Bullied to Death: Two Devastated Moms Speak Out

WEDNESDAY'S OPRAH WINFREY SHOW:
For more, see here.
END OF POST.

Genderism: a definition

[image is from here, a great source for lots of other wonderful buttons]

I define "genderism" as a politic, a social order, a philosophy, and an ideology which seeks, in its human manifestations and expressions, to distort and demean humanity in profound and destructive ways in order to create and maintain the gynocidal/genocidal/ecocidal reality of male supremacist societies and their cultures.

Western liberal societies often refer to "gender"* as synonymous with a person's "sex"--with what is assumed to be a fully natural phenomenon (whatever that means) in which the human species is neatly and discretely "made" in two distinct forms: female and male. Popularly, in many societies, these "two" genders are posed as opposites, as compliments, or as two parts of an otherwise incomplete whole. (This post is not about "sex" in that sense. Nor is it about "sex" as that term is used to refer to interpersonal sexual behavior.)

[*not all white-dominant and Western liberal societies use that term as the U.S. does; in Sweden, for example, I've heard from a Swedish friend that the term for "gender" is used primarily in academic circles, and is not as popularly used a term outside the academy as it is in the U.S.]

As polar opposites, "female" and "male" are understood and treated as essentially different, fundamentally not alike, in bodies, in character, in brains. What one gender is, the other is not. So if males are "strong", women are weak. If men are logical and reasonable, women are irrational. In Christianity, if men are close in spirit and temperament to a god in the sky, women are equated with the dirt and the devil.

As compliments, female and male while substantively different, are not necessarily understood as "in opposition". In this view, often, women and men may be seen to offer different gifts: women are seen as intuitive, knowing from the body, nurturing, emotional, peaceful; men are seen as cerebral, knowing from the mind, dominating, rational, war-prone.

As two parts of an otherwise incomplete whole, this view also allows for the possibility that women might be valued by men, but likely does not conclude "woman" is ever spiritually whole unto herself. As someone who once wore "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" t-shirt--for years until it wore out, I reject this view personally. As a gay male and as a profeminist it is, for me, an intrinsically heterosexist/anti-lesbian view, if not also more generally misogynistic. This view too often fuels absurd and harmful expectations of what in the West is termed "romantic love".

Often these three views are braided together, so that opposites attract, are meant to be together, and, if fortunate, also be soul mates. Romance novelists, soap opera screen writers, "great" white male supremacist novelists, and pornographers all work to keep these ideas alive.

As I understand them, radical feminist theorists and activists, during my lifetime and before, have sought to expose each of these views as dangerous to women and girls, to humanity as a whole, and to the Earth and all its inhabitants. Liberalism, feminist or not, has often sought to make what is seen to be "the best deal" for women and girls with some unquestioned assumptions about genderism. For a good discussion on these distinctions and the protections to male supremacy built into these unchallenged assumptions, see, for example, Catharine A. MacKinnon, in both Feminism Unmodified and Toward a Feminist Theory of the State--the latter book in some ways a more formal and theoretically refined version of the former. Using the index to look up her discussion of the work of Carol Gilligan in each books will bring the reader to the chapters in which this is explicitly discussed in terms of liberal feminists' work and theories. It should go without say that anti-feminist liberal writers and other social citizens pose far more misogynistic views of women and girls. 

"Liberalism" here, I use as a term that defines a perspective, a philosophy, a politic, that is popular if not always prevalent in white male supremacist societies.

In non-industrialised, non-Western societies, gender is a far more fluid construct and reality. In some societies, for example, there are as many as eleven genders. Using Western English terms--which has its own problems, in all societies there are babies both intersex, which is to say their genital formation is or later changes to become not identifiably just female or only male. In many societies, some variation of transgendered people have existed and exist. In white male supremacist ("WMS") societies, intersex, and transgendered people are often viewed by non-intersex and non-trans people as "a problem" in some regard that "gendered" people are not. This is akin to how heterosexist societies often view "homosexuality" as either "problematic" or "sinful" in ways that heterosexuality [allegedly] is not.

