need to know.
You parroting mass media BS tells you just about what you need to know. Don't you see: that's the problem.
And it's time from some, uh, deconstruction of this particular oeuvre.
Okay, so now that you're hauling out the fifty-cent words, I'm assuming you might have something accurate and non-sexist to say. But we know what happens when someone "assumes"...
Andrea Dworkin was an unhappy,
Not especially. She enjoyed laughing a lot, actually, and anyone who knew her says that about her. She had a great sense of humor, which you'd know if you knew her or, well, didn't parrot what antifeminists have said about her.
mentally unstable,
Nope. Wrong again. You're not demonstrating a high aptitude at "personality assessment" skills. But your sexist Dead Zone tropes are stunning. (You're welcome.)
thoroughly untrustworthy fanatic who hated men.
You mean the woman who has written about loving her father, a father who supported her intellectually? Or do you mean the woman who loved her brother and nephew? (Photographic and written evidence exists.) Or, do you mean the man she loved and lived with for thirty years? You mean she hated those men? Or are you saying that if she demonstrated that she loved men, that means she hated all men? Please clarify, because, once again, all you're doing is parroting antifeminist/anti-Dworkin tropes, that you know nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand you'll get away with, with people actually think you're being intelligent and not at all sexist, or, misogynistic.
and Dines, obviously, is more than suited to step into Dworkin's self-assigned role as the "world's leading anti-pornography campaigner."
Dworkin wasn't just an anti-pornography activist. She was also against fascism and white supremacy, quite explicitly in those things she wrote--what do you call them, again: ah, yes: each and every one of her dozen or so books (which you obviously haven't read--like her analysis of Right-wing women, in which she makes it explicitly clear she isn't Right-wing, as if her past, protesting the Vietnam war, prison abuse, and fascism, and being pro-abortion and pro-lesbianism wasn't evidence enough). You must hate it when your didactic diatribes get interrupted with things like verifiable facts and truth.
Their's is the kind of thinking that cooked up, out of thin air, the ugly fabrication
Wait. Are you speaking here of your sexist mischaracterisation of the dead feminist? Or your micharacterisation of feminist theories on pornography's relationship to racism and misogyny? (Have you been online lately, looking at pornography? What of it do you see that isn't misogynistic and racist? Just curious.)
that men commit sexual abuse of women and children as commonly as we wear shoes.
And that would be something no one but you and other zomboids has written and passed off as "verifiable". I challenge you to cite one sentence where the living feminist Gail Dines says that. She hasn't written nearly as much as Andrea Dworkin did, so this won't be difficult for you. You do read books, don't you? Dines is the person you're going out of your way to demean, disrespect, and dismiss, isn't she?
That never-walked-back lie has destroyed families and ruined lives.
You mean the one that men promote that there's no such thing as patriarchy? That never-walked-back lie that destroys families, friendships, ruins lives, and is part and parcel of wars the U.S. engages in?
It lives today, since unquestioned infamy has the veneer of truth. And, God knows, our media and academia never has doubted this crap.
This crap you're writing?
It's absolutely convincing simply because it's trash spouted by the RIGHT people.
Yes. That's so true of what you write. And so very sad.
Dines is a product of a world long ago, when dogmatic bullies hustled
Um, what do you consider Larry Flynt to be, who would demean feminists in his magazine routinely, in the name of "free speech" and all? Who would promote violence against women and child molestation in his magazine's cartoons, by one Dwaine Tinsley, who was found guilty of incesting his daughter, btw. See here for more on that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_the_Molester
So you're more concerned about "hustling bullies" like Dines than, say, corporate pimps and child molesters? That's some system of ethical triage you have going there, sir.
their way into academia and bit off press attention by combining loud overstatement, pure obnoxiousness and fake "scholarship".
You mean Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione, and Mr. Flynt? Or are you speaking here of Max Hardcore, known for filming his rapes of women and selling them. How obnoxious is that, to you?
So you haven't read Dines' work then. Because even on CNN, the white heterosexual male interviewer brought the stats to her about how pornography addiction is negatively impacting a HUGE number of heterosexual relationships. The rather decidedly liberal interviewer, John Roberts, gets it that some men prefer to have sex "alone" with pornography than with their actual sexual partners in the other room, wondering why they aren't joining them in bed. You call that knowledge "right wing" or even "feminist"? Hardly.
Would you call John Roberts any of the negative terms you've hurled here at Dworkin and Dines?
Posted by JulianReal
July 31, 2010 1:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
San Fernando Curt
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Porncone
July 30, 2010, 5:42PM
OK, folks, we can wrap up the vigil: Buttman walked.
I know some of you dreary wags out there are ignoring our government and media protests that there's nothing new in the WikiLeaks documents. That they're as interesting as plastic spoons, revelatory as barking spiders and profound as Snooki. Yeah... some of you have gone right ahead and dove in to discover silly stuff like Task Force 373, our super-secret targeted-assasination squad - and its nasty habit of shooting the shit out of anything that doesn't look Taliban, including innocent children and various barnyard animals in Afghanistan.
In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.But enough of this trivial nonsense. We know what the real story is: Obscenity charges against John A. "Buttman" Stagliano have been thrown out by a District Court Judge in Washington DC.
Stagliano, a married father nicknamed "Buttman," is known for pushing the edge of industry standards in his depiction of fetishes, and the video scenes selected by the government for prosecution involved urination, use of enemas and bondage.In the first porn-related case tried in the nation's capital since the mid-'80s, the Van Nuys (where else?) producer faced a sentence of up to 32 years if things didn't break his way. But since the judge rebuked the Justice Department special anti-nookie squad for failng even to define the crimes Stagliano supposedly broke, this could be the swan song of Bush-era moves to put porn prosecutions back on the front burner. Also, it's probably a blow (so to speak) for that weird consortium of radical feminists and Christian fundamentalists who wanted dirty pictures stricken everywhere as indecent! Even... knavish!!!
Few of the rest of us give a damn.
There are ideas, once popular and prevalent, that are now obsolete, unfashionable "dead horses" we still pointlessly kick. Racial superiority is one of these. Any white person above the age of, say, eight knows white people are superior to nothing. The feeble-minded antics of too many friends, embarrassing relatives, and our own misshapen pasts convince us by adulthood that we honkies are but commonplace among the human species.
