GirlWritesWhat taking apart patriarchal theory & the feminist historical narrative of domestic violence. It doesn't get much better than this:
Thursday, 29 March 2012
Saturday, 24 March 2012
Feminarchy
My response to a nice piece by Leap over at Staged Reality, where he asked "Does Feminism = Anarchy?"
Feminism emerged from, & is essentially a perversion of, Marxist theory, & is best understood (politically, at least) within that framework. In the late sixties, going into the seventies, women who were involved in university campus Marxism decided they could no longer stand to work alongside the men they were supposed to be trying to bring about revolution with & decided to start a new movement of their own, keeping almost all the same concepts but simply replacing CLASS with GENDER as the explanation for everything. That itself pretty much explains all feminist theory the past 40 years.
Coming from a country that still has a monarchy(!), the concept of anarchy is actually pretty cool - all it means is 'without a ruler', after all, & that is surely the wish of all freedom-loving peoples the world over. The dream of democracy, the dream of socialism, & the dream of anarchy all came about as blueprints for possible ways of re-ordering society after the removal of the monarchy, & actually have huge amounts in common. They have only come to be enemies because of the machinery & ideology that sprung up around them once the dream had been written down. It happens in politics as it happens in religion, as it happens in all closed, dead systems, once the thinking (& questioning) has stopped.
Most of my adult life I've moved in anarchistic, 'progressive-thinking' circles, working for what I hoped was the common good alongside people I thought were seeking truth the same as me & wanting the best for all. One of the hardest things I've had to wrestle with since taking the red pill has been the realization of how all left-wing political thinking - which I otherwise see many benefits of - is utterly rotten with totalitarian feminist dogma. And feminism is, after all, a hate movement. So you see my problem.
There is no space for any kind of debate upon whether feminism is a beneficial force within an anarchist or socialist forum, which is sad because it is those people, more than any others, the people wanting most passionately & generously to bring about change, that I would most like to speak with & help develop a new, post-feminist language of the sexes.
My present position is that anarchistic principles can work - I've seen them work - on a small level, within groups of a few hundred people, but to implement them on a national level is very likely unworkable. I tend to think the ideal would be to have small groups - tribes, really - of self-governing peoples who interact democratically on a national level, with one spokesperson representing them at yearly/monthly meetings etc. Really not too far from the dream of American democracy, when you think about it, just with less of the heinous, bloated corruption & capitalistic greed that ruined humanity's greatest stab yet at utopia.
Coming from a country that still has a monarchy(!), the concept of anarchy is actually pretty cool - all it means is 'without a ruler', after all, & that is surely the wish of all freedom-loving peoples the world over. The dream of democracy, the dream of socialism, & the dream of anarchy all came about as blueprints for possible ways of re-ordering society after the removal of the monarchy, & actually have huge amounts in common. They have only come to be enemies because of the machinery & ideology that sprung up around them once the dream had been written down. It happens in politics as it happens in religion, as it happens in all closed, dead systems, once the thinking (& questioning) has stopped.
Most of my adult life I've moved in anarchistic, 'progressive-thinking' circles, working for what I hoped was the common good alongside people I thought were seeking truth the same as me & wanting the best for all. One of the hardest things I've had to wrestle with since taking the red pill has been the realization of how all left-wing political thinking - which I otherwise see many benefits of - is utterly rotten with totalitarian feminist dogma. And feminism is, after all, a hate movement. So you see my problem.
There is no space for any kind of debate upon whether feminism is a beneficial force within an anarchist or socialist forum, which is sad because it is those people, more than any others, the people wanting most passionately & generously to bring about change, that I would most like to speak with & help develop a new, post-feminist language of the sexes.
My present position is that anarchistic principles can work - I've seen them work - on a small level, within groups of a few hundred people, but to implement them on a national level is very likely unworkable. I tend to think the ideal would be to have small groups - tribes, really - of self-governing peoples who interact democratically on a national level, with one spokesperson representing them at yearly/monthly meetings etc. Really not too far from the dream of American democracy, when you think about it, just with less of the heinous, bloated corruption & capitalistic greed that ruined humanity's greatest stab yet at utopia.
Rape Propaganda
As an addendum of sorts to that last piece, here is an interesting article by Duncan Idaho over at Eternal Bachelor. Hope he doesn't mind the callous thievery.
Feminists love to rant and rave about how men are all rapists,
potential or otherwise. Naturally, this is absurd, as they well know.
