there is a tumblr post going around that cites several “sources” for the social constructionist belief that there are “rape free” cultures somewhere, or there were at some time. women are apparently basing their entire activism (and therefore their entire lives or a significant part of their lives and female selves) on the belief that men raping, torturing and murdering women across time and place is culturally/socially constructed, and not innate to males themselves. and that makes me want to address it. because female health and energy are the only things *in life* with the potential to help women, and because female health and energy are resources that are not renewable or easily renewable under conditions of patriarchy, it is very, very, very important that women make decisions about how to spend their time and energy wisely.
i will not link to the post, or the sources, you can find these yourselves. but i would like to suggest some questions/issues we should all consider when evaluating “evidence” of these elusive rape free zones. we have discussed this before but i think having the issues parsed in one place for future (and present) reference might be helpful. so lets dig in.
first, 99.9% rape-free or some other percentage that is less than 100% does not mean rape-free. okay? i have seen these articles too, they were required reading in undergraduate-level gender studies courses in the 1990s (if that tells you anything — it should) and many of them do not say that any culture anyone knows of was ever 100% rape free. the evidence that some cultures have men raping women LESS than they do in some other cultures, or OUR culture, is not evidence that ANY culture is a rape-free culture. and it is definitely not evidence that rape is socially constructed mkay. if anything, the presence of cultures that are 99.9% (or some other relatively high percentage but less than 100) rape free is evidence that no matter how rape-unfriendly any culture is, culture cannot stop men from raping women. they still do it. they will rape us anyway, because they are men.
next, i would like to address the elusive 100% rape free culture. has this been documented? i have not seen anyone ever say that there are 100% rape free cultures (except when they are saying that something-less-than-100%-rape-free is the same thing as rape-free when its not) but some pointed questions about this hypothetical culture, and the studies that document this if there even are any, come to mind. and really, these questions apply to all the studies collecting/reporting on the issue at all, even if they end up discovering a culture somewhere that is mostly-rape-free.
firstly, how are they defining (framing) rape? are they only considering rape-rape? cause thats not very feminist. are they considering other kinds of rape, like underage rape, abuse of power rape, incest, sexualized child abuse, acquaintance rape, marital rape? are they counting consent that is coerced like in cases of economic, social or other dependence? what about boozy sex and alcohol-facilitated “hooking up” — this is also rape mkay. we know this. so what exactly do they mean when they say RAPE DOESNT HAPPEN HERE? this is a serious question, and radical feminists must, must demand answers to this. the situation is dire — as i said, activist women are basing their entire lives on this evidence/data, and what they think they are reading when they read it. and womens lives matter. so. in the case of the elusive rape-free culture, which reformist women believe we can create here and now based on the evidence that it has been done in other places sometime, does “rape-free” really mean what they think it means, and what it is being pushed/twisted/represented to mean? does it?
i would also ask, in the case of any culture where men rape women “less than they do here,” how much female time, energy and other resources are spent on achieving that ends? when men “rape less” including not at all, do men just decide out of the goodness of their hearts or dicks not to rape us anymore? or do women have to continuously surveil them, police them, punish them for rape/attempted rapes and for “rapey” behaviors/thoughts/values that are likely to lead to rape? if we are talking about “matriarchal” cultures where the women do everything important, and the men sit on the periphery trying not to get into trouble (including committing rape), is this evidence that mens desire to rape is socially, and not biologically/innately constructed? sorry, but no. no, it is not evidence of that. at all.
next, i would ask whether these studies considered normalized sexualized/eroticized intercourse, or intercourse for pleasures sake when a pregnancy is not wanted by the women, and considered “intercourse,” making love, and PIV to be totally different from rape? how different from rape-rape does it have to be, to be considered rape? this is a serious question. we know that intercourse for pleasures sake, removed from reproduction, is an act of hateful othering because it pathologizes female bodies in their natural, normal state — the state of impregnability and vulnerability to semen. in any other context this kind of brutal othering and deliberately causing disperate impacts/outcomes with social, political and physical consequences to a protected social class would be considered discrimination, if not an outright hate crime.
