Thursday, November 6, 2008

Woman Hating and Man Hating: Fact and Fiction

It is worth noting the history, in the Anlgo West, of "misogyny" and "misandry". The English word "misogynist" was first recorded in 1620. There is no social or cultural history at all associated with the term misandrist, through this evening, anyway. Sorry to burst your delusional bubble, Men's Rights white boys. Actually, I'm not sorry at all.


From the video below:

"[...] Please check out the statistics of the murder of Indian women, by their spouses and by whites [...] It's open season. Native American women are being murdered right and left [...] Hundreds of Mexican women disappear or are murdered all through Mexico. It's open season on Mexican women. It's open season on women in the military: our service women are being murdered and raped. It's open season on women in Thailand, Vietnam."




Men's sexual, economic, and social violence against women, fueled by a potent combination of disrespect, disregard, and disdain, is a fact. Men really do hate women, and when men hate women, violence against women happens. Sometimes it happens even when the men express love for the women with whom they disagree or argue intensely. There are many websites dedicated to promoting men's hatred of women; industry-corporate-owned pornography sites display women as things without a particular history or character, unless it is character created and scripted by a pimp for his profit and for many men's pleasure. The cash profit is gigantic, amounting to over fifty million dollars each year.

Men's hatred of women is manifest in many terms commonly used against women in private and public realms. These terms are commonly used against women to degrade and humiliate them simply by being spoken, or in combination with racially and sexually subordinating acts beyond words, such as while being raped or battered. These same terms are spoken among groups of men, with and without women present, to give themselves more status and a greater sense of superiority.

By any measure imaginable--sociological, statistical, historical, or through the study of culture--men collectively control and dominate women in many ways successfully. This occurs, in post-industrial civilisations, always in two social spheres: the interpersonal and the institutional, each sphere's misogyny reinforcing the other.

Institutionally, men create economies where only some of women's work is understood and respected as work, men create laws which make holding most men accountable for assaulting women unlikely, if not impossible. In custom and culture, men maintain misogynist myths about women, often in their patriarchal religions.

Interpersonally, men beat up women so as to break their bones and their spirits; men rape women systematically so as to achieve dominance and express derision; men rape women not knowing it is rape because, for them and in society, the reduction of the possibility of meaningful consent is often a goal, and men's heterosexual conquest is what turns many men on. So pursuit and conquest, by whatever means necessary, including by intoxicating or drugging a woman, or assaulting her while asleep, or assaulting her at an age and level of disability where she cannot defend herself physically, or assaulting her with weapons, alone or in groups, such that she knows resistance likely equals death, is experienced purely as sex for many men. It is the definition of sex for many men. Not all men. Many men. Too many men.


In the West, men believe that having access to women's bodies is an entitlement, a right decreed by nature or God. In a male supremacist society, his is but one of several Men's Rights, however wrong it is. Men believe in and practice achieving access upon demand, need, compulsion, or desire to fulfill a fantasy by using harmful force. Men gain this access (and the fantasies) in several ways. One is by using pornography, another is by renting women as prostitutes. Men can have safe sex in these contexts and the level of safety practiced is generally determined by the men: the pimps and the consumers. Male corporate pornographers and pimps have set a definition of women of all colors as "those somewhat human beings who ought to be treated as things to be used, to be abused, and to be killed, without remorse."

But women are harmed by men in ways that are not sexual also. Women are mistreated by men due to race, for example. Women are also controlled and subordinated in marriage and in other relationships with men in too many ways to name here. Women actively, concretely care for men far more than men actively care for women. And that care from women is too often met with the arrogant and self-centered assumption by men that it's a given: "That is what she is there for, to care of me." Boys are cleaned and fed by women, almost always, if and when there is food to be eaten. Rarely do men take full responsibility for the care and feeding of their children, even when they have full custody--it is often another person in the man's life who does the mundane and most routine care. When women realise they can and ought to take care of themselves first, or when a man is cared for less by a woman than she used to care for him, there are usually negative consequences to her. The toll for all this care-taking is great to women's health. Women are harmed by the work they do, inside and outside the home, and by the work they sometimes refuse to do. They are frequently harmed or killed for breaking social codes of conduct men have constructed to constrain and control women.

If you don't know several women who have been harmed by men's hatred of women, sexually and socially, expressed interpersonally and bolstered institutionally, you don't know many women.

It should be noted that men are very cruel to one another as well, at most ages and stages of life. Men rape men, batter men, kill men. Although this is not generally done for the purposes of achieving erection and ejaculation, it is something men desire to do not because of hormones or genetics, but because of what many social systems teach and model for men. Men wage wars against one another, imprison one another, bully and harass one another, and are just plain mean to one another. Not all men. Many men. Too many men.

If you don't know several men who are or have been cruel to boys or men, or the boys or men who were recipients of that cruelty, you don't know many men or boys.

Now, as a point of comparison, let's see how this plays out in regard to man hating, which is defined the way it is defined by antimisandrists, as women's hatred of men.

