Reading Gyn/ecology
05 May 2012 Leave a Comment
in About me, Mary Daly, misogyny, what about teh menz
I am currently reading Mary Daly’s “Gyn/ecology.” I’ll have something to say about it after I’ve finished more book. Between reading this, getting some job training to avoid being perennially financially insolvent, and making some quite permanent measures to banish the ex-nigel from the “They are not shelter dogs” post, and get him to stop calling me, facebooking me, messaging me, texting me, showing up at my house, calling my girlfriend, and otherwise irritating the everlasting fuck out of me I’ve been a bit preoccupied. At least I’ve not been preoccupied without some radfem company, if only in absentia in the form of books. I’ve blocked his text messages, blocked him on facebook, had my awesome and startlingly patient girlfriend block him on facebook and send his calls (how did this asshole get her phone number anyway?) to voicemail, had his phone calls go straight to voicemail, and if he shows up at my house again, then he may tangle with my dog until the police arrive. Because fuck him.
And people wonder why so many radical feminists are lesbians…
Adventures in Feminism and Finding Joy
03 Apr 2012 8 Comments
in About me, fixer psychology, joy, liberal feminism, Mary Daly, misogyny
I have been thinking and thinking and thinking about what I wanted to post on next. After a lot of thought, I decided what my world could do with was some positivity on the feminist front. Learning about the horrors of the patriarchy and cataloging the latest incarnation of the never-ending misogyny that men are up to is vital, but I think on the flip side, it’s important to try to have something to offer as an alternative to the horrors of patriarchy. Yes, it is everywhere, but the great part of radical feminism is we get to not just carve it out of ourselves, but also have the opportunity to build in ourselves and our lives something biophilic and woman-centered that feels good.
In thinking about how I’ve been feeling as I’ve been doing the hard work of getting out of my depression to get back to living my life it’s led me to feel like I want to bring some of what I’ve found that’s brought me so much happiness into my work as a feminist. Knowing that I wanted to start a series about getting outside the flushing swirl of patriarchal horrors and knowing what it is that I could say, however, are two different things, however. I’ve been stewing over exactly how I wanted to kick this off for a few weeks now, hence the long silence.
I know step one to reducing the impact of patriarchy in a woman’s life is recognizing that it’s out there, and what did that for me was fun feminism. Step two, was realizing that it’s in my lifestyle choices too, and that is what took me over the line to radical feminism. Step three was joining a community of radical feminist women to help get the word out, and that step was creating my blog and starting to write for it.
The real doozy for me was the next step, thinking about what this meant for my life, and putting what I was learning into practice. I reconsidered my life, my relationships, what I want to do for a living and what sort of part I want patriarchal overtones to take on my life. After giving it quite a bit of thought, I came to the conclusion that what I need to do for myself is take myself off the heterosexual dating hamster wheel. Neither PIV nor dating were bringing me anything but strife, so I thought about why I was doing either of these things. The answer for me was that I wanted to be in a stable, long-term partnership with someone. When I thought about what that means with a man in a patriarchy, that led me to admit what I already sort of knew, that it was marriage, and that piece of patriarchal cattle trade was not a subject that inspired me to joy. So if I don’t want to get where this train is going, what I need to do is get off of it, so I decided that I was going to officially take relationships with men off of my list of things that I was doing (and declared that in a post, since this one thing this blog is about is sharing my journey as a feminist and that was a big part.) . This decision brought me an entirely unexpected amount of joy and clarity. So much so, in fact, that I can say with no exaggeration that my chronic depression WAS just a symptom of feeling trapped in patriarchal nonsense. Not that I really believed that I was suffering from a tragic lack of poorly regulated pharmaceuticals with abysmal success rates in my bloodstream anyway.
The next logical step for me seems like it would be to take this big bundle of contentment and spread it around, thus the decision to start talking about happiness. I like having my blog not really be about men, because I like the way that creates a space where the talk is about women. FCM’s “Trigger Warning” post about how learning about the horrors of the patriarchy is horrible that sort of asks the questions “how much of this horror do we need to know about?” got me thinking. In the comments it was said several times that there needs to be a balance. Some sort of imaginary limit on how much of this you can take in isn’t really an executable balance. That still leaves the question of how much is too much and how little can you take in before you cross the line into denial. I think a possible solution to that conundrum is to propose that what goes on the other side of the scale be joy.
There are wonderful things that feminists are making happen in the world every day both in big ways that you can hear about in papers and in little ways that you can only hear about in diaries. Communities of women are forming, women are waking up to feminist consciousness and women are pushing back. Women are loving and supporting each other and finding joy outside the false constructs of dishonest phallic lust. This world that we dream of as feminists is becoming real, and the evidence of that is apparent not just in the outside world but in the changes that take place within us, which are damn real.
I was reading through Pure Lust (which due to being busy I am about a chapter away from completing) and sure enough, Mary Daly said something that was exactly what I was looking for. The answer to the question “how do we live our lives knowing these terrible truths?” is there, in the last few chapters, where she talks about centering. The patriarchal world fragments us and rips us into distracted bits that can’t see the big picture of ourselves or of the world we live in. Now that we have the ability to see the world for what it is, there comes the task of seeing ourselves for what we are. We are not broken like the patriarchs insist on saying we are. If we were broken, damaged and fragile like they said we were, then we wouldn’t have the courage to step out into the truth as we do on a regular basis, much less the truth to put ourselves out there telling this truth. Sure the necrophiliac violence inflicted on us physically and psychologically has left some scars, but scars just mean we’ve done battle and healed enough to keep living; injuries that kill never leave scars, because if your body can’t heal it then it won’t scar, you’ll just die.
Mary Daly quotes an author who describes cancer as an illness characterized by the failure of the affected cells to communicate with other cells. This lack of communication causes them to be in disharmony, and this disharmony is why cancer cells grow incorrectly the way that they do. I think that is much like the horizontal violence that happens among women. What we are doing here as radical feminists is we are reminding women that we all share a common reality. Just like the holographic model of the universe says that one part reflects the whole, in that way our voices repeating, repeating and repeating the reality of womanhood doesn’t just change us, but it changes the women that we encounter. It changes our friends, it changes our families and changes everyone who comes to our sites and reads our words. All it takes to upset the body’s balance is a few cells that log off of the body’s rhythms to make a cancerous situation, and in the same way all it takes is a few women that log off the patriarchy’s program to shake their shit up; that goes both ways.