In fact, the idea of young women being raped is one thing guaranteed to infuriate men and get them rolling up their sleeves and ready to hit someone (note that I’m defining rape as forcibly having sex with a someone without their consent, not the feminist definition of rape, which is where a woman consents but regrets it the next day, or the Andrea Dworkin definition of rape, which is any sex between a man and a woman regardless of whether the latter consents or not.)
The outrage men feel about women getting raped is utilized with great efficiency in propaganda. The extreme-right-wing British National Party recently spread rumours around that Asian gangs in Bradford were organizing gang-rapes of white women. The KKK whipped whole communities into a lynch-happy frenzy by telling horrifying tales of how black men prowled around raping white girls. Anti-semitic groups in Russia have been uttering ominous claims that Jewish gangs are supposedly abducting poor Russian girls to be taken to work as sex-slaves in Israel, and the Iraqi insurgents try to bolster anti-US sentiments by producing fake evidence of American GIs raping defenceless Iraqi girls.
All this is through the simple knowledge that – assuming they believe them – men will be outraged by such tales. Claim that a certain ethnic or religious group has a desire to rape women, and tell them that this group is eying up “our women” then you will get men more liable to feel hate towards that group.
In Birmingham a few months ago, the rumour of a 14-year-old black girl having been gang-raped by Asian men lead to rioting between the black and Asian communities, resulting in two deaths and dozens of injuries. Tensions had been simmering between the communities for a while, but it exploded into violence just by the rumour of a rape that almost certainly never happened.
Likewise, talk of the enemy raping “our women” works well in war. This does have some basis in truth, as rape is often carried out by victorious invaders, especially in the old days before War Crimes tribunals came about. It is rape that is so frequently emphasized and exaggerated in wartime propaganda more than any other atrocity.
The Japanese atrocities in Nanking during World War II included the murder of over 300,000 civilians and the sexual assault of about 80,000 women, but it is largely the sexual assaults that are often concentrated on in Chinese accounts of the atrocities (and indeed they gave the whole terrible affair the name “The Rape Of Nanking“) because the idea of Japanese soldiers raping women and girls ensures an even greater amount of anti-Japanese sentiment can be whipped up than “just” the idea of Japanese soldiers killing civilians.
Tell men the enemy are “raping our women” – or planning on doing so – and whether that “our” is translated as female relatives or just women of the same nationality or religion, and you will have most of the male population grabbing swords or guns and marching off to risk their lives. It works wonders.
It is very rare to find a man who genuinely thinks that tying women up and screwing them against their will is okay, and such men are naturally shunned if they make their beliefs known and imprisoned if they act upon them (significantly, of course, rapists are the regarded as the lowest-of-the-low in prison; even their fellow criminals do not like them.)
Yet on and on feminists rant and splutter about how all us men are somehow in favour of rape. They insist we’re all evil rapists-in-waiting, that there is an epidemic of rape in society, that teenaged girls should even be wary of their own 11-year-old brothers lest they want to ravish them with their evil willies, and furthermore they try to give the impression that the supposedly small minority of us men who don’t regularly beat up and rape women at least approve of such activities.
With the exception of hardcore lunatics like the thankfully-dead Andrea Dworkin, not even feminists really believe this. They know damn well that the majority men are outraged by the idea of rape. They rely on this fact to push through their anti-male laws (like VAWA in the US) and to ensure plenty of tax-payer cash flows to misandrist feminist organisations that help break up families. They know that exaggerating claims of rape – by either coming up with absurdly loose definitions of rape, such as a woman who regrets consensual sex a few days after the event, or by just coming up with utterly fabricated statistics – will infuriate male judges and politicians and get them to engage Chivalrous Mode and start coming down hard on the supposedly rape-happy male population.
This is why you get organizations like Men Against Rape (a rather loathsome name for a group because it implies that men who do not join them must therefore be for rape.) These guys may mean well but they’ve just been suckered into the propaganda of feminists and their bullshit statistics. Their outrage against rape has been manipulated by feminists so that they are as paranoid about the idea of an “epidemic of rape” as feminists are.
Feminists know damn well that if they claim that there are tens of thousands of unreported rapes on college campuses a year then, without even bothering to ask for evidence, men will be extra-fearful for their daughters and will join feminists in demanding women-only areas in colleges. Feminists know that if they claim that it is very common for men to spike drinks in bars and clubs with rape-drugs then you will have men becoming intensely protective of their girlfriends to the point of paranoia and will support the idea of taxpayer’s cash being poured into feminist anti-rape organizations, creating more lucrative jobs for the girls. Feminists know that if they make out that the majority of men who are acquitted of rape are actually guilty and only walk out of court free (and with wicked Patriarchal Oppressor grins on their faces) because the law is stacked against victims, then you will get men – furious at the idea of their sister or mother being raped and the rapist getting away with it – happy to accept laws being pushed through that shred men’s rights in rape cases and force men to prove their innocence against a woman’s word, even though these same men may one day find themselves the victims of such anti-male laws.
