Good-bye to Anonymity. Hello to Accountability.

I will now only accept comments from known people, from people who are registered, and from people who I can contact, as needed, off this blog.

I realise this may mean that some women (and trans and intersex people, and men) who wish to post comments here may not be able to as they once were, but going through a simple process of registering will allow comments to be made.

I won't post any more comments that promote killing masses of people. I won't post any comments by anyone who puts forth an argument for harming "all men". I won't post comments that portray all men as one thing only. (Needless to say I won't post comments that portray women or trans people as one thing only.)

This is no longer a blog promoting harming people. It is a blog about empowering people to be free from oppression, and to hold oppressors accountable to what we do. It is a place to strategise, discuss, share, and support one another's work in challenging and working to radically transform or compost CRAP (Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy) into something far more humane, just, Earth-friendly, non-genocidal, and non-gynocidal.

I want this to be a space where profeminism means understanding intersectionality of oppressions, and that most women are women of color. That for most of the world's women, sexual violence is not the only or primary means of harming or killing women: starvation, illness through unclean or poisoned water and land, and poverty are primary means of committing gynocide globally.

I may continue to keep a focus on sexual violence against women, because that is my background, what I have studied most and have heard from women about most. But I want the definition of "profeminism" to mean that one holds the radical view that there are many systems at work besides what is strictly called "patriarchy" that subordinate, injure, oppress, and kill women and girls. And this blog will never be one to discount or deny the harm to women and girls of patriarchal atrocities, practices, policies, laws, customs, values, and ways of being.

I hope that's clear.

Looking forward to the future at A.R.P.

Julian Real

What do you see? THIS PHOTOGRAPH speaks a thousand words

[image goes with the article which appears later in this post. Both image and article are here]

What's in a picture that makes it big in mainstream media? Usually a lot. Such is the case with the image above. It's chock full of political messages, all designed to tug at the hearts of those U.S. Americans who want to believe that the U.S. military is "good" and does "good things" around the world.

Is this a sweet and sad mass media photo of a little white girl who doesn't want her daddy to go off to war abroad?

Is this a mass media photo of U.S. military personnel who are about to go murder and rape women in another land?

Is this a dominant media photo of the militarisation of heterosexism, racism, classism, ecocide, and misogyny?

Is it a dominant media photo of the glorification of these oppressive systems?

Is it a classist image of non-rich men who are economically coerced into giving their lives for a country that, if they are poor and/or of color, doesn't give a shit about them and never has?

Is it a photo, with the story and accompanying photos, that is designed to make the viewer feel for that little girl, the white U.S. one, whose father, with the help of his military mates, will likely murder four year old girls of color, who may well be holding their mothers' or fathers' hands at the moment of their death?

Is it a photo of men who will rape and murder women in front of those women's four year old daughters, sons, husbands, and other relatives?

Christina brought this image to my attention and wrote:

As far as I am concerned this is WHM exploitation at its worst. The WHM controlled media are using an innocent little four year old girl to make us throw our support behind WHM imperialism. History is repeating its self. White British and [U.S.] American males in uniform are yet again going into foreign countries, oppressing their people and raping their women.

The innocent little girl in this article does not know the first thing about the evils of white heterosexual male supremacy. How many of those discussing WHM in the photo are rapists or oppressors. Even her father could be one.

It makes me so angry when I see WHM exploiting such young and innocent girls like this.

I always used to think that British WHM were the most sexist and racist in the world, but on seen what the American WHM gets up to I am not sure if there is much of a difference.

I responded to her:
About the image and article: I completely agree with you, and may I post some or all of what you say about that image to my blog as a post? I may add some commentary of my own, totally supportive of what you wrote. I think there's another dimension of evil to this photo, beyond the precise evils you name. And that is that it makes the viewer the empathiser with the girl and both "daddy" and soldier" into heroic ideas. Both are rapists. He is also likely to rape her. Maybe not "that one white man" but we know father-daughter incest is the most common form of child sexual abuse, and we also know that militarising men does nothing to make them more humane to anyone.

This is the kind of image that burns into the minds of white viewers an idea that WHM supremacy is both good and right. It is admirable and heartbreaking, but for all the wrong reasons. It is terribly sad for children, especially young children, to be separated from parents they love. But I know in this country, especially, girls and boys of color have been separated from their parents for so many reasons--due to slavery, due to putting children of color to work, due to the mother having to work outside the home, sometimes two and three jobs to make ends meet, due to the father having two work outside the home all the time, due to their being a father who steals his children from his wife if she accuses him of incesting the children or battering her.

And the global "picture" is atrocious. Abominable. It glorifies imperialism/rapism/militarism/white male supremacy/capitalism/the invisibilisation of four year old Iraqi girls whose daddies are going to be murdered by that man whose hand she is holding, and more.Yes, one of those men is likely to rape a woman overseas. And they are likely to kill mothers and fathers of four year old girls in Iraq, and they are also likely to murder the four year old girl as well. (I don't even want to think about what else they might do to such a child.)

