White Powerful Men on the Question of Rape

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” -Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri


"The method of conception doesn't change the definition of life." Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's vice-presidential running mate on the Republican ticket

Therefore, rape is just another 'method of conception'

"Even taken at its worst, if the allegations made by these two women were true [against Julian Assange], 100 percent true, and even if a camera in the room captured them, they don't constitute rape.  At least not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it. And somebody has to say this.  Let's take woman A.  Woman A met Julian Assange, invited him back to her flat, gave him dinner, went to bed with him, had consensual sex with him, claims that she woke up to him having sex with her again... something which can happen.  Not everybody needs to be asked, prior to each  insertion.  Some people believe that when you go to bed with somebody, take off your clothes, and have sex with them and then fall asleep, you're already in the sex game with them.  It might be really bad manners not to have tapped her on the shoulder and said, 'do you mind if I do it again?'  It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning." George Galloway, a British politician, author and talkshow host noted for his left-wing views

Vickers: So in cases of incest or rape...

Laura Olson, Post-Gazette: No exceptions?

Smith: No exceptions.

Mark Scolforo, Associated Press: How would you tell a daughter or a granddaughter who, God forbid, would be the victim of a rape, to keep the child against her own will? Do you have a way to explain that?

Smith: I lived something similar to that with my own family. She chose life, and I commend her for that. She knew my views. But, fortunately for me, I didn't have to.. she chose they way I thought. No don't get me wrong, it wasn't rape.

Scolforo: Similar how?

Smith: Uh, having a baby out of wedlock.

Scolforo: That's similar to rape?

Smith: No, no, no, but... put yourself in a father's situation, yes. It is similar. But, back to the original, I'm pro-life, period.

All of these perpetuate rape myths.

Rape myths and Julian Assange by Maia

Link to Original Article 

I don’t want to write about Julian Assange or the rape charges he is facing. I don’t speak Swedish, a lot of the material in English misrepresents the Swedish legal system and. I don’t have time to unpack all that.

However, I need to write about the way people have been talking about these rape charges. A facebook friend (who is political enough to know better) quoted from a a Daily Mail article* “The prosecution’s case has several puzzling flaws, and there is scant public evidence of rape or sexual molestation.”

Most women who have been raped had little public evidence of their experience. By repeating these rape myths in defence of Julian Assanger people are attacking not just the women involved, but other women who have been raped and had their experiences dismissed. They are also contributing to a culture where rape is denied, minimised, and distorted.

Left-wing defenders of Julian Assanger have been using rape-myths over and over again (as have his right-wing defenders, although they will not be the focus of this post). I think it’s both disgusting and unnecessary to uphold rape-culture to defend Julian Assanger. I want to explain why.

“There is scant public evidence of rape or sexual molestation.” As opposed to what? Is the person who stated this really arguing that usually there is an abundance of public evidence of rape? It’s a ludicrous statement, but a damaging one. Because while the antithesis of ‘scant public evidence’ sounds ridiculous when it is spelled out, it has a lot of power when it’s implied: women’s statements about their experiences cannot be public evidence and cannot be relied upon. “No-one will believe you” – rapists say that to women and women say that to themselves. So many of the repsonses to Assange’s case give that statement more weight, more power – they tell women all over the world “No-one will believe you.”

Then there’s the idea that some women are unrapeable. People uphold this rape myth if they describe some characteristic of a woman – most often, but not only, that she’s a sex worker – as evidence that she wasn’t raped, and can’t be raped. The left-wing version of this du jour appears to be that one of the accusers had connections with the CIA. But there’s a problem with this women who have had contact with the CIA, even CIA agents, can be raped.

There’s a huge difference between stating “She has X Y and Z connections with the CIA. If she was working for them then this may be a set up.” and “She has CIA connections you know.” One is making the argument – the other is constructing some women as unrapeable.

Added to this we get a re-run of the Polanski trial and an argument that what happened to these women isn’t ‘rape-rape’. People were running these lines, before they even knew what the charges are. The charges are actually really clear cut: he had sex with one woman while she was asleep, and he didn’t stop when another woman said stop. It doesn’t require a very in depth and complex understanding of consent to understand that that is rape. But there is a constant narrative that anything other than stranger rape where force is used is somehow a lesser form of rape. That narrative is really damaging to rape survivors.

But I think that defenders of Julian Assanger do the most damage when they construct a way that rape victims behave and imply that the woman involved isn’t acting like a rape victim: she tweeted about him, or she seemed happy, or she saw him again.

I lose it at this point. There is no way that rape victims act – there is no way that rape victims don’t act. Seriously. If you don’t know this then you have no right to say a word about rape.

It does so much harm to so many women, the idea that there’s a way that rape victims act. It’s not just some idea that you’re spinning off into cyber-space. It’s something that women who are going through trauma have to struggle through – their own, and other people’s expectations of how they should be behaving. And it doesn’t stop – the idea of the acceptable behaviour of a rape victim gets used as a weapon again and again.

Most rape myths are about women, about attacking suvivors of rape, discrediting them trashing them – and there’s been a lot of that. But some are about men John Pilger said that he had a very high regard for Julian Assange. And? The rhetorical rapist – the scary man, who no-one holds in high regard – is a weapon that is used against actual victims of rape all the time.

And what is most ridiculous about this spreading of rape myths by left-wing supporters of wikileaks is that these myths are completely unnecessary to stand in solidarity with the wikileaks project.
It is states and companies that are attacking Wikileaks and Julian Assange, not two women. It is perfectly possible to criticise the actions of prosecuters, interpol, judges and government’s without invoking rape myths.