but in the case of fucking women, causing them reproductive stress and pain, as well as unwanted and undesirable political outcomes based on pregnancy, doesnt count as anything. right? and its definitely not rape, even though rape historically has been used by men specifically to cause unwanted pregnancies in women, and specifically to control women politically, physically, socially, sexually, spiritually, materially, and in every way. even though PIV and rape are so much the same, they arent the same at all. right? what do the “studies” alleging there are rape-free cultures think about intercourse removed from reproduction? this is a serious question, not because i feel like bashing PIV today, but because social constructionist womens lives depend on the answer. they themselves have said this — they continue to activate because they believe these rape-free cultures exist, and that it is possible for men to stop fucking raping women. so is it? hint: mens attitude toward “sex” and “othering” women, including politically oppressing women via pregnancy (and motherhood!) is relevant.
next, i would like to know whether the studies that collect/report on data indicating that there are rape-free cultures also consider men violently oppressing women generally, such as with torture and murder. because that is really what we are talking about isnt it? rape is a form of (female-specific) torture, and rape and murder of women by men frequently go hand in hand. i would want to know, if i was basing my entire life and lifes work on the existence of these cultures, how woman-friendly are they really? are women safe from men anywhere? have they ever been? of course, the answer to this question partially depends on how one defines torture. in general, people have a pretty narrowbiased misogynistic view of what torture is (if its done to women by men, its not torture).
now, same questions about mens seemingly global, timeless aptitude for necrophilia. is there anywhere on this (formerly) green earth women can go, or could we ever, where we were/are not constantly taunted and tormented by the male death wish and mens hideous love of death, dying, and killing? kind of an important question, if the answer means that we should (or should not) hold out hope for men and their ability to exist in a biophilic, non-misogynist culture.
and finally, i will say it again, even if men have been “socialized” to rape, torture and murder women based on our sex, who “socialized” or “taught” them how to do this to us? it was not women mkay. women did not teach men how to rape us, and women do not socialize men to rape us, and women do not reward men who rape and punish men who do not rape. if these things are happening to men, and this is a huge IF, they are being done to men, by men. it begins and ends with men, in other words. this is the very definition of innate.
please understand: i am not saying any of this to endlessly repeat myself, as i have grown weary of hearing myself (and others) talk. i am saying this here, now, because women have said in their own words that they are basing their entire lives and their entire activism on the assumption that men can and will stop raping us, and that its not innate to men to do this. activist women believe the data/evidence supports this conclusion — that rape is socially constructed — but it absolutely does not. the mistake, as ginormous (and fairly, but not entirely obvious) as it is, is not womens fault of course, because the data and conclusions have been so deliberately skewed in favor of endless, reformist activating, and holding out hope for men.
this is the world we live in, thanks to men. very little in mensworld means what you think it means, and what it is re/presented to mean, and we must endlessly interrogate it to get to the truth and the information we need to live and save our own lives. it is fucking exhausting, but if the answers are this important, it must be done. because there is evidence that endless pointless feminist activating can actually kill us, in the case of “rape-free cultures” and knowing whether the evidence supports the conclusion that male-on-female rape is socially, and not biologically constructed, activist womens health and lives depend on it.
the global subjugation of women throughout historical time (and probably since before even that) is kind of its own thing, is it not? the worldwide oppression of women as a sexual class by men as a sexual class — 3.5 billion of each by now — is simply unprecedented, and unsurprisingly we find ourselves mostly without the words to describe this. we do the best we can, invoking metaphors. in the case of the global oppression of women by men that transcends time, we have used “war” as a metaphor (and had it pushed on us) but is this apt? im thinking its probably not.
