Celie's newest writing: “You Told Harpo To Beat Me?”: How Hip Hop Music Defines and Divides Black Women

It is with gratitude and congratulations that I post here the link to Celie's latest feminist writing. As noted in my comment below it, I think this essay is "awesome". You can see more of her writings at her blog, Celie's Revenge, linked to from my blog.

Below, I've copied and pasted just a snippet of it, hoping it will lead you to read the rest of it. [The "her" being referred to is Karrine Stephans.] It is copyrighted work, 2008, by Celie's Revenge.

In researching peoples reactions to her celebrity status for being a former music video dancer and groupie, Ms. Steffan's disgrace appears to be in writing a book and still not being well enough to admit that she was nothing more to these men than a "piece of ass." Some argue that she's glamorizing being a "hoochie" and is a bad example for young women. I can't imagine any literate female reading her book and seeing glamour in giving a blow-job until your nose bleeds. Steffans makes herself look bad: no matter how many books she sells or university campuses she visits her past and her rise to “fame” reflects a view of herself that many people will never reconsider. Through the sexist lens we use to judge women's truth-telling and experience she comes out looking even worse than the men. It is misogynistic to solely denounce women for holding a view of themselves that men won't release them from. It is misogynistic to focus on what's wrong with the women without leveling serious criticism at the men who create and maintain systems of abuse that exist to meet men's sexual demands, not women's. --Celie's Revenge

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"Can what pornographers do be regarded as harmless fun?" A response

Liberals love to speak about human acts, sexual and otherwise, as if there were no real world in which such acts exist. "What if we didn't live in a patriarchal society?" heterosexual men have asked me, again and again, with an optimism that isn't shared by me, given my stance against pornographers and pimps. They follow it up with the question they most want an answer to: "Would pornography then, be OK for me to look at?"

My answer is usually this:
"Let's have that conversation after there ceases to be a patriarchal society."

Sometimes they get the point. Sometimes they are determined: "No, really, WHAT IF there were no patriarchal societies?? Would you say that me looking at pornography was bad, then?" After reminding them I'm neither their priest nor pastor, I usually say, "I don't think you looking at pornography is 'bad' now, in your oh-so-guilty, Christian-dominated society's moral sense of the word bad. It's not 'bad' in the sense that some Christian preachers have taught us that masturbation is 'bad'. It's not 'bad' like that. It's bad like war is bad, like rape is bad, like genocide is bad. And 'bad' is not the most appropriate adjective to describe any of those atrocities. You won't likely hear me say that 'The genocide of Indigenous North Americans is bad'. Or 'the Nazi holocaust was bad'. Or 'the Maafa was bad'. You'll likely hear me say those are all examples of unfathomably cruel atrocities, horrible crimes against humanity, an outrage and a cause for enormous grief at what human beings are capable of doing to other humans beings."

I continue:
"I think you habitually looking at pornography is, for various reasons, harmful to women as a political class of humans beings, a political class as socially and culturally diverse as any group of human beings, reduced to one or two things--sl*t or not-sl*t--by men who cannot see the extraordinary diversity in womankind, let alone appreciate and celebrate women's diversity. I believe your practice of looking at, and getting off to, pornography is harmful in ways you cannot imagine, to any woman who sleeps with you. Were you sexually interested in me, there's not a chance in hell of me sleeping with you, if your primary sexual activity was looking at exploited, objectified human beings for fun or pleasure, pretending they are not just as real as you are. Or, I certainly hope there wouldn't be a chance in hell."

I continue:
"If looking at industry pornography does nothing else (and it does much, much more), it reinforces in you a male supremacist entitlement to have visual access to women's bodies whenever you desire to. In my view, and in the view of many feminists, this is unjust. You are not entitled to have access-upon-desire (or demand) to women's bodies. I mean, in reality, you are: this patriarchal society imbues you with that entitlement. I am saying, that entitlement is fucked up, it is harmful and dehumanising to women, it is dehumanising to you, and it is profitable for pimps who don't give a shit about girls' or women's freedom from exploitation and degradation."

"Our society is fundamentally fucked up, and that is one way in which it is so. Your viewing of women who were or are inside corporate systems of patriarchal exploitation also further exploits the photographed women whose histories you cannot know. And from speaking with many men I do know this: most men do not wish to know about those girls' or women's lives, their particular histories, the actual conditions they live with in order to become pornographically photographed or videotaped. I can't tell you what each woman's story is, nor do I claim that every woman in pornography is an incest or rape survivor. I knew a woman who found stripping to be at times empowering and also degrading--both. My point is that you can't know who is and who isn't a survivor of incest or rape, and the degree to which that, coupled with her being preyed upon by a pimp, led her to be visually available to you now. You assuming she isn't a survivor of abuse and meaningfully chose to be in pornography because that is what she most looks forward to in life, is utterly self-serving on your part and a cowardly way to avoid responsibility for participating in an industry that turns women into wh*res in men's imaginations. No woman is a wh*re. No woman."