As long as we don’t stop reminding ourselves and each other that we are creating a way for women to live without these horrors being their daily realities, I don’t think the question of “how much can we know the horrors of patriarchy without breaking” is as dire of a question. When taken with the knowledge that the world is being turned away from a rule of degradation and destruction, the knowledge that it is still occurring has some context. There are many kinds of truth to tell, and while the truth of how we as women are being degraded, invaded and eradicated is important to tell, the truth that we have not been crushed by this and we are making strides needs to be told as well. If all we were doing is being sad together then the MRAS wouldn’t be so scared that their testerical panic landed them on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate group list as domestic terrorists.
The reason that nobody can kill radical feminism off, no matter how much they call us crazy, hazy, man-hating harpies, no matter how much they don’t print our books, no matter how much they decry our words, no matter how little recognition and respect is given to women-centered feminism, is that it just rings true to women. When given the chance to let down our defenses, put our darling nigels at a thought-bubble-sized distance and really work the logic of what radical feminism has to say about the universality of the lived experience of being a woman and what living with that in mind can do for us as women, it’s hard to dismiss it. The truth knocks on that locked up bit of knowledge in us all and we feel something. All women have this in them, and while many have their well-being too entrenched in patriarchal systems to allow themselves to examine that, not all women are unable to go there with themselves. We can’t now who can or who can’t without presenting it and letting the chips fall internally where they may. I am seeing that more and more women having those chips fall in a way that leads them here. And that makes me happy.
Heterosexual Dating and Pascal’s Wager
22 Feb 2012 32 Comments
in About me, PIV, psychology, sex Tags: bi the way, dating blows, marriage, pascal's wager
You know what, y’all? I have had a revelation. I don’t want to be with a man. Any more of them. It’s not some sort of “I just figured out I’m a lesbian, who knew?! All this time I’ve been living in my body and interacting with people, and wouldn’t you know I just figured out when I like someone” sort of thing, though. I mean I am attracted to men sexually, but then again, I’ve never been exclusively attracted to men anyway. I occasionally even find them tolerant company. But the truth of the matter is, it’s one of my worst nightmares being stuck with one. Because everything I know about what being stuck with a man entails is that at best it’s not that bad and at worse, well you know, he fucking ends you when you fry his eggs wrong one day.
So to clarify, still a bisexual, so seriously, do not leave comments saying how shit bisexuals are or how glad you are that I figured out I’m a lesbian on my page. I am just a bisexual lady who has decided I’d rather date women. I never quite made the logical leap to ask myself if there is any clear reason I date them when I don’t like them that much, and don’t have the misfortune of being exclusively attracted to them, or, as yet, tied to any man on a permanent basis in any way. It was when I was thinking about what a best-case scenario with one would entail that a light bulb kind of went off in my head and I was like “Chatonne, why would you want that anyway? That doesn’t sound that great, really.”
All of this thinking about how a “good” straight relationship could/would even go made me start thinking about Pascal’s wager. Admittedly, that popped into my head because the topic was stressing me out and making me think a lot about hell. This wager basically posits that you should believe in God because if believe in Him and you’re right, you go to heaven. If you believe in Him and you’re wrong, you’ll live a decent life and be a benefit to society. If you don’t believe in him and you’re right, you get nothing for it. If you don’t believe in him and you’re wrong, you will go to hell. The basic problem with this logic, is that it only works out if there are only two options for you, believing and not believing, and there are only two options for the truth of the universe, God is, or God isn’t. This is not the case, because really, there are countless religions, and many consider the truth of their worldviews to be mutually exclusive. That means for you, faith is not an on and off switch. This also discounts the different possibilities for the universe. There isn’t just God or not God, there is god, or goddess, Krishna or Odin, god and goddess, Demeter and Isis, really any combination of gods and goddesses could be or not be. This also doesn’t work out because it’s not really hell, heaven, or neither, it’s hell, heaven, Sheol, Valhalla, Tartarus, nirvana, Hades, reincarnation, vast nothingness, becoming an angel, being reborn as a star, or any number of things.
I thought about how, in a way, relationships are like that two. It’s not man or loneliness. They say that all the time, but it’s not true. There are also communities of friends, women, blissful solitude, polyfidelity, or any countless numbers of other possibilities of ways to live and be happy. That got me to thinking, okay, now that I’ve established that this bet I’ve been asked to make is not rigged nearly as effectively as they say it is, and there are more doors I can pick than the two they said, let’s think about what’s really behind that door. Now that we’ve decided that we don’t have to accept it’s just heaven where you serve or hell where you burn, let’s actually think about how I really feel about the supposed prize I am supposed to be betting and scrambling and hoping for. And I realized that even if everything goes the way I’ve been trained to hope it does, that still isn’t something I really want. I guess the best way to put it, is eternally bowing, scraping, and singing praises sounds as torturous to me as being lit constantly aflame. So why not roll the dice and see what’s behind another door?
I had gotten to where I was willing to kind of stake it out and try to find someone that is tolerable, or maybe find someone sweet, dumb and malleable enough that I could coax them into being tolerable. And then I took a bit more of a logical journey and was like okay, you have found a man you can get along with, where does your relationship go from there, assuming all goes well? Well I thought about how relationships with men always go, and the answer to that question is “eww gross! Why the fuck would I want to do that?!” You “win” a relationship, you get stuck with babies, endless PIV and marriage, which ties all of your legal statuses and assets to him permanently. You “lose” a relationship, and there are endless ways you can be totally fucked. You get this frustrating lose-lose situation, for example, with sex.
Sex with them always must include PIV, and you’re fucked either way you turn that. If you have good sex with them, then you have more of it and you multiply your pregnancy and std risk, that sucks. If you have bad sex with them, you get to fake lots of orgasms, deal with the intense discomfort of having someone fucking you badly, and get to a point that you dread whenever they come near you with that thing which certainly produces psychological discomfort. You also are still running the same pregnancy and STD risks you would be if you actually enjoyed it. If you have no sex with them then you shoot up your rape risk in the event they get pissed with you and decide to just entirely disregard your non-consent. You are also constantly under fire as a result of your reduced relationship security. It’s like Pascal’s wager, sort of. Lose, lose, lose!
I know exactly what is expected of me when it comes to being in a relationship with a man. Not only do I have access to mass media, I’ve also met hundreds of other people in the real world; I know what’s expected. You are expected to get in a relationship where you start out with dating. What dating is, is you go on banal amusements together. Movies, dinner, dancing, that sort of thing. If you’re doing this properly, the man will pay for aforementioned banal amusements. How you will play your part, is you will get all dolled up in your lady drag, you pretend he’s not boring you shitless, and you will let him PIV you. He pays, you look pretty and let him fuck you. If a man has been taught proper manner, he will be quite nice to you during these amusements. He will open your doors, pull out your chairs, compliment your drag, and occasionally drag his eye line up from your breasts so that he can pretend to be interested in your face. Really he should be able to manage to pretend to be interested in your face after you’ve gone and put so much bright sparkly stuff on it, from earrings to eyeshadow and lip gloss. But both of you know what’s going on, he’s performing the perfunctory acts so that he can get your panties off and you can move from phase one of dating, to phase two.
