What does Consent Mean in a Society that Manufactures Contempt for Women?

[the above image, of two white men, one with a camera, one with a gun, each of which is designed to shoot and capture women in various ways, is from here, where "Stockholm Syndrome" is discussed]

Let's begin with one basic observations about how things work in dominant Western societies:

Misogyny is not only corporately manufactured, but is also promulgated, promoted, heralded, and honored as "sacred" in a society that continually finds new ways to violate and degrade women as a gendered class.

What is held as sacred in society is often that which degrades women. Notions of "Femininity" and "masculinity" as well as the idea and practice of heterosexuality, the rightness of whiteness and lightness, and the glory of fame and material gross wealth are held as sacred in this society. Murder is sacrilised as is suffering. What I am saying is nothing new. Radical feminists have been saying this, in their own ways and words, for decades. But we don't listen to women, do we? It sure seems that way.

Not questioned is this: does this woman hating have to exist at all? Why? How can it be abolished, eradicated, along with race-as-power-abused, heterosexism, and ecocidal practices.

We live in a society that tends to move into a "covering the ears with hands while humming a song loudly" mode every time a woman speaks out against white male supremacy, and that same society structures and enforces woman-man relationships such that men have the rights of exploitation and access to women's work and bodies.

In this context, we like to talk about how heterosexual and queer couples give consent to what we do, in and out of bed. In and out of the home. And, especially, we like to believe that agency, however compromised by oppression, and consent, however coerced, are fully available to everyone, hence the U.S.'s obsession with "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". Never mind that capitalist patriarchy requires poverty and the exploitation of workers in order to run "properly". Never mind that "what work is" and "what the means of production are" are seen through masculinist eyes. And never mind that power is expressed, in some way, with every act one makes, however compromised that expression of power is.

I am thinking at the moment of a radical feminist observation, I believe Andrea Dworkin's but perhaps not hers alone. That observation is that silence is often what girls and women have to use in order to express themselves and their objections to being used and abused in overly misogynistic ways.

I am thinking of my own struggles, when younger, to have a voice. To find a voice that spoke something that I needed to say. I regularly reread Audre Lorde's speech and essay "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" as a reminder of what one Black lesbian feminist poet warrior had to say to other women sitting before her. About how that essay has become what so many people need to marinate in, to figure out how to move forward with fear, to speak what is often apparently easier to be silent about.

And I think about how men need to listen to women, to their spoken words, yes, and also their non-verbal expressions of how they are feeling and what they are thinking.

I went over to a the home of some friends recently. The trip was made to speak with the only man raised as a boy who lives there with three other people. He is heterosexual and white; two of the other roommates are also white. One of the roommates is Brown but passes sometimes as white. She is predominantly heterosexual, and is planning a future with this man I went to speak to, about marriage and values while his romantic partner was at work.

But the two roommates I first encountered when going over there recently were a lesbian woman and a trans person who struggles to be seen as the person he is. I have known three of the four people living together for a few months, but we have bonded quickly, due primarily to the shared recognition that this society we live in has not respect for women, for trans people, for people who are not white, for disabled people, and for those who are materially poor. We are, collectively, injured people: injured by misogyny and masculinism, homophobia, and heterosexism, by anti-Semitism and racism. It is not the fact of our collective survival that bonds us exactly, but rather the recognition that surviving with dignity and a decent sense of self is an on-going struggle.

The trans roomie was struggling with issues having to do with work. A white male-man was disrespecting him routinely. Transphobia? At least that. This roommate was really struggling, deeply, with how to deal with this. The details, if given, would make it clear that "he can't just be fired" or otherwise eliminated, or beamed to some other part of the universe. (Besides, which part of the universe would deserve to deal with his gross insensitivies and heartlessness?)

We spoke, we felt, we hugged. And then I went off with the white male-man to talk about relationships and the institutions that structure them in many awful ways.

The day before he had wanted to know something that the mostly heterosexual woman raised as a girl was reluctant to tell him. He persisted in asking. I overheard this and asked him: "What need isn't getting met, such that you need to keep asking for the same information over and over again?" I invited him to check in with his humanity instead of behaving like a man who will not take a woman's no as an adequate answer. I was probably more triggered by his persistent dishonoring of her than she was. She has much more experience dealing with him in a self-empowering way than I do. And also she is vulnerable to him, not in a good way. She is empowered, one of the most empowered women, self-aware people I know. And she is vulnerable to him because he is a man and she is a woman and she grew up in a world where men rule women, in many awful ways. Where men disgrace and disrespect women without knowing they are doing so, sometimes.

In this instance, I don't think he was aware of what a male supremacist he was being. Had I called his behavior "male supremacist" (and I will, the next time I see him), he probably would have been shocked. He's quite anti-sexist and doesn't value being "a man" in relationship to a woman.

