Now Showing in 3D: "Denial, Degradation, and Domination"

image is from here

The image above is a visual example of what denial and domination does to women and girls: it degrades them. It dehumanises them. It makes them into things to be taken apart; things which men do not desire to put back together. Men take apart women and girls in so many grim and common ways. All of those ways are terrible and many are horrifying. It is, especially, the horror and the political construction and maintenance of it that men, as a class, refuse to be responsible for.

I have been trying to assist a friend and her children who are prisoners of the husband-father. He controls all the money and other aspects of their lives, and his abilities to do this are backed by the country in which they live. Their country, like mine, is very patriarchal. The country is his, not hers. All social and economic and political systems, and many customs, are patriarchal, are male dominated, and value male dominance over women and children. This is how it is across the globe in most places. In his country, boys and men are valued, and girls and women are not.

If her story were told--it will not be told here--many men would blame her for the situation she is in. Truth told, many women would too. Maybe even more women than men, actually, because in my experience women are terrified of being trapped by a man, and don't want to ever admit it could happen to them, unless it has already happened. And even then, denial works wonders to allow us to pretend the oppressive and dehumanising conditions we live in aren't all that bad, aren't degrading, and don't constitute severe oppression. That men's domination and degradation of girls and women is not seen as oppression in most places is something I have encountered here recently.

I called an attorney about my friend who is held captive with their children. I couldn't speak directly to the lawyer, only her assistant who is male. I asked him if there might be some form of political asylum for her. He balked at that--political asylum??? Was I crazy? He said that's for conditions in which a group or individual is being terrorised politically. (Silly me: I view battery, trafficking, rape, gendered poverty, and other domestic and international violence that way, when men do it to women and girls.) I told him VAWA would not agree with him and he might wish to educate himself. Actually, I didn't suggest he might wish to educate himself. I knew that would only annoy him and that he was set in his beliefs about women not being able to be political prisoners of men, in the home. His views are typical of most men I know.

What I find generally is that men do not wish to believe that they can be and too often are terrorists of women and girls. The fathers who molest and rape their daughters deny it. The boyfriends who abuse and control their girlfriends deny it. The husbands who beat and terrorise their female spouses deny it. The men who rape women on dates or on the street or in their homes deny it. With all that denial, is it any wonder that the male assistant to the woman attorney responded as he did?

It is not a surprise to me. But it is infuriating. I despise his point of view. I despise men's ignorance and arrogance, men's willful refusal to get how men dominate and degrade women politically.

And I hope there is a special place in hell for the men who do terrorise women and girls. Because men put women and girls in a special kind of hell by degrading and dominating them in many ways including economically and sexually, including interpersonally and institutionally--all of them political.

This has been explained and expressed in painfully explicit detail for forty-plus years worldwide. From every area of study, from every area of the Earth. Why haven't men, en masse, been paying attention? Because men, collectively, home by home, region by region, continent by continent, don't care enough about women's and girls' liberation from men's denial, degradation, and domination.

The Revolutionary Collective Liberation of Girls, Globally. A radical profeminist agenda.

photograph of two Indigenous girls in Australia is from here

It is the position of this blog that political theories and actions ought to address and center the experiences of girls and women worldwide. Our work, whoever we are, ought to strive to know, see, and feel the life experiences of those of us who are most traumatised, most starved, most trafficked, most enslaved, most exploited, most violated, most dominated, most silenced, often without clean drinking water, and those of us usually without any academic education, patriarchal political clout, or dominant social status.

In my experience, the lives of girls and women worldwide who are without race, class, ethnic, region, and education privileges, are the girls and women with the most awareness of what the price is for being a girl and a woman in a world that despises any human being regarded socially as "female"--whether or not she is female. (I'm thinking at this moment of anyone who is intersex but who are raised to be girls and women and who are treated as girls and women.)

I am concerned that female human beings privileged by race, class, region, education, and region will do what all men do: ignore the most marginalised and silenced women. This isn't a reference to something called "oppression olympics". I'm speaking quite seriously and directly about the girls and women globally who are experiencing the most traumatic dimensions men's wars--especially and particularly men's war against women and girls; girls and women who have the least access to dominant corporate media, who do not rule countries, do not own corporations, are not multi-millionaires, are slaves, are trafficked, are being intimately and systematically terrorised and violated in the home by men or by one man, are being institutionally oppressed by race, class, sexuality, and gender in ways that generate socially unnoticed forms of post-traumatic stress, because ptsd is not usually considered to be caused by normal, liberal to conservative social institutions.