So everything you say, yes. YES.

Little Soldier Girl "Didn't Want to Let Go"
Four-year old Paige didn't want to say goodbye to her daddy before he was shipped off to Iraq
By VINCE LATTANZIO
Updated 5:42 PM EST, Fri, Oct 9, 2009

Abby Bennethum

A family photo that shows a little girl beside her father and his fellow soldiers in uniform as they prepare to go to war has resonated well beyond the tight knit Bennethum clan.

Four-year-old Paige Bennethum really, really didn't want her daddy to go to Iraq.

So much so, that when Army Reservist Staff Sgt. Brett Bennethum lined up in formation at his deployment this July, she couldn't let go.

No one had the heart to pull her away.

The commanding officer allowed Paige to say goodbye as her dad prepared to ship off from Fort Dix.

Paige's mom Abby captured the moment with her camera and her aunt passed the image along to a Berks County, Pa. newspaper.

"I’ve had strangers looking me up online, sending me messages that they are touched by it ... offering a lot of support," Abby Bennethum told NBCPhiladelphia.

The picture took on a life of its own online this week. Abby says that suddenly, people were knocking on her door. "Literally overnight, there's all these people that just want to do anything they can," she says. Though she says her husband hasn't seen any stories about his family yet, he expects to.

For her part, Paige still remembers how she felt that day in July. Looking at the picture of herself -- her dad now overseas -- Paige remembers, "I didn't want to let go of him."

She calls the work he does transporting supplies across the Iraqi border, "just nice."

But that doesn't change her feelings.

"I just miss my dad right now," she says.

Sgt. Bennethum, 30, is expected home next July. Until then, Paige plans to help her mom take care of her little sister and a new baby that's on the way.
First Published: Oct 6, 2009 4:30 PM EST
__________________

Here's more analysis, not the type to be printed in any dominant U.S. media:
The U.S. military, and it's more covert operations, are known well for doing a few things, none of them "good":

--They invade countries where "other" people live. Usually people of color. Often illegally. And they go there to bomb and kill the citizens of those countries in ruthless and reckless ways. They destroy water cleaning systems, sources of electricity, major roadways, government buildings, and destroy the homes of thousands, tens of thousands, of innocent people who happened to live in a country the U.S. has decided, often for financial/corporate/military industrial complex reasons to invade and take over, all the while pretending it is "for their own good".

To understand exactly how some of this works, please read the work of John Perkins. He knows how U.S. corporations and the military work because he was part of it. Read also the work of Stan Goff, who was part of a very elite U.S. military group.

--They seek dominance in those areas, either by supporting the overthrow of leaders the U.S. government "doesn't like" (because, for example, the leader is against corporate capitalism, or because it doesn't want to share its oil with the U.S.). Or they set up puppet governments in those countries, after bombing them into a state of generations-long post-traumatic stress and infrastructure rebuilding.

--They rape the women and girls of those countries. They do this with various intentions. They do it because they want to, the desire to, and they can. They do it because force and dominance is sexual for them. They do it because no one will ever hold them accountable, especially when they kill those they have raped and murdered everyone else who witnessed it, including men and children. They do it as part not only of a global gynocidal war, but as a practice of genocide, of gross violent dominance over other regions of the world and the people who live there.

END OF POST.

New Policy @ A Radical Profeminist: Open to discussing no longer having people post here anonymously

[image is from here]

9 NOVEMBER 2009 ECD UPDATE: ONLY COMMENTS POSTED BY THOSE WHO HAVE REGISTERED WILL BE ALLOWED. NO MORE COMMENTS POSTED BY ANYONE "ANONYMOUSLY" WILL BE ALLOWED OR ACCEPTED.

For complex reasons, I may need to no longer accept any comments made anonymously or comments from anyone who does not provide me with a working and accurate email personal address (not some fake email address that is linked to a false identity). I will likely soon need to be able to verify the identity, off this blog, of everyone who posts here.

I'll wait for feedback from "the regulars" before implementing this new policy. (And if those comments are sent anonymously, they will not necessarily get posted, but I will read them and take them into account.)

And if I don't get any feedback, I'll implement it in a few days. Until then, I'm not posting comments from people whose email addresses I don't have. Anyone can send me their email address in a comment marked "DO NOT POST: HERE'S HOW TO REACH ME." This information will not get posted, needless to say!

Love to all the regular supportive readers and commenters,

Julian

END OF POST.