So once you’ve completed phase one, with the banal amusements, you enter phase two. Phase two is basically the transition stage. During phase two, you can occasionally relax your drag efforts, and he will accordingly relax his chivalrous politeness efforts. Basically, you’re laying the groundwork for stage three in which your obligations to the man become permanent. During this stage you meet parents, have a series of “the talks” where monogamy is established and plans for ongoing commitments are established and you start ironing out your expectations from one another. Towards the end of this stage, couples tend to start spending increasing amounts of time indoors, which is quite a contrast to the way that stage one is filled with little outings. This time spent indoors tends to lead rather predictably to a feeling you should head to stage three.
Stage three is where a woman’s obligation to serve a man becomes permanent. The events that lead to stage three can happen in several different sequences, and really it only takes one or two of these events in order to prompt a shift to stage three. To get from stage two to stage three a couple can either move in together, get engaged, or have the better half find herself pregnant. Either of these three things tend to lead to marriage, or a not-legally-recognized facsimile thereof. And what pray tell is marriage? Basically hell, if you happen to be a woman. It’s a patriarchal organization designed specifically to ensure a man a life-long servant. Aforementioned servant will basically be expected to do whatever the man requires of her, the list of duties is infamously mutable. A sample list of job titles that would cover the aforementioned duties is laundress, on-call prostitute, chef, nanny, personal assistant, maid, personal trainer, therapist, nurse, and secretary.
Honestly, that sounds like that sucks; I don’t want to do that. I would like to spend my life with someone, but I can’t imagine wishing to spend my life with someone that would expect me to do all of that for less than free, as I would still probably need to bring a second income into the home, thus creating a situation where I am paying at least half of my income to him and his upkeep for the privilege of providing his upkeep. That sucks, right? And from knowing other women, reading statistics and studies and just watching television and movies it’s clear to me that no matter how diligently I do all of this, I still can’t be expected to be rewarded for all of this with gratitude, consideration, affection (and NO, the obligatory PIV is not by any definition affection) or even emotional support and decent conversation. So you basically date in purgatory, and marry in hell. You know what, I’ve seen what that set of beliefs has to offer me, and I think I’ll take my chances with another faith. I know, I know, they say I’ll burn in hell. But really, their “heaven” sounds pretty shit anyway, right?
Southern Vampire Mysteries and Feminism
17 Jan 2012 20 Comments
in sex, what about teh menz, What's that got to do with me? Tags: fairies, girl scout, sookie stackhouse, trans issues, vampires, werewolves
The title indicates that I could be about to analyze the Sookie Stackhouse novels from a feminist perspective. But actually, I’m not. I might do that in another post, in the future, but I probably won’t. Why did I choose that title? Because what I have been avoiding talking about is the Girl Scouts, but I don’t want to title this thing “Girl Scouts, Transgender Rights and Women’s Space” because that is stiff and academic sounding and actually gets right to the point. I don’t want to get to the point. I’ve been trying to think about something else to blog about since that subject first got to my attention and I just couldn’t find anything else I really wanted to talk about. Then, during my sea of procrastination, I was chatting with a friend about what was going on in the feminist blogosphere. Since said friend is not interested enough in feminism to do something like read a blog about it, naturally she wasn’t interested enough to hear me whine about the drama going on within such a community. In order to keep from rudely boring her to death, I decided to create a metaphor, which wound up becoming a runaway train of metaphors as complicated conceits tend to do.
The Southern Vampire Mysteries (which inspired the often terrible HBO show True Blood) is ostensibly about a waitress named Sookie Stackhouse who is remarkable mainly because of the fact that she can read minds, and additionally, we later find (SPOILER) she’s part fairy. The series is as much about her and her love life as it is about her town and the world she lives in. The main difference between the world she is in and our real world is that in her world, there are assorted supernatural creatures, including (but not limited to) vampires, werewolves, werepanthers, werelynxes, were-other-things, true shapeshifters, fairies, elves, goblins and witches. The big event that kick-starts the action of the series is that vampires decide to admit they are real when a scientist comes up with a synthetic blood that would allow them to live without preying on humans. Well they can live on in the same way you could live off of Slimfast and vitamins, but still, live. They argue that since this substance exists, they are no longer a threat, and are now wanting to become accepted citizens of wherever they are living. While some have decided to “come out of the coffin,” other groups of things that go bump in the night are less interested in exposing themselves to the public, and are critical of this decision and prefer a more isolationist method of living. Due to differences on this issue, differences of nature, territorial problems or sometimes inexplicable assholery, all of the different sorts of supernatural creatures hate each other to varying degrees. This constant warring within what would seem to an outsider to be a community is what made me think of this issue.
The werewolves think they are better than the other wereanimals because they are more widely known and the best organized. The vampires hate the weres because they think they are irrational and temperamental. The weres hate the vampires because they’re untrustworty. The fairies hate the vampires because vampires find fairy blood addictive and their pupils dilate and they chase them down. The fairies don’t like the witches because they think the witches have weak magic. The witches don’t like fairies because fairies treat them with disdain and consistently underestimate them. When the different sorts of creatures aren’t hating each other they are mostly making a big show of callously ignoring one another’s concerns. Of course while all of this is going on, humans are busy trying to kill each and every one of these creatures off. The series is set in Louisiana, so the most typical reason the humans have for hating them is framed in religious terms.
That made me think of the cage match going on about transpeople in women’s space. That’s an issue that’s about so many conflicting issues. Men are routinely dangerous to themselves, each other, women, children and the environment; it’s not news. Enforcement of the masculinity code, by and for men, is often accompanied by an even higher risk of violence. It’s not surprising that transwomen fear men’s violence and it’s therefore logical that they would seek safe haven from it. We hit the rub when we get to the question of where they ought to go to be safe from men’s violence. The answer they seem to have come up with is “women’s space” because women’s space excludes men and men are what they are trying to hide from. That’s not a bad answer for them, but that leaves the question of “what about the people that are already there?” You know, what about the WOMEN.
Sookie and weretiger Quinn get attacked by a pair of werewolves after a date. Quinn decides to go to the local were hangout to let everybody know that it happened and seek some justice. His reception? “What are you doing bringing a HUMAN in here? It is not our concern.” He says that it was weres that did it, so they sort of think about it, and decide to ask around. Then they leave. The werebar is not a space for her to be in, and it was inappropriate for him to bring her there. They are understandably met with a hostile reaction, and would have been forcibly ejected if not for the fact that he had correctly guessed that since his grievance was with a were, the weres would be willing to hear him out and forgive the inappropriateness of his actions.