Women's sexual, economic, and social violence against men, fueled by a potent combination of disrespect, disregard, and disdain, is fiction. Women do not hate men, and when the occasional woman does despise a man who has harmed her, he doesn't suffer the forms of violence against him leveled at women by men who despise them. Disagreements, arguments, and emotionally hurtful actions are not uncommon between a woman and a man. Sometimes women express love for the men with whom they disagree or intensely argue. The forms of hurt do not include, unless exceptionally and anecdotally, sexual or physical violence including murder. There are a few websites dedicated to promoting this hatred of men by women: overwhelmingly, they are run by men and are filled with lies about the alleged power or superiority of women. These websites do not have much to draw from in culture, so one name tends to be brought up a lot: Valerie Solanas, author of a piece of social analysis of gender that has never been sold for profit. It was photocopied (xeroxed) for a small period of time, and most people have never seen it or even heard of it. It was never published by any major press, nor is it easy to find a copy of it.

The title of the piece, S.C.U.M. Manifesto, was named not by Solanis, but by a man, and his acronym means the Society for Cutting Up Men. Cutting is a real problem in society, and it is gendered. But it occurs socially in two forms: men cutting women, and women and girls cutting themselves. A society in which women cut up men is fictional. There is no evidence that it is anything else, except anecdotally. There is no industry run by women, earning women millions of dollars in profits annually, designed to promote and eroticise women doing physical harm to men. One of many genres of pornography that men produce does script scenes where women harm men. To be clear: this is for men's profits and pleasure, not women's. Men portray each other in pornography as things without a particular history or character, unless as characters, often racist, created by white male corporate pimps, for white men's profits and pleasure.

There is no industry, not one, which produces excessive cash profits for women not men. There are no industries or institutions which naturalise and normalise women's brutality against men. The anecdotal woman who may appear to hate a man is not manifest in society generally or commonly. And what men call man-hating is often a woman who does not behave in ways women are supposed to behave according to that society of men. So if a woman is verbally abrupt or rude, sarcastic or cynical, critical or analytical, not deferential, not submissive, including in written forms, men often misperceive this as hatred. Men are not so quick as to call men being abrupt, rude, sarcastic, cynical, critical, analytical, not deferential, not submissive to other men as a form of hatred against men. Nor are men likely to be honest about the fact that when they are any of those things with women, it is an expression of men's hatred of women.

There is no long list of terms women use to put down men, and those terms are not combined, in speech, with racially and sexually subordinating acts of violence against men which violently penetrate their bodies, break their bones, and crush their spirits. To the extent that the short list of terms used to put down men are spoken among women or men, this is not done in a context in which it is played out, in which women systematically assault men using those terms the ways men do to women and other men.

Sometimes women scratch men or hit men. Sometimes women yell or scream at men. Sometimes women up and leave men. Some men's hearts are broken by women, not literally. This is, in no way, comparable to what men do to women, and men do all those things to women too, but sometimes the heart is also broken literally, along with the rest of the stabbed or dismembered body. When men act sexually violent, they often target women's chests and groins as the areas they stab or tear open. There is no social practice of women doing this to men.

When women utter negative terms about men it does not change their collective status from oppressed to oppressor, from subordinated to dominant. Men's use of misogynist terms is part of the practice of subordinating and dominating women, collectively.

By any measure imaginable--sociological, statistical, historical, or through the study of culture--women do not collectively control and dominate men in any ways successfully. This collective control and domination occurs, in post-industrial civilisations, in neither the interpersonal nor the institutional spheres. And when women do have some control of their home, there is the force of a man's fist, or the weapon of his penis, ready at any time to remind her of her proper place relative to him. Men are not usually killed for breaking social codes of conduct women prefer.

Institutionally, women (alone or collectively) do not create economies, laws, customs, cultures, and religions which maintain misandrist societies.

Interpersonally, women do not beat up men so as to break their bones and their spirits; women do not rape men systematically so as to achieve dominance and express derision. Pursuit and conquest of a man by a woman, by whatever means necessary, including by intoxicating or drugging a man, or assaulting him while asleep, or assaulting him at an age and level of disability where he cannot defend himself physically, or assaulting him with weapons, alone or in groups, such that he knows resistance likely equals death, is fiction.

In the West, women do not believe that having access to men's bodies is an entitlement, a right decreed by nature or God. There exists no female supremacist society in which this is but one of Women's Rights. Women do not believe in and practice achieving access upon demand, need, compulsion, or desire to fulfill a fantasy using harmful force. The relatively small amount of pornography that is made by women, doesn't assist women in gaining this access. Women do not have access upon demand of men in systems of prostitution, including the pornography industry. Women in pornography and prostitution are not there for their own sexual satisfaction, do not generally control the level of STI/STD protection, and are extremely vulnerable to rape, battery, and murder. There are no female corporate pornographers and pimps who set a definition of white men as "those somewhat human beings who ought to be treated as things to be used, to be abused, and to be killed, without remorse."

If you don't know several men who have been harmed by women's hatred of men, sexually and socially, expressed interpersonally and bolstered institutionally, that is because you are living in reality.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

U.S. White Supremacy Takes a Blow: It's a Good Day



I can say that I am prouder to be a U.S. citizen today than ever before. And I can say that we still have so far to go, that we best be wearing some good sneakers.

