In Which I Make a Fantastical Leap May 8, 2013
Posted by FCM in books!, gender roles, international, liberal dickwads, MRAs, trans.Tags: jaws, male violence, silencing, steven spielberg, waterboarding
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stuff like this is why the organizers/PR machine for radfem13 publish stuff like this: as an example of the MRA/tranny anti-radfem propaganda campaign, the radfem13 organizers state that MRAs and others are guilty of
Singling out individual women who call themselves radical feminist and claiming that they represent radical feminism or all radical feminist views (In fact, the movement is diverse and many claim to be radical feminist but, of course, as a movement for social change, we’d wish to discuss those differences internally)
lol. see what they did there? more denial and erasure of non-social determinist radical feminists by social determinist/reformist radical feminists. of course, like a lot of good PR, this is partly true — non-social determinist radfems are indeed all the time being attacked by MRAs. we are teh evol, you see, and apparently, reformist radfems and MRAs/trannies are mostly in agreement on that point. d’oh!
also, we are so busy calling ourselves radical feminists, making buttons, banners and the like (i myself have a tattoo) that there is no time to do any actual work demonstrating a motivation and ability to get to the root of womens oppression by men, in order to liberate us from male dominance. we just “call ourselves” various random things all the time even though they arent true at all. on my days off — from falsely identifying as a radical feminist — i identify as a pickle. i produce no actual work demonstrating that im one of those either. i mean, what could i even do to show that i was a pickle? my various random identifications are all equally ludicrous, and completely subjective. but i digress.
really, i wanted to stop by briefly and make a fantastical leap so that the last remaining shred of my radfem credibility reformist political capital can be washed away forever. 
to wit, i recently learned that actress sarah jessica parkers ancestor, one esther elwell, was accused of witchcraft during the salem witch trials of 1692. there was a warrant out for her arrest and she narrowly escaped trial on a technicality — “trial” in this context being a euphemism for days and weeks of torture, sexualized violence and crazy-making by men against women under the guise of legal process. i can only imagine that this was terrifying for esther, as it was for all women who were alive during the burning times. but lets look more closely at what this means.
i am currently reading anne llewellyn barstow’s “witchcraze” for anyone who wants to follow along. in her study of the european witch hunts (to which her writing is limited — it doesnt specifically include the american witch trials) she elucidates and enumerates what women who were accused of witchcraft had in common, and it was often that they were “doting, scolds, mad, divelish; … so firme and steadfast in their opinions, as whoever shall onlie have respect to the constancie of their words uttered, would easilie beleeve they were true indeed.” barstow summarizes this as meaning “uppity women — women given to speaking out, to a bold tongue and independent spirit…quarrelsomeness, a refusal to be put down. they talked back to their neighbors, their ministers, even to their judges and executioners.” (p. 27)
i would also add, although i am not exactly fluent in ye olde english, that this seems to say that these women were not only outspoken, they actually made sense. as in, if you actually listened to them, you could tell that they were telling the truth, or making sense of things that were previously confusing or deliberately obscured. kinda like what radical feminists do, when it comes to exposing the truth about men and what they do to us, and getting to the root of womens oppression by men. get it?
notably, female heretics often received the same treatment — and defying or denying biblical dictates about womens natures counted as heresy, where the bible dictated that womens nature was to be fuckholes and slaves for men. women often did this anyway, at their peril. get it? publicly (or privately) protesting mens lies about womens “natures” could get you brutally tortured and killed. incredibly, women have been criticizing the bible anyway for 1000 years by now. both before and after the burning times. although we do see a divergence from that history in newer feminist thought which protests “stereotypes” of male behavior too. men arent naturally really the way they appear, you see, even though men created the patriarchal world and all its brutality in their own image because they like it this way. because equality. again, i digress.
a close, personal experience/association with the burning times, a time of unparalleled misogyny and widespread sexualized violence — a global terror campaign by men against women — is this womans legacy. isnt it? a legacy we now know was inherited by sarah jessica parker through her ancestral relation to esther elwell. parker reveals that she wasnt aware of this history, but heres where i make my leap: interestingly, sarah jessica parker doesnt complain. about anything, apparently. and im suggesting that her compliance/non-complaining *might be* related to her connection to the burning times, either through her lineage or collectively, as a member of the female sex class.
