This friend is obviously unaware of a feminist analysis that provides context for these women-hating sentiments. As you all know, when we hold misogynistic viewpoints of other women, we often hold ourselves up as the exceptional woman, who is not like “all those other terrible women out there”. As Ariel Levy says,

It can be fun to feel exceptional – to be the loophole woman, to have a whole power thing, to be an honorary man. But,” she warns, “if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven’t made any progress.

My conversation with Sandra came at an interesting time, since I was reading A Passion for Friends* by Janice Raymond. The book was recommended by blogger Radfem Crafts, and she did a lovely series (starting here) analyzing it.

Raymond discusses the reasons why some females hold anti-woman sentiments, (p 151)

A chorus of male voices throughout the centuries has echoed Jonathan Swift’s words, “I never knew a tolerable woman to be fond of her own sex.”.. So women disidentify with other women in order to make themselves “tolerable” to men.

In other words, perhaps women hate women because male culture hates women.

To return to Sandra’s original examples. She remembers women in high school as playing dumb and actively conforming to beauty mandates, but she does not analyze the fact that patriarchal culture tells us that women are dumb and are only worthy as beautiful objects. Or to turn to another example, she believes women are difficult to work with because they are competitive and catty, but she does not see that our culture defines aggressive behavior in women as b*tchy, and does not note such behavior in men. In other words, she sees women through the male lens of hatred and disdain.

But Raymond does not believe that we can attribute all women-hating-women behavior and words to cultural brainwashing. As she says,

It would be easy to ignore these voices by saying that women internalize men’s attitudes about them and about their relationships with other women. The problem is that, although this may account in one way for the cause of women’s antifeminist behavior, it does not assuage the awful reality of women-hating-women conduct when it happens in our own and in other women’s lives.

To return to the above examples, Sandra may have hated the young women at her high school because she was jealous of the attention they received from men (due to the fact that they conformed to the f’kability mandate, and performed femininity in male-approved way). Since male-derived power is one of the only ways women can receive power, Sandra may have resented these women for receiving crumbs of attention she would have preferred to parlay into power herself. Or, perhaps the women at Sandra’s work really were catty and competitive with other women because they believed that women are easier targets then men, and that if only so many women were going to be able to succeed, they’d like to be one of them. In other words, perhaps the patriarchal culture that hates women creates women-hating words and behaviors in women.

Sandra was not open to my feminist analysis of her feelings, and she can hardly be blamed. After all, it is easier to see oneself as exceptional than to confront the realities of male power.

The above examples are just a few of the many obstacles to women-centered reality. However, Raymond believes that these obstacles must be overcome if women are going to become Gyn/affective. As she says (p 7-8),

Gyn/affection can be defined as woman-to-woman attraction, influence, and movement.. In many ways, Gyn/affection is a synonym for female friendship.. Gyn/affection connotes the passion that women feel for women, that is, the expression of profound attraction for the original vital Self and the movement towards other vital women.. The basic meaning of Gyn/affection is that women affect, move, stir, and arouse each other to full power.

Raymond believes that a Gyn/affective life is an important step towards women’s liberation, and I agree with her (p 241). When women step beyond the lies told about themselves and each other, we can begin to see ourselves and each other as we really are, and also create a vision of life beyond the current state of atrocity (p 23).

But,

How do women live in the world as men have defined it while creating the world as women imagine it to be? p 205

Raymond suggests that we use dual vision to keep one eye on the horrific and unacceptable material realities of women’s lives (she calls this nearsightedness), while at the same time recognizing “the possibilities of being for each other” now and in the future (farsightedness) (p 207).

As Raymond says,

Dual vision poses a tension but not a contradiction. Realism about the conditions of man-made existence must be illuminated by a vision of feminist imagination that acts. And the feminist visionary task must root itself in the real world or else, as Pat Hynes has remarked, like an electrical charge that has no ground, its unguided energy will disperse in all directions. Virgina Woolf phrased it this way, “Energy has been liberated, but into what form is it to flow?” (p 207-208)

By grounding our vision in our material world, as well as in our Gyn/affection for each other, we can begin to move forward towards wherever our vision takes us. This movement towards women’s freedom, despite the real realities of our material circumstances, has already begun.