Other things were going on for him. He was feeling excluded, left out of some informational secret shared by her and me. He wanted "in" to the club of knowledge. And when I found out he'd been bullied and harassed rather viciously much earlier on in his life, this need to not feel excluded made more sense to me. It didn't make his strategy for getting "in" any less male supremacist. Men learn they have a right to get in. And being kept out is an affront, a response to his entitlement that is not socially acceptable. But, given that she knew this history of his and (at the time) I didn't, she was waiting to see if he'd figure out what he was actually doing and why. She re-asked the question I asked him: "What are you trying to get met by doing this?" But she wouldn't name his behavior as male supremacist exactly, although she might name it as oppressive and understand that oppression as rooted in gendered power dynamics.

At this point in writing this I become angry. I think of how much energy and patience women give men. I think about the extraordinary level of patience and praise Victoria Prater gave Garry Prater in Love and Pornography. Now I will note that these two men do give the women they love and live with great support, astounding support; support they have never experienced from any other man. And, their support becomes sort of magical, wondrous, amazing, awesome. It can be commented on with delight and gratitude. Meanwhile, the women who do this ALL THE TIME with men, with boys and with men, including with men who behave as boys, are not seen as wondrous, magical, awesome. They are seen as doing what women are supposed to do. When women do things they are, by an anti-virtue of misogynist stigma, those women and their actions are seen as less significant, taken for granted, assumed to exist the way air exists.

If we trace all this into how men engage with women, with how many women are disproportionately survivors of many forms of men's violence, usually starting early in life, we must ask: to what extend is "Stockholm Syndrome" woven into the fabric of how women behave around one another. I credit Judith Herman, Dee Graham, and Sheila Jeffreys with placing that thought in my head.

The flip side of this question is how and to what extent do men become possessors of people, terrorists and dominators of women, such that women develop any degree of Stockholm Syndrome? And, what can men do about this, collectively? How can we stop being terrorists and possessors, dominators and procurers?

How do we stop one another from pimping women, from sexually violating girls and women, from battering women, from raping women, from dominating women in ways not considered in the least bit criminal?

If we are a society of survivors and perpetrators, with those two camps overlapping, of course, how do we manage to accept a notion of "meaningful consent"? When dissociation and the desire to control both rule our psyches, often unconsciously, how is it that we come to perceive obedience as acquiescence, and acquiescence as "an empowered choice"?

If girls are taught that white men have the most power in society, the most status, and the most access to resources, how does her being approached by a pimp not become an act of abuse?

I can say this: I do not consent to do many of the things I do. I do them because they are asked of me, expected of me. There's no overt, visible force "making" me do them, exactly. The force has been internalised through the experience of men's violence against me, and the knowledge that it is better to be unabused, at any given time, than abused by others. This used to shape a lot of my behavior around and with men, including sexually. I stopped having sex when I realised I couldn't possibly know whether or not I was giving consent. And I am a man. And white. And have economic and class privileges. This means I am positioned as the perp, often, and it is incumbent upon me to know how my actions may trigger "complicity" in other people.

When I hear of trans and non-trans people struggling to find a voice, to just take care of themselves/ourselves without being mistreated and abused, I realize that it is indeed a struggle. Self-care is fought for over years. Learning how to set necessary boundaries with men can take a lifetime of work against the forces of male supremacy that keep bashing up against those boundaries. I am single because I don't want to spend my life learning how to defend and define boundaries on the most intimate levels.

I'd rather be blogging.
END OF POST.

Ongoing Echoes from the Women of the Long House

This important and fascinating post (title above) by Kai Chang over at his blog Zuky may be accessed by clicking here.

(Once I figure out how to "share this" post from Kai's blog to mine, I'll have the whole post up here at A.R.P. The day of me possessing that knowledge, clearly, has not yet arrived.)
END OF POST.

The Pissing Link: Hunting and Small Penis Size

Do antifeminist men actually have a sense of humor? We're about to find out. They are so fond--or is that contemptuous? with patriarchs it's so hard to know--of saying "Feminists have no sense of humor" but when the humor is on the antifeminist men, do they laugh (out loud), or just consider it more of the supposedly rampant (but as yet unauthenticated) "man-hating"?

From here:

March 29, 2005

New Research Finds Long-Suspected Link Between Hunting and Small Penis Size

Diminutive male genitalia disorder (DMGD) has, until this month, been considered only a theory in the scientific world, but now the long-suspected link between hunting and unusually small penis size has been established as scientific fact by the Diminutive Male Genitalia Disorder Research Organization (DMGDRO). The DMGDRO has conducted an extensive two-year study on men with diminutive male genitalia disorder.

Lead by Mike Streams and Brian Upchurch, who began their collaboration on human sexuality research while undergraduate students at Johns Hopkins University, DMGDRO is a team of New Orleans, Louisiana-based scientists interested in the study of male sexual disorders and dysfunction. Having identified the genetic disorder linking small male reproductive organs and the ability to derive pleasurable sensations from killing in a controlled environment without fear of personal harm (as differentiated from war or fighting back in an attack by a human being), also known as “controlled victim” aggression manifestation, Streams and Upchurch believe that there may be ways to combat men's feelings of inadequacy and curb some of the destructive behaviors that such men engage in as coping mechanisms.

