What does "Radical" mean here?

image of book cover is from Powell's Books, here

I am thinking now about Winona LaDuke's comments in a book which originally came out in 1998, called Talking About A Revolution: Interviews. She mentions how "radical" the Bush policies have been: those of GHW, at the time that book came out; who knew we'd look back on GHW as the lesser of two evil Bushes. LaDuke discusses how she's a conservative, not the white kind. By this she means she's into honoring and conserving the Earth, not objectifying it and wasting it away, conserving Native/Indigenous language, culture, and, societies, and not continuing the genocide that the US government has been practicing for the last 150 plus years, in the hopes of "finally" perfecting it.

The dominant culture's radical policies have all been advocated or endorsed by all them good ol' whiteboy presidents ["whiteboy" here is a political term, not a biological category of humans: it is not synonymous with "humans who are pale, male, and young"]. Each and every one of 'em presidents of the US of A, has put in place or maintained policies and practices that are a combination of the following: pro-slavery, pro-white supremacy, pro-male supremacy, pro-industrial civilization, pro-post-industrial civilization, pro-urbanization/suburbanization, and/or pro-agribusiness. This is all a fancy way of saying that the themes in U.S. presidential ethics are inhumane and pro-destruction, radically, to the root. The whiteboy leaders have not maintained these dehumanising and death-loving practices all by themselves, but they have done so with considerable power and influence, regionally and globally. The trajectory of this course of action leads to only one thing: the callous disregard and destruction of all spiritual/material being on/around Earth: water, air, rock, plant, insect, animal, and human, with some nifty perks for rich white folks, especially rich heterosexual white men, on route to hell.

One could also take her mention of "radical" to mean those presidential policies are extreme.

"Radical" is used, often enough, as a synonym for "extreme" or "extremist".

What is "extreme" and harmful to the root, following up on LaDuke's comments, is rape, racism, heterosexism, and ecocide. It don't get much more "extreme" than charting a one-way course to destruction of the Earth and its inhabitants, some of whom think "we own the place." (That would be, disproportionately and overwhelmingly, white Corporate-Christian publicly heterosexual men, and the followers of them.) Pro-corporate Christian whiteboys are radicals, extremists, pure and simple.

But when I use the term, here, what I mean is this: a profeminist who is open to being challenged to the root of any issue and discussing any issue that serves the aim of ending CRAP (corporate, racist, atrocious patriarchies); a profeminist who thinks white supremacy and male supremacy are inextricably linked, and that those men folks and/or white folks who claim otherwise don't understand what their manhood-behavior or white-behavior means and does to people who are gender- and race-oppressed; a profeminist who thinks ecocide and genocide are intricately related, and no less (or more) harmful and atrocious than patriarchal crimes against humanity; a profeminist who doesn't assume that everything harmful can be reduced to or seen as originating from "sin", personal history, social psychology, capitalism, patriarchy, science, God, the Left, or the Right. Not that the Right is right: it's ethically, morally, and politically wrong alright.

Radical here also means "not [white male supremacist] liberal". NOT liberal: not viewing the world, people, social and environmental issues as primarily problems of the individual mind or heart solvable through "better" philosophical ideas, or more empathic communication, or by being more loving. I'm not against developing new theories, new ways of relating, or embracing dying ways of doing things that were better than the way we do them now. I'm saying that the source, the central force of what we experience, collectively--all of us sentient beings--does not find its motor in an individual's childhood; it is not a consequence of of unintelligent thinking, poor planning, laziness, tough luck, innate inferiority, or "feeling like a victim".

Radical here, means that promoters, profiteers, and enforcers of liberal society cannot adequately explain or efficiently end rape. A radical profeminist perspective doesn't sit with occasional discomfort believing "rape happens to some women, unfortunately, so too bad for them." It doesn't assume those who have been and are traumatised and degraded "were in the wrong place at the wrong time". It doesn't displace the responsibility for the violent act on the one who was harmed by saying "she should have known better than to go out with a guy like that." It means rape is understood as part of a larger system of interpersonal and institutionalized terrorism, violation, and social subordination of women by men, in service to men's greater domination over and control of women as a class. A radical profeminist view sees that those of us in North America live inside a network of interlocking systems which men control and own, not women; whites control and own, not people of color; that the rich control and own, not the poor. A radical perspective on rape means one looks at it in terms of both race and gender politics, among other issues, not just gender politics, because rape is a raced act as well as a gendered one, largely perpetrated here by white men against women of all ethnicities.