Believing the women, or at least not disbelieving the women, does not mean that you have to stop criticising the way the (in)justice system operates or decide that that wikileaks is a bad project.**
The rape myths are unnecessary, and damaging. By repeating rape myths, you give them power. Doing so doesn’t just hurt the women involved, but strengthens rape culture, and makes it harder for many, many, many other rape survivors.

Stop it.

* If you must look at it yourself the link is here – but no good ever came of reading the Daily Mail.

** On the other side of this, having a feminist analysis of rape does not necessitate accepting that the (in)justice system prosecuting rape is a victory for rape culture. I think these are actually flip sides of the same argument, and brownfemipower has made some really interesting points about the limits of posts like this one.

Monster

Listen. I’m really slowly dying
inside myself tonight.
And I’m not about to run down the list
of rapes and burnings and beatings and smiles
and sulks and rages and all the other crap
you’ve laid on women throughout your history
(we had no part in it -- although god knows we tried)
together with your thick, demanding bodies laid on ours,
while your proud sweat, like liquid arrogance,
suffocated our very pores.
Not tonight.

I’m tired of listing your triumph, our oppression,
especially tonight, while two men whom I like --
one of whom I live with, father of my child, and
claim to be in life-giving, death-serious struggle with --
while you two sit at the kitchen table dancing
an ornate ritual of what you think passes for struggle
which fools nobody. Your shared oppression, grief,
and love as effeminists in a burning patriarchal world
still cannot cut through power plays of maleness.

The baby is asleep a room away. White. Male. American.
Potentially the most powerful, deadly creature
of the species.
His hair, oh pain, curls into fragrant tendrils damp
with the sweat of his summery sleep. Not yet, and on my life
if I can help it never will be "quite a man."
But just two days ago on seeing me naked for what must be
the three-thousandth time in his not-yet two years,
he suddenly thought of
the furry creature who yawns through his favorite television program;
connected that image with my genitals; laughed,
and said, "Monster."

I want a woman’s revolution like a lover.
I lust for it, I want so much this freedom,
this end to struggle and fear and lies
we all exhale, that I could die just
with the passionate uttering of that desire.
Just once in this my only lifetime to dance
all alone and bare on a high cliff under cypress trees
with no fear of where I place my feet.
To even glimpse what I might have been and never never
will become, had I not had to "waste my life" fighting
for what my lack of freedom keeps me from glimpsing.
Those who abhor violence refuse to admit they are already
experiencing it, committing it.
Those who lie in the arms of the "individual solution,"
the "private odyssey," the "personal growth,"
are the most conformist of all,
because to admit suffering is to begin
the creation of freedom.
Those who fear dying refuse to admit that they are already dead.
Well, I am dying, suffocating from this hopelessness tonight,
from this dead weight of struggling with
even those few men I love and care about
each day they kill me.

Do you understand? Dying. Going crazy.
Really. No poetic metaphor.
Hallucinating thin rainbow-colored nets
like cobwebs all over my skin
and dreaming more and more when I can sleep
of being killed or killing.
Sweet revolution, how I wish the female tears
rolling silently down my face this second were each a bullet,
each word I write, each character on my typewriter bullets
to kill whatever it is in men that builds this empire,
colonized my very body,
then named the colony Monster.

I am one of the "man-haters," some have said.
I don’t have the time or patience here to say again why or how
I hate not men but what it is men do in this culture, or
how the system of sexism, power dominance, and competition
is the enemy, not people -- but how men, still, created that system
and preserve it and reap concrete benefits from it.
Words and rhetoric that merely
gush from my arteries when grazed
by the razoredge of humanistic love. Enough.
I will say, however, that you, men, will have to be freed,
as well, though we women may have to kick and kill you
into freedom
since most of you will embrace death quite gladly
rather than give up your power to hold power.

Compassion for the suicidal impulse in our killers? Well,
on a plane ride once, the man across the aisle --
who was a World War Two paraplegic,
dead totally from the waist down,
wheeled in and out of the cabin -- spent the whole trip avidly
devouring first newspaper sports pages
and then sports magazines,
loudly pointing out to anyone who would listen
(mostly the stewardesses) which athlete was a "real man."

Two men in the seats directly behind me talked the whole time
about which Caribbean islands were the best for whoring, and
which color of ass was hotter and more pliant.
The stewardess smiled and served them coffee.
I gripped the arms of my seat more than once
to stop my getting up and screaming to the entire planeload
of human beings what was torturing us all -- stopped because I knew
they’d take me for a crazy, an incipient
hijacker perhaps, and wrestle me down until Bellevue Hospital
could receive me at our landing in New York.
(No hijacker, I understood then, ever really wants to take
the plane. She/he wants to take passengers’ minds, to turn
them inside out, to create the revolution
35,000 feet above sea level
and land with a magical flying cadre
and, oh, yes, to win.)
Stopping myself is becoming a tactical luxury,
going fast.

My hives rise more frequently, stigmata of my passion.
Someday you’ll take away my baby, one way or the other.
And the man I’ve loved, one way or the other.
Why should that nauseate me with terror?
You’ve already taken me away from myself
with my only road back to go forward
into more madness, monsters, cobwebs, nausea,
in order to free you -- men -- from killing us, killing us.

No colonized people so isolated one from the other
for so long as women.
None cramped with compassion for the oppressor
who breathes on the next pillow each night.
No people so old who, having, we now discover, invented
agriculture, weaving, pottery, language, cooking
with fire, and healing medicine, must now invent a revolution
so total as to destroy maleness, femaleness, death.

Oh mother, I am tired and sick.
One sister, new to this pain called feminist consciousness
for want of a scream to name it, asked me last week
"But how do you stop from going crazy?"
No way, my sister.
No way.
This is a pore war, I thought once, on acid.