The Danger of the Single Story: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, on being Middle Class, living in a Colonised Country

The video below is between fifteen and twenty minutes long. I found Ms. Adichie to be quite compelling as a speaker and have now added her to my list of "writers I must read". And I thought after viewing and listening to this, about all the lectures I've heard, including at graduation ceremonies, that were dull as hell--mind-numbingly boring. This one most certainly is not. For those with any hearing impairment, or for the deaf, there is the option below to have subtitles--in either Bulgarian, English, or Italian--appear along the bottom of the screen, as the speech is delivered.


This is the opening of author Chimamanda Adichie's talk:

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story." I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader. And what I read were British and American children's books.

I was also an early writer. And when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading. All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. (Laughter) And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. (Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them, and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available. And they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.

But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.

Source for what follows is The Washington Post:
Inspired by Nigerian history and tragedies all but forgotten by recent generations of westerners, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels and stories are jewels in the crown of diasporan literature.

In Nigeria, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun has helped inspire new, cross-generational communication about the Biafran war. In this and in her other works, she seeks to instill dignity into the finest details of each character, whether poor, middle class or rich, exposing along the way the deep scars of colonialism in the African landscape.

Adichie's newest book, The Thing Around Your Neck, is a brilliant collection of stories about Nigerians struggling to cope with a corrupted context in their home country, and about the Nigerian immigrant experience.

Adichie builds on the literary tradition of Igbo literary giant Chinua Achebe—and when she found out that Achebe liked Half of a Yellow Sun, she says she cried for a whole day. What he said about her rings true: “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.”

"When she turned 10 and read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, about the clash between Igbo tradition and the British colonial way of life, everything changed: ‘I realized that people who looked like me could live in books.’ She has been writing about Africa ever since."
_______________

The video and the talk in text form can be found here.

END OF POST.

Precious: a film about the life of a young woman in U.S. patriarchy and urban poverty

Above: an image from the movie Precious: Based on the novel "Push" by Sapphire, with Gabourey Sidibe in the title role, opens Friday in selected cities.

This is but one of the perennial problems about gender and race in the U.R.A., the United Rapes of Amerikkka: how do structurally social dominants view the oppressed--through what lenses, in the context of which distorting and destructive institutions, with what values learned from where?

Then there is the dominants' means of communication: the mass media, which only ever allows some stories to be told. For more on this see here.

With all of this in mind, a white man, A. O. Scott, tries to make sense of a movie about an experience he has never known. What does he do with this? What sense does he make of it? Does he see this as a story primarily about race? If so, why? About gender? If not, why not? About poverty?

Some of the comments on the NYT page, online, speak to his particular perceptions and to other experiences. As someone who comes from a white family which has known and still knows what rural poverty is like, for me, Precious Jones' story is one of living through corporate capitalism's cruel form of urban poverty in a context of white male supremacy, discrimination based on size, appearance, and age, and rampant heterosexism. Click here and scroll down for those.

Read on...

Source:
New York Times
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Movies

Movie Review
Precious (2010)
NYT Critics' Pick
This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.

Precious: Based on the novel "Push" by Sapphire, with Gabourey Sidibe in the title role, opens Friday in selected cities.
November 6, 2009
Howls of a Life, Buried Deep Within
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: November 6, 2009

Claireece Jones, the Harlem teenager at the center of “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” lives in a world of specific and overwhelming horror. She goes by her middle name, Precious, which seems like a cruel taunt, since nearly everyone around her thinks she’s worthless and lets her know it.

Precious’s mother, Mary, played with operatic fervor by the comedian Mo’Nique, dispenses a daily ration of humiliation and abuse. The constant verbal and physical violence she directs at her daughter would be shocking even without the monstrous crime that hangs over their dim, dirty apartment like a cloud. Precious, overweight and illiterate — and played by an extraordinarily poised first-time actress named Gabourey Sidibe — has a young daughter and is pregnant for a second time. The father in both cases, who is nowhere to be seen, is Precious’s father too.

This information is bluntly presented at the beginning of Sapphire’s 1996 novel, a first-person narrative composed in rough, stylized dialect. In Lee Daniels’s risky, remarkable film adaptation, written by Geoffrey Fletcher, the facts of Precious’s life are also laid out with unsparing force (though not in overly graphic detail). But just as “Push” achieves an eloquence that makes it far more than a fictional diary of extreme dysfunction, so too does “Precious” avoid the traps of well-meaning, preachy lower-depths realism. It howls and stammers, but it also sings.

Mr. Daniels, directing his second feature (after the vivid and eccentric “Shadowboxer”), is not afraid to mix styles and genres. In his determination to do justice to Claireece’s inner life, as well as to her circumstances, he allows splashes of fantasy, daubs of humor and floods of unabashed melodrama into the drab landscape of her struggle. Ugliness is all around her, but beauty is there too.