women are a non-entity in the war-model or are its sexy-funtime/spoils. we are “collateral damage” even where we are more maimed and more killed than the men fighting it, by the men fighting it — besides, women get it with both barrels whether “our side” has won or lost. peace, war — these concepts are largely meaningless to us, where both war and peace are (traditionally) political, and follow mens laws. all mens laws, including the one that says that men have a right to oppress women globally, that they can rape and murder us for any reason or no reason, and do so with impunity, and that they need never stop. in war, even if we’ve won, we’ve lost. is this where we want to begin thinking about liberating ourselves from male dominance? i think not.
since we (i guess?) need a metaphor to describe/conceptualize/realize womens oppression by men, since there are no words, can we at least pick a better one? lets try. firstly, anything evoking/invoking mens laws is right out, where mens overarching law is that women shall not be free of men ever, and we shall always be subjugated and oppressed no matter what. so what else is there? natural law i guess — this is where there is no distinction made between “power” and “founded claim of right to exercise it.” cause and natural, necessary effect. like when its raining so hard you literally cant see, so you *cant* go outside, if only for a few minutes at a time; or *if* you do go, your decision is adjudicated by a natural authority to have been poor, or even very poor. this is the best example i can come up with at the moment, although there are most certainly others.
so does nature offer us a model/metaphor that makes more sense than the war-one, and where we actually have a shot at surviving/thriving? note that i did not say winning — thats war-talk. as some of you probably know, ive been working with the “natural disaster” model for a while now. and i think it fits. now, im not saying anything about whether mens global oppression of women is natural, like a hurricane is natural, although if i did address it i would suggest that its more or less “natural” for them, but wholly unnatural for us. or, maybe its “natural” in the exact same way that natural disasters are natural actually — because over time, through exercising known male propensities which transcend time and place (and therefore, social conditioning) such as shameless greed, outrageous arrogance, and constant attempts to overpower and outsmart nature mens infrastructure, isnt. the inevitable occurs (a tsunami; semen exposure causing pregnancy) and women, children and indeed everything dies (homes built too close to the sea; global overpopulation/maternal mortality). yes that sounds about right!
anyhoo, the thing about using metaphors for womens global oppression by men is that they are being used to describe a political reality, and therefore implicate political strategy. dont they? if we use “war” this implicates allies, winning/losing and importantly, fighting/mortal combat where numerous casualties are expected; in the case of mens (10,000 year!!! at least!!!) war on women, women are also expected to continue to engage with men apparently indefinitely, and voluntarily place ourselves in harms way apparently forever. even as we know that men feed off womens attention and gynergy, and that they would likely (or absolutely, in the case of male children) die without it. that cant be good.
whereas in the case of natural disasters (or man-made disasters due to mens necrophilia and foreseeable failures of man-made infrastructure) and surviving natural disasters, the strategy implicated is notably and demonstrably different. among other things, the immediate response to natural disasters by people who are actually there (not the government obviously) are necessarily swift; they are regional, localized or even hyper-localized/individualized out of necessity and reasonableness (and instinct); and narrowly-tailored to fit the circumstances. importantly, in the midst of a natural disaster, no one can tell you what to do, and you would be a fool to wait around for it anyway because emergency, and because they arent there to even know whats happening to you — you are.
only you know exactly what is going down on the ground wherever you are, and what you need to do to fix survive it, including getting the hell out of the way, and the wise and natural thing and indeed the only thing to do in this situation is to “save yourself” and those physically close to you/within arms reach. and these are not individual solutions in a pomo or choosy-choice way. under a natural disaster model, there are very few choices actually, and little individualism for that matter — it is you responding to the collective reality in the place you are. here, instinct, imminence, necessity and survival carry the day. and anyone suggesting *that* is pomo garbage is selling something.
of course, i am aware that for women, the biggest problem in the aftermath of a natural disaster/failure of mens infrastructure is men, and male violence and sexualized violence. its the same problem with the war-model actually, only the war-model offers no solution and no hope to that particular problem, being that rape is built-in to the war-model as mens recreation and reward, and as a male strategy and indeed a male objective of war as a matter of fact. whereas getting the hell out of the way, and utilizing instinct and survival (not combat) skills offers the possibility of another outcome.