Someone asked me recently how it is I became conscious of racism and misogyny, of--in my world--white supremacy and male supremacy. I answered that I think that while white, being Jewish in a largely non-Jewish area let me know what ethnic marginalisation and bigotry felt like, and it wasn't difficult to imagine that anti-Black racism, for example, felt similarly awful. And while male, I believe that never being heterosexual brought me in close proximity, or in direct range of the wrath boys and men unleashed on girls and women because girls and woman are also not het men.

But, in addition to those experiences of privilege and marginalised, of structural power and structural oppression, being sexually molested, incested, and assaulted before age thirteen and living with myself as someone who acted some of that abuse out against others before turning seventeen, left me very aware, viscerally, not primarily intellectually, of the harm of oppression when it is systematised and sexualised. And both white supremacy and het male supremacy are profoundly sexualised.

I encounter people who called themselves progressive or radical and their political agendas, too often, don't center the experiences of those of us whose lives are torn apart by sex trauma, by ethnic and race trauma, and by the traumas that come with not being a white het man with class privilege.

There are many political movements which exist to make dominant society friendlier to oppressed people without transforming the systems and dismantling the structures that manufacture and support the ideologies of destruction, denial, trauma, and terrorism, most especially and particularly against girls and women from birth to death.

Whoever think girls and women are a privileged class by gender, will have a hard time making that case comprehensible to me. I've seen my whole life how girls and women's bodies are targeted for all manner of abuse and disdain. The traumas visited upon girls alone, as a class of human beings, are so unfathomably disgusting and horrid that most of us don't wish to think about them, including those of us who lived through them.

I believe that a radical political practice and set of movements and campaigns that strives and succeeds in liberating girls as a specific group, not only as individuals, from all forms of oppression will be a political movement that liberates everyone else too.

Increasingly, I am feeling called to focus on the lives of girls. And to work with adults who prioritise the lives of girls in their political work.

May all girls, one day, know what it is to live in a world where there is no incest, no rape, no sexism, no male supremacy, no racism, no poverty, and no gynocide.

Feminist Action Alert: The U.S. Government is Very Afraid of Malalai Joya's Speech: never mind that the U.S. is terrorising, raping, and murdering Afghan women

photograph of Malalai Joya is from here

Please click on titles below to link back to the source web pages from Afghan Women's Mission.

US government denies entry visa to Afghan women’s rights activist and author Malalai Joya

For Immediate Release –
 
The United States has denied a travel visa to Malalai Joya, an acclaimed women’s rights activist and former member of Afghanistan’s parliament. Ms. Joya, who was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2010, was set to begin a three-week US tour to promote an updated edition of her memoir, A Woman Among Warlords, published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
 
Joya’s publisher at Scribner, Alexis Gargagliano, said, “We had the privilege to publish Ms. Joya, and her earlier 2009 book tour met with wide acclaim. The right of authors to travel and promote their work is central to freedom of expression and the full exchange of ideas.” Joya’s memoir has been translated into over a dozen languages, and she has toured widely including Australia, the UK, Canada, Norway, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands in support of the book over the past two years.
 
Colleagues of Ms. Joya’s report that when she presented herself as scheduled at the U.S. embassy, she was told she was being denied because she was “unemployed” and “lives underground.” Then 27, Joya was the youngest woman elected to Afghanistan’s parliament in 2005. Because of her harsh criticism of warlords and fundamentalists in Afghanistan, she has been the target of at least five assassination attempts. “The reason Joya lives underground is because she faces the constant threat of death for having had the courage to speak up for women’s rights – it’s obscene that the U.S. government would deny her entry,” said Sonali Kolhatkar of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a U.S. based organization that has hosted Joya for speaking tours in the past and is a sponsor of this year’s national tour.
 
Joya has also become an internationally known critic of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan. Organizers argue that the denial of Joya’s visa appears to be a case of what the American Civil Liberties Union describes as “Ideological Exclusion,” which they say violates Americans’ First Amendment right to hear constitutionally protected speech by denying foreign scholars, artists, politicians and others entry to the United States.

Events featuring Malalai Joya are planned, from March 20 until April 10, in New York, New Jersey, Washington DC, Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington and California. Organizers of her speaking tour are encouraging people to contact the Department of State to ask them to fulfill the promise from the Obama Administration of “promoting the global marketplace of ideas” and grant Joya’s visa immediately.
 