The results show that 55.78 million people voted to put another genocidal terrorist white man back in the White house. Fortunately, 62.98 people did not wish for this to happen. With electoral college politics, it can be easy to forget, a 52% to 46% victory still means almost half of this nation is pro-white male supremacist and pro-genocidal as hell.
END OF POST.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

"All Sex Is Rape": a Feminist Lie or Men's Propaganda?

by Julian Real, copyright 2008. All Rights Reserved.

Once again, we find that it isn't feminists who make the equation of men's acts of heterosexual intercourse with rape in theory, it is fucked up men who manifest it in practice.


As noted in a previous post, I just read about a study reporting that 84% of men who committed rape did not understand what they did to be rape. That is, they understood what they were doing as participating in consensual, harmless sex--maybe a little rough around the edges, you know, the way men say women like it, but certainly not rape.

Once again, we find that it isn't feminists who make the equation of men's acts of heterosexual intercourse with rape in theory, it is fucked up men who manifest it in practice. To whatever extent the equation is an accurate reflection of social reality, it is so because of what actual rapist men DO--rapist men who called themselves husbands, boyfriends, players, frat boys, jocks, and military men (among many other terms), NOT because of what anti-rape feminists THINK men do. Rampant rape is not a figment of feminists' and Womanists' imaginations. It is part of many patriarchal societies, endemically.

While the facts bear this out, "antimisandrist" men, and other assorted misogynists, racists, and anti-Semites, foolishly or maliciously believe and promote the idea that this notion was born in the minds of out-of-touch feminists--that before there were anti-rape feminists and Womanists, no men ever confused sex with rape, in practice; that there were no social norms of date rape and marital rape being "just a good time" for heterosexual men; that rape wasn't seen and experienced as a masculinising act; that rape was not ever "rape" because white men once legally owned women, both as wives and slaves, and a "thing" can't be raped.

Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, in particular, are often alleged to have made the "all sex is rape" claim, seemingly over and over. According to some misogynist men's websites and remarks, you get the sense that's one of about only a handful of statements feminists have ever made, as if these women have collectively been in some sort of psychotic stupor, muttering these "axioms" under the breath repeatedly until the next injection of Thorazine comes along from someone in a white coat after securing the locked psych-ward door.

But here's the truth, fellas: those women are not out of touch with reality (even while you call them any number of misogynist terms, some of which mean insane), nor are women collectively crazy for fearing each man as a potential rapist or serial rapist. You are crazy, if you think the systematic rape of women by men is not a gross human rights violation. You are out of touch with reality if you believe there aren't a significant percentage men who don't know the difference between sex that is rape and sex that is not. This doesn't make all sex rape or all men rapists. It means that many women are harmed by sexual assault and there are many men scratching their heads wondering "What did I do that was wrong?!" (According to the male supremacist handbook, the answer is absolutely nothing.)

There are plenty of men who know that what they are planning for their evening is the rape of a woman or more than one woman.

There are plenty of men who calculate exactly how much alcohol a woman must consume in order to be intoxicated enough to not be able to give meaningful consent. Some men can't be bothered counting drinks, and so put a date rape drug in the first one.

There are plenty of boyfriends and husbands who feel entitled to sex only because the woman is a romantic partner or spouse.

There are plenty of men who have been taught by rapists and pimps, including through pornography, how to have a form of sexxx that shows little to no regard for what constitutes the humane treatment of another person, in this case a woman.

Heterosexual men DO brag to each other, not only in whispers, about getting women drunk and fucking them while they, the rapists (in this case), stay relatively sober and in control.

Deny all that, and then you can try and convince people that the Earth is flat.

The core message of pro-rape men is the more or less the same: men are entitled to have sex with women when men want or desire to do so. Sexual access to women is a right to be affirmed, not a question to be asked.

A particularly self-serving version of this message is that rape is natural. One book, A Natural History of Rape, written by two white academically educated men, Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, even go so far as to make the case that rape is a positive, necessary feature of human evolution--that rape helps the human species continue to thrive! I know of no raped woman who found the experience to be one that helped her thrive. But of course the authors of that absurd book don't give a shit about women's lives. This bogus theory would do little to explain the behavior of rapists who assault premenstrual children, infertile or non-menstruating women, and post-menopausal women.

On- and off-line we have ample evidence that grown and literate men insist, as if in a psychotic state of extreme paranoia, that it is women who say heterosexual genital-to-genital intercourse is rape. Meanwhile, some men keep making it a reality in women's lives. For the "just the facts" on what MacKinnon and Dworkin have and haven't said, see here and here. For a synopsis of the other MANtra's of the misogynist Men's Rights Movement, see here.

If there are any antimisandrists or MRMs who stop by to read this, and get this far, please note: two white men wrote that bullshit, not Dworkin or MacKinnon. Men make this CRAP up all by ourselves. And while some of us are terribly, terribly upset by our unrecognised lack of comprehension of the work of Dworkin and MacKinnon--which we assume is a completely accurate read, of course--we grow suspiciously quiet when it comes time to criticise the likes of Thornhill and Palmer, let alone be outraged by their theories.

To any Men's Rights activist or "antimisandrist": Why not go after corporate pimps for teaching you fucked up shit about sex, or the authors of A Natural History of Rape at least AS MUCH as you inaccurately malign Dworkin and MacKinnon?