“It's really quite interesting,” Dr. Streams says. “Like much folklore, it appears that, certainly in this case, there is a foundation in fact. This is the first time that research has been conducted on men who hunt, and it shows quite definitively that the link between what we are calling ‘the thrill of the kill' and a smaller-than-average penis is statistically significant."

Initial tests conducted on mice and rabbits proved inconclusive, but subsequent human test subjects showed what Dr. Upchurch calls “staggering results.” The subjects ranged from having a slight abnormality in penis size to a “pubis innyus” or inverted male pubic region. As data were gathered, the numbers revealed a discrepancy so great that it seemed to suggest a genetic mutation. By tracing what has been identified as the “DMGD gene,” an abnormality was discovered on the 21 st chromosome. Further investigation proved that this abnormality is consistently linked to two traits: abnormally small reproductive organs and “controlled victim” aggression manifestation. Drs. Streams and Upchurch and their colleagues theorize that an extreme case of DMGD may have been to blame in the 2004 Sawyer County, Wisconsin, incident in which a hunter went on a rampage, shooting at a group of other hunters and killing six of them.

Reaction from participants has been positive, and subjects described the results as liberating and a relief to finally be able to label their problem as a legitimate medical disorder.

Dr. Upchurch reports, “The first step in the treatment of a disorder is to understand its origins. We are pleased to have crossed that important threshold.”
END OF POST.

What Men "Using Porn" Actually Is and Does

This post is a partial response to finishing the book, Love and Pornography, by Victoria and Garry Prater.

My primary frustration, my anger, at Garry is that at no point does he seek out an understanding of his behavior as political, as privileged, and as loaded up with male supremacist entitlements. To see oneself, as a man, only as a person who was hurt as a child, who was parentified at an early age, loaded up with responsibilities no child should be burdened with, who carries deep sexual shame that warps one’s sense of self, is to miss other key components of what any man is, and what sex has increasingly become due to men's patriarchal practices.

I don’t wish to minimize any of the ways Garry was hurt as child, and was manipulated by a society that condones just about every horrible act imaginable. But for all the ways men go on and on about how much will and power women apparently have who are in pornography, it is curious, to say the least, that men’s male supremacist agency and power seems never to register or mark the radar screen when it comes to men analysizing and intervening in each other’s behavior that hurts women.

Garry, in the book which is a partial chronicle of a portion of his life with Victoria, gets to be loved as a hurt, vulnerable man-child. He repeatedly and convincingly argues an entitlement-invisibilising case for continuing to use pornography while living with her, knowing full well it is not comfortable in the least for her to live with that arrangement. She is not alone in being a woman who wishes to live her life with a man but without pornography. But one gets the feeling she’d have to live alone, without him, if she weren’t accepting of his terms and definitions of what he is actually doing that disturbs her so much. He never owns the degrees to which he is being a male supremacist. This self-serving ignorance doesn’t make him a bad man. It makes him a typical one.

The West, particularly and especially the United States, has been about as fucked up about sex as any nation to date. It has both Puritanical influences, fusing shame with sex at every turn, while mandating a European-rooted patriarchal form of men’s sexual subordination of women, through marriage and intercourse, as natural and healthy regardless of whether such institutions and practices do, in fact, benefit women. What we know is this: they definitely benefit men.

Patriarchal men commit atrocities such as marital rape, child molestation, and incest, and experience those acts as “sexual”. What the White Right and the White Left have in common is a desire and support for the production of patriarchal sexxxuality, for sex acts that both bolster and foster the social degradation of women as a class, and the abuse and murder of many individual women, seen as utterly dispensable by men. In this view, women in prostitution are not really human beings, and any woman who is assumed to be one isn’t either. Add to this the misogynistic, racist pornographic myth that all women, deep down, are really whores, and you can begin to understand how sex crimes become commonplace and normal in patriarchal societies.

In a so-called post-sexual revolutionary era, where many have left their traditional houses of religious worship to worship patriarchal capitalism’s products instead (with mall as monastery), we have reached an era where many men feel free to talk about things like their masturbatory habits and various uses and abuses of women as “fun activities” that are, irrefutably, “harmless”. For the use and abuse of women to be harmless, women cannot be human. It is that simple. Either harm hurts or it doesn’t. Either use and abuse humiliates and degrades or it doesn’t. For men acculturated to seeing incested and pimped women as merely “images of naked women” and their masturbatory or other uses of those women as recreational relaxation, means they have become terribly dehumanised, to the point of being a danger to women’s freedom and political status as human. This dehumanization includes disregard and callousness to the suffering and harm that constitutes and defines a society that produces pimps, violently subordinates women sexually, massively reproduces and markets such images of this degradation and violation. In short, men who “use porn” participate actively in the process of manufacturing contempt for women as a gendered class. This is men’s contempt for women, and men’s callousness to the harm done to women, including to the women in the lives of men who “use porn”. Unless images sought out on- or off-line are animations or otherwise completely technologically created—never involving an actual woman or girl, each picture or video of a woman is socially encrypted with information about that woman, her history, what happened to her, choices she made with varying levels of agency, and choices made for her by pimps, pornographers, prostituters, and procurers, often enough male members of her own family of origin or her boyfriend or husband and the men they know. If men did not coerce and manipulate girls and women, on both the institutional and individual levels, pornography, prostitution, incest, and rape could not exist as systematic practices and industries earning billions of dollars annually.

