Saturday, July 31, 2010

Genocidal Surgical Rape: The Truth about Forcibly Sterilizing American Indian Women. Also: Information on The Event Commemorating The 40th Anniversary Of The Indigenous Takeover of Mount Rushmore

image, without the words in red, is from here
 AGAINST AMERICAN INDIAN WOMEN'S BODIES AND LAND

STOP GENOCIDAL SURGICAL RAPE COMMITTED BY WHITE MALE DOCTORS WITH KNIVES AND A LICENSE TO PRACTICE THE WHITE MAN'S ATROCITY

Whether it's carving into women's bodies or into the Earth, the White Man finds ways to do his permanent damage without any regard for human life (women's) or sacred Indigenous ground across the U.S. that was stolen. Forty years ago towards the end of this summer Indigenous people took a stand to reclaim what the White Man named Mt. Rushmore, but which is really the Paha Sapa.

Imagine, if you're a white man, someone carving the face of your family's murderer into your flesh, as a reminder of the atrocity and to arrogantly declare "I was here". And now consider Mount Rushmore to be exactly that, except the carving was done in sacred land instead of one human being's flesh.

Next, if you're a white het man, consider how it would feel to be forcibly sterilised. Doctors welcome you into a room and when you wake up you've had your body cut into and your reproductive options taken from you. That these things happen to people who are not men and are not white is why they happen at all. How many American Indians do you think could get away with systematically and forcibly sterilising white men and be allowed to continue to do the procedure, even after it was reported?

Consider that genocide is accomplished in part by making it impossible for oppressed people to have their own children if they wish to, by cutting into the bodies of women without their permission and ending their ability to control their own reproductive choices. The history of the U.S. is to violate the Earth and to violate women of all colors. The White Man does both savagely, barbarically, with no accountability or justice for the lives and the Life that is harmed.

While many American Indian women are harmed, they also resist white male supremacist violence and atrocity: gynocidal, genocidal, and ecocidal to be sure. To all white men: what are you doing to support their resistance efforts? What are you doing to make surgical sterilisation illegal and criminally prosecuted and to make sure the license to practice atrocity is taken away from these savage white men?

What appears next also appears below, in the main body of the post, but I wanted to highlight this atrocity, this form of genocidal rape, because it gets so little attention in dominant media and no white man I know is organising to stop this:
40-50% of All Indian Women have been Sterilized. Evidence of massive sterilization of American Indians has been revealed by the (GAO) General Accounting Office in a study for ex-Senator James Abourezk from South Dakota in 1976. Most of these women were sterilized without their informed consent. The Same GOA Report also revealed that Indian Children are being used as "human guinea pigs," by the Federal Government in 56 different medical experiments (in most cases without parental consent). The Abourezk Report found that approximately 3,406 Indian Women had been sterilized in a three year period between 1973 and 1976, in only four states. Lehman L. Brightman, President of United Native Americans,Inc. estimates that between 60,000 and 70,000 Indian Women have been sterilized in the last twelve years. Most of the Indian Women were sterilized "unknowingly" and without their informed consent, and in many cases by outright intimidation. In many cases women were told they were going to die if they had more children, that they had cysts on their ovaries, or that the operation was reversible. Voluntary sterilization among the general population of the U.S. of some 200 million people isn't going to wipe out the country, but in smaller groups like the American Indians, it could wipe them out forever, as an example: If Every white woman in the state of California was sterilized, the white race in North America would not be in danger, but if every California Indian Women was sterilized, the Genocide of California Indians would be Permanent. President Carter has Refused on 3 different occasions to stop the sterilization and to remove Dr. Emery Johnson, the Director of the Indian Health Service. . .The man most responsible for Indian Sterilization.
From Censored News, with thanks to Brenda. Please click on the title just below to link back.

40th Anniversary Commemorating the Takeover of Mount Rushmore

40th Anniversary Commemorating The Takeover of Mount Rushmore
August 29, 2010, 6 to 10 pm
Location Mount Rushmore National Memorial
13000 Hwy 244 Bldg 31 Suite 1

Created By United Native Americans, Inc, A Gay Kingman

We Invite You To Both Attend and Participate In Our Upcoming Tribal Sovereignty Forum at Mount Rushmore.

This Coming August 29, 2010 will mark the 40th Anniversary of the historic Reclaiming of Our Sacred Paha Sapa (Black Hills of 1970). On this day, we will gather at the Amphitheater at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, South Dakota to reflect upon the 1970 occupation in a spiritual way, to renewing friendships and... bonds formed at that time. We come to pray, to educate The Youth about the Importance of Protecting Our Sacred Sites, and to use this opportunity for our people to be near the place of our origin, the Paha Sapa.

Additionally, we hope to coordinate Tribal Leaders who will discuss the needs of our People and move forward with real resolutions to The Issues Each Reservation Has. Such as Better Health Care on Our Reservations, Schools and Colleges, Red Road Teachings, Language Preservation, Suicide Prevention, Treaty Rights, Tribal Police Force, Water Preservation, Better Housing, Renewable energy's. Traditional dancers and Drums are Welcome to participate.

Confirmed to speak:

*Lehman L. Brightman-President of UNA-Leader of The Take Over of Mount Rushmore 1970.
*A.Gay Kingman-Executive Director of The Great Plains Tribal Chairman's Association.
*Richie Richards-UC Berkeley
*Paul Robertson-Oglala Lakota College
*Barbara Elk-Writer, Poet
*Kiera-Dawn Kolson-singer,songwriter,motivational speaker

We are extending open invitations to the Inter-Tribal Community and their families to join us, in this historic and educational event. Please RSVP at (605) 484-3036 or (510)672-7187

Our Event Is 100% Free. But, Persons Driving to and from Our Event Must Pay For Parking. There will be a car pool from the Mother Butler Community Center to Mt.Rushmore. For those who wish to car pool you can contact:

Les Old Lodge: (605)491-0651 or lesoldlodge@gmail.com
Parking Fee:
$10.00 - Annual Pass (Cars,Motorcycles and RV's)
$50.00 Commercial Bus - Day

Also there will be a community feed, for those of you who would like to donate food please contact:
Christy Ryan:(605)431-6358 or Cjryan07@yahoo.com

For More Information On How To Donate, Sponsor, Present a Work Shop and or Be a Participate.

Please Contact:
A. Gay Kingman, M.Ed. Executive Director
Member, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe
Great Plains Tribal Chairman's Association
1926 Stirling St., Rapid City, SD 57702
Cell: (605)-484-3036 Fax: (605)-343-3074
E-mail: KingmanWapato@rushmore.com

or
Quanah Parker Brightman
VP of United Native Americans, Inc., 2434 Faria Ave, Pinole, CA 94564, Cell: (510)-672-7187
qbrightman75@hotmail.com
Professor Lehman L. Brightman-National President of U.N.A. Speech on the Capital Steps in Washington D.C. at the conclusion of the Longest Walk 1978

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o86w-erjlgQ
Historical Overview & Resolutions

1978: Eleven legislative bills introduced in the 95th U.S. Congress would have abrogated Native Treaties that protect remaining Native sovereignty. The Longest Walk of 1978 was a peaceful, spiritual effort to educate the public about Native American rights and the Native way of life. Native American Treaty Rights under the U.S. Constitution are to be honored as the supreme law of the land. The 3,600 mile walk was successful in its purpose: to gather enough support to halt proposed legislation abrogating Indian treaties with the U.S. government. Shortly After, The American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) of 1978 was passed. As a result of The 1978 Longest Walk, Indigenous people were granted the federal legislative right to freedom of religion, a fundamental right guaranteed to all Americans under the U.S. Constitution.