Then there are ideas - theories, if you will - that can only be called "zomboids". These are scholarly proposals and popular fairy tales that either are disproven or never validated yet return from the Dead Zone of dumb assumptions to totter about in tiresome replay.
And that brings us back to the case in point: That much-proffered, never-proven feminist theory that pornography is a threat as great as nuclear weapons and dengue fever to our healthy human commonweal. According to the corkscrew logic of this dim brainstorm, porn takes normal, happy, sexually repressed men and turns them into raving BONIACS! They hanker only for cootie! They lust for anything pink!
This somewhat insulting proposal, which galvanized that strange Right-Libber alliance decades ago, holds that any man is a potential rapist, that beneath the calm exterior of nerdy khakis and short-sheeve seersucker lurks highly stimulated lunatics on the hunt for sexual prey. All they need are the hot buttons of full-color, two-panel twat shots to set off monstrously horney fission.
In case you thought this crusade went the way of Kalso Earth Shoes and lava lamps, think again. A Boston professor and veteran of those long-ago windmill tilts, Gail Dines, has come up with a new book to pump some fresh blood back in an old nag.
"Pornography today is not your father's Playboy,'' says Dines, 51, a Wheelock College professor of sociology and women's studies. "It's hard-core, cruel, and brutal. So you're bringing up a generation of boys who are more cruel, bored, and desensitized.''She's doing the motel/scrambled eggs tour for her new "Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality'', which makes the specious case that this new, ugly stuff risks nurturing millions of future predators. The thesis, simply put, is that any ambulatory, air-breathing male is a de facto attacker already; he's only waiting for an opportunity to drop his drawers and commit serious felony. Porn lurks ever-ready to push him to his erectile brink. It's a case of academia and the media taking itself a little too seriously, assuming perversion of their magical crafts can mesmerize the public to deviant action. Whew! Evidently there's wondrous alchemy in all that turgid prose and badly photographed asscracks.
If all this sounds familiar, it should. We've heard it all before - from Dines, in fact. Seems she was feverishly publishing anti-porn diatribe back in the '70s and '80s. As with this new book, her case always has rested on anecdotal evidence, urban legend and not a speck of scienfitic research or credible statistics. There is nothing to support her contention that many men are aroused by degrading porn. Or, get this, that they hate women. Nothing at all. In an earlier interview she said, "Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy. In nothing else is their hatred of us quite as clear." Ah... patriarchy. I knew that old chestnut would be lurking somewhere. Daddy did it. Daddy's a big penis-Nazi! Smash his capitalism and Western civilization! EVIL!
I suspect "their hatred..." means, for Dines, "men's hatred". All men. Everywhere.
Self-described on her website as "scholar, activist and social critic", Dines has worked with and has been annointed successor to the late Andrea Dworkin, the great, chronically angry, overstuffed couch of a woman who was a pioneer of the anti-porn movement.
That tells me juuust about what I need to know. And it's time from some, uh, deconstruction of this particular oeuvre.
Andrea Dworkin was an unhappy, mentally unstable, thoroughly untrustworthy fanatic who hated men. Dines, obviously, is more than suited to step into Dworkin's self-assigned role as the "world's leading anti-pornography campaigner." Their's is the kind of thinking that cooked up, out of thin air, the ugly fabrication that men commit sexual abuse of women and children as commonly as we wear shoes. That never-walked-back lie has destroyed families and ruined lives. It lives today, since unquestioned infamy has the veneer of truth. And, God knows, our media and academia never has doubted this crap. It's absolutely convincing simply because it's trash spouted by the RIGHT people.
Obviously, as a heterosexual male, it's not in my best interest to support a revival of this tripe. Dines is a product of a world long ago, when dogmatic bullies hustled their way into academia and bit off press attention by combining loud overstatement, pure obnoxiousness and fake "scholarship".
Even with the milk enemas, I prefer Buttman, any day.
Julian's reply:
Does internet media need to be accurate, or just play up the same old politically correct tropes over and over and over again?
I'm not seeing much above that hasn't been filtered through a truly astoundingly inane mass media lens; that concerns me only because if news, including political and cultural commentary and analysis, isn't anything but what conservative-liberal (no meaningful difference any more) corporate media sells us, what do we really know about anything? I'll cite a few examples of this problem from your post here.
I know some of you dreary wags out there are ignoring our government and media protests that there's nothing new in the WikiLeaks documents.
Except that is does back up our arguments that the U.S. government is in the war business, and not in the business of promoting democracy anywhere, including in the U.S. That our government sees it as a right to go abroad, illegally invading countries, raping women and bombing children, and mass murdering non-combatants, out to be a source of outrage, not apathy.
The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.
One might even be tempted to actually listen to what Malalai Joya has to say about the U.S. "protecting women in Afghanistan" as she is, well, a woman who has been living in Afghanistan. And she wants the U.S. out, and CNN won't let you that, unless you catch the British feed of CNN, that is.
that weird consortium of radical feminists and Christian fundamentalists who wanted dirty pictures stricken everywhere as indecent!
So where did you get that assessment of alleged alliance? From what faulty, very intellectually and factually flawed academic book? Because it's one of those lies that just flies around and around without anyone really caring to know the truth about it.
There are ideas, once popular and prevalent, that are now obsolete, unfashionable "dead horses" we still pointlessly kick. Racial superiority is one of these. Any white person above the age of, say, eight knows white people are superior to nothing. The feeble-minded antics of too many friends, embarrassing relatives, and our own misshapen pasts convince us by adulthood that we honkies are but commonplace among the human species.
And yet, the laws in Arizona, which may or may not remain in tact, do reinforce white supremacy in the U.S., so for you discussing racial superiority may be passe, but for people of color in the U.S. it's, how to put it, a "hot topic".
Then there are ideas - theories, if you will - that can only be called "zomboids". These are scholarly proposals and popular fairy tales that either are disproven or never validated yet return from the Dead Zone of dumb assumptions to totter about in tiresome replay.
Such as radical feminists were, in any meaningful, effective, or systematic way, working with the Christian Right-wing? Or that radical feminists are "crazy"? Those kind of "zomboidal" observations that are never proven or validated? Is that the Dead Zone of dumb assumptions you are speaking about?