What men are actually doing and seeing when they seek out and find pornographic images or videos of women, unclothed or not, tells us a lot about what men are capable of doing to women who are not in pornography. To be clear: I am not saying (nor do I believe) all men who enjoy looking at pornography are rapists and incest perpetrators. I am saying that men who routinely and habitually use pornography are increasingly unwilling and unable to even know what sexualised harm to girls and women looks like. And, let’s be honest, many of the images many men seek out are of girls and women who are obviously being coerced into doing what some men want them to do. There are various and sundry rationalisations for continuing this “just looking” behavior. First of all, let’s be clear that men are not “just looking” when seeking out and finding and enjoying pornographic images of women. They are being male supremacists. They are practicing woman-hating. They are making some women around them uncomfortable, at least. They are reinforcing a key tenet of male supremacy: the right of men to have unquestioned access to women’s bodies.

Liberal and conservative, progressive and radical men “innocently” use images of pimped women in order to achieve a particular version of ourselves—either as empowered or shameful, depending on our upbringing and current sexual value system. We may obtain dissociated or non-dissociated sexual states of arousal and obsessively sought-after orgasms after a stressful day at work, or, increasingly, during that stressful day at work if our work provides us with a computer hooked up to the Internet.

I find no shame in men (and women) wanting to reduce stress. I find nothing shameful about men (and women) wanting relief from the oppressive realities of capitalist work life. But when one’s strategies for stress reduction and release from oppressive capitalist conditions require the rape of women, that’s one of many places that I think any humanitarian ought to draw the line of unacceptability. Men of some conscience, men who claim to care about women, or at least one woman, are able to shift their arguments from “What I’m doing doesn’t harm anyone” to “I won’t support gross exploitation and rape in order to get this feeling I’m after.”

At issue, centrally, is not “How can men become more humane?” much as that question needs to be asked and answered in action. The central issue is “What do men have to do to end the sexual subordination, exploitation, and violation of women?” While these endeavors are not an either/or enterprise, to privilege the first over the second is to maintain men’s focus on “what’s good for us”, a social and political preoccupation that has led us to where we are today.

One rationale for the men who accept that at least some women in pornography were coerced or forced to be there is that “The images on the Internet have already been made; the harm—if there is any—has been done; men looking at images days, months, or years after the images were taken doesn’t cause the girl or woman any [additional] pain.” For me, this is about as callous a response as you could conjure to a political condition that is nothing short of an atrocity.

But, lest we forget, it is common in a society in which every aspect of civilisation as we know it perpetuates genocide, gynocide, and ecocide to want to deny harm is happening when and where it is. Misogynist men are not alone in appropriating this level of callous disregard as we purchase goods produced by enslaved children, for example, hoping against all reason that maybe this garment was made by well-paid adults whose living conditions approximate the buyer’s. (Think again.) I do not find the kind of dissociative lack of awareness about what’s happening in the real world that men employ to continue to “use pornography” any more or less egregious and heinous than the kind of dissociative lack of awareness of so-called First World people involved in going about our days using many things that couldn’t exist if ecocide, non-sexual slavery, various forms of racism, and genocide weren’t happening endemically. If we shop, apply chemicals to our bodies and lawns, go on trips such as cruises, and own property, we are participatory agents of genocide and human slavery, inhumanity to animals, and the killing of the planet. It is difficult to be too self-righteous when my typing on a computer necessitates all of the above. But as someone committed to exposing and challenging misogyny, I do focus here on men who use pornography and call it a harmless activity, or, even more self-centeredly, “behavior which is only hurting me”.

This is one reason why many women I know are deeply distressed when they find out their male partners are “addicted to pornography”. They report to me their male partner’s self-absorption, lack of concern about the woman’s feelings and needs, lack of interest in examining the issue more deeply, and their fears that these men act out this capacity for dissociation (or not) and objectification against women and girls in other, more social, ways. In Love and Pornography, for example, Garry, who does actually care about his partner’s feelings, speaks about his practice of objectifying “pretty young” women in public settings including when his life partner, Victoria, is out with him. We do know at least a few things about men who sexually objectify women being pimped and mass marketed to men, women who—with or without meaningful levels of agency and free choice—are tangled up in various positions across the Web. And one of the things we know about such men is that they also objectify women who are not on the Internet and devalue women who do not look like the Web-tangled women.