In the case of the Girl Scouts and transgirls, the problem these transgirls is having is not with girls or women. The problem they are having is with men. Men decided that there will be a firm line drawn arbitrarily between the likes, dislikes, activities, costumes, temperaments and mannerisms of children based on biological sex, and this line must be rigidly enforced. The actual truth is that because these things are arbitrary, real people will wind up on different sides of the line for no reason at all sometimes. Some girls will like trucks, some boys will like pink, some girls will like climbing trees and some boys will like baking cakes. The reason why people’s actual likes and dislikes will sometimes ignore the line is because the line is imaginary, and it’s impossible to confine a personality in imaginary lines. That’s not how personalities work. These same men decided that since these boys don’t fit into the imaginary, socially defined box that is a male gender role, that they are girls on the inside and must become girls on the outside in order to match, because most people are the same on the inside and outside.
Unfortunately, they were told a lie, because boys cannot be girls anymore than boys can be housecats. They can be boys that dress, choose activities, walk and talk the way girls that are expected to. But actually becoming girls is just not in their wheelhouse, because human biology has sexual bimorphism. Sexual dimorphism is phenotypic difference between males and females of the same species. This creates as real a difference between girls and boys as it does between boys and housecats. It’s not just imaginary, made up, social difference like gender is; this is real biological difference. Some people naturally fall into a third category for a variety of possible hormonal or chromosomal reasons. None of these people are trans, so by nature of them not being the subject of this discussion, they do not complicate this issue.
I have just stated pretty clearly that I don’t think people can change sex, but I will say I support people taking on opposite gender roles. I see nothing wrong with a man wearing a dress, a woman repairing an engine, a girl climbing a tree in overall, a boy baking a cake in an apron or any other person engaging in any other sort of activity that they wish to regardless of what men decided for no beneficial reason they were supposed to do or like. I do not, however, think that doing any of these things makes a person a different sex any more than me meowing, purring (yes, humans CAN purr, but they don’t do so involuntarily like cats do and it’s difficult to learn) or climbing a tree would make me a cat. I am not a woman because I perform feminine actions and wear feminine clothing, I am a woman because that is what we call an adult female human and I was born a female human and have now reached adulthood. Gender and sex are related because the patriarchy has decided to sort people into genders based on sex.This creates confusion with people unwilling to admit that these gender categories (gendah!) are imaginary and arbitrary and not naturally connected to our sex, but socially connected. But these social connections are not assigned arbitrarily or in any sort of confusing pattern, they are assigned consistently based on biological sex. It’s not true that sex and gender are unrelated, it’s just not true that they are naturally and necessarily related. The relation is social, but the social consequences are both consistent and real.
And no, feeling that you are a different thing than your observable reality would indicate does not make you a different thing. It is logically possible for a person to think they are anything, or even nothing, do so sincerely and still actually be exactly the same sort of human they would be if they had different thoughts. Since that argument doesn’t work on other grounds, it doesn’t work on these grounds either. And besides, that’s an odd argument to make in the first place. A person can only know their own feelings. You can only feel like yourself. I cannot know how any other woman feels any more than I can know how a cat or a tree or a bookcase feel, as I only inhabit my body and only experience my feelings. There’s no way to check if I’m right if I guess that I feel like any other person than by asking them. If I describe the feeling, and they say “yes! That’s what I feel” then I at least have a shot at being able to say “this feeling, we share it. I asked her, that’s how I know she feels what I feel.” Whenever women get into descriptions of “what it feels like to be a woman” the general consensus is to the effect of “what kind of question is that? I’m a woman so whatever I feel is like a woman since not being anything else I can’t feel like anything else.” The only way a man could know if he feels like a woman is to ask a woman what being a woman feels like and see if her answer matches what he is experiencing. If that’s the answer, how logically could or would a man answer “yes, that is what I feel”?
Because of all of these reasons, I’m forced to conclude that there is no reason to allow transgirls in Girlscouts. The reasons that boys have been historically kept from Girl Scouts still stand. Girls needing their own space to develop self-esteem without the pressures or threats of the presence of boys is still a real need. Boys that have interests that fit more closely with what is accepted of girls have a tough go of it and need support and need space in which boys that are more comfortable with the masculine roles they have been arbitrarily handed are not attacking them. They should have this space. But girls are not obligated to provide it. I think that it would be a good idea for these transgirls to go to the Boy Scouts and tell them that they should be more accepting of boys that want to take on feminine roles and still camp. Or join the Adventure Scouts, which admit both sexes. Or create a program specifically for non-gender-performing kids.
When Sookie was having a problem with her fairy relatives, she was kidnapped due to fairy infighting. She waited and hoped that her boyfriend would save her. And he wanted to, he really loved her. But he is a vampire, and he was strictly forbidden by his superiors from getting involved in the Fairy War. Why? Because that would embroil them all, not just him personally, in a war against fairies. Their resources, time and energy would have to be spent taking care of a conflict that by rights wasn’t their fight, and they had their own battles to be concerned with. I will say to the transgirls that want to join Girl Scouts the same thing that Victor would have said to Sookie, had he gotten a chance to explain his position to her face.
I’m sorry Sookie, it’s unfortunate that you’re having a difficult time, but that sounds like a fairy problem and vampires have enough political problems of our own to deal with. But good luck, and I hope that you get the freedom that you are hoping for. But no, I don’t have any warriors I can lend you for it, and no, you certainly cannot have this battle in my house; I just reupholstered. Like the vampires, feminists have enough of our own clashes within our movement to deal with, we do not have the spare time, energy or resources for taking on questions of ways it’s okay to be a man. When take the fight to us, we take them on, but when they take their fights with each other to us, it’s in our best interest to tell them to clear out of our spaces and fight their battles on their own turf. We are not in the business of renting men battlegrounds on our property.
Tranwomen are men that want to do more feminine things. Their issue is with men, who are the ones telling them they cannot and beating them to death when they do. Transmen are women that want to take on masculine roles. If a woman rejects the label “woman” and chooses to side with men who oppress women, then they are positioning themselves as opponents not allies. If the side they take is the side of men, then they can talk to the men about inclusion; whether they get it or not is not the concern of this movement. Radical feminism is about women organizing as women in a battle for their own liberation. By definition, men are our problem only in that they are oppressing us and we are breaking free; they have their own movements for redressing grievances against one another.