And you, men. Lovers, brothers, fathers, sons.
I have loved you and love you still, if for no other reason
than that you came wailing from the monster
while the monster hunched in pain to give you the power
to break her spell.
Well, we must break it ourselves, at last.
And I will speak less and less and less to you
and more and more in crazy gibberish you cannot understand:
witches’ incantations, poetry, old women’s mutterings,
schizophrenic code, accents, keening, firebombs,
poison, knives, bullets, and whatever else will invent
this freedom.

May my hives bloom bravely until my flesh is aflame
and burns through the cobwebs.
May we go mad together, my sisters.
May our labor agony in bringing forth this revolution
be the death of all pain.

May we comprehend that we cannot be stopped.

May I learn how to survive until my part is finished.
May I realize that I
                                    am a
                                    monster. I am

                   a
                  monster.

I am a monster.

And I am proud.





by Robin Morgan

Beauty Hurts

Man’s love for woman, his sexual adoration of her, his human definition of her, his delight and pleasure in her, require her negation: physical crippling and psychological lobotomy. That is the very nature of romantic love, which is the love based on polar role definitions, manifest in herstory as well as in fiction —he glories in her agony, he adores her deformity, he annihilates her freedom, he will have her as sex object, even if he must destroy the bones in her feet to do it [foot binding]. Brutality, sadism, and oppression emerge as the substantive core of the romantic ethos. That ethos is the warp and woof of culture as we know it.

Women should be beautiful. All repositories of cultural wisdom from King Solomon to King Hefner agree: women should be beautiful. It is the reverence for female beauty which informs the romantic ethos, gives it its energy and justification. Beauty is transformed into that golden ideal, Beauty —rapturous and abstract. Women must be beautiful and Woman is Beauty.

Notions of beauty always incorporate the whole of a given societal structure, are crystallizations of its values. A society with a well-defined aristocracy will have aristocratic standards of beauty. In Western “democracy” notions of beauty are “democratic”: even if a woman is not born beautiful, she can make herself attractive.

The argument is not simply that some women are not beautiful, therefore it is not fair to judge women on the basis of physical beauty; or that men are not judged on that basis, therefore women also should not be judged on that basis; or that men should look for character in women; or that our standards of beauty are too parochial in and of themselves; or even that judging women according to their conformity to a standard of beauty serves to make them into products, chattels, differing from the farmer's favorite cow only in terms of literal form. The issue at stake is different, and crucial. Standards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body. They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can put her body. They define precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom. And, of course, the relationship between physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one.

In our culture, not one part of a woman’s body is left untouched, unaltered. No feature or extremity is spared the art, or pain, of improvement. Hair is dyed, lacquered, straightened, permanented; eyebrows are plucked, penciled, dyed; eyes are lined, mascaraed, shadowed; lashes are curled, or false —from head to toe, every feature of a woman's face, every section of her body, is subject to modification, alteration. This alteration is an ongoing, repetitive process. It is vital to the economy, the major substance of male-female role differentiation, the most immediate physical and psychological reality of being a woman. From the age of 11 or 12 until she dies, a woman will spend a large part of her time, money, and energy on binding, plucking, painting, and deodorizing herself. It is commonly and wrongly said that male transvestites through the use of makeup and costuming caricature the women they would become, but any real knowledge of the romantic ethos makes clear that these men have penetrated to the core experience of being a woman, a romanticized construct.

The technology of beauty, and the message it carries, is handed down from mother to daughter. Mother teaches daughter to apply lipstick, to shave under her arms, to bind her breasts, to wear a girdle and high- heeled shoes. Mother teaches daughter concomitantly her role, her appropriate behavior, her place. Mother teaches daughter, necessarily, the psychology which defines womanhood: a woman must be beautiful, in order to please the amorphous and amorous Him. What we have called the romantic ethos operates as vividly in 20th-century Amerika and Europe as it did in 10th- century China.

This cultural transfer of technology, role, and psychology virtually affects the emotive relationship between mother and daughter. It contributes substantially to the ambivalent love-hate dynamic of that relationship. What must the Chinese daughter/child have felt toward the mother who bound her feet? What does any daughter/child feel toward the mother who forces her to do painful things to her own body? The mother takes on the role of enforcer: she uses seduction, command, all manner of force to coerce the daughter to conform to the demands of the culture. It is because this role becomes her dominant role in the mother-daughter relationship that tensions and difficulties between mothers and daughters are so often unresolvable. The daughter who rejects the cultural norms enforced by the mother is forced to a basic rejection of her own mother, a recognition of the hatred and resentment she felt toward that mother, an alienation from mother and society so extreme that her own womanhood is denied by both. The daughter who internalizes those values and endorses those same processes is bound to repeat the teaching she was taught —her anger and resentment remain subterranean, channeled against her own female offspring as well as her mother.

Pain is an essential part of the grooming process, and that is not accidental. Plucking the eyebrows, shaving under the arms, wearing a girdle, learning to walk in high-heeled shoes, having one’s nose fixed, straightening or curling one’s hair —these things hurt. The pain, of course, teaches an important lesson: no price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation too painful for the woman who would be beautiful. The tolerance of pain and the romanticization of that tolerance begins here , in preadolescence, in socialization, and serves to prepare women for lives of childbearing, self- abnegation, and husband-pleasing. The adolescent experience of the “pain of being a woman” casts the feminine psyche into a masochistic mold and forces the adolescent to conform to a self-image which bases itself on mutilation of the body, pain happily suffered, and restricted physical mobility. It creates the masochistic personalities generally found in adult women: subservient, materialistic (since all value is placed on the body and its ornamentation), intellectually restricted, creatively impoverished. It forces women to be a sex of lesser accomplishment, weaker, as underdeveloped as any backward nation. Indeed, the effects of that pre scribed relationship between women and their bodies are so extreme, so deep, so extensive, that scarcely any area of human possibility is left untouched by it.