Garry honestly assesses that he has been given permission, all his life, to look at these images, even while feeling shame for doing so because his parents taught him sexual feelings are shameful. Lost in this battle for sexual enjoyment without shame is any concern or awareness of patriarchal atrocities to girls and women.

A terribly inadequate analogy might be that when a Jewish man was young living in a kosher and orthodox home, his parents told him eating pig meat is a sin against God. But as he grew and entered other people’s non-kosher homes, the smell of sizzling bacon was irresistible, and sometimes, when at Gentile homes, he’d eat it enjoying every bite and chew. He’d then feel great guilt and shame, as he made his way back home, making sure his breath didn’t smell of pig meat. Let’s say this man lives in the U.S. And so the pig meat he sneakily eats is, for one thing, not kosher, and for another, mass produced in an industrialised commercial “farm” where animals are treated with great cruelty and callousness. Were he to actually witness and register the cruelty, the harm to these animals, the pain they endure so he and others can occasionally chew cooked corporate pig meat, he might decide “it’s just not worth it. I can live without eating pig meat if eating it requires animals to be so horrendously mistreated and so callously slaughtered. (I’m not sure there’s a non-callous way to mass slaughter pigs, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

If Garry, or any man, was the man being sexually violated at home by daddy, and once he left home was taken in and seasoned by a pimp and later passed along to several pornographers, he might actually relate to the woman whose image he stares at only to get a sexual fix and a somewhat empowered sense of himself. But there’s no guarantee of that. Those who are sexually violated when young are still quite capable of dissociation and objectification. I’m one example of that. As a teen and as an adult, I used to objectify men often, habitually; sometimes teen males, sometimes males in their twenties and thirties. I’m still capable of doing so. I just choose not to because I have made sure the feeling one has when being peered at in a violating way, in a consumptive if not also predatory way, in a voyeuristic and entitled way, in which the other person’s humanity is forgotten temporarily in order for objectification to occur, is not forgotten. That’s one of the two things that keeps me from visually violating other men. The other reason is that I’ve made commitments to women in my life, feminist women, to not participate in male supremacist sexual practices—objectifying and fetishising men being two of those practices. So due to a system of accountability and honesty, and a practice of identification with those I might wish to turn into sexual things, I can make the choice to not engage in behaviors which harm others, no matter how many men reassure me there’s no harm in it.

I gave up looking at pornography years ago, and have since occasionally, but not in the last years, looked at online videos of young men masturbating. I preferred to see videos where it seemed to be the case that the man was alone, and wasn’t being filmed by someone, which intensified the possibility he was being coerced or manipulated into performing for the camera man. But once I realised that my watching him was sanctioning him turning himself into a sex-thing for me or anyone else to watch, with no regard for his humanity, the appeal of seeking out and looking at such videos left me. I can still long to see them in some dissociated or depressed states, but fulfilling that longing isn’t more important to me than living my values, which I blab about so much online. I could stop blogging, end my friendships with feminist women, dismantle the systems of accountability that result from those friendships, and go on my merry masculinist way seeking out opportunities to look at those videos and also objectify young men in the non-cyber world. But, what kind of life is that? I’ve lived that life, and it’s sad and empty. It’s boring, and it’s heartless. But more importantly, it requires others to be or feel violated. If the humanity of other people is precisely as precious as my own, sexually objectifying other people, particularly but not only without their permission, is unequivocally unethical and harmful.

My Own Political Struggle with Transgenderism

[the image above is a pro-transgender feminist symbol from here, and I have added that networking site, anarkismo.net, to my important webpages to me list on the right side of this blog]

[Revised on 27 August 2009, adding bits about John and Julian Lennon, and clarifying a few point.]

There was another post made here a couple of weeks or so ago that a good friend noted was potentially transphobic, or, at least, not very welcoming of trans visitors to this blog. I agreed with her and pulled the post. I revised it so much it became something else. What follows is that something else. (I sometimes use the word "they" or "them" as synonymous with "she/he/neither" and "her/him/neither", respectively.)

I haven't dealt much with trans politics here, and I'd like to explain why, and what my own conclusions are about my politics, and my understandings of gender based on certain feminist writings, campaigns, and analyses as they meet up with my own experiences.

First, though, I'll remind the returning reader, or let the new-comers know, that had I been born at a time such that I'd be in my early twenties now, instead of, well, older, I'd likely be trans-identified. That is because in the community in which I live, radical feminism as a political movement is practically non-existent, while queer politics and, even more so, dominant gender politics are very popular. Of course only dominant gender politics is socially valued generally. No matter how much of a queer presence there is in a city or town, it remains unsafe for all queer people to be out, due to a combination of racism, homophobia, and misogyny.

In a conversation with one of the most diligently anti-racist white people I know, we discussed our own experiences of growing up as it pertained to gender identity and "fitting in" as a gendered person. Neither of us really felt like the gender we were assigned and raised to be, but were aware there was apparently only one other option. (Not all societies are like this, of course. But the ones I have been part of are.) Both of us, to varying degrees and in different ways, identified somewhat with the gender we were seen as not being.