That much-proffered, never-proven feminist theory that pornography is a threat as great as nuclear weapons and dengue fever to our healthy human commonweal.
That's not been the theory, ever. So you're just making this up, aren't you? How zomboidal of you. The theory, which you obviously didn't fact-check before writing this Dead Zone material, was that males are not born misogynists, just like so-called whites are not born racists. Misogyny and racism are learned, and culture is a teacher. That's pretty basic stuff. Is that really too controversial for you to identify as coming from years of feminist theory and sociological analysis?
This somewhat insulting proposal, which galvanized that strange Right-Libber alliance decades ago, holds that any man is a potential rapist, that beneath the calm exterior of nerdy khakis and short-sheeve seersucker lurks highly stimulated lunatics on the hunt for sexual prey. All they need are the hot buttons of full-color, two-panel twat shots to set off monstrously horney fission.
You enjoy your writing, don't you? Well, at least it's sort of witty. Never mind if it reflects anything non-zomboidal, eh?
A Boston professor and veteran of those long-ago windmill tilts, Gail Dines, has come up with a new book to pump some fresh blood back in an old nag.
Old nags like pretending the Religious Right and radical feminists were shacking up? You've got that one on an IV drip, don't you? Have you found a pulse yet?
"Pornography today is not your father's Playboy,'' says Dines, 51, a Wheelock College professor of sociology and women's studies. "It's hard-core, cruel, and brutal. So you're bringing up a generation of boys who are more cruel, bored, and desensitized.''
She's doing the motel/scrambled eggs tour for her new "Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality'', which makes the specious case that this new, ugly stuff risks nurturing millions of future predators. The thesis, simply put, is that any ambulatory, air-breathing male is a de facto attacker already; he's only waiting for an opportunity to drop his drawers and commit serious felony. Porn lurks ever-ready to push him to his erectile brink.
Uhhh, no. Can't you even accurately interpret quotes you put in your own post? Seriously. THAT'S sad, man. Damn sad.
What she's saying is that culture is part of what socialises us. You know, that same theory from before that has been shown to be accurate--like, say, that my cousin's son watched Top Gun and from that moment on decide--with no military folks in our family--that he'd go into the Navy to gleefully kill those foreign people of color? And that his dad's affection for strip clubs has infused in him a sense that "going to strip clubs" is cool, and he and his dad go, together. And that his dad, before he was born, was a Hustler magazine subscriber, and his wife (my cousin) had to ask him to please stop subscribing because they had three growing sons. And so my cousin's son is into calling women wh*res and using women as if they actually were wh*res. You don't see any analysis there that my cousin's son was "born that way" do you?
It's a case of academia and the media taking itself a little too seriously, assuming perversion of their magical crafts can mesmerize the public to deviant action.
Deviant action like not being able to analyse a quote that's pretty straight-forward in its meaning, because you've got some tired old nag of a theory you can't let go of, that's wrong?
If all this sounds familiar, it should. We've heard it all before - from Dines, in fact. Seems she was feverishly publishing anti-porn diatribe back in the '70s and '80s.
Nothing you've read, apparently. Or, well, comprehended without the Misogynist Mass Media and McAdemic Cliff Notes.
As with this new book, her case always has rested on anecdotal evidence, urban legend and not a speck of scienfitic research or credible statistics.
Like, say, what millions of people experience. Because those millions weren't in a lab, right?
There is nothing to support her contention that many men are aroused by degrading porn.
Are you kidding? You're actually stating--seriously--that men don't masturbate to men ejaculating on women's faces? Really? You're actually saying gonzo porn isn't selling well? Really? And that men go limp watching it? Really?
Or, get this, that they hate women.
No, because, pssst: there's no such thing as misogyny! That's something those feminists made up so they'd have stuff to write about. Yeah, about that. About the women who leave men and then are murdered--3000 a year in the U.S.: as many as the number of people killed by the Taliban on 9/11/2001. Yet there's no "terrorism" when men do it to women, is there? Nope. None at all. (Never mind that the women were terrified when the guy shows up with the gun. Never mind that a medical assistant I knew is dead because she rejected and walked out on a man, who, apparently, according to your theory, was what? Not misogynistic?) What do you call what Mel Gibson spews? Woman-loving cooing?
In an earlier interview she said, "Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy. In nothing else is their hatred of us quite as clear." Ah... patriarchy. I knew that old chestnut would be lurking somewhere.
Because you live in a matriarchy? Since when? Either men (and white men at that) rule every significant social, religious, economic, and political institution in U.S. society or they don't. Hold on... I'm going outside to check... Yup--men still rule them. Sorry to put a crack in your chestnut. (Well, yes, Black women do have a significant role in the Black church. I'll give you that. Funny, though, how men won't let those women be the preachers, isn't it?)
Daddy did it. Daddy's a big penis-Nazi! Smash his capitalism and Western civilization! EVIL!
Calm down. Take a breath--you're getting a little too worked up here. When we speak of "patriarchy" we're speaking of "a male-dominated society", yes? You grasp that, right? We're not talking about "daddy", so climb down off your Freudian dead horse please.
I suspect "their hatred..." means, for Dines, "men's hatred". All men. Everywhere.
You know what it does when you "Assume" right: it makes an ASS out of you and me. Or, in this case, out of you and you. Where does Dines say or write that? Hold on... lemme check... Oh, nowhere! So you like pulling stuff out of your *ss, don't you? Which brings this full circle, in a jerky sort of way.
Self-described on her website as "scholar, activist and social critic",
As opposed to, say, actually being a scholar, activist, and social critic? What parts of those descriptors seem especially "off" to you? Do you get, yet, how silly you're being here? And, well, kind of sexist, to be honest. I mean why do you need to question her credentials, white straight man? You appear to be taking advantage of those social entitlements to put down women and make them seem like idiots. What's that called??? Ah, yes: sexism. What are your credentials for dismissing her? Is it that you know your audience has also been well-trained by mass media, and hasn't read anything carefully that feminists have written?
Dines has worked with and has been annointed successor to the late Andrea Dworkin, the great, chronically angry, overstuffed couch of a woman who was a pioneer of the anti-porn movement.