Radical means I don't accept that "race" or "sexuality" or "desire" are either "natural and inevitable" or "biologically driven" in the f*cked up dualistic sense in which many people--often white academic men who call themselves scholars--toss those terms around. Nature/nurture and biological/social are made up binaries. The world don't work that way, in binaries. There's gray in them there black and white understandings of reality, and colors too.

Please read Yurugu for a much more thorough and deep understanding of this.

Radical means open to new and other understandings, to new and other perspectives, to new and other awareness; it means valuing, through practice, self-examination and self-critique. White Men's Conservatism and White Men's Liberalism are closed systems of thought. The champions of these points of view deny that they have any the boundaries, any limits, any misunderstanding. The most statused advoates of white Conservatism and white Liberalism are ideologues who refuse to acknowledge, identify, or name the problems in their perspectives, or that they are operating out of a perspective. Radicalism as a social-political perspective, here means not closed. It means acting without the assumption that "people like me" know it all. Radicalism means it is understood that no one view is correct, but when manifested as actions, some are more oppressive and deadly than others.

And "a radical", the noun, not "radical", the adjective, means that if one is also profeminist, one is an activist, not a passivist. It means one is engaged in a daily practice of resistance and struggle toward transformation, alone or in groups or community, to stop rape, end racism, and halt ecocide.

So that's what I mean by the word here on this blog, and that's why it appears before the term "profeminist".

And I have great respect for Indigenist and non-Western perspectives which see the U.S. presidents and U.S. CEOs of globalizing corporations as "radical" and "extremist."

Kyle Payne, short hair, and a lack of self-loathing

Someone who has done a fantastic job of keeping a lot of us updated on the "Kyle Payne" sexual assault case, is the operator of the blog, Eleanor's Trousers. So I want to publicly thank her for all her work. I have found it to be thoughtful, incisive, and invaluable in tracking what has been going on.

There was one paragraph in her last post on K.P. that troubled me. It was troubling because, from what I know about rape and other assault, it missed the mark on a couple of potentially related matters: Kyle's short haircut and its relationship to him being a self-loathing person.

Obviously, I can have no idea about why K.P. keeps his hair the way he does, and I cannot know to what degrees he loves or loathes himself. But I can speak beyond K.P., to "Standard Operating Procedure" regarding repeat offender rapists. And I don't know if K.P. is one of those. I just know he sexually assaulted a woman, and that since he's been caught, he has expressed much more concern about himself, detailing the consequences on him, than he has on the consequences of his actions on the woman he assaulted. And, for me, that is grossly antifeminist and antiwoman, which is to say, inhumane.

E.E. wrote:

While the change in hairstyles could be a simple result of the change of seasons, I couldn't help but think about the women who, after suffering from an assault or incidents of domestic violence, pull out their own hair and eyebrows. From there my thoughts drifted to the primarily young women who take up the practice of cutting themselves. Is it possible that Payne could be that self-loathing? You wouldn't know it from reading his blog or watching his videos.

My response to the above is this:

I don't think that's it. Honestly. I have known women who pull out their hair, carry great shame about it, and generally don't want to talk about it with anyone. No men that I know of have been compulsive hair-pullers(to my knowledge).

A man, especially a very privileged white man, who sexually assaults a woman and gets his hair cut, well, that's well within S.O.P. for assaulters. I see this as a year-round phenomenon, not one related to it being summer or winter. I'm not critical of E.E.'s thought process per se; I can relate very much to the way her mind works--one thought leading to various associations, and then on to others.

I guess, using that same process, I am speaking out about where my mind goes when I hear about men who have sexually preyed on a woman or women, who also change their hairstyles. I have seen many TV programs (mostly the evening news) that show one photo of a wanted man (not necessarily, and usually not, a rapist) followed by the mugshot when he's caught. (And we know most sexual assaulters of girls and women are not caught.)

