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.
Golden Girls Marathon. I Have My Period. February 3, 2013
Posted by FCM in feminisms, health, MRAs, news you can use, PIV, rape.Tags: genetic decay, male violence, Y chromosome
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these arent my favorite episodes or anything, they are just free, full episodes on youtube. you can find more here. really, this post isnt about the golden girls at all, im just engaging in a bit of misdirection. if i wanted to buy myself a few extra minutes, i might even add a page break, or use a couple of big words. and if the MRAs want to link to this post, their link *will* say “golden girls marathon” and “i have my period.” ha!
also, my stools are a bit soft, even though i took probiotics. can anyone recommend something for loose stools due to menstrual-related hormonal fluctuations?
are we alone now? good.
there is something very wrong with men — we know this. feminism is not about fixing men, or curing them of their repulsiveness — it would be a better use of our time to try to cure tangerines of their tangerine-ness. and pointless experimenting on citrus fruit would surely smell better, and we could eat our mistakes! yum!
i made a jello mold today but it didnt set up right — does anyone know why? i think i added too much pineapple, but i thought i had compensated for that by adding a bigger box of jello than what the recipe called for. i dont normally care for jello-based desserts but i have found that using exotic fruits and nuts keeps the focus off the jello.
thanks to mandatory PIV and rape, and mens global policy of female infanticide (but not male), there are too many men worldwide. men exist in unnatural numbers globally and we know this. we also know that genetically, the Y chromosome is defective and decaying over time — generation after generation, human males are becoming even more incomplete, even more lacking and they are indeed barrelling toward their own extinction. google it.
my TiVo crashed and i lost my entire collection of ghost whisperer! does anyone know how season 4 ended — the last episode i saw, jim had died and his spirit jumped into the body of some other dood, but does this mean that jim is still on the show and the actor that plays jim is leaving or what?
the human male is on its way out. we know this. however, on their way out the door, thanks to male genetic decay and the fact that they exist in unnatural numbers globally, they seem to have reached a critical mass of pure evil, and this might not have been the case 20 or even 10 years ago but it absolutely *is* the case now — things are getting worse. we need to understand this, and take this into account in our theory and our actions. what we thought was going to work before might not work now, or if it was working, it might not have any further usefulness because the game has changed. we have to adapt to changing circumstances and use what we know, but some seem very invested in their own status or in the work itself rather than the truth, and liberating ourselves and other girls and women from male dominance — this is a mistake.
im having a cocktail party next week and i need some good ideas for appetizers. i am really sick of the standard fare and would like to serve something with some “wow” factor — does anyone have any ideas?
women have known there is something fundamentally wrong with men for a long time, and they talk about it like its the common knowledge it is. i am BEYOND sick of feminists (and feminism) which denies reality and the reality of womens lives and what men do to us AND WHY THEY DO IT, AND WHETHER THEY ARE LIKELY TO EVER STOP. they arent.
i have an itchy anus, its especially bothersome at night — when i googled this, i found that this is a warning sign of intestinal parasites! i do eat a lot of raw fish so i am afraid that perhaps i have picked up a parasite. god that fucking sucks, as if i didnt have enough to deal with.
the increasing decay and incompleteness of the Y chromosome over time + unnatural numbers of men globally due to mandatory PIV and rape and female infanticide = critical mass of male evil. this appears to be the truth of it. this problem is real, and it is urgent.
read between the lines mkay. men are showing and telling us everything we need to know about their intentions, and what they want to do to us and to the world, whether they can be reformed, and whether they will stop. they are telling us the truth about themselves hourly, daily, weekly, yearly. believe it.