Wow. You're respect for dead human rights activists--hmmm, again, a woman you're disrespecting because of her weight--isn't that, um, well, your sexism showing? Chronically angry? As opposed to you, who are not chronically angry? I mean, seriously: who isn't chronically angry? Only the brain-dead. And, Andrea Dworkin was far more of a scholar than you'd ever hope to be. Have you checked the books she read, which she listed in the backs of most of her books? I'm guessing now, but I'll wait for your reply. Have you seen the scholarship in her book Scapegoat? Have you studied the Nazi Holocaust, in which she lost family, as much as she did? I'm guessing not. Or the history of Israel? Have you traveled the world to listen to what women around the world have to say, honestly, about their experiences of their particular "patriarchies" (which doesn't mean "daddies" remember)? I'm guessing not. But you tell me.
That tells me juuust about what I need to know.
You parroting mass media BS tells you just about what you need to know. Don't you see: that's the problem.
And it's time from some, uh, deconstruction of this particular oeuvre.
Okay, so now that you're hauling out the fifty-cent words, I'm assuming you might have something accurate and non-sexist to say. But we know what happens when someone "assumes"...
Andrea Dworkin was an unhappy,
Not especially. She enjoyed laughing a lot, actually, and anyone who knew her says that about her. She had a great sense of humor, which you'd know if you knew her or, well, didn't parrot what antifeminists have said about her.
mentally unstable,
Nope. Wrong again. You're not demonstrating a high aptitude at "personality assessment" skills. But your sexist Dead Zone tropes are stunning. (You're welcome.)
thoroughly untrustworthy fanatic who hated men.
You mean the woman who has written about loving her father, a father who supported her intellectually? Or do you mean the woman who loved her brother and nephew? (Photographic and written evidence exists.) Or, do you mean the man she loved and lived with for thirty years? You mean she hated those men? Or are you saying that if she demonstrated that she loved men, that means she hated all men? Please clarify, because, once again, all you're doing is parroting antifeminist/anti-Dworkin tropes, that you know nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand you'll get away with, with people actually think you're being intelligent and not at all sexist, or, misogynistic.
and Dines, obviously, is more than suited to step into Dworkin's self-assigned role as the "world's leading anti-pornography campaigner."
Dworkin wasn't just an anti-pornography activist. She was also against fascism and white supremacy, quite explicitly in those things she wrote--what do you call them, again: ah, yes: each and every one of her dozen or so books (which you obviously haven't read--like her analysis of Right-wing women, in which she makes it explicitly clear she isn't Right-wing, as if her past, protesting the Vietnam war, prison abuse, and fascism, and being pro-abortion and pro-lesbianism wasn't evidence enough). You must hate it when your didactic diatribes get interrupted with things like verifiable facts and truth.
Their's is the kind of thinking that cooked up, out of thin air, the ugly fabrication
Wait. Are you speaking here of your sexist mischaracterisation of the dead feminist? Or your micharacterisation of feminist theories on pornography's relationship to racism and misogyny? (Have you been online lately, looking at pornography? What of it do you see that isn't misogynistic and racist? Just curious.)
that men commit sexual abuse of women and children as commonly as we wear shoes.
And that would be something no one but you and other zomboids has written and passed off as "verifiable". I challenge you to cite one sentence where the living feminist Gail Dines says that. She hasn't written nearly as much as Andrea Dworkin did, so this won't be difficult for you. You do read books, don't you? Dines is the person you're going out of your way to demean, disrespect, and dismiss, isn't she?
That never-walked-back lie has destroyed families and ruined lives.
You mean the one that men promote that there's no such thing as patriarchy? That never-walked-back lie that destroys families, friendships, ruins lives, and is part and parcel of wars the U.S. engages in?
It lives today, since unquestioned infamy has the veneer of truth. And, God knows, our media and academia never has doubted this crap.
This crap you're writing?
It's absolutely convincing simply because it's trash spouted by the RIGHT people.
Yes. That's so true of what you write. And so very sad.
Dines is a product of a world long ago, when dogmatic bullies hustled
Um, what do you consider Larry Flynt to be, who would demean feminists in his magazine routinely, in the name of "free speech" and all? Who would promote violence against women and child molestation in his magazine's cartoons, by one Dwaine Tinsley, who was found guilty of incesting his daughter, btw. See here for more on that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_the_Molester
So you're more concerned about "hustling bullies" like Dines than, say, corporate pimps and child molesters? That's some system of ethical triage you have going there, sir.
their way into academia and bit off press attention by combining loud overstatement, pure obnoxiousness and fake "scholarship".
You mean Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione, and Mr. Flynt? Or are you speaking here of Max Hardcore, known for filming his rapes of women and selling them. How obnoxious is that, to you?
So you haven't read Dines' work then. Because even on CNN, the white heterosexual male interviewer brought the stats to her about how pornography addiction is negatively impacting a HUGE number of heterosexual relationships. The rather decidedly liberal interviewer, John Roberts, gets it that some men prefer to have sex "alone" with pornography than with their actual sexual partners in the other room, wondering why they aren't joining them in bed. You call that knowledge "right wing" or even "feminist"? Hardly.
Would you call John Roberts any of the negative terms you've hurled here at Dworkin and Dines?
Posted by JulianReal
July 31, 2010 1:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Friday, July 23, 2010
PASSAGE OF LANDMARK LEGISLATION ADDRESSING MEN'S SEXUAL VIOLENCE AGAINST NATIVE WOMEN (AIUSA news release)
white men's and indigenous men's
The following news release may be seen at its Amnesty International website, *here*.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL APPLAUDS PASSAGE OF LANDMARK LEGISLATION ADDRESSING SEXUAL VIOLENCE AGAINST NATIVE WOMEN
Tribal Law and Order Act is an 'Historic Effort to Tackle Major Challenges That Allow Crimes Against Native Peoples to Flourish,' Says Amnesty International
July 21, 2010
Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) today applauded House passage of the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that tackles the complex jurisdictional maze that allows violent crime against American Indians to continue unabated. The Tribal Law and Order Act, a long overdue effort to address public safety issues in Indian Country, would enhance the criminal justice system by improving coordination and communication between federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies.