He is not a shelter dog, he does not need cuddles
25 Dec 2011 8 Comments
in Christmas, fixer psychology, misogyny Tags: men are not shelter dogs, where in the world is Chatonne
I have not been posting for a bit because I have a lot to say and I wanted to get my thoughts together. As an atheist and as a feminist there are a million things about Christmas that upset me. For one, all of the goddamn puns. Yes, Newt Gingritch is in fact the Grinch and I do lose joy every time I hear about anything he has said. Yes Fox News is Scrooging everyone with their blindingly hateful rhetoric. NO I don’t want to watch news programs littered with such chatter. Political news is bad enough without that shit. All of the talk about how we should put the Christ back in Christmas is just a forceful reminder of how fucking irritating it is living in a predominantly Christian country. 80% of Americans are Christian but they whine like hell whenever anyone suggests they shut the hell up about it and pretend to be oppressed; I hate it. I hate that all the constant reminders of Christian supremacy bring to mind the Witchcraze, Crusades and other acts of genocide necessary to make it so. It makes me irritated as a black woman in particular because the only way people like me were ever introduced to it is that they were stolen from their homeland and forced into servitude here and made to worship the god of their masters. The fact that Christianity is such a thing in the black community to this day rather sickens me; they’re not beating us to make us worship their god anymore so can we move the hell on? It’s not bad enough to enslave our bodies and minds, but our souls on top of it. It’s an irritant.
Another thing that’s just sticking in my craw lately is the popularity of treating men as children. What caused this to bubble up to the surface now is a visit from an ex nigel of mine. Short version: he’s still a sociopathic little shit. Long version: he grew up without a father, he’s been struggling for years with his sexuality, he has borderline/bipolar/antisocial/narcissistic/depending on the therapist disorder, had a hard time with side effects of the medications so he went off of them, has fallen into the tragically common path of self-medicating. and he is a lonely person that really just needs to be loved. I bought into the mess hook, line and sinker and spent ages “being there for him” and trying to help him “figure it out” and all of that. Wouldn’t want to be disablist and neuro-atypical men deserve love too (btw, I’m a recovering Shaker).
Since I’m rather lathered up at the moment, I am going to prove how futile that shit is by literally armchair diagnosing my ex with all of the Cluster B personality disorders. Why? Because they’re all the same damn thing; that’s what they mean about “co-morbidity being common.” They’re just a list of the most common ways that people can be socialized to fuck everyone around them up for their own gratification. The best way that they can maintain the illusion that patriarchal fixers aren’t just wasting all of our money on problems they create and pretend unsuccessfully to solve is to just say “I know it looks like stupid bullshit but it will all make sense after a decade of having it constantly repeated and regurgitating it in essays.”
Lying, impulsive, irritable asshole that is lacking of empathy, devoid of remorse, allergic to accountability and thinks the rules don’t apply to him for Antisocial personality disorder. Sounds like a diagnosis of “perfectly normal man” to me; look at the damn crime statistics. For borderline you have moody, destructive to self and others, over-sensitive, manipulative, having difficulty maintaining relationships, fucking around, and having a tendency to see themselves as a victim. Sounds like the first to me, only with more emotional display. Also sounds like typical man behavior. They oddly diagnose women with this more frequently, but that smells like a reversal to me. Generally to get called emotional one has to display femininely-coded traits like crying or depression, but I’m pretty sure acts of violence qualify as being pretty damn emotional and men certainly do much MUCH more of that than women. Histrionic personality disorder is a renaming of hysteria, and happens to have the same features as borderline. Narcissistic personality disorder is, you guessed it, also the same as the rest. Self-aggrandizing, slutty, manipulative liar disease is very serious and a real thing. All of the articles on these things mention that women are most often diagnosed with them and when I first read that I laughed my face off, then I had a lightbulb moment when I realized there is no need for the patriarchal system to diagnose men with these things when they encourage these traits in men intentionally. When they are pronounced enough to garner attention they will throw a label at the men to excuse them so they can continue to be accepted while having these disorders. When women are crazy we drug them up if it’s not too serious and lock them up if they become a threat. When men are crazy we pat them on the back and guilt women into letting them abuse them and feeling sorry for them. These “diagnoses” exist in order to police the actions and thoughts of women, but some token men have to be given these diagnoses or else women will figure it out, but we can’t let these assholes be locked up and drugged up like women, so instead we just let them know what lines to use when they intend to act outside the admittedly vast range of acceptable male behavior.
As my ex was a pretty typical guy, he unsurprisingly fit the diagnosis for this perfectly well; being a man in a patriarchal society tends to have the effect of making every individual man feel like such an awesome snowflake he can feel free to abuse women and children as he pleases, and men as long as the men in question can’t beat him up. Ex-nigel lied to me so frequently that I somehow got immune to being pissed about it over time. I expected it, silently picked through the detritus he offered to figure out the truth (he wasn’t a good liar, just a constant one) and just said what he wanted, and hoped he’d get back on some meds/back off the illegal drugs or change the topic to something less stupid than his imaginary version of his life. If I had a dime for every time I heard of a woman talking about how her nigel lied to her I’d have so many dimes I might be able to buy myself an entire village of nigels, burn it down, and mount a sufficient legal defense to get away with it.
As far as impulsiveness goes, my little adventure with ex-Nigel started with him showing up unannounced and uninvited at my door at 8 AM Thursday of the week before last. That’s rude, thoughtless and annoying, but being a person that tries to do as I am expected to do, I attempted to accommodate him. I live in a fairly large city that (he claims, although he goes back and forth on it) to have never been to, so I was going to show him around. I don’t drive, but we have a vast public transit system, so I was going to take him on that. He refused, so I kind of reluctantly got in a car with him.
Irritable asshole, or as Wikipedia puts it “irritability or aggressiveness…wreckless disregard for the safety of others…very low tolerance for frustration,” also sounds damn familiar. It also characterizes ex-Nigel! I had to call the cops on him twice since I’ve known him, and nearly had to get a restraining order when he last “visited” a few weeks ago because he threatened me with imminent violence after spending all day alternating low level passive aggressive behavior with sexual harassment. He knows I’m a radical feminist, and himself pretends to be a funfem as his dayjob, so he went on about how he thinks prostitution should be legalized to nettle me and called me a bitch when I told him it was not amusing. He also made constant comments about how he’d like to rape/have sex with me. He knows I don’t like rape “jokes” and wanted to get a rise out of me. Failing to get one, he just continued on. He then went on to graphically describe his sexual encounters with other men and women to me and told me he’s sure I’d want to have sex with him because he’s got a big dick. I’m not sure if he thought he was going to get a positive response or was just trying to see if I would be willing to kill us both by asphyxiating him while he was driving. He also made a “passing reference” to having a gun in his trunk. He said “don’t worry, I’ve got a gun in the trunk.” I guess he was hoping if I called the cops on him for that again (that was what it was about the last time I had to a few years ago) that he could pass it off as a claim he was interested in protecting me (GRRRRR) and not in fact threatening me.