Intersex and transgendered people are, in WMS societies, commonly discriminated against, harassed, ostracised, alienated, and otherwise mistreated.

In WMS societies, women and girls (and some boys and men who do not fit with the gendered standards of the era and region), are frequently mistreated and discriminated against as well. What is particularly grievous is that whether girls and women fit or do not fit, it doesn't make them immune or safe from the violence against women and girls that is endemic in and foundational to WMS society. To draw on two examples of womanness, both "butch" women and "femme" women are harassed, for example, and may be raped precisely because they are females who at least one man feels entitled to degrade or violate.

Women of color face discrimination and violence from at least three groups of people: white men, men of color, and white women.

For the purposes of this post, I here define "sexism" as the oppressive, subordinating, systemic, systematic mistreatment of women and girls by men and boys. It is unavoidably harmful in a Western gendered social hierarchy. "A level playing field" does not exist in WMS societies, racially or sexually, therefore "sexism" can't go "both ways". The same is true of racism: there is no level playing field between whites and people of color. The ways that sexism manifests in women is in how women buy into and practice male supremacy, to the detriment of womankind. Racism manifests in people of color in ways that strengthen or do not challenge harm people of color thereby strengthening white supremacy. But in politically, structurally meaningful (reality-based) ways, women cannot be sexist to men; nor can people of color be racist to whites. They don't have the structural or institutional support. For a visual, imagine white people atop a hill and PoC at the bottom, with success being defined as being on top. Boys have to maintain space; PoC have to work just to approach the space, and then contend with those defending it. And laws define the top space as rightfully and appropriately white-dominated.

Heterosexism is the belief and practice of making whatever current version there is of heterosexuality appear natural, unaltered by era or region, normal, and healthy--a social good, and all other ways of being "odd" or "harmful to society"--a social evil. Racism, sexism, and heterosexism are each tied to specifically dehumanising and harmful assumptions of meaningful differences in "value" or "personhood", as assigned and enforced by systems and structures of white heterosexual male supremacy (WHMS).

I am not using the term "genderism" here as a synonym for "sexism". For me, this is the distinction: Sexism is the political practice of subordinating and otherwise oppressing and degrading women and girls as such (by men and boys), already defined as women, men, girls, and boys--in whatever language a particular dual gender system/society employs. "Genderism" in other words, must pre-exist sexism, socially, for sexism to exist. Genderism is a belief that "gender" is a social imperative or a natural inevitability.

A critique of gender among radical feminists, as I have understood such critiques, includes a belief that for women to be liberated from male supremacy, not only must male supremacy be uprooted and completely transformed or eradicated. Unlike some philosophies which have argued that females or males are "naturally evil" or "no good" no matter how they are raised, the radical feminisms I have held to firmly and absolutely reject this. In 1977, Andrea Dworkin addressed the danger of women supporting a view of men as somehow "naturally oppressive" in her speech, Biological Superiority: The World's Most Deadly and Dangerous Idea.

In the last ten to fifteen years particularly, I have witnessed tensions and hostilities develop between some non-transgendered feminists and some transgendered people who do not identify as feminist.

Whenever two oppressed groups are engaged in serious conflict, it is my opinion that their oppressors always win. This is to say, if women make the primary fight for liberation against other women, if trans people and nontrans women campaign against each other, if lesbians and gay men are embattled, WHMS is strengthened. The possibility of  radical transformation opens when all our struggles are geared toward identifying, challenging, and working to eradicate gender, race, and sex as social-political hierarchies. We must keep in mind that race, gender, and sex are enforced ideas and ideologies, backed in the real world with great violence and other coercive pressures. We live inside the ideas of others; and those ideas, when institutionalised, can be deadly.

There are, of course, feminist trans people who have publicly stated that if hierarchical dual gender systems were eradicated, or if they'd never existed, "transgenderism" wouldn't either. It goes without say that "genderism" wouldn't either. But "genderism" and gender are not synonyms. As noted, many societies have beliefs that there are far more than two genders, and that each has value, and belongs in the community as a social good.