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

84 % of Rapists Do Not Even Know They are Rapists.

Men have no claim to being fully humane if we're not working, collectively, to end rape.

Three videos:

1. A Powerful Statement by a White Woman:


2. A Powerful Statement by a White Man:


3. On Male Privilege on College Campuses, re: being seen as a rapist. A short address by a white man:
This one from Men Ending Rape.

Where the title of this blogpost comes from:

Koss et al. report that one out of every twelve male respondents had acted in a manner which would be defined legally as rape. 84% of these men did not believe their actions to be illegal.

- Koss, M. P., Gidycz, C. A., & Wisniewski, N. (1987). The scope of rape: Incidence and prevalence of sexual aggression and victimization in a national sample of higher education students. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 19, 1182-1197.
END OF POST.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

P.R.I.C.K.s

The 'Patriarchal Racist Ignorant Condescending Know-it-all': an experiential analysis distilled from Stan Goff's blog* discussions on Engels and MacKinnon

by Julian Real, copyrighted 2005, 2008. All Rights Reserved.

(*It is my understanding that Stan's blog has been or is still co-moderated by De Clarke, although I have not participated in that blog's discussions for years. At the time I was part of The Feral Scholar discussions, the URL was www.stangoff.com. That has since changed, making it more apparent that it is co-moderated.)

Note: CRAP stands for Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy.

In this essay, I will begin by making several truth claims.

1. Patriarchal racist ignorant condescending know-it-alls (or p.r.i.c.k.s, for short) are poorly equipped, individually and collectively, experientially and situationally, through social position and privilege (not biology) to know much about women that is useful in the activist struggle to end patriarchy. Some p.r.i.c.k.s are white heterosexual men, and some of them are caring and respectful partners to women, though many are not. Respectful or not, I know of no white heterosexual men who are anti-patriarchy activists in support of the radical feminist project to end racist patriarchy, except Stan. Note: being a p.r.i.c.k., like being a white heterosexual man, is not a permanent condition, and therefore one can be transformed into an humane citizen, as society radically transforms away from patriarchy.

2. P.r.i.c.k.s are raised with sufficient privileges to assume they have enough knowledge to discuss just about everything, and they can pretend and/or presume, against great evidence, that they know what they are talking about. Too often, p.r.i.c.k.s privilege men's limited experiences, man-gendered and ethnically white philosophical ideas, facts of his-story, and needlessly abstract theoretical frameworks, placing them at the center of their arguments and actions, in part to avoid dealing with the way they disrespect women, daily. What is simultaneously marginalised is (surprise!) women's experiences, ideas, herstory, and frameworks.

Due to this general disinterest and ignorance of a substantial portion of reality (women's), p.r.i.c.k.'s knowledge remains astoundingly partial and seriously biased, but is not called either by them. It is, rather, called "reality" or "important philosophical inquiry"—especially when it is so academically elite (read: abstract) as to be practically incomprehensible. That some p.r.i.c.k.s retreat to their abstract minds' "universally important thoughts" is not questioned, until now?, as a very specific political strategy for NOT dealing with women's real condition as women.

Not all white heterosexual men participate in this pro-man prioritisation and anti-woman marginalisation, but they can choose to do so without consequence of being held accountable, systematically, by other white men. For example, a woman may speak up, occasionally, after her fury, anger, irritation, or boredom subsides from the last disrespectful comment, to call a white man on something racially sexist or sexually racist, but he can generally evade her points by taking (or maintaining) possession of the discourse used in the discussion.

He will often dismiss her points of view, her experiences, as "silly" with a casual and paternalistic disregard institutionally afforded to white heterosexual men. (Note: p.r.i.c.k.s rarely call one another's ideas "silly".) He will point out that we are talking about "ideas" here, not "emotions" as if they were disconnected. He will alert her to the wonders of white heterosexual men's great work, ignoring, rather completely, the great works of women of many ethnicities, which he has likely never seen, let alone defended as "great" and "important". The "literary canon" was compiled around what white men, many of whom were p.r.i.c.k.s, loved to read. That academic white men love to read work that doesn't have much to say about women's real lives, especially those of Colour, means something. Womanists and Feminists have pointed this out, many times. Academic p.r.i.c.k.s don't seen to be able to listen, let alone hear, what these women are saying, because, well, they are so busy blissfully reading the books by their people.

3. Engels was a European married man, and, quite possibly, a p.r.i.c.k.

4. Engels was not situated or experienced, was too privileged, was not in the position, to know much about women as humans, that is, as humans altered into (e)raced women, systematically, through oppressive experiences of patriarchy, white and male supremacy, misogyny, sexism, heterosexism, racism, and other ethnic hate and discrimination. In other words, Engels didn't know how some humans become women through practices of subordination, by other human beings, called men, in patriarchy; and brilliant man that he was, it never occurred to him to find out. He did some very valuable intellectual work, but not on this matter. Engels is an expert on "the woman question" in the sense that Shakespeare is an expert on people of Colour. That both of these "white" men can be seen to be experts on "humanity" means something very dangerous: and that is that their humanity is awfully white and manly, and, therefore, ethnically and gender specific, in terms of how they view the world, and who they see as universally human when they look out at it.