"If at the end of the day or night, after you've spent several hours mindlessly or studiously glaring at images or videos of women sexually exposed inside the pornography industry, if at the end of that time you believe that some women deserve to be treated this way, that some women are on this Earth 'for you', that some women's humanity is reducible to their painted or Photoshopped genitals, or that women are "hot" to the extent that they are visually and physically vulnerable and accessible to men like you; if you believe all that so you don't have to feel implicated in an atrocity called the gross sexual exploitation and degradation of women, for men's pleasure and profit, including your own pleasure, then you ought to know that you have been lied to by pornographers and other pimps. You have been told a pack of lies that costs many women, inside and outside the pornography industry, their dignity and their lives. You need to know there's blood on your hands, the blood of women tortured, enslaved, and killed for men's entertainment. Because that is part of the industry you enjoy. When you accept all of that, and still feel compelled to look at those images, then ask yourself what being human means. And let me and every woman in your life know the answer."

Learning from Women: a Note to Men

In my experience, there is a great deal that men refuse to know about each other and ourselves.

Over the last many years, ever since studying feminism and Womanism, and befriending feminists, mostly but not entirely radical feminists, I have had many things pointed out to me by individual women, and by Womanist and feminist writings about men. What I have appreciated about these women is their seemingly tireless faith that men can be better: more humane, more compassionate, more empathic towards women, less harsh and more loving to women, men, and children, more concerned about social and economic justice and human rights.

Lorde knows, this faith is grounded in little more than the occasional, anecdotal success. Overall, men remain resistant to learning about ourselves as women see and experience us. When men do listen, and learn, women are called all sorts of names by more "manly" men, eager to instill in all men the notion that "you are the master of your own domain". When men speak out against men's sexism, we too encounter the misogynist terms usually reserved for women. I've been called them all, including fa**ot and c*nt. This is to be expected, of course. And I am well aware that what I get from men (in anti-woman hostility) is a drop in the misogynists' ocean compared to what men do to the women who attempt to succeed in holding men fully accountable. To all the women who strive to do this: good luck, and may you, miraculously, be spared men's abuses in the process of doing so.

Men assume the many ways we (mis)perceive and (mis)interpret women's actions are Truth--get out the chisels and stone as the words leave men's tongues-. We enjoy the delusion that our speech, like the white male sky-god's words-sent-directly-from-heaven, is infallible, incapable of being seriously biased, distorted and skewed, only subjective. Our words are--sorry fellas--never immortal truth, and often are not even mundanely truthful or, sadly, even honest.

Men have historically and cross-culturally, if not universally, possessed the power to name reality, including the power to define what is meant by "woman" (in many languages). Given this power, men, collectively, have ensured that there are several variations of misogynist men's fantasies of what "woman" is. This is accomplished with mythology, the apparent Word from that supernatural male sky-god, and, more commonly, with actual force either sufficient and excessive enough to ensure that at least some women will accommodate (read: be socially manipulated and intimately coerced by, or forced under fear of death) men's wishes for what woman is to be, for man(un)kind.

I have had many hundreds of occasions to be in the presence of allegedly "loving husbands" who speak to the women who are married to them with an annoying, habituated condescension or a gross, ugly passion to subordinate the women these men once upon a time promised to honor and cherish.

Consciously or not, these interruptions and corrections of women's speech is usually quite effective in humiliating and subordinating her to him. There are many variations of such misogynist verbal insults. On the most kind and considerate end, I hear husbands remind their wives, "No, honey: that's not how it went." "No it didn't happen like that, sweetie. Let me tell the story correctly." "No, darling, you keep getting that part wrong. It couldn't have happened in the winter. I'm certain it was summer."

When the wife responds, if the wive responds, with such comments as "Honey, I believe it WAS wintertime because I was the one who had to drive our child to the hospital and the roads were very icy that day" the put-off husband hurrumphs or stews, pissed off not only that he was wrong (again) but that his incorrect memory was exposed to another man (me). Any exposure of a man's ego as fallible or flawed is considered to be a serious offense by men. And men do react. Sometimes they scowl and pout, passive-aggressively demanding "their" woman's caring attention resume at once. At other times they immediately shame the wives. Sometimes husbands beat the shit out of their wives. Sometimes husbands kill them.