many of us know by now that if you play mens games (voluntarily or involuntarily) you are bound to lose, if you are a female-bodied person. this might seem “unfair” or discriminatory or even like blatant insanity, and indeed some of us have been acting like this has all been just one big misunderstanding this whole time. that if we could only articulate the unfairness (or insanity) it would be magically remedied. as if the point of the game was equity, and the whole point was definitely NOT to benefit men at womens expense. interestingly, the “accidental unfairness” principle seems to be both the premise and the conclusion of equality activating. in other words, we work from the assumption that its all just a big mistake, and then no matter what evidence is forthcoming (including evidence that its all very deliberate indeed) we conclude that it mustve been an accident.
note that there is no room here for evidence, or reality, or changing course or anything except heading in the same direction forever. a notably circular direction. judge trudy — a skit from a childrens television program — illustrates the concept of bias and circular reasoning (and victim blaming!) perfectly. the premise of judge trudy is that the judge always sides with the children no matter what. the premise of the grown-up (patriarchal) legal system is not that different. get it?
so i was thinking about the alleged “logistical problem” we have in our prison system where there simply is not enough room for all the men who commit crimes. often times, violent offenders are released because there isnt enough room to house them all — one proposed remedy to this problem of overcrowding (of mens prisons by criminal men) has been to legalize drugs. okay, thats not a bad idea — if men dont have legal remedies backing up their property rights to their drugs, they resort to violence. give them ownership rights over their drugs and they might not kill each other over disputes of ownership, creating additional violent offenders “we” dont have room for. and, like, the fact that using drugs is a “victimless crime” or whatever, so users wouldnt go to jail just for using or buying drugs. but im more interested in the property ownership aspects of it at the moment.
we are all the time working with the understanding that men will kill each other and everyone if they are given even the slightest impetus to do so. no one ever says this directly, but this is the reality of it, isnt it? we wonder why men dont take rape seriously, and feminists speculate that its because a great number of men rape, and that they all benefit from it which is clearly true. but you know what else is probably true? the people who work in (patriarchal) law enforcement and the judicial system know for a fact that if he *only* raped you, you got off fucking easy. you are lucky he didnt kill you on top of it because thats what men do. and we dont have room for all the men who murder, attempt murder, or viciously assault, let alone those who “merely” rape, which is almost all of them depending on the definition you use (including the “legal” one, not incidentally). there isnt enough room for all of them. if men were punished for rape almost all of them would be in jail and practically none of them would be free and thats just no way to run a “society” is it? (or is it?)
but what would happen if there was no more property ownership at all? what if no one owned anything anymore, including drugs? there would be more violent offenders, as men took it upon themselves to protect something that doesnt legally exist — ownership rights over property. honestly, this outcome is quite terrifying, the upside being that suddenly there wouldnt be any more property offenses either. so presumably we would have all that extra space in our prisons currently being taken up by the perpetrators of property crimes, including the only crime besides being prostituted that women commit more frequently than men — shoplifting. we would finally have room for all the violent men who commit crimes of violence against actual people. one might initially assume that this would include violent offenses men commit against women, but not so fast.
rape is still a property crime, see. rape is not defined or discussed as other violent offenses are, as something harmful or reasonably likely to result in serious harm or death — it is defined and discussed in terms of “consent” which is the language of trespass, not violence. as in trespassing, on someones property, get it? we have discussed this before. if we did away with property crimes, opening up all that extra space in jail for violent offenders, the number of violent offenders would skyrocket as they killed each other over property disputes (because men are more or less inherently violent and there is no way to stop this or change it — ask anyone except a reformist-oriented feminist!) but notably, rape wouldnt be a crime anymore at all. men would kill each other for raping each others women so the murderers would be in jail but the rapists would be dead.