you see, around the same time that we learned of her ancestry and her association with the burning times, we also learned that SJP has been permanently hobbled due to years of wearing disabling footwear as a part of her job. she wore high heels on the set of “sex and the city” for 18-hours a day “and didnt complain.” this not-complaining is considered a favorable trait in women and definitely (if not particularly) in actresses, isnt it?
on that note, see the transcript from “jaws: the inside story” here, starting at 45:49 where steven spielberg is described as having poured water down the throat of a female actress while she screamed. to make it sound like the watery female screams spielberg heard in his head, and obviously enjoyed enough to want to share with the entire world. see hollywood dickwad richard dreyfuss conclude laughingly that this practice is “now” known as waterboarding, and that spielberg is therefore guilty of a war crime. but not really!!!!11!!1234 because reasons! (honestly, this could be its own post, and if i had known that the transcript was available i surely wouldve written that post by now. its not on youtube, likely because copyright violation. they obviously didnt have a problem broadcasting it on television where all the men involved were making tons of money on the advertising and whatnot, and its almost (!) as if they arent ashamed of this at all, or even trying to hide or obfuscate what this might say about themselves *as men* or even as people. hmm.)
of course, the thing about associations with the burning times is that they are passed down through families as all legacies are, but in this case, its also womens collective history — a collective history of a global terror campaign by men against women, and its no joke. its also ongoing. and while barstow concludes that women “kept a low profile” for literally centuries after the period of the “official” burning times, i would suggest to anyone who assumes or believes that this silencing effect ended at some point that we are probably still too close to it to see the whole picture. and that we consider the evidence that women are still laying low, and that we still have very good reason to.
and to those who would counter with well, thats not fair because everything any woman has done in the past 300 years, or will do into an indeterminate date in the future, she does “after the burning times” therefore causation problem…i would agree with the assertion, if not the implicit point. there *is* a causation problem, yes indeed. but the implicit point is twofold: therefore none of this matters, and we cant or at least shouldnt discuss it. anywhere. even on feminist blogs. this is what radical feminism (and radical feminists) have been reduced to, apparently? sheesh. and i just made all those buttons and everything.
1000 Years of This. 40 Years of That. April 25, 2013
Posted by FCM in books!, gender roles, international.Tags: essentialism, gerda lerner, male violence, the creation of feminist consciousness
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i just finished reading gerda lerners “the creation of feminist consciousness” which is part 2 of her 2-part series. part one, “the creation of patriarchy” was previously discussed here. this series is an excellent history lesson and one i appreciated very much, although i admit skipping/skimming many of the details and getting straight to the conclusions/insights which is what i read feminist works for afterall. the big picture. when i see something that fascinates me, such as the material and social conditions that make slavery possible, i go back and try to grok the details the best i can.
in this case, i went back and tried to grok the details of 1000 years of feminist bible criticism, by which lerner demonstrates feminists tendency to reinvent the wheel when it comes to feminist reasoning and conclusions, and why this is. she concludes that womens history is lost to us via silencing and erasing feminists and feminist work, which stunts and thwarts the development of a global feminist consciousness over time. and that this erasure of history is one reason women have remained oppressed for so much longer than any other oppressed group on earth. she notes that despite starting from scratch every time, women have long struggled to be free of male oppression and have resisted it, and have tried to think and reason their way out of it even when they thought they were the first and only ones to do it and at great cost to themselves in terms of mental labor and personal risk, up to and including death. this is striking, yes.
but what particularly struck me was the substance of womens 1000-year history of criticizing the bible, where women specifically protested its prescriptions/proscriptions about womens natures, including womens roles in a patriarchal culture (thats redundant of course. patriarchy *is* culture). remember that institutionalized patriarchy, where legal and religious texts merely codified preexisting patriarchal relations that had already existed for a long time, is not the beginning-point of womens oppression by men. institutionalized patriarchy appeared about 5000 years ago, but male dominance over women, including mens control of womens reproduction and mens self-granted right to define womens role has been around much, much longer. (this is discussed in part one). so in reality, women were protesting something that had been around for perhaps 10,000 years or longer: womens role as fuckholes and slaves for men. and each woman who did this thought that she was the first to do it. women rarely built on previous womens work because they didnt know about it.