There may still be at least a few women who argue that once male supremacy is wiped clean off the Earth then the current political meaning and ideological existence of "woman" will be radically removed as well, and may also disappear. This doesn't mean that "women", as liberated people, disappear. Ungendering patriarchal societies at the root level liberates us, it doesn't annihilate us.

MRAs (Men's Rights Activists) and other white male supremacist activists have quite self-servingly and misogynistically promoted the least promoted views of very few feminist-identified women as emblematic of feminism generally. (These men also just make crap up and pretend the statements are truisms of feminism.) About a dozen or more "famous feminist quotes" make the rounds (around and around, to the point of inducing nausea) on various pro-WMHS websites, "proving" that feminism = man-hating, for example, in part by arguing that feminists call for "the eradication of men" when what virtually all of those feminists were describing was the necessity of eradicating male supremacy and "manhood" in its oppressive, hierarchical forms. (Again, as stated above about women, the men, as people, do not go "poof" when and if the mission is accomplished. There is no plan to exterminate men-as-people that I've ever heard of from any feminist; what I've repeatedly heard is a call to reveal, challenge, and (hopefully) end male supremacy in all its social-political-economic manifestations.

Some transgender activists make a similar claim: that the perspectives and agendas of some radical feminists will mean 'transgender' reality goes away. If your identity, as a man or as a trans person, is 'you', you may imagine that means you disappear. Careless or willful misunderstanding what radical feminists state is in service to the oppressive status quo.

For the raced gender that is alleged to manifest the greatest, most supreme levels of "intelligence", it is remarkable that these white men can be so completely and willfully ignorant about the meaning of some of the feminist quotes they pass around. It strikes me as absurd that they are unable to comprehend the political systems in which they are systemically and systematically privileged and esteemed, not the ones who are disadvantaged and degraded.

Andrea Dworkin was apparently quite optimistic about the possibility of radical feminism accomplishing its goals when she gave that speech in 1977. Now it is abundantly clear that any belief in the natural or Goddess-ordained superiority of women over men is nothing more than a rare idea among a few ostracised individuals.

Debasing nontrans women and defending nontrans men, together, remain the status quo. White heterosexual male supremacy remains one of several main sources of gross global human atrocity, more seriously and negatively impacting women and girls worldwide. Any proposed manifestation of "female supremacy" has never had mainstream status, established roots and branches, let alone ripened fruit offered in hand.

In primarily Western academic circles, Judith Butler is often quoted and misquoted, often in simplistic ways, for noting that gender is "performed". My response to that statement is this: to the degree it is performed, it is done so on a man-made stage, with male supremacist snipers in the audience and in the wings, ready to take out anyone who doesn't "perform" it correctly, according to WHMS gender standards. To assume there is a way to socially perform gender in a white male supremacist culture without facing that threat and violence, is to not grasp what genderism is and does.

USA SURPASSES ALL THE GENOCIDE RECORDS!

[above image is from here]

Below is just the artwork, without John Lennon and Yoko Ono standing by it.

It is a piece by the artist George Maciunas, who was part of what has been termed the Fluxus Movement. Yoko Ono was among the few women who were part of this movement. She has gone on to do many other creative works, in many media.
Flag poster designed by George Maciunas; it measures 54.8 x 87.8 cm. [this image was found here]
END OF POST.

In-Fidelity: Corporate Capitalism = Genocide = White [Mostly Male] Supremacy

Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with Fidelity's Albert R. Gamper, Jr.
[image was found here]

The following information on this Company is from here, and it took quite a while to find it online!
Fidelity Management & Research Company
SnapshotPeople
OverviewBoard of DirectorsCommittees

Fidelity Management & Research Company INSIDERS ON BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Name (Connections) Relationships Title Age
Edward Johnson III, 45 Relationships, 78
Dennis Dirks, 39 Relationships, 59
Albert Gamper Jr., 107 Relationships, 66