Men, of course, like a woman who “takes care of herself.” The male response to the woman who is made- up and bound is a learned fetish, societal in its dimensions. One need only refer to the male idealization of the bound foot and say that the same dynamic is operating here. Romance based on role differentiation, superiority based on a culturally determined and rigidly en forced inferiority, shame and guilt and fear of women and sex itself: all necessitate the perpetuation of these oppressive grooming imperatives.

The meaning of this analysis of the romantic ethos surely is clear. A first step in the process of liberation (women from their oppression, men from the unfree dom of their fetishism) is the radical redefining of the relationship between women and their bodies. The body must be freed, liberated, quite literally: from paint and girdles and all varieties of crap. Women must stop mutilating their bodies and start living in them. Per haps the notion of beauty which will then organically emerge will be truly democratic and demonstrate a respect for human life in its infinite, and most honor able, variety.

-Andrea Dworkin from her book "Woman Hating"

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is a common tactic used against women to undermine their sense of worth.

"Those who engage in gaslighting create a reaction—whether it’s anger, frustration, sadness—in the person they are dealing with. Then, when that person reacts, the gaslighter makes them feel uncomfortable and insecure by behaving as if their feelings aren’t rational or normal."

Here's the article in its entirety:

Has gaslighting conditioned women into thinking they’re emotionally unstable? Yashar Ali thinks so.

You’re so sensitive. You’re so emotional. You’re defensive. You’re overreacting. Calm down. Relax. Stop freaking out! You’re crazy! I was just joking, don’t you have a sense of humor? You’re so dramatic. Just get over it already!

Sound familiar?

If you’re a woman, it probably does.

Do you ever hear any of these comments from your spouse, partner, boss, friends, colleagues, or relatives after you have expressed frustration, sadness, or anger about something they have done or said?

When someone says these things to you, it’s not an example of inconsiderate behavior. When your spouse shows up half an hour late to dinner without calling—that’s inconsiderate behavior. A remark intended to shut you down like, “Calm down, you’re overreacting,” after you just addressed someone else’s bad behavior, is emotional manipulation—pure and simple.

And this is the sort of emotional manipulation that feeds an epidemic in our country, an epidemic that defines women as crazy, irrational, overly sensitive, unhinged. This epidemic helps fuel the idea that women need only the slightest provocation to unleash their (crazy) emotions. It’s patently false and unfair.

I think it’s time to separate inconsiderate behavior from emotional manipulation and we need to use a word not in our normal vocabulary.

I want to introduce a helpful term to identify these reactions: gaslighting.

Gaslighting is a term, often used by mental health professionals (I am not one), to describe manipulative behavior used to confuse people into thinking their reactions are so far off base that they’re crazy.

The term comes from the 1944 MGM film, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman. Bergman’s husband in the film, played by Charles Boyer, wants to get his hands on her jewelry. He realizes he can accomplish this by having her certified as insane and hauled off to a mental institution. To pull of this task, he intentionally sets the gaslights in their home to flicker off and on, and every time Bergman’s character reacts to it, he tells her she’s just seeing things. In this setting, a gaslighter is someone who presents false information to alter the victim’s perception of him or herself.

Today, when the term is referenced, it’s usually because the perpetrator says things like, “You’re so stupid” or “No one will ever want you” to the victim. This is an intentional, pre-meditated form of gaslighting, much like the actions of Charles Boyer’s character in Gaslight, where he strategically plots to confuse Ingrid Bergman’s character into believing herself unhinged.

The form of gaslighting I’m addressing is not always pre-mediated or intentional, which makes it worse, because it means all of us, especially women, have dealt with it at one time or another.

Those who engage in gaslighting create a reaction—whether it’s anger, frustration, sadness—in the person they are dealing with. Then, when that person reacts, the gaslighter makes them feel uncomfortable and insecure by behaving as if their feelings aren’t rational or normal.

♦◊♦

My friend Anna (all names changed to protect privacy) is married to a man who feels it necessary to make random and unprompted comments about her weight. Whenever she gets upset or frustrated with his insensitive comments, he responds in the same, defeating way, “You’re so sensitive. I’m just joking.”

My friend Abbie works for a man who finds a way, almost daily, to unnecessarily shoot her down and her work product. Comments like, “Can’t you do something right?” or “Why did I hire you?” are regular occurrences for her. Her boss has no problem firing people (he does it regularly), so you wouldn’t know that based on these comments, Abbie has worked for him for six years. But every time she stands up for herself and says “It doesn’t help me when you say these things,” she gets the same reaction: “Relax; you’re overreacting.”

It’s a whole lot easier to emotionally manipulate someone who has been conditioned by our society to accept it. We continue to burden women because they don’t refuse our burdens as easily. It’s the ultimate cowardice.

Abbie thinks her boss is just being a jerk in these moments, but the truth is, he is making those comments to manipulate her into thinking her reactions are out of whack. And it’s exactly that kind manipulation that has left her feeling guilty about being sensitive, and as a result, she has not left her job.

But gaslighting can be as simple as someone smiling and saying something like, “You’re so sensitive,” to somebody else. Such a comment may seem innocuous enough, but in that moment, that person is making a judgment about how someone else should feel.

While dealing with gaslighting isn’t a universal truth for women, we all certainly know plenty of women who encounter it at work, home, or in personal relationships.