"This historic, bi-partisan legislation addresses long-overlooked human rights abuses in Indian Country. It is an important effort to tackle major challenges that allow crimes against Native American and Alaska Native peoples to flourish," said Larry Cox, executive director for AIUSA. "If properly implemented, it will open the door for the U.S. government to address the erosion of tribal authority. In time it will decrease the high levels of rape and finally provide Native women with effective recourse if they are sexually assaulted. In short, this legislation stands to curtail the impunity that allows rapists to prey on Native women like vultures."
The Tribal Law and Order Act is bi-partisan legislation that was introduced by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and Representative Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-SD). The Act passed the Senate on June 23, 2010, as part of H.R. 725, The Indian Arts and Crafts Amendment Act of 2010. Today, the House passed H.R. 725 with the Tribal Law and Order Act attached. The legislation addresses disturbing rates of sexual violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women, a subject that Amnesty International drew national attention to in its 2007 report, Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA.
Maze of Injustice exposed the disproportionately high levels of rape and sexual violence that Native American and Alaska Native women suffer in this country -- 2.5 times higher than for non-native women in the United States. The complex maze of tribal, state and federal jurisdictions often allows perpetrators, 86 percent of them non-Native men, to rape with impunity. To navigate this maze, authorities need to establish whether the crime took place on tribal lands and whether the perpetrator was Native or non-Native to determine which law enforcement agency has jurisdiction, during which critical time is lost. This leads to inadequate investigations or a failure to respond.
"It is encouraging to see Congress begin to address some of the complicated jurisdictional issues that arise in Indian country," said Sarah Deer, Assistant Professor at William Mitchell College of Law and a consultant for AIUSA’s Maze of Injustice report. "The erosion of tribal authority means that Native perpetrators tried in tribal court can receive only one year per offense, while non-Native perpetrators cannot be prosecuted at all. The legislation provides beginning steps to empower tribal governments to take more direct action in cases of violent crime. When victims know that their perpetrators will be held accountable for their behavior, they will be more likely to report crimes. Empowering tribal law enforcement personnel to protect their communities is the key."
In addition to the jurisdictional morass, the lack of trained Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANEs) at Indian Health Service (IHS) facilities to provide forensic exams and gather essential evidence is a factor that leads to a failure to prosecute. The AI report raised concerns about the lack of prosecutions and the need for accurate information about prosecution rates.
"Currently there are no standardized sexual assault protocols within the Indian Health Service, meaning that victims of sexually violent crimes may not be given rape kits that obtain critical evidence to prosecute perpetrators," said Charon Asetoyer, chair of AIUSA's Native Advisory Council. "The Tribal Law and Order Act will remedy this and underscore the importance of the need for medical staff that collect forensic evidence to testify in a court of law. It is a critical step toward ensuring that Native women’s human rights are recognized."
The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2009 is in direct response to concerns raised by tribal leaders, tribal organizations, Native American and Alaska Native women and the AI report. Specifically the Act will:
clarify the responsibilities and increase coordination among federal, state, and tribal law enforcement agencies with respect to crimes committed in tribal communities;
begin to restore tribal governments with authority, resources, and information to address crimes on tribal land;
combat violence against Indian and Alaska Native women;
increase and standardize the collection and distribution of criminal data in tribal communities, including the data that establishes whether crimes are being prosecuted.
Amnesty International is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning grassroots activist organization with more than 2.8 million supporters, activists and volunteers who campaign for universal human rights from more than 150 countries. The organization investigates and exposes abuses, educates and mobilizes the public, and works to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.
# # #
For more information, please visit www.amnestyusa.org/maze.
On the Art of Stealing Human Rights, extracts from the speech delivered by Gerry Gambill in 1958 at a Human Rights conference, Tobique Reserve
This image of AIM patch is from here,
where there is also a photocopy of the typed document from which the text below was retyped. I'll try to include that document at the bottom of the post.
This is a cross-post, and is brilliant, and can be applied, in some cases, to other raced, gendered, sexed hierarchies and be modified accordingly for the as yet unfinished Oppressors' Handbook for Dummies, if there needs to be a section that applies across oppressions without noting intersectionality.
This document is also historically important and it certainly does and should stands on its own, speaking to the specific concerns and issues faced by Indigenous people of what became known as the Americas, unfortunately referred to in the male pronoun below. The author makes "her" into a non-person in writing it this way. Then again, it WAS written pre-feminist consciousness in dominant society in North America. And there are plenty of white men who STILL use the male pronoun as a substitute for "all people". And what the hell is THEIR excuse?
All that follows is from *here*, except the document at the bottom which, like the AIM patch image, is from *here*.
[Note: The following extracts are from a speech given by Gerry Gambill at a conference on Human Rights at Tobique Reserve in New Brunswick, in August, 1958. In this speech, he warned native people about how this society goes about taking away the human rights of native people...]
The art of denying Indians their human rights has been refined to a science. The following list of commonly used techniques will be helpful in "burglar-proofing" your reserves, and your rights.
GAIN THE INDIANS CO-OPERATION - It is much easier to steal someone's human rights if you can do it with his OWN co-operation. So..:
- Make him a non-person. Human rights are for people. Convince Indians their ancestors were savages, that they were pagan, that Indians were drunkards. Make them wards of the government. Make a legal distinction, as in the Indian Act, between Indians and persons. Write history books that tell half the story.
- Convince the Indian that he should be patient, that these things take time. Tell him that we are making progress, and that progress takes time.
- Make him believe that things are being done for his own good. Tell him you're sure that after he has experienced your laws and actions that he will realise how good they have been. Tell the Indian he has to take a little of the bad in order to enjoy the benefits you are conferring on him.
- Get some Indian people to do the dirty work. There are always those who will act for you to the disadvantage of their own people. Just give them a little honor and praise. This is generally the function of band councils, chiefs, and advisory councils: they have little legal power, but can handle the tough decisions such as welfare, allocation of housing etc.
- Consult the Indian, but do not act on the basis of what you hear. Tell the Indian he has a voice and go through the motions of listening. Then interpret what you have heard to suit your own needs.
- Insist that the Indian "GOES THROUGH PROPER CHANNELS." Make the channels and the procedures so difficult that he won't bother to do anything. When he discovers what the proper channels are and becomes proficient at the procedures, change them.