40-50% of All Indian Women have been Sterilized. Evidence of massive sterilization of American Indians has been revealed by the (GAO) General Accounting Office in a study for ex-Senator James Abourezk from South Dakota in 1976. Most of these women were sterilized without their informed consent. The Same GOA Report also revealed that Indian Children are being used as "human guinea pigs," by the Federal Government in 56 different medical experiments (in most cases without parental consent). The Abourezk Report found that approximately 3,406 Indian Women had been sterilized in a three year period between 1973 and 1976, in only four states. Lehman L. Brightman, President of United Native Americans,Inc. estimates that between 60,000 and 70,000 Indian Women have been sterilized in the last twelve years. Most of the Indian Women were sterilized "unknowingly" and without their informed consent, and in many cases by outright intimidation. In many cases women were told they were going to die if they had more children, that they had cysts on their ovaries, or that the operation was reversible. Voluntary sterilization among the general population of the U.S. of some 200 million people isn't going to wipe out the country, but in smaller groups like the American Indians, it could wipe them out forever, as an example: If Every white woman in the state of California was sterilized, the white race in North America would not be in danger, but if every California Indian Women was sterilized, the Genocide of California Indians would be Permanent. President Carter has Refused on 3 different occasions to stop the sterilization and to remove Dr. Emery Johnson, the Director of the Indian Health Service. . .The man most responsible for Indian Sterilization.

For More of The REAL History on the Longest Walk of 1978 Visit: http://www.myspace.com/thelongestwalk30yearanniv
United Native Americans, Inc.

[Original site posting was done by Brenda Norrell.]

The Brilliant Radical Feminist Dr. Vandana Shiva--philosopher, ecologist, scientist, and women's rights and environmental activist--on Sustainable Living (video)

Dr. Vandana Shiva is the author of many books, the latest of which is Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis. After the video and the caption-paragraph about it, please read the review of Soil Not Oil, which closes out this post.

For a view of her extremely important books, on Amazon.com, please visit here.

What follows next is from here at Vimeo.


Vandana Shiva on Sustainable Living from TV Multiversity on Vimeo.

Lecture given at Michigan State University on 07 April 2005. Vandana Shiva won the Right Livelihood award in 1993 and is an India based activist working for food, seed and knowledge sovereignty. Her books include 'Monocultures of the Mind' (1993) and 'Biopiracy' (1997). This video is a Media Mouse production.

*          *          *
From *here* at Amazon.com:

The World is Not "Phat"

SIDDHARTHA R. OZA and RAJESH C. OZA

Four years ago, Tom Friedman celebrated globalization with his best-selling "The World is Flat." While seeming to upend the status quo (after all, the world is round), Friedman emphasized the importance of multinational companies and their market-based economics. Indeed, he updated his Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention ("people in McDonald's countries didn't like to fight wars anymore") to a high-tech "Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention" ("global supply chains in the flat world are an even greater restraint on geopolitical adventurism"). Last year, in "Hot, Flat, and Crowded," Friedman acknowledged the problems of global warming, rising expectations, and population growth, but he continued to promote the free market, causing us to recall Einstein's quote: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

An antidote to this monocultural thinking is Vandana Shiva's "Soil Not Oil," a little book that questions conventional wisdom and demands environmental justice. Whereas Friedman views globalization as an ameliorative process, one that makes life less Hobbesian--less "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"--Shiva is a realistic utilitarian who believes the globalized world is not "phat," not at all cool: not only is the earth heating up due to careless fossil-fuel addiction, but this addiction has also exacerbated the inequity between the haves and the have-nots.

Shiva is a scientist, activist, feminist, philosopher, and community organizer who champions the rights of those whose lives are nasty, brutish, and short--those without a seat in corporate boardrooms. The seat-less include the billions who go hungry every day, small-plot food producers who sustain themselves and their communities with local farming, the earth which organically provides this food, and future generations to whom we owe a healthy Gaia. The narrative which emerges in "Soil Not Oil" is of a world headed toward catastrophe. Food insecurity, peak oil prices, and climate change are the result of hubris, and because the lifestyle of global elites is neither scalable nor sustainable, cultures of violence will emerge locally and spread back to the center. For example, the automobile and highway culture of the West has found its way to India: "6 million people will die and 60 million will be injured over the next 10 years in developing countries, with India experiencing 30 percent of those accidents."

As the "landscape [is] transformed from being centered on the sacred cow to being centered on the sacred car," the earth is seen as a source of food for cars, not people. Shiva suggests that those with seats in big oil, big agriculture, and big automobile boardrooms have a vested interest in maintaining a centralized model which enables profitable economies of scale based on standardization. Even when they seem to promote change, they are offering "false solutions," as in the case of ethanol. Shiva argues that it takes 1.5 gallons of gasoline and 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol. Shiva's distress and disdain is palpable as she advocates change: "Agribusiness and the oil and auto industries ... will use the climate crisis they have created to increase their market opportunities, even if it comes at the expense of the starving poor and pushes the planet into climate disaster." Because the book was published before the current global financial meltdown, its author's impatience with the carbon-cum-capitalist world system feels prescient.

"Soil Not Oil" brings a revolutionary perspective to the debate on how best to address the concurrent food, oil, and climate crises; indeed, some might view Shiva's earth justice activism as a poster child for South End Press's "read, write, revolt" tagline. This activism pushes for grass-roots change: local agriculture, and independence from big corporations. Readers looking for a balanced assessment of soil and oil should look elsewhere; Shiva (who uses contemptuous phrases such as "corporate dictatorship" and "food fascism") is either unable or unwilling to concede that corporate innovation has improved our standard of living through advances in healthcare, nutrition, education, transportation, communication, and entertainment. Perhaps because of this imbalance, the reader is required to re-think who the "our" is in "our standard of living." For example, although the Green Revolution introduced drought-resistant and pest-resistant high-yield-variety seeds which have mitigated starvation in South Asia, it also has been inextricably linked to a business model that benefits oil and agriculture oligopolies. Shiva's belief in bottom-up change reflects a faith in individuals to be the change they wish to see, rather than continuing the top-down structure that enables us to maintain our Anglo-American standard of living.

In many ways, Shiva is one of Gandhi's modern-day apostles of satyagraha. Like the Mahatma, she holds fast to the truth as she sees it: championing the village scale rather than the global, embracing the time-tested elegance of simplicity, and encouraging nonviolence. Over the past two decades, she has established in India an organic-farming movement called "Navdanya." This movement is based on two principles of Earth Democracy: diversity and decentralization. The diverse seeds allow the farmers to be independent of corporations which have built profitable businesses from non-renewable seeds. And local production reduces the carbon footprint of food production and consumption. A compelling common-sense argument is made for this model, which grows more food and provides higher incomes to farmers. We suspect that Shiva would agree with Einstein that "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius--and a lot of courage--to move in the opposite direction."

Will the Actual Buttman Please Stand Up? No, really: there's this one white het dude, San Fernando Curt, who doesn't think ANY straight men get off to misogynist pornography! (Proof here.)

What follows is from here at TPM. It is being reproduced here for non-profit, political discussion purposes only. This is the author of the article that follows. And after that is me taking him to task for his silliness and stupidity.

San Fernando Curt

user-pic

Following:
Followers: 46

Posts
Comments & Recommends



  • Location North Hollywood, CA
  • Party Democratic
  • Politics Neo-Realist

Porncone
July 30, 2010, 5:42PM

OK, folks, we can wrap up the vigil: Buttman walked.

