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I have been trying to assist a friend and her children who are prisoners of the husband-father. He controls all the money and other aspects of their lives, and his abilities to do this are backed by the country in which they live. Their country, like mine, is very patriarchal. The country is his, not hers. All social and economic and political systems, and many customs, are patriarchal, are male dominated, and value male dominance over women and children. This is how it is across the globe in most places. In his country, boys and men are valued, and girls and women are not.
If her story were told--it will not be told here--many men would blame her for the situation she is in. Truth told, many women would too. Maybe even more women than men, actually, because in my experience women are terrified of being trapped by a man, and don't want to ever admit it could happen to them, unless it has already happened. And even then, denial works wonders to allow us to pretend the oppressive and dehumanising conditions we live in aren't all that bad, aren't degrading, and don't constitute severe oppression. That men's domination and degradation of girls and women is not seen as oppression in most places is something I have encountered here recently.
I called an attorney about my friend who is held captive with their children. I couldn't speak directly to the lawyer, only her assistant who is male. I asked him if there might be some form of political asylum for her. He balked at that--political asylum??? Was I crazy? He said that's for conditions in which a group or individual is being terrorised politically. (Silly me: I view battery, trafficking, rape, gendered poverty, and other domestic and international violence that way, when men do it to women and girls.) I told him VAWA would not agree with him and he might wish to educate himself. Actually, I didn't suggest he might wish to educate himself. I knew that would only annoy him and that he was set in his beliefs about women not being able to be political prisoners of men, in the home. His views are typical of most men I know.
What I find generally is that men do not wish to believe that they can be and too often are terrorists of women and girls. The fathers who molest and rape their daughters deny it. The boyfriends who abuse and control their girlfriends deny it. The husbands who beat and terrorise their female spouses deny it. The men who rape women on dates or on the street or in their homes deny it. With all that denial, is it any wonder that the male assistant to the woman attorney responded as he did?
It is not a surprise to me. But it is infuriating. I despise his point of view. I despise men's ignorance and arrogance, men's willful refusal to get how men dominate and degrade women politically.
And I hope there is a special place in hell for the men who do terrorise women and girls. Because men put women and girls in a special kind of hell by degrading and dominating them in many ways including economically and sexually, including interpersonally and institutionally--all of them political.
This has been explained and expressed in painfully explicit detail for forty-plus years worldwide. From every area of study, from every area of the Earth. Why haven't men, en masse, been paying attention? Because men, collectively, home by home, region by region, continent by continent, don't care enough about women's and girls' liberation from men's denial, degradation, and domination.
they literally don't care. they're taught to not care about anything but sexual gratification and career related success and the feelings of artifical well-being these can temporarily create. this is why i think emotional work done by men with accredited practitioners is so key. it should be mandatory for young boys by the time they reach their teens. turning them out into populations of wimmin when they are teens and adults without any kind of emotional grounding and identifiable ethical framework is not just wrong, it's dangerous. to hell with drafting them into the army. they need to be drafted en masse into studies re their own emotions and socialization. i am sorry to hear about your friend and her children. my mother, after a few years of being brutalized by my father, was able to go home to her mother and be welcomed along with us children. her experience is a rarity. many daughters would have been sent right back to their abusive husbands to live or die.
ReplyDeleteI agree that young males' emotional lives need to be nurtured and males need to be taught how to value being humane more than being patriarchal men.
ReplyDeleteMy experience with men is that when men do this kind of work with each other, they forget to mention a little something called "male supremacy", "male dominance", and "patriarchal male atrocities against girls and women". Instead, they seek to be more humane because they want less emotionally narrow lives.
That's why I put more stock in this approach, which deals with the here and now of men and boys, although, to be honest, too few men, in my experience, actually give a damn to put the well-being and liberation of women at the center of their emotional/political lives:
I Want A Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape
'I want a 24 hour truce during which there is no rape' written by the late and much maligned late Andrea Dworkin says it all for me and because it has to be men who must be the ones to stop other men from continuing to dehumanise women who form the majority of the human race, this will not happen soon.
ReplyDeleteInstead men continue to blame women and then expect us to do their work for them and all the while these men will continue to dehumanise us women.
That's why Andrea Dworkin is demonised because she dared to speak the truth about men and their refusal to take responsibility and/or hold other men accountable and demand men change.
I haven't ignored your female friend's continuing oppression by yet another sadistic man who like so many men, believes he has the right to dominate, control and own women just because he happened to be born male in a world which is male-centric and still denies women our human rights.
I also know because I have witnessed it first hand, how and why so many women continue to blame women who are trying to escape male control. Women continue to deny reality and until such time as women as a group wake up and face the fact those men who all too often destroy women's lives are not 'monsters' but normal men, nothing will change.
We need more than tiny groups of men challenging each other on their behaviour whilst all the time conveniently ignoring the central reasons - male supremacy, male domination, male control and systemic women-hating masquerading as 'boys will be boys!' We need men to own their problems and then challenge other men about these problems not assuming women once again are the ones who must 'fix matters.'