What strikes me again and again is this: men cutting off our hair, or growing it out, or growing a moustache, or cutting it off, or doing the same with a beard, or changing appearance in any number of other ways, such as dying one's hair, gaining or losing weight, wearing unusual clothes (for the particular man), affecting a different accent or speech pattern, adding or removing a scar, moving to another part of the country, etc, is, for me, unambiguously a strategy for single-time offenders (or re-offenders) to more readily "get away" with committing more crimes against (too often women's) humanity. If Kyle grows out and dyes his hair, and grows in and dyes facial hair, he can appear very different from the photo that has made the rounds online, one of himself that he originally posted; in white lingo, that image is of a man who is "clean cut." This is one way to have status and cred among, for example, potential employers, in the racist/classist society I live in.

Kyle's "clean cut" look would work in his favor both in terms of him being placed in the position of RA, and in the lighter level of sentencing he got, regarding time in jail (not prison). In fact, I think it is worth noting what Kyle Payne chooses to look like in the near future, once he is released from jail, especially given that he won't be on any sex offender registry list.

Cutting to the chase: I do not believe Kyle Payne cut his hair as a compulsive expression of self-loathing.

Payne has not demonstrated any self-loathing, in my opinion. Also, many women I know dislike themselves, some intensely. They don't necessarily pull out or cut their hair, compulsively or otherwise.

Kyle, to me, is not self-hating. He's self-absorbed. Big difference: the first makes him dangerous to himself, the second makes him dangerous to others.

Hence the case itself and his on-going determination to have a good life.

The White Liberal Conundrum

On the topic of "Political Correctness", I think The White Liberal Conundrum, by Kai Chang, says it all. Period.

Original source: http://www.kaichang.net/2007/10/the-white-liber.html
Current source of archived essay: http://www.wutang-corp.com/forum/archive/index.php?t-90711.html

The White Liberal Conundrum




by Kai Chang

Anti-racism is a rewarding but grueling journey which must be consciously undertaken and intrepidly pursued (both inwardly and outwardly) if one hopes to make serious progress along its twisting passageways and steep inclines. There's no static end-condition at which an anti-racist can arrive and definitively declare, "Hallelujah! I am Not A Racist!" Rather, it's a lifelong process of historical education, vigilant self-interrogation, personal growth, and socio-political agitation. Racism fractures our world and our own intactness; anti-racism seeks to proactively treat these bleeding wounds and restore the integrity of our humanity.

As I've often noted, many white liberals remain oblivious to the depth and breadth of anti-racist work, opting to hide behind the delusion that anyone who votes for Democrats and doesn't have a pointy hood in the closet is "a good guy" in the movement toward greater social justice — as though the Democratic Party (http://skepticalbrotha.wordpress.com/2007/10/10/any-thoughts/) is some bastion of progressivism and not one of two hands strangling US polity on behalf of the ruling class and the corporate-political establishment which sponsors its power. Some might be surprised to learn that when people of color talk about racism amongst ourselves, white liberals often receive a far harsher skewering than white conservatives or overt racists. Many of my POC friends would actually prefer to hang out with an Archie Bunker-type who spits flagrantly offensive opinions, rather than a colorblind (http://temple3.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/nothing-to-do-with-race/) liberal whose insidious paternalism, dehumanizing tokenism, and cognitive indoctrination ooze out between superficially progressive words. At least the former gives you something to work with, something above-board to engage and argue against; the latter tacitly insists on imposing and maintaining an illusion of non-racist moral purity which provides little to no room for genuine self-examination or racial dialogue.

Countless blogospheric discussions on racism amply demonstrate the manner in which many white liberals start acting victimized and angry (http://www.theunapologeticmexican.org/glosario.html#magikattax) if anyone attempts to burst their racism-free bubble, oftentimes inexplicably bringing up non-white friends, lovers, adopted children, relatives, ancestors; dismissing, belittling, or obtusely misreading substantive historically-informed analysis of white supremacism as either "divisive rhetoric" or "flaming"; downplaying racism as an interpersonal social stigma and bad PR, rather than an overarching system of power under which we all live and which has socialized us all (http://www.genderracepower.com/?p=228); and threatening to walk away from discussion if persons of color do not comform to a narrow white-centered comfort zone. Such people aren't necessarily racists in the hate-crime sense of the word, but they are usually acting out social dynamics created by racism and replicating the racist social relationships they were conditioned since birth to replicate.