Other Board Members on Board of Directors
Name (Connections) Relationships Primary Company Age
Abigail Johnson, 105 Relationships,Fidelity Nasdaq Composite Index Tracking Stock, 47
James Curvey, 38 Relationships Geerlings & Wade Inc., 72
Arthur Johnson, 44 Relationships Lockheed Martin Tactical Systems, Inc., 60
Alan Lacy, 45 Relationships Oak Hill Capital Partners, 54
Peter Lynch, 112 Relationships The Lynch Foundation, 64
Joseph Mauriello, 44 Relationships Arcadia Resources Inc., 63
David Thomas, 67 Relationships Sprint Nextel Corp., 58
Michael Wiley, 65 Relationships Bill Barrett Corp., 57
George Heilmeier, 40 Relationships Automatic Data Processing, Inc., 71
Marie Knowles, 151 Relationships McKesson Corp., 61
Ned Lautenbach, 153 Relationships Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, Inc., 64
Cornelia Small, 62 Relationships Fidelity Advisor Growth & Income Fund, 63
William Stavropoulos, Ph.D. 157 Relationships, Hoechst Marion Roussel Inc., 70
Kenneth Wolfe, 57 Relationships Revlon, Inc., 67

The following Company information is from here.
Fidelity Management & Research Company
SnapshotPeople
Company Overview

Fidelity Management & Research Company is an investment management firm that acts as the investment advisor to Fidelity's family of mutual funds. Its equity investment strategies include growth, growth and value, high yield, indexing, value, small-cap, mid-cap, large-cap, and market timing. Fidelity invests globally, specifically in the United States, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, Europe, and global emerging markets. The firm is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. It operates as a subsidiary of Fidelity Investments.

82 Devonshire Street

Boston, MA 02109-3605

United States

Founded in 1946

Phone:

617-563-7000

Fax:

617-476-6150

www.fidelity.com

Key Executives:
Mr. Rodger Alan Lawson
President
Age: 61

Mr. Joseph B. Hollis
Chief Financial Officer
Age: 59

Mr. Stephen P. Jonas
Executive Director

Mr. Richard C. Habermann
Senior Vice-President and Portfolio Manager

Mr. Robert von Rekowsky
Portfolio Manager
Age: 42

There should be LOTS of outrage, over this really stark display of intentional pro-genocidal policy.

See also, here and here, and here, and here.

More news on this is here and here.
END OF POST.

Black and White Television Set-Ups, and the Horrible Truth about Wealthier White People

[image from here]

My thanks to Anxious Black Woman for reminding readers about two of many intersections of Black history, Nazi atrocity, and the matter of not forgetting genocide is not only in the past.

Her post made me think about the on-going ways in which genocide (which always includes gynocide) is invisibilised cross-culturally, across eras, and by global media.

As a little Jewish white boy, I understood from a very young age that something was terribly fucked up about suburban white Christians and Jews playing "cowboys and Indians". I had nothing resembling a clear analysis of white Christian male supremacy at the time but I knew this much: I didn't want to play, and to whatever extent I might have been coerced into playing, I never wanted to be a cowboy. EVER. The fact that the "game" wasn't called "white settlers and displaced Indians" or "genocidal european invaders and massacred Indians" remains a bit perplexing. Then again, in games like Monopoly, one can purchase railroads for two hundred dollars. It is worth noting that the game was created by a white Quaker, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Magie, who was interested in pointing out the dangers of private monopolies. By the time I was playing, it was VERY pro-monopoly, without a hint that there was anything morally or politically wrong with savvy individuals buying up everyone else's properties.