Image from here.
*You can find an excerpt from A Passion for Friends here.

First, you need to know why we have a valid reason for being concerned about the behavior of self-identified feminist men within feminist spaces, and our answer is simple: We have identified the subtle mechanisms utilized by pro-feminist men to “divide and conquer”, to erase the commonality from all women within feminist spaces and whose cumulative effect results in a gross marginalization of the radical feminist position. Nor are we are the only women to notice a problem. Megan Milanese brilliantly describes most of the tactics here — yet that list does not go far enough to analyze the extent of the problem.

So why should an erasure of the commonality inherent to all women matter to anyone besides radical feminists? Lucky Nickel makes the relevant connection for us:

Self-naming and self-identified labels mean nothing. There must be substance to the label they identify with and substance to who they claim to be. Otherwise folks can insist on calling a mouse a giraffe or claim rape is really love.

What I do think important to note is that liberals, lesbian separatists and radical feminists are all flying the radfem flag these days. The problem being, they are 3 separate and distinct political groups and ideologies, 2 of whom are inappropriately waving the radfem flag. It can get a bit tricky tho with lesbian separatists as radical feminists can also be lesbian separatists. But not all lesbians are radfems and not all radfems are lesbian separatists, or even lesbian for that matter. But in Julian Real’s case, that would be irrelevant. The dude is not a lesbian or radical feminist.

What the dude is, is liberal. And what he is attempting to do is appropriate the radical feminist label in order to inject liberal ideology. Equality politics are liberal politics, not radical feminist politics. Radical feminists seek liberation from men and their system, not equality. Liberals focus on differences between women. Radical feminists focus on the commonality of women. Needless to say, these 2 different ideologies conflict and clash. Which delights men like Julian Real to no end. Cuz if he keeps liberal women pitted against radical feminist women, it keeps women from unifying, which in turn keeps the heat off of pricks like him and men in general. Slick, no?

In talking to each other privately, we have decided to collectively communicate the following message regarding Julian Real, Hugo Schwyzer, and other men like them who claim to be feminist allies. These men do not speak for women as well as we can speak for ourselves and we ask that you give radical feminist bloggers the respect of reading our words, joining the discussion in comments on our blogs, and contributing to our own community rather than giving energy to men like Julian & Hugo who seek to divide us on points which all feminists have in common. Men exhibiting these behaviors have inserted themselves into discussions among women when their participation was insidiously harmful in nature, and we ask that you not support that behavior nor make excuses for it.

The below is quoted from The War Against Women page 158-162, from the section entitled War Against Women as Revealed in Military Language. All bold emphasis is mine (though all of it is worth emphasizing).

(photo from wikipedia)

Carol Cohn spent a summer studying with male experts in nuclear strategy. To understand them–and speak so they could understand her– she had to learn their language, one made up largely of invented words, acronyms impenetrable to most of us. Cohn found it a “sexy” language, offering the delight in power that comes from knowing things ordinary people don’t know, that shows ones intimacy with the most secret, highest reaches of state policy. Appalled by her pleasure in this language, she acknowledges it to suggest how seductive the power of such knowledge can be. She not only found its words fun to say, but was gratified at knowing the language of priests privy to god, designed to mystify and awe. Indeed, from its inception, nuclear science has used religious imagery. The inventors of the atomic bomb called its first test “Trinity” after the Holy Trinity, the united Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, “the male forces of Creation”. As it exploded in its first test, its main inventor, Robert Oppenheimer, thought of Krishna’s words to Arjuana in the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.” And the men who today devise strategic doctrine call their community “the nuclear priesthood.”

Nuclear scientists use another set of images– images of birth, birth through the male as in male initiation rituals. Scientists at Los Alamos called the atomic bomb “Oppenheimer’s baby”; those at Lawrence Livermore called the hydrogen bomb “Teller’s Baby.” Those who wanted to disparage Edward Teller argued that “he was not the bomb’s father but its mother,” and attributed fatherhood to Stanislaw Ulam, who “had the all-important idea and inseminated Teller with it. Teller only ‘carried it’ after that.” A briefing officer, excitedly describing the technical capabilities of a new satellite system, added self-effacingly, “We’ll do the motherhood role–telemetry, tracking, and control– the maintenance.”