I know some of you dreary wags out there are ignoring our government and media protests that there's nothing new in the WikiLeaks documents. That they're as interesting as plastic spoons, revelatory as barking spiders and profound as Snooki. Yeah... some of you have gone right ahead and dove in to discover silly stuff like Task Force 373, our super-secret targeted-assasination squad - and its nasty habit of shooting the shit out of anything that doesn't look Taliban, including innocent children and various barnyard animals in Afghanistan.
In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.
But enough of this trivial nonsense. We know what the real story is: Obscenity charges against John A. "Buttman" Stagliano have been thrown out by a District Court Judge in Washington DC.
Stagliano, a married father nicknamed "Buttman," is known for pushing the edge of industry standards in his depiction of fetishes, and the video scenes selected by the government for prosecution involved urination, use of enemas and bondage.
In the first porn-related case tried in the nation's capital since the mid-'80s, the Van Nuys (where else?) producer faced a sentence of up to 32 years if things didn't break his way. But since the judge rebuked the Justice Department special anti-nookie squad for failng even to define the crimes Stagliano supposedly broke, this could be the swan song of Bush-era moves to put porn prosecutions back on the front burner. Also, it's probably a blow (so to speak) for that weird consortium of radical feminists and Christian fundamentalists who wanted dirty pictures stricken everywhere as indecent! Even... knavish!!!

Few of the rest of us give a damn.

There are ideas, once popular and prevalent, that are now obsolete, unfashionable "dead horses" we still pointlessly kick. Racial superiority is one of these. Any white person above the age of, say, eight knows white people are superior to nothing. The feeble-minded antics of too many friends, embarrassing relatives, and our own misshapen pasts convince us by adulthood that we honkies are but commonplace among the human species.

Then there are ideas - theories, if you will - that can only be called "zomboids". These are scholarly proposals and popular fairy tales that either are disproven or never validated yet return from the Dead Zone of dumb assumptions to totter about in tiresome replay.

And that brings us back to the case in point: That much-proffered, never-proven feminist theory that pornography is a threat as great as nuclear weapons and dengue fever to our healthy human commonweal. According to the corkscrew logic of this dim brainstorm, porn takes normal, happy, sexually repressed men and turns them into raving BONIACS! They hanker only for cootie! They lust for anything pink!

This somewhat insulting proposal, which galvanized that strange Right-Libber alliance decades ago, holds that any man is a potential rapist, that beneath the calm exterior of nerdy khakis and short-sheeve seersucker lurks highly stimulated lunatics on the hunt for sexual prey. All they need are the hot buttons of full-color, two-panel twat shots to set off monstrously horney fission.

In case you thought this crusade went the way of Kalso Earth Shoes and lava lamps, think again. A Boston professor and veteran of those long-ago windmill tilts, Gail Dines, has come up with a new book to pump some fresh blood back in an old nag.
"Pornography today is not your father's Playboy,'' says Dines, 51, a Wheelock College professor of sociology and women's studies. "It's hard-core, cruel, and brutal. So you're bringing up a generation of boys who are more cruel, bored, and desensitized.''
She's doing the motel/scrambled eggs tour for her new "Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality'', which makes the specious case that this new, ugly stuff risks nurturing millions of future predators. The thesis, simply put, is that any ambulatory, air-breathing male is a de facto attacker already; he's only waiting for an opportunity to drop his drawers and commit serious felony. Porn lurks ever-ready to push him to his erectile brink. It's a case of academia and the media taking itself a little too seriously, assuming perversion of their magical crafts can mesmerize the public to deviant action. Whew! Evidently there's wondrous alchemy in all that turgid prose and badly photographed asscracks.

If all this sounds familiar, it should. We've heard it all before - from Dines, in fact. Seems she was feverishly publishing anti-porn diatribe back in the '70s and '80s. As with this new book, her case always has rested on anecdotal evidence, urban legend and not a speck of scienfitic research or credible statistics. There is nothing to support her contention that many men are aroused by degrading porn. Or, get this, that they hate women. Nothing at all. In an earlier interview she said, "Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy. In nothing else is their hatred of us quite as clear." Ah... patriarchy. I knew that old chestnut would be lurking somewhere. Daddy did it. Daddy's a big penis-Nazi! Smash his capitalism and Western civilization! EVIL!

I suspect "their hatred..." means, for Dines, "men's hatred". All men. Everywhere.

Self-described on her website as "scholar, activist and social critic", Dines has worked with and has been annointed successor to the late Andrea Dworkin, the great, chronically angry, overstuffed couch of a woman who was a pioneer of the anti-porn movement.

That tells me juuust about what I need to know. And it's time from some, uh, deconstruction of this particular oeuvre.

Andrea Dworkin was an unhappy, mentally unstable, thoroughly untrustworthy fanatic who hated men. Dines, obviously, is more than suited to step into Dworkin's self-assigned role as the "world's leading anti-pornography campaigner." Their's is the kind of thinking that cooked up, out of thin air, the ugly fabrication that men commit sexual abuse of women and children as commonly as we wear shoes. That never-walked-back lie has destroyed families and ruined lives. It lives today, since unquestioned infamy has the veneer of truth. And, God knows, our media and academia never has doubted this crap. It's absolutely convincing simply because it's trash spouted by the RIGHT people.

Obviously, as a heterosexual male, it's not in my best interest to support a revival of this tripe. Dines is a product of a world long ago, when dogmatic bullies hustled their way into academia and bit off press attention by combining loud overstatement, pure obnoxiousness and fake "scholarship".

Even with the milk enemas, I prefer Buttman, any day.



Julian's reply:

Does internet media need to be accurate, or just play up the same old politically correct tropes over and over and over again?

I'm not seeing much above that hasn't been filtered through a truly astoundingly inane mass media lens; that concerns me only because if news, including political and cultural commentary and analysis, isn't anything but what conservative-liberal (no meaningful difference any more) corporate media sells us, what do we really know about anything? I'll cite a few examples of this problem from your post here.

I know some of you dreary wags out there are ignoring our government and media protests that there's nothing new in the WikiLeaks documents.


Except that is does back up our arguments that the U.S. government is in the war business, and not in the business of promoting democracy anywhere, including in the U.S. That our government sees it as a right to go abroad, illegally invading countries, raping women and bombing children, and mass murdering non-combatants, out to be a source of outrage, not apathy.

The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.

One might even be tempted to actually listen to what Malalai Joya has to say about the U.S. "protecting women in Afghanistan" as she is, well, a woman who has been living in Afghanistan. And she wants the U.S. out, and CNN won't let you that, unless you catch the British feed of CNN, that is.

that weird consortium of radical feminists and Christian fundamentalists who wanted dirty pictures stricken everywhere as indecent!

So where did you get that assessment of alleged alliance? From what faulty, very intellectually and factually flawed academic book? Because it's one of those lies that just flies around and around without anyone really caring to know the truth about it.

There are ideas, once popular and prevalent, that are now obsolete, unfashionable "dead horses" we still pointlessly kick. Racial superiority is one of these. Any white person above the age of, say, eight knows white people are superior to nothing. The feeble-minded antics of too many friends, embarrassing relatives, and our own misshapen pasts convince us by adulthood that we honkies are but commonplace among the human species.

And yet, the laws in Arizona, which may or may not remain in tact, do reinforce white supremacy in the U.S., so for you discussing racial superiority may be passe, but for people of color in the U.S. it's, how to put it, a "hot topic".

Then there are ideas - theories, if you will - that can only be called "zomboids". These are scholarly proposals and popular fairy tales that either are disproven or never validated yet return from the Dead Zone of dumb assumptions to totter about in tiresome replay.

Such as radical feminists were, in any meaningful, effective, or systematic way, working with the Christian Right-wing? Or that radical feminists are "crazy"? Those kind of "zomboidal" observations that are never proven or validated? Is that the Dead Zone of dumb assumptions you are speaking about?

That much-proffered, never-proven feminist theory that pornography is a threat as great as nuclear weapons and dengue fever to our healthy human commonweal.


That's not been the theory, ever. So you're just making this up, aren't you? How zomboidal of you. The theory, which you obviously didn't fact-check before writing this Dead Zone material, was that males are not born misogynists, just like so-called whites are not born racists. Misogyny and racism are learned, and culture is a teacher. That's pretty basic stuff. Is that really too controversial for you to identify as coming from years of feminist theory and sociological analysis?