5. Due to this, it is imperative that p.r.i.c.k.s learn to listen and take in the experiences and knowledge of activist and radical women of all ethnicities, who unavoidably endure way too much CRAP.

6. Ethnically oppressed men, and white gay men, *may* know something, due to political location, experientially and positionally, about racism and heterosexism, but are also poorly equipped (politically, not biologically) to know much, if anything, that politically pertains to women of all ethnicities, as women, in various patriarchies.

7. Any men that *do* know anything meaningful about the politically harmful conditions women face as women—conditions that constitute women as women (see the next three paragraphs), know it from women or women's writing, directly. I do not know of one single living or dead exception to this point. There are abundant examples, however, of white heterosexual men *claiming* knowledge of women's conditions that they simply do not have the experience to truthfully claim. For this reason, Engels, among many other white heterosexual men, must be "left behind" generally, except as an example of the above claims: he and his work may, in other words, be utilised to prove the claims made above, but his work cannot disprove them.

"Woman", in this view, is not primarily or essentially a biological category. While some (not all) "human females" share physiological experiences, such as menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and menopause, the meanings of and responses to those experiences are strongly cultural and political: cultural laws about menstruating women being associated with being "unclean" for example, turn what could be an morally neutral adolescent to mid-life sometimes monthly experience into one tainted with negative patriarchal social stigma. That these physiological phenomena happen to some "human females", only at some ages, doesn't equate with being gendered, in my view, any more than having pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes equates with being Aryan (or otherwise raced). Admittedly, physiological and biological processes such as menstruation and pregnancy are more psychologically and socially impressive and involving than having a particular eye color (usually), but this involvement still doesn't add up to having a gender. Genitals are real, physiological processes are real, sexes (genders) are assigned in a nonconsensual, compulsory way. And if, as tons of people believe, the simple appearance of genital formations amounted to "having a gender", then what "gender" do intersex babies have, when born?

As with "woman", there is nothing about whiteness, heterosexuality, or manhood that is essentially biological. These are primarily social constructs, cultural phenomena, political affiliations: they are terms of position and privilege, rendered real through cultural and social forces and mandated identities. These identities and conditions are not learned from non-human animals, and what is "animal" in us is unlearned by being social, politically regulated human creatures. Seen this way, rape is not, as many men like to believe, a natural condition of being a male animal, even a human one; rape is a response learned in patriarchy, about who men and women are and how women and girls, and feminised boys and men, are to be treated. Being raped, and being "not a man," are mutually constituting. Rape, among other atrocities, helps make some humans into girls and women, and stigmatises some boys and men as feminised.

The meaning of so-called "significant biological differences", and the enforced ignorance about actual, more diverse differences in eroticism and ethnicity, is what is relevant here, not the facts of their physical existence. As noted earlier, some people give birth: some women, not men, do this. But many women do not give birth, or cannot, or are celibate and carry a firearm, or are post-menopausal, and they are still considered women, even while misogynistically derogatory terms are attached to some of those specific categories of women (such as "barren", "man-hating lesbos", and "old hags". Having a vulva at birth does not sufficiently, empirically, define "woman" as such. Some transgendered people born with vulvas do not identify as women when adults, nor appear as such. Joan of Arc escaped being patriarchally female by resisting all instructions, and refusing all associations with the sex she was supposed to be. (See pages 83-105 in Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin, for a brilliant discussion of Joan's life in these terms). In most patriarchies, people are defined dualistically (that is, incorrectly, distortively), through physiological qualities and biological capabilities, which are then taken as significant and supportive of creating a separate allegedly natural category of sexually subordinated humans called "women". Not surprisingly, intersex, multi-ethnic, transgendered, and ungendered folks are invisibilised by these binary, hierarchically arranged social forms. (They don't do much for women's human visibility, either.) In the case of transgendered folks, the only way to be socially real and acceptable is to "choose" one or the other as your patriarchally correct physiology and identity. That there is no way to "choose" *not* to do this, *while* being socially real and acceptable, is not something the surgical world finds ethically and politically necessary to contend with. That women cannot choose to be not-women, yet not-men, and be socially real and acceptable means that women do not have the real choice to be ungenderedly human. No one does, really, in patriarchal cultures that have gender dualism. I once knew a person who was not born male or female, had no primary or secondary sexual characteristics, and was, in fact, fully human. That there are no pronouns for this person--in English, at least, tells you something about how our reality is denied us through language.

In Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Andrea Dworkin puts it this way (p. 17): "Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming allows men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing its realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed, to control perception itself."

As Catharine MacKinnon states in her book Feminism Unmodified (p. 47), from a talk delivered at the Conference on Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, July 11, 1983): "We purport to want to change things, but we talk in ways that no one understands. We know that discourses have fashions, that we're in the midst of a certain fashion now, that a few years from now it will be another, that ten years ago it was different. We know better than to think that this is the pure onward progress of knowledge. We participate in these fashions, are swept along in them, but we don't set them. [...]