Lacking empathy and devoid of remorse…well duh. Men generally lack empathy and remorse, in fact they are intentionally socialized clean out of it. He was no exception. After it had become apparent that this whole adventure was going to be miserable, and we would not in fact be spending the day catching up, chit chatting, site-seeing and eating at my favorite restaurants (a girl can hope, and he was only in town for the day) I settled into letting him tell me the real reason he was here. The real reason (besides getting high at about 3 AM and deciding a five hour drive wasn’t that bad for a one day trip) was that he had recently dumped/been dumped by his most recent boyfriend of six months and he was hoping after listening to him whine to his heart’s content I would fuck him and make him feel better. He told me that he had been doing some soul-searching and realized that he didn’t really love the man he was with, in fact he never did. He just wanted someone to split his bills with and a warm body to have sex with. He decided that it was time for him to do something for himself, so he told this man that, and he also told him that he would like to start seeing (read: having sex in the home they shared) with other people. He then angrily added that the man moved out and he couldn’t believe he would do that without notice. I was kind of blinking at him because it was still about 9 AM and I was eating breakfast and that was about the most awful thing I had ever heard. That was also almost word for word what he said to me the last time we were dating, and it turned out that he had already started fucking a lovely young man by then. I couldn’t believe he was saying this like it was a thing that people do, and I couldn’t believe that based on his tone, what he was expecting was that I would think it was good he was behaving more selfishly and had finally gotten around to not using this man, and that it’s an outrage that he would skip out on their shared expenses. I also couldn’t believe that he didn’t remember he told me the same damn thing and what all that actually meant was that he was bored and had started fucking other people, and I know that because…well hell I was there. It was pretty impressive that he managed to show that he has no remorse or empathy for two different people all in one story, but what can I say, he’s an impressive man.
Now is probably a good time for a bit of explanation for what is going on with his “sexual orientation” which is more like a broken compass that just whirls around depending on which direction the nearest person that can be manipulated with fake love happens to lie. Although he likes the victim status he can claim by saying he’s gay, he’s always happy to make use of women foolish enough to let him when he’s feeling blue. Make use of them financially, sexually, emotionally, really any use he can get. He’s figured out that it’s much easier to get women to feel sorry for him and let him do whatever he wishes to do than it is with men, but as he found out when he joined a gay support group and announced he was bisexual nobody gives a shit about bis, so it’s most beneficial to just go with gay and pretend every time he has sex with a woman it’s an accident of confusion. He actually said to me that he thinks that there’s no reason a gay man can’t be attracted to a woman. A few years ago I might be tempted to go “what the hell does that MEAN? Like what do you think people use the adjective “gay” to describe? You keep using that word…I don’t think it means what you think it means” but at this point for all I care he can call himself a moose as long as he keeps his penis off of and out of me. He seems to always go to a more standard definition of gay when I happen to want something from him. It’s a disingenuous game, the same way all the skillful manipulation of pathological language is.
One of the greatest accomplishments that men have managed is that, in spite of the fact that they own more or less the entire fucking world, they are still children that need to be taken care of. Although it is an impressive illusion, and I feel compelled to give props for pulling of the Big Lie, it’s necessary to mention that it’s not true. It’s not true at all. While it is sometimes fun to mock men for being dipshits that can’t figure out how to function as competent adults without indulgent females around to hold their hands, accepting this assessment of male capability does nothing for women save obligating them to serve men and making them more likely to make excuses for their abuse. When a man sees a “crazy” woman he thinks “awesome! She was probably abused in the past, which means I get to abuse her too and I can just blame it all on her because bitches be crazy,” while she is thinking “maybe this guy will finally treat me okay.” When a woman sees a “crazy” man she thinks “the poor little shelter dog, I should love it, and hug it and make it okay again” and he thinks “sucker! I have someone to take care of me now, so I can stop all that tedious sobriety and medical treatment and more or less beat her up until I feel better.”
Archetypes and Identity Politics
25 Nov 2011 2 Comments
in liberal feminism, Mary Daly, radical feminist theory Tags: archetypes, identification, labels, sexual orientation
I am very uncomfortable with the idea of being defined primarily by things I have no control over. I don’t see how I can take pride in something I did not accomplish. I think it’s fair to evaluate people based on their actions and choices. I have worked hard to do and be many things in my life, and these things say who I am.
If I were asked “what kind of person are you?” I can’t imagine why someone would expect me to answer with my physical features, what place I was born in, or what sort of sex I would like to have; that seems absurd to me. As I was editing this post I was trying tp guess the purpose of this sort of identification and it hit me; these categories are archetypical.
It is derived from the Greek archetypos, meaning “molded first as a model.” This word, in turn is derived from arche, meaning original, and typos, meaning impression of a seal, mold, replica…the common definitions of archetype attempt to weld these contradictory meanings. Thus it is said to mean “the original model, form, or pattern from which something is made or from which something develops.” While on a surface level this might appear reasonable, the fact is, that which is truly original cannot be reduced to a model, form, or pattern without serious distortion. (Mary Daly, Pure Lust, pages 78-79.)
The grouping of women based on their gender preferences is not remarkably different than dividing women on the virgin/whore dichotomy. Whether you’re reducing women to their number of partners or the type of partners that interest them, you’re still boiling them down to their sexuality, pretending that all of their parts can be described in terms that really are only applicable for describing their sexuality. I don’t understand how a sexual orientation label could be used for determining what sort of music I might like, what philosophies interest me, the content of my character, what sort of clothes I wear, whether or not I’m promiscuous, how I cut my hair or literally anything about me besides who I might sleep with. My sexuality is one aspect of my life, and frankly it is not the most important one. Words like lesbian, straight, kinky or bisexual don’t say any more about the content of my character or nature of my accomplishments than words like madonna or whore do. These words still primarily define me by my sexuality, which in a patriarchal means they define me primarily in terms of my relationship with men.
Why a person might be attracted to one person and not another is as much of a mystery as why a person might like strawberries but not carrots. There are plenty of theories, but ultimately we don’t know. We don’t know if a person is born with it, if it’s acquired in childhood, if it doesn’t properly crystallize until puberty, why some people’s sexual preferences change later in life and others are consistent, if it’s genetic, if it’s environmental…anything. We just don’t know. The most popular theories right now are that it’s a choice, it’s a reaction to trauma or it’s an inborn trait. I feel like when you stop talking about archetypes and start talking about how real people live their lives you find that none of these theories matter, and since people are not archetypes it’s logically impossible that any one of these things are universally applicable.