As in religious hierarchies, birth through the male produces only males. The perversity of patriarchal thinking is such that these men felt the bombs that wreaked such human horror on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were their babies, “Little Boy” and “Fat Man.” Cohn remarks that the bombs were not only the atomic scientists’ progeny, but emphatically male progeny: in early tests, before they were sure that the bombs would work, the scientists expressed their anxiety by saying that “they hoped the baby was a boy, not a girl– that is, a dud.” After the success of the first test, General Leslie Groves cabled Secretary of War Henry Stimson: “Doctor has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother. The light in his eyes discernible from here to Highhold and I could have heard his screams from here to my farm.” Stimson then wrote Churchill: “Babies satisfactorily born.” In 1952, after the hydrogen bomb (named “Mike”) tested successfully at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, Teller Triumphantly telegraphed Los Alamos: “Its a boy.” Cohn comments: “The entire history of the bomb project… seems permeated with imagery that confounds man’s overwhelming technological power to destroy nature with the power to create.”

The view of life as a struggle for power generated a language in which life has no significance and only power matters. So nuclear scientists refer to the killing of human beings not on their own “side” as “collateral damage”. Military men, who adopted this parlance, used it in their television appearances to describe Iraqis killed in the 1990-1991 gulf war (whose actual number remains a state secret). Eighteenth-century physicians in Britain’s Royal Society began to use euphemisms in writing up their experiments because simple language made clear the horrifying pain they were inflicting. This policy is now followed in every discipline that attacks, mutilates, and kills humans (even those supposedly intended to help them, like medicine). The term “collateral damage” also suggests that human beings were not the targets of attack, but simply in the way of the important business. So defense analysts call the incineration of cities “countervalue attacks.”

Cohn’s article was published in 1987, but we are all now familiar with some of terminology she describes. We know that “surgically clean strikes” (shortened to “surgical strikes”) are “counterforce” attacks (attacks by weapons on weapons or militarily useful installations) that are supposed to “take out” (accurately destroy) an opponent’s weapons or command centers without causing significant damage to anything else. War is waged between weapons systems, not human beings, as if “enemies” sat at opposite sides of the globe playing video games. An MX missile carries ten warheads, each with the explosive power of 300-375 kilotons of TNT–a destructive power about 250-400 times that of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. This is the weapon Ronald Reagan dubbed “the Peacekeeper.” While the defense analysis community mockingly scorned his euphemism, they themselves called the MX a “damage limitation weapon.” They also discuss “clean bombs”– nuclear devices that work largely by fusion rather than fission and therefore release more energy not as radiation but as blast, destructive explosive power. They are “clean” because they do not emit as much radiation, but they have a greater potential to kill and destroy.

Men have appropriated not just birth but “women’s work,” using nursery and domestic images to mask the horror of what they do. They approve “clean” bombs and speak longingly of “patting” bombs and missiles. They named an electronic system designed to prevent the unauthorized firing of nuclear warheads “PAL” (permissive action links), a “carefully constructed, friendly acronym”, they called an early version of an antiballistic missile system “BAMBI,” an acronym for ballistic missile boost intercept. They call the president’s Annual Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Memorandum, listing short- and long-range plans to produce nuclear weapons, “the shopping list.” They choose from a “menu” of options when selecting targeting plans. Scientists call one model of nuclear attack the “cookie cutter,” and the pattern MIRVed missiles’ nuclear warheads make when they land a “footprint.” Men do not drop nuclear bombs; they are “delivered” by a “bus.” They do not use the terms “nuclear bombs” or “warheads” but call them “reentry vehicles” or “RVs”– as if they were recreational vehicles, trailers.

Cohn’s summer seminar included nine other women. She expected such highly educated, knowledgeable men, faced with ten women in their midst, to feel discomfort about their more macho expressions. But, she writes, she was wrong. They seemed innocent of feminist critiques of male behavior and openly said that for the American military, nuclear weapons were “irresistible, because you get more bang for your buck.” They told her that scientists would never seriously contemplate disarmament because disarmament is emasculation: “to disarm is to get rid of all your stuff.” One professor explained that the MX missile would not replace older, less accurate missiles, but be placed in the silos of the newest Minuteman missiles, “because they’re the nicest holes– you’re not going to take the nicest missile you have and put it in a crummy hole.” Scientists lectured on “vertical erector launchers, thrust-to-weight ratios, soft lay-downs, deep penetration, and the comparative advantages of protracted versus spasm attacks”–defined by one military adviser to the National Security Counsel as “releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage in one orgasmic whump.” They expressed serious concern about “the need to harden our missiles and the need to ‘face it, the Russians are a little harder than we are.’”