Malalai Joya is available for a limited number of interviews. Contact Sonali Kolhatkar (626-676-7884), Prachi Patankar (917-415-0659), or Natalie Reyes (562) 319-3046).

Please click on this link:

ACTION ALERT: Four Things YOU Can Do About Malalai Joya’s Visa Denial

 
* * *
 
Praise for Malalai Joya and A Woman Among Warlords:
 
‘The youngest and most famous of all the women in the Afghan parliament…a powerful symbol of change’
- Guardian
 
‘Quite simply the most passionate and devastating critique of Western intervention in Afghanistan I have ever read.’
- Peace News
 
‘Malalai Joya leaves us with hope that the tormented people of Afghanistan can take their fate into their own hands if they are released from the grip of foreign powers.’
- Noam Chomsky
 
‘Unwavering in her mission to bring true democracy to her country…Women have been known to walk for miles just to touch her. For them, she is their only real hope for a better future’
- Telegraph
 
‘Joya is a model for women everywhere seeking to make the world more just.’
- Six women Nobel Peace Prize laureates
 
‘Joya’s pain and bravery are genuine and can be felt on almost every page’
- Christina Lamb, Sunday Times
 
‘A fascinating account of Afghanistan’s political reality…Malalai Joya has been compared to Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi’
- Irish Times
 
‘Malalai Joya is a staunch defender of human rights and a powerful voice for Afghan women.’
- Human Rights Watch
 
‘Heroic’
- John Pilger
 
‘Extraordinary’
- The Independent

The Privilege of Not Being a Trauma Survivor, of not having Severe PTSD, and of Not Experiencing Environmental and Patriarchal Trauma, Horror, and Terror, right now

image of terrifying nuclear disaster site in Japan is from here

I think we're past the worst time. Time is on your side because the heat levels are dropping.

When some of the cladding oxidized, it was an exothermic reaction. That has passed at this point.

So I think if the workers can get some of these electrical cables in, some of the cooling pumps running, which they're working very hard to do, I think we're going to be on the downside of this. Now, there's still going to be burps and there's still going to be lots of news about this for a long, long time, but I don't see -- the worst time I think has passed us.  -- MR. LAKE BARRETT, NUCLEAR ENGINEER [source: *here*] [text put in bold by me, Julian]

Burps and news is what we have to fear, is what he is saying. There's no actual danger that is getting worse, is what he's saying. He's so delusional that he will be embraced as an expert, as a sane person, as a humane white man, on matters of gross environmental and human terrorism.

If a nuclear power plant were in the form of an anti-U.S. activist strapped with bombs, putting himself in the middle of a mall filled with U.S. Americans, putting many people in danger, Lake Barrett wouldn't get much airtime stating that the worst of what has occurred and what can occur is "burps" and "news".

Let me take this into the world of far too many girls and women that most white men do not experience.

If you are not being  beaten, today, and raped, today, and incested, today, and trafficked, today, and enslaved by one man or many men or a nation-state of men or by patriarchal men's customs and practices, today, and if you are not being imprisoned inside the current trauma and post-traumatic effects of such abuses and human rights violations, now, I would make a case that level of human existence is a privileged one. If whole economic, social, religious, and political systems are not working to actively, not passively, destroy you, today, I'd argue that is a form of privilege.

And I'd ask that all our political theorising and work keep in mind those of us who are trapped by men, controlled by men, terrorised by men, put in horrifying unspeakable situations by men, now, and yesterday but in ways that make yesterday into now. And by institutions and systems of harm and horror that even those of us who are in them seek various methods of survival to deny.

As someone with significant post-traumatic stress, who also has dissociation, I would like to remind people that society, as a whole functions in a state of post-traumatic stress and dissociation. Many societies thrive on dissociation, denial, and delusion to practice their specific forms of national or cultural dysfunction.

For example, I heard some "expert" white man named Lake Barrett, speaking yesterday on CNN about how the nuclear disaster in Japan (along with on-going earthquakes there, unreported by media including by CNN--ground shaking in an on-going way in quakes that register from 3.0 to 6.0) is not going to be more harmful than it already has been. Apparently, according to Barrett and many other "experts" who are also white men, people are simply overreacting the world over. There's "hysteria", we are told by many white men in the media, with financial interests in nuclear energy programs specifically and patriarchal capitalism generally.