Most feminists don’t really think men are all rapists, but they do know that we hate rapists, and so they claim the former to utilize the latter, simply in order to make us hate ourselves as much as they hate us.
In fact, the idea of young women being raped is one thing guaranteed to infuriate men and get them rolling up their sleeves and ready to hit someone (note that I’m defining rape as forcibly having sex with a someone without their consent, not the feminist definition of rape, which is where a woman consents but regrets it the next day, or the Andrea Dworkin definition of rape, which is any sex between a man and a woman regardless of whether the latter consents or not.)
The outrage men feel about women getting raped is utilized with great efficiency in propaganda. The extreme-right-wing British National Party recently spread rumours around that Asian gangs in Bradford were organizing gang-rapes of white women. The KKK whipped whole communities into a lynch-happy frenzy by telling horrifying tales of how black men prowled around raping white girls. Anti-semitic groups in Russia have been uttering ominous claims that Jewish gangs are supposedly abducting poor Russian girls to be taken to work as sex-slaves in Israel, and the Iraqi insurgents try to bolster anti-US sentiments by producing fake evidence of American GIs raping defenceless Iraqi girls.
All this is through the simple knowledge that – assuming they believe them – men will be outraged by such tales. Claim that a certain ethnic or religious group has a desire to rape women, and tell them that this group is eying up “our women” then you will get men more liable to feel hate towards that group.
In Birmingham a few months ago, the rumour of a 14-year-old black girl having been gang-raped by Asian men lead to rioting between the black and Asian communities, resulting in two deaths and dozens of injuries. Tensions had been simmering between the communities for a while, but it exploded into violence just by the rumour of a rape that almost certainly never happened.
Likewise, talk of the enemy raping “our women” works well in war. This does have some basis in truth, as rape is often carried out by victorious invaders, especially in the old days before War Crimes tribunals came about. It is rape that is so frequently emphasized and exaggerated in wartime propaganda more than any other atrocity.
The Japanese atrocities in Nanking during World War II included the murder of over 300,000 civilians and the sexual assault of about 80,000 women, but it is largely the sexual assaults that are often concentrated on in Chinese accounts of the atrocities (and indeed they gave the whole terrible affair the name “The Rape Of Nanking“) because the idea of Japanese soldiers raping women and girls ensures an even greater amount of anti-Japanese sentiment can be whipped up than “just” the idea of Japanese soldiers killing civilians.
Tell men the enemy are “raping our women” – or planning on doing so – and whether that “our” is translated as female relatives or just women of the same nationality or religion, and you will have most of the male population grabbing swords or guns and marching off to risk their lives. It works wonders.
It is very rare to find a man who genuinely thinks that tying women up and screwing them against their will is okay, and such men are naturally shunned if they make their beliefs known and imprisoned if they act upon them (significantly, of course, rapists are the regarded as the lowest-of-the-low in prison; even their fellow criminals do not like them.)
Yet on and on feminists rant and splutter about how all us men are somehow in favour of rape. They insist we’re all evil rapists-in-waiting, that there is an epidemic of rape in society, that teenaged girls should even be wary of their own 11-year-old brothers lest they want to ravish them with their evil willies, and furthermore they try to give the impression that the supposedly small minority of us men who don’t regularly beat up and rape women at least approve of such activities.
With the exception of hardcore lunatics like the thankfully-dead Andrea Dworkin, not even feminists really believe this. They know damn well that the majority men are outraged by the idea of rape. They rely on this fact to push through their anti-male laws (like VAWA in the US) and to ensure plenty of tax-payer cash flows to misandrist feminist organisations that help break up families. They know that exaggerating claims of rape – by either coming up with absurdly loose definitions of rape, such as a woman who regrets consensual sex a few days after the event, or by just coming up with utterly fabricated statistics – will infuriate male judges and politicians and get them to engage Chivalrous Mode and start coming down hard on the supposedly rape-happy male population.
This is why you get organizations like Men Against Rape (a rather loathsome name for a group because it implies that men who do not join them must therefore be for rape.) These guys may mean well but they’ve just been suckered into the propaganda of feminists and their bullshit statistics. Their outrage against rape has been manipulated by feminists so that they are as paranoid about the idea of an “epidemic of rape” as feminists are.