Sometimes I think to myself, MacKinnon, you write. Do you remember that the majority of the world's illiterates are women? What are you doing? I feel that powerfully when I think about what brings us all here, which is to make the changes we are talking about. When someone condemns someone else for the use of jargon, they tend to suppose that they themselves speak plain plate glass. I'm not exempting myself from this criticism, I'm saying that I see it as fundamental to developing a politics of language that will be constructive as well as deconstructive."

To pretend that patriarchally gendered and gendering terms, or raced and (e)racing terms, are not primarily social and political is to operate out of a dangerous biological essentialism that has the effect, necessarily, of reinscribing and reinforcing each of the atrocious phenomena (the "isms" and their accompanying forms of hate and harm) named earlier, relegating them to a somehow natural state, as if beyond social critique and political intervention. Similarly, if we believe men will always create military wars—that it is men's "nature" to do so, we are destined to live in a world where such wars persist. This point must also be made regarding men's patriarchal war against women.

It is grossly assumed that white heterosexual men speak for all of humanity. They don't. Much of the time, even when claiming otherwise, they speak for themselves, for their own experience, universalising it, pretending it applies to more than just them. This projection and extension of white men's being is a consequence of extraordinary privilege, which can and often does have the effect of rendering these social creatures profoundly arrogant and self-centered. Women of all ethnicities know (experience, endure) this arrogance daily. This privileged arrogance is manifested in institutions and other practices that women cannot avoid, and, as unavoidable, may need to ignore or repress, or, tragically yet commonly, participate in and support, much to the empowerment of CRAP.

On Stan's blog, there is a challenge to some white heterosexual men's speech, to their forms of speech as legitimately privileged, as well as to the content of the speech (that is, what it purports to say). A note to white heterosexual men: when you, as members of an oppressor class, are oppressive, and because of that, women, and other folks, respond with anger, or in other expressive ways that make you uncomfortable, I recommend *not* trying to get those challenging you to change their manner of expression, or their style of discourse. Why? Because the requirement that oppressed people speak with a privileged tongue, in a man-gendered manner, with a white ethnic accent, is a form of oppression. Specifically, it is but one of CRAP's entitlements to decide who can speak and who can be heard.

"That's fucked up!" is an appropriate critical response to what many p.r.i.c.k.s have to say. That some p.r.i.c.k.s register this sort of response as "inappropriately critical" or "over reactive", to use note two such dismissive terms, does not make it either inappropriate or unmeaningful, as a response. That some white men prefer to hear "rational" (ahem) cognitive argumentation in forms familiar to those white men, means, only, that those white men do not want to learn how to hear more emotionally unrepressed and intellectually real commentary. P.r.i.c.k.s can, usually, get away with "closing their ears" to this sort of critique. They have the power and privilege to tell the rest of us how we should debate or engage in discussion. To paraphrase my main point here: "That's just a big load of CRAP".

Most women cannot and do not ignore white heterosexual men's privileged arrogance. They instead find ways around it, under it, over it, or through it. They combat it individually and collectively, passively or actively, affectionately or aggressively. Only those women so unrelentingly inundated, insulted, and injured by this privileged arrogance pretend to not know about it, or do not, consciously, let themselves know about it. Only those for whom there seems no way around it, under it, over it, or through it, is there the solution, a political survival mechanism as it were, which does not often even allow for survival: they repress the knowledge of what white heterosexual men do, and, especially, the political meaning and reasons they have for doing it. In this repressed state, and with some privileges, at times, women are as dangerous to humanity as men, especially to children and other women.

In this discussion about Engels, some white heterosexual men have made great attempts to bolster the authority of one of their own. What they have not been willing to admit is this: they have no systematically lived experiences, no social-political position (no legitimate one, that is), from which to claim this authority. It is, rather, only by "virtue" of the privileges afforded white heterosexual men (privileges, which, along with their traumas, constitute them), that they make such grandiose truth claims to begin with. Acting unconsciously or arrogantly from this stance, oppressively, is what makes some white heterosexual men into p.r.i.c.k.s.

This must be systematically exposed and seriously challenged, if we are to move beyond "white heterosexual man as authority on the world", a pernicious and delusional stance they take, not from a base of knowledge, but, rather, from a base of privileged presumption and profound ignorance. P.r.i.c.k.s presume what people not in their group mean by what they say and do, while ignoring complaints about what they say and do. They march ahead like ghosts in the night, pretending they have substance and the power to illuminate. They have neither. Sometimes, of course, they white heterosexual men do have something useful to say about CRAP, usually because some oppressed "other" said it first, and they appropriated it, not giving credit to the originator of the thought. Every thought expressed here--what I write--has been informed, deeply and thoroughly, by women's writing about patriarchy and women's experience of it.

Charles, an African-American man, who is well-read in feminist theory, and well connected to real women, is, among the marxists here, the most understanding of the need to raise the consciousness of the Left on matters of gender oppression in male supremacy. I just don't know if Stan calls himself a marxist or not, but if so, I include him with Charles, as another anti-racist man who is seriously concerned about the Left's privileging of economics over gender.