For me, I was very girl- and woman-centered in my ways of being in the world from an early age. Woman and girl did not mean "other" in my mind, heart, and spirit; boys and men did seem, at least at times, both foreign and scary; this was especially true for me when it came to dealing with non-Jewish white heterosexual men. For the transperson I was speaking with, also Jewish and queer, they grew up to feel quite a bit of alienation from the gender assigned to them at birth, and, for a time at least, began requesting to be referred to in the pronouns of the non-assigned gender. In this person's case, they did not take hormones or pursue surgery to "be" another gender. They understood, and perhaps still understand, their gender to be fluid, flexible, and simply beyond what the dominant white society has said "exists".

When in my early twenties, I read Andrea Dworkin's book Woman Hating, and related strongly to all she said about dual gender: that woman and man, while real is not true. It was also the first book I read that actively and compassionately supported transgendered people as an oppressed group inside the patriarchal dual gender system.

My questions, concerns, and experiences led me more into radical feminism. And it, in its many forms and colors, was flourishing at the time. There I found out much more than I had been able to articulate about society, power, gender, and race. Woman and man were not just positioned as opposites, polar opposites, but also "in opposition" with men being greatly opposed to womanhood, in various ways, all the while needing womanhood in order to be alive and survive. With race also always present as a political reality, gender was deeply raced and race was deeply gendered. This has become clearer to me over the years, but it was no mystery why African American and white Jewish women were seen as "too masculine", stereotyped as they were as being the heads of households, "the ones who wear the pants* in the family", whether or not a husband or boyfriend lived there as well. (*Trousers, for those in the UK.)

Many theories have surfaced, mostly white supremacist psychological ones, to explain why men hate women so much: why rape by men against women is rampant, why men beating the shit out of women they say they love is commonplace, why poverty and famine overwhelmingly has the face of children and women of color.

One theory was that men resented how dependent they had been on a woman when little, which of course presumed either no man around or not enough of a man-parent presence. It also presumed that one's early dependence on a mother should, for some strange reason, manifest as misogyny later in life. My problem with the theory was that it was based in misogyny; it didn't explain misogyny. Why children grow up to hate women is not because women take care of them. Actually, to the degree women are able to do this well, they tend to be loved by their children. (I know: what a strange theory!) It's the absent or neglectful parent who tends to be hated and shunned, and that parent is disproportionately a man. John Lennon, to take one famous family example, hated his father for abandoning him and his mother, Julia, who died when he was a teenager; John loved his mother deeply and wrote a beautiful song about her. Julian Lennon has hated (and forgiven) his father, John, for abandoning him and his mother, Cynthia. We can hope that if Julian becomes a parent, he'll be a far more present and attentive parent than his dad was with him.

I was raised by a few people; all were family members. Those who cared for me I cared about strongly; those who didn't care for me well I had mixed feelings for, including hatred, at times. To all the Men's Rights Psycho-babblists out there: I wasn't raised by any feminist women. In fact, no woman over my age in my family of origin would identify as a feminist or womanist. Their own political views ran along and off a spectrum called conservative to liberal. The same was true for the men: conservative to liberal, in the meanings whites tend to apply to those terms. The only "woefully inadequate" parent I had was one of the women. I hated her at times for being so callous and self-absorbed. I also felt great compassion for her, for, against many odds, she struggled mightily and successfully to stay in this world.

I loved my father; he was a good role model for me in terms of how to be a person, not "a man". Many of the women were good role models for me as well, and I loved them too. They were individual people, not just "the wife of" or "the mother of". None of them would have ever considered going by the prefix "Ms." And none of them ever bought one issue of Ms. magazine or any other that went against the status quo's standards for what women are supposed to be.

The first "Ms."'s I met were teachers in high school. One was married to a man and one was not. I found this very cool. I tend to dislike double standards and different levels of social-political status being based on completely irrelevant and impersonal facts about someone. For example, a man's name did not change dramatically when he married a woman, but hers did, both at the beginning and the end: Miss to Mrs., Maiden name to Married name, even to the point of (gag) becoming "Mrs. John Smith". Whose interests are served by coming up with THAT custom? Invisibilising women's identities, or eclipsing them with men's lives, was imagined (by men) to be a good thing when I was growing up, but it never seemed like a good thing to me or to this person I was having the conversation with. Back to white music for a moment: how many people know the name of the person who was instrumental in getting Beach Boy Brian Wilson back into his creative self so he could complete the legendary unfinished album smile? Answer: Melanie Ledbetter, the woman he was wed to in 1995.

Along with the eclipsing of identity, being a woman raised as a girl also brought with it the vulnerability to men's violence, particularly and especially violence that men made into or about sex.

What's a person in a heterosexual world to do who doesn't want to be "the eclipsed" and "the beaten-up one" and also doesn't want to be the eclipser and the batterer?