This somewhat insulting proposal, which galvanized that strange Right-Libber alliance decades ago, holds that any man is a potential rapist, that beneath the calm exterior of nerdy khakis and short-sheeve seersucker lurks highly stimulated lunatics on the hunt for sexual prey. All they need are the hot buttons of full-color, two-panel twat shots to set off monstrously horney fission.


You enjoy your writing, don't you? Well, at least it's sort of witty. Never mind if it reflects anything non-zomboidal, eh?

A Boston professor and veteran of those long-ago windmill tilts, Gail Dines, has come up with a new book to pump some fresh blood back in an old nag.

Old nags like pretending the Religious Right and radical feminists were shacking up? You've got that one on an IV drip, don't you? Have you found a pulse yet?

"Pornography today is not your father's Playboy,'' says Dines, 51, a Wheelock College professor of sociology and women's studies. "It's hard-core, cruel, and brutal. So you're bringing up a generation of boys who are more cruel, bored, and desensitized.''

She's doing the motel/scrambled eggs tour for her new "Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality'', which makes the specious case that this new, ugly stuff risks nurturing millions of future predators. The thesis, simply put, is that any ambulatory, air-breathing male is a de facto attacker already; he's only waiting for an opportunity to drop his drawers and commit serious felony. Porn lurks ever-ready to push him to his erectile brink.


Uhhh, no. Can't you even accurately interpret quotes you put in your own post? Seriously. THAT'S sad, man. Damn sad.

What she's saying is that culture is part of what socialises us. You know, that same theory from before that has been shown to be accurate--like, say, that my cousin's son watched Top Gun and from that moment on decide--with no military folks in our family--that he'd go into the Navy to gleefully kill those foreign people of color? And that his dad's affection for strip clubs has infused in him a sense that "going to strip clubs" is cool, and he and his dad go, together. And that his dad, before he was born, was a Hustler magazine subscriber, and his wife (my cousin) had to ask him to please stop subscribing because they had three growing sons. And so my cousin's son is into calling women wh*res and using women as if they actually were wh*res. You don't see any analysis there that my cousin's son was "born that way" do you?

It's a case of academia and the media taking itself a little too seriously, assuming perversion of their magical crafts can mesmerize the public to deviant action.

Deviant action like not being able to analyse a quote that's pretty straight-forward in its meaning, because you've got some tired old nag of a theory you can't let go of, that's wrong?

If all this sounds familiar, it should. We've heard it all before - from Dines, in fact. Seems she was feverishly publishing anti-porn diatribe back in the '70s and '80s.

Nothing you've read, apparently. Or, well, comprehended without the Misogynist Mass Media and McAdemic Cliff Notes.

As with this new book, her case always has rested on anecdotal evidence, urban legend and not a speck of scienfitic research or credible statistics.

Like, say, what millions of people experience. Because those millions weren't in a lab, right?

There is nothing to support her contention that many men are aroused by degrading porn.


Are you kidding? You're actually stating--seriously--that men don't masturbate to men ejaculating on women's faces? Really? You're actually saying gonzo porn isn't selling well? Really? And that men go limp watching it? Really?

Or, get this, that they hate women.

No, because, pssst: there's no such thing as misogyny! That's something those feminists made up so they'd have stuff to write about. Yeah, about that. About the women who leave men and then are murdered--3000 a year in the U.S.: as many as the number of people killed by the Taliban on 9/11/2001. Yet there's no "terrorism" when men do it to women, is there? Nope. None at all. (Never mind that the women were terrified when the guy shows up with the gun. Never mind that a medical assistant I knew is dead because she rejected and walked out on a man, who, apparently, according to your theory, was what? Not misogynistic?) What do you call what Mel Gibson spews? Woman-loving cooing?

In an earlier interview she said, "Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy. In nothing else is their hatred of us quite as clear." Ah... patriarchy. I knew that old chestnut would be lurking somewhere.

Because you live in a matriarchy? Since when? Either men (and white men at that) rule every significant social, religious, economic, and political institution in U.S. society or they don't. Hold on... I'm going outside to check... Yup--men still rule them. Sorry to put a crack in your chestnut. (Well, yes, Black women do have a significant role in the Black church. I'll give you that. Funny, though, how men won't let those women be the preachers, isn't it?)

Daddy did it. Daddy's a big penis-Nazi! Smash his capitalism and Western civilization! EVIL!

Calm down. Take a breath--you're getting a little too worked up here. When we speak of "patriarchy" we're speaking of "a male-dominated society", yes? You grasp that, right? We're not talking about "daddy", so climb down off your Freudian dead horse please.

I suspect "their hatred..." means, for Dines, "men's hatred". All men. Everywhere.


You know what it does when you "Assume" right: it makes an ASS out of you and me. Or, in this case, out of you and you. Where does Dines say or write that? Hold on... lemme check... Oh, nowhere! So you like pulling stuff out of your *ss, don't you? Which brings this full circle, in a jerky sort of way.

Self-described on her website as "scholar, activist and social critic",

As opposed to, say, actually being a scholar, activist, and social critic? What parts of those descriptors seem especially "off" to you? Do you get, yet, how silly you're being here? And, well, kind of sexist, to be honest. I mean why do you need to question her credentials, white straight man? You appear to be taking advantage of those social entitlements to put down women and make them seem like idiots. What's that called??? Ah, yes: sexism. What are your credentials for dismissing her? Is it that you know your audience has also been well-trained by mass media, and hasn't read anything carefully that feminists have written?

Dines has worked with and has been annointed successor to the late Andrea Dworkin, the great, chronically angry, overstuffed couch of a woman who was a pioneer of the anti-porn movement.

Wow. You're respect for dead human rights activists--hmmm, again, a woman you're disrespecting because of her weight--isn't that, um, well, your sexism showing? Chronically angry? As opposed to you, who are not chronically angry? I mean, seriously: who isn't chronically angry? Only the brain-dead. And, Andrea Dworkin was far more of a scholar than you'd ever hope to be. Have you checked the books she read, which she listed in the backs of most of her books? I'm guessing now, but I'll wait for your reply. Have you seen the scholarship in her book Scapegoat? Have you studied the Nazi Holocaust, in which she lost family, as much as she did? I'm guessing not. Or the history of Israel? Have you traveled the world to listen to what women around the world have to say, honestly, about their experiences of their particular "patriarchies" (which doesn't mean "daddies" remember)? I'm guessing not. But you tell me.

That tells me juuust about what I need to know.


You parroting mass media BS tells you just about what you need to know. Don't you see: that's the problem.

And it's time from some, uh, deconstruction of this particular oeuvre.


Okay, so now that you're hauling out the fifty-cent words, I'm assuming you might have something accurate and non-sexist to say. But we know what happens when someone "assumes"...

Andrea Dworkin was an unhappy,

Not especially. She enjoyed laughing a lot, actually, and anyone who knew her says that about her. She had a great sense of humor, which you'd know if you knew her or, well, didn't parrot what antifeminists have said about her.

mentally unstable,
Nope. Wrong again. You're not demonstrating a high aptitude at "personality assessment" skills. But your sexist Dead Zone tropes are stunning. (You're welcome.)

thoroughly untrustworthy fanatic who hated men.


You mean the woman who has written about loving her father, a father who supported her intellectually? Or do you mean the woman who loved her brother and nephew? (Photographic and written evidence exists.) Or, do you mean the man she loved and lived with for thirty years? You mean she hated those men? Or are you saying that if she demonstrated that she loved men, that means she hated all men? Please clarify, because, once again, all you're doing is parroting antifeminist/anti-Dworkin tropes, that you know nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand you'll get away with, with people actually think you're being intelligent and not at all sexist, or, misogynistic.

and Dines, obviously, is more than suited to step into Dworkin's self-assigned role as the "world's leading anti-pornography campaigner."