Feminists know damn well that if they claim that there are tens of thousands of unreported rapes on college campuses a year then, without even bothering to ask for evidence, men will be extra-fearful for their daughters and will join feminists in demanding women-only areas in colleges. Feminists know that if they claim that it is very common for men to spike drinks in bars and clubs with rape-drugs then you will have men becoming intensely protective of their girlfriends to the point of paranoia and will support the idea of taxpayer’s cash being poured into feminist anti-rape organizations, creating more lucrative jobs for the girls. Feminists know that if they make out that the majority of men who are acquitted of rape are actually guilty and only walk out of court free (and with wicked Patriarchal Oppressor grins on their faces) because the law is stacked against victims, then you will get men – furious at the idea of their sister or mother being raped and the rapist getting away with it – happy to accept laws being pushed through that shred men’s rights in rape cases and force men to prove their innocence against a woman’s word, even though these same men may one day find themselves the victims of such anti-male laws.
Most feminists don’t really think men are all rapists, but they do know that we hate rapists, and so they claim the former to utilize the latter, simply in order to make us hate ourselves as much as they hate us.
Wednesday, 21 March 2012
Female Self-Interest Vs. The Pursuit Of Wisdom
Loosely speaking, it concerns the differences between women & men & their differing approaches to the larger truths - & of the drive to follow those truths at the expense of all else, & regardless of the cost to the self & for no other reason or reward than itself.
And how it is that women, as a general rule, have little inclination to do that, which is why women (again, as a general rule) don't start religions, or write symphonies, or start revolutions in art or science or philosophy, & the only political movement begun by women in the history of the world is feminism, by far the most selfish, short-sighted & dishonest political philosophy ever devised by humankind, demonizing one whole half of the human race while pandering to the herd instinct of the other & shamelessly lying to them both.
The need for group identity seems to me to be stronger as a rule women, which does raise troubling questions when thinking politically, (whoah! here we are at that minefield I was telling you about!) as it may be that women are, as a demographic, more easily manipulated by those looking for power - as historically they have been - by appealing to their own self-interest & immediate concerns of themselves & their children rather than higher, selfless ideals for the good of all.
Men have always been manipulated too, as demonstrated by all the rape propaganda used by every side, for every cause, in pretty much every war there's ever been. Through their innate concern for women, men can be made to go die in a trench, start fights, organize lynch mobs, risk their own lives & safety, & vote for policies which have directly adverse effects upon themselves & put their own interests last.But the same does not work in reverse: women will not risk their lives for those of men they don't know. Women will rarely risk their lives for anyone but their own children. This, of course, is simply nature, just the way we evolved to be, & women's innate drive for self -preservation (& hence the preservation of their offspring) is one of the things that has made humanity the most dominant species on earth.
The point is, there's a difference, & a double standard. And it's one I don't actually mind being there at all - like most men, it is innate in me to want to put the women & children first, but we live in a society where that noble imbalance is ignored & even shouted down every single day. We are instructed to act like there are no differences between men & women, even though we all know that there are. We act like it is a sin to even acknowledge this double standard, & keep giving even more help & assistance & special treatment to women than we were doing already, all the while acting as though the opposite is true, that women are oppressed & held back by that black nightmarish fantasm the feminists dreamt up & called 'The Patriarchy'.
What the feminists call 'Patriarchy' is, of course, to all intents & purposes simply 'civilization' - all civilization - as there has never been found any society either now or in all recorded history, anywhere in the world, any society in which men did not hold the majority of the positions of responsibility. Given our differing biological make-ups & requirements, it has always made the most sense to most peoples to configure their societies that way.
If men really were the greedy, heartless oppressors of women depicted by feminism, they would surely never have voted for the enfranchisement of women in the first place. But the important point is, since then, women - the entire female demographic - have never used that vote even once to aid 'men' as a group. Men are still popularly seen by perhaps the majority of women to be The Enemy, even the men they live & work alongside. This sexism is considered healthy, harmless, even funny, & all society encourages it.
Women never vote against their own self-interest. And, because of how much men innately want to both please & protect them, they have never had to.
I'm not saying women en masse can't be noble or self-sacrificing or whatever, only that those muscles may perhaps have atrophied over time through lack of use. Evolutionarily, they became inessential for women to survive, & besides, they had men to do all that hard work, & make all those hard decisions, for them.
Justice, Liberty, Equality - civilization - these are all male creations, borne out of male modes of thought. On the other hand, Comfort, Kindness, Consensus decision-making, Community... society (the social world).. these may well be less easy to define, undervalued female contributions, along with perhaps even language itself, or at least the language of personal relationships. All these are a much-needed tempering force to balance out the strict, ascetic male principles that created working human civilization, but when left unchecked, or even encouraged, as they have been the past hundred years - & especially the last 40 - they can themselves become a detrimental & destructive force.