see what i did there? it is suspiciously as if men cannot be jailed for committing rape under any circumstances, using any reasoning. this quirk of reality could theoretically be “reformed” if it was an accident, but i dont think it is — if left to “chance” the statistical probability of any outcome (out of two) is about 50/50 but what we see is that men win all the time and women always lose, perhaps particularly in the area of criminalizing rape, and providing meaningful punishments/deterrents to men raping women. so can you reform a system that is actually working perfectly, and exactly as it was intended?
perhaps more importantly, why would anyone want to? dont you ever get sick of trying to teach men how to be good people (and then taking the blame when you almost inevitably fail)? the fact appears to be that men want things more or less the way they are — if they didnt, they would change it themselves. men, as a class, are violent, nasty and they oppress women voluntarily because they like oppressing women. they oppress us no matter what — if there is such a thing as “meaningful brain difference” they will oppress us based on that. if there is no evidence (or no accepted or “scientific” evidence) to be found (by themselves usually, as they are the ones in the position to look) of meaningful sex-based brain difference (or of whatever) they will oppress us anyway. somehow they will find a way to do it.
this rather notable “quirk” — that men oppress women no matter what — doesnt seem to mean much to reformist feminists, but it ought to. doing this work because you are scared to death of what men will continue to do (and what they will come up with next) if you dont is a bit short-sighted, and reactive at best. and its definitely no reason to conclude that theres any hope for men. honestly, i dont know where we come up with some of this stuff. feminists using bad reasoning and then maintaining perpetual support for their reformist position using coercive tactics including thought-termination is what it looks like to me. see the discussion here for more on that.
well that was fast! i have more to say already. part one is here — i remember posting it like it was yesterday! which it was.
now that we know that wordpress has shut down “mansplainin’ and transplainin'” for a TOS violation, and in the wake of recent internet witchhunts and burnings of women who dare express a fucking opinion which is incompatible with womens sex role as fuckholes and slaves, i think it would behoove us to step back and look at the internet as a whole. what has been the internets patriarchal purpose — what has been its end effect, from which we can deduce mens intent in creating and implementing it? we know that women with an internet presence have been targeted for elimination since day one — women who were around “back then” remember vividly being told to “get off my internet” or face dire consequences at mens hands. but why?
like the patriarchal intent and effect of transgender, which i believe ultimately was to increase womens vulnerability to rape as well as erasing the political implications of men raping women across time and place, it seems that the effect of the internet as a whole has been to widely disseminate and distribute the photographic evidence of men raping women and children with impunity. otherwise known as porn, including “kiddie porn.” thanks to the widespread availability of internet pornography, porn has seeped into every nook, cranny and crevice of much of the world — practically anywhere that has electricity is now fully saturated with 24/7/365 porn. men, who already created the entire world in their own image — to wit, shit and filth — now get to live in filth and shit, more, and force us to live there too, thanks to pornographic imagery which you literally cannot get away from even if you tried.
relatedly, the internet has also been very useful in disseminating patriarchal propaganda equating sex and rape — anywhere there is “news reporting” on rape, we see the words sex-crime, sex-offender, sex-trafficking, sex-slavery. but we are not talking about sex mkay — we are talking about rape. rape-crime. rape-offense. rape-trafficking. rape-slavery. and “kiddie porn” is not porn (and much of your standard-issue adult porn isnt porn either) if what is meant by “porn” is documentary evidence of consensual fucking. this is not what porn is — insofar as intercourse is coerced or forced, and insofar as “rape” is the violent enforcement by men of womens sex role as fuckholes and breeders, most porn isnt even “porn” — it is documentary evidence of rape and it is everywhere. thanks largely to the internet which disseminates it (rape) and frames it (rape) in a way that politically benefits men at womens expense.
so are we really going to be surprised when men want women off their internet — women who arent literally in the process of being raped by men, that is? is it any surprise that we will be attacked and graphically threatened by men, and not-supported by other men who read mens threats against us and become erect because the threats include graphic depictions of rape, and sexualized woman-murder (necrophilia)? this is *all* porn to them. every bit of it. and when i say porn, i mean rape. and when i say rape, i mean “the violent enforcement by men of womens sex role as fuckholes and breeders.”