On The “Sexual Double Standard” and Slut-Shaming December 9, 2012
Posted by FCM in feminisms, health, PIV, pop culture, rape.Tags: double standard, PIV, slut shaming, slutwalk
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this will make sense in a minute hopefully? i wanted to talk a bit about “slut shaming” and what has been framed as the “sexual double standard” since long before any of us was born — i think i first heard of it in the context of first-wave feminists who noticed that prostituted women were being singled out for oppressive state controls like mandatory screenings for venereal disease while male johns werent. while i think the “double standard” concept was initially useful because it drew attention to a misogynistic phenomenon, so that we could isolate, identify and examine something that was really happening in real life, the concept itself is thinly (or not at all)-disguised equality-rhetoric isnt it? it means that, assuming we are all the same, or “all things being equal” there should be one standard that applies universally.
the problem with identifying sex-based “double standards” however is that there are actual, meaningful sex-based differences between women and men — the “assuming we are all the same” part poses a problem for radical feminists, who understand that men do not equal women and women do not equal men. for us, once we have identified the relevant issues as being reproductively-based, or having literally to do with “sex” (either biological sex or sexual intercourse, which implicates biological sex-based difference) an analysis based on the sexual double standard is a nonstarter. radical feminists can and must do better, and our analyses do in fact shed meaningful light on issues affecting women as a sexual class, including social patriarchal structures and mechanisms which are designed by men to benefit themselves and support male power at womens expense.
in the case of the so-called sexual double standard of oppressive state controls being placed on prostituted women but not on male johns, the problem is not that its a double standard (which is an unhelpful liberal, rather than a feminist, concept), but that its actually a patriarchal reversal — policy and practice has assumed that prostituted women were largely infecting men, when the truth is that its the male johns who are infecting prostituted women, and not so much the other way around.
furthermore, a truth-based policy and practice would also have to acknowledge that, as a general matter, male johns are becoming infected themselves primarily through engaging in penetrative sex with other men (and intravenous drug use) — again, due to biological differences between women and men which make it relatively difficult for women to infect men with disease, as a general matter, men are not becoming infected by women, prostituted or not. men are also known to engage in risky sexual and other behavior more than women are, which complicates the matter — what that “social” difference does not do, however, is make women more likely to infect men with sexually transmitted disease. ruminate about “nature versus nurture” on that difference all you like, but for our purposes its largely irrelevant.
to clarify, whats “unfair” about the historical treatment of prostituted women is not that they are treated differently than men — the “double standard.” no. in reality, these policies and practices are “unfair” because they are objectively damaging to women and are misogynistic and patriarchal, designed to benefit men at womens expense (and in the case of the reversal, its an inversion of reality, to boot).
savvy? now, for any of you who are still awake, i will attempt to draw a parallel between slut-shaming and the chest-burster scene from alien.
regarding “slut-shaming”. slut-shaming, apparently, refers to the “sexual double standard” whereby women who engage in (primarily) intercourse with men are cast in a negative light, while males who engage in (primarily) intercourse with women arent. yes? so dismissing the equality-framework of the double-standard as inadequate on its face (we are talking about intercourse, where there are in fact meaningful sex-based differences between women and men) we must go deeper. what is really going on here, when women who fuck men “consensually” are regarded as “more promiscuous, less intelligent, less mentally healthy, less competent, and more risky” than are the men they are fucking?
first, its obvious that this is a male-centric viewpoint — everything is, and will continue to be, unless and until women develop our own female-centric discourse, and create language and concepts and definitions that center female reality, and that address and communicate what *we* mean when we say what we say. interestingly, when viewing the world through mens eyes, the reasoning behind “slut-shaming” instantly snaps into focus doesnt it? to wit, considering that men know that intercourse is harmful to women, including the risks of disease and pregnancy; and understanding that female-specific reproductive harm is central and critical to male political and interpersonal power; and considering that intercourse-as-sex is therefore the very foundation of patriarchy itself — men tend to view women who “have sex” in a negative light because no sane, healthy, competent etc. person would voluntarily engage in it, considering the risks. get it?
so sane person. no human person. no man.
you see, there is not a man in the entire world, if the risks of intercourse applied to men, who would ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER choose to engage in it for pleasures sake. never, ever, ever, ever, ever would a man voluntarily place himself in harms way like that, and that includes the most submissive, masochistic and self-hating man. NO man would EVER do this. so if the question is, “why do men treat women who voluntarily engage in intercourse as if those women are retarded, damaged, or crazy?” the answer, im sorry to say, is “because thats what they think you are.”