Dworkin wasn't just an anti-pornography activist. She was also against fascism and white supremacy, quite explicitly in those things she wrote--what do you call them, again: ah, yes: each and every one of her dozen or so books (which you obviously haven't read--like her analysis of Right-wing women, in which she makes it explicitly clear she isn't Right-wing, as if her past, protesting the Vietnam war, prison abuse, and fascism, and being pro-abortion and pro-lesbianism wasn't evidence enough). You must hate it when your didactic diatribes get interrupted with things like verifiable facts and truth.

Their's is the kind of thinking that cooked up, out of thin air, the ugly fabrication


Wait. Are you speaking here of your sexist mischaracterisation of the dead feminist? Or your micharacterisation of feminist theories on pornography's relationship to racism and misogyny? (Have you been online lately, looking at pornography? What of it do you see that isn't misogynistic and racist? Just curious.)

that men commit sexual abuse of women and children as commonly as we wear shoes.

And that would be something no one but you and other zomboids has written and passed off as "verifiable". I challenge you to cite one sentence where the living feminist Gail Dines says that. She hasn't written nearly as much as Andrea Dworkin did, so this won't be difficult for you. You do read books, don't you? Dines is the person you're going out of your way to demean, disrespect, and dismiss, isn't she?

That never-walked-back lie has destroyed families and ruined lives.

You mean the one that men promote that there's no such thing as patriarchy? That never-walked-back lie that destroys families, friendships, ruins lives, and is part and parcel of wars the U.S. engages in?

It lives today, since unquestioned infamy has the veneer of truth. And, God knows, our media and academia never has doubted this crap.

This crap you're writing?

It's absolutely convincing simply because it's trash spouted by the RIGHT people.


Yes. That's so true of what you write. And so very sad.

Dines is a product of a world long ago, when dogmatic bullies hustled


Um, what do you consider Larry Flynt to be, who would demean feminists in his magazine routinely, in the name of "free speech" and all? Who would promote violence against women and child molestation in his magazine's cartoons, by one Dwaine Tinsley, who was found guilty of incesting his daughter, btw. See here for more on that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_the_Molester

So you're more concerned about "hustling bullies" like Dines than, say, corporate pimps and child molesters? That's some system of ethical triage you have going there, sir.

their way into academia and bit off press attention by combining loud overstatement, pure obnoxiousness and fake "scholarship".

You mean Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione, and Mr. Flynt? Or are you speaking here of Max Hardcore, known for filming his rapes of women and selling them. How obnoxious is that, to you?

So you haven't read Dines' work then. Because even on CNN, the white heterosexual male interviewer brought the stats to her about how pornography addiction is negatively impacting a HUGE number of heterosexual relationships. The rather decidedly liberal interviewer, John Roberts, gets it that some men prefer to have sex "alone" with pornography than with their actual sexual partners in the other room, wondering why they aren't joining them in bed. You call that knowledge "right wing" or even "feminist"? Hardly.

Would you call John Roberts any of the negative terms you've hurled here at Dworkin and Dines?

Posted by JulianReal
July 31, 2010 1:13 AM | Reply | Permalink

Friday, July 30, 2010

An Objective and Subjective Experience of The Gender Hierarchy, Gender Identity, and Radical Social Transformation, Part 1

image of two children playing jump rope is from here
SUMMARY ABOUT THIS POST:
This is a series of posts about the effects of promoting ideas and analyses of gender that are not explicitly connected to the reality of male supremacy. Part 1 discusses children, gender stereotypes, social stigma and status, the problem of turning complex social realities into binaries, and of pretending those binaries aren't enforced. Also, this post poses questions about how race, gender, and sexual orientation are conjoined. There are also photos of some guys I think are CUTE. 

The conclusion of the series of posts will, I hope, make the case that social justice movements dealing with gender (and race and class and sexual orientation) are strengthened by offering up an intersectional perspective and by not playing down the reality of male supremacy.

Is it important, when speaking about gender, to note that it exists to maintain male supremacy? Is gender always related to race? What about race to gender? Is interest in jumping rope a sign of one's race, gender, class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation? If yes, how? If no, why do some boys get made fun of for doing so in social spaces where girls also jump rope?

To approach this subject and these questions, I begin here: I am intergender, male-assigned and privileged, and white. (See the "About me" section of the blog, on the right side, along there somewhere above the never-ending list of websites of interest and blogs I link to for a link to what "intergender" can mean. It follows the quotes and recommended reading and has been recently revised.)

When I was a child, I didn't quite "get it" about their being only boys and girls and I sure didn't get it that there were *only* two races, although Three Dog Night tried to liberally convince me in songs like "Black and White". I knew there weren't just two classes either, but sometimes media made it sound like if you weren't rich you were poor, and if you weren't poor you were rich. I also didn't accept that there was only one "good" way to have a sexual identity, which was always an off-shoot of a gender identity--kind of like the gender identity was the prerequisite to having a sexual one. You have to want to believe that "sex" is only about gender to even "go there". I refuse to "go there".

I got that there were those two social categories, and I also got that I wasn't really either one of them. It gets tricky when trying to describe to you what I was. One could say I was "in between" being a boy and and a girl, but given how different boys are, amongst themselves, and how different and diverse girls are, amongst themselves, this doesn't really work for me as an adequate way to describe my experience. For example, I didn't live in a social space between a so-called "tom-boy" girl and a butch boy. Nor did I live in the middle of a continuum between polar ends of being a so-called femme girl and a femme boy. Or between being a butch girl and a femme boy. Or between a femme girl and a butch boy--however you understand such terms which are, of course, culturally, ethnically, regionally, and era-specific to be sure.

I liked spiders and snakes and toads and frogs and insects. (See, "spiders" are NOT insects, and I knew that when I was a child.) I like seeing birds and squirrels, not shooting them. My brother liked shooting them. I thought he was the anti-animals version of a sociopath. I liked playing with some dolls--not "baby dolls" but dolls like Barbie, but not Barbie herself, as she was too popular to hang out with people like me. I played with girls whatever girls liked to play, including card games, hand clapping/song games, and just talking about people. But if girls liked doing the things that boys traditionally or stereotypically liked to do, I didn't hang out with them. And the butch het boys--forget it. They were TOTAL losers. ;) I don't really mean that. They weren't total losers. They were the group that most put me down, though, and I learned to avoid them as much as was socially possible, especially since I lived with one who called me his brother. (Little did HE know!) I liked chess and I liked pop music, television games shows but not soap operas. I hate boy-team sports but loved the Olympics, especially girls' Gymnastics in the Summer Games and all of the Figure Skating in the Winter Games. Now I'm infatuated with Apolo Anton Ohno who's been in Short Track Speed Skating in three consecutive Winter Games. My interests have shifted over time. But not my attraction to some men.

image of Apolo Ohno is from here
Currently, the cutest guy on TV, well, until last night when he got tossed off the show, was Jose Ruiz, from So You Think You Can Dance. The sweetness in those eyes and that smile!!! O. M. G. Just melt me down and call me liquid butter. (Below is the only photo I could find that shows him smiling and close up. Jose's someone who is a great example of what might be termed "subjectively" beautiful. He's objectively beautiful too, but it's seeing him in life, not in a photo still, where his beauty really shines.)

image of dancer Jose Ruiz is from here
Here is another photo of him:
Jose Ruiz, publicity shot from TV show, So You Think You Can Dance
Is he sweet or what?!

Even though I can still have these little crushes of celebs, currently I am asexual and aromantic, as much as possible. I didn't use to be either. I an not anti-sex and The Amazing Feminist Texican can verify that this is the case, as she and I have exchanged thoughts and analysis on sex, including on vibrators, and none of my views reveal that I believe sex is bad, just plain negative, wrong, or gets you a one-way pass straight to hell--wherever the hell HELL is. Being anti-sexism isn't being anti-sex, after all. Unless you can only experience sex AS sexism, in which case you're likely to misinterpret critics of sexism as being "anti-sex".