He is very privileged to not be living in a terrorised state--emotional, physical, and national--right now. He gets to speak out about how safe people are in a place where he is safe and the people (and especially the women and girls) of Japan, and Haiti, and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the U.S., and the UK, and most other countries on Earth, are not safe, are not experiencing life as unterrifying, as unhorrifying, as so significantly circumscribed by what men do that is inhumane and atrocious that being in denial or in a state of profound dissociation are the only options for getting through a week or a day or an hour or a minute.

Global Misopedia Ring Committing Atrocity Links White Het Men in Canada and the Netherlands

For anyone who thinks the distinct social/political/economic separation of these atrocities: incest, rape, pornography production, trafficking, pimping, procuring, sexual slavery, and gross sexual exploitation and assault of women and children is possible, or--if in even more denial--is actually occurring in any meaningful and "liberating" way, please pay attention to this story and any other story about internationally sexually abused children and women. And please note that the countries involved are sexually liberal, not so conservative. Please drop abstracted theory when reality is presenting itself to you in all its grim horror.

Please stop supporting actions and arguments that "some women" and "some children" are liberated by being able to do "sex work" in societies where both sex and work are exploited to practically incomprehensible and soul-destroying levels. The understanding here of what constitutes liberation is not individualistic, but is collectivist. While some are enslaved and raped, what is the political function of arguments that "some of us" aren't harmed by gross sexual and economic exploitation? How, exactly, does that help the most exploited and harmed?

And, please also note that media will always make it seem as if white het men are heroes, even when that is the key population involved in sexually assaulting girls and women internationally. It is, primarily, women and girls of all colors who are involved in activist and other social efforts to stop prostitution, trafficking, and sexual slavery. Please keep that in mind as you read what follows. Because whether the issue is child sexual abuse, poverty and the rampant spread of disease, such as in Haiti, or nuclear power plant horror and terrorism, such as that which is going on in Japan currently, it has been women at the front lines of activism, advocating for radical social change, for decades.

What follows is cross-posted from *here*. But you can also link back by clicking on the title just below.

Europol's Rob Wainwright says police arrested 184 suspects in a global investigation into a Dutch-based international pedophile ring. Peter Dejong/Associated Press

Global pedophile ring probe nets 2 Canadian charges

Online forum involved rescue of child victims of abuse in 30 countries

CBC News

Posted: Mar 16, 2011 8:24 AM CST

Last Updated: Mar 16, 2011 11:03 AM CST

Beginning of Story Content

Two Canadian men have been charged in connection with an alleged international pedophile ring based in the Netherlands that involved the rescue of 230 children.

The charges in Ontario and Saskatchewan come as police in Europe said Wednesday they had rescued the child victims of abuse and arrested 184 suspects, part of a three-year investigation involving law enforcement officials from 13 countries, including Canada.

Philip Publuske, 40, has been charged with one count of possessing child pornography and one count of distributing child pornography, Waterloo Regional Police spokesman Olaf Heinzel told CBC News.

Publuske, who has been in custody since November, has a lengthy criminal record, including for sexual assault and possession of child pornography, police said.

Meanwhile, Saskatoon police said John William Lapage, 68, of Abernethy, Sask., has been charged with accessing child pornography, possessing child pornography and making child pornography available.

There was no word yet on whether any of the victims or other suspects are Canadian, but police said 670 suspects have been identified around the world.

Europol, the European Union police agency, said the investigation code-named Operation Rescue has identified and rescued children in more than 30 countries.

The alleged ring was based around an online forum and was "probably the largest online pedophile network in the world," Europol director Rob Wainwright said Wednesday.

The forum, based in Amsterdam, had up to 70,000 members, police said.

With files from The Associated Press

 

Related Links

Border child-porn busts on rise: customs

 

Iodine, Thyroid, Radiation, Japan, Nuclear Power Plant Danger: What you need to know to help stay healthy if exposed to radiation

I've been doing research on this and it's VERY difficult to get accurate information about how to safeguard yourself against particular dangers of exposure to radiation in Japan, due to the nuclear power plant disaster following the earthquake and tsunami last week.

First, if you can, get iodine solutions, get iodine tablets prepared and sold to keep the thyroid gland healthy, and get kelp, specifically, as it is highest in iodine of all the seaweeds. The less processed the kelp the better: meaning, consuming it in naturally occurring forms is preferable, not in "flakes" or in otherwise manufactured or processed forms. You are wanting "potassium iodide" ideally, but other forms of iodine, such as that found in Betadine solutions, can be used if applied to the skin. DETAILS FOR HOW TO DO THIS ARE BELOW.