And the act of gaslighting does not simply affect women who are not quite sure of themselves. Even vocal, confident, assertive women are vulnerable to gaslighting.

Why?

Because women bare the brunt of our neurosis. It is much easier for us to place our emotional burdens on the shoulders of our wives, our female friends, our girlfriends, our female employees, our female colleagues, than for us to impose them on the shoulders of men.

It’s a whole lot easier to emotionally manipulate someone who has been conditioned by our society to accept it. We continue to burden women because they don’t refuse our burdens as easily. It’s the ultimate cowardice.

Whether gaslighting is conscious or not, it produces the same result: it renders some women emotionally mute.

These women aren’t able to clearly express to their spouses that what is said or done to them is hurtful. They can’t tell their boss that his behavior is disrespectful and prevents them from doing their best work. They can’t tell their parents that, when they are being critical, they are doing more harm than good.

When these women receive any sort of push back to their reactions, they often brush it off by saying, “Forget it, it’s okay.”

That “forget it” isn’t just about dismissing a thought, it is about self-dismissal. It’s heartbreaking.

No wonder some women are unconsciously passive aggressive when expressing anger, sadness, or frustration. For years, they have been subjected to so much gaslighting that they can no longer express themselves in a way that feels authentic to them.

They say, “I’m sorry” before giving their opinion. In an email or text message, they place a smiley face next to a serious question or concern, thereby reducing the impact of having to express their true feelings.

You know how it looks: “You’re late  ”

These are the same women who stay in relationships they don’t belong in, who don’t follow their dreams, who withdraw from the kind of life they want to live.

♦◊♦

Since I have embarked on this feminist self-exploration in my life and in the lives of the women I know, this concept of women as “crazy” has really emerged as a major issue in society at large and an equally major frustration for the women in my life, in general.

From the way women are portrayed on reality shows, to how we condition boys and girls to see women, we have come to accept the idea that women are unbalanced, irrational individuals, especially in times of anger and frustration.

Just the other day, on a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles, a flight attendant who had come to recognize me from my many trips asked me what I did for a living. When I told her that I write mainly about women, she immediately laughed and asked, “Oh, about how crazy we are?”

Her gut reaction to my work made me really depressed. While she made her response in jest, her question nonetheless makes visible a pattern of sexist commentary that travels through all facets of society on how men view women, which also greatly impacts how women may view themselves.

As far as I am concerned, the epidemic of gaslighting is part of the struggle against the obstacles of inequality that women constantly face. Acts of gaslighting steal their most powerful tool: their voice. This is something we do to women every day, in many different ways.

I don’t think this idea that women are “crazy,” is based in some sort of massive conspiracy. Rather, I believe it’s connected to the slow and steady drumbeat of women being undermined and dismissed, on a daily basis. And gaslighting is one of many reasons why we are dealing with this public construction of women as “crazy”

I recognize that I’ve been guilty of gaslighting my women friends in the past (but never my male friends—surprise, surprise). It’s shameful, but I’m glad I realized that I did it on occasion and put a stop to it.

While I take total responsibility for my actions, I do believe that I, along with many men, am a byproduct of our conditioning. It’s about the general insight our conditioning gives us into admitting fault and exposing any emotion.

When we are discouraged in our youth and early adulthood from expressing emotion, it causes many of us to remain steadfast in our refusal to express regret when we see someone in pain from our actions.

When I was writing this piece, I was reminded of one of my favorite Gloria Steinem quotes, “The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.”

So for many of us, it’s first about unlearning how to flicker those gaslights and learning how to acknowledge and understand the feelings, opinions, and positions of the women in our lives.

But isn’t the issue of gaslighting ultimately about whether we are conditioned to believe that women’s opinions don’t hold as much weight as ours? That what women have to say, what they feel, isn’t quite as legitimate?

The Prostitution of Black Women Slaves

When you type the goddamn word “Slavery” in Wikipedia, I want BLACK WOMEN to be added to that so-called trifling "list".  I want BLACK WOMEN on that list to have a 15,000 paragraph entry where their experiences as BLACK WOMEN are stated and recognized.  I want it to demonstrate to us that they, the fuck-able ones, were EXPLICITLY and LITERALLY a sexual organ of their oppressors. They were their vaginas.  There is no question in our minds now that these women were OWNED, FUCKED, and LABORED. I need your consciousness to take a step further: these women were fucked like PROSTITUTES who are now in our porn or on the streets.  They were the sexual property of white men.  They were conquered.  And what do we know about wars where one peoples will fight with another?  They rape and pillage!  How is this any different from white man maiming the black woman in our American History?

If you want to hear the true Cinderella story of black women in America, here it is:

Once upon a time, Linda Brent was a slave.  She LIVED with her master, her pimp, her so-called lover.  Let’s call him (a) John.  Now, this John did not actually beat her.  He had more in store for her than simply that.  Instead, he psychologically hounded her with constant threats of violence, obscene accusations, and smears against her character.  She stated in her memoir:

“My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I BELONGED to him and swearing by heaven and earth that I would SUBMIT to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me.  If I knelt before my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me there.”

Linda spent years being tormented by “her man”. Linda was one of the “lucky” ones though.  In her mid-20s she attempted to escape, but failed.  Instead, for 7 years, she lived secretly in a hole in the ground under a shed in her grandmother’s backyard. After those 7 years of being buried alive, she escaped to the North where she became an active abolitionist.