Cohn found Air Force Magazine‘s advertisements for new weapons a rival to Playboy in cataloging men’s sexual anxieties and fantasies. Ads promoting weapons as “big sticks” or “penetrators”, or for their “cratering” powers. When French military men do nuclear tests on the Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific, they give every crater they gouge out of the earth a woman’s name. Phallic imagery is common in description of nuclear blasts. Cohn cites one by journalist William Lawrence, who witnessed the bombing of Nagasaki: “Then, just when it appeared as though the thing had settled down into a state of permanence, there cane shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased the size of the pillar to a total of 45,000 feet. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, sizzling upward and then descending earthward, a thousand geysers rolled into one.”

A Pentagon target analyst explained that plans for “limited nuclear war” were doomed because “it’s a pissing contest– you gotta expect them to use everything they’ve got.” When India exploded a nuclear bomb, a professor remarked that “she” had lost her “virginity”; when New Zealand parliamentarian Marilyn Waring forced her government to ban nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered warships from its ports, a retired U.S. Air Force General, Ross Milton, wrote an angry column in Air Force Magazine called “Nuclear Virginity”. Cohn found the world of nuclear weaponry pervaded by friendship and even romance: “enemies ‘exchange’ warheads; one missile ‘takes out’ another; weapons systems can ‘marry up’; the wires linking warning and response mechanisms allow “coupling.” But this sex and romance aim at murder. If one of our own warheads “kills” another of one’s own warheads, that is “fratricide.” And while these men devoted considerable discussion to “vulnerability” and “survivability,” they were concerned not with the vulnerability and survival of people but of weapon systems.

Cohn quotes two descriptions of the aftermath of a nuclear attack. One, by Hisako Matsubara, who was a child in Kyoto when the atomic bomb was dropped, is based on surviors’ memories:

“Everything was black, had vanished into the black dust, was destroyed. Only the flames that were beginning to lick their way up had any color. From the dust that was like a fog, figures began to loom up, black, hairless, faceless. They screamed with voices that were no longer human. Their screams drowned out the groans rising everywhere from the rubble, groans that seemed to rise from the very earth itself.”

The second is nukespeak, by an Army general on the National Security Council during the Carter administration:

“You have to have ways to maintain communication in a nuclear environment, a situation bound to include EMP blackout, brute force damage to systems, ad heavy jamming environment, and so on.”

The most appalling and profound truth about all this is that these men are not even concerned with their own survival. Only power matters: it is god, an exalted disembodied force more important than humankind. It is difficult to plumb such absurd and perverse thinking. Cohn stresses that men’s reference point in technostrategic discourse is not themselves or even white men, is not human beings at all; it is the weapons. These men call human death “collateral damage” less to conceal human suffering than because human death is collateral to what matters to them– weapons themselves. But, Cohn points out, when men create a discourse that excluded human life in its calculus, it is impossible to include humans and illegitimate to expect the discourse to reflect human concerns. She realized that knowledge of this language did not enable one to introduce such concerns or influence political decisions. She even questioned whether the discourse was part of the process by which political decisions are made. Cohn believes that technostrategic discourse functions as a gloss, an “ideological curtain” disguising the real reasons for political decisions. It is however likely that those decisions are based on the same assumptions, the same values, as the discourse. Terrifyingly.

(TW) If you would like to see the “collateral damage” of this type of power, please click here.

Via UP, also posted by Sargasso Sea, Lishra, Gallus Mag, No Anodyne, Cathy Brennan, Lucky, audaxille, gorrilerof4b, saltnpeppa, iameatingblueberries, Allecto, Squirrel, EasilyRiled, zeph , and Sex Matters.

There are several things we could mean.