historical note: nymphomania. this is not abstract theorizing mkay. men have long thought that women who desired intercourse with men were crazy, as in mentally ill. because no sane person would voluntarily engage in it, considering the risks. note that historically and today, this diagnosis applies only to women, although that history (and, uh, present) has been obscured of late with bullshit equality rhetoric: wiki now redirects to “hypersexuality” despite the female-specific context and connotations of nymphomania.
its not difficult to see how and in what context “slut shaming” makes perfect sense, actually. note that *i* am not saying that women who voluntarily engage in intercourse are retarded, insane, or particularly damaged. i know better, and that its more akin to making a deal with the devil, where men are the devil.
interestingly, and very much related, this is what men appear to think of pregnancy: (remakes of) the chestbursting-alien scene from alien! i couldnt find the real one, but these will do.
which is even more reason for men to think women are LITERALLY RETARDED, literally insane, to voluntarily place themselves at risk by having intercourse with men. it also demonstrates what they think of people who are insane, when sane = man = human. as in, no sane person. no human person. no man. listening to men tell it, they seem to think pregnancy and aliens are very much related.
and while *i* accept that some women might desire pregnancy under some conditions, men seem to think that NO sane person would EVER voluntarily submit to it under ANY conditions, although they are assuming the continuation of patriarchy including patriarchal medicine and how it is deliberately used to support male power and to harm and damage pregnant, birthing and mothering women. of course they are.
tl;dr. slut shaming: its what men really think of women who voluntarily have sex with men, because men know that intercourse is damaging to women. also, the sexual “double standard” cannot be applied to radical analyses of policies and practices implicating “sex” and sex-based difference. in the context of “slut shaming”, a double-standard analysis is unhelpful liberal equality-rhetoric, nothing more.
Rock This Town November 13, 2012
Posted by FCM in feminisms, gender roles, health, logic, politics, pop culture.Tags: handmaidens, rock this town, sandra fluke, sarah palin, stray cats
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does anyone notice a difference when female vocalists cover this song, as compared to the original version where a man-band performs the exact same thing? heres the original manly version:
maybe its just me, but im pretty sure that the women are actually talking about rocking. this town. and that the man isnt, and therefore — since its his song — this song isnt a song about rocking. this town. its a song about something else entirely.
we have text, and subtext, you see. text, and context. text, and pretext. the women are saying the words, but it just doesnt mean the same thing when they say it, because women arent rapey bastards swinging their male privilege — to rape and impregnate females — around and making rape culture and calling it culture. women are something else entirely.
being that this is the case — and it is — i am just not going to get that excited about a woman who stumps for right-wing men by “covering” mens anti-abortion platform. in fact, i am willing to give right-wing women the benefit of the doubt that when they say it, even when they parrot mens words exactly, the womens meaning is somewhat different. i am willing to believe that unlike right-wing men, anti-abortion right-wing women really are talking about babies, and normalizing womens reproductive function rather than pathologizing it, and generally take into consideration a female perspective, including what it takes to reduce the harm to women of misogynistic and male-centric policies and practices under patriarchy.
the fact that it will not be womens intent, meaning, or interpretation of the words that carries the day and informs the political policy and practice — it will be mens — is not womens fault. when men say “rock this town” it is mens meaning and interpretation that will carry the day, and impact the culture, even if that meaning is so misogynistic and offensive that most women would never even conceive of it. and it often is. which is the danger to women of covering male bands, and stumping for male-centric politics too.
ps. sandra fluke is a handmaiden too, for stumping for leftist politics and for not telling the world exactly *why* women as a class so desperately need birth control. and im not that excited about that, either, although the inconsistent policy and logic-fail of calling out palin but not fluke (or any number of left-wing dickpleasers like oh say gloria steinem) is a bit obvious. that is all.