I deplore of you to ask yourself how this is different from the daily and persistent abuse and violence against women today?  Not just now nor during “Slavery”, but throughout all of recorded history.  Not just black women, but of every color of woman on the face of this earth, especially those who are sold through sex trafficking.  What is trafficking, after all?  It is SMUGGLING.  It is distributing what should be ILLEGAL goods.  It is the “tricking or luring of people away from their homeland to work under exploitative conditions elsewhere.”  What is America then?  It is a land where millions of people were trafficked in, exploited for their labor, and looked at (in the case of the black woman) as sexual objects, seen as a sexual appendage of the male.  You see, women were once an appendage.  We were once worth more to the male.  We once, in the time of Adam, were a rib.  No longer.  Blacks have been turned into the whip, while now all us women have been turned into a vibrating Pussy Sleeve©.  Women have been reduced to a literal object, no longer a part of the man, but a commodified, dead object to be sold on the Capitalist Market.

I am saying that black women during Slavery were being sold on the market like women who are prostituted by white men in America or Sweden or China or Africa. 

Prospective slave buyers (pimps) looked over black woman to be purchased.  These white slave owning men had to eye the merchandise before purchase.  Black women were taken into rooms before purchase where her vagina was inspected to guarantee she was without defect so that she could be fucked.  These women didn’t even have the so-called “honor” of being courted and contracted under marriage.

Control over her body was passed from white person to white person, along with a bill of sale.

White men in our American history had selective memories.  Those so-called men of intellect and honor, raped, maimed, and killed the women in their homes, their plantations, farms.

The Plantation is just another forgotten home, shoved under the carpet by white men who wish for it to be forgotten.  It is a clear example of the exploitation of human beings, of blacks and white women, in this country.  Now, blacks have been able to break away, theoretically, from the home of the white man.  Us white women, on the other hand, still glorify and strive to live under a roof with the white man, under contract.  Marriage, to the white man, is a binding contract of sexual assess, after all.  It is a degraded position of power, as the plantation home has demonstrated.

If this isn’t horrifying, then I don’t know what it.

Typical Antifeminist Tactics

Below are a half-dozen common antifeminist tactics routinely employed to discredit and demean feminist writers and activists:

1. Physically objectify or unduly focus on the body of the feminist:Focus on the writer-activist's appearance. This is utilized against women who are considered "attractive things" by dominant white male supremacist standards, as well as for those women who are not. This tactic exists to take the focus off the author-activist's work, especially off the intellectual prowess and power of the work, in order to misogynistically retrain the eyes back on the woman as a patriarchally scrutinized body. This may be done through scornful description, objectifying photography, or both. As a test of sexism, ask yourself if a similarly well-known man's body, relative to his intellectual-political work (ideas, activism, etc)--think Karl Marx--is similarly scrutinized. Jerry Falwell just died recently: amidst the public contempt there was no preponderance of viscious disparaging comments about his weight; yet when Andrea died, "Finally, that fat b*tch is dead" was among the most frequently uttered remarks, online and off.

2. Psychologize and isolate the feminist:
Focus on the writer-activist's emotional state, internal world, and personal history as other than socially understandable and politically useful. This is what happens to raped women in courtrooms across the U.S. This tactic is used to get us to think more about what's happening in or has happened to the author-as-individual, than to examine with the author what's happening to women as a class.

3. Further portray the feminist as "a kind of woman" seen through patriarchy's distorting lens:
Turn a complex person back into the raced or gendered female Other, whether the mean mother, masochistic whore, wounded martyr, goddess-savior, or man-hating madwoman, by those who, through their writing, infer they have the ethical or political right to assess or reinscribe any woman in these misogynistic ways. She is thus more easily dehumanized, dismissed, or deified--someone who must be permanently pedestaled, knocked or otherwise taken down, or a combination thereof.

4. Undermine the feminist's work or reputation:There are many ways to do this, and most of them employ techniques of back-handed compliments, quotations taken out of context, and subtle to blatant mischaracterizations of the work and its author.

5. Promulgate lies and distortions:Especially recycle misstatements already circulating in the public domain. The repetition of these falsehoods helps keep them alive as "truth," maintaining an inaccurate or delusional understanding of the feminist under scrutiny.

6. Politically compromise and conceptually contain the feminist:This tactic exists in many forms. Portray the feminist as ideologically rigid or physiologically frigid. Minimize or ignore real patriarchal forces. Keep the sexist spotlight on what those feminists do amongst themselves, as if not in response to living in and fighting a racist patriarchy. Employ conservative to liberal understandings of reality to text that is written from a radical point of view. Refuse to accept or comprehend the work on its own terms, instead collapsing its meaning back into a conservative to liberal worldview--which the radical feminist's text often exposes as part of the political problem.

Radical feminist writers' work is never supposed to be "met" on its own terms, by the reader; there is no imperative on privileged people to do their homework, so to speak, before approaching the radical woman's material--inside or outside the academy. However, whole college courses and books for Dummies exist to help us with the basic concepts and framework, the analysis, the terminology of the "great and influential ideas" of dead white men; I've read several of them. If I'm in the academy and I don't get it, I am advised to take the intro course again, or to please stop wasting everyone's time with my misunderstandings and inaccurate interpretations. I might be advised to speak with someone "in the know" before approaching the great white man's work again. And if I do, I will be asked to metaphorically remove my shoes before entering.

From Plato to Derrida, if you are not familiar with the framework or philosophy--and sometimes also the non-English language--the usually European man's great mind is operating out of or critiquing, the failure to comprehend the material belongs to you. With women writers, the failure to comprehend is placed back on the author. The dog-shit on the soles of anyone's shoes may be wiped on the feminist soul's work, and too often, no one will notice or care.