Of course not all white liberals are like this. I'd say that a significant minority of white liberals are actually interested in learning about anti-racism once properly exposed to it. This requires enough humility to admit that people of color have something to teach white folks, a concept that many whites struggle with because racism teaches us that whiteness is the seat of authoritative knowledge, while brownness is the repository of murky musical mysticism which whiteness may dip into at will for spiritual support and servile entertainment. Nevertheless, some white folks manage to claw and bootstrap their way out of their own conditioning, opening their hearts and minds to previously unseen worlds from which the voices and stories of people of color emerge; studying and observing the profound effects of racist society on their own perceptual prisms and on the shape of the world (http://slanttruth.com/2007/10/03/the-common-elements-of-oppression/); and consciously, steadily working to counteract those effects. Such people become allies to people of color.

From what I can see, though, a solid majority of white liberals maintain a fairly hostile posture toward anti-racist discourse and critique, while of course adamantly denying this hostility. Many white liberals consider themselves rather enlightened for their ability to retroactively support the Civil Rights movement and to quote safely dead anti-racist icons (http://slanttruth.com/2007/10/03/on-civil-rights-leaders-that-are-loved-and-conveniently-dead/), even though their present-day physical, intellectual, and political orbits remain mostly segregated. They somehow take pride in being more "down with the brown" than their conservative brethren; indeed they exhibit a certain strange glee in highlighting and exploiting the "macaca" and "call me" moments of their political opponents. Armed with "diversity" soundbites and melanin-inclusive photo-ops, they seek electoral, financial, and public relations support from people of color. Yet the consistent outcome of their institution-building agendas is to deprioritize (http://blacksmythe.com/blog/2007/09/30/a-few-more-things-about-that-white-progressive-blogosphere/) and marginalize our voices, perspectives, experiences, concerns, cultures, and initiatives. When you get right down to it, the unrecognized political reality is that most white liberals have more in common with white conservatives — social cues, family ties, cognitive biases, cultural backdrops, etc. — than they do with people of color. I'm calling this tangle of contradictions the white liberal conundrum.

Obviously the record of white liberals when it comes to racism isn't good. Now I know that white folks frequently bemoan the guilt-laden burden of inheriting the racist legacy of their predecessors; to which I can only respond: If white folks disavow and destroy all the systemic advantages and interlocking privileges and perks of whiteness, then they're off the hook! But you can't enjoy the lifelong fruits of the legacy while disowning the accountability, right? That's not how it works.

For people of color, the white liberal conundrum manifests as an ongoing and often exhausting struggle to determine the extent to which they can or should work with, or trust, white liberals. Some feel that it's a waste of time, that most white folks will never get it and those who do will find their way into POC-led movements on their own. Others believe that some modicum of energy should be extended toward bringing white persons (http://www.prometheus6.org/node/18197) of good will on board anti-racism and forging common ground. I'm not really sure myself, but I do know that either way, communities of color are going to be on the move and organizing, resisting the racist social order with ingenuity and hope, even as white supremacist imperialism heaps its abuse (http://brownfemipower.com/?p=1880)as it always has (http://www.intrapolitics.org/node/64): outside of the imperious gaze of the mainstream; advanced by the tireless efforts of innumerable anonymous activists, organizers, visionaries, artists, collaborators, innovators; continually appropriated and/or sabotaged by the political and media establishment; reduced and glossed over by mainstream journalists and historians as the miraculous mojo magic of establishment-anointed "leaders" (http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w071008&s=olopade100907); and despite all that, continually inspiring vibrant cultural scenes, enabling potent spiritual networks, and undertaking positive socio-political interventions and transformations. upon dark bodies around the world. Anti-racist progress will continue to occur.