I've been watching some old b/w movies, also reflecting on some aspects of racism in television programs. "Black and White", as a term, becomes ironic at the very least, in cinematic movies or television programs where:

a) There are virtually no other people of color in these films, except for the random "Asian" (mostly from the North and East, sometimes the South) who is always a gross stereotype, or the "Mexican" who is either a seductress or some form of bandit.

b) The whites are usually mixed in class, but somehow the focus is on the ones with "class"--that term being used with sarcasm, and also a note of irony: think for a moment about the term "now he has real class!". Fucked up, right? These "classy" white folks in old movies often have a Black woman character, often not listed at all in the credits, assisting white women who are portrayed as never quite knowing how to dress themselves. Or there's a Black woman or man serving the white characters their meals, then quickly dashing off-screen, lest anyone dwell too much on what that says about race in Amerikkka. Or there's a Black man working in the house as a butler with one stereotypical accent and manner, often meant to be comical to whites. And of course there's the Black man who seems utterly at peace, if not gleeful, at the prospect of spending yet another day or decade shining white business-men's shoes. If the picture deals with traveling cross-country, there's the Black man as porter on the train of white passengers as a porter. I'm leaving out a stereotype or two, and not too surprisingly these stereotypes often dovetailed with real-life laws that prevented African Americans from being part of white-majority unions, white-dominated jobs, and working in any way that wasn't, rather directly, serving whitey. U.S. white cinema, as it is rarely called by anyone white, offered little to Black audiences that reflected anything meaningful about African American experience. For more on this subject, and for a history of U.S. Black cinema, see here.


c) Whites were and are rarely portrayed in cinema as the virulent racists we collectively remain, whether murderous directly or by proxy. Despite the harsh truth about those of us who own stocks, we are rarely clearly understood as being active genocidalists, for example. And in appallingly pro-white movies like "Dances With Wolves" white supremacist cinematic mores demand that not only the film center around the experiences of a morally distressed white person, but also that he be able to remain a hero in some sense. In that film, "hero" doesn't exactly equal "mass murderer of people of color"--even though at the era depicted, that's usually and often what "hero" meant in white society. Middle class whites, movie-going whites, and DVD-renting whites like our movies to show us in a positive light, even during those periods in history when we were overtly barbarous to people of color. And we like our movies to remind us we are superior to people of color, to this day. It's a delicate, if utterly corrupt, ethical balancing act well-accomplished in cinema and television.

d) In U.S. white cinema, historically, African American women and men are rarely if ever seen as "being in relationship" to one another, heterosexually or not. Black people seem to exist as hired satellites, orbiting around white people. These white people seem to have their own gravitational pull and, as a consequence of this fiction of physics or not, are also utterly self-absorbed. White women in cinema had a period where, although never free from oppressive white heterosexual male "beauty" standards, they were allowed a level of self-possession. Not that their lives didn't revolve around white men, of course. I mean let's not be ridiculous. But many white women in cinema, prior to WWII, demonstrated an ability to appropriately respond to misogynistic white men, and to have things called "careers". Black women didn't have "careers" exactly, unless lifelong positions of paid servitude to whites can be called "a career". If it was one, it was not likely one any child dreams about entering with glee when they become an adult. White women, on the other hand, could be news journalists, wear slacks, argue face to face with men, often of similar build and stature, and didn't yet have the perpetually polite and deferential posture found in white women's characters after the Second World War.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, there was a TV show, "I'll Fly Away", which I loved primarily due to the riveting performance of Regina Taylor as Lilly Harper. (And, um, that young white actor, Jeremy London, was kind of cute to me at the time, not that his personality did much for me.) And yes, boys, he had a brother in real life--a twin brother, in fact: Jason, whose personality I despised, for some reason.) Lilly DID have a visible, three-dimensional family, an inner emotional life, a will, a clear sense of what constituted injustice, and was neither mammy nor ho, although she was made to take care of several children, in two families. One was her own; she worked for a white one. She was a fictional character with depth. And I have always thought that Regina Taylor is a very talented actor--far more talented than many white women and men actors who get far more roles, get paid much more money, and have much fewer gaps between gigs. And, obnoxiously, even that TV show managed to make the lives of the white folks focus of the program. Just when there'd be a great scene with Lilly, we'd have to cut back to the white family's dramas and be reminded "Oh, right: Hollywood doesn't MAKE dramatic family shows with Black actors as the leads." "The Cosby Show" of the 1980s was fine, only because it kept white folks laughing. And then came "Seinfeld", which, along with plenty of other shows not featuring white Jewish characters, such as Saturday Night Live, reminded white audiences of every single racist and sexist stereotype known to dominant society.