DON'T DRINK IODINE SOLUTIONS, TINCTURES, OR OTHER IODINE LIQUIDS. 

I repeat:

DON'T DRINK IODINE SOLUTIONS, TINCTURES, OR OTHER IODINE LIQUIDS. 

The way to take iodine into your body is through proper potassium iodine pills, or by painting it onto the skin and letting the skin absorb it. Or to consume kept and other seaweeds--eating them.

Seven flat, dry sheets of sushi nori per day is one way to get iodine. Again, kelp is higher in iodine than nori.

Click on titles to link back to source websites:

Foods High in Iodine

Beware: Too much iodine can be bad for you. Over consumption of iodine can be toxic and just as damaging as a deficiency. As little as 1000 micrograms of Iodine in a day causes irritations like burning of the mouth and throat, nausea, vomiting, stomach ache, and even coma. Like under-consumption, too much iodine prevents proper production of thyroid hormones leading to goiter.
I don’t eat salt, meat, or seaweed, where can I get iodine? Your options are to consider supplements, buy foods enriched in iodine, or ensure that the plant foods you consume come from parts of the world where the soil is rich in iodine.

The bottom line is this: children, especially, need stable iodine (non-radioactive iodine) in their systems in an on-going way to prevent thyroid disease later. Adults are also at risk, but are at less risk than children because children's cells replicate more often and more quickly. How it works is this:

The thyroid gland, in the neck, is critical to overall health and well-being. It is basically a small "iodine sponge" and needs iodine to work properly. It will accept or soak up any form of iodine that passes into the body. If it has plenty of non-radioactive iodine in it, it will be "saturated" in that iodine and will not have room to accept any radioactive iodine. If deficient in non-radioactive iodine, it will soak up the radioactive element and that's where there's danger.

So, get stable iodine, preferably but not only potassium iodide, into your system, daily. Products like Betadine, and other topical (for skin application, typically for cuts and scrapes) solutions of iodine are not as effective BUT ARE BETTER THAN NOTHING, by far.

Tablets and tinctures are available. Take the recommended amounts and try not to overdose. Excessively large amounts of iodine are not recommended and may cause health problems. But for now the concern is to get stable iodine into the system of children, secondarily to adults, exposed to high levels of radiation in the air or in food.

Things to also do: DON'T DRINK MILK. Cows can absorb radioactive iodine by eating grass and it goes right into their milk.

GET STABLE IODINE INTO YOUR BODY, BY PILL OR PAINTING A PATCH ON YOUR SKIN, BEFORE EXPOSURE, if possible, but ALSO BE SURE to get it in after some exposure, and keep it in your system at recommended doses. Why? Because the half-life of unstable iodine is very short! It becomes "not too dangerous" VERY quickly. So what you want is to allows what's been absorbed to do what it will naturally do--become not-so-radioactive--and get stable iodine in your system to prevent MORE radioactive iodine getting into your thyroid gland.

See this for more information, see below. Click on titles to link back to source websites:

FACTBOX-Potassium iodide use after radiation exposure

Tue Mar 15, 2011 11:39am GMT

 

March 15 (Reuters) - Explosions at nuclear reactors in Japan damaged by last week's earthquake and tsunami have released radiation into the atmosphere.
Wind direction determines where any released radiation will travel. If high levels get into the atmosphere, those exposed are usually given potassium iodide to help prevent thyroid cancer.
Following are some facts about potassium iodide:
* Potassium iodide is a common form of salt, similar to table salt. It can protect the thyroid gland from radiation and cancer caused by radioactive iodine. Known chemically as KI, the substance saturates the thyroid gland with non-radioactive iodine, reducing how much dangerous radioiodine the gland can absorb.
* Potassium iodide is most effective if administered before exposure and can provide protection for 24 hours. It will have beneficial effects if taken up to three to four hours after exposure, as well.
* Children are considered most at risk from radiation exposure, whether through the air or in contaminated food or milk. After the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster significantly increased rates of thyroid cancer were detected in children in countries such as Belarus and Ukraine.
* Pharmacies in the United States do not typically stock potassium iodide, but it is readily available through many of outlets on the Internet.
* The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommends states with people living within a 10-mile (16 km) radius of commercial nuclear power plants stockpile potassium iodide as a protective measure for the general public. Individual states decide their own policies.
(Reporting by Bill Berkrot in New York and Susan Kelly in Chicago; Editing by Frank McGurty)