now, i ask you. where did this resistance and core-deep courage come from? how could each woman, who believed that she was a cognitive minority of one (or some other very small number) gather the gumption and conviction to realize, believe and assert that womens nature was *not* to be fuckholes and slaves to men, but was something else entirely?
note that for 1000 years, while women were resisting what the bible patriarchy said about womens nature, these women were not saying that mens nature had been misrepresented at all. although lerner concludes that early feminist thinkers articulated the difference between sex and gender, and that *both* mens and womens “gender roles” were arbitrary and socially-prescribed, i would note the complete absence of the assertion that men were not naturally violent, necrophilic and parasitic for example. in my own estimation, these have nothing to do with the male gender, and everything to with the male sex. i think early feminists knew that only too well, and that the ways this played out on womens bodies and lives (in the absence of relatively-reliable birth control for example) made the reality and unalterability of mens despicable natures more than obvious.
behold an early feminists articulation of gender. in the context of arguing that women were fit for the ministry, she asserts:
…that intellect is not sexed; that strength of mind is not sexed; and that our views about the duties of men and the duties of women, the sphere of man and the sphere of woman, are mere arbitrary opinions, differing in different ages and countries, and dependent solely on the will and judgement of erring mortals.
this from a woman named sarah grimke who lived from 1792-1873. she is talking about jobs, and roles. she was notably not talking about mens demonstrated tendency to be violent necrophiles, sexual abusers and predators across time and place. and frankly gerder presents *no* evidence in this history lesson that any early feminists disputed this at all, or conflated male behavior, specifically male violence, with culturally-determined gendered roles such as who can and should do what job. get it?
in fact, grimke astutely notes that mens enslavement of women was deliberate, disgusting and dickish. she notably does not suggest that men were acted upon by aliens, or were acting against mens own natures when they did this:
Men have not only degraded women, but have made them mere instruments for their own comfort. They have enslaved women’s minds, deprived them of education, and finally robbed them of the knowledge of their equal humanity.
and “equal” here does not really seem to mean “equal” in any modern way. for example, does grimke seem to suggest that women are attempting to gain political, social and interpersonal standing so that they can indulge “equally” in the enslavement, deprivation and robbery that all humans are prone to? i dont see it.
hilariously, in the 1500s, a woman named jane anger (!) describes and documents mens parasitic, filthy natures when she asserts that men are “comforted by our means. Without our care they lie in their beds as dogs in litter and go like lousy mackerel swimming in the heat of summer.” without women, men would lie in their own shit and be completely uninterested or unable to perform self-care. not because aliens, and not because “gender” either.
so whats my point? i guess i have two. feminist-thinking women have been asserting for over a millenia that womens nature is misrepresented by patriarchy (and via patriarchal institutions such as religion) and that this is a deliberate ploy on behalf of men who want to dominate and enslave us. women know, somehow, that this is not our true nature and we resist this propaganda/terror campaign bravely, actively and passionately. we can feel that this is true, and we know that men are lying about us. and we notably have *never* as far as i can tell tried to convince anyone that mens true nature wasnt and isnt exactly what it appears to be, and what men demonstrate by their own behavior, institutions and dictates across time and place.
this rather significant addition to feminist thought appears to be new. this is not our history, but a recent development that seems to have appeared with equality rhetoric, and certainly after the burning times, where women learned more and more (not less and less) what men were capable of, and what they did to women who said and did things men didnt like. and following a global campaign to silence and erase feminist thought, including women who for 1000 years (or more) have been documenting what appears to be a universal model of male behavior that doesnt differ *at all* across time and place, including males *acting out* parasitism, necrophilia, violence and rape, regardless of what jobs they do, clothes they wear or anything else. i think this needs to be discussed. that is all.