The feminism I came to know well was committed to exposing the degrees to which gender and race was fused to power imbalances, structural, systemic power imbalances. The radical feminism I came to trust helped me see just how bound masculinity was to being anti-feminine and pro-whiteman, and how much femininity was bound to worshipping masculinity while not emulating it. Some of its founders and more prominent activists were Flo Kennedy, Alice Walker, Andrea Dworkin, Audre Lorde, Catharine MacKinnon, and bell hooks.

For me, gender was primarily a socially constructed hierarchy. It wasn't "natural" or "how things are just because". I, for one, didn't comply with its demands for conformity nor obey its mandate to hold masculinity as inherently more valuable and honorable than femininity. I also knew there were human qualities that were neither and there were people who were neither.

The trans person and I were two of those people, but had been assigned a gender at birth, and visually appeared enough like that supposedly true gender to "pass" as it.

Most of my learning about transgenderism was not very sophisticated or filled with wisdom. Not surpisingly, it also was not introduced to me by trans people. This meant I had a skewed to messed up view of what transgenderism was or is. What I've learned from my conversation partner, and other trans people, was that it isn't one thing, but it isn't everything either. It's a cluster of experiences that meet or clash with social expectations, just as being gay is.

As I understand transgenderism now, it is the lived experience of not belonging to oneself or the status quo in a profoundly significant way. It is the sense of something being really off about one's experience of self, and what the world tells you you are, with regard to gender.

Now of course this is true for many people, especially women raised as girls. As noted, some of the women in my family figured out how to work around the expectations and demands, to create social space where they could be more or less themselves, to the degree any oppressed people can be themselves.

But I have come to see that there is a difference, a genuine, felt difference between women raised as girls who feel like they don't belong to patriarchy, or don't wish to satisfy the ridiculous demands of heteropatriarchy, and socially named girls and boys who are transgendered. The matter of intersexuality has still not "come out of the closet" as far as I can tell. And that's due entirely to the oppressive gender system which says "you are either this, or you are that, and you can't be anything else." Trans people, gender variant people, and intersex people are living proof that hierarchical gender dualism is a political idea, not a natural truth.

Where things got confusing for me was when media started portraying transgendered people as "people who want to be the other sex". Studies showed lots of African American girls knew white girls were valued more, and much has been written about how oppressed people try and assimilate into the oppressor class. I, for one, didn't want to be "the other sex"; I wanted the falsehood of that two-gender hierarchy exposed at the roots, challenged through organised radical activism, so that the violence that inheres in it could end, and people could be freer to be themselves.

When I mistakenly learned that transgendered folks want to be the other sex, this notion too reinforced rather than challenged the basic premise of their being only two sexes. The transgender people I know want to be themselves, whether that fits one of two gender categories or not.

Feminism encouraged women to love their bodies however they were shaped, however big or small, however tall or short. ALL women's bodies are beautiful was a message I got from feminism in the 1980s. Let no man or men tell women which ones are beautiful and which are not. And fuck the focus on beauty anyway.

White men, throughout history, could be fat or thin, ugly or attractive, big or small, and still be categorised as "men"; they could still have social status, standing, position, privilege, and prestige. They could be a CEO or principal or dean at a school. Men of varying sizes and shapes, and with many different physical features could be and were president of the U.S. Almost all of them white. But they had to be men. When and if socially and politically powerful and influential people are women, they are seen as being masculinised by wanting to do what only white men have given other white men permission to do. To simply run for president means Hillary Clinton is, somehow, more man-like than if she were perfectly content being an apolitical, soft-spoken First Lady. And God forbid if Michelle Obama says anything deemed "out of line": this both masculinises her and effeminises her husband. Never in the social world does a man "being more like a woman" mean he has a superior status, greater privileges, and a more dominant social position.

Since I am not transgender, the internal personal project (and external political battle) of striving to make my physical, social, sexual, and psychic selves find some form of harmony or unity is not my primary struggle. I cannot make my sexuality fit with society's. That's true. I cannot find representation of myself in media. That's true. My politics, my values, my core beliefs about justice and the world are not reflected back to me by the status quo or the visible social order. My politics, values, and core beliefs, instead, are stigmatised as worthless, stupid, insane, ridiculous, and man-hating, just because I don't worship the heterosexual cock over everything else.

I know some transgendered folks for whom the struggle mentioned above is not their central concern either. But society-at-large will make that the most significant aspect of their being, if it is disclosed. Similarly, in a conservative to liberal society, me being gay and pro-radical feminist makes me seem and feel like an outcast, a heretic, albeit sometimes a "tolerated" heretical outcast. (And in racist heteropatriarchal societies, there are far worse things to be, according to white masculinist men, such as a trans or non-trans woman of any color, or a trans or non-trans man of color.)

Radically pulling up and throwing out the oppressive, anti-woman two-gender hierarchy of the dominant West was a key project of the feminism I came to value and trust. No "trim, trim here" "trim, trim there" approach was sufficient. Getting those roots exposed and torn apart was necessary. As with Kansas's Dorothy needing to kill the Witch of the East in order to get her broomstick and have her wishes fulfilled, so too must patriarchy die for women to be free. "Ding dong, the Dickdom is dead" is a song I look forward to singing. Mulching is a good thing. ("Compost CRAP" is a bumper sticker I've been wanting to mass produce for a long time.)