There is something almost reckless about this filmmaker’s eclecticism, which extends from the casting — pop stars and television personalities alongside trained and untrained actors — to the visual textures and the soundtrack music. “Precious” is a hybrid, a mash-up that might have been ungainly, but that manages to be graceful instead. It’s partly a bootstrap drama of resilience and redemption, complete with a hardworking teacher (Paula Patton) wrangling a classroom full of disadvantaged girls. It’s also the nearly Gothic story of a child tormented by the cruelty of adults, as lurid as a Victorian potboiler or a modern-day tell-all memoir.

Above all “Precious” is unabashedly populist in its potent emotional appeal — not for nothing did Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey sign on as executive producers around the time of the film’s debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January — and at the same time determined to challenge its audience’s complacency as only a genuine work of art can.

Mary, brimming with rage, thwarted love and plain meanness, is a character bound to provoke discomfort. Even otherwise misogynistic hip-hop artists will pay tribute to the heroism of African-American mothers, and to see that piety so thoroughly dispensed with is downright shocking.

Other provocations are more subtle but no less pointed. There are virtually no men in this movie. Precious’s father is glimpsed briefly in flashbacks of his assaults on her, and in the fantasy sequences that provide escape from her pain Precious hobnobs with handsome boys, but otherwise the only male character of significance is a hospital worker played by Lenny Kravitz. Otherwise, Precious’s cosmos, for better and for worse, is a universe of women: the social worker (Mariah Carey, scrubbed of any vestige of divahood); the teacher, Ms. Rain; her co-worker in the remedial education program, played by the comedian and talk show host Sherri Shepherd; and Precious’s fellow students.

These characters all can be seen as surrogate mothers, aunts and sisters, who together provide Precious with a more functional family (to say the least) than what she has at home. But their love is also enabled by institutions and government policies. An unstated but self-evident moral of “Precious,” set during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and based on a book published in the year of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, is that government can provide not only a safety net, but also, in small and consequential ways, a lifeline.

I will leave it for others to parse the truth or the timeliness of this message. But “Precious” is, in any case, less the examination of a social problem than the illumination of an individual’s painful and partial self-realization. Inarticulate and emotionally shut down, her massive body at once a prison and a hiding place, Precious is also perceptive and shrewd, possessed of talents visible only to those who bother to look. At its plainest and most persuasive, her story is that of a writer discovering a voice. “These people talked like TV stations I didn’t even watch,” she remarks of Ms. Rain and her lover (Kimberly Russell), displaying her awakening literary intelligence even as she marvels at the discovery of her ignorance.

And Ms. Sidibe, perhaps the least-known member of this movie’s unusual cast, is also the glue that holds it together. Nimble and self-assured as Mr. Daniels’s direction may be, he could not make you believe in “Precious” unless you were able to believe in Precious herself. You will.

“Precious” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has frank depictions of emotional and physical violence, including the sexual abuse of a child.

PRECIOUS

Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire

Opens on Friday in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta.

Directed by Lee Daniels; written by Geoffrey Fletcher, based on the novel “Push” by Sapphire; director of photography, Andrew Dunn; edited by Joe Klotz; music by Mario Grigorov; production designer, Roshelle Berliner; produced by Mr. Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness and Gary Magness; released by Lionsgate. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes.

WITH: Mo’Nique (Mary), Paula Patton (Ms. Rain), Maria Carey (Ms. Weiss), Sherri Shepherd (Cornrows), Lenny Kravitz (Nurse John), Kimberly Russell (Katherine) and Gabourey Sidibe (Precious).

END OF POST.

A respose to nmbr, a member of reddit.com's men's rights group

Hello nmbr.

As I note in the post that you commented to, I apologise for your comment getting buried among others, but did want you to know that I have thoroughly replied to you.

For that reply, in many parts, go here.

You are welcome to reply.

Peace.

Julian

END OF POST.

Photograph of Julian Real finally revealed on reddit.com

MRA antihostile wrote:
"Just in case anybody was wondering, here is a picture of Julian Real."

Yes. Above is a photo of me that was recently linked to on reddit.com. It was taken last week actually; the hair looks better now--I sure was upset about the haircut for an hour or two, as you can see! (Sometimes it just takes a good cleansing cry to get over something, you know?)

Also from the same reddit.com page is this, by "a person" (<--allegedly) who goes by the screenname of ObidiahStane, aka Ironmonger, aka "spaceball" writes about me: "I wonder how he wants to go. Firing squad or beaten to death. I volunteer for either one, so long as I get to see the faggy male feminist cry."

Geesh, Obidiah, like the photo isn't sufficient??

(How much do we have to give to men emotionally, before it's enough!?)

Oh, and just so you know what Obidiah Stane looks like, he's clearly got some vulnerability issues, unlike me up there, who is human and unmachine-like enough to cry.

Click on this link for the Obidiah Stane photo, and notice that on the same page are some of his favorite boy-toys.

END OF POST.