Is the scenario logically possible? That is, is there a logical contradiction in proposing the world without the patriarchy?

In other words, can we imagine a possible world where there is no patriarchy in a way that we fail to understand a possible world where there are square circles, or where two is equal to one, or that a particular flower is both green all over, and entirely not green?

I believe that a world without patriarchy is logically possible.

Is the scenario nomologically possible? That is, is the scenario possible given the current laws of nature?

Given that a world without patriarchy does not alter the speed of light, or violate the law of conservation of energy, or any other law of nature, I believe that a world without patriarchy is nomologically possible.

Now, is the scenario a real possibility? That is, is it possible to abolish patriarchy in the actual (that is- our) world?

If it is possible, does this imply that we should hope for this possibility, work towards this possibility, plan for this possibility, etc.?

Some people say that “abolishing prostitution/the patriarchy is impossible.”

What do they mean by this statement?

Surely they don’t mean it is logically impossible, and that there is a logical contradiction involved in imagining a world where women are not sold to men to be sexually used, and therefore cannot come to be.

Surely they don’t mean that it is nomologically impossible- that is, that ending pornstitution would contradict a law in nature and would change the gravitational constant, or super cool matter to absolute zero.

Do they mean, then, that ending prostitution is impossible in the real world, given the way it is right now?

If so, then they lack vision of what the future could become. They are presuming that because the patriarchy exists now, that it will always exist, and that because women are treated like chattel now, that they will always be so treated. In other words, these folks lack imagination.

Or, perhaps they mean to make a stronger claim- namely that there is no way the world as it is now could change in order to free women from sexual slavery.

It may be impossible to completely end prostitution right now given the existence of the patriarchy, and the concentration of power in male hands.

HOWEVER, we do not have enough information about how the world could change, just by observing the way our world happens to be now. If that is their argument, then it is weak indeed.

I believe that it is possible, sometime in the future, to abolish the patriarchy, and remove mandatory male access to women.

In stating that a world without prostitution/patriarchy is possible, I am not stating that I know how to bring this world about. I’m merely stating that I have a vision of the world without constant male access to women’s bodies. I don’t know what the long way forward looks like. But I believe it is possible. Dee Graham recommends that we use science fiction, and our imaginations to think of what such a world would be like. In reading The Holdfast Chronicles, Herland , and the Daughters of a Coral Dawn series, I’m expanding my vision to include a world outside of male dominance and power.

Men do not define what is possible, and by dreaming of the long way forward now, we find the power to fight against male power today.

This is Bibi Aisha, an Afgan woman.

Aisha was the Afghani teenager who was forced into an abusive marriage with a Taliban fighter, who abused her and kept her with his animals. When she attempted to flee, her family caught her, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her for dead in the mountains.

Radical feminists know that the way Aisha was treated is wrong.

We don’t need a floating deity in the sky to tell us that this is so. We don’t need to be philosophers to know that this is wrong.

We acknowledge that different cultures have different practices. Some cultures bury their dead, and some cremate them. Some cultures communicate through sign language, and others speak Farsi. Some cultural practices are different from others. However, that doesn’t mean that all cultural practices are equally acceptable. Some cultural practices are wrong.

Femicide and violence against women happens on a worldwide scale. In the United States, 17.6% of all women survive a rape or attempted rape (and that’s only counting the 26%-37% of rapes that are reported). Woman-hating pornography in which violence occurs in over 88% of scenes is so mainstream and accepted that “progressive” Dear Abby-types see nothing wrong with it. There are over 50,000 women and children trafficked in the United States, and worldwide, at least 4 million women and girls are trafficked annually. Despite how oppressed women are, men don’t try and change the oppressive system. In fact, they still think rape jokes are funny. Some of them are in such denial that they claim women are actually the perpetrators. The authorities are no better, since 15 of every 16 rapists will go free.

This system is not just broken; it’s actively evil. By reading the above statistics, you can see that not only is violence normalized in “other cultures”– it’s normalized in our own. If right and wrong were merely determined by cultural consensus, then violence against women would be morally correct in our own culture as well as others. Violence against women is *normal* in our culture. Clearly, then, moral relativism cannot be true.