© Thomson Reuters 2011 All rights reserved

HOW IODINE WORKS AS A PREVENTATIVE TO RADIATION SICKNESS

http://www.iodine-resource.com

Hi through my own research this is how iodine works - if you are at present deficient in iodine and it is said that most people are, then if there was radiation poisoning in the air you body would take in more iodine from the radiation and this would be stored in your thyroid.  if you are now boosting your levels of iodine so that you are not deficient then you have a better chance that your thyroid will not take in the iodine from the radiation and therefore poison you!  It is better to begin now to boost your system so that you are not dificient now. Linda Joslin - this is my input not part of this article, but check for yourselves on google for other documents.

IODINE PATCH TEST

If you've ever wondered if you are low in iodine, try the iodine patch test.
It's a simple and easy way to find out. You will use tincture of iodine which is 2% orange colored solution available in the first aid section of your pharmacy. It comes in a small one ounce bottle.

If you can't find it on the shelf in the first aid section, the pharmacist may be holding it in the prescription portion of the pharmacy.
If it is not there, ask your pharmacist to order it for you. My pharmacy only had one bottle left on the shelf.

Procedure for Test

Before you go to bed, paint a half dollar size of iodine onto clean dry skin. This should be either on your stomach, under your forearm or inner thigh where material won't rub on it.
When you wake up, you will notice the color has changed. Make a mental note about how much it has changed.
Wait for 24 hours. If the color has completely disappeared, you are iodine deficient.
The body's deficiency is proportionate - the faster the iodine is absorbed by your body, the more deficient you are.

When I used the iodine patch test, the circle disappeared in less than four hours. This is considered a severe iodine deficiency.

Treatment

If the color disappears, you may begin using the iodine painting as a supplement for your iodine deficiency.
This should be done on a daily basis until the body no longer absorbs the iodine.
After that, you may then test at intervals to see if you have become deficient again and treat accordingly.

Testimonials

My favorite place to find testimonials is from Earth Clinic where you can read comments from people who have shared their experiences in treating hypothroidism (lack of iodine).
Beth from Chicago, Il, wrote about using iodine painting on her body.
She mentioned her sugar cravings disappeared after she started using iodine this way as a supplementation.

Janya from Fountain Valley, CA wrote she has been painting with iodine in the morning and evening for five years.
She stopped all doctor prescribed medications for Hashimotos disease because she found out the medications would destroy her bones and her mind.
She takes liquid kelp drops during the day and continues with the painting for less than $3.00 a bottle.

You may also supplement your iodine deficiency with Lugols iodine.

SEE ALSO THIS POST: *HERE*. I'll post more information as it comes in. Blessings and prayers for health and healing for humanity.

Thank you, Johann Hari. Yeah, what she said... Why DO we ignore the horrible abuse of women that "great" men commit?

photo is from here

This is a cross-post from The Independent (UK). You may click on the title below to link back.

Johann Hari: Why do we ignore the abuse of women?

Thursday, 15 November 2007

When is it okay to beat, rape and stab a woman? When it is okay to call these victims "whiny", "money-grabbing" and "bitches"? The obvious answer is never. But that doesn't seem to be the judgement we make, together, as a culture. No. If the wife-beater/rapist/attempted murderer can write novels, kick a ball, create songs or pose as a liberal politician, we treat their misogyny as an irrelevance or, worse, as a laddish affectation imbuing them with the testosteroney tang of authenticity. 

 

You can see this by looking at four men – about as diverse as they come – who have been lauded as heroes: Norman Mailer, George Best, Tupac Shakur, and Bill Clinton.

 

For the past six days, we have been saturated with tributes to the "greatness" of Norman Mailer. Not just his work but his life. He has been called "brave", "determined to experience life's richness", "compassionate", even "nice". It is noted only briefly that he violently despised women. He said they are "low, sloppy beasts; they should be kept in cages". He campaigned to halt every move to give women control over their lives, including birth control – because he said he wanted to retain the "thrill" of knowing the woman he was having sex with might later die in childbirth. He said feminists wanted to "destroy men" and wrote a bizarre 300-page book – The Prisoner Of Sex – to "prove" it.