For those white liberals and progressives who become serious about extracting racism from their worlds and their lives, who wish to participate in the dismantling of white supremacy, the white liberal conundrum usually culminates in some sort of series of crossroads (http://ilykadamen.blogspot.com/2007/05/preview-of-coming-attractions.html) and reckonings; they're often forced to make tough decisions about which of their previous alliances and networks — newly illuminated and often unfavorably recontextualized by anti-racist analysis — are worth trying to maintain, which are too invested in the distortions of the white lens (http://www.theunapologeticmexican.org/glosario.html#whitelens) to salvage, and which new directions and networks to pursue.

The good news for those who wish to embark upon (http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Learning-Anti-Racism-Developmental-Approach/dp/0807736376) the anti-racist journey is that there's plenty (http://www.rachelstavern.com/) of (http://whyaminotsurprised.blogspot.com/2006/08/for-white-folks-how-to-become-ally.html) help (http://www.timwise.org/) along (http://www.racialicious.com/) the (http://allywork.solidaritydesign.net/) way. The literature on anti-racist history, theory, and practice is voluminous. In the intertube age, it's not all that hard to find. White liberals who have no interest in engaging this vital body of knowledge, who refuse to incorporate it into their political vision and agendas, cannot be considered allies to people of color; they shouldn't act surprised when not all that many persons of color show up for their parties, contribute to their causes, or buy into their narratives. On the other hand, those who have the courage to allow themselves to be transformed by anti-racist consciousness have a shot at escaping the white liberal conundrum; they turn their critical powers upon their own lives, minds, and hearts first; they listen and read and reflect with seering honesty; and thus they begin to recognize — and actively oppose — the breadth and depth of racism's consistent, dehumanizing, body-shattering impact on the shape of this wounded world.

Posted by Kai at 04:33 PM

Celie's Revenge: When White Males Attack: Larry Flynt, Racism & The Left

Celie's Revenge: When White Males Attack: Larry Flynt, Racism & The Left, by Celie's Revenge, addresses a political history almost everyone on the White Left ignores completely. Why? One reason: its own investment in white male supremacy.

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Sex, Lies, and Digital Images: The Politics of Kyle Payne's Sexuality

A white feminist blogger suggested another question for me to ask Kyle:

Essential Estrogen said...
One more question for your list: Why did he video himself in public buildings? And, yeah, he did.

This is news to me. Thank you, E.E., for the link, the commentary, and your thorough coverage of this story over the months. I don't think you have anything to explain to others about why you have focused in on this case. It warrants at least as much attention as any other sexual assault case.

I hope Kyle's victim and her family find justice, somehow. Peace follows justice; if it doesn't, we aren't doing enough to change what needs to be radically transformed.

This newest revelation about Kyle doesn't upset me because he has been masturbating. It is of concern because the acts are done publicly. This doesn't mean that men's private sexual behavior is less troublesome. In contemporary Western society, a man videotaping himself being sexual, even in the privacy of his own home, can be and frequently is an act of bolstering the man's sexual self-importance--the sense that he's more of "a man" (in the patriarchal sense). In this society, males learn that an erection becomes functional only when someone else is being objectified or violated, in fantasy or reality. In Kyle's case, videotaping himself was not enough. He had to physically and photographically violate another human being; one who was as vulnerable as an adult human being can get.

This newer information, about his public acts, is also a profeminist issue. Men engaging in behavior that aggrandizes ourselves, makes our dicks into objects of patriarchal prominence, equates being stiff with being powerful, especially when it involves sexual behavior with others, is one significant element in making oneself into a gender-privileged person with a propensity to be sexually selfish and callous to the humanity of other people. This selfishness might take the form of a man only caring about the level of his own pleasure, or only wanting to engage another person in an activity in which his dick is the center of attention. There are men who insist that the other person with him must kneel down before it, such as by insisting on getting a blow-job while he is in a standing position. It's not "natural arousal" the man is interested in here. It's the act of degrading or denying another person their humanity. It may also be expressed through acts repeatedly performed in order to be a predatory exhibitionist. Kyle has demonstrated that he is both a predator and an exhibitionist, which makes his entire social universe dangerous to others.

We don't get to know precisely why Kyle wanted to engage in that behavior and later see himself do it, or make it available for others to see, "by accident" or not. But him doing this in places where others could be disturbed or violated by him has to be considered creepy at least, and a way to alarm women and undermine their sense of safety and well-being. I don't know many people who would be unaffected should they witness either the solo activity, or the videotaped version of the activity, especially if it is not wished for or welcomed by the viewer in the first place. Children and women are frequently traumatized by suddenly finding a man alone, jerking off. I have known several women who were terrorized precisely in this way.

