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A Springboard December 7, 2014

Posted by FCM in international, liberal dickwads, logic, news you can use, radical concepts.
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i realize that some of my previous comments may have seemed out of left field so i wanted to clarify what i meant when i said that the environment may not support MALE life for much longer, and almost certainly not indefinitely.  i started researching NTE/NTHE (near term extinction/near term human extinction) based on a comment on another blog and i have been thinking about it for awhile.  there have been cryptic comments being dropped on our blogs for years by trusted commenters about some imminent disaster/extinction event but nothing that was googleable, and i was apparently not inclined to investigate it on my own; at last, someone dropped an acronym — NTE.  something googleable!  so i googled it.  (witchwind has also discussed this on her blog).

i will not get into it extremely deeply here, google will tell you all you need to know (the evidence has been synthesized and kid-gloved so its readable, the really sciency among us may be able to find the original data somewhere as well).  however, i can tell you that there are some people who believe that human-caused global climate change will cause human extinction within our lifetimes — even as soon as the next 15-20 years.  due to “positive feedback loops” of environmental destruction which produce exponentially more of the same, even if “we” stopped our policy and practice of global environmental destruction tomorrow, it wouldnt help (and we are nowhere near stopping any of it tomorrow, next year, or ever).  we have passed the point of no return.

now, i think it is always a safe bet to assume that men are lying about whatever they are talking about, or that they have gotten it wrong (or both).  i think this should be our default posture when encountering any male ideology, but that we should also not dismiss all of mens work out of hand.  mary daly talked about using mens work as “springboards” for our own.  in this way, we can turn mens necrophilic theory, policy and practice into something we can use, to help ourselves.  a sound policy, considering that males have monopolized all the resources including data and methods of collecting data, and we have to get by on whatever they decide to share with us, assuming there is anything left after stripping it down of its repulsive maleness.  and i have come to believe that there is something we can use in the data/evidence and synthesis men have shared in relation to NTE.

NTE activist (mostly) males say that global climate change will make the earth uninhabitable for humans and that we will become extinct — that the planet in its oppressively polluted state will shortly get exponentially worse and will not support human life for much longer.  and this may well be.  what i have never seen discussed is the possibility that an oppressively polluted earth will not sustain MALE life (but that female or majority female life may well live on) even though there is some evidence to support this.  i am not saying PROOF — i am talking about evidence.  and this is important.

all theorists except mathematicians (i think?) rely on evidence, not proof, in forming and coalescing their thoughts — upon which is built policy and practice.  proof is reserved for mathematics in that actual logical proofs can be drawn which are not debatable — if done correctly, proofs are demonstrably true, in a mathematical sense.  others of us have to rely on “evidence” which is a lower standard, and far from ideal, but it is what it is.  of course, an even lower standard has been applied where some feminists have “theorized” about men and maleness “against all evidence” and these feminists have long professed that there is hope for men, that men are likely to change, that males will respond to females without violence.  they admit that the policy and practice flowing from these absurd beliefs has been against all evidence.  the result has been a disaster, and 100+ years of reformist politicking has been like shooting pebbles at the moon.

anyway, all this is to say that there is indeed EVIDENCE that MALE life will become extinct or endangered in fairly short order, due to global climate change.  while NTE activists (or whatever they call themselves — doomsday cultists) present compelling EVIDENCE for their claims that human life will shortly falter or fail, they have rather notably not addressed known sex-based differences in human survival rates including fetal development under conditions of pollution and maternal stress — these conditions demonstrably favor female life over male.  in other words, where male fetuses and neonates are relatively fragile, and female is the default setting for every fetus, it is largely females that survive environmental pollution and maternal stress — massive levels of both pollution and stress being on the horizon, according to NTE activists.  and males, disproportionately, do not survive in these conditions.

i have used NTE male circle-jerking (essentially, resource hoarding and hedonism in preparation for “our” impending doom) as a springboard for my own thoughts, which is that nature will favor a global female majority, and that there is EVIDENCE that this will indeed happen, and that it may happen soon.  relatedly, there is also EVIDENCE that, when the male population decreases substantially for whatever reason, life gets better for everyone.  google it!  what all of this means in practical terms, as far as i can tell, is that natural law will take care of the maleness problem, which is partly a numbers problem, ie, too many males.  and human females need not do anything — its going to happen anyway,  no matter what we do or dont.

kindly recall that i am citing EVIDENCE, not PROOF.  and frankly, as there is NO evidence that males as a class will ever change for the better, and NO evidence that males as a class can or will respond to females without violence, what i am proposing here is in fact more logically sound than anything any reformist feminist has ever proposed.  there is more evidence that the human race will become extinct in 15 years than there is evidence that males will ever stop oppressing, raping and murdering females based on our sex.  think about that.