 

He acted on this hate. He beat his young wife, Adele, punching her in the stomach when she was six months pregnant, and coerced her to have group sex with his friends. One night, in the middle of a party, he picked up a knife and stabbed her. He cut through her breast, only just missing her heart. Then he stabbed her in the back. As she lay there, haemorrhaging, one man reached down to help her. He snapped: "Get away from her. Let the bitch die."

 

Adele never really recovered. She developed pleurisy and started hacking up black phlegm several times a day. She was too scared even to press charges. She became an alcoholic, sank into poverty and could never trust a man again. When, years later, she told her story in the book The Last Party, the reviews slapped her down. They called her "whiny", "a shrill lush", and "nauseating". The subtext was: how dare this uppity bitch complain about Our Icon? Some even seem to believe that stabbing her made him a better writer – as if one woman is worth sacrificing on the altar of "genius", and it is churlish of her to keep speaking.

 

(Of course, I believe an artist's work should be assessed entirely separately to his personal life. If we discovered tomorrow that Shakespeare was a child molester, King Lear would still be a masterpiece. But Mailer's misogyny infests his work. As the feminist writer Kate Millett pointed out, his 1965 novel An American Dream "is an exercise in how to kill your wife and be happy ever after". It is revealing that his only genuinely brilliant novel – The Naked And The Dead – has no female characters.)

 

If Norman Mailer had said black people should be kept in cages, if he had said the civil rights movement wanted to "destroy white people", if he had stabbed a black man in a racist fury, the first line of every obituary would have mentioned it. So why is hatred of women taken less seriously?

 

It is not only novel-writing that gets you off the hook: if you can kick a ball, we don't seem to mind if you kick a woman. George Best first beat his wife Alex on her 25th birthday, when he punched her to the floor and kicked her six times in the chest and face. Then, on Christmas Day 2003, he gave her a bruised lip and swollen face. "So what if she's in hospital? It's the best place for her," he snapped at the press the next day.

When Paul Gascoigne admitted to having hospitalised his wife, Sheryl, "Bestie" leapt to his defence. "We all give the wife a good slap. I know I do," he said. When Alex finally left him, the press swooped – to attack her. One typical columnist said she had "not done badly" out of him, and claimed Best and Gazza's only flaw was that "they are suckers for romance".

 

I can almost find traces of this impulse to look away in myself, when it comes to people who have done a few things I admire. The rap artist Tupac is now revered as the messiah of the ghetto, "a man who stood up for black people" with tracks that bordered on genius. So everyone wants to forget about a 19-year-old girl called Ayanna Jackson. In 1993, Tupac met her in a club and coaxed her back to his hotel – where he and his friends gang-raped her. At the trial, the judge called it "a brutal attack on a helpless woman". Tupac did not "stand up" for her, he pinned her down and trashed her life. And Bill Clinton? He has indeed been targeted by right-wing hit machines, trying to take him out for his few liberal policies. And yet, and yet ... Juanita Broaddrick, an Arkansas nurse and supporter of the Democratic Party, told NBC's flagship show Dateline that, in 1978, when she volunteered for his campaign, Clinton lured her into a hotel room, raped her and tore her lip by biting down on it. She has five witnesses who saw her wounds straight after the alleged attack. Broaddrick has never profited from the story, and told it only after she was "outed" by one of the friends who'd heard the tale.

 

She is only one of several women who have claimed without profit to have been sexually abused by Clinton in strikingly similar ways. As Christopher Hitchens has asked: "What are the chances that three socially and politically respectable women, all political supporters of Mr Clinton and none of them known to each other, would invent almost identical experiences?" (Clinton's spokesman, in effect, claimed these women were liars).

 

Why do we so carefully turn a blind eye to the bruised bodies of so many abused women? This selective blindness isn't confined to news coverage; it informs our political life. Imagine if in Britain today, hundreds of thousands of men were being pinned down – in hotels, living rooms, and back alleys – and anally raped by their "friends" or acquaintances, and virtually no one was ever punished for it. It would be one of the biggest issues in British politics. Yet it really does happen to women – so it is a third-tier issue, wheeled out once a decade.

 

This shrugging reaction to the stabbing and raping so enthusiastically carried out by these men is a reminder that millennia of misogyny aren't wiped away in a few decades of progress. Lying dormant beneath the polite feminised surface, there is an atavistic belief that violence against women like Adele Mailer and Alex Best and Ayanna Jackson doesn't quite count. "Let the bitch die," Mailer growled, his hands covered in blood – and still we applaud him to the grave.

 

j.hari@independent.co.uk