Note: these husbands habitually and chronically cut down women by "correcting" their wives' versions of reality. This is "how it should be". This is not to be commented on, by me, by her, or by anyone else. He is supposed to be entitled to do this, among many other things, that demonstrate his dominance inside the household. (So much for that perennial misogynist myth that "men control the public realm, while women control the private realm".) Wives and mothers being in charge of clothing the children, doing the dishes, vacuuming, and washing hubby's underwear and other laundry doesn't constitute a form of "control" that I consider to be meaningfully liberating for women.

I do consider this work admirable and important, however, and I know from helping women with children do this work, all day long, that it is exhausting. I see the exhaustion on the women's faces, often only four hours into the day that began at 6:00am. I see how they collapse on a couch at the end of a very long day, in which so many things have had to be done, all in a certain order, while "the man of the house" is out working for pay, oblivious as to what being a home-maker is. My mother and my grandmothers were all home-makers. And both grandmothers worked outside of the house as well. The men in my family have benefited greatly from this "arrangement": food was served to us, our clothes were cleaned, our home environments were not filthy. To say home-makers, disproportionately female, do not get the respect they deserve--let alone a living wage for services rendered--is one among many understatements of any given year.

Over the years, I've had my consciousness directed, almost always by a woman, to what I'm doing that is oppressive to women or politically/personally hurtful to a woman. Often, this insight is one that I have either been utterly clueless about, or willfully didn't want to have brought to my attention. Women have remained my friends after witnessing me do some of the same shit over and over. Eventually I get it enough to give those women reason to continue on in the friendship. I will own that have less patience with men, and often think women who experience the same shit over and over should just dump men's asses onto the street, or road, or into the hills, including my own ass. The reason I believe this is because implicit in the dynamic of being called out, is the assumption that it is women, not men, who must call out this misogynist behavior. If women want a deeper level of humanity from men, they will have to at least three-quarters of the work in getting him to see that being more humane is good not only for her (because, Lorde knows, that's not enough of a motivator!), but also for him and their relationship.

Catharine A. MacKinnon achieves a new post with the ICC

Constitutional law professor and feminist author, lecturer, and human rights activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon, has been offered a significant post with the International Criminal Court. For the original press release, see here.

ICC Prosecutor appoints Prof. Catharine A. MacKinnon as Special Adviser on Gender Crimes

The Hague, 26 November 2008

ICC-OTP-20081126-PR377_Eng

Prof. Catharine A. MacKinnon was appointed as Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. She will provide strategic advice to his Office on sexual and gender violence, an area where expertise is required under Article 42(9) of the Rome Statute.

Prof. MacKinnon is recognised internationally for her work on gender issues. She is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. In 2000, she won with co-counsel a damage award of $745 million in the lawsuit Kadic v. Karadzic.

She has authored 14 books, the most recent of which are “Sex Equality” and “Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues,” and has published over 80 articles. Known for her substantial contributions to shaping legal approaches to sexual and gender issues worldwide, she is documented to be among the 32 most cited legal scholars of all time.

Professor MacKinnon will assist Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo and Deputy Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda - the OTP focal point for gender issues – and work with the Office’s Gender and Children Unit , the specialized unit working on gender issues across all the Office’s cases. Her immediate priority will be to further develop the approach to gender crimes in the Office’s cases. Professor MacKinnon will also be working on Office-wide strategic approaches to gender issues. “We are thankful to Professor MacKinnon. Her advice will be an invaluable asset both to my Office and to the broader goal of advancing gender issues in international criminal law” said Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo.
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Sheila Jeffreys' new book: The Industrial Vagina

I am looking forward to reading this, as I have all the other Jeffreys' books I've read.

For now, here's a link to it, where you can, as Amazon so provocatively says, "look inside". They might consider other terminology when dealing with a book with such a title as this, but I won't count on it.
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Audre Lorde on the Erotic

For me, the radical feminist lesbian Audre Lorde's essay "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power", from her book Sister Outsider, was so instrumental in shifting my understanding of what sex was and could be that I want to link to it on this blog because it is likely I'll be referencing it in later posts critiquing dominant understandings and expressions of sexuality.

What follows are excerpted portions of the essay and then a short conversation on this subject between Audre Lorde (photo above) and Claudia Tate (photo below). Sadly, both women have passed on, each having battled cancer. The specific excerpts and discussion that follows is from a book I have gained so much from reading, Black Women Writers at Work, edited by African American Studies professor and literary critic, Claudia Tate.

The complete essay by Lorde is linked to here. Text below is credited to the appropriate sources.