And being critical of gender as a system of political terrorism, force, violation, subordination, and domination is not to be *against* people with standard gender presentations or identities, any more than being anti-corporate patriarchy makes me *against* workers at McDonalds or Wal-mart. It is, however, to note the difference between workers at Wal-mart and the Walton family of Wal-mart. The former has almost no structural or institutional power to effect significant social change. The Walton family DOES have the resources to make a significant difference in the lives of ALL of their employees. ALL of them--all the many hundreds of thousands of them. That's the difference social/structural position makes.

As I see it--and I'm not alone--gender systems exist inside conjoined systems of race, inside of oppressive economic systems, and within systems of of global political dynamics like globalisation and the invasion and violation of the Global South by the Global North. These conjoined social hierarchies include whites believing and maintaining institutions that place them over and against people of color; similarly: men over and against gay men and all women; the middle aged over and against children and the elderly--should people live long enough to become elderly--and long enough to become children, for that matter.

I refuse to see "gender" as if it existed independently of those other realities. This isn't to say that I can't, for theoretical and analytic purposes, discuss "gender" without always talking about everything else. It is to note that should I do that, I'm necessarily abstracting people's real lives.

No one, these days, who lives in a society with media and industrialisation has an experience of gender than isn't raced and classed. That isn't shaped by heterosexist racist patriarchal imperatives and capitalist forces.

A white pro-radical feminist male view might seek to see what is patriarchal about race and class. What is gendered about whiteness and being wealthy. What is stigmatised and statused as "the degraded feminine" and "the glorified masculine".

But *this* profeminist (you know, as opposed to the other three to five--lol) will also keep turning over these phenomena, mixing and matching them, to see what is raced about gender as well, because with an understanding of intersectionality, deeper truths may be highlighted.

I grow weary of race analysis that forgets how gendered race is. Similarly with gender analysis that forgets the gendered people are raced.

The issue for this post is to what extent "subjective" and "objective" understandings of gender, in oppressively raced, sexual, classed and globalising contexts, supports radical coalition work towards the liberation of all people from oppressive systems in which some are dominants and some are subordinates, and many are both, depending on which parts of their lives we are discussing.

Here's one reality: a wealthy white gay man may exercise his power in a variety of ways. He may have stock market investments that support genocide and rape globally. He may choose to purchase an apartment building in a city where neighborhoods are experiencing racist/classist gentrification, thereby supporting the oppressive displacement of poor people, making some of them homeless. He may get beaten or called horrid names any day by any het man who seeks to express his homophobia against the nearest gay man to him. And he may participate in gay or heterosexual cultural events that are deeply misogynistic and racist, as well as heterosexist and classist. He may make fun of women who are heavy or of women who are... women.

The queer-identified people I know in the cities and sections in which I have lived are mostly white. Most of my friends are people who do not live near me. And most of my friends are not white. This means I get many views into queer and non-queer society.

With these multiple views, different truths are highlighted. Just as with the old parable about several blind men feeling a different part of an elephant, not realising they were ALL experiencing one being, so too do those of us who look at reality through one lens miss out on the whole of what we are looking at.

Gender is, first and foremost, political and enforced. It is secondarily social and institutionalised. It is, third, personal or individual, mediated in many ways. Fourth, it is tied to what is often called biological/asocial phenomena, such as the shape of genital tissue, the levels of various hormones in one's system, and chromosomal patterns. What gender isn't at all is "natural" as that term is commonly used in public discourse. A social justice movement which seeks to reverse this order is doing something that is VERY political, and VERY pro-status quo, and VERY oppressive: misogynistic, racist/white-empowering, oppressive to the Global South, genocidal, and ecocidal.

To make "gender" a primarily personal-individual-subjective matter is to deny the enormous force that is in no way purely "subjective" that is exacted against all of us to maintain male supremacy and patriarchal atrocities against the bodies of those deemed girls and women .

Dominant U.S. society wants us to all believe that gender is primarily natural, biological, and chemical--that it is a reality that is best intervened on with chemicals, medications, surgeries, and other "treatments" that seek to normalise and reinforce it as an oppositional binary: one is a man or one is a woman. And, if "transgender" one is a man (or boy) in a female body or a woman (or girl) in a male body. Or, maybe, on is also intersex and intergender and, honestly, dominant society just doesn't want to deal with that, other than to deny intergender reality exists, and to surgically change visually intersex people to "appear" more normal. Normal is always oppressive in a society in which norms exist to reinforce oppressive institutions.

If I am outside, in a social space, a police officer makes determinations about how dangerous I am based on many criteria--some highlighted more than others depending on where in the world I am. If I'm near the border in Arizona, the shade and hue of my skin as well as facial and other physical features are scrutinised, to determine if I might be "Mexican". In a white-majority/white-dominant/only white rural area, my class presentation might be most paid attention to, along with my gender presentation, including the degrees to which I stand out as possibly "gay".

As a white, male, intergender, non-intersex, adult person who is registered and treated socially as a white adult male, as, in many ways, a "man", I get how gender is both subjective and objective, and how that distinction is artificial on many levels.

I played jump-rope with girls rather than basketball with boys during elementary school recess. Many boys and very few girls took issue with me doing that (even though professional male boxers played jump-rope). Why? Because my actions were threatening to the boys, but far less threatening to the girls. The boys--most of them het--were shoring up their gender identities by socially reinforcing their sexist attitudes, their misogynistic practices and jokes, and their girl-excluding behavior. To see someone who appeared to be a boy willfully and joyfully engaging with girls in what the boys saw as "girly" behaviors, meant their own sense of themselves as "appropriate boys" was threatened. Because if I WERE a boy, and was playing jump rope with girls (while not in training to be a professional boxer), how could THEY be boys and need to refuse to do so?

Their solution at the time was to fuse sexuality* and gender into terms like "faggot", "sissy", and "queer". This, in their minds, kept me "other" than what they were--or so they delusionally thought. That I wasn't any of those things didn't matter to them.

(*among the males, we were, most of us, pre-pubescent then and were not being willfully sexual with anyone, while surely a percentage of us, myself included, were being or had been sexually abused)

You might ask, "Julian--you WERE queer, weren't you? I mean I get how you'd not want to claim those degrading terms, but you were, well, 'odd' as someone perceived to be a boy wanting to play with girls in activities that boys steered clear of BECAUSE they were things girls did on the playground?" I'd say "No, there was nothing 'odd' about it. Nothing more 'odd', let's say, than liking The Partridge Family. Because here's the secret the "appropriate boys" didn't want you to know: they ALSO liked watching The Partridge Family, but felt too ashamed to say so, socially. What may well have been odd about me was my willingness to publicly align myself with girls who did so-called 'girly' things.

What we experience that is "subjective" is shaped by objective realities. Objective realities, like misogynistic violence, are bound tightly to idea and ideologies that some people are deeply invested in, financially, and in other ways, such as by fusing one's egoic identity to these ideas and ideologies.

I watch males who present as boys and men engage in practices and behaviors that shore up their identities and senses of self as "masculine"--and that is a highly conditional and relative thing. What it means to be "masculine" varies from culture to culture and era to era, as well as across region and across generations in one family.

What it meant to be a "masculine" male-man for my maternal grandfather was VERY different than what it meant to be "masculine" male-man for my paternal grandfather. My own father's ways of being "masculine" were not in accordance with white non-Jewish forms, in many ways.


End of Part 1. See the images below of people jumping rope--and you tell me how era, region, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and gender are related to each one--get busy, now: this assignment is due before Part 2 appears on this blog!

image of children, female and male, playing double dutch is from here

image of a very strong man, Mohammed Ali, jumping rope is from here

image of teenage boys playing jump rope is from here

image of a bronze casting depicting two girls jumping rope is from here


image of a girl jumping rope is from here

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

The Heart of Intelligence may be found in this 1992 symposium's Response to Sex Trafficking Chicago Style

 [image including Andrea Dworkin is from here]

A fundamentally incorrect assumption, often made in a classist society where the affluent can afford education and the poor and working class generally cannot, is that being educated in The Academy means that you come out the other end, with diploma in hand and something less tangible called intelligence. With few exceptions, the most intelligent people I have known were not college-educated. Some have since gone to to be, but once in the hallowed halls, their intelligence was often in conflict with the racist, classist, patriarchal dictates of The Academy, and their health often suffered for having to try and keep what they know from being whitewashed away in that Ivory Tower.