And media was portraying trangendered people (often called transsexuals) as wanting to be part of that hierarchical two-gender system; as spending lots of money to be part of that system--going "so far" as to have ones breasts and genitals surgically removed or altered. In this, those few transgendered people who do try surgical approaches to finding that harmony of being are both like and not like non-trans women and men who do the same thing, to feel more like the gender they supposedly are. If a man gets his penis enlarged, it is because he has heard the patriarchal rumor that big dicks are more valued than small ones. That this is true symbolically far more than it is physically is not mentioned by the pornographised media. If women raised as girls get their breasts enlarged, it is because they know they will either feel more feminine with the implants, be more attractive to others, often men, and be paid more to do certain kinds of work (often by pimps). These are somewhat different motivations for physically altering oneself surgically than those of most of the transgendered people I know. For example, an MtF trans person is likely to lose family members, status, work, and privileges, not gain them. And s/he is not likely to be accepted as "a woman" by masculinist men. An FtM trans person is not really ever going to be accepted as "a man" by masculinist non-trans men.

The issue that I've heard a lot of discussion about is this: do feminist non-trans women accept transgendered MtF people as women? (In fact, I hear that question infintitely more than the one about whether masculinist non-trans men accept MtF or FtM trans people as human beings.)

From what I can tell non-trans feminists are not unified on this matter. As a pro-feminist man raised as a boy, I have to wrestle with where I stand on the matter of transgenderism as it relates to the struggle of all women to be free of men, of all women to be women defined not by patriarchy, but by themselves.

All of us who participate in the practice of making ourselves into more heteropatriarchally acceptable gendered people ought to be aware of why we do so, if we have the time and energy to spend trying to figure that out. Most people, feminist and anti-feminist, trans and non-trans, mainstream or outcast, do participate actively in maintaining the dual gender system in some ways, as I see it. Just as people of all races participate in white supremacy. But only some benefit materially and socially from this participation. And some of us become very ill or are killed in the process of trying to be part of it.

Lesbians, gay men, trans people, and "out" radical feminists are among the populations of people whose ways of being and belief systems make them particular targets for men's misogynistic violence.

The reason I focus so much energy doing and promoting anti-misogyny work, rather than on pro-trans and pro-gay work, is partly because I'm not trans; I'm also not in solidarity with the woman-hating values and practices of many of my gay brothers; I find a heterosexist politic centered around appeasing and pleasing the heterosexual cock abhorrent, and despise the fact that heterosexual white men's values rule the world currently. I despise it because it harms so many people, non-human beings, and the Earth with such callousness and force. But I also focus on supporting radical feminism because I see misogyny and male supremacy as core underlying reasons that transphobia and homophobia exist. Oh, and I love and respect women raised as girls, as individuals and as a particular class of oppressed people, perhaps more than any other group of people, principally because of how courageously and creatively they figure out how to survive in a world that hates them so much, while still managing, somehow, not to be like virulently masculinist men.

Honoring Janis Joplin, who, at Woodstock forty years ago, reminded us to "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)"

Janis Joplin - Try (Live Woodstock )
Uploaded by moriganne. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

[if a stupid ad pops up at the bottom of the video, just click it away at the top left of it]
"Don't compromise yourself. You're all you've got." -- Janis Joplin [quote from here]

The '60s changed as fast as it took to buy a tab of acid. Janis Joplin, the first white female rock star, sang songs that celebrated the achievements of African-American blues singers like Big Mama Thornton, Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin. Joplin was big, loud, ingested drugs and had too many blokes around her to survive, just like some of her heroines. [passage from here]

Rock on, Janis.
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It Was Forty Years Ago Today: Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, on a Monday morning

Just below is Jimi's own take on the U.S. National Anthem, including the atrocities this country committed, in his amazing rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner":



The good news is that among other amazing blues, soul, folk, and rock artists, Jimi Hendrix was chosen to be the closing act at [the original] Woodstock in Bethel, NY forty years ago. The not-so-good news is that it was forty years ago TODAY.

As the poster above indicates, the festival allegedly ran from Friday, August 15th through Sunday, August 17th: a two and a half day affair. The bad news is that due to scheduling delays beginning on Friday, and due to longer sets, Hendrix didn't make it onto the stage until AFTER Woodstock was virtually over: although I suppose we can coin a phrase: "Woodstock ain't over 'til Hendrix plays guitar".

Rather than playing for a live audience of about 450- to 500,000, he played to a significantly less large audience of around 40,000. (Note in the video that there is no massive sea of people, but rather a decent lake of people near the stage.) Apparently, though, Jimi took it all in stride. And history records his performance as great, regardless of how many fantastically muddy people already were making their way home, far away from Yasgur's Farm.

My source for this info is a new documentary called "Woodstock: Now and Then".
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