males have created a global system that is unsustainable, where they have reaped all the benefits while enduring no or disproportionately low costs (PIV is but one example of many, but it is the only one that all males share equal responsibility for; being that global overpopulation is largely what has caused this mess, this is no small point, but one that largely “sexually active” PIV-positive NTE activists have notably not addressed.  responsibility for other discrepant cost/benefit scenarios may differ amongst men based on their race and class, with white western males arguably being the worst.  but still, all subsidies are created by and for men).  the punchline, if you can call it that, is that nature will not stand for this forever.  women demanding some return to homeostasis, or activating towards it, follows natural law, but there is EVIDENCE that it is too late for any of this.  and as it always has and always will, nature bats last.

NTE activists believe that no humans will survive, but another outcome is supported by the evidence — the world will be so polluted and stressful that males will simply cease to exist, or will only exist in disproportionately tiny numbers while females survive to make the best of whatever is left, even if its been reduced to a toxic, smoking cinder.  just like we always have.  this is freeing in a dark way — and forgive me too if i find it a bit funny.  after all the FEMALE blood, sweat and tears expended advancing radical feminism (and environmentalism!) in the face of impending global male extinction…its gallows humor.

I See What You Did There. Or, “Witchcraze” Pt. 4? June 13, 2013

Posted by FCM in feminisms, gender roles, international, meta, politics.
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so radfem13 went off without a hitch.  mostly.  the event took place and the organizers have issued a postgame statement focusing on the legal issues involved in organizing and meeting as women, in women-only space exclusive of men and trannies.  the title of the piece is “protecting female-only space in the UK.”  an “interim legal statement” was previously published here.  the organizers are quoted extensively in an article on “counterpunch” which you can read here (via gendertrender).

relatedly, melinda tankard reist has been reporting on the saga of young feminist talitha stone taking on a misogynist rapper — i will expound on how this is related below.  the latest installment of this series is here.

theres a lot going on here, and its hard to know where to start.  so lets start at the beginning, which is probably “what are we doing here in the first place” or the point of radical feminism.  and lets be brief about it and come to the analysis quickly.  radical feminism is about locating, exposing and understanding the root of womens oppression by men, so that we can be liberated from male dominance.  so what is the root?  radical feminists understand that the logical endpoint to radical feminist thought is that the root of womens oppression by men is mens sexual and reproductive abuse of women.  this is what it means and what it looks like to be oppressed as women by men as men — men dominate and enslave women based on our reproductive biology and mens demonstrated ability and interest in exploiting it.

this means “othering” and pathologizing womens biology by eroticizing intercourse and separating or falsely separating “sex” from reproduction, where there has been no 100% reliable contraceptive invented and there is unlikely to be one ever.  and by gaslighting women when we experience reasonable anxiety and aversion to penis-centered “sex” and when we become “unintentionally” knocked up, as if there was any other reasonable outcome to eroticized and normalized PIV considering our female biology and how it works.

it means that men grant themselves the power to open the door to formal, institutional and state control of women by doing the one thing that only men do to only women and which we cannot do to anyone — by impregnating us.  note how the big-3 of the patriarchal institutions — medicine, religion and law — all attach to womens bodies and womens lives at the moment of conception, and that this does not happen to men at the moment of conception or ever.  its literally a trap, baited and set by men and producing an outcome intended by men that benefits men — control of women, and control of reproduction, including the terms and conditions of intercourse, pregnancy, birth, and childrearing.

this is what our oppression consists of and what it is.  men get to name it (sex, fucking, knocked up, mother, father) men get to execute it (intercourse, impregnation) and men get to enforce it (rape, heteronormativity, marriage, and legal remedies and lack thereof for sexual and reproductive offenses).  note that i am considering rape to be the violent enforcement by men of womens sex role as fuckholes and breeders.

and there is no legal solution to rape — men rape us, period.  then when we are inevitably impregnated, we are caught in their trap and cannot escape — pregnancy triggers the system of overlapping controls on women (via reproduction) including medicalizing/legislating/moralizing abortion; the medical and other standards of care that apply to pregnant, laboring and lactating women; and laws and customs that allow surveillance and control of caretakers, primarily women, and defining parenthood itself so that men are included, tethering women to the men who impregnate them for life.  all of this is made-up by men and follows no natural (inevitable) law, and is all by patriarchal design.

now, it is important to note that both rape and legal remedies for sexual and reproductive offenses are used by men to enforce their sexual and reproductive control of women.  arent they?  thus, womens relationship to the law specifically regarding issues of sex and reproduction — and therefore the terms and conditions of both our oppression and our liberation — is not merely complicated but demonstrably conflicted where men obviously use rape and then not-punishing rape, as well as restrictive (legal) controls on pregnant, birthing and mothering women, in order to dominate and enslave us.