The Presence of Absence. An Illustration? April 13, 2013
Posted by FCM in books!, health, news you can use, radical concepts, thats random.Tags: food, gerda lerner, SCD, specific carbohydrate diet
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in pure lust, mary daly talked about the presence of absence/absence of presence whereby women seem “present” in the foreground, but only as male-constructed fembots and handmaidens. in reality what we see of women in the media, the male identified/dominated/defined workplace, entertainment, our “representation” in the law etc is the complete absence of “female” or anything having anything to do with women at all.
notably, one thing “women” hawk constantly in the foreground is poop, and everything feces related. jokes on women! so you want to be an actor, or more specifically a working actor ay? how badly? will you literally talk about shit — scooping it, wiping it, dealing with the literal shit and filth of all of humanity and its pets too — even though male actors almost never have to talk about anything anywhere near as degrading, and women are specifically shamed for demonstrating nay possessing gastric function? thats what we thought.
i wont post actual videos, because there are so many, but see women talking about wiping their own and their familys asses here. cat poop. farts. it also seems as if there are a lot of women lately who cant poop at all or are otherwise suffering from “irregularity” for which there are consumerist remedies specifically targeting women. honestly, if you ever see a male commercial actor talking about shit, or more specifically wiping it, scooping it, or improving upon it, its an aberration and not the norm. so while i think there are several things going on here, including deliberately humiliating female actors (hey, at least its not porn, right? right? right? right?) and normalizing and degrading womens role as the shitkeepers of humanity, there is probably a whole vein worth excavating in a presence-of-absence sense. meaning, we see a lot about women and poop. therefore, we can probably assume what we are seeing is the absence of women and womens truth about it. we see a lot about women and “sex” too, but thats another post. from like 2 years ago. 
walk with me. i am currently reading gerda lerners 2-part “the creation of patriarchy.” in part one, she provides a thorough history lesson and concludes that patriarchy — institutionalized male dominance and female submission to male rule — has been around for about 5000 years. it was modeled after the widespread miniature, private patriarchies of the male-headed household which existed even longer. this means that women have been dominated by men for a long, long time. and the institution of slavery itself was modeled after mens oppression of women. womens oppression predated it. and women were the first slaves too — knowing how to control their own women (via rape) and utilize their unpaid sexual, domestic and reproductive services, conquering males first enslaved enemy women and killed enemy men. men they didnt know how to enslave. men developed tactics to enslave enemy men, but that came later.
interestingly, the conditions that make institutionalized slavery possible include food surpluses — slavery “seldom if ever occurs in hunter/gatherer societies but appears in widely separated regions and periods with the advent of pastoralism (animal husbandry), and later agriculture, urbanization and state formation.” slavery does not predate agriculture — it came later. to the extent that women were ever free, their freedom predated slavery — by how many years i dont know. but after slavery (and agriculture) women were never free. this is one of the conclusions i have gleaned from this book, although there are others.
now. i have recently had cause to examine an essentially pre-agricultural diet. it seems that people with various digestive issues, including serious and even potentially life-threatening diagnoses such as crohns and celiac disease, are helped with a diet devoid of grains, lactose (milk) and sugar. symptoms of crohns and celiac include gastric complaints such as chronic diarrhea, constipation, gas, and malabsorption/malnutrition which causes osteoporosis among other things. (think: poop and problems associated with poop). advocates of this diet call it variations of the “what our ancestors ate” diet — to the extent it is possible to currently do this, and this is not an insignificant qualifier, it may in fact be largely if not fully impossible at this juncture — adherents only eat (approximations of) what was likely available pre-agriculture. which means meat, berries, and some fruits and vegetables, but which notably excludes grains. one variation includes dairy but excludes most non-grain starches as well as lactose (hard cheese and 24-hour fermented yogurt are acceptable).
anyway, heres my point. for months now, i have been aware that if women were ever free, this was a long long time ago — and that the materials and activities in *my* daily life do not mirror theirs at all. i literally have no idea what its like to be free, because i am not free, but i am also not privy to the everyday experiences and sensations of free women. all the experiences and sensations i do have are *only* shared between myself and other women who are oppressed. feeling the seat and steering wheel as i sit in a car. feeling my feet on cement. that kind of thing.