Almost everything of great value to me was learned in relationship, in friendship, in conversation, and in books, but not books that were recommended reading in any college courses I took. Life is an excellent teacher if you are given the intellectual tools to analyse and process it in all its heavenly and hellish complexity. That rich white men get the biggest piece of heaven on Earth, and poor women of color get offered hell-as-life, too often, due to the rich white men hoarding the wealth and resources, is, well, atrocious and grossly inhumane, to say the very least.

What I look for in intelligence is its connection to a heart that beats in rhythms which express truths few dare to voice because the price for speaking them is so great--one is threatened, one is called all manner of ridiculous and degrading names, and one must endure the great flood of hostility that comes one's way if one simply chooses to not to shut up about what's going down all around us. The act of speaking truth to power is expensive, emotionally and otherwise. It costs many people their lives. But, as Audre Lorde noted to women, silence will only ever lead to death--silence, in itself, offers no assurance of living. So speaking out is of value, but it is not always possible. And sometimes the look in a trauma survivor's eyes tells you all you need to know that ten volumes on the subject of trauma will not convey.

This is why I value connecting with people in relationships, over academic learning. There's no either/or and it's not that the latter is necessarily "bad"--although for most people, it is utterly unaffordable, leaving the "educated" person in dire debt. But the former--the intimate, honest relationship with other people and with oneself, also with the world around one and beyond--is imperative if transformational knowledge is to infuse one's intellect. And an intellect that operates with a logic severed from the body is of little use to anyone who values revolution steeped in love.

What appears below is offered here with gratitude to Kaethe Morris Hoffer and, as always and forever, to Andrea Dworkin, without question one of the most heart-centered, humane, world-wise, brilliant people I have known. The subject of prostitution, which is in the business of making man-abused objects of anyone not deemed masculine, is contemporarily turned into an individual matter by those with enough privilege to view it that way. When you know you are one of millions suffering within the same system of harm, devastation, and death, individualism is a luxury that cannot be afforded if one is to grasp a hand extended in support and keep the other one free to reach for the other person needing the lift out of hell.

I post what follows in praise as well to all the girls and women, the boys, gay men, and transgendered people who have survived the unspeakable inside and outside the dominating, subordinating, violating, sadistic, horrific systems of prostitution/trafficking/slavery, that always function to bolster white het male supremacy, no matter where on Earth they exist.

Some of the survivors have lived to say what they know--and sometimes cannot speak of it. I try always to remember that to have survived it is, when in it, too often beyond imagination and enough of an act of revolutionary resistance.
What follows is from *here* at PENNumbra. There are links to download the whole document below.

A Response to Sex Trafficking Chicago Style: Follow the Sisters, Speak Out
by Kaethe Morris Hoffer
__________________________________________________

>Download Full Article (PDF file, 95 KB)

In 1992, the Michigan Journal of Gender and Law hosted a symposium entitled Prostitution: From Academia to Activism at the University of Michigan Law School. As the title suggests, the goal of the organizers was to support not just thinking about prostitution but doing something about it. I have long assumed that this commitment was relevant to Andrea Dworkin’s decision to participate in the event, given that one of her contributions to the event was a speech in which she said,
The assumptions of academia can barely begin to imagine the reality of life for women in prostitution. Academic life is premised on the notion that there is a tomorrow and a next day and a next day; or that someone can come inside from the cold for time to study; or that there is some kind of discourse of ideas and a year of freedom in which you can have disagreements that will not cost you your life. These are premises that those who are students here or who teach here act on every day. They are antithetical to the lives of women who are in prostitution or who have been in prostitution.

If you have been in prostitution, you do not have tomorrow in your mind, because tomorrow is a very long time away. You cannot assume that you will live from minute to minute. You cannot and you do not. If you do, then you are stupid, and to be stupid in the world of prostitution is to be hurt, is to be dead. No woman who is prostituted can afford to be that stupid, such that she would actually believe that tomorrow will come.
Ms. Dworkin went on to say that the premises of the prostituted woman were her premises, and she challenged as unacceptable—even unbelievable—what she saw as the premises of academic feminists who appeared to her to be content to treat prostitution as a subject worthy of thought and debate rather than action, opposition, and eradication.

Ms. Dworkin’s speech was a clarion call to eradicate prostitution. Her arguments put into words the truth lived by girls and women bought and sold for sex: prostitution and equality for women cannot exist simultaneously. For me, a law student at the time and now a lawyer for more than ten years, Ms. Dworkin’s speech reads as a specific challenge to lawyers and academics seeking to use words and law to improve reality for women. While privilege, material comfort, and safety have always been the defining premises of my life, the premises underlying Ms. Dworkin’s exposition of what prostitution is—confirmed time and again by other survivors from around the world—have been my adopted political premises. These premises compel me to seek ways to use words and law to end the abusive selling and buying of girls’ and women’s bodies for men’s sexual pleasure, rather than to seek ways to improve prostitution or protect men’s access to it.

>Continue reading (PDF file, 95 KB) . . .

Sunday, July 25, 2010

It's a White Man's World: Shirley Sherrod is caught in the white and male supremacist crosshairs, but what are we allowed to say about the crime?

 [image of USDA white boss man Tom Vilsack and Shirley Sherrod is from the NY Daily News, here]

I've been wondering what to say about this whole mess--the mess that is U.S. media, the mess that is electoral politics and political appointments, the mess that is white het male supremacy in the U.R.A. I've spent many hundreds of hours speaking in depth with many women, African American women, about this country and what it so effortlessly and intentionally does to anyone Black and female, that I've not really known what I should say about this, as I knew many women bloggers of color would be addressing this matter in all its political complexity. So, with that as a preface, I'll speak a bit about what I understand to have played out before our eyes this past week, informed as it is by those hundreds of hours of conversation, with me mostly listening.

I first came to awareness of this "story" seeing "the clip" of Shirley Sherrod delivering a deviously extracted sliver of her speech at an NAACP banquet, about how (in my words) she came to understand that not only was this country white supremacist, but that it's classism meant that poor whites has more in common with poor Blacks than with rich whites, despite what rich whites would have us all believe. Watch as poor and non-poor whites blame Mexican immigrants and poor Black and Brown people for their social ills, and you'll know that rich white men's media works well to bind the oppressed to the oppressor in ways that make sturdy solidarity and trustworthy alliance among the oppressed very difficult indeed.

Now, being a radical and all, and being fed up to here [cuts hand across the air a foot above my head] with liberalism in all forms, I was hoping, against all hope, that the media might be making the point that white supremacist racism takes its toll on people in many ways, and one of those ways is it causes one to doubt that white people are human. I grew up, a white child in a white area, hearing that the White Man is the Devil. I didn't understand until later how true that is.

When I say the White Man, this is not making a determination about the value or depth of the souls of every pale male in North America. No. It is not "bigoted" or "prejudicial" as the white conservatives and white liberals might politically correctly decry. To speak of the White Man is to speak of a governing idea, embodied in practice, that whiteness and manhood are supreme and ought reign this land forever. To speak of the White Man as the Devil is only to note the cruelty and callousness, the sadism and the condescension that comes with occupying this political location with so little owned awareness of what that means for those who do not. I mean on one level, Andrew Breitbart knows full well what being a white het male supremacist means. He's no Glenn Sacks, but between and among them there is this noxious denial of privilege and power; no matter how much media Sacks controls, he'll cast the white het man as the noble underdog in any social justice battle.