Lorde's essay is one of the great classics of radical feminist theory and Sister Outsider is one of my very favorite feminist/Womanist books. I have returned to it often.

Audre Lorde on the Erotic

The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. . . .

Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. . . .

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need--the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

. . . [O]nce we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. . . .

During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it.

I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.

Lorde, Audre. "Uses of the Erotic: The erotic as Power." Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. 53-59.

Claudia Tate: I am frequently jarred by my sometimes unconscious attempt to identify the sex of the person addressed in the poem. Since I associate the speaker's voice with you, and since I'm not always conscious that you are a lesbian, the jarring occurs when I realize the object of affection is likewise a woman. I'm certain this disturbance originates in how society defines love in terms of heterosexuality. So if we are to see love as a "universal" concept, society pressures us to see it as heterosexual.

Audre Lorde: Yes, we're supposed to see "universal" love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature. There is this love in this poem. The poem happens when I, Audre Lorde, poet, deal with the particular instead of the "UNIVERSAL." My power as a person, as a poet, comes from who I am. I am a particular person. The relationships I have had, in which people kept me alive, helped sustain me, were sustained by me, were particular relationships. They help give me my particular identity, which is the source of my energy. Not to deal with my life in my art is to cut out the fount of my strength.

. . . Women have been taught to suspect the erotic urge, the place that is uniquely female. So, just as we tend to reject our blackness because it has been termed inferior, as women we tend to reject our capacity for feeling, our ability to love, to touch the erotic, because it has been devalued. But it is within this that lies so much of our power, our ability to posit, our vision. Because once we know how deeply we can feel, we begin to demand from all of our life pursuits that they be in accordance with these feelings. . . .

I believe in the erotic and I believe in it as an enlightening force within our lives as women. I have become clearer about the distinctions between the erotic and other apparently similar forces. We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way. And when I say living I mean it as that force which moves us toward what will accomplish real positive change.

"Audre Lorde." Black Women Writers at Work. Ed. Claudia Tate. NY: Continuum, 1983. 100-16.



Sister Outsider can be purchased here.
I couldn't find any Womanist/feminist bookstores online that sell Black Women Writers at Work. (Yes, there's always Amazon.com.)

Genocide in the United States: U.S. Policy

The terms irony, duplicity, and hypocrisy don't even begin to describe what I've just found, which is the U.S. government's Chapter 50a Code on Genocide, and how this government is mandated to respond to such an horrific event. An "event", it must be noted, can happen continually over hundreds of years with different tactics for achieving genocidal "success".

It is worth remembering, and never forgetting, what genocide is, in practice, inside and outside the United States.

The definition referenced below is from the book Acts of Rebellion: The Ward Churchill Reader (2003), page 260:

[T]he term “genocide” was coined to describe not only policies leading to the outright physical liquidation of “ethnical, racial, religious or national” aggregates, but also policies designed to bring about the dissolution, destruction, and disappearance of these “identified human groups as such,” by other means.

Now, on with U.S. policy:

U.S. Code; Chapter 50A;
Section § 1091. Genocide

(a) Basic Offense. - Whoever, whether in time of peace or in time of war, in a circumstance described in subsection (d) and with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.

(1) kills members of that group;
(2) causes serious bodily injury to members of that group;
(3) causes the permanent impairment of the mental faculties of members of the group through drugs, torture, or similar techniques;
(4) subjects the group to conditions of life that are intended to cause the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part;
(5) imposes measures intended to prevent births within the group; or
(6) transfers by force children of the group to another group; or attempts to do so,

shall be punished as provided in subsection (b).*

In what moral universe is the United States government not committing genocide against American Indians? And why isn't the U.S. government acting accordingly? (We know why. It is because in order to effectively carry out this policy, the U.S. government would have to commit suicide.)

I pulled those two pieces of information together: the definition and the policy regarding genocide, because when I do a Google search on "Genocide in the United States" I encounter the informational equivalent of crickets chirping. Genocide not being discussed among the citizens of a dominant society is one sure-fire way to guarantee genocidal practices will not cease any time soon.

This "silence" is an outrage. As the late great feminist, Andrea Dworkin, once noted in her discussion of the work of James Baldwin: Amerika has no memory and no mind.

I'll add: or soul.

*For more on the code, click here.

If you wish to address the hypocrisy of this governmental policy directly, or to express outrage that the U.S. government is, still, committing genocide against American Indians, the contact info follows:
Prevent Genocide International
1804 'S' Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009 USA
Tel. 202-483-1948, Fax 202-328-0627
info@preventgenocide.org
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