Women are not a handful of types endlessly multiplied, they are an infinite array of individual humans. It’s just as unreasonable to claim that there is a singular reason for homosexuality as it is to claim that there is a single reason for differences in temperament, mood or fashion sense. Some people report knowing from a very young age they are gay, some say it never occurred to them until puberty, others still report that they didn’t know until they met a particular person later in life. I’m sure that some people had such negative experiences with one sex or the other that their aversion led them to seek company in a different sex than they would have otherwise sought. I’m sure some people just wanted to irritate the shit out of their conservative parents and found that regardless of how they came upon their alternative sexualities, they nonetheless found happiness in them long past the time the issues that led them in that direction were resolved. I don’t see any of these explanations as less likely or valid than any other ones.
All origin talk aside, where the rubber meets the road isn’t the road people take to get to their sexuality, it’s the lives they live as a result of it. At the end of the day, when you get past theory to practice is when you go from attraction to expression, or as The Right (rather dubiously) puts it, go from being a person experiencing homosexual attractions to a person living a gay lifestyle. That’s the part of the process that people actually do have control over. Attractions happen without a person being able to control or do anything about them, but you don’t have actions or lifestyles until some decisions are made. You can choose to pursue it or choose to ignore it. You can choose to aim for a physical connection, an emotional connection or both. You can choose to make your relationship public, or endeavor to keep it private. You can choose to build your life around your relationships, or you can choose to compartmentalize them and keep them in a lower priority than other things in your life. Sure, when emotions are involved it is possible for things to get out of hand, and when there are multiple parties involved things can develop in unexpected ways, but overall people are still expected to be accountable for the choices they make.
If you try to assert that it’s not a choice because people have to follow their passions sexually in order to maintain a standard of quality of life, I feel like that’s heading into a quagmire. In order to obligate women into PIV, it’s been asserted for hundreds of years that in order to live healthy, fulfilled lives it’s necessary that people engage in sexual behavior. The corollary to this is that the only acceptable sexual behavior is PIV, but even removing that you are still left with an impression that it is not conducive to happiness to abstain from sexual behavior. I feel the use of that argument to justify the acceptability of engaging in homosexual behavior is two steps forward and two steps back, because while it casts the “it’s okay as long as you keep it in your head and don’t act on it” compromise as cruelty, it also upholds the damaging idea that abstaining from sex is pathological. It sounds like a less offensively-worded echo of sentiments used to condemn spinsters. I think sex should always be considered a choice.
I’m not belaboring under the mainstream Judeo-Christian paradigm, so I don’t see it as necessary to assert that a person was made by God a certain way in order to justify their right to live in peace. Homosexuality differs from harmful alternative sexualities in the fact that it isn’t harmful and doesn’t necessitate violating anyone’s rights. That’s the only justification that it’s acceptable I need. I don’t think that being born a certain way or otherwise unable to determine your inclinations justifies any behaviors that are harmful, so I don’t see a reason to use that as a justification for homosexuality. Pedophiles can’t choose to stop being attracted to children, zoophiles can’t choose to stop being attracted to animals and sadists can’t choose to stop being attracted to harming other people, so I don’t see that argument as here or there. That justification holds equally well regardless of what the “reason” for homosexual attractions is, so I have no stake in being particularly attached to one more than any other. The right to enjoy your life, provided you do so without harming anyone else, is a human right to me. It doesn’t need a special corollary in order to include gay people.
Since sexual orientation labels conjure broad archetypes and not real people, I don’t think that they are useful for anything beyond determining who may or may not be a suitable sexual partner. I feel the culture of grouping people based on their sexuality is a culture that is focused on dividing people.
Female Fury is Volcanic Dragonfire. It is Elemental breathing of those who love the Earth and her kind, who Rage against the erasure of our kind. It is the Rage of those who choose this, our own Race of Elemental be-ing over all man-made, male-designed divisions and categories…refusing the effacement of our Race. Lusty women experience great diversity and know that we belong to many tribes. Dis-covering radical female-identified diversity, we decline confinement in man-made racetracks. (Mary Daly, Pure Lust. Page 5.)
As time goes on, I see people dividing themselves into smaller and smaller groups. From straight/gay to straight/gay/bi to straight/gay/bi/trans to straight/gay/bi/trans/poly/kinky/queer and so on, so on, so forth. Even those groups divide into even smaller groups, just within “kinky” you have bondage, leather, domination, submission, sadism, masochism, humiliation play, rape play, blood play, vore, torture play, water sports…on and on and on. I feel like the proliferation of these distinctions just goes to show how inadequate they are for saying something meaningful about people. In order to organize along the lines of these distinctions, these groups have come up with increasingly insular cultures, customs, lingo and rules. All this is accomplishing is the creation of new avenues for horizontal violence.
Having these terms as identity markers as opposed to simple behavior classes or descriptions of behavior means that people really take these terms to heart and will assert that these archetypical labels are WHO THEY ARE. I don’t think anyone “is” their sexuality, we are all so much more. The practical effect of personal identification with these sexual labels is that it is unacceptable to analyze sexual practices or culture in terms of the effect of these behaviors on society on a macro level. If a person identifies as a (reclaimed) slut, then they are going to be personally offended if an attempt is made to discuss pornified sexuality because they have internalized this to the point that they feel it’s “who they are.” If a person identifies as kinky, then they are going to be personally offended if you question the merit of BDSM practices or their influence on society, because these practices are “who they are.” If you discuss the effects on female identity of replicating and worshiping the masculine involved in butch/femme dichotomies and dildo culture, then lesbians will be offended because these images are “who they are.” If you discuss the prevalence of anal sex, the dangers of a culture focused on promiscuity, or the appropriation of female terms and appearances prevelant in drag, then gay men are going to be offended because these images and practices are “who they are.” If you discuss PIV-centered sexuality or the unfairness inherent in an expectation of unpaid domestic labor then straight men/women are going to be offended because heterosexual culture and practices is “who they are.”