Socially and collectively we are not encouraged to speak of this, really, honestly--especially if we are of color in the U.S., and particularly if we are women of color. This means that only portions of truth about white male supremacy may be known, because as long as men and whites refuse to hear what women of color have to say, the rest of us will be ignorant as hell.

"The Devil", coming from this white Jew who doesn't believe in such things as "heaven" or "hell" other than what appears before us on Earth, is a term that stands for something; it isn't literal. The Devil isn't a wicked being, cast out of a white-male sky-god's left hand, forever cursing those who were born left-handed to be sinister (sinestra in Italian means "left"). The Devil is a way of referring to something evil that is going on. What "evil" is, may be known to us in many ways. I don't believe it is a force without social structural roots. I don't think there is evil in the wind, for example, other than the evil of a very industrialised world that is killing the planet and changing weather patterns, making rain storms, droughts, tornadoes, and hurricanes more frequent and more intense.

The wind that current concerns me is that emanating from the proverbial buttocks of white het male supremacists who choreographed a mass media assault against a very real human being named Shirley Sherrod. They did this willfully, with malice aforethought. White het men like Andrew Breitbart, the execs at Fux News, and Tom Vilsack did this. Others participated. The men at the NAACP. The U.S. president's spokespeople. Andrew got that sudden blast of foul wind blowing but it needed currents to carry it as far as it went.

The foul wind blowing across the land these days is an old breeze--it flows out of Tea Partier Andrew Breitbart, but he pre-exists him also. It is back for another go at swaying and shaping the current crop of saplings in our collective imagination, distorting reality in such a way as to make us believe the most absurd things. Things like this: Black women have revolutionary power in the U.S.

As has been noted here before, one stream of gaseous, noxious fumes emanating from WHM supremacists is the idea that the Black woman exists for everyone else uses and abuses, and ought never be in service to herself. Every African American woman I know has been systemically and chronically mistreated by Black men and other men of color, by white women, and by white men. Somewhat paradoxically, Black women are too often regarded as white men by Black men--as the ones with more power, as Black men by white women--as "the dangerous dark other", and as mammies and hos by white het men. These groups, who each in their own ways oppress Black women, confuse race as gender and gender as race in precisely the wrong ways, and as a consequence they project all the powers of their own position onto Black women.

Black men and white women can disagree about who has more institutional power in the U.S. (That rich white men have the most is beyond dispute.) The Democratic battle in early to mid 2008 between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was experienced by me, a white male, as a socially debated sure-fire test of what you believed the lesser of two evils was: having white privilege but being a woman or having male privilege but being Black. (That there was, in fact, a Black woman running for the same office seemed utterly on many, especially the media.)

The mathematics of such calculations tends to forget that oppression isn't only additively accrued, it's exponentially experienced. So, as I understand it anyway, being a Black woman in the U.R.A. means that one doesn't "just" deal with white supremacy and male supremacy every day. It means that one also deals with the sexism that is infused in white supremacy, and the racism that is embedded in male supremacy. To be a Black woman in the U.S. is not to endure what Black men and white women endure, only. It is also its own marginalised political position, its own stigmatised structural location, with an institutionalised national identity infused and  influenced variously by the political meaning of many other things, such as class, age, and level of heteronormativity as defined and enforced by WHM supremacy.

One's own life, of course, is another matter. One's life is, at least partly, one's own, shaped by region, one's parents, upbringing, the media and events of the era, and the alchemical, spiritual combination of one's own personal characteristics, temperament, talents, and individual ways of being. As Toni Morrison said, to a white Southern man named Charlie Rose on his talk show (and I'm paraphrasing), To know I'm Black is to know nothing at all about me. To be a Black woman in white supremacy, if I've been listening closely, is to have layer upon layer of white male supremacist sordid story-telling loaded up in trucks and dumped on you daily, with little to no relief.

As some bloggers have noted*, what gets dumped is dug up from polluted ground that's been lying around all smelly and foul, for centuries now. It's not the blood of savagely massacred American Indians--through to this very hour, that fouls the ground, nor the blood of raped and lashed slaves--who exist also in this day and time. It's the blood and bodies of evil white men who controlled everything from the start of "this great nation" who in life and in death have made it their mission, an emission, as it were, to pollute the Earth with the Western capitalist societies that currently, and for some time now, ride roughshod across it, with spurs on its heels, always pounding, digging into the body of the Earth, trying to get more and more from it.

The BP oil spill disaster and what happened to Shirley Sherrod are manufactured from the same massive cloud of destruction, and its name is the White Man, a simultaneously mythic and manipulative political figure as straight as an arrow, piercing the souls of anyone who stands in his way, or who attempts to speak the truth about who he is that he projects onto everyone else: a dangerously powerful and contemptuously bigoted form of being that achieves and maintains power only through the systematic subordination and destruction of the people who he believes are not as good as him.

*See these and other posts at The Crunk Feminist Collective, That Girl Has Issues, and Race-Talk for much more detailed and careful analysis of this whole matter.

More MacKinnon-bashing, interrupted

I'm glad there are a few people out there correcting the anti-feminist foolishness going on all over Yahoo!Answers.


Question

What is it with radical feminists, why are they so hateful and delusional?

"All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman." -- Catherine MacKinnon

Right, so reproduction is an act of violence and women are always the victims?

"You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs." -- Catherine MacKinnon

How many of you girl feel this way about your father?

Answer:

"People can find eroticism in relations with people whom they respect and whom they see as equals." -- Catharine MacKinnon

If you see quotes with her name spelled "Catherine" not Catharine, they probably aren't even by her! Can you cite where those quotes are from--from which chapters in which books of hers? If not, how do you know the quotes are even accurate? Why write off someone with misquotes?

See "Snopes.com": they explain that the MacKinnon statements you quote above, with variations, that "all sex is rape/all intercourse is harmful to women" are a myth, and you can find out where it all started--in Playboy magazine because Hugh Hefner didn't like her. Geez--maybe because he's made a fortune selling one narrow idea of feminine beauty, for men's pleasure, not women's?

MacKinnon helped craft sexual harassment law, which has helped thousands of women fend off men's misogyny--the real stuff--in the workplace, such as women being fired if they don't have sex with their male bosses. See the movie North Country, for more. (Based on a true story.) She's helped identify, as fully human, the women serially raped in prostitution and pornography, and if you don't know those women, check out Rebecca Mott's blog (link below), for personal accounting of the pain--the human pain, that, if you have a heart, you'd feel as well.

It's so much easier to write off an important human rights activist than to focus on the harm men actually do to women, isn't it? Most women I know have experienced some form of rape, most of it in dating and marriage. Isn't that more of a social problem than two misquotes?

I recommend you read her books carefully and take what is valuable from them, rather than trying to discredit her with a couple of misquotes. Please show her the same respect and regard afforded to anti-feminist writers to feminist writers. Here's what some, including men, say about her important work.

[MacKinnon] is undeniably one of feminism's most significant figures, a ferociously tough-minded lawyer and academic who has sought to use the law to clamp down on sexual harassment and pornography.
--Stuart Jeffries (The Guardian )

Catharine A. MacKinnon is the world's leading feminist legal theorist, and her work over the past three decades has helped create an entire field of theorizing about gender, the State, and law. Along with the late Andrea Dworkin, MacKinnon has also become one of the major thinkers and activists on the issue of women's rights in the global arena, particularly regarding the way in which enduring distinctions between the public and the private spheres (in areas such as pornography, for example) sustain a matrix of inequality and exploitation. In this collection of previously published essays and public lectures, MacKinnon focuses on the international legal dimensions of feminist theory. She asks how international law, specifically international human rights protections, might be structured to take account of the uniqueness of crimes against women.
--Charles King (Times Literary Supplement )

Ms. MacKinnon provides numerous vivid and intensely disturbing examples of governments, through overt action or callous indifference, treating women as less than human and, thus, denying women their human rights...She is seeking to effect legal change on a global scale.
--Kay E. Wilde (New York Law Journal Magazine )

Source(s):