To any white person who suggests that due to Michelle and Barack Obama occupying the White House, not as servants, is a sign that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream has finally come true, I recommend rereading the work of M.L.K., Jr., including the entirety of the "I Have A Dream" speech, and especially the writings from the last two years of his assassinated life. Below is but a portion of that speech he delivered, with a white woman in the vast sprawling audience who would, twenty years later, become my feminist mentor. We can note that this portion of the speech doesn't get replayed every year, as it is not, in any way, a liberal, white-friendly sound-bite, nor does it come down on the side of thinking "Monopoly" is a just a fun game.

From the "I Have A Dream" speech, by Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963:

"In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

"It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

"It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges."

What about the girls? What about the women? Recognition, Discrimination, and Warfare

[the above image is from here]

Common issues that dovetail with matters of oppression are the definition of harm and the matter of whose pain is seen and responded to as if the ones in pain were human? In the dominant society in which I live, words are sometimes seen as acts that can do harm, but often are not. I grew up with the saying "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me". Uhhh, bullshit.

We are now, in this first decade of a new Christian calendar century, just realising that homophobic speech is a harmful act, harmful the way physical assault is harmful: injurious to the being of another; inducing shame; causing pain; changing who a person is so that they henceforth have lower self-esteem and are more prone to being self-destructive. We can now begin to collectively see, in the dominant media--between the latest fashion news, mid- and small-sized automobile crash-test results, Hollywood gossip, sports scores, weather reports, and kitchen recipes that can be cooked in less than twenty minutes--that harm through speech acts can and does cost some young and older people their lives. Witness the cases of the two boys, Carl and Jaheem, who committed suicide due to repeated anti-gay harassment. The speech acts alone, without adding in physical bullying, without these children also being punched or hit while being called those misogynist/homophobic names, are, in some cases deadly. Will those among us who use such terms repeatedly against one or more individuals be considered murderers, should the tormented child take their own life? If not, why not? (If I drink and drive, I might face a fine if caught, as long as I'm not in a car accident along the way from point A to point B. If I hit a vehicle and kill someone, serious charges can be, and ought to be, brought against me. Regardless of my intentions, if I get into a car while drunk, and end up hitting another person and killing them, I have committed, at the very least "(hu)man-slaughter".

I think of this also when I consider how, post-"9/11" it became a much more serious matter for white males, particularly non-Nordic looking ones, to "joke" about having a bomb while waiting on line to board an airplane. This has everything to do with a society's shared experience of threat or harm. Usually, only those who are in oppressor classes (whites, Christians, men, the rich, Westerners, the non-disabled, etc.) are understood by the media to have experienced a single act of harm or threat that was VERY SIGNIFICANT. I was deeply saddened, and at times angry, after "9/11" because it became extremely clear to me that only some people's pain matters. White folks' pain matters. Men's pain matters. Westerners' pain matters. The pain of those with wealth matters. The pain of those in nations bombed by our missiles don't matter, in our media.


The harm of grossly intensified discrimination against anyone who looks "Middle Eastern" or who is categorised, often stupidly, as "Muslim"* is not really registered in the hearts and minds of the oppressor-class masses as real harm. (*For example, Sikhs wearing a turban with a chunni, or one or the other, is part of traditional Sikh attire, and is not a form of religious dress connected with any branch at all of Muslim attire.) "Their" pain becomes "our" pain, if "we're" white and not Muslim or Middle Eastern, only when "one of our own"--a middle aged "clean cut" (read: not swarthy) white male, an elderly white woman with grey and white hair, is detained and frisked at the airport because they happened to be the seventeenth person randomly chosen to be detained and frisked before being allowed to board a plane that day.