in order to experience a sensation, any sensation that was likely also experienced by free women, so that i might feel part of what it felt like to be free i have tried to walk on a dirt path wherever possible. i have gone outside at night and looked up. i pick up rocks and branches and smell them. these sights, sounds, smells are something that free women experienced, and i want to experience them too. to the extent that sensations lead to thoughts, i want to know what free women thought. to the extent that sensations evoke memory, i want to remember what free women remembered. and to the extent that feeling my ass in a car or my hands on a plastic container (and other things) lead to thoughts and evoke memories shared *only* by oppressed women and slaves, and they could do nothing else, i do not want to experience those things anymore at all. its surely no coincidence that its going to be exceptionally difficult if not impossible to do this completely.
but right in the middle of this sensory experiment i have been conducting, i received this detailed historical lesson about agriculture, and concluded that if women were ever free, it was never in an agricultural context. and i actually wondered if it would be possible to eat a pre-agricultural diet in order to cultivate a shared dietary experience. the answer, really, is NO, although the internet explains how you can get as close to that as possible. but i also began to wonder, to the extent that women are experiencing this, and perhaps especially to the extent that a (modified) pre-agricultural diet alleviates or cures it, are womens “tummy troubles” (poop problems) their bodies literally rejecting patriarchy and the conditions of their own oppression and slavery? because stranger (equally strange?) things have happened. see depression.
that is all.
A Personal Statement February 28, 2013
Posted by FCM in books!, feminisms, health, meta, politics, WTF?.Tags: dave thomas, field of dreams, radfem 2013, radfem hub, reformism, university sponsored feminism
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please bother me for the password so you can read my super sikkrit thoughts. j/k. (this is not a password protected post. read on.)
i have experienced a blogging crisis recently. is this a first-world problem? oh dear. actually, its a speech problem, a silencing problem. women around the world experience this, and i experience it too. this is why i am a radical feminist, afterall. because i share class: female with 3.5 billion women globally who are rountinely, systematically and very easily silenced, by men, and by male technology, and you know, rape, and threats of rape. when we do get a word in edgewise, its precariously positioned indeed. we are no-platformed globally, and we speak from atop the head of a pin, standing on one foot, juggling knives. the lucky ones have a getaway-car waiting at the base of the mountain. sometimes the driver has been shot. me, i have a bicycle.
a bicycle? the head of a pin? is this supposed to be symbolic or something? no — its just words, meant to convey an image, a feeling and above all, an un-obscured message. the message might be a feeling, of course. did it work?
but its not symbolic — i dont do symbolism. i dont have time, and i was never good at it anyway. i tried, when i was young and first thought i wanted to write — a play, as i recall. with symbolism! hester prynne’s illegitimate (foreign, irritating, secret, precious) daughter was named pearl — get it? and as i was getting my characters in order, i realized okay, this is going to be a hell of a lot of work. this is going to take so much research, and there are some things that i — as a 16-year old (and girl) — simply could not know. like, i wanted one of my characters to be an adult man from new york city (i think?) how was i supposed to write that? that project went nowhere, once i realized that. i had written some notes in a small, extremely cheaply made journal covered in black chinese polyester silk. i never used the journal for anything after that. what a waste.
oh, and i just remembered! my very first big writing project was going to be a book! i started it when i was 10, over summer vacation. the only line i recall: a wave of excitement splashed over her body as she…did something. i know she — a high school aged girl — was going to a dance at school, so she was either entering the school or the gym. at 3:00 in the afternoon. because thats what time the dances were, when i was in 4th grade. somehow i knew i was being naive though, and that high-school dances worked differently, but how? i never finished the book. i remember sitting at the table in the air conditioning in a wet bathing suit, typing on an old typewriter with a couple missing keys that poked into my fingers. like, really bad. it was almost useless as a typewriter. my sister and our friend made “tea cakes” for us to eat, in our wet bathing suits in the air conditioning — “cakes” which consisted of the inner parts of whitebread slices balled up in our hands, which we drank with…something. maybe tea, but probably not. iced tea maybe. the swirls in the “tea cakes” (bread-balls) that looked kinda like cinnamon were actually dirty-hand dirt.