Source: http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/levy/

Speeches of Andrea Dworkin

http://andreadworkin.com/audio/

Dixie Chicks - Not Ready To Make Nice

The Privatization of Women

Andrea Dworkin has stated that we, in this society, DO NOT perceive a husband (the one who fucks) and a wife (the one who is fucked) as a SOCIAL unit.  It is, in fact, a private unit.  It is not a social part of life.  The relationship between a man and his wife is not interpreted as SOCIAL.  This is what church, state, and institutional laws are built around.  Men build goddamn walls around women, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, and then call it their home.  In this home, or prison, we are beaten, manipulated, raped, annihilated.  Women are most likely to be beaten, raped, and killed in their own home than anywhere else.  

On top of this, we, literally, are given a script for how to interpret that PRIVATE unit.  It’s in the media, our movies, our TV shows, our literature, our institutions.  It’s everywhere.  The romance of the woman (or, what should be more appropriately called the rape of the woman) is the script we are given.  Pornography demonstrates this clearly: women are beaten with a smile on their faces, and it is a ejaculatory event for both this man and this woman.

More than 50% of women report that they were ATTACKED in their own home, most commonly by their “intimate” partner.  The meaning of the word “intimate” is defined as “very private; closely personal”.  Women are captives with no political rights to defend off their attacker, their abuser, the man they were socially conditioned to love NO MATTER WHAT.  She is his property through and through.  She still cannot claim that she has been raped in a court of law without being laughed away.  She, throughout history through the eyes of men, has seemed to have cried wolf.  She cannot claim dignity nor respect nor any self.  According to Wikipedia, the definition of captive is “the state of being confined to a space from which it is difficult or impossible to escape”.  A place where one finds it difficult to escape?  This is the function of marriage.  It is a literal capture.  Women are unable to leave their male partners for economic reasons, for legal reasons, for every male class law and institution in place.

Women, who only got the vote 92 years ago, haven’t been able to participate in the construction of their society.  Their voices have been drowned out, ignored, silenced. 

To demonstrate to you how sub-human women are, in 1990 it was reported that there were 1,500 shelters for battered women in the United States. There are 3,800 animal shelters.  How is this possible, when the evidence is so clear that women are beaten, tortured, killed on a daily basis?  This means there are 2.5 times more animal shelters than there are human shelters, which supposedly are supposed to function when someone is in a state of EMERGENCY.  Apparently, a man’s best friend is only his dog, not his wife.  A dog’s function is, after all, companionship, while the wife is still relegated to the function of producing the progeny of the male through contracted intercourse.

The husband is the human being in this “PRIVATE” relationship.  Not the women; it’s never the woman who is human in this gender classed world.  The woman is property, an object of possession, a fetishized sexual being that elevates the man’s prosperity.  The wife is his bling, like his car which functions to get him around.  She is, literally, a PART of him, like his pinky finger or his spleen.  (Eve, after all, is of Adam’s rib)  She is not human.  She is the one who breeds, who CARES for him.  During Colonial times, men literally BOUGHT women.  They were brought to the colonies as wives.  This is ONLY 200 years ago out of our 50,000 year history as humans.  This was how America began: bringing captives, white and black, as slaves to the WHITE MAN.  Both white women and blacks were sexual slaves.  The white woman bred the new generations of white men, while blacks were bred as slaves.  Black women were also used as the sexual property of the white man.  America was literally born through the system of concubinage.

Women are literally PRIVATE PROPERTY.  LITERALLY.  To this day, this is how the laws are set up.  It is "private matters".  It is "none of your business."  Literally, it is none of society’s BUSINESS.  It is personal, not to be discussed.  Law and State interprets it this way.  The church interprets it this way.  Our learned behavior has been conditioned this way… The relationship between a man and his wife is privatized.  Women are literally owned by the men they marry.  The laws make it so. She is owned inside out.  The slit between her legs is his property.  His sexual object, his possession, his fetishized obsession.  Remember, he signed a contract saying he is the owner of her slit.  That CONTRACT states that he has sexual access to her.  He can have sexual access to her whether she likes it or not, and he will get away with it.  Like the slaves, she is the white property of his estate, his castle.  He can intimidate her, insult her, degrade her, and get away with it.  He can beat her, hurt and rape her and get away with it, and on top of that she will be the one to blame.  It is her fault; she is crazy and has “personal issues”, the script says, society says.  I am here to say that her “personal” issues ARE NOT PERSONAL.  They ARE POLITICAL.  The only thing she is trying to do is keep herself alive, trying to keep her body, mind, and soul from being violated.  And the court says, “No, you are exaggerating, lying.”  And the psychologists say, “No, you are bipolar, crazy.”  And the intellectuals say, “No, you are not worth our time nor effort.”  And her family says, “No, you are his wife. Deal with it.”  He can kill her, like chattel, and get away with murder.  And she has died a trillion times throughout history.

This is why the statement, “The Personal is Political” is so important.  I’m glad a close professor has emphasized this phrase so much to me.  Women have been privatized.  This is why the personal lives of women are so important to listen to, not to be trivialized, not to be swept under the carpet.  Yet, this is what’s going on.  Women are being ignored; to take her seriously would cause great anger, great violence, great political conflict.  The Suffragettes knew it.  In their personal conversations with each other, they strategized NOT to talk about the personal lives they inhabited with men.  These women knew it would anger men to the point of losing the vote.  They strategized not to talk about it in order to get the vote.  This must end.  Our silence must END NOW.  We are no longer living under the same state of tyranny of the 1920s… that is to say, not as much... not much, after all, has changed.  The state has reconfigured and women have done that.  Now we must act in new ways; we must have the courage to not be afraid of what men will do to us when we speak up and institute new laws.  We must end the privatization of women, the privatization of marriage, and the privatization of masculine identity.  We must end our silence on issues of “private matters”.