Only when that happens does discrimination against a non-dominant group, in recent years particularly against Muslims and Middle Eastern people, globally, become remotely real. Derogatory language and other violence against anyone who looks Muslim or Middle Eastern*, regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or region of family origin, is experienced in the form of harassment, threats, taunts, physical shoves, misogynist slurs, and other forms of violence against women, girls, men, boys, property, and land. (*Only about 20% of the total world Muslim population live in Arab countries.)

So when "our" economy, for example, takes what's termed a "downturn" (as opposed, say, to naming it a necessary step in the ending of capitalism), suddenly the media is aware of "people's distress and anxieties" about money and property. This "new concern" more deeply invisibilises the anxiety, distress, and pain many feel who were already not economically secure, inside and outside the U.S.

Whole classes of people only know economic distress; they never experience the "comeback". Some of my family falls into that category, of the permanently poor. Others in my family fall into the category of those who have "wealthy white folks' blues", which is to say, they are upset, worried, anxious, or distressed about whether the value of their half-million dollar home has gone down by 20%, or what's happening to their financial investments. Wealthy white folks speak to one another about "the market" and the condition of their stock portfolio often in earshot of people who will never own a stock portfolio, or a home. I say all of this because if you are wealthy, but are less wealthy now due to the downturn in the economy, please don't expect poor and working class people to offer you a back rub or foot massage if they overhear you being so rude as to discuss such matters in mixed class spaces. For example, telling your corporate colleague, over breakfast at a nearby diner, about "how much your stock fund has taken a hit" in front of the woman who is serving you eggs, bacon, and toast with extra butter, please, may be experienced by her as both of you being "jerks", at least. For good reason.

What we experience is often determined, if only partly, by past experience. Because, where I live, what happens to white men in certain kinds of off-shore wars is viewed as some kind of "standard" for what we comprehend as "traumatic" and "disablingly distressing", we can commonly refer to the U.S. white male war vet as having "post-traumatic stress disorder". Rarely do those of us who are white and male in the U.S. see the civilian war survivor--usually of color, often female as a likely sufferer of "post-traumatic stress disorder". Rarely do white men, as a group, see women and girls as "survivors" of a gender war. Someone "fighting as military personnel" counts as being a human being, often a hero, especially if you are white and male and from a white-majority country. Such a man is understood immediately as "probably having gone through something that has been so awful that he may never be the same". Note how invisibilised the civilian war survivor is, and women and girls across region and race, when we express only this amount of concern about "those impacted by men's military wars".

If we understand both the military war veteran and the civilian military war survivor to have varying forms of PTSD, we might appreciate and be sensitive to the fact that sudden loud noises might have a different effect on "them" than they do on "us", unless we're also survivors of trauma that involved sudden noise. It is not for "us" to tell "them" they are "over-reacting". What constitutes "over-reaction", in other words, is contextual, and depends, in part, on what someone's life has been up to the current moment. My experience of white men, generally, is that we "under-react" to most things, except when a woman doesn't coddle and care for us.

The experiences of the disabled and the oppressed are usually invisibilised by dominant media. Rarely does popular media show us what it means to be oppressed or disabled, in a way that registers viscerally as well as cognitively. And obviously there are a great number of ways to experience oppression: defiantly, depressively, aggressively, hopelessly, etc.

In the U.S. during the last forty years, the general population, including the oppressor classes, have been sensitised, to varying degrees, to the reality of sexual violence by men against women. What has yet to make the mainstream press, on any consistent basis, is an understanding of this violence, both endemic and systematic (not "accidental" or "anecdotal") as a form of warfare. That guns and knives are often used against women when men do their misogynistic harm, does not suffice to make it "count" as warfare. That men maim and kill women routinely does not warrant the phrase "war against a group of people by an aggressive enemy" being uttered.

I think this means dominant society and its media is in huge denial about men's war against women and girls.

One of most common liberal issues I see use up a lot of people's time and energy is when someone who is experiencing being oppressed by someone--verbally, states that is the case, the verbal oppressor states "You're just taking that the wrong way" or "You are too sensitive" or "You are over-reacting--chill out!" or "Why do you take offense to so many things!!"