Were these places children could wander? Were they places women would likely access? If he did it only in what are predominantly all male spaces, such as in many CEO boardrooms, in a men's locker room, or beside a basketball court, for example, I'd be little bit less concerned. Call that a bias. But in my experience, men, who are disproportionately not sexual trauma survivors, seeing men jerking off is quite a different experience than children or women seeing it happen in public. Some men I know wouldn't be troubled by it in the least. Some would be annoyed. Some would find it seriously alarming. But the range of the impact on boys, girls, and women exceeds those responses. I'm not saying what women would feel, or that all women would have the same response or reaction. (That would depend on the individual woman, her history, etc. There might be women who would laugh, others who would scream.) I'm saying that his behavior exists as one piece of a whole cultural-political puzzle, in which women, girls, and boys, are inundated with images pro-male supremacy folks (of whatever gender) produce. The dominant capitalist culture of the US is one where dehumanizing sexual images abound where women of all colors, men of color, and all children are degraded and debased, for profit. And in this society "dehumanized" is disturbingly synonymous with "sexual."

In the so-called private and public spheres, men's real time non-cyber spaced activities are unrelentingly assaulting, at least to people's psyches and often to their bodies and spirits. What Kyle has been doing, in these public acts, is reinforcing and perpetuating key elements of a rapist culture.

And him privately sexually violating a woman in various ways is especially rapist behavior, fortunately criminal, unfortunately not a felony.

Men in male supremacist cultures are renowned for creating environments that are scary, disturbing, or traumatic for women. Usually those spaces are where women grow up, where women currently live, where women work when they work out of the house, and where women pass through social space, getting from point A to point B.

I have been in conversation with women using cell phones in public spaces, while I am not in those locations. An astounding number of times, through the phone, I hear men call out to them, to "compliment" them, to harass them, or to try and rent them for sex. Virtually every woman I know who is not very elderly, who lives in an urban environment, and appears to be "a woman" to men, is harassed or otherwise intruded upon by unrequested daily male attention and commentary, often overtly misogynistic in content, intent, and effect. And it's not just construction workers who do the harassing. It's men in suits, men in cars en route to god knows where, men who get out of their cars and follow the women to get their attention and phone number, men who will not leave women alone after the women make it clear that they do not wish to be approached by strange men. Women I know are generally polite about disengaging with these arrogant or oblivious pricks. But the harassers and intruders are not only in the public realm. Inside the home, older brothers, fathers, step-dads, uncles, and grandpas are sexually predatory. As are male doctors, dentists, clergy, bosses, co-workers... the list is long. Many women I know grew up with men who, if they did not incest them overtly, did show them "special attention" when they reached puberty, commenting on their changing bodies in ways that made those (then) girls uncomfortable to say the least.

Frankly, I don't give a damn about people masturbating in places where they cannot be heard or seen, and where the knowledge or evidence of them masturbating there doesn't create feelings of unease, unsafety, or disturbance in other people. One more time with feeling: it's not the masturbation itself that is problematic; it's the social-political context in which it is happening and its impact on others. In this case we are talking about someone who has repeatedly gone out of his way to make himself intrusively sexual, for other people to find him. Kyle carrying around a video camera 24/7 is beginning to be plausible, and additionally disturbing.

Kyle the white profeminist, has, apparently, been engaging in overt sexual behavior in public and in private, and has been recording and saving it, for a reason. And those who live anywhere near him ought to know the extent to which he did this. If he were sexually abused as a child, this information might lead me to conclude that, in part, this is "acting out" behavior; that he was being foolishly risky in order to get caught and feel bad. But because he's twenty-two, not six, or even eleven, his past stops being an excuse or an explanation. Individualistic psychological explanations ought not be applied to overly political actions that have a structural and systemic root.