Getting back to the point - such as it is - there are innate, clearly observable, evolutionary-based differences between men & women that skew much rational dialogue between them. Every now & again I am reminded that we really might be from Mars & Venus, though sharing the same language. Repeatedly, I think I'm having a nice, reasonable discussion, pooling resources, sharing ideas on politics or philosophy, & suddenly a woman stands up, face white with fury & tears in her eyes, marches out of the room & slams the door, goes off to break things in the kitchen & never talks to me again. This shit really happens to me. I remember one woman, the girlfriend of a friend of mine I gently questioned about some of her (frankly hateful) feminist statements, pushed herself back in her seat, crossed her arms & said (to her man) "okay, I'm not saying any more until your mate gets his gender politics put right".
And I thought: 'That's genius! What she is saying is: "I REFUSE TO ARGUE WITH YOU UNTIL YOU AGREE WITH ME!" What a perfect method of debate! No-one could ever make you feel even the littlest bit uncomfortable in your beliefs ever again!'
Anyway, the maddening thing is the women that do this usually don't realize, or refuse to realize that they are even doing it, often vehemently denying they are becoming emotional while in the same breath attacking personally & ending all discussion. On the internet, especially, I find girls continually derailing reasoned discourse to interject ad hominem attacks, use shaming language, & appealing to others around to come to their aid. Making the impersonal personal. Women often seem to have a harder time than men seeing that there could be a difference between the wider truth of a situation & their own felt experience, or what their particular group mind has told them they should believe.
I never used to think this way. I used to do my very best to believe women & men were interchangeable units & that the only reason women as a group hadn't been able to create anything much of great or lasting value was because of a universal conspiracy against them to keep them down.
I know! Crazy, right? Well, I was young.
I do see some extraordinary women who seem to me possessed by genius but there's not a lot of them, & every single one of them is working in a field opened up by men, within a conceptual framework invented by men. Genius is male, & the initial spark of creativity, courage & invention emanates almost exclusively from the masculine.
The first person to get to the North Pole, for instance, or even the moon, or to sail a balloon around the world, was always going to be a man. Later, once it had been shown it could be done, repeatedly, & in relative safety, then a woman would climb into the cockpit of a plane, or fly a hot air balloon, or go up into space. The Wright sisters getting that crate off the ground was never going to be a possible future, regardless of differences in opportunity or the structure of society. And if we try to look rationally & objectively at the weight of evidence throughout history, we must recognize that as a simple truth, beyond any conspiracy theories of women's oppression. I'm not trying to rub anyone's nose in it by saying this, I guess all I'm wanting to do is try get women & the men in western society to consciously acknowledge these complimentary halves of the whole & to factor them into their models of the world. We need to be able to speak openly of the things we can see with our own eyes to be manifestly true.
*
There's an Australian YouTuber, Kelly Jones, who has gone into some of this in a few of her pieces recently, usually from the perspective of a psychological analysis of religious experience - which is of course interesting in itself, but this video in particular I felt went some way in expressing much of what I've been thinking myself on these things. Check her out, she has soothing voice & a sharper mind than mine:
And this one addresses matters even more bluntly:
Monday, 12 March 2012
Painting Feminists With A Broad's Brush
I know this is rapidly turning into the GirlWritesWhat official fan-page, but the woman is so decisively hitting so many nails on the head with her mighty hammer of common sense that I really don't feel I could say any of what she's saying any better myself, & just want to do what I can to spread the sanity a little wider.
Her latest post is a response to some feminist youtuber called Cases&Materials, who accused her of "painting all Feminists with a broad brush". Here is the meat of her rather delightful retort:
Full original video here: http://youtu.be/sns4Dhuw7Nk
Her latest post is a response to some feminist youtuber called Cases&Materials, who accused her of "painting all Feminists with a broad brush". Here is the meat of her rather delightful retort:
Full original video here: http://youtu.be/sns4Dhuw7Nk
Friday, 9 March 2012
Feminism Is A Type Of Mental Illness
Latest - & as always, superlative - broadcast from the future first female president of the USA, GirlWritesWhat. As usual, it starts slow & comes at you sideways, creeping up on you until after about 15 mins you go 'My God! There's no arguing with this shit!' Always the best kind of argument, I tend to think.
Excellent Jessica Valenti impressions at 7:31 & 09:01, by the way:
Excellent Jessica Valenti impressions at 7:31 & 09:01, by the way:
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