- Make the Indian believe that you are working hard for him, putting in much overtime and at a great sacrifice, and imply that he should be appreciative. This is the ultimate in skills in stealing human rights; when you obtain the thanks of your victim.
- Allow a few individuals to "MAKE THE GRADE" and then point to them as examples. Say that the 'HARDWORKERS" AND THE "GOOD" Indians have made it, and that therefore it is a person's own fault if he doesn't succeed.
- Appeal to the Indian's sense of fairness, and tell him that even though things are pretty bad it is not right for him to make strong protests. Keep the argument going on his form of protest and avoid talking about the real issue. refuse to deal with him while he is protesting. Take all the fire out of his efforts.
- Encourage the Indian to take his case to court. This is very expensive, takes lots of time and energy and is very safe because laws are stacked against him. The court's ruling will defeat the Indian's cause, but makes him think he has obtained justice.
- Make the Indian believe that things could be worse, and that instead of complaining about the loss of human rights, to be grateful for the rights we do have. In fact, convince him that to attempt to regain a right he has lost is likely to jepordize the rights that he still has.
- Set yourself up as the protector of the Indian's human rights, and then you can choose to act only on those violations you wish to act upon. By getting successful on a few minor violations of human rights, you can point to these as examples of your devotion to his cause. The burglar who is also the doorman is the perfect combination.
- Pretend that the reason for the loss of human rights is for some other reason that the person is an Indian. Tell him some of your best friends are Indians, and that his loss of rights is because of his housekeeping, his drinking, his clothing.
- Make the situation more complicated than is necessary. Tell the Indian you will have to take a survey to find out how many other Indians are being discriminating against. Hire a group of professors to make a year-long research project.
- Insist on unanimity. Let the Indian know that when all the Indians in Canada can make up their minds about just what they want as a group, then you will act. Play one group's special situation against another group's wishes.
- Select very limited alternatives, neither of which has much merit, and then tell the Indian that indeed he has a choice. Ask, for instance, if he could or would rather have council elections in June or December, instead of asking if he wants them at all.
- Convince the Indian that the leaders who are the most beneficial and powerful are dangerous and not to be trusted. Or simply lock them up on some charge like driving with no lights. Or refuse to listen to the real leaders and spend much time with the weak ones. Keep the people split from their leaders by sowing rumour. Attempt to get the best leaders into high paying jobs where they have to keep quiet to keep their paycheck coming in.
- Speak of the common good. Tell the Indian that you can't consider yourselves when there is a whole nation to think of. Tell him that he can't think only of himself. For instance, in regard to hunting rights, tell him we have to think of all the hunters, or the sporting good industry.
- Remove rights so gradually that people don't realize what has happened until it is too late. Again, in regard to hunting rights, first restrict the geographical area where hunting is permitted, then cut the season to certain times of the year, then cut the limits down gradually, then insist on licensing, and then Indians will be on the same grounds as white sportsmen.
- Rely on some reason and logic (your reason and logic) instead of rightness and morality. Give thousands of reasons for things, but do not get trapped into arguments about what is right.
- Hold a conference on HUMAN RIGHTS, have everyone blow off steam and tension, and go home feeling things are well in hand.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Women on TOP? You've GOT to be Joking! A Reality Check for Delusional Antifeminist "Anti-Misandrist" Men
[image of book cover featuring white het men's misogynistic fetishes is from here]
What follows is a cross post from The Independent (UK) followed by another from The Times (UK) by the same writer. With great thanks to Mary Ann Sieghart for telling it like it is is this "post-feminist" West (please insert an overtly disrespectful cough) where increasingly there are delusional, bitter, scornful white, class-privileged, and "straight" men--men who are utterly clueless about what it feels like, means, and IS to be a structurally, systemically, institutionally, and culturally oppressed adult human being--are lashing out at and physically and verbally bashing women for problems created, promoted, and protected by white het men. To any and all MEN: place your disappointment, criticism, and rage where it belongs--toward WHM and the man in the mirror. You may link back to original site/source, by clicking on the title just below. And, beyond that, in this post, is another brilliant piece by Mary Ann Sieghart, as well as a link to an important analysis of evolutionary psychology--a blatantly illogical, irrational, and biased, bigoted anti-woman field of pseudo-scientific inquiry, that ought to be never been presented publicly or in the press without hisses, boos, or laughter.
Mary Ann Sieghart: Women on top? You've got to be joking
For at least 20 years, we have been fed the line that the 'Future is Female'. But the future has always failed to materialise
Monday, 19 July 2010
What a depressing week it has been to be female. A psychopathically violent woman-beater and murderer is lionised. A film director who drugs and then sodomises a 13-year-old girl is let off. A famous actor tells his ex-partner she deserves to be "raped by a pack of niggers". And the Catholic Church elevates women's ordination to the same level of offence as child abuse. Thanks, chaps.
Meanwhile, a new report has reminded us of how little progress women have made in the arts. And, as Selina Scott complained to the BBC last week, when women do succeed on TV, they're removed as soon as their first wrinkle begins to show, while men carry on till their faces look like a relief map of the Hindu Kush.
First to Raoul Moat, though. The most depressing aspect of the men (and women) defending this "legend" is the blame they have heaped on his ex-girlfriend, Samantha Stobbart. She, remember, is now recovering from being shot twice in the stomach by Moat. During their relationship, he split her head open. He threw her against a wall and jumped on her stomach. And he threatened her with a gun. His former partner, Marissa Reid, has said he beat her with his fists and a baseball bat, and raped her while she was tied to a bed. Nice.
So what do ordinary people make of that? Here are just a couple of comments on the RIP Raoul Moat Facebook page: "Maybe if she kept her legs closed none of this would of happened. Maybe Moaty had good reason to be angry," and "Moat is a true British hero, he done what he thought was right by getting revenge on his cheating ex-girlfriend." Moat himself wrote: "I never cheated on her. I wish she hadn't cheated on me. She pulled the trigger by doing so just as much as me."
So a woman who moves on from a terrifyingly abusive relationship deserves to be shot in the stomach? And a man who loses a girlfriend is entitled to try to kill her? That's still a scarily prevalent view. Men are 10 times more likely than women to kill a partner who has left them. People often wonder why women suffering domestic violence stay in a relationship. Usually it's because the man threatens to kill them if they go. Raoul Moat wasn't the only man to have said to his girlfriend, "If I can't have you, no one else can," and to have followed it through.