I know what I know, about women-as-humans and men-as-humans, only because of my experiences of patriarchy, male supremacy, misogyny, sexism, heterosexism, racism, and other forms of ethnic hate and discrimination. I do not know these things through personal and interpersonal (social) experiences only, though this has created a solid foundation of important emotional knowledge. I know them also through reading of the experiences of women, almost never well-articulated by men. James Baldwin is one exception I can name. He was neither white nor heterosexual, and this is significant in understanding why he could know more about women's experiences of oppression, and write convincingly about women's plight inside racist patriarchy. (See the Communion chapter in Andrea Dworkin's book, Intercourse, for a deeply respectful, stunning analysis of Baldwin's worldview and ethics.)

You will find that those white heterosexual women who know most about women's diversely oppressive condition and experiences, are those who have read or talked openly and respectfully with women of many non-dominant ethnicities and sexualities. You will find that white heterosexual women who have not consulted or learned about the experiences of women of many non-dominant ethnicities and sexualities are limited in their understandings, but still carry much experiential knowledge, of patriarchy, male supremacy, misogyny, and sexism, as experienced within their own men's ethnically privileged arenas. White heterosexual women are, not surprisingly, less reliable on matters of patriarchal heterosexism and racism. They, like their brothers, have been and ought to continue to be held accountable to their privileged unwillingness to listen to women of Colour, women of other oppressed ethnicities, and women of many sexualities.

Generally speaking, you will find that radical feminist lesbian women are more knowledgeable on matters of patriarchal heterosexism.

Generally speaking, you will find that women of Colour are most knowledgeable on matters of patriarchal sexualised racism, as well as on matters of patriarchy, white and male supremacy, misogyny and race-hate, and sexism.

In conclusion:

White heterosexual men simply don't know what the fuck they are talking about, when claiming to know the truth about women. What they know with any accuracy, they know from emotionally and politically meaningful intellectual contact with women.

Lesbian white women, and women of oppressed races and ethnicities of all sexualities, do know what they are talking about, when speaking of these and other matters, due to what they experience and their contact with other women similarly or differently affected. Oppressed people, it has been noted many times, often know much more about oppressors and their institutions, than oppressors know themselves.

That there is a connection between experience and knowledge is something p.r.i.c.k.s are not willing to admit, in large part because it would destabilise and challenge (to the core) their abilities to legitimately make truth claims about women.

I offer as proof of what I say, every entry in the discussion on Engel's and MacKinnon, on Stan Goff's blog here, here, here and here (see each post's "comments" sections).

That Stan is exceptional on these matters, means this: he, unlike *any* other white heterosexual man I know, pays attention to what women say. He listens and learns from women of all ethnicities, has emotionally close politically accountable friendships with lesbian and heterosexual women, and therefore knows, experientially, through respectful engagement and empathy with those women, what women endure that men do not, inside CRAP.

Empathy is the key ingredient in the political group "men" knowing anything at all about the political group "women". Cognitive intellectual analysis, especially abstract intellectual analysis and academic philosophising will not get any man very far—except among his own people, who, often, do the hiring in academic institutions, and the publishing of their books. College courses and academic texts often thrive by promoting needlessly abstract conceptions of the world of white men's ideas. But unless he has found ways to respectfully empathise with women, thereby learning one dimension of those women's bases of knowledge, and engage respectfully with their cognitive intellectual knowledge, he is lost in a tiny ethnic and gendered universe that he rather alarmingly believes is the entirety of the Universe, as he conceives of it.

I invite men of all sexualities, races, and other political locations and affiliations, to politically empathise with the women around them, in order to know and befriend them better. I challenge men to read the work of politically radical feminist women. (A suggested reading list follows.) Then, and only then, might those men have something useful to say about radically and effectively challenging CRAP.

I will conclude by making this truthful statement: The writings of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon are to a cogent critique of patriarchy and analysis of male supremacy, what the writings of Marx and Engels were to a cogent critique of capitalism and analysis of the dictatorship of the proletariat: each set of writings are profoundly important to understanding, deeply, the central conditions and key determinants of each oppressive social-political phenomenon, patriarchy and capitalism, respectively.

Recommended reading list. All works are non-fiction, unless otherwise noted.

By Andrea Dworkin:
Woman Hating
Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
Pornography: Men Possessing Women
Right-wing Women
Ice and Fire (a novel)
Intercourse
Letters From a War Zone
Mercy (a novel)
Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women
Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation

By Catharine A. MacKinnon
Sexual Harassment of Working Women
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law
Toward A Feminist Theory of the State
Only Words
Women's Lives, Men's Laws

By Dworkin and MacKinnon:
Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality
In Harms Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (editors)

See also, by Patricia Hill Collins:
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism

And, by Patricia Williams:
Alchemy of Race and Rights
Seeing a Color-Blind Future : The Paradox of Race

...for additional perspectives on humanity outside the experiential and intellectual limitations of a white ethnic experience.

MacKinnon, deservedly, gets the last word on this post: from p.13, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State:

"Engels, by contrast [to Marx], considered women's status a social phenomenon that needed explanation. He just failed to explain it."

Sexxxism, P.R.I.C.K.s, and other CRAP

I am fond of creating new terms and acronyms for things that are inadequately or deceptively named by the dominant oppressor society I live in. Here's a list of a few of them that may appear occasionally or often on this blog.