I am not a relativist. I believe that our patriarchal system must be destroyed, because it is objectively harmful. I don’t need a moral theory to tell me that.

*This essay by James Rachels is a good 101-type document on cultural relativism, if you are interested.

What follows are some rape myths that are commonly found in pornography. The selection is taken from _Pornland_ by Gail Dines p 97-98 (emphasis mine).

“Rape Myth: Women don’t know their own minds; men know what women really want and need sexually.
Porn Example: “Lystra is homesick and wants to move back to Korea. Professor Lawrence knows what’s best for his best students—like his cock inside her moist, little hole.”

Rape Myth: A woman might not want it at first, but once she gets a taste of hot sex, she can’t get enough.
Porn Example: “Katie was a bit reluctant at first, but after two hard cocks stretched her tight ass wide open she screamed with joy.”

Rape myth: Women are by nature sexually manipulative.
Porn Example: “Jaclyn Case is pretty smart about how she tricks boys into coming over and giving IT to her. She’s also pretty specific about how she wants her pussy serviced.”

Rape Myth: Women are sluts who get what they deserve.
Porn Example: “Gia is a nasty little whore that can’t seem to get enough cock. We make sure this slut gets what she deserves and more!”

Rape Myth: All woman are whores at heart and want to be fucked by any available man.
Porn Example: “Vanessa might seem like a sweet girl, but deep inside, she’s a whore wanting big white dick.”

Not every man who uses porn will swallow these rape myths whole. To argue such a point does not account for the variations that exist among users and would reduce the effects debate to one effect- rape. But what anti-porn feminists are saying is that such myths promote a culture that will affect men in myriad ways: some will rape but many more will beg, nag, cajole their partners into sex or certain sex acts, and more still will lose interest in sex with other human beings. Some will use women and disregard them when done, some will be critical of their partner’s looks and performance, and many will see women as one-dimensional sex objects who are less deserving of respect and dignity than men, both in and out of the bedroom. Whatever the effect, men cannot walk away from these images unchanged.“

My book club is reading _Pornland_, and had a remarkably positive response it, and even asked to cover it again at the next meeting. I had expected some fun-feminist protestations, like “what about feminist porn?” or “porn for prisoners!“. But instead, I participated in an amazing conversation with fabulous women who *got* the harms of pornography, and understood the damaging cultural messages it propagates. They saw that the messages above are harmful lies about women, and that anyone who consumes these messages regularly will be affected. They understood that this doesn’t mean they are “anti-sex”. As Dines says,

Now to assume that if you are against pornography you’re against sex, is to assume that anyone who criticizes McDonald’s is anti-eating. People who criticize McDonald’s are against the destruction of the environment, against the assault on healthy foods, and against child obesity. They are against an industrial product. They are not against eating. So why can’t they see that it is the same thing when it comes to pornography and sex?

These women in my group do not identify as radical feminists. However, the truth about the harms of pornography was clear to them. It is clear that the academic/funfeminist discourses around pornography are counter-intuitive, and are patriarchal reversals. Women who have not been brainwashed *can* see how harmful this material is.

I am motivated to speak to women in the community about how pornography hijacks our sexuality and sells it back to us. I have new hope that someone out there will listen. At the same time, I am *worn out* talking about this subject. Dines and many others are so amazing to be able to fight so hard against something so awful. I’m rather exhausted on the topic, which is why post doesn’t really contain much analysis. Sorry folks- reporting is all I’ve got today.

Today’s entries are from various artists. I’m not claiming that everything these artists produce is feminist-friendly. Indeed– it is difficult to find artists that meet my standards for this series. As a reminder, I’ll mention my three criteria:

1. Zero misogyny is present in the work.
2. The artist(s) is/are female.
3. Relationships with men are not the sole/main focus of the cultural offering.

Without further ado, please check out these feminist-friendly songs.

From Sarah Harmer

“Oleander” (about growing a flower)

“Lodestar” (taking the boat out at night)

“Escarpment Blues” (save the land!)

Sarah Harmer is just an overall excellent Canadian musician. I can’t say that all of her music is feminist-friendly, but I love her.