so.  regarding radfem13, we have organizers statements indicating that “protecting female-only spaces in the UK” is paramount.  whether or not this is the case is a question for the community.  so i present the question this way: does protecting female-only spaces in the UK cease or even affect mens sexual and reproductive abuse of women?  in order to know whether it does or doesnt, or whether radfem13 was radical at all, we must understand what the organizers themselves intend and mean when they say it.  and to figure out what they mean, it helps to read what they have said in their own words about what they were trying to accomplish and why.  they tell us what they mean where they say that they wish to evoke the Equality Act to preserve their right to legally assemble sans men; and they explain that the reason they need to do this is because gender, meaning stereotypes which emanate from a persons born-sex but which arent endemic to either sex.  and that the artificiality and unfairness of “gender” (meaning sex-based stereotypes) apply to both women and men.

so firstly, we have an appeal for legal reform/protections in one country to meet in women-only space; being generous we can assume they mean that they wish to have mens laws interpreted and applied fairly to women generally and globally, although they do not say this.  previously, the organizers released this statement which indicates their intention to fight for our right to meet as females; and another statement here concerning the legal issues and difficulties involved in meeting in female-only space in the UK.  again, no mention is made of why this is necessary; nowhere in these statements is there an acknowledgement of or an appeal to end womens sexual and reproductive abuse by men, or why its important, or how they wish to achieve this.  and (therefore) no mention of anything of any importance to radical feminists or radical feminism as a matter of fact.

from an outsiders perspective (i did not attend) and assuming that it served some legitimate purpose, it seems as if the intent and effect of radfem13 was meta — the purpose of meeting in the UK in women-only space was to prove that they could.  one wonders whether this was fair to women who traveled long distances to attend a radical feminist conference, rather than a reformist one, or one centering the legal situation in the UK which does not affect all or even most women globally.

but still, is it possible that, once attendees gathered inside, this conference became radical, or less reformist?  sadly, organizers statements made elsewhere indicate that it probably didnt.  while all radical feminists must agree that “sex matters” and that trans and queer politickers misuse “gender” essentially as a euphemism for sex, albeit “brain sex” (or as voluntary “performance”) the obviously reformist-oriented radical feminists we see organizing radfem13 and elsewhere misuse both “sex” and “gender” to mean essentially sex-based stereotypes.  “stereotypes” which, according to them, are oppressive to both men and women, or at least reflective of the biology or essence of neither, even as we see male violence — and mens sexual and reproductive control of women enforced with male violence — as a global phenomenon that transcends social conditioning, and men across time and place embracing it and manifesting it in various ways.  even the “good guys” and men in less violent and “less patriarchal” cultures do this in their own way and we fucking well know it.

and even as we see women, globally and throughout time, dissonating with, negotiating within and around, and ultimately rejecting our sex (not gender) role as mens fuckholes and slaves.  equating women with men — against all evidence — is a false equivalence and simply is not rigorous, logical analysis or honest intellectual labor.  and conflating “sex” with “sex-based stereotypes” does nothing to locate the root of womens oppression by men — our sexual and reproductive abuse as women, by men as men — in order to liberate women from male dominance.

and finally, i bring up melinda tankard reist’s recent reporting of the young feminist who is single-handedly taking on a notoriously misogynistic american rapper because this is yet another manifestation of reformist-oriented politicking, what it consists of and where it leads.  on her blog, reist says,

One of the great rewards of this work is seeing a growing wave of young women go into battle against violence against women in all its brutal manifestations, calling out and naming this violence as unacceptable. One such woman is 24-year-old Talitha Stone. […]  Talitha’s passion and gutsy activism gives me hope that things can change.

okay.  here, we have reist, a well-known, seasoned radical feminist who makes money on radical feminism as a speaker and writer, applauding and encouraging individual women who dont make money on it and who in fact may have little or nothing to gain from it, to engage in “gutsy activism” (and everything that entails including the very real danger of physical and emotional violence by men) by taking on a misogynistic industry and all misogynists everywhere — in this case by protesting rap lyrics that describe the sexual abuse of women by men.  how and indeed whether this instance or this kind of activism is likely to liberate women from male dominance is never made clear.  and frankly, giving well-known seasoned radical feminists who make money from radical feminism hope that things can change, in the complete absence of evidence that this is true, or even that radical feminism informs this activism, how, and why, is not a good enough reason for anyone to do it or to expect anyone to do it, or to applaud those who do it at great cost to themselves.

indeed, if a woman throwing herself on the pyre in this manner inspires hope, and i think this is an apt metaphor, one might wonder “hope for what, exactly?”  hope that the next generation of women will fall into the same reformist traps, creating paying “radical feminist” jobs and opportunities for MOAR ACTIVISM, and more meta — the continuance of reformism itself, in other words, as opposed to identifying the root of and liberating women from male dominance — is what it sounds like to me.