I feel like you don’t have these sorts of problems if sexuality is conceived as, not something people are, but something that people do. That allows for people that don’t fit into one of the stricter categories like pansexuals/bisexuals to live their lives without the censure invoked by transgressing or the isolation of erasure. It also allows people to move from one category to another if they feel another one might fit without having to worry about losing their membership card, Gold Star or whatever the kids are calling it these days. People agonize over picking sexual labels because with these labels functioning as substitutions for the self and identity markers a quest for a label becomes synonymous with a quest for the self. No single adjective should ever carry that kind of weight. The fact that the queer community is as adamant about forcing people into these boxes as the mainstream one just tells me that the main queer community is an offshoot of the mainstream community in much the same way liberal feminism is an offshoot of porn-saturated mainstream culture; we don’t need to draw the same lines that they do. If I had to make a guess, I would say that Mary Daly would say that being a lesbian is exactly as powerful as being an augur, brewster, crone, dike, dragon, dryad, fate, phoenix, gorgon, maenad, nix, muse, naiad, nix, gnome, norn, nymph, prude, salamander, scold, shrew, stiff, virago, virgin, vixen, webster or weird. No more, no less.
Men Are Not Afraid of Women
24 Nov 2011 7 Comments
in domestic violence, misogyny, what about teh menz, woman beating Tags: domestic violence, intimidation, women hit men too
One thing that frustrates me endlessly when attempting to discuss any sort of feminist topic with men is when they insist that I only think women are oppressed because I don’t understand how oppressed men are. Apparently because there are some men who are negatively effected in some ways, there is no basis to claim that women have it harder than men and even suggesting such a thing is displaying a reptilian lack of empathy to male victims of…anything they happen to be victims of. Usually I just get irritated and stop talking about the issue with the man in question when the conversation goes there, and then gradually stop talking to him about anything because I have an aversion to people that don’t a shit about issues that upset me.
Well on one particular discussion on domestic violence, we hit the inevitable “what about teh menz” section of the conversation. I was in one of my calmer moods, and talking to one of my less offensive male acquaintences, so I decided to drag the “women do it to men too” thing down to its logical conclusion. I’ve heard a million times how women hit men too, and women are just as likely to initiate violence and how men aren’t supposed to hit women so it’s not a fair fight. Well all of that stuff is just obvious bullshit. A small child is easily as likely to yell at or strike her mother as the mother is to yell at or strike her. Does that mean that child abuse of parents is as serious an issue as parent abuse of children? No it doesn’t. And some of these little fuckers are practically Omen kids, I’ve heard of them setting the house on fire and everything. Just like I’ve heard of tiny dogs killing newborns or getting a major artery in the ankle and causing someone to bleed to death. It does happen, yes, but it almost never happens so stop wasting my life repeating it because on a grand scale it’s so insignificant I suspect that you’re playing devil’s advocate.
A fellow I had been involved with was complaining about how his ex used to hit him and how she controlled and victimized him. After a few years of hearing about that, I decided to tackle the subject. I asked him if there was any point in the relationship where he didn’t have the means to leave her, like didn’t have another place to go. The answer was no. I asked if she ever seriously physically hurt him. He hedged by saying that it always hurts when someone you trust tries to control him, so I repeated the question. The answer was no. I asked if she had any sort of hold over him, like a child to make him stay. As I already knew, the answer was no. I asked if there was ever any point in time where he feared for his life. His response was that she made him miserable, but no. I asked him if she was stronger than he was physically, again the answer was no.
Based on that, I concluded that yes, I’m sure she was a terrible, no good bad person that treated him like shit. But no, that situation wasn’t comparable to a woman being abused by a man. I said that any minute he wanted to, he could have flipped that shit clear around and put her on a stretcher, in a second and with his bare hands. He agreed, but said he was taught not to hit a woman and he wouldn’t do that. He went on to say that women know men are taught not to hit them, and that’s how they get away with doing it all the time. I pointed out the obvious fact that men hit women all the time; it’s a myth that men sit around getting beat up by women. He agreed.
Men let women hit them when the women don’t hurt them, because it amuses them when they get all riled up and impotently swat at them. That falls in the same category as when men tell women they’re cute when they’re mad; men don’t fear our anger because they don’t see us as threats. When they chivalrously refuse to hit a woman, it’s an indulgence done by of their own volition, just like any other chivalrous act. There’s a reason I’ve never known a woman that said her nigel was cute when he’s mad; men’s anger has consequences and women know this. All of that polite indulgence goes out of the window if a woman actually does hurt a man. In that case it generally becomes immediately clear who’s in charge in that situation whether the man chooses to leave or chooses to physically assert his dominance.
That conversation about his previous relationship went on for awhile from there, although the defensiveness on his part dropped a whole lot once he admitted that he was miserable, but never in danger. When I asked him why he stayed, he said that the sex was crazy good; she’d PIV him or give him blowjobs whenever he asked, and that was hard to give up. When I asked him what make him finally leave, he said that what caused him to leave was that he was scared he’d snap and kill her. That sounds exactly nothing like him being controlled and dominated by her, and exactly nothing like him running for his life. Even if a surface description might make it sound the same if you flip the genders, it isn’t the same because men and women occupy positions too different to be interchangeable.
Women are not laying the hurt on men in any serious numbers. Men are bigger and stronger than women generally, and usually bigger and stronger than their girlfriends specifically. Any interactions they have with women contains this knowledge. No matter what they say or how they act, they know that if push comes to shove, they could physically or sexually overpower a woman pretty much whenever they decide to do so. I’ve heard people say that men are intimidated by strong women, that’s why they avoid women that are strong and have opinions. More likely than not, what these people mean is that men resent strong women and are itching to put them in their place.
I’ve been told many times that the reason I’m not approached by “decent men” often is that I “intimidate them.” Well let me clarify how men that approach me treat me. They yell at me, they threaten me, they honk their horns at me, they stop their cars and ask me to get in them, they ask me how much it costs for a night with me (because apparently it’s fun to treat me like a prostitute), stranger men ask me to watch their children, strange men ask me to have their children, strange men ask me to go home with them, strange men ask me to make their dinner. They then go on to call me a bitch for not giving them the time of day, ask me what my fucking problem is and say I look like a whore anyway. Oh yeah, sounds like they’re shaking in their fucking boots, right? I’m so beautiful that they just get tongue-tied and scared like schoolboys. My apparent intellect just shames them. Wrong.
And it’s not just me, look at the treatment of polarizing female political figures or celebrities. If I had a dime for every time some guy said they wanted to express their displeasure with Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly, Catherine MacKinnon, Ann Coulter, Christine O’Donnell, Hilary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin, Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, Megan Fox, Britney Spears, or Michelle Bachmann by sticking a penis in one or more orifices or beating them viciously then I’d have enough dimes to pelt every fucking snool that said something like that to death with them. In different ways these are all women that are culturally significant, but invariably the male reaction to them is not fear, but rage centered on them as women. As different as they are, male attacks on any of these women are likely to sound completely identical; to men in a patriarchy we’re all the same and can all be handled the same way.