From Butterfly Boucher

“Another White Dash” (song about road-tripping away from home)

“Life is Short” (Rather cliche, but still fun)

From Jesca Hoop

“Big Fish” (about leaving town)

“Money” (about selling out- the video is kind of strange)

K T Tunstall

“Push That Knot Away” (about fighting fear)

I hope you’ve enjoyed these recommendations. Feel free to make your own in the comments section.

My brother and I have been close every since we were in high school. We grew up in a highly conservative religious family, and so we supported each other through our rebellions, our mistakes, and our successes. We lived together once in college, and now we live together again (my partner and I live with him, to be clear).

My radical feminist awakening has changed my worldview (I was going to say it has *fundamentally* changed my worldview, but that’s not quite right. Radical feminism uses argument and logic to deliver true conclusions. Popular or “fun” feminism uses none of those things. I got my master’s degree in analytic philosophy, which helps explain radical feminism’s appeal to me. Indeed, it should appeal to everyone who takes the time to recognize the global hatred of women in our society. So in that sense, coming to radfem consciousness has expanded, rather than altered, my worldview).

I’ve made the mistake of confiding this new-found worldview with my brother. He does not get it *at all*, and so we end up yelling at each other. I am so saddened that he is entirely unwilling to bend just the slightest bit to what I’m saying. He’s always listened to me before.

I know that radfems who have been around awhile are not at all surprised to hear my story. However, the personal revelation that our loved ones are *a huge part* of the problem is a difficult one to learn for the first time.

I’ve finally decided that he and I will not talk about feminism any longer- it is the only way to save our friendship. But given how much I care about radical feminist topics, this will mean that we will grow apart if we aren’t able to share on this topic. It will also mean that if he laughs at a misogynistic joke, or drinks out of a female-bodied naked headless wine container (true), I will have to ignore his behavior, swallow my anger, and continue on. Either that, or lose him as a friend and brother. Honestly, that will probably end up happening anyway.

Having convictions sucks. It means I’m alienated from the people I care about the most. I’m deeply sad about this.

PS I want to point out that most of the defenses he levies for his views involve his claim that B (a libfem lesbian and probably his best friend- see paragraph 13 of this post for more on her) doesn’t see the problems I elucidate. To him, that means *I’m* crazy and wrong.

I saw this documentary over the weekend. I thought it was going to be an anti-plastic surgery doc, but it turns out to be a pro-beauty mandate doc. Despite having been actively thinking about the issues raised in it, I found it affecting my own self esteem.

You can find the trailer here.

Perhaps I should have known better. The trailer, as I see it, seems to set up the absurdity of mutilating one’s own body with surgery in order to fit an impossible body standard. Although the doc does contain some anti-beauty mandate commentary, it is for the most part an endorsement of botox and plastic surgery.

I’m getting those under-eye lines, and smile lines. I think I look older than I am. YET the reason I focus on these small, totally inconsequential details of my appearance is because I’ve been fed falsehoods that contradict my inner sense of well-being. I’ve learned not to trust my insides when they tell me that these tiny external signs simply point to the fact that I AM ALIVE, and do not say anything negative about me.

In Mary Daly’s Pure Lust, she talks about the effects of sadosociety on women.

“Women who have been thingified, deprived of conscious participation in Be-ing, have trouble believing in the sanctity of women’s “insides”– both their own and those of other women. This doubt extends to spirit, personalty, Self. Within sadosociety this doubt applies first to a woman’s own participation in Be-ing. It extends to the be-ing of all women. Thus the disorder which I shall call *masosadism* is injected into women. To the extent that this injection “takes”, a woman is rendered incapable of moral outrage on her own behalf *as a woman* and on behalf of the race of women. Her outrage has been expropriated. She may experience and be informed about atrocities against women, and yet she is unable to feel sustained rage against the perpetrators of the atrocities, and incapable of acting against the men who are the originators, rulers, and controlling legitimators of the sadostate. Masosadism, then, fixes women.” p60-61

As I say in this comment, “The deprogramming of women who have been so altered is one of the goals of radfeminism (as I see it).”

I’m working on deprogramming myself, and sharing the experience with my sisters. That’s what radical blogs and books and articles are for. The sadosociety is slippery though, and it’s easy to get confused. Also, its messages have become so ingrained that for some it’s a constant struggle to abandon them. At least we’re naming it though. That is a start.