i had thought exclusively positive things about all of this — it was fun! — until one of the mothers asked us what “tea cakes” were, and then what the swirls were. she also asked me what i was writing, and when i replied that i was writing a book, she seemed skeptical! it hadnt occurred to me to be embarrassed about literally every single thing i was doing there at that table, eating dirty hand-balled whitebread, typing words that would never be a book ever, because there is no possible way. then, im sure i went swimming. in a dirty lake. with fish. in case anyone was wondering.
anyway, what was i saying? oh, symbolism. i dont do it. what i do is write things, for people to read, and then i converse with them about it. generally speaking, i speak literally (not metaphorically) and i invoke feeling, as well as convey information. in every post i write, i include an insight, because otherwise i bore myself to death and see very little point. these insights come from different places and i dont take credit for most of them — i just work here. i show up to work here. luckily, i am frequently inspired.
as a part of this writing-thing, i sustain direct and indirect hits, because for whatever reason, people are actually reading what i am saying. they are paying attention to it and responding to it in various ways. i *dont* like attention, but i do like writing things, for people to read, and then discussing it with them. so i keep doing it. sometimes i think about ending it so that i dont have to deal with the shitty parts of it anymore, and the shitty part is really fucking shitty. like, i feel like i am eating some amount of shit every fucking day, or most days. it feels toxic and alienating.
what i started doing when i feel toxic and alienated — because when i get like this i feel like i have nothing else to read, even though thats not exactly true, but thats how it feels when there is so (relatively) little radical work out there and i just want to feel inspired again, and i am feeling quite alone and frustrated by this point, and the thought of picking up a 30-year old book isnt doing it for me, and i dont want to have to search for anything, wahhhh, poor me — i read my own archives. okay? i do. i read the posts and i read the comments — seriously, i highly highly recommend the comments. it takes about an hour to read 2 or 3 posts and the conversations that follow, and every time i do this, i think — this is some of the best if not THE BEST writing on the internet. or something. you literally cannot get this anywhere else. okay? i think this about the posts, and i think this about the comments. its not the writing as much as the ideas of course, but damn those are some nice words, strung together in a coherent way, intended to make sense to other people. which is different than being a “good writer” not incidentally. get it?
and i used to do this with the HUB too. every time we were under attack or experiencing some crisis or sustaining repeated blows, from within and without, sometimes at the same time, i would pry one hand out of my hair and go a-browsing. in its early days, i would browse HUB’s front page — it went on forever, and had so much fresh content, it was glorious — and i would think “this is really good work. i am really happy about this. excellent.” or something. and you know what else i would think about? as much as i hate to admit it to all you amazing women who might be able to go entire minutes without an old white man popping into your head, i (would and do) think about dave thomas, the creator of the wendy’s hamburger franchise.
okay? i think about dave freaking thomas and his freaking fast-food restaurants. because i once saw a biography about him, and he spake into the camera thusly:
every time i feel down, and like this cant possibly succeed (he was competing with the biggies mcdonalds and burger king, dont forget) i go into one of my restaurants, and i have a burger and a frosty and i think “this is really good food.” and that makes me feel better, and i start to believe this might actually work.
thats a paraphrase, and its rather like “if i build it, they will come” — but with pickles and onions. get it? if i build it, they will come. another dumb 80s reference that has stuck with me all this time, for some reason. the young ‘uns can google it.
so look. deep down, im just a hick who remembers stuff, and i find inspiration where i find it. i involuntarily recall this interview of dave thomas i accidentally saw once, when im feeling down about radical feminist blogging, or when the biggies are about to crush me. because the biggies are about to crush me, always, and therefore, i sustain blow after blow, from within and without, i end up thinking about hamburgers a lot. not all the time, but more than i normally would, for sure. i am thinking about them right now. and now you are too.
so, is there an actual point to be located anywhere in this post? yes. did it come through? you tell me. i feel like hammered shit right now, and im thinking about crusty, greasy hamburgers i cant even eat. because of food allergies, mind you. my appetite is completely fine.