Feminism’s war against their oppressors has always been about ridding the masculine identity from the face of the earth.  Women have done this through changing laws, obtaining the vote, creating women shelters and rape centers, through using their words. They have done this with their mutilated bodies up for grabs, putting their lives up for the violent backlash which pounds back 10 times harder. Feminism, I will tell you, have not raised up in arms as a collective force.  They have used merely their words, marching, protesting. 

But this is a war no matter how men try to define war; it is a war which violates the bodies of women.  Men use their propaganda, pornography, which is now so proliferate that even “women’s magazines” are filled with it, showing the bodies of hot young fuckable girls with a look of sexual seduction on their faces in stiletto heels.  Women, now more than ever, have internalized this masochistic language as the pornographic imagination has extended out past farther than even anyone imagined: into the public sphere of commercials, television, the media, the internet.

This war is no different from nations violating the human rights of other nations.  War is defined as a state of emergency, and so is the condition of women as they stand now, in 4 inch high heels.  Women are in a state of emergency, yet, when we speak up, go to the authorities, talk with our closest friends and family, we are trivialized and told we deserve it, need it.  Women need to fight back against the all holy masculine identity dependent on pillage and rape.  A precondition for joy for men is putting women in their place.  This is the function of marriage, of the dating system.  It is to put a woman in her place: as a sexual object to be bred and used for physical labor.  This must change.  Men need to find a way to break the systematic sadistic joy and literal erection they get from beating, raping, and ejaculating on women.  If they do not, we, women, will force them to; they will be forced to change, and if they do not, they will perish from this world because we will make this world into something they cannot thrive in.

I'd like to leave you with a speech given by Andrea Dworkin, who highly influenced this piece.

http://andreadworkin.com/audio/montrealdworkin.mp3

Andrea Dworkin on The Sexual Politics of Killing Women

If you want to hear how the witch trial hunts against women have reconfigured into into its current state, right now, happening NOW, listen to this:

 http://andreadworkin.com/audio/montrealdworkin.mp3 

 I promise you will be changed by Dworkin's words. She clarifies that women are still, in fact, chattel. Literally still the property of men.

Andrea Dworkin's Testimony to the Attorney General On Pornography

Here is Andrea Dworkin's famous speech before the attorney general on the effects of pornography on women's civil rights... couldn't have been put any better.

Andrea Dworkin

This is a great documentary about Andrea's stance on pornography.  The documentary also includes interviews from those women who were exploited in porn and their experiences with it.  Very powerful.  If you want to listen to someone who has a very powerful and empathetic voice, look no further.

Witch Trails

 

Get THIS:

On December 5, 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued the Summis desiderantes affectibus, a papal bull in which he recognized the existence of witches and gave full papal approval for the inquisition to move against witches, including the permission to do whatever necessary to get rid of them. In the bull, which is sometimes referred to as the "Witch-Bull of 1484", the witches were explicitly accused of having "slain infants yet in the mother's womb" (abortion) and of "hindering men from performing the sexual act (control over women's sexuality) and women from conceiving" (contraception). 

                     -Wikipedia, Witch trials in Early Modern Europe 

Wanna really blow your mind?

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers 
by Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English

Women have always been healers, and medicine has always been an arena of struggle between female practitioners and male professionals. This pamphlet explores two important phases in the male takeover of health care: the suppression of witches in medieval Europe and the rise of the male medical profession in the United States. The authors conclude that despite efforts to exclude them, the resurgence of women as healers should be a long-range goal of the women’s movement.

Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts 
by Anne Llewellyn Barstow

In the sixteenth century, a rise in sexual violence in European society was exacerbated by pressure from church and state to change basic sexual customs...As the centuries since have shown escalating levels both of violence, general and sexual, and of state control, the witchcraze can be considered a portent, even a model, of some aspects of what modern Europe would be like."

Over three centuries, approximately one hundred thousand persons, most of whom were women, were put to death under the guise of "witch hunts", particularly in Reformation Europe. The shocking annihilation of women from all walks of life is explored in this brilliant, authoritative feminist history Anne Llwellyn Barstow. Barstow exposes an unrecognized holocaust -- the "ethnic cleansing" of independent women in Reformation Europe -- and examines the residual attitudes that continue to influence our culture.

Barstow argues that it is only with eyes sensitive to gender issues that we can discern what really happened in the persecution and murder of these women. Her sweeping chronicle examines the scapegoating of women from the ills of society, investigates how their subjugation to sexual violence and death sent a message of control to all women, and compares this persecution of women with the enslavement and slaughter of African slaves and Native Americans.

Ultimately Barstow traces the current backlash against women to its gynophobic torture-filled origins. In the process, she leaves an indelible mark on our growing understanding of the legacy of violence against women around the world.

Bewitched to the Rescue!

This scene (go exactly 9 minutes into the show) could have come straight from a feminist's mouth as Samantha tells Darin how she feels about a particular incident with Darren. Great stuff.

It can also be interpreted as a commentary on racism too:

Wikipedia states: "Some episodes take a backdoor approach to such topics as racism, as seen in the first season episode, "The Witches Are Out", in which Samantha objects to Darrin's demeaning ad portrayal of witches as ugly and deformed. Such stereotypical imagery often causes Endora and other witches to flee the country until November. "Sisters at Heart" (season 7), whose story was submitted by a tenth-grade English class,^[10] involved Tabitha altering the skin tone of herself and a black friend with coordinating polka-dots, so that people would treat them alike."

I'd highly recommend watching the entire episode as there are some other nuggets of wonder. = )