In their splendidly named study The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Chattel [***click on link here or see bottom of post for the link to this important work], the evolutionary psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly write: "Men lay claim to particular women as songbirds lay claim to territories, as lions lay claim to a kill, or as people of both sexes lay claim to valuables." This sense of ownership gives these men a sense of entitlement and a fury at the notion of losing "their" woman to someone else. So when Samantha Stobbart took up with a karate instructor, in order to feel protected and safe at last, she apparently "pulled the trigger" on herself.
Moat's twisted logic finds a reflection in other walks of life. When women who have been victimised ask merely to be treated fairly, they are often amplified by men into threatening aggressors. Researching a Radio 4 programme about opponents of women priests last week, I was told of an exhibition put on by an Anglican man who opposed women's ordination. He had painted pictures of leering women, naked apart from their dog collars, with intimidatingly large breasts, gathered round a communion chalice filled with menstrual blood. What's that about, Sigmund?
The Catholic Church, of course, has not just forbidden women's ordination, but made it a dreadful crime. Last week, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith decreed that "both the one who attempts to confer a sacred order on a woman, and the woman who attempts to receive a sacred order, incur an ex-communication". This puts women's ordination on a par with child rape.
If only paedophilia were taken as seriously as women's ordination. The Vatican has hounded theologians and priests who have questioned the Church's teachings on women. Had it used the same energy to root out abusing priests, thousands of children's psyches could have been spared.
Even in the Church of England, which now has women priests and is close to accepting women as bishops, the hatred and vilification are shocking. At last weekend's meeting of the General Synod, some women priests were spat at. And a male bishop who appeared on the radio programme I made complained that the Synod had now been "swamped" by part-time women clergy or – as he put it – "ladies with time on their hands".
Hearing a word like "swamped", you might expect the House of Clergy to have been taken over by women. In fact, they account for just 39 of 197 members. In other words, men still take up 80 per cent of the places. But if women are seen as threatening and monstrous – as in that priest's painting – even their minority presence is hugely amplified.
This overestimation of the power and representation of women is commonplace. Research shows that when women speak in the classroom exactly 50 per cent of the time, both men and women think they spoke more. When I took part in an internet debate recently about whether Oxford University was sexist, James Kingston, president of the Oxford Union, said: "Most of the History tutors at Christ Church seem to be women." In fact, there are six women and six men there.
So perhaps that is why we put up with such appalling under-representation of women in public life. We believe there are more than there are. A report out last week from UK Feminista found that for every female character in TV drama there are two men. Is that an accurate portrayal of our lives? At Glastonbury this year, 71 per cent of the performances were all-male acts. Just 12 per cent of Turner Prize winners have been women, and 7 per cent of Bafta award-winners for screenplay-writing. Even in literary fiction, at which women are supposed to excel, awards go two-to-one in favour of men.
I can understand – just – why only 1.6 per cent of conductors at this year's Proms are women. Conducting is an all-consuming job with gruelling hours and constant travel. But it's hard to believe that men are twice as good at writing fiction, three times better at pop music and seven times better at art. And I certainly don't see why, as a former BBC TV executive admitted to me: "As male presenters get older, they become an authority; as female presenters get older, they become a problem."
The real problem is that 21st-century Britain still undervalues women, and particularly older ones. Open any newspaper, look at any billboard, switch on the TV or read a magazine and you will search almost in vain for a picture of a woman over 50. Girls may be doing better than boys at school, but it is ridiculous to claim that men are being marginalised. They still have the best jobs, the most money and the preponderance of power. And when women make any progress, however small, that is exaggerated to suggest that they are somehow taking over from men.
For at least 20 years, we have been fed newspaper articles telling us "The Future is Female". But the future has always failed to materialise. The present is still overwhelmingly male and women's advances are still over-amplified. I'll start to feel sorry for men when they are wildly outnumbered on company boards, wiped off TV in their forties, routinely earning less than women, and not just being murdered by their jealous partners, but being blamed for it.
m.sieghart@independent.co.uk / twitter.com/MASieghart
More from Mary Ann Sieghart (click on link to the left, and also see below:)
From
October 22, 2009
The men who kill out of passion
Men are far more likely than women to kill for jealousy. But the law is changing to stop them using infidelity as a defence
Mary Ann Sieghart
All men kill the thing they love,” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, ruminating on a fellow inmate who had murdered a woman in her bed. Love is also used by Othello to justify the same crime. He asks to be remembered as “one that loved not wisely but too well” and claims: “For naught I did in hate, but all in honour.”
So how much has changed in 400 years? Even now, says Harriet Harman, the Deputy Prime Minister, “A man can say, ‘It was only because I loved her. It’s her fault I killed her. She must have provoked me. I killed her because she was planning to leave me’.” As a result, they can sometimes get the charge reduced from murder to manslaughter, with a far shorter sentence.
Between one and two women a week in Britain are killed by their partners. This is often prompted by jealousy, or as a punishment for wives or girlfriends seeking their independence.
Only last week, Neil Ellerbeck, a banker whose wife wanted to leave him, was let off with manslaughter after strangling her. The judge branded him as an “obsessive and jealous” husband who would stop at nothing to prevent his wife divorcing him. He could be out of prison in as little as three years.
In September, Brian Lewis, 31, was found guilty of murdering his wife Hayley Jones, 26, after she changed her status from “married” to “single” on her Facebook profile. She was stabbed and strangled.
“Till death do us part” is the vow we make in the marriage ceremony, but men are much more inclined than women to try to bring it forward. They are three to four times more likely than women to kill their partner or ex-partner. And of the women who do kill their husband or lover, the overwhelming majority do so after suffering years of violent abuse.
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson are evolutionary psychologists who specialise in the roots of male violence against women. In their fabulously titled The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Chattel, they write: “Men lay claim to particular women as songbirds lay claim to territories, as lions lay claim to a kill, or as people of both sexes lay claim to valuables.” Not only do men see their partners as their property, apparently, but they have a sense of entitlement to them and therefore a huge sense of grievance at the prospect of losing them to somebody else.