im not surprised that this is happening to us at all, and no one would be, if they were to understand that the entire purpose of the internet was not “communication” or dissemination of information per se, but the communication of a certain idea, and a certain image, with a very specific intent in mind — the whole point being to threaten 3.5 billion women globally with rape, and to violently enforce all womens sex role as fuckholes and breeders. and fuckholes and breeders do not speak about being fuckholes and breeders. fuckholes and breeders do not speak at all, unless it is to ask for more of the same — and even then, men dont necessarily want to hear it. they put things in those womens mouths to shut them up too, when the sound of the raped womens voices becomes tiresome, or interferes with mens ability to rape, or to rape to maximum political effectiveness — which requires ejaculation. doesnt it?
in the end, wordpress can shut down all our blogs, and i will not be surprised at all. none of us should be, and really i dont think we would be anyway. outraged, yes. surprised? no. in a way, im surprised we have lasted this long, but mens obfuscating yet tenuous adherence to their own fake principles of “free speech” and the “marketplace of ideas” seems to have confused even them for a minute. soon the facade will fall away, and they will shut us all down, because what we are doing and saying is the antithesis of what the internet is for. we are speaking, when the entire purpose of the internet has been to shut us up, via rape, and threats of rape.
like the purpose of transgenderism, the purpose of the internet has been rape, and disseminating, normalizing and perpetuating men raping women across time and place. thats all. its been nothing more, and nothing less than that.
imagine with me. whenever a woman is raped, every man within 20 miles of where the rape occurred is presumed to be a rapist, an accomplice, an egger-onner, an enabler, or completely disinterested (in protecting women from rape). they are all rounded up and jailed.
because it would be stressful for all women involved if there were any uncertainty regarding whether the men would be released or not — if the men were “coming home” or if they would ever again be “walking the streets to rape again” — to relieve womens stress, the answer would be NO, none of them will be released, ever. all the women would go on with their lives and never look back. there wouldnt be any prison-visits either. (feel the relief wash over you like a warm bath?)
if there was a problem of prison overcrowding (can you imagine the logistical problems we would encounter if we actually started punishing men for rape?) well thats easy — let all the newbies i mean “new fish” sleep in the recreational areas until a spot opens up. start a “communication initiative” whereby all prisoners would be given a new mont blanc pen and a letter opener and instructed to write letters to other prisoners around the country, like a pen-pal kind of thing. watch them all kill each other with the pens and letter openers. overcrowding? no longer an issue.
keep doing this for a few months, a few years. what is “society” like now? how many men would there be left in free society — im thinking a negligible amount if any. so under these new circumstances, what happens when we go out at night (or stay in?) what happens to us if we dont know how to run the factories, or universities, or the coal mines (because we were never taught, or not enough of us were)? what happens if we *do* know?
in this new, free society, what would we throw away? what would we keep? what would we invent, or implement, or revive? understanding of course that we could learn *any* of mens values, systems and machines (if not their machinations) if we were willing to put the time and effort into it — if men did it, it cant be that hard. i mean really. but we dont *have* to — thats my point. we would start anew.
if we actually punished men for raping girls and women, without regard for fairness to men, and *only* caring about fairness to women and relieving womens stress, and centering womens survival as a sexual class, including the complete eradication of rapey males and rape culture, female separatism would no longer present the logistical problem it once did — “mens culture” would become prison culture. it already is, you see. under conditions of zero tolerance for men raping women, we would have “womens culture” and female separatism by default. it probably wouldnt take but a year at most for (nearly?) every single man to be rounded up and imprisoned for raping or contributing to the rape of a woman, if we actually punished men for rape, and contributing to rape.
thats literally all it would take to create female separatism: justice. thats all.
femonade 