Moron Creativity May 19, 2013

Posted by FCM in books!, international.
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we have discussed creativity before here.  this post is more on that subject, and its also about men.  get it?  moron.  i always assume people get that, but maybe its just me.  sometimes i just make myself laugh and thats good enough, but as vonnegut once wrote, maybe people would like art more if the artist explained it a little?

i am currently reading about the witchcraze and one thing ive noticed, indeed its rather difficult not to, is that men were very creative in the ways they treated witches.  more to the point, they were creative torturers.  men came up with shit that would blow your mind if you only knew about it, and it *is* mindblowing to read about this stuff.  its mindblowing in the same way as reading the work and ideas of any creative genius is mindblowing as a matter of fact.  its shit you could never come up with yourself in a thousand years.  of course, the destructiveness of mens torture, when coupled with the creativity of it creates a mindfuck experience as well.  we have no words for this, as “create” and “destroy” are supposed to be opposites.  but they arent.  not for men anyway.

you see, i think its very obvious by now that men are creative torturers and creative destroyers.  in light of recent conversations about the innateness of mens destructiveness and violence, the idea of creativity hits the right note.  a good thing, too, because im getting sick of going around and around on this one.  because all of us, i think, are quite aware that some people are just naturally gifted in certain areas, and that this giftedness cannot be taught.  although we do not fully understand where natural giftedness comes from, we accept and admit that it is real.  we are perfectly comfortable saying people are naturally gifted in certain areas, music, sculpting, cooking, that kind of thing.  arent we?  naturally.  gifted.

welp.  men, as history and experience shows, are gifted at torture.  they really are.  and torture is violence taken to an artform, its violence imagined, designed and implemented with creativity.  isnt it?  if we are going to use other artforms or abilities as analogies, we could say that a naturally gifted person (like a painter or an athlete) can be coached or inspired, and that the gift can be developed and helped along.  but what we know we cant do is teach it.  okay?  creativity, and true creative talent, cannot be taught.  it is innate, and we fucking well know this.

and as men are creative in the area of violence, otherwise known as torture, we can see that men are in fact naturally violent.  i think this is indisputable, and again, that the proof of innateness is that they are able to be creative about it.  they are gifted.  and the existence and pervasiveness of torture, perpetrated by men, globally, across time is absolute proof of this natural propensity and that men share this innate tendency because they are men.

now.  this does open up areas for discussion, and even hope.  because just as we know that creativity can be nurtured, we also know it can be stunted.  we can take away opportunities instead of providing them.  leisure time, money, and an understanding of what is possible based on what other people have done in the field, for example, are used to increase and encourage creative pursuits, and withholding these things can be used to stunt them.  we have lost many geniuses and natural creative talents this way in fact, and i daresay most of these lost geniuses were women due to womens general lack of all conditions and materials known to foster and nurture creativity.  we do this to female talent all the time.  and we have evidence, dont we, that creative talent can be stifled, if not snuffed out completely.

and now that ive thought this through a bit, i can see mens propensity for creative torture, including their torture devices everywhere.  its not just the political torturers and witchhunters, although they might be extreme — that is, different in degree but not kind.  womens clothing and shoes for example — known torture devices.  “restraining orders” that are naught but a piece of flimsy paper, creating a mindfuck.  get it?  and humiliation.  tampons and “pads that feel like diapers.”  as mundane as this kind of torture is, it is still creative.

of course, i could go on and on.  we all could because we all know.  ex-husbands paying child support late every month, in order to make women squirm.  by “sexualizing” intercourse, the only thing *in life* that creates unwanted pregnancy.  that kind of thing.  and in general by turning womens bodies against them in the many ways men do.  indeed, the “body being turned against the agent whose body it is” is the whole point of torture and this is accomplished through both pain and fear (in male terms).  of course, male bodies cant be literally hijacked, but ours can — through unwanted or forced pregnancy.  if anyone needs examples of the creative ways men torture other men, just google. trigger warning for extreme and graphic (and creative!) male violence.

but what im also thinking is not whether but how and how soon we can stunt mens natural propensity for violence?  if we cant do this, or if we dont want to, at least we know that it is possible.  and understanding and accepting, knowing, that men choose to nurture their gift for creative torture and violence instead of stunting it, when we all know they could, is evidence of something too.  oh yes it is.  maybe, maybe just talking about this will help.

In Which I Make a Fantastical Leap May 8, 2013

Posted by FCM in books!, gender roles, international, liberal dickwads, MRAs, trans.
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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.
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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.