1. CRAP

In the summer of 2005, I coined the term "CRAP". It stands for corporate, racist, atrocious patriarchy. Other activists call the oppressive systems we live in by more accurate terms, such as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. I wanted something that was shorter to type, and also had some humor value, even though I'm talking about a network of systems and institutions as destructive to Life as nuclear war and poisoned water.


2. Sexxxism (with many variations: sexxx, sexxxist, sexxxuality, sexxxism industries, etc.)

This refers to the forms of heterosexist, racist sexism that, among other places, permeates industry pornography and other systems of sexxxual exploitation.


3. P.R.I.C.K.

This acronym was also created in 2005. It stands for patriarchal, racist, ignorant, condescending, know-it-all. This phrase was born in response to witnessing and arguing with mostly heterosexual white men who were such deliberate or unconscious jerks to feminists and/or women of color, on the blog The Feral Scholar, that I felt compelled to address them, with an acronym that synthesized most of how they were behaving.

It also identifies a larger group of white men than racist, misogynist asshole blog-commenters. This larger group of white men is those who are intentionally and activity motivated to maintain and bolster CRAP's many systems and practices of harm to women of all colors and ethnicities, among other people. These men have a few reasons for doing so:

a. They profit from this, monetarily.
b. They gain pleasure from doing this.
c. They gain esteem and status from doing so.
d. They claim they don't know how to behave any differently.
e. They are not meaningfully held accountable by any systems or policies.
f. They are jerks or assholes, avocationally if not also professionally.


4. EDC

EDC means the Era of Christian Domination. BEDC means Before the Era of Christian Domination.

Everyone I know is forced, through a lack of socially/historically meaningful options, to use the dominant Christian time-line as some sort of "universal" calendar system. I object!

I know of no other "globally agreed upon" (ahem) calendar system of marking time that I can use here, especially, for example, if I wish to refer to when a book was published, or what today's date is.

In protest, in place of the commonly used AD and BC, I use the letters ECD (or BECD) after the dominant Western Christian calendar system's "year" is written. Today is, therefore, for me, the 26th of October, 2008 ECD.

The Western Academy's scholarly version of this, if referring to the time before or after a man named Jesus was supposedly born, is BCE or CE (in the Common Era/Before the Common Era, respectively). Calling Dominant Christianity and the Christian Era "common" is not only untrue for most of the world's population, it also negates many other calendars, and invisibilises many other ways of understanding and representing time. It is also woefully benign moniker for a period of time in which so many nations, cultures, societies, people, non-human animals, and other Earth-based spirited life, have been savagely and sadistically massacred and otherwise destroyed by what has come to be termed (in English) by many of the sexually and racially oppressed as the white man.

Lakota Woman: on not being white or male

Lakota Woman, by Mary Crow Dog, with Richard Erdoes. Copyrighted
1990, by Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes. [She is also known as Mary Brave Bird. What follows is from pages 3 and 4 from the 1991 (ECD) book. ECD means the Era of Christian Domination. What follows is brutally honest and graphic in describing the horrors of white male supremacist behavior on what is now called North America.]

Chapter 1
A Woman from He-Dog

A nation is not conquered until
the hearts of its women
are on the ground.
Then it is done, no matter
how brave its warriors
nor how strong their weapons.

--Cheyenne proverb


I am Mary Brave Bird. After I had my baby during the siege of Wounded Knee they gave me a special name--Ohitika Win, Brave Woman, and fastened an eagle plume in my hair, singing brave-heart songs for me. I am a woman of the Red Nation, a Sioux woman. That is not easy.

I had my first baby during a firefight, with the bullets crashing through one wall and coming out through the other. When my newborn son was only a day old and the marshals really opened up on us, I wrapped him up in a blanket and ran for it. We had to hit the dirt a couple of times, I shielding the baby with my body, praying, "It's all right if I die, but please let him live."

When I came out of Wounded Knee I was not even healed up, but they put me in jail at Pine Ridge and took my baby away. I could not nurse. My breasts swelled up and grew hard as rocks, hurting badly. In 1975 the feds put the muzzles of their M-16s against my head, threatening to blow me away. It's hard being an Indian woman.

My best friend was Annie Mae Aquash, a young, strong-hearted woman from the Micmac Tribe with beautiful children. It is not always wise for an Indian woman to come on too strong. Annie Mae was found dead in the snow at the bottom of a ravine on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The police said that she had died of exposure, but there was a .38 caliber slug in her heard. The FBI cut off her hands and sent them to
Washington for fingerprint identification, hands that had helped my baby come into the world.

My sister-in-law, Delphine, a good woman who had lived a hard life, was also found dead in the snow, the tears frozen on her face. A drunken man had beaten her, breaking one of her arms and legs, leaving her helpless in a blizzard to die.

My sister Barbara went to the government hospital in Rosebud to have her baby and when she came out of anesthesia found that she had been sterilized against her will. The baby lived only for two hours, and she had wanted so much to have children. No, it isn't easy.

When I was a small girl at the St. Francis Boarding School, the Catholic sisters would take a buggy whip to us for what they called "disobedience." At age ten I could drink and hold a pint of whiskey. At age twelve the nuns beat me for "being too free with my body." All I had been doing was holding hands with a boy. At age fifteen I was raped. If you plan to be born, make sure you are born white and male.