Daly and Wilson put this down to the asymmetrical risk of cuckoldry. Men can’t know for sure whether their partner’s baby is theirs. With women there is no such uncertainty. So males of most species go in for “mate-guarding” to ensure that their partners can’t get pregnant by another male. And as Matt Ridley, the evolutionary science writer, puts it: “Spouse killing is an extreme form of mate-guarding.”
This can take many forms. In 2007 Susan Goswell, 63, was stabbed to death by her depressive husband Roger, 66, when he discovered that she had not been a virgin on her wedding day 46 years earlier, an inquest in Chichester heard.
Women get jealous too, of course, but evolutionary psychologists say that the nature of male and female jealousy is different. For a man it is sexual: he doesn’t want another man to impregnate his partner. For a woman it is emotional: she doesn’t want her partner to give time, attention or resources to another woman, as she needs these for raising her own family. But while jealous women will sometimes take revenge on their partners, they are more likely to take a knife to their suits than to their throats.
Daly and Wilson, in studies of spousal homicide, have found that by far the most common motive is the man’s jealousy. Sometimes this is “morbid jealousy”, in which the man becomes completely obsessed with the idea that his wife is being unfaithful, even when there is no evidence for it. Sometimes, though, it is standard jealousy, set off by her wanting to leave him. Then, says the psychologist Oliver James: “There’s a point at which, if I can’t have her, no one else will. In a kind of way you’ve got her for ever if you kill her, because no one else can have her.”
Dr Elizabeth Englander, in her book Understanding Violence, cites a study of 83 cases of spousal homicide in the US: 42 cases of husbands killing wives, and 41 of wives killing husbands. None of the husband-killers had jealousy as a motive.
Women are most at risk of being killed by their partners at the time of separation or soon after. People often ask why abused women don’t just walk out of the relationship: this is why. Englander notes that the abuser often reminded his partner that if she left him, he would track her down and kill her, and sometimes their children too.
It is no idle threat. In a Chicago study, three quarters of women who were killed had left or tried to end the relationship in the previous year. And violence that continues after separation tends to be more serious and obsessive, often including stalking and sometimes leading to murder. Women don’t tend to pursue their partners after a relationship has broken up. Men do: they are ten times more likely than women to kill partners who have left them.
And when they do, it is usually more violent than other murders. The majority of men who kill their wives or girlfriends use repeated blows or stabbings — far more violence than is necessary to cause death. This is rarely true when women kill.
So what is the mechanism that makes all this anger and jealousy explode into extreme violence against women? Men are in any case much more violent than women, and they commit many more murders. Men tend to externalise their anger, while women internalise it. Just look at disturbed adolescents: young men will fight, drink and take drugs, while young women will self-harm and starve themselves.
Tom Fahy is a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. Jealousy, he says, “is a dangerous emotion, especially if it reaches pathological proportions and if there is alcohol involved”.
Although women can suffer it too, “the type of extreme, inflexible attitude, the sense of feeling of ownership, is much more part of the male psyche”. And men who are left by their partners can feel a sense of complete abandonment. When it’s for another man, “that’s a killer blow to self-esteem”.
Women who kill are already much more dysfunctional than the men who do so. “They often have a background of horrendous physical and sexual abuse themselves,” says Fahy. “They are much farther away from the mean than the average male killer.”
But do jealous men who kill their partners get an easier ride from the law? Historically, that’s been the case. In 1706, in the Mawgridge case here in Britain, it was declared that “jealousy is the rage of man and adultery is the highest invasion of property”.
Several American states used to have statutes that allowed men to kill adulterous wives without fear of prosecution — these were abolished only in the 1970s, and juries still sometimes acquit men who do.
When Harriet Harman became Solicitor General in 2001, she was horrified by the number of cases in which male killers pleaded their wives’ infidelity as provocation and had the charge reduced from murder to manslaughter. On behalf of bereaved relatives, she sent three cases to the Court of Appeal because the sentences seemed unduly lenient.
In one, a solicitor’s wife had admitted to having feelings for a karate instructor. The husband went out, bought a knife and stabbed her to death in front of their four children. Despite the apparent premeditation, he got off with manslaughter. “The relatives of the woman killed were heartbroken,” recalls Harman. “She was being blamed for her own death and she didn’t have the chance to defend herself in court. They thought the injustice of it was absolutely overwhelming.”
The Court of Appeal said that the law needed to be changed. As a result, the Coroners and Justice Bill, which is now wending its way through the House of Lords, will remove any defence of infidelity as provocation.
Not all lawyers, even feminist ones, are sure that this is the answer, though. Baroness Kennedy, a senior barrister who has spent much of her career standing up for victims of domestic violence, thinks that it’s more important for attitudes to change. “There are still ideas that somehow there are ‘good’ women and there are women who bring this stuff on their own heads. I still hear people saying that being a wicked-tongued woman is equivalent to a man being violent.”
She thinks that it would be unfair not to acknowledge in law the devastating effect that fear of abandonment has on a man. “I’d be cautious about denying to men the possibility that you could snap when you think your life is falling apart, though the defence shouldn’t be applied too generously. Changing the law is a simplistic solution to problems that ... require bigger shifts in society.”
Harman agrees that the problem is profound. “It’s about whether or not male ownership of a woman’s sexuality entitles him to take violent action. It’s very primeval.”
But surely we’ve moved on from our caveman days? Harman certainly thinks so. “Violence within a relationship is criminal, just as it is outside a relationship. We don’t accept a man’s ownership of a woman’s sexuality. It’s hers and doesn’t belong to him. It’s not for him to control her or her sexuality by violence or any other means.”
Society has already agreed that domestic violence is unacceptable, and there are no excuses for it. The men who receive sentences of a few years for manslaughter would be sent to jail for longer if their partners had survived and they were convicted instead of grievous bodily harm, for which there is no defence of provocation.
Even Othello decides that a fitting sentence is to stab himself to death. And Oscar Wilde’s protagonist? “The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die.” Britain no longer has the death penalty, but at least now, once the law is changed, men who kill their partners will no longer be able to get away with murder.
Related Links:
Life for Facebook murder boyfriend
Top banker cleared of murder after killing wife
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