Each of these responses is not only insensitive, but is another layer of emotional harm to the one being oppressed. Personally, as a white gay Jewish man, I don't need any white non-Jew telling me what is and is not "anti-Semitic" in speech. My gut tells me just fine, thank you very much. And if I'm speaking or behaving in a way that is condescending or threatening to a woman, and don't realise it or intend it, that doesn't mean my actions are not what the hearer says they are.

Oppressors historically define reality, including what constitutes fair and reasonable treatment of those they oppress. Inside many white Christian communities, for example, even those that are not "fundamentalist" there is a notion, an idea, promulgated, that women and men are "compliments" not "equals". This argument is used to spiritually support up all manner of misogyny and sexism, and many forms of male supremacist behavior and attitudes. If a man sees women as "his compliment", I'd assume the man has some serious sexism issues he hasn't bothered to check at the doorway of his social world.

What I think about whenever I hear about the media's presentation of human pain and atrocity, is "who else is suffering in this or other ways"? We know that the pain and suffering of males, whether they are males in only-oppressor classes or not, is real. We understand, for example, that boys who have been and are being molested by Catholic priests and other Christian preachers, are being harmed, irreparably. A great deal of media attention was brought to bear, critically, if also exploitively, on the horrid matter of priests sexually abusing boys.

And white men suffer too, of course. I have suffered as an adult, as has my brother, and other white male relatives in my family of origin. Our suffering, or dimensions of it, at least, is registered as real and is also transformed, as Andrea Dworkin once noted, into great theatre, visual art, and literature. We assume, here in the U.S., at least, if not also in the U.K., that Shakespeare writes of "human" suffering, even while he writes of a specific kind that is very gendered and raced. Which students are being taught that Shakespeare wrote colloquial ethnically specific stories primarily about the inner and outer worlds of those with gender and sexuality privilege?

I do not wish to minimise anyone's pain, except when its expression is grossly insensitive to those who are suffering far more.

When I hear the stories of the abused, including of white male military war veterans, and of white Catholic boys I feel sadness and sometimes rage at the unchecked harm produced by white male supremacist societies. This is the case whether stories are of young males being bullied, teased, taunted, exposed to homophobic and female-hating slander or slurs, enduring spiritual and physical and psychic betrayal at the hands of those entrusted to spiritually care for young people, or of boys neglected and abused in other ways.

And, mixed in with that sadness and rage, I often wonder: what about the girls? Is their pain also being recognised? Are there as many reports about girls who kill themselves because of lesbophobia and heterosexism? If a woman who knows her sexuality not to be "hetero" becomes the spouse of a man and has children with him, and also becomes increasingly depressed and despondent, does her depression and despair count as being caused by homophobia and heterosexism? If she has committed suicide, is her death registered as "in the same category" as those others who have taken their lives due to these forms of oppression and discrimination? If women are "never the same" after being raped and battered by a father, boyfriend, or husband, or due to growing up impoverished, or because they were given up for adoption because they are female, or were not given up for adoption but knew, very clearly, that their care-givers value boys more than girls, is their pain registered in the dominant society's psyche and told in its media, accurately and honestly, not exploitively and sensationally? Does it, too, become great art?

The question I want the answer to, if there is one, is this:
What else has to happen to girls and women for the dominant media to regularly report on what happens to them as "part of men's war against women"? We in the U.S. seem to barely grasp economic class warfare, although elsewhere in the world Leftists seem quite clear about it: capitalism kills, not just when a caught, criminal corporate executive shoots himself in the head. We seem to barely grasp racist warfare, the war of whites against all people of color, although at least some anti-racists are clear about that. The plights and plans of those of us who are Indigenous are never spoken of it dominant society, and the destruction of Aboriginal people is rarely seen as "genocide".

To this list of grievances I add one more: what of this endemic and systematic violence against girls and women by men? Why doesn't that count as "warfare" too?

On Earth Day: Derrick Jensen, on Civilisation and Enlightenment

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