This new information adds something to the "Kyle Payne is a hypocritical sexual violator of women" story. This blog entry is related to and flows from the observations Essential Estrogen brings to the discussion. Kyle's sexual practices, the one he makes sure people can and will know about, not only demonstrate a propensity to engage in overtly sexual criminal behavior. Sheila Jeffries wrote a substantive analysis of gay men's sexual behavior and its negative impact on lesbians and other women in a book I recommend queer communities read and discuss; the book is titled Unpacking Queer Politics. I especially recommend it to white queer people, as that is who she is discussing primarily. In one section of that book, she analyzes how men engaging in public sex impacts women's lives.

Women have so few places, public or private, where they are not being confronting with something traumatic or triggering that men are doing around them or to them; this includes a female-only households where the grim details of another rape is reported on the evening news. My hope, as a profeminist man, is that we men will be honest about our struggles before we are caught; that we make public what we do but not in ways that are in and of themselves irresponsible and insensitive to an audience that includes survivors of sexual abuse and other white male supremacist oppression.

It is likely Kyle is without his camera, or soon will be. Any masturbating he does in the future will, let's hope, not be recorded for anyone other than his courtroom prosecutors to see. With Kyle put away, for six months, the public places he committed these acts might now be less predatory places for people to be in. Using social calculus for measuring creepiness, women may be a tiny bit safer because one more abuser of women has currently been removed from a mixed gendered environment, for six months. Six months isn't a very long time.

Am I implying that I think Kyle Payne, please forgive the pun, is getting off easy?

What I actually believe about his sentencing is this: his victim should have determined the amount of time he spends behind bars, not US laws that do little to nothing to challenge white male supremacy as such, and rapist culture specifically.

Kyle Payne has been sentenced to six months in jail, not prison

Here is the story from the Iowa newspaper that has been closely following this case.

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A few questions for Kyle Payne

Hi Kyle.

I have a few questions for you, and I'd appreciate you answering them here.

1. Why have you not posted Nikki's and my comments that we sent months ago, in response to your post A Different Kind of Pain? Or, if you have, where are they?

2. Pertaining to the incident:
Did you turn yourself in to your superior (in your capacity as RA), to other adminstration at the college where you worked, or to the police?

3. (Relating to the above) If not, how did it come to pass that this whole matter was discovered and uncovered? I think there's stuff floating around on the web about this, and I'd rather hear about this directly from you: what happened that led the police to confiscate your computer and camera, I mean after the time the photos and short video were taken? How did the police know that you had committed a crime, or series of them?

4. How much time transpired between you taking the images and the police (or whoever) taking away your computer and camera? Did you upload the images of the victim into your computer?

5. Before the incident discussed in your recent blogpost with update (08.09.08 and 08.02.08) have you ever taken a photograph, digital or not, video or still, of a woman in any state of undress, without her knowledge or permission?

6. How do you plan to make yourself publicly accountable if you are only privately collecting responses from feminists? Have there been requests, to date, for a public online discussion or forum in which you and your questioners can interact? If not, why have you not initiated this?

7. What argument or reasoning can you give for why a woman or women should feel safe around you if the woman or women is/are asleep, drunk, on drugs, or in any state of consciousness or unconsciousness? You acknowledge quite clearly in your statement that this impulse just came over you in a bewildering and confusing way. Doesn't that make you more dangerous, not less? Explain how women are safer now that this story--the press's version and your own telling of it--made it to the public sphere?

8. You state that your intent in speaking about your past was to put the incident in context as a profeminist, yet you don't adequately explain how your white, male, and heterosexual entitlements factor into what you did, except to say that you own what you did. Why is the childhood abuse you suffered more relevant to disclose than a detailed list of your entitlements? (And, which of these entitlements are still in place?)

9. On your blog you wrote:

I write this letter in the interest of dropping barriers, sharing openly and honestly a story that is very difficult to talk about, in hopes that doing so may bring peace, understanding, and hope to the lives of others.

In what ways have you dropped barriers, aside from sharing the story? You seem pretty inaccessible generally, and fully in control of this process. I believe hope is found in concrete action, action that is radically different than behaviors that have harmed other people, if we're talking on the social level.

10. What are you doing that is radically different from your harmful actions, to make yourself more directly accountable to feminists and profeminists outside and inside the blogosphere? How can we know this won't happen again?

I look forward to seeing your answers here.

Julian